How AI Can Transform Your Business Strategy And Your Results

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Hi, everybody. It's a wonderful Sunday afternoon, and Jeff and I are going to talk about where AI is probably useful and probably where it isn't useful, as far as we can tell right now. Okay, so this is going to be anything and everything, and you'll observe that we're going to stick right to the main subject for the next hour. It's gonna be one of those historic days. Do you remember the Jeff and Dan podcast? It was, I don't know what date that was. I know it was in July, it was 2024. Yeah, they actually stayed focused.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: They stayed focused, yes. So place your bets and see whether or not they stay focused today as they talk about AI with the A, as you and I have spoken about, Dan, standing for artificial.
 
Dan Sullivan: And artificial, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the granddaddy of all English dictionaries, says that it's got two primary meanings. The first one is that it's man-made. It's not organic. I agree with that. And the second one is that it's phony or fake. Artificial, you talk about someone, well, that's artificial. She's got artificial accoutrements. I think I'm seeing both of those definitions of artificial in today's world. And you were just talking when we came out, we were just chatting about the craze with which anything with, you know, the two letters AI and it seems to be hot number. Oh, it's got AI in it. You know, that means there's going to be large amounts of money to be made if we invest in this activity. And I think, Jeff, we both go back to the 1940s. We've seen other examples of odd new things that people would invest in. Not that they don't move forward, and not that certain people don't make a lot of money in it because obviously, Nvidia, which is the lead chip maker for AI applications, has gone right to the top in terms of most highly valued corporations in the world. And I think it's legitimate because, as we were mentioning before, there are some areas where this is going to be an extraordinarily valuable technology.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think though that what happens, and I think that we're in the midst of it with AI, is that there's a hype phase. Friends of mine who are in the financial world who run hedge funds, AI at the end of just about anything was entree into getting serious meetings about money. But what wasn't yet clear was how you're actually going to make money with it. I mean, it's a good time to explore because you can get a lot of very sophisticated applications for free. But what do you look at it as in terms of, you know, you and I were talking before we started recording about the areas that AI can be potentially quite profitable and have great applications.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we mentioned four just to get ourselves interested in the topic, but I think the fourth one is the one where I've seen the power of AI already, and that's in medicine. I think the kind of testing that can be done—there's a site, Clery, where with basically a very little blood, you know, one vial of blood, they will check you out for 43 different types of cancer. And it was interesting because I went through a lab where I did this. More than a lab, it's a medical service built around technology, not just AI, but lots of technology, more advanced technology. And I have a condition and it's a white blood condition called CLL, that it's one of the indicators that you may be getting cancer, blood cancer. But it was diagnosed 15 years ago in Chicago by a cancer surgeon. And he said, we'll watch it because if it stays stable, there's no particular problem and it's been stable for 15 years now. But one day after I sent in my blood sample to this new lab, I got a personal phone call from the person in charge. He says, we've got a condition here, CLL. This is the first time they tested me, so they didn't really know where I was. But the results they got were the results that I got 15 years ago. But I was really struck by how fast they got back to me. And this was of the 43 markers. Now, that's not all the cancers you can get, but this would be 98% of the type of cancers that are dangerous. But very, very clear because medicine is just total complexity.
 
So I'm going to introduce a thought right here at the beginning of our podcast. I think AI is a complexity solver. For example, traffic systems is a complex issue. And for the most part, in every large city, the traffic light pattern is set. You know, it's not adjustable to the way traffic is. You know, they may get an overview and change a few rules, but a city, you know, let's say 10 years from now, some city's going to really apply this to their entire traffic system, and it's taking account of the entire traffic system in the city, and certain streets, nobody's coming out that street, so they don't change the light for the busy street, they stop it, and then if it builds up, then it changes, but it's a constant system that's just adjusting to what's going on in the entire system. Air traffic control is another one. You know, anything where you have a tremendous amount of complex factors happening at the same time, I think AI is going to see some of your biggest breakthroughs in that area.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And at the same time, it's of course collecting all the traffic data. And it wasn't long ago, it was just a few years ago, companies like Waze, which was an Israeli company, it was actually developed by their defense department. They had little cameras on different private car companies like Uber and Lyft, and there were a number of others that have actually gone out of business since then. And they were collecting all this data as the drivers were working, you know, every day and on traffic patterns and where accidents happen and all of that. And you made me think of when you're talking about the red light. I remember when I started driving at 16 back in Akron, Ohio, and it was late at night and you get a red light and there's no traffic. You know, you still sit there for two minutes waiting for the light to change and it was totally agnostic in terms of what kind of traffic flow there was. Well, if you've got something that can both collect, retrieve, and recognize patterns, which are the complexities you deal with air traffic control and with stoplights and all of that, it could be so much more efficient if that application was constantly used, which I'm sure more and more that is what the case of what's going on.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you know, and there's vast areas of complexity in society. I mean, when I was born, there were two billion people on the planet in 1944. There were two billion. Well, now there's pushing nine, or maybe they've surpassed nine billion. And they didn't have cell phones in 1944. So there wasn't really a lot of action going on between the people. But now, I think it's about four billion people, four out of the nine now have cell phones that they're using every day. And it creates a multiple of complexity, you know.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The closest we came to cell phones when we were growing up was a really long cord from the wall to the phone.
 
Dan Sullivan: One of the early tech guys in the 1970s, his last name was Metcalf, and he's got a law. I don't know if it's a law, but it's an interesting formula. He said that the value of an electronic network, anytime you have an electronic network, is the number of connected users squared. So if you have two people, the value of that system is four. When you get to 100, it starts getting really useful. When you get to a million users, it really gets interesting, you know. And that's why electronics, technology stocks, they're all connected users, why they're so highly valued in the stock market valuations. Well, they're using this formula, saying if you have a million connected users, then the potential economic value of this system is a million squared. And it's really interesting. Well, humans just using their brain can't sort that out. You need something that can actually read all the complexities, simplify it down to a single number. It's either green, yellow, or red, you know. If it's the interactions are happening and business is being transacted, then it has value. And this is why I think social media is deceptive because there's a lot of connected users, but there's not necessarily any economic activity that's happening.
 
Stephen Falter, I'll give you an idea of something really amazing. We were in New York. We had a layover. We were flying to Buenos Aires and we flew to Kennedy and we had a layover of about six hours. And Stephen lives about a half hour from Kennedy. So he and Michelle took us out to a Japanese restaurant. And Stephen has really been very successful with TikTok. And he basically provides accurate information on how pregnancy actually happens. He's an IVF doctor. And he had done a TikTok just before he left home. And by the time he got to the restaurant, we settled down. It was about an hour. He had 100,000 downloads of his video. And through a series of stages that it went up, including it going on Instagram, it going into other networks besides TikTok, within two weeks, he had 270 million downloads. And it was 30 seconds. And it has economic value for Steven in the sense that he's becoming everyone's favorite IVF doctor, that he's the person who knows about these things. And his phone at the office has been ringing off the hook for the past year. You know, you're the doctor, you're my doctor, you're the one I have to go to.
 
So what Stephen's done now, he's created a line between clinical care and education. So he's got a vast amount of education. A lot of people don't get pregnant just because they're not eating properly, they're not doing anything properly. And he's saying, look, if you want to get pregnant, there's a diet that you have to be on for that to happen. And then he talks about the stress levels that people have, which prevent conception from happening. So, he's created this whole program now of educational films. They take it right to the line. Beyond this, you have to go to see a doctor. You have to go to an actual clinic. But here, this is just misinformation.
 
And it's really interesting because they have associations, you know, all these medical specialties. They're like guilds. And the president of the IBF guild, there aren't that many. There's only about 3,000 IBF doctors in the United States. So she phones him and she says, oh, you're a rock star, Steven. You're doing amazing work with this education. But in some of your education, you're suggesting that some IVF doctors are giving out the wrong information. And he said, well, they are. She says, I know that, but you shouldn't say it in public. But I just want to show you what one doctor using technology and this is all AI driven. I mean, TikTok is AI driven.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Is he using that also to help him generate content?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, he doesn't know all that he knows until someone asks him a question. You know, he's getting a lot of interest from people in his profession because he's figured out the number one problem that all professionals have. How do you just have totally educated, qualified people knock on your door and say, I'm ready to go with you, sort of lead generation. But my sense is that 10 years from now, we will think of AI like they thought of electricity in 1920. Are you into electricity yet? Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, everything's got electricity in it, you know? And I think AI will become, there'll be AI in all the electrical stuff you're working now, all the electronics you're working now, there'll be AI generated capabilities in that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, that's another huge area. And I assume that it's going on in some degrees already in traffic patterns and both on roads in the air.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the other three areas besides medicine that we talked about is military. I think the military was using AI 25 years ago. Not in the easy form we have today, but I suspect they're using AI completely. And I think that the gaming industry is using it. I saw it. Somebody gave me the figure in the previous year that roughly close to 3 billion people were gaming at some time a year. They were on their computers doing some sort of game. I'm sure it's being utilized there. And I'm sure in the entertainment world in various forms, it's being used. Well, we know it is because the outcry from a lot of the craft and the art in Hollywood is complaining about the use of AI. See, something can be big as a technology, but any particular company using it isn't necessarily a good investment.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. That's right. And, you know, one of the ways it's used and it's another form of really traffic is dynamic pricing. Live events, theater, sports, concerts, and so on. And so these are all applications that make tremendous sense to me because it's handling insane amounts of data. And you have to really have that data process retrieved almost instantaneously for the customers who are trying to buy a ticket. And for you, the seller who was trying to maximize the price you get for that ticket, you know, or that plane reservation, you know, or that rental car or whatever. So those kinds of things, I think, are ways that AI has been used for years that the general public didn't think of it as AI. What is the distinguishing factor between that stuff and what now is kind of accessible to everybody online, that AI? And I mean, one thing is just a simple user interface. You know, because you can communicate in conversational English and begin to get results that you can then refine. But I'm wondering what is that difference? Do you know?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I don't know because I only am using it consciously two ways. One is, is we have an AI newsletter, and it's created by a great entrepreneur by the name of Joe Stolte. And he's been through a number of tech lifetimes. He's in his forties, so he started very early in his teens. And so essentially, I'll tell you what we can deliver every two weeks. It's a very interesting newsletter, and it's got about 10 articles in it. But what we do is we submit a whole bunch of content that we have to the newsletter. And then we say thought leaders that we follow that we enjoy their content. And so we do that. And then let's say it's a Tuesday, a completely designed newsletter will appear and it's got all the content laid out. And some of the content’s just print and some of the content is audio. And some of the content is video. It's got all three, uh, three things. But it wasn't designed well. So I worked with my artists who's working with the AI people. And I said, you know, we've got certain design rules that has to look like this. If it's going to come from Coach, use of colors, page layout, how you put the headlines in and don't put somebody's article in without putting their picture in, you know, so you should have a photo of all the authors. And in the newsletter world, if you're hitting 20% click on, you're doing really well. Our average has been 84% click on right now.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Okay. But just so everybody knows, isn't yours called Spark?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Spark, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Just so people can check that out.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, Spark. And then it sends it out, and it does a complete data analysis of who's responded, what they've responded. And then it gives you a scorecard, comes back the next time, and said, this is how the last one did, and this is the next one based on our learning from this one. This uses up about one hour of our team's time every two-week cycle. So we just tested it out and it grows naturally. So we've made no attempt to expand it. But I think over the next 12 months now, we're going to go after everybody who's shown an interest in Strategic Coach, let's say over the last five years. And that would be about 50 to 60,000 where we have their email addresses and everything. And now we'll start sending it out to the larger audience that we have. But the amount of work that we have to do is still the same as it was before. So that's a good one.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Now, do you use AI to also aggregate the articles and the stuff that you publish in the newsletter?
 
Dan Sullivan: The AI does that for us. Yeah. And a couple of our podcasts have been in there with your picture. Your picture has been in it. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of calls from single women, you know, wanting to see who's the guy in the dark glasses, you know, here I am, you know, I look really good, but don't have the glasses. You know, I just don't have the glasses. I'm checking out my own surge pricing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the other one I have is one I just do for, it's replaced Google. I, the moment I got this, um, uh, and I've mentioned it on our podcast Perplexity and I just love it. I just love it. And something will happen in the news and I'll just put in a prompt for the site. It's very, I mean, it's free if you want to, it won't save your searches if it's free. And then they have a pro version, which saves your library of all your searches. So I put it in, you know, I'll see something in the news and I'll say, give me 10 facts about this particular thing happening. And it takes about less than five seconds. Number one, number two, number three, and all it's done is a search of the entire internet and it's answered your prompt. Okay. So anything that answers your prompt, it's got a very nice feel to it. And where it tells you information is lacking, it tells you, you know, there's not a lot of information, what you're asking us. But whereas Google is a search engine, Perplexity is an answer engine. And that's a huge difference. I see it as very different.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And define that difference for us.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, Google will just give you articles. You know, if I ask a question, it'll give me 10 articles that if I dig through the articles, I might get the answer. It goes through the articles and gives you the answer. Okay. Because it's not based on an advertising model right now. You have a subscription model, which costs you, but it's not onerous. But I really like that. It's got a very friendly feel to it. It's kind of like a dog. You know, one reason I like dogs, they're really earnest. I've never really come across a deceitful dog. I've come across scared dogs. I've come across mean dogs, but I've never come across deceitful dogs. Dogs just kind of want to do the best for you. And I find this, like, for example, I've heard with some of the other sites, you ask a question, they say, there's no answer to that question. And if you ask it again, we're going to notify the FBI. We're going to notify the FBI, you know, anyway. So it's got a nice feel to it. I think the people who designed it are helpful people. Jeff Bezos has a big stake in this company, which is backed up by his money. So those are my two experiences so far. But, you know, I'm not using it really to create money. I mean, we are with, you know, eventually we'll get the good leads. It's like podcasting. We're just establishing a relationship out in the marketplace.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which is incredibly important. And there's so much competition for attention, which makes establishing relationships harder. And, you know, if people are bored for a nanosecond, they're gone. You know, but we talked about two other areas of AI, but I want to since you talked about something very hands-on for you, Perplexity, you know, there's a whole bunch of businesses that have popped up that are basically, here's how you can build your business with AI in here and there's all these kind of gee whiz tools. I'm predicting that half of them will be out of business in two years, but all these gee whiz tools that are there and so on. How do you even know what to use, what to go after? Is that why people aggregating different tools are worthwhile or did you find like with Perplexity once you tried it, you liked it and you just continued to use it?
 
Dan Sullivan: What we had, we have a great client in Strategic Coach. He's late twenties. He's been at AI for 10 years, since he was 19. His name's Evan Ryan. What he does, he said, I'm going to show you how your company, through the use of available AI tools, each employee in your company can eliminate five hours of replicated work. You're just replicating something or it's not really requiring any creativity. It just asks you have to move some information from here to here and here to here. And he said, so that would be five times 130. We have 130 team members. So that would be about 650 hours a week times 52 weeks. And that's his entire business model. He didn't eliminate newsletter activity. We weren't sending a newsletter because it was just too much work. It just required too much backstage work, artists, writers, and everything. But the thing that he's doing, he's giving us a new capability that doesn't really cost us any time. And it's like $12,000 a year for the whole newsletter, and there's 24 issues of it. Well, that's cool. That's a reasonable price. And that's his entire business. He says five hours, we can do it. We can take any company, look at the way work's being done now. And every week we can eliminate five hours. Give you five hours back essentially to do other things. Well, I'm all for that. And what is his company? I think it's called AITeammate.com. AITeammate.com. Yeah. And his whole attitude is you're just adding it like a teammate into the company, and it just does specialized tasks of freeing your existing teammates.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's how I look at the AI I use. Kind of like an idiot savant in a certain area. As long as you give it really clear prompts, which is what's critical. But you still have to look because there's still many errors that are made. It still has to be proofread.
 
Dan Sullivan: My entire sense of it is that you don't want AI in the front stage.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Meaning what?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you want it back stage so that your human front stage is better.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And is that also why you want to have pictures of the people in there? So it's just not a data dump. It's you're associating it with humans. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And this is not created articles that we're sending out in the newsletter. This stuff already exists.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Aggregated articles around different interest groups. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the kind of thing, another client of yours who, I don't know if you would call it a newsletter, more of a news memo or something, but like Howard Getson, you know, sends out links that are related to the market, you know, the financial markets. And he also does links that are sort of, as he calls them, for lighter reading or about AI or that kind of a thing. And there's a company called Morning Consult, which was recently bought. I had met the founder of it a couple times, and they built up what was probably the newest aggregation service of news, trends, business, all that. They had a number of different newsletters, and it was all kinds of different aggregations, and they grew very quickly. And I don't remember what it sold for, but it was a lot, and they weren't that many years into it. So that aggregation is something that's become much easier because it's, you know, again, it's search, storage, retrieve.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, probably things that you're watching on the internet, because the internet is my main source of information, but the companies—for example, my main news source is a site out of Chicago, which is called RealClear. And they have RealClear politics, RealClear markets, RealClear science, RealClear health. They have a whole series of categories in each of them. And they're exactly the same. They're aggregates of articles. In some cases, news, it would be the last 24 hours. And these would, for example, with the event of last night, and we're talking the day after the attempted assassination, tomorrow they'll have 15 articles on this from different points of view. But all they're giving you is the title of the article, and you punch on it, and it takes you right to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal. It just takes you there. And some of them have paywalls, so you have to decide whether you want to subscribe or not. And I find it very even-handed. In terms of politics, they cover the spectrum. And so there will be people who are 100% for the issue, there are people 100% against the issue, and they list those articles. And some of them, because they're not of the nature science that wouldn't be every day, it would be for the last 30 days, the key articles. And I'm sure they're busily employing AI to make their service better. So my sense is that 95% of the improvements that AI are making will never make the news. It's just that people who are already good at something already are just getting it done easier, faster and cheaper.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. And so isn't a question an entrepreneur should ask themselves or any business person before they get involved with AI is number one, well, how am I going to use this? And if I use it, will it make my life easier, faster, and simpler?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think there's four things. It makes it easier, it makes it faster, it makes it cheaper, and you get a bigger result. But that would be anything that you would look at.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Exactly.
 
Dan Sullivan: So as opposed to, this does not defy good business practice principles.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. That's what I'm trying to get at is that it's important to understand it's not a magic bullet for all things. It's a tool that could be used for certain things very well. And other things, other than you're afraid you're going to miss the boat, it may not be the right tool for you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, you know, it just depends. I mean, we're writing a book, Looking at Your Entrepreneurial Business as Theater, and we have seven suggestions of how looking at your business as a form of theater as opposed to being a little corporation. But my sense about our readers, they're already good at business. This is an enhancer of something they're already good at.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think we're also going to be giving them a system that can result in a very robust and engaging ecosystem for their own business to innovate. People will love working there.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, exactly. They'll have very enthusiastic, loyal fans.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: But my sense is that people are going to read this book and utilize it. They're already good at that. But this takes them to a higher level.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and it also probably defines and names some processes that, oh, yeah, we are doing something like that. It was just never labeled before, you know, like back office stuff, that is the back stage stuff. You know, the thing that's interesting, there's a lot that's interesting to me about this. I had a really interesting conversation Friday night with a neuroscientist, very smart, and she's Harvard educated, Oxford doctorate, and her name's Heather Berlin. And we were talking about AI. It was an interesting conversation because her background is in neuroscience and also psychology. So she's a psychologist too. And one of the things that, one of the really interesting parts of the conversation we had was about how there are a substantial number of people that think AI is sentient, or it is heading towards sentience. And I said, what is your opinion? I said, it's not. And I said, well, tell me more. What do you mean that it's not?
 
So in order to have sentience, you have to have consciousness. Computers don't have consciousness. They don't know they're computers. But the only way they can communicate is through words. But words are an abstraction. You know, they're not pure expression of what something is. So they can't have sentience, but it can give people the impression of it because they read the words and then they project onto that that it must be sentient if it is saying something like that. So it's becoming more like us. And the answer to that is no, it's not becoming more like us, but because it has gotten like—the reason you like Perplexity, you can speak to it in conversational English and you can get a response in conversational English. And again, that doesn't mean that whether it's conversational English or gibberish, it doesn't mean that the machine interprets that as it now has feelings, but oftentimes the consumers do. And I think that's a whole other interesting part of AI because I think it's going to be answering the fundamental business questions you said is how most people I think are going to use it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, there's a great writer in The Wall Street Journal, and he has an article about every two weeks. And he's a tech guy. His name is Andy Kessler, K-E-S-S-L-E-R. And he said, as near as I can figure, it's a new dial tone. He says, you know, when we switched over from live operator telephones to automatic dialing, he said there was a period there that people didn't get a handle on it because they were so used to talking to an operator. They didn't quite get that all you have to do is press zero and you get a dial tone and then you dial your number. And he said he thinks that it's kind of like the dial tone. It will vastly expand existing technology. In other words, the amount of phone calls were made once they became automatic was exponential. I mean, it just shot through the roof. And he said, all technology, if it's good technology, creates exponential results. It's not additive results, it's exponential.
 
Sort of like I was mentioning before we started, Metcalfe was an early tech pioneer in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And he said that why electronic networks are selling for such high valuations is that they're exponential. If you have one phone, you have nothing. If you have two phones, you now have an activity going on. So the value of a two telephone system is two times two. It's worth four. If you have three, it's worth nine. If you have a hundred, it's worth 10,000. So he said, this is why you get valuations for Facebook, you get valuations for Apple. He says technology is part of it, but it's actually the possibility of economic activity from having a lot of connections, a lot of people connected to a lot of other people produces a lot of economic activity. And I've always been struck by that. And the United States as a country has the highest exponential connection rate across the board compared to any other country. More Americans just talk to each other than any other country. And we really go for technologies that make that easier.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Is it true, actually, that Americans talk to each other more on the phone than any other country?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, probably. Certainly in the business sector, it's out of sight, the amount of interactions that go on among American business, business-minded people, which is most people. Yeah, it's off the charts. Now, one of the reasons is I'll bring up an obstacle to the growth of AI. It just uses up a monstrous amount of electricity. And right now, if they're projecting what AI is going to be five years from now, you know, that's a growth curve. We don't have the amount of electricity to handle that. I'll give you one example, the Nvidia chip, which is now the most powerful. I mean, Intel will have their chip and TSMC, they'll have their chip. They're all going for these AI empowering chips. But if you buy three EVs, say you buy three Teslas and they're used every day for a year, you know, normal driver, you know, say it's 20,000 miles, 25,000 miles. I don't know how much people drive. I don't drive, but a NVIDIA chip uses more electricity than those three cars will in a year. In what period of time does NVIDIA chip use that power? In one year. The NVIDIA chip, compared to the use of the three electric vehicles, will be the same. And they've produced 5 million of these chips since November of 22. There's not the amount of electricity you need to power all that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And doesn't it take an insane amount of energy for crypto mining?
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So competition for that kind of energy. You know, all those that like to get in on the ground floor and check out, it's not really the ground floor anymore. But who are the companies that are going to help produce that energy?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think all of a sudden, and I'm just keeping track of articles over the last year, and it's really clear now that only nuclear can do this. And I have a client in Wyoming who's specializing in manufacturing what are called modular nuclear. They use a different aspect of uranium. It doesn't explode, you know, it doesn't have the radiation dangers. But if you, I'm just trying to give a space comparison. When we were in Nashville and we were doing the breakout group, that room that the nuclear plant would be that big. That room where we did the breakouts? Yeah, they're that small. You can bring them in on an oversized truck trailer.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, actually, I saw something that was talking about the power that was being required for crypto and they were bringing in those kinds of almost like in a way kind of smaller, but like a third of a boxcar or something.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, that would be it. And this is going to be the huge breakthrough will be in the creation of this energy. And that will be, I mean, energy for everything. But if you're going in the direction of AI, you're going to have to have an entirely new source for your energy, your daily energy. So if you think about it, for example, Intel is putting in a huge chip factory north and west of Columbus, Ohio. And it's basically farm country. And it's going to be, I think the number of employees is going to be 7,000 workers. And that will require another, probably double that number of jobs just to be in the neighborhood. So maybe the total is about 20,000 jobs. Using this new approach, when you're building the factory, you bring in your first modular nuclear and it supplies all the power or the building of the plant. Then when the plant's operational, you bring in as many other modular nuclear that you need and nothing comes off the grid. None of the energy comes off the grid. So these are all unique sources. And they have about, I think as far as their fuel goes, I think they're good for 18 months and then they have to get the wasted material has to come out and the new ones. But the U.S. Navy's been using this type of thing now for 70 years. So starting in the 1950s, they started creating nuclear subs. And as the old aircraft carriers went out of operation, all the new carriers are nuclear. And the newest nuclear generator that they have on the aircraft carrier is 15 years, no refuel.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, really. So it will be companies that are building these modular energy.
 
Dan Sullivan: So I have a client who's got one in Wyoming and he's in the process of producing five of them. And they're about a billion dollars each.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And how many of those are required for what kind of business? I mean, that seems like an awfully huge spend.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, probably in New York, if I look at where you live, probably you could go A8, you know, you could probably run from the park to the Hudson, starting at Broadway and go up to Harlem with one mile. Let's say Central Park was developed. I mean, I'm sure there's real estate developers in New York who have wet dreams about what they would do with Central Park, but if you just took Central Park and ran … well, it runs from, what, 57th Street up to … it's 59th, it's like 114th.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. So, you know, talking about applications of AI. So in health care, in gaming, in different military applications, some of these things which have been going on for a long time already, what we the public are seeing are those things like Perplexity, ChatGPT, on and on. And I was saying before that we're now in the hype phase of that. And, you know, on Instagram, since I pause on some of these things about AI, of course, I'm fed more and more and and it was, you know, here's the top three AI sites to look at. Now there are sites that have a thousand different, I mean, you can like just bury yourself in this stuff, a thousand different applications that you can get for free or at least try for free. And, you know, if you're somebody who feels compelled to check every new thing out, that's all you're going to do every day because it's all happening that fast. So the question is, how do those companies make any money at this? Because there's a lot of concern as to how AI is going to monetize for all the kinds of uses that we talk about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I would say just looking at other tech breakthroughs that if you have a thousand applications, let's say it represents a thousand new companies that are doing it. I would say maybe 20 will be in their present form five years from now. The iPhone has probably about 350, 400 applications that were developed as separate applications over the last 40 years, but they're all packed into a very, very small space. It's probably about $2 billion worth of technology inside of a $800 iPhone. What do I use my iPhone for? Very few people have my phone number, so I'm not answering a lot of calls. I'm sure that the company that makes my Oura Ring, which tracks my sleep overnight, is using an AI program to do it, taking the data from my heartbeat. I think the best model to look at AI is electricity. You know, wow, you got some really neat electricity in your room behind you, Jeff, I'm looking at. Wow. You're really into this electricity stuff, aren't you? I mean, that's where we are with AI. You know, in 10 years, nobody will even talk about it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I don't compare it to electricity as much as I compare it to, let's say, basically what the internet is. I think that it is a platform like that, which is kind of the next major iteration of what that is. Just like what you were saying is you prefer Perplexity to searching on Google.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I asked one day, I asked Perplexity a question. I said, since you have such a great site, why would anyone use any other form of AI besides you? And he says, and it gave me 17 reasons why it does this really well, but there are other sites that do it a lot better. He says, for example, for local information, restaurants, addresses, and everything else, he says, Google is far better than us. You wouldn't use our AI for doing that. But if you have questions about political events or business trends or anything else, it's infinitely better than Google. I mean, because Google is only showing you articles that have been paid for with advertising. Now, I don't know how this site is going to go forward. I don't know what their business model is, but there's a world of difference between their subscription site and their free site. I mean, I like to see the searches, my answer searches that I've done. But if they go, they'll be bought out by someone else. You know, if it doesn't work for them, they'll become part of somebody else's capability.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah, I mean, I've used Perplexity. I use Claude. I use Meta.ai and ChatGPT. They're 4.0 now. At this point, there's two of them I have subscriptions to. And the other two, I don't really need to get subscriptions to them. And what I'm doing, and I know there are hubs that you can have up to six screens and do them all at once. But what I'm doing is comparing the kinds of answers I get and where they're the least amount of mistakes, what sites, the sources of their research that goes into the answer. And it's really interesting. I mean, it's a fascinating set of tests to do in terms of seeing how does this do it, except it's also so adaptive and I wonder, AI now is used so loosely, and even we're using it loosely as we talk about the different applications, because some of these things, although it wasn't called AI, but some of these things have been used for decades by the military, you know, and not just the military, in gaming and all of that. And I wonder what is the gap between AI, as we think we understand it, and just the normal operations on a computer? Because Google feeds you things based on other things that you've searched for. And I wonder, what is the difference? When does it become AI as just opposed to—well, one way of … it's really fast computing.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, it's of an order of magnitude faster computing. That's why the Nvidia chips, they can really crunch a lot in a short period of time. And I mentioned the electricity problem and everything like that. But I don't think they're using language in an interesting way. But everything's being digitized. And my sense is that for my experience, and you know, I'm not a real tech nut and I don't really dig into these things, but I think it's a matter of speed. It isn't a matter of a difference of order or anything. And there was a lot of talk about it around the office, you know, my team about a year ago, and nobody even talks about it anymore, but they're using it. Okay, they're using it. And this program, they're using it for this reason. But in every time they're getting things done faster, they're getting things done easier, they're getting them done cheaper. And that shows up, you know, are we profitable, you know, at the end of the year, if a lot of hours have been freed up for less productive work, and it's devoted to more productive work, we'll see it in the bottom line.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I will bet you that everything that you just said, when personal computers came on the scene, and they were accessible to the general public, as opposed to mainframes, which were just for businesses, all those same things were said, you know. So that's why I think what we have is a new platform, because, you know, computers from their inception to now have only gotten faster. And I think the difference is, I mean, IBM made their fortune not so much in the mainframes, but in staffing people permanently at these large companies to keep the mainframes working. You know, that's how IBM made a ton of money. And I think that there is something that the main difference is, and this is relatively recent, I think it's an evolution of the personal computer that's led us to this, is that instead of code, you can talk to the computer in conversational English, which has just thrown the doors wide open in terms of accessibility for tasks that would have been impossible for the layperson to use. Because they don't know coding. My son knows coding and he's brilliant at coding and knowing growth marketing and all of that. And I don't even have the attention span, you know, to look at that stuff and even try to figure it out. But I think that is one of the most interesting distinctions because this is now put it within reach.
 
Dan Sullivan: That move over from coding to graphic user interface happened in 1981, ‘82. That was a huge jump when all you have to do is click. Remember it wasn't coding, but it was programming. Everybody's going to have to become a programmer.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, people aren't going to become programmers, but if you can show them with just a click, they can get a lot of programming access to the value of programming. Then they're going to go for it. And I think that, as I say, there's four criteria. Does your thing allow people to do it faster? Can they do it easier? Can they do it cheaper? And can they produce a bigger result? And I think that if the answer is pretty much or the answer is yeah, significantly, that's the difference between a losing business and a real business. I think it makes productive people 10 times more productive over time. And I think it makes unproductive people 10 times more unproductive over time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, because I think you can go down the rabbit hole and you're not being productive at all. But that's kind of like the equivalent of surfing the net, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, say somebody bought all thousand AI apps and spent one day on examining if any of these were useful. So a thousand days they used up. Meanwhile, there's been 10,000 more created.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And half of the ones you look at are out of business.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, people are remarkably inventive and wasting time, you know?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And because there's that turnover, it's like the constant shedding of the skin or moulting your feathers or whatever the hell it is. By the time you get through and you look back and more than half of them are out of business.
 
Dan Sullivan: But I think the big thing right now with a lot of the craze, and I'll go back to your neuroscientist, I got real interested with, does this in any way resemble or will it surpass human thinking? And the longer I go with this, I said that this is the invention of AI as part of human thinking. And my sense is that the creature can't overcome the creator. You know, it's just a logic thing. What I think is going to happen in some quarters is we're going to become more and more knowledgeable about what human thinking really is as a result of artificial intelligence. And I think the finest human intelligence is being able to create something new that delights other human beings. We're back to my play.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, I think you're right. But you know, when you say that the creature can't overcome the creator, I will point you to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, nice story.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And the interesting thing about the story is the thing that went wrong was the wrong brain. And that's kind of what we're talking about, you know, through this, because it's how you use it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think some real damage can be used, but that's true of almost every technology. AT&T had to admit that somebody just hacked all their consumer accounts in the United States. They know their credit card numbers and everything like that, you know, I mean, that's real damage.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and I think the other thing that happens is that we become hyperbolic. It's either going to create this utopian or dystopian society, which it's going to do neither. You know, I think it's going to be realized as another powerful tool that's great for some things. And if anybody gets anything out of our podcasts today, I would point them to your question, which is, should I use AI? And your answer, does it help you do anything faster, easier, cheaper, with a bigger result? And if the answer is no, then you don't need it, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And there are things that are just enjoyable. And so far Perplexity hasn't really helped with anything business related, but you and I are just interested in things that happen in the world. And I like getting a backdrop. I have an interface. It's called, tell me 10 things about this that are important to know. If you're going to know about this, what are the 10 things to know when I go like that? Well, that's great. You know? And I find what it's doing, it's making me less inclined to just answer off the top. And I said, I don't know, I'll have to think about that a little bit. And I go and talk to Perplexity. And I said, I didn't know that. And thought about that. That's, that's really, really interesting. So I think my relationship with Perplexity is making me more cautious that I know the answer up front, you know, which it's a good human skill.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It is. And, you know, I remember when I was doing research papers in college, which there was no internet. So it required tons of reading. And by the way, that wasn't reading in books that I just had at home. I either had to buy books, some I had to go to the library, in some cases, even going through microfilm, you know, and all these people now have grown up. When I say these people, people under 35 or 40 have grown up with the computer and the access to information. Where it becomes so powerful is the ability to access information to, as you found out, be more cautious in terms of finding out more so that you can have a more intelligent discussion about things and sourcing material. But because there's humans involved, there's always going to be aspects of the system that are corrupted for profit or just mean-spirited crap or whatever. And there will be people that are doing really cool things with it that are really wonderful. And the vast majority of people are going to be somewhere in the middle. Can I use this? Do I need this? Just fun, as you said. But I think it's fascinating because it's changing so quickly. Literally on a daily basis.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the big thing is that Thursday of this week, the 18th, I think, is Thursday, Wednesday or Thursday. We're dating, but it's okay. is I will have not watched any television for six years, and I don't feel I've missed much. We got the news of the event last night, the attempted assassination. And I said, I'm going to bed. And I got up to bed and then I checked in the morning and they knew a little bit about what was going on. I checked this afternoon. They knew a little bit more about what was going on. Still no explanations how someone with a rifle could get that close. You know, there's no, because I think there's some real bureaucratic failure here, you know, I think, and they're trying to sort things out. You know, I've spent maybe half hour on the event where 10 years ago I might have watched 15 hours of television on the event. But, you know, my time is more usefully spent these days than it was 10 years ago.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and I would say for myself, I do watch some television, and I'm including in television, Netflix and HBO and Hulu, where we watch series and, you know, which I liken in some cases to, you know, reading a good book for a few hours. But on all the 24-hour news channels, there's way, way, way more repetition and speculation than anything else. So I have a very finite appetite for that. I don't check in like you were talking about. You check in, but I don't need to be focused on that five
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, in ‘63, I was working five blocks from the White House when JFK was killed. And, you know, I mean, the world stopped, the world really stopped, but I got on with my life. But people were asking me about the election this year. And I says, well, I've got my home team that I'm rooting for. And they said, well, what if it turns out different? And I said, the next day, I have a really good entrepreneurial day. I create stuff, I do things. I said, it doesn't affect me directly any of this, so I don't need to attach emotion to it. It's interesting, you know?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Well, I just bought a book that I'm going to be reading after I finish the one I'm doing, which is called Cue the Sun, about the impact of reality television on the public. And, you know, one of the things we share in common is this kind of insatiable curiosity about all kinds of stuff. You know, I was thinking of a character in a book that they have pledged to never repeat themselves. So as a result, they either have to speak to a lot of people at once because they aren't repeating themselves and spend a lot of time quiet, you know, because so much of what we do is repetition. That's kind of fascinating to me.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's another skill there. Remember if you said this to the same person once before. That's right. I try to remember, did I say anything? You know, Harry Truman, he had a great line. He says, he says, tell the truth. It's much more economic. You only have to remember one version, you know, and everything like that. But, you know, I think there's a great wastage of time involved in all this media. And you're paying with your attention. I mean, my attention is my property.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that's right. And I'm looking for the author of something just to enhance what you said. There is a book out that was entitled, Which Lie Did I Tell You? And it was William Goldman. And, you know, I think that your Truman thing is on the money because it is so much more economical because you only have to remember that one version, as you say. And I think that we do not know, it's another thing I want to talk to my neuroscientist friends about, what is the impact of a 24-7 cycle where you hear so much repetition and so much of that repetition is about bad news? What does that do to us cognitively?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they're getting pretty good figures of what it does to teenage girls. Well, on social media, yes. Boys less so, but still a lot. And I talked to my team about their children, and a lot of them have really, really cut down the access to social media. They get them enrolled in every sports program where they're out playing soccer and everything, you know. I think there's a pushback coming, you know, like, you know. It's a bit like alcohol, you know, people say, well, why did prohibition happen? And I said, because men were taking their paycheck for the week and going and spending that one night at the bar and their family starved to death. That's why prohibition happened. I said, there's excesses that become harmful. And then there's a pushback against it. And, you know, smoking.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, in some things, like with smoking, the companies are large enough that they can hire the most effective PR firms and all the inevitable for 20 years before the public finds out about it. That's a lot harder now with social media. You know, that's a lot harder to do.
 
Dan Sullivan: But there's all seven out of eight doctors who smoke, smoke camels. I mean, that might have been true. I don't know. And it was an odd statistic.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I'm picturing somebody, you know, where they're pulling up a camel's ass.
 
Dan Sullivan: There were ten, but two of them died. But, you know, I was so struck. I remember flying into L.A. in the nineties. I was going in and you could barely see the ground. It was so much smog. And now you fly into L.A. and the air is as clean as can be, you know, because they got rid of leaded gasoline and other toxic fumes. So there's a pushback that happens at a certain point. You know, let's put a damper on this.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I did a job for the Harvard School for Public Health. I did a documentary about them. I've met people. It was humbling, some of the people that I met and what they did. And they were responsible for getting smoking outlawed on airplanes. And I said to one of the lead researchers, I have no background in chemistry or health care or any of these things, but it didn't take a lot for me to think, oh, you remember those little curtains that hung between from the back of the seat to the … sometimes it was just a sign.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. Yeah. That any further back and you'll experience smoke. But if you're on this side of the sign, no smoke.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yeah. And I said, the thing I wonder, it took about eight or ten years for that legislation to happen. And I said, doesn't common sense tell you that smoking is bad, you know, and that that on the airplane is not going to stop the smoke as a recirculating the same air and all of that. And he said, you got to present data. And they said, yeah, he laughed and said, yeah, you could say it's common sense. How could it be good for you? He said, but you got to present the data. And that takes time to accumulate the data.
 
Dan Sullivan: Also, nicotine is a powerful drug. People were addicted to the drug.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Well, the addiction is, of course, the issue of helping them get off that addiction. But policy is affected when you can present a compelling enough case and back it up with data. So things it seems like that should have been easy weren't.
 
Dan Sullivan: Plus, you know, politicians have to fundraise. Tobacco companies were good donors to political campaigns, just like the alcohol companies are, the pharmaceutical companies are, you know, there are companies are on and on. So it takes time to do these things, but you know, don't smoke. Just don't smoke.
 
Dan Sullivan: Did you ever smoke?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No.
 
Dan Sullivan: Not me either. Now my father smoked, my mother didn't smoke. And so when my father was 60, he had to stop smoking because he had high blood pressure and a lot of other things. So my mother had always purchased his cigarettes from the time they were married. So that had been 35 years. And she said, she came in one day and she had all the bills from 35 years. And she says, this is how much you spent on smoking for the last 35 years. It was a big number. And she said, I didn't want to smoke, so I haven't spent this money, but now I want to travel. So this is how much money I have for travel.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: A certainly compelling argument.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And my grandfather, my father's father, was a real mean drunk. And so my father, neither of my parents drank. So I never smoked because I was always involved in sports. And in those days, you know, you get kicked off teams if you smoked as a kid. So that never happened. And I never drank until I was 27. And I did drink for 13 years. And one night I've been drinking and mine was wine. I think it was a bit of a sugar thing with me, too. And I was really a horse's ass. I don't know if you've ever been a horse's ass. I have. And you know, you're a horse's ass and you can't stop being a horse's ass at a dinner party. And Babs said the guests left early and Babs came and she said, do you like being that way? And I got up the next morning and I said, no, I'm not going to drink again. I didn't drink for 25 years. So I had birth to 27, no drinking. And from 40 to 65, it's probably done my liver good. And now, yeah, I drink. I mean, I'll have wine with a meal or I don't drink by myself.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, well, I think that as we wind this down, we certainly got into some of the everything.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah But I think we stuck with AI as a theme, you know?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I think we got to some conclusions, too.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and I think your four questions to answer in terms of should you use AI, and it's true for anything you're going to purchase in business, I would say, wouldn't you agree?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Shall we have the author say the four things?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Will this allow me to get things done faster, easier, cheaper, and with an overall bigger result? The answer is yes. Probably it's a good thing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And I think that that's, so if you end this listening session with that result, you've gotten some really valuable information and hopefully enjoy the rest of it. And if not, we'll say something different next time you hear us.
 
Dan Sullivan: Next time we should talk about secret knowledge because somebody asked me once, you know, there's this word superpower, you know, super, have you heard superpower? Another one of these memes. And they said, if you could have a superpower, what would be the greatest superpower? And I said, tomorrow's Wall Street Journal yesterday. That would just pretty well take care of everything.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That was very similar when I have been asked, you know, if you had it to do all over again, what would you do differently? And I said, buy Amazon and Apple back in the eighties. Now, Groucho Marx's answer to that, when he was asked on his 80th birthday, if you had it to do all over again, what would you do differently? And he said, more positions. Thanks for joining us today on our show, Anything and Everything. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit acreativecareer.com and madoffproductions.com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach.com.