Inventions That Changed How We Operate

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff and welcome to our podcast called Anything And Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan.

Dan Sullivan: Jeff, we've been more talking about some things than other things. And one of the things we've been talking about is AI. And I'm really interested in historical proof that ways of thinking might have existed before the present day that were very profound shifts in thinking, and I've been looking at them. And the one thing I came up through the reading of a book about money was the emergence of zero and the nine-number system, the 10-digit system, plus zero being the number 10 thing, and how profound a revolution this caused when it came into Europe, having been invented in India and then moved westward through the trading routes, basically Arab countries, and then started to infiltrate Europe. And it was a profound change with just a concept and a new way of doing things. And it actually didn't take centuries. It took just a matter of years for it to go through all the economic systems of Europe using this new numbering system that was the offer for today to talk about things. The thing that I am probably most interested here, it's not so much a technological breakthrough; it's a cognitive breakthrough. You know, you think differently immediately once you grasp the new system. And I don't know if you've seen anything else that can match that, but that's the one that the whole basis of modern science, modern economics, is really based on the fact that you have zero. You can have minus and you can have plus.

Jeffrey Madoff: Well, there's a couple things about it. Coincidentally, this past week, it had hit me about how talking about AI, which has been a topic you and I have gone back and forth on for a while now that we both find quite interesting. I was looking at the wheel and how disruptive was it when the wheel first came about, you know, how fast was the adoption? How high was the resistance? The amazing thing is how much it mirrors what's happening today. And it mirrors what's happening today in that there's tremendous resistance to the wheel. Initially, by the way, the wheel was used as a potter's wheel, wasn't used for transport. Going back to Mesopotamia, there were even kids toys that had wheels, but wheels weren't used for transport for a number of reasons, essentially because there were no roads or anything that a wheel could travel over.

Dan Sullivan: You required a certain amount of flatness of the land for a wheel to be useful.

Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. So, I always question when it says, and then in 400 BC, and I'm thinking, how do they know it's BC? How do they calculate that? That's always throwing me off. But it took 300 years to go from the potter's wheel to the first wheels that were used the way we think of wheels now. Similarly, and I came across this when I was researching it coincidentally, was it actually when Fibonacci …

Dan Sullivan: Well, he was also involved in the zero issue, too.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that's what I'm referring to. That's right. Yeah, that's right. But it didn't become widespread until the 1500s. It was 300 years, coincidentally, the same amount of time. It's credited for how long it took the potter's wheel to become a wheel, as we know it. And the same with the concept of zero, it took 300 years. And so in doing that research, I read that and then I saw your thing a couple hours ago and you said, oh wow, this is interesting, just that convergence in that way. So these things don't change so quickly, is what's interesting. But one of the things you said I think is quite interesting is that you talk about AI isn't a technology. It's an infrastructure. Like zero. Could you go into that a little bit deeper and help me to understand that?

Dan Sullivan: You know, in the computer world, you had all sorts of computers that came out, but the winners were the ones who created platforms. Bill Gates would be the first real big platform with Windows. And then Apple had its platform. And so my sense is that we have various competitors in the AI world that are trying to be the ruler of the AI world. But I don't think the platform has really, really established itself yet. But zero was so neat and clean because it's just symbols. You know, there was talk about this over the weekend because the SpaceX IPO was 2.1 trillion dollars. And there was a whole article in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday. If you ask somebody, what's a trillion? They said, well, it's bigger than a billion. And I said, well, how much bigger than a billion is a trillion? And it's a thousand times. And we talk about billionaires, now we're talking about possibly the first trillionaire. They estimate he's about 1.1 trillion, which is almost the GDP of Canada. So it's hard for a deal in those numbers, but there's no way you could think in these terms if you didn't have the numbering system that we have.

Jeffrey Madoff: One of the things that is interesting to me, I mean, I got this about an hour before we started talking and the coincidence hit me in terms of the timing, because I was just, you know, looking into that. But, you know, with the numbering system, zero was kind of the dividing line between positive and negative numbers. It was the first time you could have negative numbers.

Dan Sullivan: Exactly.

Jeffrey Madoff: And what did that mean?

Dan Sullivan: Think of that. Then you got double entry bookkeeping for the first time. You know, if it's minus six on this side, there has to be a plus six on the other side. So I think it's fascinating.

Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, how was that divided? How did you even make change? They actually had currency back then. I imagine there were issues in theology in terms of zero, what that meant, and what that meant to money lenders.

Dan Sullivan: How could zero have meaning? It's basically how can nothing have meaning? And it shows you that thoughts do not live in their own silos. Thoughts immediately go out and impact other thoughts that already exist. One of the things that I'm curious about is, let's say it's 10 years in the future right now, we're talking about the mid-‘30s, and you have a generation of children who've grown up with AI, where they can access information that they're interested in and are quite gifted. I mean, the technology is going to be way, way more advanced because it's more way advanced in June of 2026 than it was in January of 2026. You know, so you have this rapid evolution of technology. What's the sales pitch for universities to get these children who are very gifted at using a knowledge tool, essentially. The university is sort of a knowledge platform. It's a knowledge tool. But what's your pitch that if you come and spend four years with us sitting in classrooms listening to someone talk, how's that going to be an improvement on what you're already doing with your AI?

Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think the mere fact that you're talking to somebody else and listening to somebody else, I think that's important in terms of culture and community. So I think that, you know, there were the areas that I remember when I got out of college, the big thing when I was in college was, you know, get an MBA and you'll work forever and it's not a problem. That's the way to go. That was the general thing. Back not that long ago, it was learn computer programming and coding. Well, that's all changing too. And so do those other jobs just go away because they've become folded into the current technologies, and you don't need to learn those anymore. And, you know, I think about when I was younger and first started writing, I was thinking, well, I wish I could talk into a typewriter. Well, you can do that now. But I thought, wow, that would be so cool if you could talk into a typewriter and get stuff printed out. How much easier that would be. And always, you know, trying to narrow the interface between man and machine, between the human and machine. The interesting thing is that wrapping one's brain around a new concept, like the concept of nothingness, because it has religious implications, it has philosophical implications, it has financial and economic complications.

Dan Sullivan: Scientific. Scientific.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, yeah. So I think that it's really fascinating the questions that arise because all new answers create new questions. And I think, you know, asking the right questions is really important, because you can't go on the path to unravel a mystery if you don't know what questions to ask or what to do.

Dan Sullivan: I don't know if you've had any recent conversations with someone in the university world about how it's being talked about. I'm strictly in an entrepreneurial world, so it's not really part of who I would be talking to.

Jeffrey Madoff: You mean in terms of the impact of AI?

Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Madoff: No, other than the articles that I've read, which, you know, things that I find interesting are out there. And first, what I would consider significant book that I read on AI that raised really interesting questions was that God, Human, Animal, Machine. And that was a philosophy professor from the University of Wisconsin, which is where I went. I mean, she's much younger than I, but that was really interesting because it surfaced a lot of interesting questions. You know, and unfortunately what we're hearing now is all these gloom and doom stories about what's going to happen with the jobs, what world are these kids going to be facing when they graduate. But I don't think that human skills are ever out of fashion. And I think we have a desire—you know, it's interesting. So the Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time since 1973, right? And I started thinking about that. Probably the biggest underdog to win in NBA history. I'm not a big basketball fan. I don't watch sports on TV much. I'll look at highlights sometimes. My daughter called me Monday. She's not, you'd have to know us both to know how ridiculous it is for my daughter to call me and say, dad, are you going to watch a game tonight? And she came over and the, you know, the athleticism and the back and forth, they were exciting games.

Dan Sullivan: I mean, from a 29-point deficit to win large games that they won, they came from very significant deficits.  

Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Really interesting. So it hit me on something else—this is getting away from the AI, but it's just the cross-section of players. On one hand, you look at the game, you look at the extraordinary athleticism, and I never looked this up until this morning, that the NBA is 70 percent black, and that 135 players from 43 countries across six continents, there's that many players who are foreign born, who are then immigrants.

Dan Sullivan: Well, the most valuable players, two years in a row now, it's been somebody from Africa who came from Canada, actually. He grew up in Montreal, I think. And he's been the most valuable player. He played for Oklahoma City. But before that, you have to go back a long way before you have an American-born player being the most valuable player.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and by the way, when we were growing up, Jackie Robinson, that was such a significant social and cultural event. And it just makes me think about, I don't know how to articulate it, but what we look at and what we consider important, we love being entertained. People love being entertained. And if you are entertaining, whether you're a great athlete or a great performer or singer or actor or whatever, a lot of the things that we apply to day-to-day life go away and aren't questioned.

Dan Sullivan: For a while.

Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yeah. Yes. I mean, initially they're questioned big time, which is why there were high fences between these things. But those have come down in a lot of instances. One of the things that I find tying this back to AI, fascinating is, so what are the patterns in the evolution of these things? Just like the 300 years, you know, of how long that took, because you and I growing up, instant photography was a minute, you know, when Polaroid came about. And then I think, didn't it get down to like, 10 seconds, I think. And then digital was, of course, instantaneous. And so what defined something has constantly been evolving and changing. What I like about questioning AI, just to get some of these profiles statistically and so on, is that's where the pattern recognition and heavy lifting of that goes. And then what you can conclude from that. I mean, this exploration I'm doing into the wheel, and the comparison, I think, is fascinating, because what you also realize is, none of it's new in terms of these are questions that have been asked over the ages. And I found it also fascinating with the numbers, one of the difficulties with the zero was it was too easily doctored to make it another number. You could add an extension. It could be a nine or a six. And so fraud, way back in India, became a question in terms of, how you use this and how do you do it and how do you protect against fraud? Like deepfakes, right? These are all things kind of pinballing around in my brain here. I realize that I'm not staying on the linear path

Dan Sullivan: I'm a great police person on this subject, so.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, you are, yeah.

Dan Sullivan: I just keep you on the straight and narrow.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, that's our responsibility to each other.

Dan Sullivan: Yes, yes. I'm as responsible as you are.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, yeah, which is I think why the name you came up with is still so fitting.

Dan Sullivan: Oh yes, it's well named. Enormous amounts of freedom. Yeah, you know, the last paragraph of the article that I sent you, it said, you know, the country's prospered who just used it and didn't debate it. Looking through, it's the very last paragraph, I think. So there's been some real brain work that's being done on Wall Street and the other financial centers, because they're not seeing the return on investment that they thought in the big corporations who are using AI. They're not seeing it. Some places are really seeing it. Financial markets are really using AI. I mean, they're dealing directly with money, and I think money is easier to make progress on really faster. You can put financial deals together incredibly faster than you ever could. I had a real estate lawyer about a year ago. He was talking about a deal that was put together that had nine players. You would need their information from nine different players, and you would need okays from five of them to move it forward. And he said that basically in his memory, it would have been about a six-month project that was done in three days.

So in the conceptual world, money is a concept. We have things which represent money, but essentially it's a concept. And when it goes digital, it's just a digital signal. I think there are some areas of society that are actually employing this. There's actually four industries, which are the money industry is one of them, the energy. They're doing so much, creating so many efficiencies and putting together logistics for energy, for research into energy. The medical world is really moving ahead very quickly with AI, because every biological signal can be translated into a digital signal. So you can do a test where you don't need the biology, you don't need this stuff to actually test. You know, the doctors we know who are plugged into the research world said, you know, how fast you can test things out.

For example, they're creating new drugs out of old drugs. They can just get all the signals of the existing drugs and say, what can we put together that already exists in a new form specifically for this type of issue? And the answer is back in a very short period of time to do this. So I think it's very unequal. I think there's a great inequality that it favors certain industries more than other industries.

Jeffrey Madoff: But it kind of makes sense to say it's not equal. Obviously, there's things that are better suited to certain tools than other tools. I think an area where AI is, I'm sure, being used like crazy is not only financial markets, but now the predictive markets that people are betting on. The New York Times had an interesting article this week about, here's how these work, and giving the mathematical formulas. Now, I'm sure there's been a billion of those related to the stock market and commodities and futures and all of that, because everybody's always looking for the quick money.

Dan Sullivan: They're trying to be the inside player. I mean, you always want to be the early inside player. There was a talk, sort of a lifetime associate of Elon Musk, who's been with him right from when he was at PayPal, when his first really big payday came from PayPal. So just on Friday, he made 67 million dollars. 67 billion. 67 billion, not 67 million. So human intelligence is completely unequal, and human conceptual intelligence is certainly unequal. And I think people who are good at concepts but are also practical about it, this favors them.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and I think that nothing has become the be-all and end-all for everything. There isn't a universal …

Dan Sullivan: That's a concept called God. I just want to introduce that. The be-all and end-all is just the concept of God. That's where God came from. What's above this? Who created the Big Bang?

Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, I think it was the Lone Ranger initially. Yeah, well, we're always looking basically for the same answers. You know, how do you make more money faster? How do you … How do you make things easier?

Dan Sullivan: Right. And how do you extend your life? I find writing 10 times easier now, just in a matter of two years.

Jeffrey Madoff: Using AI?

Dan Sullivan: Using AI, yeah, using AI, because I'm getting constant feedback. When you're just writing by yourself, you're not getting feedback. When you do a second version, a third version, a fourth version, it's so neat to have the feedback coming back at you, because you're doing contextual prompts. Like I'll get something done, I say, now I'd like you to introduce this idea into the whole document where it's contextually appropriate. That's my prompt. And then I'll write out the idea, and then it goes, shoop. In some paragraphs, it's not contextually appropriate. I find it really interesting. I just find it very stimulating.

Jeffrey Madoff: When I decided to look into the story of the wheel and comparing that to any technological advancement and how throughout history you can now pretty much predict initial resistance. Those who champion it are the ones who stand to make the most money from it.

Dan Sullivan: Well, those who are making money in a certain way, and it's not going to be made that way, you can see how things are developing. Probably, you know, when you had AT&T suing people and stopping people, they may have been at the point in their corporation where they had a lot of momentum, but they didn't have a lot of originality like they did in early days. I mean, it started with a telegraph, really, AT&T, according to Tim Wu. That's where it all got started was with the telegraph. So they had had, by the time they got to the latter part, I think, when was the breakup? 1970s, I think, the AT&T breakup?

Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think it was late ‘70s, mid or late ‘70s, I think.

Dan Sullivan: So the big thing is, what is the nature of the people running the corporation after a while? You know, they're not the people who started the corporation. They're not the people who are the new inventors in the corporation. They're the managers. They're going by numbers that they didn't choose. When they assumed the job, the numbers were imposed on them and they could see a loss of market share. It always goes bureaucratic. Anything big goes bureaucratic.

Jeffrey Madoff: I think that's true. And I also think that AI isn't the answer to everything. But it consumes all the oxygen at this point in terms of what is it and the opportunities for it, both the fears and the hopes and all of that. I still think that as interesting as it is, the areas you talked about will probably be the best tools to use in those areas of whether you're looking at protein patterns in medicine or pharmaceuticals or the financial patterns or whatever. But I think that also we are losing certain aspects too. What do you get and what do you give up? I keep thinking about our book, Casting Not Hiring, and thinking about how much the human component of the equation, just how important that is. And that can't be replicated. Even though it seems like you get responses from AI that are personal, they're not. it has been trained enough to know how people respond. So when it compliments you or gives you a good idea, that can become a little addictive also in terms of the feedback. And when it's late at night and you're sitting at your computer and you're getting that interaction going on, it's fun and exciting.

Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that's good. Knows my name. Yeah, I've been thinking about addiction lately, you know, and I says, we're all addicted, you know, I mean, we have our things that we do every day, you know, well, you're addicted to it. I mean, it's giving you some sort of reward. We had CoachCon. And we had a breakout group, and it was Shannon Waller, a client who's a psychologist, and he has a particular approach to conflict resolution. A woman who was in the Program for a long time, 10 years, and then has been out for 10 years, and she came to CoachCon because she's gonna come back into the Program, but she was talking about a particular personal problem where she's in conflict with an adopted child. I was thinking about it because it seemed to me that the way in which it was talked about and the time it took to talk about it in the presentation, I had a sense it left her more confused than when she brought up the topic.

So I went up to her afterwards. 20-year-old son came back from college. He'd been drinking too much. He's now drinking right in the family home, and he's very, very messy. It's just driving me nuts. And I said, people say addictions are problems, but I said, actually, they're solutions to a deeper problem. I mean, alcohol is a solution. It's not a very good solution, but it's, you know, for the hour that you're doing it, it's actually a solution. You're relieved of the tension and the stress and everything else. And I said, it's not really your problem that you have to deal with, it's that your son has some problems and he's communicating with drinking and he's communicating with being really messy. And I said, you should approach it not as your problem. You should approach it that his behavior is an attempt to solve the situations that he has. And that relieved her. She said, I never thought about an addiction being a solution. I said, oh yeah, all addictions are solutions. They may be self-destructive solutions, but they're solutions. And I think AI is, absolutely, it's addictive.

Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, yeah. I mean, there are many people that that's become another issue where that's their main point of contact with what they think is somebody, which it isn't, but they think it is. And when I think about a solution, I think that it has solved something. And if it solves it only temporarily, well, I guess you could argue that is a solution, too. I mean, you get Novocain before you get drilled, and so you wanna make sure you have that so you don't feel the pain. I think that addiction has a lot with the solution is avoiding pain. So if whatever it is that you do is avoiding that pain or saving you from that pain, as you said, it's not necessarily the best answer. It is a solution, but if it's a temporary solution, it being temporary means you're not attacking the principal problem.

Dan Sullivan: Yeah, just what are you attempting to create in your life that's probably not working the way you want it to work and you're up against it, yeah. But, I mean, it's coming into the world that's fully packed with addictions already, you know what I mean? I mean, I think social media is a much more difficult one than AI.

Jeffrey Madoff: How do you mean that?

Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, these are real people on the other end. You know, it's not AI talking to you; it's other people that are texting or they're sending TikTok or whatever. Sometimes, you know, when I'm in airports where you have a large number of people and they're all looking at their phone, they're going like this, you know, and they'll be doing this for 10, 15 minutes. So there's, they're looking at 50 to 100 things. And I said, I wonder what the overall impact of that activity is on their brain. I mean, I'm approaching on July 18th, no television for eight years. And boy, I got enormous amounts of time back by not watching television, you know.

Jeffrey Madoff: And so it's interesting to me because there are real positive uses of what might be called small talk.

Dan Sullivan: I think small talk and trivia are grossly undervalued.

Jeffrey Madoff: I do too. Why do you think that?

Dan Sullivan: I'll go back to something that happens at Abundance 360. They say, don't waste your breaks. Make sure you're talking about important things, talking about strategies and everything else. And they say, when you're out in the evening, don't just be having fun. Be talking about this. And I said, nah, I'm going out and just have fun. I just want a good, solid half hour of bullshit. That's all I really want, you know? You know, you gotta come up for air. But I think we have a natural instinct, I do, and you do, when you meet someone who's different, to try to find, as soon as possible, is there common ground that we can actually communicate about? You're a schmoozer, I'm a schmoozer. Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey Madoff: It's so funny because that schmoozing, some of that is small talk, good humor, and just being open. And it seems to me that it's become an obsession, the world of making it. You know, when you say you need a break, I agree with you. Everything doesn't have to be about, you know, so how do you get more productive? How do you enjoy your life?

Dan Sullivan: A researcher that actually he knew Shannon Waller, and I met him through Shannon Waller, I haven't seen him in a decade. His name is Louis Schiff, and he's from New York, and he does research for financial companies. And he says, you know, I've done a little research project and it's three types of people. I think I said this on a previous podcast, but if CEOs, C-level executives, corporate executives, they get together, when they're just together, what do they talk about? In other words, they're not performing on stage. They're just at a place where everybody in the group is in the same role. They're C-suites. They're chief financial officer, chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief technical officer now. That's one group. The other group is professionals. And this would be doctors, this would be accountants, lawyers, engineers. What do they talk about when they're in a group by themselves? And founding entrepreneurs of their own companies, what do they talk about?

And they found out that the CEOs talk about their successes. They talk about their wins. And the reason is they have short tenures at the corporation. It's about six years for a C-suite. They're looking at, what's my next jump after I finish this? The professionals talk about the problems that they're solving. Doctors are talking about this kind of problem. The accountants are talking about this kind of problem. It's very interesting when the entrepreneurs get together, they talk about the disasters that they came back from. I just introduced a tool. I actually built it for CoachCon. The tool was called From Failures To Breakthroughs. You do a column of all your biggest failures, and then you do a column of all your breakthroughs, but they're not matched up. You just write down everything you know about this, and then you start putting them together. The outcome of the tool is that you can't get the breakthroughs without the failures.

Jeffrey Madoff: I'm curious, with those failures, interesting charting of that, do people list, in your experience in doing this, do they list, for instance, divorce?

Dan Sullivan: My marriage fell apart. Bankruptcy, divorce, injuries. I tell them both your business life and also your personal life. Okay, so they list those. And then they pick the top three. So what are the worst failures and what are the best? And then you start putting the best breakthroughs together with the worst failures. And they begin to see these things are actually connected. And it's usually connected when you're trying to do something new that's risky and that a failure comes, and that would include divorce. It's risky. Personal relationships can be risky. The divorce rate sort of indicates that. But what happens is they start knitting together that these are not two separate categories. They're actually contained with each other, and one of them is a stage of development that isn't working, and then because it isn't working, you start going for what actually works.

And with very few entrepreneurs, after I've been testing it this week and I'll test it for three weeks in a row, they begin to see that there's a pattern there. And if they get into the mood that they're now starting to fear failure, they're also cutting themselves off from breakthroughs. Yeah, but it's interesting, the moment you talk to an entrepreneur about a disaster that they had and they've come back from it. Comebacks—entrepreneurs are all about comebacks. How they got a hold of themselves and they rearranged things and they tried out something new and everything else. They love that talk.

Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you know, when you've talked about the origins of Strategic Coach, you do a lot, which I think is wonderful, of crediting Babs.

Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey Madoff: In terms of, you know, I guess in looking at your life and what it was and recognizing that unless you did something different, your life wasn't gonna be what you wanted it to be, and meeting her, you were able, unlike the guy, you've told the story a couple times, but I always get a kick out of it, the guy who was married.

Dan Sullivan: Five marriages.

Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Is there a common thread?

Dan Sullivan: Yeah.

Jeffrey Madoff: What do you mean?

Dan Sullivan: Is there any individual who is a witness to all five of these? I'm just asking the question. Nothing personal. I'm not inferring anything here. It's scientific. You want to find what's the common element, you know. See, my sense is AI is here and it's never going to go away. And now AI meets human nature. What does human nature do with AI? Human nature has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and, you know, it's developed certain ways of responding to things, especially new things, and it won't defeat human nature.

Jeffrey Madoff: In evidence of that in your Zero essay, what was so interesting is that bankers who were restricted to Hindu-Arabic numerals, and a zero could be doctored, as I mentioned before, into a six or a nine, so there was a concern about fraud. One of the first things about AI was concerns about fraud. You know, deep fakes, all of that kind of thing. And it's all the same. You know, if we somehow were able to teleport back to 1200 BC, we would see the same shits going on with people. I think it's such a fascinating area.

Dan Sullivan: I think all criminality is a function of incompetence.

Jeffrey Madoff: Tell me what you mean by that.

Dan Sullivan: You can't succeed playing by the rules. So you have to do a shortcut or something. Or you think you can't succeed without breaking the rules. There was some research done into break and entry thieves, people who broke and entry into homes, and they tracked their lifetime from, let's say, age 20 to age 60, and they found that for all their robberies and all their time in prison, they worked less than the minimum wage. You know, if they just had a job that they got better and better at, they would have made a lot more money. But, you know, when you go away to prison for 10 years, your income doesn't go up.

Jeffrey Madoff: It's true. It's true. And it's really hard to be a traveling salesman.

Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that doesn't change at all. I think the fraud element, the criminality, it's always a player in human affairs.

Jeffrey Madoff: I think one of those major players in human affairs is the get rich quick scheme. Listen to me and you will get rich quick. I can give you the five steps that are going to guarantee success, especially for me if you buy the program from me.

Dan Sullivan: The David McWilliams book, the bunny book, talks about Gutenberg, and Gutenberg was a borderline criminal. He got into the indulgence business. That's where he really made his mark. The church would sell indulgences for your soul or for somebody's soul, that after death they might go to purgatory and they might spend a great deal of time in purgatory, might go to hell, so you would give the priest, you'd give the church a certain amount of money, and they would give you a document that was a signed document that this relieved two years of punishment after. That's where he made his money.

Jeffrey Madoff: I love that. I guess he's seeing Peter going, what the fuck is this? It's signed. Get out of here.

Dan Sullivan: There's a joke about a lawyer, 50 years old, and he dies of a heart attack, and he goes following the Christian thing. And there's a big excitement at the gates of heaven, and St. Peter comes down. He says, you know, I haven't been down here in years. But he says, you're the first person who has died at 300. So I wanted to come down and meet you, because we haven't had people who live that long before. He says, I didn't die at 300. He said, I'm 50 years old. So St. Peter's got his flip chart, and he's going there. Oh, I was looking at your billable hours. There's all sorts of fraud.

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.