“When you see yourself from this kind of awakened perspective, what happens is you create this radically empowered person that makes choices from a space of full alignment with the truth of who you are.“
Alexi Panos & Preston Smiles – Entrepreneurs, Authors, Founders of the Bridge Method; Living with intention; Building a business from passion; Now or Never
Segment 1: (Length :04:00) – General Updates; Introduction to Alexi Panos & Preston Smiles and their journey as entrepreneurs; Their own personal transformations to today.
Alexi & Preston’s finer points:
From Preston:
“So first of all, I know we look young and sexy and we are. We definitely are. The truth as far as human numbers is that I’m a grown ass man so I’ve lived a lot of lifetimes and so in my 36 years, I’ve been through many trials and tribulations.”
I've been to the depths. I've had many friends be shot and killed. I've watched people die in my arms. I've gotten sick and that's the one I'll use as the one that really opened this space up for me.
“When I was 25, I had just moved to LA from Louisiana. I went to LSU and I got my Master’s degree from there and I started feeling these heart palpitations and one thing led to another.”
“I was one of those dudes that never went to the doctor and I went. That doctor took a few tests, sent me to a cardiologist. That cardiologist had me walk around with a machine for 24 hours and then come back and, essentially, asked me two questions that changed my life forever. The first question was,”
“What are your stress levels like?”
“The second one was,”
“What was your diet? What are you eating?”
“I said, ‘What’s a stress level? I’m 25, I don’t even know what that means,’ and then the second one, I was like, ‘I eat food,’ and he was asking me to explain food to him. I was like, ‘Well you know, McDonald’s, Burger King. I drink beer. I smoke weed. I do everything everybody else does.”
“I just went through this gamut of all the stuff I ate and he said, “How long have you been doing that?” I was like, “What do you mean, ‘how long’? Like forever.”
“It was this moment where, A, I got really upset because he said, “Young man, that’s not food,” and I’m like, “What do you mean it’s not food? It’s on the commercials. That’s definitely food. My family eats that way. My friends eat that way. Everybody I know eats that way.” He said, “Unfortunately, it’s not and I’m going to have to give you some pills to regulate your heartbeat for the rest of your life, essentially and I suggest, as a father, that you look into this.”
Really, that dude was lifesaver because I got mad enough and scared enough to make some drastic changes and went down the rabbit hole of finding all the other places of where I had been lied to.
“Because once I discovered that McDonald’s was not actually healthy for you, it opened up a lot of more spaces for me and I became an angry vegan and an angry everything and start trying to wake everyone up and then no one was listening and then realized that love was actually the portal, that love was the master key to everything. That sent me on a journey over the last 11 years to get to this point right now.”
From Alexi:
I've been around on this planet now for 33 years. You guys spoke about change in the beginning of this and it's such a powerful thing because I believe that those moments, those catalyst moments of extreme change were really the ones that brought me to what I'm currently doing and to my entrepreneurship.
“What’s interesting is at a young age, I got into the entertainment industry, first with modeling. I was doing it as a kid but kind of stopped between 7 and 12. At 12, I shot up to 5’9 and was super tall and skinny so New York came calling.”
“. I started doing fashion weeks in New York and Miami, and started flying out to Europe and had this whole kind of outside lifestyle because I was born in a small town where nobody left Eerie, Pennsylvania. You got pregnant at 17 or 18 years old from your high school sweet heart, got married and that was your life. I got to see outside of that life early on.”
“What’s really interesting is that kind of led me to saying, ‘Yes,’ to a dare to enter a singing contest at 15 which I ended up getting a recording contract with a huge, huge producer at the time. It was crazy because I never really wanted to be a singer, but I loved the idea of getting out of my small town and traveling the world and just having this different kind of life.”
“That seemed really exciting so that led me to doing exactly that. From 17 to 19, I traveled the world, on tour with Ja Rule, at the time, which was a whole different thing. Take a small white girl from Eerie, Pennsylvania and put her on tour with guys from inner city Queens and it was just this whole cocktail of me seeing the world from a totally different side.”
What was really incredible about that time in my life was I really kind of lost myself in the pursuit if fame and fortune and got into partying and that whole kind of glamorous lifestyle.
“We were actually towards the end of our world tour and we were in Africa. We’re in a town in South Africa and leaving a night club, just spent a bunch of money on champagne and we’re leaving. We’re getting on the tour bus and I look to one side and I see this Shanti town . . . Tin houses, people kind of living on top of each other, poor electricity, poor resources and it just hit me like a ton of bricks that I was kind of living this life as a fraud and I was kind of a taker.”
“I just saw this whole thing play out. I kind of flash-forwarded in my mind, ‘Like what would my life look like in five years if I stay in this?'”
“Then I saw the people I was with. A lot of great people I was on the road with, but I saw the never ending chase, the never ending pursuit of more, more fame, more fortune. It was never enough and I didn’t want that to be my life because I saw how much misery could be created with that.”
“I kind of came back to New York City where I had moved in between the tour and quit the music biz, got a regular job. I was bartending and I ended up managing a spot in New York City and really just started saying, “How do I want my life to look? Where do I want to leave a legacy? How does my legacy look for people?”
I really got clear that I wanted to give. I wanted to contribute and that's where EPIC came from. It was really this idea to use my life for good and to make my life matter, to make it mean something more than just taking and consuming.
“I got back into entertainment. I was television hosting at the time and modeling again and doing really well for myself, made high six figures, bought my first place in New York City. Everyone in New York knew who I was. I kind of had all the things that any 20 year old could’ve wanted at the time and I had it all but I still felt like something was off.”
“I still felt like something was missing even though I was giving back, even though I had this amazing nonprofit where, once a year, I was spending a month or two in Africa giving back.”
“What really hit me was the majority of my time, the majority of what I spend my time doing, is not aligned with the truth of who I am. The truth of who I am is I’m a leader and I am someone who loves to empower other people into their leadership and I certainly wasn’t doing that in entertainment.”
“At the time, I was hosting for E News. I was doing their E News Now blast. I remember I was reading something about Reese Witherspoon wearing a particular outfit while playing tennis and I literally wanted to shoot myself.”
Again, I found myself in this position where I'm like, 'Dude, I'm here perpetuating the shit that I hate. Why am I doing this?' It just became so clear that I had to radically change and transform what I was up to in the world and what I spent my time on so that's what got me to this place where I get to do, every single day, what I absolutely have been obsessed with my entire life which is learning, growth, transformation, supporting other people and it's never felt better.
Segment 2: (Length :08:00) – Talking with Alexi Panos & Preston Smiles; Building a tribe and a community; Bringing their personal brands to the public;
Alexi & Preston’s finer points:
From Preston: On building a following
there was a point when I realized that the only way I could ever support anybody is by filling my cup and giving from the overflow.
“I got in this conversation about, “How much love can I experience in any given moment?”vI got in this conversation about, “What books can I read and what nature can I tap into that would support me in being the dopest version of me possible?”
“I was an actor at the time. I was in Entourage. I was in 90210. I did like 50 commercials, even more than that, probably. I was well on my way but in that time, I was spending most of my time reading 7 Spiritual Laws of Success, Conversations with God, As a Man Thinketh and all of these different books.”
“Those things both work really, really well. That’s where most of your spend should be when you think about your digital environment.”
“I was pouring myself into psychology, and essentially supporting myself in becoming awesome. Friends and family started saying, “You know, Preston’s turned into like this little black Buddha, man. This dude’s like straight wisdom, bro.”
Everybody would come to me and ask me these questions and I essentially became a coach without knowing I was a coach. There was no money involved. I was still pursuing acting and then I was doing this on the side.
“One day, I said, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if I made a YouTube channel called Questions With Preston? Because everybody’s asking the same questions.”
“We’re all dealing with the same stuff. We’re all bombarded by the same media, and at the very root of this whole conversation is a worthiness conversation. Wouldn’t it be interesting if I just started answering them on YouTube so I didn’t have to spend all this time with these people so I could focus more on what I’m already doing.”
“I created a channel and I started posting on YouTube. I leave these videos up, by the way. You can find them on my YouTube, now. I leave them up so people can see the evolution. I put them up and 10, 20, 50 people would watch them. The interesting thing was out of that, let’s say, fifty people, I would get about 20 messages inboxed. ‘Hey, that really meant something.’ ‘Hey, this is ‘so and so’ from Germany. Thank you so much. That’s helping me.'”
“It just became one of those things where I was like, “Wow, I’m actually serving,” so I just kept focusing on, “How could I serve these people best?” On Facebook and on YouTube, I’m putting out content literally everyday and once every two weeks with a video.”
Essentially, my people brought me people. I just kept serving and I kept serving relentlessly and all the people who knew me as Preston, the gang member, as Preston, the 'whatever names they had for me,' those people were the last ones to share my stuff. They were the last ones to jump on the bandwagon, but they did. All of them, slowly but surely, went, 'Oh, he's serious about this. He's not actually just in this for the 'fame or significance.' This dude actually cares because here we are, 7, 10 years later and he's still going.
“That’s how my following built and we made a science of it. What are people actually being with and how can I support from what I understand in this given moment? That’s me.”
From Alexi:
“For me, what’s interesting is, much like Preston, I would be working, I would be on set and I have been into the personal development thing for a very long time.”
My mom actually was always into it and so since I was eight years old, I was kind of forced to listen to books on tape with Marianne Williamson and Tony Robbins on all of our long road trips.
“Then I went to my first Tony event at 16 and did landmark education at 18, so it’s always been a part of my life and I’ve always loved reading. I’ve always been a nerd so I’ve always been like 100 books in a year, at least flipping through and getting some good nuggets and trying them out.”
“What was interesting is I found myself eventually on set coaching people for free. I’d be coaching the makeup artist while she was doing my makeup. I’d be coaching the hair person. I’d be offering advice or assistance to the girls or the guys that I’d be working with and I just really loved it. I found that I was really, really good at it.”
“It’s so funny because at the time, probably back in 2007 to 2008, I had a company called Ultimate Quest and what we did with Ultimate Quest was we went around the world. I’ve always been a travel, I love traveling, travel junky.”
“With Ultimate Quest, that’s when I started the whole filming thing and traveling and filming. That’s when I learned production and I learned all of that stuff. At the time, I remember my hosting agent, he called me and he’s like, ‘Hey, I noticed on your YouTube channel, you’re putting up some videos that kind of aren’t going along with your whole hosting thing. We need to be really consistent.'”
I was making really kind of esoteric and deep philosophical videos and posting them on YouTube and my hosting agent's like, 'You need to pull those down.'
“I was talking about what matters in life and yes, I do all these other things but what really makes a different? I kind of put that aside for a while and then when I moved from New York to LA, I really got clear that I wanted to get back into the business of platform because entertainment was essentially a platform.”
“I knew that, in order to make a big impact in the world, I wanted to utilize my expertise in platforms so I said, “You know what, instead of hosting, instead of using my face like I have for the last God knows how many years with modeling and hosting, why not just use my voice and my intellect?” Because I was so sick of just being known as a face, right?”
“I started a Podcast called Transformation Nation. That was back in 2011 and I just started interviewing these amazing friends of mine who I was meeting at like startup conventions and retreats and just amazing entrepreneur, just people who had it together in one particular area.”
“We would just have amazing conversations. That led to eventually creating this worldwide market and audience. They’d reach out to me and say, “Hey, this is really great. I did some research on you and your so great in front of the camera. Why not do some stuff on video?” I was like, “Oh God, should I go back to that?”
For me, that was like all the permission I needed to get back involved in doing what I was doing before. Us coming together was really, our art kind of spoke to one another. Our vision definitely spoke to one another.
“When we met, we talked about our own vision of how we saw the world and how we saw our role in the world. It was just so apparent and so clear that, a, yes, we were supposed to be together romantically, but also, we were supposed to create together.”
“This was in divine order for us to come together to see what we could put out and what creations we can make that could really change and influence the way that the world works.”
Segment 3: (Length :10:00) – A meeting between two people;
Alexi & Preston’s finer points:
From Preston:
It's awesome. Interestingly enough, this lends to our entire philosophy in essence. How do I say this? Because you asked how we met, right? Which is a even longer story and I'm not going to go into the long story of it, but the short of it.
“that I went to Louisiana State University. I met a guy there who I was super nice to. He’s a little younger than me, but took him under my wing. We moved to LA. We separated. We weren’t, “Friends,” anymore.”
“Then years later, I get a message from him that says, ‘Hey, I’m in London and I just met the female version of you. She’s kind of like dating my buddy, not really, but kind of and he’s like in love with her. I think you guys are going to work together. I’m going to put you in a message.'”
“He put me in a message with Alexi and for me, I was also holding space. I had done six months of celibacy and started dating again, but I was calling in my one so I was clear that anybody I was going to date was going to be one or two but not three or four.”
I was serious about bringing in that one that was going to support and really take things to the next level. Long story short, I had a blind date set up. Alexi and I messaged back and forth. I thought she lived in London. She didn't respond back on Facebook because she doesn't do that much. I had left it alone.
“I had a blind set up for a Friday. Thursday morning, I woke up literally at 6 AM on the dot and you can find this on the internet right now. I was like, “Uh-oh, she’s coming.” I knew, like knew, that whoever my wife was, that I was going to meet her very soon.”
“I went on Instagram and on Facebook and I posted a picture two wolves kissing. I said, ‘I can feel her coming, dot, dot, dot. #Wifey, #TheQueenIsOnHerWay.’ The next day, I went on the blind date. The blind date came to my door, I opened the door. I knew it wasn’t her but we had already bought tickets to a show. I was like, ‘Uhhh.'”
“I knew enough to just be silent and still and go back and ask from whatever is out there. I call it God, The Universe, Divine Intelligence, and the answer was, ‘Go. You have to go.’ I’m like, ‘Really? But this isn’t her and I don’t want to go on a date with some girl that-‘ I wasn’t letting my penis run the show at the time so for me, it was like, ‘If this is not something I’m really interested in, then why go?'”
“Well, we get in the car. We go. We’re late. We get there. The guy says, ‘We oversold the show by ten seats. You’re going to have to stand on the wall.’
He takes a few steps away, turns around, stops in his tracks like something told him to stop, reaches back to us and goes, 'Actually, you two.' Now, take in mind, there's like 10, 20 other people standing on the wall. He's like, 'You two, I'm going to add two more chairs to the front row,' so he puts two chairs in the front row.
“I sit down. My date sits down. I look at the stage. I look at my date and, essentially, next to her, two chairs down, is Alexi. Literally, straight up like a movie, I have this like, ‘Holy shit, that’s my wife,’ moment. That’s her and I’m like, ‘Alexi?’ She’s like, ‘Preston?’ I’m like, ‘What are you doing here? I thought you lived in London.’ She’s like, ‘No, I live in LA. I was visiting London. I just moved to LA.’ We just go through this whole conversation.
Of course, she's not seeing me like that. She thought that it was still like a business conversation, but for me, I was like, 'Yo, that's my wife.' That's the beginnings of how we met each other.
Segment 4: (Length :10:00) – State of social media; Leading with intention; Building a business from passion; Their book, Now or Never.
Alexi & Preston’s finer points:
From Alexi:
“Yeah, and to go back, too, to your question of how we built this thing, because there’s so many people now. Social media is such a thing, right?”
Everyone's trying to get famous on social media or get big on social media and back when we started, we literally were just sharing our passion. We were sharing what we loved. We were sharing because we knew it helped people and we were just sharing what felt authentic and organic for us.
“We just started marketing, like intentionally.”
From Preston:
“Yeah, everything you see right now is straight organic. The forty, fifty thousand people on our personal Facebook pages each, that’s just what happened. What’s on Instagram, the thirty, forty thousand something, that just happened.”
“That’s not like, “Hey, let’s market to try to get this many people.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we haven’t done any of that up until the last couple weeks.”
From Alexi:
“The cool thing is we found a way to make a business out of something we love and to do it from a really cool space where it doesn’t feel like, ‘Sales,’ or doesn’t feel like there’s a certain tension to put out there. It’s just, ‘Hey, we’re just doing what we’re doing and we’re sharing because we love this,’ and people have been resonating with it.”
Listen, at the end of the day if you're not intentional about your business, and this is what we've realized, you can't serve as many people that you could potentially serve.
“What a disservice to the world if we’re not reaching as many people as we could potentially reach because we’re not willing to do the work, business-wise.”
From Preston:
“Which is why we wrote Now or Never. Because we understood that many people learn in different ways. Simon & Schuster saw the same vision and they were like, ‘Yo, here’s a bunch of money. Make this awesome book.'”
“‘How else and where else are we not serving people at?’ Videos are awesome. Instagram, social media stuff, is awesome but people also want tangible tools that they can have and their hand.”
“For us, this book is like The Four Agreements with a bunch of heavy tools that are beautiful that people can use today.”
From Alexi:
“As you go through the chapters you recognize that the steps are just kind of the umbrella for what houses a multitude of tools that really support you in building this newfound awareness of who you are as a human being so that you see yourself completely differently than you’ve been seeing yourself your entire life.”
When you see yourself from this kind of awakened perspective, what happens is you create this radically empowered person that makes choices from a space of full alignment with the truth of who you are.
“The problem is in today’s world is a lot of people don’t know who they truly are because they’ve been living based on societal programming that’s been around for ages, from their well-meaning parents and their schools and the government and the city they grew up in.”
“We’re living out these patterns that aren’t truly us which is why most of us wake up either at 25, 35, 45, 55, have a midlife, quarter life crisis, and go, ‘What am I doing with my life? Have I just wasted everything? What now?'”
“We’re trying to cut that so that that doesn’t have to happen and have you kind of go through your own intentional wake up where you say, ‘Okay, who am I? What do I want to create now?'”
From Preston: (on authenticity)
“Self-help gurus,” are imprisoned by the image that they’ve put into the world. We’re beating that by showing you what’s behind the curtain. We’re beating that by taking ourselves off the pedestal and reminding everybody that everybody is still trying to figure this thing out.”
“At the depths of our soul, all we want is love. Making sure that we don’t portray ourselves as perfect, reminding people that we’re in process forever unfolding on a journey home to the self just like they are, just like anybody else who has walked this planet is.”
Pointblank, it's being intentional. We're intentional about making sure that we're not putting ourselves on a pedestal.
Segment 5: (Length :03:00) – Hustler Thought of the Day:
Failure is just information. It simply presents an opportunity to grow. And just like failure, success is also an opportunity to grow. Both success and failure are neutral but hold within them immense possibility to sharpen your tools and get you back in the game, better than ever before. – Preston & Alexi, Now or Never
GENERAL NOTES:
Alexi Panos & Preston Smiles – Entrepreneurs, Authors, Founders of the Bridge Method
- Personal Development’s power couple, Preston Smiles and Alexi Panos, are world renowned innovators and pioneers in the Emergent Wisdom Movement.
- As founders of the groundbreaking Bridge Method (which includes their live workshops, and various online training programs), they have created a movement of transformation that has taken humanity by storm through their unique and passion-filled approach to sharing age-old wisdom. It includes a a fully immersive and high octane human potential training.
- Using social media as a main source of connection and distribution of their lively educational videos, they’ve built an incredible tribe of loyal fans around the globe who aren’t just inspired by their work, but are empowered by it.
- Preston is a motivational speaker, Inspirational writer, founder of the love mob. He also wrote Love Louder and co-wrote the forthcoming Now Or Never: Your Epic Life in 5 Steps, with Alexi.
- Preston’s mission: To empower, inspire and ignite a multi-generational movement of radical growth through conscious creative content, acts of love and living boldly.
- Alexi’s journey began quite some time ago while having a successful entertainment career as a television host and model. However, she felt something was missing from her life and wanted to leave a legacy of contribution, creativity, collaboration and love. In short, she wanted to create shift that mattered inspire others to step into their own greatness, share the love that they are and truly shine.
- She wrote the book 50 Ways to Yay! Transformative Tools for a Whole Lot of Happy and co-authored Now or Never with her husband Preston. She also co-founded a non-profit organization called EPIC (Everyday People Initiating Change) where for the last 10 years she’s been focused on bringing clean water and community development to those in need in rural Africa.
- Check Alexi & Preston out at http://alexipanos.com & http://prestonsmiles.com & http://alexiandpreston.com
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