Transitioning from Imagination to Reality

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia, Mr. Sullivan.

Dan: But where do the files go? That's what I want to know.

Dean: Top secret files.

Dan: Yeah. Yes. The party knows all.

Dean: That's so funny. Well, welcome to Cloudlandia. Where are you Right.

Dan: More and more. More and more, we're in it. We're more and more. Week by week, day by day, we're more and more in Cloudlandia.

Dean: I agree with you. I'm considering immigrating.

Dan: Well, you know, I always think that the real big opportunity is the courier service between the two. That's what we're doing. That's actually what we're doing. We're currying their thoughts between the mainland and Outlandia.

Dean: I think you're absolutely right. And that's really where the. I've been thinking a lot about the. You know, that transition from the. From imagination to reality is really a great thing. I've been really thinking about the. You know, my primary world is imagination, which. Which is very Cloudlandic, compliant. And it's. If you start thinking about the physical. I've been using the word constraints, but, you know, I'm open to another word for it. Of reality. Of the. Of the mainland. Is. Really works on reality time. There's. There's no shape shifting. No, you know, think about imagination time. You can go backwards and forwards and in any. You know, instantly be taking a thing from the past and projecting it forward into the future, thinking how a projected path might take. But the reality is in the mainland. No matter what vision you set up in your imagination there, if it's going to happen on the mainland, will require adherence to the constraints of reality. I was thinking about if I were going to. If I decide in my imagination that I would love. I have a vision for, you know, having lunch with you at Select Bistro on Saturday, next Saturday. Now, the. I can imagine that because we've been there. I've got a history of it. I know I enjoy it. I can immediately recall all the times that you and I've been to Select Bistro. List Select. At the times that we've been to Jacques. And I can recall those. I can. So I know and can anticipate that it would be delightful. But the reality is that in order for that to take place, I would have to move my physical meat robot from Winter Haven on my couch in my courtyard right now to the La Select Bistro. And there's some physical realities to that. If we were having this conversation 150 years ago or 200 years ago, that would require traveling the 1200 miles by foot or by horse or, you know, some way to get.

Dan: 150 years ago, you could have done it by train.

Dean: Okay, there you go. That would be the top speed of the thing, which would still take some real time. You know, there's no way to shortcut that. You're going by the speed of reality in that. Right. And right now the. If I were going to walk it at 4 miles an hour, it would take 300 hours to get there. Or the fastest way possible to get there right now would be to, you know, take a private plane, a private jet from the airport, 10 minutes from my house to the island airport, and I could probably be there touching down. I could probably be at select Bistro 3 and a half to four hours from right now if I decided to.

Dan: Yeah. And they're open nowhere. Yeah, yeah, they're open this morning. So.

Dean: Yeah. Perfect.

Dan: By the time you got here, the table would be waiting for you. Yeah, yeah.

Dean: And so it's interesting to really. Because I was thinking about that in. In the same thing. Taking that for every thing that you want to transition from imagination to reality. And writing a book is a perfect example of that, where if you're. If you're going to write a book, you know, that your quarterly books, I think you've told me, is about a. 30.

Dan: 35 hours.

Dean: 30, 35 process that. And that's as fast as, you know, you could run that in the world.

Dan: In a world of books. That's pretty fast.

Dean: Absolutely. Yeah. And is that. That 35 hours is the tip of. Are you counting that 35 hours of your time or the.

Dan: Yeah, 35 hours of mine? 30. No, it's several hundred hours of.

Dean: Right. Other people. Yes, you're totally. You're leveraging everybody else. So it's knowing that kind of stuff and having your throughput system to get you. You plug into your throughput system that lets you put out a book every quarter for 35 hours. So you're talking 35 hours. Yeah. You're talking less than. Yeah, we're just.

Dan: We're just wrapping up the next one. And. And this was quarter 32. And it was book 32. Book 32. So we're on schedule because my goal was 100 books and quarters and. Yeah, but when the first one I did, which involved working with your team, took me a little over a hundred hours to pull that off. And by probably the next quarter we had gotten it down to about 60 hours. And then it's been incremental drive efficiencies that you Build into the system. Yeah.

Dean: And you removed. I think. I think we worked on you with the first three and first two.

Dan: First two.

Dean: The first two. And then by three, you had your own. Your team in place.

Dan: Yeah, we had our own writer, and I had my own interviewer writer and editor by book, number three. So. Yeah, but the, you know, I was thinking the. The big multiplier of our times for individuals is, number one, teamwork. Because entrepreneurs, you know, the vast majority of them, I mean, there's great things said about entrepreneurism here in the 21st century, you know, but if you look at most entrepreneurs, they're kind of rugged individualists, you know, that they're entrepreneurial in the sense that nobody's paying them a salary, you know.

Dean: Right, yeah. They're in the results economy. Right.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. But when you take a look at what they've done, they've. They really haven't created a business, they've created a job.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And. And I. And I suspect in most cases, I have no, you know, idea of this, but they're actually working harder for. At the job they created for themselves than they ever worked. They worked at a job where they were working for someone else and. And not necessarily liking it any better. Yeah, right, right, right.

Dean: They say, isn't that the thing where entrepreneurship is the only place where people will work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. And. And their boss, first of all. Yeah. First of all, there's real meaning to what you just said in the sense that the sense of freedom is worth working an extra 40 hours a week. And I said, well, I said, you know, there's better ways of doing this. There's better ways of doing this. And the two multipliers are, in the mainland world is teamwork with other people. And that's what I've done with, you know, with the book Project One is technology, and that's really what Cloudlandia is. But, you know, we were talking about my most recent book, the book that was last quarter's book, which was called you are not a Computer. And I said, you know, it's an interesting thing, but with all the talk and this has been going on for. This talking has been going on for a couple hundred years about how technology destroys jobs. And I think it destroys specific jobs, but it doesn't destroy. It doesn't destroy overall jobs. And. And because when the first technology that gave rise to that thought was actually milling, it was fabric trading clothing. So it was around 1800, and 1800 was the first time that human being, human population reached a billion. They have pretty good statistics estimates.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Most countries had census taking and they established it as a billion. And the last two centuries, one of the most notable features has been constantly increasing technology. And so that means that if you have this amazing increase of technology over 222 years, which we have had, gee, that billion population would have to be down to maybe about 500 million. Right. 500 million would have gotten. I mean, if they don't have a job, they're not eating and so they're not existing.

Dean: But it also created other. You know, I think.

Dan: Yeah, but the, the world population's 8 billion now, you know, and most of them are, Most of them are working. So it's been just the opposite. That increasing technology creates increasing jobs. Increasing, increasing jobs. And actually the.

Dean: Yeah, new jobs, new opportunities. Yeah, completely new. Like there's many people that are working in jobs that weren't even in existence 25 years ago.

Dan: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dean: I mean, go that far. You know, you look at it that so many people, the biggest.

Dan: How many companies back then? Not many podcasters back then.

Dean: No. And so all of that. Every advancement creates new opportunities. I remember the talk when, when I was researching Cyrus McCormick, the guy that invented the reaper, you know, and it was credited, along with the telephone and the railroad as the three biggest things of the 19th century. I guess the 1800 that were. That paved the way for the industrialization. We shift from agricultural society to an industrial society because it freed up people out of the, out of the fields into the factories.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know the number that you gave me when you told the, the Cyrus McCormick story, that one person with a horse and a reaper could equal the work of 18 people. 17 or 18.

Dean: 14 men.

Dan: Yeah, 14. Okay, 14. So. And immediately people think, well, those 14 were unemployed. And I said, well, I said, well, it'd be interesting to put some thought to that because actually probably a third of those people saw what had happened and they went out and they got land and they got McCormick. Reapers did the same thing. So actually they did it and others became McCormick dealer. McCormick, yeah. Reaper dealer.

Dean: Reaper dealer.

Dan: Right, Reaper dealer. Yeah. A reaper dealer.

Dean: Huh?

Dan: What do you do? Oh, what do you do for a living? I'm a reaper dealer. Yeah. And you know, and you know, it's like human beings can't respond creatively to something new. It's that whole basis is always based on, you know, the way humans are. Humans can't. They. They don't have enough sense to see what's going on around them and they don't. They can't see what just happened and. Because you know that they don't have a mind that can actually just adjust to circumstances and take advantage of new opportunities, you know, and it's always, you know, it's always based that terrible things are going to happen to the human race because the human race is incapable of reacting to anything new. You know, I mean, it's a foolish thought.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: But you look, I mean, that's. Yeah. Everything adapts. Right. You're. It's funny you say people might become dealers, you know, reaper dealers, but that was, you know, on the back of it, that was it. When I first discovered it, The. The first thought about the compelling offer versus a convincing argument. Convincing argument, hey, you could do the work of 14 men, but that compelling offer is, hey, why don't you let me. Why don't you. Why don't I let you use the reaper for the heart for the season here?

Dan: And you could pay and you pay me at the end. Yeah,

Dean: that was a compelling offer.

Dan: That.

Dean: Because everybody was convinced that it was a good thing, they just couldn't afford it, you know.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah.

Dean: So that paved the way.

Dan: Yeah. I think probably, you know, to put your two, you know, argument and offer together, that the final step of a convincing argument has to be a compelling offer.

Dean: Yes. And you need most. In order for it to be a compelling offer, they have to under, you know, fundamentally be interested in the argument in a way that if it's, you know, the. If there's no, there's no argument that they're not convinced that this, that the reaper's going to be a benefit for them. It's an interesting, like, chicken and egg sort of situation. You know, it's. You have to still present the convincing argument that, that does make then. But the compelling offer is what gets into action, you know.

Dan: Yeah. From a marketing standpoint, we don't think convincing arguments attract attention.

Dean: No.

Dan: So I think it's probably a compelling offer. And they say, oh, tell me all about it. And you bring on the convincing argument and then just to get them to take action, you stop the first. You tap the first compelling offer with another compelling offer.

Dean: Yeah, that's. That's exactly. That's the model. So first of all, we do it. So the first four profit activators in our eight profit activator model are selecting a single target market. So you're in that. That harmonizes with your idea of always be the buyer. You're doing the select. I Have to outline for people or go through this process that this is different than positioning yourself to be selected, which is what most people are thinking when they're doing advertising. They're thinking, I want to cast a wide net so that anybody that could possibly be interested in what we do will be able to select us. Right. Being, you know, doing the select thing is picking who you're, you know, a great place to start is thinking about your largest check and thinking about who are the, who's your ideal client and then you go out and select them. And now the compelling and convincing where that, where I look at those and you're exactly right. It's that three step process of compelling your prospects at first just to raise their hand and say and pay attention to you. Yes, pay attention. So you do it in a way that is, that is compelling to them. I was using an example. There's a great series of books and one of them is read this if you want to take great photographs. That's the name of the book, the title of the book. And he's also got in that series a book called Read this if you want to take great photographs of people. And then read this if you want to take great photographs of places. So the way I say to people is if you've got a company, you've got services that you offer to photographers and you've got, you know, training courses or equipment or any of the things that support people in their photography endeavor. Rather than making a convincing argument that hey, our cameras are the best for taking, for taking photographs of people, you first of all have to just get in front of people who are potentially interested in taking photographs of people. That's the end result, right? It's the thing that they really want.

Dean: So having a book like that, getting people to raise their hand, that's compelling them to turn from being an invisible prospect into a visible prospect because now you, you know, pulled them out of the woodwork. We've used this example so many different ways. In Toronto I worked with a party rental company and you know, being convincing people to choose you for their party rental need is an uphill thing. And I was asking them about what's the, you know, what is their, who'd be their dream client, what would be their largest check. And they said an outdoor wedding is like the big win at the tents and the generators and everything that goes with it. Almost everything they have gets used for an outdoor wedding. But trying to convince people to choose you for your as a party rental company for the outdoor wedding is an uphill climb. So we, rather than putting making that convincing argument, you know, McLean party rental since 1963, serving Toronto, you know, all these things that build up your. What you think would be a convincing argument to choose you over other options is to put all that aside and just realize people who are about to have a wedding are invisible prospects. You can't get a list of them, but you can build a list of them by the other thing. Is they what they want?

Dan: They don't do it all the time.

Dean: Right. That's why. Exactly.

Dan: I mean, the bride and the groom aren't doing this every three months. You hope so, yeah.

Dean: So we put together a directory of a hundred great places, have an outdoor wedding in Toronto. And that was what we would advertise. And when people respond and ask for

Dan: the outdoor, that was really the big. That was the really big decision.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: Where is it going to be exactly Right.

Dean: And you get right up to the front of the line as far as the priority of decisions. And now you're in contact with somebody who has got. Who's a visible prospect with a real timeline, probably, you know, six to 24 months of planning or time. And you're the only party rental company that knows this ahead of time. You've got a list of them. So that was a compelling thing getting. Because it's what they're interested in. It's. You're tapping into the jet stream that way. And then we're able to convince them that going with McLean party rental would be the big win. You know, it's because of all the. Then it makes sense.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: When they start to get to choose.

Dan: But yeah, it's really interesting. I was just in workshop last Thursday with somebody who's been in coach for 31 years. So I've seen him the minimum. I've seen at a minimum. I've seen him every quarter for 31 years. And then with the new zoom connector calls that probably. Yeah, you know, is. Is double that is double that now. And we were just chatting because he had moved to Toronto in the 1970s with his father. His father had the. Had a printing operation, you know, you know, retail printer. You know, he would, you know, and, and. But because of the language loss in, In Quebec, he had moved to Toronto. And so he was starting into a new market in Toronto and everything like that. But he did well enough that he could, you know, he could be attracted to strategic coach. And, you know, he saw this as an investment. So the first day I sat down, the workshop hadn't started and I sat down next to him and I asked him what he did and he says, printer. And I says, boy, you must have been a really evil person in your last life that this is the punishment in this life. And I said, I don't think there's an industry in the world where you get commoditized to death as a normal daily experience, you know, and everything. And I said, you know, I think printing is very important. And I said, we do a lot of printing and prone, like as technology increases, you're only going to get more commoditized. And he really took me seriously. So I'm going to make a very long story very short. And I'm just going to say that today he's a marketer. He's an innovative marketer. And only he lives in Toronto, but all of his customers are in New York, New York City, mostly Manhattan or maybe a couple of the other cities. And what he does is he's, he has a real gift for designing very innovative envelopes just for direct mail, just for. And a lot of our listeners will not appreciate this fact, but it's absolutely true that to this day, the single most effective form of direct marketing is the mail system. The mail.

Dan: So when you send out a piece of mail that has much bigger rate than any other form communication. Okay. So anyway, but he creates these very innovative and he's gotten them patented. So he has a path, though. And now he has, I think, five of the biggest financial corporations in the United States as clients and he designs programs for their, you know, their direct mail campaigns for.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, credit card. Credit cards or, you know, other services that they offer. And, and these all require printing. And he's the only printer that they can go through.

Dean: His ideas, he's. His ideas. He does the brokering or whatever.

Dan: Yeah. If you buy this, you want this unique proprietary idea for your thing. I get all the printing. And on any particular project, the amount of money he makes off that project is 10 times what he would make in a year and 31 years ago without a bid. There's no bids. So he doesn't do it. So what he's done is that what they don't actually want printing, what they want is new customers.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, he had to approach it a completely different way. And the other thing is right now, you know, he lives in Toronto, but all the money is generated in the United States. States. And when I looked Friday morning, the exchange rate is $1.38 right now. So he's getting $38 to buy you know, a dollar of printing and like that, you know. So the interesting thing is he's not talking to them about printing. He doesn't even the subject of printing doesn't come right until they say well, how soon can we get the project out there? And he says, well yeah, we'll have to look at the printing schedule here. So you, let's just look at the dates here. And, and there's no discussion about who the printer is going to be. He's the printer.

Dean: I love that I just got and

Dan: actually he isn't a printer. He uses print shops in Toronto, you know, to use it. And they do absolutely nothing to not have him want them as their printer, you know, because jobs are so big, you know. So anyway, so going back to the start of the podcast, you were talking about imagination. You know, all failure of business and all failure of employment is a failure of imagination.

Dean: I'd love to hear that unpacked. Well,

Dan: what you're compelling offer, you know, 10 times more persuasive than a convincing, a convincing argument. The one factor you're taking in into consideration there is what does it look like from the other person's point of view, Right?

Dean: Yes. Then that's really, that that's the big win is if you can, you know, still in their imagination, your vision for their outcome, that they get compelled by that. That's really, that's really the thing. Everybody wants the outcome. And we're really in a point now where the, you know, when we were talking about the VCR formula, vision capability and reach that all of the elements of those things now just like that marketplace in China, the electronics marketplace are available. There's no revolutionary new electronic componentry that needs to be invented. Right. That's not, we're not trying to solve any of the, the hardware problems. All of that's been, all of that's available and commodified and that's, you know, I kind of look at. Commoditized has always had sort of a negative connotation. If you're a business owner that it's trying to, you know, then of course the margins are going down. This competition, there's more options. But if I'm looking at, if you're a visionary, the commoditization of capabilities is a winning thing. And I'm, I just views when I'm talking about commoditized meaning available for sale or available for you to actually to either purchase or partner or acquire those capabilities. But that's, I mean, yeah, I think

Dan: the, yeah, you know, I'VE looked at it from both ways because we. I think that there's a difference between automation and commodity commoditization. You know, in other words, that under your term of reach, you know, you're not commoditizing something to have reach. You're putting something in the hands of people who can instantly put your product, your product offering and your product itself into the hand.

Dean: But I look at, in a lot of ways, reach is, the way I would think about reaching as a commodity is that it's available for hire. You can, right now, you can buy from, from Facebook access to their newsfeed, you know, there and show your ad specifically to any segment of their audience that you choose. You know, and you don't have to build that audience. You don't have to do anything. Get right in front of them. YouTube that, all of those eyeballs that access to that reach is commoditized in that you can buy it. You can show ads to specific people who watch specific things, even to the point where you can show, you can reach an audience on YouTube of people who were just four hours ago searching on Google for something. You know, somebody searches for red wagons on Google and then four hours later, they're surfing on YouTube, watching, you know, cat videos, and comes you with, hey, are you looking for a red wagon? Come on down to Red Wagon Village. You know, get right in front of your exact audience that you need to get in front. And so all of that is, you know, that used to be what. Even the postal service that you talk about is a commoditization of reach. You have to pay. So that's where either capital or organic is how, you know, building that reach. Mr. Beast, the advantage that he has is that he's got a hundred million subscribers that he can access for free because he's built up all of that, that audience, you know, but they get monetized because you can, you can show ads on a Mr. Beast video if that's your target audience.

Dan: Right.

Dean: There's just such having. Recognizing your assets all across that the VCR formula, you know, vision assets is intellectual property of knowing what to do capability. Assets are equipment, people, technology, tools, you know, manufacturing, anything that you need to actually organize to be able to do something. And then reach assets can be accessed to your. Your audience, to your clients, to your stuff. So you can participate in the VCR formula with whatever assets you have. You know, you could be a vital part of that. Nothing happens unless somebody's got a vision for it.

Dan: Yeah, well, the other thing that I think happens. And, you know, I've constantly. This is, you know, constant thought process going on inside my brain. And I said, what is it that when opportunity is staring someone in the face, they don't take out. They don't take the opportunity when the opportunity completely matches what they want. You know, they say they. What they say they want. Okay. And what I've realized is that they have other conditions that they're not putting on the table. And one of them is it can't disturb my overall life at all. You know, if you say you're going to take my opportunity up 10 times, that's not going to come without a price. Right? Okay. And I think that more and more, for example, something that we've been on to and it's been really dramatic, has to do with getting our clients to renew into the program at the end of a program year. Okay. So always, you know, it's another sale to a certain extent. I mean, some people, it's a given, you know, you don't. They're just automatically going to sign up. But, you know, I would say that there. And there's. It's a given that certain people are not going to. To sign up.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And I would say, you know, I don't have any numbers that come to mind right off the bat, but our success really depends upon the. The percentage of the total number of clients at the end of each year that have to be re. Re. Engaged or resold with why they're doing. With why they're doing this. And, and the interesting thing is you'll have entrepreneurs in strategic coach who just had their greatest year ever. And then they say, and it's time for renewal. And they say, well, yeah, I don't know. I'm not really. I'm not really sure, you know, I'm not really sure I'm going to come. And they said, but you just, you were saying that to everybody in the workshop. You were just having your best year ever. So what is it? Why wouldn't you want to continue on with that? And I said, well, you know, I got to really think about this, okay? And I told my program advisors who are the, you know, they're the. They make that sale. The program advisors are the people responsible for moving people from one year to the next by renewing. And I say, I'm going to give you a tip. It doesn't have anything to do with their business. It has to do with what's. What's happening in their personal life. And they say, I said that year of extraordinary Growth created pressures on them from the people that they know because the people they know are not having extraordinary years. So one of the things is that you're a marketer and on the face of it the programs you put together are a no brainer. And yet people don't necessarily. Not as many people as you think would just immediately engage and initiate them. Right.

Dean: That's where that is. And that's the frustration of things like you just said it on the head. Like you know, on the one thing that they. It works. I was, I take this approach where I look at your return on relationship is one thing that we measure in the after unit of a business. So when you look at what your describing there is we would, if I were looking and overlaying this on Strategic Coach I would say okay, the after unit of your business is I would call it everybody who's in year two or beyond of the program and measure the percentage of revenue that comes from that relationship portfolio. The people that have successfully moved into year two, I would call that the after unit and I would call the during unit year one of the program. They're getting it established and then if they move into year two, the odds much higher that they're going to stay even longer. So when we look at in establishing that in people's minds like for Strategic Coach members and I've had this conversation with Joe Polish that we've been talking about this idea of return on Genius where document and get people to really put a number to the tangible return on Genius. So within Genius Network the things that are going to have an impact are going to be primarily ideas that you got an idea that you then implemented and it generated this much this outcome for you or contacts that you met somebody who became a client or became a resource or became a collaboration that had a monetary gain, you know what the payoff was. And I think ultimately that's the one of the biggest things. Yeah. You could show that it would be pretty compelling where if you get people to think in lines that they are that it's paying for itself.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: If you look at you've told the story of in Genius Network and the first meeting, the concept first hour, the first hour of ten Times first in your mind you got that idea was planted. You can go right to there and say that was where I burst the idea of the 10 times program. And now you set that into motion. And what has been the impact of that over you know, the ongoing, you know, keep continuing to go and that whole reframing the investment and Then we use that language too as a capital investment in Genius Network as opposed to thinking about it as a 25,000 or $100,000 expense. To frame it as a. I've said to Joe thinking setting up a 10 year context to think of it as a $250,000 investment, allocated $25,000 a year for the next 10 years to chart and measure when people reach escape velocity. Like I could see. It'd be an interesting exercise, you know, the moment.

Dan: The other. Yeah, I think the other aspect is. And the book that we're writing this quarter is called thinking about your thinking, which I think really the new state of mind that people acquire from repeated strategic coach workshops. Okay. And after a while they don't really pay that much attention to what the world is thinking about anything. They more and more just pay attention to what they're where their own.

Dean: Thinking about your thinking.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, thinking about your thinking. And I said, you know what it is? And somebody said, you know, you're creative, Dan. You know, you're very creative. You just. We always know you're going to have new stuff every quarter. And, and they said, what? How do you do that? And I said, well, I've heard that my brain is an independent force with a will, with a will of its own, okay? And so what I've learned to do more and more every year is to put myself in the best possible position where I can collaborate with my own brain. Because, because my brain's going to do what it wants. And so instead of trying to, you know, put a leash on it and say, you can only go here, you can only go here, you can't go there, and everything like that. I say, you can go wherever you want to go, but just bear in mind that I have to catch up with you every now and then.

Dean: Quite.

Dan: I haven't quite learned the game yet of adjusting quickly to new places where you take me. So I just want you to be patient with me. You know, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm working on myself to be in top notch condition, prime condition that wherever you go, I can go there with you and I'll benefit from, from the journey, you know, and, and anyway, and that's literally the truth how I experienced my relationship with my own brain. And people say, well, aren't you paying attention to what's going on in the world? I says, I have to tell you, I just don't have time. My, my brain just so busy. Yeah, yeah, my brain just keeps me so busy, you know, I Wish, you know, I wish I had the time to actually pay attention to a lot of other things. But I. Yeah, quite frankly, you know, I'm just. Yeah. You know, if I get through the day and I've done a good job of collaborating with my brain, I have to tell you, that's a great day.

Dean: Yes. That's so great.

Dan: What do you think about that?

Dean: No, I think it's fantastic. I mean, I think about this, my. My life, like, for 25 years now. More than that, now 27 years. I started journaling in earnest in April of 1996. So, you know, 26 years of journaling, which I look at as a constant conversation with my brain. This ongoing dialogue we have, you know, is thinking about my thinking. And I. It's my favorite. My favorite thing, you know, the thing that I just need. I need a pen and a notebook and a comfy chair. And we're off. You know, it's just. It's effortless. And luckily, I've been able to create outlets in the real world for, you know, for the things. One of the real, like, the things I've been really thinking about my thinking on is what I've discovered recently with Russell Barkley, the ADHD doctor, completely reframing and realizing that, you know, the building and the exoskeleton idea that. I don't know why this wasn't more obvious to me, but I really started looking at every single good thing that's come in. Everything that works in my life is surrounded by a scaffolding that externally supports it and makes it happen.

Dan: Oh, yeah. Not.

Dean: I have been sort of resistant to that idea in a lot of ways. Like, I even my, you know, I know I'm being successful when I wake up every day and say, what would I like to do today? Because in my mind, my mistaken sort of thought was that I need space to be able to get things done. You know, like, if I have all the time, then I could wrangle and focus my brain to. To get stuff done. But this reshaping my mind of looking at. At my ad as a real. You know, I'll use the word disability as a thing of just not having executive function, meaning, not the mobility to move my ideas from the imagination world, the imagination side of the equation. I'm a billionaire in that mind level. And. But moving it into the reality side requires, on some level, you know, real movement. Right. And that's. I saw one of his videos where he likens that you wouldn't say to a paraplegic. Well, all you got to do is just get up and run. Just. It's right over there, you know, and as. As easy and seem obvious as it seems, you just gotta buckle down. That's where I've been taking that approach on myself of looking at it as I just need to buckle down and discipline myself and get myself to take action and control myself into it. When I realize it's not a matter of will, it's a truly matter of ability, you know, and that's.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: So then the job is setting up.

Dan: Yeah. No. And each of us only has the ability that we have. But for there to be a maximum external result, it's going to require your ability to be multiplied by many other abilities.

Dean: And that's. That's exactly right. So every, the biggest wins in my life have come from plugging into an existing executive function branch that has the ability to take. I could plug in my ideas into an existing infrastructure that is an execution engine or how's the executive function to take things and turn ideas into, into results?

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Compared to trying to. And wondering why have I continually underperformed in my ability to execute on my own ideas on my own behalf.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: You know, that's been a big thing.

Dan: Looking at it historically, I can understand why this idea didn't appear before and why.

Dean: Because I'm.

Dan: Well, because the number one, the number one task that really used up everybody's daily energies and their attention was just having enough to eat. And that the reason why America went through the roof, you know, from, you know, if you think about even when the revolution happened, there were, there were about 3 million Americans, but that's how many people there were when the country started. You know, and let's say Washington as first president, you're up to about 4 million. And that had happened in about a 25 year period, which is pretty good when you think about it. Population went up, you know, by 33% in 25 years. And America was the only society where food was a given. You they, you know, they were able to produce their own food, they have unlimited protein, especially with hunting and you know, animals and fishing and everything like that. And there's a pretty well established rule that in order to do work above physical work and you know, have the leisure to do more than physical work, requires an average of at least 2, 500 calories a day.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: You have at least 2500 calories a day. Since its birth, the US has averaged basically about 3500 calories a day. Okay. That means that over the last 200, 300 years, Americans have just had a calorie advantage that nobody else in the world has, you know, thought of it like that. Yeah. And so what meant that there could be more and more mental work. Okay. And one of the prime ways that mental work was used is figuring out how to reduce physical work. So we're the beneficiaries. We're sitting here in 2020, 2022, and we have just the enormous growth of over. You know, I mean, if you go right back to the beginning, 1600. So it's 2,400 years of calorie rich humans actually creating more and more scaffolding for us outside so that once we get an idea, it just goes boom. The idea just goes. Yeah. All our mental work immediately is multiplied outside of ourselves. If it's actually creat. Creating value for other people. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying right there.

Dean: That's. Yeah. And now, of course, if you carry that line all the way, like, you know, initially it was that's what all the mechanical, all the industrial things, be able to create things and then to move them around the country, you know, increasingly easier and easier you know, moving physical goods from, you know, the railroad opened up national distribution opportunities for companies. Yeah.

Dan: Now, and I mean, quite frank, quite frankly, probably one of the great multipliers for Cyrus McCormick was actually that he could get customers who would telegraph him and saying, I'd like to get in on your pay after the harvest deal. Could you send me a harvester? And that harvester and Cyrus would be packaged up, taken down to the local rail station, and within a matter of three days, that person would have their harvester. Yeah. And so my sense is that he came along and he could do what he was doing because there were other technologies that were breakthrough technologies like his own that would deliver the goods that.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Once he had the goods there, there was a delivery system for the goods.

Dean: Yeah. And now you think about, you know, if you fast forward now we're on the c. Of where we're delivering digital products digitally to a global audience that there's zero friction, zero cost. You know, there's. So that's where there's. So that's where we are right now. There's so much.

Dan: Yeah. And there's no. There's never any end to it. I mean, you know, I hope we use it all up before there isn't any more. Right. You know. Yeah. And. But if we lived in the physical world, there's very. A very good chance of that happening. I Mean, if, you know, you're, you were strictly a mainland operation. There's, there is an end to things.

Dean: Yeah, well, real limits of things that we're going to face into our attention. But that's the finite, that's the finite resource we've already got. I did the most recent calculations on YouTube. It would take 32,000 years of eight hour days to consume one day's worth of uploads to YouTube.

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Dean: So the, you know, the appetite, nobody

Dan: has the go, but nobody has the gold to do that. You know, I mean.

Dean: Right, exactly.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's, you know, we calculate, you know, humans, you know, we calculate we have the same, you know, intentionality as an oak tree or oak tree or a maple tree. So I'm go, it's, it's acorn dropping season right now in, in Toronto. I look out there and then it seems like millions of acorns all of a sudden came down over, over the night. And I said, but each of these was supposed to be an oak tree and. Right. You know, and they're always. And they said, well, you know, each of the oak trees got here because one of them took root, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: April trees. So. So the big thing about it is that what you're looking for is effectiveness, not efficiency. That.

Dean: Yeah, that.

Dan: Yeah. You know that you don't want every oak, you don't want every acorn to become an oak tree. Okay. Right. Yeah. A lot of it you just want to be squirrel food.

Dean: That's right. Yeah.

Dan: And everything. And so it's, it's very, very interesting because I think that the same principles of manufacturing in the mainland world are also going to be absolutely true in the digital world.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And looks to me like Mr. Beast is like the Cyrus McCormick of, you know, he's sort of.

Dean: Yeah. I'll keep an eye on the over 1600 Mr. Beef restaurants right now. Restaurant and well, of locations like other people's collaborations, let's call it 1600 collaborations. Using excess capacity capabilities in other restaurants to deliver over $100 million revenue. And they just opened a physical location in New Jersey that's doing $30,000 a day right now.

Dan: Why wouldn't you?

Dean: Why wouldn't it indeed? Exactly.

Dan: Yeah. But I think he's like, you know, I mean, he's doing in the digital world what Cyrus McCormick or Henry Ford or what they did in the, what they did in the mainland world.

Dean: Yeah, well, the other thing I'm keeping an eye on is Cole, who partnered with Amazon to do all of Their returns, they added 2 million customers a year. They just partnered with Sephora to open a Sephora makeup store in all of the Kohl's stores. So this idea of like Toys R Us inside of Macy's and you know, restaurants within restaurants, these collaborations and, you know, looking at these capability, assets, capacity, excess capacity as a immediately harvestable opportunity, you know.

Dan: Yeah, I think one of the. There's a really interesting phenomena that's happening in the world right now. And the Japanese are actually the trailblazers on this. That because the age of global trade is actually over. It's actually been over for about 10 years now, you know, and part of the reason is that the US went basically about 60, 60 years where they didn't protect their own economy with tariffs. Okay. So producers in their own economy. And so everybody in the world was allowed to sell into the United States with no penalty. There was no penalty for selling into the United States. And that build up the world, you know, that build up the world. But it didn't build up the United States. Actually. The US basically paid a price at a sacrifice of jobs, sacrifice of communities, sacrifice of that to educate the rest of the world. But now the US has decided not to do that again. That started with Clinton and then you went Bush and Obama and Trump was the one who announced that it was a new situation. And Biden's doing basically the same thing. And what the new deal is, you can't sell your products into the United States, but you can move your factories to the United States.

Dean: Oh, wow.

Dan: So Japan, almost their entire, you know, and Japan has basically moved its manufacturing out of Japan and a large amount of it has gone to the United States, like Toyota, Toyota and you know, Mazda and everybody else. And they're, they're, they're throughout mostly in the southern United States in terms of the. Because they only go to right to work states. So they don't go to union states. Okay, but think about that, you know, as the new phenomenon.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Yep. You can sell it to Americans, but your factory's got to be where the American. And guess what? The people working in your factories have to be Americans.

Dean: Wow, that's great.

Dan: What do you think about that?

Dean: I think that's a great idea.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: I mean, it just seems like that it's so obvious.

Dan: Well, the other thing is that the states and you're talking about everything that's not a unionized state and it's the larger percentage of states in the United States where they are in, you know, in the world and they have their factories, probably 25% of their expenses are just bribes. They're just bribes to get a license to, you know, and everything else. And they say, well, here you don't have to. You just, just take the bribe money and put it into creating a better factory and everything else. So I think that the US is, I don't know if this, you know, I can't think that there was anybody who saw this in 1945 and set it up, but it just happens to be turning out this way. So that's my Mr. Beats project. I'm going to follow this and I will report back into welcome to India on a satisfying basis. I like what I'm hearing, you know, I'm going to report to this that I think the US has come up with an entirely new way of running your economy. Anybody who's got a successful factory anywhere in the world, invite them to bring their factory and establish it.

Dean: Sharing their. Our reach.

Dan: That's really. Well, the other thing is, you know what? The US has a lot of space.

Dean: That true, that too.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. You could double the population of the United States and the country still wouldn't feel crowded. Yeah.

Dean: I just saw some. That if you look at, I forget what percentage of the population, 80% of the population of the United States lives kind of east of the middle of the country. If you draw a line up the middle. Yeah. 80 plus percent of the population.

Dan: Yeah. The Mississippi river, essentially. Mississippi river, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we only opened up about 10 possibilities for future exploration.

Dean: Absolutely. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. But I will report back on this massive movement because I think this is one of the most extraordinary global economic innovations.

Dean: I love it.

Dan: Yep.

Dean: Always enjoyable, Dan.

Dan: Okay.

Dean: Okay. Have a great day.

Dan: Okay, bye.