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In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, I reconnect with Dan Sullivan for another wide-ranging conversation that blends current events, history, technology, and human behavior.
We start by reflecting on the safety and comfort of life in Canada while discussing the news of missile strikes in Israel. From there, we explore the idea that innovation often advances when entrenched leaders move on—whether in science, business, or geopolitics. Dan brings up Thomas Kuhn’s idea that progress happens after the old guard exits, creating room for new ways of thinking.
Our conversation shifts into the role of AI as a horizontal layer over everything—similar to electricity. We compare this shift to earlier transitions like the printing press and the rise of coffee culture. Dan shares his belief that while AI will transform systems, the core of human life will still revolve around handled needs and personal desires.
We wrap by talking about convenience as the ultimate driver of progress. From automated cooking to frictionless hospitality, we recognize that people mostly want things to be “handled.” Despite how fast technology evolves, it’s clear that unless something is of deep personal interest, most people will let it pass by. As always, the conversation leaves room for reflection and humor, grounded in the reality that technological change doesn’t always mean personal change.
Links:
WelcomeToCloudlandia.com
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
ListingAgentLifestyle.com
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Dan: Mr Jackson, I hope the rest of your day yesterday went well.
Dean: Oh, delightful, I learned stuff yesterday. That was a very nice day, beautiful, beautiful weather today. You know what, dan, if you could, as an option at the Hazleton, upgrade to include your perfect weather for $1,000, this is what you'd order, it's this kind of day. Yeah, mid-70s perfect white fluffy clouds. Yes, it's why.
Dan: Living in a safe, globally unimportant country.
That's exactly right. Holy cow, I don't know if you've seen, yeah, what's uh? I woke up like literally just a few minutes ago seeing all the, uh, the raining missiles on israel right now from Iran. Have you seen that this morning?
Dean: Oh yeah, there's a lot of them. Most of them don't hit anything and most of them are shot down, but still it puts some excitement in your day.
Dan: I mean really, yeah, these ones look like. They're something unique about these ones that they're supersonicersonic and many of them are hitting, yeah, different than what we've normally seen. Like normally, when you see it, it's the, the iron dome or whatever is, you know, intercepting them, which is always interesting, but these ones are like Direct, like you can see them hitting in inrael that's. I mean, could you imagine, dan, like you, just look at how geographically we are. You know we've won the geographic lottery in where we're positioned here, you know, just realizing that's never. Even though you can, all you know you always take precautions with the umbrella above us, over the outside.
Dean: But I mean still that today. I've lived in Toronto for 54 years now, just past the anniversary, the 54th anniversary and I think that, first of all, when you have a really large city like Toronto, the center of a lot of things that go on in Canada, A world-class city like Toronto. Well, it's not a world-class city. But yeah, they have to go five years. I'm putting a new rule in for world-class cities. You have to go five years without ever saying the words.
Dan: Yeah, we're a world-class city.
Dean: We're a world-class city. And that takes you to stage one probation.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: No, that takes you to stage two, probation, and then stage three probation is where all the people who've been saying it's a world-class city have either died or moved, and then it's sort of like science. There was a famous he wasn't a scientist, but he was a, I think, a science historian. Thomas Kuhn K-U-H-N if you ever came across that name wrote in the 1960s and he wrote a very influential book which is called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and he was asked many times when you have a sudden series of scientific breakthroughs and we really haven't had any for quite a long time, it's been mostly almost a century since we've had any real scientific revolutions. So all the progress we've made over the last century were for discoveries in physics and magnetism and electricity and uh, you know nuclear but they had already worked out how that was going to happen in the by the 1920s.
and he said what when, all of a sudden, when you get a breakthrough, let's say, for example, they discover a new hydrogen atom and it essentially gives everybody free energy? That would be a scientific breakthrough. Do you think that I mean? Would you think?
Dan: that would be.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. In other words, energy just didn't cost anything anymore, you know, and the price of energy would go down.
Dan: That would free up a lot of that, free up a lot of other things energy would go down that would free up a lot of that'd free up a lot of other things, and, uh, and, and he said, the single biggest cause for scientific breakthroughs is the funerals of old scientists. Oh who everybody defers to that you can't first them.
Dean: Yeah, well, defers to, but they control promotion of young scientists. They control where the money goes for a scientist and then they die and their control loosens up and to the degree that control disappears. Now you get new.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: Yeah, so that's a long way around. But I think that in the world today there are people who are basically in control of geopolitical systems, economic systems, you know, cultural systems, and in the next 10 years, I think, a lot of the controllers are going. They'll either die or people will think they've already died. They don't have to actually die, they just have to be in a room somewhere and no one's heard, and no one's heard anything from them recently, and uh and uh, you know, and everything like that, and then things change and then things really shifted. But my sense about Toronto is that it's going to be the Geneva of the Western Hemisphere.
Dan: Okay, that's interesting.
Dean: Switzerland from a geopolitical standpoint really. I mean, nobody ever talks about well, what do the Swiss think about this? But lots of stuff happens in Geneva. People meet in Geneva. There's tons of money that goes through Geneva and you know, when you know people who hate each other want to talk to each other and feel safe about it, they do it in Geneva that's interesting.
Dan: How did Switzerland become its neutrality known for? Is that just because of its positioning between Austria?
Dean: and Germany mountains.
Yeah, the uh, the germans had given some thought during the second world war to invade switzerland, and switzerland can put into the field in a very short period of time a very big army. I don't know what the numbers are. But the other thing is, uh, for the longest period I know maybe a century long they've been howling out the mountains. So they've got, you know, they've got secret bases inside the mountains, but there's also they've created lots of dams with big reservoirs and if there was ever an invasion they would just blow up the dams and they would flood the entire lowlands of.
You know, people are told to the mountains, the entire lowlands of you know, people are told to the mountains, get to your bunker. You know everybody's got a bunker and they've all got guns and they do it. You know they just want to. They're in the middle of one of the most warfare inclined continents in human history. Europe is very warlike. It's always been warlike.
Dan: Europe is very warlike. It's always been warlike, but they haven't wanted to be part of the wars, so they've taken the other approach.
Dean: Yeah, and Canada is kind of like that, but the US is very uniquely positioned, because a lot of people don't know this. I mean, you come to Toronto and it's big skyscrapers, yeah, you know, and it's a financial center. It's very clearly a big financial center, it's a big communication center, it's a big tech center. But a lot of people don't know it's a big manufacturing center. There's the airport here.
Dan: Oh yeah, All around the airport.
Dean: Mile after mile of low-rise manufacturing Industrial yeah, all around the airport Mile after mile of low-rise manufacturing Industrial. Yeah Actually, sasha Kurzmer, who you'll see tomorrow, you'll see Sasha says it's the hottest real estate in Toronto right now is industrial space Really Wow, yeah. Yeah, we have enough condos for the next 10 years. I mean most of the condos we got enough.
Dan: It's enough already. Yeah, that's true. That's funny right.
Dean: I mean the vast number of them are empty. They're just. You know they just built them.
Dan: Money lockers.
Dean: Right yeah, money lockers right, yeah and uh, but a semi-truck you know like a big semi-truck loaded with industrial products can reach 100 million americans in 24 hours and that's where the wealth. That's where the wealth of toronto comes from. It comes from that distribution.
Dan: Access to American market.
Dean: Yeah, that's true. So you have the bridge at Buffalo, the big bridge at Buffalo. That goes across to New York and you have the big bridge at Detroit or at Windsor that goes across to Michigan and 80% of all the exports that Canada makes goes over those two bridges.
Dan: Wow.
Dean: Rapid-fire factoids for our listening audience.
Dan: Yeah, absolutely, I mean that's.
Dean: I like things like that. I like things like that.
Dan: I do too. I always learn. You know, and that's kind of the you think about those as those are all mainland exports physical goods and the like but you know that doesn't. Where the real impact is is all the Cloudlandia transfers. You know, the transfer of digital stuff that goes across the border. There are no borders in Cloudlandia. That's the real exciting thing. This juxtaposition is like nothing else. I mean, you see, navigating this definite global migration to Cloudlandia. That's why I'm so fascinated by it. You know is just the implications. You know and you see. Now I saw that Jeff Bezos is back, apparently after stepping down. He's gotten so excited about AI that's bringing him back into the fold, you know.
Dean: What at Amazon?
Dan: Yes.
Dean: Oh, I didn't know that.
Dan: I saw that just yesterday, but he was talking about AI being, you know, a horizontal layer over everything, like electricity was layer over everything. Like electricity was, like the internet is, like AI is just going to be a horizontal, like over everything layer that will there's not a single thing that AI will not impact. It's going to be in everything. And so when you think about it, like electricity, like that I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that was kind of a curiosity of mine Now is seeing who were and what was the progression of electricity kind of thing, as a you know where it, how long it took for the alternate things to come aside from just lighting and now to where it's just everything we take for granted, right, like like you can't imagine a world without electricity. We just take it for granted, it's there, you plug something in and it and it works.
Dean: You know, yeah, no, I, I agree, I agree, yeah, and so I wonder who I mean?
Dan: do you? Uh and I think I go all the way back to you know that was where, like gutenberg, you know, like the first, the transition there, like when you could print Bibles okay, then you could print, you know, multiple copies and you know, took a vision, applied to it and made it a newspaper or a magazine. You know all the evolution things of it. Who were the organizers of all of these things? And I wonder about the timelines of them, you know?
Dean: And I wonder about the timelines of them. You know Well, I do know, because I think that Gutenberg is a real, you know, it's a real watershed and I do know that in Northern Europe so Gutenberg was in Germany, that in Northern Europe, right across the you know you would take from Poland and then Germany, you would take from Poland and then Germany, and then you would take Scandinavia, then the low countries.
Lux date that they give for Gutenberg is 1455. That's when you know a document that he printed. It has the year 1455, that within about a 30-year period there were 30,000 working presses in Northern Europe. How many years. That'd be about 30 years after 1455. So by the end of the—you've already surpassed 30,000 presses. Yes, but the vast majority of it wasn't things like Bibles.
Dan: The vast majority of it was't things like Bibles.
Dean: The vast majority of it was contracts. It was regulations.
Dan: It was trade agreements.
Dean: It was mostly commercial. It went commercial and so actually maps, maps became a big deal, yeah, yeah. So that made a difference and also those next 150 years were just tumultuous, I mean politically, economically I mean yeah yeah, enormous amount of warfare, enormous amount of became.
Dan: Uh, I imagine that part of that was the ability for a precise idea to spread in the way it was intended to spread, like unified in its presentation, compared to an oral history of somebody saying, well, he said this and this was an actual, you know, duplicate representation of what you wanted, because it was a multiplier, really right.
Dean: I mean that's, yeah, I'm. It was a bad time for monasteries yeah, exactly.
Dan: They started drinking and one of them said you know what? We should start selling this beer. That's what we should be doing.
Dean: We should get one of those new printing presses and print ads labels.
Dan: Oh, we got to join in. Oh man, it's so funny, dan, that's so true, right? I mean every transition. It's like you know what did the buggy whip people start transitioning into? We're not strangers to entire industries being wiped out, you know, in the progress of things, yeah.
Dean: Well, it wasn't until the end of the Second World War that horses really disappeared, certainly in Europe, certainly in Europe.
It's. One of the big problems of the Germans during the Second World War is that most of their shipping was still by horses. Throughout the Second World War, you know they presented themselves as a super modern army military. You know they had the Air Force and everything like that, but their biggest problem is that they had terrible logistical systems, because one of the problems was that the roads weren't everywhere and the railroads were different gauges. They had a real problem, and horses are really expensive.
I mean, you can't gas up a horse like you can gas up a truck, and you have to take care of them, you have to feed them. You have to use half of them to. You have to use half the horses to haul the food for the other half for all the horses.
Dan: It's a self-perpetuating system. Yeah, exactly, that's so funny.
Dean: Yeah, it's really an interesting thing, but then there's also a lot of other surprises that happen along the way. You know, happen with electricity and you know everything, but it's all gases and beds.
Dan: Well, that's exactly it, and I think that it's clear.
Dean: It'd be interesting with Bezos whether he can come back, because he had all sorts of novel ideas, but those novel ideas are standard now throughout the economy. And can he? I don't know how old he is now. Is he 50s? I guess 50s.
Dan: Yeah, he might be 60-something.
Dean: Yeah, well, well, there's probably some more ingenious 20 year olds that are.
Dan: You know that are coming up with new stuff yeah, that were born when amazon already existed, you know I mean, it's like howard schultz with starbucks.
Dean: He had the sweet spot for about 10 years, I think, probably from, I would say probably from around 90 to 2000. Starbucks really really had this sweet spot. They had this third space. You know, they had great baristas.
Dan: They had.
Dean: You walked in and the smell of coffee was fantastic and everything. And then they went public and it required that they put the emphasis on quantity rather than quality, and the first thing they had to do was replace the baristas with automatic machines. Okay, so you know, a personal touch went out of it. The barista would remember your drink. You know, yeah, a personal touch went out of it. The barista would remember your drink you know yeah.
Dan: They were artists and they could create you know they punched the buttons and do the things, but they were not really making.
Dean: Yeah, and then the other thing was that they went to sugar. They, you know, they brought in all sorts of sugar drinks and pastries and everything else. And now it wasn't the smell of coffee. When you walked in, it was the smell of sugar drinks and pastries and everything else. And now it wasn't the smell of coffee. When you walked in, it was the smell of sugar and uh and uh.
So that I mean, people are used to sugar, but it's an interesting you know, and then he also, he trained his competition, you know, if you look at all the independent coffee places that could have a great barista and have freshly ground coffee. He trained all those people and then they went into competition with him.
Dan: I think what really you know, the transition or the shift for Starbucks was that it was imagined in a time when the internet was still a place that you largely went to at home or at work, and the third place was a necessary, like you know, a gathering spot. But as soon as I think the downfall for that was when Wi-Fi became a thing and people started using Starbucks as their branch office. They would go and just sit there, take up all their tables all day.
Dean: I'm guilty.
Dan: I'm guilty, right exactly and that that kind of economically iconic urban locations, you know where you would be a nice little oasis. Yeah, it was exotically, exotically. European, I mean, he got the idea sitting in the.
Dean: Grand Plaza in Venice you know that's where he got the idea for it, and yeah, so it was a period in a period in time. He had an era, period in time to take advantage and of course he did. You know he espresso drinks to.
Dan: North.
Dean: America. We, you know, maxwell House was coffee before Jeff Bezos, you know, and yeah, I think there's just a time. You, you know, I mean one of the things is that we talk about. We have Jeff Madoff and I are writing a book called Casting, not Hiring where we talk about bringing theater into your business and we study Starbucks and we say it's a cautionary tale and the idea that I came up with is that starbucks would create the world's greatest barista school and then you would apply to be, uh, become a barista in a starbucks and you would get a certification, okay, and then they would cream.
They would always take the best baristas for their own stores and and. But then other people could buy a license to have a barista licensed, starbucks licensed barista license yes.
And that he wouldn't have gone as quickly but he would have made quality brand. Yeah, but I think not grinding the coffee was the big, the big thing, because the smell of coffee and they're not as good. I mean, the starbucks drinks aren't as good as they. They were when they had the baristas, because it was just always freshly ground. You know, and yeah, that that was in the coffee and everything like that. I I haven't been.
I actually haven't been to a starbucks myself in about two years that's interesting, we've got like it's very funny.
Dan: But the in winter haven there's a independent you know cafe called haven cafe and they have won three out of five years the, the international competition in in Melbourne. Uh.
Dean: Australia. Yeah see, that's good, that's fantastic yeah yeah yeah and Starbucks can't get back to Starbucks. Can't get back to that. You know that they're too big right, yeah, we just in winter.
Dan: I haven't been yet because I've been up here, but it just opened a new Dutch Brothers coffee, which you know has been they've been more West Coast oriented, but making quite a stir.
Dean: West Coast. That's where the riots are right. The riots are in the United.
Dan: States.
Dean: Oh man, holy cow, riot copy, riot copy.
Dan: Yeah, exactly, I mean that's yeah. I can't imagine, you know, being in Los Angeles right now. That's just yeah unbelievable.
Dean: Yeah, I think they're keeping it out of Santa Monica. That's all I really care about.
Dan: Nothing at shutters right.
Dean: Yeah, I mean Ocean Avenue and that. Have that tightly policed and keep them out of there.
Dan: Yeah, exactly, it's amazing To protect the business. Yeah, I'm very interested in this whole, you know seeing, just looking back historically to see where the you know directionally what's going to happen with AI as it progresses here.
Dean: Yeah, you know like learning from the platforms it's just constant discovery. I mean, you know like learning from that, it's just constant discovery.
Dan: I mean uh, you know yeah yeah, I mean it's um.
Dean: I had a podcast with mike kanix on tuesday and 60 days ago I thought it was going in this direction.
Dan: He says now it's totally changed it and I said, well, that's probably going to be true 60 days from now yeah, I guess that's true, right, layer after layer, because we won't even know what it's going to, uh, what it's going to do. Yeah, I do just look at these uh things, though, you know, like the enabling everything, I'm really thinking more. I was telling you yesterday I was working on an email about the what if the robots really do take over? And just because everybody kind of says that with either fear or excitement, you know, and I think if you take it from.
Dean: Well, what does take over mean? I mean, what does the word take over?
Dan: mean, well, that's the thing, that's the word, right. That's what I mean is that people have that fear that they're going to lose control, but I think I look at it from that you get to give up control or to give control to the robot. You don't have to do anything. You know, I was thinking with with breakfast, with Chad Jenkins this morning, and we had, you and I had that delicious steak yesterday, we had one this morning and you know just thinking.
You know, imagine that your house has a robot that is trained in all of the culinary, you know the very best culinary minds and you can order up anything you want prepared, exactly how it's prepared, you know, right there at your house, brought right to you by a robot. That's not, I mean, that's definitely in the realm of, of realistic here. You know, in the next, certainly, if we, if we take depending on how far a window out you take, right, like I think that things are moving so fast that that's, I think, 2030, you know, five years we're going to have a, even if just thinking about the trajectory that we've had right now yeah, my belief is that it's going to be um 90 of.
Dean: It is going to be backstage and not front stage. That's going to be backstage yes, and that's got. You know I use the. Remember when google brought out their glasses, yeah, and they said this is the great breakthrough. You know all new technology does. And immediately all the bars and restaurants in San Francisco barred Google glasses.
Dan: Okay, why?
Dean: Well, because you can take pictures with them. Oh, I see, okay, and say you're not coming in here with those glasses and taking pictures of people who are having private meetings and private conversations. So yesterday after lunch I had some time to wander around. I wandered over to the new Hyatt. You know they completely remodeled the Hyatt.
Dan: Yeah, how is?
Dean: that it's very, very nice. It's 10 times better than the Four Seasons. First of all, they've got this big, massive restaurant the moment you walk into the lobby. I mean it probably has 100 seats in the restaurant.
Dan: Like our kind of seats yeah.
Dean: Yeah, I mean it's nice. I mean you might not like it, but you know you know, you walk into the Four Seasons and it's the most impersonal possible architecture and interior design. This is really nice. And so I just went over there and I, you know, and I just got on the internet and I was, you know, I was creating a new tool, I was actually creating a new tool and but I was thinking that AI is now part of reality.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: But reality is not part of AI.
Dan: Say more about that.
Dean: Well, it's not reality, it's artificial, oh it's artificial.
Dan: It's artificial. Oh, exactly it's artificial.
Dean: I mean, if you look up the definition of artificial, half of it means fake.
Dan: Yes, exactly.
Dean: Yeah, so part of our reality now is that there's a thing called AI, but AI is in a thing called reality, but reality is not in a thing called AI.
Dan: Right.
Dean: In other words, ai is continually taking pieces of reality and automating it and everything like that, and humans at the same time are creating more reality. That is not AI.
Dan: AI, yeah, and that's I wonder. You know, this is kind of the thing where it's really the lines between. I'd be very interested to see, dan, in terms of the economy, like and I'll call that like a average you know family budget how much of it is spent on reality versus, you know, digital. You know mainland versus cloudlandia. Physical goods, food you know we talked about the different, you know the pillars of spending, mm-hmm and much of it you know on housing, transportation, food, health, kids. You know money and me, all of those things. Much of it is consumed in a. You know we're all everybody's competing outside of. You know, for everybody puts all this emphasis on Cloudlandia and I wonder you know what, how much of that is really? It's digital enabled. I don't know if you know. I just I don't know that. I told you yesterday.
Dean: Yeah, but here, how much of it? The better question is. I mean to get a handle on this. How much of it is electricity enabled?
Dan: Oh for sure, All of it.
Dean: Most of it Well, not all of it, but most of it. I mean conversation, you know when you're sitting in a room with someone is I mean it's electronically enabled in the sense you like. Have it the temperature good and the lighting good and everything like that, but that's not the important thing. You would do it.
Great conversations were happening before there was electricity, so yes, you know and any anything, but I think that most humans don't want to think about it. My, my sense is, you know, I don't want to have conversations about technology, except it's with someone like yourself or anything like that, but I don't spend most of my day talking about technology or electricity. The conversation we had last year about AI the conversation we're having about AI isn't much different than the conversation we're going to have about AI 10 years from now Did you?
see this Next year. You're going to say did you see this new thing? And I said we were having a conversation like this 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely true, I don't think it's going to change humanity at all.
Dan: Yeah, I'm just going through like I'm looking at something you just said. We don't want to think about these things. Girding of that is our desire for convenience, progressively, you know, conserving energy, right. So it's that we've evolved to a point where we don't have to think about those things, like if we just take the, if we take the house or housing, shelter is is the core thing. That that has done. And our desire, you know, thousands of years ago, for shelter, even hundreds of years ago, was that it was, you know, safe and that it was gave did the job of shelter. But then, you know, when, electricity and plumbing and Wi-Fi and entertainment streaming and comfortable furniture and all these things, this progression, this ratcheting of elevations, were never. I think that's really interesting. We're never really satisfied. We're constantly have an appetite for progressing. Very few things do we ever reach a point where we say, oh, that's good enough, this is great. Like outhouses, you know, we're not as good as indoor plumbing and having, you know, having electricity is much nicer than having to chop wood and carry water.
Dean: Yeah, well, I think the big thing is that efficiency and convenience and comfort, once you have them, no longer have any meaning.
Dan: Right. But the ratchet is, once we've reached one level, we're ratcheted in at that level of acceptance.
Dean: I mean possibly I don't know. I mean I don't know how you would measure this in relationship to everybody's after this. First of all, I don't know how you measure everybody and the big thing. I mean there are certain people who are keenly interested in this. It's more of an intellectual pleasure than it is actually. See that technology is of intellectual interest. You me, you know, you myself and everything else will be interested in talking about this, but I'm going home for a family reunion next weekend in Ohio.
I bet in the four or five hours we're together none of us talks about this because it's of no intellectual interest to anyone else. Ok, so you know but it is for us. It's a, you know, and so I was reading. I'm reading a is the observation of the interest and behavior of a very small portion of the population who have freedom and money and that.
And the era is defined by the interest of this very, very small portion, the rest of the people probably they're not doing things that would characterize the era. They're doing things that may have lasted for hundreds but it doesn't. It's not interesting to study, it's not interesting to write about, and you know, I mean we look at movies and we say, well, that's like America. No, that's like actors and producers and directors saying this is how we're going to describe America, but that's not how America actually lives.
Dan: Yeah, that's interesting, right, movies are kind of holding up a mirror to the zeitgeist, in a way, right.
Dean: Like Strategic Coast, is not a description of how the entrepreneurial world operates no, you know the yeah.
Dan: The interesting thing thinking about your thinking is is transferable across all. You know it's a durable context. That's kind of the way. That's what I look about. That's what I love about the eight prophet activators. The breakthrough DNA model is very it's a durable context. It's timeless.
Dean: Yes, I mean if the Romans had the eight prophet activators, and they did, but they just didn't know they did.
Dan: Right.
Dean: Yeah, and you go forward to the Star Wars cafe and probably the ones who are buying drinks for the whole house are the ones who know the eight prophet activators.
Dan: Secretly, secretly, secretly. Who's that?
Dean: weird. Who's that weird looking guy? I don't know if it's a guy. Who is it who you know? Well, I don't know, but buy him a drink oh my goodness, yeah, I'm.
Dan: I think this thing that is convenience. We certainly want things to get easier. I mean, when you look at, I'm just looking down no, we want some things to get easier. What things do we not want to get easier?
Dean: The things that are handled. We don't want to get easier.
Dan: Oh right exactly.
Dean: Yeah, for example, if there was a home robot, we would never buy one, because we've got things handled.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, I have no interest in having a home robot. I have no interest in having a home shop for a cook. I have no interest in everything because it's already handled and it's not worth the thinking it would take to introduce that into my, into our life I mean yeah, and it right like that. So it's.
Dan: There are certain things that we'd like to get easier okay, and we're and we're focused on that yeah, yeah, I think about that, like that's I was thinking, you know, in terms of you know the access we have through Cloudlandia is I can get anything that is from any restaurant you know delivered to my house in 22 minutes. You know, that's from the moment I have the thought, I just push the button and so, yeah, I don't have. There's no, no thinking about that. We were talking about being here in the. You know the seamlessness of you know being here at the Hazleton and of you know I love this, uh, environment, I love being right here in this footprint and the fact that you know the hotel allows you to just like, come, I can walk right in step, you know, get all the function of the shelter and the food and being in this environment without any of the concern of it, right?
No yeah, no maintenance. No, I never think about it when I leave. Yeah, it's handled. Think about that compared to when I had a house here, you know you have so much.
Yeah, that's the thing, that's a good word handled. We just want things handled. You know Our desires. We want our desires handled and our desires are not really. I think our basic desires don't really. Maybe they evolve, it's just the novelty of the things, but the actual verbs of what we're doing are not really. I think you look at, if we look at the health category, you know where you are a you know you are at the apex level of consumer of health and longevity. Consumer of health and longevity. You know all the offerings that are available in terms of you know, from the physio that you're doing to the stem cells, to the work with David Hasse, all of those things. You are certainly at the leading edge and it shows you're nationally ranked, internationally ranked, as aging backwards.
Dean: I'm on the chart. You're on the chart exactly, but I got on the chart without knowing it. It's just a function of one of the tests that I take. Somebody created sort of a ranking out of this and I was on it.
It's just part of something that I do every quarter that shows up on some sort of chart. They ask you whether you want to be listed or not, and I thought it was good for um, because your doctor is listed on it too, and I. I did it mostly because david hoss he gets credit for it, you know he does it for yeah you know, it's good. It's good for his advertising and you know his marketing and I mean it's just good for.
It's just good for his advertising and you know his marketing, I mean it's just good for his satisfaction and everything like that. But you know that's a really good thing because you know I created that. It was like two years I created a workshop called well, it's a lifetime extender, and then I changed it to age reversal future, because not a really interesting term, because it's in the future somewhere.
Right but age reversal you can actually see right now it's a more meaningful comparison number and I had hundreds of people. I had hundreds of people on that and to my knowledge nobody's done anything that we talked about which kind of proves to you, unless it's a keen interest you can have the information and you can have the knowledge. But if it isn't actually something of central motivational interest to you, the knowledge and the information just passes by. The knowledge and the information just passes.
Dan: Yeah, and I think it goes. If you have to disrupt your established habits, what do you always say? We don't want any habits except for the ones that we have already established. Right, except for the ones that are existing.
Dean: Reinforce them, yeah, reinforce them and anyway, today I'm going to have to cut off early because I have, and so in about two minutes I'm going to have to jump, but I'm seeing you tomorrow and I'm seeing you the next day. It's a banner week. It's four days in a row. We'll be in contact, so, anyway, you know what we're doing in context, so anyway you know what we're doing. We're really developing, you know, psychological, philosophical, conceptual structures here. How do you think about this stuff?
That's what I think about it a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always pleasurable.
Dan: Always, Dan, I will. I'll see you tomorrow At the party. That's right. Have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow night okay, thanks, bye.
4.3
99 ratings
In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, I reconnect with Dan Sullivan for another wide-ranging conversation that blends current events, history, technology, and human behavior.
We start by reflecting on the safety and comfort of life in Canada while discussing the news of missile strikes in Israel. From there, we explore the idea that innovation often advances when entrenched leaders move on—whether in science, business, or geopolitics. Dan brings up Thomas Kuhn’s idea that progress happens after the old guard exits, creating room for new ways of thinking.
Our conversation shifts into the role of AI as a horizontal layer over everything—similar to electricity. We compare this shift to earlier transitions like the printing press and the rise of coffee culture. Dan shares his belief that while AI will transform systems, the core of human life will still revolve around handled needs and personal desires.
We wrap by talking about convenience as the ultimate driver of progress. From automated cooking to frictionless hospitality, we recognize that people mostly want things to be “handled.” Despite how fast technology evolves, it’s clear that unless something is of deep personal interest, most people will let it pass by. As always, the conversation leaves room for reflection and humor, grounded in the reality that technological change doesn’t always mean personal change.
Links:
WelcomeToCloudlandia.com
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
ListingAgentLifestyle.com
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Dan: Mr Jackson, I hope the rest of your day yesterday went well.
Dean: Oh, delightful, I learned stuff yesterday. That was a very nice day, beautiful, beautiful weather today. You know what, dan, if you could, as an option at the Hazleton, upgrade to include your perfect weather for $1,000, this is what you'd order, it's this kind of day. Yeah, mid-70s perfect white fluffy clouds. Yes, it's why.
Dan: Living in a safe, globally unimportant country.
That's exactly right. Holy cow, I don't know if you've seen, yeah, what's uh? I woke up like literally just a few minutes ago seeing all the, uh, the raining missiles on israel right now from Iran. Have you seen that this morning?
Dean: Oh yeah, there's a lot of them. Most of them don't hit anything and most of them are shot down, but still it puts some excitement in your day.
Dan: I mean really, yeah, these ones look like. They're something unique about these ones that they're supersonicersonic and many of them are hitting, yeah, different than what we've normally seen. Like normally, when you see it, it's the, the iron dome or whatever is, you know, intercepting them, which is always interesting, but these ones are like Direct, like you can see them hitting in inrael that's. I mean, could you imagine, dan, like you, just look at how geographically we are. You know we've won the geographic lottery in where we're positioned here, you know, just realizing that's never. Even though you can, all you know you always take precautions with the umbrella above us, over the outside.
Dean: But I mean still that today. I've lived in Toronto for 54 years now, just past the anniversary, the 54th anniversary and I think that, first of all, when you have a really large city like Toronto, the center of a lot of things that go on in Canada, A world-class city like Toronto. Well, it's not a world-class city. But yeah, they have to go five years. I'm putting a new rule in for world-class cities. You have to go five years without ever saying the words.
Dan: Yeah, we're a world-class city.
Dean: We're a world-class city. And that takes you to stage one probation.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: No, that takes you to stage two, probation, and then stage three probation is where all the people who've been saying it's a world-class city have either died or moved, and then it's sort of like science. There was a famous he wasn't a scientist, but he was a, I think, a science historian. Thomas Kuhn K-U-H-N if you ever came across that name wrote in the 1960s and he wrote a very influential book which is called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and he was asked many times when you have a sudden series of scientific breakthroughs and we really haven't had any for quite a long time, it's been mostly almost a century since we've had any real scientific revolutions. So all the progress we've made over the last century were for discoveries in physics and magnetism and electricity and uh, you know nuclear but they had already worked out how that was going to happen in the by the 1920s.
and he said what when, all of a sudden, when you get a breakthrough, let's say, for example, they discover a new hydrogen atom and it essentially gives everybody free energy? That would be a scientific breakthrough. Do you think that I mean? Would you think?
Dan: that would be.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. In other words, energy just didn't cost anything anymore, you know, and the price of energy would go down.
Dan: That would free up a lot of that, free up a lot of other things energy would go down that would free up a lot of that'd free up a lot of other things, and, uh, and, and he said, the single biggest cause for scientific breakthroughs is the funerals of old scientists. Oh who everybody defers to that you can't first them.
Dean: Yeah, well, defers to, but they control promotion of young scientists. They control where the money goes for a scientist and then they die and their control loosens up and to the degree that control disappears. Now you get new.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: Yeah, so that's a long way around. But I think that in the world today there are people who are basically in control of geopolitical systems, economic systems, you know, cultural systems, and in the next 10 years, I think, a lot of the controllers are going. They'll either die or people will think they've already died. They don't have to actually die, they just have to be in a room somewhere and no one's heard, and no one's heard anything from them recently, and uh and uh, you know, and everything like that, and then things change and then things really shifted. But my sense about Toronto is that it's going to be the Geneva of the Western Hemisphere.
Dan: Okay, that's interesting.
Dean: Switzerland from a geopolitical standpoint really. I mean, nobody ever talks about well, what do the Swiss think about this? But lots of stuff happens in Geneva. People meet in Geneva. There's tons of money that goes through Geneva and you know, when you know people who hate each other want to talk to each other and feel safe about it, they do it in Geneva that's interesting.
Dan: How did Switzerland become its neutrality known for? Is that just because of its positioning between Austria?
Dean: and Germany mountains.
Yeah, the uh, the germans had given some thought during the second world war to invade switzerland, and switzerland can put into the field in a very short period of time a very big army. I don't know what the numbers are. But the other thing is, uh, for the longest period I know maybe a century long they've been howling out the mountains. So they've got, you know, they've got secret bases inside the mountains, but there's also they've created lots of dams with big reservoirs and if there was ever an invasion they would just blow up the dams and they would flood the entire lowlands of.
You know, people are told to the mountains, the entire lowlands of you know, people are told to the mountains, get to your bunker. You know everybody's got a bunker and they've all got guns and they do it. You know they just want to. They're in the middle of one of the most warfare inclined continents in human history. Europe is very warlike. It's always been warlike.
Dan: Europe is very warlike. It's always been warlike, but they haven't wanted to be part of the wars, so they've taken the other approach.
Dean: Yeah, and Canada is kind of like that, but the US is very uniquely positioned, because a lot of people don't know this. I mean, you come to Toronto and it's big skyscrapers, yeah, you know, and it's a financial center. It's very clearly a big financial center, it's a big communication center, it's a big tech center. But a lot of people don't know it's a big manufacturing center. There's the airport here.
Dan: Oh yeah, All around the airport.
Dean: Mile after mile of low-rise manufacturing Industrial yeah, all around the airport Mile after mile of low-rise manufacturing Industrial. Yeah Actually, sasha Kurzmer, who you'll see tomorrow, you'll see Sasha says it's the hottest real estate in Toronto right now is industrial space Really Wow, yeah. Yeah, we have enough condos for the next 10 years. I mean most of the condos we got enough.
Dan: It's enough already. Yeah, that's true. That's funny right.
Dean: I mean the vast number of them are empty. They're just. You know they just built them.
Dan: Money lockers.
Dean: Right yeah, money lockers right, yeah and uh, but a semi-truck you know like a big semi-truck loaded with industrial products can reach 100 million americans in 24 hours and that's where the wealth. That's where the wealth of toronto comes from. It comes from that distribution.
Dan: Access to American market.
Dean: Yeah, that's true. So you have the bridge at Buffalo, the big bridge at Buffalo. That goes across to New York and you have the big bridge at Detroit or at Windsor that goes across to Michigan and 80% of all the exports that Canada makes goes over those two bridges.
Dan: Wow.
Dean: Rapid-fire factoids for our listening audience.
Dan: Yeah, absolutely, I mean that's.
Dean: I like things like that. I like things like that.
Dan: I do too. I always learn. You know, and that's kind of the you think about those as those are all mainland exports physical goods and the like but you know that doesn't. Where the real impact is is all the Cloudlandia transfers. You know, the transfer of digital stuff that goes across the border. There are no borders in Cloudlandia. That's the real exciting thing. This juxtaposition is like nothing else. I mean, you see, navigating this definite global migration to Cloudlandia. That's why I'm so fascinated by it. You know is just the implications. You know and you see. Now I saw that Jeff Bezos is back, apparently after stepping down. He's gotten so excited about AI that's bringing him back into the fold, you know.
Dean: What at Amazon?
Dan: Yes.
Dean: Oh, I didn't know that.
Dan: I saw that just yesterday, but he was talking about AI being, you know, a horizontal layer over everything, like electricity was layer over everything. Like electricity was, like the internet is, like AI is just going to be a horizontal, like over everything layer that will there's not a single thing that AI will not impact. It's going to be in everything. And so when you think about it, like electricity, like that I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that was kind of a curiosity of mine Now is seeing who were and what was the progression of electricity kind of thing, as a you know where it, how long it took for the alternate things to come aside from just lighting and now to where it's just everything we take for granted, right, like like you can't imagine a world without electricity. We just take it for granted, it's there, you plug something in and it and it works.
Dean: You know, yeah, no, I, I agree, I agree, yeah, and so I wonder who I mean?
Dan: do you? Uh and I think I go all the way back to you know that was where, like gutenberg, you know, like the first, the transition there, like when you could print Bibles okay, then you could print, you know, multiple copies and you know, took a vision, applied to it and made it a newspaper or a magazine. You know all the evolution things of it. Who were the organizers of all of these things? And I wonder about the timelines of them, you know?
Dean: And I wonder about the timelines of them. You know Well, I do know, because I think that Gutenberg is a real, you know, it's a real watershed and I do know that in Northern Europe so Gutenberg was in Germany, that in Northern Europe, right across the you know you would take from Poland and then Germany, you would take from Poland and then Germany, and then you would take Scandinavia, then the low countries.
Lux date that they give for Gutenberg is 1455. That's when you know a document that he printed. It has the year 1455, that within about a 30-year period there were 30,000 working presses in Northern Europe. How many years. That'd be about 30 years after 1455. So by the end of the—you've already surpassed 30,000 presses. Yes, but the vast majority of it wasn't things like Bibles.
Dan: The vast majority of it was't things like Bibles.
Dean: The vast majority of it was contracts. It was regulations.
Dan: It was trade agreements.
Dean: It was mostly commercial. It went commercial and so actually maps, maps became a big deal, yeah, yeah. So that made a difference and also those next 150 years were just tumultuous, I mean politically, economically I mean yeah yeah, enormous amount of warfare, enormous amount of became.
Dan: Uh, I imagine that part of that was the ability for a precise idea to spread in the way it was intended to spread, like unified in its presentation, compared to an oral history of somebody saying, well, he said this and this was an actual, you know, duplicate representation of what you wanted, because it was a multiplier, really right.
Dean: I mean that's, yeah, I'm. It was a bad time for monasteries yeah, exactly.
Dan: They started drinking and one of them said you know what? We should start selling this beer. That's what we should be doing.
Dean: We should get one of those new printing presses and print ads labels.
Dan: Oh, we got to join in. Oh man, it's so funny, dan, that's so true, right? I mean every transition. It's like you know what did the buggy whip people start transitioning into? We're not strangers to entire industries being wiped out, you know, in the progress of things, yeah.
Dean: Well, it wasn't until the end of the Second World War that horses really disappeared, certainly in Europe, certainly in Europe.
It's. One of the big problems of the Germans during the Second World War is that most of their shipping was still by horses. Throughout the Second World War, you know they presented themselves as a super modern army military. You know they had the Air Force and everything like that, but their biggest problem is that they had terrible logistical systems, because one of the problems was that the roads weren't everywhere and the railroads were different gauges. They had a real problem, and horses are really expensive.
I mean, you can't gas up a horse like you can gas up a truck, and you have to take care of them, you have to feed them. You have to use half of them to. You have to use half the horses to haul the food for the other half for all the horses.
Dan: It's a self-perpetuating system. Yeah, exactly, that's so funny.
Dean: Yeah, it's really an interesting thing, but then there's also a lot of other surprises that happen along the way. You know, happen with electricity and you know everything, but it's all gases and beds.
Dan: Well, that's exactly it, and I think that it's clear.
Dean: It'd be interesting with Bezos whether he can come back, because he had all sorts of novel ideas, but those novel ideas are standard now throughout the economy. And can he? I don't know how old he is now. Is he 50s? I guess 50s.
Dan: Yeah, he might be 60-something.
Dean: Yeah, well, well, there's probably some more ingenious 20 year olds that are.
Dan: You know that are coming up with new stuff yeah, that were born when amazon already existed, you know I mean, it's like howard schultz with starbucks.
Dean: He had the sweet spot for about 10 years, I think, probably from, I would say probably from around 90 to 2000. Starbucks really really had this sweet spot. They had this third space. You know, they had great baristas.
Dan: They had.
Dean: You walked in and the smell of coffee was fantastic and everything. And then they went public and it required that they put the emphasis on quantity rather than quality, and the first thing they had to do was replace the baristas with automatic machines. Okay, so you know, a personal touch went out of it. The barista would remember your drink. You know, yeah, a personal touch went out of it. The barista would remember your drink you know yeah.
Dan: They were artists and they could create you know they punched the buttons and do the things, but they were not really making.
Dean: Yeah, and then the other thing was that they went to sugar. They, you know, they brought in all sorts of sugar drinks and pastries and everything else. And now it wasn't the smell of coffee. When you walked in, it was the smell of sugar drinks and pastries and everything else. And now it wasn't the smell of coffee. When you walked in, it was the smell of sugar and uh and uh.
So that I mean, people are used to sugar, but it's an interesting you know, and then he also, he trained his competition, you know, if you look at all the independent coffee places that could have a great barista and have freshly ground coffee. He trained all those people and then they went into competition with him.
Dan: I think what really you know, the transition or the shift for Starbucks was that it was imagined in a time when the internet was still a place that you largely went to at home or at work, and the third place was a necessary, like you know, a gathering spot. But as soon as I think the downfall for that was when Wi-Fi became a thing and people started using Starbucks as their branch office. They would go and just sit there, take up all their tables all day.
Dean: I'm guilty.
Dan: I'm guilty, right exactly and that that kind of economically iconic urban locations, you know where you would be a nice little oasis. Yeah, it was exotically, exotically. European, I mean, he got the idea sitting in the.
Dean: Grand Plaza in Venice you know that's where he got the idea for it, and yeah, so it was a period in a period in time. He had an era, period in time to take advantage and of course he did. You know he espresso drinks to.
Dan: North.
Dean: America. We, you know, maxwell House was coffee before Jeff Bezos, you know, and yeah, I think there's just a time. You, you know, I mean one of the things is that we talk about. We have Jeff Madoff and I are writing a book called Casting, not Hiring where we talk about bringing theater into your business and we study Starbucks and we say it's a cautionary tale and the idea that I came up with is that starbucks would create the world's greatest barista school and then you would apply to be, uh, become a barista in a starbucks and you would get a certification, okay, and then they would cream.
They would always take the best baristas for their own stores and and. But then other people could buy a license to have a barista licensed, starbucks licensed barista license yes.
And that he wouldn't have gone as quickly but he would have made quality brand. Yeah, but I think not grinding the coffee was the big, the big thing, because the smell of coffee and they're not as good. I mean, the starbucks drinks aren't as good as they. They were when they had the baristas, because it was just always freshly ground. You know, and yeah, that that was in the coffee and everything like that. I I haven't been.
I actually haven't been to a starbucks myself in about two years that's interesting, we've got like it's very funny.
Dan: But the in winter haven there's a independent you know cafe called haven cafe and they have won three out of five years the, the international competition in in Melbourne. Uh.
Dean: Australia. Yeah see, that's good, that's fantastic yeah yeah yeah and Starbucks can't get back to Starbucks. Can't get back to that. You know that they're too big right, yeah, we just in winter.
Dan: I haven't been yet because I've been up here, but it just opened a new Dutch Brothers coffee, which you know has been they've been more West Coast oriented, but making quite a stir.
Dean: West Coast. That's where the riots are right. The riots are in the United.
Dan: States.
Dean: Oh man, holy cow, riot copy, riot copy.
Dan: Yeah, exactly, I mean that's yeah. I can't imagine, you know, being in Los Angeles right now. That's just yeah unbelievable.
Dean: Yeah, I think they're keeping it out of Santa Monica. That's all I really care about.
Dan: Nothing at shutters right.
Dean: Yeah, I mean Ocean Avenue and that. Have that tightly policed and keep them out of there.
Dan: Yeah, exactly, it's amazing To protect the business. Yeah, I'm very interested in this whole, you know seeing, just looking back historically to see where the you know directionally what's going to happen with AI as it progresses here.
Dean: Yeah, you know like learning from the platforms it's just constant discovery. I mean, you know like learning from that, it's just constant discovery.
Dan: I mean uh, you know yeah yeah, I mean it's um.
Dean: I had a podcast with mike kanix on tuesday and 60 days ago I thought it was going in this direction.
Dan: He says now it's totally changed it and I said, well, that's probably going to be true 60 days from now yeah, I guess that's true, right, layer after layer, because we won't even know what it's going to, uh, what it's going to do. Yeah, I do just look at these uh things, though, you know, like the enabling everything, I'm really thinking more. I was telling you yesterday I was working on an email about the what if the robots really do take over? And just because everybody kind of says that with either fear or excitement, you know, and I think if you take it from.
Dean: Well, what does take over mean? I mean, what does the word take over?
Dan: mean, well, that's the thing, that's the word, right. That's what I mean is that people have that fear that they're going to lose control, but I think I look at it from that you get to give up control or to give control to the robot. You don't have to do anything. You know, I was thinking with with breakfast, with Chad Jenkins this morning, and we had, you and I had that delicious steak yesterday, we had one this morning and you know just thinking.
You know, imagine that your house has a robot that is trained in all of the culinary, you know the very best culinary minds and you can order up anything you want prepared, exactly how it's prepared, you know, right there at your house, brought right to you by a robot. That's not, I mean, that's definitely in the realm of, of realistic here. You know, in the next, certainly, if we, if we take depending on how far a window out you take, right, like I think that things are moving so fast that that's, I think, 2030, you know, five years we're going to have a, even if just thinking about the trajectory that we've had right now yeah, my belief is that it's going to be um 90 of.
Dean: It is going to be backstage and not front stage. That's going to be backstage yes, and that's got. You know I use the. Remember when google brought out their glasses, yeah, and they said this is the great breakthrough. You know all new technology does. And immediately all the bars and restaurants in San Francisco barred Google glasses.
Dan: Okay, why?
Dean: Well, because you can take pictures with them. Oh, I see, okay, and say you're not coming in here with those glasses and taking pictures of people who are having private meetings and private conversations. So yesterday after lunch I had some time to wander around. I wandered over to the new Hyatt. You know they completely remodeled the Hyatt.
Dan: Yeah, how is?
Dean: that it's very, very nice. It's 10 times better than the Four Seasons. First of all, they've got this big, massive restaurant the moment you walk into the lobby. I mean it probably has 100 seats in the restaurant.
Dan: Like our kind of seats yeah.
Dean: Yeah, I mean it's nice. I mean you might not like it, but you know you know, you walk into the Four Seasons and it's the most impersonal possible architecture and interior design. This is really nice. And so I just went over there and I, you know, and I just got on the internet and I was, you know, I was creating a new tool, I was actually creating a new tool and but I was thinking that AI is now part of reality.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: But reality is not part of AI.
Dan: Say more about that.
Dean: Well, it's not reality, it's artificial, oh it's artificial.
Dan: It's artificial. Oh, exactly it's artificial.
Dean: I mean, if you look up the definition of artificial, half of it means fake.
Dan: Yes, exactly.
Dean: Yeah, so part of our reality now is that there's a thing called AI, but AI is in a thing called reality, but reality is not in a thing called AI.
Dan: Right.
Dean: In other words, ai is continually taking pieces of reality and automating it and everything like that, and humans at the same time are creating more reality. That is not AI.
Dan: AI, yeah, and that's I wonder. You know, this is kind of the thing where it's really the lines between. I'd be very interested to see, dan, in terms of the economy, like and I'll call that like a average you know family budget how much of it is spent on reality versus, you know, digital. You know mainland versus cloudlandia. Physical goods, food you know we talked about the different, you know the pillars of spending, mm-hmm and much of it you know on housing, transportation, food, health, kids. You know money and me, all of those things. Much of it is consumed in a. You know we're all everybody's competing outside of. You know, for everybody puts all this emphasis on Cloudlandia and I wonder you know what, how much of that is really? It's digital enabled. I don't know if you know. I just I don't know that. I told you yesterday.
Dean: Yeah, but here, how much of it? The better question is. I mean to get a handle on this. How much of it is electricity enabled?
Dan: Oh for sure, All of it.
Dean: Most of it Well, not all of it, but most of it. I mean conversation, you know when you're sitting in a room with someone is I mean it's electronically enabled in the sense you like. Have it the temperature good and the lighting good and everything like that, but that's not the important thing. You would do it.
Great conversations were happening before there was electricity, so yes, you know and any anything, but I think that most humans don't want to think about it. My, my sense is, you know, I don't want to have conversations about technology, except it's with someone like yourself or anything like that, but I don't spend most of my day talking about technology or electricity. The conversation we had last year about AI the conversation we're having about AI isn't much different than the conversation we're going to have about AI 10 years from now Did you?
see this Next year. You're going to say did you see this new thing? And I said we were having a conversation like this 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely true, I don't think it's going to change humanity at all.
Dan: Yeah, I'm just going through like I'm looking at something you just said. We don't want to think about these things. Girding of that is our desire for convenience, progressively, you know, conserving energy, right. So it's that we've evolved to a point where we don't have to think about those things, like if we just take the, if we take the house or housing, shelter is is the core thing. That that has done. And our desire, you know, thousands of years ago, for shelter, even hundreds of years ago, was that it was, you know, safe and that it was gave did the job of shelter. But then, you know, when, electricity and plumbing and Wi-Fi and entertainment streaming and comfortable furniture and all these things, this progression, this ratcheting of elevations, were never. I think that's really interesting. We're never really satisfied. We're constantly have an appetite for progressing. Very few things do we ever reach a point where we say, oh, that's good enough, this is great. Like outhouses, you know, we're not as good as indoor plumbing and having, you know, having electricity is much nicer than having to chop wood and carry water.
Dean: Yeah, well, I think the big thing is that efficiency and convenience and comfort, once you have them, no longer have any meaning.
Dan: Right. But the ratchet is, once we've reached one level, we're ratcheted in at that level of acceptance.
Dean: I mean possibly I don't know. I mean I don't know how you would measure this in relationship to everybody's after this. First of all, I don't know how you measure everybody and the big thing. I mean there are certain people who are keenly interested in this. It's more of an intellectual pleasure than it is actually. See that technology is of intellectual interest. You me, you know, you myself and everything else will be interested in talking about this, but I'm going home for a family reunion next weekend in Ohio.
I bet in the four or five hours we're together none of us talks about this because it's of no intellectual interest to anyone else. Ok, so you know but it is for us. It's a, you know, and so I was reading. I'm reading a is the observation of the interest and behavior of a very small portion of the population who have freedom and money and that.
And the era is defined by the interest of this very, very small portion, the rest of the people probably they're not doing things that would characterize the era. They're doing things that may have lasted for hundreds but it doesn't. It's not interesting to study, it's not interesting to write about, and you know, I mean we look at movies and we say, well, that's like America. No, that's like actors and producers and directors saying this is how we're going to describe America, but that's not how America actually lives.
Dan: Yeah, that's interesting, right, movies are kind of holding up a mirror to the zeitgeist, in a way, right.
Dean: Like Strategic Coast, is not a description of how the entrepreneurial world operates no, you know the yeah.
Dan: The interesting thing thinking about your thinking is is transferable across all. You know it's a durable context. That's kind of the way. That's what I look about. That's what I love about the eight prophet activators. The breakthrough DNA model is very it's a durable context. It's timeless.
Dean: Yes, I mean if the Romans had the eight prophet activators, and they did, but they just didn't know they did.
Dan: Right.
Dean: Yeah, and you go forward to the Star Wars cafe and probably the ones who are buying drinks for the whole house are the ones who know the eight prophet activators.
Dan: Secretly, secretly, secretly. Who's that?
Dean: weird. Who's that weird looking guy? I don't know if it's a guy. Who is it who you know? Well, I don't know, but buy him a drink oh my goodness, yeah, I'm.
Dan: I think this thing that is convenience. We certainly want things to get easier. I mean, when you look at, I'm just looking down no, we want some things to get easier. What things do we not want to get easier?
Dean: The things that are handled. We don't want to get easier.
Dan: Oh right exactly.
Dean: Yeah, for example, if there was a home robot, we would never buy one, because we've got things handled.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, I have no interest in having a home robot. I have no interest in having a home shop for a cook. I have no interest in everything because it's already handled and it's not worth the thinking it would take to introduce that into my, into our life I mean yeah, and it right like that. So it's.
Dan: There are certain things that we'd like to get easier okay, and we're and we're focused on that yeah, yeah, I think about that, like that's I was thinking, you know, in terms of you know the access we have through Cloudlandia is I can get anything that is from any restaurant you know delivered to my house in 22 minutes. You know, that's from the moment I have the thought, I just push the button and so, yeah, I don't have. There's no, no thinking about that. We were talking about being here in the. You know the seamlessness of you know being here at the Hazleton and of you know I love this, uh, environment, I love being right here in this footprint and the fact that you know the hotel allows you to just like, come, I can walk right in step, you know, get all the function of the shelter and the food and being in this environment without any of the concern of it, right?
No yeah, no maintenance. No, I never think about it when I leave. Yeah, it's handled. Think about that compared to when I had a house here, you know you have so much.
Yeah, that's the thing, that's a good word handled. We just want things handled. You know Our desires. We want our desires handled and our desires are not really. I think our basic desires don't really. Maybe they evolve, it's just the novelty of the things, but the actual verbs of what we're doing are not really. I think you look at, if we look at the health category, you know where you are a you know you are at the apex level of consumer of health and longevity. Consumer of health and longevity. You know all the offerings that are available in terms of you know, from the physio that you're doing to the stem cells, to the work with David Hasse, all of those things. You are certainly at the leading edge and it shows you're nationally ranked, internationally ranked, as aging backwards.
Dean: I'm on the chart. You're on the chart exactly, but I got on the chart without knowing it. It's just a function of one of the tests that I take. Somebody created sort of a ranking out of this and I was on it.
It's just part of something that I do every quarter that shows up on some sort of chart. They ask you whether you want to be listed or not, and I thought it was good for um, because your doctor is listed on it too, and I. I did it mostly because david hoss he gets credit for it, you know he does it for yeah you know, it's good. It's good for his advertising and you know his marketing and I mean it's just good for.
It's just good for his advertising and you know his marketing, I mean it's just good for his satisfaction and everything like that. But you know that's a really good thing because you know I created that. It was like two years I created a workshop called well, it's a lifetime extender, and then I changed it to age reversal future, because not a really interesting term, because it's in the future somewhere.
Right but age reversal you can actually see right now it's a more meaningful comparison number and I had hundreds of people. I had hundreds of people on that and to my knowledge nobody's done anything that we talked about which kind of proves to you, unless it's a keen interest you can have the information and you can have the knowledge. But if it isn't actually something of central motivational interest to you, the knowledge and the information just passes by. The knowledge and the information just passes.
Dan: Yeah, and I think it goes. If you have to disrupt your established habits, what do you always say? We don't want any habits except for the ones that we have already established. Right, except for the ones that are existing.
Dean: Reinforce them, yeah, reinforce them and anyway, today I'm going to have to cut off early because I have, and so in about two minutes I'm going to have to jump, but I'm seeing you tomorrow and I'm seeing you the next day. It's a banner week. It's four days in a row. We'll be in contact, so, anyway, you know what we're doing in context, so anyway you know what we're doing. We're really developing, you know, psychological, philosophical, conceptual structures here. How do you think about this stuff?
That's what I think about it a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always pleasurable.
Dan: Always, Dan, I will. I'll see you tomorrow At the party. That's right. Have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow night okay, thanks, bye.
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