Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Welcome to her Empire Builder Show. I'm your host, Tina Tower, business strategist, course creator, best selling author and unapologetic champion for women chasing big audacious dreams. Since starting my first business at 20, I've built and sold multiple companies, traveled the globe and discovered the magic of online courses. A model that has changed my life forever. Building a business is no easy feat. It's a long road filled with sometimes challenges. But with the right strategy and consistency, your success is not only possible, but it's inevitable. Here on the show, I'm bringing you candid conversations with extraordinary humans, practical strategies and a whole lot of inspiration to help you scale your online business, create wealth, freedom and impact that you deserve.

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:02:23]:
This is where bold dreams meet proven action. Where we ditch the limits and go all in on business building. And we get to live lives full of fun and freedom that light us up. If you're ready to play bigger, earn more and step into your power as a fearless empire builder, you're in the right place. Let's make it happen.

Tina Tower [00:02:45]:
So south by Southwest, one of my favorite events that I get to do every year. I was a little trepidatious this year going because of the current in America. I was a bit nervous about what was going to be happening and how that was all going to go. It went fine. It went fine. People were quite touchy politically, so a lot of people just tried not to speak about it or the people that did were very, very passionate about what they were speaking about. But I won't go into the politics in the week of what I will go into is all of the things that I think would be most helpful to you to know that I learned in south by Southwest. So I always go because I want the growth, I want the inspiration, but I also want my role.

Tina Tower [00:03:29]:
I see it as being at the cutting edge in showing people how they can implement the latest tech, the latest AI before their competitors do. And so that's something that I take quite seriously, is I want to know things quicker than I want to see or know things so that I can show my members inside her empire builder as well. So the game changing takeaways that I went through and I'm going to look at my notes quite a lot here. Usually I do a podcast episode with not that many notes, but this one, because I want to get it right, I will be looking at the notes quite a bit. So the biggest thing was AI was everywhere. I mean, granted, 2019, I think like the year before COVID hit, that was really when I saw AI starting to come into the different tracks, the different sessions that were happening. So a little bit of south by Southwest is a conference that has all different tracks running at one time. So you've got film, music, tech, but in the tech There is about 20 sessions running at every hour that you can choose from.

Tina Tower [00:04:31]:
And so you go to your app and you get major FOMO in trying to decide which one you're going to go to and which one you most want to know about. The way that I chose my tracks this year was a lot around the tech that I wanted to learn, a lot around AI and a lot around podcasting. So that was where a lot of it came and messaging and storytelling. I went to a lot of those branding sort of sessions as well. But some of the best ones that I've ever been to were the ones that were totally left of field like I saw once. One of my favorite sessions in all Sapphire's history was Ron Brown, who had just landed back to earth after being in space for the previous year. And he was talking about his re entry and just things like that that really make you think differently. So AI was everywhere.

Tina Tower [00:05:17]:
But I will talk about this a little bit more later. I don't think people want it as much as the tech world thinks people want it. And I will explain what I mean by that a little bit later. There was Kasli Kalam was one of my favorite speakers. She was talking about the art and science, science of connection. Some things that she shared, though, were quite shocking and quite polarizing and good for us to know. So she was talking about all of the future of health being social, that people are going to have mindset coaches in the same way as they have personal trainers, that it's going to become so prevalent because our mental health has now gone from taboo to priority. And the more we're moving in this tech world, the more important that that mental health is going to become, because we're kind of embracing all of these technologies that are really bad for our mental health.

Tina Tower [00:06:10]:
And so that was quite interesting to look at in going. I mean, I love tech, I love the convenience tools, but how can we use them in a way that's sustainable, in a way that's really healthy in there as well? She also talked about how we're in such a loneliness epidemic with 20%, 20% of adults saying that they don't have anyone that they can turn to in a crisis and anyone that they can count on. Which I wonder whether that is true or whether people feel that way. That was what I thought, was that surely one in five people cannot be feeling like they have no one to turn to. If that is you. Like we have thousands of people listening to this podcast. If that is you find somebody, because I bet you there's someone in your life that would want to be there and want to be counted on. One in four surveyed, and this was a survey of tens of thousands of people said that they have severe bouts of loneliness.

Tina Tower [00:07:04]:
And she talked a lot about this loneliness epidemic that we're coming through. And it's just been brought on more by social media, which was designed essentially to have us connected. So that's interesting that people. She was saying people are turning to AI for companionship and love and that one of the big things that we need to be aware of as we're developing a lot of AI and technology is that tech needs that complement are not substitute for the human connection. And she had this five, three, one game that I thought was a really, really great thing to keep top of mind. So with her 531 game that she says if you do these things you will avoid loneliness. So that is one in four people said they have severe bouts of loneliness. So I like the idea of this.

Tina Tower [00:07:50]:
So the 531 game is five connect with five different people each week, like valuable connections. So having a meal with somebody, doing an old fashioned phone call like those quality connections, go for a walk with a friend, all of that maintain at least three close relationships. So think of your three best friends or family members that you can connect with and maintaining those three and putting all of your effort into three. And then one is engage a one hour of quality interaction daily. So she said that can be things like if you've got family having a family meal and how many people are not actually having family meals together anymore. How many people aren't sitting down and just having a conversation with their partners. How many people if you're single then seeking out those friendships and being able to connect with people daily in there as well. I mean it was interesting for me because I'm an introvert and so I was like oh my gosh, I'd love to only have 531.

Tina Tower [00:08:47]:
Like I have so many more and I'm often going how can I get less people, not more people, but you know, one in four people are experiencing that loneliness. So I thought that was really, really handy and redesigning our lives that there's time for family meals and time for fun activities with friends in there as well. I also found it really interesting how she was talking about introverts versus extroverts and saying that introverts need it as much as extroverts because there's a lot of lonely introverts because they don't seek out that social interaction. But what we as introverts need is a lot less interaction to feel fulfilled and to have it feel meaningful. Whereas extroverts for that 5:3:1 game, for example, if you are off the scale on the extraversion end, 531 might not be adequate for you, you might need to double that. So it's really looking at what do you need to feel fulfilled and socially interactive with them. The other thing I really found interesting for us as course creators is studies show that most people think people don't like them but that other people liked them more than they thought they did. And I found that really interesting because I know we can all feel like it's harder for us.

Tina Tower [00:10:00]:
Like maybe people don't like us all as that much. But if you ask other People, they like you just fine. We're often just being really hard on ourselves, and that was shown in these studies of tens of thousands of people. Anyway, I thought that was really good. Next one is Niall Firth, who shared the 10 breakthrough technologies of 2025. And I'm not going to share all 10 with you, but the ones that really grabbed my attention was genital. I can never say. There's a couple words I can never say.

Tina Tower [00:10:29]:
One is this word and regenerative. Did I get it? I think I got it. Generative. Generative, yeah, I got it. Genitariv AI search. The other one I could never say properly is remuneration. And I think I nearly got it there. Anyway, what is the problem with generative? There you go.

Tina Tower [00:10:50]:
I got it. Generative AI search. Oh, my goodness. Is it's harder to tell what is right and wrong and what is fact and fiction. And so they're talking about big themes throughout the AI world. They're saying, well, news will go out of business, journalists will go out of business. But the trend that they're actually seeing is that people are being more willing to pay for actual investigative trusted journalists and news outlets because we just don't know what to believe. And so these sort of AI search tools can give us all sorts of false information as time goes on.

Tina Tower [00:11:23]:
So it's going to be really, really important to know what we're searching for and being able to trust where that's coming from as well. The other is small language models. So LLMs is what we all know ChatGPT runs on. So a large language model. It is an environmental nightmare, which I heard about in South By a lot, and I had heard it kind of mentioned previously, but hadn't understood the full impact environmentally of what we're using ChatGPT for. And so what they see a big trend in rising is, is the small language model. So instead of using the power of something like ChatGPT, this is going to date this podcast episode massively. But four at the moment is what is out.

Tina Tower [00:12:08]:
So instead of using that model, which is searching billions of data points at one time, so the amount of energy that that is using to all of those data points is absolutely huge. And so what it's saying is we're instead of using the power and, you know, going at a simple task with the size of a Thor's hammer, that we could actually just use a small language model which could be something like a custom GPT using something like Sintra AI using ChatGPT mini, so that you are using Smaller language models rather than having the full force and saving a million massive amount just to search on ChatGPT mini instead of the four. It only uses 2% of the energy in that. So use that as much as you can. Is my public setup announcement on that one. The other things were robo taxis. I got to travel in a Waymo Taxi while I was there. Like the driverless vehicle which was really super cool.

Tina Tower [00:13:02]:
Fast learning robots which they think will be commercially available from 2030. I saw a lot of robot demonstrations. Some really cool bio picked a guy who was born without his hand and he had something like a prosthetic. It's not. You can't even call it prosthetic. I can't remember what they called it. It was like a bio something. But his thoughts is what moved all of the hand.

Tina Tower [00:13:26]:
It was the most incredible thing that I have seen. So there's a lot of fast learning robots all coming into play. AI agents and AI avatars. So at the moment, currently Synthesia came back as the best from multiple speakers in terms of AI avatars. If you're wanting to build a clone of yourself or using something like Delphi AI. It was also rated really, really highly. The thing that freaked me out the most was brain computer interfaces. So something like neuralink, which puts chips in people's brains.

Tina Tower [00:13:57]:
And this is the point where I was like, they're super excited about it. Like the tech nerds are like this is game changing. This is amazing. What I think is most people don't want chips in their brains. And so thinking about that, I was going there's going to end up being a big massive divide between people that are early adopters of the technology and people that kind of go analog and go the opposite direction and want to like repel from the tech because it's coming like ready or not, it is coming in. But I do think that there's going to be large subsets. Like I exist in a bubble quite a little bit. I only like all my best friends are business owners.

Tina Tower [00:14:35]:
I talk to a lot of business owners. I work with business owners. Like I am in a bubble. But if I look at the average person walking down the street and I think does that person want a neuralink chip placed in their brain? Probably not. So I think that that's going to be a lot slower than what the tech people really do anticipate. It is another talk that I really loved was from the Signal President Meredith Whitaker which signal was. So I had heard a little bit about Signal before, but I hadn't used it as a test. So it is basically end to end encryption, encrypted chat.

Tina Tower [00:15:10]:
And about a couple weeks after south by ended, there was a massive scandal with Signal because it's what all of the war plans were leaked by the Trump administration. Were having a chat on Signal and they accidentally added the journalists from the Atlantic to their group chat, which, oh, my goodness me. Anyway, but that was on Signal. So I was like, oh my gosh, I know all about Signal. But the biggest thing that she was talking about was cybersecurity and how we are not paying enough attention to the security that we need to have. So one of the things that I did while the talk was still on was add end to encryption on my ICLOUD account, because that is not just by default encrypted. And so it means that it's very easy to hack. If you think of your ICLOUD account or if I think of my ICLOUD account, I've got all of my pictures from my entire life, contacts, email, calendar, everything is ifa, all my notes, everything is there.

Tina Tower [00:16:05]:
So that is now encrypted. But she was talking about really the problem with confidentiality and cybersecurity when it comes to the rollout of AI agents. So at the moment, a lot of the AI that we use are just these elements. They're just these large language models that we're getting data after we feed in a pump. But what is coming out is a lot of these AI agents that can essentially connect this information together and then implement something. And so an example of that would be, say, instead of having a travel agent, you've got an AI agent that can book your trip. But to be able to adequately do that and be your assistant in that way, the AI agent is going to have access to your frequent flyer number. It's going to have access, say you want to meet people there, it's going to get access to your contacts, it's going to get access to, to your emails, it's going to get access to your calendar, to your credit card details.

Tina Tower [00:16:59]:
So many different siloed things that it will have connections to altogether. And so the more AI agents you have connecting all of the different parts, there is no way to add encryption to all of that. So from a data confidentiality and security point of view, it's going to be massively problematic. And nobody has solved that yet. And so when I was thinking about that, I was going, gosh, like, I don't know if I want to have access to all of that or If I want to have outside systems have access to all of that. I mean, the way AI is doing a lot of it at the moment, I quite appreciate when I go on Instagram and I've been having a conversation with my husband and talking about something that I wanted to buy or what we wanted to do, and then all of a sudden there it is in an ad in my feed. I actually don't mind that level of talking. However, if we give away every piece of information that we have, it could be severely problematic.

Tina Tower [00:17:52]:
Okay, next one was Rohit Bhagava. He is at every south by Southwest and he is so entertaining. He talks about like different tech, emerging tech trends, but he does it in the most entertaining way. But there is a couple of things that he said with the rise of AI and the rise of tech, because it is moving faster than it ever has in history before, obviously. And so he was talking a lot about is actually people who understand people that win. Where we are going to, you know, AI doesn't have emotion, it doesn't have nuance. It can talk about, you know, if you feed a pumpkin and you say, I want to have more emotive coffee or I want to inject this sort of emotion, it can do it from a point of view of what it's been taught so far, but it doesn't have that emotional intelligence. It doesn't have the nuance.

Tina Tower [00:18:36]:
So we need to understand people as we're going forward. We need to focus on community and connection. So always ask yourself, like, what's always going to matter? What can AI not replace? And being uniquely human is what that is. It's you. It's being uniquely you along the way. The other one that I wrote down was challenge yourself for different and new opportunities to get outside our echo chamber. So this is one of the main reasons I go to south by every year. Like, I always hear things that are so outside of my echo chamber that really make me think of, do I believe that? Do I agree with that? Do I not believe that? What do I even think about that? And so being able to take opportunities to get outside of our own echo chamber so that we can have more critical thought, more independent thought, I think is going to be so incredibly important.

Tina Tower [00:19:26]:
Because, I mean, I was even talking to my kids about this last night saying ChatGPT will and a lot of the AI programs that I've worked in will repeat back to you what you say. It will support your ethos, it will support your beliefs. If you say, I'm going to do this, and I think this is going to be a great idea. You know what it'll say? Amazing. You're so on it. This is so good. Let's roll with it. It'll be so supportive for you unless you ask it to do otherwise.

Tina Tower [00:19:54]:
And so it is going to be even more important as we fill our lives more with AI, that we have that ability to critically think, that we have that ability to go, hang on, is this right? Is this really what I want? Is this really what I believe? Do I need to go down another direction and not just blindly follow our machines, which I see people doing already? So challenging ourselves is going to be a big one. Seek out moments of wonder and awe. Don't forget to get outside into nature, be curious about people and don't do what you've always done. So because the world is changing so quickly and it's going to get more increasingly difficult to know what's real and what isn't, always questioning our assumptions, always going, well, the way I thought up until now, should I change my mind on that? Do I still believe that? Because changing our mind is never a sign of weakness, it's a sign of growth. Next is Amy Webb. Amy Webb again is a very frequent south by Southwest presenter. She's actually. There's a South by offshoot in Sydney happening in October and she's coming to speak there as well.

Tina Tower [00:20:57]:
So if you haven't been to a South by before, good opportunity to be able to do it in either Australia or America. One of the most horrifying things that I've written down at the top is in a lot of the autopsies and studies that they've been doing on people is they have found that a lot of people can have the equivalent now of a plastic teaspoon's worth of plastic inside our brains. Like actual, really that much plastic inside our bodies. And so they're starting to put in notices of how to actually ingest less plastic, how to have less plastic in our everyday lives. And it's just these things that, you know, 50 years ago weren't an issue that are going to be such big issues as we go ahead. You know, she said AI, biotechnology, advanced sensor innovation, which is the thing that breaks me out the most, it's just created this growth super cycle. And what a lot of people are feeling is instead of the fomo, that fear of missing out, it's moving towards this FOMO, which is fear of missing anything. And so you're seeing people really addicted to technology, really addicted to their phones, because they don't want to miss anything.

Tina Tower [00:22:02]:
And I know that if I put a bit of personal into that, I go in cycles with my phone message. I can go sometimes and not indulge in looking at social media for a really long time. I'll go on, I'll respond to my messages, I'll post my stories, but I don't actually scroll and I can do that for weeks and weeks. But then if I kind of fall down the vortex or I'm having a bit of a chill out and I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to scroll for a bit and then I get back in the cycle of looking at it again because I don't want to miss anything, especially if someone's doing something really fun and I want to follow their trip of different things. And so this foma has really come into play as well. So just being noticeable about when we're feeling that as well. She says, don't fear the future, plan for it. So for a lot of people there's a general sentiment in the world at the moment with everything that's happening with climate, with technology, with politics, it can feel very, very heavy and it can feel very, very scary as well.

Tina Tower [00:22:58]:
And so a lot of these things are unstoppable, they're going to happen. But ready on it, here it comes. And so make a plan for it. So, alright, if we know that this is happening with the climate, what can we do? And a lot of people are feeling this despondency and this hopelessness because of that, but really going back to we matter and the little things become the big things and how can we be the change we want to see in the world? And I know that sounds super cliche, but even doing ChatGPT mini searches instead of the full ChatGPT search is going to save a lot of climate. And if everyone does it, it makes a really big difference and so start where we're at. She also says what's cutting edge today may be old news, like later today where they used to be able. I follow TechCrunch as the newsletter. I love the TechCrunch newsletter and often when things would come out about AI, I would like bookmark it to read later.

Tina Tower [00:23:48]:
And then I'd come in once a month and I would go through everything. What I am finding now is like it's gone if you're not on it. Like there's a new thing that's replaced it in like 0.5 seconds. And so the cycle is going a lot, a lot quicker. The biggest thing, like I've said a couple of times, is these advanced technology that is going into our bodies that really freaks me out. So Google DeepMind, which is the department of Google, is currently working on AI and biology. And they have said, and she has said, and a lot of people were talking about it will impact every single physical product that we have in the future. And the different things that they'll be able to.

Tina Tower [00:24:26]:
The hybrid embed in physical products that we will be able to also use AI elements of. And so showed all these demonstrations of people either injecting the chips into our bodies, and there's already people using them for getting on and off the subway and into their buildings, and they've got them underneath their skin. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Anyway. But also they can be used for really good. So. So they've been doing studies on cancers, on autoimmune diseases, and a lot of medical problems where people can swallow tiny neurons that are going to wrap around cells, and then it can actually read them, understand them, interpret them, and treat them from within your body. So there's like she was saying, it could even replace all vitamins you could swallow these tiny little neurons that could figure out what your body is lacking and then give you what it is lacking.

Tina Tower [00:25:23]:
Which that freaks the shit out of me. So we'll see how that does. But that's a big thing that's coming in there as well. So my thoughts from that was, when does convenience no longer become the goal, but autonomy and the ability to just be. That was a really big thing that I was thinking about when all of this technology was coming out and all of these AI things. I know in my life, I actually used less technology than I did a couple years ago. So I used to wear an Apple watch wherever I went. Now I have nothing on me.

Tina Tower [00:25:52]:
I used to have an OURA ring, and now I've got rid of that as well. I do sleep on an 8 sweep, which has a lot of biometric data and AI in it. I use icloud. I drive a Tesla. Don't judge me. I got it before I knew Elon was crazy. We have some smart house things in our house. Like our door lock is all done with our fingerprints and clothes and different.

Tina Tower [00:26:14]:
Like, there is a lot of things that I've started to look around at in going, you know, what's this? The piece? Like, how far do I want to go with technology and how far is too far so that we don't disconnect from what makes us human? So that we are making sure that we're leaving enough time and space in our brain to just be, to just feel, to just do the things that make us human and to laugh and to smile. So I want more connection and I actually want to be offline more. That was a big thing that I took away from. This was going all right, if I want to take all of this and actually implement, I want to take advantage of AI, I want to be able to use it to do the things that I want to do in my business. Faster, easier, less friction. But then what I want to do is use that space to then connect with people, have more human rich experiences, have more wonderment, have more aura in my life, have more connections. Because it breaks my heart that one in four people identify as severe bouts of loneliness. So we shouldn't be like that in our world.

Tina Tower [00:27:14]:
We have so many people on the planet that would love to go like, love to meet you, love to chat with you, love to do all of those things. And so I think we're going to find this really delicate balance of technology and humanness together. So connecting is a big one there. And I love being able to get all of the latest AI tools. I mean there is built about 100 different AI tools that I wrote down through the whole thing and tested them all out so that every month in Transplayer Builder I run an AI implementation session so I can just roll them out as we go, which is so good when you're traveling. So they were my key takeaways. The other thing that I want to say while I'm talking about south by is a lot of people say to me every year when I go, how do you get away like that? How do you get the whole week? I will say it takes a lot of preparation. I know I went from south by straight into launch.

Tina Tower [00:28:00]:
So the month before that, probably the two months before that were a lot of hard work. It was longer days than what I'm used to so that I could batch everything for that few weeks to be away. Because south by itself was only five days. But then I went into launch and you know, everything, everything kind of piles up in that time. So there's always with travel, a lot of logistics with especially being a mum as well. And so being prepared for that is incredible. And the people you meet are incredible. Like I will once more standing in a line and was talking to the person next to me and he ended up being an editor of the Washington Post and just standing in the line with everybody else with his backpack on, like just everyone's there to learn and grow.

Tina Tower [00:28:38]:
And that is what I love so much about it. But I do think that you can still bring the inspiration of south by into your life without hopping on a plane. Like taking that time every week to just go through, subscribe to a new set of like tech trains, read that, really figure out what you want to implement. I know that sometimes the risk we take is that it can be too many things. I know when I read about one came out yesterday that I really liked the look of and I'm like, do I really have it in me to go and try out another? Do I really need it? It's just too much. So really be discerning of what you give your time to so that you can make sure that things you are putting time and money into are going to bring you that return. And the return we're looking for is either to increase the profit of your business, to enhance the customer experience, or to give you more time and freedom. If it's not one of those things, leave it.

Tina Tower [00:29:34]:
Feel free to come and join me at south by Southwest in Texas anytime.