Techno‑Spiritualism And The Myth Of Sentient AI

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything And Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: We suffer from an abundance of opportunities to talk about things, Jeff, because do we have anything to talk about is that we've got everything to talk about, but the question is, what do we really want to focus on each time we get together? And you brought up an interesting, and it had to do with Mark Zuckerberg, who is the creator, at least the early owner of Facebook, which is now called Meta. I've not spent a lot of time thinking about him, but I remember a video of him when he had to testify in front of Congress. And I noticed that he's not very tall and his feet didn't quite reach the ground. And I got a sense that he was sort of a late model robot. What came across, he was sort of a late model. Not there yet, but you could see he had some of the mannerisms of a human being. But there was just some tells that kind of tell you that he was a bit like the Terminator. You know, he had a list of things that he could respond, and he had to go through them.
 
But the big question is, can AI become sentient? And you pointed out that sentient means that you can feel. I have no experience of the AI that I use of being that way. It's just operating on very clever uses of language. And it's a fast computer, so it's speed of computing plus the use of language. Right up front, I'll say that I think the essential quality of consciousness that human beings have is the wall in which AI won't get past. So that's my first, that there's a vast realm, an infinite realm called consciousness. And there's nothing so far that indicates to me that computers can be conscious.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: What's interesting about it to me, and that's one of those distinctions, it's really interesting about consciousness and sentience. And my belief that you can be conscious without sentience, but you can't have sentience without consciousness. I don't think that AI is either one of those. And there's a term that I read recently that I like, because it really sort of nails it. It's called techno-spiritualism, and there's all this magical thinking.
 
Dan Sullivan: New religion.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. When you go back in time and you think about the telegraph, that was considered spiritualism, and that Edison, the radio, there's the spirit phone. So there's always when something is new that we don't quite understand, it becomes somewhere in that realm of religion and acceptance, because we don't understand how something works. And it's not understood how AI works. There's lots of interesting questions around what is reasoning? What is intelligence? Does AI actually function like our brain? The answer is no, it doesn't. But that's the closest thing, because it's the most complex organ there is and the brain is way more complex than AI is. So I think when we get into this realm of the magical thinking and the awe that it inspires, and then we realize that actually throughout history, that's also been used for marketing.
 
And, you know, the magic label as a shield, you know, why calling AI magic is brilliant marketing, because it's a strategy that excuses the tech industry for being able to explain what it actually does, because a lot of people don't understand it. So I think it's really fascinating. And I wrote down my notes here, because I thought if we talked about this, this could be interesting. But before I jump ahead to that, since we're in anything and everything land, so we can ricochet like a pinball, there was a headline in The Guardian, Meta creating AI version of Mark Zuckerberg so staff can talk to the boss, and the digital clone is being trained on his thoughts and tone and mannerisms to help workers feel connected.
 
Dan Sullivan: And what that suggests is so far they haven't felt connected.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I empathize with them.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And connected to what? Because if you're connecting to some kind of an AI device, are you connecting in the emotional sense? If you are, I think that's a potential problem for you, because it's not a recipient of empathic response or sentient response. And so I think it's really interesting that I think the premise is so flawed that they're creating a digital clone of him so that other people will feel more connected. Meanwhile, he's even more remote. He's not even showing up for that anymore. I don't know what happens to these people. It gets really weird.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, this is marketing. Mark Zuckerberg is a really good marketer, and his success as a trillion-dollar company indicates that he was really good at marketing. But the thing that I've been thinking about a lot along these lines has to do with language, that it's obviously doing something very, very interesting with language. I can tell by just my interaction with Perplexity that it's getting better and better at understanding what my language is, the way that I write. For example, I just put together my next quarterly book, which usually takes me about three or four weeks to get it all structured. And I had it nailed within about two hours, the entire structure of the book. Now, my books are all structured the same way, so that there's a pattern this way, but I was really impressed when I got finished that it has enough of my language in its memory that it's actually phrasing things the way that I phrase things.
 
Sometimes I'll just get an idea and I'll explore the idea. I'll say, tell me 10 things about this thought, you know, a matter of seconds. I've got 1 through 10. And then he'll say, do you want us to rewrite this using Dan Sullivan's approach? And I said, yeah, let me see it. And it was pretty good, the phrasing. Everybody's got a distinct phrasing, so they've worked with me enough to know. And it really likes saying nice things about me. Like, I'll say, I've got an idea, and the idea is a couple sentences. And they say, Dan, this is absolutely brilliant. He said, I'd be happy to work on this. So to me, they've got down how you can communicate pleasing to someone who's interacting with you. They've got it down. And they're just using millions and millions and millions and millions of examples. But they must have a private depository of how Dan talks about things. And they just are now using my way of speaking to answer my requests. I think that's great.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's two things that are interesting to me about that. One is that how it's complimentary, which, you know, what that does, basically what that does is seduce one. And the seduction then is to keep the conversation going. And the more you converse with it, the more they learn your language. The more it learns your language.
 
Dan Sullivan: And nobody was ever seduced who wasn't looking for sex.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that's correct. One way or the other, but there are certain things you don't want to get fucked about. So I think that part of it is that it's a marketing exercise to keep on engaged because we're tiny users of it. Those who are on the enterprise scale level of using it, they want to use more and more, because that's, if they're going to make any money, that's where that's going to be made. And we're just the seasoning and additives and spices that can be peppered onto something. But I think that saying that your idea is brilliant and all these things which keeps one engaged can also interfere with the quality of the feedback that you're getting. And this is what's, from my background in doing advertising, always the challenge was when we did fragrances. I did a number of fragrance launches. And it's so, how do you sell a smell?
 
Now, somebody came up with the idea at some point back in the ‘70s or ‘80s of scratch and sniff. And so you get a sense of the fragrance or something. But it was interesting because all fragrance, more money went into the bottle design than the juice, as they called it, that went into the bottle. And, you know, Apple realized when they were trying to sell computers, and when they were trying to sell the iPods, nobody was interested in the details of the technology. So what they showed, and they brilliantly showed in their commercials, was how you could have fun with it. And so it was how you experienced that technology was the thing. Well, AI doesn't even really have that. And it's a tool made of math and code, which isn't all that interesting nor understandable to most people. So what there is, I think, is this, I don't remember anything being hyped quite as much as this has been. Can you think of anything?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no. Of all the technology that I've experienced in my life, this is the 800-pound gorilla. This is a really big one. Now, I should say, I'm not really a buyer of many things. I mean, I have certain things that I buy and Babs and I have a nice lifestyle, and it's mostly complete. Like, there aren't too many places in the world that I want to go to. I'm asked this question, Dan, if you could go someplace you haven't been that you would really want to go to? And I say, well, there really isn't any place I want to go to, because wherever I go, it's me experiencing that I'm used to me.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You've been with yourself for a while.
 
Dan Sullivan: I've been with me many decades, and I said, I'm still the same person. And I feel travel is sort of like a form of porn. You know, if you read the luxury travel magazines, it's almost like pornography, I think, because, you know, I won't admit that I've ever watched pornography. But the basic thing is that you're going to be a different person. And I think that a lot of advertising is based on the premise that you're not the person that you want to be. That you need to have a certain magical experience that's going to allow you to be the person that you want to be. But if you're okay with the person you are, there's not much that they can tempt you with.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean, it's the bedrock of advertising, which is, you know, if you can create the problem and sell the solution to it, you know, that's really good. And that can be very, very profitable. But, you know, the idea, I mean, you've been with yourself for many decades. And coincidentally, I've been with myself for many decades.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we have that in common.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. But I think that there is a need for that kind of magical thinking. Because, you know, a lot of things, if you could explain them, it would probably be hard to keep your audience awake during that explanation. But if you can excite them and engage their emotions, that's something else. So, you know, we've got the conversation about AI is that it's either utopian or dystopian, and which I think you and I agree it's going to end up at neither one of those extremes. And, you know—by the way, speaking of Zuckerberg and brilliant marketing, the Metaverse shut down. And I remember when I first heard about it, I thought, what a horrible idea. Did you ever see Wall-E, that animated film?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I didn't get that one.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But it's basically how these morbidly obese people who are always moving around on carts, like what I saw when I was doing a job in Vegas. And I thought, what's going on here? Is there, is this a disability conference going on? And I remember asking the concierge at the hotel and he said, well, no, no. ‘Cause I saw these really heavy people in like these golf cart kind of things. He said, nobody wants to walk.
 
Dan Sullivan: Wow. Wow.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And it's a weird place. It's a weird place. But I will reel myself back in from that. But do you agree that people seem to need a kind of spiritualism or magical thinking or dramatic story to go along with something like this, like AI?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, very much so.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And why do you think?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I've been thinking a lot about it because I'm clinically diagnosed as ADD, and I think a fair number of my Strategic Coach entrepreneurs, those who are in the Program, are ADD, and that is that they are distracted by the future. And what I mean by that, they'll get an idea, a possibility, and they have a rapid response of emotionally connecting themselves to some possibility in the future. And it's like real for them because they're having the emotion attached to a future possibility, which wouldn't be a real problem if it was just one thing, but it's 20 things. You could do a 360 on their life, and then their personal life, they want this and they want this, but they don't have it yet. But they're having the emotions as if they're actually having the future experience. And I think that a lot of people are trapped in the past or they're trapped in the future. Where they're not operating very well is in the present. So they're caught between something that could have been enjoyable or not enjoyable, or could have been sad, or it could have been painful from the past, and they're caught with that on the one hand, and then they have something in the future that is the reverse of a bad previous experience, and they want to be that, where they really, really aren't.
 
Engaged is what's actually happening right now during this particular day that they're having. They got lots of experiences today, but they're not really engaged with the experience. And I've trained myself out of that. If it's a new idea, something new I've created for the entrepreneurs, I'm not emotionally engaged with it until I get the feedback from the entrepreneurs. And people said, you have really interesting ideas, Dan. How do you operate with having all these ideas? And I said, I have a rule. I don't fall in love with my ideas until somebody else does who can write a check. And then I get really engaged with the check when it arrives, but I don't.
 
But I think there's something having to do with the part of them that is responding to great marketing. It isn't really at the conscious level. It's at the subconscious level. You know, we have a lot going on. All you have to do is have some experience where you're having a dream at nighttime and you're conscious that you're having a dream. And I've talked to everybody. I said, do you ever have an experience when you're dreaming that there's a part of you that can actually be conscious to the dream that you're having, and you say, boy, this is a really interesting dream? You don't necessarily remember it the next morning, but you do remember that you were conscious that you were actually dreaming. So I think there's two realms that we operate. We operate in the conscious realm, and we operate in the unconscious realm. And I think that the advertisers used to go after the conscious realm, but now I think they're going after the unconscious, the subconscious realm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: There's a lot to unpack in what you just said, because what you described in terms of the dreaming and then being aware that you're dreaming, most of us at some point have experienced those kinds of dreams that are so vivid. And it's called lucid dreaming. It was actually a term for it. And lucid dreaming is quite fascinating. And some people, and I've tried to do it, have tried to train themselves, which you can do with lucid dreaming. When I've been successful at having the discipline to do that, have you ever gone to sleep thinking about some problem and you woke up and actually it's not that you can't remember what it was, that actually you can remember what it was? And a good thing to do, I think, by the way, is to keep a notebook by your bed and a pen. Because when I wake up, I'm like pretty high level of awareness. I don't go through a groggy state when I wake up.
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't either.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You don't either?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I'm just like that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, me too. The problem is if I wake up at like three in the morning, I'm gonna probably be up ‘till five. That's the problem with it. If I don't fall back asleep within 10 minutes, then I'm up for a few hours, which is a drag. But advertising plays on the subconscious, as you were saying, and the conscious, I mean, both, you know, it's desire is something you can act on. If you're a drug addict, it's abuse substances, that may be one way that you are going after what you're going after, or I won't go down that road, but getting life altering advice from an advertiser, you know, they're trying to sell you something, and these things that will change your life, as you were saying earlier. But what's doing that is basically a black box, which is essentially math and code. So how do you position that to make it appealing? You make it appealing; it almost becomes like a religious experience. So my question is this, as I was going around the block in a number of different ways, is, I think there may be something to this thought that AI is filling the void that's left by the decline of traditional myths and religion. I think that's a fair statement, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I don't suffer from loneliness. Generally speaking, I can spend days, you know, if Babs makes a family trip, she goes to visit her family in Michigan, and she might be gone for three days. I'm not socializing during those three days. Some three days I'm reading. I'm quite content to be by myself. My own company has been a pleasant experience. But I think there's a profound loneliness. I know people who just can't be alone. They have to be with someone or they have to be talking to someone. We have one of our salespeople and she's been with us —she's probably in her fifties now, but she joined us in her twenties, so she's probably closing in on 30 years. And the week after she was hired, we took a trip to Boston, and she was sitting in the seat in front of me. And the moment we took off, and seatbelts were off, a different era of air travel, so this is 30 years ago, and she gets up and puts her arm, she turns around, she's kneeling under, and she starts talking to me.
 
And I like to read when I'm on the plane. And every time I've been with her, she talks. She wants to talk about this, she wants to talk about that. So we took a trip once. I had a speaking engagement in Scotland at a very famous golf course. And she went with us. And then I looked at the travel plans and we were flying back from Edinburgh to London. And then she was going to go back to Canada and I was just going to be in London. So we were in the limo going to the airport after the speaking engagement. And I said, “Now, Julie, I just want to tell you something. When we get on the plane, you're sitting right next to me, but you can't talk to me.” I said, “I've got something I want to read, and you can't talk to me.” And she says, “Oh, why? Was something wrong?” No, no. I said, “I like reading on the airplane, and I don't want to talk. You can talk now. I have no trouble talking now.” It was so funny because we got on and we just took off and she says, I said, “No, no, no talking.” I think it was the most painful 40 minutes of her lifetime. She just couldn't talk.
 
And I wonder that we're really wired differently in terms of our relationship to ourself. I'm as social as I need to be, but I have no problem being alone. And I think loneliness is a profound common experience in today's life. And even talking to an advertiser or talking to a marketer is almost like you're having a relationship and you're having a connection with someone.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you're right. And a company that most people don't think of this way, but actually took great advantage of that, was QVC. It was on all night and you could call in and you could also see the results of how many things were sold. So there was always a scorekeeping on there. And it was for a large portion, well, their audience, it was addictive and it was also company. You know, if you got up at three in the morning, you could turn on QVC and you could interact through the telephone and watching the screen. And that was a huge part of their market. And I knew people that were addicted to QVC and it became humorous. I mean, my accountant at the time said, “Yeah, I've got a porch filled with about eight sets of golf clubs.” Because it seemed like such a good deal, and all this stuff that he hasn't even used or opened. And then in talking to other people and actually meeting people at QVC who were bartering stuff on there, selling it, most of their clientele at a certain time of night were regulars who couldn't possibly use all the crap they bought, but they felt connected to something. And I think that lack of connection is epidemic at this point.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the things, and you and I have a lot of similarities in how we've approached our personal life and how we've approached our business life, and it struck me that creative people, they're different for most people because most people are reactive rather than creative. They need to be reacting to something to have a sense of themselves. But I find my projects, like a quarterly book—every quarter I write a book, every quarter I create new thinking tools. But that's a relationship with myself. And it's like there's two of me when they're doing it. There's one of me that's kind of strategic, and the other one is sort of saying, well, let's try this out, let's try this out, let's do this and everything else. And I'm very, very comfortable with that relationship. And if anything, I'm uncomfortable with being in a situation where other people aren't creative, because they go ordinary on me.
 
They say, well, I don't understand how that connects to that. Now this connects to that. So, and I haven't studied this, so I don't know the basis, but I think there are people who have learned how to have a conversation with themselves that has a transformative outcome. In other words, I'm thinking about, oh, that's a great idea. And then you'll write it down or you'll draw a diagram or something. But you're just having this relationship with yourself. I would say that most people who are on their phone and they're always interacting on their phone, they don't have that kind of relationship with themselves.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I do think there are people that have a compelling need to not feel alone, even if it's engaging in very toxic dialogue on social media, but they feel a part of something.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, they certainly feel strong emotion, but I'm just asking the question, hasn't it always been that case? I mean, we like to say that ours is a different age, but I'm just wondering if it was always that way, you know, that there are certain people who are quite content to have not just a conversation. It's not like you're gossiping with yourself or anything like that, but you're actually creating something new, that first of all, I don't think there's a lot of people who do that. You know, my perception is you can tell when you're interacting with them, whether they're creative in that way or not.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think that people going back in time when religions were happening—and I think there are things that have replaced religion, although religion is starting to experience another upswing, which is kind of interesting, because I think as things get more complicated, there is always that nostalgic desire to get back to something more basic, you know, whatever that means. And I think that we, in our culture, worship technology. And now there's becoming pushback to that where people want simpler phones. They don't want to be so connected all the time, all of that kind of thing, even going back to analog and music, which is kind of interesting because then there's a physical object, you know, a record album.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the popularity of theater when it was predicted in the 20th century that theater was going to disappear because you had movies, you had television, you have the internet, but theater has always retained its importance.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right, because I think it is a fundamental human need to not just experience things, but experience things with other people. You know, the old sitting around the campfire and the more interesting person is spinning a tale, you know. So I think that that's true. And I think that there are things that have replace religion by trying to convey a magic about what is being done. And there's a lot of people that say …
 
Dan Sullivan: Is it also feeling part of something that's bigger than you?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm wondering, I wonder what is it? I think there's a compelling need to make sense of the world around us.
 
Dan Sullivan:
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yep, yep. I tell the story in my Creative Careers book about a neighbor, Billy Loudon. We were about 12 years old, and his parents got him a telescope. I went to the backyard—our backyards abutted each other—and he said, “So you wanna see through the telescope?” I said, “Sure.” And I look, and he said, “Do you see Orion?” I said, “No, I see a bunch of stars.” And he said, “No, no, don't you see Orion?” I said, “I see a bunch of stars.” And he looks through and he goes, “Look, on the right there, there's the three stars in a row, that's his belt. There's his shoulder. Don't you see that?” And I said, “No, I just see a bunch of stars.” He said, “How can you not see that?” And I said, “Well, I see what other people call Orion, but that's just, you know, could have been called something else.” It's just, we have a need to organize and make sense of those things around us. That's what religion is. It's trying to make sense of things that many things in here don't make sense. And the schism between religion and science actually is interesting because sometimes it narrows. You start hearing stories about how this physicist believes in God because there's no other explanation for X.
 
What I've never understood is, why do we think everything has to be explained? Maybe there aren't answers to those things. So that doesn't mean by default I'm going to then subscribe to something that's easier. It's just, I'm not uncomfortable with the fact that, no, there's no real answer for that. Why do bad things happen to good people? That's contrary to the Bible. But why does that happen? And I see that in everyday life. And I think that tied into that is social media. I think that there is a worship of celebrity and fame in our culture that has, the turnover is a lot quicker now with social media, with the saturation of imagery all over. I think it's going to be, it's never been easy to sustain a career. I think it gets harder.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I'm going to throw in an idea here of operating system. And an operating system is that you understand the world in such a way that you have predictability. See, I think a lot of it is, how do you take action in a world that you don't understand? How do you make decisions? How do you make plans? How do you take action? And if you look around the world, there's great inequality of operating systems. And I happen to think America is the most well-developed operating system in the world because it's economic, it's political, it's national. And a lot of people say, well, this is the roughest period we've ever gone through. And I said, no, it actually isn't if you look at American history. But I said, there's sort of a local reality that's comfortable to you. You like the local reality that you're in.
 
But I think up until the present moment, that's something that you were born into. You were born into a neighborhood, you were born into extended families, you were born into a local municipality, and there was a predictability about it. That made things easier. There were a set of rules on how you make it in this local reality, and there's ways that you can get into trouble with your local reality. I think what people have lost is local realities. Because if you're in a setting, let's say a hundred years ago, everybody was talking to each other, but now they're talking to their phones. And you're not part of that reality. Whoever that person is communicating, you're not part of that. They had a choice to talk to you or talk to a machine, and they talked to a machine. And I think that makes you feel very lonely and disconnected. You can see it right there.
 
And the first reality was the family. If you look at how things developed, you had a family. And then you had a whole set of families, and that was like a tribe. And then as it got bigger, and I think that agriculture really came in with a whole new operating system, that you could be aware that there were hundreds and thousands of people who were more or less like you. And they developed it, it started, you know. But the U.S. is just an unusual reality, because it's based on a document. The Constitution is just a very, very powerful operating system. We don't have it here in Canada. They have a constitution, but it doesn't have any of the same significance to Canadians as the American Constitution does. And you can be from either side of the political spectrum, but you kind of know this is how the country actually runs. And there's a lot of testing of the limits that is going on right now. But I don't see America as any different today than the way it was in the 1800s, in terms of being contentious and being argumentative and everything. It's just that the scope is far bigger.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Back then, news didn't travel so quickly.
 
Dan Sullivan: There wasn't that amount of news. Well, the news was local.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's what I'm saying. It didn't travel that. So you knew what was going on at the town square, but what was going on even a hundred miles away, you may know nothing about. Now everything, if it's sensational enough, becomes a national story. And so I think it's different. And it's hard because we're blinded by such a hailstorm of constant and repetitious news. It seems very much nonstop and relentless.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I don't think there's any reversing of it. I mean, you can make personal choices. I'm going to pay attention to this, I'm not going to pay attention to that. I'm known in Strategic Coach as an absolute news junkie. Dan is always reading about these things. I'm just interested in a lot of different things. And, you know, you're playing with it and everything like that. And they say, why do you watch the news? It's so bad. And I said, yeah, but it's interesting to ask the question, why are they reporting on this? And that's been one real breakthrough for me with AI. I'll read something, and it's a very compelling article, and then I'll take the link to the article and put it in AI and say, tell me 10 things about this subject that the author of the article doesn't mention. And what it does, it expands my understanding. He's got a point of view. He's very passionate about this, and he's obviously studied it. But he's got one thing that he's going after, or she. I have to get the she in there because this might be observed here that I'm being biased.
 
But one of the things is you have chosen, if I make an observation, you've spent a life paying attention to people who are interesting and ignoring the people who aren't interesting.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, it's a survival mechanism. I don't want to be bored to death.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you've constructed a whole society. I mean, you have a whole network of friends that go back to early childhood, and you've created a whole world for yourself, and you make the rounds, as far as I can see. You know, you make sure that you're getting together for lunch here, breakfast there, dinner, you're going to plays and everything. But it seems to me you've constructed a whole world that is stimulating to you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah. I don't think early on …
 
Dan Sullivan: I think that's a skill, by the way. I think that's a skill.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's a skill then that I learned from my parents, because they both had lifelong friends. That was just normal to me. And, you know, one of the things that changed things dramatically in a kind of cool way, and it's very simple. This is for everybody. They can do it. When we were growing up, a long-distance call was a thing. That was an event. And the fact that it's long distance meant you shouldn't stay on the phone very long. And of course you couldn't walk around any further than the cable would allow you. But now, and this has been true for the last 25 years or so, long distance isn't a thing anymore. And I find if I'm thinking about somebody and the thought sticks, it's not just a passing thing, but, oh yeah, I wonder how maybe somebody that I haven't talked to for 40 years, I'll actually call them. The reason I do that is because with very few, there are a couple, but with very few exceptions, it's been wonderful. And it's so easy. It's so easy to do. And I believe, as I've said many times, that the sustainability of the relationships that you have, that's the real currency in life.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep, yep.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And you know, that's what I think is so valuable. And it's so easy to do now. You know, I understand because I have been one of those people that's so busy, I can't do X, but that's only for a circumscribed period of time. If I was in production out of the country, I might be out of touch for a few weeks. But for the most part, it's just not an issue. And even now with WhatsApp, you know, I talk to my friends in France and in London and in Belize and, you know, in Ibiza and all these different places, and it's simple and it's quick and it doesn't cost anything. And so I think that the barriers that have come down for direct communication with actual friends and people you care about than engaging in social media, which is, I consider to be so toxic for the most part, you know, for teenagers, especially for younger people, because also I think that that's a time of life when you start learning and potentially mastering those social skills, which are only going to help you in business and help you in life. You know, so yeah, I think it is interesting. And yeah, why would I want to put my time into being with people that, that exchange could be just Friday night?
 
I talked to a dear friend of mine since seventh grade. And we talked for like an hour and a half. We were probably laughing for 45 minutes of it. And it was great. It was absolutely great. And we both, you know, at the end of the conversation, how that was fun, that was great—spending time with people that you know and care about and unearthing some of those contacts and re-establishing some of them, which you can do quite easily if you just take the chance or time to do it. And one of the things that makes me think of, one of the things that really annoys the shit out of me, is if you call somebody and you get, I don't listen to my email, so if you want to get in touch with me, please send me a text that says, fuck you. It's, why do you have it set up if you don't use it? And why are you making it harder for me to reach it? And communication can be so easy, yet it's so often not followed through. I know in our relationship, you follow through. You know, hence, we do this every Sunday, and enjoy it. And it's both built our relationship and it also has enabled both of us to engage in things we might not have otherwise engaged in and topics we might not have engaged in. And that's great. I think some people like to feel important to not be in contact.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, my sense is that I would say the way that you go about it is unique to you, okay? And my sense is that the expansion of technology has allowed people more choice in how they want to do what they do. I remember I had a brother who moved to Toronto. He was here for about three or four years, and he didn't like it. He really didn't like Toronto. He says, it's so cold. And he said, you know, he says, you just don't know anybody. You just, you don't. He actually developed a whole series of friends while he was here in Toronto, and they were mostly drinking friends. And one of the things I've observed in my family, that I'm the only big city guy in my family. Everybody else is small town. And he said, “Do you ever meet anybody you know on the street?” He says, “When you're walking around Toronto, do you ever?” I said, “Almost never.” I said, “Because a lot of the people I know aren't from Toronto. You know, I know them through the Strategic Coach network. So I know them, you know, I've got friends, people that I'm constantly communicating with, who are all over the world.” He said, “Does anyone know anything about you in Toronto?” And I said, “Probably not.” I said, “Canadians are, they're a different breed, you know, that Americans, you can get to know much more quickly than you can Canadians.”
 
And I think it is that historically the U.S. has been a much more mobile community. Very seldom do you meet someone who's actually was born in the place that they're living in. They've moved. You were born in Akron, but Akron is not your number one community. I grew up in Norwalk, I grew up in Milan, and I can go years without ever going back there. It's only because of some family event, or every once in a while I've gone back for a school event, but not very much. But my sense that I'm getting here is that everybody uses their experience to construct the world that makes sense to them. And you do it one way, I do it another way, but you talk to anyone and they've constructed a world. Now, how that world is populated makes all the difference because it could be very negative. They're populated with people who are whiners, they're complainers, they're gossipers and everything, and you're dealing with that. And if you stay with something long enough and you don't have any alternative experience, what you dislike about them is what's dislikeable about you. There doesn't seem to be any direction to it because the technology is changing things so quickly. It's the speed of change, which I think is really bothering people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think it's the speed of change, except here's the difference to me. Yes, there is a rapid speed of change, but that sense of the rapidity is greatly amplified by hype. And so when's the last time other than, I hadn't heard about the Metaverse for a while until I heard that shutting down. But there was a while there where it was going to redefine how we live.
 
Dan Sullivan: That was an attempt by one person to redefine how we do it. I remember when the first Metaverse video came out, and Mark Zuckerberg was on some sort of self-propelled surfboard, and the whole system was based on VR, which has not gone anywhere. The VR thing hasn't gone anywhere. Because it only uses two senses. It only uses visual sense, and it uses audio sense. There's no touch, there's no taste, there's no smell. And one of the things AI isn't even going after is smell. To give you an idea why it won't be sentient is because it doesn't know what to do with smell, but yet smell is an incredible part of our existence.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's the smell in your olfactory lobes; it's attached to memory. And it's a very evocative of memory. But, well, first of all, I want to make a statement here that maybe we'll do it next week. I think that the sentience is such an interesting topic that what we're talking about is laying a good foundation for that next discussion about it. I think that the feeling of the rapidity, there are changes happening very quickly on one hand. On the other hand, a lot of these things have been in process for sometimes years before it's actually manifest. But I do think that the hype factor makes it seem like It's nonstop, because the reporting on it, whether it's through civilians or the news media or whatever, the reporting of things are just relentless. And I think that heightens the feeling that we're on this just spinning roller coaster, which it feels like. I mean, I know a lot of people that are just emotionally and physically exhausted and are disengaging. However disturbing I find certain things in the news, I will always try to learn from it and find out what's going on. But I understand, because I know a lot of people that just, I need a break. I can't deal with this anymore.
 
Dan Sullivan: What is happening to them that exhausts them? I catch up with the news. A lot of mine is reading, though. It's still reading. There's this great platform called RealClear.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: RealClearPolitics, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: RealClearPolitics, yeah. And I check it every morning, you know? And it's got a broad spectrum. You know, if they have 20 articles, you can tell which ones are liberal and which ones are conservative. You can tell right off the bat. And, you know, I plug in, I read them, I do that, then they have real clear markets, real clear science, real clear technology, real clear medicine. And you can go across, and it's current, it's within the last week or the last 24 hours that these articles are coming out. But I'm a reader, so, you know, I tend to go to the article and read the article.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Me too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, it's perpetual, but I knew it was perpetual. It was perpetual all my life. It's been perpetual because I used to go to the library, to the reading room, and I'd read The New York Times. I'd read the Wall Street Journal, you know, back when I was a kid. So the one thing is that the way I create a constant, I said technology is always changing. Something new in technology doesn't particularly impact me at all. I said, I remember when I was in New York, when the stock market crashed in 1987, Warren Buffett was, I think it was Warren, no, it was—remember one of the first mutual fund guy was John Templeton. Do you remember John?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I remember, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: And he had the first really big mutual fund that really took off. And he was being interviewed on one of the networks. And the stock market had gone, I think it was 2,700. And then one day it went down to 1,900. I mean, that was almost like a third of the stock market collapse. And New York's a really interesting city when the stock market crashes. Because the whole city's about the stock market. And John Templeton was on, and so they said, what do you think's gonna happen? And he says, well, he said, this is 1980, he said, I bet by the year 2000, 13 years, I bet by then the stock market will be at 10,000. And they said, 10,000? Do you know how long it took us to get to 2,700? And he said, yeah, but you know, something's happened that you have to take into account here. And he says, most of the scientists who've ever been alive are alive today. Most of the inventors who have ever been alive are alive today. And we now have the ability to communicate with each other. And how could this communication between really bright people who are discovering new things, inventing new things, how could it just not invite an enormous amount of investment? Well, the stock market was like at 15,000 by the year 2000. But we just live in a world where there's a lot more people, there's a lot more inventive, innovating people, and they're creating new things, and they're communicating them across mediums that we could never do before, and we're doing that. So I just think that's just the world we're living in.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think one of the things that happened, or a couple of things that happened—for instance, in finance, it was pretty rarefied air. You or I couldn't do a trade if we wanted to.
 
Dan Sullivan: Now you can do it for free.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. And you have shows like Jim Cramer, Mad Money, where, you know, he's brought this entertainment component to it.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it's sometimes correct too.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Sometimes. And I like that is when, and this is the person that had predicted X. There's always somebody who predicted something that ended up happening. And in that moment, they're a star.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's like the broken clock.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly, exactly. But the other thing is that the buying of stocks online, as you just said, you can do the transactions for free. I think that investment has become a sport. And you can participate in that sport for very little money, relatively speaking, very little money. And if you're foolish, it's like playing in Vegas and you'll lose that money and be scared off from ever doing it again. Or you may get lucky. But I think that that business changed so dramatically as a result of online trading, the cost of transaction going down so far. And you know, everybody thought that was going to be the end too, but it wasn't. And so it's interesting to look at these things that did really blossom because the stock market didn't have those kinds of dramatic moves, but I don't know what the market was when it crashed in ‘29, but It's way bigger now than it was then, but the devastating effect that it had back then was significant.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. You know, and there have been safeguards that went in. But the other thing that happened, and I think it happened with the personal computer, that's my personal experience of it, is there were various silos in the financial world. There was the stock market, and the stocks were separate from the banks. The banks had their separate world. The insurance had a separate world. There were trusts. And these were all separate worlds. And when the personal computer came in, these worlds started going across the borders into other worlds. So you never had a company that was called a financial services company. It was an insurance company. It was a bank, or it was an investment bank. But I think what happened is that everything got mixed together now.
 
When I started Coach, I started having really big insurance agents, and these were like gunslingers out of the Old West. I had one in 1976, he was a Scot who had moved to Toronto, and he was making 500, 600,000 a year in 1976. But he belonged to a single insurance company, and you couldn't see the rate sheets of the other insurance companies unless you asked permission of the insurance company. Why do you want to know what other companies' rates are? Once the personal computer came up, everybody knew everybody's rates. It all went into a common platform, and you could compare 10 different companies. So financial choice really exploded. Financial ability really exploded. So my sense is that the AI is about what money does in the world. How do you get money? How do you get investments? And so my sense is the amount of money-making and the different ways that you can engage with money have exploded exponentially in our lifetime. I think a lot of it, the hype is really about the money.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and I think you see that it's on the front lines in politics, you know, money, affordability, these kinds of things, the stock market. And I think, again, it's become this spectator sport. Well, it's not just spectator, you can be an active participant. If you buy, you know, a share of something. Because you can do that. So I think there's a participation factor that, you know, again, I think feeling a part of something.
 
Dan Sullivan: Something that's exciting, growing, and bigger.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and is happening constantly. There's a lot, if you get into that stuff, there's a lot to chew on. 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.