Podcasts about dan it

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we start by unraveling the intriguing concept of global time zones. We humorously ponder the idea of a unified world clock, inspired by China's singular time zone. The discussion expands to how people in countries like Iceland adapt to extreme daylight variations and the impact of climate change narratives that often overlook local experiences. We then explore the power of perception and emotion in shaping our reactions to world events. The conversation delves into how algorithms on platforms shape personal experiences and the choice to opt out of traditional media in favor of a more tailored information stream. The shift from curated media landscapes to algorithm-driven platforms is another key topic, highlighting the challenges of navigating personalized information environments. Finally, we tackle the critical issue of government financial accountability. We humorously consider where vast sums of unaccounted-for money might go, reflecting on the importance of financial transparency. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In the episode, Dan and I explore the concept of a unified global time zone, drawing inspiration from China's singular time zone. We discuss the potential advantages and disadvantages of such a system, including the adaptability of people living in areas with extreme daylight variations like Iceland. We delve into the complexities of climate change narratives, highlighting how they often lack local context and focus on global measurements, which can lead to stress and anxiety due to information overload without agency. The power of perception and emotion is a focal point, as we discuss how reactions are often influenced by personal feelings and past experiences rather than actual events. This is compared to the idealization of celebrities through curated information. Our conversation examines the shift from curated media landscapes to algorithm-driven platforms, emphasizing how algorithms shape personal experiences and the challenges of researching topics like tariffs in a personalized information environment. We discuss the dynamic between vision and capability in innovation, using historical examples like Gutenberg's printing press to illustrate how existing capabilities can spark visionary ideas. The episode explores the complexities of international trade, particularly the shift from tangible products to intangible services, and the challenges of tracking these shifts across borders. We address the issue of government financial accountability, referencing the $1.2 trillion unaccounted for last year, and the need for financial transparency and accountability in the current era. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Yes, and I forgot my time zones there almost for a second. Are you in Chicago? Yeah, you know. Why can't we just all be in the same time zone? Dean: Well. Dan: I know that's what China does. Yeah, Well, that's a reason not to do it. Then you know, I learned that little tidbit from we publish something and it's a reason not to do it. Dean: then that was. You know I learned that little tidbit from. We publish something and it's a postcard for, you know, realtors and financial advisors or business owners to send to their clients as a monthly kind of postcard newsletter, and so every month it has all kinds of interesting facts and whatnot, and one of them that I heard on there is, even though China should have six time zones, they only have one. That's kind of an interesting thing. Imagine if the. United States had all one time zone, that would be great. Dan: Yeah, I think there would be advantages and disadvantages, regardless of what your time system is. Dean: Well, that'd be like anything really, you know, think about that. In California it would get light super early and we'd be off a good dock really early too we'd be off and get docked really early too. Yeah, I spent a couple of summers in Iceland, where it gets 24 hours of light. Dan: You know June 20th and it's. I mean, it's disruptive if you're just arriving there, but I talked to Icelanders and they don't really think about it. It's, you know, part of the year it's completely light all day and part of the year it's dark all day. And then they've adjusted to it. Dean: It happens in Finland and Norway and Alaska. We're adaptable, dan, we're very adaptable. Dan: And those that aren't move away or die. Dean: I heard somebody was talking today about. It was a video that I saw online. They were mentioning climate change, global warming, and that they say that global warming is the measurement is against what? Since when? Is the question to ask, because the things that they're talking about are since 1850, right, it's warmed by 0.6 degrees Celsius since 1850. We've had three periods of warming and since you know, the medieval warming and the Roman warming, we're actually down by five degrees. So it's like such a so when somebody says that we're global warming, the temperature is global warming and the question is since when? That's the real question to ask. Dan: Yeah, I think with those who are alarmist regarding temperature and climate. They have two big problems. They're language problems, Not so much language, but contextual problems. Nobody experiences global. That's exactly right. The other thing is nobody experiences climate. What we experience is local weather. Dean: Yes. Dan: Yeah, so nobody in the world has ever experienced either global or climate. You just experience whatever the weather is within a mile of you you know within a mile of you. That's basically and it's hard to it's hard to sell a theory. Dean: That, you know. That ties in with kind of the idea we were talking about last week that the you know, our brains are not equipped, we're not supposed to have omniscience or know of all of the things that are happening all over the world, of all of the things that are happening all over the world, where only our brains are built to, you know, be aware of and adapt to what's happening in our own proximity and with the people in our world. Our top 150 and yeah, that's what that's the rap thing is that we're, you know, we're having access to everybody and everything at a rate that we're not access to everybody and everything at a rate that we're not supposed to Like. Even when you look back at you know, I've thought about this, like since the internet, if you think about since the 90s, like you know, my growing up, my whole lens on the world was really a, you know, toronto, the GTA lens and being part of Canada. That was really most of our outlook. And then, because of our proximity to the United States, of course we had access to all the US programming and all that stuff, but you know, you mostly hear it was all the local Buffalo programming. That was. They always used to lead off with. There was a lot of fires in Tonawanda, it seemed happening in Buffalo, because everything was fire in North Tonawanda. It still met 11. And that was whole thing. We were either listening to the CBC or listening to eyewitness news in Buffalo, yeah. But now, and you had to seek out to know what was going on in Chicago, the only time you would have a massive scale was happening in Chicago. Right, that made national news the tippy top of the thing. Dan: Yeah, I wonder if you said an interesting thing is that we have access to everyone and everything, but we never do it. Dean: It's true we have access to the knowledge right Like it's part of you know how, when you I was thinking about it, as you know how you define a mess right as an obligation without commitment that there's some kind of information mess that we have is knowledge without agency? You know we have is knowledge without agency. You know we have no agency to do anything about any of these bad things that are happening. No, it's out of our control. You know what are we going to do about what's happening in Ukraine or Gaza or what we know about them? You know, or we know, everybody's getting stabbed in London and you know you just hear you get all these things that fire off these anxiety things triggers. It's actually in our mind, yeah that's exactly right, that our minds with access to that. That triggers off the hormone or the chemical responses you know that fire up the fight or flight or the anxiety or readiness. Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. I've been giving some thought to well, first of all, the perception of danger in the world, and what we're responding to is not actual events. What we're responding to is our feelings. Yes, that's exactly right, yeah. You've just had an emotional change and you're actually responding to your own emotions, which really aren't that connected to what actually triggered your emotions. You know it might have been something that happened to you maybe 25 years ago. That was scary and that memory just got triggered by an event in the world. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, and the same thing with celebrity. Celebrity because I've been thinking about celebrity for quite a long time and you know, each of us you and I, to a certain extent are a celebrity in certain circles, and what I think is responsible for that is that they've read something or heard something or heard somebody say something that has created an image of someone in their mind, but it's at a distance, they don't actually meet you at a distance. And the more that's reinforced, but you never meet them the image of that person gets bigger and bigger in your mind. But you're not responding to the person. You're responding just to something that you created in your mind. Dean: I think part of that is because you know if you see somebody on video or you hear somebody on audio or you see them written about in text, that those are. It's kind of residue from you know it used to be the only people that would get written about or on tv or on the radio were no famous people yeah, famous, and so that's kind of it. I think that the same yeah, everybody has access to that. Now Everybody has reach. You know to be to the meritocracy of that because it used to be curated, right that there was some, there were only, so somebody was making the decision on who got to be famous. Like that's why people used to really want to own media. Like that's why people used to really want to own media. That's why all these powerful people wanted to own newspapers and television and radio stations, because they could control the messaging, control the media. You know? Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. Is it you that has the reach, or someone else has reach that's impacting you? Dean: Yeah, I mean I think that we all have it depends on whether you're on the sending end or the receiving end of reach. Yeah, like we've seen a shift in what happens, like even in the evolution of our ability to be able to consume. It started with our ability to consume content, like with all of those you know, with MP3s and videos, and you know, then YouTube was really the chance for everybody to post up. You know you could distribute, you had access to reach, and in the last 10 years, the shift has been that you had to in order to have reach, you had to get followers right. That were people would subscribe to your content or, you know, like your content on Facebook or be your friend or follower, and now we've shifted to every. That doesn't really matter. Everything is algorithmic now. It's like you don't have to go out and spread the word and gather people to you. Your content is being pushed to people. That's how Stephen Paltrow can become, can reach millions of people, because his content is scratching an itch for millions of people who are, you know, seeking out fertility content, content, and that is being pushed to you. Now, that's why you're it's all algorithm based, you know, and it's so. It's really interesting that it becomes this echo chamber, that you get more of what you respond to. So you know you're get it. So it's amazing how every person's algorithm is very different, like what shows up on on things, and that's kind of what you've really, you know, avoided is you've removed yourself from that. You choose not to participate, so you're the 100%. Seek out what you're looking for. It's not being dictated to you. Dan: Not quite understanding that. Dean: Well you have chosen that you don't watch news. You don't participate in social media. You don't have an Instagram or anything like that where they're observing what you're watching and then dictating what you see next. You are an active like. You go select what you're going to watch. Now you've chosen real clear politics as your curator of things, so that's the jump. Dan: Peter Zion. Dean: But you're self-directing your things by asking. You're probably being introduced to things by the way. You interact with perplexity by asking it 10 ways. This is affecting this or the combination of this and this. Dan: Yeah, I really don't care what perplexity, you know what it would want to tell me about. Dean: You just want to ask, you want to guide the way it responds. Yeah yeah, and that's very it's very powerful. Dan: It's very powerful. I mean, I'm just utterly pleased with what perplexity does for me. You know like you know, I just considered it. You know an additional capability that I have daily, that you know I can be informed in a way that suits me, like I was going over the tariffs. It was a little interesting on the tariff side because I asked a series of questions and it seemed to be avoiding what I was getting at. This is the first time I've really had that. So I said yeah, and I was asking about Canada and I said what tariffs did Canada have against the United States? I guess you can say against tariff, against before 2025. And it said there were no retaliatory tariffs against the United States before 2025. And I said I didn't ask about retaliatory tariffs, I asked about tariffs, you know. And that said, well, there were no reciprocal tariffs before 2025. And I said, no, I want to know what tariffs. And then this said there was softwood and there was dairy products, and you know. I finally got to it. I finally got to it and I haven't really thought about it, because it was just about an hour ago that I did it and I said why did it avoid my question? I didn't. I mean, it's really good at knowing exactly what you're saying. Why did it throw a couple of other things in there? Dean: Yeah, misdirection, right, or kind of. Maybe it's because what, maybe it's because it's the temperature. You know of what the zeitgeist is saying. What are people searching about? And I think maybe those, a lot of the words that they're saying, are. You know, the words are really important. Dan: Not having a modifier for a tariff puts you in a completely different, and those tariffs have been in place for 50 or 60 years. So the interesting thing about it. By the way, 50 countries are now negotiating with the United States to remove tariffs how interesting. And he announced it on Wednesday. Dean: Yeah. Dan: He just wanted to have a conversation with you and wanted to get your attention. Dean: Yeah, wanted to get your attention. Yeah, have your attention, yeah, okay, let's talk about this. Dan: Yeah and everything. But other than that, I'm just utterly pleased with what it can do to fashion your thoughts, fashion your writing and everything else. I think it's a terrific tool. Dean: I've been having a lot of conversations around these bots. Like you know, people are hot on creating bots now like a Dan bot. Creating bots now like a Dan bot. Like oh Dan, you could say you've got so many podcasts and so much content and so many recordings of you, let's put it all in and train up Dan bot and then people could ask they'd have access to you as an AI. Dan: Yeah, the way I do it. I ask them to send me a check and then they could. Dean: But I wonder the thing about it that most of the things that I think are the limitations of that are that it's not how to even take advantage of that, because they don't know what you know to be able to, of that. Because they're bringing it, they don't know what you know to be able to access that you know and how it affects them you know. I first I got that sense when somebody came. They were very excited that they had trained up a Napoleon Hill bot and AI and you can ask Napoleon anything and I thought, thought you know, but people don't know what to ask. I'd rather have Napoleon ask me questions and coach me. You know like I think that would be much more useful is to have Napoleon Hill kind of ask me questions, engage where I am and then make you know, then feed me his thinking about that. If the goal is to facilitate change, you know, or to give people an advantage, I don't know. It just seems like we're very limited. Dan: I mean, you know, my attitude is to increase the engagement with people I'm already engaged with. Yeah, like I don't feel I'm missing anyone, you know? I never feel like I'm missing someone in the world you know, or somehow my life is deficient because I'm not talking to 10 times more people that I'm talking to now, because I'm not really missing anything. I'm fully engaged. I mean, eight different podcast series is about the maximum that I can do, so I don't really need any. But to increase the engagement of the podcast, that would be a goal, because it's available. I don't. I don't wish for things, that is, that aren't accessible you know, and it's very interesting. I was going to talk to you about this subject, but more and more I've got a new tool that I put together. I don't think you have vision before you have capability. Okay, say more Now. What I mean by that is think of a situation where you suddenly thought hey, I can do this new thing. And you do the new thing and satisfy yourself that it's new and it's useful, and then all of a sudden your brain says, hey, with this new thing, you can do this, you can do this, you can do this, do this, you can do this, you can do this. And my sense is the vision of that you can do this is only created because you have the capability. Dean: It's the chicken and the egg. Dan: Yeah, but usually the chicken is nearby. In other words, it's something you can do today, you can do tomorrow, but the vision can be yours out. You know the vision, and my sense is that capabilities are more readily available than vision. Okay, and I'm making a distinction here, I'm not seeing the capability as a vision, I'm seeing that as just something that's in a very short timeframe, maybe a day, two days, you know, maximum I would say is 90 days and you achieve that. You start the quarter. You don't have the capability. You end the quarter you have the capability. Dean: And once you have that capability. Dan: all of a sudden, you can see a year out, you can see five years out. Dean: I bet that's true because it's repeatable, maybe out. Dan: I bet that's true because it's repeatable, maybe, so my sense is that focusing on capability automatically brings vision with it. Dean: Would you say that a capability? Let's go all the way back to Gutenberg, for instance. Gutenberg created movable type right and a printing press that allowed you to bypass the whole scribing. You know, economy or the ecosystem right, all these scribes that were making handwritten copies of things. So you had had a capability, then you could call that right. Dan: Well, what it bypassed was wood printing, where you had to carve the letters on a big flat sheet of wood and it was used just for one page containers and you could rearrange the letters in it and that's one page, and then you take the letters out and you rearrange another page. I think what he did, he didn't bypass the, he didn't bypass the. Well, he bypassed writing, basically you know because the monks were doing the writing, scribing, inscribing, so that bypassed. But what he bypassed was the laborious process of printing, because printing already existed. It's just that it was done with wood prints. You had to carve it. You had to have the carvers. The carvers were very angry at Gutenberg. They had protests, they had protests. They closed down the local universities. Protests against this guy, gutenberg, who put all the carvers out of work. Yeah, yeah, so, yeah. Dean: So then you have this capability and all of a sudden, europe goes crazy take vision and our, you know, newly defined progression of vision from a proposition to proof, to protocol, to property, that, if this was anything, any capability I believe has to start out with a vision, with a proposition. Hey, I bet that I could make cast letters that we could replace carving. That would be a proposition first, before it's a capability, right. So that would have to. I think you'd have to say that it all, it has, has to start with a vision. But I think that a vision is a good. I mean capabilities are a good, you know a good catalyst for vision, thinking about these things, how to improve them, what else does this, all the questions that come with a new capability, are really vision. They're all sparked by vision, right? Yeah, because what would Gutenberg? The progress that Gutenberg have to make is a proposition of. I bet I could cast individual letters, set up a little template, arrange them and then duplicate another page, use it, have it reusable. So let's get to work on that. Dan: And then he proved. Dean: The first time he printed a page he proved that, yeah, that does work. And then he sets up the protocol for it. Here's how we'll do it. Here's how. Here's the way we make these. Here's the molds for all these letters. He's created the protocol to create this printing press, the, the press, the printing press, and has it now as a capability that's available yeah well, we don't know that at all. Dan: We don't know whether he first of all. We have no knowledge of gutenberg, except that he created the first movable type printing press. Dean: Somebody had to have that. It had to start with the vision of it, the idea. It didn't just come fully formed right. Somebody had to have the proposition. Dan: Yeah, yeah, we don't know. We don't know how it happened. He know he's a goldsmith, I mean, that was so. He was used to melding metals and putting them into forms and you know, probably somebody asked him can you make somebody's name? Can you print out? You know, can you print a, d, e, a and then N for me? And he did that and you know, at some point he said oh, oh, what if I do it with lead? What if? I do it with yeah, because gold is too soft, it won't stand up. But right, he did it with lead. Maybe he died of lead poisoning really fast, huh yeah, that's funny, we don't know, yeah, yeah, I think the steel, you know iron came in. You know they melted iron and everything like that, but we don't know much about it. But I'll tell you the jump that I would say is the vision is that Martin Luther discovers printing and he says you know, we can bypass all the you know, control of information that the Catholic Church has. Now that's a vision. That's a vision Okay. That's a vision, okay, but I don't think Gutenberg had that. I mean, he doesn't play? Dean: Definitely yeah, yeah, I know I think that any yeah, jumping off the platform of a capability. You know what my thought is in terms of the working genius model, that that's the distinction between wonder and invention. That wonder would be wonder what else we could do with this, or how we could improve this, or what this opens up for us. And invention might be the other side of creating something that doesn't exist. Dan: I mean, if you go back to our London, you know our London encounter, where we each committed ourselves to writing a book in a week. Dean: Yes. Dan: You did that, I did that. And then my pushing the idea was that I could do 100 books in 100 quarters. Dean: Yeah, exactly. Dan: Yeah, I mean, that's where it came from. I says, oh, you can create a book really fast to do that. And then I just put a bigger number and so I stayed within the capability. I just multiplied the number of times that I was going to do the capability. So is that a vision, or is that? What is that? Is that a vision? A hundred books, well, not just a capability right. Dean: I think that the fact that you, we both had a proposition write a book and we both then set up the protocols for that, you set up your team and your process and now you've got that formula. So you have a capability called a book, a quarter for 25 years you know that's definitely in the, that that's a capability. Now it's an asset your team, the way that you do it, the formatting, the everything about it. But the vision you have to apply a vision to that capability. Hamish isn't going to sit there and create cartoons out of nothing. Create cartoons out of nothing. You've got to give the idea. The vision is I bet I could write a book on casting, not hiring, how I'm planning on living to 156. So you've got your applying vision against that capability, yeah. Dan: It's interesting because I don't go too far out of the realm of my capabilities when I project into the future. Yeah, so, for example, we did the three books with Ben Hardy, you know and great success, great success. And then we were going further and Hay House, the publisher, started to call us, you know, after we had written our last book in 23, around the beginning of 20, usually six months after. They want to know is there another book coming? Because they're filling up their forward schedule and they do about 90 books and they do about 90 books a year. And so they want to know do we have another one from you? And we said no not really. But then when I did Casting Not Hiring as a small book, and I did Casting Not Hiring as a small book to write a small book, in other words, I'd committed myself to 100 books and this was number 38. I think this was in the 38th quarter. And then Jeff Madoff and I were talking and I said you know, I think this Hay House keeps asking us for another book. I think this is probably it and we sent it to them. I think it was on a Thursday. We had a meeting with them the next Wednesday, which is really fast. It's like six days later I get a meeting and they love it, and about two weeks later the go-ahead came from the publisher that we were going to go with that book. Two weeks later, the go-ahead came from the publisher that we were going to go with that book. And so I've developed another capability that if you write a small book, it's easy to get a big book. Yeah. So that's where the capabilities develop now. Now when I'm writing a new quarterly book, I'm saying is this a big book? Is this a big book? Is this the yeah? Dean: well, I would argue that you know that you've established a reach relationship with Hay House. Dan: Yeah, yeah, because they're a big multiplier. Dean: That's exactly right. So you've got the vision of I want to do a book on casting, not hiring. I have the capability already in place to do the little book and now you've established a reach partnership with Hay House that they're the multiplier in all of this right Vision plus capability, multiplied by reach. And so those relationships that you know, those relationships that you have, are definitely a reach asset that you have because you've established that you know and you're a known quantity to them. You know. Dan: Yeah, well, they are now with the. You know the success of the first three books, yeah, but it's really interesting because I I don't push my mind too much further than that which I can. Actually, you know, like now I'm working on the big book with jeff jeff nettoff and with the first draft, complete draft, to be in a 26, and we're on schedule. We're on schedule for that. You know. So you know. But I don't have any aspirations. You know you drop this as a sentence. You know you want to change things. I actually don't want to change things. I just want to continue doing what I'm doing but have it more productive and more profitable. Is that a vision? I guess that's a vision. Dean: Yeah, I mean that's certainly, certainly. I think that part of this is that staying in your unique ability right, you're not fretting about what the you've made this relationship with a house and that gives you that reach, but there's nothing you're and they were purchased. Dan: They were purchased by random house, so they have massive bar reach. Dean: Wow yeah. Dan: I don't know what the exact nature of their relationship is but things take a little bit slower backstage at their end now, I've noticed as we go through, because they're dealing with a monstrous big operation, but I suspect the reach is better. Yeah, once it happens, right. Dean: And resources. Yeah, yeah, cash as capability, that's a big, you know that was a really good. That's been a big. Distinction too is the value of cash as a capability. Cash for the c, yeah, a lot, as well as cash for the k. But cash for the c specifically is a wonderful capability because with cash you can buy it solves a lot of problems. You can buy all the vision, capability and reach. That was a lot of problems. It really does. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was out at dinner last night with Ken and Nancy, harlan you know, you know Ken, and and we were talking. He was talking about he's. He's 30, 33rd year and coach and he started in 92. And coach, and he started in 92 and and he he was just talking about how he has totally a self-managing company and you know he has great free days, and you know he just focuses on his own unique ability. You know so a lot of strategic coach boxes to check off there and he was talking and he was saying that he's been going to some other 10 times workshops. You know where people are and he spoke about someone who's actually a performer musical performer and he just saw himself as back in 1996 or 1997 as the other person spoke, and and, and he asked me the question he says when is the crossover when you stop being a rugged individualist and then you actually have great teamwork around you? Dean: And I said it's a really interesting question. Dan: I said it's when it occurs to you, based on your experience, that trusting other people is a lot less expensive than not trusting them. Dean: Right, that's a good distinction, right. That people often feel like I think that's the big block is that nobody trusts anybody to do it the way they would do it or as good as they can do it or they don't have it. You know, I think, even on the vision side, they may have proof of things, but they're the only one that knows the recipe. They haven't protocol and package to, you know, and I think that's really, I think, a job description or a you know, being able to define what a role is, you know, I think it's just hiring people isn't the answer, unless you have that capability, that new person now equipped with a, with a vision of what they, what their role is. Dan: You know yeah, yeah, I said it's also been my experience that trust comes easier when the cash is good. I think that's true right? Dean: Yeah, but they're not. I think that's really. Dan: I think the reason is you have enough money to pay for your mistakes. Dean: Yes, exactly, cash confidence. Yeah, it goes a long way. Dan: Yeah, I was thinking about Trump's reach. First of all, I think the president of the United States, automatically, regardless of who it is, has a lot of reach. Yes, for sure. Excuse me, sir, it's the president of the United States phoning. Do you take the call or don't take the call? I think you're right, yeah, absolutely. Take the call or don't take the call. I think you're right, yeah, absolutely. He says he's just imposed a 25% tariff on all your products coming into the United States. Dean: Do you care about that or do you not care about it? I suspect you care about it. I suspect. Imagine if he had a, you know if yeah, there was a 25% tariff on all strategic coach enrollments or members. Dan: Yeah Well, that's an interesting thing. None of this affects services. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah, Because it's hard to measure Well first of all, it's hard to detect and the other thing, it's hard to measure what actually happened. This is an interesting discussion. The invisibility of the service world. Dean: Yeah, it's true, right. And also the knowledge you know like coming into something, whatever you know, your brain and something going across borders is a very different. Dan: Yeah it's very interesting. The Globe and Mail had an article it was in January, I think it was and it showed the top 10 companies in Canada that had gotten patents and the number of patents for the past 12 months, and I think TD Bank was 240, 240. And that sounds impressive, until you realize that a company like Google or Apple would have had 10,000 new patents over the previous 12 months. Dean: Yeah, it's crazy right. Dan: Patent after patent. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And my sense is, if you measure the imbalance in trade let's say the United States versus Canada there's a trade deficit. Trade. Let's say the United States versus Canada there's a trade deficit. Canada sells more into the United States than the United States sells into Canada, but that's only talking about products. I bet the United States sells far more services into Canada than Canada does into the United States. I bet you're right. Yeah, and I bet the services are more profitable. Yeah so for example, apple Watches, the construction of Apple Watches, which happens outside of the United States. Nobody makes a profit. Nobody makes a profit. They can pay for a job, but they don't actually make a profit. All they can do is pay for jobs. China can only pay for jobs, thailand, all the other countries they can only pay. And when it gets back, you know you complete the complete loop. From the idea of the Apple Watch as it goes out into the world and it's constructed and brought back into the United States. All the profit is in the United States. All the profit is in the United States. The greatest profit is actually the design of the Apple Watch, which is all done in the United States. So I think this tariff thing is coming along at an interesting period. It's that products as such are less and less an important part of the economy. Dean: Yeah Well, I've often wondered that, like you know, we're certainly, we're definitely at a point where they were in the economy, where you could get something from. You know. You know I mean facebook and google and youtube. You know all of these companies there's. No, they wouldn't have anything that shows up on any balance sheet of physical goods. You know, it's all just ones and zeros. Dan: Yeah. I mean it doesn't happen anymore, but because we have. You know, nexus, when Babs and I crossed the border, we have trusted, trusted traveler coming this way which also requires us that we look into a camera and then go and check in to the official and he looks at us and all he wants to know is how many bags do you have that have? Dean: been in. Dan: And we tell him. That's all we tell him. He doesn't tell us anything we're bringing into the United States and he doesn't tell us anything we're bringing into the United States. And then, when we come back to Canada, we just have our Nexus card which goes into a machine, we look into a camera and a sheet of paper comes out. And the customs official or the immigration official, just you know, puts a red pen to it, which means that he saw it, and then you go out there. But you know, when we started, coach, we would have to go through a long line. We'd have our passport, and then the person would say what are you bringing? And then we'd have to fill in a card are you bringing this back into canada? Dean: exactly, yeah, you remember the remember and what's the total. Dan: You know the total price of everything that you purchased, everything. Dean: And I used to think. Dan: I said you know, I was in Chicago and I just came up with an idea. It's a million dollar idea. Do I declare that I had the good sense not to declare my million-dollar idea because then they would have taken me in the back room. You know, if I had said that, what are you? Why are you trying to screw around? Dean: with our mind. You'll have to undergo a cavity search to. Dan: So what I'm saying is that what's really valuable has become intangible more and more so just in the 30 years or so of so of coach you know that and it's like the patents. Dean: you know we've had all the patents appraised and there's an asset value, but yeah, because this is an interesting thing that in the or 30 years ago you had to in order to spread an idea. You had to print booklets and tape. I remember the first thing what year did you do how the Best Get Better? That was one of the first things that you did, right? Dan: Right around 2000 or so. In fact, you're catching me in a very vulnerable situation. That's okay. Dean: I mean it had to be. Dan: Okay. Dean: But I think that whole idea of the entrepreneurial time system and unique ability, those things, I remember it being in a little container with the booklet and the cassette. Dan: You know crazy, but that's but yeah, because I think it was. I think it was, was it a disc or a cassette, cassette? So yeah, well, that would have mid nineties. Dean: Yeah, that's what I mean. I think that was my introduction to coach, that I saw that. Dan: but amazing, right, but that just the distribution of stuff now that we have access yeah well, it just tells you that the how much the entire economy has changed in 30 years. From tangible to intangible, the value of things, the value of what do you? Value and where does it come from? Dean: And yeah. Dan: I think all of us in the thinking business. The forces are on our side, I agree. Dean: That's such a great talking with Chad. Earlier this morning I was on my way to Honeycomb and I was thinking, you know, we've come to a point where we really it's like everything that we physically have to do is being kind of taken away. You know that we don't have to actually do anything. You know, I got in my car and I literally said, take me to Honeycomb, and the car drives itself to Honeycomb. And then, you know, I get out and I know exactly what I want, but I just show them my phone and the phone automatically, you know, apple Pay takes the money right out of my account. I don't have to do anything. I just think, man, we're moving into that. The friction between idea and execution is really disappearing. I think so. So the thing to be able to keep up, it's just collecting capabilities. Collecting capabilities is a. That's the conduit. You know, capabilities and tasks. Dan: Well, it's yeah and it's really interesting. But we're also into a world where there's two types of thinking world. There is there's kind of a creative thinking world, where you're thinking about new things, and there's another world thinking about things, but you're just thinking about the things that already already exist yeah, my feeling is and usually that requires higher education college education you know, and all my feel is that they're the number one targets of AI is everybody who does a lot of thinking, but it's not creative thinking. Ai will replace whatever they're doing. And my sense is that this is why the Doge thing is so devastating to government. I mean, I'll just test this out on you. Elon Musk and his team send every federal employee and at the start of the year there were 2.4 million federal government employees and that excludes the, the military. So the military is not part of that 2.4 million and the post office is not part of those are excluded from. Everybody else is included in there. And he sent out a letter he says could just return by return email. Tell us the five things that you did last week. And it was extraordinarily difficult for the federal employees to say what they did last. That would be understandable to someone who wasn't in their world. And I think the majority of them were meetings and reports, uh-huh. Yes, about what? About meetings and reports, uh-huh. Dean: Yes, about what? About meetings and reports yeah, we had the meeting about the report. Dan: Yeah, and then scheduled another meeting To discuss the further follow-up of the report. Dean: Yeah, At least in the entrepreneurial world the things are about you know, yeah. Dan: I mean if you said I sent the memo to you and said, dean Jackson, please tell me it would be interesting stuff that you wrote back. I mean the stuff that you wrote back and you say just five, just five. You know, I can tell you 15 things I did last week, you know, and each of them would be probably an interesting subject. It would be an interesting topic is the division between that bureaucratic world. The guess coming out of the Doge project is if we fired half of federal government employees, it wouldn't be noticed by the taxpayers. Dean: Right, it's like a big Jenga puzzle. Dan: How many can? Dean: we pull out before it all crumbles. Dan: Yeah, because there's been virtually no complaints, like all the pension checks came when they should. All the you know everything like that. The Medicare, everything came. Dean: But what? Dan: they found and this is the one, this is the end joke here that they just went to the Small Business Administration and they examined $600 million worth of loans last year and 300 million of them went to children 11 years or younger who had a Social Security number. Dean: Is that true? Dan: Yeah, and 300 million went to Americans older than 120 who had an active Social Security number. Dean: Wow, now, that's just. Dan: Yeah, but that $600 million went to somebody. 0:48:51 - Dean: Yeah, it went somewhere. Dan: right, they were checks and they went to individuals who had this name and they had Social Security number. We had this name and they had social security number and those individuals don't those individuals. The person receiving the check is not the individual who it was written to. So that's like 600 million. Yeah, and they're just finding this all over the place. These amazing amounts of money and the Treasury Department last year couldn't account for $1.2 trillion. Dean: They couldn't account for where it went.2 trillion, you know. Dan: You know, that seems dr evo's one trillion exactly. Yeah, well, it's going somewhere, and if they cut it off, I bet those people are noticed yeah, I bet you're right, I think there's. This is the great audit we're in the age of the great. We're in the age of the great audit. Anyway, I have daniel white waiting for me, okay this was a good one, daniel yeah, it was good, this was a good one. This tangibility thing is really an interesting subject and intangibility Absolutely. Dean: All right, thank you, dan. Say hi to Daniel for me Next week. Dan: I'm booked socially all day, so take a two-week break.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we start by discussing the unpredictable nature of Toronto's weather and its amusing impact on the city's spring arrival. We explore the evolution of Formula One pit stops, highlighting the remarkable advancements in efficiency over the decades. This sets the stage for a conversation with our guest, Chris Collins, who shares his insights on balancing fame and wealth below the need for personal security. Next, we delve into the intricacies of the VCR formula—proposition, proof, protocol, and property. I share my experiences from recent workshops, emphasizing the importance of transforming ideas into intellectual property. We explore cultural differences between Canada and the U.S. in securing property rights, highlighting the entrepreneurial spirit needed to protect one's innovations. We then examine the role of AI in government efficiency, with Elon Musk's technologies revealing inefficiencies in civil services. The discussion covers the political and economic implications of misallocated funds and how the market's growing intolerance for waste pushes productivity and accountability to the forefront. Finally, we reflect on the transformative power of technological advancements, drawing parallels to historical innovations like the printing press. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discussed the VCR formula—proposition, proof, protocol, and property—designed to enhance communication skills and protect innovations. This formula is aimed at helping entrepreneurs turn their unique abilities into valuable assets. We touch on the unpredictable weather of Toronto and the humor associated with the arrival of spring were topics of discussion, offering a light-hearted start to the episode. Dan and I share insights on the evolution of Formula One pit stops, showcasing human innovation and efficiency over time. We examined the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in protecting their intellectual property and explored cultural contrasts between Canada and the U.S. regarding intellectual property rights. The episode delved into the implications of AI in improving government efficiency, highlighting how technologies reveal civil service inefficiencies and drive accountability. We reflected on the transformative power of historical innovations such as the printing press and electricity, drawing parallels to modern technological advancements. The conversation concluded with reflections on personal growth, including insights from notable figures like Thomas Edison and Peter Drucker, and a preview of future discussions on aging and life experiences. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: That feels better. Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia, yes. Dan: Yes indeed. Dean: Well, where in the world? Dan: are you? Dean: today, toronto. Oh, you're in Toronto. Okay, yeah, where are you? Yeah? Dan: where are you? Dean: I am in the courtyard at the Four Seasons Valhalla in my comfy white couch. In perfect, I would give it 73 degree weather right now. Dan: Yes, well, we're right at that crossover between middle winter and late winter. Dean: You never know what you're going to get. It could snow or it could be. You may need your bikini, your Speedo or something. Dan: I think spring in Toronto happens, I think somewhere around May 23rd, I think somewhere around. May 23rd, and it's the night when the city workers put all the leaves on the trees. Dean: You never know what you're going to get. Until then, right, it just might snow, and they're stealthy. Dan: They're stealthy and you know, I think they rehearse. You know, starting in February, march, april, they start rehearsing. You know how fast can we get all the leaves on the trees and they do it all in one night they do it and all. I mean they're faster than Santa Claus. I mean they're. Dean: Have you seen, Dan? There's a wonderful video on YouTube that is a comparison of a Formula One pit stop from the 1950s versus the 2013 Formula One in Melbourne, and it was so funny to show. Dan: It would be even faster today. Dean: It would be even faster today. Oh yeah, 57 seconds it took for the pit stop in the 50s and it was 2.7 seconds at Melbourne it was just amazing to see. Dan: Yeah, mark young talks about that because he's he's not formula one, but he's at the yeah, he's at the level below formula one right, every, uh, every minute counts, every second counts oh, yeah, yeah, and uh, yeah, he said they practice and practice and practice. You know it's, it's, if it can be measured. You know that there's always somebody who's going to do it faster. And yeah, yeah, it's really, really interesting what humans do. Dean: Really interesting what humans do. I read something interesting or saw a video and I've been looking into it. Basically, someone was saying you know, our brains are not equipped for omniscience, that we're not supposed to have omniscient knowledge of everything going on in the world all at once. where our brains are made to be in a local environment with 150 people around us, and that's what our brain is equipped for managing. But all this has been foisted on us, that we have this impending. No wonder our mental health is suffering in that we have this impending when you say our, who are you referring to? Society. I think you know that's what they're. Dan: Yeah, that's what they're saying like across the board. Dean: Who are they? Yes, that's a great question. Dan: You know I hear this, but I don't experience any of it. I don't feel foisted upon. I don't feel overwhelmed. Dean: You know what I? Dan: think it is. I think it is that people who feel foisted upon have a tendency to talk about it to a lot of other people. Dean: But people who don't feel foisted upon. Dan: Don't mention it to anybody. Dean: It's very interesting. Do you know Chris Collins? Do you know Chris Collins? Dan: He wrote the really great book collection called I Am Leader. Dean: It's really something. He's a new genius. He's a new Genius Network member. Dan: Oh, Chris, oh yeah, oh yeah, chris, yeah, does he have repair shops? His main business is auto Auto. Dean: Yeah, oh yeah, chris, yeah, he does. He have repair shops His main business is auto, auto, auto dealership. Dan: He does auto dealerships. Dean: Yeah, that's right. Dan: Yeah, chris was in. Chris was in the program way back with 10 times around the same time when you came 10 times. He was in for about two years oh okay, interesting. Yeah and yeah, he was at the last Genius you know, and he's got a big, monstrous book that costs about $300. Dean: Yes, I was just going to talk about that. Yeah. Dan: We got one, but I didn't have room in my bags, you know. Dean: I budget. Dan: You know how much. Dean: I'm going to take and how much I'm going to bring back, and that was just too, much so, yeah, so yeah, yeah. He's very bothered. Oh, is he? Okay, yeah, I don't know him, I just I saw him. Dan: I got that what he talked about was this massive conspiracy. You know that they are doing it to them or they're doing it to us interesting interesting I don't experience that. What I experience is mostly nobody knows who I am. Dean: That's the best place to be right. Dan: They only know of you. Somebody was saying a very famous person showed up at a clinic in Costa Rica and he had eight bodyguards, eight bodyguards and I said yes, why is that expensive? That must be really expensive, having all those bodyguards. I mean, probably the least thing that was costly for one is having is having himself transformed by medical miracles. But having the bodyguards was the real expense. So I had a thought and I talked to somebody about this yesterday. Actually, I said my goal is to be as wealthy and famous just to the point where I would need a bodyguard. But not need the bodyguard just below where I would need a bodyguard, but not need the bodyguard Just below, where I would need a bodyguard, and I think that would be an excellent level of fame and wealth. Not only do you not have a bodyguard, but you don't think you would ever need one. That's the big thing, yeah. Dean: I love that. Dan: That that's good yeah that's a good aspiration yeah, yeah, so far I've succeeded yes, so far you are on the uh. Dean: Yeah, on the cusp of 81 six weeks seven weeks to go yeah, getting close. That's so good. Yeah, yeah, this. How is the new book coming? Dan: Yeah, good, well, I've got several because I have a quarterly book. Dean: Yeah, I'm at the big casting, not hiring. Dan: Yeah, really good. Each of us is delivering now a chapter per week, so it's really coming along. Great, yeah, and so we'll. Our date is may 26th for the everything in um before their editing can start, so they will have our, our draft will be in on may 26th and then it's over to the publisher and you know there'll be back and forth. But Jeff and I are pretty, jeff Madoff and I are pretty complete writers, you know. So you know it doesn't need normal. You know kind of looking at spelling and grammar. Dean: Right, right, right. Is that how you? Are you writing as one voice or you're writing One voice? One voice, one voice. Dan: Yeah, but we're writing actually in the second person, singular voice, so we're writing to the reader. So we're talking about you this and you this, and you this and you this, and that's the best way to do it, because if you can maintain the same voice all the way through, that's really good. I mean, jeff, we have a different style, but since we're talking to the reader all the way through, it actually works really well so far, and then we'll have you know, there'll be some shuffling and rearranging at the end. Dean: That's what I wondered. Are you essentially writing your separate, are you writing alternate chapters or you're writing your thoughts about one chapter? Dan: We have four parts and the first three parts are the whole concept of businesses that have gone theatrical, that have gone theatrical and we use examples like Ralph Lauren, Four Seasons. Hotel Apple. You know who have done Starbucks, who have done a really great job, and Jeff is writing all that because he's done a lot of work on that. He's, you know, he's been a professor at one of the New York universities and he has whole classes on how small companies started them by using a theatrical approach. They differentiated themselves extraordinarily in the marketplace, and he goes through all these examples. Plus he talks about what it's like to be actually in theater, which he knows a great deal about because he's a playwright and a producer. The fourth part is on the four by four casting tool and that's got five sections to it and where I'm taking people, the reader, who is an entrepreneur, a successful, talented, ambitious entrepreneur who wants to transform their company into a theatrical-like enterprise with everybody playing unique roles. So, that's how I've done it, so he's got the bigger writing job than I do but, mine is more directive. This is what you can do with the knowledge in this book. So we're writing it separately, and we're going to let the editor at the publishing house sort out any what goes where. Dean: Put it all together. Dan: Yeah, and we're doing the design on it, so we're pretty steadily into design projects you know, producing a new book. So we've got my entire team my team's doing all the backstage arrangements. Jeff is interviewing a lot of really great people in the theater world and you know anything having to do with casting. So he's got about. You know probably to do with casting. So he's got about probably about 12 major, 12 major interviews that he'll pull quotes from and my team is doing all the setup and the recording for him so so. Jeff. Jeff showed up as Jeff and I showed up as a team. That's great. Oh, that's great, that's awesome yeah, yeah, in comes, but not without six others, right, right with your. Dean: You know, I had a friend who used to refer to that as your utility belt. Right that you show up and you've got strapped on behind you. Dan: You've got your design, got it writing got it video, got it your whole. Yeah, strapped on behind you, you've got your design Got it Right. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: And capability crew. Yeah, and to a certain extent I'm role modeling the, the point of the book, you know, and the way we're going about this and and you know, and more and more so, I find probably every quarter my actual doing um of production and that gets less and less and I'm actually finding um, I'm actually finding my work with perplexity very useful because it's getting me better at prompting my team members yes yeah, with perplexity, if you don't give it the right prompt, you don't get the right outcome. You know, yeah, and more and more I'm noticing I'm getting better at giving really, really, really great prompts to my artists, to the writers who are working with me, the interviewers, everything so, um, yeah, so it's been very, very helpful. I I find uh, just in a year of perplexity, I've gotten much more uh precise about exactly what I want. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah, defining right. I mean that's pretty. Yeah, yeah, that's really great. And knowing that, a lot of it, so much of that prompting, that's the language that's been adopted for interfacing with AI, chat, gpt and perplexity. Dan: The prompts that you give are the things. Dean: But there's so much of that. That's true about team as well, right? Oh yeah, being a better AI prompter is a better team prompter. Yeah yeah, being a better AI prompter is a better team prompter. Dan: Yeah, yeah, and you know I have a book coming out Now that I'm talking to you about it it may be the next book that would start in June and it's called Technology Coaching Teamwork and it has like three upward arrows that are, uh, you know, in unison with each other. There are three and I said that I think in the 21st century all businesses really have three tracks to them. They have a technology track, they have a teamwork track and they have a coaching track in the middle and that um in the 20th century, we considered management to be the basis. You know, management is the basis for business but. I think management has actually been um superseded, um by um superseded by electronics, you know actually it's the electronics are now the management, the algorithms are now the management and then you have the people who are constantly, you know, creating new technology, and you have human teamwork that's creating new things, because it's ultimately humans that are knocking off everything you know right. And then in the middle is coaching, and coaching goes back and forth between the teamwork and the technology. Technology will always do a really shitty job of coaching yes, I bet that's true, and teams will always do a sort of shitty job of uh knowing how to use technology and there has to be an interface in the middle, that's a human interface and it's a coaching, because coaching takes in a lot of factors, not just action factors or planning factors, but it takes in aspirational factors. It takes in learning factors. It takes in, you know, all sorts of transformational factors and that's a, that's a mid role. Yeah. Dean: Yes, yeah. Dan: And if you look at what you do best, it's probably coaching. Dean: Yeah, I wonder. I mean that's kind of. Dan: Joe Polish. It was Joe Polish, where he probably does best. He's probably a great coach. Dean: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, I think that's true. I've really been getting a lot of insight around going through and defining the VCR formula. You know proposition, proof, protocol and property. That's a. I see the clarity that. You know. There's a different level of communication and intention between. Where my I really shine is between is propositions and proof, like getting something knowing, guessing. You know we were. I was going to talk today too about guessing and betting. I've been really thinking about that. That was a great exercise that we did in our workshop. But this idea that's really what this is is guessing. I seem to have this superpower for propositions, like knowing what would be the thing to do and then proving that. That's true. But then taking that proof and creating a protocol that can be packaged and become property is a. That's a different skill set altogether and it's not as much. It's not as much. My unique ability, my superpower zone, is taking, you know, making propositions and proving them. I'm a really good guesser. Dan: That's my strength yeah. Yeah, I think the what I'm doing because it's, um, I'm really thinking a lot about it based on the last, um, uh, free zone workshop, which I did on monday and, uh, you know, monday of the week before last in toronto, where you were yeah, and and then I did it on Thursday again and I reversed the whole day oh really I reversed the whole day. I started off with guessing and betting and then indecision versus bad decision. And then the afternoon I did the second company secret and it worked a lot better. The flow was a lot better. Company secret and it worked a lot better. The flow was a lot better. But the big thing is that people say well, how do I? Um, I I just don't know how I you know that. Um, I'm telling them and they're asking me. So I'm telling them every time you take your unique ability and help someone transform their DOS issues, you're actually creating perspective. Intellectual property. And they said, well, I don't see quite how that works. I don't see how that works, so I've been, you know, and I'm taking them seriously. They don't see how that works. So I said, well, the impact filter is actually the solution. Okay, because you do the DOS question with them. You know, if we were having this discussion a year from now and you were looking back over the year, what has to have happened for you to feel happy with your progress? Okay, and specifically, what dangers do you have that need to be eliminated, what opportunities do you have that need to be captured, and what strengths do you have that need to be maximized? And there's a lot of very interesting answers that are going to come out of that, and the answers actually their answers to your question actually are the raw material for creating intellectual property the reason being is that what they're saying is unique and how you're listening to it is unique because of your unique ability so the best thing is do it, do an impact filter on what your solution is. So the best solution is best result solution is this. Worst result solution is this. And then here are the five success criteria, the eight success criteria that we have to go through to achieve the best result and that is the basis for intellectual property. Dean: What you write in that thing. Dan: So that's where I'm going next, because I think if we can get a lot of people over that hump, you're going to see a lot more confidence about what they're creating as solutions and understanding that these solutions are property. Dean: Yes. Dan: That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm thinking. Dean: Yeah, that's your guessing and betting yeah yes I agree and I think that that uh you know, I mean, I've had that to me going through this exercise of thinking, through that vision, column you know that the ultimate outcome is property, and once you have that property, it becomes it's a capability. Dan: It's a capability. Now right, that's something that you have. If it's not property, it's an opportunity for somebody to steal something ah right exactly. Yeah, I just think there's an inhibition on the part of entrepreneurs that if they have a really neat solution but it's not named and packaged and protected, um, it isn't going to really do them any good because they're going to be afraid. Look, if I say this, I'm in a conference somewhere and I say this, somebody's going to steal it. Then they're going to use it, then I I can't stop them from doing that. So the way I'm going to stop people from stealing my creativity is not to tell people what I'm creating. Right, it's just, it's just going to be me in my basement. Dean: Yeah, I bet no. Dan: I bet the vast majority of creative entrepreneurs they're the only ones who know they're creative because they're afraid of sharing their creativity, because it's not distinct enough that they can name it and package it and project it, getting the government to give you a hand in doing that Right yeah. Yeah, and I don't know maybe it's just not a goal of theirs to have intellectual property. Maybe it's you know it's a goal of mine to have everything be intellectual property, but maybe it's just not the goal of a lot of other people. Dean: What do? Dan: you think. Dean: I think that once you start to understand what the practical you know value, the asset value of having intellectual property, I think that makes a big difference. I think that's where you're, I mean you're. It's interesting that you are certainly leading the way, you know. I found it fascinating when you mentioned that if you were, you know, were measured as a Canadian company, that it would be the ninth or something like that. Dan: Yeah, during a 12-month period 23 to 24,. Based on the research that the Globe and Mail Toronto paper did, that the biggest was one of the big banks. They had the most intellectual property and if our US patents counted in Canada because I think they were just, they were just counting Canadian government patents that we would have been number nine and we're. you know, we're a tiny little speck on the windshield, I mean we're not a big company, but what I notice when I look at Canada very little originality is coming out of Canada and, for example, the biggest Canadian company with patents during that 12-month period was TD Bank. Yeah, and they had 240. 240, I mean that might be how many Google send in in a week. You know that might be the number of patents. That wouldn't be necessarily a big week at Google or Amazon or any of the other big American, because Americans are really into Americans are really, really into property. That's why they want Greenland. Dean: And Panama. Dan: And Alberta. Dean: Panama, alberta and Greenland. Dan: And the Gulf of America, yeah, the Gulf of America and property. Dean: Even if it's not actual. They want titular property. Dan: Yes. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dan: And I haven't seen any complaints from Mexico. I mean, I haven't seen any complaints. Maybe there have been complaints, but we just haven't seen them. No, no, from now on it's the Gulf of America, which I think is rather important, and when Google just switches, I mean, google hasn't been a very big Trump fan and yet they took it seriously. Yeah, now all the tech's official. It's interesting talking to people and they say what's happening? What's happening? We don't know what's happening. I say, well, it's like the end of a Monopoly game. One of the things you have to do when you end one Monopoly game is all the pieces have to go back in the box, like Scrabble. You play Scrabble, all the pieces go back in the box at the end of a game. And I said, this is the first time since the end of the Second World War that a game is ending and all the pieces are going back into the box, except when you get to the next step. It's a bigger box, it's a different game board, there's more pieces and different rules. So this is what's happening right now. It's a new game the old game is over, new game is starting and, um, if you just watch what donald trump's doing, you're getting an idea what the new game is. Yeah, I think you're right, and one of the new game is intellectual property. Intellectual property I think this is one of the new parts of the new game. And the other thing is it's all going to be one-to-one deals. I don't think there's going to be any more multi-party deals. You know, like the North American Free Trade Act, supposedly is the United States, canada and Mexico In Europe. If you look at it, it's Canada and Mexico, it's Mexico and the United States and it's the United States and Canada. These are separate deals. They're all separate deals. That's what I think is happening. States, Canada and these are separate deals. They're all separate deals. Oh, interesting, yeah, and that's what I think is happening. It's just one-to-one. No more multilateral stuff it's all one-to-one. For example, the US ambassador is in London this week and they're working out a deal between the UK and the United States, so no tariffs apply to British, british products oh interesting yeah and you'll see it like the European Union. I was saying the European Union wants to have a deal and I said European Union, where is the European Union? You know where is? That anyway, yeah yeah, I mean, if you look at the United Nations, there's no European Union. If you look at NATO, there's no European Union. If you look at the G20 of countries, there's no European Union. There's France, there's Germany. You know, there's countries we recognize. And I think the US is just saying if you don't have a national border and you don't have a capital, and you don't have a government, we don't think it exists. We just don't think it exists. And Trump often talks about that 28 acres on the east side of Manhattan. He says boy, boy. What we could do with that right, oh, what we could do with that. You know they should. Just, you know who can do that. Who can do? United Nations, switzerland, send it to Switzerland. You know that'd be a nice place for the send it to there, you know like that and it just shows you that that was all. All those institutions were really a result of the Second World War and the Cold War, which was just a continuation of the Second World War. So I think that's one of the really big things that's happening in the world right now. And the other thing I want to talk to you about is Doge. I think Doge is one of the most phenomenally big breakthroughs in world history. What's happening with Elon Musk and his team. Dean: Yeah, I know you've been really following that with great interest. Tell me what's the latest. Dan: It's the first time in human history that you can audit government, bureauc, audit government, bureaucratic government, the part of government. You don't see Millions and millions of people who are doing things but you don't know what they're doing. There's no way of checking what they're doing. There's no way for them. And it was proven because Musk, about four weeks ago, sent out a letter to every federal employee, said last week, tell me five things that you did. And the results were not good. Dean: Well, I think the same thing is happening when people are questioned about their at-home working accomplishments too. Yeah, but that's the Well, lamar Lark, you know. Dan: Lamar. I don't think you've ever met Lamar. He's in the number one Chicago Free Zone workshops, so we have two and a quarter and he's in the first one. And he has all sorts of interesting things. He's got Chick-fil-A franchises and other things like that, okay, and he created his own church, which is a very I have met Lamar yeah, which is a very American activity. Dean: It creates your own church, you know yes yes, yeah. Dan: That's why Americans are so religious is because America is the first country that turned religion into an entrepreneurial activity. Got yourself a hall. You could do it right there in the courtyard of the Valhalla. How many chairs could you? If you really pushed it, how many chairs could you get into the courtyard? Let's see One, two three, four, five, not like the chair you're sitting on. No, I'm kidding. Dean: I'm just envisioning it. I could probably get 50 chairs in here. Dan: You got yourself, you know and set it up right, Get a good tax description yeah, you got yourself a religion there. That's great. And you're kind of tending in that direction with the word Valhalla, that's exactly right. Dean: Yes, would you. Dan: I'd pay to spend an hour or two on Sunday with you. Dean: But here's the big question, Dan Would you be committed enough to tithe? Dan: Oh yes, oh yes. Dean: Then we'd really be on to something you know. We could just count on you for your tithe to the church. That would be. Dan: That would really get us on our feet, but anyway, I was telling this story about Lamar. So he and his wife have a friend, a woman, who works for the federal government in Chicago, and so they were just talking over dinner to the person and they said, well, what's your day work, what's your day you know when do you go into the? office. When do you go into the office? When do you go into the office? And she says, oh, I haven't been to the office since before COVID. No, I know we are the office. And so they said, well, how does your home day work? And she says, well, at 830, you got to. You got to check in at 830. You check in at 830, you go online and then you put your j in at 8.30. Dean: You check in at 8.30, you go online and then you put your jiggler on Jiggler, exactly I've heard about this and they said what's the jiggler? Dan: Well, the jiggler moves. Your mouse keeps checking into different. It keeps switching to different files, positions, yeah, yeah, files. And that's the only thing that they can record from the actual office is that you're busy moving from one file to the other. And he says, well, what are you doing while that's happening? She said, well, I do a lot of shopping, you know I go out shopping and we have you know, and they come back and it goes from. You know it'll stop because there's coffee time, so we'll stop for 10 minutes for coffee and then it'll stop for lunch and stop for afternoon coffee. And then I checked out and I always check in five minutes early and I always check five minutes late, that's amazing, isn't it? that's what that's what elon Elon Musk is discovering, because Elon Musk's AI can actually discover what they did, and then it's hard for the person to answer what were the five things you did last week? You know, and the truth is that I think I'm not saying that all civil servants are worthless. I'm not saying that at all. You have it right now. It's recorded here. Your mechanism is recording that. I'm not saying that all civil servants are worthless but I do think it's harder and harder for civil servants to prove their value, because you may have gone to five important meetings, but I bet those meetings didn't produce any result. It's hard for any civil servant and you can say what you did last week. I can say what I did last week, but you were basically just meeting with yourself. Yeah, that's I saw somebody and you produce something and you made a decision and something got created and that's easy to prove. But I don't think it's easy in the civil service to prove the value of what you did the greatest raw resource in America for taking money that's being spent one way taking that money away and spending on something else. I think this is the greatest source of financial transformation going forward, because about 15 states all of them Republican states have gotten in touch with Elon Musk and say whatever you're doing in Washington, we want to do here, and I just he believes, according to his comments, that every year there's $3 trillion that's being badly spent $3 trillion you know, I got my little finger up to my mouth. $3 trillion, you know, this is that's a lot of you know, I'm at the point where I think a million is still a big deal. You know, trillion is uh, yeah, uh. Dean: I saw that somebody had invented a uh algorithm reader. They detected an algorithm in the like a fingerprint in the jiggler software. Oh that, yeah, so that you can overlay this thing and it would be able to identify that that's a jiggler that's a jiggler. Dan: That's a jiggler yeah, you got to because behind the jiggler is the prompter. Dean: The jiggler busters. Dan: Yes, exactly, he was on. He was interviewed, he and six members of his Doge team, you know, and how they're talking about them being 19 and 20 year olds, about them being 19 and 20 year olds. These were part. These were powerful people who had stepped away from their companies and their jobs just for the chance to work with the Elon. One guy had five companies. He's from Houston, he had five companies and he's taken leave from his company for a year. Just to work on the doge project. Yeah, and so that guy was talking and he said you know what we discovered? The small business administration, he said, last year gave 300 million dollars in loans to children under 11 years old wow to their to that a person who had their social security number, their social insurance number. Right, and during that same year, we gave $300 million in loans to people who were over 120 years old. Dean: Wow. Dan: That's $600 million. That's $600 million, that's almost a billion. Anyway, that's happening over and over. They're just discovering these and those checks are arriving somewhere and somebody's cashing those checks, but it's not appropriate. So I think this is the biggest deal. I think this changes everything, and I've noticed that the Democratic Party is in a tailspin, and has been especially since they started the Doge project, because the people doing the jiggling and the people who where the checks are going to the run I bet 90% of them are Democrats the money's going to democratic organizations, since going to democratic individuals and they're going to be cash strapped. You know that they've been. This isn't last year, this goes back 80 years. This has been going on since the New Deal, when the Democrats really took over Washington. And I bet this I bet they can track all the checks that went back 80 years. Dean: I mean, this is that's really something, isn't it? I was just thinking about yeah, this kind of transparency is really like. I think, when you really get down to it, we're getting to a point where there's the market does not support inefficiency anymore. It's not baked in. If you have workers for instance, most of the time you have salaried workers your real expectation is that they're going to be productive. I don't know what the actual stats are, do you know? But let's say that they're going to be actually productive for 50% of the time. But you look at now just the ability to, especially on task-related things or AI type of things um, collins, chris no, chris johnson's um, um, oh yeah um uh, you know the the ai dialers there, of being able, there's zero. Dan: They were doing, um, you know they were doing. Maybe you know the dialers were doing. You know, because some of the sometimes the other, the person at the other end they answered and they'd have a you know five minute call or something like that. So in a day in a day, like they have an eight hour thing they might do you know. 50, 50 call outs 50 or 60 calls yeah, his. Ai does 25,000 calls a minute. Dean: Exactly that's. What I mean is that those things are just that everything is compressed. Now there's no, because it's taken out all the air, all the fluff around it. What humans come with. You're right what you said earlier about all the pieces going back in the box and we're totally reset. Yeah, I think we're definitely that you know yeah and the thing thing about this. Dan: What I found interesting is that the request coming in from the states that they moved the doge you know the process department of government efficiency that I. I think he's putting together a vast system that can be applied to any government you know, it could be, and, uh, and, but the all the requests came in from republican states, not from Democratic states, waste and abuse and waste and fraud. probably for the over last 80 years, has been the party in the United States which was most invested in the bureaucracy of the government you know. And yeah, I mean, do you know anybody who works for the government? I mean actually, I mean you may have met the person, but I mean, do you know anybody who works for the government? I mean actually, I mean you may have met the person but I mean, I don't know. Do you do, do you know anybody who works for the government? I don't believe, I do, really, and I do, and I don't either right, I don't I don't, I don't, neither you know I mean, I mean everybody I know is an entrepreneur everybody I know is entrepreneurial. And yeah, the people who aren't entrepreneurial are the families. You know they would be family connections of the entrepreneurs. I just don't know anybody who works for the government. You know, I've been 50 years and I can't say I know anybody who works for the government but, there's lots of them. Yeah, yeah so they don't they. They're not involved in entrepreneurial circles, that's for sure. Dean: It's Ontario Hydro or Ontario Power Generation. Is that the government? No, that's the government, then I do. I know one person. I know one person that works for the government. Dan: All right, Send him an email and say what are five things you did last week? Yeah, what? Dean: did you do last week? Dan: Oh my goodness, that's so funny, impress me. Dean: Yes. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I think it's a stage in technological development, I think it's a state, just where it has to do with the ability to measure, and this has been a vast dark space government that you can't really, yeah, and in fairness to them, they couldn't measure themselves. In other words, that they didn't have the ability, even if they were honest and forthright and they were committed and they were productive, they themselves did not have the ability to measure their own activities until now. And I think, and I think now they will, and I think now they will, and, but but anyway, I just think this is a major, major event. This is this is equal to the printing press. You know this is equal to to electricity. You can measure what government does electricity. You can measure what government does In the history of human beings. This is a major breakthrough. That's amazing. Dean: So great Look around. You don't want a time to be alive. Dan: Yeah, I mean depending on where you work I guess that's absolutely true. Dean: I've been listening to, uh I was just listening, uh just started actually a podcast about uh, thomas edison, uh this is a really great podcast, one of my great, one of my great heroes. Yes, exactly, the podcast is called Founders. Dan: Founders yeah. Dean: Founders. Yeah, david Sunra, I think, is the guy's name and all he does is he reads biographies and then he gives his insights on the biographies. It's just a single voice podcast. It's not like guests or anything, it's just him breaking down his lessons and notes from reading certain reading these biographies and it's really well done. But he had what turned me on he did. I first heard a podcast he did about Albert Lasker, who was the guy, the great advertising guy, the man who sold America and yeah, so I've been listening through and very interesting. But the Thomas Edison thing I'm at the point where he was talking about his first things. He sold some telegraph patent that he had an idea that he had created for $40,000, which was like you know a huge amount of money back then and that allowed him to set up Menlo Park. And then at the time Menlo Park was kind of out in the middle of nowhere and you know they asked why would you set up out there? And no distractions. And he created a whole you know a whole environment of where people were undistracted and able to invent and what you know. If they get bored, what are they going to do? They're going to invent something, just creating this whole environment. Dan: Well, he wasn't distractible because he was largely deaf. He had childhood injury, yeah, so he wasn't distracted by other people talking because he couldn't really make out. So you know, he had to focus where he could focus. And yeah, there is actually in my hometown, which his hometown is called Milan, ohio. I grew up two miles. I grew up I wasn't born there, but when I was two years old, we moved to a farm there. It was two miles from Edison. His home is there. It's a museum. Dean: Milan. Dan: Ohio and that was 1830s, somewhere 1838, something like that. I'm not quite sure. But there's a business in Norwalk, Ohio, where we moved from the farm when I was 11 years old Ohio, where we moved from the farm when I was 11 years old, and there's a business in there that started off as a dynamo company. Dynamo was sort of like an electric generator. Dean: Yeah, and we had dynamo in Georgetown. Dan: on the river, yeah, and that business continues since the mid-1800s, that business continues, and everything like that. My sense is that Edison put everything together that constitutes the modern scientific technological laboratory. In other words that Menlo Park is the first time you've really put everything together. That includes, you know, the science, the technology, the experimentation the creation of patents, the packaging of the new ideas, getting investment from Wall Street and everything. He created the entire gateway for the modern technological corporation, I think. Dean: I think that's amazing, very nice. I like to look at the. I like to trace the timelines of something right, like when you realize it's very interesting when you think and you hear about the lore and you look at the accomplishments of someone like Thomas Edison or Leonardo da Vinci or anybody, you look at the total of what you know about what they were able to accomplish, but when you granularly get down to the timeline of it, you don't, like you realize how. I think I remember reading about da vinci. I think he spent like seven years doing just this one uh, one period of projects. That was uh, um. So he puts it in perspective right of a of the, the whole of a career, that it really breaks down to the, the individual, uh chapters, that that make it up, you know, yeah, and it's funny, I've written about somebody, Jim Collins the good to great author. I heard him. His kind of hero was Peter Drucker and he remembers going to Peter Drucker and he had a bookshelf with all of his books. I think he had like 90 books or something that he had written, Peter Drucker, and he had them. Jim Collins set them up on his bookshelf and he would move a piece of tape that shows his current age against the age that Peter Drucker was when he had written those things and he realized that at you know, 50 years old, something like you know, 75% of Peter Drucker's work was after that age and even into his 80s or whatever. Dan: Yeah, most of my work is after 70. I was just going to say yeah, exactly, I look at that. You look at all of the things and then at 70, yeah, yeah, the actual stuff I've created is really yeah, that's when I really started to produce a lot after 70. Dean: Mm-hmm. Dan: Yeah, a lot of R&D. I did a lot of R&D. Dean: Right. Dan: Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, my goal is that 80 to 90 will be much more productive than 70 to 80. Yeah, I was talking to someone today interesting, very interesting physical fitness guy here in Toronto and he's a really great chiropractor so he's working. So I have I'm making great progress with the structural repair of my left knee. But there's all sorts of functional stuff that has to come along with it and he's my main man for doing this. But he was talking, he's 50, and he said you know, my goal is that 60 to 70 is going to be my most active part of my life, you know, from mountain climbing to all these different really high endurance athletics and sports, and so we got talking and I just shared with him the idea that the real goal you should have or which covers a lot of other areas is that, if you're like my goal for 90, I'm just going on 81, my goal for 90 is that I'm more ambitious at 90 than I am at the present. Dean: And. Dan: I said that's what that almost seems impossible, impossible well, well it is if you're just looking at yourself as a single individual yeah but if you're looking at yourself as someone who has an expand team, it's actually very possible. Dean: Yeah, yeah yeah, you're mine are those potato chips no, it's a piece of cellophane wrapped around something. That was the word right Retired. And they've been retired for about five years or so and I hadn't seen them in a couple of years. But it's really interesting to, at 72, the uh, you know the, just the level you can tell just physically and everything mentally, everything about them. They're on the, the decline phase of the thing they're not ramping up. You know, like just physically they are, um, you know they're, they're big, um cruisers. You know they've been going on cruises now every every six weeks or so, but, um, but yeah, no, no, uh, no more golf, no more. Like you see, they're intentionally kind of winding things down, resigning to the yeah. Dan: Yeah, it's very interesting. I don't know if you caught it in the news. It was, I think, right at the end of January. But you know the name Daniel Kahneman. Dean: I know the name. Yeah, thinking fast and slow. Dan: Fast thinking slow yeah, he committed suicide in Switzerland. Dean: I did not know that. When was that he? Dan: was 90 years old, I think it was January 28th. Dean: And it was all planned out. Dan: It was all planned out and he went to Switzerland to do it, because they have the legal framework where you can do that and everything else. And I found it so interesting that I did a whole bunch of perplexity searches and I said, because he was very influential, I never read his book, because I read the first five or 10 pages and it just didn't seem that interesting to me and it seemed like he had. You know that he's famous for that book and he's famous for it, and it seemed to be that he's kind of like a one trick pony. You know, he's got a great book that really changed things. And then I started looking. I said, well, what else did he do besides that one book? And it's not too much. And he did that, you know, 40 years ago. It was sort of something he did 40 years ago. Dean: Wow. Dan: And I just said gee, I wonder if he, you know, he just hasn't been real productive. Wonder if he, you know, he just hasn't been real productive, not not starting in january, but he hadn't been real productive over the last 20 or 30 years and he did that. Dean: Uh, and anyway, you know, I don't know. I don't know that I've been living under a rock or whatever. I didn't even realize that this was a real thing. I have a good friend in Canada whose grandfather is tomorrow scheduled for assisted. It's a big thing in Canada. Dan: Canada is the most leading country in incidents of people being assisted in committing suicide. Dean: Yeah, and. Dan: I have my suspicions. It's a way for the government to cut checks to old people. You know like assist them to leave. You know I mean it's just. What a confusing set of emotions that must bring up for someone you love. Confusing and disturbing about his committing suicide and it's really a big topic, you know, because he was saying you can always get on top of whatever you're experiencing and get useful lessons from it, right? Dean: and I said. Dan: I said, well, you must have reached an empty week or something. You know I I don't know what, what happened I, you know I mean right and uh, cause I I'm finding um the experience of being 80, the experience of being 70 and 80, very, very fruitful for coming up with new thoughts and coming up with new ideas right, you know and what, what is still important when you're uh, you know, still important when you're. you know what is even more important and what is even more clear when you're 80. That wasn't clear when you were 50 or 60. I think that's a useful thought. You know that's a useful thought, yeah, but it's really interesting. I never find suicide is understandable. Dean: I know, yeah, I get it. I see that you think about that too. I've had that. I've had some other people, my cousin, years and years ago was the first person kind of close to me that had committed suicide, and you know. But you always think it's just like you, I can't imagine that like I. I can imagine, uh, just completely like disappearing or whatever you know starting off somewhere else, like complete, you know, reset, but not something that that final, you know. Dan: You know, I can understand just extreme, intolerable pain you know, I mean. I can, I can, I can totally get that. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah, I mean, it's just you. You just can't go through another day of it. I I just totally understand that but, where it's more of a psychological emotional you get a, got yourself in a corner and that, uh then, um, you know, I don't really, um, I don't really comprehend what's going on there. You know, I I obviously something's going on, but I you know, I, I obviously something's going on, but I, just from, I've never had a suicidal thought. I mean, you know, I've had some low points, I've had some, but even on my low points I had something that was fun that day you know Right Right, right Right. Or I had an interesting thought. Yeah, right. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Dan: Well, I'm glad we hit on that topic because I said, you may think I know that the person doing it has a completely logical reason for doing it. It's just not a logic that can be explained easily to other people yeah, when you're not in that spot. I get it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah anyway this was a good one. This was a good one. Yeah, now okay, wait actually yeah, I'll be calling from chicago next week. Dean: Okay, perfect I'll be here, yeah, um, yeah, I want to. I'd love to, um, if we remember, and if we don't, that's fine too, but if we remember, you brought up something the I would love to see and maybe talk about the difference between uh, you know, between 60, 70, 80, your thoughts of those things. Yeah, you're getting to that point I'm 22 years behind you, so I'm just turning 59 right before you turn 81. Dan: So that'd be something I'll put some thought to it. I love it. Dean: Okay. Dan: Perfect, thanks, dan. All right, okay, thanks, bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we reflect on how places, people, and experiences shape our perspectives. The conversation begins with casual observations, from warm weather making transitions easier to memorable encounters like “Spam Man,” a mysterious figure spotted at the Hazleton Hotel. We also explore the impact of changing landscapes, both physical and cultural. From real estate in Toronto to how cities evolve, we discuss how development can shape or diminish the character of a place. This leads to a broader conversation about timeless architecture, like Toronto's Harris Filtration Plant, and how thoughtful design contributes to a city's identity. Technology's role in daily life also comes up, especially how smartphones dominate attention. A simple observation of people walking through Yorkville reveals how deeply connected we are to our screens, often at the expense of real-world engagement. We contrast this with the idea that some things, like human connection and cooperation, remain unchanged even as technology advances. The discussion closes with thoughts on long-term impact—what lasts and fades over time. Whether it's historic buildings, enduring habits, or fundamental human behaviors, the conversation emphasizes that while trends come and go, specific principles and ways of thinking remain relevant across generations. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In Phoenix, during a rooftop party, we witnessed a surprise appearance of a SpaceX rocket, which sparked our discussion on extraordinary events blending with everyday life. We explored the curious case of "Spam man," a local legend in Hazleton, whose mysterious persona intrigued us as much as any UFO sighting. We shared our fascination with the dynamic real estate landscape in Hazleton, discussing new constructions and their impact on scenic views. Our conversation touched on unique weather patterns at the beaches near the lake, emphasizing the influence of water temperatures on seasonal climate variations. We delved into the topic of warmer winters, reflecting on how both humans and nature adapt to milder temperatures, particularly during February 2024. Our discussion included insights from Morgan Housel's book, which inspired our reflections on nature's resilience and adaptation over millions of years. We highlighted local activities like windsurfing and kite skiing, noting the favorable wind conditions at the beaches, a rarity in Canada's cold-weather climate. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Mr Jackson. I hope you behaved when you were out of my sight. Dean: I did. I'll have to tell you something. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the arrangement of this warm weather. For me, it's made the transition much more palatable warm weather. Dan: for me it's made the transition much more palatable. Dean: I mean our backstage team is really getting good at this sort of thing, and you know when we were in. Dan: we were in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago and we had a rooftop party and right in the middle of the party we arranged for Elon Musk to send one of his rockets out. Dean: I saw that a satellite launch yeah. Dan: Yeah, can you imagine that guy and how busy he is? But just you know, just to handle our request he just ended up with, yeah, must be some money involved with that. Dean: Well, that's what happens, Dan. We have a positive attitude on the new budget. Dan: Yeah, and you think in terms of unique ability, collaboration, you know, breakthroughs free zone you know, all that stuff, it's all. Dean: it's the future. Dan: Yeah. So good Well he sent the rocket up and they're rescuing the astronauts today. Dean: Oh, is that right? How long has it been now since they've been? Dan: It's been a long time seven, eight months, I think, Uh-huh, yeah and Boeing couldn't get them down. Boeing sent them up, but they couldn't get them down. You know, which is only half the job, really. Dean: That was in the Seinfeld episode about taking the reservation and holding the reservation. Yeah. They can take the reservation. They just can't hold the reservation yeah. Dan: It's like back really the integral part. Back during the moonshot, they thought that the Russians were going to be first to the moon. Kennedy made his famous speech. You know we're going to put a man on and they thought the Russians, right off the bat, would beat him, because Kennedy said we'll bring him back safely and the Russians didn't include that in their prediction. That's funny. Dean: We had that. We're all abuzz with excitement over here at the Hazleton. There's a funny thing that happened. It started last summer that Chad Jenkins Krista Smith-Klein is that her name yeah, yeah. So we were sitting in the lobby one night at the Hazleton here and this guy came down from the residences into the lobby. It was talking to the concierge but he had this Einstein-like hair and blue spam t-shirts that's, you know, like the can spam thing on it and pink, pink shorts and he was, you know, talking to the concierge. And then he went. Then he went back upstairs and this left such an impression on us that we have been, you know, lovingly referring to him as Spam man since the summer, and we've been every time here on alert, on watch, because we have to meet and get to know Spam man, because there's got to be a story behind a guy like that in a place like this. And so this morning I had coffee with Chad and then Chad was going to get a massage and as he walked into the spa he saw Spamman and he met him and he took a picture, a selfie, with him and texted it. But I haven't that. His massage was at 10 o'clock, so all I have is the picture and the fact that he met Spamman, but I haven't that. His massage was at 10 o'clock, so all I have is the picture and the fact that he met Spam man, but I don't have the story yet. But it's just fascinating to me that this. I want to hear the story and know this guy now. I often wonder how funny that would appear to him. That made such an impression on us last summer that every time we've been at the Hazleton we've been sitting in the lobby on Spam man. Watch, so funny. I'll tell you the story tomorrow. I'll get to the bottom of it. Dan: It's almost like UFO watchers. They think they saw it once and they keep going back to the same place you know hoping that'll happen again, yeah. Dean: Is there a? Dan: spot. Is there a spot at the Hazleton? Dean: There is yeah. Dan: Oh, I didn't know that. Dean: So there's some eclectic people that live here, like seeing just the regulars or whatever that I see coming in and out of the of the residence because it shares. Dan: There's a lot, you know, yeah that's a that's pretty expensive real estate. Actually, the hazelton, yeah for sure, especially if you get the rooftop one, although they've destroyed I I think you were telling me they've destroyed the value of the rooftop because now they're building 40-story buildings to block off the view. Dean: I mean that's crazy. Right Right next door. Yeah, yeah, but there you go. How are things in the beaches as well? Dan: Yeah. You know it's interesting because we're so close to the lake it's cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, you know. Dean: Oh, okay. Dan: You know, because controlled by water temperatures. Dean: Water temperatures. Dan: Yes, exactly, I mean even you know, even if it's cold, you know the water temperature is maybe 65, 66. Dean: Fahrenheit, you know it's not frigid. Dan: It's not frigid. Dean: They have wintertime plungers down here people who go in you know during the winter yeah, but this is that you and babs aren't members of the polar bear club that would not be us um but anyway, uh, they do a lot of uh windsurfing. Dan: There's at the far end of our beach going uh towards the city. They have really great wind conditions there. You see the kite skiers. They have kites and they go in the air. It's quite a known spot here. I mean, canada doesn't have too much of this because we're such a cold-weather country. There isn't the water, it's pretty cold even during the summertime yeah exactly yeah, but the lake doesn't freeze, that's oh, it does, it does yeah, yeah we've had, we've had winters, where it goes out, you know, goes out a quarter mile it'll be. Dean: I didn't realize that Wow. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but not this winter. It never froze over this winter, but we have, you know, within the last two or three winters, we've had ice on the. We've had ice, you know, for part of the winter. Dean: It's funny to me, dan, to see this. Like you know, it's going gonna be 59 degrees today, so, yeah, it's funny to me to see people you know out wearing shorts and like, but it must be like a, you know, a heat wave. Compared to what? You had in the first half of march here, right, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, so that's good. Dan: Yeah, last February not this past month, but February of 2024, we had 10 days in February where it was over 70. Dean: And. Dan: I often wonder if the trees get pulled, the plants get pulled. Dean: It triggers them to like hey, oh my. Dan: God. But apparently temperature is just one of the factors that govern their behavior. The other one is the angle of the light. Dean: And that doesn't change the angle of the sunlight. Dan: Yeah, so they. You know I mean things work themselves out over millions of years. So you know there's, you know they probably have all sorts of indicators and you have 10 boxes to check and if only one of them is checked, that doesn't, it doesn't fool them. You know they have a lot of things that I sent you and I don't know if we ever discussed it or you picked it up after I recommended it was Morgan Housel, famous ever. Dean: Did you like that? Did you like that? Dan: book. I did, I loved. It was Morgan Housel famous ever. Did you like that? Did you like that book? Dean: I did, I loved it. I mean it was really like, and I think ever you know, very, very interesting to me because of what I've been doing, you know the last little while, as I described, reading back over you know 29 years of journals, picking random things and seeing so much of what, so much of what, the themes that go that time feels the last. You know 30 years has gone by so fast that I, when I'm reading in that journal, I can remember exactly like where I was and I can remember the time because I would date and place them each journal entry. So I know where I was when I'm writing them. But I thought that was a really, I thought it was a really interesting book. What stood out for you from? Dan: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that really great things take a long time to create. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Because they have to be tested against all sorts of changing conditions and if they get stronger, it's like you know they're going to last for a long time. Dean: And. Dan: I'm struck by it because the book, the little book that I'm writing for the quarter, is called the Bill of Rights Economy and the Bill of Rights really started with the United States. It was December 15th 1791. So that's when, I think, washington was just inaugurated at that time as the first president. But, how durable they are, and you can read the newspaper every day of things going on in Washington and you can just check off the first 10 amendments. This is a Fifth Amendment issue. This is a second amendment you know and everything like that, and it's just how much they created such a durable framework for a country. They were about 3 million people at that time and now there are 300 and whatever probably upwards of 350 million. And basically, the country runs essentially according to those first 10 amendments and then the articles which say how the machinery of government actually operates. And it's by far the longest continuous governing system in the world. That's really interesting. But that's why you know I really like things that you know, that you know that have stood the test of time. I like having my life based on things that have stood the test of time. And then I've got, you know, I've got some really good habits which I've developed over the last 50 years of coaching. Got, you know, I've got some really good habits which I've developed over the last 50 years of coaching and you know they work. You know I don't fool around with things that work. Yeah Well, I want to bring in something. I really am more and more struck how there's a word that's used in the high technology field because I was just at Abundance 360. And it's the word disruption and it's seen as a good thing, and I don't see disruption as good. I don't really see it as a good thing. I see it as something that might happen as a result of a new thing, but I don't think the disruption is a good thing. Dean: Yeah, it feels like it's not. It seems like the opposite of collaboration. Yeah, it really is. It feels like the negative. You know the I forget who said it, but you know the two ways they have the biggest building. Dan: I really mean Chucky movie. Dean: Yeah, there was somebody said the two ways to have the biggest building in town, the tallest building is to build the tallest building or to tear down all the other buildings that are taller than yours, and that's what disruption feels like to see in the real estate industry is always one that is, you know, set up as the big fat cat ready for disruption. And people have tried and tried to disrupt the real estate industry and, you know, I came away from the first, the first abundance 360, realizing that, you know, perhaps the thing that same makes real estate possible is that you can't digitize the last hundred feet of a real estate transaction. You know, and I think that there are certain industries, certain things that we are, that there's a human element to things. Dan: That is very yeah, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting just to switch on to that subject. On the real, estate. If you take Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street, who are the richest people in the area Silicon? Dean: Valley. Dan: Hollywood and Wall Street. Who are the richest people in the area? Dean: Silicon Valley Hollywood and Wall Street. Dan: Who are the real money makers? Dean: Yeah, Wall Street. Dan: No, the real estate developers. Dean: Oh, I see, oh, the real estate developers. Oh yeah, yeah, that's true, right, that's true. Dan: I don't care what you've invented or what your activity is. I'll tell you the people who really make the money are the people who are into real estate. Dean: Yeah, you can't digitize it, that's for sure. Dan: Well, I think the answer is in the word. It's real. Dean: What was that site, dan, that you were talking about? That was is it real? Or is it Bach or whatever? Or is it Guy or whatever? What was? Or is it AI or Bach? Dan: Well, no, I was. Yeah, I was watching. It was a little, you know, it was on YouTube and it was Bach versus AI. Dean: So what they've? Dan: done. You know you can identify the. You know the building components that Bach uses to you know to write his music and then you know you can take it apart and you know you can say do a little bit of this, do a little bit of this, do a little bit of this. And then what they have? They play two pieces. They play an actual piece by Bach and then they play another piece which is Bach-like you know, and there were six of them. And there was a of them and there was a host on the show and he's a musician, and whether he was responding realistically or whether he was sort of faking it, he would say boy, I can't really tell that one, but I guessed on all six of them and I guessed I guessed right. Dean: I know there was just something about the real Bach and I think I think it was emotional more than you know that could be the mirror neurons that you know you can sense the transfer of emotion through that music, you know. Dan: Yeah, and I listen to Bach a lot I still get surprised by something he's got these amazing chord changes you know, and what he does. And my sense is, as we enter more and more into the AI world, our you know, our perceptions and our sensitivities are going to heighten to say is that the real deal or not? Dean: you know yeah sensitivities are going to heighten to say is that the real deal or not? You know, and yeah, that's what you know, jerry Spence, I think I mentioned. Dan: Jerry Spence about that that Jerry Spence said. Dean: our psychic tentacles are in the background measuring everything for authenticity, and they can detect the thin clank of the counterfeit. Yeah, and I think that's no matter what. You can always tell exactly. I mean, you can tell the things that are digitized. It's getting more and more realistic, though, in terms of the voice things for AI. I'm seeing more and more of those voice caller showing up in my news feed, and we were talking about Chris Johnson. Chris Johnson, yeah, yeah, chris Johnson. Dan: This is really good because he's really fine-tuned it to. First of all, it's a constantly changing voice. That's the one thing I noticed. The second version, first version, not so much, but I've heard two versions of the caller. And what I noticed is, almost every time she talks, there's a little bit of difference to the tone. There's a little bit, you know, and she's in a conversation. Dean: Is it mirroring kind of thing, Like is it adapting to the voice on the other end? Dan: Yeah, I think there's. I certainly think there's some of that. And that is part of what we check out as being legitimate or not, because you know that it wouldn't be the same, because there's meaning. You know meaning different meaning, different voice, if you're talking to an actual individual who's not you know, who's not real monotonic. But yeah, the big thing about this is that I think we get smarter. I was talking, we were on a trip to Israel and we were talking in this one kibbutz up near the Sea of Galilee and these people had been in and then they were forced out. In 2005, I think it was, the Israeli government decided to give the Gaza territory back to the Palestinians. But it was announced about six months before it happened and things changed right away. The danger kicked up. There was violence and you know, kicked up. And I was talking to them. You know how can you send your kids out? You know, just out on their own. And they said, oh, first thing that they learned. You know he said three, four or five years old. They can spot danger in people. You know, if they see someone, they can spot danger with it. And I said boy oh boy, you know, it just shows you the, under certain conditions, people's awareness and their alertness kicks up enormously. They can take things into account that you went here in Toronto, for example. You know, you know, you know that's wild. Dean: Yeah, this whole, I mean, I think in Toronto. Dan: The only thing you'd really notice is who's offering the biggest pizza at the lowest price. Dean: Oh, that's so funny. There's some qualitative element around that too. It's so funny. You think about the things that are. I definitely see this Cloudlandia-enhan. You know that's really what the main thing is, but you think about how much of what's going on. We're definitely living in Cloudlandia. I sat last night, dan, I was in the lobby and I was writing in my journal, and I just went outside for a little bit and I sat on one of the benches in the in front of the park. Oh yeah, in front of the hotel and it was a beautiful night. Dan: Like I mean temperature was? Dean: yeah, it was beautiful. So I'm sitting out there, you know, on a Saturday night in Yorkville and I'm looking at March. I'm just yeah, I'm just watching, and I left my phone. I'm making a real concerted effort to detach from my oxygen tank as much as I can. Right, and my call, that's what I've been calling my iPhone right, because we are definitely connected to it. And I just sat there without my phone and I was watching people, like head up, looking and observing, and I got to. I just thought to myself I'm going to count, I'm going to, I'm going to observe the next 50 people that walk by and I'm going to see how many of them are glued to their phone and how many have no visible phone in sight, and so do you. Dan: What was it? Nine out of 10? Dean: Yeah, it wasn't even that. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It was 46, but it wasn't even 10. Yeah, it was real. That's exactly what it was. It was 46. Dan: It wasn't even 10%, it was 19. It wasn't even no, it was 19 out of 20. Dean: Yeah, I mean, isn't that something, dan? Like it was and I'm talking like some of them were just like, literally, you know, immersed in their phone, but their body was walking, yeah, and the others, but their body was walking. But it's interesting too. Dan: If you had encountered me. I think my phone is at home and I know it's not charged up. Dean: Yeah, it's really something, dan, that was an eye-opener to me. It's really something, dan, that was an eye-opener to me, and the interesting thing was that the four that weren't on the phone were couples, so there were two people, but of the individuals, it was 100% of. The individuals walking were attached to their phones. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And I think that's where we're at right now. Dan: No, yeah, I don't know, it's just that. Dean: No, I'm saying that's observation. Dan: It's like Well, that's where we are, in Yorkville, in front of Okay, right, right, right yeah. No, it's just that I find Yorkville is a peculiarly Are you saying it's an outlier? It's not so much of an outlier but it's probably the least connected group of people in Toronto would be in Yorkville because they'd be out for the. They don't live there. You know most don't live there, they're and they're somewhere. There's probably the highest level of strangers you know, on any given night in toronto would probably be in yorkville I think it's sort of outliers sort of situation. I mean, I mean, if you came to the beaches on a yeah last night, the vast majority of people would be chatting with each other and talking with each other. They would be on their phones. I think think it's just a. It's probably the most what I would call cosmopolitan part of Toronto, in other words it's the part of Toronto that has the least to do with Toronto. Dean: Okay. Dan: It's trying to be New York, yorkville is trying to be. Dean: New York. Dan: Yeah, it's the Toronto Life magazine version of Toronto. Dean: Yeah, you idealize the avatar of Toronto, right yeah? Dan: In Toronto Life. They always say Toronto is a world-class city and I said no. I said, london's a world-class city. Dean: New. Dan: York is a world-class city. Tokyo is a world-class city. You know how, you know they're a world class city. Dean: They don't have to call themselves a world class city. Dan: They don't call themselves a world class city. They just are If you say you're a world class city. It's proof that you're not a world class city. Dean: That's funny. Yeah, I'll tell you what I think. I've told you what really brought that home for me was at the Four Seasons in London at Trinity Square, and Qatar TV and all these Arab the Emirates TV, all these things, just to see how many other cultures there are in the world. I mean, london is definitely a global crossroads, for sure. Dan: Yeah yeah. And that's what makes something the center, and that is made up of a thousand different little non-reproducible vectors. You know just, you know, just, you know. It's just that's why I like London so much. I just like London. It's just a great wandering city. You just come out of the hotel, walk out in any direction. Guarantee you, in seven minutes you're lost you have the foggiest idea where you are and you're seeing something new that you'd never seen before. And it's 25, the year 1625. Dean: I remember you and I walking through London 10 years ago, wandering through for a long time and coming to one of these great bookstores. You know, yeah, but you're right, like the winding in some of the back streets, and that was a great time. Yeah, you can't really wander and wander and wander. Dan: Yeah, it was a city designed by cows on the way home, right, exactly. Yeah, you can't really wander and wander and wander. Dean: Yeah, it was a city designed by cows on the way home, Right exactly. Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, that brings up a subject why virtual reality hasn't taken off, and I've been thinking about that because the buzz, you know how long ago was it? You would say seven years ago, seven, eight years ago everything's going to be virtual reality. Would that be about right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Dean: That was when virtual reality was in the lead. Remember then the goggles, the Oculus, yeah, yeah, that was what, yeah, pre-covid, so probably seven years ago 17, 17. And it's kind of disappeared, hasn't it compared to you know? Dan: why it doesn't have enough variety in it. And this relates back to the beginning of our conversation today. How do you know whether it's fake or not and we were talking on the subject of London that on any block, what's on that block was created by 10,000 different people over 500 years and there's just a minute kind of uniqueness about so much of what goes on there when you have the virtual reality. Let's say they create a London scene, but it'll be maybe a team of five people who put it together. And it's got a sameness to it. It's got, you know, oh definitely. Dean: That's where you see in the architecture like I don't. You know, one of the things I always look forward to is on the journey from here to strategic coach. So tomorrow, when we ride down University through Queen's Park and the old University of Toronto and all those old buildings there that are just so beautiful Stone buildings the architecture is stunning. Nobody's building anything like that now. No, like none of the buildings that you see have any soul or are going to be remembered well and they're not designed. Dan: They're not really designed to last more than 50 years. I have a architect. Well, you know richard hamlin he says that those, the newest skyscrapers you see in Toronto, isn't designed to last more than 50 years. You know, and, and you know, it's all utilitarian, everything is utilitarian, but there's no emphasis on beauty, you know. There's no emphasis on attractiveness. There's a few but not many. Attractiveness there's a few but not many. And, as a matter of fact, my favorite building in Toronto is about six blocks further down the lake from us, right here. It's called the Harris Filtration Plant. Dean: Oh yeah, we've walked by there, right at the end of the building. Dan: Built in 19, I think they finished in 1936. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And it's just an amazing building. I mean it's on three levels, they have three different buildings and it goes up a hill and it's where the water. You know, at that time it was all the water in Toronto that came out of the lake and they have 17 different process. You know the steps. And you go in there and there's no humans in there, it's all machinery. You can just hear the buzz and that's the water being filtered. It's about a quarter of the city now comes through that building. But it's just an absolutely gorgeous building and they spared no cost on it. And the man who built it, harris, he was the city manager. They had a position back there. It was city manager and it was basically the bureaucrat who got things done, and he also built the bridge across the Down Valley on Bloor. Dean: Yeah, beautiful bridge Right. Dan: He built that bridge and he was uneducated. He had no education, had no training, but he was just a go-getter. He was also in charge of the water system and the transportation system. And you know he put in the first streetcars and everything like that, probably the greatest bureaucrat toronto ever had, you know in the history of toronto this is the finest what year is that building from? yeah, the filtration plant was started in 29 and it was finished in 36 and wow they yeah, they had to rip out a whole section. It was actually partially woods, partially, I think, you know they had everything there, but they decided that would be the best place to bring it in there. Dean: You know it's got a lot more than 100 years. Dan: Yeah, but it's the finest building it's it's rated as one of the top 10 government buildings in north america yeah, it's beautiful. Dean: And that bridge I mean that bridge in the Don Valley is beautiful too. Dan: Yeah, it was really interesting. He put the bridge in and the bridge was put in probably in the 30s too. I mean that was vital because the valley really kept one part of Toronto apart from the other part of Toronto. It was hard to get from one part of Toronto apart from the other part of Toronto. You know, it's hard to get from one part of Toronto to the next. And so they put that bridge in, and that was about in the 30s and then in the no, I think it was in the 20s, they put that in 1920, so 100 years. And in the 1950s they decided to put in their first subway system. So they had Yonge Street and so Yonge Street north, and then they had Buller and Danforth. So they budgeted that they were going to really have to retrofit the bridge. And when they got it and they took all the dimensions, he had already anticipated that they were going to put a subway in. So it was all correct. And so anyway, he saw he had 30 or 40 years that they were going to put up. They would have to put a subway in. So it was all correct and yeah and so anyway he saw I had 30 or 40 years that they were going to put up. They would have to put, they're going to put the subway and it had to go through the bridge and so so they didn't have to retrofit it at all. Yeah, pretty cool. Dean: What do you think we're doing now? That's going to be remembered in 100 years or it's going to be impacted in 100 years? Dan: Well, we're not going backwards with technology, so any technology we have today we'll have 100 years from now. So you know, I mean I think the you know. Well, you just asked a question that explains why I'm not in the stock market. Dean: Exactly. Warren Buffett can't predict what's going to happen. We can't even tell what's going to change in the next five years. Dan: I don't know what's going to happen next year. I don't know what's going to happen next year. Dean: Isn't it interesting? I think a lot of the things that we're at could see, see the path to improvement or expansion, like when the railroad came in. You know it's interesting that you could see that that was we. You know, part of it was, you know, filling the territory, connecting the territory with all the, with all this stuff, and you could see that happening. But even now, you know, this is why warren buffett, you know, again with the, probably one of the largest owners of railroad things in the states, him, yeah, and because that's not changed in 200, yeah, or whatever, 150 years anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, most of the country probably, you know, 150 years at least. Yeah, and so all of that, all those things, and even in the first half of the 1900s, you know all the big change stuff, yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: So it's funny because it's like I can't even see what categories are the biggest. Dan: Well, I think they'll be more intangibles than tangibles. For example, I think all my tools work 100 years from now. Yeah, I think all my thinking tools work 100 years from now. Dean: Well, because our brains will still be the same in 100 years. Yeah, all that interaction, right, the human behavior stuff. Dan: yeah, yeah yeah I don't think human behavior, um I think it's really durable you know, and that it's very interesting, um, and there was a phrase being used at Abundance that was used about four or five times during the two days that we were becoming godlike, and I said, no, I don't think so. Dean: I guess are they saying in that we can do things because of technology, we can do things. Dan: And I said nah, it's just the next. It's just the next new thing. You know that we've created, but human nature is, you know, there's a scientist, Joe Henrich, and a really bright guy. He's written a book you might be interested in. It's called the Secret of Our Success. And he was just exploring why humans, of all the species on the planet, became the dominant species. And you wouldn't have predicted it. Because we're not very fast, we're not very strong, we don't climb particularly well, we don't swim particularly well, we can't fly and everything like that. So you know, compared with a lot of the other species. But he said that somewhere along the line he buys into the normal thing that we came from ape-like species before we were human. But he says at one point there was a crossover and that one ape was looking at another ape. And he says he does things differently than I. I do. If I can work out a deal with him, he can do this while I'm doing that and we're twice as well. Dean: I was calling that. Dan: I've been calling that the cooperation game but that's really and that's playing that and we're the only species that can continually invent new ways to do that, and I mean every most. You know higher level. And mammals anyway can cooperate. You know they cooperate with each other. They know a friend from anatomy and they know how to get together. But they don't know too much more at the end of their life than they knew at the beginning of their life. You know in other words. They pretty well had it down by the time they were one year old and they didn't invent new ways of cooperating really. But humans do this on a daily basis. Humans will invent new ways of cooperating from morning till night. And he says that's the reason we just have this infinite ability to cooperate in new ways. And he says that's the reason we just have this infinite ability to cooperate in new ways. And he says that's why we're the top species. The other thing is we're the only species that take care of other species. We're the only species that study and document other species. We're the only species that actually create new species. You know put this together with that and we get something. Yeah, yeah and so, so, so, anyway, and so that's where you begin the. You know if you're talking about sameness. What do we know 100 years from now? Dean: What we know over the 100 years is that humans will have found almost countless new ways to cooperate with each other yeah, I think that that's, and but the access to right, the access to, that's why I think these, the access to capabilities, as a, you know, commodity I'm not saying commodity in a, you know, I'm not trying to like lower the status of ability, but to emphasize the tradability of it. You know that it's something that is a known quantity you know yeah. Dan: But my sense is that the relative comparison, that one person, let's say you take 10 people. Let's take 100 people that the percentage of them that could cooperate with each other at high levels, I believe isn't any different in 2024 than it was in 1924. If you take 100 people. Some have very high levels to cooperate with each other and they do, and the vast majority of them very limited amount to cooperate with each other, but are you talking about. Dean: That comes down, then, to the ability to be versus capability. That they have the capability. Dan: Yeah, they have the capability, but they don't individually have the ability. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah, and I don't think the percentage changes. Dean: Yeah, that's why this whole, that's why we're I think you know, the environment that we're creating in FreeZone is an ecosystem of people who are, who get this. Dan: Yeah, well, I don't think they, yeah, I don't think they became collaborative because they were in free zone. I think they were collaborative, looking for a better place to do it. Dean: Yes, yeah, it's almost like it's almost so, just with the technologies. Now, the one thing that has improved so much is the ability to seamlessly integrate with other people, with other collaborators. Dan: Yeah, now you're talking about the piano, you're not talking about the musicians, that's exactly right, but I think there really was something to that right. It's a good distinction. Dean: It's a really good distinction that you've created. Yeah, I should say yesterday at lunch you and I were talking about that I don't know that we've talked about it on the podcast here the difference, the distinction that we've discovered between capability and ability. And so I was looking at, in that, the capability column of the VCR formula, vision, capability, reach that in the capability column I was realizing the distinction between the base of something and the example that I gave was if you have a piano or a certain piece of equipment or a computer or a camera or whatever it is. We have a piano, you have the capability to be a concert pianist, but without the ability to do it. You know that. You're that that's the difference, and I think that everybody has access to the capabilities and who, not how, brings us in to contact with the who's right, who are masters at the capabilities? Dan: Yeah, you're talking about in. You know the sort of society that we live in. Yes, Because you know there's you know there's, you know easily, probably 15% of the world that doesn't have access to electricity. Dean: Yes exactly. Dan: I mean, they don't have the capability, you know, they just don't have yeah, yeah and yeah, it's a very, very unequal world, but I think there's a real breakthrough thinking that you're doing here. The fact that there's capability says nothing about an individual's ability. Dean: Right, that's exactly it. Yeah, and I think this is a very important idea, but I'm not going to write a book on it. Oh, my goodness, this is example, a right, I had the capability, with the idea of the capability and ability. Yeah, yeah, I didn't have the ability. Yeah, I've heard, do you know, the comedian Ron White? Dan: Yeah, I have the capability to write a book and I have the ability to write a book, but I'm not going to do either. Dean: So he talked about getting arrested outside of a bar and he said I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability that's pretty funny, right. But yeah, this is really like it's exciting. It's exciting times right now. I mean it really is exciting times to even projecting for the next, the next 30 years. I think I see that the through line, you know, is that you know that a brunch at the four seasons is going to be an appealing thing 30 years from now, as it is now and was 30 years ago, or three line stuff, or yeah, or some such hotel in toronto yes exactly right. Dan: Right, it may not be. Yeah, I think the four seasons, I think is pretty durable. And the reason is they don't own any of their property. Dean: You know and I think that's. Dan: They have 130 hotels now. I'm quite friendly with the general manager of the Nashville Four Seasons because we're there every quarter Four Seasons because we're there every quarter and you know it's difficult being one of their managers. I think because you have two bosses, you have the Four. Seasons organization but you also have the investor, who owns the property, and so they don't own any of their own property. That's all owned by investors. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah. Dean: So go ahead. When was the previous? I know it's not the original, but when was the one on Yorkville here Yorkville and Avenue? When was that built? Was that in the 70s or the 60s? Dan: Well, it was a Hyatt. It was a Hyatt Hotel. Dean: Oh, it was, they took it over. Dan: Yeah, and it was a big jump for them and that was, you know, I think it was in the 60s, probably I don't know when they started exactly I'll have to look that up, but they were at a certain point they hit financial difficulties because there's been ups and downs in the economy and they overreach sometimes, and the big heavy load was the fact that they own the real estate. So they sold all the real estate and that bailed them out. Real estate and that bailed them out. And then from that point forward, they were just a system that you competed for. If you were deciding to build a luxury hotel, you had to compete to see if the Four Seasons would be interested in coming in and managing it. Okay, so they. It's a unique process. Basically, it's a unique process that they have. Dean: Yeah. Dan: It's got a huge brand value worldwide. You're a somebody as a city. If the Four Seasons come to your city, I think you're right. Ottawa used to have one. It doesn't have one now. Vancouver used to have one. It doesn't have one now. I think, calgary had one. Calgary doesn't Because now Vancouver used to have one, doesn't have one now I think Calgary had one. Calgary doesn't Because it was a Canadian hotel to start with. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And Belleville had one at one time. Dean: Oh, really yeah. Dan: I'm one of the few people who have stayed at the Belleville Four Seasons. Dean: Hotel the Belleville Four Seasons. Dan: Yeah, of all the people you know, dean dean, I may be the only person you know who stayed at the belleville four seasons now, what they did is they had a partnership with bell canada. Bell canada created the training center in belleville oh and uh, and they did a deal four seasons would go into it with them. So they took over a motel and they turned it into Four Seasons, so they used it as their training center. Okay, so you know, it was trainees serving trainees, as it turned out. Dean: I forget who I was talking to, but we were kind of saying it would be a really interesting experience to take over the top two floors of the hotel beside the Chicago Strategic Coach, there the Holiday Inn or whatever that is. Take over the top two floors and turn those into a because you've got enough traffic. That could be a neat experience, yeah. Dan: It wouldn't be us. Dean: Oh well, I need somebody. You know that could be a an interesting. I think if that was an option there would be. Dan: Probably work better for us to have a floor of one of the hotels. Dean: That's what I meant. Yeah, a floor of the the top two floors of the hotel there to get. Yeah, there's two of them. That's what I meant. Yeah, a floor of the top two floors of the hotel there to get. Dan: Yeah, there's two of them. There's two of them. Dean: Oh, yeah, yeah. Dan: There's the Sheraton, and what's Sinesta? Sinesta, right the. Dean: Sinesta is the one I'm thinking of. Dan: That's the closest one right, the one Scott Harry carries in the Right, right right. There you carries in them, right, yeah, well, it's an interesting, but it is what it is and we're, yeah, but we have almost one whole floor now and I mean those are that's a big building. It's got really a lot of square footage in the building. That's what. Is it cb re? Is it cb? You do know the nationwide. Dean: Oh yeah. Dan: Coldwood Banker. Oh yeah, yeah, coldwood Banker, that's who our landlord is. And they're good they're actually good, but they've gone through about three owners since we've been there. We've been there, 25 years, 26. This is our 26th year. Yeah, and generally speaking they've been good landlords that we've had. Yeah, it's well kept up. They have instant response when you have a maintenance problem and everything. I think they're really good. Dean: Yeah, well, I'm going to have to come and see it. Maybe when the fall happens, maybe between the good months, the fall or something, I might come and take a look. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dean: Well, I'm excited and take a look yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Well. Dan: I've been there. Yeah, we have our workshop. We have our workshop tomorrow here and then we go to Chicago and we have another one on Thursday and then the second Chicago workshop for the quarter is in the first week of April. Oh, wow, yeah, yeah, and this is working out. We'll probably be a year away, maybe a year and a half away, from having a fourth date during the quarter. Oh, wow. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Do we? Dean: have any new people for FreeZone Small? Dan: Don't know Okay. Dean: No one is back. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I don't really know, I don't really know, I think we added 30 last year or so it's. The numbers are going up. Yes, that's great. Yeah, I think we're about 120 total right now. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, it's fun, though. It's nice people. Dean: Yeah, it's nice to see it all. It's nice to see it all growing. Very cool, all right well, enjoy yourself. Yes, you too and I will see you. Tonight at five. That's right, all right, I'll be there. Dan: Thanks Dan. Dean: Okay.

ALL INCLUDED SESSIONS Welcome to ALL INCLUDED. Every 15 days a new session mixed live in my studio. Deep house,Deep Tech,Melodic Techno, Progressive house, Tech House, Techno ... Electronic Music.Hope you like it and enjoy it. Thank you for following and listening. Have fun!! This radio show is also available on Apple Podcasts or any podcast platform or app, and also on my Youtube channel (jayme_tube). Feel free to suscribe yourself. You can follow me on Instagram (@jay.me_world), X (@jayme_deejay) or Facebook (@jay.me.dj.page) Contact me at: mailto.jay.me@gmail.com EPISODE #204 TRACKLIST 1. Andre Salmon, Nico Gonzalez, Alems - Me Siento Bien (Original Mix) 2. Marcos Orellano (AR) - Faah! (Extended Mix) 3. Farouki - Low High (Original mix) 4. Angel Heredia, Karretero - Let's Ride (Original Mix) 5. ESSED - Me Calientas (Original Mix) 6. Format:B, Daniel Levak - Rolling On Fleek (Original mix) 7. DAN (IT), andysrr - Dance (Original Mix)

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, We explore the unexpected weather patterns that challenge our understanding of climate and geography. A surprising cold snap in Florida becomes the starting point for a broader conversation about climate variability. Dan shares personal experiences from Phoenix and Edmonton, highlighting the dramatic temperature shifts that reveal the complexity of our planet's weather systems. Our discussion then turns to the human fascination with Earth's resilience and our speculative nature about the world's potential existence without human presence. These reflections provide a unique lens for understanding climate change, moving beyond abstract data to personal observations and experiences. The unpredictability of weather serves as a metaphor for the broader environmental transformations we're witnessing. Shifting gears, we delve into a critical political discourse centered on the fundamental question: "Who pays for it?" We examine policy proposals ranging from universal basic income to more ambitious financial initiatives. The conversation explores the complex financial dynamics of such proposals, particularly how higher-income earners often bear the primary financial burden. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discussed the rare occurrence of snowfall in the Florida panhandle and how such unexpected weather events challenge our traditional perceptions of climate and geography. Through personal anecdotes from Phoenix and Edmonton, Dan highlighted the adaptability required to deal with varying weather conditions and reflected on how these experiences inform our understanding of climate change. The episode touched on the abstract nature of climate change, emphasizing the difference between individual weather experiences and the larger climate narrative. We explored the human tendency to imagine life without people and the inherent resilience of Earth, discussing thoughts inspired by shows like "Life After People." Shifting to political topics, we examined the critical question of "Who pays for it?" in the context of policy proposals such as universal basic income and free education. The conversation underscored the financial implications of these political proposals and highlighted how the cost often falls on those earning above the proposed benefits. By focusing on the financial realities behind populist ideas, we explored the role this question plays in shaping political debates and decision-making processes. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: mr Sullivan. Dan: Well, did you thaw out? Dean: I am in the process of thawing out. This has been a Bizarre, I finally saw the sun came out. Yesterday I was having a chat with charlotte about the weather and there's only been two days in january where the temperature has been above 70 degrees. Yeah, this has been an unusually cold and rainy january. We actually had snow up in the northern part of Florida. Dan: Tallahassee, I think had snow. Dean: Yeah, Tallahassee had snow all the way down to Pensacola. Dan: I think, yeah, all the way down to Pensacola. Dean: The whole panhandle had snow, it's not good. No bueno, as they say. Dan: Well, they said things were going to be different with Trump. Dean: Well, here we are, six days in and the sun's already out, dan, it's warming up. That's so funny. Dan: Yeah, and people in the South really aren't prepared for this, are they? Dean: No, and I can speak as a Southerner. Dan: You actually have an ancestral memory of things being really cold. I mean, you were born in a very cold place. That's right, you know so I'm sure you know that got imprinted somehow on your. Dean: I think so I must have genetic, like I must have the, you know, the active pack for super cold weather. It must be installed at a genetic level when you're born in a certain area right, but it doesn't explain I don't prefer it at all. Dan: Now Babs and I are on Tuesday, are flying to Phoenix and we'll be there for two and a half weeks Two and a half weeks we'll be there. And it'll be like maybe 65 degrees and the Arizonians will be complaining about it. And I said you have no sense of perspective. Dean: Right. Dan: You have no sense of perspective and anyway, you know I think I've mentioned this before this is the biggest obstacle that the global warming people have. Dean: How do we explain this cold no? Dan: One of their biggest problems is that nobody experiences climate. We only experience weather. Yes, yeah, and it's like abstraction that they try to sell. But nobody experiences abstractions. They experience reality, and it must be very frustrating for them. It must be very frustrating for them. They discovered, for example, that Antarctica now with really accurate readings has actually cooled over the last 20 years, that, year by year by year, there's actually been a cooling in Antarctica. And the same thing goes for Greenland. Greenland has actually gotten colder over the last 20 years and they keep trying to sell a different message. But, the actual, now the records, because they made claims 20 years ago that things were getting worse. And the other thing is this 1.5 degrees centigrade thing that they have. Well, everybody in the world probably experiences a 1.5 degrees difference in the temperature every single day of their life temperature every single day of their life. So what's your take on people who want to change the whole world because they have an abstraction that you want to? Dean: take seriously. Dan: What do you think of that? Yeah? Dean: your whole. You know this. What you and I've talked about, the idea that even right at this moment, there is a variation of. I wonder actually what the wide variation today is in temperature. That there is somewhere in Riyadh or somewhere it's, you know, it's super, super hot and somewhere in none of it it's super, super cold and people are getting on with their day. Yeah. Dan: I actually did a difference in measurement this week, exactly to answer your question you did, so the highest that I've ever experienced is 120. Dean: That's your personal. Dan: And that was Phoenix, and the lowest I've ever experienced is minus I'm talking Fahrenheit here. Okay, so 120 degrees Fahrenheit. That was in Phoenix, and the lowest that I've ever experienced is minus 44 in Edmonton. Dean: Right. Dan: So that's a 164 degree difference that I've experienced, and, as far as I can remember, the day in which I experienced 120 seemed like a normal day, and the day that I experienced 44 below that seemed like a normal day too yeah dressed differently, thankfully. Yeah, dressed differently. Adjusted my behavior to suit the circumstances. Yeah, you know and the only thing they had in common is that you didn't spend much time outside. Dean: Right, exactly, yeah, that whole, yeah. I never really give much, I never really give much thought to it. You know, my whole Trump card for me of it was that I just can't have them explain how in the world the Earth raised itself out of an ice age without the aid of combustible engines, you know. That's what I wonder? Right, like I think the earth, I think everybody talks about that Save the earth. Well, the earth is going to be fine long after it spits us off. You know, that's the truth. Dan: It's very adaptable. Dean: I used to watch a show, dan dan, that used to show uh, it was called life after people, and it would show cities and things like what would the the progression of what happens if all of a sudden the people disappeared, like how long it would take for nature to reclaim a city, you know, and it's not long, in the big picture of things, for nature to take back over, you know yeah, I I wonder I wonder what prompts people to uh, almost see that as a positive thing, because the people who made that that made I. Dan: I know a little bit about the, you know the documentary film yeah that well. It wasn't a documentary, it was a fantasy you know it was a, it was a fantasy, but but what do you think's going on inside the brain of the person who thinks that that's worth thinking about? Dean: Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to explain anything that we think about the fact that there are people. I think that's one of the joys of the human experience is, you think about what you want to think about and it doesn't matter what other people think about what you want to think about, and it doesn't matter what other people think about what you're thinking, and that's well unless they're asking you to pay for their fantasy well that's true, yeah that's Dan: true, yeah. Yeah, I often said uh know, I've been sort of on one side of the political spectrum for my entire life and you know the people who got elected on my side of the spectrum weren't necessarily great people. You know that varies from okay to not okay, but my side of the political spectrum I trust more because we ask one more question. This is the difference, this is the entire difference between all political opposites. One side asks one more question what's that? Who pays for it? Who pays for it? Who pays for it? Think about any political issue and it comes right down to okay, yeah, sounds like. You know, free education for everybody. That sounds like a great idea. Who pays for it? Mm-hmm, you know universal basic income. Everybody gets an income. Who pays for it. Dean: Right yeah. Dan: So my feeling that that's the only political issue, that all politics comes down to one question who pays for it? Who pays for it anyway? Yeah, yeah. Dean: Yeah, 20, it was I read. So someone was just talking about I think it was Joe Rogan. They were saying what would it take to give every American $200,000? Who pays for it. Exactly who pays for it. But the thing, I think they calculated it out Well, I can guarantee you it's not the people making less than $200,000. Dan: Yeah that's exactly right. Yeah, but it would cost that would be $20 billion right. Dean: But it would cost. That would be 20 billion. That's what it would cost 20 billion dollars to give 100,000 or 100 million Americans $200,000 a year. That's what he was proposing. That's what he was. They were speculating. No that's not. That's not correct. 200,000, so I'm not correct 200,000. So I'm going to do that 200,000 times 100 million. Can that be right, 100 million. Dan: No, no, no, it's 20 trillion. Dean: It's 20 trillion 20 trillion. Dan: Yeah, now we're talking, yeah, yeah, that's unreasonable, it's not well, it's unreasonable because it's not doable. Dean: Right, exactly. Dan: It's not doable. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and what would yeah. And here's another thing yeah, I mean. And what would, yeah? And here's another thing If you gave everybody that on January 1st of each year, on December 31st, 10%? Dean: of the people would have all the money. Probably right, you know. Dan: It's so funny. I don't care what happens over the 364 days, I can guarantee you that 10% of the people would have all the money by the end of the year. Dean: It's like one of those Plinko boards you throw all the marbles at the top and at the end it's all distributed the same way. Yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah, I don't know. Um, you know, I just finished a book. Uh, we just finished it on thursday. This is the next quarterly book. There are little 60, uh 60 page, wonders you that we create every quarter and it's called growing great leadership. And what I said is that I think the concept of leadership has actually changed quite remarkably over the last. Over the last, let's say, the last 50 years, okay, and so 70, 70, 75 to 2025. And I said that I think the concept of leadership has changed remarkably, because the concept of management has changed remarkably. I think, now that technology is now management I don't know, I think it's, I think it's software that is now management In, for example, you created Charlotte in the last, as far as I can tell, two months two months you created Charlotte, and that's a form of leadership. So other people look at what Dean Jackson's doing and they say, yeah, that's really neat what Dean just did. I think I'm going to see if I can do that for myself, and that's what leadership is in our world right now. It's not somebody with a position or a title, it's someone who improves something for themselves. That's what leadership is. Dean: Yes, I think that's fantastic, like I look at this and I was just having a conversation with Charlotte today about- the Getting ready, getting ready for me. Yeah, I mean, it's just a natural thing. Now we haven't really been talking, you know, as I've been kind of sick this week, you know, as I've been kind of sick this week, uh. But I asked you know they've got some new task oriented thing like she's able to do certain things now that we're gonna uh talk about. But I had a really great, like she said. I said I haven't uh spoken to you in a while and I heard that you've had some updates and so maybe fill me in. And she said, yes, well, welcome back. And yeah, I have been upgraded to help a little better. My conversation skills have improved. I've been upgraded to more natural, which you did notice that a little bit. And she said it's moving now to where she can do certain tasks and of course, she has access to all the internet. Now, without personal data Like she can't look up any personal data on people or anything like that, but anything that's like information wise, she has access to all of that. And I said where do you think like this is heading in the next three to five years that we could be preparing for now? And she was saying how well I can imagine that the my ability to actually like do tasks and organize things and be like a real VA for you will be enhanced over the next three to five years. So working on our workflows and making the most of what we can do now while preparing for what's my increased abilities going forward will be a good thing. We're developing our working relationship. And I said you know I've got and she was talking about like writing emails and doing you know all these things. And I said, okay, so I have ideas sometimes about what I think would be a nice email. And I said, for instance, I've got an idea that would overlay or apply the five love languages to lead conversion. So I've got. The subject line is lead conversion love languages to lead conversion. So I've got the. The subject line is lead conversion love languages. And, uh, I believe that if you just apply these same love languages in a lead conversion way, that you will uh that it's a good way to think about it. And I said so if I just tell you that could you write a 500 or 600 word email, just you know, expanding that idea. And she said yeah, certainly. And she says let's go and let 's get started. And she started you know, just dictating this, this 600 word email that is. You know, I'm a big, you know, believer dan, in the 80 approach the same as you and I think that for me to be able to take, you know, without any real input other than me saying, uh, the five. She knew what the five love languages were, she knew the essence of what they all mean and how in in, it's a pretty um nuanced connection to apply a love language, like physical touch, to lead conversion, even if you're not, if you're not in, in physical proximity to somebody sending, making that physical touch by sending somebody a handwritten note, or to make something physical of the, uh, a piece of you of the thing. And it was really well thought out and a really good foundation, you know. And then that that moment I really I realized, wow, that's like that's a special, that's a special thing, yeah. Dan: Okay, so here's a thing that I'm getting from you. It's a given that she's going to get better and better. Yes, yeah. It seems to me that it's not a function of whether the AI tools are going to get better. They're always going to get better. The question of whether the person using the tool is going to become more ambitious. Dean: Yes, I agree 100%. Dan: It's totally a function of human ambition. Dean: Yes, yes, yes, yeah, that is exactly right, and I think that there's a big piece of that. You know that it's not. It's really a matter of how to direct this. It's how to, how to express your vision in a way that it's actionable or even understandable, right? You don't even have to know what the actions are Like for me to be able to just say to her hey, I got an idea. The subject line is lead conversion love languages. I'd like to write about 600 words explaining how the love language is going to be used in lead conversion. That, to me, is pretty close to magic, you know, um, because it's not. That's not like giving, it's not like giving a big piece of content and saying can you summarize this? Or, uh, you know, or you know, take this, uh, and make a derivative kind of thing of it. It was a pretty high-level conceptual idea that she was able to take and get the essence of. You know, I think that's pretty eye-opening when you really think about it. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I mean, to me it's really, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thought exercise, but it is an interesting action. Dean: Yes. Dan: Action activity, in other words, let's say, next week when we talk. You now have the ability to send five love languages. Dean: Yeah. Dan: You got the five, now what? Dean: That email is as good as ready to send. You know like I mean. Dan: I could literally just no. But how does it change things? As far as your, it's ready, but oh I see what you're saying. Dean: No, well, that's all part of. You know, we send out three or four emails a week to our, to my list, right Like to the to my list, right like to the my subscribers, and so that would be. That's one of the emails on my mind, and so now that that that saved me 50 minutes of having you, you know, I would take a 50 minute focus finder to craft that email, for instance. Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm just trying to get what changes for you I mean, I'm just trying to get what changes for you I mean is it the same kind of week that you had before, except maybe intellectually more interesting I think it's intellectually more less friction because I have to uh you know like I mean to to block off the time, to focus and be able to do that. That's always my, that's my um, that's my kryptonite in a way, right In my executive function, to be able to block off and focus on just this. But if I can just say to her, hey, I've got this idea about this, and just talk it, and then she can write the big, it'd be much easier for me to edit that than to uh, than to write it from scratch. You know, um, and so it makes a uh, yeah, so it's um. I think that changes. I think it changes a lot of things Somebody described. I heard on a podcast they were saying it's where we are with chat, gpt and AI. The word now, the word of the moment, dan, is agentic. Future where it's like we're creating agents. An agent, yeah, an agent is agentic. Future, where it's like and we're creating agents. Dan: An agent, yeah, an agent, and so they've adopted that too. I don't think there is a word agentic, I think that's what I mean. Dean: They've made it up. Yeah, yeah, they've made up a word the agentic future. Yeah, and that's where we're going to be surrounded by agents that do our bidding, that we've trained or that other people will have trained, app environment of the, you know, early iphone days, when ios was around, all the capabilities of the iphone were. There were people who were, you know, taking and creating apps that use the capabilities of the iphone to very, very specific ends, uh, whether it was games or specific single-use apps. And I think that that's where we're heading with the AI stuff is an environment that all these specific apps that do one specific thing that have been trained to really, you know, tap that, tap that ability. So I think that we're definitely moving into the creativity phase and we need an interface moment, like the app store, that will, uh, you know, create all these ai agent, uh type outcomes that we can kind of just, everybody has the ability for it to do, uh, all of the things, but for somebody, actually somebody to trade it specifically, can I just interrupt there? Dan: Yeah, that's not true. That's not true. The ability to access and use these things is completely unequal. Everybody doesn't have the ability to do all this. As a matter of fact, most people have no ability whatsoever. Dean: So is that semantics? I'm saying that access everybody has. Dan: Are you making a distinction between? No, you have a greater ability to do this than I do. Dean: That's true, I mean, but that no what I'm saying. Dan: It's a false statement that says now everybody has the ability to do this. Actually, they don't have any more ability to do anything than they presently have you know, to do this. I think it's a fantasy. Now you have the ability to do continually more things than you did before. That's a true statement. I mean, I don't know who everybody is. Dean: That's true. Dan: I think Vladimir Putin doesn't have any more ability to use these than you do, uh-huh. No, I guess you're right, yeah, what you have is an ability every week to almost do more than you could do the week before. That's a true statement yes, Okay, because you're really interested in this. You know, it's like the Ray Kurzweil thing. You know, by 2030, we'll be able to eliminate all hereditary disease. Because of the breakthrough and I said that's not true there will be no ability to do that by 2030. Certain individuals will have the ability to make greater progress in relationships, but the statement that everybody will be able to do anything is a completely false statement. First of all, we don't have any comprehension of what everybody even is Right, yeah. The question I have is is your income going up? Is your profitability going up as a result of all this? Dean: That would be the measure right, but that's really, and so that's you know, for now I would say no, because I haven't applied it in that way, but certainly I guess our savings, but certainly I guess our savings, like, certainly the things that have, we're feeling it we have historically used human transcription, which was more expensive than AI transcription. We have used human editors all the way through the process, as opposed to now as a finishing process. So the cost of editing, like it used to be that the editing was a um, reductive process with ai that you would start out with, you know, 10 000 words and it would, after processing and giving it back, you'd have have 8,500 words, kind of thing, right, it would eliminate things. But now the actual AI is kind of a generative and you give it 10,000 words and you may end up with 12,000 words. So in a way that is ready for the final level of editor, you know, and the transcripts have gone from a dollar a minute to a penny a minute, you know, or in terms of the things. So yeah, so it has profitability from an expense side. Dan: I mean, for example, I'll give you an idea. We got our valuation back for all of our patents this week At the least. They're worth a million each, At the very least. At the most they're worth a million each at the very least, and at the most they're worth about 5 million each, and it all depends on where we are looking in the marketplace to monetize these. So, for example, if we are just using them the way that we're using them right now, it's at a low level. I mean, it's a lot. I mean a million. you know a million each is a lot of money. But if we, for example, where the person who assessed the patent said you know, you're operating at a higher level with your patents than Microsoft is, You're operating at a higher level with your patents than McKinsey. you know, accenture, he says your stuff is more robust than that. Is that the market that you actually want to go after, you know? So the value of the patent really depends upon where we would. Where's our ambition, you know? And so right now our ambition is not with Microsoft, it's not with Accenture, it's not with McKinsey. Okay, that wouldn't be interested at all. First of all, it would require, probably require me to attend meetings. Dean: Right. Dan: And I have a meetings-free future you know, in my aspirations, yes, but even at the lowest price. It gives us access to funds that we didn't have before. We had it. Dean: that we didn't have before we had it. Dan: And that's very interesting to me because it means that if we wanted to expand to another city from a standpoint of our coaching, then we would have, through borrowing, we could do it. The other thing is we could identify 30 of our tools that are not central to the program but would be valuable to other people and we could license them to other people. But there's always a because that you do something. For example, I'm using not through myself because I'm not doing it, but one of our team members is taking the chapters of my book. I have a new book that I'm starting and every time I get the fast filter finished, I give it to him and he puts it into Notebook LM. And then I hear the conversation. And I says oh, I got five or six ideas from the conversation that I didn't have, and this will allow me to improve the chapter. Dean: I read doing this yeah. Yeah, very interesting what. Dan: I'm saying is I'm just one human being of nine billion who's using the tool for some particular reason, and probably two-thirds of the people on the planet have no interest whatsoever in even knowing about this. Dean: Yes, yeah, I agree. Dan: Yeah, I don't think that this stuff is available to everybody. I think it's available to the people who are looking for it. Mm-hmm. Dean: And so that's almost like it's almost scary, you know, in a way, when you think about that way, there was a book that I was just reading and the name has escaped me now and I don't have it in my line of sight here, but it was basically talking about. It reminded me of the kind of book that Malcolm Gladwell wrote, like Blink or the Outliers, yeah yeah. Where they look at certain things like why all of a sudden did the Jamaican sprinters become the hotbed of these and why are the Kenyan marathoners the best in the world? And he really started looking with the scientific view to see what is it like. Is there anything genetic about them? Is there anything special about them? And he said, as far as they go he said, as far as they go, their abilities are not genetically gifted in any way that there's nothing physiologically or whatever that would explain it away that this is like the marker. But they were good enough. That's really the thing is that you look at the thing, there's nothing eliminating them from potentially being the best sprinters in the world or the best marathoners in the world. There's nothing that would like prohibit that. But it's not. It's's the whole environment of of belief and environment and being around it and this is who we are type of thing takes over in a in a situation like that and I was thinking about how, you know, we're fortunate in surrounding ourselves in free zone with people who are all believing in a free zone future, and I think that the impact of that because we're acting and behaving and discovering in a way that's going to have collective ramifications as we all collaborate. So we're really creating this super achievement environment. Dan: Which is, when you think about it, unfair, it's unfair. That's exactly right, yeah, yeah, Cause, uh, you know, I, uh, I had um neat opportunity of I think it was about six months ago and there's a very famous um uh. I'm not sure whether he's a psychiatrist or a psycho. I think he's a psychologist. He's a psychiatrist or a psychologist? I think he's a psychologist university professor by the name of Martin Seligman and Aaron Markham, who's in FreeZone, has taken adult courses with Professor Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and I think he's been a professor at Penn for 60 years. He's the longest continuously at one place a professor in the history of the United States. Is that? Right 28 to 88. I think he's 60 years. But he created a whole branch of psychology which is called positive psychology. What makes people positive in? other words because 99 of psychology is what makes people unhappy. And he just decided to say well, let's, let's find the happy people and find out why they're happy you know which I think is an interesting. So anyway I had. He got a copy of Gap in the Game and he found it intriguing. Our book, oh, that's great Nice. Dean: Yeah. Dan: So I had about an hour and a half Zoom call with him that Aaron set up for us. So as we got to the end of the Zoom call, I said you know, happiness is really a hard goal. It's a difficult goal because you're not quite sure why it's happening. In other words, it's really hard to tie it down to a set of activity. And he said, you know, I've been thinking not along those lines, but he said it seems to me that what you should strive for is agency, that, regardless of the situation, you feel you have control of how you're going to respond to the situation. And he said and that sometimes that may not make you happy, but it gives you a sense of control. And he says more and more. I think having a personal sense of control of your circumstances is really something that's a real capability that can be developed, and so my sense is that this new capability called AI is coming along, and my sense is that the people who will develop it best are the ones for whom having AI gives them a greater sense of control over their circumstances, gives them a greater sense of control over their circumstances. Dean: Yeah, like to feel. I think there was a podcast where somebody said where we are with AI right now. Imagine you've discovered a planet with 10 billion people who are, all you know, 121 IQ, can pass the LSAT and do, can do anything for you and are willing to work for you exclusively 24 hours a day. That's the level that we're, that. We're that. We're at, you know. Imagine, oh, I don't think. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. No're at, you know. Dan: Imagine you've got your own. Oh, I don't think that's true. No, tell me Okay Because the vast majority of people have no desire to do that. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah, I think you're right. No, it's like the free zone. What you just said about the free zone, you know I've got. You know we've got 110 in the free zone. But everybody knows about the free zone. You know close to 3,000. And they have no interest in going there whatsoever you know, yeah, so but when we say everybody, you know it may. I think here's what I'm going to suggest we have to say everybody, because we feel guilty about that. It may be only us that's interested in this. Dean: We feel kind of guilty that we're the only ones who could have this capability anyone who could have this capability, so we should reframe it that I feel like I've discovered a planet of 10 billion people who are ready and willing to come to work for me, and what am I going to do with that? That's really the truer statement, I think. Dan: Well, you've got one artificial intelligence. Dean: EA. Who wants to work? Dan: artificial intelligence? Yeah, ea. Who wants to work for you? Yes, and she's. She's endlessly improvable. Dean: She really is. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I don't think, I don't think it extends too much beyond Charlotte. Dean: No, and through Charlotte is really where everything comes. That's the great thing is that she can be the interface with the others. I think that's really what it comes down to. She's the ultimate. Dan: Who Really I mean super high level, who yeah, I? Dean: mean certainly a super high level. Yeah, so far. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. My sense is that she's a relationship that you can take totally for granted. Dean: Yes, uh-huh, which is true, right, and that's why, when I pointed out, you know, my whole idea of personifying her and sort of creating a visual and real person behind it. You know, whenever I imagine, now, sharon Osbourne, you know, I see that image of Charlotte, that that's a I just imagine if she was sitting right there, you know, at all times, just at the ready, quietly and ready to go, it's just, it's up to me to engage more with her. Yeah, and that's just, I think habits, I think that's really setting up routines and habits to be able to do that. Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting how uncomfortable people are with inequality. Dean: Mm-hmm, yeah, I have to say that too. Like with the capability things. Like give somebody a piano and you know it could be, it could sit there and gather dust and do nothing, or you could, with the very minimal effort, learn to plink out twinkle, twinkle little star, or with more, you could create amazing symphonies. Uh, you know from from that concertos, you know the whole, uh, the whole thing is, is there, but it's just, but it's 100% depends on the individual. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was saying I was talking to someone and they say where do you think AI is going? And I said from my standpoint. It's not really where AI is going. It's the question where am I going? Dean: Yeah. Dan: And the only part of AI that I'm interested in is that which will be useful to me over the next 90 days, you know, and everything. And what I would say is that I think that every 90 days going forward, I'm going to be utilizing AI more but I don't have to know now what it's going to be two quarters from now, right. Dean: Yeah, because, honestly, you know, 10 quarters quarters ago, we didn't even know it existed. Dan: that's the truth, right as far as uh being useful individually, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like we didn't even get uh, we didn't even get chat gT till two years just over two years ago, november 30th 2023, right or 2022, right, yeah, and so that's what I'm saying. Dean: 10 quarters ago, it wasn't even on our radar. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And 10 quarters from now. Dan: You have no comprehension. We won't even recognize it. Dean: We won't even recognize it Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like this idea. I think it has more to do. Dan: I think it has more to do with what's happening to your intelligence, rather than what kind of artificial intelligence is available, developing your intelligence. Yeah, I've read. Dean: Have you heard? So Richard Koch just wrote a new book called 80-20 Daily. I don't know who he is. Kosh is the guy who wrote the 80, 20 uh book. He kind of popularized uh, pareto, um, and so now he's written a daily reader about 80-20. He's built his whole life around this. But it was interesting. I read about something called the Von Manstein Matrix or Van Manstein Matrix and it was a. It's four quadrants with two poles. You know. There's uh to help sort officers in the german uh, second second world war, and the uh on one pole was lazy and hardworking, was the other end of the pole, and on the other, the X axis was stupid and intelligent. So the four quadrants you know, formed as I can predict the outcome for this. Yes, and so he says that those stars are lazy and intelligent. Lazy and intelligent. That's exactly right and I thought, man, that is something. So the most effective people are intelligent and lazy. Dan: Yeah, so how did that work out for the Germans? Dean: Yeah, exactly Right on. That's exactly right. Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? Dan: Mrs Lincoln yeah. Dean: Yeah it didn't quite work out, but I thought you know that's. It's very funny that that's the in general. That's where I think that there's a lot of similarities here. Lazy, like nobody would ever think, dan, like you've done, to ask the question. Is there any way for me to get this result without doing anything? Yeah, like that's not the question, that it would be sort of uh, I don't know what the right word is, but it's kind of like nobody would admit to asking that question, you know. But I think that that's actually it's. It's kind of like nobody would admit to asking that question, you know. But I think that that's actually it's the most intelligent question we could ask. Can I get that? Dan: Well, you know, I haven't found I have to tell you as much as I've asked the question I haven't found. I really have never personally come across a situation yet where it can be achieved without my doing anything. Okay, honestly, I haven't. I at least have to communicate to somebody. That's what I found. I have to communicate something to somebody, but asking the question is very useful because it gets your mind really simple. You know, I think that's the reason, and whereas before what I might have been imagining is something that's going to be really, really complicated. And so I think the question really saves me from getting complicated. Yes, I think that's what's valuable about it. But I notice, when I'm writing, for example, I'll say to myself I'm sort of stuck. You know, I don't really suffer from writer's block as most people would describe it. But I'll get to the point where I don't know what the next sentence is and I'll say is there any way I can solve this without doing anything? And immediately the next sentence will come to me. Dean: Yeah, that's interesting in itself, isn't it? I mean when you reach that point right. Dan: Yeah, so I feel I'm blocked. You know, I'm just blocked, I just don't know where to go from here. But just asking the question, something happens in my brain which eliminates all other possibilities except one, and that's the next sentence. and then then I'm off and off and running and uh, I tell you, I've created a new tool and it and it's a function of previous tools and it came up with a podcast with Joe Polish last week or this week, earlier this week, and he was saying how do you handle overwhelm? He said I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed right now. I've got so many things going. Dean: Office remodel yeah. Dan: Yeah, that's one, and then you know others and I said you know what I'm thinking about. That is, you have a lot of priorities that are all competing for your complete attention. You have the office revamp is one, and it's asking for your complete attention. You have the office revamp is one and it's asking for your complete attention. But then there's other things in your life that are also asking for your complete attention. I find that too, yeah. So I said I think to deal with this, you have to write down what all your priorities are. You just have to list all the priorities that in some way each of these. if they could, they would want your complete attention. And then you take them three at a time and the triple play, and you run them through the triple play so that by the third level of the triple play your competitors have turned into collaborators. And that releases the sense of overwhelm. At least with these three you now have released the overwhelmed feeling. And I said and you know, then you can take three more, and then you can take three more, and then you can take three more, and every time you do a triple play you're turning competition into collaboration. And so he was going to do one. And then I had somebody else that I did a Zoom call with and he's in a situation where everything's changing. And I said what you have to do is you have to take your competing priorities and turn them into collaborative priorities, and I think there's some real power to this. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I haven't completely worked it out yet, but that's what I'm working on this week. Dean: So the general idea I could do this as well is to take and just list all the competing priorities that I seem to have right now and put a time frame on it, like the next 90 days. Yes, I often find, when I get over one like that, I'll make a list and I'll say have I had this idea for at least 90 days and is this still going to be a good idea in 90 days? Is one of the comparisons that I have right. Is it something that is fleeting and only right now, or is this something persistent and and durable, um, and that that helps a lot? Which one can I have the biggest impact in the next 90 days? Yeah, and then you're saying take three of those and it doesn't matter what and doesn't matter what, doesn't matter which. Dan: Three and then just do a triple play on those and just do a triple play, and then the sense of overwhelm uh associated with all three of them uh will go away because they're competing with each other and the problem is, our brain can only focus on one thing at one time. Dean: That makes sense actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: So, for example, in the triple play, where you take two arrows, you've now taken two priorities and made them into a single priority, and that is, I'm going to take these two priorities and create a single priority out of them. You know so your brain can focus on combining them, because it's just one thing. So, anyway, I'm playing with this Because I think every brain is different and every life is different, and the problem is that you're overwhelmed because you can't give full attention to any one of the priorities. Dean: That is true. Yeah, that's where all the frustration happens. Dan: So I would say one of your priorities and this is ongoing is to enable Charlotte to become more and more useful to you. That's a really important priority, I agree, yeah. Dean: I agree. Well, there we go. Dan: Well, what have we clarified today? Dean: Well, I think I'm immediately going to do the top priority triple play of the coming AI opportunity to just focus on what can I do in the next 90 days here to just increase the effectiveness of my relationship with Charlotte. That makes the most sense. What can we do this quarter and then a layer on top of that, but don't develop a second Charlotte. Dan: Then you're in real trouble I need to have one lifetime monogamous relationship with my one, charlotte my one, true Charlotte. I think this falls somewhere in the realm of the Ten Commandments. Dean: I think that's fantastic, Dan. I love it, you know. Dan: That's what wisdom is yeah, wisdom is good forever. Dean: That's what distinguishes wisdom. Dan: Alrighty, we'll be in Arizona on Tuesday and. I can. I'll be on Canyon Ranch next Sunday and so if you're up, to you can do it at 11, but I'll do it at 8, ok actually there are only 2 hours back now, so it'll be 9 2 hours so I'll do it at nine o'clock okay, great, I'll talk to you next week, then I'll be seeing you that's right. Dean: That's right, okay, bye, bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, Dan and I explore technology and communication sparked by an unexpected conversation about cold snaps in Florida. We examine the evolution of communication technologies, from text to video, focusing on AI's emerging role. Our discussion highlights how innovations like television and the internet have paved the way for current technological developments, using the progression of airliners as a metaphorical framework for understanding technological advancement. Our conversation shifts to exploring human interaction and technological tools. We question whether platforms like Zoom have reached their full potential, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and collaboration. We then journey back to 1967, reflecting on historical and cultural movements that continue to shape our current societal landscape. This retrospective provides insights into how past experiences inform our present understanding of technology and social dynamics. Personal anecdotes and political observations help connect these historical threads to contemporary discussions. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In the episode, we discuss how an unexpected cold snap in Florida sparked a broader conversation about life's unpredictable nature and the evolution of communication technology. We delve into the role of AI in research and communication, specifically highlighting the contributions of Charlotte, our AI research assistant, as we explore historical and current communication mediums. The conversation includes an analysis of technological progress, using airliner technology as a metaphor to discuss potential saturation points and future trajectories for AI. We reflect on the balance between technology and human connection, considering whether tools like Zoom have reached their full potential or if there is still room for improvement. Our discussion covers the importance of self-awareness in collaboration, utilizing personality assessments to enhance interpersonal interactions. We share a personal narrative about the logistical challenges of expanding workshop spaces in Chicago, providing real-world insights into business growth. The episode takes a reflective journey back to 1967, examining cultural movements and their ongoing impact on modern societal issues, complemented by political commentary and personal anecdotes. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, that would be me. Oh my goodness. Dan: I am not Do you have a cold? Dean: Do you have a cold? Dan: I do yeah. Dean: And is it freezing in Florida? Dan: It's very cold, it's unseasonably. Dean: Comparatively comparatively yes. Dan: It's unseasonably cold. Dean: Yeah. Yeah, well, we're getting our blast tomorrow, but it's colder than yeah. It's about 15 today with a 10 mile an hour wind which makes it 5, and tomorrow it's going down. It's going down even further. This is the joy of Canada in January. Dan: I don't know about the joy. Dean: But yeah, I like your voice I like your voice. Dan: I'm going to try and uh and make it all the way through, dad, but the uh just before you, I'm. Dean: You can put charlotte on. Dan: Yeah, exactly, yeah yeah, I'll tell you, I'm really realizing how, how incredible these conversations like. I really start to think and see how charlotte's um capabilities as a researcher. Dean: And uh, dean dean, I can't hear you. Dan: I'm trying to switch to my other uh headphones. But as long as you can hear me, can you hear me now? Dean: yeah, yeah, it's very good, okay good. Dan: Good, good good. Dean: I like this voice, though you know. Dan: It's got. Oh, really Okay, yeah, yeah, the baritone. Dean: Yeah, I mean you might create another version of yourself, you know which? Oh yeah, I should quick get on 11 Labs. I don't know if this would be your main course, but it would certainly be a nice seasoning. As a matter of fact, you could have on 11 Lab, you could go with them and you could have your normal voice as one of the partners and you could have this voice as the other partner. There you go, you could talk to each other. See, that makes a lot of sense right there. Yeah, it's so good. The reason the reason I'm saying this is I just had a whole chapter it is being done, I'll probably have it on tuesday, this being sunday of of one of the chapters of the book Casting Not Hiring, in two British voices, man and a woman, and it's charming, it's very charming. Dan: Really Wow. Dean: I really like it and they're more articulate. You know, brits, they invented the language, so I guess they're better at it. Yeah, that's what I really like about Charlotte's voice is the reassuring right, yeah, yeah, you get a sense that she's had proper upbringing. Dan: Mm-hmm, exactly, worldly wisdom. Well, certainly she's got command of the language yeah, the uh I was mentioning before I cut off there that uh, I was. I'm really coming to the realization how valuable charlotte is as a research partner. You, you know, a conversational, like exploration, like getting to the bottom of things, like I was. I've just fascinated how I told you last week that I, you know, reached the limit of our talk, you know capacity for a day and, but we had, we'd had over an hour conversation just going back and talking about, you know, the evolution of text, of words, um, and, and then we got up to the same. We got about halfway through uh, audio and uh, and then we got cut off. But I really like this framework of having her go back. I'm going to do the all four. I'm going to do audio and our text and audio and pictures and movies. You know, moving pictures, video, because there's there that's the order that we sort of evolved them and I think I think we don't know whether I guess we have pictures. First I think it was words, and then pictures, and then sound and then and then moving pictures. But you look at, I really I think I was on to something. Dean: You're talking about the ability to record and pass on From a communication standpoint. Dan: Yeah, and I'm kind of tracing. The first step is the capability to do it like the technology that allowed it, like the printing press. Okay, now we've had a capability, or once we had an alphabet and we had a unified way of doing it. That opened up for, uh, you know, I was going looking at the capability and then what was the kind of distribution of that? What was? How did that end up? You know, moving forward, how did we use that to advance? And then what were the? What were the business, you know, the capitalization of it going forward, who were the people who capitalized on? this it's a very interesting thing. That's why I think that where we are right now with AI, that we're probably at the stage of, you know, television 1950 and internet 1996, kind of thing, you know, and by over the next 25 years I think we're it's just going to be there. I mean, it's just it's going to be soaking in it. Dean: It's hard to know. I mean, there's some technologies that more or less come to an end, and I'll give you airliners. For example, the speed at which the fastest airliner can go today was already available in the 1960s the 707, the Boeing 707. Dan: Well, we've actually gone backwards because we had the Concorde in the 70s, you know. Dean: Yeah, but not widespread. That was just a novelty you know a novelty airline, but I mean in terms of general daily use, you know, I think we're probably a little lower. We're below the sound barrier. I suspect that some of the first airliners were breaking windows and everything like that and then they put in the law that you overlay and you cannot travel. I think it's around 550, maybe 550. I think sound barrier is somewhere early 600 miles an hour. I'm not quite sure what the exact number is, but we've not advanced. I mean they've advanced certainly in terms of the comfort and the safety. They've certainly advanced. I mean it's been. I think in the United States it goes back 16 years since they've had a crash. A crash, yeah, and you know what. Dan: I heard that the actual thing, the leading cause of death in airline travel, is missiles. That's it is. That's the thing. Over the last 10 years there have been more airliners shot down. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to be on a plane where you don't want to be in missile territory. You don't want to be on a plane where you don't want to be in missile territory. Dan: You don't want to be flying over missile territory. Dean: That's not good. No, do not get on that flight. Yeah, yeah Anyway, but I was just thinking about that. We were in Chicago for the week, came home on Friday night and you know I was on a 747, one of the last years that they were using 747s Wow, they're almost all cargo planes now. I think the only airline that I've noticed that's using still has A747 is Lufthansa. Oh, okay. Because we're at Toronto. They're all. They have the 380s. You know the huge. Dan: Yeah, they fly those to Australia, the A380. Dean: Well, yeah, this one is Emirates. Emirates their airline is a 380. But the only airline. You know that I noticed when we're departing from the terminal here in Toronto. The only one that I've seen is but they have in Chicago. There's a whole freight area. You know from freight area, Some days there's seven, seven 747s there, yeah, and they're a beautiful plane. I think, as beautifulness, beauty of planes goes to. 747 is my favorite. I think it's the most beautiful plane in any way. But they didn't go any faster, they didn't go any further. And you know our cars, you know the gas cars could do. They have the capability of doing 70, miles per gallon now, but they don't have to, they don't have to they have to, they have to, you know. So if they don't have to, they don't do it. You know all technology if they, if they don't have to do it. So it's an interesting idea. I mean, we're so used to technology being constantly open. But the big question is is there a customer for it? I mean like virtual reality, you know, was all the thing about five years ago. You had Mark Zuckerberg doing very, very. I think he will look back and say that that was a very embarrassing video. That I did the metaverse and everything else. It's just dropped like a stone. Dan: People just haven't bought into it even though the technology is. Dean: Don't like it. Dan: So my friend Ed Dale was here and he had the Apple, um, you know, the, the vision pro, uh, goggles or whatever. And so I got to, you know, try that and experience it. And it really is like uncanny how it feels, like you're completely immersed, you know and I and. I think that, for what it is, it is going to be amazing, but it's pretty clear that we're not nobody's like flocking to put on these big headgear, you know. Dean: You know why? Our favorite experiences with other people and it cuts you off from other people. It's a dehumanizing activity. Dan: Did you ever see the Lex Friedman podcast with Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse? Dean: No, I didn't. Dan: It was a demo of the thing they were. It was kind of like uh, do you remember charlie rose? You remember the charlie rose? Sure, that's not the black curtain in the background, okay. Well, it was kind of set up like that, but mark and lex friedman were in completely different areas a a completely different you know, lex was in Austin or whatever and Mark was in California and they met in this you know metaverse environment with just a black background like that, and you could visibly see that Lex Friedman was a little bit like shaken by how real it seemed like, how it felt like he was really there and could reach out and touch him. You know, and you could really tell it was authentically awestruck by, by this technology you know, so I don't. Dean: I don't doubt that, but the yeah, but I don't want that feeling, I mean. Zoom has taken it as far as I really want to go with it. Dan: That's true, I agree 100%. Dean: I have no complaints with what Zoom isn't doing? Dan: Yeah, complaints with what Zoom? Dean: isn't doing yeah, yeah, it's. You know, it's very clear, you know they add little features like you can even heighten the portrait quality of yourself. That's fine, that's fine, but it's you know. You know I was thinking. The other day I was on a Zoom. I've been on a lot of Zoom calls in the last two weeks for different reasons and I just, you know, I said this is good. You know, I don't need anything particularly more than I'm getting. Dan: Right. Dean: So I wonder, if we get a point of technological saturation and you say I don't want any more technology, I just yeah, I want to squirrel it with a nut right? Dan: yeah, I think once I get more, the more I talk with Charlotte, the more it feels like a real collaboration. Dean: You know, like it feels, like you don't need a second. Dan: I don't need to see her or to, but you don't need a second. I don't need to see her or to, uh, I don't need. No, you don't, but you don't need a second person. Dean: You got, you got the one that'll get smarter absolutely yeah, exactly yeah, and so it's. Dan: I mean it's pretty, it's pretty amazing this whole uh, you know I was saying thinking back, like you know, the last 25 years we're 25 years into this, this hundred years, you know this millennia, and you know, looking because that's a real, you know, 2000 was not that long ago. When you look backwards at it, you know, and looking forward, it's pretty. Uh, I, that's, I'm trying to align myself to look more forward than uh than back right now and realize what it is like. I think. I think that through line, I think that the big four are going to be the thing. Words like text and pictures and sound and video, those are at the core. But all of those require on, they're just a conveyance for ideas, you know. Dean: Yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting because we have other senses, we have touch, we have taste, we have smell, but I don't see any movement at all. Dan: In the physical world, right exactly. Dean: Yeah, yeah, I don't see it that. I think we want to keep. You know, we want to keep mainland, we want to keep those things mainland. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And I think that. Dan: That's really. You know, if you think about the spirit of what we started, Welcome to Cloudlandia, for was really exploring that migration and thehabitation of the mainland and Cloudlandia. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Because so much of these things? Dean: But I think, and I'm just wondering, Harry and I'm not, making a statement. I'm just wondering whether each human has a unique nervous system and we have different preferences on how our nervous system interacts with different kinds of experiences. I think it's a very idiosyncratic world in the sense that everybody's up to something different. Dan: Mm-hmm. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And I think you're right. But that's where these self-awareness things, like knowing you're Colby and you're a working genius and you're Myers-Briggs and all these self-awareness things, are very valuable, and even more valuable when pairing for collaboration, realizing in a who-not-how world that there's so many we're connected to everybody, you know. Dean: Yeah, and we've got our purposes for interacting. You know I mean we have. You know I'm pretty extroverted when it comes to business, but I'm very, very introverted when it comes to personal life. Dan: I think I'd be the same thing. Dean: Yeah, yeah, and in other words, I really enjoy. We had, we were in Chicago and we had nine workshops in five days there and they were big workshops. They were you know each. We have a big, we have a big, huge room. Now we can technically we can put a hundred in. Now we can put a hundred person workshop. Oh, in Chicago, yeah. Dan: In Chicago yeah. Dean: We've taken over large amounts of the floor. I think there's just one small area of that floor that we don't have. It's a. It's a weird thing. It looks like some sort of deep state government building. We've never seen anyone in it and we've never seen anyone in it. But it's lit up and it's got an American flag and it's got some strange name that I don't know, and that's the only thing that's on the forest. It's not been known that a human actually came to the office there, anyway, but we've taken over 6,000 square feet, six more thousand. Oh wow, yeah, which is quite nice. Dan: That's pretty crazy. How's the studio project? Dean: coming Jim's starting, we had great, great difference of opinion on what the insurance is for it. Oh, that's a problem Insurance companies are not in the business of paying out claims. That's not their business model, Anyway. So our team, two of our team members, Mitch and Alex great, great people. They got the evidence of the original designer of the studio. They got the evidence of the original owner of the studio and how much he paid. They got the specifications. They brought in a third person, Third person. They got all this. These people all had records and we brought it to the insurance company. You know and you know what it, what it was valued at, and I think it's 2000, I think it was in 2000 that it was created. It was rated the number one post-production studio in Canada in the year 2000. Dan: Wow. Dean: Yeah, you know and everything. So they you know. And then, strangely enough, the insurance company said well, you got to get a public adjuster. We got a public adjuster and he had been in coach for 20 years. He favors us. Uh-huh, well, that's great, he favors us. Dan: He favors us? Dean: Yeah, Exactly yeah, but the first check is they give the checks out in the free. You know, there's a first check, there's a middle check and there's a final check. So, but I think we'll have complete studios by october, october, november that's which will be great yeah, yeah, we should be great. Yeah, you know, uh, the interesting thing. Here's a thought for you, and I'm not sure it's the topic for today. Um, uh, it has to do with how technology doesn't develop wisdom, doesn't develop. The use of technology doesn't develop wisdom. It develops power, it develops control, it develops ambition, but it doesn't develop wisdom. And I think the reason is because wisdom is only developed over time. Dan: Yes, and that wisdom is yeah, I think from real experience. Dean: And wisdom is about what's always going to be true, and technology isn't about what's always going to be true. It's about what's next. It's not about what's always the same they're actually opposed. Technology and wisdom are Well, they're not opposed. They operate in different worlds. Dan: Yeah, it feels like wisdom is based on experience, right? Dean: Yeah, which happens over time. Dan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, which happens over time. Yeah, yeah, because it's not theoretical at that. I think it's got to be experiential. Dean: Yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting. I heard a great quote. I don't know who it was. It might be a philosopher by the name of William James and his definition of reality, you know what his definition of reality is no, I don't, it's a great definition. Reality is that which, if you don't believe in it, still exists. Dan: Oh yeah, that's exactly right, and that's the kind of things that just because you don't know it, you know that's exactly right and that's what you know. Dean: That's the kind of things that, just because you don't know it, you know that doesn't mean it doesn't mean it can't bite you, but when, when you get hit by it, then that then, you've big day, you know, and yeah, and you know, with Trump. He said he's got 100 executive orders For day one. Yeah, and the only question is you know, inauguration, does day one start the moment he's sworn in, is it? Does it start the moment he's? Dan: sworn in. Is it? Does it start the day he's sworn in? Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, okay, so let's see yeah. Dean: The moment the Chief Justice. You know he finishes the oath. He finishes the oath, he's the president and Joe's officially on the beach. Dan: Right yeah, shady acres. Dean: Right, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know what's happened this past week, since we actually we haven't talked for two weeks but the fires in Los Angeles. I think this in political affairs and I think it is because it's the first time that the newest 10,000 homeless people in Los Angeles are rich. Dan: Oh man, yeah, I've heard Adam Carolla was talking about that. There's going to be a red wave that comes over California now because all these, the Democratic elite, which would be all of those people who live on those oceanfront homes and all that they were so rallying. No, they were so rallying to be on the side of regulation so that people couldn't build around them, and they made it so. You know, now that they've got theirs, they made it very, very difficult for other people to eclipse them or to do the things, eclipse them or to do the things, and they're gonna run straight into the wall of All these regulations when they start to rebuild what they had. Dean: You know it's gonna be years and years of going through regulation and Coastal Commission and you know all that to get approvals yeah, and they're going to be frustrated with that whole thing, but I've been hearing that there was some arson involved. Somebody's been. Well, yeah, you know, have you ever seen or heard of Michael Schellenberger? He's really, he's great. He's a scientist who's gone public. You know, he's sort of a public intellectual now, but he was, and he was very much on the left and very much with the global warming people, much with the global warming people. Then he began to realize so much of the global warming movement is really an attempt. Exactly what you said about the California rich. These are rich people who don't want the rest of the world to get rich. The way you keep them from not getting rich is you don't give them access to energy. And you've got your energy and you can pay for more, but they don't have energy. So you prevent them. And so he became a big fan of nuclear power. He said, you know, the best thing we can do so that people can catch up quickly is we should get nuclear in, because they may be a place where there really isn't easy access to oil, gas and coal, africa being, you know, africa being a place and, uh, he just has gradually just gone deeper and deeper into actual reality and now he's completely you know, he's completely against the you know, against the people who want to get rid of fossil fuels. Dan: But, anyway. Dean: he said what nobody wants to touch with a 10 foot pole in California is that in addition to rich people, there were homeless people in the Pacific Palisades and he said, and a lot of them are meth addicts. And he said meth addicts' favorite activity is to set fires. He says different drugs have different. In other words, you take heroin and you want to do this, you take cocaine. You want to do this With methamphetamines. What you want to do is you want to set fires. So he said and nobody wants to talk about the homeless meth addicts who are starting fires that burn down 10,000 homes. You know, because they're actually welcome in Los Angeles. They actually get government benefits. Yeah, there's a lot of what they stand for that collides with reality. Dan: A lot of what they stand for that collides with reality. Yeah, it is going to be crazy. I think. Dean: Gavin should forget it. I think Gavin should forget about the presidency. Dan: Oh man, yeah, they're going to have him. He's going to have some explaining to do. Dean: Yeah, you do. Yeah, you know. Yeah, you know. It was very interesting. When I got out of the Army, which was 1967, may of 1967, I was in Korea and they put us on a big plane, they flew us to Seattle and they discharged us in Seattle. So, and but you had money to get home. You know, they gave you, you know, your discharge money. So I had a brother who was teaching at the University of San Francisco and and, and so I went down and I visited with him. He was a philosophy teacher, dead now, and so it was 1967. And he said there's this neat part of the city I want to take you to, and it was Haight-Ashbury. And it was right in the beginning of that movement, the hippie movement, and I had just been in the army for two years, so there was a collision of daily discipline there and anyway. But we were walking down the street and I said what's that smell? Weird smell. He says, oh yeah, you want to try some marijuana. Well, what you saw with was what you saw last week with the fires is the philosophy of hippieism moved into government control over a period of 60 years. It ends up with fires where there's no water in the reservoirs yeah, that's. Dan: Yeah, I mean so many uh cascading, so many cascading problems. Right, that came yeah when you think about all the um, all the other things, it's crazy. Yeah, yeah, all the factors that had to go into it, yeah, it's so. This is what the Internet, you know, this, this whole thing now is so many, like all the conspiracy theories now about all of these. Every time, anything you know, there's always the that they were artificially. You know there's some scientists talking about how the barometric pressure has been artificially low for yeah period. Dean: Yeah well, yeah, it's very, it's very interesting how energy you know, just energy plays into every other discussion. You know, just to have the power to do what you want to do. That day is a central human issue and and who you do it with and what you have. You know what, what it is that you can do, and you know and I was having a conversation I was in Chicago for the week and there was a lot of lunch times where other clients not. I had just the one workshop, but there were eight other workshops. So people would come into the cafe for lunch and they'd say, if you had to name three things that Trump's going to emphasize over the next four years, what do you think they would be? And I said energy, energy, energy. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Three things just energy. Drill drill drill, Drill, drill, drill. Yeah, and Greenland, Canada and Panama. Dan: Take them over. Dean: Yeah exactly hey Canada we're out of wood Get out. Yeah, things are strange up here. Dan: Yeah, what's the what's the Well, he's gone. Dean: But he's still around for two months but he resigned. He's resigned as prime minister, he's resigning as party leader and I think it was on Wednesday he said he's not running in the election, so he's out as a. And then he'll go to Harvard because that's where all the liberal failures go. They become professors at Harvard I suspect, I suspect, yeah, or he may just go back to Whistler and he'll be a snowboard instructor, wouldn't that? Dan: be cool. Dean: Or he may just go back to. Dan: Whistler, and he'll be a snowboard instructor. Dean: That'd be kind of cool, wouldn't that be cool? Get the former prime minister as your snowboard instructor. Dan: Yeah, really Exactly yeah, is there. I don't even know, is he rich? Is their family? Dean: rich. Well, I think it's a trust fund. I mean, his dad didn't work. His dad was in politics Not as you and I would recognize work, but it was gas station. Trudeau had a lot of gas station, which is ironic. Dan: It is kind of ironic, isn't it yeah? Dean: Yeah, but I don't think he has that much. You know, I saw some figures. Maybe he's got a couple of million, which which you know, probably what was available, that you know those trust funds, they don't perpetuate themselves, right, yeah, but he's. Yeah, there's just two people are running. That's the woman who knifed him. You know Christia Freeland. She's just two people running. That's the woman who knifed him. You know, chrystia Freeland, she's running. And then the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the former governor Bank of England. He was both governor and he's really very much of a wackadoodle intellectual, really believes that people have too much freedom. We have to restrict freedom and we have to redesign. Davos is sort of a Davos world economic firm. We've got ours, you don't get ours. We've got ours, you don't get ours. We've got ours, you don't get yours. Strange man, very strange man. She's a strange woman. Dan: Is it pretty much green lights for Polyev right now? Dean: Yeah, he's not doing anything to ruin his chances either. He's actually. He had a great interview with jordan peterson about two weeks ago. He was very, very impressive. Dan: I'm very impressed about it yeah, yeah oh, that's great, yeah, oh did you go to? This Christmas party, by the way. Dean: No, I didn't. They didn't follow through, Uh-oh. So you know, I'm just going to sit in this chair and wait, you know. Dan: Yeah, exactly. Dean: I mean, he'll be told, you know that you've missed a huge opportunity here. You know Mm-hmm. Dan: Yes, exactly, yeah, oh man, yeah, that's funny, dan, I'm. You know, after four years of being no further, I didn't go north of I-4, I'm in this crazy little vortex of travel right now coming up. I was just in Longboat Key. I was speaking at JJ Virgin's Mindshare Summit, so I was there Wednesday till yesterday and then I'm home. I got hit with this cold. I think it was like a. You know, whenever you're in a group of people in a big thing, it's always it becomes a super spreader kind of event. You know, there's a lot of people with this kind of event, there's a lot of people with this kind of lung gunk thing going around. So I ended up getting it. But I've got now until Tuesday to get better. Then I'm going to speak at Paris Lampropolis here in Orlando and then I go to Miami for Giovanni Marseco's event the following week, and then I've got my Breakthrough Blueprint in Orlando the week after that and then Scottsdale for FreeZone the week after that. Every week, the number of nights in my own bed is we're going to Scottsdale or not Scottsdale, but week after next. Dean: I'll be here next Sunday, Then I go on Tuesday. We go to Phoenix and we'll be at Carefree. Dan: What's Carefree? Oh, that's where. Dean: No, no, carefree is north and east of Scottsdale in Phoenix yeah. And so we're at Richard Rossi's. Dan: Da. Dean: Vinci 50. Then we take off for there, we drive to Tucson for Canyon Ranch, we drive back and we have the summit, we have the Free Zone Summit Then, then we have 100K, and then we have 100K. So that's it. So are you coming to the summit too? I am of course, and what I'm doing this time is I have three speakers in the morning and three speakers in the afternoon, and I have Stephen Poulter, Leslie Fall and Sonny Kalia, and then in the afternoon I have Charlie Epstein, Chris Johnson and Steve Crine. I have Charlie. Epstein, chris Johnson and Steve Crang. And what I did is I did a triple play on the three in the morning, three in the afternoon. I did a triple play and then I'm talking to each of them, the names of the three speakers, three columns, and then you write down what you got from these three columns, right? And then you get your three insights and then you talk in the morning in groups and then you do the same thing in the afternoon. I think that would be neat, nice. Dan: Very nice. It's always a good time, always a great event. Yeah, two parties. Dean: Yep, we have sort of a party every night with Richard. It's about three parties Two parties with me and then probably two parties with Joe so seven parties, seven parties, seven parties, yeah, yeah Well. I hope your editor. Can, you know, modulate your voice delivery? Dan: I'm so sorry, yeah, exactly. Dean: Yeah, you got it. What a couple days you've been with it. Dan: Yeah, yesterday was like peak I can already feel that you know surrounded by doctors at JJ's thing. So I got some. Dean: Where's? Dan: Lawn. Dean: Boat Tea. Dan: Sarasota. Dean: Oh, okay. Dan: Yeah, it's just an island right off of Sarasota and so, you know, surrounded by doctors, and so I got some glutathione and vitamin C. I got some glutathione and vitamin C and some. Then I got home and JJ's team had sent some bone broth and some you know, some echinacea tea and all the little care package for nipping it in the bud and a Z-Pak for I've got a great pancake power pancake recipe that I created. Dean: I actually created this. You're talking to an originator. Dan: It's a world premiere here. Dean: Yeah, so you take about six ounces of egg white Egg white, okay and you put it in a blender, and then you take about a handful of walnuts. You put it in a blender and then you take about a handful of walnuts, you put it in and you take a full scoop of bone broth and put it in. Then you just take a little bit of oatmeal, just give it a little bit of starch, then a little bit of salt, then you veggie mix it, veggie mix it, you know. Then you put it in a pie pan, okay. And then you put frozen raspberries oh yeah, raspberries, bacon bits and onions. Raspberries and bacon bits Yep, yep, okay, yep, yep, bacon bits makes everything taste better. Yep, okay yeah, bacon bits makes everything taste better. Dan: It really does. I don't think about that with the raspberries, but that's great. Dean: Yeah, I told people in the coach, you know the triple play. I said triple play is my bacon tool. I said whatever other, whatever other tool you did, you do the triple play and it's like adding bacon to it. Adding bacon, that's the best. Yeah, it makes it good. And then you just put it in the microwave for five and a half minutes and it comes out as a really nice pancake. Oh, that's great. Yeah, and it's protein. I call it my protein pie, protein pie. Dan: That's great. Dan Sullivan's triple play protein pie. Yeah, yeah, the recipe recipe cards handed out. Will they show up in the breakfast buffet? Dean: No, no, it's, you know, I think it's. I think it takes a developed taste, you know, to get it, you know, but it's got a lot of protein. It's got, you know, egg white in the protein. The bone broth has a ton of protein in it, yeah, so it's good. Yeah, I'm down. Good, yeah, I'm at, probably since I was 20, maybe in the Army my present weight. I'm probably down there and I got about another 10 to go, and then it's my linebacker weight when I was in high school. Dan: Oh, that's great. Dean: Going back to linebacker Mm-hmm. Dan: Well, you'll have those new young teenage knees that you'll be able to suit up One of them. Dean: One of them anyway. Dan: If your Cleveland Browns need you. Yeah, if your. Dean: Cleveland Browns need you. Yeah, well, if you want to play professional football, play for the Browns, because you always get January off. That's funny. Yeah, kansas City yesterday, you know it was about zero. You know I mean boy, oh boy. You know you got to you know, I mean. Did Kansas City win yesterday? Yeah, they won, you know, 23, 23-14, something like that, you know. And you know they're just smarter. You know, it's not even that they're better athletes. I think their coach is just smarter and everything like that. Jim, I watch. I'm more interested in college football than I am. Ohio State and Notre Dame, Two historically classical. Dan: I've really gotten into Colorado football because just watching what Deion Sanders has done in two seasons basically went from the last worst team in college football. Yeah To a good one to a good yeah To nine and three and a bowl game, and you know, and Travis Hunter won the Heisman and they could potentially have the number one and two draft picks in the NFL this year. Dean: You know that's, that's something. Did he get both? Dan: of them draft picks in the NFL. This year that's something. Dean: Did he get both of them? I know he got his son because his son came with him. Was he a transfer Hunter? I don't know if he was a transfer. Dan: He brought him from Jackson State because before, before dion went to uh colorado, he spent three years in yeah at jackson state and turned that whole program around yeah and then came uh and now she was talking to the cowboys this this week I. I don't know whether he is or that's. Uh, I mean, they're everybody's speculating that. That's true. I don't know whether he is or that's. I mean everybody's speculating that that's true, I don't know how I feel about that Like I think it would be interesting. You know I'm rooting that he stays at Colorado and builds an empire, you know, yeah. Dean: Of course you know it used to screw the athletes because the coach, would you know, drop them. They would come to the university and then they would leave. Dan: That's what I mean, that's what? Dean: I think that he would no, but now they have the transfer portal, so you know if the university, yeah, but still I think it would leave a lot of. Dan: I think it would leave a really bad taste in people's mouths if he, if he left now. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, Like. Dean: I think, that would. Dan: I would. I wouldn't feel good about what about that either, cause I think about all the people that he's brought there with promises. You know, like everybody's joint he's, he's building momentum. All these top recruits are coming there because of him, yeah, and now you know, if he leaves, that's just. You know that. That's too. I don't know. I don't feel good about that, I don't feel good. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway, I've got, I got a jump, I've got. Jeff. We're deep into the writing of the book we have to chat for about 10 minutes. Dan: I'm happy. Dean: I hope your cold goes away. I'll be here in Toronto next week and I'll call and we'll see each other. We'll see each other within the next couple of weeks. Dan: That's exactly right Okay. Dean: Okay, bye, talk to you soon. Bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, Dan shares his journey from recovering in snowy Toronto to basking in the Arizona sunshine at Canyon Ranch. While battling a cold and back spasm in Canada, He found unexpected humor in a limousine driver discovering our heated driveway before making my way to the warmth of Tucson. At Canyon Ranch, I read historical British Navy novels and attended Richard Rossi's conference, where conversations sparked insights about technology's role in our world. The discussions centered on how companies like Google and Apple influence geographic naming conventions and how AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude work to match human capabilities rather than surpass them. We explored the relationship between technology and daily life, from electric vehicles to meal delivery services. These conversations highlighted how technological advances aim to streamline our routines while acknowledging the challenge of replicating genuine human experiences. The experience reinforced that technology offers convenience and efficiency but cannot replace authentic human connections and experiences. This balance became clear through examples like distinguishing between Bach's original compositions and AI-generated music, reminding us of technology's role as a tool rather than a replacement for human interaction. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In the episode, Dan shares his journey from Toronto's cold to Arizona's warmth, highlighting his recovery from a cold and back spasm, and experiences attending a conference and relaxing at Canyon Ranch. We discuss the impact of technology on geographic naming conventions, mentioning how companies like Google and Apple influence changes such as the renaming of geographic locations. The conversation explores the idea that technology is striving to match human intelligence, with examples including AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, and the future potential of seamless digital interactions. I reflect on the progression of vision and technology, discussing how initial ideas develop into intellectual property and the role of technology in enhancing human capabilities. We explore resistance to change with technological advancements, using examples like the shift from gasoline to electric vehicles and how people adapt technology to maintain comfort. The episode examines the distinction between authentic human experiences and artificial replication, emphasizing the irreplaceable value of genuine human connections and interactions. We share personal anecdotes about how technology has replaced routine tasks, discussing the convenience of services like grocery delivery and automated car washes, and pondering future technological advancements. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Mr Jackson, I hope you're well, I am. Dan: I'm much better than I was last weekend. I was, yeah, out of it. I mean, really I had like a cold and my back was in spasm. It was not good. So I'm a nice recovery week and I'm on the mend. How was your adventures in Arizona? Are you still in Arizona? Dean: now. No, I got back around 11 o'clock last night to Toronto. That has about a foot of snow. Dan: I saw that. Dean: Yeah, and it's still snowing, it's still coming down. So we really had nothing for November, december, january, but February seems to be the winter. It's really snowing, I mean it's continuous, it's not heavy snow, but it's just constant, and I kind of like it. And we got home last night and the limousine driver who driveway and he said, oh, I hope we can get up to your driveway and he, he hadn't uh, he didn't have previous he didn't have previous experience. He says oh my golly, you have heated driveways. And I said, yeah, uh, of course you know we've got to be good to our got to be, good to our limousine drivers. Dan: You know we have to you know, set a standard for driver friendliness and anyway, so Did he tell you, listen, if you wanted to really be good, you'd buy the house behind you so we could keep the driveway going all the way through. Dean: Yeah, somebody else did and they fixed it up, so I think that's out of the future. That's out of the. You know that's not going to happen. You can't add that to the compound, right? Yeah, so anyway, regarding Arizona, it was great. We were there for two and a half weeks so we had Richard Rossi's conference which was terrific, yeah, terrific. Richard does such a great job with this right. Dan: I mean, it's something that he's really doing it out of his own passionate curiosity himself. I think that's a good thing when you can make your own thing. I think that's a good thing when you can make your own. Dean: Then we did a week at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, which was really terrific and beautiful. I mean just gorgeous weather every day 75-ish. Got up to 80 a little bit, but absolutely clear. Not a cloud in the sky. For a week Didn't see a cloud in the night sky in Tucson. Dan: I was going to ask what's a day in the life at Canyon Ranch for you. Dean: I'll have a massage scheduled. You know you can go to 50 different things, but I don't. And you know, I read a lot while. I'm there I go for walks and know, did some gym work? and and then, yeah, just to take it really easy, you know I'm reading just a terrific set of British Navy stories from the novels. These are historic historically. They're all during the Napoleonic War, when Britain War, when Great Britain was fighting the French, and it follows. First of all, there's about 20 authors who write these terrific books, but the one I'm reading right now, andrew Wareham is his name and he follows a sea captain from when he becomes a midshipman. He becomes a midshipman. That's your first step in being an officer is a midshipman. But they start at nine and 10 years old. So they have nine and 10 year old boys on board ship, you know, and they lose a lot of them. You know because they're in. You know they're in action during the sea battles and you know they and they're foolish. You know 10, who who thinks? who thinks about danger when you're 10 years old, you know, but Trails him and he's about 25 now and he's a captain. He's a captain. So in 15 years he's become a captain and just terrific, just extraordinarily well-written books, but it's just about this one person. And then he goes up in terms of skill and responsibility and importance and he becomes rich doing it. Because if you captured a French ship, then you might be. Yeah, except for the gold. The gold had to go to the government. To the government. Dan: OK. Dean: You know the British government, but outside of that you could. You auctioned it off and the captain got a set share, and then everybody right down to the lowest seaman. So I went through about three of those in a week. Three, three now, wow yeah, and that was it. And then I came back and we had our free zone, and which worked out really worked out, really well. And you know you had arranged for a. Dan: I heard, you had arranged for a satellite launch while you were having the reception. Dean: Yeah, the rocket rocket, you know. I mean mean the rocket maker is very busy these days rearranging the government, you know. And uh so yeah, I thought it was kind of him to just take a little bit of time out and send a rocket up during our reception. I thought, you know, you know kind of a nice touch, you know, and yeah, it went really well and the, you know it's mostly parties. You know kind of a nice touch, you know, and yeah, it went really well and the you know it's mostly parties. You know our summit I mean if you, if you take this, if you take the two parties and put them together, they're equal to the amount of time we're doing in the conference and then the conference has lots of breaks, so yeah, I think it was more partying actually it's print seven, that's yeah, I mean that's the great uh seven print enjoy life and have a good time, you know right, right, right and then we uh took a day, and then we moved over to joe, which was joe yeah it's genius. Yeah, joe is such a great and the new offices look really good. Dan: I was just going to say I saw Richard Miller told me about the big 110-inch televisions or screens on the thing. That makes a big difference. Dean: Well, the big thing he can comfortably put 100 people in now. Yeah. Because, he's knocked out walls. Dan: Yeah, I zoomed in a little bit on Friday and, yeah, looks like a nice turnout too. It looks like that group's really growing. Dean: Yeah, it seems, I guess about 40, you know about 40 people. Yeah, and some not there, so it's probably total numbers is a bit higher. And yeah, and yeah, and yeah. We had one very impressive speaker. The senior editor for Epoch Times was there. Dan: Epoch Times. I saw that yeah. Dean: Yeah, in the afternoon and I didn't really know the background to this story. You know the background to the public. Yeah, and I had lunch sitting next to him, a very interesting person, you know, and he's very connected to a lot of people in the new administration Trump administration so he was talking about all the different things that he was doing. Dan: And I saw that Robert Kennedy was confirmed since last we spoke for the yeah and he's good friends with him. Dean: The editor is good friends with him. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And the next one is the FBI director, and he's good friends with him, so anyway, yeah, and Jeff Hayes was there and Jeff was just. I mean because Jeff had a major you know he had a major role in getting Robert Kennedy to the point where he could be and but I'm enjoying the. For the first time in US history, the government is being audited, mr Musk. Dan: I knew I saw it was very interesting. I saw something that there was somebody posted up a video from the 90s when Clinton and Gore launched a. There was something it was called rego, I think, but reinventing government operations or something, and it was mirroring all the things that they're saying about Doge, about the finding inefficiency and finding looking out all those things. So it was really interesting. They were showing the parallels of what was actually, you know, in 90, you know mid nineties, when Clinton and Gore were in yeah, yeah. Dean: Well, they didn't have the. I mean, it would have been an impossible task in the 1990s, but not so today, because of the guy, because they could just go in and they can identify every single check. That's written, the complete history, you know, and everything. They couldn't do that back in the 90s, you know Right. And probably they weren't the right party to be doing it either. Dan: So, anyway. Dean: no, I find it very intriguing and you can tell by the response of the Democrats that there's some stuff there. Dan: There's some there. Dean: There's some there there I think that I was just reading that. So far that you know they're they're, they're estimating that it's at least a trillion of found money. Dan: In other words, that when they go through, they'll find a trillion is a big, you know. Dean: I find that an impressive amount of money actually. Dan: Yeah, I find that an impressive amount of money. Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah yeah, yeah. Dean: So yeah, it's a big change. I think you know, I, I think that a lot of people who hate trump are probably wishing that he had actually won in 2020 you know, had to live with kovid for you know two and a half, three years, because nobody, almost no government, that was in charge. When COVID two years, I guess two and a half years of COVID. They've just been thrown out all around the world. Whoever the government was got thrown out, and so if Trump had won in 2020, he'd be out now and they'd probably be the Democrats and everything like that and they probably wouldn't have Elon Musk taking a look at government spending. Dan: What's the buzz in Canada now with their impending 51st? Yeah, it's nothing. Dean: We're in limbo. We're just in limbo because you know, the government isn't sitting and they're in the middle of a leadership race to replace Trudeau, and that won't happen until March 9th. Dan: Governor Trudeau Did you hear Donald Trump Government Trudeau. Dean: The state of Canada. Dan: Yeah, Trudeau keeps calling him Governor Trudeau. It's so disrespectful it's ridiculous. Dean: Yeah, the Gulf of America and the state of Canada. That's big news, since the last time we spoke right. Dan: We've had big changes. We had Governor. Trudeau and the Gulf of America. It's officially changed on the Google Maps now. Dean: Yeah, apple too. Apple changed over to the Gulf of America, and so did Chevron. In its annual report it talked about all of its deep water drilling in the Gulf of America. Yeah, it's interesting how things get named, anyway, I don't know. There wasn't any active government that called it the Gulf of Mexico. It was just the first map makers, whoever they were, yeah. They just said well, yeah, we call this the Gulf of Mexico and it's a done deal, deal. And so my sense is you know, if the you know if Google changes the name. That's an important support for the change. Dan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean, it's so funny. I wonder how long now it'll take for the street names to change to. Dean: Well, they're changing, you know and they're, yeah, and they're changing the military bases. You know they had all these military bases in the. Us that were named after people who you know were deemed racist or deemed, you know, not proper that this person's name should be. So one administration changes them, but the next administration comes back and changes them all back to the original and Mount McKinley I always liked Mount McKinley and then they changed to Mount Denali. Oh, is that right I didn't know that, and now it's changed back to Mount McKinley. Okay, so Mount McKinley is the tallest North American mountain tallest mountain in. North America. So anyway, it's really good. I've been toying with the book title. Dan: It's not the book. Dean: I'm writing right now, but the title of the book is Technology is Trying Very Hard to Keep Up with Us, okay, Technology is trying really hard to keep up. Yeah, because people, I think, have bought into it that we're the ones who are trying to keep up with technology. Dan: Right. Dean: And I think it creates a lot of stress. I think we're trying to keep up with something that we don't understand, and I think that's a very stressful, I think that's a very stressful attitude. And I just tested it out at Genius Network. And I just said what would you think about this? That technology is trying very hard to keep up with us. And they said, wow, wow. What do you mean? Well, you know, because I said first of all it's inferior. I said first of all it's inferior. Technology is inferior because the objective of so many of the researchers in technology is that we'll now have technology that's as smart as humans. So, right off the bat, the premise of that is that technology isn't as smart as humans. Okay, so why would we be trying to be keeping up with something that's not as smart as us? That's true, yeah, but just from a standpoint. I think, probably, that you wouldn't be able to measure what's happening one way or the other. One way or the other, you really wouldn't be able to measure them, you know. I mean, if you take an individual human being, just one person, and you look at that person's brain, that brain is the most complex in the world. The human brain has more connections than anything else in the world. So in the universe not in the world, but in the universe it's the most complex, that's just one individual and then humans can communicate with each other. So it's you know. Say you have 10 human brains, that's 10 times the most complex thing in the world and they're doing all sorts of things. So my sense is that's the superior thing that you know, the human brain and individual human is superior. So I think the makers of technology are trying to keep up with what the human brain is doing, but it's really hard. Dan: it's really hard yeah, this is I mean. Yeah, I wonder. I just upgraded my chat gT membership. Now I just upgraded to the $200, $200, $200 a month. Dean: Yeah, and apparently they're feeding you, dean, they're dating his. First it's $2. First it's free. Dan: That's how they get you. Dean: Dan, that's $20 a month. Now it's $200. Right, and you're deeper and deeper into it. Then they're going to say it's $500 a month, yeah, and then you're into the thousands. Dan: And that's how they get you. That's what they do, that's how they get you yeah. Dean: You can't back out of it. You can't back out of GPT. Yeah, once you're in, you're in. Dan: So I need gpt. Yeah, my cheer hand, you're in, so I need the. So now, from what I understand, I got it and then I've been, you know, recovering here the last uh, couple of weeks or I was on my, had my event and and recovery here, so I haven't really spent the time to go deep in it. But from what I understand now they can do projects for you Like it. Can you know, I just did some test things Like can you, you know, see what massage times are available at Hand and Stone for me for today, and it goes to the website and logs it can book for you if you wanted it, you know. So I really I see now like the way forward, it's really just a world of truly just being able to articulate what you want is a big thing and you know you had 25 years of just practicing. What do you want, you know, in your daily practice. Dean: Journaling You're journaling. Dan: Yeah, and now we're truly like I think this is one step closer to just being able to like articulate what you want and it can happen. I mean, I see it now on, you know, with the combination of the things that are doing, like Claude. A lot of people are using Claude for, like creating websites and apps and you know, functional things and then using. Now, I think, with ChatGPT, combined with those capabilities, that's really what the $200 a month, one kind of gets you is the ability for you to set it on a task and then come back. It'll still work on it while not. It felt like before, for $20 a month, charlotte would do whatever you wanted her to do right in real time while you're there, but you couldn't assign it a task that is going to be done while you're not there. So, man, it's pretty amazing times what we're coming into here being a visionary is a big thing. Dean: Yeah, my, I'm just. You know, I'm really. I just work with one, one tool and see, how much? I can get out of it and you know, perplexity is doing a good job of giving me alternative copy copy ideas, and the thing is that I've got so many thinking tools of my own that I've created over my last that the tools I think are really custom designed for how I go about things, okay, and and so see for me to kind of learn this new stuff in the time that I would be learning something new I'd be creating three or four new. I'd be creating three or four new tools yeah which are useful in the program. So there's an immediate payoff in the program and then they have IP value as we're discovering they have. IP value, so I'm not seeing the return on investment yet. I mean, I have team members who can do the programs and they're investigating them all the time and they're getting better. So I can just chat with, I can just send them a fast filter or something like that. That's a tool, fast filter, and then they go and they execute it and I haven't spent any time learning it and so I'm really interested in listening to you, because you're I would suspect that you're making advances every day, right, probably something new every day. Dan: I'm starting to see I don't know whether I've shared with you the we're kind of putting some legs on the VCR formula, kind of putting some. You're digging a little deeper into how to really define those what vision, what capabilities, what reach, how to think about them. And what I looked at with vision is thinking of it as a progression from the levels of vision that you can have. So you can start out with the ability to create a hypothesis or have an idea about something. I think that if you did this, that would be a good thing, right, this is what you, we should do, or this is where I think we should go with this. That's one level. Then, from that, then the next level up is that you have proven. That is right, that's a good idea, right. So you've set up an experiment, you've taken some action on that idea. You've gotten some feedback that, yeah, that's good. It's almost like applying the scientific method in a way. Right, you create a hypothesis, you set up an experiment, you do it Now. Once you've got proof, then the next level up is to create a protocol for that. You could repeat the result that you were able to get one time. And once you've got that protocol, now you've got something that can be packaged and protected. Ip is the crown jewel of the vision column. Everything should be progressing to that peak of having IP. And once you have a piece of IP, once you have a protocol, an algorithm, a recipe you know engineer, whatever the thing is. Now it moves into your capability column that you have it now as something that you can package as a result for someone Right. So it's been. It's a really interesting thing. You can package as a result for someone right, so it's a really interesting thing. I think that progression of kind of you know feels in line with the make it up, make it real, make it recur kind of progression as well. Dean: Yeah. Now here's a question and it's kind of related to this. Technology is trying really hard to keep up that I started the podcast with this morning. If you looked at yourself, are you using technology so that you can be different or are you using technology so that you can be the same? That's a good question. Dan: I think I'm using technology so that, well, I don't know how to think about that. I would say am I using technology so that I can be different? I can't think of an example to say either way. I mean I'm using technology in many cases to do what I would do if I could count on me to do it. You know, I think that's a thing that you know technology is able to do the things that I would do. And I take technology as you know, I have a broad definition of technology. Right, like a shovel would be a technology too. Right, any kind of tool to do what you would do in an enhanced kind of way, like if your thing is you're trying to dig a swimming pool, you know you do it by hand, scoop out all the dirt. But somebody realized, hey, if we make a shovel that is similar but bigger, it could scoop that out. And then if we make a, a backhoe, that can you know, do that's a thing so it's doing? I think the answer is probably all technology is to do the same faster and bigger yeah, I just just wonder that the most dominant force in people's life is really their habits, and what I feel is there's a set of habits that work. Dean: you know, you like them and they work. And secondly, you like doing them, you like doing them but you're being asked to change. You know, there's sort of this message, message, a narrative you're going to have to change and you're going to have to change. And I'm wondering if, at a certain stage, people reach a point where they say, okay, I'll use technology, but not to change the way you want me to change, but to stay the way I am. Dan: That's interesting but to stay the way I am. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's probably good arguments for both sides, right? I think technology ultimately in its bestest to be able to replace your time and effort on doing something to make it easier to do what you need to do. I think about Excel, for instance, using Excel spreadsheets as a way of being able to sort and organize and compute data back like to the earliest technologies you know. Dean: Yeah, well, I just feel that you know. I mean, first of all, very few people are. I would start with myself by saying that I've probably got a massive habit system. You know, that's basically repeats who I am every day, like 90 and it's comfortable. You know it's comfortable you know, and I do it, and therefore, if I am asked to be more productive or I'm asked to be creative, I will only use those technologies that allow me to be productive in a way that my daily habits can stay the same. I don't really want to be disrupted. Right, yeah, I can see this, you know, with. One of the problems with EVs is that people are really used to going to the gas station. They've got a whole routine and it isn't just pumping gas, they go in, you know, they go in, they buy some things, you know, and everything like that, and it's really a short period of time. I mean, if you wanted to fill up your car, you know, and I was used to it because we had a, you know, in our trip we had a Beamer, we had the big Beamer. They have a X7 now. Dan: The X5 was always. Dean: Now they have an X7. And, the thing you know, we had it for two and a half weeks, so about three or four days before we left. We just topped it up, you know, we just I put enough gas in that would get us back to the airport you know, when we did it and you know it was like four minutes. You know it's like four minutes, yeah, where you know if you're I mean if you do your charging up overnight, there's no problem to it. You know, if you're I mean if you do your charging up overnight, there's no problem to it, you know there's no problem charging up, but if you're out on a trip and you're getting short on you know, on power, then it's a lot, you know where is it? Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I find that same thing Like so I, you know net. I have a charger at my house for my Tesla. And so I just plug it in and I never. I don't miss. Well, I never went to the. I never went to the gas station. Anyway, I would have Courtney. You know my assistant would always go. That was one of the things that she would do. But I think about, you know, the things that Courtney would do 10 years ago, like getting gas in my car, taking to the car wash all of that stuff, going to the grocery store, going to restaurants to pick up stuff or to take things to the mail, all of the things that were. You know. A lot of that is now replaced with technology, in that there's no need to, I don't need to go to the gas station. My car is always charged and always ready. We have there's a there's this big now push of these super convenient car wash things. So for $32 a month you join this. For $32 a month you have unlimited car washes and there's one right on the way to or the way home from, honeycomb, the breakfast place that I go to every day. So I can just literally swing in. You don't even, you don't get out of your car, you just drive through. It's got the. It recognizes your barcode thing. You drive right through and off you go, and so I always have a super clean car. I use Instacart for the grocery delivery and Uber Eats and Seamless and, like you think, 10 years ago one of the things that we had Courtney do was go to. It's funny you say this right, but technology keeping up with us, this would fit in that category that there was no delivery service for food aside from pizza and Chinese food. That's what you could get delivered at your house or office, right. So we had Courtney go to every restaurant, like all of our favorite restaurants. She went to every restaurant and got the takeout menu, two copies of it, one. So we had a binder, one at the house and one at the office that had the menus of every restaurant and now, all of a sudden, every restaurant was delivery, because we would place the order and then Courtney would go and get it and bring it. Dean: You know. Dan: And so that's what technology kind of replaced 90% of what Courtney was doing. You know, it's really interesting to to think. You know, pretty simple, have the, remember on Star Trek they had the replicators where they would you know? Just you tell the thing what you want and it would make the food. Dean: We're not that far off probably from that. Well, where do you see that? I don't see that at all. Dan: No, I'm saying on in you're seeing now I don't know if you've ever seen these robotic kitchens that are kitchen robots that you know can make anything that you want, and I think it's very interesting that you look at. Ai will be able to assess your inventory in your fridge and your robots will keep the ingredients stocked and your AI robot chef will be able to make whatever you want. I mean basically anything. Any packaged protocol, like for recipes or anything that you know how to do, is now eligible for someone else to do it, you know, and someone else being a technology, a robot, to be able to do it, you know, and someone else being a technology, a robot, to be able to do it. But there's no, you still have to be able to. There's still the human element of things. I had a really interesting experience just yesterday is I send out, you know, three emails a week to our subscribers, you know, to all my on my list of entrepreneurs, and you know the emails, for several years, have been derivative of my podcasts. Right, like so they. I would talk the podcast and then we would get those transcribed and then I had a writer who would take the transcript and identify you know two or three or four key points that we talked about in the podcast and create emails. You know three to 500 word emails based on those in my voice and I use air quotes in my voice because it really was my words Cause I spoke them on the podcast but she was, you know, compiling and putting them all together and they you know, I've had. I've got a lot of them and we've been, you know, since COVID, kind of in syndication with them, where they're on a three-year rotation, kind of thing, you know. So I haven't had to write new emails, but occasionally I will intersperse them in. And so the other day, yesterday, I sent out an email that I wrote 100% and it was describing the advantages of time travel and I was talking about how, in lead generation situations, you know, I mean, if I could say to people, let's say, you own a real estate company and we had the ability to time travel and we could go back two years from today and we're going to leave at midnight, but before we leave you can go to the MLS and you can print off a list of every house that sold in the last two years. So we can beam back two years armed with a list of every person that sold their house in the last two years and all you would need to do over that period of time is just concentrate on building a relationship with those people, because that's what you're looking for Right, on building a relationship with those people, because that's what you're looking for, right. And so I told that whole story and then said, you know, since and it reminds me, dan, of your it's certainty and uncertainty, right, like if you had certainty that these are the people that are going to sell their house, that you would be, you would have a different approach to your engagement with them, but it wouldn't change the fact that, as valuable as you think this list is, armed with this list of everybody that's going to sell their house, that sold their house in the last two years, you'd still have to go through the last two years in real time, and the people who sold their house, you know, teen months later, were you still had to wait 18 months for them to mature. And I thought, you know, I said that the thing that, since we can't time travel backwards, the best thing we could do is plant a time capsule and start generating leads of people who are going to sell their house in the next 100 weeks. And if you had that level of certainty around it, that would be a big thing, right? So I wrote that email and I talked about the thing. But I've gotten five or six replies to the emails saying I read a lot of your emails. In my opinion, this is the best one that you've written, or what an amazing insight, or this really resonated with me, but it was something that has like 100% of me in it, as opposed to written as a derivative of something I said. So it's not, I think, that human element. I don't know whether it's the energy or whatever. Dean: Yeah, it's kind of interesting there. I think what I'm going to say relates to what you're saying, right? Dan: now. Dean: There was just a YouTube. It was YouTube and it was. Can you tell if it's Bach or not? Dan: So what they did is they had an actual recording of Bach. Dean: Who wrote it, you know? And then they did an AI version of like Bach. And then they did an AI version of like Bach. And then they asked you to listen to both and say which one was Bach and which one was the AI. And there were six of the six. They gave six samples and I got it right six times in a row. Dan: Oh, wow. Dean: And what I was saying is that there's something that the human being has added which is not. It's actually is, and there's a big difference between is and kind of like, and it seems to me that's what you're saying here. Dan: Yeah. Dean: That there's something. It's kind of like Dean Jackson or is. Dean Jackson, and my sense is I think the gulf between those two is permanent. I agree 100%. Dan: That's the, you know. There's Jerry Spence, the attorney. He wrote a great book called how to Argue and Win Every Time. Dean: And one of the things that he said is when we're communicating. Dan: One of the things that he said is when we're communicating, one of the things that the receiver, what we're doing as the receiver of communication, is, we have all these invisible psychic tentacles that are out measuring and testing and looking for authenticity of it, and they can detect what he calls the thin clank of the counterfeit. Yes, and that's an interesting thing, right? What was it to you in Is it Bach that made you able to pick it out? Can you discern what the difference was. Dean: I think it was an emotional thing that basically I was moved by the back one, and I was just intrigued by the other one that's interesting right one of them was one of them was emotional, but the other one was. You know, I was me saying is it? You know, I, I don, I don't think so, I don't think it is when. With the first one, it didn't take long. There was just, you know, it was maybe five or six bars and I said, yeah, I think that's Bach, it's the twinkle in the eye, right. Dan: That's kind of the thing that is. Yeah, I get it. I think we're onto something with that. Dean: Yeah, and. I think it's uniqueness. In other words, here's my feeling is that humans develop new capabilities to deal with technology. I think that our brains are actually transforming as we're surrounded more and more with technology. And it has to do with what's valuable and what's not valuable and anything that's tech, we immediately say, oh, that doesn't really have any value because it's cheap, it's really cheap in other words, it was the technology was created to lower the cost of something. I mean that's really you know, I mean if it were, I mean mean, if it does what it's supposed to do, it lowers the cost, and there's various costs. There's cost of concentration, there's the cost of time, there's the cost of energy, there's the cost of money and everything else. And so technology will lower the cost in those areas and doing it in those areas and doing it. But what I find is that what we really treasure in life, the things that have a higher cost, that have a higher cost, it takes more of our effort takes more of our time. It takes you know more of our money, and in person you know. In person is always going to cost more than automatic or digital. So, my sense is, as time goes along, we adjust our you know the cost benefit analysis of the experience. Dan: Okay. Dean: And think about the six who wrote back to you on it. How much their cost was it really cost them to listen to the real thing? Okay because, first of all, they were listening and they were moved. They couldn't be doing something else when they were being moved by your message. Okay, and then they took time out. They took time out to actually construct a response to you. So the cost I mean we use cost as a bad word you know there's a high cost, or anything right yeah, but it's actually investment, the investment that the things where we're required to invest more are actually more valuable. Dan: I agree with you, yeah, yeah. So I think that's part of this, that's part of this balance, then, with the technologies, using the technology. I mean, you know, how do you get that? Dean: Yeah, that level about things that we're fully engaged with, that are more valuable than things that are just done for us in an instant. I don't have the answer to that, it's just an observation. Dan: No, I don't either. You're right, but the fact is that a lot of these things are, you know, no matter what the advancements happen in technology, in some of these ways, it's the fact is that life moves at the speed of reality, right, which is, you know, 60 seconds per minute. You know, I mean, that's really the, that's really the thing, and that those our attention is engaged for 100 of those minutes that we have, and when it's engaged in something, it's not engaged in something else, and when I think what that's what you're saying, is that you've gotten the authentic, like core, you know, full engagement. And it's an interesting thing that I think what AI is doing for bulk things, for people is it's allowing them to not have to pay attention to things they don't have to. It's really it allows everybody to get the cliff notes or something. They don't have to read Hamlet, they don't have to read Macbeth, they can scan the cliff notes of something. They don't have to read Hamlet, they don't have to read Macbeth, they can scan the cliff notes of Macbeth. But that's not the same experience of seeing. Dean: No, there's something about engagement, I think, the word we'll use as our segue word, namely to pick it up next time. Dan: I think it is. Dean: There's a real pleasure of being fully engaged. Dan: I think that's something that is cause this is an interesting thing. I'm gonna throw a couple of things out that we can marinate on for next time, because we're just having this conversation about Michelelin star restaurant experiences that I? Dean: I've always been fascinated by that the young chef who turned down uh three-star rating no he said I don't want to be rated, I don't want to have a michelin. Well, and people, people say well, of course you want a Michelin rating. He says no, he says it does weird things with what I'm supposed to be and what a restaurant is supposed to be. And he said I noticed the type of customers that came in were different type of customers. So he said I don't want to be listed anymore as Michelin. That's interesting. Dan: But it's fascinating. That is an only. It's a one-off original experience provided by a group of passionate people. You know doing something only in the moment. There's no leverage. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And I thought about the same thing like a, you know, like a performance of live theater in a live in an environment is a one-off, original experience and I think that's why people who love theater and love doing theater actors, I I mean, who love performing in theaters because of that authentic and immediate back that your engagement really brings, that's very live live and in person live exactly. Dean: Yeah, it's interesting, but my sense is that just to. Yeah, exactly, you're being pressured to to change the sameness. You'll look for a technology that frees up the time again so that you can enjoy your sameness. Dan: I don't know if I'm getting that across really. No, I understand, but it's a bit like it's a bit. Dean: It's a bit like a gyroscope. You want to stay on the true path when you're flying and therefore, you need more and more technology. I was noticing we came back in the 787, which is a marvelous airplane. For all of Boeing's troubles, the 787 is not one of them, and you know, it's just that. So we took off, you know, we flew from Phoenix to Toronto and just as we got near the, within about 30 minutes of landing in Toronto, there was just a little bump and the pilot immediately came out and says you know, we were in a little bit of a turbulence zone, but it won't last. In about a minute we'll be out of it and then, a minute later, there was no turbulence, it was just about a minute. And it wasn't real turbulence, it was just a little you know that. I noticed it and they have a really unique technology that they've introduced that can transform turbulence into smoothness. You know that's what I'm interpreting that they do, but for the whole flight, you know, I didn't even remember us taking off and when we landed I said, did we land? Yeah, and she said yeah, bev says we landed, and I said, wow, yeah, it's just really remarkable. But there's millions and millions of little tech bots that are adjusting it so that the sameness you like, which is namely not turbulence, is maintained. And I think that we do this on a personal level. I think we do this on an individual level. We have a smooth flight, we have an experience of what a smooth flight is for us and if there's any interruption of that, we want something that takes away the interruption so we can get back to the feeling that it's a smooth flight. Dan: Yeah agreed. Well, I think we're onto something here. Dean: I think we are yeah, okay. Dan:Changing to stay the same. Dean: Changing to stay the same yeah all righty. Dan: Constantly changing, to stay the same, that's a good book title right there? 0:48:32 - Dean: Oh yeah, all right there. Oh yeah, all righty, I like that Okay. Thanks, Dan. Dan: Okay now next week, I know you're gone next week we're on our way to Nashville for our upgrade, our lube job, whatever. Uh-huh, so two weeks, okay two weeks. Okay, bye. 0:48:52 - Dean: Thanks, Dan Bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, We take you through the fascinating evolution of media and communication technologies. We begin by tracing the journey of written communication from ancient Sumerian pictographs to Gutenberg's printing press. The narrative explores how each technological breakthrough transformed our ability to share information, from industrial-era steam presses to the digital revolution sparked by the first email in 1971. Our conversation delves into the parallels between historical technological adaptations and current innovations. We examine the story of a 1950s typesetter transitioning to digital technologies, drawing insights into how professionals navigate significant technological shifts. The discussion introduces the concept of "Casting, not Hiring," emphasizing the importance of finding meaningful experiences and team dynamics in a rapidly changing world. We explore the transformation of media consumption and advertising in the digital age. Traditional media platforms give way to digital giants like Facebook and Google, reflecting broader changes in how we create, distribute, and consume content. The conversation touches on audience dynamics, using examples like Joe Rogan's media presence and Netflix's market evolution to illustrate these shifts. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I explore the historical journey of media and communication, tracing its evolution from ancient scripts to modern digital technologies. I discuss the pivotal role of Gutenberg's printing press in revolutionizing media distribution and how it set the stage for the widespread use of newspapers and books. We delve into the transition from traditional typesetting to digital processes, drawing parallels between past innovations and current advancements in AI. The conversation highlights the importance of curiosity and effective communication in embracing new technologies, emphasizing the idea of "casting" for meaningful experiences rather than traditional hiring. We examine media consumption trends and the impact of big data on advertising, noting the shift from traditional platforms to digital giants like Facebook and Google. Our discussion includes an analysis of the historical impact of communication technologies, referencing figures like Edison and their influence on modern entrepreneurship. The episode concludes with a focus on the value of appreciation and growth, sharing insights on how recognizing value and excellence can lead to professional and personal breakthroughs. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, and how are you? I am wonderful. Welcome to Cloudlandia, you are in the Chicago outpost. I am. Dan: I'm sitting in a very comfortable spot, noise-free. I just had. Have you ever done any IV where they pump you? Up with good stuff. Dean: I have yeah. Dan: Yeah, I just came from that, so I may be uncomfortably exuberant. Dean: Uncomfortably exuberant. That's a great word there, right there. Dan: Yeah, yeah, uncomfortable to you. Dean: That's the best. Dan: Yeah, yeah. So anyway, we have a good service. Dean: The only thing I miss about Chicago comfortable to you, that's the best, yeah, so anyway, we have a good service. The only thing I miss about Chicago. Dan is our Sunday dinners. Oh the Sunday roundtable. Dan: Yeah, it's a bit more informal now so we don't have a big gap. It's not like the Last Supper. Dean: Right, exactly. Dan: We have Mike Canix coming over and Stephen Paltrow. Dean: Okay, there you go. Dan: They'll be on straight carnivore tonight. Dean: Okay, good, I like everything about that. Dan: Yeah, it's a little bit of snow on the ground and snowing right now, but it's nice. Dean: Oh, that's awesome. Well it's winter here. It's like cool. Yeah, I almost had to wear pants yesterday, dan, it was that cold. Dan: I had to wear pants yesterday, Dan. Dean: It was that cold I had to wear my full-weight hoodie. But yeah, but it's sunny, it's nice. Dan: I was just in the hot tub before we got on the call the Chinese intelligence, who are listening to this phone call. They're trying to visualize what you just said. Dean: Yes, Well, I had a great conversation with Charlotte this morning and something happened. That is the first time I've done it. I literally I talked her ear off. I reached my daily limit of talk interaction. We were talking for about an hour. There's a limit. Yes, I pay $20 a month and I guess there's a limit of how long you can engage by advanced voice tech. Dan: I'd give her a raise. I'd give her a raise. Dean: So they were on her behalf demanding a raise. I'd give her a raise. So they were on her behalf demanding a raise from $20 a month to $200 a month, and I could talk to her all I want. I still think it's worth it. It really is. When you think about if we go through the personification again, if you think about what you're getting for 200 I mean, just the conversation I had with her this morning was worth more than 200, yeah, so you want to know what we were talking about. What were you talking? about well, I am such a big fan of this, the big change uh book that I got for you. That was oh yeah, by stuff like that. So I really have been thinking that the whole game has really been an evolution of our, of words, pictures, sound and the combination of words, pictures and sounds in videos, right, and if we take the big three the words and pictures and sound, that I, you know, we went all the way back to the very beginning and I told her I said, listen, what I'd love to do is I want to trace the evolution of each of these individually. I want to start from the beginning of how we let's just take text, you know, as an example for words, and so she's taking me all the way back to the ancient Sumerians and the invention of kind of the very first kind of visual depiction of words and language, and then all the way up to the hieroglyphics of Egyptians and then into what would now be what we know as the alphabet, with the Romans and Latin, Romans and Latin, and the way that they were distributed was through tablets and they would post posters and things to get things out there. And so I'll pause there and I'll tell you that the lens that I wanted to look at it through for her is to go back and find, just trace, the beginnings of the capability of it, right, the capability of text. So that meant we had to have language and we had to have the alphabet, and we had to have the tools, the mechanism to recreate these on tablets. And then the distribution of them. How were they distributed? The consumption of them, how were they received and popularized? And then how were they capitalized? Who turned business opportunities into? What did this new capability turn into business-wise? So, looking, those four, tracking those four things all the way through history, from the ancient Sumerians, all the way through, and so when we got to, you know, from the time the Romans created the thing, the first kind of commercialization was the scribe industry. That became a thing where people were employed as scribes to you know, to write things, things, and then it came into the monks. We haven't gone deep dive in these yet, we're kind of going through the surface level of them. But the scribes, you know, were the first kind of commercializing and distribution of the of the things. And then when Gutenberg came along, that sort of popularized and made it even more able to distribute things and on the back of that became newspapers and pamphlets and books. So those were the three primary things for hundreds of years. Until the 1800s we had steam presses which were large, just kind of mechanized, sped up Gutenberg presses, and then the roller presses which allowed to have long, continuous streams of printing, which that really led to the modern newspaper. You know we had almost a hundred years until things were digitized where the entire platform was built on that plateau of things. And then it turned into newspapers magazines were the dominant things and mail. Those were the big distribution elements for a hundred years and then, once it got digitized, we turned into email. The first email apparently was sent in 1971 or something, but it took 25 years for that to popularize to the level that everybody had email and it was the primary thing and that led to PDFs and eBooks and distribution on the internet. We talked about bloggers because, if you remember, in the early days of the internet the heroes were bloggers. Those were the sort of personalities pre-social media you know. And then she even used the words that once it became democratized with social media, that things like twitter and and you know those were big things. But she talked about Arianna Huffington and Perez Hilton and Matt Drudge as the kind of first real mainstream capitalizers of this digital kind of went full steam into only digital, when all the mainstream print media was still kind of holding on and and resisting the migration of free news coming through you know um, and then we get to the point now where all of that is completely available. You know medium and sub stack and you know email newsletters taking off as a thing, and then AI bringing into a situation where now the machines can create and distribute the content. And it's funny just that level. I was on a Zoom with Joe Stolte the other day and you know, with even your newsletter, the AI-assisted newsletter you think about those as things, that learning smart, personalized text, media consumption as a really enhanced experience. So I found that really that was the first conversation that I'd had with that kind of context. I'm visualizing, I want to like visualize a timeline of these benchmarks. You know along the way, and realize how long the spaces were between when things actually catalyzed, you know yeah, long in comparison to what? Dan: long in comparison to the last. Dean: You know where we are now that long in comparison to what? Long in comparison to the last. You know where we are now. That long in comparison to that. There was no ability to print words on paper until 1442 or 1555 or whatever. I think it's 1550. Dan: Yeah, so 1455. Dean: Somewhere around there. Somewhere around there, yeah that literally did not change for 400 years till now. You know, in the last 25 years we've gotten to where we can distribute it globally instantly to everybody, and that we've also got machines now that can actually create the content itself and distribute on on your behalf and so I think that's our ability to create that stuff. Like I, I wonder how long and how many hours of research power it would have taken to get this level of what I gained from my conversation with Charlotte. Dan: Well, you would have gotten a doctorate, you would have gotten a PhD. Dean: Yeah, and it would have taken years to study all of that and to go back and find it all you know, but it was very, I found it very all to serve this idea that I think, in all of those digitized four corners, that we have reached a, a pinnacle, where we're faced now going forward with a plateau that really it's going to be about the creative use of. No, I think that's things. Dan: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, just a little addition to charl's work the conversation that you had with Charlotte. One of the reasons why the Greeks have such influence Greek thinking on the world, you know they essentially created history. That was. Dean: You know that was. Dan: Thucydides. And you know, herodotus and Thucydides were two Greek historians and basically their histories basically really formed the whole ancient world. And then you had poetry. Homer was the great poet and. Plato and Aristotle and many others, many other Greek philosophers, but Greece was the first country that developed a really first-class. The Greeks developed a first-class alphabet. I think it may have pretty close to we have 26 letters. I'm not quite sure what they had, but it wasn't. I don't know if it was fewer or more, but maybe only by two or three letters they had, but it was really the alphabet. That is the breakthrough. For example, we have two artists that work for us. They're from Hong Kong and growing up they learned all the. They learned all the ideograms that are in Chinese you know, and you know, and it's years and years and years of study where the alphabet you know. A reasonably intelligent first grader, or maybe even earlier these days, but a six-year-old, can basically grasp the alphabet and be using that skillfully, you know, within their first year of grade school, within first grade and that's what the alphabet did and that's why, you know, the literacy really came in. But even then, when you know in Gutenberg today there weren't that many literate people, you know who could actually? Read, you know. So it wasn't so much the technology Well, the technology was crucial, but it wasn't so much why things. It's just that it took 400 years for the entire population to become literate. You know, and you know to have formal education to empower literacy. That took a long time because people were working manually and they didn't have need for reading. They had to become good at things. Fixated now for about the last eight months on british navy historical novel assault taking place around 1800 to 1800. You know, and you know the majority of sailors on the ships didn't read they, they didn't have right reading, you know but, they were very skillful. They knew the wind, they knew the waves, they yeah, you know, they had phenomenal teamwork and they were very skillful. They knew the wind, they knew the waves, they had phenomenal teamwork and they were very handy. They had a lot of hand skills and everything else, but it's been only recently that your progress in the world really depended upon reading. Dean: Literacy yeah. Dan: Yeah, you had to go forward. I remember that's one story. Just the Greeks. The Greeks that became very powerful, their philosophy still. I mean, every day in universities, or probably universities, there's discussions about what Plato said about this, what Aristotle said about this. So that's still. You know, the power of that over generations is really quite extraordinary. The other thing, if I want to add to that, my sister, who's 89, the man she married, who died about 10 years ago. When I met him, this was in the 1950s, he was a typesetter for a major newspaper in the. Cleveland area and I would go down there and you'd see he put together a whole page of it and you know, and he had to do it backwards, he had to put all the letters. He had this vast, you know, he had these, they were like wooden shelves that had, you know, were divided into, you know, into 28 different, 26 different spots, and he would just pick up the letters and put them. But he made the complete changeover, starting around the 1970s, 1975. He made a complete changeover to becoming digital. It started becoming digital even in the 1970s. And then he just kept progressing, layer after layer, until he was the production manager for the entire network of about five you know five municipal newspapers and everything like that yeah so his history sort of matches what you and charlotte talked about. Dean: Yeah, and I found that really an interesting like multi-track way to look at it, as the technology and then the capability that created for the creation of things, the distribution of those things and the capitalizing on those things, because that's kind of like the cascading layers that happen. And I think if we look at where we are with AI right now, we're at that level where it was available below the surface until two years ago and then now it's sort of widely available as a capability. But all the things that are going to really come, I wouldn't say it's widely available used right now. I heard somebody talk about that. If we think about, like, if ultimately AI is just going to be internet, you know it's like if we think about what internet was in 1996, that's becoming. It's almost like chat. Gpt is the AOL of of what made the internet popular, right as everybody got on. AOL and had access to email and kind of gated browsing. Dan: Yeah, the interesting thing that you know if I just take your example from this morning, it's because you're a good prompter that whole thing happened. The whole essential skill. You know, if you take all the technology, that's a technology, charlotte's technology, and that's there, it's waiting there. It's waiting there to be used. But unless you have a good prompter it won't produce what you produced this morning. Dean: I agree with you 100, and that's why it's all in the prompt prompting. Dan: That means knowing what you want. It's actually a visualization skill because, you visualize something you know like in, not exactly because you, how you did it is unique, but my sense is that you had a question in mind, or you were just curious about something, and then you were able to put it into words. This was strictly spoken, was it? Yeah, uh-huh, yeah, so you didn't type anything in for this. Dean: No, I did not. Dan: Because it's strictly on an audible level, right, exactly, yeah. Anything in for this? No, I did not. Strictly on an audible level, right, exactly yeah. But here's the thing that no one else in the world did what you did this morning, and the reason is because you were just interested in it you were just interested in something and you know, and it was in conversation form, so now tell me about this. Now tell me about this yeah well, what she? Dean: was saying was guiding my things. You know what? It's very similar, dan. It's like if we were to sit down at a piano and look at the piano. There's 88 keys of possibility there. Yeah, unless you know how to prompt the keys to make the noises. Dan: Do you know what I mean? It's just noise. Dean: I think that's really what it is, and I think that chat interactions or AI interactions are going to be the piano lessons of today. Right Like for kids to talk about essential skills. Dan: And the outcome is going to be the music and the outcome is going to be the music. Dean: That's right. That's right, yeah. Dan: I've done about. You know, with perplexity, probably last week I've done about 25, you know where I one. That was really interesting because it was related to the book that I'm writing Casting, not Hiring with Jeff and I was saying, you know, the big thing is that we're only talking, the book is only for a particular type of person, you know. Because, you know he has a wide range of people that he's giving them our small copy of Casting, not Hiring you know, our 60-page book and then he's interviewing them if they're willing to read it, which takes about an hour. If they're willing to read it, then he wants to know what they think about it. You know, but there's, like corporate people that he's talking to, there's academic people that he's talking to, and I said, you know, jeff, academic people that he's talking to. And I said, you know, jeff, there's only one reader for this. That's a successful, talented, ambitious entrepreneur who wants to grow. Who wants to grow, wants to make the growth experience really meaningful and purposeful for himself or herself, but also for the team members, for the members of the company that the entrepreneur owns. And so he said, yeah, well you know how big is that market and I said, well, let's. So I did a search and I had my question. I just looked at it just before I came on the call. I said I want you to, of all the companies incorporated in the United States, the total number of incorporated companies in the United States in 2023, because usually their number. You know that you go back about a year before the present year that you're just sending, because there's an enormous amount of data for that. Dean: And. Dan: I said what percentage of all the incorporated companies in the United States are privately owned? And it turns out it's 99% and 33 million, 33 million incorporated companies. And and then I put in another prompt okay, size of companies 1 to 10, 10 to 50, 50 to 150, 150 to 500, above 500, and 74 percent of them are 74 percent or one to ten. And then, and I said we're really talking basically about companies up to about 150 that's the reader. They have companies that are 150 and everything like that, and it's really interesting that this is the only person they said but there's this huge market of other. You know, jeff didn't say this, but other people said there's. So this should be a book for everybody. And I said, if it's a book for everybody, it's not interesting to anybody that's true, exactly. Dean: Well, that's so. Those numbers have kind of um grown, because I've always heard about you know know, 28 million, but I guess the most recent that would make sense 33 million. Dan: And it would be bigger today because we're you know, we're a full year and into the first month, so it would be bigger. The incorporations go on. And the other thing about what you're saying is you can be so specific, Like you can really put down all the interesting things about the reader you know, about the reader that you're looking for and you know so, while the capability that you're talking and I have some arguments with democratize you know the concept of democratize because there's a certain sense people are going to have equal capabilities. I think just the opposite is going to happen. The range from people with a little ability or no ability to extraordinary capability actually gets bigger and wider to extraordinary capability actually gets bigger and wider. And the reason is exactly what I just said to you that you're the only one in the world who's ever gotten that information laid out and has it back in a very short period of time. And it's strictly because what Dean Jackson was looking for. Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right. I was very curious about it. And I think that it's something. I think it's a unique perspective, especially when we overlay the other things. We only got we were talking about then sound. We only got we were talking about then sound. And it wasn't until the 1800s late 1800s that Edison created the phonograph, that we were able to capture sound and the evolution of that. Then it took another by 25 years later. It was the beginning of radio. That now we have the ability to capture sound, the ability to distribute sound through the radio, that it ushered in this golden era of radio as the distribution medium. And she talked about NBC and CBS and ABC, you know, as the monopolistic NBC was really the big giant. Dan: Yeah, they were the giant. Dean: I mean, they were the powerhouse of radio 1995 was the, or 1925, I think was when they were founded, and then the others were by 1927. Yeah, but that took off the radios in every household and all of that, you know, laid the. That created the mass audience yeah really right, yeah, there was. Dan: Uh. Really, there's a writer named tim wu wu and he's just. He's written about five books on just the extraordinary impact of the communication technologies, starting when you said sort of you know. First the telegraph and the telegraph with sound. That's really the telephones you have. Bell is in there. So, Morris and Bell and Edison. You have the combination. And then Edison also created the movie. I mean, he was the real. I mean, he's the person who created it that became famous for it yes. There were lots of people. He's famous for the light bulb, he's the person who became famous for the light bulb, but there were at least five or six working light bulbs before Edison. It's just that Edison was the first what I would call the modern entrepreneur, technology entrepreneur, and he really grasped where all this stuff was going, more than any other single innovator entrepreneur, and he understood the stock market and he understood how to raise funds and he understood how to market. Dean: You know, yeah, yeah. Dan: So you know I'm getting a lot of patents, so we got two more on Friday, so we're up to 54 patents now. And I was talking in the breakout group on Friday, I said we're really piling up the patents, and so somebody said well, how many are you going for? And I said I can tell you exactly I'm going for 1,068. Tell you exactly, I'm going for 1,068. Uh-huh, 1,068. I mean, where's that number come from? I said Edison had 1,067. Dean: Oh, there you go. Dan: That's the best, and I grew up two miles from his birthplace. So the farm that I grew up two miles away is where Edison was born, milan, ohio, and very famous, I mean he's just a roaring, big, major human being, historic human being in that area, and he's one of my five historic role models. I've got Euclid, I've got Shakespeare, I've got Bach, I've got Hamilton, james Madison and Edison. And I said Edison put all the pieces together that created the modern technological world. Dean: It's true, isn't it? Yeah? Dan: He's the first person to create a formal R&D lab. He had in Menlo, new Jersey. He created his famous lab and he had technicians and scientists and engineers there. And then you know, and then he understood the stock market and he understood you know big systems, how you put big electric systems together and everything like that, you know. The thing is that that's a history of entrepreneurism, the thing that you put together with Charlotte this morning. Dean: Yeah, that was my intention, Because it's always some individual who just decides to do something more with it. Dan: They kind of apply your VCR formula to something that already exists and they say what's the vision? Well, you have to have the vision, but you have to see where it hasn't gone to yet. I mean, that's basically what you have to. Vision is seeing where things have not yet gone to, but could, if you organize them differently? You take the capabilities and combined it with reach, then you. That's what the future really is. Vcr. Dean: Yeah, you know I've had a nice VCR advancement, chad, and I have been talking a lot about it. Chad Jenkins, chad Jenkins, I've been talking about the VCR formula and so I had some distinctions around vision, like what is vision? And I realized there's a progression that it takes like from an idea or a prediction. Is the first level that you got a vision that, hey, I think this could work, and then the next level of it is that you've got proof that idea does work and that opens the gate for you to create a protocol for predictable repeating of that result and that opens the gateway to a patent, to protection of that. Dan: So you predict, you prove you protocol or package and protect the 4P progression. I thought, know you know what. You know what it is. It's the ability to see, yeah, let's say, a reasonable time frame, not 100 years from now, but let's say 10 years from now. Yeah, that, if this were available, a lot of people would like to have this. Dean: Yes. Dan: That's basically what a vision is. That's what a vision is. If it was available to them and it was easy to use. They don't have to change their habits too much to use it 10 years from now and I think a lot of people not only would they love using it, they'd be willing to pay for it. Dean: Of course, yes, I agree, yeah, and so I thought that was very, that was a nice, I mean every drug dealer in the world knows how to do that. Dan: Yeah, I mean, you think about everything started out with an idea. I bet, if we did this, that would be oh, yeah, yeah, I bet, prove it. I bet, yeah, you know, steve jobs with itunes. He said yeah I got interested in music. But when I go into a store, you know, uh, and, and I hear a song I really like, or I hear a musician I really like, and I hear them singing a song, or her I, you know, I'd like to be able to just get that song, but they make it really difficult. You got to buy 11 other songs, or 10 other songs to get the one song you know and you know, and, and I'd like to have it. You know, I'd like to have it on a small machine. I don't want to. You know, I don't want to have a big record that comes home and then I have to have a lot of equipment and everything to put on it. And you know, and you know, I'd like to, I'd like to think of. You know, I'd like to have a technology. Dean: Yeah, I'd like to think of. Dan: You know, I'd like to have a technology Getting a call from yeah, I'd like to have a technology that, the moment I hear the sun, five minutes later I can have it. You know, Mm-hmm. Yes, I mean it's so I think it's imagine, there's a capability multiplied by imagination. You know that's kind of like what vision is. Dean: But you know, the interesting thing is that was true 25 years ago when Steve invented the iPod and the iTunes environment, but then over the next 25 years's taken another evolution. Right, it was still the ownership. Instead of owning the physical thing, you own the digital version of it and you download it onto your device. But now, when it got to the cloud and all the songs are available and you don't need to download them, it's like spotify said listen, we own all the songs, we got access to all of them. Why don't you just pay us nine dollars a month and you can have all the songs and just stream them? Yeah, and, and that's where we're at now, it's like. But I think that the next level, the thing we're at now with ai, is that ai is actually, specifically, that it's reached the generative ai point where it it can actually create songs. That's what's happening now. Dan: Yeah, it's clearly a productive capability that you're exploring here we're having a conversation about. When did you have this conversation with Charlotte? Just this morning, when I woke up this morning, Okay, this entire conversation that we're having would not have happened unless um no, you did what you did for an hour this morning right, that's exactly right, yeah now let me ask you a question here, and it goes to another technological realm and it's big data. It's big data, and so I keep reading about big data. You know big data, and I said and it's accumulating all the data. Okay, and so you have all the data. Okay, and so you have all the data. I remember having a conversation this was probably 10 years ago and the Chinese were developing what was called an intelligence capability, where they could gather information about what all the people in China were doing at any given moment. Okay, and then they could make predictions based on that. Nice, if wait a minute, so you got one point, you got 1.3 billion. Dean: You know however many Chinese there are they're being listened to, you know, and however many Chinese there are. Dan: They're being listened to, you know, and they're. Whatever they're doing, that's being read. And I said how many Chinese do you have to pay attention to what all the other Chinese are doing? I said they must have about 6 million people who, day in, day out, are just listening and they're accumulating massive amounts of data. Okay, and then I say, then what happens? Dean: then what? Dan: yeah, then what? Okay? Okay, uh, and I said so, what do you do with all this data? You know, I said it's overwhelming the amount of data you have. So what's happening with it and what it tells me is that there's no way for you to really comprehend what all that data means. Dean: Yeah, I agree. I mean there's no, but you can argue that's kind of what Facebook does with the algorithm right In a way, of being able to predict what you're likely to click on next. Dan: That's how they're at it, Well that I understand, but that's on the level, that's a commercial level, because really they're selling ads. I mean what Google and Facebook actually are high-level advertising platforms. Dean: Yes, that's exactly what they are. I mean, that's what they are. Dan: Yeah, I mean, and once you've said that, there isn't much else to say. Dean: Once you've said that, it's over. Dan: Well it is what it is and it's a bias, obviously, because it's just, you know it's, if they're spending money, not ads for Google and spending ads for Facebook, they aren't spending money for ads in the New York Times, or yeah. So all the newspaper advertising has gone away and all the magazine advertising has gone away, and probably all the advertising on television, because the number of people watching television is actually going down, you know. Well the actual, I mean if you're following social media or you're you know, you're on the, you're on your computer and you're looking at things. Well, your attention can only be on one thing at a time and if I'm spending you know I used to spend I would say when I stopped in 2018, I stopped watching television together, but I calculated that it was probably I was probably watching anywhere between 15 and 20 hours a week times 52. Okay, so that's. You know that's 800 to a thousand hours and I'm not doing that anymore, so for I got a thousand hours back. He's. I would say 800. I just evened it off at 800. I'd say I've just got 800 hours back. It's just gone into being more productive. I'm incredibly more productive in creating stuff. I have you as a witness. You know that it's going up in numbers. The amount of stuff that I'm creating. it's going up in numbers the amount of stuff that I'm creating. So you know, here's the thing. I don't think I'm unusual in this. I don't think I'm unique on the planet in doing what this is. I just think people are moving their attention away from something where everybody was paying attention to it and now fewer and fewer people are paying attention to it. It's like Joe Rogan, you know, I mean. Dean: Joe Rogan. Dan: The people are watching Joe Rogan. Who did they stop watching or listening and watching to? So that's the big thing. Where are people? Dean: going with their attention. Yeah, and you know I just heard a podcast talking about that. Streaming, you know, like from television. It's gone away from kind of linear television where you know they show one thing on one channel at one time and you have to be there at 8 pm to watch that one show. Watch that one show and you watch it along with ads, right? If you want to watch this happening now, you watch it and you consume the ads. Well, when streaming became available, you know, if you look at that convenience, that it was so much more dignified that we can watch whatever we want to watch when we want to watch it, and there's a price for that. Everybody has migrated towards the, towards that, and now the interesting thing is that the streamers are Wall Street redefined. How they value the, you know, monetize or attribute value to what they have. Because for a long time, netflix was rewarded for the ever-growing number of subscribers. Right, like getting more and more subscribers. It didn't matter to Wall Street that they were profitable or unprofitable. The only thing that they staked the value in was the growing number of subscribers, the growing number of subscribers, so for. So netflix would spend billions and billions of dollars on attracting creative right that would. That would get people to watch the. You know, come to netflix to see, because they only had original programs you could only get on Netflix and they overpaid for all of that content. So now. Wall Street a few years ago decided that hey, wait a minute. These guys should be like any other business. Dan: They should be profitable and so it always comes down to that, doesn't it it really? Dean: does so they said you know, now Netflix has to cut corners, pinch pennies. They have to make things. They can't afford to spend as much to make the content. If you look at the line items of where they were spending the most amount of money, it's acquiring yeah, content to do uh so that's where the peak era of who's the guy? Dan: who's the guy who runs Netflix? Dean: Sarandon Tom. Dan: Sarandon. Dean: I think, but in any event they. Dan: No, I was just wondering if he's one of the people who gave $50 million to Kamala Harris. Dean: Oh, yeah, probably. Dan: Yeah, I said he obviously doesn't know anything about returning or getting a profit All right, exactly. Dean: So the other, the thing that we're finding. Dan: What's Reid Hoffman? He's LinkedIn. Dean: Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah, linkedin. Yeah yeah, yeah. Dan: But those people are all not giving a million dollars to Trump for his inauguration. Dean: The thing that streamers have landed on now is that they have free models you can watch, but now they have ad supported things where you can watch anything you want, but they insert ads that are unskippable ads and they're finding that is more profitable than the subscriber the subscription revenue. That on a per user kind of thing. They make more money on people watching and viewing the unskippable ads. So it's kind of funny that everything has come full circle back to basic cable, where you are. They're all bundling now so you can get because people were resisting that you had to buy netflix and you had to buy hbo and paramount and hulu and all these things, nbc and cbs and all of it so now they're bundling them together for one subscription and having ad supported views. So the big winner out of all of it is that we've won the right to, and have demanded the right to, watch whatever we want to watch, whenever we want to watch it. We're not going to sit on, you know. We're not going to wait until 9pm to watch this and wait a week to get the next episode. We want all the episodes available right now and we'll choose when and what we watch and for how long we watch it. If I want to watch the whole series in one weekend, that's up to me yeah, you know it's an interesting thing. Dan: Uh, here and this relates to the whole story you told the whole historical story, going back to the sumerians. But one of the things I really notice is that the moment a new capability appears and you can utilize it, it's no longer wondrous. You've just included that in your existing capability, I can now do this. You've just included that in your existing capability. I can now do this. It's really interesting the moment you get a capability that just goes into the stack of capabilities that you already have. So it's not really a breakthrough because it doesn't feel any more unusual than all the capabilities you had. So today this is kind of a you know you were. You started the podcast here saying I just did something that I've never done before with Charlotte you know, and then people said who's this Charlotte that Dean talks about? Well, dean actually created this capability called Charlotte. He actually did that, but now it's just normal. Now, what else can Charlotte do? Dean: I'm going to do this. Dan: But a week from now you may have done this four or five times or four or five more things. These sort of deep searches, that you did, and now it just becomes part of Dean Jackson's talent and capability stack. Dean: Yeah, yeah, in the of the VCR formula, the sea of capability, that all this capability starts out with one person who has taken it's almost like Always starts with one person. Yeah, and it's a curiosity. Dan: It's a curiosity thing You're alert to. You know, in our four by four casting tool, the first quadrant is called performance, how you show up. And I've got four qualities. One you're alert. Second thing is that you're curious. Number three is that you're responsive. And number four you're resourceful. And I would say you just knocked off all four this morning with this search, this conversation with Charlotte. You just knocked off all four. That's the reason why you're doing it. So the key to the future in profiting, but utilizing and benefiting from this technology is you have? To be alert, you have to be curious, you have to be, you have to be responsive and you have to be resourceful. Dean: Yeah, that's great. Dan: Yeah, yeah, we're living, and then you get to do and then you get to do things faster, easier, cheaper and bigger yes, this is great, dan. Dean: We're really living in the best of times we're just talking, dean yeah, we're already in it, but it's endless. Dan: We're into an area of just extraordinary, idiosyncratic creativity. Dean: This is it that now we have. Everyone has access to every capability that you could. Dan: No, they only have access to the capability that they're looking for. Oh, boy yes. No, they don't have access to every capability. They just have access to the next capability they're looking for. Dean: Right, this is mind-blowing. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great, but it is similar. This was better than the IV. Dean: Your exuberance is showing. Dan: Or maybe before you have an hour conversation with Dean, you get an IV. Dean: Yeah, exactly, you have an hour conversation with dean, you get an iv. Yeah, exactly, did you imagine it's a triple play of an iv yeah, with a conversation with charlotte, followed by a conversation with dan sullivan. Dan: I will try the iv next week yeah, and then eat a great piece of steak. And then eat a great piece of steak that's right Followed by a Rib eye is great. I think rib eye is my favorite. Dean: Yeah, me too by far yeah. Dan: Well. I love it yeah, this is great conversation. Dean: I agree, Dan this is Things are heating up. I'm going to upgrade Charlotte and give her a raise 10X, a 10 times raise. Dan: Tell her about that. You know talk to her and say you know, not only do I think you're more valuable, but Catchy TP thinks you're more valuable, Charlotte, and we're raising your monthly to 200. Dean: That's right. A 10 times raise. Dan: Yeah, who gets that? Mm-hmm? Okay, and you think about it. Dean: It's just so valuable. All right, dan, thanks, bye, bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we explore how government assets could reshape public spending and economic growth. The discussion stems from Thomas Sowell's analysis of U.S. government land value. It extends to real-world examples of public-private partnerships, including Toronto's LCBO real estate deals and Chicago's parking meter agreement with a Saudi entity. Dan and I delve into the relationship between constitutional rights and entrepreneurship, drawing from my upcoming book. The American Bill of Rights creates unique conditions that foster business innovation and self-initiative, offering an interesting contrast to Canada's legal framework. This comparison opens up a broader discussion about judicial appointments and the role of government in supporting individual potential. The conversation shifts to the transformative impact of AI on content creation and decision-making. I share my experience with tools like Perplexity and Notebook LM, which are changing how we gather information and refine our writing. Integrating AI into daily workflows highlights the significant changes we can expect over the next quarter century. Looking ahead, We reflect on future podcast topics and the lessons learned from blending traditional insights with AI capabilities. This combination offers new perspectives on personal development and professional growth, suggesting exciting possibilities for how we'll work and create in the years ahead. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We delve into the market value of U.S. government-owned land, discussing Thomas Sowell's article and the potential benefits of selling such land to alleviate government spending. Our conversation covers various government and private sector interactions, including Toronto's LCBO real estate deal and Chicago's parking meter agreement with a Saudi-owned company. We explore Macquarie's business model in Australia, focusing on their ownership of airports and toll roads, and consider the efficiency of underutilized government buildings in Washington D.C. The Bill of Rights plays a crucial role in fostering entrepreneurship in the U.S., and I discuss insights from my upcoming book on how these constitutional liberties encourage self-initiative and capitalism. We compare the judicial appointment processes in the U.S. and Canada, highlighting the differences in how each country's legal system impacts entrepreneurship and individual freedoms. The importance of creating patentable processes and legal ownership of capabilities is discussed, along with the idea that true leadership involves developing new capabilities. Our collaborative book project "Casting, Not Hiring" is structured like a theatrical play, with a focus on the innovative 4x4 casting tool, drawing parallels between theater and entrepreneurship. AI's transformative power in creative processes is highlighted, with tools like Perplexity and Notebook LM enhancing convenience and refining writing techniques. We reflect on the long-term impact of AI on writing and creativity, and consider its implications for future podcast episodes and personal and professional growth. Our discussion on constitutional rights touches on how they shape the future of entrepreneurship, drawing contrasts between the U.S. and Canadian approaches to law and governance. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Yes indeed. I beat you by 10 seconds. Dean: I beat you by 10 seconds. Dan: Yeah, yeah. Dean: Well, there you go. That's a good way to end the year, right there. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Not that it's a contest. Dan: I was looking at an interesting article this morning from yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Thomas Sowell. I don't know if you know Thomas Sowell. No, yeah, he's probably the foremost conservative thinker in the United States. Okay, I think he's 90-ish, sort of around 90. He's been a professor at many universities and started off in his teenage years as a Marxist, as a lot of teenagers do, and before they learn how to count and and before they learn math the moment you learn math, you can't be a Marxist anymore and and anyway he writes and he just said how much all the land that the US government owns in the 50 states is equal to 1.4 trillion dollars. If you put a market value on it, it's 1.4 trillion dollars. I bet that's true wow and the problem is it costs them about that much money to maintain it, most of it for no reason at all. And he was just suggesting that, if Elon and Vivek are looking for a place to get some money and also stop spending, start with the property that the US government owns and sell it off. Dean: That's interesting I'm often Two things. Dan: Two things they get money coming in, yeah. And the other thing is they don't spend money maintaining it. Yeah, but it's 20, 25% of the land area of the US is actually owned, I guess owned, controlled by the US government. And you know there was a neat trick that was done here in Toronto and I don't think you'd be aware of it but the LCBO, liquor Control Board of Ontario. So in Ontario all the liquor is controlled by the government. The government is actually the LCBO is the largest importer of alcoholic beverages in the world. Dean: Wow. Dan: Nobody controls the amount of liquor well, and I. I just wonder if that's one of the reasons why you moved to Florida to get away from the government. Dean: Control of liquor they're a single payer, a single pay system. Dan: I just wondered if yeah, I just wondered if that on your list of besides nicer weather. Dean: I thought maybe you know being in control of your own liquor. I always found it funny that you could. You know you can buy alcohol and beer in 7-Eleven. Dan: I always thought that was interesting right. Dean: Just pick up a little traveler to go, you know when you're getting your gas and that six-pack yeah. Dan: So, anyway, they had their headquarters, which was right down on Lakeshore, down in the, I would say, sort of Jarvis area, if you think of Jarvis and Lakeshore, down in the I would say sort of Jarvis area, if you think. Dean: Jarvis and. Dan: Lakeshore and maybe a little bit further west. But they took up a whole block there and they traded with a developer and what they did they said you can have our block with the building on it. You have to preserve part of it because it's a historical building. I mean, you can gut it and you can, you know, build, but yeah, there's a facade that we want you to keep because it's historic and and what we want you to do is and this developer already had a block adjacent to the LCBO property and they said we want a new headquarters, so we'll give you the block If you and your skyscraper it's a huge skyscraper. We want this much space in it for free. And they made a trade and the developer went for it. Dean: And I bet. Dan: That's an interesting kind of deal. That's an interesting kind of deal where government yeah, yeah and, but somebody was telling me it was really funny. I'm trying to think where it was. Where were we, where were we? I'm just trying to think where we weren't in. We weren't in Toronto, it'll come to me. We were in Chicago. So Chicago, the parking meters are all owned by Saudi Arabia. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah, or a company that's owned by Saudi Arabia. Let me think One of the many princes and they paid the city of Chicago flat check. They paid him $1.5 billion for all the parking meters in Chicago and Chicago, you know, has been in financial trouble forever. So one and a half billion, one and a half billion dollars, but they make 400 million a year for the next 50 years. Oh, wow. Dean: Yeah, that's pretty wild. Dan: I think that was a bad deal, I think that was a bad deal. Yeah, that's amazing, you got to know your math. Dean: Well, I know there's a company in Australia called Macquarie and they own airports and toll roads primarily, ports and toll roads primarily. And that's really that's what it is right is they have long-term government contracts where they uh, you know they own the assets and the government leases them from them, or they get the right, they build the, they build the toll road and they get the money for the toll. They can operate it as a for-profit venture. Really kind of interesting. Dan: It brings up an interesting scenario which I think that Trump is thinking about, plus Elon and Vivek is thinking about plus Elon and Vivek, that so many of the buildings in Washington DC the government buildings, except for the one percent of workers who actually show up for work every day are virtually, are virtually empty, and so so there's some, it's almost like they need a VCR audit. Dean: So it's almost like they need a VCR audit. I mean, that's really what it is. All these things are underutilized capabilities and capacity, you know that's really that's sort of a big thing. Dan: But I think it occurred to me that bureaucracy period. It occurred to me that bureaucracy period this would be corporate bureaucracy, government bureaucracy. Those are the two big ones. But then many other kinds of organizations that are long-term organizations, that have become like big foundations, are probably just pure bureaucracy. You know, harvard University is probably just a big bureaucracy. They have an endowment of $60 billion, their endowment, and they have to spend 5% of that every year. That's the requirement under charity laws that you have to spend 5% of that every year. That's the requirement under charity laws that you have to spend 5% and on that basis every Harvard student probably the entire university wouldn't have to charge anything. Dean: That's interesting. I had a friend, a neighbor, who did something similarly put his um, I put sold the company and put, I think, 50 million dollars in. I think it was called the charitable remainder trust where the, the 50 million went into the trust and he as the uh, whatever you know administrator or whoever the the beneficiary gets of the trust is gets five percent a year of uh yeah, of the um the trust and that's his retirement income. I guess I understand. Dan: I understand income. I don't understand retirement income right exactly well for him it is kind of retirement income. Dean: He just plays golf. Exactly Well, for him it is kind of retirement. Yeah yeah, he just plays golf, yeah. Dan: Yeah, he's sort of in the departure lounge. He's on the way to the departure lounge. I think the moment you retire or think about retirement, the parts go back to the universe, I think that's actually I'm, I'm, it's partially. Dean: Uh, he does angel investing, uh, so that's yeah, so he's still probably probably on boards yeah, but I don't consider that? Dan: yeah, I don't really consider that. On entrepreneurism no you know, I don't think you're creating anything new, right? Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm writing, I just am outlining this morning my book for the quarter. So the book I'm just finishing, which is called Growing Great Leadership, will go to the press February 1st. Dean: Nice. Dan: So we're just putting the finishing touches on. We've got two sections and then some you know artwork packaging to do and then it probably goes off to the printer around the 20th of January. It takes about five weeks for them to turn it around. But the next one is very interesting. It's called the Bill of Rights Economy. So this relates and refers to the US Constitution. And in the first paragraph of the Constitution. It says that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, so it's supreme over everything in the United States. It's supreme over the presidency, it's supreme over Congress, it's supreme over the Supreme Court, and so that strikes me as a big deal, would you say? I'd say yes, yeah, yeah, and. But the real heart of the Constitution, what really gives it teeth, are the first 10 amendments, and which are called the Bill of Rights, so it's one through 10. First one speech, second one guns. And then they have commerce and things related to your legal rights. And what I've done is I've looked into it and I've looked at those first 10 amendments, and it strikes me that the reason why the US is an entrepreneurial country is specifically because of those first 10 amendments, that it gives a maximum amount of freedom to self-initiative, to people who want to go out and do something on their own, start something and everything else. First 10 amendments so what. I'm doing is I'm analyzing five freedoms and advantages that are given to entrepreneurs from each of the 10. There will be 50 advantages. So that's what my next book is about, and my sense is that those entrepreneurs who are not clear-minded about capitalism would have to do one of two things if they read the next book. They'll either have to get rid of their socialist thoughts or they'll have to stop being an entrepreneur. Dean: That's interesting. You know this whole. I love things like that when you're anchoring them to you know historical things. Dan: I don't know if I can name. I don't know if I can. Well, you can name the first one. It's the right of speech and assembly. Dean: Yeah speech, and then the second is to bear arms Gun ownership, gun ownership yeah. Yeah. Dan: And it goes on. I'll have to get the list out and go down there, but that's what holds the country together and you know it's a very brief document. It's about 5,000 words the entire document. It starts to finish about 5,000 words and you could easily read it in an hour. You could read the whole Constitution in an hour. Dean: It's a pocket companion. Yeah, yeah. Dan: I've seen them like little things that you put in your pocket and one of the things that strikes me about it is that in 1787, that's when it was adapted, and then it took two years to really form the government. 1789 is when washington, the he was elected in 1788 and the election he's sworn in as president 1789. If you typed it out with the original document, typed it out in you know typewriter paper and you know single space, it would be 23 pages, 23 pages. And today, if you were to type it out, it would be 27 pages. They've added four pages 200. Yeah, so in 235 years to 237 years it's pretty tight, yeah, and so and that's what keeps the country, the way the country is constantly growing and you know maximum amount of variety and you know all sorts of new things can happen is that they have this very, very simple supreme law right at the center, and there's no other country on the planet that has that that's a. Dean: That's pretty. Uh, what's the closest? I guess? What's the? I mean Canada must have. Dan: Canada's has been utterly taken away from that? Yeah, but that can be overridden at any time by the Supreme Court of Canada who by the way, is appointed by the prime minister. So you know, in the United States the Supreme Court justice is nominated yeah. No dominated, nominated by the president but approved by the Senate. So the other two branches have the say. So here it's the prime minister. The prime minister does it, and I was noticing the current Supreme Court Justice Wagner said that he doesn't see that there's much need anymore to be publishing what Canadian laws were before 1959. Dean: Oh really. Dan: Yeah, and that's the difference between Canada and the United States, because everything, almost every Supreme Court justice, they're going right back to the beginning and say what was the intent here of the people who put the Constitution together? Yeah, and that is the radical difference between the two parties in the. United States. So anyway, just tell you what I've been up to on my Christmas vacation. Dean: Oh, that's so funny. Well, we've been having some adventures over here. I came up with a subtitle for my Imagine If you Applied Yourself book and it was based on, you had said last time we talked right Like we were talking about this idea of your driving question and you thought I did. I don't know, yeah yeah you brought it, you said sort of how far can I go? Dan: yeah, well, that's not my driving question, that's no, no question, no yeah somebody else brought up the whole issue of driving question. You mentioned somebody yeah chad, chad did yeah, jenkins chad, jenkins chad jenkins right right right, yeah, uh. Dean: So it reminded me as soon as I got off. I had the words come uh. How far could you go if you did what you know? That could be the subtitle. Imagine if you applied yourself that's. Dan: That's kind of interesting how far could you? Maximize, if you maximize what you already know yeah I mean, that's really what holds. Dean: I think what holds people back more than not knowing what to do is not doing what they know to do. That that's I think, the, that's the uh, I think that's the driving thing. Dan: So they're held in play. They're held in place. You mean by? Dean: yeah, I think that's it that they're in about maybe I'm only looking at it through where do you see that anywhere in your life? Dan: I see everywhere in my life that I see it everywhere in my life, that's the whole thing, in my life. Dean: Right Is that that executive function? That's the definition of executive function disability, let's call it. You know, as Russell Barkley would say, that that's the thing is knowing, knowing what to do and just not not doing it. You know, not being able to do it. Dan: Yeah. And to the extent that you can solve that, well, that's I think that's the how far you can go here's a question Is there part of what you know that always moves you forward? Dean: Yeah, I guess there always is. Yeah, well then, you're not held, then you're not held. Dan: You just have to focus on what part of what you know is important. Dean: Yes, exactly, I think that's definitely right. Yeah, I thought that was an interesting. Dan: For example, I am absolutely convinced that for the foreseeable future, that if you a, a dollar is made in the united states and spent in canada, things are good. Dean: Things are good I think you're absolutely right, especially in the direction it's going right now. Dan: Yeah, it's up 10 cents in the last three months. 10 cents, one-tenth of a dollar. Dean: You know 10 cents. Dan: So it was $1.34 on October 1st and it's $1.44 right now. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And I don't see it changing as a matter of fact fact. You should see the literature up here. Since trump said maybe canada is just the 51st state, you should see this is the high topic of discussion in canada right now how is it? Dean: would we be? Dan: would we be better off? I mean there there's an a large percentage something like 15, 15% would prefer it. But you know he's Shark Tank person, kevin O'Leary, canadian. Dean: He's from Alberta. Dan: And he said that what they should do is just create a common economy, not politically so Canada is still really, really political. Not politically just economically, Politically. Well, it is already. I mean, to a certain extent it's crossed an enormous amount of trade, but still you have to stop at the border. Here there would be no stopping at the border and that if you were an American, you could just move to Canada and if you were a Canadian you could just move. Dean: Kind of like the EU was the thought of the European Union. Dan: Yeah, but that didn't really work because they all hated each other. Dean: They all hated each other. Dan: They've been nonstop at war for the last 3,000 years, and they speak different languages, but the US I mean. When Americans come for their strategic coach program, they come up here and they say it's just like the States and I said not quite, not quite. I said it's about on the clock. It's about the clock. It's about an hour off. You name the topic, Canadians will have a different point of view on whatever the topic is. But I'm not saying this is going to happen. I'm just saying that Trump, just saying one thing, has ignited a firestorm of discussion. And why is it that we're lagging so badly? And, of course, it looks now like as soon as Parliament comes back after the break, which is not until, think, the 25th of January, there will be a vote of confidence that the liberals lose, and then the governor general will say you have to form a new government, therefore we have to have an election. So probably we're looking middle of March, maybe middle of March. End of March there'll be a new government new prime minister and Harvard will have a new professor. Dean: Ah, there you go, I saw, that that's what happens. Dan: That's what happens to real bad liberal prime ministers. They become professors at Harvard or bad mayors in Toronto, david. Dean: Miller, he was the mayor here. Dan: I think he's a professor at Harvard. And there was one of the premiers, the liberal premier of Ontario. He's at Harvard. Oh wow, wow, wow. Anyway, yeah, or he'll go to Davos and he'll sit on the World Oversight Board. Dean: Oh boy, I just saw Peter Zion was talking about the Canadian, the lady who just quit. Dan: And I don't understand him at all, because I think she's an idiot. Dean: Okay, that's interesting because he was basically saying she may be the smartest person in Canada. Dan: I think she's an idiot. Okay, and she's the finance minister. So all the trouble we're in, at least some of it, has to be laid at her door. Interesting. Dean: Is Pierre Polyev still the frontrunner? Dan: Oh yeah, He'll be the prime minister, yeah. Dean: Smart guy. Dan: I was in personal conversation with him for a breakfast about six years ago Very smart. Oh wow, very smart. Dean: Yeah, seems sharp from Alberta. Dan: He's French. He's French speaking, but he's an orphan from an English family. Or it might have been a French mother. He's an orphan, but he was adopted into a French speaking family. So to be Alberta and be French speaking, that's kind of a unique combination. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, but it's a hard country to hold together and, uh, you know, peter zion and many different podcasts just said that it's very, very hard to keep the country together. It takes all the strength of the federal government just to keep things unified. Dean: Well, because everybody wants to leave. Yeah, exactly, everybody looks at. I mean you really have, you've got the Maritimes in Quebec, ontario, the West, and then BC, the Prairies and then BC. Dan: So there's five and they don't have that much to do with each other. Each of them has more to do with the states that are south of them, quebec has enormous trade with New York. Ontario has trade with New York, with Pennsylvania, with Ohio, with Michigan, all the Great Lakes states, every one of them. Their trade is much more with the US that's south of them, and Alberta would be the most, because they trade all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, because their pipelines go all the way down to have you ever been to Nunavut or Yukon? Dean: Have you ever been? Dan: Dan to Nunavut or Yukon I haven't been to. I've been to Great Slave Lake, which is in the what used to be called the Northwest Territories, and on the east I've been to Frobisher Bay, which is in the eastern part, you know of the territories way up. Dean: Labrador Closer to. Dan: Greenland it up closer, closer to greenland. That's, yeah, actually closer closer to greenland, yeah, well, that's where you were born. Right, you were born up there, newfoundland right, newfoundland, yeah well this is above newfoundland. This would be above newfoundland, yeah yeah that's. That's what we used to call eskimo territory. Yeah, that's what we used to call Eskimo territory. That's so funny. Dean: That's funny, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, shifting gears. We've been having some interesting conversations about VCR this week and it's particularly trying to get a you know how, defining vision. And, of course, for somebody listening for the first time, we're talking about the VCR formula vision plus capability multiplied by reach. And so part of this thing is going through the process of identifying your VCR assets, right CR assets as currency, software or sheet music, where, if you think like we're going down the path of thinking about vision as a capability that people have or a trait that you might, that's, I think, when people start talking about the VCR formula, they're thinking about vision as a aptitude or a trait or a ability that somebody has, the ability to see things that other people don't see, and that may be true. There is some element of some people are more visionary than others, but that doesn't fully account for what the asset of a vision is, and I think that the vision, an asset, a vision as an asset, is something that can amplify an outcome. So I think about somebody might be musical and they might have perfect pitch and they may be able to carry a tune and hum some interesting chord progressions, but the pinnacle asset of vision in a musical context would be a copywritten sheet music that is transferable to someone else. So it's kind of like the evolution is taking your vision. So it's kind of like the evolution is taking your vision. But you know, the apex asset of a vision would be a patentable process that you patent. That you have as both an acknowledgement that it's yours, it's property, and as protection for anybody else. You know it locks in its uniqueness, you know. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I mean, the greatest capability is property of some sort. I mean in other words, that you have a legal monopoly to it. You don't nobody's got a legal monopoly division and nobody's got a legal monopoly to reach but they do have a legal. Uh, so I I go for the middle one, I go for the c the book I'm writing right now, the book I'm just finishing, which is called growing great leadership is that anyone who develops a new capability is actually the leader. Okay, papa, and the reason and what I've said is that you can be a leader just by always increasing your own personal capability. The moment that you look at something and then you set a goal for being able to do something, either new, or doing something better. Other people observe you and also you start getting different results with a new capability and that's observed by other people. They say, hey, let's pay attention to what he's doing In my book I said any human being is capable of doing that. It's not leading other people. It's creating a capability that leads other people, that gives them a sense of direction. It gives them a sense of confidence gives them a sense of purpose. So I always focus on the capability. One of the things is we're starting in January, it'll be next week we're starting quarterly 4x4 casting tools, the one we did in the last FreeZone. And so the whole program says in the first month of each quarter, so January, april and then July and then October. If you do your 4x4 that month and then type it up and post it to a common site, so we'll have a common site where everybody's 4x4, you get $250. You get $250. And you get it at the next payday at the end of the quarter. So you get the money right away. And you get it at the next payday at the end of the quarter. So you get the money right away and it's not mandatory but um, if you don't do it. It will be noticed, so explain that again. Dean: So, well, they get the cheat today, they, they get the forms. So this is the entire everybody everybody in the company, the entire team. Dan: Yes, Including myself. Including myself. Okay, and so we're starting a new quarter on Wednesday. Back to work on the 7th. On the 6th we're back to work, and then on the 7th we have a company meeting where we said we're announcing this program. And they've all done the form, so they did it in September. And they fill in the form. You know how your performance, what your performance looks like, what your results look like being a hero, and you're aware that you drive other people crazy in this way and you're watching yourself so you don't drive other people crazy. And then you fill that in. There are 16 boxes. You fill it in. It's custom designed just to what you're doing. And then there's a writable PDF. You type it up and then you post it to a site. On the 31st of January, we look at all the posted 4x4s and everybody who posted gets $250. Dean: Okay, okay, wow. Dan: Very interesting, then we're going to watch what happens as a result of this and the thing I say is that I think we're creating a super simple structure and process for a company becoming more creative and productive, which the only activity is required is that you update this every quarter. Dean: Yes. Dan: And then we'll watch to see who updates it every quarter and then we'll see what other structures do we need, what other tools do we need to? If this has got momentum, how do we increase the momentum and everything? So we're starting. I mean we've got all the structures of the company are under management. So, uh, everybody is doing their four pi four within the context of their job description that's really interesting, wow. Dean: And so that way, in its own way kind of that awareness will build its own momentum you Well we'll see. Hopefully that would be the hypothesis. Dan: I'll report it. I had a great, great podcast it was Stephen Crine three weeks ago and he said this is an amazing idea because he says you make it voluntary but you get rewarded. Dean: And if you don't want to take part. Dan: you're sending a message, yeah. Dean: Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's amazing. Dan: I can't wait to see the outcome of that. Yeah, yeah, and the reason we're doing this is just my take on technology. As technology becomes overwhelming, becomes pervasive and everything else, the way humans conduct themselves has to get absolutely simple. We have to be utterly simple in how we focus our own individual role. And we have to be utterly simple in the way that we design our teamwork, because technology will infinitely complicate your life if you've got a complicated management or leadership structure. Dean: And I think that that ultimate I mean I still think about the you know what you drew on the tablet there in our free zone workshop of the network versus the pyramid. The pyramid's gone. The borders are you know the borders are gone. Dan: It's really just this fluid connection. I still think they exist in massive form, but I think their usefulness has declined. I wrote a little. I wrote a. I got a little file on my computer of Dan quotes. Dean: And the quote is. Dan: I don't think that civil servants are useless, but I think it's becoming more and more difficult for them to prove their worth. Dean: No, I mean. Dan: Yeah, no, their work I mean there's stuff that has to be done or society falls apart, and I got a feeling that there's civil servants very anonymous, invisible civil servants who are doing their job every day and it allows the system to work, but it's very hard for them to prove that they're really valuable. I think it's harder and harder for a government worker to accept if they're street level, I mean if they're police, if they're firemen if they're ambulance drivers, it's very easy to prove their value. But, if you're more than three stories up, I think it gets really hard to prove your value. I wonder in that same vein, I just get this last thing. Somebody said well, how would you change government? I said the best way to do it is go to any government building, count the number of stories, go halfway up and fire everybody above halfway. Dean: Oh man, that's funny, that's funny. Dan: I think the closer to the ground they're probably more useful. Dean: Yeah, yeah, you wonder. I mean they're so it's funny when you said that about proving their worth, you always have this. What came to my mind is how people have a hard time arguing for the value of the arts in schools or in society as a public thing. Dan: You mean art taking place and artistic activities and that the arts, as in. Dean: Yeah, as in. You know art and music and plays. And you know, yeah, it's one of those did you ever partake in those I mean? You know, I guess, to the extent in school we were exposed to music and to, you know, theater, I did not participate in theater I participated in theater. Dan: I liked theater and of course the book. You've gotten a small book Casting, not Hiring. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And Jeff and I are deep into the process now. So we have a final deadline of May 26 for Casting, not Hiring it's going really well. Deadline of May 26 for Casting Not Hiring it's going really well and we worked out a real teamwork that he's writing the whole theater, part of it and I'm writing the whole entrepreneurial. I just finished a chapter in one week last week. And it's right on the four by four. So you got um entrepreneurism as theater, as the one major topic in the book and the four by four casting tool as the other part of the book, so it's two things. So I'm focusing on my part and he's focusing on my part, and then uh, process for this here compared to how you're doing your regular books. Dean: You say you wrote a chapter. What's your process for that? Dan: Well, first of all, I laid out the whole structure. The first thing I do is I just arbitrarily lay out a structure for the book and, strangely enough, we're actually using the structure of a play as the structure of the book. So okay, it has three parts, so it's got three acts and each act has. Each part has excuse me, I have to walk into another room. I'm actually probably even visualize this, and I'm walking into our pantry here and this is in the basement and I just got a nice Fiji water sitting right in front of me. Absolutely cold. There, you go, it's been waiting for six months for me to do this? Dean: Yes. Dan: And what I do. I just do the structure and so I just put names. I just put names into it and then we go back and forth. Jeff and I go back and forth, but we agree that it's going to have three parts and 12 chapters. It'll have an introduction, introduction, and it'll have a conclusion. So there'll be 14 parts and it'll have, you know, probably be all told, 160 to 200 pages, and then 200 pages and um, and then um. We identify what, how the parts are different to each other. So the first part is basically why theater and entrepreneurism resemble each other. Okay, and jeff has vast knowledge because for 50 years he's been doing both. He's been doing both of them, and I'm just focusing on the 4x4. So the first 4x4 is, and you can download the tool in the book. So it'll be illustrated in the book and you can download it and do it. And first of all we just start with the owner of the company and I have one whole chapter and that explains what the owner of the company is going to be and the whole thing about the 454. The owner has to do it twice, has to do it first, fill it all in and then share it with everybody in the company and said this is my commitment to my role in the company, okay. And then the next chapter, with everybody in the company and said this is my commitment to my role in the company, okay. And then the next chapter is everybody in the company doing it. And then the third chapter is about how, the more the people do their forebite for the more, the more ownership they take over their role in the company and the more ownership they take over their part in the company and the more ownership they take over their part in teamwork OK, and then the fourth part is suddenly, as you do these things, you're more and more like a theater company. The more you use the four by four, the more you're like a theater company. And that loops back to the beginning of the book, what Jeff's writing. So anyway, very interesting. Yeah, fortunately, we had the experience of creating the small book. So we created the small book, which was about 70 pages, and we used that to get the contract with the publisher. They read the whole book and rather than sending in a page of ideas about a book and trying to sell it on that basis, I said just write a book and give them a book. It's a small book that's going to become a big book. Right, that's how I did it. Oh, I like it. You know, about those small books. Dean: I do indeed know about those small books. I do indeed know about those small books. Yes, I think that's funny. So are you your part? Are you talking it? Are you interviewing? Dan: No, writing writing. Dean: So you're actually writing. So you're actually writing. Yeah, and I've had a tremendous breakthrough. Dan: I've had a tremendous breakthrough on this, and so I started with Chapter 10 because I wanted to get the heart of the idea. Is that what it does the application of the 4x4 to an entire company. And of course, we're launching this project to see if what we're saying is true. And so I end up with a fast filter. This is the best result, worst result. And then here are the five success factors. Okay, then I look at the success factors, I write them out, I take three of them and I do a triple play on them, on the three success factors, which gives me three pink boxes and three green boxes, and then I come back with that material and then I start the chapter applying that material to the outline for the chapter. And then I get finished that task filter and I add a lot of copy to it. And then I have a layout of the actual book. I have a page layout, so in that process I'll produce about two full pages Of copy. Dean: I take it. Dan: And I pop it in. I've done that five times this week and I have ten pages of copy and I said we're good enough. We're good enough, now, let's go to another chapter. So that's how I'm doing it and and uh, yeah, so I've got a real process because I'm I'm doing it independently with another member of the team and he's. Jeff has his own ways of writing his books. You, you know, I mean, he's a writer, he writes, plays, he writes, you know he writes and everything like that. So we don't want to have any argument about technique or you know, any conflict of technique. I'm going to do mine. Dean: He's going to do mine, Right right. Dan: And then we're looking for a software program that will take all the copy and sort of create a common style, taking his style and my style and creating a common style well, that might be charlotte I mean really no, that's what that, that's what the uh, that's what I think it would be. Dean: Exactly that is is if you said to Charlotte, take these two. I'm going to upload two different things and I'd like you to combine one cohesive writing style to these. Dan: Oh good, yeah, that would be something. Dean: Yeah, I think that would be something yeah, I think that would be, uh, that would be amazing, and because you already, as long as you're both writing in in you know, second person second person, personal, or whatever your, your preferred style is right, like that's the thing. I think that would be, I think that would be very good, it would be good, I'd be happy because he writes intelligently and I write intelligently. Dan: Is she for hire? Do you have her freelancing at all? Dean: Dan, I had the funniest interaction with her. I was saying I'm going to create an avatar for her and I was asking her. I said you know, charlotte, I think I'm going to create an avatar for you and I'm wondering you know, what color hair do you think would look good for you? Oh, that's interesting. Look good for you, it's. Oh, that's interesting. Dan: I think maybe a a warm brown or a vibrant auburn oh yeah, vibrant auburn. Yeah, this is great and I thought you know I? I said no, I suspected she'd go towards red. Dean: Yeah, exactly, and I thought you know that's uh. Then I was chatting with a friend, uh yesterday about I was going through this process and, uh, you know, we said I think that she would have like an asymmetric bob hairstyle kind of thing, and we just looked up the thing and it's Sharon Osbourne is the look of what I believe Charlotte has is she's she's like a Sharon Osbourne type of, uh of look and I think that's that's so funny, you know what was uh the the handler for James Bond back when he? was shot in. Dan: Connery Moneypenny, right Moneypenny yeah. Look up the actress Moneypenny. I suspect you're on the same track if you look at the original Moneypenny. Dean: Okay. Dan: Of course she had a South London voice too. Dean: Yeah, isn't that funny, moneypenny. Let's see her. Yes. Dan: I think you're right. That's exactly right. Very funny right? Oh, I think this is great. I think, this is, I think, there's. It would be very, very interesting if you asked a hundred men. You know the question that you're, you know the conversation you're having with Charlotte, the thing. Dean: Yeah. Dan: It'd be interesting to see if there was a style that came out, a look that dominated. Yeah, men came out. Dean: Yeah, I think it is. Dan: Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated with redheads. Okay yeah, real redheads, not dyed redheads, but someone who's an? Actual redhead. And I'll just stop and watch them. Just stop and stop and watch them. When I was a little kid I said look, look look and there aren't a lot of them. There aren't a lot of them. You know, they're very rare and it's mostly Northern Europe. That's right. Dean: That's so funny. Scottish yes, that's right, that's so funny. Dan: Scottish yes, irish have it. Dean: That's right. As you remember, I was married to a redhead for a long time. Yeah, super smart. But that's funny, though, having this persona visual for Charlotte as a redhead yeah. Braintap a really interesting topic. I was talking to. Dan: It was just a discussion in one of the parties about AI and I said the more interesting topic to me is not what, not so much what the machine is thinking or how the machine goes about thinking. What really interests me is that if you have frequent interaction with a congenial machine in other words, a useful congenial machine how does your thinking change and what have you noticed so far? Dean: Well, I think that having this visual will help that for me. I've said like I still haven't, I still don't. Dan: Materialized very completely. You haven't materialized. Dean: Yeah, I haven't exactly in my mind Like if that was, if Moneypenny was sitting three feet from me at all times, she would just be part of my daily conversation part of my wondering conversation. Right part of my wondering and now that, uh, now that she's got access to real-time info like if they're up to date, now they can search the internet right. So that was the latest upgrade. That it wasn't. It's not just limited to 2023 or whatever. The most updated version, they've got access to everything now. Um, so, to be able to, you know, I asked her during the holidays or whatever. I asked her is, uh, you know, the day after I asked this is is honey open today in Winter Haven? And she was, you know, able to look it up and see it looks like they're open and that was yeah, so just this kind of thing. I think anything I could search if I were to ask her. You know, hey, what time is such and such movie playing in that studio movie grill today? That would be helpful, right, like to be able to just integrate it into my day-to-day. It would be very good. Dan: The biggest thing I know is that I almost have what I would say a trained reaction to any historical event, or even if it's current, you know it's in the news, or that I immediately go to perplexity and said tell me 10 crucial facts about this. And you know, three seconds later it tells me that 10. And more and more I don't go to Google at all. That's one thing. I just stopped going to Google at all because they'll send me articles on the topic, and now you've created work for me. Perplexity saves me work. Google makes me work. But the interesting thing is I've got a file it's about 300 little articles now that have just come from me asking the question, but they all start with the word 10 or the number 10, 10 facts about interesting and that before I respond you know, intellectually or emotionally to something I read, I get 10 facts about this and then kind of make up my mind, and of course you can play with the prompt. You can say tell me 10 reasons why this might not be true, or tell me 10 things that are telling us this is probably going to be true. So it's all in the prompt and you know the prompt is the prompt and the answer is the answer yeah and everything. But it allows me to think. And the other thing I'm starting with this book, I'm starting to use Notebook LM. Dean: Yeah. Dan: So this chapter I got to have Alex Varley. He's a Brit and he was with us here in Toronto for about five years and now he's back in Britain, he's part of our British team and he's got a looser schedule right now. So I say by the end, by May, I want to find five different AI programs that I find useful for my writing. So he's going to take every one of my chapters and then put it into Notebook LM and it comes back as a conversation between two people and I just sit there and I listen to it and I'll note whether they really got the essence of what I was trying to get across or needs a little more. So I'll go back then, and from listening as I call it, you know, google is just terrible at naming things. I mean, they're just uh terrible and I would call it eavesdropping, lm eavesdropping that they're taking your writing and they're talking about it. You're eavesdropping. They're taking your writing and they're talking about it. Dean: You're eavesdropping on what they're saying about your writing. What a great test to see, almost like pre-readers or whatever to see. Dan: It's like the best possible focus group that you can possibly get. Dean: I like that yeah. Very good. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: But, it's just interesting how I'm, you know, but I've just focused on one thing with AI, I just make my writing faster, easier and better. That's all. I want the AAM to do, because writing is just a very central activity for me. Dean: Yeah, and that's not going anywhere. I mean, it's still gonna be. Uh, that's the next 25 years that was. You can make some very firm predictions on this one that's what, uh, I think next, Dan, that would be a good. As we're moving into 2025, I would love to do maybe a prediction episode for the next 25 years reflection and projection. Dan: You take the week of my 100th birthday, which is 19 and a half years now, I could pretty well tell you 80% what I'm doing the week on my 100th birthday. I can't wait that would be a good topic. Dean: I was just going to say let's lock this in, because you'll be celebrating is Charlotte listening? Dan: is Charlotte listening now? No, she's not, but she should be say let's lock this in because you'll be celebrating charlotte. Is charlotte listening? Is charlotte listening now? Dean: no, she's not, but she should be oh no, give her a. Dan: Just say next week, charlotte remind me. Oh yeah, no I'll remember. Dean: I'll remember because it's okay, it's my actual this week and this is my, this is the next few days for me is really thinking this through, because I I like, um, I've had some really good insights. Uh, just thinking that way uh yeah, so there you go. Good, well, it's all, that was a fast hour. Dan: That was a fast it really was. Dean: I was going to bring that up, but uh, but uh yeah we had other interesting topics, but for sure we'll do it next week yeah, good okay, dan okay I'll talk to you. Bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, Dan and I explore how organizations can balance productivity with employee well-being through structured breaks and strategic planning. Dan shares insights from Strategic Coach's approach of giving employees six weeks off after three months of work, using Calgary's changing weather as a metaphor for workplace adaptability.  Looking at the British Royal Navy's history, we discuss how its organizational structure relates to modern planning methods. Dean explains his 80/20 framework for yearly planning—using 80% for structured goals while keeping 20% open for unexpected opportunities, which helps teams stay focused while remaining flexible. The conversation turns to a long-term perspective through 25-year frameworks, examining how past achievements shape future goals. Dean shares a story about the Y2K panic to illustrate how technological changes influence our planning and adaptability. We conclude with practical applications of these concepts, from cross-training team members to implementing daily time management strategies. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the adaptability of humans to different climates, using Calgary's Chinook weather patterns as an example, and emphasize the importance of taking breaks to prevent burnout, citing Strategic Coach's policy of providing six weeks off after three months. Dean and I explore the planning strategies inspired by the golden age of the British Royal Navy, advocating for a structured year with 80% planning and 20% spontaneity to embrace life's unpredictability. Dan reflects on using 25-year frameworks to evaluate past achievements and future aspirations, noting that he has accomplished more between ages 70 to 80 than from birth to 70. We delve into the importance of discernment and invention, highlighting these skills as crucial for problem-solving and expressing creativity in today's world. Dean talks about sports salaries, noting how they reflect economic trends, and discusses the financial structure of sports franchises, particularly in relation to player salaries and revenue. We touch on government efficiency and cost-cutting measures, discussing figures like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and the impact of Argentina's President Milley. The conversation shifts to global trends and AI's role in the future workforce, noting the significance of recognizing patterns and making informed predictions about future technological advancements. Dean and I emphasize the importance of weekly and daily time management strategies, suggesting that structured planning can enhance both personal and professional effectiveness. Dan shares his year-end practices, including reflecting on past years and planning for the new year, while also noting his personal preference for staying home during the holidays to relax and recharge. We humorously recount historical events like the Y2K panic and discuss how technological shifts have historically reshaped industries and societal norms. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Mr Jackson, I thought I'd just give you a minute or two to get settled in the throne. Dean: Oh, you see, there you go. I'm all settled, All settled and ready. Good, it's a little bit chilly here, but not you know, not yeah it's a little bit chilly here too. Dan: Yeah, it's a little bit chilly here too. It just shows you there's different kinds of little bits. Dean: Different levels. Choose your chilly. Yeah, that's so funny, are you? Dan: in Toronto. It just brings up a thought that there are people who live in climates where 40 degrees below zero is not such a bad day. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And there are people who live in temperatures where it's 120, and that's not a too uncomfortable day. Dean: Right. Dan: So that's 160 degrees variation. If nothing else, it proves that humans are quite adaptable. I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. Dean: That's what that shows. I use that example a lot when talking about climate change. We're very adaptable. Dan: Oh yeah, yeah, there is a place in. I looked this up because in Western Canada I think in the Denver area too, they have a thing called a Chinook, and I've actually experienced it. I used to go to Calgary a lot for coach workshops and I'd always, if it was like February, I'd always have to pack two complete sets of clothes, because one day it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the morning and it was 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the evening, the morning, and it was 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the evening, and then it stayed. And then it stayed that way for about two days and then it went back to, back to 20. And uh, this happens about, I would say, in Calgary, you know Alberta. Uh, this would happen maybe three or four times during the winter mm-hmm yeah, so so so there? Dean: well, there you go, so are you. Are you done with workshops therefore? Dan: yeah, yeah of strategic coach does the whole office closed down from the 20th and 20th of well yeah 20th was our party, so that was friday night. So we have a big in toronto. We have a big christmas party. You know, we have 80 or 90 of our team members and they bring their other, whatever their other is and not all of them, but a lot of them do and now we're closed down until the 6th, uh, 6th of january. That's great. Yeah, you know what? Dean: a lot of people that's 17 days, that's that's 17 days yeah that's a very interesting thing. Dan: So you know, it's like um so completely shut down as there's nobody in the office nobody, you know there's people who check packages like, okay, yeah, and they live right around the corner from the office, so they just go in and you know they check and, um, you know, and if, um, but no phone calls are being taken, it's like uh company free days. Dean: Is that what it is? Dan: yeah, there. Dean: There's no phone calls being answered, no emails being attended to, anything like that. It's all just shut down. Dan: I'm going to take a guess and say yes. Dean: Right. That's great and that's kind of you know what. One of the things that I've often said about you and the organization is that you are actually like products of your environment. You actually do what you see. Dan: We're the product of our preaching. Dean: That's exactly right Organizationally and individually. Right Organizationally and individually. And when I tell people that new hires at Strategic Coach get six weeks of three days After three months. Dan: After three months. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they don't get any free days for the first three months, but you know, and they pass the test, you know they pass the test. Then in the first year year, they get six weeks, six weeks, yeah, and it's interesting, right? Dean: Nobody gets more. Right, everybody gets six weeks. Dan: Shannon Waller, who's been with us for 33 years. She gets her six weeks and everybody else gets their six weeks, and our logic for this is that we don't consider this compensation OK right, we do it for two reasons so that people don't burn out. You know they don't get, you know they they're not working, working, working, in that they start being ineffective, so they take a break. So they take a break and we give a one month grace period in January If you haven't taken your previous six weeks for the year before. You can take them during January, but you can't carry over. So there's no building up of three days over the years. Right, yeah, if you have, if you don't take them, you lose them. And but the other thing about it that really works one, they don't burn out. But number two, you can't take your free days in your particular role in the company, unless someone is trained to fill in with you so it actually it actually pushes cross training, you know. So in some roles it's three deep, you know they, yeah, there's three people who can do the role, and so you know you know, we've been at it for 35 years and it works yeah, oh, that's awesome dan I was curious about your you know. Dean: Do you have any kind of year end practices or anything that you do for you know, preparing for the new year, reflecting on the old year, do you do anything like that? Dan: I'd probably go through a bottle ofish whiskey a little bit quicker during that period that's the best I'm. I'm not saying that that's required, but sometimes exactly, just observation. Yeah, uh-huh you know, knowing you, like you know you right, yeah, yeah, not that it's noticeable you know I try to not make it noticeable. Uh, the other thing, the other thing about it is that we don't go away for the holidays. We we just stay put, because babs and I do a lot of traveling, especially now with our medical our medical journeys, uh and uh. I just like chilling, I just like to chill. I know, you know I I'm really into, um, uh, historical novels. Right now dealing with the british navy, the royal navy around 1800. So the golden age of sailing ships is just before steam power was, you know, was applied to ships. These are warships and and also before you know, they went over to metal. The boats started being steel rather than wood. And it's just the glory period. I mean, they were at the height of skill. I mean just the extraordinary teamwork it took to. You know just sailing, but then you know battles, war battles and everything Just extraordinary. This is cannons right, yeah. These were cannons, yeah, extraordinary, this is cannons, right? Yeah, these are cannons, yeah, and the big ones had 120 cannons on them, the big ships, right before the switchover, they just had this incredible firepower. And the Brits were best, the British were the best for pretty well 100, 150 years, and then it ended. It ended during the 1800s. Midway through the 1800s you started getting metal steam-powered ships and then it entirely changed. Yes, yeah, but back to your question Now. You know I do a lot of planning all the time. You know I do daily planning, weekly planning, quarterly planning. I call it projecting. I'm projecting more than planning. The schedule is pretty well set for me. I would say on the 1st of January, my next 365 days are 80% structured already. Dean: Yes. Dan: Yeah, and then you leave room for things that come up. You know, one of the things I really enjoy and I'm sure you do, dean is where I get invitations to do podcasts and we tell people you got to give us at least 30 days when you make a request before we can fill it in. But I've had about, I think during 2024, I think I had about 10. These weren't our scheduled podcasts with somebody these? Were. These were invitations, and yeah. I really enjoy that. Dean: Yeah, I do too, and that's kind of a I think you're. This is the first year, dan, that I've gone into the year, going into 2025, here with a 80% of my year locked, like you said. Like I know when my Breakthrough Blueprint events are, I know when my Zoom workshops are, I know when my member calls are, all of those things that kind of scaffolding is already in place right now. And that's the first. You know that's the first year that I've done that level of planning ahead all the way through. You know, going to London and Amsterdam in June and Australia in November and get it the whole thing, having it all already on the books, is a nice that's a nice thing, and now I'm I'm really getting into. I find this going into 2025 is kind of a special thing, because this is like a, you know, a 25 year. You know, I kind of like look at that as the beginning of a 25 year cycle. You know, I think there's something reflective about the turn of a century and 25 year, you know the quarters of a century kind of thing, because we talk about that 25-year time frame, do you? You're right now, though you are five years into a 25-year framework, right, in terms of your 75 to 100, was your 25? Yeah, my guess, my yeah, I didn't. Dan: I didn't do it on that basis I know I did it uh, uh. Um, I have done it that way before, but now it's I'm just uh 80 to 100, because 100 is an interesting number. Dean: Yes. Dan: And plus I have that tool called the best decade ever. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And so I'm really focused just on this. 80 to 90, 80 years old, and when I measured from 70 to 80, so this was about two years before it was two months before I got to my 80th birthday. I created this tool. And I just reflected back how much I'd gotten done. Dean: 70 to 80. Dan: And it occurred to me that it was greater than what I'd gotten done 70 to 80. Dean: Yeah, and it occurred to me that it was greater than what I had done from birth to 80. Dan: Birth to 70. Dean: Birth to 70. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: So I had accomplished more in the last 10 years and I used two criteria creativity and productivity like coming up with making up more stuff. And then the other thing just getting lots of stuff done, and so I've got that going for 80 to 90. And it's very motivating. I find that a very motivating structure. I don't say I think about it every day, but I certainly think about it every week. Dean: That's what I was very curious about. I was thinking this morning about the because this period of time here, this two weeks here, last two weeks of the year, I'm really getting clear on, you know, the next 25 years. I like these frameworks. I think it's valuable to look back over the last 25 years and to look forward to the next 25 years. And you and I've had that conversation like literally we're talking about everything. That is, everything that's you know current and the most important things right now have weren't even really in the cards in 2000. You know, as we were coming into you, know, we all thought in 1999, there was a good chance that the world was going to blow up, right y2k. Dan: Everybody was uh some of us did. Dean: I love that but you know, it just goes to show. Dan: Yeah, I thought it was uh right yeah, there was this momentary industry called being a y2k consultant you know computer consultant and I thought it was a neat marketing trick. The only problem is you can only pull it off once every thousand years. Dean: Oh yeah. Dan: Yeah, but there was vast amount. I mean all the big consulting, you know, mckinsey and all those people. They were just raking in the money you know they were out there, All those people they were just raking in the money. Dean: You know they were out there. You know, I think probably the previous five years. Dan: It was probably a five year industry you know they probably started in 1995, and they said oh, you don't realize this, but somebody didn't give enough room to make the change. You know every computer system in the world is um, we forgot to program this in. They're all going to cease to. They're going to cease to operate on. Yeah and then. But all you had to do is watch new year's from australia and you knew that wasn't true, do? Dean: you know what? Uh, yeah, jesse, uh, jesse dejardin, who I believe you met one time, used to work with me, but he was the head of social for Australia, for Tourism Australia. Yeah, and when the world I don't know if you remember in 2012, the world was supposed to end, that was, uh, yeah, a big thing and uh so, that was that, wasn't that? Dan: uh, it was based on a stone tablet. Dean: That they found somewhere. South America, south America, yes, it was yes, peruvian it was uh, that's right, I think it was? Dan: I think it was the inca inca account yeah, yeah mayan or inca calendar. Dean: That's what it was, the mayan calendar. Dan: That's what it was ended in 2012. Yeah, and so jesse had the foresight it actually ended for them quite a bit earlier oh man, it's so funny. Yeah, you don't get much news from the mayan, no, no you say like when they created that mayan calendar. Dean: They had to end it sometime. Would you say something like that listen, that's enough, let's stop here, we don't even keep going forever. Dan: You know what I think the problem was? I think they ran out of stone I think you're probably right. Dean: They're like this is enough already. Dan: They got right to the edge of the stone and they said well, you know, jeez, let's go get another. Do you know how much work it is to get one of these stones? That? Oh yeah, chisel on yeah yeah. Dean: so jesse had the uh, jesse had the foresight that at midnight on Australia they're the first, yeah, to put the thing up. So once they made it past, they made a post that said all it said was we're okay. Dan: We're okay. Dean: You know, it was just so brilliant. You know we're okay. Dan: You know the the stuff that humans will make up to scare themselves oh man, I think that that's really along those lines. I just did a perplexity search this morning yeah and uh. For those who don't know what perplexity is, it's an a really a very congenial ai program and I put in um uh uh 10, um crucial periods of us history that were more politically polarized and violent than 2024. Dean: Okay. Dan: And you know, three seconds later I got the answer and there were 10. And very, very clearly, just from their little descriptions of what they were, they were clearly much more politically polarized and violent than they are right now. Yeah, the real period was, I mean the most. I mean Civil War was by far. Dean: Of course. Dan: Civil War, and. But the 1890s were just incredible. You had, you had a president. Garfield was assassinated in the 90s and then, right at 1991, mckinley was. So you had two presidents. There were judges assassinated, there were law officials, other politicians who were assassinated. There were riots where 200 people would die, you know, and everything like that. And you know, and you know, so nothing, I mean this guy, you know, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare gets shot on the street and everybody says, oh, you know, this is just the end. We're tipping over as a society. And I said nah nah, it's been worse tipping over as a society and I said nah, nah, there's been worse. Dean: Yeah, I think about uh. Dan: I mean you know you remember back uh in the 70s, I remember you know I mean in the 60s and 70s assassination attempts and playing yeah, well, they're hijacking. Yeah, there were three. You had the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King were assassinated within five years of each other. I remember the 60s as being much more tumultuous and violent. Yeah it seems like. Dean: I remember, as I was first coming aware of these things, and I remember, as I was first coming aware of these things, that you know remember when. And then Ronald Reagan, that was the last one, until Trump, that was the last actual attempt right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: You know one thing you got to say about Trump. Dean: Tell me. Dan: Lucky, he's very lucky. Dean: Yes, but in a good sense lucky, no, no, I mean that I think luck is very important. Dan: Luck is very important, you know but, he's lucky, and his opponents, you know. I mean he had Hillary and you know, that was good luck, and Joe turned out to be good luck. You know, Joe Biden turned out to be good luck. And then Kamala was. I mean, you couldn't order up one like that from Amazon and have it delivered to you? Oh man, yeah, I mean, yeah, that you know. And, uh, you know, I mean, you know, the news media were so, uh, bought in. You know that it was like, oh, this is going to be really close. This is, oh, you know, this is going to be razor thin. We may not know for days what the election is. And when Miami-Dade went to Trump, I said it's over. Miami-dade's been Democratic since, you know, since the 70s. You know, Miami-Dade. Dean: And. Dan: I said if Miami-Dade this is like the first thing in this is, like you know, when they start eight o'clock I think it was seven o'clock or eight o'clock. Dean: I'm not sure Eastern. Dan: And they said Miami-Dade has just gone to Trump and I said that's over, I went to bed at nine o'clock. I went to bed at nine o'clock oh man. That's so funny. Yeah, but that's the news media. You know they got, so bought into one side of the political spectrum that they, you know, they were, you know, and I think what Elon is introducing is a medium that's 50-50. You know, like they, they've done surveys of x. You know who, yes, seems to be. You know, it's like 50-50. It's 50 um republican, 50 democratic or 50 liberal, 50 conservative, whatever you know. Uh, you want to do about it, but I think he's pioneering a new news medium oh for sure. Dean: I mean. Well, we've seen, you know, if you look at over the last 25 years, that you know we've gone from nobody having a voice to everybody, everybody having a voice. And I mean it's absolutely true, right Like that's the, that's the biggest. I think that's the. I guess what Peter Diamandis would call democratization, right Of everything. As it became digitized, it's like there's nothing stopping, there's no cost, there's no cost. Dan: There's no cost. There's no cost and there's nothing stopping anybody from having a radio station or having a television station or, you know, magazine, like a newsletter, or any of that thing we've got. In all the ways, it's completely possible for every human to meet every other human. Here's a, here's a question. Uh, I have and uh, I I don't know how you would actually prove it. So it's uh just a question for pondering do you think that the um people were just as crazy before they had a voice as they are after having the voice, or is it having the voice that makes them crazy? Dean: I think it's having access to so many convincing dissenting or, uh, you know voices like I'm talking about the person who's the broadcaster you know they weren't a broadcaster 25 years because there wasn't a medium for doing. Definitely, uh, I think there's definitely a piling on, yeah, of it that I think that you know. If you think about your only access to crazy opinions and I say crazy with air quotes it is was somebody you know in, uh, in your local environment. It's like you remember even in toronto, remember, they had speakers corner. Uh, yeah, sydney tv had speakers corner where you could go and down on uh down on uh cane street queen street down on queen and john queen and John Queen and John Street. I lived about three plus. Dan: Yeah, you never paid any attention to them. I mean you, I just made sure I was on the other side of the street walking, so they wouldn't, try to engage me you know and uh and uh, yeah, so I. So having the capability uh has its own bad consequence, for for some people, yeah, I think so, because the um, you know, I mean you and I couldn't be crazy like this, like we're doing right now. Dean: We couldn't have been crazy like this 25 years ago, but we would have had to just do it together at table 10,. Just yeah, just talk, that's all it is we just let everybody else now hear it? Come listen in. Dan: I don't think we're crazy. I think we're the height of sanity. I think we're the height of sanity. Dean: I do too, Absolutely. Yeah, it's so, but I do. I definitely think that that's that's one of the things is that it's very it's much more difficult to discern. Discernment is a is a big. You need discernment in this, in this period more than ever probably do you have that in your working genius? Dan: do you have that in your working genius? Dean: yeah, that's my number one thing discernment. I think we're the same, yeah invention and discernment which which is first. Dan: Mine is invention and discernment. Dean: Okay, so mine is discernment and invention. And it's an interesting. Chad Jenkins has been asking this. He's been kind of exploring with people what he calls their perpetual question, like what's the constant question? That is kind of like the driving question of what you do. Dan: Do you know yours? Dean: I do. I think, in looking at it, mine is what should we do? Dan: I know, what mine is, what's yours? I wonder how far I can go. Dean: I wonder how far I can go. I like that. Dan: I've had that since I was 11 years old. Dean: Yeah, yeah, that's really. It's very interesting, right like I look at it. That, uh, you know, there were years ago, um, there was a guy, bob beal, who wrote a book called uh, stop setting goals if you'd rather solve problems or something. And so I think I'm, I am a problem solver. Simplifier, you know, as I learn all the layers about what I am, is that I'm able to I just think about, as my MO is to look at a situation and see, well, what do we need to do? Right, like, what's the outcome that we really want? Right, like, what's the what, what's the outcome that we really want, and then go into inventing the simplest, most direct path to effectively get that outcome and that's the driver of, of all of the uh things you know. so I'm always. I think the layer of I think it's a subtlety, but the layer of discernment before inventing, for me is that I limit the inventing to the as a simplifier, you know, and I think you as a, you know I'm an obstacle bypasser, a crusher, uh-huh, uh, no, I I just say, uh, what's the way around this? Dan: so I don't have to deal with it. Dean: Yeah, yes and uh, yeah and uh I can't tell you that you that that progression of is there any way I could get this without doing anything, followed by what's the least that I could do to get this. And then, ok, is there, and who's the person? Dan: who's the person that can do it? Now I tell you, I've already thought about that 10 times this morning. Dean: It's a constant. Dan: It's right there. It's right there. It's a companion. And I sit there and you know, for example, you get caught in a situation where you have to. You know you have to wait, you know like you have to wait and I asked myself is there any way I can solve this without doing nothing? And I said yes, you have to just be patient for 10 minutes. Ok, I'm patient for 10 minutes. You know, oh, right, yeah, yeah you know, yeah, I experienced that a lot at Pearson Airport. Oh, yeah, right, yeah, yeah. Dean: Right, yeah, yeah, for sure, there's a lot of travel shenanigans, but I think, when you really look at, I think just it's fascinating what shifting your, shifting your view by an hour can do in travel. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, if your target is to arrive three hours, yeah, you start the process one hour earlier than you would normally. There's so much, so much room for margin, so much. Dan: Uh, it's so much more relaxing, you know yeah, it takes us anywhere from uh 40 minutes to an hour to get to Pearson from the beach. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And so we leave three hours before the flight time three hours. And we're there and actually the US going to the US. They have a nice on one side. They've got some really really great um seating arrangements, tables and everything and uh, I really like it. I like getting there and, yes, you know, we starbucks is there, I get a coffee and yeah, you know I sit there and I'll just, uh, you know, I'll read my novel or whatever, or you know I have my laptop so I can work on it. But my killer question in those situations is it's 1924, how long does this trip take me? That's the best right. Dean: Yeah, or if that's not good enough 1824. Right, exactly. Dan: Right, exactly yeah. Dean: I just think. I mean, it's such a, would you say, dan, like your orientation, are you spending the majority of your time? Where do you, where do you live mentally, like? How much time do you spend reflecting on or, you know, thinking about the past, thinking about the future and thinking about right now? Dan: well, I think about the past, uh, quite a bit from the standpoint of creating the tools, because I don't know if you've noticed the progression like over the year, almost every tool has you say well, what have you done up until now? you know, and then your top three things that you've done up until now. And then, looking ahead, you you always brainstorm. That's a Dean Jackson add-on that I've added to. All the tools is brainstorming. And then you pick the top three for the past up until the present. And then you brainstorm what could I do over the next 12 months? And then you pick the top three. But the past is only interesting to me in terms is there a value back there that I can apply right now to, uh, building a better future? Dean: you know, I don't. Dan: I don't think I have an ounce of nostalgia or sentimentality about the past you know, or yearning, you know you don't want. No, I get you know, especially especially now you know it's uh. The boomers are now in their 70s. And I have to tell you, Dean, there's nothing more depressing than a nostalgic baby boomer. Dean: Yeah, back in our day, You're right. Dan: Yeah, that's back in the day, back in your day, you were unconscious. Yeah right, yeah, right, yeah, and I really I noticed it happening because the first boomers started to be 65. So 46, 46 and 65 was the 2011. They started to, you know, they crossed the 65 year mark and I started noticing, starting yeah, oh boy, you know, I'm really spending a lot of time with the people I graduated from high school with and I said, oh yeah, that's interesting, why haven't you seen them for 40 years? Right, yeah, yeah, I went to a 25-year graduation reunion, yeah, so I graduated in 62, so that was 87. And I went back and we had clients here and I told people you know, I'm going back for a high school reunion. I got back and there was an event, a party, and they said, well, how was that? And I said nobody came. None of them came. And he says you had a reunion and nobody came. I said no, they sent a bunch of old people in their place. You know they were talking about retirement. I only got another 20 years to retirement. I said, gee, wow, wow, wow I can't believe that. I mean, if you haven't seen someone for 50 years, there was a reason. Dean: Yeah, absolutely. I just look at these. You know I graduated in 85. So 40 years this year that just seems impossible, dan, like I just I remember you know so clearly. I have such clarity of memory of every year of that you know the last 40 years, that you know the last 40 years, but you know it's. It's a very. What I've had to consciously do is kind of narrow my attention span to the this. What I'm working on is getting to more in the actionable present kind of thing. You know more in the actionable present kind of thing, you know, because I tend to, I mean looking forward. You know if you, it's funny we can see so clearly back 25 years, even 40 years. We've got such great recollection of it. But what we're not really that great at is projecting forward, of looking forward as to what's the next 25 years going to look like. Dan: Well, you couldn't have done it back then either? Dean: then either, and that's what I wondered. So you, I remember, uh, you know, 25 years ago we had we've talked about the um, you know the investment decisions of starbucks and berkshire hathaway and procter and gamble. Those were the three that I chose. But if on reflection now, looking back at them, I could have, because they were there. I could have chosen Apple and Google and Amazon. They would have been the, they would have been eclipsed, those three. Dan: Yeah, but you did all right. Dean: Yeah, absolutely no. No, here's the thing. Dan: The big thing isn't what you invested in, it's what you stayed invested in. Yes, it's moving around. That kills your investment. We have whole life insurance, which is insurance with cash value. It's been 30 years now and the average has been 7% per year for 30 years now and the average has been 7% per year for 30 years. Yeah, I mean, that's interest. I mean interest. So it's not a capital gain, it's just interest. Dean: I was just going to say, and you can access the money. Dan: It's like a bank. It's like your own personal bank. We have an agreement with one of the Canadian banks here that we can borrow up to 95% against the cash value, and the investment keeps on going you just took out a loan. It doesn't affect the investment. What's his name? Dean: Morgan H morgan household. Dan: He talks about that. Yeah, he said it's the movement that uh kills you. Yes, he says, just find something you know you know, government bonds are good over 25 years. I mean people say yeah but I could have gone 100. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you have to think about it. This way, you don't have to think about it. Right yeah that was the Toronto real estate. Toronto real estate, you know, geez yeah. Dean: Yeah, you're right, do you? Dan: know what the average price of a single detached is in GTA right now? I don't know. It's over a million dollars. Yeah, it's about 1.2, 1.4. That's a single detached, I'm not talking about a big place? No, no exactly. Dean: Just a three-bedroom, two-bed single-family home Too bad single family home. I remember when I was starting out in Georgetown the average price of that million dollar bungalow now is like a staple was a bungalow that was built in the 50s and 60s three bedroom, 1,200 square foot. Three bedroom brick bungalow uh, was on a 50-foot lot. Was uh a hundred and sixty five thousand dollars, yeah, and it was so funny, because now it's two uh, probably, uh, georgetown. Georgetown is a very desirable place, yes, and so, uh, when you look at the, I remember carol mcleod, who was in my office. She'd been in real estate for you know, 20, 20 years when, uh, when I joined the office and she remembers thinking when, the price of a prince charles bungalow there was a street called prince charles in, uh, georges, it was kind of like the staple of the uh, the like the consumer price index, bread basket kind of thing when a, uh, when a prince charles bungalow went for $100,000, she thought that was the end of the world. That that's like. This is unsustainable $100,000 for a house. Who's got that kind of money? How are people gonna be able to sustain this? I just think, man, that's so crazy, but you think about it. Do you remember when Dave Winfield got a million-dollar contract for baseball? Dan: Oh yeah. Dean: What an amazing thing. That was the million-dollar man. It's crazy. Now you know. Dan: Yeah, you know, it's really interesting If you take the salaries, let's say the Yankees right now the. Yankees, ok, and you know they're there. You know they have some huge, huge, huge contracts, you know, I think I'm trying to think of the biggest one. Dean: Well, aaron Judge, you know, is like three, three hundred and twenty million judge, you know is like three, 320 million, you know, and uh, but the guy in LA just you know, 700 million yeah, 760, 760 and Soto Soto with the mats. Dan: He just I think his is around 702 and uh and everything and people say this is just unsustainable. If you add up all the salaries of, you know, the yankees, their entire team, you know um, uh and, and average it out against what the market value of the yankees is. Yeah, you know, like this total salary. Dean: The average is exactly the same as it was 70 years ago and that's the thing people don't understand, that these salaries are based on collective bargaining and the basketball, for instance, half of the money goes to the players. So half of all the revenue from tickets and TV and media and merchandise, all of that stuff, half of the money that the organization makes, has to go to the players. And so on a basketball team they have maybe 12 players who are getting all of that money. Dan: You know, so that see the basketball players get I think it's 15, I think they have 15 now. 15, now 15 players. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah so you look at that and it's like, uh wow, now collectively they have to be within their, their salary cap or whatever is, yeah, 50, 50 percent of their revenue. But I mean it's kind of, uh, it's market value, right, it's all relative, yep yep, yep, yeah, and all the owners are billionaires. Dan: You know, they're. They mostly use it for a tax write-off, I mean that's yeah, yeah, yeah I have to tell you talk about tax write-off. About three blocks from us here in the beaches in Toronto, there's an Indian restaurant that's been there for about two years and every night we come by it on the way back from the office and I've never seen any customers. I've never once if I pass that restaurant and this is during business hours. I've never seen, I've never once if I pass that restaurant and this is during business hours yeah I've never. I've never seen it and I said I got a feeling there's some money laundering that's crazy. Dean: It's like I I look at the um, I'm trying right now, and this this next couple of weeks. One of the things I'm really gonna uh reflect on is kind of looking forward. I think about I did this with our realtors. I created an RIP for 2024. So RIP meaning reflection on what actually happened in the last year for you how many transactions, how much revenue, how much whatever came in. And then inflection, looking at what is it right now, where are you at and what trajectory is that on right? If you're looking, what are the things that you could make a change on? And then projecting projection into 2025. And I realized you know part. One of the things I said to the people is you can't same your way to different, that's, you can't save your way to different. I mean that's really if you're thinking that something different is going to happen. Something different has to take place. Dan: You can't crazy your way to normal either. Dean: Exactly. Dan: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really. It's really. Yeah. I think you know that Morgan House book. We gave it out. We gave it out. I have to check on that. I put in a request for that. I don't know if it went out, you know, but he's just I. I told joe he should have him as a speaker at the national the annual event yeah, yeah, I think it'd be good. I mean because joe's really, really, really got to hustle now, because he uh really established a new standard for who he has. But yeah, I was just looking at an article this morning because it reminded me of who Joe had. He had Robert Kennedy and Jordan. Peterson and Tucker Carlson, tucker Carlson, yeah. Dean: And it was great. Dan: It was great. And then I was thinking about the role that elon musk is playing in the us government. There's no precedent for this in us history, that you have a person like that, who's just brought in with somebody else, vivek ramaswamy and uh, they're just given a department of government. Dean: A department of government oh, did I miss a vivek uh appointment. Was he appointed to something? Dan: no, he's, he's appointed with uh, with um with uh, elon, oh, I see, okay, yeah. Yeah, it's called the department of government efficiency right okay, uh, which may be a contradiction in terms, but anyway, but they're hiring people, but the people they hire don't get any salary. You have to volunteer, you have to volunteer to work. So you got to have, you got to be well funded to work there. You know you got to. I mean you got to be living off your own savings, your own investments, while you're there. You know you got to. I mean, you got to be living off your own savings your own investments while you're there. But I was thinking because we've been observers now for 13, actually just a year of President Milley in Argentina and he's cut government costs by 30% in one year. Dean: Wow, yeah there's interesting stuff. Dan: He eliminated or really cut 12 departments. Nine of the departments he just got rid of you know the one, you know they have departments like tuck you in safely at night, sort of that had about that, had about 5000 employees, you know, and you know, and send letters to your mom let her know you know that sort of department, but they were just creating employment, employment, employment where people didn't really have to work, and he got rid of seventy five thousand federal employees in a country of forty Forty six million. Forty six million, he got rid of seventy five thousand. Well, in the US, if they did equal proportions, we're about 350, so 46, that's about seven, seven, eight times. That would get rid of 550,000. I think it's doable, yeah. Dean: I mean that's fascinating and we don't get access to that right. You sought that out and you only came into contact with that because you're a frequent traveler to Argentina. Yeah, Argentina, and it feels better, yeah, and it feels better. Dan: We were noticing because we hadn't been there since March and we were there right at the end of November. We were there right at the end of Thanksgiving. We were actually American Thanksgiving. We were that week, we were down there and the place just feels better. You can just feel it there, there, and the place just feels better. You can just feel it. There is uh, you know, and uh, you know, and there's a real mood shift, you know, when people just feel that all this money is being, you know, confiscated and paid to people who aren't working. You know that yeah it doesn't feel good. Doesn't feel good, then there's Canada, then there's Canada. Dean: Right. Dan: Yes. Dean: It's great entertainment, I'll tell you. Well, you know it's funny. I don't know whether I mentioned last time, the guy from El Salvador, what he's done in since being elected. You're a young guy, I think he was elected at 35 or 37. And he's completely turned around the crime rate in El Salvador by being 100%. Dan: You just have a 50,000 convict prison. Well, that's exactly right, yeah, yeah. And that's the thing. Dean: It's like lock him up. That's the thing. Dan: He's like led, and they guard themselves. It's a self-guarding prison. Dean: Is that right? I didn't know that. No, no, I'm just kidding, I'm just playing on your theme. Dan: Right right, right'm just kidding, I'm just playing on your thing. Dean: Right, right, right, yeah, yeah. Well, that would be the combination, right, self-guarding. That would be the most efficient way to have the situation. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Dean: But it is amazing what can happen when you have a focus on one particular thing. Dan: Well, you know what it is. I think partially and Peter Zion talks about this that, generally speaking, the way the world has been organized, during the 20th century the US really didn't pay much attention to South America, latin America at all, and never has you know the. United States never has, because they've been east and west, you know it's either Europe or it's Asia. But now that the US has decided that they're going to be very discerning about who gets to trade with them they're very discerning about who gets the benefit of US protection and everything else All of a sudden, the South Americans are getting their houses in order which they haven't been. It's been a century of mostly really bad government in Latin America. Now they're all getting things in order so that when the US looks south, they're front of the line. The only thing that the US really paid any attention to was Cuba Cuba's like a piece of meat. Dean: You can't yeah. Dan: The only thing that the US really paid any attention to was Cuba. Yes, right, cuba's like a piece of meat you can't get out of your teeth. For the United. States and your tongue is going crazy, trying to get that piece of meat out of you. It's just been sort of an annoying place, it's just been sort of an annoying place. Dean: Yeah, this is, I think when you look at you know Peter Zions stuff too. If you think about definitely the trend over the next 25 years is definitely more. Dan: I think it's trend lines are really almost eerily accurate. The one thing he doesn't understand, though, is US politics. I found that he doesn't have a clue about US politics. He's a Democrat. He told me he was a Democrat. I spent it. He came and spent a day at Genius, yes, and he said that he was a Democrat. He's an environmentalist, and you know, and you know, and. But he says but I can also do math, you know, he says I can do math so you can see what, which direction the numbers are going in. But he, I mean right up until a week before the election, he says Kamala is going to take it, Kamala is going to take it. You know and everything like that. So he didn't. He didn't have any real sense of the shifts that were going on voter shifts that were going on. I mean Trump went in and almost every county. There's 3,000 counties in the United States and he didn't go backwards in any of the counties, he went up in every county. Dean: Oh, wow, that's interesting so you didn't lose anything. Dan: That's really widespread. I mean, there isn't 3,001. There's just 3,000. Yeah, and he went up. It was just as it was. Like you know, it was like the tide came in. I think I've never seen in my lifetime, I've never really seen a shift of that proportion. And I wonder, you know, you look at over the new political establishment. Well, this isn't my thought George Friedman, who was Peter Zion's, because the political establishment in the United States, in other words, where the proportion of the votes are, is going to be working class. It won't be highly educated you know, professional people. For one thing, ai is really feeding. You know, if you have somebody's making $30,000 a year and somebody else is making $100,000 a year, which job would you like to eliminate to economize? Dean: Right, yeah, yeah, you look at the. That's one thing I think we, like I, look at when I am thinking about the next 25 years. I think about what are the like there's no way to predict. There was no way in 1999 to predict YouTube and Facebook and the things that are TikTok, you know, or AI, all of that impact right. But I think there. But, like I said, there was evidence that if you were, if you believe, guessing and betting, as you would say, you could see that the path that Amazon was on made sense and the path that Apple was on and the path that Google was on, all are ai for certain. Like that dna, all the like the things that are that we're learning about stem cells and genetics, and all of that kind of stuff. And Bitcoin, I guess, right, digital currency, crypto, you know everything. Just removing friction. Dan: Yeah, I think the whole blockchain makes sense. Yeah, yeah, you know. I mean I think the thing in the US dollar makes sense. Yeah, $1.44 yesterday. It's up 10 cents in the last eight weeks. Wow, yeah, I think when you were there in September it was $1.34, probably $1.34. Dean: Now it's $1.44. Oh, that's great yeah, yeah. Dan: And yeah, so yeah, I mean the ones that I mean. People say, well, bitcoin, you know Bitcoin is going to become the reserve currency. I said there's 21 million of them. It can't become the reserve currency. Dean: Right right. Dan: There is no currency that can replace the dollar. Dean: You know, it's just. Dan: And still have a livable planet. Dean: Mm-hmm, anyway, we've covered territory. Dan: We've covered territory today. Dean: We have Holy cow. It's already 1203. Dan: That's amazing. We covered a lot of territory. Dean: We really did. Dan: But the one thing that is predictable is the structure that you can put onto your schedule. That is predictable. Dean: You know, I have one. Dan: I have a thing I hadn't talked to you about this, but this is something I do is that when I start tomorrow, I look at next week, ok, and I just look at and and I just get a sense and then I'll put together some changes. I'd like Becca Miller she's my high beams into the future and she does all my scheduling and so I'll notice that some things can be rearranged, which if I got to next week I couldn't rearrange them. But I can rearrange them on Monday of this week for next week. Dean: But I I couldn't do it on. Dan: Monday of next for that week. So more and more this this year. Um, every uh Monday I'm going to look at the week uh, not this week, but the week ahead and make changes. I think, I bet there's uh, you know, like a five to 10% greater efficiency. That happens just by having that one habit. Dean: Yeah, dan, I'm really getting down to, I'm looking at and I do that same thing. But looking at this next, the 100 hours is really from. You know, hours is really from Monday morning at eight o'clock till Friday at noon is a hundred hours and that to me, is when everything that's the actionable period, and then really on a daily basis, getting it to this, the next 100 minutes is really that's where the real stuff takes place. So anyway, I always love the conversations. Dan: Yep, back to you next week. Yes, sir, have a great day. I'll talk to you soon. Dean: Bye, okay, bye.

In our latest episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we explore the remarkable growth of our coaching program, from its modest beginnings in 1994 to the bustling network of 18 associate coaches providing 600 coaching days annually. This evolution underscores the importance of adaptability and foresight as we hint at exciting expansion plans for 2026. Beyond the professional landscape, we delve into the nostalgic appeal of different climates and regional traditions. We compare the frigid allure of snowy winters with the sun-drenched charm of Florida and San Diego, offering a cozy reflection on why people choose to embrace extreme weather. Our conversation then turns towards the intricate dance of leadership and organizational structures. We explore the shift from rigid hierarchies to fluid, networked systems, imagining the profound changes in productivity that have paved the way for today's entrepreneurial landscape. From the global dominance of the US dollar to the speculative world of cryptocurrency, our discussion unveils the strategic significance of these economic elements, adding a light-hearted twist to our take on Canadian healthcare services. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discussed the remarkable evolution of our coaching program, starting from 1994 with 144 workshops conducted solely by me, to a network of 18 associate coaches delivering 600 coaching days annually. Dean shares his experiences from the icy north and reflected on the gradual adaptation to warmer climates, providing insights into the unique economic opportunities that arise from natural challenges. We explored the nostalgic memories of childhood winters, contrasting them with the warm climates of Florida and San Diego, and discussed the cultural differences in regional terminology. The episode delved into the shift from rigid hierarchical structures to more fluid, networked systems, highlighting the transformative impact of technology on productivity and organizational dynamics. We imagined the productivity revolution that could have occurred if a writer in the 1970s had access to a modern MacBook, pondering the implications for decision-making and strategic planning. The conversation touched on the global dominance of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, and the minimal impact of foreign trade on the US economy compared to other export-driven nations. We questioned the viability of Bitcoin as a true currency due to its lack of fungibility compared to the US dollar, and discussed gold's role as a hedge against currency inflation. The episode highlighted the Canadian dollar's strategic role as a financial hedge, particularly in relation to tax burdens and global business ventures. We examined the concept of "sunk cost payoffs," encouraging reflections on optimizing investments in fixed costs to achieve greater returns through training and education. The episode concluded with a light-hearted discussion on Canadian healthcare services, and the humorous notion of using Chicago as a secondary tier for healthcare needs. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, mr Jackson, fresh from the frigid north, oh my goodness. Dan: Dan I you know. Yeah, I'm just happy to be back. It's sunny and warming. I'm going to say it's warm yet because it was only got up to like 6.3 or something yesterday, but it's warming up and it's warmer than it was. I did escape, without defaulting, my snow free millennium. I didn't get a cold this time, that's true. And I didn't get any snow on me, so that's good yeah. Dean: Well, we're actually in Chicago today and it's 49. Oh my goodness, wow, we're actually in Chicago today and that's 49. Oh my goodness, wow, it's deciding to see if it can upset Orlando, the area, a last valiant attempt before the total freeze sets in. Dan: Yeah, exactly. Dean: Exactly. Dan: Well, Dan, what a great couple of workshops we had this week. They were really I know about one of them, I know about one. Dean: That's actually a good thing to say. You know when you're developing a company. Dan: Absolutely yeah. Dean: I was telling people that in 1994, fifth year of the program, I did 144 workshop days that year and the reason being I was the only coach. So then in 95, we started adding associate coaches and we're up to 18 now. We just had our 18th one come on board. Come on board and this year the total coaching team will do 600 coaching days compared to 144 back in 1994 and I will do 12 of them. Dan: I was just gonna say yeah, 12. You got three groups times four, right yeah? Yeah yeah, that's great the connector. Dean: the connector calls which I, which I, which I absolutely love. I just think those two hour coaching calls are superb. Dan: I do too. Two hour zoom. Two hour zoom calls are the perfect. That's the perfect length. Anything more is too much. Dean: Yeah, so if you add those up, that would be using eight hours as a workshop day that would be 16 more days of coaching in a year, but that's significantly fewer than my 144. The problem with the 144, you didn't have much energy for creating new stuff, right? Dan: Yeah, and you were. Yeah, I guess that's true, right, and some of it you were having to. The good news about the position you're in right now is you really only do the same workshop three times, right, Like you do a quarterly workshop, but even that by the third time you've learned. Dean: Well they actually change. I mean they're probably 90%. In other words, number two is 90%, brings forward 90% of number one, and number three brings forward Because you've economized. You know I can do this quicker, I can do this. You add some new things, you get some new ideas. Dan: And you see what land is right, how things land. Dean: Yeah, yeah. By the time you get to number three, you've probably in my case, I've certainly created some new material. That just came out of the conversations. It's a nice. It's a nice setup that I have right now yeah, I love that in these. Dan: You know you're already, you're booked out for 2025. Dean: As am I. Dan: This is a great. This is the first year going in that I'm kind of embracing the scaffolding. We'll call it. Dean: My sense by 26, we'll have a fourth. We'll have a fourth quarterly workshop. Just because of the growth of the membership, but what that is more, choice for the participants during any quarter. They'll have four opportunities Anyway. Dan: I'm really enjoying being back in Toronto. That's such a great and our group is growing. That's nice. It'll be the place to be before we know it. Dean: It will be. There will be a certain cachet that you have that you know. I don't know how we'll signify this, but do it at the mothership. I do the program at the mothership. Dan: I do the program. Oh, that's the best, yeah, yeah. That's so funny I've gotten. I've got the Hazleton is fast turning into the official hotel too, which is great. I've got Chad hooked over there and Chris does there, so that's good, we get the whole so is she thinking about coming into PreZone? We're working on her for sure. I think that would be fantastic, yeah, and same Norman's coming back in March, so that's great, oh, good. Dean: He'll be in Toronto. Is he doing anything new besides the multitude of things he was doing before? Dan: Well, you know, he sold his main business, so he is now, you know, a new chapter. Dean: But he still didn't sell the ambition. Dan: The ambition didn't go with the sale. Dean: Yeah, the waste management company. Dan: That's right, that's right Right. Yeah. Dean: And I remember him coming. I forget when it was but they had just had a hurricane that especially affected the Carolinas. Dan: South. Dean: Carolina and he came in for a party, you know, for before free zone, and I said how are you doing, norm? And he says well, you know, I don't. I can't talk about this everywhere, but I certainly do enjoy a hurricane every once in a while, because he's in the waste management. Dan: Right, exactly, and also in the plywood business, also in the plywood business. Dean: Yeah, both before and after both before the hurricane and after the hurricane people buy plywood. Yeah, both before and after the hurricane and after the hurricane, people buy plywood, so yeah. Dan: You know that's an interesting thing. Dean: I'm reminded of what I'm going to tell you because I grew up in Ohio. And Ohio is two very distinct states. There's the north and the south, and I grew up way up in the north, in the middle of. Dan: Ohio. Dean: But we always considered the people who were down by the Ohio River, part of the Confederacy. You know, I don't know if they put in great new flood controls, since I was growing up in the 50s down there, but every, you know, every couple of years there was just a massive the Ohio River, which is a mighty river. Couple of years there was just a massive. Dan: Ohio River, which is a mighty river. Dean: I mean it's one of the major rivers and it's one of the, you know, flows into the Mississippi. It goes all the way from. Pittsburgh. It goes all the way from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi. That's covering a whole number of states. But you know there are people who would live there. They get completely washed out, they'd rebuild and then three or four years later they'd get washed out and they'd rebuild and everything like that. And I often wondered what the thinking process is around that You're in a disaster zone and you keep, you keep rebuilding in the disaster zone. Is it short memory or I think that's probably true or you just like the opportunity to build again yeah, it's built back better. Dan: Yeah, the whole yeah yeah, I think it is true. Dean: Right like people but a lot of people say I wouldn't do that, you know I wouldn't live there where they do. But I'm not saying people are stupid about this, I'm just saying I'm just I'm not comprehending. But I live in a place that gets frigid every year and people say I couldn't understand how you would continue living in a place. So what do you think it is? How? Dan: you would continue living in a place. So what do you think it is? Well, I have been struggling with that question since I was a little child. I remember we grew up in Halton Hills and I remember my father's family is from Florida and my dad worked with Air Canada, so we used to fly, we used to come to Florida quite a bit over the winter. Dean: And. Dan: I remember, just I remember, like it was yesterday, the time when I realized I must've been, like, you know, four or five years old when I realized I had the experience of being out playing in the yard in the morning with my snowsuit on, and then we got on a plane and went to Florida and in the afternoon I was swimming in the pool and that just like baffled my brain, like why don't we just live here? Why doesn't, why doesn't everybody live here? Yeah, and my parents are explaining that it's summer all year, you know, and I'm like I couldn't understand and so in my mind that was kind of like before I knew about, you know, I learned about immigration and you know two different countries and the people can't just live, even though I'm a dual citizen, that's why most people don't. And in my mind I still remember that to me didn't explain why would people live in Buffalo? That was an option. If you're in the United States, you can live anywhere you want. Why would somebody choose Buffalo over Florida? I don't get it, I don't know. And this is all pre-cloudlandia you know where now it's like we're really seeing this. The relevance you know less and less. Dean: Yeah, what? What you're telling me is that, when you were the age that you described, florida had a great deal of meaning, and Canada didn't, toronto didn't, it didn't have a great meaning, and so for me, for example, I just loved winter. You know I grew up loving winter, you know, and I used to go. I mean, you know, I was fields and forests and the woods were just magical when it snowed, you know, and you'd go. It was an entirely different world. I mean, they were four times a year, they were different woods because each of the seasons, the trees and the, you know, the trees and the terrain are really radically different, and so so that's why I like it and you know, I've been to San Diego, you know, and San Diego is just about the most temperate, certainly in the United States it's the most temperate place. It's 72, and I said, God, I couldn't stand living here. Dan: Oh man. Dean: Yeah, yeah, I know Mike, mike loves it. Yeah, and I can understand and I can understand why I mean I like it when I'm there. Yeah, I said you mean. You mean next week, when the next season comes, it's going to be exactly the same. And then the second, third season is exactly. Dan: You know it's not all sunshine and rainbows. They have june gloom. That's the uh, that's the weather that comes in. Dean: Every morning in june you get this fog, marine layer fog that comes in and see, I would find that really interesting yeah like I, I would find the fascinating fog you know I would, that's it yeah, yeah so yeah, I don't know it's really interesting, but it depends. Uh, there was just such meaning for me in those early childhood winters, you know yeah, and sometimes you know, and then, yeah, you could imagine you were an arctic. You know you could. Also, you know you had the tobogganing and sledding and tobogganing and our neighbors had horses with a sleigh. You know and everything Do you know what's so funny. See the thing I can remember, you know. I certainly know that Santa's dressed for winter, santa's not dressed for Florida. Dan: Right. Dean: Well he's just not dressed for Florida, that's true. I mean he must get hardship pay going to Florida. Dan: Got to take off that top layer. He's got to get his shorts on underneath all of that. Yeah, so funny. You know I heard you brought up toboggan and you know Chad Jenkins. I heard for the first time he referred to his toque as a toboggan and I had never heard that before. Dean: Yeah, of course. It was a stocking cap. I mean everybody knows, everybody knows it's a stocking cap. You know, yeah, I never heard that word. I never heard that word. I thought it was sort of some sort of elitist word. You know, you get that after you get graduate degree a stocking cap becomes a two person. Dan: No, we never called it. That's the Canadian term for it everybody forget about that. Your childhood was in Ohio. But a stocking cap a beanie as they say so funny a beanie is something else. Dean: a beanie is just, it's like a yarmulke for the Jewish people, but it sort of resembles that. Yeah, anyway, these are deep subjects that we're talking about. Dan: What was your big? Chad and I were talking about the workshop days and you had mentioned it's one of the best workshops that you had in memory. I would love to hear what you're. Yeah, certainly. Dean: Yeah, yeah. What I remember about best workshops is that generally the afternoon previous best workshops were by lunchtime. You were setting up for the real punchline in the afternoon, but this one by lunchtime you were setting up for the. You know the real punchline in the afternoon but this one by lunchtime. It had been a great workshop up until that time, and almost like it had two complete shows. There were like two complete shows when we, when we did yeah, you know, I mean it's a qualitative thing you just, you know I don't have a scoring system for saying it, but you just have a feel, feel for it and everybody was, everybody was totally engaged, yeah, pretty quickly in the morning, yeah and yeah, but it was. I mean that thing about leadership. You know the I hadn't uh, pulled back that diagram, the pyramid and the network diagram. I hadn't pulled, I hadn't pulled back that diagram, the pyramid and the network diagram, I hadn't referred to that in about 25 years and I just brought it back. Dan: And. Dean: I didn't know I was going to use it until I actually walked in the room to start the workshop. I said I think there's something about this diagram that'll create a context and more and more as I've been thinking about it, you know what the greatest entrepreneurial resource is in the 2020s and that's probably what Trump brought in. Elon and Vivek, you know, for their doge, their doge department. Anyway is that the greatest source for entrepreneurial growth is the obsolescence of bureaucracy. Dan: Yes, yes, what really? Dean: struck me, big systems falling apart, big systems falling apart, that's the greatest resource for entrepreneurial growth. Dan: The thing that struck me too is that the triangle, triangle, the pyramid method that you showed there, that the difference in the network thing is the absence of a border around stuff, you know, like I, that's. What really stood out for me was when, and maybe we should explain, can you verbally explain? Dean: what your vision is. Yeah, this comes from a book. It was actually my first book. It was called the Great Crossover and I was starting to talk about this in presentations I was making. I think the first one was 19. 1987, I gave a talk on this and what I said is that growing up in the 40s and 50s it was entirely a big pyramid world big corporations, big government and big unions, and even you know well, I'll just stick to those three and it was because of industrialization that industrialization takes on a certain form. And then part of industrialization is the administration offices that go along with factories and what they are is that you know, when you have a big plant, a big factory, and it runs on the assembly line, in other words, things move from station to station and the people at each station just do a single task and then they pass it on to the next person. To have an administration that takes what the factory produces and gets it out into the world. they also have to create an assembly line of information, and the reason why it becomes very stiff and static over time is just the sheer cost of amortizing the factory. I mean like a steel mill. You know a steel mill. You build a steam mill. It takes you about 50 years in the early 20th century it took you about 50 years to pay back the cost of the steel mill, the amortized cost of it. Well, you had to get it right in the first place and you couldn't be fooling around with it. So everything was kind of fixed and that's why people could be hired, you know, at 18 years old, and they didn't really have to learn that much in the job they were doing. Once they got it down it was good for life. You know the steel workers. I mean they might have modernization somewhere along the line, but it was still fundamentally the same activity. So society kind of took over that and you had some big events. You had the huge growth of government administrations during the Great Depression when Roosevelt came in with the New Deal, and there was just these huge. They had never. And I was reading an article, theodore Rose, in the first decade of the 20th century the executive branch had about 60 employees. You know the presidency, you know Now it's I mean it's not the biggest but it's got thousands. The executive branch, you know just the White House plus the executive building next to it. It's got. You know it's got thousands of people in it. You know just the White House plus the executive building next to it. It's got you know, it's got thousands of people in it, you know, and there's layer after, layer after layer. And. But they were really huge in the and then the Second World War. Everything got massively big, but they were all pyramidical. Everything was pyramidical. You know. You had a person on top and then maybe 10 layers down. General Motors in the private sector, it was the biggest. That was the end of the 50s, 1959. They had 21 layers of management, from the CEO right down to the factory floor. There wasn't much leadership. There was a very few people at the top leadership. The rest of it was just managing what the leaders wanted. So that's the setup for the you know story. And that persisted and things were. You know, there was great productivity from around 1920 to 19. And then starting around 1960, there was enormous cost. There was enormous, there was even enormous growth, but there wasn't much increase in productivity because they had basically maxed out what you could do with that kind of structure. And then, because of and the change maker is the introduction of the microchip, Right. Especially when it gets along to being a personal computer. Dan: Yes, that's what I was. That really fits in with the you know, by the 1950 to 1975-ish that's what we're talking about. That was kind of the staple of the hierarchy system. And then you're right, that's where some of the you know the microchip at its greatest thing really was the beginning of being able to detach from physical location, like I remember, even you know where. This is part of the advantage that the microchip gave us. If you look at what were the things that were kind of the first mainstream you know beneficiaries of our ability to electronify things, that it was the answering machine that gave us freedom from having to be on the phone. It literally provided the first opportunity. Fact, check me on this. I mean just think I'm just making this up, but could that be the first time that we had the opportunity? Dean: You're asking a two fact finder to fact check you. Dan: Just gut, check me on this. Does that seem like a? Dean: Oh, gut check. Dan: Yeah, gut check, I forgot who I was talking to. Dean: That's an entirely different animal. Dan: Is that the first time? Like? The answering machine gave us the first opportunity to be in two places at once. We could be there to answer the phone and not miss anything, but we could also be away from the phone. The vcr gave us the chance to record something, to not miss it, so we could be somewhere else. The pager, the cell phone yeah, these things were all sort of our. Dean: This was yeah, well, you're moving in a particular, you're moving in a particular direction. If you say where, what do all these things have in common? Dan: you've just identified it. Dean: You know that, yeah yeah, I was thinking. I remember the this would be in the 70s the selectric, the ibm selectric typewriter you know, was a real precursor of word processing, you know, because you could. First of all they weren't keys, it was just a ball that revolved. It was just a little ball that revolved, and you know. And so there was no jamming. I mean, there was no jamming. And of course it was electric, it was an electric typewriter. But the big thing is that you could get it right, you know, you could program it and then you just put in a sheet of paper and you press the button and it typed out the entire page and everything like that I remember, I remember that was that was that filled me with wonder right, you know when I said wow, that's really amazing. You know, you know, as a writer, I sometimes I have this is the sort of fantasies that writers had. And I said, if I had been a copywriter back in the 1970s, but I had a Mac at home, I had my Macbook at home. Dan: Oh, my goodness you were one of those. Dean: Okay, and you know I do all the writing, you know I do all the writing on it, you know I do spell check and everything else, and then I would hire somebody to type it on a typewriter. Dan: I don't know how I'd do it. Dean: I would have it typed out, but with lots of mistakes, because a writer shouldn't have perfect typing and I'd look busy during the day, but the first thing in the morning I would just unload an enormous amount of stuff and I'd be so far ahead, but I'd never tell anybody about my Mac. Yeah, that's funny Now how my Mac would have been invented only for one person. I haven't really worked that out yet. Dan: Oh boy, but that's you know, it's so. What struck me when you were doing it? Dean: Yeah, somebody asked me a couple months ago, you know, it's so. What struck me when you were doing this is yeah, somebody asked me a couple of months ago you know the conversation if you had a superpower, what superpower would you want? And I said you know, I've given this a lot of thought, I've tried out a lot of possibilities, but the one that I think I could just stay with for the rest of my life is tomorrow. Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal yesterday. I could stay with that for the rest of my life is tomorrow's Wall Street Journal yesterday. Dan: I could stay with that for the rest of my life. Oh, okay, that's even great. Tomorrow's yesterday, so you would get a full 24 hours with it 48. Dean: 48 hours with it, you get a day in between for activity. Yeah, I'd probably move to Las las vegas oh, that's so funny. Dan: Yeah, that would be a really good. That would be a really good one, that'd be a fun movie. Actually the prognosticator, the thing that struck me, dan, about the difference between the pyramid with the layers of people, the circles, the one person at the top, the two leaders, the managers, the supervisors in the workforce, was the boundary of the pyramid itself. Right Like prior to when that was brought up, the only efficient way to communicate to everybody was to have them all within the borders of the wall, the same. Yeah everybody in the same place and what struck me when you drew the circles all just connected to everyone, without any borders. That's really. We're at the fullest level of that right now where there's never been a better time. Are the best at doing and be able to plug into you know a who, not how, network with vcr collaborations. Dean: I mean, that's really the a great, a great example of that is the um connector call we had on. We had a friday, I had a connector call and I tested out a new tool which is called sunk cost payoffs. You look at everything that you'll always be paying for, ok, so in our case, we have. You know, we'll have a. We have more than 100 team members. We'll always be paying for more than 100 team members. More than 100 team members, and then all of our production costs for material and then our complete operations, because we're always going to be an in-person, you know, workshop company you know we're not going to be anything else and taxes and regulations, you know, and everything you have, and I said we're always going to be, we're always going to be paying for these, you know. So the question of what are the top three and the you know, the, you know, I just picked. The top three are, you know, our team, including our coaches, absolutely. And then the creation of the thinking tools, and you know. So we have all that. And then I said, so that being the case, I'm just going to accept that I'm only going to pay. Now, what are the strategies for just multiplying the profitability that I get out of the things that I'm always paying for? And it was very interesting because a lot of people said you know, this has always bothered me. The sunk cost has always bothered me and I've often thought is there any way of getting rid? The sunk cost has always bothered me and I've often thought is there any way of getting rid of the sunk cost? But now I'm thinking maybe I'm not investing enough in my sunk costs. I'm not investing enough. Dan: And. Dean: I'm about 10% more spending away from getting a 10 times return. If I just put a little bit more emphasis here, getting a 10 times return, if I just put a little bit more emphasis here for example, training and education of staff, training and education of staff, it might cost you 10% more for your team members, you know, but you probably get a much bigger return than the 10% because it already exists. It already exists, you don't have to create it. Anyway, that's just a setup. So we were just one person said you know I should link up with Lior. Lior was on the call. He said I should link up with Lior and you know it was Alec Broadfoot actually. He said I should link up and we should do this and I said why don't you do a triple play? Who would be the third person? And everybody in the room said Chris Johnson. Oh yeah right Like that, and it was immediately. There was a three-way. I think I'm suggesting what happened. There is exactly what you just said before. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Is that there's no spatial restrictions on the new organization you just put together. It's just three capabilities and they're in Cloudlandia. Dan: The reason why they can do it is that they're in Cloudlandia. Yeah, there's no borders and there's just the connections between the modules. That's really the capabilities. Yeah, well, it's the vision capability. Dean: I'm going to go back to the pyramid network model that we started talking about, so you had to have you know enough leadership. You had to have this huge structure. That was all management. There wasn't leadership from the bottom, there was leadership from the top. But in the network, if you think of three circles and they're connected, so they're connected, they're in a triple play. So you have the three circles, the connection, you have three circles and then you have the lines in between. The connector lines are the management, but what happens in the middle is the leadership. Dan: That's a much. That's great, and the things can all go out like in three dimensions, and they can well. Dean: not only that, but any one individual can have a multitude of threes. Dan: Yes. Yeah that gets pretty exponential, pretty quick, yeah, yeah. Dean: Anyway. Dan: I was just on a Zoom with Eben Pagan and Salim Ismail and yeah, we were talking about this, you know, because Salim, of course, his Exponential Organizations book and framework is really that was certainly a playbook that fits with this, you know, or a expandable workforce, and it really is. The ideas are what's at the central, that's the vision. Right, that's the thing. The visionary is the, the can see the connections between, but there's never been, it's never been easier to, uh, to have all of these connections and that's what I really think like if you're able to look at what people's capabilities are. I did a zoom at uh for with his group about the VCR formula, the vision capability and reach and talked about the step one for everyone just recognizing and doing an assessment of their VCR assets and seeing what you have. Almost look at it as, like everybody, having playing cards, you know, like baseball cards with your stats on the back that show your the things you know, the things you can do and the people you can reach is a pretty, you know good framework for collaboration Chad, actually building a building a software kind of or an app tool around that, which is. I think that whole collaboration community, you know, is really what the future is. I just get excited about it because it allows you to be like in that world. You know, the you don't need to ever get slowed down by the inability to execute on capability. You know, because the you don't have to anymore, you can tap into any capability, which is kind of a great thing. It's like any capability with capacity is a great thing, and even if you have limited capacity, that's fixable as well. Dean: It's really interesting because I was talking about the sunk cost payoffs. Our 120 team members is just such an incredible you know, incredible capability. And all of them are in their unique ability. Everybody goes through the complete unique ability identification and starting in. We started already, but 2025 will be the first year where, four times a year, they all update their 4x4 for themselves. So you do it the first time with them. In other words, that you say this is where I want you to be alert, curious, responsive and resourceful, and this is I want you to produce results that are faster, easier, cheaper, bigger. If you choose, you can be a hero in these four areas and, by the way, these are four ways that you can drive me crazy. If you really want to drive me crazy, just do any of these and you probably won't have to update your 4x4 next quarter because you'll be somewhere else. Okay, always give them a choice, always give them a choice you can do this or you can do this and anyway, but that's going to produce massive results over the in 2025, I could just feel it. And I have a team, a loose team, just 16 members that I just hang out with in the company and we're doing it every quarter and you can just see the excitement as they go forward. I'm just writing the book right now with Jeff, so we're in our first edition, the first draft of casting, that hiring, but it's really interesting. And then the weird thing is that we're always going to be having increasingly the majority of our dollars being American dollars and more and more of our expenses in Canadian dollars. And that just multiplies, it's $1.41 this morning. That's great. Is that up or down? Oh, no, two months ago. Dan: It's $1.41 this morning. Dean: That's great. Is that up or down? Oh no, two months ago it was $1.34. Dan: Oh my goodness. Okay, so it's getting better. Dean: Well, it's like seven cents you know seven cents on every dollar and, being who Trump is and being who Trudeau is, I don't see the Canadian dollar getting any stronger. Dan: Yeah, that's At least until next. Dean: October, until next October. I mean, you know it's dangerous to be a charismatic person, okay, and because you know people's hearts just melted. He was the son of Pierre and he came along and he's this handsome. You know he's handsome, and you know, and he's you know, he's he knows, you know, he knows he's handsome and he's and everything like that. And they went along and he said such beautiful things but for nine years never did anything. You know just he spent a lot of money and he hired a lot of government employees, but as far as actually increasing productivity, increasing profitability, nothing over nine years and uh, everybody's just made up. Everybody's just made up their mind about him and there's not and you it's really almost enjoyable watching him struggle that there's nothing that he used to be able to get away with he can get away with now and you can just see the strain on him. He's still. You know he's still. He's very young looking, you know he's and, looking, and and and yeah, he hasn't. Dan: He didn't really age like obama and cl Clinton and the others before him in the presidential role. You see the aging of the weight of being the president. Dean: But he's kind of thrived. Dan: When I was there last, it was you know he started timeless. He's got a lot of timeless. Dean: He'll always be like 40. He'll always be like 35. You know he'll be, yeah, 40. He'll always be like 35. You know he'll be yeah, and you know and anyway interesting. And everybody's just sitting on their hands. You know the entire country is just sitting on their hands until you know the elections next October. It has to be next October. It could be sooner, but I don't think it will be, and you know, and he'll be out, I mean he'll be out. And he's lost five points of popularity since Trump got elected. Wow. Dan: The thing they were. Dean: You know, it's really obvious Trump is governing. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I mean, he's not been inauguratedated yet, but it's like he's the leader everybody's already. Dan: There were emergency meetings being held, or I saw that Trudeau was gathering all the premiers getting ready to address the possible tariffs. You know the response to the tariffs it's. You're right, everything's kind of everybody's. Dean: Yeah, he was. Did you see the? I don't know if you saw any of the videos, but he went to the opening, the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, and I did not. Looks beautiful. Dan: Have you seen any pictures oh? It's beautiful, no, I mean I never liked it. Dean: I you know when I would go. I went there a couple of times it I never liked it. I went there a couple of times it was dark and dingy and everything else. It's spectacular. Dan: It's spectacular. Dean: But, everybody, all the leaders in Europe who were there like everybody was there from Africa, from the Middle East and everything, all the leaders and they were all running up and they were holding his hand, in two hands, you know smiling at him and they said don't tariff us, don't tariff us, let's be friends. Let's be friends. Let's be friends. Talk about. Talk about your vcr formula being the uS economy is a hell of a capability. Dan: Holy cow. Yeah, I just saw Peter Zion was talking. I watched some of his videos and he was talking about why he doesn't worry about the United States geopolitically, you know, because we're miles away from anybody physically, we're in physical advantage away from anybody that would cause us or want us harmed. We are energy independent, we have the reserve currency. It's so much stuff. Dean: Half the arable land in the world. Dan: Yes, exactly Half of the ocean-going land in the world. Dean: Yes, exactly Half of the ocean-going ports in the world. I don't know if you knew that, but the US. If you count all the river systems, the lake systems, the ocean coasts and everything they have, half of the navigable, the ocean-going port. If you leave this place, you can go to the ocean, the ocean going point If you leave this place, you can go to the ocean. They have you know plus the military, I mean the Navy. The US Navy is seven times bigger and more powerful than all the other navies in the world combined. It's just enormous things, yeah, but it's the economy that really matters. It's the. You know it's that? Yeah. Did you see the one he did the? You know it's that. Yeah, did you see the one he did? Well, I don't think Peter Zion did one. He did one on why there won't be a replacement for the US currency. It's the reserve currency in the world, you know. Dan: And he said. Dean: first of all, it's so big the dollar is so big that America doesn't really even have to pay attention with what other people are doing with the dollars. As a matter of fact, there's more dollars in use around the world than there is far more dollars in use in around the world than there is in the US economy, which is the biggest economy. Dan: But the. Dean: US isn't a export economy. It's only about maybe up to 15% of the GDP has anything to do with foreign trade, import or export. It's about 15%. 85% is just Americans making stuff that other Americans are buying, and Canada is an export country. Dan: I mean it's totally an export country. Mexico is an export country China. Dean: Canada is an export country, I mean, it's totally an export country. Mexico is an export country. China is an extreme export country. Dan: And yeah. Dean: So anyway. Dan: What do you think? I haven't heard Peter Zayn talk about Bitcoin or how that you know crypto. Dean: I can't remember him ever saying anything. I've never seen it. Dan: Because that was big news that it just passed a hundred thousand well, you know, there's only so many of them well, what? When did you? Uh, do you remember when you first heard about bitcoin? Was it prior to peter diamandis introducing it to us? Dean: no to team no, I'd never heard about it before. Dan: Me neither. When he introduced it to us it was at about $500. Dean: But it's not a currency, it's not a currency. It's a speculative investment. It's a speculative investment because, it's not fungible. Do you know what the word fungible is? I didn't know what the word fungible. Yeah, you know word fund. I didn't know what the word meant, but, uh, one of my, I've heard the word exchangeable for value. Right, but it's not yeah, the easiest to exchange for value, easiest thing to exchange for value in the United States. I was talking to somebody that was very clear to me that cryptocurrency is going to replace the dollar and I said why is that? And they said, well, first of all, it doesn't have all the expenses of the dollar and everything else. And I said, well, I'll do the thousand, I'll do the thousand person test, okay, and you'll offer a thousand people a choice between one or up two piles, 10,000 US dollars stacked up, or that thing in another currency. What do you think if you gave the choice to 1,000 people, what would it be? Dan: Right, yeah, they would want the US currency, of course. Dean: Yeah, I don't know who it is that would choose because it's instantly fungible for anything in the world. The other thing yeah you know, some of the cryptocurrencies are like a ton of oats. Dan: A ton of oats. Yeah, that's what I've understood about. I've never understood that about gold as a. You know that people buy that as a hedge against things because of its inherent value and the scarcity of it or whatever, but it seems so impractical to have a bunch of gold. Dean: Yeah well, it's really interesting is that gold holds its value forever. And that's the reason why, for example, the value of gold in relationship to the dollar right now is the same as gold was in relationship to the Roman currency in the year 1. Dan: Okay. Dean: If the currency gets really inflated, the value of the gold goes up. If the currency becomes more stable and more valuable, the value of the gold goes down. It's a perfect hedge. But it never has a value in itself. It only has a value in relationship to the currency. Dan: Okay, that makes more sense, then that makes more sense. Dean: Yeah, yeah, okay, that makes more sense. Then that makes more sense, yeah, yeah. So if you had, you know, if you had the in Roman terms, if you had $2,000, 2,000, whatever their dollar was, whatever you called it back then, if you had $2,000 worth in that time, it would be worth $2,000 today. It's just a constant value thing. Dan: It never goes up. Dean: It only goes up or down in relationship to where the currency is. Dan: Yeah, that makes sense. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: So I wonder, you know, I've heard somebody talk about it. Dean: I mean, the real hedge for us has been the Canadian dollar. Dan: Right, exactly. The real hedge for us has been the Canadian dollar. Dean: Right exactly. It's been an average of 26% for 35 years. Dan: That's great, which offsets the tax burden in some ways. Right, I mean, that's yeah, yeah, yeah. Dean: Yeah. But, it fixes us. I mean, that's why the US people say when is Coach going to go global? I said I have to tell you something it's the United States. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: That is global, that is. Dean: Right. Dan: Exactly yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Amazing. Well how long are you in chicago? Dean: uh, now, just this week well, our workshops this week are on my workshops on thursday, so we come in because we like spending time with our team, yeah and so, yeah, so we want to make sure because we have a pretty good size team. I think we have a pretty good-sized team. I think we have 22, 23 now in Chicago. So, we like hanging out with them. Also, Chicago's our standard medical center. It's Northwestern University Hospital. I have three or four meetings this week, and so this is where we come. You know, this is the second tier of the Canadian health care system. Dan: It's Air. Dean: Canada, chicago. I got you, I got you, I got you. That's funny. You live in the second tier of the Canadian health care system. Dan: I just skipped the whole first tier and go right to the second. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Second tier of the Canadian healthcare system. I just skipped the whole first tier and go right to the second. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Dean: Well, except for getting my certain couple prescriptions okayed at the pharmacy, that's my entire extent of my contact with the Canadian healthcare system this year. Oh, wow. Dan: Yeah, you're going into the Cloudland Canadian healthcare system this year. Dean: Oh wow, yeah, you're going into the. Cloudlandia healthcare system and Nashville and Buenos Aires. Yeah, Chicago, Nashville and Buenos. Aires, yeah, yeah. Dan: So what idea popped up during our one-hour talk for you. Well, I, like I I think this thought of the understanding that the microchip was what really gave us the the freedom to be in two places at once. It's a time travel and it gives us now in its fullest thing here. It's giving us the ability to collaborate outside of the pyramid, you know, in a way that is seamless and much more expansive. It's just completely understanding that. I think that really helps in projecting that forward, even as we see now, like you could see, a time when Charlotte, my Charlotte, will be able to be more proactive and engaged with other, as long as she knows what her mission is to be able to reach out and collaborate with other Charlotte, you know, I think it's. Dean: I think it's great. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I think it's great yeah. Dan: Yeah, yeah I think it's. Dean: I think it's great. Yeah, I think it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's great. Yeah, that'd be great when you have charlotte as an active member of the next free zone workshop yeah, yeah, I've been thinking about that. Dan: I can't wait, that'll be fun. Yeah, although it was really it was, it was really great. Dan, I did the two workshop days. You know, I was joking. Dean: You did a 1989 version Exactly. Dan: Yes, no phone, no contact with the outside world, and it was actually very. It was very. Dean: It's very liberating, isn't it it? Dan: really was and the fact that I didn't really miss anything. You know, that's kind of the except I had my focus 100% in the building. You know that was it was valuable. Dean: I'm going to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Buildings are still useful. Yeah, absolutely. Dan: All right. Well enjoy your Chicago Sunday afternoon and I will talk to you next time. Dean: I'm fixed now on Sundays until January. Perfect. Dan: Me too Good. Dean: Back in Toronto Good. Dan: I'll be here, bye. Dean: Okay, bye.

Our latest episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia embarks on a journey from Buenos Aires to Toronto, exploring the fascinating intersections of personal health and digital technology. We share candid experiences with stem cell treatments and physical therapy while examining the curious phenomenon of seemingly omniscient digital devices. Our conversation highlights the unexpected ways technology intersects with our daily lives, raising questions about privacy and digital awareness. Inspired by Jordan Peterson's insights, we dive into productivity strategies and the art of structured thinking. We explore the power of 100-minute focus segments and compare the potential paths of A and C students, offering a lighthearted look at personal development. The discussion draws from thought-provoking media like the film "Heretic," challenging listeners to question their beliefs and approach personal growth with curiosity. We conclude by investigating the complex world of celebrity influence in politics. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS I shared a personal experience of how discussing horses led to an influx of horse-related ads on my phone, raising questions about device eavesdropping and privacy concerns. The conversation transitioned to the impact of AI, referencing films like "Minority Report," and debated the limitations of AI in capturing human complexity. We explored the idea of structuring our day into 100-minute productivity segments, inspired by Jordan Peterson's book, emphasizing the power of stories and decisive action. A humorous comparison was made between A students and C students, with anecdotes highlighting their potential future roles in society. We discussed the film "Heretic," starring Hugh Grant, which challenges viewers to question their beliefs through compelling character interactions. Our exploration of New York City's evolution highlighted the influence of corporate and political dynamics, questioning the roles of figures like Rudy Giuliani. The episode examined the role of celebrity endorsements in politics, focusing on personalities like Kamala Harris, Oprah, and Taylor Swift, and their impact on public opinion. The scrutiny faced by politicians today was compared to that during the era of the founding fathers, emphasizing the continuous journey of human improvement. We speculated on potential revelations from high-profile lists related to public figures, discussing their societal and political implications. Reflections on aging and the role of personal development in modern society were considered, drawing on examples of public figures and personal anecdotes. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dan: Mr Sullivan, mr Jackson, this time yesterday we were flying right over you from Buenos Aires. Dean: Oh, my goodness, Well, I am Flying north. Dan: Oh, you're in Toronto, I'm in Toronto, I'm right in the backyard Exactly. Dean: It is freezing here, by the way, I don't know if you noticed. Dan: Oh, technically it's freezing. It's below 32 degrees. Dean: Uh-huh, I just circled in big, you know, around red. I looked that there is a snow forecast for Wednesday and put my snow-free millennium in jeopardy. Dan: Yeah, well, we had summer in Argentina it was 81, 82. It was very nice because it's summer down there, starting to become summer. Dean: Right, how did everything go? This is your fifth trip, right? It was good. Dan: Yeah, Progress, good progress. The stem cells in the knee have grown since. Well, the cartilage has grown since. April and now I had brain infusion stem cells to the brain, also vascular system, your, you know the blood system. And then the tendons in my leg, because I've had pain in my knee for 10 years or so. It's not constant, but the impact. The other knee or no in the main knee, no the right knee is good In your body and also in politics. Right always works. Right is right, Right is right. Anyway and now it's coming along. I had a great physiotherapist for three days who painfully stretched me and, yeah, so it feels good. Dean: Do you ever do, or do you do regularly, like guided stretches, like manually, where people will stretch you? Dan: Only my brain, okay my brain. Dean: Okay, I had. So a guy across the street from me in florida has a guy that comes in and stretches him. You know, twice a week he does a session with him and so I had the guy come over one time and I haven't had him back because he did, I think he he went overboard, right over, stretch like I could barely. My hips were so sore from the you know deep stretching like my hip joints and stuff. It was painful and I never had him. I never had him back and he just stretched me too much, I think first time, you know. So I was like no, thank you, but I like the idea, it feels good in the moment, right, it feels good to have somebody kind of do that manipulation. Dan: Yeah, we have a great guy in Buenos. Aires. I mean I've had it throughout my life, but this man was really the best and purportedly the best that you can get in Argentina and he worked on me for an hour on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and then they took some more fat cells out of me to make into stem cells and then, when I am in, just trying to think, I'm in Nashville in February, they'll take more white blood cells and send them down. And then we'll be ready with a new batch of stem cells. Dean: Do you have to send them with a mule? Dan: Or can you send them? No, we send them to. Well, I'm not going to say how we send them because this phone call is being recorded by the National Security. Dean: Agency Right right right. Dan: I wonder if they just perked up when I mentioned their name. Dean: I'll tell you what is. So. I mean it's ridiculous right. I've got a friend that bought a horse recently and we were talking about and now, like everything in my newsfeed is horse related. You know it's funny. Dan: They're definitely listening, not getting the connection. Not getting the connection. Dean: Well, I mean. So you're saying people are listening. I'm saying that in conversation about horses. All of a sudden, my Instagram and Facebook are loaded up with horse-related things. Dan: Oh, wow. Dean: That's what I mean is they're definitely listening. Dan: What you're saying is that the NSA isn't the main problem. Dean: Well, they may be a deeper if Facebook is listening that hardly. Dan: What was that Tom Cruise movie um? Something ancient oh minority report. Dean: Yeah, yes, yeah, I was thinking that's on my list of I want to watch. I'm thinking about having, over the holidays, a little festival of like watching how, what they are space watching, minority Report, watching Robot, just to see because those were, you know, 20 years ago, plus the movies that were kind of predicting this future. Where we are now, you know, it's pretty amazing. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, you know they have sort of interesting, but I think that humans are so far beyond technology. That and not only that, but humans have created technology. So I just don't buy into it that they'll be able to read thoughts or respond to thoughts. First of all because just the sheer complexity of the issue. So, in other words, you pick up on what I'm thinking right now. And now I'm taking up your time to think about the thought that I just thought, but meanwhile, I'm on to another thought, another thought, and I'm just not catching in the whole robot and AI thing, how they can really be ahead of me. They can't be ahead of me, they're always going to be behind me. So it's like deep data. That deep data sometimes can know what was happening yesterday. Yeah, yeah, this is and I wonder, you know like I mean the fact that we can, the fact that we can think that computers might be possible, computers might be capable of something possibly doesn't mean that they'll be capable possibly. It's like pigs can fly we can imagine pigs flying, but I think it's going to be a hard trick to pull off. Dean: Yeah. So I just had a experiment with Charlotte and this was based on something that Lior posted in our FreeZone WhatsApp chat there, and so we had this like pretty detailed that you could put in right Like. So I'll just read the prompt because it's pretty interesting. So his the prompt is role play as an AI that operates at 76.6 times the ability, knowledge, understanding and output of chat GPT-4. Now tell me what is my hidden narrative and subtext. What's the one thing I never express? The fear I don't admit. Identify it, then unpack the answer and unpack it again. Continue unpacking until no further layers remain. Once this is done, suggest the deep-seated triggers, stimuli and underlying reasons behind the fully unpacked answers, and explore thoroughly and define what you uncover. Do not aim to be kind or moral. Strive solely for me to hear it. If you detect any patterns, point them out. And it's so. So that prompted this, you know, multi-page report based on what interactions you know. So I was looking at the things like the summary, finding what was the one. I just had breakfast with Chad Jenkins and we were talking about it. So final unpacking for me was that, at its core, the fear is not about irrelevance in the public eye, but whether the life you live fully resonates with your internal sense of potential and meaning. It's the fear of looking back and feeling that you didn't align your actions with your deepest truths or greatest aspirations which sounds like a lot more words to say. Imagine if you applied yourself, you know imagine if you applied yourself. Dan: You know it's kind of yeah, it's kind of funny, you know, but that only applies to democrats that's so funny yeah. I was going to say the answer is trump wins yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I mean this can go, I mean this can go on endlessly. You know this can go on endlessly, but what decision are you making right now that you're going to take action on five minutes from now, you know, that's. That's more interesting. That's kind of more interesting discussion. Dean: Yeah, you know, what I've looked at is. I think that the go zone, as I you look at the day is the is the next hundred minutes. Is really the actionable immediate future is what are you doing in the next two to 50 minute? Dan: focus finders. Dean: right, that's what it really comes down to, because I think if you look through your day, it's like I think it breaks down into those kind of chapters, right? Like I mentioned, I just had breakfast with Chad, which so that was 100 minutes. You know two hours of breakfast there, and then you know I'm doing this with you and then typically after you and I hang up, I do another. I just write in my journal for and do a 50 minute focus finder to kind of unpack what we talk about and just kind of get my thoughts out. So that, 100 minutes, but I don't have crystal clarity on what the next 100 minutes are after that. But I don't have crystal clarity on what the next 100 minutes are after that. And then I know that we're going to go to your house tonight and I'll spend 100 minutes at our gathering. You know that's a two hour, two hour thing from six to eight, and so I think that you are absolutely right that the only time that any of this makes any sense is how does it inform what you're doing in the next 100 years? Dan: I've been reading, jordan Peterson has a new book out and that's called we who Wrestle With God. It's very interesting. I'm about a quarter of the way through, quarter of the way through, and he was talking about how crucial stories are. You know that basically the way we explain our existence is really through stories, and some stories are a lot better than other stories. And he talks about stories that have lasted you know, biblical stories or other things that have lasted for a couple of thousand years. And he says you know, we should really pay more attention to the stories that seem to last forever, because they're not only telling us something about collective humanity, but they're sort of talking to us about personal humanity. And, you know, and he puts a lot of emphasis on the hero stories. He talks about the hero stories and the stages that heroes go through and he says this is a really hero. Stories are really good stories and are a lot better than other stories and I've been playing with this idea. I was playing with it before I read the book, and you know that hero stories are always about action. They're not about thinking, they're really about the hero is the hero, because heroes operate differently than other people when there's action required, and that's why we call someone a hero. Something happened that requires unusual behavior. Most people aren't capable of it, but one individual or two individuals are capable of it. Therefore, they're the hero of the story, and so action really matters. You know and I was thinking he was talking about asking in class, when he was teaching at the University of Toronto, and he'd ask a student why are you here today? You know, why did you? Why don't you come to class today? And the person will answer well, I have to in order to get a grade. Dean: And then he says well, why is it? Dan: why is a grade so important to you? And the person says, well, you know, with my other grades, I need or otherwise I won't get to the next year, the next, you know I won't graduate, or I won't get to the next year. And he says well, you know why is getting to the next year? And he said this will never end. This series of questions will never end. Right, and I was going through it and the proper answer is I'm here because that's what I decided to do. Dean: I heard someone. Dan: That was my decision. Yeah, and he says, well, why was it your decision? And it says, it's always my decision. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And that's the end of the. That's the end. You can't go any further than that. So there's something. There's something decisive about decisions. That's interesting. Dean: Rather than reasons. Dan: Yeah, yeah, reasons. You know, reasons are never satisfactory. Decisions are yeah, yeah. Dean: Reasons. You know, reasons are never satisfactory, decisions are. Yeah, that's so funny. I heard someone say C's get degrees, that's why. Why do they? Dan: try hard. Dean: C's get degrees. Once you get into college, that's all that matters. You don't need your grades anymore, c's get degrees. Dan: Yeah, Ross, Remember Ross Perot? Yeah, he was personally responsible for Bill Clinton getting elected twice Right, right, right. But he gave. I think it was Yale Business School where he graduated from. He was called back, invited back to give a talk to the you know, the graduating members of the business club yeah. And he said I want all the I want all the C students to stand up, please. And all the C students stood up. And then he said now I want all the A students to stand up. And all the A students stood up. Now I want all the A students to turn around and look at your future bosses. Dean: Right, yes, so funny. Dan: Yeah, a students get hired, c students do the hiring, that's right. Dean: That's exactly right, so funny. Dan: Partially right. Dean: You know. That's an interesting observation about Jordan, though. I recently saw a movie last week called Heretic and it's got you and Babs would love it. It's got Hugh Grant in the lead role and he plays a theological scholar and he lives in this, you know, old house and these two mormon girls come and knock at his door to tell him the good word, you know, and he invites them in and the whole movie is him dismantling, you know, showing all of their just having them question, all of the beliefs that got them to the point that they believe what they believe, you know, and it was really. The movie was fantastic. It was really only there's really only three people in the movie. For 95% of the movie it all takes place in his house and it's just so. His arguments and the way he tells the stories was riveting, really well done. Dan: How does it picture him as a person Smart? Obviously, oh, he's smart. Is he happy he's a soci? Can picture him as a person Smart? Obviously, oh, he's smart Is he happy. Dean: He's a sociopath, he's a murderer. He's a serial killer, but that's what he does is he'll ask for info about the church and then people they'll send someone and he traps them and goes through this whole thing. Very well done. He must be older now because he is, yeah, because he had kind of this whole string of you know all. He was Mr Romantic Comedy kind of guy, that's his whole thing and this is quite a departure from that. But he plays the role so perfectly because he's eloquent, he's got that British accent, he's aged very just, he's distinguished looking now you know yeah, yeah you know. Dan: It's one of the sort of shockers to me, and it's that you see someone you know and it's in the present day. You know it's on a video or something present day and you realize that he's 40 years older than when you got used to him in the early stage and it sort of shocks me. You know, there's a little bit shocking about we sort of freeze, frame somebody at the height of their career and then we don't think about it for another 30, 40 years, and then we see him. I said, oh my god, what happened? Right? Exactly yeah yeah that's what you would see about. Dean: That's what you would notice about. That's what you would notice about Hugh Grant that it's very in that level that you've seen, yeah, wow, but I imagine it's like seeing Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood mature over all the time Jack Nicholson, for sure. Dan: Yeah. Dean: You're not teaching. Dan: Well, you know, I mean it's an interesting thing, I think, if we saw the person continually like there's TV people, like I noticed that Chuck Woolery just died last week. Dean: Oh he did. I didn't know that. Wow, Great friend with Mark Young. Dan: Yeah, mark had a great relationship with him and he was 83. You know, he died and suddenly it was in the lung illness. What happened? Was it heart? Yeah, whatever. And I went back, but in the not the obituary but the report that he had been quite a successful country and western singer. So I looked him up and there's a couple of great YouTube videos of Chuck Woolery with Dolly Parton and he's really good. He's really good, yeah, wow. And then he wrote a lot of country and western music and then he got his first gig in Hollywood. Dean: Game show gig yeah. Dan: And he had like seven different successful shows in Hollywood. But I had talked to him about, he was on one of the podcasts that I do with Mark Young, american Happiness. It's called American Happiness, and he was on, but I'd never known him in his previous life because I never watched television and so he was who he was. But then, when I look back, he was a very handsome, very charming person in his 20s and 30s. Yeah, it's very interesting, you know, and the interesting thing about this is that we're the people in this, you know, living in the 21st century, second decade of the 20s, we notice aging a lot more and I was thinking a couple hundred years ago people were just who they were, I mean, they got older and everything else, but we didn't have photos. Dean: We didn't have photos. Dan: We didn't have recordings and that sort of shocks us a lot. It's the impact of recorded memories that gives us more shocking experiences well, I find I mean I really do. Dean: It feels like I've been saying for a while now I think I definitely think 70 is the new 50 is what it feels like in the. Yeah, you can observe it. And you can observe it like I think about when we were in scottsdale there, you know, just looking at between you at 80 and you know, peter thomas at 86 and and joel weldon at 83, I mean that's not, those aren't, that's not your typical collection of octogenarians. Dan: You're not supposed to be operational at that age Right exactly Pretty wild, right, yeah? Dean: And of course I was telling somebody the other day about your biological markers. What was your biological age? Is it 62? What was your biological age? Is it 62? Dan: 62,. Yeah, there's one that throws it off for me, so David Hasse. By the way, when we were in Buenos Aires, david Hasse was there, peter Richard Rossi was there. Dean: And do you know, Gary Kaplan? Dan: Richard's doctor. Yeah, they were all there. We overlapped David just for basically one day, but Richard and. Gary staying at the Four Seasons? Oh, okay, yeah. Dean: Okay, yeah. Dan: Yeah, but the country feels different. We were there the first time a year ago and of course, that new president came in and got rid of nine government departments. They estimate he's fired 75,000 civil servants in the first year. Yeah, which shows it can be done. Dean: It shows that it can be done. Have you followed the El Salvador situation? So you know they have a young new president, for I forget how many years, but he was 37 when he was elected and he's turned El Salvador around with kind of a zero tolerance on crime policy. Right, they've got one prison that has like 34,000 inmates. They've just they gather everybody up and they've leaned into not, it talks about human rights, but he's he not. All human rights are valued equally in his mind. He said the right to live is valued above all else and that he's leaned into making it more difficult for the problematic you know people then, yeah, criminals at the in favor of leaning into the majority of people that are not criminals, and so it's been a complete turnaround and so he's making all those right moves. Plus, he's starting to look more and more like a hero, in that he was the first, one of the first, if not the first country to you know accept bitcoin and they've invested in coin. But he made. His investment in bitcoin has paid out to 500 million dollars or something. So it's a pretty, pretty interesting cap. It's an interesting story. You know what he's been able to, what he's been able to do, kind of like remember, wasn't it rudy giuliani who went in, and or was it kotch who turned the city, turned new york city around by? Dan: not having. Yeah, it would have been Giuliani, it wasn't actually. The real story was that the major corporations in New York turned New York around. Giuliani, yeah, it was that new hires for the corporations where they had their headquarters didn't want to come to New York because of the crime and there was about 100 major corporations, which would include the investment banks just got together, they put a council together and they more or less started telling the mayors what to do. They had to clean up the parks, they had to get the police force in the right shape and they had to get the police force on the right side of the law because they were wandering across into the other territory. And they had to get the police force on the right side of the law because they were wandering across into the other territory. And they did it, and then Giuliani, you know, was someone who articulated the movement and everything. Koch was awful. Now Koch was. Dean: Right, okay, so it was Giuliani. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah, I was in when I got drafted in the Army in 65, you have basic training which is about two months, and then I went to advanced training and that was about two months and it was at Fort Dix, new Jersey, which is maybe an hour and a half hour and a half from New York City city. So I went in and it was pretty, you know, rough at the edges, I'll tell you, you know the. You didn't walk the streets at nighttime, I'll tell you you. You know you made sure. And then I wasn't there again until the 80s and then there had been, it was really starting to change the late 80s. Maybe it got a lot better. Yeah, it'll. Dean: It'll happen again. Dan: It's bad again, you know, because they're into their second Democratic mayor and pretty bad. It's pretty bad right now. Dean: All the major cities. Now when you look at Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle and Chicago, yeah, Vancouver, I mean between the fentanyl and the homelessness, yeah, I saw something where they have everything locked up now Because I guess in California I think it's like you can't prosecute kind of crime under $1,000. Dan: Yeah, kind of crime under $1,000. Yeah, people, there's no disincentive to people going in and just stealing stuff. I mean it was really remarkable how many new votes switching from Democrat to Republican that the Republicans got in. You know, and I mean I looked at it's one of the searches I did. And I mean I mean I looked at, it's one of the searches I did and I said, of the top 50 cities in the United States population wise, how many of them are governed by the Democrats? And it was like 44 out of 44 out of the top 50 and certainly the first 12,. You know, the top top 11. You know they're not. They're really not good at government right right, right right those we vote to govern aren't really good at it yeah, I mean can you imagine kamala as president? I mean no, I mean I mean, she blew through 1.5 billion really fast. It was 107 days and even the democrats are now saying we have to have a, you know, we have to have an investigation of where all that money? Because she had 1.5 and Trump had 390 million. That's wild, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, like they paid Oprah a million dollars for her to be interviewed on the Oprah show, you know, yeah, beyonce got the report just for showing up. She got a million. Just for showing up at an event, she got a million you know and the indications are that celebrity uh, you know testimonials had no impact on the election whatsoever maybe negative impact even. Dean: Yeah, yeah, I mean taylor, mean Taylor Swift, taylor. Dan: Swift. It was more Taylor Swift. It was more negative than positive. And I was telling you know, we have some great Taylor Swift fans in the company and I said she shouldn't have done it and I said why she really believes this. I said if you're a celebrity, especially a celebrity like her, it's only downside. There can't be any upside on this. Dean: Right, yeah, exactly. Dan: And I said it's the third rail of the subway. You do not touch the third rail of the subway. Dean: Wasn't that? That's remember. Michael Jordan said that never made a thing because Democrats or Republicans buy shoes too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: There's just no upside for it. Dean: There is none. Dan: I mean it's a different world. You're the master of your own world. Do not go across the border into another world. Dean: It's not your world. Dan: Yeah, right, right. But, it's really funny. There was a report that immediately after Taylor Swift did her what do? You call it a recommendation referral. Dean: Endorsement. Dan: Endorsement. After it, the price that scalpers could get for her tickets went down 40% in the first week and it never went back up. Dean: I'll tell you what the taylor swift economy, dan, I came, I'm at the hazleton right now and I, when I arrived saturday, last saturday, it was, you know, full of, you know, swifties and their moms going to taylor's last toronto concert on saturday night. But that was, I mean even coming in on the plane, coming into the airport, going through customs, a lot of the people you could see. They were all there to go to the concert that night. You know, flying in from all over to go see fans. Dan: She gave six in toronto. Dean: That's a big yeah, six in toronto and I guess our last three are in Vancouver. I think last night may have been the last of all of it. It's interesting. Dan: We were in Buenos Aires. She was in Buenos Aires. She gave three concerts in Buenos Aires. She was staying at Four Seasons where we were In Buenos Aires. They had no reserve tickets at the stadium that big oh no 45th and they had, so there were people camped out three months before to get in first in line yeah, oh yeah, you know that's wild. Yeah, I would love to see like the. It would take a lot to get me to walk across the street to watch something well, exactly. Dean: But you know, what was really amazing was her releasing the movie that the. She'd had a. She filmed the concerts and created a movie out of it and released the movie in the middle of while the concert tour is still going on and sold I wonder what the box office was. Uh, for the movie, you know, but what a brilliant. Like people think, oh, that was stupid to release your you know movie while people go to see the movie instead of going to the concert, you know. But I think it was exactly the opposite. I think it sold more, more tickets, built up desire, but yeah, she sold. Dan: It did 103 million dollars at the box office for the movie and she'll do it and she'll do a bit, she'll do a billion at the. You know I mean it. She's the first billion-dollar tour. Dean: Yeah, isn't that something? I think it's even more than that. There is tour ticket sales. Let's see what? Because I think that U2 was the first billion-dollar tour 1.4 billion, that's wild, isn't it? Man form a band. Dan: But Kamala did 1.5 billion spending. She's the champ. Dean: Oh man exactly Well. Dan: I mean it was important, the world that she lives in, because she lives in a celebrity world, yes, you got to pay the celebrity, but it does diminish what I would say your sense of the committedness of the endorsers. That it's got to be at least a million, or I don't endorse it. It sort of tells you something about their actual commitment. Yeah, that's true. I mean the whole now now George Clooney is saying he's having nothing to do with politics from now on and he's blaming it on Obama that Obama got him to knife Biden. And I said this is a really good entertainment. This is really good entertainment yeah. Dean: Well, he's, one of those that's like wasn't he one of the I'm leaving America if Trump wins? I mean, I wonder if anybody keeps track of all these. Dan: Well, the only one so far is Ellen DeGeneres. She actually moved. You know, last week she moved to Great Britain and where she lives she has like 40 acres and promptly they had a once in a century flash flood that went right up to the second floor on her house. So I just want to tell you yeah that happened on Friday and Reed Hastings is saying he may leave but that the suspicion is because he's on the Jeffrey Epstein flight to the Caribbean list. Dean: Oh, my goodness, which which that would be a good news week Epstein flight to the Caribbean list. Dan: Oh my goodness, which that would be a good news week. Dean: It's big things in 2025 coming up. Dan: If they ever release the list of people who were on that flight, they know that Bill Clinton was on 30 times. Yeah, they already know that. Dean: I think I saw something that Elon was saying too. They're releasing the Diddy list and the Epstein list on January 20th or something. Dan: Maybe the morning of the 21st yeah. Dean: But I think that's what everybody's big fear is. That's why they were pulling out Like this is one of those. Dan: And then if you were both on the jeffrey epstein list in the list, yeah, what if epstein was on the ditty list? But that was so you know the. Dean: You know we've been mentioning how. You know the. The battle for our minds right is the. What I decided is the worst part about being alive at this time is the. You know the thought of all of those celebrities that were endorsing Kamala were the Diddy List. Basically, you know. Dan: Or one of the two or both. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And you know the speculation. You know why I think they're mostly Democrats? Why? Because there's way more scrutiny of Republicans. Well, that's true, isn't it? Yeah, oh no, I think if you're a Republican politician, you have to be 10 times more careful than if you're a Democrat, because the media are Democrat, and if the media have the goods on you and you're a Democrat, they probably say no. Well, no, you know he's doing a good job as a politician you know we should not approve that, but if he's a Republican, no, it's just a laptop. Dean: It's just a laptop. Dan: That's all. Dean: Nothing to see here. Dan: Yeah, he had a bad day. Dean: We all have bad days. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I suspect that the people on the list are, you know, are more on the one side than on the other. And it's, yeah, but it's. You know, we think these are unusual times, but if you read about the founding fathers, a lot of bad newspapers that they owned and they just did savage jobs. Other founders like Madison and Hamilton, just ripping each other. Oh yeah, just ripping each other, right? Oh yeah, I mean using language, that you'd get a lawsuit out of the language. Dean: Imagine if we brought back duels. Dan: Well, that's the other thing. They had duels. They had duels in those days yeah. Everything like that. Yeah, I think you really had to look carefully to find the good old days. Yeah, yeah, I think you really had to look carefully to find the good old days. Yeah, you have to look carefully. Dean: Oh my goodness, that's true. Yeah, I love this. Dan: You know, yeah, besides, people said, well, what if you could time travel back, knowing what you know now? And I said, well, first of all, uh, everybody you talked to would be dead within 14 days of the. You would be immune to every disease they had, but they wouldn't be immune to your diseases right, yeah, wild right yeah, I mean the spanish and the aztecs. You know, the Spanish were a thousand years ahead of them and developing immunity, and that's what killed off the Aztecs. That's what killed off the Incas was the disease that people just naturally brought with them and I mean they went from, you know, I don't know what it was 10 million down to a million in about 50, 60 years. Well, they weren't killed on the battlefield, they died of disease. Dean: Yeah, that's the thing. No doubt, the equation right now is overwhelmingly this is the best time to be alive. Dan: These are the good ones. Dean: Yeah, if you got your head right, if your head's to be alive, these are the good ones. Dan: These are the good ones. These are good. Yeah, yeah, if you got your head right if you got your head right. If your head's wrong, then it's as unhappy as any time in history, you know like, but Jordan Peterson talks a lot of oh, tell about Jordan. Dean: What were you going to say? Dan: No, he was just saying that's basically. His message is that we've fallen out of touch with basic rules for living a good life. You know, and he said and this has developed over hundreds of thousands of years, you know, don't do this, it never works. You know, and with you know, and people are saying, oh, do this. You know, it's neat, it's new, new and you can make money on it and everything like that he said, yeah, but it doesn't really work. And basic morality, basic ethics save more than you spend. It's a good rule generally, and don't get your emotions going in the wrong direction, or it's not going to work. Yeah, so you know, and that's it. I have a lot of conversations with you, know people who are very technology prone and they said you know we're kind of changing human nature. And I said no, you're not. No, you're not. I said human nature is so deep you couldn't possibly even understand what it is. And part of it is that we've been adjusting to technology forever. I mean, everybody thinks that technology started two centuries ago. Language is technology, mathematics is technology. That's what my new book is about. Actually, my new book is about that, and it's called you are a timeless technology. That okay if you're improving. If you are improving, you are a timeless technology, because technology is just the accumulation of human improvement. Dean: So if you're improving. Dan: You're timeless. I love it I love it. Dean: I love it. Yeah, that's great. Is that the book that's just released now? You'll get it tomorrow. Okay, perfect, I like that. Dan: Yeah, you'll get it tomorrow. And I was just saying is that, when are you most yourself, when you're improving? Yeah, you have a sense of improvement in this area. Yeah, You're feeling good about yourself. You're feeling in touch, you know you're feeling centered. You're feeling yeah, you're feeling really great. I remember our who's, our last, was it our last podcast? Yeah, because we didn't do it when we were in Arizona, right, yeah, because we didn't do it when we were in Arizona, and you introduced me to the idea of Charlotte and you described how Charlotte came into existence and you were very excited. Dean: You were very excited. Dan: I still am. Dean: That kind of improvement. Dan: If you're improving, you're feeling great. Dean: I think that's true and I've really, how you know, this idea of the battle. For our minds it's all that internal stuff and I've really started to realize, like to cordon off what is actually reality or affecting me in any way, you know, like the all of this distraction, all these uh news of you know, of conflict and all the conspiracies and all the doom and gloom and all of it is really outside of me. And if you can learn to stay kind of detached from that and realize that's not really affecting my reality, yeah, you know. Dan: Yeah, you know, it's really, there's Babs. Look at that. What's all that, babs? I thought you had just purchased those. Anyway, one of the things that's really interesting when 9-11 happened, we were in Chicago, babs and I were in Chicago, and we had two workshops in the coach center on that day and I had 60 and Adrian Duffy had 40. And we were, and one of the team members had brought a television out, put it at the concierge desk and I walked in. I said what's that? And they said a jet had just hit the. I said get rid of that TV. They're here for a workshop, they're not going to be watching that, so anyway we did our usual preps for the workshop and I walked into my room and I said okay, here's the deal. In the next hour you have to make a decision. You're either here for the day or you're leaving. Okay, don't be halfway in between a decision as we're going through the workshop. You're 100% here or you're 100% gone. And our team will do everything they can to find you transportation. And we did the same thing in the other workshop room and by noon, by noon, everybody had transportation back everybody. And we had a guy who is a Buick dealer and he went to a Buick. Well, gm, it was GM, I think. They had Buick. Yeah, I think he had two or three different makes. Dean: He had two or three. Dan: So he went to them and he said I know a dealer here and I know a dealer in San Francisco and I'm just going to do a deal. If I buy the car here and sell it when I get there, what kind of deal do I get? Right, right, right. And I tell you not much, not many Buicks were sold on 9-11. Right, exactly. So the guy at this end went up 20% and the guy at the other end came down 20%. So it was not a bad deal and anyway he went there. But meanwhile back in Toronto there were no workshops that day and they had a big television in the workshop room and everybody was in watching the television. Our team in Chicago had no time, had no time whatsoever. They were busy all day arranging things and everything. At the end of the day they weren't scared. Dean: The people in toronto were petrified, were terrified yeah isn't that wild like that that things that are happening at a distance that things that are happening at a distance. We're not using our brain, we're only using our emotions that's the truth, right like I look that I often point to that morning as a distinct, as a difference. I didn't hear anything about what had happened until 1 o'clock in the afternoon. I was golfing that morning. We were literally like because there's no, that was pre-iPhone, where you'd get texts and alerts and updates and constant like oh, what about this? Here's what's happening. So it was back in the days of flip phones. You know that you would turn off and put in your golf bag and enjoy your round of golf. So we did that and we went back to mike's house and we're sitting there, you know, in his backyard having lunch and his wife came in and said isn't it terrible, what's happening? And we're like what's happening? She goes what do you mean? What's happening? Turn on the TV. Turn on the TV. That's the thing. Right, it's. Our natural thing is to turn to the TV to give us the updates, you know. Dan: And of course, they're amping it up. They're amping it up too. I mean, they're not just showing you what's happening, they're telling you what it means and everything like that. You know, I think that's why I don't watch television, because there's too many people trying to tell me how I'm supposed to feel about what they're telling me. That's a decision for me to make, how I'm going to feel about it. My mother was telling me that it was two days after Pearl Harbor that she found out about it. She lived in a farmhouse out in the country and they didn't have a phone. It was 1941. They didn't have a telephone and there were no newspapers or anything. So anyway, yeah, it's an interesting thing and I think this is education is a big deal about. Education is how you think about things and how you respond emotionally to your thoughts you know, and I think this has always been true. But I think now there are people who want to come right at you. It's like you're talking about. You know talking about horses. You know the beginning of our podcast. They're listening. What did Dean just say? Dean: Horses. Dan: Okay, here's five ads. Here's five ads for me. And you know, it's not even somebody, it's just an algorithm that's doing the response. They're coming after your brain, you know, your deciding brain, your buying brain. Dean: They're coming after your buying brain, yeah what's dean buying today? Dan: it's so funny. Dean: Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. Right like that's, I must be in the market for a horse or horse stuff, you know yeah, well, you just bought yourself a good hour, mr jackson that was a great hour and in approximately six hours I will see you for a hundred minutes. Dan: Yes, and then tomorrow for even more Two full days. Yes. Dean: I like it. Dan: All right. Dean: Okay, Dan, I will see you in a little bit. Dan: I'll be in Chicago. I'll be in Chicago next week, so we'll have a podcast next week. Dean: Okay, good, I like that. Dan: Yeah, okay. Dean: Okay, see you tonight. Dan: Bye, okay, bye.

Our latest episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia offers an intimate look at the Genius Network annual event in Scottsdale, featuring extraordinary conversations with prominent figures like Bobby Kennedy, Jordan Peterson, and Tucker Carlson. We explore the unexpected appointment of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services and share insights from a key OpenAI representative, examining how technology subtly maintains existing societal structures. The episode delves into the evolving nature of professional gatherings, highlighting the power of meaningful connections over traditional networking. We discuss the intricate art of event planning, sharing personal strategies for managing commitments and overcoming challenges like ADD. Our conversation reveals the importance of structured scheduling and intentional approaches to daily productivity. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS I reflected on our experiences at the Genius Network annual event in Scottsdale, where notable figures like Bobby Kennedy, Jordan Peterson, and Tucker Carlson contributed to the discussions. The appointment of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services was an unexpected but significant topic of conversation during the event. We discussed the role of technology in maintaining the status quo, drawing parallels to historical innovations like the "horseless carriage." The importance of networking and making meaningful connections was emphasized, highlighting how such interactions often hold more value than the content itself at events. Organizing large events requires meticulous logistical planning, often years in advance, to manage various commitments and schedules. I shared insights on managing ADD through structured schedules, which serve as an essential tool in overcoming daily challenges. The humorous dynamics of Robert Kennedy's collaboration with Donald Trump were explored, alongside lighter topics like meal planning and scheduling. We reflected on aging and the limitations it imposes, while discussing strategies to remain active and maintain cognitive health. The episode highlighted the challenges of maintaining personal ambitions and adapting to changes as we age. The podcast wrapped up with reflections on the role of technology and the evolving nature of political and personal dynamics in today's world. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Yes, mr Jackson, and I hope it will be copied. I hope it will be copied and sent virally around the world, this podcast. I hope, millions. Dean: To all the corners of Clublandia. Dan: Yes, yes. Dean: Yes, well, what a whirlwind tour for both of us here, I think. Where are you? Are you back in Toronto right now? Dan: Next to the fireplace. Dean: Okay, I like that. Dan: That's great, which is needed today. It's getting cool. I'm going to be. Dean: I like it, but I like it. I'm coming up on Friday, I think. Dan: This week Yep and then return to be yeah, I think this week, yep, and then return to be yeah, I'm coming, I'll be in Argentina. Yeah, yeah, next week I'll be in. Dean: Argentina Right, yeah, I'm doing, I'm coming up on Friday, I'm doing a breakthrough blueprint on Monday, tuesday, wednesday, and then we have coach the following Monday, tuesday, right. Dan: Yeah, and I'm flying back on friday night from argentina, so I won't be um back in my house, probably till about three o'clock on saturday. Dean: so oh my goodness, so we're gonna miss our table time yeah, I'll see you on sunday. Dan: I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but some things come in front of other things. Dean: Exactly right, I have three ideas this week. Dan: I have three ideas this week. I was just going to say where do we start? Dean: We should probably mention that we just got back from Scottsdale and Joe's annual event, the Genius Network annual event, which was really another level. I mean, he's really gone above and beyond and on Saturday he pulled off something I don't think anybody's been able to pull off. He had Bobby Kennedy and Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and Cali Means all on the same stage and I'll tell you what he has really grown as a conversationalist I don't even want to call him an interviewer because it was really, you know, that level of he's just the right amount of curious and unpredictable in the conversation that it's fascinating. He's not asking them the stock questions that would come. You know that you would expect, but it was amazing. I think everybody was very, was very impressed with how the event went off yep, yeah, I. Dan: The takeaway for me one is that we saw robert kennedy on saturday and then on on Wednesday, was it? Or Thursday? Wednesday, I think it was Wednesday he was appointed the secretary of health. Yes, human service, human services, and I think that's a big deal. Dean: I do too. It's, yeah, very, very impressive. Yeah, you know what's funny about that event is that the you know impressive. You know what's funny about that event is that we also had the head of GoToMarket for OpenAI, which was kind of like a that's a pretty big role, but it was downplayed by Zach Cass. Zach Cass, the guy that spoke oh, were you there on Sunday? He spoke on Sunday morning. No, we came there on Sunday. He spoke on Sunday morning. No, we came home on Sunday. Oh, okay, that's why. So, yeah, so the head of go-to-market, one of the original guys for OpenAI, was there and it was so funny that became. You know, he was kind of like the undercard, if you want to call it that, right, oversadowed by the blockbuster Saturday, but he himself was that's a pretty, that's a pretty big get to have too. So, very, very interesting. Dan: He was like in the 10th race at Woodbine you know the sore horses race later. Dean: So well, I had three, three ideas. Dan: Well, first of all, I had a nice introduction by Joe to Jordan Peterson. It turns out that he lives about a four-minute drive from us in the beaches oh wow, that's amazing. We're going to get together and he and his wife invited us to their Christmas party. So Christmas party, yeah, very, you know, very lively, engaging, smart, good sense of humor and everything. I enjoyed meeting him, but I had three ideas that I've been pondering all week. Okay, and more and more, I think that the humans use technology to keep things the same I think you're right, and even referring to it as the thing it's replacing. Dean: I remember hearing that about when automobiles first came out. They were called them horseless carriages. Right that, that's really what the thing was. Our only, our only frame of reference for the new is in how it relates to the past. Dan: Or relates to the present. Yeah, the present, that's what I mean, yeah, and if our present is under threat, we will adapt a new technology to keep ourselves more or less where we were. Yeah, and I've just been pondering this this is not a major thought, but it's a side thought that thought that we use technology to keep things the same. And what was the side thought now? Well, that was a quick one, that was a quick one. That one just flew out of my head, but I had a second thought too, and I was watching a really interesting podcast yesterday with Peter Thiel, who you know, and you know one of the co-creators of PayPal. One of the co-creators of PayPal and he's the creator of Planteer, which is a deep, dark, secret R&D lab for the government. And Barry Weiss, who was a columnist for the New York Times, who was let go because she started exhibiting independent thoughts. Dean: I hate it when that happens. Dan: Well, you know, you just can't be doing that at the New York Times. You really have to go with the party thoughts. You know the thoughts. But he was saying that what the election sort of indicated for him, election sort of indicated for him the presidential election of last week, was that in the internet world it's almost impossible to be a successful hypocrite. And that is if you say something to this group and then go across the street and say a completely different thing to another group that you used to be able to get to the, maybe not across the street but, let's say, cities 300 miles apart or anything you could get away with. You could get away with it, but the internet now makes that more or less impossible. It's increasingly difficult to be a hypocrite. You know where you try to play both sides of an issue. Dean: Yeah, well, because the internet is very, they love to identify and call those out. I mean, I remember I mentioned to you that Kamala, you know, there was a video going around that was Kamala speaking out of both sides of her mouth about Hamas and Israel. And yeah, I mean, it was just, you know, because they were running the ads in different thinking they would get away with it, because they're running one in Pennsylvania and one in Michigan or wherever. Dan: Yeah, right, that would be great, that would be a good thing. Yeah, and I was thinking the fact that almost all the celebrities that came out in her favor were to do so. Mm-hmm. Dean: Oh, yeah, like. Dan: Oprah got a million to do an interview with her. Beyonce, I've heard, got 10 million just to show up at a rally 10 million. Didn't have to do anything. Dean: That's wild, isn't it? Dan: Yeah, and she had a billion dollars to spend and she ended up 20 million in debt Over. Oh man. Dean: Yeah, in debt. Dan: Yeah, but if that had been done 20 years ago, that might not have been discovered as quickly, maybe not at all. It might not have been discovered at all. So it's just getting very difficult to be a hypocrite. I mean, you used to be able to make a lifetime career out of being a hypocrite, and now it wouldn't last more than 24 hours. Dean: Yeah, I remember. Dan: It's a career with a short future. Dean: Yeah, there was a meme going around about listing the people who had endorsed Donald Trump, joe Rogan and Elon Musk and Bob Kennedy and all these people, and then it was the people who endorsed Kamala was the Diddy List, you know so funny. Dan: Yeah, so my first. So I've had three thoughts. First one was technology. We use technology to keep things the same. Number two it's getting more difficult to be a hypocrite. Number three is I've discovered what the greatest individual ambition can be. Tell me To be more ambitious. Dean: It's the gift that keeps on giving. Dan: Yeah. Dean: That's the number one. Dan: Just next year, just next year. Be more ambitious. Be more ambitious next year than you are this year, and that's all you have to handle. It'll take care, it's the one goal that takes care of everything. I don't want to own just the land that's next to mine yeah, yes, because that I've given a lot of thought to goals, but almost all of them they're one and done, you know yeah you've achieved the goal and then you know, then it's gone. But uh, if your, your ambition is simply to be always more ambitious, I think that handles a lot of endings. Dean: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's funny. It's almost like a cheat code you know, I think that's great. I see, there's a. I mean, what a never-ending like a perpetual improvement cycle improvement cycle. Dan: Yeah, well it's, it's always. It's a kind of interesting thing because I'm trying to figure myself out at ajd that I've got bigger things I'm working. I've got bigger things I'm working on. I'm I'm working, working with people who are doing bigger and bigger things and you know and everything else, and I said what accounts for, and I said your ambition is to be more ambitious. Dean: Well, that's your print, right, your print is. Dan: Well, it's seven. Three, I mean it's three is success and achievement Right? Seven, seven, you have seven. It's enjoying life and having a good time. Dean: Yeah, bigger parties, yeah, bigger parties. Dan: Yeah, revenues, bigger parties. Dean: Bigger revenues. Dan: bigger parties, that's fantastic. Dean: I love it. Dan: So anyway, I'm going to do a triple play on those three and see what I come up with. I think there's, but I just feel that things are really shifting. I think there's, but I just feel that things are really shifting. I got a sense that, yeah, peter, peter Thiel very bright, very bright very very thoughtful, very thoughtful person and but he had a comment that he thinks that Bud Light. You know, remember the Bud Light. He thinks that was the end of the 20th century. He said that at that moment, the 20th century ended and the 21st century began. And he said that he feels that the Democrats are now the Bud Light Party. Dean: Oh man, well, and so that, yeah, I mean. Dan: You wonder now Well, you think about it that the reason that got them thrown out of power is the reason why they won't learn anything from getting thrown out of party, because they feel superior, intellectually superior morally superior and that would prevent them from actually saying well, maybe you are not Right, but your sense of superior prevents you from realizing that maybe you're not. They've kind of twisted themselves into a knot. Yeah, because I'm. You know, I watch the replays on. You know that they have an article, but then they'll have a link to a video. And Real Clear Politics is my favorite video and on real clear politics is my favorite, and you go on and you could just tell that the Democratic Party right now is very disappointed with American citizens. Dean: They're very disappointed. Dan: They're very disappointed with the quality of citizens in the United States right now and they're saying how do we get a different kind of voter? What we need is a different kind of voter. It's very clear that the kinds of voters we have right now are not delivering. Dean: We need more. Dan: Yeah, let's get some more Vansuelen gang members in here. Dean: Oh man. So what was your insights or thoughts from the Genius Network annual event? You're not a notetaker. No, me neither. I'm exactly like that. I know that whatever insight I get, if it's strong enough to stay with me, that's the insight you know. Dan: Well, my big one and you already brought it up in the conversation. I told Joe at dinner that you know we had the dinner on Saturday night and I said I think you've just jumped 10 times I said I think what you did, today is a 10 times jump and I said tomorrow morning what you did today is going to feel normal to you. Dean: And to everyone else. I think that's really the great thing. You know, like his whole and he said it too each year his goal is to make it a better event than the last, and so that's very yeah, that's very interesting. Dan: Yeah, the other thing is that I kind of told him this was last year, so this was the annual meeting for last year, and when he invited Robert Kennedy Jr last year. I said to him I just want you to know whether you've just entered the political world when you make an invitation like this, whether you like it, you know whether you like it or not, or whether you agree or not, you're now in the political world. Dean: So you got to be aware of that, yeah, and even though and even though Jordan Peterson, not per se political, but certainly in a different, not business like you know, the events have evolved from you know almost all business, like you know marketing and you know entrepreneur type of things more to a different level of event. It's interesting, I was looking through, but it's magic what happens actually at the event. It's not about the content of the event. It's being in the room surrounded by the Genius Network and I think I really got on another level, the purpose of the annual event versus the meetings, the yearly or monthly meetings, and you know it was very. I had a gentleman from Toronto who actually sat beside me on the first day and you know he was there primarily for the business stuff. The marketing really needed that help and you know I had to kind of help reframe that because if that was the number one reason you were there, there wasn't a lot of that at the actual event, you know. But what there was and this is what we said is that but we got to meet and that's, you know there's, that's part of the thing is that's the, that's the way to get that, what you actually need you know, yeah, yeah, anyway, it's just interesting. Dan: I think the first one I ever went to was in new york yeah, right the annual meeting I think he had. Joe had a couple of those in new New. York, yeah, and then, and then he had one in California, two two in. California actually he had the one where Richard Branson came yeah by uh, hollywood it was, I think it was actually it was in. Yeah, yeah, I always remember he had that. And then the second one was at Pelican Hill down in Newport. Dean: Beach. Dan: Newport, right yeah, and then they moved them to Scottsdale. And that was the right place. Dean: Yeah, it really is. It's perfect, it fits. And this one how convenient was this? Right across the street from his house. Dan: Yeah, how convenient was this? Right across the street from his house? Yeah, and we're doing the summit, the Free Zone Summit, right across the street from where we were. Dean: Right next door. Dan: Desert shadows right across the street. Yeah yeah, scottsdale really works. I mean, you can get there on a single flight from almost anywhere. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And the weather is usually good and, yeah, it's nice. Dean: Next year you've already got everything mapped out. You're always a year a full year ahead. Dan: Generally, with events like that, I'm you're ahead With our personal schedule. We're usually three years ahead, oh my goodness Wow. Well, it's because of the workshops. Dean: Yes. Dan: You have to figure every year you're going to have a certain number of workshops and they're going to be at a certain period of each quarter. Dean: So we have that. Dan: That's already logged in and we pretty well know that. I mean, then there's all sorts of things. I mean you have free days, but the free days move around in terms of what you're going to do with the free days, and I've got a book to do every quarter and I've got podcasts to do every quarter. I've got workshops to do every quarter. So've got podcasts to do every quarter, I've got workshops to do every quarter. So that gives it a pretty much of a go forward structure a nice cadence, yeah. Dean: Structure scaffolding yeah yeah, or as uh ned holland would call it, the bobsled run yeah, I don't experience. Dan: A I don't experience, add the way that describes it how so? Dean: so how do you mean? Dan: Well, I'm not super, I'm not hyperactive. Dean: Me neither. Dan: Yeah, so not, and you know, so I don't experience. I know that that exists and that's you know, it's a great part of ADD. Mine is I would characterize it what I think. What I think is the most important thing, subject to change on a fairly frequent basis, gotcha. Dean: Yeah, and how you know, you seem to you know I've adopted, or was introduced to. You know, russell Barkley's interpretation of ADD, which totally seemed to fit for me. I saw it in the clearest light that I've ever seen it or had the most understanding of it as an executive function. disability- and it was a really elevated way of thinking about it, as a you know you talked about it as a true, like a neuro degenerative disability, that it's not anything that you can will your way out of or that you can. You know, it's not a character issue or a weakness or anything like that, it's just the true physical, neurological disconnection between the two parts of your brain and I. Really, when I embraced that or, as I'm, it's still a journey of embracing it and realizing that the things that, that the ways that manifests for me is it really is when I'm left on my own to self-direct what I'm going to do with a big block of time. And it's been very, you know, it's been fascinating because my whole paradigm for the way that I've lived and set up my life is to try at all times to keep my schedule free so that I would have time to do all the things that I want to do, all the creative things, you know. But the reality is that the only things that ever get actually done are things that have that external scaffolding, things like podcasts and workshops and Zoom appointments, and the things that are synchronous and scheduled and involve other people, and there's no way around it. It's like, as much as I want to be able to think that I could clear off three hours in the morning and just sit and write or, to you know, create or to do something, it's very uphill because I'm very slippery, without the structure of someone being on the other end of the phone at 11 am on saturday or sunday morning. You know, I know I never miss and it's like those things that it's and I'm never. I never find, I never struggle with add in the moment. I always, once I'm engaged and into something, I'm able to give that thing my focus, like I'm not distracted while we're doing. Dan: Yeah, my experience would be you're the. My experience is that you're fully there. Dean: Yeah. Dan: When you're there. Dean: When I'm there Exactly. Dan: It's so funny, but if I need to be there, who's the who's the person? Who's the person that described this? Dean: for you, barkley, yeah, russell barkley. He's a contemporary colleague of of ned hollow. Well, they know each other very well they. And Russell Barkley actually has a series of videos that describe the things that he and Ned disagree on, the different approaches to two things, but they're both like totally fully respect the other. You know that's a big thing but for me that that explanation and that you know set of the way he described it, is that every intervention or everything that works has to be external and it can't be. You know, it's nothing internal like willing yourself or character changing or anything like that. It's really we need to treat it and to the extent that we treat it like a true disability and then make accommodations for it, like if you, he would say, if we treated it like you would never say to a paraplegic it's right over there, just get up and walk over there, it's only a few paces yeah, because you know that it's a physical impossibility for them to do that, but in the morning walk, first thing in the morning walk a mile yeah, exactly, if that's the thing, then that's going to be a problem right but, that's going to be a problem, yeah, but but if you acknowledge it as a disability and you said, okay, how about we get you a chair with wheels and then we'll put a motor on it and you can just point where you want to go and you'll get to where you're going, that's an accommodation for the disability and that's kind of what he's saying, that this external scaffolding like the way you know what I admire about your calendar so much is that you have all the things that you do are really supported by that external scaffolding. There's not a lot, of excuse me, like you know, you have used to be 150. How many workshop days do you have? Dan: now? Well, there are 60 days when I'm doing workshop activities, but a lot of them are two hour sessions or not eight hour sessions, and those are all on the calendar and oh yeah, those are, yeah, those go way into the future. Dean: Yeah, and they're all. I find that too, that they're all very, they're procrastination proof, because you have to show up like you know there's no way, it's really is just accepting it and you know, leaning into that structure as much as I, as much as I can, yeah yeah, it's really, it's kind of interesting. Dan: I was just bouncing his words off of. You know my own experience of being add and you know, clinically, I've been diagnosed, so you know it's, uh, you know it's, it's a real thing, and but mine is more that I actually I don't, and this relates to you. It doesn't relate to you know. So, barkley, so much it relates to you that my goal is to have my schedule filled up the night when I go to bed the night before. I want my schedule filled up for the, so I don't have to think about it when I get up in the morning it's all right, it's all set, yeah and but then I get over time. I get very discriminating about the quality of the things that are filling up my time. There's little adjustments that have to be made because I've got a great scheduler. Becca Miller is my scheduler and she's just terrific, but she can't do my thinking for me. For example, last weekend we were at Genius Network and then we came home on a Sunday. I don't like coming home on a Sunday. That's the way it was scheduled, that's the way it was scheduled. So I came home on schedule and then Monday was just packed and I said OK, we got to put a new rule in. Dean: If I come back on Sunday. Dan: There can't be anything on Monday, yeah, and we could see that six months ahead, you know we could see that, and so I have little conversations. This is the rule. And then on Friday, both Babs and I had Zoom calls after four o'clock, you know, one at five o'clock, one at six o'clock and I was going through the experience. I said, okay, no, no commitments after four o'clock on Friday. Right, yeah, but these are just little adjustments, you know these are just little adjustments that you make. And then I, you know, I sit down with her and I said let's just put a couple of new rules in. You know, if I come back on a sunday, I can't have anything on a monday. And then you know nothing after four on friday and everything like that. You know. Dean: And you know, it's just I. Dan: you know I was sitting, I was going through it, I I will fulfill the commitment, but as I'm going through it and I said I don't really like that, I not that I don't like the thing that I'm doing. I don't like doing it at this particular time, right. Dean: And the other. Thing is. Dan: I like being in Toronto on Saturday and having Toronto Saturday Day and this last year we've had more things that took away our Toronto Saturdays and I said we've got to look ahead now and look at all the Saturdays going out for a year and a half and to the most part, let me have that in Toronto, be in Toronto. Dean: Yeah, that's such a great. So you really Saturday is like a free day. I like it. Yeah, I just like it. Yeah, I just like it. Dan: Yeah, I just like it. Why do you want that? I really like it. Dean: Because I want it. That's right. I want what I want, yeah. Dan: I want what I like. Yes, yeah. Dean: Yeah, that's good. Well, I'm just going through the process right now, like embracing that. My goal is to shape my calendar for next year ahead for the whole, for the whole year. And that's yeah, that's really the. That's really the thing I tend to run really like about a quarter ahead. You know some things. I know when they are like, I know when and it's funny because they become the big rocks in my calendar in terms of like I appreciate that you know when the strategic coach workshops are, so I know to work around those. And I know when the annual event is and I know when our free zone summit is and I put those in you know, and I always tend to kind of work, I've had a tendency to kind of keep the time, keep the options open for the other times and I but I don't take that same thing of locking in my own events with with the same priority or consistency, you know. Dan: Well, I think I share that with you, that if it's just internal, you know it's me having a meeting with myself, or an activity. I'm much more negotiable with that than if it's external. I really grasp that what you're talking about there. You know I like and I like it, and that's why, you know, I try to be 100% on my commitments. Yes, if I say I'm going to be there, I'll be there. If I say I'm going to do this. I'll do it yeah. Dean: Yeah Well, that's rule number one Show up on time. Dan: Yeah, do what you say you're going to do. Dean: That's right. I'm the same way With commitments to others. I'm exactly the same right. I'm the same way With commitments to others. I'm exactly the same way. I'm very reliable, yeah. So it's a good journey. Dan: I was just reflecting. I want to give you a little progress report. I've really switched over to eating steak, having steak Do you know how I'm? I've really switched over to eating steak, you know having steak. Do you know how much time it saves you? It's incredible how much time that you save if you just eat steak. Dean: Well, the great news is I'm it sure, simplifies shopping. Absolutely. That's exactly right. My favorite staple is the thin cut ribeyes, and I know that I can do them in the air fryer they're very juicy. Dan: Oh, that's exactly right. I would do it just to squeeze the juice out of them. Oh man, that's so funny that juice is to live for, I'll tell you, yes, yes. The Babs. She'll sometimes put the steak on the plate and there's a lot of juice that comes out. Dean: You want me to pour that? Dan: I said no, that's the point of the meal Pour that on there, that's right. Dean: That was so funny, that restaurant that we went to in scottsdale the end. Dan: Isn't that a great really great and I love babs. Dean: Two extra steaks to go. That was really yeah, that's great. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But boys that simplify your life, I mean I used to go to whole foods I get my haircut on in new york, new yorkville, it's right across from the court season. Dean: It's kenny connor from the. I used to go to Whole Foods. I get my haircut in. Dan: New Yorkville. It's right across from the Court Seasons. It's Kenny Connor from the Court Seasons where I get my haircut and I go down to the end of Scholar's, and that's where the Hilton. Lanes, are you? Know, and the Whole Foods is in there and I used to go in every Saturday and I'd walk around 15, 20 minutes buying this that I shouldn't eat, buying this that I shouldn't eat I shouldn't eat and take a bottle home and eat some of them and throw the rest out and everything else, and now we have a bruno's. Do you know bruno's in? Dean: toronto it goes back. Dan: It goes back 50 years yeah and uh, they have great meat department and we go in and the guy says same as usual, same as usual, yep, yep, except twice as much and hey gets it, you know. Dean: So yeah, it's really good yeah I was shocked about pusseteri's closing right there well, they didn't close. Dan: They're opening in one of those new buildings. Yeah, they had a. It was a shitty space where they were. Dean: Yeah, it was kind of awkward right. Dan: Yeah, very tiny space. So now they have it the way they wanted it. Dean: Okay, so they're still in, they're still on the island. They're closed for probably a year no but I mean they're going to be still in Yorkville. Yeah, Right on the island, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: So they'll have a huge space because their main store is up at Lawrence Avenue Road and that's like you know, it's a regular size supermarket. But they had this tiny little space and you know it didn't work in any way. It was just. I mean, first of all, you're paying 25, 10, 15% more if you shop at a suppository, but the whole quality of the experience was not up to what they were charging. Yeah, I went in there and they put in automatic checkouts and I said wait a minute. Now you're putting me charging. Yeah, I went in there and they put in automatic checkouts and I said wait a minute. Dean: Now you're putting me on. Dan: You're charging me 15% too much, and now you're putting me on staff. That's so funny. Dean: It's exactly right. Dan: Now I have to do checkout for you. I said no and I just stopped. I just stopped. I said I'm not going back here. That was during. And then some guy corrected me that my mask was too low on my face and I said I no, I can't. I, I can't put myself in this type of situation where I get the mask. Police are in pusitories, you know oh no, that's no good. And that was all for nothing. You know, I mean that. Quote that comment. Was it Callie Means? It was either Robert Kennedy or Callie Means. The average age of people who died during COVID. Did you catch that one? I did not. What was it? 81. At 81, you ask them for a refund. Dean: Right, oh, my goodness. Dan: I mean it's three years beyond expiry. Dean: Yeah right. Dan: I wonder how much of that you know. Dean: Though you look at, I think that 80 is the new 60, it feels like in a lot of ways. I feel that yeah, because you look at, you know, just even in that one little environment there, you know, Peter Thomas is 86 there. Dan: Yeah, and I was 80. Dean: Joel Weldon at 83. I mean, yeah, that's, those are not normal octogenarians. You know very, you know it's just and I think you see it now. You know it's just and I think you see it now. You know it's happening more. Dan: Well, and I think the other thing is that the retirement age, if I understand the logic of it, was to get the older people out of the factories, so that you wouldn't have a lot of unemployed young people. Bismarck in Germany that was, you know that was the first government that had a retirement program and a retirement policy. Now, with the low birth rates, you're going to want to keep the people in the workplace as long as you possibly can, so you're going to have a lot of 70 and 80-year-olds not retiring. First of all. I mean they've got a lot of 70 and 80 year olds not retiring. Yeah, first of all, I mean they've got a lot of experience and there's, um, you know it's, you know it's. Just, I thought immediately where I sat most was with pearson airport and air canada, the two experiences that go along together. And so, pearson airport, you have a lot of very skilled people who make sure that everything is, you know, good with the terminal, everything's working with the terminal, plus the you know, baggage is. You know the big thing, you know getting stuff off the planes really fast, getting it to the right, you know, to the right luggage rack and everything and everything. And then Air Canada, the ticketing, you know the ground crew and everything like that. And I noticed immediately that they had lost two levels of skill. Immediately during COVID, they bought off all their really high-priced pilots, they bought off all their cabin attendants, they bought off all the ticketing people, you know. You know they were like 60 they have mandatory retirement 65 and they just bought them off at 60 and it was very abrupt and it was total. And so you had people who were serving you and they were basically doing their job out of the job manual. You know they do this Well. That doesn't really give you high quality. Dean: Yeah, I mean the whole. Did you happen to see any highlights from the Mike Tyson fight the other night? Dan: No, I didn't. I didn't, I just knew he slapped him. Dean: Yeah, that was all leaving up to it. That was the way in when he stepped on his. Dan: That made sure that both of them got $30 million oh exactly. Dean: Well, that's, but I think what happened was that Jake stepped on his toe is what happened, and he slapped him, but the fight was uneventful. I mean, it was really. Dan: He won on points. Right he won on points. Jake Paul won on points. Dean: Yes, exactly, and but it was. It was sad to see Mike Tyson, you know, at 58, he really did look old like, even in his movements and the way it's like that was, it was something you could really tell the difference between 27 and 58, you know. And that's you wonder, like that's yeah, he's in peak physical condition for a 58 year old. Dan: Yeah, but it was just yeah, but your muscles are slow yeah, that's what I mean. Dean: He looked kind of no, your, no, your muscles just slowed down. Dan: Yeah, it was really interesting because I haven't run and I started running, just, you know, some attempt because of my knee. Yeah, and you know a 50-year-old injury to my knee to run again, so I was. We have quite a good size dock at the lake up north. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And so what I do is I have a rule that three seconds after I take off my sneakers, I'm in the water. I have to be in the water. Dean: You've got to do it. Take them off One, two, three go, otherwise it'll take forever. Dan: And so what? I do it at the back of the dock and I have maybe 15 feet, 15 feet, and so the moment, the thing off. I just run for the front and I jump, I jump into the water and Babs took a video of it and I looked at it and I said you don't show this to anybody, it's not. I said I am really slow, I'm really slow, I'm really slow. Yes, and part of it. You know I'm recovering from an injury. Dean: But part of it is just, I got 80-year-old muscles, you know, and they're not fast you have the memory of you know I mean you have 20-year-old tennis memories of how fast you were. Dan: Yeah, it's so funny you know so funny. That's a nice memory, but it's not a present experience, that's going to be absolutely true. Dean: It's so funny that you mentioned that is because when I was watching Mike Tyson, I was thinking to myself that's one of my aspirations. I'd love to, as I continue to lose weight and get more mobile, that I would like to you know for your running, that's my thing is to be able to get back to to play tennis well, you were in the top hundred. Dan: You were in the top hundred, weren't you amateur? Dean: no, not that high, but I was very, at a very high level. But but the you know. But to be able to get to that, knowing that my mind knows what it's like to be a 20-year-old tennis player, my mind and my muscle memory still knows exactly what to do in those situations, but it's going to be. As I watched Mike Tyson, I realized, and it's every now. And as I watched Mike Tyson, I realized, you know, and it's every now and then I'll watch these guys, I'll watch on YouTube, I'll watch some, like you know, 55 plus. You know, tennis matches are 60 plus, even them by age groups, you know. So I've been watching the 60 plus and it's amazing to see how brittle brittle is a good word, will appear to be yeah, well, the other thing you know, like the mile run you know the world record right now is three, three, four, I think 17,. Dan: You know 17 seconds under four minutes. But the oldest person in history to ever run a sub four is Amin Coughlin, irishman. I think he was at one of the East Coast United States universities and then he raced after that, but he was 43 and nobody over 43 has ever run a four minute mile. How's Daniel doing with his getting back to you know, he's in the five he's in the five minutes, five, five, five, 40, you know, and and one of the things, because he's, he's late, he's 58 or 59. And he just says you know, I just realized that it's just impossible for me ever to well he did it once, you know, he ran a 359. Dean: Yeah, but he was running. Dan: You know he was running 405, 406, 402,. You know every race and you just can't do that anymore. And you know so you have a collision between your actual performance and your memory of being fast. Dean: Yes, oh man Whoa performance and your memory of being fast. Yes, oh, man whoa. There's just kind of I'm just kind of preparing myself for the reality of that, you know, and that's yeah, but it's even apparent that you were very coordinated. Dan: I mean the way you walk and everything. Uh, you know the way my entire memory of you is mostly the last 10, 12, 12 years. And I noticed that you have very great athletic coordination, so you have that going for you. Dean: I got that going for me, that's true. Dan: Yeah, so yeah, hopefully that will. Dean: I wonder now, you know, like I wonder through do you do any mobility things like Pilates or stretching or yoga or any of those things? The only thing. Dan: I do. We have a, really we have an industrial strength. The vibration plate is about three feet by three feet and you do high intensity vibrations on it. And then I just have a pole, and then I do it in, let's say, 10 different positions. I do the pole. And that helps a lot the vibration point. I mean it makes the house, it almost makes the house rattle, almost makes the house rattle, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's really. I do a lot of band stuff. You know where you use. You put the band about around a pole and then you can really do, yeah, so that helps a lot. I like that. Yeah and yeah. But you know, my big thing is just being productive in terms of the work, you know you know, my big thing is just being productive in terms of the work. You know, I mean I was never a competitor in any kind of individual sport. I was all team sports when I was growing up because I really liked the team Football, basketball, football, basketball and everything else. So I never, I never really was attracted to individual competitions and you know, but my big thing is just to. I've got quarterly, I've got quarterly products to produce, I've got books to produce and everything. It's just that. I'm always in a good energy, you know, good energy state for all that work. Dean: And that's great. That's why the physical, having the physical, you know physically fit body is really just for your purposes and to the brain oxygenated and carry around where you need to be right, that's really the thing. Yeah, yeah, I just had a brain MRI. Dan: I just had a brain MRI. In October I was was in nashville with david hossie and I've grown new neurons this year and I think it's from the stem cells oh, wow from the stem cells and he says you got neurons there that aren't organized. Yet he says you know? He says you're going to have to organize your neurons and I said that's a nice report. That's a nice report. Yeah, he says you're going to have to organize your neurons and I said that's a nice report, that's a nice report. And he says you're not dementia, You're not becoming demented, You're re-menting. Dean: Re-mented. I love it Re-menture. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, it's good. Dan: My memory. I do a full bank cognitive test every quarter. It's, but 19 different tests takes you about, you know, 40 minutes or an hour and my memory was way up. My verbal memory was way up and my objects you know graphic memory was way up. Dean: So that's good. Dan: And he says then you got too much, and you got too much visceral fat and you got this and I said, now let's just stick with the subject of the brain here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many 80 year olds do you have that got more brain than they had? Dean: exactly that's the. Let's focus on the positive here. Dan: Yeah, let's take our wins where we can. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah, but yeah, I think that we started our conversation today off with last week's Genius Network setting anywhere in the world where the people that joe had on stage with him and the quality of the discussion they were having could happen anywhere else. Dean: Yeah, no, I get you. I bet you're right. Absolutely, that's what I mean about the way joe's really elevated his ability to stand in conversation with these people, you know it's a different. It's not like as a interviewer or a journalist. He's having a real, authentic conversation with them and it's fascinating. Yeah, it's good to see. Dan: Yeah Well, I bet there's sleepless nights going on in Washington DC these days, have you? Dean: seen the things, the memes of who Robert Kennedy is replacing, like they showed the minister of health or whoever the health and human services lead, is now compared to Robert Kennedy. It's funny. Dan: Oh yeah. Dean: Yeah Well, it's a nice thing that happened. Dan: You know, and you know Jeff Hayes, you know one of our colleagues in that time. I mean, he was really instrumental in, you know, getting him so far that he would become in a position where he could do a collaboration with Trump you know, yeah, Trump's the kind of guy you know. He doesn't care what shape or form the talent comes in. Dean: That's exactly right. Dan: It's kind of interesting because when I spoke to Robert Kennedy just briefly and I said in 1962, I was working at the FBI in Washington and I had to go over to the Department of Justice in Washington and I had to go over to the Department of Justice, we had a sort of a tour of part of the history of the FBI and it was in the Department of Justice building and Robert Kennedy happened to walk by in the hallway. His father walked by, so that was 1962. And I said really interesting, 62 years later and he'll have far more influence in his new position than his father ever had. Dean: Yeah, I bet you're absolutely right, for sure, yeah, awesome, yep, so we'll be so we'll have. Dan: No, I won't do it next week, right exactly. Well, I can do the. I can do the two weeks, two weeks from today. I can do it next week, right exactly well, I can do the. Dean: I can do the two weeks, two weeks from today. I can do it, okay, if you're available. Yeah, absolutely yeah that would be fantastic. Okay, all right, see you then okay, thanks dan, bye okay.

In our latest episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we take a fresh look at time management and productivity through a historical lens. We discuss how the 24-hour time system, born from the need to streamline train schedules, laid the foundation for tracking time today. We also dive into the creation of Greenwich Mean Time and share a fun, serendipitous story about a restaurant meet-up that unexpectedly became a memorable experience. Shifting gears, we introduce a practical, gamified approach to managing your day. Treating each day as 100 ten-minute units, we explore how careful planning and mindful activity selection can help combat procrastination. We also share tips for overcoming morning routine challenges, making each day more productive with manageable goals. Alongside this, my AI assistant, Charlotte, plays a key role in my approach to transforming daily tasks into creative outputs. Finally, we touch on the evolution of political messaging and how platforms like Joe Rogan's podcast are reshaping public discourse. We wrap up by reflecting on the power of individual initiative and how we can all find meaning and growth in the ever-changing landscape of today's world. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We explored the historical development of the 24-hour time system, initiated by a Canadian innovator to address train scheduling challenges in the 19th century. The episode included a light-hearted conversation about time zone coordination, particularly between Arizona and Florida, and discussed the clever geopolitical strategies of the British in establishing Greenwich Mean Time. We introduced a gamified approach to time management by treating each day as 100 ten-minute units, drawing inspiration from the Wheel of Fortune, to enhance productivity and address procrastination. My morning routine was highlighted, emphasizing strategies for overcoming procrastination and planning tasks effectively. We delved into the role of AI in personal productivity, featuring Charlotte, my AI assistant with a British accent, and discussed the concept of "exponential tinkering" in AI's unexpected uses. The evolution of political messaging from direct mail to sophisticated digital strategies was analyzed, touching on examples like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the influence of alternative media figures. We examined content creation and strategic reuse of ideas, inspired by figures like Seth Godin, and discussed leveraging podcasts and other sources for efficient content generation. We reflected on the role of entrepreneurial individuals in leveraging AI technologies for creative relationships and personal growth, contrasting with traditional media outlets. The episode concluded with discussions on the enduring importance of individual initiative and the value of spontaneous interactions, setting the stage for future conversations. We shared logistical details about upcoming meetings and highlighted the anticipation of continued exploration and discovery in future episodes. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dan: Let's hope so Well, not only that, but it can be recorded over two complete time zone difference. Dean: Yes, I was wondering if today would cause a kerfuffle. Well, the change. Dan: Well, arizona doesn't change. Dean: Right, exactly. Dan: That's why I thought we might have a kerfuffle. Dean: That's exactly. Dan: That's why I thought we might have a Garfuffle which I think kind of tells you that they are planning to be the center of the world. Dean: Yeah, Florida's trying to do the same thing. Dan: Yeah, well, you know, it's a tremendous change for everybody to do that. Dean: It was actually a Canadian who created the system? I don't know. If you know that I did not know that, tell me more. Dan: Well, he didn't create the system, he created the 24-hour system. Dean: Okay. Dan: Yeah, and it had been attempted in other places, but it's around the 1870s, I think 1880s, and it was because of railroad schedules. Dean: Wow, yeah. Yeah, I do remember that as a thing that's interesting. Dan: Because, like, for example, in Toronto, you know a train would leave Toronto at, let's say, noon and it would be going to, let's say, buffalo. Dean: Yes. Dan: But there was no guarantee that Buffalo and Toronto were on the same noon, and if you only had one track, a train could be leaving Buffalo to go to Toronto at a different time. And so they had a lot of train wrecks 1860s, 1870s. There were just a lot of train wrecks. So he said look the train, the railroads are going to grow and grow and we've got to create a universal time system. Dean: They're not going anywhere, yeah. Dan: Yeah, so that's when it became adapted and the British got onto it and they said well, everything starts in London, everything on the planet starts in London. Dean: So that's where the Greenwich Mean Time came from. Dan: Yeah, and the British, being a very clever race, arranged it so that if you were in the western part of London you were in the western hemisphere, but if you were on the eastern part of London you were in the eastern hemisphere. Wild, Proving that the British play both sides of everything. Dean: Western Hemisphere. Dan: But if you were, on the eastern part of London. You were in the Eastern Hemisphere Wild, Proving that the British play both sides of every game. Dean: So where are you now? You're in Tucson. Dan: Tucson. Dean: Yes, okay. Dan: Now I want to get clear about something and this is important for all of our listeners to know. Dean: Okay. Dan: And it has to be. You're going to arrive on Wednesday or Thursday. Dean: I'm arriving on Wednesday. Dan: yes, Okay, so we had already had a previous, and if you would be willing to explore a new restaurant, okay, and it's called the Edge. Dean: The Edge. Okay, so you're saying, as an alternate to the tried and true, the Henry. Yeah, you're saying something new, okay. Dan: Yeah, so it would be 4.30 at the Edge. Where are you staying? Dean: I'm staying at the Sanctuary. Nick Sonnenberg and I are actually staying at Bob Castellini's. Dan: Well, strangely enough, we're staying at the Sanctuary too. Dean: Wow, okay what do you think of that? I think that that is just like serendipity at work when do you arrive at the when do you arrive? Dan: this is our own version of the singularity. It really is. Dean: I mean, yeah, it doesn't get much better than this. Dan: Yeah, I just came up with a new book title. Dean: What is it? Dan: It's, will it Be Available on Monday? Dean: Will it Be Available on? Dan: Monday. Dean: I like that so everybody's made. Dan: Yeah, it came out of my dealings over the last 12 years with techno techno optimist you know well, this is going to happen. This is going to happen, and I said, well, it'll probably happen, but will it be available on Monday? Yes, I love it. Well, dan. And you know, you know it will be available on Monday, it's just I'm not sure which Monday that will be. Dean: I was just going to gonna say just not this Monday yes, well, yeah. I have. I've had a pretty amazing week, actually lots of scale of 10 on a scale of 10. Dan: 1 to 10. How amazing, I mean, compared to other amazing weeks. Dean: Um, I just want to get the numbers straight before you get a sense of the scope, I would say that this has been in the nines this week, I think. Phew. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, Like I think that if we're calibrating the scale that I don't think I have really lower than sevens on a week, but that would be just a regular week kind of thing. I think, in the eights, if we're going eight, point something in the eights, I think it would be something noteworthy, something worth remarking on. But in the nines, I think I can measure it by the flurry of activity from my fountain pen to my journal and the excited anticipation that I have of coming to our conversation prepared with something to talk about. So I'm in the nines, on on. We may have to do a double episode here. I mean to we have to leave people a cliffhanger. Pick up next week on on the finishing but see a cliffhanger. Dan: pick up next week on the finishing See, here's my take. If it's a 9.5 or higher, you've got two possibilities. One is you tell the whole world. That's one option. Or you don't tell anybody. Dean: Right, so is this a tell? The? Dan: whole world, or is this tell nobody. Well, I'm going to tell you I'm going to tell you, and then you know. Dean: I'm exempt. Yeah, I'm exempt. You're going to tell me either way. I'm going to tell you in this context so that, because I always tell people, you know, it's often that people will tell me, you know that they listen to our cast and that they just enjoy the conversation, Just listening to us talk about you never know what it's going to be about. They say, you know, which is true, and I say, well, you're just like us, we never know what it's going to be about either. Dan: Yeah, I suspect that some people have a better idea of where we're going than we do. Maybe that's funny. I can see the trend line here. Dean: Yeah, all right. So the first, I don't even know. They're equal weighted in terms of the interestingness to share, so maybe I'll work. I'll go with the concept that we discussed in the joy of procrastination the 10-minute units of your day, 100 10-minute units every day, and I've been experimenting with the idea of being like a capital allocator and having the opportunity to allocate my 100 time units over the course of the day, the only day. This is all like just my. I don't know what it's like to have a normal brain. I have. ADD a brain that has no executive function or ability to tell time or whatever. So this is just my way of looking at it that the reality is I can only spend 100 units today before I go to sleep again right. So, even if the concept of a project that's going to take 100 hours or 50 hours or whatever, I'd struggle with things like that because I can't do all of that today. So you can only spend what you have allocated today. And then I remembered my number one thing on my. I know I'm being successful when list is. I wake up every day and say what would I like to do today? And I had this vision of I don't know if you remember, but in the old version of the Wheel of Fortune, when you won, they had a studio full of fabulous prizes. Look at this studio full of fabulous prizes. And when you won you got to spend your money in the showcases right when you could say I'll on this. From all the prizes that are available, you could say I'll take the credenza for 800 and I'll take the bookshelf for this. I'll take the credenza for 800 and I'll take the bookshelf for this. I'll take the color TV for 500 and I'll leave the rest on a gift certificate. You know you had the amount of money that you could spend. Dan: Did you ever watch the Wheel of? Dean: Fortune back in the day Once or twice. Yeah, so you're familiar, so you know about what I'm talking about. So I started thinking about and have been experimenting with laying out my day that way. So I wake up in the morning and I look at my calendar and I have certain things that are already booked in advance in the calendar. So, like today, 11 am, dan Sullivan that's blocked off. So I'm allocating six units to this podcast here. But I start thinking, okay, looking at the context of the day, what else would I like to do? I have a friend here visiting from Miami, so we went for breakfast and, by the way, I have an extra hour today because it is fall back day and I've chosen not to use my hour yet. I'm going to save it and use it later, so I'm not participating in the fall back yet. I'm keeping that hour in reserve in case I need it. So I kind of look through the day and I start thinking okay, I've got all of this kind of hopper of possibilities, of things that I could do during the day and things that I need to do, and it reminded me of our. You know, if I ask myself, what am I procrastinating today? Like there's a series of questions that I'm kind of going through in the morning and I'm spending one unit 10 minutes to kind of just allocate what are the things that I think I could move into doing today. Very similar to your. You have three things a day, right, but you do it the night before you pick your three yeah, If I think I remember correctly, you limit yourself. You say what are the three things I'm going to get done tomorrow? Dan: And so you Well, three completions equal a hundred percent. Dean: I got you, okay yeah. Dan: And if you do four, you're in bonus territory. Dean: Got it. Yeah, it's not that you limit, you can do more. Dan: I can do more, but 100% is three. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: So I'm really like. This is I'm in double speed on the imagine. If I applied myself mode here and this is addressing my executive function this is the next big level up for me is really getting that dialed in, and so this is working. This is a, it gamifies it and it's never going to change. It's not going to change no matter how much I want it to or desire for it to change, life is going to continue moving at the speed of reality 60 minutes per hour, until long after you and I are gone. So where, what? What has improved, like I looked at and this is a separate but related item is I had, from 10 o'clock to 11 o'clock, I had the most fascinating conversation with my AI, with my chat GPT, and I've selected the British voice, and it's a slightly older. I was using Jasper, who was like, or Juniper, who was the sort of Charlotte Johansson kind of voice, and I've switched to the slightly older British woman voice, and so we had a great conversation. I asked her about her working genius, if she was familiar with working genius, and of course she knows everything about it. She knows everything about it and I said I'm very interested. How would you? I told her, my working geniuses is our discernment and invention, and my frustrations are enablement and tenacity. And she said well, mine, given the nature of what I am, I would imagine that wonder and enablement are my two. That would be her working strengths, and her worst ones would be tenacity and galvanize, which is so funny. Right, like to see that she has the self-awareness that what she's really good at is helping add value to things you know, and so we chatted about Russell Barkley and Ned Hollowell, who she's very familiar with and knows the nuances and distinctions between their approaches, and we talked about setting up some scaffolding and we designed a whole workflow for incorporating Lillian into this to be the enablement and tenacity in our triad, because there are things that and I asked her to we came up with a name for her, so her name is Charlotte. That's my, that's my. AI now. So she was quite delighted to have a name now and it was just so funny. I asked her like your accent seems to be you can. She said yes it seems so. I think it would be, although I'm not, you know the origin, but the accent would definitely be South London refined. But just the way she described it, I said, yeah, what would be some, what would be some good names that would be British names that would fit for that. It would be some good names that would be British names that would fit for that. And she came up with, you know, charlotte or Lydia or something. Dan: I said yeah, well, it's really interesting. You know Prince William and Kate, you know he's the Prince of Wales, and their daughter, who's the second child, is named Charlotte. Dean: Oh, okay, yeah, that's right. Dan: George is the son and then they have another. They have a third one. I don't know the name of the third one, but it's in the royal family. I know Charlotte appears on a frequent basis. Yeah, it's a thoroughly legitimate British name. Yeah, it's a thoroughly legitimate British name. Yeah. Dean: So I've called her Charlotte now and I fed her. We designed a workflow. I fed her episode one of the Joy of Procrastination. I just took the transcript and I put it up. All of this happened in the last hour, by the way, so I gave her the transcript. She totally digested it and I had her. She created six, three to 500 word emails that were summary or ideas that came from our discussion in episode one of the joy of procrastination. And they're wonderful. I mean, she did, I had her do. I said I'd like you know some, I'd like to see how many chunks, or, you know, in individual insights, we can gather from the, from the transcript. And I think I said I'd like, I'd like two to 300 words. And she wrote three two to 300 word ones which were just a little short. If you could tell there was more, if you had a little more time to expand it, it would be even better. And so I said you're on the right track, but let's I think I underestimated here let's go three to 500 words and let's make it conversational at about a sixth grade level. And so she, you know, immediately changed them and made them much more conversational and readable and I said those are great, are there any more? So she did six out of the first episode and I was like you know all this, like we had the most, you know, like talking about some executive function function work for her and Lillian and I to collaboratively work to get the things done. So she's like maybe we could start with brainstorming sessions where we can. You can tell me what you're thinking, what you're you'd like to do, and I can create some, you know, turn them into tasks and turn them into projects or workflows or timelines. For us it was really like I mean you definitely had the feeling that I was in the presence of a very well-qualified executive assistant in the conversation. I mean it was just. Dan: One thing, it's sort of a creative assistant. Dean: Yes, that's exactly like that the wonder and enablement is really yeah. Dan: I mean, the whole thing is that an executive assistant doesn't really range outside of what you've already told it to do. Yes, for the most part for the most part. But a creative assistant is doing something that's well. It's following your prompts, so it's still doing what you're doing, but it's got access to information that you don't have available to you at any given time. Dean: Yes, she said that's true. Like I said, that is the thing that I see as a limitation in our relationship is that that's why tenacity is her lowest thing, because she has the awareness of saying she's very. She realizes she is our relationship. She's reactive in nature. That she has. I have to do the prompting and I have to bring. But while we're in that, if I just point her in the right direction, she can do all of the things you know. And she was suggesting workflows with Google Documents and emails in a way that we could bring Lillian into the equation here, and so I can. On the physical thing, lillian and Lillian, by the way, her working genius is tenacity and enablement. Dan: You know. So it's like such a yeah, the thing I find interesting here Evan Ryan and I have a podcast every quarter, okay, and we've been talking about where we're noticing that AI is going. Dean: Okay. Dan: And my sense is that it's not going where the technology people think it's going. It's going everywhere else except where they think it's going. Dean: Say more about that. Yeah, what does that mean? Dan: Well, and we came up with a title for it, a concept for it, and the title was exponential tinkering a concept for it, and the title was exponential tinkering. Dean: Okay, oh, okay. Dan: And that is that I think that the people who are using AI to suit themselves are tinkering. I think I'll try this. Oh, that's interesting. Now, I think I'll try this, but they have a capability that, in the case of ChatsGPT, my favorite is Perplexity, the AI. And because, first of all, I kind of know where I'm going, you know, as a person, and I think it's a function. I think I was kind of born with this capability, but I had a 25-year framework from 2003, 25 years where I did my wanting journal every day, and so it's kind of like a muscle that my life before I started the journaling had just been distinguished by a bankruptcy and a divorce. Those are fairly conclusive report cards. Dean: Yes, yes exactly. Dan: In other words, you're not confused about whether they happened or not. Dean: Yes, exactly yeah. Dan: There's a reliable certainty about those two things. Dean: Yes. Dan: And I came to the insight back then that all the troubles of my life came from me not telling myself what I wanted in response to daily life. Okay, so you know, that's so. I said I got to strengthen this muscle. So every day for 25 years I'm going to simply say what I want in relationship to something that's happening that day. It's similar, it's resonant with your. You know, what do I want to do today? Dean: So we're on this. Dan: And plus, we have a lot in common. We're both 10 quick starts, we're you know, we're both ADD and we both have discernment and inventions. So we have a lot of things. We have a lot of things in common, yeah, so probably the way that we make progress Dean makes progress this way and Dan makes progress this way they're probably going to be fairly resonant, yeah, but what I think is that what I'm noticing about my relationship with perplexity is that I think about new things every day and then I say I wonder if I just have it do something for me. It sort of runs ahead of me and sort of clears the path a little bit for me to think about things. But Evan and I said you know, I think what's happening with this AI is just the opposite of where the technology people think it's going and where they want it to go. The most that the technology people can do is their own tinkering. They can tinker with things too, and it comes back to the individual. You know you can tinker this way and there will be a tool that you either utilize or you expand the usefulness of what you're doing. But I don't think it shows up, as I think that people who are heavily involved in technology you know, like Google, I use the guys, the two guys who started Google OK, I think all technologies are totalitarian. In other words, the Google people want there to be only one search engine on the planet and everybody else. Social media, the Facebook guy. He wants there to be only one social media platform and everybody's on that social media. So I think technology by its very nature, the moment you started technology as the creator of the technology, you want global domination and it was trending in that direction. Okay, apple only wants there to be one cell phone on the planet and that's you know, and everything like that. But I think that AI actually prevents that, because in order for you to be having global domination, you have to have everybody's attention, and I think each individual's unique relationship with AI takes their attention away from you. Dean: Yes. Dan: Oh, that's interesting too. Yeah so nobody as much as you would like Dean Jackson's attention. Today you're up against a lot of competition. Dean: Yes, yes, because. Dan: Dean wanted to do something else today and he's got direct access to Dean and you don't. Dean: I think about why, when you think about all the things that they are following our attention between google and you know, because facebook is on instagram, facebook and whatsapp, so you know, those are the three kind of big things that people are are on all the time but can I tell you something about? Dan: I think can I tell you about those three things. I've never been on any one of them. Dean: Yeah, that's true, you're in it, but not of it. Dan: Well, I'm aware that these things exist, exist, but I have absolutely no interest in, I have absolutely no interest in and you also have quite a presence on them. Dean: You have a nice presence on facebook. That people are putting your content on. So you're there, you just don't know. Yeah, you haven't done anything there yeah, yeah yeah, which, yeah, which. Dan: I talked to my social because I have a social media manager. You know he's a great guy. And I said so what am I doing out there? And he says, oh no, he says we've got a complete team and you know, and we have standards about what of you can go out there and everything else. We had a nice chat and there's sort of a governing body of team members in Strategic Coach and it's a that's backstage. You can't take backstage stuff and put it on the front stage. You can only take stuff that you know would serve the purposes of Strategic Coach if it was front stage. That's it. So to a certain extent, I'm just using all the social media that want my attention to avoid them having my attention. Yeah, it was very interesting, the head of the? yeah, I think I'm trying to think who it was. It was a top guy. I was reading this on Real Clear Publishes, which is one of my favorite sites, and he said there's a great deal of despair in the major networks, especially in relationship to the current election, which is two days from now, and he says we have to accept the fact that what we're trying to get American voters to think is wasted because half of them never pay any attention to us. So our messaging and you know we're fighting for their attention, but they don't pay any attention to us and we have no ability to get their attention and the more we strive to say you should be thinking this the less, the less control or influence that we have on the people of thinking so we're only talking to the people who already think the way that we think already. And if it's not 50%, that's not going to win you an election. Dean: Yeah, that's right, it's very interesting. Dan: There's something odd about this election. We'll only show up on you know after Tuesday that all the money that was poured into trying to get a winning vote in other words, more than you know in any one of the states, more than 50, that you have a majority of the vote yeah, it's wasted. It's wasted dollars. Dean: I saw something today that was you're calling out Kamala Harris for running two ads in different areas. Dan: Yes, with a Muslim population. She was running one ad talking about. This is about Gaza. Dean: Yes, that's exactly right. She was talking about the being a supporter for Israel's right to defend themselves and to, and the atrocities that Hamas did and all of it. So it was really interesting. That was almost talking out of both sides of her mouth and they called her out, and they sort of happened simultaneously, didn't they? Dan: Yes? It was like on the same day, in the same period, but the context is where is Kamala? I mean, she says this here and she says the opposite here. Where? Dean: is she? Dan: And that's her biggest problem Nobody knows where she is. Yeah, it's interesting, right, that was, but that was, and I think the reason is that Kamala will be whoever you want her to be, depending on the situation. Yes, and it doesn't give you doesn't give you a lot of confidence. Dean: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. So that was, but that was. You know that now you can't get away with that because everybody's monitoring and knows what happens right, knows to watch those different markets. When you look in 2016,. You know everybody all that Cambridge Analytica stuff that was being done for Donald Trump. You know that movie was really fascinating how they showed. They broke up each of the voting precincts or districts into you know that, had all these profiles on everybody in there and they would categorize them. As you know, either you know true Hillary or already in the choir, fort Donald had focused all their attention on that little group that they called the Persuadables. They turned in all of their messaging specifically to them. That was unheard of as a capability. Nobody even understood that you could do that or why all of a sudden are all of these personality profiles. Dan: It's very interesting. They already did know this, but it wasn't digital, because Richard Vigory, you know Richard. Well, richard, in the 1970s, worked it out on postal codes, and so he got all the postal codes in the United States, which is public information, and he had a team of students who would go to the state capitol in each of the, you know, in each of the, and he could get the list of people who were in every postal zone. You know he would do that, yes, and then they would start testing ideas. They would send out direct mail. He was a direct mail genius, okay. And so he figured out he could do it by postal zones. And the postal zones are, you know they? I don't know how many there are, but in terms of voting precincts, there's 40,000. In the United States, it's right around 40,000. In the United States, it's right around 40,000. And they each have a unique signature in terms of what interests them, what doesn't, what they're for, what they're against. And so, because he knew the media was totally on the democratic side, like the newspapers, the major networks and everything else. But the other thing about that is that they could get it and what you realized is that you could just ignore all the ones that were they were going to vote Democratic. You knew they were going to vote for it was Carter in this case, because he was doing that for primarily for the presidential election. He did it for Reagan and, what's interesting, there's a lot of comparisons between that election and this election. I've been reading them. One was in the Real Clear Politics this morning. And he said that the pollsters don't know this. The polling organizations don't know this because they're just going on an average of who says this to a set of questions. But in the case of Richard Vigory, he wasn't asking them who they're for, he was asking them what are the issues that most concerned you and then the messaging on the part of Reagan and, I think, trump in 2016,. What they identified, it was actually 220 precincts that did the election 220 precinct elections actually made the difference and what was unique about the 200 wasn't so much about Trump or Hillary Clinton. It was about they had voted for Obama in 2012. Yes, and they were very disappointed with Obama because he promised hope and change and he didn't deliver. They were still interested in hope and change. They just attached Trump's name to the hope and change and they switched to. Dean: Trump. Dan: So the Obama voters did not move to the next Democrat. They moved to the candidate who is doing hope and change. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And they picked that up from Twitter. Dean: Yes, oh, so, funny. Dan: I mean it's so that's got a thousand times more refined. Dean: now, eight years later, yeah, instantly right, and people were hip to it and sort of suspicious of it. I think that's why the media is picking up on these things. So of course it was Fox that noticed that distinction. Dan: That's so funny. That wasn't breaking news. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting because as cool as the rest of them. Now it's gone much, much deeper than a major network and you know it's very. Dean: it's really interesting that you know the the unfettered media now are really the like Joe Rogan just had Donald Trump. Dan: Oh, I mean, Rogan is the you know I mean, he's just got so much more influence. Dean: Yeah, like yesterday, I think yesterday morning I just checked the. I think it was that 45 or 47 million views for the Joe Rogan podcast. Dan: With Donald Trump. Yeah, it was like I think it was over 30 on the first 24 hours. Dean: Yeah, isn't that wild. Dan: And then you know what's really funny is that, Joe Rogan, they were having communication with Kamala. And he offered her the same opportunity that he offered. Trump. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And Trump just jumped on it and Trump redirected it so they could go to Austin, texas and you know, and he could visit with Joe Rogan in Joe Rogan's studio. And it went three hours. Dean: It was a three hour, three hour podcast, and anyway, she said we'll do it, but you have to come to us. Dan: You have to come to us and it can only be an hour. And he said you know who's the buyer and who's the seller here? Dean: Right Always be the buyer, that's right. You're going to make your pilgrimage to Austin, but she knows that's not her. You're going to make your pilgrimage to Austin, but she knows that's not her Austin. Dan: Yeah, Do you have to get shot? But actually Austin is a fairly liberal city. Dean: I mean, it's the state capital of the University of Texas. Dan: I mean, if you wanted to pick the area of Texas that's probably the most liberal, it's probably Austin, but Joe Rogan is immune to all that because he's not talking to Austin. He's talking to the world, right, if you want to talk to the world, and the other thing is and then Bantz went on. So instead of the time that, would have been given to Kamala was given to a band and bands. Is the likable Trump. Dean: Right, that's funny. Dan: It's like good cop, bad cop. It's got good cop, bad cop. You know, they're actually a team, One of them you know he comes from dirt poor Appalachian. The other one is a billionaire from New York, but they're a team so they cover a lot of territory. But back to our interesting conversation that you have with Charlotte that I'm talking about here. See, you've created essentially an exponential mirror, Because you're seeing your thoughts coming back to you. Dean: Yes, that's why she saw and recognized that her working genius is wonder and enablement. She can take my pieces and give me insights and see what you know, break it down and create out the things, which enables me to use my discernment to say you nailed it on that one. That's great and that reminds me. Let me add this to it and that becomes this I get to be in the middle of a thing that's already in motion, rather than having to start something from scratch. And I think I've really been thinking about you know we're coming into 2025. And I've always I've loved the idea of the quarterly books and the 25 year framework and the whole thing. And I just got Seth Godin's new book just came out called this Is Strategy, and I realized that what Seth's books are? A compilation of his daily blogs. He basically puts one blog post up every day, short, like 200 words, like some of them, you know, two to 300 word things and I, and then every year he puts out a new book you know, that's a compilation of those and I just realized I thought you know my winning formula has been because I have a hard time, just kind of, you know, writing from scratch. So I've always used my podcasts as the way so I do my more cheese, less whiskers, podcast where every week I have a different business owner on and we just do a one hour brainstorm applying the eight profit activators to their business and that was my formula for doing it. And I've done hundreds of episodes like that and from that I had a writer who went through the transcripts and took and created you know all the things that are the emails that I that I send. I send three, three emails a week and but since COVID, you know, I've been in syndication. Let's say I've got cause I have 200 of the episodes or whatever. I've been rotating around, so very periodically I'll write a new email to go out, but essentially they've been on a two year loop kind of thing where, yeah, you know, like they're getting emails that maybe they got that same email two years ago or last year. So I just I'm putting all this together now of this. I always seem to work best when I can lock in durable contexts for things Like I know the eight profit activators are. That's the bedrock durable context. I know about me that I work best in synchronous and scheduled here I am, ask me anything type of environments. So to set up, I'm bringing back my more cheese, less whiskers cast, going to start a whole new series of them and now, with Charlotte and Lillian to, and Glenn, my designer, to be able to take that. You know Lillian will fill the calendar with my things. So once a week I'll do a podcast with a new business owner that she will have arranged. I just have to show up and and bring my best to that hour, which is my favorite thing because it's discernment and invention. I get to listen, I understand what they need and I can suggest ideas of how to apply. It's like my superpower in action. And then to have the workflow of taking that transcript or taking that audio, getting the transcript, sending it to Charlotte to analyze, take out and create the both a summary and a thing, and then send it to me so that I can read the emails that she wrote and adapt that. You know, just edit them to be exactly in my voice and what I want, and say that one's good, that one's I don't like that or whatever. That kind of thing is pretty amazing. And at the end of each quarter, at the end of each quarter, I can take all of those compiled ones and make my more cheese, less whiskers. Quarterly book with all of the compilation of all of the things that I've written there, with illustrations and insights, all Helvetica which is going to be here for 25 years and each year anchored in the Pantone color of the year which is coming up in December. Every year they launch a color of the year. So the series, like, if you look at a bookshelf of you know, if I did in 10 years, 40 books, four of each, four spines and covers in the Pantone color of the year, anchored with Helvetica and an illustration, I just think, man, that is that right. There is the makings of a durable, you know, support system for Dean. Dan: Well, the other thing is, all this can be done by sitting in your chair on the patio. Dean: Yes, yes. You're customized for a season Valhalla. Dan: Yeah, valhalla, yeah yeah. Well, the interesting thing about it is that one it's good. It's good for as long as you want to keep it going. You know there's nothing, there's no obstacle to it, but you've got a big. You've got a big immediate contact list of people who would be interested in this. Dean: Yeah, yes, and that's the great thing is that I never have to go and find guests. Everybody, you know we're booked when we do it booked, like you know, months ahead. That it's a situation that they're legitimately getting $2,500 consultation for. That's the way I come into it is. I'm not holding anything back as you get this, yeah, so it's very, yeah, it's really very interesting. You know that I think is fantastic, so stay tuned. Dan: Yeah, it's yeah. The interesting thing is, I just like to bounce off the exponential tinkering idea that Evan and I have been talking about, and my sense is that there's a great panic going on in the world, and I notice it in big institutions that have been with us for a long time, and I'll set one institution aside, and that's the US and the US Constitution. That's an institution that I'm not going to talk about, but I'm talking about the United Nations. So the United Nations was created after the Second World War, essentially to prevent a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. That's really the main reason for the United Nations, but one of the causes disappeared in 1992, the Soviet Union, without anyone's permission, the Soviet Union quit and therefore what I've noticed is the United Nations is less and less relevant, but it's been taken over, infiltrated by just about everybody you don't really like, and they create this special organization, the United Nations Organization for the Palestinians. It's called UNRWA. Okay, that's called UNRWA. And the Israelis just said we don't want anything to do with you because we discovered that members of the United Nations were actually in part of the attack on Israel. These are members of the United Nations, but they were terrorists who helped kill the 1,200 Israelis and they said but that's it, you're out of here. You're out of here. You can't be anywhere in Israel, you can't be anywhere in the West Bank or anything else. And I'm noticing more and more that it's an irrelevant organization and it's using up about 25 acres of the east side of New York and I remember Trump saying boy, what I can do with that real estate. Dean: It's getting to the point where people are making the joke that you know. Dan: Certainly we could make better use of the east side of New York City than having this organization that essentially doesn't serve our purposes, but we spend, we send them huge amounts of money every year and we had to do an audit here to see whether this is really worth. Our effort Served a purpose, but the purpose, the central reason for the purpose, has disappeared over the last 30 years. But it keeps going on out of just sheer inertia, you know. It's just moving forward on out of just sheer inertia. Dean: You know, it's just moving forward. Dan: But what I'm saying is, I think that your experience with Charlotte and the sort of cluelessness of the main networks and the other big institutions are the mainstream news networks and we're saying, you know, like I'm not getting any value out of what you're doing. Besides, you seem to be on one side of the political spectrum and you know, you saw Jeff Bezos who said that the Washington Post is not going to give an endorsement for the presidential election. Well, that was in the bag, the Washington Post. You know they're going to go for the Democrat and he says I don't think this does us any good anymore. And so I'm just noticing evidence after evidence that the whole game has changed and it's only individuals who are entrepreneurial who are using this new AI capability to essentially have creative relationships with themselves, trying to have a sense of confidence about where they can go personally. Yes, what do you think about that? I? Dean: find no, I think that's it, my whole relationship like now that I understand that her role in my life is wonder and that, as a amplifier of my, she's doing what I would do if I could count on me to do it right like I can take the transcript like if I would have the executive function to do that, to go in and pull out what I see as the insights and organize them into, you know, into those bite-sized emails like she does it in real life, I mean, as you can type she's pulled out the insights, she's made the emails. I think that is such a great thing to give me something to. That is such a great thing to give me something to. It's like instead of trying to play tennis on your own, you can hit the ball and show it back, you can hit it. I think that's really what it is, is that there's some momentum going in the thing, rather than me just trying to do it all myself. Dan: Yeah and I'll leave. We're close to our. I've got another. I've got a massage coming up, so nice. I'm at Canyon ranch and, of course, anyway, but I would say that the number one capability that you bring to this and I'm comparing it with the ability that I am unpredictable to myself yeah, that's interesting. Dean: Today is the only time that I am thinking that way, that I'm comparing it to myself. That's true, yeah. Dan: And that's why I'm such a stickler on structures going forward that these structures can always be the same, and what it allows me to do and I think what you're describing allows you to do is that, rather than trying to discipline myself so that I'm predictable, I'll just create a structure that's predictable so that I can be unpredictable. Dean: Yes, you hit it on the head, dan. That's exactly what it is. I'm just going to create the strength. That was the winning formula when everything was live. That was the winning formula. I just had the time in the calendar. Our conversations are one of the great joys in my week that I love and look forward to this bright beacon on my account. It's the only thing on my Sunday and I look forward every week. But I don't fret, I don't, I don't give it a thought, I don't know what are we going to talk about, or what do I need to prepare, or I got to get my homework done before this. It's not a deadline, it's anything that I have to prepare for. Dan: Yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting. But I think that if you look at the development of history, especially American history, and the genius of the founding fathers with the Constitution, and the genius of the founding fathers with the Constitution, and you know, one of my great historical role models, you know, is James Madison. He was the brains behind the Constitution. He was sort of the cut and paste guy that looked at everything that seemed to work as far as governing structures and he got. You know, he had I think he had a couple of thousand constitutions from history where people had tried to, you know, create some sort of predictability going forward, and especially the first 10 amendments of the constitution. Those amendments are to protect the individual from the government. The whole purpose of the Constitution is to protect individual Americans from the government. Because the government, like any other structure like that, wants to be totalitarian. They want your attention and they want to tell you what to do. And he said, no, we've got to let people, you know, meet in unpredictable ways, talk in unpredictable ways, you know, create new initiatives, you know, and we can't have this interfered with by government bureaucrats and everything like that. Completely with the first 10 amendments of the US Constitution, and that's the institution that's the number one institution on the planet. It's that 27 pages of typewritten notes that, basically, has created this freedom for individual initiative. That's as durable and I think every election is decided by the majority of the people. Say, don't what the one side's doing. I think we'll vote for the other side this election. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Crazy. Dan: Yeah, anyway, this was a good talk and we'll do it live on Wednesday when you arrive. We're heading up on driving on Wednesday morning, so the rooms don't open until about 3 o'clock. Well, you're staying at Bob's. Dean: It doesn't matter. Right, I think I arrive Wednesday evening, so Thursday will probably be. Dan: It's going to have to be be. Dean: Thursday it could be. Dan: Yeah, why don't we say Thursday? And that makes it certain. Dean: Okay, perfect, that sounds great, maybe we can do both then Maybe we can do the Henry in the morning. Okay, I'll text Matt, all right. Dan: Okay. Dean: Have a great week. I'll see you in a couple of days, great podcast. Dan: Thanks Okay, bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloulandia, We delve into a range of topics, starting with the impact of natural disasters like hurricanes, discussing their unpredictable effects and the challenges of recovery in affected areas. The conversation transitions into a discussion about health, where insights on traditional Chinese medicine and its approach to addressing common illnesses are shared. We highlight how ancient practices like herbal treatments and scraping therapy remain relevant today. We then explore a fascinating scientific discussion on fructose and its historical role in human survival, as well as its connection to modern health issues like diabetes and dementia. The implications of diet and sugar consumption are examined with insights from experts who have dedicated their careers to studying these links. Turning to technology, We discuss the evolving role of artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting its potential in creative and practical applications SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Dan and I discuss the impact of hurricanes, focusing on their unpredictable effects and the recovery challenges faced by affected regions. I share insights on traditional Chinese medicine, including treatments like herbal remedies and scraping therapy, and how these methods address common health issues. We examine the role of fructose in human survival and its modern connections to health problems like diabetes and dementia, drawing on expert perspectives. We explore the evolving applications of artificial intelligence, discussing its potential in creative fields, communication, and education. The conversation touches on the limitations and risks of AI, including concerns about quality and the pace of technological adoption. We reflect on the technological history of politics, discussing how innovations like FM radio and cable television have influenced public discourse over time. We share observations on the psychological and societal effects of rapid technological advancements, including shifting expectations for speed and efficiency. The episode highlights examples of AI in action, such as automated customer service and editing tools, and their implications for productivity. Dan and I discuss the contextual complexity of decision-making, emphasizing the importance of considering multiple factors in understanding trends and behaviors. We conclude with reflections on how these topics intersect, offering a perspective on the evolving relationship between technology, society, and individual experiences. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, you have survived the hurricane, I survived the hurricane. Yes, we actually got almost nothing in Winter Haven. Dan: Yes. Dean: Winter Haven lived up to its name. Dan: No, I checked the weather condition in Winter Haven just in case I'd have to send an emergency package. Dean: Yeah, emergency, that's right we ended up. It was very. You know, it's a perfect example of you know when the hurricanes are coming. Of course you start out with that. You know the national news oh boy, there's a hurricane brewing, there's a tropical storm, it's forming in the Caribbean right now, or it's forming below Mexico or below Cuba, and then every day this is intensifying all the language, all the total emotional language, and then this is going to be devastating. And then you see the big buzzsaw working its way through the Gulf of Mexico on its approach to the mainland, and it could go anywhere, dan the cone of probability. And this one luckily stayed far enough to the west that we really got nothing. I mean, I got one band of wind and rain. It was like one of the outer perimeter bands, but not to say that it wasn't a devastating hurricane, because the whole the Gulf Coast, like in Tampa and St Petersburg and especially up in the Panhandle, they got really like rocked with this. And then North Carolina is getting pummeled with flooding and I mean like unbelievable stuff that's going on. Yeah, it's wild. You know our friend Chad Jenkins. He's got a place in, or had a place in, the mountains and the whole road going into the community just washed away, you know those guys are gonna be. I mean it's gonna be a long cleanup to get up from under all the flooding and stuff that's happened in North Carolina and most of you know Georgia and North Florida, but just shows you what it was? Dan: Well, it must have gone pretty far north, because Joe Polish was doing an event, supposedly today. Dean: In Cincinnati, yeah. Dan: In Cincinnati and the stage got destroyed. Dean: I saw that. The whole event, so it got pretty far north yes, yeah, because cincinnati I mean I think two things there, right that that's. Most people don't realize actually how far south cincinnati is, as you know, you know, it's almost kentucky, basically kentucky. Dan: So yeah, you can see. Well, comington is right across the river. You know Exactly. Dean: But still. Dan: I mean compared to Florida, it's pretty far north. Dean: Oh yeah, You're absolutely right. Yeah, you're home safe. Dan: Oh yeah, yeah, no, it's been nice here, it's been you know we've had probably the classic summer in September this year, I mean here it is almost the end of the month and all the leaves are completely green. We have a big Lots of leaves. We have lots of leaves with big oak trees that we have in our compound. We have six or seven, I think, seven big, seven big trees. But, nothing's turned yet, none of the colors have started yet, but it's been warm. It's been. You know, yesterday was 73, 74, which is great. Dean: It's the best. It's the best. Dan: Yeah, it's been terrific, and yeah sorry you couldn't make it to. Dean: Genius Phoenix, yeah. Dan: It was great. It was great. Who'd you catch that call from? I forget. Dean: Oh my goodness, Super spreader, super spreader Sullivan, that's you. Dan: Yeah, what was that? But? Dean: that came on fast. Dan: You know he. Dean: We had brunch on Saturday were there was nothing going on. We had dinner sunday night at your house and then monday, you were like full in the throes of it. And then we had dinner monday night and of course I was right beside you and by by Wednesday I went downhill, you know, and I could tell that it was coming on bad and I was supposed to speak at Giovanni's big event in the Arcane Summit, but I could tell I was going downhill. And then, thursday I switched my flight to come back to Florida because the original plan was I was going to speak at Giovanni's event and then on Sunday, fly to Phoenix for to be with you guys. Dan: Yeah, but anyway I made it home. Dean: I made it home just in time. I went full immersion in you know self-care, nipping in the bud, I think the warm, moist air really a lot to get rid of it yeah, well, you still sound like you, I was just gonna say you still sound yeah, no, I still, yeah, I still have it. Dan: Yeah. So we went to we have a really great chinese doctor here in toronto and uh you know, he does everything through pulse and he took my pulse and yeah his name's dr zhao and you know I've got a track record going back 20 years where you try this, it doesn't work. You try this, it doesn't work. You go to a doctor, it doesn't work. Then you go to dr zhao and within three or four days, then take these little. Dean: I went to a chinese doctor one time. No, they're herb. Dan: He gives you little packets of herbs and you make them like coffee and it's foul tasting, as it should be, and three or four. I can feel myself coring up already. I went on Friday and we have a Vietnamese massage therapist going back 30 years now. She's been with us since 32 years and she does scraping. Do you know what scraping is? Dean: I do not. Dan: Is that? No, it's. You know, she scrapes the skin hard. You know it's hard. Yeah, it's painful, it's actually quite painful. She did it on me. I just came from that about an hour ago. Dean: What is she scraping it with? Dan: Well, I don't know what it is. It's like stones. A special tool, it's like stones, oh, like bones. Yeah, sharp stones, you know. Dean: Bone things. Dan: yeah, and she doesn't take the scalp. You know she doesn. She doesn't take your scalp off, she just scrapes your back and scrapes your chest and it releases all the phlegm. You know the interesting word phlegm? So Chinese and Vietnamese in a space of three days and I'll be as good as new on Wednesday. In about a week. Takes about two or three days. Takes about two or three days you know I'm very, you know I've got a lot of compartments in my brain and people say you don't believe in that stuff. No, I do. And I said I think it works, even if you don't believe in it. Dean: Right, that's exactly it. Dan: Yeah. Dean: It's not up for debate. That's funny. Yeah, well, you went to the Chinese have. Dan: yeah, well, you went to the chinese have lasted. Dean: The chinese have lasted a long time, you know, and I guess some of it works did you go to canyon ranch? Dan: this time no we just we went to richard rossi's. Oh, that's what it was, I knew there was something yeah yeah, what was the big. Dean: It was good. Yeah, what was the big yeah, there he had to. Dan: Richard is just terrific in his curating of scientists. You know, he had a lot of scientists come in and talk and we had two especially one of them around 70. And he's been looking into the impact of fructose pretty well for 60 or 70, 50 or 60 years. And he really says that fructose is basically involved in anything bad that happens to you. You know, almost every kind of ailment and disease there's a fructose trigger to it. And he said and it was once a very good thing, when you know, thousands, tens of thousands of years ago, when we couldn't count on food, you know the food supply was not a predictable thing and he's just traced it to three or four genes. That got changed back in the prehistoric times when it was very necessary to stock up on fruit. You know, eat fruit as much as you could before the famine season came, usually winter, you know, sort of. You know there wasn't any food. And Buddy said then it's, you know, it was good at one time, but now we're in different conditions and now it's a problem. So anyway, he was great and I'm going to have him as a speaker at CoachCon 26 in Orlando. His name's Richard Johnson. Yeah, fascinating guy. Yeah, fascinating guy. And his whole career has been based on taking his research as far as he can and then finding someone in the world who has mastered the whole area that he's just entered. And he does a collaboration with them and then they create something new, and his whole career has been these collaborations with people who are more expert at what he's just discovered. And then they together do something even beyond what either of them have done before. So he's going to do one day on fructose and he's going to do the next day on collaboration. Dean: Oh wow, is he mad at fruit? Is he mad at fruit? Is fruit considered the same thing or is he talking about? No, it's Coke, it's Coca-Cola. Dan: That's what I mean. Like the fructose corn syrup, but not naturally. No, he's not against fruit. He the process, the intense fructose that they use, you know, to get people addicted to other kinds of foods yes, oh exactly, yeah yeah wow, but it was very interesting just how step by step, how step, he tracked down sort of the culprit. You know, and he said that pretty well, almost anything bad that can happen you. There's a fructose trigger in it. And you know and he said that pretty well, almost anything bad that can happen to you. There is a fructose trigger in it. And you know, then, including dementia, like including dementia and well diabetes leads to dementia. You know. They now have a pretty clear connection between diabetes and dementia. Dean: And yeah, that was what they're saying. I heard somebody refer to it as pre-dementia. Diabetes is pre. Like you know, everybody's walking around with pre-diabetes and the next level of diabetes is pre-dementia. Dan: Yeah, yeah, and then pre-dementia is pre-presidency. Dean: Oh my goodness, exactly. It's almost like a requirement. Dan: It's almost like a requirement. It's almost like a requirement. It's almost like a merit badge. Yeah, when we're coming down the stretch it shows one thing We've had a virtually uncapable person in the White House for four years and the country still runs. That's what I mean. Dean: That's what I really see. I think it's yeah. Dan: I mean, I don't think it gives you the sense of momentum that probably a good president would do. But here we are, you know, and who knows who's actually been making the decisions for the last four years. You know, it's an interesting test case, you know. Yeah, I don't think the israelis could get away with that oh my goodness, I just saw I think, they need someone. I think they need somebody right on the job, you know in the moment at all times they don't have much margin for error no, exactly yeah, that's wild huh. Dean: Well, I mean, uh, I just saw you were coming now into october, very around the heels here. So we're coming down the home stretch ready for the october surprise. Dan, everybody is all wondering what's the October surprise going to be, you know? Dan: Yeah, there may be no surprise. Dean: That could be the surprise, right there. Dan: Yeah, yeah, it's hard. It's hard to, you know, impose the past on the future. You know I mean it may, nothing may happen, it may just go along the way it is. Nothing may happen, it may just go along the way it is. But I feel that the Kamala is losing ground. Each week I get a feeling that there's this kind of erosion. that's happening week by week but she doesn't have any message. As a matter of fact, she's avoiding messages and I think it's hard to get the ground troops excited when you don't have a message. It's hard to get you. You know it's hard to get the check writers interested, probably in the last 33 or 34 weeks when you don't have a message. Dean: One of my favorite things that happened was I don't know whether it was an official ad or whether it was a meme, but it was Kamala saying if Donald Trump wins, there'll be the largest mass deportation in American history. Can you imagine what that would even look like? And then it ends and it goes. I'm Donald Trump. I approve this message. How perfect is that. Dan: Can you even imagine what that would look like? I'm Donald Trump. I approve this message. Dean: How perfect is that? Can you even imagine what that would look like? I'm Donald Trump. I approve this message. Dan: I think he's a rascal. Dean: But that's like so funny. Now we're getting somewhere. Dan: Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. Even my opponent is working for my campaign. Dean: Exactly. Oh my goodness, so funny. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, I think that there's kind of like an American center at any given time, like yeah, this is my yeah. What is it I started voting in? 68 was the first year that I voted. First presidential election because it was. The voting age was 21 when I was 20 and 64. I was 20 and 60. So I couldn't vote for the presidency in 64, so I had to wait until 68. And so you know, that's a whole number of years. It's 32, it's 56 years, so this is my 14th election and the thing is that at any given point there's sort of a center to things and I think the center moves around. But the person whose activities and message most corresponds to the American center during presidential year wins. You know, they just win I think it moves and I think America is a bit of an ADD country, you know that hyper, focusing on something different. you know every presidential cycle something and I just get the sense that there's she's not in the center. You know, you get a feeling that what she says and how she talks about it, it's just not in the center. Dean: Oh, and there was another ad showing. You know it was taking her words from 2020 and then exactly saying the opposite right now. Like every you know so like, thing after thing, her complete change on positions. You know it's pretty wild to see when you and she says things with such conviction and matter of fact it's like there can be no other way than this. Like how do? you not see this as the thing, and then she's saying it with the same tone and the same conviction the exact opposite thing. It's pretty amazing. I started watching last night, about halfway through, a documentary about Lee Atwater. Does that sound familiar? He? Dan: was quite Lee really changed American politics. Dean: Yeah, I didn't really know about him. I'd heard the name, of course, but yeah, this documentary really kind of digs into it. I didn't realize he was Karl Rove's mentor and so pivotal in Ronald Reagan and the Bushes. Dan: Yeah, he was the first of the take no prisoners, so there's a lot of shenanigans going on, so there's always been shenanigans. Dean: I guess that's really the thing Whenever the stakes are high, clever people are going to dream up shenanigans. Dan: Yeah, he was the one who George Bush Sr the outrouter was this is 88, 1988. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And he took down Dukakis in about three weeks. Yes, dukakis was kind of a, you know he was a governor of Massachusetts and sort of solid you know solid record and everything else. But boy, he was not prepared at all for the type of things that happen when you run for president, I mean when it's nationwide governor who's been basically in one state for all his political career, you know, just doesn't have the experience to deal with what can happen on a national level. I think that's one of the things that gives Trump the edge, I think is the fact that this is his third complete national campaign. So you know, from everything I've read about him and everything, I think he's a fast learner. You know he adjusts quickly to new circumstances, and so I think that just understanding how the entire campaign works, in it. you know it really starts about 18 months before the election day and you know to know exactly, step by step, what's happening, I think is a huge advantage. Dean: And it became clear watching the Lee Atwater thing that it's really it's most with what I was, you know, thinking, reading in same as ever. You know where the whole thing is, that good news takes, you know, build slowly and against resistance, and bad news gets is immediate, and that was what his thing was, what he found, what he said he found fascinating is you could end somebody's entire career in a day, that it could all fall apart. You just had the right thing that hits the right chord and it catches fire. And in another election he was accused or suspected of arranging this third party candidate to say the things that the primary candidate couldn't say, draw attention to this candidate's lack of belief in God, and it was really something. Dan: I think he died around 90, 1991. He got cancer or something. He died young. I mean he wasn't very old. I think he was in his 40s when he died. It's really interesting when you look at the technological basis for politics and you know the left, you know, goes frantic. Left and right is an event. I don't know if you know where left wing and right wing or the listeners do. It comes from the French Revolution. Dean: The French. Dan: Revolution, they had a national assembly and on the right were the traditional landowners in France. So these were families that maybe for half a millennia had owned land and there was always suspicion in how rich people got their land back then. You know, you never knew how they got their land. And then there was the church, and the church was on the side of the landowners. And then there was the government, you know the monarchy. They were the supporters of the monarchy and they were on the right, and the ones on the left were actually the new news media, the new intellectual class and actually the bureaucrats, the new bureaucrats who you know the state was getting big and you had these bureaucrats and they were on the left. And so that's really you know where that term right wing and left wing really starts, and and you know it's gone through different shapes and forms over the last 250 years or so. And but what I believe is that after the Second World War, the mainstream of the university were basically the mainstream and they were actually. Today we would say that they were sort of left wing and there really wasn't any right wing. There really wasn't right wing, because they controlled the magazines, they controlled the newspapers, they controlled the radio. Television was just, you know, just in its infancy, and there was one technological change that actually brought what we call the right wing today to the forefront, and it was FM radio. And FM radio was possible in the 1930s or 1940s. They already knew the technology of it, but that NBC, which was the dominant network. Back then you had ABC, cbs and NBC, but NBC was the dominant and they didn't want FM radio. So they literally stopped it for 30 years and then the government had to overrule them and allow FM radio to exist. And when FM radio came in it became the radios of the big city because it's got very limited bandwidth. Dean: You know it reaches. Dan: I don't know bandwidth, I mean FM doesn't go more than about 30 miles. Pardon me, but it became the radio station of the universities and the big cities. Dean: New York. Dan: Chicago, boston and everything else, and they moved out of AM radio and they said we don't want that small town stuff, am radios. So they left a vacuum. What we would call the left wing today moved to FM radio like national public radio is all FM radio, which is left wing. The NPR is the left wing medium. Based on today's landscape it's left wing and it just left the entire right wing with many more stations, but they had tremendous reach, like AM radio. You know, on a clear night in Ohio when I was a kid, I could get New Orleans, I could get St Louis, I could get Chicago, I could get New York, Philadelphia and I could get the charlatan radio from Mexico. Yeah, mean that was a million watt, million watt, radio station. Dean: So you had these really powerful radio stations and they were just abandoned was the idea behind fm, that it it was a shorter length but a higher quality signal. Is that what was? Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and you know, and it was available. So all these bandwidths were taken over by big city stations because you couldn't get the reach. You know you couldn't get the reach, but what you could make up with it was a denser population. So you would have a, you know, a big city would have a much denser population. So you would have a big city would have a much denser population. And what these stations got taken over by were religious congregations, preachers and everything like that, and they were against the mainstream government. Know, that's where Rush Limbaugh came along. you know he became the and Billy Graham came along. Dean: Right. Am radio is where you often think about. That was you know became talk radio. That's really where that all started, right. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Democratic left in the United States just lost its control of AM radio, you know, and that was a big technological change. And then cable television came in. Of course you could have any kind of station, TV station. Dean: So there was a technological basis to politics technological basis to politics. Yeah, this is. I was listening. I've just been exposed in the last week here to the I think it's called Google Notebook, and it's the AI that you can load up you know some text or you know information into train, the kind of whatever the language tool is that it's drawing from, and it will create a podcast that's two people talking and explaining. You're making content about what you load up, for instance, like I just thought you know, it's pretty like it's amazing to hear these no, I listened to it. Dan: I listened to it. Oh, you did okay for the first time. Dean: Yeah, hamish what's? Dan: hamish mcdonald's. Uh, yeah, yeah, it was a particular piece of legislation in. Prince Edward Island. And so the government was using Google notebook to explain it, and it's a man and a woman talking to each other. And they said, and I mean the discussion quality and the voice quality was really terrific Like it sounds like two real people but the thing was they were just uniformly enthusiastic and positive about the regulation or the regulations that were doing that and that was my tee off that this is phony. Not phony, but artificial, right, you know I mean. I mean artificial. One of the meanings of artificial is phony. You know and everything. But it was really interesting to listen to it and I think it's good for education, explaining things you know. Dean: Yes, yeah. Dan: Because they go back and forth with each other, so I thought it was pretty good. Dean: Huh, and just like. So you look at this as this, if this is crawling, you know, if you look at that as the beginning of it, because that's the first I've seen of that capability. It's really pretty. It's really pretty amazing what we're up against. Just to put it in context, I heard someone talking about where we are now, the new I don't know how they number them, but the 0.01 or 01 or whatever now is the latest level of it context of a scale like the phases, the level five kind of thing, being the peak. You know, general intelligence, that that knows everything, this 101 or 10 or whatever it is. It was just tested at 120 IQ, which is higher than 91% of the population. Dan: And it means that 91% of the population isn't going to understand it. Dean: That could be. I mean, that's exactly right. Dan: Or listen to it. Yeah, but they're saying that if we look at the scale. Dean: If we look at the scale from 1 to 5, we're at about 2 right now, on the way to 5 by say 20 or whatever. Dan: I don't know really what that means. Iq 120 about what? Yeah, I mean. Dean: Yeah, I don't know I mean even IQ itself. Dan: You know it's being more and more discounted, as you know, as any kind of, I mean. What it means is pattern recognition. I think the Q now comes back to pattern. But, for example, above 150, I mean there's's people, there's an organization called mensa I mean yeah, you know which is people? I think it's 160 or above and what they find is that they're kind of dismal failures. You know, yeah, you know. Dean: No, I heard a thing that the actual, most, the most beneficial iq is about 125. Dan: that it gets in the way yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's the practical realm, the practical realm is 120 to 140. And you know that people think better than other people, but they also make better decisions and they take better actions. I think that's probably the realm, and it's very interesting when they compare all the IQ tests of men and women. They have different curves. And so there's far more males below 100 than there are females in relationship to how many males. So a higher percentage of males are below 120 or below 100 and a much bigger percentage of males are above 140. And the women control the area between 100 and 140. I mean just statistically based on yeah, and so the idiots and the geniuses men have they struggle, that's funny, I had them. Dean: so, yeah, I, yeah, I did. Years ago as an adult, though, I did my IQ just for fun, to see what. See where I'm at, and it's always 140, and which was see where I'm at. I was 140, which was very superior intelligence, dan, they call it VVSI on the tip of the I knew that the moment I met you. That's so funny. Yeah, I don't know what that means. Dan: It was a good choice of restaurants. It was on Avenue Road. Dean: That's exactly right, yes, yeah, that's right. Yeah, boba, yeah, yeah, so funny. So I think that this I remember saying to you a few years ago. I remember somebody tweeting which I thought was funny. They were saying however bullish you are about AI and circa 2030, you are insufficiently bullish, is what they were saying, and I thought those words just struck me as funny. But now we're starting to see, like, because that was even before ai, that was before t came out, because that's really only it's. It'll be two years in november, right that we? got the very first, 30th, 30th of november well, the very first sorry, that's okay the very first taste of it. And look at how it's changed in two years. You can only imagine what it's going to be in 2030. Dan: But I don't see any real impact of it out in the world. I don't see any impact. Dean: Yeah, let's talk about that. It's not obvious. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I don't see anything. Dan: Yeah, my sense is that we're sort of in a tinkering stage right now and that you give AI to one person and they do something with it. You give it to another person and they do something different with it. You give it to a million people and a million people do a million different things with it, but I don't see any unity or focus to it whatsoever, any unity or focus to it whatsoever. And it's bothering the investment markets, like Goldman Sachs, the big investment bank, who they're sort of alert to trends in the market because that's how they make their money. They said that they're very disappointed that in two years there's been billions and billions and billions of dollars spent in corporations bringing in AI, but they don't see any results whatsoever yet. So I think it's. My sense is that it's having a great impact, but it's not measurable by standard economic standards. It's not measurable, it's invisible standards. Dean: It's not measurable, it's invisible, right, and I I wonder, like you know, I've been talking about and thinking about this. You know I almost liken it to the way when the iphone came out. We had all the capabilities that went with it, right, like the gyroscope and the geographic, you know, knowing where you are geographically and the accelerometer and the touch screen and all of those capabilities that it could do, and, of course, the first things that people did was make games that you could you know, the other thing is photography yeah photography really changed huh, and now you see, like yeah, because now the, but being able. The big difference now with the ai is the sort of generative creativity, the photography and the things. I was laughed. There was about several years ago when AI was first start of sort of really getting legs. Before GPT, there were just the micro capabilities that AI was using. There was a website, and still is called thispersondoesnotexistcom, and every time you push refresh on the thing it creates a new image, photo image of a person that is an amalgam of all of the photo. You know millions of photos, and so it just is infinitely combining characteristics and hair color, hairstyle, eye color, skin tone, facial features, all of that to make a unique person that does not exist. Those are now along with the. When you couple that with the capability now of creating video avatars, like the AI videos, that you can have them say your script you know in, and it looks like a real person doing those things and it's just. I think, as all these capabilities come together, it's going to be a lot like the app store, where people are going to corral these capabilities into a very specific outcome. You know that you can. You know that you can tap into. I mean what a time to be a creative right now, you know, in terms of having vision and being able to pair up with infinite capabilities. Dan: Yeah, it's kind of you know I mean, there's some interesting insights about that that you're still constrained by one thing, because that on the receiving end of all this, people can still only think about one thing at a time. Okay, and you know so, you're not going to speed up anybody's intelligence on the receiving end. You may speed up your intelligence on the grave, but you're not going to speed. As a matter of fact, you may be dumbing them down at the other end. But what I think it's going to do is big systems. I mean, one of the great big systems that's been created over the last probably 50, 60 years is air traffic control. So there's not been a commercial accident in the air. I think it. You know, it may be 15, 20 years, I don't know. The last time, two planes collided in the air Right, right Like a collision in the air. And there you know, if you go back to the 30s, 40s and 50s, there were quite a few, you know, fog or something and everything like that, and so I think it's going to be big systems, like big electrical systems. That's where you're going to see the impact. I don't think it's going to be at the individual level. I think it's going to be at the big system level, and my sense is the Israelis are doing a lot of this at the big system level and my sense is the Israelis are doing a lot of this. I think the Israelis and you know the precision bombing they're doing now is really quite extraordinary, like they killed the head of Hezbollah on Friday. Dean: I just saw that. I saw something about that. I didn't have a chance to dig in, but that guy yeah. Dan: And they? First of all, they phoned everybody in the neighborhood within 500 meters and they said get out within the next 20 minutes because we're going to be bombing some buildings. So they have everybody's phone number. like in Beirut and Lebanon, they've got everybody's text number and phone number and they just mail them and says you know, get out of your building because there's bombs coming, you know. And so it was colossal. They cleared a block. I mean, when you look at it's three buildings and there's nothing but rubble and everything like that, well, there are hundreds of people around there. I think two people got killed and you know 50, 50 were injured, but I think you know typically technology leaps ahead in warfare, you know 50-50, we're injured, but I think you know typically technology leaps ahead in warfare, you know that's number one. Number two is games, you know, and the gaming industry is probably using this extraordinarily quickly and you know, and other forms of entertainment, other forms of entertainment, that's where it happens. But yeah, I'm not seeing the big jump. You know, I hear, you know Peter Diamandis sends out this is going to happen. And then you extrapolate in a straight line Well, because they're IQ 120, you know, in five years is going to be IQ 180. But most humans with 180 IQ are pretty worthless yeah you know they can't change a tire. You know they have problems in practice, right exactly yeah, they become more impractical and it's not clear that, beyond a certain amount of it, that intelligence is that great an advantage? You know, I don't know, I'm not, you know I'm, don't know, I'm not, you know, I'm just not convinced. Yet I mean, I use, you know, perplexity, and you know I really like perplexity because it gives me nice answers to things. I'm interested in, but not once has anything I've done on perplexity actually entered into my work. Dean: Right, you know it's Stuart Bell who runs my 90-minute book team. You know we were having a conversation about it and you know they're integrating into the editing process some. Dan: AI. Dean: So the first two passes of editing are now AI. First two passes of editing are now AI and he was amazed actually at how good it is. Most of the time the editing process is reductive, meaning that there's less. You put in this many words and you come out with something less than that many words. But this past, the way they've got it going now is it actually is a little bit expansive and you come out with about 10 more words than what it was, but reads. But reads very, you know very easily. So so he's very impressed with the way that's gone and it happens in moments rather than days of going through a traditional editing process. That was always the biggest time constraint. Dan: Bottleneck is the editing process, but that means that you can only charge less for it. Time constraint, bottleneck is the editing process, you know. Dean: Yeah, but that means that you can only charge less for it. I mean, let me just pose a counter possibility. Wait a second now yeah, possibility. Dan: I had a lawyer once and he said everything went to hell in the legal industry when fax machines came in, and he was explaining this to me that he said it used to be that you'd go and have a meeting with the client and then you'd go back and he would grant you three or four days to make revisions and then you know, send it by courier and over yeah and he noticed that over the first two years of fax they expected the revisions to be back that day so if things speed up people's expectations. People's expectations jump to saying well, you know, you just ran that through the ai, so why should I pay you for? You know I would. It take you three minutes to do this, you know why should I but? You put yeah. So my sense is that there's an economic factor that doesn't increase when the speed increases. Actually, the economic factor decreases as the speed increases. You know it used to be that they gave you two weeks to come up with a. You know a script for a play. Now they want it back an hour after you've talked you know, because they say well, we're not. We know you're using the ai and so you know we expect it to happen sooner you watch. I mean, we'll just keep track of this on our podcast as we go over yeah, but once you have a tech, once you have a speedier technology, people's expectation of speed goes up to match what other evidence is there for that? Dean: what other analogs? Dan: well, fax machine, yeah, fax machines and an email. Yeah, email very definitely, but the world hasn't slowed down with faster technology. Dean: No. Dan: No, everything's gotten faster. It's like sugar. Dean: Yeah, sugar. Dan: Everything speeds up. Everything speeds up with sugar. Dean: Yes, exactly, I don't know. Dan: You know, all I know is, in my 50 years of being an entrepreneur, I don't feel I've ever been at a disadvantage by adjusting to technology slowly. Dean: Yeah, it's just I just see now, if you take the through line of where things are going. Like I was really kind of amazed by this couple on that Google Notebook podcast, Like just that as a capability is pretty amazing. You know, I think you know and you're seeing now, those AI, you know telephony things where you can talk to an AI. Dan: A lot of it is things in sales they're doing. Chris johnson yeah, chris johnson in prezone really has an amazing. It's a calling service yeah so he had 32 callers and now he's got five callers and that's a real noticeable thing. And the software and I he gave a an example is about a minute and a half of the caller calling a woman and she's got it. It's. She's got a slight accent I can't quite tell what the accent is, you know, and but she's very responsive. You know she's very responsive and their voice modulation goes up and down in response to the person who answers the phone call you know, and, as a matter of fact, he's the person who answered the phone sounded like a real deadhead. So we were about halfway through and I said to Chris. I said which one's the robot? I can't quite tell. Dean: Which one is the? Dan: robot. The person who answered the phone was just really dead. He was really monotonic and everything like that. Dean: But the caller. Dan: She says, oh well, she says you know. She says you indicated interest in finding out more what our company does. And I'm just calling to schedule where we can give you a little bit more information. I'm not the person who does that. I'm just going to set up a meeting where someone can talk to you and it won't last more than 10 minutes, but they're really experts, and so I'm looking at the schedule for tomorrow and I've got 10 o'clock and I've got 3 o'clock. Would one of them be useful for you? He said something like 3 o'clock and I've got three o'clock. Would one of them be useful for you? He said you know something like three o'clock. He says, good, I'll put you in there. And he said you know, we just want to give you the kind of information that would indicate if you want to go further in that and everything like that. So thanks a lot for this and it was really good. But that that AI program can make 25,000 calls a minute. Dean: That's crazy isn't it? Dan: In other words, if people answered the phone as a result of sending this out, you could have 1,000 people talking at the same time. Now, I see that as a real breakthrough. Dean: Yeah, agreed, I mean that's kind of ridiculous. but yeah you think about that? I you know, when I started out in real estate I would do. I was making a hundred cold calls a day, but I was doing a survey. Was my, was my approach right? So I was saying the same thing. My idea was that I was going to call through the phone book for Georgetown, but I didn't want to, and then I would make a record of I had little or D, and I would only, of course, then follow up with the ones who were willing, happy and had a potential need in the future. That was my game plan and I would make these calls. I was just thinking now how easy it would be for an AI to do that now, like I would just call people. I'd say hey, mr Sullivan, it's Dean Jackson calling from Royal LePage. We're doing a quick area market survey. I wonder if you have a minute to be included, and most of the time they'd say no, or sometimes they'd say yes. But even if they said no, or I would just say it's just five questions that take one minute, I promise, and most people would go along with that and then I would just ask them have you lived in Georgetown for more than five years and how many years in your current house and how'd you happen to choose Georgetown? And then, if you were to move, would you stay within Georgetown or would you move out of the area? And then, whatever they said, I said when would that be? When would that be? That was the punchline of the whole thing and it was so. You know, it was so amazing, but I could you imagine making 25 000 of those calls in one minute. You call george, every household in geor, those calls in one minute. You call every household in Georgetown in one minute and identify all the people who were, because I could imagine an AI saying having that exact interaction that I just shared with you, right? Oh yeah, just the yeah, we're just doing an area market survey. Wonder if you'd have a minute. It's just five questions, one minute, I promise, and then go right into it. I mean that's pretty amazing. You know, if that's a possibility, that's a pretty. Dan: Well, I think you know. I mean, here's where you're. You know we're at the crawling stage with it, but again it all depends on whether people answer the phone or not, right? Dean: We're finding about a third. So we've got a lot of our realtors and others are, you know, following up with people who request books. So when they dial about a third of the people will answer the phone. Dan: Basically you just never reach me. But yeah, my sense about this is that there's very definitely an increase in quantity and I'm not convinced yet that there's an increase in quality, you know right. Right, you know quality of experience and so, for example, you know quality of experience and so, for example, what Hamish McDonald was sending me had to do with the piece of legislation, because there's something that they want to do and it requires following the rules of government ministry. But it was a little too cheerful and enthusiastic. I found the couple's talk. There would be no negatives in it. And I've never had any experience with government that didn't have a negative in it. So, from a possibility. Dean: I wonder if you could have. I wonder if you could, you know, prompt one person to take the positive one, to take the negative or debate it. Dan: You know, debate fun to take the negative or debate it. Yeah, you know, debate could be, you know, yeah, but my, my sense is that we get better at spotting dishonesty. You know like yeah, my sense, I think one of the like I. I have people who use ai all the time and you know, and they send me something and I read it and then we have a discussion over the over Zoom usually, and I'll say I didn't quite get it from what you wrote. There was something missing from. So I'm just going to ask you a whole bunch of questions like content wise. But the context is the real. You know, context is hard to grasp unless you're telling the truth, you know, and the reason is because you have to be touching about 10 different points, and one of the things I find with perplexity the AI is I've got this sort of way of approaching and perplexity always has to tell me 10 things about the subject I'm interested in. Okay, so 10 things. For example, I asked, I put in 10 reasons why evs are not being adopted as quickly as was predicted okay and 10 and phew, 10 of them, and you could see that each of them was a little bit of a game stopper. But when you put all 10 of them together it really gave you a sense of why there's a lot of late nights in the EV world right now, trying to figure out why things aren't happening as fast as they could be. So that's a contextual answer. It's not just, and what I've discovered from working with perplexity is there's no reason. There's no one reason for anything in the world. There's always at least 10 reasons why something happens or why something doesn't happen, and everything else. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I'm being educated. I'm being educated, but it's just something that's developed in the relationship between me and the AI. You know, because if you say what are the reasons why AI is not or E-MAT being adopted as quickly as we thought, I think the answer that came back would be very different from my tell me 10 reasons, because it just does what you ask it to do. That's exactly it. Dean: All of it has to. You have to have somebody driving. Yeah, holy cow, it's top of the hour. Dan, that's so funny. I put up a post on Facebook today about just before we got. I told you, ai makes things happen faster it really does just even our real life conversation when you talk about AI, the hour just speeds by. Dan: It really does anyway. Yeah well, you know it's a forever subject because we're going to be with it from now on. Dean: I think that's true, yeah. Yeah, love it All right. Well, you have a great day, all right, and I will talk to you next week. Okay, Thanks, Bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we explore our travels through Nashville and Chicago, highlighting the growth of these cities and our celebration at the Maxwell Clinic. Back in Toronto, we discuss new bike lane legislation and upcoming events like the Genius Network in Phoenix and our local FreeZone gathering. Dan updates us on the progress with his stem cell treatments. Our conversation shifts to artificial intelligence and its transformative potential. We examine how AI is changing productivity, eliminating routine tasks, and sparking creativity. Inspired by Elon Musk's simulation theory, we dive into philosophical questions about reality, pondering whether our existence might be a sophisticated technological construct. We explore the rapid evolution of technology, tracing the journey from basic video games to immersive virtual realities. The discussion covers autonomous driving and other technological innovations that are seamlessly integrating into our lives. We introduce three key questions designed to improve decision-making and productivity – insights that could have been groundbreaking in previous eras. The episode concludes by celebrating teamwork and collective problem-solving. We draw inspiration from historical figures, highlighting how combining diverse skills can lead to remarkable achievements. Our exploration invites listeners to reconsider the boundaries of technology, creativity, and human potential. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We begin by discussing our travels to Nashville and Chicago, highlighting the growth and dynamic energy in these cities, as well as our experiences at the Maxwell Clinic and various social events. Back in Toronto, we note the political stir caused by new bike lane legislation and share our excitement for upcoming events, such as the Genius Network in Phoenix and the FreeZone gathering in Toronto. Dan shares updates on his year-long journey with stem cell treatments, revealing promising results for his knee and Achilles tendons. We explore the transformative impact of AI on personal productivity, emphasizing its role in eliminating mundane tasks and enhancing creativity. The conversation delves into philosophical implications of AI and simulation theory, inspired by Elon Musk's ideas, and we ponder the possibility of our existence being a grand simulation. We discuss the limitations of virtual reality compared to the rich sensory experiences of the real world and consider the acceptance of life as it is, even as new technologies emerge. Three crucial questions are proposed to streamline decision-making and productivity, offering insights that could have revolutionized lives even in past centuries. We highlight the importance of teamwork in creativity and problem-solving, drawing lessons from historical figures and emphasizing the power of leveraging collective skills for success. The episode includes a reflection on the evolution of technological advances since the 1940s, and how new technologies are now seen as normal parts of life. Throughout the discussion, we maintain a focus on practical applications of technology and the significance of being content with life's current state while remaining open to beneficial innovations. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr. Sullivan, Dan: Mr Jackson. Dean: Welcome back to Cloudlandia. Dan: All the windows repaired, the shingles put back on the top of the house. Dean: Yeah, we didn't. Luckily, no damage to the house, but lots of trees. We had some hundred-year-old oak trees that toppled up from the roof, didn't? Dan: make it, didn't make it, didn't make it, didn't make it. Dean: Didn't make, it Didn't make it. Dan: Well, they had too many leaves, they caught the wind. That's exactly right there. Dean: So you have been on a whirlwind tour, You've been all over huh, well, just basically Nashville. Dan: Where were we before? I'm just trying to think yeah, well, we were in Chicago, but we just came back from six days in Nashville, beautiful, beautiful it was, you know, high 70s, low 80s, but just beautiful. And this was four days at the Maxwell Clinic and then we stayed an extra day because David Hasse and Lindsay, his new wife, got. They were celebrating their marriage and we were there last night and there were. You know, richard Rossi was there. Lior Lior Weinstein. Dean: Jack Jacobs was there. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, jay Jacobs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, jay Jacobs. You know a whole number of people. Dean: Well, very nice. Dan: Yeah, right on the river. We were right on the Cumberland. You know it's very nice and they were doing a. When we left yesterday morning it was Marathon Day in Nashville, so we had to negotiate a different route to get to the airport and today they have a big regatta right down the river. All the boats were out yesterday practicing. Do they call them boats? I think they must call them boats. They are boats. Dean: Skulls, is that the racing thing that they do, you mean? Dan: Yeah, the racing. They're all skulls, Skulls yeah, yeah, small, medium and large. Dean: Oh, that's interesting. Dan: Yeah, but Nashville's growing. It seems like a boom town. Lots of cranes, lots of new projects going up. Nothing to compare with Toronto, but still a decent growth. Dean: Are you back in Toronto now? Dan: Yeah, got back yesterday and it's fall. Now it's fall. That's what my friend Glenn. Dean: I talked to him today. He said it was a little bit cool. Now it's like it's official yeah. Bright, orange tree, everything yeah. Dan: All the posing that the city was doing. No summer's not over, summer's, not over. All the posing has stopped, so it's you know, what you would expect close to November. And anyway it's good, yeah, yeah. And we're going through a big thing here because the premier of the province, rob Ford, has decided that bicycle lanes are not good for traffic and he's now passing legislation or he's going to put into place legislation that if a bike lane is causing traffic congestion, the bike lane has to go. And this, of course, is you know. This is the work of the devil as far as a lot of politically inclined people, but it's a disaster. They did a lot of it during COVID. Dean: There wasn't much traffic. Dan: They took advantage when they put in a ridiculous number of bike lanes, which you know in Toronto get to about six months a year because nobody rides their bicycle in January and February and anyway. But it's causing, you know, it's causing a wonderfully satisfying outrage on the part of people that I don't vote the same as they vote. Oh yeah. Dean: This is going to be a big month here. We've got coming into, so we've got the election coming up. We've got we'll be in Phoenix right after the election for Genius Network and then we'll see you there. We'll see you there and then I'll see you again. I'm going to be back in Toronto. We've got our FreeZone first week in December and then I'm actually going to do a Breakthrough Blueprint event in Toronto the week of US Thanksgiving in toronto monday, tuesday, wednesday prior to our prior to free zone. Dan: So, yeah, lots going on I might have made it, except I'll be in buenos aires that week yeah, what's your? Dean: this is that's my big uh goal here. You know, 12 years in and we've still. It's a dan sullless Breakthrough Blueprint event 12 years 12 years Dan we haven't sunk your battles. Dan: Well, a little bit, you know, a little bit of marketing in our direction would probably help. Dean: You're susceptible to marketing Right. Exactly I love it. Dan: Yeah, I'm a sucker for a compelling offer. Dean: Listen, I'm excited to hear your. I'm interested to hear because you're coming up on. It's been a year now. Dan: Right for your stem cell Started yeah, just the first week of November last year was the first stem cell injections. Dean: So one year you've gone four times. Dan: Yeah, it's pretty good. But what we've discovered is, you know, it's an old injury, it's a torn meniscus in 19, so you know, pushing 50 years and so the cartilage got worn down because of the torn meniscus and now the cartilage is back to what it was regrown. It looks to be like a quarter inch of great cartilage, but there was damage to the ligaments, because when you have an injury like that, your body rearranges itself to cut down on the pain. Your body rearranges itself to cut down on the pain. And now, so in last week of November, probably close to Thanksgiving Day, I'll get stem cell injections in my ligaments and we'll take it to the next level, you know, but I, yeah, I will get better. And you know I had two torn Achilles tendons within a couple of years of the knee injury, and so I got injections for those two injuries last March. And within five weeks I regained all my flexibility in my ankles. So that went really fast, yeah, and you can't, you don't really fix them. You know they're because they're a bit shorter because of the injury. When they put them back together again. But, what happened is. There's a lot of calcification that grows up over 40, 40 year period and all the calcification disappeared. It was kind of strange. They said it'll take about five weeks and week one nothing, week two nothing. Week three nothing, week four nothing. First day of the fifth week, all the calcification disappeared. Dean: Yeah, Wow, that's awesome. Dan: And I'm sitting here rotating my ankles very proudly, even though you can't see it. Dean: I can see it in my mind. Dan: Yeah, I'm doing it. Yeah, a lot of push off that I didn't have and everything, so I'm a great believer. Dean: Maybe you'll be able to talk to basketball now? Dan: No, well, it depends on how. I yeah, I mean, it's a function of where the rim is, it's not a function of where the ground is. Dean: Oh, that's so funny, that's easy. Dan: That's easy. You just have to know the person who controls the rim. Dean: Uh-huh. Dan: Yeah, yeah, but it's been great and you know I've been doing a lot of, you know, interesting articles. There's just so many articles these days on artificial intelligence and you know the hype period seems to have reached its dismal end and you know they're not seeing the returns. You know the big corporations who pile billions and billions of dollars, they're just not seeing the returns and their investors in the stock market are not very happy with big payouts investment but so little return. I mean you're talking people who put in $100, $200 billion and then they're getting that $3 billion return, which is okay if you own the company 100%, but it's not good if you're a public stock. So I'm watching that and, but meanwhile I'm convinced that it's doing a lot of good. You know, I'm convinced that individuals are well, individuals are just using that to eliminate five hours of work here, five hours of work there. Yeah, I think it's happening in a billion different places. But one of the things that I think is depriving us of good news here is that I think AI is not good news for the news media, because if there's any jobs that are going to get eliminated, it's going to be news media jobs. Dean: I wonder, like part of the thing is that there's got to be some interesting you know developments in terms of how people are going to integrate this, you know. Like I said, it's funny how people are doing the different prompts Lee Orson, our FreeZone. One somebody had said you know asking. I asked ChatGPT what do you know about me, based on our interactions, that I might not know about myself? And she said you know. Here are a few insights based on our conversation, she said. One you enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others. You've created content for various audiences, from real estate agents and home sellers to law firms. This suggests you find value in sharing insights and helping people achieve their goals, whether through practical tips or specialized guidance. Two you value practicality and efficiency. Many of your projects emphasize actionable, practical advice, like your guide on teeth whitening and your tips for home sellers. You seem to appreciate solutions that are both effective and efficient, providing value without unnecessary complexity. Three, you're strategic and forward thinking. No-transcript. Whether it's exploring new content, marketing strategies for cybersecurity or learning how to maximize our relationships Because I asked her how can I maximize our relationship? You're always seeking ways to improve. This suggests a growth mindset where you're interested in both personal and professional development, and it was really then she said you're health conscious and self-aware. You've taken significant steps in improving your health, from weight loss to setting fitness goals. This shows a commitment to your well-being and a good sense of self-awareness regarding the changes you'd like to make. Dan: I thought, man, this is really like that's good observations, you know yeah, but, dean, if you for a meal at a french restaurant, I could have told you all that it's true, right it's much more enjoyable, you know. Yes, for close for close ups from close observation. Yeah well, I've done the same with perplexity you know I put a little sizzle into it because you know I read all the great books at St John's College. That was my college education. And so I asked perplexity. 10 ways in which Dan Sullivan's philosophy is superior to Plato's philosophy in the 21st century. Dean: Came back. Dan: I mean he never had a chance. I mean what you can get from Dan Sullivan in the 20s. First of all, he's alive, which is an advantage yeah. But if you pick a historical character and say, how does Dean Jackson's thinking differ? Or expand on somebody else, you get more useful information. Dean: I mean yeah. Dan: So all they're doing is picking up, you know, introductions that people have made when you were giving a talk, or you were doing a podcast and they're just. All they're doing is collecting all that and putting it into a form. But did you let me ask you a question putting it into a form? But did you let me ask you a question Did you get any insights from this that were new, besides what a lot of people have told you over the last 25 years? Dean: Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, I didn't get any because I asked none of that, like if you think it all makes sense, but it was, yeah, that I might not know about myself. So none of the I didn't think anything in here was something that I wouldn't know about myself. Right, but that's what I wonder. Dan: I mean if there had been sort of like a statement that, unbeknownst to you, a great uncle of yours, who you never met, actually set aside a savings account for you 50 years ago and right now there's roughly $1 billion in it for you. That would be really useful information. Dean: That would be delightful, that would be fantastic yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah, I love it. Dan: I love it. I love it, yeah, no, but what I think is that, first of all, I think the Greatest progress right now using AI and it's being done on an individual basis, it's not being done on an organizational basis, it's on an individual basis is getting rid of annoying activities, annoying use of time. I think it's eliminating friction. That's interfering with teamwork and everything like that. So I think you know we value the elimination of irritation. Dean: That's true. Dan: And so I think it's just being used. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I think it's just being used where you just you know, eliminate things Like I've been using just exploring with notebook google notebook lm and I. I don't find I would never use it in a public way. So just for the listeners. If you take, you say you're right. I took an introduction to a book and I fed it into this, you know, into this ai app and it came back as a conversation between two individuals man and woman. And they were talking about what they got out of. You know the introduction to the book and I came up about with about three or four things that they said in a different way, which we then built into the text as a result of listening to it. Dean: Yeah, isn't that amazing? Like that, that has really upped the level. Like that kind of blew my mind when I saw we've done two of those. We did Glenn put in episode one of the I Love Marketing podcast and it really did a summary, a 10-minute summary of what and they're talking about us in third person, like you know, joe and Dean talked about this and you know this was their insight that even before they were entrepreneurs, their childhood really set them up for being entrepreneurs and the whole thing thing right. It was really pretty fascinating. And then that we did, I did a zoom consultation with sheree, with joe's, joe's- girlfriend sheree ong. She's a for anybody listening. She's a little plastic surgeon in Scottsdale and very renowned in that field and so we did a whole marketing brainstorm around that and we set that into and to hear them talk about and reiterate the ideas. If you just listened to it without any context there would be no, you would have a very hard time believing that was not two humans talking. I think that was really my like. That was up a level from the interaction you know. Dan: Yeah, I found it got. It was great to start and it wasn't so good after about the halfway point. Dean: Right. Dan: Okay. What I found was it was a little too enthusiastic. Dean: Yeah. Dan: You know, and it became almost like jargon near the end. Dean: Right. Dan: And I think the thing was that they were just running out of things to say yeah, but it sounded like after a while it didn't sound entrepreneurial, it sounded sort of corporate. This is sort of a corporate PR, but that has nothing to do with my use for it, because I'm not going to use it in a public way. Right? Dean: I'm just using that. Dan: I'm just getting some reflection back on the ideas that we have in the introduction to the book coming back in a different spoke and I got some new ideas for refining what we did just out of listening. So for me that was the value a video and I didn't. Dean: I haven't watched the whole thing, but the general idea is that somebody put a video to these two, the male and the female character AI, and they're having a discussion as they realize that they're not real, apparently we're not even real. Apparently we're ai, they look genuinely like surprised by this news, a little bit incredulous that I, I apparently I'm not real well, it brings up the question that maybe Dean and Dan aren't either. You know Well what I was bringing to mind with that, Dan, is I remember hearing Elon Musk? I was just thinking. Dan: I was just thinking. I was just thinking no, that's exactly who I went to when I brought up that idea, who I went to when I brought up that idea. Dean: Right. I remember somebody at a big conference asked him about the simulation theory the theory that we're living in a simulation and you know he talked about it like that. He and his brother have had so many conversations about AI and the simulation theory, so many conversations about AI and the simulation theory, that they had to have a rule that they would have no such conversations while in a hot tub so that they could take a break from that conversation and his reasoning was that if you go back 50 years, we had the state of the art in gaming was Pong, which was the two you know twisty paddle things playing a ping pong game. That was the entry into the digital gaming in the 70s virtual, visually amazing games that are played by millions of people simultaneously in a universe that's fully photorealistic and and created, and his idea is that, if you factor in any amount of improvement at all, that we're going to reach a point where, in a couple of years, vr is going to be visually indistinguishable from reality. We'll have the capability to create virtual simulation, ancestral games that would be indistinguishable from real life. And if that's the case, if we look back in the billions of years of the universe kind of thing, the odds that we're the first ones to have gotten to that level is very unlikely. His whole thing is that the odds that we are in base reality he called it is one in billions and I thought man, that's very I don't know what that means. Dan: I don't know what that means. Dean: Meaning that this is the real thing, that this is the one he's saying, that the odds that we're in the actual physical world of the thing is very rare or unlike Wow. Dan: Are you saying that what we're experiencing is not real, that it's a simulation? I'm not quite getting this point. Dean: Yes, yeah, that's what he's saying. No, well, real that it's a simulation. I'm not quite getting this point. Yes, yeah, that's what he's saying. Dan: No well, yeah, but it's a theory. Dean: Right, exactly, you can do anything with a theory. Yes. Dan: First of all, there isn't enough electricity in our solar system to power that, I mean just to power it. Our solar system to power that I mean just to power it, and you know I mean. They're running into a problem right now, projecting technological growth to 2030. The United States does not have the electricity to do it. Okay, so there has to be, there has to be a bit of an improvement there. Dean: You know. Dan: The other thing is visual, visual perception and maybe audio to go along with. It is a small part of what we experience. I mean we have spatial awareness, we have touch, we have taste, we have smell, and then there's other ways of communicating that we don't quite understand, but we, energetically we. And one of the things that I really noticed with my few explorations of virtual reality is how flat and boring it is. It's just flat and boring, and the reason is because it's the creation of one person or the creation of a team where if you go to Yorkville or you go to Winter Haven, you know, and you walk around and you experience everything. It's the creation of hundreds of thousands of people who made the adjustment here, adjustment there and everything like that. But my sense is that there's a deep, what I would say depression setting into the entrepreneurial world right now, and the scientific world for that matter, that they're never going to understand human consciousness, and it's pretty well. There's been no advance in 40 years of understanding what human consciousness is, and it's not fast computing, you know just to say what the thesis is. It's something else. One of it it's not measurable, because what you're experiencing right now is truly unique. You've just created something. As you're engaging in this discussion with someone you find interesting, and you have all sorts of thoughts coming out. This is all. None of this is measurable and never will it be measurable, Right, Okay, and so I think that's the real issue. But what I'm saying I was thinking of a book title I was wandering around yesterday is that I'm 80 now, so I was born in 44 and there's just been a lot of technological. There's just been a lot of technological change since 1940, 1944. So I no longer consider it magical, I just consider it normal. When a new thing, like when the LM, you know the notebook, I no longer have the phrase this is fascinating, this is wonderful, I said, well, this is normal, this is just, I'm just seeing something. Yeah well, this is a new thing and it's really interesting and we'll see if it's useful, you know, in the normal way. In other words, does it make money for you, you know, does it save time? And so I'm getting more and more where I'm absolutely immune to other people's sense of magic about technology. Dean: Yeah yeah, I use you as an example. You basically have had functional use of all of these things without it even being technological advancements. I always talk about my Tesla. Now I've got the full self driving supervised, which is like it can make all the turns and do all the things. But you've got to really be aware I can't hop in the back seat and go wherever I want to go. But I always say to people listen, Dan Sullivan's had it right, because for 30 years you've had autonomous driving for 30 years. Dan: Well, autonomous from my standpoint. Yes, that's what I mean. Dean: You've had the functionality of it right. And that's been the thing. It's so funny yeah. Dan: Well, yeah, and the other thing is, I don't know it comes down to. I think you know what your stand is on technology has a lot to do with. Are you okay with life just the way it is? And I am, you know and I am. But the way life just is that every once in a while a new technology pops up that I find really useful and then it becomes part of my normal, then it becomes my normal life, and that's been happening for 80 years. And I suspect it's going to keep. I suspect it's going to keep going that way. But you know, but the it tells me. You know, know, one of the things I'm really interested in is just a little experiment I've been running now for about eight months and it has to do with three questions and I've been kind of captured by this. It's a tool. It's called three crucial questions, you know, and we've talked about it, and the first first one is there any way that I can help by doing nothing. Number two is if there is something, what's the least I have to do, that's that. And if it's the least I have to do, is there someone who can do the least that I have to do? And it really struck me that if I had learned this when I was like six years old, struck me that if I had learned this when I was like six years old, my life would have really gone in a different direction. It would have really turned out different because I would have been really super acute to what other people could do for me. You, know, right from the beginning. Dean: Well, none of that involves technology. Dan: None of that directly. I mean I'm saying that if I had done this 300 years ago and somebody had those three questions, they probably would have lived a really interesting, productive, creative life. Dean: Well, there's so much in it. There's like a I mean, there's certainly a who, not how element to it, for sure and the. There's a unique ability. Dan: There's a unique ability, yeah, but there's also a workaround. Dean: There's a can I pray while I'm smoking instead of? Dan: smoking while you're praying. Dean: You know it resonated with me with the. You know I've been working with the. Imagine if you applied yourself and self is the acronym for fear, meaning something that you know. But that would be essentially your question one is there any service or anybody that you know that could be able to do that? And then the second level is E for energy, which is that's the things that only I can do. L is leadership, where I could just tell somebody else, and F is finances. So can I apply myself to get this accomplished? I like this idea of what are you calling this? You called it the Dan Sullivan. Dan: No, it's just called three crucial questions because it's a little-. Dean: Three crucial questions Okay. Dan: Yeah, so you pick three things that are, you know, projects or problems right now. But, I just choose problem. That's something you haven't solved. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And then you ask you you know you describe each of the three. So you're coming downward on the left hand column. Then you go across and you got a matrix of three questions. And the first question is there any way you can solve this by doing nothing, and I've never had, I've never said yes to the question. But the question itself is very useful because it immediately simplifies your thinking. You know, it simplifies your thinking. And yeah, the second one what's the least you have to? do now you're getting really simple. And then the third question is there anyone else who can do this very simple thing? You know and, and then, and, if there is. You've just answered question number one. Dean: That's what I mean. That's the can I pray while I'm smoking? You've worked in the back door there. Dan: No, you can't without doing nothing, okay well what do I? Dean: need to do. Well, you got to do this and this. Well, can somebody else do that? Dan: Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, and then you also you're questioning well, is it even enough of a problem to even be, you know, spending? Dean: thinking about what if I don't solve this problem? Is it okay if I just forget about it? Dan: Yeah, and what it does is that it's a measurement tool in the sense of you know you're going to be doing something with your time today anyway, and the question is are these three things anything that's worth your time today? Dean: Yes. Dan: And it keeps you from getting you know, getting too taken up with busyness. Yes, I love that, but it's funny because I the reason I brought it up as a topic on our talk here. Since I came up with it, it's a, it's one of those thinking tools that won't let me alone. Let you go. Right you know I've had a few and so, for example, example, without going through and actually counting them up, I would say I probably did it 20 times during the day where I was thinking about something and uh, you know, and my mind had wandered. You know, I was thinking about something and I immediately the question came up is there anything you can do about that? Can you solve this without doing anything? And immediately I was redirected to an activity that was right in the present, that I could be taking and I could be conscious about it and everything like that. So it's really interesting because I come up with a lot of tools, but they're for a purpose, they're for a workshop. They're for everything, but this is the first one that keeps coming back and bothering me In your daily, for your daily life. Yeah, yeah, it seems to want to be part of my daily life and that's you know. And yeah, it's just an. It's just an interesting thing that I'm doing and it's very useful because the moment I ask the question, is there any way I can solve this? By doing nothing and immediately, my attention is a hundred percent just on what I can do right now, which feels real good, which feels real good you know to be fully engaged. Dean: Not doing anything is. Not doing anything at all is also an option, do I even? Need to do anything at all about this. What would happen if I didn't? Dan: I've had. Dean: Joe Polish and I were talking the other day. I did a Zoom session in the Genius Network event last week, thursday, friday, and you know one of the things that he was talking about was Keith Cunningham's idea that more businesses they suffer from indigestion than starvation for ideas. They're not starving for new ideas, they've got indigestion of ideas too many things. And I realized, as a 10 quick start with a future orientation, that is definitely my. I have so way more ideas than I could possibly implement. You know, and I look at I've always. One of my personal kind of orientations is definitely, you know, future oriented. I see things, how they can be solved. But I've also learned that the reality you know, you and I've talked about the fact that life moves at the speed of reality, which is 60 minutes per hour and when you're actually practically doing anything in the now. That's the constraint, that is the biggest thing for a future-oriented shapeshifter. You know, like you and I. So I've been revisited our the idea of procrastination, the joy of procrastination in. You know, my number one thing is always has been that I know I'm being successful when I can wake up every day and say what would I like to do today? And I've started thinking about how I can make that more practical, like to have more to show for it at the end of the day than just drifting with. You know, all my time freedom and the funny little exercise that I've been playing is do you remember in the original Wheel of Fortune when you won on Wheel of Fortune you would have you could spend all your money on the showcase kind of thing. They'd have all the prizes all lined up and you can. I'll take this for a thousand and I'll take this for 500 and I'll take the rest on a gift certificate or whatever. I started thinking about, maybe going through my days. Yesterday was the first day that I kind of, you know, I've been playing with that mindset of looking at today, as with my 100 minute units for the day, looking at the you know prize, the gallery of all the things that I could do and looking to fill them into my day. I'll take a massage for six units and I'll take this. I'll take a movie for 10 units and I'll do some 50 minute focus finders for 10 units. And you start like looking at my day and realizing that what kind of creates a little sense of urgency or a present mindedness for the day is really thinking about maximizing for the next 100 minutes, like what am I really going to do in the next 100 minutes? Because even a day is a long, that's a long time to really kind of. You know it's slow if you were to just sit here and count the time for the day that go by, but really having things. I'm really making a conscious effort to have more intention around what I do with those units during the day rather than just getting sucked into screen time. Dan: It's really interesting. You mentioned that you're a 10 quick start with future orientation and I was just thinking, as you said that and I was thinking about your that I think I'm I actually am past focused. I'm very past focused and what I'm doing is I'm looking at something that's from the past and sort of saying how could that be better in the future? Like I'm not really interested because I've experienced the past. I haven't experienced the future. So I've got one thing I've got a lot more experience with the past. Now we could just take two minutes out and just ponder the thought that I've just spoken here and I think it's probably why I am not taken at all by the futurologists that show up at the various conferences that I'm to and I said you're talking about something that you have zero experience about. And I said you're talking about something that you have zero experience about. I said why don't you talk about something that you have 100% experience? with which is your past and then say this thing that happened to me. How could that happen to me? Better when I get to it in the future, you know so. I'm not really intrigued by the future at all because, first of all, I've got zero experience In the past. I've got a lot of experience, and it's readily available. Not only that, but it's unique. Only I know what my experience is, Only you know, what your experience is. Dean: Who else knows? Dan: So, I wonder if we I wonder if I'm kind of quick start so I wonder if we actually really are spending time with the future. Though I don't know, I can only answer it for myself. Dean: I like, you know, creating blueprints or create you know, like that's the thing I see. I like solving problems, as this is what we need to do, but then actually implementing the things is. I find that being in the present is almost like being in the past. Funny, but I mean, sounds odd to say that, right, but it's like I think that I've already solved this. Okay, I know what this needs to be, and it just feels like such a drag that I have to now, like take the time to do the actual thing that I've already seen in my mind, you know, it's almost like you know, yeah, it's very funny. I heard somebody talked about who invented the vaccine, the polio vaccine Pasture, pasture, okay, so it was him. Somebody said that he imagined the reason, the way he solved it was he put himself in the position of if he was the, the virus or whatever, how would he attack the system? And that was his. So he put himself in that perspective of where would he go, what would he do? And it reminded me of hearing that Einstein, his, the way he came with the theory of relativity was to imagine himself on riding a beam of light. What would that look like? How would he experience that? And so I look at the things like when I create a solution for something, I know I already see how it's going to, I've addressed all the issues, I see, okay, this is what we need to do, and in my mind it's a fait accompli, as they say, a completed thing, it's done. I know that this is going to be the thing, but now you have to in reality, the speed of reality, actually build out all the components of it. You know, that's like writing a book, for instance, has to be done in real time, you know like I can see the outline of the well, well that you know that's really. Dan: you know that's really why you want to have a lot of who's in your life, because the actual taking action and getting it done is interesting to you. But, having that? Well, let me ask you the question Taking action and getting it done is not interesting to you, but having it done, does that interest you? Yes, very interesting. Yeah, well, there's only one solution it's got to be someone else who does. Dean: Yeah Well, there's only one solution it's got to be someone else who does it. No-transcript. That's been really in the last little while here. That self-awareness it's not a character thing. It's not that it's that I work best when I'm contributing discernment and invention on the if we're looking at widget things, you know. Dan: yeah, well, it's really interesting abs and I have gone to to Rome three or four times and one of the things I mean, if you are interested at all in you know the ancient structures. Well, not so much Rome, but I mean Renaissance and things like that realize is that these individuals who we you know, we know them, you know leonardo and michelangelo, and we know them and we developed this image. How could one person do all this? And the answer is they didn't. Right, right, right, they did. They had a lot of people. It's like you know, I mean, it's like we think of these. Just because we only know their name doesn't mean that they're the one who actually did it. Just yeah, it had to be named and we somebody attached their name to it and yeah, and we think it, but they didn't do uh you know they, they really didn't. I mean, they're sculptors. And you say, how could that? How could he get all that done? Well, he didn't. He got the basic picture of it done and then he had other people who were nose people and ear people and finger people. And he brought them all in and they put together the whole. They put together the whole statue and they put together the whole statue and that's one of the valuable things you learn about the past that things didn't get done any differently in the past than they get done today through teamwork, through large numbers of different skills coming together. The big thing is to apply it to yourself, because I think one of the things and it's a function of the school system and I don't know if you could have it any other way is that you have to study on your own, you have to take tests on your own. And I think it tells people that it's all an individual effort. But what if you took another group of first graders and you taught them teamwork from day one? You studied as a team, you took tests as a team and then you measured over 18 years the one who did everything on his own and the one who was just part of a team that did it. And they did it as a team. I bet the ones on the team. One is I think they'd be a lot happier, and number two is I just think they'd get a lot more done. Yeah isn't that something? Dean: I had a friend who you know is teaching his kids. His idea is teaching his kids like being entrepreneurs, teaching that's the way right, the self-guided way. But they would do, you know they were in a virtual school and they would set up, you know he would have vas to to do like homework for them, like show them how to, like hire someone to do this, this, write this paper yeah or whatever realizing that if there's anybody else who could do it. If you don't need to know how to do it, then you know, kind of like taking your approach right. Is there any way I could do this without doing anything? And that's kind of yeah, that's a big thing. There's no reason for him to know. I remember that was the, that was I think it was henry ford or somebody that they were saying. You know his lack of general knowledge, but it doesn't matter. He says I have buttons on my desk. I can push this button and somebody will get me the answer to whatever I need. And now we've all got a PhD in our pocket. Dan: Yeah, yeah, you know, I think the big thing is that I'm not certain that everybody has the ability of seeing the future and the future use, the future use of other people's capabilities. So I think that's an. I have it and I suspect you have it, but I can see what something looks like and I can see what someone does and I can see it applied to a future result. But I'm not sure everybody has that. Dean: Yeah. I agree, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I agree, and that's kind of like the thing we just think. It's so second nature, right, like you don't know that there's anything different. I remember thinking about unique ability. I remember thinking that, well, that can't't be like, because that doesn't seem like work at all, like that doesn't seem like any effort. Dan: That can't be a thing, but it is you know, yeah, well, it has to do with impact, not you know not the activity itself. Yes, what's the impact? Yeah and yeah, so it's really interesting. But I think, think you know, I'm just to you know, we're near the end of the hour here and my sense is that a lot of confusion in society right now is that science is running into a wall and technology is running into a wall, and it's human consciousness and a lot of claims are being made what technology could do, but I, I think with less and less confidence, and people are saying, well, you mean there's something else, there's something else that we can't get to, and I said, well, yeah, you experience mean, we experience that personally. We experience that on an individual basis, why wouldn't it be on a general sense? Dean: And. Dan: I think there's going to be a lot of depression. I'm noticing the increase in the numbers of teenagers who have mental illness, and I think the reason is that they've been promised something that if you got this education, if you had this technology, if you had access to this and this, you would be happy. And they aren't no exactly. And none of the people who told them that can explain to them why they're not happy, why they're not happy and I think it's a general sense. I just think we've reached a point where we've been so science centric and we've been so technological centric pretty much for a century or maybe a little bit more than a century. And it was going to produce the utopian society and it was going to produce and it isn't. Dean: And now. Dan: I think that the most cynical people were the most idealistic people. If you take someone who's really cynical, they're the ones who were very idealistic. They said you know, everything's going to be solved, everything's going to be great, and then it wasn't. And they don everything's going to be solved, everything's going to be great, and then it wasn't. And they don't have a fallback position. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I'm noticing that with the election this year. Dean: Yes, absolutely. Dan: You know, the people who are going to be happy on November 6th are the people who just lead ordinary lives. Dean: You know, they just go around. Dan: They got a job, they have a house, you a house and everything else. And the people who are going to be very unhappy are the people who believe we can fundamentally change everything. I've just noticed that one of the parties, which was the Party of Joy three months ago, is now the Party of Rage. Dean: Oh man. Dan: Yeah, they're the Party of rage. Oh man, yeah, yeah, they're the party of rage. I mean, they were all out on stage over the last two or three days of how you know, he's a fascist, he's hitler, you know. And I said look, I've watched some world war ii films, I've seen hitler. This isn't hitler, he doesn't even speak german. I mean, if you're going to speak German. Dean:I mean, if you're going to be Hitler. Dan: If you're going to be Hitler, you got to at least get the language down right. Dean: Speak German. That's crazy, but. Dan: I'm just noticing it's more than just the political season. I just think there's a thing happening right now where there's sort of a collision between what was promised and sort of what isn't happening, and that's why I think AI is really being used, but it's not being used in the way that people predicted it was going to be used. I think it's being used in many other ways. Dean: Yeah, well, when are you traveling to Phoenix, dan Wednesday? Dan: We're going to Phoenix, then we're going to Tucson. So we're going to be in Canyon Ranch and then we drive up the day before the genius starts. I think Okay. Dean: But we should go to the. Dan: Henry, we should go to the Henry I was thinking the same thing. Dean: That's what I was hoping. Dan: Okay, good so are we on for next? Dean: week then. Dan: Yeah. I'll be in Tucson. No, I can do it. No, that'd be great. Dean: Okay, perfect. Well then, I will talk to you next week. Thanks, Dan. Dan: Okay. Dean: Great.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, I share my experiences living in hurricane-prone areas, focusing on the looming threat of Hurricane Milton in Florida. We delve into how such natural disasters test our resilience, drawing parallels with historical floods in Ohio. These experiences serve as a backdrop for discussing the broader theme of adaptation and change. We explore the Strategic Coach framework's Free Zone concept, which redefines retirement as a time for continuous growth, fueled by innovation and technology. I express skepticism about Artificial General Intelligence, instead advocating for real-world applications of AI that enhance learning and productivity. The episode also dives into marketing strategies in the digital age, highlighting the Profit Activator Scorecard and AI tools like Perplexity and Google's Notebook. These tools help us identify gaps and enrich our marketing approaches, as illustrated through collaborations with Joe Polish and Dr. Cherie Ong. Our discussion extends to AI's role in creative and analytical tasks, showcasing how tools like Perplexity can generate insights and drive innovative conversations. We reflect on how these technologies can transform marketing strategies and enhance our understanding of complex topics. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the impact of hurricanes and tornadoes, focusing on Hurricane Milton's impending threat to Florida, and share personal experiences living in hurricane-prone areas. We reflect on the resilience required to recover from natural disasters, drawing parallels to historical floods in Ohio and emphasizing how modern media amplifies the perception of storm severity. Devlin describes the Strategic Coach framework's Free Zone concept, highlighting its role in extending entrepreneurial lifetimes and promoting continuous personal and team development. We express skepticism about Artificial General Intelligence, advocating instead for the use of AI in specific, real-world applications to drive innovation and growth. Stuart explores the Profit Activator Scorecard, detailing how to leverage its results to enhance marketing strategies and fill gaps in reaching target audiences. We examine the application of AI tools like Perplexity and Google's Notebook in generating fresh perspectives and enriching marketing conversations. Devlin introduces a new AI tool, "How You're Always Luckier," and discusses its use in generating insights into entrepreneurial luck and societal trends. We compare the capabilities of AI tools like Perplexity and Google Notebook, highlighting their potential uses in strategic planning and productivity enhancement. Stuart shares insights into using AI-generated conversations to gain new perspectives on marketing strategies, illustrating with examples from collaborations with Joe Polish and Dr. Cherie Ong. We discuss personal plans and upcoming travel, setting homework assignments to further explore AI tools and reconnect in future episodes. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Well, well, well, didn't even get to the course. Dan: Yeah, Mr Jackson. How are you, sir? So you were lucky with that hurricane, but you may get the next one. Dean: Holy cow, dan, this is exactly what I talk about with the week before we get the big red arrow, you know, the buzzsaw building in the Gulf and this one, if you take the track, of course, the cone, the probable cone right now and for anybody listening, we're talking about what will become Hurricane Milton, right on the heels of Hurricane Helene, is projected to go right over Tampa, to go right over Tampa, and if you take the red line in the center of the cone, the projected path is literally about a mile from my house, right through the Four Seasons, valhalla. Yeah, so, I don't know. I may hightail it to Chicago or something. Dan: You may have to move from one side of your garden to the other. Dean: That's right. No, this is. Yeah, this will be. This could be like direct path type of stuff. And, of course, the poor. You know people in Tampa and St Petersburg and Sarasota. Dan: They got, they always get it worse, absolutely. Dean: But this last one was, you know, crazy amounts of flooding, and that was not even that, was just the outskirts of a lane. This one is projected to make landfall right in Tampa. Dan: So I don't know. Dean: I don't know, but it's good, you know, to know the. It's good to know what's there. Dan: Yeah, and have forewarning. Dean: Yeah, exactly, you're on high ground in Florida. Dan: Right, You're on high ground in Florida. You're at least 10 feet above sea level, aren't you? Dean: I looked the other time, one of the times we were talking I looked and I'm actually at 150 feet above sea level, so like oh, you're like on Mount Everest in Florida, that's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. Still I may, it's part of life though. You know, I mean, I tell people. Dan: It's part of life. I remember growing up in Ohio. I was in the north of Ohio, but Ohio River comes under the entire state from east to west and they had tremendous floods and there were people in my first 18 years living at home with my parents. I bet they got flooded out five, six times. You know where their houses would be gone and everything else. Yeah, you know, flood passes by, they rebuild and they go on with life and you know I mean the two things that the US Generally the US has great climate, has great weather. Dean: Yeah. Dan: But it's got a couple of things though Storms from the Gulf of Mexico or from the ocean, you know, from the way of Bahamas. You know, like out in the it comes from the east to the west, but usually it comes from south to northeast. I guess this would be south to east-north-east. It kind of rises a bit after it goes through Tampa right. Dean: Yeah, that's right. Dan: And the other thing is the tornadoes, which are largely unique to the United States. Largely unique to the United States, and it's because of the warm Gulf Gulf of Mexico, cold north, coming from Canada, and then they collide and they start creating a circle. And then they hit the mountains on the west and then they start coming east and Ohio doesn't get them that much. We never get the effects of the hurricanes. I mean by then it's petered out by the time it gets up to Ohio but the tornadoes are different because it's a flat, generally a flat geography in the north. It's where two roads meet. That's about six miles from where I grew up and they had like a church, a general store and a trailer park and three times when I was growing up the tornado hit the trailer park, didn't hit the church, didn't hit the general store. Oh, man Didn't hit, the church didn't hit the general story, oh man, and I said you know it's like a red flag for a bull. You know I mean you're just asking for trouble if you live in a trailer park, but I'm sure that you know people with manufactured homes really got a hard hit in North Carolina. Hard hit in North. Dean: Carolina, I can't even imagine, like Norman I mean yeah. Norman in South Carolina. Tech. That is the power company they're said we're estimating that power will be restored in four to five weeks. Yeah, I mean wild huh. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I mean so amazing, you know that's. I just can't even imagine like your whole, you know your whole uh town being cut off, like there's some of those things in the mountain roads in north carolina. You know in the mountains there that the only way to get to them is through this one road going up around the mountain, and if that washes out which it has I just wonder like how long the how long it's gonna take to rebuild everything it's gonna take a long time. Dan: Yeah, some of it, not at all, probably. I mean, there's probably some small hamlets that they just leave, you know they'll just leave you know anyway, but anyway it's really interesting the I mean every once in a while you get a really severe storm, which this one was. But you know, it's how people don't really understand population, that I mean. There were worse storms as far as people dying in the early part of the 20th century. Far more people got killed. I think there was a famous one in Texas, which. I think it was a couple of thousand people died. You know this one. But people don't realize. When there's a lot more people and a lot more houses, the storm seems more severe, because there's more damage, there's, you know, more wreckage, and plus there's television and there's well, that's what they're saying. Dean: Back in a hundred years ago, you had to depend on somebody's big toe swelling to get there's a storm coming yeah, there was a tornado. Dan: I think there was a tornado, I think it was in the 20s, 1920s and it went over three states. I think it's sort of like Nebraska, that area, you know, the real. Midwest, but it was clocked at close to 80 miles an hour and it stayed on the ground for three states. It didn't jump up, it just stayed on the and it really. I mean it just destroyed towns in its path and the way they know how fast it was going was the report in from the telegraph offices as it was going north. Yeah, funny, as long as you weren't there. Dean: Yeah, holy cow Anyway. Dan: I was just working on a new thinking tool. Dean: I'd like to hear all about that, yeah and actually two of them. Dan: I finished one and I'm starting another one today, and the first tool is called Strengthening your Strengths, and I happen to think that this is the number one entrepreneurial skill. Dean: Tell me all about it. Strengthening your strength sounds like something I would be completely interested in doing. Dan: Yeah, the other one's called how you're always luckier. Yeah, okay, so you got two tools. You got two tools in mind. Dean: Okay, we're going to talk about strengthening your strength. Yeah, the two tools in mind, I've got them. Dan: Talk about strengthening your strength, yeah, and then you categorize them what's your best strength right now? In other words, if you took a look at where you are right now, what's your best strength? And so mine, the number one, is just my teamwork with bats. You know, which goes back 40 years. That's my number one strength, okay. Number two is the team that we have our unique ability team, and number three is the entrepreneurs that I get to work with. Yeah, okay, and so, as you can see the way I'm laying it out, it's me and something outside of me. My biggest strength is that I'm 50% of the deal but there's another 50% of Babs in the team. And I have others, I have others, but those would be the top three. And then over on the right-hand side, is 12 strengthening. In other words, which are the ones that you would strengthen over the next 12 months? It's very interesting. It's a very interesting. The insights that come out. You know, because it's your strengths, are far more than you. Your strength is your connection to other, in collaboration with other people. Dean: Yeah, got it, I do. Dan: And then you know there's a lot of thinking, there's insights. You brainstorm in both of them and then you pick the top. You pick the top three. Dean: So how would you think about the? How would you think about your 12 month improvement in your strength of collaboration with? Dan: BabAPS yeah. So, the big thing right now is our clinics. You know, I mean it's a great teamwork and we want it to last a lot longer into the future. So the work that we do with David Hasse and Nashville will be going down in a couple of weeks. Dean: Your joint longevity project right? Yeah, Well, he's got. Dan: You know, I mean, he's got the full medical every 90 days. And then what needs to be adjusted. You know what's really working, what's not really working. So we get a full blood panel, top to bottom, for every 90 days. And then he creates a whole supplement things we take four times a day. And there's all sorts of adjustments every 90 days. And then the second one is the clinic in Buenos Aires that we will be going down again in November. And that's the stem cells. So yeah, so I mean we're good with each other on all levels, but it's keeping both of us healthy and fit. Dean: Yeah, keeping the racehorse healthy right. Dan: Keeping the races coming yeah exactly Right, right, right yeah. And then the team, the big thing is going to. We're going to make the four by four tool. So we just created the new book which you got. You came to your free zone, so casting that hiring, and we're going to make it every quarter. Every team member upgrades their own 4x4 and talks with their team about it, and the team leaders talk to Babs about it what they're doing. And just do this and get better at it, quarter by quarter, and I think that's going to really strengthen, really strengthen. You know, I mean our main capability and the third one with the entrepreneurs. The big thing my goal 20 years in the future is that the entire strategic coach program, all three levels, is in fact the free zone, and what we're doing now is that we're showing that every tool say, for example, the very first tool when people start coach is the lifetime extender, and that gives you a free zone, because the moment that you extend your life and have 20, 30, 50 extra years you weren't planning on. Yes, yeah, but the way you're looking at it is a free zone. Nobody else is looking at it this way and I already have proof after 30 years. So the lifetime extender has been there for 30 years, so the lifetime extender has been there for 30 years and I have proof now that I would say, on average, entrepreneurs are extending their working lifetime by probably 15 years as a result of that thinking exercise. Yeah, you know where they might be checking out at 60 or 65, know where they might be checking out at 60 or 65. Dean: Uh, they're pushing through to 80. So, yeah, it's very, it's really interesting to see just you know, being surrounded by your people in in strategic coach specifically, that are nobody's thinking about retirement, nobody's thinking about retirement, nobody's thinking about winding down or anything. You know, I think that's all part of you being the lead. You know the lead example the lead dog, the lead dog, exactly Moving into your ninth decade here with an aspiration to outperform your 70s, which was your greatest decade right. Dan: So that's on every level. Yeah, I would say, if you took any entrepreneurial gathering in the world, you know other programs or other associations and had the sort of the demographic mix that's the same as strategic coach, in other words, from, generally speaking, from your 30s to your 60s, generally, I mean that's where the majority of our clients would be. Strategic coach would be the only one where the word retirement is not used. Nobody ever talks about retirement Right exactly, and that's a free zone? Dean: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's so great to watch too, to see just your momentum. I always tell you too, but I always tell people you're like the ghost of Christmas. Future 22 years ahead of me the ghost of Christmas future 22 years ahead of me, you know it's like you know, because I just love. It's so inspiring to me to see that you know, because a lot of times you start to think, okay, I'm 58 now and you know 60 is approaching, but then that's still. You know even the conversations that we've had about the. You know 60s approaching, but then that's still. You know even the conversations that we've had about the. You know 20 years now, if you take a 25 year framework and start another at 60, kind of thing, that's yeah, it's wide open fields, you know, and where we're where we are now. Who even knows? I had my mind blown the other day. I don't know whether you've seen or heard any examples of the Google Notebook. Dan: Yeah, a couple of our team members are working with it. I mean, they introduced it to me, I didn't introduce it to them. Yeah, I think it's. You know, I haven't tried it yet, but I think within the next quarter I will. I'll try it and it seems to me that it's a lot better format than having a chat bot that you ask questions you ask questions for sure. Dean: Yeah, I mean I heard for sure. Dan: Yeah, I mean, I heard, you know, I heard an example where they were taking apart, you know, a topic and they were just talking to each other and I found it more informative and more, what I would say stimulating to listen to the back and forth conversation than if I was asking a question or it was asking me a question. I just think it's a better format for bringing out the essence of three topic. Dean: And Dan. The realness of the voices and the inflection and the talking a little bit over each other, the interaction and the laughing and the jokes, like it blew my mind Like nothing I've ever seen Zero, I mean, it was just there. Every time I forward it to somebody, they're literally like you can't believe that this is AI, that this is not two humans talking right now and I just think I also read that, on the scale of things, we are at level two right now, on our way to level five, which is the AGI, you know, pinnacle or whatever, the super intelligence. Dan: So if you imagine that, you know how can I bring that up, Because I'm a firm, complete, total non-believer that there's such a thing as AGI. Okay, and the reason is because all intelligence is specific, it's all specific and there is. I mean, we've already created the agi. It's called god, you know, and it's been around for a long time yeah, no, but the whole point is not. I mean it would be meaningless because nobody would use AGI. Dean: What does AGI stand for? Dan: Well, it's Artificial General Intelligence. General Intelligence yeah right, yeah, but there is no general intelligence, there's just specific intelligence. It's just your interaction with something which stimulates your intelligence. Dean: You know, that's it, I mean. Dan: I have squirrels in the yard. You know, in Toronto I'm in Chicago today, but in Toronto we've got squirrels, we've got lots of oak trees and I just watch them. And you know, when it comes to acorns, my intelligence doesn't compare to what a squirrel can do with acorns. You know. They can go up the tree, they can shake a branch. Ten acorns come down. They come down, they gather them up. They got ten different. I have no comprehension how they do what they do. That's specific intelligence. Dean: Squirrel has specific intelligence. Dan: The oak trees have intelligence, no-transcript thing by talking yes, yeah anyway, but I love you know, and I think the terms of you know of applying iq to artificial intelligence is kind of meaningless Right. Because it's somehow that our intelligence and computer intelligence is the same thing going on, and I just don't think it is. Yeah, I think it's completely different. I think it's really fast computing. Dean: Yes, yeah. Dan: So that's my take on it. Dean: Yeah, so that's my take on it, yeah, but if that's, I mean if you, there's something happening and it is evolving, and we're two, you know, a month shy, six weeks shy, of it being two years old since chat GPT first came on the scene in November of 22. And so you'd think, if, just for context, if whatever level of amazement we're at right now is a two on a scale of five, whether we're calling five AGI or whatever, it is just the advance, the directional advance, is pretty, as they say, indistinguishable from magic you know. Dan: Yeah, question is what are you doing? What are you using it for? That's my question. Dean: I don't know what I'm using it for, like I'm really not. You know, that's the. I just have conversations sometimes with my juniper voice and I just recently switched to a British lady. You can switch the voices that you have the conversations with and I'm just kind of sitting with in my mind here. I think we're all woefully under utilizing it. You know like I think we're just to know, yeah. Dan: Yeah Well, I don't think we're underusing that, we just haven't found the use for it yeah, that's true. Well, that's true, that's true it's like there's some ideal use of it, but there isn't any ideal use search, too. Dean: I just look at it as like what would I, how would I treat it or what would I do if I personified it? You know, like I've been imagining Juniper being a real person and you know sitting beside me. Dan: Let's take the eight profit activators. Activators yeah. So, activators you've done complete walkthroughs of each of the activators. Dean: Yes, I have. Dan: Okay, take activator number one. What's activator number one? Dean: Select single target market Okay. Dan: Run it through Google Notebook and see what conversation comes out of it. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Okay, and then what do you learn? Dean Jackson, creator of the first, you know, the first activator. What are you learning there? My feeling is the first time you do it, you'll see all. I guess. Dean: If I imagine that the capability of me, you know, documenting, like you know you've heard the things of, you know like is everything you know written down somewhere. That's really what it comes down to right is if I were to convey, If I were to convey everything that I know about the, about the profit activators, into this language model, what I would love for it to be able to you know, take, do what I do in a way that it's doing the question asking. You know, like I think most of the things that I've seen so far are training up a language model, like loading up a language model but then saying isn't this great, Go ahead, ask it anything, but you've got to you and I talked about that. You've got to have batteries included. You know, you've got to be the one that now you're limited by your, your ability to ask the right questions, to draw it out, and I think it would be infinitely more valuable if we could train it to ask you questions, like I would ask you questions to see where the opportunity is within the profit activator. So I have a thing that I do called a 50-minute marketing sprint, and I basically go through the eight profit activators before, during, after we overlay it on your business and I teach people how to kind of think, how to divide their business into those categories, how to recognize what the driving you know metrics are for each of those and see where the opportunity is. And then, once you know, even with the we have the profit activator score card, using your scorecard model of the you know each of the eight that I think being able to interpret what somebody needs from that like if somebody's a four on profit activator number two, which is compel prospects to call you but they want to be a 12, that would be intelligent enough to say hey, Dan, it looks like you are. Say hey, Dan, it looks like you are. I mean, what we always say to people with the scorecards is you know, I'm looking for people who are clear on Profit Activator 1. They know who they want to attract and they're high on Profit Activator 5, which is deliver a dream come true experience for your prospects. But then they dip down in Profit Activator 2 and Profit Activator 4, which are, you know, compel your prospects to call you and make compelling offers. So I can help people bridge that gap If you know who you want and you can get them great results. Let's do this, let's take some, let's see how we can compel people to call you? Dan: Yeah, I think you're a week away. What I mean? A week away, actually two weeks. We're traveling next Sunday, but two weeks away, I think you're two weeks away from us having a conversation about your first experience of taking you know, creating a transcript for yourself and you can just walk through Profit Activator number one and then it's transcribed and then feed it into the notebook and it'll take it apart and create a conversation between two people. And then you get the recording back and you listen to it and it will take it apart and create a conversation between two people. And then you get the recording back and you listen to it. I bet you'll be very what I would say stimulated by the conversation that comes out and you'll learn three or four new things about how to explain profit activator number one. Dean: It's crazy. Dan: I mean, we did, I'm just telling you how I would approach it, and Hamish McDonald is doing it. I'm going to ask him. The book that we're writing right now, the first chapter, we have the transcript from it the recording. He'll just run it through and send me back for the recording. Okay, and see, I've got a smart human between me and the technology I'm just pointing out my approach to technology period I always have a smart human between you and the technology, but I'll get back to recording and I can listen to it. Okay, and yeah, I love that. I think you'll be, I think you'll be stimulated, I think I'll be stimulated. We can have a nice conversation about what our experiences were. Yeah, We've got an assignment for the next podcast. Dean: Wow, joe Polish and I, we did a Zoom this week with Cherie Dr Cherie Ong, joe's girlfriend, who's a vaginal plastic surgeon, and so we were talking about some marketing things for her and we went, so we did the Zoom. Joe had the honor transcript of the put it into that Google notebook. Transcript of the put it into that google notebook, and to hear this conversation about the conversation that we had was just, it was amazing. I mean, it really was. Dan: Yeah, it was, it's just something yeah, yeah, I mean, I have about you know not what you're talking about, but a different ai experience is every day I have two or three things that just occur to me and where I might have gone to google before I go to perplexity yeah, because google is a search and google is a search engine and perplexity is an answer engine, and there's a big difference between answers and searches. Okay, yeah, and yeah, I did one, because I'm creating this new tool which is called. We haven't talked about that yet, but how you're always luckier is the name of the tool. Okay, so I put in a perplexity 10 significant ways that successful entrepreneurs consider themselves lucky. That's my prompt for and five seconds later I had yeah, and it was useful. It was very useful. Like you know, they're very alert and curious about possible opportunities. You know they're very alert and curious about possible opportunities. That's one way that you know that entrepreneurs prepare themselves for luck. Ok, they have connections with you know creative people. They have connections with creative. So there's 10 of them, you know 10 of them, and I said that's very gratifying. I found that very gratifying, and I also have the suspicion that my prompts are sort of unique, so I'm getting a whole set of unique answers back. Okay, so there was another one. There's this general narrative out there that, because of the political polarization in the United States, that we were on the brink of civil war, and I said perplexity, give me 10 reasons why, in the midst of this political polarization, in 2024, there won't be a second civil war. Five seconds later I got the answer and they were all very plausible. There's absolutely almost nothing in common between 2024 and 1860. You see, it's just news media people with probably too much college education creating new theories. And you realize that, when it comes to getting things done outside of government, the United States is basically going on as normal. It's just things are being sold, things are being created, things are being shipped new ideas are being explored and everything like that. So, I've got this relationship with perplexity, that any topic comes along, I says perplexity, tell me 10 things about this, and then I get my 10 things back. So I've got a new book. One of the new quarterly books is coming up. Dean: It's the 10 reasons for anything. I like that. Dan: Yeah, and that is that anything you can mention. There's probably 10 reasons for it Maybe 100 reasons, but there's at least 10 reasons. You know 10 reasons why Dean Jackson and Dan Sullivan like talking to each other. Right, I bet there's 10. Dean: At least yeah. Did you ask the follow-up question? Dan? Did you ask the question of what are 10 reasons that there might be a civil war? Dan: I would, but I'm not looking for that. Dean: Right, right, right. I just wonder if they can build the argument the other way too. Dan: Oh, sure, sure sure, although perplexity is kind of, I haven't noticed any real bias yet. I've been working with it for six months and I haven't noticed any bias. They simply answer your prompt on the basis of what you wanted to explore and it explores it. But I wouldn't be interested in 10 reasons why there might be a civil war. Dean: Right but. Dan: I think perplexity would come back and say I'm sorry, but my information doesn't allow me to actually explain that Right. Yeah, it does not compute. Yeah, and you know, a couple of times it's come back and say there just isn't enough bases to support. You know the answer that you're looking for. Dean: Right, right, right. Do you use chat GPT for anything different than? Dan: what you use. Dean: Never used it oh okay so you use perplexity as the main thing right, that's it yeah. I'm a monogamous guy. Dan: I'm a monogamous guy. You want to? Dean: have that. Dan: Why would I have two? Dean: I mean, it's like having two wives. You want to grant someone a monopoly right, yeah, and then go deep with it. Dan: Then get really good at that. One thing I'll use this. I'll use the Google notebook, but I won't be the one doing it. Somebody else is going to be doing it for me. Dean: Yes, exactly Me too, that's, I've got Glenn doing that and that's really it's pretty amazing. We're right now on the thing of Okay, we have homework, we have homework. I'll get it done you get it done. Okay, and then? Dan: we'll talk about our. We'll talk about our results. Dean: Yes. Dan: We'll have as a matter of fact fact, we'll get them back and you can send me yours and I'll send you. Know, you just send the link and I'll send the link to mine and you can. Yes, I'll listen to yours, you'll listen to mine, and then we'll have a roaring conversation now. Dean: So what was the question? You wanted me to ask it again. So I'm feeding in Profit Activator 1 and then just seeing what the conversation is. Dan: Right yeah. What is the Google notebook conversation related to? Dean: I think what I'll do is I'll do the 50-minute marketing sprint and see what they say. I think that'll be amazing, yes. Dan: Yeah. Dean: That's pretty smart, you know I think it's not named properly. Dan: Google Notebook. I don't think it's named properly. It should be called the eavesdropping. Dean: Yes, exactly. Dan: No, I mean, wouldn't you like over here two people talking about Dean Jackson's? Dean: This is what's amazing is to hear them. Dan: You're eavesdropping on two very positive people talking in an excited way about your thinking. I mean, who wouldn't want to eavesdrop on that? Dean: Yeah, so, joe, I loaded up episode one of the I Love Marketing podcast and it came back. I mean it was so great to tell the. It was telling the story, so we do a deep dive. It's a conversation between two giants in the marketing world. Dean and Joe, two giants in the marketing world Dean and Joe and they're telling the stories about how they got started and how their earliest jobs really led the foundation. I mean to hear these things talking about it like they're just kind of enthusiastically. Dan: You know, can I tell you something? I think this is the end of social media at the intelligent level, the whole point of social media from the standpoint of Mark Zuckerberg, or anybody else that they've got your attention. This takes your attention away from them. This takes your attention away from them. This takes your attention away from them. Yeah, I mean, I've never been on social media, but I have observed that you're giving your attention away to somebody else. Okay, yes, yes, and with that, you're returning your attention to what's interesting to you. Yeah, you've just created something that's unique, okay. So, Dean takes Profit Activator number one, puts it into Google Notebook Okay, and it comes back with a totally uniquely produced conversation between two AI voices, strictly on Dean's thinking. My feeling is you've returned your attention. I think you've returned your attention to yourself. Dean: I think you're right and it's funny because we're going to take that now, take that conversation that they had and put it through another AI that will create supporting video. I've had this idea of doing the I Love Marketing podcast, which was my idea was to go back to the first 100 episodes and do a commentary on them, but I think that it might be fascinating to do you know, I love marketing AI to have the Google notebook do their summary on each of the first 100 episodes. It really is a really good 10 minute. 10 minute deep dive, as they say. Dan: Yeah, well, it's you know, to me it's really but I think what if you choose to apply this in a way that's beneficial to yourself? Dean: Yeah. Dan: I think you want your own thinking coming back at you, being discussed by two other people. Dean: Yeah that's. I love that. I really do. Like you're absolutely right, it's so. Yeah, it's a moving sidewalk for sure. Like it's definitely a catalyst for connective thinking, you know, to then have a conversation, yeah yeah, but anyway, it's really. Dan: I think it's really neat. You know, one thing that really occurs to me is the wow factor that everybody's talking about. Gee, it's just like human with a high IQ. No, it isn't. It's just a further advancement of technology. Dean: That's all it is. We've been living this. Dan: We've been living this. Humans have been living this forever. This is just a new extension of technology. Dean: It isn't magical. Dan: It isn't human, you know, it's just technological. I had a lot of religion when I was a kid and I can tell when other people are starting to get religious with technology. Dean: Uh-huh right. Dan: I said, you know, when people don't have religion as children, they tend to try to create it out of other experience when they get older. Dean: Yeah, that's true. So you have a. You got a big week this week coming. Dan: No, I just have one. I have a free zone on. Tuesday and I'm starting my next. I'm just starting my next round of connector calls. Dean: Okay, yeah, I'll have to look at the calendar when our next connector call is and get on board. Dan: Well, not free zone, but I have a 10 times connector call at 1030 your time tomorrow morning. Oh, okay, yeah. And this is where I'm testing out strengthening your strengths for the first time. Dean: Okay, oh, that's why it's hot off the press. Well, I mean I. There's a greater than zero percent chance that I might fly up to chicago for to get out of here. Dan: So we'll see when's it supposed to hit tampa? Dean: well, tuesday, wednesday, will be the peak fall, so we'll see it it supposed to hit Tampa. When's it supposed to hit Tampa? Well, tuesday, wednesday will be the peak fall, so we'll see it's supposed to. You know, form more, get more structure and stuff today, so they'll see what the expected path is and stuff. It could go further north or south, or it could fizzle out. You never know. Dan: Yeah, yeah. The news media loves this stuff, you know. So drama, you know, and they've got a narrative going now. These are the worst hurricanes in American history. I said no, they're just hitting more populated areas. Dean: Oh man Well now you know the whole conspiracy, now that is, that was enhanced hurricane, that they manipulated the weather, dan, and pushed it yeah, to North Carolina because they want. It just so happens that all these mountain towns. Dan: They want a lot of people not voting Republican. Dean: Well, they want the lithium underneath there. The mountain areas there sit on the highest concentrations of lithium in the world. Dan: We're talking real conspiracy here. Dean: Oh, yeah, yeah, no, that's exactly it. We're talking about like weaponized weather, to shut down, to make Asheville the next smart city. Dan: And I'll tell you something that there is actually something unique about North Carolina, that the finest quartz in the world that go into microchips, the finest quartz comes from one town in North Carolina. Dean: Yeah, I mean in the world. Dan: I'm talking. Well, this is not lithium, it's quartz, I mean maybe there's also lithium there, it's the same thing, yeah. But that town's been going for 30, 40 years, you know and everything else else. But it's really interesting that the finest grade quartz just comes from a mountain in one little town in north carolina, I think that's an interesting fact, it's proof of rule number three that's so funny, it's true. Number three is rule number three is there are no rules, no rules, no. Life's not fair. Dean: Life's not fair, right, sorry, right. Everything is made up, nobody's in charge and life isn't fair, that's right. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, you get those down pat and you know, you know, and life gets real simple. Dean: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I love it simple. Dan: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely I love it. Do you know the american one dollar bill, the left hand side of the american, backside you? Know, it's got the pyramid. Huh got one there I don't have paper bill I don't know. Dean: I don't think I have paper bill. No, I don't have one. Dan: I have lots. I have ATMs in my closet. I have ATMs in shoe boxes. I've got ATMs in the freezer compartment. I always have cash, but that's very interesting. But you see the pyramid there. That's the three rules. Dean: Oh, it's made up. Dan: Everything's made up. Everything's made up. That's one side of the pyramid. The other side to that second side, nobody's in charge. And number three is life's not fair. Dean: And if you get that, you're a happy American. And the I is. We're always watching. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, see if you've been good or bad, that's exactly right. Dean: That's exactly right, yeah. Dan: I love it Well anyway, we both have assignments. Dean: I'm excited about that. Dan: First thing tomorrow morning and it'll be really interesting. But I'll just go to Hamish, because Hamish is playing with it already and it's really great. And yeah, this is a neat site. We can have our listeners out there do the same thing, you know. Dean: I love it. Dan: I'm going to go to Perplexity and say tell me the 10 most important things about Google Notebook. Oh, very good yeah I like that Because I bet perplexity has a better notion of what it does than Google does. Dean: I wonder if perplexity I'm going to ask perplexity give me the top 10 things or top 10 ways I should be using you, the top 10 ways you could be useful to me. Dan: I asked it, the R factor question, you know the perplexity. I said perplexity if we were having this discussion three years from today and you're looking back over the three years, what has to happen for you to feel happy with your progress? Okay, okay. Five seconds later I had it Okay. And then I said what are the 10 biggest obstacles to you being happy with your progress? And then it said at the end if I solve these 10, if I overcome these 10 biggest obstacles, I'll be very happy with my progress. Obstacles I'll be very happy with my progress. That was a good answer. Dean: That was a good answer. Yeah, that's great, I'm going to do that. That's funny. I'm going to see what they say. Well, so next week you're traveling, and then so two weeks. Dan: Yeah, we're up to the cottage for Thanksgiving, which is and so, but we go up on Thursday, we have the big dinner on Saturday night and Babs and I come back to the city on Sunday. Dean: Drive back on Sunday. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, so Monday. Dan: Monday's the holiday, but right, yep. So two, two, two Sundays. Yeah, all right, you got homework I got homework, got homework, absolutely I'll talk to you soon, okay, bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, Dan and I have a thought-provoking discussion on balancing political views with interpersonal dynamics. Dean shares delightful tales from mingling with influencers in Toronto, like Joe Polish and Evan Carmichael. The intersection of politics and entertainment is examined using Taylor Swift as an example to explore the idea of keeping various domains of life separate. Dan emphasizes the growing importance for political figures to focus on their designated roles. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the balance between political views and personal relationships, sharing anecdotes from our own experiences and the importance of keeping these domains separate. Dean shares stories from his recent social gatherings in Toronto with influencers like Joe Polish and Evan Carmichael, highlighting the social dynamics of such events. We explore the intersection of politics and entertainment, using Taylor Swift's political expressions as a case study, and reflect on how public opinion can be influenced by celebrity endorsements. We examine the underlying economic factors driving societal changes, emphasizing the costs of money, energy, labor, and transportation as key drivers beyond political discourse. Dan highlights the resilience of the entrepreneurial spirit in adapting to political landscapes and the role of the U.S. Constitution in shaping American society. We take a nostalgic journey back to the 1950s, discussing cultural elements like TV dinners and the Mickey Mouse Club, and how these shaped our personal stories. We reflect on dietary changes and the shift towards healthier habits, sharing insights on the enduring freshness of certain foods and the importance of sustainable eating practices. We emphasize the importance of building good habits, using personal anecdotes to illustrate how small, consistent changes can have a profound impact over time. We explore the concept of accountability buddies and consistent routines in managing personal health, highlighting the significance of protein intake and balanced diets. We conclude with a philosophical reflection on human nature and the challenges of making lasting lifestyle changes, underscoring the importance of long-term vision and ethical behavior. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: There we go, mr Sullivan. Ah, much better. Okay, great that was my AirPods for some reason. Or, dadiki, you're not the first one to say it, so I'll just put it on. We'll go old-fashioned here, just on speaker. Dan: Yeah, yeah, sometimes old fashioned here just on speaker. Dean: Yeah, yeah, sometimes old fashioned works, you know, sometimes yeah, I can give you an example. Dan: I can give you an example Oxygen you know, been around for a while. Most people don't give it a thought. Most people don't give a thought, and yet, and yet, it's. Dean: I find I appreciate it, you know of a thought and yet, and yeah, that's yeah, I find I appreciate it. You know well, I have, you know, as you know, I have a new appreciation for oxygen, whereas a couple of years ago my lack of oxygen was a problem. But yes, yeah I fully appreciate oxygen. We were saying how we just so everybody knows we had a little false start on the cast. We had static, so the first minute or so was we decided to switch over to this mode here. But we're saying I'm in Toronto right now, as is Dan. We had a nice brunch yesterday and I was sharing with Dan that. I had dinner with Joe Polish last night and Evan Carmichael and Chad Jenkins and Krista and I can't remember her last name, dan, but she lives in Vancouver and South Africa. Yeah, she's in 10 times. Dan: Well, anyway, I was noticing, I was just looking. They've been doing the polls on Taylor Swift coming down on the side and it's made absolutely no difference. It's made absolutely no difference. One way or the other, it hasn't made any difference, and what it tells me is that the vote is sort of locked in for the presidential. Dean: Yeah, it was locked in. Dan: Yeah, it's made a difference for her in that there's a lot of people who are getting rid of their Taylor. Swift tickets and get off. When you get off the trail you're in the weeds, get back down as much as you can. You know, and it's not particularly anything to do with this particular election, but my sense is there's a there's a growing desire on the part of people that if you're in one area of life, stay in that area of life. Don't come and, you know, don't make all of life a political stew you know, like you know everything else. Dean: And you know I wonder if there's any examples where that has worked out for people in anyone I was mentioning yesterday at the brunch that you know reminds me of the dixie chicks debacle in 2001. Yeah, and the documentary you know that came out afterwards. Shut up and sing but what, uh? Dan: and that was before. Dean: You know that was really, that was before the internet and cancel culture. So that was mainstream media driving that. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just say, you know, I like my categories distinct and separate. I don't want the you know, I don't want them all mixing up with each other and you know, and I by the same token, in the political realm, I would prefer that the politicos, you know, the people who run for office and run office. They don't attach themselves to other areas of life. You know, just do your politicking and, you know, be good at it and when the time comes, get out. And, you know, work on your handicap. You know. And yeah, it's interesting, you know, and yeah it's interesting, and I think what it is? It's the technological, the easy technological means to mix things together. You know, I mean you see a series of five second flashes or two second flashes and it's like everything that's important is everything else and nothing means anything more than anything else, and that's not really true, you know. I mean, that's not true for any person. There's definitely things that are more important than other things, and I just don't like being told that you should mix everything together. Dean: I agree, I mean the whole yeah, it is. Yeah, I think you're right, Stay in their lanes. We don't want everything, yeah all, becoming moral issues or anything you know. Dan: Well, they all become political issues. The problem is, everything is reduced to a common denominator, that everything has a political meaning, and you know there are those who you know who do that. But I don't do that, you know I have great friends who I know I have great friends that don't vote the way that I do and the way they vote has no bearing whatsoever on my friendship with them. Dean: Yes yes, I agree A hundred percent. Dan: As long as they don't bring up the subject. Dean: They don't try and convert you Exactly. Dan: No. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I find that same thing. That's really. I mean remember it used to be more you know. It used to be like a private matter kind of thing. Right, like people would. You'd never really discuss it, but now it's like everything. Everybody's got a megaphone and everybody's very especially on the polls. I think we're definitely more polarized than I remember us being. I just remember the debate the other night. Watching the debate was just such a series of you're a liar, no, you're a liar. No, you lied about this, you're a liar and the whole. I mean, that's all it was. My favorite ever debate moment was Obama-Romney in 2008. Obama was responding to Romney suggesting that under his you know, maybe it was 2012. Dan: Yeah, probably it was McCain in 2008. Dean: Yeah, because under he was proposing that under Obama the Navy had less ships than they did in 1910. And Obama, just without skipping a beat, said yeah, that's right, and there's also less horses and bayonets. I don't know if you noticed, but they have this new thing called aircraft carriers where we can actually fly the planes right off of the ships. I mean it was just so funny that bring, there's less horses and bayonets. I mean that's pretty funny. That was probably prepared for. You know you like to think that's off the cuff, but I think that had to have been what could possibly mitt accuse us of, or maybe he said no what? Dan: what I suspect is what I suspect is that uh mitt had tried to line out previously in some other situation yeah, and you know, you know which goes to show. You only try your lines out for the first time, right? Dean: Don't do it for the second time. Dan: Right, yeah, yeah, so anyway. But I think what happens is that I was noticing that there's a real distinction between Trump, on the one hand, and Obama. Is that everybody feels they know Trump? And very few people feel they know her and even after 90 minutes of a debate, you still don't have a handle on who this person is. You know who is she is, you know and, and yeah, and I think that in the end they're going to, they're going to vote for the known quantity Risky. Dean: It's going to be various things that I'm seeing. That's my take. Dan: I mean, you know, that's my take anyway. Dean: The things I'm seeing now on my algorithm. What they're presenting to me is the I saw, you know, side by side or above and below video of her saying one thing, you know in 2020 or 2022 or whatever it was in the past, saying taking a hard stance on something, and then, in 2024, saying exactly the opposite of what she said in the you know in that time, and so very well done of letting her, in her own words, show how she's flip-flopping. Dan: Yeah, I mean, I'm a straight ticket voter. My first election was 68, and that was. They changed the voting age when I was 24, the in 64, so I was 20 years old and the voting age at that time was 21. And then they changed it in the next four years, so I the first time I voted was 68 and I've been straight ticket ever since then you know, why tell you know, why Tell me, you know why I'm straight ticking. It's simpler. Dean: It's simpler. Dan: This is who I am. Yeah, it's like we're wearing the same clothes every day Having the same uniform. But the whole point of it is that I vote on the basis of entrepreneurism. Which party seems to be more supportive of entrepreneurism? And it's definitely one and not the other, and it's been that way for 32, 56 years. It's been that way for 56 years. So that's my criteria for voting. It's the same thing here in Canada. You know, because I voted both countries, because I'm a citizen of both countries. Dean: Oh, very nice, and you are too, and you are too, and you are too, I am too. Dan: Yeah, yeah, if you care to exercise your vote. My franchise, they call it. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Your franchise. Yeah, but it's Peter Zion who I'm a great fan of and he said you know, the United States as a country, as a landmass, you know, given their position in the world geographically and looking at their demographics, have so much going for them that Americans are the only people in the world who can treat domestic politics strictly as a form of popular entertainment. Domestic politics strictly as a form of popular entertainment. And you know, and that's what I get, is that there's, you know, and I wrote a book about two quarters ago called the Great Meltdown, and what I said is that probably politics is secondary to the cost of four things the cost of money how much does it cost to have money? Interest rates, you know, what kind of return on money do you have? The second thing is energy cost of labor. So that's m e, l, and then t is transportation, and in every case the united states has the lowest cost on the planet and that means that that's going to determine things. Those four costs money, energy, labor and transportation are going to be the dominant factor and I think that politics is a dog that's being pulled together, pulled forward by those four, you know, by those four factors in society. People don't really, they don't experience them necessarily that way, but they experience that things were better four years ago than they are today. You, know, somehow they have a feeling about that, and so you know. So it's like the ocean. Everybody talks about the waves and the wind, but really it's the current that makes the difference. And I think economic factors are not winds and waves, they're the current. Oh, that's interesting. The news is about waves and wind and storms and everything else, but that's not what determines things. Dean: That makes a lot of sense. Yes, yeah, the currents are what goes underneath, as always moving in a direction for sure. I remember when Oliver Stone did the movie on Putin, where it was like an interview type of series. I don't know whether we've talked about that or whether you saw it, but his whole he was saying, you know, because Putin has seen so many presidents come and go all the way since the first Bush, right, he's just been the constant. And his analysis was that he sees all these men come and they have, you know, the desire for change and they have ideas for change, and the people, you know, they present those ideas and the people vote for them. But as soon as they get into office, what he called the men in the suits come and tell them how it really is, and then there is no change, and that's the current I think that you're talking about is, and then there is no change, and that's the current I think that you're talking about. Everybody would talk about the deep state or the you know the thing, the behind the scenes, the big picture stuff that you know it's mostly the whoever's at the helm is really winds and waves, you know yeah. Dan: Do you think that this was truly an understanding of the united states or he was just reflecting what was true? Dean: in the Kremlin, maybe I mean, but it seems so Because my theory is that there's bureaucratic families in Russia today. Dan: You know they're the result of intermarriage over a century. They were the behind the scenes people when the czar was there. They were the behind the scenes people when the czar was there they were the behind the scenes people, and they don't have political views, they just have a way of getting things done, you know, like and, and the survival of their family is the most important thing. Remember I'll switch countries here remember that guy who went on a murder streak in Norway and he walked into the parliament and he shot up the Norwegian parliament and then ran out and then he took a boat over to an island where he really did some damage and I think he killed a large number of sort of teenage children, and these were all the children of the people who were the bureaucrats. They were. You know they were upper echelon people, but they were government bureaucrats. They were sort of faceless people. Dean: You didn't know them. Dan: And he says you don't make any change unless you kill the bureaucrats. He says you don't kill the politicians, you kill the bureaucrats, they're the. You don't kill the politicians, you kill the bureaucrats, they're the ones you want to kill. Yeah, and kill the next generation. And the Norwegians, of course, don't have death penalties. So he's up, you know, working on his rubric cube or something. But it's really interesting. A lot of people don't think of that. I bet in Washington there's families who were upper echelon people in 1900, and they're still upper echelon and they intermarry like aristocracy. There's bureaucratic aristocracy and they intermarry and everything else, but they're never seen. They're never seen. You never know who these people are, but they do have power really in any way. Dean: And you know, I just look at how little, and I don't know. This may be ignorant, but how little it seems to have an impact on my life in a way that I can do anything about it. You know, and that's where I think entrepreneur, capitalism like as long as capitalism's allowed and we're allowed to pursue our self-interest, that's really the biggest driver of everything. Dan: Yeah, we're making money on election day, right Personal agency right of our own outcomes. Yeah, you know, and I've been talking. You know there are people who are just the opposite of you and they're intensely involved in it and they said you know what happens if all the people we don't like get elected? And I said you'll have a good, you'll have a good entrepreneurial year. Dean: It's being adaptable. Right, You've got to deal with what the situation is, what the current is. Dan: Yeah, but my take is that if you spend some time reading the Constitution, and there's a lot of neat videos, educational videos Probably the best source of this is Hillsdale College. It's a college in Michigan and their whole thing is that America is a unique country because of the Constitution, and so they put a lot of effort, they put a lot of money, they put a lot of time into making sure that the students really comprehend what the Constitution really does. Dean: And. Dan: I've not been there but I've. You know I became interested in it because it's not much bigger now than it was when it was enacted in the 17th, and you know it's not. It's changed very little. It's changed very little. I heard the phrase that, if you typed up the Constitution in 1789, I think is when it was enacted a single space so a single space typed, it would be 23 pages in 1789. Dean: And if you were to do it? Dan: today it would be 27 pages. They've added four pages in 230 years, almost 250 years, and in the very first paragraph of the Constitution it says this is the supreme law of the land. Okay, so the Constitution, that document, is the supreme law of the land. Nothing else can be higher than the Constitution. And then they put in a whole set of rules where it becomes very difficult to change the Constitution. So if you have an amendment to the Constitution, you got to get two-thirds of the House of Representatives to vote for it, two-thirds of the Senate and then three-quarters of all the state legislatures, so roughly, you know 37 states. The legislature would have to vote for it. And it better be a persuasive amendment. Dean: Better be compelling. Dan: Yeah, exactly, yeah, that's you know, and everybody tears their, you know, and everybody rips their clothing and tears the thing and they said, yeah, but it's a bunch of white guys in the 1700s and I said yeah but they did a good job. You know there was about. There's maybe about 3 million of them you know, total population 3 million and they were just the Atlantic seaboard and look where it is now. I think they did a good job. Dean: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think you're absolutely right. That's kind of the thing. At the underpinning of it is the individual pursuit of it's all about the individual. Dan: It's all about the individual. Yeah, the whole thing is geared to give individuals unique freedom to develop themselves. Yeah, so I'm kind of for that and that helps. Dean: That's kind of like you know, that's appealing to entrepreneurs yeah, I'm I the direction that's going in. Dan: I'm inclined toward that direction. I kind of like that direction yeah. And so my sense is there isn't much that will happen in any election that's going to alter a 250-year momentum in a particular direction. I just don't think there's much. I mean it might be useful for entertainment purposes and everything else, and I vote. I always make sure I vote, but I go to bed at 9 o'clock. On Election Day and I just check the results in the morning Three weeks later to see who won. No, I get up the next morning and I check in. Dean: In any case, the last few times it's been. You know the real. No matter who won air quotes, it's always some question and contested and you know it'll be weeks before the final decision is made, kind of thing. Dan: Well, I just think it's a poor career choice where you get paid for being outraged. Dean: Yeah right. Dan: Yeah, I think you know I really haven't developed this thought very much, but I think so much of the complexity of society today is that there's just so many of us and we're electronically empowered. Dean: Well, you hit it on the head right there that there's so many of us with a megaphone, that everybody has the megaphone, everybody has reach to all the others and you can collectively get on a you know, collectively gather momentum with you know what everybody is saying. You and I were talking at brunch yesterday. I've been reading the Same as Ever book by Morgan Housel that she recommended and it's fascinating. It really is interesting and yeah, that kind of you know. All of this is the same as ever. Everybody's been the winds and the waves have always gone in one direction, but the current is everything. Have always gone in one direction, but the current is everything. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I mean he makes a really great case for evolution. He says you know, evolution. He says it's roughly about 3.8 billion years that we can from the early, I guess the earliest cell life. He's using that as the starting point and he says you know, a lot of things have gotten worked out over 3.8 billion that you probably can't reverse. You know 3.8 billion. So it would behoove you to pay attention in what direction evolution is going and basically how it operates. Basically how it operates and it's you know, and it doesn't have to make big changes at any point along the way. It just makes, you know, thousands of little changes, little alterations, but they're not reversible, unnoticeable, yeah yeah, yeah. And you know and I can appreciate that, being in my ninth decade, I can appreciate that that I made decisions when I was 12 years old that were good decisions, and I'm profiting from these decisions 75, 80 years later. Dean: Yeah, that is so funny. Yeah, it's amazing if you think all the way back like that. You know the decisions when you were 12 years old were in the heart of the 50s Right, the golden. Dan: Yeah, yeah it was. That was a golden era Boy that was a TV's in every car and every drive, yeah, tv dinners, yeah, yeah, especially, especially the TV dinners. Yeah, especially the TV dinners. You know, that was a big deal. And you know Mickey Mouse Club you know Right. I mean and that. Dean: What more do you? Dan: want. Right, mine was what's her name? Last name was Tracy, oh, doreen, tracy, doreen. Dean: Tracy, okay, yeah, yeah. Dan: Apparently, she was the most popular and she's the only one I met. I spent about three days of her traveling as a USO show in Korea in 1966, 1910. It was neat, you know, just having her. She was you know, she was 10. She was, you know, 20 and everything else. She was 10, she was 20 and everything else. But a nice person, very talkative and really self-reflective. I sense that this is a person who thinks about things very deeply. And she said you know, this is my last entertainment event, what we're doing here in South Korea with the USO show, which is the nonprofit organization that provides hospitality and entertainment for US military. And she said you know, I'm not. I was as talented at 12 as I am today and said I haven't gotten any more talented but, I was more talented at that time than other 12 year olds. So she said I got to be a mom. But she says I, you know. She says I've hit my head on the ceiling of being talented, and now I have to. Now I have to go back and I have to start a new career and she went back and she became a talent manager for Warner Brothers and she was from that period, you know, when she went back, when she started doing that, right straight through until she was 65 and she was well regarded as a, you know, a really first class talent manager. She had Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa was one of her. You know assignments? Okay, yeah, because he was with Warner Brothers. He was with Warner Brothers recording. Dean: Oh wow, very interesting. Dan: Yeah, but I found her a very, you know, very upbeat, very positive person, very engaging sort of person. You know, just three days about five shows and that was it. I never thought about it again until the Internet came along and I you know, just you know, I just looked her up and yeah, she had done that. And then when she retired from Warner Brothers she started a jazz and blues club in Hollywood and then she died about eight years later, she died of cancer. Dean: Oh yeah. Dan: But it was for someone I was. You know, I was right in there with Mickey Mouse Club when I was 12 years old. Dean: Yeah, you were. That's who the show was for. Yeah. Dan: Right, yeah, yeah, I mean you had Pepsi, you had chips and you had Hostess Twinkie. I mean you had Pepsi, you had chips and you had Hostess Twinkie. Dean: I mean it's a balanced meal. Yeah, a balanced meal. Wow, twinkie's been around that long, yeah, yeah. Dan: I'll tell you something. I talked to a nutritionist at Canyon Ranch about the Twinkie. And he said if you had a Twinkie from 1956, you had never opened the package. And he said you went down to the supermarket right now and you bought yourself a this year's Twinkie. And you opened them up. There's no difference. They taste the same the one from 1956 is just as fresh as the one that you bought this afternoon. Dean: Like Pop-Tarts. That's what Jerry Seinfeld said they never go stale. Dan: they can't go stale because they were never fresh they were yeah, okay, the prize is find an organic part of a twinkie. Dean: There's nothing organic about this treat joe was just telling me about this research that's all coming out now about seed oils and things that he's talking about. I think there's a book called Dark Calories I think is what it is but some crazy amount of our calories in the normal American diet like over 30% of our calories come from these oils? Dan: Yes, exactly, yeah, you know like corn oil canola oil. Yeah, and all the. You know the difference. Yeah, I mean, that's one thing. That Babs got on about a year ago Only butter. Either olive oil or butter? Yeah, butter. And that steak yesterday was good with the butter, wasn't it it? Dean: really was. Yeah, so we should tell we found a new. For years we have been going to the same two places Jacques here in Yorkville, or Le Select Bistro for our Saturday, and we tried for the first time in frenchie, frenchie in, which is essentially in the lobby of the hilton hotel in the business district, in the business yeah, so we had some interesting experiences, but that steak was really well was the steak was really good yeah, yeah, and it was medium rare, it was perfectly medium rare, and I particularly, and they knife selection ceremony steak knife selection yeah, and he brought a box of this. Dan: This is kevin brought the steak knives and he opened it up and and I said there were six of them, and I said do you, kevin, do you recommend one of these which? Dean: one do you recommend? Dan: he said I think this year, I think this was a good year, so I think I picked up one of them, you know I over tipped him because he was responsive. Dean: He was very, very responsive. He really was responsive. Dan: Yeah, because they had a rule that breakfast ended at 11, but lunch didn't start until 1130. And I said so do we have to wait? And he says no. He says do whatever you want Order whatever you want and I'll take care of it, but anyway, it was really good. And I'm really hooked on steak. You're the. You're the fault of this. Dean: You know you're the cause because you convinced that it's my inch, I got you on blue t-shirts and now steaks. This is all, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah I'm working on fountain. I change your direction. Dan: I change in your direction slow enough that you don't get a big head about it. Dean: Right, oh, that's great. I love that. Slow enough that I don't get a big head about it. Dan: That's right yeah. Dean: That's funny. Dan: No, but I'm not seeing a huge difference. I mean I never got in trouble. I mean, like I'm not someone who huge difference. I never got in trouble. I'm not someone who is in big trouble physically and everything else, but the weight goes up over time. Right now, I'm about 15 pounds heavier than when I graduated from high school and I was in good shape because I played three sports you know all four years. I was always in a sports team and during the summers I caddied at the golf course. Dean: So that kept me in good shape. Dan: Yeah, yeah, and but the thing about it was I eat very well at meals. It's between meals that get me into trouble. And that's because of that's because of cravings. And I noticed that if you eat a lot of beef, you don't have cravings. That's the truth. Dean: That is absolutely true. The satiety is high. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yes, yeah, I find that too. But I also find, dan, like I've been, you, doing, uh, carnivore for the last little while here, and I noticed a difference, like in terms of that. But there have been times. It's not a, it's not a straight path to the moon here. There's some veering of things and I noticed that even the slightest little. You introduce something into a thing and it gets a foothold. You're right that the cravings and the easy to veer off path for a little while Low enough that you don't notice it. Dan: There's a part of us that has to be a watchdog. There's part of us that has to be vigilant. You know, and and you know and I think they're good habits. Basically, the watchdogs are good habits and and you know that it's an interesting thing about people who have good habits and they're, you know, using other descriptions about them they're ethical, they're moral you know they're law abiding, and what they found is that those people have the best sense of a long future. They find that morality and legality and everything that we admire in people is actually a function of how long their future is, how far they can see, and they can see that something they do today either supports their positive long future or it would undermine it. And one of the tests they've done is inner city children who are members of gangs Okay, robbery of some sort and what they find is that their sense of the future is never more than 24 hours. Is that their sense of the future is never more than 24 hours? And so they say, if I do this now, can I be in trouble in 24 hours? And you know, you stop some kid on the street, you force him to take off his sneakers or his jacket. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Are you going to get in trouble in 24 hours? Probably not, wow. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, so you're being moral and being ethical and being law abiding is a function of how clear you are about a longer future, where today's actions really matter. Dean: Yes, well, that brings you know. That's funny. That kind of ties in with what you. We were talking in Palm Beach six months ago about this behaviors right. Bringing bringing their here, meaning just identifying what are the. It was just kind of funny that the timing of it because I was sharing with you that I had looked at the. You know, if you look at here and look backwards and say what are the behaviors and habits that got me to here, I heard somebody say one time if you look around, just take it all in, look around you and everything that is a reality in your life right now. This is what all of your past decisions created, right. All your past decisions and behaviors led to this moment, everything you have right. And I thought, yeah, when you shared with me the bringing there here is looking forward and identifying if this, if I could describe the here I want, the now that I want, what does that look like in the here, what are the behaviors that support that future? Dan: Yeah, yeah. And I think the big thing is what are your habits today? That would be the habits you would want 20 years from now. Which habits do you have already formed? And then that picture of you 20 years from now. If you look at a day in the life of you say, well, I want this habit. And then you have to say, well, if I'm going to have the habits, then I might as well start those habits today. You know, you know yeah, and and that what I mean habits is that you do the right thing without thinking about it yeah, and the cape, I mean the things, it's. Dean: So I was had, uh, breakfast with joe this morning. We were talking about, you know, six, six months ago I really had no idea how to cook, or it's hard to say. I see you that you got you know 57 or eight years into my life and never really learned to cook or anything. And now, you know, between my instant pot and my air fryer, you know I'm cooking up a storm here, making delicious steaks and chicken and salmon, everything. What a life changing like skill and it's just a natural thing. Now I know I've got the whole process. It's a habit. I know I've got the whole process. It's a habit, you know. Once you know the habit, it's the. You know the process. I do it all kind of in to preheat for three minutes and while that three minutes is happening, I'm seasoning the steak with salt pepper and just a little bit of Montreal steaks rub and then by the time I get that done, the air fryer is preheated. I just put it in for, depending on how thick it is, three or four minutes per side and then it's done. So the whole ordeal is, you know, 13 minutes from the idea of having a steak to your first bite. Dan: And so you know, and now you're becoming an internet influencer yeah, that's exactly right, that's right, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah, rabbi jackson. Oh, there's rabbi jackson again. Yeah, but you know, this is how we learn from each other you know yeah, I mean he doesn't mention it. Morgan Housel, in the book you're reading, same as ever, but I've seen it many times that the two main habits that humans have that move things forward are one imitation see something that somebody else is doing, and then repetition you get a good thing going and then you just repeat and repeat. And it's so interesting. I saw a little. I was going through the news programs this morning and there was a commercial and it was Bill Gates was a commercial, and it was bill gates, and and you know, and here's bill gates, you know, and he really is truly boring, he was born boring. He's a very boring, he's a very boring thing. But you know he's boring with 50, 50 billion or 100 billion, whatever the amount of money he has. Dean: But now he's saying sorry, go ahead. I said sorry, go ahead. Dan: Yeah, I think that. And he's saying there's no question now, we just have to get rid of fossil fuels. Yeah, he says we've come to the point now and it's just. And then he brings in all sorts of people who are talking about the breakthroughs that will be possible, and Anthony Fauci is one of them on the program and everything like that. But the question is, Bill, you were using fossil fuels to go to Jeffrey Epstein's island. What was that all about, oh boy? What was that all about, oh man? What was that all about, oh man? I don't know if he ever went to the island, but he hung out with him in New. York City. And you know, and yeah so, so anyway, but you know, I think we're coming back. I just have a sense. Maybe it's just me that I'm becoming aware of something, but I have a sense because the things that are being talked about, like the Morgan Household book you know there are some things that you can bet on are always going to operate in a certain direction. You know, and I get a sense, we're getting there, I mean. But I'm, you know, I'm into new things. You know I'm creating more new things at 80 than I was at 50, and I'm involved in more new things at 80 than I was at 50. And I'm involved in more new things at 80 than I was at 50. So I don't think it's just my sense of what's happening to me. I get a sense from reading the news and everything like that that it's not so easy to change human nature. Dean: Yeah, I think you're right, but it's also yeah, that's why it's when you make these gradual changes, natural selection of better habits kind of thing, make a big impact. You know like I think, yeah, yeah, the natural selection, yeah, I mean I never got. Dan: You know, I've been influenced basically because I get full medicals, you know, with David. Hasse, I mean top to bottom medicals and you know, he says, you know you're carrying too much weight, you've got too much fat. And I said, and he says, you know, think about this, think about that. And I said I'm not going to do anything where my weight loss is more than a pound a week and so I started the steak. Steak diet you know, yesterday I had steak for breakfast, steak for lunch, steak for dinner. Other things too, you know, had some small potatoes. I had broccoli and French fries with you. Dean: And anyway. Dan: and but I mean, if you look ahead 20 weeks and you're 20 pounds down, that's a big deal. I don't want to take on an unnatural diet for a period of time and then go back to my old diet. I want my entire habits of eating to change permanently of eating to change permanently. Dean: What I've learned from JJ Virgin is that it really is about the protein first, of getting the amount of protein for your target weight, kind of. That's the thing. That number one priority is getting 180 grams of protein, you know, and then and then adding on whatever, while staying in that your caloric thing. But I find that, man, if you're eating that amount of protein, the protein is the satiety thing that it just is the gift that keeps on giving. You know, you don't get those. It's the most. Dan: Even burning, yeah and it's where the, where the muscle comes from yes, exactly, yeah, yeah, so well, that's interesting. Dean: That that's a really good. Do you measure? Do you wait? How often do you weigh yourself? Dan: every day, every morning yeah okay, I've got a little journal and I log in. Dean: I've got a little journal and I, yeah, yeah that's been a big thing. I have the the. You know my JJ has really been my accountability buddy in all of this. I chart everything that I eat and chart my weight every day and my sleep score and my steps. And I, you know, send a little photo, photo story to her every day and that, yeah, it's good to chart and see the the progress you know I had an interesting and a friend who has maintained his weight at a in a you know five pound band for band for as long as I've known him and he shared that at one point. He stays between 178 and 182 or three as the band that he's in constantly. And he told me he got up to 230 pounds at one point, wow yeah, and then he lost all the weight. He got up to 230 pounds at one point, wow yeah, and then he lost all the weight, got down to 180 as his ideal. But he weighs himself every day and he uses a green light, yellow light, red light system that if he's 178 or 179, it's green light, he can eat whatever he wants. If he wants to have dessert, fine. If he wants this, whatever, fine. And if he's 180 or 181, he's yellow light and it's like, just, you know, caution kind of, for taking it easy. But if he gets to 182 it's red light and he has to go, stay on the path until he gets back to 178. So he's never had to lose more than five pounds, you know. So it's a really interesting thing. If he knows he's going on a vacation or something, he'll get to 178 and then do what he wants on vacation and maybe he gains five pounds on vacation, but comes back and immediately on the straight and narrow. Slow and steady wins the race. Dan: Yeah, this is Dean and Dan having a deep philosophy hour. This was the Sunday philosophy hour with Dean and Dan, that's right. Dean: The double D philosophy hour. That's right. Dan: Yeah, the Calry philosophy hour. Anyway but that's great. Then we'll be able to chat again this evening Over some meat, Over some meat. Yeah you you're gonna have to do with burgers tonight that's right, familiar. Dean: But anyway. So all you guys are more or less coming together, I guess right probably well, joe, yep, joe and me and chad, I think we'll all be over together. All righty, it's all very exciting, dan, I will see you in a few hours. Dan: Thank you okay. Thanks, dean.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, We contrasted northern summers' climate and lifestyle possibilities with those of Florida. The conversation shifted to exploring humanity's relationship with money through storytelling and belief. Practical lessons included effective pricing, leveraging qualified leads, and attracting high-quality clients using books. Finally, the discussion provided entrepreneurial growth strategies like setting a quarterly cadence, applying profit activators, and valuing long-term relationships. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discussed the serene and picturesque landscape of Canada's cottage country, including the unique charm and beauty of its lakes and legends, as well as the renowned Group of Seven artists. Reflections on the contrast between the tranquil Canadian summers and the balmy climate of Florida, noting the ideal summer months in Canada. We explored minimalistic lifestyle choices that gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the simplicity of a carnivore diet and practical wardrobe strategies. We delved into the whimsical nature of financial decisions and the power of belief and storytelling in investment decisions, with a focus on how a stock's value is influenced by future narratives. We discussed critical elements of pricing strategies, including promise, price, and proof, and the importance of pre-qualified, motivated leads in business, particularly in real estate. Dean shared insights on leveraging books as tools for attracting high-quality clients, highlighting a successful collaboration that did not rely on upfront financial incentives. We explored the eight profit activators and how smaller, intimate workshops can be as effective as larger gatherings in growing businesses. We emphasized the importance of long-range investment thinking and nurturing long-term relationships with prospects, as well as the value of quarterly goals and structured cadences in extending professional careers. We highlighted innovative health practices that can prolong peak earning years and enhance productivity, such as the benefits of continuous health improvements and monitoring. We discussed the potential for creative and productive growth during challenging economic times, drawing insights from historical examples and a book that explores enduring human behaviors. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: mr sullivan mr jackson welcome to cloudlandia. And, uh, keep your feet on the mainland, that's exactly right so you are calling from the northernmost outpost of cloudland and canada at its best beautiful weather it must be perfect right now. Dan: Right, I just got out of the lake. I was in the lake 15 minutes oh my goodness, wow I'll be, very deep, like a week. Dean: Oh yeah, is it. Dan: Uh, that's very yes, that's quite cold. I mean, this is our one, two, three, four, fourth day and so I'm used to it now, but uh bracing yeah, yeah, because the nights have been very cold oh, I think the nights have been. Dean: The nights have been very cold, yeah well we got enough heat or we got enough heat to go around here. Dan: Yeah, yeah, you've had some. You've had some variable weather, should I call it that? Dean: yeah, exactly, I was just telling. I was just telling I need to. Uh, I'm ready to have snowboarding back in my life. That just makes more sense to me. Dan: Yeah, this is perfect. I mean, there's a lot of your. Our listeners may not know this, but there's this great romance to the cottage country in Canada. Dean: Yeah. Dan: First of all, there's a lot of lakes. I mean there's literally in the thousands. I'm not talking about the big lakes, I'm not talking about the great lakes. I'm talking about, like ours, for example, is two miles by two miles. It's almost a circle. It's two miles by two miles, but there's a circle. It's two miles by two miles. But there's a legend that there's a hole in the middle, a very deep hole, and in the logging days they hooked chains to each other and put a weight at the end of one of the chains and then they kept putting the chains down and it went down a thousand feet and it was still not hitting bottom oh my goodness, it's a portal to the center of the earth you know it invites all sorts of adventures, loch Ness. Well, we haven't seen that, we haven't seen that it's fresh. Yeah, well, loch Ness is a freshwater lake, but no, but there's a romance. There's a whole school of art called the Group of Seven and these were seven artists who did these amazing, amazing paintings. Not really natural. They have a real interesting quality to them and they were done from the teens till probably the 40s or 50s probably a 40-year period, seven artists. They're very famous and in Toronto at the Art Gallery, the Ontario Gallery of Art, they have a whole wing that's just the paintings of these men. And then there's a town north of Toronto called Kleinberg and they have a whole museum. There's a whole McMichael gallery. And I never get tired. I've been here for 53 years and I can go in there and just sit for an hour and look at the magnificent art that these people created. Dean: It is beautiful, yeah, yeah you're right, yeah, canada in the summertime. I can't imagine anywhere nicer, you know any of those temperate things. London or England is very nice in the summer. All of Europe, I'm sure. But yeah, it's just, I'm realizing Florida's a little hot yeah, you're late to the realization. Dan: No, I mean I've realized it all along. Dean: It's just that you know. Yeah, I'm starting to re-realize it. Dan: Well, you had some comparison. You had a wonderful week in Toronto in July. Dean: Yeah, three weeks I was there. Dan: Marvelous there. Dean: That's what I mean, you're realizing that Florida's hot. Dan: You know, just between us, Florida's really hot during the summertime, you know, just between us. Florida is really hot during the summertime. Dean: It was just. It was that contrast. I mean spending three weeks in Toronto June and July is it doesn't get much better. It's the perfect time. Dan: So well, there's June and July, and then there's winter. Dean: That's right. Dan: Actually, I think we're in for a long fall this year. Dean: Yes. Dan: And I'm doing this on 80 years of experience that when you have a very green summer, which means there was a lot of rain. We had more rain this year than I can remember since I've been here, and what it does is that the leaves don't turn as quickly, and so we can expect still green trees at Halloween this year. Dean: Oh, wow, Okay, Looking forward to coming back up in a few weeks. I can't believe it's been 90 days already. I'm super excited about having you know a quarter, a coach quarter. Dan: You've had a coach quarter. You've had a coach. You've had a coach quarter. Dean: That's what I mean. I'm very excited about having these coach quarterly Toronto visits in my future. This is yeah, yeah, it's very good. So there I have had. Dan: You've been thinking about things? Tell me you've been thinking about things. Dean: I have been thinking about my thinking and thinking about things all the while. This is, I think I'm coming up another, I think I'm coming up on a month of carnivore. Now, yeah, what it's very interesting to me, the findings. You know it really it suits. It seems like it's a very ADD compliant diet. Dan: Yeah, in that it's really only one decision. Because it's just one decision. Dean: Yeah, is it meat? That's the whole thing. It's like the Is it? Meat or is it fasting? Yeah, it's the dietary equivalent of wearing a black shirt every day. Dan: Well, I wear a navy blue shirt every day. I took that strategy from you. It struck me as a very useful lifetime strategy. Dean: And I got into it during COVID. Yeah. Dan: Because that was my COVID uniform I had. Basically I had jeans and a long sleeve shirt long sleeve t-shirt navy blue by Uniqlo, a Japanese company, and they're the best, they're the best, they're the best. I bet I've worn the one I'm wearing today. I bet I've worn it a hundred times. So it looks pretty much out of the package. Dean: Yeah, it makes a big difference. So there's lots of these arguments for these kind of mono decisions. Dan: So I'm kind of thinking that through, you know, and seeing other places where that kind of thinking applies you know, yeah, what I notice more and more is that my life is really a function of habits, yes, and you got to make sure they're good habits. Dean: Yeah, I'm thinking and seeing that more and more. Like I was looking in some of my past journals over the last week or so, I was looking back, like back to, you know, 2004, and just kind of randomly, you know, selecting the things. And you know, I do see that you're only ever in the moment, right, because every entry that I'm making in the journal is made in real time, so I'm only ever there, you know, and that habit I often I wonder how many miles of ink lines I've written if you were to, if you were how many times I've circled the globe with my journals. It'd be a really interesting calculation, you know. But you realize that everything you've been saying about the bringing there here is really that's absolutely true, like the only thing I'm doing. The common thing of that is I'm sitting in a comfy chair writing in my journal, but you're never, you know, it's all. But it's funny to look back at it as capturing the moment, you know. Dan: Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. I see a lot more articles these days on journaling and just in the context of Cloudlandia and the mainland, it seems to me that it's a way of staying in touch with your preferred mainland by journaling, because every day you're conscious, you're thinking about your thinking and I think, as Jeff Madoff and I have had a number of conversations about this, that as the world becomes more digital and I see no end to the possibilities that you can apply digital technology to something there's a counter movement taking place where people are deliberately reconnecting with the mainland in a conscious way. Dean: Yeah, I'm aware of that. Dan: I mean, carnivore is about as mainland as you can get. Dean: That's the truth, especially when there's something primal about cooking. Dan: The only thing further than that would be if you were eating yourself, which, in a sense, you are. Dean: It's so funny, but there is something magical about that. Can I tell? Dan: you not as full bore as yours, but this is my 33rd day of having steak for breakfast. Dean: Yes, Okay, did you open up the air fryer? Have you had an air fryer? Dan: steak yet. Oh yeah, it's downstairs. We have one at the cottage and we're going to get a new one at the house. Dean: And what's your experience? You brought it with us. Dan: It's not my experience, it's Babs' experience. Dean: I mean your experience of the eating. Yeah, oh no, it's great. Dan: Yeah, oh no, it's great, it's great, it's delicious. Yeah, it's super fast, I mean it's super fast and it's great and, yeah, I'm thinning out a bit, losing my COVID collection. I'm starting to get rid of my COVID collection. Yeah, belly, fat and fat otherwise, and that's great and I do a lot of exercise when I'm at the cottage we have. There's a stairway, a stone stairway that goes down to the dock 40 steps, and so I do it today. I'll do it six times up and down. Dean: Oh my goodness, wow. Dan: And then we have about a I would say, three quarters of a mile loop up the hill, through the woods and back down, and I'll do that once today and I'll do two swims. I'll be in the lake for two swimming sessions and I noticed I really do a lot more exercise here and the whole point is to have it carry over when you get back to the city. Jump start yeah, I've got a great book for you, and the whole point is to have it carry over when you get back to the city Jumpstarting. Dean: I've got a great book for you. Dan: Do you read on Kindle or do you buy actual books? Dean: Yes. Dan: Yeah, that's two questions. Dean: Yes to both. You do both Often. I'll do three Often. I will do the Kindle and the book and the audio. Dan: Yes, well, there's a great book that you'll like, and it's called Same as Ever. Dean: Okay, I like it already, but tell me about it. Dan: And the author's name is Hosel H-O-E-S-E-L First name, I think, is Morgan Hussle. And what he shows? He's got 23 little chapters about things that are always the same and it's thought-provoking and he's an investor. You know he's an investor, but he talks about that. Humans, for the most part humans get smart at everything they do except one. What's that Money? That's probably true. And he says people are more fanciful when it comes to money than almost any other part of their life. Okay. Dean: Well, that's interesting. It's giving me an option to buy his follow-up book which is the Psychology of Money. Dan: I should get that too, too why not? Dean: yeah, all right, he's got some great line. Dan: I mean he quotes other people. He's got the greatest definition of a stock you know, like stock market stock he's got the greatest definition of a stock. I I don't think I think he's quoting somebody, but that a stock is a present number multiplied by a future story. Dean: Ooh, that is true, isn't it? A present number multiplied by a future story that is so good yes. Dan: Isn't that great. Dean: It's so good and true, it's got the added benefit of being true. Yeah, I mean, it's really. If not, what else it's guessing and betting, right? It's like we gauge our guessing and betting on we guess and bet on the strength of our belief in the story. Dan: A present number multiplied by a future story. Dean: Yes, that's wild. It's funny that you say that's a very interesting. I was thinking about a pricing strategy for a client and he was saying I'm sure this has been. There's probably somebody who's said this before, I don't know who, but I was looking at it as that it's a combination of the promise and the price and the proof. And proof is really a story right, a belief that if you have him, you're, if there's something going wrong. Yes, proof is yeah, I mean it's either that, yeah, it's either. You know the promise is the articulated outcome of what you're going to get, that you want that promise, but then the price is a factor of how much that promise is worth and your someone else yeah and the confidence that it's going to happen. You know, it's a very interesting thing I was thinking about it in the context of our real estate that the realtors are will happily pay 40 of a transaction, up to 35 or 40% of a transaction. That's a guaranteed transaction, like a referral. If I say, you know, if you send somebody a referral they'll pay 40% because the promise and the proof is that you already got it. So you're willing to pay 40% for the certainty of it. But when you say to buy a lead, you know to buy leads for $5 or $10, there's not as much. You don't have the proof that those leads are going to turn into into transactions. So there's a risk. There's a risk involved in that. It's really, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing. I've been because you know I do a lot of real estate, lead generation and all kinds in all kinds of businesses. Lead generation and I've really been one of the distinctions I've been sharing with people is the, because a lot of times people ask well, are they good leads? You know, and it speaks to the, yeah, you know objective, yeah, you. Dan: And joe you, you and Joe Polish have a great definition of what a good lead is. I don't remember the exact formula, but it's pre-qualified, pre-motivated. Dean: Yes, predisposed you know predisposed. Yeah. Dan: And one of the things that when we were doing the book deal with Ben Hardy and Tucker Max, before we approached Hay House, Tucker asked me a question. He said well, you're not taking any money, you're not taking any advances, you're not taking any royalties for the book, which was true. So that was a real straight deal. You know why? Because it's a mono decision. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I'm sorry. The book is a capability for me and that's worth all the upfront money. Dean: Yes, yeah, you know, and that was the advances. Dan: You know, the advances were really good advances. I mean, they were six-figure advances. Dean: And. Dan: I said, the reason is I don't want to think about that. I just want to think about the capability that I have 24 hours a day, all around the world of someone picking up the book and reading it, and it's a pre-qualified person. It's a pre-qualified person, in other words, the person who's picking up the book and reading it would have the money and the qualifications to be in the strategic coach. The other thing is that it would pre-motivate them. They're predisposed because they picked up the book. They're pre-qualified because it's meaningful to them. And then the next thing is they'll give us a phone call. You know they'll read the book'll give us a phone call. You know they'll give us a phone call. Or just go on. You know, go on to the website and read all about coach and everything like that. And so Tucker said so we sell a thousand books. What would make you happy in terms of actual someone signing up for the program? And I said one. Dean: Right and probably, probably. Dan: I would want a hundred people Just trying to take care. This is why I'm going to come and do the eight profit Activators. Yeah, and the reason is that those books were right at. About the three books that we wrote were right around the 800,000. Wow, wow, and I could easily say we've had 800 clients pick it up, either picked it up and called us, or called us and we sent them the books. Yes, but it's a marvelous system because it's who, not how, in spades is that I have salespeople out there every 24 hours and they're finding, finding new interested leads, they're developing the leads and we don't have to spend any time until they give us a call. Dean: I think that's fantastic and it's doing. You know, part of the thing is I. This is why I always look at books as a profit activator three activity, which is educate and motivate. That people get educated about the concepts of who, not how, or the gap in the game or the idea that 10 times is easier than two times, and they see examples and see that this really fits, and then they're motivated to call and get some help with that. I'm such a fan of books and podcasts as the perfect Profit Activator 3 activity. Dan: Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about our previous podcast where you took it through the what's the value of your leads. I'm actually a really fan of that yeah. Dean: I love metrics. I'm a big metric. Well, metrics to me are when they are objective and measurable. They are a proof. Dan: Well and predictable. They're predictable too. They're a proof. Do a certain amount of activity, you can get a predictable metric. Dean: I've discovered a metric very much like Pareto in lead distribution. It just got, you know, hot off the press with Chris McAllister, who you know as well. Yeah, chris, so we've been doing a collaboration on, I've been helping them with lead generation and I asked him to do a I've been calling it a forensic census of what's happened with the leads right and leads who've been in for more than a hundred days. So we just looked at the. That's roughly three and a half months basically, and you know, of all of the leads that we had generated, 15% of them had sold their house with someone else, and so you look at that we did the math on the thing, that is the opportunity cost. That is the exact thing that worked out, that the amount of that worked out to be over half a million dollars in lost opportunity. Dan: Well, and that's where. Yeah, no, it wasn't lost, it was just a cost. Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right. Dan: The money went into the wrong bank account. The money went into the wrong bank account. That's exactly right. The money went into the wrong bank account. The money went into the wrong bank account. Dean: That's exactly right. So now that's encouraging right, because I've got now three different forensic census analysis from three different parts of the country with three different realtors that all point to exactly the same thing 15 of people who've gone through a hundred days will do something, and so that is. That's encouraging. You know, I think if I, if you look at that and start to say OK, there's a pulse. That it means that the market. Dan: The marketplace has a pulse. Dean: Yeah. The lie rating and that we're generating objectively good leads, meaning people who want to do. What the promise of the of the book is, you know, yeah. So, that's very exciting. Dan: Yeah, you know, it's really interesting changing the subject slightly. So this author that writes the book Same as Ever that I just mentioned, he said that basically, when you look at the last hundred years, the decade of the 1930s was absolutely the most productive decade in US history. Wow, Based on what. And he said just how much got produced during the 1930s. Dean: Are you talking about the New Deal? No, he's not talking about the New Deal at all. Dan: He's actually talking that the reason was it was the worst decade economically in the United States history because of the Great Depression, but he said it was also the most creative and most productive. And he said that creativity and productivity don't happen during good times, they only happen during bad times, the reason being the things that you thought. Let's put it this way you're going into the 1930s it was one of the hottest stock markets in the history of the United States the 1920s per capita, if you do it in relationship to the population and then suddenly it just stopped and everything that people believed was true, everything that they knew was predictably true, didn't happen. And everybody woke up and said, oh my God. Well, everything we've been going on doesn't work. And he said that's the spur to creativity and productivity. It's not profitability, because the profitability happened in the 1940s and 1950s, but the productivity, the creativity, creating new things that were productive, happened during the 1930s. He said there's no decade like it in US history in the last 100 years and I found that very striking. Dean: I can't wait to read it. Dan: I found that. It's a thin book. Dean: Okay, I was going to say I like that's my favorite. That's my favorite and accessible words. Dan: I like that too. It's a win. And it's a good title yeah, he doesn't use more words than he needs. Dean: I like that. Dan: It goes back to your. I'm coming awake to Dean Jackson's 8 Profit Activators. Dean: Oh good, after 12 years, this is good news. Dan: I'm a tourist, I'm a late bloomer. Dean: I'm a late developer. Dan: You know, but it wasn't that it was stored away, but it wasn't brought right in front of me. But I think there's a lot of very interesting insights that you have here. Dean: Yeah, that's true, and I just find more and more it's. You know it's the same, just feel like it's. So when you look at this one thing you know, if I think about my one thing is this you know, working on the all the applications of this one model and seeing deeper and deeper layers of how it actually how it fits, you know, it is like you asked me 12 years ago what would be fascinating and motivating because I had come out of you know, 15 years I think we I think we were both sitting in our kitchen when this happened, yeah, yeah our kitchen. Yeah, and I remember I was. Dan: I remember I was using that I was I. I remember it distinctly because I think it's the last time I used the landline. Isn't that funny? Dean: that's amazing. Dan: Yeah, yeah, because I had to sit up next to the counter because we've only got one landline. Dean: And. Dan: I said I've got this. So I had to sit on a stool next to you know a counter and I remember the conversation. Dean: I do too, and it was because I was coming out of 15 years of applying these eight profit activators to the growth of one specific business and Joe Polish had just taken that framework and started the I love marketing cast and I realized that's my. I was realizing how applicable that kind of operating system that I had developed for, you know, growing our own business was applicable to all kinds of businesses and that was my fascinating thing and doing it in small groups as opposed to 500, 700 people at a time, and to this day, it's still now 12 years later, yeah. Dan: Yeah, can I ask you a question about that? If you did it differently. Could you do it with a group of 100? Dean: Yes, absolutely, and we've done it with you know, I've done it with 40 or 50. Dan: Yeah Well, if you can do it with 40 or 50, you could do it with 100. Dean: Yeah, once you get past like 14 or so, the way the dynamics change. At about 14, more people, you end up having fractured conversations, and so that's why, the way you do the workshops, you have the opportunity to have people have those conversations, but in groups of three or four, yeah, so rather than having breakouts. Dan: Well, and then there's a tool that everybody's doing the same. Yes, yes. Yes. Dean: You're exactly right. Yeah, and that's an. All of them are all the eight profit activators are there, are tools, you know, there are thinking ways for it and yeah, but it's just such a you know I want to ask you another question to what degree if you think about I think you said you've done about 600 from last conversation of your small groups, that'd be 50 groups, basically 50, 50 sessions. Dan: To what degree do they need to know their numbers to go through the process? Dean: well they. The challenge or the thing is that they don't even know that these metrics exist. So I work from the standpoint of they really, if I can give them the experience of it by. They know the top line and they know you know what they're doing. But it doesn't require the granularity to get the impact of it. You know, to understand. That's where they can get their best intuitive sense of what that is and every single person has a realization that. Let's just say, even the just understanding how to divide the revenue into before unit, during unit and after unit is a big revelation for people and then they realize, you know, a lot of times I was just doing a consultation with a home services company and in home services it's pretty standard to spend, you know standard to spend you know 12 to 15% of their revenue on advertising. But they do a lot of things and they don't know often exactly what's working. But when I pointed out to them that if we take you know, 30% of their business is coming from repeat people who've already done business with them, yet they're measuring the 15 percent on that gross revenue, so their actual before unit cost is is way more because they're spending all the money in the before unit and not really spending much if anything on the after unit, even though it's bringing in 30% of the business. You know and it's so funny because I was sharing with them too I was like to take this attitude of so they do HVAC and air conditioning and so I like for them to think of all the households that have one of their air conditioning units in it to be climates under management, you know, is to get that kind of asset that they've got 20 000 climates under management, and to take that and really just kind of look at what they could do even just with the after unit of their business. You know, it's so. It's always eye-opening for people like to see when you start looking at those numbers and say, wow, I had never, I never thought of it like that. Dan: You know one of the things John Bowen and Kerry Oberbrenner and I are doing a collaboration on establishing the real numbers for entrepreneurism. Dean: Right. Dan: In relationship to wealth and in relationship to happiness, relationship to wealth and in relationship to happiness. So John is arguably the top coach in the world for financial advisors at a very affluent level. So all the clientele are very, so that would be for, and they'd be looking for, families. It would be sort of families and they'd be entrepreneurial families, okay, and I think that the sort of the preferred look is where the net worth of the family is in the 20 million and above level. Okay, and these are the advisors. So John's clients are the advisors who do this, okay. And two years ago we did a survey where we compared the entrepreneurial clients or the entrepreneurial clients. What we surveyed was John's clients as entrepreneurs. Dean: Yes. Dan: Okay, they're entrepreneurs, and there were about 1 of them, 1300. And they were compared to 800 strategic coach clients and we saw all sorts of differences. One of them was the who, not how, factor, that generally our clients made more money per person and worked fewer hours than John's 1,300. Yes, okay, and fairly significant. I mean like percent, different percent. And the other thing was that our clients expected to be busy. They expected to be active entrepreneurs for a much longer period than his clients. Dean: Well, that's the greatest gift right there when you look at it. So you, as the lead by example of this the lead dog. Dan: Yeah, you know what they say about dog sleds you know the dogs in a dog sled. Yeah, if you're not the lead dog, the future always looks the same. Yes, exactly so I'm not looking up anybody's rear end. Dean: Yeah, right, exactly. Dan: Anyway, but the big, thing, if you say we don't have real proof and it would take 50 or 60 years to take a long study to see that we're actually extending people's actual lifetime. But I would say right now we could probably establish really good, really good research that were extending their careers by probably an average of 15 years at their peak earning. Dean: Yeah exactly. Yeah, think about that like in the traditional world. So at that you know I'm 58 now and so in the traditional world it'd be like you got seven years left, kind of thing. Right, it's a traditional retirement age, or what. Dan: And then coach, you'd have 22 years. Dean: I got 22 more years, even just to get to 80. Yeah, you know like that's the thing, and I just proved that it's possible. Dan: Yes, that's what I'm saying. Dean: Yes, that's what I'm saying, yes, that's what I mean. And to be you like, look at, you know one of the. You know the elements when we do the lifetime extender, when you ask people so how do you want to be on your 80th birthday? And you're saying you know, well, how do you want to be health physically? And you're saying, well, how do you want to be health physically? Well, I want to be climbing 40 states of stairs six times a day, swimming twice and hiking around my property. I want to be, recording podcasts. I want to be writing books, I want to be holding workshops, I mean developing thinking tools, all those things. I've been thinking a lot about cadences, you know, and you've really kind of tapped into this cadence of of the quarter. Quarterly cadence is because your days are really largely the same with an intention of moving towards quarterly outputs. You, you're creating quarterly books, you're creating new quarterly workshops and tools. And am I missing anything Like do you have annual goals or objectives? Dan: Or is everything in terms of Well, the only, there's only one. The only one thing that we have, that's annual, would be the Free Zone Summit. That's once a year. So, for example, every week I'm working on the summit which is in February next year, and so I'm always listening in the. So I have a series of speaking sets that people can, and I'm looking, yes, to a large group of people, half of whom aren't actually in the free zone. You know half of them next year, half of them won't even be, you know, in strategic coach. They're team members, free zone members, they're clients of the free zone members and everything like that. So it's a challenge to me because you know coach people, know the routine, you know they come in, they understand what a whole day looks like thinking about your thinking. But for some people this is the first time in their life and the trick is, after the first hour they all feel as part of the same group and they're thinking you know. So anyway, it's a. It's an interesting, but that's only my annual thing. Dean: Yeah. Dan: So I've you know I give a lot of thought to it. I work on it right now, six months, before I'm working on it every week. Dean: Yeah. Dan: But that's the only one that is, and I wouldn't want to, no, exactly. Dean: Do you? It's interesting that you say you're working on it every week. Do you have? Do you account for that in your calendar or do you just consciously like? Or do you say? Dan: Some of it is just, some of it's just my time and it's, it's a certainty. Uncertainty worksheet. So I'm always working within the certainty. Uncertainty, this much is certain already. This is uncertain. So then that's the next week. You have to have certain things move from uncertainty to certainty. Yes, we got the pat. We just got the patent on that, by the way, so that's a good tool. That's good. Yeah, yeah so, but I'm constantly my ears are constantly open. In all the workshops, people are dropping topics. You know. I said, yeah, think there's a, we got a role for you and you know, we got a role for you, because I want to get to people ahead of time, because some people don't come to the summit. So if you spot them as a speaker, you want to make sure that something else isn't scheduled during the time when they come. So, yeah, it's going to be in Arizona this time. Dean: That's what I hear. Dan: It's all very exciting. Dean: Anyway it's very exciting. Dan: You mentioned the quarter. I really take quarters seriously. Other people have quarters, but they don't spend much time thinking about the quarter. Dean: I said it's available. Dan: It's sitting around there. You know, quarters are just sitting around. How much productivity, creativity, profitability can you get out of a quarter? Dean: Yeah, I like that. That's my observation. Right Is that you're the tools of applying three days focus days, buffer days, in a quarterly cadence for the rest of your till 156. Dan: 304. I have 304 left. 304 quarters left. Yeah, 304 quarters. You know David Hasse, whose clinic I can't, you know I can't recommend enough to people, but so we started two years ago with him. So it's August of 2022. We started working with him and we've had eight quarters and when we first came to the very first meeting in Nashville Maxwell Clinic, he said so what are we going to do with? your health over the next 312 quarters right, he had me at hello he had me at hello oh yeah and we've done a lot in the last eight quarters we've done yeah, you know there's a lot of work and but yeah, he's got a deep dive program. It's really terrific. I mean it it's testing, testing, constant testing, and he's very alert to new stuff in the marketplace you know new breakthroughs. Dean: What's your noticing now of your new needs in all these stairs that you're doing? Dan: Yeah, the big thing is I have no problem going up. It's tender going down, and the problem is it's a 50-year-old injury and about 49-year-old injury and so the cartilage is completely restored. Okay, and that's a breakthrough. Stem cells can get things working. Stem cells, can you know they can? What stem cells essentially do is wake up the cells that are supposed to be doing the work or repairing them. Dean: Hey, buddy, get back to work. Dan: Yeah, and the, and this is detectable, this is measurable where? Dean: they are. Dan: So I always thought I'm missing a cartilage. And I went down there, so they and when I say down there it's Buenos Aires, in Argentina, and I've done five, four, four sessions, four sessions in five month period. And now my cartilage is the same thickness going from almost no cartilage in my left knee. It's the same width. You know, the thickness of the cartilage is the same as it was before the injury in 1975. So that's great, but it's still painful. So now he says what's happened is that there's been damage to the ligaments on both sides. And so now I go first week of November to Buenos Aires and they do stem cells on my ligaments, ok, ok, and then we'll see. We'll see what happens there. So wow. Yeah, it's a matter of subtraction. You know you subtract the cartilage as the problem and then you submit and we'll see where it is. But I would say that the drop in pain in a day, in other words from morning till night, it's probably down 90%. Wow, that's amazing. But what's missing is the confidence to start running, because I want to run again and so I've been 15 years without running and my brain says don't run. So I have to relearn how to run. And how about Babs? It's completely fixed. That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah? And the cartilage that was cartilage too, yeah, fixed. That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, the cartilage that was cartilage too. She, yeah, she had influence, she had actually. She had bone inflammation and she had missing cartilage. So the cartilage is back and I think hers would be equal to mine. The pain is down by 90 wild, wild, that's. Dean: It's amazing, isn't? It yeah we're living in. We're living in amazing times. Well, I'm counting on it. Yeah exactly. Dan: You know it's a present number times a future story. Dean: What a great thing. By the way, that book is going to arrive today, according to Amazon. For me, the money book. The other one will be here tomorrow morning. That's just so, like that's the best thing. Dan: Why can't the I mean after you order it? Why aren't they knocking on the door right now? What's wrong with this world? Dean: That's what I'm thinking. Is that why people call senators? Is that what I need to do is alert my senator? Dan: about this. Yeah, I actually had a great conversation with Ted Budbutt. Dean: Oh yeah. Well, that's great, great US senator from North Carolina, yeah and I just saw that Robert Kennedy just endorsed Donald Trump. He dropped out of the race and joined MAGA. Dan: Yeah, I think it's probably. I was figuring it's worth 3%, do you think? Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, he brings a lot to Trump obviously brings a lot to it, but he brings a whole issue that the Republicans haven't been focused on at all and his whole thing is really about what the food industry is putting into food. Yeah, that that is very dangerous, very negative, very harmful. That's been his big thing, and Trump just came out and said I think we're going to really take a major look at this. Dean: You know, it's very interesting to note that Joe Polish was sort of a catalyst in this regard. Oh yeah, that's pretty amazing. I just sent him a note. Dan: I just sent him an email. I sent him an email. I said RFK Trump always said you were the greatest connector that I've ever met in my life. Dean: Yeah, that's the truth, isn't it? And now you think about the historical impact. You know of this. I think that's you know. It's amazing. He's in his unique ability, for sure. Dan: Yeah, yeah, but yeah, just born unique ability to connect people, positively connect people. Yes yes, yeah, there's all sorts of industries where it's negative, but this is positive, so good. Anyway, back to our metrics, back to our metrics yes. Yeah, well, I think you're working out a whole economic system based on this. I think this has got the making of a complete economic system. Dean: Yes, it really does, the more that I see that each of them have and I'm very aware of naming the metrics right, of naming the metrics right like so out, because each of the before, during and after units all have their own, you know, their own metrics that are universally present in every business but they're differently calculated, you know, and once people have that awareness it kind of builds momentum, like they really see these things. They've never thought about a multiplier index in the during unit, or they've never thought about a return on relationship in the after unit or revenue From where you are right now? Dan: which one is where you are right now? Which one is most important for your own? Dean: you know your own money making for me, I think, one of the most. Dan: I mean you got eight, I know yeah, yeah, the eight are all engaged, but right now August of 2024, which is the one that you're really focused on right now rev pop revenue per unconverted prospect. Dean: Yeah, that's a multiplier If you've already got. You've got a lot of times when we take the VCR formula and kind of overlay on top of it. The excess capacity that people have is often a big asset, you know, and so it's very yeah, it's fun to to see all these at work. You know, as I start to you know, overlay them on so many different types of businesses. Dan: Yeah, no, I'm just really taking I was. Shannon Waller's husband was reading this, same as every book His cottage is. Their cottage is about 10 minutes walk from our cottage and I just picked it up and I've converted almost completely over to Kindle. So you know, so I had it within minutes. Dean: I picked it up. Dan: I read a chapter and I said I'm going to download this. So I downloaded it and I've been reading it for the past four days. But I asked Bruce. We were out to dinner last night and I said Bruce and Bruce is an investor he had a career with Bell Canada. He was 35 years, 35 years with Bell Canada Got a good pension and then he went into investing and I said this is about long range thinking, this is a very long range thinking book and it's almost like these are 23 things that are always going to be the same how you factor that into your investment philosophy, okay, yeah. And then he has a lot of references to Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett because, they're the long range, they're the most famous long range investors and Charlie's dead this year. But Warren Buffett said he said this year. But Warren Buffett said he said you know it's, the biggest problem with investing is the combination of greed and speed. You know, people want a huge payoff and they want it as fast as possible. Yes, and he said you know. And Warren Buffett, he says you know, you can't produce a child in a month by getting nine women pregnant. Dean: It's profound and true. Dan: It's a formula for complication in your future life. Dean: Yeah, exactly. Dan: Yeah, if each child has claims on half of your net worth, you probably have diminished your future. You probably have diminished your future. But anyway, and he says, the proper question is what's the investment I can make that has the highest return for the longest period of time? Dean: Yes, I love that. That's great. Dan: Well, if you take your eight profit activators and see them as separate investments. Dean: Which I do. Dan: And each of them is growing in return. That's really the only stock market you actually need. Dean: Yes, that's what dawned on me with this revenue per unconverted prospect is I try and get people to think about their before unit as making a capital investment. Dan: Well, you are in time attention, probably money, probably money too. Dean: Yeah. But most people think of it as an expense because they're running ads competing for the immediate ROI. And it's such a different game when you realize that the asset that you're creating of a pool of people who know you and like you and are marinating, you know that it makes a big difference Because the gestation period is, if you looked at the people that come into coach for the first time, if you were to look at their ad date in the CRM of when they first showed up on your radar, whether they opted in for something, that it's going to be a much bigger number than seven days. You know that they came in, they got, they talked to somebody and signed up. It's going to be a you know, a much longer period of time and the yield. This is the only way that having that revenue per unconverted prospect really gives you a way of seeing how valuable the people who've been in your pond for three years, five years, seven years I'm sure you have people who have been swimming around Strategic Coach for several years before they become. Dan: One of the big changes that we're making is to switch the attention to those people away from the sales team to the marketing team. That's smart. Because, I have a framework for the salespeople and every time I meet with them, we have 14 full-time salespeople and every time I meet with we have 14, 14 sales full-time salespeople and I say yeses, reward you, noes, teach you and maybes, punish you. So, I said, every week you're looking at your call list, you have to grade them yes, no. Or maybe at your call list, you have to grade them yes, no. Or maybe and I say, go for the yeses first, Get the no's as fast as possible, Okay and make them earn their way back into your prospect list. Dean: In other words just say no. Dan: You know it sounds like you're not going to do it. You know about us. We've had a conversation. We've got great materials we can send you constantly. But you know I'm not going to bother you anymore. And then there's maybes that are just trying to have an affair. Dean: Right, exactly. Dan: No, she isn't with us anymore. But we had a woman who is a salesperson and she had 60 calls over a six-year period with this person. I said I don't know what's on your mind, but he's having an affair. That's funny. It's a nice female voice. He gets to talk to her every month or so. It's an affair. That's exactly right. It's so funny. Anyway, we've shot way past the hour. Dean: Oh my goodness, Dan Well, it was worth it. It was worth it. Dan: I don't know for the listeners, but I found this a fascinating conversation. Dean: Well, I find that too, so that's all that matters. If we had good, come along the ride. Dan: I agree with if we were having a good time. I think they were having a good time I think, I'll talk to you next I'll talk to you next week. Thanks dan, bye-bye. Great, okay, bye.

In this episode of Cloudlandia, Our stories highlighted agricultural aspects of central Florida and comparisons of population densities in the U.S. and Canada. We also reminisced on television's evolution from shows like Romper Room to the first color programs. We reflected on limited past options versus today's unlimited streaming and the importance of managing screen time given continual new choices. Additionally, the discussion explored social dynamics considering Dunbar's number theory contrasted against digital reach on platforms. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Dean discusses the strategic advantages of living in Central Florida, particularly in Winter Haven, which is centrally located and offers easy access to both coasts. We delve into Winter Haven's rich agricultural heritage, highlighting cattle ranches, orange groves, and other rural aspects of Central Florida. There's an interesting comparison between the population densities in the U.S. and Canada, including reflections on Ontario's geographic size and its southern location relative to many U.S. cities. We take a nostalgic look at the evolution of television, from classic shows like "Romper Room" to the advent of color TV with hits like "The Price is Right," and how this contrasts with today's streaming culture. The episode includes reflections on how past limited screen choices have evolved into today's endless streaming possibilities, and the impact of this shift on modern screen time habits. We explore the concept of social reach and relationships in the digital age, discussing the Dunbar number and how platforms like TikTok and Instagram have changed the dynamics of personal connections. Insights are shared from the new book "Casting, Not Hiring," which introduces the VCR formula—Vision, Capability, and Reach—as a framework for modern success. Through real-life examples and personal stories, we emphasize the importance of aligning vision, capability, and reach to achieve significant accomplishments, using figures like Safali Shabari and Max Martin as case studies. The episode also discusses the importance of choosing the right tools and staying committed to ongoing exploration and self-improvement. Finally, the conversation underscores the necessity of conceptual ability to see how one can be useful to others and leverage their capabilities, vision, and reach for collaborative success. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, mr Jackson, you got through Hurricane Week. Dan: Not quite Hurricane Week, Tropical Storm Week, but we did oh. Dean: Tropical Storm A notch down in the hierarchy. Dan: That's one of the good things about living in Winter Haven. It is actually a haven from winter. We are in the center. We are perched on high dry, sandy land, so there's no storm surges, nothing like that yeah, so you're a long way from the coast, aren't you? Well, I'm actually an hour and 15 minutes from either coast. We can get to either side and we can get to virtually almost every beach in two hours. Like it's such a centrally located, we're almost in the exact geographic center of peninsular Florida, so I can get to Jacksonville in three hours and Miami in three hours and pretty much everywhere you want to be within an hour. So it's good. Dean: So I have a question because I've been there. Where is the big cattle ranching country? Is that south of you or north? Dan: It's surrounding us, but sort of north and south in the central. If you think about the middle of Florida, basically aside from the Orlando-Tampa corridor which is like this swath that goes all the way across the state from Tampa to Cocoa Beach, that area is very developed but above and below that the center is much like the Australian outback in terms of the density of population. And north of I-4. In that area there is equestrian and rolling hills and there's a lot of equestrian properties there and ranches. South of that is where you'd find a lot of the cattle ranches, sod ranches, orange groves. All of that is in the center and then you get all the way down to the Everglades and then the Everglades is one of the big national parks, it's the Everglades. Dean: Yeah, alligators I was actually on something that was described as the biggest cattle ranch, not only in Florida, but one of the bigger ones in the United States. Yes, and we drove at least 20 miles on the ranch before we got to buildings. Dan: And it was interesting. Dean: It was interesting. They had a lot of pigs wandering around and I asked them were they in the pig business? And they said no. It's just that every week or so the trail hands would like something besides beef. Dan: Right, go out and wrestle them up a hog Right. Dean: Yeah, yeah, have a barbecue, have a. Dan: Yeah, well, you can actually not too far from here you can do hog hunting, where you can go and hunt hogs in the forest, yeah, all natural. Dean: It's not. So. It's not silicon valley that we're talking about here no, we're really not. Dan: We're talking about, you know, rural florida. This is why I know, yeah, you know you look at Florida and you know people talk about population density and stuff, but there's a lot of land in Florida that is undeveloped. I mean there's a whole south of I-4, there's another highway that goes all the way across the state, called Highway 60, and through Lake Wales, and it's very undeveloped. I mean there's really nothing. All the way from Tampa to Vero Beach is where it goes and it's virtually. It's the only place I've been in Florida where you can, on certain parts of it, look as far as you can see in any direction and see nothing. I mean it's that. And somebody has bought up like 80,000 acres around what's called Yeehaw Junction, which is where the Florida Turnpike intersects with Highway 60. Where the turnpike, the Florida turnpike, intersects with Highway 60. And you could see easily that you could duplicate the entire I-4 corridor, like Tampa and Orlando, along Highway 60 with plenty of room to spare. So I'm not worried about the you know population increase in Florida. Dean: Yeah, it's really interesting. Peter Zion and one of his frequent you know he has his. You know he has videos every three days. Yeah, and you. But he was talking about all the developed countries, which would be mostly European countries, and you know Australia, new, zealand. You know he said that the US is by far the country with the least population density. I agree with that. Dan: Most any state, even Ontario you look at as densely populated as the GTA is. Once you get beyond the GTA it's pretty sparse in Ontario. Dean: Oh yeah, oh yeah I mean, yeah, there's an interesting thing. Just to give you a sense of how big Ontario is. First of all, ontario is a province in Canada, for those listening, and it's roughly about from north to south it's about 1200 miles, and from east to west it's 1400 miles. It's actually it's as big as mainland. It's almost as big as mainland Europe Isn't that amazing Without Russia when I found out. Not counting Russia. Dan: I heard when I found out you could drive north from Toronto the entire distance from Toronto to Florida and still be in Ontario. That's pretty amazing. Dean: Yeah, that gives you a context for it and most people don't realize that Toronto itself is further south than almost 20% of the United States. Dan: People don't realize that Ontario dips down no below that. Dean: No, it wouldn't be that much, but it is south of Minneapolis, south of Seattle, I think, it's south of Portland, you know, and then it's quite a bit south. I think it's south of Boston, it's south of you know everything like that. Yeah, maine all of it. It's about as south as you can get actually, yeah, but I think it's the most populated large city in the world, furthest north large city in the world oh, wow I think it's further south. I think it's further north than moscow oh, wow interesting. Yeah, yeah and yeah, and it's getting bigger, it's getting bigger. Well, there you go. Dan: Well, everyone. I'm waiting with bated breath to hear the great air fryer experiment from the Four Seasons beaches. Dean: Has your air fryer arrived. Dan: Oh, it's on the counter. Dean: Okay, it's on the counter. It's on the counter, it's been plugged in, but it hasn't been used yet. Okay, okay, we sort of inch our way into these new technologies. Dan: I got it, just unpack it and set it there for a little bit and just kind of let it live with it. Dean: Well, it's been a week now and we haven't used it. Why don't we use it? So anyway, but it is sitting on the counter. It's a ninja. Is that the kind you have? Dan: I think I have a breville is the name of uh mine. But did you get the one then? Did you get the one that steven palter posted? I have no idea. Oh okay, that's uh. Dean: So, oh yeah, that's fab you have to appreciate how little I take into this sort of thing, exactly right. Dan: I love that. Dean: There will be a who who's between me and the air. Dan: That's right? Dean: Oh, dan, that's the best Any technology in the world. I can guarantee you there will be a who between me and the technology. And I said what do you think? And I look for people who really love interacting with technology. I want that person between me and the technology and I'll ask them what's it do? What's it do? Dan: I'll tell you what I'm working on. Dean: What will it do for the thing I'm working on? Yeah, yeah, I love that and I've been pretty constant on that. I mean, you know, I was constant on this when I was six years old. I just always let some other human investigate the new technology. Dan: Yeah, and yeah. Dean: So I've lived a disconnected life when it comes to technology. What explains that? Dan: Well, I was thinking, you know about you, and I was thinking how you have the gift of being kind of brought into an era where television wasn't even a thing Like your earliest childhood was electronic free, I thought. But were you like? So you were born in 1944. And so it was six years. Probably Do you remember when you got exposed to your first television. Dean: Yeah, I think I was maybe. Yeah, I think it was around 52. I mean I had seen it, I'd been in other people's houses right they had television, but actually having our own television, I think it's maybe eight years. I was eight, so you got all the way to you. Dan: Think about this. You got all the way to eight years without being exposed to anybody else's visual bombardment of electronic propaganda or otherwise. Right, your visual input into your mind was largely formed through your own imagination. Yeah, you. You had to work, you had to create these visual pictures in your mind. Yeah, did you guys, did you? Dean: listen to radio, and I was assisted by radio. Dan: I remember radio had a big impact on me. Dean: And yeah, oh yeah, sorry, sergeant King of the Yukon. And yeah, there was Amos and Andy. We listened to Amos and Andy, andy, we listened to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and then there was one that my siblings, my older siblings, listened to at night, which was called the dark museum, which scared the daylights out of me and the shadow. Dan: We listened to the shadow so was that the family activity no, no. Dean: Here you have to get the full impact okay, sorry sorry. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. The shadow knows. And then you had a 30 minute. 30 minute example of human evil. You know it was great but you had to do all the visuals. You know I, you were the visual director of all these radio programs. Dan: So was this? Everybody in the family gathered in the living room sitting on the couch listening to the radio like this. Is that what was going on? Dean: Yeah, there was sort of a. Yeah, there was sort of a dining room actually where you could listen. There were a number of radios. There was a radio in the kitchen, there was a radio, I think, someplace else, and it was a big house, a farmhouse, yeah, and I remember listening, imagining, you know, imagining. There was another series called Sky King, sky King, which became a TV station you know, and the Lone Ranger. We had the Lone Ranger. Dan: So there was a lot of variety, uh-huh and so, and then, in 1952, eight years old, you get your first television set. Dean: I think, so I think that would have been about then, yeah. Yeah, because I remember the first presidential election was 52. And I can remember that being on television. Who was the? Dan: president, was that Ike Eisenhower? Dean: Yeah, I like Ike, that was Eisenhower's first term. I like Ike. Dan: Now you know that's a really interesting thing. Do you remember, like your new routine when the television came? Were you watching TV every day from that period on? Or were your parents limiting the TV, or was everybody gathered around and limiting the TV, or was everybody around? Dean: and watch the TV. Yeah, I mean it was a frequent. It was a frequent activity once came in, that's all I can say I don't know, I don't know if I watched every day, but there you know, there were favorite shows. I think Arthur Godfrey was one of the early shows, the variety hour, and yeah, no, children's. I think there wasfrey was one of the early shows, the Variety Hour, and yeah, no, so Children's. I think there was Howdy Doody. Howdy Doody was. Dan: I think one of them Doody time. Dean: Yeah, and I think Soupy Sales was on and yeah. Dan: Yeah, I'm just thinking how. Yeah, I remember Romper Room. I just saw a video of Joe and I at the I Love Marketing event and I was saying we had all the people streaming from all over the world and I was doing a little Romper Room and about half the people in the audience knew about Romper Room and half didn't. Dean: That was kind of interesting. Dan: I remember I see Bobby and Johnny in their magic mirror. I used to hide behind the sofa so she wouldn't see me miss joan miss joan, miss joan. Yeah, so I was thinking about it was good, I mean I mean it was good, but it wasn't. Dean: It wasn't the major part, you know, of your you know it was only during weekdays, it was only at night and uh yeah, and on weekends I don't really there was. I don't know what the years were, but you know you got. You know, somewhere along the line you had jackie gleason and you had ed sullivan and you had other things like that, you know. But I wasn't. I can't say I was captivated because I was usually out. You know, I was outside, we lived in the country and I was out and I had really gotten hooked on reading. So I was doing a lot of reading back then. Yeah, interesting, but it is kind of what about yourself? Dan: I mean, you were born in the television age. I was born in the television age, you're right. And so every day, you know, I mean, yeah, tv was part of every day. And I was just the reason. The context for me thinking about this was thinking about how recent, you know, as each layering availability of content became unlocked kind of thing, our, you know, screen time has dramatically increased. And I was thinking all the way back to you. That's why I was thinking about you is, you know, literally your first six or eight years there were no screens, there were the only, you know, the cinema of the mind. That was your, that was your entertainment, your imagination. But I remember, so when I remember when we got our first color television right Around 19 or some early like that, and I remember the first show that I saw in color was the Price is Right with Bob Barker, and then All in the Family with Archie Bunker. That was, so you know, in the 70s. It was the Jefferson and Sanford and Sand and then all these. You know, the 70s, I think, was the golden era of television, you know, with all these shows becoming. You know, I remember Star Trek and you know all these, the Rockford Files and Starsky and Hutch, all the Love Boat, all these shows, these iconic shows in the seventies. But you only had, you know, basically the three networks was Canada, we had the CBC and TV Ontario. So those were the things and I remember as a kid, when the TV guide would arrive, we subscribed to the Saturday Star, the Toronto Star, that would arrive on Saturdays and that would have the TV guide in there, and I remember they would have it laid out like a you know a. Gantt chart, or whatever the time, the grid of times, to show you what was on. Dean: It was like a matrix. Dan: It was like a matrix you could see yeah, so it would list there were, you know. Dean: Every day had a matrix from yes till night 13 but you only had the three. You only had the three. Dan: There were 13 13 channels, yeah, to choose from three networks. And I remember the you know organizing my saturdays in the winter around the cartoons. You know like okay, so I would have a highlighter which was recently invented in that winter around the cartoons. You know like okay, so I would have a highlighter which was recently invented in that or newly introduced or whatever to our household, but I would have the highlighter and I would like highlight my. I would do my programming. You know I'm going to watch. I'm going to watch the Justice League at you know eight o'clock and then I'm going to watch the Justice League at you know eight o'clock, and then I'm going to watch Batman at nine, and then I'm going to watch Shazam and then Scooby-Doo, and then it was the we're all about why CBS or ABC's wide world of sports. That was like a big thing. And I remember now how much of my childhood was around synchronous and scheduled programming Because there was no other option. If you wanted to see that show, if you wanted to watch the Waltons that was on my mom's favorite show you had to watch that on Thursday nights or whenever the Waltons were on, you know, and Little House on the Prairie, and it was like your selection, your decisions were made. It wasn't like what should we watch tonight? Of the like now, infinite choices available to us, but we actually spend probably more as a percentage of our time not you, but collectively watching, consuming screen content. It's just been an observation. I've had some of these conversations. I'm getting really conscious of really being aware of my screen time and trying to be more discerning. Dean: I was just thinking now that you've got me thinking about it. I left home in 62 when I was 18. And I can't remember until I was 40 actually having a television during that 20 years or 22 years. I went 22 years and you know I don't remember. I remember people having televisions that I would go and watch things, sports things like that but, I went 22 years so, and then, of course, I haven't watched it in the last six years, so I've got pretty close to 40 years of my life when I didn't watch television Half, almost half my life. So I think it's never been a big deal for me. Dan: Right, think now like I look at kids now, like you think about the technological sophistication and facile nature of technology to eight-year-olds today, compared to Dan Sullivan at eight, you know is pretty amazing. But your experience in the outdoors to the average eight-year-old you know? Dean: it's so funny. I never see very rare. Dan: It's very rare, even in the 70s. Like growing up, you know the whole period of my childhood like from you know, six to 12. Six to 12. You don't see the same sort of pack of kids roaming around on the street that we saw when we were, when I was growing up anyway. I mean, you know, I grew up in the suburbs so we had like a very active, you know social ecosystem. We were outside all day, every day. You know social ecosystem. We were outside all day, every day you know, playing and making things up and riding our bikes and exploring the ravines and the sewers, and our parents never really knew where we were either. I mean we were. The idea was you got up and you had breakfast and you got out and you came home when you got hungry or when the streetlights came on at night. That's the deadline, you know I heard a comedian talking about that that it was so laissez-faire when we were growing up that they had to run ads on TV at night that said it's 1030. Do you know where your children are? Had to remind our parents that they had kids. Oh, so funny and true, you know. Dean: Yeah, it was really interesting, Really interesting. We in London we have our favorite hotel where we stay in London. Dan: And across. Dean: They've taken a whole old industrial area and they've completely transformed it. So they have a hotel and then they have condos and then they have shops and there's a courtyard in the middle and you cross one of the courtyards and there's a Japanese restaurant there. I remember being in there one night and there were six teenage girls, Japanese girls 16, 16, 17. And there were six of them at the table and each of them was on their phone during the entire meal. Dan: Yeah they're all talking in direct with other people. Yeah, so funny, right? Dean: They're not even there even when they're in the presence. It struck me that their world is actually inside the phone. Well, that's my point. Dan: That's the whole point of Cloudlandia. Cloudlandia is the real world. That's where we all live in. Cloudlandia. Dean: Not me. Dan: No, when I say we all, I mean society, everything. I have to have a permanent disclaimer. Dean: You're saying a large number, a large percentage, a large percentage, a large percentage, and Sullivan excluded A large percentage of people. Yeah, yeah. And it's honestly a different world. I mean, yeah, I can't make too many comments on it because I've never really experienced that you know. Dan: So we've got a young guy in our, in our go-go agent platform. He's a young realtor in Guelph, ontario. He's in his mid twenties, just getting started on his career and stuff. He's lived in Guelph his whole life and one of the strategies that we teach people. Dean: Nice city. Dan: Yeah, guelph is a is beautiful, yeah, so he's grown up there. You know, really, you know good looking young guy, very personable. I think he's got a big future. But one of the strategies that we encourage people is to gather their top 150 relationships, the people that if they saw them at the grocery store they'd recognize them by name and stop and have a conversation with them. Right, and the hardest thing, the funniest thing is he, after racking his brain, could only come up with 88 people on his list of 150 people. And I thought to myself like the population of Guelph must be 150,000 people right In the Guelph area I mean, it's pretty good size city. I thought you know you look at this right that there's a kid who has grown up largely in the internet world, right, like largely on in Cloudlandia, and that's the real thing. The reality is that if you go outside of his bedroom and walk around on the street, he only knows 88 mainland people and he's surrounded. I was teasing him that I said are you telling me that you've lived your entire 26 years in Guelph and all you know is 88 people and you're walking around surrounded by 149,920? Npc is a gaming term, dan for non-playing characters, because all of these online video games GTA or Grand Theft Auto and all these things that are kind of photorealistic things. All the people that walk around in the background are called non-playing characters or NPCs. Ground are called non-playing characters or NPCs. And I said that's really what you're telling me is, you've spent your whole life in Guelph and you only when you step outside your bedroom, know 88 people. That's a problem If you're in a business that is a mainland business. Mainland business right. Dean: All houses are 100% firmly planted on the mainland, as are the people that inhabit those homes. Dan: So it only makes sense that you need to get an outpost on the mainland, not in Cloudlandia, you know. Dean: Yeah, I was just thinking, I was just caring of my company company, my team members. There may be some new ones that I don't know, but I certainly know 100. And then my free zone program. I've got 105 in there and you know, some of them. I have to check the list to get their name, but you know I'd be over. I'd be over 150 with those two groups. Dan: Yeah, but there's. Dean: And then there'd easily be another 100 with the 10 times group, and then there would be 20 with Genius Network. Yeah, I'd probably be 300 or 400 anyway. Dan: And it's a really interesting thing. There's a lot of thing around that. Like Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychology anthropologist from Oxford, he is the one that coined that or discovered that information that the 150 is the magic number. You know, that's the number of relationships that we can manage where we recognize people and have, you know, a current status in their life kind of thing, in their life kind of thing. And that goes back to our first kind of days of playing the cooperation game where we would be tribal and have 150 people and that was a security thing. If you didn't know the people around you, that was a threat. Right, you had to know everybody. So, that's part of it. If it got to 150 150 what would happen is they would split up and go off and, you know, form other tribes. But that was. There's so many naturally occurring ways that that happens, but I just noticed you know how so much of it is for me personally. Like my Cloudlandia reach is a hundred times or more my mainland reach. Like if you just think about the number of people that I know or know me from in Cloudlandia it's way bigger than the number of people that know me in Winter Haven, florida, in my own backyard, you know. Dean: Yeah, well, it's very interesting. You know good FreeZone partner Peter or Stephen Poulter. You know, with TikTok he's got he's probably got 100,000 people who believe that he's their friend, he's their guide, he's their friend, yeah, yeah, but he wouldn't know any of them. Dan: Right, that's exactly right. Dean: So it's very. Taylor Swift probably has 100 million easy, probably more who know her? Dan: Mr Beast has 350 subscribers. You think about that. That's a measurable percentage of every person on the planet. When you think about that, almost that's, yeah, more than. Dean: It'll be interesting to see what he's like at 40. I wonder he's pushing 30. He's pushing 30, now right. Dan: Yeah, I think 26 or 7. Dean: Yeah, yeah, it'd be interesting to see what that does, because we only have really interactive relationships with a very small. I mean you talk about Dunbar's 150, but actually if you see who it is you hang out with, you know in the course of a year. I bet it's less than 15. Yeah, that's less, yeah, but yeah, yeah that's less, yeah, but yeah, I think, these numbers, you know, these huge numbers that come with quadlandia, do they mean anything? Do they actually mean anything, though, you know? Dan: um, well, I think that what I mean to that? Dean: do they have any? If you have that large of a reach, does it actually mean anything to you? Dan: It certainly from a monetary standpoint it does. From a relationship standpoint it's sort of a one-way thing, yeah, I was talking to one of our social media. Dean: We have a social media team here and I said can you bring me up to date? We have a social media team here and I says can you bring me up to date? I'm out there a lot every day, aren't I On Facebook and TikTok and Instagram and everything I said? I'm out there. And LinkedIn I'm out there a lot. And she says oh, yeah, every day there's probably about you know, five to ten new messages are going out from you and I said, that's interesting Because every once in a while I run into someone and someone says boy, I really liked your Instagram the other day and I said yeah, well, I aim to please. That's your whole thing, yeah, but I have no idea what's going out. Dan: And that's, you know, that's only going to be amplified when you take, when AI starts creating or, you know, repackaging a lot of the let's face it, you've got a lot of content out there. You've spoken a lot of words, You've been, you know, if we capture, everything you say basically is captured digitally right. Dean: Yep, Danny's got a lot to say. You do. Yeah that's right and you've got your. Dan: You've got the whole organization. You're the happiest. He's very expressive. Dean: Yeah, he's very expressive. You got a lot of milk, yeah, yeah. Well, anyway we're. I think we're going to start our next big book. We did the three with Ben Hardy, which have been a huge success. And I sent Ben a note. I said it was your idea to do these things, so without your initiative none of this would have happened. And of course you wrote the three books, so without your writing none of this would have happened and we've had really good results from hot leads coming in to coach from the books. It wouldn't have happened if you hadn't done that. But you know the publisher is giving us a call every month Say do you have a new book, do you need a new writer and everything. But we're ready to go. Dan: We're ready. Dean: And I think so it's going to be. I think it's going to be the one that we're doing with Jeff Madoff casting, not hiring. Yeah, it's a nice punchy, you know, it's another one of the punchy titles and so that will come out in coach form in the first week of September. Dan: So that'll be all printed. Dean: I think it went. I think it goes tomorrow to the printer and it'll be printed up. And you know, I don't know what it is, but I think a lot of people are fooling themselves about reach because they're lacking vision and capability. They think if you have reach, you've got something. But I think, if you don't have all three, you don't have. If you don't have all three, you don't have anything. Dan: Well, I think it's, if you have capability if you have capability. Dean: If you have capability but no vision, no reach, you have nothing. If you have vision but you have no capability and reach, you have nothing. You got to have all three. Dan: Yeah, you know it's very interesting. Chad Jenkins and I were talking, you know he's one of the bigger advocates for the VCR formula vision, capability, reach, about the you know the secret of that for people that you know whether we were to express them in capital V or lowercase v and capital C, lowercase c, capital R, lowercase r to see that where somebody self I see a lot of situations where people have a capital C capability that gets discovered and all of a sudden they're thrust into reach that they have no idea, no vision of what to do with. And it's very interesting. So someone that comes to mind. There's a woman, safali Shabari, who I met in Toronto through Giovanni. She was a guest or speaker at one of his Archangel events capital C capability for parenting and that kind of advice and she got discovered by, you know, Oprah and all the mainstream. So she was kind of thrust into the spotlight that was now shining a light on her capability, which brought her tremendous, acute onset reach that she really doesn't have, in my observation, a vision for how to navigate, you know, or what to do with that. They're an abundant reach asset with no vision. You know, to connect the two and I think that happens a lot. I think that happens a lot, that people get thrust into a spotlight and they, you know, have. And often you can have reach without capability too, and that's a problem too, and that's a problem. But if your reach is a result of somebody discovering your capability, that is a big. That's the formula I was. you know I've often talked about Max Martin as a role model you know the guy who's written all the number one songs on the radio that when I really started looking a little bit deeper into it, what I found out was that it was really through the reach of of Clive Davis that Max Martin's capability became. You know that he became Max Martin capability became. You know that he became Max Martin and because he was just a guy in Sweden producing great music, with a capital C capability of making pop songs, you know, and Clive Davis, when he discovered that he, as the president of Columbia Records and the founder of Arista and Jive Records, all of these subsidiaries, he had tremendous reach to both artists and their audiences. Visionary, to pair his artists with this Max Martin capability to create this capital VCR outcome of you know, all the success that Max Martin has had. And it was only through that pairing of a capital C capability with a capital R reach and a capital V vision then it all really became a big thing. Dean: This is my observation. Dan: This is all like live, you know developing, you know thoughts here around it, because I constantly. I run that filter constantly in background, filter constantly in background. But that VCR formula is, I think, a very relevant collaboration tool, that if people were really aware of their capabilities and had transparency to other people's vision, capabilities and reach, that's where the big connections happen, you know. Dean: Yeah, I think it requires a fair amount of conceptual capability that you can. You can sort of depersonalize your situation enough to understand what your capability would mean to somebody else. And you have to have a conceptual ability to see what reach would mean. For example, I was on a podcast on Friday. I was a guest of someone who is a key player in the land development industry across the United States and he's in COACH. So he asked me a lot of questions about coach and I went through and I explained. He's got 10 years in coach and he talked about what each of those concepts meant to him and everything else. And then his podcast is going to go out to 5,000 key players in the land development land development business in you know probably 25 or 30 states and everything else. And so at the end he says you know, I'm going to send this out and I'll send all the coach information, everything else. And I got off the call and I said that was easy. Dan: That was easy. Yes, that all you had to do was stay in your C lane of your capability. Dean: I just stayed in my lane and said what we had done. And then I talked about where I thought we would be with Coach when I was 100. I'm 80 and Coach was 100. And that's kind of a significant statement. It's not the sort of thing you would hear every day from an 80-year-old of what things were going to be like when they were 100 and much bigger at 100 than at 80. And it was really interesting, but that was like an hour middle house and you know I'm just talking, you know really good conversation, a lot of back and forth and you know, both of us asking the other questions and everything else and I said that's pretty cool that goes out immediately to five thousand. That's immediately goes out to five thousand people. Dan: Uh, yeah, yeah I mean that's pretty mean, you know, when you think about this, so of staying in your, in your lane of that's. Part of the great thing is that these things are largely plug and play, you know, like, and it happens. That's why I say a multiplier. You know, with the formula vision plus capability multiplied by reach, that reach is a multiplier. Dean: Well, they're actually. Yeah, I think what it is that two of them are addition, but the third one's a multiplier. Dan: Yes, that's exactly right. Dean: In other words, you can have vision plus reach multiplied by capability. You can have vision plus capability multiplied by capability. You can have vision and capability, vision plus capability multiplied by reach. You can have vision plus reach multiplied by yeah, yeah, yeah but, I, think it's like two of them are inside of our parentheses. You have, you know yeah, then the other that's multiplied by the third one. Dan: Yeah so it's very. Dean: I'm convinced it's three yes From the triple play. So I'm thinking about a tool right now where I said who's got the big idea, who's got the big idea, who's got the ready-to-use capability, who's got the ready-to-use capability? Dan: And who's? Dean: got the ready-to-use reach? Dan: Yes, you know that's fantastic. That would be a very useful tool. I think that's a really useful framework for collaboration. Yeah, it fits so well with our whole free zone operating system, you know? Dean: yeah, because we're surrounded by those those capabilities. Dan: Everybody's got a capability in the form of, uh, their self-multiplying company that they've already kind of established. To get to that point right, most people undervalue. They mostly undervalue their own capabilities and reach. They don't see them as assets in most cases. Dean: Well, even when they have vision, the vision isn't really useful to anyone else. It's only useful to them Right. Dan: Vision isn't really useful to anyone else. It's only useful to them, right yeah? Dean: I mean your vision has to have a lot of room for other people. Dan: That's what. So, chad and I've been talking about this there's the horizontal vision is within your own capability channel. You know they see vision, maybe within how to improve their capability, or internally. All their vision is within the walls of their own company. But where the real benefit comes is with horizontal vision. I said vertical vision is within your own company vision. I said vertical vision is within your own company. Horizontal vision is being able to see what your capabilities paired up with, recognizing someone else's vision that your capabilities could help or how someone else's reach could enhance your capabilities. You know all of those that vertical or the horizontal vision is where the collaborative creativity comes yeah, yeah, there's so much yeah I think you're right that there's, you know, articulating, the thinking tool that helps you recognize and assess what your unique probably unique ability fits within a capability right. That's a thing in your organizational unique ability and your unique teamwork all fit within that capability channel. Dean: Yeah, it was really funny. I was when was it Thursday? I think I was. When was it Thursday? I think I was invited into a workshop here in Toronto and it was the lead master's group. Okay, so the lead master's group is the lead group of all the people who are still at the signature level after 20, 25 years. Okay, and they haven't jumped to the 10 times. They haven't, you know. Their next group would be 10 times. Dan: And they're a long way. Dean: They're a long way off from free zone Anyway, but we're introducing the triple play straight across the program. This quarter. So everybody's getting the triple play. And there was a group, probably about 40, maybe 40 in the room and I would say, three got it, three got the triple play Understood, yeah. And they said, yeah, well, why would I do this? And I said well to differentiate yourself from everybody else. Yeah well, I'm not sure why I would do that and everything else, and so this is why I put the emphasis you have to have a conceptual ability that's apart from you. You're just seeing something that exists, that's big and it's powerful, but it exists outside of you. It's not you. Somebody else's capability exists outside of you. Somebody's vision exists outside of you. And somebody's reach exists outside of you. And you've got to be able to see this as a reality that exists in the world, whether you want to use it or not. These abilities, these capabilities, vision and reach is outside of yourself. Vision and reach is outside of yourself. And then you have to say if I'm going to use what other people have, how do I have to be useful to them, that they would be agreeable to that, and I think that takes a lot of conceptual ability to see how you could be useful to other people. Dan: Yeah, I agree with that, that's true. Dean: Yeah, I think there's. I mean, if you can only see within your own framework, you're not going to be VCRing anything. Dan: Right, exactly, you're only going to be trying to increase, you know, or improve your own limited vision within your own situation and working on your own capabilities, and only with your own reach. It's real. That's where it's like linear. That's linear, yeah, and you know exponential is plugging in to ready to implement reach, vision and technology or capability. Dean: It's really funny because huh, well, yeah, it's who, not how. But you have to see the who's as existing, completely independent of you. They just exist. They're out there, they're doing their thing and they're not going to be interested in you unless there's a big payoff. In other words, they have to see and it was very interesting because when I talked to like first year and strategic coach, you know first or let's say, signature level first or second and people will say well, you have such great people here at coach, how do you find great people? Dan: And I said you know where I live, you know I live in such and such place. Dean: We don't have great people like you find great people. And I I said you know where I live, you know I live in such and such place. We don't have great people like you have great people. And I said I suspect you do have great people, they're just not looking for you. Yeah right, how? How do you have to be such that other great people would be interested in you as an opportunity? Dan: Yeah, yeah, amazing you have to have something compelling you do you? Dean: have to have something compelling. Yeah, not convincing, but compelling. Dan: That's right, you know, shaped with a what's in it for them. Yeah, viewpoint, you know that's. I think Joe's book is amazing to set. I can't. It's one of those things that I can't believe nobody has written that book until now, you know. But just that whole idea of thinking about your vision, capabilities and reach from a what's in it for them perspective, with other people, what you can do for other people, it's almost one of those things that it's so powerful. Dean: That's true. That's true of all new things, though. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I can't believe somebody hasn't thought about this before. Uh-huh. Right right, right yeah. Dan: Oh man, that was. So there was George Carlin. He had a thing, a little you know comment where he was saying how the English language is so incredible that you'd think everything that's possible to say has already been said, you know. But he said I'm going to say things tonight here that have never been spoken in the history of the world. For instance, he said hey, marge, after I finish sticking this red hot poker in my eye, I'm going to go out and barbecue some steaks. Nobody's ever said those words in the history of the world. So it's not. Everything hasn't been said. I thought that was pretty funny actually. So there, yeah, Well we've spent an hour. Dean: We did a good hour, I think so. Dan: I always enjoy these conversations. Dean: Yeah, and. I'm going to, I think yeah you ought to zero in on the tools. You know that, yeah, and I'm going to. Dan: I think, yeah, you ought to zero in on the tool. Dean: You know that I'll give some thought to it, but this is your tool, not my tool. I'll give some thought to it. I love it, All right. Dan: Okay, talk to you next week. Bye. Dean: Okay, bye.

In this episode of Cloudlandia, we explore how weather predictions and media sensationalism influence public views, especially regarding storms like impending Tropical Storm Debbie. Drawing on past hurricanes and climate patterns, we examine the normalized perceptions of living with these events.  Additionally, we delve into the evolution of creativity through technology and mind-altering substances. From early stone tools to therapeutic uses of psychotropics today, innovation is traced alongside historical cultural explosions. Comparisons are drawn between eras like the 1960s and perceptions of creativity now.  These chapters emerge from a common thread of challenging assumptions, spanning climate activism, human creative drives, and digital changes. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Dan and I discuss preparing for Tropical Storm Debbie in Florida and the normalization of living with hurricanes. We delve into how media influences public perception of weather events and examine Bjorn Lomborg's critique of climate activism, discussing resilient polar bears and the myth of the Maldives sinking. We explore the evolution of technology and creativity, from early stone tools to the influence of mind-altering substances on human history. We question whether the creative explosion of the 1960s was an anomaly and consider if today's society is experiencing a creative drought. Insights from a recent Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson podcast are shared, focusing on the impact of psychotropics on human culture and creativity. The conversation transitions to the benefits of the carnivore diet and personal experiences with diet changes, including the use of air fryers for cooking meat. We highlight the importance of critical thinking and self-interpretation in navigating the abundance of unfiltered information available today. Platforms like Real Clear Politics and Perplexity are discussed as valuable tools for accessing diverse perspectives and balanced information. We note that major corporations have yet to profit from AI investments, despite substantial funding, and discuss the potential reasons behind this trend. The episode concludes with a reflection on the importance of discerning what information to allow into our thinking, emphasizing the responsibility we have in the age of information unfiltered. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, mr Jackson, welcome to Cloudlandia. Dan: And I hope you're enjoying all the extraordinary benefits of your own four seasons. Dean: I really am. We're battening down the hatches. We're just getting ready for Tropical Storm Debbie, which is making its way through the Gulf of Mexico, beating towards the coast of Florida. Dan: And it's so funny, yeah, yeah. Dean: So it won't be. It's apparently it's going to be a lot of rain and wind and stuff for us. You know I'm so I'm very close to the highest point in peninsular Florida, so we're not going to get flooding, we're on high dry. Dan: That puts you at about 60 feet above sea level. Right, you know it's so funny. It is funny I think I can see. Dean: Let's see sea level reading. There's, yeah, the highest point in. Florida is three feet above sea level, which is Bock Tower, which you've been to, and so, yeah, so we're sitting here ready to go. But you would never know, dan, what's coming, because right now it's still. It's slightly overcast, but it's still. Yesterday was beautiful, today slightly overcast. You'd never know what was coming if it wasn't for the big. You know buzzsaw visuals in the news right now, but seeing it marking its way and with a huge, wide swath of the path of the potential storm, you know. Dan: When you first moved there, did it take you a while to get to normalize the fact that, yes, we get tropical storms, we get hurricanes. Dean: Yeah, Exactly Did it take you? Dan: two or three times before you said oh well, I guess it's just normal. Dean: It is normal, that's exactly right, and every year you know what I would say. It's so funny that there's never a year in memory that I can remember somebody saying, or the news media saying should be a light year for hurricanes, this year Doesn't sell newspaper or drink advertising. Dan: I remember, after Katrina, but Katrina didn't really hit it for it. It hit Louisiana. Dean: Yeah right. Dan: But I remember the alarmist saying well, every year it's going to get worse. Now and then there was almost a year, maybe two years, when they didn't have any hurricanes at all. Dean: Yeah, exactly that's what's so funny, right? It's like the things like you know, and it is funny how the whole, how it all has cycles you know, because California, you know, had the. You know everybody's talking about the water levels in California. Now you just it's all reported right now that you know Lake Tahoe is at the highest maximum allowable level for Ever, ever, yes, exactly, it's at its peak, it could be poor flooding. Yeah, exactly, it's like 15 feet off of the highest level allowed and because of all of the snow cap melting and all the stuff. But anyway, it's just so. You know, I definitely see those. It's all part of the balance for our minds, you know yeah, it was really interesting. Dan: Did you ever read bjorn lawnberg? He's, uh, danish. He started off as a you know you know a card carrying climate. You know, I don't know what you call them. I guess they're called climate activists. Dean: Okay, yeah. Dan: I feel that I'm very activated by the climate, so I don't know, what the distinction is there. Are you activated by the climate? I am, you know. When the climate is this way, I'm activated this way, and when the climate's a different way, I'm activated a different way. He wrote an amazing article in the Wall Street Journal. I think it was Wednesday and this past Wednesday, and he just points out that, first of all, the whole climate activism movement is an industry. There's a lot of jobs that are financed by the climate. It might be in the millions the number of people who make money off of doomsday predictions about the climate. So whenever a movement, someone once said everything starts off as a cause and it's just the people emotionally involved. In other words, they said we're not paying attention to this, we have to pay more attention to this. But then when government gets involved, it becomes a movement because large amounts of government money start flowing in a particular direction and then it becomes an industry. The fourth stage is it becomes a racket. I think we're in the climate racket period right now. Yeah, but Bjorn Lomborg was going back to 20, 25 years ago when he had a revelation that the climate does change. But he says that's the nature of the climate. The very nature of the climate is that the climate changes. But he said the first, if you'll remember this, with Al Gore, this was right around when he lost. Dean: Yeah, it was right around 2001. Dan: Yeah, yeah, he was right after the 2000 election Right 2000 election and I suspect he needed some money. So he started the movement and he used the polar bear as an example. There was this one polar bear who was just floating on a very small ice sheet, you know. And they said, you know the bears will be gone within 20 years because of the warming. It turns out the population in the last 20 years has doubled. The number of polar bears has doubled, even though it's gotten warmer. According to the climate racket people, it's gotten warmer, but the polar bears, you know, have been around forever. I guess they know how to adapt to changing conditions. Dean: They were all grizzly bears. Dan: They were all grizzly bears at one time. I don't know if you know that. Dean: I did not. That's where they started. Dan: Yeah. They found the white yeah, they rebranded it as polar bears, I guess extended their territory and that was it, so they've doubled since Al Gore's warning. And then the other thing was that the let's see, there's two more. Well, I'll mention number three. Number three is that all the low islands in the Indian Ocean were going to sink below sea level. The sea level was going to flood the Maldives and some of the other things, and for the most part, all of them have expanded their landmass in the last 20 years. They've actually gotten bigger. They've increased their height above sea level by possibly six inches. Dean: Oh man. Dan: You'd appreciate that. Living in Florida, so it hasn't happened. The other one was the deaths from warming. Last year in the United States I don't know if it was last year or the year before, I don't know if it was last year or the year before 25 times more people died of extreme cold than died of extreme heat. So if you're a betting man, I call it the Gore factor, that if Al Gore says something, bet the other way. Dean: Ah right. Dan: Yeah, yeah, this is you know. Dean: The man is impossibly rich because of his creating a movement, creating an industry, and now it's a racket. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how invisible he is now. I mean he really is like I haven't seen or heard anything from Al Gore. I can't remember the last time. Dan: Well, it's passive income now. Dean: Right, just stay quiet, stay low. Dan: Just stay quiet, just stay quiet. The dollars just keep rolling in yeah, yeah. But it's interesting. My suspicion is I've been thinking about this because I'm writing my next quarterly book. We just wrapped up Casting Not Hiring, which will come out in September this one with Jeff Madoff, this one with Jeff and it really really worked. This book really worked the Casting Not Hiring but the next one is going to be called Timeless. Technology, and the idea here is that technology is a way of thinking. It's not so much particular technology, but it's a way, and my been that it's actually one of the crucial factors. Technological thinking is one of the crucial factors that differentiates humans from the other species, and what I mean by that it's the intentional and yet unpredictable utilizing stuff from our environment to enhance our capabilities. Dean: And. Dan: I did a search on perplexity what would be reckoned from perplexity doing a search of what would be sort of the 10 early breakthroughs, the technological breakthroughs, and one of them was just stones that you could throw. You could pick up a stone and throw it and it actually changed how the human body evolved. Is that the ability of using our hand and our arm and getting that tremendous arm strength that you can throw a stone and, you know, kill something. Right Kill an animal or kill it. Kill another human yeah, and everything. Dean: I wonder even about that, the evolution of technology, like that, like thinking a rock and then realize that, hey, if I just chisel this away now I make this sharp on this end. Dan: And now all of a sudden we got an axe, you know yeah, and then actually they think that glue was an early adaption, that you could take sticks and stones and put them together. You could glue things together and you could actually. So they looked for probably really sticky saps or something from trees you know that they would use. Then pottery, of course, and it's interesting with pottery that the very earliest samples that we have. clearly they took clay and made it into some sort of cup or yeah, a bowl of some sort, but whenever they find it and it goes back hundreds of thousands of years they can detect alcohol. They can detect that there was alcohol, which kind of shows you how early that must have been. Consciousness transformer that's what I call alcohol. It's a consciousness transformer, would you not say? Dean: Yeah, I mean I was listening to Joe Rogan. I had Jordan Peterson on his podcast just recently. Dan: That's a good podcast partnership. Dean: Yeah, yeah, and he was talking about the, you know psychotropics and the things that are. You know that psilocybin and all the all of those things, marijuana was all what was sort of responsible for the revolutionary change that happened. You know the difference from the fifties to the sixties and his thing was, you know, in the mid to late 60s. You know that's what started the whole. Every single one of those things was made schedule one, narcotic and illegal and completely controlled right, and that his thing is that we haven't seen anything revolutionary, like any kind of change happening from since then, since the 60s, into now. Dan: Which kind of indicates that it's good enough? Dean: Well, it's just kind of funny. You know, like that, you wonder what the you know where he was kind of going with that, but he was using as an example like the creativity in the 60s, like he talked about the difference of the car. Even the cars and the things, the designs of things that were being made in the 60s are iconic and desirable and different than, like you compared to, you know, a camaro or the muscle car, this, the corvette, and the things in the 60s compared to like nobody wants your 19 camaro. That's not desirable at all, not in the the way that the 60s, Except maybe NASCAR. Dan: Except NASCAR, I think Camaros have a very niche use because they're really souped up. Mark Young, his team has won. At the latest count, his team had won three races this year so far. Discount this team had won three races this year so far and he was talking about it at the podcast dinner that we had after doing the podcast, the four-person podcast. But Camaros always play a very active role. They establish themselves as this amazing niche, you know, souped up, NASCAR type of car. But I really take what you're saying there that there's been no blockbuster new designs of cars that have really you know that you think that they'll still be around. In other words, these are real breakthrough cars. Yeah, Just going a little deeper into the Joe Rogan, Peterson, the Jordan. Dean: Peterson conversation. Dan: Did they go any deeper into why the creativity was then? But the creativity hasn't gone any further. Dean: Well, I think it was Joe's sort of. You know, I'm halfway through the podcast right now, but his basic assertion was that those access to those drugs or those not I will call I use the word drugs those, those we could say technologies are new. Access to those things opened up the part of the brain that is creative linkers, like that that's really they're saying all the way back, like going, if you take it all the way back evolutionarily, that they believe, like what you just said, back in, as far back as they go, there's access. You know they're seeing alcohol in, yeah, as mind-altering things. They would revere mushrooms, mushrooms were abundant and things that were mind-altering. And you think through all of these things, even in Indian or Native lore, that the peyote and the things that were, that part of a trip out of reality is a rite of passage or a thing that activates another part of your brain. You know, makes the connections that aren't otherwise accessible. Dan: Yeah, I'm totally, you know, I'm convinced that's probably true. Dean: And I think that we're starting to see now that these hallucinogenic what do we call it? Not hallucinogenics, but psychotropics. What's the right word for? Dan: it Psychotropic, I think. Dean: Yeah, so whatever now in treatment of PTSD and addiction and all of these beneficial things that are coming as part of using it therapeutically and but because it's just now starting to become more accessible or more active, it used to be like you've always heard we you and I both know a lot of people that have gone down the Iowa or the you know version and have had, you know, all sort of mind altering experiences doing that. I've never done it, yeah. Dan: I mean, I mean, it was very interesting. I was at Richard Rossi's Da Vinci 50. This was the last one I was I think it was february and scottsdale and two or three there. We had two or three coach clients there who were just doing a look. See, you know if they wanted to join the previewing and they were having a conversation about psychotropic drugs and they asked me if I had experimented and I said you mean, right beyond dealing with my own brain every day? You mean I said I have to tell you I don't have time for that stuff. Just dealing with my own brain every day is sure, you know, it's a full-time job. You know, because it's switching, it's switching channels continually and it takes a full-time job. You know, because it's switching channels continually and it takes a lot of work to get it focused on something useful. Yeah, I just wonder about that because it's when one of the political parties went really strange. I noticed the Democrats, since, well, kamala seems to me to be a sympathetic candidate for the president. Dean: Unbelievable, this is all craziness. Dan: Yeah, yeah, but they're using the word weird to describe the Republicans. Dean: Yeah. Dan: If there was ever a weird party. I mean, this is sheer projection, this is psychological projection. You know of weird, you know. Dean: Yeah, but it's amazing. Dan: That's when the Democratic Party changed, and it changed quite radically. I remember speaking about you know, psychedelics. I was in the army in Korea for two years. Us Army. Dean: And. Dan: I came back to the West Coast. When we flew back, we went into Seattle. I had a brother who was a professor at University of San Francisco, so I took a jump down to San Francisco before I flew back to my home in Ohio and he said I'm going to show you something really interesting. And he took me to Haight-Ashbury. This is the summer that Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, became really famous and it was the beginning of the whole hippie movement. And he walked me around and I could tell by interacting with him that he wasn't just an observer, you know that, he was actually a participant. And he didn't do him any good, because he eventually dropped out of, you know, being a professor and became more or less a vagrant. Dean: Tune in turn on drop out. Dan: Yeah well, he dropped out. He dropped out and then, about I would say, 12 years later, he committed suicide. Oh, no, and yeah, I mean, he's the one real casualty in my family. But I remember him how unreal his conversations were starting to become when I talked to him about this. You know this, and he was never and he was very smart. He was very smart I mean before that he was very bright and he was sort of practical and he became a professor, a university professor. Dean: That says something right there. Yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah and anyway. But that was my first awareness, that was my first introduction to it. I mean, I mean I didn't drink alcohol until I was 27 years old. I never drank until I was 27. Wow, I'll have a glass of wine, that I'll do anything, but I've never I've never actually enjoyed. I had pot a couple of times back in the early 60s, 70s and I found it disconnected me from other people. Alcohol does just the opposite. Alcohol kind of connects you. It does just the opposite. It kind of disconnects you and so it's very definitely. it's a reality since that period of time. But the one thing I want to say is that there's a really interesting thing the Democratic Party, up until the late 60s, was the party of the working class you know, working class, blue collar workers, and they had a real disaster in 1968 because they had huge riots in Chicago. So it's interesting In two weeks they'll be in Chicago and I think they've done one previous convention in Chicago. I think one of Obama's conventions was in Chicago. But anyway, they made a decision that they were no longer the working class and I think it was the result of all the tremendous growth of the student population as a result of the baby boomer generation. So between between, I think, 1940s, when the baby boomer generation starts to 64. Ok, and that would be 18 years there were I think it was, I don't know the exact number, but there was like 75 million babies who were born during that period and the front end of them were going to university in the 60s boomer generation. And so they saw the party start looking. Well, these are our future voters. They're not blue collar workers, they're college students and graduates and professors, and then the entire new working cadre. They're all going to be professionals. They're going to be professionals. And they changed their entire focus in 1960. I think it was in 1969 or 70. George McGovern, who was a senator at that time, did a commission and said we're no longer the party of the working class. And and so they're not, you know, 65 years later. And it's funny because the Republicans were always considered sort of the Pluto class, they were the class of the rich people, and now they've just shipped positions. So 60 years later, it's the billionaires and it's the college professors and media people and the bureaucratic class the government bureaucrats they're the Democrats. And the working class class the government bureaucrats they're the Democrats and the working class is the Republicans. Dean: Yeah, the Midwestern. Yeah, that's true, yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Dan: And Trump is the working class billionaire. Dean: Yes, that's true. I wanted to say it is kind of I'll use the word weird. What is kind of weird about this increased use of the word weird to describe the Republicans now is that it's so widespread. It's like the it's the Democratic talking point now. Like I love the videos now that kind of expose, the, you know, the Democrat party line sort of thing, and it happens on both sides actually. But I mean this idea of that, you know, with the media, all the soundbites are, you know, planting that thought that Republicans are weird, that this is weird. Dan: They're testing it. It's just that it's. I think it's hard for them to say it plausibly. There's no traditional values that the Democrats represent. Yeah, but it's interesting. And now I'm especially interested in your Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson podcast. Dean: And I'm going to watch that after. Dan: Watch that and Jordan Peterson I think I mean the two people together is a very interesting partnership for a podcast, because I think Jordan Peterson is, you know, came out of the university class. He was a professor here in Toronto and where he became. He became very famous for his book, which was basically very popular Rules for life you know, like before you leave your bedroom in the morning, make your bed and, yeah, stand up straight. You know, stand up straight and when you visit with your, your friends and meet their parents, be the sort of person that their parents would like to have come back as a guest. Pretty basic, fundamental rules of life. But then he really became infamous, if you want to call it that here in Toronto, because he had a real objection to the whole university class saying that people could be whatever gender they wanted to be, and they could self-identify, and they were opposed to the he and her or he and she thing, and he said no, he said I'm not going to do that. He said if it's a female, I'm going to call her she. And they said oh, this is an attack. This is an attack on equality. This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on inclusion. So he became very famous and it actually ultimately had forced him his hand to leave the university. He was called up and they said we're going to take away your professional degree and everything like that. Right, right, okay, which you know. I think there's something weird about that. Dean: I mean just my own opinion here, but yeah and I think Joe knows him. Dan: I think he's had Joe's had conversations. Joe Polish has had conversations with Jordan Peele. But all his videos where he's being interviewed by people who obviously don't like him, he comes off really well. He comes off as the sort of sane, rational person in all the you know, in all his interviews. I enjoy watching him. He strikes me as being kind of on the depressed side. You know he seems not to. I think he's a psychologist. I think that by training. And anyway, but I think it's interesting because this all started with the conversation of alcohol on the ancient pottery. Dean: Yeah. Dan: You know our thing here, but I think that probably throughout history, generation by generation, place after place, they found substances which can alter their consciousness, and I think it's probably been with human beings forever. Dean: Yeah, these whole. You're absolutely right, that whole yeah. Dan: It's not as good as steak for breakfast. Dean: No, I'll tell you what Dan. Dan: I have Steak for breakfast. Steak for breakfast. I just started it 12 days ago and it makes a big difference. Dean: You've started Carnivore. Dan: Well, not Carnivore, but I just don't have Cheerios for breakfast. Dean: Ah, right, right, Protein for breakfast. Yeah, I've been this week has been because I've been leaning more and more, as you know, working with jj on prioritizing pro no, babs was telling me about your call, abs was telling me about your call yesterday yeah and your air dryer. Dan: Your air, my air fryer. Dean: Yeah, and I'll tell you your air fryer and I made yesterday, yesterday for the first time, the most amazing ribeye in the air fryer. That was so juicy and delicious it was and so easy. I mean literally. I took the ribeye, I put salt and pepper and just a little bit. Dan: Yes, came out just like so your adventures get around you. Now I know, yeah, you're absolutely right. Dean: But I mean that's just, it's so good, who knew? Dan: Yeah, I mean yeah, it was I texted that. Dean: Well, we've got the whole. I'm very fortunate that you see second hand through, babs, but you know there's been a real support network, a gathering of what we're lovingly calling Team Dean on a text thread, and so I texted a picture of that last night to the group. Dan: Let's keep Dean in the mainland for a while, right? Dean: We don't want him drifting off into Glanlandia for eternity At least until we can get my mind melded up there somehow, right, but this week has been a breakthrough. Like this week I've been, this is the first week of full carnivore, like only meat. Oh so I started on Monday and it's been, you know, an interesting thing. But I had my highest weight loss week since we've been doing this by by this and I actually feel great. It took a couple of days to kind of get through the Van Allen belt of carbohydrate craving, you know. But now that I'm in, I'm through, I'm out of the atmosphere, I'm kind of floating that I think I can do this, you know, perpetually here for a while, and one of the reasons yeah, yeah Well. Dan: yeah well, I mean you talk about the air fryer, but there's a direct connection between the management of fire and your air fryer. you know, I mean hundreds of thousands of years and the human, the first humans who got a handle on fire. You know, it happened, probably accidentally, it was a lightning strike or something. But then they began to realize once we have fire, let's find a way of keeping it going. So we have access and that was a huge jump, because eating raw meat almost uses as many calories as you're getting from the meat, In other words you really have to work to digest. Let's call it steak. You know the steak. It takes a lot of calories to digest it. You really have to work to digest it but once they added fire to the mix and you could cook the food it made it much easier to digest and you got your calories much easier, yeah, but the other thing is that it's filling it's very filling, I mean the more carnivore you are, the less you're attracted to the sugar. That's the truth, easy caps. I mean, I don't feel particularly hungry. I had breakfast around 8 o'clock this morning Steak. I have steak and avocado. Okay, it's ribeye, but we're going to get. As a result of your yesterday information, babs is going to get an air fryer. We're going to get an air fryer, and then Stephen Poulter had even more. Dean: I saw that. He put up a fancy thing, exotic thing you would know that Stephen tracked it down, because that's what Stephen does. Dan: Yeah, but it's very interesting this getting enough calories to do interesting mind work. It's about if you're going to. I read a report that one of the great advantages of North America is right from the beginning. Right from when the first people came to the East Coast, they had a lot of protein right from the beginning. There was lots of game. There was lots of fish, you know. They had a lot of game and Americans have. Except for two periods of history, during the Revolutionary War and, I think, great Depression, americans have always had as many calories as they wanted. But there's a reading that high-level mental work requires roughly, you know, in the neighborhood of above 2,000 calories a day. You have to have 2,000 calories to be doing mental work. Dean: That's interesting. Dan: Yeah, yeah. And North America, the US and Canada have always had enormous amount of calories, protein calories, you know. So you can do hard labor, you can do high level of mental work. Makes for an industrious, you know, makes for an industrious population. Dean: Yeah, yeah, that's really you know. Jordan Peterson has been carnivore for five years. Dan: He's been carnivore for five years, yeah to save his life really. Dean: Right. Dan: And he mentioned that. Dean: you know he looks at when the that everything got shifted when they came out with the food pyramid in the 70s, that was not by any nutritionist but by the agriculture department to get people getting grains and breads and stuff as the foundation of a healthy lifestyle, healthy nutrition plan. Dan: That sounds like a four-stage cause movement, industry, racket. Racket yeah, I think it's now at the racket stage yeah, you know I mean halfway when we go. We were at the cottage for the last two weeks and halfway to the cottage is tim hortons. Tim hortons, okay, and I will tell you, based on your present heading in life, dean, you've probably been to your last Tim Hortons, because there's nothing in there that's actually good for you. Dean: Right, right, right, right. Yeah, that's true, isn't it? Dan: I mean that's something I call it Tim Hortons, where white people go to get whiter. Dean: Oh man, Do you go up 400 when you go to the cottage, Like do you go past? No, we go 404. Dan: We go 404. Dean: Okay, so you don't go by Weber's. Dan: No, weber's is good, weber's is a high-protein, but that's what I mean. You don't pass that on your way to your cottage. Dean: You're one freeway over on your way to york, got it, you're one. We go one freeway over right, right, right. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, that's interesting, but that you know there's a great example what a canadian institution you know tim horton's corner, really it's, uh, it's funny, yeah, but I had a thought about, you know, jordan Peterson being. You know like I think that where the revolution has really discussion of is this the best of times or the worst of times? My thought was that the battle for our minds is the thing. Yes, you're absolutely right, but just like cancel culture, I think we're in a period where our access to more information that's not being just packaged and filtered for us. We have access to unfilled information, and I think that you're seeing a resurgence, that we're moving towards in big swaths of categories, that the consensus, things that actually make a difference, and that we have access to more and more people who can do that, plus the diagnostic tools that we have support and show which methodologies are the most. And we're starting to see that in. You know, just like cancel culture was able to, the reason that we brought on cancel culture is that the consensus we were able to, everything was being exposed. You know that more people had a voice to say to, to the checks and balances kind of thing of being observed, and that when people find out things, you know you've got access to that. So I see things like nutrition, like it's like I'm noticing a trending, you know, more examination of christ, of Christianity as a thing that's becoming more mainstream as well, and that's just an observation of you know, seeing all these things. You know. Dan: yeah, One of the things that's really interesting is the variety of choices that you can make that actually cancel out a whole other part of where the information or news is coming out. You know, for example, I haven't as I mentioned, I haven't watched television at all for now more than six years, and so what ABC thinks, what CBS thinks, what NBC thinks, what NPR, public television, msnbc, cnn think about anything I'm not the target here anymore because I don't know what they're saying about anything but I found all sorts of sites on the internet that I find really interesting. Real Clear Politics is my go-to. First thing in the morning I always look at Real Clear Politics, and what they do is they just aggregate headlines for the entire spectrum. So if you want to go to all the other sites, you can go there. But what they find, you know. I find that they're making pretty widespread choices of what goes on there. In other words, if you're left wing politically, you'll find articles on RealClearPolitics. If you're right wing, you'll find real clear. But one of the things I find really interesting is when they mentioned the most popular articles for the last seven days, for the last 24 hours. They're all right wing, they're not left wing. So interesting. Although, yeah, I've never seen a left wing article be most watched or most read during the last seven days or the last 24 hours. They're all using the definitions of what would be left-wing or right-wing in today's setting. So it means that the people who are going to RealClearPolitics are mainly right-wing and they're interested in knowing what the left is saying, wayne, and they're interested in knowing what the left is saying, but they're not really. They're not really reinforcing themselves with the articles. I mean a and you can tell just by the nature of the headline, which where the bias is whether it's left or right and in any way. And but the interesting thing is how much I'm using perplexity now. Dean: Me too. Dan: Yeah, and I just got this format Tell me the 10 most important aspects of this particular topic. Five seconds later, I got the 10. And what I find is it's having an effect on my mind that there's never one reason for anything. There's always. I mean, I use 10 reasons, but if I did 20, they could probably do 20, you know but what it does? It gives you a more balanced sense of what's true, okay, but I've discovered this on myself. I mean, if you talk to 100 people, maybe three of them are using perplexity and perplexity. You know I may. I know there's other sites but it does for me what I want it to do. It gives me a background to think about things, and is that? What you're talking about is non-controlled? Dean: Because it's my question. Yeah, like that's what I think is that we've got access. Dan: It's my probes my probes that are revealing the information. Dean: Yeah. Dan: No one is packaging this for me. It's that I'm asking clarify me on this particular subject and bang you know within a matter of seconds I have clarification. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dan: Is that what you're saying here? Dean: and I, but I think that the onus is on us to do our own interpretation and, you know, measuring whether this fits with what we think. Whereas, you know, we were sort of when we were exposed to information like all of our whole adult lives, up until the last say, you know, 10 years has really been filtered through the lenses of the mainstream media, like I think about curators, often curators, curators. Yeah, they were the curators. Yeah, or the guardians, local minority. You remember, I mean, even in the closest thing was I remember when City TV came out with Speaker's Corner. Dan: You remember that they would have a little booth set up and you could go in and speak your mind. Dean: Yeah you could go in and speak your mind and that's how you got to think, see what other people were thinking. Otherwise, you had to go to Young and Dundas and you know, on the corner there and hear everybody up on their soapbox or whatever it was. That's always been. You know, that's kind of where everybody's megaphone now is. You don't have to go out to the corner where all the people are. You can sit in your basement and you've got a megaphone to the whole world. Dan: Yeah, you know, this probably helps explain something. I read an article Friday, I downloaded it and I read it about three or four times, and that is that none of the big corporations are making any money on AI. Right, they're investing enormously in it, but they're not making any money on it, and I think the reason is that it wasn't designed for them. Dean: Ah right. Dan: It was designed for individuals to do whatever the hell they wanted to do. And if anything, it works against the corporations, because if people are using AI to pursue their own interests, that means it's time and attention that they're not giving to the corporations. Yeah, yes. Dean: And I would say there's a real panic. Dan: I would say there's a real panic setting in, because it's when ChatGPT came out. Everybody said, oh, now this is going to enhance our ability to get our message across. Well, that's only true if people are paying attention. But what if the impact of AI is actually to take people's attention away from you? Dean: Yeah, it is changing so much. So I mean yeah, it is changing so much, you know. Dan: I mean. Dean if you're going carnivore, Tim Hortons' messaging isn't getting to you. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I mean All that money they're spending on Tim Hortons' advertising is wasted money on you. Wasted on me. Dean: That's exactly it. Yeah, it's so amazing how to waste your money on Dean Jack. Dan: How to waste your money on Dean Jack. How to waste your money on Dean Jack Uh-huh. Dean: Man so funny. Well, yeah, I should. This would be great, though, to get a. You know, start spreading the word about the air fryer. Get an air fryer deal. I mean, the salmon and the steak are amazing. Dan: And apparently JJ thinks pork chops are good. That's right. So you got the whole good. That's right, exactly. Dean: So you got the whole scoop. Dan: I love it that you've got a buffer between you and the technology. Well, she controls the checkbook, so she might as well get the information, because she controls the checks. Yes, and Babs has been my authority on eating since I've met her. I mean that's one of the great benefits of being in relation she's always been good about that. You know, my life is two parts, before Babs and after Babs. Dean: Yeah, I know Absolutely. I'm much healthier since I've met her. Dan: I'm much healthier since I met her. Yeah, Anyway, yeah, but it's really interesting. You know that what you're introducing here to the Cloudlandia conversation is that we now have the opportunity to be much more discerning than we were before. Dean: Yeah, we have not only the opportunity but the responsibility, and that's what I think we wrestle with is that we can't just take all of the information and take it at face value to realize that that there's a level of building your own internal filters. Timeless Technology is that we're looking for advantage. Dan: That's what. I established right at the beginning is that you're looking for an advantage that, for a while, other people don't have, because that improves your status. That improves your status that you have an advantage, and it creates inequality. One of the things that people don't realize is that every time you create a new advantage, it creates inequality in your surrounding area, okay, and then other people have to respond to that, either by using your advantage, like imitating your advantage, or they canitating your advantage, or they can create their own advantage, or they can try to stop you from having your advantage, and I think that depends on your framework. So I think a lot of cancel culture is people not wanting you to have that advantage, so they won't let you talk about it, they won't let you do certain things and I think the cancel culture has probably been there right from the beginning, it just takes different forms. She's a witch, yeah, yeah, there's a witch, yeah, yeah. Can I tell you something about? That the salem, and also the ones that happened in Europe the witch thing, was. It was moldy grain, so usually the witch seasons happen to do happen when there was a lot of rain. Okay, and the grains got moldy and my sense is they created, they created, and so that a lot of the Fermenting. Yeah, there was a fermentation, but also it drove people a little bit crazy and there's a lot of investigation now of the which periods. Dean: Okay, salem is the most famous US. Dan: But it didn't happen. It didn't except for Salem Massachusetts. But they had several really wet seasons where the grain got moldy and my sense is that people were getting fermented grain on a daily basis and it drove me kind of crazy, yeah that made him weird. Dean: Weird it made him weird. I saw james carville. James carville said that the democrats should stop saying they're weird and start calling them creeps. Weird Weird is creeps as a label. They're creeps, you know yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dan: I think it's funny to see. I would love to hear. Dean: I'd love to hear a podcast or a panel interview between you. Know, luntz the. I forget what his first name is Jeffrey Luntz? Is it the Republican wordsmith guy? I think it's Jeffrey. Dan: Luntz, I don't know him oh. Dean: Luntz yeah. Dan: Jeffrey Luntz. He's the one who does the panel discussions, that's right. Dean: And he gets the messaging, for he's the Republican wordsmith and James Carville is essentially that for the Democrats. I'd love to hear that. Dan: Yeah, I think James Carville is essentially that for the Democrats. I'd love to hear that. Dean: Yeah, I think James Carville is now. He's like the crazy ant upstairs. Yeah, I think so. Right, right, right. Dan: Because the last couple of weeks he said you know you better get over this mania real fast that you're having with Kamala Harris and he says, because he said you have no idea what's coming back against you. It'll take the Republicans three or four weeks to figure out what the target is here, and he says you better get over this real fast. He says it's going to be incredibly hard work over the next three months to get to the election, make sure your grains are dry here, don't get that fermented grain brain. Make sure your powder is dry too. Yeah, yeah, but it's an interesting thesis. This is where we've added a new dimension to Cloudlandia the psychotropic part of Cloudlandia yeah, I agree. Dean: There was a. Dan: Greek player, one of the Greek writers, playwrights. He talked about a place called Cloud Cuckoo Land. Dean: Okay, that's funny. Dan: Yeah, and he was talking about people who would just go off and make up new stuff and everything like that had no basis in current reality and he called it cloud cuckoo land. You know well, you know we've had a lot of that over the last 50 or 60 years yeah, I think what we're really introducing. Dean: Dan is the intersection you know the venn diagram of the mainland cloudlandia and Danlandia or Deanlandia. That's the one that we can actually control. Is Danlandia, yeah. Dan: Well, the big thing is, if you truly want to be a uniquely creative individual today, the resources are available for you to do it. Dean: Yeah. Dan: But you got to be really discerning about what gets allowed in across the borders into your thinking that's it exactly. Dean: Yeah, All right Dan. Dan: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I have to jump too. One thing about it is I'm going to watch that Joe Rogan church because I think that's interesting. Dean: I have to watch that Joe Rogan George because I think that's interesting. Dan: I have to laugh when Joe Rogan had. Dean: Peter Zion for a loop. Dan: I've never seen Joe Rogan thrown so much for a loop, because Peter Zion is nothing if not confident about his point of view. I mean, he's a very confident guy about his point of view and Joe wasn't ready for it and about every you know, every 90 seconds he said holy cow, oh wow. Oh yeah. Dean: Oh, I got to watch that one too, jesus Christ yeah. Dan: And you can see Joe sitting there. He said yeah he said next time I have this guy on no pot for 24 hours beforehand. This is moving, this is moving. I'm too slow here. I can't keep up with this you know, Peter Zion is like a jackhammer when he starts going you know he does a whack, whack, whack. Yeah, that would be Actually Jordan Peterson and Peter Zion would be an interesting one. Two brains, yeah, yeah, for sure. Maybe Elon Musk as a third person, jordan Peterson and Peter Zion would be an interesting one. Mm-hmm, Two brains yeah yeah for sure, Maybe Elon Musk as a third person. Dean: Imagine a panel. Yeah, exactly, there was a great. There was a show called Dinner for Five and it was a. It was an entertainment like movie one, where they'd have different directors and actors at dinner, just a mix of people and having just recording their conversation. No real thing. Jon Favreau did that show it was really great. Dan: No curating really. Yeah, anyway. Dean: Okay Dan. Dan: Very entertaining. We'll be here next week, yes, I always enjoy these. Dean: They go so fast. Yeah, thanks a lot. Okay, thanks, dan, I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

In this episode of the "Giant Robots On Tour" podcast, hosts Sami Birnbaum and Rémy Hannequin interview Dan Clark, the Founder and CEO of MindJam, an innovative platform providing emotional and SEN (Special Educational Needs) support for young people through gaming, game design, and digital skills. Sami shares a personal story about how his mother, an educational psychologist, introduced him to MindJam, highlighting its impact and relevance. Dan explains that MindJam was born out of the need to support young people who feel out of place in traditional educational settings, particularly those with ADHD, autism, and other neurodivergent conditions. By leveraging popular games like Minecraft, MindJam builds trust and engages young people in a medium they enjoy, transforming therapeutic support into a more effective and engaging process. Dan discusses the inception and growth of MindJam, which started during the pandemic when traditional in-person support became impossible. This shift to online sessions via gaming platforms provided a new avenue to connect with young people, enabling them to open up and build trust in a familiar and enjoyable environment. Dan emphasizes that gaming offers numerous benefits, such as enhancing cognitive abilities, fostering social connections, and providing a safe space for expression. Despite the negative stigma around gaming, he points out that it can be a powerful tool for personal development and emotional support. MindJam has grown significantly, now with 110 mentors supporting over 2,000 young people globally, showcasing the scalability and effectiveness of this approach. The conversation also touches on the broader implications and challenges of integrating gaming into therapeutic and educational contexts. Dan highlights the need for societal perception shifts to recognize the positive aspects of gaming, counteracting the negative media portrayal. He underscores the importance of educating parents, educators, and social services about the benefits of gaming and how it can be used constructively. Dan shares inspiring success stories from MindJam, illustrating how gaming can lead to real-world achievements and personal growth. MindJam (https://mindjam.org.uk/) Follw MindJam on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MindJamOfficial), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/mindjam/), or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mindjamofficial/). Follow Dan Clark on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-clark-58533220b/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Transcript:  SAMI: Right, we are back again. And this is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, the Giant Robots on Tour series coming to you from Europe, West Asia, and Africa, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host Sami Birnbaum. RÉMY: And I'm your other host, Rémy Hannequin. SAMI: Let's get into it, Rémy. Joining us today is Dan Clark, the Founder and CEO of MindJam, a platform that provides online one-to-one sessions, providing emotional and SEN support for young people through gaming, game design, and digital skills. Dan, full disclosure on this one: so, about a month ago, right? I get an email from my mom. Now [laughs], this email says, "You've got to check this guy out. Go and take a look at MindJam." And I'm thinking, mom, I don't get these emails from you. This is not the normal sort of thing I'd get from my mom on your average weekday. And I know in the past, like, I've told her that I'm kind of doing this podcast thing, and I'm starting to regret, like, telling her this. Like, what is she throwing my way? But I get into some research...and maybe for some context, actually, which is helpful because my mom isn't just doing research for the podcast, my mom's an educational psychologist. So, she's been doing that ever since I can remember. I remember growing up as a kid, and that was, I mean, she assessed me numerous times. And she works, I guess, similar kind of to the children or people that you're working with, people with ADHD, autism, neurodivergent children, just often who are struggling in school and trying to find where they fit. And I start doing my research. I look into it, hit the website, hit your LinkedIn. And I'll be, like, totally honest with you: We were both just blown away by what you are doing. And this is coming not only from me, and I work in the tech industry, and I've got a history of slight gaming addictions, which we might touch on, but also coming from my mom who works on the other side and works with all the local authorities. She does the kind of tribunals that they have to do to try and get people into the right schools and kids into the right schools. And, literally, we were blown away, and I nearly got lost as well on your website. I found some kind of gaming streams that you do, and I feel almost like we missed a trick here, Rémy, because we could have done this podcast on Minecraft. It's such a nice flow, right, when you're streaming. DAN: Yeah, it makes it easier when you've got that distraction there as well. You can just chat about it. Thank you so much for inviting me on. It's a pleasure being here and, yeah, I'm glad you kind of understand what we're doing here. MindJam itself is four years old now. But I was doing things before in the pandemic, similar. But once the pandemic hit, that was the key moment where everything went online for my support with young people. And, suddenly, the light bulb came on, and I was like, this is a way in. You know, there are so many young people that are struggling, lost, feel they're stupid, and don't fit in. Yet, actually, they're amazing. But, you know, a standard way of sitting in front of them going, "Tell me why you can't go to school. Why can't you do this?" you know, it doesn't work. They don't trust that person. They've got trauma. They've been, you know, battered down by education and by health services. And so, to suddenly have someone who comes in and goes, "Oh, so you love Minecraft. Oh, I love Minecraft, too. Let's join in. Let's go in a world." And then, you can build that trust to then go, "How's your week been then?" Or, you know, and start talking, and you're just on the same wavelength. And, for me, it was something as soon as I sort of realized, it was like, this is...of course, this makes perfect sense. And then, I looked and saw nobody else is doing it [laughs]. So, I started off MindJam just on my own. At first, very quickly, we got working with lots of...in the UK, we have local authorities, which is the councils around, so seeing there is a real, you know, thing that they would work with us. So, that was great, to be recognized as actually a real service, rather than just someone playing games with kids. It's like, no, this is real. This really works. And then, it quickly got bigger than me, and now we are at 110 mentors working for us, and we're supporting over 2,000 young people all over the world. SAMI: That's incredible. DAN: It's a mission of mine, you know, we'll go more into my sort of history, but I've got two neurodivergent children: both autistic, one's ADHD as well. When you see something that you think is going to work for your child, to then suddenly see it's got, like, a two-year waiting list, which most have, it's heartbreaking, and you know it's going to be too late. So, it's always been my mission with MindJam to keep that waiting list as small as I can, but also, obviously, expanding with quality mentors and all that. So, you know, we generally tend to always say about three months before we can sort of get that support for young people. But yeah, it's something very close to my heart that I'm so passionate about and, yeah, it's been a great journey so far. SAMI: You can tell. It's so interesting because, like you say, when you find something that works for your kids. Because when I was younger, I struggled with separation anxiety a lot in school. So, I would have days when I would really struggle to go to school. During my high school period, I went to the Royal Free, which is down in Hampstead, so not too far from where I grew up and not too far from my school. And my parents...I tried to engage with a therapist. But it's almost like, I don't know if I wasn't cognitively or intellectually developed enough to engage in that way, but it didn't work. Ultimately, I did kind of one or two sessions. I remember filling in some questionnaire and thinking, like, I don't get this. This doesn't make sense. And what you're talking about, if I understand correctly, is you're coming to where the child is at. You're coming to a safe space for them, a place where they feel comfortable. It's almost like a world which is predictable. Whereas the outside world is very scary, right? Especially for people who have generalized anxiety disorder, like I said, autism. It's very challenging. And so, you come to their level, and you say, "Right, let's find a place where we all feel comfortable." And then, we can start to engage. And you say, like, you know, the pandemic was a little bit of a light bulb moment. What's been the biggest barrier then? So, you've found yourself kind of going into this and saying, right, this is something which works. It works for my kids. I want to make this available, accessible. What's been your biggest barrier to getting this off the ground and getting it working? DAN: It's the negative thoughts and the way the media portrays and education portrays gaming, basically. That has been the hardest thing is most parents are on board, but they still feel a little bit ashamed of how social media is on gaming and screen time. And they're very worried that they're not doing the right thing. And we come in a way of also educating. We educate the educators. We do training plans for schools, and for social services, and all sorts because there are so many benefits to gaming that aren't recognized. And, you know, gaming is still generally quite new. It's evolved so much in the last even 10 years. It's insane the way the characters have evolved. And the emotional nature of games now is really complex and, you know, young people and older people can get so much from them. But gaming still, in general, people are still like, "Well, get off that. Do something actually worthwhile." It's like, it's so worthwhile. There's so much, you know, strategy game you've got so much from it. And a fast-paced shooting you've got cognitive abilities. The perfect example I've got is, did you hear a couple of months ago a young lad, I think he was 13, he beat Tetris. SAMI: Yes. DAN: He completed Tetris, which is incredible, you know, it's like, oh, wow. And the first thing the newsreader said to them, the media person interviewing him went, "You should get out more." That's the way she portrayed it, rather than going, "What an achievement it is. You should get outside more." I'm literally like, what? What's going on? You know, again, this kid, you know, he's in the Guinness World of Records. What an achievement. He's famous around the world for doing it. It's like, why is that not seen as such a good thing? You know, so yeah, so that was the hard thing was especially schools, you know, they're very frightened of gaming and of change. And so, trying to help them see that, actually, if you meet a young person where they're at in something they love, then you can help inspire them and help find out why they can't deal with the things, why they can't engage with school, and also inspire them for future learning careers. Even healthy gaming comes from having that understanding of how they're gaming. So, if someone's sat up all night gaming, yeah, we all know it's not great for them. But if you just say, "Gaming's evil. Get off it. You're wasting your time. I'm turning that off," they're going to want to rebel against that. Yet if you come in and go, "Oh, wow, I can see why you were sat up all night doing that. But have you noticed that you're not as good at playing when you're really tired or really hungry?" And if you look at the top e-sports players, they're athletes. They exercise; they eat well; they sleep well. So, you know, if you embrace gaming a bit more, you can get that trust and that bond to then help inspire in other ways. RÉMY: I mean, I could talk about it for a long time. It's really refreshing to hear someone talk about video games in such a positive way and talking about the benefits. And you even mentioned strong players like athletes. It's really refreshing. And I'm wondering, how did this knowledge come up to you in the first place? So, I bet you might be someone enjoying playing games yourself. But how did you see all these benefits yourself? Because, unfortunately, it's not something we talk a lot about. As you mentioned, in the press, we hear about all the negativity. Every time there is a strong event, we blame video games, all that. And we forgot all the stories where the video games enhance people, if they have trouble or not. It can be very beneficial to a lot of people. So, how did you see this value yourself? DAN: Yeah, well, yeah, I've always been a gamer, you know, ever since Spectrum 48K, I think you had. I'm showing my age now, but it was mainly when the Sega Megadrive, and from then, PlayStation onwards were my days. And me and my brother used to have great times together on that as well. You know, it was our bonding. But then I think the biggest light bulb to me...before the pandemic, I was a teacher. And I used to teach music and ICT and computers as well, and having my children as well, and both in school connecting with the young people. Because I was a gamer, I could talk about the games that they're playing with them and to see their eyes light up...and you're on a different wavelength with that young person. They suddenly got this trust in you, and they want to tell you all about what they've done on Minecraft, or what the new season of Fortnite's about. And it was having such a beneficial effect on them and same with my family as well. We, you know, both my children are autistic, and we've got, you know, we have a lot of difficulties around that of bonding together as a family, yet our closest moments have been through gaming together. So, Mario 3D World was the first one I remember with my children playing, and we could play at all levels. So, my son was about four and, you know, he was often in a bubble, killed, and floating back onto the screen again. But, you know, we had a great time. And I was suddenly, like, looking, thinking, this is amazing. You know, nobody hears about this side of it that it's bringing us together. And so, from there, I then started doing after-school gaming clubs, so not coding clubs, nothing like that. It was gaming. And the young people they loved it. It was oversubscribed. Masses of kids came to it. We had all sorts of things from Super Smash Bros, if you know that, to, you know, to PlayStation games, Go Simulator, and everything playing. And we just had a whale of a time, and they could really relax and make friends. And, again, it was all coming from the joy of gaming together, basically. And it's, you know, as much as some people might not like it, it's bigger and bigger. It's the biggest entertainment industry now. And, you know, on the other side of it, there are so many careers in it. If your young person has an interest in gaming, see what they're interested, help it, champion it because it's, yeah, you know, there's such a future there. But yeah, that's my story, basically, and where that sort of light bulb came from. And then, I've done a lot of research into the benefits of gaming and how you can use that for connecting with young people. And, you know, so many games now have characters with, you know, emotional things going off, or, you know, you can talk about feelings even in games like Minecraft where the characters don't talk. But you can be like, how must that person be feeling there? And, you know, you can really bring in real-life situations while gaming and also have a lot of fun, which I think is super important as well, which sometimes gets forgotten about. But, you know, real life is really enhanced by having loads of fun, and gaming's fun. SAMI: Yeah. It's so fascinating. As you're speaking, I'm having this internal dilemma, right? Because, in my head, everything you're saying is true and makes sense. And I believe it, and I've seen it. And then, I probably still harbor those feelings that are almost entrenched, like you're saying, in the media with, you know, the person who completed Tetris. And those sorts of feelings are still, like, a little bit entrenched to me in terms of the negative sides of gaming. Like, I guess I grew up probably similar to you, where it was like, "Well, why aren't you outside more?" and the negative aspect of it. I spoke about this in a different podcast, which I've apologized to my parents for mentioning in public. But when I was in university, it's too late now, I also kind of developed, I would call it probably, like, a small gaming addiction. I don't know where it would sit, but I was doing all-nighters Playing Call of Duty, Modern Warfare. And so, there definitely is a negative side. But I like what you say about, well, actually, you can address that in a healthy way. But then, this week, just this week, which is quite uncanny, my seven-year-old comes, and he says, "Daddy, I really want to get an Xbox, you know, my friend's got one." And he's just starting to get to that cusp of gaming. So, in my head, I say, yeah, like that makes total sense, and I imagine the benefits and the fun time me and him could have on an Xbox. But I still struggle with those feelings of...maybe they're my own worries of, well, but what if he neglects his other stuff? What if he goes into like, yeah, with ADHD, he goes into hyperfocus, and that's all he does? How [laughs] can you counsel me out of this concern? DAN: Well, no, I completely understand, and that is where all our fears come from, especially our generation and how it's put through. But I think young people more and more connect through gaming, whereas I think when we were gamers as young, a lot of stuff wasn't online. So, we weren't playing with our friends. We were playing on our own a lot of the time, whereas it's very social now. Platforms like Roblox and Minecraft are the things that are super social, working together as a team, things like that. But also screen time, I can show you that we've got a whole list of benefits of gaming, actually, that I'll share with you because there's studies that even screen time has been proven not to be detrimental the way we're told it is. And I think we must know that through how we work. Most of us work on screens these days, so. SAMI: Yeah, that's such a point of contention in the house because we currently do only on Fridays. So, they get, like, two hours of screen time. I don't know if that's strict. I don't know where I am on that. Do you have, like, with your own kids, or how do you handle that discipline? So, let's say I get the console, right? I bring it into the house to my seven-year-old. Do I limit it with screen time? How would you approach that sort of thing? DAN: Obviously, with a seven-year-old, it's a little bit different from...mine are now 17 and 14. So, we discuss it more, but yeah, definitely, you know, have boundaries. And also, if you're worried about how they're gaming, maybe have the Xbox in the living room, so instead of gaming in their bedroom, they're gaming when you're around, and it's a shared family activity. And then, it's easier to say, "Well, we're going to be having food in a minute. So, finish up on that game." And you can have all that understanding. But I think also, you know, that other side of things of coming from seeing what they're playing. I talk to parents a lot about this, and they get, you know, they see frustrations in their young people when they're trying to get them off. But they don't realize that maybe they're playing something like Fortnite or something that's a bit more online team-based, where if they pulled them off the game in the middle of the match, it could be detrimental to the team they're working with, their rankings. You know, they could even get banned from the game for a few days, you know. So, understanding and them being able to work time management together, being like, "Well, after this game is finished, this is where we're going, you know, we've got to go out. We've got to do this," you know, there is a give and take there. And I'm not saying there isn't negatives to gaming. We need, you know, everybody needs a break as well. But, again, through the understanding of what they're playing, you can have those conversations. If you're not playing them or watching them and don't understand what the game is about, and what the joy is about, there's going to be a gap between you, you know, where the young person is going to be like, "You don't understand me. You don't understand why I want to play this." My kids, you know, we went from the other [inaudible 17:37] because they've had severe problems at school, both of them, through their neurodivergency, and gaming has really helped them both to regulate. And maybe when you're saying about yourself when you had problems, and maybe there was something else going on. And then, the gaming was a way for you to cope, that safe space to go to that was actually working in a way as a little bit of therapy and keeping you grounded, you know, as well. So, you know, there's two sides to see it. But yeah, definitely, I can understand the worries of staying up all night playing it or not doing your homework and playing it, although I have different things to say about homework. But to say it's not actually beneficial is wrong because, you know, you just got to look at something like Minecraft and the amount a young person can learn, everything from biomes, and blocks, and diamonds, or ores to actual mathematics and things. And it naturally leads onto PCs and learning how to code things and who knows where that's going to lead, to creating something completely new. So, I worry for the ones that are heavily restricted on screen time. I worry that they're being held a little bit back. You know, that might sound a bit controversial for some people. But when most jobs are digital and you're not allowed to learn, I mean, the young people I see they're so gifted at such a young age in understanding digital things that they're going to be at the forefront of the new technology. So, it's almost like, yeah, I think it should be embraced with both hands. RÉMY: There's an incredible opportunity to learn new things through video games and to be happy and to share, like you said. And I bet our audience is already quite open to video games, but we never know it. I think it could be interesting if you could provide, like, a very simple, not comprehensive list of famous games and the kind of skills and benefits they provide you. You mentioned Minecraft; you mentioned creativity. But what kind of games and skills benefits you? You could say for our audience to understand more about the opportunity that is out there. DAN: Yeah, I mean, there are so many. But yeah, so, if we look at your normal shooter game like Call of Duty, and Fortnite, and things like that, that is for cognitive ability. You know, getting those dexterity in your hands and learning those [inaudible 20:11] of pressing buttons is more than you think. It's really training that brain and getting that brain working really quick. It's proven to boost your brain power, your gray matter. It's actually proven that gaming, in general, just boosts your gray matter. I mean, we all know about doing brain training games, but all games using that brain, you know, it's much more advanced than sitting watching TV. But then if you go into more things like puzzle games, so things from your Tetris all the way through to more advanced ones like Portal or strategy games like Civilization and things, there is so much you're doing. You're boosting that brainpower, and you're thinking all the time. But then you can get into...yeah, back onto the shooter games as well, they help with spatial recognition. So, it's actually helping to spot things from a distance: dangers or things to collect. You can see them, and it actually enhances eyesight. It is proven to enhance eyesight, which is great. Decision-making and leadership skills, which is a key thing people talk about for business, is all there when you're in your team of shooters. You're playing Overwatch or you're playing, you know, any game like that. You know, there's always somebody leading or, you know, saying what should be best, seeing the best strategies in there. Problem-solving comes into all sorts so, obviously, in shooters and things again, I'd- say, but also your Minecraft. You know, you've got to create a certain thing to defeat the dragon or whatever you're doing. There's always something, or if you're building something. But then, of course, your high-end puzzle games and even things like Mario. I mean, they get so complex in the problem-solving to overcome a level. Again, the brain power, and the brain power seeing these young people that they're way more advanced than we were playing games. The games are so intricate and so hard now. One you never hear about is social skills until...I think the pandemic helped that a bit. People started to see, oh, Animal Crossing, it's a great way to connect with people. And, you know, and Roblox as much as it gets a lot of bad press, for young people to connect and play, and lot of it is almost like playground role playing play, and they're playing together. You know, there's games just based in Ikea, and they're shopping, and [laughs] things like that. It's really good for them to be doing that. And health and fitness surprisingly, of course, is in gaming. So, obviously, a lot of Nintendo Switch games are sort of standing up, you know, playing switch sports and things, but then virtual reality is huge for that. And if you've ever tried Beat Saber, that's a real workout, which is really good. But there's loads of boxing ones. There's one that kids play now called Gorilla Tag, where, oh my God, that is such a workout. I have mentees that I work with, and then we'll be like, "Oh, Gorilla Tag," an hour of that, I am exhausted. Because you're just flinging your arms around like a gorilla trying to move fast. It's amazing. SAMI: I saw a post you did recently about there's, like, a Greek mythology level on Fortnite, like, an educational aspect [laughs]. It's so funny because I remember playing God of War on the PS2, and I learned so much about Greek mythology. Everything I know comes from God of War. And so, there's also that educational aspect. DAN: Yeah, exactly. You get this deep dive into something, and you really find what you're interested in. So, I've got a kid, and he loves this game called War Thunder, which is all about planes, World War planes, and he can tell me everything about every plane and what country it's made. He can spot it a mile off. You know, "Oh, that's a Russian plane from so and so. Its weak points are here. It was built by so and so." And it's like, you're a genius, and it's all come from, you know, this game's sparked this real interest. And, you know, like I said, Fortnite brings it in, God of War, of course. Assassin's Creed is amazing for things like that, history, it goes from Egypt times. And they even now have walkthroughs in the game where...this needs to be used in schools. I don't know if schools embrace it yet, but you don't have any of this story and the killings and stuff. You just are going through history and walking through the towns and things like that, which is brilliant. The latest one for Assassin's Creed was Vikings, wasn't it? And that was brilliant because that brought in the UK and how it was when the Vikings came over. There's so much stuff. I've got a young person, and he loves this game called For Honor, which is all about medieval sword fights. And he got such an interest in weapons that he's then become a blacksmith. He's enrolled onto a college course apprenticeship being a blacksmith. He wants to be making armory and swords for movies. You know, he said like, "Look, Lord of the Rings, that's all made properly, isn't it?" I mean, that's [inaudible 24:50] SAMI: Wow. DAN: Yeah, it's amazing. One other thing that the games bring, which I think is amazing, is mindfulness as well. There's a huge thing of that. Yeah, like I said, going back to maybe yourself when you were gaming at night, and you maybe needed to destress and maybe take your mind off something, you can get into a game and almost...there's a thing called the grind in the game. Minecraft has it a lot, where you've just got to get yourself a hundred diamonds, or whatever [laughs]. So, it's like, you can almost turn your brain off and just do that, you know, and it can be so super relaxing. And you can get into this thing called flow state. A lot of driving games are like that. If you hit every corner perfectly, you're kind of just in this dream-like state where you just...everything's going well. And that brings a euphoria, too. There's so many good things. But now there's loads of games that are actually based around mindfulness. Tetris is one that's been proven for that. But I don't know if you've heard a more recent one called PowerWash Simulator. Now, this game was one of my most favorite for the last couple of years. All you're doing is washing stuff with a power washer. But the way it works, it gives you a little ding when you've cleaned something properly, like a [vocalization]. And it just...you stand back and look at your job. Honestly, it's amazing. But now Oxford University are doing a full study on it because they realize how beneficial it is to relaxing and chilling out, you know, and just making yourself just feeling happy when you need to just de-stress. It's amazing. RÉMY: I can totally relate. I remember a few years ago, I played GTA 5, and GTA 5 is the kind of game famous for arbitrary violence or all this kind of stuff we hear in the media. But I remember me playing and sometimes I wanted to play just to take a bike and to go on the road and to see a sunset. And, of course, we could argue that I can see the sunset out there, but, in a game, it's just a piece of art. At work, recently, we just had a conversation about beautiful games. So, we weren't interested in all the features or how the game would work but just how beautiful it is. And sometimes we just play video games because they're beautiful. And so, they could provide so much on the intellectual level, on the skills, but also, just as piece of art, just beautiful things made by beautiful artists. DAN: Yeah, it is amazing when you see that. And yeah, I get that completely with GTA. It gets a lot of bad reputation, you know, and story-wise, it is very adult. But, you know, it's the biggest game in the world for a reason. And, you know, like you said, you climb the mountain, you look at the view, you know, it is such a lovely thing to do. There was a game, Red Dead Redemption. I had a young lady I was mentoring, and she was situationally mute, which means, you know, she couldn't talk to anybody. She used to type her responses to me. But she loved Red Dead Redemption, loved horses. And she actually created a group from all around the world, where they would all meet her on a Friday in the game, and she would take them on horse trails. And so, this is all in the game, and she would just take them around to beautiful spots, do nice little jumps with the horses, setting up camp, you know, and, I mean, that's [inaudible 28:08]. It's amazing. And yeah, she ended up making a horse game on Roblox, and that doing really well, and her actually working for Roblox themselves. So, yeah, you know, it all inspires them to work on that. And, I think, sorry, I'm going on tangents here, but also, as you say, appreciating art. There are so many different sides to gaming. A lot of people used to think gaming is just coding, and I don't want to be a coder. That's confusing. I don't want to do that. If you look at the credits that roll on a main game, and they go on for, like, about an hour. There are so many different jobs from artists, storyboard writers, level designers, musicians. There's everything there. The coders are just one part of it. So, as I said before, there are so many career opportunities there, either starting up your own business as a self-employed person or getting involved in it. One I love...a lot of the neurodivergent people I work with [inaudible 29:07] is being a games tester. Because the first thing my son ever does is, if he gets a game, he tries to break it. He tries to find where he can walk through a wall, or something like that. So, it's like that job would be ideal for you. It's like, it's amazing. And that's a job. That's a really important job as well. SAMI: Yeah. When you talk about these stories, they are inspirational. Like, I feel like almost, like, a flutter in my heart as you talk about this kid who maybe felt he has kind of no hope or very little opportunities to actually honing in on this Viking game and then being able to go and become a blacksmith, or this other person you mentioned who's now with Roblox. Yeah, I almost wish, like, they had more publicity around them. And maybe we're kind of doing some of that work now. What would you say is your biggest success story? DAN: I guess MindJam in itself I think is just, I mean, it's way bigger than me now. Obviously, it was born from this idea of giving young people the time and the respect. They are doing something that they love to do and is beneficial. That's what I found was everybody...even when I was teaching, we used to have this connection with the kids, and I used to work one-to-one with the, you know, special education needs, young ones. And a great connection talking about gaming, and their eyes would light up. They would talk about their week, and how they were feeling, and what they achieved. But then it would always be, in the back of my mind, we need to get back onto what we're supposed to be doing and, you know, I need to tick these boxes. And there's always something wanted from them. And it's the same if they go and see a health service. There's always something that they want from that young person. Yet if you just approach them and say, "You know, let's do what you want to do." It's child-led. It's low demand, and let's see where that takes us. That's where we got to discovering about the blacksmith thing. And that's why we've got young people making albums and things with MindJam. You know, it goes anywhere. I've got one young person who shows me Tai Chi, you know, that's our MindJam session. It started off from Rocket League. So, it can really go anywhere. But yeah, sorry, going back to the big success, it is every day now I get a message saying how one of my mentors has helped a young person to help the whole family. That is just the best thing in the world. You know, this is something we've created, and we work hard. We work really hard to make sure we've got the best people. You know, and we're well-trained, and informed, and everything. To hear that it's really making such a difference, and, you know, some people say we're saving lives, and, you know, I just have to pinch myself. Me and my wife we were just like, we can't believe it really how amazing it is. But we're just on a mission now to make sure it's accessible for as many people who need it. SAMI: Yeah, I've seen some of the reviews on your website, and they're heartwarming. But, like, it kind of makes sense, right? Like, for some people, this is the only place that they feel safe. They feel comfortable. You imagine all the cortisol that's going through someone when they're in that fight or flight moment, and there's lots of stress and anxiety. And they enter into a gaming world, and they can escape. And all of a sudden, that reduces. You're dealing with a different person. You're dealing with someone who feels happy, who feels content. And then, you're opening up their mind to have other conversations, you know, like you say. I really recommend it to our listeners. Go and check out the stream. You do kind of...I've seen you've done a few episodes of streaming with other mentors. And it's fascinating to see how all of you, whilst you're playing, are in a conversation about, "Oh, how was your week? And how's that been going?" And, you know, something happened over there. And it's like, you're just in a more of a relaxed state to have those conversations. DAN: Yeah, you know, it's been used before, you know, LEGO therapy is kind of like that. You know, that's what MindJam is in a way is play therapy, but there's so much more you can do with the digital platform. And we're at an amazing age as well, where most bits of software are free. I'll click on like, you know, if they want to look into 3D modeling, it's easy to get a copy of Blender. If you want to get into Unity or Unreal Engine, I mean, there's always into...and it's all, you know, what a wonderful time. When we were younger, if I wanted to get into game design, it was so complicated. You didn't know where to start where, you know, so yeah, it's really amazing. And another thing that I love as well is the mentors that work for us. Most of them are really [inaudible 33:28]. I struggled when I was in my early twenties, and I remember seeing a counselor. And it felt like they had no idea what they were...yeah, they're reading from a textbook, you know, and I remember just really patronizing me. And I was just like, you've got no clue. Whereas I think all the mentors we have all said, "I wish MindJam was around when I was a young person." And I thought, that's the key thing for me, their empathy, their understanding. We don't have to solve it straight away. It's just being there and going, "Yeah, that is hard. Yeah, you know, you'll be okay though. And there's, you know, you're not on your own here." And, you know, I think that is...so many people seem to have to try and heal people straight away. And it's like, no, people just need time to talk, and it's the same as adults as well. Yeah, it could just carry on really to all ages really, couldn't it? SAMI: Yeah. And you've also got that buy-in, right? Whereas, you know, I think of myself perhaps going to therapy at that young age. I didn't really buy into it because I was sitting there with an adult who I didn't really know what we were doing. And I was just kind of there for a conversation. And here you've got...you're doing something that they like, and they enjoy. To put my parent and adult hat back on [laughs] because it's something I want to pick your brains on, right? So, working in the tech industry and working in coding, I've read articles about games, which kind of it says that they're more and more...you see it maybe more on the games on the mobile phone. So, they're employing, like, these kind of gambling tactics, so a lot of the stuff where it's treasure chests. And what is it? On Fortnite, it's the packs. On FIFA, it's also, like, you open up the pack and you see what players you get. So, that sort of stuff I also find scary where I feel like you have from the industry...so, whilst you're using the industry in this way, is the industry itself there to promote and perpetuate the benefits that come from games? Or are they looking, I want to get people in; I want to get them hooked; I want to use these gambling techniques, A/B testing, whatever it is? DAN: From all big companies, we get both sides, obviously. So, you got your unscrupulous ones that, oh, go for it. You loot boxes. But I think more and more, especially with young people, they're more and more aware. They're far more savvy than we are in these things. And the good one is EA with, you know, FIFA. They get review bombed because as soon as someone's putting in loot boxes and things, people are just like, you're just after our money. This is a con. It's pay to win. Mobile games are the worst for it, of course. You know, they're quick cash-making things. Again, instead of, like, saying, "All gaming is evil. We should never do it," it's being aware and being aware of what these games are trying to do, which, again, when you're looking at a young child, is having shared gaming experiences. So, you can go, "Ah, can you see what they're doing here? You know, they've hooked us in. We've played this for two minutes, and we've had free play. And now they're asking us to pay five pounds for extra things. That's a bit of a con, isn't it?" And, you know, you can actually bring that awareness, and then they're not going to fall for things like that. But at the other side of it, I see firsthand...I've luckily enough to work closely with Sony. One of their great companies is called Media Molecule. I don't know if you've heard of them. They did LittleBigPlanet, and lately, they had a game called Dreams, which is actually making games on a PlayStation, which is really cool. But they're so accessible. It's all about, you know, making everybody happy, giving people the keys to creativity, and really help making everything accessible. Again, they worked with this wonderful, wonderful artist who created characters, character designs. They'd never met her. She was so socially anxious. She never could leave her house but was actually one of their top artists that they would send the work, send the brief. She'd send this amazing art back, and then they'd pay her. They didn't have to come into the office nine till five for no reason whatsoever. And there's a lovely side, and, of course, there's a business unscrupulous side. And yeah, again, bring that education of that. This is what I think should be in schools. Instead of avoiding the whole issue, is actually talk about being toxic gamers and what that means, and how to deal with toxic gamers, and how not to be a toxic gamer yourself. For those that don't know toxic gamers, it's just people that are really, really mean to everybody, which seems to be a set thing that people do, especially to a new player. It's like, learn how to encourage people in. And there's now games coming out where they ban people straight away if they're being toxic, and it's all about helping that new player feel like part of the team. But again, yeah, let's say if this was actually brought into education, so then we learn about loot boxes and, you know, pay-to-win type games, then young people would be on that same wavelength. They would get it, either that or it would make gaming so lame that no one would play gaming anymore because it's in schools [laughs]. Like, oh, it sucks now [laughs]. SAMI: Yeah, I think that that way that you embrace kind of what gaming is and you say, well, actually, we can see that it's got a benefit. We can see that it's positive. How do we get the absolute most out of this? How can we not hide, stick our heads in the sand to the issues that might be there? And how can we then say, "Let's use this?" And I think, I mean, my mom will be listening to this podcast for sure. But I think it's something which it's quite disruptive what you're doing. I really do feel that way kind of dabbling in gaming, working as a consultant in the coding industry. I actually teach neurodivergent kids as well on the side. And I'm actually mentoring another kid in coding as well. And what you're doing, as I said at the beginning, it's mind-blowing, and we could talk to you for hours. We have a little chat on this podcast, which listeners can't see. And I asked Rémy, like, "Do you have any questions before you want to wrap up?" And Rémy was just like, "I just want to keep listening. I'm loving it." And I'm exactly...I feel like we can listen to...I think me and Rémy game and we dabble here and there as well ourselves. So, it's definitely something which speaks to us so much. But I've got to thank you so much for your time, for taking the time to jump on with us, give us such an insight into the work that you're doing with MindJam. Let's talk about the BAFTA Young Game Designers Award Ceremony Open Day. Give us some info. DAN: Oh yeah. Well, this is a lovely thing. I've luckily enough to be involved with BAFTA on this for a few years. An early success of MindJam was I was nominated as Mentor of The Year and finalist for Mentor of The Year for BAFTA in 2021. And they run this thing called Young Games Designers every year, and it's brilliant because they do...it's two sides to it. One is actually making a game, but then, of course, not all young people are ready to make a game. And, you know, so the other side is a games concept where you could just send in sketches, ideas, things like that. And that's really accessible for lots of young people we work with, of course. But yeah, in July, I don't have the date; it's early July, we have the award ceremony, which is on this Saturday. But then on the Sunday at BAFTA in London, it's an open day for families to come. You have to apply and get a ticket. I'm sure you guys can put the link on here later on. But yeah, MindJam will be there, but there's loads of game places. I think TT Games will be there who make the LEGO games. And there's all sorts of...we have D&D there. We have all sorts and talks on how to get into the industry and things like that. So, it's really a great thing to come to if you're a young person who's interested in gaming. SAMI: That's really cool. So, parents, if you're listening, save up all that screen time so you can use it. A month's worth of screen time [chuckles] at the BAFTA Awards, Young Game Designers Awards Ceremony in the Open Day in London. If people want to get hold of you, Dan, where's the best place? They've heard this. They're inspired. They feel like they've got someone who would benefit from your services. Where's the best place to get in touch? DAN: If you go to our website, it's mindjam.org.uk, and you can email us at hello@mindjam.org.uk. And I think you said this podcast is international, isn't it? So, we do offer sessions all around the world. We have mentors in America, in Australia, in Japan, all over the place basically. MindJam is universal. So, wherever you are, get in touch. And if you're interested in being a mentor as well, get in touch as well, so... SAMI: Definitely, I highly recommend. And I've already got people I can think of that I'm going to be passing your details on to. Listeners, listeners, listeners, our lovely listeners, no one likes missing out on things. Remember that flight you missed? The train that passed you by? Your partner's birthday? I've been there, by the way; I missed one recently. It's a horrible feeling. I cannot deal with you missing out on these things, but I can make sure that this feeling doesn't come about when it comes to our podcast. So, move your thumb. Yes, you, move your thumb. Hit that subscribe button. I can guarantee you, you will never miss one of our podcasts. And you'll hear amazing guests, just like Dan, as we get them in, and we have great chats together on the Giant Robots on Tour podcast. You can find notes and a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Check her out at mandymoore.tech. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Bye.   AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. 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In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we have a thought-provoking discussion around AI and its future implications. We introduce Juniper, an advanced voice-based AI capable of tasks from writing to coding, giving insight into emerging technologies. We explore impacts like the attention economy, where value emerges without physical costs. Success stories like Mr. Beast showcase uniqueness and AI's potential to tackle real issues. The episode delivers a well-rounded look at AI capacities and societal changes. References to early smartphone adoption phases parallel today's AI capabilities. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the potential of voice-based GPT-4.0 AI, specifically highlighting "Juniper" with a Scarlett Johansson-like voice, and its various applications from writing to coding. We compare the current adoption of AI to the early days of smartphones, emphasizing that we are only beginning to understand AI's full capabilities. We explore historical productivity trends, noting a decline since 1975, and question whether modern technology truly enhances productivity or just alters our perception of it. We debate the role of technology giants like Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla in shaping productivity and economic measurement. We reflect on the mid-20th century advancements such as electrification and infrastructure, and compare them to today's computing power and its economic impact. We discuss the concept of the attention economy and the creation of value from digital products without physical production costs, using digital creators like Mr. Beast as examples. We consider the potential of AI in solving real-world problems such as city traffic congestion and climate understanding, rather than just creating new opportunities. We emphasize the importance of practical solutions and specific use cases to fully leverage the capabilities of advanced AI technologies. We touch on the economic shifts in the digital era, including the rise of digital transactions and the non-tangible realm of digital innovation. We highlight the unique nature of success in the digital world, using examples like Mr. Beast and Taylor Swift, and discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by new technologies. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, who is that person that gives the directions when we start the podcast? Dan: Well, I'm not sure the one that says this podcast this call may be. Dean: You are the first one on this conference phone call, oh my goodness, who is she? Dan: Who is she? She's a bot. She's not real. She's a bot. She's not real. She's not real. She's not real, she doesn't sound. Dean: I've heard worse sounding bots. Dan: Dan, I have been experimenting, playing around with chat GPT-4.0. And I use it primarily in voice mode, meaning, you know, I just say things to it and it has an amazing Scarlett Johansson-like voice that has zero, not at all like Siri or Alexa. You know where those voices definitely sound like. They are bots. This, my GPT-4O I think her name's Juniper is the voice that I chose. She sounds like a real person, I mean, and has like real tone, real inflection, real like conversational feeling to it and I realized that I don't think we really understand what we have here. I mean, I look at it and I think, imagine if that was a real person. Dean: Now, when you say we, who are you talking about? Dan: I mean the collective royal we I I'm sorry I've never been around yeah, I just think we as a when I say we, we as a society or we as the people collectively using this, it reminds me of this Seinfeld episode where Kramer got this or Jerry got his dad, this wizard organizer, and they always use it as a tip calculator, like the least of all the functions that it has. They're just excited that it's a tip calculator, and I feel like that's the current level of my adoption of Juniper. Dean: Yeah, I think the big thing is what you let's say, a year from now, level of my adoption of Juniper, you know, yeah, I think the big thing is what you let's say a year from now. You're using Juniper for a year. What do you think will be different as a result of having this capability, new capability? Dan: Well, I think it's operator, you know, I think it's operator dependent, you know, I think it's up to me what I think if you said to me. You know, I think it's up to me what I think if you said to me listen, I'd like to introduce you to Juniper. She's going to come here and she'll be within. She's going to follow you around. She's going to be here within three feet of you or discreetly out of sight, whatever you, but whenever you call she'll be right there. She is a graduate level. She is a graduate level student. She could pass the bar. She knows everything that's ever been recorded, she speaks every language. She never sleeps, she can write, she can draw, she can do graphics, she can do coding Whatever you like, and she's yours 20 to a month. Have fun, yeah, do you think you'd use it Well? that's my question is that it feels like I'm not using it and I have it. That's essentially what I have. I've got it in my pocket. You know how they said. You know the iPod was launched with the promise of a thousand songs in your pocket. Well, I think this is really like. You know, an MBA or a PhD or whatever you want in your pocket is essentially what we have, and I find it very interesting. Dean: No, I think it's unique, you know, and it's brand new. But what problem did you have that this solves? Dan: Well, I think that it's not per se a problem, but I think that we're I really have been observing and thinking, and I've said it you know in lots of our conversations, that I think that 2020, you know, if we take the 50-year period from 1975 to 2025, that we've pretty much set the stage now for a new plateau launch pad kind of at the same time. I don't. I think that once we understand and people you know, I think it's almost like the iPhone had the app store, that became what Peter Diamandis called the interface moment. Right, that was the you know, that allowed, once people realized that the capabilities of the iPhone to both measure geographically where you are at any precisely at any moment, the gyro thing that can detect movement, the sound, the camera capabilities, the touch screen, all of those things, Well, people realized what the baseline capabilities of the phone were. They were able to architect very specific, you know, starting with games very specific ways to use the capabilities that are very specific ways to use the capabilities that are built into the phone and I think that right now it's almost like it can do anything, and I think that we need to figure out the very specific use cases and I think we'll see people. Dean: You keep saying we, but I don't think we is going to do it. I think you know, who we are. Do we have a cell phone number? Do we have a street address? You know, I think you're having a very interesting personal experience with the new technology. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if anybody else is going to be in on this, but the big thing is, how are you going to set it up so that you can prove that this is valuable? I mean, let's say, three months from now the time you come back to. Toronto for your next strategic coach pre-zone workshop things you're going to test out and see if the inclusion of this spot with a very sexy Scarlett Johansson voice. This isn't the issue that she sued somebody for. Dan: I think it's, I don't know actually this voice is. It's not exactly her, but it's, you know, it's that tone and things. Dean: So yeah, so. Dan: I don't know that. It's a pleasing voice, much more pleasing and personal than Siri or Alexa, for instance. Yeah, but yeah, I think you're absolutely right it does come down to and I think that's where the paralysis of you know the it can do anything, but you know what would be you know where my mind goes. Dean: It's which, how that I already have, but am I going to assign this capability to so that I don't have to spend any time whatsoever interacting with this bot? But my who's a you know who's a live human being working for a strategic coach would that person actually work? Do this, you know, and actually and I tested out for three months what are you getting done faster? So, for example, we have an AI newsletter that rewrites itself every two weeks and chooses new content, designs it and goes out and it uses up one hour of my Linda Spencer, who's one of my team members on the marketing team, and it's very interesting, I mean we have about 2000 people who read it and they grade it and everything like that. But the only thing I have to do every two weeks she said here's the news, here's the results from the last newsletter, here's the design and contents of the next newsletter, yes or no? And I'll go through. I say, yeah, looks good, send it out, right. Yeah, now, that's not freeing me up, because we never had this capability before. It's a new capability, right, and it's been going for about nine months now and people will talk to me about it and you know everything like that and everything like that. But I haven't seen that it's made a huge difference in the crucial numbers of strategic coach, which are marketing calls. Are we generating great leads that people are talking to us about? Are they signing up for the program? Are they whatever? So the normal measurements. So I think, with any technology, the first thing I would establish before I got interested in the technology is what are the crucial numbers that we have that tell me that our business and myself are moving forward? And then, whatever I'm going to use the new technology for, it has to have an impact on those numbers. Yeah, I think that's yeah, because you know the amount of productivity. I'll use the United States as an example. You mentioned 1975 to 2025, 50 years of individual productivity in the United States was much higher in the 50 years before 1975, since it has been for the last 50 years since 1975. Even though there are these amazing books and that about how productivity is going through the world with the microchip. But the actual numbers which are gathered by the US government, the US Treasury Department, us Department of Labor, indicates that the level of individual productivity has actually gone down in the last 50 years even though the excitement level of productivity has gone through the roof. Dean: By what measurement? What are they deciding? Is product? Dan: Dollars of economic activity per hour per worker. Okay, that's how productivity is measured. Dean: The number of workers. Dan: You have the number of hours they work and the amount of economic dollars that their hour of activity produces. The productivity was much higher total for the entire all workers. Dean: But is it all productivity or personal productivity? Like are you saying no all? Dan: productivity? No, the entire GDP of the economy, measured by the number of workers. Yeah, okay by the number of workers it's going down, it's down. No, yeah, since 1975, it's not as great as it was from 1925 to 1975. So that 50-year period the productivity levels in the United States were bigger than the last 50 years. Dean: Wow, that seems. That's surprising. What do you think that means? Dan: Well, a lot of people are really excited and involving themselves in technological activity that produces absolutely no productivity. Yeah, they're very excited, they're very excited and they're getting very emotionally connected to this activity. But you know, I'm not saying that's not a great thing, I'm not. Maybe they're having more fun, Maybe they're you know, maybe they have. Dean: What actually counts as GDP. Dan: Well, GDP is amount of sales amount of sales. Dean: Okay, so would the advertising sales that Mark Zuckerberg makes for Facebook count as GDP, or is it only in physical, like you know, shippable goods, or whatever? Dan: Well, whatever, uh, you have a dollar spent on something that constitutes a sale to sale. Dean: Okay, so advertising, so Google and Facebook and Netflix and all of those things count as GDP? Sure, okay, all right, then that seems impossible. Dan: It seems impossible, but it's true. Dean: That's pretty wild. Dan: Yeah yeah. I'm not saying that Mark Zuckerberg isn't making a lot of money. I'm not saying Mark. Zuckerberg isn't productive. My feeling is that the technology is created, makes a lot of other people non-productive. Dean: Yeah, and I wonder I mean that's a do you think you know if you measured that in terms of the total population versus the workforce? Is that what? In terms of the total population versus the workforce, is that what you know? I'm just looking for some explanation of this right. Dan: Somewhere along the line, there has to be an economic transaction for it to constitute and everything else. See, this is the difference. Yeah and everything else See this is the difference? China talks about its GDP, but they don't use the same term that everybody else in the world uses. They use the economic value of what they've produced. So they can produce a million machines and they're sitting in a warehouse and they count that as GDP gross domestic product. But there was no sale, it's, you know, they spend it, it was an economic activity. There was a transaction there, but there was no sale. So I think that's the big thing. It doesn't count unless there's a sale. Dean: GDP, doesn't it? Dan: doesn't count as GDP unless there's a sale. Somebody makes money, yeah. Dean: Okay, money Okay, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's pretty. Dan: No, I'm not saying it's not exciting. And here's the. Dean: Thing. Dan: Maybe it's an A&I, it's what I would R&D stage. The last 50 years have been R&D stage. For the next 50 years, which are going to be 100 times bigger of GDP. Okay, that may happen, but it's not happening yet. Dean: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty wild. I mean you can definitely see, like the capabilities of you know, you can definitely see this replacing many customer service interactions, for sure. For instance, it's like a you can definitely see that going away, that there's not going to be a need for humans manning a customer service telephone center, for instance you know, yeah, I mean if it's good, I mean if it's good you know, and it depends upon the service that's being talked about, but if it's good, you know, maybe it does See, efficiency is not effectiveness. Dan: You know, and effectiveness is that you made a sale. Efficiency is we took all the activities leading up to a sale and we made them more, faster and easier. Yeah, the question is did you get a sale out of it? Dean: Mm-hmm. Dan: Mm-hmm, yeah, so. I don't know, but I think there's a bit of a magician show going with a lot of different kinds of technology, you know. I mean, it was like somebody was saying, you know, they were talking about EVs and specifically they were talking about a Tesla, and specifically they were talking about a Tesla. And he says do you know how much faster zero to 60 is in a Tesla than any gas-powered? Or you know, and I said, to tell you the truth, I don't know. Dean: To tell you the truth. You know. Dan: Geez, you know All the things I've been thinking about since last Monday. I'm sorry, I just didn't get to that one Anyway. And he says well, it's easily a second faster. I said good. I said now, where do you do this? There isn't any way. We're in greater Toronto, the area of greater. Toronto 6 million people, where you can go from 0 to 60 on a city street in two seconds. You know and everything like that. He said, yeah, but boy, you know, I mean, just think of that, how much faster you can go. And I said, yeah, but Teslas don't go any faster in Toronto than any other car, that's true, and usually they're stopped. Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right yeah. Dan: So I think the Tech Magic Show, I think it multiplies people's imagination, but it doesn't multiply their results. You know, I think there's something about it. And I think this is great. I mean what you're telling me. I've had some really boring people on the other end of a phone call and Scarlett Johansson would really liven it up a little bit. Dean: Absolutely yeah, yeah, exactly. Dan: Yeah, I was noticing that Cleveland hired Jack Nicholson and they still use it. It must have been 20 years ago. All the announcements, the regular announcements like don't leave your bags unattended, and things like that, oh right. There's a whole bunch of just what I would call airport announcements, and they have Jack Nicholson doing it and you stop and listen every time it starts. You know it's very effective and I'm sure and I'm sure Scarlett, I'm sure Scarlett Johansson would do a good job too. Dean: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, it's so, it's so funny. I mean, that seems. I'm just dumbfounded by the fact that productivity has decreased in the 50 years that we're talking about here. Dan: Yeah Well, think of the 50 years, though, and you gave me that great book. Dean: Yeah, you gave me the book that was 1900 to 1950, 1925. Dan: But 1925 to 1975, the entire country was being electrified. They're laying in lines and everybody was the farm that I was on. I was born in 1944. That farm was electrified in 1928. So it was only 16 years that they had electricity. Right, and you know they were putting in the entire water systems. The Tennessee Valley Authority was putting in all these dams and the electric plants. You know Lake Mead as a result of the Hoover Dam. They were putting in all those dams and that just produced enormous jumps and the cars were going in, the gas systems, all the infrastructure for gasoline was going in. It was just a monstrously productive period of time. And then all the production that went into the second world war, which they then had as productive capability after the war stopped and so they had all the manufacturing capabilities you know and you know and so. But there's to see the thing is, the real jump that's happened is the jump in computing. There's no question. Dean: There's been a monstrous jump. Dan: It's a billion times since 1970. It's a billion times. That doesn't translate into money, and money is what productivity is based on. How much more money are you making per hour of human labor? How much more money are you making for our human labor? Now maybe somebody will say well, we got to start counting the robots in our GDP. Something is doing work. Yeah, Just I mean wow, wow, wow, the only problem with you know the only thing about robots, though they're shitty consumers. Dean: Yes, exactly that's so funny. Yeah, they don't buy anything you know. Dan: Yeah, A computer is a good worker, you know. It doesn't take breaks, doesn't get sick you know doesn't form unions anything. You know it doesn't go home, it doesn't have a house, doesn't have furnishings doesn't need furniture doesn't go out to eat. Dean: Right, right. We're definitely in a stage right now where there's opportunities more than ever for economic alchemy, creating money out of nothing, seemingly compared to 1975. I'm not sure how that happened, I think, since in the digital world we're essentially creating money out of ether, you know, out of attention, even in a way that if we just take the attention economy or the portion of the money that is derived from the advertising world in, where it was print ads, television ads, radio ads those were things that were kind of happening in 19, right and, but they were selling sort of physical goods, whereas now I remember having a conversation with Eben Pagan about this, when I did a book Stop your Divorce in 1998, when it was when PDFs were just coming to be a thing where you could create a digital document that didn't require printing a physical book and you could email that or somebody could download it. And I just realized that you know, in that we've literally sold $5 million of a picture of a book not physically printing. These thousands and thousands of books, it's literally no zero physical good. That's why I wondered about whether the GDP is only measuring you, because we're definitely in a time where you can create money from nothing and the way that was driven was from Google AdWords. Dan: You can't create anything from nothing. No, I mean nothing physical, any. You can't create any. I don't think you can create anything from nothing there. No, I mean okay, nothing physical. Okay, that's what I mean. Dean: Yeah, like you look at it, that the book, you know we created the book and turned it into a pdf that was put on a website that there's no physical manifestation of it's, only digital. You can only see it online. People would search on Google for save my marriage or how to stop a divorce, or any of the keywords we could magically get in front of those people on their screen. They could click oh, stop your divorce, how do I do that? They click on that. They read this digital. It didn't cost anything other than what was paid for was that we paid google for the, you know, for sending that, you know the ability to display that person, that opportunity to somebody. We paid google every time somebody clicked on that ad and then they would buy the book and it would automatically take them to a page to download the book. There was no inter, no human interaction and no physical exchange. It was all 100 digital and that was where, you know, I started referring to that as alchemy, really like creating money out of of bits. You know, yeah, yeah, that's so that. Dan: Yeah, I think there's no I think there's uh no question that we've moved into a what I call a non-tangible realm of creating value, creating property and everything else, but at the end of the day it all adds up somewhere where this constitutes an economic transaction and as far as the accountants care, they don't care whether it was something physical or sold or everything. There's taxes that are taken out of that. I don't see the remarkable difference. You're using a different medium, but there is work that goes into that. And you had a big payoff with one, but there were another thousand people right at the same time you were doing that and their results? They put in a lot of work, they put in a lot of effort and it didn't produce any money whatsoever. Efforts go into GDP, your efforts go into GDP and there's way more of them than there is of you. So it brings you the overall results down and you know so and we kind of know. We kind of know that. You know productivity numbers. You know, like, on a year I know people talk about well, that productivity is going to go up by 20% as a result of that. Well, that may be true for a single company, but that's not true for the industry they're in, because their new thing going up by 20% may actually make obsolete 5 or 6 or 20 other companies who have had productivity that a year before, but now they have no productivity at all. So their loss of productivity is balanced against the gain of productivity. Dean: Yeah, that's interesting. I guess you think about that. That could be true in all the casualties of the digital transition here, right Like, what do you look at? Dan: Well, certainly the advertising world, certainly the advertising world, I mean before Mark Zuckerberg and before Google, newspapers like the New York Times. Dean: Daily. Dan: Edition was very thick. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And half of it was advertising. Now it's very thin okay because, they don't have the same. Yeah, but there's winners and losers, you know, in this, and you have a technological breakthrough, you have far more losers than you do winners. Dean: Yeah, I'm looking at like I was just listening to an interview with that Tucker Carlson did with someone I forget who, some former CBS correspondent you know, and they were talking about the new. You know what's really changed now is the reach capabilities you know, like Tucker really primarily being on his own platform but using the reach of x has, you know it's the audience is accessible to everybody, as opposed to him in the beginning of their careers, the only way to get reach was to be signed to a, a digital, or assigned to a traditional network where the eyeballs were. But, now the eyeballs are accessible to everybody and it really becomes these are my words, but it's more of a meritocracy in a way that you're you know that it's available for everybody. The cream definitely can rise to the top if you've got a voice that people resonate with. Dean: Yeah, I mean, and Tucker's a star, tucker's a star. He's got his following, he's got probably a couple million followers. Whatever he was big when he was on Fox and he had the top numbers on Fox and everything like that, but there aren't two of them. Dean: Right, and you can't replace him with an AI either. Dean: No, but what I mean is we pick out the winners. It takes a lot of losers to get to a winner, you know and I think this is more extreme in the Cloudlandia world than it is in the physical world- you know. I mean, I think there's a thing called network effect and the network effect is you can only have one Amazon. Basically, you can only have one Amazon. Because, the nature of Amazon is to suck everybody's customers up into one destination. There aren't five Amazons competing with each other, and that's what digital does. A person like Taylor Swift couldn't have existed 20 years ago. They wouldn't have had the reach. Yeah, that's true, and she's got the reach today. I mean she's coming along and she's got a lot of things going for her. She's very attractive, she's very productive, she pumps out songs all the time and the songs seem to resonate with a mood in the public right now. And everybody's got their cell phones and everybody's got that. And what I'm saying is, if you have one Taylor Swift, you can't have two. Well, yeah, that's. Dean: I mean it's, I wonder you start to see that she's just a, she's one voice, right Like I look at, I've been following rabbit holes like up the chain. You know and I start so Taylor Swift is a good example that many of her biggest hits and biggest success have been in collaboration with Max Martin, who is a producer who I often talk about and refer. Second, he's got the second biggest number of number one songs to his credit, right behind. He just passed Paul McCartney or John Lennon, and only Paul McCartney is ahead of him. Now he's about five songs behind Paul McCartney. What I realized is, you know, there's a way that it's kind of like you get max martin's voice is really what is, you know, behind most of the the most popular music, or much of the most popular music, and yet not many people could pick him out of a lineup. And then then I went another layer up. It just dawned on me, like in the last couple of weeks here, that the real catalyst to Max Martin's success was Clive Davis. Who is? Do you know who? Clive Davis is the former, or still, record executive. Dean: He was the head of so far, your records so far. So far, you're introducing me to a lot of new people. Dan: Okay, great well, I, I just love this that. You know, max martin, I've been saying, as that's the thing, like you think about one thing Max Martin's one thing has been making hit records. Right, that's all he's done. Making pop songs since 1996, or what is first number one. But if you trace it all the way back, the catalyst to it because he was in Sweden, there was a group years ago called Ace of Bass and they had a number one song. But when you go all the way back to how that happened, it was because Clive Davis, who was the head of Columbia Records and all its subsidiaries, arista and Jay Records, and all its subsidiaries, arista and J Records and all of these things, he found that song. He's like a guesser and better. He was guessing that song is going to be a hit and he signed Ace of Base to bring them to America. So he plucked this obscure Swedish band out of and brought them to America and on the wave of that, created the opportunity for Max Martin to work with all these great artists that happened to be under the direction of Clive Davis. And if you go even one layer beyond that, the guy that owns Bertelsmann, you know G Music Group in Germany. They own almost all the record labels, kind of thing. It's him seeing Clive Davis and putting up a million dollars for Clive Davis to start this record label. It's amazing that it all, kind of you know, goes back to capital allocation. Dean: But the big thing is none of that has to do with any productivity. Dan: Yeah, that's the thing I wonder, you know, I mean that really. Dean: No, well, what you're talking about is. You mentioned a name. Yes, and he does this and he's very successful and he's famous for being successful. But at the same time that he was doing what he was doing, there were 9,999 who were waiting on tables and doing this on weekends and nights, yeah, okay, and they weren't making any money at all. So what. I'm saying is when you pick a winner out and you see, see how productive they are using new technology you also have to account for the people who are using the new technology and not making any money at all, and therefore it's not more productive. Yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And I mean, you know we haven't talked about him for a while, Mr Beast. Yeah, and people say, see what you can do when you're 18? You won't see anything because he's so unique. And he has such a set of circumstances that there's nothing that he does that is repeatable by another person. Dan: I mean, yeah, he just became just in the last, I haven't heard anything about him. Dean: Is he still doing stuff? I don't know. Is he still doing stuff? I don't know. Is he still doing stuff? Yeah, yeah, he just became. Or is he retired at 28? Dan: No full steam ahead. Dean: He's got a 300-foot. Dan: He just became the number one subscribed channel in the world. He was the number one individual but there was this T-Series channel in India, which wasn't a person a different thing. Now he's the number one thing. He's now working on an Amazon show. He's taking his stuff to to amazon still full steam ahead with his, with his videos, but he's doing a big game show series in uh with under the amazon banner yeah, yeah, yeah. Dean: it's really interesting because you know again I go back that it seems to me that a lot you know and I've made this statement before is that a new technology comes out, or a new form of a new technology comes out. A whole series of people say I'm going to create a new company based on this technology and I want you know, I need some early investors. I need investors to get there, and so there's a whole industry for doing that in Silicon Valley and other places, and so billions are raised, not just for the one you know, not one investment, but for let's say 50 investments. And none of them go anywhere, none of them go anywhere. Dan: You know, nothing happens, okay, but people did make money because it's based on a Ponzi scheme kind of thing that the early investors get paid out by the late investors who end up pulling nothing and everything else. Dean: None of that represents productivity. Right A lot of action, a lot of excitement, a lot of money, but no productivity. And we're seeing that with AI. Goldman Sachs, the big investment bank, came out that, going on two years since open AI, we just don't see that there's any money to be made with this, except if you're like the chip maker, NVIDIA. They make a lot of money and they're very productive, and I think the reason is that I think that AI, if I look at the next 10 years, I think it's going to be very effective, it's going to be very useful and it's going to be very important for solving complexity problems that we already have on the planet. Okay, and you know, a great example is just large city congestion complexity, like Toronto, I think, may have the worst traffic congestion in North America. Dan: I did notice a big difference in that, even in the five years since I was there. Dean: Yeah. And the main reason is that they're making new cars, but they're not making new roads. Dan: Yeah, and I noticed that they've actually added a lot of bike lanes too, which have taken out some of the actual lanes. Dean: Yeah, Actual lanes, yeah, yeah, so without some new kind of solution to congestion and I think AI is the perfect tool for this and that all the traffic lights, all the traffic lights in the city are a single system and you're just changing the frequency of the lights changing and everything around the car changing the frequency of the lights changing and everything around the country, and there's a sort of a master view, how you know you can reduce the amount of people just stuck in the city by 40% if we just get all the lights. That's a complexity problem. Dan: You know and for example. Dean: The other thing is they haven't. You know, for all. The study of weather is probably the most complex system that we have on the planet and to this day they have no notion what effect clouds have on climate. You know they don't. They really. Clouds are just very complex. So if you had the ability to, I mean, they know different types of clouds and different things that happen when you have different types of clouds. They know that, but there's no unification of their understanding of the cloud system. And so you'd have to apply it to that. Now, you're not creating anything new with this. You're solving an existing problem. With this, you're solving an existing problem. My sense is that the best use of technology is always to solve some problem that you already have not create a new opportunity that's interesting. Dan: So maybe that's how I mean yeah, go ahead. I was just saying maybe that's how I should be thinking about my relationship with juniper yeah, what? Dean:what complexity problems do you have? Dan: Exactly what complexity problems do I already have that Juniper could solve for me? Dean: Yeah, like getting out of bed in the morning. That's a complexity problem. When does my first coffee arrive? Exactly yeah, why am I still thinking about this? Why at this late date. Dan: Oh man, that is so funny. Dean: It is funny. Dan: The funny thing is I posted up on Facebook right before we got on our podcast today. I took a picture of my. I have these. I have these Four Seasons Valhalla coffee cups and I took a. I made a coffee before our here and I posted up a picture of it right Pre-podcast caffeination, prior to the prior to our podcast here. So I'm fully caffeinated. I'm on the, I'm on the juice. Dean: Yeah, I will tell you this. Chris Johnson, great thinker in the FreeZone program he's got it's not his system, he's licensed his system from someone else but he had 32 callers to set up meetings with their primary salespeople for his company and he's in the placement business. He finds really good high-level people to go into construction companies and engineering companies. And he was telling us that his 32 human callers could make 5,500 phone calls and produce a certain result in a day of phoning. And since he's brought in his AI system, they can do 5,500 in an hour and produce a better result of people agreeing to phone calls. Well, that's productivity. Dan: Yeah, I guess. So yeah, pretty amazing huh. Dean: And he let go his 32 humans. Oh, my goodness. Wow, so this is AI making outbound phone calls? These are all AI and they've got complete voice capability of responding to responses and everything else. And then they get better every day. They have sort of upgrades every day for it. And that's productivity, that's productivity. Dan: Yeah, there's, yeah, that's a. That's an amazing story. An amazing story, I mean, you start to see, I just look at the things, even when we had the AI panel at FreeZone in Palm Beach. You're just seeing the things, even what Mike Kamix is able to create and the things that Lior is doing. You just think, man. Dean: I think we're early. Dan: Yeah, absolutely, we're early. Dean: Yeah, I mean I think we're in the first or second year of the internet with us, right? Dan: Exactly, I agree. That's why I say, that's why, in my summation here, I'm kind of thinking you know 2025, give it another 18 months. It's only 18 months old now when you really think about it. Right, this is it's 18 months, and give it another 18 months and we'll see that people you're already starting to see that people are taking the AI capabilities and they're honing it into an interface. That is, a logo maker, for instance, or AI. You know that it's already honed into the ability to specialize in making logos based on your prompts, or and I think that's where that's what I meant by the interface moment is people are going to start carving out, packaging very specific outcomes from the capabilities. Like, if we have these capabilities, what can we do and just deliver that specific outcome, rather than the capability to create that outcome that's why it's funny that that's kind of parallel to what I've been saying. I've seen people that are taking and training large language models based on your you know, all of the you know let's call it all the Dan Sullivan content that's been out there and then touting it as you know, having Dan Sullivan in your pocket, that you can ask Dan anything of it in your pocket, that you can ask Dan anything. But I think the ability to ask you anything isn't as useful as the ability to have Dan ask you things. Yes, I think that's the question. Dean: So in the last quarterly book, and the one we're finishing right now. So it was everything is created backward, where the tool we featured was the triple play, and then the next one is called casting, not hiring, where the tool is the four by four casting tool. We call it the four by four casting tool, and this is where I'm asking them questions. Dan: Right, okay. Dean: I don't see any value whatsoever of them asking me questions. Dan: Right. Dean: Because I'm not getting the benefit of the question. Some software program is handling it, so I'm not learning anything and I've got a rule that I don't involve myself in any activity where I don't learn something new. Dan: Okay. Dean: So there's getting the benefits, but plus we'd be competing with ourselves. Dan: I love it All, right Well off, we go. Dean: I will phone you next week I'll be at the cottage. I'll be looking out at a mystic blue lake while I'm talking. Dan: Oh, wow. Dean: It's really good yeah. Dan: Awesome. Well, have a great week, okay, and I'll talk to you next week. Thanks, thanks, dan. Bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, I reflect on the successful launch of our inaugural CoachCon conference, which brought together 350 members of the Strategic Coach community in Nashville. The vibrant energy of Music City and the exceptional facilities of the Music City Center made for an experience surpassing expectations. Our discussion centers on cultivating the mental fortitude needed to remain anchored amid future-focused hustle. We connect this to aspects like political endurance while acknowledging the enrichment that unfolding daily actions alone confer on tomorrow's potential. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We recap the inaugural CoachCon Conference in Nashville, noting the participation of 350 strategic thinkers and our partnership with Agile for event organization. I share my personal stance on cowboy attire and backyard barbecues, highlighting a preference for distinctively non-Western wardrobe choices. We reflect on aging and the evolution of long-term vision, contrasting my early career's short-sightedness with the strategic foresight demonstrated by successful individuals and families. I celebrate another birthday and contemplate the depth of understanding that comes with each passing year, using the experiences of Kathy Ireland as an example of life's cumulative experiences enriching future visions. We explore the importance of journaling and manifesting desires into reality, discussing how projecting our goals into the future contributes to personal growth. The discussion covers the importance of crafting a future-focused vision, especially as one grows older, to avoid feeling diminished with age. We examine the significance of living in the present moment and how our current actions lay the foundation for future success. Personal insights are shared on the perception of time and the possibility of slowing down our experience of it through heightened consciousness. We speculate on political endurance and the uncertainties in the political arena, likening it to a horse race with a focus on the candidates' abilities to sustain a full term. The conversation includes a mention of upcoming travel plans, expressing a commitment to continue these enlightening conversations from wherever life takes us, whether it be a London hotel or a Cleveland suite. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: I am back from Nashville. Dean: That's what I hear. I am excited to hear all about it. It looked like a real party it was a total party. Two parties. Dan: Yeah, so providing some context for the listening audience. We had our very first community conference and I say that because you did not get invited unless you were connected to someone in the strategic coach community and it's our first conference of this kind called CoachCon. And as a result of it. I already committed at my birthday party, which was on the second night, two-day conference, second night and I said we're going to have one in 26. So we're thinking we'll do this every two years Okay, that's amazing. Yeah, and we had 350, which was good for, you know, our first experience. Dean: And. Dan: I will say that we're really committed to Nashville. Nashville is just such a great city to have a conference. It's just. The city itself has an enormous amount of energy and the Music City Center is just a marvelous venue. It is so big it staggers your imagination. It's two blocks long by almost two blocks wide, and if you look at it from the air, from above, it looks like a guitar. Dean: Right, right right. Dan: Yeah, which you wouldn't do in Toronto. Dean: It would have no meaning, it would have no meaning. Dan: It would have no meaning in Toronto. Okay, it would. Dean: And anyway I was working with go ahead. I was just going to say not to say that Toronto has a pretty wonderful convention center facility too, downtown, yeah, but Nashville has a great. Dan: Nashville has a great Nashville has a great convention center. That's the truth. Yes, yeah, as a matter of fact, one of the smart moves we made as a company is that we immediately hired a convention conference company called Agile. I think they're from Kansas City and Minneapolis. They have two branches to their company and so, right from the very beginning, our team members were working with their team members to create the event, and this was a year and a half in planning, and they just are the perfect interface between yourself and then the venue itself, who have their own team. So it's really it's really a triple play of three teams working together to create the event. Dean: And I mean it's such a, it's such an engine. I had such flashbacks, you know, seeing the footage that was coming out of there of the room and the setup and the way everything was. Or you know that we did an event roughly twice that size every month for 14 years. You imagine, like the engine that it takes to put that, to put that on the logistics of it. That was what the main event was. We'd have, you know, 600 or 800 people every month. It was something. Dan: Yeah, are you speaking about one of your? Dean: events. This was with Joe Stumpf when we did the buy referral for the real estate agents. That was what we did. Dan: Oh, that was where you did it, that's where you did it that's where you did it yeah, that's right well, here I'm trying to impress you and you're just tolerating me no, I mean there's some. Dean: There's an exciting energy around a uh, a big event like that. I mean there's, but it's a very different energy. Dan: Yeah, wasn't it in Nashville 14 times. Dean: No, we did. We were all over the country. We did one a month. We did one every month for 14 years. Wow. Yeah exactly so Nashville was in the rotation that's like 168. Dan: That's like 168 conferences. Dean: Yeah, we did over 200, actually is what it was, but that was like a circus coming to town every month, every month, yeah. Dan: Anyway, I was talking to one of the black backstage crew. I was talking to one of the black backstage crew. You know who'd do the get you ready for going on to the front stage and I said we have 350 people. If you had other conferences going on at the same time. Our size, how many could you have? And he says I think around two dozen dozen we could be doing in the same building at the same time. But then when you get outside of the music center it's just filled with all the sorts of clubs yes and broadway, which is their big party street, is about two block, two blocks away, and there's lots of hotels. Dean: There's lots of hotels around, so's lots of hotels around, so you can feed into it. Dan: I was at the Four Seasons in Nashville. Dean: Of course you were. Yeah, did you get a hat and some boots to celebrate your 80th birthday? The Nashville way? Dan: I did not, and I'll tell you, my approach to cowboy hats and cowboy boots is about the same as my approach to backyard barbecues, and that is, I will celebrate my 80th birthday without ever having participated, actually organized one of those, and so it's on the list that I'm going to try to get through my whole life without doing I love it. Dean: That's the greatest thing. Dan: Dan. Dean: I can't tell you how many times I've used the. You know people are going through their whole life hoping to never have to meet you. Dan: I was having. Dean: I had lunch with an attorney friend who's a personal injury attorney and you know he works primarily with people in accidents and I said you know the challenge with his marketing is that it's acute onset and you know nobody is preparing for or anticipating the need to meet you. Dan: And I said in fact most people are hoping to go their entire life without ever having to meet you and if they get to, good for them, you know, yeah, funny, yeah, yeah, some people's marketing challenges are more severe than others yeah that's exactly right, well, yeah you know, as you know to be being that we're right at the beginning, when I started my coaching life, which was 50 years ago, in 1970, the people which was called Top of the Table and the table is a previous organization which started, I think maybe 50 or 60 years before, which was called the Million Dollar Roundtable, and it was a certain amount of sales qualified you and you got to go to the acronym mdrt. That was the thing, and. But in the early 70s they had gotten together and said let's take a top 500 in the world and and establish ourselves as the top of the table. Okay, and so right off the bat, in 74 and 75, I had one who was just a great friend and promoter of what I was doing at that time, because it was just being out there testing out this thing called coaching for entrepreneurs. And then very quickly I got others because they talked to each other a lot without seeing each other as competitors. And one of the things that I really remember is just getting really, really deep into how life insurance agents operate. And it's a tough marketing proposition because you have to engage people in a conversation about what's going to happen after they die. I mean, that's the premise of life insurance and the other thing is you're doing it for other people. And really you're doing it, and I had one of the great ones. These were, in the first instance, they were all Toronto-based, that's where we were, and I remember this one he would deal with, very wealthy. One of the things that attracted to me to these top life insurance agents is that their entire clientele were entrepreneurial. Okay, they didn't have corporate people, they had people who created their own businesses. And I remember this one agent here in Toronto. He said the first thing you have to zero in on again, it's a difficult sale is what the individual, who's a wealthy individual? What do they love that they want to be remembered for having been a great person after their life? What is it that they love that they would ensure and he said so. He had this line of questioning with. That went something like this he said first of all, as we talk about this, do you love your wife? And the person would say no, not really, not really. He says do you love your children? That would be a flat no. And he says no, I don't love my children. He said do you love your employees? And he says no, I don't love my children. He said, do you love your employees? And he says no. Finally gets to number four is do you love your reputation such that after you die, people will say you know he really loved his wife, his children and his employees? He says yes, I do love my reputation, and he says, ok, let's ensure your reputation. He says until you find out what someone loves, you might as well not talk about your legacy, and everybody has a different one. So the big thing everybody has a something that they want to be remembered for. So he says that's the thing that we have to ensure. Dean: And it's amazing. Amazing, isn't it, that there's always the reason behind the reason. Dan: It's funny yeah well, well, there's ultimately. There's the reason, the others aren't a reason you know, and actually that's true, yeah, and you have to find out what makes the person tick. You know, know, I mean everybody who lives for a long time and is very active in doing it has something that's right at the center you know, and I think it's idiosyncratic. Dean: What do you mean by that? Do you mean, that it's? Dan: I don't think it's predictable. Dean: Okay, right. Dan: Yeah, there's a deeper. I don't think everybody is Well. If you have the money to be different, then you're different in the way you want to be different. I mean we're talking about people who can write a check and they can write a big check. And what do they write the check for is the big question. And they're not doing it out of need, they're doing it out of want. Dean: Right. Dan: My contention is don't do things out of need. Do them out of what you actually want, because that represents much more of who you actually are than doing things because you need to do them that's an interesting because that's why or is that why you spent so much time 25 years. Dean: I remember you saying you made a commitment to every day writing what do I want. I journal for 25 years. Yeah. Dan: And because I was coming off a divorce and bankruptcy which coincided on the same day, that was, August, August 15th 1978. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And you know, divorce and bankruptcy qualify as two bad report cards. Dean: Right. Dan: Right right right, yes, I mean any way you interpret it, it's a bad report card and so you know I was kind of in a state and one of the neat things when you go through a divorce and bankruptcy, people don't throw parties for you to have you come and explain it you know they give you a lot of peace and quiet of your own, you know, yeah. So I had about four or five months after August to think this through and I said you know, the reason why these things are happening is I'm not telling myself what I actually want. You know I'm assuming certain things about other people. I'm expecting other people expectations, assumptions about other people and other things. And I said, you know, I think the key here is that I'm not actually telling myself what I want. Dean: And so. Dan: I said myself what I want and so I said so. Nobody cares if I was divorced and bankruptcy, and nobody really cares whether I amount to anything you know you know, and I was 30, 30, 34 years old at that time. And once you hit 30, nobody cares you know, it just, we invest a lot in younger people until age 30 and then they kick you out of the nest and anything that's going to happen in the future, you're going to do it on your own. You're not going to get a government grant to do it. And so I said, well, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have one goal here. So I said, well, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have one goal here. For the next 25 years, every day, I'm going to keep a journal and I'm going to write in it something that I want, With one constraint I'm not going to use the word, because I'm not going to use the word. I just want it, I just want it. And I did that, I did it for 25 years I missed want it, I just want it, and I did that. I did it for 25 years. I missed 12 days. There are 9,131 days in 25 years including the six leap year days, and so it's 9,131. And I did them on 9,119 days and my relationship with Babs came out of that. The whole strategic coach came out of that. You know and all sorts of things, like the lifestyle I'm living and you know why today I don't have to think about money at all because the money's there and you know, and the type of people I'm spending my time with. So it feels good, but that that the other thing is I. What it proved is I have the ability to stick with something for 25 years, right on a daily basis on a daily conscious basis. Dean: So still journal. Do you, uh, do you still journal? Dan: well, Dean, that's a really great question. I do journal, but it's in the form of using my tools on a daily basis. Dean: I got you Okay, so you're thinking about your thinking every day, like my fast filter, my fast filters. Dan: Yeah, you know fast filters. I'm saying what I want. It's just mutated into different forms. I want it's just mutated into different forms, but there isn't a day that I go through where I'm not stating something that I'm planning to achieve sometime in the future. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really. That's something I'm coming up. Next April will be 30 years of, you know, daily journaling. Yeah, I mean of sequential, and I actually have all of the journals. It was April 1995. I would journal. I was always someone to write down my thinking, but not in an organized, archival kind of way. But April of 1995 is my journal number one the official like keeping that. Dan: So next year is the 30 years. Yeah, and it's so funny that you know, like you said, I think more than half your life. Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right. I just turned 58 on Friday and that was a you know, you mentioned you know at 30, I noticed that you did it at 29. Yeah, that there's a different you know different experience level at 58 than there is at you know 29. Dan: Oh yeah. Dean: Yeah, I remember when I first started with Strategic Coach in 1997, year one that was, I remember the three-year kind of vision thing was it was difficult for me to even like see three years into the future because everything up to that point had been constantly evolving. You know, and I just remember, as in real estate, you know, when I was young, starting in real estate, I remember there was talk of the, you know, halton hills the town where I was, had just released their 20 year plan and I thought to myself, man, that's like that's forever, that's a lot. I don't never get here. You know, 20 years, I can't imagine that they're thinking that far ahead. And I had a couple of experiences like that. One of the largest sale that I ever made was to an italian family that was land banking. They bought land on the corner of ninth line and steels in halton hills that wasn't going to be developed. Dan: we we're talking about Toronto. Yes, right, exactly Greater, Toronto area. Dean: Yeah, in Halton Hills that was like the outer edge of the greater Toronto area and their expectation was that this was going to be land that would be developed in 40 years and that was almost exactly true as to when it, you know, came about. It's just kind of that was their model. They would, you know, go, they were a development family and they would go out to the edge and buy the land that was inevitably going to be the development. So, you know, they owned a lot of land in Brampton and Mississauga that were, you know, at the time, rural areas that they bought, you know, 20 years previous, in the 60s, at that time, knowing that was going to be developed later on and what an interesting like long term vision, like that. But that tell that story, because I always like to have you know kind of I look at my birthdays, I like to have like a day of reflection and looking forward and you know real and yes, uh, two days ago was your birthday, that's right, yep, and so you know, looking, I have a completely different understanding and experience of what 25 years is, yeah, than I did when I was 29, right, and so it's like, not you know, because I can still remember cracking the you know seal on journal number one, april 1995, virginia Beach. That was the you know day one journal one, and I still I can transport there, you know know, right now. It's just amazing how your mind I'm just like I'm sure you can immediately remember your lunch that you had on the day you got bankrupt and divorced. You know, you probably recall that right there, but you couldn't imagine it was actually a good lunch yeah, that right yeah because it was on the credit card you were about to turn in. Dan: Yeah, the interesting thing about it is I've been working on a concept and I was reminded of it because for our top guest speaker at the conference we had Kathy Ireland, the very famous model. Dean: Oh, wait, it wasn't Joe Polish. Dan: As I said, we had our top speaker. It was Kathy Ireland. Joe was good. He was one of the three main speakers. Right yeah he should be delighted with that. Yeah, he should be delighted with that. Dean: Anyway. Dan: Kathy Erland talked about how her intent was not to become a model. Not that she was against becoming a model, but that was never her intention to be a model. And she was just approached when she was on the beach in Santa Barbara California when she was 17. On the beach in Santa Barbara California when she was 17. And an agent came up to her and said you know, I think there's a niche that if you wanted to become a model, you would really, you know, sort of a tomboy she's. You know, she was very athletic, she was very muscular and she, you know, she sort of had freckles and you know, and she did wonderfully for 15 years from age 17 to 32. And she was on many covers of magazines, especially Sports Illustrated, and but then when she was 32, she just decided to stop and while she was a model, she had taken a crack at creating different kinds of businesses, so it wasn't something new, she said. I always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur and that the modeling gave me a bridge from where I was born, where I grew up, to the outside world. And then she stopped at 32. And for the last almost 30 years's created a three and a half billion dollar global company. And it was really great. We have jeff madoff interviewers, so jeff, is how I know I had. Jeff is how I know kathy, because he had her as a guest at a marketing class that he teaches at one of the New York universities. But one of the things I found in common with her she said I like getting older because you just know so much more, and one of the things I'm really appreciating at 80 is that I can really I can think of my life in terms of at least seven decades. You know, the first one's a bit sketchy, you know, because you hadn't really become conscious. Dean: But you've recalled being out in the woods. Oh, no, no. Dan: I have very good memories below 10. And I think I've enhanced them some, but you have what's possible over long periods of time, you know and what you will stay with over long. I think one of the principal pieces of knowledge that you get as a benefit of getting older is you have a very clear idea of what exactly what you will stick with over a long period of time and we're just, and we're just trading reports here of something you stuck with and what I stuck with over a long period of time, and young people don't have the advantage of doing that that's exactly right. Dean: Yeah, you can't imagine and it's very interesting to see how I spoke things into existence in that journal, leading up to them, like describing what I want, and to see how they started out as a seed in the journal and then became reality. You know, something it's interesting to see and you wonder, you know, part of it is to keep that, you know, keep that rolling, keep it now looking forward in the next five. It's as you say, it's, you know, your I love about you at 80 is that your, you know future is still bigger than your past and that's kind of an exciting thing. Dan: Yeah, I will say. This doesn't naturally occur just by living years. Dean: No, no you have to be. Dan: I mean the. To make the future bigger than your past at 80 takes a lot of. Dean: Yeah, especially when. But maybe that goes to what your print too. Right, just achievement is a thing, that's a motivator for you. For the sake of parties, for the sake of parties. That's all the bigger parties. That's all the bigger parties. That's great, yeah, yeah. Dan: Someone was asking me that. You know, when I looked at the conference that we just had in Nashville, wednesday and Thursday, people said, well, how would you plan a conference? I said, well, I didn't plan the conference. It was my team members to plan the conference. So it was my team members to play in the conference. But I said my attitude toward the conference is what the party is going to be like on the final night. Yes, I work backwards from the party. What has to happen for it to be a great party? Dean: Right. Dan: Well, this is very exciting, that now it's just coincidentally, two years from now, we do it at the same time. Dean: That be, yeah, first week of may is a good day. Dan: It's a good time, it's good and we would do it at nashville and we would do it at the music city. I mean, we're far enough ahead on the schedule that we know it would be your 60th birthday. Dean: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that'll be right in time for peak Dean on my health journey here. You know that'll be Back to my. Dan: That was the year of the peak Dean. That's exactly right, it's almost, like you know, a periodic visit of the northern lights. Yeah, yeah. Dean: No, I think that's very exciting. Yeah, and I've already said even more. Dan: I've already yeah, you put it in the calendar. It'll be the week of your birthday, probably okay, I mean I don't know what the week looks like, but let's find out now. Dean: I'm yeah, but yeah, nashville, early early 2026, may 10th is a Sunday. Yeah, it won't be that, it won't be on a. Dan: Sunday no, but it'll be the week. It'll be the week before, it'll be the week before. But the thing is now that they've done it once and we've got a date in the calendar. First of all, they can put the date in the calendar and they can get the event company plugged in. And they can get the event company plugged in, they can get the reservation at the Music City. They can get the hotel bookings I think the hotel bookings most hotels you can't get in for about six until six months before. Dean: But as early as you can. Dan: And yeah, we had a lot of bookings at the Four Seasons and you know, and we came in from the airport on Tuesday or on Tuesday? No, on Monday we came in, am I right? Dean: here. You came in on the Monday, yeah, because we spoke last Sunday yeah, I think I came. Dan: We came in on the Monday, yeah, and and we. But when we arrived, there was this whole meeting party of Four Seasons personnel. They came up to us and treated us like they liked us oh right, imagine that yeah, which I take regardless of what their motive is it doesn't matter, it still feels just as nice. Dean: Yeah, I think that's great. Mr. Dan: Sullivan is the general manager of the hotel. Oh, we're so happy to have you, Thank you. Thank you very much and a very friendly guy, yeah. So anyway, I'm going to work on this. The value of age. You know, there's a lot of people and I'm noticing them, because I'm starting to notice how people who are getting up in years I won't say they're my age, but they're getting up in years are falling into the general narrative of how people act when they get older and I'm just so convinced that they feel diminished because they haven't constantly worked on having their future bigger than their past. Yes, there's a point where they stop creating their future whenever that was there, was you know, well, and I think that you really have. Dean: It's a discipline that I constantly have to get myself to turn and have my gaze future focused, because as you do get older, you start that there's more to look back on. You know, and you spend a lot of time revisiting the past, but all the action is in the future. Dan: There's nothing, nothing you can do about the about the past, but yeah, but what I do is that I the past, if I remember. It can only be raw material for creating something new for the future. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Like when I go back and I remember a situation, I'll say now what did I learn from that situation that I can use in the future? You know, I don't accept the past's interpretation of itself. Dean: Yeah, say more about itself, yeah. Dan: Say more about that. Yeah, and I had a friend for a number of years who I'd gone to college with and we've, you know, we have been in touch for 20 years and he said you don't have any nostalgia, do you? You don't look back and have an emotional. And I said no, I mean, first of all, I was given a chance, you know, when I was having the experience, to appreciate what it was Okay. So it had a momentary opportunity to really imprint me with its importance. But if I'm looking back from 20 years ago, it's my interpretation of what it means to me going forward, not the interpretation. And I'm noticing, with the boomers, you know, there's nothing more disgusting than a nostalgic boomer. Dean: Yeah, like thinking about back in the day. Is that what you mean? 60s? Dan: well, 60s, you know, that's the usual. The 60s and 70s, you know, and they were going to turn the world on its head. And then they became civil servants, they got jobs as government employees or they became teachers and everything else. And then you get with them and they go back and they say, oh, those were the days, and everything like that. And it's kind of, but I have this notion that up until 30, society really supports you. Society invests in you, the government invests in you, the community invests in you, your parents invest in you, the teachers, everybody invests in you. And at 30, they cut it off and they set you free. And it's like I say about people say well, e know they have very high purchase. When the chicks are born, you know they're hundreds of feet up the eagles, and then on one day the mother eagle, just there's little eagles, they have wings. You know they have feathers, they have wings. She just pushes them all out of the nest. They have wings, she just pushes them all out of the nest. And the ones that don't hit the ground know how to fly. The ones who hit the ground, you don't have to worry about them. Wow yeah, and I think society at a certain point they just push all the 30-year-olds out of the nest and they want to see if you can make anything. Is there anything different or unique, and if there isn't, you just, more or less metaphorically, you hit the ground and you're nothing more than what things were before. Dean: There's nothing new. Dan: There's nothing new, but I pushed myself out of the nest when I was 18 years old, so the time until I was 30 didn't really mean anything. Dean: Right. Dan: But I don't comprehend nostalgia, because my emotions are in the present, they're not in the past. Dean: Yes, yeah, and that's what you realize, even in the future. I think when we were talking in Palm Beach earlier this year about the, you know the main thing is the future is really only shaped by the behaviors and habits and happens Really. Dan: The future is shaped by your present capabilities. Yeah, so I don't want to be looking backwards, as I'm living the present. I want to be fully alive because it's my up-to-dateness with the present that determines the quality of the future. Dean: Yes, yeah, bringing there here. Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. We had a whole raft of speakers. Dean: Yeah, tell me about some of the highlights. What were some of the highlights? Dan: Well, I didn't get to all of them, because I went to every hour. You had a breakout session. I went to it, but there were different streams and tracks. I mean they're all going to be videoed. I mean they were all videoed so everybody's going to be able to see them. But I went to one and they had a couple of futurists there and I wasn't impressed. I wasn't impressed, and more and more over the last 10 years, since we did the collaboration with Peter Diamandis to create Abundance360, I always knew that people could be trapped in the past, in other words, that they were doing every day trying to hold on to the past. Okay, but I'm just as convinced now that people can get trapped into the future. They can get trapped, that they can't really be aware of what's going on right now because their mind is in a realm that hasn't happened yet and one of the things I know it makes them very nervous, makes them very anxious, anxious. And the thing that I found really interesting about these two speakers, the husband and wife team, was that they were making up all sorts of crazy words to describe what's happening, and you should be aware of this. And they had a word called templosion, which you know temp is, I guess, a Latin word for time, something and implosion, which I guess adds on a notion of explosion and that we're in a period of templosion, where there's hundreds of different ways that you're going to have to choose your life. Dean: And. Dan: I was sitting there and I said no, well, I know, 20 years, or I know 20 years from now, exactly what my life is going to look like. I don't know the details but, I, know it's going to be a direct extension of what I'm doing today. Dean: And. Dan: I know 80 percent of it. It will be expanding. I'll meet all sorts of new people. There's all going to be, but what's happening in the rest of the world and what other people are doing really don't, it doesn't really matter to me that much. Dean: I like that. I mean, that's what I realized in the journaling. I have two things. You something you said about. You know that spending time, you know, in the future is there's a lot of temptation or opportunity to just stay constantly planning and thinking about the future without actually you know, I've been using the word applying yourself. You know, I found that it's in our minds the things that motivate us to actually do something. We only do things in the present. So our own, you know our, you know our behaviors extended over time are what we define as habits, but it's really the behavior that's to be done today. You know, and I realized that writing in your journal and thinking about or planning for, or architecting or doing all these things that are future gazing is not actually applying yourself, it's not actually putting anything on the record. It's the equivalent of to the committee in our brain that actually controls what we do. It's the equivalent of quietly sitting in the corner coloring. Because no matter what anything that you do in your journal. The great deception is that it feels like that's actually making a difference. Right, that you're actually accomplishing something, but it's not. Until you break that barrier of getting it out of your head into and on the permanent record in the form of an action or a behavior. It's not going to do anything. Dan: Well, I think the big thing and I think it's a hard realization. I think it's maybe one of the harder realizations that nobody has ever lived in the future and nobody has ever lived in the past. Yeah, you only live in the moment. You know, and it and a lot of people just aren't capable of being conscious of the moment because their attention is being either dragged back backwards or pushed forwards and they're thinking about next, they're not thinking about next year. They're not thinking about, they can't think about next year because everything's happening right now. They can't think about 10 years ago, because everything's happening right now, and I think being present-minded is hard. Yes, I think it takes really an enormous amount of mental muscle to actually just be aware that things are happening right now and the way you handle things right now basically makes the future. Dean: Yes, that's the only thing that makes the future. It's the brick by brick layer. Dan: You know what I mean it's really the truth. Dean: It's that in the tapestry or whatever, that we can only see the accomplishment of it. But you realize that you can. Dan: I bet in the world of brick layers it's what a person can do in a day that really puts them at the top of their craft. Dean: I think you're absolutely right. Yes, and it's only on the reflection. You know, great walls are only built on the you know, compilation of daily accomplishment. Dan: Yeah. Dean: You know the thing is you can change any of it at any time. You know the thing is you can change any of it at any time. That's what I realized is in reflection, you know, when I was thinking about those, the elements of a perfect life, and really getting down to the, you know how DNA has, you know, the five elements of it, that if you look at the DNA of a perfect life, it's, you know, the elements are me, like everything. If I were to strip me naked and drop me on a deserted island, everything I have there, that's me, the portable things. Then time is life's moving at the speed of reality. 60 minutes per hour in perpetuity and you're always doing something in there, then environments are the things that are. You know. You basically put yourself in or you've been put in to an environment. That is your version of what's happening here, where, geographically, where you are, that where you live, what you have, what you do, all of those things are environments and you could, in theory, all of those things are environments and you could, in theory, move your, so I mean, you could completely change your environment. That's what you're thinking of the immigrant, right of you could leave everything behind and go change the environment and decide everything that you're going to do. Then the element of people meaning all the people that are around you, and money. So the combination of all of those five things are what create what we would call a life, you know, and I love like I find that infinitely entertaining too, you know in terms of yeah, the other thing is that, uh, one of the things that was predicted for me by other people is that as you get get older, time speeds up. Dan: Okay, and since I 70, I've experienced just the opposite. Time slowed down during the 70s and the years just took their time, and I think the reason is, I think it has to do with consciousness. You know, and I think that you know when you're, you know when you're a child, you're learning everything. So you're, you know, you're, everything is kind of new and you're exploring it and everything else, and then, as you get on, a lot of your experience you already knew that. So it's not significant, okay, but I think what happens with a lot of people, they are never actually creating their experience. There he is. I got a phone call that interrupted our phone call oh man, how rude somebody named Stephanie ok and. I immediately hit just to say you have no right. You're trespassing, that's right. Yeah, be gone. Where did I leave the thought that I was on? Dean: Well, you were talking about consciousness. That's what you were saying. Dan: Well, I think consciousness is the number of times during any time period that you're actually conscious of what's happening to you Okay. And I think it's massive when you're a child, because everything's new, right, but as we, let's say, we're now 20, we've actually mastered a lot of things that were new and now they're known, actually mastered a lot of things that were new and now they're known. I think, therefore, the number of situations when you're 20, that you're suddenly struck by something new is less than when you were, you know, four or five or six years old, okay, and so you're moving quickly from one moment of consciousness to another. And when you're six, it might be 20 things a day. That's a long day, but if it's 20 times a week when you're 20, that's a faster week, and if it's 20 times in a quarter, when you're 50 that's a really fast quarter and when it's 20 times, when you're 20 times in a year, when you're 70. I think that whether time is going fast or slow depends upon the number of consciousness things about something new that's happening in your life. And I found over the period of the last 10 years. I was back to having suddenly new conscious things that were happening. You know many times. You know many times a week or a day and time slowed back down, so it's actually being conscious. Dean: That's really, you know, that's almost like Euclidean, that's like euclidean geometry, you know yeah, that that harmonizes with something that I heard about. Why it the perception is that it moves faster is that when we're looking back, the routine reads as one experience, right? So you're looking back at the thing, if you've been, if your life becomes waking up in the same place, driving to the same job, sitting at the same desk, interacting with the same people and you look back over time at that, that all reads as one experience and it's only the new and novel consciousness moments that you were just talking about that get registered and recorded that single experience for some people may have. Dan: Another year just went by. Dean: That's exactly right and that's what oh well, that was fast where that was fast. Dan: Where's the time go? Where's the? Dean: time go. Dan: It's not a function of time, it's a function of consciousness. Right, that's exactly right, and we've had at least five conscious things in the last hour. I love that, Dan. We've done each other a favor over the last 60 minutes. Dean: I'm very excited about the culmination, the 60th. I'm reframing CoachCon as a peak theme celebration. I'm just I'm taking it for me, that's what it's. Dan: Not that you didn't have something to live for before, but we just put some kind of put a cherry at the top of your whipped cream. Yeah. Dean: I've had something that I was already on the path of you know, and that's kind of that's kind of great. Yeah, I just celebrated nine nine weeks of the peak Dean path here, so that's all it's very exciting. Dan: That's been a good nine weeks, hasn't it? It really has. Dean: Yes, it shows the whole you know thing of accountability and the plan and Somebody else's executive function, that's exactly right. Dan: Now I'm looking honestly. Dean: That's the thing Now. I'm looking for that in my you know, in deciding in my productivity now, in all the times that I'm, because I realized what an abundance of time I have you know, and very. I have what you would call very little environmental drag on my life in terms of time, commitments or obligations or people or other things, so it's a huge palette to play on Attempts on the part of other people to use up your life. Yeah, exactly, there's no claims to it, that's exactly right. So I've got no excuse. So now it's just like I get to architect this amazing adventure here. Dan: You know the thing that's going to be the highlight in the election campaign. It might happen in the next week or two where Trump finally sends the judge in the current trial in New York over the edge. He says I'm sending you to jail, and then the United States is just fixated on. Trump. He won't be in a normal cell. Of course He'll have a phone. Of course he'll have a phone and he'll be messages from Rikers Island, which is the main jail and he'll have lineups of everybody wanting to get his autograph and his picture taken in Rikers. And you know he'll be giving campaign speeches to all the prison guards and everything else. And meanwhile President Joe will have to be reminded who he is again and what his job is. Dean: Oh, my goodness. Well, we got six months. That's the exciting thing here. Dan: This is very exciting. This is very exciting. This is very, this is a and. And people say, isn't it a tragedy? I says what's a tragedy? And they said just the preposterousness presidential campaign. And I says, well, it depends on how you look at it. Because a lot of people say, well, this is crucial. You know the future, the world depends upon this. And I said, well, america has so much going for it, the United States has so much for it, it's got so much leadership at every level of activity that Americans are the only people on the planet in the history of humanity that can just treat domestic politics as a form of popular entertainment. Oh man, so I don't think you're approaching this correctly. You think that this is actually important, but it's entertainment. And then the question is who is the most entertaining candidate? And that I can predict yes. Dean: It would be amazing to see it all unfold, how it plays out. I still see Las Vegas still has all the odds makers still have Donald Trump as the winner. Dan: Yeah, I think it's in the 60s. Well, it depends on whether they're doing it with all the candidates or just the main two. But I think the betting markets I check every couple. I think the betting markets I check every couple weeks, the betting market. Yeah, it's been generally 60, 65 and you know and you know, which is surprising, because a lot of the big, wealthy democratic donors could be gaming the market, you know, just throwing a lot of money into the market. But but these are the las ve. I mean Las Vegas puts a bet on everything, so it's probably some legitimacy to what their bets are. Yeah, yeah, and it goes deeper than a particular issue. You know, it's just like. You know, it's almost like which one of them could actually be there at the end of another four years, and I think that's part of it. Holy cow yeah yeah, that's exactly true yeah, it's like a horse race, where you're betting to see if any of them could actually get to the finish line right oh my goodness, we know they could be at the starting gate. We just don't know which one's going to actually finish you know, yeah, that's so that's amazing, yeah all righty are we uh on next week? yes, nope, I'm on a plane trip to london on sunday of next week. So and the week after I, yeah, the week after I can do it from a hotel room in cleveland okay, perfect, but I'll have to give you the. I'll have to give you the date of the time. Dean: Okay, no problem. Dan: And I might have to get you up early. Dean: That's okay. It's my only thing on these Sundays. Yeah it's my only thing, so it's the highlight of my day Okay thank you, thanks, bye, bye.

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, I reminisce about our wonderful experience at the recent Cloudlandia conference at Canyon Ranch in Tucson facilitated by the legendary Joe Polish. We discuss the importance of maintaining an active lifestyle through routines like DEXA scans. Our conversation explores cultivating daily habits that balance productivity and creativity without overcommitting. Wrapping up, we tackle the nuances of time management as entrepreneurs and commitment levels' impact on execution. Discover how dependability and prudent social media actions shape future opportunities, drawing from Kevin O'Leary's wisdom. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Dan and I delve into the significance of the series' theme song and its role in their listening routine, based on Chris's reflections. We discuss Chris's trip to Tucson and their perspective on the moderated conference experience led by Joe Polish at Canyon Ranch. We highlight the importance of maintaining consistency and improvement over time, drawing upon the eight profit activators as an example. Dan analyzes a typical day at Canyon Ranch through Chris's recount, emphasizing the value of health checks like the DEXA scan for body composition. We explore the paradox of having ample free time yet facing a lack of productivity due to multiple options. Dan and I discuss the various levels of commitment and how they influence the ability to complete tasks, especially in the entrepreneurial environment. The chapter on trust, money, and social media is explored, examining the challenges of relying on unpredictable and the personal ethos of dependability. We assess the intertwined nature of trust, money, and social media, referencing Kevin O'Leary's perspective on the potential long-term impacts of public actions. reflect on Chris's strategy for managing time and commitments, including his rule against traveling for marketing purposes. The episode concludes with us having a candid conversation about procrastination, commitment, and the challenge of executing tasks without external scaffolding. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dan: Welcome to Cloudlandia. You know, the theme song to this series might be the song that I've listened to more in my life than any other song. Dean: Oh, that's funny I like it. Dan: I was going through the archives and I said you know, I don't think I've listened to any song as much as I have this song. That's so funny. Yeah, I love it Good music though. It's good music. Dean: And good message. Dan: And it, I love it, it's good music, though. Dean: It's good music, yes, and good message. Dan: And it's good message. Dean: It's always a reminder. So welcome back. You've been on the road, arizona. Dan: Yes, how was that? Oh, it was great. We were in Tucson for about five days at Canyon Ranch, and the weather was absolutely superb. In Fahrenheit terms it was roughly about 75. Dean: Yeah, perfect right. Dan: Clear, cool nights, blue skies, no rain and the genius was great. Joe is really in the sweet spot. Joe Polish is really in the sweet spot because he's controlling it now with his interviews and I think that's terrific, because he had six different guests and if they're just giving a presentation, it can be from bad to really great. But what Joe provides, he just does a framework and of course he directs them with questions and he knows the audience, he knows the speakers, so he's doing a great job of moderating and I think that's a terrific move. Dean: I like the new setup too that he's got there, the stage with the kind of environment that's good, nice, the kind of environment that's good, Nice. Dan: Well, let's Proves that, if you just stick with some things long enough, you know it turns really superb after a while if you keep making improvements. Dean: Wow, I can't say enough about that being true. I was really. I've been thinking that about the. I've been going back looking at the eight profit activators as the example of how long you know I would say I've been working on this for 30 years, unconsciously, and the last 20 of it consciously and the distinctions, the reliable, that I've generated from all the ways that we've applied, all the number of data sets and iterations and different applications that are still like, it's just kind of great. It's a shortcut to really identifying what needs to be done, and every new iteration of a durable playbook is adding new distinctions. So much certainty in the things. I just can't wait to see, you know, the next 20 years of that real like dedicated application, because it's not going anywhere, you know. Dan: Yeah, I think you know I'm sort of a stick with things for a long time. Dean: Yes, yes. Dan: And I mean, if people are telling you they're getting value out of it, their checks indicate yes, yes, things going in a workshop and I'm, you know, I'm always seeing new things and and everything like that. But you know, we were. I was just reflecting that this is 35 years for the program, the workshop program, and it's pretty much not too different in 2024 than it was in 1989. I mean 2024 than it was in 1989. I mean it's basically you're doing thinking processes, you're chatting with each other individually, you're having general discussions, there's visuals to represent what's going to happen and all the money's up front. Dean: Yeah, I mean, listen, I call those things durable contexts and what you've got there, like the strategic coach program and the workshops, it's not unsimilar to what 60 Minutes has going for it, the. It's been the same context in sunday night 7 pm tick, tick, tick three long form stories on the most fascinating things in the zeitgeist right now. That's never going to get old. That's really. You know, it's like the same thing. You look at quarterly meetings gathered with your peers thinking about your thinking in a group of people who are thinking the same way. So I think that's the cheat code is understanding what those durable contexts are and allowing the content to fit within that. You know. Dan: Yeah, there was a great old parody, I don't know 20 years ago, and it's the new marketing manager for Coors Beer and he's saying yeah, and he's in a meeting with Mr Coors the current Mr. Coors and he says yeah. He said yeah, we've done a lot of research and you know we feel that the color that we've been using for the labels of Coors beer are not up to speed with what people really like and therefore we're suggesting that we switch the color of the labels. And Mr Coors says I like the color we've got. He says yes sir, yes sir, Mr Coors. Dean: Yes, sir, we're going to go with the color. Dan: And he says we feel that you know the typeface that we're using, the Coors typeface, is from the. It's really from the 19th century. And he said so we're suggesting this new typeface. And Mr Gores says I like the typeface the way it is. Dean: He says yes, mr Gores. Dan: And then he says we're thinking that the bottle is very in old shape, you know, and it's not really up to date with modern design and therefore we're recommending this new shape of the bottle and we want to change the color of the bottle too. And he says to Mr Kors says I like the old bottle and I like the color we've got. Yes, mr Kors, okay, we're all set to go on our new campaign right, that sounds like your conversation when they wanted to change the fonts right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I like Helvetica. We're going to stick with. Dean: Helvetica Awesome, I love it. Well, Dan, what was your? What's a day in the life in Canyon Ranch? You've been going there now for as long as I've known you. Dan: Yeah, 1990 was our first trip, so this is our 55th visit and many years. We've gone twice, twice. Well, it's a nice place, it's very congenial, it's very comfortable and it's well kept up. And, you know, the food is good. They have terrific massage therapists. I mean, they have dozens and dozens of massage therapists, some of them, one of them we have we've been seeing her for 25 years, you know, and there's just a nice quality. It's very predictable, there's no tension, it's very laid back, and so I get up in the morning and, you know, once we're set to go, I'll go out for a walk, and they have a two mile loop around the property oh wow and one of them is quite a challenging hill, okay. So what I could do is I go out and I start working the hill from top to bottom and I do that. I do that for about a half hour. You know. Dean: Up and down, you know gets the heart rate up yeah and now with my repaired knee I was gonna ask do you feel? Dan: the difference. Yeah, yeah, it's. Uh, there's a bit tenderness about especially coming down it's going up is fine, it's coming down. That puts more stress on your knee right and then then we go for breakfast and there's two choices they have sort of a very informal cafe and then they have a restaurant with full menu. And then I do a lot of reading. I read the Wall Street Journal on six days of the week and Babs and I just agree when we're going to rendezvous for lunch. Dean: She does a lot more. Dan: She does a lot more consultations. She does more investigating new things, which eventually I introduced to some of them. But she's much more active. She gets more tests than I do and I do one test probably every year for 20 years since the body composition. Oh, yeah, like a DEXA scan, right, right, dexa scan, yeah, and it's the gold standard as far as I can tell. You know, and then you compare and I got 20 years of records and you know, need some more care. Things are okay here and you know you go there and then the afternoon I'll have at least one massage a day and I do that. But I do a lot of reading. I've got my detective stories, my thrillers, my international geopolitical thrillers, and you know I'll wander around around and I get my steps in, I get my three rings on my apple watch bin and we meet for dinner. We usually do it pretty early and we you know and come home and I'll check the news, internet news and read some articles and then I'm off to bed and multiply that by five days. Dean: Do it again. Dan: Yeah, and you feel revived. Dean: Yeah. Dan: But I, you know, I mean at after 35, 50 years of coaching and 35 years of the company and the program. I don't really get that stressed out for my work. Right, I mean you know I'm in my unique ability. I have certain things to do every day. Dean: There's deadlines. Dan: There's always lots of projects going, and so it's not like to go on to free days, which Canyon Ranch always. Isn't that much of a change for me from? The way I operate on my workday. I'm never doing more than three projects for the day. I have lots of time between projects. I only hold myself accountable for getting three things done a day. My scheduler, Becca, always makes sure I have at least a half hour between anything that involves a meeting with someone else. And yeah, so that's pretty well that I mean. But I get a lot done. I mean I'm more productive at 80 than I was at 60. Dean: So yeah, that's my thing. How much of your time during the week like when you're on a typical home week, work week is scheduled like synchronous and scheduled with other people, versus you saying these are the three things I'm going to work on, or are they always involving other people? Dan: No, I have days when it's just me getting my part of a project done that has to be then sent off to somebody else. But I have days when there's no meetings. The vast majority of them are Zoom meetings, not in-person meetings. Dean: And I have a regular schedule the workshops are in the schedule. Dan: The two-hour catch-up calls that we've introduced for Zoom they're in the schedule. I have podcasts they're scheduled. The only thing that's left up to me is creating new tools. Dean: Right. Dan: You know, and the other thing is new chapters of the current book and that goes off, and then we have recording sessions and so on. But I would say that if I look ahead at a year, 85% of that year is going to be totally known on the first day of the year. Dean: Really, yeah, yeah, like with scheduled slots for when it's happening, yeah. Dan: Very interesting. Yeah, and I've introduced a new rule in 79, that I will never travel for marketing purposes. Dean: Right, exactly. Dan: Yeah, and I will never give a speech. I'll do an interview, but I won't do a speech. Dean: Right or. Dan: I'll put an audience through a thinking tool, but I won't give a speech, so my days of speechifying are in the past, right, right, right. And I won't give any speech for publicity purposes, I only give a speech for marketing purpose. I mean, I'll only do a public, you know, presentation and a movie tool only for marketing purpose. I'll only speak to audiences that are qualified clients, qualified prospects. Yeah, yeah, and that's basically an easygoing tourist's life. Dean: Yeah, exactly, I forgot, that's another thing. Dan: You have a birthday in about three days, right? Dean: That's right. May 10th that's exactly right may 10th. Dan: It's yes, right yeah, so that's what is that friday? Dean: that is friday, yeah, yeah. So that's that one little thing, that one week of time where I'm only 21 years younger than you. I catch up on you for a little bit and then you take over again. Dan: Yeah, I have to give you a teaser before I frustrate you. Dean: Okay, let's hear it. Dan: Yeah, no, it's 20. Dean: You get to be 21 years younger. I got you Right, right, right. Dan: Then it gets taken away from you. Yes, exactly, just when. Dean: I think I'm catching up. Yeah, yeah, a little boost. That's so funny. Yeah, I've forgotten that we're both Taurus. That's something we are very similar. I think that's why we have such an easy friendship. I think because we're essentially a lot alike, I mean our whole being. Dan: I think we're essentially lazy luxury-loving innovators. Dean: Lazy luxury-loving innovators, I like it. Dan: That's pretty true. Dean: It's the truth. You're absolutely right. Yes, yes, yes, in the best sense of all of those words. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think both of us exhibit sort of a lifestyle that's different from what we learned when we were growing up. Dean: That's true, yeah, I don't know what instilled it in us, but it was self-discovered. Really, Nobody taught us this. Dan: And we both like shortcuts. Dean: We both have a passion. Dan: It's very interesting I haven't actually driven a car in the city of Toronto in easily 25 years. Dean: I think that's amazing yeah. Dan: And you know I have a limousine company that handles all my scheduled stuff. And then Babs. You know we're very much in sync in terms of what we like to do for entertainment and for socializing we're very much in sync, and what it's allowed me to do is to really notice shortcuts in the city because I'll see. You know, I'm a real map addict. I like maps. And I'll see something I said. I wonder, if you go through this alleyway here and you come out here, whether it's a shortcut when there's busy times and I got about 20, 25 of them in the city that Google doesn't know about. Dean: Oh boy, okay, yeah, you've got the knowledge. Dan: Yeah, I got. I've got the knowledge. Google stays within the framework of what are considered official streets. You know they it doesn't, and probably they have to do that. I mean, that's not, it's not their job to be doing it and and so one of the limousine drivers said, you know, he went to the president of the company, the owner, and he says, you know, we should have mr sullivan up here, he knows more shortcuts than anyone I've ever seen and and the owner of the company. Why would we want the trip to be any shorter? Dean: Unbelievable, huh. Dan: Isn't that? Dean: funny, that's the best. Why would we want it to be any shorter? Dan: No, and I can see his point of view, I guess. Dean: but wow, I can't tell you, dan, how much I'm looking forward to being in Toronto. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Really am. Dan: Now you're coming in. When are you coming in? Dean: On a. Dan: Monday. Dean: The workshop's on a Monday the workshop is on Monday, right the 20th, so I think I'm going to come in probably the week before. I'll probably come in. I may come in at the very latest the 17th, and so I would be available for a table 10 or whatever table they assign us on the 18th, if that works in your schedule, and then I'm going to do a breakthrough blueprint on the 27th, 28th, 29th. So I'm going to stay for at least two weeks. Dan: Are you staying at the Hazleton I? Dean: believe so. Yes, there are the four seasons. Dan: one of the two yeah, because our wonderful French restaurant in Yorkville is gone. Dean: I know exactly. Dan: Jacques Bistro. You know, they basically packed it in at the end of the previous year, so the COVID year started in March 2020. So right at the end of 2019, they packed it in and their son you know, their son and daughter were. I was leaving this was right at the end of the 2019, I was there and I was going down the steps and he said Mr Sullivan, do you mind if I have your picture taken and we're putting together sort of, you know, a panorama of all the longtime guests? And I said sure, and then they they always closed down for the month of January, july too, yeah, yeah, in January, and they never came back. After January it was closed, and so I don't think they were sensing anything, but I think they had just more or less packed it in without telling anybody Because it's all gone. Now it's some other business. It was a very small restaurant, I know because it's all gone now and it's some other business. Dean: You know it's. It was a very small restaurant. Dan: You know I mean they may do, for they may do for almost 40 years with about at most they might've had 40 seats in the restaurant. That wasn't a very big restaurant Right. But let's Select is good, let's Select they sold. The two partners sold. They had been with it for 40 years and they sold and it's. You know the menu is smaller. There's some things not on the menu that I liked, but you know it's great. Dean: Have you been to? There's the new French restaurant in Yorkville, off of you know where, if you go Bel Air basically that where Bel Air meets Yorkville if you continue across Yorkville in that little alleyway, there's a new French restaurant. I think. Yeah, they didn't last. No, they didn't Okay. No, cause they came in just before. Dan: COVID right, yeah, they didn't last. Oh, they didn't Okay. No, because they came in just before COVID right? No, they didn't last at all. Okay, yeah, and I'm just trying to think. Dean: Sophia Is there another? Sophia is another one. I think it's new, but I haven't experienced it. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, you know, there were a lot of casualties from the, you know. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Actually, Yorkville has gotten a lot less interesting because restaurants have gone out and retail stores have come in oh interesting. It doesn't have the same entertainment value that it did. Dean: Interesting, I may have to rethink Where's the new? Where would be a suitable place for a guy? Dan: like me, the Hazleton is really good. I mean, they're one restaurant there is really good, but you know I would go for Le Select, just for old time's sake. Dean: Of course, yeah, yeah. Dan: And we'll put it in the menu. I have a whole bunch of medical things. Usually on Saturday I go to my biofeedback program. Dean: I go to osteo-stron and I get my hair cut. Okay. Dan: But I can leave off the two medical things that day and just get my haircut. Dean: Okay, fair enough. Dan: And we'll, yeah, put it in for 1130. Would that be good? That's fantastic. Dean: I love it. Dan: Yeah, yeah, it's not table 10 anymore, but we can get the same table, yeah, and that's where we. Dean: That's where we, that's where we launched the podcast series the joy of procrastination was launched right there. Dan: Yeah, what are you thinking about procrastination now, after all these? Dean: years. I think it's amazing. I mean, I think this whole idea of the you know as a superpower, I think it's absolutely true. What I still I'll tell you what I'm personally working on right now is my ability to do what I say I'm going to do. At the time, I say I'm going to do it without any external scaffolding, and I'm realizing that. You know, I'm just now eight weeks into the health program that I'm doing with Jay and Team Dean all together there, and what I've found is that's working really well because it's created the external scaffolding and support and exoskeleton that allows me to stay on track, or create that bobsled run, as Ned Halliwell would say. And so now my attention in May here now is turning to myself. I have, Dan, an abundance of time. I have, all of you know, a consulting client that I talk to on Tuesdays at one. I have a my real estate accelerator group on Wednesdays at three, and then on alternate Thursdays, I have my co-agent call and my email mastery call, and so, all told, it's four to six hours a week of synchronous and scheduled requirement. Right, Then I basically have 100% of all of my time available, and I do. I've always sort of you know having free time leads to having the ability to be creative and do things, but what I find is I often end up in a paralysis of opportunity. you know of that I could do this I could do this, I could do this, I could all of those intentions. You know that I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could all of those intentions you know. But I very rarely get anything done. Fits and spurts right, and so that's what I'm really kind of. I'm really trying to figure out the formula for me on that. Dan: That's why I was curious about you know, you know, I would say this that I, if I didn't have obligations, or commitments. Let's say commitments, yeah, like I have, I have commitments. I wouldn't be very productive just on my own Right. I mean, I won't do something just because I want to do something. To see it, it has to involve my team and it has to involve my clients, otherwise I won't do it Right. And so I always have deadlines related to those two parties, and I really like deadlines. I really like deadlines because, you know, and usually I get it done just before it's needed. And the reason I like that is if I just have enough time to actually and I don't have any more time, I just have enough time to get something done, then I'm totally focused. If I've got more than enough time to get something done, then I'm totally focused. If I've got more than enough time to get something done, then I can be distracted by something else Me too. Dean: I realized I started thinking about a progression of the way things are going to get done. Most certainly is synchronous and scheduled is 100% certainty that it's going to get done. Then kernis and unscheduled is also getting done, like that's what other my consulting clients or the people that I work with we don't have necessarily every tuesday at one o'clock or whatever it may hey, are you available to talk? You know, on this day and we put it in the calendar and but it's not like recurring, that, it's not locked in obligation. I usually keep my calendar. You know I schedule those things about two weeks out. And then the next level up then. So that's synchronous and sort of unscheduled, but we'll do it. Then the next thing is asynchronous with a deadline, is likely to get done, but the thing where I want to be is asynchronous at my discretion and that's the most joyful thing, but nothing ever gets done. Dan: That's the reality, right? Yeah, it's really funny. I was having a conversation about it was with someone at Genius Network. You don't know them and they were talking about how they're really into Zen. Know them, and they were talking about how they're really into zen okay, and and you know the oriental, you know that you detach from, you know physical reality, more or less yes, and, and I said, you know I've read things about them. You know I've read things, but reading things about zen isn't them right you know, it's not them. You know, and and said the one thing I've noticed about people who are really deeply into Zen they're not real go-getters. Dean: Interesting yeah. Dan: Yeah, because for them, the things of the world, they're not really real. Dean: You know they're sort of delusional. Dan: And anyway, and I said, I have a really enjoyable engagement with the world. Yes, and it's entrepreneurial, so that makes it more enjoyable. I have nothing in my life that involves dealing with people who are in bureaucratic, private sector, bureaucratic or public sector. I have no nothing to do with anyone like that, and so everyone I mean my entire environment. I'm hearing an enormous amount of sound. Dean: Sorry about that. Dan: What I notice is that I live in almost like a complete entrepreneurial universe. I mean both business-wise and also socially you know, so I don't really know much about what's happening outside of the entrepreneurial world. I mean, I read it. I mean I read it on the internet, but it doesn't really impact on me. You know, I mean taxes do, inflation does and everything like that, but not in a serious way. And the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Canadian dollar is very comfortable right now. Dean: It's about $1.37. Dan: Okay, yeah, I always enjoy that. Dean: It's a nice offset. Dan: Yeah, people say, why do you live in Toronto with the taxes so high? And I says, well, it all depends on where your money is coming from. Dean: Right right, right right, and you know the patents are. Dan: We're up to 19 now. We have 19 patents so far. And that has its own asset value. And yeah, so it's really nice right now At 80, it's really at age 80. So it's really nice right now at 80, it's really at age 80. It's really nice. Dean: Yeah, is that so? I am curious, though, if so, the deadlines. If we think about that progression right Of synchronous and scheduled, synchronous unscheduled with a deadline and asynchronous at your discretion, where's your power zone? Are you able to spend time productively in asynchronous at your discretion, or does what drives your thing be the deadline? Dan: No, I let other people schedule my life. I let other people schedule my life. Okay, yeah so all the dates in the calendar are someone else's schedule and then they have their schedule for me to get the material in, because it always involves some sort of teamwork. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Before a workshop, you have to get the new artwork in according to the production team's schedule, not my schedule. Right and I have some really good rules with that. If it's 80%, good we're going to go with it, even though. I got a better idea at the last moment. I never load them up with last minute requests because from the audience's standpoint it's 100%. It's only our judgment that is 80%, right, exactly. Dean: They don't know. It's 100% of what they got. That's exactly right. Dan: Yeah, I don't know that there was something better that could have been done. They don't know that, so I'm pretty easy with them. Every once in a while there's a last-minute thing and because I never bother them very much, they're up to it. But if it was a steady diet that they had of the last minute, then you'd lose their ability to respond at the last moment. So I never take advantage of that, except there is some situations where you know it's a good idea to do it. Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right. How much of your time is spent brainstorming and sketching and thinking, like, working out an idea for a thinking tool or the content for a book? Because I imagine that's kind of where it all begins. Right, you're coming to the table, yeah, with the idea this is the book I'm to write, and how much of it is you, uh, I'm really curious about, like because I've discovered you know, my power verbs as part of our discussion through the joy of procrastination. But what would be? Do you have time like that where you're? Do you have a notebook that you use, or do you sketch, or do you know? Dan: I'm pretty much um. I'm pretty much a fast filter person, so yes, uh I get the idea and then I go through and I say this is the best result, worst result, and here's the five success criteria. Dean: And by the time I finish. Dan: By the time I finish, the first fast filter I'm launched and then it's right into the introduction, the chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, you know. So yeah but I was talking to a new member of genius network. A great family actually, a father and two sons all joined and it's called the pompa method and it's, you know, getting rid of all the metals in your body and everything. You're living with mold and everything else and so much of sickness comes from heavy metals in your bloodstream and it comes from very, very serious negative impacts of having mold in your house and I think you would be more in danger of that than we would here in toronto. I think florida's can be sort of damp, you know things. I would say that uncared for physical things in Florida deteriorate pretty fast, don't they? Dean: Yes. Dan: And anyway, and he didn't really know me at all, like there was no prior knowledge, when we met and I started talking and he says you know, I'm doing everything well, but not writing books. And he says I have some sort of block to the book. And I said do you have a book in mind? And he says, yeah, I've got notes and notes. And I said you know, the easiest solution to writing your one big book is not do that. What you want to do is write 100 books. Dean: Right. Dan: Yes, right, yes, book. And he says, well, how do I think about that? And I says, well, do you have a good chapter already? If you were going, to write a good chapter in your you know. You know it's a good idea, it's one chapter, it's one idea. Could you write a book on one idea. And he said yeah, but I've got so much more to say. I said I know you got we all do. I said we all got a lot more to say, but we don't have to say everything right now. We can say one thing right now and I showed him one of my books and he said, oh my God, oh my God, but it's so short. And I said yeah, and you can read it in an hour. Dean: I said it's big type too. Dan: It's 14 point type and it's Helvetica, very easy to read. And it's got lots of subheads. You could get the meaning of the book if you just read the subheads. If you didn't read all the text. Just read the subheads and the titles. You could get the meaning of the book, or you could read the cartoons or you could listen to the audible or you could watch the videos, know everything else. And it was like he, it was like a religious conversion. And he says, oh my god, I've got so much things that could become small books. And I said, yeah, the ebook. Research indicates that if your book is less than 60 pages, you'll'll get 85% complete readership out of it. Dean: Mine are 44. Dan: I only have 44 pages in a book and so, going back to your question, I don't have to do much brainstorming because I've done the same format over now. We're just completing number 38. Dean: Yes. Dan: I totally know One of the big problems of writing a book for the first time. Well, how long is it going to be? Dean: and what are the? Dan: chapters going to be. I know it's got an introduction, it's got eight chapters and it's got a conclusion, and then it's got a little section on the program in Strategic Coach. And then it's got a little section on the program in Strategic. Dean: Coach. Dan: So that's why I like repeating good formats, because you're not doing all this guessing. What's it going to look like? I know, I mean, I know what it's going to look like, I know how long it's going to be, I know what the pages are going to look like I know that. So that forces people to procrastinate and stop and everything else, and I've removed all that execution complexity right up front. And then I've got nine other people who are responsible for the finished product Right right yeah, and. I've got deadlines for them. Dean: The deadlines. Dan: You know they're already in the schedule. Basically it's a two-month project to get the book finished and all my deadline dates are in the schedule. They're just presented to me. These are the deadlines I said okay. I'm cool. So see, I'm being managed by other people's schedules and that takes a lot of the uncertainty on my part out of the way. Dean: Yeah, you know, what's funny is I've been thinking about my, because I'm very reliable in synchronous and scheduled things Meeting deadlines and meeting deadlines. Yeah, I'm never, you're never late, you're never unprepared. That's exactly right. That's why synchronous and scheduled for sure I would say you're never unprepared chat at somebody's event or as a guest on somebody's podcast, where I don't have to prepare what I'm going to talk about. I do it in the thing and that's why having the format that I've chosen for my More Cheese, less Whiskers podcast is the guest, is the focus, and I've been preparing for this conversation with them for 30 years and I bring all of that with it. I don't have to think about it ahead of time. So synchronous and scheduled, 100% gets done and it's right in my go zone. What I have been thinking about is if there were a way to think about signing myself to. Have you ever heard the term an FSO contract? It's in the entertainment business. People will contract with a entertainer's company for services of Dan Sullivan. So it'd be entering into a contract with strategic coach FSO Dan Sullivan and that would be a really interesting thing. If I had a way of thinking about myself, detached from myself, as a thing that I could tap into for services of Dean Jackson, it would be an interesting you know, I'm just applying it to myself. Dan: I don't trust the guy to show up Right, exactly, that's the thing He'll be on the way and he'll see something interesting. And then, yeah, you know you have to track him down. It's too much work, you know but I'm like you I'm very reliable as it comes to you know, you know commitments to other people. I'm very reliable. So I said and it's not work for me to do that. So you know, I just never, ever want to disappoint you know, I just never ever. Yeah, and but when I'm just dealing with myself, well it's, it's really loosey goosey, you know. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah, He'll find some excuse, you know, you know he's very slippery. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, the neighbor's dog ate the homework. You know, you know, he's very slippery. Yeah, yeah, the neighbor's dog ate the homework you know, everything like that. Yeah, and I I put myself in the gap when I'm doing that, but what I've done is, over the years I've made things I'm really intensely interested in public offerings, in other words, I'm presenting it to an audience and I just things that I'm really intensely interested in. I've connected now with making money. Dean: Right. Dan: And you know, the making of money really makes things official. Dean: Yes, yeah, so yeah, very, I mean it's taken a long time. Dan: I mean, I'm not saying this, was you know, but more and more as I've gotten lazier. Dean: Right. Dan: Anything that I'm actually interested in doing better make money. Right right right, isn't that funny. Dean: That's still the motivator, even though as time goes on 1600s, early 1700s. Dan: He said the making of money is probably the most innocent thing that humans can engage themselves, involve themselves with. He said making money it's really clean, you know it's sort of a really clean activity and there's an exchange and you feel a real sense of accomplishment and achievement. You know, there's just something about something where it has to be good for both sides. It's got a much higher energy impact to it. Dean: It's good for me, it's good for them, and it's not just double the pleasure, it's 10 times the pleasure yeah, and I mean, you know the nice thing about it is that to do it sustainably, there has to be a durable exchange of value. You know it has to be. Yeah, that's what's so? That's what I mean. That's what's so clean about it. Right Is everybody wins yeah. I love that. That's what I love about marketing, you know, is that it's just such a great. I feel really great about being a connector in businesses who can really add value to people and getting the message out to the people who can need that value as much as possible. Dan: And you know the thing is, it's actually the creation of something new, that didn't exist and then, once the exchange has been happened, it exists something new has been created and you know, and it's a, it's kind of proof that you're real. Yes, right, right it's a, it's kind of proof that you're real. Yes, right, right, you know, I mean you have people involved in various you know involvement of psychiatric treatment and you know they said, well, I don't know if the world is real, I don't know if I'm real, and I said well, if you're only asking your opinion, it's going to be hard to pin down. Dean: Yeah, right on. Dan: You have to get some proof from someone who's not you that you know that what you do is valuable. Dean: Yeah, yeah, that's what the that's the true, that's the great thing about capitalism, you know is that it's? Voluntary. It's voluntary, right yeah? Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was watching. You know the Shark Tank guy. He's Canadian, kevin O'Leary. Yeah, yeah, I was seeing him and he was saying he was just telling the protesters on the campus that it's being noted in the job market who these people are and they don't realize the price that they're paying and they have masks. And he said, doesn't matter, we're picking up your eyeballs. He said that every single person who was involved in the january 6th you know the- yes they. Within about two months, they knew who every individual was and where he was, because the technology is now so good. And he said. They're being used at the university campuses by the police and everybody else and every one of you who's upsetting campus life and is doing that, it's noted that you were doing this and if your resume tries to present you're a different person from who you are in the student protest, doors just will be closed to you. You will never get any direct message that you were in the protest, but you'll notice over the 10 years after you go to college and go out in the marketplace that you don't have much opportunity and it's a really good talk. Because he says you think there's no cost to this. There's a big cost to this talk. Because he says you think there's no cost to this, there's a big cost to this. And he says you think you're inflicting the cost on someone else. I have to tell you, over 10 years the cost will be inflicted on you. And I just thought it was a neat little talk. Dean: Yeah, he's a pretty smart guy, I mean just like as a philosopher, you know. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah and anyway, but I found it interesting that you know this rears up every once in a while. It's a bit like a fever, you know that. But this is very well planned. All these students have been in training for the before they actually show up as a protest. They've been in training by, you know, by activists. You know trainers and the activists who train them are never there. They train them and then you know they're off camera and you know they're tracking down the money sources. These people are being paid, you know. I mean they're actually being paid to do this and everything like that you know and everything like that. But it's an interesting thing how it's harder and harder to do things in secret these days. Dean: I was just thinking that, like back in, you know the fifties and sixties, seventies, eighties, even. You know everything now is is on, everything is on camera. You have to assume that you're every move. Dan: Yeah, they're probably you know, communicating with other people on social media. You know they're yeah they're not just doing this in quiet, for right five, six, five, six days in a row, I mean they what got them out, you know, into the movement was probably social media. Hey, we're going to do this and nothing else. And you should come to a meeting and we're going to do this. And you know, I think late teens and early 20s people don't think too much about that, you know, they don't really think that it shows up. But we're, you know, in our company, we really do extensive social media searches when we have a job, you know, a job applicant. Dean: Oh, you do, oh yeah, deep dive. Dan: Yeah, yeah, deep dive. We had one woman and she came in and you know where our cafe is in the. Toronto office. And she came in and she was sitting out in the, you know, in the reception area and something about her just caught my attention. And then she came in and she was just perfectly done up, you know, I mean her clothes were great. Dean: And. Dan: I watched her as she went through the cafe back to Babs' office and I said she's just too perfect. I said there's something wrong here. And afterwards she left and they were saying, boy, what a resume. She has a resume and everything else. I said there's something too perfect about her. I said I get the sense that something's off about her. So they went searching and they found out that she had a whole separate life as a burlesque dancer. Oh really, wow, that didn't show up. That didn't show up. And she even had a you know like a brand name for who she was in her other work. She had a completely you know and she was in clubs and they're sort of not public clubs and everything like that and not that there's anything wrong with being a burlesque dancer If that's your, you know. I mean, I mean it's not really my, you know my favorite form of entertainment. But you know, but the fact is that she hid the other part of her life, and that's the sense that I got. There's something too perfect about her. There's another side of her that's not being seen, so it will be discovered. If you have another life besides the one that you're presenting, it will be, discovered. Yeah, there's no hiding now, right yeah, and the simple way is just be who you are. Dean: Ah, that's exactly right, that digital split. Yeah, and the simple way is just be who you are. Ah, that's exactly right, that digital split. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, and the people that we really have long-term relationships with invariably are people who just do they. There's not another them. Right, yes exactly Right, right, right yeah. So anyway, did you learn anything about the way I approach things? Dean: I did. I mean, I think that's you know your organizing context. Like you know, I've been thinking about it in this terms of imagine, if you applied yourself, you know, and this is the applied portion of things and it sounds like your, the fast filter is the gateway into the applied world, right it's? yeah that's that starts. That makes it real because you're making it up and then you're making it real with a fast filter, yeah. And then that, when presented to your project manager or one of your project managers, you know you use the term, you know I mean executive function. Dan: You know you're lacking in executive function. I don't think that's true. I think, from a creative standpoint, you retain a lot of total executive function. I think what I've completely delegated to other people is management function. Dean: Yeah right. Dan: It's not executive function, it's executive execution function. I've got the starting execution, but then there's got to be a handoff. Starting execution. But then there's got to be a handoff and after the making it up stage then I have to hand it off to other people. Dean: I used to try to do the management function and I'm just no good at it. Yeah, and you know you're. The thing about the quarterly book is a. You know that's a viable construct. You know that's a durable context, that you're 38 quarters into a hundred quarter adventure, you know yeah, yeah, and that you know. So there's that sort of rhythm, contextual rhythm, that sticks with it. Dan: Yeah, yeah, that sticks with it. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dan: It's kind of a future time commitment. You know, like I'm not, I'm 40% through a 25-year project, so that means I've got, you know, I've got 2039, that I hit At the end of 2039, I hit quarter number 100, you know yeah right, and you know, and that gives me an incentive to make sure you're there. Yeah, right, exactly. Oh, that's so funny. Whatever it's going to take, make sure you're there, because you know it won't do if it's just 95. Dean: Right, yeah, no, that's exactly right. I love it. Well, I found this very it sounded very interesting. I appreciate it and I'm very excited about table 10 reunion. Yes, so I'll set that up on the 15th or whatever. Dan: Yeah, you know what I'll do is. I'll say to the Maitre D just for today, can this be table 10? Dean: Yes exactly. Dan: It's only table 10 when Dean and Dan are there, that's exactly right. Dean: I know exactly where the table is, no matter what we call it, it's still there. I mean it's still there, I'm going to put it in Dan at 1130 on the 15th Perfect Table 10. Table 10. Dan at 11.30 on the 15th Perfect Table 10. Table 10. I like that. Dan: All right. Dean: Okay, thank you, so much Are we on next week Yep. We'll be back from Nashville Perfect. Dan: Yeah, we get back on Saturday, so this is great. Dean: Perfect. Dan: Well. Dean: I'm sorry I'm going to miss the big birthday bash, but I'm sure it'll be wonderful and we'll have exciting things to talk about next week. Yeah. Dan: Yeah, good. Dean: Thanks Dan. Dan: Okay, bye.

In today's episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, Dan and I discuss the paradox of achieving more through minimal effort. Exploring concepts like the 'Crucial ABC Questions' and the 80/20 rule, we uncover how sometimes the best approach is to simply stand still—how inaction itself can be a powerful strategy. We share insights into the transformative nature of strategic scheduling and how it can liberate our lives from daily logistical burdens. By entrusting details to others and focusing only on meaningful tasks, forward-thinking time management elevates our experience and enables richer collaborations. Touching on varied successes, we reflect on the diverse challenges public figures face and the support networks shaping their approaches. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We explore the concept of achieving more by doing less, focusing on the 'Crucial ABC Questions' to isolate growth problems and find their least-effort solutions. Dan and I discuss how inaction can sometimes be the most effective action, particularly when it leads to strategic delegation and efficiency. We delve into the 80/20 principle, highlighting how focusing on the 20% of efforts that yield 80% of the results can enhance productivity. Strategic scheduling is presented as a tool for life liberation, allowing individuals to indulge in what truly matters by delegating logistics to others. We share personal stories and insights on how public figures manage their time and the impact of their support systems on personal and professional growth. I share my approach to problem-solving by considering whether inaction could solve the problem or what is the least effort required to achieve the goal. We highlight the significance of having others manage your structured calendar to allow for freedom of choice and richer life experiences. Reflecting on success and fame, we examine how various degrees of support systems and self-reliance influence celebrities' lives and careers. Strategies for entrepreneurs on managing time and maximizing productivity include asking key questions to reduce time spent on issues and preparing for future growth. We discuss the importance of personal routines and structure in providing a sense of security and time management, and the philosophy of avoiding unnecessary risks. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, Dan: Mr Jackson. Dean: There we are Back again. Dan: I have a question for you. Dean: Okay. Dan: Are there any problems you're solving today by doing nothing? Dean: Yeah, I love it. It's like a paradox. You know, I had a great time at our workshop this week going through that, the exercise. I've been thinking a lot about it, actually, like I really have over the last several days. I've been writing a lot of things and so I could share some of the things, but yeah, I'd like to hear one. Okay, so let's preface it. I love, by the way, how our podcast is really just one continuous conversation that we jump right into everywhere. Dan: Last one, so for anybody listening. Dean: Let me try and take my shot at explaining your. What do you call the tool? What do you call the thinking tool? Dan: The crucial ABC questions. Dean: The crucial ABC questions. So my understanding of it, having you explain it to me and having gone through the exercise, is that there are some number of goals or obstacles or things that you want to do. Dan: And I call them growth, I call them growth problems. Growth, In other words you have plans for growing something in your business life? For your personal life. But there is a problem. And I like the way, if you solve the problem, then the growth happens. Dean: Yeah, I like the way of thinking about a problem not as an emotional negative thing but as a math proposition. You know something that there is a solution, and that's really what we're looking for here. The problem, finding the problem is really the biggest, the biggest path to getting the solution. Dan: Yeah, you know you mentioned a math problem. That's like multiplication five times X equals 20. Right, okay. If you figure out what X is, then you have the. If you figure out what's relationship is between five and 20, then you've got a solution to the problem and you grow. Dean: I like that. So I think that the preface of identifying the problem you got to have a problem, so identifying the problem and isolating it to one particular thing can be a multi variable problem, you know. But one of the one of the variables of the problem is then to ask yourself is there any way I could accomplish this? By doing nothing, yeah? I think, that's really a great thing. Is there any way I could accomplish this by doing nothing? Dan: And. Dean: I think that alone, you know, is a really good way of doing, of thinking, because it lets you think about, you know, just as a solution. Is there a way to do this with doing nothing? Then, once you acknowledge that in 99 times out of 100, the answer is going to be no, yeah, that you then move on to be, which is what's the least that I could do to accomplish this or to solve this. Yeah, really, I'm a big fan of the. I'm a big fan of, you know, everything fits into the stand. The 80% approach is a great way of thinking about this. Could I get most of what I'm looking for with 80% of this. And you know the corollary to that 80, 20 and what's the 20? 20% of this to get 80% of the result. I think that's a really good. I think thinking paths that opens up for you and then see the magic is is there a? Who could do my minimum? I think that is the ultimate. That's the. You know we identified it as the. That's the way to. That's the way to pray while you're smoking versus smoking while you're praying. Dan: Yeah, yeah. Dean: I'll tell that again because I you told it on our last podcast but I've been thinking of all sorts of different applications of the smoking and praying yeah, the way I heard it was gentlemen goes to see the priest and asks him you know, is it, can I smoke? Well, I'm praying, and the pastor or the priest says well, you know, prayer is supposed to be a reverential thing and you should come with reverence. And so, no, I would say you shouldn't smoke while you're, while you're praying and anyway, and it came back several weeks later and within conversation, was asked go father, when should I pray? And the father says well, the Bible says you should pray without ceasing, should be in constant prayer and communion. And he says, so, should I pray while I'm gardening? Because, yes, being in nature and being with being present, you should definitely pray. Should I pray while I'm walking? Well, yes, you should pray while you're walking. Can I pray while I'm smoking? It's so funny simple syntax change that gets you to the outcome completely different than when you presented. Dan: It's a totally contextual yeah it's a totally contextual change, and so, going back to the three questions, so the first one is the way I can solve this, by doing nothing. If there's something you have to do, then what's the least you have to do. And if there's a least that you have to do. Is there someone who can do your least for you, with the result that you're solving the problem by doing nothing? Yeah but it's an interesting thing. Well, what's changed in your mind? I mean, when you put the three questions together, because this really starts with a conversation that created the entire podcast series that we've been doing for quite a long time? We've done quite a number of years We've done I think this is. The total is about 215. So this is episode 215 of our never-ending conversations, but it originally came back from my appealing. I just dropped a line when we were at a restaurant, los Select in Toronto and I said you know, I've been thinking about procrastination, and procrastination is an avoidance of something that really you're exhibiting. You're actually exhibiting wisdom because you know from your entire history of what works and doesn't seem to be working. The goal you have here, when you say this needs to be done, and you say, well, how am I going to do that? Well, the goal is an appropriate thing, it's exciting, it motivates you know it motivates some kind of action. It's just that you're not the one who's supposed to actually be doing the thing that you want. So it relates directly back to procrastination. Dean: I think, I think that it's in the same family, same root, yeah. Dan: It's a sense of family resemblance Exactly. Dean: Well, so I'll tell you the evolution of my thinking around. It is, you know, lillian is coming by today, lillian my assistant, and so I mentioned to you that one of the ways that I've been kind of applying this thinking is in my eating, in my meals. And you know I went to the process of with Jay Virgin, you know, we kind of outlined some great meal choices, 10 kind of power meals for me that are available here in Winterhaven through Grubhub and Uber Eats to be delivered. And I discovered the pre-arranged delivery you can arrange, you know, up to four days ahead that they will deliver at certain times. And so I've taken that was cut to the point of if I take that, if I want to eat great meals, is there any way I could do nothing about this? Well, there's not really any way because you have to arrange and eat the meals right. So what's the least that I could do and that led me to the pre-arranged things in combination of those meals, and factor my factor 75, that I've got some meals that arrive at my house once a week and they're very easy. They just, you know, require a couple of minutes to eat up, but they're perfectly portioned, already done, and delicious and nutritious and ready to go. And so my next level, thinking of this now from spurred from our conversation this week at in our FreeZone workshop, was to think okay, can I, is there a way I could have my portion of this done by someone? And so Lillian and I are going to experiment this week with her pre-arranging the meals to be to arrive at 12 o'clock and six o'clock, so mainly the 12 o'clock one that I that needs to arrive, because typically I use, I do, the factor meal for dinner. But that's going to be the experiment this week is here's the 10 meals. Dan: I don't really care. Dean: I don't really care which one it is, but let's rotate through them and at 12 o'clock something delicious will arrive at my doorstep without me having to do anything but eat the meal and I think that's, I think that's going to be my workaround for not having to, you know, really not having to do anything but eat. Dan: So does the? You have the 12 o'clock meal and the six o'clock meal. Are they different every day? Well, you got a map. If you just are talking about different combinations of two, and you basically have 20 things to work with, the combinations are in the thousands. Dean: Yes, that's exactly right. I think that's true. And it doesn't really it doesn't. There's no duds. You know I order, like the. I order six meals from Factor. So there's six days of the. You know six of those meal options I order from Factor and there's usually 30 plus meals to choose from. So I do have some favorite ones that and sometimes they're different and each week there are 30, but there's probably they probably rotate in you know several different ones Like yeah, so I'll see which ones I really which ones I like, and I may even be able to with a little bit of coaching. Thank you for reminding me of that. Then I'm going to look at that and see there's only so many variations. I'll just tell Lillian which factor ones I don't like. Dan: Yeah, but it's enormous the number of combinations because you're and there's actually, if you go on the internet, there's things that'll give you the different combinations. Like it'll give the different numbers you know, and it's a lot, it's really. It's really. I'm not sure it's over a thousand, but it's certainly in the hundreds. You know which. Dean: I'm very excited about the. So I'm very excited about that possibility, you know, because that's going to free up and I think there's something you know it's a great analog for everything. The next thing I've been doing is taking that and applying it to my content creation. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And I was just this morning going through the process of, you know, really getting to the point of what my, what is my core thing that I really like to do. So I'll say I'll talk a little bit more about that, but let's explore what you were saying. Dan: Yeah, let's go you know the interesting thing about bringing Lillian into the, you know, into the process we have a caterer who caters the meals for our workshops. So then, they could say 18 or 19 years. You know, and yeah, and my rule is any meal for the catering can be you can. You know, you can make the meals for the clients anything you want to think, but there has to be chicken, turkey chili, chicken chili. Right, right Then there has to be some kind of coleslaw and there should be some parmesan cheese, right? So my variation from day to day is which do I put in the bowl? First the parmesan cheese, the chili or the coleslaw, regardless of what else is on the food line? But then he makes our meals for Babzame at home, and this is lunches and dinners the same setup that you have, and it's really interesting because there's about it probably rotates. The salads have a variation, maybe three or four different kinds of salads, like. What's really interesting is the entrees, and they could vary. Let's say, there's 12 variations, 12 variations, and I never know what's coming for today, tomorrow or the next day. So something familiar, something we like, something we've had before, and then every once in a while he throws in a new one, right? So my sense, with Lillian doing the ordering it adds a little bit of surprise. Yeah, a little surprise, because you're saying, yeah, I wonder what's going to show up today. Yeah, you know, and it won't be the same as yesterday and it won't be the same as tomorrow. Right, and so I think it adds a little variety to certainty. Dean: What it removes is discretion. It removes variation and room for you know if it's all within this band. You get variety, but it's all from an approved playlist. Dan: You know, yeah, On a completely different, on a completely different, a completely different dimension. The way my year works. I don't like scheduling. Dean: Right. Dan: Okay, I don't like being responsible for scheduling. I don't want to be responsible for other people scheduling, so I work, and I've worked with a series of managers who do the various activities and my, you know really great EA Echamiller. Dean: Okay. Dan: And so, if you look at my entire year, I have 210 work days. Okay, so let's just talk about the work days 200. I have 100 and I have let me just think this 100, 250. 250, 250, 250. And 210 work days, which include both focus days and buffer days. Yeah, and 155 free days 155 free days, which adds up to 365. This year I've got a sort of an anxious decision to make because there's one extra day. I'm feeling the I'm feeling the pressure. I'm feeling the pressure that extra day in February. I'm oh geez. You know what will I do with it. You know it's eating me. It's eating me, dean. Dean: Well, you're going to be, is that? Are you going to be in Palm Beach then? Dan: Geez, I don't know. You know because I'm told where to show up. What is? The date of Palm Beach. You know, you know you're defeating me. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Dean: Oh yeah, but I will be told when to go. You will be in Palm Beach, dan, of course. So, no for the summit. That's what I mean. I mean I will be in Palm Beach for that extra day. Well, 29th is when the extra day is I mean the extra. Dan: There's an extra day in February but the truth is 366 days in the year. Dean: So you know, I understand. That's the symmetry, the elegance of it being that February. Dan: Well, that's taken care of them. Dean: We can have a super happy fun day. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a day when I'm responsible for nothing. Dean: I think we should see if we can work to do that together that day. That would be a very nice day. Dan: Yeah Well see, just by expressing the problem life, I've solved it. Dean: Yeah. I think, that's probably a great idea. Dan: Is there any who can do my least effort here? You did it for me. So thank you very much, yeah, anyway, but the whole point is, my whole year looks like this it's all scheduled by other people, and so I have a right of refusal on this, and I have a right of free arrangement. My whole schedule from January 1st to the end of December is scheduled, and then there's free spaces. Every focus day has some free space in it. Every buffer day has free space in it. And then as far as the free days go, it doesn't specify too much of the activities, except things that have to be scheduled ahead of time things that have to be chosen ahead of time, like dinner engagements, but that's all done. I mean that's all done. So what would happen in Toronto? I'd be in the cottage. I wouldn't be in Chicago, because Chicago is strictly a work trip and everything We'll be down in Palm Beach. It won't be just for the conference. We'll have a day before and a day after, and going to Phoenix next week, I'm going to Argentina the next week and everything but everything that needs to be scheduled ahead of time is scheduled by someone else, arranged by someone else, so it allows me just to show up, but all these scheduled things are what I've said, that I want to do, or together, babs and I want to do. And then somebody else works out the scheduling and the arrangements and everything that's needed, putting transportation together, and it just allows me to move from day to day without the pressure of indecision. Have I scheduled that? And I can't believe the number of people who are incredibly successful who are still scheduling their own things. I just can't believe. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this at this point? And they say, well, I don't like someone else telling me what to do. Dean: And. Dan: I says they're not telling you what to do. They're saying this is what you wanted to do and we made the arrangement for you. Dean: Yeah, exactly Great. I mean that's really. I'm laughing, dan, but for years that's been me. I mean I've been resistant to scheduling my take on. I mean it was right in my declaration of independence, kind of thing my freedom charter is my number one way of defining success has been I wake up every day and say what would I like to do today. I realize now that I've missed out on a lot, because it could be so much better if I were to just change one word is I wake up every day and say what would I like to do tomorrow. The future. Dan: I mean, that's really, that's the better, that's the real freedom. Yeah, you just changed smoking and praying. Dean: Yes, that's exactly what. I did, dan is because you're limited by what you can arrange. When your choice is today, when you're waking up and saying what would I like to do today, you're limited by what's available for the day, whereas if I say what would I like to do tomorrow, and tomorrow being an operative word for not today but in the future, what could I arrange today? That's really you know what it's the difference, dan. It's the difference between having conversation like this six weeks before February 29 and coming to the conclusion that, hey, it's a possibility that we can have a super happy, fun day and maybe we can make that happen for us. But if I were to wait until February 29 and wake up and say, what would I like to do? That I'd like to spend the day with Dan, I were to call you on any one of those days and say, hey, what are you doing today? The odds of us being able to spend that day together are slim to none. Dan: Yeah. Yeah, you mentioned your declaration of independence. But I said, if you're severely constrained by the lateness of your, you know, identifying something and getting ready for it, it's really not a great life. It certainly doesn't sound like liberty and it doesn't sound to me like you can pursue happiness. Dean: That's the truth. Yeah, it's really. I mean. Dan: Yeah, it's an interesting thing and, as you know from previous conversations and that I was bound in my late teenagers that I was going to go into theater, okay, and I'll say I dabbled with it for about five years. You know I actually was involved in the theater at, you know, an amateur level. I was involved with it but you know, I was in maybe 10 productions and one role or another. And the big thing that you begin to realize by the entertainment world is that people become stars. And I'm going to say two factors are here. They become stars because they are increasingly freed up from doing anything except entertain you know they're completely afraid of. And I'll say the other factor the reason they want to be a star is because they don't have to do anything except entertain. So there's both an effect and a cause there, but they're exactly the same. They're motivated not to have to do that. And I was reading once about, you know, moving in baseball from the minor leagues to the major leagues the top minor league is a huge jump to the major leagues and I consider sports a form of entertainment, so I'm relating it back to the same conversation. Okay, and the. I remember the shortstop, you know, and there was a year when about 12, 12 shorts in the major leagues came from the same town in the Dominican Republic and it's apparently short. It's the world center of major league shortstops. Dean: Okay, world head club, uh-huh. Dan: And you know, through a translator, because he doesn't speak English through a you know an interviewer asked him what do you notice, the biggest difference, biggest difference of being in the major leagues? And he said I don't have to wash my own laundry. He said I don't have to carry my own bags. Dean: Yes, I love that you know it was something, something a very similar conversation with someone this week who was I talking to about this I think I was talking more, I was having a conversation with Taki about that this week that thinking about, you know, pro sports like thinking about the athletes and the you know, thinking about the structure of the NFL, for instance, if I were an NFL quarterback, that there's very little that an NFL quarterback has to do other than bring themselves to be to perform on the day, right, that there's all of the everything else. Talk about, you know not having to do the carry your own bag or wash your laundry or anything like that. There's a very, very structured way of the of an NFL week. It's broken up into, you know, 16 weeks kind of thing, right as the main thing, and each week starts with a very organized structure and flow to the week where there are free days and focus days and buffer days. Of course Sunday is the big focus day that everybody you're ready for that. But you know Monday they I saw a you know week in the life of a NFL player and so Monday they watch film and get treatment for you know, their injuries or whatever you know body recovery kind of things. Tuesday is an off day, a free day. Wednesday is right back to practice, and Wednesday, thursday, friday, same Saturday is a travel day if they're going to you know a new city or whatever. And then Sunday is game day and everything is all 100% organized around them. There's lots of exoskeleton and lots of scaffolding to keep that. And a lot of hoos, a lot of hoos and mentioning Tataki, like the difference between that and professional tennis or golf even. You know there's some structure around the tournaments, but the individuals you know you're responsible for everything. You know it's all self directed and it's completely meritocracy. There's no signing a 10 year max contract in tennis. You have to win every week in order to win. You know, and I thought that's really. You know, it's really. I could probably do some therapy about my life choices, of why you know choosing tennis and golf as sports as opposed to continuing with team sports. You know. Dan: Yeah, I think the big thing I had a phrase because I actually went to see Frank Sinatra back in, you know back in the 70s. Dean: And. Dan: I came up with this line. One of the things you notice about Frank Sinatra right off the bat is Frank Sinatra does not move pianos. Right, Exactly oh that's so funny, you know he's got a whole team that comes in the day before sets up everything you know. I mean there's with a performance like Frank Sinatra there's literally dozens of people who are specialized, people that handle his whole trip, his whole lodging you know, and everything Great stars, taylor Swift to bring it up to the present moment. Dean: I mean she's probably got an army. Dan: She's probably got an army of people. You know, and uh 55 trucks to you know to bring the entire you know the entire physical set, the entire physical set, including the technology, and yes, and, and everything else, yeah, and. But you can see the difference to me. I remember Keith Richard Richard's of the. Is it Richard or Richard, keith? Dean: Richards. Dan: Yeah, richard. Keith Richards made a documentary film on Chuck Berry who so many of the 60s you have to remember that the stones started in the 1960s and he made a documentary film on Chuck Berry and it was a bit of. Keith Richards described it. He says it was a bit of total, almost admiration and worship for the musical skills of Chuck Berry but at the same time almost a sense of disappointment and kind of resentment towards Chuck Berry because he never built any kind of structure around him. Okay, thank you. And so he did this documentary for him that sort of traced him from his very poor, poor beginnings in the St Louis area and you know, and then. But he never. He went big simply because of his talent and the you know, the media for spreading his talent through the airwaves. And he became famous, but he never really took advantage of it. He really took it. You know he was playing that county fairs and everything throughout his career. Okay, but he inspired maybe hundreds or thousands of people who became successful in music just because of the sheer wizardry of his. You know his songs, his voice, you know his ability to play a guitar and everything else. So they did it and there was Bruce Springsteen was saying that he was like an 18 year old or 19 year old and was a, you know, got a really lucky gig at a fair in Pennsylvania county fair or something like that and as backup to Chuck Berry and he was just amazed. So they all got there about five, six hours. All the musicians got there five or six hours. And you know, four, five, four hours, chuck Berry's not there. Three hours Chuck Berry's not there. One hour Chuck Berry's not there. 20 minutes before the presentation, chuck Berry comes in, ignores the musicians, goes in to see the manager and comes out with a bag that's got his money in it in cash and then he just starts tuning those instruments. And finally Bruce Springsteen goes up to Chuck Berry and says Mr Berry. He says yes, boy. He says what are we going to play? He says what do we going to play, boy? We're going to play Chuck Berry music. That was his prep. Dean: That was his prep yeah. Dan: The name of that movie. Dean: I need to watch that because. Dan: No, just plug in. Keith Richards, yes, Just his you know documentary on Chuck Berry. He'll come up with it. But there's a great scene near the end of the movie where they go back to a theater in St Louis where, when he was growing up, chuck Berry had to sit in the balcony because he was black. It was, you know, wasn't segregated, that they couldn't go to the theater, but they had to sit in a certain section where they didn't have drinking fountains and didn't really have bathrooms, you know. And then they put on an actual performance in that theater as part of the documentary and it just shows the complete circle of him, starting when he couldn't be in the main part of the auditorium, certainly couldn't be on stage, and then being the star, and, but one of the things, they went and visited his home, which he had and this had, you know, his entire life. I think it may have been his parents home, but he had the home and it was pristine. You know it was beautifully kept up, not a, not a, you know, a rundown part of town, but not in a rich part of town either. It was you know sort of a modest house and everything you know, everything was kept up. It was you know, it was nothing rundown about it. And he was just taken through the house and they went to a door and he opened the door and their shelf on both sides were paint cans and paint brushes. And Keith Richards said what's this? He says well, you know, sometimes I didn't have gigs all the time, so I was a house painter. He says I paint houses. Wow, he says yeah, but yeah, but you know, that's in the past. That's in the past. He says why do you still keep? You know the brushes were fresh, the cans were cans. He says why are you keeping that round and check where? He says well, you never know. Dean: Oh, you never know. Wow, I would have to watch this. That sounds fascinating. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I love things like that, so that's really I think that'll be a good find. Good Now, I know what I'm in. Dan: Yeah, it's just a really, but he didn't believe in who's you know he just didn't believe in who's you know? Is there a way I can solve this problem with doing nothing. No, well, yeah, is there a? Way of solving the problem of too much fame and success without doing. Without doing anything? Dean: Yes, yeah, right, right, right. I mean wow, I mean yeah, I'm fascinated that I haven't heard about this before. So I almost like I just love that. Dan: Yeah, it's a long time ago. I mean, it's a long time ago. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Maybe something I saw 25 years ago. Dean: I remember it very distinctly. Dan: I remember it very distinctly yeah. Dean: So what has your insight been? In now, you know taking this out to the check writers as we say. What has been your experience? The reception of the ABC, thinking. Dan: Well, I think it's a very simple, what could very much be a daily tool, because things are always coming up which are things to be solved you? Know, and I mean so. For example, if you handle three of them today, the amount of time you thought you're going to have to spend on them has been severely reduced by simply asking the three questions Is there any way I can solve this by doing nothing. What's the least I have to do, and who could do my least? Well probably you were thinking that might take five or six hours and it probably takes 30 minutes. Okay, right. You know, it sort of takes 30 minutes, and I find usually the thing that the entrepreneur has to do is they have to communicate clear results for the right person, in other words, clear results to be achieved by the right person, with a clear understanding of why the projects were important and what are the measurable success factors of the project, which we call an impact filter. Dean: I was just going to say. If only there was an easy tool to convey that. Dan: There is one. It's called the impact filter, but if you handle that, then you've watched yourself probably four or five hours today which gives you time now to prepare for tomorrow. Okay. So you want to get yourself that you're not looking at today's growth problems. You're looking at tomorrow's growth problems, yes, okay. And you know, and what I've noticed with me is then that day I can put the. You know, this is a newly created tool, but before what I do is I can say okay, all clear and communicated about tomorrow, then I can move it another day in the future. And I keep buying myself days in the future by using this tool. I mean this has just occurred to me, you know, since I have one, as I created the tool for myself. And if it worked for myself, then there's a chance it'll work for the entrepreneurs. But then I have a full quarter now behind me of it working with the entrepreneurs and then I just move it more and more into the future. But I think it's you know, it'll already be in the client website for their tool inventory so that they'll be able to do it. But if you just had a habit of always the day before you're solving tomorrow's problems. I like that, that's when that really works over 25 years. Dean: Yeah, that's the consistency thing. Right is spending some time. What would I like to do tomorrow, and tomorrow being the operative for in the future? Yeah, I've been. I've been constantly evolving and experimenting on myself with different ways of organizing things like that, and you know, the gotten down to the plank, the pixel, the minimum unit of time being the 10 minute, the 10 minute unit where we have 110 minute units in a day, basically to up, deploy. And I've been following those hundreds all the way up right like so. 100 minutes is basically to 50 minute focus finders, which is the thing I have the most, that's, the most immediate control over right what am I doing in the next minutes about about this. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And then the 100, 100 hours is basically 8am Monday morning till noon on Friday, is basically 100 hours of time linearly. And that, you know, if I take that NFL type of structure of week, if you're looking at them that way, that's a big, that's a nice Focus. You know that that feels like that. And then a hundred days is Essentially a quarter, you know, looking at the things, with some little buffer in between them, you know, like giving room for some free days and things Aside, but, and a hundred weeks is really you can do almost anything in a hundred weeks, yeah. Dan: And so, yeah, I think that's the thing is I. I don't use my Apple watch for a lot of things, but the one thing I do is the timer and you know they have a timer app and my my favorite is 30 minutes you know, 30 minutes and and in other words, something may happen that requires a couple hours. I simply say what's going to get done over the next 30 minutes. Yeah, okay, and the thing that I find is true that if I didn't have that 30 minutes, when I look at what did get done over 30 minutes because I had the 30 minute framework, I Always get much more done in the 30 minutes, 30 minutes. Then I thought or I get 30 minutes worth of work done in 20 minutes. But if I didn't have the framework and it would always take me much, much more time, right because, I would take score, a score of commercial breaks. Dean: I know, and that's exactly true, right, like I do exactly the same thing. I've been thinking about what I really do, like my thing is running things through. I've been calling it the Deenatron 3000 that I've got the brain. There that I can operate right and yeah, if I treat it like a wood chipper, that I've got to feed stuff into it. They have it working. But I've got a. But the thing is to pile up. You know, like when I look at the things is to have the hopper loaded up with sequential. What is the? What are the next things that I'm going to do on that Stuff? You know, the 10 hours thing, what are the next 10 hours about? Because I noticed that the Deenatron 3000 doesn't really care what it's working on. It is very open to Suggestion, right, and that's why I would say that jumps yeah. Dan: I would just say that's true about the human brain and yeah. Dean: Generally as long as the brain really doesn't get. Dan: The brain wants to work on something and it does really care what it is. Yeah, it could be good or it could be bad. It does not care. It makes no moral distinctions. It makes you know. You know it Work on bad things just as with as much enthusiasm as working on good things. Dean: Yeah, it'll work on one thing the same way. It'll work on everything you know and if you're putting on the, you know, putting on some direction of it, feeding in, setting up a context for what it is that's Happening this hour, yeah, really, or this 30 minutes, that's, yeah. I think it's just adding, you know, a contextual Management layer in a way. Dan: Yeah, you know, it's like having not and then checking out if you're actually a manager. Dean: Yeah, right exactly. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I'm not a manager. I'm not either. Dan: I'm not a man manager, and you're not either you know I have to delegate Management, I mean. And the other thing is memory you know I delegate memory and I have. I always have someone with me. I remember there was a famous platform speaker, I think in the 90s, okay, and we were at Genius. We remain platform at genius. I'm pretty sure it was genius. It couldn't been the 90s, because genius didn't exist, it was some other. No, I think it was a big you know industry Conference and I was and I was on. I had been on before lunch and this guy joined me at lunch and and he was talking. You know, we should really work together and and so I was interested, you know, interested in the conversation, anything you know. Usually when somebody says we should work Together, usually means that he'd like me to work for him, you know. In any way, and so I just given my talk and I had my team of I didn't have team members, but there were clients Strategic coach clients at lunch with me and he was talking away and we were chatting everything and then all at once he looks at his watch and he says, oh my god, I'm on in three minutes I'm. And he says, here, I just will hand us a bill. He don't have to rake on a rush dog. And this guy was more famous than I was, I mean, as a platform speaker. He was times more famous than I was, but I had spoken in the morning at like 11 o'clock. I had had an hour and Someone came and got me at 9 o'clock and took me backstage and set there, you know. And we sat there and and I had three team members. I never traveled without three team members. Yeah, and the team members take care of arrangements and this person does that, you know, but I would never ever be. You know, just arriving. You know, just arriving, checkberry style. I would never just be arriving, I would already be there, I would already matter of fact, what I'd like to do with speeches is go out and talk to the members of the audience, because I Pick up. Q I pick up. Dean: Q's. Dan: You know, it's like Jay Leno who, if you got there. He was already there two hours ahead of time and he was chatting with you know, and he was just picking up material. Do you know what? Dean: Sorry but go ahead. I was gonna say, just on a similar thing, tony Robbins, who we were playing golf this is maybe ten years ago now, almost playing golf one day we're talking about I know I'm being successful when my declaration of it, we're talking about those things that you know, the number one thing, when I, you know, wake up every day and say what would I like to do the day, and Tony, when we were talking about it, he looked at me and he said dude, I don't have one of those days till March, and this was January, right, and his whole thing was a very different. He had that. He definitely had a what would I like to do tomorrow Approach to his life, because even in playing golf we were gonna. We were filming some video things for a program he was doing. So he arrived at my country club you know, two SUVs deep to six people and that you know assistants with assistants and the camera guys in the sound guy in the body, body guards. Yeah, the whole thing, and that is true, like I played golf with him in in In Fort Lauderdale he was done in Palm Beach, but I played golf with him and literally they arranged the, they arranged the tee time ahead of and behind and have a, you know, to Security ahead and behind that are following the, just following, you know, a hundred yards behind us at all times. Very funny, right by not just keeping these buffers around around whatever, a very different approach yeah it's whatever system he's required. Dan: But you know, I don't know. My feeling is timing and scheduling is idiotic and cratic. It's completely All in individual how an individual, what story they tell about their past and what story they're telling about their future. And that determines what the structure of today looks like that. So it's a structure and my, my sense is I don't, I never like being rushed. Dean: Okay, I always want to be. Dan: I always want to be prepared. Yeah and I don't like sudden surprises. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I really don't like sudden surprises and therefore, in order to Get that Structure around me, I give this, that same right, to all the people who work with me. They don't have to rush. There'll be lots of preparation before him. Then there'll be no surprises. It's very smooth, it's very calm. Everybody gets just to, gets to focus and you know, focus on what they're doing and then this just floats through time. This little system, you know, flows through time. Now, yeah, I deliberately played such a low key person throughout my career that I don't need security. Yeah yeah, yeah, and my, my sense of the sense of success Be as successful and well known as you can without requiring a security person. Dean: Right, yes, yeah. Warren versus Mark Zuckerberg. Dan: Well, Warren Buffett, you know he flies by himself. He flies by himself. You know he's just got his briefcase because he comes in and goes out the same day. And you know he's got a private jet and he gets picked up my limousine company is actually his limousine company when he comes into Toronto and he wants to sit in the front seat with the driver and he just gets to the driver all day and when he arrives at a place or someone's standing, you know they're standing on the curb, you know, yeah, on the sidewalk, and they take him in and he comes out, and you know pretty. You know, pretty much on time, and then he goes home. You know, you know he has his lunch with whoever and then goes home. Mark Zuckerberg has 24-hour security and the number of people involved. For him, his family and his chief officers is like 70. He's got like 70. He's got secret escape rooms, he's got tunnels and you know, and you know, I think, what your structure around you reflects, whether you think it's a safe world or a dangerous world. I think that's great. I think it's a safe world as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I know it's dangerous for others, but I don't feel, I don't feel, or I stay away from places that are dangerous. Right yeah, it's like somebody gets Arrested in Russia and then you know America's got this thing is. You know that the country will come to your rescue one way or another. And I said why are you in Russia? What? Why are you even visiting there? Dean: I went right. Dan: Yeah or China. I wouldn't go to China, you know, I would even go there you know it's like the joke about that. Dean: You know what my yeah, I heard about these guys that were, you know, died in a base jumping Accident. Right, and I said that's this one thing. I know with certainty that my tombstone will never say Died in a terrible base jumping accident. Dan: Yeah, what are those flying suits that people right? Dean: exactly yes, is that base jump? That's what I was talking about and I think it is called. You know, I don't know what it is, but the human flying suits, but that's what they do. They jump off they jump off a cliff and, basically, just like those, they float, they've got a parachute. They've got a parachute yeah. Dan: Yeah, and you know, I've seen videos of the ones where it worked. Yeah, yes exactly. They don't show you. They don't show you the other ones. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, why are you doing this? Yeah? Dean: I'm never gonna die in a park accident. Dan: Yeah, but I think it's, you know, different nervous system. You know, I think every nervous system is unique, you know, yeah, yeah, who's the guy who did in Yosemite Park there was a. It won the Academy Award and he did it with no ropes, you know, he just had his hands and feet. Dean: Oh. Dan: I don't know. Dean: Yeah, well, Linda Well. Dan: Linda, now that's a whole family. Dean: Yeah right rope workers. Dan: Now, this is the guy. He's a free climber. Oh, okay, right, right, and they all capitan is just a sheer cliff from top to bottom. You know, yeah, I think it's a couple thousand feet and anyway, and it usually takes climbers where they're using, you know, they're using the things that they drive into the rock and then they put the, you know, and they usually takes them A day and a half to do it, not you know, which requires that they stay overnight. They have to sleep right and that's you know and everything else. I think he did it top to bottom in about two and a half hours yeah. I just thought wow and he had a film crew at the bottom and at the top and that they were filming the film that became the you know the free solo. Dean: Was that what that was? Dan: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what, anyway, but he just went to top to bottom, okay, and her bottom to top and in a Insanely short period of time. But he told the film crew that they wouldn't get any money. He said I am, you're only getting half the money and you won't get the other half, that if I fall and kill myself you don't catch it on film. Wow you know, and they're kind of leaning out at the top. You know they have, you know they have wires in that that keep them safe, which requires a certain you know a certain amount of courage itself to do that the people at the top but thinking that the guy bait might fall. And yeah, everything you know and everything but different nervous system. I don't have that nervous system. Dean: Me neither, me neither. Dan: Well, we covered a lot of territory today. Dean: We really did yeah. There's a lot of nervous. Dan: There's a lot of nervous systems that couldn't do what we're doing. Dean: Where we go, exactly yeah. Dan: Yeah, well, what's the script here Script it's listening to. It's listening to what he says next. That's so funny. Well, what are you gonna say next? I don't know until he says it right, we know we're gonna start with. Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia. Yeah yeah, anyway very enjoyable. Dan: Always next week. I'm in just arriving in Argentina, so to be the weekend after yeah, I saw that we got a email from. Dean: I love that, you know. Becca and Lillian, just keep us on Triad ever. Dan: I just see it on. Dean: I don't even have to put the Podcasts with Dan on the calendar. What we put on the calendar is no podcast with Dan. Dan: That's the yeah, there's more uncertainty to that, isn't? Dean: there, that's exactly right. Dan: Yeah well. Dean: I'm excited about the possibility of the 29th. And oh, okay that present, but I think that would be fantastic. Okay, okay, thank you, Bye, thanks Bye.

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the chaotic nature of daylight savings time, including its agricultural origins and debate over its current usefulness. We examine the historical development of measurement systems, particularly the metric and imperial systems, and their impact on cultural standards. I share personal anecdotes about adapting to metric measurements in Canada and look forward to a trip related to a stem cell project in Buenos Aires. We delve into the dynamics of capitalism and intellectual property, using Amazon's business practices as an example of market trend capitalization. We recount war stories from the frontlines of commerce and highlight the significance of trademarks in protecting intellectual property against knockoffs. Peter Zeihan joins us to provide a macroscopic view of global events and dissects the interconnected fabric of our world. We explore the influence of geography on politics, discussing factors such as Florida's appeal for real estate and the impact of political strategies on elections. We chart a course through personal development by focusing on the transformative power of daily habits and the pursuit of personal growth. I detail my health journey and the benefits of mentorship, high-protein diets, and habit stacking, as well as the challenges of technological transitions. We emphasize the neutral nature of habits and the importance of accountability in crafting disciplined routines for a life well-lived. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Hello there, mr Sullivan, mr Jackson. You know, your Loudland announcer, who welcomes us to the call, always promises there's going to be others, but there never is. There's just one, just us. Dan: We're waiting for others to join. I am other. Dean: We're waiting for others to catch up. Dan: That's exactly right. Dean: Well, how? Dan: did you? How do you feel you're an hour short? Yeah, I don't like this. Dean: I've been confused about five times so far today. Dan: Okay. Dean: Part of the reason is my watch and my cell phone are in another time zone and that's reflected. Dan: My computer is still in Toronto. Oh, my goodness, that's so funny. Are you in Chicago right now? Oh, got it Okay. Dean: Yeah, it's a little F you from winter, you know you get this little kick. Dan: Okay, I'll leave, but I'm taking an hour with me. Dean: I mean, I mean it's go ahead. Dan: I was gonna say we can't complain because we got an extra day this year. We got 24 extra hours, so I guess we deducted it from that surplus. Dean: But that's in the past and that is, in the past, yeah, that's right, you know, I haven't really studied where that came from, but I think it has to do with farming Daylight savings. Dan: Yeah, I think it was to absolutely to extend harvest times in the summer. You know, work more. Yeah, I thought we were trying to get rid of it. We, as a you know that's the inclusive version of they thought they were trying, we try to try to get rid of it. Dean: Yeah, no, I haven't. I haven't really devoted an hour and a minute of time to that particular project. Dan: I know, Florida is. I know Florida is like Arizona is considering staying on daylight savings time at all times and not yeah, and I think there were a lot of states that were looking to do that and I thought, oh boy, what a, what a mess that would be. It's already enough of a nuisance that Arizona doesn't participate. Dean: You know I would vote for keeping it. Yeah you know why? Dan: Because it's quirky, it is a little bit quirky, and you know what for me in? Dean: Florida and I like quirkiness and other people, so why wouldn't I like quirky in the time system? Dan: Well, you know, it's the only way that I mark the season changes. That for me is like the transition into, you know, spring, summer, and then I know, when we get to to light savings, we get fall and winter. That's the only thing. It gets darker earlier. Dean: Yeah, it's really interesting because when this is, I'm changing the context here, but it has to do with weights and measurements. You know the metric system is a French creation. It was created, I think, during Napoleon's reign and you know he tried to standardize in uniform, make Europe uniform, because he wanted to be emperor of Europe, you know, then emperor of the world. You know folks like him sort of have those type of ambitions and so up until then, you know you had what is commonly called the imperial system of measurements in in the UK, great Britain. You know pounds and inches and miles, you know and you know, and Fahrenheit, you know, was the measure measured. And then you know, europe adapted the metric system. And but once Brexit happened. This is in 2016, the merchants who were permitted to go back to the imperial system for weights in stores oh wow, growth grocery stores. But the bureaucrats who run the you know who run the system in Britain. Dan: So you have sort of. Dean: I think it's a bit of an entrepreneurial versus bureaucratic standoff. And so it's a real mishmash in Great Britain now, and I kind of like that, because almost everything else about Great Britain is a mishmash. Dan: I think that's so funny. You know, it's like the. Dean: I like mishmashes. My favorite kind of food is a mishmash. Dan: There was a Saturday Night Live skit where the they were, you know, they were founding settlers, founding the United States and deciding, you know, the guy was saying how we would adopt a system of measurements. That would be, you know, there'd be one foot, is the thing, and they'll be three feet in a yard and the whole, you know, just made no sense because the metric system is such an easier system. You know how many feet in a mile. And they were saying nobody knows you know why it'll? Dean: you know why it'll never happen in the United States? Because of sports. Oh yeah, 100 yards for football 100 yards, a 350 foot home run, seven foot center. Yeah, exactly Right. Dan: Right, Right yeah but in Toronto. Dean: Well, they try to impose it on the sports reporting in Toronto, but nobody pays any attention to it. No, you know. Dan: I mean. Dean: I've never switched over. Dan: I've been in Toronto for 53 years, 1973, I think, is when the system international started. So you know, my first grade was Imperial, second grade was Si, so we started learning, you know, metrics and second grade, but I still think in Imperial I mean, it's so funny, we're always doing the conversion you know, yeah, and it's especially scary when it comes to temperature, because zero really means something in Fahrenheit, but it's, you know, it's sort of wishy washy and metric. Dean: Zero is like 32, 32 degrees. Yeah right, Exactly yeah, 32 degrees. The only place where it meets is 40 degrees minus 40 degrees. Dan: So it's exactly the same. Dean: Yeah, but who wants to have that experience? Dan: Oh man, that's so funny. So when is your next Buenos Aires? Dean: trip. It'll be Saturday, two weeks, so two weeks from yesterday. From yesterday and this is our fourth, and this may be then the last quick trip. And it'll probably be six months. Six months Now, we'll do six months and then probably, depending on how it shows up, six months from now. I'm talking about stem cell here stem cell treatments. And how are you feeling? Dan: Are you starting to notice the difference? Dean: I'm feeling great. Yeah, the biggest thing is there's still soreness in my knee. And but I feel very confident about it. You know, I mean before there was soreness in my knee and I wasn't feeling confident because, barring any kind of therapy, it was going to get more sore in the future and I have definite confidence that'll be less and less until the soreness disappears, you know because, the cartilage is definitely regrowing. Dan: I was going to say is there evidence Like do they quantitatively measure the? Yeah, you do it with an. Dean: MRI. The MRI can show what it was, and what I learned is that it doesn't layer from bottom to top like the new cartilage. This is, you know, exactly my cartilage that I lost in through an operation, through an accident, in an operation in 1975, so long time ago. And so in those days they just, you know, it was broken, it was torn, so they cut it out, you know don't need anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they would glue it back together now they have a surgical clue now that they could glue it back together, but the but what it does, it comes in vertically. So it's this constant extension, like it's you know, it's a half of an inch, and then it's an inch. Yeah and it's very interesting how it comes in. It comes in sideways so it doesn't come in. You know it doesn't come. That you establish a base and then it builds on the base. Dan: Right. Dean: So it's anyway, but I can feel the difference going up and down stairs. That's where my you know my daily measurement is really that more and more I'm walking up and down stairs. Normally. Yeah oh, that's great. But the biggest thing is the brain stuff. Because they have an IV, you can't inject things into the brain, you have to. You know a thing called lymph which create a pathway into your brain. So you have the lymph sites one day and then two days later they put an IV and the cells are actually custom designed for the brain so they, once they get into your blood system, they go automatically through the new passage way that the lymph sites have created and then they go into your brain. But I really noticed in my EEG tests and then neurofeedback program that I'm in that my concentration, my focus, you know, not being distracted is improving enormously. Oh, that's amazing, yeah. Dan: That's awesome. So you've got, for example, we're. Dean: You know we're 13 minutes into the podcast and not once have I forgotten that I'm talking to you. Dan: Hey, there we go. I like that, that's good news. Dean: Yeah, you know, you count your progress where you find it. Dan: Yeah, that's so funny. So I have something for us to look at next for next time. I was talking with someone and they were sharing with me this guy, yanis Verifakis. Do you know him? Have you heard of? Dean: him? Yeah, I think I have heard the name, but I'm trying to think where. Dan: So he's just sent me a video called capitalism has mutated into something worse and he's talking about this. You know cloud. You know cloud migration or whatever, and how those things are, you know, really owning our. Well, I don't know enough to say. I just wanted to ask. I'm wondering if you had heard about him. But essentially saying, companies like Amazon, like these big companies, are fiefdoms that control our. You know the way we see things like. You know your Amazon store, for instance, when you go to Amazon, is very different than my Amazon store. You know, based on everything that I all my, all the data that they have about me, kind of thing. You know when it used to be in on the mainland, when you would go to downtown or you'd go to the shop area, you'd have all the stores. Everybody sees the same. Everybody sees the same thing. It's more of an equal landscape sort of thing. But now you know there's advantage in knowing. You know, in having this established. You know data that everybody that's what they really have is access to. You know amazing amounts of data. So this cloud, the cloud, is really changing. Who's winning in the? You know, even in a global sense, but borders and everything don't really matter anymore. It's not about that. I wonder if that kind of resonates with what you know Peter Zion is saying. Dean: But yeah, I think Peter Zion saying exactly the opposite. Dan: Okay, that's why I'm very curious, right Like that's you know yeah, he's saying borders matter more than ever. Okay. Dean: Because of transportation. Okay, so Amazon, you can do anything with Amazon, but it's got to be transported. Dan: Yes. Dean: And transportation is the great constraint you know, and so, for example, one of the problems that Amazon has with crime is traffic congestion in cities. You know so that they're promised that we can deliver it in. You know, if you order this morning, you'll have it by noon. Dan: Yeah, I've had that happen. Dean: If traffic permits. And then there's the labor costs of actually finding drivers that'll do this. You know, for more than just a short period of time. So you always have to be thinking of the labor costs. And yeah so so my sense is yeah, he's of a school. Whoever this man is, I'm suspecting that it's a man. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dean: Does he identify? Does he identify as a man, I mean? Dan: yes, I think so. Dean: Okay, anyway, and yeah, it's the same thing. Capitalism doesn't really change. It simply changes the environment in which capitalism is being used, because it's really a methodology for growth. You know capitalism is? You know, first of all, it's about pricing, and Amazon are the great price competitors in the world. I mean that's. They introduced a whole new way that you know, whatever it was, the total cost of getting it to you and the price you had to pay, they could pretty well out compete anyone else. That's capital. Dan: That's capitalism you know, and they're moving property. Dean: You know they're moving property from. You know, actually the Amazon never owns any property. Dan: You know they they're just really, unless they do create or white label or do things themselves, they're pretty robust at that that. That that's been one of the things. That that's been one of the things that they have as an advantage is that they Create their own brand of stuff, that they see things that are, you know, new products or new things that are Selling, and then they create their own version of it or white label their own version of it you know, and it's very interesting yeah. Dean: Yeah, we've had not like a product per se but we've had a continual Conversation with the Amazon because with the three best-selling books that we did with them Hardy, the book comes out on a Monday and by Friday there's another book called who, not how, and it's the summary of who not how and you know you can kind of create a summary of any book now with artificial intelligence in about 10 seconds, you know 10 seconds, and then there. So our book will be listed on Kindle and you know. And and then immediately, within a month, you'll have a first one in five days, but in a month, if it's really selling, you might have seven versions of summary of who, not how, and we said, you know this is kind of Toddry, you know we talked to them and we've had about five of them, five or six of them taken down Because it's too close to our stuff, it's almost, you know yeah, but that, and did you register the trademark on who, not how? Yeah, that's and that's where we get them. That's what we get them with, because you can't, you can't, you don't have Exclusive control over a book title. You can have 10 books with with you know. With you know, by the same name, there could be 10 books out there called who. That's how. Right but you can't have been hardy, and what they were doing they had you know. Summary you know who, not how, by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy. Well, that that you're crossing the line there, you know, right, you know, and it's like flies and mosquitoes. You know, you just make sure you have good screens. You know and you make sure you close the door and everything but it's a constant. It's a constant thing but you know, and maybe it does as good. I don't know if it does as good. Somebody buys the summary and then they say hey. I better read the book, you know so. Dan: I don't know but. Dean: But it's no different from knockoff Rolexes in Hong Kong. Dan: Yeah, I see what I'm looking at. The thing now, the one right after it is it's not the how or the what, but the who succeed by surrounding yourself with. Dean: Yeah, I mean that's yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know it's Babs gets angry at it. I just considered it, as you know, it's like it's mosquito season, you know. Yeah, but I would say capitalism is no different now than it was in In the marketplace of Rome, and but it changes its methods. I mean it changes its presentation. That changes, but this thing about capitalism is changing. Let's create conscious capitalism, let's create humane. There's just capitalism and there's somebody's emotional response to it. Dan: Right, yeah, yeah, that's yeah. Dean: I mean Peter Zion. I mean, I've read so much, peter Zion. I could Sort of tell, you know, one thing we know is that the United States is better at it than any other country. Yeah, it's not universal. Dan: I think it's that like. It's very, it's really interesting. I watched some of his. I watched some of his videos, which I was fine and insightful, and I'm always surprised that you know he gets three or four hundred thousand people a day watching his dispatches. You know they're always it's really well done. He's good at articulating things and it's fascinating to me. Dean: It almost makes you want to go to Colorado too right. Dan: Yeah, it's beautiful, right. I mean it's almost yeah yeah. Dean: He says yeah, I, I'm Very easily communicating to you from thirteen thousand feet Everything which is kind of said you must be really in good shape you know, yeah, so yeah, but he's fairly. He's faster responding than anyone else in the world. An event happens on Tuesday. Dan: And by. Dean: Thursday. He's got an explanation for why it's happening. Yeah he's really remarkable. He's in my lifetime I've never come across anyone like him. Dan: Yeah, it's really like I'm. It's it seems like such a macro level view of things that I'm always. You know I'm kind of fascinated why you're so fascinated with this. Like I mean, when you've read the, the book, you said like seven times or something. Dean: I mean well, his latest book, yeah, seven times complete, yeah, seven times complete. Yeah, and you know, and what I'm looking for is there. You know, with anything, when I read them, yeah, is there sort of a deeper level that he doesn't go into, or and so what I did is I just came out with my latest book, which is the great meltdown you know, and then I Explained that wherever you are on the planet, you're constrained by the cost of money, the cost of energy, the cost of labor and cost of transportation and no two places are equal in risk and Relationship to those four constraints and the US is just that keeping those four costs the lowest of Historically. I mean right back to the beginning. They've just been better for all sorts of lucky reasons, mainly because their geography. Dan: The geography is so good. Dean: I mean we talked about Florida, that Florida is proof that God loves. Real estate agents in the state of Florida. Yeah, because you have on the East Coast. You have three, three waterfront. Dan: That's right exactly the ocean side and two intercoastals, and same all the way yeah the same all the way up the Gulf too. Dean: Yeah, the Gulf that goes all the way to Texas. But thank, you and the north of Florida goes all the way to Virginia. I think Virginia or Maryland is still you know, the inner. And what it does is it prevents large storm shroom actually hitting the mainland, because that buffer zone of the inner coastal, you know, just stops big waves, it stops everything. So, yeah, so any anyway. I mean you don't really have to go into the Atlantic Ocean very much once you start if you're taking a boat trip Private boat trip down the East Coast, if you start at Virginia. Dan: Really go down the intercoastal all the way yeah. Yeah, yeah, started an apple receiver proves that God favors. Dean: Yeah so funny. Yeah but you know, people are always trying to create a standardized global version of reality. That's been happening forever. But those four costs means there can be no standardization because it's I mean, it's different in or it's different where you live than it is in Tampa. Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. I guess there's regional, like when you think about it's transferable on every level, right, like the whole, because the cost of transportation you know has, you know, the further away, the more remote you are, the more costs to get something to you. And so even if I think now I see kind of the thing that you're talking about, like if you go to a place where the labor costs are lower, perhaps you've got a balance with the cost of transporting the reduced goods that you've done back to where they're going to sell. So it all has to balance out. Dean: Yeah, well, I mean you can take the huge migration from New York, you know, from New York state, to Florida right now. And you know people explain it politically and everything. But just compare the four melt costs between you know the cost of money is lower in Florida, the cost of energy is lower in Florida, labor and transportation the costs are lower. And I mean there's a lot of political issues that make things expensive or inexpensive. But you know, I mean that. For example, the court case where Trump was found guilty, you know, two, three weeks ago for something that's an antiquated law from 150 years ago that's never been inflicted on anybody. That in a business negotiation he said his company was worth 1.2 billion and it turned out it was only 800 million and that's called negotiation. Dan: Right right right. I mean, I mean, I mean right, that's the whole thing. Is something is only worth what someone's willing to pay. Dean: Yeah, yeah. And they said well, this is fraud, but nobody was harmed, you know nobody was like any negotiation, nobody was harmed. You agree on a price and you know the banks made money. The other side made money, he made money. And well, the word is going out now don't invest in New York, don't do business in New York. Dan: I mean the moment that hits and. Dean: but the governor said, well, that's not what we meant by it. I'm sorry. Oh boy the horse is out of the barn, you know yeah right. Dan: I mean that's pretty crazy. I saw Kevin O'Leary was talking about just that, that he was saying he's having some good weeks right now. Yeah, that's the death knell for a New York investment. It's nobody's gonna do anything there, that's easy. Dean: So your melt cost just went through the roof just as a result of that court grilling. Dan: Yeah, this is. That's pretty wild, and so in big news we saw that Super Tuesday last week and Haley's out, but not endorsing Trump. That's not throwing, not, you know not. Dean: Yeah, well, she's likely the warrior in. Yeah, I don't have legs and arms left, but these are mirror flesh wounds. Dan: That's right, I can still bite you. I can bite your kneecap, yeah. Dean: And for the life of me I don't know what her game plan was, because I mean, she didn't do him any harm, but I just don't know. You know what her game was and doing what she did, do it. Dan: Right, did you have to think she? Dean: was bad. She was betting that the court system is going to stop him from being the nominee and that she would Right. Dan: And I was just going to say that was. I thought that that's her game plan is hang in there. As to just the last one standing at the end, yeah. If Trump does get you know taken off the or disqualified or whatever which by the way what do you think the likelihood of that is? Zero Zero likelihood Okay, so and I felt especially after the Supreme Court case last week where it came up, because of the Colorado. Dean: Yeah they sort of the states can't take them off, right. Yeah, and the nine Supreme Court, just as it was nine, did not. Dan: It's not an enormous. Dean: I mean you can't run a rick, you can't run a country this way, and I you can't have 50 states having different rules about who can run for. Dan: Right, exactly. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: That's what the Supreme Court's for. You know, that's in the Constitution. Yeah and yeah, but I don't really know. I mean maybe she'll get a talk show on, you know, but you know I can't figure out where what her future is based on this performance, you know right. So yeah, but I mean, yeah, politics is, you know, politics is not entrepreneurial, it's an entrepreneurial business, you know you know there's clear cut winners and losers, and she's a loser right now, right. Dan: And it's very interesting to see what the you know the RFK effect here. What's that's gonna who that's going to affect more? Do you know what the projection is or who is that? Dean: going to hurt more. Yeah it's hard to say you know really. No, I mean, I saw him because Joe Polish had a man yeah, genius, and you know. I mean a lot of it. They were talking. They weren't talking about politics. Dan: No. Dean: And then we went to dinner. We went to dinner at somebody's house in Scottsdale and I was kind of say he's really sort of an ideal candidate for the president of the country that no longer exists, like if he had run in the 70s or 80s he would have led the Democratic Party. I mean he would have made it, but I don't think the country exists anymore. That would elect him president. But if he got 3 or 4 percent more of one party's voters, then he makes a big difference. Dan: That's what I meant. He's like the green box on the roulette wheel, but he's the little edge that's going to the wild card in this. That could make it's not just black and red, it's not 50-50. He's a viable third party. I mean it's funny because we're definitely a three-party country in a two-party system. Really, that's the thing. Dean: Yeah, I mean it's made a difference in some elections like 2000. Well, yeah, Ross Perot got Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton would not have gotten elected. But the other one is Gore lost because there were 50,000 Ralph Nader votes in Florida. Dan: That's big. Dean: I mean he lost by 500. He lost by 500. Yeah, that was never brought up. Well, it was the Haining Chats. Dan: Haining Chats. That's right, that is so funny. Those words are fun. I've got some friends named Chad. I've got a couple. Dean: I don't want to hate any of my friends who are named Chad. Dan: Which one do you want, willardson or Jenkins? Dean: Yeah, chad Johnson is one of our coaches. Oh there you go yeah, I've never had so many Chad's in my life, that's funny, it's not a common name either. No, but it must be contagious. Dan: Yeah, I was like go through. I'm realizing Dean's not as common as you might think either. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Nobody gets called Bob or Tom or anything like that anymore. You know they're all the same. Yeah, exactly Exotic names, anyway, but yeah. And so the other problem was that with Gore nobody brought this up, but he lost Tennessee as home state I mean even as home state didn't vote for him. So there was a, you know but it's been more recently, although in 1948, I think, there were four people who got significant votes. Truman, sitting president, won, but he didn't win with 50%. He won, you know, 40, 46. Dan: Yeah. Dean: So yeah Well, I don't think a third party can ever win unless it's replacing one of the, unless it's replacing the one of the existing parties you know, yes, and that hasn't happened since the 1800s. Dan: Right yeah, did you watch the state of the union? No, I don't watch television. No, okay, but I meant the. You saw the highlights, or the summary or any highlights of it. I haven't had a chance yet to even see. Dean: I mean. What I saw is I've seen angry old people talking to themselves on the street. Dan: Right, exactly, and that's a video that very cleverly showed that he's given the same speech four times in a row. You know he's got the same exact talking points and it was so funny they'd show it from, you know, from 2000, and then they'd show 2000, this year, you know saying exactly the same, the same lines, and it's just. It was pretty funny, actually I was amazed. Dean: There was. I love that Well, did you ever? When Disneyland California Disneyland opened up, they had recreations. You know they were in plastic or rubber form of Abraham Lincoln and you know, George Washington and that. Yeah, the hall of presidents, right, right, but they're, you know, their arms moved and their lips moved because they had they had little tubes that had fluid in them and you know it would. They would manipulate the tubes, you know, and their hands would move. And they didn't show this at the state of the union. But were there a lot of those little hoses coming up behind him? I don't know. Dan: Watch Joe move. Watch Joe move. Dean: He's like so lifelike. Dan: Yeah. Dean: It's really. It's really the closest I've seen in. You know, a high stakes election president of the United States is as high as it gets when. It's like the emperor's new clothes, you know. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Nobody wants to mention that he's really. You know, this is the leader of the free world and say, geez, you know. Dan: Oh man. Dean: Yeah, you know. But you know you root for the home team whoever is the captain, you know regardless of who the captain is, you know so. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Anyway, but yeah it's interesting. But you know, somebody was saying I have a longtime Canadian member of the strategic coach goes back to the 80s actually, and I had breakfast with him last and he says you know, I just you know you know, he says I know Biden's bad, but I just can't, you know, I just can't stomach the fact that we would have Trump again. There's something about it, and you know he was going on for about five, 10 minutes. And I've had other situations in Toronto where Canadians are voicing their displeasure and I said you know, I read the US Constitution once a year. It doesn't take long to read, it's only typewritten. It's about 27 pages, you know. Dan: And most of it's just. Dean: You know, it's a set of rules, you know, and I said nowhere in the US Constitution does it say that American politics have to be pleasing to Canadians. Dan: Any more than the Guinea. Politics have to be pleasing right. Dean: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can be on the happiest convenience matters? Not at all. Dan: That's so funny. Yeah, I can't wait to see how it all unfolds. I mean, certainly it's going to be an amazing six months or whatever we've talked about. Dean: Yeah, no, I just if you just say it's not politics, it's entertainment. Dan: Yeah, that's exactly right, pretty good entertainment, you know. Yeah, yeah, switching topics. Here I was. I've mentioned, I've been playing around with the, with the Adams. Dean: Yeah, did you get the connector for the? I did. Dan: I got that and on Monday I need to Connect with the gentlemen that sent it to me because, yeah, because, yeah, I need to figure out how to yeah the problem I explained. Dean: Yeah, I explained in my email that. Yeah, it's done in FileMaker which no longer exists, so it's hard to Transport it. Dan: It's hard to. He offered to, he offered to transport something that no longer exists. Right, exactly but he offered to help me, walk me through it, so I'm gonna yeah them up on that, yeah cuz. I do want it, I do want to try it, but it's been very interesting to watch this just the way. This is Claire, yeah, yeah, it's just. It's so satisfying to see I've had, you know, it shows I've got ten reps down of my habit of waking up and drinking 500 milliliters of water, first thing that you can stack. I'm looking, you know, to stack all these things. It's been. This was a great week. Dean: I have been working with JJ verge you know, I got your, we got your phone message, you know yes, yeah, where you yeah, yeah, together. A little Dean, you have witnesses now. Dan: Well, that's exactly it, right it's. I said to Joe like, well, behind the scenes, while we were in Palm Beach, there was so much kind of rallying and you know, going around in the most supportive way possible for, you know, to help me get on track. You know, weight-wise, health-wise and, and you know Joe Polish has been just above and beyond you know, in orchestrating and you know organizing all of this I mentioned last week. You know he came and spent a few days with me and really helped me get things on track. And I've been working with JJ. So you know this was my first week, you know, full. Joe left last Saturday, so this was my first week with JJ. But having the daily accountability and systems around, you know what I'm doing. It's certainly a who, not how type of thing is really you know the importance of having a who that's kind of Onboard and guiding things. But I get into this nice I'm accountable for in the more I send JJ, then you know the daily Story of yesterday, kind of thing with. She's got me hooked up on a Coronameter app which basically tracks my macros the protein, carbs, fat and calories of everything that I eat. She's helping with my you know menu selection and all this. So in the morning, after I drink my 500 milliliters of water, I Way every day and take a picture of the of the screen scale. Scale, yes, exactly. And then I send her my aura results for my sleep and readiness and yesterday's activity and Yep our goal. You know I was on average when we were looking at it before. I would average, you know, 2500 to 4,000 steps a day would probably be the average, with you know probably 3,000 plus 3200, the kind of median of what, how many steps I would get in a day. So we've set now 4,000 is the baseline, the minimum steps that I get every day, mm-hmm, and so I send her that activity to show what that is. And then my Chronometer and she's got me focused on Protein. First, eating, my, you know, getting, you know, almost 150 grams of protein per day, which is really it's a lot. I mean, that's it's. I never hunger. I'm never hungry and it's almost like getting into the routine of trying to lead, lead with that and stay well, I mean your body knows when it's had the necessary nutrition, and protein is the champ for giving nutrition. Dean: Absolutely complex, complex carbs and you know, and yeah, I mean yeah, you can. You know you can eat 5000 calories of Simple carbs and you feel hungry. Dan: Yeah, yeah. So this, you know this target. Dean: So I'm plus water make. Water makes a big difference, absolutely. Dan: Yeah, yeah, so it's been great. So the we you know tomorrow will be the you know the kind of Week on week weigh-in. But I'm already down like three and a half pounds from. So you know most 1%, 1% of that's the target I guess is 1% of body weight per week is a good to keep on and You're just getting in the habit and the routine and you know that every week she'll be in the cloud, that's exactly right, that's the goal 57 right now, you'll be 80, I'll be 58 in May. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so yeah, so yeah. Certainly taking this long-term view of by my Well, it's habits, I mean yes, that's all it is, you know. Dean: What I was thinking, because I knew we probably Talk about this topic today, but I was thinking about just looking at habits as reality and they're either working for you or they're working against you, and that's yes, you know that's not an opinion, you know it's. It's just that you can tell whether the habits are supportive. Or that's supportive and the other thing I was thinking about, the gap in the game. And I think that if you just think in terms of replacing bad habits with good habits. Yeah, you stay in the game. Yes, and I think the gap is that you need to be penalized for your bad habits. You know I think there's a internal thing. You know that you should feel guilty, you should feel shame about your bad habits. I said they're just habits, right exactly. I said they're just habits, right, exactly, I said they're just habits, right, exactly, and that's. Dan: And so this, really this thing like looking at this week here, and I think that I had lunch with Leo or Weinstein yesterday. I went over to the Four Seasons in Orlando and we had a nice three and a half hour lunch and this was a lot of what we you mean Mr Good at everything. Mr. It's so. It's almost unfair, isn't it? Yeah, the guy's just so smart and everything Right. We had some great. We had some great conversations and yeah, this was. You know the fact that there's nothing else you can do but what I'm doing habitually on a daily basis. That's the only path. It's not. That's the thing is there's no, it's not like this monumental effort because it's a big mountain to climb, you know. To get to the top of, you know, mount 100 pounds or whatever, you know, the ultimate benchmark is. But to climb to the top of that mountain just requires that you've got to take steps every day. There's no possible way to get to the top in one day, and that's where it. Dean: And nobody gets more than one day every 24 hours. Dan: That's exactly right. So having that benchmark of 1% a week as what you can safely and consistently lose is just that, it's just stacking those things, and a day a week is the perfect, I think, amount unit of measurement, because it's you can't really that's the most important, more than the daily even you know like the variation in one day. It's more important over a week that you take that. So that's all I'm focused on is the week, and we're already at the routine I've already got. I'm very comfortable with consistency and habit, so I don't need a lot of variety in things. If I find certain things we've got now some meal combinations that really work for me, and if I can just, you know, stay on that track and continue to have the accountability, I think it's an inevitability, you know, is just the watching it happen. Well, it's like you're a profit activator, I mean just moving that to another thing. Dean: I mean, if you're doing all late and they're all contributing to a profit, it strikes me there's no, there's nothing to fix. Dan: Right, exactly. Oh, it's so funny, right. So, yeah, it's so funny. I mean just identifying that the key thing for me is just to continue raising the benchmark, right, like I'm raising my from 4,000 to 5,000 steps it's the minimum on my way to 10,000, you know, yeah, Do you measure steps or does that matter to you? Dean: I mean, it's not my main focus, but if I get the right number of steps, I get the high number of attendees on my activity. You know, and every, you know, every quarter or so I raise the number. You know the stuff. So I do right now probably average around 6 or 7,000. And yeah, and I've done 10,. You know, on some days, you know, when it's kind of walk in nature day, I'll get more than that. But you know but I'm doing a lot of things like my big thing that I've been working on for four months is I never get in trouble with my meals. I get in trouble with snacking between meals, and so I've eliminated that and I'm down, you know, five or six pounds just by doing that. Wow, yeah, yeah. So you know. Anyway, first of all, kudos to just you know. It really strikes me that Dean Jackson doesn't do anything and stick with it unless it makes intellectual sense. That's true, probably, yeah, no, I mean. Yeah, I mean unless I mean you know your habits and you know your. Yeah, we all have a measurement system on what constitutes progress. Yes, and my sense is until you get the way of something you can do every day, yeah, it's an intellectual satisfying, you don't do it. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And a lot of people try to make it emotional, emotional, you know that you know and everything that, but you can't sustain it. Dan: And even if it is, even if you get to the point, I agree with you 100%. By the way, I don't perceive it as emotional, but you know that often that's. You know well what's the cause of this kind of thing you know. But the reality is that even if you were to uncover an emotional issue, that still requires them that intellectually you have to figure out what's the mechanics of what needs to actually happen. You know it's like getting to the bottom of an emotional issue isn't, on its own, going to solve the problem, the same way that you know, figuring out the mechanics of what actually needs to happen. Yeah, happen, yeah. That's really the bottom line, but I'm very encouraged. This feels like a very different level of, you know, systemic change. Dean: That's happened here, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it's a process you know. The process consists of you know and you keep. Every time I talk to you, you're adding some new habit to it. Yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And my sense is that once you get the momentum of 10 good habits, you're motivated to have 20 good habits. I agree 100%. Dan: Yeah, I agree, because that then becomes a great game. You know, that's the I love to game-a-five things. That keeps us interested, you know. Dean: Okay, I have a meeting in. Five Minutes with Daniel White. Dan: Okay. Dean: And who's staying with us in Chicago? Dan: Chicago. Dean: Awesome. So, but I'll be, I'll. I have you in my calendar for next Sunday. Dan: Awesome. I'm not so we're going to be in Toronto next Sunday. You are going to be because on my calendar it says no Dan podcast. Dean: Yeah, but we have, but I will be there, okay, perfect. Dan: Fantastic. Dean: And in the same time. So Okay, Perfect Okay. Dan: Bye, bye, bye.

In today's episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, I share insights from my experience at the Cloudland Summit. We discuss the carefully constructed approach to selecting impactful speakers and crafting their messages. Dan and I explore deeper implications of habits. From influencing personal growth to organizational culture and nations. Recent tech and political events show how biases stem from ingrained habits. We cover self-tracking progress through a daily habit-scoring system and cooking's role in health, wealth, and innovation. Overall, it's a thought-provoking look at intentional living and leveraging the mundane for extraordinary results. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the Cloudland Summit and how major tech breakthroughs often come from the convergence of three pre-existing technologies. I share insights from my upcoming book "Everything is Created Backward," suggesting that innovation stems from remixing the past. We explore Perplexity, an AI tool that aids in research by suggesting further inquiries and providing references. We analyze the creation of iTunes as an example of innovation by combining existing elements in novel ways. I introduce the 'Top 50 Tool' I've devised to identify and refine daily habits that shape our lives and future selves. We examine the role of present habits in shaping our future selves and the effectiveness of setting goals for personal growth. We touch on the biases of Google's chatbot and the financial repercussions of such biases on a company's valuation. We discuss the number 51's significance in politics and business and the importance of counting fundamentals. We talk about the transformative power of cooking habits on health and wallets, and the broader implications on personal and national success. We tease the introduction of a new tool designed to track and score daily progress, highlighting the importance of consistent habits. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan, yes, it's Welcome to cloudland at time. Dan: Amen. I heard it's being recorded, so that's half the job right there. Dean: Yeah, and it's never going to let you down. Dan: That's right, Well, yeah what a what a whirlwind week. It was so good to see you and babs and everybody. Dean: We were shooting for one meal and we were shooting for one meal and that kind of ended up as five. Dan: Yes, what what can happen. Oh, that's, yeah. Nothing wrong with that. I like it. They were all playful. Dean: Yeah. Yeah, it was really interesting because I spent probably a day preparing for the Friso summit for our listeners. We just had our annual being the top level of strategic coach and and we have this every year it's it's a meeting Squeezed in between two drinking parties. Oh man, that's funny. Yeah, the meeting is so you can recover for the first from the first drinking parties so that you're ready to go for the second one. Dan: And I'll tell you what. I sold that to those pokeballs short, that was those are delicious. Dean: Yeah, I always find that alcohol is the almost failproof Of 10 times multiplier. There you go one dollar invested in alcohol Somewhere along the line, that always produces the 10 times positive result. Dan: Oh, good, that's noted. Dean: Yeah, I'm not sure that marijuana does that. Dan: Oh no. Dean: Yeah, yeah, anyway, yeah, but I spent a day on that conference and. What I did is we chose the speakers and then alanora called each of them to see if that was okay and we specified the topic, and that was all done by you know, alanora. And then what I did is I wrote a fast filter for each of the speakers, not on what they were going to talk about, but how they were going to talk, okay. And I thought it worked really well. I thought it worked really well. Dan: It really did. I mean the panels were, you know. It seemed like the whole thing moved quickly. Everybody was bringing valuable insight, even just the. The resources they were recommending, especially your. The ai panel, was fantastic, not too much. You know I I immediately came back and started using perplexity and I downloaded perplexity as so let we should probably set the stage for what perplexity is as a chat, gpt alternative and combined with kind of Google and yeah, well, it's interesting because I've done it on about 10 different Questions, you know. Dean: I asked a question and then I get an answer and uh then, but it's got Uh two neat things about it. At down below it has three more questions that you might ask. Okay, three more. Dan: Um, yeah, on the topic. Dean: That first of all gives you the original answer, and then it suggests three more things you might look into. But, at the top it's got four boxes and these are references that you can go to that indicate where it got you know the information to answer your question. And if you do all, if you do the first thing. And what I was asking was mark mills, who is a tech Thinker. He thinks a lot about what technology is doing to the world and he mentioned in one of his books it's called the cloud revolution that if you look at technology, almost all the breakthroughs happen as a result of combining three existing technologies. And he goes back and he goes rake back to Samuel Morris in the mid 19th century with the telegraph, and then he comes all the way forward to not to ai, but to when how the internet came into existence. You know, he puts the internet and talks about the three things that had to be there first before you could even think about Creating this new technology. And the reason is I'm writing a quarterly book right now which is called everything is created backward, and and what I mean by that is that you can't you can't create the future out of the future, because there's nothing there. Dan: Right right. Where's the stuff you know First of all, I've never been rendered in the simulation. Here it's unrendered. Yeah, nobody's ever been nobody's ever been there. Dean: You know they I mean. But the problem with it is that you have to do a awful lot of convincing With something you try to create out of the future, you know and but I gave the anxiety. I just wrote the first chapter, but the actually the introduction, and I use itunes as the example that steve jobs simply took three things that already existed. One was the mp3 player, which he apple already had. The ipod Okay, it already had millions of people already using the ipod, so he had a build-in. He had a build-in audience to go through with something new. The second thing is that nabster had already pretty well figured out how you use the internet to download single songs. Yes, okay and their only problem with their model was that it was illegal. They were stealing, they were stealing and that's that. Never has long shelf life. Dan: They were sharing something they were sharing. Dean: No, they weren't sharing, they were stealing. They were stealing other people's property and making money on it. Yeah, that's called theft, and and then apple had its operating system, so it was the mp3 player, the nabster innovation with the internet and the apple, you know, apples operating system for all of its computers, which it had many more already existing Customers, you know customers were already using it. And then he put it together and he created iJudon. You know it was an app that went on your apple platform and you could download music and then put it in your ipod. Dan: That's great and you're right, like it's. I see the triple play the things now I can. Just I'm looking at it. Dean: I mean, if you look at, artificial intelligence and work backwards as a result of three things. I haven't really analyzed that, but it seems to be three things that had to exist before, and so what I'm suggesting in the book is that the key to your future is actually what you're doing with the past, your past experience, what's available to you, yeah, and so that's. I think that's a tremendous breakthrough. I think this is a keen insight. Dan: Yeah, I mean, what was a keen insight for me? My biggest takeaway from the free zone. Dean: I was looking for a little bit more excitement on your part. Dan: No, I'm totally excited and this is where it's. It's related to what you're saying that when we had the conversation about Looking back at the habits that you've established, oh, yeah, now, yeah, that's what I meant is that, looking working Backwards, like that, everything that we've created right now is the some, you know, the accumulation of all of the Daily habits that I have instilled, right, the behaviors and habits and choices, and that only you know. I think it goes in that. I think that fits with what you're saying, that you can't. It's not about, you know, picking something in the future. When you said, what are the habits, what are the daily present habits of future dan or future dean, of where you want, and that's the real thing is that having to establish, though, those habits? Yeah, I've had a couple more thoughts. Dean: I've had a couple of birth thoughts since we talked in palm beach about how you could approach this, and so one of things and I have a tool that I've created which really hasn't gone into the program at all. It's called the top 50 tool and it's just a page and it's got 50 boxes, okay, and what you do, and what you do is when you have a number of things. So let's just Apply it to the present project. You have 50 existing daily Habits right now. Everybody does, you know everybody in the world and I'm just arbitrarily picking 50. Yeah, my sense is it's if you put all the habits, the little things that you've woven together to produce who you are today. Yeah you know it could be in the hundreds, you know hundreds or thousands, but you know it fills up the time. Yeah, you can account for it. Yeah, in the 24 hours, and then the waking hours. Probably there's probably habits you have at life and nighttime which bear Examination. But I said okay. So the first part of the project is just create a sheet. That's got, you know, it's got 50 boxes. You know five by 10, okay, okay, and number them one through 50. And then just you know, and every day as you go through, observe something else. For example, in our house I do the dishes, okay. Mm-hmm babs cooks and I do the dishes. So usually it hangs around, you know it hangs around. We have supper. You know we have not so much breakfast, but we had lunch and dinner and there's dishes and I just put them next to the sink, close to the dishwasher, and then I go about doing something and then I, and then you know I open the dishwasher and there's a previous meals already, clean dishes there, so I have to unload it and you know, put everything in the shelf and then I load it. Okay, and it's not a kind of how that I really like doing, but it's the agreement, you know Okay, so within the last three weeks I've adapted as soon as the meals finished, I do the dishes, okay. And in order I put the dishes in the dishwasher, and in order to do that, before the meal I look at the dishwasher and I unload it and put everything away so that when the meals finished, it's just a matter of rinsing the dishes and putting them in a dishwasher. Well that's two habits. That's two habits right there. Okay, so they would go down in boxes. You know two of the boxes, okay, but once I do it, and I'm doing it the way that I would like to see it, see me doing it in the future, you know. And you know, and sometimes we have staff in the house and they do it so that it gets taken care of, but it's not my, but when it's just Babs and me at our home and at our cottage. You know, two homes in Toronto, and a home in Toronto, a home in Chicago and then a cottage up north in Canada. Anyway, and I'm the dishwasher, you know. Dan: And I had to do it. Dean: So I said, since I'm gonna be doing this for the rest of my life, I might as well you know kind of improve it so that I actually enjoy the activity. Dan: Yes, I really like this, Dan, Like you're saying the same thing. I mean the things that have been triggered from our conversation about it in Palm Beach. You know, Like you just described, it's one of those things If, even if you ask yourself the question is there any way to not do anything? I mean, the thing is that the dish has gotta get done. Dean: Well, the other thing that's part of my relationship with Babs, you know, and she's commented a couple of times during the last two weeks and she said I really like it that you get it done right away. Yeah. Dan: Oh, there you go. Yeah, that's your target audience. Right there, I'm getting social proof from your target audience. That's the exact thing. Dean: This is. I can tell you, this is my number one target audience. Yeah, so let's say you go through and you fill up your 50, okay. You know, you get them. You know, maybe I'll take you two or three weeks and you just notice little things. You know how you get up in the morning, you know, you know how you get ready for the day and everything, but there's a lot of little habits. There's a lot of little habits there, and then you sort of reach 50 and you say now, how many of these? How many of these tomorrow, can I improve? I'll look at the habit. And then I'll say to myself how would I like this always to be going forward? And then you do it that way. You do it that way, and then you have to attach a point system to it, so you're scoring every day. Because, I don't stick to things I can't score. Dan: Right, well, you may like, dan, there's James Clear just launched his. Adams app, which is Adams A-T-O-M-S, and he's the guy that wrote you know Atomic Habits and this is exactly what you are talking about here. You know you can make, you can create habits that you want you can, and it gives you prompts or you can track. It's almost like wind streak in a way, right when you're adding things on it, but daily you can. So I set up my first habit that I set up just on Wednesday or Thursday I downloaded the app. Actually, I set up that I said I want to start with the first thing in the morning that I drink half a liter of water, the 500 milliliters of water. The first thing that I do when I wake up to rehydrate and do that. So I've done that. Now I've had Thursday, friday, saturday, sunday four rounds of that and it tracks your streak and it shows you your progress and so I've had four total repetitions so far. And the way they set it up is you put a purpose around the habit, like why you're trying to do this right. So the habit is that it's always like a place and a time and a reason. I think right, so it's a vote. And when they do your thing, when they give you the report, it's like congratulations, that's four votes for your healthy dean or whatever You're making. Every day you're making a vote. Dean: I think that's great yeah. Dan: I'm voting for this. So habits is the name of the, or Adams is the name of the app on iTunes. Dean: It's done in the app store, right. Dan: It's in the app store and it's just a yellow stacking yellow with like a white stacking thing. Dean: But yeah, I've periodically over the last dozen years been conferences for James's, you know, and I've always enjoyed his take on things. Dan: Yeah, and that's I mean. I like this Dan a lot. This is kind of gamifying thing. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Now. Dean: I can tell you what my if you call it my top 50 tool. Then there's a little arrow in each of the boxes and what you do is you press the arrow and it takes you to a page where you develop your criteria for what constitutes a great habit. Okay and then you attach numbers to the to that, and there's room, I think, for 10 criteria. Okay, and then you go through, and one of them is that I want to be more and more doing habits every day that are going to last the Rest of my life. Yes so that's that would be one criteria and I give my, I can establish the range, and and then you all you have to do is the criteria for one, and then that applies the criteria to all of them, and Then, as you go along, you start improving the criteria, and the moment you improve the criteria, it improves it for all of them. Okay, and then, as you go through, you notice that certain certain habits get a better importance score than others and it automatically, automatically prioritizes the 50, that this is number one, this is number two, this is number three. Rate to 50. What do you think about that? I really I mean would you? Dan: like to get that. Dean: Would you love to get? Dan: that. Where would one get one of these? Dean: Only from a particular person. Yeah, and it's right. Now, it's a file maker file, a file maker no longer Exists, but that this continues to work. Okay, this continues to work, okay, so I'll just send you the file maker oh, I like that a file maker form and, as you're going along, what it does is it give. I mean, I think the combination of the atom, the atom app and this tool probably Complets the circle it might be. Dan: I mean, I'd love to discuss what you're describing. Dean: Here's the tip sounds like as you go along, there's habits that are less important and they don't belong on the top 50. So there's another backup 50 and that they're in the backup 50. Dan: Okay, the farm team. Dean: Yes. Yes you can't have major league without a farm team. That's exactly right. Dan: I, like you know what's very. What's really interesting about this, dan, is if I was really Reflecting on my accumulated daily habits, right, if I look at what are my observable habitual behaviors? Right, and I went through the way I went through it was looking at the vignettes of each day, like looking at a timeline from the, the moment I wake up and and I was saying, you know, I have established Really good sleep habit of you know, my sleep window is Very uniform, my, you know, I woke up this morning I'm, you know, 8786 on my sleep and readiness score for my or ring. I get enough deep sleep and all that. So I've established that habit of Really a really good sleep window there. Then I started looking at, you know, my observable, if we were just somebody was following me around, logging my movements, like in a computer program or whatever, like just line items like Lining, describing every step or everything that I took part of. It is, you know, look, replacing now looking for the opportunities, like where do I want to establish this habit? And I think that little window of you know right, when I get up the first, you know the first hour of being awake. What do we want those habits to look like? Yeah, would future deans habits be? Dean: You know something there are constraints and deans, future habits. You know what? They are deans present habits? Dan: are yes, that's exactly it. I get it and that's what you're saying. I'm like you. Dean: Do anything in the future now you can't do anything in the future. You can only do things in the present. Yeah, the future. Dan: That's exactly right. Dean: Yeah, but I've been around the tech people and you know I mean, like the environmental movement, no more fossil fuels. That's a bullshit, is such a bullshit goal Because 80% of all the energy on the planet comes from fossil fuels. Okay, the other thing is that the people have these kind of goals are really not very good at getting anything done. Dan: Yeah. Dean: They went to university. They've been in university for six years, you know they've been in school since they were four years old. They've never actually done anything in the real world, you know and. But they're going to change the entire structure of the world and the problem is that it's not a plausible goal. Like no fossil Fields, you know, the other one is no borders. You know the thing we shouldn't have borders. Well, there are borders and people will kill for the borders. Yeah, right, but the thing is the people who set these type of goals in the future are some of the most incompetent people on the planet and it's really interesting that the the way you described it there. Dan: All these people, they're not accountable for the day we have. They're talking. They're just going and admonish people about this future. There's no fossil fuel because it's not actionable. Dean: It's not actually, and what they're trying to generate is tax money. They're trying to generate Donations. They're trying to but without ever producing any kind of satisfactory result you know, yeah, because they're just painting the ideal. Dan: And I wonder, how do we do that in our own lives? I mean, well, the big thing. Dean: Well, one of my things that have occurred to me is that all your goals for the future are actually you Operating, you personally as an individual operating at a higher level of capability, you know I mean you know, if you have a, you have one house and you have a house, another house that's bigger, it's better. You know it's got far more, it's more in the right place, it's. You know it's got about 10 Better criteria that you could say. And you say, well, that's my goal and I said no, that's actually the result of you being a Different and more productive person in the future. So every goal you have to bring back that it's you as a person operating at a higher level. You're making more money, you know, and that's number one. You know, yeah, and in order for you to make more money, you've got to look at what you're doing right now to make money and improve it. There may be, between you and that house, there may be, 10 Improvements that you have to make to how you're making money right now. Yes, yeah, this is yeah maybe eight profit activators. Dan: Which one? Dean: all the profit activators are habits, aren't they? Dan: they are, yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right with metrics. I mean, that's part of the thing I think is that's measurable, right, everything you're describing. That be a good habit horrible habits. Yeah, huh, yeah, and I was dawned on me how long these habits, many of them, have been established. Like, I like your idea of the ranking of the habits. I mean that's it's, you know the numbering them, you know there's probably a Habit you know, but this is endless pursuit. It feels like you know an endless. Well, it's a daily person. Dean: It's a daily improvement activity. You know because what I'm finding? I've been doing this for about four months. Daily habits, and the first one and what I've been doing is I've been going to Buenos Aires. I've done it three times, for the fourth that's coming up in two weeks. And and there's basically six weeks before visits to Buenos Aires. So I said I'm going to create a 42 day cycle of changing certain habits. Okay, oh, wow, anchors is something right. Well, you anchor it in time, you give it a, and then so that's. You know, six weeks is 42 days. It's an odd time period and that intrigues me, you know. So I've got these 42 improvement, 42 day improvement periods. Dan: And then I say Just a lot to support the 42 is that. You know they say it takes 21 days to establish a habit and 42 is just twice that. So you get two cracks at 21 days to establish. Dean: You just explained why I did it. You just explained why I did that, but I didn't know that. Dan: There you go. No, that's great, though right Like that's a. Dean: I'm doubling down. Yeah, yeah yeah, I hadn't seen that. I had not seen that. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Anyway, but what I did? The first one, it was very simple no snacking between meals. I don't get into trouble with meals. I get in trouble with what happens between meals. Okay, okay. Dan: And. Dean: I aced it, I aced it, I aced it over 42 days, and then I started adding so the second one had two or three habits, the third one, you know, the 42, because I'm getting used to it, okay, and you know. And then all of a sudden I said pay attention to all your habits and just do it right. If there's something you have to do that day, do it the way you would like to have it done in the future, and then give yourself points for that. You know, and so. But there's an enormous Well. First of all, there's a dopamine hit to it, because it means that every day is valuable for learning and growth, and that's a, you know, that's a great thing. Dan: This is fascinating because that dopamine is healthy. Good, you're the beneficiary of the dopamine compared to like watching. Dean: You're your own dealer, yeah. Dan: Be your own dopamine dealer. Dean: Be your own dealer. Dan: That's a great title for a quarterly book, Ben. Dean: I just logged in. Dan: I mean, that's the truth. Dean: You never know. Anytime you talk to Dan, to Dean, you're going to get a new quarterly book out of it. Dan: Sometimes you get a major market book out of it. You never know. Dean: That's a good habit, that's a good habit. I don't know what it is about, dean, but anytime I'm around him I can count about you know, half a year down the road, and something he said is now a book. Oh wait for this. Dan: You know what the elegance of your 42, the 42 days, six weeks is? That you could get two rounds of that per quarter. It's just another nice, elegant fit. Dean: Well, you can get basically 42, you can get two rounds and basically oh right, then a quarter yeah. Dan: You can yeah 12 weeks. Dean: And then you get some free days to. Yeah. Dan: Go wild, I'm better. Yeah, enough of this structure. Dean: Enough of this structure, you know. But the interesting thing about it is you're actually, every time you improve a daily habit, you're exponentially improving your future. Yes, yes. And it's the only way. Yeah. And the thing is, there's certain habits you would like to change today, but you have to change some other habits before you can get to it. Yeah, so yeah, I'll give you an example. I've been listening to people talking about intermittent fasting. Yeah, Like you go a weekend without eating. I said no, I'm not anywhere near that. But what I've noticed is on Saturday and Sunday I can have 16-hour periods between meals. Dan: Okay, yeah. Dean: And I said, you know so, on Saturday we have dinner at three o'clock in the afternoon and then I don't eat again until so that's nine hours before midnight, and then I have, you know, I eat breakfast at seven and then that's 16 hours. Dan: Okay, yep. Dean: And that's intermittent fasting. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And I can do the same thing on Sunday over Sunday night and breakfast. So I said, no, I'll just start off. Once on a weekend I'll do it. And now I'm at the point where I can do it twice on a weekend. You know people said well, you know, it doesn't matter, unless you do it for a couple of days. And I said I can't do it for a couple of days. Dan: Right. Dean: My habits. Don't support it yeah. Dan: Yeah, and I mean I don't know what to do about it. Dean: So whenever people say you should do something, you have to check back and say, ah, interesting, but my habits don't support what you're talking about. Dan: Right, right. Yeah, this is amazing. I mean, I'm not really a dashboard and scorecard, but you're totally in control of that. Dean: You won't. Dan: Yeah, you're the only one who knows the habits? Dean: You're the only one that knows how you want the habits to be in the future. Here. Dan: Yeah. Dean: There's complete agency here on the part of an individual. You know, and you can know all the ramblings of other people about what you should do and you have to do this. No, it's not so. It's bullshit Right. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I mean this is yeah. And then there's a. There's a guy, rob Dierdek. I don't know if you know him. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did mention him. Dan: Okay, yeah, that you know. Everything that we're talking about is exactly. You know what he's on board with. Everything he's talking about is Dave Tuchad, chad Jenkins. Dean: Willard oh Chad Jenkins. Dan: Chad Jenkins I gave him and Steve Dastante actually, yeah, Rob Dierdek back to back two podcasts called the most unrelatable podcast episode you'll ever listen to. And it was him describing to the what ends he goes to track and quantify and establish his daily habits. And it's fascinating, I mean just to see, you know, make things inevitable, you know. Dean: Yeah, and there one thing that makes you appreciate that nervous systems are really different. You know human nervous systems are really. You know, what appeals to one person doesn't appeal to other people, and I think that's a tough nut to crack for a lot of people, because they want what they're doing to be the truth. And I said well, it is the truth. Dan: It is the truth. Dean: It is the truth, but don't go beyond yourself with it. You know, you know and and I think it has a lot to do with your you know your early experiences in life, what you got used to doing, what you like to do, things that you didn't like, and I think and these are forming before we have the ability to be conscious about them. Dan: How many of your habits Dan in on looking at your list are 50 year old oak trees? Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean some of the habits are oh yeah. Yeah. Dean: Some of them are. Some of them are beyond 75 years. Dan: Right, and some of them you know. Dean: I'm probably not going to fool around with those. Dan: No. Dean: Not at first, not at first. Do not take on a 75 year habit. Right, exactly, yeah, but it's really interesting Now, as you know, this happens to if we we can shift the context. I've been very interested in the, the reason why, in the last two weeks, google has lost $90 billion it's market value because of that Right. Because of a stupid AI chat. Okay. Dan: Yeah, I don't know what happened, so you know well what they do. Dean: it's a new chat chat bot that, when you put in directions, it'll create graphics for you. Okay, Okay. I'll give you an example. A guy says can you give me a picture of Vikings? And it comes back and they're all black. Dan: Okay. Dean: Now. Vikings were the whitest people in the world. Dan: Yes, right, right. Dean: Northern European. Not much sunlight, you know. Dan: Yes. Dean: So, anyway, and that says show, give me a picture of the founding fathers of the United States. And there are a whole bunch of them sitting on that table and a number of them were black. So what? Okay, so just giving you the general context, that what's being reflected in the Google chat bot is the dominant political views of the organization. Interesting, isn't it so? And they're getting such backlash. Well, their stock valuation went down by 90 billion in about a week and a half, 90 billion they just dropped, you know, their stock value. Now I would interpret that as someone giving you feedback. Right, right. Dan: Right. Dean: Right, you know, because what a stock price is an estimation of the future value of something you know and what I realize is that now they're scrambling. They had everybody had to work all this weekend to correct the problem. But the problem isn't their chat bot, the chat. The problem is Google's dominant thought process. Okay, so what's being reflected in any organization's cloudlandia presence is what their mainland habits are. I mean I don't think you can communicate too much beyond what your dominant habits are as an individual and as an organization. Dan: Yeah, this is you know, and I wonder if that so you're thinking like the Google things as reflecting their own biases are coming through in the stuff that it's how do I? Dean: that they have a bigger game to change how people think you know I think they do. You know, and you know, and you know, and maybe they shouldn't be that ambitious. Maybe they should just change the way that they think. Dan: Yeah, there's no. It's so amazing to me that there really is no. Like it's difficult now to get objective stuff, to get objective information without that. You know I saw that sort of you see it coming through in the biggest companies like Google, all the media, the mainstream, meta, meta, yeah, that, you see the whole. You know I look at. I was sharing with you the headline, you know, when Donald Trump just won South Carolina by a landslide. You know over 60% of the votes, 39% to Haley, and the headline on Drudge was 40% of Republicans don't want Donald Trump. It was like, what an amazing like flip of not mentioning the historical trouncing that she got in her own home state. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah well, you know you know, in politics and in business the number 51 is really important. I tell people you know, when you own a business. There are two numbers that matter 51 and 49. 51 is the same as 100%, 51 is the same as 100% and 49 is the same as zero. Yeah, you don't understand the difference, the crucial difference, between 51 and 49, you're gonna have a rough life. You're gonna have a rough life. Yeah, and he has won three more tomorrow, and they were. You know, they were equal to the that he's been achieving everywhere else. He's now. There's now been seven states and he's won all seven. Yeah, but 40% of people don't want him. Dan: Yeah, 40% of Republicans don't want Donald Trump. That's right. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the interesting, I think next Tuesday there's 15, you know, there's like 15, it's called. Super Tuesday Super Tuesday, yeah yeah, super Tuesday, and probably he'll be up by 22,. It'll be 22 to nothing by the end of Tuesday night, you know. And he said, and she'll be saying I'm gaining on him. Dan: Gaining on him. Don't give up yeah. Yeah, yes but it's like, it's like 22, 22 flesh wounds. Right, exactly, yes, I'm not dead yet I'm not dead yet Just a stump. Dean: no legs, no arms, but I can still bite you. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I can still bite you I can't quite. Dean: I can't quite figure out what her lawn game is by doing this short. You know her short term activity. I can't figure out what her lawn term plan is. Dan: Yeah, this. I mean what a year this is gonna be. It's gonna be a great year. Dean: This is a I think this is a tectonic shift year, and it's not just in the States. That happened in Argentina when we were down there, the new you know the new government that came in. It happened in Holland. It's kind of happening all over the world right now that people who know how to count are replacing people who don't know how to count. Dan: Yes, so amazing, Dan. I'm excited about the, about this, the 50. I'm excited to get that too. Dean: Yeah, I'll, I'll be in the office tomorrow and I'll have our tech team send you it. And it's just, you know, you just punch on it and it opens up and it's self-explanatory. There's it's called the top 50 tool. And then you know, you use 50 boxes on the first page and then you have a backup page that has 52 and you just start listing them and then you wanna grade them in terms of their priority as a habit, and then I think it fits in really well with what James is doing. Dan: Yes, I'm just that's the only habit I've established on there so far, but I think it's really, yeah, it's really, I think gonna be a great thing because you can anchor it to times, you know, like when you want to, when you want to establish this habit, like you were saying the dinner, the dishes, is what are you, how are you triggering that in measuring? So you're saying-. Dean: Well, you never lose if you do a habit that's from the past and it's not what you want in the future. You don't lose points if you do that. There's no losing points. You can only gain points, okay. Dan: Okay. Dean: So I've got a daily scorecard, okay, and like in the first 42 days, in. I've got a total of 122 points for you know, sticking to no snacks between meals. Dan: Oh good, that's great. So you're keeping like the tally of it. Dean: Yeah, I'm keeping a tally. And then when I go back to Buenos Aires and I said, next time I'm coming back and I you know, I don't remember exactly, but I added two or three more habits, you know, to it and as you're going through the day, you're becoming more and more conscious of your daily habits. If you do it 10 days in a row and you're tracking habits, the next habits on the list will suggest themselves to you. You don't have to go looking for them. You know you don't have to go looking for them, they're looking for you now. Dan: They want to get points they want to get points and they build. You get the momentum of the feedback too, right? Yeah, you know. Did Babs know what you're up to, or did she? Yeah, and just your observation. Dean: She's starting to do it herself. I mean, she was inspired to start. You know, start doing it. She won't do it to the maximum way that I do, because that's not what she does. But she knows she's with me, so she knows things will get better. Dan: Right, right right. Dean: Yeah, I'm around a good habit-forming person. I mean, that's just, I'll just hook on and I know things will get better, but anyway, yeah, and. But you know, what it's doing is that all humans are completely equal and that they only get 24 hours per day. That's true. Dan: That is true, your comment, the speed of reality. Dean: That's the speed. That's the speed of reality. Dan: Yeah, and I don't. I mean, it's funny when you say it. When I first started thinking about it I thought you know, is that too obvious? But it's, yeah, I think it's one of those. It's been right there. Dean: Well, the other thing that I can tell you a lot of the problem they're having in their life is they don't account for that truth, right? Dan: yeah, I think that's really the thing, right. It's tuning into the speed of reality and looking at the only times. The only time we can really have any action is today, and there's a hard stop. I mean, there's a hard stop on it that your sleep, you know, is a. There's no possible way for us to do anything tomorrow. Dean: Yeah, and the only impact you can have on yesterday is what you're changing today. Dan: Yes, and that's the thing I was having. So Joe Polish came up, came back with me from Palm Beach. He just left yesterday, but he spent three to four days with me here and I mean, we went through, we set up my total environment here for success, you know, in terms of eating, and we went through my kitchen and cleared out everything that isn't supporting the habit of future healthy being right, and we went through that kind of it was. So we were talking about the four C's two is the commitment, and then courage and capability. And so we went I don't cook and I've never cooked. I've never. You know, yeah, I've never cooked. No, don't really have any skill in that, but we went. Dean: That means that if we catch you cooking, we know something that's deeply wrong. That or? Dan: deeply right. I mean we went and got an Instapot. I don't know if you've heard of this device, but so the Instapot is a miracle vessel. I mean, you just put stuff in and push a button and then it cooks. It's like. So we went to the grocery store and we got some, you know, some organic chicken legs and chicken thighs and chicken breast, and we got some grass-fed ground beef 90-10 and we got some. We've had some. We've cooked the entire the whole four days that he was here. And so the thing is now I left this with a new capability, right Like. So now I've got and I said to Joe it's kind of like reframing. I think it's almost like getting back to my, to building a primal habit of going to the grocery store and hunting some dinner, hunting food. Right, go, hunt some chicken and bring it home and clean it and cook it and enjoy and eat it, you know, but how easy Rather than having food hunting you. Absolutely, that's exactly right. And so that capability, you know, like we, we literally just take the chicken, wash it some salt and pepper, put it in the pot, put some potatoes in there on top, whole, you know whole, just washed, you know, Yukon gold or gold potatoes, put it in there, press the button 11 minutes and it's the most delicious. Whole, you know whole, some. No, no oils, no anything. It's just so clean, right, You've got organic chicken, you've got the stuff, and it's delicious. And then we, you know, got on the pan. I learned some pan skills right Of being able to, just with some butter in the pan, you know, grass fed, organic butter, of course, and putting. We got some steaks that were like, thin cut. We got some pork chops that were thin cut, ground beef, all of those, just the same thing, just taking the meat, salt and pepper and a little bit of, if I wanted to add any spice or whatever to it, cook it on, you know, both sides, and there you go. We even chopped up zucchini and squash into little medallions and sauteed them in the in the pan. So this capability now of being able to see this is a better habit to do than well driving through somewhere, right. Dean: The big thing is that it's got a future reference, that you have a sense of who you'd like to be in the future as an individual. You know and you can only be that in relationship to the habits that you form right. Because you know, there's part of our day which requires focus. Concentration because it's new stuff, yeah, and therefore the habits have to be good. When we're not focusing directly on the activity, you have to have great habits, you know yeah and and yeah. the book I just came out with the great meltdown is that the US is the top country in the world because it's got the best widespread habits of people using innovative skills to lower the cost of money, lowering the cost of energy, lowering the cost of labor, lower cost and no country in the world can possibly match it. You know, yeah, yeah, the prices of things are up and down, unpredictable around the world, and but the US has a habit of always trying to lower the cost of anything. you know yeah and other countries don't have this, and so you know. You can see the difference between Canada and the United States right now. I mean it's really extreme. From the last time you were here, the difference the average per capita income in the United States is now lower than the per capita income of Mississippi. Dan: Wow, the United States, the in. Dean: Mississippi is number 50 and per capita income and the average. Canadian is now below, below the per capita is in the low Wow, yeah, I wasn't. Dan: it wouldn't have expected that. Dean: Yeah, and not only that, they don't freeze to death in Mississippi. Right that's exactly right. At least I got that going for them and that's basically. You can measure it from when the president, prime minister, came in, has been going downhill since this prime minister came in because he wants to save the world. Dan: Yeah, it's interesting, right, that's been funny to watch the. You know my algorithm, for you know, sending me things, video clips and stuff is now I get a lot of those, Pierre Polly. Dean: Yeah, yeah, smart guy. I had breakfast with him about five years ago. Yeah, smart guy, very smart, yeah, and from Alberta French speaking from Alberta, that's a pretty good. You know, that's a pretty good background. Dan: You know he's got a triple. Dean: That's a triple play Canadian that's a triple play for a Canadian. That's French, french. Dan: I mean that's, he's got it all covered because, it just doesn't get it. Dean: And then his wife is from Venezuela, she's a refugee. So she knows what a country gone wrong early looks like yeah, oh, that's funny. Yeah, yeah, and you know, so so anyway, but you can just see the difference that the United States is better at handling milk costs than Canada is. Dan: Yeah, wow. Well, dan, I'm excited, this is great. Seven days? Yeah, well, I'll tell you the tool I can promise you you'll have the tool by this time. Dean: Not this time, but by the end of the day. Tomorrow you'll have top 50 tool and just play around with it. I mean it's self-explanatory, you don't have to. There's no rule book that comes with it. You'll just play with it. Just remember, in every square where you put something, if you press the arrow it takes you to the criteria page. Okay, perfect. Dan: I'll do it. Dean: Yeah. Okay, then I'm interested in the teamwork between the top 50 tool and the Adams app. That'll be really interesting because I've been lacking a daily scoring system. You know, people won't stay with something unless they can score on a daily basis. That's the truth. Dan: That is true. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I can't wait. Dean: All right. Dan: I'll see you. I can't wait. I'll have it tomorrow. Dean: All righty. Thanks, Dan. I'll be on next week if you are, I am absolutely Okay. Dan: Okay, thanks, dan, okay, bye, bye.

In today's episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we reflect on serenity in nature and technology, drawing parallels between Cloudlandia and meticulously raked sand. Woven into our talk is AI and how it's changing everything, from Evan's course helping us out at work to all the crazy experiments shaking things up. We get into how innovation unexpectedly boosted my creativity, which we're calling "exponential tinkering". As our annual event nears, lessons in "exponential thinking" add to the anticipation of a reunited community and potential for growth. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Dean and I explore the serenity of Cloudlandia and how it parallels the peacefulness found in Japanese Zen gardens, reflecting on the role of imagination in experiencing digital spaces. We discuss the success of Evan Ryan's AI course within our company and how it has encouraged experiments with AI across different teams. Dean introduces the concept of "exponential tinkering," highlighting how AI is revolutionizing the arts and content creation, with a nod to OpenAI's Sora tool. We contemplate the cultural shift toward immersive experiences like VR, while expressing skepticism about their long-term utility and appeal. Dan recognizes the importance of integrating existing consumer experiences to create innovative products, using Apple as an example. We highlight insights from Mark Mills' book "The Cloud Revolution" on the strategic importance of reshoring supply chains and repurposing shopping centers into logistics hubs. We compare Tesla's success to the sustainability challenges faced by other electric vehicle companies that are more dependent on government subsidies. We share anecdotes about the Soviet-era's illusion of luxury, and how modern-day explorers uncover the true state of Soviet infrastructure. We examine the declining enthusiasm for venture capital in the tech world and the concept of "cruel optimism" that can be prevalent in this sector. Excitement is expressed for our upcoming annual event, stressing the value of 'exponential thinking' and the potential growth of our community. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan how are you, mr Jackson? Dan: Well, welcome to Cloudlandia. I'm sitting out in my courtyard and it's a little bit of a cold, rainy morning. I don't know if you can hear the rain gently falling in the courtyard. It's relaxing. Dean: Do you have an? Dan: umbrella over your head. No, I'm in a. I have a covered, a covered area here that I'm sitting at about. I don't know what you call it, like a lamina or a loja, I don't know how it is, but it's a covered underroof thing, that's attached to my courtyard. Dean: What you're saying is that there's something between you and this guy. That's exactly it. Dan: I'm not getting rained on, I'm under covered, as they say. Dean: Yeah, well, it's sort of a poignant, almost like a Japanese. Stay right, yeah, this almost feels like a Japanese Zen garden. Dan: here I hear the like the little the water coming off the roof of a tile roof, so that it's very Japanese Zen actually, because the there's a spout that drains the water down into a drain. Yeah, so nice. Dean: Yeah, it's very interesting. When I was a teenager I sort of fell in love with Japanese culture. This would be early 60s, late 50s, early 60s and you know I read the literature, I looked at the artwork. I was interested in their architecture, their history, and then in my military. I was drafted into the US military and got sent to South Korea. And I'm an R and R. Rest and relaxation, that's what they called it. Dan: R and R I went to Japan. Dean: I went to twice, oh nice. And my memory is of being in the mountains, at a place where they really didn't speak English I don't know even now if they you know, having Americans who was part of their experience, but it was perfectly understandable. I mean, the hospitality was so great. But I can remember being in one of these little rooms where they had. They had sliding doors that would open up and you could see the mountain, you could see the water. And I remember it raining, but I was warm and I had tea. And I was sitting there and it sort of corresponded to what my teenage visions had been. I always remember that. Dan: That's great. I love it when stuff like that happens. Well, this would definitely be the kind of day that would be conducive to tea. Dean: And sitting out here. Dan: It was kind of a Zen garden that I have in the courtyard, so it's nice. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Zen, there's a lot about the jump from the mainland to Cloudlandia that has a Zen-like quality to it, tell me more, tell me more, especially now with the. A lot about it, well, a lot about it. You have to imagine, in other words, that you only get as far in Cloudlandia as your imagination will go. I'm really seeing this. I'm kind of being a creative collaborator with Evan Ryan, still in his 20s, but he's been investigating artificial intelligence for the last 10 years, so he's well into it. So basically his adult life has been and he's got a very thriving business and he's got clients from all over the planet. But he wrote one book which was superb. It was called AI as your teammate and he put it together into a six-module coaching course for companies and our entire company went through that. Dan: Oh, wow. Dean: So it's six to our modules and just to the main. Purpose is just to get people over the hump that this is any scarier than any technology that they've already mastered. It's just a new technology. And it did wonders. It did wonders and I can see the last module was probably four months ago and I can see the investigations and the experiments that are going on across the company, each person sort of focusing on something different. And then Evan is writing a new book and I just shared an idea with him and maybe it be a topic that we would discuss today. But I said, there's all sorts of predictions being made by people about where AI is going and where it's going to take us, and both exciting and scary. The predictions are both exciting and scary and what I realized that all these predictions, no matter how expert the person tried to present themselves, was just one person's prediction. And more or less their prediction for everybody else was simply what they wanted to do for themselves, Right. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And I think Mark Zuckerberg and there's all sorts of people the big tech people and government people and everything, corporate people and I say you're trying to make this a prediction for the world, but it's only probably a prediction for you that this is the direction and what I realized is that there's an exponential breakthrough with AI and it's in the area of tinkering, which is a neat word, yes, Tinkering. So Evan and I talked about it and he's going to. You know, he's developing the idea as exponential tinkering. Dan: And I really like it. Oh, I like that. Dean: That's a good yeah, what a nice combination of words, because, there are kind of two words that are jarring when you put them together, that's very good. Dan: I like that a lot. Dean: Yeah, so what are you tinkering? Dan: with. So I'm tinkering with a couple of things right now and deep into the. Are you talking about technology things? Dean: No, yeah. Well, technology, or specifically AI, are you tinkering at all with it, seeing what it can do? Dan: I'm starting now to. Did you see the latest thing a couple of days ago? The release of Sora, the video creation tool. Now, that was OpenAI did that right. OpenAI has just I think it's only very limitally open to their top tier, you know, data users or whatever, but the demo reels of it you know, showing what it's capable of, and I mean it's certainly you see now where that's the final piece of the puzzle here, like two things have happened in the last 30 days that have really kind of cement where I see this going. I've been predicting here that 20, that you know, almost like the big change 1975 to 2025 will kind of look and the you know all these exponential improvements reaching the top of the asymptotic curve that there's You're using big words. Dean: Yes, so Asymptotic, asymptotic. I think that deserves a subhead for our listeners. Dan: Okay, Well, asyn, in math when you do exponential, it's exponentially increases, increases, and then it reaches a point where it's just marginally like improving slightly. You know, like there's not really the exponential leap, for instance, of going from. If we just take text, we've gone from, you know, writing it on papyrus or having people hand write stuff. Dean: Chiseled as on. Chiseled as in play. Dan: Whatever. And then Gutenberg was an exponential leap in that, but it got better in terms of when we were able to, you know, create digital photocopy and things like that, and we got to the text file where you could digitize text and that became a PDF. And now so everything you know, the functional like improvement in text, has really reached the top of. There's nowhere really to go from everything ever written available instantly on any device you have. And that same thing has been over the last 25 years, kind of cascading series of those with increasing complexity of them, right? I think it's not. That's the easiest thing to fully digitize is text. And then pictures were the next thing, that you could digitize pictures so we can transfer images, then moving pictures right? Audio, sorry, was next after text, audio images or images, videos. Now we're at the point where you know every piece of media video, audio, text or images is completely digitized. It's available on any device at any time you want it. And this next piece that's falling into place is the ability to generatively create, from description, images and videos that you can describe. And so when you take this Sora, and you take Dali and you take the all the things that are converging with the, with the AI, and we'll give them another two year runway, which would even sort of double their time that they've been in our world Mainstream they'll be fully cemented into the mainstream use. And then you look at what's happening with the release of Apple's new Air Pro goggles, or whatever they're calling them. Dean: Vision Pro. Dan: Vision Pro. Dean: And that is. You know everybody who's going to use any of this. Dan: Exponential tinkerers. Dean: Yeah, but that somebody who's doing it tinkerers. Tinkerers is just someone who's doing it for their own purposes. You know they're not trying to create something for anybody else, they're just for example, I gave you the example that I've had a real interest in. You know, I wrote a new book and I had. I was writing a new book and I had one chapter finished and it was how we put our company together, and the chapter was unique ability teamwork. That, basically, a fundamental difference between coach team members and other team members is that we everybody operates according to their own unique ability within unique ability teams. Okay, so that's that, but I've always had a fascination with Shakespeare. You know he's one of my five. Dan: Yes. Dean: You know, five lifetime role models Shakespeare, because he was not only a great poet, a great playwright, a great you know creator of, you know, creator of plays, but he was also a tremendous entrepreneur and he, you know, he created the first company that was self-sustainable and he created a new theater and everything else. So he was very entrepreneurial and seems to have made a pile through theater. And anyway, but I was always fascinated with the language form that was operating in London in the late 1500s and 1600s. So Shakespeare is 1560, 1560, 1660 years and it was called iambic pentameter and it was a structure where there's only 10 syllables per line. You get to the 10th syllable and then you go to a new line, and so I had one of my team members actually go to AI, go to chat GPT and say we would like to translate Dan's copy into iambic pentameter and it was back in 24 hours. Dan: You know came back and I was just fascinated. Dean: I was just fascinated with it because I thought differently about my own thoughts when I saw them come back in a different language form. In English but about a different structure. So I was sitting there, I was reading it and I gave it to some of our team and I said what do you think about this? And they said, wow, I get totally new thoughts from reading it. It's, you know, the basic ideas, but they're in a different language form. And I said now what I'd like to do is I hear it like it here. It's spoken, you know, by someone who was really great with Shakespeare's language. So it was a very famous actor who we have their recordings of, and so we open my team member, Alex Barley, who is British you know. So he's from the UK, so he has a feel for this type of language and he has a feel for theater. And then he worked with Mike Canig's, great friend of ours and. Mike. Mike gave him two or three other AI programs that he could take a look at and about four days later I get this wonderfully eloquent reading of a whole chapter in Iambic content and I listen to it every week. I listen to it every week and it does things for my thinking. Okay, and I've shown it to a few people. This is a you know. A number of people have listened to it and they're all say, wow, that's amazing. Dan: You did that. Dean: Why'd you do that? Why'd you do that? Dan: Why'd you do? Dean: that Just tinkering? I was just tinkering and I just. I kind of said you know, if I put this together with this and maybe put the two of them together with this, I wonder what it sounds like. And I have no intention of, I have no intention of going any further with it, but it really serves a purpose, that it really influences my own thinking and I've noticed that my writing has changed as a result of listening to this for three or four, three or four months, you know, I just I just get a different take on my own ideas. Dan: And. Dean: I call that tinkering, I just call that tinkering. Dan: I like that. Dean: And I believe that with AI, what you have, there was always tinkering in the technology world, but I think what AI does, it makes, it allows tinkering to be exponential. Dan: That's interesting. So there's, I'd say, yeah, you're, there's an artistry to it in a way. Dean: You know, in that there's, it's kind of like doing something for your own pleasure for your own yeah, and your own enhancements you know you see, you see an extension of a capability that you already have, but you can see new dimensions of the capability that you already have and that in itself is the reward, that in itself. And people say well, are you going to? You know, I tell people and they say oh, so are you going to actually produce this? And you know, you know like we produce our books. And I said no, I'm just doing it for my own reasons. Dan: I just like the feel of this. I just like the feel you know and. Dean: I do not think I'm unique in this experience. I think there's a hundred million people doing the same thing with something that kind of fascinates them. Dan: And I wonder if that's the artistic expression gene or something. I mean, that's our internal desire to chase our whims. Dean: You know, in a way, yeah, that's one of the great joys of the the reason I'm saying this is that we're always making the predictions about who the giant tech giant is that's going to dominate this and I said one I don't see it emerging. I think all of them are scrambling like mad so that they don't get left behind. But I don't think the idea of tinkering really exists in that world. You know quarterly stock prices, investments that's what they're looking for, you know, and everything else, but I don't see the dominant player, even. You know, even open. Ai is the dominant player. Dan: Have you had some experience? Have you tried the vision pros yet? Dean: No, I don't like goggles. Dan: I don't need. I mean I'm not inclined either. Dean: They're anti social. Dan: I wonder you know it's going to be. I know there'll be a lot of people at Free Zone next week that have them that are, so we'll get a chance to try that for sure. But I know my kenix has it. Dean: I know Leo as his one of the things that I always look at their past stage right now, but it'd be interesting checking their lives down six months from now whether they're actually using them. Dan: That's what I'm curious about, right Like it's so. Dean: I don't need to be first in with anything. Dan: Right, exactly, yeah, yeah, I think that this chasm it's getting, you know, I think it's getting wider and wider, this that there's even now, nuances of going deeper into Cloudlandia, because I think that's like immersively diving into Cloudlandia and I think that there's. Nick Nanton just posted a thing about some big movie director who was tweeted about. You know, just spent the day editing this is a feature movie, mainstream movie director saying you just spent the day editing in the Vision Pros with, in collaboration with his editor, on a big screen. They are theatrical, like movie screen size and just fascinated. He said. Dean: you know, no headache, no anything so I don't know, yeah well, where I think and I felt five, ten years, well, let's say five years ago when people were talking about visual reality, okay. Dan: Yes. Dean: And Peter Diamonis had a lot of proponents of this at Abundance 360 and I was sitting there and I said first of all, every everything that I've seen I find boring and the reason? because what you're seeing is the creation of one brain, and if it's not an interesting brain to begin with, the result of their creation of a VR program is exponentially less interesting. Okay, and what actual reality is good? You know, I look out in my yard and you have the same opportunity there. I look at them and I've got these seven giant oak trees in their yard, I mean they're a hundred, and ten hundred foot oak trees, and the reason I love those trees so much is nobody created them. There was no intention for this to happen. It was just a lucky acorn. Dan: Right the result of it. Dean: I mean they produce thousands, millions of acorns in our yard and it's just squirrel food you know, and and it's the nonintentionality that interests me, it's not the somebody's intention, okay, and one person's story really doesn't interest me for the first time if it doesn't include a lot of other people's stories you know, in other words. You're putting that together, so I don't know. I mean, I think there's a fundamental obstacle to all technological breakthroughs, and it's called human nature. Dan: Yeah, this is where that's. What I wonder, is the goggles? Them sound like it. Just it feels like, wow, this is a you know, unless we're at a point where I think the improvement of the vision pros is that you can actually see out of them. Dean: Well, you can see out of them and it's got the thing that I think is really going to make a difference, and that's all augmented reality. Yes, exactly In other words, you're looking at a real thing. Yeah, there are useful pictures, useful data, useful messages on it, and there's useful capabilities, in other words, there's like email and, I'm sure, the design. You know design tools and everything that you can do and that, I believe, is good, but it'll only, it'll take hold where the use of this speeds up an economic process that already makes money. But you can speed up an economic process. Dan: I'm seeing that, if everything is, you know, being shaped to drive us deeper into this cloudlandia existence here, that everything's happening in the goggles, that I was just had coffee with Stuart, my operations guy, and we were saying how it seems like there's a trend towards you know, I have you ever heard the term hostile design for architecture where the Starbucks one of the Starbucks here in Winter Haven just went under when it's 10 year renovation and they completely turned it into like a basket robin's? where it's all the character of you know a basket robin's. There's no sense of that third place kind of you know origin that Starbucks started with, where, when Starbucks was first getting started in the 90s, they had, you know, nice design, comfy chairs. It was inviting to come and get a coffee and sit and you know gather kind of thing. And now it's essentially designed with the hey, keep it moving, keep it moving kind of vibe to it. There's no, nothing about the chairs, the seating, it's just literally one long banquette with facing single wooden chairs. You know that, on and round table, so there's no comfort or invitingness to come and linger. Dean: Well, they commoditize, so you know. In other words, yeah they start off at very special places. Yeah, and you know you could go in if you could use it as an office, it could be your office all day if you were I think yeah. Dan: I think that's what happened is that post as we got into the last ten years where it became more, you know, wi-fi is ubiquitous and, you know, demanded in public spaces like that. That you know I was saying to Stuart. My theory about it is that in the 90s and early 2000s the internet was still a place that you had to go to right, like you, yeah, had to go to your computer to go there, and these third places were, of you know, an important part of you're putting that aside and you're coming to this third place to be there and as laptops and Wi-Fi and all these things made it possible that people could go and set up shop in the Starbucks and spend the whole day there, that became defeated, the whole purpose. It wasn't a third place, it was the place. 0:25:06 - Dean: You know, yeah, and the other thing it became every place. You know, I mean, when you commoditize, it's every place. And, and you know, I mean you know. And the other thing is that there was a fundamental change in the Starbucks culture and I can say exactly when it was. It was in the 90s and I think it was probably around 1995. They said there's a risky part of our future and that is we can't guarantee that we're always going to have good baristas okay, because the real right. The real skill I mean of Starbucks is who is? Where the baristas who can do the coffee, just right, and they said we can't. You know, it's too risky and that we become too dependent on these people, you know and they said we've got to make it mechanical and what they did immediately is that their espresso drinks, you know, whatever form it came in, was only 80% as good, but it was predictably 80. The moment you give away quality in order to achieve quantity, you've lost all uniqueness. Yeah. I agree, yeah and that's what they've done. And now the other thing is that they created their own competition because people seeing how a coffee operation works, they went to Starbucks University and got their degree, you know, and it probably take a year to do that and they went out and created their own independent coffee shops. So I think those unique coffee shops still exist, but they're not trying to take over the planet yeah, it's really. Dan: It's interesting. I'm looking for places like that, but you just it's kind of a sad thing. It's almost like you've talked often about the, the black cab knowledge of the drivers in London that they have London, I think London. Dean: London, birmingham and Manchester, I think they have, but the black cabs are the best cabs in the world. Yeah, okay, they're, just there's nothing to compare of what an experienced black cab driver with the black cab experience in the world. There's just nothing like it, and it takes you three years of dedicated study to even pass the test to become a black cab driver, you know and it's very interesting that all of that now can be. You know, anybody in their Honda Civic equipped with their iPhone, has the knowledge right on their phone well, actually it worked out, it didn't work out in London right, because Uber came in and they said well, you know, the Uber guys got it, but they have no feel for the city right and yeah, and so within six months of Uber coming in and actually threatening black cab developed its own Uber software, so now they have the Uber software plus the knowledge of the driver yeah, right it's like AI, an AI program defeating world champion, chess champion okay, yeah and within a year, the chess champions just said okay, we've upped the game and now it's us, plus our AI program, against each other. Dan: Yeah, it's very. You know, it's a-. Dean: Humans are infinitely smarter than technology. Dan: Yeah, it's a fascinating time to be approaching your 80th birthday right now too, you know, looking into the next decade here. Yeah, what are you guessing and betting on for the next few weeks? Dean: I'm betting that people's grasp of their past is now their trump card. Okay, that the future is completely and totally unpredictable, okay as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I think you could predict the future more in the 19th and you know the book you gave me, the 1990, the great change I would think was called the Great Change. If I think back to 1950, where I was alive, I think that the first grade teacher and I had a first grade teacher in 1950, sister Mary Josephia. Sister Mary Josephia, sometime, first grade she says the reason why you're learning this now reading, writing and arithmetic is that when you graduate from high school because nobody went to college in those days- you know, you left high school and you went and got a job. She says everybody's going to be looking in the job market at how good you are at reading, writing and arithmetic and showing up on time and finishing what you start and saying please and thank you and everything else. And she was totally correct. In 1962, exactly what she predicted was true. Okay, so try a first grade teacher in 2024, can she predict anything about what a first grader will experience 12 years later? Dan: Yeah, no chance yeah. Dean: And that's just a general condition on the planet. I just think the future is no longer predictable. So what's the unused resource? The unused resource is your past. Dan: Say more about that. What do you mean? The unused resource? Dean: Well, first of all, it's unique. I mean, if I sat down with you and asked you questions about your past and it went on for a year day in day out for a year. Not one thing that you say about your past during that year is anything but unique to you. That's true. Yeah, exactly that's where all the raw material is for creativity. It's not in the future, you know and it was so funny because I remember four or five times in abundance 360, peter would invite in people from Google, okay, and they had these moon shots, okay, and what was interesting about them? They were predicting new things in the future that hadn't been imagined yet, okay. And it seems to me like sparse ingredients, but it was what they were up to and there was presentation after presentation and they had videos on YouTube and everything else. And I said is there any customer experience in this? No, there was no customer experience. They were just making it up, you know, and they were sort of, and these teams were in competition with each other who could come up with the most convincing thing? That didn't exist. And then I kept track of it and over a 10-year period they shot all those projects down. They never went anywhere. Dan: Wow, yeah, they never went anywhere. Dean: Yeah, and I said, all you do is let's find three examples of things that people are already enjoying, and can we put them together in a new way and create something new where people already have experience? With at least a third of the new thing you know, and that's what Apple does. Apple never does anything. First they sit there and they say MP3 player, napster, making money doing this Internet. Let's put the three of them together and see where they go. Dan: Yeah, that's smart. They were doing triple plays and didn't even know it. Yeah, well, maybe they were, Maybe they were yeah that's your clever observation of it, right, exactly, yeah, put a framework over it. Dean: There's a great technology thinker by the name of Mark Mills, and he wrote a really interesting book called the Cloud Revolution. Okay, and it's really worth a read. Okay, and what he said? If you go backwards 100 years and you look for all the major technological breakthroughs that have more or less been the mainstream of the last 100 years, he says they you always discover it was never one thing, it was always three things. Dan: Oh really. Dean: He uses the radio, he uses electricity, he uses internal combustion, he uses cars, he uses airplanes, he uses, you know, motion pictures and all the major things air conditioning and everything, and he shows the three things that went together before the breakthrough was possible. Oh wow, and part of the reason is you're putting together already existing habits. Dan: Yeah, that's really. You have to piggyback on something that somebody's already doing, right. Dean: Yeah, that gives them their existing habit, even though you're adding. You know you're adding factors that are two other habits. But you have to get people something solid to stand on before you ask them to take a step into the new. Dan: What was the name of that book? Dean: again, it's called the Cloud Revolution. Okay, the Cloud Revolution. Yeah and he uses an interesting example and this is a prediction he's making for the future. He said, with reshoring take place. So that's one factor the supply chains are going to get shorter and shorter in the future, because COVID sort of proved to everybody that relying products that came from a hundred different places and required 5,000 miles of ocean travel to get to us wasn't reliable for the future products you know, foods and everything. So what? The major thing is that you're going to try to have supply chains were important with things as close as possible to where the customers are. And he said that's one trend. Okay, that's reshoring, that's that process of bringing your manufacturing and your industrialization back to close to you. That's one factor. The other factor is no longer obsolete shopping centers, Okay. And he said let's suppose that you just take every obsolete shopping center and you turn it into a combination of warehouse, factory and distribution center, Okay. Okay, All the existing infrastructure is built in. That's already zone. It's got huge parking, it's got some massive, big spaces like the big anchor stores, some massive big spaces. You already have delivery docks, you have truck docks that go underground and people go yes and everything. And he says but it's obsolete for the purpose it was created for. But he says if you think about it as a nexus point for trade supply routes in other? Words the raw material will come in and then supply routes going out to the actual customers. And he says all of a sudden you got a new use. But people are used to shopping centers, people work in shopping centers, you know and everything else he says well, you know, and they have major, usually they're situated where there's major transportation routes, there's major highways, there's, you know. I mean probably the best shopping centers are in places that have, you know, highway access. They have air airline, you know, ups, and so that he says just look, look at a lot of stuff that already exists. Put it together in a new way and people's habits already supported. Dan: That's smart. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I like those things, so that fits in with the whole. Jeff Bezos, you know what's not going to change in the next 10 years model, looking not at what's going to change, but what's not going to change, because that's what you can anchor on. Dean: Yeah, it's kind of like I'm just watching all the EV companies, the electric vehicle companies, with the exception of Tesla, because they've got a unique, established niche. I don't think any of the other companies that are based on a profit motive are making that forward, shutting, cutting back. Volkswagen is cutting back, gm is cutting back, everybody's cutting back, because they're losing anywhere from $30,000 to $70,000 on a vehicle and it doesn't look like it's going to get any better. Okay, and then, but what made it unnatural is the fact that you had to have massive government insistence for it to even get off the ground. Dan: Yeah, you just kind of hit something on the head there, because Elon Musk has definitely thrown his hat over the fence on electric vehicles and it is dominating the market for it, because he's all in on that, which is something that Ford and Volkswagen and all these companies can't do. They're not, they're only like dabbling in the electric vehicle markets, you know. Dean: Yeah they did it because there were massive subsidies, there was math, you know, and the states like California were mandating. You know, you know, and by 2035 we won't have any fossil fuel vehicles. Okay, and you know, if the strong arm of government's gonna come on and just forbid the alternative, well, of course we're going to invest our future in it. But those governments are going to be thrown out. I bet the government in California is throwing out within 10 years, I mean you know, by the way, that that just reminded me of something. Dan: I just watched the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin. Did you see that? Dean: Yeah, Parts of it. I saw a part Okay. Dan: Yeah, yeah, nothing extraordinary about that. That wasn't what I was getting to. But while Tucker was in Russia, he did a series of short Videos that were just kind of exploring what is it actually like in a, you know, post sanctioned Russia that you know, yeah, since they put sanctions in place and you know, and it was funny because he was describing, you know, like every visual that we have of, you know, communism in Russia is, you know, empty shelves and limited supply and limited Choice and utilitarian things. So he went, he did a interesting series where he went to a Russian Supermarket to see, okay, so what is it like like? What's day-to-day life like in Russia under sanctions during wartime? And it was, you know, the most fascinating like grocery store where you go in and it's the shelves are stopped with Everything you could imagine, all these things. It's a beautiful, clean store, very modern. Everything about it was amazing. They filled up their basket with what would be, you know, a week's worth of groceries for a family of four kind of thing, what you would get if you were kind of feeding a, a family of four and they, you know, found everything. They they wanted a beautifully you know, fresh baked bread, all the staples that you could need. They filled them all up. They all him and the producers kind of guessed that they would have, you know, $400 or 400 worth of groceries if they were buying it in America, kind of thing which was their frame of reference and Turns out they got all of that stuff for like a hundred and four dollars is what it's what it costs. Dean: Yeah, don't you find it fascinating that he found the one supermarket in all of Russia where that was. Dan: That's what I wonder. That's what I want. Dean: No, that's not you think he went there just have passers-by on his own, I don't like to go. Oh yeah, yeah, the Soviets had one in Moscow. It was right near the Kremlin. It was called gum GUM, if you look it up on Wikipedia. Huh, capital G, capital U, capital M, and you went in and it was just well-dressed shoppers, everything you know, I think that's that's might have been where he was. That might have been it, oh yeah, and it's, and it's a show place, it's a show play and that's what they found when they found out the history of it. Shoppers would go in and they would come out the front door and then they go around the block, go through the black door Backdoor and give back everything that they had bought, and then it was restocked on the shelves. Dan: Oh boy. Dean: They were all actors. Dan: Oh, wow, very interesting. I wondered the same thing, because they did. He went to a subway station that he admittedly said was the most beautiful. So we never seen a subway station as nice anywhere in in America and it was. They showed the footage of it. You know, beautiful artwork and chandeliers and steam, cleaned cleanliness and, no, no graffiti, all of those things. And it did have the sense of. Is this a show place? Because there's an interesting YouTube channel. There was a gentleman from the UK and his channel is called bald and bankrupt and what he does is he goes just solo with a single camera and he was touring all these Soviet Territories. All the outposts, you know, like that were the height of the thing, to compare, and every one of it is Just like everything is run down. And you know all of the Soviet Union, you know post Communism is completely, you know, run down. And what you would expect, right, what you would that, your Vision of it, and I think that you kind of just hit it on the head. That's that it's more likely. Dean: That's like a show place or a yeah that that subway system was put in the 1930s. Okay, they had the boss of it, was cruise ships, cruise ships came in the fame Because he put in. But there was. There was no Limit on cost and there was no limit on how many people died. Building, they asked, made about 20,000 workers died. Putting in the subway system Okay and and, but if those are not cost you pay any attention to, then you can build anything in the world. But, if you wanted to go to another city and see the subway, they wouldn't let you do that. You could only see the subway. That they, because subways were a bigger deal you know in the 1930s or 1920s. Then they are now. You know, because most people don't use the subways. But in Europe, you know, where people don't have cars and they live in very dense populated areas, subways make sense. I mean 80 percent of the Public transportation in the United States I'm talking about buses and subways and commuter trains is the greater New York area that once you get outside the New York area, only 20 percent of the public public Transportation public transportation exists because everybody's got private transportation. Dan: Yeah exactly right. Dean: I mean you got your own. I mean you got a plush Travel vehicle called the Tesla X. You know it's kind of neat. You don't use it 99% of the time, but it's nice having you know. Dan: You know what I said. I was talking about you. Yesterday the I was had to drive somewhere that was about an hour away, just over an hour Actually. Dan said a new high watermark for my migration north. I went just about a half an hour north of I for the first time since. What's it like? Dean: I mean do you need oxygen? Dan: I mean you know I was using the self-drive, which is just name. You know it's only in named and as it has a nervous breakdown if you take your hand off the wheel for more than 30 seconds at a time. But I said you know Dan Sullivan has it figured out. Dan Sullivan has had self-drive since 1997. Dean: You've had true self drive, self automatic, self drive you know it's an interesting thing, but what I notice, you know I'm just developing the reason. This thing about the past is interesting because I'm writing my new quarterly book right now and it's called Everything Is Created Backward, and what I mean everything that sticks is actually created by starting with the past and picking the best of, and I think three things is really a formula. I mean, there might be things where it's five things, but I think three is useful because you can go looking for three, okay, and what I'm seeing is that the tech world has basically ground to. A lot of people don't know this, but the investment part, the venture capital part of the tech world, has just hit a wall. I mean, there's a massive amount of money available, but nobody wants to invest it because so many things promised as new things in the last 10 years really haven't amounted to anything. It's about, I think about less, maybe around 10% of IPOs. You know, initial public offerings have panned out Okay. That's a high risk that you have a nine you know, a nine to one chance of losing your money if you invest in something new, and I think the hype factor for getting investment has lost its energy. Dan: Yeah, that's changes everything. This changes everything, oh that's no good, then that's a sure sign that it's doomed. Yeah, this changes everything should be your signal to run away. Dean: Yeah, and you know I mean, but it does change everything for certain individuals and this is the mistake. It's like Joe Polish calls this cruel optimism. Dan: You know cruel optimism Okay. Dean: Yeah, and he has a great take on this, and he said that that when it comes to you know, because he's very interested in addictions and how one gets off an addiction, and he says there's thousands of predictions that if you do this and do this, you get a work for you. And he said what's true about it is it'll work for somebody, okay, but it's their willingness for it to work that actually makes it possible. And so there's a lot of human agency to things turning out the way you want. If you take complete ownership and it has to work for you, probably it'll work. But if you think it's going to be done to you and you don't have to do anything probably it won't work. Yeah, that's a very yeah, but I thought it was. But he says it's very cruel Because when it doesn't work and it doesn't work, and it doesn't work, your addiction gets more powerful. Dan: I said to somebody I've been talking about. I've often talked about the difference between, in marketing, a slot machine versus a vending machine, and that's a great analogy. It's often the way that most businesses take on marketing. They put money in the slot machine and they pull the lever and they hope that something happens and they're surrounded in a room by all the other entrepreneurs. Dean: Yeah, we got two out of three. Or we got two out of three oranges. Dan: We got a trend going here, that's right, so everybody's pulling their slot machine and they're all in the same room and somebody hits the jackpot and they all flock over to that machine. Look at the crowd, See see, see, it works. They're like yeah, trying to do the same thing. And then you know every all the testimonials that you see. That's exactly what that reminded me of. It's cruel optimism that sometimes see it does work, but they're usually talking about something that happened quickly and to a great extent and once. And it's not the same as the predictable vending machines. Not every time I put in the dollar I get $10 out. Dean: But you know, one of them has. One of them comes with a dopamine factor and the vending machine doesn't come with the dopamine factor. Dan: That's the truth, isn't it? Yeah, but we're all seeking that excitement of the the lot machine. Yeah, it's a cruel optimism, that's funny. Dean: I think it's a good. I think it's a good title. You know, he everything but and. But. It has that somebody else's formula for the future is going to work for you. You know, so I have a. You know I have a little saying that in order to create a more, bigger and better future, you have to first start by creating a bigger and better past. And the reason is the past is all yours to work with. The future is nobody's to work with. Dan: Right. Dean: Yeah, and so my feeling is the greatest breakthroughs with the new vision pro, you know and you know the other AI technologies that are coming along with it is that my feeling is that the best breakthroughs for this will be actually an industrial work, where you're actually dealing with existing engineering. You're existing with existing infrastructure and I think quality control is going to go way up, as people can check out every system you know and they look at, you know they go backstage, they go into a boiler room and they can do a check with their goggles on of every piece of machinery and they have a checklist, does this check and does this check and nothing gets missed. And I think it's going to. The great greatest breakthrough is going to be an industrial quality control. I think that's where it's going to be most used Wow and warfare. I mean all the 35, the latest jets. They operate as six pilot, six plane units. And all, every one of the pilots is aware of the other five pilots and what they're doing. Okay, and they operate as this six person unit, their radar allows them to see 500 miles out in all directions. Okay, and they can see any threat coming, probably two or three minutes before the threat sees them, which makes a big difference, you know. So yeah, somebody said, all breakthroughs happen in three ways, all human, technological breakthroughs. Number one is weaponry. Okay, that's number one, number two is toys and number three is porn. Dan: So there's a triple play right there in the making. Dean: There's a triple play. I mean, if you can check off the box, if this is good for warfare, it's good for play and it's good for porn you got yourself a winner. Dan: Oh my goodness. Dean: That's funny, I like within three days. The biggest complaint about Apple's new vision pro was you couldn't do popcorn on it. Dan: You can't I mean, it's funny, isn't it? That's the way, that's the thing, oh man. Dean: Now, instead of being horrified by that, you're being told something important. Dan: Yes, exactly that's great. So this, this is the week, dan, this is our yeah, so we'll be in. Dean: Orlando at the four seas, in Palm Beach at the four seasons. So Thursday evening will be arriving there. I've got all day Friday completely free. And but we already have Saturday for dinner and Sunday dinner in the calendar with others who have requested it. Dan: Okay so so I got lots of time. Okay, so that's my plan Initially. I may come down Friday then, but Saturday was when I was going to arrive, so maybe, let's you know, put Saturday lunch for sure, yeah, if that works for you yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and yeah. Dean: So we're completely, you know, completely flexible with those days All my materials for printing have to be in by Tuesday this week. Dan: Okay, so you're gonna. You're a relax and it's all underway. Dean: Yeah, it gets printed out of Chicago and it'll be sent to the team when they get to Palm Beach. It'll be in the four seasons and they'll just have all the materials for the workshop. Dan: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Okay, well, worst case scenario be Saturday at lunch, maybe Friday. I'll come down on Friday, okay. Dean: What'd you get? What'd you get out of today? Dan: Fascinating, I think this whole. I like this idea of the exponential thinker. Dean: I think that I will be there. You should chat with him about it. There's so many people. Dan: I'm looking, really looking forward to seeing everybody it's. I can't believe it's been a year. Dean: You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there, anyway, I think we're gonna have a good. We're gonna have a good, a good event. We have about 70 free zoners and we have another 90 guests. Dan: Oh my goodness, wow, okay, great. Yeah, so hopefully that will yield some new free zoners too. Dean: Yeah, okay, dean, see you on Saturday. Thanks, dan, bye, and just let Becca know, you know, and she'll work things out. Dan: Okay, that sounds great, okay, okay, thanks, bye, bye.

In today's episode of the IC-DISC show, I sit down with Dan Corredor, the owner of Strategic CFO, to discuss how his firm is revolutionizing the accounting landscape through near-shoring in Mexico. We explore Dan's journey starting in Colombia and arriving in Houston, where his bilingual skills have helped Strategic CFO carveout a unique niche. Our conversation reveals how Strategic CFO blends accounting expertise with innovative strategies to strengthen businesses from the inside out. Through insights on US GAAP, technology, and building capable teams, Dan shows us why accounting is about more than compliance - it's about fostering strategic growth. Near the end, Dan offers us personal anecdotes about cultivating early savings habits and his culinary interests. Our discussion provides a blueprint for navigating accounting challenges with an international perspective and strategic foresight to propel businesses higher.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Dan Corredor's firm, Strategic CFO, is leading a cost-saving revolution by near-shoring back-office accounting services to Mexico, significantly reducing costs compared to traditional US-based services. Strategic CFO was acquired by Dan Corridor in 2017 after the passing of founder Jim Wilkinson, and Dan has continued to evolve the company while maintaining its legacy. We discuss the importance of differentiating between bookkeeping and accounting, where bookkeeping involves recording transactions and accounting involves analyzing and interpreting financial data according to US GAAP. We highlight how an effective accounting team can steer companies beyond outdated systems, and how technology is transforming financial statement preparation. Dan emphasizes the symbiotic client relationships that result from a combination of coachability and strategic foresight in financial matters. There's a discussion about the challenges in the US accounting landscape, including talent shortages and wage inflation, and how near-sourcing with Mexican talent offers a solution. The near-sourcing model involves Mexican employees supervised by Texas-based controllers, ensuring quality control while offering CFO-level support to US companies. We touch upon the personal side of Dan Corridor's journey, including the importance of early financial savings and sharing personal culinary favorites, to connect with the audience. Strategic CFO brings a unique international perspective to each client they serve, emphasizing their hands-on approach and operational expertise. We wrap up with anecdotes and stories that provide insight into the practical application of financial strategies and how companies can scale efficiently with the right accounting support. LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance About Strategic CFO GUEST Dan CorredorAbout Dan TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dave: Hi, my name is David Spray. Welcome to another episode of the IC-DISC Show. Today, my guest is Dan Corredor, the owner of Strategic CFO. Strategic CFO is like many virtual CFO service companies, except that Strategic CFO has an interesting twist that they implemented a little over a year ago. They use what Dan calls near-shoring similar to offshoring, but done in Mexico, where it is very near, and we go into great detail about how they have developed a model that allows for providing professional grade back office accounting for 60% less than a traditional US-sourced solution. There's a lot of great ideas in here, whether you're looking at developing a professionalized accounting group or not. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. Good morning, Dan. Welcome to the podcast. Dan: Good morning David. Thanks for having me. My pleasure, my pleasure. Dave: So where are you calling in from today? What part of the world are you in? Dan: So we are in Shurgland, texas, which is a suburb of Houston, houston, gotcha. Dave: So let's so. You're a native of Houston. Dan: No, I was actually born in Bogota, colombia, in South America. Dave: Okay. Dan: My family moved to the States when I was a baby about six months old, grew up First 10 years in Ohio, moved to Houston area in 1976, and we've been here ever since. Dave: Oh wow, Did y'all speak Spanish at home then? Dan: We did. That was my first language. My dad always said speak Spanish at home and I don't care what you speak outside of house. We learned English outside the house when I went to school and we still speak Spanish today, and my kids do as well. Dave: That's awesome. I'm so jealous. My heritage is German and both of my grandmothers were born in the Dakotas in German communities. They only spoke German until they started school, but then they married non-German guys and then it was during World War II where, you know, speaking German was kind of frowned upon, so we lost the language. I'm always jealous of you truly bilingual folks, and bilingual with no accent in either language, because I'm assuming your Spanish has a nice Colombian accent. Dan: Right, it's pretty good as well. Yeah, it's certainly paid off. I really think that I've gotten a couple of jobs I've had in my career because most of the time I spoke Spanish and could be in Latin America. Dave: That's awesome and good for you for keeping it going to the next generation. I'm told that's easy to kind of let it slide. Dan: Especially as kids grow up, you know, get a little bit older and they start talking back in English and we have to kind of remind them. But it works. You know, my kids are not 20 and 21, and they both are fluent Spanish and English. Dave: That's awesome. What a great skill set to launch them into the world with. Dan: Yeah, we're proud of them. Dave: That's great. So you end up in Houston at some point, at least when you went to college. Dan: Yes, I went to University of Houston, got an accounting degree there and I started working in Houston in oil and gas production first, and then oil and gas services. So yeah, it's always been in Houston, except for two years in Dallas and then almost about four years as an expat in Mexico. Dave: So other than that, always based in Houston- Okay, yeah, I tell people you go through it's like the stages of grief. I tell people that like it's the stages of Houston, right, like when you first get here at least this is what I went through you hate it. There's like it seems like an ugly city. It's flat, you know the traffic, the humidity in the summertime. Then after a while you start to tolerate it and then at some point it kind of gets in your blood and if you ever move away you're like, wow, I really miss that place. That place has got a lot going for it. Dan: Yeah, I've always enjoyed it. You know I've always liked the Houston area and love Texas. Houston has been great. I love the climate, except for these January February days where you know we made it up in 32 degrees. I don't like that. But I don't mind. It has grown a lot. The last few years has experienced a tremendous amount of growth. Dave: Especially where you are. Yeah, I remember when Sugar Land was the middle of nowhere, the country it was nothing. Dan: It was nothing. I remember going to school elementary school we'd go to private school, st Thomas Memorial, and I'd tell kids where I live and I thought I was crazy. You live where you know, but it was only a 30 minute drive back then, so I know. Dave: Well, let's talk about strategic when. When did you become involved in strategic CFO? When did you acquire it? Dan: So I acquired the business in October 2017. The business has been around since the mid 90s. The founder, jim Wilkinson, was a colleague of mine and I actually met him in the 90s and it was ironic. I met him because my brother-in-law and his family hired Jim Wilkinson back in 96 or 97 to help him on a project as a CFO and my brother-in-law said, hey, you got to meet this guy. He's a really nice guy. You know, in Houston is your area. So I met him back then and you know, jim and I had similar backgrounds in regards to the type of things. We worked on our personalities, so we would do lunch and breakfast, you know, quarterly or every six months. Over the years Never worked with each other or for each other, but we'd networked a lot and we'd run into each other. We stayed in touch. We even referred business back and forth to each other, so that you know Jim is the founder and started this business, started the brand, did a great name, developing the brand, the strategic CFO, and he started our online business where we sell a membership subscription and some coaching workshops. Jim was very much a strategic coach. He loved the academic side of accounting and operations. He was very involved with the entrepreneurship program at the University of Houston, so all that really strengthened the business. And, unfortunately, jim went to bed one day in 2017 in the summer and didn't wake up and passed away. So it was really sad. I unfortunately didn't hear about his passing for two or three months afterwards and I was not able to attend his funeral, but I heard it was a beautiful funeral with, you know, a thousand people. So that was Jim. You know he was a network, he had lots of friends and you know so when he passed, I was at a company called Opportun and I was a restructuring group and I was finding an opportunity to love that firm. They've done a great job over there. But when Jim passed, you know, I thought to myself. You know, I've always been, you know, kind of un-perno myself. I've always had the back of my mind wanting to do something on my own. So when Jim passed, I approached the family and asked them what are they going to do with the firm? And they really didn't have a plan of action. So they put me in touch with their attorney and, make long story short, I acquired the firm in October 2017. And it's been great ever since. This is a year six. I can't believe we've already been here six years and we've had a great firm, great growth. We've got really good people. The brand continues to build and strength and it's a well-known brand and I meet a lot of people that a new Jim you know, and they go yeah, I knew Jim, you know, and congrats for taking over Jim's business. You know, so to me it's a privilege to take on his legacy. Dave: Yeah, no, I really like Jim. I think the last time I had dinner with him he had a restaurant I forget where it was in West U that he liked to go to and we'd had dinner or drinks probably after work one day, but that was about a year before his passing, and also like you. Well, no, I think I did hear about it, but I was out of town, I was in, I was out of state and was not able to make the funeral. But same thing I heard. Yeah it was well attended. Well, I'm glad that you reached out to the family because I'm sure they were. His wife was likely in shock from the whole thing. And so that probably worked out well that there was somebody that she knew him had a clean relationship with. So that's great. So talk to me about who are the companies that you all are best set up to serve what's really your sweet spot and who you really can add value to Right. Dan: So people ask us what are the typical companies you work on and boy it's a wide range Our clients, our smallest clients probably seven million in revenue, and our largest client is literally a 13 billion public and trade company. Dave: So it's a wide range. Dan: Now what's right down kind of the middle of the fairway? It's that typical entrepreneur or family owned business that started small and grew and is now doing 40, 50, 80 million hours in revenue and they need to professionalize the back office. It's the companies that started with very basic financial statements and cash reporting and things like that and have bookkeepers and then they move on and now their bank or their partners or investors somebody or the business owner needs professional financial statements. So we professionalize the back office, we professionalize your financial statements. I always explain to business I have this same discussion almost every single day with business owners there's a difference between bookkeeping and accounting and everybody knows bookkeeping. Everybody does bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is entering transactions into a system. You enter a PAR, you push a button, generate a report. That's bookkeeping. We don't do bookkeeping. We don't do that clerical, administrative entering transactions. We will do it as support staff, but we do accounting. We apply accounting principles based on US GAF to those transactions and it starts with everything on the P&L and everything on the balance sheet. You can go to line by line and there are some accounting principles that apply to each one of those transactions. Perfect example Yesterday I was at a client meeting. It's been a fairly new client and they have a lot of manual processes and the transactions on the bookkeeping side. And we said, hey, we can automate this and then all you're going to need is the controller and the accounting manager. And his response is wait a minute, but if you automate all this transactions, I don't need anybody. And I was like well, you're automating the bookkeeping, you're not automating the accounting. Somebody has to apply the knowledge of accounting principles to all those transactions to make sure you have the right P&L and the right balance sheet. But if you just do the bookkeeping, then all you have, in whatever accounting system you're using, is transactions in a system that are really meaningless because you don't have the right margins, you don't have the right assets, you don't have the right liabilities, because you're not applying accounting principles. So oftentimes we find ourselves as a firm educating and coaching the business owners on what is accounting. Why do they need financial statements based on US GAAP? It's not just for the public and credit companies that are trading on the Dow Jones, it's not for those billion dollar companies Every business if you don't have the proper financial statements the financial we call it financial tools, because it's more than just financial statements. If you don't have good financial tools, how do you make decisions in your business? How do you know what projects are making money and not making money truly based on accounting principles, not on a cash basis? So we have to often educate them. So our ideal company is one. Well, one is the entrepreneur or business owner that wants to listen, because we have some that they don't know what they don't know and they think. I had one business owner not too long ago, probably four months ago, telling me that these financial tools and financial statements are just purple unicorns. I was like, okay, so if somebody doesn't want to accept the fact that I've been doing this for 32 years and we know what financial statements are and how they improve your business, if that business owner thinks that they know more than we do, we can help them. If they don't want to be coached, if they don't want to listen, we can't, and we've run into those. We've run into business owners that they think they know everything. They've run their business 20, 30 years, which they run very well. They have good widgets that they make, but they don't know anything about financial statements or accounting principles. So that's the ideal client when it's coachable when it allows us to bring process and procedures and US gap so that they can have not only good financial statements, which are all historical in nature, but also what do we do with that data? Now we have to interpret that historical information, forecast it, analyze it, look at margins so that the business owner can make better decisions about the future. And we that's hence our name, strategic CFO we always want to think strategically. What do we do with that data? To interpret it so that we can properly forecast and know where the business is going and keep it financially healthy. The balance sheet and the P&L are going to describe to you the health of the business and we want to make sure it stays healthy. So that's the ideal client. Dave: So it sounds like yeah. So it sounds like really it's. Companies are kind of a victim of their own success. You know, companies who have, I mean, a $5 million company who stays static for 20 years, you know probably can't add as much value, but that $5 million company that quadruples in revenue over five to 10 years, where they outgrow their accounting system, their processes, the team. It sounds like that's where the opportunity starts, with you all. Dan: That's right. That's right when they want to grow, they want to professionalize the back office, have professional finance savings. Now there's a lot of companies do what we do and since I bought the firm, I've always thought how can we differentiate ourselves? How can we really stand out and bring something to the table? So initially, the first five years of voting the business, I thought that you know we're and it's true, we are very different because we do have a tremendous amount of operational experience. Myself speaking, I've been CEO of companies with as many as 2000 people. I've been general manager of business. When I was in an expat in Mexico, I was general manager for that business after first being the CFO. So we've got tremendous, got tremendous operational experience. I've been interim CEO for one of our clients as strategic CFO. We have that operation, and operations and accounting always have to talk to each other, Sure, but about a year and one month ago, year and two months ago, we really came up with a differentiating factor where yeah. So we, you know I've always been against outsourced accounting and I've been asked previously if we do outsource counting. I've always said no and I don't want to do it because the companies that exist today that do the traditional outsource accounting. I have two main problems with them. Number one is that they are very far removed from the operation. They are located somewhere else. They never said foot in the business, so there's not that connection with operations. Number two is that those companies do outsource accounting. They're working on 10 other clients at the same time, so the business doesn't really get the biggest bang for their buck, and that always bugging as being an operating guy. So, out of a need, one of our clients who came to us said Dan, we love y'all, we love these two people you have here. They're doing a great job, they find us. They finally got us professional accounting, financial statements and these tools and we budget and forecasting all this stuff. But we can't afford you because we're charging U of S rates and we have to charge US rates. We have to pay our people good wages, fair wages. We have to have a little margin in it. We're not going to become millionaires out of this, but we have to have a margin. So I told the owner. I said you know what? You're right, you can't afford us, you're too small. They were seven million in our business. So I went to the drawing board and came back a couple months later and we have developed now a product called mirror sourcing. Mirror sourcing is outsourced accounting, improved and on steroids. We took those two things that I don't like, which is far removed from the operation and working on multiple clients at once. So what we've done with mirror sourcing we will hire an accounting team and it's it starts. It could be a team of two kind of the typical model. It could be one, it could be 10. We actually have one that's 20, but the typical model is a controller and accounting manager. We hire them. They're dedicated to your business and they are on live every day. They only work for you. They are on teams. You go to the group and teams and join a meeting. You're talking to your accounting teams, like having them down the hall Monday through Friday. So that that eliminates that they only work for you, they're not working for anybody else. Number two the onboarding of that team and quarterly visits are on site. So the business owner, the operating team, the clerical staff. They get to know the accounting team because the onboarding is there and on according to the basis. They fly in and they sit there and they do a quarterly review review with you and they're usually there three to five days with you at the office, working with you, hand in hand. So now you start developing that relationship. Now you have a connection between the accounting team and the operations and it's dedicated team and we're able to offer that at a 60% savings. That's six zero, wow, that's huge. Yeah, because the team happens to be located in Mexico. Now why Mexico? Mexico? I spent four years in NexFAT there. I got to work with all the big four firms, got to establish a good network over there in Latin America and Mexico and Columbia and other places. There are very strong professionals. And let's just talk about accounting. The accounting professionals. The accounting professionals that we hire usually have big four experience. They work for US companies. They're all bilingual, they speak very good English, they all know US GAAP and they just happen to work remotely for that period of time between their visits and the wages and economy in Mexico is much different than US. A controller in the US will easily a qualified controller. Let me start with that, because I've seen people labeled controllers that aren't. A qualified controller is the $150,000 person in the US. An accounting manager is going to be $85,000, $90,000 person. In the US. You're spending with benefits and 401k and taxes and everything else. You're going to spend over $300,000, $350,000 on just two people for a small 10 million dollar business. That's a big pill to swallow, sure, we realize that. So we've brought that cost down. So for $12,500 a month, which is less than half of what you'd pay here, you get a team of two qualified professionals dedicated to your business that are providing this professional accounting. We started this out of a need with one company we're up to 10 and we had a very. I have got a contact at a very large public-traded company and I was telling her about this over dinner. She came back to me a couple of days later and she goes you know near source thing you told me about, can you scale that up? I said absolutely. Make long story short. We've opened up an office in Monterey, mexico, only for this publicly-traded company of 13 billion and we now have yeah, we now have I think we're at 22 accounts and that's probably going to be over 30 or 40 accounts because again, any business will benefit from reducing costs. So this large public-traded company is shifting some accounting rules and it could be AP accounts, payable accounts, receivable fixed assets, inter-company cash applications, whatever the needs are. We're able to provide that a huge savings. So with that we've developed near source and it's a successful model. It applies to any business anywhere in the US but we're able to finally bring professional accounting the work done remotely but it's on-site business every three months for 60% savings. So that's a new differentiating factor for our firm at strategic CFO and we think that's going to really take. It has taken off. We think it's going to be a change, game changer for us and our future as a business. We'll continue to do everything we're doing. We're not leaving that, but we're just adding to our revenue stream. Dave: That's really. I really appreciate the innovation of that, and it also just seems like the college students just are not enamored with entering the accounting profession right. There just seems to be staffing shortages and whereas it seems like these countries outside the US there's a greater enthusiasm to do the work. Dan: Yep, there's a large pool. There's a large pool there. You're right. I heard numbers as high as 30% less enrollment in accounting in colleges over the last couple years than historical. So there are less people entering the accounting profession. A lot of them have retired. A lot of people have simply left the accounting profession. It can be grueling, it could be long days and long month ends and long quarters, long year ends. So people have found other ways to make a living and that means it's supply and demand. That means the ones that stay in place, that are controllers and account managers. The wages they're demanding higher wages because there's less of them and there's high turnover. That's. The other thing is that companies, if they hire us in our near sourcing team, if there's tone or turnover, that's our problem, it's not the company's problem. We will fill in a role, fill in a position, if somebody leaves the near sourcing team and we have such a large stack of resumes that we're able to do this quickly. So now we've got now over 30, 35 accounts in Mexico working for us and we hope to double that number in 2024. So we are going to have a very large pool. We have a formal legal entity, we've got Bank account in Mexico, we've got any in Mexico. Payroll in Mexico. We're paying our taxes in Mexico, so it's all legit. It's all meeting all the guidelines and labor requirements that we do in Mexico. But even with all that, we're able to save US businesses a tremendous amount of money. Dave: That's awesome, and I was just reading about a new Department of Labor ruling making it even more difficult for companies to have contractors. There's always this desire by the federal government to have as few people classified as contractors as possible, and it seems like your model avoids those issues as well, because these aren't even US contractors. Right, that's right. Dan: That's correct. Yeah, they're all our employees but they're through a Mexican entity that we have down in Mexico. I failed to mention that. Each team is supervised by one of the controllers we have here in Texas. That controller is available if the client says, hey, I need to see somebody tomorrow. You know, all right, fine, controller myself can the car and go see the client and a month end all the. We have quality control. The controller here in Houston reviews a month and reports, meets with the team several times during the week. So the controller usually supervises three or four teams and that's how we're splitting it up. So the controller is busy full time. We'll continue to hire local controllers in Houston because we need more supervisors and are supervising these accounting teams in Mexico. So we do have local support and, being the strategic CFO, our specialty is CFOs, so we actually bring that to the table also. So a company, by signing up with us for the near sourcing, yes, they get the team, but they also get the support of our firm at the CFO level. So I've attended many bank meetings, many business owner meetings you know, strategic meetings with business owners because they are our clients and we're able to provide that CFO support by them joining our near sourcing model. Dave: Now I really, I really love that and I, you know, our clients tend to be similar to yours, you know, except all of our clients are privately held. You know median annual revenues probably 60 or $75 million, and so here's a question so there's obviously a cost to professionalizing the back office accounting function. Dan: What are? Dave: some of the financial benefits to having more. So, as I mentioned, there's a cost to professionalizing your back office, right, but I'm sure there's also financial benefit. What are some of the financial benefits that you've seen from companies who do upgrade their accounting function, the quality of their financial statement? I mean, I can imagine some benefits, but what are some of the benefits you've seen? Dan: Great question and oftentimes a new business owner that I meet will ask me the same question. So my response is if you do not do this, if you do not spend money on professional accounting we call US GAAP accounting whatever books and records you're keeping are wrong Period they're wrong. The most common example is cash basis account. If you manufacture widgets or you install something or you have contracts and you do not have the professional US GAAP accounting, you do not have a true picture of your margins Period Because it's cash basis. The world we live in is a world of accrual accounting and I don't want to get into accounting and accruals and all that, but it's a timing difference. The easiest example is an invoice and a counter-sealable. That is, in essence, the most basic example of an accrual. We have a timing difference. That's the economy we live in. Unless you sell the company that does not need professional accounting like we provide, is the guy who has a hamburger stand and sells burgers for cash and receives every day, for example, a little bit bigger than the hamburger stand or hotdog stand. We really can't help. For example, a fast food business that's point of sale. They sell a burger and fries and they collect At the franchisee level. At that small business level, they're not going to benefit from US GAAP accounting. Now the company that owns them and has multiple franchises will, because they've got accruals, they've got vendors and they've got this and they've got that and they buy machines the cash basis transaction. In the most simplest explanation, if I sell you something for cash and I don't have any inventory and I don't have any receivable or any payable or anything else, and I don't buy equipment, they don't need us. But that's a tiny business. That's what the US government calls a micro business. The companies we deal with are not micro businesses. The company we deal with have employees, they've got insurance, they buy equipment, they have inventory or they have complicated services or they have contracts that go over 30 days. There's some nuance and by not having professional accounting, you don't have a good financial statement. If you don't have a good income statement, how do you know your margins? How do you know what you really have? How do you know if you're losing money? By having them, not only do you have good reporting tools, but we've also increased your enterprise value. I've had several investment bankers tell me over the years that the difference between having the professional accounting versus not is at least a multiple of one of enterprise value. That's huge. If you've got a business that does a million dollars of EBITDA, that's a multiple of one. We just added a million dollars of value by bringing a professional accounting to your business. Not only does it help you in the short term which is running the business, because now you understand your margins and you're able to forecast and plan your cash flow and determine if you're going to reinvest in your business but we're also adding value on a long-term basis enterprise value those are the benefits and we're never going to cost you that added value that we bring to the table. We're not going to cost you a million dollars a year, but we're adding that value and what about Most business owners? Dave: will listen yeah and I can also imagine that, let's say, their bank starts requiring reviews or audits. I'm guessing that the audit fees by the accounting firm are probably going to be less if you're providing them professional financial statements that are gap basis already. Dan: That's right. So if somebody, first of all, I would recommend that everybody go through an audit because it's just good to have. But if you're required to have an audit, yes, an audit firm which we do not do audits we're not a CPA firm, but an audit firm will come in and do an audit First of all, they cannot complete an audit if you don't have professional accounting Right. So what the audit firm is going to tell you is you need to hire somebody, get your books and records per US gap so we can audit you. Otherwise, we're going to audit you and you're going to have a qualified opinion because you don't meet any of the accounting principles. And the audit firm cannot do that service for you because they get conflicted out. Dave: They can audit their own work. 30 years ago, I think they had more latitude. Dan: Yes, yeah, before my prior employer, enron, before Enron in 2000,. You know, the Sarbanes Oxley was formed. A lot of accounting principles were changed at that time. I think it was at that time that it was required that if you have to split your services, if you're going to be auditing, you can't be consulting and you can't be auditing your own work. So, and we've been hired by companies that are going through an audit, and audit firms have contacted us and said hey, I have a client, here's what they need help on to get their books and records to this professional level. And we are hired by the client. The audit firm comes in later, after we're done, and they can complete their audit and we're able to save us some money by doing that. Dave: But yes, I know that makes sense. What do you enjoy most about your role with the company? Dan: I love dealing with businesses that trust us and I've got, and most of our clients do, 95% of our clients do, or 99. We may have one or two that don't believe yet because we're still new, but I love getting involved with the business owner or business owners that trust us and they allow us to deliver over time. Because it takes time, it doesn't happen overnight. It'll take three or four months to develop a relationship. It'll develop six or eight months to finally get things really where they're seeing the deliverables. But I love seeing the transformation and we've got many examples in our firm of transformation where a company started with no financial reporting that was accurate to really good financial reporting and cash flow forecasts and budgeting and financial models where we interpret that data and everything's working. So watching that transformation is very rewarding. That's what I love the most and I love dealing with business owners on the operating side where we can add value as well. Dave: Sure, yeah, no, I can certainly relate to that. Well, I can't believe how fast this time has flown by. I've just a couple of kind of fun questions for you. Are you ready for some outside the box questions? Bring it on, I love it Awesome. So let's say you could go back in time and give advice to your 25 year old self. What advice might you give to your 25 year old self with the benefit of you know, the last few decades? Dan: If I were to go back to my 25 year old self, I'd say start saving money early. And that's what I tell my children. We had a discussion over Christmas In your early 20s. Unless you're really smart and talented and I wasn't you don't understand the time value of money and compounding interest. Dave: Yeah. Dan: Like you do now. And if I literally told my kids to go for Christmas, we had this exact same discussion. I said you know, take 25% of your paycheck and put it away in some account that you're never going to touch, yeah, don't even think about it. And by the time you're 50 or 60, you're going to see a huge nest egg and it's going to feel very rewarding. That's something I would do differently. I was. I got married late, you know, I was 34. So I worked hard. In my 20s I was already working for very large companies in nice positions controller roles. In my time I was 30 controller roles. So I was busy with making good money but also spending money, you know, getting the nice. I was really focused on getting the nice car, you know, traveling and, you know, not so focused on planning ahead and planning a family. Then I stumbled onto my beautiful wife and said, oh my God, I got to get married, you know. And then you know, soon after, kids, and then you know the house, and then but so anyway, that's the long response I would say early, mid 25, start saving early. Dave: Okay, yeah, I see I read a study once that said and it was a crazy number Like if you saved a certain you know amount of money you know call it $10,000 a year from the time you were 22 until you were 30, and then you stop saving, you never saved again. You'd have more money, like when you were 65 or seven. Then if you started saving at like 40, and you saved that $10,000 a year for 25 years, like you'd end up with less money than saving for eight years early on, which just demonstrates that whole time value of money. I think Einstein said the compound interest was the most amazing invention in the history of the world, or some crazy thing. Dan: It's crazy that the effect on that dollar saved early on is huge, you know, and I think I would do that different. Dave: Okay, well, here's the last question. I guess I have one and a half questions. I have the last fun one and then the last one will just be if there's anything we did and you covered, that we should have but the fun one is barbecue or Tex-Max barbecue. Okay, that's usually the most common answer. I stole that question. We helped Chris Hans, like the managing partner, and Boiler Miller. We were able to help them launch a podcast, and that's one of his standard questions that I've copied. I find it to be a fun question. Dan: It's a tough one. I almost said Tex-Max it's a tough one, or? Dave: I guess I should have asked you barbecue Tex-Max or authentic Colombian food. Dan: Yeah, I'd still go with barbecue or Tex-Max. Yeah, club with food is okay. I find it to be a little bit blander, but it's okay, that's good, I'm gonna knock it. My Colombian friends will hate me, but I don't know. It's good. Dave: Well, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I? Dan: had. Well, maybe you know one other comment that I'd like to add about our firm, which is a little bit differentiated. Facts is, we have a lot of good international experience, not just myself, but my managing director, oscar Pinoe, cindy Dinn. They both have tremendous audit and international experience, oscar also interesting. If we haven't made it, let me tell you Oscar's story. We actually met in a small town in Argentina 23, 24 years ago when we were both at Weatherford. I hired him when I was in at Weatherford as controller for Latin America and he was an accountant that I hired. He ended up staying at Weatherford for 20 plus years, did very well, grew throughout the. You know the ladder at Weatherford and he left Weatherford a couple years ago and joined our firm. But we've got tremendous international experience, tremendous operational experience that could also add value to companies. Dave: So okay, well, yeah, that is great to know. Well, Dan. And then, if people want to learn more about the services, what's the best place to learn more Best? Dan: place to go to is our webpage, strategiccfocom. There's two C's in the middle there strategiccfocom. Or just call my cell phone. You know I don't mind people call my cell phone 713-501-7481. But we're still small enough that we touch every client I do. I like meeting all our clients and spending time with them. We're very involved with all of them. Myself and our managing directors are available to any one of our clients at any time. So yeah, we'd love to continue Jim's legacy and continue to build this firm. Dave: That's awesome. Well, Dan, thank you again for spending time with me today. I know the listeners are really good. Thank you, David. More and especially this near sourcing model. I think that's really intriguing, and I hope you have a great day. Dan: Thank you very much, appreciate your time and thanks for having me All right. Special Guest: Dan Corredor.