Join Dean and Dan as they talk about the durability of procrastination.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep073
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: There you are.
Dean: Here I am.
Dan: Yeah, we had a bit of a Cloudlandia mix-up.
Dean: Well, nevertheless, I'm excited about "Here we are."
Dan: Here we are, and I'm in the cottage country. Dean, have you ever had conversations with Americans about cottage country in Ontario and how vast it is? I mean, it's hard for a lot of people to grasp.
Dean: Here, of course, people have beach houses, I mean, stuff like that, but it's a different experience than the cottage. My first few cottage experiences were with friends in cottages that were boat access only, which is a different even experience.
Dan: We have two lakes just north of us where there's actually islands in the lakes and people's cottages, they go right around the island. In order to get to these cottages, you have to take a boat. You can't drive to any of them. You drive to a landing, to a marina, and then there's boating over. That's just a regular thing. They'll do this five, six, seven times a year for weekends or for longer stays.
We're in 11 days, this one with us right now, we're in 11 days. Ours used to be an island, but they put a causeway in, I don't know, 20-30, maybe even longer, maybe about 40 years ago. There's actually a roadway across to an island, but there's about 15-20 cottages and we're in one of them.
Dean: Well, there you go. How was the week of solitude?
Dan: It was great, it was great. This is our third trip this summer, end of June, end of July, and now 11 days so they total just short of four weeks total. We've had, with the exception of two intermittently rainy days, the rest of it's just been bright sunshine. It's just been superb weather. Today at 75-76 and I'm using American code there. I'm talking in Fahrenheit.
Dean: I like that.
Dan: Here's a question, did you ever switch over?
Dean: Well, here's what I did. Here's what I did is, I gave up on trying to convert because what I just decided was, all I need to know is that the ideal temperature for me is outdoor temperature with sun, 25 degrees. I would prefer each degree less than that to be rather than more than that. I would prefer it to be 15 over 35. I know that somewhere in that range of 18 to 23 is the sweet spot for a guy like me. That's all I need to know. I don't need to convert anymore. I think that's where everybody gets in trouble, is let's just adopt it.
Dan: Well, it's really interesting because I had moved to Canada in 1971 and I think it was right around then that they switched over to-
Dean: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I remember I was in first grade when we made the switch to the metric system, as was everybody else in my generation, right? My age and up, we grew up with the switch to the metric, but they were teaching it and teaching it with conversions. They were teaching centimeters as they relate to inches and kilometers as they relate to miles per hour. Everything was about this confusing learning to do the math of the conversion rather than learning-
Dan: You were learning Esperanto actually.
Dean: I think that's absolutely true. When you have a better, superior. When you look at it, the metric system is clearly easier and completely understandable. Why do we need to know that a meter is about three feet? Let's just learn what a meter is, and then know that this is two meters. Why do we need to convert everything?
Dan: You're voicing an opinion, of course, of someone from a younger generation here, because God, there's something fundamentally grounding. I think metric is a halfway house on the way between the mainland and Cloudlandia.
Dean: I think you're right.
Dan: I think it's the language that the bartenders speak at the Star Trek café, which is halfway between the mainland and… I think they order drinks in metric and it doesn't really matter because everyone's going to get inebriated one way or the other, so it doesn't really matter whether it's a pint or it's a liter.
Dean: Yeah, milliliters.
Dan: Anyway, back to the cottage country, I was doing some Google research and one thing that I already knew is that Canada as a country, we're talking just one country on the planet, either contains or borders on half the fresh water in the world. If you think of all the fresh water in the world, Canada as a country either contains, so it has self-contained fresh water lakes, or it borders them, and that would be the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes with the United States.
That's half the fresh water on the planet with one country, but the province of Ontario, for those who are not familiar with Canada, we call them provinces, so there's 10 of them, and Ontario and Quebec are the two biggest ones. I think Quebec's the bigger than Ontario, but Ontario has 250,000, that's a quarter million, fresh water lakes. That's half the fresh water lakes on the planet, this one province that we're in.
Of course most Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border, so they don't really actually experience these lakes. It's left over from melting glaciers. I suspect that's where the water, because it's not salt water, it's fresh water. It's quite spectacular just how many lakes there are up here. I know northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, that they have lakes and everything, but it's nothing to compare with just the proliferation of lakes here.
It is beautiful territory, too. It's called the Canadian Shield and right up front of our cottage we have a slanting cliff, granite. All of it is granite, total granite and it goes right down. It's 40 feet from where we have sort of a patio out front and then it's a slanting 40 feet of granite that goes and it just keeps going down because when it gets down to the bottom of the lake it's 200 feet down.
I was reading about this rock. This is the oldest exposed rock in the world, not our particular rock but just this whole rock formation, which is called the Canadian Shield. This rock has been exposed for 4.5 million years, this is the oldest. The Himalayas are very, very young compared to this rock right here. There you go, I mean, I'm just filling in, it's a Sunday.
Dean: The more you know.
Dan: The more you know, I mean, why do I know these things? This is the big question.
Dean: You are eternally curious.
Dan: Yes, I think that's very, very true. When did you discover that about yourself, this curiosity?
Dean: That I was curious?
Dan: You are a curious person.
Dean: I am, absolutely I am.
Dan: I've often said that, I've heard people say that, "Dean Jackson's very curious person." I said, "How do you mean that?"
Dean: You mean curious peculiar or curious inquisitive?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yes, and yes to both is probably the right answer. I remember one of my greatest, earliest memories is I had a "I Want to Know" set of encyclopedias, junior, kids' encyclopedias. These were illustrated, kind of simple things. I remember I would just sit and read these. I felt very studious. That goes all the way back to first grade as I'm learning to read. I remember being very curious about these things.
I remember at one point in maybe third grade or so, I was fascinated by auto engines. I found these big books that had the drawings of the way engines worked and stuff. I remember checking these books out of the library and looking at just the illustrations of the cutaways of how combustion engines. Even though I'm not at all mechanical inclined, I just remember that was something that was really interesting to me.
Biographies, when I was young there was a series of illustrated biographies. They were all about popular people. Pelé was one of them, the great soccer player. Elton John was one of them, but they were almost like children's books, because I was in second grade or whatever, but they were illustrated kids' books that taught you about these people, so I've always been curious like that.
Dan: Yeah, well, mine was different. Mine was historical, but the same starting point. We had the Britannica, the actual adult Britannica.
Dean: We didn't get that
Dan: Also, we were about two miles away from one of the Carnegie libraries, small town but it had this beautiful library with a reference room. I remember they'd go for shopping trips into this small town to pick up stuff. There'd be an hour or so and I would go toddle over at six and seven years old to the reference library. They had all sorts of encyclopedias, Collier's and Macmillan.
They had these and I would check to see, but the Britannica was clearly the more authoritative one. One of the things that really fascinated me was to read about a historical period that say had happened, I was born in the '40s, that had happened in the early part of the century, and then actually meet someone who had been a child from that age and was 40-50 years older than I was. Then I would ask them if they remembered the incident that I'd read about in the book.
I got this crossover between how things are written by people who weren't there. In other words, these are historians who are looking back and they're collecting maybe newspaper articles or reports at that time and they're putting together a picture. Then you meet someone who was actually there during the times and I just noticed this enormous difference between how people actually experienced these things and how they were talked about in day-to-day life, and those who, looking back from a distance, actually described them.
There was this tremendous difference. One is that when people are going through important things, they don't think that they're important. Hello, are you there?
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Here we are. What I'm saying is that when people are actually living through important times, they're not really aware that they're really important times. That's a description and a title that's put on later. It's like the '60s. I remember growing up through the '60s. I mean, there was a lot going on but you didn't have any sense that there was an enormous importance to any of this stuff.
Dean: That is something, when you look back on times. I remember looking back that when the Berlin Wall came down, 1989.
Dan: November of '89.
Dean: It was on the news and it was something that was happening, but I actually had a couple of friends from college who went over there and were there and experienced. Now they've got a piece of the Berlin Wall and the story of being there as the Wall's coming down. I'm looking right now at what's happening in Hong Kong as all these protests are going on where we kind of have this sense of distance for things.
We have a window on everything in terms of watching it unfold through Twitter and Instagram and social media and YouTube and all these things. All we saw in 1989 was what we saw on the news or in magazines, right? There was no sense of the real-time thing of seeing protesters cut down these... I don't know how in touch you've been with what's going on over the last week, but the latest thing now is there's all the protesters cutting down all the facial recognition towers, because they have cameras that are everywhere.
Dan: Well, they've already run into a problem. People are trying to leave by airline from Hong Kong and they're being refused because their social credit score prohibits them from actually traveling by air cross country.
Dean: Meanwhile, it's dinging their social credit, just watching them on video.
Dan: I think that the Chinese government is really between a rock and a hard place here. Part of the reason is just the thing that you pointed to, is that when they did this in Tiananmen Square, this was 1989.
Dean: One image.
Dan: Well, first of all you never really saw the massacres that actually went on and they estimated maybe anywhere between five and 10,000 people who were ultimately killed there. First of all, it was way in the north, because Beijing sits way, way north of Hong Kong. Hong Kong's in the tropics. Beijing is up just a little bit south of Korea. Manchuria, Mangolia, it's a northern city, but the other thing is, they didn't have witnesses.
In 1989 the Chinese could control totally what got videoed and what didn't get videoed. Now, with a population of 2.5 million people, each who have a cell phone and are talking to each other and they're sending images out and everything else, is that you can't pull that type of political stuff, that real, hard-fisted, stomping down on protest. You can't do that today and get away with it the way you could 30 years ago.
It's very, very interesting and it's witnesses. The big thing is, it's witnesses. I was talking to someone. They said about Toronto, the city of Toronto. I said, "The most momentous thing happened in Toronto." Probably, you might remember it, it was the last mayor of the actual city of Toronto because Toronto is now a big, amalgamated government now. The GTA is now an amalgum. Mayor Tory is now the mayor of a much bigger, bigger section of land than the mayor in, I think it was in the '90s. Barbara Hall I think her name was, Barbara Hall.
Dean: How far-reaching is it now, the boundary?
Dan: Well, first of all, you used to have a mayor of Leaside. You had a mayor of North York, you had a mayor of Scarborough, you had all these. Well, that's all part of the city of Toronto now. The thing about it was that, I remember, and this is just the city of Toronto, so it's basically downtown Toronto that was the city. This mayor brought through a zoning law, which I think utterly changed the city of Toronto.
She said that in any area you can have mixed use. You can have residential, you can have retail, you can have commercial, you can have corporate. Then any building can have all four of those. You could have a hotel, you could have condos, you could have stores, you could have a mall and it can all be contained. That just utterly changed the city because what it meant is that you didn't have separate use sections of the city.
Probably the most resistant to that in downtown Toronto right now is Bay Street. I mean, if you think of Bay Street, the financial district is still mainly corporate, mainly corporate buildings. At night time it's kind of empty. I'm noticing as time goes on that some of what used to be corporate office buildings have been turned into condos, right in the downtown area. Now, where before you had floors and floors, some corporations would have three or four floors, on those same floors now you might have 20 condo units multiplied by two maybe.
You have 30, 40, 50, 60 people living there. Then there are restaurants down on the street because they have to eat somewhere. Then there's stores and everything else. What it means is that at night time in downtown Toronto there's just lots and lots of people around watching things and the crime rate's very low because there's so many witnesses. I don't know if you've noticed this but thieves tend to plan their activities in such a way that there aren't any witnesses.
Dean: Then you have witnesses. It's much more successful. You don't want a primary witness. If you're actually robbing the witness, yeah.
Dan: I mean, if you go to the very basic, level one handbook for thieves, it spells it out right there. Your best bet is having a successful future as a thief.
Dean: That's why everybody's so shocked when they see it happen in broad daylight. All of your thievery, all the good thievery happens under cover of darkness.
Dan: What I'm going back to is your discussion on the difference between Hong Kong in 1989 and Berlin Wall, or the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Hong Kong in 2019, that there's just no ends of witnesses, where even that event, the reporting on it was still controlled by large media organizations or by the government in a communist country.
I think that it's just showing the difference to the Chinese that they're getting into the world that's not controlled by the Communist Party as much it is in other areas of the country, where they can control what goes on and they can control and hear. If they bring the tanks in, immediately what makes Hong Kong a valuable city switches in about two weeks to Singapore. There's enormous flight capital. Singapore is just sitting there waiting for the Chinese government to ruin Hong Kong, because Singapore would then be the main center.
Again, it's Chinese. I mean, Singapore is mainly made up of Chinese people, very interesting. I mean, that's a real thing, a difference of relationship you and I are experiencing, the shifting relationship between Cloudlandia and the mainland.
Dean: Yeah, you've got your lens. That's what's really amazing is your lens into the mainland from Cloudlandia. You tap into and you've got this portal that you can really be transported anywhere that we can witness. I mean, I'm sure there are people who are live-streaming lots of different perspectives of what's going on.
Dan: I mean, they're giving first-hand, on-the-street reports that used to be restricted to approved reporters or reporters taking a risk. Here they're not really taking a risk because everybody's doing it. Two of my main artists, husband and wife, are from Hong Kong. I chat with them and they said, "Yeah." I mean, they're watching and they've walked the streets where this is happening, so it's an interesting perspective.
Dean: I think about CNN was kind of just the only game in town really for that 24-hour news in that period in the '90s, when the Berlin Wall was going on. Dan, I don't know if you're ever going to reinstate your television situation, but I just watched a series on the loudest voice in the room, I think it was called, which is the telling of the Roger Ailes story, how they built Fox News from the beginning.
Russell Crowe plays Roger Ailes in it and literally disappears into the role through prosthetics and make-up. He looks exactly like Roger Ailes, just all the extra weight, full-body padding, prosthetics, everything about him, and he did a stellar job. It was an amazing story, too.
Dan: I mean, the thing is now, and of course it was the Murdoch family, I think, that owns Fox, really, isn't it?
Dean: Yes, that's right.
Dan: Murdoch?
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: Elder Murdoch, I don't know, is he dead now? Rupert?
Dean: No, he's still kicking.
Dan: Yeah, he's 90-ish or something like that. Anyway he was a real hard-nosed entrepreneur, but his children are very squishy and his children now run Fox. I'm noticing squishy in the sense that he hewed his whole career and Fox came very late in his career. He's this big media guy in Britain and Australia originally, Australian originally and then went to the UK. I think he created sort of independent television against the BBC in England and everything like that. The thing is, they themselves are now being surpassed by the internet channels.
The real story on the internet is really Breitbart. Breitbart is like what Fox was 20 years ago. Breitbart is the independent voice. They've got such a hold that they can't be shut down by Google. Google would love to shut down Breitbart, but they can't because it's just got too big of an audience. I think that as Fox has lost its political identity, which was basically certainly right of center, I think people have switched over first of all to a different source, but the source isn't another cable channel, it's actually an internet platform.
Dean: I think that's really where you can get exactly the flavor or whatever you're looking for, but you realize, too, that the internet has really opened up the whole opportunity for you to be Breitbart. There's nothing stopping you from picking your lane. I mean, every category has examples of that. There's a big company called Barstool Media, where they've taken over kind of the sports world of that. They're like an independent sports network with both podcasts and video.
It's all the content, building an audience like that. Whatever your lens is, it's part of this thing, Dan, of coming into Cloudlandia. Your citizenship in Cloudlandia gives you a radio station, a free press and a television station, and free distribution of free mail, basically with email to be able to reach them, and a one-to-one connection to five billion people.
Dan: We're into our fourth year now with The Joy of Procrastination. I mean, it's really flown by because it was July of 2016.
Dean: Is it really four years, Dan?
Dan: No, we're into our fourth year.
Dean: Oh, I see what you're saying. Next year-
Dan: We'll be into our fourth.
Dean: I see, okay, three and a bit.
Dan: Yeah, we're into our fourth year, but think about the speed with which it started. It started at a conversation on a Saturday over lunch and by Sunday virtually 24 hours later it was a podcast reality.
Dean: I think when we look back at this particular moment in time, right now, if we take a snapshot of 2019 as we're just about to head into 2020, I think as we enter into the '20s right now, I think you can't even find the right words for it, monumental set of circumstances that we find ourselves in right now with the fully-matured internet as it is, right? There's more smartphones than people, there's more bandwidth than we need. There's nothing stopping anybody from being Breitbart. You know what? One of the things I did want to-
Dan: Well, yeah, I mean, the one thing I've created with my podcast manager, Gord Vickman, we've created one called Podcast Power because we're getting lots and lots of inquiries from Strategic Coach clients because they listen to our podcast, and they say, "Well, how do you actually get started with that?" I said, "Well, first of all, you got to feel you have something to say, number one. Number two is that you have to have an audience that you know that will probably engage with what you're talking about."
I said, "Then you learn as you go that you get feedback continually. People are feeding back to you and say, 'Boy, I really like that. Hey, could you talk about this and that,' so you're in a relationship." My audience tends to show up once a quarter and they give me reports. The thing is that I want to bring up a topic here because there's a word, which I think no longer applies to any kind of reality that I experience, but I had this reality when I was growing up, but there is no reality.
It's called systems, systems, okay? I'll give you an example. There's the educational system. I grew up in an educational system. I grew up in sort of a hospital system and I grew up in a national newspaper system, a national radio system, national television system and everything else. We look at today and everything seems confusing because things aren't organized into systems like they were at an earlier time in our life.
They kind of crave this. "Well, where is the system here? Who's in charge?" I said, "Yeah, well, that's kind of quaint. There isn't anybody actually in charge." I think that it's the cause of the tremendous amount of anxiety right now, the feeling that "Well, you're in charge." I mean, we're in charge basically. We had an idea and you had the means to immediately trigger it because you had already created the podcast. Tell everybody again how they can get to this, because I think it's useful, because a lot of people really don't know how they can start a podcast just by going to a platform.
Dean: We are multi-platform now. It's just arrived in the app store now. We have a service called dialtalkdone.com.
Dan: Dialtalkdone.
Dean: Dialtalkdone, and we have an app now for solo podcasts. There's really three ways. I think podcasting is going to be an amazing thing because you're keeping and building a living thing, an asset. I think there's a lot of value in that content. I just saw, I don't know if you've seen the news right now, but the contract for the digital rights to distribute replays of Seinfeld online was with Hulu.
The contract with Hulu is up at the end of 2019, and the estimates of the bids to have those rights going forward for the next five years are at $500 million for maybe Netflix or Amazon. Somebody's going to have those rights for a show that they built, content that they built and recorded, captured, for nine years, 180 episodes or 200 episodes they did total. It's been worth billions of dollars.
Dan: The interesting thing about it is that they're kind of timeless because they were designed not to have any meaning.
Dean: Right, not about anything, that's exactly right.
Dan: I mean, it was nine years. That's a new definition of timeless that at the time it has no meaning in the moment. There's no meaning in the moment. I mean, it's amazing stuff, and it's kind of funny because Jerry Seinfeld himself seems to be almost the person least impressed by what the accomplishment was.
Dean: I think you're right, absolutely.
Dan: Everybody else has tried to hook their career to it. Julia Dreyfus, I think she's probably been the most successful, but everybody else, nobody else really got a big career bump out of it once they were finished with Seinfeld.
Dean: Yeah, a little known fact, I didn't realize that Julia's father is a billionaire.
Dan: The Dreyfus family, I mean, Dreyfus Funds, I mean, they've been giants for 100 years in New York, the Dreyfus Funds, and Europe before that I think, yeah.
Dean: Europe, that's where it first started, yeah, her grandfather or whatever, I guess, but anyway, that's neither here nor there, but people starting a podcast that it lives, and you have this thing where you're joining a conversation, or anybody in the future can join a conversation and catch up very quickly. It allows you to condense the amount of time that it takes for somebody to know that they're one of you, that you're one of them, that they're in your tribe.
Dan: You know something? Can I tell you where I think that I certainly had this at a much younger age and experience with this, and I don't know if it came over to your particular generation, but it was The Little Rascals.
Dean: Yeah, I remember The Little Rascals, yeah.
Dan: The Little Rascals were done as soon as you had sound movies in the... Well, it's basically the late '30s and through the '40s. They got replayed when television came in because these were movie serials that were done on Saturday afternoons. You went to the local movie house, 15 minutes to half hour episodes of The Little Rascals. I remember when they came on it was so exciting. This would be in the '50s when they got the rights to replay them.
I think that there's sort of a similar situation of going from where movies were something that you went to a place on Saturday and you watched them. Then you had this thing where you could just watch them on TV, I mean, still at a restricted hour, at a timed hour. Then now you had Seinfeld, which occurred at a particular hour on cable TV or certainly network TV, and then now, it's available whenever you want to watch it on the internet.
It's interesting but I remember talking about the characters. You were talking about them like they were eight or nine years old but by that time they were in their twenties and thirties, the actual actors.
Dean: The actual people. I remember it was funny, of all the things to talk about is The Little Rascals to come up. I don't know whether I was recording the podcast or whether I was just talking with somebody about looking back. We're talking about in the '70s, what was happening in 1976. We were talking about some TV show that was on there, which is 40 years ago now, right?
Dan: 43, 43 years now.
Dean: I think we were talking about looking back, we're looking back on it now with fondness on whatever it was we were talking about in the '70s, 1976 or 1980, I think it's in that range. Then looking backwards the same amount of time, if we were there looking back from 1980 backwards, or 1970s, that '76 to '79 backwards, that would have put you smack in the middle of the '30s within The Little Rascals' time, that's what we were talking about.
Dan: The Little Rascals, yeah.
Dean: They're captured forever.
Dan: Well, here's the thing that a conversation about Seinfeld today, that's really not part of my experience. I went and I checked it out and everything else, but I mean, it really wasn't part of my experience going through the Seinfeld series, but I would say that conversations about Seinfeld among people now who are seeing the whole series, are going through it again, is much more meaningful than conversations were about Seinfeld.
Dean: Kids now, who are watching it, college kids now, who are binging or catching up or watching Seinfeld on reruns, these are all things that were happening before they were even born. For me, same with Gilligan's Island, and same with Andy Griffith, those kinds of things. All that to say that recording these things, the conversation that Joe Polish and I had when we first started I Love Marketing, was to document the conversations that we were having.
Think about 100 years from now, and I say that not to compare ourselves to Claude Hopkins or Albert Lasker or the great advertising people in the teens and '20s, but imagine 100 years from now that somebody uncovers these conversations between contemporary marketers in the 2000s here. Exactly, you start to think now how fascinated we would be right now if Albert Lasker and Claude Hopkins had gotten together and recorded a podcast every week about what they were doing and what was working and what was going on. I would just consume every minute of that.
Dan: I mean, the really smart people are smart relative to the time that things are taking place. I've been playing with this concept of advantage and I was at a party last night. It got into, well, that fossil fuel's days are numbered. I said, "Well, that's been true for my entire life, that fossil fuels' days, that they're numbered." I said, "Here's the thing about it."
They said, "Well, it's very, very clearly that earth would be better off if we were totally on solar power." I said, "Well, probably solar power has an absolute advantage over fossil fuels, but during any next 90 days, fossil fuels always has a relative advantage over solar energy." In other words, would you willingly over the next 90 days stop your dependence 100% on fossil fuels and switch over to solar for the next 90 days? In other words, everything you did you're going to say, "Well, I know it's got the absolute advantage so I'm going to switch over right now."
He said, "Wait a minute, you got to get around to get things.” The thing is that the amount of ingenuity and new technology going into the capture of fossil fuels is actually greater than the amount of ingenuity and investment going into solar. The thing that I'm seeing here, and this is for another discussion, but I think it's very, very important as it relates to our procrastination.
I think we procrastinate because we feel that if we just wait for the absolute solution to come along, it will be better than the relative solution that we might be contemplating doing today or tomorrow, and therefore we procrastinate. The fact is, the absolute never comes. All we get is choice that we have to make. It's kind of like, would you switch over to electric cars? Babs has an electric car.
Dean: Yes, on my way, I'm waiting.
Dan: You have one? You have one and people say, "Well, everybody should switch over to them." I said, "Yeah, but it wouldn't make sense for everybody to do it because the relative advantage of the electric car for them, they don't have a garage where they have a charger. They live some place where they don't have a charger whereas there's a gas station around the corner, they can go around and get gas."
Anyway, I'm just playing with an idea here, to talk to you about it, that the mainland reality is really based on relative advantage, it's not based on absolute advantage. Cloudlandia dreams about absolute advantage, when things like this can happen just like this, but in fact we live our lives by making choices on relative advantage, not absolute advantage. Does that make sense?
Dean: No, it really does. I think what you've hit onto in this labor of procrastination there is people waiting for the absolute advantage, or the absolute win. Well, it's a really interesting thing, the anticipation of something declining, or the anticipation of something. I look at a couple of different versions of this. I can say I experience a form of procrastination that on review here was costly to the tune of probably millions of dollars, in that when I met Homer McDonald in 1998, the gentleman that I wrote, Stop Your Divorce!
Dan: The divorce book, yeah.
Dean: Yes, Homer McDonald was 76 years old when I met him. He was a different 76 than you're going to be in less than a year here, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: In the back of my mind, as I was kind of thinking about this, was thinking I don't know whether I want to go full on into something here with someone who's 76 years old. Now keep in mind, I was 32 years old at the time, right, so even my perspective on time and stuff has changed. I was really only less than 10 years into what I'll call my adult entrepreneurial life, kind of thing. I kept delaying or not 100% committing.
I would say I was only partially committed to this for a period of time. I didn't do everything that I could have done because I wasn't thinking that there would be the long term of this. Fast forward, he just passed away a couple of years ago, but he lived to be 93, 94 years old and 100% in top condition, still doing telephone counseling every day, all the way through into his nineties.
If I look back on that now, it would have been a different scenario. I would have done more. I find myself now in that same... I'm looking back on this thing now and I see this sort of paralysis happening among my real estate community, among the people in my real estate world, in that there's all this talk of disruption and eye buyers and things happening in the marketplace and everybody's sort of sounding the death knell for the real estate industry as a whole.
I see that and I start to think "Is that true" first of all. I think when you look at, I don't know what the right word is here. We kind of overestimate how quickly the future is going to get here and underestimate the amount of time.
Dan: The durability of the present, well, the durability of the present, too.
Dean: That's a good way to put it, the durability of the present.
Dan: The durability, I mean, the present still has the muscle. It still has the today muscle.
Dean: That's what I'm saying, what's your take on that?
Dan: Yeah, well, I was thinking of the Bill Gates story. Bill Gates, who's from Seattle and had money because his Dad had money, nevertheless when he first started what became Microsoft he did it in Texas, I think it was in Austin, Texas. He had just an industrial building and sort of those sort of you see on the outskirts.
Dean: Are you talking about Michael Dell? Are you talking about Michael Dell?
Dan: No, I'm talking about Bill Gates, I'm talking about Bill Gates. This is Microsoft.
Dean: Bill Gates started in Seattle.
Dan: Yeah, but actually when they really first got started, he was actually in Texas.
Dean: I didn't know this operation.
Dan: They were short on cash flow one month, and he went to the owner of the building, and he said, "Look, I'm just going to offer you this right now because we're just getting started here," and he said, "I just wonder instead of paying you rent you just take a percentage of the company." The guy said, "Oh no," he says, "Oh no," he says, "I've seen you guys before." He said, "No, no, no." He says, "Cash up front, I want cash up front."
Well, I don't care if it was a half of 1% or a hundredth of 1% because he would have probably done better. I mean, I won't do this with any of my other clients, but I'll do it with this one, just to hedge my bets I'm going to do this with one of them just to see if it actually works out." This is a Microsoft story, this isn't Michael Dell.
Dean: That's amazing.
Dan: I think so, too. I think the thing is that if you're listening to a general narrative, you're not paying attention to a specific narrative. In other words, if I disregard what the general narrative is, isn't there people I know who want to buy real estate in the next year and would be really interested in somebody helping them out with this? Are there people who I know who would want to sell real estate?
Would that be probably if I really thought about it and put down names, buyer column, seller column, where I can be useful and connect people and that, would that amount of activity kind of match what was true for the last 12 months? In other words, the 12 months going forward, does it look like the amount of activity is pretty much the same as the activity and say, "Good, well, why we don't just do this next 12 months and then make a decision on where the industry is going."
That's just choosing the specific and the relative over the general and the absolute. I think everybody who does well in life ignores the general and the absolute and just focuses on what's available.
Dean: Yes, that's brilliant. I'm doing the real estate event that I did last fall, where you and I recorded that. The focus this year is going to be on the future of real estate. That's a valuable perspective right there.
Dan: I mean, I remember there was a recent President of the United States, the one before Trump, remember that one guy before Trump?
Dean: Yes, exactly, I do.
Dan: I remember some comments that he made while he was President. One of them is that "When is enough income, enough income? When do you have enough income, when do you have enough wealth?" He was trying to shame people who have this as a goal. One of the things we have to worry about now is the rising sea levels. He says, "Why are people still buying massive, expensive pieces of real estate where clearly on coastal areas the seas are going to reclaim that?" He said, "This is a world-wide problem," and yet the news yesterday is Michelle and Barack Obama just bought a $15 million mansion-
Dean: On Cape Cod.
Dan: On Martha's Vineyard, which is coastal and it turns out that the former President and his wife, who went into the White House in 2008, not having very much net worth at all, now have $135 million net worth. I said, "Well, just shows you, if you just pay attention to deals that are possible over an 11-year period. No matter what the people say is generally going to happen and the seas are going to rise and everything like that," I said, "He must know something." I mean, if you were investing $15 million on a piece of property.
I've seen the property and the house is a football field or even less from the sea, and that's the Atlantic, that's the Atlantic, so that's one of the big seas.
Dean: There you go.
Dan: That just tells you that there's still action in the real estate market.
Dean: I like the word durability of the present, that's the word.
Dan: The durability of the present, yeah.
Dean: The durability of the present. I think that's true when you look at the near term, three-year window here, that the durability is probably quite secure for the next three years, that there's nothing going to completely blindside us in the next three years.
Dan: You know the master of this is really Warren Buffet. His newest company that he's investing in right now, in other words the company that has been around the least amount of time is 43 years.
Dean: What's that?
Dan: That's Apple. I mean, he invested in Apple about two years ago. He said, "I kind of get a handle after 40 years what these guys are really about." He says, "I think they're worth investing in." I mean, you look at his entire portfolio of things, I think he just has a feel of stuff that's just going to stick around forever.
Dean: I agree.
Dan: I got a feeling every day regardless of what's happening in the world, people are probably going to, somewhere, are going to want a Coke. "It could be a Cherry Coke like me," he says, "I buy it by the box." He says, "I buy a big carton."
Dean: I love where he said that. They're going to wake up with whiskers and King Gillette is going to be there to help them.
Dan: Did you see the whack that Gillette took over the last year?
Dean: I did not.
Dan: Yeah, they went with the #MeToo movement that they went against men being masculine over the last... They've been out there 12 months and they have lost $4.6 billion in sales. You know who's picked them up is Schick and Harry's, the home razor thing. Harry's doesn't really care if you're a manly man or what as long as you buy the razor. They don't really care what your ideological beliefs are. I think when corporations start delving into political and cultural and social issues, I think along the line their stockholders are not going to be happy with their decisions to get involved in that.
Dean: Agreed, agreed.
Dan: Just sell stuff, just sell stuff.
Dean: Yes, well, there we go.
Dan: I have to tell you, you and I have really covered the neighborhood on this one.
Dean: We did, because we're restless.
Dan: I think relative and absolute, and the durability of the present with the overestimation on how fast the future is going to arrive, because I think that paralyzes people.
Dean: It has paralyzed me in the past, and if I do an experience transformer on it looking back that I would have taken a different course of action had I known. I find myself surrounded by and in the midst of people with the same reluctance of saying "I don't know whether I want to go all in, in the real estate world, because I don't know how long it's going to last in its current thing."
I think like you're saying and I've been thinking, if you encourage people to think in terms of what is durable, you hit the nail on the head with "Do I know people who want to buy and sell homes?" I think if you look at what's not going to change is the shelter business is not going to go out of style, right? We're going to want to live in houses and people are going to want to move those houses and something's got to happen.
Dan: Well, I mean, status competition operates on all days, status competition. I mean, it's not that homes don't have many other dimensions to them, but they certainly have that movement upwards in the real estate market is certainly a very, very tangible form of status competition. Is there an end to that? I mean, a year from now, are people not going to compete on the basis of status? I don't think so.
Dean: I don't either. All right, Dan.
Dan: This was a delight.
Dean: For you? It was a delight. It always is delight.
Dan: Anyway, lots of new themes to pick up. I'll pick up on some of the thoughts about having tomorrow happen today.
Dean: I really want to talk about that, too, yeah.
Dan: I'm going to talk about that, yeah, I've given more thought to it, but you had some real interesting stuff. The Seinfeld/Little Rascal comparison is a tremendously interesting one.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: I'll tell everybody about my three days with Doreen, one of the original Mouseketeers and one of the ones. I spent three days with Doreen and Tracy.
Dean: I remember, yeah, yeah.
Dan: She just died last year. She died of cancer last year. Anyway, but it was really interesting because the original Mouseketeers at the Epic Historical Town. Of course, you're very near the Kingdom, you're very close to the Kingdom. Anyway, I had three days to talk to her about what it was like to be one of the original Mouseketeers. Very, very interesting, very solid.
I mean, the more I think about it looking back, who she was and how she presented herself and then what became of her over a long lifetime actually really struck me as really someone who was really levelheaded and simply took advantage of opportunities. Really great stuff. Have a great day, Dean.
Dean: Next time. Bye.
Dan: Bye.