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Why The Future Of Work Is Blended And Collaborative

Episode XXX
October 22, 2024

Why The Future Of Work Is Blended And Collaborative - Free Zone Frontier Podcast

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Should businesses be focusing more on engaging their customers virtually or in person? Since some customers prefer one and some prefer the other, you’re alienating people if you go too far in either direction. Dan Sullivan and Steven Krein discuss the incursion of digital elements into various aspects of human life and what this has your potential customers feeling—and seeking out.

Show Notes:

There was an industrial phase where everything old was torn down to build something new. And then there was pushback.

A good city is for both the people who live there and the people who only come for a few hours, then go home.

There’s a 50% renewal rate for Strategic Coach® clients who stick to virtual, and a 75% renewal rate for Strategic Coach clients who attend in-person workshops.

Some people have decided to just not travel anymore.

Virtual strengthens what happens in real life; it doesn’t replace it.

Testing something out on 50 people gives you a good idea about whether it works.

People are now pursuing what they’re interested in, and it’s harder to get their attention for what you want to share with them.

News stories disappear from public discussions much faster than they used to.

In the 1940s, the notion that you were supposed to enjoy your work didn’t exist.

There’s become a complete disconnection between higher education and the job market.

When people don’t know where they’re headed in the future, they go back to what they know and defend it.

Resources:

Thinking About Your Thinking by Dan Sullivan

Unique Ability®

The Transformation Trilogy set by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The Unique EDGE® Program

Episode Transcript

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Why The Future Of Work Is Blended And Collaborative

October 22, 2024
Dan Sullivan
Why The Future Of Work Is Blended And Collaborative - Free Zone Frontier Podcast

Should businesses be focusing more on engaging their customers virtually or in person? Since some customers prefer one and some prefer the other, you’re alienating people if you go too far in either direction. Dan Sullivan and Steven Krein discuss the incursion of digital elements into various aspects of human life and what this has your potential customers feeling—and seeking out.

Show Notes:

There was an industrial phase where everything old was torn down to build something new. And then there was pushback.

A good city is for both the people who live there and the people who only come for a few hours, then go home.

There’s a 50% renewal rate for Strategic Coach® clients who stick to virtual, and a 75% renewal rate for Strategic Coach clients who attend in-person workshops.

Some people have decided to just not travel anymore.

Virtual strengthens what happens in real life; it doesn’t replace it.

Testing something out on 50 people gives you a good idea about whether it works.

People are now pursuing what they’re interested in, and it’s harder to get their attention for what you want to share with them.

News stories disappear from public discussions much faster than they used to.

In the 1940s, the notion that you were supposed to enjoy your work didn’t exist.

There’s become a complete disconnection between higher education and the job market.

When people don’t know where they’re headed in the future, they go back to what they know and defend it.

Resources:

Thinking About Your Thinking by Dan Sullivan

Unique Ability®

The Transformation Trilogy set by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The Unique EDGE® Program

Dan Sullivan: Hi, everybody, it’s Dan Sullivan here, and this is Free Zone Frontier, and this is our podcast, and this is my partner, so here’s Steve.
 
Steven Krein: Hey, Dan, love being here with you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I just am noticing something, and it’s sort of a pushback against what I would say digital incursion, pushing digital into all sorts of areas that’s being resisted. And I think one of them is coming out because of AI. But I think the other one is simple things like QR codes, that they don’t give you the information anymore, they give you the QR code. A menu in a restaurant would be an example of that. You know, I can see with a fast-food place, like you know, you’re in an airport and they want to move the traffic through real quick, and they want some orderliness on the ordering. But when you’re paying over $100 per person for the meal, I kind of like the menu.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, I think there’s a movement towards optionality, flexibility, or really preference to be guiding some of these things — digital versus in-person, or virtual versus in-person — everything from work to events to reading, watching, listening, to ordering food. I think there’s just people who prefer one or the other. And I think if you swing to just one and not the other, I think you’re alienating a lot of people. And I think the same is true about the other way.
 
I think you brought up this QR code example — I think you said Jeff Madoff talked to you about a place you can only get the menu in QR, or the QR code, and then you order online, and then you pay for your tip and you do all that. And I think it’s swinging too far one way, right? We’re seeing this in our community at StartUp Health, where there’s something very different about requiring everybody to be in person or only offering virtual, and that people like both for different reasons. And I think it’s the same as it goes to ordering food. I just think it’s hard to pick and go one way without offering the alternative.
 
Dan Sullivan: I guess that revolves around the word choice, right?
 
Steven Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: People want choice.
 
Steven Krein: They want choice. Do you want the paper menu or do you want the QR codes? I’ve heard actually people hate dirty menus. And I’ve heard this anecdotally from some people who own restaurants that, maybe during COVID, and it was exacerbated by people handling things, but they got used to going in and having a little QR code on the table. And the idea of a dirty menu being handed around just turned people off. But, at the same time, I think there’s something very real about holding a menu and flipping pages and seeing all the different options versus just doing a quick search and getting to your preference.
 
Dan Sullivan: I notice I eat more if I have a menu, a real menu. You know, you go through it, yeah. But, you know, this is not unique, the digital revolution. I remember the industrial age– I’m thinking of Robert Moses in New York City. And, you know, just the neighborhoods he just ripped through to put in the freeways — east, the east side and the left side. And then, you know, one of the most beautiful buildings in New York history, the Penn Station, they tore down Penn Station and everything like that. But there was an industrial phase where you just tore down everything old to build something new. And then there was a pushback.
 
Toronto really caught it very early. They stopped all the freeways. They’re paying a huge penalty for it, but they stopped all the freeways coming down into the city in basically 1970. They stopped two major freeways. It’s great. We live in one of the neighborhoods that the freeway would have gone right through, and it’s a great neighborhood.
 
And so there’s a pushback. What are cities for? Are cities for the people who live in the city, or are the cities for the people who come into the city for a few hours and go out of the city? So who is it for? And the truth is a good city is for both, but there has to be some trade-offs one way or the other.
 
Steven Krein: Are you seeing– Because I know the Coach experience is both in-person workshops, but now you have these Connection Calls. I know there’s also a virtual program. I don’t know how that is doing versus the in real life, but do you see the renewals different when people can do both? Like when they have not just the opportunity to see you once a quarter in person, but also get to see you maybe one or two times in between virtually?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the added factor there that doesn’t make it a simple thing is the two-hour things that we added. I’ll do 48 two-hour sessions: 24 for Free Zone and 24 for 10x. And I think that that makes it a little harder to see what the influence is, but I would say this: where people have decided they’re going to do four virtual workshops in a year, they won’t travel at all. They won’t do an in-person workshop. The renewal rate’s less than 50%.
 
Steven Krein: Really?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: That’s very interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: And in-person, it’s about 75%. That’s significant.
 
Steven Krein: That is?
 
Dan Sullivan: And it’s not that they’re dropping out of virtual to go to in-person. They’re just dropping out.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, it’s interesting. Do you survey the relationship between in-person and virtual? I think the comment you made a moment ago about those that are signing up for the for virtual won’t even do anything in person. And by the way, some of that might be because they live in Australia and it’s a big thing, but others might be just because they’ve decided not to travel anymore. But I think the idea that the results are that different on renewal between the two tells you a lot about the relationships that you’re developing with them. Because I’m assuming that’s got to be a big part of the community development that is keeping people renewing is not just about what’s happening in the room, but the relationships they’re developing.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, this is our 35th year of doing the workshops. And I’ve developed some touchstones about what makes the workshops work. And one of them is that I think more is caught than taught. That basically it’s what happens in breaks. It’s what happened the night before or the night after. I think there’s a learning that takes place that isn’t possible on virtual at all.
 
Steven Krein: Virtual strengthens what happens in real life, but it doesn’t replace what happens in real life. Right? I’ve noticed that on these Connection Calls where somebody that I spent time with in a meeting in person over the last couple of quarters is different than somebody that might be from a different session, so I’d never have a chance to meet them in person. But you get into a breakout room, and establishing a new relationship virtually is different than even saying hello and meeting them because they were sitting next to you or you were to break out with them in person. So it’s not either or, it’s just how they work together, I think.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the greatest breakthrough that we had with COVID, because of the, you know, that we had to go to Zoom, is the two-hour sessions. That’s been a great addition. And when we stopped the 10x Program, I committed I would do it for a year. And now I committed it for another year, and I’m going to commit for another year.
 
Steven Krein: Of just Connection Calls, not workshops.
 
Dan Sullivan: These are Connection Calls, yeah. Cause they’re so good. I can test out new tools. You know, I come up with a tool, I’m just going to test this. I got 50 people coming in and I’m just going to– Fifty people gives you a good idea of whether something works or not. But they’re real fast. But I get everybody talking. I have a goal. If I have 50 people, all 50 people are going to talk during the two hours. And I have a list. And I have a good memory. And I get them talking.
 
But I think the one thing is, what’s being talked about? Is it interesting? But the other thing is thinking about your thinking. I think our whole approach that it’s not that you’re going to think about what I’m thinking, it’s that you’re going to think about what you’re thinking. You don’t make decisions based on what I’m thinking, you make decisions based on what you’re thinking.
 
What we’re finding, for example, I had the end of the quarter virtual for Free Zone, and I had four people. And I said, that’s it. I’m not going to do any more.
 
Steven Krein: Oh, the virtual Free Zone.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And it was dead. It wasn’t a good use of their time. It wasn’t a good use of my time. But we’ve added another live date during the quarter. So you got Toronto or to Chicago. The Toronto one, we had 25 people here, but they were mostly Americans coming out.
 
Steven Krein: Easier to get to Toronto than Chicago from a lot of places like New York.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The whole gang was here. Joe was here. Mike Koenigs was here. Dean Jackson was here.
 
Steven Krein: Serendipitously? Or was it crafted that way?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think they talked among themselves and they all decided to come up. But, you know, if I look into my reasons, for example, just on the main topic here about digital, it was about 2018, I remember it was July. And I was watching television one night and I said, you know, this is a complete and total waste of my time. It’s also packaged information. There’s no live, you know, really batting ideas around where you used to have that in the 1950s. You know, when television first arrived, it was live, it was in person and everything else. And it just may be, you know, having seen a lot and listened to a lot over a large number of years, and I said, I’m just not interested. The other thing, it has to be on their time, not on my time, you know, like the regular programming. And I want the choice of when I take in things. So I’m–
 
Steven Krein: You’re still watching movies.
 
Dan Sullivan: No. I haven’t watched movies either.
 
Steven Krein: You don’t do movies or series or anything? No, even on the Internet? Nothing.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, on the internet, I catch the news. You know, it’s the next day, usually somebody will have a reasoned, thoughtful, you know, analysis one way or the other.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Like sports. I’m a big sports fan. I haven’t seen a game on television in six years and a month.
 
Steven Krein: You check the scores.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, what I do is I check the scores after the game’s over, and then if my team won, I go to the highlight films and I watch the highlight films.
 
Steven Krein: And it’s like, what, three to five minutes of even good–
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, football, your team, maybe four minutes. Both teams, maybe eight minutes. Baseball, it’s even less, you know. And NBA is usually just the last two minutes.
 
Steven Krein: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: But I think part of it is just that that particular activity doesn’t interest me as much anymore. When you’re three times older than the players on the field, it doesn’t have the same emotional pull.
 
Steven Krein: Interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. In our previous podcast, we talked about people kind of doing their own thing. And we related that to economic terms, that people were finding ways of being entrepreneurial that they couldn’t be before. But I’m just wondering if, in a general sense, culturally, people are just pursuing what they’re interested in, and they have the tools available to do it, and it’s harder to get their attention for what you want to talk to them about.
 
Steven Krein: That’s a massive topic, right, when you think about the attention– And I’m watching it real time with my children, my three girls, who are 15, 18, and 21. I’m looking at how attention is different for them, how its, attention is for us. I see it with the entrepreneurs in the StartUp Health community. I see it with funders. I see it across the board. The things vying for your attention, whether it’s your phone, whether it’s your notifications, whether it’s the constant– I mean, think about how long news cycles are now. Maybe because you’re not watching TV, you’re not seeing it, but maybe you’re seeing it on the internet. News cycles, stories, movies, things that used to take up–
 
I remember when we were growing up, if a new movie came out, everybody was talking about that new movie for weeks. And now a new movie comes out that is a blockbuster, and it’s a topic for a day. You go back to the assassination attempt on Trump, these things go quick, quick. And so attention is just — the idea of what can hold your attention, keep your attention, and what you can choose, it flipped upside down.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there’s an interesting thesis about historical periods, whether they were an objective historical period or a subjective. And what I mean is, we’re in a very, very much of a subjective historical era right now. Okay. The degree to which psychological matters have become a main topic for people, you know why are you feeling that. A really objective period would be you know the United States from, let’s say the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War, it was just gung-ho build you, know you just build things. I mean you know, the U.S. was already you know, just a century as a country, and they were already the number one economy in the world in 1900. In 1945, they were half the world economy, the United States was.
 
But what I feel this is that there’s not big organizing principles in society right now. There’s an enormous amount of emphasis on how you’re different than rather than how you’re the same. Yeah, so what people’s attention on is right now–
 
For example, I was born in the 1940s and the whole notion that your job should be fulfilling was a foreign thought when I was growing up. You know? That had no bearing on– You got a job, and you had to pay for things, so you had to have a job. The whole notion that you were supposed to enjoy your work, enjoy your job, it wasn’t a foreign thought, it was a non-thought.
 
Steven Krein: That couldn’t be more opposite than when you see kids coming out of college today expecting. I know that we’ve hired a lot of kids in their young 20s and you see the expectations are the opposite of what you’re describing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: It’s actually a job that you have to enjoy. It’s a different expectation.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: Some of that’s good, by the way. Right. Some of that’s really good: to enjoy and be a Unique Ability. But I always think about your analogy or your description of those sinks? In the villages that were ripped off the wall? And they couldn’t understand why–
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, the Mongolian–
 
Steven Krein: The Mongolian– Yeah, tell that story.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mongolian plumbing, yeah. At the end of the Second World War, the Russians had gone through so many troops, the Soviets, that they were drafting people for Mongolia, which is almost on the Pacific Ocean. And the way they trained them, and they put them on a train, and by the time the train got there, they were trained. I mean, there was no training with these people whatsoever. For example, they were used right at the end of the war when the Soviets got into Germany and got into Berlin. And just to give you an idea of the massiveness of the loss of life, just the Soviets taking Berlin cost them 300,000 troops. That was about four weeks. Four weeks, they went through 300,000 troops.
 
And a lot of them were Mongolians, and they grew up in what are called yurts. You know, they’re like igloos, but they’re made out of skins. And, you know, they’re nomadic people and, you know, agricultural at best, mostly herding people. They got in and, you know, Berlin was a very modern city. It was, you know, a very sophisticated city.
 
And they’re getting in, and they’re going in these rooms that have these white things attached to the wall and you press a button and water flows. And they said, “Geez, would this ever look good back in the yurt? I got to bring something back.”
 
So they went to pick them up, but they were attached to the wall. So they had axes and they just disconnected them, put them on trucks. They went back.
 
This is an apocryphal story, by the way. There’s no evidence that they did. But it’s a good story.
 
Steven Krein: It’s a great story.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they got back there, and the–
 
Steven Krein: And it’s even gotten better as time gone on, Dan, by the way.
 
Dan Sullivan: But everybody’s thrilled to see them. You know, they’re safe. They disappeared. And now they’re back. So they said, “Wait till you see what we brought back.”
 
And they put the sinks up against the wall and they went like this. Nothing happened. And the bathtubs, the toilets, the same thing. And the moral of the story is that you can steal the appliance, but you can’t steal the plumbing.
 
So the big thing is that I’ve been very, very interested just to be talking to parents right now, and you’re one of them who had teenagers during this period of time, especially during the COVID period of time. And there’s just enormous psychological dimension that goes on today that simply did not go on when I was the same age. Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Well, I think I’m tying it back to the plumbing example, which made me think of it was I think the idea of enjoying your job or enjoying, you know, what your company does, and the idea of an expectation that you should get enjoyment out of working and how you’re spending your day, goes back to what’s the plumbing in that? Because you can make this statement and then go get a job and say, I’m expecting that. A lot of them are taking the responsibility of finding what they enjoy. They’re just going to a job and expecting to enjoy it. And I think therein lies the difference between what happens when they get the job or when they take the job versus what happens when they’re looking.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, I try not to look at the people or, you know, why are they so different? Why are they so strange? But what are they responding to in society that leads them in that direction? What are they picking up? And I think one of the big changes happened in ’07, ’08, ’09, when we had the big downturn because of the subprime collapse in the United States. And a contract got broken during those three years. And the contract was that you can pay any amount of money for higher education, and you’ll amortize it with future salary.
 
Steven Krein: Yep.
 
Dan Sullivan: And that got broken during that three-year period, and there became a complete disconnect between higher education and the job market.
 
Steven Krein: And it’s only gotten worse since. Bigger, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s only gotten worse since. There are some really, really interesting articles out these days. Do you remember Don Muntz? Don Muntz was in the program for a long time.
 
Steven Krein: I do, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Don Muntz created the equivalent of eHarmony.com between seniors in high school and private universities. And so you’d have the private university say who they’re looking for, and the high school students would say who they’re looking. And I guess it was kind of like an AI program that put it all together back then. And it would tell you these three or four colleges would really like to meet you. And the college would say, these 600 students[/ would really like to find out about you. And so then it became personal. He sold out, he sold out his company about 10 years ago, sold out completely. And he said, it was actually a conversation that triggered something. And it was a very wealthy parent who said to me– And he said, this is a parent who could have paid for four years out of his ATM, you know, four years of university out of his ATM. I mean, money was no issue.
 
And he said to Don, he said, “You know, I don’t even know if college is any good anymore.” And he said, “The most I’ll do is I’ll put him for a year in community college just to see what he likes or what he doesn’t like. And then we’ll make a decision after that whether he’s going to go to university or not.”
 
And the thought that finally triggers your brain is probably the hundredth thought, but this one really got your attention. And Don says, I think it’s over. He said, I think it’s over. I think that that move, that automatic move towards university, and then you’ll have four years and then maybe three more years after that, but you’ll be guaranteed a job, you’ll be in the right networks, you’ll have the right social credentials and everything — and it’s over. And I think the contract’s been broken.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, it’s definitely shifting. I think some kids are choosing schools just differently, or different expectations of what they’re going to do. You know, the schools matter a lot to, you know, where they go to mature through, I think, a very important period of their life where they are finding themselves. But they’re still not being given the tools that they need or require. Not sure how we zigzagged to this, but I think it comes back full circle to expectations. And we started the conversation talking about optionality.
 
Dan Sullivan: Pushback against digital incursions.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. There’s a generation of kids graduating this year in particular who lost their senior to freshman year. They lost their graduation year of high school and even their freshman year of college. They’re now graduating from college, or at least is the first year to graduate college. So I think we’re going to see a very different workforce coming in over the next five–
 
Dan Sullivan: And it’s a smaller workforce.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: This is a huge drop from the Boomer generation. I mean, you had X, you had the Millenniums and everything. But this is a small. And this simply because a lot of people stopped having babies a long time ago. You just don’t have babies anymore. But one of the things I’m feeling is that we’re going through a profound change period right now. As you know, I really follow Peter Zeihan’s thinking about how the world works. To this day, I think he has the biggest overview of why the world’s changing, and that is that the U.S. set the world up, for security reasons, to not have a war in Europe against the Soviet Union. It’s kind of interesting, the Russians and Americans have been enemies for so long, but they actually haven’t fought that much. They’ve sort of stayed away from each other.
 
But Peter Zeihan said the period from 1945 to 1991-1992 was set up by the United States to prevent having to go to war against the Soviet Union. So they bribed the rest of the world into, you’re going to be between us and the Russians. We’re going to pay you for it. Not only that, but you know your economies have been destroyed by the Second World War — we’re going to help you rebuild. We’ll help you industrialize. You can make anything you want. We’ll guarantee transportation all over the world. And in 2019, this is the year before COVID, the cost of transportation as part of the final cost of anything that was sold in the world was 1%. They had gotten the price of transportation down to 1%. Now, in some places, it’s 5%, it’s 10%. Well, you’re making no profit if your transportation costs are 5%.
 
Steven Krein: Five percent, right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: So how does that translate to today, then?
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s just that the United States really isn’t interested in the rest of the world anymore. They’re just going to bring everything back. They’re going to bring all the manufacturing back. They used Mexico as the new China. And this affects the job market. This is what it affects– We’re not looking for white collar people who know how to organize meetings. We’re looking for skilled labor who know how to work with robots.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, with robots. I know, if you watch what’s happening there, that’s the big shift.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Community colleges are going through the roof right now. They’re expanding–
 
Steven Krein: I’m assuming trade schools would as well.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, trade schools, yeah. Yeah. Toronto, you graduate 18 years old from high school. You take a 10-week welding course. At the end of those 10 weeks in the first year, you’re making $60,000. In five years, you’re making $150,000 and you’ll never make less.
 
Steven Krein: Do you think there’s a version of that for entrepreneurs? Or the same kind of pathway to lean into those who either believe they have or have, or embody those entrepreneurial characteristics and mindset?
 
Dan Sullivan: I’m still in two minds after coaching entrepreneurs for 50 years, whether you can learn to be an entrepreneur or whether you’re born an entrepreneur. Okay? I go through phases on this, but I’m favoring more that you’re born with it. And I’ll tell you why. I think that if I knew you, Steve, when you were eight years old–
 
Steven Krein: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean–
 
Dan Sullivan: …I wouldn’t see any difference between who you are right now.
 
Steven Krein: No. But if you take that example, if I could have gone to, you know, instead of just going for a business degree or a law degree or things that you think are just suited for that kind of pathway, if it was just a trade school for entrepreneurs, where you can actually learn how to take that natural born ability or inclination or mindset and lean in on it and truly– Go back to your three books, right? If you learn 10x thinking and you learn Who Not How, you learn these things that ultimately shape who you are. I mean, it’s accessible. It’s there for you out there if you want to read, watch, or listen to it. But there are, of course, accelerators and programs you can go to if you’re starting a company. But one step before that, there’s not.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know, because I’ve seen it in multigenerational, you know, when you have three family generations.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I very seldom seen any of the children or grandchildren who had what the grandfather had.
 
Steven Krein: Yep. Rare. But the school– I think I’ve talked on previous podcasts, like my dad showed me how to be an entrepreneur through his actions of not being an entrepreneur and getting laid off and having an employee mindset that showed me. And I think there’s a lot of those, right? You had to figure out how to make your own money because you know you aren’t going to be taken care of by your parents. You see things. I saw my dad get laid off when he was 50. That was the day I think I decided I was going to be an entrepreneur. But then you graduate, like you’re going to become a welder. Go to become an entrepreneur, besides starting a company, which is a great way you learn it. It’s on the job training. But for that, there’s not a trade school for entrepreneurs still.
 
Dan Sullivan: No. I don’t see our stuff going in that direction.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, we have the Edge program–
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, which my daughter went to. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, it’s a day and everything else. But the people who are showing up are the children of entrepreneurs.
 
Steven Krein: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they do that. But my sense is that the Coach program, more of the mindsets than the tools, is being communicated to children through their parents who are in the Program. Yeah. You know, you’ve done an admirable job, from the way you describe it, of letting them grow up in a great family–
 
Steven Krein: Grow up in a great family, loving relationships–
 
Dan Sullivan: …where their parents love each other, where their father is excited about his work. I think that’s good education.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Well, and there’s a lot of things like even my daughter’s speech at her bat mitzvah was about being batteries included, and the idea of being very mindful of not only the energy that you’re putting out, but the energy of others. So yeah, making it normalized — fantastic.
 
Dan Sullivan: How’d that go over?
 
Steven Krein: People still talk about it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: When they see her and they haven’t seen her in a bunch of years. We have friends that’ll say they, you know, they still love that. And it was not a typical 13-year-old speech.
 
So, well, Dan, always love these conversations.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think the big thing is that I suspect, you know, my research of the 5%? I suspect in 25 years, it will still be 5%.
 
Steven Krein: It’ll be interesting. I’m going to challenge that–
 
Dan Sullivan: The skill set of the general population will have changed. But somebody who will just bet the ranch on opportunity?
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. I don’t know if you have to bet the ranch anymore. I’m going to posit to say that we’re going to see it move up for the first time. I’m not going to go as far as to say it’s going to double, but I’d be very remiss to believe that the accessibility of tools like the books you put out or tools like the software that you can now get and take advantage of, coupled with the inability to get hired for some jobs that people used to get hired for are going to create more entrepreneurial opportunities. I don’t know if they’re big business entrepreneurial activities, but I think people being on their own, I mean, with software–
 
There’s designers now that are Canva and Figma specialists and they are a fraction of the cost of a designer who only knows InDesign or any of the high-end Adobe products that now can be very useful to your organization. And those are people who now have five or 10 or 20 clients, and they’re on their own. And they’re not what you would have called entrepreneurs in the traditional sense, but they are now. So, in any event, what’s your biggest insight from the conversation?
 
Dan Sullivan: I believe that only Internal Revenue can tell you. [LAUGHTER] Well, I think it’s more that I think we’re too early into a change of tide here, you know, what’s happening right now. And I think that the two big factors is the COVID and the impact worldwide in COVID. And then I think the artificial intelligence is another huge factor. And I think the third one is just the United States going into warp drive and leaving pretty well the world behind. I think that’s a big factor. And the U.S. has got maybe about 10 countries that they’re interested in as allies and trading partners. But this is huge. You know, I mean, there’s so much polarization right now. I mean, the word is being used a lot, so I guess there is, politically. But I think it is that When I think people are just shaky, they just don’t know where the direction of the future is right now. And you go back to what you know and defend what you know during a period like this. And I just see this on both sides.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Yeah. Coming back to the beginning question about hybrid or should say optionality of in-person or virtual, digital or print, I think the idea that you can efficiently offer people both options or maybe integrate them together. So I think a lot more things are going to look like that. I think community is hard to do with big periods of time in between. So I think that your Connection Calls, a lot of our programming offered in between sessions. We have an annual event, but then a lot of individual touch points at different conferences along the way, but a lot of virtual. And I think it’s the hybrid is definitely the optionality that people are looking for. I think our print magazine is highly sought after, even though there’s a digital version of it. There’s something very different about holding a magazine…
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s tangible.
 
Steven Krein: …that has the Alzheimer’s moonshot. It’s just very different reading a story in here than just reading it online. So exciting times, Dan, exciting times.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Good.
 
Steven Krein: Always. All right. Great speaking with you. Look forward to the next episode.

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