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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

Christmas is an amazing time – because it's God's declaration of peace.  Peace and goodwill available to us all for the taking.  But what does that mean? The Human Dilemma Here we are, Christmas is almost upon us – can't believe it but there you go – another year, just a few weeks to go and on the program, we are talking about peace. We have been talking about peace the last couple of weeks because there's so much turmoil in people's lives. We get a lot of feedback – people write and ring and send us emails who have listened to this program and for so many people, what they consistently say is that as they've let God's Word, through this program Christianityworks, come into their lives and into their hearts, it's given them peace in the midst of their turmoil and that's what God does. That's what God's Word does, God's heart is for us to have peace. But what is peace? What does it look like? Over the last few weeks we have been looking in the Book of Ezekiel, which talks about Israel's rebellion against God. God blessed them greatly and God started a covenant with them – a promise; a relationship – that we can read about. We won't go there now, but you can read about it in Leviticus chapter 26. Oh, we will go there now, let's go. Grab a Bible – can't help myself – let's go and have a look at Leviticus chapter 26 and this covenant talks about God's blessing. It begins by saying: If you follow my statutes and keep my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will give you the rains in their due season and your land shall yield it's produce and the trees of the field will yield their fruit and your threshing floor will overtake the vintage and you'll be blessed - I'll bless your socks off, if you keep my commandments. And in the middle of it He says: And I will make my dwelling place in your midst and I won't abhor you and I will walk among you and I will be your God and you will be my people. That is the heart of God; it's the heart of God then and it's the heart of God now. God's heart is to be our God and for us to be His people but right after that He says: But if you will not obey me and do not observe all these commandments - if you spurn my statutes and abhor my ordinances, so that you do not observe all my commandments and you break the covenant (this promise), I in turn will do this to you. I will bring terror on you, consumption and fever that wastes the eyes and cause your life to pine away. And then He goes and lists all the curses that will befall Israel if they don't keep the commandment. And that's the dilemma of humanity. You read through the whole Old Testament and Israel could never uphold their end of this covenant and nor can you and nor can I. We can't keep our end of that covenant and like a marriage, when we fail, we reject God. It's like adultery in a marriage and God out of His great love, lets His anger roll forth. That's what this punishment is about. We saw last week on the program, and if you weren't with us you can listen to the program again at our website, "Christianityworks.com". Go and have a listen – that God's anger is kindled out of His love because He wants His people to come back again and you can read about that in Ezekiel chapter 14. So that's the dilemma of the Old Testament covenant that we just read in Leviticus chapter 26. On the one hand God wants to bless us, on the other hand, if we don't obey Him, He will curse us and He will bring His punishment and judgement and anger upon us but sandwiched right in the middle of those two, in Leviticus chapter 26, from verse 11 through to 13, is this heartbeat of God: I will place my dwelling place in your midst and I shall not abhor you and I will walk among you and I will be your God and you shall be my people. And because we can't hold up our end of that bargain, God had a choice. Either to keep punishing us or to come up with a new plan; a new covenant and He did that. We looked at that last week on the program. He came up with a road map for peace and it was never a plan "B"– it was always His plan "A" because as I said the Old Testament is a story about how we struggle with God and clearly, over a thousand years, it tells us that Israel could never uphold its end of the bargain through its own works. So God can either punish us or God can come up with a new plan and God came up with a new plan that we read about in Ezekiel chapter 37, where He said: I will make a covenant; a new covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them and I will bless them and multiply them and I will set my sanctuary amongst them for ever. My dwelling place shall be with them and I will be their God and they shall be my people and then the nations around them shall know that I am the Lord God who sanctifies Israel, where my sanctuary is among them for ever more. And that new covenant; that new sanctuary; that new presence of God in our midst, is Jesus Christ and that is what Christmas was about. If you flick forward to John chapter 1, the fourth book in the New Testament and it says: And the Word became flesh. God became flesh and tabernacle amongst us. In other words the very presence of God came into our midst. That is awesome! That's what Christmas is about because God steps into our dilemma. God puts on flesh; God wraps Himself in our flesh and puts Himself in your life and my life, here and now and that's the Christmas present. God Himself, wrapped in our flesh, one of us, stepping into our dung heap; into our circumstances, into our sickness, into our pain, into our lost-ness and saying, “I'm here, now let me bring you peace.” Christmas is God's declaration of peace with humanity and that's what we are going to look at during the course of this program.   Prince of Peace Well, we are talking about this central human dilemma which is our rejection of God and you know, when we rejected God – we all have, none of us have lived up to the glory of God. We have all fallen short and sinned, when we rejected God; we declared war on God and the reason so many people in this world don't have peace in their lives, peace in their hearts, peace in their spirits, is because they haven't accepted God's peace plan. When Jesus was born He was taken to the temple - if you've got a Bible grab it and open it at Luke chapter 2, beginning at verse 25: When Jesus was born He was taken to the temple and they presented Him at the temple and there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon and this man was a righteous and devout man looking forward to the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came up into the temple and when the parents brought the child, Jesus in, to do for Him what was customary under the law. Simeon took Him in his arms and praised God saying: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant, (wait for it!), in peace, according to your Word, for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all the peoples; a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel. See, this old man, Simeon, in his spirit, knew that God was sending His Saviour, Jesus Christ and he said, “I can now go, in what? "In peace" – "in Shalom" – because Jesus brings peace. Now some people won't accept Jesus and it goes on to talk about that in this chapter and Jesus Himself later said: "You know, I'm going to bring division, because some people will reject Jesus and some people will accept Jesus." And it's funny, you know, when I talk on different radio stations, some radio stations don't want me to talk about Jesus. They're happy for me to talk about God but not about Jesus because Jesus is a stumbling block to a lot of people. But those who accept Jesus, to them He brings shalom; peace, wholeness, blessing, prosperity, that assurance that God is with us. There's a beautiful picture of that, just a few chapters on in Luke. Let's go and have a look. It's just this wonderful picture of this woman in Luke chapter 7 verses 36 to 50. Let's have a read because here this woman is so low; she's so desperate and Jesus brings her peace. This is what it says: One of the Pharisees who were religious leaders, ask Jesus to come and have dinner with him, so Jesus went to the Pharisee's house and took His place at the table. And a woman in the city who was known to be a sinner, having learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, bought an alabaster jar of ointment. (Now that was worth a fortune!) She stood behind Jesus at His feet, weeping, and began to bathe His feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing His feet and anointing them with this ointment. Now when the Pharisee, this religious leader, who had invited Jesus, saw her, he said to himself, “Well, if this Jesus were a prophet, He would have known who and what kind of woman this is and who's touching Him and she's a sinner. Well Jesus knew what he was thinking and spoke up and said: “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher,” said Simon, “speak.” “A certain creditor,” said Jesus, “had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii and the other fifty. When they couldn't pay he cancelled the debts for both of them, now which one of them would love him more?” and Simon answered, “Well I suppose the one for whom he cancelled the greater debt?” And Jesus said to him: “You have judged rightly.” Then turning towards this woman, He said to Simon: “You see this woman? I entered your house and you gave me no water for my feet but she bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came she hasn't stopped kissing my feet and you didn't anoint my head with oil but she anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins which were so many, have been forgiven. Hence she has shown great love but the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” Then He said to her: “Your sins are forgiven,” but those who were at the table with Him began to say amongst themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you, go in peace." We don't know what sort of sin this woman had but you can bet your life, that she was either a prostitute or an adulteress. She must have had quite a bit of money because this jar of alabaster was very expensive indeed. In contrast you have the Pharisees; the religious leaders; these fanatics who went to endless lengths to obey God's law. And this Pharisee; Simon, invites Jesus over for dinner and they do all the right things but, you know, they never gave Jesus any water to wash His feet, which was customary. They never greeted Him with a kiss, which was customary. They never anointed Him with oil, which was customary. So they were going through the motions; their heart wasn't in it, and this prostitute or adulteress – I don't know how she got into the house but she did – and she does all these things. This lowliest of the low, takes this jar of alabaster, worth a fortune, and she cries tears onto His feet and washes it off with her hair and kisses His feet. I mean, you know, it pretty inappropriate, lurid behaviour, isn't it? But that's who she is and Jesus touched her heart and what she was doing was expressing her love and her acceptance and her faith in Jesus, the only way she knew how. She gave her heart to Jesus and Jesus said: Your faith has saved you, go in peace; go in shalom. We often compare ourselves to other people. You know, we look around and we think, "Oh, how they dress, what they do." We look on the outside, but God looks on the heart, at our rejection of God – is a massive thing. I look back on my life and still today, I make mistakes and when we do that it is an offence to God and God calls it sin and He sees our heart. We judge ourselves on the outside, the way the Pharisee judged the woman and we think, "well, I'm not good enough." The Jesus that I know, the Jesus of Christmas, the one that I don't deserve, brought His mercy and brings His peace when you and I give our hearts to Him. No, we don't deserve it – that's the whole point! Under the old covenant that we talked about before, you know, if we honour God with everything we are all the time, we get blessing, if we don't we get cursing. I deserve cursing; I deserve punishment, you probably do too, and we look at other people and think, "they are so much better than me and I don't deserve this." You know what Jesus does? He turns around the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5 and He says: Blessed are the poor in spirit (the people who know that don't deserve it) for theirs is the Kingdom of God. Jesus came for that woman – Jesus came for you – Jesus came for me. That's THE Christmas present and when we acknowledge our poverty; when we acknowledge our weakness; when we acknowledge our inability to do all the things that we need to do to be perfect and we acknowledge that there's only way, and we believe in Jesus, then by faith we are saved. Not of our own doing, it's a gift from God. It's not the result of our own works so we can't boast. It's a free gift – I'm not good enough for God – that's why He sent Jesus. That's why, on that clear, cool, starry night in Bethlehem, that child was born so He could come to this earth and pay for my sin – ugly word ‘sin' – and yours. I just pray that the Holy Spirit would breathe this Christmas gift into your heart.   Drinking in that Peace Well, we are talking about the wonderful peace that comes at Christmas time. Christmas is God's declaration of peace. Just flicking back to Isaiah chapter 37. We were talking about that earlier in the program where God acknowledges the problem of Israel. The problem of Israel was they could never keep up their end of the promise between them and God – the covenant, it was called, where God said: If you honour me first, if you do all these things, I'll bless your socks off and if you don't, I'll punish you with my anger because I want you to know that I am the Lord your God. God's heart is always to be our God and for us to be His people, but we can't hold up our end of that bargain, and so, when we rejected God, there was a war between us and Him and at Christmas time God declares peace. His peace-plan is set out in Ezekiel chapter 37, beginning at verse 26: I will make a covenant of ‘peace' with my people. It will be an everlasting covenant with them and I'll bless them and I'll multiply them, I'll set my presence among them for ever and my dwelling place shall be with them and I will be their God and they shall be my people. That's us! And many years later, the Apostle Paul after the birth and death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ – the Apostle Paul writes this in Romans chapter 5. He say: We are justified. That means, we are set right – by faith and we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus, when He was born at Christmas time, is God's declaration of peace. You need peace in your life – we all need peace in our life and the main reason we don't have peace is we reject God. Well, Jesus is God's peace offering for us. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we now stand and we boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God. Ok, we're going to go through suffering, knowing suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and that hope doesn't disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. God is now present with us. So what Paul is saying, first and foremost is, we're justified; we're set right through Jesus. Peace has broken out through Jesus with God. And we have access to that because we are standing in His grace. If you and I place our faith in Jesus Christ, we are set free and we have access to God's peace. And Paul's realistic, he says, "ok, life can still be tough", but the Holy Spirit has been poured into our heart and He's been poured into us and that's a hope that never disappoints. You see what's happening here – God started off in a tent, in the exodus, in the desert, then He moved into a building, called the temple. And then He moved into a man, called Jesus and when we place our faith in this Jesus God puts His Spirit in us. See there's God's dream; there's God's heart, “I will be your God and you will be my people and I will tabernacle amongst you. I will live with you.” All of that is possible through Jesus. Now, this peace is not some theoretical thing – it's real; it's being able to live a life in the knowledge that God is in control - that God has forgiven us – that we have peace with God. You see, God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Now, what Paul writes is this: Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by His blood, that is, set right with God by Jesus, we will be saved through Him; through Jesus, from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by His life. But more than that, we even boast in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have now received reconciliation. See, it's not just a past thing – it's not just. Ok, we were set right with God, we've got a life to live; you have a life to live and God's plan for your life is peace – not theoretical, not theological – in life, here and now. I was talking with a man recently who has been through a lot in his life – a couple of marriages, into this third relationship, he knows about God but he hasn't ever given his heart over, every single bit of him, the way that woman did in that story. That's a tragedy, because until we do, there can be no peace, no completeness, no safety and soundness and prosperity and peace and quiet and tranquility and contentment and knowledge of God. What about you? Heading into Christmas, have you given every part of your life over to Jesus? Are you living in the peace that He came to give you? Like that woman, your faith has saved you, go in peace. I'm going to pray for you right now. If you want God's peace, we are going to pray for God's peace. Father, I pray for everybody who is listening right now. You know where each one of us is at and Lord, you have this passion to be our God and for us to be your people and Lord we believe that you sent your Son, Jesus at Christmas time to be your peace offering. Father, we just want to accept Him, maybe for the first time or afresh or anew, wherever we are, Lord we lay our lives – every part, every compartment, every thing that we would hold on to – we lay down at your feet and we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Father I pray in the mighty name of Jesus, that you would pour your Spirit out into each one of us and you would fill us with a joy and a peace that surpasses all understanding. Lord I just pray that you will bless our socks off with your presence and your grace and your love and your Spirit and your Son and your peace. Father we ask that in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

  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? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Follow Joe: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcostelloglobal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcostelloglobal/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcostelloglobal/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZsrJsf8-1dS6ddAa9Sr1Q?view_as=subscriber Transcript Joe: Welcome, everybody. I'm really excited today to have Simon T. 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.

Today we bring on guest, Simon Bachofner, Crossfit owner/instructor at HubCity Crossfit. He is not only a Crossfit owner and instructor, but also a registered nurse working on a Master’s to become a nurse practitioner.  With the Crossfit movement and background, let’s dive into a few questions that can help you guide what kinds of exercise you’d like to pursue in 2020. Meredith: What’ got you interested in fitness?  Simon: I’ve always been a fitness enthusiast at heart. Through the course of my fitness journey, I’ve traveled many different directions. I started as a high school athlete playing baseball. I often tell myself if I had a program like Crossfit in high school, I would have been a much better player. I journeyed into endurance sports for a while . . . things like Triathlons. Through nursing and being a health professional . . . I’ll be honest, my wife got interested first. That’s usually how it happens; my wife get’s interested first. I was skeptical at first; I always thought it was competitive exercise back when it first started, but I’ve come to see the value in it. We’ll get into that later. There were things I found about Crossfit to be really positive early on and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s a passion. It got to the point where I ended up opening my own gym. If people can drum up the courage to walk through the front door, it’s really not as bad as people make it out to be. We’ll get into that later too. I believe in it strongly, and I don’t think I’ll do anything else.  Meredith: I really appreciate your Crossfit and healthcare backgrounds. I run into the question every day of “is Crossfit for me? Is it good?” What do you think about the rise of Crossfit in general? Who is it good for? Simon: In level one (coach training), they teach you that Crossfit is for everybody. Whatever workout or movement you are doing is infinitely scalable. I have a class; it’s my favorite class. It’s a group of ladies who come in Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8 AM. They are all over 65; I think the average age is 72-74. These ladies come in and crush it. They do whatever I put infant of them; of course we modify and scale to every individual athlete’s need.  With the rise of the Crossfit games and individual competitors, we have to remember that that’s the one percent of the one percent. Crossfit, at its core, is design for general physical preparedness for your average human being. That’s the philosophy at my gym. That’s the way we program the daily workouts. They just had an open workout this past week on handstand walking. Yes, we use functional movement; that’s not a functional movement; we’re not going to program in handstand walking for the general population. Yeah, it’s cool. If you can walk on your hands, you can probably do a whole lot of other things. It can be a marker for your own fitness, but that’s just something that our general population is going to see. Crossfit is for everybody. What you see on TV shouldn’t be what’s stopping you from walking in the front door of your local Crossfit gym.  Meredith: I like that. So many times we see social media, or the Crossfit games and assume that’s what we’re going to be asked to do on day one. We’re going to be asked to do a PR of some kind of a lift, or monkey bars, or walk in a handstand. When people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s that have spent a lot of time in the corporate world think they want to start fitness, what tips would you give them? How do they get started with fitness safely again?  Simon: From a Crossfit perspective, number one, you have to assess and meet them where they are at. I offer a free one-on-one fundamentals session for everybody. Crossfit has nine foundational movements build into it. I generally screen each new athlete coming in. Where they are at with those basic movement patterns of overhead pressing, squatting, and pulling movements. We run them through those movements and see where there might be faults. We don’t start by loading anything. We start with a PVC pipe.  There is a great picture I found and re-posted on Instagram of a baby bending down to pick up a ball. It maps out their angles. That’s how we were meant to move. Over the course of doing all the things that we do as human beings, like sitting in chairs and being hunched over at computer screens, things change. Our goal is to get as close to the native movement pattern as possible. We may not get there. We’re going to get as close as we possibly can, safely. You gotta be gentle; you can’t force somebody just because the workout says we’re going to work up to 1 rep max on the board; You have to know your athlete and where their limits are and work things to their relative potential.  Meredith: Sounds like you’re doing a great job of making things scalable and relative to each individual. I think sometimes people get into the Crossfit box (and I see this in my neighborhoods too) and are excited by what is going around them, but they are new to fitness. How do you help people that are new avoid doing too much too fast?  Simon: Good question. That comes down to coaching. We get a lot of folks who may have been athletes early on in their lives, but over the past 10 20, 30 years have devolved into obesity, poor movement patterns, poor range of motion and flexibility. It’s up to the coach to know. Those athletes are going to come in and think they can just go right back into doing what they did in their 20s, and that’s just not reality. You can pick those athletes out when they come through the door and have been exercising for zero minutes in the past 10 years thinking they can go right back to where they left off. You want them to come back the next day. When you let them go too hard, they’re not going to. That’s the “check your ego at the door kind of thing.” No matter where you came from, or what you used to do 20, 30, 40 years ago, you gotta ease into it.  Meredith: I like how you included the screening process. Even if people aren’t ready to start Crossfit, it sounds like everybody needs with a goal and a motivation; we can’t just pick up a barbell and throw it overhead because we could 20 years ago. We have to work back into it. I’m wondering if you can share any success stories, whether it is for yourself or people you coached where you saw a major transformation in some part of life.  Simon: I’ve got so many. When I first started, I worked with a gal named Diane. She’s now doing her 2nd Crossfit open. She has PR-ed every single one of her lifts. I couldn’t quote you off the top of my head how much weight she’s lost, but she keeps her pair of jeans in her gym bag that she used to wear when she first came in. She’s on fire now. She crushes just about everything. We did a challenge the other day, a bingo community building thing, and she did every single one of the spaces on the challenge. She’s gotten excellent results.  There’s another one that, from a medical standpoint excites me, a guy with a traumatic brain injury in 2004. He still has some residual instability with gait/walking. I don’t love when docs cap out rehab potential on patients and say “this is as good as its going to get.” This young man came in with a cane. I don’t believe I’ve seen him walk with a cane now. He started four months ago, and I don’t think I’ve seen him walk with a cane after his first month here. Pull ups, push ups, squats . . . he can even do some of the more complicated Olympic lifting movements, which is really taxing neurologically and neuromuscularly. He comes in and loves it. He’s doing great. That’s the kind of stuff that gets me going. He was told he’s walk with a cane for the rest of his life, but now he’s doing great.  Meredith: Yeah; that’s the kind of thing I share with my patients. They’ll ask “can I . . .” followed by something from the Crossfit Games or Wounded Warriors. I respond with “I’m not going to tell you that you can’t, because you’re just going to prove that I’m wrong.” A lot of that inspiration has come from Crossfit.  How is Crossfit different from other workouts? This is a common question when people want to workout, but don’t know how they want to workout.  Simon: This goes back to the question, “how do we optimize health?” My philosophy is not just developing a workout program. You can’t out-fitness a bad diet. More than that, we’re not just lumps of flesh and skin, we need to have human connection, a tribe, and the psychological piece as well. That was one of the things I noticed early on about Crossfit that was unique. It was unique in its ability to provide real human connections with other people that had a common goal. Caveat is that you have to go to the right gym and find the right people, and have the right ownership that will cultivate that community because it is important to them.  At our gym, we are not trying to send people to the Crossfit games, and that’s never what we sought out to do. We sought out to make our community healthier and build a strong social network of folks that just wanted to be the best versions of themselves.  The physical stimulus is built into the workouts, but the psychological piece . . . you get to come in, and let’s just say you are lifting heavy and trying to PR a 1 RM, but you just don’t have it that day. Crossfit is a safe place to come in and fail, and that’s important to being human. You have to be OK with saying, “I didn’t have it that day.” That’s alright.  Personally, for me, having a wolf pack, having your guys, having your squad . . . that’s a really valuable thing for men that are trying to stay healthy or regain/reclaim their health. We’re not an island. We are social beings. Evolutionarily speaking, you didn’t go out and hunt alone, you hunted in a party. Being stuck in a cubicle by yourself and then going to the gym by yourself and putting your headphones on  . . . I’m not surprised you’re not motivated to get your workout in. If you come in and show up with your boys and we’re all doing the same thing, it draws a parallel to how we used to go about doing things as men. All those things are inherently built into Crossfit. When it comes to health, I think that Crossfit hits optimization comprehensively.  Meredith: Absolutely. When people are looking to join a Crossfit gym, what are some questions they should ask to try to figure out where their wolfpack is? Which one is the right one to try?  Simon: You won’t know until you get in there and try. It’s a trial-and-error process, but I think you’ll know right away. Does somebody greet you and shake your hand? Does the coach come up and talk to you and try to just form a relationship first and foremost? What that tells me is that that gym is about people; its about helping you reach your goal; helping you reach your potential; getting to know you; getting to know your strengths and weaknesses, and working together to get you to where you want to be.  Meredith: I appreciate you sharing, as so many people coming back to fitness don’t know. Just having this as a frame of reference is a great place to start. When people are adults in their 40s, 50s, 60s . . . what are the first steps you give them, other than “come to class?” Simon: I think that you have to develop a pattern of consistency first. I haven’t seen anyone that was inconsistent get the results that they wanted. It is a little bit different with older populations. Make sure that they space out their workouts and get adequate rest in-between. Especially early on. Every other day works well. For new athletes and for older athletes this works well. Even for myself. If I go five days in a row, it takes me two days to recover. Optimizing for recovery is important. Then we get into nutrition; first and foremost, I want the athletes to stop eating garbage. Meredith: What is garbage?  Simon: Garbage is anything in a bag or box. I want them to eat things that if left on the counter would die and have to be thrown away. I want most of those meals to consist of real plants. Rule number one: eat real food. The Crossfit way of doing things is eat Paleo, meat, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar. If you can stick to those things, you’re 90% of the way there. As you progress in your training, we can tweak nutrition to optimize performance.  To summarize, I want them to find some pattern of consistency with training and rest. The second thing would be to dive into food and nutrition. If there was a hierarchy, sleep, then nutrition, then training, then sport specific movements.  Meredith: Thank you. That really helps hi-light the link between health and Crossfit. Is there anything else you were hoping I would touch on as it relates to healthy lifestyles for busy people?  Simon: I need to mechanically move soundly with consistency before I add any intensity. Intensity can be defined as speed or weight. Slow down and revert back to good mechanics consistently. We do ask you to do challenging things, but Olympic lifting—they give gold medals for that; don’t expect to go into a Crossfit gym and ace your first snatch workout. There are certain positions and movement patterns that people spend years just to add one or two kilos. They give big gold medals for that. You have to go at your own pace with mechanics first and check your ego at the door. Be there for the right reasons; be there for the community; be there for health and your own well-being. If its not working for you at your gym, there are plenty of others. Crossfit is going back to why they started in the first place . . . for the person on the couch; getting off the couch and into the gym. I wouldn’t be scared; the hardest part is stepping through the front door.  Meredith: I really appreciate how you bridge health and fitness with what a people can find inside a Crossfit box should they have the bravery to walk through the door and take that first step.  Closing thoughts form Simon: The farther you move into fitness, the farther you move away from illness.  Simon’s contact info: HubCityCrossfit.net in Albany, Oregon. You can reach him on Instagram and Facebook as well. 

Jesus : Simon, Son of John, Do you love me ; Simon : You know everything, you know that I love you; Jesus : Feed my sheep...

On today's episode of Progressive Property Podcast, our guest host Den Hedges talks to Simon Church, an ex-footballer turned property investor. Learn about how his early retirement from professional football led him to build an investment firm on his own name. Hear about how he got affected by the unforeseen retirement, how important influencer is his dad in this career shift, how he decided to focus in catering to professional sports people, and how he made the transition from his professional sports to property investment. Simon says that these two things are quite similar and there are things in sports that he was able to use inside the business. You can find out more if you listen to this episode! KEY TAKEAWAYS As a professional player in the world of sports, you have to be strong-minded be focused on your end goal. There will be a bad game and you won't be able to shoo away negative comments and reviews. You don't have to worry about everything they say. Focus on improving gameplay. "Stick in property." At a young age, this is Simon's dad advice that he can't seem to brush off. He always thought he'll play till 35. According to Simon, there are many sportsmen and women who don't know what they'll do after their career or haven't planned on anything to secure financial stability. It took him time get around the news of his retirement. It was all he was doing at that point from the age of six. He still has his hopes to be the top player at that time. "Outside football, the only thing that excites me is property." Simon doesn't like chasing stuff that he doesn't like. He educated himself about property investment. And, through this, he also saw the chance to help other players to go forward through property investment. His business provides services like sorting properties, guide them through mortgages, etc. to professional sports people. Simon sees every moment working on his business as part of his learning process. He saw opportunities and learned about networking when he exited the world of professional football. Simon felt he was in a bubble. He was just exposed to what you're allowed to. He's enjoying exploring every avenue he sees. BEST MOMENTS "Talent can only get you so far. I say, between the ages of 14 and 16, there's a lot of time that you need to realize where you wanna go... I think when you get into the professional side and you're in the professional club, you have to be one-minded - this is what I wanna do." – Simon "You can have the ability and the talent, but if your mind is not there on the day, then you could have a bad game." – Den “It resonates with sports players, we have to do what exactly what we're told." – Simon "Once your mind slips a little bit, your performance slips. Then, you can easily slip down the slippery slope." – Simon VALUABLE RESOURCES Church Investments ABOUT THE GUEST HOST Den Hedges is a Personal Development Manager, Trainer, Speaker and Author. He is currently the Account Manager for Progressive Property. ABOUT THE GUEST Simon Church is a retired footballer who played as a striker for Wales. He won the last of his 38 caps in the Euro 2016 semi-final defeat by Portugal.  After the retirement at 29, he decided to move onto a new career – property investment. The idea of getting into property investing was ingrained by his dad when he was a kid. At the age of 20, he already bought his first property and started building his portfolio. He, then, decided to give services to professional sports people who want to venture in property investments. CONTACT METHOD Simon Church Church Investments Simon's Twitter Den Hedges Den's LinkedIn See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Why you should never ask somebody for free advice. ---Transcript--- Hey everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and I have a very special “Marketing in Your Car” for you for today. Hey, everyone. I just got my hair cut, and I’m driving back home. I actually wanted to do a special podcast. I don’t normally log into Facebook very much because it stresses me out. Typically I’m getting a lot of people who are asking me for my help for free. It’s just hard, because I want to, and I wish I could give them all the attention. The problem is, with everything I’m doing right now in my own company, in my own business, and in my own coaching clients, it’s hard to find time to even sleep at night. There’s so much stuff always happening, and so I don’t typically log in that often, but the last week, I did for a couple of reasons. I just checked again when I was walking out of getting my hair cut. I saw a message, and it just made me think, so I want to tell you about two different people that approached me on Facebook. I won’t use their real names, but I want to share their approaches with you, because they were both very different. The first guy that contacted me basically said, “Hey Russell, I’ve been watching you for a bunch of years. I love your stuff. I think you’re awesome. How much would it cost to buy an hour of your time?” I said, “Right now, I sell an hour for twenty-five hundred bucks,” and he wrote back and said, “Oh, that’s kind of steep, but hey, man, I love your stuff, and I think you can help me, so where do I send the money?” So I told him. He sent the money. Two days later, we were on the phone. We spent an hour on the phone with him looking at his funnel, building it out, tweaking it, giving him all the advice that he needed, and after he was done, he was like, “Man, that was awesome. I feel like I’ve shifted my focus. I know exactly where I’m going now, I’m going to go ahead and implement it. Hey, do you mind if I shoot some questions now and then as I’m building this thing out, to help me create it?” and I’m like, “Yeah, no worries.” So he went out, and he’s been building, and he shot me a couple of questions. I gave him some feedback, and I haven’t minded because he understood the value of my time, and what it takes for me to spend some time. I don’t mind helping him now, because he valued my time up front, and he was willing to invest, and now he’s trying to implement what I showed him, and so of course I’m going to help steer him in the right direction and have success. It’s been awesome. Then I have this other guy. Again, a really nice guy, and my heart strings go out to him and to other people that I’ve gotten this message from. Literally, I think, five or six people this week sent me similar messages about, “Hey Russell, I love your stuff. I don’t have any money, but I want to work with you. I’d love it if you could get on the phone with me and coach me through this. I’ll give you half of my profits, and I’ll do all of this kind of stuff.” That’s their mentality, and it’s tough, because honestly, for me as a person, I can’t even tell you how much I want to, but it’s hard. Most of those I don’t respond back to, because it’s just so hard for me to tell them “No”, but it’s like, “You have to understand, that when I was getting started, I never would have gone to somebody who is as busy or had as much success, and just ask them for their time. I always would have gone and figured out how I could provide value to them, whether it’s money or whatever, because their time is valuable.” I look at my schedule. For example, this week, I was at the office twice until 3 a.m. in the morning this week trying to get some projects done. I literally had, I think, seven or eight one-hour phone call consultations with people. Every single one of those people, outside of the first guy I told you about – he paid $2,500 – everybody else paid $25,000 for those, and it was hard for me to fit those $25,000 one-hour calls into my schedule, because it’s so busy with everything. I obviously made the time, because they made the investment. Plus I’ve got the Reactive Coaching for our $25,000 students, and then on top of that, I’ve got my own projects and my own businesses, and in our supplement company, we’re in the process of trying to hire three or four more people. It has by far eclipsed our internet marketing business [laughs] to this point, which is exciting. We’re about to launch Click Funnels, which is a brand new company. We’re in the process of trying to find new office space and probably hiring a staff of, who knows – ten to twelve people to help with that. I literally don’t have time to sleep right now. I go home. I spend time in the morning with my family and kids and at night with my family and kids. As soon as they all pass out, I’m back to work trying to move things forward, and it’s hard when I get an e-mail saying, “I just need an hour of your time. Remember what it was like when you were just beginning and you had no ability? If you had just gotten some guru to help you…,” and how it would help them, and again, my heart strings go out to them, but I don’t think people really understand the reality of it. For me to carve out another hour of my time, I would have to put one of my projects on hold, and you look at opportunity cost. The one lesson I learned from my college education is opportunity cost. With opportunity cost, if you remember the concept, you’ve got two options. The opportunity cost is what you lost by not taking the other option, so for example, if I was to jump on the phone with this guy for an hour, the opportunity cost is that I’ve either got to give up an hour of time with my family, which is not something I’m willing to do at all, or I’ve got to carve out an hour of time from all of my other projects. An hour of focused time working towards Click Funnels or an hour towards something else, will make me a lot of money. It’s hard, because what he is asking for and what people like that are asking for – they don’t understand what they’re asking for. They’re asking for an hour of your time. An hour of your time, literally, on the low end, is $2,500. I was trying to be nice to this guy, but because he was willing to respect the value of my time, I was willing to do it for $2,500, but the reality is an hour of time that’s focused on your own business is worth so much more than that. I just wanted to share. It’s been on my mind. I may send him this podcast, and I hope it doesn’t hurt his feelings. That’s not my intention, but more so just to help him understand the value of other people’s time, and if you want to get someone’s attention, you’ve got to look at things differently. When I first got into this business, I remember I went to this event, and there was this guy that was at the event. He was in this Mastermind group, and he was in four or five others, and I was like, “How in the world did you get in all of these groups?” and he said, “I learned something early on in life, Russell. I learned I can either work my way in, or I can buy my way in. It’s way easier just to buy your way in.” He had spent tons of money in to getting in to these different clubs. I said, “How in the world do you afford that?” I think he had spent almost a hundred grand in these Masterminds. He said, “Well, I couldn’t afford it, so instead of complaining about the fact that I didn’t have the resources to afford it, I tried to get resourceful. I went out to a bunch of Internet marketing forums, and I found a bunch of people who were in similar situations like me. They couldn’t afford it, but they wanted the information, and so I said, “Look. This is the deal. I’m going to invest in these five Mastermind groups, and my total cost is going to be X amount of dollars. I can’t afford it right now, but if you will pay X amount of dollars into it, I will go to these events, and I will learn. I will do everything, and when I come back from these events, I will bring back and break down everything I learned, all the notes, give you everything, and you’ll get a chance, at a fraction of the cost, to go to all of these events with me, basically, to get all of the information I extract from these.” This guy literally got ten people to give him $10,000. He had $100,000 in cash to go out and join the best Masterminds in the world. I was just like, “Wow.” – resourcefulness, right? He didn’t have the resources, but he figured out a way to make it happen. I always think about one of my favorite people I ever met in my entire life, and this is in the business, or out of the business, but it’s a guy named Stu McLaren. Before I even met Stu, I was putting on this workshop called “Affiliate Boot Camp”, and Stu paid $1,000 to be part of this boot camp. He’s one of the smartest people I have ever met. It was a life-training series that I did, and I’d do a teleseminar. Every teleseminar, I’d open it up for questions at the end, and the first person to pop on was Stu, saying, “Hey, Russell, that was amazing. I’m Stu McLaren. That session you gave was amazing. It just totally built me up,” and he talked about why it was so great. He’d ask me some questions, and then he’d thank me, and, “Boom.” Literally, for ten sessions in a row, Stu was the first one asking questions, the first one thanking me, all of that kind of stuff, and it was awesome. Then at the end of the event, he called me up one day, and he was like, “Hey, man, I’ve got an idea. We should work on this project together.” I knew who Stu was, and I knew he’d given me so much value from that side. Me, as an educator and a teacher – to have somebody invest in my business and thank me and all of these things along the way, it changes it. Where now, just like the dude who paid the twenty-five hundred bucks, I have a vested interest in him. I want him to be successful. I want him to take the advice. Yeah, I’m going to pick up the phone, and I’m going to return the call. The other interesting thing is, in my Mastermind group, in our inner circle, we have a couple of different levels – anywhere from $8,000 up to $25,000 in our coaching program, and inside the programs, all of our members are able to ask me questions each week. They can submit video clips and write questions to me, and we can chat back and forth. It’s a cool process. What’s interesting is that the majority of people who ask me questions will jump on and ask me a question, and that’s it. We move on. Sometimes, they’ll say, “Hey, thanks,” but that’s it. There’re not many people that say, “Thanks,” and I’m fine with that. I’m not looking for thanks, but there’s one guy whose name is Simon Cryer, and Simon signs up for the coaching program, goes in there, studies a bunch of stuff, and then he jumps into this thing where he can message me, and makes me this video, and all the video said was, “You know, Russell, thank you. This was one of the most amazing things in the world. It was awesome. It was…,” and all of this stuff. I watched the video, and then I was waiting for him to ask me a favor, a question, or whatever, and he never did. He just thanked me, and I was like, “Dude, that guy’s awesome.” Simon’s name, I remembered. A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed me a question, and because I knew Simon’s name, and because he’d given me value, I literally sat up that night while my wife was angry at me, because she wanted me to go to bed [laughs]. I spent almost an hour on the computer making videos for him, mapping out the whole game process, showed him what he was doing right, showed him what he was doing wrong, sent him all of my files. I literally gave him a years’ worth of my research. I gave it all to him, one hundred percent, and I just said, “Hey, here you go, Simon.” He told me when he got that that he started crying, because he couldn’t believe that I would give him that. I told him afterwards, “You know what, Simon? You’re the first person that ever thanked me.” It was interesting how that works, and so the reason for this, you guys, is I would just say – I don’t know what I’m trying to say, to be honest, but when you want things in life, there’s the right way and the wrong way to do it. The right way is to figure out how you can provide as much value as possible to other people, and if you do that, it’s amazing what they’ll do back in return for you. Sometimes that is paying people, right? I pay coaches all of the time. I wrote Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher a check for $25,000 in January, because I wanted some of their help. I’m friends with them. I could text them. I could call them, but I wanted to show them that I have respect for them and what they do, so I wrote them a check. I asked them one or two little questions here and there, and those things have transformed my business. I look at Bill Glaser. I was in his Mastermind group for six years. I spoke on his stage tons of times, and one day I had a question. Instead of calling him and saying, “Hey, Bill, I have a question for you,” I called his assistant, and I sent him, I think, fifteen hundred bucks for an hour of his time. We got on the phone, and we talked through it. It’s just you understanding that people are busy, and yes, they may have time, and they’re there for their buddies or whatever, but if you’re going to pick their brains or you’re going to do whatever, understand that that’s not a small thing. I have people all the time that are like, “Hey, man, let me take you to lunch and pick your brain.” In my life, I have not had the luxury of having lunch for months. I don’t have time for lunch. I eat while I’m working, because I don’t have time to break away and go to lunch. I have too many projects and too many things that are happening. If I were to go to lunch, I would miss time with my family, so I don’t eat lunch. So for them to say, “Hey, Russell, I want to take you to lunch and pick your brain,” it seems like in their mind, they’re thinking it’s such a small thing –“Hey, I’m going to buy you lunch,” but for me to pull away and go to lunch, it’s like, “You don’t understand the opportunity cost of that. That will cost me on the lowest end, $2,500, and on the high end, I’m losing $10,000 to $15,000 or more by letting you take me to lunch to pick my brain.” I think that it’s important to understand that, especially with people you’re trying to get to, trying to get access to and need information from. Figure out ways that you can provide value first. Coming to someone and saying, “Hey, I’ll give you half of my business,” or, “Hey, if you do this, I could make a lot of money, and I’ll give you part of it back,” that’s the same pitch everyone is giving them. It’s funny. I had a guy – this is another one. I get these all of the time, so I apologize for the rant here, but I had a guy the other day who came up to me and said, “Hey, Russell, this is the deal. I pitch you. You’re the one I want to work with on this project. This project’s awesome. What I want you to do is I want you to work with me to set the entire thing up. We’ll do this, this, and this. Help me launch and help me do everything and from that I’ll give you a percentage of the profits.” I wrote him back, and I was like, “Dude, for the effort that it would take for me to go and do what you just asked me to do,  I could do the exact same thing on my own project and keep all of the money. I don’t think you understand that. You’re not providing me value by giving me half of your company and letting me do all of the work. There’s no value for me in that, all right?” And so it’s just an understanding of you looking at the people that you want information from and figuring out, “How can I serve them first?” Stu McLaren was smart. He did not come to me, day one, and say, “Russell, I need this. I need this. I need this.” He said, “How can I serve Russell first? I’m going to join his coaching program and ask him questions. I’m going to edify him, and I’m going to do all of this stuff, and I’m going to build a relationship,” and now, when Stu calls, I will drop anything. When Stu says, “Russell, I need this,” I will. To this day, if Stu was to call me at three in the morning and tell me that he needs an accountant, I’d be there. That’s how much rapport he’s built with me. I look at somebody like Simon. After that whole thing happened, I happened to be in Dallas one day, and I think Simon’s from Dallas. We e-mailed, and an hour later, we’re hanging out. We spent the whole day together, and I consider him a close friend. He came out to Boise. We went to the fights together. All of this stuff came from him saying, “Thanks,” from him figuring out what I needed in my life to help me. Because of that now, I have this reciprocity, where I want to make sure he’s successful, and he’s going to be successful, because he played his cards right. This guy that came to me first and said, “Hey, I’m going to pay you twenty-five hundred bucks for an hour of your time because that’s what it’s worth to you right now,” I’ve probably answered fifteen questions for him since then, because he respected my time. It helped me to feel that value first, and so, yes, I want to help him back out in the other direction. Anyway, I hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears. In all aspects of your life, whether it’s relationships, whether it’s business or whatever it is, this advice is important. It’s key, and you need to understand it. I don’t want to admit this, but one of my favorite shows on TV is “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”. I watch this show, and I cringe every single time, because these guys get two minutes with the bachelor or the bachelorette to get to know them, and the ones that always blow it are the ones that get on there and go, “Okay, so my name is Joe, and this is what I do, and this is what I love,” and they just start talking about themselves, and just dump all of this garbage on the person that they’re on this date with. The girl gets done and walks away, and they’re like, “Wow. I know everything about that guy, but he didn’t ask me a single question about myself.” The guys who are successful are the ones who sit down and ask the girl questions. –“Tell me about you. Tell me about this.” Those are the ones that succeed. The ones that fall in love are the ones who are not talking about themselves and telling them why they’re great. It’s the ones who go on the dates and ask questions to the other person. When I was in college, I had a roommate. He was one of the most fascinating people ever, and I say that because I always thought that. I remember always thinking that this guy – John Merritt was his name. I thought, “This guy’s just fascinating.” He was one of the coolest people. I just thought he was awesome. One day, I came home from something, and I sat down, and I was talking to him, and he literally asked me questions directly for probably an hour straight – just question after question. Everything he had to say, he seemed more fascinated by what I said, and I was like, “Man,” and all of the sudden, in the middle of this I remember pausing and thinking, “Oh, wow. I think he’s so fascinating, but I’ve never asked him a single question. I’m like that guy – I’m the bad date, but he’s the most amazing person in the world.” He just kept asking me question after question after question. Everything I said, he seemed fascinated by, and that’s what he gave me. That’s why I always wanted to be around John. Everyone wanted to be around John. He was one of the neatest people ever. So anyway, there’s some stuff for all of you guys to think about. I have no idea if this went the right direction or not, but I hope that you guys got some value out of it. I am at the bank grabbing some money, so I’m going to jump off for now, and I appreciate you guys, and I will talk to you all soon.