Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

All right, all right, all right, all right, all right. Let's get the show on

the road. All right. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

podcast episode number

149Do Androids Dream

of Electric Sheep by fellow K. Dick with John

Hill aka Small Mountain in

3, 2, 1.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is

Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode

number 159.

We will open our show today with a

short yet iconic speech that resonates

both as a naive warning and as a prescient

prediction of humanity's future. And I'm thinking that

future is just about 10 minutes from now.

And I quote, I've seen things you people

wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the

shoulder of Orion. I watch sea beams glitter

in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All

those moments will be lost in time like tears in

the rain. Time to die.

Close quote.

Combine that from Roy Batty with this

little tidbit I recently pulled from a email

newsletter list that I'm a part of that tracks trends.

It was published in January of 2025 from a

story on Forbes.com so take from this what you

will, and I quote the CEO of one of the leading

manufacturers of humanoid robots says it has signed a

second commercial customer that is, quote, one of the

biggest US Companies. Close quote Figure

CEO Brett Adcock also said that he sees the potential

to ship 100,000 humanoid robots over

the next four years and said that figure is focused on two

markets, commercial and home. And I quote

directly from Forbes quoting Figure CEO

Brett Adcock, our newest customer is one of the biggest US companies, Adcock says

in an update on LinkedIn it gives us potential to ship at high volumes,

which will drive cost reduction and AI data collection between

both customers. We believe there is a path to 100,000 robots

over the next four years. Those

as of January 2025, close quote

100,000 robots, humanoid robots no less, in

commercial and home applications by 2029 or maybe 2030

at the latest. Right? Oh, and by the way, these humanoid

robots will be equipped with baseline large language model programming, in case any

of you are wondering out there. Thus taking the next leap forward in

seeking to solve the embodiment problem inherent in AI and

robotics understanding. Since Alan Turing

came up with the Turing Test back in the

1940s.

Our. Author today would only be surprised that it

took all of us until about 2025 to arrive at the

doorstep of our brave new world. With, of course, echoes of

our cowardly old world. And that we got here without a major

nuclear exchange and without colonies

on the moon, without vacations to Mars or

even interstellar exploration. No, no. We got here with

144 characters and people endlessly hot, taking each

other about things that don't matter.

We've seen things our author today would agree

that he wouldn't believe.

Today on this episode of the podcast, we will recommending that leader. Recommending

what leaders can do and what leaders can think and how

leaders should behave in times of cynically delivered technological

fantasies, fatalistic opportunism and endless

denuding cultural slop by exploring

insights provided for us from the book Do

Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By

Philip K. Dick. Leaders.

We're soon going to find out the answer

to the title question

and we are going to be joined on the show today by our co

host rejoining us from episode number 122. By the

way, I've looked through it appears that he has been on at least seven

episodes with us. So he's officially sort of getting ready to arc into that

regular guest co host slot, working his way

up past some other competitors like Libby Unger and Richard

Messing. So that's good. He's got a goal

now. And in episode number

122, we discuss Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Our guest host is with us today from an

undisclosed location deep,

deep in the heart of the American West.

John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. How you doing,

John? I am

loving my life right now. I'm on vacation, family road trip. We're in

New Mexico. So that's as, that's as disclosed as we're going to get here.

Right. Because I'm in the land of Enchantment. So come find me if you want

to come hang out and. Yeah, I

can, I, can I talk about my, my unique perspective on this or do you

want to talk a. Little more about the book? No, go ahead, jump in. One

thing I will say is. We. Are,

because this book is still under vicious copyright, we are not going to be reading

directly from the book today. We will. Oh, okay. If you, if

you, if you, if. We will be reading clips, pieces, little paragraphs here and there

to make larger points, but we will be referencing and framing pieces

of the book for folks just like we did on our introductory episode, episode number

158. I recommend you go back and listen to that before you listen to this,

which frames some of the themes, the larger themes that we're going to be talking

about today in our new, our new format where I do an

intro episode by myself, and then I bring on a guest, and we sort of

break this down a little bit larger level. Cool. So we're doing that. This

is part of the new format. Oh, yeah, that's right. You haven't, you haven't been

around since the new format. Yeah, this is, this is the new, this is the

new thing, John. Okay. Doing, doing a little bit of, kind of a little bit

different thing. That way we could do a deeper dive into, into books. Plus, it

also lightens the, the reading load on, on

me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I. Whenever we first

started talking about shows and episodes and everything, and you were showing me your

schedule, I had a moment of like,

how, how, like, I read a lot, you know, and you go ask my

friends who don't read, and, like, in their perspective, I must be

just, like, locked in a tomb 24 hours a day. Right? But then I see

your schedule of just, like, the stuff that. And I was like, oh, there's no

way he keeps this. And we've known each other for a couple of years now,

and you, like, this is the first year that you've had to, like,

move anything, at least in, in my, in, you know, in

relation to me, right? Well, I, I, I moved. So

I will say this. I went from running eight

books a month to running four books a month now.

So I'm currently reading, just so that you know that y' all know, because

these are all upcoming on the podcast. I'm reading Empire of the Summer Moon,

which is getting turned into a show written by Taylor Sheridan.

So I'm kind of on a little bit of a little bit of a kick

on that. Then I'm also reading B.H. liddell Hart's

why Don't We Learn From History? That's going to be coming up in October.

I'm about 75% through. We talked about this just before we hit record, about

75% through Martian Chronicles. And

I started. Interesting enough, I started Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which we're going to

read in June. And I got to a point in

Huxley where I had to get off the train. And I won't talk about why

on this episode, but I had to get off the train with Huxley.

I was just. I was done. I was like, I mean, I see where you're

going, Aldous, but we're. We're finished here. We're good.

We're good. So I'm curious, right? As a guy who has

this show, right, and promotes this idea that, like, you don't need to

reinvent the wheel. Someone has gone through something similar, right? And you. And you spend

a lot of time looking back at this. And I'm also very aware that, like,

we're not on topic at all, but I'm in vacation mode, so you just have

to, like, wrangle me. So. So how do you deal with

a book like that?

Right? Like, you. You see, like, is it. When you can see

where it's going, you're like, okay, like, I'm not going with you.

Is it like. Like, how. When does Hay San decide that a book is

not worth it? How does Hasan quit a book? Like, how. How do you go

through that process? I'm very fascinated with how people grade reading,

think about reading, quitting points, when to put down a book, and stuff like that.

Because life is just. I want to read everything. Life is just too short, though,

you know? Yeah. Yeah. So for me,

and this is just my. My perspective, your mileage will vary,

right? You know, you're asking me the question. I host the show. So here

we go.

If I reach a point in a book where it.

The writer is postulating an idea

where I can see the logical outcropping of that idea,

and they're not. They're not. They're telegraphing sort of where they're going to be

going. And I don't. I'm not

in agreement with that idea, or I find that idea. And really,

agreement's really a tenuous one because I can read a lot of things I do.

I read a lot of things I don't agree with. So let's not really put

too much stock into that. It's the idea that I

find morally repugnant that violates my. And we talked a little bit

about morals and ethics before in Fahrenheit 451. And,

you know, my morality is. Is. Is. Is influenced.

Good, bad, ugly, or different? It's. It's influenced by how I

perceive, not how I perceive. No, it is influenced

by how I practice my Christianity. Okay. It's influenced by how I practice my religion.

It just is. And I would be lying if I said it. It wasn't.

I think most people do lie. You are being influenced by something that's a higher

thing. You just don't know how to identify it. Right. And you don't really know

how to talk about it. So if I'm in a book and this is

just me again, not everybody else, just me. If I'm in a book

and. And I'm going along, I'm Bebopping along and I find

something to be morally repugnant in there. And I can see that the author is

sort of using this to make a larger point.

I will say to myself and to the author,

you know, I don't have to go down that road with you. I'm

not required to now. I will tell you, it's taken me a long time to

get to that point, you know, So I read Brave New World

when I was probably 15 or 16 maybe,

was the first time I interacted with that book. And I

was in a totally different stage of life. I had, you know, didn't have kids.

I didn't have responsibilities. I read

it in. In parallel to or right around the same time that I

also read. I was reading the Stand

by Stephen King. Oh, wow. So there's kind of a lot of things going on

here together. I have not read either one of those

books, but Melissa's a huge Stephen

King fan, and she's like, hey, anytime you're ready. And she'll just kind of point

to it. And I'm like, I know it's there, but, like, I'm not ready for

it, you know, so. So some of the worst excesses of COVID you will

find in the Stand. Oh, that's interesting. Okay.

It's. It's what, logically? No, it's one of those

books that the first time I read it, it. And I was already,

as you can imagine, I was already walking down the road to being jaded at

15. And that even led. I

mean, that book even, you know, had the bottom dropping out of me,

you know, because he

nailed human patterns of behavior

so accurately in that. And so

particularly when all the rules are off, right? When there's no more boundaries, no

more restrictions, what are people actually going to do? How. How.

What's the pattern, the typical pattern of human behavior? Then let's just logically

push that forward. Huxley, on the other hand,

Brave New World focuses around hedonic pleasure and

around what hedonism looks like. And how do

we. How is that

used for utopian ends by people who want to be in

control and be in power? And you can see a lot of that in our

own culture right now. Okay. And

so where I have wound up, you know, 30 years

later with kids and with a perspective

on the hedonic culture, that's. It's probably counterculture

and sort of where I go with all of that. I. I

can't follow a quote unquote free thinker like Huxley. He would say,

I'm I'm captured by morality. Nietzsche would say a slave

morality. I would disagree with Nietzsche too. I don't think he really understood what he's

talking about there, but that's what he would say. And that's, and that's sort of

where I go with Huxley. And so I'm having this philosophical battle with the author.

And I do this, by the way, in every book that I read. Am I

having this philosophical battle with this author? So

I mentioned Empire of the Summer Moon, and that's another book there too, where I'm

sort of having this philosophical battle with the author. Yeah. When you first

started to talk about your way of thinking around this, I was kind of confused

for a moment, right? And then I was like, okay, but to put this

into a business book context, right, because everybody's own business books and you do as

well, right. So if I'm hearing you correctly, if, if,

you know, even if it's like a very highly touted business book, right.

If they're making the example use case off of,

you know, Hugh Hefner or Larry Flint or,

you know, or, or anything in that realm, like, like, if that is

the use case that's forming your thinking. We did. Like, like, like that's just where

you called it is kind of what I'm hearing. Okay. Yeah, that's what I'm going

to call the game. And that's for me, like, I'm not saying that that has

to be for everybody. And you know what? Quite frankly, maybe the author gets to

a different spot on the other end of it. And that's kind of my, that's

kind of my, like, next question. Right? Because, like, I, you know,

I'm like you in my, in my own way of, like,

I. Sometimes it's just too real. Like, sometimes it's just I don't, you

know, I don't need to subject myself to this, you know, and stuff like that.

But then on the other side of it, I am concerned about building an echo

chamber, right? Of just having, you know, people around me believe what I believe

and the books on my shelves that I really like because they just, you know,

validate all my thinking that's already there in place and everything, you know, and it's

weird because I try to, I try to have

some balance to this stuff, right? Like, I'll, I'll try to go finish

a book that, like, I'm, like, struggling with or, you know, I'll, I'll go dive

into a conversation with someone who I know is polar opposite of me just because,

like, I can respect them enough that I can, you know, hear them out

and leave it, you know. But you know,

to me, I think that that's, I think that that is also dangerous, right? Of,

you know, you know, there's line and stoicism of like

the worst place you can be before you know who you are is in a

crowd, right? And then, and then the worst place to be after you know

who you are is also in a crowd. It's also in a crowd.

So like, I don't know, I like it's Seneca or like Epictetus. I'm not sure

which one it is. But like, I just think about that all the time because,

like, man, I was hanging out in these crowds and I'm drinking from that Kool

Aid and stuff like this, and now it's just like, I know to avoid those,

those circles that like just don't serve me and everything else like that.

But I also try to live by the idea that I should be challenged. My

con, my, my blind spots, my conventions, my thinking and stuff like that.

Because I also think that it's easy to get complacent. So

I think that there's multiple different ways to do that. And I think

books, obviously, conversations with people who, to your point,

are of opposing viewpoints or perspectives. I

honestly, I don't, I never,

and I don't want people listening to this to think that I'm a censorious person,

because I'm not. I want everything published. Publish it all. That's why

we have free speech. Absolutely should all. The government should take no position.

Don't get me started on government schools and government school run

libraries. Don't get me started on that nonsense. Just don't.

Government should take no position. Library should actually be funded by the public,

or by the way, public by private individuals. Put whatever you want to put in

there and let's move on. The

responsibility for curating and

quite frankly censoring ideas

comes from not an overall

institution. But quite frankly, and this is why you have free speech from the

culture. Yeah, the culture will figure it

out. And what we see if we

have robust free speech and robust book publishing,

which is also why I'm opposed to some of the things going on with

LLMs, I see a narrowing of

view and a narrowing of thought that is supposed to be the

majority. So I'll go back to Brave new world.

Huxley's perspective on hedonistic

pleasure has become the dominant perspective. And I say this with

absolutely no. What do you call it?

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not taking a position on this one way or another,

whether this is a good or bad. I'm just saying this is a fact. I

think we can look around and see it. We also

have enough examples

of people of all different age brackets and

ranges literally from cradle to grave being

influenced around what their hedonic pleasures should be.

And primarily, this is being driven by the cell phones.

Okay. Yeah, okay.

Huxley won the argument.

Guys like me lost. We lost. It's fine. We

lost. And by the way. By the way, I'm not saying by the way that

the argument is. It's still ongoing. I'm merely saying that we lost the argument.

Now, does that mean that we shouldn't stop having it? No. Does that mean the

discussion shouldn't still be going on? No, it will be, because people can't shut up

about it. But. But we lost. And that's. And

by the way, that's the thing that happens in culture. Culture decides who wins and

loses, right? And that's very tough for us to deal with

either side of the argument, right? And then we want. And then we want to.

And then we want to dump it off into politics and make it a political

thing, when in reality it's not. It's a cultural thing. It is a cultural thing.

Um, this is fascinating because I just read this other book, right? The. The.

The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, and it. Oh, yeah, really?

Really? This is my second book by him that I've dove into. The first one

was Start with why, and a friend of recommended this one, and, man, it was

so good, because I think it brings a lot of

interesting perspective to the conversation you're having, right? Like

that, like, culture is an ongoing game. It's not like a. Like a.

You know, and if you're trying to win at it, right, you're taking it out

of this finite, kind of dense, beautiful tapestry and stuff like that, to use

all these very weird, crunchy labels, because I'm in New Mexico and I'm allowed come

after me if you don't like it, right? Versus

this, like, okay, we lost the argument. Okay, well, like, hey,

like, you know, but there's also these. These other trends and

encounters to this whole thing, right? Because, like, you know, I think

that maybe some of this freewheeling, you know, that we're dealing

with now is. Is kind of this, like, right, You.

You put. You run it through the machine, right? And the tightening machine happens, right?

And. Right? It's. It's the. It's the same reason why, like every

preacher's kid has like an amazing college experience, you know, kind of thing.

Right.

Well, to your point, and this is one of the reasons why I talk a

little bit about the end of the fourth turning on this show. So I do

think. I do believe more and more in historical

cycles. Right, yeah, agreed, same.

And so I do fundamentally believe that in 2025,

when we're recording this together, that you and

I are at the end of a particular 25 year cycle.

I do believe it is wrapping up. Oh, okay, interesting. And I

think the next cycle is going to.

The players will have similar names or similar

functions. I should maybe say that similar mindsets, but. But different labels,

those mindsets. Yeah. Well, no, no, I think even the mindsets are

shifting around. I'm seeing signs.

Mindsets. Mindsets are shifting around because these things

start. And I actually talked about this, interestingly enough with, with Tom libby

on episode 157 about Sitting Bull as well, brought up this point.

But I think mindsets start at the center. I used to think they started

at the edges in the places that we typically associate with culture,

cultural dominance in this country. So la, New York,

dc. Right. I think.

And we don't understand a vibe. Vibe shift. We don't

understand a thing. A thing that's happened until.

Right. I hate. Hate that term. But we. We don't understand a thing that's

happened until we're outside of it. And so it's very hard to see

it when we're in it. Well, it's just too easy to be like, this is

the right way, because these are the decisions that I'm making and I've not died

yet. Right. So it's like weird. It's this weird survivorship bias

thing. Oh, man. Beautiful book on this whole idea by.

Is it to Live? Oh, yeah. To live, yeah. Oh, God, Phenomenal book.

Right. And like, as a poker player and like, I spent a whole

lot of time having to get really comfortable with the idea of, like, just because

I made the decision doesn't make it right. And just make it right. Just because

I won the hand doesn't mean that that's the way that I should play this

hand again next time and next time and next time and next time and next

time. Right, well. And you're not. And you're not. Also not. You're also trying to

not be blinded by a hindsight heuristic. Well, well. But the first

thing that you have to acknowledge is that, like, hindsight is not the 2020 thing.

That everyone is just going around talking about, like, hey, you know how perfect that

is? Like, let's acknowledge the fact that, like, we got lucky, right?

In most situations, you know, like most people, like when,

when I talk about, like, poker with people that have never played poker before, and

they're like. And I'm like, oh, you're just thinking that this is like, well, you

either one of your law won or lost. And that's the only decision making, right?

Any hand of poker that plays to the, on average 18

different decision points in it, and every one of those decision points leads to a

different reality at the end of the day. And sales conversations are remarkably similar.

Let me just pitch you. Let me just see if you actually need any of

these things that I do. But first, in your reality will change completely, right?

You have people and they're pushing their ideas and their agendas and their. But it's

the same kind of, like, thing. But you have to think about probabilistic thinking. And

then when I do this, what could happen? What is most likely

to happen and then what never happens because we actually go out and test it,

right? And people don't do this in sales, but I wish that they did because

people would like salespeople a whole lot more. Right. If we actually, like, tested

in, like, well, tested for benchmark, as opposed to just thinking that benchmarks were just

pushy. But everybody's sample size is too small. Oh,

yeah. Oh, you know, we can't talk about. Hold on. We can talk

about that. Like, we need 17 books

on just this topic. And you would still have every one of your

listeners be like, well, hey, son, I made three cold calls. Cold

calling is dead because I didn't talk to anyone to book an appointment to close

a deal. Oh, did you make them all in the last 10 minutes? Like, I,

I mean, come. I mean, like, sample size and time duration are these two things

that people are not thinking about when they're thinking about any of these. Any of

these things. And it's. Right. And so the question you have to ask is at

a cultural level. So we talk about that in business. Yeah. At a

cultural level. Let's scale this up to culture, right? So

just in the United States, just let's keep it. The sample size to

the, to the third of the continent that we're spread across. Let's just keep it

to that for just a minute. Okay.

350. Approaching

350 million people on this continent. Right.

Okay. Okay.

And it terrifies me, like, like in those moments, you know,

like, It's. It's been so interesting to come up here because, like, I

told some friends that I was coming to New Mexico on vacation. Like, oh, man,

where are you going? I was like, well, we're going. And they were like, why?

And I was like, because I just want to go explore. I don't know. I

like the state. I think it's cool. I like mountains, you know, and I like

not having to go all the way to Colorado. So what? And everyone was like,

man, you should just go to Colorado or you should go to the. Like, everyone

has an opinion and an idea. Everything else like this. And I was just like,

cool, I'm gonna go validate this for my own stuff. And you know what? We're

having an amazing time. Like, my family loves thing. Like, my

daughter's like, you know what? I could switch schools. And my wife was like, we

could be outdoors. Like, everything is going according to plan. And if I listen to,

like, all my friends that are like, man, why don't you just go to, like,

LA or Vegas? Because I don't want to, guys. You know, so we're

here and everyone is so delightfully weird in a way that

doesn't really give a whole lot of space for. Right? Yeah, just

call that what it is. Sure. And. But then

it's just this whole new perspective of all of this stuff, like, coming

in and, like, you're allowed to do what you want, which is really nice and

cool. But this is why I don't. This is why I

don't work B2C, honestly. Right? There you go. Right? Because there's

too many Cs, and every C has

their own opinion, and every C thinks that their thing is

unique to them, which I guess it is to them, but it's not.

And the thing is, when you're a consumer, right, and you're just thinking about yourself

and your own needs and everything else like this, it's super easy to be like,

you know what? Improvement can wait. Right? The diet. Oh, yeah. The change starts

next week and everything else like that. And. Right. But like, in a business, there

is. You're supposed to be working on something, right?

And that's, that's why I don't, like, I don't want to go rattle the cages

of people that are not ready for it to be rattled. Right? And that's a

big thing of how I teach people of, like, if you're trying to force your

way in, what happens after they say yes? Now you got to

deliver under duress in high pressure environments. And how excited

are you to do that? Right? As opposed to going and finding someone and being

like, hey, I had an idea. And they say, hey, that sounds like an interesting

idea. I'd like to explore that with you. These are two different realities, right? And

you can explore either one. And it's going to lead to you hating your

business, hating your life, hating sales or anything else like this or

it being manageable. Well, and that gets to this.

Well, that gets back to my point about cycles, because we don't at

a sociocultural level, because it's so complicated and the

sample size is way the hell too big than the individual.

Just on our small sample size of the continent of North America and

the population of the United States, okay, that is a hyper gigantic

sample size for most people. Right. And so

the dynamic at a sociocultural level of cycle shifting, you

don't see that until you're outside of it, on the other end of it.

And so when I say things like the chaos

that has started, that started with September 11th is almost over

or is over and now we have to prepare for something else, I will tell

you, 99% of people look at me like I'm crazy because

I'm not saying, I'm not saying that Aldous Huxley's

brave New world hedonistic perspective on whatever pleasure

isn't still going to be around. I'm also not saying that

Philip K. Dick, to go back to the book for just a second, that Philip

K. Dick's perspective on

robots, I mean, we just read from the future CEO who wants to have a

hundred thousand humanoid robots walking around by 2030. I'm not

saying that that isn't a possibility. And I'm not saying there will be a whole

parade of horrors that will open up from that. I think there will be. But

I think that the ways in which those are going to be dealt with

are not going to be addressed or are not. The ways in which those are

going to be dealt with are not going to be the same ways with the

same mindset as someone in the last historical cycle, the last

historical spring in the America which was, you know, the

1940s, the end of World War II, going into the mid-60s. It's just not.

You're not going to have silent generation people who saw their buddies, heads blown

off in Okinawa, dealing with robots, bots. Yeah, it's very.

And that's what we don't understand about, about historical cycles. That's what we don't get.

It's going to be people like you and me and our kids dealing with

humanoid robots. Well, like, man, there's,

I, I, I might have lived a whole life in the, in the time that

you were talking through that, because I just started thinking about everything. You know, I

started thinking about

that, like, this all starts with, like, innovation, like, what can we

do? What is there, right? And to be clear, I'd not

read this book before, and I have not read the Asimov books either, right? So

some of the stuff I'm getting to appreciate, kind of new, right? My path

into science fiction fantasy was, like, through, like, Gerald, which is like,

you know, in, like, Heinlein and stuff like this. Heinlein. Heinlein. However you want to

say it, it doesn't matter. But I was reading all that stuff, right? And so

I go to my brother and who, who was an Asimov fan, and I was

like, hey, should I be reading Asimov? He's like, no, you're too young. Enjoy all

this other stuff. And then I just haven't ever come back to it. But now

I get to experience all this as, like, an adult who's, like, also living in

versions of this, right? And it's delightful because it's not

exactly that. It's not exactly what he's talking about in the book. But,

like, I could see that, right? A couple of decisions going different ways,

right? Like in this, in this rich tapestry that we're talking about, decisive

moments and everything. A couple little things going the other way. Like, you know,

it's not crazy, right? But then what I think he does such a

good job of in the book is just, like,

how we would, how we would justify everything that we would justify that happens in

this book. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, that, to me, is the

most fascinating part of it. And this, this

very interesting thing. It's like all the nerds are worried because the nerds are the

people who read this book, these books, right? But they're also the people that are

going to be pushing to make them better and to make them improved and everything

else like this. And then everyone else who's like, oh, it's not going to be

a problem, are going to inherit this problem because

they're also going to be the people that are pushing for all the advancement. I

want it better. I want it better. I want it to do more. I want

it to do more. Okay, cool. And then we're going to. And then inadvertently, it's

going to tip the scales, and then there's money behind it, and then

it's just like, in the book to where they're trying to, like, see, like, what

can they get away with? And it's such an interesting. And it's going to happen.

It's absolutely going to happen. This is my first. This is my first

beat on this book. The nerds

want the technology. So the nerds all read Martian Chronicles when they

were kids. The nerds all read. All

read Philip K. Dick. And they all. Not just. Not just

do androids dreamable as your sheep. I mean, they read the three stigmata of Palmer

Eldrick. They read Scanner Darkly. They read all of it, right?

And they mixed all this together with, to your point, the Trillion

Dollar Company. Like, even Elon has said he read science fiction. Peter Thiel,

Sam Altman, all these guys, right? And they

learned precisely the wrong lessons.

And you can see this, and this is my first point. You can see

this in the fact that there are no black people in the Jetsons.

So you had sent.

Okay, so for those who listen to this, right, I'm going to provide a. Little

bit of background context on that. Haysan sends

over a script, right, with kind of his ideas and some of his thinking about

the book and everything. And this is actually very helpful when you're a guest, right,

because you kind of know where he's going and everything. I don't always read these

things the moment he sends them over because I like to be a little unprepared

because I like to be real on these things whenever I can.

And so I was reading this last night and I saw this line and I

was like, interesting, because the day before

yesterday we go to the local museum here, right? We're big museum nerds.

And so we're hanging out in there and there's this huge science fiction area, right?

Because we're in the land of nuclear warfare and everything else

like this, you know, and they're talking about the science fiction

inform the future or does the guessing inform

the future kind of thing, right? Like, like chicken or the egg situation.

And it was very interesting because he was talking about a lot of these ideas,

right? And

in the money just like ruins everything, which is like a very weird thing to

say. Like as an entrepreneurial person and a guy running a business, and

I've created this thing and I'm putting myself out there and everything. And I

do have goals and aspirations of building this bigger, and I've got monetary goals and

everything, but I'm also just hyper aware of how much money just

blows everything out of proportion and just ruins things, right?

And I also realize that it's there, right? Like,

you gotta, you gotta, you gotta. I mean, innovation.

Innovation doesn't happen if there's not a way to monetize it. If there's not those

ways of like, okay, what, what are these things? Then it's just like,

then we have to have the really bad arguments of, like, the science matter, right?

At least, at least now we can, like, you know, make a big push about

science and innovation because we can tie it to capitalism and growth and cool things

like that. But then all the stuff gets in the way. That gets in the

way. Your scientists were so worried about whether or not they could, they

didn't stop to think about whether or not they should. Yeah, great line

from Jurassic Park. Freaking Jeff Goldblum. Jeff Goldblum.

There's no one. There's no. Okay, there's no one better for that part. No one

better. Never want to sell me on the idea that there's any other actor on

the planet who would have done that part better. That's why they brought it back,

like five times in all of the ridiculous sequels.

And they need to stop. Just, I've had enough of these

mother effing dinosaurs on this mother effing plane. I've really had enough.

The other day, and it was like. It was like while they, While they were

actually kind of talking about the fact that they're really good at recreating dinosaurs, what

they've really gotten really good at is recreating the next worst

dinosaur movie, of course,

which is just true. Like, like, oh, maybe this one will bring it. But

no, no, no. Chris Pratt again. No,

not happening. It's not happening. And we don't need her running around in her, like,

high heels in a white. And somehow a miraculously white dress that never

got a drop. I can't, I can't even. I can't even with it. I can't

even stop at Hollywood. You go home, you're drunk.

No, I think you're. I think you're onto something. Because the thing about it is.

So when I go to the museums, right? Or when I look at

the cultural landscape surrounding all of these innovations and I

listen to the kinds of discussions we're having now. Like, I read an article

today on Substack from a guy who, who is a

philosophy major, was a philosophy major in college, like, 40 years

ago, and he's bringing up.

And his point is valid, he's bringing up how AI

and large language models don't have ethics

built in and are now beginning to behave in ways

that we would define if human beings were behaving in that way as

evil, quote unquote. Right, okay. Yeah. Now I'm

not going to get into the whole, does an AI have autonomy? Does AI

have free will? I'm not going to get into any of that. I don't care

about any of that. My point with bringing this up is

we built the AI. That's fine.

The people who built it were influenced

by Asimov and Bradbury and

Gibson and Heinlein and Dick. They

were influenced by all those guys. Great, Cool. They learned all the wrong

lessons because they didn't go to philosophy classes in

college. They went to computer engineering classes in college and

finance classes in college. Right, okay. Or if they did go to

those philosophy classes, they immediately forgot everything the second

they were out of there because it didn't mean anything to them.

And so when I walk into a museum or I read a

book like do Androids Dream of Electric

Sheep? I look at it and I go, the first thing that hits me

is, for all the money in the world, it doesn't predict

the civil rights movement. Oh, yeah,

well, like. And so there is a counter. So I take the line from Gandalf

in Lord of the Rings. There are other forces than just the evil ones in

this world, 100%. And all those other forces

are, are, are, are, are, are, are battling.

And maybe this is a zero sum statement, I don't know, but they're battling

in a cultural space for the minds and hearts of people.

And in general, what wins the minds and hearts of people is not technology.

In general, what wins the minds and hearts of people are

challenges and issues, which is what Dick gets to, I think, in his book so

brilliantly. Challenges and issues of identity.

And that is something that the nerds have no answer for because they don't

care enough to think about it. Yeah,

exactly. I, okay, so I,

so I work in sales, right? You know this. But I don't know if people

listen to your show, do or not. So I work in sales. I'm a sales

consultant and I get brought in to talk about sales improvement, sales coaching and sales

training. And right now everyone is very enamored with the idea of an

AI driven salesperson, right? And if you're really into sales, then you might have

even be thinking about the term of like an aisdr. Right? And so an

AISDR is essentially AI generated outbound

outreach robocalls, right? And if we look at all

the warranty calls that everyone just loves to get, right,

what happens there? Right? Let's look at what happens

when it's annoying enough because

now all cell phones have the ability to route any kind of

probable spam risk over to spam, right? So what happens

is we don't get. We don't fix the problem. We just create

a really bad trash bin to put the furthest

versions of it, right? Because think about it this way. If salespeople were taught to

just be normal, consultative, solution focused and

not held to such stupid goals that it puts you into a place of emotional

need, we wouldn't have as many people trying to

run game, trying to manipulate, obfuscate, manip. You know, all these things,

all the bad labels and everything else, and we would just have people going around,

hey, do you need my help? Hey, we do these things. Hey, here's how we

serve our clients and customers. Do you need these things? But

people don't. People only recognize

the bad aspects of selling, right? Every one of these people who hates the sales

people, they have probably a financial advisor that they love working

with, right? Who's a salesperson. They probably have bought a home from a

real estate agent who's a salesperson and a doctor who's a salesperson,

right? And so what, they're just thinking about, they're thinking about

the. The person in Walmart working the charter table

right now. Like, like this is the new version of it. Because now even the

car lot guys are getting a broader, wider pass because of Carvana and every. But,

like, look at this, right? The technology's coming along to build

room to avoid the parts that you don't want to hate or that you would

hate. So you don't want to deal with a salesperson. Cool. Carvana, right? But what

happens is when you let the nerds try to engineer the path, right?

And we stop thinking about the humans on the other end of this thing

is when we start getting very misaligned on

should versus what does work, right? And

if you're around this stuff, right, There's a, there's, there's people talking about this

idea that, like, you can have a sales process, which is the way that you

want to sell. But, hey, let's appreciate their journey as the buyer,

right? You've never even heard of a CRM technology before. You don't even know that

you need one. Let me. Why would I show up on your doorstep and talk

about the differences in five different top high, very,

very high expensive CRMs in the place? Why would I? That doesn't make any

sense. But this is what people are doing all the Time, because they're very smart

nerds and they're just thinking about the math of the problem, but they're not

thinking about the individual chaos machine that is the human being and the range of

how they're going to respond and react. Well, they are in one way, and this

is something that I've said. I've even posted it on Facebook. I think you might

have commented on it sometime within the last year, maybe year and a

half. Because it's something that. It's a

major insight that I think we all miss. And let me be very clear. I

like the nerds. The nerds are the reason I'm here. Same without the

nerds, this podcast wouldn't be the people. Right?

Yeah. That's the most important part of this thing, is that without

sales training, for anyone who's listening to this, I mean,

I thought that I was going to sales training to learn everything

that everybody hates about salespeople. Right? Right. I thought, I'm here

and my coach is like, hey, what if you didn't even try to play that

game? What if you just found the people who wanted. So, like, I'm. I'm even

learning from these things, but culturally, I was being fed this

idea that I can do it because other people can do it, but I'm going

to use my powers for good. Which makes you the tyrant, right? Exactly

right. That's right. You're the worst person. These nerds who were like, well, you know

what? I don't want to do outreach. I don't want to bother people. So

I'm going to create an AI bot. And then because everyone hates talking

to AI bots, it only works, like, one time in a million. So then I

got to build a machine that'll let me do this 7 million times a day.

Right. Like, and we're just working on the problem from the wrong ass

end of the equation. As opposed to, like, what do you really like?

Well, the reason. The reason we're working on it from the wrong end of the

equation is because.

Marketers, Engineers, Marketers ruin everything. Well, marketers is one reason,

but engineers, I don't disagree with that. I'm a marketer myself. And we do. We

ruin everything. Engineers

view all of the friction points. This is the point I made years

ago on Facebook. They view all of those friction points

as a bug to be algorithm away

rather than as a feature. So here's the thing. A human

being wants to buy, to your point, about real estate or about

charter cable or about cars. I don't care what it is. I used to sell

real estate. I've done a lot of those

things. At the end of the day, you can automate the

entire process if you would like. You can, you absolutely can. And human beings,

we're trying to figure this out for a while now. Oh, I know, they're all

clients. Right. But at the point

of sale, a human being still wants to see

another human being. Not a humanoid robot, not.

Not an empathy box. They want to see an actual human being. You think? Okay,

you think it's two points? Okay, I think it's two points. I think it's the

beginning. Right. Because we did. I was on a project a

couple of years ago and this was, you know, B2B technology, all this other

stuff. Right. You know, doesn't really matter for this conversation, but we can talk about

it if you want. Sure. And they were doing all automated

outbound sequences. Everything is in a. Everything is done by machine and automations

and everything. Nothing is done by hand, right. So I get brought in because

they're not hitting their goals. And so I'm like, okay, what is our process? What

is our sequence? How do. How are we going to market? What are we doing

here? And the phone call was like step seven,

right? So there's like three LinkedIn things and all this email and everything else like

this. And the phone call is happening so late. Now I'm an introverted

person, but I have to ask the question because I'm trained in sales, why is

the phone conversation happening so late in the sequence? Why aren't we leading with this?

And they say, well John, it's different for us. And I say,

okay, please tell me more. Because everyone says this, please tell me why yours is

different, right? And they say, well John, we work with major, major huge

corporations. We're in fin tech, financial technology, right?

Everyone has a phone tree and everyone has a voicemail. And I'm like, cool.

And you know. And they don't have an answer for me. And

I'm like, okay. I'm the nice coach. And I'm like, okay guys,

so you guys think that if we do enough volume with your approach, we're

going to hit the goal? Absolutely, John. We just got to do enough volume. Cool.

What does that volume look like? We have no idea. I'm like, okay, great.

You have a month to find the volume. And then if we don't find the

volume, we're going to do it my way. Because your leadership is

concerned about Yalls way. Is that, does that sound fair? I'm going to Give you

some time. And they were like, yeah, of course they miss the goal. First thing,

we do calls first. And they're like, john, it's just a voicemail.

I'm like, cool. Bridge to another channel, right? Stop expecting

a sale. Start a relationship, right? And so I'm like, hey,

this is me. We've never had a conversation before. It was reaching out about these

situations we hear about all the time. You'll need to call me back. I'm going

to send you an email to see if this is even worth the conversation or

not. And you know what happened? It was like a

1400% increase in their booking rate, which

sounds really, really crazy, but like, when you're at one, you know, so like, so

like any growth is, is really really, you know, when you're starting from like, nothing.

But it was just like. And I talked to more people that want to

take that approach. They only want to put their humanity in there when they, when

they see that there's an opening in interest in sales. If

you're going to do it right, is about creating that interest. And if you don't

know how to create interest the right way, you're stuck running this weird volume timing

game that all these guys are trying to do over do out over here. So

human first, to show that you're a human and have some

human connection so you actually get seen as a human first before we get

boxed in as a salesperson. Oh, you just want to sell me. You just want

to close me. You're just asking these questions because you don't care if I show

you that I'm human first, I then get seen as a human first. And

then if I have something to show you, we can talk about it. But all

these guys that are trying to be like, okay, let's just keep this brass tax.

I'm the wolf of not Wall street, but Electric Street. And

we're just going to do SEO for you and everything. You're just going to buy

these things from me. But just brass tacks, do you want this thing or not?

You're never gonna find the volume ever, ever, ever,

ever, ever. And like, I gotta say this just one more time

because I am the most systematic laboratory nerd on the

planet. And I'm still telling you that like leaning into the conversation has a,

has it exponential quantified impact on your lift. And

you're just scared, which is why you don't want to do it. That's why all

these people are trying to build these massive engines, because they're scared and they're fearful

and they don't want to change. And that's exactly what is going to be the

problem that's going to lead to all the problems with all these bots.

Okay, let's talk about the bots. I'm glad you said that at the end. Let's

talk about the bots. Talk about the bots. Let's talk about the bots. So.

And actually, we should probably talk about a little bit about the. A little bit

about the books. Let's talk a little about the book. So this is your first

touch on this. I've seen

both Blade Runner movies, both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049.

Pick from that what you will, but I've seen both of them

and I've. I've drawn certain conclusions

from them. And so seeing the film and then

touching on the Philip K. Dick book, I hadn't really, really read

it. Okay, so you had not read the book, but you had seen them. I

had seen the movies. Right. What was your perspective on the movies? Just seeing the

movies without reading the material. So just seeing the movies without reading the

material. Blade Runner as a film.

Well, two things. One, Blade Runner as a film could never be made today.

And that's why Blade Runner 2049. Well, number one, that's why

Blade Runner's sequel took so long to get up off the. Off the deck.

But number two, that's also why,

as a sequel, it kind of doesn't work,

because the shift that has occurred since the

original Blade Runner in culture, not in

technology, in culture, the shift that has

occurred doesn't support some of the idea. Right,

right. Yeah. You know, I have a guess. I have a guess. I have a

guess. This is where we're going. So hold on. Go ahead. Okay.

Okay. I think. Oh, okay. So

is the newer movie so sensationalized and overblown and so big?

Because we're kind of used to the idea of, like, AIs and robots and everything,

because culturally, it's kind of just more interwoven. So they've got to make it a

bigger conflict point. And it ruins the movie and the story.

Yes and no. Interesting. So they're, they're, they're trying

to hold on to the aesthetic in the original Blade Runner.

Okay. Yeah. Because that, I mean, it's, It's. I mean, it's iconic. I mean, it's

iconic. It's. Yeah. Iconic aesthetic. And the people who, you

know, Dennis Vilu. View. I cannot pronounce the guy's last name. Who

directed Dune and is directing Dune or directed Dune 2. And I

was directing Dune 3. That guy directed Sicario,

which I just watched the other day. Great film. Great. Tough watch.

Tough watch, but a great film. You know, you.

Guillermo del Toro, like, underrated actor. Like, I liked

him. Right? But watching that. Yeah. Excuse me, Benicio del Toro. Yes,

Del Toro. Guillermo del Toro is the director. Muffled. Yeah, but, like,

watching that, because, you know, like, I've seen Snatch. I've seen this stuff, and I'm

like, okay, cool. Like, he is that very interesting character. But then I'm

like, oh, dude can be real dark. Okay. He. I loved it

when he says to Emily Blunt, the things that you are going to see are

going to offend your American eyes. And he just walks out of

the room. And I was like, yep, yep, you're exactly right.

Get ready. And she couldn't. She couldn't. And then Josh

Brolin is the CIA spook. Oh, yeah. He's

phenomenal in that role. It's so good. Well, he actually. He actually. He

might. I think he actually probably went and hung around some spooks because I've known

some former CIA folks in my time, and they are

literally exactly. That guy. Yeah. Just. That's. That guy.

Yeah. You're just dead. It's wild. You're just. Just dead on. Dead on.

Application of that. And then all the Delta guys who are what they are.

Delta guys are what they are. Anyway. No. So you look at Blade Runner

2049, and then you look at the original Blade Runner and see both. And I

resisted, by the way, watching the sequel for a long time. I really did, because

the other movie, to your point, is so iconic. But

I had long ago come to the conclusion that we are

already living in the future that Blade Runner promised,

just with less pollution. Oh,

so the Gray Dust, that's in. That's in. Do Robots Dream of

Electric Sheep? Yeah. Okay. Like, we're fighting each

other viciously about global warming, while China, of course, produces

one new coal plant a week. But we're fighting viciously about global

warming because, you know, we don't want that.

Okay, That's. That's a plus. I'm not saying that that's a negative. That's a plus.

We should be having that vicious fight about what we do with the environment. Cool.

Have the arguments. Let's talk about it. But because of those

arguments, because of how far that went, and by the way, Philip

K. Dick died in 1982, so we didn't have a chance to see sort of

all this sort of come. Come to Fruition but because of regulation.

Because of. To your point about capitalism, Capitalism

being forced to be regulated. Right. By a

governmental entity that doesn't care about capitalism. Yep.

Cleaned up the environment, but it had nothing to say.

So you don't have acid rainfall like in the original Blade Runner. Right. But

nothing to say about. And this is.

This is again, the point that I think Philip K. Dick makes nothing to say

about the relationship between man and technology. Government

is astonishingly silent on this, for the most part.

And private industry is astonishingly, to our point earlier,

venal on all these areas. And so the venality

Dick didn't. He got part of, but he thought the finality would

come from government. That's why Deckard works for the government. He thought it would come

from the government because he came out of a time in the 50s and 60s

when government was the biggest problem and private industry was highly regulated

coming out of World War II. So when he was a kid, the world he

grew up in was the CEO married their secretary

and didn't make more than X number of thousands of dollars a year. And yet,

if adjusted for inflation, the CEO made just as much then as the CEO makes

now. Except they just hid because of unions. They just hid the

money in different places. Okay, fine. So everybody looked like they

were conforming, and everybody looked like they were the same culturally,

which certain political parties in our country would like to go back to

that visual look of conformity and are

hidebound to that idea. By the way, Ray Bradbury wrote about this. This is

where the Martian Chronicles and everything else that he ever wrote, Fahrenheit 451, came out

of that sense of being hamstrung by

conformity during a time that, again,

certain political parties in this country would like to get back to where everybody looked

the same. Right. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Dick is

writing as a countercultural, along with Heinlein, to a certain degree, writing

as a counterculture, countercultural opposition.

Right. To that idea. So he could project that forward into. Into the book. And

that gets picked up in the movie quite brilliantly. The original braid runner

that gets picked up quite brilliantly. Now,

as a movie, it kind of falls apart in the third

act. The original Blade Runner does. Okay. And it

descends into this action movie trope because it's the 80s and

they didn't really know where to go with it. And so they had to. It's

funny because my wife is a huge Harrison Ford fan and big

reader and stuff like this, and so she was giving me some of the knowledge

about the Backside of the book. Apparently he didn't want to make the movie.

He got. No, he didn't. He got forced into a contract and apparently, like, was

like a begrudging, like, unwilling hostage for most of the shooting

in the. In the production of the movie and stuff like that, and has made

no bones about it whenever anyone asks. Yeah, you know,

him and Ridley Scott did not exactly see eye to eye on that set.

Yeah. So, like, you know, and I can imagine, because the book

itself, to me, like, I have a lot of questions after the book

ends, you know, like a

lot, honestly, you know, which in my mind makes it a good book.

Book. Right. Like, you know, it's supposed to have some momentum afterwards if it's just

like, okay, I'm done. I'm never gonna think about this again. You know, you're probably

lying to yourself if you tell. You tell yourself that you like it.

But I, like, I'm excited to see it. I.

I'm. I'm very interested to see how they talk about

the chicken head stuff in the, in the movies, if they

do it all, because I think that that was pro. That. That seems probably the

hardest thing to, to nail in a film.

Yes. So

it is. It is visually referenced, but not

verbally addressed. I'll frame it that way. Okay. So

if you know what to look for or if you're primed to look for that

in the visuals, you will see it in certain scenes, but it is

not. And there's like, like junkie homeless behavior kind of stuff.

Yeah. Okay. It's not directly referenced. Right. Because.

Okay, so. So there were probably three things in, in the novel

that were really hard to translate to film. So the first thing was, was the,

was the, the destruction of people's IQ by the gray

dust. The chicken head piece. Yeah. The second

piece was the lack of.

Shall we say, lack of

geopolitical

anchoring that was in the book. Right. Because when Blade Runner came out, the

movie came out in 1982, I mean, you're knee

deep in the Cold War at that point. You just. You're just in it. Right.

Gorbachev has not come along yet. I think that was at

the time when. And so they're all kind of. Oh, that's

fascinating. Right. Because like, whenever I was reading Heinlein in

late 80s, early 90s at, like, I was. I. I read

Heinlein too. Too early, I would say, like, I was probably 10,

right. And my brother was like, oh, hey, stranger in a strange land. And, you

know, here's Body Dysmorphia. And transitioning consciousnesses into other sexes

and everything, you know, so. But

all of those books have kind of this weird vibe. It almost

seems like. Of like I pick up the vibe that you're talking about that like

government is the bad guy, which then kind of forces individual focus onto the

individual. Right. And so then in all of these books, like Highline books and the,

in the Philip K. Dick book, Philip K. Dick books, it seems like there's like

this big divide between like almost like

the, like the aware and the unaware. Almost.

Right. And you know, not for nothing, there's a.

There's seems like there's a pretty big gap between those

two circles and buckets of the population today. Right.

People that are just like sitting at home watching the news and on the Internet

and versus that are actually going out to. And being around people and seeing for

their own eyes what is happening. Because like the whole buster part.

Yeah, that I was like, right. But

on, on some level that was redeeming a little bit of

like, oh, okay, like, like it almost felt like in my head it was like

too much of like a thing. So like I'm like. I'm like, okay, like this

doesn't make sense. So like in my head it was, it was, it was almost

like hope that that that is what it was. And then whenever it was, I

was like, I was. Oh, okay. But also a little convenient.

Well, and, well, and then the third thing in the book. Well, so this ties

into the third thing in the book, which is the mercerism.

Okay, so mercerism does not. None of that is. I will

just. Right now, none of that's referenced in the movie at all. Oh, to me,

that's like the most interesting part. And.

The thing that, that I think Philip K. Dick was trying to say with

mercerism. Yes. He's making a point

about religion in the opiate of the masses and the Marxist point and blah,

blah, blah. Yeah, okay, I'm uninterested in that. The Marxist framing of that. I

don't care. Or not that I don't care,

but I'm dismissive of that for a whole variety of reasons. I think that that's.

To surface an analysis of what he's trying to do here. He was

working through, to your point about the divide between

the people who are paying attention and the people who aren't. He was working

through the divide of the masses versus the elite

for sure in that. But he was also working through

social control, the role of hallucinogenics

and the role of lsd. His own personal experiences with

drugs. I mean, he talked about it in an interview that was published.

Gosh. In the 1970s or might have been a speech, I think was an interview

published in the 1970s where he talked about how a lot

of his friends use drugs and wound up screwed up on drugs.

And so he was not interested in

expanding his mind in that kind of way.

Whereas you had. At the same time, folks,

like, in 1982 is 10 years in, 10

years in on the founding of Apple Computers,

founded by a guy, Steve Jobs, who went

to India and went traipsing

around trying to expand his mind. And

allegedly, according to him, anyway, went

on an LSD trip and came up with Apple Computers.

Oh, interesting. Okay. I've not heard this story.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the reason. You know why that the logo for Apple

is Apple, right. Is an apple with a bite out of it.

Yeah. Oh, it's because I'm Alan Turing.

When he was. When he was

prosecuted by the British government after World War II for being a

homosexual, committed suicide by putting it

either cyanide or arsenic, I can't remember which one. But it was some kind of

poison in an apple. And he, He. His

body was found with an apple next to it with a bite taken out of

it. Oh, interesting. Okay.

Huh. And that's the reason for the Apple logo.

Really? Yep. Man. Have I just been reading all, like the

marketing virginized of all of this stuff of. You know,

because, like, you gotta go back. You gotta go back and read what Steve actually

said about it. Yeah. The marketers said afterward what he actually

said. Yeah, yeah. Because, like, I was like, I. I listen to all these business

books and read a bunch of business content and I just. And I just heard

a story that they were. They were shown this graphical

interface. Oh, yeah, that did happen. Yeah. They went to IBM and.

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, like. So like, all of that stuff is a

start. Is a stuff that stands out in the business lore. Not. Not this

other. Okay, so that's. Well, because. Because they don't. Because everybody,

God bless folks in business, but they want to siphon off to the

point about finance guys, Right. Who don't take philosophy classes. They want to

partition off all that other stuff and just focus on the money. Because the money

seems clean and it seems pure and it seems as though it's unfettered.

And of course, that's a lie and a deceit. And then it gets too big.

Right. You know, like. And the fascinating thing is,

like, why do we keep. Like,

it almost feels like, you have to be willfully ignorant to like, not

look at the 101 versions of this, like, getting in our way,

like, over and over and over and over and over again, right? Like,

I mean, like, it leads me to start thinking, and this is not

helpful. How many times do we have to go through this, like, version of this

thing before we can be like, oh, hey, hey, hey, hey. We

see that, we see that, right? Like, it was, it was like the weirdest moment

of like, I remember. Like,

I think anyone who's an adult right now can probably appreciate this. Like, before COVID

right? You'd watch one of those movies like Contagion or, you know,

any of that stuff, right? And it always has the same montage on the front

end of it, right? Of like the news cycle, right? And I, and I, and

I could remember watching that as a kid and being like, hey, you know what?

Like, no, no, no, not

like, like that's all just drama. Like, people aren't really that dumb,

you know. But then we fast forward to like, Covid and I'm

just like, oh. Like, it's like, it's like this very

weird moment of like, oh my God, the books are real. And then

like, oh, wow, those people really had a really good grasp on humanity.

Like, wow, you know, like that to me is the mind

blowing part. Not. I made my piece with the fact that we can do this

and I do a version of this and I'm probably not even paying attention to.

Because we're all humans and, you know, you can only be aware of so many

things. But like, the people who don't even think that it

could be somewhat similar are. I'm like, how

would they are people. Who are consistently and

repeatedly mugged by reality. I love this term. It's a term the conservatives

sometimes use. To describe by reality. Mugged by reality. Describe liberals

who switch from being liberal to being conservative. They say that a liberal is just

a conservative that was mugged by reality. Or conservative is just a liberal who was

mugged by reality. That's it, right? And, and,

and I like that idea of being mugged by reality

because it is only. So I often say

this in relation to people who are or,

or have been in, in, in war zones, right? Regardless

of how they got there, there's certain things that you can

only learn when a bullet goes past your ear. And you could

read all the books about it, you can watch all the movies, it doesn't matter.

None of all that stuff fades into, into, into nonsense

the second you almost die. Or if you are in

a traumatic. Any kind of trauma basically in your

life. And I'm talking, like, real trauma. I'm not talking like, I didn't get an

Uber to take me from the airport to my house. That isn't trauma.

I'm not talking about, like, oh,

you know, I'll even go stuff. I will for myself. I'm

not talking about. Someone said some nasty name to me when I was walking down

the street. Like, I'm not talking about that. That ain't trauma. That's just. Just whatever.

That's just stupidity or ignorance or whatever. That's being a human, dealing with other humans.

All right? That's life. We used to call that life. No,

real trauma is. And by the way, real trauma is.

I went to the doctor because I found this weird thing on me, and I've

been diagnosed with cancer. Now I gotta do it. I gotta deal with this. I

was just talking to a lady in my town

who. Small anecdote here. Lady who lives in my town. She had an

office next door to mine in a previous location. I moved. I

had seen her in a little over a year. I was sitting out on the.

On the. On the side. Well, not on the sidewalk, but on a bench. On

the sidewalk, waiting for my food outside of a local restaurant. And she

saw me. She walked across the street. She's like, hey, how you doing? And we

were talking. I said, what's up with you? And she said, oh, I've been diagnosed

with a pretty aggressive form of cancer. And.

And I'm going to. She didn't say I'm going to die, but she said, I'm

exploring treatment options for this right now and kind of going through this. I was

walking through this with her, right? And that's

trauma. That's trauma, yeah. Like,

friend of mine, very old friend of mine, he's another sales nerd, and

he. We got connected over this nonprofit that was for, like,

they were driving awareness around this cancer nonprofit.

And we. We became friends after that. And one time he shared this thing with

me. He goes. He goes. He goes. Every time I have an acre of pain,

first thought is that I got cancer again, right? And, like,

imagine, you know, you can't.

You can't really know it until you go through it, right? But then also,

it's going to change how you think about it, right? Like, I mean, sometimes you

can't. This is why it's so important that if you have

never been in sales, do not think you can lead sales,

because. Oh, yeah, no, you. You just you, you, you can't. And the people are

just not going to believe you because they're going to be able to see through

the, the facade, the fabrication, the take it to you, make it stuff,

right? It. And just don't try. Like we're not, we're not

great at it, you know, but also be open to going and

experiencing these things before we take these hard line decisions. Right? Like,

exactly. Going back to the thing that we were talking about. Like, you and I

have read all of these books, right? About everything that can go wrong.

Right. Like, and I've read way more books about it going wrong than it being

beneficial. Right. You know, kinda. Right. And

there's also this, like, there's a sec. There's this kind of weird thing.

There's this weird overlap with like martial arts thinking. Right.

I don't train and I don't practice and I didn't put that time into that

thing. So that way I could go around with some weird inflated

ego and everything else like this, right. I go there. So that

way I'm, I'm trained and I'm

practiced. But there's this weird shift that happens with every martial artist that gets to

any kind of height, right? And you, and you've seen it, it, you have to

go from that I want to be a badass to like, this is the way

of life. This is how I approach my, my conflict, my thinking,

my, my judgment and everything. And like you don't make it past the

mid tier in anything without that shift happens.

Right. And so this is a weird thing. I don't talk about this a whole

lot, but like now whenever there's anything I want to go learn. It

used to be because I am this person, I am the nerd that thinks that

it, well, if I just know the basic fundamentals, I'm going to be able to

figure this thing out. Okay. And that's my normal, normal way of approaching everything. But

I spent 10 years as a salesperson trying to think that I could find a

way around the human connection and dealing with the humans and everything. And

I only found success whenever I stopped doing that kind of thing. So in

every aspect, there's the version of reality that you think matters and then

there's the higher level of it that everyone else is thinking about. Right. As a

poker player, how do I win these pots? Okay, well, as a professional poker player,

how do I lose the less. Right. As a, as a, as a

beginner black, as a beginner martial arts student, how do I like, never get hit?

Okay. Master, how do I go home?

How do I make sure that I'm the one going home? Right? Yeah. And. And

more often than not, that means I don't need anything at all.

You know what I'm saying? So the old enough to know

better kind of thing, Right? To use that, like very old folksy wisdom and

everything else like this. Right? Like, we're only old enough to know better because

we've spent our time reading and consuming these ideas that everyone

else was like, oh, this is just hyper nerdy, stupid. Oh, but robots,

you guys can just like give me robots and they can do all this cold

calling that I don't want to do. And we just need to do 3,000 of

these a day and we're like out of

00,0001%. And John, like, you're an

injury. There's a better way to fix the problem. Guys,

let me ask you a question with all this. No,

because this is good. Let me ask you a question about all this. Please.

Cheer ship. I'll allow it. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

Good on you. Thank you.

If the figure CEO Mr. Adcock

is correct, right? If there will

indeed. If he can indeed. And I don't know that he can. I think

I. Number one, I think building a robot is incredibly difficult. Number two, I think

embodying a robot that can even do just minimal

menial tasks is also incredibly difficult. Then I think your third

order level of difficulty is putting the object in the world and

having it be accepted by other human beings. With all of our years

of whether it's evolution or creationism, I don't care. We've got

stuff that that robot doesn't have. I don't care where you think it came

from. We've got it. They don't. Okay? That's the difference between us and

the monkeys. Okay? The Monk. We ain't putting the monkeys on the

factory floor. Okay, so you've got three major

first order problems there. You have to solve three major ones.

And by the way, the AI does not solve for any of those three at

all. I don't care how evil it is, I don't care how much it hallucinates,

it doesn't solve for those problems. It's also other problems, but not those three. Okay,

let's say those three problems could be solved in the next four years.

You and I both live in or near a major city where one of

these humanoid robots is probably going to show up. Yeah.

More likely than not.

First, as a sales guy, let's start from here. And then let's move down the

level. Okay. You want to put the worst version of him?

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

How is sales going to sell to a robot? Let's

start with that question. And by the way, not a bot.

Beautiful question. Not a bot. I want to be very clear. Not

a bot on a phone, disembodied somewhere. I mean, you

show up at the building and the robot

is the gatekeeper. Oh, well,

oh, that's, that's the body problem. There you go. The embodiment problem.

Well, that's what everybody wants, allegedly.

Well, they, they think that they want that, right. Like, like one of the biggest

lessons that I, that I learned as a, as a stuck,

not high minded salesperson is very stuck, was that the idea is that

the gatekeeper is not really there to tell you. No, they're there to protect the

time of the person who hired them. Right. Because

sometimes, and people will talk about this sometimes the reason why they have a

gatekeeper is because they're so excited to talk to you that they got to have

someone there, you know, And I'm like, you know, and there. And that's true.

Like some people are just so people oriented that they can't help themselves. Right?

But I was like, gatekeepers are bad humans and all this

stuff, right? Because I wasn't winning, you know. And then the

biggest change was whenever I started to make them like part of

my approach, right. Hey, you probably see a thousand

people looking exactly like me coming in here, trying to get time with a doctor

and stuff like that. And I don't want to, I don't want to waste their

time. Right? You probably got some pretty good insight into the doctor, what he

likes and what he doesn't like, where his frustrations are with his outcomes,

with his patients, with his time on the table. I'm curious, like, like, what do

you think that that would look like? Because I don't want to waste their time.

Oh, I don't, I don't, I don't actually know. Or they would say like, okay,

he, he hates this, but he likes this, right. And things like that. So

whenever I made them part of my team, right. And treated them like a human,

which they are, I had better outcomes. Right.

And so now there is a very robotic version of

a buying. It's called an rfq, right.

Hey, we're going to go out to market and we don't know what

in the hell we're actually looking for. So we're going

to, we're going to do an RFQ and we're going to, and we're going to

go to chat GPT. We're going to have GPT create this RFQ for us,

right? And because it's AI, it's going to know exactly what to do. And then

essentially it's like, hey, invitation to waste your time. Oh yeah,

right. Like, like that's what I get as a sales professional. I'm like, okay, cool.

Would love to ask you a couple questions. No questions. You must fill it out

and then we will select it. Okay, cool. I know where I'm at. You not

ever make any decisions because you don't even know what's important to you. I'm gonna

go find someone who's at least open to a con. And so then right there

I am making a judgment driven decision based upon my own experience

as my time as a professional. Okay, but if you've not spent

the time as a professional in that space, just hang

out, right? Like, like that's just follow up. 17

touches of follow up and you know, start a newsletter, you know, and

everything else like this that everyone else is pushing.

But here's the thing. All of this stuff, all of this, all the

marketing stuff is I think going to go out of the way because you know

what you're not going to be able to do? Indoctrinate an AI into your way

of thinking. Right? So all these things of like, well, if we just, just, if

we just give them a lead magnet and then they opt into our stuff,

if we just keep sending the messaging, eventually they're going to start thinking about it.

Yeah, okay, but here's the thing. You're not going to make the Apple guy

go to PC. You're just not right in, like in, in

reality. And if your gatekeeper is an AI that you teach it and

tilt it to, like here's what you live through and here's what you don't.

You don't ever get in front of anybody unless they're

confirming your own biases. Right? One of the things about salespeople that is so

difficult is you're supposed to have an opinion, right? People hate us

because they all think that we're going to do anything, be anything, say anything to

get a deal. But the only people that are doing that are the people who

have made a decision that they're only going to do this for a short period

of time. So yeah, they only got to do it until like it really takes

off and then they're going to go back to being their like normal regular selves.

But here's the thing I am a normal, regular self, and you either like it

or you don't. I'm going to go find other people to talk to, you know,

so it's like all of those little bitty shifts that come

from time and grade of, like, really doing the work and realizing,

hey, this is. This is the weirdest way to make my piece with this. But,

like, I've lied to prospects and it still didn't close,

so why would I just keep doing that to myself, right? Like, Like, I now

have these facts that making myself uncomfortable and lying and,

like, didn't actually change anything. It just made me more uncomfortable. So, like, why would

I continue to do that, right? You have to go through

the experience and learn. And one of my favorite lines and, and this is one

of my biggest concerns about this whole motion, right? And I'm going to butcher this

line. You probably, you probably might know it in the. In the original form, but

it's show me the person who cares about the. About the, the

one in the volume of numbers. And that's a

real human, right? It's around this idea that, like, you make a big enough

sample size, it's impossible to care about the individuals, right?

There's a whole lot of room to extrapolate on that whole

topic, right, when it comes to political and culture conversations

and stuff like this, you know? But the same thing happens here, right? So if

all these people, the first time an AI sabotages their

business or does something that categorically harms their reality,

they're then going to be a lot more concerned about it. But until then, you're

just thinking about the positives. Okay, now, now, we saw this in chapter

10 of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep when

Rick Deckard fails to kill retire

the Android Luba Luft, who's posing as a. As an

opera singer, right? Great little framing there by Philip K.

Dick also on that. But he, He. He's

administering her the empathy test, the Voight comp test, and

she doesn't like the questions. And so instead of answering the questions, she behaves

as a human would, which I think of this in sales. She doesn't like the

questions the salesperson is asking. I was gonna bring up the same.

Thing, so you knew where I was going. And so.

And so she calls a cop, which the cop is a robot or the

cop is an Android. The Android cop puts him, arrests him,

takes him to this second police station in San Francisco

that he's never seen before. And again, this is

for me, the moment where sort of the bottom drops out of the plane, right?

Yeah. And Deckard is having this existential

crisis in an Android police station

full of androids.

Maybe I'm the Android, right? And that maybe I'm the Android.

Maybe I'm not real. Maybe I'm the one with a problem. Now,

in our world today, many, many people,

and we could argue about the genesis of where this comes from. I think it

comes from the, the decline of meaning in, in Western society

and specifically Western society, or generally in Western society, but

specifically in American culture, we're struggling with meaning right now, and we

have been for the last 15 years. And this is tied into identity and a

whole bunch of other things. I mean, you see this in, you see this

in, in teenagers, most notoriously. Now, I was talking with a

friend of mine who's a clinical, clinical

psychologist, and he said the clinical studies

are showing that a child forms their first political

identity in ninth grade. It's starting as early as ninth grade now.

He said it didn't start earlier than that. He's like, we started

way later than that. Previously. He said it's because we're having an identity problem.

We're having a meaning problem problem in our country. Okay,

I'll let you, based on that while I ask you this question.

Well, I'm going to let you based on this, hold on. Based on that for

just a minute. Hold, hold that thought in your head. So the question

becomes,

how long will it be with these 100,000 humanoid robots before

somebody says that robots have rights?

Well, in,

so A.I. the movie, the Spielberg movie with Jude Law.

Right. I haven't seen in 20 years. Yeah. And my daughter is,

you know, about to be 14 and we

litter read widely. Right. You know, if

we're like, hey, you know, give this a couple of years. But you know, we,

we don't ever say like, this is not allowed. We try to give her some

like, hey, when you're going through this, this will be more meaningful to, to you

then. Yep. And you know, so part of me is very excited

now about going back and re watching AI with her and watching the Will Smith

iRobot. Right? Because like, I remember watching that movie and like there's a scene

in the bar where like, everything is so ungodly expensive. It's like, it's like

$160 for like two beers and a pair of Chucks or something like this.

And I remember watching it being like, no way. Well, like, hey,

you know, I'm on vacation and the tourist traps aren't the only things that are

expensive anymore, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, like we're living in this

reality, right? And you can, I think it's very easy

to like read the books

and then when it's not perfect, completely dismiss any of

the thinking of the, of, of the author of the book, of the story and

everything. And I think if you read enough, you see

enough of those trends, enough of those patterns, enough

of those things happening, and it's not ever exactly the same

thing. But we can, if we're being really honest about it, if we can

shelves our egos a little bit, man.

We, we have a lot of room to just

dismiss and go for the negative, right? And then you have people that

know that and they, and they have those levers around

negativity and hate and you know, creating one common opponent. So

then, you know, like the playbook is so well known by the people who shouldn't

have access to it. It. Right. Like that's, that's the bigger concern

for me over that because I, I'm more concerned that someone would

start that whole thing just that way they have a battle to go fight against.

More than it being like a real reasonable kind of discussion of like,

hey, like it. The question is not do they have

rights in my opinion, it's like at what stage

should they, at what stage would it make sense

for them to be in the situation? So that way we don't do

well. They're never going to have rights ever. Right? And then something

changes, right? And then I, I don't, I don't know. It's a very interesting

thing. I've got, I've got a lot of concern about it, you know,

and I think that right now back to the earlier question. We

can't, we can't even get a software that like all

these softwares, that market being the best at all the things and not a one

of them is they're good at one thing and then they're just packaging on, you

know, all this other use case stuff so that way they can bump

up their, their costs and everything. I think we're going to have that,

I think we're going to have potentially some androids

capable of doing very basic tasks that are going to be very robotic and very

clunky because all the people that are putting effort into empathy and

emotion and communication, I don't think are really focused on like the body,

right? So I think we're going to have these two very, very different tracks, right?

The body people and then the conversational stuff. The,

the Empathy stuff, the connection with the human. And because I think

that these will be very different packs or tracks when they try to bridge them

together, it's going to be a bit of a nightmare. That's my thinking, on the.

On that specific thing. So I think you. You're

probably on to something. I think

the. The reason I asked the

question is because of the explosion in

transgenderism over the last people

identifying as transgender. Yep. And I'm not. I want to be very clear.

I'm not getting. I'm not. I'm using it as merely a

data point for extrapolating to a future pattern of behavior,

because past performance does sometimes indicate future results.

But fascinating thing here, right? Like, I. Like,

have you read Altered Carbon? Or have you seen the Netflix. I know the

Netflix show. I have not. I haven't watched it, but I'm aware of what it

is. The book was solid. Right. And. And it kind of exposes this idea, like,

what if we can transfer consciousness into, like, other people? Right.

What if we could live for forever, but the body wasn't meant to do so?

Okay, great. What does that whole thing look like? Well, if it's not the body

and it's just the consciousness, like, what happens if you can shift into another body

and it's not your body? Right. And, you know, it's. It's wild

because it goes back to the whole main thing, like, do we

give access to this? Do we ban books? Do we keep it off to the

side? Do we give access to information? I was 11 years old when I read

a Heinlein book about a guy who was in a car accident and gets his

consciousness transfer transferred into a female's body.

Right, Right. I was reading other science fiction books about

telepaths that could take over bodies of other people, genderized or not, and

everything else like that. But so, because I was so, I guess,

open to the idea in the science fiction format. Right.

It doesn't offend me the way that it offends, like.

Oh, and I'm not saying you. But there are people. Yeah, yeah.

That this. That this idea offends. Right? Yeah, yeah. And I'm not asking from

an offense perspective, because I think. Here's the thing. I think. I think that the

bifurcation, the trifurcations will be along

these lines.

You will for sure have people who will insist

that a humanoid robot have rights, for sure.

Even though it'll be very, very proven that it is all if this, then

that. And they won't care. There's no ingenuity if you will.

Right, right, right. They won't care. And I think there's going to be crossover between

those people who insist that the robot has rights and people who

are using. Let me be very blunt.

And, and, and because they have a lot of kids listen to the show, so

let me be blunt and baseline on this. Who are using

objects for base physical pleasure. Okay. There's gonna be

crossover between those two groups. Immense crossover.

Oh, okay. So, yeah, if I'm hearing you correctly,

all the red pill incel folks who are

going to see this as an outlet so that way they don't have to deal

with. They're going to be the people who are both pushing and very

much against. Yes. At the same time. That. Yeah, I.

Yeah, I can see all the same time. All the same time. So that's one.

That's one. This is my significant other. And this is my

toy. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So that's gonna be one group of people.

Notoriously, the Joaquin Phoenix movie. Her. Right. Okay. It's gonna be those

folks. I'm not that movie. Do you recommend it? I've seen the

trailer for it and I, I

thought it was kind of like a book that I was like, oh, I

know where this is. That's a reality. I don't want to explain. I don't need

to explore. That's fair. I need to explore that. I. I've

had enough of my challenges in those spaces. I don't need to go down that

road. Thank you. Then you'll have another group of people.

This is the second group. The second group of people will be those

who are not supportive, but

they're also not violently opposed. They're the wait and see people. I think that's. The

vast majority of folks want to wait and see. Because if it's

not in my town of name your place here,

then it's. Not that big of a deal. It ain't that big a deal. That's

something for those people in Chicago or Detroit or New York or LA or

wherever. It could be a brave new world over there.

I'm still hanging out. Yeah. And they're taking the robot. That's like picking

the corn, you know, Like. Like there's going to be.

I mean, like, I. I just don't think it's possible to not have a blind

spot. Like, I really don't. And that's your third group of folks. So

your third group of folks are going to be the people who are

all the way. Well, they're all the way on the other end of the continuum.

I think it's going to take while for the reflective people to shake out. And

I think they'll probably shake out from a weird combination of these three groups.

But you'll have your people all the way over on the other end of the

spectrum who will say,

no, robots don't deserve rights. What the hell are we doing?

And they're going to sabotage stuff left and right. Case in point,

during the most recent LA riots, one of the more

fascinating videos that I saw

was of people who were riding against ICE raids

in la destroying self driving

vehicles in downtown la.

That's your third group of people. And I feel like the third

group in. And I'm trying to,

I'm trying to look at trends and patterns and seeing if this like holds true

as I zoom out on it. I think that the third group is where

all the, all the, all the potential bad actors hide. Oh yeah,

for sure. So remember I said, remember the question I asked you, like, would you

walk up to a building with a robot gatekeeper? The vast majority of people, by

the way, will be in that middle group of. I don't know, I don't care.

It's not an issue until it shows up to me. Right, right, right. When it

shows up to you and you have to walk up there, the third group of

people will be the people hiding in the car around the corner trying to get

into the robot via wi fi to hack it.

Yeah, exactly, right, exactly. You know, or the 14

year old in Arkansas who has nothing to do but hack drones all day

because he's bored. And by the way, I'm sorry ladies, it will be a he.

It always is. I'm sorry, it just is. Yeah,

because you know, there, there, there's going to be.

Well, and then what'll happen is like, it's like, okay, cool, you have a robot

gatekeeper. Here's our robot AI. Cold email bot.

Bingo. And then, and then, and then there'll be a

cultural answer of like harder, harder spam filters. Right?

And then. But like, what's fascinating to me is like as a

salesperson, I analyze how this

weird tit for tat, you know, we're gonna win. No, we're gonna win.

We're gonna win. No, we're gonna win. Happens, you know, because

it's like all the bad stuff that everyone hates about salespeople,

most of it happens because most consumers

are very uncomfortable being direct with salespeople. I'm not alone for

you. I would never buy this. And you can waste your time if you want,

but I'm pretty set y. Okay. And so if,

if, you know, if, if it seems like a maybe, I'm

supposed to follow up on a maybe. Right? But if you could tell me, right,

that, hey, and this is why I try to be very direct with people. Like

if you cold call me for like lead gen. Hey, no, I'm not ever buying

lead gen from anybody. Ever. Right? I, I don't believe in the time

waste. I just don't. Right. So you can keep following up.

I am telling you, I'm an Apple guy. You're trying to sell me PC

products. It is a waste of time. Right, Right. I'm a vegan and you're trying

to sell me on, on half a cow. Like, just stop. Like, like

go find a better opportunity as opposed to thinking that you can force

change minds. Because that's just not how it works. But

the people who don't do the job are not the people that are building the

motions and building the strings and trying to find the shortcuts. Correct? Right.

Well, and I mean, this is where Roy

Batty's speech in the Tears in the Rain speech. I've

seen things you people wouldn't believe. Shape we get ready for that,

folks. I think, I think Philip K. Dick called it. There are going to be

things in this next cyclical historical cycle

around embodied. I

hesitate to use the word intelligence. Embodied computer.

Algorithmic algorithm. Embodied algorithms. That's a better term,

embodied algorithms. That you're not going to believe. And it's not going to be the

embodied algorithms problem. This is sort of where I get to. It's going to be

our problem. It's going to be a human problem. Okay? So

let's, so let's just look at this reality for just a minute. I'm going to,

I'm going to try to extrapolate this as we're talking about it, okay? You're a

founder in this new world and there's, and there's robots, okay? Because this happens

now with salespeople. And they're like, you know what? I have a good idea.

But like, I just can't seem to get anyone to buy, so I must just

not be good at sales. So I'm gonna go hire a salesperson because salesperson can

do this. Okay? So already your perception is

screwed, right? That you were not enough versus

understanding that how you communicate about your product and services

is really the difference maker. Right? And also just basic

expectations. Some people just aren't gonna buy. Right? And so

then what happens is they come along and then they're like, okay, great. I'm gonna

hire a bunch of apartments setters, right? And like, okay, great. How many dolls do

they have to do and everything, right? And they start doing these things. Now what

happens is, because humans are humans, you have these battle royale

situations, right? And some of these companies do, right? And financial services is

major culprit of this, right? And SAS is becoming that way as well. It's kind

of shifting a little bit in SaaS, but not quick enough in my opinion of

like, hey, we're going to hire 30. Most of you are going to quit, and

that's fine because we just need the one and. And we'll be good.

Okay? Imagine no one quits because they're all

robots, right? And like, imagine your

brand. Imagine your brand capital whenever you go out and you

program 5,000, like, SDR AIs that are just going to

bludgeon everybody in your market. Like, the stakes are going to be

bigger for brands, I would say, right? Because

eventually, if enough people quit from your sales

team, you might be like, hey, maybe I'm part of the problem,

right? But if no one ever quits because they're all like these like, AI,

yes men. Oh, yes, boss. Yes, boss. How much more can you do? Well, I

don't know where. Okay, well, you know, can you. Can you make $3,000 a

day versus just the 300? We'll figure out a way, boss. Right now it's

duplicating itself, these things that are happening, you know, and so it's like

that. That's gonna get. That's my, that's my number one

concern as a sales professional. Not that I'm not going to have a job, but

that, like, no one is going to ever hear

anybody else out again. Because everyone

is just so thinking that, you know, oh, you're just the

AI. You just want to sell me. All the rapport is

fake, John. You just want to network with me so that way you can sell

me. Actually, you're kind of jumping ahead a little bit because I don't know if

you're tall enough to ride this ride well. And I, I think there will be

a fourth group in there, which I kind of hold back a little bit on

because I don't know where this fourth group is going to come from. I think

there'll be a fourth group of folks, right? So you'll have your, Your, Your

crossover. These robots have rights slash

baseline pleasure people of all kinds, by the way. Not just physical,

but, okay, tied into identity and all that. Because

all the, all the same entrepreneurs that are like, hey, why would I hire Americans

when I can just like get Filipinos for $3 an hour? And it's okay

because the cost of living is just so different. Like, I mean, there is the

realm of cost of living differences and then there was the realm of you justifying

being a cheap asshole or just. Right. Just exploiting people for

whatever. But now you can expl. But now you can exploit an object.

Right? So it's all better. And they're not

humans. Right, Because. Because that's the other concern. Right, because since I am the

science fiction fantasy reader, right, like, is it

beyond the realm of possibility that eventually, like a. More of a

cyborg kind of thing of like, you know, like the neuro link and things like

that, of it moving together and everything. Like, like at some point we're gonna have

to have some really deep conversations about this and those

conversations are going to be easier

or harder. Kind of like the civil rights movement based upon some of the decisions

that we're making, I think in these early stages of this thing. Yeah,

yeah. So I don't, I, I think those, I think those kinds of

conversations are going to come up. I do not think they will come

up in this next cyclical cycle that's going to start probably around

2030 or so, 2035 at the latest, and

then run out, run out 20 years to 2055 or even

2060. It won't start until what I call

the 21st century's version of the Summer of Love. It'll be

my kids in middle age that'll have. My youngest son, who's 8 in

middle age, will have to deal with the answers to that question

because we still have. To your point, we're right at the cusp of

all of the nonsense. And so there's certain decisions that have to be

made here that are going to, to your point about poker, lead to one of

18 different outcomes or a multiplicity

downstream, you know, for, for. As pervasive as it is in my,

in my inbox and in my. And in my feeds and my, in

my world, if you will. Like, we're still

on the very much bleeding edge of most of this stuff in conversation,

right? Oh, absolutely, yeah. Like most people don't know the difference

between like an LLM and automation. No, they don't. You know,

like, like at all. Well, well, when you walk around, this is that fourth group

of people. So the fourth group of people. And I think that I keep going

back to this idea that the fourth group of people are the ones that are

going to keep the other three groups anchored because those other three groups are going

to be, for lack of a better term, they're going to be a minority report.

The group that's going to. The group that's going to keep

those other four groups anchored is going to be the same group of people that's

always kept that other group of people anchored. And it's going to be the people

that do not. I hate to. No, no, I don't hate to say

this. All the people who live their lives online

miss this. The vast

majority of people that you need to engage with, you talk

about sales that you need to engage with, are not in

online spaces. And they do not care what

happens there because their lives

are still driven by human to human interaction

from literally the time they get up in the morning to the time they go

to bed at night. Case in point, your garbage man.

Case in point, your road crew.

Case in point, your, your.

Yeah, your, your. Well, to a certain degree, your academic educator in

certain types of schooling situations. Okay, hold on a second. And those people,

Those people are the ones. Those people are the people who will keep the other

three groups anchored because they. Empathy box.

There you go. That's the empathy box, right? It's that.

Okay, so this is fascinating, right? I spend a lot of time online. Most of

my business comes from my. From my online network,

if you will. I had a pretty good local network, but whenever I started my

business, I had this moment of realizing that, like, I didn't want to be limited

to just Fort Worth, Texas, because there wasn't enough business for

me, right. And I didn't want to make compromises. I wanted to work with who

I wanted to work with. So I started. Okay, this worked

locally. Let's see if it works digitally, right? And so I just ran the same

play in a digital format. And so most of a lot of my relationships are

with people that I've never met in person before, right. Which is kind of a

weird version of the future to live in, right? It feels kind of High Line

esque, right? Or, or Demolition Man. Right, right. Video

calls like we're living that reality. And so

it. There is this weird thing, right? So I bought this

lathe off a guy off of Facebook Marketplace. Right. And it was, you know, in

this, I mean, it was about an hour away. A friend of mine went, went

with me because it's the real world and you know, you see the stories and

everything else like this, you know, and also it's a big ass lathe. I'm gonna

have to put in the back of a truck and everything. So I take a

friend with me, the guy had it listed for like 300 and everything. And we

show up and I start talking about the fact that I'm new to this whole

thing and then I don't know anything about this at all. And I'm brand new

and I got to learn. I'm asking him questions and everything. The guy goes, let

me knock a hundred dollars off of this thing because you're have to go buy

some things that are essentially going to cost you about 100 bucks. And I just

want you to start, right? And for like three days I had this like half

life of like humanity of like, man, there's some

genuinely nice people out here, you know, so, you know,

there's this weird kind of thing for myself of like, I'm trying to do more

of that now of, you know, that's part of the reason for the road trip.

Like let's just go hang around and be around some people, like some real actual

people who probably have an agenda, but it doesn't start

with how they're messaging me, you know what I'm saying? And stuff like this. And

so it's just been fascinating that as I have really great

relationships with people that I've never met before, you and I have never met in

person ever, right? Like, I have people that I've done five figure business

deals with that don't, don't live on the same continent as me, right? But by

that same token, I also know that like by, by choosing to spend time with

humans. Oh, that connection is faster, it's richer, it's deeper. There's

so much more to it in this, right? So it's one of those things to

where don't get lured in by

scale, right? There is this messy aspect to it

that is going to fundamentally change what, what your

reality is. Right? And the nerds are the people who want to remove

all the human connection, right? And, and I say this as a nerd who

thought that in the beginning I could just brass tax my way through. Well, let

me just build something that you can't say no to. Oh my God. Right?

But I go back to this thing of, one of my favorite things is if

you can ask the question, am I being narcissistic? You're fundamentally not.

Right? And I think about this like, like with, with AI and automation

and everything else, like, why am I using this? Like am I

am, you know, and it's weird in entrepreneurial circles, right? Because people

talk about automation and be in virtual assistance and delegation and

just delegate all the work that you don't want to do. Okay,

like, at what standard? Because, like, I think.

I think that's where the, where, where the line is going to be. What. What

is your standard? And you're going to have all these people that are building

very, very salesy, pushy sales robots that hate

whenever a sales robot reaches out to them, but they think that they're completely

justified as the tyrant. Just like I did whenever I was thinking that, that my

way was okay because I'm not using it for nefarious sins. It's all, it's all

the. It's all these other guys that are the problem. We're going to have that

on a much bigger scale because it's not going to be one person doing their

own reach. It's one guy who owns 5,000 robots that are sending 3,000

messages a day. They're talking to other

robots, sending him responses. Should we go into robot

shorthand? Jeez.

Well, I've got to turn the corner here. Yeah. This has been a

delightful conversation, though. This has been awesome. This is. This has been great.

No, I gotta. Let me turn the corner here. Let's get ready to close.

Three things I think will absolutely be true in the upcoming fourth turning,

and to John's point, or the first turning, we're going

into a secular high. And I don't know what it's going to look like, I

have no idea. But it will look different than the last secular high that we

went through in the mid 20th century, that we all sort of hearken back to

the high that Philip K. Dick was born into and Ray Bradbury was born

into and Robert Heinlein was born into. And then that shaped them

as they went into an awakening period. And an awakening period always

involves, at least in our country,

it always involves an almost spiritual

like or religious pursuit of a higher conscience. We saw that

during the transcendental movement

in the 19th century. And then we saw it 100 years later, which, by the

way, led into the Civil War. And then we also see this a little bit

later in the 1960s, which of course led into the civil rights movement in the

20th century and our own version of

interseen civil strife. And I think it will arrive 100

years from now, right on time, in about 2060.

I won't be around maybe to see. Or if I will be around to see

it, I'll be a very old man and no one will care what I have

to say, but it will

show up and how that war will be

fought and who will have thoughts on that war?

Well, those people are the sons and daughters of folks like

myself and John who are having these conversations and thinking about these things

right now. Based off of what we were reading from the last

time we all went through this. I do

believe fundamentally that human beings and. And work

done by humans, for humans, with other humans. I hate to be the bearer of

bad news, but that ain't going nowhere where it's almost built.

It's almost as if it was built into the structure of reality itself. And so

far the engineers and the nerds have not been able to pull apart the structure

of reality itself. They could barely understand the structure of

reality itself, much less pull it apart. So

we'll still have work. I'm not one of these people who believes that

we'll have a bunch of people, surplus people floating around with nothing to do who

will engage in civil strife. I don't believe that for a moment people will

find something to do. Even with all our robot

helpers, I think we will also still have

Christianity, Islam and Judaism. I don't think those are going away.

And the reason why is because we. We need to have an

eschatology of meaning. We need to have a

structure of meaning that goes beyond the inevitable ceiling. I

love this line that I wrote, the script that goes beyond the amenable ceiling that

an art artificial transhuman paradigm will eventually hit. I

guarantee they will hit a ceiling. The cybernetics folks. To John's

point, I do think there will be a rake Hertz Weil weird merging or

at least a proposal for it of man and machine. And it will only look

weird because it's not something that I'm used to. But that will be a

proposal that will be put forth. It's already being put forth

by several people. And I don't know if it will come in the form of

a downloading of quote unquote consciousness. We already understand very little about

consciousness, much less how it differs from an algorithm

or is the same. So the big

three. The big three religions aren't going anywhere. And if you're not a

religious person listening to this, I hate to tell you they're not

going anywhere because they're containers of belief that have been around

longer than the robots and longer than our current problems.

They're sturdy for a reason. Then the third

thing that will be true is that

there will be resistance to all of these changes. For sure

that will be true. Some of it will Come in the form of.

Of loud, obstreperous and

grading objection like riots and

people destroying the Waymos in la. And some will

be very quiet and subtle, sort of like the

Essenes back in the Old Testament inter period time,

who in the Middle east,

mountains. And they created something called the Dead Sea Scrolls that

showed up, you know, 2,000 years later. You'll have those

folks, you'll have the preppers, what we would call in our time in America, the

preppers. You'll have those folks who will say, no,

I don't want to be involved in your world. I don't want to roll the

dice and I don't want to play.

Those are going to be the things that are going to be

consistent even through the next cycle with

whatever is coming down the pike.

And so I remember the words from Ecclesiastes 1, not

the thing that has been is a thing which shall be, and that which is

done is that which shall be done. And of course, there is no new thing,

no genuinely new thing under the sun.

Final thoughts. John, today on do androids

dream of electric sheep? Actually, maybe that's the final question.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

I think that when they do, we need to be ready to

have all those connecting conversations, because I think it's just a matter

of time before we get to go do that.

There. There was this very weird thing yesterday at the.

At the museum, and I would love to just kind of talk about this. My

daughter was going through it and she. And it was. It's called. It's called the

Drake formula. Are you familiar with the Drake formula? Okay,

so it's a science fiction formula. I don't know if it comes from science fiction

books or just science and theory, but it's around the idea of. It's a formula

that you can kind of run yourself through, which kind of extrapolates

whether or not you're optimistic or pessimistic about other intelligent life

in the universe. Right. Are we alone or not? Right. And it was

interesting because my daughter was going through it and it's telling her, like,

hey, on average, we usually see one planet

capable of bearing life in a. In a system. Right? And then it asks the

question, what do you think? Just like

0.01% 01%, 01% on

all these things. Right. And I appreciated how, how it was framing the question.

Right. It was talking about like, hey, you know, science shows

that as soon as the environment was right on Earth, life

started to move in that direction, scientifically speaking. Right.

So bearing that in mind. Right? What do you think that if you have the

right components for intelligent life just from a scientific perspective

that you end up with this as a, as a product just like

0.01% right. And I'm like you're so fixated

on humans as humans as humans in our

specialty, our, our

preciousness that it's leading you to like I

think gauge a little low and of course this is a conversation that's very hard

to have with a you know, 13 about to be 14 year old girl but

it was just such as this beautiful thing like I am so optimistic about these

things that it also makes me thoughtful and considerate about

the conversations that are necessary around it as opposed to it's never going to happen,

never going to happen. Oh crap. How do I deal with

this kind of situation?

And with that I'd like to thank you for listening to the leadership

lessons for the Great Books podcast today. And with that, well hey,

we're out.