A Downpour of New Ideas

Dean: Mr. Sullivan.

Dan: Mr. Jackson, it's. Welcome to Klein.

Dan: It's almost like a weather event, you know, where when I hear your voice, it's like, well, you know, it's a full front again. A full front of new ideas.

Dean: Hey, there we go. Well, how was your Thanksgiving getaway?

Dan: Well, it was great. It was great. Yeah. You know, we were on our island. So the. It's an island that's connected. So they build a causeway. But it used to, you know, in the old days it was a complete island. And there, as far as we could tell there, you know, there's about 16 cottages and I think maybe six or seven families were there, including ourselves. And then Shannon Waller, who, you know is a 29 year veteran of Coach and her mother, who's been with us for 23 years, and her sister who's been with us for 24 years, they were all there and it's the first time I've seen them in person. Marilyn and Julia, Shannon's sister and mother. It's the first time I've seen them since. In person, since March. March 13th.

Dean: Well, I'm going to tell you something that one of my greatest joys in life when coming to Toronto is the rare occasion of getting what we've started lovingly calling a Three Waller hug, where you get all three of the Wallers in one hug. And I'm. I've gone all of 2020 with. With. I may have had one Waller hug in February.

Dan: I think it might have been. Yeah, yeah. I think anyway. Yeah, it's. They've been great. You know, they've been just great unique abilities for us. And in each case they found their own niche. You know, what I try to do is we create kind of a setting where we help people zero in on what we call their unique ability and Strategic Coach and then the company, you know, the company has various growth challenges. And what we do is we see if somebody's unique ability can fill a niche, kind of be a whole know, be a particular type of who. You being the author of the concept of who, not how. That's exactly what we tried to do is we encourage people to be the most valuable who that they can be inside the company. And they've done stars, all three of them.

Dean: Oh, that's awesome. Well, that's nice.

Dan: Yeah. So it's kind of interesting. I'm 76 and they're combined time at strategic coach is 76 years. So. Oh my goodness, that's a lot of experience. You know, I mean, one of the things that I've been contemplating lately is what I call institutional wisdom that when people have been sort of usefully and happily employed in a project for a long period of time, they work out all sorts of understood teamwork which isn't necessarily written. It isn't necessarily written down anywhere. But, you know, when Covid happened and we have the shutdown on March 13, we had, out of our total, we had about 100 and pushing 130 team members and 76 of them had more than 10 years experience in the company. So my. A bit more than half. Wow. And, and, and we pared down because about 20, I would say about 20 of them had been hired within the last six to 10 months.

Dean: Six.

Dan: And they really hadn't found their place yet. And so in both the United States and Canada, they, you know, the government

Dean: gave relief to people.

Dan: So we, you know, we just had to make a decision right off the bat because we didn't have time and we didn't have a focus to help them kind of find their place in coach. We need people with experience. And so we, this is the first time we've ever done it, by the way. And you know, and we had gotten through 31 years without ever paring down during a downturn. But we did this time and you know, and about half of them said, you know, when you. Things start growing again and you find a new normal, can we consider coming back? So it wasn't a negative.

Dean: Right.

Dan: Way in which they. But our team leaders said, we just don't have time to sort them out. You know, they were, they were hired for growth purposes. But now the growth won't happen during this year. Right?

Dean: Well, not like that. Not traditional growth, but you've grown the Cloudlandia division, Unlimited opportunities in Cloudlandia, which

Dan: is off to a good start. I mean, we have two full workshops and you know, 21 countries. That's the, I mean, that's the, you know, early signs of what the future might be is a sudden jump in the number of companies, countries. And probably the one that's probably most an indication of what's to come is that in the first 30 years we had 25 strategic coach clients from Australia, 25 total. And in these first two virtual workshops, we had 15 coaches, more Australians. So. And in each case it was something they had known about for quite a while. It was on sort of a future checklist for them. They wanted to attend Strategic Coach. But, but the plane flight was always arduous.

Dean: It was a. Oh, man. Yeah, for sure. That's an even. I Mean helped when you started doing Los Angeles, but they could kind of within striking distance. But yeah, even still.

Dan: Well, it's still Los Angeles. I mean we do it on Los Angeles time, you know. And, and they, you know, they don't mind doing things early in the morning or late at night because they're kind of used to doing that in relationship to the world anyway because they've. Yeah, you know, they.

Dean: I had, I had a, the second of my email lead conversion workshops started this week and I had. The geographic span was from Gold Coast, Australia to Portugal. So we had that whole people on there same time from you know, really early in the morning. I think it was 4am in, in gold coast and into the evening in, in Portugal, but all at all points in between. So it was kind of.

Dan: Yeah, we, yeah, I had a two hour, you know, one of my two hour connectors for the 10 times. This was on Tuesday. I think it was on Tuesday. And I had to Sarah, Wednesday, I forget which date it was, but we had, we had about probably 60. So this is 10 times and it could be from any 10 times workshop. But we, depending on whether you call the east or west, we had two from Mumbai, one from, you know, a couple from the Emirates from Dubai and I think one from another place in the, you know, the Emirates and then you know, areas of Europe or Spain. Spain and you know, I think probably Switzerland and then UK but wrapping around the globe going around completely the other, the other direction. We had Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. You know, so if you take Singapore as the furthest going west and you take Mumbai the furthest going east, there's, you know, it covers about 20 time zones.

Dean: That's amazing, isn't it?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. And you know, and they're completely okay with it. And you know, they said they bought, they all took steps, you know, to raster whatever else they need to. Need to do or would rest as soon as it was over with.

Dean: But.

Dan: And yeah, and I tell people I said this is normal what we're doing right now. What we're doing right now is normal. I said we are getting to a new normal. This, we're in the new normal. This is the way the world's going to be for the rest of our entrepreneurial lives.

Dean: Yes, I think that's gonna be true. I think the, you know, I was looking just this morning actually the full circle sort of actualization now of cloud kitchens where, you know, this is the new normal now when you start looking at the food, you know, the process of starting a A restaurant. Now, how that has really evolved. And, you know, I remember because I remember we may have had a conversation about this, about the concept of the. The ghost restaurants when it first kind of came out, when it first was on the radar, you know, maybe five years ago now, and where it was just a, you know, kind of a secret. It was a. People were kind of like, hey, wait a minute, there's no actual restaurant here. Like, it's. There's no. They don't have any. Any dining room here. And people were kind of hiding the fact that the food was actually being prepared in a commissary kitchen. And it was a, you know, kind of loophole thing that people were taking advantage of. But now it's gone to where it went full. Everybody's aware of it now. And now there's an entire infrastructure funded by, you know, Travis Kalanick sold 90% of his Uber stock and is full in on this cloud kitchens concept where they are providing everything that a, you know, food entrepreneur would need to start a restaurant, including the support things where literally all you do is come in and do the cooking, and they've got runners that take the food and a centralized collection area for the delivery people. So everything is just, you know, completely supported. It was like the idea of what we're talking about, a capability farm. A capability farm where you come in and you fully embrace a cow. The. The. The creative person of it who just allowed to do their. Allowed to do their unique ability. Fully supported by farmers all around them. Yeah.

Dan: You know, I grew up in a town in northern Ohio, first on the farm. But when I was about 11, we moved into a town called Norwalk, and it was named after a town in Connecticut. So there was. You could tell where the people had come from who actually came to Norwalk. And a man in the 1920s started collecting, you know, like, eggs and. Eggs and meats and that from the local farmers. And he then set up delivery for all the stores, you know, and he had, you know, first of all, he had just an early kind of truck, and then he started accumulating trucks. And then it got to the point where he would have, you know, companies that would. Wanted to ship things, they would ship. He would pick them up with a smaller truck and then take them to a terminal, and then they would be packaged up and they would be put in larger trucks. And then started so very early in the truck trucking lines. And private. Was a private company. But by 19, you know, when I came across 1955, they were the. They were the largest independent truck line in the United States. And they were the second largest overall truck line in the United States. And basically from Chicago east, they didn't go west of Chicago because that part of the country hadn't developed fully yet. And it was called Norwalk Truck Lines. And my father, he would do the farm work during the farming season, but in the winter, you know, let's say. I would say probably October till October to March. I'd say October to March, he would work on the docks at the Norwalk Truck Line and tell you how things have changed. I used to get off school and the terminal was about four blocks from the school. And I walked down and I would just walk around the terminal. I go in the machine shops and into the offices and everything else. And I met, you know, the president of the company, John Ernst House and Wood Rock. He says, how are you today, Dan? He says, you up for Dr. Pepper? And I said, oh, Mr. Pepper. He says, let's go. Let's go get a. Go get a Dr. Pepper, you know, and he treated me to a Dr. Pepper.

Dan: And he said, what are you discovering about truck lines? And he said. He said. I said, you know, I just go in and look at the map and I say, what a wonderful thing that packages sitting on the dock right now are going to go to this city and this city and this city. So, you know, I mean, it's not the same. It's the same principle of the. Of the ghost kitchen, so it says, is that, you know, individual restaurants have to do everything. If you think about what they have to do, everything they have to do ordering and supply and they have to keep up their backstage and they have to hire and, you know, and everything like that.

Dean: Right.

Dan: So my sense. My sense is that this is sort of the truck line principle from 1920 being applied to the. The entire, you know, the entire experience of feeding yourself for the day is now being supplied by another one of these. It's kind of like a platform, really. It's a platform. And he created a Truckline platform in 1920. And then you're creating another kind of platform in, you know, in 2020. So it's a hundred years, but if you look at it, you say, well, this is the same, and this is the same, and this is the same, and this is the same. And, you know, but it's 100 years later with all the technology that goes along with the passage of time.

Dean: Yeah. Everything just getting faster. And, you know, like, now there's a whole. That was reading online about the Next. There's so many different nuances now to people solving this. What they've still come to call the last mile, you know, problem or the last mile, you know, services of getting things to two people. And now apparently the thing is with apartment complexes or condo buildings, it's still a bit of an issue for non doorman related things. So now there's sort of companies that are intermediaries. Well, they will accept the packages kind of thing and then when you get home, you call and they'll come and deliver it to you at the right, whenever you want. Like, like you order it to come, you know, to your, to your house there. So it's really, you know, we really have. Anything physical can be in our hands, you know, literally the next morning. What they're doing now is they're calling dawn delivery, where if you order something, if you order something by midnight, you can have it delivered by dawn the next morning. So 7:30am when you wake up, it's there for you. Yeah, that's pretty like what a great.

Dan: Well, some of them. For example, we notice a noticeable difference in quality of delivery. If you take FedEx and you take UPS and you take Amazon. Amazon is 100%. The inferior delivery service compared to UPS is by far the best. And part of the reason is their drivers stay with them for 25 or 30, 35 years. And so they know quirks about neighborhoods. So for example, between our house and the next house there's a missing number. So we're 39 and the next house is 43. So and the numbers are there, but you have to look, you kind of have to look for them. But UPS knows this. We've had the same driver in our neighborhood probably since we've been here. So they know the quirks and FedEx is a little better, but the Amazon, for about two weeks they would think that we're 41 and then they would think that 37 was actually 39. So everything that was supposed to go to our house, they didn't know. So they just threw the packages over the fence into the front yard and left.

Dean: Wow.

Dan: And it rained one day and all the packages were soaking wet and we phoned them up and they didn't, they didn't do a good job. So, you know, and so what I notice is that there's some weaknesses in all those systems. If you have new people driving every day, there's going to be problems, you know, like, and you know, human beings are not infinitely replaceable.

Dean: Mm,

Dan: that's true.

Dean: That's true. You Know, I don't, I don't know that the. Yeah, this whole infrastructure now, this whole like invisible, you know, surface layer of the mainland. This certainly, this delivery logistics is one of the major, is one of the major things. Yeah. So I wonder there may be some.

Dan: Well, the thing is that in the technology world, convenience and efficiency are the central standards. And cost.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Getting the cost, but those aren't the central standards in the mainland.

Dean: Yeah. I wonder if that's true. You know, like you look at the things. I'm starting to just get the lay of the land of. I was looking for the underlying context of things. Right. Like what the actual undergirding is of things. And when you look at that layer of moving goods around right to your house in a timely manner, that is better than it's ever been for sure. But we're still having problems like you just described, you know.

Dan: Yeah, well, I think that certain things like food, we want it now, you know, I mean, we don't want it two days. We don't want it two days from now.

Dean: Right.

Dan: You know, you know, we. So it depends upon the thing being purchased. Like people say, you know, I ordered this thing, you know, I ordered a new pair of shoes in the morning and I got them in the afternoon.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And you say, well, that's really great. But if they had come two days from now, would that been a problem? You know, I mean.

Dean: Right.

Dan: They were a new pair of shoes. So my sense is, well, first of all, food's perishable, but I think that, you know, when you're hungry, you're hungry. You don't delay your hunger for two days. Yeah. So I think it depends upon the particular human need or the human want that's being, you know, but there's no question that there was a, you know, you know, I don't know if you remember a long time ago, I used to describe the marketplace as Death Valley. And so what you have is you have two mountain rangers, you have a mountain range. The Highland, let's call it the Highland left hand side and the Highland on the right hand side. And then there's this valley in the middle and it's the one. Highland is extreme custom design. It's, you know, it's kind of like, yeah, it's like just ultra custom design on one side and then on the other side is Walmart or Amazon. You know, like you have the, you know, complete commoditization, you know, with all the, you know, speed of delivery, low cost, infinite variety on the one Side. The other side.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: Custom designing just for your needs. You know, in the middle is everything else. And they're neither foul nor fish. You know, like I look at the retail stores in my neighborhood that have gone out of business in the last seven months, and I said, yeah, but they weren't. They didn't offer low price, convenience, infant variety. And on the other hand, they didn't custom design anything for you either. You know, they were in the middle. And so there was nothing to hold your loyalty to them.

Dean: Yes. Including an experience or anything.

Dan: Yeah, right. The experience was, you know, you went in there and they didn't have what you want and they kind of treated you indifferently.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan: So, you know, and so they get. So my sense is that there's a general killing off of neither unique nor convenient.

Dean: And, you know, this is kind of an interesting. In that same vein, you know, Joe Polish and I were talking about the annual event coming up for Genius Network where we're talking about just this thing, these custom designed, highly customized events where

Dan: you.

Dean: What we have now with the way zoom and the way the breakout rooms work is you have an opportunity to really create a customized experience for people where you can have exactly the type of discussions that you want to have or to be. You know, pursue the things that are most interesting to you. And what I found this is. I wonder if there's a parallel here, but there was a. When we were looking at, well, what do you think people are going to, you know, want to discuss? Like we talked. Joe's got the overriding concepts of health, wealth, and elf. Those are the three kind of contexts of what everything is. And we started thinking about if somebody could design anything they wanted around health and around wealth and around elf, what would be the things that they would choose, you know, like if you gave them the opportunity. And it reminded me of years ago, Burger King, when they launched their new chicken sandwich. com and what it was was a site because Burger King's, you know, tagline is have it your way. And so subservient chicken. They had a guy in a chicken costume in what looked like a apartment in Hollywood or something, looking at the camera almost like a. And this was sort of pre YouTube, right, where video was just kind of get it new on the Internet. It was just started to get where you could stream video and stuff. And so the, the chicken would. You would go to the website, all you would see Is a screen with the chicken guy standing there looking at the camera like he's looking at you with a box underneath, a search box where you could type in your command. You know, command the chicken to do whatever you want. And then you press go. And it looks like the guy's kind of reading, seeing what's come up, and then he'll do that. So you say jump up and down. And then the chicken would jump up and down and you'd say chase your tail, and he would chase his tail. So it felt like you were commanding this chicken in real time, that it was like a real guy.

Dean: But it turns out what they were doing was they just had a series of, you know, 30 or 40 second video loops that he always stood on a mark, and so it started there. He would see what came in, and then he would do whatever it was and then return to the mark, be there waiting for you to give him the next command, which was really just getting back to the, the home base kind of thing. And it would feed whatever the next video that you.

Dan: That was tagged.

Dean: So how they did it though, Dan, was they took a picture of the guy, put it on a piece of paper with 10 lines underneath it, handed out a thousand of them to people and said, think of 10 things that you would command the chicken to do. And people would write the things. And then they took all of those entries, all of those things, data, entered them into a spreadsheet and kind of created the, the tags of what it was. And what they found was that there's 80% of, you know, the 80, 20 rule, certainly 80% of the things that, that people asked it to do made up 20% of the, the things. And there was very little in the sort of longer tail of it. And they ended up making all, you know, all of these, but covered almost 90% of all the things that somebody could ask for. And I said to Joe, I think it's going to be the same thing. Right. If you think of giving somebody, if you could have anything you want to know about health or about wealth or about elf, what would be the things? And, you know, I think it's, it's a really. There's a opportunity there within sort of the. I want to be careful about the word I use the illusion of customization or the sense of customization that you can provide that for people.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's an interesting thing because in all human beings there's a line between consuming and creating.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, and, you know, and, you know Just, you know, talking for myself right here is that I'm less and less interested in new consuming capabilities or consuming experiences and more and more interested in new creating capabilities. Yeah, yeah. So my sense is people really vary where they are with the line, you know, some of emerge 20% consumption and 80% create grading and some of them are 90% consumption and 10% creating. So, you know, I think people are responsible. Maybe.

Dean: Can you clarify that? Tell me what you mean by that. Well, for example, what would be an example?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. Well, television. Watching television. I used to, I figured that I probably watch television, you know, 15 hours a week, maybe an hour during the week and a couple hours, you know, two or three hours on Saturday and Sunday. And I don't know what it was. It was just a, it was a fluke thing. It happened in two years ago. So it would have been 2018. But July and August were just beautiful months and Babs and I here living in Toronto, we'd, instead of in the evening watching television, we'd, you know, we'd eat on Fatio and we, you know, we'd have our Kindles and we'd read and we'd talk and everything else. And then we'd go to bed. Then we have a cottage up north and we went to cottage and the same thing and we don't even have a TV up north. So that's it. So I suddenly realized from around July 20th till Labor Day, I hadn't watched television once. You know, I just had not watched it. And I said, it's really interesting because I don't feel I've been deprived of anything. There wasn't like an overriding need to get back to watch television. Oh God, you know, I got to get back there and watch television. I noticed, yeah, if anything, my habits had shifted during a six week period. And I said, I wonder how long I can go with this. Well, I'm now one full year, two full years and three more months. You know, I'm three more months into it. And we just cancelled all, we just canceled all of our cable, you know, we just canceled that. We still need the Internet that we, you know, we canceled the TV package and everything like that. And it was, it was four, you know, it was kind of four separate things you had to do on the television. And I couldn't, if you asked me today, Dan, can you turn on the tv? You know, I mean, right. I said, I've kind of forgotten how to do it. You know, it wasn't just, it wasn't like the old Days where you just, you know, you click. Something on the TV came out. So that was consumption. That was 15 hours of consumption per week times 52 weeks. So it's, you know, 750. Some.

Dan: Somewhere around 750 hours. And my reading has gone through the roof, you know, and reading is more of a. As a. More of a creative form of consumption than television. In other words, you have to use your brain. You have to remember characters. You know, if it's a mystery story, you're looking for clues and everything else. So what I'm noticing, and it's just a general trend, I think, in my 70s, that I'm looking for novelty. You know, I'm looking for novelty, you know, where I get to use my brain to interact with things. And just having things done for me, it's not that interesting anymore. Mm, no. So there. So that's a. You know, some variations. First of all, I think that people are, you know, just from this consumer, on the one hand, because there's nothing creative about watching 15 hours of television. You know, you're getting hit, you know, every. They're doing a change of pace every 10 to 15 seconds, you know, to keep your interest and make sure you don't switch the channel. And they want to get their ads in and everything like that. So. So their parcels of information have gotten smaller and more emotional. You know, like, they're shorter and they're more emotional. They. They want to shock you. And so, you know, I'm just talking about one individual out of eight billion here. So. Yeah, yeah, I'm noticing my line is switching. So that's the thing that. I mean, they're trying to. You know, I can. You know, if you're looking at people who are trying to capture millions of people, they're trying to find the thing that's the same for all million and then just pound it to death, you know, like. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of interesting. But humans are, you know, they can be weirdly unpredictable.

Dean: Yeah, this is. Yeah, I think, you know, you ever think about the. I was trying to calculate maybe how much. I think probably at that same pace, 15 hours, you don't realize that's 750 hours a year. That's a lot of.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. So far, you know, it's approaching what most people, you know, if you take 20, 27 months, it's. The amount of time freed up from television for me, is probably equal to most people's average work. Work hours, you know, for a year. 2000, 2000 work hours. And you Know, but I noticed my productivity has jumped up. I'm doing far more, you know, in the, you know, creating new materials for the program. I've doubled the number of contacts that I have per quarter. I always, you know, I was about 13 full day workshops, but now I have 2613 full day workshops and I have 26 two hour, two hour sessions. And I'm liking it. I don't feel burdened by this. I'm kind of liking the greater frequency of contact. I'm finding that two hours, it's an hour and a half and I'm going to increase the pre zone to two hours because I think 90, because then I can do two breakout groups and in two hours I can do two breakup groups. And that really adds a lot to the quality of the conversation. Uh huh.

Dean: Yeah. I'm finding with the, by the lead conversion workshops that, that model of. I've been doing three hour things with, you know, two with a full, with a break in between in the middle, but space down.

Dan: That's on three Tuesdays, two Tuesdays, four depending on four Tuesdays.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: For two days, three hours. Yeah, yeah.

Dean: And so that is, you know, I do find that's, I think a, you know, a great way of getting an impact on something that is going to benefit by experimenting by you taking something that you learned on day one and then implementing it and coming back and talking about that. So now you have not only the intellectual understanding of it, but you have an experience of it.

Dan: Yeah. And you have time. Yeah. And you have time to test too. And you have time to.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan: I think there's all sorts of shifts going on, you know. I mean. Yeah, you know, I mean and there's big industries that I have just, you know, been devastated. Professional sports, for example, baseball, football, basketball, their TV ratings are, I think NFL, their TV ratings are down 20%. The Major League Baseball, their TV ratings are down 50% and the NBA was down 75% playing for the playoffs, you know, they only had 25%. And, and, and I think the reason is that they don't know how to increase the entertainment, you know, the entertainment value. How do you increase the entertainment value when you had already more or less maxed out?

Dean: Yeah, this whole. Yeah, you know, I watched some of the NBA and the way they had the visuals, the stands was really weird to see. Like, you know, they had crowd noises and then digital images of fans. So trying to recreate the fans.

Dan: They had cutouts, they had like.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Was that done? Was that baseball? That was Baseball, I think it would have been better if they had put giraffes and zebras and gorillas in the stands.

Dean: Well, the U.S. open at tennis. The U.S. open, tennis, they had nobody in the stands, but they had their ratings.

Dan: Their ratings were up.

Dean: That's interesting.

Dan: But it's purely tennis and golf actually. The ratings have been up this year. So what is it about those two sports that's, you know, that's uniquely different?

Dean: Yeah,

Dan: I don't know, it's funny, like I was thinking about nascar. NASCAR wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. You know, you can't, you never see the fans anyway, you know, and you can't hear the, you can't hear the fans, you can't see the fans. So I don't think that's nascar. And NASCAR is actually a bigger, you know, it's a bigger sports, it's a bigger TV sports than the major league sports. Yeah, NASCAR draws a lot more. Yeah, yeah. I think late, late nights in the strategic planning, strategic planning departments. A lot of big industries. Yeah. I mean airlines, what do you do? You're a startup. You know, you may be the biggest airline in the world, but guess what, you're a startup.

Dean: I've been seeing some great charts. I think the chart for, I think air travel is off by 70% or something. Is that possible? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dan: I'm surprised as high as 30% that actually do fly. Yeah, yeah. One of the things we had one of our clients and he's grown a logistics company, he's got a global logistics company sending packages. And I was saying, you know, with the air carrier, you know, the passenger carriers down a lot must leave a lot more air traffic room for the cargo, you know, for cargo planes, just pure cargo planes. He says, well, he said that's the interesting point. He said is that one of the things that made the passenger airlines,

Dean: you

Dan: know, profitable was the fact that on a full flight, like you take one of their big planes, you know, you have 250 passengers. He said yes, they're actually luggage. He says only represents about a third of the total freight that they're carrying. He said, he said we were, we, you could send freight out. He said that's how you can get, you know, fast time delivery because there's far more passenger flights in the world than there are cargo flights. And so he says it's really been hard. He says I, he says our numbers are up. But he says it's harder because you can't promise like two day delivery because, you know, he said he Said because you don't know if you're actually going to have a plane that's going to have room for you. Yeah. So everybody's had to refigure things.

Dean: Wow. So he's saying that they, that was what they were using was.

Dan: Oh, yeah, it was just automatic. I mean, if you want to ship something to Chicago, you know, from Toronto to Chicago, well, you got Air Canada, you got WestJet, you've got United Airlines, you got. Yeah, yeah. He says there's 40 flights. 40, 50 flights a day.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, of course you can get it there tomorrow. He said, I didn't realize, you know, but he says if they're down 70% now, 40 flights have become 12 flights and everybody's fighting over getting their package on One of the 12 flights, you know, so.

Dean: I see.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. So it's a very, really, really interesting. This is the mainland, you know, the mainland is. Yeah,

Dean: I'm really seeing these whole, like, I'm just, I'm really, I've been doing a lot of journaling and a lot of really observing of the contexts of things. Right. Like we have talked about this idea of the, the kind of 30 mile zone as the, your mainland hub, your mainland bubble that you, that is affecting you. But certainly everything is, you know, I wonder, what if I were putting a percentage on it? How much of things are, what percentage of things are driven by, you know, Cloudlandia? You know, all of our entertainment and all of our news and all of our, you know, awareness and shopping and everything is, is certainly Cloudlandia.

Dan: Well, the interesting thing is the lifestyle, you know, I mean, first of all, you know, society is divided. People don't like talking about it. It's not an American thing to talk about, it's not a Canadian thing to talk about, but the classes, you know, the classes. So you and I are entrepreneurs. So entrepreneurs are kind of a separate class unto their own. You know, if you take a look. Because we declare independence from the economic system of most people very early in life, you know, declare independence from it. And therefore socially we don't have to pay attention to a lot of social cues that if you wanted to, if you were in a corporate or, you know, whether it's a government bureaucracy or a corporate bureaucracy or you're just an employee, that certain kind of social, you know, you have to pay certain kind of social rules and you know, you got to take part in certain kind of, you know, you have to dress properly, you have to pay attention to your, you know, and, you know, and your small Talk has to reflect small talk of other people. And, you know, and there's politics in there, Scotty. You know, there's cultural. There's political things in there, and entrepreneurs, to a certain extent, if they know how to get a customer, they know how to control cash flow, they know how to produce profitability. You can be basically indifferent to other people's social concerns or their, you know, the social language.

Dean: Yeah, yeah.

Dan: And the two. But what I'm noticing is the impact of the pandemic and the worldwide pandemic, worldwide lockdown conditions on everybody. What it does to the classes. And one of the things. One of the real casualties in this has been the celebrity class. Yes. Of people who, you know, had gotten to the top. They become celebrities. And you can become celebrities in a lot of different ways in today's world, you know. Yeah. But you got to be. You got to have the language downright. You got to have the outward symbols downright and everything like that. But I think since March, nobody cares what you think about anything. Where celebrities used to make a lot of money telling other people what they thought about something, but right now, nobody really cares. And you've pointed out that they're not celebrities, but there's their influencers, that celebrities have been replaced by influencers.

Dean: Yes, absolutely.

Dan: And influencers. Yeah, yeah. Attention guiders or attention curators, basically what they are. And that's a big shift. That's a big shift. And that.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: That influencer thing you're putting your, you know, your finger on is, I think, a phenomenon of Cloudlandia. It's not. Yeah. You know, it's. I never saw the extent and the power of these individuals in the mainland. Right.

Dean: Yeah, you're right. Like, I. This is. What's that. What this allows is equal access for the long tail of outliers. I mean, there's some. You know, there's two things that I've noticed just even in observing what's happening with TikTok, and I think TikTok is a really good sort of barometer of what's going on in Plavlandia right now. I mean, just the shift in that. It's come up so kind of quickly in consciousness now, but it's been around for a while, and it is definitely where all of the attention is now. And the, you know, the advantage.

Dan: I've not. Can you. Can you explain it to me? Because I've not been on it. I mean, I've heard the name.

Dean: Okay, so what is different?

Dan: What's different about TikTok and other Social media.

Dean: Yeah, it started out as an app called Musically and it was a. Basically kids would do lip sync videos to popular songs and then it started evolving into them doing, you know, funny things or dance moves and all of this. But you have basically one minute to do a video and then you just keep infinitely scrolling, you know, it's infinitely bringing those to you. But the two girls that are at the tippy top of TikTok Now, Charli D' Amelia and Addison Rae have, you know, I think Charlie has like 90 million now and Addison Rae has 70 million followers. And. But it all happened because the wave of attention that went onto the app where they were in, in the water swimming when the crest of the tsunami came, right. And they were lifted up to the top and everybody now is coming in, trying to catch up to try and get in front of the tsunami, but in order to be at the very top, they had to be in the water paddling well before it even became a thing. They were swept away into this, you know, and it's just such a. Yeah.

Dan: Interesting issue. I've studied a lot about Tick Tock, but not knowing what it was. But from a political standpoint, they're a Chinese company and so that they're going to have to make a switch where whoever owns TikTok has to satisfy the, you know, the US government that they're not a Chinese, that they're not. So they've got some sort of big strategic capital.

Dean: I think they just sold.

Dan: Did they sell? Did they? Did they actually.

Dean: I don't know. There's, that's the last I heard those.

Dan: Yeah. You know, you know, you know, and this is a mainland, this is a mainland issue, but we're into a new cold, Cold war. This is very, very similar to what happened to between the United States and the Soviets after they had been allies during the Second World War, but very quickly, you know, after the Second World War. And you know, and so that's a mainland issue. And you know, a lot of people who are in Quadlandia say, well that's stupid. Politics is stupid. Well, mainland is just as real as Cloudlandia. You know, you have both of these, you wake up in the morning, guess what, you're not in Cloudlandia. You're in the world of gravity, you know, and.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And, and so my, my sense is that anything Chinese right now, if I can give a context how I think it's being seen increasingly outside of China, is that what are they up to? You know, there's sort of under question if they create anything new or anything becomes popular. So what are they up to with this one? You know, so there's a skepticism and a scrutiny and, you know, they've been heavy handed about how they've gone about things and they've been less than. Less than what? I would say less than. Completely honest. Completely honest. How they handle other people's property and how they handle other people's, you know, and so now there's a mounting opposition to things Chinese. And you know, one of the stories in the who not how book is about Paul Heiss, whose manufacturer he's got three factories in China and how he used who not how to create a factory in India and he's using who not how to create a factory in Mexico. In Mexico. And. But it's all because of the cold war, you know, coming. And this is going to go on for the next quarter century. Quarter century. And I mean, it'll get worse every quarter and it'll be going for the next 25 years. I've lived through a cold war in my early.

Dean: Oh, really? Yeah.

Dan: And I know what a cold war feels like, you know, and it gets worse. Ever. Yeah.

Dean: Wow. Well, I guess that's part of the thing. You wonder, you know, without being fed the media, would you even know that you're in a cold war?

Dan: No, because one side of the media isn't saying anything about it at all. And if you look at who owns who, their big investors are, they're Chinese investors. So they. So, you know, I mean, it was like there's this thing that's come up about Biden and his family with, you know, all sorts of. I won't say it's illegal. I don't think.

Dean: Right.

Dan: I don't, I don't think there's crime here, but it is corrupt, you know, I mean. Yeah, corrupt. So anyway, some of this evidence was posted in the New York Post daily paper in New York and it's the oldest newspaper in the United States, actually.

Dean: Was that just recently?

Dan: No, it's Tuesday. Wow.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And. And Facebook and Twitter came down hard and they wouldn't allow any mention, mention of this Biden report, you know, this report on the Biden family on Facebook. They just came down and they censored it.

Dean: Wow.

Dan: And. And which was. And they'd been lambasted from inside the technology community. What are you doing? You didn't even check out. I mean, you said it's, you know, it's false, but you didn't have time to even. Nobody said really time to check into it, you know, and everything. So it's. They. They took something that they wanted people not to know about, and they made everybody know about it because it involves them. Well, yesterday, it turns out that the number one person that Facebook. Facebook. Who is in charge of whether something can be on Facebook or not Facebook, was Vice President Biden's personal advisor on these foreign trips that have caused the repulsion.

Dean: Oh, my goodness.

Dan: Yeah, well, that's not criminal. There's nothing. There's not a crime about that. But it is corrupt. You know, it is corrupt. And. And then it's bad for Facebook. You know, it's bad for Facebook because

Dean: it's not a good look.

Dan: Yeah, well, the one thing a corporation does not want to do is to turn off half of your consumers, you know, turn off happy. You know, it's Michael Jordan. He says, you know, Republicans buy sneakers, buy shoes, too. That's right.

Dean: That is true.

Dan: You know, well, which side are you on? And he says, well, you know, Republicans buy sneakers too. He answered the question. But he didn't answer the question. But he answered the question in the best possible way. I thought that was fun. People say, well, Dan, you've been silent during 2020. You haven't said a thing. You know, you haven't said a thing about, you know, the election or anything else. I was going to ask, but I say, I've got a lot of great Democratic clients in strategic coach.

Dean: That's true. Yes. That's funny.

Dan: I've got a lot of clients who vote Democratic. And I said, that's true. They aren't. They are paying to be in coach to hear political. Political viewpoints. That's not why they come true. Yeah. And I've learned that, you know, I've learned that painfully because, you know, previous times, maybe five years ago, six years ago, you know, like that, I was very vocal, and I just got a lot of complaints. So people. So people saying, what do you think is going to happen with the election? I said, I got two predictions. It's going to be on November 3rd. Yeah, November 3rd. And I'm going to vote. Those are my two predictions.

Dean: And somebody's gonna win. That's a prediction.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Yep.

Dan: Yep.

Dean: Eventually.

Dan: Doesn't matter who wins. I do the same thing the next day. I do code.

Dean: That's exactly right. That's exactly.

Dan: You do. And you do your stuff. And I said, you know, it just

Dean: so happens that the next day, tomorrow, I've got my strategic Coach workshop tomorrow, 10x10 times.

Dan: 10 times.

Dean: And then game changer on Tuesday oh, free zone. Free zone. I'm sorry. Yes. Free zone on Tuesday. So it's all very exciting.

Dan: Yeah. And it's really great. And we have a party tomorrow night. We have a party like we usually do.

Dean: This is great. But I miss the dinners, though. That's one thing.

Dan: Well, there you can really see, you know, you can really see that there. There's a whole dimension that. There's no way that Cloudlandia can provide that dimension.

Dean: That's exactly right. Okay, well, I will. I will see you tomorrow, Dan.

Dan: I will see you. And this will be Chicago time, so.

Dean: That's right.

Dan: 10 o', clock, 10 o' clock Eastern Time. And it's a. An amazing workshop. I have to tell you. I've had my team who are kind of experts on this because a lot of them have been around for 20 years or so and they said this is the greatest 10 times quarterly workshop ever.

Dean: I can't wait.

Dan: Yeah, you'll love it. You'll love it. And connected. The whole thing is connected. For morning till night. I've got four separate things that are. They just build on each other's throughout the day. So it's a terrific.

Dean: I love it.

Dan: Alrighty.

Dean: Well, I will see you in the morning.

Dan: Will do.

Dean: Thanks a lot.

Dan: Bye. Bye.