How Your Audience Makes You Great

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called “Anything and Everything” with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Hi everybody, it’s Dan Sullivan, and this is Jeff Madoff, and this is the next episode of “Anything and Everything”.
 
I was just going through some old YouTube videos today, Jeff, and I came across a favorite TV show of the late Fifties, and it was Louis Prima and Keeley Smith. And this was a dynamite show at the time, and it occurred to me that I don’t think you could duplicate the partnership that they had today. And the other thing was, it seemed to me that a fair amount of it was just improv on the spot. And part of the reason, I think, is that they came up performing live their entire careers with live audiences, whereas a lot of people today, their first experience of entertainment is in the recording studio. And then they try to create an audience because of their recording.
 
So just a bit of thought about that, because everything in the Fifties was people who had decades of live experience. And I think it just creates an ease of performance and sort of an ability to create on the spot that people today don’t have.
 
That’s my thesis. That’s the topic that we’re going to stick to for about three minutes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But let me tell you about the dinner I had last night. (laughs)
 
We were talking about this topic. The title that was running through my mind was “Nostalgia’s not what it used to be.” And, you know, you were wondering also if those kinds of groups could be replicated.
 
And I also wonder about what will my kids, who are now, they’re not kids anymore, they’re 30, but what will they be nostalgic for? You know, we had a lot less choices, which in many ways I think is good. Because you ended up paying attention to something instead of flicking through the channels, if you will. Remote control, I think, started that. You could just get rid of things immediately.
 
Dan Sullivan: We used to have to just move a little bit the thing to see if the antenna was actually picking up the program. That was mostly the work, is to make sure that your antenna was actually picking up one of the three possible choices.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. The rabbit ears.
 
Dan Sullivan: ABC, NBC and CBS.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. It has changed.
 
Well, you know, you’re right about the entertainers that we grew up with when we were quite young, the ones that were favored by our parents. You know, they played vaudeville, and they had the different circuits that they traveled, and there is nothing like being in front of a live audience—both the good and the bad. When it’s going well, it’s amazing. And when it isn’t, you’ve got to be agile enough to both take the hits, verbal and whatever, and be able to come back on top and recover.
 
Dan Sullivan: The audiences had a greater ability to really punish you for a bad performance in those days. Well, that’s right. Today, it’s just “click”. That’s how they punish you today. They just click you off.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and I think, you know, when if you live in a larger city, like New York, where you’ve got live clubs, the groups that still go through that, our comedians still go through that at the open mics and all of that at some of the comedy clubs.
 
You know, one of the things that you hit on is pretty quickly what happened was instead of establishing performance capabilities, people got discovered and I’m talking about currently, you know, you could be on YouTube and end up getting a special on Netflix. You know, Justin Bieber started on YouTube. So there are these YouTube stars, but they had no idea what a live audience was actually going to be like. And that agility, to be able to deal with a live audience spontaneously and engage them, I think was a, a talent that was absolutely essential. And I still think it’s really important.
 
But what do you think of when you think of the stuff that we saw growing up and the things that stuck with us that were nostalgic? And by the way, we’re talking about things like The Beatles, you know, because that’s when we were teenagers or in our twenties or whatever. And just how amazing, and I still think how amazing, it all holds up. I mean, they were phenomenal. What will people be nostalgic for?
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, you and I are talking about, I don’t know if it’s nostalgia, is that for me, things that happened 70 years ago, and we’re talking about the Fifties, that’s 70 years. Fifty-nine, I sent you a clip of Louis Prima and Keely Smith, and I think it was late Fifties, 58, 59, so I would have been 15 years old.
 
But I think that, generally speaking, I think your strongest permanent impressions happen young.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think that’s true.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and that’s just the way the human brain develops, because it eliminates things that aren’t important and focuses.
 
I have a number of pediatricians who are clients in Strategic Coach. They have birth to three or four years old, and they deal with children. And they said, if you put sound sensors up on a two-year’s head, it just sounds like constant noise, and that’s the brain choosing synapses and eliminating synapses. It’s just this kind of normalizing things, okay?
 
So we grew up really in the golden age of television, both of us, and we grew up in the golden age of rock and roll. Okay, and we grew up, I remember the Fifties, that you had three baseball teams in New York. You had the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants. And I remember one year, each of their center fielders was the All-Star, and each of their center fielders became Hall of Fame players. So the Yankees had DiMaggio and Mantle. And the Dodgers had Duke Snyder, and the Giants had Willie Mays. And these are three or four of the greatest baseball players of all time. But if you look at the crowds back then, the attendance, they didn’t really draw that much attendance. If you had more than a million in a year, that was good. And I remember going to Cleveland to see the Yankees play, and Mickey Mantle was in center field, Yogi Berra was the catcher, Whitey Ford was pitching, you know, these are phenomenal names. But they stayed with their teams for their lifetime, and I think there was a constancy to entertainment acts, sports teams, and everything. They lasted year after year. There was no free agency in those days. Plus or minus, you know, good and bad. But I think that you developed an incredible loyalty to both fields. I mean, first of all, sports was sports and entertainment was entertainment. Now they’re merged together.
 
And I was noticing what’s happened to college football in the last three or four years. And it’s just chaos, what’s happened, because they now have free agency for college players. One is, they can make money by having their likeness used. So there’s some players who are making two or three million dollars. This Peyton, the Manning, this is, I think, the grandson of the original Manning, who’s a Hall of Fame player. His two sons were Hall of Fame players. And now the third one is coming up. And he’s already got about three million dollars a year just in, he’s being photographed. Okay? Well, he gets paid for his photograph. He says something, he gets paid for what he says. So they have that.
 
And the other thing is that they have a thing called the transfer portal. So you join a university and you go and it looks like you’re never going to be the top star on the team. So you go into the transfer portal where another college team can say, well, “You’ll be my quarterback.” Okay? So it’s hard for a fan to get really, really attached to a team where everybody can be one and gone.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, it’s interesting, because I wonder with, in college, you all share a certain geography, if you will, that maybe contributes towards a fandom loyalty because it’s, you know, you all go to that school.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, Ohio is a good example of that. I mean, I remember for years that Ohio State, the main university in Ohio is the main campus of Ohio State. They had a very famous coach called Woody Hayes. Okay? Woody Hayes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I remember him.
 
Dan Sullivan: Hall of Fame coach. And they always asked him why he didn’t schedule Notre Dame. They never scheduled Notre Dame. Another very famous. Actually, it’s the only college team that’s got its own TV contract.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, really?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, they’ve had their own TV network contract forever. Yeah, Notre Dame always has its own contract, you know. And it had to do with it being a Catholic university. Long story, I won’t go into it right now, or we will, because it can be anything or everything. But Woody Hayes says that he wanted to retain the Catholic fans in Ohio, so he would never play against Notre Dame.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And by the way, Ara Parsegian, who was the Woody Hayes, if you will, of Notre Dame, was from Akron. He coached at St. Vincent’s High School.
 
Dan Sullivan: Actually, Paul Brown, who really created modern National Football League was born in my hometown. It was born in Norwalk, Ohio. And he became the coach of Massilon, which was one of the most famous high school teams. And then he took over at Ohio State, and they won the national championship. And then he had a very interesting, he had a team during the Second World War, which was called Great Lakes, which was a Navy base. And he could pick and choose almost any top player in the country, and they would play for the Navy. It was sort of a deferment. They didn’t have to go into action if they were playing for… And then he created the Cleveland Browns, and afterwards he had his pick and choice of all these players, and then he made football very systematized and everything else.
 
But a lot of it came from Ohio. They always said there are three important things to Ohioans: There’s God, there’s America, and there’s football, but not necessarily in that order.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, right. Yeah, you know, when you talk about, you’re reflecting on the Yankees, seeing them play, my wife and I just watched a wonderful documentary on Yogi Berra. And it’s really good. It’s actually poignant. You talked about the greatest players, what inspired the documentary. His granddaughter did it. And what inspired her to do it was there was a ceremony, I don’t remember which stadium, Yankee Stadium maybe, but anyhow, it was like the four greatest players. And it was Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax, and Johnny Bench. Well, in fact, Yogi was on more All-Star teams-
 
Dan Sullivan: Won more World Series.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, that’s right. And she’s thinking, “Why wasn’t he there? Yeah, why wasn’t he chosen?”
 
So she did this deep dive into how horribly he was treated by the press because of the way he looked. And he was a phenomenal ballplayer. Well, I mean, nobody’s been close, you know, in terms of the things that he has done. And it’s really good.
 
And I can’t say I mean, when I was a kid, I was an Indians fan. My dad and I would go to opening day every year, but I didn’t say a sports fan once I was even in college. I went to University of Wisconsin, as you know, in Madison. And among the fanatical football fans, the Green Bay Packer fans are fanatical. And they were playing against the Cleveland Browns. So I went up to the student lounge in the dorm to watch the game. And when I was exuberant, when the Browns scored, there were these guys that actually wanted to beat me up.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, sure.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: …Because I was a Browns fan.
 
Now, who knew later on you could just put that into politics instead of sports?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But it’s an interesting thing is that you become, at an early age, attached to the greatness of your time.
 
And I’m sure there’s people who, right now, the greatest nostalgia they’re going to have in 20 years, 30 years, is going to be Taylor Swift.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. You’re right. I think that’s true. I mean, she is-
 
Dan Sullivan: First of all, she’s the first kind of national entertainer in a long time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think there have been others, but not to the extent with the size of the tour she did. I mean, I think Michael Jackson was one.
 
Dan Sullivan: But that’s a long time ago. You’re dating yourself here. Michael Jackson?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that kid who would be 63 or 65.
 
Yeah, it’s interesting. I met Taylor, I’ve interviewed her twice. And, you know, this was back in 2015 and ‘16, I think those two years, and she did the Victoria’s Secret show. And I enjoyed meeting her. She was clearly bright, good sense of humor, engaging. I mean, could I have ever, ever predicted how the phenomenon that she would become? The answer is absolutely not.
 
But it is really interesting because we can look back and think of, you know, a number of entertainers that captured national attention and it didn’t have the competition that she has to hold attention, which he has been phenomenal at doing, which is really interesting. And I wonder, you know, like my dad loved listening to Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra.
 
And because he saw the first talking movie, which was The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson, and he liked, you know, Jolson’s music. Now, the only ones of those that sounded really dated to me was Al Jolson. I couldn’t relate to that. Forget about all the racial stuff. I just couldn’t relate to his singing. It seems so of the period, where Judy Garland still sounds great. Barbra Streisand still sounds great. You know, listening to that music. Sinatra still sounds great. Will people think that Taylor Swift sounds great 30 years from now? Is her music memorable or is it the phenomenon of her fame?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think that’s totally unpredictable. Oh, I agree. I mean, it could be a Britney Spears thing, just with a lot more media, you know, with a lot more media. But when Britney Spears came along, people said, “She’s going to be remembered as one of the greats”. And it didn’t last long. It fizzed out pretty quickly. You know, she’s in her thirties now. And, you know, it’s not been a easy or happy last decade or so for her.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But then you parallel that to Judy Garland. Oh, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we were on a road trip yesterday. And it was Judy Garland singing three or four songs. And I said, “Amazing talent for such an unhappy life.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Mm-hmm. Well, I think, you know, that’s an interesting phrase.
 
Dan Sullivan: But her talent was the therapy to a very unhappy life. Exactly.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Her relationship to the audience was her therapy.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You worked with her daughter, too. And I saw her daughter at Radio City Music Hall. And what a great talent. But what a shadow to grow up in.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Now, when did you see her there? Was it by any chance the Stepping Out, which was her big comeback?
 
Dan Sullivan: Could have been. Could have been. Where they showed a lot of visuals of her mother and her father, too.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And she sang a song to that? Yeah. I did that film.
 
Dan Sullivan: I can remember sitting there in the audience and saying, “I wonder if Jeff Madoff is doing the…” This predates our knowing each other.
 
You’re like Zelig, you know? “I wonder where Jeff is. I know Jeff’s here somewhere.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It was interesting because Liza asked me if I would take her to the Met Gala, which I did. We did a couple of major projects together, the Radio City and one at Lincoln Center, which was a tribute to the designer Halston, who she was very close to and he was my first client. But when we were-
 
Dan Sullivan: This is a fashion designer, right?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, yes. And when Liza and I were walking up the steps, and the paparazzi were there, and the Met Gala then wasn’t the phenomenon it has become, but it was still a big deal. And there were photographers yelling and crowd members yelling at her, “You’re nothing compared to your mother.”
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that’s great.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And horrible, horrible, hurtful things. Oh God, I just, you know, felt for her.
 
And she is, in her own right, an extraordinary talent. You know, from Cabaret to her live performances, she’s phenomenal.
 
And, you know, going back to Taylor Swift, it was a big question when Swift embarked on this big tour is “Can anybody unite audiences anymore like they used to back then?”
 
Dan Sullivan: And the answer is yes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? What is it?
 
Dan Sullivan: But don’t ask how she did it. I don’t think it’s analyzable how it…
 
I think this goes according to my thing: There’s a magic moment when talent and opportunity and audience triangulate, they come together and the magic happens. And it doesn’t last forever, but it lasts for that ever. I mean, if she’s still going bigger 30 or 40 years ago, then it’s a true phenomenon.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And I mean, there are those that in fact, you know, had very long careers.
 
Dan Sullivan: Um, Sinatra, you mentioned.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: But Sinatra was up and down, you know, he was up… A lot of people don’t realize that he was scrambling for an opportunity in the Fifties.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah. And, and I think one of the things that helped him come back was From Here to Eternity when he did that part.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, and a little-known fact about him, because he very much wanted to act, is that one of my favorite films is On the Waterfront. It was hard getting financed. Brando was only known for Broadway and, you know, Streetcar. Ilya Kazan wanted Brando. Studios wanted Sinatra. because, you know, he was a star and they thought, you know, none of the other people in the movie were big stars. And thank goodness Brando got that part. And it’s interesting. But acting was something with Sinatra that really helped his career, I think, reignite again.
 
But I think if you’ve got a career that’s long enough, isn’t everybody on kind of a roller coaster? I mean, you see that in businesses, too, don’t you?
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah.
 
Well, I think it has a lot to do with how long that the person thinks they’re going to last.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When do you think they start pondering that? Or are you talking about the agents or the performer themselves?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no. First of all, that entrepreneurs last longer than corporate executives. And the reason is-
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But do their businesses last as long?
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, their businesses last much longer than most corporations.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Is that true? I don’t know those stats. That’s an interesting stat.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, for example, Fortune 500, if you went back 20 years, there’s very few companies that are on the Fortune 500, or even have the name they had 20 years ago. They’ve been brought out. They go through the sushi bar and they get divided up and combined. Filet mignon becomes meat patties over a period.
 
But my sense is, I tell entrepreneurs, first of all, I said “There’s a good side and bad side to being an entrepreneur. The good side is that your career can last as long as you want it to last. If you retain ownership and you retain agency, you’re the person if you want to do that. But the bad part about it is that it’s a life sentence. You can’t do anything else.”
 
You’re unemployable at the beginning and you’re unemployable all the way along. I would never hire an entrepreneur to work for my company.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, I agree with you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because they’re just doing R&R for a couple of years, or they took a hard hit and they need to put themselves together, but I know it’s temporary. And whenever somebody is an entrepreneur who gets hired by my company, because I’m not in charge of hiring, I’ll sit down with them, I say, “First of all, let’s get an agreement that you’re not going to be here long. I know you’re not going to be here long. And the only thing I ask is that you give us your best while you’re here.” I said, “You got the virus, sooner or later it’s going to flame up again.”
 
I mean, there are some exceptions, you know, there’s exceptions to every rule. That’s what makes it a rule.
 
But for example, so next year is 50 years I’ve been coaching. I know that the moment that I settled on what I’m doing right now, I knew it was forever. Okay? And it didn’t have anything to do with the marketplace. It didn’t have anything to do with year-to-year success. I knew I would never do anything else.
 
No corporate executive really knows more than about five or six years.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think that that raises an interesting question. Number one, how did you know? And that’s one question, that that was what you’re going to do. And number two, when you go into a position, and you’re a CEO at a company and you think, “You know, I’ve probably got about five years into this one.” How much does that affect the performance of the company where you’re trying to generate profits for your own bonuses and everything else as opposed to the possible good of the company?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, my answer is yes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thank you very much for clarifying that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it has everything to do with the former. “Where am I going next? And how do I put myself in the best position here to get to the next one?”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, I think it’s interesting-
 
Dan Sullivan: And that’s the way the system works. You and I wouldn’t like being in that system. Okay? But there’s people whose nervous system is geared for that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, right. I mean, I think that’s correct.
 
But it’s interesting when you think of certain companies, like I think of, I happen to have met David Kohler. And, you know-
 
Dan Sullivan: What, fourth generation?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think fourth or fifth. Yeah. You know, that’s one of those companies that there’s a town in Wisconsin named after them. I think his great grandfather was a governor or whatever. But the point is, it’s still an independent company. They’re concerned about quality, image, all those things.
 
It was David’s father who went from basically plumbing supplies to creating a brand for Kohler and making it, you know, having a higher-tone look, making it more unique, and bringing branding to something that used to be just, you know, sinks and toilets and faucets and stuff.
 
The point being that because it stayed independently owned.
 
Dan Sullivan: And in Wisconsin, too.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. And never becoming a public company. I think there was still the pride of the family mission, which I think a lot of companies lose.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the moment you go public, you lose all control over that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s kind of fascinating too.
 
I mean, Koch Brothers, that’s an independent company. And I’m just talking now about what does that continued entrepreneurial ownership, where you don’t go public, where you are involved in building something, and in these cases, global brands doing billions of dollars, yet it’s still that entrepreneurial spirit in the company. How do you maintain that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it’s a two-way thing. It’s both internal and external. It’s internal in that you pay real attention to who the company is, you know, who the employees are, who the managers are. And you’re looking for people who are not here just for a year or two years. You’re looking for people. And that’s a special problem today because there’s a lot of mobility. I don’t know if there’s a lot of mobility, but there’s a loss of loyalty. So they may be there for five years or 10 years, but they’re not necessarily loyal. Okay? So they minimize how much they have to commit to keep their job, but their focus really isn’t on the company and the ways the company actually existed.
 
And the other one, the second part of that is externally, you really, really pay attention to your customers. and what your customers are looking for. Do they like the quality? Do they like the service? Do they like the dependability? And there’s other groups in there. There’s contractors and suppliers and everything is quality. You’re looking for quality and longevity.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So I think first of all, when you mentioned quality and all these companies, all the companies that I can think of, that was top of their list.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think that quality is the smartest business plan. You know, I think that that’s really, really important. And I think that, you know, it goes back to, we were talking about nostalgia. And I think back at some of the cars that were around when we were younger that aren’t around anymore. You know, that was a huge thing when the new model cars would come out. I used to park cars at this car show.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s late October, I think, right? Wasn’t it late October?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think so. But it was like a huge reveal.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It doesn’t happen anymore at all.
 
Dan Sullivan: I can’t even tell the car maker, aside from the logos, which you get used to. I can’t tell one car from another, really, that much.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I can’t either. But if any of my friends that I grew up with are listening to this, they’d crack up at me even mentioning that, because I don’t even own a car. I can rent a car whenever I want. I live in New York. It’s like having another person in your family, the cost of maintaining a car in New York. The rental in the garage, you know, $1,200 a month, I mean, it’s nuts.
 
But yeah, I think it’s interesting because that transition from, could we call it a prideful entrepreneur to a CEO of a global company? What I’m trying to get at is corporate culture is a huge thing when we were coming up. I don’t know yet, it’s too early to tell how permanent the changes are going to be that happened as a result of COVID, remote work, what’s going to happen. But when you talked about loyalty, how do you build loyalty when the people in the company don’t even know each other and the closest they come to being together is a Zoom call? And how is that going to affect business going forward, employee retention, loyalty, and all of those things.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it’s going to change drastically and I think that we’re just ending, actually I think it ended in 2020, a period where it was possible to project forward and say “The only thing I know forward is that things are going to grow globally, things are going to grow. The market’s going to be bigger.”
 
And I think that 2020, it wasn’t because of COVID, but COVID was a bit of a final straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of globalization. And these aren’t my thoughts, these are really Peter Zeihan, who I’ve mentioned before. And Peter Zeihan said that there’s two things that really determine whether the future is going to be bigger or the future is going to be less, and it’s demographics of your country, how your population is spread out. And the other thing is your geography, where you are in the world.
 
A good example is the last month as the attacks on shipping trade off the east coast of Africa from Houtis. I don’t know what they are. They’re pirates or they’re…
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: But they’re not to be invited for New Year’s Eve, you know, people do that. And, Immediately, half the trade in the world that used to go through the canal is going around Africa now to avoid what’s happening. Half the global trade, and every freighter, you know, big freighter with the standard containers, a really big one has 2,000 containers on it. And in those containers might be products that relate to 100,000 different supply chains. And now, instead of arriving predictably in three days in India or Southeast Asia, now it might be a week or 10 days. The insurance costs go through the roof, okay, just to get insurance. Russia, for example, hasn’t been able to get any insurance in or out for the last, since the invasion of the Ukraine.
 
Well, in 2019, and again, these are not my numbers, these are Peter Zeihan, he said, 2019 was the greatest year in history because the cost of transportation worldwide was 1% of final product. That’s how good it had gotten. Four years later, it may be 3% or 4%, it might be up to 7% or 8%, and there goes everybody’s profits. I mean, if you’ve taken 2% or 3% more of final cost, you’ve taken away profit.
 
My sense is that immediately how America is responding, the US, and this is not any particular president, this started with Clinton in ‘92, so Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden, they’re saying, “Let’s bring everything back home again. Let’s bring all the manufacturing back home. We no longer depend upon global trade routes for anything that’s crucial to the country.” I think that’s gonna change corporate life a lot.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Do you think that can even happen when one of the main things about businesses just about any business is cheap labor and finding a labor force like, you know, fashion’s notorious for it, finding a labor force that is, you know, it used to be when I was in the fashion industry in the seventies, 95% of the goods sold in America—this is fashion goods—were manufactured here. That’s now flipped. It’s 5% is made here. 95% that’s sold is made somewhere else.
 
And, you know, you look at the chips being made, you look at the iPhones and other computer things being made at, you know, what’s it Foxconn in Japan or in China. I mean, you know, cheap labor has always been a big part of the economy.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, what’s happened in China, and they’ve priced themselves out of the market because a lot of people think China today is China of the last 20, 30 years. But they had a period of about 20 years where they had it perfectly. They had a nice balance of younger population, mid-range population, and older population. But they stopped having babies 40 years ago. And now they have more people over 60 than they do under 20. Twenty to 50 is your labor market, 20 to 50 is your consumption market, 20 to 50 is your investment market. And they’re running out of laborers, they’re running out of consumers, and they’re running out of labor all at the same time.
 
So they’ve forbidden the—I was noticing on, I think it was on Wednesday—China has forbidden any release of their demographic statistics to the rest of the world.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Really?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the reason is for at least 10 years now, their population has been dropping.
 
The other thing is they miscounted by a hundred million how many people they had, and these would be all people under 40 and three quarters of them would have been women. They’re just not having babies anymore.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I mean, there was actually legislation about that. I mean, that was policy, and especially females. So, you know, it’s really interesting that these policies that were set into motion 30 years ago or whenever, I don’t exactly know when they were put into motion, but that there was no projecting forward, realizing the population shrinkage that would happen as a result and its impact on the country. I mean, it’s crazy when you think about that.
 
Dan Sullivan: But let’s just take that as a one single fact that China plays no factor in the future of corporations, which I think pretty much in 10 years, that’ll be true. China won’t play any part in corporate thinking anywhere in the world.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that’s hard to imagine because of the size of the market still, both Chinese production and Chinese consumption.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, not consumption because they were never a consumer market to begin with. They were an export market. I mean, the average per capita income in China is about $8,000 US a year. Okay?
 
The other thing is because of the weirdness of their demographics, which is government policy, there’s a separation between where the women are and where the men are. So the women are all on the coasts. They’re the employees in Foxconn, so Foxconn has 100,000, 150,000 workers. Eighty percent of them are women who live with other women in apartments, five to an apartment, and they don’t see any men.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It’s corporate housing, isn’t it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, some of it is, yeah, some of it, but there’s no men there. Women are just better at that type of work than men.
 
It’s a hard fact to remember that everybody, you know, it was like, remember back in the early Eighties, Japan was going to take over the world?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And then in the mid Eighties, they just hit a wall. Their economy actually hasn’t grown at all since 1988.
 
But what they did, they were smart. They moved all their factories, mostly to the United States. And they said, “We’re not gonna have the workers anymore, so we’re going to move our factories to the United States.” But they’re American factories, they have American management, they have American workers, and they have American customers, and Japan every year gets a portion of the profits. China isn’t gonna do that, they’re not smart enough.
 
Besides, they’re kind of unpopular right now. I actually look at shoes, sneakers, and if it’s made in China, I won’t buy it. So all my sneakers are made in Vietnam, which is kind of hard to remember the Vietnam War, that one of the closest allies the US has in Southeast Asia is actually there. And they have a very young population.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it is fascinating, these global shifts. I mean, South Korea, in terms of technology and companies like LG and Samsung, it’s kind of fascinating their growth.
 
Dan Sullivan: But no young people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that I don’t know.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, they went through the same thing. They stopped having babies 30 years ago.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: South Korea?
 
Dan Sullivan: South Korea, yeah. I was there in the Sixties. I spent two years in there. They were just, you know, a third world country, badly beaten up from the war. Not just the Korean War, but the Second World War, the Japanese occupation and everything else.
 
No, all those countries, Taiwan’s got the same problem. They don’t have young people anymore. Taiwan right now, outside of Phoenix, and we went past it and it’s massive, 20,000-employed chip factory north of Phoenix. And the Taiwanese, in their wisdom, have realized that the distance between Taiwan and China and Phoenix and China is, Phoenix is significantly further away from China, so they’re moving their factories.
 
In Columbus, Ohio, our home state, Intel is building their biggest chip factory just north, a little bit east of Columbus. It’s going to be 10,000 workers. So all the chip-making is coming back to the US.
 
But my fashion is most of the fashion that you’ve been paying for Southeast Asia is actually going to go to Central and South America.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, there’s been a lot of that already, in terms of that. Yeah, it’s really fascinating because-
 
Dan Sullivan: But as an entrepreneur, none of this matters.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, ‘cause you’re just looking for, you’re agnostic other than opportunity.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You’re just looking for your next opportunity. You don’t really, really care. Corporations really care about this stuff.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and understandably so, because one of the things that happens with major corporations is they’re not nimble. So they can’t respond to the change as rapidly. I mean, that’s just a matter of size, you know, trying to steer a barge. It’s not so quick. You know, there’s a Yogi Berra, who I alluded to earlier, one of his phrases is “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
 
Dan Sullivan: You’re speaking about one of the greatest American philosophers of all time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s correct. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, years later, you’re saying, “What did he actually mean by that?”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I mean, my favorite is probably, you know, “When you get to the fork in the road, take it.”
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, the other thing is “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. Yes. And he was driving with his wife and she said, “You know, Yogi, we’re lost.” He said, “Yeah, but we’re making good time.”
 
So, you know, we’re talking about someone who was a sports hero from decades ago. Somehow we’ve strayed. I don’t know.
 
Dan Sullivan: Let’s just go back to just say “Louis Prima and Kelly Smith”. It’s a gyroscope. We just put this back on the thing.
 
No, I’m just saying that, and I think what’s emerging for me from this conversation is that I think greatness comes out of being able to focus on something you’re really uniquely good at over a long period of time with a constant audience, with a constant market. I think it takes time. I think it takes a lot of time. And the more that that was a live audience, I think the better.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You’re talking about like the early developments of talent.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you know, I think that it was interesting, early on comedians who had honed their craft and all that over the years when things shifted and talents were cherry-picked off of YouTube even and discovered that way, but the talent themselves didn’t have the history of performing in front of a live audience, in most cases, couldn’t sustain an audience’s interest. So talk about flashes in the pan.
 
I mean, there’s always in popular music, the one-hit wonders as they were called. But I think there’s more of that because I think that although the barrier to entry is lower in the sense that you can post on TikTok and YouTube and potentially get a huge audience, the vast, vast majority can’t attract any audience of significance online. So although, you know, the democratization of entertainment and so on, it’s really hard to break through and get enough attention to try to build something on that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the things, and this relates to the topic, is one of the things I noticed, you know, my early years, the Fifties, Sixties, and I think it has to do with this experience with audiences, you know, the live experience with live audiences, is that it seemed to me that we’ve named a whole number of great entertainers, they didn’t get between the audience and the song.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Explain to me what you mean by that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, what I mean is so much about today, it’s not about the song, it’s about their personality. So the song doesn’t really matter. It’s their personality’s relationship to the audience. And I don’t think those people last because the audience’s taste for personalities changes really quickly. I don’t think the audience’s taste in songs changes that much.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So the interesting thing about the personalities is, and I think, again, Taylor Swift is in a class of her own because so many people know that the songs…
 
Dan Sullivan: Let’s just take Taylor and put her over here. Let’s talk about all the people who aren’t her.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, but what’s interesting about it is that she has used her love life, you know, the boyfriend she has had, and all her fans know this, and she’s kind of the large-living version of what they would like their lives to be in terms of that expression, in terms of all that, because I think looking at her and trying to understand what is that phenomenon that is her and why does that resonate with such a huge global audience? And I think that what she has done, which is the toughest thing to do, is establish a true connection with her following. And the results of that have been not only this record-breaking, unprecedentedly record-breaking tour, even the concert film was the highest-grossing concert film that’s ever happened. I mean, it’s like right now, she can do no wrong. But she does have those roots. I mean, when I met her, it was early in her career, relatively speaking. She was on her way up, but nobody could have predicted this.
 
I think people are so hungry for connection. And I think that putting herself out there the way that she does, which encourages connection, or at least the perception that you’re connected, is huge. Because I think that we’re dealing with such profound effects of isolation that if you feel part of a movement or a fanbase or whatever it is, when you feel connected to something that gives you a certain meaning.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I was in Buenos Aires at the Four Seasons Hotel, and she was staying there the first week we were there. She had three concerts at a big stadium in Buenos Aires. And the Four Seasons had to set up barricades to keep the Swifties, had to keep them there, and they said, “Look you can’t come into the lobby,” and everything. They had barricades up, and all the people were there they were making these bead bracelets, and we learned that at the stadium some people had been living in tents since June. This is November, and they had been living in tents. It was a complete industry around the stadium, you know, food stands, and they had to have portable toilets and everything for it.
 
So I was just sitting back quite from the entertainment, so I said, “What’s going on in society that this is so important to them?” I said, “The answer is nothing else is going on in society that’s important to them.” She’s sort of an organizing structure for these people’s lives, in terms of her lyrics, in terms of her music, in terms of her presentation. She’s created a structure that they can kind of orient themselves to, which I think is what you’re saying, because they feel totally isolated and irrelevant to everything else.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And if you look at some of her recent history, when she had the dispute with her label, and then she just basically rerecorded her catalog so she owned it all. And so her as an individual and I would say ‘entrepreneur’.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, she is. She’s a pure entrepreneur.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. Uh, that it’s really, quite fascinating.
 
So she has, before she hit this level of fame, what she did do is also, I think, become a representative for those individual rights, that “You’re not going to exploit me,” that “I’ll do it myself,” and all of those kinds of things. And it didn’t hurt that she was extremely successful in that David and Goliath story at that point, and she won, she prevailed.
 
Dan Sullivan: In some ways, the equivalent to her is almost Steve Jobs. No, Steve Jobs stopped the world when he would present a new product. The stock market would stop, the tech world would stop, the investment, you know, the whole thing. And that was in the Eighties, you know, that Steve Jobs became that person. And when he died, it was like Mother Teresa died. The Apple stores had flowers out front. They had vigil lights out front. As a Catholic, I could relate to this, you know?
 
And the interesting thing is that, again, it was a lot of young people who really got fascinated with what this person did. And, you know, there’s a lot of mythology around, you know, “Came out of a garage,” you know, and everything. I mean, the backstory is always a bit more complicated than it’s presented.
 
But I read that when Taylor Swift was 11 years old, she made her first trip to Nashville, and she stopped at every recording studio and dropped off a disc. It was discs in those days. So already at 11, she was the entrepreneur. She was on the streets. She was knocking on doors. She was delivering her products. So this is at 11 years old. And she’s not trying to imitate someone else. She’s just trying to take your talent and get it out into the world.
 
There’s this very interesting phrase, and it’s by a French philosopher who died around 2015, who moved from France to Silicon Valley. Rene Girard, I think his name is. And he came up with a really interesting concept. And the concept is called “mimetic desire”. And he said that the way the world works is that people imitate other people’s desires.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Imitate them, or…?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, a lot of people really desire Taylor Swift. So a lot of the other people say, “I think I’ll imitate that, because it makes me part of the community, part of the group.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You’re talking about a magnetism in a sense.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yup. Well, not so much about her, but the phenomenon around her. They want to be part of the phenomenon around her. It’s not so much that they want to be her. I mean, you’d have to ask each individual what they’re thinking, but their performance says they want to be part of this movement as part of this phenomenon.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think we see that-
 
Dan Sullivan: Same thing happened with The Beatles. Same thing happened with Frank Sinatra back in the Forties.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: We even see this now in politics, you know, that, whatever you think of him, Trump has got a dedicated following.
 
Dan Sullivan: It just sucks the oxygen. I mean, I was watching the Colorado, they said he can’t be on the ballot for the primary.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: And, you know, so I was watching a news program and he says, you know, is the Secretary of State of Maine on Trump’s payroll. His approval rating is just going to go up by three or four points because he’s got a shtick that “I’m being persecuted”. And every time they do that, they increase the proof of him being persecuted.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And he just sucks the oxygen out of the, I mean, I’m just talking about his own side here. I’m not even, well, I don’t even know if he’s on the side that other people, the side that people think he’s on. But my sense is, poor Nikki Haley, you know, DeSantis and everything, they haven’t got a chance. There’s just no oxygen. He just sucks the oxygen. I mean, yeah, “Let’s talk about tax policy.” “No no, let’s talk about persecution.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes.
 
So the thing that’s interesting to me is, where it gets down to fundamentals, really basic, basic questions is to those that, whether you’re talking about Taylor Swift being a hero, or to some people, Trump is a hero. Why do we need heroes?
 
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.