Thinking About Thinking

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia, Mr. Sullivan.

Dan: It's a joy. Wow.

Dean: Here we are.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I think that we didn't really connect with Caroline before we went. It was sitting in my schedule there.

Dean: So.

Dan: Yeah, you know, so here we are. If it was possible. I want it to be possible. But yeah, also Phoenix doesn't change time. So, you know, we were three phone time away last night, but we're only two hours away. So I just wonder.

Dean: You're getting closer.

Dan: Yeah. I had a client from Newfoundland once and we were talking at the time of Quebec separation when Quebec was voting possibly to separate Canada. And I asked him, how do you feel about that? And he says I'm for it. He says I'm totally for Quebec separation. And he says why? Why? He says because then St. John's will be that much closer to Toronto.

Dean: Exactly. 9:30 in Newfoundland.

Dan: No, but the whole province of Quebec would be messing.

Dean: Yes, exactly. Get out of the way. We'll just shift everything to the west.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: You know, I am an official.

Dan: We probably have to explain that to our listeners who are.

Dean: Well, I am by the way, an official Newfie. So I get to.

Dan: Yeah, you were born in Gander. You were born in Stephenville

Dean: near Gander. Yes. And so there's a. For our friends that are listening from other parts than Canada, Newfoundlanders have a very beloved place in the hearts and minds of Canadians. As often the. Let's call it the. The blondes of the blonde joke world is the Newfie jokes in Canada. And that's a fun. That's one of the fun ones. If Quebec separates, it'll be. That'll be in Newfoundlands that much closer to Ontario. Yeah.

Dan: So anyway, we finished with Genius Friday night and then there was a party on the Friday night. But we just, we're just hanging around in Scottsdale for two or three days before we go down to Tucson. So.

Dean: Okay, nice. So you're here. This is good.

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Dean: How do you. Where are you staying this time?

Dan: Royal Palms.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: Yeah. Because we were going to spend time with Joe, you know, we were here and we haven't in person, we haven't seen him since the shutdown back in.

Dean: Right.

Dan: 2020. And then he. Yeah, he gets last weekend and it was a bummer for him. So anyway, so. But gee, the two days were really terrific.

Dean: Yes. We want to debrief a little on that.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Because that was a. You were experiencing it live front and center.

Dan: Yeah. And it was, it was, I think our best in, in person experience going back to 2011. That was when Babson. I first joined Genius Network and it

Dean: was in New York, 2011.

Dan: Right? Yeah, yeah. First of all, you know, Joe's team, you know, they've really upped the game.

Dean: I have to say that Tim, Tim Paulson did an amazing job of facilitating and orchestrating the, the event. He's really great in that role. And he did it, did an amazing job.

Dan: I told him he'd been hiding. I said, you've been hiding for 20 years. Mm.

Dean: Yeah, we brought it out just in time to retire.

Dan: Yeah. Anyway, yeah, we thoroughly enjoyed it. It was. And he did a wonderful job conceptually structuring, you know, how to approach the two days, you know, he had those four sort of mindsets up front. The, you know, follow the master. And, and so it was, it was really nice because structuring, content, you know, where people say, we're going to cover this, we're going to cover this and cover this doesn't interest me that much. But when you give up front a set of concepts. And I actually got a cue from that, you know, for my own ongoing workshops at the beginning. Don't talk about, don't talk about the content of what's going to be happened. But these are the concepts, conceptual frameworks to keep in mind as we're going through next period of time. So that was a total pickup for me.

Dean: I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what was.

Dan: You could. You can continually remind them of the concepts. You know, the. I'm not saying con. Contextual rather than conceptual, but the contextual, you know, you have to keep this in mind. Like halfway through feels like a failure, you know, and that. Yeah. Saying, so are you having an experience? Are you really kind of, you know, challenged by this or, you know, kind of struggling with this? Remember, halfway through as feels like a failure. And I said, gee, you know, it's really a terrific way of, terrific way of putting together a, you know, a two day that has a lot of content. So it makes people kind of a overview. So anytime they're worried about if they're getting it or not getting, they, they, you can just remind them. Remember, we're halfway through Max just kiss, blew a kiss to you and she's on her way out to the Henry.

Dean: Okay. Oh my goodness, I love the Henry.

Dan: Yes.

Dean: I miss it. Yeah. Well, Dan, you know what's funny, because last week we kind of talked a little bit about that halfway. And it's even more deceptive digitally because we talked about the doublings of things and up until the last Iteration, you're only halfway, like doubling. That was what happened with the digital camera, right? Is it feels like a failure. Like this isn't going to be anything. That's why it's deceptive, right? Because it's at 0.2 pixels, megapixels, then point 4, then point 8, then 1.6, and then pretty soon two more iterations and you're at the highest level of any camera even available. And it's totally the disruptive at that point, you know, and that's interesting, I think when we see these things now, you know, when you start talking about, like, I think when you. The mega. I think that the domino, the big, like colossal domino has been tipped now in terms of setting the metaverse into action, that there's no spirit away from that now. That's. And inevitability. Right. And I think that we're getting that way with cryptocurrencies and that decentralized finance. I think these things, we're definitely at a cusp of at least the convergence of those two things shaping what's going to happen in the next, you know, five years, kind of.

Dan: Yeah. I think the thing that the way I approach it from, you know, from, you know, these predictions, first of all, they are predictions.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, and I was reading Gordon Moore. I was reading a little article on Gordon Moore, whose name is associated with the exponential, you know, the exponential progression of the microchip, basically.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: He was. He was talking about a single device in 1965, I think he wrote an article in a technical magazine, and he had three data points of seeing the processing power, what was called an integrated circuit at that time. They hadn't put the name microchip on it yet. And he was talking that there might be an interesting progression here, just based on three data points that maybe and perhaps every 18 months to two years we might get a, you know, a doubling of the processing power. And it seems to me that it costs less to do this. And it caught on immediately like it became wildfire. And he was asked about that. He says, you know, you've almost like discovered a law here. And he says, actually it's not. He says, it's not a law. He says, not like the law of gravity. But he says what it is, it gives imaginative people a framework to actually aspire, you know, aspire to a much bigger result. And, you know, and it seems to give a language that people can compare their progress against, against, you know, against this particular standard. And, you know, we can put a date on the calendar and say, okay, this is the beginning of the two year doubling and then everybody strives to actually achieve, achieve that. And my sense, the Metaverse, I've been reading a lot about, you know, I've been reading articles about it. And when people say it's going to transform things, it means to like, you know, at a certain point everybody's going to be doing this. But half the planet right now doesn't have access to electricity.

Dean: Right.

Dan: I mean, you know, electricity that could possibly power this type of technology. And yeah, it wouldn't be at the top of their list of things they want to achieve that day. But what it does say is that some individuals who have a lot of everything's handled in terms of, you know, their organization and their, you know, communication and their economics and everything else. Yeah, will, will create a way of operating more in this new world than they're operating in previous world. And that's what it means. And in fact, if you got back now and said, well, is there any people right now, even before this becomes popular, are there any people right now who are, who have actually been doing this for a long time? And the truth is that the Navy SEALs have been operating and other special forces units in the military have been operating in the Metaverse for quite a long time. In other words, they create three dimensional, complete three dimensional digital replicas or worlds. Yeah, replicas or setups of what the place looks like or the destination place and what the building looks like and how do you approach it. And they practice in virtual realm. Thousands, maybe halfway around the world, they practice and then they work out angles and then they say, well, what happened to you there? Are there any blind spots you have to worry about? So my sense is that there's two places generally where technology makes its greatest advances with a small number of people before it becomes available to a large number of people. And one of them is weaponry or war and the other one is games. So my feeling in the games world has been operating for quite a long time and the, in the military world has been operating for a long time

Dean: in the intelligence world. Yeah. I wonder if you wonder about DARPA and what that kind of, I mean, crazy stuff we don't even know about.

Dan: Yeah. And I mean in a simplest form like, you know, airline, you know, pilot training now is done all in simulators,

Dean: you know, and has been for years.

Dan: Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, I. 30 years ago, there's a place near Pearson Airport in Toronto, it's called eas and they're the number one provider of cockpit Simulators for airline pilots. And the pilots have to go in there, have to go in there and they have to test on a regular basis.

Dean: Wow.

Dan: So my sense is that, you know, when predictions are made about technology, you have to understand these technologies are already being used by some people. And what the projection is like, you know, with Mark Zuckerberg a couple of weeks ago and other people talking about that they want the experience to be mass consumed. Like everybody is doing this to a certain extent. They're trying to sell people, you got to get into this as soon as possible.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And so I think it's not so much a technological projection, it's a, it's a marketing message.

Dean: Yeah. And that's, I think, you know, when you look at the, we mentioned, I've been watching these history of things and I think that we're looking now that, you know, 100 years from now, 150 years from now, look back at the men who built the Metaverse as the same, in the same way we look at the guys that, you know, wired the country for electricity and the guys that wired the, laid the roadways and the, the railroads, all of that as foundational infrastructure. And that's the platform then I think that I'm starting to look for like what are the second and third waves of it? Like once the railroad was there, that then laid the platform for what other types of opportunities on top of that, that's where I think that, that's where I get excited, that's where I kind of tend to look, is to adapt the things that are, you know, available there in, in new ways that we can use that infrastructure.

Dan: Well, I've been, you know, doing a project for a couple years, self driving automobiles. Okay. And you know, because the predictions have not come true, not in the way that, yeah, self driving automobiles. And I started, you know, I was noticing that there was growing anger and apart from the proponents of, of, you know, why public officials, you know, weren't catching on, they weren't getting with, you know, they weren't getting with the program, you know, anything else. And so what I created was a file of all the reasons why self driving cars won't happen. And so there's lots of articles and there's lots of little checklists of the reasons why self driving cars won't happen. And it was an interesting example because they can't figure out where the key sensors are going to be. The key sensors going to be in the car or the key sensors going to be in the environment. Like for example, that the cars will have a uniform kind of system which picks up on cues from outside the car. Yeah, that. What that guarantees is that all the cars are picking up on the same environmental cues from outside. You know, and that's not. There are nowhere of knowing whether that's true because the reason is that if you're going to have a major breakthrough, it probably has to be the environment that is uniform, not the independent it'd be. When trains first started, they didn't realize that you had to have a common gauge, in other words, that the tracks had to be uniformly apart. And then you make all the different manufacturers who make locomotives in cars, they have to build their cars so that it meets the grade. So everybody wheels and self driving cars aren't anywhere near that standardization yet. They aren't. Because they're in competition with each other. Well, first of all, they're at the stage where it's just that they're striving to be electric cars and the whole notion that then this is a platform, then where will be self driving cars? So they're a long way away because it interacts with municipal laws, it interacts with, you know, the political system. And I was they.

Dan: So somebody took an example of New York City and Manhattan and they said, you know, well, let's just talk about a mile of street in Manhattan where we put all the sensors in. And they estimated, you know, to put it in the sensors it'd probably be about a million and a half, $2 million a mile. And that's not. Which automatically becomes $3 million a mile because bribery and payoffs and.

Dean: Right.

Dan: Work stoppage, work stoppages and strikes and the afternoon. So 3 million mile. But you can't do just one mile. You got to do the entire system because just having that self driving for one mile.

Dean: Right, right.

Dan: Wouldn't do it. And, and so the obstacles, the number of meetings to talk about obstacles goes up exponentially.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And. And then do people want that or do not people want to do that? So I was talking to, yeah, I was talking to Peter one day and I said, you know, when you have these predictions, all the money is actually in the obstacles.

Dean: Mm, solving the obstacles, of course.

Dan: Yeah, that's where all the money is. Yeah, that's where all the money is. I said the money isn't in the payoffs. The money is in everything that prevents the payoff.

Dean: Transforming obstacles.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Yes. Yeah.

Dan: And you can see this in our world that, you know, just to use an example, the tax code, I mean, if there's anything that's gotten exponential in our common experience. It's the tax code, you know, I mean, our tax code, personal tax code, you know, at one point might have been five pages and now it's 500 pages. Exponential growth in the tax code. And then all the money is in consulting and, you know, accountants and lawyers and everything to deal with the complexity of the tax code. Yeah, yeah.

Dean: That's wild. I mean, wonder. I mean, that's kind of the talk of how the, of how NFTs could change that level of thing too, if it were embraced. That could be that just inherent within it is the. Almost like a circulation tax in a way of currency or whatever money gets exchanged and used for that. There's that siphoning, transactional siphoning, almost like you have transfer tax there. That's a possibility. You know, it's really. I think, yeah, things are gonna heat up here in the, in this next little while.

Dan: I mean, you must bring up another point that was brought up in our last podcast. And yeah, you, you made a statement that you find me the most analog person that you probably know. And I was thinking about that during the week and could you put a couple other observations with that so that, first of all, that I can understand what you're seeing, but our listeners can understand that sort of analog.

Dean: Yeah. So you have an iPhone, but the number one person dialed on that is this number that we're talking on right now that every 95% of the minutes that you have available are spent in one thing you're not on. You're not accessible digitally in a way that most people are accessible. People who know you and are close to you are around that. I mean, you understand that there's, I imagine that there are a handful of people, maybe a bigger handful of people who actually have your email address.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: So I know I can email you if I need to reach you or want to, but I wouldn't dream of texting you or calling you. They don't have that. And by analog, I think what we're, I mean it in the best way of asynchronous at your discretion is how you engage not synchronously and interruptively. You know, most people who are. Once you're plugged in to the digital way. The digital way, excuse me, is that we're interrupted, that we're tapped in like, you know, it's interesting just this exchange right now. Here we are. You sent an email to me this morning after we had talked last week. I thought that you were going to be at Canyon Ranch this week and that we were, it was an off week. And then I got your email because I have my digital, you know, tethering device in my hands and I saw that and I was able to email you back and we jump on and did this so that I don't have that level of confidence that your, you know, reactively checking your email in at all times or whatever. I don't feel like that. And that's what I mean by that. That is analog in that way. You are disconnected from TV and from interruptive piped in programming that is sent your way and you are selectively curating, seeking what you want to bring into your attention. You know, your, that's, I mean there's part of it, but I mean just almost in every way where people are more digitally tapped in, you are standing apart, you know, you're nobody. You're not, you're not connecting to in a digital way. You're, you using Facebook, you're using these things on your team, things are happening but you're not getting any of it on you. You know, your very insulated from that. So I feel that's my take on it, that you're directing it and you know, contributing your, you know, thoughts or content.

Dan: Yeah. And the reason I'm bringing this up because we had Ned Hallowellwell giving a talk.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, adhd. And when I had gotten my analysis, it was with the Amen Clinic, Joe, Joe Polish and Babs and I went to Newport beach and this is 2000, it was 2010, 2011. And I did, I had heard about, you know, that the testing, you know, I'd seen a little article I saw, you know, on the Internet about this testing. And it was three days of testing and long story short, we went and you know, we did it and. But before you were admitted to their program, you had to go online and they had a 200 point questionnaire, 200 questions that you had to which I was thinking would probably, probably screen out about 95% of AD, right? Yeah. But in my case, I don't have any problem with that kind of thing. I like, I like being asked questions and then you know, coming up and it was like a 3,360 degree analysis of your personal life, your professional life and how you organize yourself and you know, what your family situation was growing up and what you observed about your parents and your siblings. Because ADD is very inheritable. It's of all psychological characteristics. I think it's, you know, near the top of things which will be Inherited from parents to children. And it's very clear to me that both my parents, I mean looking back and knowing what I know about adhd, it's very clear to me that they both were, had, had this and, but it's very clear to me that none of my siblings do. Yeah, they're very focused, you know, they're very orderly, very, very structured and except for one brother who actually committed suicide. And I, it made me think that this condition, not understood back in the 1950s, not understood in the 1960s, got him into difficult situations which compounded the kind of a sense and at a certain point he, you know, it got it mixed up with drugs and all sorts of other things and he committed suicide. But anyway, so I got, I did that and so I answered all the questions, then went to the clinic in Newport beach and did three.

Dan: It's about three hours a day, three days of testing with brain scan machines and then they measure you at rest, measure you in activity, concentration, memory, alertness, response time, everything. And then they put together a report and then there's a two hour wrap up talk with one of their specialists who's a psychiatrist. And she said, you know, she's, I, I was really looking forward to talking to you. She says, because in all my experience doing these tests with people, you have the widest difference between what your, the answers to your questionnaire tell us and what the test tells. She said the, your answers to the question questionnaire prompted my question. Why is he even coming and talking to us? He, you know, there's no need or there's no need for him, you know, to have anything done because he lives in a very orderly environment. It's very structured. If, you know, seems to not be overwhelmed by, not be overwhelmed by all sorts of interruptions and distractions. He seems to have a good control of time and you know, he doesn't have a lot of complications in his life. But she said the test, you've got like a ten ring circus going on all the time, right? And she says, can you explain that? So I said, well, it all comes down to who owns the circus.

Dean: You're in control of the circus, right?

Dan: I'm in control of the circus, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think I said the way your test described me is my daily experience. I'm constantly thrown off track. Yeah. What I've done is that I've systematically and I think probably if I can measure. Back when I started creating thinking tools for myself, it was probably late teens that I was starting to create tools where I Could think through certain situations then and come up with a really good solution for me and then work to make that solution a daily habit. Yeah. And. And she said, well, and then we got into the strategic coach and she said, well, she says this really explains a lot because she said, I don't know who else you created this strategic coach program for, but I do know that you created it for yourself.

Dean: Well, you know what's funny is that's the. What I mentioned when Ned was talking, I think it was in response to a question from Babs, talking about my. The 50 minute focus finder. That was something that I created for myself just on observation, like, I'll tell it quickly. So for people who haven't heard me talk about it, but you know, I was observing that it was difficult for me to do the things that I knew I wanted to do, like to get myself to sit down and focus. And I started one of the great questions that I always ask myself, is that true or are there situations where I do focus? Right? And I started thinking, I don't have any problem at all focusing for four and a half hours on playing around a golf. I find it delightful. I do it regularly and successfully and I don't have any problems with that. I love going to movies. I can focus for up to three hours watching a movie, you know, very focused and disciplined in that. You can't distract me from it or take me off course. And I started thinking, okay, so what is it about golf that allows me to demonstrate that level of focus? What goes. What is it about the environment of it that is allowing me to do it? Because at the time I was playing two or three rounds of golf a week and I would. I recognize that my system for that was that I knew the times that I was going to play golf. I had a goal. So I made the acronym of golf, G, O, L, F and G had a goal. I was going to play golf. I defined my outcome, what I was going to do. I'm going to play golf. And I would put it on my calendar and I knew who I was going to play with, where I was going to play, what, what time I was going to play, and it was there. And my whole week would work around it and I would arrange so that I would show up on time, just like our big four, show up on time and do what I say I'm going to do and finish what I start and say please and thank you.

Dean: But the, you know what, I would show up and then the O is for an optimal environment. And a golf course is the optimal environment for playing golf. It's laid out exactly like we need it to be. 18 sequential holes with a little path to keep you on track, broken down with benchmarks along the way. You keep your score as you're going all the way to stay on track. You know your progress then. L is for limited distractions, right? When you're on the golf course, if you leave your phone in your locker and you are out there off the grid, there's very little distraction to take you off of off task. And F is for a fixed time frame. We know, I know it's gonna take four and a half hours or four hours to to play golf. And same thing with a movie. From going to a movie, I know that it's two hours or three hours like the Fitsian epic movie, but I never have a problem blocking those things off. So I started taking my cues from that and applying that framework to the things that I wanted to do. And so I would define what it is that I want to do in terms of the goal. What do I want to do? I want to. And I'd have a verb for whatever it is. We talked about the verbs on the the joint procrastination podcast. Often it would be brainstorm and outline or record or those are my. The power verbs or think about whatever these are. So I'd say I want to think about this project or this book or this program that I'm working on and I'll block it in the thing and then the optimal environment. Where's the optimal environment for this? What is my power position for this? For me, most of the time my number one power position is sitting on my white couch in my courtyard with my journal and. Or my remarkable and thinking. Right. I'm in the position there. But what I have to also do is limit distractions. So that means that I leave my phone in another room. There's no Internet, there's no anything there. I'm in a quiet environment. There's no people to distract me, no tv, no computer, none of that.

Dean: I'm just limited distraction focused in my environment for a fixed time frame. I have an egg timer. I have an egg timer, non digital analog that twists to 50 minutes. And I sit and I can focus for those 50 minutes. And that is how I work around, you know, my created that as a workaround and it's the most. It's like the, the base unit of productivity for me. Everything, no matter what I'm going to do, requires me to be able to focus for at least, you know, that 50 minutes at a time be multiples of that. But that's the base unit. It's just repeating that same process. And so that technology, for me, is my. That's my workaround. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. So just a couple observations is that. I totally understand, you know, I understand. I totally understand exactly what you've pulled off, you know, in the past to get to where you are and how you're going to pull it off in the future. And. And because it checks out all the boxes exactly why I've done what I've done. And then the other thing about it is I would never do it the way that you do it, and you would never do it the way that I do it.

Dean: Yeah. Tell me your. Your model.

Dan: No, but. And what I mean by that is the individual strategies and the individual structures that you've created are uniquely yours. Yeah. You know, and part of it is because you've tested them, and this works. And there's nine that didn't work. And there's this whole. You know, there's this whole looking backwards. There's this whole path from the backwards horizon of things you've tried that worked and didn't work and didn't work, and you've gradually refined them down to the things that always worked. You know, they just.

Dean: Yeah. It was interesting to me that they're the things that, like, you know, pulling off playing golf for four and a half hours three times a week is. That's a pretty disciplined focus.

Dan: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dean: And going to movies, you know, being, you know, setting up that time. Every Friday afternoon, we'd go to the movies and record a movie review. You know, those things are disciplined, you know, repeatable things that I was already. There's clues in my life that I am capable of taking repetitive, focused action, you know?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. So what I'm saying, I'm applying this back to the metaverse world.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Okay. And I'm saying that I think that there's a boundary in the future between two uniquely different kinds of people, and that is there are people who can only feel structure for themselves, you know, and that kind of sense of, you know, pleasure, actually, you know, they have. I'll call it pleasurable structure, that they have structure only by consuming what other people have created. Okay, so there's a whole consumption side of this.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: And then on the other side of the line are people who create their own pleasurable structures, because the stuff that other people create are. Are subpar.

Dean: Right.

Dan: You know, and, you know, and. And that's the entrepreneurial crossover, you know, because the vast majority of people, I mean, for all the talk about, you know, how entrepreneurism is increasing, there's no, there's actually no statistical evidence that it's changed in the last 50 years. You know, it's about 5% of the working populate, the adult population actually brings their, their useful income, you know, their necessary and useful income by their own means. You know, they have to initiate something and create something and everybody else has to have it created for them. They have to, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: They have to have an employer.

Dean: I've been thinking, I've been trying to plant this seed for Philip here about the, the concept of makers and takers.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: You know, and that's really a, that's really a big distinction.

Dan: No, and that's exactly. And I mean, using two different words than I use. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: That it has to be given to you. It has to. Someone else has to give it to you. And what I did is, you know, I, I had created and I think, you know, it's nudging ahead to the front of the line for one of my quarterly books. And it's the book that I call thinking about your thinking. And what I said is the vast majority of thinking that goes around you in daily life on the planet falls into three areas that people are thinking about things. You know, there's things around us, things we like, things we don't like, things other people have, things we have and things we're acquiring, things we want to acquire. Things are no longer useful, but it's about things. And these are objects. And without any question, they were things that were actually created by other people. You know, they were that. So we are born into a world where, you know, a world of many things. The other one is they think about people. Okay. They think about other people. And there's constantly a non stop self comparing themselves with other people. And one of the things they self compare themselves with other people is what kind of things that other people have that are better than their things.

Dean: Isn't that amazing? It's so true that the Kardashians, the Real Housewives, all of these things that as a society people are wired to do this.

Dan: Yeah. And then the third level up, people who think about thoughts, but they're not their thoughts. They collect, you know, thoughts, you know, and the thoughts of other people.

Dean: They follow pundits, right?

Dan: Yeah. And they compete with other people, they. To have thoughts that are superior to the thoughts that other People have. Okay. In other words. And so there's a competition with others. Competition on the level of things. Competition on the level of people and who you get to hang out with and competition on level of thoughts.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, I can. You know, I have acquired relationships with people who, because they have these thoughts, they're able to acquire these things. And everything that I have is better than people that I want to feel superior to. Okay. But not once in this entire process, and this didn't go from birth to life. Have you ever actually thought about how you're thinking about things.

Dean: Right. Yeah.

Dan: And then you cross over to a line and you say, well, I know all that exists. That's not really where I get my pleasure. I get my pleasure actually out of creating my own ways of looking at what's happening to me and then stepping back and having kind of an interesting exploration and, you know, exploration and of just how is it that I'm thinking about this?

Dean: Right. That's the great joy. That's what I love. Look. That's what journaling has done.

Dan: Oh, yeah.

Dean: For me, that's.

Dan: That was my breakthrough journal for 25 years straight. You know, every day, I want this. I want this, I want this. And there wasn't. And I couldn't use the word because. The because referred back to other people's worlds.

Dean: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

Dan: The word because always means that you're comparing to other people or you're justifying yourself to other people. I said, well, I'm not doing this to justify. I just want to get a handle on what I want know and everything.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Like that. So my sense is that one of the reasons why we enjoy talking to each other so much is that we both have gone across that line into thinking about our thinking.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: And other people are doing it. It's kind of like an endless world when you find someone else who does thinking about their thinking. And generally speaking, they've kind of handled the whole world of things, people and thoughts.

Dean: Yeah. That's. You know, it's funny that thinking is. I look at it at the highest level of the most valuable things that I've done have come from thinking about my thinking like that. Something like I look at one of the highest, and I create time for it. You know, this is the thing. It's the most valuable thing I can do is sit, you know, in my comfy chair right here thinking about. And I have an unending appetite for it. Just, you know, it's effortless to me and increasingly enjoyable. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. So I'd like to take this back to the analog. You know, your observation about analog is that when I'm thinking about my thinking, I don't like being interrupted by the world of things, people and thoughts.

Dean: That's what it is. That's you've created that optimal environment. I call that removing the reactive activators because the more the thing that takes you off that track is not, you know, more often than not it's a reactive activator that somebody calls you on that phone or somebody texts you on that phone or you get some kind of notification and that then takes you into that environment which takes you onto the Internet, which takes you to the cat videos. Next thing you know, and it's all because you reacted to that activator if you don't have it there. That's the great thing about, you know, the great thing about the analog world was that the newspaper came once a day. Mm. The, you know, it wasn't. The magazines were printed once a month, the mail came once a day. There were, the inputs were at a frequency that was, you know, manageable. It wasn't disruptive. And I think.

Dan: Yeah. And I think because, because the time in between issues, you know, like issues that generally speaking the content probably had at least a one day or two day value, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: If you didn't get it. So if I missed the morning's paper and I didn't get to this morning's paper until tomorrow morning, I could still read it and what was written was sufficiently. Still useful. It was still useful but it wasn't

Dean: immediately refuted by the opposition to that idea in equally disruptive and convincing ways. Yeah, I mean that's really the thing, right. Is the number of voices and the commitment of the polls not, I mean the polarity of the opposition and in favor to 100% discredit any information. I mean you get one things printed about hey, good news for vaccines, then 3 seconds later vaccines are killing you. It's the mind control. It's the stupidest thing that this battle by the most diligent, thoughtful army of people, 100% dedicated to furthering your hatred for or belief in vaccine in a convincing way. I mean Everybody's megaphone is 100% professional appearance. It's very difficult to make sense of even with an earnest, you know, effort to do so. It's very difficult to make sense. I mean you and I both have friends that are doctors at the highest levels and often they don't even agree on, on, on things. So what chance do you really have. For doing the right thing, you know.

Dan: Well, well, I mean, it's a really good question because we were after the party on Friday night, we over to dinner, the, you know, the owner of the Sanctuary Resort here, Bob Castellinus, I think his name is.

Dean: Yeah. So.

Dan: And he was in. I hadn't met him before. Joe had talked a lot about him,

Dean: but he was Bob Castellini, right?

Dan: Castellini, yeah. And so we, you know, he's got this mountaintop. He's got, I think, the highest mountaintop home and Paradise Value Valley, you know. And so we were up there and we were talking and Nick. Nick Sonnenberg was there and we got into discussion about, you know, politics and the current situation and everything else. And Nick says, I don't know in that world how you know anything. He says, how do you know anything in the political world? And, you know, and it was an interesting discussion because he's. My experience with Nick is that anytime you bring up, there's kind of like a waving off on next part, you know. You know, that's not even an area of discussion where you can actually know anything. You know, it's all emotions. And so. And I said, you know, I've met people in your world, in the technology world, where they talk in theories and they talk in projections and everything else. And I said, how do you know in choosing technology whether anything's real? He says, well, there's fundamental principles. And I said, I got that. And here's what I get about it, that in your world there are fundamental principles that I don't know. And therefore, a lot of your world looks like gibberish to me. But I want you to know that in the political world, there's fundamental principles that you don't know. So all that from the outside looks like gibberish to you? And I would say, and I say that's true in a million different worlds. That there's somebody who's really, you know, really been fascinated and gone deep in a particular world. And they're at the level of fundamental principles, you know. You know, and, and, and 100 years ago, we shared more. A less deep understanding of the world. But what we shared more in common were a lot of fundamental principles that allowed us to operate with each other.

Dan: And I think what's happened 100 years later is that each of us have been able to go deep into something where our experience is that we're actually operating in our thinking and our decision making, our communication, action from the standpoint of fundamental principles and the Person we're talking to doesn't get this and so we form an opinion about them, you know, you know that, you know, they don't know anything, you know, they don't, anything. Well, they don't know anything about our deep world, but we don't know anything about their deep world either.

Dean: Right. Yeah, that's well said. I mean, that's something that's true when you don't know. It's like. Yep. Your mind, your eyes only see, your ears only here.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: What you're looking for. Right.

Dan: So I think the, yeah. Were you there on Thursday? I know you were there for Ned's on Friday, but were you there for Thursday? Yeah. Remember Craig Shoemaker, you know, and laughter thing?

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: I think that this why laughter is so important is because people with radically different deep worlds can still find things funny.

Dean: Yes, I agree. And that's funny. The differences are often funny. Shining a light and isolating the polarity is very funny. And the fact that the polarity exists is funny.

Dan: It's funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dean: And people's commitment to it is funny.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. I, I had the, you know the man, Casey Fleming, who was the China, you know, giving the warning about China.

Dean: Yes. Yeah.

Dan: He was at my table, you know, and I talked to him and I, you know, I kind of got, I fell into, you know, I, I immediately reverted to. I'm a 6 year old and I'm talking to a 45 year old. I don't know any, anything, but I, you know, what's happening in the adults world. And I just asked him questions like this, so he told me and I kept asking him questions. But yeah, you know, why he got on this track and everything else. And the more I asked him and why he got on his track, the less tense he was. I mean, he was kind of, he was kind of, you know, he was a little bit tense in the meeting. And so we're talking and after the, we had seen him and that was, you know, I, that, that whole talk really put people, you know, people started sitting up, their eyes started getting really big and everything like that. And then Craig Schumach, they did a good timing because they had Craig Shoemaker come on and, and he just had everybody laughing for about an hour. And I said, you know, I think the ideal next version of what we just saw over the last two hours was next time, next time Casey has to conduct an hour of laughing and Craig has to conduct an hour of talking about China.

Dean: Now that would be funny. Oh boy.

Dan: And I said, and I said, because actually, both areas of knowledge are really important, but each of them can only go so far and taking us deep with his knowledge. And I said, switching roles for an hour would probably give each of them an expanded sense of where they go next with their own interest, you know?

Dean: Yes, very funny.

Dan: Maybe the solution to the whole China thing is just to start creating China jokes.

Dean: Laughing, Right?

Dan: Yeah. Okay. I'm just send them China jokes, you know? You know, and then they're little spies, you know, I said, you know, if they're cool, if they're collecting all the information, like, you know, 330 million Americans, and how much complexity is there every day that we're doing digitally and they're collecting that, and that's just part of the world. They got their own 1.4 million people that they got to keep a handle on. How many people in the Chinese Communist Party is this using up every day just to collect the information, you know?

Dean: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Dan: They must have 6, 7 million people. And how do you decide at the end of each day, what are the one or two, three things that we've heard out of a quadrillion pieces of information that are important for tomorrow? You know, it seems to me that they're, you know, and Ronald Reagan, who had Soviet jokes, you know, and it was very tense during the 1980s, but he had all these Soviet jokes, and he would tell them in every public, and it just drove the Russians crazy.

Dean: Right?

Dan: Yeah. Because don't they realize that the, you know, the Marxist, Leninist communist view of the world is the most profound and serious insight ever?

Dean: Oh, man.

Dan: You know, and everything. Yeah. And he laughed at it. But the other thing he said, you know, he said, we're so worried about the Soviets having our secrets. And he said, I got a way of solving this. He said, I got a way of solving this problem with the Soviets. He said, every month, we have a thousand 747s, and we just load them up with a month's worth worth of American secrets. You know, the last month secrets, and we fly and we dump them on the Runway. All the secrets, we just dump it all on the runways right in Moscow. And he says just having them try to sort that out would bring their entire empire to a collapse. And I think, you know, in a certain way, that's actually what happened.

Dean: Mm. Yes. You can't keep it down. We got more secrets making more every day.

Dan: You think you've got our secrets. You haven't seen anything yet.

Dean: That's right. Exactly.

Dan: Yeah. Well, I. I think this is very rich territory. You know, you combine last week's and this week. Yeah, very rich. Because my feeling is the maker taker line that you were talking to Philip about is the crucial is your life going to be a taking life or is your life going to be a making life?

Dean: Yeah. And the fact is, Dan, it's getting easier and easier to be a take too. It's very. That division is. It's very tempting to live a very comfortable taker life.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, it's. Yeah, it's. It's very interesting. But what has changed is that for. And I was talking to someone, you know, about what I think the stakes are right now in the world. And it's. And it seems to me that the stakes are a definition of what humans are in relationship to computers. Okay. And the Singularity model, I'll just use that. And I'm not talking strictly, you know, about Singularity University, but the Singularity is an idea that's been around for 70, 80 years. You know, it didn't start with, you know, with what's his name then Peter's partner who created the Singularity together.

Dean: Oh, Kurzweil.

Dan: Yeah, Ray Kurzweil. I mean, he was just picking up on something that had already been discussed by dozens of other people, you know. But the basic premise there is that the human being is an information processing. The human brain is an information processing mechanism and that computers are information processing mechanisms and that we're not getting any faster, but the computers are getting faster. And there's a point in the future, you know, 10 years, 20 years, where there's a crossover and that the human being, the computers are better information processing units. And then it goes exponentially from there. And therefore the stage when humans, where the information processing, you know, ultimate. That's. And we become obsolete. I said, well, you know, if you, if your premise is true, you know that we're information processing. And I said, but what if human brain isn't information? As a matter of fact, it has nothing to do with information. And what we are is meaning making. Meaning making. The brain is a meaning making that we have inputs, but the inputs are actually kind of irrelevant because we just take the inputs and do something totally different with them. Because we get it. We get real pleasure out of creating new types of meaning. And we like playing with the meaning that we make and we like trading the meaning that we make. And then the two of us get together, we can make different kinds of shares of meeting. And the information, I mean, the information is just, you Know, it's. We don't need much of it. We can do a lot with not very much, you know, and everything like that. So if you have 100 computers and you give it the information, you know, the information coming in, they more or less have to do the same thing because they're computers. That's what a computer is, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: In other words, we like computers because they're predictable human. We like humans because they're not

Dean: unpredictable, predictably irrational.

Dan: I mean, a predictable human being is a long day. Yeah. I mean, five hours with a predictable human being is a week.

Dean: Oh, that's so funny. Okay.

Dan: You know, and you know, five minutes with an unpredictable computer is really scary.

Dean: Right? That's exactly right. Frustrating, you know?

Dan: You know, so. So my feeling is that we're getting to the point where one of those things is true, you know, the first one, that humans were just inferior early models of transcendent computers, or we're something completely different. And computers are just some of the meaning that we've kind of created and tested out for a while. And it's okay, you know, but there's always, you know, there's always something better we can do with them. And the big question is, you know, because if, you know, if it's the first the computers are, then we're. Then we're doomed to be. We're doomed to be trouble takers until the computers no longer have any use for us.

Dean: They don't need us

Dan: anymore.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And. Yeah, so that's what I'm seeing, you know, as I put the two things together. And both of them, you know, both of them are guesses, you know, and at a certain point, you know, humans are always guessing and we're always betting on certain guesses rather than others. And I just see what's happening here. But our conversation and the line that you crossed over and the line I crossed over, where the real pleasure is structuring our environment in such a way that we can spend increasing amount of time thinking about our thinking.

Dean: Yes, that's exactly right. And then in the words of Whose Line is It Anyway? You realize that the points are everything's made up and the points don't matter. Oh, so funny. It's true.

Dan: Okay, quick wrap up.

Dean: It's been delightful. This was great that we got to. We got to pull this off. I enjoyed that. I thought about for another thought that's going to come out of this is thinking about our thinking, but also what we're representing to think about our thinking out in the through Our avatars. You know, that's something. I just saw some courtroom footage about Hulk Hogan when the Bacher lawsuit was happening, about he was suing them for publishing his sex tape and was arguing the difference between the Hulk Hogan Persona and Terry Bellea the person, and that they have different rights and levels of expectation of privacy. And you took. You know, Todd Herman has his book Alter Ego, which is very mainstream right now, and there's actually a television called Alter Ego where these avatars are presenting in a singing competition. And I think that there's some seed of some neat, you know, next level things that are happening here. So I'll circle back with that, because I'll let that thought percolate. But it's just something that's in the crock pot right now, just kind of marinating.

Dan: Mm.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Well, you know, I mean, the interesting thing is when you're looking into the future and you're seeing the emergence of something.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: It's also useful to look back where that was always happened. That where you are right now is maybe at the halfway point between something that started a long time ago and. You see what I'm saying?

Dean: Yes.

Dan: We always think that we're at zero and we're seeing in the future. But I said. And the other thing is that Maybe it took 10,000 years of experimenting with other things to get to the halfway point, but the next. The second half can happen in, you know, and exponentially.

Dean: That's what. That's maybe what Alter ego has been, that alter ego. The Clark Kent, Superman, the Batman, Bruce Wayne, all of those things have been historically, you know, it's been a common thing now, this digitally, going forward, they can take on their own digital identities. And that's an interesting thing.

Dan: Well, they can interact with each other and, you know, in a way that's not predictable.

Dean: Yes, exactly.

Dan: Yeah. I think predictability gets boring fast.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Okay. I'm glad we. I'm glad we used analog time to get.

Dean: Yes, exactly.

Dan: Digitally connected. Yes. Thank you.

Dean: I love it. Okay.

Dan: Okay, bye.