Transforming Ideas Into Reality With Innovation And Technology

Steven Krein: Hi there, Steven Krein here with my podcast partner Dan Sullivan for another episode of the Free Zone Frontier Podcast. Hi, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Steve, you were at the shore and I can see the effects of being at the shore.
 
Steven Krein: Yes. Yeah. Am I talking slower than I talk when I'm in the city, Dan?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, you've got sunlight embedded in your face.
 
Steven Krein: So that's yes. Well, I love living in the city, but I also love being at the beach. And I've run in Central Park and only be beat by a run on the beach or on the boardwalk. So definitely best ways to start. My mornings are infused with the ocean. And August is a good time to do that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm hmm. We were chatting this week. Last Friday, yeah, I was on a two-hour Zoom call. You said something, and it really struck a chord with me. And you said, you know, I'm noticing the way that I'm using AI, artificial intelligence, is more interesting what it does to my brain than what it does to my business. I had found the same thing. I mean, I'm sure we're using AI in our business. The tech aspect of my company is not really my big thing, but I find it's interesting for what it does to my thinking when I interact with a pleasurable app and Perplexity has been my favorite go-to. I just find it really interesting how I think about things differently now than when I first started using it, which was in February. So it's about five, six months ago. What's your take on that?
 
Steven Krein: To me, there's been two categories that I've noticed of interaction with AI, either AI software or tools or enabled tools. One is OpenAI, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are my two go-to apps, both on my phone and on my desktop that I go to. If I need a more comprehensive search for answers, Perplexity is definitely easier and more efficient than Google or ChatGPT. ChatGPT does a terrific job of helping write or develop ideas much further along, quite frankly, before they get handed off to the team or I get in conversation with the team than I would have. And then the other type of AI enablement is in the form of all the apps that our company uses, or the tech stack our company uses, our CRM, our database, our community platform or portal, our Zoom recordings, where AI is built in. And now almost every app that we use and pay subscription to has an AI companion or an AI-enabled button to help utilize that tool much better. So those are the two pockets. Standalone DIY or was it done for you? Done for you kind of on one side and done with you on the other.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, 10 years from now I suspect everybody's going to be using AI just as a matter of interacting with their computer.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, you know, I'm a beta tester on the new iOS 18 for the new iPhone and iPad and Mac OS. Apple's building it into the phone, everything. So when you write an email now or respond to a text message in your iPhone, the tools are right there. And to summarize an email you receive to reply to a text, I mean, it's damn good in terms of even quick text responses back in text that are sitting there waiting for you. When you go into your photos app, when you go into your music app, they've just integrated AI right into it. So people like my mother who would never use Chat GPT or Perplexity are now going to have it just built into what they're doing on their iPhone. So, yeah, I think it's just disappearing and becoming the expectation. I think by the time they roll it out in the fall, people aren't going to have any other choice but to be utilizing AI, you know, to get about their day.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, in a different league, but when I grew up, I was born on a farm in northern Ohio in 1944. And it was only 16 years previously that the farm had been electrified. And when I think about AI more and more, I'm thinking that it's kind of like electricity. When it first emerged, New York City was the main spot where electricity first emerged. And I'm sure there was a talk for a couple decades, say, have you got electricity in your office yet? Have you got electricity in your home yet? And my sense is that nobody talks about electricity except when it's not there. My sense is that this is not going to be the big deal that people thought it would be when they're selling investments. But it's going to be a really big deal, like you're kind of a barbarian if you don't have it.
 
Steven Krein: If you don't have it, if the software doesn't have it built in or take advantage of it, I think it's the same thing with the internet. When I was graduating law school and the internet was coming of age and my first company built, you know, because the internet did not have any marketing or direct marketing or promotion infrastructure. My whole first company was to bring that world online. Now, I don't think people think about having a business without the internet being a part of it. And I think it's the same thing with AI. You just need to have it. So you're right. But it's going to happen faster than I think, you know, we talk about electricity or the internet or even mobile. I just think AI is going to be a must include it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Andy Kessler, who does a lot of writing in The Wall Street Journal, he had a really interesting take on it. And he said it's the new dial tone. And he said that, you know, when Bell Labs sort of worked this out, not too far from New York City, Bell Labs up the river from New York City, how do you make the move over from an individual being able to dial where they don't need an operator. And he said they had to create a medium. They had to create an interface that told the person and their phone that they could now dial. And it was the dial tone. He says, I think that's how AI is going to emerge, is that you have sort of an AI dial tone, which tells you that you're interacting with AI. Okay, so what's your question and what's your prompt and everything else? And it's going to become so normal that it'll become boring.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Well, I think it becomes real clear when it's not being used. You know, I'm watching my kids, you know, two in college, one in high school. It wasn't that long ago that using a product called Grammarly was a big deal and it was actually, in the first couple of years it was out, they were not allowed to use it. Or at least they were told they shouldn't be using or leveraging Grammarly to help them with their punctuation because they need to learn the basics of it, they need to learn when to use it, when not to use it. It was frowned upon to use Grammarly and I remember spellcheck back in the day kind of had that same thing where, you know, you're not supposed to rely on it. But the speed at which AI, you know, used to be you can't use Chat GPT to assist you in your writing, but you can't open Google Docs anymore. Soon you're not going to open your iPhone to write notes anymore or any of the software tools that students use or anyone uses to write things without it being suggested—how to start it, how to write it, how to improve it. So it's just interesting to think about what we had to, you know, back in the day, I know the way you learned when you were growing up, or I learned when I was growing up, or even five or 10 years ago, the way they learned, I think is different. It's creating a whole new generation of, I think, people learning how to learn in a different environment with different prompts kind of at their fingertips.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the thing is that people are looking for results, and how they get their results is not a big issue. Kathy Kolbe, I had a long conversation with her, and for those who don't know Kathy Kolbe, she created a great profiling system where it, by answering a whole bunch of questions, takes about a half hour, it can tell you how you take action best, what do you do to take action and get results best. And she was saying that what happened in the school system in Phoenix, she said that 30 years ago, she started doing Kolbes with the faculty of all the schools in Maricopa County. And she said, in terms of the Kolbe profile, you had about an equal number of teachers who were mainly Fact Finders, mainly Follow Throughs, mainly Quick Starts, mainly Implementers. And she said it was spread out all over the point. But she said as they started cutting back on programs, they got rid of the gym program, they got rid of the after-hours drama department, they started eliminating sports. She said more and more, the entire teacher core of a high school would be Fact Finders and Follow Throughs. And that was right around the time when they started noticing a lot of disruptive students who give the teachers a hard time, they wouldn't do it the way they were told to do. And she said, you know, the whole topic of ADD became a big thing at that time, and you were recommending Ritalin or you were recommending Adderall for the students. And she said what it was, that they were cutting off the possibilities for people who weren't Fact Finder Follow Throughs to just get results. And they started testing, did you do the right method to get the result? And it was really interesting. So she talked one high school, and I think she talked most of the county into, I forget what the name was. She had a sort of a neat little phrase that the teachers would be told if the student got the correct result, then have a conversation with how the student actually got the result. And they said the teacher will learn some things that there's a lot of different ways to get the right result. So my sense is that humans want to get results, and they'll use whatever tool or means available to get the result. And that determines whether something moves forward as a technology or doesn't move forward. Are people getting the results that they want to get?
 
Steven Krein: So one question that I was pondering on when I asked, when I brought that up last week on the call, was this notion of are people who are either entrepreneurs or entrepreneurially-minded getting different results from the AI and the tools than those that are not? So I find that many of the tools are so efficient and so helpful that if you either are an entrepreneur or think like an entrepreneur and you're able to use that creative set of prompts and questions, you're able to do a lot more than somebody who doesn't need creativity and doesn't need a collaboration partner to develop an idea. So I do know it could be very effective at coming up with plans to follow through and doing a number of the things that you need to go through, but I'm wondering if there's any data or any truth to that notion of those that are entrepreneurs or more entrepreneur-minded have different and even better results than those that don't versus just those that are getting more efficient with their job because of the tools they have access to.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I haven't really interacted with my team at all very much on this. We brought in Evan Ryan. Evan Ryan came in and taught everybody and he said the goal is that you find some way of getting five hours per week back from your job, you know, you get five hours back. So I'll talk to my tech people about how that's gone, because it wasn't my bailiwick. I have to tell you, I haven't used it all for creating anything in Coach.
 
Steven Krein: So it's interesting you say that. Is it because you don't interact with technology that way or you haven't tried it? Well, you do, because you said Perplexity is something you use. But do you use it for anything you're developing in Coach?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, it's all been interesting questions. For example, I've seen several articles, and I'm a sort of an article guy on the internet. They were saying, you know, the U.S. dollar could cease to be the reserve currency by the end of the 2020s. So I asked Perplexity 10 reasons why nothing else will replace the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency. You know, five seconds later, you got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And it really expanded my notion of the criteria that's necessary to be there if you're going to have a reserve currency. And one of the things, which I think is very true, that the amount of dollars that are outside the United States is equal to the amount of dollars that are inside the United States. As a matter of fact, you know, there's dollars that just operate in the world for transactions. And they said that one of the hallmarks of a reserve currency, it doesn't matter how other people are using your currency, it doesn't affect the value of your currency. And the other thing is you have to have a massive consumer market to keep it really useful. And so they went through the 10 points and all the 10 points, there's no other currency that could do any of the 10 points. I just found that useful for when I'm in conversations with people. Peter Diamandis thinks that cyber currency is going to replace the U.S. dollar. And I said, only if the Federal Reserve decides to digitize the dollar. It's still going to be the dollar, because it has to have some value backing it up. But not replace the dollar. Cybercurrency has no value backing it up. It's just a speculative investment, you know.
 
So anyway, it's really interesting for conversations, you know, about things that are going on in the world. And what I'm finding is very interesting things. Like, I read a whole series of German novels about what was happening in Berlin at the end of the ‘20s in the first three or four years of the ‘30s. And a question, I said, how much was the birth of Nazism in Germany actually caused by the reaction of the military leadership at the end of the First World War? And boy, oh boy, I just dug into it with Perplexity and it was very, very clear that the two main generals, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, were basically the people who got all the conditions ready for Nazism in the 1920s. Because they couldn't admit that it was their bad leadership that lost the war. So they had to blame it on the usual suspects. But it was a very interesting search, and I spent about an hour on it and reading the history. And that's the sort of thing that I'm doing with that. I'm not using it for creating new Coach tools or anything.
 
Steven Krein: So think about the audiences, or at least the community, I should say, in the different Free Zone groups, maybe less so in the 10x group, but the Free Zone who are doing collaboration. The number one use of it in our community when it comes to the scientists and the academic founders who have a great deal of maybe even too much knowledge in scientific language that they're using to describe what they're doing. And we encourage them to do that. Run their communication or their script or their transcript through Chat GPT and ask to explain it to a 10th grader. This simple idea of just going in and having one thing to do, like go into Chat GPT, put down or read what you're saying to me and about to present to whether it be funders, whether it be customers with partners, and they feel like finally somebody is helping them translate. Very simple. Well, that's great. You know, just that's great. Simple communication. And as crazy as it sounds, I can't believe how many people don't think of that. Right off the bat. Like, hey, you're having a board meeting. You're going to be talking to the board. Not every one of them is going to understand everything you're saying. And rather than making them ask you, why don't you try explaining the biomarkers? Why don't you try explaining it in language that a 10th grader would understand? And so all of a sudden, we're seeing a great deal of much more I would call it easy-to-understand communication coming from highly scientific, whether it be life science companies, biotech companies, digital health companies that really struggled with communicating what they're doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I can really see that. Actually, the one field that I'm convinced that it's world-changing is regenerative medicine. I'm more convinced that it's the number one growth industry in the United States over the next 50 years is regenerative medicine. One is that the topic interests everybody. It has personal meaning for everybody that, hey, maybe I can slow down my aging. Maybe I can reverse my aging. But what I've gotten from the people who are doing that is the speed of testing using AI. The speed of testing anything, yeah. Testing anything. Like 10,000 to one, the difference. Like one manual test and you can do, if you translate the biomarkers into digital language, you can do 10,000 tests in the same amount of time it would take to do a manual test.
 
Steven Krein: Okay, yeah, that's huge.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, that's huge. Not only that, but the testing and diagnosis of, you know, the speed of detecting cancer, the speed of detecting long ahead of time, you know, predisposition towards strokes, predisposition towards that. I think it's phenomenal where it's happening there. So I think where it's most used is going to be the growth industry. And I think medicine is going to be the growth industry.
 
Steven Krein: It's interesting to see how many entrepreneurs and founders feel like they've been using AI, not necessarily generative AI, but using AI in their tools for many years. But I think the notion of not only what they can use AI for, but also how much more collaboration they can do, because they realize that their area is so deep and rich with need for their Unique Ability that they are being more comfortable with partnering for the other capabilities. And I think AI is one of the things that's instigating some of that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I got into a conversation with Evan Ryan, and it was basically on the topic that you brought up last week. I said, it's not the whole use of AI, but I'm seeing a definite trend. And I call it exponential tinkering. People are just tinkering with it, and it's not detectable at all what they're doing. People are just using it for what I would call uniquely eccentric reasons. They've got a new power, and they said, hey, I can find out all sorts of things. Description of my searches, like, well, why do you want to know about the reserve currency? I said, well, I just find it an interesting idea. Why do you want to know about the birth of Nazism? I said, I just find it interesting to know these things. You know, and that's sort of tinkering. I'm just tinkering. I have no in mind that I'm going to produce this knowledge. It just informs my brain.
 
Steven Krein: So that was what I was suggesting when I said entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial-minded. And maybe it's not the right way to describe it, but the tinkering, like as an entrepreneur, as a Quick Start, which a lot of entrepreneurs are, I know not all of them are, but a lot of them are, there's something powerful about riffing. Like a lot of entrepreneurs like talking to other people who are entrepreneurial about their ideas to kind of develop them. And everybody has kind of a, person in their company or a person, whether it's a designer, whether it's a developer, whether it's a business partner, that they develop their ideas with. And I know you take an Impact Filter, and that's a lot of what you start with. But I would posit that even an Impact Filter can get further along than you might otherwise be with an idea because you can bring to the next person or the next collaborator a lot more of the thought developed. So it's almost like, what is the version of an idea? What would you call something that you could take an Impact Filter, if you could take it to a generative AI discussion, how might that even be more further developed to increase the likelihood that the Impact Filter is able to go further with those partners, whether those are designers, whether those are writers, whether they're developers. It would seem, I have at least found, I'm bringing ideas to people much further developed than I would have a year ago.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you know, I use it as a screener if I have a thought of doing a project. I use the small version, the Fast Filter, and I can tell by the time I get to the end, you know, I don't think it's worth the effort. You know, I'll just cut it off right there rather than using up someone else's time or having a meeting or getting something started that we then stop. But on the other hand, if I get through the Fast Filter and I'm more convinced than ever, it's very easy to communicate to other people what I'm up to. And we have a rule in Coach that if you get a Fast Filter from Dan, it's 100% he's going to go for this. Doesn't mean it's going to happen exactly the way he thinks it's going to happen, but it's going to happen. So I think that I've wasted a lot of my time. I've wasted a lot of other people's time with ideas that I got excited about, but they didn't have legs enough to become a reality or they really were in the wrong direction. They weren't going to produce the type of result we really thought. And it brings up a question because you've been in Coach for 27 years. To what degree is our Coach tools actually a form of artificial intelligence?
 
Steven Krein: It's probably more akin to the prompts of artificial intelligence than the results of it. So if I use the example of the four or five questions you have to answer in an Impact Filter, best result, worst result, criteria. I guess it's three questions in a Fast Filter, but five questions in an Impact Filter when you add a couple more of the things on. So they're prompts. for your mind to think about something. And you said something I heard, I think it was on either Mike Koenig's podcast or Dean Jackson, where you were saying that people don't have questions for Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan has questions for you. Yeah. It was something along the lines of that.
 
Dan Sullivan: So we were talking to Lior. Lior said you had to put an AI companion into all of your little books. So, you know, we had somebody do it who knows how to do this. And we tested it on about 10 clients. And they said, well, we don't really have any questions for you, but we wish you had some questions for us. What we'd really appreciate is that Dan asked us questions. Yeah. Well, I do that in all the tools. I mean, to a certain extent, every tool we have is a series of questions. It's a set of, it's an algorithm of questions.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Well, that's why I said they're prompts, right? So when you log on to Chat GPT, it's an open box, right? So you have to ask it questions. Perplexity, by the way, same thing. You open it up and it's just sitting there. Although what I do think is very interesting about Perplexity is they show you the five things they're doing back stage to come up with the answer. So it shows you the evolution of their prompts, which in some ways is like, if you think about your tools, it would be like, here are the five questions that need to get answered to come up with the result of the Impact Filter or the Fast Filter.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it's really interesting. I did a tool, a brand new tool I tried out on 10x this morning. I sent you the file and it's called Tech That Works For You. Okay. Yep. So you just do it, you personally and your company and what's all the tech that works for you. Top three, best three, you know, same thing for the company. And then what are your insights from identifying all this technology and ranking it? It was very explosive. First of all, there were an amazing number of interesting tech ideas that went into chat on Zoom. People say, can you put that into chat? I'd like to try that. I mean, most people were kind of convinced that they were using technology that was good for them. Like I have three main, aside from the Apple platform, I didn't include that because you have to have a platform. So I didn't include Apple, but for me it's InDesign because I use InDesign all the time for the writing and for the layouts. The other one is Zoom. I mean, Zoom has just amazingly, when I did the exercise for me and my company, how much Zoom has been an accelerator for us. And we have Salesforce, everything is coordinated by Salesforce. But I was saying, you know, we're a really simple company. You're a really simple company. The business model is just utterly simple. Yeah, it's just a matter of how much, really, in our system, how much face-to-face time people actually have. The more face-to-face, and that could be on Zoom, it doesn't have to be live in person. So the big thing is that people get to think about their thinking, And then they talk to others about thinking about their thinking and what they've been thinking and everything like that. It's a very, very simple process. And then they come back and it goes into action, you know, through another tool or something like that. But we're not much different in 2024 than we were in 1989, 35 years ago.
 
Steven Krein: No, but your tools are better, of course.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: And there's more of them.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there's more of them.
 
Steven Krein: But I think the idea of it is that some tools are tools for the individual that are just, you know, open boxes to query or question like Perplexity or Chat GPT. Others are tools that are enabled by AI. And by the way, collaboration. And I want to actually shift to that because I've seen a big difference. So we used InDesign for a long time before that, you know, I think. predecessor desktop publishing apps. But there's two packages, software, one called Figma and one called Canva. They're almost like democratized versions of those so that people can collaborate together. And I saw a huge uptick in the collaboration around design when we started doing things in Canva. We use Canva more than Figma, but they're the same kind of tools where they operate a little like Google Docs or any of these things where three or four people can add in comments or could make suggestions or review. And it's not all held with a designer as the only person to play with it. And they've democratized everything from templates to ways you can work. And I think that same thing is in our CRM. We use something called Affinity. There's a handful of these tools that the expectation is they're for teamwork. And I think that has been a real unlock on Free Zone capability, where these tools are now enabled with AI, but they're also enabled with collaboration and teamwork. And that's a real different way we, as an organization, build things. And I think it speeds up the iteration. I don't know if you've seen that might be above your pay grade, so to speak, in terms of what you're allowed to play with. But I'm assuming those kinds of tools versus what you were using in 1989 has changed the amount of teamwork that happens with these technologies.
 
Dan Sullivan: For all I know, they may be being used by the tech. I mean, I generate pretty well all original design, although over the last year, I would say there's probably 10% of modification of tools and new tools that's being done, you know, by other team members. But I want to go back to the original thesis here that there's a real advantage for entrepreneurs to get smarter.
 
Steven Krein: Actually, it's a disadvantage not to. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I mean just generally smart. I don't mean smart about anything in particular, but just you're more alert, you're more responsive, your concentration is better. And we had stem cells to the brain, which is not done. And the reason is because you can't inject anything into the brain, it has to go in. And this doctor in Buenos Aires has figured out that you can use blood cells, white blood cells, to create a lymphocyte. And the lymphocyte creates a passage and the stem cell, which is your fat cells, which has been converted into another cell, goes in. And my test, like I do that 19-stage cognitive test every quarter, and really getting better. So I'm really, really interested in that. Some of these, Buckminster Fuller had a great comment that my artist sent me today. And he said, if you want people to think about things differently, don't try to make them think differently. Just give them a new tool. And their brain will interact with the tool, and they'll think differently as a result of the tool. And I'm just wondering if we're just in a massive historical period right now, where people's intelligence is being altered by the tools that they use, which they can do independently in a way that they couldn't do before this. Yeah.
 
Steven Krein: It's a combination of intelligence and capability. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just much more capable alone now with certain tools to get them further along and do more individually than I was able to do alone before where it required teamwork. And I think teamwork, and I know this is Evans, you know, the whole thing is, was it teamwork as an IRA as teamwork as a teammate, as a teammate? And I think that my view is a little bit like the oxygen mask that you have to put on in the airplane, you know, take care of yourself before you take care of others. But if you're the CEO or the founder of the company, you're not able to leverage it, explain it, and show how it's been useful to you. I think it's very hard for you just to kind of tell people to use it. I know I've found many tools much more exciting than some of my team members have found them. And I go and I show them and I feel a lot more like, you know, they should just be able to grasp it and use it as quickly as I did. And it's just not the case every time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, what's the permanent difference between you and them?
 
Steven Krein: Entrepreneur.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you know where the company is going. They don't.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, true.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, no, I don't mean you're holding it secret or anything, but you think about it a lot.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Like I talk pretty easily about what the company is going to be like when I'm a hundred years old.
 
Steven Krein: I'm constantly seeing the impact of AI, not just on my company, but on my community. And I'm really looking at Alzheimer's disease and diabetes and areas like food as medicine and regenerative medicine and just seeing how are these tools going to impact entrepreneurs and founders working on companies in these spaces. And in particular, collaboration, AI, and thematically, I think the speed at which this stuff is moving is just different than it ever has before. And so there's a different mindset needed about this generation of entrepreneurs in healthcare than any prior generation, I think.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, my sense is that we're going through a profound, I don't want to use this as the verb, but there's an entrepreneurializing of society. And you can see that with social media, everybody can become a broadcaster these days. Would you say that?
 
Steven Krein: Wait, can you repeat that? The what of society?
 
Dan Sullivan: The entrepreneurializing of society. And I think it's because of the tools that are available. That's it. It's not that they intend to be entrepreneurs, it's that they've got tools that make them entrepreneurial. And I think that's why the big investment bank, Goldman Sachs, they came out with an article and they're seeing no results from the investment of large corporations in AI. But I bet you would see the profound impact of the use of AI and all the people they've laid off over the last three years. I remember Silicon Valley got rid of 300,000 within the time when Chat GPT came out. And I said, they just created their future replacements that if you just got laid off by Google, or you just got laid off by Meadow or anything like that. And there's this new technology available. My feeling, if you're entrepreneurial, you say, well, I'm just going to learn this new technology and create some sort of new business. And I think there's just a lot of general disruption in the social, economic, and political realm right now. And I think it's just a function of the tools that are available that a lot of things can be disrupted right now.
 
Steven Krein: There's a movement towards fractional roles in companies now that have become … They've gone from being something you didn't talk about, somebody being part-time, it's almost like by calling them a fractional chief financial officer, a fractional chief technology officer, a fractional anything, it's become a status symbol of efficiency and you know how to … You don't need a full-time X, whatever that role is. So you're using fractional services that are enabled by AI, that are enabled by collaboration tools, that are, I think, the new way people are going to build companies in the beginning phases or stages, where if you don't need that full-time leadership position, and I think leadership is one area it's happening, then you can rely on almost a bench of fractional leaders that you have for a much smaller period of time, much smaller period of expense, but some cases don't even lose any of the output because of AI, because of some of the tools.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we have two of them. We have a marketing, she works with about seven, eight different companies at the same time. And we have a financial, fractional financial.
 
Steven Krein: So what's interesting about that is, so if you think about fractional roles in a company, instead of calling them part time, it's repackaging of it. It wasn't that long ago, pre-COVID, that people didn't admit to having no office or having no offices in certain places and being remote. There's a whole bunch of things in the last 10 years, especially the last five years, that have shifted in the entrepreneurializing of society. I think that idea of not just the company … You said it better than I did. Well, because you start to see a framework being built around. How do you build a company in 2024 or scale a company in 2024 or 2025? If you're not utilizing collaboration, if you're not utilizing fractional roles where you don't need full time, you can get much better capabilities at a fraction of the cost, but they're widely accepted and almost widely appreciate it when you're explaining the cost of building your company or scaling your company or scaling your revenue. And I think it's interesting because it also creates more entrepreneurial opportunities for the fractionals. Like a CTO, I know, is it Lior who's working with the fractional CTO? I think the idea of that whole category of marketers, technologists, financial people becoming entrepreneurs, many of them, by the way, getting laid off and starting fractional service companies that they're not calling them consulting companies anymore. They're not out of work trying to get some work. They're actually set up for a lifestyle of choosing their clients and choosing their time and becoming entrepreneurs themselves.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and there you could certainly see the natural meshing with AI programs.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. The entrepreneurializing of society. Gordon, I think you have the title of the podcast there.
 
Dan Sullivan: The entrepreneurializing of society. Do you watch the tide when you're at the beach? Do you watch the tide come in and the tide go out?
 
Steven Krein: Of course.
 
Dan Sullivan: And how high is your tide?
 
Steven Krein: We were in Cape Cod and it was anywhere from 7 feet to 10 feet.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh.
 
Steven Krein: You mean, do I measure that way or do I actually when I'm sitting on the—no, no, you just watch. And I'm acutely aware because we have a boat. My brother's got a boat. So we go out on it. And there's a couple of places where if it's not low tide, we can't go through the bridge unless we call in advance and let them know. And so I'm acutely aware of when there is high tide and low tide here.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it's really interesting because when you watch the tide, it's just a, it's reversed, okay. So the tide is reversed and the tide is coming in you know and it's 50 feet offshore, you know that's where the water is and you come back and it's two feet of water right up to where there's a wall or something like that. And my sense is something like the technological change is kind of like the tide. It just happens everywhere at the same time, but you don't notice any real profound breakthrough at any point, but it's just the force of that new tide coming in. I think entrepreneurializing would be a tide coming in.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, I think these tools are democratizing. So I was talking about Canva and Figma democratizing design. Like InDesign is not accessible to the average person. You have to know a little bit about design and the software and all that. Canva, you know, everybody can look like a great designer because they have templates and elements and all the shapes and sizes and so many other things, much better than Keynote or any of the other, you know, solo tools. But I think there's a need of democratizing entrepreneurship, democratizing the idea that somebody who got laid off from their finance role or somebody that got laid off from their marketing role can start a company, become an entrepreneur, get a bunch of clients and be a business because they now can use the tools to get up and running, get going, and even service their clients. A whole different ballgame.
 
Dan Sullivan: So what's the difference between democratizing and entrepreneurializing?
 
Steven Krein: Well, I said democratizing entrepreneurship, but it is leading to entrepreneurializing society. Like, in other words, I think for a lot of people, entrepreneurship felt out of reach. I think it felt like something they either were or they were not. And I think that the idea of people being able to start companies and build companies, they might not be gigantic companies, but they create some of the same entrepreneurial freedom that, you know, Coach has been focused on from day one around, you know, money, purpose, relationships. But for somebody who was an employee and they got laid off, and in many cases there's no jobs to go back to. They go looking for those jobs that they get laid off from, and it's just another company that's hiring them. Some of these organizations have streamlined their teams permanently, or at least for the time being.
 
I talk about this often when people come to me, they say, are any of your companies looking to hire a chief medical officer? That's an easy one where it's like, well, not a lot of companies can afford a full-time chief medical officer. But if you're a pediatric endocrinologist, you can make yourself available to 10 diabetes companies that need a fractional amount of your time, but you can have a monumental impact on innovation. And so that, to them, was a mind-blowing way of thinking about their time and their capability. And then all of a sudden, because of Zoom, because of some of the different products and technologies out there, they can stand up even a side gig as a chief medical officer they couldn't have done before. So it's all the same pieces of the threads of entrepreneurializing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, one of the things that really strikes me is that it's very few people who think in an entrepreneurial fashion. And it goes back to the two entrepreneurial decisions about 25 years ago at Coach. And the first one is that you'll take 100% responsibility for your future security. And the second one is that you won't expect any opportunity unless you create value. And you may have a skill, but you're looking for people who want your skill. That's not entrepreneurial. That's just job hunting. See, I think entrepreneurialism is a great cause of inequality, actually.
 
Steven Krein: Because it seems out of reach or because it's not what people seek?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you're creating new things and every new thing creates inequality. Something gets more valuable and something gets less valuable. You've just created inequality. Parents are the root cause of all inequality because everybody wants their kids to have a better deal than everybody else's kids. You don't want other kids to suffer, but if there's some unique advantages available, you would want your kids to have the unique advantages. But my sense is that entrepreneurism by its very nature creates disruption. It creates inequality.
 
Steven Krein: If there's any evidence of, I'm not talking about small business owners, but real entrepreneurs building companies to grow and have the freedom that they want. So not just jobs, but actually freedom of entrepreneurship. And I wonder if you're noticing even anything at the Signature Program in terms of the entry point for entrepreneurship in 2024, 2025, are the characteristics of those individuals different than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. One of the big differences, they're younger. We're noticing 26-year-olds making a half a million. And you didn't see that earlier. I mean, you didn't see that, but it's the way they're making their money. That's different because it was more like financial services. That was a big way that you could make a lot of money when you were younger, but now tech enabled people of any kind can make money, a lot of money, very early. I mean, we have a $200,000 threshold just to get in the Signature Program. And it's not quite a fair answer I'm going to give here, is that almost all of them have read all three books.
 
Steven Krein: All three of your mass-market books you're talking about, you mean, Who Not How?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and they come in and they've bought in, they've got the right mindset. We just had a new number one, and I was just blown away by these guys. And I didn't go in and talk to them, I said, I'm having lunch in my cafe, if you want to have lunch with me, come on in, sit down. They came in and they knew the language, they knew the concepts, and this was their first workshop.
 
Steven Krein: So, perfect example of when I started my first company almost 30 years ago, there was like one book on entrepreneurship and startups. I mean, it was called Startup. It was in the ‘90s. And I remember how inaccessible that kind of information is. So now there's mass market books like those three that you can buy on Amazon or download and listen to it on Audible or read on your Kindle. So you're basically for under $100 for the cost of all three books able to get the kind of education that I had to go to Chicago to get and spend a year or two or three with you. Democratizing of the very fundamental things that get you a lot further along than you would have. I mean, any one of those concepts would rattle your mind 30 years ago that you had to pay for and go to a program to get. And now you're making it free effectively for the price of a book to kind of learn how to think radically different than most people think when they're starting companies. Who Not How is a perfect example. It's not what people are taught or even encouraged to do when it comes to delegating. Nobody thinks about delegating up, they think about delegating down. Who Not How just blows up that whole concept.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm really seeing what you're saying here is that the knowledge necessary to be entrepreneurially capable is a lot more available.
 
Steven Krein: At your fingertips, either free or at such a low cost that, put it this way, if you want to read, watch, listen to, consume all the basics of entrepreneurship, of collaboration, of these things, without even touching AI, you can get there. Now you talk about AI and the power of these tools at your fingertips. People, and I think Sam Altman is now credited for talking about the first billion-dollar company, so one person's billion-dollar company is going to emerge from all this. You're encouraged to think how to do things with fewer human resources and more technology resources today. That's just one example. So the idea of a solo entrepreneur, solo investor, solo companies used to be frowned upon. Why would you do it all yourself? You can't do this, it doesn't scale. I think it's just been blown up. And so the books that you just talk about or any of these tools are all building blocks of the entrepreneurializing of society.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and even there, it's going to be 5% of the working population. It hasn't changed in 50 years. In 1974, when I started coaching, not Coach, but coaching, the percentage of people, and you do it on tax basis, what kind of tax return do they fill in and everything else, it was 5%. And the same conditions were 2022, there's still 5% of the working population. But what I think is happening is a lot of people who aren't entrepreneurs are acting in an entrepreneurial way. They're forced to act in an entrepreneurial way. Even within the framework of employment, they have to be more entrepreneurial.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. I mean, I don't think they're going to have a choice, but I'd be interested in that data update in the next year or so to see if it didn't change in 50 years, has it changed in the last two?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the big reason is that other factors involved, like politics and economics and, you know, culture and everything. And I'm talking about the United States here. I'm not talking about any other country here. But the U.S. is the culture that encourages entrepreneurship more than any other culture. You know, our cultural ideals are largely entrepreneurial ones. So my sense is that there's a mindset that looks at change differently, that if you have more of an entrepreneurial culture and that's the kind of messages you get on a day-to-day basis when you're in public, the kind of things that people talk about, that's all part of the culture. And my sense is that it has to do with a positive attitude towards change.
 
Steven Krein: Well, let's use this as a bookend of this episode. What'd you get? Well, I think where this came full circle from the comment last week was this idea of the tools available for individuals who are entrepreneurs or entrepreneur-minded, I think are exponentially greater than those who don't tinker with the tools. And I think there is a massive democratization of entrepreneurship taking place, even if people don't think of themselves as entrepreneurs or have never thought of themselves as entrepreneurs, that the AI tools and the collaboration tools combined, both of them, are leading to people's capabilities being able to be monetized in a way they never were available before and companies are being rewarded for having those kinds of capabilities around the table. So remote fractional resources, where you're just paying for and utilizing the unique abilities of people wherever they are, because they are enabled by AI tools, degenerative AI tools, because they're enabled by collaboration, I just think we're going to have exponential growth across the board over the next five years that people are just beginning to get their heads around.
 
Dan Sullivan: How about you? That was a brilliant sum up. I don't know if I could do any better. The thing that's really interesting for me, and we could talk about it in another podcast, but I made a decision just as I was turning 80 that I would never give another speech for the rest of my life. I would just put people through a thinking tool. It's very, very interesting because it's other people thinking about their thinking, not thinking about my thinking that I'm more interested in right now.
 
Steven Krein: Did you just say that or you said, because I know you haven't done travel for speeches for a while.
 
Dan Sullivan: I had a couple of speaking invitations last year and I said, I don't want to do that. I don't want to stand up in a room full of strangers and try to figure out which of my ideas is going to land with them. And I said, I'd much rather put them through a thinking tool where everybody in the room is thinking about their thinking, and then they can talk about their thinking in a particular topic. I said, that's a better use of their time. That's a better use of my time. It's in your time.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. What tool have you done? And I'm not talking about your clients. I'm talking about non-client groups. What tool do you think has been the most impactful tool that you've taken them through as a result?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think it's the tool that I did both at the beginning of Free Zone and Palm Beach. Your best ever year. You just look back at what was true last year.
 
Steven Krein: Decade. Wasn't that the best decade?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, it wasn't a decade one. It was a shorter time span. It worked crazy because you had people in the room who are Coach people, and you had the people, this is the first time they even heard of Coach, and they all had a great first hour, and the same thing happened in Nashville at CoachCon. I did the same thing, and it was great. The whole room just lit up. You get everybody in the pool in the first hour, and then they make their way through the next day or the next two days. But more and more, I'm in a position where I don't have to give speeches. The books are my speeches. But it's really interesting. I said, never again am I going to ever be on a speaking platform where I give a talk.
 
Steven Krein: Right. You could do that virtually over Zoom or on stage. Well, it's interesting because, to be continued, but I think the idea of, and I've noticed this at conferences I've gone to where the content, even a panel discussion of listening to people pontificate, talk in something that you can now watch either on YouTube or online or read or listen to, it just doesn't do it anymore. I think that there's been such an influx of information and content over the last 5 or 10 or 15 years that are now available that the relationships and the people in the room connecting seems to be a lot more useful than getting there to listen. So you're giving them something to leave with that's not just about the concept you would have shared, but now their own thinking that they could bring back and even talk to other people about. It's fantastic. Fantastic. All right, Dan, we'll always enjoy, never know where it's going to go, but I think thematically very timely and useful conversation. And I think as we go to the next episode, maybe we pick up on next time the people or the relationships and the connections that AI can't actually replicate or help with. It could be a topic around that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's very interesting. Jeff Madoff and I, we've been on almost like a single theme for the last four or five podcasts, and it's really the theme of live and in-person, the importance of live and in-person. And we're just seeing signs of it all over the place, that the attempt to introduce technology into what was previously very much give and take, humans together with each other, is being resisted. For example, QR code menus. I won't go back to a restaurant that has a QR code menu.
 
Steven Krein: You will not go back to it?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I just want the menu. Just give me the menu. I want to feel it. I want to look at it. And I immediately won't go back to that. I said, why can't I have a menu? And they said, well, it's easier this way. And I said, not easier for me. So I have a question.
 
Steven Krein: Would you like to order digitally or you want to talk to a waiter or waitress? I want to talk to a waiter.
 
Dan Sullivan: And by talking to the waiter, I calculate my tip, you know, I calculate, do they know anything or are they just going through the script, you know? But Jeff was telling me a restaurant in New York where you go in and you have to order your food as you're standing there, you have to pay for it and you have to leave a tip before you go in. And I said, I don't think they'll have repeat business. But my sense is there's a line that's establishing itself, and there's a lot of different examples that I haven't put together, but one of them was the interesting situation between Sam Altman and Scarlett Johansson.
 
Steven Krein: And the idea of the lack of permission or … Well, first of all, she was the voice of her.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, her, yeah. And Sam Altman contacted her. I think he contacted her personally and said, would you be the voice of our Chat GPT? And she said, no, I won't. And then he reproduced her voice anyway. And there was such a backlash that they had to drop it after about three or four days. And that's sort of the creepy wall. I call it the creepy wall. There's sort of like a creepy feeling about it. I mean, first of all, I guess you can ask somebody if that can be their voice. But when you go ahead and you use AI to reproduce the voice anyway, I think you've gone creepy.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, I think there's a whole set of boundaries that are going to have to be established or re-established.
 
Dan Sullivan: And you're a lawyer, so you know some of the territory that we're talking about here. But I think there's going to be a pushback. Here's another example that is the huge growth of vinyl records.
 
Steven Krein: I haven't been following that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and entirely new technology, entirely new kinds of vinyl, where the sound is a lot better. So you're getting album artists again and everything else. So my sense is that there's a kind of a experimentation phase where people see how this goes and at a certain point they say, nah, I don't want that. It's like my giving up television. You know, I'm in my seventh year now of not watching television. And it's been great. It's just been absolutely great. You know, I got 800 hours a year back for six years, that was good. So I'm just wondering, and I want to know the role that maybe COVID really played in this, where people were really forced, really against their will in a lot of jurisdictions, that they couldn't meet with each other, they couldn't talk with each other, they couldn't be with each other. You know, they had to rely entirely on digital communication, and at a certain point they got back. So I think we're in a transition phase, but I think there's a huge pushback. Well, Steve, it's very, very clear that I think we're in relationship to AI right now the way that some German city in the 1400s was after Gutenberg came out with his printing press. And it's kind of hard to predict what's going to happen over the next hundred years. And I think this is one of the great, great transitions technologically. But I think this one affects things politically, economically, culturally, socially, and everything. This is a huge change, what you call the democratization of entrepreneurship. I think that's a key idea, what you identified there.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, I agree. And I think the idea of what looks like an avalanche of tools and capabilities and teamwork and things that a generation of both kids, but a generation of entrepreneurs are going to have at their fingertips is just unprecedented. So the shift to internet, the shift to mobile, now the shift to AI, exponential difference, exponential difference. Great seeing you, Dan.