AI Is Your Megaphone, Not Your Master

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Jeff, I want to bounce something off of you. You know, since microchip technology started early ‘70s when it became public, they called them integrated circuits before, but they came up with this nifty little name, microchip. And there's been a whole series of latest things that came out with the promise that this is going to change everything. And AI is the big subject right now. And you've been working with AI, I've been working with AI, and I find it really handy, and I get a lot of benefits from it. But the way it's being talked about in the media, especially the way the big tech companies, the chip companies, or the AI app companies are talking about it, it's almost godlike. And my sense is that there's going to be a wall that gets hit this year, next year, where they begin to see that this isn't the savior of mankind that everybody's been talking about, or the destroyer of mankind that everybody's talking about. And the reason is that humans have been dealing with things for a hundred, five hundred thousand years, whatever it is. And there's always new things. There's new dangers. There's new opportunities. And humans are kind of structured to wait and see and not bet the entire firm on a new thing. And my sense is that it's going to turn out not to be as transformative as they're predicting it to be, and that's going to cause a bit of a holdup in society. Plus, it uses up a ton of electricity that we actually don't have right now. Probably running out of electricity is always a big deal.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you know, the new, new thing, to quote Michael Lewis's book title, that's what AI is now. And I think that innovation that's public facing has been fairly dormant since the cell phone, the smartphone. And then people finally realized, you know, I don't actually need to replace my phone every year.
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't need 99% of what they're putting on the phone.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. By the way, that's a new pet peeve annoyance is that AI is so permeated so many things because nobody wants the fear of missing out that you know, I go to write something and Microsoft offers its co-pilot, you know, to rewrite something and I turn on my phone and I have an Android and there's an AI thing. When you go on to Zoom, the AI assistant pops up and they don't make it easy for you to opt out of this stuff because what it's doing is, you know, vacuuming up as much information as possible, you know, to do that. So we were talking before we started recording, you were talking about how there's such a rush to invest in AI. And, you know, friends of mine in private equity, and I said, yeah, all we do is, you know, put the same thing we're trying to sell them before, but put .AI after it, you know, and then you can get a meeting. And so I think that it's kind of like, you know, the gold rush, to use that as a metaphor.
 
Dan Sullivan: It is a gold rush.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And the funny thing is that the biggest group of people that made money in the gold rush are the people selling the shovels.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The general stores, the general merchandise, and the lawyers, always, always the lawyers.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. So I think that we don't know what the outcome is. I go back to the beginning of television. In the beginning of television, which was another seismic change, there were two things that were said at essentially the same time. I believe it was Bill Paley who said that television is the window on the world. He was the co-founder of CBS. And Newton Minow, head of the FCC, said television is the vast wasteland. And they were both right. It's both. There's great stuff, there's horrible stuff. AI is another tool. And there's a lot of people that see tremendous opportunity in trying to get other people to enlist in their programs, their whatever it is, to distribute AI. Here's how to use it effectively. Here's how to 10x your business using AI. Here you can eliminate all these people. Here you get all that. We don't know what's going to happen. I think that's the main thing is we don't know, but we do know that it can be a powerful tool for both good and not good.
 
And if you don't mind me mentioning, you sent out kind of a series of inspirational, if that's the right term, notes about AI, which I read this morning before getting onto our podcast. You were talking about the endless niches for AI and for ideation and all kinds of things like that. And my thought was, as I was reading it, probably the same things were said about the pencil. You know? And that's not to diminish anything. It's a new idea, a truly new idea. I mean, it wasn't that long before people couldn't read. Then with, you know, movable print and Gutenberg, et cetera, and we know all that history. And when people could then start creating the word themselves by learning how to write, you know, that was huge. Huge cultural shift. I don't know that AI is any different than that because there can be things that are written that are inspirational. There are things that are entertaining. It's another tool for expression on one hand.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I think that all technologies are amplifiers of one kind or another. You know, something that was done just a little before wasn't done at all suddenly becomes done a lot. And, you know, like when printing comes along, there was very little printing going on. It was all handwork. And then all of a sudden, you could print really fast. And comparatively, you could do it much more cheaply than it was done before. But my sense is that it amplifies whatever already exists. And sometimes it's smart amplifier, and sometimes it's dumb amplifier, you know, that it's human beings that get amplified and that good human beings and bad human beings and everybody gets amplified. But I think that the thing that you brought up before, that there hasn't been a big breakthrough technologically since the mobile phone, I sense the way I understand the stock market—you know, from afar I don't really involve myself directly in the stock market. But I've watched it, that when they've gone a long period, and this was basically 14 years and there wasn't a new, new thing to go after that, there was a buildup hunger for a new, new thing regardless of what it was.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think that's true because you know with the smartphone for a while people were sufficiently bamboozled to think they needed a new smartphone every year.
 
Dan Sullivan: And what's your, well, you're a Samsung, you have Samsung, right? No, you have, you have Android, right?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Which is the operating system for the Samsung phones.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay. Yeah. I have the iPhone, but mine is a 13. So what's the latest, 18 or something like that?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. You have a delay in your signal that sets you back four years.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, the thing is, they aren't even phones anymore. They're computers that you can also talk to people on. You know, so it's …
 
Dan Sullivan: Little computers. Little computers with a lot of power.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you know, the comparison has been given that your iPhone has more computing power than what it took to land the first lunar module, which is, you know, kind of interesting to ponder, you know, what that is. But I think that, I mean, I get so, and I'm sure your inbox too, is inundated with AI bullshit, people trying to sell you every variation possible on how you should use it to do so on. And if your only selling point is that you can lay off a lot of people, I don't know how well that bodes for things. But one of the things that's happening within AI is, you used a phrase I want to just put, which is the daily flow of human intent. I like what that sounds like. What does it mean?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it means that what I say is that AI and everybody involved in the AI technology is trying to catch up with new human information, new data. And I'm saying that one thing that is hard for them to catch up with is human aspiration. Okay, because we come up with ideas that are unique, you know, it's based on our history, it's based on our circumstances, and we're coming up with new things, and it's impossible for any technology to measure that because it's being created not just by one person, it's being created by billions of people every day. And half of them have access to cell phones, so they're talking about it. And so the best that AI can do is do a reasonable job of what happened yesterday.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think that we have all become unwilling participants in the development of AI, that so much of our data has been harvested, that without permission, it's one of the only places—you can't do that in music, you can't do that in books. I mean, you can, but you could get sued. But in AI, it's just this aggregation of everything.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we just got two $3,000 checks from them using one of our longtime books, you know, 10 years ago. They used our book. And there's an AI program that will sense whose material is being used, and it will red flag people if there wasn't permit. So this lawyer and a publisher actually red flagged about 150 of their authors. And they each got a $3,000 check for the use of it, you know. And I said, I've got 60 books. I'll give them to them if they'll send me 3,000 times 60. That's not bad. I'll send the check to you for your play.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you know, it's interesting because it makes me think of Lloyd Price. And Lloyd Price gave his accountant proposed something to him. And his accountant was Alan Klein, who went on to manage the Rolling Stones and then the Beatles. And Alan said to Lloyd …
 
Dan Sullivan: A very young Alan Klein, probably.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean, he was around Lloyd's age. So yes, at that time, he was young, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: They were both young.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It was funny, by the way, I don't know if I ever mentioned it to you or not, but when Lloyd and I went to meet—this is probably in 2016 or something. Lloyd was close with Alan and he was close with Alan's son, Jody. And I was at Jody Klein's Bar Mitzvah party on my mom's side of the family. My cousin Harold, who lived in New York …
 
Dan Sullivan: That was 13?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, the Bar Mitzvah person was 13. I was like 22 or something, 23. And it was funny because Harold, my cousin, said to me, do you want to go? They have a plus one. I think you'd find Alan an interesting character. I said, sure, that'd be fun. Do you remember ever seeing a picture? He gave John Lennon a psychedelically painted Rolls Royce. And he said, come on, let's sit in the back of the Rolls Royce. And so that was parked there for his son's Bar Mitzvah party, which was a grand affair. And so when I met Jody 35 years later or so, I said, you know, we met before, but I don't really expect you to remember it as we did. He said, yeah. I said, do you remember Harold Stern? Oh, God, yes. I love Harold. He was my cousin. I said, well, he was my cousin too. And he invited me to go. He says, well, we have pictures of you from my Bar Mitzvah party. And anyhow, that was Jody. He was a very nice guy. Alan got his start in the music business. He said to Lloyd, you know, you're getting robbed. You're not getting paid royalties that you are due. And I'll bet you that I can go through with ASCAP and BMI and these labels and recover a significant amount of money for you. And then he got whatever percentage he got.
 
Well, he did recover a significant amount of money for Lloyd and he did it for the Rolling Stones too. And, you know, so there's always been stuff pirated. That's been forever. But, you know, getting back to the AI, you know, you talk about bringing the past to the screen. And you said AI faithfully brings the past to your screen, you know, updated and organized. The thing that's kind of my concern about that is that never before has there been the ability to both eradicate and distribute information as widely and quickly as we can now. And I remember when Khrushchev fell out of grace in Russia and, you know, there was talk here about how they're rewriting the history books and leaving Khrushchev out, which I don't see any different than people trying to ban books in high schools because they think To Kill a Mockingbird shouldn't be read and, you know, Judy Blume's book shouldn't be read. To me, it's an open marketplace for ideas and, you know, you put the ideas out there. But anyhow, the thing is, does it concern you at all that there is that potential? Because history can be rewritten, facts can be altered, and those ideas and misinformation can be widely distributed, because there's no barriers to any of this stuff yet. And the higher the stakes and the less boundaries we have, the greater the opportunity is to be misled, whether it's in small things, replacing the Nigerian Prince email that we all got that fooled a lot of people into sending checks, to a massive scale of rewriting history and omitting things or fabricating new things. Because even before all this stuff, there's people that believe that, you know, the moon landing was a hoax.
 
Dan Sullivan: Who would know? I've never met anyone that believes that. I've seen them interviewed, but I've never actually met anybody.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, we don't travel in those crowds, fortunately.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. But the big thing is my sense is that it's always been done because the records of things have always been perishable. They could be accidentally destroyed, you know. There were vast libraries in the Middle East that were destroyed by the Mongols when they came in. And the great library at Alexandria had a couple fires that burned, you know, tens of thousands of scrolls and everything. So my sense is that that's probably always happened, you know. And the other thing is the whole notion that the winners rewrite history, you know, that if you have a conflict between two people, one of them wins, the history of that conflict is going to be written by the winners. You know, Churchill had this great line because he wrote the great history of the Second World War, you know, in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. He was always scrounging for cash. You know, Churchill generally spent more than he made, and he got this huge contract for his five volumes, the History of the Second World War and then the History of the English-Speaking Peoples. And his comment was, he said, you know, history is going to treat me really well because I'm the one that's going to write it. Yeah, so my sense is that it's not a new thing, because the passing on of information was actually in the hands of very few people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I'm not suggesting it's a new thing. What I'm suggesting is that there has never before been the opportunity to spread so much so fast to so many.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, there's never been so many.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's true, too. So I think that it's interesting to be aware. I mean, I always go back to one of my things is critical thinking has just been out the window for years. And we need critical thinking. We need intelligent debates on all sides of the political spectrum. We need all of those things. And the more that things can be monopolized by single sources, the less benefit that has to the citizenry of this country and others. And I think that we haven't had the opportunity. I don't think there's anything that hasn't been done before. You know, I mean, just this morning I read about a mass shooting in Australia, and then at Brown University, doesn't even qualify as much, because only two people killed, but nine people severely injured. And, you know, there used to be hordes that went through towns killing people, you know, they'd come in on horseback and kill people. I mean, it was just, none of this stuff is new. You know, you and I have talked about how human nature seems to be the only constant. But I think it's the scale and the rapidity.
 
Dan Sullivan: But are people taking it in? You know, are people actually taking it in? The question is, you know, I've got an aggregator where my news, because we get two papers, we get one of the Toronto papers and we get The Wall Street Journal. And I like the commentary section of The Wall Street Journal, you know, the article. But my main source is a site called RealClearPolitics, and it's a RealClear platform. And it's RealClearPolitics, RealClearPolicy, RealClearMarkets, RealClearWorld. They have about 15 different channels on it. And what it is, is an aggregator of recent articles, newspaper magazine articles. And so the publications, for example, The New York Times has to compete to get one of their articles on RealClearPolitics. But when you read it, they'll have about 25 new articles, and it's usually twice a day, except for Saturday. They just have basically Saturday mornings, and then you go into Sunday. They don't repeat it.
 
And what it is, if you look at it, left or right, politically, if they have 25 articles, it'll be evenly distributed. And usually on the same issue, they'll have a for and against right next to each other, okay, and they do a really good job of it, you know—that Trump is the greatest president ever and Trump is a large criminal that should never have been allowed to become president and everything else, and the two articles to be right next to each other. And you have your choice which one you want to click on, and then it takes you to the actual publication, and you can read the article. The ones that have a paywall, I don't bother with.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Was that started by Irving Crystal?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no. They have a podcast every day and it's a good podcast. They just take three issues that happened yesterday and they talk about them. But three of the people are key people in the organization. It's out of Chicago, but it's an aggregator and it sells advertising, you know, but they have really good polls. They aggregate polls. So they'll have 13 polls on the presidential election. And generally, they're very, very close to the outcome. You know, they'll have university polls, they'll have, you know, they have Wall Street Journal poll and everything else, and they aggregate them, and they weight them on history, you know, which has been close. But they're fairly close. They're a percentage of a point off in the final results. And they were accurate in, I think they first came on around ‘06, and they were accurate in ‘08, ‘12, ‘16. They've always been bright in their choice of who's going to win.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean, I'm familiar with them. This makes me want to go on online and see their site and see what that is, because I don't know they've been on that. But yeah, they have people that go on TV often, too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah, but they have the intention, and I think that they've been faithful in following it out, of giving both sides of issues. And they do it in every area. They do it in science, they do it in defense. You're always getting a choice of which side you want to explore.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and I think that an informed individual would want to read both sides, you know, as opposed to just going for the confirmation bias of reading somebody that already agrees with you. Plus, it's not a bad idea, if you're interested in these things, to know what the other side thinks. You know, I'm always interested in why people believe what they believe, which is agnostic in terms of, you know, what political party or anything, you know, why do you believe that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Generally speaking, I've been happy with my biases.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: We all are.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, well, that's good.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. That's good. It's, you know, when you have to carry that burden of being right all the time. I mean, I find that a big burden to shoulder, but you know, it makes me think we were talking about the gold rush. We were talking about AI as investment and all of that. It makes me think of crypto, where there's huge overhype, which drives the prices up, then all the people who are for crypto can point to it and say, well, look how much this is appreciated. And then when there's the close examination of what it is, it falls down 30% or more. Or the owner goes to prison.
 
Dan Sullivan: Which has happened.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, no, that's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mr. Freed. Yeah. But he was using his reserve fund to prop up his currency, and you can't do that. You can't use investor money to pay your salaries.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, do you see any parallels between crypto and the rabid enthusiasm around it as an investment vehicle and as, ultimately, as a replacement for currency, even possibly globally? And what we're seeing with AI, which is, you know, we're reading about Nvidia selling their chips to China and all that. Do you see any parallels between those two things?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the more we're into the 21st century, the more that things are global. They used to be national. You know, I did a search of all the transformative technologies we've had since 180—which one had the greatest impact politically, culturally—and they rank AI right now as like number nine, and railroads were the biggest one. They said nothing changed the world like railroads, you know, for 20 different reasons. It just totally changed. But it's, you know, it's been at work for 180 years. You've had railroads somewhere. But it just totally changed. So AI is too early to even make proper guesses on what it's going to do. But I have a young guy, he's now in his early thirties, but he's been working with AI for 12 years, since he was 20 years old. And we were talking one day and I said, I think the biggest impact that I can see so far is that there's going to be exponential tinkering. You're going to get a lot of people tinkering with their AI tools purely for their own subjective reasons. They just want to see they're having kind of an interaction, where it's kind of like a technological mirror. They can see back how they're thinking about things and they want to investigate something and they can get useful, pleasing information back and everything like that.
 
And that's why my sense is that what we had was the large corporations really taking over in the information age. Microsoft was one of them. You know, you had Google. My sense with AI, AI seems to be going in a different direction. It's not consolidating. Everybody's kind of using it for what they want to use it, and that gets fed back to the platform. But the more people get involved in it, the more the diversity of feedback is coming back to the platform, because the platforms are in competition with each other. Anthropic is in competition with OpenAI. They're all in competition with Google. I like Perplexity. Perplexity just has a nice, it's just got a friendly feel to it. And they haven't really made any extra demands on me since I started 18 months ago. Very nice, very polite, you know, and I thank it. I always get more if I thank it. I say, you know, that was fantastic. That really did what I wanted to do and said, oh, I can do something more for you if you want. So, you know, I like politeness. One of my biases, I like politeness.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. But do you say thank you to a vending machine?
 
Dan Sullivan: I do for my ATM. I'm always happy. We're in London, and we'll be in London next week, and I'm sure we'll hit the ATM machine, and you plug it in and everything, and all at once you hear, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, and out comes the cash, and I say, what a world, what a world, this is great. And I've never been shortchanged, it's never been run, so.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I'm talking about, you know, it's interesting because in a way one could make the argument that AI online is a very sophisticated vending machine with, you know, a smorgasbord of offerings through it, but do you feel the need to say thank you to a vending machine? And I think it tells whichever platform you're using more about you, you know, and that's …
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I'm convinced that that's the impact of AI. It tells you something about yourself.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think it also tells them more about you because, you know, where you say, how do you refer to it? Do you refer to it as, you know, when you're prompting, do you say, I want you to re-evaluate these numbers or I want you to do X, or, what I do is just give a direct command.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I just give a direct command using a declarative verb, you know, do this, do this, do this, do this, and do this. You know, I don't have a personal, I haven't gone into the area that it has a name, like some people personalize it, but—what was the movie with Tom Hanks where he was marooned on the island and he developed this passionate relationship with Wilson, who was a volleyball?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Humans, I think the word is anthropomorphize, anthropomorphize everything.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, we do that with lots of things. He, she, you know, and everything like that. Ships are always her. Yeah, I don't have any problem with that. The other thing, you know, that you mentioned before, the whole concept that they're trying to find out whether AI is sentient. And I remember I was at a conference and one of the futurists was there and he was talking, you know, he says, in 10 years, computers are going to be smarter than humans. They're going to have more intelligence than humans. So at the break, I went up to him and I said, when you say more intelligent, are you talking about consciousness? And he said, well, nobody knows what consciousness is. And I said, well, I think it has something to do with intelligence. And he said, yeah, but you know, that's not, there is a general trend that if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. And, you know, it's not scientific if you can't measure it. It's, you know, you have to have some means of measurement.
 
So I've been, ever since the internet came along, I've been studying consciousness. And somewhere about 40 years ago, they hit a wall with consciousness, and there's been nothing new discovered about human consciousness in the last 40 years, in the spite of hundreds of thousands of people pursuing this subject. And the reason is, human consciousness is 100% subjective. And you can't measure anything that's subjective. I mean, in the time we've been on, you've had a million thoughts, really, really fast thoughts about, and none of your thinking was measurable in the last hour and a half.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I was told that all through school, by the way.
 
Dan Sullivan: Only I can measure your thinking. And the problem is that this is a mechanical view of the universe that started in France with Descartes about 300 years ago. Descartes said that everything can be measured, everything, that our bodies can be measured, our brain can be measured and everything. And it's an erroneous, they're just on the wrong path. They've been on the wrong path. The fact that you want to measure everything is okay, but the fact that you think you can and that you have measured everything is false. As a matter of fact, probably science has measured 1% of what human experience is actually all about.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So measurement, quantifying, and so on, you know, I understand the perceived needs for that. So for instance, in television, the big spend was always advertising, right? So how do you figure out what you can charge the advertiser for the airtime on your network, on your radio program or whatever? And it has to do with, well, here are the number of eyeballs we're aggregating, or ears we're aggregating, and so on. And back before television, Nielsen was monitoring radio. And what they did, and this is, by the way, straight, as they say, from the horse's mouth. This is Frank Stanton, who started CBS with Bill Paley. And he and I had lunch together. It was amazing. Not the lunch, but the conversation. Although the chicken wasn't bad.
 
And so Frank started when he was working with Nielsen and it was his job. He said, you want to know how we measured this stuff? How scientific it was? And I said, yeah, I'd love to know. And he said that we put a paraffin cylinder in the radio where the tuning things were—remember those? You ever take apart a radio and you see those things, how they find the frequencies and all that? So the belt that turned that, the more you went back to the same station or whatever stations, it would leave an impression. And then they would estimate based on the depth of the groove how often you went to that station and all that. And so from that paraffin cylinder, that's how they divined what the audience was. Jump ahead when they had the Nielsen boxes and it had gone that far in the technology and had gone to television.
 
The Nielsen box, I think it was something like 1,200 Nielsen families that were responsible for just billions of dollars of ad spends. And actually quite unscientific, based on a really tiny, tiny percentage of the actual audience, which of course they claim that they chose the Nielsen participating families based on all these differentials to equalize, who knows? But the point is that that kind of measurement for a spend and justifying a spend was probably one of the more creative aspects of television. You know, which is, how do you justify those prices and how are you measuring what these responses are? And I think it's, you know, Nielsen then moved into satellite and cable and streaming, but that whole business has changed so much in just the past few years because now there, I don't know if you can get a handle on the staggering amount of microseconds of microsecond change.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, first of all, there's no question that predicting is a competitive skill. I mean, you do it, I do it. In other words, we play hunches. You know, we have a hunch that I have a hunch that this book is going to be a big seller. But it's based on the fact that the first three books at Hay House that I wrote have done really well, so part of your hunch is probably the same readers are going to buy the fourth book. So my sense is that each human probably has a series of measurements of one kind that they're looking at that allows them to make a good prediction about tomorrow, you know, what's going to happen. One of the interesting ones in Canada, they have a feeling, some of the economists, the country is really heading for a depression. And it has to do with people missing their car payments. And they said the last thing that people will ever give up is mobility. So if they reclaim your car, a lot of other bad things are happening to your life. You know, so that's a little indicator. That's like a measurement.
 
You know, Joe Kennedy bragged that he could tell by the guy who did his shoeshine in New York City which way the market was going to go. And he saw him one day, and this was October of 1929, and the guy says, you know, I've had no business for the last three days. He was in Wall Street. And Joe Kennedy, by his claims that he went and he sold all his stocks that day, and the market crashed the next day, and then he bought back, you know, when it hit the bottom, he bought back. And I'm not saying he did or he didn't, or he was just telling a story, but those are the kind of indicators that people use. They try to have something that if it's going this direction, I can bet this way, and if it's going this direction. I think everybody has millions of these in their head, that they kind of use to have a hunch about which way the future is going.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: If they didn't, Vegas wouldn't be in business.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's right.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, I'm seeing this image and while you were talking of, you know, the guys in the racetrack and talking about, yeah, but in a muddy track and it rained today and this horse does really well in a muddy track and, you know, and all of that kind of stuff, all of which they think is data because it won, you know, X number of percentage of its races when it was a wet track and other bullshit.
 
Dan Sullivan: And of all the better, some are a lot better than others.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yeah. But, you know, one of the big lessons to me, it's happened already now a few times in my life because I'm old enough now to have seen different cycles. But in 2008, you know, with the savings and long crash. And I'm thinking there is all these smart people with all these computers that are going to the fourth decimal place or fifth decimal place. And it all seems so data driven and precise. And almost nobody saw it coming. And these people are doing that 12 hours a day. And I thought, so how does that happen? How does that happen that nobody saw this coming? You know, you smart guys, allegedly.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you know, I mean, we're all guessing and betting, you know? Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, everybody's guessing, not everybody's betting, but, you know, but that's my book. My quarterly book right now is Guessing And Betting Confidence. How do you become confident about your ability to guess and bet? You know, it's about 50 different things that you have to normalize in the way that you approach everyday life. One of the things is make lots of little small bets so that you develop the skill. A lot of people make really big bets, but they don't make a lot of small bets. And the biggest thing we bet on is other human beings.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Although, you know, I've come to learn that people will bet on anything, and the esoterica that they will bet on where you can call Vegas and place a bet on, you know, at what point will this player hit this many points in the game. And, you know, I mean, it's like unbelievable. I think you have to be a bit disturbed. You have a gambling addiction if that's what you do. You know, and if you are trying to figure out all the time how to decode, I mean, nobody's done that yet.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep. Tell you, I had a client in mid-nineties, and he asked if he could have lunch with me privately. And he said, you know, I'm on my fifth marriage, and it's not working really well. And I said, hmm, so this is five different women, right? And he said, yeah. And I said, are you marrying the same person every time? He said, oh, no, no, they're very, very different. And I said, that's funny. If you think back, is there anything that's common to all five of them? I mean, is there any one? And he says, no, they've all been really different, he said, totally different. But if there's one thing that's always the same in these five marriages, is there anything? And finally, he says, I just can't think of anything. I said, well, did all five of them marry the same person? He said, oh, you mean? I said, I'm just asking the question. I said, I don't know. You know, it's kind of interesting, you know. Probably the toughest thing to bet on for most people in their life is themselves.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah, you know, when you and I, when I interviewed you the first time, I interviewed you years ago, we talked about pricing and you talked about the double sale, which is very much in sync with what I believe too, is that first you've got to sell yourself. And if you aren't capable of doing that, what you present to a potential buyer or investor, if you're not confident in it, why should they invest in it? You know, and you're right, people invest in people because it's really about, you know, people are investing in your ability to execute on the promise that you're putting forth.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I noticed that I think that in our company, we've gotten better and better at bringing people on board who turn out to be what we thought they were going to be. But we've had a lot of people. I mean, we have 120 in the company right now, but we crossed over that we've had 500 who have worked with us over 36 years, So 380 have come and gone and some of them were with us for ten years and it was great but they moved on and some of them, you know, fortunately you get a three-month no fault on most people, you know, and you find out. We had one that was interesting. He was hired as a new salesperson who sells the Program and he wa—we don't meet everybody who's hired. We don't. Some key positions, we meet the person. For example, we have a new person coming in as head of Production who replaces Christine. You started working with, but Christine retired. And you know, we're a big production house. We have a lot of materials that are being published every day for the Program, for books, everything.
 
And the second day he went out with a bunch of the other salespeople. And he said, do you guys actually believe this shit that Dan Sullivan talks about? He wasn't there on the third day. So, you know, but they've gotten smarter. I mean, we've gotten smarter and, you know, we do better scrutiny, you know. But a lot of them are right out of college. We hire a lot of people right out of college. You know, these days, college records don't mean anything. The fact that they graduated means something. You know, they could stick to something for four years and everything like that. But university grades and everything really don't mean anything these days. And they're not dependable. Universities are not dependable for giving you an assessment because the professors get punished for low grade these days.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I've heard that claim, and I'm sure in some areas that's true, and I don't know how pervasive it is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, none of them chance it. None of them chance it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, Harvard, 60% of the students get an A. I always had questions also about grading on things that aren't precise answers, you know, which is also an interesting thing. I wanted to mention, because I'm researching her book, reading about Herb Kelleher. Herb Kelleher was the founder of Southwest, co-founder of Southwest Airlines. Very, very interesting guy and very counterintuitive. And one of the things he said, which is contrary to almost everything you hear in business is he said, I put my employees first, my consumers second. And when questioned about that, he said, because my employees are the ones that get and sustain our consumers. If they don't have a good experience, if they aren't treated well, then those people aren't going to want to fly on Southwest. So I make sure if you have happy employees, your business is going to do well. And if you don't, and you're just looking at them as just another cost factor, then you're not only missing out on the advantage, you're not going to build the same kind of business. And I had never heard anybody put it that way. That, you know, their employees are the ones that make sure they maintain the customers.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've had, I think it's up to 10 now, but we've had, you know, in 36 years, we've had 10 run-ins between one of our team members and a client. And in every case, we fired the client.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, I learned that lesson too. That's interesting. But before I give you my story, why, how did that happen?
 
Dan Sullivan: First of all, it was the vast majority of our team are women and the vast majority of our clients are men. So it was a sexual thing. And we tell our team members that we'll support them 100% if they're in a situation like that, but they have to tell us. They can't take it silently and go on with it, you know. Somebody will make a pass or they say, can I take you out to dinner after? And we don't allow our teams to go out on social calls with our clients. And they say, you know, it's what are you going to do? You're going to marry him? I mean, what are you doing? But the big thing is we say that we'll always come down on your side, but you have to tell us the moment something happens so that it doesn't get out of hand. It doesn't get out of hand. And we had one male-male situation that happened.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: In all in that area …
 
Dan Sullivan: In 36 years.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's a pretty good record.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It's hundreds of thousands of the clients and hundreds of our staff. So it's, you know, the high incident, but we say, you know, it's just that you're going to be with us a lot longer than the clients are. And so, you know, we're betting on you, but we'll give you 100 percent support. But you have to, the moment something seems odd to you, you have to talk about it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's a good rule, though, because also you're giving them permission.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Our door’s open. Talk to us about this. Don't let this go on. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: We had one, and the guy made some reference to the woman's legs, you know? And she immediately turned to him and she said, do you think if Dan knew about what you just said that Dan would be happy with what you just said? And all of a sudden he said, oh, I'm sorry, I'm really apologetic. But he was fired anyway because he did it again. But she told us, she told us. We really complimented her because she just faced him down. Yeah. You know, I mean, there's lawsuits. I mean, we're in a crazy time right now.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And, you know, I think that when there's the pendulum swing in those early stages of the big swing, there may be overreactions and all of that. But I think it's making up for so much pent up that wasn't resolved because people didn't engage in that dialogue because they didn't think they'd be supported and they couldn't afford to lose their job. Yeah. You know, when I was working in this shoe store …
 
Dan Sullivan: I remember Kathy Ireland, when she was at the New School, you had her as the guest on the New School, and somebody from the audience asked, was she ever make an attempt, you know, of that notion? And she said, just once. She said it was just one punch. The word went around.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, when I was working at this shoe store, then I was young, that's a job I talked my way into the job. And the manager was a very good guy who I learned a lot from. And one Friday evening, I'm working, and I was 16 or something. And I said, this guy was picking up some of the shoes and looking at them. And I said to him, good evening, is there anything I can help you with? And he goes, young man, if I'm shopping in this store, and if I buy something from you, I'm helping you. You're not helping me. And I said, okay, fair enough. Can you help me with anything this evening? And he exploded—you talking back to me and all this kind of stuff. And Bob Chesney, the manager, was just a few feet away and he had observed the whole thing. And this guy started saying, who's in charge here? I demand that this young man be fired. And Bob said, I'm the manager. And he goes, I want that. And he said, I heard you. I heard you. You may leave the store. The guy looks at him and says, what do you mean I may leave the store? And he said, I don't want your business. I want you out of the store. You don't treat people like that. I heard the whole thing. And the guy looks at him and says, out. I don't want your business. And the guy left. And I felt supported.
 
And I mean, to this day, because we're talking now 60 years later, I adopted some of the management principles that Bob did, from breaking the rules and hiring me to supporting me when someone was mean with no justification at all for that. And I think that means a lot, but it is true that if you don't value your employees—I loved it when in my company, the clients could talk directly to my editor. They could talk directly to my executive producer, because I knew that the people that I had hired knew how to talk to people. And that I gave them the responsibility and they valued that, you know, and they earned it. You know, I mean, I didn't do it foolishly. I did it because the guesses and bets, I guessed and bet on that person that they would be great to have as part of the team. And they are.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, I think it's the one thing in a company that is, especially when you have a company that deals with the public. I mean, there's just the majority of our team members out of 120, more than half of them 60, are dealing with the public. And I think there's always a big question, if there's a problem, do I get supported? Do I get supported? And I think you have to answer that question straight up. It's told, you know, in the first week that they're there, oh, absolutely, we will support you. So anyway, yeah, the one Herb Kelleher, the one that I like, he said, you know, if you ever have a thought, you're the entrepreneur, you ever have a thought that you should fire someone, the thought reaches your brain that you should fire someone, you should go and fire them. Because it takes a long time for that thought to get to your brain. But he says, when you fire them, you'll find out that you were the last one in the company that thought that that person should be fired. Everybody else knew.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think we have been true to our anything and everything today.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Exceptionally so. I think exceptionally so. And I think that we changed roles because initially you were the anything and I was the everything and then we switched.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah.
 
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.