Simplifying The Complexity Of Capitalism

Steve Krein: Hi, this is Steven Krein. I'm here with my good friend, and partner, and mentor, and coach Dan Sullivan for another episode of The Free Zone Frontier podcast. Hi, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: How are you, Steve?
 
Steve Krein: I am great, feel very excited about today's topic that we're going to talk about, which is your new book called Capitalism—And Everything Else. And I have to say, having read it, listened to it now, done a couple of thinking tools that you've developed around it, quite frankly, this, along with your Thinking About Your Thinking book from last quarter, I think your two best books of all of them-
 
Dan Sullivan: Of the 34. That was 33 and 34, so-
 
Steve Krein: And I was happy before the last two quarters, but I think your Thinking About Your Thinking laid the groundwork for... I think you even called it a little autobiographical in terms of getting inside your head. But when you combine it with this book, and I want to talk about this book and how you've even changed your thinking about the books, as it relates to even bringing it to the community, I don't remember the last time we had a workshop that you brought a quarterly book into it so quickly as the Capitalism book. So, let's talk about it, what it is and what it means, so that everybody who might not have read it yet or listened to it yet can grasp it. And then also, you're learning, even in putting it together, what you came away with.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, first of all, in terms of thinking about it, this is a 50-year-old book. I began thinking that there's something about capitalism that people just aren't getting because they're opposing it as a rival to supposedly other systems like communism, or fascism, or Nazism. And I'm a historical reader. I do a lot of reading about history. And then, of course, as an entrepreneur, you're acting out your beliefs in capitalism. And I think that one thing is, people say, "We have to find a new name for it." And I said, "No, the name is perfectly okay. Your thinking about the name is not okay." And I said, "Capitalism isn't in competition with anything. Capitalism is its own realm, and it's a methodology. And I suspect, if humans have been around for 200,000 years, which seems to be the consensus right now where you can identify humans as humans, very shortly after humans became humans, they started being capitalist."
And the way to get a handle on capitalism is to understand the verb. The verb is capitalize. You're capitalizing. You're capitalizing on your own talent. You're capitalizing on your own time. You're capitalizing on what you produce. You're capitalizing on your ability to become more productive. You're capitalizing on your profitability, keeping more of what you make. And you're capitalizing on living in a world of greater prosperity. So, I said, "You got to zero it." People who don't have any problem with capitalize... I talk to people, "Well, you're capitalizing on that opportunity." And they said, "Yeah, I really am." But they hate capitalism. And I said, "I don't know, but you're creating a competition between something." And the other things, communism, and there was mercantilism, there was feudalism, there's all these -isms, but they weren't methodologies, they were belief systems. They were ideologies, if I can compare it. Methodology is, if you have something unique about you as an individual and you multiply the impact of your uniqueness over, let's say, 10 years or 20 years, you will have done it through the methods of capitalism.
 
Steve Krein: When you think about it under that context and you think about how the typical entrepreneur approaches it, who hasn't thought through the way you just described, what's the biggest aha moment you found, even in the last couple of weeks, it's rolled out and you started sharing it in the workshops?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think the greatest surprise has been the five Ps because I broke the methodology into five growth stages. And they realize that their thinking about these things was pretty fuzzy, or they're going through the five Ps, and the five Ps are pricing, property, productivity, profitability, and prosperity. They weren't really relating it to the reality of their business life, and they weren't relating it to the reality of their personal life. They kind of knew. It was sort of a fuzzy journey. And they know they're capitalists, but they say, "I don't feel good about a lot of things in my capitalist life." But I said, "If capitalism is only these five things, which one don't you feel good about?"
 
Steve Krein: Well, it's interesting because the design is a flywheel, at least the exercise you designed is a flywheel that we walk through, which means it keeps going. And this notion of feeling good about it, I talk to a lot of very wealthy individuals who are giving money to foundations, or hospitals, or making an impact in healthcare, and you wonder... Sometimes, when you ask why, some of them do it because they—and maybe they don't talk about it openly—they feel guilty, they feel a sense of they've been very lucky and blessed and they've got to do something for other people. And there's a deep emotional element to success from capitalistic activities like building a business and entrepreneurship. And so, the five Ps normalizes it a little bit and creates a very non-defensive articulation of capitalism, non-defense or offensive, offensive being an insult, not offensive being intentional.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And to add to this, another dimension, is that where these other belief systems that oftentimes are, in their ideology, they're anti-capitalist, to the degree that those other systems are successful in the world—in other words, they grow and they have greater impact in growth—they're using capitalist methods to get there.
 
Steve Krein: Yup.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I said, "You know you're biting the hand that feeds you here." And I think the reason is is this confusion that these are competing ideological systems. Capitalism isn't an ideological at all. It's just that if, using you as an example, Steve Krein has an idea about a worldwide network of startup health companies because of his own entrepreneurial capitalist experience of taking one firm and growing it from just Steve and himself in a coffee shop to taking a point where it goes through the stages of being an initial public offering, and then you hit the jackpot and your timing is impeccable and you get a big payout, and then the market falls hard for it, and you use that.
 
And I remember even talking to you about it right up to and just after you had sold the company. What I was noticing is that your intention was to move it into a coaching company, and it would have a coaching structure. You stayed with that. I think you did a lot of R&D over a period of six, seven years or whatever it was, and then out it pops that the first thing you had to come to is, how does this get priced? In other words, what's my time worth, and what's my talent worth here, and what do I bring that people on the investor side would be willing to write significant checks? And what do people on the entrepreneurial side bring to it that they would commit their time and they would commit even some of their future property to it? So, that's pricing.
 
And then, since then, you've created massive amounts of intellectual property in the structure of how you did it, the methodology, the processes that you have and everything else, which is all IP. And then, every year, you become more productive, there's greater profitability, and there's a general prosperity among all the people involved in this. They feel they're part of something growing in the world. Well, that's one entrepreneur with his venture. Now, think of millions of entrepreneurs with their ventures, they're going to have to do it exactly the same way.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, yeah. I think, when you break it down into the pricing, property, productivity, profitability, and prosperity, it's a road map. I liked how it's designed as a flywheel, but it's a road map to begin to unpack the complexity of capitalism and simplify it, simplify the complexity. But what I found really interesting as I was listening... And by the way, it happened in the first chapter... Actually, in all fairness, listening to it, not even reading it, your interviews with Shannon... I always appreciate and start with your audio interview that you do for the book with Shannon, but before you even got into the meat of each one of these elements, just laying out the five elements was a reframing, instantly, that you couldn't unhear or unlisten to.
 
And so, as soon as I started reflecting on not just my own company, not just the startups and companies and StartUp Health, but all of my experiences out in the world, you start to realize this is what's happening every day in, not just thousands of [inaudible], businesses and companies, and every big company started out once upon a time as just a one- or two-person show that was an idea that they figured out the price, and add property, and each of those things. And some of them we see 20 years later, some of them we see 100 years later.
 
But inside the belly of the beast of a company that we're running, sometimes you can't appreciate until you lay out your five... Within these five elements, your own bullets, if you will, of how do I think about pricing? What are the ground rules that I've had for pricing it? What kind of property do I value it? And all of a sudden, you start valuing each of these things differently. Even your productivity thing, what am I leveraging for my productivity? I shared with you on the last episode about Rome and the cultural productivity we've had as an organization in the last 90 days was compounded by a new technology that emerged. So, you just start having new vehicles for your thinking.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. But my sense is that wherever the methodology is followed, and more and more people use the methodology, things improve in that setting, things improve within the organization, they improve within communities that do this. And one of the interesting public topics over the last year has been large hedge funds saying, "Well, we're not going to allow any stocks into our hedge fund that don't have a framework where the environment, and social activism, and governance is part of our consideration on whether it's a good investment." Immediately, the shareholders, the investors looked at that and said, "Oh, yeah, yeah. Time to short the stock. Time to short the hedge fund." Because their minds have wandered off the five Ps.
 
And I don't care what it is. I have a hedge fund manager who's been in the Program in Toronto for 30 years, and he says, "When an entrepreneurial company suddenly becomes big, the moment they go into the public realm and they have public stocks," he says, "I watch the personal behavior of the founder. And when the founder starts talking about acquiring a sports franchise," he says, "I short the stock."
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. It's because behavior change follows... I'm assuming the five Ps are organized around a flywheel intentionally because it's not a linear, like left to right, and then it's done, or you stop when you get to prosperity. And I think, therein lies the, are you just doing it to get rich or have a lifestyle or does it cycle back and you keep building on the new level of pricing, and the new offering, and the new more value creation for your customers or for whoever you want to be a hero to?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I'll just have you take a look at this. You have some flywheels that are forever flywheels, and then you have some flywheels that are new project or new initiative. So, there's more than one flywheel going in the company. You can talk about the Strategic Coach as a flywheel, but then you have the Signature Program, and then you have the 10x. So, we have these different flywheels, and you got to pay attention to the five Ps with all of them.
 
Steve Krein: It's interesting, slight deviation, but a metaphorical alignment with Saturday Night Live and the longevity of what Lorne Michaels has done for the last 40 or 50 years. I just went to the after party probably two months ago or three months ago. It was the first time I got to. I went downtown at 1:30 in the morning and went to the after party, and then the after party of the after party. So, I spent five or six hours immersed in their community, and I've read about it, but I actually talked to a number of people on their staff about it, which is, they have a very real flywheel at work. Every Monday through Saturday night, of the 21 weeks a year they're on, there is a set thing they do on Mondays, and it's always ideation and spaghetti against the wall and the writers are just throwing stuff out there.
 
And then Tuesday, there's refinement of that, and they kind of whittle it down to less things. And the set designers and all the staff starts to work on things they need for Saturday. And then Wednesdays, they do certain things, and they start to cut by Thursday. And then Friday, there's dry runs and they're cutting it down even more. Then Saturday, they do, before the actual recording, there's a rehearsal that's about a half-hour longer than the actual show. It's a two-hour rehearsal from 7:00 to 9:00 or something like that. And then, they do the real one at 11:30, but they party afterwards and celebrate every Saturday night. And then, there's a celebration of the celebration after that, ends at 7:00 in the morning. They rest for one day. They repeat. Only 21 weeks a year, and then the other ones are free, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: But think about that flywheel. But what I found fascinating is the flywheel within the design team. They're not worried about a lot of other things, they're just in their area, and the writers and each of the elements. But there's this machine running that will run, hopefully gets passed after Lorne Michaels to somebody else, but he's run this machine and has turned out great new actors, and comedians, and things as a factory. But you just see multiple flywheels at work within a company, pricing, of course, in all the elements of capitalism still at work because clearly advertising in the network, and the distribution, and the shorts. And then, by the way, now, how many different new projects, and programs, and movies have spun out from those people and even Lorne Michaels. But I just saw the parallelism here of the flywheels, but capitalism at work, and it just comes in lots of different flavors, but still from the same team.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And they're part of a network, a big, big TV network. And the thing is that they have to be a growing successful flywheel within the network. And the network is probably owned by a larger corporation. So, there's flywheels within flywheels. But I think that the thing about it that bothers some people is that it demands extraordinary individual accountability. Every step of the process demands that you have to be getting better.
 
Steve Krein: You said it bothers some people?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Of people who don't like being accountable. In the five Ps, there's no place to hide.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. So, in the same way it attracts, it repels.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah.
 
Steve Krein: I mean, attracts the right people, repels the wrong people.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. It's an outgrowth of entrepreneurism in the sense that an individual decides to create something new, decides to take something that exists and improve it, but it's always an individual decision. The process always starts with an individual who has something different on their mind than what is conventional and what is regular. And the other thing is that it disproportionately rewards individuals when they're good at it.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. I'll leave it with one more mention, which is like Lorne Michaels at the center, that is the entrepreneur, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: And then you look at what kind of factory, if you will, of talent he has multiplied out that follow and have similar kind of outgrowths. And so, there's an ecosystem, if you will.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And it actually started with Second City. Second City was the original birthing ground because Lorne Michaels had been part of Second City in Toronto, not the Chicago one because he's a Canadian, Lorne Michaels. So, like John Candy and Mike Myers and all those people came out of the Toronto Second City. So, it started as a live comedy club. And then, Lorne Michaels was the innovator because he said, "Why not do live television?" Because who's got the guts to do live television?
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: "You mean no editors?" "No. No. No cutting floor..." It's very exciting.
 
Steve Krein: He's very smart. When you take, and think about, and you go back to the ecosystem we were talking about before, capitalism applied to that, controlling the pricing of what you're producing. In the case of Lorne Michaels now owning all of late night TV, and the Tonight Show, and those things. And then, how many movies come out with people that originated on Saturday Night Live, and he's producing that work, and Broadway shows that are coming from that. And then, the property emerges. You start to see that he's built this incredible base of intellectual property, and content, and things that he owns, and that's owned by the different entities he's created. But the productivity engine is fascinating and the teamwork that goes into it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. And to go through that school, if you want to call it the school, the-
 
Steve Krein: It is, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: ... Saturday Night school, for someone to go through that and be part of it, I think puts you in an extraordinary advantage for anything that you do afterwards because you have this-
 
Steve Krein: Well, you got the five Ps locked. You see like an Adam Sandler who locks the five Ps in, there's plenty of other people that have gone through and not done anything. They didn't grab the five Ps. But the smart ones... I shouldn't even say the smart ones, the entrepreneurially-minded people who go through their school come out with the five Ps, even though if they don't realize, they come out with those five Ps, they then go create their own five Ps.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the things, because I was interviewed on this yesterday on a podcast with Mark Young, and name of that podcast is American Happiness. And I said, one of the things that I think understanding capitalism in this way, people understand that the United States was instituted as a capitalist republic. People say the United States isn't even a democracy anymore. And I said that the United States was never a democracy in the first place. It uses democratic methods in some of the election process, but it's actually a republic, and it's made a whole series of interesting innovations that the people are going to be represented at the federal level, but they're going to be represented at the state level. And the states themselves are the representatives within the national government.
 
So, it's got lots of interesting- They're rules. But at the basis is that I think that the founders in the 1770s and '80s had a profound sense of capitalism. They didn't sketch out capitalism. And as a matter of fact, there's no mention of capitalism whatsoever in the founding papers, the Constitution. But it's interesting that I was pointing out to Mark and he says, "We're changing, we're going way off course." And I said, "Yeah, but this has happened 50 times over the last 250 years that there seems to be a diversion and you're going such a way. But actually, if you think about it, in the last 250 years, the country that has changed the least in the world is the United States."
 
Steve Krein: And it was created by kids.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, they were in their twenties. Then they lived until their seventies and eighties.
 
Steve Krein: Which at the time is into their hundreds now, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. But the Constitution, 1787 is when it was more or less agreed to, and then they had to get all the colonies to buy in to become states. If you typed it out in those days, single space on 8.5x11 paper, it was 23 pages. And 250 years later, it's 27 pages. They've added four pages to the basic operating system. And it's actually designed to stay the same so that the economic system can change, there's this enormous growth. And it's the only country in the last 150 years, 15 decades in a row, that has a higher, a more successful economy at the end of each decade, 15 decades in a row. And the reason is, they don't tamper with the governmental operating system. Think of the rituals, I mean the congressional rituals, the senate rituals, the governor rituals, and you have these cycles, the presidential cycles and everything else, but they're not much different now than they were 200 years ago.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. And if a country can run for that long, think about a company and the framework of a mission for a company having enough flexibility, but enough direction and commitment, to follow that direction. You wonder, and I don't want to know if this is taking it too far with your five Ps, but can you apply the five Ps to the country? And can you apply it entrepreneurially to that? Or is that taking it too far, and is it really just about the individual organization and people?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, what's interesting is to watch the competition among the states, that some states are growing in economic terms and some of them are declining. And that's always true. That's always been true right from the beginning. Two hundred years ago, New England was the powerhouse of the country. We were in Manchester, New Hampshire, to visit Dean Kamen's enterprise there. And this was the greatest fabric manufacturing center in the world, right up until about the 1850s or so. And Levi Strauss started there, and they had like 20,000 workers in these buildings and everything like that. And then it all went south, it all went to the Carolinas and Georgia, and then it even went further. It went to Southeast Asia and it went to South America.
 
And so, these places became ghost towns also. And I grew up in the Midwest, in Ohio, and that was the most industrial state. They elected seven presidents from Ohio over a period of 50 or 60 years. It was just a powerhouse of industry. And then, after the Second World War, it went overseas—the jobs went overseas, manufacturing went overseas—and now it's coming back, and now we're going through a period when it's coming back. But throughout that entire period, the governmental structure didn't change at all.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, it allowed for a lot of that. Looking across your global community of clients, do you see cultural acceptance of capitalistic progress and what these five Ps represent country to country, in particular where people are finding a tribe of other people who make them feel good about it or bad about it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I will tell you this, that the clients who come from different countries value Strategic Coach because they're connected to America. That's the British clients. They love it because they're talking to Americans. The Canadian clients, they love it because they're talking to Americans. We have a really top entrepreneur in Lahore in Pakistan. And he said, "More and more, I believe that I have to come to the workshops in the United States, I have to come to Chicago, because I have to be among Americans." And so, my belief is that the gold standard in the capitalist world is the United States, and the reason is because it's taken for granted. People can talk about this bad thing that they associate with capitalism or that, and this is cruel, and everything else. But the next day, they go to work and they're successful by using capitalist methods.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Reflecting on our community, we're about 80% in the U.S. And the value that people from outside the U.S. get is what you're describing in terms of how people here think. That being said, there's a lot of the reverse admiration for some of the less complex places to innovate in healthcare. And so, health innovation globally, in many ways, the U.S. is behind in a lot of the health innovation and impact that can be made because of the speed and lack of some of the regulatory and other business model hurdles that you have. That being said, when you open it up to a global conversation, the bidirectional nature of it creates a little bit of a better stew, if you will, of community, of different perspectives, different struggles, different challenges. And the idea of what capitalism means here, oftentimes when it comes to healthcare and health innovation, gets logjam because of how difficult it is to be a capitalist in a traditional healthcare system.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I think, from an innovation standpoint, and I mentioned this when you came to the first Free Zone Summit in Chicago, I said, "It seems to me that you've created the first global entrepreneurial R&D lab." And I'm as committed in that viewpoint now as I was four years ago. And you've taken advantage that this innovation that's taking place, but you've created in a single system and you've done it in a very American way. In other words, just the structure and how you are able to combine the investment market with the entrepreneurial market, I don't think someone in Europe would've come up with that idea. I don't think they'd have been able to pull it off.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: The big thing that the U.S. is, it's not so much in innovation, it's the incredible power of the capital markets in the United States. In the United States, you can get a new thing to the marketplace faster and with muscle than you can anywhere else on the planet.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Within the lens of healthcare and doing that, what I've found is that a lot of people don't think you can mix capitalism with impact. So, can you make money and can you make impact? There's a framework called double bottom line, and I'm not talking about the ESG double bottom line. I'm saying where you can make money and make impact. In fact, you can make more impact if you make money; therefore, they go together.
 
So, philanthropic endeavors oftentimes fall flat because they don't have the capitalistic framework in it, capitalism. And so, having an entrepreneurial mindset and a transformational mindset within a healthcare ecosystem and industry oftentimes gets watered down on both sides. But I think your capitalism framework, and this is how I've been thinking about it for the last few weeks since I listened to the book for the first time, I think it needs to be integrated with the impact that needs to be made for true improvement on people's lives. And I know there's a whole age-reversal program or Lifetime Extender program, and things like that, but a lot of that innovation... And by the way, I think on one of our last episodes where we interviewed how important philanthropy has a role in the early stages of health innovation, but really to get it to market-
 
Dan Sullivan: That was with Tim Nelson, our interview.
 
Steve Krein: Tim Nelson. But to really make its way to patients and families, it needs to be at a commercial [inaudible], and commercial institution and scale requires a capitalistic framework of the five Ps.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And one of the things, when Steve and I had a podcast interview with Dr. Tim Nelson, who's part of the Mayo Clinic network, but he has just been given FDA approval for a stem cell cure to one aspect of congenital heart disease in newborn babies. And this was all done with the funding of one billionaire family who had the problem in their family. They had the daughter who had this problem. They met Tim Nelson at a conference, and they said, "Are you the kind of scientist and researcher that will stay with something until there's a cure?" And he said, "Yes." And they said, "Well, we're the kind of funder that will stay with you until there's a cure." And that was nine years and $130 million, and they got the cure.
 
But now, what he's doing is that the family has said, "Now, what we're going to do is, we're going to take a look at all the other cures that are necessary for congenital heart disease, and we're going to create a club of billionaires, and each of the billionaires are going to fund one cure." And I said, "Tim, I think you've created an entirely new funding model here."
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the thing is that it's matching commitment. You got 100% commitment on one side, and you have 100% commitment on the other.
 
Steve Krein: Alignment of mindset from the beginning.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: Everyone is talking about how important that alignment is and how often it's overlooked and not dealt with.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and the other thing, you know yourself, Steve, that the way things have developed around certain issues, like cancer, is that there are far more people living off of cancer than dying of cancer. And if you cure it, well, what's going to happen to the spring cancer ball? It's a social affair. So, what are we going to replace the spring ball or the... So, there's a whole socialization and politicization that happens around philanthropy, and they talk good stories and everything else, but you say, "Well, what if in the next 12 months, cancer is completely cured? We have a universal cure for every kind of cancer. Are you okay with that?" And they said, "Yeah, but what are we going to have the ball for, the spring ball? Or the Christmas event?"
 
Steve Krein: So, I want to bookend... We're out of time. This is fascinating. What's your biggest insight? I think, from the perspective of going through the process of writing it, now sharing it, and I think engaging with the community with it and this conversation, what's your biggest insight from today's conversation about capitalism and the framework?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think the thing is that I've created a nice binary model in the sense that there's nothing ideological about capitalism. It's not a belief system, it's a results system, and it starts with individuals who have a sense of uniqueness about themselves. And their first step is to say, "If I just devoted myself to my idea, then who pays for my time? And who pays for my talent? And who pays for my results?" So, you have to start off with pricing. And then, you have to say, "Well, in addition to being successful and getting paid a lot, am I accumulating any innovative property that I actually own in this process?" And then you go up through productivity, and profitability, and prosperity. And my feeling is that it's the organizing structure for any existing or new quality control system for any economic activity that wants to grow.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that perspective as well as you share it. As I've gone through listening, reading now, going through a couple tools and talking about it further, I'm continually interested in the intersection of it with the impact that needs to be made in healthcare and the problems that need to be solved, and how to weave this in to that conversation. Because the interesting thing that, again, now 450, 60 companies in, I have a deep appreciation for some very simple questions that a lot of entrepreneurs in healthcare—many by the way, who are clinical or academic side come in—which is, "So, how are you going to make money? How are you going to make money? How is your company going to make money? How are your other stakeholders or investors going to make money?" And it makes people uncomfortable sometimes-
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.
 
Steve Krein: ... to ask that question. And when you mix the two and you say, "Well, just important from day one. How do you even think you're going to make money?"
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: Getting about even knowing it, and you say, "What's your vision for this and how do you think it's going to work and how would you begin to price it?" It's an interesting question that is probably, although it evolves, probably the best first question to ask.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.
 
Steve Krein: Even when you're trying to solve a big health problem, you talk about cancer, or any disease, or illness, at the end of the day, the whole flow and the flywheel, if it's going to reach patients and families, somebody's paying for it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's what's going to make it work, the fact that people will pay money for what you're thinking about. Otherwise, it doesn't propagate itself out in the world. It's a really interesting thing. There was a great speaker at A360 on artificial intelligence. Do you know Palmer Luckey?
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. He was there, and he was really, really interesting. I think he shocked Peter, and I think he shocked a lot of the people who were there. He said, "One of my biggest lessons as an entrepreneur is not to follow my dreams." He says, "My biggest insight is to follow your talent." And he says, "What are you really good at that people will pay a lot of money?" He says, "Wherever that goes, follow it."
 
Steve Krein: I love it.
 
Dan Sullivan: And what he said is, "I thought we were going to create really, really neat software stuff, and gaming stuff, and everything. And you know where my talent is most utilized? It's creating really great weapons systems for the U.S. government." He says, "I'm really, really good at creating weapons systems." And he said, "And the more I found my talent, I found the more patriotic I became."
 
Steve Krein: I love it. I love it. Perfect bookend for this episode.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, I mean that it relates to.
 
Steve Krein: It does. It does. And I think even gives fodder for the next episode. Dig into that. Great seeing you as always, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you.