Join Dean and Dan as they head into 2019 looking at Optimal Procrastination.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep055
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: And, it's Mr. Jackson if I'm not mistaken.
Dean: That's right. Listen, I just have one question today.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: Are you ever going to give me up?
Dan: No. No. I've carefully given through the checklist of all the different things that I could do to screw you, and I won't do any of them.
Dean: Oh man, that's so funny.
Dan: You know I just finished a fascinating book along those lines. The title of the book is Who Can You Trust? It's a British journalist and it's a fascinating book. She's got a thesis right at the beginning that the level of trust that humans have is actually a constant. When you read the headlines or you hear new reports of people that have completely lost trust in this. This doesn't mean that their amount of trusting has gone down, it's just that they're shifting it from one thing to another.
Dean: How interesting.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: It's really…
Dan: Go ahead.
Dean: No. I was just talking about this. I wrapped up a Breakthrough Blueprint event here in Orlando this week. One of the things we were talking about was we were going deep on the psychology of referrals and why we refer. We have this inherent desire to support and enhance our friends, our closest, our tribe, our top 150, the people that we know. That goes all the way back that there's so much of society that we really take for granted, that is built on a fabric of this baseline level of trust. In those days it was this. That's why when you study Robin Dunbar where he came up with Dunbar's Number, that most tribes had 150 plus or minus a various handful of people because that's the number that we're capable of having a, "I know you, you know me and my context in your life relationship with."
When it gets beyond that, we don't have that level of capacity to manage more than that, and it becomes a threat to the group. Because if we're wandering around back then, and you didn't know people in your midst there. You didn't know that they were one of you, that you could trust them. We look at all these things now that we take for granted this baseline level of trust. We drive in vehicles, 3000 pound vehicles driving 100 kilometers an hour down the road with an implicit trust that the person driving the other way is going to stay on the other side of that yellow line even though they're hurdling at 100 miles an hour the same way. All business relationships are based on that inherent trust, right? Credit card companies give people the ability to just show them this card, and I'll vouch for you. I'll give them the money, and you just pay me back these various interest rates.
Dan: Yeah. It's very interesting. Have you met Chris Hale?
Dean: Where would I have met him?
Dan: It would have been in the 10 Times Workshop. He's from Silicon Valley actually, but he was a financial advisor, a wealth manager who did well and has basically rendered the company to self-managing and self-multiplying status so that all of his time has been freed up. What he's created is an international platform, a global platform that's called Countable. Among its main features is that businesses all around the world are heavily evaluated on terms of their social media network. In other words who do they interact with? So that would be the various social media platforms and one of them of course is LinkedIn. They are given credit value for the power of their social media that's analyzed.
They've got analytic tools. Therefore, they will be funded money that they need and especially where they're funding transactions across global borders where they'll be given credit to actually send what they have and it's backed up. It's backed up breathing treatments Countable through a series of investors. Investors actually invest in this. Then there's a pay off for being an investor in this, but it's an interesting notion. I'll have to get her name. It's BL&S Bondsman, I think Bondsman is her last name. Bozzman or Bondsman, I'm not quite sure what the name is. But it's called Who Can You Trust? It's fascinating because she said that there's a profound shift going on where humans are taking trust away from human institutions and placing them into technological platforms. We're looking for the technological platforms that we can trust.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: I'll give you an example, is the ATMs. I've been using the ATM for as long as they've been available, at least a quarter of a century. I have always gotten the, I've never been short-changed.
Dean: Anywhere in the world.
Dan: My balance has never been wrong, so I trust. I trust the ATM system.
Dean: It's interesting, now there's news from China that as they're rolling out their social scoring so that people are in everything, taking in all the factors. As we move toward that level of transparency.
Dan: Here's what I know about the system that the Communist Party of China will run. First of all, it'll be 100% totalitarian from the moment it's put out there. It'll be 100% totally corrupt. There'll be a new medium of corruption now where you can pay programmers who are running the social credit-
Dean: To raise your score.
Dan: Yeah, to raise your score for a certain amount of money. It's just made for corruption.
Dean: Wow. Isn't that something? It's an interesting thing that when we think about... I've been thinking about all this stuff we know and all the data being compiled now and the access to it is in different silos in a lot of ways, but it's converging into one. I think it's going to be a very interesting time when we converge this with BlockChain, for instance. Everybody will have this instant and available credit to them if they're credit worthy or whatever. That there's no application process or decision process. I think it'll be an invisible marketplace for it that'll happen in background that somebody, another level of the pre-approved credit card offers that people have there. I think it's going to get to a point where preemptively people are going to offer to fund things for people to be able to calculate quickly, I want to buy this house and it can happen instantly.
Dan: The ledger, the distributed ledger automatically gives you instant verification around the world that you're credit worthy, and you are who you are. You have what you say you have, and you are who you say you are. That's what we want. We want that trust. If we're dealing halfway around the world with someone, we don't want to have it be costly to verify that the person is trustworthy. The other thing is we don't want it to be inconvenient, that it's going to take up a lot of time. It's going to require a lot of hassle for me to verify that I can trust someone who's around the world that I haven't met, I haven't seen, I haven't interacted with, but I want to be able to trust that person.
Dean: I think all that is going to happen largely invisibly behind the scenes instantly. That I can be able to say, "I want to buy this house," and instantly it would be approved behind the scenes. Who knows there's maybe a marketplace of people who are maybe bidding even or competing for the ability to take that down.
Dan: One of the chapters that this author who wrote the book, Who Can You Trust? Has, it's a whole chapter on the entire drug trade that's done entirely on the Dark Web. The Dark Web, which has been something I've just come across mainly through novels over the last two or three years. There's a whole mirror internet that is essentially for really criminal activity.
Dean: It just sounds like such a shady kind of place.
Dan: The other thing, the interesting thing she says, essentially you're buying drugs and they're illegal drugs, it's heroin, it's coke, it's in some places Marijuana. She said because it's conducted on the web, basically it's much more honest than street level illicit drug trade. She said that the Dark Web punishes very, very quickly anybody who cheats or passes of drugs to say, "This is 100%, but it's actually 50%." She said the comeback on the Dark Web is incredibly fast. The dealers do their utmost to establish trustworthiness.
Some of them have scoring systems that everybody who purchased from them can score them. I find it very, very interesting. She said it's actually one of the best uses for online buying in the world and that it's self-enforcing. Obviously there's no regulatory body that enforces honesty. She says it's a self-policing, self-trusting system. She said it's probably further ahead than most of the above board systems where you're dealing almost in pure crime, technically according to government laws, you're dealing in pure crime. That it's much more honest.
Dean: Honey, it's funny.
Dan: Than the ones that are actually legally regulated.
Dean: Honor among thieves. It's funny.
Dan: Well there's no regulator to get around, so you have to be more honest because the profits are much bigger. It's very profitable. Of course no one knows where these people live. Basically you can't track them down to find out where everything is done with cryptocurrency.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: All the payments are in cryptocurrency, but it's all delivered by the Post Office. They've learned how to ship packages in such a way that they're undetectable.
Dean: Wow.
Dan: But it's a fascinating chapter, it was just all total, just total learning on my part because I'm just very recently becoming aware of this thing called the Dark Web. Then the fact that it's probably some of the commercial breakthroughs that will end up in the honest world or the legal world are all-
Dean: The Light Web.
Dan: They're being experimented with in there. It tells you that going back to your basic awareness of the world is through your 150 relationships.
Dean: Yes, that's absolutely true. That's an interesting thing as that really now expands, that we're able to have that level of trust with people.
Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. My four by four that I put out for the Game Changer, Game Changer Group. I said this is how I want you to perform, these are the results I want you to do. This is how you can be a hero to me.
Dean: Drive me crazy.
Dan: Can really drive me crazy. It's had a noticeable impact. I noticed a real upswing in the workshop since September. I put it out in July, I've noticed a real upswing in the amount of collaboration and the amount of sharing that's gone on in all the workshops, simply because I put out a set of dos and don'ts regarding how you can best be as a participant in the Game Changer, but also what you could expect of your fellow participants.
Dean: Yes. I was talking with, who was I with? Of Nick Nanton, I was just with Nick on Friday and we were talking about what a great workshop October was. You could see the whole everything as a group even gelling. Which is great because everybody understands us.
Dan: Just kudos to Nick Nanton for everyone listening, he just won his fifth Emmy award.
Dean: It's his 11th Dan. He won six just this past weekend, bringing his total to 11 including best director of the popular Dan Sullivan Game Changer.
Dan: The Dan Sullivan Game Changer video. Yeah, we were really pleased with that. All kudos to Nick because he's-
Dean: Yes.
Dan: So he won six this time, I did not know this.
Dean: He's got 11. He was nominated for seven-
Dan: He had five before that.
Dean: Yeah, he had five before that. He was nominated for seven this time and won six of them, including for what the level of work is just going up and up, you can see that. It's so amazing. I love the way he thinks. We get together probably six or eight times a year just to have a day together and think and talk. It's good to see.
Dan: Just contemplate this Dean, what if half of your 150, I'm talking about you personally. Half of your 150 were 10 Quick Starts that were in the Game Changer program?
Dean: I know. It's true. That's the thing. That's where I really see that. A lot of them-
Dan: Well Nick is one of them.
Dean: Yeah, Nick is one of them. Joe Polish is one.
Dan: No, Joe's a nine, Joe's a nine.
Dean: Oh is he?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: How many 10 Quick Starts are there in Game Changer?
Dan: Well I had a new one start in September and I had a new one start this week. I've got four that I know of. You and Nick and Garnet Morris who went in in September and Norm Dungannon, who came in and just started on Thursday.
Dean: Wow.
Dan: That's really, really interesting. And I think it's very, very interesting that it's a place where you can surely Who, Not How, with other people who are as quick thinking as you are.
Dean: Right. Right. We should start the Q10 society.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: The Quick Start 10 society.
Dan: It's really interesting, there's instant comprehension. You have to have some brain power to go along with the... I asked Cathy Colby once, "What if you had a 10 Quick Start in her profiling system, if you're a 10 Quick Start?" But they had a really low IQ. She said you'd just have an endless series of really, really stupid ideas.
Dean: An endless series of really stupid ideas. I love it. That's funny. Well I read something really interesting today or this week Dan as a nice little transition here for us. I read an article about a study in Melbourne Australia that looked at the effect on our cognitive abilities of work, working. The optimal amount of working hours, what I'm thinking from this is engaged, doing your unique ability or that's the way I would look at it here. It seems that the optimal number is 25 hours a week of engaged time, that has a positive correlation on our cognitive ability. Working less than 25 hours, you can increase your cognitive health and abilities up to 25 hours. Then after 25 hours, it starts to have a negative effect on your cognitive abilities and this stretches well into people they say up to 80 years old. It ties in with what you were saying about retirement. That people get to 65 and they immediately shut down and there's not 25 hours of engaged time in their week to keep their cognitive abilities up. That was an interesting, I felt study, because that seems exactly what we're shooting for here.
Dan: Yeah. Well the interesting thing about that is and let's say it is true, that it's 25 hours. It might vary a little bit because it's obviously an average. It's an average, but I'll take the average and do 25. Then what you want to do is you want to increase the unique ability quality of the 25 hours.
Dean: Right. That's it.
Dan: Then the second step you want to do is you want to have more and more of your unique ability activity be about simply stating what the bigger and better goal is and then immediately finding the who, who is actually going to do all the how.
Dean: That's it. I think there's some number of that that I think that too that 25 hours really if you're doing it right from who if we're talking about a hundred times impact that that could be guiding or directing 2500 hours a week of concerted effort.
Dan: On the part of other people.
Dean: That's what I mean so you have 100 people working at that 25 hours all in the same direction, that's a 2500 hour moving in concert.
Dan: Your 25 triggers 2500?
Dean: It could. Yours does.
Dan: Yeah. A lot of this stuff, this number and also the Dunbar Number that you gave me at the beginning. This is based on people being relatively unconscious of what they're doing. In other words, you have 150 that you interact with and can go out to 150, but I think it's based on unconsciousness.
Dean: Well the interesting thing when they did it.
Dan: The same thing with this 25 hours for the most part based on a general population, the highest percentage of them are totally unconscious of what they're doing, they're just basically on the beam, off the beam, on the beam. But if they have a lucky week where they're spending 25 hours on the beam, that's the best week that they can have.
Dean: Yep, and that's interesting just to correlate with Robin Dunbar's work that when they looked at Facebook for normal people, people not like entrepreneurs or people who have an inflated number of friends, the average number of friends for real people, normal society is 153 people.
Dan: Wow.
Dean: Which is so interesting. Because the real Facebook people, real, the world on Facebook, what they've got is 150 friends, people that they know.
Dan: Yeah, and it's really interesting over the course of my podcast series with Peter Diamandis we've talked about this difference between local and global. Which is the number one political issue or it's the number one point of global tension, or human tension right now is the tension between things that are going global and things that want to stay local.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Politics is local, the economy driven by technology, Cloudlandia is really global. They have to run global. I've constantly been thinking as I hear this is that the relationships that we appreciate the most are the ones that actually happen in the mainland.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: But what we utilize is Cloudlandia capabilities to make these relationships easier to maintain, and easier to enrich, and easier to strengthen. We use Cloudlandia means to strengthen what are our favorite mainland relationships.
Dean: Yes. Yes. It's pretty amazing when we think about the implications there. I just read that now the number of people online now, just reached 3.9 billion, so that means Cloudlandia population 3.9 billion.
Dan: It's now more 50%.
Dean: Of the world.
Dan: It's definitely sounds interesting.
Dean: It's interesting in the United States, one in four people in the United States is not online. The United States has one of the highest rates of adoption of the internet.
Dan: Which does?
Dean: The United States, 76% of the United States is online. But India is the emerging one, even more than China because China of course everything is filtered. They're not really in Cloudlandia, they're in a walled off garden of Cloudlandia.
Dan: Well two things about China and India, which are actually when people go gaga about China. They're doing the same thing to China that was happening to Japan around 1980. The Japanese of course were going to control the 21st century. They're saying the same thing about China, the Chinese are going to control the 21st century. I said, "Well it's really interesting that the Chinese population actually peaked in 2013." In other words they're now dropping.
Dean: I did not know that.
Dan: And they'll start dropping quickly simply because they have the fastest aging population in the world because of their 40 years of the one child policy. What they've got is an increasingly top heavy age-wise population. Just for two statistics, projections, these are predictions, but they're using fairly standard and cautious demographic projections. Right now the United States average age if you take the entire population, and you take the average age of the US, it's around 37. I think China is slightly below that, it's about 36, but by 2050, the average age in the United States will have moved up one year from 37 to 38, but China will have moved up 15 years. The average age of the Chinese in 2050 will be 51. The second prediction is that by the year 2100, the population of the United States will be about a half a billion, and the population of China will be one billion. The US will have half the population of China.
Dean: Oh wow, China is really going to drop, huh?
Dan: They're really going to drop and that's why they're desperate. When you hear about their credit score system, a total societal surveillance. This is out of pure paranoia on the part of the Chinese leadership because they don't see the United States as their biggest enemy. The leadership of the Chinese government doesn't see the United States as their greatest enemy or any other country in the world. They see their own people as their greatest enemy.
Dean: Wow. You can't even imagine what the day-to-day life in a country like that would be. We take that so much for granted, that largely we're self-directed in every way. What we think, what we do, what we watch, what we engage in, who we associate with, where we go. All of that, you can't even imagine that every one of those things is controlled or monitored.
Dan: Yeah, and i generally have the feeling throughout my whole life, and it would be interesting. I just feel left alone to do my own thing.
Dean: Yeah. Right.
Dan: I've never had the sense that my behavior in any way was being curbed by someone else's surveillance of me.
Dean: Yes. That's true. That's true on a lot of deep levels.
Dan: And that's one of the trust factors we have of just particularly living in Canada, the US. I don't have a sense that my performance or my results are being particularly observed by anyone. There are systems like the revenue collectors and that. They do notice you at certain times of the year simply because they feel you owe them money. One thing I wanted to tell you. It was just a thought that came to me and I thought you would appreciate it. If you want to know your true income last year, ask the revenue department, they never underestimate.
Dean: Oh right. That's funny. They know. They know.
Dan: They may overestimate, but I'll tell you they never underestimate.
Dean: Oh that's so funny.
Dan: It's just a funny thing that the check up points that we have in our society. I just want to tell you a little progress-
Dean: Tell me.
Dan: In one of our previous talks I mentioned this line there's never any room for improvement, but improvement always comes. I created this into an actual exercise at the beginning of the workshop. Everybody walks into the workshop and there's a statement on the screen that says there's never any room for improvement. It's just a big statement. When I walk in, first of all I've got a lot of people that said, "What's that about? What is this thing about?" Which tells me I've done partially my job because someone noticed it. Then I start and I just click, the second line comes up, but improvement always creates more room.
Then I have this animated, what I say is, "Right now you're operating at 100% capability and there's no room for improvement. Right where you are now, you're starting the workshop, you're at 100% capability, there's no gap. You're doing 100% as well as you can and there's no room for improvement. I've added just a little bit of a humorous touch to it showing you're trying to get more room and the world is saying to you, "No, forget it. Buzz off. Get out of here." I said, "But if during the course of the day you identify four or five improvements you would like to make and spend the quarter making them, then 90 days from now you will have created more room for yourself."
Dean: Right. That's great. It was interesting because I don't think we've talked about it since, but I emailed you after we had our last get together. That's true for it seems like there's never any time.
Dan: Time or money.
Dean: Any time or money. Yeah, time for improvement, but every improvement creates more time, new time. There's never any money for improvement, but every improvement creates new money. It's true.
Dan: Yeah, and one of the things Alex Epstein was in for his workshop, you know Alex with the Moral Case For Fossil Fuels. You know him through our various connections. I was saying to him that one of the things that nobody talks about is that there's never at any time any surplus energy available in the world. We're at 100% utilization of the accessible available energy. People say, "Well what about large supplies of oil and gas that are just in tanks." I said, "It's not accessible, it's not available."
Dean: Right.
Dan: I said that. "The whole notion that you can completely cut out the main source figure out energy in the world and replace it with reliables. I said, "There will never be a minute, never be an hour when that's practically possible, because we need the energy. Every day 7.7 people all with goals of one kind or another that require more energy in the future, they don't want any cutback in any kind of energy between now and when they get to them. They won't give up their plans. They won't give up their progress for some theory about what's going to happen to the world 100 years from now."
Dean: Right, and that was it. Scott Adams has a pretty interesting YouTube channel where each morning he does a live Coffee With Scott Adams. Scott Adams the debate cartoonist.
Dan: Yeah, he's the great democrat that predicted Trump was going to win hands down in 2015. He said, "He's going to take the whole thing. He's going to knock all the competitors in his own party out like duck pins." Which actually happened. "And then he's going to win the election." It was not based on his political beliefs because even I voted. Most of my life I've voted democrat, I'm democratic. He says, "He just has a stack of persuasive talents that are just unmatchable out in the world." He proves it day-to-day.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Every day they say, "Oh now he's in trouble. Now he's going down. The end is near."
Dean: Yes. Exactly. It's so funny that he gives a play-by-play on.
Dan: Yeah, he tells you exactly-
Dean: The influence.
Dan: What he does. Tell me about this Scott thing you were talking about. I love him by the way. I listen to a podcast with him and Sam Adams, do you know Sam?
Dean: Yes, I do.
Dan: Sam Harris.
Dean: Sam Harris, yeah.
Dan: On political matters. It's just fun to see Sam Harris who prides himself on being so rational and everything just continually, increasingly lose his cool in the course of the podcast, because Scott Adams just stakes out where the middle is. You have to run around the periphery to deal with him.
Dean: Yes. He was talking this time about global warming and all the big advocates around that and why nothing will ever really be done about it in terms of, that the impact of it. They're saying by 2100 that the perhaps economic impact on GDP of global warming might be 10%, worst case scenario. He's saying if you look like that, forward the GDP of the United States in 2100, will be so big that that will largely be unnoticeable. All the main things that are going to be troublesome, we'll figure things out for. In terms of we'll figure out how to accommodate the change, like rising water levels or how to cool people more reliably. There's actually a big, I don't know whether I heard that that's one of the XPRIZE is more efficient air conditioning.
Dan: Oh yeah.
Dean: Because it's been largely the same, same technology for air conditioning since it was invented.
Dan: By Carrier, it was Carrier. It goes back a century, that air conditioning was created.
Dean: These are arguments that Alex Epstein might-
Dan: Yeah, Alex whole point is, "I don't have a love affair with fossil fuels. It isn't about fossil fuels, it's about energy that's dependable, cheap and reliable, accessible. If you can come up with a new one that checks all three boxes I'm all for it." Right now, the only one on the planet that is probably the best step for the future is nuclear.
Dean: Right. I think that there's new advances now that fusion will be at some point. I think I heard Scott Adams say that at one point. They figured out the science of it and now it's an engineering problem to figure out how to make the massive magnetized things that they need to contain it or whatever.
Dan: Yeah. The US, maybe since 1953 has been running all of its new subs and all of its new aircraft carriers since 1953 have been nuclear powered. Then they have 25 years-
Dean: Oh wow.
Dan: It goes 25 for years without a refill. They have a nuclear reactor on the subs and a couple of them on the aircraft carriers. They make all their fresh water every day simply by running sea water over the reactors to keep everything cool. They pump out more than they need in fresh water every day.
Dean: It's a miracle thing if we could figure it out.
Dan: They've had no accidents. Out of 6100 24/7 nuclear, they call them nuclear years. They've done it. Three Mile Island, which was the famous incident that really caused a stop in creating new reactors. Well there were two reactors at Three Mile Island. One of them they shut down and by the way nobody was hurt. Nobody suffered ill effects as a result of it having a problem, but the other one has been going ever since then. It's about 20,000 homes, 30,000 homes have been powered nonstop since them. I grew up near a big nuclear reactor. If you were born in Toronto you had Pickering, Pickering was a big nuclear reactor.
Dean: Right. Interesting.
Dan: Yeah, but I love Scott Adams. He's a wonderful jokester. He just have first principles that he applies to the world. He says, "One of them is persuasive skills."
Dean: Yes.
Dan: One of the most fundamental things. He said it isn't one thing, it's any number of things, but if you can stack a lot of persuasive skills on top of each other, they magnify each other.
Dean: Well I think you would like it. It's on YouTube, the channel is Coffee With Scott Adams.
Dan: Okay, I'll do that.
Dean: He does it every day. Just some kind of summary. He actually does it live from Twitter where he'll do it through Periscope. It says a thousand people join in, in the first couple of minutes. He'll have everybody join him for the simultaneous sip of coffee or whatever it is. They synchronize by taking the simultaneous sip and that's the symbolic start of the show.
Dan: In Cloudlandia we're all that. I've been doing Facebook Live every month or so I do a Facebook Live where one of my team members interviews me. They have to write me a impact cover to launch the project. I say, "It's good." We've been for the first seven I think we did we got around seven or 8000 downloads. We hired a new person on our social media team. She came in and she said, "You know, there's a little trick you can pull with these." The first one we did we went from let's say 8000 was our best previous number. With this one we went to 38,000. She said you just slipped Facebook $200 and you can multiply your results.
Dean: They boost it. Isn't that amazing.
Dan: It tells me how the world is actually works. I thought I'd try this one on you. There are two, maybe I tried this out last time. I said there are two types of knowledge on the planet. One of them is called inside knowledge, the other one is called worthless knowledge.
Dean: Oh right. Inside knowledge and worthless knowledge, yes.
Dan: Yeah, and everything I've seen that really works on the planet is because certain people have inside knowledge that is really, really useful and all other knowledge in that particular area is worthless now because it doesn't produce the results. Government absolutely depends for its longevity on worthless knowledge because you can have lots of meetings.
Dean: You sure can and I think that worthless knowledge, it's an interesting take because I've been really these last few weeks really paying attention to my level of connectedness to Cloudlandia, to the internet, to my phone. I've been experimenting with tapering times. I wanted to ask you about and I know are you still would you say about two hours a day online?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: What's a Cloudlandia day in the life for you?
Dan: Well.
Dean: Are you on usually at the same time?
Dan: Yeah, well it starts in the morning. I get up, and I get an energy drink before I start my exercise routine. I've got supplements I take, so I get them out of the way first thing in the morning. There's about a 15 minute period where I'll just check on, and I've got sites that I go to, and my main one is called RealClearPolitics. I go there, and it's what are they called?
Dean: Aggregate.
Dan: They're a big aggregator out of Chicago. What they do is they have, they just check out the previous 24 hours of headlines and articles of all the media, probably three or four, probably about 500 publications in the world. They just pick the ones that they think their readers will be interested in for that day. Then they have a main one, which is called RealClearPolitics and they have about eight other channels if you will. One on markets, so it's just economic news. They have one on policy, which is basically not the events of politics, but the lines of thinking in politics. They have health, they have science, they have history, they have books. They have one on cyber now, it's just cyber, it deserves its own channel and sports. Each of them is an aggregator in its own right.
Now the RealClearPolitics probably, politics, policy, and markets and world, they have the first four are 24 hour cycles. The other ones are probably two to three day cycles. The readership, they're really even handed. I was looking at it this morning. I would say in RealClearPolitics and it's US politics that they're talking about there. They probably had 20 articles listed the last 24 hours. I would say they were about half and half. They would favor the left or favor the right. Then they have a little scorecard, scoreboard of most read articles over the last 24 hours. It's very clear that its readership is republican, conservative republican.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: Who is doing the reading here is mostly the republicans, someone who would be on the conservative side would be the readership.
Dean: Right.
Dan: But it's very interesting, a publication like the New York Times, which is arguable the number one most prestigious newspaper in the world. They have to fight, they have to take a ticket and stand in line to get one of their articles on RealClearPolitics.
Dean: Wow. You do that for about 15 minutes?
Dan: I'll do that, and I'll download, I won't read the article, I'll click on it and I'll get the first paragraph. Then if I just bookmark it for later that day. I'll get an early swipe and then I go to Breitbart, which is a big conservative platform. I have a whole series of platforms. There's one called American Thinker, which is more weighty type of essays and articles. I check the sports news. That's it then. Then during the day when I've gotten my five engaged hours in. I get a little weary. In the afternoon I can't do much creative work after, because I usually get up around 4 or 4:30. Then around 3:00 Babs is finishing up with stuff, I'll go on for an hour and just read what I bookmarked that morning. Then there's links from one thing to another. Oftentimes if it's a really good article, they'll pull up other articles to support it so you go into this network of articles.
Dean: In the café while Babs finishing up at the office.
Dan: Yep, in my café to do it. If you watched and measured me for seven days it would probably come out to 14, 15 hours that I do this a week. I never see myself changing, that's an enjoyable activity.
Dean: Right. Right.
Dan: I'm not really looking for anything in particular. I'm really looking for things I didn't know before or I wasn't aware. I can't have an algorithm that finds me articles that I'm looking for because that's exactly what I am not looking for.
Dean: Right. Yes. Exactly. Yes, you want to go discover it. That's exactly right.
Dan: I want articles that catch me by surprise. "like, "I didn't know that. Gee, I haven't seen that." Like the article that you just talked to me about I'd be fascinated with, the Australian article.
Dean: Yeah, I'll forward it to you.
Dan: You owe me one.
Dean: It's in Inc. Magazine.
Dan: Okay. That's a great one.
Dean: That's the thing. No, you're not keeping up with the Kardashians or anything. Not going to TeenBeat.com or anything?
Dan: No, I don't. I pick up things on social. Culture, there's a interesting comment by somebody and I forget who actually said it, but he said that culture is now upstream from politics. In other words politics is now actually if you look at the political world it's caught between two things. It's caught between culture and it's caught on the one side it's caught between popular culture and the other side it's caught on exponential technology. Exponential technology and popular culture is a simultaneous loop because the power of popular culture has really been a product of exponential technology.
Dean: Well our access that it truly is now, I think I saw an interview with Michael Ovitz, the guy from Disney. It was really interesting contrasting 20 years ago and beyond going backwards he was really one of the most powerful people ever in shaping what we actually saw as a society because he controlled the outlets in terms of the Disney movies and the NBC or whatever, is it ABC or NBC that Disney owns. You look at all of that every popular show that got on television, every newscasts, all of that stuff, he was really shaping that. It was a much more rigid, very few outlets, beacons that we had to actually get access to things.
You think about why all these powerful people wanted to own media, own the newspaper and own television stations. They were the beacon to the world kind of thing, what's going on in your world locally. Then now with the internet this is where truly popular culture is really reflective of what is popular culture because it's become more of a meritocracy in a way where everything that is truly popular rises to the top.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Without any blocks or any gatekeepers to get there. Now it's come around, it's almost like you said, it's where that puts politics secondary to popular culture and stuff because-
Dan: I think part of the reason going back to the Trump thing, Trump was deeply involved with popular culture first of all because he ran casinos and casinos really, really have to have their ear to the ground about what the people who come in and play the slot machines and everything want and the shows and everything like that. The other thing is he had one of the most successful reality TV programs in history, 15 years. He was right at the top. I think that he's got a tremendous ear for what's happening in popular culture. The other things he had, he owned wrestling for a while. The wrestling thing and wrestling is one of the most enjoyable phony fake activities on the planet. He understood that it wasn't about sports, it was about entertainment.
Dean: Exactly.
Dan: What he's done is he's taken his side... It's like you go up against someone else, and the democrats have to sort this out over the next two years, "Who are we going to put up against him, who has an ability to make himself look really entertaining and make you look boring for roughly 18 months coming up to an election."
Dean: Yes.
Dan: He isn't going to destroy you in political debate, he's just going to make you look really boring by comparison.
Dean: Low energy.
Dan: Low energy.
Dean: So, it's so dismissive in a way.
Dan: That's an understanding of popular culture, popular culture is based on what's entertaining, it's not based on whether it's philosophically logical or rational it's based on whether it's actually entertaining. People say, "What a terrible world that that is." I said, "Is there some other world somewhere else?"
Dean: Well there may be, we don't know. That's right.
Dan: Mars. I heard the first wind. Did you hear the sounds of the wind from Mars?
Dean: No, I did not.
Dan: I know NASA landed.
Dean: I saw the news of the wind, but I have not actually heard the wind.
Dan: Yeah, NASA just landed, and they have about 30 seconds, you can listen to it and listen to the wind. It's wind and everything else, but we've never heard a sound from outer space. This is the first time we've actually heard a sound from outer space. It was kind of neat.
Dean: Wow. Amazing.
Dan: What a crooked path we walked today.
Dean: We really did. I was just looking at the clock here and realizing yes, we have walked a very circuitous journey today.
Dan: It sure is.
Dean: But delightful in its surprises.
Dan: Summing up the year, we'll have at least one next week.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Next Sunday. I was just wondering if you had to go January to December on three things just period you've really taken a jump in terms of improvement and more room for yourself or would you say they are?
Dean: Well certainly this idea of having my thousand who'd up hours as investible hours. Which and I'll tell you next time what I've been doing, how I'm allocating those. This whole idea of really thinking about it like that. I didn't understand something, I just have gotten it in the last few months since we've been having this conversation about what that actually means and to allow myself to be a catalyst. I really think when I look back at the things that have been the biggest impact that I've been able to have, have been through even more than the impact that I've been able to have individually, have been impacts that I've had in collaboration with other people and that often when my contribution in a lot of ways on the surface seems simple. But because it's such a contextual bedrock to something, that everything else that comes from that then is a multiplier. I'm really learning more and more about myself and embracing that.
That's still a process that even for the last couple of months of the year, I've really taken some time, and I'm in the middle of that process right now to really evaluate a lot of these things on my life here and see where I'm going to point that and embrace it. Give myself the freedom of not having to feel like I need to scale something internally or on my own or something like that. I can have a bigger impact in collaboration. Really looking at what that actually means and how to find those opportunities.
Dan: Yeah, I think you covered three things in one statement. That was good. Mine is definitely the impact of the phrase that you came on the podcast once and said, "I've discovered that all the cause of my procrastination is where I try to do a how that some other who should actually be doing." That created the Who, Not How and we sent you the new books, did you enjoy it?
Dean: I love it yes. It's so great. It's so great.
Dan: That really transformed our program, it's transforming our organization. It's allowed us to go back and completely re-contextualize every other concept we have in the program, it's been phenomenal. The start of the Game Changer program has been huge. I've said this in a number of situations. The learning curve that I feel I'm on since the Game Changer started is the fastest that I can remember since I learned how to read when I was six years old. My mother told me that school wasn't important, but reading really was because if you could read you could go anywhere you wanted with your brain. What this is reading 2.0 for me, Game Changer because I'm now able to profit by where other people's brains are going in terms of the collaborative projects and enterprises that they're creating. I feel enormously stretched just by being in the workshop and listening to all the different ways that people are collaborating.
Dean: Yes, and that's another thing. You're right, just the synergy in the group. I think everybody is having that same realization. Nick and I were talking, even in conversations outside of the workshops that we're having, this idea of Who, Not How has really been embraced by everybody in terms of it's the way that we're thinking now is that we need a who for that. We need whos. So good. I'm just so excited. That's an example of a contextual construct that has a great thing, much like this before during and after that I've based all of my stuff on, the units. So good, I can't wait to see how it all takes off.
Dan: All right. That was a terrific use of six Jacksons.
Dean: Thank you. That's perfect. I love it, it really was.
Dan: It's funny, but some of the best Jacksons I ever spend are with Dean Jackson.
Dean: That's so great. I love it, so funny. Well you have a great week.
Dan: We'll chat next week.
Dean: I'll talk to you. Yeah, perfect. Thanks Dan.
Dan: All right. Okay, bye.