The Cloud Meets The Real World

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia. Welcome to Cloudlandia.

Dan: Yeah, welcome to everybody to Cloudlandia. But be in both worlds. Be in the mainland and be in Cloudlandia. Okay.

Dean: You know what is so funny that you said those exact words, because my thoughts this weekend have been on the. That intersection between Cloudlandia and the mainland. And you know, specifically I was thinking about how it's more. It's very easy right now to imagine and only exist in Cloudlandia as a business, like as economic thing. You can almost exclusively live in Cloudlandia. And I was thinking about 25 years ago, there was an article that was like cutting edge journalism at the time. Somebody, the magazine or the New York Times or somebody embedded a journalist in an apartment in New York City with the intention of seeing could they survive for a week with their only means of communication, the Internet? That was like, you know, daring journalism at the time. They were cutting themselves off from society, essentially, and only existing with the minority of people who were on in Cloudlandia, the early adopters, I guess you would call them. Right. And now it's. So that would be almost cute kind of journalism to see if you could survive. I think it would be, you know, I think we've mentioned before, it'd be more. It'd be more daring to see if you could survive a week without interacting with Cloudlandia.

Dan: Yeah, you know, we, most of us had an experience of that actually. Let's say February of 2000. And so the challenge in February, first week of February 2000 is that your in person business, you have to switch it to being a virtual business.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: And Zoom, you use Zoom as the means of doing that. So you have to replace all the income that you're making from person to person, interaction to interaction only on Zoom. And I couldn't have done it, but By February of 2022, we had done it.

Dean: Yeah, you opened up a whole new world of opportunity. And now that both are back, you know, now that you, the mainland, you've already figured out and you've got a substantial, you know, mainland based kind of business. And now with the at, with the addition of, you know, Cloudlandia cohorts, got the recipe to double or more. I'd probably find out that the. Are you on a track that the Cloudlandia portion of the business will surpass the mainland portion?

Dan: Well, it's true right now, you know, it's too early to tell.

Dean: Trajectory.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, but I think it's too early to even set a trajectory because you don't know during this comeback year of 2022, where they're going to settle, you know, we, right now we have about, I think out of our 2300, there's 2300 total in the program. And I think about, let's say 500 of them will do their workshop during this quarter. So the quarter, I'm just talking about the next three months. So it'll be June, July and August. I think about 500 of them will do their, their workshop in virtual on zoom rather than actually traveling to, to, to an in person workshop. And you don't know whether that's just because they're still hesitant or they still, you know, trying to figure out what's going to be what. So, you know, I told the team, you know, you really won't know how behaviors have changed until about halfway through 2023. So I think this year is a transition year and I wouldn't draw, I wouldn't project too many, you know, things to it. But I do know that we're having our best sales here ever. So they're either choosing to be in person or they're choosing to be virtual. I mean we're still having virtual sales.

Dean: So.

Dan: But I think that my, my sense is that the majority of people are going to go to some sort of hybrid model and it have a lot to do with when they choose to travel and when they choose not to travel and you know. Yeah, so I pay attention to check writers. They kind of tell me the way they want it.

Dean: Right, exactly.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dean: That's interesting. Or definitely, you know, we're seeing more and more the, you know, I've been thinking about specifically it's talked about the intersection, but then combining that with the free zone concepts of the free zone collaborations and we're starting to see, I really keep my eye open like for more of these things and to see the evidence that the things that we've already identified are progressing and you know, look at what's been a big hit. Some of the, one of the first kind of these collaborations that I noticed was Amazon with Kohl's as far as allowing people to just bring their physical goods to Kohl's to return them rather than going to the post office and that Kohl's estimated that brought them a or track that that brought them 2 million new customers and everybody that brings something back to the store is issued a receipt for that along with a discount coupon for something in the store today. So you're in a store returning, you've obviously got a need that was Filled and it may be right there in the four walls. Something better than what you're looking for. And here's incentive to, to do it. And then the more recent one is Toys R Us combined with Macy's and their pilot program was such a success, they're rolling that now to 400 stores. Yep. And they've completely integrated their digital businesses as well. So now the Toys R Us website and digital e commerce thing is on Macy's as well. And, and that's going to be a huge success. I'm seeing, we're seeing more and more of those things now. I think Sephora has, I forget who they have combined with somebody with Nordstrom's and you start to think about these big bloated retail flagships, you know, the anchor tenants at the mall kind of thing with these 40,000 square foot stores that you know, you think about that giving up, you know, 20% of the space is 8,000 square foot standalone little store that you could have inside the walls and not make any difference. You just take out your bottom 20% of space, make room for, you know, the, your partner's top 20% in that 8,000 square feet. There's limitless.

Dan: Yeah, I think, you know the, I think probably the, there may be someone I'm just not taking account of, but it seemed to me that Starbucks got into this because Starbucks started, you know, even in the. I first encountered Starbucks and, and it I think was in the mid-80s and I started, you know, doing one on one coaching in Vancouver. And Vancouver was the first city other than Seattle where there were Starbucks stores. And you know, and I was so impressed because they had, they had two stories that were kitty corner from each other.

Dean: One was right on the corners on Busy Street.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, on opposite corner. They were on opposite corners. And one of them was for the, I would say the artistic, artistic market in Vancouver. And the other one was for the bikers. So one of them had always, you would always see about 15 Harleys parked outside of the one and you go in and you know the clientele were bikers and. But if you crossed over to Kitty corner, the opposite, diagonally opposite corner, it was the blue haired nose ring folks and they didn't mix. And so Starbucks figured out we got separate markets here so we'll, you know, we'll create two stores and those. One of them was the biggest grossing Starbucks store for a number of years. Bigger than the one they started, Pikes.

Dean: Wow.

Dan: And Pike's Market in, in Seattle. And then you know, and then the, they went Global. But then they started, I think Marriott was the first hotels that every Marriott hotel had a. And then they just started linking up.

Dean: Yeah, that was a program they had called serving Starbucks where they would do location based licenses. So Barnes and Noble was doing that. Starbucks.

Dan: Yeah, Barnes and Noble was another one.

Dean: Airport.

Dan: Yeah. And I think United Airlines had Starbucks on their planes. Yeah, just their coffee, not espresso or anything like that. And. But it's, you know what I think about this is if you go through history, the most prosperous and interesting countries have always been for the most part maritime countries. And a significant amount of their revenues in the country came from maritime trade. And it seems to me that in, you know, we started off the podcast by talking about being resident in both worlds, being resident in the mainland world. And because each is the test of the other. Each, each of the realms you are is the test of another. In other words, a mainland, a new mainland thing right now is really good if it also is connected to the Cloudlandia. And a Cloudlandia thing is good if it's still connected to the mainland. Yeah, because I think there's a. Checking out both sides is an important reality. Test.

Dean: Yes. And that's another word.

Dan: In other words, let's say property in Cloudlandia, you know what you're seeing with non fungible token as a Cloudlandia, you know, it's a Cloudlandia property. And. But is that also translatable? I mean, in other words, can you translate that into dollars in the. I mean most of it's being paid paid for with dollars. You know, I mean to get the nft you're paying dollars. So obviously there's, it's perceived in the mainland as having value even though you're buying it in Cloudlandia, it's perceived as being fungible. You can transfer it back to the value of it back to the mainland.

Dean: I do think it's like slightly ironic that the, you know, even though these things are being touted the cryptocurrencies as independent outside of the traditional financial world, they're still measured in terms of their value in US dollars, which is kind of funny, you know, like no matter what the things that you're buying, mostly you're buying the NFTs with Ethereum and they're all, you know, it's all pegged to what the value US Dollars.

Dan: Well, you know, you know, in the news reports, crypto is going through the roof. Which roof? The US dollar. Exactly. You know, desperate losses in crypto world. What are the, what's Desperate. It's. It gets you fewer US Dollars.

Dean: Yeah, exactly.

Dan: Yeah. Above all the gods you worship, there's maybe another God.

Dean: Right? I think that's so funny. You know.

Dan: Yeah, I was just reading. We have ongoing discussion group of clients here in Toronto and tomorrow night is our quarterly and it'll be 80th, so it'll be 20 years.

Dean: Wow.

Dan: And every quarter there's about a dozen to 14, and I would say that nine of them have been continuous over the 20 years. And. But there was an article in. One of the articles that was submitted was on the central bank, digital currency. And that's a term that probably is going to be banned. You know, it's a new term, but it's a cbdc. It's called CBDC and it's a central bank, so it's the Fed in the United States. The Federal Reserve would issue its own digital currency right now.

Dean: Oh, I didn't realize that.

Dan: Yeah, well, no, it's a proposal. It's a proposal.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: It's not a. It's an idea that's floating around. And part of the reason is to get ahead of the curve. I think that government officials say it's very clear that we are going to digital and we don't want the dollar to decline in usefulness in the world. So we'll just digitize, more or less digitize the dollar. And so, you know, and it'll be backed, it'll be backed up by the central bank of the United States. So, you know, that's. Yeah, that's a significant support structure.

Dean: And that's interesting because I wonder then if that will allow, you know, for a peer to peer kind of infrastructure.

Dan: Yeah, that's exactly, that's exact.

Dean: Mm. That would be. That would solve the. One of the issues that people are turning to Bitcoin.

Dan: Yeah, there's about 10. There's about 10 compelling offers that it has, but it's got, it's got about 10 convincing counter arguments why it won't work. So it's at the certainty uncertainty stage right now. The. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot going for it, but there's also, there's a lot unknown about when you do it. It's, you know, there's things that once you start something, you can't unstart it. And so you got to be real careful about it. But in a certain way, digital currency has existed for a long time, and I'll give you an example is when you buy a Starbucks card, you have a piece of plastic which is, in fact, a form of money. You know, in a Starbucks, you go in, you don't have to use your credit card, you don't have to use cash. You just give the Starbucks card and, you know, there's. I won't say millions, but there's countless number of other cards that you give. And it's a. It's like free money for Starbucks because they get your money now.

Dean: You're right.

Dan: And they get your money now. And there's a 20% chance that you'll forget about it or lose it. So it will never be redeemed. It'll never be redeemed. Yeah.

Dean: Yeah. That's really. I think that's interesting.

Dan: It's almost like the government. It's almost like the government selling lottery tickets.

Dean: Yeah, well, that's. You know, you think about the. In many cases, you don't even need the card for the. On the app, you can reload your digital card. But I just look at the. I think.

Dan: But that seems to me to be digital. That's digital money. I mean.

Dean: Yeah, right. I think that they're thinking about companies that have enhanced the mainland experience with a Cloudlandia layer. Yeah. Starbucks has. You just reminded me, Starbucks has really, like, raised the bar on that in that you can. I treat. You know, you can have. I call it like a diplomatic experience. That. That Starbucky, you're treated like a diplomat. Like, you can say in the car on the way, hey, I'm coming. Here's what I'd like. And then you walk in the door and they've already got it prepared and on the counter for you. Pick it up and leave. Talk about like friction.

Dan: Yeah, I would be. You know, that really struck me. I was on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and there's convenient Starbucks just off. It's on the side street, but it's about, you know, a minute walk from the intersection of Michigan Avenue. And I went in there and I was in line with four or five people. And it was during COVID So they had nobody sitting in there. So that section, sit sitting section was off. It was out of bounds. And. And I was just counting the number of orders that were being put right by the baristas. They were, you know, they were fulfilling and bagging. And by the time I got. I was number five. By the time I got my order In, I counted 17 picks up pickups for people to come in.

Dean: Right, exactly.

Dan: And pick up their, you know, picked up their order and. Yeah, yeah, that was all being done digitally. I think that's all the ordering part was done digitally.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And, and digitally.

Dean: And all you had to do is walk in, pick it up. I, you know, that reminded me too of, you know, Amazon is now, you know, doing that. They're bringing these Amazon Go stores which are like convenience stores where you can, there's not a single person in the place you walk in. It's all app driven knows that you're in there. It's all cameras and sensors and you just take what you want and leave. And it automatically charges your Amazon account. No, no checkout, no nothing, just pick it up. It sees that you picked this up and you just leave. That's pretty amazing, right?

Dan: Well, I think what they're facing with the end of COVID is traffic congestion is their number one growth obstacle.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, first of all they're having a hard time finding drivers and traffic conditions, I mean are as far as I can tell in Toronto anyway, traffic congestion is back to its pre Covid normal. And, and you know, and so, you know, everybody says this delivery business is terrific and I said it may have been terrific during COVID but my sense is the once you get back to mainland traffic congestion, then you've got yourself a, you know, you got yourself a slow down, you know, slow slowdown factor that really can't be solved digitally. You can't solve it. So having a place where people can go and pick up, you know, and you know, gets them out of their chair.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Dan: The reason I'm commenting on that is I bought a, had a Apple watch purchased for me two weeks ago and I love it and I purchased it one for one reason, for its size app, how much exercise I've done. And, and, and it reminds me if I've been sitting for more than 60 minutes on the 60 minute mark, it reminds me get up and walk around and I love it, I love it and I'm very compliant, you know. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So my sense is that the idea that you would still go some distance to pick something up strikes me as people are willing to do that.

Dean: Yes. Well, that's what, that's what Walmart is counting on in their counter argument to Amazon. If you're thinking about their, they're looking for their, you know, competitive advantage in world and you know, they bought Jet.com which was a huge, you know, E commerce site that came out of nowhere really but became, you know, a huge online retailer and Walmart bought them, integrated them into their own E commerce situation and so greatly enhanced their digital cloudlandia capabilities. But now they've using, they're using the logistics of doing delivery and, but having it centered from their stores and so you could get same day delivery. You can order online and either pick up or have it brought to you for most of the items that they have, which can be, that can be an advantage, especially in their superstores that have grocery items and stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Dan: I mean the, my discussion group that I was mentioning before, we have articles which are formatted into book pages and then we have a bound book of 30 or so articles. And this is just people picking up things that other people in the group, they think that other people in the group would be interested in thinking about this and talking about it. But we also have a book quarter and I'm usually the originator of the book because I've seen a couple of

Dean: those that I love to see that, you know. Yeah, they're great.

Dan: Yeah, it's a really, it's a really interesting book. And they're kind of like time captures too, because if you got one that was our quarterly, quarterly articles from 10 years ago, it would be like time travel back because you'd say, you know, none of that stuff would be news right now. None of the stuff from 10 years ago would be news. Right, yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, now it's a lot about, you know, it's triggered by the upcoming election. It's triggered by Russia, Ukraine. It's triggered by inflation. It's, you know, there's crypto, currency. Yeah, energy, you know, energy thing. A lot of, you know, very current topics. And it's sort of captured, you know, it's sort of captured. This is what's in the, you know, this is what people are talking about, thinking about today.

Dean: I just saw a great meme that was on the heels of Davos in, of the World Economic center or whatever they get together there. It was a picture of all the private jets lined up and it said, yeah, there are 195 private jets descend on Davos to talk about your carbon footprint.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Which was so funny because now I think what they're proposing is a way of you can have an app that tracks your lifestyle and calculates your carbon footprint. Yeah, I thought, man, that is just, it's so ironic, isn't it, that these guys are flying on private jets to talk about getting individuals to really watch their carbon footprint. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dan: That's a whole subject in itself, Davos.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: But anyway, but the book we have for this quarter is a really fascinating book. It's called the The Cloud Revolution. And it's by Mark, Mark Mills. And he's a terrific writer. He's mainly an energy writer. I followed him for the last 25 years. He, he's out of a think tank in New York called the Manhattan Institute and basically economic, economic trends. And he's just talking about the, the combination of the cloud with artificial intelligence. And he's saying, you know, more and more we're seeing that a lot of the, you know, a lot of what is facilitated by the cloud is sure real world productivity jumps using artificial intelligence. And one of the, there's two predictions that he makes that I find very interesting because I, right off the bat I find them very plausible. And the first one is the complete retrofitting of big shopping centers into actually manufacturing and manufacturing production and delivery centers. So let's say you take Yorkville, we both know Yorkville shopping center in Toronto. And it's massive. I mean it's just acres and acres of stores. And he said, well, in some places these are not viable. You know, they've lost their economic status. So you have a lot there. Some of them are like 50% empty. And he said the natural tendency is you're going to tear it down. He says don't tear it down. Clear it out by the other people out who are in it and clear it out and then start putting factories in it that are. And one thing about the shopping centers, they're always close to transportation systems, right? And so for example, if you went to Yorkville, the subway system connects with it. I think the Go line connects with it. The, the, you know, the 401, which is one of the bigger, busiest freeways in North America. And then you have, the airport is only about 15 minutes, 15 minutes away. And there, there are rail yards, you know, rail yards, very. So it's superbly located. And he said, and then he said, but what you have is factories which are robot driven factories, you know, and the workers there are, you know, basically it workers that service. But he said the other thing you got is tremendous parking lots. So you can have massive delivery.

Dan: You could have trucks pulling into, you know, to. So what he said, the raw materials come into the shopping center and are produced or the components are. So you have one supply chain that brings the materials in and then the production takes place in the shopping mill and then the finished products go out. And so it's the end of one supply chain and the beginning another supply chain.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, Amazing, right? And that's, I think we're seeing, I think Amazon was Eyeing those as well as warehouse, like distribution centers because of their proximity to, you know, dense population.

Dan: Yeah, but I was thinking of the. I was thinking of the skyscrapers in downtown Toronto. Easily, I think a third of people, a third of the pre Covid work population that came into the inner city won't come back to those buildings. You know, so you could have whole floors which are warehouse space, or you could have floors that are factory space and. Yeah, and you've got, you know, you've got parking underneath them. Yeah, you could have one floor of parking which is just for pickups and deliveries.

Dean: Yes. Yeah. Repurposing. Right. I think that's really the. Yeah.

Dan: So the first one which I found really interesting was this notion that shopping centers could be retrofitted as, you know, as, you know, real production. Real production centers. And the other one which I found really interesting is what's called materials technology. So one of the real. What I would call supply chain issues in the world that so much of what goes into high technology in terms of what goes into microchips and everything else and, you know, things digital, are comprised of rare earth. They're called rare earth materials. And lithium would be an example for batteries. You know, that it's only found in certain parts of the world. And most of those parts of the world are under the control of people you don't necessarily like. And. And he said that what he sees 20 years from now is that you design new materials and you just create them out of atoms. Like, you know, in other words, that you basically know what goes into a particular material and you just create it. You know, you create it in the lab. And, you know, so there's no mining, there's no transportation of it at all. You just create. You just create it on the site where you need it.

Dean: Yeah. I wonder how far we are away from, you know, materializers, you know, like.

Dan: Yeah, that's a good name. Material. They're materializers. Yeah.

Dean: Yeah. Where you have, you know, all the elements, you know, freeloaded, periodic.

Dan: You have the periodic.

Dean: Exactly. The periodic staple vending machine that you push the button and the recipe for H2O produces water. I wonder.

Dan: Well, I think. Right. I think Dean Cayman would probably be the person who would look at that. I mean, he got an agreement, I think it was with Coke, and he created.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Coca Cola.

Dean: Cola.

Dan: These big machines.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Where you could customize your Coke. And he invented the machine and he gave it to Coke in return for Coke agreeing to get fresh water throughout the world to distribution.

Dean: Fascinating thing. That, that it turns out that Coca Cola has the farthest reaching distribution network of any company in the world. You go to deepest, darkest corners of the earth and there are Coca Cola fountain machines, you know, that, that are, that are established as distribution. And that was for his water because he had created the potable water purifier that can turn puddle water into, into drinkable water. But you know, the interest.

Dan: But the other thing is he's now in human organs. You know, his factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, they've been doing replacement skin and the replacement bones and replacement ligaments for the U.S. department of Defense for the battle battlefield injuries. And they were on schedule to start producing baby hearts. You know, where a baby is born with a defective heart, you take healthy tissue from the heart and send it to Dean Kamen's factory and they take that healthy DNA and they. 42 days, I think it is 42 days, they produce a identical heart that is. Can't be rejected because it's. Yeah, it's genetically the same as the defective heart. Yeah, so he's already doing that. So my feeling is that materials. And it has to do with when something's crucially it's needed, there's a crucial need for it and there's a formidable obstacle that doesn't make it predictable, in other words, that this could get cut off. And so my sense is that you'll put up with that for a while, but then you say we've got to create a bypass to this problem.

Dean: Yeah, it's really, you know, it's fascinating because that it's looking, you know, you start to think about combining all these elements. The interesting thing about his Dean's, you know, Coca Cola machine that can make all of the drinks right. With this little syrup tubes is his original thing that he invented was the, the diabetic, the insulin that, that delivered precision dosage of insulin.

Dan: Home dialysis.

Dean: Yes, exactly that, that what he was really, what he had was the plumbing or the infrastructure for precision fluid delivery. That was the piping and the infrastructure that he combined to solve the puzzle of how to make, you know, grape soda and how to make cherry Coke from the same with a touch screen. It's all the formula of how much, you know, how much water, how much carbonation, how much syrup went with it. Yeah, but imagine now, I mean, you could have materializer where you could do.

Dan: I think, I think you just named it.

Dean: Absolutely. But now we're getting into the, the Star Trek Replicator. You know, that was what every. They had the thing that would Create all of those. It's going to be interesting to see. Star Trek has been right about everything so far. It's still, I still keep Zoom as close as we've come to the transporter, but it'll be interesting to see if it ever gets to where we can.

Dan: Yeah, there would have to be some compelling need to, you know, to send our bodies, you know.

Dean: Well, that may be what the metaverse will be, the actual practical.

Dan: Well, so far, so far the word from it is that women get attacked more quickly when they go.

Dean: That's amazing, isn't it? It's just like such a. What a weird world we live in in some ways. I mean, that's just.

Dan: Yeah, I mean there's a, you know, there's a Zucker effect that I think is pretty apparent right now that he wants to do good, but generally when he touches thing, they turn bad and right. You know, so, you know, so my sense is that first of all, I mean, the metaverse already has existed for quite a long time in the military and as a matter of fact, the new fighter, and this will be the last probably American fighter jet, where there's actually a human pilot. The written from this point forward, the fighter jets will be super drones and but this one and the whole thing is that you have, it's the F35. And apparently it's so advanced that if another, let's say an enemy jet is with 120 miles of the F35, it's dead.

Dean: Wow, that's amazing.

Dan: Yeah, and so it's not even observable. And the point is that there's never one F35 up. You know, you never send one F35, you send six of them.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And the six of them are a system of, of communication and information and coordination. And plus they have satellite, I mean they're using satellite connections. And so 120 miles is beyond the horizon. You know, if you're at 20,000, 25, 30,000ft, 120 is beyond the horizon. And they're picking up people just as they're entering a time zone. Within five minutes they'll be, they'll be visible above the horizon. And there they can already fire their rockets while the other jet is. Wouldn't even be picking up on them. And that's because of the advanced communications and you know, and after this, it'll be guys parked in a trailer at, in Las Vegas.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And it'll be back to the things that they were doing when they were 10 years old.

Dean: Isn't that war Games. Yeah. Yeah. Boy, that's amazing. When you really. I mean, we've come a long way since pong in the 70s. That's just. It's almost. I mean, it baffles your mind as to how much it's changed, but how gradual it happened, you know, 25 years now since.

Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. I had the idea for one of my new quarterly books, and it's called Timeless. The book title that I'm Provisional book title is called Timeless Technology. And my sense is that technology is a human ability that goes back right to the beginning. In other words, that you're trying to improve your environment. Humans are the only species that immediately sets about altering their environment to make it suitable for themselves.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: And they're faced with some problems. Things are too heavy, you know, things are too far. You know, there's just all these. And then we think up, well, how could we defeat this? You know, how could we. How do we turn this to our advantage? You know? And my sense is that the first human who started using something outside of themselves to change something out of themselves, you're into the realm of technology and you can draw a continuous line backwards back to that first person saying, you know. You know, he's thinking about it, how could I do this differently? You know, how could we move this around, you know, if we do this and do this, you know, and, you know, lightning creates fires. And he says, how could. You know, it's too. It's not convenient that we have to wait around for the. Just the right type of lightning strike to get fire. I really like that fire thing, you know, how do we. How do we kind of capture it when it happens? But then how do we. How do we.

Dean: Fire on demand? Fire on demand.

Dan: Fire on demand. You know, it's like. Yeah, it's. And. And everything. And I think. So my whole point is that the technological experience is built right into our nervous system that is as timeless. And to have a psychological problem with it means that you're. You're trying to. You know, you're trying to swim up waterfalls, you know, I mean. Yeah, you're not getting the point here. You're not getting the point. This is that this is an innate ability of improving things. You know, you just want to improve things anyway, so that's the. That's my.

Dean: But that is funny how we do crave. We do seek that. I don't. I remember several years ago, I saw a video or some kind of tell something either on television or on the Internet about the Jewish Innovators that would invent machines or ways that could do things that you technically weren't allowed to do on the Sabbath that, you know, it would be. It would, like, pick up the telephone or something, or it would start the thing without you. Actually, you'd be able to. With the letter of the law thing. Well, I didn't lift that up, you know, or whatever that they weren't allowed to. To do. They had a technological kind of loophole around it.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: That would solve the. The issue to keep them sort of within the letter of the law, but not the spirit, of course. Funny. But we do crave that kind of thing.

Dan: Oh, yeah, We. We encounter an obstacle, and we can imagine what it'd be like without the obstacle.

Dean: Yeah. I wonder what the. Aha. Like, that's a fascinating. I'd love to see, actually, a little, like, vignette of the great inventor. Like, the great things that. The aha. Moment that led to them. Like, I wonder what was going through Gutenberg's mind and experience before he had the idea that, hey, I could. I know. He was a jeweler or something.

Dan: No, it was a gold. It was a gold. It was a gold. Yeah, yeah. And he was used to creating forms for different shapes of gold. And then it just occurred. And then, you know, it just occurred to him that maybe somebody wanted their

Dean: initial or something in a. Yeah, gold A. Yeah, they wanted a gold A. And that got him, hey, wait a minute. I could make a B and a C. Yeah, yeah.

Dan: You know, I mean. I mean, you never know what it is. But my sense is that it's the type of mind that, you know, it's like having. It's like how your tongue goes crazy if there's something stuck in one of your back teeth, you know? And my fake is that there's minds that are, like, tons, you know, that once. Once they're up against something, they can't let it go. They have to keep working to figure a workaround or a bypass to. To it. Yeah.

Dean: And every time I think about tongues finding a solution, I think of Jeff Foxworthy. It was talking about. This pie is so good. If you put a slice of that on top of your head, your tongue will beat your brains out trying to get to it.

Dan: Yeah, that's a compelling. It's a compelling offer.

Dean: Isn't that funny, though?

Dan: Yeah, it was funny. Steve, Kryn and I were doing a podcast on Friday, the Free Zone. It was with Keegan Caldwell, and boy was it. We did three of them in about two hours. Three. Oh, wow. And he was telling me things about his world. That ip. He's in the Keegan is free zone. He's in. Yeah, he's an IP lawyer. He's got the fastest growing IP firm for the last three years in the United States. So which I suspect is probably the fastest growing in the world because it's probably where.

Dean: Well, that's the biggest IP market for sure.

Dan: Yeah, it's the fastest market. And there's two things that he was telling me and that is that there's now software that he uses where he can calculate the speed with which you can get a path. Okay. So what it does is it kind of puts together all the wisdom that there is about the patent bureau category. And then you would punch in and where you've made it, you've made it. What I would say you, your application doesn't have any drag to it. You know, like. Yeah, you've, you've just lubricated it in such a way that it just goes right through the patent process. And, and the other one which I found really fascinating is that if you're an inventive kind of firm or you're an innovative type of firm and you have lots and lots of innovations, not necessarily you haven't commercialized them, but there's now a whole process in software which can give you the future valuation of your non commercialized fee. Wow. And it will establish what you. And they have a bank that backs this up, so they evaluate the future value of your. Let's say it's $20 million. You could then borrow up to $10 million against the future commercialization of your IP. Wow.

Dean: Great. What a great thing. I've never even thought.

Dan: And the thing about it is that essentially that's why you go to the investor market is basically. But you have to give up ownership this way. You don't give up any ownership.

Dean: Yeah, that's, that's interesting because you start to see it's becoming really a thing now that, you know, within the last six months or so you've seen, you know, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and Justin Timberlake and all these people who've sold their catalogs, their, their publishing catalogs for, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. And so that's been going on for a long time. David Bowie was one of the first that, that sold. Somebody put together Bowie Bond that was sell and buying a future interest in the, the value of his, of his catalog. But you said you have, there's somebody in the program who does, who buys Long Tail music. Ip right. Was that.

Dan: Yeah, I'll see him tomorrow night. He's in my discussion group. Greg Ishaan, he's a hedge fund manager here in Toronto and he created it and the first one he did, he, it was just an experiment and it worked but the, the team wasn't right. So he sold the company to another big thing. So he made, you know, he made a good, he made a good, got a good payday for it.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And then he really, he got enough of the model in his mind that he could now design a 10 times better team. And now he's really big. I mean he's, it's gone really big in the last, wow, two years. And, and it's, it's a fairly predictable. Once you do it, it's a fairly predictable thing in the sense that it's based on. And he said that you don't go, I mean it's not going after the big stars. So if you think of the lawn tail, well, the line on the right is straight up and you're not going to touch that. He says you come down the tail and it's from basically the 20% mark of the tail as it curves down. So you start at 20% and you go to 40%. And he said that's the sweetheart and it's somebody who has written music. And 20 years ago, well, let's say when downloading started, you know, so it'd be 10 years, let's say 10 years ago when downloading using your phone or using, you know, one of the services has started and he said you get you. There's 5,000 downloads a month. And it was that way 10 years ago and it's that way right now. That, that's just, that's a beautiful thing.

Dean: Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, there's so many different. You must see like some amazing businesses just among the people in strategic.

Dan: Just, just in free zone now. I mean, just in, just in free zone now. I mean we're up to 60 now in free zone and we just had somebody from Europe join. He's from Switzerland and he's got a management consultant network of 1400 consultants in 35 countries. And he, but he's got this, you know, really bad network of consultants who are, but they have a software based connector with the, their clients, they're all businesses and, and it solves a lot of problems right up off the bat. It's very, you know, it's a very clarified, it's kind of like a transformative software experience that gets you started on It. And then they add human, then they add human coaching to it, you know. Yeah, yeah. And you know, and yeah, just really, really. We got a guy who is starting the whole process of constructing big components for the new, the new type of nuclear reactor, which is probably going to be the ultimate solution to the energy thing. And he's starting in Wyoming and Wyoming has a billion dollar, a startup fund for the new generation of nuclear, which is actually kind of like salt. It's like a, it's a particular salt process from what I understand. And the governor of Wyoming is big, you know, really big on this and you know, and there's a lot of investor, there's a lot of big investors

Dean: and they're smaller scale or.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. I mean my neighborhood, what I can figure out is the house that I'm in right now, you know, the big house that we have here, that they wouldn't be much bigger than our house. Yeah. And they're, you know, they, they're largely, you know, they're digitally run mostly and they don't have, they don't have the problem of meltdown. That is if anything immediately goes wrong, the entire system just shuts down. You know, and you could, that'd be

Dean: interesting if you could just integrate them into a neighborhood like they do. The real transformers, we used to joke because they would, in neighborhoods they would build a house like a facade of a house that looks, it just fits in the neighborhood, but it's actually a transformer. And we remember as a real estate agent we would, let's call it hazing. We would haze new people who came into the office by calling in and setting up a listing appointment for them for 142 Mountain View, which was the address of this house that was the transformer house. They'd get all excited thinking they're going to go out and get their first listing, drive up to the house and it's the transformer.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Oh, that's funny. Those were the days.

Dan: Yeah. Yes. When you were experimenting with cruelty.

Dean: Yes, exactly. Well, back then, non digital cruelty. Right. You'd actually had to go drive to the house before you realized what it was. You couldn't just look it up on Zillow and realize you can do.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. But where I see it is, you know, like if you have a server farm, you know, like. Yeah, one server farm. You have the nuclear reactor right in the middle of the super farm and you're never, you're never connected to the grid at all. You, you're self sufficient. You're self sufficient. With your own nuclear power and you know, I mean there's, you know, outlying places that could never be settled. You know, in other words, you could never have a housing development out there because of the lack of energy. Just too hard to get the energy you just put right, you know, and, and there's a lot of wide open spaces in the world, you know, that would be pleasant to live in, except there's no power. And you would provide power and you could, if you have power, you can create water, you know.

Dean: Is it gaining momentum? The. Oh yeah, nuclear.

Dan: I think it's the, the, the generation. I think it's the 70s generation. It's a contentious generation. And when I say 70s, that they were in their 20s, in their, in the 1970s and they're the cap bureaucrats and they're the top politicians in the world who developed a very anti nuclear attitude in the 1970s.

Dean: And they're disappearing.

Dan: They're disappearing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're disappear, they're disappearing. And, and the newer generations don't have any history of this, you know. So if you talk to a 20 year old now about anti nuclear, they, they, they blank, you know, they have no notion what you're talking about. So they blank got no developed attitude about it. Right. Yeah. I mean, Thomas Kuhn, who wrote a great book called the Structure of Scientific revolutions in the 1960s, he was asked what's the key factor for a new technological breakthrough? And he said the funerals of older scientists.

Dean: That's. Well, there's something to that. You're right, because along with the old scientists dies the old ideas. Right?

Dan: Well, the old controls too. Yeah, right. The old opposition, the old controls and everything. So I think we're getting to the point, you know, I think we're at an intensity high heat right now with the political polarization which really started in the 1970s. And my feeling is within 10 years it'll be like a fever. Who are experiencing a fever right now, but the fever will pass. And people said, what was that all about? You know, can you imagine? God, you know, when you look at it seems like kind of crazy. And I said, well, that's what it feels like when you have a fever.

Dean: Yeah, amazing.

Dan: Anyway, an hour has passed. It has literally flown by.

Dean: Yeah, well, I always enjoy it. It's always a fun, It's a beautiful day here in Florida and the Florida outpost here too.

Dan: Yeah, we're having gorgeous June weather.

Dean: I love it. Well, Dan, I will talk to you next week, same time. Okay, have a great day.

Dan: Okay, bye.