Technology Changes, But These Fundamentals Don’t

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Jeff, you sent me an interesting insight into, I guess I would call it kind of finding out who you are and who you're right for in a world of technology. So basically, we live in a ... what I would say a saturated technological world that's been made more saturated with social media. And the big thing is, how do you use social media without social media using you? So that's kind of what I got out of it. And you used a word in there which I'm a great adherent of, and that's basics. Of regardless of what technology it is, it simply really, really depends enormously on what do you actually have to say that's actually interesting and valuable to what other people want to hear. So what put you... Were you on a rant or something, Jeff, that you sat down and wrote this?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well I think that... I don't know that I was on a rant, but I think it's really interesting, with all the talk, constant talk about AI, and because, you know, I'll look on Instagram, and because I pause on some of those things, and I see the, so far, unending tidal wave of .AI companies that can do everything and all of that, and all of the hyperbolic things it's supposed to be able to do. And then I think about, well, it's really a tool. And so how do you use a tool most effectively?
 
So technology changes, but I'm not so sure that our human behavior changes and the fundamentals of what makes a good story. I don't think that changes either. So I think that the basics, as you were saying, stay the same. We still create content, we consume content, and we need people to look at our work if we're using it for business purposes or hope to build a career in the arts or whatever, people to pay attention. And so creativity is the cornerstone of effective usage, which is a human trait. So that's sort of what got me thinking about it because social media is, you know, simple in a sense—all you have to do is post something. But in order to build a substantial following, and then, to use that term, monetize it, that's not easy. So it's easy to get involved, not easy to make it manifest into something worthwhile.
 
Dan Sullivan: I remember in the '40s and '50s, a famous economist by the name of F.A. Hayek, Austrian, who moved to the United States, and he had a neat thing. He said, you know, the word social is a very interesting word. And he says, I call it a weasel word. And he said, weasel, he says it's not true, but weasels do something when they come across a nest of the bird's eggs, that they just chip a little corner out of the egg and they suck out the contents of the egg. So when the mother bird comes back, she doesn't think anything's wrong until she discovers there's nothing left in the eggs. And he says, I find the word social does that to any other word. If you put the word social in front of another word, it sucks out all the meaning of the other word. But you think you are buying something, but there's nothing inside.
 
There's an interesting insight that when a new technology comes across, it generally is applied to all the content that already exists. And it sort of, for a while, it will suck out the meaning of the previous content. And it's really, really interesting. And after a while, there's nothing left. Nothing gets communicated. And I've been noticing that there was a new occupation that was created that I became aware of about four or five years ago. It's called social media influencers. And they're finding that none of the influencers are doing well these days. They're not making a lot of money. And part of the reason is because they're not really creating anything. They're connecting you with other people's creations. And after a while, there isn't anything left there.
 
So I'm just wondering, if that doesn't happen with every new technology, and I can call upon your experience here, because you and I were both born in the 1940s, and we've seen a lot of technology come along. I grew up on radio and then television. Television was fascinating in the 1950s. But if you look at television now, which I haven't for the last six years, part of the reason is, I don't think I'm going to see anything particularly new or interesting on television these days now that everything is television. So I'm just wondering when you began noticing this is that technology has a hype factor. It has a hype phase when everybody says, this changes everything. But at the end, everything's pretty much the same.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think that, you know, it's funny when you mention radio, and I'm going to turn off my technology for a moment, which is air conditioning just because of the noise. [sound of siren in background]
 
Dan Sullivan: And the New York police force.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. You have your choice. That's I call that the New York Symphony playing in the background. I got a huge kick out of it for some reason. I got the absurdity of it when I was a kid that Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist with Charlie McCarthy... And he was a ventriloquist on the radio. [laughs] How does that work? I'm a very good ventriloquist on the radio. I loved it because then there would be Arthur Murray's dance party.
 
Dan Sullivan: On radio.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: On radio, that's right. And so I used to think, wow, this is wild. How can you actually sell this? This is like amazing to me.
 
Dan Sullivan: But what was your brain doing with that? You were filling in what couldn't be seen.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I actually was just found it funny because it immediately hit me. You know, obviously I had seen ventriloquists on television, Ed Sullivan Show and Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney. Interesting fact-
 
Dan Sullivan: Señor Wences.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. Yes. "All right. All right. Very nice. Very nice. Very good. Very good. It's all right. It's all right." Yes. And Paul Winchell, by the way, who I always preferred to Edgar Bergen, he actually invented one of the first artificial hearts. That's a true story. So it's just I found that kind of fascinating. So neither Jerry Mahoney nor Paul Winchell were actually dummies. They were good. But, you know, radio, if you look at the evolution... You know, we had, we could send dots and dashes and do code over it. And radio wasn't initially used as an entertainment medium. It was purely a communication medium. And it's kind of fascinating when stories that were on radio in the '50s... Like, I Love Lucy started off as a radio program, not with Desi Arnaz.
 
Dan Sullivan: No.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And Lucy's husband worked in a bank. And then it was actually Lucille Ball's desire to work with Desi that, when CBS offered her money to do the show, I Love Lucy, she actually didn't want to do it because they wouldn't hire Desi Arnaz. And they said to her, well, you know, she would never marry a Cuban nightclub musician. And she said, "What do you mean? He's my husband. And he's a Cuban nightclub musician. What do you mean I would never marry him? I did." And she actually took the show out on the road. And it became tremendously successful in live theater. And came back to New York, the CBS executives came to it, and then a TV legend, maybe one of the first, certainly one of the earliest TV legends was born in Lucille Ball. And then people talked about the episodes. It was, you know, the water cooler thing, whether it was something you heard on the news or something that you saw. And the two-way communication wasn't between the individual and the corporate entity. It was among other people, which I think is interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: You put me on to an author named Tim Wu, who's written some tremendous books on technology. But he talks about the growth of radio in the early 1930s, that there was one weekend when 85% of all radio listeners in the United States, according to the testing they could do in those days, was listening to Amos 'n' Andy. And that became an incredibly powerful force, that show, for the development of radio.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and what was interesting about it was Amos 'n' Andy on radio were white men. And so there was a lot of pushback in terms of doing a TV show because it would be-
 
Dan Sullivan: Freeman Gosden ... Freeman ... Freeman.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And I don't remember the other name, but that's one of them. One played the Kingfish and the other... Andy was actually a cab driver.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Amos and... Yeah. The Kingfish. Kingfish.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And yeah, it was interesting because the two guys who originally played Amos and Andy, you know, when they did it on vaudeville, you know, they wore blackface, but not the extreme blackface of a minstrel show. I mean, it's weird when you think that nowadays, that was the norm to do, was... And so the TV show, which actually you know, was entertaining. It was funny, you know, at least looking at it within a certain framework, they were good actors and delivered comedic lines well. The big controversy is, you know, we're going to put a show that has a black cast on. And that was kind of weird. But yeah, there was a lot of transition from radio to television, and that's where the first…
 
Dan Sullivan: If you think that's bad, you have people who've designed an entire musical with a black cast. I mean…
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You talking about Cabin in the Sky?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah ... or Personality.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That one, yes. [laughs]
 
Dan Sullivan: A few whites for flavor.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting because radio fed television like Broadway fed the movies. You know, the content evolved and got resold-
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it didn't replace anything. It just added another dimension.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. And another big marketplace. And, you know, so the phrase used to be the water cooler talk, which people would talk about programs, not necessarily I Love Lucy, but whether it was the news or Edward R. Murrow, you are there, or Gunsmoke or, you know, any of these ongoing dramas and all of these kinds of things eventually... getting more voices talking became-
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing was that there wasn't much different between the life of Amos and Andy and them going about their work life and their home life than there was with The Honeymooners when Jackie Gleason came along.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You were picturing people, you know, and I think it actually showed that these are normal people just like the normal people you know.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, well, I think there was a relatability, you know, that that happened. I mean, jump ahead to what was at the time revolutionary. The Sopranos. The fact that this-
 
Dan Sullivan: Mafia people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: And that more mafia people could just be as boring as normal people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And, you know, I mean, aside from being actually one of the greatest TV dramas ever, it took a mafia kingpin who was in therapy. You know, I mean, that had never been looked at in that way, which when you think about it, seems almost odd. Wow. Because it was such a revolutionary idea at the time. But, you know, as the times changed, and we were viewing ourselves differently in our culture, and something like that became a huge, huge hit.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's very funny. I went on a hiking tour in Italy, and one of the other people on the hiking tour—Babs and I were on this hiking tour—she was a vertigo therapist, and she was from New York City. She was a vertigo therapist, and she was telling us that she had a client who was a mafia boss who suffered from vertigo. And you just can't have a crime boss falling over sideways. You know, it's just not, it's just not good. So she cured him, and he ran a whole series of pizza places to launder the money, I guess. And he says, I think her name was Angie. He says, "Angie, you cured me. You got pizza for life. You got pizza for life." And she cured him and she got pizza for life.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: [laughs] Then he killed her.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no. She saved his life. You know, you can't have a mafia boss falling over. You know, it's not good for the image.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So what is it that back when people spoke directly to each other, exchanged ideas, and there wasn't the fear of having your life eviscerated online if you said something controversial. I used to say to my students, it's not social media, it's corporate media. And if it appears to be free, it's because somebody's paying for something somewhere.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you're paying with your attention.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. And you're selling that attention to advertisers. That's right. That's right. So what is the difference between social media and people talking to each other, the water cooler talk? What was that step that made, I think I can start us off by saying anonymity. You did not have that when you spoke at the water cooler. You have it when you go online.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, I think the other thing is, when you're talking at the water cooler, it's based on relationship. In other words, there's people you like talking to at the water cooler, and there's people you don't talk to. So it's just, the communication is confined by the circumstance. And it's continuous. In other words, you'll pick up from day to day and maybe over an entire career. And anyway, where the other thing is that you're videoing it at the water cooler. Your intent is not the relationship; your intent is to create a media relationship-
 
Jeffrey Madoff: On social media, you're talking about..
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, so social media is that you're searching for an audience and you're using your activity as a form of entertainment. You hope. You know, you hope that it goes out there. I've never done it myself, you know, so I've never... I mean, Joe Polish, I'm probably more known to the rest of the world because of Joe Polish, because he puts the camera in my face and says, what do you think about this and everything like that. But I've never actually done this myself to someone else. I've never... And I've never been on social media. I mean, if you told me, go on Facebook or go on TikTok or that, I wouldn't know how to do it because it doesn't interest me. I mean, doing our podcast together interests me because it's a conversation we have most Sunday afternoons. And it's always interesting just in the top- I do it for the activity, not for the reach.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So I had you all wrong.
 
Dan Sullivan: I've had more continuous discussions with you than I think any other person in my life ... I wasn't living with. [laughs] That I wasn't living with. But I think the thing is, what's your intent when you do this? My intent is to have a really great conversation where I learn something new.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yeah, and because great conversations require listening, active listening and active participation, as opposed to waiting for your turn to talk. And in the water cooler world, you'd be seeing that person five days a week. So, even if you wanted to say something that you shouldn't, if you had any governors at all going on in your brain, you wouldn't. Anonymity, in its own way, gives permission to be incredibly nasty, toxic, and you don't have an ongoing conversation unless—and this is back to your comment about intent—people decide to go at it and troll somebody and follow them online and badger them and all of that sort of a thing.
 
And so It's interesting because we have changed so much of our communication, because we see people just out in the world now, they can be sitting next to somebody, but they're both just looking at their phones. They're not interacting with each other. And we know the stats now, there's more and more data being yielded of how damaging this is to teenagers, especially girls. But, you know, I think that asking questions and offering value and creating a two-way conversation, which can be a lot more than just two people, it becomes what you care about and it becomes who you are. And, you know, why are you doing this and why are you commenting on this? And I think that's really interesting because then it goes down to, in terms of business, how do we promote ourselves online? You know, I mean, you aren't online yourself, but your image and quotes from you are on LinkedIn and Instagram. I did the same thing.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, I'm going out there to the world every day. We have a social media director, and he's very good. You met him, I think, in Nashville, Chris. I mean, I'm out there, I'm being broadcast every day, you know. And people say, boy, I really like your Facebooks. Your Facebooks have been great. And I said, thank you. Yeah, maybe I'll get around to watching them myself, you know. And we have guidelines, you know, we have guidelines. And Babs has a screening process that it represents, you know, who I would want to be seen as. But it's part of the structure. We've just taken social media and created a... transformed it into a broadcast medium. But I don't interact with anybody. My only interactions is on the podcast.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So what is your intent?
 
Dan Sullivan: To establish a relationship with people who are meeting me for the first time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And that's the intent?
 
Dan Sullivan: That's it. That's it. You're selling a relationship. I'm interested in these kind of things is how I like to talk. I'm interested in what I'm conveying because, except for one of my podcast series, it's always with a partner. And I want to show people how you have, I mean, if I want to demonstrate anything, I want to demonstrate how you can actually have a good conversation when you have someone on the other side who has the same willingness.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, which is something that we used to do just by default.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, it's interesting because first, of course, it was just the neighborhood and whatever the meeting place was in the neighborhood. And telephones allowed us to extend our reach, so to speak, to talk to people that we might not see often at all, they could be across the country or out of the country. Out of the country was crazy expensive. I remember growing up here and, you know, "Remember, it's long distance!" You know. It was costly and so on, but we were communicating directly, and the technology at that time facilitated that kind of communication.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and it's an interesting thing because you and I are taking advantage of something that we've developed over a 50-, 60-year period, and that is that we are capable of having really good discussions with the right partner. And as much as people would like to do that today, they don't know how to do it. You know, I was watching, I was in a restaurant, we were in the Four Seasons for lunch yesterday in Toronto. And I was watching a couple, they were over to my right, and they had probably about a six-year-old girl with them. And not once in an hour and a half, except for eating her food, was she anywhere except on her phone at six years old. And I said, you know, she's really being disabled here. They're really disabling... She doesn't know how to carry, she won't know how to carry on a conversation. Just a live conversation where there's no technology in the middle of it, you know, as you go over. And I said, I think there's a real disabling happening here. They don't know how to have conversations. The biggest thing they don't know how to do is ask questions. But we have the real ability because we've had conversations since the 1940s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and we've maintained a certain activity our whole life. And I mean, one of the reasons we do this podcast is I just enjoy the conversation so much.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Me too. Me too. To play devil's advocate here. "You guys are just older guys. This is how we communicate."
 
Dan Sullivan: That's great.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: "That's, you know, that's how we communicate. What's the matter with that? What's the downside of what we're doing? We're just, you know, we're doing it this way."
 
Dan Sullivan: We don't have to go to a therapist. We can do this without the therapy.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But is there something inherently different in how we communicate with each other? I mean, your business, my business is built on communication, both giving and receiving. So it's an active participation on both sides. What do you think is, in fact, being lost, or are we just the blacksmiths of communication and eventually we'll achieve singularity with a chip in our head and AI is going to tell us what the other person was going to say anyhow, so we all just become this corpus with nothing going on inside, which means, and I'm not religious, but the soul.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think something's being lost, but my sense is that I've talked to some parents who are telling me that some of their children are going off social media, they're just not doing social media anymore. And they've got a circle of friends that they hang out with, but they do it live. So I think after a certain way, you know, it's a bit like, eating, you know, after a while, you know, you realize that the fast carbs just don't give you any nutrition. You need some real protein, you know, in conversational. And so, I don't know. I think children are children for longer these days.
 
You know, I remember, you know, when I graduated from high school, only probably five out of a class of 55 went to college. They went and worked for General Motors. They went to work for Ford. They did it. If you got a job at 18 on the line at General Motors in the 1950s or 1960s, you were set for life. I mean, if you stayed there, you would move up, you'd become a foreman, you'd do things. And they had a pension plan that was a great pension plan. You could buy a house at 23. You could have three kids by 30. And it forced... You know, you couldn't be a child and do that. You had to become a certain amount of adult.
 
I think that there's a prolonged childhood going on where you have 28-year-olds now who are getting out of college, and they've been in school since they were four years old, you know. And they haven't actually been in the workplace yet. So I think because we're living longer—there's a possibility of living longer because of health benefits, people are living into their 60s, 70s, and 80s. When I looked at the mortality rates for the United States the year I was born, this is life- Now, mind you, they had just gone through the Depression and they had just gone through the Second World War. But the average life expectancy was around 48, 49 years old. In 1944, it was about 48. That was the life expectancy for males. And then it jumped to 78 over the course of the next 50 years, next 60 years. And a lot of it was just sanitation and penicillin and a whole bunch of other things. Life got safer and everything. So one of the things that I think is that we're now expecting childhood to last till people's late 20s.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: How much of that, though, is economic realities? You know that... I mean, we had a disruption with COVID that had a real-world impact.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I think it's substantial.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. And I don't even think we yet know...
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no. I think this is equal to the Depression.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. You know, or a world war, really. Because it posed travel restrictions...
 
Dan Sullivan: I think you'll see it play out over the next 20, 25 years. The impact of that. I think it was a real disruptor. Those three years was a real disruptor. What do Audrey and Jake say about that?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you know, fortunately, they are both gainfully employed and, you know, have their own places. And that's all to the good. Neither one of them spend their time... They both have their own businesses. And so they don't, they're more apt to sound more like us railing against the toxicity of social media and what that's doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, so it's not a function of age; it's a function of what you're doing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think, you know, in so much, it's so interesting because, you know, we like to... It's not "we like." The notion of Gen X, Millennials, Baby Boomers, and all of that was a construct that was totally artificial that was created by the advertising agencies for how you determine the markets that you're hoping to target and sell to. I know people that were Baby Boomers and were the earlier part of the Baby Boomers after World War 2.
 
Dan Sullivan: You are, you are.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: [laughs]
 
Dan Sullivan: I was born two years before the Baby Boomer.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, were you?
 
Dan Sullivan: 44, I'm 44. 46 is the [unintelligible].
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, so are you the, you're the last?
 
Dan Sullivan: Quiet, it's called the quiet, the quiet. Yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you've done a poor job of being the Quiet Generation, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it was the first American generation that was ever smaller than the generation before.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which we may be headed toward-
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, no, no. Z is, I mean, numbers wise, they're probably equal to my generation, but percentage wise, they're... And the thing is that you have the retiring population now, which was the biggest ever, you know, likely to be the biggest ever for a long time. And then you now, the job market is taking on the smallest generation, that's going to have, that's already having profound impact. But the big thing is, I think it's a bit of a craze that'll normalize after a while. I think that…
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You mean birth rate or what?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, I'm just saying the impact of the technology on people. And I think when you get one of the, you talk in your, the little blog that you wrote, is that to get back to the basics. Well, the basics is, people like people. And if you're a smart person, you like smart person. And if you're a good conversational person, you'll seek out really good conversation.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So what's your criteria for a good conversation?
 
Dan Sullivan: It's open-ended, that it really operates by improv rules that you don't say no to the other person and you help the other person out. In other words, the person says something, you think of something that furthers the thought that was there. And if you disagree with it, you have a pleasant way of disagreeing. And the best way is, you ask them a question about what they really mean. Okay. You don't take it at first value, you hear something and it triggers something. You just simply say, hmm, that's interesting. How are you looking at that? I'm not quite understanding how you're looking at it. But it's like you're enjoying the activity. You want to keep the activity going. I think the great thing is that the purpose of the conversation is to have a really great conversation.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so you use the word triggering, which has become much more part of our daily vernacular. How would you define triggering?
 
Dan Sullivan: You have an emotion and you express the emotion. You don't have an emotion and think about why you feel that way and then express the thought. It's emotional response, not thinking response.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So still walking through a minefield, so to speak.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I'm aware, you know, that we've lived half a century, and our political influences are totally different, you know, our religious differences, but I'm aware of that, you know, I'm aware of that. And quite frankly, I don't have great religious conversations with anybody. I mean, I was deeply marinated, and I'm aware of what the language is. I'm aware of the framework. But one is, I'm past retirement age on that subject. I got what I got, and I enjoyed what I got, but I don't need to talk about it. But that doesn't mean morality and ethics. Morality and ethics are mainstream conversations. Is it moral? Is it ethical? Everything else. That doesn't depend upon religion. That just depends upon, is this a good way to treat people? If you act this way over a long period of time, does it turn out to be a good result?
 
Dean Jackson and I had a conversation this morning on our podcast where he was talking about psychotropic drugs. And he says, isn't it interesting all the psychotropic drugs that are going on? And I said, well, you know, I grew up during the 1960s. They had a lot of psychotropic drugs back then. And I said... I was at Richard Rossi's mastermind group on regenerative medicine, and there was a group talking, and they said, Dan, have you experimented with psychotropic drugs? And I said, you mean aside from dealing with my own brain every day? And I said, it's a full-time job. I said, I just don't have time for side issues.
 
But I remember when I was in the Army in 1960s, '65 to '67, I was in South Korea. And I came back to Seattle. That's where we landed. And then I had a brother who was on the faculty of University of San Francisco. He was a teacher at USF. And I got there, and I noticed something, not as I remember him. I remember... He's about seven years older than I am. And he said, I wanted to show you something really interesting. He took me to Haight-Ashbury. This was '67. And he says, this is really interesting what's going on here. And I could tell he had added some elements to his entertainment enjoyment. And I was just noticing, he's a really smart person, very, very smart person, but this isn't doing him any good. I mean, he's talking in a way that I just don't see this ending good, what he's doing. And he pretty well fell apart within two years, and he committed suicide 12 years later. And I'm just careful about how I affect my brain, what I take in, affect my brain. Well, up until now, you had to take something in your mouth. Now you're listening to it, and now you're watching to it. And it's kind of like a drug. It's certainly a dopamine drug. You're triggering dopamine. You're probably triggering all sorts of other drugs inside of yourself by what you're consuming, so I'm really careful about what I take in.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: My sense is, and this has been true for a number of years now, that if I ever did hallucinogenic for the last 30 years, I would end up in assisted living. Although I certainly had fun at a certain time of my life with that. But you know, getting back to the hype of AI, which I've talked about before, and the idea of everything has to become bigger, it seems. One of the things that I have always found interesting about Strategic Coach is, I mean, you do talk about 10x-ing your business and all of that, but it's not, the primary goal doesn't seem to me to just be, more and more and more in terms of money and building and building. I mean, you could have a relatively small business and make a very good living depending on where your mindset is.
 
Dan Sullivan: And what your goals are. Yeah, well, our emphasis is on freedom: Freedom of Time, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that more and more, you're using your time in a way that suits you. Number two is Freedom of Money, that you have enough money that it's not the deciding factor in what you're doing. Freedom of Relationship, both in your company and outside of your company, you're dealing with people that you really like dealing with. And number three, Freedom of Purpose, that all of this is, you have a purpose in mind and your entrepreneurial company is your vehicle in your business life of achieving your goals. And you can add to that freedom every quarter. You can make decisions about not going to do this anymore, gonna do more of this every quarter.
 
So that is very pleasing to the people. And one of the things a lot of people find when they talk to Strategic Coach entrepreneurs who've been in the Program for a while, they hardly ever talk about money. And the reason is, money's kind of a system, and they know how to get their money, and the money works, and they're able to do that. And what I noticed when I go to other conferences of entrepreneurs, sometimes a guest, sometimes I'm a participant, there's an enormous amount of talk about money. And if you can only talk about money, it means that nothing else is happening good in your life, that money has to be the main topic.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, I agree with you, so what is the metric? Because it's become more that than anything else.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it's maybe people don't have any other metric than the money. And I mean, we have a time system in Strategic Coach. It's called Free Days, Focus Days, and Buffer Days. And Free Days are days completely free of anything related to business. And so, for example, they say, well, I get phone calls. And I said, have another phone call that's your Free Day phone, and it's just personal relationships so that personal people can talk to you, but there's no business talk. And you can't look at your laptop, business-wise. You can't read business books. And they said, well, what would I do? And I said, yes, that's a really good question. What would you do? Is there anything besides business to do in your life? And a lot of people, they don't have anything. I said, you got to fill in the rest of your life. You got to have activities. You have to have relationships that aren't about business.
 
And so it's remedial in that sense, a lot of people. You know, I have this question I ask, "How many of you can remember the courtship? How many of you here are married?" And they're married. And I said, "How many of you remember the courtship days? Remember the courtship days?" And they said, yeah. And I said, "I bet there was a lot of free time during the courtship days, wasn't there?" And I said, "Because back then he or she was a what? Prospect, right? Prospect, you know? So whatever free time you needed to seal the deal, you sealed the deal. And how many of you since then, both you and your partner are guilty of bait and switch?" I says, "Why don't you start dating again?" "You mean my wife? Date my wife?" And I said, "She's nearby. She's available. Why not?" Anyway, so they have to restore some order in their life with doing that. And a lot of what Strategic Coach is what's happening in their life so that doesn't involve work, that doesn't involve business. And after a while, they're nourished from all their life, not just one aspect of their life.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's interesting when you talk about that courtship period. When my business, I was, yeah, I'm always busy, right? I mean, we're all... Jobs take time. Whatever time you allow it, it will expand to fill that. And then other times are more busy and whatever. Anyhow, at a certain point, my wife and I were having difficulty. And she said to me, "You know, if you were having problem with your client, you would find the time to solve that problem." And I really hate when she is right. And, you know, and that just went to my bone marrow because she was right.
 
Dan Sullivan: That sounded suspiciously like truth.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, that's right. Exactly right.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was very close to truth.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. Yeah, and that just stopped me cold because just, you know, she was right. And It goes back to something we've talked about before, which is I think if your goals are financial, you're always going to measure yourself against other people. And, you know, and I think that the idea of measuring where you are today compared to where you were a year ago today, because you're the only one you're really competing with. And then so much comes down to that term "mindset" in terms of how do you look at your life? You know, people talk about purpose, but a lot of times talking about purpose is an opportunity to try to make a sale. And I think that you have goals in business. Yeah, you know, I guess purpose has become one of those Gothic print words. And I think it's important to understand why you're doing something. And is why you're doing it the same as purpose?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It's like the 10th why. You know, when somebody says you're doing that, why are you doing it? And you get down to the 10th level why you're doing it, it has a lot to do with what's your whole life for, you know, what's the meaning of your whole life? You know, I mean, is there an impact here? Is there enjoyment here? I mean, why are you doing what you're doing? And, you know, I just like being extraordinarily useful to people who are really talented, creative, and ambitious, sort of laying out structure for them so that they can actually get enjoyment out of all their progress. You know, and that they create new things. I'm really interested in people creating new things because I think there's an enjoyment. And especially where it's really useful, useful new things to do them. And, you know, I've already lived a long time by statistics. I'm, you know, I'm 80 years. And I would say for, since I've become an entrepreneur, I've been increasingly more useful to other people every year.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, aside from being more useful to other people, what does it do for you?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I just feel good. You know, I feel, you know. I like being who I am. I enjoy the company. I, you know, never thought about being someone else, you know, never tried to be like someone else. So I think there's just a sense of consciousness that things are good. You know, that, you know, I'm a happy person.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So this then circles us back to the beginning of this conversation, which is about fundamentals. Because these are the fundamentals. Who you are, what you do, why you do it, what brings you fulfillment or enjoyment. And I think that one's personality, if you will, is shaped by those different aspects of what we pursue, what has meaning to us, and so on. And you apply that to what's going on with technology now in the world. The fundamentals are the same. We are people who have certain feelings we repress, certain feelings that we embrace, certain interactions that we engage in. And, you know, I'm trying to form this as I'm talking because it goes back to fundamental behaviors long before any of this technology existed. We did all of these things before. There's no aspect of what we're doing that we haven't done before and there's not a historical antecedent to it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, what I like to think is that technology is always with us from the very beginning. It's been a way of gaining advantage. Advantage, you know, that a year from now, you have greater advantage than you have today in terms of what you're doing. So my feeling is, the next book I'm writing is called Timeless Technology, that technology is a way of thinking about how you do better in the future than you're doing now. You know, it's got a lot of different aspects to it. And technologies, and my idea is, language is a technology. In other words, it's a structure. And there's some language that's a lot more effective than other kind of language. As you found out when you took your play from two hours and seven minutes to 60 minutes, you found out that some words were more important than other words. Some activities. So there's a technology to how you did that together.
 
But technology is simply a way of creating an advantage that can be shared, and other people can gain the advantage that you have. And it's a way of making progress that's measurable. You know, you can compare what you're doing now with what you're able to do a year from now. And I don't think it's peculiar to a particular type of technology. It's just an increase of capability and confidence that people have, which allows them to commit to a bigger future and have the courage to take a jump. So I see it as a fundamental human trait. I think it's what differentiates us from the other species. You know, that we have an ability to intentionally and deliberately create new behaviors that are experiments, and that they prove useful, and then we adapt the new thing to do that. So I think it's just a way of doing it. But it doesn't, shouldn't at all change what your fundamental values are as a human being, regardless of what the new technology is.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah, I think technology can in some ways amp up our ability to do something on a…
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, I think the way that technology is talked about today, it's a new form of religion, and we've talked about that before. It's a way of getting away from ourselves, and I think that's always a religious instinct. You know, you're trying to transcend who you are today, and I said, why? What's wrong with how you are today?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I agree. I mean, that's, you know, I always get a kick out of hearing, you know, how do you show up and what's your best self? And no, this is, this is it. There's good days and bad days, and you try to minimize the bad days. But all those things that we want, all those things that we pursue, I believe are the same things that were true a thousand years ago. Because I think it comes down to that very simple phrase that people are people. Whether it's power struggles, whether, you know, the words you were talking about, I believe words are a mode of expression, because that was birth of language. And language started off all from survival aspects. And I think that there's often a gap between our language and our feelings. Not that we all should walk around fully exposed with our fully exposed feelings because that vulnerability... The fear is if you are vulnerable, you'll be hurt. And that's another risk, right? You know, it's another risk. Are you going to be hurt if you express that feeling? And I think that we too often look to others as our measuring stick instead of at ourselves.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing is that you develop a sense about who you can be around.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Or who you want to be around.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's nine billion on the planet. I don't need them all.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Where would you put them?
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, I mean, there's a, it's not a proven law, but it's called the law. It's one of those common sense laws. It's called Dunbar's law. And that basically we can't have an emotional connection with more than 150 people, period. And then the top 10 are infinitely more powerful than the next 140. Where it's been most proven is that there's very few military units in the world that have more than 150 individuals in the unit. And the reason is that you can't feel an emotional commitment to more than 150 people. You can't do it to 15,000 and everything like that. So probably every person in the world doesn't have an inner circle that's more than 10 people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And where that takes me is I think that we are all, and I think we go through our lives, seeking connection. But if we are, if one is afraid of the potential vulnerability when establishing that connection...
 
Dan Sullivan: It inhibits you. It inhibits you. Yeah, yeah. I was mentioning the story of watching the little girl be totally buried. And it may be that her parents are just boring, but I just got a feeling that she's living her life in her phone.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I'd imagine many of her friends are, and that seems to be the normal for that.
 
Dan Sullivan: The reality is inside their phone. It's not out in... You know, I said to Babs, I said, I'm kind of happy we didn't have cell phones when I was a kid. I mean, I know how to use them, but they aren't the be-all and end-all. You know, I think our last several podcasts are taking on a particular direction. And I think it came a lot out of writing the book Casting Not Hiring, and that basically we are being challenged to live inside of a purely technological world, and it's not satisfying. And since it's not satisfying, let's go for the world that really is satisfying and keep adding more and more dimensions to the world that's really satisfying. I've tried out technology as a way of living, and it's not a good way to live.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So let me tell you what just happened this past week. I was thinking back, I was going through a closet, getting some stuff out, and I have this briefcase that was made by a friend of mine back in 1970. And it's really cool. It looks like, it's still this great-looking, heavy leather, cool, timeless, classic-looking briefcase. Really nice. That guy who did leather work, he went to University of Wisconsin, where I went, and he was my second hire when I began Billy Whiskers, which is my clothing company. And I thought about him, and I wondered whatever happened to him. And so, thanks to technology, I was able to find him. And I was able to find his phone number. So I haven't spoken to this guy for 53 years. I called him up and, "It's Jeff Madoff." And we talked for two and a half hours.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's like you had talked last week.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, yes. And it was a fabulous conversation. He is a coach, not a business coach. And he got into being a coach 25 years ago or so, which was early in that game. And we had a great conversation. He said to me, you know, "I've thought about you over the years. And I know when I ended up leaving Billy Whiskers, which was the company, he said, I think I might have expressed some of my anger towards you. And it wasn't until much later that I realized that the anger I was expressing was at myself. I didn't know what direction I wanted to go in. And things became other people's fault, not mine, when I had to take ownership of how my life was going to unfold." And we had just a fantastic conversation.
 
And, you know, he said, did you, do you remember feeling that? And I said, I remember that you had some anger, but it was also, we were kids. You know, we were 24 years old, you know, when we separated in terms of the business. You know, you were trying to find direction. And he said, yeah, and I was trying to find direction for the next 25 years until I started doing this and realized this is really what I want to do. And that everything I had done before informed me where I could recognize this in other people because I had gone through it too. And it was just fabulous. The conversation was absolutely wonderful. We'll continue the conversation, and using technology like that, you know, to put together a Zoom with a bunch of people I grew up with, which I did when COVID hit. I'm not talking about now work applications. There are also great work applications because, as you and I have both said, it's a tool, period. It's a tool. How you use it is going to determine its value and what that value, how that value affects you. So I can use it for business, but I can also use it for those personal connections.
 
Dan Sullivan: Before Zoom, we wouldn't be having these conversations.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, we would when we see each other, but we wouldn't-
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Not the frequency.
 
Dan Sullivan: Not the frequency. We created a book out of the conversations. We wouldn't have done that, you know.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the whole book was created through Zoom.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. In our conversations on it. And yeah, I think about when people say to me that they have Zoom fatigue, whatever the hell that is, which I've never experienced. To me, I think about…
 
Dan Sullivan: What it means is that they're boring normally, and Zoom just multiplies the boringness.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, you can be boring to a lot more people.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. I have a lot of discretion about how I want to be bored. I don't want technology to play any part of that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and I think I say to people, God, can you imagine what that lockdown for a year and a half would have been like if you didn't have Zoom?
 
Dan Sullivan: It's really interesting. One of my clients at that time, I haven't really seen him much over the last three or four years, but he had, out of the top 10 people at Zoom, he had seven of them as financial clients. And I asked him, I said, they handled it so well, were they waiting for something like this? Because they went from 10 million to 50 million in four months. They're not that high now, they're down somewhat after COVID stopped, they're down somewhat. And he said, yeah, they had a feeling that there was gonna be something big and unexpected that happened, that they were going to be the solution. And one of the things that they did right from the beginning was make sure that the picture on the screen was so great. And Skype wasn't like that. None of the other platforms are like that. But the thing that really gets you about Zoom is, you know, it's as good as the television. Yeah. But he said that they had worked for another company before and they all left en masse and they created this new question because they weren't putting enough emphasis on the picture quality. So, you know, they saw something in the future and they prepared for it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And where the vernacular used to circle around, just like in phones with BlackBerry, Palm, then BlackBerry and then the iPhone, you know, this kind of communication online, "Skype" was the term. It was a verb even. And, you know, they all but disappeared. I mean, I know it's all around, but it's not...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. People say we have to do it on Skype. I said, I'm sorry. I won't, I won't do a conversation on Skype. I said, I can't stand it. I said, I won't like the experience right now. So we do Zoom or we don't do it. Anyway, it's an interesting thing, but you know. But I've loved it and I've not found anything [unintelligible]. I mean, you're there, I'm here, but we're someplace else. There's a thing that we're developing out of the last number of podcasts. We're seeing this line between humanity and technology. I think it has infinite dimensions to explore as we go forward.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thanks for joining us today on our show, Anything and Everything. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit acreativecareer.com and madoffproductions.com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach.com.