SHOWNOTES
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mari Smith, widely known as the "Queen of Facebook" and a top social media thought leader. Mari is an in-demand keynote speaker, social media strategist, and author of The New Relationship Marketing. In this conversation, you’ll learn:
🌟 Mastering Facebook & Social Media Trends
Mari shares her journey from Scotland to becoming a premier Facebook marketing expert. (including the "Star Wars Day" coincidence that changed everything) Learn how her passions for relationships and technology fused into a career that has lasted nearly two decades.
🌟 Adapting to Algorithm Changes
Why having 50 followers might now be better than having 50,000 (and the unexpected shift that's leveling the playing field for everyone)
🌟 The Power of Video Content
The "hidden switch" most creators don't know about that could make your content go viral overnight (plus Mari's secret approach to testing content for free)
🌟 AI and Social Media Strategy
Mari reveals the AI tools she refuses to work without in 2025 (and her yet-to-be-announced plans that could transform how we use social media)
🌟 Human Design in Business
Mari introduces the Human Design System—a blend of science and spirituality—to help teams and individuals better understand their strengths and make decisions aligned with their natural energy. Discover how she uses it to create harmonious and effective teams.
🌟 Key Updates from Meta
Why Mari believes Facebook's latest changes could create a "hot mess" (and the surprising reason she thinks Meta might be filling your feed with AI)
🌟 Practical Tips for Marketers
The counter-intuitive approach Mari uses that goes against everything most marketers believe (but is working better than ever)
🌟 Looking Ahead to 2025
Mari shares her vision for the future, including exciting plans to integrate AI and Human Design into her work to empower individuals and businesses.
Whether you're a marketer, business owner, or just curious about the latest trends in social media and AI, this episode reveals the behind-the-scenes insights Mari has never shared before about where social media is really headed in 2025.
RESOURCES
Mari's Human Design resources: MariSmithSuperstars.com
Connect with Mari Smith:Facebook: facebook.com/marismith
Instagram: @marismith
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00.590] - Jen Lehner You're not going to believe what happened with this episode. We recorded this right before Christmas, and I was so, so excited because maybe like you, Mari Smith, the queen of Facebook herself, has been an important guiding light for me in my business over this past decade plus. I have always trusted her, and she has always been my go-to source of information as to what's going on with Facebook. I was really, really excited about this and a little bit nervous, probably as well. Anyway, we had a great conversation, and I was mortified to learn at the end of our episode that I had only recorded the last nine minutes of the episode. As you might imagine, I was just horrified. I felt sick to my stomach. I probably shed a few tears. I immediately reached out to a good friend of mine who also has a podcast, and I told her what happened. She said, Listen, Mari Smith is probably not going to listen to this episode, so you don't need to tell her, but just record everything you could think of while it's still fresh in your mind of everything that she said. Let your listeners know what happened and let them enjoy the last nine minutes of the episode with Mari Smith after you summarize what Maury had said.
Read more...
[00:01:19.390] - Jen Lehner I was like, Okay, that's what I'll do. That's all I can do. I recorded it, and then I thought, No, I'm just going to tell her. I emailed and I was told her, I'm so sorry, this is what happened. I'm really embarrassed. I really was embarrassed. I was just mortified. She wrote back with the most lovely email, and she put me at ease, Don't worry about it. Sometimes these things happen, and it's just going to make our next episode that much better. So please send me a scheduling link and we'll rerecord it. I was blown away by this response. It just not only made my day, it made my week. It made me feel better about humanity in You know what I mean? When people you look up to, don't disappoint. They tell you never meet your heroes. But when you do, and they live up to what your expectations are, and even exceed what your expectations are, it's a beautiful thing. We re-recorded. That's the episode you're going to hear. You know what? It was indeed much better than the first episode, and I had a blast. Enjoy this episode with Mari Smith. I I think you're going to be delighted, and you're going to learn a lot of really cool things.
[00:02:35.710] - Gary Vaynerchuk Hey, guys. It's Gary Vaynerchuk. And you're listening to the Front Row, entrepreneur podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:02:44.290] - Jen Lehner Often referred to as the Queen of Facebook. Our guest today is widely known as the premier Facebook marketing expert and a top social media thought leader. She is an in-demand keynote speaker, dynamic live webinar host, savvy social media strategist, and popular brand ambassador. She is the author of the New Relationship Marketing and is also passionate about the human design system to help businesses and brands grow in a much more authentic, impactful, and successful way. Welcome to the show, Mari Smith.
[00:03:21.620] - Mari Smith Thank you so much, Jen. I am happy to be here and looking forward to our chat.
[00:03:26.000] - Jen Lehner Me too. This really is a full circle moment for me When I was brand new to online business and digital marketing, you were always a voice that I could depend on to guide me in the right direction. Now, all these years later, you are still here as a voice that we can trust. I think that's because you are just so consistent. Your consistency in the space is absolutely extraordinary.
[00:03:51.440] - Mari Smith Wow. Thank you for saying it. It means a lot.
[00:03:55.100] - Jen Lehner I mean, is it an illusion or are you consistent with your content creation and showing up and all of that?
[00:04:02.300] - Mari Smith I'm pretty consistent. To me, I think sometimes it feels like I really want to do so much more. I don't post that often on LinkedIn, and it always bothers me. I'm like, I should do. My mind's always talking to me going, Come on, you should do more on LinkedIn. But But Facebook is my jam, right? So is Instagram.
[00:04:18.910] - Jen Lehner Yeah, Facebook is definitely your jam. How did you get started in Facebook and social media in general?
[00:04:25.180] - Mari Smith In general, I mean, the short story is that for many, many years in the early days of my career as an entrepreneur in the United States because I emigrated from Scotland in 1999, and I had these two loves, these two parallel loves. I love relationships and studying behaviors, what makes people tick. And then I actually got trained and certified as a relationship coach. And so I was teaching classes for singles and for couples and doing counseling or coaching. But then I also had this other aspect of me that's really technical. I'm very techy, very internet savvy. I love doing marketing, internet marketing, building email lists, that thing. In 2003, my first eBook was about email marketing. Then fast forward to about 2006, it probably was six or seven, I had a mentor at the time saying, Mario, you can't have these two paths. Pick one. Are you the relationship girl or are you the tech email marketing girl? And the very next spring, it was May the fourth of 2007, it was Star Wars Day, right? Star Wars Day of '07, a very auspicious day. It was right around, I know we might touch a little bit on human design, but retroactively, I learned about myself.
[00:05:40.110] - Mari Smith It was right around my 40th birthday. I took on a new frequency, a new energy theme, life theme, which was about contagion, and it was just about evangelize. It was like exact timing, the exact moment. It was like written in the stars that I was meant to join Facebook when I did. And within three weeks, just basically telling everybody I knew on the planet, you got to get on this. Are you on Facebook? Let me show you how. And it was as if my two paths fused and became one, the whole love of relationships and the love of tech and marketing and reaching people and connecting through technology. The rest is history. As they say, I'm coming up on my 18th anniversary, which is astounding to me. Wow. Since I left school in my teens, it's the longest I've ever stuck with any one career.
[00:06:32.950] - Jen Lehner Well, it doesn't feel like a career, right? I know it's a lot of work, but I mean, doing what you love, it's true what they say. It's like, what is it? You won't work a day in your life if you do it for something. Yeah, exactly. How did you get the attention of the big Z? I mean, and when?
[00:06:50.330] - Mari Smith Well, I want to say a little bit here and there over the years. I think it was Mike Stelsner, the founder of Social Media Examiner. I first met him 2008, and that really helped him launch. I was one of his original firestarters that helped him launch the whole social media online. First, he did it online, and he moved to the live events, and then the Social Media Examiner. I just was a guest on his blog for a 10th time or 12th time or something. I'm the most frequent guest. I think I go on once a year. Let's see. Sometimes I lose my train of thought.
[00:07:26.620] - Jen Lehner What was the question? Mark Zuckerberg. How How did you get on his radar to become... Because now you're affiliated with them. I mean, I know you're not employed by them, right? But you are affiliated with them.
[00:07:38.050] - Mari Smith Well, they've hired me as a contractor many times over the years. Specifically, the flagship year, if you will, was Dean them. They hired me to go on tour, basically, around the United States and to several cities where I was their main headline speaker, teaching small businesses, local small businesses, how to start using Facebook. Those were fun events. Then I've also worked with them with their blueprint, helping them with the curriculum. That's their free training. Some of it's paid and people can get certified and whatnot. Then now, more recently, I work with what's called their Meta Megaphone platform or program, which is really helping get the word out about new features or ads, AI inside of ads and all those kinds of things. Real fun, quick sidebar. I have met Mark Zuckerberg's sister many times. Randy, he has three sisters, but Andy Zuckerberg. A lovely lady. We've shared the stage. She's a former Broadway performer, so she often sings at her keynotes. Really nice. I never forget this one moment where we're in a little VIP room after party or after event, live Q&A. She comes up to me and she's like, Maury, I want to say it was like Budapest or something like that.
[00:08:53.890] - Mari Smith I was just talking to all these women, and I was overseas, and they're all coming up to me going, Do you know the Queen of Facebook?
[00:09:02.050] - Jen Lehner That is- That's to me.
[00:09:04.380] - Mari Smith You've really made a name for yourself.
[00:09:07.050] - Jen Lehner What a moment. But from the outside looking in, I mean, that's 100% accurate. You are the Queen of Facebook. You're as much the face of Facebook in my world as Martin Zuckerberg himself. I mean, it's synonymous because when I was learning Facebook, there you were. This is probably a good time. As of the time of this recording, there were two big pieces of news with Facebook. I wanted to get your opinion, if you have one, on Mark Zuckerberg ceasing to do the fact-checking on posts. Then the other piece was, which I haven't seen with my own eyes. I just keep reading about how they are creating avatars in our likeness and showing them to us as ads in our news feeds. Why are they doing that with AI, with meta-AI? What is the thing behind that? Do you have any thoughts about that? I'll just leave those two questions there.
[00:10:01.800] - Mari Smith Two huge questions. The fact-checking, let's address that first. It's very, very timely. Yeah, I do have an opinion. I always have an opinion, whether I share it or not. But I was just recently posting about that. The whole ceasing to do the fact checking is supposedly is in the name of allowing more free speech, more free expression. It's very political, I mean, unquestionably politicized, even though they were trying to reduce the amount of political or civic, they call it, civic content. If we look at the downside of having their pretty sophisticated programs in place that highlight content and/or accounts that shouldn't even be on the platform, so many times people get very, very innocuous, bona fide pieces of content taken down and then even their whole account deactivated. It was absolutely just something harmless. And so now we're going to see less of that, which is good news. On the flip of that, we could start to see, I was joking the other day saying to people, get ready for an even bigger hot mess. This is going to be a big steaming pile of hot mess because you are going to see all kinds of potentially pretty heinous things in your feed, possibly.
[00:11:22.770] - Mari Smith We'll see. Supposedly, they have safeguards in place for the really strong breaches of their terms. Those will get immediately taken down. But then for the more minor breaches or inappropriate stuff, they're going to rely on us, the users, to report that. And so they have this news feature that is totally... Even Zuckerberg mentioned it in his little video, his five-minute video, that it's the same as they have on X. They've copied the exact same where it's- Yeah, the community notes. Yeah, so people can add feedback, they can upvote, downvote. I suppose that's what made Reddit so popular, is that whole community feature. We'll see, And I have grave concerns about this. It's clearly a political move. I mean, how can Zuckerberg go many years ago from, and I won't even say his name, but we'll just use his initials, to from banning and blocking Mr. Dt to now winding and dieting and contributing million dollars to the funds and complying, sure, we'll lift our fact checker. Sure, we'll just make it open and free. And Maybe it'd become too woke. I don't know. But it's going to be an interesting ride. I see people buckle up.
[00:12:37.000] - Mari Smith This is going to be a bit of a roller coaster. A lot of folks I saw in my feeds, you probably did two, Jen, were like, That's it. I'm leaving. I'm shutting down my Facebook. I'm going to Blue I. Other people were like, Woohoo, yay, finally. Yeah. Very mixed.
[00:12:51.070] - Jen Lehner Yeah. I'm wondering, speaking to the innocuous stuff that got taken down and how annoying it would be be just so many little things that we aren't allowed to do. I know a lot of clients back in the past when I would do Facebook ads for them and stuff, if we had any weight loss experts, and you weren't allowed to show. You had to be very careful talking about weight loss or any health-related stuff. Is that going to be a free-for-all now? Are your people just going to be able to go on the whole other side of that and then be grossly advertising just in your face blatantly?
[00:13:29.020] - Mari Smith Not for ads, Actually, Jen, there are some safeguards in place with the ad side because I guess this probably has been a long time in the works, this whole removal of fact checkers and basically making it a free-for-all. But meanwhile, something that's also been coming in waiting in the wings and it's now being deployed as of January 2025 is really clamping down on what they call sensitive categories in health and wellness being one of them. And so you're going to need to... If you're advertising with some of these sensitive categories, you're going to need to be complying with the tighter rules around that. But then on the organic side, it's like, well, what? Wait a minute. We can say whatever the heck we like over a year, but we have to be more complying on the paid side. Who knows? It's going to be an interesting path.
[00:14:18.230] - Jen Lehner I remember. I know what I was thinking of when I was thinking of what was that thorn in my side and all of our sides. It was back when you could not have a graphic with too much text on it.
[00:14:27.460] - Mari Smith Yeah, 20% rule. We would just Yes.
[00:14:30.300] - Jen Lehner And you had the tool to tell you if you had enough text. We've gone from that to this. And it's very interesting times.
[00:14:38.400] - Mari Smith Now, by the way, they'll take your money. They'll happily take your money. You could have an image that's absolutely covered in text. But I want to address your AI avatar thing as well. So it's interesting what you describe that they're taking our likeness and using it in ads. I have not seen that. I don't think that's quite the case. I'll have to investigate further. But what I have seen and heard and was just even listening to an AI podcast this morning, it's quite frightening what they're doing. It's they're creating AI accounts, potentially AI influencers, but certainly just what we would call fake. It's basically a fake account interacting with other fake accounts. And for what purpose? To gooze the algorithms, to pretend like they've got more engagement, to encourage people to engage more, to make it look like there's more content than there really is? It could be. And in this podcast, it was actually where Paul Ritzer, the founder of the Marketing AI Institute, and he was like, maybe they're doing this because it's like a legacy platform, Facebook in particular. Instagram still feels very relevant, but Facebook struggles year after year to just stay relevant and keep enticing the younger and younger generations because they need them.
[00:15:54.640] - Mari Smith They need them. But it's like, well, wait, what's the point? I have all these fake AI created accounts in here, and apparently, some people had discovered there's been some already infiltrated since 2023. I don't know. We got to stay vigilant, Jen. Stay vigilant.
[00:16:14.400] - Jen Lehner I wonder, as you were talking, I was thinking in terms of what could possibly be their point and how could that be? Because we certainly don't need more fake content. But do you think it's a way to push us into using Even though those are personas that they're creating, that they want to get... Because they tried so hard to get us to use the avatars, and they so much wanted us to engage with the metaverse, and now the Fediverse. So maybe introducing us to these things and getting us used to interacting and engaging is one step closer to us adopting them ourselves so that we can then move over into the Fediverse and the VR and AR and all that. I don't know. Just a thought.
[00:17:04.160] - Mari Smith I think you're onto something. Jen, I'm right there with you. I've had these same thoughts myself ever since they've been really pushing and pushing and pushing the avatars. And I like some of the previous versions better. I think the avatars on Facebook and Instagram, you can do WhatsApp. I don't think they've brought it to threads yet, but they're not as strong a likeness, but they're more 3D-ish. See, they were a bit flat before. Now they're more like... You see, even in Messenger, I love sending the wee dancing lady people. I spent a whopping $2.99, $2.99 on my red dress. I forget what designer it is.
[00:17:37.010] - Jen Lehner That's the beginning. That's the gateway drug, Mari.
[00:17:40.860] - Mari Smith That was a few years ago, and I'm like, I'm never taking this dress off. I think you're absolutely onto something that there's... It's like it was too big a leap in what was it, 2020 or whatever, but where this whole metaverse was just being pushed on us. People were like, no way. We're never going to walk around with headsets on and not have real interactions. But it's just this creep factor, right? It's like creep as in, like creeping up on you.
[00:18:08.120] - Jen Lehner Yeah, in both senses of the word, I think.
[00:18:09.490] - Mari Smith Yeah, exactly. I just thought as soon as they said the word, I'm like, yeah. So then, yeah, it's like One of the things that they're really encouraging right now, they went meta, is to do these... Imagine yourself in a field of strawberries, imagine yourself floating in a sea of unicorns. And But what it gets you to do is you have to, and I haven't done it myself. That does creep me out a bit. But it's like, take a selfie, face on, right, back, left. So it's getting this nice full 3D visual of you so then it can make a more believable avatar. So, yeah, I just feel there's a lot of insidious agendas going on here, including back to the fact-checking thing. We got to stay smart here. People, you got to trust your gut, trust your intuition, read between the lines, do your own due intelligence. Don't take anything at face value. We got to dig our heels in here.
[00:19:06.030] - Jen Lehner Yeah, I could not agree with you more. Hey, I thought this would be a good point in the conversation to interrupt myself and let you know about our brand new AI Strategy Club. You can learn more about it at frontrowvip.com/ai. Basically, this is a place where we come together and learn about AI, learn about ways to use it in our business and our personal lives as we're discussing today. So check it out. I would love for you to join us. All right. A lot of our listeners are marketers or people with online businesses, and they're very much dependent on social media and still Facebook for getting the word out and helping to grow their businesses. What would you say is working right now?
[00:19:59.970] - Mari Smith Yeah. I tune into Gary Vaynerchuk from time to time. Long-time industry friend of mine, literally since the early days of '07. And sometimes I go through- He was my first podcast guest. He was your first guest. Awesome. That's so cool, Jen. He's very just down to earth. And he's also got his finger in the pulse. He has an agency with 3,000 employees. And I want to say off the top of my head, it's something like 120 of which whose sole job is to simply study all all the social platforms, including Snapchat and probably Blue Sky now, but all the main ones, and see what is working right down to the color of the font and the size and the thumbnail and what people are clicking on and engaging with and topics. So one of the things that Gary is really beating the drum about now, and I am absolutely right there with him, is that there's never before been a time in the social media arena where, in essence, the playing field is completely level. It's not about more followers. It's not When we're not about chasing those cavity followers, which is really a public-facing, quote, vanity metric.
[00:21:05.200] - Mari Smith We're shifting away from the friend graph, or we could even call it the the Follower graph, to the interest graph. And this was something that really TikTok pioneered, and And they're really sophisticated algorithm that knew you, knows you way better than anyone on the planet, and it can predict with incredible accuracy what you might like to see in your feed. Well, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, absolutely the same. I think the algorithm is similar on YouTube and LinkedIn even. So what's happening is you publish a piece of content and you want to start paying close attention to your non-follower metric. You go in and you see the views. It's a unified view now. Before it used to be all these different metrics, views of replaced impressions. You got this unified view, unified metric on both Facebook and Instagram. So your video view on Facebook used to be three seconds. It's now one millisecond. Same as on Instagram, and that's what reels are. Reels have always been one millisecond. It's just the nanosecond that it's on the people's screen. So think about it. If you have an account which is 50 followers and someone else has 50,000 followers, but you create amazing content.
[00:22:19.300] - Mari Smith It's relevant. It's topical. It has a great hook. It has a great thumbnail. It's probably a vertical video. It's short. It's consumable. It's highly shareable. People hit that little airplane icon on Instagram and they share it with all their friends in the DMs, which is one of the top metrics that Adam Mosseri keeps talking about. Now you have just as much chance to have a quote viral piece of content, whether you got the 50 followers or the 50,000 followers. Plus, one of the things that Gary V often really is beating the drum about is brands, agencies, businesses of any size, you now have this opportunity to really test your creative for pretty much no cost No to low cost, seeing how the algorithms, seeing how the people respond to it, then you put your ad budget on what you've tested for free.
[00:23:09.410] - Jen Lehner Let me ask you about that because I haven't played with that yet. I know it's a little toggle switch that I've seen, and it says test. But how is that different than just sticking your content out there? Because that's a test in and of itself. Like, either people engage with it or they don't. If I put tests on it, or is it like you secure it with your credit card, you don't pay anything, you let it run out as a test and then it starts charging your card or something. Is it done through the ads platform or is it done?
[00:23:37.170] - Mari Smith Okay, I think I know what you're talking about. So this is on Instagram, fairly recent. They introduced something called trial reels. Yes. Trial reels. And it's a little toggle. It totally is. And I think it's off by default, so you can put it on. And I'm positive it will come to Facebook because that's usually what they do. And what it does, it takes your reel and it will go and it will show Show it first to non-followers, 100% non-followers. So people that have never heard of you, never come across you. Maybe they have heard of you, but they just don't follow you. But generally speaking, it's going to be people that just never come across you. But because of the incredible sophistication of the algorithms and the AI and machine learning, it's going to go, Okay, all these people over here. And now you can decide as the creator within about a 24-hour period, Wow, that one did really well. Flip the switch and now we'll show it to followers as well, and it can carry on getting reach. But I think also what you might be referring to is the A/B testing feature. They have it for free in Meta Business Suite that you can A/B test posts on Facebook.
[00:24:43.980] - Mari Smith And certainly Any time you're doing anything with Ads Manager, there's always going to be a fee. But they automatically... They'll call it like when you're first running an ad campaign, it's going to take probably as much as two or three days, and it'll show you in learning phase It's in the learning phase. You don't really want to tamper with it until you've got that learning phase complete, because it is. It's testing by itself all of these different possibilities of placement and audience reach. And also just one more quick thing on that, too, while we're talking about it, is the Advantage plus Audience. Anytime you see Advantage, the B plus sign, that's met as AI at play. And there's lots of them in Ads Manager, one of which is called the Advantage plus Audience. So you can tell These are some suggestions. I'm looking to reach women aged 52 or whatever, early 50s in this particular Northern California, whatever. You got your specifics and you're saying, those are suggestions. And what it does, it goes out, it's like, whoa, you didn't even realize, but there's men in their 30s are actually a target for you as well.
[00:25:50.710] - Mari Smith I'm making this up, but not really. I'm drawing from one of Meta's examples. They had a baseball cap company, and they were showing you how if you broaden your catchment area, there's all these other possible avatars that you didn't even think about that they would love to buy your product.
[00:26:05.420] - Jen Lehner Would you say that lookalike audiences uploading your existing customer list is probably even that much better than it ever was because of AI?
[00:26:15.890] - Mari Smith Oh, big time. Big time. 100 %. I would say, and especially because email marketing is more and more of a struggle these days for people to really get their emails at the top of the inbox and in the primary folder and opened and read and clicked. And open rates are not as accurate a metric as you and your listeners may or may not know, but it's like we want to really more focus. It's a good benchmark, but you want to really be looking at the click rate to click through rates. I love following Jay Schwedelson. He's founder of subjectline. com. He's a guru on the email site, and he's funny, too. I just really enjoy listening. He's a real funny guy. But yeah, so email. So the point of making, though, just to close that loop, is that because it's tough to keep that retention rate high on your email subscriber list, you want to keep scrubbing it, keep it clean and utilizing any time you get new leads and customers, maybe once a month or something, that you're going ahead and creating those custom audiences in ads manager, assuming you're running ads. Then from there, like you just mentioned, to broadening that with the lookalikes.
[00:27:30.530] - Jen Lehner Okay, great. Do you have any information about when, if ever, we'll be allowed to stream inside of our groups again? Why did they take that away?
[00:27:40.320] - Mari Smith They won't bring it back. They took the API, the application programming interface. They took the API off of groups. My best-educated reason gas as to why they did that was something to do with privacy because you used to have third-party tools could schedule in there, and then they had third-party tools for analytics. And there was something to do because there's some groups that are really private or even the ones that are private and hidden. They used to be called secret groups. And so I think what Mata did is they just drew a line in the sand like, that's it. We are not going to allow any apps whatsoever. The good is it's for streaming, you can absolutely still do that. You just have to use the live producer and get that little key and just set it up in advance. Really easy to do on Zoom once you've done it once. But I know a lot of people use StreamYard or There's E-Cam. You can use any streaming third-party app you want and still totally stream into your groups. Just a little bit of tech know-how and off you go.
[00:28:42.780] - Jen Lehner Well, I'm so lazy that I'll do like I stream, use StreamYard, and I'll stream to all the places that it allows me, LinkedIn and Facebook page and YouTube, wherever else. Then from my Facebook page, my team will just, once I go live on the page, share that into all the groups. Sure. That's our shortcut.
[00:29:05.890] - Mari Smith May I challenge you, Jen? You're not lazy, you're efficient.
[00:29:09.150] - Jen Lehner Oh, thank you. Yes, I will use that word instead. Okay. What about... I'm curious. In your intro, I had mentioned human design system. Can you tell us what that is and how you're using that? I'm very curious.
[00:29:26.190] - Mari Smith Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I just love it. I love to some more feedback for you reading. It came about in the late '80s. The best way to describe it is a fusion, a synthesis of multiple sciences, esoteric and exoteric. You've got the Chinese Yi Jing with those little lines, stick lines, hexagrams. The Book of Changes, thousands of years old, incredible wisdom. And then blended with Eastern and Western astrology, you got the Kabala, chakras. And then you've also got quantum physics, astronomy, genetics, biology. It's just the most profound system of helping us to know our own selves at deep, deep level and to know others. Then to be able to watch the dynamics and be so much more informed and will use a business or a marketing approach in particular. It can be used really a personal, spiritual business, you name it. I'm studying it all. I'm now entering my fifth year of deep professional studies, sometimes taking as many as four, five, six classes a week. I'm an investigator. I know that about myself. I'm a one, three profile, which is the deep, deep investigator. This is also what's made me good, if you will, are so successful at Facebook all these years because I will go in and investigate all the details.
[00:30:44.470] - Mari Smith And then I don't mind learning by trial and error. So I'll just test things out. But what it is, is based on your date, place, time of birth. And it is a genetic imprint. It shows you your conscious genetic imprint of your strengths, your skills, your your natural abilities. Then unlike astrology, there's also an imprint that we can see about 88 days, but approximately three months prior to birth, which shows your unconscious. There's aspects of you that just come out of you. On the business side, one of the things that really lights me up is I do consulting for a small number of folks because it does take a lot of my individual time. I will fuse together their social media strategy with this human human design system in helping to really make sure that the right people are in the right roles and that they have a fully functioning team. There's no gaps in the team which can be identified through the human design system. It's called a Penta. You got three to five people, and you can see, wow, no wonder we keep failing with our accounting. Nobody on the team is that good at accounting.
[00:31:49.190] - Mari Smith Maybe somebody is just forced to do it, but it's not a natural skill. What if we just outsourced our accounting? But yeah, it just really lights me up. I love it. I love supporting people in a way that really helps them to get insights about themselves. One of the key aspects, I think for your listeners, I say probably the number one takeaway is these body intelligent decisions because we have been so conditioned to make these head decisions. We talk ourselves into and out of things. An invitation comes across your desk and you're not feeling any energy on it, but the head's going, Oh, but I don't want to say no. I don't want to look good. I want them to like me, or maybe I could make a lot of money, or they need all the chitter-chatter that goes on in the monkey mind. But for me, as a generator, two-thirds of the planet are generator types, are manifesting generators. The inner authority, it's called the inner authority, the way in which we make decisions. So for me, it's my gut, my sacral. And I respond best to yes, no questions. People ask me a yes, no question.
[00:32:53.690] - Mari Smith It's a totally different experience now after many years of these studies, hearing it through my physical ears from outside of myself when someone asks me a yes, no question. So that's why I have my VA do that or some other people in my team or close friends. And I'm struggling with a decision and I just feel into the energy right down in the bottom of my gut. Other folks where it's more they're emotional- Wait.
[00:33:17.870] - Jen Lehner Yes, sorry. I need to ask you a question. I'm unclear. So you're saying you're not good with yes, no questions?
[00:33:25.980] - Mari Smith I am good.
[00:33:26.760] - Jen Lehner You are good. But you said your VA will do the yes, no's for you?
[00:33:31.060] - Mari Smith Yeah, maybe I misspoke. The difference between me sitting, trying to make a decision by myself, I know I'm collaborative, too. I'm the person that's not designed to work solo all day, every day. I need to be around people and I need to interact. So that's a factor. But hearing a yes, no question outside of myself, I'm able to tune into the sensation in my gut way differently than if I just look at a yes, no question on the screen or I ask myself it or I'm in my mind going, do I really want to do this? I don't know. It's like, just like that, I'm up in my head and it's a little more different than hearing the yes, no question outside of myself by somebody else. That's what I'm hearing. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So that's the decision making for the sacral generator types. The most popular decision making body intelligence is what's called the emotional intelligence, the solar plexus, the seat of emotional intelligence. And those folks, and it's about 60% of the world, are not designed to make fast decisions. And you think, Jen, how much pressure there is? Like, buy now, midnight tonight, come on, you have to decide before you leave.
[00:34:41.890] - Mari Smith No much pressure to decide fast. Urgency and scarcity. Emergency, yeah. And to be spontaneous. But most people need time, at least overnight, and to be able to get in the habit of saying, I'm going to need some time. When do you need to know by? I need to sleep on it. And they feel into where the emotional waves are in their body, and And the clarity emerges. The clarity isn't in the moment. Maybe for some emergency thing or something, but for most 60 plus % of folks, they need that time to just wait out the emotional waves. So the example I like to give is, let's say somebody invites you for a weekend in Las Vegas and you're up here on your emotional wave. You're like, Yeah, let's do it. You decide right away. Then later that day or maybe the next morning, you're a little bit lower on your wave and you're What was I thinking? I don't even like Las Vegas. Oh, no. How am I going to get out of this? And it's just like,.
[00:35:36.460] - Jen Lehner I feel like that's how I live my life. I'll say yes to a talk. This often happens to me when I say yes to going to an event, to give a talk. And then almost from the moment I've said yes to the day that I give the talk, I'm like, Why did I say yes to that? And then I'm miserable. And then I'm usually happy once I give the talk. Or I don't know, I feel like I'm in that situation a lot where I'm super feeling it and I'm really excited. And then later I'm like, Oh, no. What was I thinking?
[00:36:06.200] - Mari Smith A lot of it, too, interestingly, is the transit. So every day the planetary transits make their way around the wheel. It's got a wheel or a mandala with all the different gates. But you're like me. You actually have your... I just took a quick peek at your chart. You and I have very similar human designs, and it is your circle. So having people ask you, yes, no questions. You're also designed to be collaborative. But waiting at the emotional way The negative part is like everybody right now on the planet is affected by the background frequency of being a little bit more sensitive, a little bit more hyper, a little bit more touchy, a little more moody because of where the planetary transits are, the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, the whole works in our solar system. The solar plexus is lit up. It's defined right now for everybody until the end of January. Okay.
[00:36:57.760] - Jen Lehner So what happened... I shouldn't say what I thought that there was a crisis. But what was the thing when you started, you dipped your toe into this, did something happen where you were like, Wow, this is real. There's really something to this. Was there a moment?
[00:37:14.710] - Mari Smith Yeah, I had my first human design reading around 2003, and it went right over my head. I probably spent maybe two hours, an hour and a half with the analyst, and it just seemed like mumbo jumbo to me. I was like, what the heck is he even talking I'm sure at the time, maybe I had a few takeaways, but the only takeaway I could remember is he said to me, Mario, you have a really busy mind. It's probably hard for you to meditate. And I'm like, yeah. And you know what's funny as I look at our chart? You and I have the exact same. It's called abstraction. It's a mind that's very, very busy. It sees in visual pictures, lots of mosaic of all those things. And you just go through and try to make sense of the past in order to create a better future. So this very visual, busy mind. And so that was then. And then Fast forward over the many, many years. Every now and again, it would come into my awareness. My older sister was studying it. She talked to me about it now and again. But then it was the winter solstice of 2020.
[00:38:10.110] - Mari Smith A dear girlfriend of mine came for a little sleep over at my house in San Diego before I I live to Oregon. She's very intuitive. She's reaching into her purse and she's like, Why? I don't know why, but I was leaving my house this morning. My intuition just told me I was supposed to bring this book to you, and she showed it to me. I just like, talk about timing. I leapt out of my chair. This is like a real sacral response, a real body intelligence response. My whole body, my arms flew in the air. I'm like, Human design? There's books on that? You can study it? What's really cool, back to when I said about when I first joined Facebook and my new theme was contagion and my chiron return, which is around age 50, that was in 2016. My background frequency, the chiron, shifted what's called service. My main one is the explanation. I'm born to explain. I'm born to take the complex, simplify, and explain to people. But then when 50, and I thought, I had been feeling for a few years this lesser degree of satisfaction with my Facebook career. You know what, Jen?
[00:39:15.470] - Mari Smith I kept thinking, there's going to be more. I want to add more value. I want to change people's lives. I want to wake people up. I want to help them transform. I want to help them realize how amazing and brilliant they are and empower them. It's like, I can do that with human design, adding it to my social media career.
[00:39:33.400] - Jen Lehner Wow. Well, your passion for that is absolutely contagious. It's just jumping through the screen here. People who might want to work with you on this, and I know you can't take that many people, but would they find information at marismith.com on this?
[00:39:46.710] - Mari Smith Not yet, but the best place to go for my human design is lots of free resources and free trainings and stuff I've done. Just introductory classes is marismithsuperstars.com. Marismithsuperstars.com. That is proudly built on Mighty Networks because I really wanted to try out the platform. They're great, they're amazing. I have grand plans in 2025. I will definitely be introducing a lot more free and low-cost access to the human design knowledge.
[00:40:16.270] - Jen Lehner All right. Well, in addition to your future things that you're going to be creating with that, is there anything else you're super excited about for 2025?
[00:40:26.630] - Mari Smith I sure am. I'm glad you asked. Ai. I am in the intros of potentially, possibly, and we'll see by the time this podcast releases, we'll see, I'll keep you posted. But I'm in deep in discussions with a full service AI agency, and I am looking to, I'm not quite ready to share everything about what that looks like yet because it's so early days yet, but it's going to move fast. It's going to move fast. I do use a little bit of AI, like many people, ChatGPT, I got Google Gemini. I love the Fathom, like yourself, the Fathom note taker. I I don't even have a meeting without my Fathom. But really deeply, deeply embedding more AI into what I'm doing with all my processes and to leverage and to reach more people. My course sources, maybe different languages, lots of possibilities on the horizon, and bringing the human design into the social media work with the use of AI. We're at the tip of the iceberg right now, but it is exceedingly exciting. Last This fall, I ended a 10-year partnership relationship, which had been long time coming, and I finally made the decision, took a lot of courage, but at the same time, it has really created what I feel for me personally is this blank slate, this reset.
[00:41:46.070] - Mari Smith It's like hitting the reset button. It's like it's giving me a new lease of life. I'm like, wow, okay, what do I want to create with this new version of Mari?
[00:41:55.440] - Jen Lehner That's really so exciting. I know that we're going to following you and to see all this exciting stuff take place. I'm with you. I'm super so excited about AI, and I use it every day, and I just can't get enough of watching the brilliant use cases that people are putting to play. It's just all coming at us so fast. It's in a good way. I mean, obviously, there's the bad stuff, but I mean, this part of it is terribly exciting to me. So can't wait to see what you do with it, what I do with it, what we all do with it. Just thank you, Mari. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really wonderful, and I really appreciate it, and I would love to have you back anytime.
[00:42:41.300] - Mari Smith Thank you. This has been a real pleasure for me, too. I appreciate it.
