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Due to overwhelming demand (>15x applications:slots), we are closing CFPs for AI Engineer Summit NYC today. Last call! Thanks, we'll be reaching out to all shortly!The world's top AI blogger and friend of every pod, Simon Willison, dropped a monster 2024 recap: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Brian of the excellent TechMeme Ride Home pinged us for a connection and a special crossover episode, our first in 2025. The target audience for this podcast is a tech-literate, but non-technical one. You can see Simon's notes for AI Engineers in his World's Fair Keynote.Timestamp* 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome* 01:06 State of AI in 2025* 01:43 Advancements in AI Models* 03:59 Cost Efficiency in AI* 06:16 Challenges and Competition in AI* 17:15 AI Agents and Their Limitations* 26:12 Multimodal AI and Future Prospects* 35:29 Exploring Video Avatar Companies* 36:24 AI Influencers and Their Future* 37:12 Simplifying Content Creation with AI* 38:30 The Importance of Credibility in AI* 41:36 The Future of LLM User Interfaces* 48:58 Local LLMs: A Growing Interest* 01:07:22 AI Wearables: The Next Big Thing* 01:10:16 Wrapping Up and Final ThoughtsTranscript[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:00:00] Brian: Welcome to the first bonus episode of the Tech Meme Write Home for the year 2025. I'm your host as always, Brian McCullough. Listeners to the pod over the last year know that I have made a habit of quoting from Simon Willison when new stuff happens in AI from his blog. Simon has been, become a go to for many folks in terms of, you know, Analyzing things, criticizing things in the AI space.[00:00:33] Brian: I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, Simon. So thank you for coming on the show. No, it's a privilege to be here. And the person that made this connection happen is our friend Swyx, who has been on the show back, even going back to the, the Twitter Spaces days but also an AI guru in, in their own right Swyx, thanks for coming on the show also.[00:00:54] swyx (2): Thanks. I'm happy to be on and have been a regular listener, so just happy to [00:01:00] contribute as well.[00:01:00] Brian: And a good friend of the pod, as they say. Alright, let's go right into it.[00:01:06] State of AI in 2025[00:01:06] Brian: Simon, I'm going to do the most unfair, broad question first, so let's get it out of the way. The year 2025. Broadly, what is the state of AI as we begin this year?[00:01:20] Brian: Whatever you want to say, I don't want to lead the witness.[00:01:22] Simon: Wow. So many things, right? I mean, the big thing is everything's got really good and fast and cheap. Like, that was the trend throughout all of 2024. The good models got so much cheaper, they got so much faster, they got multimodal, right? The image stuff isn't even a surprise anymore.[00:01:39] Simon: They're growing video, all of that kind of stuff. So that's all really exciting.[00:01:43] Advancements in AI Models[00:01:43] Simon: At the same time, they didn't get massively better than GPT 4, which was a bit of a surprise. So that's sort of one of the open questions is, are we going to see huge, but I kind of feel like that's a bit of a distraction because GPT 4, but way cheaper, much larger context lengths, and it [00:02:00] can do multimodal.[00:02:01] Simon: is better, right? That's a better model, even if it's not.[00:02:05] Brian: What people were expecting or hoping, maybe not expecting is not the right word, but hoping that we would see another step change, right? Right. From like GPT 2 to 3 to 4, we were expecting or hoping that maybe we were going to see the next evolution in that sort of, yeah.[00:02:21] Brian: We[00:02:21] Simon: did see that, but not in the way we expected. We thought the model was just going to get smarter, and instead we got. Massive drops in, drops in price. We got all of these new capabilities. You can talk to the things now, right? They can do simulated audio input, all of that kind of stuff. And so it's kind of, it's interesting to me that the models improved in all of these ways we weren't necessarily expecting.[00:02:43] Simon: I didn't know it would be able to do an impersonation of Santa Claus, like a, you know, Talked to it through my phone and show it what I was seeing by the end of 2024. But yeah, we didn't get that GPT 5 step. And that's one of the big open questions is, is that actually just around the corner and we'll have a bunch of GPT 5 class models drop in the [00:03:00] next few months?[00:03:00] Simon: Or is there a limit?[00:03:03] Brian: If you were a betting man and wanted to put money on it, do you expect to see a phase change, step change in 2025?[00:03:11] Simon: I don't particularly for that, like, the models, but smarter. I think all of the trends we're seeing right now are going to keep on going, especially the inference time compute, right?[00:03:21] Simon: The trick that O1 and O3 are doing, which means that you can solve harder problems, but they cost more and it churns away for longer. I think that's going to happen because that's already proven to work. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there will be a step change to a GPT 5 level, but honestly, I'd be completely happy if we got what we've got right now.[00:03:41] Simon: But cheaper and faster and more capabilities and longer contexts and so forth. That would be thrilling to me.[00:03:46] Brian: Digging into what you've just said one of the things that, by the way, I hope to link in the show notes to Simon's year end post about what, what things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Look for that in the show notes.[00:03:59] Cost Efficiency in AI[00:03:59] Brian: One of the things that you [00:04:00] did say that you alluded to even right there was that in the last year, you felt like the GPT 4 barrier was broken, like IE. Other models, even open source ones are now regularly matching sort of the state of the art.[00:04:13] Simon: Well, it's interesting, right? So the GPT 4 barrier was a year ago, the best available model was OpenAI's GPT 4 and nobody else had even come close to it.[00:04:22] Simon: And they'd been at the, in the lead for like nine months, right? That thing came out in what, February, March of, of 2023. And for the rest of 2023, nobody else came close. And so at the start of last year, like a year ago, the big question was, Why has nobody beaten them yet? Like, what do they know that the rest of the industry doesn't know?[00:04:40] Simon: And today, that I've counted 18 organizations other than GPT 4 who've put out a model which clearly beats that GPT 4 from a year ago thing. Like, maybe they're not better than GPT 4. 0, but that's, that, that, that barrier got completely smashed. And yeah, a few of those I've run on my laptop, which is wild to me.[00:04:59] Simon: Like, [00:05:00] it was very, very wild. It felt very clear to me a year ago that if you want GPT 4, you need a rack of 40, 000 GPUs just to run the thing. And that turned out not to be true. Like the, the, this is that big trend from last year of the models getting more efficient, cheaper to run, just as capable with smaller weights and so forth.[00:05:20] Simon: And I ran another GPT 4 model on my laptop this morning, right? Microsoft 5. 4 just came out. And that, if you look at the benchmarks, it's definitely, it's up there with GPT 4. 0. It's probably not as good when you actually get into the vibes of the thing, but it, it runs on my, it's a 14 gigabyte download and I can run it on a MacBook Pro.[00:05:38] Simon: Like who saw that coming? The most exciting, like the close of the year on Christmas day, just a few weeks ago, was when DeepSeek dropped their DeepSeek v3 model on Hugging Face without even a readme file. It was just like a giant binary blob that I can't run on my laptop. It's too big. But in all of the benchmarks, it's now by far the best available [00:06:00] open, open weights model.[00:06:01] Simon: Like it's, it's, it's beating the, the metalamas and so forth. And that was trained for five and a half million dollars, which is a tenth of the price that people thought it costs to train these things. So everything's trending smaller and faster and more efficient.[00:06:15] Brian: Well, okay.[00:06:16] Challenges and Competition in AI[00:06:16] Brian: I, I kind of was going to get to that later, but let's, let's combine this with what I was going to ask you next, which is, you know, you're talking, you know, Also in the piece about the LLM prices crashing, which I've even seen in projects that I'm working on, but explain Explain that to a general audience, because we hear all the time that LLMs are eye wateringly expensive to run, but what we're suggesting, and we'll come back to the cheap Chinese LLM, but first of all, for the end user, what you're suggesting is that we're starting to see the cost come down sort of in the traditional technology way of Of costs coming down over time,[00:06:49] Simon: yes, but very aggressively.[00:06:51] Simon: I mean, my favorite thing, the example here is if you look at GPT-3, so open AI's g, PT three, which was the best, a developed model in [00:07:00] 2022 and through most of 20 2023. That, the models that we have today, the OpenAI models are a hundred times cheaper. So there was a 100x drop in price for OpenAI from their best available model, like two and a half years ago to today.[00:07:13] Simon: And[00:07:14] Brian: just to be clear, not to train the model, but for the use of tokens and things. Exactly,[00:07:20] Simon: for running prompts through them. And then When you look at the, the really, the top tier model providers right now, I think, are OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. And there are a bunch of others that I could list there as well.[00:07:32] Simon: Mistral are very good. The, the DeepSeq and Quen models have got great. There's a whole bunch of providers serving really good models. But even if you just look at the sort of big brand name providers, they all offer models now that are A fraction of the price of the, the, of the models we were using last year.[00:07:49] Simon: I think I've got some numbers that I threw into my blog entry here. Yeah. Like Gemini 1. 5 flash, that's Google's fast high quality model is [00:08:00] how much is that? It's 0. 075 dollars per million tokens. Like these numbers are getting, So we just do cents per million now,[00:08:09] swyx (2): cents per million,[00:08:10] Simon: cents per million makes, makes a lot more sense.[00:08:12] Simon: Yeah they have one model 1. 5 flash 8B, the absolute cheapest of the Google models, is 27 times cheaper than GPT 3. 5 turbo was a year ago. That's it. And GPT 3. 5 turbo, that was the cheap model, right? Now we've got something 27 times cheaper, and the Google, this Google one can do image recognition, it can do million token context, all of those tricks.[00:08:36] Simon: But it's, it's, it's very, it's, it really is startling how inexpensive some of this stuff has got.[00:08:41] Brian: Now, are we assuming that this, that happening is directly the result of competition? Because again, you know, OpenAI, and probably they're doing this for their own almost political reasons, strategic reasons, keeps saying, we're losing money on everything, even the 200.[00:08:56] Brian: So they probably wouldn't, the prices wouldn't be [00:09:00] coming down if there wasn't intense competition in this space.[00:09:04] Simon: The competition is absolutely part of it, but I have it on good authority from sources I trust that Google Gemini is not operating at a loss. Like, the amount of electricity to run a prompt is less than they charge you.[00:09:16] Simon: And the same thing for Amazon Nova. Like, somebody found an Amazon executive and got them to say, Yeah, we're not losing money on this. I don't know about Anthropic and OpenAI, but clearly that demonstrates it is possible to run these things at these ludicrously low prices and still not be running at a loss if you discount the Army of PhDs and the, the training costs and all of that kind of stuff.[00:09:36] Brian: One, one more for me before I let Swyx jump in here. To, to come back to DeepSeek and this idea that you could train, you know, a cutting edge model for 6 million. I, I was saying on the show, like six months ago, that if we are getting to the point where each new model It would cost a billion, ten billion, a hundred billion to train that.[00:09:54] Brian: At some point it would almost, only nation states would be able to train the new models. Do you [00:10:00] expect what DeepSeek and maybe others are proving to sort of blow that up? Or is there like some sort of a parallel track here that maybe I'm not technically, I don't have the mouse to understand the difference.[00:10:11] Brian: Is the model, are the models going to go, you know, Up to a hundred billion dollars or can we get them down? Sort of like DeepSeek has proven[00:10:18] Simon: so I'm the wrong person to answer that because I don't work in the lab training these models. So I can give you my completely uninformed opinion, which is, I felt like the DeepSeek thing.[00:10:27] Simon: That was a bomb shell. That was an absolute bombshell when they came out and said, Hey, look, we've trained. One of the best available models and it cost us six, five and a half million dollars to do it. I feel, and they, the reason, one of the reasons it's so efficient is that we put all of these export controls in to stop Chinese companies from giant buying GPUs.[00:10:44] Simon: So they've, were forced to be, go as efficient as possible. And yet the fact that they've demonstrated that that's possible to do. I think it does completely tear apart this, this, this mental model we had before that yeah, the training runs just keep on getting more and more expensive and the number of [00:11:00] organizations that can afford to run these training runs keeps on shrinking.[00:11:03] Simon: That, that's been blown out of the water. So yeah, that's, again, this was our Christmas gift. This was the thing they dropped on Christmas day. Yeah, it makes me really optimistic that we can, there are, It feels like there was so much low hanging fruit in terms of the efficiency of both inference and training and we spent a whole bunch of last year exploring that and getting results from it.[00:11:22] Simon: I think there's probably a lot left. I think there's probably, well, I would not be surprised to see even better models trained spending even less money over the next six months.[00:11:31] swyx (2): Yeah. So I, I think there's a unspoken angle here on what exactly the Chinese labs are trying to do because DeepSea made a lot of noise.[00:11:41] swyx (2): so much for joining us for around the fact that they train their model for six million dollars and nobody quite quite believes them. Like it's very, very rare for a lab to trumpet the fact that they're doing it for so cheap. They're not trying to get anyone to buy them. So why [00:12:00] are they doing this? They make it very, very obvious.[00:12:05] swyx (2): Deepseek is about 150 employees. It's an order of magnitude smaller than at least Anthropic and maybe, maybe more so for OpenAI. And so what's, what's the end game here? Are they, are they just trying to show that the Chinese are better than us?[00:12:21] Simon: So Deepseek, it's the arm of a hedge, it's a, it's a quant fund, right?[00:12:25] Simon: It's an algorithmic quant trading thing. So I, I, I would love to get more insight into how that organization works. My assumption from what I've seen is it looks like they're basically just flexing. They're like, hey, look at how utterly brilliant we are with this amazing thing that we've done. And it's, it's working, right?[00:12:43] Simon: They but, and so is that it? Are they, is this just their kind of like, this is, this is why our company is so amazing. Look at this thing that we've done, or? I don't know. I'd, I'd love to get Some insight from, from within that industry as to, as to how that's all playing out.[00:12:57] swyx (2): The, the prevailing theory among the Local Llama [00:13:00] crew and the Twitter crew that I indexed for my newsletter is that there is some amount of copying going on.[00:13:06] swyx (2): It's like Sam Altman you know, tweet, tweeting about how they're being copied. And then also there's this, there, there are other sort of opening eye employees that have said, Stuff that is similar that DeepSeek's rate of progress is how U. S. intelligence estimates the number of foreign spies embedded in top labs.[00:13:22] swyx (2): Because a lot of these ideas do spread around, but they surprisingly have a very high density of them in the DeepSeek v3 technical report. So it's, it's interesting. We don't know how much, how many, how much tokens. I think that, you know, people have run analysis on how often DeepSeek thinks it is cloud or thinks it is opening GPC 4.[00:13:40] swyx (2): Thanks for watching! And we don't, we don't know. We don't know. I think for me, like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we basically will never know as, as external commentators. I think what's interesting is how, where does this go? Is there a logical floor or bottom by my estimations for the same amount of ELO started last year to the end of last year cost went down by a thousand X for the [00:14:00] GPT, for, for GPT 4 intelligence.[00:14:02] swyx (2): Would, do they go down a thousand X this year?[00:14:04] Simon: That's a fascinating question. Yeah.[00:14:06] swyx (2): Is there a Moore's law going on, or did we just get a one off benefit last year for some weird reason?[00:14:14] Simon: My uninformed hunch is low hanging fruit. I feel like up until a year ago, people haven't been focusing on efficiency at all. You know, it was all about, what can we get these weird shaped things to do?[00:14:24] Simon: And now once we've sort of hit that, okay, we know that we can get them to do what GPT 4 can do, When thousands of researchers around the world all focus on, okay, how do we make this more efficient? What are the most important, like, how do we strip out all of the weights that have stuff in that doesn't really matter?[00:14:39] Simon: All of that kind of thing. So yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe 2024 was a freak year of all of the low hanging fruit coming out at once. And we'll actually see a reduction in the, in that rate of improvement in terms of efficiency. I wonder, I mean, I think we'll know for sure in about three months time if that trend's going to continue or not.[00:14:58] swyx (2): I agree. You know, I [00:15:00] think the other thing that you mentioned that DeepSeq v3 was the gift that was given from DeepSeq over Christmas, but I feel like the other thing that might be underrated was DeepSeq R1,[00:15:11] Speaker 4: which is[00:15:13] swyx (2): a reasoning model you can run on your laptop. And I think that's something that a lot of people are looking ahead to this year.[00:15:18] swyx (2): Oh, did they[00:15:18] Simon: release the weights for that one?[00:15:20] swyx (2): Yeah.[00:15:21] Simon: Oh my goodness, I missed that. I've been playing with the quen. So the other great, the other big Chinese AI app is Alibaba's quen. Actually, yeah, I, sorry, R1 is an API available. Yeah. Exactly. When that's really cool. So Alibaba's Quen have released two reasoning models that I've run on my laptop.[00:15:38] Simon: Now there was, the first one was Q, Q, WQ. And then the second one was QVQ because the second one's a vision model. So you can like give it vision puzzles and a prompt that these things, they are so much fun to run. Because they think out loud. It's like the OpenAR 01 sort of hides its thinking process. The Query ones don't.[00:15:59] Simon: They just, they [00:16:00] just churn away. And so you'll give it a problem and it will output literally dozens of paragraphs of text about how it's thinking. My favorite thing that happened with QWQ is I asked it to draw me a pelican on a bicycle in SVG. That's like my standard stupid prompt. And for some reason it thought in Chinese.[00:16:18] Simon: It spat out a whole bunch of like Chinese text onto my terminal on my laptop, and then at the end it gave me quite a good sort of artistic pelican on a bicycle. And I ran it all through Google Translate, and yeah, it was like, it was contemplating the nature of SVG files as a starting point. And the fact that my laptop can think in Chinese now is so delightful.[00:16:40] Simon: It's so much fun watching you do that.[00:16:43] swyx (2): Yeah, I think Andrej Karpathy was saying, you know, we, we know that we have achieved proper reasoning inside of these models when they stop thinking in English, and perhaps the best form of thought is in Chinese. But yeah, for listeners who don't know Simon's blog he always, whenever a new model comes out, you, I don't know how you do it, but [00:17:00] you're always the first to run Pelican Bench on these models.[00:17:02] swyx (2): I just did it for 5.[00:17:05] Simon: Yeah.[00:17:07] swyx (2): So I really appreciate that. You should check it out. These are not theoretical. Simon's blog actually shows them.[00:17:12] Brian: Let me put on the investor hat for a second.[00:17:15] AI Agents and Their Limitations[00:17:15] Brian: Because from the investor side of things, a lot of the, the VCs that I know are really hot on agents, and this is the year of agents, but last year was supposed to be the year of agents as well. Lots of money flowing towards, And Gentic startups.[00:17:32] Brian: But in in your piece that again, we're hopefully going to have linked in the show notes, you sort of suggest there's a fundamental flaw in AI agents as they exist right now. Let me let me quote you. And then I'd love to dive into this. You said, I remain skeptical as to their ability based once again, on the Challenge of gullibility.[00:17:49] Brian: LLMs believe anything you tell them, any systems that attempt to make meaningful decisions on your behalf, will run into the same roadblock. How good is a travel agent, or a digital assistant, or even a research tool, if it [00:18:00] can't distinguish truth from fiction? So, essentially, what you're suggesting is that the state of the art now that allows agents is still, it's still that sort of 90 percent problem, the edge problem, getting to the Or, or, or is there a deeper flaw?[00:18:14] Brian: What are you, what are you saying there?[00:18:16] Simon: So this is the fundamental challenge here and honestly my frustration with agents is mainly around definitions Like any if you ask anyone who says they're working on agents to define agents You will get a subtly different definition from each person But everyone always assumes that their definition is the one true one that everyone else understands So I feel like a lot of these agent conversations, people talking past each other because one person's talking about the, the sort of travel agent idea of something that books things on your behalf.[00:18:41] Simon: Somebody else is talking about LLMs with tools running in a loop with a cron job somewhere and all of these different things. You, you ask academics and they'll laugh at you because they've been debating what agents mean for over 30 years at this point. It's like this, this long running, almost sort of an in joke in that community.[00:18:57] Simon: But if we assume that for this purpose of this conversation, an [00:19:00] agent is something that, Which you can give a job and it goes off and it does that thing for you like, like booking travel or things like that. The fundamental challenge is, it's the reliability thing, which comes from this gullibility problem.[00:19:12] Simon: And a lot of my, my interest in this originally came from when I was thinking about prompt injections as a source of this form of attack against LLM systems where you deliberately lay traps out there for this LLM to stumble across,[00:19:24] Brian: and which I should say you have been banging this drum that no one's gotten any far, at least on solving this, that I'm aware of, right.[00:19:31] Brian: Like that's still an open problem. The two years.[00:19:33] Simon: Yeah. Right. We've been talking about this problem and like, a great illustration of this was Claude so Anthropic released Claude computer use a few months ago. Fantastic demo. You could fire up a Docker container and you could literally tell it to do something and watch it open a web browser and navigate to a webpage and click around and so forth.[00:19:51] Simon: Really, really, really interesting and fun to play with. And then, um. One of the first demos somebody tried was, what if you give it a web page that says download and run this [00:20:00] executable, and it did, and the executable was malware that added it to a botnet. So the, the very first most obvious dumb trick that you could play on this thing just worked, right?[00:20:10] Simon: So that's obviously a really big problem. If I'm going to send something out to book travel on my behalf, I mean, it's hard enough for me to figure out which airlines are trying to scam me and which ones aren't. Do I really trust a language model that believes the literal truth of anything that's presented to it to go out and do those things?[00:20:29] swyx (2): Yeah I definitely think there's, it's interesting to see Anthropic doing this because they used to be the safety arm of OpenAI that split out and said, you know, we're worried about letting this thing out in the wild and here they are enabling computer use for agents. Thanks. The, it feels like things have merged.[00:20:49] swyx (2): You know, I'm, I'm also fairly skeptical about, you know, this always being the, the year of Linux on the desktop. And this is the equivalent of this being the year of agents that people [00:21:00] are not predicting so much as wishfully thinking and hoping and praying for their companies and agents to work.[00:21:05] swyx (2): But I, I feel like things are. Coming along a little bit. It's to me, it's kind of like self driving. I remember in 2014 saying that self driving was just around the corner. And I mean, it kind of is, you know, like in, in, in the Bay area. You[00:21:17] Simon: get in a Waymo and you're like, Oh, this works. Yeah, but it's a slow[00:21:21] swyx (2): cook.[00:21:21] swyx (2): It's a slow cook over the next 10 years. We're going to hammer out these things and the cynical people can just point to all the flaws, but like, there are measurable or concrete progress steps that are being made by these builders.[00:21:33] Simon: There is one form of agent that I believe in. I believe, mostly believe in the research assistant form of agents.[00:21:39] Simon: The thing where you've got a difficult problem and, and I've got like, I'm, I'm on the beta for the, the Google Gemini 1. 5 pro with deep research. I think it's called like these names, these names. Right. But. I've been using that. It's good, right? You can give it a difficult problem and it tells you, okay, I'm going to look at 56 different websites [00:22:00] and it goes away and it dumps everything to its context and it comes up with a report for you.[00:22:04] Simon: And it's not, it won't work against adversarial websites, right? If there are websites with deliberate lies in them, it might well get caught out. Most things don't have that as a problem. And so I've had some answers from that which were genuinely really valuable to me. And that feels to me like, I can see how given existing LLM tech, especially with Google Gemini with its like million token contacts and Google with their crawl of the entire web and their, they've got like search, they've got search and cache, they've got a cache of every page and so forth.[00:22:35] Simon: That makes sense to me. And that what they've got right now, I don't think it's, it's not as good as it can be, obviously, but it's, it's, it's, it's a real useful thing, which they're going to start rolling out. So, you know, Perplexity have been building the same thing for a couple of years. That, that I believe in.[00:22:50] Simon: You know, if you tell me that you're going to have an agent that's a research assistant agent, great. The coding agents I mean, chat gpt code interpreter, Nearly two years [00:23:00] ago, that thing started writing Python code, executing the code, getting errors, rewriting it to fix the errors. That pattern obviously works.[00:23:07] Simon: That works really, really well. So, yeah, coding agents that do that sort of error message loop thing, those are proven to work. And they're going to keep on getting better, and that's going to be great. The research assistant agents are just beginning to get there. The things I'm critical of are the ones where you trust, you trust this thing to go out and act autonomously on your behalf, and make decisions on your behalf, especially involving spending money, like that.[00:23:31] Simon: I don't see that working for a very long time. That feels to me like an AGI level problem.[00:23:37] swyx (2): It's it's funny because I think Stripe actually released an agent toolkit which is one of the, the things I featured that is trying to enable these agents each to have a wallet that they can go and spend and have, basically, it's a virtual card.[00:23:49] swyx (2): It's not that, not that difficult with modern infrastructure. can[00:23:51] Simon: stick a 50 cap on it, then at least it's an honor. Can't lose more than 50.[00:23:56] Brian: You know I don't, I don't know if either of you know Rafat Ali [00:24:00] he runs Skift, which is a, a travel news vertical. And he, he, he constantly laughs at the fact that every agent thing is, we're gonna get rid of booking a, a plane flight for you, you know?[00:24:11] Brian: And, and I would point out that, like, historically, when the web started, the first thing everyone talked about is, You can go online and book a trip, right? So it's funny for each generation of like technological advance. The thing they always want to kill is the travel agent. And now they want to kill the webpage travel agent.[00:24:29] Simon: Like it's like I use Google flight search. It's great, right? If you gave me an agent to do that for me, it would save me, I mean, maybe 15 seconds of typing in my things, but I still want to see what my options are and go, yeah, I'm not flying on that airline, no matter how cheap they are.[00:24:44] swyx (2): Yeah. For listeners, go ahead.[00:24:47] swyx (2): For listeners, I think, you know, I think both of you are pretty positive on NotebookLM. And you know, we, we actually interviewed the NotebookLM creators, and there are actually two internal agents going on internally. The reason it takes so long is because they're running an agent loop [00:25:00] inside that is fairly autonomous, which is kind of interesting.[00:25:01] swyx (2): For one,[00:25:02] Simon: for a definition of agent loop, if you picked that particularly well. For one definition. And you're talking about the podcast side of this, right?[00:25:07] swyx (2): Yeah, the podcast side of things. They have a there's, there's going to be a new version coming out that, that we'll be featuring at our, at our conference.[00:25:14] Simon: That one's fascinating to me. Like NotebookLM, I think it's two products, right? On the one hand, it's actually a very good rag product, right? You dump a bunch of things in, you can run searches, that, that, it does a good job of. And then, and then they added the, the podcast thing. It's a bit of a, it's a total gimmick, right?[00:25:30] Simon: But that gimmick got them attention, because they had a great product that nobody paid any attention to at all. And then you add the unfeasibly good voice synthesis of the podcast. Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's the lesson.[00:25:43] Brian: It's the lesson of mid journey and stuff like that. If you can create something that people can post on socials, you don't have to lift a finger again to do any marketing for what you're doing.[00:25:53] Brian: Let me dig into Notebook LLM just for a second as a podcaster. As a [00:26:00] gimmick, it makes sense, and then obviously, you know, you dig into it, it sort of has problems around the edges. It's like, it does the thing that all sort of LLMs kind of do, where it's like, oh, we want to Wrap up with a conclusion.[00:26:12] Multimodal AI and Future Prospects[00:26:12] Brian: I always call that like the the eighth grade book report paper problem where it has to have an intro and then, you know But that's sort of a thing where because I think you spoke about this again in your piece at the year end About how things are going multimodal and how things are that you didn't expect like, you know vision and especially audio I think So that's another thing where, at least over the last year, there's been progress made that maybe you, you didn't think was coming as quick as it came.[00:26:43] Simon: I don't know. I mean, a year ago, we had one really good vision model. We had GPT 4 vision, was, was, was very impressive. And Google Gemini had just dropped Gemini 1. 0, which had vision, but nobody had really played with it yet. Like Google hadn't. People weren't taking Gemini [00:27:00] seriously at that point. I feel like it was 1.[00:27:02] Simon: 5 Pro when it became apparent that actually they were, they, they got over their hump and they were building really good models. And yeah, and they, to be honest, the video models are mostly still using the same trick. The thing where you divide the video up into one image per second and you dump that all into the context.[00:27:16] Simon: So maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising to us that long context models plus vision meant that the video was, was starting to be solved. Of course, it didn't. Not being, you, what you really want with videos, you want to be able to do the audio and the images at the same time. And I think the models are beginning to do that now.[00:27:33] Simon: Like, originally, Gemini 1. 5 Pro originally ignored the audio. It just did the, the, like, one frame per second video trick. As far as I can tell, the most recent ones are actually doing pure multimodal. But the things that opens up are just extraordinary. Like, the the ChatGPT iPhone app feature that they shipped as one of their 12 days of, of OpenAI, I really can be having a conversation and just turn on my video camera and go, Hey, what kind of tree is [00:28:00] this?[00:28:00] Simon: And so forth. And it works. And for all I know, that's just snapping a like picture once a second and feeding it into the model. The, the, the things that you can do with that as an end user are extraordinary. Like that, that to me, I don't think most people have cottoned onto the fact that you can now stream video directly into a model because it, it's only a few weeks old.[00:28:22] Simon: Wow. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's Big boost in terms of what kinds of things you can do with this stuff. Yeah. For[00:28:30] swyx (2): people who are not that close I think Gemini Flashes free tier allows you to do something like capture a photo, one photo every second or a minute and leave it on 24, seven, and you can prompt it to do whatever.[00:28:45] swyx (2): And so you can effectively have your own camera app or monitoring app that that you just prompt and it detects where it changes. It detects for, you know, alerts or anything like that, or describes your day. You know, and, and, and the fact that this is free I think [00:29:00] it's also leads into the previous point of it being the prices haven't come down a lot.[00:29:05] Simon: And even if you're paying for this stuff, like a thing that I put in my blog entry is I ran a calculation on what it would cost to process 68, 000 photographs in my photo collection, and for each one just generate a caption, and using Gemini 1. 5 Flash 8B, it would cost me 1. 68 to process 68, 000 images, which is, I mean, that, that doesn't make sense.[00:29:28] Simon: None of that makes sense. Like it's, it's a, for one four hundredth of a cent per image to generate captions now. So you can see why feeding in a day's worth of video just isn't even very expensive to process.[00:29:40] swyx (2): Yeah, I'll tell you what is expensive. It's the other direction. So we're here, we're talking about consuming video.[00:29:46] swyx (2): And this year, we also had a lot of progress, like probably one of the most excited, excited, anticipated launches of the year was Sora. We actually got Sora. And less exciting.[00:29:55] Simon: We did, and then VO2, Google's Sora, came out like three [00:30:00] days later and upstaged it. Like, Sora was exciting until VO2 landed, which was just better.[00:30:05] swyx (2): In general, I feel the media, or the social media, has been very unfair to Sora. Because what was released to the world, generally available, was Sora Lite. It's the distilled version of Sora, right? So you're, I did not[00:30:16] Simon: realize that you're absolutely comparing[00:30:18] swyx (2): the, the most cherry picked version of VO two, the one that they published on the marketing page to the, the most embarrassing version of the soa.[00:30:25] swyx (2): So of course it's gonna look bad, so, well, I got[00:30:27] Simon: access to the VO two I'm in the VO two beta and I've been poking around with it and. Getting it to generate pelicans on bicycles and stuff. I would absolutely[00:30:34] swyx (2): believe that[00:30:35] Simon: VL2 is actually better. Is Sora, so is full fat Sora coming soon? Do you know, when, when do we get to play with that one?[00:30:42] Simon: No one's[00:30:43] swyx (2): mentioned anything. I think basically the strategy is let people play around with Sora Lite and get info there. But the, the, keep developing Sora with the Hollywood studios. That's what they actually care about. Gotcha. Like the rest of us. Don't really know what to do with the video anyway. Right.[00:30:59] Simon: I mean, [00:31:00] that's my thing is I realized that for generative images and images and video like images We've had for a few years and I don't feel like they've broken out into the talented artist community yet Like lots of people are having fun with them and doing and producing stuff. That's kind of cool to look at but what I want you know that that movie everything everywhere all at once, right?[00:31:20] Simon: One, one ton of Oscars, utterly amazing film. The VFX team for that were five people, some of whom were watching YouTube videos to figure out what to do. My big question for, for Sora and and and Midjourney and stuff, what happens when a creative team like that starts using these tools? I want the creative geniuses behind everything, everywhere all at once.[00:31:40] Simon: What are they going to be able to do with this stuff in like a few years time? Because that's really exciting to me. That's where you take artists who are at the very peak of their game. Give them these new capabilities and see, see what they can do with them.[00:31:52] swyx (2): I should, I know a little bit here. So it should mention that, that team actually used RunwayML.[00:31:57] swyx (2): So there was, there was,[00:31:57] Simon: yeah.[00:31:59] swyx (2): I don't know how [00:32:00] much I don't. So, you know, it's possible to overstate this, but there are people integrating it. Generated video within their workflow, even pre SORA. Right, because[00:32:09] Brian: it's not, it's not the thing where it's like, okay, tomorrow we'll be able to do a full two hour movie that you prompt with three sentences.[00:32:15] Brian: It is like, for the very first part of, of, you know video effects in film, it's like, if you can get that three second clip, if you can get that 20 second thing that they did in the matrix that blew everyone's minds and took a million dollars or whatever to do, like, it's the, it's the little bits and pieces that they can fill in now that it's probably already there.[00:32:34] swyx (2): Yeah, it's like, I think actually having a layered view of what assets people need and letting AI fill in the low value assets. Right, like the background video, the background music and, you know, sometimes the sound effects. That, that maybe, maybe more palatable maybe also changes the, the way that you evaluate the stuff that's coming out.[00:32:57] swyx (2): Because people tend to, in social media, try to [00:33:00] emphasize foreground stuff, main character stuff. So you really care about consistency, and you, you really are bothered when, like, for example, Sorad. Botch's image generation of a gymnast doing flips, which is horrible. It's horrible. But for background crowds, like, who cares?[00:33:18] Brian: And by the way, again, I was, I was a film major way, way back in the day, like, that's how it started. Like things like Braveheart, where they filmed 10 people on a field, and then the computer could turn it into 1000 people on a field. Like, that's always been the way it's around the margins and in the background that first comes in.[00:33:36] Brian: The[00:33:36] Simon: Lord of the Rings movies were over 20 years ago. Although they have those giant battle sequences, which were very early, like, I mean, you could almost call it a generative AI approach, right? They were using very sophisticated, like, algorithms to model out those different battles and all of that kind of stuff.[00:33:52] Simon: Yeah, I know very little. I know basically nothing about film production, so I try not to commentate on it. But I am fascinated to [00:34:00] see what happens when, when these tools start being used by the real, the people at the top of their game.[00:34:05] swyx (2): I would say like there's a cultural war that is more that being fought here than a technology war.[00:34:11] swyx (2): Most of the Hollywood people are against any form of AI anyway, so they're busy Fighting that battle instead of thinking about how to adopt it and it's, it's very fringe. I participated here in San Francisco, one generative AI video creative hackathon where the AI positive artists actually met with technologists like myself and then we collaborated together to build short films and that was really nice and I think, you know, I'll be hosting some of those in my events going forward.[00:34:38] swyx (2): One thing that I think like I want to leave it. Give people a sense of it's like this is a recap of last year But then sometimes it's useful to walk away as well with like what can we expect in the future? I don't know if you got anything. I would also call out that the Chinese models here have made a lot of progress Hyde Law and Kling and God knows who like who else in the video arena [00:35:00] Also making a lot of progress like surprising him like I think maybe actually Chinese China is surprisingly ahead with regards to Open8 at least, but also just like specific forms of video generation.[00:35:12] Simon: Wouldn't it be interesting if a film industry sprung up in a country that we don't normally think of having a really strong film industry that was using these tools? Like, that would be a fascinating sort of angle on this. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.[00:35:25] swyx (2): Agreed. I, I, I Oh, sorry. Go ahead.[00:35:29] Exploring Video Avatar Companies[00:35:29] swyx (2): Just for people's Just to put it on people's radar as well, Hey Jen, there's like there's a category of video avatar companies that don't specifically, don't specialize in general video.[00:35:41] swyx (2): They only do talking heads, let's just say. And HeyGen sings very well.[00:35:45] Brian: Swyx, you know that that's what I've been using, right? Like, have, have I, yeah, right. So, if you see some of my recent YouTube videos and things like that, where, because the beauty part of the HeyGen thing is, I, I, I don't want to use the robot voice, so [00:36:00] I record the mp3 file for my computer, And then I put that into HeyGen with the avatar that I've trained it on, and all it does is the lip sync.[00:36:09] Brian: So it looks, it's not 100 percent uncanny valley beatable, but it's good enough that if you weren't looking for it, it's just me sitting there doing one of my clips from the show. And, yeah, so, by the way, HeyGen. Shout out to them.[00:36:24] AI Influencers and Their Future[00:36:24] swyx (2): So I would, you know, in terms of like the look ahead going, like, looking, reviewing 2024, looking at trends for 2025, I would, they basically call this out.[00:36:33] swyx (2): Meta tried to introduce AI influencers and failed horribly because they were just bad at it. But at some point that there will be more and more basically AI influencers Not in a way that Simon is but in a way that they are not human.[00:36:50] Simon: Like the few of those that have done well, I always feel like they're doing well because it's a gimmick, right?[00:36:54] Simon: It's a it's it's novel and fun to like Like that, the AI Seinfeld thing [00:37:00] from last year, the Twitch stream, you know, like those, if you're the only one or one of just a few doing that, you'll get, you'll attract an audience because it's an interesting new thing. But I just, I don't know if that's going to be sustainable longer term or not.[00:37:11] Simon: Like,[00:37:12] Simplifying Content Creation with AI[00:37:12] Brian: I'm going to tell you, Because I've had discussions, I can't name the companies or whatever, but, so think about the workflow for this, like, now we all know that on TikTok and Instagram, like, holding up a phone to your face, and doing like, in my car video, or walking, a walk and talk, you know, that's, that's very common, but also, if you want to do a professional sort of talking head video, you still have to sit in front of a camera, you still have to do the lighting, you still have to do the video editing, versus, if you can just record, what I'm saying right now, the last 30 seconds, If you clip that out as an mp3 and you have a good enough avatar, then you can put that avatar in front of Times Square, on a beach, or whatever.[00:37:50] Brian: So, like, again for creators, the reason I think Simon, we're on the verge of something, it, it just, it's not going to, I think it's not, oh, we're going to have [00:38:00] AI avatars take over, it'll be one of those things where it takes another piece of the workflow out and simplifies it. I'm all[00:38:07] Simon: for that. I, I always love this stuff.[00:38:08] Simon: I like tools. Tools that help human beings do more. Do more ambitious things. I'm always in favor of, like, that, that, that's what excites me about this entire field.[00:38:17] swyx (2): Yeah. We're, we're looking into basically creating one for my podcast. We have this guy Charlie, he's Australian. He's, he's not real, but he pre, he opens every show and we are gonna have him present all the shorts.[00:38:29] Simon: Yeah, go ahead.[00:38:30] The Importance of Credibility in AI[00:38:30] Simon: The thing that I keep coming back to is this idea of credibility like in a world that is full of like AI generated everything and so forth It becomes even more important that people find the sources of information that they trust and find people and find Sources that are credible and I feel like that's the one thing that LLMs and AI can never have is credibility, right?[00:38:49] Simon: ChatGPT can never stake its reputation on telling you something useful and interesting because That means nothing, right? It's a matrix multiplication. It depends on who prompted it and so forth. So [00:39:00] I'm always, and this is when I'm blogging as well, I'm always looking for, okay, who are the reliable people who will tell me useful, interesting information who aren't just going to tell me whatever somebody's paying them to tell, tell them, who aren't going to, like, type a one sentence prompt into an LLM and spit out an essay and stick it online.[00:39:16] Simon: And that, that to me, Like, earning that credibility is really important. That's why a lot of my ethics around the way that I publish are based on the idea that I want people to trust me. I want to do things that, that gain credibility in people's eyes so they will come to me for information as a trustworthy source.[00:39:32] Simon: And it's the same for the sources that I'm, I'm consulting as well. So that's something I've, I've been thinking a lot about that sort of credibility focus on this thing for a while now.[00:39:40] swyx (2): Yeah, you can layer or structure credibility or decompose it like so one thing I would put in front of you I'm not saying that you should Agree with this or accept this at all is that you can use AI to generate different Variations and then and you pick you as the final sort of last mile person that you pick The last output and [00:40:00] you put your stamp of credibility behind that like that everything's human reviewed instead of human origin[00:40:04] Simon: Yeah, if you publish something you need to be able to put it on the ground Publishing it.[00:40:08] Simon: You need to say, I will put my name to this. I will attach my credibility to this thing. And if you're willing to do that, then, then that's great.[00:40:16] swyx (2): For creators, this is huge because there's a fundamental asymmetry between starting with a blank slate versus choosing from five different variations.[00:40:23] Brian: Right.[00:40:24] Brian: And also the key thing that you just said is like, if everything that I do, if all of the words were generated by an LLM, if the voice is generated by an LLM. If the video is also generated by the LLM, then I haven't done anything, right? But if, if one or two of those, you take a shortcut, but it's still, I'm willing to sign off on it.[00:40:47] Brian: Like, I feel like that's where I feel like people are coming around to like, this is maybe acceptable, sort of.[00:40:53] Simon: This is where I've been pushing the definition. I love the term slop. Where I've been pushing the definition of slop as AI generated [00:41:00] content that is both unrequested and unreviewed and the unreviewed thing is really important like that's the thing that elevates something from slop to not slop is if A human being has reviewed it and said, you know what, this is actually worth other people's time.[00:41:12] Simon: And again, I'm willing to attach my credibility to it and say, hey, this is worthwhile.[00:41:16] Brian: It's, it's, it's the cura curational, curatorial and editorial part of it that no matter what the tools are to do shortcuts, to do, as, as Swyx is saying choose between different edits or different cuts, but in the end, if there's a curatorial mind, Or editorial mind behind it.[00:41:32] Brian: Let me I want to wedge this in before we start to close.[00:41:36] The Future of LLM User Interfaces[00:41:36] Brian: One of the things coming back to your year end piece that has been a something that I've been banging the drum about is when you're talking about LLMs. Getting harder to use. You said most users are thrown in at the deep end.[00:41:48] Brian: The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out. I mean, it's, it's literally going back to the command line. The command line was defeated [00:42:00] by the GUI interface. And this is what I've been banging the drum about is like, this cannot be.[00:42:05] Brian: The user interface, what we have now cannot be the end result. Do you see any hints or seeds of a GUI moment for LLM interfaces?[00:42:17] Simon: I mean, it has to happen. It absolutely has to happen. The the, the, the, the usability of these things is turning into a bit of a crisis. And we are at least seeing some really interesting innovation in little directions.[00:42:28] Simon: Just like OpenAI's chat GPT canvas thing that they just launched. That is at least. Going a little bit more interesting than just chat, chats and responses. You know, you can, they're exploring that space where you're collaborating with an LLM. You're both working in the, on the same document. That makes a lot of sense to me.[00:42:44] Simon: Like that, that feels really smart. The one of the best things is still who was it who did the, the UI where you could, they had a drawing UI where you draw an interface and click a button. TL draw would then make it real thing. That was spectacular, [00:43:00] absolutely spectacular, like, alternative vision of how you'd interact with these models.[00:43:05] Simon: Because yeah, the and that's, you know, so I feel like there is so much scope for innovation there and it is beginning to happen. Like, like, I, I feel like most people do understand that we need to do better in terms of interfaces that both help explain what's going on and give people better tools for working with models.[00:43:23] Simon: I was going to say, I want to[00:43:25] Brian: dig a little deeper into this because think of the conceptual idea behind the GUI, which is instead of typing into a command line open word. exe, it's, you, you click an icon, right? So that's abstracting away sort of the, again, the programming stuff that like, you know, it's, it's a, a, a child can tap on an iPad and, and make a program open, right?[00:43:47] Brian: The problem it seems to me right now with how we're interacting with LLMs is it's sort of like you know a dumb robot where it's like you poke it and it goes over here, but no, I want it, I want to go over here so you poke it this way and you can't get it exactly [00:44:00] right, like, what can we abstract away from the From the current, what's going on that, that makes it more fine tuned and easier to get more precise.[00:44:12] Brian: You see what I'm saying?[00:44:13] Simon: Yes. And the this is the other trend that I've been following from the last year, which I think is super interesting. It's the, the prompt driven UI development thing. Basically, this is the pattern where Claude Artifacts was the first thing to do this really well. You type in a prompt and it goes, Oh, I should answer that by writing a custom HTML and JavaScript application for you that does a certain thing.[00:44:35] Simon: And when you think about that take and since then it turns out This is easy, right? Every decent LLM can produce HTML and JavaScript that does something useful. So we've actually got this alternative way of interacting where they can respond to your prompt with an interactive custom interface that you can work with.[00:44:54] Simon: People haven't quite wired those back up again. Like, ideally, I'd want the LLM ask me a [00:45:00] question where it builds me a custom little UI, For that question, and then it gets to see how I interacted with that. I don't know why, but that's like just such a small step from where we are right now. But that feels like such an obvious next step.[00:45:12] Simon: Like an LLM, why should it, why should you just be communicating with, with text when it can build interfaces on the fly that let you select a point on a map or or move like sliders up and down. It's gonna create knobs and dials. I keep saying knobs and dials. right. We can do that. And the LLMs can build, and Claude artifacts will build you a knobs and dials interface.[00:45:34] Simon: But at the moment they haven't closed the loop. When you twiddle those knobs, Claude doesn't see what you were doing. They're going to close that loop. I'm, I'm shocked that they haven't done it yet. So yeah, I think there's so much scope for innovation and there's so much scope for doing interesting stuff with that model where the LLM, anything you can represent in SVG, which is almost everything, can now be part of that ongoing conversation.[00:45:59] swyx (2): Yeah, [00:46:00] I would say the best executed version of this I've seen so far is Bolt where you can literally type in, make a Spotify clone, make an Airbnb clone, and it actually just does that for you zero shot with a nice design.[00:46:14] Simon: There's a benchmark for that now. The LMRena people now have a benchmark that is zero shot app, app generation, because all of the models can do it.[00:46:22] Simon: Like it's, it's, I've started figuring out. I'm building my own version of this for my own project, because I think within six months. I think it'll just be an expected feature. Like if you have a web application, why don't you have a thing where, oh, look, the, you can add a custom, like, so for my dataset data exploration project, I want you to be able to do things like conjure up a dashboard, just via a prompt.[00:46:43] Simon: You say, oh, I need a pie chart and a bar chart and put them next to each other, and then have a form where submitting the form inserts a row into my database table. And this is all suddenly feasible. It's, it's, it's not even particularly difficult to do, which is great. Utterly bizarre that these things are now easy.[00:47:00][00:47:00] swyx (2): I think for a general audience, that is what I would highlight, that software creation is becoming easier and easier. Gemini is now available in Gmail and Google Sheets. I don't write my own Google Sheets formulas anymore, I just tell Gemini to do it. And so I think those are, I almost wanted to basically somewhat disagree with, with your assertion that LMS got harder to use.[00:47:22] swyx (2): Like, yes, we, we expose more capabilities, but they're, they're in minor forms, like using canvas, like web search in, in in chat GPT and like Gemini being in, in Excel sheets or in Google sheets, like, yeah, we're getting, no,[00:47:37] Simon: no, no, no. Those are the things that make it harder, because the problem is that for each of those features, they're amazing.[00:47:43] Simon: If you understand the edges of the feature, if you're like, okay, so in Google, Gemini, Excel formulas, I can get it to do a certain amount of things, but I can't get it to go and read a web. You probably can't get it to read a webpage, right? But you know, there are, there are things that it can do and things that it can't do, which are completely undocumented.[00:47:58] Simon: If you ask it what it [00:48:00] can and can't do, they're terrible at answering questions about that. So like my favorite example is Claude artifacts. You can't build a Claude artifact that can hit an API somewhere else. Because the cause headers on that iframe prevents accessing anything outside of CDNJS. So, good luck learning cause headers as an end user in order to understand why Like, I've seen people saying, oh, this is rubbish.[00:48:26] Simon: I tried building an artifact that would run a prompt and it couldn't because Claude didn't expose an API with cause headers that all of this stuff is so weird and complicated. And yeah, like that, that, the more that with the more tools we add, the more expertise you need to really, To understand the full scope of what you can do.[00:48:44] Simon: And so it's, it's, I wouldn't say it's, it's, it's, it's like, the question really comes down to what does it take to understand the full extent of what's possible? And honestly, that, that's just getting more and more involved over time.[00:48:58] Local LLMs: A Growing Interest[00:48:58] swyx (2): I have one more topic that I, I [00:49:00] think you, you're kind of a champion of and we've touched on it a little bit, which is local LLMs.[00:49:05] swyx (2): And running AI applications on your desktop, I feel like you are an early adopter of many, many things.[00:49:12] Simon: I had an interesting experience with that over the past year. Six months ago, I almost completely lost interest. And the reason is that six months ago, the best local models you could run, There was no point in using them at all, because the best hosted models were so much better.[00:49:26] Simon: Like, there was no point at which I'd choose to run a model on my laptop if I had API access to Cloud 3. 5 SONNET. They just, they weren't even comparable. And that changed, basically, in the past three months, as the local models had this step changing capability, where now I can run some of these local models, and they're not as good as Cloud 3.[00:49:45] Simon: 5 SONNET, but they're not so far away that It's not worth me even using them. The other, the, the, the, the continuing problem is I've only got 64 gigabytes of RAM, and if you run, like, LLAMA370B, it's not going to work. Most of my RAM is gone. So now I have to shut down my Firefox tabs [00:50:00] and, and my Chrome and my VS Code windows in order to run it.[00:50:03] Simon: But it's got me interested again. Like, like the, the efficiency improvements are such that now, if you were to like stick me on a desert island with my laptop, I'd be very productive using those local models. And that's, that's pretty exciting. And if those trends continue, and also, like, I think my next laptop, if when I buy one is going to have twice the amount of RAM, At which point, maybe I can run the, almost the top tier, like open weights models and still be able to use it as a computer as well.[00:50:32] Simon: NVIDIA just announced their 3, 000 128 gigabyte monstrosity. That's pretty good price. You know, that's that's, if you're going to buy it,[00:50:42] swyx (2): custom OS and all.[00:50:46] Simon: If I get a job, if I, if, if, if I have enough of an income that I can justify blowing $3,000 on it, then yes.[00:50:52] swyx (2): Okay, let's do a GoFundMe to get Simon one it.[00:50:54] swyx (2): Come on. You know, you can get a job anytime you want. Is this, this is just purely discretionary .[00:50:59] Simon: I want, [00:51:00] I want a job that pays me to do exactly what I'm doing already and doesn't tell me what else to do. That's, thats the challenge.[00:51:06] swyx (2): I think Ethan Molik does pretty well. Whatever, whatever it is he's doing.[00:51:11] swyx (2): But yeah, basically I was trying to bring in also, you know, not just local models, but Apple intelligence is on every Mac machine. You're, you're, you seem skeptical. It's rubbish.[00:51:21] Simon: Apple intelligence is so bad. It's like, it does one thing well.[00:51:25] swyx (2): Oh yeah, what's that? It summarizes notifications. And sometimes it's humorous.[00:51:29] Brian: Are you sure it does that well? And also, by the way, the other, again, from a sort of a normie point of view. There's no indication from Apple of when to use it. Like, everybody upgrades their thing and it's like, okay, now you have Apple Intelligence, and you never know when to use it ever again.[00:51:47] swyx (2): Oh, yeah, you consult the Apple docs, which is MKBHD.[00:51:49] swyx (2): The[00:51:51] Simon: one thing, the one thing I'll say about Apple Intelligence is, One of the reasons it's so disappointing is that the models are just weak, but now, like, Llama 3b [00:52:00] is Such a good model in a 2 gigabyte file I think give Apple six months and hopefully they'll catch up to the state of the art on the small models And then maybe it'll start being a lot more interesting.[00:52:10] swyx (2): Yeah. Anyway, I like This was year one And and you know just like our first year of iPhone maybe maybe not that much of a hit and then year three They had the App Store so Hey I would say give it some time, and you know, I think Chrome also shipping Gemini Nano I think this year in Chrome, which means that every app, every web app will have for free access to a local model that just ships in the browser, which is kind of interesting.[00:52:38] swyx (2): And then I, I think I also wanted to just open the floor for any, like, you know, any of us what are the apps that, you know, AI applications that we've adopted that have, that we really recommend because these are all, you know, apps that are running on our browser that like, or apps that are running locally that we should be, that, that other people should be trying.[00:52:55] swyx (2): Right? Like, I, I feel like that's, that's one always one thing that is helpful at the start of the [00:53:00] year.[00:53:00] Simon: Okay. So for running local models. My top picks, firstly, on the iPhone, there's this thing called MLC Chat, which works, and it's easy to install, and it runs Llama 3B, and it's so much fun. Like, it's not necessarily a capable enough novel that I use it for real things, but my party trick right now is I get my phone to write a Netflix Christmas movie plot outline where, like, a bunch of Jeweller falls in love with the King of Sweden or whatever.[00:53:25] Simon: And it does a good job and it comes up with pun names for the movies. And that's, that's deeply entertaining. On my laptop, most recently, I've been getting heavy into, into Olama because the Olama team are very, very good at finding the good models and patching them up and making them work well. It gives you an API.[00:53:42] Simon: My little LLM command line tool that has a plugin that talks to Olama, which works really well. So that's my, my Olama is. I think the easiest on ramp to to running models locally, if you want a nice user interface, LMStudio is, I think, the best user interface [00:54:00] thing at that. It's not open source. It's good.[00:54:02] Simon: It's worth playing with. The other one that I've been trying with recently, there's a thing called, what's it called? Open web UI or something. Yeah. The UI is fantastic. It, if you've got Olama running and you fire this thing up, it spots Olama and it gives you an interface onto your Olama models. And t

Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable support and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5k per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch support and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, contact sales@thoughtbot.com. __ Simon Ritchie, the founder and CEO of Blox, discusses his background and journey leading up to starting the company. He began his career in finance but discovered his passion for technology and finance systems. He worked at Anaplan, a successful finance planning and analysis software company, but saw the limitations of rigid systems when COVID-19 hit. He realized there was a need for a more flexible and accessible financial modeling and planning tool, especially for small businesses and charities. Blox aims to fill this gap by providing a powerful yet easy-to-use modeling, calculation, and planning engine that sits between spreadsheets and complex enterprise software. The company is about a year old, has raised venture funding, and launched a free tier of its product. They prioritize building a compelling product, iterating quickly, and engaging with users to understand their needs. Simon acknowledges that building the product has been enjoyable, leveraging his background in product management. However, sales, marketing, and customer traction have proven challenging. Nonetheless, he remains optimistic about Blox's progress and is committed to providing a valuable solution to help businesses make informed decisions and achieve their financial goals. Blox (https://www.blox.so/) Follow Blox on Twitter (https://twitter.com/blox_is_awesome), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/blox.for.planning), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/blox-plan/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/bloxisawesome/), or TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@bravewithblox/) Follow Simon Ritchie on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/siritchie/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with me today is Simon Ritchie, Founder and CEO of Blox, which provides pre-built planning models to help business leaders escape the tyranny of complex, clunky, and error-prone spreadsheets, giving you visibility into and confidence in the reality of your business. Simon, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today? SIMON: Hey, guys. Yeah, I'm very good today. VICTORIA: So, Simon, where are you joining us from today? SIMON: So, I'm joining from the UK. I live in a city called Brighton on the South Coast of the UK, where it's a lovely day today. It's nice and sunny. VICTORIA: Oh, that's where our thoughtbot summit has been the last two years, in Brighton, actually. SIMON: Fantastic. Yeah, it's a wonderful place. VICTORIA: And a great place to be in the summer right now, right? Do you get out in the water very often? SIMON: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like many others, we have a paddle board. So, I go out with my family. I have four kids, so we go out and have fun at the beach. Brighton's got a stony beach. So we are, as Brightoners, we're very proud of the stones. You know, if you have sand, you get sand everywhere, stones are...it's much cleaner. [laughter] It does hurt your feet, though. There you go. [laughter] WILL: Yeah, that was the first time I've ever seen that, and I was like, that's very interesting. SIMON: Yeah. [laughs] WILL: I probably will like it because I don't like the sand getting everywhere, so... SIMON: Yeah, absolutely. WILL: So, yeah, I probably could trade that in. [laughs] SIMON: Yeah, yeah. You just have to wear shoes if you want to go run around. We're proud. We're proud of it. VICTORIA: I didn't think about that either. It makes a lot more sense. I don't really like the sand [laughter]. Rocks make more sense. But in California here, we're surfing, so having too many rocks on the beach would be a problem [laughs] for those of us who can't control ourselves. [laughter] SIMON: Yes. Yeah, Victoria, I thought you lived in Wales when I first looked at your profile -- VICTORIA: Oh, right. SIMON: On LinkedIn. And I thought, oh -- VICTORIA: That's...yeah. SIMON: A Welsh girl. That's -- VICTORIA: My family is actually Welsh on my mother's side. SIMON: Oh really? VICTORIA: Yeah. SIMON: Okay. VICTORIA: And Cardiff...California is named after Cardiff, Wales. SIMON: Okay, oh. VICTORIA: But yeah, so that's where it came from. So, I thought that was very cute, too. SIMON: [laughs] Very cool. VICTORIA: But, you know, Cardiff-by-the Sea is its own little beach town here. SIMON: It's not Wales. [laughs] VICTORIA: Not Wales. [laughs] Pretty different. But I do hear Wales is beautiful. SIMON: Oh, it is. Yeah, absolutely. VICTORIA: Awesome. Well, let's talk about Blox a little bit. So, why don't you tell us maybe a little bit about your background and how you came around to starting it? SIMON: Yeah, great. So, and just in terms of me and my background, so I started my career in finance, actually. I didn't really know what to go and study, so I thought, you know, studying numbers was probably a good thing. So, I did an accounting finance degree. And I got into the world of work in finance roles very quickly realized that finance wasn't for me. I just didn't really want to be a CFO. I just didn't feel the passion for it. But I was the techie guy always in the finance team. I was the guy people turned to and originally for, you know, Excel and spreadsheet modeling. And behind Excel, you've got VBA. So, you've got this little, you know, it was my first exposure to programming and some, you know, and what coding was. And so, I sort of just realized, actually, I love the technology side. And so, I followed my passion more into the finance systems arena. And my passion has always been...the focus of my career has been helping leaders understand what's going on in the business by getting hold of those numbers, the data that they have, and analyzing it, summarizing it, trying to draw insights from it so they can make decisions. And so, in the early days, it was lots of Excel spreadsheet modeling. And, in some businesses, there's still tons of spreadsheet modeling going on. And then the next phase of my career was actually working in...there are a number of software options that help you with planning, modeling, reporting, et cetera. So, I joined...well, I did some consulting for a while and then joined a company called Anaplan. And was an early employee, the company was still very early in their journey. They were just launching a European office, so I joined as one of the early European employees. And Anaplan went on, over the course of nearly eight years that I was there, to be [inaudible 04:31], absolute rocket ship, grew up to 2,000 people, and we floated on the New York Stock Exchange and then IPO in 2018. It was acquired last year for a very big number. So really fantastic time there. But to just talk about Blox, so I left Anaplan two years ago. The observations that I made that led to Blox ultimately were there were sort of three main aspects. Like, when COVID happened, the world changed radically. And what I saw...I was working in Anaplan. For anyone who doesn't know, Anaplan they focus on selling to large enterprise. So, you may not be familiar with the company if you're not a CFO or a finance person in a very large company. And they sell very expensive product. It's very, very powerful modeling, calculation, FP&A, finance planning, and analysis software. And so, companies...we were working with companies like Procter & Gamble, HP, Cisco, Google, and others. What I observed was when COVID kicked in, the FP&A system was too rigid. So, Anaplan, you know, these models that people had built up, spent a lot of time and energy building up, it was too rigid. The world changed so much that they couldn't really use their typical budgeting systems or these FP&A solutions. They couldn't use Anaplan. So, everybody just jumped back into a spreadsheet to figure out, you know, do I still have a business? How am I going to survive this if I just had to shut all my retail stores or if I had to send everybody home? You know, so everyone was using spreadsheets, basically. And so my observation there was that the tools that are available at that point are still way too hard to use. They're not flexible enough. You can't mold them quickly enough to really handle some of those scenarios that you want to throw at it as a leader. So, when you're trying to make big decisions about new revenue streams, new offices that you would want to launch, restructuring your team, investing in more people, those things they're really hard to model in the tools that are available. You need real specialist experience and expertise. That's very expensive, et cetera. So that was one part. And then the other thing that happened was I've worked most of my career in larger companies. And I'd worked in, yeah, in finance, in businesses. And also, I'm a chartered management accountant. It's all about helping with managing a business with your numbers. And I hadn't really worked with many very small companies. I ended up volunteering. When the lockdowns were happening, there were lots of people that were sheltering in place and they were staying at home. And so, a local charity had organized to put together food parcels, and then they found drivers to drive them around. And so I had volunteered through a friend of a friend, and somewhere my name got put in. So, I ended up driving these food deliveries around for the summer, and I loved it. Every Thursday, I'd take a couple of hours to just drive around and drop some food on people's doorsteps and then maybe have a quick conversation with them from a distance. I got connected with the charity. It is a local charity that runs on the South Coast in England here. And they found out I was an accountant, and I worked in software technology. They were like, [gasps], please, you can be our new best friend. We need some help. So, I ended up helping them a bit in their back office with some of the reporting that they do. And to cut a long story short, they're a charity. They live on grant funding that they get. So, they apply for grants, and then the grant providers want them to report back on the progress that they've made, the services that they've offered, the people they've helped. So, I went and helped them, and they needed these reports and some plans for grants that they were trying to get. What seemed really easy to me, like, they were showing me that they had to download this data from a system. And they needed to filter it and then count how many people they had been helping. And they basically were just, you know, with different needs and in different categories and cohorts. So, they would basically download the data, open it in a spreadsheet, put a filter on, select some filters, and then they would count the number of rows that had that criteria. And then, they would type the number into an email. And I just showed them some very simple things, like, when you do a filter or if you select the cells, you can see a countdown at the bottom-right in Excel, and I showed them that. And they almost fell off their chair because [laughs] they were like, "Oh, you know, why did we not see that sooner?" But I suppose through that, and, you know, through the various times that I helped them...and I just helped them with initially some spreadsheets and just some help with that. But it just showed me that there are a lot of businesses, a lot of charities in this case, but a lot of businesses where the leaders are not finance savvy, and they are not accountants. They're not MBAs, but they still need help running their business. They need to do reporting. They need to do planning, you know, manage their business, control the finances. So, I just thought, you know, just started thinking a lot more about what does a small business need? What does a leader in a business need to make great decisions, run the business? And how could we get them a tool or some software that doesn't cost hundreds of grand every year but is accessible, a nice, low price point, and really easy for them to use? And that's the problem that I thought about for a long time. And ultimately, that's what we're trying to work on with Blox. WILL: That's amazing. I used to work at a nonprofit. And I remember those days of, like, because I wasn't an MBA, like you said, MBA finance and just trying to figure out numbers. I don't even remember the software we used. SIMON: [laughs] WILL: But it was old and very hard to maneuver. [laughter] SIMON: Oh yeah. WILL: It was harder to maneuver than spreadsheets. And I was like, ahh, this is a nightmare. So, this is amazing that you're doing that. Can you tell us more about how Blox solves that issue? Because it sounds like it is a tween of big software that's for enterprise companies and spreadsheets. So, it's kind of in the middle; it sounds like. SIMON: So, spreadsheets are great. They're really easy. They're easy to start with. You'll often find that your spreadsheet will just kind of reach its natural end. It becomes too complex. And that normally happens when you've got, like, you're planning for lots of people, or lots of products, or lots of different projects. And so, you end up sort of having to figure out how to scale the model, you know, across lots of different columns or rows, or you start copying. And how you'll have three identical tabs or ten identical tabs. And, at that point, you've basically outgrown Excel, and trying to keep that spreadsheet running and working it becomes a real nightmare. And so, that's the point where Blox comes in. You could use Blox right from the very beginning. We've started with a focus on making really nice, simple models that you can just pick up and use. So, our earliest customers are startups doing a financial model for a brand-new idea. So, you can use Blox from the beginning, but you could probably use a spreadsheet, too. Where you would want to use Blox is where it becomes more complex, and you've got a lot more going on. You might have lots of different months, and you've got loads of time. You might want to connect it to your actual accounting system or a CRM system. And so, when you want to pull in actual data and do some reporting and maybe have different scenarios, different versions of a plan or of a report, that's where you've basically outgrown a spreadsheet, and it just becomes complex and unwieldy. And that's where you would want to move into a system. That's what we're building with Blox is basically a powerful modeling calculation planning engine that scales really easily. So, you can build up your dimensions, products, countries, time, et cetera, and you can build up those dimensions. You can build up your logic. You can add your own KPIs. You can add your own projection logic, et cetera. You can build out a model. We've got lots of template models that you can start with because you shouldn't have to start from scratch every time. You can get going. You can load up your own data very quickly at the beginning. For a lot of models, it's just assumptions. You're just trying to work out, okay, like, we've got some service businesses that use Blox. To get a basic model together, what you need to know is how many people do you have roughly? How much do you pay them? And then, how many people do you plan to hire at certain times? And how long does it take to ramp a new hire? Because, normally, there's some sort of ramp time. And if it's a service business and you're selling time, then you kind of have an average number of hours billable or often called utilization. So, with a few quick assumptions, you could throw them in. You could build out a multi-year plan for your business. And you could use that to think about, okay, how can I grow this business? I kind of talk about it as a financial roadmap that you could create. So, you know, often in the product world, we talk about product roadmaps. I like to talk about, you know, a business roadmap or financial roadmap. And that's really what we are working on; Blox and Blox will help you with this financial roadmap that you can build out. You know, I'd like to get my business to this point to, you know, 2 million in revenue, or 10 million in revenue, or maybe there are some financial or non-financial goals that you're trying to get to. And, with a model, you can help try and kind of work out what the assumptions and drivers and what those things need to look like. And then, as a manager of the business, you can start working on, okay, how do I increase my headcount? Or how do I decrease this particular cost per unit or various things like that? So yeah, that's a very high level on what we're doing with Blox. VICTORIA: Thank you for that. And I certainly can relate to that, having worked for several different consulting services companies and how difficult it can be to get software [laughs] to project that -- SIMON: [laughs] VICTORIA: Far into the future, like, to think about how you're going to hire, all the things that go into it. So, I'm curious about your own plan for Blox. Like, how would you describe where you are in your plan for the company? SIMON: We are a year old, actually just celebrated our one-year anniversary. In the last year, we've formed, hired an early team. We've fundraised successfully. So, we raised venture finance to fund the business. It's a complex product to build. We're trying to replace a spreadsheet, which has got tons and tons of features. They've been developing that for a long time. So, for someone to come across, it needs to be a relatively mature product. So, we raised venture funds from investors. We're busy investing that to build up the product and take that to market. It's been a fantastic year. And this is my first time as a founder. I've worked in leadership roles in technology businesses, in customer success, and in product as well. Yeah, I definitely would say working as a founder in a brand-new startup is very different to working in product, in a scale-up. You know, some of the lessons that I learned back there have been useful. You know, you learn how to juggle chaos, how to juggle...how to spin lots of plates. But yeah, I'm really delighted with our progress so far. We've fundraised. We ran a beta of our product last year with some early customers. We graduated from that. Our approach has always been to try and get the product out, so really embrace agile. It's kind of you don't see it so often in enterprise software. What you see is companies that like to just put "Book a demo" on the website. And they don't like to show their software until they've already kind of sold the value, and they've pitched, you know, positioned their pricing, and qualified their leads, et cetera. Our approach has always been let's build a fantastic product. Let's build something which is super compelling, super easy to use. Let's get people into the product as quickly as possible so they can experience it, see if it's going to be valuable for them. We launched a free tier of our product, the first sort of MVP, as a free tier, so not paid, not with some of the features that we plan to add to the product. And so, we've got that out there, and it's been fantastic. We've got users from all over the world using it in all sorts of different ways. And that's the other thing that is really great for us. Because it's such a flexible product, it can be used in lots of places. So, we've got all sorts of different applications being used by it. People jump in; they use it. They can try different templates that we've got. And then, if they need something different...every business is slightly different. So, if they need something slightly different, they can just chat to us in the product. We absolutely love chatting to people. And then, you know, we'll often spin up a custom template for them. And when we've done a few of those, then we'll build a standard template for a new industry. That's a little bit about where we're at. We're a small team based between here and India, where most of our developers are. It's good fun. Some of the learning...so I would say maybe it's just because of my background. So, I moved into product, and I was a product manager and then product leader for the last six years. So, for me, I've found building the product has been the easier part, probably because it's my background and that's where my passion is. So, I absolutely love anytime I get to spend in the product and spend with the team. The original founding team is myself as founder and CEO. And I don't get too much time on the product. I have a product manager and a designer. And so, that was the first...the early team, the founding team. And then we've added marketing and some other roles and software development. And so that's the team. I've found building the product has been really fun, and that's been a bit easier. Trying to work out how to do fundraising was a real challenge, so that took a lot of energy. We've been pretty successful so far in that. Still, always more to go, always more fundraising needed definitely. The really hard thing, especially in the market that we're in right now, it's hard, you know, getting early customer traction and selling. And that's really hard trying to get your name out there, build a brand, find early customers. That's really hard. So yeah, that's definitely an observation for me that the product has been really fun and a bit easier than I thought. But yeah, trying to do sales, marketing, figure that out...and probably as well because it's not my background or my kind of natural area of interest, so I've been learning. That's always tough, isn't it? Mid-Roll Ad: VICTORIA: Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable support and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5K per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch support and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, contact sales@thoughtbot.com. VICTORIA: And with me here, I have Richard Newman, who is the Development Director on our Boost Team, to talk to me a little bit more about what maintenance actually looks like once you've built your software application, right? RICHARD: Hi, Victoria. VICTORIA: Hi, Richard. You have experience building applications. I wonder if you could describe to a founder who's considering to build an application, like, what should they consider for their long-term maintenance? RICHARD: Well, like you said earlier, part of what you're going for with that long-term maintenance is making sure the health of your project, of your application, is always there. And you don't want to be surprised as you're continuing to work with your users and so forth. And so, a number of things that we pay attention to in maintenance are, we're paying attention to keeping the application secure, providing security updates. We want to make sure that the ecosystem, basically, all of the tools and third-party services that are tied to your application that, we're responding to those sorts of changes as we go along. And then part of it is, occasionally, you're going to find some smaller issues or bugs or so forth as your user group continues to grow or as needs continue to change. You want to be able to respond to those quickly as well. And so, a lot of what goes into maintenance is making sure that you're paying attention and you're ahead of those things before they surprise you. VICTORIA: Because what can happen? Like, what are the consequences if you don't do that ongoing maintenance? RICHARD: Well, the security updates those happen across gems and in the platform sort of tools that are there. And so, if you're not keeping those up to date, your exposure, your vulnerability to being hacked, or having a bad actor come into your application start growing on you if you're not doing the maintenance. The other ones that can come up is there's new interfaces that these third-party services...they may be updating their APIs. They may be updating how you're supposed to work with their tool. And so, those can occasionally break if you're not paying attention to what's going on or you're suddenly surprised by an upgrade that you have to make. And then, finally, there's this long-term sort of code change that just builds up over time if you're not keeping it refactored for the changes that are upcoming in a language or the gems that you work with. And then, suddenly, after a while, it suddenly gets to the point where you have a lot of work that you might have to do to rehabilitate the application to take on some of the newer features that are being released. And so, that makes it that much more difficult, that much more friction about being able to deliver updates for your users or to be able to respond to changes that are happening out there in your application. VICTORIA: Right. So, if you don't have that ongoing maintenance, you could run into a situation where, suddenly, you need to make a very large investment and fixing whatever is broken. RICHARD: Absolutely. It's going to be very tough to plan for if you weren't keeping up all the way along and, yes, absolutely ends up being much slower if you have to remediate it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. I wonder if you have any examples of a project you've walked into and said, "Wow, I wish we had been doing a little bit more maintenance." [laughs] And maybe you can share some details. RICHARD: Yeah. We had a fairly large application that involved a number of clinic services. So, we had an application that users were going in every day and counting on our fast response. And, over time, we've got surprised by a database upgrade that had to happen. Basically, the database was going to be changed by our third-party hosting service, and that hadn't been tested. There hadn't been procedures in place when we discovered this need. And there was a very hard date that that change had to be done or else the entire application was going to go down. And it came at a very inconvenient time, at the end of the year around Christmas, that we had to respond to all of that. And had we been in front of it and just updated it every quarter and staying current with it, it wouldn't have been nearly the lift that it turned out to be. We were facing a pretty hard deadline [laughs] there to keep things going. It was very, very stressful and disruptive for the team and potentially for the clinics. VICTORIA: Right. And it always happens around a big holiday or something like that, right? When it all comes to a head. So... [laughter] RICHARD: Absolutely. You want to be in control of the timeframe and not have the timeframe be in control of you. VICTORIA: Right. And if you have a team like thoughtbot supporting you, you can go on your vacation with a little bit more knowledge that if something breaks, there's someone there who can respond and fix things, and you don't have to interrupt your very valuable time off. So... RICHARD: [chuckles] Absolutely. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Richard, for joining me today. I appreciate you coming here to talk with us. And we'll talk to you again soon. RICHARD: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. WILL: You mentioned getting your product out there how challenging it can be. So, what has been some other wins and some challenges that you've had as a first-time founder? SIMON: So, my approach to things as a leader is I basically like to bring silliness and games to help motivate and energize the team. So, as a human, I have quite a lot of energy. I roll around with lots of energy. And I take loads of photos of what I'm doing, and I share those. So, we have a Friday wrap-up with the team, and so I'll often share a lot of the pictures of, you know, what I've been up to this week. So, yeah, there's been some really fantastic moments launching a product. We launched our MVP in three months. So, we basically set off...I actually funded the first season of the business, a couple of software developers, a couple of early employees. I funded the first season. We hadn't raised money. And I just spoke to my wife, and I said, "Look, now's the time. I really want to do this." You know, I've been saving up if you like, I had this, like, one day I'll do a startup fund. Some people would probably call that their long-term savings or like, you know, some...and I kind of called it my one day I'll do a startup fund. So, I'd been building up this fund because I knew that at some point, I'll probably go do this. The timing was way earlier than I thought. I thought I'd still do another four or five years in a career in a corporate role to try and get a few more notches in my belts to make fundraising easier, et cetera. The timing came. The team was perfect. And everything just felt right, so we went for it. But yeah, we basically set out. We didn't know where we were going to get funding from. The market was in a real state, so this was middle of 2022. The Ukraine war had kicked in; valuations had dropped by 90% for a lot of tech companies. The post-COVID bubble had burst. It was hard. So, we sat down, and we were like, okay, we could spend all of our runway trying to fundraise now, or we could crack on and try and build the first MVP. But we'd already done a lot of the market research, the user testing, early prototypes, et cetera. And that's a bit of a long story. But we had done that in the company that the founding team had worked at, and then we were actually a spin-out. So that happened. And we were sitting here thinking, okay, you know, we could spend all of our runway fundraising, or we could just crack on and build a product as quick as we can in the next three months. And so, we had this really hard conversation where we descoped so much stuff. And we just figured out what's the core piece that will really show the value of what we're trying to build, that we'd give to a user, that we could give to an early customer that they could use and get value from? And so, we came up with that scope. And we cracked on, and we built it. Within two and a half months, we had a working version. We played with it. Within three months, we kind of launched into this beta and got early users onto. So that was, you know, fantastic. So, we did that in the first three months, and then off the success of having an MVP, and just being able to show the product, and start getting some early user feedback, initial feedback was, you know, we took into account very quickly and improved. And just having that, you know, you basically start building momentum. Every step is still really hard, but you do build momentum. So, we got this product. We launched it. We went to a couple of events, and we talked about that, and then we did some fundraising. And we landed some funding, so that was fantastic. And then, you know, and then we've just gone sort of step by step from there. So, it's really fantastic what we've been able to achieve so far. The challenges there's been loads of them, especially when you're building a startup. It's really exciting. So, you can get people excited quite easily about the future potential. And you can kind of talk about what this can be. I've got a printed picture of a unicorn on my whiteboard in my office right here as a sort of a statement of, you know, where we're going. It's really hard as a founder or a leader trying to persuade people to leave a stable job, take a pay cut, and come and work with you and give them some equity, which you hope will be worth a ton, and you kind of paint the picture. But also, you don't know how long you can keep them because you're on runway. You're on runway. You haven't got infinite cash if it's not a profitable business. So, you know, there are some real challenges. And, as a founder, you go through ups and downs. Ben Horowitz talks about it in his great book, The Hard Things About Hard Things, as the struggle. I definitely understand that a lot more now because there is an up and down to this. You do build momentum, but you also...you're creating the momentum, you know, one hard push at a time. So that's that early customers come on. You kind of pitch the dream of what the product will do, and then it will fall over as soon as they touch it. But I absolutely love it. What I love is the chance to create and how quickly you can move in the early days of a startup or a new product, where you don't have masses of technical debt. You don't have hundreds of customers. You don't have all this, you know, you don't have a massive team where everyone's got their point of view on what you should do. So, you can move really fast, and that's fantastic [inaudible 30:14] creative season. So yeah, lots of ups and downs, but it's really fun. VICTORIA: That's so interesting and particularly interesting that you're trying to make something that's easier to use than Excel. So, I'm curious how you're testing to make sure that it's actually easy. And what might be...I'm sure there's some interesting feedback you got about that. SIMON: Yeah, so we're making Blox easier than Excel. But it's got to be powerful enough to be able to handle the data and the modeling that you need for a business. If you're doing projections for multiple years if you've got lots of products or teams, then it can be complex, so it needs to be powerful enough to handle that. It needs to be flexible enough because you can take a template, but every business has got its own unique quirks. So, it needs to be flexible enough that it can be tailored easy for a unique business. And then, crucially, and this is also important, it needs to be easy enough to use so that the person who understands the business can change the model to kind of suit their business. That's the bit that most of the other players, you know, the enterprise software that's available today, just that they haven't figured out how to make it easy enough so that a businessperson that, you know, doesn't have database experience, can't write SQL, not going to write Python, you know, doesn't do complex scripting or any of this stuff. It's got to be easy enough that they can, you know, tailor, reflect the way that their business works, the way that they make money, the way that their cost structure works, so they can figure out what drives the business. And so, if they're projecting revenue, they can work out the costs associated. So, one of our founding team is a UX designer, a really, really fantastic designer, very experienced. He's been in the game for 25 years since, way before it was called UX. And started doing graphic design, and then has done lots of branding and branding for some really fantastic, large companies, did lots of consulting. And then got into UX and how, you know, the art of wireframing and helping to make products easily usable. I call him my secret weapon. I've worked with some fantastic designers in the past, so, as a founder, I think I appreciate and understand the value of a really good design and a really good UX designer. So, Mike, our UX designer, has just been fantastic at that. He's very good at wireframing and very good at testing. And he's not a finance planning expert. That's why I call him my secret weapon because, you know, I understand planning really well, but sometimes I understand it too well. When I describe what a user is trying to do or, you know, what I expect a screen will look like, I'm just probably subconsciously replacing or recreating something that I've seen or used before, whereas he's coming at it brand new. He's not worked in planning or data modeling, or many of these things. He's worked in lots of different businesses. So, he comes at it with a mobile-first perspective. Normally, he's thinking about, okay, how could this be used by a busy leader on their phone and they're running around? And so, he's been really fantastic at helping to keep it simple and easy and to rethink and to create a product, which is just so different to what other tools in the space are doing. And that's some of the feedback we get. It looks so different. It works so different. But yeah, the hard thing is that spreadsheets are the most sticky tool, I think. They're just so useful for, you know, for everything where you need to get a list of things. You just start throwing it into a spreadsheet, and then you can, you know, organize it and improve structure over time. But yeah, it's a really sticky tool. And we train people how to use spreadsheets from early days from school. My 12-year-old daughter she already has been taught how to use a spreadsheet in school. So, what we're trying to do is create something which is easier. But there's also, you know, you want there to be some familiarity in there so that people will...to avoid some of the friction of the people who have it. No one really signs up to learn a new tool if they can avoid it. We're lazy. [laughs] VICTORIA: It makes sense that design would be a big priority for your product because that was your intention from the beginning, right? Is to make something that's easy to use, so you prioritize that as an investment. SIMON: That's right. That's absolutely right. Yeah. VICTORIA: What's on the horizon? What are you the most excited about for Blox in the coming months? SIMON: So, yeah, we've got some really exciting elements of our roadmap coming. So, yeah, really excited to see these things come to life. Like anyone working in building products, whether you're designing, doing product, sort of overseeing, or actually developing, it's so great to see these things come to life. You spend a long time thinking and chatting about them, imagining, ideating about how they could look. The thing that I'm just most excited about is—and that's probably why I love product—is, you know, you're building a product, and then you can...then you're talking to somebody about how they would use this. Or before that, you're talking about their day-to-day right now and what their problems are, and how you could help them save time, save money, et cetera. And so, you know, I absolutely love chatting to more and more different types of companies, leaders in different parts of the business. And, you know, especially in our space, it's mostly about, okay, how can I help? You know, how could we improve this planning process that we've got, whether it's, you know, planning for the cost of running a big project or trying to figure out how can I scale my business to reach my objectives? So, I just love chatting to lots of different leaders globally. So, I love going to events, chatting to people, fact-finding about how they run their business, how they think about finances, et cetera. In terms of the product roadmap, we're working on some exciting new scenario capabilities, so you can easily look at different scenarios around a decision. So, you might be trying to decide, you know, should I be aggressive with my investments and hiring, or should I be pessimistic? Or is there a middle ground? So, we're adding, like, scenario capabilities where you can build out different versions of that, and then easily compare and contrast, and then decide which one to do. We're working on some really...really enjoying working on some intelligent capabilities. So, again, in the search of making it really easy to use for a busy leader, for a busy businessperson, or a busy finance person, making it really easy to use. So, we've invested a lot in AI technology and been designing, developing POCs around how AI could help to onboard customers faster, how we could help to personalize models for businesses automagically. So, as soon as we understand the website of a user, what sort of industry they're in, we can automagically personalize the template for them, add their own KPIs, like, industry-specific KPIs, into the model, and throw in benchmark data and all these things. So, we've got some fantastic AI capabilities coming through the pipe and some data integrations. As we get out more and more, we're connecting to different data sources. So, yeah, exciting times ahead for the roadmap. And as we add more features, then we'll add different pricing tiers, you know, so we can try and offer a nice, affordable entry-level offering for Blox, but then we will, you know, as you get more and more different features, you'll pay at the appropriate level. So that's a little bit about what our future looks like. WILL: That's neat some of the things you have coming up. You mentioned AI and how you're kind of embracing that. Can you expound on that? Like, kind of I know you said some data models automagically is going to do it. But, like, where can you see the benefit for a customer to use that? Because I know AI can be scary and stuff like that. But, like, just kind of taking the fear out of it and talking about how beneficial it can be. SIMON: Yeah. So, there's lots of different places where AI can help. So, the typical model today for finance planning is you'd have a leader who's responsible for the business, and they're responsible for an advertising budget. You know, they just intuitively know, you know, where should I spend money, what's good return on my investment, what's, you know, what works. But when it comes to actually trying to model that, so how to put that into a financial model or some other model that you can understand the relationships between these things, put in the KPIs, have the formulas, calculating things in the right way at the right level, what you often find is that the leader is not the system's expert. So, you'll often have, especially in bigger businesses, you've got this expert data analyst or FP&A finance planning person that will do the modeling. So, we really believe that AI can be like a digital business coach to digitize that business advisory piece. So, the leader can be sitting down. They can be looking to try and improve some part of their business or understand some part of their spend and trying to work out, like, what would life look like if I increased my spend on this particular channel by X? And so, you know, we are looking at AI to help with lots of different areas around this. Initially, it's helping a new user to get onboarded with Blox. So, it's taking a template and helping to personalize it for their business. What we basically try and do is fetch as much data about a new user and a new company as possible. So, if their team is on their website, then we'll pull in their team. If their products are listed on their website, we'll pull in a list of their products and try and throw that into the model and take out a lot of the friction that you have. As a user in the new system, you have to type in everything normally. If you're trying to model a business, you used to type it all in or copy and paste it from a spreadsheet. So, we're looking at lots of options to help onboard new users. That has a good value add for us because we can increase the speed of adoption and help get users to value faster, which is great for us. And also, users are, you know, they're busy. They're impatient, and they want to understand what value they're going to get before they spend lots more of their time. So that's going to be useful for us and them. And yeah, helping to interpret the data. So, they'll connect us to their source systems. We'll be able to interpret what's going on, help them to understand different options and scenarios about how things might play out in the future. Basically, AI will help us to draw our insights that we can present to the user, will help explain what the user is looking at when they're looking at the model, so we can summarize some of the key insights so that they can use that. We're expecting to have all sorts of users, but we're really focusing on really busy leaders who may have a good understanding of spreadsheets and data, but they're just too busy, and so they don't have time. So, they want something which is quick and easy. Or leaders who don't have that expertise, so those are the ones that we really cater for. We try and keep it really simple and help guide them through the process, et cetera. So that's where AI is going to be, like, that digital business AI...We kind of kind of talk about this AI business coach concept. And, over time, we'll build up more and more elements to that coach capability. We call him Anton in our team when we talk. We'll add more and more capabilities to him. But we've built a number of different POCs. And we've launched a couple of those with some customers. We've been out to events and showing off these new capabilities to basically test them out, understand what's working, what's not. What more do we need to think about to productionize this proof of concept? So that's, yeah, it's a very exciting time to be working on those things. VICTORIA: I love hearing about that. That's super interesting to see where it's going to go. So, my last question for you today is, is there anything else that you would like to promote? SIMON: I think I would just say, yeah, if you're a leader running a business or maybe it's a service business, and you're trying to think about, you know, when hiring business planning, financial planning, anything like that, then I'd love for you to come over to Blox, and you can jump straight into the product from our website. You can sign up. I absolutely love chatting to people about their businesses and what they're trying to do with their finances. So, if you want to do that, you can sign up. You can chat to us. I actually take a lot of time to respond to people in there, so yeah, if you want to do that. Or, if you can, also find me on LinkedIn. You can search me there. Just strike up a conversation and say, "Hey, Simon, I'd love to chat about financial roadmapping or finance planning." Yeah, I absolutely just love to speak to different leaders that work right across the business in different roles and see how we can help them to build a business that really unlock the potential that they have in their business through a great understanding of finances. So, yeah, if I can be of help, I would love that. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And we'll have all those links in the show notes so our audience can go and take a look. WILL: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Simon Ritchie.

About SimonFounder and CEO of SnapShooter a backup company Links Referenced: SnapShooter.com: https://SnapShooter.com MrSimonBennett: https://twitter.com/MrSimonBennett TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't "the monthly bill?" Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing; visit snark.cloud/firefly to learn more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the things that I learned early on in my career as a grumpy Unix systems administrator is that there are two kinds of people out there: those who care about backups an awful lot, and people who haven't lost data yet. I lost a bunch of data once upon a time and then I too fell on the side of backups are super important. Here to talk with me about them a bit today is Simon Bennett, founder and CEO of SnapShooter.com. Simon, thanks for joining me.Simon: Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.Corey: It's fun to be able to talk to people who are doing business in the cloud space—in this sense too—that is not venture-backed, that is not, “Well, we have 600 people here that are building this thing out.” And similar to the way that I handle things at The Duckbill Group, you are effectively one of those legacy things known as a profitable business that self-funds. What made you decide to pursue that model as opposed to, well, whatever the polite version of bilking venture capitalists out of enormous piles of money for [unintelligible 00:01:32]?Simon: I think I always liked the idea of being self-sufficient and running a business, so I always wanted to start a physical business when I was younger, but when I got into software, I realized that that's a really easy way, no capital needed, to get started. And I tried for years and years to build products, all of which failed until finally SnapShooter actually gained a customer. [laugh].Corey: “Oh, wait, someone finally is paying money for this, I guess I'm onto something.”Simon: Yeah.Corey: And it's sort of progressed from there. How long have you been in business?Simon: We started in 2017, as… it was an internal project for a company I was working at who had problems with DigitalOcean backups, or they had problems with their servers getting compromised. So, I looked at DigitalOcean API and realized I could build something. And it took less than a week to build a product [with billing 00:02:20]. And I put that online and people started using it. So, that was how it worked.Every other product I tried before, I'd spent months and months developing it and never getting a customer. And the one time I spent less than [laugh] less than a week's worth of evenings, someone started paying. I mean, admittedly, the first person was only paying a couple of dollars a month, but it was something.Corey: There's a huge turning point where you just validate the ability and willingness for someone to transfer one dollar from their bank account to yours. It speaks to validation in a way that social media nonsense generally doesn't. It's the oh, someone is actually willing to pay because I'm adding value to what they do. That's no small thing.Simon: Yeah. There's definitely a big difference between people saying they're going to and they'd love it, and actually doing it. So.Corey: I first heard about you when Patrick McKenzie—or @patio11, as he goes by on Twitter—wound up doing a mini-thread on you about, “I've now used SnapShooter.com for real, and it was such a joy, including making a server migration easier than it would otherwise have been. Now, I have automatically monitored backups to my own S3 account for a bunch of things, which already had a fairly remote risk of failure.” And he keeps talking about the awesome aspects of it. And okay, when Patrick says, “This is neat,” that usually means it's time for me to at least click the link and see what's going on.And the thing that jumped out at me was a few things about what it is that you offer. You talk about making sure that people can sleep well at night, that it's about why backups are important, about—you obviously check the boxes and talk about how you do things and why you do them the way that you do, but it resonates around the idea of helping people sleep well at night. Because no one wants to think about backups. Because no one cares about backups; they just care an awful lot about restores, usually right after they should have cared about the backups.Simon: Yeah. This is actually a big problem with getting customers because I don't think it's on a lot of people's minds, getting backups set up until, as you said in the intro, something's gone wrong. [laugh]. And then they're happy to be a customer for life.Corey: I started clicking around and looking at your testimonials, for example, on your website. And the first one I saw was from the CEO of Transistor.fm. For those who aren't familiar with what they do, they are the company that hosts this podcast. I pay them as a vendor for all the back issues and whatnot.Whenever you download the show. It's routing through their stuff. So yeah, I kind of want them to have backups of these things because I really don't want to have all these conversations [laugh] again with everyone. That's an important thing. But Transistor's business is not making sure that the data is safe and secure; it's making podcasts available, making it easy to publish to them.And in your case, you're handling the backup portion of it so they can pay their money and they set it up effectively once—set it and forget it—and then they can go back to doing the thing that they do, and not having to fuss with it constantly. I think a lot of companies get it wrong, where they seem to think that people are going to make sustained, engaged efforts in whatever platform or tool or service they build. People have bigger fish to fry; they just want the thing to work and not take up brain sweat.Simon: Yeah. Customers hardly ever log in. I think it's probably a good sign when they don't have to log in. So, they get their report emails, and that's that. And they obviously come back when they got new stuff to set up, but from a support point of view is pretty, pretty easy, really, people don't—[laugh] constantly on there.Corey: From where I sit, the large cloud providers—and some of the small ones, too—they all have backup functionality built into the offering that they've got. And some are great, some are terrible. I assume—perhaps naively—that all of them do what it says on the tin and actually back up the data. If that were sufficient, you wouldn't have any customers. You clearly have customers. What is it that makes those things not work super well?Simon: Some of them are inflexible. So, some of the providers have built-in server backups that only happen weekly, and six days of no backups can be a big problem when you've made a mistake. So, we offer a lot of flexibility around how often you backup your data. And then another key part is that we let you store your data where you want. A lot of the providers have either vendor lock-in, or they only store it in themselves. So… we let you take your data from one side of the globe to the other if you want.Corey: As anyone who has listened to the show is aware, I'm not a huge advocate for multi-cloud for a variety of excellent reasons. And I mean that on a per-workload basis, not, “Oh, we're going to go with one company called Amazon,” and you use everything that they do, including their WorkMail product. Yeah, even Amazon doesn't use WorkMail; they use Exchange like a real company would. And great, pick the thing that works best for you, but backups have always been one of those areas.I know that AWS has great region separation—most of the time. I know that it is unheard of for there to be a catastrophic data loss story that transcends multiple regions, so the story from their side is very often, oh, just back it up to a different region. Problem solved. Ignoring the data transfer aspect of that from a pricing perspective, okay. But there's also a risk element here where everyone talks about the single point of failure with the AWS account that it's there, people don't talk about as much: it's your payment instrument; if they suspend your account, you're not getting into any region.There's also the story of if someone gets access to your account, how do you back that up? If you're going to be doing backups, from my perspective, that is the perfect use case, to put it on a different provider. Because if I'm backing up from, I don't know, Amazon to Google Cloud or vice versa, I have a hard time envisioning a scenario in which both of those companies simultaneously have lost my data and I still care about computers. It is very hard for me to imagine that kind of failure mode, it's way out of scope for any disaster recovery or business continuity plan that I'm coming up with.Simon: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I haven't—[laugh] I don't have that in my disaster recovery plan, to be honest about going to a different cloud, as in, we'll solve that problem when it happens. But the data is, as you say, in two different places, or more. But yeah, the security one is a key one because, you know, there's quite a lot of surface area on your AWS account for compromising, but if you're using either—even a separate AWS account or a different provider purely for storage, that can be very tightly controlled.Corey: I also appreciate the idea that when you're backing stuff up between different providers, the idea of owning both sides of it—I know you offer a solution where you wind up hosting the data as well, and that has its value, don't get me wrong, but there are also times, particularly for regulated industries, where yeah, I kind of don't want my backup data just hanging out with someone else's account with whatever they choose to do with it. There's also the verification question, which again, I'm not accusing you of in any way, shape, or form of being nefarious, but it's also one of those when I have to report to a board of directors of like, “Are you sure that they're doing what they say they're doing?” It's a, “Well, he seemed trustworthy,” is not the greatest answer. And the boards ask questions like that all the time. Netflix has talked about this where they backup a rehydrate-the-business level of data to Google Cloud from AWS, not because they think Amazon is going to disappear off the face of the earth, but because it's easier to do that and explain it than having to say, “Well, it's extremely unlikely and here's why,” and not get torn to pieces by auditors, shareholders, et cetera. It's the path of least resistance, and there is some validity to it.Simon: Yeah, when you see those big companies who've been with ransomware attacks and they've had to either pay the ransom or they've literally got to build the business from scratch, like, the cost associated with that is almost business-ending. So, just one backup for their data, off-site [laugh] they could have saved themselves millions and millions of pounds. So.Corey: It's one of those things where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And we're still seeing that stuff continue to evolve and continue to exist out in the ecosystem. There's a whole host of things that I think about like, “Ooh, if I lost, that would be annoying but not disastrous.” When I was going through some contractual stuff when we were first setting up The Duckbill Group and talking to clients about this, they would periodically ask questions about, “Well, what's your DR policy for these things?” It's, “Well, we have a number of employees; no more than two are located in the same city anywhere, and we all work from laptops because it is the 21st century, so if someone's internet goes out, they'll go to a coffee shop. If everyone's internet goes out, do you really care about the AWS bill that month?”It's a very different use case and [unintelligible 00:11:02] with these things. Now, let's be clear, we are a consultancy that fixes AWS bills; we're not a hospital. There's a big difference in the use case and what is acceptable in different ways. But what I like is that you have really build something out that lets people choose their own adventure in how managed they want it to be, what the source is, what the target should be. And it gives people enough control but without having to worry about the finicky parts of aligning a bunch of scripts that wind up firing off in cron jobs.Simon: Yeah. I'd say a fair few people run into issues running scripts or, you know, they silently fail and then you realize you haven't actually been running backups for the last six months until you're trying to pull them, even if you were trying to—Corey: Bold of you to think that I would notice it that quickly.Simon: [laugh]. Yeah, right. True. Yeah, that's presuming you have a disaster recovery plan that you actually test. Lots of small businesses have never even heard of that as a thing. So, having as us, kind of, manage backups sort of enables us to very easily tell people that backups of, like—we couldn't take the backup. Like, you need to address this.Also, to your previous point about the control, you can decide completely where data flows between. So, when people ask us about what's GDPR policies around data and stuff, we can say, “Well, we don't actually handle your data in that sense. It goes directly from your source through almost a proxy that you control to your storage.” So.Corey: The best answer: GDPR is out of scope. Please come again. And [laugh] yeah, just pass that off to someone else.Simon: In a way, you've already approved those two: you've approved the person that you're managing servers with and you've already approved the people that are doing storage with. You kind of… you do need to approve us, but we're not handling the data. So, we're handling your data, like your actual customer; we're not handling your customer's customer's data.Corey: Oh, yeah. Now, it's a valuable thing. One of my famous personal backup issues was okay, “I'm going to back this up onto the shared drive,” and I sort of might have screwed up the backup script—in the better way, given the two possible directions this can go—but it was backing up all of its data and all the existing backup data, so you know, exponential growth of your backups. Now, my storage vendor was about to buy a boat and name it after me when I caught that. “Oh, yeah, let's go ahead and fix that.”But this stuff is finicky, it's annoying, and in most cases, it fails in silent ways that only show up as a giant bill in one form or another. And not having to think about that is valuable. I'm willing to spend a few hours setting up a backup strategy and the rest; I'm not willing to tend it on an ongoing basis, just because I have other things I care about and things I need to get done.Simon: Yeah. It's such a kind of simple and trivial thing that can quickly become a nightmare [laugh] when you've made a mistake. So, not doing it yourself is a good [laugh] solution.Corey: So, it wouldn't have been a @patio11 recommendation to look at what you do without having some insight into the rest of the nuts and bolts of the business and the rest. Your plans are interesting. You have a free tier of course, which is a single daily backup job and half a gig of storage—or bring your own to that it's unlimited storage—Simon: Yep. Yeah.Corey: Unlimited: the only limits are your budget. Yeah. Zombo.com got it slightly wrong. It's not your mind, it's your budget. And then it goes from Light to Startup to Business to Agency at the high end.A question I have for you is at the high end, what I've found has been sort of the SaaS approach. The top end is always been a ‘Contact Us' form where it's the enterprise scope of folks where they tend to have procurement departments looking at this, and they're going to have a whole bunch of custom contract stuff, but they're also not used to signing checks with fewer than two commas in them. So, it's the signaling and the messaging of, “Reach out and talk to us.” Have you experimented with that at all, yet? Is it something you haven't gotten to yet or do you not have interest in serving that particular market segment?Simon: I'd say we've been gearing the business from starting off very small with one solution to, you know, last—and two years ago, we added the ability to store data from one provider to a different provider. So, we're sort of stair-stepping our way up to enterprise. For example, at the end of last year, we went and got certificates for ISO 27001 and… one other one, I can't remember the name of them, and we're probably going to get SOC 2 at some point this year. And then yes, we will be pushing more towards enterprises. We add, like, APIs as well so people can set up backups on the fly, or so they can put it as part of their provisioning.That's hopefully where I'm seeing the business go, as in we'll become under-the-hood backup provider for, like, a managed hosting solution or something where their customers won't even realize it's us, but we're taking the backups away from—responsibility away from businesses.Corey: For those listeners who are fortunate enough to not have to have spent as long as I have in the woods of corporate governance, the correct answer to, “Well, how do we know that vendor is doing what they say that they're doing,” because the, “Well, he seemed like a nice guy,” is not going to carry water, well, here are the certifications that they have attested to. Here's copies under NDA, if their audit reports that call out what controls they claim to have and it validates that they are in fact doing what they say that they're doing. That is corporate-speak that attests that you're doing the right things. Now, you're going to, in most cases, find yourself spending all your time doing work for no real money if you start making those things available to every customer spending 50 cents a year with you. So generally, the, “Oh, we're going to go through the compliance, get you the reports,” is one of the higher, more expensive tiers where you must spend at least this much for us to start engaging down this rabbit hole of various nonsense.And I don't blame you in the least for not going down that path. One of these years, I'm going to wind up going through at least one of those certification approaches myself, but historically, we don't handle anything except your billing data, and here's how we do it has so far been sufficient for our contractual needs. But the world's evolving; sophistication of enterprise buyers is at varying places and at some point, it'll just be easier to go down that path.Simon: Yeah, to be honest, we haven't had many, many of those customers. Sometimes we have people who come in well over the plan limits, and that's where we do a custom plan for them, but we've not had too many requests for certification. But obviously, we have the certification now, so if anyone ever [laugh] did want to see it under NDA, we could add some commas to any price. [laugh].Corey: This episode is sponsored in parts by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word.Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half dozen manage databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications, including Oracle, to the cloud.To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: What I like as well is that you offer backups for a bunch of different things. You can do snapshots from, effectively, every provider. I'm sorry, I'm just going to call out because I love this: AWS and Amazon LightSail are called out as two distinct things. And Amazonians will say, “Oh, well, under the hood, they're really the same thing, et cetera.” Yeah, the user experience is wildly different, so yeah, calling those things out as separate things make sense.But it goes beyond that because it's not just, “Well, I took a disk image. There we go. Come again.” You also offer backup recipes for specific things where you could, for example, back things up to a local file and external storage where someone is. Great, you also backup WordPress and MongoDB and MySQL and a whole bunch of other things.A unified cloud controller, which is something I have in my house, and I keep thinking I should find a way to back that up. Yeah, this is great. It's not just about the big server thing; it's about having data living in managed services. It's about making sure that the application data is backed up in a reasonable, responsible way. I really liked that approach. Was that an evolution or is that something you wound up focusing on almost from the beginning?Simon: It was an evolution. So, we started with the snapshots, which got the business quite far to be honest and it was very simple. It was just DigitalOcean to start with, actually, for the first two years. Pretty easy to market in a way because it's just focused on one thing. Then the other solutions came in, like the other providers and, you know, once you add one, it was easy to add many.And then came database backups and file backups. And I just had those two solutions because that was what people were asking for. Like, they wanted to make sure their whole server snapshot, if you have a whole server snapshot, the point in time data for MySQL could be corrupt. Like, there could be stuff in RAM that a MySQL dump would have pulled out, for example. Like… there's a possibility that the database could be corrupt from a snapshot, so people were asking for a bit of, more, peace of mind with doing proper backups of MySQL.So, that's what we added. And it soon became apparent when more customers were asking for more solutions that we really needed to, like, step back and think about what we're actually offering. So, we rebuilt this whole, kind of like, database engine, then that allowed us to consume data from anywhere. So, we can easily add more backup types. So, the reason you can see all the ones you've listed there is because that's kind of what people have been asking for. And every time someone comes up with a new, [laugh], like, a new open-source project or database or whatever, we'll add support, even ones I've never heard of before. When people ask for some weird file—Corey: All it takes is just waiting for someone to reach out and say, hey, can you back this thing up, please?Simon: Yeah, exactly, some weird file-based database system that I've never ever heard of. Yeah, sure. Just give us [laugh] a test server to mess around with and we'll build, essentially, like, we use bash in the background for doing the backups; if you can stream the data from a command, we can then deal with the whole management process. So, that's the reason why. And then, I was seeing in, like, the Laravel space, for example, people were doing MySQL backups and they'd have a script, and then for whatever reason, someone rotated the passwords on the database and the backup script… was forgotten about.So, there it is, not working for months. So, we thought we could build a backup where you could just point it at where the Laravel project is. We can get all the config we need at the runtime because it's all there with the project anyway, and then thus, you never need to tell us the password for your database and that problem goes away. And it's the same with WordPress.Corey: I'm looking at this now just as you go through this, and I'm a big believer in disclaiming my biases, conflicts of interest, et cetera. And until this point, neither of us have traded a penny in either direction between us that I'm ever aware of—maybe you bought a t-shirt or something once upon a time—but great, I'm about to become a customer of this because I already have backup solutions for a lot of the things that you currently support, but again, when you're a grumpy admin who's lost data in the past, it's, “Huh, you know what I would really like? That's right, another backup.” And if that costs me a few hundred bucks a year for the peace of mind is money well spent because the failure mode is I get to rewrite a whole lot of blog posts and re-record all podcasts and pay for a whole bunch of custom development again. And it's just not something that I particularly want to have to deal with. There's something to be said for a holistic backup solution. I wish that more people thought about these things.Simon: Can you imagine having to pull all the blog posts off [unintelligible 00:22:19]? [laugh]—Corey: Oh, my got—Simon: —to try and rebuild it.Corey: That is called the crappiest summer internship someone has ever had.Simon: Yeah.Corey: And that is just painful. I can't quite fathom having to do that as a strategy. Every once in a while some big site will have a data loss incident or go out of business or something, and there's a frantic archiving endeavor that happens where people are trying to copy the content out of the Google Search Engine's cache before it expires at whatever timeline that is. And that looks like the worst possible situation for any sort of giant backup.Simon: At least that's one you can fix. I mean, if you were to lose all the payment information, then you've got to restitch all that together, or anything else. Like, that's a fixable solution, but a lot of these other ones, if you lose the data, yeah, there's no two ways around it, you're screwed. So.Corey: Yeah, it's a challenging thing. And it's also—the question also becomes one of, “Well, hang on. I know about backups on this because I have this data, but it's used to working in an AWS environment. What possible good would it do me sitting somewhere else?” It's, yeah, the point is, it's sitting somewhere else, at least in my experience. You can copy it back to that sort of environment.I'm not suggesting this is a way that you can run your AWS serverless environment on DigitalOcean, but it's a matter of if everything turns against you, you can rebuild from those backups. That's the approach that I've usually taken. Do you find that your customers understand that going in or is there an education process?Simon: I'd say people come for all sorts of reasons for why they want backup. So, having your data in two places for that is one of the reasons but, you know, I think there's a lot of reasons why people want peace of mind: for either developer mistakes or migration mistakes or hacking, all these things. So, I guess the big one we come up with a lot is people talking about databases and they don't need backups because they've got replication. And trying to explain that replication between two databases isn't the same as a backup. Like, you make a mistake you drop—[laugh] you run your delete query wrong on the first database, it's gone, replicated or not.Corey: Right, the odds of me fat-fingering an S3 bucket command are incredibly likelier than the odds of AWS losing an entire region's S3 data irretrievably. I make mistakes a lot more than they tend to architecturally, but let's also be clear, they're one of the best. My impression has always been the big three mostly do a decent job of this. The jury's still out, in my opinion, on other third-party clouds that are not, I guess, tier one. What's your take?Simon: I have to be careful. I've got quite good relationships with some of these. [laugh].Corey: Oh, of course. Of course. Of course.Simon: But yes, I would say most customers do end up using S3 as their storage option, and I think that is because it is, I think, the best. Like, is in terms of reliability and performance, some storage can be a little slow at times for pulling data in, which could or could not be a problem depending on what your use case is. But there are some trade-offs. Obviously, S3, if you're trying to get your data back out, is expensive. If you were to look at Backblaze, for example, as well, that's considerably cheaper than S3, especially, like, when you're talking in the petabyte-scale, there can be huge savings there. So… they all sort of bring their own thing to the table. Personally, I store the backups in S3 and in Backblaze, and in one other provider. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. Like—Simon: I like to have them spread.Corey: Like, every once in a while in the industry, there's something that happens that's sort of a watershed moment where it reminds everyone, “Oh, right. That's why we do backups.” I think the most recent one—and again, love to them; this stuff is never fun—was when that OVH data center burned down. And OVH is a somewhat more traditional hosting provider, in some respects. Like, their pricing is great, but they wind up giving you what amounts to here as a server in a rack. You get to build all this stuff yourself.And that backup story is one of those. Oh, okay. Well, I just got two of them and I'll copy backups to each other. Yeah, but they're in the same building and that building just burned down. Now, what? And a lot of people learned a very painful lesson. And oh, right, that's why we have to do that.Simon: Yeah. The other big lesson from that was that even if the people with data in a different region—like, they'd had cross-regional backups—because of the demand at the time for accessing backups, if you wanted to get your data quickly, you're in a queue because so many other people were in the same boat as you're trying to restore stored backups. So, being off-site with a different provider would have made that a little easier. [laugh].Corey: It's a herd of elephants problem. You test your DR strategy on a scheduled basis; great, you're the only person doing it—give or take—at that time, as opposed to a large provider has lost a region and everyone is hitting their backup service simultaneously. It generally isn't built for that type of scale and provisioning. One other question I have for you is when I make mistakes, for better or worse, they're usually relatively small-scale. I want to restore a certain file or I will want to, “Ooh, that one item I just dropped out of that database really should not have been dropped.” Do you currently offer things that go beyond the entire restore everything or nothing? Or right now are you still approaching this from the perspective of this is for the catastrophic case where you're in some pain already?Simon: Mostly the catastrophic stage. So, we have MySQL [bin logs 00:27:57] as an option. So, if you wanted to do, like, a point-in-time of store, which… may be more applicable to what you're saying, but generally, its whole, whole website recovery. For example, like, we have a WordPress backup that'll go through all the WordPress websites on the server and we'll back them up individually so you can restore just one. There are ways that we have helped customers in the past just pull one table, for example, from a backup.But yeah, we geared towards, kind of, the set and the forget. And people don't often restore backups, to be honest. They don't. But when they do, it's obviously [laugh] very crucial that they work, so I prefer to back up the whole thing and then help people, like, if you need to extract ten megabytes out of an entire gig backup, that's a bit wasteful, but at least, you know, you've got the data there. So.Corey: Yeah. I'm a big believer in having backups in a variety of different levels. Because I don't really want to do a whole server restore when I remove a file. And let's be clear, I still have that grumpy old Unix admin of before I start making changes to a file, yeah, my editor can undo things and remembers that persistently and all. But I have a disturbing number of files and directories whose names end in ‘.bac' with then, like, a date or something on it, just because it's—you know, like, “Oh, I have to fix something in Git. How do I do this?”Step one, I'm going to copy the entire directory so when I make a pig's breakfast out of this and I lose things that I care about, rather than having to play Git surgeon for two more days, I can just copy it back over and try again. Disk space is cheap for those things. But that's also not a holistic backup strategy because I have to remember to do it every time and the whole point of what you're building and the value you're adding, from my perspective, is people don't have to think about it.Simon: Yes. Yeah yeah yeah. Once it's there, it's there. It's running. It's as you say, it's not the most efficient thing if you wanted to restore one file—not to say you couldn't—but at least you didn't have to think about doing the backup first.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to talk to me about all this. If people want to learn more for themselves, where can they find you?Simon: So, SnapShooter.com is a great place, or on Twitter, if you want to follow me. I am @MrSimonBennett.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:30:11]. Thank you once again. I really appreciate it.Simon: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.Corey: Simon Bennett, founder and CEO of SnapShooter.com. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry insulting comment that, just like your backup strategy, you haven't put enough thought into.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

IN THIS EPISODE: Today we discuss the challenges of being human at work with two of my favorite humans – Amanda & Simon Cookson. The three of us have a passion for helping leaders and organizations build more human workplaces and shift away from the commoditization of employees that has created stifling, unproductive and dehumanizing work environments. We talk about the power that humans have to innovate and succeed in times of disruption. We also talk about future trends in the workplace and the necessity for trust, vulnerability, and honesty, and a flexible, more person-centric workforce. Amanda and Simon are partners in both their personal and professional lives. They're married with two children and they are also the cofounders of the UK-based consulting firm, Northern Value Creators. Some of you might recognize Amanda from the “Leaders in Conversation” web series that she and I cohost. I think Amanda and Simon are both brilliant and as we move through the conversation I'm sure you'll see why. ABOUT OUR GUESTS (in their own words): Amanda: “I've always been drawn to rebellious ideas and their potential to change the world.   Following years in senior roles, building award winning teams I realised that my approach and ideas were often at odds with conventional management thinking. Treating people like resources, controlling them through bureaucracy didn't feel right. I knew there were better ways.   After my organisation went through a merger, radically shifting the culture; I began to feel like an outsider. My approach was not welcome and I felt under attack. Leaving this bruising experience behind me, I began my exploration into coaching and human leadership.   I was fascinated by how my experiences had impacted me, leading me to study the neuroscience of conversations and how our brains react in the workplace. This deep work allowed me to do what I love today – making business better by making them more human.” Simon: “It started back in the DotCom Boom when I was part of the team changing the way we do banking. For the past 20 years I've been involved in digital start ups, technical consultancies and big IT firms. All trying to bring about change with technology.   Stopping to reflect I realised most projects had failed, or at least failed to deliver what they promised. I wanted to know why. This investigation led to the founding of Northern Value Creators 4 years ago and shapes everything we do and believe today.   We can't afford to keep getting it wrong. There are no more excuses.   We can get the people piece right.” SHOW NOTES: To connect with Simon on LinkedIn and Twitter. To connect with Amanda on LInkedIn and Twitter. Check them both out at: http://www.northernvaluecreators.com/ and https://peopleprimer.co.uk . INSIGHT AT WORK PODCAST THEME MUSIC: Our theme music is composed by Chris Lucca, Jr.. You can listen to more of Chris' work at http://chrisluccamusic.comYou can also connect with him on Twitter: @Flipluka and on Instagram: @_flipluka.music_ ABOUT THE HOST: Ken Blackwell is a speaker, trainer, facilitator and executive coach. His signature practice is "rescuing Accidental Leaders and Dysfunctional Teams". His firm InKlaritas, based in Princeton, NJ, works with teams and leaders in companies in the U.S. around the world. You can find out more about InKlaritas at: www.InKlaritas.com and connect with Ken on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethjblackwell/.

The self-righteous pharisee.  He is convinced not only of his own holiness but also of other's sinfulness. The self-righteous end up alone because they don't want to be around sinners and sinners don't want to be around them. And we all are guilty of this sin. In this video I focus on a key figure from the Gospels, Simon the Pharisee. He doesn't believe that he has been forgiven much and therefore he doesn't love much. A woman, a sinner busts in on a dinner at Simon's house. She falls at the feet of Jesus, and Simon is appalled. Simon judges her, condemns her– and Jesus for letting her touch him. We've all been there. We snub the person we are jealous of. We don't invite certain individuals to our gatherings. We judge figures of authority and their motives. We criticize everyone else while neglecting to see our faults. We, like Simon, forget the dirt from which we came. We commit a sin that is worse than sin. And if we, and Simon remain there, we will be given the harsher judgment. Our Lord says to the measure that you measure, it will be measure out to you. But that isn't the end of the story for Simon and it doesn't have to be the end of the story for us. In this video you will discover the rest of the story about Simon (It is amazing) and how it applies to you, and how you can begin to conquer playing the pharisee. Hint: You will never look at Jesus scourging or a crucifix the same again. A couple of great resource that helps us in this area of self-righteousness: The Thorn: Seven Surprising Effects of Suffering and Temptation https://fathersofstjoseph.org/product/the-thorn-seven-surprising-effects-of-suffering-and-temptation/ The Imposter: how Your Perception of God Can Determine Your Eternity https://fathersofstjoseph.org/product/the-imposter-how-your-perception-of-god-can-determine-your-eternity/    

Durée : 3:07 - Cette semaine, les élèves de la section internationale de CM2 de l'école Anatole de Monzie à Nantes nous présentent leurs chroniques spéciales Noël ! Et en anglais s'il-vous-plaît ! Ils interviendront régulièrement à l'antenne pour nous apprendre un peu d'anglais sur des thématiques spécifiques. Vous avez aimé la chronique ? Retrouvez leur texte ci-dessous : Charlotte : Hello, we are Anna, Simon and Charlotte ! Aujourd’hui, Anna et Simon vont vous raconter l’histoire du Grinch - un personnage grognon qui veut gâcher Noël. Today, Anna and Simon are going to tell you about The Grinch. Avant cela, un peu de vocabulaire pour bien comprendre : (Charlotte en anglais / Simon en français) - grumpy : grognon, grincheux - a character : un personnage - joyful : joyeux - to steal : voler, dérober - still : toujours, encore - to ruin : gâcher - to bring something back : rapporter, rendre quelque chose   - Anna : The Grinch is a grumpy character. He lives in Mount Crumpit, next to Whoville, a town where people are joyful and optimistic. - Simon: The Grinch hates Christmas. - Anna : One day, he decides to go to the village to steal all the Christmas presents and decorations. - Simon : But after he takes all the presents, the residents are still joyful. - Anna : He does not understand, he is shocked ! - Simon : « Why are they still happy ? Why can I not ruin their Christmas ?» Anna : Later, he learns how important Christmas is, so he brings all the presents back. At the end, there is a big party with the people in Whoville. - Simon : It’s a happy ending !   Charlotte : C’était l’histoire du Grinch. Nous espérons qu’elle vous a plu !  

  I had the distinct privilege to sit down with Simon T Bailey to discuss his timeless book, "Shift Your Brilliance". I met Simon in March of 2020 when he gave a keynote address at a conference I was attending and his infectious manner and positive energy, drew me in. I had to interview him and find out more about this man. In this interview, we explore his book "Shift Your Brilliance" because it is so incredibly timely with what's happening in the world today with COVID-19, so many people furloughed from their jobs and so many companies going under with the weight of an almost non-existent economy due to social distancing. I hope this interview provides some real life guidance to those of you who may be a little lost at the moment and not sure what you next move might be. If you can shift your brilliance in a new direction, you'll surely come out on top when the dust settles. Enjoy! Simon T Bailey: Simon's Website: Simon T Bailey Connect with Simon: LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simontbailey/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrilliantSimonT/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simontbailey Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonTBailey Simon's Books: "Shift Your Brilliance" "Release Your Brilliance" "Be the Spark: Five Platinum Service Principles for Creating Customers for Life" "Brilliant Living: 31 Insights to Creating an Awesome Life" "Success is an Inside Job: Brilliant Service is the Bottom Line" "Releasing Leadership Brilliance: Breaking Sound Barriers in Education" "The Vuja de Moment: Shift from Average to Brilliant" "Simon Says Dream: Live a Passionate Life" Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? 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Bailey on the show, Simon and I met in March of this past year, but it was very briefly was passing in the hallway at a conference in Colorado. I shook his hand, told him how I loved the talk that he had just given the group. And then I was lucky enough to get him to say yes to come on to my podcast. So, Simon, welcome to my podcast. Thank you so much. Simon: Hey, Joe, good to be with you. Thank you for having me. Joe: Yeah, so I have one question before we even start, Simon: Sure. Joe: Why Simon T. Bailey? Simon: Because the "T is for terrific, you walked  into Joe: I Simon: It Joe: Said, Simon:  there, Joe: Damn, I should have guessed, I should have guessed. Simon: Though, the T is is a family name that my father gave to me. It stands for Theopolis, which is great. So Joe: Wow, OK, I was just wondering. Simon: It's a branding thing as well. Joe: So we are definitely going to talk today about your very timely book, which was published in 2014 called Shift Your Brilliance, Harness The Power of You Inc. Super interesting. I'm an audio book guy, so I listen to the audio book part, which for me is even better because I love your voice. Your laugh is probably the most infectious laugh that I've heard in such a long time. So that was great for me. But before we get into it, I just kind of want to lay a little groundwork about who Simon T. Bailey is. I know that from the book and from your talk that you gave out in Colorado, and I know you speak all over the world, that you came from the corporate environment. So you can start as far back as you want. I know the book covers some of your childhood, so it's completely up to you how far back you want to go. But I want to just lay a little groundwork so they know who you are and then we can get into all the other stuff. Simon: All , so give us two in a minute and a half or less, because it's important to what I'll share today, 14 years of age, mom and dad took me to Bennett High School or McKinley High School in Buffalo, New York, where I grew up, went out for football, basketball, got cut, went out for track and field. They said you're too slow that summer, attempted to commit suicide, didn't go through with it. Sophomore year, brand new high school teacher says to me, write a speech for the entire school. Absolutely changed my life. Ended up being class president. I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, dropped out of college after my first year, went back to college, took me ten years to finish my undergrad degree, started at a decent hotel making five dollars and ten cents an hour as a front desk clerk. That was about 30 years ago, fast forwarding got hired at Disney after a ten interviews over a ten year period. I stayed at Disney for seven years, left Disney after turning down for job same and a job saying that I wanted to be or I did an interview saying I wanted to become the number one guy at Disney that was put in front of that didn't quite work out. So I thought it probably best for me to find my happiness elsewhere. After Joe: But. Simon: Being married for twenty five years, went through a divorce and a video was posted to Facebook about me telling that story. That video has over 90 million views to date. And then from there I went through a bout of cancer. I am a cancer survivor, thank goodness. I have two amazing children. Twenty one year old son, eighteen year old daughter. And today I've worked with almost eighteen hundred organizations in forty nine countries just teaching a very simple concept that you have to shift your brilliance in the midst of uncertainty. I've written ten books, I've worked in forty nine countries and three of my courses are linked and learning. So that's just it in a nutshell. Joe: Man, oh, man, I'm tired just hearing that's amazing, that's truly amazing. And there's some of those things, obviously I didn't even know so and what I love about you besides the talk that you gave and how infectious you are and and it's and I even said it the other night, we were having a conversation and how I was having you on as a guest is that you're you're so positive. And it's it's and you you smile all the time, like every Instagram post, everything. It's just it's part of who you've become. And I think when I when I listen to the audio book and I heard you talk, I feel like you were the person at Disney that you've you're now trying to get at least the business people. Not like there's regular people that I know that this book and what you talk about attracts. But you were that person at Disney where it was just heads down working. And I think you even talked about a sport where you didn't even know the people that were part of your team or you didn't like you talked about getting reviews or something to that, where they just said if you actually knew the people you were working with and they knew you as a person, it would shift things for you. Simon: Totally, totally, I was so busy trying to climb the ladder of perceived success, in the words of Dr. Stephen Covey, only discovered my ladder was against the long haul. So I was the boss with an agenda instead of a leader with a vision. Joe: Yeah, it's it's really amazing. Well, I appreciate you giving us the background, I think now the people that are listening to this, they're in for a real treat. So I can let you just take take it from here and then I'm going to try to sneak in some of these things that I want to sneak in. But I really want you to get into the fact that you wrote this book in twenty fourteen. And literally it's almost as if you you could have written it in the beginning of March knowing that covid-19 was coming, because when I listen to it, it's, it's literally that, that everyone needs to be poked and say this is the time to do this, this is the time to shift your brilliance and figure out what it is. I keep preaching. No one's coming to rescue us. We've got to do this Simon: That's Joe: On our own. Simon: That's totally yeah, so when I when I wrote the book and it's so appropriate for now, I was holding on to the way things had always been going for me as my business. When I left Disney, I started speaking Friday in training consulting and I was thinking that's the way it was always going to but as you can imagine my entire world has been disrupted as as everyone else. And what I recognize is sometimes we have to let go of what is comfortable and convenient in order to embrace what wants to emerge. So everyone  now is experiencing what many will call V.U.C.A., volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. So you have 40 million people that have been laid off. You have millions who have been furloughed. You have companies that have gone under. But also in the midst of that, there are some companies that are totally shifted what they have been doing and moving into a whole other direction. I was interviewing a company out of Baltimore and they are whiskey company, but guess what business they are in now, hand sanitizer, because they understand there's an opportunity to shift. So everyone is listening to us, has to begin to say, what about my career or my business? I could be doing this now for 18, almost 18 years since I left Disney. And I have to tell you, Joe, I have reinvented I'm on my fifth reinvention in 18 years because I have to shift. So I wrote that book from a deep place with this is one concept, and that is we have to implement vu ja de If deja vu has been there, done that, that's pre covid budget day is going. They're doing that. It's seeing the old and the new. The new and the old. Joe: Yeah, it's just really incredible, it's literally like the book was, I don't know how it did when it came out in 2014, I'm sure it did great because I was just so captured listening to the stories that you told in it. But, man, it's just like it was written for now. It's just unbelievable. Is it OK if I ask a couple of questions about it? OK, Simon: Absolutely! Joe: So there's a line in there that you talk about where you say we are spirit beings having a human experience. And I heard that and I was like, wow. So could you elaborate more on that? Simon: Yeah, so when I first started out years ago, I was invited to an event where Dr. Stephen Covey, the late, great Dr. Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, was the opening speaker, Libby Sartain, who at that time was the chief people officer for Yahoo! And I was the closing speaker. And I just wanted to sit in and hear Dr. Covey because I was so fascinated. And he made this statement, which was originally, I think, quote by Wayne Dyer, and he said, We are not human beings having a spiritual experience where spirit beings having a human experience. And when I heard a joke, it was like a joy bomb, like BOOM!. I was like, what's that? And what I begin to recognize is all of us, we have a spirit. But how we show up into an environment, we either are hugging people with our words or we're tearing people down with our words and and words impact our spirit because words carry energy. And so we are spirit beings having a human experience. I believe what we're going through  now is everybody is being spiritually reset. Whatever spirituality means to everyone, they are thinking about meaning, not just money. Yes, money's important, but they're thinking about is my life really meaningful to thinking about power, not just or they're thinking about purpose, not just power, but that I think the other part of the spiritual reset that's happened is that people are also thinking about moving from success to significance. And that's so important when you're on the spiritual journey. Joe: And then there was another line in there, and again, I remember now that you brought it to my attention that Stephen Covey had said that and you had heard it in that that event. But hearing it from you gave it a different meaning when I listen to the audio book. So I had to bring it up because it was just like, man, I got to remember that and just keep that in the forefront of my mind. But then there was another one which was live from the inside out. Simon: Mm hmm, yet when you look from the inside out, you break the cycle of fear and worry because see what happens is  now uncertainty and worry has driven up stress and anxiety. And when a person is stressed out and they are living in fear and worry, it actually slows down the human operating system. So when you live from the inside out, what you're saying is, I'm not going to allow the outside circumstances to dictate how I what I produce, how I show up, how I thrive or survive. I'm going to take control of the steering wheel of my life and drive into the future and not be driven by all the news around me that's living from the inside out now. Yes, we need to be informed. Yes, we need to be well read. Yes, we need to pay attention to significant notifications that hit our phones. When you live from the inside out, what you realize is life is not a remote control. You can change the channel on your tell-a-vision. So when I live from the inside out, I am literally forecasting my future instead of living in the predictions of the day. Joe: When we talk about the book, but what's the audience that really needs something like this? Simon: Yes, so the book is written to that person who say twenty five to fifty five and they have either been furloughed or they're back at work, they're waiting for the other shoe to drop because now there's massive pressure to do to do more with less and working now might be working remote. So they're having to deal with the new world. But it's also written to that entrepreneur who says, I've done X, now I need to do Y and Z. How do I begin to harness the power of what we've done to be relevant for where things are going? It might be that solopreneur or that person who said, you know what I'm thinking about this is the time to go for it. And literally, I give you the tips and techniques on how to shift your brilliance, because it's my exact story when I left is the question. My entire for one with significant housing stock took out a line of credit on the house. So when I wrote "Shift Your Brilliance", I was probably already 10 years into my business. But I was thinking what had made me successful ten years in 10 years would make me successful in another 10 years. And I was wrong. Joe: Again, I keep thinking that people just think the Calvary's coming, you know, Simon: Oh, no, no. Joe: It's. Simon: Listen, every industry that literally can be turned upside down is being turned upside down. When you hear about retail like Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus filing for bankruptcy, J.C. Penney. These are these are brands that you thought would be around forever. And they are they're just going to look different, Joe: Yeah, Simon: ? Joe: Yeah, and by the way, you would know Neiman Marcus because I've seen you dress, so I know that Simon: Good. Joe: I know they love they love seeing you walk in the door because I've seen sharp and really sharp. It's funny because I met you there because I own management booking agency here in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona. And then we expanded into Colorado last summer. I spent six weeks there developing all these relationships to take what I've done here with success and move it out there. So I'm in the same boat as you. There was nothing going on. I'm just starting to put some entertainment back in the resorts. But when I work with these destination management companies who you know well through the corporate world, who books entertainment to the level of someone like you, they're starting to come to me going, OK, what are the virtual options? And so have you been doing some virtual speaking? Simon: I've done about 25 virtual events in the last 100 days, Joe: Wow, that's Simon: And Joe: Amazing. Simon: It is it has been just a rewarding experience and now I've told the team, hey, let's get it down. I can do two to three a day, you know, Joe: Yeah, Simon: Let's go. Joe: Yeah, Simon: Yeah, let's go. Joe: And where are you doing them from? Are you doing  where you are now or. Simon: Really  that  now and every now and then, I will put up, depending on the setting, I will, you know, just change my screen there and . Joe: Exactly, exactly. Simon: This is the world we live in. And, yeah, it's been a great experience. I really love this virtual setting and I can't wait for life to come back, but I'm totally fine with doing the hybrid. Joe: Yeah, I was just wondering, because I know that's how we met, so I was wondering how you're faring through all of this and how many times you've done the whole virtual the virtual experience. So and and while we're talking about live, when you did give that talk, I noticed that you very rarely stood on the stage. And I don't know how do you know the number of people that were there were like 15 or 18 or twenty five hundred. Simon: They were expecting to lose about twelve hundred. Joe: Twelve hundred, OK, so for me and someday I aspire to maybe public speaking, so we'll see if that happens, but that's why for me, it was so interesting to watch you and you were on the floor most of the time. And so why do you when do you choose to do something like that? Simon: So, so many times everybody is looking at the stage, the stage on stage, and what I really believe people really want is a connection. And can you imagine that was probably the last presentation that I've given with that amount of people where there was no physical distance yet we had even heard of social distancing. Joe: . Simon: . So what I like to do is I like to have a conversation with people. So me coming off stage allows me to be almost like a jazz artist in the moment. I can reflect. I know where we need to go. I'm going to I'm going to stay on time. But I also get to do things on the fly in the moment. And it can only happen if I'm looking face to face with the human being. Joe: Yeah, I thought it was really different because there were so many people there and I was close enough to the front and towards an aisle, so I was happy. But I think some of those people in the back might be like, I can't really tell what he's doing or where he is, Simon: Which Joe: But. Simon: Is why they've got the IMAX, so Joe: Yeah, Simon: I knew they had and they had the cameras and Joe: Yeah, Simon: They would project me on the screen Joe: Yeah. Simon: And good on the video as well, because on a video, if I'm only on stage, you don't see the audience. So for your purposes to come off the stage, you see the audience. It is spontaneous and it's in the moment. Joe: Yeah, it was great, I was captivated the entire time. I love listening to you talk, conscious mind versus unconscious mind, that also hit me when I was listening to the audio book. And I understand it because I work on at least my own. I try to do meditation when I can remember to. It's tough. I was in a really good routine at one point and I slipped a little bit. At least I'm doing yoga almost three times a week. So it's Simon: Very. Joe: It's at least a little bit of a balance. But can you go into that a little bit more? Simon: Yeah, so one of the things I really believe is, as you know, in the unconscious mind, we just do things automatically, like if you get in, you drive in your car, you're going to go the way you always go. It's just unconscious. But when you become conscious, you're paying attention to what am I thinking? Thoughts, what am I saying? Words, and then what is the habit or behavior that I'm doing? And then what? It's that slight adjustment that I need to course correct in order to get better. So I'll give you a prime example. I've been working on losing weight and this has just been an ongoing battle for 20 years. So I decided during this COVID-19 time that my health coach sent me a Fitbit. So I got the Fitbit and it's monitoring my walk. So I go on a walk every morning. I get in at least seven to eight thousand steps within forty five minutes. But then I come. I came back home and I started doing push ups. Just ten push ups and sit ups will now up to 40. Now, I don't say that to be braggadocios or anything, but here's the deal. When I became conscious that I really want to lose weight, I start I stop focusing on losing the weight and focused on a healthy lifestyle, some conscious of that. I work out that I sleep. Did I drink my water? I got my water here. Did I actually take my vitamins? How am I eating better? So it's becoming conscious to say there's something I have to do every single day to move towards where I'm going. And I'm happy to say that I lost ten pounds over the last six weeks, but I have a good 10 to 15 to go and I'm excited about it because it's a conscious, healthy lifestyle instead of I have to lose weight because now the emphasis is on losing instead of maintaining and being healthy. Joe: No, well, that's great, congratulations, And see, and that's what I like about your post and when I watch your videos and is that you take things that so many of these people have been hearing for years and years, but there's a way that you word things and you shift things in your speech or you change the way someone thinks about something. And it's sometimes just that shift alone helps people to then understand it better and say, I can do that. And it's Simon: This. Joe: It was it's literally doing the same thing, as was mentioned five hundred other times, but it's the way it was said or the way it was presented. And that's what's cool about you. That is. Yeah. Another thing that popped out and stop me at any time where you want to dig in deeper to anything in the book. These are all the things that just jumped out at me. So information to revelation, that's a strong phrase. Simon: Yeah, so what I have discovered over many decades of studying, researching and really being mentored by very, very wise men and women, is that information is knowledge. OK, but then the next level below information is understanding, which is comprehension. So, for example, when I go to get my driver's license, I have read everything that I need to know to get the license. That's information. That's knowledge. But it's the understanding that if I don't stop at the stop sign and a cop sees me, I'm going to be pulled over and given a ticket because I ran through a stop sign. So now I have understanding to stop at the stop sign, to stop at the red light. It's not just information, but then the next level down is revelation and revelation is application. So car example, if I'm in my car driving, as my dad used to tell me, you have to drive for the car in front of you and the car behind you. I grew up in Buffalo, New York. So dealing with snow all the time. You know, if you're driving, you don't want to pay attention to the snow bag because somehow the car is going to veer over. So. So you have a revelation that I want to look straight ahead. Simon: I don't want to end up over there, but it's it's like that causes you to drive straight ahead and avoid an accident. So when I talk about my information revelation, it's really understanding that sometimes we can have information that is a mile wide but only an inch deep. And when I moved to revelation, I have the ability to go three to four levels down in in whatever I'm working on. So when we look through this COVID-19 time. All , let's just look at it from a revelation standpoint. So the first is PTSD is going to be at an all time high because there's fear, stress and worry on the planet. . We also understand that that the magnetic fields, climate change, everything is just being turned upside down. We also then recognize that industries are collapsing and being reinvented. The fourth level is we also realize that during this time that corporations see this as an opportunity to furlough and to lay people off and never bring them back, because we are in a world of automation, algorithms, artificial intelligence like never before. But the fifth level, which is so I think even more powerful, we also see the companies that have cash who have been sitting on the sidelines waiting. Simon: They're going to poach and buy up companies. So if you remember, just a few years ago, Apple had over one hundred and seventy billion dollars in an offshore account. And due to the Patriot Act, they could bring it back and not have to pay as much. But when you have that much cash, you could go and buy companies. Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, they have over a hundred billion dollars of cash sitting and waiting. So when everyone is running scared and worried as as a good friend of mine, a hedge fund investor, he said, Simon, the money is made in the dip. You don't make the money at the top of the mountain. You make it when everybody is running scared. So when you think about revelation, it's going five levels deep, saying, what do you see that others don't see? What what are you noticing? What's the budget day? Because we will hear of companies that will literally come through this that time. And we're like, where do they come from? Because they decided to play another game. They shifted their brilliance and what the opposite direction. So everyone was zigging. They were zagging. Joe: Yes, so let me ask you this, when you wrote this in 2014, what sparked it? Like I can see you writing it now, like I can see you writing it on March 15th going well. I need to write this because we're in some deep stuff  now. So if I really put my head down and I can get this done in 30, and that's another thing I'd love to do some days, write a book. But if you put your head down, you could have maybe finished it by April 15th and now it would be out. But it makes total sense now. And that's why when I listen to it, I was like, gosh, this is like he he knew it was coming. It's like, well, what made you write it in twenty fourteen. Simon: My business had dried up. I was holding on by a thread Joe: And what was Simon: Business Joe: That just Simon: Wise, and Joe: Was that Simon: Yes, Joe: Speaking and Simon: I was Joe: Coaching? Simon: I was I wasn't getting the bookings at the feed that I needed, because when I quit my job, my wife, my then wife didn't work outside the home. So everything was on me. And we had young kids, mortgage, private school, the whole nine yards. So the business wasn't coming in and and the book sales weren't moving. We had a consultant project that had come to an end that had kind of given me a buffer. And so literally it was dry as toast business wise. And I said, you know what, I got to shift what I'm doing. I've got to think differently. And that's when I began to realize I'm not in the business. I'm in the content media distribution business. And the money is in content. That's what I remember at Disney. So I recognize if I didn't shift my my brilliance and reinvent and let go of what had been working and move into another direction, I probably wouldn't be here today talking to you. So what I realize is I can always do the speaking. But then I started adding coaching. I started adding training, I started doing online learning. And that's when I got connected with the folks over at then it was Lynda.com was called LinkedIn Learning Now and they said, you need to put your course into micro content. I was like, what's micro content? And there they're like three to five minutes of the snippet where you don't give it all away, but you chuck it down and people can access it. Twenty four, seven, three sixty five. Joe I had never heard of it. I was like what? I've always delivered on stage. But now all of a sudden a new opportunity came out of nowhere. And it's kind of like when Netflix had an opportunity to be purchased by Blockbuster and Blockbuster didn't see it will look more. Netflix is now and Blockbuster. ? So I had five when I wrote the book. Do I want to be Netflix or do I want to be Blockbuster? Joe: Wow, and did you is it basically the book, did it come as you were making this transition yourself? Were you take would you take everything that you sort of did and put it into the book as you were physically working on yourself and mentally and emotionally and whatever your transformation is, basically this book during 2014. Simon: So you ask a very important question, what a lot of people know, the book that came out in twenty fourteen was actually a book that I had written back in 2008 during the financial meltdown, Joe: Wow. Simon: And it was a different title. So the book has gone through three title changes and twenty five rewrites over almost two to three year period because I had to live through the shift. So the reason some of the words pop off the page from a just an energetic standpoint, because I wrote it from a deep place I was living, I was in the thick of it, so I was phoning it in. It was literally my life. I had to change the title because when I went to a publisher there, "Vuja de Moment", that's, you know, that's like esoteric. What the great  for the average person could understand Joe: . Simon: It. So what if we do this together? Like, no, Shift Your Brilliance. And I said, OK, that's what I'm living. But I had to live through it in order to write about it. Joe: Yeah, that's incredible. It's and you could tell and I really hope a lot of the listeners and viewers of the YouTube channel will go in and get the book because I'm doing it like obviously I have no choice. So it's so funny. I'm a musician at heart. I actually went to school out at Fredonia. Out where? Simon: Oh. Joe: Yeah. And and I played a lot in Buffalo. I played at the Lafayette Taproom. I don't know if that was there when you were there. I don't know. Simon: We Joe: Yeah. Simon: Got a good. Joe: Yeah, I got a I got a buddy that lives in Williamsville. Yeah. So when I found out you lived in Buffalo, I think man, when I picked that school to go to college and I was waking up at eight o'clock in the morning to go to theory and walking through four feet of snow, I was like, what were you thinking? Simon: Wow. Joe: Gone to Miami or somewhere. Oh, this is a great phrase. Broadband results on a dial up network. I love that. I heard that. I was like, gosh, I got to make signs of all of these things and just put them around my office. Simon: You have to evaluate how often are we upgrading what we're doing and here why this is why this is important for everyone listening to us from the time Apple releases the iPhone. OK, over many years, . The iPhone had 18 upgrades from two thousand seven to twenty nineteen eighteen upgrades. Every upgrade of the iPhone, a camera was better. More storage on and on. But what's interesting, if you look at that over 12 years, 12 times, 12, 12 years, 12 months is one forty four, one forty four divided by 18 upgrades simply means every eight months Apple was upgrading what they were doing because if they didn't, everybody else out of the market would catch up. So when I made the statement, we sometimes want broadband results by using dial up methods. It's the challenge that if I'm not upgrading my mindset, my skill set, my will set, then there's somebody else that's catching up when I'm asleep. Joe: People should make that sign and just put it somewhere, especially during this time  now, you know what I mean? Just trying to get the word out to say this is this is like of we've been given. What did I say? I said something about where you thought you had a deadline March 1st for some assignment a teacher gave you and the biggest gift and you totally hadn't done a thing. And the biggest gift that you got was the teacher gave you six months to get it done. And I Simon: That's. Joe: Feel like this period of time, I don't know if this will ever happen again in history. Like I went through 9/11 with an office in New York, like I owned the company. I was on 38th Street and Broadway. Everything shut down just like this. And now obviously we got hit a lot harder than the rest of the country because New York just stopped. The rest of the world, paused for a moment and then started to pick back up. New York just stopped. So I've gone through that. And then, like you said, we've gone through the 2008 crisis and then now this. And when each time these things happen, I was less stressed because I I knew that I would just figure out a way and shift and change and pivot and move on. So I never even though I my company was just slamming up and told when we were out in in Colorado every couple of days, I'd get a phone call from another client because I book a lot of resort entertainment here and it would come in little dribs and drabs and say, hey, I think we're going to have to cancel the music. Things are starting to get a little weird here. And I'm thinking, OK, and then it just hit. And then everyone call like within four days and said we're I need everything canceled until further notice. I was like, oh my God, now. And but I never stressed about it because I knew I was going to pivot and do something different. And I was able to finally start my podcast, which I had put down on a piece of paper. And I think in twenty fifteen. So here we are, twenty twenty. And I finally have the opportunity to get it . Simon: That's so that hey, that's so good. Same thing with me. We had over six figures worth of business disappeared seven days Joe: And. Simon: That night and some of it canceled, some of it moved to next Joe: Mm Simon: Year. Joe: Hmm. Simon: Some of it they just we never heard back from that. They just and then we also had to refund about five figures of of money back to folks who just wanted their money back. You know, Joe: Yeah. Simon: And what I recognize, I can either stay bitter or I can get better. And I was already working on some new things that I said are, let's hit the gas. Let's go. Joe: Yeah, yeah, I hear you, man. OK, here's another phrase that I heard in the in the audio book, Make a U-turn. I don't remember the context of it, but I'm hoping you do. Simon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'm sitting at the beach and on the way to the beach with my family because living here in Florida, we're really big beach people. And you know how you see a sign that says you're so many miles away from the destination? Well, I thought, hey, I know a better way how I'm going to get there. Well, I went almost 30 to 40 minutes in the wrong direction, so I had to make a U-turn to come back because my my my wife had said to me at the time, you know, you should turn there. And I'm like, no, I got, you know, typical guy, . All directions. Joe: , , . Simon: So clearly, I'm sitting up, sitting by the pool the next day and I got a little drink with a pink umbrella and it hits me what happens when a person is heading in a direction and they never make a U-turn and see what I say, U-turn. It's not just the letter U. It's YOU u turn. Because when you turn, that's when you notice all the opportunities and possibilities that were waiting for you to make a turn. But if you never make the turn, you can miss it. Joe: And it's so funny because I think having GPS now has saved a lot of arguments in cars with the guys because we're always , we'll go out of our way to just say, no, we didn't miss any turn. Fail forward... Simon: Yeah, you know, in the dictionary, failure comes before success, and I'll never forget I went to speak for the CEO Council of Tampa Bay, and during the debrief time, one of the executives said that he had he gets out of failure award every quarter. And the failure award is to encourage his team members to fail. And I happen to go back and talk to them again. And I said, do you still give out the failure award? He says, no, we changed it. We changed it to fail faster. And what he was saying is so many people walk on eggshells at work. They don't want to break out and do anything that's out of the norm because they want to play it safe. And real breakthroughs comes when you walk on the edge, when you do something that you haven't done before. That's where the breakthrough is. So failure comes before success. If you go to the dictionary, fail faster because failure is not a bad word. It's only feedback. And the quicker you fail, then you can quickly see what won't work. Listen, I have failed more times than I can count on both hands. ? But I can tell you those failures have informed some of the successes that we've experienced as well. Joe: Yeah, so it's too bad the word has such a bad connotation to it, because you're , it's just it's just a flare. It's just, hey, this this wasn't  or something didn't work. But instead, it makes you feel as if you're less of whatever you're trying to do, whether it's less of a human, less of a father, less of a business person, less of whatever. And it's too bad it has that that feeling or that label attached to it. Simon: Yes, Joe: You know, and Simon: Yes. Joe: Like you just worded it, it's it's you need those things in order to know if you didn't have those signals, how would you know that something was wrong or that you need to change? . Simon: Exactly. Joe: Ok, you're going to have to help me on this one because it's Chapter seven. And all I put was it's about today. I assume it's about the time we're living in. But I didn't put any more than that. Simon: Yes, so what I was really getting at about today is so many times we are future focused that we forget to be present in the moment today. And if we focus on today, tomorrow, it's going to take care of itself. But who we are today goes into our future, waits for us to get there and says, welcome, we've been waiting for you. So what are you doing today? Is this the highest and best use of your time today? Joe: Are you in your space  now with what's happening and the pivot's you're making, the changes you're making, how much different do you feel than you did when things were rocking and rolling in January of this year? Simon: Yeah, you know what, I have to be really, really real with you. I struggled for about a good thirty to forty five days when this first first of the year I was rocking and rolling. I was in my groove. I was great. Life was wonderful. I've been home since obviously March 13th. And for a few of the weeks, I just was down in the dumps. I was ticked off. I was like, oh my goodness, woe is me. What's this virtual thing? What, what, what, what, what. And then. And then I said, Wait a minute. Hello, buddy. You know, a little of your cooking, if Joe: The. Simon: Not a little bit. So I got up and I looked at my wounds and stopped crying  over spilled milk and all of the contracts that it cancelled and realized entrepreneurship is not easy. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it, Joe: A man, Simon: But. Joe: Gus. Simon: You know, you don't earn your stripes, entrepreneur, when you're on top of the mountain in the valley, when no one is coming to save Joe: . Simon: You, the phone is not ringing and you're looking at your bank account and say, I need to make a payroll. Joe: Yeah, Simon: And so we mentioned the IRS, Joe: Yeah, Simon: . It's a real brother. Joe: Yeah. Simon: It is real. And that's what I just said. OK, I've got a choice to make. First quarter got second, third quarter, it's going to look a little bit different, so I told our team we're not going to dial for dollars to try to get business. We're just going to love on people and help them understand that serving is the new selling. So who could we serve? So we just reached out to clients and say, hey, we'll do a free virtual whatever you need, bring your team. And I just started doing a ton of those. And it's so rewarding. And then almost counterintuitive, we started getting calls for business Joe: Yeah. Simon: And it's just like we weren't even setting out to do that, but it just happened. So, yeah. Joe: Yeah, and I was curious because, like I said, you never know what's going on behind the curtain with anybody, ? And you Simon: Yes. Joe: And I don't know each other that well, but there's something that just comes through the screen, comes through on the videos, definitely when I'm there in person with you. And to me, I would have been that person that had gotten down and I flowed  through. Like people were just like how people are calling me How, because I, I, I think we sent out probably over one hundred, ten, ninety nines for twenty nineteen because we have so many entertainers on our roster and it's literally everything across the board and they're all reaching out. How are you holding up. Because they knew everything dried up and I was like man and I know people think I'm nuts, but this was such a blessing for me because I just needed this time to do other things. And, and and I have I have not stopped with someone as positive as you. I wanted to just kind of get a feel for how does Simon T Bailey handle a situation like this to me? He'd be like, oh, we got this. And so I was just wondering if and and I appreciate you explaining that you aren't the superhero that I think you are, that you did have your moment, which is very human. But like you said, you you lick your wounds. You stood back up and said, OK, now it's time to get busy and stop crying. . Or whatever. Simon: And you know, when I came out of this fog, I realized I needed to start cooking, so I started cooking. I've learned how to cook a little bit enough to survive. I stop binge watching on on everything. That was all. I turn the TV off. I started reading. I started writing, I started thinking and I started doing Zoom calls, almost like as a mastermind with different people from different areas of business, just getting input insight. And all of a sudden I was like, OK, wow, OK, here's what we need to do. And once I got into the groove, because I love all things business and I love what I do, I just start seeing all the opportunity. You and I said, OK, we're going to have to come to this. But probably the most important and I would be remiss if I didn't say this COVID-19 and my my my prayers and heart goes out to all of those who've been directly impacted in either losing a loved one or have been impacted by it. But for me, it has been a time for me to get closer to my children. I've got a twenty one year old sophomore in college, Daniel, a daughter who graduated. She's the COVID-19 graduate, you know, graduated from high school to head the college. Interesting time of life. Two kids in college, ? So I'm like, OK, I'm writing checks  now. Joe: Oh. Simon: It's just like in school you go to school at seventeen thousand dollars a year. I'm like, oh, Joe: Oh, Simon: Like, Joe: Man. Simon: Yo. But here's what I did during this COVID-19 time. I hired both of them as my research assistants. So every Sunday night they have to read a book that I have purchased for the different books, business books. They have to listen to a podcast, listen to a YouTube video, watch or view an article, and then they have to write a summary and answer seven to nine questions. They have to turn it in by Thursday at five p.m. I pay about twenty dollars a day. They could take Friday off and we're already seven weeks into this. And it's all the things that Dad said you should know. Now I'm paying them to learn because it's actually research for another book that I'm working on, but it's probably closer to my children. This is your covid-19 time, so I'm just eating it up. Joe: That's awesome. Are they going to school there where you can see them? So they're going you're in Florida, ? You're Simon: Not in Florida, Joe: At. Simon: So so my son is online and my daughter, believe it or not, she's actually going to go to campus, the private school, private college, and she's going to their class ratio is maybe one professor to 20 students. So they're just going to practice physical distancing and she'll start in the fall. But I'm excited for them. But we've gotten closer Joe: Yeah, that's great. Simon: And so it's been good. Joe: Yeah, are your Simon: Yeah. Joe: Beaches open or closed? Simon: The beaches are open, you know, here in Florida, we we kind of march to the beat of a different drummer and we love our beaches. Joe: I don't blame you, I I grew up on the East Coast, so I'm from New York originally, so. Simon: Oh, Joe: Yeah, Simon: Yeah. Joe: I don't blame you. Brilliant versus average. Simon: So average living is dead, as we would say here in the south, that dog won't hunt. So the days of doing average work with an average attitude is gone um average people show up to collect a check. Brilliant people show up to add value. What I discovered after interviewing top performers, those who got promoted, who were promoted over time, they discovered that a paycheck is given to people who show up, but opportunities are given to people who work and think beyond what they're paid to do. That's a difference between average versus brilliant. Joe: So you can help me with this, because I I and I was there like I'm not I don't ever see these things as if I had all the answers. I'm fifty eight. I'm I'm a late bloomer, like, you know, I'm working Simon: Young Joe: Now. Simon: Man. Joe: Yeah. I'm working on this stuff as if I'm reinventing myself. And I feel like so many people get stuck in thinking they can't do things and I don't know where that comes from. I know it's fear is part of it, but there's got to be a way to say, listen, all the people that use you look up to or you see or you aspire to become or they all they all have to figure it out the same way we all put our pants on one leg at a time type thing. . So how is it to how do you try to get people to shift their their frame of mind to say, listen, you can do this just as much as anyone else. It just takes hard work. But other than that, some of these people are like lifelong learners, but they literally don't do anything . They take course after course, conference after conference, seminar after seminar or whatever, and they just don't do anything with it. Simon: You know, it's it really comes down to something so simple and not to be simplified, but there's a Yiddish proverb that says the only person that likes change is a wet baby. And what I've discovered, the reasons people don't go for it is because they don't want to change. So think about it. When you first learn to ride a bike, probably you fell, ? You perhaps started your business. You started had some success, but maybe experienced a little failure. It was a change that you had to make. Just look at this whole virtual world like everybody now understands Zoom. But when they first heard Zoom, you're like, no, no way. Or you could get changed. All of a sudden you're telling other people, did you know that you can go in the chat and you could do this? You could do that. So until people are willing to take just a little step, I don't have any entrepreneurs in my family. I'm the first one in my family to leave a nine to five and venture out into these uncharted waters. Why do I why did I do it? Well, first of all, it was a dream, but a dream until you put feet to it. And it's just something in the sky. You got to move every single day. And until people are really ready to change, they don't want it bad enough. You got to be hungry and go after it. Joe: Yeah, I guess that's just it, , it's not it's not even the fear, because if you want to bet enough, you'll push the fear aside. Simon: Anything you want, your first car, your first home, your first job, you become laser focus and you go after it. Joe: Well, this brings me to the last thing I had on my know, which was and this is perfect shift or be shifted, ? Simon: When you look at that work shift, shift, if we were to break that down, simply means see how I fit tomorrow, see how I fit tomorrow shift. That's the acronym. So if if I don't shift, see how I fit tomorrow, I will be shifted by everything in every one. So let's look at a prime example. How many malls are going to survive after this? COVID-19 malls are going to forever be changed. But guess what? If they don't adapt and come up with a new model, the Amazon of the world is literally going to shift and replace them. And if it's that simple, so everyone listening to us  now, they have to say, don't wait for the tap on the shoulder or the phone call with your boss. You shift before you shifted. So how do I begin to look at my workplace through a fresh lens if I'm an entrepreneur? Who are the top 20 percent in my field? What are they pivoting to? What are they doing? How do I begin to ask a different set of questions that allows me to shift before I'm shifted? Joe: Yeah, and that's , this is what we're talking about now, the Calvary is not coming . You have to shift, you have to do it on your own or you're going to be shifted for sure. And it might be wherever. Simon: Yes. Joe: Yeah. Is there anything else about the book you want to talk about before? I don't want to keep you we're just about at an hour. And I know you're a busy man. So is Simon: One Joe: There. Simon: Thing, there are exercises in the book that I encourage each person to go through, and also we have an online course called "Shift Your Brilliance" system that people can walk through to take their teams through it. And we've gotten rave rave reviews from people who've gone through the course, and it's at simontbailey.com. Joe: Awesome, so I'll put all of this stuff in the show notes for everybody so they'll have all the links. What is the best way to get in contact with you? Simon: Yeah, they just go to simontbailey.com, "T" for terrific, Joe: Exactly. Simon: As we really Joe: Love it. Simon: Got to. Joe: So my my middle initials, P. So I can't say P for perfect, because that's not going to fly. Simon: P for Powerful. Joe: There you go. OK. I like that, OK. Like I said, I'll put all of that in there. I can't thank you enough for doing this. I you know, I respect you so much. I love watching all your videos, Instagram stuff that pops up. So it's super inspiring to me. Someday if I can get my speaking act together, maybe I'll ask you for advice someday on how I get my first one and how I Simon: Oh. Joe: Can get to the point. And maybe we'll share a stage someday before I take a dirt nap or say. Simon: Thank you. Thank you so much. Joe: Thanks. Thanks a lot for coming on here again. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart, I really appreciate your time. And it was an honor to speak with you. Simon: Thank you, Joe. Joe: Ok, man, you take care of yourself. Simon: Take care.

Experience what it feels like working with big and small brands with Simon Lamey. He tells us about how it is important to work with people who have the same passion as you and how to do proper content marketing with what he calls the "Emotional Acupuncture". Building and creating a business is not a walk in the park, and having a mentor who will guide you in your journey is not an expense, but an investment. "Content Marketing isn't just about "being present", but it is the ability to establish a genuine connection with your target audience, maintaining a good relationship with them and nurturing it in the right way. Simon Lamey has proven ways on how to do it with passion so your customers can eventually turn into your "Brand Evangelists"." Show Highlights 6: 49 - Ari: Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do, please? 7:07 - Simon: At the moment I sell marketing advice, one-to-one consultancy typically through agencies to their bigger clients, but I also sell my time via online communities. 8:12 - Ari: I saw when you were up and coming you were just getting into the business you started out by working for Saatchi & Saatchi a that I pronounce that right? Anyways, you're working for this big advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi and you started off doing Adverts for cement. 8:32 - Simon: Yeah, that was my first account, I wasn't even the guy who could do the Creative. I was the guy who was the project managing it they call it account manager. It was even duller than that. 9:40 - Ari: What are some of the bigger brands that you've worked with? 9:46 - Simon: Coca Cola, Honda, Social media with Coca Cola . I've worked with so many. The reason I'm pausing is because that I think I've worked for 220 brands.... 10:31 - Simon: It's just incredibly Cutthroat. So it was a big reason why I went to well the big reason it was another factor that why I went to work for myself because I think I lost the sense of meaning if you like the feeling of meeting going to work for people and working for bigger companies who can do stuff to people's lives. 12:58 - Ari: I wanted to know what lessons have your learned from working with these huge brands? 13:04 - Simon: I guess one is how disloyal people are and you can't force people to be more loyal than they are. There's a phrase which is called polygamous loyalty. 15:48: - Simon: Pretty much every other business I know wants to grow quickly. They're not happy with it. They haven't found their limit of what they can handle if you don't reach new customers , you just try and reward people who are existing customers only, you know, you can't always get them to buy more. 16:26 - Ari: Before you would said that a lot of people are unable to get people to be loyal but I had this like thought when you said that I was like, but with the right, I don't even want to know if it was a brand here, but with the right outlook and the right attitude, I feel like you could technically Inspire loyalty. 17:15 - Ari: There's an old story here on this side of the pond. I don't even know if it's true, but it doesn't have to be true with the feelings that it evokes. You know, there's an old story that there was a Nordstrom's that opened up in a like a mall and a lady walked in and she was like I want to return this tire and the guys like.... 18:27 - Ari: The healthiest breakfast on the planet. Can you tell us about this? 18:36 - Simon: Of course, I highly recommend it. So every morning, I have this breakfast that was inspired by a fitness instructor.... He's got a guy called Mike Dolce.. He's amazing guy and he lives in California and he trains MMA fighters. And this is the breakfast he gives them but it's I've adapted over the years but it is phenomenally healthy and I claim it's the healthiest. 20:26 - Ari: The project that you're currently working on, you call it the Brainwheel. Can you describe what the Brainwheel means and can you just tell us a little bit more about this initiative that you're working on? 20:35 - Simon: Yeah, of course, of course a the brain will is it all originates from and I was talking to a guy called Michael Shawn who he said he had a problem with about why it's about why but why is it that the customers go to the competition even though he's got a much better product or service. 25:58 - Ari: Can you describe how to do content marketing that gets clicked in not ignored? 26:02 - Simon: That's exactly the emotional acupuncture that's how to do it so, this is a that's a great question. So this was the presentation actually I did a few weeks ago as well. So in order to do that, it comes down to having the right message. I think the easiest way to think of it is the Facebook ad. I know Facebook isn't is so pure content ideally it should be organic but the principles are always the same..You have to connect with your audience straight away. 26:35 - Ari: Absolutely. Yeah, really important. It's really what I talk about with people as well, I'm talking about my own marking my own bringing the more that I can essentially make myself into almost an IBM type choice that are off I can be that's just going back to that old saying nobody ever gets fired for hiring IBM. 31:35 - Simon: It's not got a good track record. So it's like the same with content if you want some contents really travel far, find a horse that's proven, you know people like it. 31:50 - Ari: What are some of the reasons that the competition will get the customers even though the other companies are making the better product? 32:06 - Simon: Yeah, One of them is size and it's very difficult if you're small because there's something called the double jeopardy law which means the... 32:38 - Simon: So they studied data from hundreds of years. It was hundreds of brands in different countries. Well, it is quoted as a law and but there are ways to work around that. 35:32 - Simon: I always say you gotta start with anger and rage.... I think you do have to start and creating Superior product with rage. Rage is where you start. 35:50 - Ari: I think that maybe sometimes there are others, you know passion love inspiration. Rage can save a life. Hey, I recently did an interview with somebody who used rage literally to save his own life 38:18 - Ari: A lot of companies are shifting to almost all digital marketing. Is it best to do that? 38:31 - Simon - It depends on your size first of all. I think if you are a small starter, I think you have to start offline. 40:00 - Ari: You've mentioned a number of times these Marketing Science Institutes, what are we learning from these new wave of evidence-based marketing science that's changing really the fundamentals of how we would market a business? 40:17 - Simon: There's so many interest , sort of many revolutionary things that are comin out that the bigger brands are getting access to... 40:55 - Ari: IPA's one of the bigget institutes that's coming out with this information? 41:59 - Ari : "I'm not one of those marketers who promise you gold mansions and black panthers. So I am just wondering what's the dream with gold mansions and black panthers? 42:08 - Simon: You see those cheesy clickfunnel things saying I will teach you something that will make you rich.... 45:58 - Ari: Did you have any moments of like a huge failure in your life, Can you think of anything else that you are willing to share? 46:17 - Simon: One was about 4 years ago where I set up a business called The Green Fastlane and I want people to go Green. The problem is that it is a really good idea but it wasn't a business idea. 48:13 - Ari: Once you realize that this was not going anywhere. What did you do specifically to overcome it to get past it? 48:22 - Simon: I tried another wacky idea which was to try to make vegan protein shakes. 49:15 - Ari: How did you begin to move mentally away from this mental mode of failure? 49:30 - Simon: Yeah it is. I mean you need a great teacher however successful or unsuccessful. You need a great teacher. That was my first fantastic step. 55:32 - Ari: What would you say is your most successful moment today or one of the most successful moment? 59:18 - Ari: What one concrete piece of advice that people can put into play now to help them move in their Way To Greatness? 59:24 - Simon: Don't look at the competition, Keep your eyes focused. Keep focused where you are. Originally recorded 3/18/2019 Special Guest: Simon Lamey.

What Have You Changed Your Mind About? With Carol Lethaby, Dave Weller, Karin Xie, Matt Courtois, Paul Nation Simon Galloway - TranscriptTracy Yu: Hi, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Welcome to the podcast. This, as you probably noticed, is our third‑anniversary episode. To celebrate, we're doing a special long podcast, the longest one we've ever done. We've got six special guests for you, and all of them are going to answer the same question. That question is, "What have you changed your mind about?"Tracy: First, we've got Dave Weller and Simon Galloway. Dave currently works as an online diploma and TESOL tutor and blogs at barefootteflteacher.com. Simon runs his distance learning courses for teachers and managers. Both of them have been on our podcast multiple times before.Ross: The second up is Paul Nation, emeritus professor in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Paul's one of the most influential writers and researchers in vocabulary acquisition in the world. You'll have heard him before in our second‑anniversary episode about reading last year.Tracy: The third is Matt Courtois, who currently works as an academic director in a young learner language school, and Karin Xie, who works as an academic manager at Trinity College London in China. You might remember Karin from our previous episode about applying learning, and Matt from episodes about observations, minimalism, and also teaching writing.Ross: In the fourth segment, we'll hear from Carol Lethaby, who's a teacher, a teacher trainer, and materials writer based in the US and Mexico. You might remember Carol from our episode about neuroscience. You can learn more from her on her website, www.clethaby.com.Tracy: Finally, Ross and myself will talk about what we have changed our minds about over the years.Ross: Great. Enjoy the podcast, the longest one ever.David Weller & Simon GallowayRoss: Dave Weller, Simon Galloway, you've both been involved in English education for what, 12, 15 years?Dave Weller: It's 15 years for me.Simon Galloway: Same, pretty much.Ross: What have you changed your mind about? There must be one thing, Dave.[laughter]Dave: You're talking about since the beginning of my teaching?Ross: It could be at any point at all.Dave: The biggest thing I've changed my mind about since I began ‑‑ for myself, and for students, trainees, and everything ‑‑ is I used to think in quite a fixed mindset. I used to think, "Well, some teachers are good, some teachers aren't. And some students are smart and some students are not."The more I do this the more I realize what it's really about. Attitude and effort are going to be the things that make the difference. It's a bit of a cliché because I know everyone starts to think that way these days. Is it a bit of a...Ross: I don't know. I think that's still true to an extent, isn't it? I'm not sure. I ultimately do think in those terms that, for trainees for example. You find some at the beginning of the course, and you probably think these guys are the stars, the A‑People, the B‑People, and the C‑People.I almost think that fixed mindset, growth mindset is one of those things that I know as a fact but I'm not sure the extent to which I'd genuinely apply it or really believe in it deep down. Have you seen courses where people who you thought they were the weakest people at the beginning, ended up becoming the strongest at the end?Dave: I don't think the courses long enough for that, but there are definitely teachers that start at about that level and end about that level because they're not really trying to grow. There are other people that actually use the effort.I can see that through my distance learning courses, too. There are some people that start with a pretty bad first assignment and by the end, they're way up here. There are other people that just...Ross: I think of people on diplomas that we run. We, for example, observe them at the beginning before they got on the course. Some people that we thought, "They're not good enough to get on the course." There was a big kerfuffle. Eventually, they got on the course and they did really well.I've also seen the opposite of people that we said, "Yep you'll have no problems on this course," and the people go on to fail.Dave: Yeah, and I wonder if actually what we're saying to them is even affecting that. If we tell them, "You're going to do great," then that actually fosters a fixed mindset in them.Simon: It goes back to what we were saying earlier about praising the effort. If you tell someone, "You'll have no problem in this course" you, in a way, set them up to fail. Maybe they won't put the effort in as much because they think they're intrinsically or naturally intelligent enough or they're already at that skill level ‑‑ they won't need to put as much effort ‑‑ and they struggle.Dave: It certainly happens with some people.Ross: It's almost like there's an unspoken assumption that these people are going to put in X amount of effort. That's the bit that doesn't get said. "You'll be fine. You're going to do really well in this course."Dave: Assuming that you spend 10 hours a week?Ross: Yeah, but a lot of people don't know. Dave, let me guess. You didn't used to believe in learning styles but now you do?[laughter]Dave: No, actually. I think that when I was a new teacher, perhaps one year or two years in, I was always so certain of everything. On my original course, I took everything as gospel. I held my opinions so strongly, and I was so sure about everything. I knew I had a lot to learn, but what I did already know, I was certain that this is just the way things are.Since then, I've changed my mind and been exposed to new ideas, new evidence. I've changed everything so many times over the years. I can't remember who said it, it was something like, "You have strong ideas, held lightly," something like that. The longer I'm in this industry, the more I fully agree with that.I fully believe in what I do and how I do it, but if you show me some evidence or a compelling study, or show me a different way of doing things, I'll willingly change and try something new. That willingness to change, I guess that's [inaudible 06:13] . My willingness to change and to be shown to be wrong, I actually welcome now.Ross: That sounds like a perfect description of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. After your cert course, you believed a hundred percent in everything, like it was the gospel. The more you learned, the less confident you've become in those things.Do you think there's a problem then in how we present information to trainees on cert courses? I always find that maybe it's at diploma level that we maybe encourage people to think critically about the things that are being shown to them. The emphasis on introductory courses is, "Here's what you need to just be OK in the classroom and survive your first year."Maybe we're giving people false confidence. Maybe the more effective learner autonomy, long‑term strategy to teach people is, "I'm going to show you these things, these principles, but you also need to be able to question them."Simon: That goes back to something I've said before. You can take it to the wider education industry as a whole. In the language class, should we even be teaching language? Should we just be teaching skills and applying motivation? If you give someone the motivation to learn and the skills to be able to do so independently, then they're inevitably going to be able to learn a language.It's the same with any course, almost. I think the days of the tutor being gatekeeper to information are long gone with the advent of the Internet. Sure, a curated course is much easier to work through step‑by‑step because you can trust the authority of the source. It's broken down and spoon‑fed to you in a certain way.I do think that, in most courses that we run, there is that lack of teaching meta‑skills at the beginning or teaching to think critically. I think every course assumes that a course before has done that, even going back to initial education from 5 to 18. It's something, I think, missing in that, but that's a much larger issue.Dave: Yeah, we assume that everyone's got a degree or whatever, so they must know this. Then the university course, "They must have learned it before."[laughter]Dave: At secondary school, "They must have learned this at primary school."Simon: They thought, "Oh, parents must have...Dave: "The parents must have taught them that."[laughter]Simon: It might make a flip‑side argument. We're saying this from a position of 10, 15 years in the industry. As a new teacher, I can still vividly remember going, "Just tell me what to do next. I just want to get through my next lesson. I want to survive."I think it is a responsibility for initial teacher training courses to be able to provide that to teachers, so they can go into the class with the confidence that the learners will probably learn something. If you just give them a bunch of meta‑skills to work with, and then throw them into a highly pressured environment, they're going to fall to pieces. They need to have something to fall back on.Ross: Maybe there's an advantage of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. If you know almost nothing and you're really confident in it, that will overcome your lack of skill. If you're a new teacher and you said, "I'm telling you all these things, but maybe they're true. Maybe they're not."You maybe go into the classroom, and you wouldn't have the confidence to make up for your lack of skills. Maybe that Dunning‑Kruger effect, maybe there is some benefit to having that and believing in something even when you don't know much about it ‑‑ as a new teacher.Dave: It is to some extent, but every time, just keep on reminding the trainees that they can make their own...Simon: "This is the best way to do something. Or is it?[laughter]Dave: Just keep on pushing for deeper questions, like, "Was that effective in your lesson today? How do you know that? What real evidence were you going on? I saw the student do this. Why do you think that was? Do you think the same thing would work in another class?"Simon: What's the point of life? Why are you here?[laughter]Simon: Yes. Is anything even worth it?Ross: It's interesting. There must be a point where it would become counter‑productive and you just end up with...[crosstalk]Dave: Yeah, there's in so much doubt.Simon: No, it's true. Again, as a good trainer or a good manager, you should be able to spot when your teachers are ready, if they're not been challenged. When I was at [inaudible 10:14] you could see teachers that are ready to be pushed to the next level. People reach plateaus, and you could see when somebody goes, "Well I know everything now."Ross: That's a good point.Simon: "Actually, you don't. [laughs] Let me introduce you to some new ideas, like differentiation in the classroom or some of the higher‑level teaching skills." They go, "Oh wow! I had no idea you could do this." When their ability to implement what they know reaches what they know, then that's the time to give them more knowledge so they then turn that knowledge into skill.Dave: I like this idea of that plateau. If someone's already on like a slope, you don't want to stick them on a much steeper slope just for the sake of it.[crosstalk]Dave: ...just pick a Sisyphean boulder something. But if you're on a plateau already, you've got to get them on the slope.Ross: If you've had a trainee at the beginning of the course who's really struggling to give instructions, and you're like, "OK, here's a three‑step way of doing it," tell them in simple language, model it, and then ask questions.Dave: Show them, tell them, ask them, give them, Ross.Ross: Right, but then you wouldn't want to do afterward, "Well, when would that not be effective?" Do you know what I mean? You're just trying to get that person to that basic level.Simon: When you're observing them, you wouldn't want to sidle up to them and, "Sorry, um, you know that, according to Vygotsky, that's actually [inaudible 11:27] what you shouldn't have really done that there. This kid's ZPD is way off.[laughter]Ross: That might be too much.Paul Nation Ross: Hi, Paul. Welcome back. You published your first paper on language teaching in about 1970. You've had a very long career as well as a fascinating one. Can you tell us what's one thing that you've changed your mind about during your time from being a teacher all the way up to the present?Paul Nation: First of all, I like to think I always got it right from the beginning, [laughs] but I guess the main change that has occurred to me is the idea of the roles of the teacher and how the role of the teacher as a teacher becomes an important role but not the major role of the teacher.I say there's four or five roles of the teacher, and I always forget one of them. You know the number one role is the planner. The number two role is the organizer of activities and opportunities to learn. The third role's something like the trainer who trains the learners in strategies to learn, vocabulary and strategies to deal with the language learning.The fourth role would be the teacher as the tester who's giving learners feedback about their progress and showing them how much vocab they know and so on. The fifth role is the teacher as the teacher who actually gets up in front of the class or guides them through an intensive reading passage or something like that.I think that those roles are sort of ranked in the order of planner, organizer, trainer, tester, and teacher. That probably would be the major change I've come to during my reading of research, doing research, and so on. On the other hand, I also have to say that just about every PhD student I've had, and I've had a lot, have proved me wrong about the topic that they were working with.That's virtually without exception, sometimes proved me spectacularly wrong. I remember, for example, Teresa Chung doing research on technical vocabulary. I'd said in the first edition of "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language" that technical vocabulary probably made up about 5 percent of the running words in text.When she did her research, she found it made between 20 and 30 percent of the running words in the text, which is quite a bit different, one word out three compared to one word out of twenty. [laughs] That was sort of major changes, once people have done the research, to say, "Wow! I think I'm going to step back and change my ideas about that."I would say that the biggest one is the idea of you need a balanced approach to vocabulary learning and you need to see that teaching is a part of that, but only a part of it. You've got to make sure that the others are there. I would've given a much greater role to teaching very early on in my career.Matt Courtois Ross: Matt, what's something that you have changed your mind about, and why did you change your mind?Matt Courtois: What haven't I changed my mind about?[laughter]Matt: Looking back to my first year in Korea compared to now, I don't think there's a single belief that I still have that I had then. The biggest underlying thing that has changed in me was, at first when I was a teacher, I kind of thought the more knowledge I had about the language I could acquire, the better teacher I would become.I actually don't think that's really necessary. Being able to discuss any grammar point at the drop of the hat to me is not what makes a good teacher anymore. Having some of the skills to draw that from people, to run a good activity, and to facilitate improvement is much more essential to being a teacher than just knowing the subject matter.Ross: Can you remember when you changed your mind about that? Was it a long process?[crosstalk]Matt: It was a really long process. I taught in Korea and Russia, and probably my first year within China, I looked at teaching language in this way. Within my first year of teaching at my last company, there's a job opening for a content developer, content writer, something like that.I remember I took one of my favorite grammar skills lessons ‑‑ I think it was about the passive voice ‑‑ and I submitted it to the manager of this department. He sent me back an email that was three pages full of criticisms. The most positive things he said were basically about some of the animations that I had in my PPT...[laughter]Matt: ...not about the content of this deep analysis of the passive voice. He was just saying, "The method in what you're doing it, it's not about the grammar itself. It's how you present it," and stuff like this. I think I improved so much when that manager sent me such a critical feedback.I started approaching teaching grammar from, "What context am I going to use?" rather than having this giant scope of understanding the passive voice, every tense in English, rather than looking at myself as somebody who analyzes language. That's not my job.So many English teachers talk about how being prescriptive is so bad, but they're teachers. That's what they're doing. They're not writing dictionaries. They're not contributing to the corpus. We're not describing the language here. We're taking what those guys have and then presenting it to students in a way that they can practice it.Once I got over that mindset that, "I'm holding the key to the language, and I'm the person who's defining the language," and said, "No, I'm coming up with situations and facilitating situations in which they can use it," I think I improved a lot as a teacher and a trainer.Karin XieKarin: Teachers used to just think, "Well, my English is good, so I can teach English," or "I'm not confident in teaching English because I'm not confident in my English." Language awareness, like your knowledge in phonology, lexis, and grammar, they are important and are very helpful. It's just the teaching skills, they are very important, and they should be emphasized more.Ross: You need both, don't you?Karin: Yeah.Ross: If you don't know any English and you're the best teacher in the world, you can't teach English. Equally, if you're amazing in English and you can't teach at all, that's not going to work, either. You need a bit of both. At some point, especially for lower levels, the knowledge of English becomes less important than the skill to put it across.Karin: Because I was trained in the CertTESOL, DipTESOL way, I always believed that I need to build the classes around the learners, and I need to train teachers a reflective coaching way. I believed that was more effective than any other ways.Recently, I just come to realize that not necessarily, and use that as good challenge or good chance for me to try out different things, or give people different options and see how things goes. It's not one way better than the others. It's just there are different ways of doing things.Ross: This is one of the dangers of just working in one environment for a very long time. You're often only exposed to one way of doing things. You get transposed to another place, and you automatically just assume, "Well this isn't the right way to do things. This is wrong. This isn't the most effective." But is that true? Is there any evidence?Karin: Exactly. I think all the things that I've tried out shaped how I do training and classes now. They're definitely not the same as when I was in the old environment for such a long time.Carol Lethaby Tracy: Hi CarolRoss: Hi Carol. I think you're very well known for integrating ideas from research into your practice. We'd love to hear from you about what was one of the most important or the most interesting things that you've changed your mind about over the years.Carol Lethaby: I think the example that came to mind here certainly was not using the mother tongue in the classroom. I did my PGCE in the UK in learning to teach French and German. This was mid‑'80s, and the communicative approach in foreign language teaching then had a big hold on the profession.We were explicitly taught not to use English at all when we were teaching French or teaching German. Of course, I carried this on when I started teaching English. I did my Delta and the same thing, it came up all along the way. I remember it seemed to go against my intuition, but as I know now, don't always rely on your intuitions, because they might not be right.I actually did some research into this as a part of my master's degree here in Mexico and found out that, when you ask learners, one of the things I asked them in a piece of research I did, was, "Do you want your teacher to have English as their first language? Do you want your teacher to be a native speaker of English?" a list of pedigrees.The one that came out top at all levels, especially at beginner level, was they don't care if their teacher is a native speaker. They want a teacher who can speak their first language, who knows their first language.It made me think about, "Why then are we telling people you don't need to speak the learners' first language, you don't need to know the learners' first language, and you don't use the learners' first language. It's better not to"? Obviously, I was reading the history of English language teaching, Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism.You realize how this happened and how this idea was transmitted and perpetuated. Now, knowing more about the brain and how we learn, I really don't believe that. I am convinced that we need to use the learner's first language in order to teach them another language.Ross: How would that look like in the classroom then, Carol? Do you have any examples of what that might look like with a group of students?Carol: I remember trying to teach the difference between first and second conditionals when I was teaching the younger Mexicans in Guadalajara here. There was this explanation that I was trying to work with them with levels of probability. It depended if you were an optimist or a pessimist whether you would use the first conditional or the second conditional.How confusing that was and how unsatisfactory that was for a learner, I'm sure. Now I would just tell those learners, "This is how you say it. The first conditional corresponds to this in Spanish and the second conditional corresponds to this in Spanish."Spending ages trying to define a word or an expression when just a quick translation could really help in that case, using the learners' language for effective reasons.I remember I didn't speak a word of Spanish when I first arrived here. I was given beginner's classes precisely because it was the idea that this would be a genuine communication situation, etc. I couldn't get to know my students.It means I couldn't ask them, "How are things going? How are you getting on in these certain situations?" Or, "What things are worrying you about learning English? Don't worry about this [inaudible 23:43] . It just means this. I can help you with this later."All these kinds of things that really enhanced language learning, I wasn't able to do because the idea was that we couldn't speak each other's language and only think in monolingual situations. It's just ridiculous not to take into account and use the learner's mother tongue.Ross Thorburn & Tracy Yu Ross: We heard there from a bunch of our favorite guests over the last couple of years about things that they have changed their minds about. Tracy, to finish the podcast, what have you changed your mind about?Tracy: There are a lot of things I have changed over the last few years. One thing is how I can connect on education‑related either theories or practice and into what I'm doing, my work in context. In the past, I remember when I started being a trainer, I read a lot of books about teaching, training, and theories in ESL, TESL, exactly related to this industry.Then, I realized maybe I just focused too specific to this industry, to this area. When I listened to podcasts and watch TV, or read other books, magazines, or journals, sometimes I realize that actually something that relates to this industry could really help what I'm doing. I need to give you an example, right?Ross: Give us an example, yeah.Tracy: I read a book about how marriage works. The book is "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work." When I started reading this book, I didn't expect any connection to work, but the more I read about it, I realize actually there were a lot of principles [laughs] can apply to work, to manage a team.For example, there's one thing mentioned about criticism versus complaint. You can see the difference between these two. You can say...Ross: What's the difference? Do you want to give us an example of each?Tracy: A complaint, you can say, "Oh, you didn't do this very well," or "You didn't complete this on time," for example, at work. Criticism, it's like, "Oh, you always did this this way. You're not able to do this," something like that.Ross: It sounds like more you're talking about the person rather than the actions that they've taken or not taken.Tracy: Yeah. Of course, people can complain. You can give constructive feedback to the other person. You can talk about the facts, you can talk about the behavior, but you don't jump into conclusion and say, "Oh, this person is not able to," or "This is always like this." You're not giving the person another chance to reflect and then to make things better.When you're working with colleagues or you're managing a team, it's really important to distinguish the difference between a complaint and a criticism. Another thing is super, super useful, when I had a difficult conversation or tried to give feedback to our staff, just try not to have a harsh start‑up when you're having a conversation.Even though before you start a conversation, you knew it's probably towards some kind of a conflict or uncomfortable situation, still try to avoid a harsh start‑up in a conversation. Maybe you want to ask this person how they feel, what's going on, and what happened, and find out more information.Then provide more specific information to the person. Then give the feedback and then action plan, rather than at the beginning is said something very negative. It's difficult for the person to receive your feedback.For you, Ross, you work in different roles for the last 12, 13 years. You were a civil engineer, and then you work in education. Anything that you've changed over the last few years?Ross: Something I'm in the process of changing my mind about is a lot of the things that we talk about here and we do on teacher training courses in materials design and management is we concentrate so much on what goes on in the classroom as that's where the learning and everything takes place. That's fundamentally the most important thing.I used to believe that, but I'm coming to believe more that what happens in the classroom might not be the most important part of their learning process. What might actually be more important is what happens before the class and what happens after the class.I found a nice quote yesterday from someone called Ausubel, hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. He says, "If I were to block out and reduce all of education's psychology to just one principle, I would say this. The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach them accordingly."That was really cool. How much time do we ever spend actually finding out what students already know? I would guess, generally, not very much time or not a lot of time. Certainly, on this podcast, we don't talk about that very much.I think the same thing for what happens after class. We tend to assume that things finish once the students walk out the door. We know from memory curves and things, if students don't revise what they've already learned, then they forget the vast majority of things that happen in classroom.That's something I've changed my mind about. I think we need to spend more time focusing on what happens outside the classroom every bit as much, if not more, compared to what happens inside the classroom.Tracy: How can you do that then, to find out more information before the class about the students?Ross: I don't have all the answers to it, but I think it's more important that we think, like ascertaining what students already know before lessons, finding out what problems do they have, and designing our lessons to try and solve specific issues that students have.What normally what happens is students get placed in a certain level. Then they just work through a course book, which roughly approximates what they know and what they don't know.We don't go into enough effort to find out what are the holes and the gaps, or the peaks and the troughs, in students' current ability and knowledge, and try and smooth over the troughs, to make sure what we're doing in class fills those in.Tracy: Have you ever seen any examples or some teachers who were able to focus on what happened before the class or after the class?Ross: Some things, like the whole flipped classroom principle, goes towards that. Some educational technology works towards aiming to find out what students know before the class. It has them answering questions and makes sure that they reach a level of mastery before they move on to the next topic.I don't think that's the norm in most scenarios. It's something that we don't talk about enough, and I think those things are every bit is important probably as what goes on in the classroom and deserve our attention a lot.Everyone, I hope that was interesting. I presume for a lot of people that the reason that you're listening to this podcast in the first place is so that we can change your minds about some issues that are important. Hopefully, it was useful hearing how some of our favorite guests have changed their minds about different things over the years.Tracy: Thanks very much for listening.Ross: For the last three years, thank you. Good‑bye.Tracy: Bye.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: Hello!Simon: Hi!Todd: How are you today?Simon: Not bad! Not bad!Todd: OK. What is your name?Simon: My name is Simon Bentz.Todd: Simon. How do you spell your name?Simon: S-I-M-O-N.Todd: OK. Nice..nice name. Ah, Simon, where are you from?Simon: I'm from Vancouver, Canada.Todd: OK. What kind of place is Vancouver?Simon: It's a nice place. It's got mountains, beaches, and lots and lots of Japanese students.Todd: Really! OK. Ah..why does it have so many Japanese students?Simon: Because they study English there.Todd: OK. Is it cheap to study English in Canada?Simon: I think it is cheaper to study English in Vancouver than the United States or England.Todd: Oh, really! OK. Ah, what do you think about Vancouver?Simon: I love it. You can go skiing or snowboarding in the winter, you can go windsurfing and hang out at the beach in the summer.Todd: Nice.Simon: It's just a good place to live.Todd: What is your favorite thing to do in Vancouver?Simon: I like to hang out with my friends and play soccer.Todd: Cool. Nice. All right, thanks.

DNA & Book of Mormon can be a very controversial topic.  Last year we talked with Dr. Ugo Perego on this topic, and today we'll get a contrasting point of view.  Dr. Simon Southerton served as a bishop of the LDS Church until he found he could no longer reconcile the science with the story of the Lamanites. https://youtu.be/69uUUGWRl4c Simon:  My name is Simon Southerton. I'm from Canberra, Australia.  I am retired now from science really.  I was a molecular geneticist with CSIRO[1] for almost 20 years. ... I work up in the morning.  I finally knew.  I knew without a doubt that the Book of Mormon wasn't history.  It's a great book filled with scripture and all of these stories.  It never happened.  There was never a migration of Jews to the Americas in 2000 B.C. or 600 B.C. All of my research over the last fifteen years has convinced me that conclusion is 100% correct.  There is no evidence of Jewish DNA or Middle Eastern DNA coming into the Americas. GT:  Ok. Simon:  It's pretty compelling stuff for me, and this is my work.  That's my research area.  I work with DNA.  I've worked with it a long time and led research groups that work in population genetics.  That's another thing you'll hear from apologists.  Oh, he doesn't know population genetics.  It's such a complex science. It is a complex science, but I work in population genetics.  I've published in population genetics in leading international journals.  When you work in the field and you understand the power, you know the full power of the research, it's very compelling when you see that evidence.  You just can't ignore it. We'll also talk in detail about his excommunication.  I wasn't very familiar with that, and I found Simon very candid. GT:  Ok, well one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you at Gospel Tangents, I like to get a lot of different opinions.  I interviewed Dr. Ugo Perego a few month ago,[2] and you have a little different perspective on DNA and the Book of Mormon, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that.  I know you've written a book.  Can you tell us about the book? Simon:  Yes, the book is called Losing a Lost Tribe, and I wrote that and published that in 2004.  The impetus to write the book, I was not happy with the way the DNA science was being interpreted by church apologists.  I thought that was a way of putting them right and correcting them. ... Simon:  Everyone that knew me locally liked me, because they knew me.  We had shaken hands.  They had looked me in the eye and knew that I was a good bloke.  But then area leaders wrote to me:  Vaughn J. Featherstone wrote to me, and the whole letter was just designed to scare me back into the church.  He hadn't even spoken to my stake president.  All he heard was rumors around the grapevine.  The bishop in Brisbane had left the church evidently. GT:  But you hadn't left the church.  You were still going to church. Simon:  No, I hadn't left the church.  I was aware of the fact that I probably would.  I received it [the letter] while I was still a primary teacher.  I mean, what do you do when you're the bishop and you don't believe the Book of Mormon is true?  How can you function as a bishop when you've got the keystone of the Mormon religion and you don't believe it ever happened?  It wasn't appropriate for me to be a bishop, so I did the right thing. Anyway, he wrote this three-page letter, and so I wrote him back and I told him off.  I didn't rebuke him.  I just said it was inappropriate for him to write without talking to my stake president and finding out really what was going on.  He wrote back a letter and apologized, and then gave me more warnings about how life would turn out. So yes, it has been a tough ride leaving the church, and this is what many members of the church don't realize.  It's a very painful process to leave the church.  In fact, during that process, about five years after we left, I was separated from my wife,

Durée : 3:07 - Cette semaine, les élèves de la section internationale de CM2 de l'école Anatole de Monzie à Nantes nous présentent leurs chroniques spéciales Noël ! Et en anglais s'il-vous-plaît ! Ils interviendront régulièrement à l'antenne pour nous apprendre un peu d'anglais sur des thématiques spécifiques. Vous avez aimé la chronique ? Retrouvez leur texte ci-dessous : Charlotte : Hello, we are Anna, Simon and Charlotte ! Aujourd’hui, Anna et Simon vont vous raconter l’histoire du Grinch - un personnage grognon qui veut gâcher Noël. Today, Anna and Simon are going to tell you about The Grinch. Avant cela, un peu de vocabulaire pour bien comprendre : (Charlotte en anglais / Simon en français) - grumpy : grognon, grincheux - a character : un personnage - joyful : joyeux - to steal : voler, dérober - still : toujours, encore - to ruin : gâcher - to bring something back : rapporter, rendre quelque chose   - Anna : The Grinch is a grumpy character. He lives in Mount Crumpit, next to Whoville, a town where people are joyful and optimistic. - Simon: The Grinch hates Christmas. - Anna : One day, he decides to go to the village to steal all the Christmas presents and decorations. - Simon : But after he takes all the presents, the residents are still joyful. - Anna : He does not understand, he is shocked ! - Simon : « Why are they still happy ? Why can I not ruin their Christmas ?» Anna : Later, he learns how important Christmas is, so he brings all the presents back. At the end, there is a big party with the people in Whoville. - Simon : It’s a happy ending !   Charlotte : C’était l’histoire du Grinch. Nous espérons qu’elle vous a plu !  

Durée : 3:07 - Cette semaine, les élèves de la section internationale de CM2 de l'école Anatole de Monzie à Nantes nous présentent leurs chroniques spéciales Noël ! Et en anglais s'il-vous-plaît ! Ils interviendront régulièrement à l'antenne pour nous apprendre un peu d'anglais sur des thématiques spécifiques. Vous avez aimé la chronique ? Retrouvez leur texte ci-dessous : Charlotte : Hello, we are Anna, Simon and Charlotte ! Aujourd’hui, Anna et Simon vont vous raconter l’histoire du Grinch - un personnage grognon qui veut gâcher Noël. Today, Anna and Simon are going to tell you about The Grinch. Avant cela, un peu de vocabulaire pour bien comprendre : (Charlotte en anglais / Simon en français) - grumpy : grognon, grincheux - a character : un personnage - joyful : joyeux - to steal : voler, dérober - still : toujours, encore - to ruin : gâcher - to bring something back : rapporter, rendre quelque chose   - Anna : The Grinch is a grumpy character. He lives in Mount Crumpit, next to Whoville, a town where people are joyful and optimistic. - Simon: The Grinch hates Christmas. - Anna : One day, he decides to go to the village to steal all the Christmas presents and decorations. - Simon : But after he takes all the presents, the residents are still joyful. - Anna : He does not understand, he is shocked ! - Simon : « Why are they still happy ? Why can I not ruin their Christmas ?» Anna : Later, he learns how important Christmas is, so he brings all the presents back. At the end, there is a big party with the people in Whoville. - Simon : It’s a happy ending !   Charlotte : C’était l’histoire du Grinch. Nous espérons qu’elle vous a plu !  

Unity Body MOT Podcast 2   Simon Wellstead and Chris Dabbs     CHRIS: Hi there and welcome to the Unity Body MOT podcast. Welcome to show 2 of the Unity Body MOT podcast with Simon Wellstead. SIMON: Hi there Chris. CHRIS: Hello, and me Chris Dabbs. This week’s podcast is going to be slightly different to last week’s podcast where we discussed how the Unity Body MOT system can help fitness professionals and other people working within the fitness industry to really help their clients make sure that any exercise that their doing is the best thing for them. Now Simon, I understand this weekend you’ve been pretty busy with talking to potential new clients and other people with the fitness industry, is that right? SIMON: Yes, it’s been a fascinating weekend Chris. It was a three day seminar with my business coach who specializes in fitness and exercise and health professionals. And I was there in the capacity of having an exhibition stand and talking to probably about 250 people over the weekend, it was a really massive experience for me listening to fit pros and exercise pros, listening to what they do, how they work with their clients and enabling me to help them understand how we could help them serve their clients in a bigger way. CHRIS: Oh wow! So basically you were talking to people about how Unity Body MOT can help their business, and I guess in turn, help their clients – is that right? SIMON: Yes, absolutely. It’s all, at the end of the day, about them helping their clients in a bigger way so their clients feel as though they’re being served better and say, “Wow, that guy is great” or “That girl’s great, go and use them.” That’s essentially what I was doing so it was a really enlightening experience for me working and talking to so many great people in the fitness industry and enabling me to understand their needs in a better way. CHRIS: Okay, well it’d be great to actually talk about what happened at the conference to really understand how people saw how your system could help them to be able to grow their business and help their clients. So what was the main question that people asked you? SIMON: It’s a really interesting question Chris. The questions were not particularly specific because people don’t know what they don’t know. And what we teach and present and coach fitness pros in is very new to them. So the first question that I generally got was, “Simon, I love the introduction that got done for you and I’ve been watching your video that you’ve got on there and I understand you’ve got a free CD to take away, but actually, what is it you do? Can you explain it to me in my context of my business?” So we’d then start by talking to them about what they did, understanding their clients. So it was a reverse questioning situation that I went through because everybody I work with works differently, they have different clients, those clients have different needs. So it’s not a case of one size fits all, which is actually a phrase I use a lot. CHRIS: If it’s not a case of one size fits all then does that mean that people who work in a specific part of the fitness industry, in other words maybe a personal trainer rather than a fitness professional or any of person within the industry, would benefit more from the Unity Body MOT system? Or do you think it benefits everybody equally just in different ways? SIMON: The latter definitely Chris, it benefits everybody but in different ways because, as I said, they all have different clients with different needs and everybody’s training is slightly different. So a personal trainer will have a slightly different training to a Pilate’s instructor to a sports coach to a running coach or somebody who does group exercises at gyms which is mat based in a studio. They will have different requirements/different needs and the important thing is to realize that once you understand that client better you can give them a better service. You can advise them more effectively and ultimately, hopefully, the goal of this is that the client gets their objectives achieved in a quicker time or more successfully or more safely or whatever it is they want to do. CHRIS: I see, so let’s rewind a little bit there then, let’s try and narrow this down to a specific type of trainer or fitness pro. So let’s have a look at a Pilate’s instructor; how would a Pilate’s instructor be able to use the Unity Body MOT system to deliver a greater range of benefits to their clients? Is it as simple as that – by using the system? Can that actually happen or is it complementary to Pilate’s? SIMON: Totally complementary, I know never step over the line and say I’m doing training or a course specifically for Pilate’s people, I love delivering what I do to a mixture of people. Having said that, a Pilate’s instructor is specifically taught to help improve people’s posture, help them move better, and if they’re working in a therapy context, help them get out of pain if they’ve got back pain – which is very different to a personal trainer who is there to perhaps deliver performance improvement, weight loss, increase somebody’s stamina if they’re training for something or just generally be fitter. So there is a difference and once a Pilate’s instructor understands the information that we present, they understand that need to have good posture, need to move more flexibly, need to move more smoothly in a different way. They’ve got a toolkit of extra knowledge, so if they see somebody struggling and is clearly not responding to an exercise series that is being given to them in the way that the Pilate’s instructor would hope, maybe they could go to their bag of tools and say, “Okay, let’s look at this in a little greater detail. I’ll take a different tool out of my case and work out why what is happening is happening” and therefore give them more understanding so that the client doesn’t get frustrated that things are not working for them. I ran a course in Hertfordshire back end of 2015 and I think I had 3 Pilate’s instructors on that particular course. There were personal trainers and other fitness professional there as well. And we teach them some tools, including a slightly different exercise model that they can employ with their clients, and the feedback I got the next morning was that two of the Pilate’s instructors had taken that exercise model and actually delivered it to their clients that very morning. And the response was that the clients felt much better after it and they were then able to do the other exercises that the Pilate’s instructor was trying to get them to do more effectively. It felt more easy, they were able to get into positions perhaps from a postural point of view or move better. So the Pilate’s instructors had taken what we’d instructed them in, taken the new exercise model and ideas that we’d presented, given them straight away to their clients – which was absolutely fantastic – and had reported back instant benefit. CHRIS: Wow, so what you’re saying is that the Unity Body MOT system gives somebody knowledge that they can use immediately and really get results for their clients immediately. It’s that quick? SIMON: It is that quick. What we’re teaching is actually more a change of mindset, a change of the way to think about a client’s issue. So if you give a client something to do, it’s not quite working for them as well as you or they might hope… CHRIS: Because they’re struggling or…? SIMON: Great, because they’re struggling; then we give them a toolkit that allows that analysis to be done to say, “Okay, why is that happening? Ah, okay, maybe that is happening instead. Now I can understand that and I can change what I’m asking the client to do so it’s appropriate for their body.” CHRIS: It enables them to really think about how some of the information you’ve given them enables them to do something different for their clients so quickly that the client – it’s probably imperceptible to them – it’s so smooth and such a transition. SIMON: Absolutely, that’s a great description. CHRIS: Right, oh wow. So okay, for Pilate’s instructors it’s allowing them to step back and have an overall view of what is happening. And to be able to change their advice to their clients in a way that would benefit them much more quickly. And what about sports coaches and things like that? How would it apply to them? How can they benefit their clients? Is it equally as quick? SIMON: it’s really great that you picked up on sports coaching because I did run some coaching up in Sheffield a few weeks ago and we had two sports coaches actually present. One was a running coach and one was actually a coach for the Great Britain climbing team. I didn’t understand that Great Britain had a climbing team but hey. CHRIS: We do have a team, but that’s fantastic though isn’t it, that we have a team climbers? Brilliant! SIMON: We do, and obviously from a sports coaching perspective, they are more interested in improving performance, improving technique and trying to get them to be able to run better, run faster, run longer, or in the case of climbing which I learned a lot about over the weekend, to help them climb faster – it’s all clock based climbing that they do so they have to basically get from A to B but it’s vertical. CHRIS: Who would have thought? SIMON: And we had some really great discussions because the tools that I present in training are just as equally valid for improving taking somebody up from performance level A to performance level B in whatever they do. So I’ve got colleagues and friends of mine who work in the same area and work with tennis player or work with golf players. And obviously we’ve talked about running and climbing, it is a very big area but it is all performance based. And they’ve got a greater understanding now about their client’s body so if they’re seeing, in the case of the running coach, that somebody is running in a particular way and struggling to get over some kind of threshold that they’re trying to deliver against, whether that be speed or whatever it might be, they can now take a step back and say, “Ah okay, hang on, maybe this is happening so I’ve now got a toolset of tests I can do that will tell me whether something different is happening.” But before the training they would have never known that something different could have been happening or was happening. CHRIS: So you’re really enabling these coaches and fit pros to know more than they didn’t know, if that makes any sense. So in other words, really they didn’t understand precisely how they could help somebody or know what the problems were that somebody had. And just through the initial phases of the Unity Body MOT program, you are actually them to help their clients to make those tiny incremental changes that make all the difference. And I suppose a few very physical types of sports including, as you say, the climbing team for GB – who would have thought that we were a) any good at that, b) actually in it in the first place and c) that yes, every single part of the body has to work in such a way as to be able to literally claw back every single millisecond of climbing a vertical face I guess? SIMON: Absolutely. CHRIS: That’s incredible! So for the climbing team, let’s have a look and try and understand exactly how you helped their trainers and their coaches to help the climbers themselves. Is there something specific you can share with us on that? SIMON: Yes, I mean I’m not a climbing expert, but I had these discussions with the gentleman who was on the course and we were talking about the fact that when you’re climbing you’ve got to have a massive amount of coordination and strength between the fingers that are obviously gripping a particular place and the lower body which is going to help you move up to the next point on your war. CHRIS: Pushes I guess, isn’t it? SIMON: Absolutely, and that is coordination but it’s also strength. So the tools we were delivering would give a different dimension as to why they might be struggling to get from A to B in a particular way given a particular obstacle on a particular wall. They might have a problem with their foot, there may be an issue with their pelvis, there may be an issue their nervous system which is not allowing them to have the flexibility, strength and mobility to deliver that type of movement in that particular situation. CHRIS: Okay so if they had to, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of how to explain this in a climbing term; but if they’re climbing up just normally, I guess any climber can do that properly, I’ve seen some of those very difficult maneuvers where there’s a ledge that comes up on top of them or above their head and they have to… SIMON: I think they call those an overhang. CHRIS: Oh, so overhang. Oh so the overhang, and then they have to kind of flick themselves over. And that sort of maneuver, I guess, really does need to be trained for – it’s not just something you come across and just do through innate skill I guess. How would Unity Body MOT help that particular climber to train for that? I mean are you talking about being able to weed out the people who aren’t able to do that particular maneuver or helping people who find that particularly difficult to make it easier for them to then do that maneuver – if you see what I mean? SIMON: Certainly the latter, it’s finding out what in the body is blocking or providing a blockage for them to do something that they need to do that they can do and that they maybe can be able to do well. But this is all about fractions here, so we’re saying taking them from A to B but that’s actually taking where A is already pretty damn good – they may be completion climbers, or completion runners or competition tennis people – but it’s basically finding that next level. And there may be something within the body, which is maybe not visible to the human eye, which is inhibiting them being able to make that step in terms of additional performance. CHRIS: Yes, so we’re looking at the physicality again here rather than the mental state of any training or any sports person. That’s fascinating really. Okay let’s try and not talk too much about the elite athletes and let’s go back down to basics and really look at, say me, because I’m basic believe me; but me in a gym situation with a personal trainer. Is there a way for a personal trainer to sort of identify that knee issue without me knowing that it actually exists? I mean can they spot it because of my gait for instance? Is that something that the system trains them for? SIMON: Yes absolutely and that’s a really interesting example. We now know that well over 90% of knee problems have got nothing to do with the knee, but what it has got to do with is something that is actually not visible to a personal trainer or anybody really. CHRIS: That sounds strange, how does that work then? SIMON: Well the vast majority of knee problems come from your pelvis not working properly. CHRIS: So what, are you saying it’s referred pain from the pelvis or just because it’s just putting somebody out of kilter? SIMON: It’s not a referred pain because referred pain is where you have pain in place A and pain in place B. What we’re saying is somebody may, after exercise, report some pain in their knee. But that actually could be to do with something not working in the pelvis and there actually isn’t any pain or any symptoms in the pelvis at all. We’re just talking about, “Does the pelvis do its job properly?” Is the pelvis doing its job properly and that’s one of the things we train personal trainers to pick up on because a lot of body functions in exercise and performance are obviously managed the pelvis. It’s in the center of the body, pelvis means basin – it’s the bucket of the body – it’s where everything from the top comes down to the pelvis and everything from the foot upwards comes into the pelvis. So it’s not surprising that a lot of issues stem from the pelvis. But it’s not just a case of looking at the pelvis and saying, “Oh it’s tilted or it’s not doing this or it’s not doing that from a visual point of view.” We actually teach the personal trainers to work out precisely how is or is not working. And then that’s going to deliver a lot of information about somebody’s pain in their knee or pain in their foot or lower back problems or shoulder problems. So the knee is a really good example, we now know that the vast majority of knee problems don’t stem from anything actually happening in the knee, they stem from something else in the body not working properly. CHRIS: Okay, so I kind of understand that really the podcast isn’t the place to give real instructions on how to overcome any particular knee problem per say. But I guess that actually makes a lot of sense because the Unity Body MOT program is about enabling the personal trainer to look – I guess it’s the old phrase – look outside of the box rather than looking at the knee and saying, “Oh yes you’ve got a problem with your knee, you can’t do this exercise or that exercise.” But what you are enabling people with is the tool and the power to step back and to really assess a client’s situation, would that be about right? SIMON: Yes, that’s brilliantly put actually Chris. We’re about changing a mindset and being able to, you use the phrase ‘take a step back’, and use some strategic thinking which will be new to the vast majority of fitness professionals. CHRIS: Oh yes, and foreign as well I would have thought. SIMON: Absolutely! So we’re saying that just because you can see a problem somewhere, you used the perfectly good example of the knee but it could be anywhere in the body, we can move on the other ones in a second. But just because somebody’s coming to say, “You know when I do those types of exercises I actually experience this pain in my knee.” – beyond just saying, “Okay you won’t do those exercises because you get a pain in your knee” we give the personal trainer the tools to say, “Okay let’s work out how you can do those exercises more safely, let’s work out how you can do those exercises so they won’t cause an issue with your knee.” Another classic example is tight muscles, who hasn’t got tight muscles? But the way that most fit pros will address that is to actually see that muscle X is tight, let’s pick one – hamstring – it’s one that is commonly very tight in lots of people. The intervention for that would be most typically to introduce warm ups or components of the exercise regime which try to stretch that hamstring to reduce the tightness. Unfortunately, we now understand that there are several different types of tightness and stretching, quite often, is not the answer. But we teach the personal trainer to take a step back and say, “Okay, I can see that there’s tightness there in the hamstrings. Let me work out (using the tools we teach) what type of tightness it is. And therefore, I can then build an exercise program which matches exactly what’s going on in your body.” The net result, we hope, will be less tightness in the hamstrings; but not just by pulling the ends of the hamstrings to make them longer because they’re tight and therefore we’ll stretch them. It’s using a somewhat more strategic approach to say, “Okay, so I know that there are three of four ways that a hamstring can become tight, which one is applicable to you Mr. Client/Lady Client? Okay, I now understand why your hamstrings are tight, now we can move on. CHRIS: Yes from a lay person’s point of view I guess as with anything, even in my industry everything moves forward at a very fast rate, and really your Unity Body MOT system is really like continuing personal development for fit pros really. To make sure that they’re augmenting their own original training that they’ve been through – sweated through – to qualify and get to be able to do everything that they want to do for their clients. And so yes, Unity Body MOT helping in that way by allowing them to step back can only be a great thing for clients. SIMON: Yes, and I think that’s a key point. I mean I’m a trained sports therapists and I learned this information which I now train people in was something I learned, I didn’t learn it in sports therapy training, it was just through circumstances and the people that were coming to me and the sort of people that I met and got involved with and was talking to – peers in the industry – that said, “Actually Simon, the sort of things you’re talking about can be dealt with now through this additional training.” So I learned this stuff through additional training. I’m now basically paying that back to people and saying, “I’d like to do the same for you.” I benefited from it, I was able to help clients in a bigger way by taking a step back and questioning what I’m seeing, what the client is telling me to enable to then move forward. It’s a case of taking one step back to take two or three steps forward. CHRIS: Well exactly, as opposed to just running into it like a bull at a china shop kind of thing and just doing the first thing that comes to mind. Stand back, consider and then action really, I think that’s that. Okay fascinating, absolutely fascinating trying to understand how personal trainers and fitness professionals can help their clients just by stepping back for a few minutes, it’s incredible. Okay, well let’s go back to the conference that you attended this weekend and you were exhibiting at. You spoke to lots of people I bet, how many people were there, 250 did you say? SIMON: Something around that figure, yes. CHRIS: So you had 200/250 people who are all in the fitness industry, and you must have spoken to a whole bunch of those people, and what sort of things were people asking you? What were the sort of the main issues I guess with how they felt was how the Unity Body MOT program could help them? SIMON: Okay, so generally speaking the conversation would start by them not fully understanding what it was that I was doing. So they were coming at it from the point of view of they don’t know what they don’t know, which is great. But then I would generally turn the question round to ask them who they typically worked with – we use the phrase ‘ideal client’ – who are the people that they go to to get on the marketing? Who are they looking to work with most? And then understanding typically what those ideal clients are coming to that personal trainer or that fitness professional with, then we can start saying, “Well okay, so what typical strategies do you currently employ with those clients and are you hitting any brick walls? And a common one is “Yes they’ve got persistent tightness but for the large proportion of them we don’t seem to be able to get rid of that tightness.” Or in the context of a Pilate’s instructor, coming back to the Pilate’s area, obviously a big thing that Pilate’s instructors do is get people to activate their core but in some people the core just isn’t firing. And when I was having the discussions about, “Okay so sometimes the reasons why the core can’t fire is because something else in the body is stopping it from firing.” So understand what that thing is, it could be the pelvis or it could be something else, it could be in the shoulder. But to understand that there is a route forward to help these clients more rather than the client and the trainer getting frustrated, which is quite often what happens, and then they switch off and say, “Well Pilate’s doesn’t work for me, I went to Pilate’s and I just couldn’t get this working.” Or, I went to this personal trainer with really tight muscles and I just didn’t get any benefit from it.” That’s not a critique of the individual or what they did it’s just that there was some information that was missing and I fill that gap of information. We’ve talked about taking a step back and saying, “Okay, what I’m doing is not necessarily performing in the way that I would hope. Right, okay, now let’s use these tools to work out what that is.” The ideal client is the ideal client with the same problems, it’s just that every body is different and reasons why something is happening in that body will be different. It falls into patterns obviously, but it’s having that ability to say, “I want to learn more about my ideal client, my ideal client is a new mom who’s just had their babies and they want to get back into the fitness that they had their babies” is another classic exampl

www.unitybodymot.org Video Narrator: If you’re an experienced personal trainer, fitness or movement professional, the chances are you chose your profession because you love the buzz of helping your clients maximize their potential. But it is important to stay ahead of the game by constantly expanding your knowledge by learning new skills, if you don’t your competition will, leaving you playing catch up. So don’t get left behind, with Unity Body MOT you can build your existing skills – not simply the latest fitness fads or equipment but in the very latest information and skills to help you and your clients be more successful. We’ll help you learn the relationship between exercise, movement and injury using the very latest science and research. How and why common exercises and movements are not right for many individuals and advise the right exercises to the right people at the right time. Understand how the majority of tightness mobility injury and other issues occur, what you can do about this, and learn how to relay this new information to clients in plain English; keeping them healthier and happier with their bodies and with you. You will learn precisely how your client’s body is working on the inside so you can help them in a much bigger way than before. These are the skills essential to stay ahead in the game and set you apart as an exceptional fitness, movement or exercise professional. And of course, it gives you the edge when it comes to retaining existing customers and attracting new ones. If you’re serious about your profession and your clients, never stop learning. Contact Unity Body MOT to learn more today for a totally free strategy call to discuss your specific situation and how together we can help elevate your career to another level. Hi there and thank you for joining us for a series of informative, and we hope, useful podcasts for everything a wellness professional needs to know to ensure that their clients are receiving the best training possible, and therefore allowing the trainer to be more successful by having more happy clients. My name’s Chris Dabbs, and as always, I am joined by Simon Wellsted – founder of Unity Body MOT. Hi Simon, how are you? I hope you’re well. Simon: I am good Chris, thank you. Chris: Fantastic, okay. Well really what we’re going to be trying to do today is to acquaint you with what Unity Body MOT are up to and how Unity Body MOT can help you to increase your business. So our podcast is aimed at helping wellness professionals become better acquainted with how to help their clients more by helping them to train effectively while understanding that their clients will gain more when their exercise routines are tailored to meet their clients goals. While taking into account how injuries or infirmities can affect the outcomes. I know that’s a bit long winded Simon but does that sound about right? Simon: Yeah that sounds great. Thanks Chris, that’s a good summary. Chris: Okay. So really looking through your website and watching the video, which of course we heard as an intro at the beginning of the podcast, tell me something about how you would explain this to me if I was a wellness professional looking at helping my clients to become, well, fitter I suppose. Simon: Okay, so I start this by normally saying that a given client will be given a certain set of exercises for a given objective, and those exercises might be fairly typical for a range of clients. But what we are now beginning to understand is that certain exercises are going to be right for some, neither right nor wrong for others and definitely wrong for quite a few. And we reckon that that quite a few is probably 50-60%. Chris: Really? So you’re saying that more than half of the people, potentially, are doing exercises that are what? Injurious or will injure them? Simon: Down the line, potentially, yes. We use the phrase ‘laying the foundations for injury’. So they may not have any symptoms today, they may be perfectly correct, they may have no mobility issues, they may not have any obvious tightness; but what we do know is that if there are things going on inside the body, which we teach PTs about and the PT can find those, they can then make changes to their exercise program to get around those so that the client moves forward faster. Chris. Okay. So you mentioned changes or things going on inside the body perhaps, would the client be aware of these things or is this something that…? Give me an example, if I wanted to do some upper body exercises to try and get rid of my belly, how would your program help my trainer – my PT – to help me to, I guess, achieve my goals? Simon: Okay, so just taking a little bit of a step back, one of the key learning points from the training that we do with personal trainers and other fitness and movement professionals is to say that what they can see and what their clients can see and the information that the client gives back to the trainer can often give a misleading picture of actually what is going on. Chris: Okay. Simon: So they may say, “I’ve got really tight hamstrings”. And one of the key learning points at the very beginning of our training is to say just because somebody has got really tight hamstrings doesn’t mean that you have to work them – stretch them, mobilize them – that tightness of those hamstrings might be coming from somewhere completely different in the body. So we use the phrase ‘a robust and sustainable solution’, if you’re working with somebody and you are giving them exercises and their achieving the objectives in the timeframe that you would expect them to be achieved – fantastic. If they keep on coming back to you week after week and they’ve regressed, and the same problem is appearing, then that’s a really strong indicator that something else is getting in the way – somewhere else in the body is causing that issue – so just progressing with doing that exercise faster, harder, more frequently isn’t necessarily the right answer. Chris: Right. So, okay if something was ringing a bell for me in terms of, what are they called, you know the insoles that you can buy that are specially tailored to your feet? Orthotics or something like that. Simon: Yes, orthotics. Chris: Orthotics. The reason for providing that is because your feet can affect your gait and your stance and how you stand and therefore you can develop back problems or shoulder pain or something like that. So that’s kind of what you’re saying, obviously not to do with orthotics, but that’s kind of what you’re saying. In other words, there may be an issue arising from somewhere else within the body that prevents the exercise from achieving its simplistic goal of, as you were saying with hamstrings, of really sort of loosening up the hamstrings. Simon: Correct. We’re living in a press-button society, everybody wants a quick result for health or any other area of our lives. So people see that they’ve got an issue so people tend to focus on where that issue is. Orthotics is a wonderful example, I’ve done training for podiatrists and demonstrated that we can completely change the biomechanics of the foot by working on the shoulder. Chris: Alright, really? Simon: And that’s not as a manual therapist, that’s as a PT working on the shoulder. So just putting in an orthotic for a runner because they are seen to have a particular gait characteristic, putting in an orthotic to stop that characteristic isn’t necessarily the right answer. And we actually take PT’s through a process – a very simple, quick and safe process – where they can make those determinations for themselves, not just from a ‘should they have an orthotic?’ because obviously PTs are not qualified to put orthotics in. But they are qualified to help somebody achieve mobility through their hamstrings or mobility through their spine, whether that be upper or lower body. Chris: Yeah, I see what you mean because what you are saying is basically, if someone has a pain in their shoulder that could potentially affect their gait because they’re trying to compensate for that pain in the shoulder. Simon: Absolutely. Chris: Whereas the orthotic would mean that they don’t walk in that particular way. What they are doing is transferring, potentially, the issue somewhere else and creating a new one as well as keeping the pain in the shoulder. Simon: You’ve hit the nail on the head there; it’s creating new ones as well. When we’ve run training for podiatrists we’ve demonstrated, actually using them as models, that they’d come out and screen somebody’s foot and reported back to the audience what they found because their foot specialists. We’ve just then told them how to do something very simple on the shoulder from an exercise perspective, then told them to go back and rescreen the foot, and everything’s changed. So sometimes orthotics are required, but for very good medical reasons, sometimes they’re not. What we’re saying is that we can make a very, very good determination as a fitness and health and movement professional whether somebody should be working on their hamstrings, whether they should be squatting, whether they should be moving their spine in a particular way, whether they should be doing upper body extension of their arms in a particular way and we can then say, if the case in a particular client is no they shouldn’t, they’d know that. They can steer clear of those exercises, but also we teach them how to solve that problem as well, from an exercise perspective. Chris: Okay. Is there a simple way to explain to us how the PT, you know the personal trainer or the wellness professional, can actually find a way to work with that client to overcome it? Is it as simple as a manual manipulation of the shoulder? Simon: Yes, we’re not talking about manipulation here, because obviously personal trainers are not typically qualified to put their hands on people in a manual way – that’s a therapy. We’re not crossing over to therapy. Chris: That makes sense. Simon: Yeah, we’re not crossing over the therapy threshold, if you like. Chris: Well no because obviously the osteopaths and all of those people in that world are trained in being able to do that and obviously they need to be able to work alongside professionals. Would that be about right? Simon: Absolutely. What we’re talking about here is a client who doesn’t necessarily have any obvious issues. We use the term asymptomatic; they don’t have any pain, they don’t have any mobility issues that they are aware of, they’re not injured – because a personal trainer, and as they add additional qualifications to their own skills set, they won’t have the insurance to treat that injury. Chris: No, or the training of course. Simon: Indeed. However, we know that if we can help the PT identify that somebody, for example, has a high risk of a knee problem, and that is very simple they can determine that in about ten minutes… Chris: Well that’s my next question. Simon: Absolutely, then certainly for the foreseeable future, that PT should not be recommending that they go on a treadmill or go through exercises which put heavy forces down through the knee. We also teach them how to solve that problem through other exercise options. So they’re achieving the same objectives but not actually putting high pressures through the knee because that particular client has a predisposition to a knee problem and we can determine that and say what the risk is of that person sustaining a knee problem which is relatively new science. So it’s all about doing what’s right for the client, not saying, “Don’t exercise, go and lay down because you can’t exercise.” It’s saying, “Exercise is important but let’s exercise, for you, in this way because you have a, for example, predisposition to a knee problem or back problem” – whatever that might be. We will still exercise but we’ll just do these exercises which don’t exacerbate that particular issue that you have. It may not be painful now but, and then this is the difficulty that we have, in that people don’t understand that they have a predisposition to an injury. Chris: Well exactly there Simon, I mean that’s the thing, if you go and see a personal trainer and you’re undertaking a training regime you may not realize, as you’ve said, that you have an issue with a knee/back problem or anything else. Are you saying that the PT can actually spot that because of compensation or compensatory movements or something? Simon: We give the PT a toolset, a very simple toolset which takes no more than ten minutes to do once their competent at it, and they will be able to pick out whether somebody has a predisposition to a knee problem, whether they have a back problem, whether they have a predisposition to upper body shoulder issues and if those markers are in place then the exercise professional then has a choice: they can say, “Okay I know that, that is really useful information”, educate the client about it which is absolutely crucial, in plain English. Chris: Right, I think more importantly the plain English, exactly. Otherwise you’re potentially giving some bad news to somebody – I don’t know. Simon: Right, it’s got to be all delivered in a positive way. So the way our personal trainers that we train tend to work is to do these tests, they then say to the client, “Well, we know your objectives are to lose weight, to get fitter for running…” or whatever it might be, “because of what I’ve checked on your body, this is the right exercise set for you.” And if the client turns around and says, “Well what about going on a treadmill?” for example, they might turn around and say, “Well actually, at the moment you have a high marker that say you shouldn’t really be putting forces through your knee so we will train you in a different way.” Chris: Okay. So give us an idea of these markers that the trainer would be able to employ, or to identify I guess. I’m thinking it’s something it’s something along the lines of exercising and perhaps there being a perfect range of movement within a joint and then if the client can’t achieve that then that that’s an indicator, or is that too simplistic? Simon: It’s part of the solution. In our training courses we actually teach that there’s two types of biomechanics, and without getting too technical; there is biomechanics from the outside – what we can see – but most people’s view of biomechanics is photographic athletes with little balls on them and watching the angles of their body and various other forces that are acting on the outside. Chris: Yeah I have seen that. Simon: That’s called extrinsic biomechanics. What we are talking about is what is happening on the inside, we can now apply those same principles to various soft tissues of the body. And of course you can’t see those, they are hidden by our skin and our body, you can’t see for example how the hamstrings are pulling and whether their pulling in the right direction. Chris: Well no, exactly. Simon: But we give the trainers the ability to work that out through very simple tests that they do. Yes they have to put the client in particular positions and do certain movements with them that are designed to pick up those markers. And we’re looking at the soft tissues in the body, and that’s everything from joints, muscles, nerves and all the other soft tissue things that are inside our body. And we’re just picking up what we now understand as being markers which give a high degree of certainty that that person should really not be doing that type of movement at this particular point in time. Simon: That’s interesting because of course what that would mean, if you think about it, say I go to the gym and I decide I am going to take on a personal trainer to help me, I would be looking at a plethora of choice really, maybe five, six, seven or eight personal trainers who within that particular gym, and how do I choose? I think that’s one question, if you haven’t been referred to a personal trainer, it is difficult isn’t it? You know I wouldn’t know. So recently, in January of course like with most people – they go to the gym at the beginning of the year, I’m looking at the PTs and I’m thinking, “Okay, that one looks a bit young, that one looks a bit old, that one doesn’t look like they know what they’re doing etc.” so I end up choosing just one guy who seemed okay and who spoke to me in a respectful way. Now I suppose if there’s a way that personal trainers can differentiate themselves in that sort of marketplace because really if you look at it from an economic point of view, someone is making a big investment to become a personal trainer, it is something the love to do and they need it to pay for their own lifestyle don’t they? Effectively it is their job so this is like putting up a new offering, a new service, a new shop front; something to differentiate themselves from their peers who they’re also working with so that they get more business. Is that right? Simon: Absolutely, it’s a very crowded market, the fitness and exercise market. You’ve got personal trainers, you’ve got fitness instructors… Simon: They are different, they have different qualifications. And you’ve got group exercise people as well – Pilates and yoga and other types of exercise. And as with all businesses it is crucial to find unique selling point, something which you can say to your clients which is basically going to give them a hands-up that says, “Hi I’m here, I can do something different, I can actually make sure that the exercise program that I’m giving you is right for your body – tailored for you!” And that is a massive differentiator, it makes them stand out from the crowd, allows them to charge more for their services. Chris: I suppose it would do wouldn’t it? Well yeah if you’re better trained and you’re an expert in something, then yeah you have to charge more for the services. And of course you will keep your clients longer because they are going to be even happier with the results. Simon: Absolutely, I mean the crucial thing is that the client is happy. If the client can get to their objectives quicker, more safely but still achieve the objectives they want to achieve – that’s’ a big tick. If the personal trainer or the exercise professional that their working with can give them some useful information about their body and how their body’s working… Chris: Especially if they didn’t know anything about it is the first place. Simon: Absolutely. So help them in their daily lives especially if they’re, as is very common, somebody who is sitting at a desk behind their PC or driving a lot, then they can give that information. Just like they do currently with nutritional advice, it’s the whole package and this is just a new tick in the box to say, “I can give you a tailored exercise program for your body because I will be able to tell you which exercises are right for you today, which ones are perhaps not so correct for you today,” and if the personal trainer’s got the right mindset, some do some don’t and that is absolutely fine, they can either steer them in the direction of other exercises or use exercises, which they are the professional in, to actually help correct the markers. We can get rid of these markers and that’s crucial. Chris: Well yeah I understand. Again going back to the shoulder, it’s about making sure that the shoulder issue is sorted out through exercise and all that sort of thing. Well that makes a lot of sense Simon and really I’m getting exciting just learning about this. I think when I go to the gym next I’m going to be asking whether or not the exercises that I’ve prescribed are the correct ones. Should I be spending ten minutes on the cross trainer if I have an issue with my hip? Is it a good idea? Simon: Absolutely. I think that’s a perfectly valid question and people are getting more knowledgeable about their own bodies in a whole series of ways. When they go to see the doctor they will typically ask what these drugs or what this intervention is designed to do. When you go to find a personal trainer or any exercise professional, whether it be pilates/yoga, in a gym or a sports coach, it’s really good to ask those questions and get answers back from that professional say, “yes, your body is right for this.” And that’s really where we are now, we have this ability to get this knowledge out there as widely as possible so that the fitness and exercise industry can really be proactive in giving their clients the best exercise program for their objectives and their body. Chris: Okay fantastic. Well I think that what we’ve got now is a real opportunity for PTs, or any wellness professional really, that is involved in mobility or exercise or training or anything like that to really benefit and grow their business whilst helping their clients. So I think that in our future podcasts what we’ll be doing is looking at various tips and tricks that people can learn and actually use with their clients so that they can help them to move forward quickly. And Simon you don’t mind giving those tricks and tips to people do you? Simon: No we can give out a few. Chris: I think it’s a really good, think people will absolutely love that. And then of course, at the end of the day, what makes more sense is that Unity Body MOT offer a full one to one training system that you can either subscribe to and come along and Simon will help you with that so that you can learn a about how your clients work. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Simon: Yes. Our differentiator is that we look to provide training that fits in with the professional’s lifestyle and business. We put on public training courses; we run both a one day and a two day workshop but we also, and actually what I do more of, is the fitness professional will contact me and say, “Love this material, want to learn it. I simply don’t have the time to go on a two day training course, can you come to my gym and train me at my location or can I come to see you?” And I’ll do that and we’ll work out a package, and that can be on a one to one basis or a small group basis. The key part here, if we do that the personal trainers own premises, they can bring clients in. And they learn, obviously the client has got to be okay with this, but they learn with a real client so they can learn the skills and we can be helping a client at the same time. It instills the knowledge more quickly, they haven’t got to go away for a weekend and learn the stuff and then come back to their workplace and think, “Okay, how on earth do I implement this?” Chris: Exactly, so that’s the way you go on training and then you hope you’re going to remember it when you put it into practice, whereas if you have a live client with you – wow! Simon: Absolutely. And then what they do is they join a learning community. We’ve got a secret Facebook group where people who have been on the training are members and the idea then is that they can join that community and ask questions. Chris: And that’s so vital because that’s the thing, people are in isolation more and more and especially, if you think about it, if one out of the ten PTs at a particular gym is on the Unity Body MOT program there is no one that they can discuss it with so you feel very lonely, isolated and all of that knowledge potentially goes to waste. I love that Facebook thing that is brilliant. Simon: And we’re hoping to run other courses around the country as widely as we possibly can but also what I want to do is to put on what I’m calling masterminds, so that once or twice a year we’ll grab a room – at a gym if somebody wants to host it that’s great – or at a hotel or some other venue, people who’ve been on the training can come and collaborate through that. And they can bring case studies if they want, we can do some refresher work, we can answer their questions and we can give them an update because this knowledge is not static, it changes all the time and it is crucial that we give them up to date information. So if something has changed or we’ve got a greater understanding of something that we taught them, we’ll give that information on the mastermind so they’re cons