The Power of Attention

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia.

Dan: Well,

Dean: well, well, well. Welcome to Cloudlandia.

Dan: Welcome. Welcome. And I'm feeling the effects of Cloudlandia.

Dean: Tell me.

Dan: You know, daily I, I notice more effects of Cloudlandia. Do you? Yes, I actually do.

Dean: I've been making really conscious efforts to be more aware of my. I call it lost time in Cloudland. Yeah. I've been rereading your property, your attention, your property. And I realized that is. Yeah, I do. I. There's a lot of. If you're caught up in Cloudlandia, there's a vacuum that will suck your. An attention sucking vortex of just waiting to suck up all of your attention.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: With no end.

Dan: Yeah, well, it's like, you know, I think it's kind of like an energetic, you know, dynamic in the sense that our attention is really, you know, our greatest power. You know, when humans can put their attention on something. That's actually quite a power when you think about, think about it in the scheme of evolution. You know, that the majority of animals, I'll use animals as the contrast error. They only have very predictable ways putting their attention on things, you know, related to their survival, related to eating, you know, related to, you know, being what they are.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And the ability to conjure up attention and put it on something that you've basically created for yourself, I think that's quite a high level. That's quite a high level skill. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and it attracts other human beings when that happens. You know, the ability to say, hey, I've just created this possibility and I want it tell you about this possibility and you know, see how this connects to you and everything else. That's quite an ability on the part of one. One person in a group of many people has an ability that's greater than any of the other ones to actually put out a, you know, a possibility of focusing their attention on something that's new, better and different and it's quite a thing.

Dean: Well, you think about those days back in the day, like from what we know about history of, you know, being everything being passed down through oral traditions. Right. Gathered around the campfire at night and you know, telling. That was our way of, of that was what was getting our attention. In the evenings, we'd all migrate towards the fire and talk and tell stories and we count the day and bond. And that was where all it was the social media of the, of the age. Yeah. And then, you know, it was all. This is what was really when I really started thinking about those things. The thing about it was that it was all synchronous and real time. Right. There was no. You weren't behind. If you missed what was said at the campfire, you missed it. And there was not at another channel going on over here. It was everything. Everybody gathered around that campfire. And it wasn't what Gutenberg was kind of. Or the, I guess the written word transcripts and stuff was where you could, it was asynchronous communication when you could even starting with a cave drawing or whatever, you could communicate something in an asynchronous way, but no way to distribute it. You had to stumble upon it, you had to come to it and then.

Dan: Or it got memorized.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: It was a high skill that one individual had the ability to memorize in one location something that had been said and watch miles and was able to reproduce it. Right. Probably adding to it and augmenting it and like telephone.

Dean: Yeah, exactly.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, probably, you know, like the Bible.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Adding different new features that would make it a better story. Everything doing it. And you know, there became this powerful. This powerful desire to have a better method than that. You know, we have to depend upon individuals whose presence is not predictable or whose performance is not predictable. And isn't there a way that we can capture things and make them available at a time when we want to read them and listen to them and everything. And you can see how that desire to have stuff we found valuable. You know, stuff, thoughts we found valuable or stories or songs we found valuable, or lessons we found valuable. And you can just see how that desire would grow and it would pop out with writing, you know, that things would get written down, they would create language that then it was to everybody's advantage to learn a language because then you could understand what was being said, but you could read it alone. You could see the words alone and

Dean: that you could actually do it.

Dan: You know, it's, it's, it's powerful lot of desire that's gotten us from the old days to the new days. Yeah, I think. And it's all that we want to, we want to share in a bigger combined understanding of what's going on now.

Dean: Like every, the, the minute. There's not even minutes that are left on, you know, without opportunity like that. These. Look at the most popular, the most popular things right now is the social media feeds and TikTok where every, you know, there's, it's the fills in. Even the two minute opportunity of stillness that you have is enough time to get a quick dopamine hit of looking at the things I think I shared with you in the last few weeks, I've been experience going into the coffee shop in the mornings with no phone and realizing what a, you know, what a richer two hours is with no, no dopamine. And I'm just, I'm really, I'm looking at those things. But I have to say, like, I have this level of. I almost can't imagine just cutting myself off from it, which is really like, you are rationalizing in my mind the things like I say, and I say to you too, you know, that part of it is that's how I see stuff because I'm so immersed in pop culture and the world kind of thing around me that it's the raw material for my observations through my filter. But that is all just smoke and mirrors. That's just, you know, there's a lot of, if I really put that to the test of what I'm doing is not. It's not all. Not all crucial, you know.

Dan: Yeah. One of the things I forget when. Oh, we are having every quarter almost for 20 years. I know that because we have a booklet that we create. This is about a dozen of us here in Toronto. We create a quarterly booklet discussion discussion group. And people will read articles and send them in to one person who is organizing this. And yeah, she takes it and she formalizes the pages about everything, regardless of what publication it comes from.

Dean: She's seen one of those documents.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, eight and a half by 11. And then it gets spiral bound and it's a sneak book of 30 articles. And what I've done is that I've put a. Included at the top of every one of my articles, why I submitted the article. In other words, I give it sort of a reason. I give a reason why, you know, that this article seems to be saying such and such and such, you know, so anyway, and no one's followed my example yet, so I'm seeing how long it's going to take for somebody to say why. Why say, yeah, I do them on five of the 30 articles and I've done it now for three quarters and nobody's picked up on my innovation yet.

Dean: But interesting.

Dan: But you know, I can hold on for a long time. I'm the sort of person that can just keep doing something for a long time. But anyway, we had, we had a great, we had a great meeting and it was a lot of articles of current affairs things. So every quarter you get sort of what was topical in the media reflected through articles. And there's a lot right now about the cancel culture, you know, people being so fearful of other people's opinions that they will demand that these opinions be canceled so that they can't be spoken of out there. And that's an interesting phenomenon. I find that interesting who you have to be that you would be so threatened by someone's opinion that the way that you want to deal with the other person's opinion is that it should not be heard. You know, it should be cut off. This person should be prevented from even expressing their opinion. I said, yeah, that's kind of interesting. That's kind of interesting that there must be some lack of confidence on the outraged person that they can't deal with the ideas that are, that are being expressed by the person who threatens them. And I said, you know, it might be a better, it might be a better approach on their part to look into what the other person is talking about and become knowledgeable about it and there and then be able at a certain point to actually have a very interesting conversation with that person based on what you've learned about what they've done. But that's, that's an alternative way of doing it. But it seems to be rejected. Well, it's not worth my effort to actually find out what this person actually is trying to express because I know right off the fact, right off the bat that it's evil.

Dean: Yeah, right.

Dan: I shouldn't bring myself into contact with someone's evil thought. Yeah, everything, well that's kind of the thing.

Dean: But there's always these inherent, the built up enemies who's really good at foiling those things are really poking like away at the systemic error of the ways is Jordan Peterson is excellent at that. I was just watching one last week. They were, someone was trying to point out how equality of, you know, opportunity for women as executives is so far skewed towards the patriarch, towards men. And Jordan started out his talk, his rebuttal. It said, well, 99.9% of bricklayers are men. And if we're going to have a discussion about equality of distribution of opportunity,

Dan: why aren't we, let's start with the bricklayers.

Dean: Why don't we start with the most egregious of the distribution and start with the bricklayers and really do something to dig into why is this the truth? And she, it was so funny because she didn't want to have anything to do with. She thought that was most ridiculous. But he's saying if you're arguing that the system is and the evidence that you have is in the Numbers of the distribution, then why is that? And he brought out that men, just gender differences in men and women, that men, by and large are much more interested in things and women are much more interested in people. And so if you're going to be an engineer, it makes sense that you are much more interested in things. And if you're going to be a nurse, it's imperative that you care more about people than things. So there's already these natural tendencies to go to things that are your, you know, within your automatic sort of makeup.

Dan: Yeah, we have. I don't know, we have one of our clients who for 10 years of his life was an instructor, a qualified instructor in helping the Iraqi army and the Afghan army create their own equivalent of the American Special Forces.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: You know, these are the, you know, the very best shock troops and the army can have. The US has them like the Navy seals and the Delta Force that they have. You know, they have various names for them because there's different units that do this. But they're. They're highly skilled people. And you send them in and, you know, and I said, well, well, take all the people that you've ever trained who, you know, somehow volunteered for this, and you made them into highly effective soldiers who could rape, make raids. In other words, identify an enemy location and, you know, use your best strategies to sneak up on them and then. And then. Boy, raid them.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And I said, yes. And I says, and as you review your experience, how many of the ones who made it through the entire training and took whatever it took to get into the best possible fighting condition, how many of them were men and how many of them were women? And he said it was always 100% men.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And the thing is that they weren't going there. They weren't training themselves actually to go and practice social skills when they went on those missions.

Dean: Right, right.

Dan: Wow. They were. They were going to practice this destructive skills. And men seem drawn to destructive skills, you know, and. Yeah, so, so it's an. So it's an interesting thing. And, and I think that in order to have a. Towards everybody being graded at the level of, let's just say, interpersonal social skills, you then have to. You. You then have to establish that only a world where social skills of this sort are the most valuable skills can be allowed to exist. In other words, that we have to have us. We have to have a world where the most highly valued skills are social, interpersonal skills. And those are the skills that are the most important skills. Okay. We can't have where, you know, shock and awe and destructive skills can be considered the most important skills. And my sense is. But actually, we actually need both worlds. Yeah.

Dean: I think it's so. Yeah, there's. We just get to observe these things now on. At the highest level, at the widest scope, in fastest time, everything is compressed. We see the impact of something like, even with the cancel culture, you know, heard kind of thing jumping on something right away. The thing that got me the most, the really interesting thing that saw this was when a little bit before the Me Too movement was the Cecil the Lion movement, which really, like, struck me as something that the Internet just got like totally inflamed about and immediately went and stomped out. Do you remember the situation that dentist in from Michigan went over to Africa and was on a safari and killed this lion. But then they personified him. They named him Cecil the Lion. And in the world got like, hated this dentist. Every day was like the whole stampede. The full weight of the disapproving cancel army, you know, stomped all over this guy in Michigan.

Dan: As if you didn't. As if you didn't already have enough reasons to hate it.

Dean: Right, Exactly. But the thing I still. The whole thing to me to this day that seems so disturbing about it is that I have not seen a single mention of the word Cecil the lion on the Internet prior to the day that this guy, you know, that they named him Cecil the Lion. And because it seemed like it was constructed for that, you know, and that's really because everybody got none of the villagers where they were like 340 people died that year from lion attacks in the village. And they don't. They could care less about the lions. Like one less lion that's like fewer people that are going to get killed in their village. You know, they don't. They don't care. And there are these were, you know, licensed safaris, like real. You go through the whole process to do it. It wasn't like he went in and swiped this lion, but the fact that you could create something like that and do it. And then, of course, then all the Me Too stuff was really in that world too.

Dan: Yeah. Something very interesting along those lines. I read an article last week, and it was how using the structure of jokes to understand when Twitter as a technology works and then when Twitter does not work. Does not work. And what they made. What they pointed out was is that jokes are funny to the degree that people have a great deal in common with each other. And therefore they're accepting the setup that the jokester the comedian is putting out to them, and then he introduces a sudden surprise that they all understand. So they all understand what the setup was, and they understand what the surprise was. And the surprise requires to. There's a snap in their mind. There's a kind of a sudden snap in their mind when they're directed to bring two things together that they both understand, but they don't belong together. And that makes it very fat. That makes it very funny.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And he said that what he's noticed about Twitter is that Twitter works in the first place because the communication, the actual tweet is to people who have things in common.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: You have things in common and you're sending messages. Where Twitter doesn't work is where you re Twitter and send it out to all the people who don't have that starting thing in common with everybody else. And then they respond by being very angry and very insulting.

Dean: Dave. Dave Chappelle is going through that. He's refusing to be canceled. And people are like. And good for him on the way he's handling it. And they're realizing, oh, wait a minute, we can't just cancel somebody because his fans have a voice too, and they're on his side. You know, you can't just cancel someone like that.

Dan: Well, I was, I was watching his little response to Jesse Summit, you know, Jesse Summit.

Dean: Jesse Smollett. Yeah, exactly, Smollett.

Dan: Jesse Smollett. And so Dave Chappelle said, you know, we've just had a situation. He said, you know, situation, A crime related situation that involved not only someone who was black and not someone who was gay, but someone who was also French, Frenchman by the name of Juicy. Juicy Smollet. Juicy Smollett.

Dean: Yeah, exactly.

Dan: Okay. And the audience just laughed and laughed and laughed. And then Dave Chappelle walked through the, you know, he walked through the history of the incident that happened. And what he brought in was a police officer from the Chicago police who had to write down the immediate, you know, the immediate details of what this French actor, Juicy Smollet, had actually encountered. Suzy encountered. And he says, you were up for a walk, Mr. Smollett. You were out for a walk at 2:47am at 2:45 in the morning, 16 degrees below zero. 16 degrees below zero. You were out for. You were out for a walk? Yes, yes. And you were, you were going where? To the subway at 2:45 in the morning for sandwiches. For sandwiches. And he said, and these two individuals, as you say, came out, they rushed out and they said, then they were wearing maga make America great again. And they were saying that you're in mega territory. And it just gets funnier and funnier as he does that then. And he says now there was uprage across the, the entire world when this happened. But did you notice where there was no outrage at all, Mr. Smollett? There was no outrage among African Americans. And the reason was nothing you said added up.

Dean: Oh, right, exactly.

Dan: And he said, we supported you with our silence because

Dean: that's it. We could support you is with our silence. Right.

Dan: Yeah. The only way we could support you with ourselves because we knew there was no way.

Dean: Exactly.

Dan: Anything that anything you said could be true.

Dean: I mean, isn't that amazing? Yeah, yeah.

Dan: And it was really a beautiful performance because he, you know, and the, you know, he just pointed out the ridiculousness of the situation.

Dean: Yeah, yeah.

Dan: I mean, and it has to do that. It's Chicago, it's 2:45 in the morning.

Dean: Right.

Dan: 16 degrees below zero. And then if they're going to recognize

Dean: him as the guy from that Empire show. Yeah, yeah.

Dan: And if they're saying mega hat wearing guys.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: People who are not going to be on the street in Chicago, downtown Chicago at that time, or people with mega hats.

Dean: Right, exactly.

Dan: Claiming that it's their territory, you know, we own Chicago. Well, not really. And I, I think what I like about, I like what he. But he does is that he informs these kind of wild situations or these wild claims with the actual physical reality of what's going on when they're supposed to have been happening.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And the, the physical reality has a greater strength to say, this is nonsense, this is nonsense. This couldn't have happened. You know, the physical reality. So. Yeah, I think he's very gifted. I think Dave Chappelle is very gifted person. Oh, very.

Dean: Like just the way that he sees things. Such a clear thinker, too. And that's an amazing, that's an amazing thing on its own. Yeah. I think he's doing, he's doing a great job, but, you know, it brings. Yeah.

Dan: You know, and he's. The thing is, I read up on him and he's not, you know, he's not up from the streets. He's not a character who's up from the streets. His grandfather was the president of a university.

Dean: His. Oh, yeah.

Dan: Father was a professor. His father was a professor at a university. And he's very well educated. He's very well educated. So he's, he can approach these things with a certain amount of, you know, philosophical background, historical background, intellectual.

Dean: Really. That's Right.

Dan: He's an intellect, he's an intellectual. Yeah. And therefore he can. He can poke fun, he can point out ridiculousness in a way that most people can't. Because he's, you know, he's not. He's not really. He's not really engaged with the anger.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, that's true. The whole. You're thinking about this, the. The juicy sommelier situation and mega country is one of the things that strikes me too right now is this sense there is no sense of local territory anymore. Feels like. Like I don't. You know, I've said to you before, I. Growing up, I definitely have this sense of having had a Canadian experience and having had a lens of Toronto with a little bit of Buffalo brought in here. Right. Like in the Eyewitness News and the whole thing that our lens was from Buffalo to Toronto and, you know, the newspapers were the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail and the sun, that everything that we saw and explosive, which shaped my lens was, up until really till 1984, all just that Canadiana kind of lens. Right. And that you wouldn't have any exposure to or connection to anything that was going on in Chicago or in, like, I don't remember ever really hearing anything about Chicago or about, you know, other Atlanta or, you know, all the big sort of regional clusters of things that were happening. And I wonder now, because your way up out of that was through the hierarchy you had to kind of get out of. You had to earn your stripes kind of thing. We were joking about. There was a movie about U2, the band, and it was. The movie was called Killing Bono. And it was a movie about what was the second best band in Dublin at the time. And it would sue these two rival high school bands that started up at the same time. And it was the second best band in Dublin. But you think about, if you're going to be the best band in the world, you've got to be the best band in Dublin on your way up to that. And yeah, unless you're Lil Nas X and you can immediately jump the Atlanta scene and immediately get on the thing. And it struck me that we've kind of gone back now. If you take Cloudlandia, Cloudlandia is like America in the 50s when there were only three television stations and you could mass advertise on NBC, ABC, CBS. Except instead of that, it's Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Mm, that's the one.

Dean: Those are the four global, you know, attention, suckers. If you can get on those things, that's what's really. That's what's happening. So there's. I'd love to. Because you kind of came from a traditional advertising background back in the. Right at the tail end of when I would call those the 50s to 70s was kind of the glory years.

Dan: I was there in the early seventh, early seventies. And you were aware that something like the golden age of advertising had happened, but you knew you weren't part of it, Right?

Dean: Exactly.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: And I wonder now that that is that really. That's what's kind of happening right now. It's a good analog. If you start to kind of think about.

Dan: Well, I think the other thing. I think the other thing is that there's now competitors coming up. And the one is a very interesting thing. There's a very active site right here in Toronto on Adelaide Street, I guess it's right around the university in Adelaide, and it's called Rumble. And Rumble is pulling people from YouTube. So it's a graphic thing. And they've been able in their first three or four years to pull over 15% of customers who would put their videos on YouTube but not are now putting them on Rumble. Okay.

Dean: And this is a Canadian.

Dan: We're interested in it. Yeah, it's. Well, no, it's wide open. I mean, it's, it's, you know, they're situated in Canada, but they're inviting in Americans to put. And they're not going to have any censorship rules about, you know, politics. Okay. So they're opening up and then there's two initiatives that are moving towards Rumble so that Rumble and two other things will be combined within the next year. And one of them is called Truth Social that was created by Donald Trump. And then there's another organization whose name escapes me right now, and they're putting it together and they have a lot of money and they have a lot of investors and they have a lot of action. And what they're creating is a counter to the Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube world, okay? And they're coming, coming forward. And it's based on people who don't want to see things ideologically censored. In other words, they're willing to have their. They're willing to have their content put on this new emerging media on the basis that it will cost tension, it'll cause tension between this message and everything. And it's, and what they've created is a spac, a special, A special purpose investment vehicle. And then at a certain point it has to define itself. They have a time period to Define themselves, but it's got millions of dollars invested in it. And to create a counter, to create a counter platform to the ones that have clearly identified themselves with what I would say the left, the democratic sort of the woke message. And this other platform will identify itself as being opposed to the censorship and cancel. Cancel culture attitudes of the other medium. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting thing to watch. It's interesting to watch. And Trump has, you know, put himself directly in it and he created this platform which is called Truth Social. One of the neat little things about Truth Social media that he worked out was, is that anytime you go to Google and you punch in the word truth, it'll immediately send you to Truth Social. So he's done this little trick with YouTube, with Google, that anybody moving to their platform to investigate the truth, any inquiries will immediately be sent to Trump's platform. So that's his little, that's his little thing.

Dan: So I think we're seeing, you know, it's been more or less the narrative for the last two or three years now that anything that is not appropriate to a certain left mindset that's represented by, you know, it's represented by Mark Zuckerberg and by Jack Dorsey and by the Google, the Google gang people are just going to get shut off. And now another medium is emerging that is saying, oh, there's going to be an alternative place.

Dean: Well, it's really interesting just what's happening. You know, Google are, and YouTube and Facebook and we do a lot of Facebook advertising simply because of the targeting abilities. You're able to target exactly who to show the message to. But what's happened is the things that I primarily do advertising and like for real estate and franchises and you know, employment, which would be business opportunity things, they're really tightening up now that you can't use any of those targeting things for, for those like they started out, we could target on Facebook. We used to be able to go directly to a micro neighborhood. I could get your neighborhood from, you know, from Queen street to the beach and from, you know, just that south of, or the beach side of Queen. You could get those, all of those homes in there. Now you can't. The minimum targeting that you can do geographically, a 15 mile circle. So you have to show ads to Everybody in that 15 mile radius. And you can't use age or income or any of the different variables that they have for selecting people if you're offering anything to do with real estate. And now the newest one is you can't even ask for, if you offer to send them something, you can't even ask for physical mailing address, because that is something that you could use to discriminate. So you're only allowed to make offers that they can get with email. And so they're making it like, you know, I guess they're trying on real estate and lending.

Dan: And I love about that, you know, I love about that, is that it brings forward a comment that the Emperor Napoleon is reported to have said that never interrupt your enemy when he's committing suicide.

Dean: Right.

Dan: But it's really interesting what they're doing is they're committing suicide.

Dean: Well, you know. Yeah.

Dan: I mean, so if someone else comes along and allows you to make all the distinctions that you're forbidden by the other side to make and you make all the distinctions, that means that vacated the field to you.

Dean: But I think it's being driven by the. That it's the hud, it's government driven, that they're really feeling heat from doing untoward things or whatever. Allowing people to steer. Yeah. So there. Yeah, they're feeling the pressure.

Dan: Yeah. The real problem of real estate in the Toronto is the vast amount of money that's coming into funding condo projects. For example, they just opened up the possibility of this immense condo project south of Lakeshore, and it's in the Docklands. It's now. Yeah, you haven't been here for a while, but it's entirely cleared. And they knocked off the ramp from the Gardner Expressway. That's completely gone. And they're. They're now constructing new waterways. So. So they're going to put in a community that will, you know, the next phase, the first phase, they're going to. That will. They will have a 10,000 population in condo like. And then the Lever Brothers, you know, the big Lever Brothers factories that were north of. Yep, the same. Those are being leveled. And a entirely new shopping center is going into that area right now. Okay. So. And the big thing is that the thing that does not want to be mentioned, you shall not mention this in Canadian media, that the money that's coming in to finance all this stuff is coming from your great friends in communist China. Your great, great friends in communist China are moving their money out of China as fast as they can and getting it into overseas investments. And it just happens to be that Toronto is just one of those great overseas investments for Red Chinese. People at the top can move their money and move their children out of the country of Red China, get them safe. Because we don't know how safe Red China is.

Dean: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Dan: And that's the big issue. That's the big issue. I mean, if you want to talk about red, but the big issue is that creates all the little issues. That's the big issue.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And nobody wants to talk about the fact that all this Chinese money is flowing into Toronto, which I just makes the world. Yeah, I think it makes the world interesting.

Dean: Well, I am too. I mean, I just look at this in this transition, I wonder where local, where the mainland is going to land. What is like in all these movies that you see that paint this, you know, the future. Like if you look at all the movies that, you know, show the digital future where everybody's in there, VR headset. It's like the mainland has become this dystopian, neglected, you know, backstage thing that nobody pays any attention to. Comparative.

Dan: Do you actually know any people who live in those AR VR worlds? I mean, our committed residents.

Dean: Every one of, every one of our, you know, every one of our 5 year old to now 20 year old kids is living in those worlds right now. I mean, that's really. I dawned on me that the interesting thing. Do you know who Clotaire Rapai is who wrote the culture code? He's a French marketer who is well known for defining for companies the underlying code about why something is popular, right? Why people's first imprints with things. He didn't work with autistic kajo, but you've probably seen him. He's a French guy who wears these, you know, fancy suits and he's got this French accent that he talks about. He is the guy that worked with General Motors when they released the Hummer, for instance, and he determined that the code for, for SUVs is domination. That's why we buy them. That's why our reptile brain buys the Hummers. Because if you look at a logical situation, most people don't ever express an interest in it. Seems so counter message, right? Everything, fuel economy and all of these things. But even the rational reasons that people use for safety and for, you know, convenience. And you know, but he's saying, but you live in Manhattan. You know, it's like, why is this the thing? So once he got the code for domination, his instruction for everything is if you saw the original advertising for them was that it was always photographed from below, looking up the narrow windows. It looked authoritative. It had the epaulets on the side. The, you know, all of it was intimidating. And that was what people were subconsciously seeking. So I told you that just to tell you one of the things that he was brought in by a company to help them crack the Japanese market for their coffee. And they couldn't figure out how to sell coffee in Japan. And every culture has a different thing. He had success with Kraft selling cheese in America. He said, the difference between cheese in America and Europe is that in Europe the cheese is alive and we leave it out and you let it breathe. And you, you know, that's the thing in America. We want the cheese to be dead. And we want.

Dean: It's why it's in body bags, in these hermetically sealed things that you seal the cheese and you put it in the fridge in the morgue, that it's, you know, it's dead. Nothing is going to, you know, grow or be bad. It's not going to go bad on there. Which is really fundamental difference. Right. When you look at it and you understand it, in Japan, they're more of a tea culture than a coffee culture that they don't have any imprint of. And he calls an imprint. He has people go back to their very first impression or their very first encounter with things. And so in, in coffee, the Japanese had no, no imprint of coffee. Right. It wasn't in there. What he suggested to them was to abandon the idea right now of bringing coffee into Japan, but Instead take a 15 year view and introduce a line of children's desserts that are coffee flavored. To introduce the flavor of coffee and pleasurable associations with it from your very first memories to in 15 years, gradually get to a point where now when they're in adult, that they're introduced to this thing that harkens back to their childhood. Well, what we've been observing for the last 15 years now, since 2007 or whenever the games, video games really became fully immersive, that every teenager right now is 100% immersed in these metaverse type of environments, they're 100% groomed, that when they come into adulthood, of course the metaverse for adults is going to be there waiting for them. And that's what's really, I think, putting the stuff on there. So it's been happening without us even knowing it, you know, without us even seeing it, because we're not part of it.

Dan: Yeah, well, it still comes down to who owns what, you know.

Dean: Right. Yeah.

Dan: And I'm trying to understand the metaverse as basis for property.

Dean: Well, here's, I'll tell you, here's an example. One of the biggest accomplishments that they've done now several times, but Fortnight, which was the big winning game of near the last five years, say, is this amazing universe that you could. It's a fixed universe and you fly around and you go wherever you are. It's like a mapped universe. You can go to a particular place in fortnight on the island. And they had, they've had on several occasions now, concerts, but the first one that they did, they had 10 million people live attending a concert by Marshmallow, one of the big EDM dj. And you went to the stadium or you went to the. The party area where they were doing it. And it's as if you were right there experiencing it at the stage. You're. You're experiencing the whole thing.

Dan: You got cut off there, Dean, for about a minute. Yeah. Okay, so, okay, the last point that you were that 10 million people were engaged in the conference.

Dean: Yeah, 10 million people came to the concert and were all experiencing the same thing. It's pretty interesting. What's the right engineering or the way that they program and the way that they did it. It looks like you're among a few hundred people right there at the stage and you're watching Marshmallow and you're, you're, you know, his avatar. You're taking part of that whole thing. And then they just duplicate that a bunch of, you know, millions of times where 10 million people are having this same exact experience at the same time. And so now you get a sense that it would make sense if you could have a booth, you know, right now. All the things for you to be able to make in app purchases on something. Imagine if you had a booth that you could sell T shirts at this merch at the concert, and you just go to the thing you look at and you could click to buy the T shirt at the thing. Being in front of 10 million people like that would be a big piece of geography. And that's why companies like Louis Vuitton and big brands are buying real estate in these key locations where everybody's going to gather. So the metaverse being formed is really where we're all going to the same place on the Internet. Or that sense of all going to the same place, it's a. It's going to happen quickly because it's happened. It's all been happening below the scenes. It's now there. Like in the adult world. They're kind of scrambling to build the final station. But that train full of millions of Gen Z kids who are at the just turning 20 now, you know, they're all 100% immersed in virtual environments and their NFTs all the in app purchases, all of the things that are just gonna naturally equate over into the thing. Instead of going into, into Minecraft or Fortnite worlds where they're building and playing and competing in gaming, they're going to easily translate into going into we work type of environments where their avatar is going to go into a work space where they'll sit around and take Overlandia in a cooperative way. From a more mature business standpoint, if

Dan: they actually understand any business, well, that's it.

Dean: That's it. They certainly understand.

Dan: Because my sense is that, you know, that Kavania is like, like a new planet. Not like a new planet, but a new continent that you've developed. And there's, if I understand it, that all human experience has danger and risk and hardship involved in it, that you have 10 million viewers of one act. Well, the winner seems to be the one act, not the 10 million. Okay, so, so, so my sense is that we've had this in the, you know, you know, you have similar things happen earlier in history. When Johann Strauss Jr. Came to Boston in the 1860s, they had a concert that had 200,000 people and they had 1500 musicians who were coordinated by Johann Strauss waltzes. He was the Beatles of that day. He was the Beatles of that day and everything like that. But they, you know, there were the spectators and the spectators are interesting and everything, but the spectators don't actually own anything.

Dean: Right.

Dan: The organizers of the council are doing something And Johannes Strauss Jr. Owns something. So, so it doesn't mean that there's riches made if you've shifted things, because if people are consumers in cloud Vanbia, they're probably. Their basic instincts is to be consumers and at their consumer consumers in Maine,

Dean: I think that's fair to say in any situation. I mean, I would argue that a 20 year old circa 1971 is no, far less prepared for the world than a 21 year old in. In 2021.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Just especially for the future. The world the way the future is.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. My basic differentiation is people who are creators and people who are consumers, you know, and there's far fewer creators and the reason is because they need a lot of consumers. So a certain number, a certain few people can be creators and a great many of people can be consumers. And so my sense is that the switch over from the mainland to Cloudlandia, the numbers will probably hold.

Dean: I wonder. Right? Yeah, you just got. Everybody has access to them.

Dan: You know, I've been listening for 30 or 40 years of digital technology is going to make all people into entrepreneurial creators. But I don't. Yeah. Any of the. I don't see any evidence. Evidence indicating that.

Dean: Well, I don't know. I mean, you look at. I would put Lil Nas X. I would put the Bridgerton musical. I would put. There's lots of now stories where otherwise.

Dan: Mr. Beast.

Dean: Yeah, yeah. All of these.

Dan: I would say that these are the superstars. Like. Yeah. You know, any previous world has had superstars. Yeah, they just happen to be.

Dean: If we ask Jordan Peterson about. That's distribution, that's systemic distribution. That in any order you're going to have the 1%. Be interesting to lay it out like that and see. You know, it's not. It's just. It's fascinating that it's not anything to do with the. With anything broken in the system per se. It's the. It's a natural order of distribution that 1% of any. You know, the top 1% of anything is going to be by far the winners by a long shot. So much. I mean, it's such amazing times.

Dan: You know, I think for all the talk about we're going to have fundamental breakthroughs and how people live and there is a sense in which that's true. And I look at how much my life is enhanced by electronic capabilities, the movement to zoom over the last two years, and just generally electricity is a friendly force in my life. I really appreciate electricity in my life.

Dean: Electricity has been very, very good to me.

Dan: But on the other hand, what I notice is the amount of people being bothered and moaning and whining seems to grow with the increase of electronic capability.

Dean: Yeah, I agree.

Dan: I think the constant between excitement and unhappiness remains the same when you move from one domain to the other.

Dean: Yeah, I can't wait to watch it all unfold.

Dan: Yeah, well, we're in the middle of it, so keep notes.

Dean: Okay, I'll talk to you soon.

Dan: Okay, bye.