Join Dean and Dan as they talk about the balance of procrastination and privacy.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep048
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Mr. Jackson. I'm diving deep into our theme song, so I come on extra two minutes early so I can luxuriate in the lyrics, but the thought for today is that I'm never going to give you up or let you down.
Dean: Oh, man, that is the best.
Dan: I like that. I would never give you up, and I would never let you down.
Dean: You know, it's so funny. You know, when I had the option, you know we have a very fancy, high level, professional Uber conference account which allows you to set your own on hold music, if you're the first one that dials in. So, of course, Rick Ashley was my choice for you.
Dan: No, I love it. I love it.
Dean: It's the best.
Dan: Well, I never get tired of it. I just never get tired of it. I was in a supermarket, and I was quite rushed to ... I had to pick some stuff up. We were on the road, and I was going to meet Babs, but I got delayed because the song came on. I can't shop while I'm listening to this song. I sat there sort of stupefied. I just was kind of stupefied. I looked like a meerkat, you know like one of the meerkat if you've ever seen a meerkat?
Dean: I have. Oh man. You crack me up. I love it.
Dan: I think I saw Huck.
Dean: I think so.
Dan: Anyway, anyway, but yeah. Wonderful times. Now here's an interesting thing. I had a series of podcasts on Friday. So, two days ago with Peter Diamanda. He's going to China, which is now apparently has plans to become a digital dictatorship. In other words, they will be such an extraordinary surveillance state that nothing can happen. This is the theory. Nothing can happen that doesn't get picked up by a sensor, by a camera, and then gets immediately processed by central artificial intelligence.
If you're doing something that looks like it's uncivil, like it's not like what a good Chinese citizen, immediately action is taken. Yeah, and we were discussing not only that, but the rumor is that Google is helping the Chinese government doing that, to do this, and Facebook. They're in there too.
So, we were discussing whether privacy is possible if you go forward in the 21st century. It kind of relates directly to the topic of procrastination because I said, "Well, I think ...” I told Peter. He asked me what I thought about this, and I said, "Well ...” I just brought up the topic. I said, "Peter, we've known each other for seven years," and I said, "Did you know that I worked for two years at the FBI, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation?" And he was kind of, I mean involuntarily, he was kind of stunned because we do it on Zoom so we can see each other.
Dean: Oh, yeah, right.
Dan: And he said, "’No, I didn't know that." I said, "Yeah, I've kept that a secret. I've actually kept that a secret that I worked for the FBI." I said, "I checked you out quite a bit before I started collaborating with you."
It was a joke. This was in the 1960s. It was right after high school. It was a job I could get. It was a boring job based on all my different profiles, but it was a chance to jump 500 miles from home, and go into another world. It had its interests, you know, because it was during the Kennedy administration. JFK was president. His brother was the attorney general, who is actually in charge of the FBI, and then J Edgar Hoover was the famous director, creator and director of the FBI.
We had a chance to meet him. I was one of 500 on a particular day that met him, and everything else. I was there during Cuban missile crisis. Yeah, all this interesting stuff.
But, I was just thinking about privacy, you know, because we all have a front stage that we show to other people, but there's lots of stuff that happens backstage that we kind of keep to ourselves. I just wanted your initial thoughts about that because I'm going to develop this as a theme that you can have as much privacy as you choose to have.
Dean: Well, I think that's absolutely true. But, I also think that there's a real case for transparency, and giving up what you would think of as that privacy to make things easier. We've slowly seen the erosion of our limits on a voluntary giving up of privacy. We look at the ... When you think about Amazon, I think about allowing Amazon to store my credit card, which would be a very, until online, would have been a very private thing, right? You guard your credit card information, and my mailing address, and my gate code, or any shipping instructions that need to be done for them to make it easy to bring things right to my doorstep. I've been willing to give that up in order to have that convenience of this one click ordering, right?
Without me allowing them to store my credit card, I wouldn't be able to have that one click ordering. That's why they have a monopoly on all of my online purchases that can be facilitated through Amazon. You know? Anything that is not them, this is how it ties into that article that I mentioned about the tyranny of convenience.
That when I think about my first, got three levels of protection, or three levels of convenience. If I could just get something on Amazon with one click, I'll do that. If I can't, then I'll use Get Magic to buy something for me that ... Because they have my credit card, they can go and order something for me on another eCommerce site that I can't ... I think about my remarkable tablet that was only available through remarkable.com, but I don't want to go and take out my credit card and type in all the information in order to ... That all requires opposable thumbs.
I can just send a text to Magic, and say, "Hey, Magic, can you buy me a remarkable tablet." And they go, "Sure, I'll buy you a remarkable tablet. I'll get right on it. I'll update you in 30 minutes, right?"
If there's anything else that I needed, a thing that requires actually talking with someone, I'll use Lillian on my team, my assistant, to do that. I think that we're very voluntarily kind of getting expanding the boundaries of the things we're willing to give up what would be considered traditional kind of privacy things for convenience.
Dan: Yeah. See, I would, despite my claim that I would never give you up, if somebody took over my cell phone, you'd be the only person I'd be giving up.
Dean: It's all the contact information. You don't even have it as an official contact. It's just the last dialed number.
Dan: Yeah, no, no, I was reflecting on my own behavior around these things because one is that I never have ever ordered anything online. The only thing I ... Well, I do with Amazon because I'm on Kindle. They obviously have my number, but Kindle is the only thing because it's just a book, and I said, "Do you want to buy?" And they buy. They're good about it because they say, okay, it's in your library or you already bought it.
Dean: That's the best when you already bought it.
Dan: Yeah, they're good about it.
Dean: That's the guest thing-
Dan: Yeah, they're good about it. They say, "Dan, you've already bought this."
Dean: By the way.
Dan: Here's the date when you bought it. So, it's good. Their algorithm is a respectful, appreciative algorithm. They worded it correctly. The whole point about it, I don't know why I was reflecting on this, but Babs and I got up early this morning. We went to this neat little restaurant which is on ... For those of you who know Toronto, it was Queen Street East, and it's called Bonjour Brioche. It's a little French-like breakfast restaurant. It goes to about 3:00 in the afternoon.
Just absolutely fresh croissants, quiche and everything, but they take not credit cards, no debit cards whatsoever. It's straight cash. So, one of the things, I've got a cash stash in the house. Whenever we go there, I go, and my own sort of accessible ATM inside the house, and I take out the cash, and make sure I've got enough for breakfast, and I go there.
To a certain extent I operate in the cash economy. Like I do it when I have to because it's based on what a particular store, restaurant, and that, what their rules are, but there are people who are committed as much as possible to stay in the cash economy because they don't like the surveillance of the digital cash thing.
So, it seems to me that there's a lot of playing with where the line is right now between what I want to keep private, and what I don't care if somebody else knows.
Dean: I agree with that. The more that I realize giving those things up, like I have my inbox. I give everybody my email address, Dean@DeanJackson.com. Everybody can email me. I encourage people to do that, but I'm not the first layer of accountability on that, or that's seeing that. Been experimenting with different things, but my inbox is manned by a couple of people that there's ... To see what's the appropriate thing so that every email is getting-
Dan: Responded to.
Dean: Yeah, gets the proper attention that it needs.
Dan: In terms of speed and satisfaction, you have people that respond on the spot, and to the satisfaction of the requester, I guess.
Dean: Yes. I've been my most recent experiment, my most recent email policy has been adopting something that I kind of adapted from a story you told me about the attorney who said, "I will never return your call today, but I will always return your call tomorrow." I've kind of taken this approach of getting kind of a digest of all of the emails that came in in one day at the end of the day, so that I can, the one time when I'm actually responding to emails, respond to the one that came in yesterday. And not be constantly checking and responding in real time or whatever.
Dan: Yeah, and I've noticed more and more when I send an email to someone there are more and more messages appearing, "I'm not available today. Will respond this particular date." If there's something urgent, then you go to a second site.
So, my feeling is that we're starting to tame the tiger. My feeling in this society, there's this domestication of what seemed to be getting out of control, the digital overload. I have a feeling that when something new comes on it's got kind of a Wild West period when ... You know, the image of the Wild West, of lawlessness, and all sorts of unpredictable behavior and risks that are going on. Then people start to get a feel for it, and they say, "We've got to put in some rules here. There's got to be some fences, there's got to be some red lights here, and everything else."
I think that's probably where we are right now. I think that thrill of it has diminished a great deal. Nobody's thrilled about this stuff anymore.
Dean: I think so too. It's kind of different.
Dan: It's seen as necessary, but it's not seen as wow, this is amazing, and everything else. I don't get that about personal technology anymore. This is what we've got.
Dean: Yes. I mean. I kind of imagined it as ... Because what I try and look at is the necessary frequently of it, you know? Like that the [crosstalk 00:16:45] because I imagine if it was real mail. Imagine if emails were real, like what it replaced, postal mail. And every time something came, you know if the mailman would come and ring your doorbell, right? Here, got some mail for you. Hey, got some mail for you. Hey, here's another one.
The fact that the mail for all these years came and still does come one time a day, gives it something to ... You kind of look at it, and there it is. I think that if that's possible, so part of this is I would say right now 50% theoretical for me because I'm experimenting with it even though I still look at the emails coming in.
It's just if I were to block that as a strategy. I was thinking about this under a heading of this kind of thinking about 10 decisions that would change my life. One of them would be really getting my emails, all of it, one time a day. It would change my brain because there's always this sort of capacity to it.
Just around that time I saw, I think it was from Ben Hardy, a quote that said, "100% is easier than 98%," meaning if there's that super potential possibility of going and checking my email that that requires some will power to not do it.
Dan: Yeah, well, it's a bit like the nuclear submarine. I have a nephew, he's passed, but he spent 25 years in the US navy, 25 years. He was on nuclear subs. You have to have a certain kind of personality make up to be on a sub.
For example, just to give a person we both know, you wouldn't really make Joe Polish be on a nuclear sub for a year at a time.
Dean: No. Don't think he wouldn't enjoy that.
Dan: No, he wouldn't enjoy it, and it would make him nervous. There wouldn't be enough opportunity. You have to be kind of placid, and you have to be kind of easy going, and he was. He is to this day. Runs a flower shop now. He owns his own flower shop.
But, he said once a day they would come up to just below surface level, and an antenna would go above the water just about two or three feet, and they'd get all their messages for the day in about 10 seconds, and then these would be distributed electronically and print-wise to messages, and a thousand, you know, a thousand, five thousand messages would come through in 10 seconds. Just come from a satellite overhead, and that was mail from home.
They would send their messages too. They had another antenna that sent their message, although they could send messages all the time based on strategic requirements.
But, anyway, that's how they handled it. We can't be this. It's not just that we have a security issue. We can't be seen above the surface for them because people are watching for us, but the other thing is we can't be disrupting people all day long with messages from home. They're going to all get it. They know when it's coming in. They know when they get it. Everything like that.
I think that that's a boundary, and it's a rule, and we're kind of domesticating it, you know. We like the power of this. We like the power of this thing, but it can't be disrupting us. It's got to play by our rules. We can't be continually disrupted by someone else's intentions for us. I can't be disrupted because somebody else got an idea about what I could do for them, and then they want to disrupt me with their idea, which wasn't my idea. It was their idea.
Yeah, I will respond to them, but I'll respond to them according to my rules not according to their intentions, or their desires.
Dean: That fits Dan in so many ways. We were talking about the mainland. It's almost like being underwater.
Dan: Oh, yeah.
Dean: Right? When we're saying like being separated from cloudlandia feels like that's where all the oxygen is, up in there. But imagine if you could be in my little submarine going around and coming up with my antenna once a day into cloudlandia to get all my messages in that one little period. That seems like that would be life changing.
Dan: Yeah, well, and you could do it the way that you ... I mean you can just have an hour when all the emails collected by your intermediary are presented to you at once. And, probably even better because you would also get the reports of how they get responded to without you're having to be involved. My feeling is that you've got to ... It's not just a, you know, my looking at it when I choose to look at it, but work has been done on my behalf, which didn't require even my knowledge, and certainly didn't require my involvement.
I think that's the way you do it, and you've just taken what can be constantly distracting for a lot of people from morning until night, and brought it down to a very manageable period of time. How many Jackson units would that actually require for you to actually take a look at them all?
Dean: Yeah, so I've been observing that, right? Like I've been looking at back testing it, and looking at the days, like if I look at, first of all, it's very surprising how few really personal only for you emails you get. There's a lot of marketing emails. There's a lot of information being sent to you by email there's not a lot of personal, like meant that connecting with you type of emails that you get.
So, that's exactly what I was thinking about is how many units could it be? I think even returning the emails, it's no more than two or three.
Dan: Yeah, and I just want to bring any new listeners of the Procrastination series up to date that a Jackson is a unit of time equal to 10 minutes. You have six Jackson units in an hour, and if you have 10 hours you have 60 Jackson units, and can you do things inside of Jackson units. Dean came up with it, and I said you're the originator, so I'm going to name this innovation after you, so it's a Jackson, Jackson unit or for short just a Jackson.
Dean: That's really, like this idea, if that was the way that my email was handled, what a game changer that would be? Then it's really, because I just start to look at, I've been really looking at simplifying things, right, and getting the re-reading essentialism, and thinking through those things, like when it really comes down to it. I realize part of how this ties into procrastination is that there's so much, for me especially, so many options that that's where it all comes from, that feeling of having so many things to choose from.
And realizing, like how in my observation of you, how simple things are. Like you're very crystal clear on the thing that you do is the workshops. The 10 times workshop, and then game changer workshop, and soon to be probably only game changer workshops, and also be [crosstalk 00:26:51]-
Dan: I have the date in the calendar, you know, it's the first of January 2023. The entire team has been informed. There's four years and 10 months before I'm moving all my time completely to the game changer workshop. That's another thing, not leaving things indefinite.
Yeah, well, there's a huge difference between saying couple of years from now I'm not going to be doing anything about the game changer. That's one statement. The other statement is that by January 1st, 2023, everything has been removed from my plate, except complete focus on the game changer program. There's a high difference between those two statements.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. I mean that's mm-hmm (affirmative). In the context of a 25 year framework, that five year period is not really that long of a time. Right.
Dan: No, no, no. But, the thing is that since I committed to it, and you know there's going to have to be some hustling. There's some new capabilities we require that this is not disruptive or injurious to the possibility of the coach, and to those who are in one of the programs, the 10 times, but not in the game changer program, are being given a four year period to make up their mind whether they actually want to make the jump.
It's not like we're blindsiding them. We're not blindsiding people, but it's because of the commitment, the certainty on their part. Every time he ... from the past, I have a track record. Every time I just say by this date this is true, I've really endeavored to actually have it happen that way. So, there's a credibility there [crosstalk 00:29:03].
Dean: You did that with the game changer program itself. That was [crosstalk 00:29:10] calendar.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That that was your-
Dan: I put a date in the calendar, and I freed myself up from the signature level in 2013. I said July 31st 2013 I'm not going to be involved in the Master's level of the signature program. I'm strictly with 10 times.
And then it's a commitment, and I've got a household. I've really got to think of new ways of approaching this. I'm really excited about the freedom to come, but I'm a bit scared that I might not pull it off in a way that works for everybody in the best possible way. But, it's neat. It's neat.
Dean: But the commitment brings courage.
Dan: Yeah, you're just using the future to create reality for yourself. Deadlines are marvelous because deadlines are real because especially if you have witnesses to the commitment, their reality to them.
But, you know something, I just want to say, Dean, I'm getting more and more really appreciative comments from a large number of individuals who say they just love the conversations that you and I have. This is unsolicited. People are just coming up [crosstalk 00:30:42]-
Dean: You mean other people listen in to these conversations?
Dan: They do. They do, yeah, they do.
Dean: Is that what you're trying to tell me right now? Is our privacy being violated here somehow?
Dan: Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. It is being violated. But right back, it's interesting, I want to go back to Peter Diamonte's podcast because he's in China right now, so, you know, and I said one of my observations is that a government that is increasing surveillance over the minute by minute activities of its citizens is doing that out of fear.
Dean: Yeah, you wonder what drives it, right?
Dan: My feeling is that quite frankly if you have a country of a billion four, billion five, whatever their population happens to be. I don't think they actually know how many people they have in their country, and each of them gets up and has different thoughts about the day and everything like that, there's no government that could possibly know even a minute percentage of what's going on with its citizenry.
My feeling is, and I read, you know it was two years ago, in the previous 12 months there had been 50 thousand riots and uprisings across China. There's actually outside associations, intelligence bureaus, that record uprisings and riots in China. Okay? Well, that'd be a lot for the United States.
Dean: Yeah, because the news even the way they report it, all these uprisings, and protests, and that seems like we have a lot. Seems like we have a lot, but can't imagine, I mean 50 thousand of them is a ... That's a pretty busy calendar every single day.
Dan: Yeah, and I think their greatest fear because they've been historically China has been through a lot of civil wars. I think that their nerve endings, historically, are much more fearful of any wayward thinking, wayward activity, than you would in the States. The States, first of all, you're granted a certain amount of waywardness, or a certain amount of waywardness is actually encouraged for economic reasons, and for creative reasons. We want a certain level of waywardness so that new things get created.
But, you know, the Soviets were the same way. They were deathly scared of any kind of pushback on the part of their citizens, the Nazis. I'm putting together is that your desire to know intently, at a very, very intense, very, very immediate level, what other people are up to is based on fear. It's not based ... I personally want to know as little as possible of people's personal lives, what they do personally, except whether they feel that they'd like to tell me.
I certainly don't go searching for what people are doing when they're not with me. The reason is because I generally deal with people I really like, and I trust them, so what do I care what they're doing in their personal life.
Dean: Right, right, right. Yeah, that's something. I wonder where that goes, you know? Like, where does that lead? If you just push it all the way that they are able to ... You've heard what's getting a lot of press now is their social scores.
Dan: Yeah, oh, yeah.
Dean: Almost like our Uber scores, right? Our Airbnb scores. It's something we're kind of doing that same thing in a lot of ways where trust needs to be high, you know? I think about it's so just ironic what our needs of privacy and our sense of safety that parents now feel like it's the smartest thing in the world to let their 16-year-old kids get in a car with strangers rather than them driving themselves.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean actually it's really interesting because when Uber, to use Uber as the example here. When they first came on the scene this was, they went after five or six major cities in the United States. I was in LA, and LA seems like a place where you really want to use Uber because the distances are longer, and the other thing is congestion and everything else is significantly greater than some other places.
What they found was that the Uber's main impact wasn't on other taxis, like taxi service, personal taxi service, or other limousine companies, which were normal rule type of limousine companies. The biggest impact was on the public transportation system. That is that parents found, well, not just parents, but anybody to get from here to here, and I don't have a car, that just calling an Uber not only was incredibly cheap, incredibly faster, but it was incredibly cheaper. It was actually cheaper, all things taken into consideration, you know, the price of wasted time is a cost.
The other thing is that there weren't any hold ups of Uber cars because they don't carry any money, where the taxis would get held up. So, Uber could actually go into neighborhoods because they were just going for one person, to pick up one person. It was strictly personal, and the transaction was already handled before the person got into the car. The Ubers experienced fewer violent situations simply because they could identify themselves. I think they had some means in LA to actually identify themselves. It's not worth holding them up. They don't have any money.
Dean: Yeah, that's really...
Dan: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: I like this ... It reminds me of almost like a gap moment in a way, right? Like when you're looking, we're talking about privacy looking forward. We're looking at the horizon which keeps moving about what level of privacy we're actually willing to give up, or where that's going. If it can support us, you know, like I'm willing to give up the privacy of my inbox to have people so they can support me in being able to respond in a timely way without me having to actually, in most cases, do the responding.
But looking back, looking back at the progress that we've made, like certainly over the 30 years of my being an adult in business, the levels of privacy that we've ... How has it shifted? There's a great book that came out about 20 plus years ago now, maybe 95, called the one to one future.
Dan: Oh, yeah. I remember.
Dean: Do you remember that book?
Dan: Absolutely. I remember. I remember the plane ride I was in actually. I was in Amelia Island, South Carolina, Amelia island is right.
Dean: Amelia Island is in Florida.
Dan: Oh, in Florida. Amelia Island, right up near Jacksonville. I think it's a few miles from Jacksonville. Anyway, and I picked up the book before I left, and I had it in my bag, but I was going back to Toronto, a late night flight to Jacksonville, and I remember reading. This is an extraordinary useful framework for understanding how to create unique value in the future.
Dean: Yeah, and I thought, you know, that at the time, Eben Pagan and I interviewed Don Peppers and Martha Rogers who wrote the book about that. Probably in 1997 we did that, and kind of that was one of ... Amazon was one of the examples that he used because Amazon was just kind of getting started, but they had that idea of letting you store your credit card in there, and monitoring your book purchases so that they could recommend other things to you.
It's such an interesting thing there, and I'm wondering how, if we take this idea of our first transition from we've got this bigger future of these things that we want to get done, and writing those down on an impact filter, and kind of sharing them with somebody. Privacy is really just kind of ... Feels like we're kind of just letting other people in on things.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, and you know it's really interesting because I was thinking of my computer. I just switched over to another laptop, and they switched my entire files to a new computer, and it was announced that everything was going into the cloud now, like all the backup. It was continuous, and it was to the cloud, which we just got at the company.
And, I was just requesting. I was sitting there. I said, well, if somebody stole my files, my entire files, they could go through everything, read every message I had on there, one is would it bother me? And I said, not really. I mean there's nothing that I have written that would concern me that they could look at.
Biggest thing was, they couldn't do anything with it because if you didn't know the mindsets and the rules and the strategic coach structures and everything else, you wouldn't really understand what this was about. So, even though, it's like, yeah, you can read everything I wrote, but it's all in code.
Dean: Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.
Dan: It's all in code. I remember Ronald Regan when he was president, he said, "You know what we ought to do with the Soviets? Get our secrets. We should just have a week when we take every secret we've got, and get as many 747s as we can, and load all of our secrets on the 747s, and we fly them all to Moscow, and we dump them on the runway." He said, "I bet we could bring the Soviet Union to a collapse in about two years of them trying to read it."
Dean: Oh, that's so funny. I laugh because on my ... I had a couple of people, well, for my more cheese, less whiskers podcast, are concerned about sharing things. Especially if they're in the formulation of like start-up or getting something going. That they have this fear of somebody stealing their ideas, or something, right? They don't want...
I always say to people, look, I can't get the people who are paying me to give them the advice to do the things that we're sharing. The odds that somebody's going to take your idea and implement it are very, very low.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, and if they do, I want to know who that person is, so I'll hire him. You know? It's like delegation by theft.
Dean: Yes, exactly.
Dan: You're getting all your projects out to the world just on the off chance that somebody out there might actually be able to follow through. I mean it's really interesting. There's a riddle. I'm just creating the riddle. The only protection against having one of your secrets stolen, is to give them all your secrets.
Dean: Yes. Yes, that's the truth, isn't it? Eben Pagan and I were having dinner recently, and we were talking about this, like really talking about this idea of making our ideas, our business ideas, like these frameworks and things, wide open. Kind of just documenting, putting them out there, putting them out, and letting somebody take them and run with them kind of thing because there's so many that we're not going to ever do anything with, you know, but to find somebody who this is the one for them, and then kind of collaborate with them on executing it as an advisor or whatever would be a really great thing.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. You know, the thing is that I think that stealing, when you steal something from someone else, I mean there is sort of short range situations where obviously the thieves can make away with some things. But, my sense is that when you feel the need to steal somebody else's idea, you're doing injury to yourself because you're basically saying that you don't have any capacity whatsoever to be original like the other person.
Since you're not original, like the other person, you won't find any original way to use the stolen, original idea.
Dean: That's it.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's it.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. The thing about it is the lack of originality isn't just on the making it up stage. It's also on the making it real and making it recur stage. You're completely non-original. You won't even figure out a new way to use this new idea. You'll try to use this new idea in an old way, and it won't be a new idea.
So, anyway, yeah, it's really interesting, but I should say this, that I think that one of the big procrastination items that people have, and I'm talking about a very, very self-selected audience here of people who are entrepreneurs because that's my main experience for certainly the last 30 years completely. That is one of the causes of procrastination is the fear of having ideas stole.
Dean: I wonder if-
Dan: That they don't act on the ideas. They don't act on the ideas, and they don't share them with [inaudible 00:48:46] to the how because they're fearful of the idea of being stolen.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Maybe that's it is part of it is like feeling like they've got to do all the parts of it.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's an interesting ... I forget, Dan, whether you and I have talked about Kylie Jenner.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: She was recently become a billionaire, but the most fascinating thing about her past with Kylie Cosmetics is she did $350 million in sales in 2017, and she has five full time employees on her team. Everything else was done through collaboration.
Dan: It just [crosstalk 00:49:52]-
Dean: Through the manufacturer, with Shopify, with her mom's management company. Yeah, and everything else is ... She's literally just the make it up, and get the colors and the names and the product vision, art directing design for what they want, and then collaborating with other people to actually make all those things a reality.
Dan: Yeah. Well, my immediate take on that is the five people that she has full time is just to count the money.
Dean: Oh, that's so funny, yeah, really. I don't know [crosstalk 00:50:46] five people just to count the money.
Dan: Yeah, I mean, did you see the J Paul Getty film, Kevin Spacey was supposed to be set?
Dean: I did see it, yeah.
Dan: But that scene near the end where it's an Italian farmhouse, and all the women are counting the kidnap money. They have to verify it's true. That picture just flashed into my mind about Kylie's five people.
Dean: Her five people counting the money.
Dan: Late at night, yeah.
Dean: Oh, boy. That's so funny.
Dan: Yeah, but you know I mean all sorts of experiments. We can experiment with this. I will tell you this, I think that this has been a continual human activity from day one, you know, when humans became human. Namely, you had consciousness. That we've been dealing with this limitation that what we want is greater than the time that we have to actually achieve it.
Dean: Yes. That's true.
Dan: That our mind can make up all sorts of things, that you can get passionately interested in, but the moment you think of your limitations you feel this enormous frustration. I got a feeling that this is human experience 101, that basically right from the beginning every human being, the moment they sort out that they're them and they're in this world, I think we're confronted with this fact that our minds can envision amazing things, which we're immediately confronted with the fact that we don't have the time, we don't have the capability, and everything else.
To stop ourselves from going crazy, we have to work out all sorts of schemes and systems and strategies in doing that. These are not only useful for us, but they're also useful for other people. Yeah. We're all experimenters one way or another.
Dean: Yes, and just lucky that now there's never been a better time. There's never been a better time to tap into immediately an entire world of people who can help.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. But the thing I'd like to get across, although the way, the means that we have to deal with this particular issue are radically different in terms of the multipliers that we can achieve. I don't think that the basic activity itself is new at all. I just think that this is what human existence has been about right from the beginning.
Dean: I think you're right. You think about the ... Yeah. I have to wonder about, I think about now, like going back, how many of the things that we deal with right now that just weren't even a possibility even 40, 50 years ago? But, yet, procrastination is always there, anyway. There's always still the ability to procrastinate.
Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. What I like to ... Sometimes we'll get into conversations in certain settings about whether people believe in the afterlife or not. Some do, some don't. Some do that want to talk about it. Some don't, and don't want to talk about, but if I can find people actually want to talk about it, just statement. Do you believe in the afterlife? Then you start asking them what is going to be different about the afterlife than what you have right now.
You know, since I'm talking to you, what it sounds like to me, a lot of people's notion of the afterlife is like Amazon Prime with a flash of a thought. In other words [crosstalk 00:55:22]-
Dean: On click implementation [crosstalk 00:55:25] fulfillment.
Dan: Yeah, but it's just the click of a thought. Oh, I want that, and there it is. It's kind of like the removal of this frustration of being able to see something brilliantly, and not being able to have it, and that's our frustration. I start talking to people, and it's kind of like in heaven, it happens instantaneously.
But, that's got some problems too, but then, so what? Where is the achievement? Where's effort? Where is growth, and everything like that? You know, so should be happy for our frustrations. We get to grow by utilizing our frustrations, you know.
Dean: Yes, yes, yes. I hadn't thought about it like that, but you think about the thing, what would that actually be like, you know? I've been thinking with magic it's really interesting that I find that with services like get magic where I can text and have anything happen, what you really realize as I'm explaining this to people often is that we're not used to thinking about just articulating what we want in a way that somebody else could actually make it happen.
Dan: No.
Dean: We kind of focus on the longing for it, the longing for it, and then actually have to sit down and think about how something would have actually have to happen. But, to be able to do it, it's something.
By the way, I want to tell you, I just watched last night, this as a tip to you, is the Quincy Jones documentary that just came out yesterday on Netflix. It was really, really well done.
Dan: Great giant. What a giant.
Dean: Absolutely, yes, absolutely. There's a guy who just thinking big. It's really as you see it. I didn't really get the whole ... I didn't realize that he started out doing arrangements for Frank Sinatra. I didn't realize that.
Dan: Oh, yeah. I mean just dozens of extraordinarily well known people Quincy Jones was the genius behind the scenes who made everything right.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean it's fascinating to me because so many great things are happening in so many different ways that there's no possibility of you even knowing more than a few of them. My attitude towards that is saying, well, that's great then. I'll just focus on my own stuff. There's no need for me to be supporting and propping up the world. The world's taking care of itself.
I think there's this huge, especially in the academic world, and in the high bureaucratic world, there's this enormous fear that they've lost control of the world, and this is dangerous for everybody that they've lost control of the world. Like the editors of the New York Times, or the station heads or the network heads at CNN or the departments of government.
They always felt that the world was only holding together because they were explaining it properly, and without their explanations everything would fall apart, and I think there's a crisis among the intellectual classes now. It's been going on for quite a long time. I think certainly especially since the microchip was created.
The world just kind of organizes itself at the individual level, and the thing is that bird flocks. Can I talk ... Bird flocks?
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dan: Yes, well there was this belief because bird flocks could suddenly hundreds of birds could immediately change direction in an instant. There was a belief that there's a master bird brain, like the flock has a master bird brain, and the bird brain is controlling the flock. But, actually what it turns out is that each bird is born. It's implanted in the bird brain that all you have to do is watch what the bird ahead of you and the two birds on each side of you are doing. You just adjust very quickly to whatever those three birds are doing.
Dean: I saw a great documentary about that.
Dan: Yeah, and my feeling is that we humans operating in this massive world where digital is part of our thinking, is that all we have to do is pay attention to a few local indicators, and everything works. We don't have to understand the whole thing.
Dean: That makes sense.
Dan: Mastering the rule of bigger, who not how, is what I think a fundamental tuning. Okay, this bigger and better thing, I want it. Okay. No one's going to do that for me. If you just have in built those two rules, you fly like a bird.
Dean: Well, you know what's interesting is that those birds are all genetically exactly the same size. They fly at exactly the same speed. They are programmed to fly the exact same distance from each other, and it's really it's that whole kind of they form a mesh network in a way that way.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah, but we do it with an infinite number of possible variations, as [crosstalk 01:02:33]-
Dean: Yeah, humans we do, absolutely.
Dan: Yeah, and the other thing is that we intentionally sort out which flocks we want to fly in, and who our flock mates are. You and I are good flock mates, I will say this right now. I think we're excellent flock mates.
Dean: Yes. Well, I enjoy flying alongside.
Dan: Yeah, or ahead.
Dean: Or wherever.
Dan: Above, above, wherever it is. So, anyway, we've progressed through an hour very productively. I think we've covered a lot, but I'm really interested in this privacy because Peter got my sensors up with this one. He said, "I just don't believe there's any privacy anymore." I've got a bone to gnaw on here, and I'm going to ... I'm really going to develop this.
My feeling is it's like free will, you know the whole thing about free will. People say, well, humans don't have free will. I think that's true except for the ones who say they do.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dan: If you say you don't have free will, that's true. If you say you do have free will, that's true.
Dean: That is true.
Dan: I'm just going to say that I have it.
Dean: I've got it too.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. All right, I'll talk to you again next Sunday, and then the next time I'll see you is at the game changer.
Dean: That's exactly right. Have a great week.
Dan: Okay.
Dean: Thanks, Dan.
Dan: Bye.
Dean: Bye.