The Technical Difficulties Podcast
A podcast all about the latest trends, devices and topics related to smart homes and home automation.
The Technical Difficulties Podcast
Simon Say Listen To This Episode
Today's Guest: @simonsayshomeassistant
In this engaging conversation, Simon discusses his passion for home automation, the challenges and joys of content creation, and the evolution of voice control technology. He shares insights on balancing his full-time job with his YouTube channel, the importance of community engagement, and his experiences in China exploring smart home products. The discussion also touches on the most overrated and underrated smart devices, as well as the technical challenges faced in home automation.
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me one McDonald's item from New Zealand Oh, they've got a Kiwi burger. There we go. Yeah. Friday can be true. They'd be making a Kiwi burger. Beat root, I don't even know what that is, but I don't want it. Beetroot, you don't know beetroot? it's awesome, eh? trust me. know what a beat is and I don't like beats and I assume a beat root is worse than a beat. That's. So anything else? This is my show! No! We'll be the ones to ask the questions around here, okay? Stay in line. Shut your mouth when you're talking to me. gonna log dead. Welcome to season three, episode 10 of the Technical Difficulties Smart Home Podcast. Today we're talking to Simon Kader of the Simon Says Home Assistant YouTube channel. Now I'll be honest, I was a little bit concerned about having Home Assistant focused guests on two weeks in a row on this show, but I'm really glad we did because we had a lot of fun during this chat. We talk about his visit to China. We learn about New Zealand and South African accents. We discussed the Coriolis effect on bidet toilets and of course, kiwiburgers, obviously. It's kind like packing a semester abroad into one hour long course, this kind of immense value is only made possible thanks to our sponsor, Zeus. Zeus makes smart home Z-Wave products you can depend on. And right now you can save big on your favorite Zeus devices during the lucky spring sale at thesmartesthouse.com. From now until March 25th, you'll find huge savings on Zeus Z-Wave switches, motion sensors, relays, dimmers, leak sensors, and so much more, including $50 off the Titan water valve actuator, which is one of my personal favorite smart home devices. Shipping is free in the United States on orders over $99. And of course, all Zeus devices come with a ridiculous five-year warranty when registered within 30 days. Visit thesmartesthouse.com to see all of the great deals on Zeus products during the lucky spring sale. Again, that is the smartesthouse.com. And now on with the show. all right, here we are with the podcast with me as always is Brandon. Brandon, how is Vince doing today? You know, Vince is doing great. He came over and helped me set up the Arbo. So I really appreciate him for that. Vince, what a guy, and Vince how is Brandon doing today? I feel like telling him that I helped him set up is probably an understatement. I think I set it up and he watched me set it up. Yeah, there'll be a video and you'll see the amount of effort that was put in. don't, honestly couldn't have done it without him. I just was taking the two rods and just sticking them together. Like, yeah, this is how that goes. Right. Brandon started at 4 p.m. unboxing and I got there about five and he was just finished unboxing and started to break down boxes. It literally took him an hour to take everything out of the boxes. eight giant boxes. They were really heavy and a lot of shit to break down. Plus it was recycling the next day, so I had to make sure to get everything in there otherwise I would have had to deal with those giant boxes. But I really appreciate the help. And by help I mean I appreciate that you did everything. wife driving up and you could just see the look on her face with everything scattered everywhere in the garage. She's like, am I going to be able to park here? this is Brandon's MO though. Like if he has a project that needs to get done, he invites a friend over and has them do it for him. It's kind of brilliant. exactly. Under the guise of creating content, I say, To be fair, Brandon did come over to my house as I was running Cat6 cable to also assist. have his children do all the work while I supervised. I'm good at the supervision, right? Like I've got ideas, I'll encourage you to make holes in your wall. like, I don't know if this goes to the outside. I don't know if I should drill here. He's like, just go, just do it. I'm like, of course you say that. It's not your house. And so when I want to get into Home Assistant, I'm going to have Simon come all the way over from New Zealand and he's going to set it up for me because I don't know shit about Home Assistant. Let's be real. I don't even know why you guys have me on this one. I know nothing about Home Assistant. well, you know how much I love Home Assistant, but yes, our guest today is Simon from the Simon Says Home Assistant YouTube channel. Simon, say hello to all of our friends out there, the thousands, the millions of people that are excited to see you on our podcast. I like it awesome. It's really great to be on your show today guys. It's just fantastic I'm just fizzing about home automation. I think 2025 we're gonna see some super awesome stuff one of the things I've been playing with recently is local voice control and Yeah, it's not anything near miss a and the other crowd, but I think it's gonna come a long way So yep, great to be on the show and yeah, look forward to an awesome time Well, we're happy to have you on and right before the show, he told us that he actually for his, for his real job, he runs a podcast for his real job. And that was, that made me a little bit nervous. I liked the idea that maybe we were going to have a little more control over this. Maybe someone's going to look a little bit less professional than me, but apparently Simon is here. He's going to make me look like a fool, like everyone else does. So yeah, thanks for, I know, I know. Pete. So we actually were introduced to Simon through a past guest on the show, Michael Lean. And I saw you guys did like a live stream where you were talking about the local voice control stuff. And it was way over my head, but I think it's neat. How the heck do you do that? How do you get local processing to do all these large language models? Well, the guys at Home Assistant have spent a long time on this. I think there was year of the voice and then there was the next year of the voice. So it's sort of been a long process. So they started off developing a voice recognition tool, a speech tool, a wake word tool. And it was all coming together, but the hardware was really flaky because they were relying on various other providers to do the hardware. And then just recently, I think it was December 2024. They launched this voice edition preview, which is their own little hardware device. And I think it's amazing. I mean, it's it's it's really not anywhere near what you're going to get from the traditional ones, but it's. actually able to process a local voice recognition. You can also go up to the cloud so Home Assistant has its own cloud called Nabu Casa and if you've got a paid subscription with them you can actually go up to the cloud which will offer you quicker processing. So prior to this local voice consistent control, have you been a big voice assistant proponent? Do you use it a lot in your home? I was using voice originally when I first started I connected up miss a and I was playing around with that quite a bit and then something changed on the so in order to connect that the miss a to home assistant you have to go and create a developer password and Something went wrong with that developer thing and I just gave up on it So I was playing with voice and then I didn't for a while and then once the local stuff came in started playing with it again, so Yeah, I'm sort of on two, two different sort of views of voice control. I believe that ideally home automation should do things automatically without having to tell it what to do. But then again, I really like the integration of the AI in the background. So when you start bringing in, you know, Google's Gemini or whatever, and you can actually start having really smart conversations and. finding out what's going on in your home automation system. That's when it gets really fascinating. So yeah, I think there's some really interesting stuff to come. And for me, it's much more interesting actually doing it within the infrastructure of Home Assistant locally rather than sending your data out and relying on this third party that who knows what they're doing with it. I watched Michael Eanes' video on, he went and compared all of the voice assistants and he kind of proved that they got a long way to go to kind of catch up to the other systems with Amazon and with Google. So we'll kind of see where that leads us and where that takes us. Kind of give us a little more background about yourself. So what inspired you to start your Simon Says YouTube channel? So I'm going to go right back to when back in the 80s when I was a kid. I remember getting, I don't know if you guys have ever seen that clap system for turning lights on and off. Yep, the clapper. Yeah, that's the one. you have that? By the way, was that commercial? Was that in New Zealand? The same commercial with the song? yeah, beautiful, okay. The one I just sang, they didn't have the clap on, clap off, clap on, clap off, the Clapper. You may have to put in the commercial into the into the bureau. Yeah, I know what talking about. Like an infomercial, you know. it was amazing. But yeah, go on with the clapper. So the clapper, that's where I got started. Clap off, clap off, was it Australia? I got it, or no, New Zealand, I'm interrupted, go ahead. got it. That was in South Africa, actually. I grew up in South Africa. I moved to New Zealand 20 years ago. yeah, the clapper was great. Elon Musk, that's the one. Yeah. you go to school with him? You guys buddies? So he send you a billion dollars every once in a while to go, hey, no, okay. clapper was my start and started playing around with electronics and Then I sort of gave it a miss and I just moved in another total direction and then about five years ago I moved into a new home and I started sticking in some of those smart LED RGB light bulbs and I got miss a Connected the two up started playing around with it. I thought it was awesome And then I just started watching heaps and heaps of YouTube videos. And I found this thing called home assistant and I found out that my IT manager at work was using it as well. So that just really excited me. Pulled out my old Raspberry Pi, stuck it on the SD card. And yep, that was where it all started. About a year later, I thought, why the heck don't I start a YouTube channel? I'm watching all of these videos. I make videos that work. Why not just do them for myself and that's where the channel kicked off. I think your pathway is very similar to a of the other creators that we've talked to. It starts with getting a new home and then wanting to do all these things. And then all of sudden you're going deep down the rabbit hole on YouTube and it's like, well, why don't I do this for myself? Or you can't find the information you're looking for, so then you create it for others. And so that's really cool. Yeah, it's been, it's been heaps of fun and my biggest fun about it all is engaging with other people. Yeah, these live streams that I'm doing now with other creators and some of the manufacturers is just amazing. It's just, yeah, that for me is what it's all about is actually engaging. I love doing live streams, getting my, you know, my audience chatting to me, asking me questions. And yeah, that's for me, it's that connection with people across the world. Last year I actually went over to China and visited one of my manufacturers over there, Reolink, and yeah, it's just, it's a really fun, fun game. and sounds like a pretty incredible opportunity. How are you finding the guests that you're bringing on for the live stream? Um, so just I just basically it's people that I've watched on YouTube, you know, so when I first started watching, I was watching guys like Dr. Z's. mean, that guy's the absolute legend live streamer. I don't know if you've ever seen him. He's a, um, anithetist. That's what it calls himself, Dr. Z, but he does absolutely crazy stuff with home automation, home assistant and W LED, all the colored LED outdoor lighting stuff. So yeah, I just found these guys and then I just literally messaged them. I find these days you can message anyone in the world and they're actually quite keen to respond and get on board. It's crazy. for those that are watching or listening, we're in the United States, he's in New Zealand. It's six o'clock in the morning right now where Simon is and that's crazy to me that you're, you're look, you are more wide awake and chipper than I am and it's almost noon where I am. So you're doing these live streams, like you said, all around the world. You're doing them in Europe. You're doing them here. Do you, is this like from, from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. That's my streaming time. And that's just like a normal part of your life. Cause that sounds. Horrible, no offense, but. My normal streaming time is 10 funny enough. 10 AM is works really well. I seem to get the U S audience, but I get quite a big audience from Europe as well. So I get Sweden, I get South Africa. get, yeah, everyone seems to be able to sort of tee up at my time. 10 AM in the morning seems to, seems to work for everyone. By way, I do wanna ask you, so you're New Zealand. You said you started in South Africa, then you moved to New Zealand. When I just saw you, I didn't know just from watching your videos, I assumed you were from Australia because your accent. How do you? How do you get a New Zealand slash Australian accent by growing up in South Africa and moving like, well, I don't know. I'm not cultured enough to know what a South African accent sounds like, but did you just change it? You're like, screw it. I'm here. Let's go for it. Well, I know, but I feel like I wouldn't have a French accent if I moved to France. Like, I don't know. Maybe I would. I don't know. After 20 years? I'm pretty sure you would. Would you? I don't know. There's people up, like I know Australians that live here and they still sound Australian and they've been here for most of their life. So I could be wrong. Do you feel like if you listen to yourself, Simon, from 20 years ago, would you sound remarkably different? Or are you? Okay. but if I speak to people here in New Zealand, they pick up on the South African immediately. So I've got enough of a South African accent to make it very clear to local Kiwis that I'm a South African. But yeah, I mean, obviously you guys in us, you know, it's you're on obviously different accent. And yeah, accents are crazy. mean, I lived in South Africa, then I lived in Dubai. I've lived in UK a bit and now NZ. So real mixed bag, you know. Wow, yeah, you in Dubai and everything. Okay, so I don't know if you're a sports fan at all, but I know that the cricket and the rugby, very big in South Africa and in New Zealand. So do you like still pull for South Africa or do you pull or do not care? Do you pull for New Zealand or do you just not into that sort of thing? I'm not hugely into sport, yeah, if it's a big rugby game, I would still go with South Africa. That's my roots, someday we're gonna get a guest that is into sports and then I'm gonna totally, Brandon is just gonna shut down while I, yeah, nerd out. But no, that's cool, that's cool, Can you give us your best South African accent Is it similar? Because it was a British colony? I've got to try and it's sort of instead of yes, you're saying, yeah, which is a, the Afrikaans word for yes. I can't even do an accent. Now you put me on the spot. I just wanted to know. I was trying to give Pete some more culture so that he knows with an accent from South Africa. But I was also intrigued as well. We'll just give you like a statement to say, know, like Mary Poppins is the best woman I've ever met. And then, alright, so I'll go. Mary Poppins is the best person I've ever met. I'm used to said accents. It's sounding the same to me. I don't know, guys. What do you think are the most overrated or underrated smart home devices today currently? And I know that you probably have some different devices than we probably do, just different companies and things like that, I would say that I'm very much on the same devices as you guys. mean, basically most of my gear comes out of China. Most of the devices that I'm playing with. What is the most overrated? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, at the moment, there's sort of, there's a whole lot of different devices that I use. Cause obviously every, every week I'm testing two or three new devices. So I just have this absolute overflow of devices. So if we look at categories, mean, lighting is probably the most standard and the most everyday you use lighting. For me, sensors are really cool. You know, sensing presence, sensing temperature, humidity. So that's really great. So overrated. mean, cameras are cool in a way, but I don't use the cameras that much, maybe because I don't really have major security problems where I live. It's hard to say. They're all heaps of fun, to tell you the truth. Anything that I can connect to something else via Home Assistant, I enjoy. So yeah, I don't think there really is an overrated product. I think everything has got its place. I feel like all the three of us would say on the podcast that probably like the smart faucet is probably the most overrated product in the market. You guys agree? Okay. I haven't tried one of that. highly rated. I don't think a lot of people even know about the smart faucet. You can ask Miss A to turn your water on for you or to, you know, like I want a gallon of water at 97 degrees Fahrenheit, by the way. It's like a party trick at best. I would say the most underrated would be a bidet toilet. Simon, do you have a bidet toilet? No, but I did try one in China. When I went to China, they have these awesome toilets. You walk up to the lid opens, you sit down, gives you nice warm water to wash with. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I will be upgrading my toilet one of these days and probably not. I think I'll stick with it. way does the toilet swirl down in New Zealand? here at Hemisphere, so isn't that anti-clockwise in southern? Anti-clockwise? Is that how you call it? Anti-clockwise? We're counter-clockwise people. That's how we know it is counter. Okay. Interesting. One of these days we're going to have a bidet sponsor on the channel and it's going to be awesome. Every guest will get a bidet and we'll talk about how great it is. Just on a journey to educate the entire US population that wiping your butt with tape paper and walking away like you are 100 % clean is not the way to Tell us more about this trip to China. Like how did this come about? You went and visited Reolink. Did they reach out to you and invite you or how did this go down? I don't think I'm quite at that level yet, but I just thought I've been dealing with all these companies in China and I thought well, why not go there? was I was going to Bangkok for a bit of a holiday in Bangkok and the airline was stopping over in China on the way. I thought well, why not Shenzhen is sort of the capital of the tech world in China. So I thought let me just pop in there and go and have a look and yeah, it was super interesting, but it was certainly pretty challenging being an English person in a Mandarin speaking country with virtually no English spoken people at all. You literally, you might come across one or two, but in general, there's no English. So that was the biggest challenge for me. Plus everything is different. So even Google maps, you would assume that Google maps works around the world. Truly it does not. I got in the taxi, I had my Google map on, you know, the story, you always wonder if the taxi drivers going to drive you, you know, a hundred Ks around to get a 10 K zone. Had my Google maps. I was like, you're going the wrong way, going the wrong way. And it turns out Google maps doesn't even work in China. yeah, so was crazy. So I'd seen this thing called the Sega market, which is apparently this big market where all of these product manufacturers have their little stalls and you can go and see what's the, uh, meet everyone there. So I went along, um, stayed in a little hotel, found my, eventually found where I was going, managed to get to SegMarket, walked around there. In hindsight, I would have set up a lot more meetings, one-on-one meetings. I assumed just going to the Seg, I was going to find all these home automation companies there, but I didn't really just bump into any of them. So I had set up this meeting with Reolink prior to it. They were just amazing. You know, they spent three hours with me. absolutely showed me exactly what was going on. It was just a fantastic people to deal with. They speak English, which is a big help. But yeah, if anyone's going to China, I would definitely pre-plan your visit, book in the appointments with people that you can actually meet with because otherwise, yeah, you can, you can waste a lot of time. just can't imagine going there without having like a guide or a translator. It'd be so overwhelming. At least with other countries, they're like semi-closed English or like a lot of the population speaks English as well. But to go somewhere where like they just don't would be very intimidating. So kudos to you for going through that experience. That sounds awesome. It's cool dealing with these people that are actually making these amazing products. I mean, I come up with all sorts of... I really like looking for different stuff. You know what I mean? This is a really cool board that you can basically control everything. It's got ESP home that you can load into there and you've got basically eight inputs that you can monitor, wired inputs. You've got eight outputs you can control. You can connect up about six temperature humidity sensors. You can connect. It's got RF control. It's got just absolutely everything. These sort of things are what I enjoy, finding different stuff that other people are not talking about. And this is a small tech manufacturer in China that does these sort of boards. This is what I enjoy, looking for things that not everyone else is talking about. So like, would you like, me a specific use case for something like I would see that and my brain would melt. I don't know what to do with something with a board. I need it to be in a package that says, this is what you do with it. Like what do you do with a raw board? So that specific board, think a really cool use for it and I did a video on it recently is if you've got an old alarm system in your house. So you've got all these PIRs and door and window sensors all wired up to a panel, but you've got this old outdated band panel that all it does is connect to the alarm company. So I would rip all of that out and connect all the wires up to this device, download the Alarm Add-on in Home Assistant, and then you've got your own custom-built wired alarm system. So how much did that board cost? Just curious. So I found a cheap, this is the latest version they've just sent me, but I first of all found a cheap version that was literally around $30, which is pretty crazy money, US dollars. Yeah, okay. So there's a, company called connected that has a pro full product that does what you're, what you're talking about. But I think that's a $99 product or something. So look at the savings like what is your process for testing those products and then adding those or putting them on your channel? So once they arrive, unbox them, have a good look at the device, plug it in. I'm someone I don't read the instructions. That's just me. I just plug it in and see what happens. Sorry, we're something fake. language here, I like it. I literally chuck that thing and I just start playing with it. Sometimes I blow them up, but that's what I do. Literally plug it in, see what happens, try and connect it to Home Assistant. That's my big thing is will it connect to Home Assistant? That's the big test that I want to see because once it's in there, I can access all the data, play around. So yeah, I just connect it up, play with it, you know, try and break it and then make a video. Okay, so how long are you testing it for? What is your documentation process like for when you're testing the products and then how do you translate to that to video? Are you creating scripts? Are you gathering B-roll as you go? Do you go back and get that? Kind of walk us through that whole process. Mine is a really ad hoc process. I've tried the scripting route and I just found it takes a lot of time and you also lose some of that sort of spontaneity on camera. So literally with my channel there's no documentation. I literally pull the device out, figure it out and then as I'm going I'm filming b-roll as I'm going and then I have all these clips, stash them together and stick the video up. So it's... It's a really, it's a simple process. I'm more of a quantity over quality to tell the truth. I don't do all these high sort of, um, you know, high budget sort of video shots and stuff like it. I'm just trying to give people a raw idea of what this product is, um, introducing to products. They don't know. Test it out, see if it'll connect to home assistant. Yep. It's, it's a really simple process to tell the truth. So you're saying you wouldn't put a bluegrass banjo video at the end of your, any of your videos? Probably not. Okay. anything. So you're very prolific. Did I say prolific? Prolific, I can't even say it like, see, I'm talking to someone from New Zealand with a South African accent and it's blowing my mind. can't say it. So that word I just said, you make a lot of videos in a short amount of time, like you said, like you do a few videos a week often times. How long does it take you? That's, I know. I know, and they're not shorts. I mean, they're like regular videos. how long does it take you to make a video? You say you're doing it without a script. Like if I did a video without a script, it would take me four hours to record because I stumble over my words and don't know what I'm talking about. So you must be pretty good at that. How long does it take you to produce a video from I'm going to do this to I'm finished? So literally the shortest video I've recorded would have taken me less than an hour but some of them would be way longer than that. know, sometimes you'll get a product and it's quite a challenging thing to actually get it working and then to try and get across what you've done and what it's actually doing. I would say anywhere between an hour and probably the longest would be probably eight hours but that would be very few would be eight hours. have you had any unexpected like viral videos that you kind of were just throwing out there and didn't really expect anything but got pretty good quality or a pretty good response from it? Totally. So literally the second video I did was the top video of mine for about a year and a half and I couldn't get it to, I couldn't manage to actually replicate it. And it was, I think it was quite different. So I used to live in a rural part of town and we didn't have town water supply. So we had these big 22,000 liter tanks and come summertime gets real dry and the water runs out and everyone's freaking out and you've got all these water trucks. So most people go along every day or every second and lift up the lid and see what they've got there. Or you can go and spend, you know, 250 New Zealand dollars and get this system. So I ordered this little sensor. Basically, it's a diaphragm based sensor that you chuck in there and it basically measures the pressure. And then I hooked it up to a Shelly Uni and connected that up to Home Assistant. And I showed basically a little gauge of how much water was in my tank. and I could then send myself alerts when it was running low and literally that video went crazy. Do you think it's because it's like a how-to and you had come up with something like unique that people were interested in It was pretty unique. There's a one guy in Australia that I actually watched a video and learned how to do it from. So he'd done that video probably a year before I did mine. So there was literally his video and then it was one other guy that done with a little bucket and literally was the three of us with this one type of video. And yeah, just went just a huge amount of interest. Literally, people just. loved that video for some reason. And it was, it was my second ever video. It was, it was, it was a real surprise to me and a real frustration to try and replicate that, that again. And I feel like with Home Assistant, the audience is a little bit more DIY focused, so you're not going to run into like with the major channels when they all feature like the newest whatever and it's all under embargo. then Thursday comes around and it's 10 videos from the biggest creators all on the same new lock or camera or something. And they're all kind of competing for that. With this, it's more of a smaller audience. And so if you can get technical and really show them how you're using it, you'll get a lot more views. Do you find that a lot of it is like search driven or is, are you getting people for the browse or just your subscriber base? How are people finding the videos? Yeah, it's quite interesting. Most of my video views are from search based in YouTube. So I think people are putting in a certain problem. They've got like, for example, you know, water tank level measurement or something like that. And they're finding my video based on that because a lot of my focus is how to. So I've done some basic setup videos as home assistant. I've also done some basic building of sensors. So taking an ESP32 wiring in DHT22 sensor and building your own sensor. I find that super fun. For me, that they've got this ESP home thing that you can just flash onto ESP32. That is super exciting and those do pretty well as well. So do you like doing the product, the tutorial videos more or do you like doing the product reviews or just love doing everything involved in everything? You seem like a guy that everything, so. I love everything pretty much. mean, I just did a video on, the latest release of home assistant. Those, those go crazy. mean, I've got 3000 views in a day and a half how do you come up with ideas for new videos? and how do you decide which ones to make? And then what's the process for creating your thumbnails? Things like that. So literally I thought when I started my channel, I thought, man, this is going to be hard to come up with ideas, but literally it's not the coming up with ideas. It's actually trying to make them fast enough because the ideas are literally flying. So I've got a number of ways that I do it. I get a lot of manufacturers that approach me. So literally just out of the blue, get emails coming in. Yep, we've got this product. Do you want to test it out? So a lot of them come from that. Obviously I follow Home Assistant pretty closely. So I do all their release videos. I do anything that comes out new so like voice or whatever. just follow and I'm always looking at YouTube see what other people are testing. So literally that's how come up with ideas. Super easy. When it comes to thumbnails, that's probably my weakest point. You asked what I don't enjoy. I am useless at graphic design. I don't even try to do it. pretty good. Oh yeah, we got the text, it's got your face, it's easy to tell what it's about. I think you're onto something there. I will appreciate your support. So literally I just, I found Canva. I just chuck stuff together on Canva and I put it up. I've had a few guys approach me about doing thumbnails. I've tried out a few of them, you know, just the cheaper ones. I haven't gotten the super high end ones, but literally the guys will do a thumbnail and I'll put it on the side by side test on YouTube. And sometimes my like, I'm a real afterthought. Apparently you're supposed to do the thumbnail first and then everything flows from there. Mine is like up, I basically edit the video, hit the button to process it and then in that time, so I've got two minutes, whatever, I'll put the thumbnail together and stick it up. I'm real quick on that. outsource, I throw it on like Fiverr, but then I'm impatient and like I'm gonna hit publish before the thumbnail's even done. Then we got Pete over here, he just agonizes over the thumbnails. It's been like an hour on a thumbnail. I agonize over everything. It's my biggest problem with YouTube. Okay, yeah, Simon. Okay, this is a personal question. How do you get over the overanalyzing? Like you said, you just go, go, go, I'll change things over and over and over again So how do you get over that? How did you just be like, I'm just gonna post it and see what happens. think it's just my natural personality is that I am a, I'm a doer in life. basically go out there and I do stuff. I do not procrastinate. just, so it's just my nature, quantity over quality. And then I've been in sales all my life. I've done sold all sorts of different stuff and it's always been, you make the numbers. You know what I mean? If you put the numbers out there, something will happen. And that's what I've done with YouTube. Literally just make the video and I'm literally I'm super excited. Lucky Brandon. I just want to that button, man. I'll hit that publish button. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually just telling Pete this yesterday. was like, I think you're better off doing 100 shots on goal than trying to, you know, ready aim fire and only take 10 shots. I'm going to go with the shotgun approach of like, let's just do it and see what works. But you're always one mistake away from everybody in the world losing all their respect for you. That's the problem. That's okay. People are like goldfish, man. They're gonna forget. how do you find all the time to do the testing, to play with the stuff, to record it, and to do like three hours a week in addition to your full-time job? And it sounds like you are doing podcasts for that as well. So like, how do you balance all this? I'm pretty much focused on work. I basically, as I say, I woke up super early. I'm often up at four in the morning and my schedule in the morning is go through all my emails for my podcast, for my home assistant channel, go through all my emails, go through all my comments on YouTube, try and respond to as many comments as possible. So I'll spend probably two hours in the morning. Then I'll go to work eight hour day at work, get home and then get back into it. So I'm pretty full on. Yep. I enjoyed. Clearly passionate about it. And earlier, before we hit record, you were talking about your day job. Tell us a little bit more about that. So I work for an amazing company called Proclima. It's a German company and we developed what's called a smart air tightness membrane. So smart vapor control and air tightness. Effectively what it does is first of all it stops that internal moisture inside your house from going into the wall and the ceiling framing and causing mold and condensation. And second of all what it does creates this airtight envelope inside of your building. That means you've got energy efficiency. So you're not just leaking that energy out. yeah, we, we, work with architects, designers, builders, engineers. We help them the design in the system. We garden train the builders on site. And I, as the podcast is on the side, as we are interview, you know, building scientists and engineers and architects around the world and engage with them and share that with my audience. It's fascinating. So do you primarily do that for education purposes for the audience or is it more of a relationship building tool? the goal with the podcast? It's a bit of both the real goal. the initial goal is so we spend a lot of time with architects more now with builders as well. But our big thing in New Zealand, New Zealand is an interesting country. we basically live in these. It's basically like a tent. We only had insulation introduced 1978. So prior to that, house I live in was built with no insulation at all. so we've been almost 20 years in New Zealand with Proclima and it's a challenge to actually get that concept of let's do a really high performance build. We obviously have high building costs at the moment as well. So that is another pushback. But the goal of the podcast was to get in front of individuals sitting in their home and actually get them to understand that, I'm going to build this house and let's not just build it to standard code because it's going to overheat, it's going to be cold, it's going to be miserable. Let's build with something better. So that was the idea is to get into each and every homeowner, 5 million people in New Zealand. I'm not familiar with the climate of New Zealand. if you live in tents, like you said, basically what's the climate like where you live? So climate's variable. So we're along slim Island. So we, I'm in Auckland, it's pretty mild. So we would probably go down to minimum of about five degrees. Maybe we hit zero. I don't know Fahrenheit man. is so easy, dude. But then we've got the South Island where they've got, you know, it's Alpine conditions in Queenstown. So it's, we've got everything. so five degrees Celsius is your low, which is above freezing here in Auckland, right? Auckland, Auckland, there we go. There we go. I'm getting the accent at last. so it gets chilly, but it doesn't get cold. You're not getting snow. You're not skiing in the winter and, things like this. Not, not a lot. Right. You would. Auckland. So the interesting thing is that you get people coming from Canada living in New Zealand and they say they're the coldest they've ever been. Because they're used to living in a house that has a central heating system. Here in New Zealand, there's no central heating. So my house in winter, it might be 13 degrees inside when I wake up in the morning. speaking of Canada, I'm interested. Is New Zealand like Australia's Canada? Yeah, yeah. There's a real, real aji-baji between New Zealand and Australia, totally. Interesting. So is Australia going to make New Zealand their next state? They would love to, I'm sure. But then, okay. your day job, you've been doing the podcast. using some of those same skills and the same setup for your live stream. How are you identifying guests? I know you said you enjoy collaborating with creators and brands. So I'm just always basically researching. The moment I open up YouTube, I'm researching and those are where I'm finding pretty much everything is YouTube is my search engine. So every day I go in there, I put home assistant, put home automation and I basically link up with every single creator that's creating home assistant content. those guys those are my leads for Basically doing these live streams getting people on getting them together and then there's the the the manufacturer side I mean, I've got guys that I've been working with for a while. I don't know if you guys have you you guys know Apollo Apollo automation. They are from Kentucky. are two guys, Trevor and Justin, started about a year ago building sensors, air quality sensors and millimeter wave sensors in their basement. I think they sold 70,000 sensors in their first year. I think that's the number they told me. Well good for them. I've sold zero sensors in my two years on YouTube, want to sell anything. Wow, as a salesman, that's impressive that you don't wanna sell anything. I am curious, so you're talking about, you said you follow all the people who, YouTube is your search engine. Who are the top YouTube creators that are coming up in your search regularly? And have I ever popped up in your feed, the DIY smart home guy? And it's okay, I will not be insulted if the answer is no. I've seen your podcasts. I've certainly seen these podcasts pop up without a doubt. but I haven't seen, have you got a personal channel as well? It's the same channel. put the podcast on my channel. certainly come up. So it's, it's quite interesting. Um, because I've been following this for quite a while. Sorry, are we saying something? I said, notice he didn't say you watched them. They're yeah, they pop up. Scroll through, I just joked with it. Just joked with it. So I am, I'm just amazed at the people that pop up. obviously the traditional ones that I used to follow was guys like Dr. Z. Have you guys seen Dr. Z? Yeah, yeah. that man's a legend. So yeah, I found guys like that, but, then there's really big, I don't know if you've seen, I think the guy's called Network Chuck. Have you seen him? He's got a pretty big channel. I have seen him like one time, he popped up recently and his video had like two million things on it. And like, who is this dude? I've never seen him before. also like, yeah, I see this guy with two million views. just started doing a home assistant videos, which is awesome. Then you've got guys like read in that are that are doing this sort of ultra high quality more sort of not so much technical, but more sort of, walking around the house to get this big flash house and showing off our things that happening and all that sort of stuff. So there's quite a few of those guys. They seem to have huge numbers of followers. and then you've got, other guys that are all about the comedy. You know what mean? So it's an interesting bunch of people out there. Paul Everdasterman. Pete's aspiring, he is not quite YouTube-y level, but he'll get there eventually. it's such a cool community and I love when the new ones pop up you know like Michael. Michael's awesome. So I met Michael probably over a year ago when he's just starting his channel. I did an interview with him. It was super cool. I mean that guy's going places. Yeah, he's awesome. We got a chance to meet in person out at a CS. We hosted like a creators dinner, which was a ton of fun. And then got him in the Slack channel. Now I'm trying to convince him and his wife to move to Minnesota. So we'll see. man, I'm so jealous that that catch up meet up at CES looked awesome. I thought you were jealous of him moving to Minnesota possibly. Is that not what you're? Well, if you come to see us next year, we're going to do it again. So there you go. Start planning now. You've got a, you've got a few months. Yeah, I've got to try and there man. looks fantastic. Digi Blue. the highlight of the show for me each year. I was just hanging out with fellow creators and geeking out about some of the stuff and going through the process. that's honestly like kind of what prompted us to do this podcast where we're interviewing creators like yourself, because it's fun to go, we're all doing kind of the same thing, but a little bit different. So it's fun to compare notes. It's, it's super fun, man. I've, literally, I reach out to basically every creator that I see and I asked him if they're interested in coming on board. Some, some you just don't hear from others are super keen. you know, bearded Tinker, I know if you've seen him. He's a cool dude as well. There's everyone is just so different and they doing everything in their own little way, I'll tell you something interesting. So when I was growing up, I. Honestly, my big thing was I wanted to be on TV or radio. That was literally my goal when I was growing up. And of course, back in the eighties, you know, it was, did TV ads and stuff like that. but that's as far as you can go, you know, literally your chance of getting on, the network is, is pretty limited. So when YouTube popped up and podcasts, I was like, man, it's my opportunity. Yeah, well you're making it work and that's fantastic. So let me, I do want to ask you about your being in Australia and you've been in South Africa and your name is Simon Says, your channel is Simon Says. We kind of had this conversation about Duck Duck Goose slash Duck Duck Great Duck, but like I'm interested to how did Simon Says, that game, that lingo get all around the world? Like you would think it would have started somewhere and just kind of hung out as a local thing, but it seems, Simon Says seems to be like a universal. thing that everyone is aware of or did you come across that somewhere later on? Yeah, I don't even know where I first came across it. I mean, literally you grow up and you just hear this Simon says, and I just thought, this is cool. I'll just jump on the bandwagon. So I have no idea where it came from. do you have kids by any chance? I do, I've got a son, he's 18. Do you use that to get his attention? know, Simon says go to your room like when he was a kid. you, Simon says take the garbage out. Simon says mow the lawn. That's what I would have if I were you. Did you ever do that? No, I can't say that. told him to do this stuff, but not Simon says it is. I'll remember that. think I'm going to try it. Yeah, he's 18 and out. He's 18. I don't know if it's gonna work anymore as he's 18, but... You at your job or with your customers. Simon says pay your invoice Yeah. Simon says you're not getting any more product if I don't get the money. Let's go. And do you remember those, do you remember those Simon games back in the eighties as well? That one where you press the colored buttons? Yeah. So it seems like Simon's this name that comes up with these random bizarre things. that's fantastic. I didn't know that was international too. Man, everything gets, it gets all over the world. I've learned anything with this podcast is that Pete doesn't understand how the rest of world works. In your mind, it's like nothing exists outside of the United States. I just assume I thought everything. No, I just thought that I thought they had their own things. I thought like you'd go somewhere else and like you go. Then again, I should. have been to I've been to Europe and I've been to Mexico and I've been to a like everywhere I go, I go to McDonald's. So like I should have figured out that. me at all. McDonald's rules. I'm a big fan. We got heaps of McDonald's. It's probably the most, yeah, it'd be the most prolific restaurant, yeah. Okay, me one unique McDonald's item from New Zealand that we might not have here in America. Like, do you have Kiwi burgers or something? Oh, they've got a Kiwi burger. There we go. Yeah. So it's got, um, it's got, what has it got in it? It's got a fried egg. It's got a, um, beetroot. Patty, the rest of the stuff, but yeah, Friday can be true. They'd be making a Kiwi burger. You I was interested in... I was in... dot what's the New Zealand top level domain, we got to find this out. man I listen I always kind of wanted to go to New Zealand, but now I'm not not so sure Beat root, I don't even know what that is, but I don't want it. That's all I know that's Beetroot, you don't know beetroot? it's awesome, eh? It's like this sort of red, it grows in the ground, it's like this red thing, it's awesome, trust me. know what a beat is and I don't like beats and I assume a beat root is worse than a beat. That's. It's my guess. no. you can still call them French fries or chips. Yep, fish and chips. That's a Kiwi thing, big thing, fish and chips. Commonwealth do you feel being part of the Commonwealth? Like is that like a little bit like why why do I have a king you still have a king, right? That's kind of Yeah, just kind of weird like your own thing and like we got this king I guess that doesn't do anything but he's still our king. So Yeah, you're king of the castle. Yeah, it's pretty, mean, South Africa, I grew up being part of the Commonwealth. So yeah, I suppose pretty used to it. Commonwealth's okay. You sort of have Queen's birthday, et cetera. Extra holidays. That's about the only benefit. Simon have you been to the United States before by the way? Which or where have you been? my brother lives in Seattle and I've been to, San Fran. Yeah. I love us. Yep. I'm definitely planning to visit again. I, I think you guys are super welcoming to guests. How long is that flight? That's what I wanna know. Oh man, I think it's not too bad because you're flying the other way. So what would be 12 hours? I don't know. Maybe a bit more. Yeah. is what does your brother sound like like as far as accent wise we had it like if he lives in United States now yeah, he hasn't really gained much of a state, a U S accent because he's been there for about 30 years. Yeah. not nat- See I told you guys it's not a natural thing accent that you just can't, just people just don't grab onto, I feel like. American. No, not at all. I mean, probably if he went back to South Africa, they'd think so. But for me being my weird Kiwi British, whatever South African accent that I've got, I don't pick up any Americanism in his accent at all. on the technical difficulties podcast. What is your biggest technical difficulty or biggest smart home fail that you have had I'll tell you what really frustrates me. The other day I had my home assistant going nicely and I literally did some sort of an update and it literally totally bricked the O-Troids that I was running it on. I don't know what happened. It was like totally gone. updates? That's like Home Assistant's calling card, right? We crash when we update. Ta-da! really? like that. Like literally when I started three years ago, it was all the time. But the last year or two, I've been perfect. But now I did this update. I just break it. I sign up tomorrow, migrate everything over. Well, Simon, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you had a good time. I enjoyed our chat here today. We're gonna put links to your videos and your channel and everything in the description below. So look for that everybody. And on behalf of Vince, on behalf of Brandon, on behalf of our guests, Simon, thank you for joining us. Thank you to our sponsors, Zeus. Go check them out at the smartesthouse.com and we'll check y'all next time. See ya. Awesome guys, that was a lot of fun. Thank you very much.
