Greetings from moving day here at Casa de Sandlan. As some of you remember, I moved recently. It moving. Looks like that and moving. Welcome to my office. That's right. It's coming together, everybody. It is definitely not enough. Remember my couch? I have a couch. Not bragging. We're a little behind. So that's what this video is about. So now I want you to just. This is a video in transparency and letting you guys know what we're up to. And what I'm up to is moving. Stephanie has also had knee surgery. She's doing great. As I mentioned in a previous video, she doesn't need anything, don't offer anything. She's lovely and happy and doing her physical therapy and well on the road to recovery. Great for her. I'm on the road to having these boxes back. I own all my things again under one roof.


00:55

Feels good. So Stephanie and I have not had the September meeting we normally have. We have a September meeting every September to debrief hypnothoughts Live and get ready for next year. We have not had that yet, so everything's a little bit behind schedule, so. And we also taught the AI Summit class about a week ago, so we're a little bit behind. Let me help catch everybody up on a few things together. Here we go. Thing 1 Speaker reviews for Hypnothoughts Live went out last night or this morning. Stephanie was going to do them after we talked yesterday. I don't know exactly when she got them out, but I know you guys all have them because I've already heard from a few of you. So we're sending that out or it's been sent out. By the time you get this video, it's been sent out.


01:43

Take a look at them. They're great. Overwhelmingly, we had really good feedback. The number one complaint was still the very few people who tried to hard sell people and sell from their talk. Now's not the time for me to go into yet again why that's a really stupid idea. And to people who say, like, oh, you can't teach in an hour. Shut up and don't teach at our conference, you're just wrong and you're just not good enough at teaching then to teach at our conference, no problem. We can deal with that and things are going to be great. Overwhelmingly, you guys didn't have that as a problem, though. Overwhelmingly, you guys took our feedback and took it seriously and presented wonderful content. And the feedback that we've all been getting has been different than that. So great.


02:29

The call for presenters usually goes out last week. It has not because of all this. But here's the other thing. One of the changes we're making this year impacts presenters dramatically. And I wanted to explain this and get feedback and do a whole bunch of stuff. And we're still going to get your feedback on how we're going to do it and the exact specifics. But I want to give it to you in broad strokes right now because I want your feedback. So, Stephanie and I want your feedback. So here's the deal. Breakfast was awesome, wasn't it? I'm really happy with how breakfast went. Breakfast was also very expensive. That was the most expensive breakfast that the Sahara makes and I did that. We, Stephanie and I made the decision to do that for a couple reasons.


03:17

One, we genuinely love you guys and wanted to provide the best breakfast we could for you. And also we wanted to level set with everybody from the top and say, this is the best breakfast. It's also quite expensive. Is it worth it? I think it is worth it to stay at that price. If you go down one notch. It's not a big notch down in terms of price, but it is a big notch down in terms of quality. If you go down a second notch, the value starts to line up again, but the breakfast gets much worse. So the value's right, but the quality's worse. Here's the deal. And by the way, I'll show my work. I'll post below this a screenshot of the BEO from the conference from the Sahara Hotel. We'll just show you the screenshot.


04:05

We'll post it below in the Facebook conversation because we really want to be transparent with you guys. And the basics are this. It's about $60 person per day to put on that breakfast. Ish. Like 64 bucks. Something like, we have it in writing and I'll show you what it is. But what that comes down to is for the three days the presenters, we're spending 200 bucks on each of you and what we'd like to do is have you guys pay for your own food. That's it. And I know other conferences have done that. And I just think it's. I think it's fair. I think if we're going to make our conference fair, I think having all the presenters pay for their own food and just pay for their own way is worth it.


04:50

And you guys know us, we're going to reinvest that money back into the conference to continue to make the conference better and better. And as you've Seen, that's what we do with the money is invested in all of us, because it's our money, it's our community's money, and we're just sharing it that way. Stephanie and I are on salary. All the money that comes in goes back into the conference, and that's just how we want to do things. But I want your feedback on that. So let me share. Kind of like $200 is what it would be as a nice round number for, you know, just the breakfasts and, like, some coffee and then the pool party and the presenter party and the costume party, all the apps and all that stuff.


05:37

We want to keep paying for that because that's us, you know, saying thank you to you guys. So we want to continue to say thank you. And so our thought is we would pay for all that stuff as we have, and as you know, Ken sponsored the pool party, and, you know, all those things will continue to happen. Or you guys pay 333, which is the early bird price. All the presenters. What if all the presenters paid 333? Or if the presenters paid 200? Or what if we did something lower than that? Or nothing. And if we did nothing, we would have to cut breakfast or something like that. I do not want to do something with tickets. We're just not doing I don't want breakfast or I'm opting in or put something on my badge. We're not policing people.


06:25

I want, as much as possible, everyone to be treated equally. And that's why I actually like the idea of presenters paying their own way like everybody else. They don't pay for the conference because they speak to kind of neutralize that and balance that out. So education for education balances, but they pay for the food. That. That's what sounds reasonable to me. Also, I appreciate the economy that I am sharing this idea in and what the world looks like right now and how it's not like, the best it's ever been. And I don't want people to say, like, well, if I have to spend $200, I can't afford to go to the conference. That's an interesting conversation for how you're doing as a professional and if you're ready to be a presenter, but also the economy and maybe we just shouldn't.


07:12

So I want to have really open, honest conversations with all of you guys. Normally, I would have sent this as a video just to the presenters, but with the bandwidth that we have and how behind schedule we are, I'm just getting this out to everybody and everyone can you know whether you're a presenter or not? We want your feedback. What do you guys all think about this? There's other changes we're going to be making to the conference. As we always do. We're going to change pre conference kind of a lot. I'm still unhappy or unsatisfied with how pre conference is going, so we're going to work on that. We have some notes. You'll get details on that later. But for now we're going to. You got your feedback. I want to get your feedback on this piece.


07:56

We're going to put out the call for presenters. The contract will stipulate if you're going to pay 200 or 333 or $100 or what? Or nothing or whatever. Like, I. I want to have answer to that before people are applying. And that was the goal. Because I don't want to like, make it feel like a bait and switch. But just with. We try to close our speaker application process by Halloween and you know, we're talking about six weeks until Halloween. Like, things are going really fast and we've got a lot to do and I have a lot of fun projects to share with you guys. We've got a couple cool things that you guys are going to like a lot. Some of you, if you were at the AI Summit, you already know about some of them.


08:39

And the rest of you, we don't have time in this video to get into it. You'll just have to hear that in another video. But that's the transparency video. Attendance was really good. The conference went really smoothly. I just could not be more grateful to you guys. And I'll say this real quick, I know we're coming up on the end of a long video. You guys are great. I want to thank you for supporting us when stuff works and when stuff doesn't. Last year we tried a couple things that I don't think worked very well and so we modified them. This year we tried a couple new things and they really did work. Breakfast, obviously, being one of them. The family room we started last year. I thought that was a great idea.


09:16

And then there's a couple other things we've tried here and there and. And I just want to say thank you to you for supporting us, for giving us feedback when something doesn't work, but then still coming and supporting us even after we've done something wrong and made a mistake. And that's how we are continuing to learn and iterate and make the conference better and better. So that's it. I'm going to get back to unpacking boxes. This is 9 minutes and 38 seconds in and I guarantee my wife and son would like me to get back to unpacking boxes before I hit the 10 minute mark. So thank you and we will see all of you very soon. And thanks for making Hypno thoughts live 2025. Genuinely the smoothest it's ever gone and I think my favorite we've ever had.


09:59

Big stuff for 26 and you'll see. But please give us your feedback on all this stuff and talk to you soon.

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