Everything Is All Made Up

Dean: Welcome to Cloudlandia.

Dean: Mr. Sullivan.

Dan: Mr. Jackson. Happy New Year to you.

Dean: Happy New Year from Cloudlandia.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Here we are. We're in. Yeah, we're on the mainland. Are you today?

Dan: Yeah, I'm in Toronto.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: We just chilled. We just basically chilled. Yeah. Yeah. We were traveling a lot in November and will be the same in January and February, so decided to, you know, it's been very nice. I mean, we had the storm, not much of one here. It was about 4 or 5 inches. Clearly the fault of some variation on global warming. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I think cause number 89 or something like that. You know, they have a lot of different. Different causes, but Buffal got hammered.

Dean: Full combustible.

Dan: Buffalo always gets the worst because they have the. They're at a weird configuration. They're right at the eastern end of Lake Ontario and the southern end of. Well, southern end of Lake Ontario and eastern end of Lake Erie. And there's a weird thing that dumps six or seven feet on that.

Dean: Oh, man. I know. I often remember that, like thinking, you know, the two things that always stuck out of my mind about Buffalo is first of all, the fires. Because if you watch

Dan: in Tanawanda, I think it's just.

Dean: I think that was because it was fun to say fire in North Tonawanda. Tell them at 11.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. And then the.

Dean: We both share that realization.

Dan: Yeah. I don't think anyone else in the United States, Alaska, they might, but not in the mainland. I think that buffalo gets the worst of it when they have a sort of storms and, you know, it is what it is. I mean, those sort of things happen and. But it's been happening forever, so it's not something recent.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, the thing, what people. You know, there's just a couple of factors that don't take people into consideration. You know, first of all, storm damage. Well, you know, when the population was one third as great as it is right now, when I was born, it was about a third of what it is right now. You have that many things to damage, you know, from the storm. Okay. So the other thing is the number of people who are now reporters and journalists and comment commentators. And that's truly exponential. That's truly grown exponentially.

Dean: I think you're right. It's almost like every. Every person. How many people now are online that, you know, up to 5 billion yet.

Dan: No, I think it's, you know, 4 or 4. Yeah, I might.

Dean: 4 billion.

Dan: Half the global population might be higher. I mean, who could. Who doesn't count on this, you know, is there a.

Dean: Well, exactly.

Dan: Is there a meter somewhere?

Dean: That's.

Dan: Yeah, we just crossed five. We just crossed five billion. Yep, yep. Yeah, it was a little boy. A little boy and one of those Indian Ocean islands.

Dean: Count again. 1, 2, 3, 4. No, but the point is that there's 3 or 4 billion people all over the globe. There's probably no corner of the globe that's not covered with access to satellite or being a direct link to Cloudlandia. And so you've got now 3 or 4 billion people with an instant satellite uplink and a video camera. Everybody's a news crew. That the. As soon as that fire breaks out in Tonawanda, you've got the closest person with their cell phone is the one.

Dan: People in South Africa. People in South Africa know about it.

Dean: Yeah. And all of a sudden it's trending on Twitter like the dispatch center. The, you know, the British are coming. The British are coming. The. That little. That way of getting the message out is super fast now. And you look at that, that, I think is reflected in how quickly chat GPT got to, you know, it's just however many million.

Dan: And it's an emotional. It's an emotional and psychological multiplier. You know, those emotions get multiplied by. By this, you know, I mean.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And I've really noticed the drop off inside of that. Being affected by that multiplier since I'm in my fifth year now with no television and just not tuning in every day lessens the force of people's emotional overwhelm in the world because that's what gets reported on is outbreaks of emotional overwhelm.

Dean: Yeah. I was doing some reflecting yesterday and realized I've been kind of observing the, you know, the dopamine effect of, you know, constantly being hooked in to the Matrix, you know, like I do, if I look, if I'm honest about screen time or screen sucking, as our friend Ned Hollowell would call it, there's a lot of screen sucking in my life, you know, be it YouTube or, you know, and often a lot of those things, you know, you kind of justify it by, well, I'm watching podcasts or I'm watching, you know, important thing, not just watching, you know, cat videos. But then I realized, you know, I do. I watch a lot of talk and Facebook and YouTube shorts has been the latest that you just get into the river of this ever ending stream of one minute dopamine, hit every with an infinite scroll and all of a sudden fill in all of those. Look at all the Time. You know, if I mentioned how the thing about I was reflecting on verbs and my doing.

Dan: Verbs and nouns. Yeah, the verbs.

Dean: Yeah, yeah. So I'm always. You're always doing something with every minute of the. Of available time. Right. You can't just. Not just even nothing. Is something sitting. Because you're sitting or standing. And I was playing around with this matrix of the state of the position you're in, like contextually. So we go from, you know, from a state of lying down or sitting or standing to moving to running kind of thing. You're on the move is one of those. Your mobility level. And then the primary things of the inputs really come from thinking is the least effortful thing. Thinking or listening or watching or reading or talking or drawing or writing. Those things are all like go from pure input to output kind of modes. But it was kind of. It was a. It wasn't an exhaustive list. I mean, there's certainly everything that I do could fit into those handful contexts. Right. If you overlay all of the activities and then the content fits under those. So what am I thinking about? What am I watching? What am I reading? I'm reading. You know, there's a modifier to it then. And it's kind of an interesting. I'm a very. I like to get, you know, bedrock things, like to see where. What are the edges of things, the boundaries, you know, set up the constraint that the buckets that everything fits into and looking to, you know, apply those to the outcomes that.

Dan: So what would be an example of a bedrock measurement? What would be an example.

Dean: Well, a bedrock. So I mean, the amount of time that I'm actually just. If you look at those things and you overlay on top of that this. What never changes is that the mainland, you know, I distinguish the mainland from Cloudlandia in that the mainland is material, real, actual. There's rules, there's science that goes with the mainland. You can be a shapeshifter in Cloudlandia, you can. You're not bound by the rules of. Or the limitations of the mainland. But on the mainland, the general rule is that it's always moving. It was moving before we got here, it's going to be moving after we're gone. And it's moving at the rate of 60 minutes per hour. That's a foundational, bedrock thing. Nothing that we can do to change that reality that we are moving at the, you know, in time at the rate of 60 minutes per hour. So if you and I are going to record a 60 minute podcast that has to be executed within the reality of 60 Real Minutes. Those have to be then positioned as coordinates, if you look at the calendar as the actual coordinates, to map what we're doing. So you and I have the least amount of planning or organization or effort required to make this happen. Because we have established that Sunday morning at 11am we're going to meet in Cloudlandia. Right. Established those coordinates. So we've got that locked into place and we don't have to do any thinking about it unless an outlier situation happens like this morning. And you emailed and said, can we do 11:30? Right. Had to change the coordinates. We couldn't, couldn't be in two places at one time. Right. Do what you had to do and be here. So that's a limitation within the construct of the mainland. And I'm really. This is really coming from. I've been doing some deeper thinking about the applied element of. Imagine if you applied yourself, you know, so what does the applied mean? Applied is where. It's the catalyst thing, you know, it's where everything happens, everything that that takes shape in the mainland is going through this, you know, into. Into the mainland through the time energy, you know, those verbs that we need to. To do. And so my list, that was my.

Dean: You know, I think that if I take that list of thinking of, you know, thinking, listening, watching, reading, talking, drawing, writing, if I take those, those are pretty much the toolkit of the, of the input output kind of ratio. And I. That's why I say about bedrock. I don't know that there's anything. Those contexts. Pretty much everything we're doing fits into one of those base contexts. It's like the, almost the periodic elements of.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean. And I was just thinking of human affairs, you know, both on the personal level and then on the interactive level. You know, two individuals working with each other and then groups and communities and everything else. You're on the success scale. You're either successful or unsuccessful to the degree that you come to grips with 60 minutes an hour.

Dean: Yeah. And that's the truth. And the greatest thing, the real leverage within that, there's not much. There's certain ways that you can advantageously apply those. I mean, there are certain things that you can create. I heard this great concept, J. Conrad Levinson, I have to give him credit for this. A guy who wrote Guerrilla Marketing and he wrote a book that was less known, but it was called the 90 minute hour. And what he talked about was looking for opportunities where you could blend things to essentially create a 90 minute hour. So if you're looking at things where technologies or combinations that if advanced planning can help you do two things at once, it would be conceivable, for instance, for me to record this podcast, but also be driving to somewhere an hour away from now. And I've essentially doubled the fact that I've gotten the one hour of, you know, doing that. There's combinations of things that you could do. You can listen to a podcast while you're driving, you can ride on a treadmill while you're watching YouTube videos, or it's the, it's those 90 minute hour things. And then the other way of multiplying it is by, you know, through automation, but also through other people.

Dan: That's the real who, not how.

Dean: Yeah, that's who, not how is the thing. If you can, if you expand yourself to follow our acronym, you know, your sphere, your energy, leadership and finances, that if you're involving other people, you know, like right now you've got, how you've got over 100 employees now.

Dan: 130.

Dean: 130 people. So every business day you are, you know, you're getting 130 hours per hour. Multiply. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

Dan: Yeah. Well, didn't ask for it, Siri. So, you know, have a good new year.

Dean: Oh, that's so funny. But so now it's like, those are really. This is where I'm learning about the applied, the thing or, you know, sharpening, thinking around the applied side. And I mean, they're almost like putting

Dan: those recipes, you know, I think that, you know, if you take, let's use a big topic like philosophy, you know, and philosophy, the, you know, the Greek words translate very loosely into English as they love the love of wisdom. The love of wisdom, really what philosophy means. And wisdom is, you know, if you think about it from the standpoint that you're talking about, wisdom is knowing what to do with your time. You know, it's basically, did you know what to do with your time? Did you know, did you know what's the best way to use your time? Did you know why it's important to use your time in such way that it, you know, makes you happy? And yeah, so there's, you know, there's a, you can go down maybe a list of seven or eight things, but if you took them all together and said, you know, basically, if you study all the books of philosophy, they're touching on the issue of how does one use one's time? You know, basically, that's basically what all philosophy is about.

Dean: Yeah. And that's exciting like that to me. I'm enjoying this process of, you know, replacing. Because I find that infinitely. You think you said something about when you kind of realize that what's going on inside your mind is much better than what's going on inside your television. Right. That's better. I think that's where you said it. I mean, that's the way.

Dan: I mean, you gotta check this. You gotta check this out person by person. But, you know. You know, I think would say that that was very crucial to my decision not to watch television because there wasn't anything going on there that was, you know, it was as useful as an hour with me sitting in a room with nothing going on but just, you know, thinking about you, watching. Thinking about my thinking. Lots going on when I'm thinking about my thinking. But any. Anyway, and, you know, I want to bounce three things off you. It's the subject of my next book. So I'm getting. I'm closing in on the end of quarterly book here. So we got January to get it all shaped, shaped up and shipped out to the publisher, to the printer. This one that I'm sending out is called Capitalism Dash and everything else to indicate that a lot of people like to create. There's an equivalency. Like there's an ideological shopping market. Then there's the capitalism section and the socialism section and the communist section. And it's a silly thought. There is no equivalency capitalism, which produces everything good and new. And then there's other systems that oppose capitalism, but they don't produce anything. They simply take what capitalism produces and redistribute it in a highly prejudicial way. Yeah. In other words, you didn't produce it, but you think that it's not fair that the person who produces it should get all the benefit. So we're going to let you produce anything you want, but we're going to take a portion of it or a very big portion of it or all of it, and we're going to keep it for ourselves or we're going to give it to people who are deserving of what you produce. That's the reality of the planet. And it goes back. It's one of those things like time, because production is very. Being productive is very much related to your basic measurement of 60 minutes per hour. You know, people who are the people who are productive and the people who are profitable and the people who are prosperous are the people who do a better job of capitalizing. On their 60 minutes per hour than other folks are. You know, it's basically what it is.

Dan: But I was thinking that with kind of a lot of unsettling things going on in the world right now. Unsettling in the sense that people thought things were going to go along one way, and it's turned out they're going along, going along in an unpredictable way. And I think that unsettles people when your expectations are defied by reality. And a couple of things that I think have unsettled people. One is the sudden inflation that's kicked up over the last, you know, over the last two years. See, and we were supposed to be at a point where at Most you'd have 1%, maybe 2% inflation per year, and you could count on that. There would be no inflation. All of a sudden, you know, you're sitting at 6%. And people who have limited income for the rest of their life, they. That really impacts their life. They get very unsettled by that. Okay.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Okay. Yeah. And the other thing is that we weren't supposed to have those kind. Our public health care was supposed to be totally on top of things. And, you know, there were Centers for Disease Control who were supposed to control disease, and it turns out they didn't.

Dean: Yeah, we're not full top. Right.

Dan: And the public healthcare system isn't what we thought it was. So that's an unsettling fact. You know, and then there aren't now supposed to never be another war in Europe. And there is another war in Europe, and it's a major one. And, you know, and the FBI are supposed to be the good guys. And now we have a lot of proof that they're not the good guys, at least from my perspective. They're not the good guys for my side. They may be the right guys for somebody else's side. They're not supposed to be partisan. They're not supposed to be favoring one side. You know, so I just go on. I could go on about 10 or 20 things, and this gets talked about. And it's essentially what the news is. You know, what we call the news, you know, with capital letters news. That's basically what it is. And I was sitting there about a week ago, and I said, what if none of it means anything?

Dean: What if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about?

Dan: Yeah. What if none of this really means anything? And it's really. It's just basically the store. It's just a total mushroom cloud of emotion. You know, it's Just kind of. It's just like a tsunami wave. It's like a tsunami wave, and you only get caught by the tsunami if you have those emotions inside of you. Otherwise, it's like nothing's happening. Like, if you don't relate to why other people are emotionally upset, then you're not going to be upset because there's no communication line between their emotions and your emotions. Okay. So it's an interesting thing. So I got further thinking, and I said, what would be some rules that you would need to be basically a field, you know, for feeling. Okay. For feeling really kind of cool and very calm in the storm of other people's negative emotions? What would you be looking for? What would be some rules to do? Well, I know you don't understand that. Yeah. But I tell you, you get Siri into any kind of conceptual matters, and she's. She's helpless.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And she's just. Yeah, she's just helpless with context. And I'm saying that. So it's recorded at Cupertino and make it. There you go.

Dean: Perfect.

Dan: Anyway, Siri, why is Apple still in China? Could you talk to some people there? There you go. She's at least rehearsed it. She's at least rehearsed it. Anyway, I'm gonna throw my watch. I'm just gonna throw it across the room. I threw it under the couch.

Dean: There you go.

Dan: I'm out of your range for. Anyway, the. So the three. Three rules I came up with, and, you know, I'm just introducing these are everything's made up. Number. Rule number one is everything is made up.

Dean: I like it a lot. That's true.

Dan: Okay, number two is nobody's in charge.

Dean: Yes. Everything is made.

Dan: I'm not saying that. I'm not saying. I'm not saying there aren't people who think they're in charge. I'm just saying that nobody actually is in charge.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And let me just remember the number three here. I have to go over my notes on this.

Dean: My goodness. Reminds me of the. That show, Whose Line Is It Anyway? That was the odd television. They always. The show where everything's made up and the points don't matter.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: That's kind of what you're. Everything is made up. No one's in control or no one's in.

Dan: No, no one's in charge.

Dean: No one's in charge.

Dan: No one's not in control. There are people who are kind of in control. In other words, they can keep you from doing certain things or they can force you to do certain Things, but they're not really in charge, you know, like, you're not really buying into, you know, their authority. You're not really buying into their position. You're not really buying into that. And there was a third one. If you don't mind, I'm gonna. I'm gonn new thing. Gonna walk upstairs because I want to get that. I want to get that third thing.

Dean: Yeah, I do too. Yeah.

Dan: I'm walking up the stairs. Okay. I'm now at ground level. Okay. Babs is peeling vegetables. I'm just going to grab my computer and bring it down. Good lesson for the future. Always bring your computer down.

Dean: Yeah, but the first two so far, though, I was just gonna say I really like where it's going so far. That's the. That is the truth, you know, and it kind of parallels when I was thinking about these contextual things. Like, I had that realization from the Shangri La hotel in London, looking down at all the ants, all the people marching in the same direction, and realized, you know, you take out the sound and you just look at the mechanical things. There's very few things. We're doing all the same thing. If you just observe. We're walking, we're sitting, we're standing, we're talking, we're looking at a screen. All of those things are the physical, you know, mechanical things that we're doing. But what brings them to life is the content of it. And that's all really made up in our heads, you know.

Dan: Yeah, I got rule number three. Okay. So rule number one is everything's made up. Rule number two is nobody's in charge. And rule number three is life isn't fair.

Dean: That is true. Those are all great.

Dan: Yeah. And if you can kind of own those, you know, to a certain extent, you can take those inside. And when things happen, you say, well, first of all, remember everything that's being discussed here was made up by somebody, you know, I mean, somebody may have been a couple thousand years ago, but it was made up. And you realize all sorts of stuff are being made up today, some of it in competition with things that were made up thousands of years ago. So there's a certain level of competition about this, you know, especially around the topic of truth, you know, topic of reality. Well, what's reality? And I said, well, you know that 60 minutes per hour, there is a reality to it, but you have to realize that one time it was made up.

Dean: Yeah, that's true. Right. But that is true. There was no. Nobody was. I mean, it existed. It was There, you know, just the cadence of it, though. I mean, the rhythm was certainly there. The observable. Hey, the sun disappears every night and then it comes up again every morning behind me, appears in front of me. It comes up behind. Where'd the sun go? Oh, there it is. Oh, wait a minute. That happened again. Hey, wait a minute. At noon it seems like it's right over top of. I mean, it's amazing to me the. Where we've come, you know, from just like observing the things around us. Right. Everything that we take for granted now has come from the realization by other people thinking about their thinking that, hey, wait a minute, that sun seems to go on a path from the east to the west. And it. Let's call that a day. Yeah, I mean, that's something. Right. When you look at. If we were to measure it, how long does it take to go.

Dan: Yeah. And made up the thing was that people said, well, you know, how do we actually measure what happens between one sunrise and one sunset? You know, and they said, yeah, yeah. And they had, you know, they had various ways that they looked around to do it and you know, one of them, you know, and they had to advance quite a bit before they could do what I'm going to now talk about. But they say, well, let's have candles and we'll burn a candle and we'll have measurements on the candle. And it looks like it sort of burns down at a constant pace here every time it goes down. And then they'd get some sort of rough handle, you know, they could do it at midsummer's day when the, you know, the time between sunrise and sunset is the longest. And they would do it just a week ago when, you know, at midwinter's day when it's at its shortest and they'd work out tables, you know, and. But think of all the other things, the other kind of tools that they had to create to get a handle on just one.

Dean: Yeah. And how long it took. I wonder what is. I wonder what the history of the time is. That'd be an interesting chat. GPT session.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the Romans. The Romans really didn't have it, you know, so they were very advanced. They had sundials, you know, that was the best they had. Yeah, I think they had. I think they had some form of a sand dial too, you know, with, you know, you would put. You have two vessels and one of them's got a hole in the bottom and you put, you fill the one up with sand and then it leaks out the Bottom and goes into the other one and they takes up. But you need something that you can already measure with to create some new measurement, you know, and even now with atomic clocks, you know, which they're based on, you know, the deterioration of a atom, there is a. I looked it up a couple of years ago, but there's a clock. There's one clock in the world. It's in the United States, I think, where it keeps track of all the time in the world. And so, you know, but it's not exact. And every, you know, five years, six years, they have to add a second or deducted second, you know, then everybody's time.

Dean: Yeah. I wonder how. You ever wonder how they keep. How that stuff gets made up, you know, that's.

Dan: Yeah, well, it is made up. Yeah, somebody made it up. I mean, it was like the railroad time, you know, for the, you know, was necessary because the locomotives had been created and they were using single tracks between cities where you would have, you know, trains leaving the city more or less at the same time, but coming in opposite directions. And if one of them didn't go off to a side track at a certain point, you were going to have a collision. And in the early railroad days, they had a lot of collisions and so they had to create. That was a Canadian, actually, who created the global railroad time.

Dean: Is that right? Those Canadians?

Dan: Yeah. And, you know, in the mid-1800s, you know, 18, 1850, I think it was, it was established at one of the world fairs, you know, in the late 1800s, because they had those world fairs they had back then that was to introduce new scientific and technological breakthroughs when everybody could come together in one place. Anything else. But I just looked at, you know, I was just looking at my three rules for staying calm and cool of everything's made up. So the moment you hear something you said, I don't know if I accept that or not, but I do accept the fact that somebody made it up.

Dean: Okay, Acknowledge that somebody made that up.

Dan: I acknowledge that somebody made that up. But it kind of contradicts something else that I hold on to, which also someone made up. So it's a choice of which made up I'm going to accept here. And I think that relaxes you.

Dean: Just acknowledge, hey, it's all made up. So this is the best. I mean, well, people thought the earth was flat and some still do.

Dan: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why they thought that, though, because it's very clear that, you know, if you get up on any kind of Height. There's very clearly that the.

Dean: The.

Dan: When you get to the horizon, it sort of curves. Sort of. It sort of curves around. Yeah. And I don't know why, you know, I don't know. Yeah. I wonder who made that up. That the world was flat. That it supposedly. People believed in show where the thought.

Dean: People who didn't climb. People who didn't climb mountain. That's it.

Dan: Yeah. People were born. Yeah. But my feeling is that it. What it does is that it. It relaxes you a little bit. And you say, well, you know, I feel strongly about this, but I do have to acknowledge that I'm believing strongly about something that somebody made up. And if you ask me who that was or what the history of it is, I'm not in a position to tell you right now. So that lessens the power of my outrage that you're suggesting you're making up something now that contradicts what I made up. So. And the other thing is, nobody's in charge. In other words, there isn't anyone you can go to whose opinion about where things come from is going to be any better than yours.

Dean: And what was the third one? So everything is made up. No one.

Dan: Life's large. Life's not fair.

Dean: Yeah. Right.

Dan: Yeah. So there's nothing that you're born into that is fair. You know, when we're born, there's nothing fair. There's nothing fair. Wasn't. Nothing was designed for you with you in mind. Nothing was made up with you.

Dean: That's so funny.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I'm just playing with them. They're like rules of geometry. They're like the geometry. Geometry of staying calm and cool.

Dean: This is, you know, Dan Euclid Sullivan's view of the universe. Yeah. This is how to make these things up. Euclid made it up.

Dan: Well, he was a great aggregator of, I think, everything that other people had made up. I don't think that Euclid was an original math documenter, was he?

Dean: The documentary.

Dan: He was an aggregator. He gathered everything and organized it and put it into a system. And in one case, he showed that there's a sequential system that, you know, I'm. A proposition number one is divide a straight line into two parts. The first proposition of all mathematical genius. So what you do is you draw a straight line, okay. Which is, you know, it's in the sand or it's on a piece of parchment or anything. You draw a straight line, and then to divide it in half, you take a compass, you know, a compass, not a compass for discovering The North Pole. But a compass for drawing a circle.

Dean: Circumference.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, circle. And you put the. You put the point of the compass in one end of the line and you make. You. You make. Take it out further than half of the line, and then you draw a curved line above it, and you do the same thing on the other side, and you draw a curved line. And now you have an intersection of two lines. Then you do the same thing underneath the line, and then you have. And then you draw a straight line between the two points, and that divides the line into two parts. And that's the start of all geometric mathematics in the world. There you go.

Dean: How it came from you. You know, that's his. That was his thinking about his thinking. I wonder how long it took for him to, you know, come up with that. But you imagine, like the. I'd love to see, you know, a kind of dramatization of Euclid's discoveries in the modern. You know, if he was in modern times, sitting in a three. Yeah.

Dan: Actually, they think the Library of Alexandria, that it was a sort of a. It was a big library where all the scrolls were. And. But they had, like, conferences there and they had tutorials and classrooms, and, you know, people came and discussed new things that they had discovered. And it was sort of a collecting point. I think it was sort of the Google of the age. And, you know, and he was a mathematician, a Greek, I think, but the Greeks traveled far and wide in the Mediterranean world and is where he situated himself. And there's not much known about him except that he did exist and he was acknowledged at the time of being someone knowledgeable about mathematical principles. Yeah. So he's as good. People say, well, people say, well, how do we know that Euclid started all this? And I said, somebody made it up.

Dean: Right, Exactly. Is that all part of your. This new capitalism and everything else? No.

Dan: Okay. Oh, this is the next book. So I'm just starting in on this. And what is the next one called?

Dean: Everything Don't Matter.

Dan: No, it's GI. Just changed the name, actually, because of our conversation here. Geometry of Staying Calm and Cool.

Dean: Okay, I like that. That's good.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And it's because it's very clear to me that just feeling something and expressing yourself doesn't really increase your ability to get a handle on 60. There's 60 minutes in an hour. Anything can impact you from the outside, and you have no control over your reactions to things from the outside. I just don't think you're going to make very much progress as a person and you're not going to get much done.

Dean: Right.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: That's pretty. Is that. How far out do you book your quarterly book?

Dan: One quarter.

Dean: Just. You just think like, so you've got a. Yeah.

Dan: When I'm getting closer. Yeah. Yeah. I have a file and I have 30 possibilities, but usually they stay in that file because they were worth writing in the file, but they weren't worth getting out of the file and actually doing something out of it. And. But I don't feel waste. I don't feel that I'm wasting, you know, wasting time or anything like that, you know. So you write it down. Okay.

Dean: Profile. I saw a profile of Woody Allen years ago and, you know, it showed his process. He writes ideas down. He writes like, you know, synopsis or scene ideas of movie titles, ideas on yellow pads, and he just stuffs them in a drawer. And then when it's time, basically makes one movie a year for 50 years now or whatever. And when it's time, he goes in the drawer and he looks out and picks out one and. Okay, that's the one. And then he goes to work on writing and exploring that one.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Pretty interesting.

Dan: I mean, I get a sense, you know, of everything that's happening in my experience of the clients in the workshops and, you know, so. And I get a sense of what kind of thinking tools might be useful for the next quarter and then what would be. Then I've got the relationship with Ben Hardy about, you know, a big book.

Dean: Yeah. I just got my 10 times. It's easier than two times.

Dan: The galley. You got the galley proof here?

Dean: I got the galley, yeah. Thank you. So that's awesome.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: What's your next.

Dan: So everybody. Yeah, I mean, we send it out to. I think we send it out to everybody. Everybody in free zone. In 10 times. We sent them. We sent this out, the galley proof and you know, and. And then we asked people to. Because it's already up on Amazon, you know, with. You can pre order it. Yeah. But we ask people if they get the. Is to put up a review because that helps. That helps with the pre order. Yeah. Gotten some good stuff. And there's a couple thousand that have already been pre ordered, which is great. And what's next?

Dean: Yeah, you got the next one already.

Dan: Yeah, we hold off on that. Ben gets eager. Ben would like to have the, you know, he would like to be a little bit further ahead with that, and I think Hay House would too. But, you know, our big thing is to capitalize eggs that are about to be laid. Not, you know, a future chicken.

Dean: Yeah, that's good.

Dan: I mean, I'll get to it when we get to it because. Yeah, because they have. They have a production year and everything, and we're doing it this year in May instead of. If it had been on normal schedule, it would have happened two months ago in October. But they. There has been a huge supply chain problems for paper.

Dean: Paper shortages.

Dan: Yeah, paper shortages in the United States. And so they had some commitments of, you know, that they had to. You know, that they had to take care of books that were in production and had a earlier prior deadline to ours. So they wanted to guarantee that they could do justice to those other books. And so they asked us. But I actually like May a little bit better than October. I think it's.

Dean: Well, our birthdays are in May.

Dan: Yeah, well, I was looking for the reason, and you just. If I didn't.

Dean: Yep, that's it. Both of our birthdays in May. That's right.

Dan: Yeah. You're the ninth. Are you the ninth?

Dean: I'm May 10th, yes.

Dan: Yeah. Well, it. Actually, the release day is the day before your birthday this year.

Dean: Okay. All right. Yeah, that's a good thing.

Dan: Yeah. But anyway. Anyway, this is. This is really interesting. And you know the interesting things, and people often ask, you know, what is the intent of your podcast with Dean Jackson? That's called Land the Unthinking. What is, you know, what's your strategy here? What are each of you and both of you together trying to achieve? And I said, I haven't given that much thought. I'll have to bring the topic up with Dean.

Dean: There we go.

Dan: I'm clueless. I can't think of. I can't think of any intent whatsoever. That's why we're doing this.

Dean: It's one of those, you know, the value is in the doing of it. It's really. I think it's one of my.

Dan: The activity is its own reward.

Dean: That's exactly what it is for me. And it's so funny that you say that, though, because every now and then, but not every now and then. I mean, almost every week I'll have people say, you know, I was just listening to you and Dan. Somebody was saying they were going. They were driving somewhere and they went back. They started like, on episode one of welcome to Cloudlandia, he said in episode three, you know, you guys. And I forget what it was Dan. But we were talking about something that he was like. That was a really, like, shift for me. And I think it's just. It's a great thing that the com. The comments that I get are that people. It's, you know, gets their. Gets them thinking about their thinking.

Dan: Yeah. I think the big thing is that I think that there are. There. It is important, especially for your practical life, that you do have periods of time and you have particular type of interactions where there is a particular result that you have to achieve, and you have to achieve it by a particular deadline, and that's got a economic consequence. Okay, I'm clear about that. Okay. But that's. But I keep that within the framework of strategic coach activities. Okay. That are related to our program. You know, everything comes down to the program. And. And. But then one of the rewards you get for doing that well is that you get all sorts of time where you don't have to impose those requirements on your time.

Dean: Yes, yes. And then I think that by the

Dan: things that you choose to do on purposeful time.

Dean: Yes. And then. But I think ultimately then that that shapes the thinking of. That you bring into the things that have that commercial intent or what you. The way you were just describing it there. Because I think about, you know, the seeds of the things that we talked about with the joy of procrastination, you know, even starting all the way back when we first had that, the very first conversation there. There's a lot of seeds of thoughts that have really developed into other things, which is kind of a. I like that a lot. Yeah, it's a wonderful. Like, I honestly, that's part of the thing is it's one of the selfish joys too, that I find it very useful just even personally, you know, having these conversations with you every week has been a delight.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Well, we're both reporting on our wanderings, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: This is where I wandered last year. Last week, you know, and. And it's kind of neat otherwise, you know, you can get lost in your own wanderings if you don't. Right back in period of time where you can kind of bounce it off somebody else's wanderings. You know, it's. It's one of those things. And I think that this is. I think the value of this has lessened in my lifetime, you know, if I go back to the 40s and 50s, you know, and I mean, there was. In my life, there was. First of all, it was a pretty easygoing life, if I remember it accurately, the 50. I mean, it moved at the. You know, it moved at the speed of the one traffic light that we had in our local town. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that was. And to this day, that town has one traffic light. There's, you know, there's only one traffic light.

Dean: Huh. There's that, though. I think about that all the way back to the 80s, too. Right. Like, in the analog world, there was no way really of shaping, you know, we talk about from 1950 to an 80. There's basically very little change that your consumption of things was real time and synchronous was no way of, you know, even when you look at things like the answering machine, free telephone was one of the first things where you could be two places in one time. You could be wherever you wanted to be, but still get that important call if you needed it. And then the VCR allowing you to be doing something else, but also capturing what you wanted, added in some asynchronous element to what we're doing. But now, you know, fast forward now, and nothing has to be synchronous, really. Core things do. But, you know, as far as, like, choice and when things happen, if you wanted to watch Gunsmoke, you had to be in front of the TV on Sunday night or whatever. Gunsmoke or the. Whatever television show you wanted. There was no other option but to organize your calendar and your day around being there at that time. And you watched whatever one of the three choices were that happened literally until we got up to 13 channels. Right. In the 70s, we had 13 channels. Some of them were, you know, one was French, one was the government, and one was, you know, not working. So you had to choose between. You maybe had seven or eight choices. Right. Three of them were Buffalo stations and the CBC and Global television and the Kitchener channel.

Dan: Ctv. Ctv.

Dean: Ctv, yeah, yeah. So you have those.

Dan: And, you know, at 10 o' clock or 12 o', clock, depending when the national anthem played.

Dean: Yeah, yeah.

Dan: I said, good night.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: You know, and they opened, you know, like, I was sick. I don't know when in the morning they started to get maybe six or so. But, you know, they were obeying timeless, you know, the tr. The time schedule of antiquity, you know, like. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting thing. And somebody made that up. You know, somebody made that up. It's just one of the things that you pointed out is that when television first started, the first visual would be screens open, you know, the curtains opening, you know, like. Yeah. And they were saying, you know, how do we make a presentation? Well, it's, you know, people are used to the curtains opening, so we have to have the curtains opening.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And that was a standard sort of or the, you know, and then they in the movie business, they, you know, started to create corporate logos like the MGM lion, the lion roaring or the, you know, 20th Century Fox had.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Art deco, sort of Universal had the planet and they had. Yeah, yeah. But it's very interesting, but things that you're, when you're born, things that are already made up seem timeless to you.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And the reason is nobody told you that the thing that you were watching or experiencing had been made up. You know, they themselves may not have known that.

Dean: I like it.

Dan: Yeah. I mean. Well, it's an interesting one because I think that calms you down. It just calms you down. And you just said, well, you know, and it probably the thing that was it when it was made up, it was to replace something that wasn't as good or didn't have as many voters or didn't have as many buyers, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And you know. You know, and you know, you know, it's really funny because one of the topics that was discussed at the time of the US Constitution was would there be a national language? In other words, and the reason was there were a sufficient number of people who spoke German in the country at that time that people said, well, you know, are we going to be two language country? I mean, where have you ever heard that? I mean, what a nonsensical notion. Right?

Dean: That you would have. Crazy.

Dan: I mean, think of all the different things you run into when you make up a country with two official languages. You know, I mean, boy, I mean, that'd be hard to. That'd be hard to negotiate. But that was something that had to be negotiated and you know, and they had all the control considerations because most of the colonies started with an established religion, you know, Episcopalian, which is Anglican, and then there was, you know, Catholic. Maryland, the private colony of Maryland was a Catholic colony. And then you had, you had Puritans, Puritans in Massachusetts and the Friends, which are the Quakers in Pennsylvania. And you had all these. And they had deep roots. They had deep roots. You know, by the time you got to the constitution, they'd been 100 years. 150 years. And so there was that to be taking account. And then the Constitution was made up. And it was made up by cutting and pasting from 13 other constitutions. The colonial.

Dean: The.

Dan: Each of the colonies had a concert that was. That were made up, you know, and a lot of this stuff came from British examples of made up constitutions. And you know, but after a while, you know, something works and people Will kind of say, okay, let's not fool around with it.

Dean: Let's stick with this.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. And you know, there's challenges I'm seeing right now that if one of the political parties in the United States starts getting disadvantaged by the electoral college, they say, okay, this is a 18th century white slave owner system, you know, and everything else. And the reason is that their numbers are starting to dip down. They're noticing because every 10 years there's a census and in the United States. And somebody made that up. Somebody made that up. But they also made up a rule that when you get the census, you take the total number and you divide by 435.

Dean: Okay, for what?

Dan: Well, that gives you the average number of people that makes up a congressional district.

Dean: Oh, I got you. Okay, Right, right, right.

Dan: Because there's only 435 congressional seats.

Dean: I see. Okay, right.

Dan: You know why I didn't know that.

Dean: Okay. No, why?

Dan: Because in the building called the House of Congress in Washington, that's all the number of people you can fit.

Dean: Oh, I love it. That is funny.

Dan: And in 1927, they put an amendment in the, they put an amendment in the Constitution that you could only have 435 seats in Congress. So when Hawaii and Alaska at that time they were at about 48 states. I think they pretty much reach 48. Then in the 50s, they had Alaska and Hawaii were added, and then they had to take some seats away from other states to give Hawaii. I think they, both of them, when they started, just had one. I don't think Alaska. I think Alaska only has one congress. They've got two senators.

Dean: Do they do. And then do they redraw the lines every 10 years?

Dan: Well, yeah, if there's more than one seat. If there's more than one seat, then yeah, they redraw them. And the power of that goes to the state legislatures. So the state legislatures are the ones who redraw the laws in their state, which is totally 100% prejudicial, because publicans redraw the lines to favor them and Democrats redraw the lines and people say, well, this is absurd. This is absurd. Why do we have this at all? Why don't we just have the total population? Everybody gets to vote, you know. And I said, well, there's problems with that too, you know.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And why do you have to be a citizen to be able to vote, you know?

Dean: Oh, boy.

Dan: And why can't 10 year olds vote?

Dean: Everything affects them.

Dan: They've got an iPhone. They've got an iPhone why can't they?

Dean: Yes, yes. I think that's the secret. Everybody, one iPhone, one vote. Yeah. What you want to do?

Dan: See, I've solved the Siri problem. Just throw the phone under the.

Dean: Under the couch.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: I love it.

Dan: Yeah. I think she's lonely.

Dean: Oh, man. I wonder if she notices that you're.

Dan: No, she does.

Dean: She doesn't.

Dan: Well, if she would be bothered, it wouldn't make me want to take my phone off and throw it under. Because then you can negotiate, but there's no negotiation. Negotiating.

Dean: I got it.

Dan: I mean, what a cop out. I mean, what's the thing of Apple still being in China? And she says, any questions related to Apple Corporation, please. Oh, that's so funny. Come on, Siri, you're supposed to be intelligent. You got to have a view here.

Dean: Party line.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, that's another one. You know, that China was going to take over the 21st century. Another expectation. And you know, and I think a lot of people right about that.

Dean: You were right. My. I often tell people your observation that anywhere where two hours from the capital city, people are sitting in a hole.

Dan: Sitting in a hole in the ground.

Dean: Competition. That's not your competition.

Dan: That would definitely be true.

Dean: Absolutely.

Dan: Yes, that would be the case. Yeah.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: But, you know, they have a history of not holding the country together. And it goes back 4,000 years or so. And the period we're in right now, since 1949 when the communist government took over, is the longest stable period, peaceful period and fairly prosperous period in Chinese history. And it's coming apart. It's coming apart. And the reason is it's almost impossible country to hold together, you know, and, you know, the north and the south have zero to do with each other. I mean, they speak a different language, you know, Manga, Mandarin, and what's the

Dean: other one for me?

Dan: Cantonese and Mandarin. You know, they speak two different languages. And you've got coastal Chinese from. There's a big, you know, a big river outlet that goes into where Shanghai is. And if you start with Shanghai, come out to the coast and go south around to Beijing, that's a totally different China. That China relates to the world. That's related to the world forever. Don't have virtually nothing to do culturally with people in Beijing. Yeah. And don't really like each other. Don't say good things about each other.

Dean: Almost like Democrats and Republicans.

Dan: Yeah. So anyway, so plus they just stopped having children 40 years ago. And the children they did have were all boys. And that causes problems. And that causes problems.

Dean: Yeah, yeah, that Is interesting to see those population charts and where. What the coming impact of that is going to be.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need lots of women to have lots of children and they don't have marriages. Yeah. I mean.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: And a lot of the adoptions, you know, there were adoptions where people were foreigners. I knew a man when I started coach in the 90s, and he was from Indianapolis, and he and his wife had just adopted twin girls from China.

Dean: My good friend Lane has two boys from China.

Dan: Huh. That's surprising, man. The reason is that they didn't allow the boys to be adopted. You know, they allowed the girls to be adept. And I said, you know, you're not looking long range here.

Dean: Right, Exactly.

Dan: Men are expendable. Women are not expendable.

Dean: But as far as if your importance

Dan: is to carry on, one man, one man and 100 women can create a civilization.

Dean: There you go.

Dan: Yeah. One woman and 100 men means that you just have a very tired woman by Friday.

Dean: A tired man. Yes, exactly. That's funny.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: I love it.

Dan: Yeah. What'd you get? What'd we get in our wanderings here?

Dean: I think we. We established the. We established the pace of mainland at 60 minutes per hour. That's what. In the contexts of the movement and doing. And then everything is made up and nobody's in charge. And the third. Hang on, now we get the third rack back. I'm not going to. Black's not fair because you. Life's not fair because you have to go and get the notes.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Life isn't fair. Yeah.

Dan: It doesn't mean that life is mean. It's just that fairness is a internal judgment that we make about things that are outside of us and nature. You know, life is not really controlled by our internal judgments.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: I mean, we can make things fair. I mean, I think humans do a really good job with people that they know and situation they live in. They create something called fairness, but it's made up. Yeah. I mean, look at the rules of sports. You know, the rules of sports are. Yeah, yeah. We have. I mean, we're finely tuned with our games that.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: The game's only worth playing if there's an agreement that. Of what fair play means.

Dean: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love these contextual conversations. This was good. I'm going to keep going.

Dan: Karen Squarek, my emissary to Florida, you know, the diplomat to Florida, and at. Through your good graces, she was able to go to the studio. And they treated her wonderfully. Yeah, they treated her wonderfully. And she learned a lot. And we have a trove of useful tips on creating our next, you know, studios because we get to start from fresh and that's exactly right. Yeah.

Dean: And one offered. He'd be happy to. Happy to consult her to share, whatever. Yeah, be a resource for you if you need questions answered or anything.

Dan: Yeah, that's great. Alrighty.

Dean: Okay, Dan, Happy New Year.

Dan: Next week. Next week I'm in. I'm in Chicago for free Zone. So I do the free zone workshop on the Tuesday and we're doing this. So I have a new 10 times coach on the Monday. There's Lee Brower. Lee Brower is the coach on Monday. So, yeah, we.

Dean: Then we have virtual Free zone coming up too.

Dan: Yeah, we have virtual. And then you'll be at the summit. You'll be at that summit.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And I have a fast filter to outline your thinking that you're going to share with us about, you know, things Cloudlandia. Okay.

Dean: I like it. I like what I'm hearing. Yeah.

Dan: Okay.

Dean: Okay. Well, thanks, Dan. I will. I'll be here next week.

Dan: Okay, great. Thanks. Bye.

Dean: Thanks. Bye.