The Future Is All Guesses And Bets

This is Jeffrey Matto and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner Dan Sullivan. Do you have a big treat on your hands? Because in the next hour, we're going to talk about anything and everything. We don't know what's going to happen. This is all guesses and bets what we're doing. And I thought I was a big guesser and better, but I've met my match. — Well, we can guess about that. — Yeah. — You know, the guesses and bets phrase, which I love, you know, it relates so well to entrepreneurism because all new businesses are guesses and bets. And I'm wondering, do you think that when you start talking about things like how do you know there's a market for it? What kind of price threshold is there for? Do these kinds of questions help us make better decisions or does it just make us feel more confident about the decisions that we're making since they're inherently uncertain? Anyhow, — well, first of all, I think guessing and betting is a capability. If there's a difference between entrepreneurs and other people, I would say that entrepreneurs generally do a lot more guessing and betting than, for example, just to compare. Someone who's employed, you know, has a job and they had a guess and a bet that this would be a good job for them. But I think once the employment takes part that they're in the job, they have a sense that now I don't have to guess and bet anymore about my paycheck. And I think entrepreneurs by the very nature of the activity that the income has to be constantly created. There's no guarantee that it's going to continue. It may not continue in the way it's been continuing. I may have to find out some new approaches. explore new opportunities. And I think entrepreneurs, they have a makeup that makes them want that activity more than something that seems like a guarantee. And I would say that entrepreneurs are more comfortable with uncertain times than other people who are employed just by the nature that they approach uncertainty from the standpoint. In uncertainty is opportunity. and people who are employed in uncertainty there's danger. I think there's a difference between opportunity and danger and how people approach uncertainty. — Well, I think if you're looking for a job that distinction is greater because you think, you know, I'd like to have a steady paycheck. — Yep. — And so your guess and bet is which is much more of a guess and bet than what we grew up with that you'll have that job. But even those companies such as Amazon have shown us that the Facebook too or Meta that you know it's not stable any place. — Yeah. — I was just reading Washington Post. They fired 300 people and — right my sense is that we've entered into a period now I don't know if this is unique in human history. I've done a lot of reading about the crossover between the agricultural economy and the industrial economy beginning of the 20th century late 19th century early 20th century and there was certainly enormous amount of uncertainty in the marketplace so I don't know the answer to that but I have much more certainty of cash flow at this point in my entrepreneurial career than I did right when I started coaching you know that was monthto month was the money going to come in and now at the beginning of the year we kind of know where 50 to 60% of the cash flow is going to come from. — Mhm. — Yeah. — And you've also been in business for 45 years. — I've 52 years but the company as it exists this is our 37th year. — 37th. Okay. — Yeah. So there's a certain predictability about how things are going to go about — right. All of our fees come up front and there's no refunds. So, we can tell by the way that things are coming in and we work towards this. You want to have predictability. — Yeah. Now, and I think things are predictable until they're not. — You know, I think that's true with the stock market. It's true with the weather. You know, it's true with a lot of aspects of life that they may seem predictable or more regular, — if you will, which also relates to ball movements. And both can have a lot of [ __ ] I had to go around the block for that metaphor. I don't know if it was worth the trip, but I think that it's interesting because I think we fool ourselves into thinking that we're

making the right decision when we don't really know, but we're making the best decision we can make with the knowledge that we have. — Yeah, I think we can know that. — Yeah. Yeah. And it all depends on what your risk tolerance is. you know, the project that you've been on now, you know, since you got the idea that the life of Floyd Price would make a great musical. If you combined his life story with the music that was recorded, it would make a great potential Broadway musical. And it strikes me that it's been constant guesses and bets right from day one. Oh, — absolutely. And the only thing I can say about that is I knew that much. You know, I didn't necessarily know what the guess or bet would be. you know, whether it was guessing that, you know, doing the enhancement deal with People's Light Theater, who were great partners to start, but no one could have ever anticipated that CO was going to happen. — Mhm. — And the disruption that caused and the year and a half delay, not just for us, but for people just involved in live performance, — you know, that was a huge thing. How could you prepare for that? — I have a question for you. You did this in your late 60s, early 70s. So this all happened. If you had compared yourself backwards to who you were at late 30s and early 40s, do you think that you were more knowledgeable with having 30 years experience between your late 30s and your late 60s that you had seen this before in many other types of projects and therefore you could be more at ease with what you were actually doing? because you never seem particularly freaked out by the uncertainty of how this was going to go. — No, the uncertainty has never freaked me out. I mean, have there been times of concern? Yeah. I mean, we did our concerts in October of 25 and ticket sales, even though I had been told that characteristic since co actually is that people buy much closer to the event. I was kept getting told that and it was a week before and we hadn't even cracked 30% sales, but then we ended up selling out two shows. I wasn't freaking out. I think I've been through enough that freaking out doesn't do anything for you. And I try to keep as clear ahead as I can. So if I have to make a decision, I'm either making a decision based on not only my knowledge but you know the group that I put together that has the combined experience of success and longevity and sustainability in the business. And I truly believe and this is something that hit me years ago. the big things in life which are your health, the health of loved ones and assuming that you can at least take care of a certain level of living in lifestyle that you're comfortable with. You know, to me the really big questions are those things that tie in more to the most important relationships in my life. — You know, the concern for good health, — you know, and taking care of yourself. You know, our friend Joe, when he made that switch and concentrate a lot more on addictions, I think he wanted to help other people — based on what he had gone through and maybe helping them shortcut the issues they're dealing with. And I think that if you have a lot of experience whether it's in something like that in working with entrepreneurs I mean with the play what I knew about co was well we're all affected by this you know in terms of in theater and so on. We're all affected by this. So it's not like all of a sudden a bad decision I made gave everybody else an advantage or whatever. It was everybody gets affected by that thing. So, I don't tend to get freaked out, but I do go for solutions and I do seek what I believe to be wise counsel in making those decisions. And I think that we're all going to screw up sometimes. You know, that's going to happen. And the question is, how do you recover from those problems or mistakes or obstacles that you couldn't have or didn't anticipate? So I do hope just to finish answering your question that 30 years later, you know, when you go back in time and then ask me about those 30

years, I would hope that I've gained not just knowledge but wisdom. — Mhm. — That informs the decision making and the processes that I go through. — And that would be a sorry statement if I thought I knew everything at 40 and now at 77, you know, I know everything. So I haven't really questioned myself for the last 30 years, although I certainly know people that do believe that about or at least try to convince others. — Yeah. The thing that I've really been interested in was I mean there's two types of uncertainty. There's uncertainty because that which you thought was predictable has turned out not to be predictable. But there's another thing. You're actually doing new things that you've never done before. And there's uncertainty attached to that. And of the two, I prefer the second. — Well, I prefer the second also. — But if you stop doing new things, then you're left with the first. — Well, that's right. You know, I think that not knowing, being open to new experience. I guess what I'm coming to is that I think that businesses have more in common than they do different. So the leap to theater from doing the kind of productions that I did, there's a lot of similarities. — Oh yeah. — And being aware of those similarities or being able to connect those dots so I can recognize the patterns of what's going on. — There's an awful lot of overlap. So nothing seems so foreign. — I can see antecedent similarities to it through the things that I've been doing over the last 45 years in production. Mhm. Does that make sense? — Oh, yeah. Totally. We're both theatrical in our approach to our businesses. We have been from the beginning. — Mhm. True. — Yeah. I mean, I think the reason why we wrote the book is because we've been living the book for the last 50 years. Well, truth be told, the real reason that we're doing the book is because when you and I were doing a podcast about a year ago or so, and you asked me about how I approached hiring, and I gave the answer, and you went, "Whoa, there's a book here. " And fortunately, you were right. You know, that's great. And I think that the wisdom to make that call, it wasn't just an exclamation. I think that what informed that was the books that you've done before, the market that you know that's out there for entrepreneurs, all of those kinds of things. And so the wisdom, which I think knowledge without wisdom is information. — Mhm. — But wisdom allows you to make the best decisions. — Mhm. So I think that your recognition, call it pattern recognition, you had your who not how or gap in the game. And so when you heard casting not hiring, there was a resonance there. And when we talked about the experiences of entrepreneurs and not building a staff but building an ensemble, not interviewing but auditioning, how collaborations can be fruitful, taking the theatrical model rather than the business model — and all of these things. I think that both of us were able to build on that initial idea. — Mhm. — Based on the wisdom that we've gained — Mhm. — in the past few decades. — Mhm. — Yeah. And I think the thing about it at the same time we were doing that when a whole new technology was being introduced into the world. One of its impacts is to eliminate the usefulness of jobs. A job is kind of like an algorithm. you know, your job is to do this and there's a method to it and in this situation you do this and this and this. There's a predictable pattern or system or process that's involved in every job. And it just happens the new technology is very good at automating those type of processes. And therefore the way someone can make themselves safer in the marketplace is that they're using their intelligence or using their experience to spot new things that need value created. New solutions are needed. And that's like improv. And if you don't like doing that, well then there's going to be a lot of discomfort. risk. And there's probably going to be a lot of bad experience. Because the technology now eliminates I mean the technologies of a century ago eliminated physical labor. Now we're eliminating mental labor. And I think that there are significant problems with

that. And I think that AI is a fantastic tool which as we've spoken about in the past, you've got to vet the information. You can't assume it's all correct and all of that sort of thing. But before we started recording and you were talking about AI isn't being forced on us. People are adopting it really fast. There's two push backs I have on that. One is without the foundational aspect of the internet that's something that you know facilitated the opportunity for even a more rapid spread of ideas. — Mhm. So I think that without the internet this would have been one idea among many and whether or not people heard of it in a timely fashion or adopted whatever but now everybody's kind of plugged into that switchboard anyhow and then whether you're using Gmail or whether you're searching on Google and you get Gemini to do the search there's a lot of things that the blanks are already filled in so you can respond to an email respond to this or that without thinking and I think that can be dangerous — and I think that you know one of the people that I interviewed Victoria Mikum her idea of human in the loop technology and she's in financial services she said you know because 95% accurate is not accurate enough you know and that creates problems we have to be more accurate than that and I think that human in the loop to moderate to keep the eye on things that are new that haven't been identified before. As such, you're not going to get good information about that through the nature of what AI does and what it does really well and it'll do more things really well, but at this stage of its evolution, there are opportunities that are created. Most of the opportunities that I see being created are people trying to sell other people on their knowledge of AI and how your business can't live without it. And so here's what you should be doing. And I think that that's I don't know that there I'm sure there has been intelligent discussion both pros and cons of the potentials of this. And I'm talking about without the hyperbolic this is the best thing utopian or this is the worst thing destruction aspect but you know how do you use that tool in the best way — to net the best results. — Mhm. — Well, one thing that is apparent to me is that no technology is self coaching. — Explain what you mean by that. — Well, no technology explains to you how to use it. And the reason is because it was created by people who are already very skillful at it and they've lost touch with people who aren't skillful. — You know, I was thinking of a previous technology that would sort of resonate with what people are going through right now. And it's a technology, but it's more a capability. And that is literacy. I'm reading this whole series of historic novels that take place in the British Navy in the early 1800s and it's very clear that your upward ability to move in society was a function could you read and write? Well, the printing press had been created 400 years before that you know good three and a half centuries. So even over a space of about four centuries, literacy had not really caught on yet. It was just starting to catch on that you really had to learn how to read and write, you know. Well, I think if you use AI, you know, you're really going to have to learn how to use this if you expect to go upward. And we're in the very early stages of that process. — Yeah. And one of the things that I do when I use AI, I mean, I really dislike the fact that I'm getting these, you know, predigested responses to emails that I could just, you know, click it and send it. And I think that like anything, if you stop exercising a certain muscle, it atrophies. And I think that there's a lot of potential for atrophy. Mhm. — And I think that it's important to engage with a subject in a way that allows discovery and growth rather than just, oh, this makes it easier. — Mhm. — And then you click without thinking, which it seems to me a lot of people do. — But it seems to me, are you doing that? — No. — Okay. Well, you're the one human you can have an influence on. — Oh, that's right. I actually had an influence on my cousin who forwarded

me these things and I sent him the sightings and the verifications about what we were talking about and cuz he had just forwarded an email basically cuz he agreed with it but it wasn't about vetting anything. It was about you know oh this supports my point of view and you just send it without checking whether or not it's even true. Mhm. — But one of the ways I use AI is I will actually ask it if you were creating a prompt to ask you this question. How would you phrase the question? — Yeah, I do that too. — And that can net some interesting answers. — Oh yeah. But they're contextual. It's not contentbased. It's contextbased. I mean AI will be as smart as you require it to be. — That's right. — In other words, if you just want content, it'll just give you content. But if you ask a question that gets a response that you're really dealing with an intelligent partner, AI will do that. It'll be smart or stupid as you want it. It's probably as smart or stupid as the user. You're simply getting a mimicry back at the level of intelligence that you're operating at. If you're asking really multi-dimensional contextual questions, it will respond to you because it has all the patterns, you know, it has access to all patterns of thought that are in print, you know, that it can actually do that. So my sense is I had an experience about 3 or 4 weeks ago and I think I told you about this but I have a thinking tool that I created which is called the fast filter and you state the best result and I'm doing it in the second personal so I'm talking to a you who's the reader. I set up my chapters this way and then the best result is an individual who's really smart, who's really ambitious, who's really growing and I'm saying in my thinking, you're doing this and here's five ways to prove that you're actually doing this. Okay? And then to counter it, I have backup writers and I have editors. I create a negative statement where the reader is really stupid has no ambition whatsoever and just abruptly perplexity you know the platform that I use said we cannot respond to this request because we don't want to be making statements that people are stupid or you know lack ambition and everything we don't think that's good and I said well over the last two years you've done it about 300 times and you didn't have any problem with it? And it came back and says, "No, but we have new safety rules and this violates our new safety rules. " Okay. I said, "Okay, well, it's your platform. You can, you know, they're your rules. " So, anyway, next fast filter, I do the best. Then I get to the worst and I say, "Now, I want you to read the best paragraph, the best result paragraph that I've read here. And I want you now to create a paragraph, same style, same voice, same structure with just the opposite meaning and message than the best result. Just like that. Okay. So, it was and then it started saying, "Do you want me to make this message even more cynical than you've voiced it? " And I said, "Yes, yes, make it more cynical. " And then it says, "Do you want it to sound more depressing and demoralizing? " I said, "Yes, I would like the So what happened? " I got exactly the same result as I was getting before, but I wasn't the one that used the word depressing. I wasn't the person. So they said, "We can ask you a question, okay? And we're not responding to your negative request. " So there's something in the legality of what they're doing. My sense is that they're facing lawsuits and they don't want to be on the hook that they encouraged someone or they went along with someone's writing negative messages. You know, it's a very nuanced thing that's actually happening. But it was interesting just my understanding of how this technology is working that they had found a way of answering my request but not in the way that I had originally presented it. — Yeah. or they're hoping to avoid lawsuits. — Yeah, I think we're very close to where there's going to be real legal, you're going to start seeing lawsuits about AI and I think it's going to become a major political issue. I think that the party that grabs a hold of this and is going to have a long run with it in the same way that the Democrats were the ones who grasped the entire social impact of industrialization and the Republicans

didn't. — Starting in 1890s, it was the Democratic Party in the United States that, you know, really got in touch with what was happening to industrial workers and the Republican stint. — Yeah. And I think that when you have something that can disseminate information so quickly and appear to answer questions so accurately, it's incumbent on the user or to use that phrase, you know, if it's being done by a business or whatever, the human in the loop that I think is it would be a good idea not to censor speech but to know how to vet information. — Yeah. But you bring up the case people are just accepting the answer. Well, I know a lot of people who do that person to person. They just accept the information without — Yeah. So my sense is it's not AI that's doing that. It's the user of AI is being undiscriminating. They're not discriminating. They're not discerning. — Well, this is a tool that allows them to do that on a much larger scale. — Yeah. It's one thing if you're just talking to your neighbor. It's quite another thing when you're addressing tens of thousands if not millions of people with something. — Mhm. — So there's a difference in impact. And I just think that knowing how to it would really be interesting. This just occurred to me to hear the decisions about the atom bomb. We know certain things that have been paraphrased and so on, but the moral questions that arose from do we drop the bomb or not? How many potential lives do we save by doing that as opposed to prolonging the war? All these kinds of things. And what I'm saying is that on the big questions, I'm not talking about if you're writing new marketing copy, but in the big questions, there needs to be questions and discussion about what that is. — Mhm. And I think that anytime there has been something really major, I don't know what there is now to kind of put the brakes on certain things until we know more than we know. I don't think there are. And as you said, I mean, unscrupulous people are going to game any system you set up. — Well, and undiscriminating people are going to buy anything that unscrupulous people sell. — Yeah, that's right. — Yeah. But that's been true since — forever. Yeah. — Yeah. Oh, absolutely. — Yeah. — Absolutely. But, you know, I totally agree with that. But I think that as more and more people have access to these tools, raising the questions and having informed discussion about them is an important thing. — Yeah. We don't know how they're using them. I mean, there's no way of knowing how people are using Some people use them to organize their hobbies. Some people no I mean the getting information my sense is the same biases that conditions someone's doing research before I think the same biases are still there if they're just using a faster tool. — I agree. — Yeah. And the question is how do we recognize — well who is we? — How does the public how do users how do consumers do that — individually and differently with each person? — And are we better off if people are making decisions that have been questioned and push back as opposed to just accepting whatever you get as truth because you got it because it's on the internet or whatever. — Yeah. So I think people is an abstraction here. I think each individual is probably responding quite differently, you know, because they're relating it to different experiences and all experiences are subjective and unique. The main problem here is that it's so fast. And why is that the problem? — Well, in the same way that movies were a much more powerful medium of communication than still photographs. I remember Matthew Brady who was the great Civil War photographer after the battle of I think it was the Battle of Vixsburg which was just in Pennsylvania. He had his photographers out and they were photographing the aftermath with the bodies laying across the field and in ditches and he put on a great exhibition in New York City of just showing these photographs and the lineups were around the block for better part of 6 months because people had just never seen an actual depiction of what war was like afterwards and everything like that. And this was a this had an

enormous impact on people's thinking about war, — you know, — but World War I, which was the first real videoed movie photography thing was in spite of the censorship, you know, I mean, these films, but they got through to the public, you know, 2 years later, 3 years later, and they would see the damage, but they were watching movies. They weren't looking at individual photographs. and the impact it was much greater and it was the speed. It's a lot easier to fool people with a movie than it is to fool them with photographs because of the speed factor. It seems like it's real. You could have a research project where people go out for 6 months and they bring back an amount of research and it's presented. It's got a point of view and a search that takes 5 seconds and it brings the same amount of information to this. What seems more magical is the speed with which it happens. — Mhm. No, I agree with that. I think that individuals aggregate depending on of course what one's purpose is and how you're using things. Whether this is just something that affects an individual, they purchase something maybe they don't need or they purchase something that's great. — Yeah. Yes. Yeah, — but I'm saying the more people learn how to distinguish between the two, the better off we are. — Yeah, — that's what I'm saying. And will we ever escape that kind of drifting? No. I think that's been here forever and it will be. But if there are ways that people can be better informed in the decisions, whatever it's about, whether you're buying a car or whether you're voting in for a political party or you're doing research, we have tools, as you said, that do it faster than ever before. But it isn't just a dialogue between two people in certain aspects of the usages we're talking about. So I think I always go back to critical thinking in context. Mhm. — How would this differ from newspapers? How is what's happening now any different from the newspaper trade which was at its greatest 100 years ago? Much more influential 100 years ago than they are today. How is it any different than what was going on there? — How do you mean what was different? — Well, it doesn't seem to me that the danger is greater with AI than it was with newspapers. people still aggregated and they talked about things and in some cases they were being misinformed and it spread through the entire population and in other cases it was accurate. It doesn't seem to me that it's a difference of kind. It may be a difference of degree but it's not a different of kind. What's always been there since we had mass communication. — Yeah. And I think going back to your point before which is correct speed. — Yeah. you can get a lot more in front of a lot more people a lot faster. — And so I think that that's the thing and things happen so quickly and a lot of people don't necessarily know how to discriminate between the two which has also always been the case. — I'm not saying that it hasn't been the case and I'm not saying that people being fooled or misinformed or whatever is a new phenomenon. It's just that we've been able to speed up that process tremendously as a result. — You know what hasn't speeded up at all is people can only think about one thing at a time and it takes time. So our ability to process information hasn't improved at all. Okay? It's constant because our brain can only think one thought at a time. Now they can get overwhelmed by the tsunami of informations coming in but then they just cut off thinking altogether. people just say I think it's all [ __ ] and then they go there. So I'm just not seeing you know is the danger any different today than it was at a previous time. I don't know and I don't know how you actually compare it. First of all I think it's an interesting question. — Mhm. — How do you vet information? I think most people look for the simplest solution which is that one message that they can then send to several thousand people at once. And you know, just things get out there quickly, much more quickly than they did before. — The intent of the individual, I think we both agree, is no different. Everybody wants whether they're buying something that's going to increase their income or make them more attractive to the opposite sex or the same sex. All of those things, the selling and marketing fundamentally have not changed. And — I think what has changed is how quickly information can get out there and be disseminated. — And so I just think it's important if

you're going to pass it to anybody aside from yourself. I believe it's the importance of vetting something, not accepting things out of hand and just passing them on. That's all. And I say that's all. That's not small. No, I'm just saying that I think in your case and my case, all we can do is make sure that we do that. — Yeah. And if everybody did that. — No, but there is no everybody. There's just you and me. Cuz I don't know who the Wii is. Is there a group of you that gets together that talks about this? I mean, I don't know what the control factor here is that you could ever change it. — I don't know either. I think that again that's why I think that asking those questions can make a difference. — Well, I think it makes a difference for you. — Of course, — it doesn't make a difference for any abstract we. I just don't know who the we are here. So far, there's only been two of us on the podcast since we started. Well, that was the criteria we set up at the beginning because we — we wanted two forces that were aligned in terms of, you know, and it's interesting. We're aligned on the importance of informed debate, — of context, of critical thinking, of those kinds of things. Doesn't mean we're going to reach the same conclusion. — Well, it also doesn't mean that I'm trying to influence someone else by having the discussion. You know, I'm more and more improving my own ability just to think things through in such a way that I've got a fairly accurate read on what's going to happen next. — Well, I think a byproduct of being informed is that — Mhm. — hopefully we're making decisions that are better decisions as a result of the information that we consume and all of that. So, none of these are simple questions in terms of we do this. It's not even a question of well this is about if you and I were just having private correspondents and hopefully somebody's listening to this besides you and I. I think that these are not new questions. There's just new technology to bring other conditions. — I think they are simple questions. It's just that the answer is hard. — Right. That's what I'm saying. — The answer is diff. The question is pretty straightforward. — Right. It's finding the answer. Agreed. I think part of the reason is that the further away you get just from the person who's asking the questions, the more difficult the answer gets because I think it isn't like there's one good way of doing it and then everybody else is doing the bad way of doing it. I think people are using the information they need to live their life. They're acquiring the knowledge And I don't think there's any broad sweeping movement among people that takes them too much further than leading their life. What kind of life do they want to lead? You know, — yeah, — that also leads to a lot of big questions. And again, the questions are the easy part, — you know. The difficult part is — what's the answer? What do I do with that information? Does it even make a difference? — Yeah. Well, for example, our last three podcasts before this one were on happiness, and the topic came up that there are polls that for the last 50 years, people have not gotten any happier, — right? — And I say, well, who did the polling? — Mhm. And what were the questions and how did they frame it? — What were the questions and who did they ask? You know, So that in itself 50-year polling is saying maybe the person wanted to prove that over the last 50 years people haven't gotten any happier or so they just selectively picked the people who agree with that particular thesis. Yeah. Again I don't disagree with that but what you're bringing to bear on that which I think is the good part is critical thinking. You're asking a question of how did you arrive at this conclusion? — What's the criteria for making the decision? that you reached. Well, who was talked to? — I agree with all that. — Yeah. — And one of the things that's interesting along those lines is they're discovering now it's applied to doctors in medicine. It's applied to lawyers in the areas of law that for example they find that automated diagnosis machines in medicine do a better job of getting to what's actually going on with the patient than a live doctor asking the questions. — Mhm. — You know for example I've seen demonstrations of this where first of all doctors are authority figures lawyers are authority figures. Okay. So the doctor asks the questions and the person gives an answer and the doctor says well the patient will just immediately change all their answers just because of the doctor's reaction. — Mhm. — So they find that automated polling for example where you just have to hit numbers on your phone are much more

accurate than a live interviewer phoning a person who are they favor of and everything like that. So the whole point you know it's Heisenberg the German philosopher it was called the Heisenberg principle and he says the experimentter influences the experiment. — Mhm. — Yeah. And I think that's true. So all polls are necessarily almost subjective. Well, and as we know, I mean, you can only talk about the accuracy afterwards. And oftentimes that ends up being a platform for excuses as to why these two polling groups reach diametrically opposed answers and were supposedly sampling similar groups of people. — Yeah. No, I'm just saying that one of the great uncertainties about the discussion of anything that we're dealing with subjects that are largely subjective. Like there really isn't a lot of objective knowledge out there. I mean that gets into an interesting area too and I want to go back to the question you asked me and ask you which is and I'll frame it more in the world of entrepreneurs. Can a 30-year-old entrepreneur be as wise as a 70-year-old? Or is there something about living through decades and having more experience that makes that what does the 70-year-old bring to what the 30-year-old doesn't have or vice versa? — Well, I think that if wisdom was a matter of experience, I would say probably not that the 30-year-old isn't as wise. But I think that there are people who are born wise and I think there are people who aren't wise who are 70 years old who practice not being wise for 70 years. You know I said you know stupid old people really practiced. — Yeah. They had decades to practice. That's right. — Yeah. They doubled down. So it's hard to tell. I would say how I related to entrepreneurs. I don't use the word wisdom up, but I do use the word common sense. You know that they have a better sense that they know what they know, but they know there's a lot that they don't know. And so they're open to that possibility. I just may not know what's going on here. And I think that's an attitude which is probably they're young and it gets better as they get older. I know I'm way practically smarter at almost 82 than I was at 32. — Yeah. Yeah. — It's interesting. Is it smarter or you see things differently? — Well, you've practiced in hundreds of situations and you have a sense of how far you can go with any venture before it's not worth investing in anymore. — Mhm. What increases with really smart entrepreneurs is the ability to say no to things they would have said yes to earlier. For example, I make up my mind about people much quicker today than I did 50 years ago. I get involved with far fewer projects because the projects just don't take me where I thought I would. know you're asking about entrepreneurs because I think entrepreneurs at least the entrepreneurs in the strategic coach program are learning at work for a much longer period than most people who aren't entrepreneurs — which makes sense — cuz they're taking on new projects, new relationships, new opportunities on a continual basis. I just think they have vastly more practical experience than people who, you know, went to college, came out, got a good job, were in a situation, didn't own the company, you know, they were simply paid employees, their salary went on, they knew the industry they were in. I think that if you compared the learning experience, the trial and error experience of the entrepreneur, it could be a hundred times greater than a corporate executive. Well, what I wonder about is that there are entrepreneurs that are brilliant at certain strategies for business, but that's sometimes and not infrequently coupled to the need to be right even when the problem would be best solved or approached with collaboration. — Mhm. — Or accepting ambiguity or something like that. And I think in some cases being smart can become a liability, — you know, because you can also think about all the things that could go wrong which has caused you not to do it. Mhm. — And there is some truths to that phrase, ignorance is bliss, you know, and do you

see that with any of the entrepreneurs that you coach or just that you've been exposed to over the years, whether they've been a part of strategic coach or not, that need to be right often times gets in the way of progress, but it may not get in the way of making money. You know, it's just how they work with people. — Mhm. And I think also just a tag on response to what you were saying, I am saying no to more because I only want to do what I want to do and you know can do that. — Mhm. — And I think that's good. But I'm also aware that I am older and my time is more valuable than it ever was. — Does that play into your decision on that too? Yeah, I think there's a lot of different factors and they would resist learning new things and if they're resisting learning new things, they'll drop out of the program. So, they won't be in the program for very long. We're constantly asking them to look back at their experience and what did they gain from their experience? — And if you put this experience together with that experience, do you see anything new? And they do. And if they don't have that experience, they don't renew. They just don't renew in the program. So I think the majority of my experience is people of 20 25 30 years who are just constantly learning and constant learning requires that you realize I wasn't looking at this properly and now I'm looking at it in a better way. If you have that flexibility of thinking then probably their main point isn't being right. Their whole point is being continually successful at adapting. — It brings up Darwin's the survival of the fittest. Well, they're not fittest. They're adaptable. When circumstances change, they change. You know, I think they're much more open to seeing unpredictable change as a positive thing than a negative thing. — You know, I remember when most of my work was film based, and I loved working with film because video allowed you to be a lot sloppier. because video tape was much less expensive than film. It didn't have the same processing costs and all of that kind of thing. However, there were many of the cinematographers when this was really beginning to take root, you know, shooting with video cameras rather than film cameras was really starting to take root in the probably late 80s into the 90s and beyond. And now you know Spielberg's one of the few or Paul Thomas Anderson some of these filmmakers who really want to use film. And what's interesting is that film is a much more challenging medium to use well and video was started as an engineers medium. But to get to the point I wanted to make is that there were a lot of cinematographers I knew that did not want to learn video. They had their film cameras. — Part of their package and part of the revenue stream was that you hired them and rented their equipment, which was fine equipment, but they were using film when others wanted to use video. And they got frustrated and even angry at the fact that the principal technology was in a state of flux and going to be changing. And it was clear that you couldn't unring that bell. And so the smart thing to do would be adapt and learn how to use video and use the talent you have. Like all the video people I ever hired had film backgrounds. That's not going to be the case anymore because the years and the technology have progressed so much. But going back to them because they knew lighting better. — And so the cinematographers knew lighting so much better than video. But I said to those cinematographers, well, I'm not going to learn video. It's [ __ ] It's not. I said, 'You know, that's temporary. The techn is going to get better and better. And if you don't use it, unless you're in that very rarified air, you're going to not get the job. So, you got to decide. It's not just a question of a particular job, it's a question of your career. Do you want to keep doing what you're doing? Because you're aging out of it in terms of your ideas. — Yeah. They weren't adaptable. That's right. Stubbornly so, — you know. So then you just find all the things wrong with it. — Well, and then if you take a look at what else is happening in that person's life that's making them unadaptable in this part of their life, — like what — you know, their personal life, their health may not be as good and they don't have the energy — to learn something new, you know, — or the desire — or the desire. Maybe they've already

achieved what they want to achieve and they've got enough stored away that they can take a risk at not learning. — True. That's true. — Yeah. From an outside standpoint, we definitely can spot an adaptable person from a not adaptable person. — Yeah. And it's interesting how that manifests because — I mean you could you see it very definitely in putting a theater production actors who are adaptable to a change in approach from one day to the next. you did it this way yesterday, but we have to do it this way. And the ones who can adapt to that 24-hour change stay employed, and the ones who don't aren't employed. — You're right. I mean, one of the things that happens during auditions is Sheldon Eps, the director, will give somebody direct. they do a scene, he'll have them read it and then he will give them direction on, you know, he said, "I'd like you to try it this way. " You know, give them some other direction. Many people just do the same thing again. — Yeah. — And so, one of the things that you want to find out whether you're in theater or — entrepreneur, — that's right. Yeah. — Can this person take direction? — Can they actually act on that direction? Mhm. — So, you hope that you are weeding out those people before you get to the booking them stage because it's only going to create ongoing problems. — Mhm. — It's interesting and those worlds that have changed so much and how that medium has changed so much. — Yeah. But those who adapted — have done well — because they had a big record to start with in terms of their resume and the work they've done and so on which is great — but instead of applying that to what they did they felt this negated everything they had done and they for whatever reasons including the ones you mentioned they aren't interested in changing. — Yeah. You know I think that people do adapt. I would say the vast majority of people who do adapt do it under pressure, do it under they're being coerced by the circumstances to change. But there's other people who just have a natural they've trained themselves to be adaptable. — Mhm. You know, so how have you trained yourself to be adaptable? In other words, if you think back as of today, you got probably 71 years of conscious experience. I'm discounting the first six. I don't, you know, generally speaking, before six, we don't have too much of a handle on things, but you have 71 years. What have you worked on to make yourself adaptable? talking to people who are using that new technology, asking them what they feel the benefits are, what the pitfalls of it are, do they think this is going to be around or do they think that this is a novelty that a lot of people are talking about? And also talking to people who are using it and finding out what are the resistance points they have — and why cuz even back then it was clear to me and I'm going back now 35 years. It's clear to me it was only a matter of time before video production usurped film production almost totally. — Mhm. — And uh and it didn't matter even which did I like the best. — Mhm. — It's what this is what was going on. — The same thing happened in sound recording. — Yeah. Sound recording. That's correct. I mean, it was almost seemed like overnight the record stores and I used to go into Power Records and Disco Mat all the time because I was a big consumer of music. I love music. And, you know, it went down to from having these albums with great artwork and the liner notes and all of that to a link. You know, I think that my adaptability was I realized I was along the spectrum of things happening and so I would seek to understand those things to try to make the best decision and I always felt like the more knowledge I have the better off I am anyhow. — Mhm. — You know, so I think learning is inherently a good thing. — But it also allowed me to make those changes. You know, when I bought my first editing system, it was linear editing, not nonlinear, which is, you know, what Avid or Adobe Premiere or those kinds of things. — Well, it's all software now. Very few people are cutting film anymore. The guy that maintained my equipment was the person that installed all of the new what were called Avids. Avids were the at the time the most innovative nonlinear editing software. And he said, "I'm going to show you how the software works. " And he said, "I know you well enough. Your problem with adjusting to this will be non-existent. You'll love it because you're going to be able to

edit sound and pictures like you edit words in word processing. " And it's not good enough yet. The resolution, you can't deliver on it. It's only for editing. And then some months later or so he said they just released AR35 or whatever it was Avid resolution AR35 which was equal to 3/4 in tape. He said you can deliver on this for your clients and now you should invest in it. And during that time I had learned a lot about it and it was great to work for and much faster and there were so many things you didn't have to worry about that were amazing. So, I've always been open to those things as opposed to looking at the problems of having to learn it. I looked at it more as an opportunity that I can learn more, come at things differently, and that opened the door for me to do different kinds of work, too. — Mhm. You know what I'm seeing from your description of the cinematographers who couldn't adapt and I've got a feeling that I haven't really talked about this before but they had a social reality because there was a long period where cameras were kind of the same you know and I'm sure that movie cameras were kind of the same and once you learned the skill you didn't have to do too much learning to do it. You had to master your craft, but then the craft was agreed on. Then you were set for the rest of your life because you have the craft. The craft is your judgment, but the craft is also your use of the technology. — That's right. — And it's almost like a guild. You started off as an apprentice and then you went to Journeyman and then you became a master and then you got to have a social life, an exclusive social life with all the other cinematographers and you would get together and it wouldn't be so much about filming or projects. It would be we're really special people. We get to hang out together and we swap stories and everything like that, but we're at the top. we're making good money. Our names are on lists. We're on short lists and we get pulled into projects and then an entirely new technology comes along which not only puts their craft in a question mark, it puts their technology but their entire lifestyle of being the masters. So I think it's a real threat to identity. It's not just a threat to what they know, it's a threat to who they think they are. — Yeah. And you know the thing is you saved up and you bought you know an airy 35 mm or one of the other top cameras and you were correct. The technology was essentially the same. The motors were quieter but it was basically about putting film through at 24 frames a second you know and that's what it was. So your income was also impacted because the video cameras were really expensive at that time. I mean, they're still expensive, but part of their revenue stream was that they would rent their equipment package along with them. So, it was redefining all of that. — Mhm. Yeah. — But those who I knew who were great that adapted did video better than the ones who didn't have a film background because they knew light. They knew the crew setup. And video cameras wouldn't look like they looked if they weren't trying to make cinematographers who were experienced comfortable like airy film makes arguably the best video camera for shooting feature films and it mimics the film cameras kind of like how the cordy keyboard took over as the input device. So, you know, it's really interesting and all the greatest cinematographers I worked with and I worked with amazing cinematographers, Academy Award winners like Vil Mo Ziggman who they knew their craft so well and the majority of their craft transferred and those other things they learned really quickly anyhow because they were just smart and good at what they did and knew what they had to do to achieve the look that they wanted. Mhm. — But it is really interesting is what do you do when it seems like everything you've been doing for 30 years has now been wiped out and you got to start again. — Yeah. I often think it's an identity problem of who they think they are. That once they achieved a certain identity, they thought that was predicted that identity would never change. — I think that's true. — Yeah. And there's just a point where people stop adapting. too much work, too hard, don't have the ability. I mean, there's a point where they really stop and there is a deterioration of the brain. I mean, we know that the brain volume goes down and there's now ways of increasing brain volume, but there's a point where your brain just isn't what

it was. You know, — these guys, by the way, weren't necessarily old. I mean, I'm talking about people who have been doing it for 20 years, but they were in their mid4s. — So, they had a long life ahead of them in that field. — But I think the disruption to what they were doing — that they didn't own that equipment that it just shuffled things around for them. — I mean, they didn't rent their own equipment when they were, you know, making a feature film. Vilos did McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Deliverance, is a phenomenal cinematographer, but for him, you know, he could walk in, it was so cool. The first time I met him, we were on set doing a commercial. And he walks in, he's like looking around, he goes, "Okay, we need a quarter stop net on this. " Wasn't even using a light meter. — He had a total field. — That's right. — Yeah. — And it was just cool to behold cuz he wasn't showing off. No, — he's just been doing it that long and he was that good. — Yeah. — Which was a pleasure to work with. It was cool. — Yeah. He just had many more dimensions to his craft than other people did, you know. — That's right. — Yeah. The one example that's used just how great people can get was the filming of the jazz album kind of blue. — You'll love that. Miles Davis — and it happened in New York City. It happened on two days and he brought all these famous the very top musicians and they started off and he had some sketches on a sheet of paper and he says I do this and then Cannonball you come in here and he had them all and he says I'll just start in there and I'll just nod to whoever goes next and these were all different instruments and he did it and they did a whole day they went out and did whatever jazz musicians do at night and then They came back the next day and he got finished and they went through. He says, "Yeah, we got 11 cuts here. " He says, "I think this is good. " And that was it. But each of them had 40 years of doing riffing, you know, adjusting to different situations. And they had all played with each other over those years. So, they just had this vast knowledge. And it's the number one selling jazz album of all time. — Oh, it's fabulous. Lloyd's wife, Jackie, dated Miles Davis before she dated Lloyd and she was very good friends with Miles. And my favorite band I told you about the Ed Polmo big band. He's so brilliant. He did this whole thing about kind of blue mashing it up with the Who. So it starts off with the who music which is I can see for miles and miles that then segways into kind of blue and it's just such a wonderful ride. — It's just fantastic. — Mhm. — Yeah. I think that Miles Davis is a good example because he did jazz and then he was one of the first major jazz musicians to do fusion. — Mhm. And because he was such a creative artist, there were some that of course felt like he was somehow a traitor because he was doing that just like, you know, people thought Bob Dylan was a traitor when he played electric guitar. — Mhm. — You know, and it's so interesting the people that are fans you would think would be open to the person that they liked — innovating and doing things, but you know, they get very stuck in their expectation. Well, when you're too much of a fan, you become a fanatic. — Well, true. Fan addict. That's right. — Yeah. — If you keep it at three letters, it's okay. But it's an interesting thing. And my sense is that 10 years from now, how people adapted and used AI will be seen as very different from how it's being predicted right now. — Well, I'm sure. I mean, because that's almost always the case. — Yeah. And for example, the top six AI companies, you know, Nvidia is one of them and then Google's lost $1. 4 trillion in market valuation last week on the stock market. You know, they're appraised valuations. And the reason is the article says what they thought was going to happen quickly isn't either going to happen at all or it's not happening as fast as they bet. — Right. — So, you know, — like everything else. Yeah. — Yeah. But a lot of good will come out of it. You know, it's like remember the subprime real estate market, you know, 0809. — Oh, yeah. — And everybody says what a scam. But 3 million actual houses got built during that period in record time. And they're all houses that people need today, you know. So whenever you have this boom situation in anything, a lot of really

neat stuff gets created whose value is not seen until afterwards. Yeah. Sometimes long afterwards. — Yeah. Well, yeah. I think that is more the rule than the exception. I think that the rule is that things take longer are more expensive and you know the payoff comes further down the road than people hoped. — Yeah. — But everybody focuses on how they can become a billionaire at 32 and you know chances are really high that's not going to happen. — Yeah. Or who we think are going to be the winners and losers. It turns out differently. — Yes. — It just turns out differently. you know, that online shopping. Well, it turns out the people who had great bricks and mortar businesses actually weathered the storm with online. I mean, you know, Walmart has done very, very good with online shopping and they were the bricks and mortar champion. Yeah. So, the big thing is it's all guesses and bets. It's doesn't matter what comes along, it's all guesses and bets. — Yeah. I mean the brick and mortar that was the their appearance in a way was Sears. Sears was like Sears has everything. That was their slogan. But they didn't adapt and basically they don't exist anymore. — And then I think it was just last week that Walmart hit a trillion dollar valuation. — So it is all guesses and bets. And you say that's our takeaway for today. — I think that's it. Yeah, it all comes back to guessing. Anything is a guess in a bet and everything bet. — The wall Yeah. I loved your film story. I think that's really great. I'm reading a story now in the British Navy. They've gone from sailing ship and they're bringing in steam ships. The skill required to sail a great sailing ship is 20 times the skill needed to sail a steam ship — because the steamship doesn't care what the wind is. waves are. Steamship doesn't care about anything. And so the skills you need on a steamship are basically just make sure you got enough coal. — Yeah. You had all these incredible skills, people who could work with the sales and it was just a huge drop in skill level with the new technology and they could go much further. They couldn't go as fast at the beginning where the top sailing ship could do 14 knots an hour. The top steam ship could go about seven knots, but they could do it hour after hour for the next three weeks and the sailing ship could. — Yeah. But it's really interesting and they're having these discussions you know how sad it is that we're losing all this skill and you know we used to have honor in our profession and everything else but what's the honor of being able to put coal into a furnace but you could just see that technology has that deskkilling quality and I'm sure AI is doing that right now. — Yeah. And it's an interesting lens to view it through. 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 a creativecareer. com and mattoproductions. com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach. com.