Reactive vs Creative

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia, Mr. Sullivan.

Dan: Mr. Jackson. Excuse me, I was still on London time.

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia, East Coast.

Dan: Thank you.

Dean: United States time. Yeah, I was.

Dan: It was interesting there. Canada has adopted a new policy regarding baggage.

Dean: Huh.

Dan: If there's two of you, one of your bags arrives two days later and the other one arrives the evening before you're going to return back to Toronto.

Dean: Oh, I see. Okay. That's a great policy. That's funny. Yeah. Oh, man.

Dan: Yeah. In case you didn't have any sensitive excitement about your baggage, this extra step on their part is an enhancement. You know, like so happy about it. You really happy. I mean, when the bag comes off the plane and is, you know, you pick it up as normal, there isn't a very high excitement level if you've been flying for 50 years.

Dean: Right.

Dan: This just introduced a whole new sense of anticipation and you know, kind of

Dean: left to repack if it arrived the night before. Saving. It's a time savings really.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. Sense of. Yeah. So you know what I think it is, and this is probably a topic worth exploring that I've been reading a lot about the employment problems and large corporations, not in the sense that they're looking for good people. And I think one of the reasons is that they're really good people who had been understanding work systems and work and had understood teamwork basically. Like not necessarily the way it's written up in the manuals, but the way that they had actually worked things out. A lot of those individuals chose during COVID to just take early retirement. And so what's missing from all the big corporations is something that I call wisdom. In other words, institutional wisdom. In other words, they know how to solve problems in hundreds of ways which aren't really written down. And what they've ended up with is brand new people trying to operate according to the rule books. But the rule books don't actually create customer satisfaction.

Dean: Do you know what I've noticed now, like in terms of since COVID since everybody's remotely working, is the number of stories of people getting caught with two or more full time jobs that they're getting two positions and neither of the other companies know that they're working for the other full time. Yes. They're doing two full time jobs by remote. And you were talking about retiring. There's. But it was on the job retirement.

Dan: Yeah. This is sort of the opposite to the G. Yeah.

Dean: Well, the retirement thing is not. It's retiring from the work without retiring from the paycheck. It's doing the Bare minimum.

Dan: Well, yeah, well, basically the. Before, they were getting a full check, a full paycheck from just one company for not doing very much. So they decided they just not do very much for two companies and get two paychecks.

Dean: That's exactly right.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Isn't that fun?

Dan: They're. They're devious, Devious creatures. Humans are.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Yes.

Dean: Looking for.

Dan: But that, you know, that advantage. We're looking for. Advantage.

Dean: Yes. Yeah, I think you're right. But you know, there's that whole. That's opening up a whole new world for people who can, you know, work in the results economy that get. Can get paid to do the one thing, the unique ability thing that they do for multiple people.

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Dean: So there. So how is. How was London? I miss it. I haven't been.

Dan: Well, it was very short. It was a short trip. The reason being that once we got back to being able to travel, everything that was like a. Of a conference nature that had been postponed during COVID got put into the schedule for March, April and May. So Babs and I have been essentially on the road two thirds of the last seven weeks to trips to San Diego, trips to Phoenix, trips to Florida, trips. Yeah, you know, usual trips to Chicago. But for the last 20 years, we've always had like a two and a half week trip to London, you know, and a few days of that are work.

Dean: You go twice a year to London, don't you?

Dan: No, we have done that. We did it in 19 simply because we had a funeral to go to in the fall and. But no, normally it's two and a half months in May. May is a pretty good month to be there. Usually nice weather and a lot of things happening. They have the Jubilee, you know, a lot of monarchy, a lot of monarchical things are. Take place in May. Weddings, you know, you know, when somebody's been queen for 200 years, they celebrate.

Dean: That's great. I love it.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, they reigned for a long time. They reigned for a long time. I mean. Yeah, you go back the very famous king who, you know, was the cause of the American Declaration of Independence. Yeah. George iii. I'm just trying to think the number of monarchs they've had since then. They had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. They've had six, including Georgia, myself. So they've had seven monarchs in the last 230 years. And that's an average of about 35 years each, you know, so. And she's not made up for it. She's made the present queen. That's made up for two reigns. She's 70 years.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And I think it's first week of June or something like that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And, you know, and there's something to be said for that. I bet she's got enormous institutional wisdom which has not been passed on.

Dean: Well, were the streets of Soho abuzz? I remembered fondly our long walk all over Soho. And.

Dan: Yeah, we. Actually, I think Bab sends you a. Yeah. The picture from the same 10 Greek. 10 Greek street where we.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Had dinner after our long walk that day.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: No, I mean, nothing particular that I noticed. We were staying at the Hamyard, which is closer, you know, in Piccadilly. Yeah. It's just steps. You walk out the hotel, and then five, six minutes, you're at Piccadilly Circus.

Dean: That's the same. That's the same hotel chain, Firmdale, right?

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And. But we follow our concierge that we've had for 20 years, and he was instrumental in communicating with Air Canada because it's not an activity that we enjoy even when there's nothing wrong.

Dean: Huh. Wow. Well, I think I remember. I think I told you the. The Four Seasons has a new. New hotel over there at London Tower Bridge. Yeah, you did tell me in London. And I miss it. I miss it a lot.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: And Toronto. Good grief.

Dan: Toronto. Yeah. Well, you'll still have to wear a mask if you come back here, you know.

Dean: Oh, my goodness.

Dan: Air Canada is not taking any chances at all that they could catch COVID from you and.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: So they're putting all their efforts. They're putting all their efforts and people being very observant of the mask role, but meanwhile, they're not delivering your bag where my.

Dean: My monkeypox body suit pretty soon.

Dan: Yep, that's next. That would probably do it. Yeah. Well, they're desperately, you know, the government officials are desperately looking for new disease to lock us down, you know.

Dean: Yep. The foundation.

Dan: Yeah. They were trying to get the war going. Yeah. We would have, but Ukrainian, Ukrainians have more or less handled part of it on their own, so they're not requiring troops coming over from North America to fight in the battles. You know, just send us money and just send us technology. We'll do the rest, so. Yeah, it's odd, isn't it? I mean, it's really odd. I mean, you've lived your entire lifetime without a war of this kind going on.

Dean: That's true. And I've really been taking a page out of the Dan Sullivan playbook and paying less and less Attention to it. Now I haven't. I don't really participate in the news. You know, that's been a recent development. I've been more.

Dan: What are you discovering out of that? Because I find that when you cut off one habitual sort of source of information, your brain goes and searches out new things to do with your attention.

Dean: You said something that was very influential to me. It struck me the way that you said about your, you know, cutting off TV and things like that, that you said, what I've got going on in. In my brain or in my mind or in my world is much more, infinitely more interesting than anything going on in the outside world. And that has been where my. Where my mind's been telling is spending more time in contemplation, more time thinking, journaling, all of that stuff. There's way more. An infinite richness of. Someone else's. I saw a podcast. I forget who the gentleman was, but he's a college university professor at either Stanford or Princeton, one of those. And he teaches a social communications class. And really talking about the influence of social media and the, you know, he does a poll at the beginning of the class of having people, you know, turn, take their iPhone and look at the screen time. And he's saying that on average, it's 12 to 15 hours a day of sleep that these. These college kids now are having. That's literal. Like when you get up into hours

Dan: of your waking hours.

Dean: That's exactly right. And, well, he said, what we're missing out on is boredom. And boredom is where new thoughts come. Boredom is that our brains are. We're kind of wired to seek the highest and best use of what we could be doing kind of thing, right? So if we're. Boredom serves a purpose that if we're picking blueberries, for instance, and then we get to a point where we've, you know, the reward. The reward ratio is off, that there's less and less blueberries for the effort that we're putting in to find it. That's a signal to maybe we should go find another more fruitful bush, right, to keep that reward going. And it's an interesting thing that we don't have that mechanism. We don't allow that mechanism to take place to observe what's going on in. In our lives because we fill every down moment with every down moment with screen time. We start sucking in dopamine and all these. You look at where you look at what's winning right now in that landscape is this infinite scroll of 20 to 40 to 60 seconds, talks, and, you know, Instagram and Facebook scroll, where we can infinitely scroll to the. You know, it fills the time available that we have without it being an investment of, you know, any amount of time to watch one thing. Constant novel.

Dan: You know, you. You mentioned something there which I think is heart of the matter, and that's the dopamine, okay? And, you know, when you're, you know, you're just born and, you know, you're one or two years old, you haven't figured anything out yet. You know, there's. There's. I mean, you've got one other human being sort of partially figured out that if you make a noise or something, you can get that other person to pay attention to you and everything like that. But I think that, you know, there's two words that you prompted when you. What you just said about what that professor said. And that is there's two words. And it's kind of a neat thing about English, but they use exactly the same letters. And the first word is reactive. You know, that. I think we're trained, first of all in life to react, you know, in other words, that we react and we get other people to react, okay? So we kind of major in reaction, you know, for the first part of our life. But there's a crossover point where the letters rearrange them. The letters that make up reactive re can rearrange themselves into creative, okay? And the interesting thing about it is that they both pump dopamine. They both pump dopamine. But leading a reactionary life to get dopamine means that you're not in control. You know, you have no. You have no control. And creativity, on the other hand, is where you take control of getting the dopamine. So I think probably, I mean, there's kind of a fork in the road. I don't know when it is. I remember a younger brother that I had, and I was in Iceland one summer, and he said, boy, I would like to go to Iceland. And so, you know, he paid part of it, but I paid most of it. And he came over and he had read about Iceland, and, you know, he had studied it before he came over, and he said, so, what are we going to do today? Okay, which I can kind of understand on the first day. What are we going to do today? And so I very quickly put together an agenda for the day and, you know, take him around.

Dan: And then the next day, he was sitting there and he said, so, what are we going to do today? You know, and not once during his stay, which was about six days. Did he ever mention anything that he had read about? Oh, I'd like to go see this and I'd like to go see. So in other words, he was totally in a reactionary mood, you know, reactionary mode, and there was any creativity to what he was doing. And I said, boy, you, you took a different fork in the road than I did. Yeah, you know, so, so the interesting thing is, and I don't know what it is, that either wakes up the creative approach or it stays dormant, you know, and oftentimes the only time people are really creative is when there's an emergency, when there's a, you know, there's a threat of losing something, then they become creative. They'll do think of something new. They'll do something of new. Take what the tech, you know, the social media platforms have understood that most people don't see their attention as being anything valuable. All they associate it is that if other people can give them something to focus their attention on, that might trigger the dopamine which they're looking for. What they do know is that, but a lot of people don't even know they're looking for dopamine. They just call it feeling good or feeling fascinated or feeling intrigued.

Dean: that, you know, that's interesting that you can create it. You can. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing.

Dan: I mean if you can create your, if you can endlessly create your own dopamine supply and actually do a better job of it, do a better job of it than outside influences, I think that's a great freedom.

Dean: Yeah. I'll tell you, like a pen and a pad and a question can provide infinite great launching pad for creativity brainstorming. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like such a great, such a great thing. And I think driven by, I think when you're driven it by a rich, you know, inventory of want that really is a, is a great jumping off point, you know, like your whole idea of wanting what you want and being clear on what you want, then it's like brainstorming about those wants becomes. There's so much clarity that comes from that. Yeah, it's amazing. And I find even just like, I would say just looking at the, you know, as far as like tv, Netflix, you know, just default surfing, you know, on OTT things, you know, Netflix, all of that on the TV was probably like a four hour a day thing for me. And. Yeah, so, you know, It's, I think, and I've experimented before with, with some swap outs, you know, like instead of watching Shark Tank is to have a think tank, you know, just block. I would often have my own sink tank and brainstorm about my own opportunities rather than watching passively somebody else's opportunities get explored. You know. Now I'm not downplaying that in that I. A lot of the ideas that I have are because of my awareness of and paying attention to pop culture and what's going on kind of things, you know, because I tend to have a connective process where I'm thinking and examine why things are and how they're working like that. Like I would put the VCR formula as a one of those by really thinking through what is Kylie Jenner doing here, that that has given her the opportunity to be a billionaire, you know. And by the way, Mr. Beast Burger now has passed $100 million in its first 15 months of operation.

Dan: And yeah, for those who are now give a little background to that because yeah, yeah, you can give a progress report for the Beast Frontier. All right.

Dean: I was observing this.

Dan: What's his actual name, by the way? What's Jimmy Donaldson is his name from Carolina.

Dean: He's from North Carolina. Right, exactly. And the guy has figured out he's

Dan: the top YouTuber and he's in his 20s now, right? He's in his 20s.

Dean: Early 20s, early 20s. He's just been single mindedly focused on one thing. He's got absolute tunnel vision, which is how to make amazing YouTube videos. And that's been his whole mission. And it's an interesting, you know, case study in single minded focus and picking a winning horse. You know, like I think he's picked a platform that is durable. You know, YouTube is not going anywhere and our desire for watching, watching stuff is not going away. And he's at a point where now he can get 50 million views on videos, which is far more than any television show. Now, like there was, I was talking.

Dan: No, I mean if a television showed 7 or 8 million, that's exactly right.

Dean: I just had a nice catch up with Joel Zadak a couple of weeks ago because I was reading about the upfronts were going on in New York City a few weeks ago. And that's where traditionally the networks have showcased all of their fall slate of programming that's coming out to advertisers to get them all frothy about advertising on those shows to reach that audience. And this was the first time that they really, it wasn't even, it was more about the digital things than it was about the broadcast things. And it almost like an admission by the networks that they realized that's a dying model because in 2002 there, you know, they had several shows in over 10 million friends, had 20 plus million viewers per week of their show. Now there's only three shows on all of network television that reliably have more than 10 million viewers. And their legacy shows that the crime

Dan: procedurals that have, you know, the other thing about that is the accessibility, you know, and the. In other words, that there's, you know, and that it's something that I departed from, you know, four years ago. So in July it'll be four years. And that one of the things that I found irritating about network presentations that was according to their schedule, not my schedule.

Dean: Right. I always laugh because remember I mentioned that article in the New York Times about convenience several years ago, maybe in 2018. And they said that once, you know, that was in the context of once we experience a new level of convenience, we don't go backwards historically. And so once you get a taste of a mechanical washing machine, you don't go back to hand washing your clothes. And once you get a taste of streaming television shows, you. It's difficult and almost a little undignified to have to be in front of

Dan: the TV at a particular time.

Dean: Exactly. But undignified with such a great word that is like the tail wagging the dog kind of thing. Right. That it's little undignified that you've got to sit there at the appointed hour to watch this show interrupted by, you know, infinite commercials. There's now only, you know, 22 minutes in a 30 minute, so eight minutes of commercials in a 30 minute broadcast. And that's a really interesting thing. But all of that was, you know, paying attention and that we were talking about Jimmy Donaldson and how what I saw happening with him was, you know, about 15 months ago now, just before, maybe 18 months now, just before Christmas, he launched a restaurant, Mr. Beast Burger, in partnership. This was a, you know, collaboration zone, collaboration with Virtual Dining concepts to launch 300 restaurants on the same day with the power of one video that got 50 million views and immediate. It's like having your own super bowl ad, right. That you could create that you've got an audience that is totally your target audience because he's built them that way. So. So paying attention to that and along with what, you know, Kylie Jenner was doing in partnership with Seed Labs with her cosmetics line, that led me to see the context of What I developed as the vcr, you know.

Dan: You know, this is on a lesser level. It's not as extraordinary as Mr. Beast is what Peter Zion has done during COVID but especially since the war in the, in Ukraine broke out. Yeah. And what's interesting, that he wrote a book in 2018 called Disunited nations, and in it he made a prediction that sometime in 2022, the Russians would invade Ukraine. Okay. So four years previously. And he did that by looking at the demographics and population. Demographics and geography of Russia. And he said they will feel extraordinarily paranoid every year going forward and they'll have to go on the attack probably in 2022. Okay. And of course, in February 2022, according to his prediction, they, they did for the reasons that he's talking about. And, but so what he's doing is he's doing updates constantly. He does little seven, eight minute updates on YouTube and then he puts together the thesis, go forward thesis. Now that this has happened, what else did I predict now that's going to fall in place? Because this is a very dramatic proof of what my, what my formula is, my prognostication abilities.

Dean: Right.

Dan: Yeah. You don't understand anything unless you understand the interplay between geography and demographics. In other words, where is a country located? Who's outside their borders? Are they friends or foes? And the other thing is, what's happening to your own population? Is your population an aging population? Is, you know, is it a. Is an okay population? You got lots of young people working and, and he said that you can just take any country and sort of analyze its situation. And Russia is one of those countries that has been invaded 50 times, apparently in the course of a couple thousand years. In other words, whoever considered themselves the native population, they got invaded from the outside 50 times. So it's developed a, almost genetic paranoia in the Russians that they need to create buffers between them and the people that they fear most. And, and so, and Ukraine was part of Soviet Union, of course, it was a crucial part of Soviet Union. It was the productive agricultural part of Soviet Union that was also very productive in manufacturing and science and technology. And so it's an affront kind of, I guess, to the leader of Russia that 30 years after the Soviet Union collapse, which he considered the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. You know, for him, I guess, not for me. And, and, and he's seen Ukraine do nothing but prosper and his own country going downhill. And I think it's an affront to him, so he attacks them, you know, but Peter Zion now is being invited into the Pentagon, into the War College, into all the high level military think tanks and everything. And he said, and being asked to lay out predictions and battle plans for these things. And. But he laid the groundwork with his books. So he had three books that were very counter, you know, counterintuitive because everybody else was predicting unlimited, expanding, accelerating, Kumbaya. Everybody's in love with everybody else. We're just one big. One love family. Yeah, one love family. And he said, well, it kind of looks that way just for the time being, but that's not where it's going. And so, and so he's taken advantage now. And YouTube, he's really gotten good at it. I mean, his.

Dan: And now what he is doing debates with people who don't agree with him and they're very stimulating because he looks like a Cy Young winning major league pitcher pitching to high school batters. You know, wow. They don't even see the ball. Oh, that's funny. When he, when he pitches, but he takes him out. I mean, he's very respectful and everything like that. But somebody will go on for about a minute and saying, why this and this is going to happen? And he said, well, well, I disagree with you. And quite frankly, I don't think that anything you just predicted is actually going to happen. As a matter of fact, you can see the signs, I'll give you some of the signs that it's just the opposite from which you predict is going to happen. And then he goes on and explains it and I think he enjoys it, you know, I think he enjoys it. So he's, he never lose. He never gets ruffled by anything. And so it's a, it's an interesting. And I came back and so my sense is that it's a perfect time for. If you have real expertise that you feel confident about and it's got a lifespan going ahead of you, this is a really good time to position yourself with YouTube.

Dean: Well, absolutely. I mean, that's just because it truly is a meritocracy in that the cream does actually rise to the top. You know, if you've got something that people want to hear that is, that's a good thing. And we're seeing it again and again. I think that's really a. Those barriers are down and you're seeing what's leading the way is certainly entertainment. I mean, when you see that's Lil Nas X and that's the Bridgerton musical Girls, you know, starting from scratch, from nothing. To make the Bridgerton musical and win a Grammy, you know, from coming from nowhere is a. That can only happen in Cloudlandia. That now that everybody's wired, everybody. Everybody has a access to everybody, you know.

Dan: Yeah. And I've been noticing that Netflix has really been scrambling over the last two or three months. And I think one of the reason is that Covid, for all practical purposes is over as far as people's daily habits go.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And they picked up a huge audience during COVID because there was no alternative. And so I think what happened is they were making all some parts of their company were making plans that were simply based on a temporary, temporary situation, temporary opportunity. And so I think things have gotten back to more competitive where people are doing more.

Dean: There's way more opportunities for television and I call it television program. But to me, television is anything I can sit on my couch with my remote and watch access. So that whole landscape is called over the top or OTT over the top of the existing cable infrastructure. Anybody can have their own access to that. And so YouTube is certainly one of those places that anybody like all of the YouTube that I watch is on the television and it's no different than watching thing on broadcast television. I would say that 90% of our viewing was real time select or time shifted like recorded. Watching it on demand at my choice. And there's just so much available. I really do see the opportunity for curation in this, you know, that there's just. We're hopeless against being able to discover everything, you know, and that's. I think. Let's go back to that.

Dan: Let's go back to the beginning of the discussion because I think curation is very important. But self create self curation is really skill above. You know, in other words, we've. We're asking other people to kind of curate what's interesting to us and.

Dean: But we're the one we're doing even when we're doing self curation, Dan. The algorithms that are watching our creation are building a, you know, under the radar curation method that is presenting things to us that are in line with what our previous choices have been. If we were to look at even in search engines like Google is doing that, YouTube is doing that. So even though it appears that we have free will and that we're hunting raw from all of the choices that are available out there to discover were actually searching from the subset of all of that raw material that Google thinks is what you mean by what you're searching based on your historical choices. That you've made. Right. So if you and I were to search the same thing, we would get different. We would get different results.

Dan: Yeah. The problem is, you know, the belief in that I think is a bit depressing because I'm unpredictable to myself. So I don't think I've got to be. I, I don't think I'm going to be predictable to somebody else. In other words, we are having it. I'm writing a book right now, a little quarterly book.

Dean: Imagine that's called.

Dan: That's called, you are not a computer.

Dean: Right.

Dan: You are not a computer. And I said, I'm just going to put out a little test to see if you agree that this is true. And I said, I have 10 human beings lined up or they're in a circle. And I have, I have 100 computers that are connected to each other. Okay. I'm going to put a message in the ear of the first human being who then has to pass it on, whispering to the second, who does the third all the way through to 10. And 10 comes back and reports what they think the message is. And in most cases it doesn't have any resemblance.

Dean: Right.

Dan: What the first message was. Okay, so. And that's well known. And that's well known. And it's seen as negative proof that human beings are not reliable. You know, they're not reliable. And you can't really count on human beings on sending a consistent message. Then you do 100 computers. And you know, we naturally expect. And it's usually always true that the message sent through the first computer is the same for the other 99. And you know, you could make it a thousand computers, you could make it a million. And, and that's what the whole value of that technology is. If you send the message here, it's a consistent message that gets distributed and multiplied any number of times. And that's considered why computers are so much better than human beings. But it's based on a premise that these are both information processing organisms. There's a human who's an information processing organism and there's computers. And therefore this new invented organism is much superior at the one thing that human beings are valuable for is information processing. And that's only true if you think that humans are information processors. And I would suggest that you've never processed any information in your life, nor have I, nor anyone. You know, that we take in experience and we immediately transform it into new forms of meaning. We're not information processors, okay? And the great value of humans, if you rank them, are the ones who can take in new experience and turn it into meaning that's valuable to other human beings. And no computer can do that. As a matter of fact, we don't want a computer that doesn't do things predictably inconsistent. So I think that.

Dean: Yeah. So anyway, that reminds me of Jamie Smart, Jamie Smart's book Clarity that you know, you said we're meaning makers and that's. That reminds me that, you know, Jamie's idea that the we're everything that we feel or everything that, that we experience is happening from the inside out and not from the outside in. Because you can take, you know that people can take the same set of inputs and run it through their meaning making machine and it can turn into meaning something that causes a reaction of anxiety or depression or the negative spiral of things that you've associated the meaning of that input to or if you have the ability to realize that the input is not what's creating your reaction to it. You can, you know, really just make a meaning, you know, less anxiety producing, I guess or whatever, whatever you want from it ever is going to serve you.

Dan: So I think, you know, Mr. Beast, Jimmy Donaldson is interesting not because he's an information processor because, but he's a meaning maker. He creates all sorts of new meaning on a continual basis that other people find intriguing, useful, you know, and yeah, instructive. And it's amazing how thoughtful he is

Dean: about the process, how it seems like it's just kind of randomly put together and stuff. They're you know, studying frame by frame every. Everything in those videos to make the very best videos and by very best meaning compelling that keep people watching and keep them coming back. He and so single mindedly focused on that purpose. I saw a. He was on the Joe Rogan podcast and very, you know, it was a really good look at the inner workings of the way he thinks about that and how it all came about. But he's a different cat.

Dan: Well, you know, I mean it's, it's human genius and taking advantage of a new medium.

Dean: Yes. Yeah. And being there at the right look.

Dan: I mean, no,

Dean: some people might think that it's too mature now that you can't really, you know, that it can't. You probably can't build something like Mr. Beast built now.

Dan: And I'm not doing it, not doing it the way that he's doing it.

Dean: Right.

Dan: Yeah, I mean he'll have a lot of copycat, copycat artists. Yeah, we'll do a Mr. Beast and they. That's not why he started Doing it. I mean, I mean, you have to understand what was, what's in his mind about what he's doing. And, you know, and I don't think that's discoverable because he's just finding out himself.

Dean: But it's a really interesting thing. The big things that he's chosen to focus attention on like that, you know, I think there, one of the things he did was, you know, organize all of the YouTubers to do a drive and they're planting 20 million trees, which, you know, it's kind of an interesting thing. And now they're, they've shifted to clearing the ocean of the plastics. Yeah. And so it's kind of resting, you know, when you can mobilize that collective audience of all of the top youtubers towards a practical outcome, something that's actually doable, you know, that there's going to be a lot of change.

Dan: You know what I think, though? I think that's where the model will start to fail.

Dean: Okay, okay, tell me what you think. Yeah, yeah.

Dan: Because I think that's politics. You're moving into politics now. My feeling is once you move across the line from entertainment to politics, first of all, the purposes are more theoretical in politics than they are in entertainment. Yeah. You know, they either switch stay with you or they switch you off immediately. Politics doesn't operate. Operate that way. And you get preachy. There's a tendency to get preachy when you do that. And it's funny, I don't know why it is that really successful people have to prove who have done great good for the world in the area of entertainment, have to now prove it in the area of improving the planet. I always find the message goes sideways when you try to improve the planet.

Dean: You know, I mean, that's interesting because, you know, the politicians, like, you know, Beto o'. Rourke.

Dan: Beto o', Rourke, yeah.

Dean: He's got a little.

Dan: He's a stand up comic. I haven't seen one like that before,

Dean: you know, and he got a lot of heat this past couple of weeks by ambushing that meeting, meeting about the shooting in Texas. I saw a meme that was really sort of indicative of what's going on. It was like a circle with the arrows going around indicating the cycle of this. Where there's a school shooting, everybody gets angry. Then there's lots of Facebook arguments and something's got to be done. Then nothing happens. Then crickets and then school shooting and it starts again. Right. And that. Well, but they're not seeing that.

Dan: They're not going after the central issue is that schools are wonderful places to do shootings because they're.

Dean: Right.

Dan: Gun free zone. It's a gun free zone. The shooter has no competition when he goes to a school.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. Tell him that there's five armed guards that have Uzis. Then he's going to pick another school. He's going to pick another school.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: I mean if the moment you get out of your car you get shot down, you know, because there's a guard with a newsy walking the parking lot.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: I mean that's the central issue, that they're gun free zones.

Dean: Yeah. Said that about 9 11. That 911 happens. And we didn't ban planes. We secured the cockpit, you know.

Dan: Yeah. And you had a federal official who checked, checked the cockpit. Federally designated, you know, company person or airport person who after the cleaners are finished with the plane, you go through and you check, check underneath the seats to see if they've taped, taped, you know, box cutters.

Dean: Oh wow.

Dan: Because that's. Yeah. Because the cleaning staff, one of the women was the husband of one of the. Were with someone who was affiliated with the kidnapper. Not the house. The terrorists, let's put it, let's put the emphasis where it was the terrorists. Right. And she could bring in five or six box cutters and you know, she was alone in parts of the plane and she taped six of them. She knew what seats they were because they had already scheduled and that's. It was the box cutters that they had left. So now they have someone to go through and has a metal detector. You know, metal detector goes down and deep, deep because shouldn't be there. And they find the box cutter and that does it. But the thing is there was a, another Texas. Was a Texas situation in a church where on a Sunday the shooter got up to shoot the congregation and about six, six members of the congregation, I remember caring and he was dead. He was dead in 15 seconds. I mean.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: I mean the moment he got up there were six guns on him. And that kind of tells you if you're a shooter, don't go to that church. That's not a good choice to go to. Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, I have a client, she has, she had a great formula and she said I've got, I think what is a formula for world peace? She said, certainly making it a less dangerous world. And I said, what's the formula? She says, well, first of all, everybody's required to carry. So 8 billion people are required to carry. And she says, and Everybody gets one free kill. Wow. And she says, so you're always really polite because you don't know if the person you're talking to has got their, has got their free kill in. Yeah.

Dean: Unbelievable.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. But my feeling is it sounds really crass, it sounds really callous.

Dean: Right.

Dan: But solutions are at that level than confiscating all the guns. You know, that's not really a solution. That's not really a solution. And I was looking it up just because they're talking about gun control and you know that they all confiscate guns. And I said, check the last two years. This would be the year 2020, 20 and 2021. The purchases, the legal purchases of firearms in the United States. What do you think the number is? Okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna press you on this, but I'll give you the answer. It was 41 million. 41 million new firearms in a two year period. 40. So Canada historically, right up until it has 22 million firearms. Okay. That's for the entire history. Canada up until the bomb is 22. And the United States in two years says 41. I said, where would you start the confiscation campaign if you had 41 million? And every day that you confiscate, you know, you confiscate 10,000 guns or 100,000 guns, you've fallen further behind because there were more new guns.

Dean: Right. I heard there's 500 million.

Dan: Yeah. In the United States.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: There is more than people. Yeah. Well, civilians in the United States have 400 times more weapons than the military.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Okay. The U.S. military and they have a hundred times more weapons than all the police forces. And that would include. Or number one, I thought the.

Dean: In terms of. We're number one in mass shootings too. By a factor of that. We're there in the. I think in one year there were 288 and the next, the second is eight countries. I mean, in terms of countries.

Dan: Yeah. But you're not including places like the Congo and, you know.

Dean: Right.

Dan: Sudan and other. There's places where there's. It's not been a successful day if you haven't had five mass shootings. Right. You know, so, I mean, those are military. You're comparing it to Sweden or something like that, right? Exactly.

Dean: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Dan: Where you can watch time slowing down, you know.

Dean: Yeah, yeah.

Dan: So, yeah. Well, it's interesting, but first of all, we're not used to operating in, you know, as individuals. We're just not, we're not any good at thinking in terms of big population numbers because we ourselves really, as far as meaningful relationships, we, you know, we're at most maybe a hundred, you know,

Dean: 100 people, you know, Dunbar, Robin Dunbar.

Dan: Dunbar's law. Yeah.

Dean: 150 people. That's the.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: That's what we're capable of, right.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Of usefully interacting with, you know, both from a social and a work standpoint. 150 is.

Dean: That's.

Dan: I mean, we put a limit that we will. We can go 10 times in strategic coach with the addition of only 30 more staff, which would get us to 150. Yeah. And we have that as a model that any growth thing that we do, the company can't get bigger than 150 people.

Dean: Wow.

Dan: Yeah. And Zoom has been the breakthrough. We can do it with Zoom.

Dean: Yes. Wow. Well, I can't believe how fast this has gone.

Dan: Yeah. Well.

Dean: Yep.

Dan: Same time next week?

Dean: Okay, awesome. Thanks, Dan.

Dan: Take care.

Dean: Okay, bye.