Capability-Enabling Technologies | Capability Amplifier

Hi, this is Dan Sullivan, and this is the Capability Amplifier. And this is our next episode. And this is with my partner, Mike Koenigs, who really keeps me on my toes. I don't often get nervous, but I started pumping my usual pharmaceuticals last night just to put myself in the proper frame of mind. And, Mike, we kicked off with our first episode a week or so ago, and it just clicked, you know, and it's really amazing that we've known each other going on 10 years, but we've never really done something like this before, and we. Every time we get together, when we're at Genius Network or at Strategic Coach, I always am absolutely fascinated with the conversations which instantaneously spring up. But, you know, this type of podcast, first of all, podcasts are pretty new to the world, but this type of conversation that we're having in the Capability Amplifier just wasn't thinkable. Twenty years ago, the topics were not thinkable. And the means by which we can actually distribute these breakthroughs that are happening around the world electronically, digitally, is also brand new to the world. So we're actually doing something, each of us, in our own entrepreneurial world, to amplify our capabilities, which each of us, if you go back to the 1990s, we were not able to do this.

You're right. And you know what? First of all, Dan, this is a dream come true for me too, because you offer such a unique skill set. But the other thing that just building on top of what you just said, if you think about it, the combination of high performance humanism, in other words, who we can be with a combination of pharma and food, our knowledge of our bodies, our knowledge of our brains, and also the fact that we are living in a new augmented reality. All this technology that's around us, for better or worse, allows us to know almost anything on demand all the time and communicate with the entire human race. So the fact that we live in this incredibly abundant world right now, where I think anything is possible, and you agree with that, and you have access right now to an incredible array of people, you think about who we know and who we're connected with, whether it's Peter Diamandis or Ray Kurzweil, people involved in robotics, artificial intelligence, genetics, and what we're able to do by collaborating and combining all these things all at once, not to mention the fact that we are very, very quickly entering an opportunity in a time where we're crisscrossing over to where spirituality meets science and science meets spirituality on a whole different level. In an Array as well. I'm so excited to be alive. And this truly is the greatest moment in human history to be alive. And every minute for forward is even better too. So let's get this show on the road. I know we've got a new structure that we're going to be teaching within that I'm really excited about. You did your homework. I'm excited to talk about what you've done and what you prepared.

Well, one of the things whenever I come up with a new idea, you know, the term capability amplifiers simply came out of our first discussion. So what I try to do, there's a thing called the strength finder. It's a test that was created first of all by the Gallup organization going back probably 15 or 20 years ago. And it's based on really big numbers. Like they interviewed 6 million people and they came up with a set discrete number of capabilities that people seem to have. And you take this test and you get your top five. I really, really like getting a description that I can really make sense of my experience with. And the number capability that I came up with in my profile was ideation that what turns Dan on is ideas. You know, I'm a sucker for new ideas. Number two is maximizer ideas. So I'm not interested in ideas that just make average a little bit better. I'm interested in ideas that take really great people already and maximize them out in the world. And the third one which is pertinent to our discussion right here is. Or the fourth one actually is context. Third one is self assurance. I never think I can get in trouble with a new idea. But the fourth one is context. And that is I like to know the 360° of a brand new idea. And what I've tried to do for the purpose of our ongoing discussion here is to sort of have a framework that when you talk about capability amplifier, there are some mindsets that support that. And what I try to do is just get a sense of what kind of other mindsets do you have such that the idea of capability amplifier would be an interesting idea to you. And the first thing is that you have to kind of love the idea that who you are at your best is actually being multiplied by the world around you. Of course, you were very early into this when I met you. You were kind of the 800, not 900, 800 pound gorilla right at the center. There's a way of creating traffic if you're a marketer on the Internet and you called it traffic geyser, which is just A marvelous combination of two words. Everybody can envision what traffic means, but it was kind of like you could take this and you could really create an explosion of impact out in the world. You, you mentioned another idea like this just before we went into the actual recording today, and it was category domination. And I love these words that you have because every word deserves to be in the language because it has an emotional impact. So can you just talk a little bit about what you mean by category domination? Because I mean, who wouldn't like that, right? Just before I let you on, I'll do this little thing with my really top groups in Strategic Coach, which is the 10 times program, and my new game changer program. And I said, all of you really want to create value, but how many of you actually your ultimate game plan is just global domination. You just want to dominate the space that you're in and you just keep wanting to expanding the space that you dominate. So talk about category domination. This is actually relating to Mike, your day job. You know, I mean, we all have day jobs. We're doing this for fun, but we have day jobs where we're actually taking our ideas to use to make money for other people.

Right. Well, thank you for that. And I think there's two setups here. So if I frame this a little bit, my day job is I help amplify business owners and help them reinvent themselves in the next version of themselves or find money they don't see because they don't see a gap. And I'm going to talk about the gap in a moment. But let's first of all get the definition of what a category domination is all about. And this is loosely based on a concept that Tim Ferriss did years ago when he created the book the Four Hour Workweek. He created the category of lifestyle business, essentially. So what was brilliant about this strategy is by carving out a brand new category that didn't exist, he instantly was number one. And he got people thinking about the possibility of what could happen when you escaped the nine to five and you became a member of the new rich. That theme of that book appealed to an entire generation of people. I'd say Gen X to the new millennials. And now that his audience has evolved and now they are decision makers and they actually have money, Tim Ferriss popularity and value increases as well. So putting that in context for our listener, by being able to dominate a category, what you want to be able to do is find a unique way of telling your story so people instantly acknowledge and recognize you as an authority and an expert and a thought leader in a space that either you invent or you slide in sideways to. And therefore, you're able to charge absolute premiums. You can command the stage, you can command the media. And there's something about the combination of who you are and the hook you create. In other words, the very quick way of being able to describe to the world, as I say, you want to say to the world, here's my billboard. Here's who I am, what I do, who I do it for, and the benefits and results you can expect to work with me. And from there, your value continues to increase and increase and stack and stack and stack. So that's kind of the way to contextualize this and set it up.

So I just want to see if an idea I have fits into your notion of the category domination. We're both political junkies, in addition, you know, to our day job, our night job, but we also have time to reflect on it. And I really love history because of my context thing. And two or three of the most important geopolitical ideas came right after the Second World War. And one of them was. Was Churchill, who really made this famous. But he was on a tour after he had been defeated right after the war as being Prime Minister of England. He came to a little college in Missouri, and he gave a speech which is very famous. Anybody can go to Google, and to actually just punch this in. It's on YouTube. And he said, you know, what's happening in the world now that a lot of people don't know? Over the ancient capitals of Eastern Europe, an Iron Curtain is descending. And that Iron Curtain now is separating the totalitarian world from the free world. And all the people who wanted to get along with the Russians absolutely hated this idea. Look, we don't want to make this distinction, but it just went viral, as things could go viral in those days. And for the next 50 years, it was the Iron Curtain. And then an American diplomat said, you know, we've been fighting hot wars, but this one is going to be a Cold War Cold War. And this became the Cold War. And those two ideas, the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, absolutely defined the category of geopolitics for the next 50 years.

Yeah.

And that's category domination in another realm.

It totally is. You know, you think about what Trump manages to do with a little Twitter phrase. He dominates a category inside someone's mind. If he calls someone a name, it's two words in what he has the ability to do is peer into someone's Weakest point that people don't have the either the courage or the ability to zoom in on, but they subconsciously know what it is, which is a very acidic bully ish tactic. But when you get down to it, how do you win an election? It's going to be with bullyism and acid. So I'm not advocating the behavior, but the net net is how do you create a great media hook or how do you own a category? Absolutely. So obviously you can take that and it becomes a theme. It's like 911 means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a big stacked phrase. There's emotion packed behind it. There's an outcome, there's a behavior, there's a good guy, there's a bad guy. As we were talking about before we started, every hero needs a villain. And I think that is powerful. And if you have a mechanism for storytelling and getting someone emotionally connected with and attached to one or two words now, you can instantly trigger buying behavior, attachment, authority, thought leader, influence. So people are ready to move into whatever the next mode is which you have control over. So yeah, I think that's actually a very brilliant observation. The fact that there's different categories because there's a. Basically I'm a marketer in a lot of ways. At heart, that's where I create opportunities for other people. But I'd like to think that there's something bigger than that.

Just taking a look at the world out there and you're very, very tuned in to technological breakthroughs. Mike, what are you seeing as emerging category definers right now, where they're just a couple words, but the moment those words get out there, they may be emerging right now or they've just emerged within the last year or two and they're defining whole new ways of operating in the world.

Well, the three that pop into my head right away, which aren't necessarily new, but they're going to mean a lot more to a lot more people. In other words, I think right now we're going through a phase in human evolution where our association, attachment with some phrases and some ideas are going to. Someone has the ability to own them fairly quickly. So there's AI, of course, artificial intelligence, there's VR, virtual reality, and the other one is blockchain and cryptocurrency, those being the three biggies. Now, AI has been around a long time, but it's about to come online and it's already affected us from a marketing perspective. Again, you could argue that the combination of Google and Facebook image Recognition and what happens in China right now with privacy and control, there's going to be, I believe, revolutions, physical armed revolutions as a result of what AI is going to do to the white collar business professional. Anyone involved in finance and money and banking and transactions are going to wake up one day and the world will have changed underneath their feet. Right?

Yeah.

When you get to VR and AR are augmented reality and virtual reality and the two are very distinct and different. But augmented reality meaning like look through your phone and see, for example, when you combine AI with augmented reality, pretty soon, with your permission you're going to say hey LinkedIn, when I hold up my phone, anyone who's opt in to be seen, show me that people that I follow, one, two or three connections, I'll be able to see them and look at their status in real time through this. You know, it's like a heads up display and I can connect and interact with them and start doing business. Very similar to what Grindr's done for the dating community. Right. The accessibility to either finding a date or getting laid, whatever it may happen to be. And then beyond that with blockchain and cryptocurrency once again evolutionary revolutionary ways that are going to disrupt the social fabric and governments forever. And where I believe these things are going to turn into significant things is specifically with cryptocurrency. Let's take countries like Venezuela or Africa where you absolutely positively cannot trust many of the countries in Africa. And when the people on the ground, the new emerging markets who have mobile phones right now are going to start using cryptocurrency to exchange, with no government intervention, no one really knows what's going on. You'll be able to protect and hide from this thing and exchange wealth and actually think about it right now, if you live in India, you can't convert your rupees, just like when you live in China, you can't convert your currency. To get out of the country, you got to smuggle cash. You and that world is going to cease to exist so fast. And so, you know, how is cryptocurrency going to take over banking transactions and relationships is because people who had no access to it, billions of people are suddenly going to be transacting and trading without fear of their government stealing from them on an ongoing basis.

Can I just talk about one that came out in the last abundance 360 Peter actually took large ownership over a category called abundance just simply by bring out his book. You know, everybody's talking doom and gloom and here this guy comes along and he says, no, no, no. He says, you're simply looking at the downside of disruption. But the upside of disruption that's happening technologically around the world, geopolitically is actually abundance. People are eating better, people are healthier, Far more people are free. And yes, I'm right in the depth of this book right now. And I have a quarterly discussion group with about a dozen of my clients that goes back 16 years here in Toronto. And the book you just showed me on your iPhone is the book we're reading this quarter.

Let's tell people what it is.

Yeah, it's a Canadian. He's actually from Toronto. You know, he's a professor in the States, but he was born here in Toronto.

This guy has got it going on. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now the subtitle. And at first it threw me off the case for reason, science, humanism and progress. But here's what's important about it. This guy did his data, he did his research from as far as I can tell, apolitical organizations, hard data on the fact that the world is a better place now than it's ever been by a long, long, long shot. Fewer people are dying, starving to death. The quality of human life overall. Now, of course, there is an exception that my wife mentioned, which is in concentrated social information. Let's call it in a hate cyclone, okay? Like, if you're in the middle of a storm of hate caused by social media, you're definitely in a bad space, okay? And that is a psychic attack. And we haven't figured out how to measure the negative effects of all this technology and phones specifically. But in the grand context, this guy is. I think he's done a great service with this book.

The particular term. Talk about a new category. Peter had convergence on the impact of the blockchain. And this woman who had been born in the worst possible war conditions in Serbia and had escaped with her family, she says, I was a non person once. I came out of Serbia because I had no identity. And other people have introduced this idea, but it was the first time it had really made an impact on my mind. And it was individual identity, sovereignty, and that is on the blockchain. You will have a sovereign identity on the blockchain that nobody can tamper with, no government can override it, nobody can hack it, and that's your identity. And I said to Peter afterwards, I said, you know, I've been studying politics since my very first election that I was really conscious of in the US which was Eisenhower in 1952. I was eight years old, I watched the election on television. I said, this is the first uniquely different and original political category that I've had in my entire lifetime. Individual sovereign identity. It doesn't matter what your membership is. In an actual sovereign state, you have an identity that is overridden and it cannot be determined. And I think the Chinese situation where they're creating this status register based on your social media and it's your agreement with the communist government. Your status will be determined by what your words on social media are determining. And it will affect your ability to travel, it will affect your ability to be employed. It'll be, you're in fact moved to a particular city and buy real estate. That shows the bad side of how this can go.

Yeah, when we said agreement, that's in loose quotes, that's for damn sure.

Yeah.

Agreement with whom?

But my feeling, this is China trying to hold on to an old control model. And, you know, I saw Zuckerberg in front of Congress, and my feeling is that he has a very narrow window to capitalize on free information. And that within 10 years, that if an organization, whether it's Facebook or Google, they want to make money on my personal information, first of all, they have to get my agreement. And the second thing is they have to give me a piece of the action. If you're doing it, there has to be a smart contract in place on the blockchain that if you use my personal information for any reason, I get a penny, I get a dime, I get a dollar on the transactions. So he's kind of like the railroads. When they went across the United States, the government granted them 300 miles of track and they got a quarter mile of free real estate on every side of the track because that's where the towns were going. Railroads never made any money as railroads. They made all their money on the quarter mile on each side of the track. So he's making money for a period of time, maybe it's 20 years, you know, when he just discovered something that's free and is limitless and he's making money. But people say, okay, that's your game. Now listen to my game. If you want my information, you're going to have to pay for it. And only the information I want you to know.

Yeah, I think Facebook has a choice, just like any of these social networks, which is at some point and fairly soon, they're going to have to eat their own young and destroy their traditional business model in order to survive. Or someone with a worse product or service will be tolerated simply because they're abiding by a new, new category. I think going down the road with the theme that we started with in the first place here, I think it's possible, it's entirely possible for someone to create a new category, a new word, a new phrase that so negatively could categorize Facebook that people would just leave it in droves. It's kind of like what, you know, Me Too did to Hollywood. It shook the fabric of doing business over there and changed the conversation and for all sorts of reasons. Again, it's pretty wild. So I want to touch on one other thing, Dan, which is going back to the notion of what AI and AR and blockchain is going to do is I'll give you just three thematic concepts. One of them is what the blockchain represents an opportunity to do is not only allow you to have a sovereign identity, but score people based upon their behavior. And then you could mute people completely from your life based upon behavior and score. And this will eliminate. It'll completely get rid of spam, junk, voicemail, junk text, because you'll just say, block whomever fits within a certain criteria or is by my definition, a felon. Okay, there's gonna be a whole new category in class. Now. It also means what governments who are not operating and abiding by this, in other words, all data that goes through phones pretty soon could theoretically go through the blockchain and be tamper proof. But in the meantime, a government like China, which is again, loosely holding onto its power because pretty soon it won't be able to control the money supply, it certainly won't be able to control the information supply. Smart people can get around anything they're doing. But what it does mean is they can say, hey, look, if you are a quote unquote felon in our eyes based upon your behavior, and we're going to just start randomly replacing words in your text streams and we'll do voice synthesis. They could scramble. They could actually drive someone crazy and torture them through their data devices. So think about that. If every time you use the letter A it got turned into a random letter, and then you'd have words that could do that as well. I mean, what is the definition of torture? It's taking certainty away from your conscious reality. And this is a fascinating concept.

Yeah, I was watching Ray Kurzweil, you know, in the very first meeting we had, which launched Abundance360. I don't know if you were there. It was in Silicon Valley. It was at, you know, Moffett Field, where Singularity has its headquarters. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I may have been at the very first one. Wasn't there a big blimp outside or something like that? I can't remember the details now.

Yeah, well, what they were doing is that Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, who created Singularity University, actually were going to do a series of videos. And then about two months before, Joe Polish, who has packaged the whole thing, said to them, they said, you know, it'd really be good if you actually did this with an audience that you just weren't doing it to the camera, you know, which had a lot of sense. Peter had just joined Strategic Coach at that point and he just sent me an email. He said, would any of your people like to come to this? We have room for 50. And I, you know, I just sent out an email. Babs and Dan are going, and, you know, there was a fee for it. And I named the fee and 35 of my people came in. And that's where the real possible teamwork between Peter and Strategic Coach actually happened. Because we have a real good ability to put butts in seats. You know, this is the nature of our model. But I remember they were talking about, you know, the Singularity. And at a certain point, a single computer will surpass all the human intelligence on the planet. And I wrote something down that is an article of faith for me. And the article of faith is humanity is always infinitely larger than anything that humanity creates. Okay, so everything we're Talking about here, AI blockchain, AR VR, are things that humanity has created, but they don't encompass humanity. Humanity is always bigger than that. And we're using that to actually grow ourselves. We're using all these new technologies to grow ourselves. And my feeling is humanity is just infinitely bigger. And it was bigger when they discovered fire and it was bigger when they discovered language, but it's not without pain and suffering and disruption. And, you know, there's downsides to this and upsides.

Yeah.

But I will keep always coming back that I think this notion that technology is going to overwhelm humanity, you're just not thinking about humanity in the right sense here. So the Chinese thing, like the Chinese really think they've got this handled. They have 2 million people whose full time job is to use social media to say good things about the Chinese government. Well, that's 2 million jobs. You know, they're doing it just to reinforce that they're doing a good job. Those are 2 million jobs that are up for grabs, you know, because at a certain Point there's going to be a bypass. Humans always find the bypass. Your job, my job is always to find the bypass.

Yeah. We make our money by predicting the bypass and monetizing the gap. Getting back to the whole notion of what capability amplifiers are and getting back to even this category ownership is predicting the behavior, seeing the gap and monetizing the distance between the time it becomes mainstreamed and someone rejiggers it. I mean, when you talked about Traffic Geyser earlier, I'm going to go down one little tangent here because I think it's relevant. Is the big idea behind Traffic Geyser at the time is in my former years, I was a hacker. So I figured out how to remove copy protection from computer software when I was younger and I started writing applications that did it so me and my buddies could. I mean, we couldn't afford software, so we basically stole it. That's how I learned how to program. I'm not proud of it. It's just I didn't even think of it as stealing at the time. I was just solving a problem.

But it beat picking corn.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we're talking about corny tasseling. So back when there were a lot of search engines, I wrote some software that generated about 50,000 web pages per minute and then to automatically submit it to. At the time, There were like 20 different search engines, lots and lots of them. And that's basically what this thing would do. Well, then fast forward into the future. Figured out a way to automate video distribution, and from there you just got lots of traffic. It was literally push button, make money. At some point there became a word called spam content spam. There wasn't a word for that before. It wasn't negative. It was like, oh, I beat the search engines and I got free traffic. That's what it took. So a shift in context and language and category changes the behavior and the thinking structure of people. So getting back to the super idea of what you're talking about, Dan, which is this idea of humanity always wins. I think what is going to continue to happen is our definition of humanity is actually going to change considerably to incorporate augmented humans, which already, if you carry a mobile phone and you use it to communicate and you look up any data at all and you don't look at a map anymore, you are an augmented human. It has changed humanity. If you observe the behavior of any kid, aged, let's say nowadays, nine to whatever, most of them have smartphones and the way they interact with people, I mean, just try to Have a phone conversation with an 11 year old and they have no context for a conversation like we did when we used an old school rotary dial phone on a wall. So I think all these complexities change the category, change the language and change the way we think and how we interact with all these things. And that again, the opportunity has to do with when we reach a crest in something's useful lifespan and redefine what something means in a way that benefits an industry. You can create an industry from a category as well. So that's the first time I've gone down this deep, dark path and thought about it like this.

But there's great historical proof for what you're talking about. So the stage we're in right now, you know, and this is an amazing time to be alive. If you have your wits about you, it's a wonderful time to be alive is only one of four situations like this, from my reading of history, that's actually happened. And I call it a great cross. And it's where the fundamental means of communicating with each other is transformed exponentially. And the first, obviously was when humans learned how to talk. Those who could talk with each other had phenomenally better teamwork than the other. People could only do grunts and sign language or whatever else they were using. We suspect it was about 100,000 years ago. And it has to do with changes in the jawbone where speech would be possible. The next one, of course, was writing where you could do two things. You could communicate at a distance, which was phenomenal. And the other thing is you could communicate across generations. Two enormous exponential leaps. Those who could do it, they dominated their category. That brings you up to Gutenberg. And Gutenberg is the one that I've really studied because it's fairly recent in history. It's about half a millennium back. But the closest period we have to actually identify what's going on now is 150 years after 1455. That's the date when Gutenberg actually introduced moving type into Europe. It had existed before, but not in mass printing. Chinese had it, but they hadn't really figured out what to do with it. But he did it and it turned Europe on its head. The Protestant revolution, which knocked the foundations out of the Catholic Church over much of Europe, happened only because of mass printing. But the big thing about humanity. Well, first of all, Steven Johnson, in his wonderful book How We Got to Now, said that the moment that people could read and they had a profusion of things to read, Europeans found that they were all short sighted. And that propelled the glass industry, the reading glass industry. And people, instead of reading only taking place in public, in churches and everything else, people started to go into parts of their houses and they would read alone. And the person who I think is the great innovator here is Shakespeare. Because the great Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom, who's at Yale University, he said that modern humans start with Shakespeare. And what I mean by modern humans, he said, Shakespeare is the first person who portrayed people talking to themselves with nobody else on stage. Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Othello, they all talk to themselves. And there's no known incidents in any dramatic approach to humans before. So the whole notion that we talked to ourselves and mirrors became widespread at this time, and people for the first time could actually see themselves. You know, throughout all of human history, most people didn't even know what they looked like. And now they would have conversations with themselves. And our whole modern age is really a function of the fact that each of us has the ability to actually have conversations with ourselves, and it's a function of reading. Because when we're reading, we're actually having a conversation. We're not only reading the words, but we're thinking about our own ideas as we're interacting. So that was tremendous. So I see a continuum here. I mean, a lot of people think that it's discontinuous, but I don't think it's discontinuous. I think there's just a constant growth of human capability being amplified by tools that we create outside of ourselves to actually amplify what's going on inside ourselves.

It's interesting. Now, you mentioned there's four things, though. So there's talking, writing, Gutenberg, what was the fourth Biggie?

Digital communication.

Right.

You can take any kind of communication in the world, and you can convert it to a binary code of 1 and 0. Steve Jobs undid the entire record industry in about four or five years just by taking all musical signals and converting them to ones and zeros. And he introduced the notion that if you like a song, buy the song, don't buy the other 11.

Yep, definitely change the behavior overnight of the record industry.

Itunes, you know, you don't have to buy an album with 11 songs you don't want in order to get the one song that you do. So the amplifying of capabilities, what I'm getting out of this, so far, what we're talking about here, there's this ability for us to create something outside of ourselves that can then amplify our thinking, amplify our communication. Amplify our ability to get things done. And it's a reciprocal relationship because we get smarter and. And the technology gets more useful.

Well, I've got a couple reflections on this because I'm glad you went down this path. As usual, I love how you're drawing from history. So there's a common denominator here. If you go from talking to writing to Gutenberg to digital, that all of the most powerful people, meaning influencers. Influence to me, is the greatest capability amplifier of all. And being a great orator, which really means to be a great storyteller. At the end of the day, the skill set that defines movement is going to be orations, storytelling. And that also gets back to this whole idea of the category, category domination. When you also mentioned this thing about Steven Johnson. And when people have an abundance to read, think about now, the abundance to consume. And I think we talked about this a little bit in our first episode, which is right now, the average lifespan of anything is the length of a thumb flick. So as you're flipping through your phone, a text message, an email message, or whatever it is, and once you've flipped off the screen, it's gone. It's not like having your Gutenberg Bible in the day. And what you pay for something determines oftentimes how much you value it. And with the abundance of content right now, which most of it is meaningless, I think this idea of less is more is more relevant now than ever before, which is, again, in the age we're living in. Churchill gets credit for this, but if I had more time, I would have written a shorter speech or I would have made a shorter speech. Something along those lines. I think that is worth examining as well. You know, in the context of all this, it just gets back to storytelling, storytelling, storytelling. And. And as I'm listening to you right now, I'm making a distinct commitment of speaking less and compressing more thought into everything that I ever make. So for what it's worth, that's really what I want to think about here. So there you go.

Well, let me ask you a question about that. If you look at Mike 10 years ago and you look at who you are right now, and you've got this insight of making your communications a lot shorter and a lot punchier and a lot more effective. Let me ask you a question. Have you compared with how you would communicate 10 years ago and how you're communicating now, have you gotten a lot better at that?

I think so. As I've matured, I've been paying attention to so I'm working with a high performance accelerator. So I have been paying someone to live with me part of the week. And I'm going to get a little woo woo on you. But I know you have an energy coach.

Yes, I do.

My high performance accelerator is a team. I have the equivalent of an oracle that lives in my pocket. Someone who is extremely sensitive. I've never spoken to this person with voice before. I'm only allowed to communicate through text, so it forces me to communicate with words. So I have to express myself and this person. Anytime I'm ever communicating in a way that is clearly not fully thought through, I get held to task. Okay. I mean, it's for every ounce of communication that goes on between us. And then my high performance enhancer that I'm living with, who comes travels with me everywhere I go. And this person catches me anytime I'm doing something or saying something that is thoughtless. So the whole idea is what prevents us from having what we want is our unconscious behaviors, our language patterns and how we treat other people. So the focal point of anything that we're doing right now revolves around love, creativity and receptivity. Being able to really listen. So the best way to answer your question is I think I've gotten better at communicating using fewer words but also being more thoughtful. But only now am I realizing how thought less I am because I've got a greater means of seeing the contrast and also seeing probably patterns that go back to my unconscious behavior of when I was five or six or seven years old. I am appreciating simplicity now more than ever before. In fact, I'm about to gut my home and just get rid of this is sad to say, but it's true. I just don't read books anymore. I read my Kindle. I've got bookshelves and bookshelves filled with books. And yeah, I might have an association with them, but for all I know they're probably moldy and making me feel bad at night because they're in my room, right? So I just don't need them. I've just got noise in my life I'm just getting rid of. And I think the less noise you have around you, the more thoughtful and conscious you become.

Okay, so I've got a second question for you then. So that was 10 years back and you're measuring where you are today. If we go out 10 years into the future, how will you be thinking about the previous 10 years?

Oh, that's a great question. So here's the vision I have which is I absolutely want to be doing a lot less. So in my previous life I'll say my less conscious and I'll even call it my pre cancer life. I just had an insatiable desire to build and grow and have. And I spent a lot of time wanting but wanting unconsciously meaning I didn't know what hole I was trying to fill with my want. And it's not good bad. I think it's just the pursuit by a young unconscious person. And we generated a lot of money but I didn't keep a lot of the cash at the time. We were just moving so fast and we made so many mistakes with our business. And then post cancer I really got associated with a lot of the things that I've been doing for the past four and five years which is creating thought leadership, creating a lot of best selling authors and helping people tell their stories more effectively. And in the process I become a much better storyteller and I can listen to someone and spot where they're leaving money on the table really quickly and tell their story so they make more money and achieve a higher level of success and all that. And I love doing it, I really do. But now I'm at a place where leverage and thoughtfulness and depth of relationship means so much more. And so the 10 year version, in fact I'm shooting for one year, not 10 year. I want to live my 10 year dream inside of this year is from a business perspective. I've decided that I'm going to take on eight to 10 clients over the next year, work with them and go really deep and participate in an equity level. So I'm significantly more invested in the big picture and the volume isn't important. I mean if it were just 2 or 3 it's fine or 10. But my need to have more and spread myself thinner is practically non existent. So you know, volume of people is not important to me. Having a big audience and being rich and famous on some stage, you know, is just like it shifted considerably and I'm not sure where that changed because it was never my goal to be famous necessarily. And rich is relative because the God honest truth is I don't have an expensive lifestyle, I don't need fancy stuff. I got a nice car and we live in a nice place, we got a place on the beach but. But do I need it? Eh, whatever. It's just not important or valuable. So I don't know if I answered your question or over answered it but. Simplification.

Yeah because I have a 10 year memory of who you were. And it's interesting that you brought up the cancer, because the first person to write the English dictionary, popular English dictionary, was Samuel Johnson in the late 1600s. And he had a great line. He said the prospect of the executioner in a fortnight partially sharpened the mind. Like, I went through a cancer operation two years ago. I don't know if you knew that, but I had a cancer operation two years ago.

Yep, I knew it.

And I noticed that my sense of clarity and my sense of purpose has gone through the roof since I went through that. You know, it was caught in time. And there wasn't any trepidation on my part that I wouldn't come through it. But if I had gone another six months without knowing about it, then I would have been in real trouble. And all of a sudden it simplified me. And I sensed the same thing about you because I knew you then, and I knew you while you were going through it, and I knew you afterwards. And I think that you've become a much more focused individual. I have a belief that the experience was certainly part of that, and mine was, and I can relate to it. But my sense is that if you're conscious, and what I really sense is a constantly growing and expanding and deepening consciousness on your part, that you will get simpler because you prioritize two or three things and everything else can be dispensed with. It's not important. What I sense is 10 years from now, you will be 10 times simpler, but you'll be 100 to a thousand times more impactful. And that's really capability amplification.

That was extremely well said. And I can't imagine anyone not relating to that notion. Because if anyone who has any goal to be effective, in my experience, they get a lot more satisfied with simplicity. And this isn't everyone, I guess. I know some people just feed on the complexity. But what I've seen or observed after being around an enormous number of celebrities and thought leaders is once you get past the surface, a lot of them are miserable people because they haven't been able to overcome their insatiable hunger for something they don't. You know, it's basically some old wound they're trying to fill from their past and getting back to the reset. Very frequently it is that quote unquote, near death or near health situation that redirects you. Because the way I tell the story is when I laid on my hospital bed while I went through surgery, chemo, radiation, I woke up in a pile of my own hair that was definitely A reset, because I realized how my identity was attached to my flesh. And I made a decision that, look, my flesh is not who I am. And also, the world didn't stop when I got off for a little while. And the illusion that everything you do, every single minute with all the interruptions, actually matters is a grand illusion. It's an addiction to chaos, which is another topic I want to cover in an episode, an upcoming episode that I think is worth examining in detail, because that is what, in fact, prevents you from activating your capability amplifier.

Yeah. So what I love about the conversation during this episode, Mike, is that we can apply this capability amplification to ourselves. You know, you and me, we can actually talk about how we're individually actually experiencing this. And then the more that we experience it ourselves, the more we can actually see indications of it and great examples of it outside of ourselves. I don't think you can see outside of yourself what isn't becoming clear inside of yourself. That's a fundamental working principle that I've had ever since I was conscious of, you know, And I don't want to leave off. We're at the crossover point between this episode and the next episode of the Capability Amplifier. But a couple of things I'd like to capture and hold on to, and I'd like you to go into greater detail next time, is you actually talked about two things. You talked about category ownership and then category domination. And I think these are distinct things. So if we could pick up there the next time and then talk about that. The category ownership, I believe, is that you've just introduced a capability amplifier that for a period of time, has absolutely no competition.

Exactly. Unquestionably. And even if there is competition, your ability to influence and direct the conversation can be uniquely yours, driven by unique stories, which kind of gets back to the communication segmentation we talked about earlier, which is oration and storytelling. So, yeah, I think we've got some really fascinating things that we can drill down into as we move forward here. And there's more great stories, too, some examples that we can draw from, some practical ones that our listener can just say, oh, yeah, I can apply that right now and in my life and my business. So, yeah, I'm super excited for our next episode. And there's just so much more to come and drill down into. And I love this conversation. It's really stimulating.

Yeah. Anyway, for those of you, the listeners, this is an ongoing series, the Capability Amplifier. And what we'd like you to do as you listen to Mike and you listen to me and to the examples that we talk about here of how capability gets amplified in the world, take stock of your capabilities and do an inventory on capabilities that you've amplified really quite successfully. And also the ones you feel kind of frustrated with because they're not amplifying, they're not going any further than the way they've been for a long time. We'll talk more about what the insight is that you should draw from that capability amplifier, the inventory. So, real pleasure. This is all new stuff for me. I love it.

Thank you, Dan. And for everyone else, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode.

Yourself, what isn't becoming clear inside of yourself? That's a fundamental working principle that I've had ever since I was conscious, you know, and I don't want to leave off. We're at the crossover point between this episode and the next episode of the Capability Amplifier. But a couple of things I'd like to capture and hold on to, and I'd like you to go into greater detail next time, is you actually talked about two things. You talked about category ownership and then category domination. And I think these are distinct things. So if we could pick up there the next time and then talk about that. The category ownership, I believe, is that you've just introduced a capability amplifier that for a period of time, has absolutely no competition.

Exactly. Unquestionably. And even if there is competition, your ability to influence and direct the conversation can be uniquely yours, Driven by unique stories, which kind of gets back to the communication segmentation we talked about earlier, which is oration and storytelling. So, yeah, I think we've got some really fascinating things that we can drill down into as we move forward here. And there's more great stories, too, Some examples that we can draw from, some practical ones that our listener can just say, oh, yeah, I can apply that right now into my life and my business. So, yeah, I'm super excited for our next episode. And there's just so much more to come and drill down into. And I love this conversation. It's really stimulating.

Yeah. Anyway, for those of you, the listeners, this is an ongoing series, the Capability Amplifier. And what we'd like you to do as you listen to Mike.