Creating Backstage Magic With Teamwork And Technology

Gord Vickman: Welcome to the next episode of Podcast Payoffs. My name's Gord Vickman, here with my pod partner, Dan Sullivan. Dan, how are you?
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm good. Been traveling the Western Hemisphere in the last two, three weeks, all the way to Buenos Aires in Argentina. Yeah, it's human, just like all the other places I've been to.
 
Gord Vickman: Well, that was a teaser. So do you want to give a two-line summary of why you're up and down to Argentina—regenerative medicine?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I'm doing regenerative medicine, which is the most advanced probably stem cell clinic in the world. It's a marvelous scientific lab that has a clinic. Pushing 80, I'll be 80 in three months. And I have some orthopedic injuries from the 1970s, which I have refused to get replacements, like knee replacements. One of them is a torn cartilage from 1975. More or less put up with it for almost 50 years. And this new possibility of regrowing your cartilage came up, and we jumped on it, and it's a bit of a trip.
 
Gord Vickman: A lot of teamwork involved in the whole process of going down there. And that's my clumsy segue into the topic of conversation for the podcast today, because the latest quarterly book is called Everyone And Everything Grows. And I read it and I thought this could be the bible, give or take, for teamwork and team building. I thought we could give it a little bit of love. And Podcast Payoffs, if you haven't joined the show before, we cover the intersection of teamwork and technology. Dan covers the teamwork masterfully. I cover the technology to the best of my ability. So we thought we'd go through as many of these as we have occasion to do so, and then I can maybe throw a few questions at you to see how would technology either hinder or assist each of these points. So before we get into the nitty-gritty here, Dan, what inspired you to write this book, Everyone And Everything Grows? Where did this come from?
Dan Sullivan: Well, I was aware of a particular request on the part of our entrepreneurial clients, and this is year 35 of The Strategic Coach Program in workshop form. So we started, Babs and I got this going in 1989. Babs Smith is my partner in life and my partner in business. So we've put together a great team over 35 years and just basically making up the structures and the processes that we use in Coach. And it reflects what entrepreneurs get in The Strategic Coach Program. But it really got very, very intense during and after COVID that people were saying, how did you ever put this company together? Because we just flew through COVID. I mean, it was about a three-month fast hustle to get the whole program and all of our interaction with our clients switched over from in-person workshops, which was 100% in-person workshops, to 100% Zoom.
 
And we pulled it off in 90 days. We took a hit. You know, certain people just couldn't handle the Zoom experience as far as clients are going. But our team came out stronger after two and a half years. Our team came out stronger than we went in. And we had acquired this new global capability to have workshops that went all over the world virtually. So that people said, you know, where do you get such great people? You know, which is an interesting question that I've got a series of answers for. But the big thing was, it got to the point where I said, we've never written a book on the backstage of Strategic Coach. So, put it together, you know, it's a 90-day project. Put it together, and it just went very, very smoothly. And I have nine team members on the team who take aspects of the book production, including the audio, the video, and the cartooning. And it just went very, very smoothly.
 
We adjusted our whole company and how we operated to Zoom, and we adjusted the whole program. So I said, we learned a lot about how good we are during the COVID period. So that's what put it together. And the response has been terrific. As a matter of fact, I just had my sleep doctor from California, who I have a Zoom relationship with, have never met him in person. He got really interested, and he said, I checked you. He said, you got a lot of podcasts. He said, I'm listening to your podcast. And I said, I got a lot of books too. He's read about 10 of the books. And one day, he says, you know, I'm going to sign up for this program. And I said, that's good. I'll give you someone to talk to. And he did, and he did his first workshop three days ago in Santa Monica. This is live workshop because we're back live again. But he got the book. He got the Everyone And Everything Grows, Gord. And he said, you know, by talking about how you put the company together actually sells the Program better than if you had a book about the Program. And he said, every entrepreneur would like to have a team like this. So that's where it came from.
 
Gord Vickman: So we'll put a checkmark into the tech as a force of good because could you have envisioned any way that Coach could have pulled this off without Zoom? Let's say Zoom did not exist.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, we were dead in the water if we didn't have Zoom. I mean, Zoom themselves, the statistics are really quite remarkable. Before COVID, they had 10 million users. I mean, they were a big player in the virtual world. But in six months, they went to 50 million. From my perspective, I think they handled it pretty seamlessly. I mean, everybody's got their complaints, but I said, geez. The way I looked at it, Gord, and I think we've had some conversations about this, is that it's not communication, it's transportation. You're actually there. You know, when you put a Zoom workshop together, people, with three clicks I think, are actually there. I said, I don't treat it like it's television. It's not television. It's communication. You're there. And I think the people who made the cut to adjust it easily took it as transportation. And the ones who didn't, they said, no, no, it can't be like real life, you know, like seeing people in person. And I said, well, it's missing a whole aspect of the in-person relationship, but there's some things you can do with Zoom that you can't do with in-person workshops. So I look at it, this has got real strengths, this has got real strengths, and we have the advantage of having both strengths.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah, and I think you heard people talk about Zoom fatigue and whatnot. I think there were companies that were using it properly, and there were companies that weren't. If you had used Zoom as a monitoring tool where everyone's just constantly connected... For example, we have a tool here at Coach called The Fast Filter, The Impact Filter for a longer form version of that, that gets completed before any meetings, especially those with you. Dan, I know you love meetings. But everyone has to complete the Filter before any of these meetings happen. So if you're using Zoom just to sit around and stare at people, then I'm sure that's where the fatigue came in. But if you're going in with purpose, I don't think you really need to be on Zoom for huddles longer than an hour. You don't need to be on an all-day Zoom meeting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I just had one this morning. We have a Zoom sales meeting worldwide. You know, they'll probably have people from 10x and [unintelligible]. The actual team member who is the emcee for it is in London, England. And we have, you know, people from the continent, European continent. We have people from Africa, people from the Middle East, going east as far as Mumbai and India. And then going west, of course, all of North America, we would have all of North America. There'll be some Australians and New Zealanders there. South America, we'd have South Americans on. Well, we couldn't do that before. But we had a meeting and there were about 15 of us and everything was prompted by a Fast Filter that Eleonora Mancini had put together. And we just went through, walked it. And I said, everybody clear about it? And there were some questions and, you know, and I made some adjustments from the last time we did it just to make it more user-friendly for people who had no Coach experience before. And half hour and we were all set. We have 300 on the guest list and our statistics tell us that we'll get 180. So 60% will show up and out of that we'll get 20% sign up. So that's pretty good.
 
Gord Vickman: Mm-hmm. In the book, you talk about "no defense budget." Sounds military, but I think it has more to do with teamwork. Can you elaborate?
 
Dan Sullivan: I'd like to link that back to the organizations that don't do Zoom well. They're highly political. It's a big thing that prevents people from using Zoom properly is that there's enormous competitive politics inside the organization. So, for example, I've heard of big corporations, they'll have 20 people on the meeting, and everybody is blacked out. And what they don't like with corporations that are very hierarchical, and they're very political don't like is that an individual on the Zoom screen can be anywhere on the screen, you could have the CEO down at the bottom, and you can have, you know, the lowest person on the totem pole is actually on the top. And they feel very insecure about that because they think they're on top. And I mean, it's very haphazard because everybody is on the screen differently for everybody who's on the screen. And you can move them around. I can move the squares around. So, for example, if somebody is talking, I always move their square right next to me so that when I'm looking at the camera, I'm looking at them. I just flip them around on the screen. Everybody can do that. They can flip me around. We have big groups. Like on Wednesday, I'll have four pages of people. And I always wonder. I go to the next page and next room and talk to people, and I'll call on them haphazardly. But I think our culture, so going back to your question, what I really strove for was the notion that people could come to Coach and they don't have to spend any energy on defending themselves. You know your role. You know what your job is. You know the team that you're in. We've got all sorts of thinking tools that allow you to really, really streamline communication and teamwork and collaboration. And all I want, if you're working in the office, and we're tightening that up a little bit after a couple of years of experience of virtual teams, of having at least one day a month where everybody in each location, our three main locations are the UK, and we have a Toronto team, we have a Chicago team, and then we have other people who are more remote. But we just want them to have the experience every month of actually being together. We have breakfast, we have lunch, and people get to interact with each other. And so that's a little adjustment we've made after a couple of years. It needs a little bit more in person. In June, we have everybody worldwide, where everybody's coming to Toronto for it. These are things you learn as you go along. You notice there's requests and there's a sense- Babs has a spidey sense about this. She says, I think we've got to tighten up a little bit so at least 12 times a year people have the experience of being in a big group.
 
Gord Vickman: And just one more addition to that, another check in the tech box, because we have the capability now to make data-driven decisions. We use AI tools for various decision-making processes and whatnot. And further to the no defense budget is everybody has the numbers. We know what is expected of us. We know what we're trying to hit. Furthermore, if you set a big, scary, ambitious goal, in the corporate world, if you don't hit your numbers, that's a really bad thing because you're the guy who has to come or the gal who's coming into these huddles and these meetings and you're not hitting your numbers. But on the other hand, here at Strategic Coach, if you set a number that is bigger than you expect and add 20 percent—the Dan Sullivan pricing model, set a price that scares you and add 20 percent—well, if you're thinking about podcast totals, you're thinking about qualified leads, you're thinking about social media presence, any content, video views, set a number that scares you and then add 20 percent.
 
So If you're not hitting your numbers, no one's going to put you over their knee and spank you. They're going to say, okay, so you set a big, bold, ambitious goal. This happened, this happened. You can do an Experience Transformer. You can sit back and you can say, okay, well, why didn't this work? Maybe the number was just so outrageous that, you know, we pulled it out of our wherever. We didn't quite hit it. But you'll never be punished for setting a goal that is ambitious and a little bit frightening. I would assume and I trust that most of the entrepreneurs that are in Strategic Coach, this is not totally insular to us, but they would encourage their team members. Do you hear that often? They would encourage their team members to set big, bold, ambitious goals because no one's going to be punished. No defense budget. No one's going to get a spanking if they don't hit their numbers. Do you hear that often?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I think we're the role models here because Babs and I have had this mindset. I mean, we created the company with this mindset. There are three possibilities. So one is that you're winning. So you're on track for your big numbers, and we've got a good teamwork organization that, I mean, we get daily numbers and we have open-book management. So everybody who wants to know, if you want to know what the numbers are and how much money is being made, what the profits are, that information is all available. Not everybody wants to know it, but it's available. Quite frankly, being one of the owners of the company, I know the sales numbers. I know pretty well on a daily basis how many new people are signing up for the Program, what the renewal rates are. So I know that. Don't know a lot about what the marketing numbers are. We're a profitable company, and we've had two non-profitable but they weren't losing years. So, you know, we've got really good cash confidence as a company.
 
But the other thing is that quarters and years are kind of arbitrary. I mean, you can fail to meet your goals and our year-end, and it's across the board now in the U.S. that everybody's year-end is the 31st of December. All companies have a year-end. You used to be able to choose your year-end, and there was a lot of tax fiddling, moving tax years. Now it's just a single, so it simplified things. But you can have a really bad December that made you miss your numbers for the end of the year. But you can have a phenomenal first quarter in the next year that shoots you way above. So you got to have a certain amount of common sense with this. Calendars are arbitrary. But the way business flows and the way that cash comes in, there's seasons to it and there's unique things that happen that all of a sudden you get a a real tsunami of cash coming in. And you didn't figure on that, but you have to build in both the bad surprises and the good surprises. You just have to have a sense of that.
 
And we've got 35 years of experience, so we know what works. But I think the other thing is that I find that when things don't work, it's not an individual problem. It's a system problem, it's a structure problem. So what we do, we have a tool called The Experience Transformer. So when we say we don't hit our numbers, we say, okay, what worked? The first thing you have to do is, what worked about it? I mean, what was it that we were doing that really worked? And you have to have at least five things, and that raises everybody's confidence. So much so that they're confident. I said, okay, so now let's look at what didn't work. And it's never an individual failure. It's always, we hadn't really put this together properly. You know, we took too much time doing this. We did what we thought was best, but we hadn't taken into account some things. And then we say, if we were doing this over again now, knowing what we know now, how would we do it better? How would we do it differently? So I've got a phrase that there's only two teams that you can be on. You can be on the winning team, or you can be on the learning team. And you've got to be on both because you're moving back and forth between winning and learning.
 
Gord Vickman: There's a lot of trades going on between the winning team and the learning team for future considerations.
 
Dan Sullivan: The only way you can be on the losing team is you didn't win and you didn't learn. And that's the losing team. What you want to do is you never want to be on the losing team. You just want to be on the winning team or the learning team. That requires complete transparency, and it requires complete openness. That's the system that's not working. Because everybody, if they're freed up from the possibility of being blamed or they have to defend themselves, can get very creative about what happened and what didn't happen. But if you don't give them that reassurance that it's going to be safe to point out glitches and things not quite clicking the way they should, they won't be creative at all. They'll just defend themselves. They don't want to be in the spotlight for blame.
 
Gord Vickman: Therein lies the reason why the grinding machine bureaucracy of massive corporations, everything grinds to a halt because people spend more time trying to make sure that no one's watching them screwing up than actually developing anything or making anything or doing anything.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, there's a great example that I follow because it gives me joy. And it's, except for Tesla, all the EV companies have hit a wall over the last two years. Can you imagine, I mean, Ford, which was in- All the big three, Ford and GM and… whatever name Chrysler goes by these days, they just hit the wall. Volkswagen hit the wall. The only one that didn't hit the wall was Toyota and says, we don't see a future in EVs. We see hybrid being the way to the future. You have both fuels. You have electricity and you have, I mean, Toyota is probably the biggest car company in the world, total sales. And they've been around for a while and they've seen cycles and they're not seduced by technology too much. They have great dealerships. They have great service. Cars are solid cars. Not spectacular cars, but very solid cars. But I was watching- Can you imagine what it's like in one of those large corporations where somebody bet their business career on EVs, and they're losing $50,000, $60,000 on every vehicle they produce? And they said, well, you're the one who sold this idea! We knew it wasn't going to work! You know, the knives and the hatchets are out, the budget's on the floor, and everything like that. Well, who wants to take the chance of being creative in an environment like that, you know?
 
Gord Vickman: Mm-hmm. Well, until there's a charger on every corner, or at least multiple corners, we're still a long ways away from mass adoption, despite what commercials, I mean…
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing is, I think Tesla just used up the potential buyers, you know? I mean, Elon wants to walk on Mars. He's not really into EVs. It's just a way of making his valuation go up so he can create rocket ships.
 
Gord Vickman: And troll Disney. Dan, we've been talking about the latest quarterly book, Everyone And Everything Grows. You can get your copy at strategiccoach.com. Just click "store." There's a free download or you can purchase a hard copy, whichever way you'd like. It's available there. Everyone And Everything Grows. Unique Ability Teamwork. I mean, we can't talk about teamwork without talking about Unique Ability Teamwork. It is so instrumental to the work we do here at Strategic Coach. So that wove its way into the book, and that seems like a given. So top line for that before we chat technology.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, the big thing is that one great freedom that technology brings, if it's properly thought about and if it's properly implemented, is that it allows human beings—and we've got 35 years of history with this—that the more you just utilize technology for the kinds of activities where it wouldn't be anyone's Unique Ability. Okay, like really fast calculating, there isn't any human being you want them spending their time doing fast calculating. There are some things that technology is just super fast at, and it always is correct. If the input is proper, the output is always proper. But what it does, it frees up human beings to be human beings. But you have to give humans a target when they first join Coach.
 
Basically one way that we communicate this is that you have a Unique Ability. You were born with it. And it's an area of activity that you love doing. You're just naturally proficient at this. You're just naturally great at this. You always keep getting better. It always energizes you. And it's what people would value you most if you could do it all the time. And we're going to do a deal. You know, when you join us, you're going to do a whole bunch of activities that we need these activities done. But we're going to be watching you and talking to you. What part of what we've given you do you love doing? What part don't like? And as you get better and better and you fit into a team, you know, of Unique Ability skills, your Unique Ability, five other people's Unique Ability, and you create Unique Ability Teamwork. We're going to reach a point where we can free you up from everything that doesn't energize you. Anywhere where you get into trouble because you're not really good at it.
 
We want to blueprint your time at Strategic Coach for you to be more successful, more excited, more energized, and more valuable. That's what we want to do. That's from day one. You know, a lot of people, you know, they just not go for that. They said, you know, I just want a job. I just want to show up at nine and do something and go home at five. And I said, well, fortunately, there's an enormous amount of opportunity for you to do that. Not in our company.
 
Gord Vickman: They're out there. It's just not here.
 
Dan Sullivan: Believe me. The way we do it, you can't find it anywhere else on the planet, but the way we don't do it, it's all around you.
 
Gord Vickman: You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. That's what they used to say at dive bars at 2 a.m. here in Toronto. You don't have to go home, but you just can't stay here. You can go wherever you want. Dan, I wonder about something. I wonder if you wonder about something. Let's noodle this for a moment, shall we? I wonder if the reliance on AI tools—so we have GPT, Google released Gemini. I wonder if the reliance on AI tools to solve the minutiae of every problem in one's life and outsourcing your own hopes, dreams, and wishes because it's simply easier to get an AI to do it. Is that going to stifle the ability of younger people in their quest to discover their Unique Ability? An over-reliance on having the machine do it for them, not allowing that serendipity, not allowing that waiting, wondering, wandering, being bored, allowing yourself to develop those whatever it is, whatever it's going on in synapse town up in your brain to develop those pathways to discover what you like. Do you think that's where we're headed? And maybe young people should pull back a bit to discover that Unique Ability? Or are we past the threshold? What do you think?
 
Dan Sullivan: I did a podcast with one of our great clients, Dean Jackson, yesterday. And I said, you know, I've been watching this more as an observer since November 30, 2022 was when ChatGPT went public, public in the sense that anybody could use it. And I said, you know, I don't get any trend whatsoever after a year and a half. I just don't see anything. And if anything, the picture is less clear now than it was a year and a half ago. We have a great AI guy in the Program, Evan Ryan, who's just pushing 30. And he's been working with AI one way or another since he was about 20. He wrote a really great book called AI As Your Teammate, which he has a program and our entire company took it. You know, and I've talked to people, and I mean, we have some AI projects. I have an AI newsletter that writes itself every two weeks, and we're getting 80 to 90% open rate on every issue now. It's really great. We wouldn't have a newsletter like that ourselves because it would be too much boring work for too many people. But this thing writes itself, it tests itself, it gets the research, it summarizes, you know, all the response rate and gives you a scorecard every two weeks. And then it says, based on how it was received last time, we suggest these articles and everything.
 
And I said, that's terrific. You know, it gives us more exposure. You know, we started with 120 people. Looking at it now, we've got over 2,000, it'll be 4,000 in six months. So, you know, it grows every issue. And I said, that's really neat, you know. But if we didn't have it, it wouldn't affect the overall success of our company that much. And I was telling Dean, I said, when the Vision Pro, Apple's new Vision Pro came out, which is goggles, you know, I'm not a big fan of goggles. First of all, it's really pricey. I mean, ChatGPT doesn't cost that much. It's just utilizing a program on the computer. But Vision Pro, you know, it's like $3,800 American, I think. Maybe in Canada, it's $5,000. I don't know. So Dean was saying that he hadn't really been seduced by it yet. And I said, I got two questions about any new technology that changes everything. I mean, every time one of these comes out, this changes everything. And I said, well, depends on what your everything is. And I says, I've got two questions. And this is a personal question. This technology, does it increase or decrease ADD?
 
Gord Vickman: And the answer will determine whether you are an early adopter or not.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I said, it doesn't sound like it would do someone with my neurological makeup a plus. Okay. The other question I ask is, if I don't do this, am I going to miss anything? And as far as I can say, it looks like it will increase my ADD and it looks like it'll make me more unproductive than I am right now. So I'm going to take a pass on it. I think that's the heart of the matter with this. You know what I think it is? I think it has to do with dopamine. And that these new technologies give a constant dopamine hit. It makes you feel like you're mastering the world and you're becoming progressively more useless. But you have a good feeling about being useless. Before, you didn't feel good about being useless. Now you're getting dopamine highs from being distracted and useless.
 
So going back to Evan Ryan, our 30-year-old AI wiz. He said, I'm thinking about writing a new book. And I said, I got a title for you and see if it corresponds to your experience. And I said, I think AI is exponential tinkering. And he says, boy, that's a really interesting use of words. Tinkering is that you get an idea one day, say, I wonder if I take this and put it together with this, what it will produce. So I think it's just a lot of people, 100 million or so, you know, maybe a billion, are just doing little private projects. They say, you know, if I put this together, I wonder if I can do this. And, you know, I had this project where I wanted to know what my copy that I write in my books, and it was actually the book that we're talking about here, Everyone And Everything Grows. I've always been fascinated with the language of Shakespeare.
 
So there was this very, very interesting writing structure in the 1600s, 1500s, 1600s. It was called iambic pentameter, where everything is just 10 syllables. Every line is just 10 syllables. So I said, can I see this chapter? And it was Unique Ability Teamwork, actually. It's the chapter we're talking about. And I said, I wonder what this looks like if it was written the way Shakespeare would write things. And came back in about an hour. And it was fascinating. It was just interesting. Totally different thought structure, totally different thing. And I said, that's really great. But reading is one thing, hearing it read by someone who's got a gift for Shakespearean language. And I picked a very famous actor, dead 25 years. And I said, can you get his voice and have him just read this? Took about two days, and really, really great. And I listened to it once a week. I just listened to it, and I said, gee, that's really beautiful. I mean, you'd never communicate it to anyone, but it does interesting things to my brain.
 
So what I'm getting across is that every use of technology, I mean, there's the Googles of the world, and the Metas of the world, and the open AI. We're going to take over the world with this. But I think the daily use, if you could really, you know, detect how it's being used. People are just playing. They're just fooling around. You know, they're kids in the playground who say, yeah, I wonder if I put this together like this, and, you know, how if I build this. And I think there's just a lot of tinkering. And I think that will take the world in a direction that nobody was planning on or even hoping for, you know, that I think it's going to just get a lot of people a lot of amusement, a lot of entertainment. And one of the big things I do predict is that people will get in touch with how they actually think about things. And because they have this technological mirror coming back and showing them how their brain works. And I think people are going to get a lot of delight out of that.
 
Gord Vickman: Most of it will be used to make memes. Then you have the dirty stepsisters. You have scams and pornography because scams and pornography built the internet.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, Vision Pro came out, what was it, two weeks ago? The Apple Vision Pro. And already they're being blasted because you can't do porn on it.
 
Gord Vickman: Mm-hmm. Yet. Yet.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's not far off. And it's just new ways of experiencing your old addiction.
 
Gord Vickman: On that note, Dan, can I add a third thing to the checklist of your technology adoption thing? Do I have to wear anything stupid on my head? If the answer is yes, then I'm probably not going to adopt it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It was like, what was the Google, the Google glasses?
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah, those look stupid, so they dropped them. And then so Apple came out with Apple Vision.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you looked like a jerk. I mean, people have a sense of style, but some people don't. So it doesn't really matter, you know, and actually they feel more comfortable walking around with goggles because they don't want to interact with people anyway. So you have to understand the people designing these things are designing it for the world that they live in. And that ain't the world that you and I live in.
 
Gord Vickman: And I'm thankful for that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Gord Vickman: All right.
 
Dan Sullivan: What'd you get out of this conversation? A new thought.
 
Gord Vickman: A new thought that I got is, technology can be used as we weave it through. We spent this episode talking about Everyone And Everything Grows. We gave you three of the eight chapters there. That's the sizzle. If you want the full steak, you can get the book at strategiccoach.com. Just click "store." Technology can be used for a force of good. It can be used for a force of evil. You can shoehorn it into any of these to make any of these chapters or any of these elements of teamwork and bettering yourself worse, or you can use it in a smart way. And that's what I got out of it. When I read the book for the first time, then the second time, I thought, we'll go through these chapters in our next podcast, and we'll pepper in where technology kind of fits into it, because it goes in line with the show and the intersection of teamwork and technology. So it can be used for a force of good, it can be used for definite evil, but it's up to the individual to decide how you're going to use that and how you're going to carry that forward.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think it has to do with individual aspiration and what people are attracted to. And I think it just multiplies inclinations. I think technology does multiply directions that you're already going in, and people are going into directions that are good for them and they're going in directions that are bad for them. I think that artificial intelligence, if you weren't productive, it'll make you 10 times more nonproductive. And if you're productive and approach it strategically and intelligently, it'll probably make you 10 times more productive. I mean, the microchip did that. The internet did that. So I've got a lot of history. My use of a technology is a function of who the person I am and my plans for myself in the future. And I think technology is a magnifier, but it won't turn a useless person into a useful person.
 
Gord Vickman: Maybe in a virtual world, but here you're still swimming upstream. Dan, you mentioned Evan Ryan earlier. Recent guests on this show, Podcast Payoffs, when this episode is done and we're pretty much wrapped up now, you can hop back two episodes and you can start on the double series we did with Evan Ryan—really fascinating guy, super duper interesting, smart as hell. And he shared with us tips, tricks, techniques, things that you've probably never heard about. And you will get value and glean new information from those episodes with Evan Ryan. So hop back and have a listen to those. Don't just take my word for it or Dan's word for it. You can go back and take Evan Ryan's word for it. And if you like this episode, please share it with someone. Share it with a friend. Share it with someone you love, know, and trust. Share it with someone you don't like at all. We'll take it. Dan, always a pleasure. Thanks so much.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Gord