Technology And Originality In The Age Of AI

Dan Sullivan: Hi everybody. This is Dan Sullivan and I’m here with my, probably in my lifetime, all time great conversational partners. And I have a line-up. I mean that’s heavy competition and the reason is that none of my other conversational partners start in the 1940s and not in Ohio, not in northern Ohio. So Jeff and I have a lot of common roots. We have passion for lots of things that we hold in common.
 
So this is Jeff. Jeff, say hello to everybody.
 
Jeff Madoff: Hello to everybody. I’m part of Dan’s-
 
Dan Sullivan: Not everybody, but everybody that counts is here, and topic that’s been more discussed, I think, than any other technological new thing, just introduced over, let’s see, it’s November 30th was the introduction, so two-and-a-half months, and that is ChatGPT from a company called Open AI. Elon Musk is one of the founders of it and a lot of other people are involved in it, and I won’t say it’s taken my entrepreneurial client base by storm, but it’s taken them to wonder what we think of it, you know, and what other people think of it.
 
So I just had a Strategic Coach Conference for the group called the Free Zone, where the whole program is just based on collaboration, in Palm Beach. So there was so much demand to have something on the agenda for the day about ChatGPT, as I just did a little survey of who was actually professionally involved in using this, like we haven’t quite a number of computer consultants, network consultants, and other people who have immediately taken it and used it for something in their businesses.
 
I gave them each of them 7 minutes and I tell them, “I know, you know a lot, but the audience doesn’t, so I want you to tell them why they should know more.” That’s not so much how they use it, but how do you think about it?
 
And it turned out very, very good and the recording of this panel discussion is going to go out. And I think it was very, very beneficial. I have some thoughts that I put together, and in just briefly talking to you about this prior to our podcast today, which happened because you made a error with your iPhone and we wouldn’t have even really known about it. But you phoned me, but you weren’t trying to phone me and I said, “You know it’s like a alcoholic going into a bar for a glass of milk, you just can’t help yourself.”
 
Anyway, I can’t remember. We’ve been through a lot of technological changes in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and everything else. What do you take on it? Just as a general phenomenon, not so much what the thing does itself, but just the phenomenal interest in this particular technology. And then we should describe, because some people who are listening to the podcast this may be the first that they’re hearing of it, you know.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, considering that you just had that panel, and you gave, was it five people?
 
Dan Sullivan: Five people.
 
Jeff Madoff: Seven minutes each to describe-
 
Dan Sullivan: What it meant to them.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. What’s this distillation of that knowledge?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, the first thing, everybody’s in agreement that it’s a great first draft thing. If you’re writing something. Mike Koenigs who’s deep into it, very, very deep into it, and he’s using it for all sorts of packaging reasons.
 
Mike has a very interesting process. It’s a three-day process about somebody who’s thinking about creating a new business. It’s called Next Up. So they’re very successful at what they’re doing. But they’re thinking now they may have sold, they’re in the process of selling the business they have and they’re creating a new business. But they haven’t really wrapped their mind around it. Just seems like a lot of work and “I gotta start from scratch.”
 
And what he does in three days, he completely packages their idea. He creates their website, he gives them what their pitch is and everything about the new business. And it just saves a ton of time, and it takes advantage of all their experience and everything up and up. It’s a great thin, and he just found that he could now do the three days with someone, he could do it in eight hours using not just ChatGPT, but a lot of other AI apps. I’ll call them AI apps. He was very enthusiastic about it.
 
Steven Palter was on it, and he was saying that it was very useful to answer very specific questions that come in about fertility. And he says, “You know, there’s just an amazing amount of disinformation in the world right now.” And he’s able to give very, very fast written responses that are punchy and everything.
 
So one of our panelists, the man by the name of Leor Weinstein, and Leor is from Israel, originally, lives in Hawaii now, and he had his whole team analyze all the activities that they do, which are summarizing, diagnosing, you know, everything that’s not really a creative activity, it’s more of a summary type of activity. And he’s incentivized them just to find new uses in their present work with this app to see if they can eliminate repetitive… It’s actually kind of a procrastination thing. The projects that they would most procrastinate because they’d have to create a something before they could improve this something and ChatGPT allows them to create something immediately so they can start working on this something that they don’t procrastinate on getting started. It actually gets them started really fast.
 
And Lee Richter, who you know. Lee gave a talk that “Don’t involve yourself personally in this unless the team’s involved. Because you don’t want to be the one using the technology, you want your team using the technology.” OK?
 
And we have a lot of written material that goes out like emails, you know from our sales team. We have three sales teams. We have the “Get ‘em in” sales team. We have the “Keep ‘em in” sales team, and we’ve got the “Get ‘em back” sales team, and there are three different sales team, and there’s massive amounts of communication that’s going out all the time. And it varies from really great communication to “Wish I had seen that before it was sent out” type of communication.
 
Yeah. I mean, it’s always grammatically correct. It’s always spelled right and the sentence structure is always good, but it’s totally a function of what kind of input that the app gets from you.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, you know, when I think about this, one of the things that I have a tendency to look at are precursors: What are the antecedents to what came before this? And, you know, there hasn’t been anything to be that excited about in terms of technological advances since the smartphone.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that was the last one. The Internet was before that, and the personal computer. And software was before that.
 
Jeff Madoff: And so it’s interesting to me. First of all, the genesis of it. So when people talk to me about the ChatGPT and—I have the right initials there, right? “GPT?”
 
Dan Sullivan: GPT. Yeah, yes, the Great Big Typhoon. Now I remember.
 
Jeff Madoff: That hit when we were children in Ohio, I think that’s right.
 
And so my response when people said to me, “Well, what do you think of artificial intelligence?” My answer is “I prefer actual intelligence.”
 
And the thing about the chat to me is that there are certain functions that it would be great at and we have the precursor to ChatGPT, and what that is is greeting cards. You know greeting cards. They have that message. Whatever holiday it is, you know you give it the input. “I want a birthday card. I want an Easter card. I want a bar mitzvah card. I want a Christmas card. I want to thank-you note.” And then it puts the cliched phrases under. But when they first came out it was a huge time-savings because most people, even then, couldn’t write a sentence that they were happy with. And so if you will, the inputs for all those different holidays and all the different occasions you would send cards and other ones coming up—Valentine’s Day. And what’s more personal than a pre-written card to your loved one, you know?
 
So that’s what I look at it as. You’re not going to get anything original, but because of the computer’s ability to retrieve information really fast and to recognize patterns and put them together, which sometimes is fantastic and other times, as we’ve all experienced with spell-check, screws things up tremendously, so the accuracy isn’t that great yet.
 
And because of my play, for instance, in terms of writing a play, I would never want to do a first draft or writing my book. I would never want to do a first draft in ChatGPT simply because I’m building on an artificial foundation.
 
And so, for me, I think that you know, there’s so much fear as to how much stuff it will eliminate. Now you know, did greeting cards really eliminate many jobs? It actually created jobs. And even on all of us who use, for instance, Google Mail, you know, there’s already prepackaged responses based on the inputs that have been given, so you don’t even have to write a response in your own words.
 
I actually feel that the thought process in, other than in the most rudimentary routine things that you don’t need to spend any time on, but everything I think makes us lazier and lazier, and I think that it’s so important to engage with material.
 
You know, the interesting thing is, again, it’s retrieval, and it’s retrieval and pattern-recognition that put these things together. So I’m somewhat of a skeptic of its uses beyond, you know, more sophisticated than holiday cards, but variants on that, what fulfills a need for what can become a routine operation that you could speed up tremendously because of the computing power.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the other thing, it’s compensating for something that’s gotten weaker and I think the big thing is literacy. There’s a drop in literacy. And the other thing is that the writing skills are not what they were as we were taught in the 1950s.
 
I mean, I have an editor and she didn’t have any real grammar until she was 16 years old. Well, I had grammar down-pat by the end of my first year in grade school. She often comments because I do outline setups for my books. I produce a book a quarter, but I don’t actually write the book. What I write is a chapter-by-chapter outline with the main headings that “In this chapter…” And all my books are the same size. I’m a copywriter, my main writing in life was a copywriter for a big agency.
 
If you’re going to learn writing in this world, advertising, copywriting, rather than academic writing or journalistic writing, OK? Because in advertising writing you get 30 seconds to tell the story or you get 60 seconds or tell the story, or you get 3 inches or you get 5 inches of copy to tell the story, and so everything is in the headlines and the subheads. OK? So you should be able to look at something and immediately know what it’s at just by reading what’s in bold.
 
And so what I do is an outline, and then I’m interviewed on my outline. So the actual writer and editor get my outline and then get the interview where I’m asked about this and my interviewer is great for ask me questions about everything she doesn’t understand or doesn’t see the connections and then I make all the connections. I’m really great at context, but I don’t want to be a lonely writer knocking things out late at night and weekends. I just want to get something done. And I’m not writing the books to be famous, but I take concepts for the Program and I go deeper into Strategic Coach. And actually three of the books have now become major-market books, and I have a writer who takes my little book and then interviews me on what this book means. And then he interviews people about their experiences of what I’m talking about.
 
So my attitude is that I would never probably involve myself in the technology, and I went on once and it took too long to get to the point on the app. I went on once, just as you see what it was about, and it was taking too long for me to go through their examples. And I said, “No, I’m not touching this. That’s the last time I’m going to be involved with this technology. But,” I said, “I want to have smart people around who know how to do it.”
 
I have a rule, always keep a smart human between yourself and any technology.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, you know what’s interesting about what you said, and it makes me think about process, like you just described the process two years in terms of turning out your books on a very regular basis. And so many hacks as they are called, are about shortcuts. Well, hack is a shortcut.
 
So when you are shortcutting everything what you are doing is eliminating process. When you are eliminating process, the idea of context goes out the window. And I think we have a real problem with the lack of critical thinking, and that because of that, that is fostered by these kind of hacks.
 
And now there’s another saying that ‘hack’ means, which is you’re not very good at what you’re doing. “You’re a hack.” Yeah, that’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: People who do a lot of hacking are hacks. And it’s true. You know, words either mean something or they don’t mean something, you know, or somebody’s trying to change the meaning of a word.
 
And I know there’s one very famous guy who’s in the regenerative medicine. He’s doing things, and he has all these biohacks they’re called “biohacks.” And I said, “When you say ‘hack’, do you mean a shortcut? In other words, you found a shortcut?”
 
And he says, “Yeah, but it’s more than short-”
 
I said probably the only hacks that are really useful are the ones that are shortcuts. So why not use the word ‘shortcut’?
 
Jeff Madoff: And the answer?
 
Dan Sullivan: Everybody knows what shortcut… It’s faster, it’s easier, it’s less steps, and everything like that. ‘Hack’ doesn’t mean anything. As you said, it’s got a negative connotation.
 
Jeff Madoff: You know, I think that if your goal in this, you know we’ve talked about it before, Dan, the idea of everybody is all tuned into this idea of productivity.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, they’re not interested in productivity, they’re interested in efficiency.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Draw that distinction for us.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, ‘efficiency’ means that you’re doing something extraordinarily well, but it doesn’t say anything about whether it’s something that’s worth doing. ‘Productivity’ means that there’s actually an outcome that’s valuable outside of yourself.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. And I think that and when the concentration is on constantly trying to find the hacks or shortcuts to those things, you stop understanding what the process is. However, the spillover effect is you lose patience and attention-span because it was supposed to be quicker.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing is nothing happens to your brain. Like, when you’re creating, you know, like, I’ve been part of the evolution of what is now going to be a major-market musical production, starts in Chicago, and all of our clients will know about this within the next month, so we’re this is the month that we get out all the information about the Chicago opening—it’s 12 months.
 
But I’ve been talking to you about this for five years, pretty well continuously. And I understand the evolution. I understand how your thinking has crystallized about what parts of the plot really, really work. And, you know, it’s like this constant testing and improving the plot-lines and then the characters, who’s got the characters right? You’ve done audition after—this is your fourth major process of auditioning and getting people who can act, people who can sing, and people who can dance.
 
Usually you don’t have a checklist and they get a score. You and the director just get a feel: “This person fits. This person fits,” because you total understand the total context of what the overall message of this play.
 
So I think that there’s a distinction between content and context that has to be established.
 
But the other thing is everything has to fit together. There’s millions of parts—the lighting, the sound, the staging, and everything has to fit. That just comes from doing 30 years of productions of some 40 years. I don’t know how long it is when you really got into doing video productions and documentaries and openings of new fashion seasons and everything like that, you just know the production process. Like you don’t have to think about it. You just know, “This has to be there, this has to be there,” and it’s a feel. There’s a feel and a certain point the feel feels right.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. And, you know, it’s interesting because I think when we lose the concept of process and we become impatient with process because somehow “If we can hack this and hack that…” I mean, the most routine crap? Yeah. You know, you don’t want to do those repetitive things that are pointless to do over and over and over again.
 
But I think that any creative execution, any new idea… And I think this extends into even with entrepreneurs, how if all these alleged productivity hacks and all this kind of thing, nobody then expects the reality is that it’s a lot of work. You know? It’s hard work, and those hacks don’t take away the hard work. That’s the raw, hard stuff.
 
I think that that’s something that it really needs to be grappled with, because I think there’s such a false premium put on speed. But speed without thought, to me, is dangerous. And also the ramifications of that speed.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean this goes in all sorts of directions, because it’s related to other kinds of public presentation besides the ones that this directly impacts on. But I think that there’s a general deficiency in education that has come because the educational system gets paid for processing a lot of people through the process of education. They get paid large amounts of money.
 
I mean, it’s interesting: There’s only two parts of the economy that technology has made things more expensive, OK? And one of them is healthcare—“disease management,” as I call it. And the other one is education. Everything else in the economy has gotten cheaper, you know, in terms of, you know, producing a lot more for less and faster.
 
But I think the casualty is always quality. As you can do things faster, easier, and cheaper the impact is a loss of quality.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, I agree. And where there’s a loss of quality, I think, is in the thinking about what you’re doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah.
 
We have a form and one of our clients said, “You know, I can get ChatGPT to fill in every part of this.”
 
And I said, “Yeah, but did anything happen to your thinking while GPT was filling in the form?”
 
In other words, I don’t have my forms because I like you filling out forms, is that I really want to know how you’re thinking about your thinking, OK? And there’s nothing wrong with efficiency in certain areas. I don’t want to have to be checking my thermostat at night every hour to see if, you know, the furnace is doing what it’s doing, especially, or our air conditioning. So there’s an intelligence in the form of the thermostat that’s sensing everything, and it’s following our specifications of what the temperature should be throughout the day.
 
There’s lots of things I don’t want to go back to checking. OK? I don’t want long-distance calls to use up a lot of my disposable income. I prefer… I remember Thoreau when the telegraph was introduced, Thoreau. I don’t really know much about Thoreau, but he said, “I understand now that New York can talk instantly to Texas. The question is, does New York have anything to say to Texas?” I think there’s a real point to what he’s saying: We can communicate all we want. We can communicate with 500 people a day, OK? But is there any point to the communication?
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
You know, and I think that there’s a couple of things, you know, now we’re being too hard-
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, I think we’re in agreement that this is not a breakthrough in quality.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: As a matter of fact, it’s a commoditizing of what in its original form is quality, and then you’re commoditizing something.
 
Jeff Madoff: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that there’s something even more insidious happening. And what I think that is is we are being programmed.
 
Dan Sullivan: Do we end right now and put it for the next one? Because there’s something insidious happening, but we’re not going to tell you in this session.
 
Jeff Madoff: As we’re speeding towards the cliff, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think we just came to the cliff scene.
 
Yeah, I used to go to Saturday serials, you know, 15 minutes, and then they always left you hanging at the end of 15 minutes, so you had to come back the next week. This is an old trick. This is an old trick.
 
Jeff Madoff: It’s done on streaming TV now. Were you watching that series? That’s what binge-watching is. But we could certainly, I don’t think we should stop this one yet, do you?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, no. We have to go a little deeper. I think we have to produce some quality.
 
Jeff Madoff: I have some hacks for us to use where we wouldn’t have to worry about quality. We could get it done quickly.
 
So what we’re being programmed—and this is what I think is the insidious part—is we’re being programmed not to think, buying selections based on what we’ve purchased before, or are put in front of us all the time. They follow you to Facebook, they follow you to Instagram, they follow you when you go on Google, they follow you when you go from merchant to merchant. All of these things are already happening. It is to the advantage of most businesses that we don’t think, that we just respond. And going back to the Pavlovian response is that, you know, you see it and you start to drool, the dog starts to drool before it gets the reward.
 
So I think that, you know, all of these things is… you don’t have to think anymore. This will do it for you. Well, I think that’s really dangerous because as sentient individuals, we ought to be thinking about what we do. We ought to have an awareness of process, because once we lose that idea…
 
You know, we already don’t agree on facts anymore, you know? But there’s a process to things that I think is so important. But by process, by its very nature needs thought and critical thought to do it, and as you said, doesn’t improve the quality. And I think that that’s really an important statement, also because you know, in business, the companies that last for the companies that deliver quality.
 
Dan Sullivan: The other thing is the ones who deliver your quality don’t have to be changing all the time. But I know you just had a class at the new school on fashion.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I went back to the Oxford English Dictionary, and I looked up ‘fashion’, you know, and the word, you know, like a lot of words, they have roots before English picked it up, but one thing I thought about immediately was probably my favorite style period in the American culture, which was the 1930s. And if you go to wardrobe in the 1930s, and you go to architecture in the 1930s, and you go to car design in the 1930s it’s probably the Golden Age of original design, and then the Second World War happened and everything got, by the necessity of the war, everything got industrialized, you know?
 
And Harry Rosen, who’s probably one of the great clothiers in the world in the last 50 years, in Toronto, he said, “You know, men have it a lot easier than women, because as a man you can find what your style of confidence is. You have a certain confidence in style.” And he said, “You don’t have to change this very much for a whole lifetime. You have a particular style and you can just stick a style. It’s very hard for women to do this.”
 
Actually, I have a closet full of Harry Rosen suits and jackets. You know, since COVID, I haven’t worn one of them. And I developed a Zoom style, you know, on Zoom. You know, if you wear a dark sweater and that your face shows up, of the white persuasion on the planet, and I’m a bit pale, and then Zoom has certain enhancements to sort of put you at your best and everything else. But since I’ve gone back to live workshops, I don’t wear the jackets. I don’t wear the suits. I just wear what I wear on Zoom because I’m very confident and there’s nothing in my business future that requires me dressing up. I don’t have to socialize to grow my business. I don’t have to present publicly, you know, in any kind of conference and that. I said “I can just be who I am.” We’ve got enough of a reputation and we’ve got enough following that I can just find a style.
 
And everybody has a style, but it’s not a fashion, it’s something you can stick with. It’s like Jeff Bezos had a great line on this, he said, “You know, everybody pays attention to what’s going to be changing over the next 10 years.” He said, “But the people are really good, it’s what isn’t going to change over the next 10 years.” And quality doesn’t change.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, that’s right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Quantity changes all the time because it’s got a very fast wear-out factor.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, the panel that I had just done was for the Masters program at Parsons, which was about sustainability in fashion. And the question that I posed, and I had a terrific panel is “It fashion even sustainable?” You know? You can’t really talk about it that way because the whole business model is-
 
Dan Sullivan: The whole point of fashion is that it’s not sustainable.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, “Buy more.”
 
That’s that’s right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: No no, buy new, buy different, buy novel. Yeah, it’s novelty.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.
 
I think that it’s it’s a really interesting thing because if you go to the websites of any major fashion brand, they have their sustainability statements, they have all these things. Most of them are bullshit. And when you set up these standards, most companies don’t live up to them, you know.?
 
Now another question is. Is that even incumbent upon them to do so?
 
Dan Sullivan: No.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, that’s another part. But I think that if you want to be a conscious consumer, and you want to do business with companies that align with your values or whatever it is, all that goes out the window once it’s at a price that you think is a great deal, you know? Then, then so many principles then go out the window, because we like stuff that’s not expensive. You know?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but can I tell you? I really thought that through, of why people go for bargains and cheap and everything else. It’s so they can create a surplus income that they can spend on quality.
 
Jeff Madoff: But in fact, what that does in the real world is that overproduction does a number of things. One of the things that it does is create a huge discount market. A major landfill issue. But again, that’s kind of the nature of fashion. So what do you do? I was speaking with Vincent Stanley. He was not in this panel, but he was a guest prior to my class.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I remember you reported on the conversation.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes. So it’s interesting cause yeah, the company that probably does the most in terms of those beliefs and those issues doesn’t even refer to themselves that way, because they don’t think that the business model is about sustainability.
 
Dan Sullivan: Can I tell you where the sustainability is in great businesses, it’s actually backstage. In other words, that they have a particular way… For example, we stayed at The Four Seasons. Four Seasons is a Canadian creation. I think it started in the early Seventies, and it started in Toronto. It started with a motel on a back street. It was the red light district of Toronto. And it was a guy named Isador Sharpe. And he was an architect. And he went to Europe a lot. And he liked the sort of quality of how you were treated when you went into these hotels, and he didn’t have that experience for the most part in Canada or the United States, OK? And the United States is a bit of a a branch economy. You know, a lot of what operates in Canada are branches of American companies who have come into Canada. And he said he just wanted to create a hotel that he loves staying in. So he took a year out. I think he more or less ended his architectural career. And he went to Europe and he stayed in 20-30 hotels and he took notes and then he created a system and a process. And he says, “Let’s just start with, say nothing place.” So it was a motel, this motel, it was a drive-in, you know, the cars were out and you went into your room. But it was not a motel that had the reputation of selling for a whole night. You know, an hour, an hour, an hour, hour… Some of the entrepreneurs stayed all night, but the customers came and went.
 
Jeff Madoff: Literally and figuratively, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it was across from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation main radio station, OK? And Toronto was starting to arrive on the entertainment scene, OK?, when this happened and the CBC, which is government network, TV and radio, so they would have a lot of stars who were at the theaters, who were entertaining, you know, it would be musicians, it would be actors. So they’d have to come to this out-of-the-way place to be interviewed in the studio.
 
So he did a deal with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to build their studio for these people in his motel. And then he showed them “This is like first class. You won’t find any of the great hotels that have the service, the food, and everything like that.” So over a period of three or four years, they just got the reputation of Hollywood and Broadway and Country and Western music. They say, “You know, if you go to Toronto, it’s really weird, but if you’re gonna be interviewed, you might as well stay at this place,” You know? And then there was limousine service that picked them up to take them, you know? He worked it all out. And he just got known as the place to go. This kind of funny, weird place in Toronto that you would stay at a motel, and it was kind of a conversational piece. And he tested out. He tested out his first team. He tested out all their methods, and then he went into partnership with Sheraton and they did a joint venture, but it was too big. It was like 400 rooms. He was dealing with Sheraton and Sheraton really didn’t believe in this quality experience the way he did. You know, it it didn’t check the boxes. So he would wait for either a hotel was moving to a larger premises and they already had a well-developed... It’s about 200 rooms is about the model, you know, it’s about 150 to 200 rooms, and then they just kept developing this reputation for extraordinary quality. But they have a couple of basic rules, and this is one I find is that quality is always based on rules.
 
Jeff Madoff: Standards.
 
Dan Sullivan: You probably want me to go forward now and say what the rules are.
 
Jeff Madoff: I think that you’re correct. Yeah, that’s part of the process.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because you’ve revealed to us, the insidious part is to getting people not to think.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think that’s technology in general. I think the impact of technology in general is to get people not to think. We can’t take the error of humans… So much depends on this so that we can’t get it where human thinking can screw up what we’re trying to create. You know, I think that’s part of.
 
But they had two rules, and the Rule #1 is if anybody from the outside comes into a hotel and they ask you for something, you stop your job and you walk them to the person who’s going to answer what they want. OK? And that’s a rule. You have to stop what you’re doing and you have to take care of the customer.
 
The other thing is when you’re doing your job, you do your job, plus one other thing. And what’s one other thing? Well, look around. Is there anything that’s not your job that isn’t right? Are the pictures not straight on the wall? Check all the lights. Are all the lights working? And everything else. And what they created was this kind of system, and they have an overall rule “Systematize that which is predictable so you can humanize the exceptional.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, I like that. That’s great.
 
Dan Sullivan: A lot of the people who work in hotels, it’s not their only job. They’re oftentimes immigrants. You know, the staff that cleans, the staff that, you know, is behind the works and everything, oftentimes, you know they weren’t born in the country, this is a job and everything like that. But my first one was 1980, and I’ve stayed at 30 of them, and the quality is uniform. The interesting thing is if they make a mistake, the way they repair the mistake is more memorable than if they had done it right in the first place.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, because they have something to overcome to win your trust.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, not only that, but they want to prove to you that it was their fault.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: So my sense is that great sustainable businesses have standards that cannot be tampered with.
 
Jeff Madoff: I agree. I agree, and you used a phrase earlier that ties us back into the ChatGPT, which I think is really important, which is “commoditized thinking.” Because commoditized thinking by its very nature is not original.
 
Dan Sullivan: No. And it’s all about price. It drives everything to lowest possible price.
 
Jeff Madoff: And I think, of course, along with that goes quality.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: And along with that goes longevity.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: So to bring this part kind of to a wrap, because I think you know again, we have proven our point of we talk about anything and everything, but it goes all under the same umbrella or large tent that you and I have set up over this time that we’ve been doing our podcast together. Because this is the new new thing. ChatGPT is the new new thing, but how new is it really? I don’t think it’s that new. It’s now we’re just using the computer more to retrieve more and to establish patterns of retrieval more. But is it making anything better?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, it would be worth a discussion, not in this one, but where have you used technology and it really is useful.
 
Yeah, for example, there’s not much that I use the computer for more today than I did when we got our first Mac in 1986, 1987. And they had graphic user interface. Because I wasn’t gonna learn any programs.
 
In the beginning, they said, “If you don’t know the program symbols and how to access things, you’re left behind. The train’s going to leave without you.” And then Xerox, of all places, some guy at Xerox just created graphic user interface and Steve Jobs—It was in Palo Alto, PARC is P-A-R-C, Palo Alto Research Centre—and Xerox just gave an enormous amount of money to people just to work on anything.
 
It was like Kodak. Kodak did that. And Bell, AT&T, they just created all sorts of things. It was just to try things out. And they invited Steve Jobs over. And, you know, he watched it. It was apparently fully operational graphic user interface. And the guy showed him. He was never going to get rewarded in Xerox for this. I mean, when the Board of Directors or the CEOs of Xerox get together, if it didn’t have anything with copying supplies, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. So Steve Jobs said, “I don’t see this going anywhere.” And then he tiptoed out and then Bill Gates heard that Steve Jobs had stolen this thing, and then Steve Jobs stole it from him.
 
But graphic user interface was a phenomenal breakthrough.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, because it made computers easier to use.
 
Dan Sullivan: Made it accessible, yes. Yeah. And I didn’t have to learn.
 
So you know, mine is mostly word processing. I’ve created all sorts of desktop tools of my own tools, and then they all have copy in them. But I don’t think I’ve advanced at all.
 
The only other big jump was Zoom. That was a big jump for me was.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, in my world, going from tape-to-tape or film-to-film editing, going from that to nonlinear editing with computers was a really fascinating leap with a very, very new technology.
 
The thing that’s interesting is, two things happened. One is as digital cameras got better and better and were able to emulate film. I knew a lot of great cinematographers, actually not great ones. I knew good cinematographers who didn’t want to use it. And it wasn’t really that they thought that the film quality was so much better, although it was earlier on. I mean, the gap has narrowed tremendously, but it’s because they didn’t want to learn something new. So they rationalized why they didn’t need to learn. And to me, it’s a tool. So what tool is going to do the job the best? That’s all I care about. I don’t really care about anything else other than that. So if I have to learn this, I’ll learn this. I have to learn that, I’ll learn that. Because you can dig in your heels and the world will pass you by. That is what will happen.
 
So in my world of filmmaking, the technological advances in cameras and in editing made a huge difference. But what a lot of people who grew up in this world, who are a lot younger than you and I who are doing it, they don’t realize that there were great films made long before this technology existed. You know, that they somehow think it’s impossible to have done something really good, which is just not the case. And that’s why context and history is also so important to understand.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
 
But I think that you really got to the heart of this: Does this improve quantity? No question, it improves quantity, but it also multiplies exponentially the number of fart jokes that there’s going to be. My sense is, is the person creative? Then, if they’re creative, they’ll find a creative way of using this to enhance their creativity. If they’re not creative, this is going to make them less creative. If they’re productive already, they’ll find some way—because they take anything and they can use it to make them more productive. But if you’re not productive, it’s going to make you more unproductive, because it’s going to waste more of your time.
 
The other thing is it’s going to increase people’s workload immensely.
 
Jeff Madoff: And how so?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I had a lawyer. He was in the workshop program right at the beginning, 1990s, and he was a very, very thoughtful guy and his last name was Lawyer.
 
He said, “You know, fax has really has had a very negative impact on my profession, my own personal work,” he says, “because you used to take people... I’m gonna take two or three days to work this out, and now they want it back in three hours because they know you can fax it over. So it increases the public’s demand on what they want faster and easier and cheaper.” OK? And he said, “If I didn’t have all the practice that I had, and I have certain insights about what’s working right now, and I was just having the customer kind of tell me what I was going to do next, and I’ve noticed,” he said, “that it’s, it’s going to destroy law firms,” he said. “Fax is going to destroy law firms.”
 
And it’s very, very true in the sense that the younger lawyers, you know, just out of law school, they were working 45- to 50-hour weeks, and now they’re working 80-hour weeks. OK? And this is to get maybe 20 years from now, a chance at partnership. And what they do is they quit and they just go out and use the technology to create their own law firm.
 
So you either got the giants or you got the there’s only giants and Pygmies in the legal industry. You know, I think it’s made the big bigger because they can, then get almost wage-workers to knock out boilerplate work.
 
But this is gonna have an enormous impact on boilerplate work in accounting firms and law firms, architectural firms, engineering firms. I bet the quality of plans, generally, architectural plans is probably been declining.
 
Jeff Madoff: Because?
 
Dan Sullivan: You can do things really fast. You can do things really fast.
 
I was looking at the Chrysler Building. William von Allen created the Chrysler building.
 
Jeff Madoff: One of my favorite buildings in New York.
 
Dan Sullivan: York, one of my favorite buildings in the world. Yeah. Inside and outside. I mean the inside is almost more spectacular than the outside. And just the meticulousness of design, floor by floor, you know, and different, very different as it gets higher, the architectural design, both on the outside and inside. And it was done very fast because they were in a competition with the Empire State Building. Yeah, the Empire State Building, which is—just trying to think—it’s 102 stories, and from ground level to the top, it was done in 54 weeks.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, there’s a very interesting study the of the tallest building in New York stayed the tallest building for, I think, 11 years or something. And then the tallest building changed, like, 15 times in the next very few years. It’s quite fascinating.
 
But, I’m sorry, I interrupted, there you were saying about the Chrysler building.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, that was OK, but I was just looking at the quality of the work and that’s because he had been working on projects, hands-on projects for about 30 years before he got the opportunity to do this one. And he created very unusual buildings in New York.
 
There was restaurant chain, and he created some of the building—I forget the name. I was just reading him, but the architectural design and the interior design and everything of the Chrysler Building.
 
But I mean, there’s hundreds of skyscrapers in New York, but most of them are throwaway buildings, I mean, they’re expendable buildings. They’re not designed for the ages. They’re designed for profit per square foot.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, in the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, or truly, to use a word that has been beaten to death, but it’s true in this case, they are iconic pieces of architecture. And both from the Deco period, which you were referencing earlier, you know, where there was just a beauty of grace of line in what was done.
 
You know, I did a film for the 75th anniversary of Radio City Musical Hall. And another place, when you walk into that theater, it’s absolutely magnificent. That was going to be torn down. And what a lot of people don’t know is that there was a smaller version of it. So Radio City, I think seats—I don’t remember for sure, Google it for audience—but I think it’s might be 4500 seats. I’m not sure. And the other ones seated, like I think, 1200, so smaller theater also a jewel-box of a theater that did get torn down. Then the landmarks committee got involved and they were able to preserve Radio City. They, you know, wanted to build another soulless office building, you know, in that space. And what a shame it would be to lose a magnificent, another iconic Art Deco masterpiece.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, Penn Central station.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: New York. Yes, magnificent building, you know? Got torn down, you know. Yeah.
 
So anyway, the interesting thing here is, from the standpoint of my interest in things technology really got triggered in 1973 when they started to use the word ‘microchip’. OK? Because up until that time it was just a single integrated foundation for whatever they were doing, and now they integrated it smaller, smaller, and smaller into a chip.
 
So in 1973 there was a New York Times article, and I read it until it fell apart because it made some provocative statements and what it said is “This is probably one of the more important inventions ever because it’s an invention that can be applied to almost any existing invention. And not only that, but it can be applied to itself. You can use existing microchips to create more new, powerful microchips.” And they said, “There’s two things that are going to happen is that is going to introduce a speed of change in the world that large bureaucratic organizations have a hard time responding to.”
 
Because a big bureaucracy is just a really crappy way of creating a microchip, where you’re using humans as the integrated circuits, OK? You’re passing a message on and humans are really horrible at processing information because we all want to add our twist to the piece of information that we just got. Or we get the incomplete information and our brain immediately completes it and sends it on.
 
And the other thing it said is that it’s probably going to favor entrepreneurism, the microchip. And the reason is that there’s going to be individuals now who are going to acquire computing power that only large organizations have had before this used to have.
 
It was very predictive. It was very predictive. But they said it’s probably in the next 50 years, there’s just going to be a massive transformation because of this microchip thing.
 
Gordon Moore, who in 1965 wrote an article, and that wasn’t about the microchip, it was just about integrated circuits, and he says, “There’s something odd about this, and what I’ve noticed is that each new version of it that you create seems to be more powerful. And the computing power gets cheaper. The cost for computing gets cheaper.” And he said, “I’ve just got three data points that I’m using here and on the base of three data points,” he said, “I wonder how long this can go into the future that you get this exponential jump.” He wasn’t making any prediction, he says. “Just.” Thing. And immediately it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
 
And he was asked about—you know, Moore’s Law is like the 10 Commandments, you know. And he said, “Well, it’s not a law,” he says, “I think it just appeals to human aspiration.” He says, “I think all it does is that prediction just appeals to human aspiration and that people say, ‘I wonder if we can pull this off?’” And he said, “That’s a good thing.” And he said, “That’s a good thing.”
 
And I think it’s the same thing with this, that this appeals to human aspiration: “I wish everything I wrote could sound professional. I wish my first drafts got me started with…” But it’s productivity from a personal standpoint. “I just wonder if I can be more productive here. This helps me be more productive.”
 
But I think it only really matters if you’re in competition, if you’re in severe competition with other people. You know, it’s kind of like the two guys are out walking in the woods and one of them hears something and says, “I think that’s a bear. I think a bear’s coming.”
 
And the other one says, “Oh, oh my golly.” And he kind of is frozen.
 
And the other one sits down, takes off his backpack, pulls out his running shoes, and he puts on the running shoes. And the guy says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun the bear.”
 
He said, “I don’t have to outrun the bear.”
 
And I think there’s a lot of it this it’s a aspect of extreme competition, scary competition, and “Maybe this gives me an edge on my buddy.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, I think. It’s also the shiny keys, too. Where all of a sudden now with all these articles.
 
Dan Sullivan: We’re looking for the ID. Yeah, it’s a form of Messiah-ism. You know, “The Messiah will come, and-“
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, I can’t miss out on this thing that’s changing the world, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, not doing that, but “The train’s leaving.” You know and-
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: …”And I’ve I’ve got to catch the train.” But I think it’s it’s more about human emotion than it is about technology.
 
Jeff Madoff: Which I think most things are, you know?
 
Dan Sullivan: But not stated as such.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s correct. That’s correct. This [unclear] there’s a lot more places to go in this conversation, and I think one of the things that we will want to talk about in the future also, which is I think a huge thing, not only for entrepreneurs but for people who are working in companies, too, which is establishing those boundaries. You know? I know that’s a big part of Coach, in terms of boundaries, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Coach is all about boundaries.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. And I think that that’s an important thing to look at, because also a lot of entrepreneurs have the mistaken notion that, “Yeah, I get to control my own time.” Well, you do, at a certain point in your career, if you have gotten to that point. But you also then have to understand what that actually means and how you do it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, well, that’s good. “Boundaries” is a good topic for next time well.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, it was good chatting with you, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, restrictions and boundaries and limitations and everything, because my feeling is that it’s the ability to work within restrictions and limitations and boundaries that actually creates quality.
 
Jeff Madoff: I agree, and it’s also the thing that it’s not…
 
I was consulting to Verizon. They had five innovation teams and they gave me their pitches for what they were doing, which were all things that, you know, had some kind of technological twist to them, an app that, you know, could replicate a picture, you know, and then you could communicate that picture to a predetermined group and all this sort of thing.
 
I met with each team separately and my first question was “Why would anybody want this?” Nobody had an answer and that’s, you know, that’s the fundamental question when you go into development for product or service is, “Why would anybody want it?” If you can’t answer that question now, maybe you ought to rethink about what you’re doing.
 
But it was to the point you were making earlier: It was just because they could. But that’s not a good enough reason to try to start something. And so I then said to them—and I know this also plays into a part of Coach—I said to them, “So Verizon just bought a company a couple months ago,” which was Yahoo, “what you wanna do is, instead of trying to show your technical razzle-dazzle, think about how you can become a hero to the people at Verizon who made the decision to purchase Yahoo. What kind of things would they be looking for to make that the right decision and the right purpose, so that you can be a hero, and make them a hero.” You know? Because there’s so much that’s done simply because you can do it without thinking about, “Well, so what?” You know? “Who’s got a use for this?”
 
Dan Sullivan: What did you get out of this that’s taken your thinking further?
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, a few things. As I was going on my walk today, you know, I thought about, you know those precursors and that I kept hitting what really landed to me was that, you know, greeting cards were really early form of what has become ChatGPT. And that really hit me, because that’s what it is. I mean, there’s very little that’s new. You can do it faster. You know, you can retrieve more information. You can store more information. You can just find more patterns.
 
Dan Sullivan: And there’s more information to call on. You know, there’s been a exponential growth of information.
 
Jeff Madoff: But information without context doesn’t mean a whole lot, and it can lead you down the wrong path. When I think about it, it’s, you know, without the smartphone, without satellite technology, you couldn’t have, you know, Uber and Lyft, which still don’t have business models yet that have proved to be sustainable.
 
Dan Sullivan: Or AB&B, really.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
 
So I think that you know, it’s another way to use the technology, but whether or not it’s something that’s going to make things, as you said better, and the whole idea of that commoditized thinking. And I do believe it is to those business advantages that we don’t think, yeah, that “We just think that this is going to be faster,” and that we’re looking at the wrong indicators, the wrong metrics for doing something well, to reach what you spoke about wisely, and I agree with, quality. Because quality lasts. Rolls Royce still means a really good car. Quality lasts.
 
What about yourself?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, the big thing that I got is the why having processes where your brain has to constantly mature as you’re going through the process is really one of the fundamental bases of quality, OK? And that’s in terms of individuals, and I think it’s in terms of teams, OK? So there’s a thing called “institutional wisdom”, where you have people who are really good at what they do, and they’ve just been focused within a teamwork context on what they’re really great at. But they’ve done it for years and years and years and years, and they just have a feel of… It’s that sense of feel. We don’t have a sense of feel about quantity. We have a sense of feel about quality. OK? And it’s the development of the quality feel, which I think is an advance in real intelligence, real intelligence.
 
Jeff Madoff: Not artificial.
 
Dan Sullivan: RI. RI.
 
OK!
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, this has been “Anything and Everything”. And again we stay true to our name with my friend and partner in this, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: This is a sustainable-
 
Jeff Madoff: There you go.
 
Dan Sullivan: [cross-talk] Anything and Everything. OK. OK. Thanks a lot, Jeff.
 
Jeff Madoff: Great. Thank you. Bye.
 
Jeff 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.