Experimenting with Digital Freedom

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia, Mr. Sullivan.

Dan: I think we have different Internet systems for the different houses, so

Dean: you gotta find the right one. Which house are you in today? Recognize that view?

Dan: It's 35. This was the first. This was the first one. This very first house. 1993. Yeah. Okay. It said it could not be joined, but obviously we're joined.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: This is the best it's going to be.

Dean: You may be joined to the one next door. Yeah. Okay. It's just. It's a little intermittent, but it should be fine. Okay.

Dan: Can you give me another three minutes? I'll go to the next house.

Dean: Of course. Dan.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, we have lots of time.

Dean: Yeah, of course.

Dan: Okay, good. Hold on. Then I'll jump over to the next. Jump over. Okay. Okay.

Dean: Okay. I'll be right here. Let's see.

Dan: There we are.

Dean: Well, now that looks much more familiar. Yeah.

Dan: Anyway, so here we are. And that was a nice little, I thought, our opening. For those of you. We won't necessarily have recorded that, but just to let everybody know, first of all, welcome to Cloudlandia. But secondly, I had flown from Chicago to Toronto yesterday, halfway discovering I had left my briefcase there and my cell phone was in it. And my cell phone is extraordinarily valuable for two reasons. Because I have a device called Happy, which is a mood regulator created by Scott Donaldson and won't go into that right now. But the other reason I use my cell phone is because that's the device that I use, the advanced technology that I use to have podcasts with Dean Jackson. And besides calling the guy who cuts my hair and my limousine company, I have no other uses for the cell phone.

Dean: That's the best. I love that.

Dan: But being deprived of a first class technology, I had to resort to a landline.

Dean: Oh, man, I know.

Dan: A land line.

Dean: Surprisingly, you still have one. It's so funny. I used to have three. I had three landlines in my house. We were down to one now, but I mean, remember you talked. In fact, you had used to have a dedicated fax line and then you'd have. Yeah, yeah.

Dan: Well, it's kind of like, you know, in the first 10 years when we were on the farm and our first five years when we were on the farm, we had a refrigerator. We still kept the icebox.

Dean: Yeah. Isn't that funny?

Dan: Because you never knew.

Dean: Hold on. Yeah, we still got.

Dan: You just never knew. It's like, you know, I wonder how long people kept their horses after they got their cars.

Dean: Mm. A long time. Yeah. So.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Well, how was your first, this was

Dan: really first month really.

Dean: Because really of back to. Back to workshops.

Dan: Yeah. So five work, six workshops and couple observations. Number one, has changed radically. There's a real difference to. There's a real difference in the entrepreneurs coming back after the two years. Okay. And it's very noticeable and that is that there the commitment level is way higher, the appreciation level is way higher. And the other thing is that we have trained ourselves very deeply and broadly to actually economize our coaching model for the purpose of zoom. Because you can't fool around on Zoom. You can't have dead space. You can't have.

Dean: Right.

Dan: You know, and so we had become very tight, you know, in terms of how we delivered the material. So what I thought, because I now have eight hours for the in person workshop and the zoom was six, that I said I'm going to stick with the six hour discipline as far as delivering the content, but I'm just going to leave the other two hours for free forum discussion. And it's beautiful.

Dean: It's beautiful. That's a beautiful thing because I've noticed that in. You've been experimenting with that in Free Zone for a while. It feels like that we've had some, the free form discussions where we don't know where it's going to go.

Dan: I did one and I didn't even have any thinking tools. I just asked three questions.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, I remember.

Dan: And we, and we went for six hours. We, we went for six hours and about the beginning of the sixth hour, one of my team members came up to me. She said, are you going to have time to do the tools? And I said, oh no, that was. That. That opportunity was gone long ago. So anyway, you know, but it's good to have this structure. And, and so I had a. 10 times. I had five, 10 times and then I had one free zone and it was great. Yeah.

Dean: So now did you lose your briefcase with the phone or did you.

Dan: No, no, it's at home. That's.

Dean: I just left it at your house. Yeah. So no experience transformer necessary.

Dan: No, I'm. I'm out of travel.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: I'm out of travel discipline, you know. Yeah. I mean I'm all at loose ends with this travel business.

Dean: That's. Oh, that's funny. Wow. Well, I mean it's. Yeah. What a world. Now, did you notice that people are more, I don't know what the right word is. What's the word for being, you know, back to something that we're kind of, we used to take for granted well, like riding a bike, kind of getting back into the regular workshop kind of modes for people.

Dan: No, I don't think so. No. I think that they're, you know, I mean, I would say that 90% of the people who have come back also were there with us for Zoom. So they had, you know, say they had also gotten used to things being like this.

Dean: Yeah. I wondered what was the ratio of people who just decided to bow out for.

Dan: 20. 20.

Dean: 20% were people who just said, I'm not in the Zoom. Let me know when you come back and I'll come back.

Dan: Yeah, we're going to have a. We're going to have a big. We're going to have a big deluge in the fall. Yeah, no, right now. It'll start now because Toronto eliminates all mask requirements on tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last. Tomorrow is the last day and don't

Dean: have to show about travel to April. I heard that, like, April 18th or

Dan: something is going to be the last on the airlines. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, and then Fauci came out yesterday and he said, we may have to go back to lockdowns. And I said, well, you'll be doing it on your own, Dr. Fauci.

Dean: Oh, right, right.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. As a matter of fact, you can just lock yourself down for the rest of your life as far as we're concerned.

Dean: Can you imagine? I mean, that's. Well, I successfully timed the bottom of the trough again to get a live event in next week, so we'll have, you know, Live. Yeah.

Dan: I think Gary Clayburn is joining you again. He. I think Gary's coming. Third time. His third time, I think. Yeah. And Derek Lobo. Yeah, yeah.

Dean: Good.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: We always. I always love having. I love. Gary's a great. He's. This format is really good for him and it'll be the first one for Derek, but I think he's been emailing back and forth and going through all the exercises and stuff ahead of time, and he's. It really fits with the way he thinks, which is good.

Dan: So Gary's a great guy because he hates doing the forms. Like the forums. Now, there's two types of people who hate the forms. They hate the forms and they don't do them, and Gary hates them. And he's always the first one done. He just goes, yeah. And I said, boy, you really do it fast. He says, I have to because I hate them so much.

Dean: Plug your nose and eat your vegetables quick. Right, Exactly. Get it out of the way. Yeah, that's funny.

Dan: Yeah. So anyway, Yeah, I mean it's an interesting period and I have a feeling that it's total impact these last two years will only be realized probably over the next 10 years. I think there's going to be a lot of studies just 360 degrees what happened that changed before and after. I think there'll be. There'll be some mass. It'll be like the Great Depression or you know, the Second World War or something like that. It'll be that type of analysis that they'll do.

Dean: I heard some words, Dan, that I wanted to kind of have a conversation about because it dovetailed with some of the things you were talking about at the end of the last conversation we had. But I found out I was reading about ByteDance the company that is the holding company that owns TikTok and all the apps and all the things that they own. And they. The word that I heard was let me get it right, is a. Shared services platform. They look at themselves as an SSP where bytedance itself has all of the technology capability. If we're. I was overlaying it with our VCR formula that they are. I would look at those shared services platform as allowing their companies access to all of their VCR capabilities, all of their things specifically how they would assist or help that one app because some app may benefit by having reach of another one of their shared. That becomes a shared service of being part of the ByteDance platform. And I thought about it as you were. Because you've always talked about the free zone economy, right? We measuring the impact of the free zone economy. And I imagined it as if we're thinking of both privately as companies being and developing these shared services platforms as a strategy but also on a meta. Not meta beating the metaverse but on a meta level one layer up that being part of a free zone community of companies, entrepreneurs that are operating as a shared services platform as an opportunity. That's really. I thought that was very interesting.

Dan: Yeah, well, I think that you know we've got some really. I mean TikTok's really big, but you have two or three others that like think about the Swift banking system where the Russians got thrown out a couple of weeks ago. It's 11,000 banks and actually nobody owns the platform. Nobody owns the platform. It's just a collaborative platform and that certainly seems like shared services and it speeds up the completion of transactions where it involves a number of banks being being involved. So that's one. The other one is I think AWS seems to have. Based on AWS certainly Amazon's web services. And the other one is the cables that go under the ocean for the major companies like Facebook and, and you know, obviously Google and others. And they have surplus in the cables and if anything goes wrong with one of their cables, they can move over and use one of the other. One of the other cables. Okay, so it's a. Thinking of the bigger game. In other words, they're making sort of

Dean: bites their cable or something, right?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. And they must be hard to find. I mean, first of all, they're a long way down, you know. Yeah.

Dean: You know, they must settle in under the sand.

Dan: I think the casual swimmer couldn't do anything to just. Right, right, right. Anyway, but my sense is that this is the coming trend more and more, you know, anywhere where you have capacity beyond what your present needs and make it available to other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, I was just, I did a. This is F.A. hayek, economist from the 40s and 50s, quite famous. And he has a book called the Fatal Conceit, which has a particular meaning relationship that a few people can run everything. And it's a fatal conceit because 99% of what happens every day in just the world, people getting up and working with each other, 99% of that activity is totally not detectable, nor could it be described. It just happens. Okay. And he said that capitalism, the unfortunate part of capitalism is that it was named by its enemies.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And so he says capitalism isn't really about capital. It's just the byproduct that gets thrown off. It creates so much economic activity that a lot of capital gets thrown off as a extremely positive byproduct. And then that byproduct is used to enhance. It comes back and enhances the overall system, enhances people's participation. And he says, but capitalism is actually an ever expanding system of increasing trust and cooperation among strangers. So just use Doc Mrbeast and his Beast burger. He basically made something. He made something based on trust and cooperation that allows 1600 restaurants to date to actually enhance their menus and vastly expand their interested customers who would come to their restaurants. You know, that's capitalism. Yeah, I watched the interview, by the way.

Dean: How did you like that?

Dan: Oh yeah, he's a smart guy. Well, he's kind of charming too. He's just, how can you, how could you not like the guy? You know, I mean, he's just. He says, man, you're surprised? I'm surprised.

Dean: Exactly. But then he readily says too, this is the result of I've just been.

Dan: I've been at this since I was 11. I've been at this.

Dean: I've been super obsessed on one thing my entire life.

Dan: 12 years. 12 years I've been at that. I've been doing this now for a longer period than my age when I started. You know, more than half my life, I've been doing this. I'm 23.

Dean: Yes, that's exactly right. And so you think. I just thought you would really enjoy that. What I really. I got a lot out of. Because it completely dovetailed with my ideas versus execution. Yeah. Model of him talking about the value of the ideas, especially when you're going to 10x, that's really. Yeah. It's not 10x isn't about the execution. It's about the ideas. Executing the right ideas.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Well, it also, you know, I'm really going deeper and expanding my concept of shortcuts, programs, and platform. Okay.

Dean: That was where we left off last time. Last time.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: And I wrote. I thought I wrote those down. I don't have the piece of paper I wrote them on right now. Shortcuts, platforms.

Dan: Shortcuts, programs and platform. Okay. In relationship to, you know, and so my. For the use of my clients, I said, everything that you're doing as an entrepreneur is your platform. Okay. But you have various offerings to various groups, so those would be your programs.

Dean: I got it.

Dan: And you're increasingly enhancing both your programs and your platform with new shortcuts. So the way you think about it, one way to look at it, is that your platform is a big kettle. Okay. And inside of it is delicious soup, and that's your programs, and. And underneath it is firewood, and those are your shortcuts. And it's just cold soup unless you keep creating new shortcuts.

Dean: I see. Okay. Keep stirring.

Dan: Yeah. Well, keep adding. You know, you have to keep the fire going. You know, you have to keep the fire going. And that's just a way to understand it, that your platform is a container for everything that you do. Okay. But what feeds it is new, entirely new ideas of doing things faster, easier, cheaper, and bigger. You know, which is your VCR model. Yeah. And it's been a big hit. It's been a big hit as I've learned how to talk about it. It's the first thing that we do in 10 times, and I give it two and a half hours. We go two and a half hours with it, and it's really great. And people, you know, people just ask questions, and I say, well, tell Me how what your business is. And I said, okay, let's go through and, and organize your business about what's your platform, what are your programs and what are your shortcuts, you know, and they actually, the way I do it is I just have them brainstorm right off the bat the most important improvements they've made to their business over the last three years. And then I give them three columns with three boxes each. And I said, okay, so let's take your improvements and, and sort them out. Which of the improvements would be shortcut improvements, which would be program improvements, and which would be platform improvements. So an example for us is last year I created 40 new thinking tools for the free zone and 10 times program. So those are shortcuts. And then we are bringing on four new 10 times coaches who will succeed me after this year. And that's program improvement, because it was a huge improvement. And the other thing is we're creating the new lifetime Extender series program. So that's a program improvement. And then the platform is just the impact of Zoom taking strategic coach worldwide. I mean, it's the signature program, not

Dean: just live workshops in Toronto and Chicago.

Dan: Yeah, the signature program. But the platform has acquired a massive new capability, massive new reach, you know, so anyway, and everybody kind of gets it. And I said, and I said, look, if you get an 80% feel for it and when we're finished, are you clear about how to think about your business going forward? And if you were to go 10 times or 100 times, could you see that you might keep this three way, three way of looking at it? You know, you wouldn't look at it even though you were 10 times bigger. It didn't get any more difficult to. And I think that's the central problem. We're all in the complexity business, you know? Yeah. I mean, we're in the business of making other people's complexity into simplicity. But we can't do that if we ourselves are getting complexified.

Dean: We need shortcuts.

Dan: We need shortcuts.

Dean: Who doesn't want shortcuts, Dan?

Dan: Shortcuts are, you know, you'd be a fool to disregard shortcuts. Yeah, Well, I was thinking, I read this great book. It's called the Information by James Gleig. It's just phenomenal. But he said, you know, it was only 700 BC that someone figured out how to create language, written language and spoken language, mainly written language in an Alphabet of one side or another. Okay, so. And there were a number of alphabets. There's the Cyrillic Alphabet, you know, Russia, Ukraine, and there's the Greek Alphabet, you know, which is different. And then the Roman Alphabet, you know, the Roman. And the Romans kind of, you know, because they had a big empire and they could enforce it. That became. And then that gradually transmuted eventually into the various European languages. And English is the big one. English has just taken off like a rocket. And he said, but before that, you had to memorize cuneiforms, like in Egypt or the ideograms in China or Japan. And they have 10,000 of them. And. And you're not a literate person until you've memorized. And they don't have any sound. They don't really have any. You can't put these together, you know, in easy language. He said, that was an amazing shortcut. And the other one was the mathematical one of just nine numbers plus zero. And you can do. You can take over the world with nine numbers and a zero.

Dean: I just had a. That was, yeah, really interesting reading about the Chinese or Japanese. One of them had actually invented movable type hundreds of years before Gutenberg. But it was too cumbersome because there were so many different.

Dan: They had 10,000 formal Mandarin Chinese or the, you know, sort of. The Imperial Chinese had 10,000. I mean, many.

Dean: To make it work. Right.

Dan: It was faster with a brush.

Dean: Right, Exactly. Yeah. That's funny.

Dan: Yeah. And then you make a mistake. You're on page 20, and you realize you made a mistake on page two, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And. Yeah. Yeah. So humanity is really about. It's a shortcutting species.

Dean: Yes. Now you look at the whole. All the. When you look at. It was difficult even in the last 10 years, because we've been around Peter Diamandis now for 10. 10 years. Yeah.

Dan: Our 10th one, and the one coming up is number 10.

Dean: Exactly. So when you look at that, I think that things were definitely in the tail end of 100% being digitized, and everything was a lot of disruption. I think we've gone through that phase, and now we're definitely in the stage where everything is being demonetized and democratized in that level. Right. The big things. It's kind of like what we had talked about that almost like the way I'm positioning it and imagining it is. It feels like we're entering into warp drive 1950. No, I think either warp drive or. Because I don't think it's going to be warp drive in continued evolution of new technology per se as it's going to be. We've reached. The new technology is here. And it's going to be a period like electricity, like 1950 to 1980.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: That period where 30 years of just people using the platforms that have been established. Like I think if we were to say in 1950, the platform would be television. Broadcasting would be one. We would say radio broadcasting would be another.

Dan: Well, the other technology in the states, if. And you really, you know, technologies are a thing that enabled people. But was the coast to coast interstate highway system in the United States.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: All of a sudden you had a. You could.

Dean: That was. You could leave, right?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. Started in late 40s and still going. I mean it's a never ending project.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: But it means that you could go, theoretically you would. You could go from Portland, Maine on the east to Portland, Oregon on the west without ever leaving a super elevated, you know, four lane highway. Right.

Dean: Which meant that it was on its way. That was already there wasn't really that one.

Dan: Television was probably the. Television was probably the big one. And then television, you know, television became used to visualize everything.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember, I put 1974, I did a thing back in the 80s, it was called the great crossover. And I was talking about the crossover from the microchip as the organizing structure to the large bureaucracy as the organizing structure. So my thesis was that a large bureaucracy. And I used General Motors that in the 50s, which was the heyday. The 50s was the heyday for the big car makers in the United States. And then the foreign cars started coming in the 1960s, you know, so that. But their heyday, GM in Detroit had 21 levels of management before between the CEO and the shop 4, 21. And I said, you know, you know, and humans are just terrible at passing on information accurately. I mean, we're just the worst.

Dean: If you think we either game of telegraph or telephone or whatever.

Dan: Yeah. We either distort the meaning or we forget some of the words or we change the meaning as we pass it on. And we're not trying to do that deliberately. It's just that our brains aren't real good at reproducing accurate information. I mean, maybe some people are doing it purposely. I don't really know about that. But if you think of GM in itself, with all of its human integrated circuits, it was just an attempt to create a microchip. You know, it was an attempt to create, you know, but you know, it couldn't stand up to an actual microchip. So my thesis was that everything based on these big pyramids was going to have trouble. They were going to start having breakdowns and complexities and complications and conflicts inside of them. And smaller units and even individuals armed with microchip technologies would become much more alert, curious, responsive, resourceful, and they could do things faster, easier, cheaper and bigger. You know, and they.

Dean: You.

Dan: And there's an interesting thing. Who pointed this out, I think it was Matt Ridley in the Rational Optimist. But he said in. In 1990, the average number of people in an incorporated enterprise, so all incorporated, incorporated entities in the United States was average of 24 people per corporation. Okay. And in 2015, it was 12 people for. So the number of people had dropped. But the power of those 12 equipped with micro technology was probably 10 times what the 24 person was. You know, and that's not anything special.

Dean: That just.

Dan: I mean, that's just what would happen.

Dean: Yeah, but that's really interesting that when you look at now what we've come to, if you look at these shared service platforms like you mentioned, aws that for any company, there's no company that needs to invest in that layer of anything. They're instant access to just the right amount of scale, just the right amount of capacity that they need with no investment in. Yeah.

Dan: And I, you know, here at Coach, we've taken advantage of two of the big platforms over the last two years, Amazon for our books. You know, Amazon is just, you know, just really a great medium. And then audible. Audible, Audible has helped us. And then the zoom. Zoom has just been wonderful during that time. We've really brought in Salesforce and all of our. Top to bottom. Now it took us about three and a half years to get it through the entire organization. You know, so the Salesforce, the program that eats your company.

Dean: My bad.

Dan: Right. But we can see now as people are used to it and they're all collaborating with each other and I mean, it's infinitely better to have access to everything, all the.

Dean: But you have to fully adapt. You have to fully commit to it to make that happen.

Dan: Yeah. But we were taking a look at 10, 20 years and we had maxed. We had a Jerry built, you know, our own. You know, it was a patch here, patch there. And we had put various capabilities together, but we maxed out. You know, we maxed out when we hit 2,000 clients, you know, and after that you were just having break breakdowns and conflicts and everything else. We. So. Yeah, yeah. So we converted to the big religion.

Dean: Yeah, there you go. So if I. So if we were looking again back at the, you know, this comparison between, you know, 1952 and 19 or 20, 22. The. You know, the. The. It feels like we're at the starting line.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Where the pla. If you just, like, put the blinders on of everything that's happened in the past and you come to where we are right now, that if you're coming, you're emigrating to Cloudlandia. Welcome to Cloudlandia. Here's what you get. Here's what you have access to, is really.

Dan: Yeah. And I floated a thought during the last three or four months. I said, maybe the virus was incidental to the lockdown. And I said, what if it was just a global thing? Okay, let's slow things down now and let's start using the stuff that we have, you know? You know, because I. Almost everybody I talk to maximize the technology that they already had. They didn't bring in new technology. I don't know what technology sales were like over the last two years, but I think if the sales were great. If sales were great, it was existing technology, it wasn't new tech. So it goes along with your thesis that now we're. I mean, who uses all the capabilities on their cell phone?

Dean: Well, that's. What I mean is that's where we are. Here's where we are. You get your phone and you've got. On that phone, instead of NBC, CBS and ABC, you've got Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, you've got. Those are the distributors of the, you know, the networks kind of thing distributing the info.

Dan: Yeah. And then the millions of really useful, talented human beings or even websites or applications that other people have, and you're doing it. And I think if you don't get a handle on that in your mind, you feel, you know, you feel that somehow the world has just passed you by because you have a feeling that all sorts of great things are going on. But unlike previous breakthroughs, going back to 1950, as your example, it was very visible what was happening. It was very visible. It's not visible today. What's happening.

Dean: Yeah, it's not. I mean, you look at these. I'm calculating out right now just on my things that divided by 365. So just calculating out how the depth of what this stuff is being used, Even just on YouTube as an example, and I may have shared this with you, but there's 300,000 hours a day of new videos being uploaded to YouTube. 300,000 300,000 hours a day, which means that if you were just to stop and just to.

Dan: So it's about 800 of. Oh, that's a day.

Dean: That's day. So it would take you.

Dan: That's a lot in a year. That would take you light years, 34 years. No, you're into light years now.

Dean: It would take you 34.

Dan: 34 years. Just word today. Yeah. Well, if missing stuff puts you in the gap, you're really in the gap.

Dean: Well, and. Exactly. But that shows you the importance of what, what Mr. Beast was saying.

Dan: Oh yeah.

Dean: The having something that he's got a trusted brand that when he puts out a video, he's got reach that is, he's a, he's the real deal on that.

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Dean: And it was really less is more kind of was part of what he was saying. That would be easier to, easier to get because the seeing how the system works is that the YouTube and the system and the algorithms for all of these platforms are agnostic. They don't care what somebody's physically watching. It's either that their attention. The crown jewel of everything that we're looking for, the crown jewel is the attention of those eyeballs looking at YouTube right now. They don't care what people are watching. And so as long if it's. If every time they send your content through, people watch it, then you're going to have an advantage. You're going to be shown because you're proven that people will watch your stuff. Rob Dyrdek right now, former skateboarder and turned TV executive, now has over 60% of the programming on MTV. Is Rob Dyrdek programming. He's got a particular show called Ridiculousness which is like a America's Funniest Videos kind of show, except it's all testosterone and frat related kind of humor. People crashing on skateboards and doing, having accidents. All these things. Boys. Yeah, testosterone and alcohol fueled stuff, right? Yes, that's it.

Dan: Not a lot so funny. When you get close to the beaches as you're coming out on the gardener and then you get on Lakeshore Drive and then you come, there's a series of parks on the left and you know, lakeside parks on the other. But one of them, they put a skateboard, they put in a complete skateboard and it was just concrete. Now it's all graffiti. Like every square inch is graffiti. But you'll come by on a summer day and it's really crowded. There might be a hundred teenagers, mostly teenagers there. And it's 50. 50. It's 50 boys skating and 50 girls watching. 50 girls watching.

Dean: Right, right, right. That's funny.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: But that, that ends up. They show, they, they show it almost on a constant loop on mtv because they can put it on at any time and it draws eyeballs. Yeah, come on. They stay.

Dan: Some of us just. Yeah, but what's he do? What? Mtv. I mean, that's the. Originally, the music.

Dean: They never show music.

Dan: No, they never show music.

Dean: Isn't that funny now? Yeah, it's so funny.

Dan: Yeah, well, it was an available. Underused. Underused capability. It was a underused capability.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: It's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting when a country more or less decides that it wants to disconnect from the world system, which I think the Russians have kind of done. I mean, I don't think that they thought that the response would be as swift as it was, you know, I mean, it was like, whoa. Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, it cascaded over about a five day period and even the Swiss did it, you know, I mean, even the Swiss, I mean, the Swiss are the neutral country of the planet and they even cut it off. And part of the reason is that the Swiss don't have any secrets now in their banking system, as the US said. The US government said that if they did, then none of the Swiss banks could communicate with the American banks. So, you know, that it's not worth it. It's really not worth it for them. But even they came out and said, no, throw these banks out. And. Yeah, yeah. And no, they can't get the money that they have with us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Found money in our vaults anyway. Yeah. So the, what do you. I mean, I can see how we're doing very definitely some of the things that, you know, that Mr. Beast is talking about and you know, the VCR model, I mean, we're very definitely resonant in many. What I, what I've done. It's the next. It's for the June workshops. I put together 10 ways that Zoom is multiplying us in the world 10 different ways that use. The use of Zoom does. And I said, you know, if you gradually got rid of the activities in your company that weren't Zoom enabled, you'd really multiply really fast. And you connected all the Zoom activities. In other words, all your teamwork was reconfigured to maximize zoom. I bet we go 10 times.

Dean: I bet you would too. Because just even the inefficiency of any other method of more than one person meeting is, you know, it's a lot faster to walk through this door and be anywhere in the world right here with your, you know, you've got this, your rectangle here is kind of a branded, you know, that. That's what I'm comfortable seeing you. This is your.

Dan: And my penthouse studio here, you know, Right. I got art on the wall. People say, what's that? Art? And I said, you know, it's art, you know.

Dean: Yeah, exactly. Right, Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And that feels like it's the. Right. That's a good environment for. Yeah. But the fact that you literally could walk right next door and be there and have any number of people along with it, it's definitely changed. And people are not.

Dan: They're not adjusting to it. There was a series, Downton Abbey became very famous, but about 25, 30 years before Downton Abbey, there was a blockbuster British TV show called Upstairs Downstairs. Okay. And it was the same thing. It was, you know, it was. I'm sure it had a great influence on Downton Abbey. But there was one episode when the telephone was brought into the wealthy people's house, okay. And it was, interestingly enough, it was put in the servants quarters. It wasn't put in any of the. Upstairs. Upstairs. And. But it was interesting. Only one person could answer the phone, and it was the butler. Okay. Because in the house, the only person who could open the door when there were guests coming was the butler. You know, you couldn't have. You couldn't have another servant.

Dean: The representative to the. Yeah, he was.

Dan: He was representative. He represented.

Dean: But both your arrival.

Dan: He represented both downstairs and upstairs. He was the master of downstairs and he was the main servant of upstairs. So he was that. So anyway, the phone rings and they all shout, Mr. Hudson on the phone. And he says, just a minute. And he goes and he puts on his coat and he looks. I think that's what's happening with Zoom right now.

Dean: Yes, right.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. There's another story that's an even, even earlier breakthrough, which was Gutenberg with printing press. Okay? So the story, and I don't know if there's any truth to it, but it's a great story and was that a bishop heard about Gutenberg's invention and he sent him a pile of written sermons that he had created over the years, and he asked to have a book made out of his sermons. So about 100 sermons, you know, a couple pages each. And anyway, he took. And Gutenberg gave him an incredible deal because the bishop had influence not only in his, you know, in his realm. And he was known by, you know, people who are well to do people, but also he had influence within the ranks of the churches of the church, you know, all the different places. So he gave them a really good deal and he printed 100 copies. Copies and he had them shipped over and waited, you know, to see, you know, what the response was from the bishop. And he waited. It was a week and then it was a month and it was like 90 days. And he finally, he started inquiring among the staff and servants of the bishop. He said, does he like it? And he says he hasn't finished proofreading all 100 copies yet.

Dean: Oh my goodness. He's still proofreading. Oh my goodness.

Dan: Oh, he hadn't really. So that. He hadn't really gotten that.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: This isn't a difference. This isn't a difference of degree. This is a difference of kind. I think that's the big thing. A lot of people are adjusting to the difference of degree, but they're not responding to the difference of kind of.

Dean: Yeah, I remember, Stephen. It wasn't too long ago, Dan. I remember when one of the first things I did online was I created a book called Stop youp Divorce, which I know you're aware of.

Dan: Yeah, Homer.

Dean: Yeah, we've sold $5 million worth of that one book. It was one of the first kind of ebooks being sold online like that. And that was the cutting edge thing, all the right at the beginning of these capabilities being available. Like, I came from an analog world where if you wanted to get 100 pages of something to give to you, you would have to go physically print out. You'd have to have 100 physical pages of something to give to you, which a book had real value. Right. I remember being amazed that you could download 100 page document, a PDF. This is when PDFs were first getting started. Even though it would take a long time because it was dial up and wherever you would take you a while to download.

Dan: Fax is the same thing.

Dean: But if fax was still physical paper that you were doing, right, the fact that you could get this and read it just on your computer as a document, that was really like new. And I was amazed by that. And it just was so. I was so giddy about the idea that I could sell something that was not even selling the thing. It was selling a picture of a thing really is what it was, right. Like kind of what the way people are thinking about NFTs now that it was really that you're buying, you're paying $79 for a file, a picture of something that there's no less of it for me to continue to sell. I don't have any diminishing Inventory of it. Yeah.

Dan: All the cost is in the first one. There's no cost in 1 through 9, you know, 2 through 100. There's minimum, there's minimum cost.

Dean: Yeah. The only cost is getting somebody to buy it. And that was then. Now we had access to where I could get in front of people who are actively searching for divorce related keywords, where there was a search engine called goto.com, which was the pioneer of the pay per click search engine world, which then quickly took off. That Yahoo was actually the leader ahead of this before Google was. Yahoo had Overture and then Google started out with their AdWords program early 2000s. And that was the thing that, that was the rocket fuel. As soon as Google got in the game, that rocketed the whole.

Dan: Yeah. And there, there, you know, the big transition, to go back to an earlier kind comment that you made eyeballs in attention that what it's allowed the most successful companies to do is to lower their cost almost to free. You know, they've lowered the cost of what they're doing to free. And people say, well, the product is, product is free and actually the product is very expensive because you're the product.

Dean: Right? Yeah.

Dan: You don't realize that the free thing they've given you has captured you. And in capturing you, you have become the product that the company's actually selling to other companies.

Dean: Right? Yes, true.

Dan: I mean, Zoom, right now we're the product. You and I are the product. Yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean it's ridiculously free. But the whole point is that we're where the model breaks down. We're not at the receip. Receiving end, we're at the creating end. What you and I are doing is actually creating. So I think in some ways Zoom is really ahead, is really ahead, you know, of what they do. And my feeling is that the big increase in Zoom that happened within a six month period in 2020, 10 million to 500 million, which, you know, I don't know anybody who seems to think that's a big deal, but I happen to think it's a big deal, you know, and my sense is that economy, which nobody, which you can't be seen, you know, in the outside world, and I think the reason it's not being reported on is that it's invisible, is that is the single most productive economy in the world right now, the 500, you know, the 500 million users of Zoom, which is 1 16th of the global economy, that's by far by a factor of maybe five times it's the most productive and creative economy in the world.

Dean: Do you think that's where we're going to land or do you think that there's an up and comer who's going to take over zero? Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. Well, you know, who knows?

Dean: You know where we're going to land. It doesn't matter whether it's Zoom or another room or whatever. It can't be more. It can't be much more perfect than what this is right now. Yeah.

Dan: People say, yeah, but how much better if you were actually in the same room with Dean? And I said, well, I don't know if Dean would like it. And I don't know if I would like it. Basically, it's good enough. I think that good enough rules the world, actually.

Dean: Yes. 80% approach.

Dan: Yeah, that's good enough. That's good enough. You know, I mean, do you want it any better? I mean, why do you want it better? You know?

Dean: Right.

Dan: Yeah. I mean, what. Yeah, I think it's a fringe element that wants to live in this immersive world. You know, the immersive world and the

Dean: thing that I can see, Dan, and we've talked about it before, like this is not unlike normally for our listeners won't know that we're actually recording this by Zoom today. So we're looking at each other. Normally we record just on the phone.

Dan: I like this. Did you like this?

Dean: I do like it. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. Why don't we continue doing this?

Dean: We could absolutely.

Dan: Yeah. You know why? You know why? I bet because if I send out just the audio recording to my client base, I don't think that I would get that much of a response. But if I sent this out to my client base, I think there'd be a big response.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: Yeah. So I think it's great. I really liked it. I was hoping you weren't like the landline.

Dean: I don't mind these whole things, you know, this is the. Again, that's the whole reason. That was the whole reason behind my, you know, Dial Talk done was the idea of getting Everybody's got the iPhone.

Dan: Yeah. But this is Dial Talk done.

Dean: Yeah, exactly. Same thing.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Talk Done.

Dan: As long as you record. As long as you record.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. As long as we capture the oral output.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: The new method is in multiplied oral output. So. Yeah. Part of the thing that I do like about this is this has. That this has more of a table 10 feel to it because I really, I miss that more than anything. I miss our, you know, our Lunches at Jocks and select.

Dan: See the black line that separates our two screens? That's table 10.

Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Dan: That black line is table 10.

Dean: And that's what I mean about. I see a future for this Dan,

Dan: where

Dean: more than putting on helmet or putting anything on our heads, I see a bigger plane window in front of us that is higher and higher depth of resolution that will feel more almost like we're visiting each other.

Dan: I think the resolution. Yeah, I just got the new Mac, the one with the new chip and I have to get used to new email systems so I'm just. We're a bit in a travel mode right now, so I'm going to wait till next week and I've got my tech team to get me up to speed with a new email service. But the resolution is incredibly better. The new MacBook you mean or the new MacBook? Yeah, because they have that new chip that, you know, I mean I saw a guy write in the New York Times who's a cynic kind of. He's very skeptical and cynic and he wrote a review on the new MacBook but it was mainly about the chip. I think it's called the M1 or something. And he said, I have to tell you, he said everybody's talking about quantum leaps in terms of what they've introduced. That's so much better than what other people. He says, but this is a quantum leap. He said, there's Mac. Apple is just so far ahead of the game with this chip, you know, and it's a new kind of chip, it's not a faster chip but even with the fastest chips they do things sequentially. So you know, and we don't realize it because sequence means, you know, sequence means a second or two, you know, the whole sequence is done. And he said this is instantaneous. So they've created some kind of multi armed chip that can do a lot of different things at the same time, you know, and they said that there's a huge market for this, especially in automobiles and you know, all sorts of other things. Yeah, but my sense is, you know, that you have a model VCR which is good forever.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And I'm creating this because I'm interested in people's understanding of their organization. For example, when I created this model shortcuts, programs and platform, I immediately saw that the only thing I'm interested in is shortcuts. Like other people organize the platforms and they organize them and they do all the integration of the platforms and you know, Babs is Really, the person who manages the platform and. But all I want to do every day is create new shortcuts. I'm a shortcutter.

Dean: Yeah, as am I. Yeah.

Dan: Yep.

Dean: Documenting and testing.

Dan: Or cheese less whiskers.

Dean: Right, Exactly.

Dan: That's the shortcut. You know, a first compelling offer is 10 times more persuasive than an argument, than a convincing argument. That's a short. That's a shortcut. Yeah.

Dean: Yeah. I love those. Those are all.

Dan: It's endless. These are like axioms. They're. Euclidean geometry is a set of axioms that you put the two axioms together and you create a third axiom. You know, we're creating Cloudlandia axioms.

Dean: What I've been doing is taking axioms and heuristics and combining to create algorithms that are repeatable. That's the ultimate shortcut, is a plug and play algorithm that if you run this algorithm in your situation, it works. And that's really a. That's what I've been most excited about is creating those. The algorithms. Like that.

Dan: Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. I think that one thing just. We're kind of at the end of the. The hour when we really got started. The thing that I really notice is that the world kind of responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, kind of in a way that the body rejects something that shouldn't be in the body. You know, it kind of said, well, and it was kind of. It was. It wasn't like the UN met and they deliberated for 10 days and they came to a decision. It was just. The entire banking system just said, oh, we can't have this inside of our. We can't have this inside of our banking system. You know, and it was so funny. It was just a visceral. It was just visceral, you know, oh, no, this is mid 20th century. We can't have this. We can't have this. And it was very, really interesting. I think that a lot of people haven't talked about that, but I think that's. It's like that part of the world which has been Cloudlandia rejects this kind of gross mainland activity.

Dean: Yes. Yeah. This is. I mean, it's such an exciting time to be alive right now. Hamilton. Look around, Dan, look at. All right, okay, well, next time we will look around and I'll see you in the next week.

Dan: Next week.

Dean: You're right here.

Dan: Next week. I'll be here. Next week I'm going to Philadelphia to see the opening of Jeff Madoff's Broadway play.

Dean: Finally. Nice.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And it started, actually Sunday of last week. He's just gotten rave reviews, and so we're going down on. We're going to see it Tuesday and Wednesday. On Tuesday, about 20, 25 coach clients from the Philadelphia area.

Dean: Look at you. Impressive.

Dan: We're going to have dinner, and afterwards, Jeff is going to come to. We're going to have a reception afterwards. And Jeff. Jeff will come, and he'll bring cast members and everybody for it, because we've been there. Babs and I have been there pretty much from the beginning with this. And.

Dean: Yeah. Isn't that what you get a new role now? Is that. Would that the official. We could officially call you an impresario.

Dan: I'm an impresario. Yes.

Dean: Yes. I love that.

Dan: My main thing is that I think the amount of money that Babs and I gave paid for all the coffee from first to last, which is not unimportant.

Dean: Fueled by caffeine.

Dan: Yeah. Not an unimportant thing.

Dean: There you go.

Dan: Okay.

Dean: Joy and I will see you back here.

Dan: Okay, bye.