Join Dean and Dan as they talk about the upcoming content revolution.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep032
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Yes. I have Mr. Jackson. Even though it's been a short time, it's a pleasure to hear you again.
Dean: I think it hasn't even been 24 hours, that's right.
Dan: Yes. I'm thinking about some of the things that we were talking about at lunch yesterday.
Dean: Me too.
Dan: You know if you ... I think that there's a great game changer if a process can be created whereby entrepreneurs can take the ideas that they have, new possibilities, new techniques and they're able to turn it very easily some way into content. In other words, putting in a form, either in vocal. In other words, it could be audio, it could be video or it could be text. And we were talking about that yesterday. I think that's a great break through for any entrepreneur when they can produce content.
Dean: Well what I realized in the last little while here is that, we've been having conversations about conversations being our kind of sweet spot of the thing that is our kind of winning zone. What I realized when I was in Phoenix, right before we were at Genius network, was the multiplier of conversation is when you can turn it into something digital, because that was where I ... I hadn't understood or made that distinction the difference between the analog nature or talking to people, just having conversations that are not captured and having, or writing things in a journal or thinking thoughts, all those things are sort of analog in potential energy, are potential things, until they are recorded. Once you record an audio, once we capture this conversation, this now becomes a multiplier. It becomes an asset that we have the opportunity to ... we can turn this into text by getting it transcribed. We can turn it into a podcast, which we've done. We can take little sections of it and overlay some illustration or images with it and make it a video.
There's so much, so many ways you can multiply that, but all based on conversation. I think that audio, I think talking, is the winning move. It's the highest bandwidth output from our brain, because you do it a lot more than typing.
Dan: Yeah. Creating text on its own ... text is sort of, I think, the lowest version of, least multipliable version of primary output. If you're just strictly writing, somebody would have to ... you'd have to go backwards even to have somebody read it to turn it into audio or overlay video on all of that. But audio has the most potential derivatives of it, I think.
Dean: Why do you think that is? From your perspective? I agree with you. I'm just going through it in my mind as you're talking about it.
Dan: Well everything ... and first, just the speed and ease for one thing. If we look at it that ... we're talking about ideas in the packaged format, packaged being digital now, format. It's going to take one of four forms. It's either going to be audio, it's going to be video, it's going to be text, or it's going to be pictures, images. There's only four outputs. When you look at that, everything else is kind of a derivative of that, right? When you look at the ease of creation to write something is, for some people, it's probably their comfort zone of being able to do it, but you and I, for us to go off alone and write, that's a procrastination inducing thing.
Dean: Very much so.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. So there's no ... you can't really collaborate in the creation of the written word as your primary output source, right? We're talking about capturing ideas from your brain, ideas into a tangible, digital format that you can share. Now video, on another version of it. Video is a really great thing and a lot of people feels like it's ... you know, sit back and watch a movie is kind of the most engaging thing if somebody wants a fully immersive experience. But the downside of it is that it's the most complicated to capture, requires the most set-up; the lighting, the camera, the mic and all of the stuff that goes into doing that.
Yet, it also requires the most attention to consume it.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: It requires full immersion.
Dean: Yeah. I would say that for most people, it's the scariest medium. And if you ask people ... if I can just talk to you for a few minutes here and we're going to record it, then what's been recorded can be easily edited or it can be transcribed into text. So the parts you don't like will come out, but all you ... you don't have to concentrate on anything there except the conversation. I'm going to ask you a few questions and everything else. And there's an ease to it because people are used to talking all day. From morning until night, people are involved in dozens of short, medium size, or perhaps even long conversations. But it's something that is very, very easy. I think writing is harder. You can go off by yourself and write and people do write because they text every day or they send emails every day. But being videoed is a strange activity for most people.
Dan: I agree.
Dean: I've found ways of making it comfortable for myself. But I've made a concentrated effort to do it and it took me a couple of years to find a mode that ... one is that I felt very confident about. And secondly, I have a team around me which does all of the hard work to get it done.
Dan: You've got that fancy teleprompter dealy-o.
Dean: So anyway, but I think your point is really a great one. Just to reflect on what power getting what is going on in your head out in a form that's independent of you. In other words, it's out there working when you're doing other things and spreadable.
Dan: Yeah, it becomes shareable, distribution.
Dean: Yeah. It's multiplying you in the world, this is the big thing. And I was just reflecting ... as you know, I have a real history itch and I itch it quite a bit to go back and look at things because there's a great deal of talk with the technological age about things going viral. But there is an interesting statistic that printing as in the western world, really, really starts in a major way with Johannes Gutenberg because Gutenberg created movable type. He did great printing. Printing has been around ... if you take China, which seems to have been the first place where printing actually started. But each page had to be carved and imprinted. But what Gutenberg said, "Well let's just make lots and lots A's and b'c and c's as little metal units and then we can rearrange a whole page and then when we're finished, we can throw all the letters back in the box and we can do it again with other pages, yes.
So that was a great break through. But within 30 years ... I'm just thinking of the number ... 1455 is generally considered the beginning of printing in Germany. It was in a town in Germany and within a quarter century, there were 30,000 presses like Gutenberg's all over Norther Europe, which kind of tells me that there was a real hunger and a thirst for people to be able to get their ideas down and get them distributed out into the world. When you get such a huge jump in the manufacturing of these presses, because there must have been a tremendous demand that people really, really wanted; one, on the sender's side. There is this tremendous desire on the part of people to get their ideas out there or their news or their thoughts or whatever it is, but on the other hand, there must have been a huge audience for it.
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. Well you think about it. What other ways would they have had to procrastinate back then? This is going to be a wonderful thing to read that I'm going to procrastinate.
Dean: Yeah. It would have been hand written.
Dan: Exactly, yeah.
Dean: And they were scribed. There were scribes. You could hire someone to write things out, but it couldn't be mass produced. Each one was a one-off. One of the things I've noticed, Dean, because I've been in the business of talking to entrepreneurs about their plans for their futures since 1974, where I'm getting paid for this activity of just sitting with you and asking you all sorts of questions about what you'd like to do with your future. Then I would draw pictures of this. I would actually draw diagrams and I'd give them big sheets of the results of our conversation and they could look at that. I did that for close to 15 years and made a good living at it. It was escalating over the 15 year period. But it was all conversation based and that was triggered by questions that the person hadn't really thought of before I sat down with them. That's where my whole idea of the question that I really formalized, which is the three year question where I ask, "If we were having this discussion over three years from today, it's the 17th of December in 2017. So we're talking about the 17th of December in 2020, and we're having a conversation on that day and you're looking back now, back to today over the three years. What has to happen over that three year period, in your life both personal and professionally, for you to feel happy with your progress?"
Well, the person's never had that question before in their life. And all of a sudden, their brain rearranges itself and thoughts come out and you're forced to make choices about this and that and it's very lively and it was such a valuable exercise, me asking that question and them answering, that they would pay me just to sit there for an hour, two hours, whatever the time period was. Then show them in written documents and diagrams and everything else what they had said. But they had no access to that information before I asked them the question.
Dan: Right. That's great. The thing about the picture, which was another form of that digital kind of output is that, I think that images, drawings, charts, are the way ... this is one of the things that really magnifies the concepts that you have, is the accompanying illustration that goes with it that somebody can see. Or the simple form, the thinking tool that goes along with it. I really think that combination of the thinking tool with the audio explanation of it is ... that's the power move.
Dean: Yeah. We had a good example of that in the workshop when you came on Thursday and we got into the conversation of that distinction between having a thought about a future improvement, where you're making things bigger and better, and which question do you ask after you have this picture. We've been talking about this probably for the last five or six of the joy of procrastination podcasts here. And it makes all the difference in the world if you ask yourself who, rather than how. In other words, if you ask yourself how, then you're into the thick of it and it's hard labor, but you prove-
Dan: Yeah, it's really been interesting because I've, oh sorry, go ahead.
Dean: Yeah. I was just saying, as you were explaining this to the entire workshop and it had a huge impact on everybody. When we went around the room at the end of the day, about half the people, about 30 people there, and about 15 of them said that distinction between how and who is the take away. That makes all the difference in the world. But I went up to the light board, my magic board, and I actually diagrammed out what you were saying at the same time that you were saying it.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: And it made the difference. And what I really liked about the way that you diagrammed it, was that I've been diagramming it from the top down in a vertical format, representing the units of time down the left side of the page and the moment you have that what at the top. And then the forking to either the how side or the who side. And when you were doing it horizontally, from left to right, what really made it ... I think the nice thing that neither of us saw coming, was that when you decide to go down the who path, you forked the path up and to the right. And when we went down to the who, or the how, path, it was down and to the left. Which, there were so many implications in that, that first of all, when you go with who, it automatically implies and requires a collaboration. So when you go down how, you're automatically putting yourself down into an isolated and linear-
Dan: Yeah. And i think that's another important districtionis because, there's a radical emotional difference between collaboration and isolation.
Dean: Yes. Yeah, so I thought it really tied in well with what we've talked about with collaboration. This whole idea that it certainly ... it's an elevator. It's elevating you up when you're thinking who and cooperation and collaboration. Than limiting yourself to ... because I imagine then, as you go up and to the right, time moves faster because you're doubling up. When you're going down the how path, you've slowed yourself down to the linear single minute at a time of your own time.
Dan: Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I have the exercise put in a text every quarter that is accompanied by cartoons. So I'm always working my cartoonists. This next week I'll have three meetings by Zoom. It's at a distance. He's about 1200 miles away, but on Zoom he's right there. And in Zoom, he can actually pull the text up that we're looking at and we'll look at the pages and we'll pick out the key ideas. Then he'll actually draw a little outline of the pages that are going to be diagrammed and we'll sit there for about 15,20 minutes and go back and forth and we'll just fill it up with the elements which best support the text. But not just sort of reproducing the text, but actually grabbing the essence of it and creating pictures for it. He actually does it right on the screen with me pretty fast. It's the same as McDonald's.
The thing that I've learned over the years just being a graphic artist myself, but also collaborating with a graphic artist, is that progress is always to the right and it's always up. If you try to represent it in any other way, it doesn't work.
Dean: Right.
Dan: So when I was doing that, and I came to the point of absolutely who had to be up and to the right and how it had to be down. I was thinking maybe I should have looped it backwards so maybe points for how that, not only were you going down, but you started curving backwards.
Dean: Yeah, that's true because then you'd have to loop all the way around to get right back to-
Dan: Well you're actually looping back on yourself. You haven't gotten anywhere. You've actually regressed rather than progressed in the sense that, before you only had this bugging you, now you've got something else bugging you. You've added to your load of isolation frustration that you have. I think that's really what procrastination really is, is that ... and you get fearful of having new thoughts about the future because every time you have this new job and you immediately default to how am I going to do this? You've just added to your burden and frustration.
Dean: Yeah, it's absolutely true. I've been saying that deciding to go down that how path is like writing a blank check that's payable with your most valuable asset, your time in an unknown amount. You know? You don't know how long it's going to take you and there's no guarantee of what the result of it's gonna be. It's the most uncertain thing to bank on. Whereas if you are collaborating with somebody who is a known getter of the result,of the what, that you're trying to accomplish, they know how to do it, you can write a check with your most renewable asset, which is money.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it odd. It struck me as odd; I'll see if it strikes you as odd, that here we are with every year showing more and more digital capability out in the world, and we're kind of going back to the most fundamental skill that human beings have. As we've progressed from the beginning of the joy of procrastination podcasts in July of 2016, isn't it interesting as these digital tools multiply out there, that the only safe space for humans is actually conversation?
Dean: Yeah. It's comforting. It's fantastic.
Dan: I find it, because I can talk forever.
Dean: I can too. And you know what you find is that the derivatives, the stuff ... I'm realizing, and I'm not even doing it ... I'm throttling back on the output that I'm capable of in terms of the amount of things that I can say, because I know that each hour that I talk is a ... there's so much derivative that comes from it that it's ... I'm working with three different writers right now to keep up with the things ... and that's just with doing three different podcasts.
Dan: Yeah. For the world, it can't just be all Dean all the time because there's got to be room for all Dan all the time.
Dean: That's exactly right. That is funny, Dan. You know I told-
Dan: We gotta work out some boundary lines here between our talking territories.
Dean: It's almost unfair. I said to Joe Polish the other day ... I don't whether I told you this, but at one point, when I had launched my new listing into a lifestyle podcast for the realtors, at one point between you and Joe and I, we had five of the top 200 podcasts on the marketing section of I tunes, which was really pretty fascinating. Well because we had I Love Marketing. We had the talks. Our Joy of Procrastination was the only one that wasn't on there. What we could have ... on there. We had 10X talks, Joe's Genius Network, my More Cheese, Less Whiskers podcast and my Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast. So we had five of the top 200 at one time on there. Now occasionally, when we release a new Joy of Procrastination episode, we get up there. So it's possible that at some point we could have six of the top 200 podcasts on the charts between the three of us.
Dan: Yes. And all we were doing was having a good time.
Dean: Good conversation. That's the one thing in common. No fanciness required. That's what's really ... when people get the idea that they want to start entering this digital world. They want to say, "Well, okay. I want to start getting my conversations out there." They immediately get stuck into, "Well, how do I do that? How do I get it on I tunes? How do I record? How do I do this? How do I?" All this whole long line of how thoughts that get in the way of them actually doing the stuff. And a lot of times, I just think when you combine the things that I've learned from you with this, in terms of the 80% approach. When we take this ... I think that you look at this, our Joy of Procrastination podcast, my other podcast that I do alone, are all truly 80% approach podcasts in that we don't have a theme tune, we don't do any editing on the podcasts. There's zero friction in creating it. The closest thing we have to a theme tune is me opening the conversation with Mr. Sullivan. That's the beginning of it, right? But what do we need the theme tune for?
It's like really from concentrate.
Dan: Yeah. Heres an interesting thing. I don't really do a lot of listening because I'm a born reader. I'm a born conversationalist, but when I'm by myself, I'm reading and it's usually not books. It's usually, I'm on the Internet, I'm surfing and I'm looking for interesting takes on something that I hadn't thought about before. There are algorithms that you have that will search for what you found interesting before and they'll direct this stuff to you. But that's not interesting to me because I've already covered it. What I'm more interested in is going across and saying, "Oh, gee. That's an interesting thing. I hadn't thought about that before." Then I'll go in. But I don't want it to be long. In other words, I should be able to grab it in about five minutes.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: If it's really interesting, maybe I'll spend 10 on it, but if it's going to take me more than 10 minutes to get the value out of it, it's too long for me because I want to do a lot of this. A Jackson unit is-
Dean: One Jackson is all it takes.
Dan: Beyond the one Jackson, it's ... the author hasn't done a good job. He should have got me right up front. But heres the thing about that: podcasts where it's just one person talking at the audience are of no interest to me whatsoever.
Dean: Right.
Dan: I had an interesting contrast because there's a guy people say, "You should listen to Sam Harris." Sam Harris is really neat. Sam Harris has a podcast. Sam is-
Dean: Okay.
Dan: -famous for being mostly an atheist so he's ... in the Atheist community, Sam Harris is a big star. I listened to him and he's very smart. He's very smart. He speaks extremely well. He's very incisive logic, but after about three or four minutes of him, I'm starting to drop off. Then there's this other man, Scott Adams, who's famous for being the cartoonist who presented Gilbert and he's got a lot of interesting ideas. But I listened to him for about four or five minutes and I said, "Its kind of dry." And I'm finished with it. But last summer I was listening to a podcast on Sam Harris's podcast where he interviewed Scott Adams.
Dean: Ah. Okay so that's a combination.
Dan: And I listened to the whole thing for an hour and it was scintillating.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Just one person talking doesn't do it for me.
Dean: Right.
Dan: With one exception. I have a thing called multiplier mindset. But I keep those to about five minutes. I never talk more than about five or six minutes because I found that that's about the maximum timeframe where you can go just yourself getting an idea across.
Dean: Right.
Dan: But your different. You talk in a different way and I was noticing that when you were talking the other day in the workshop. You have a speech style that can ... it's almost like you're having a conversation with yourself. Like there's two Dean's. You've managed to create kind of a two Dean track. You have a very, very interesting speech pattern, which doesn't wear out beyond the five minute mark. So I just wanted to pass that on to you. I just noticed that you hit upon a particular way of talking, which can kind of keep the listeners going. So obviously, you're successful with your longer audios. I think you've actually, whether you're conscious of it or not, you've actually hit on a particular way of talking. I think it is, you leave real pauses in your thinking and it creates a little tension. You'll say something and then there'll be a pause and immediately, because you're not talking right away, the person says, "Oh, cool. What's coming next?" And then you talk again. So I wanted to point out that whatever you're doing, don't change it.
Dean: Wow. That's really interesting. I think part of the thing that ... coming from a copy writing background, or writing ... I've sort of trained myself to write as if I'm writing to one person. And maybe that's the thing is that I've kind of trained myself to speak as if I'm in a conversation with somebody.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: And most people-
Dean: And saying exactly the same ... yeah. The same way I would say it if I was just talking at length to you over lunch.
Dan: Yeah. And most people don't. Most people have a writing in them and they have a talk in them.
Dean: And there's broad differences between-
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the schooling system. The schooling system has trained people to write in a way that's not as interesting as their conversational style-
Dean: To address an audience.
Dan: - yeah. Address an audience and make sure your sentence structure is right.
Dean: Right.
Dan: And everything like that. I think it's ... I think most people who are interesting as talkers have been trained out of being interesting as writers.
Dean: Yeah. I think you're right. I mean, it's so ... yeah. It's funny because ... and I try and avoid doing that at length myself. I really enjoy the conversational element of having conversations with somebody. So I think that's the context for a conversation is kind of my go-zone, that's the one I really like. But this ... as a listening agent lifestyle podcast, it was a lot easier to procrastinate the first foundational episode of that, where I laid out the eight elements of the listing agent lifestyle. And it was a full hour that kind of sets the stage, which now is being converted to the book. So, this whole ... this has been a really great example of taking audio and going through all the derivative parts. I've gone through it with More Cheese, Less Whiskers now what I'm doing with Listing Agent Lifestyle is that I recorded that one episode that sets the foundation and the context and now every other episode will be with a real estate agent who is either winning at applying the listing agent lifestyle principles, or we're helping them get the right action plan for working on any of those elements.
Turning that first episode, that one hour, into a 90 minute book as a opener to the conversation, because it ... I talk about that 80% approach that I learned from you and that's really what makes a small, a shorter book a viable thing is that you get the ... it takes so much less effort to ... 20% of the effort for 80% of the result of a bigger book. Or maybe, in this case, if you're using it as a lead generator, 100% or more of the result that you need for it. And using that as a way to attract the right people. Offering the book, the Listing Agent Lifestyle, to the people who that message is attractive to. And in one plane flight, like you talked about it, it's a book that you can read in an hour and get completely up to date on the foundational things of the concept and then, now that you've got their name and their email address to begin a dialogue with them, the podcast now is really the rest of the book, if you want to think of it like that.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: Like rather than take six months to write a Capital B book, the winning formula that I'm seeing now is spend 90 minutes to write the 80% approach book with the title that gathers the right audience and spend the next six months recording podcasts that have a conversation with that audience, or that would be interesting to that audience. And then seeing what we've been able to do with all of that audio.
Dan: Yeah. I mean if people could write a book in six months, that would be fantastic, Dean. But I've heard five year projects, 10 year projects. This is the absurdity of approach and there's some ... research will show why this is so absurd. I remember back 10 years ago and you still had, in the United States, Barnes and Noble was a huge ... and they still exist. They've got actual stores and I think that they're coming back with more stores. But Borders was the other kind of twin in the marketplace.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Borders and Barnes and Noble and Borders went under. So they disappeared. I used to love some of the Borders stores. I would go to Borders and hang out in Borders and they'd become-
Dean: Wasn't it Borders that made the mistake of partnering with Amazon for their online delivery stuff?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's fine. You stay in your lane. You handle the bookstores, we'll do all the online.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch out for the Devil. Watch out for the Devil. Anyway, don't get into stranger's cars. I was told that as a kid. If a smiling stranger says, "Okay, I'll give you a ride," don't you get in that car. Anyway, but one of the things they could do because they got in, both of them got into the early E-Book ... you could buy a book just simply by downloading it onto your phone. And one of the things they found out is that fiction books for the most part are read from beginning till end.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: John Grisham, those people, they sell hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of books. But they can track the downloads electronically and they can see how far the reader went with it. Generally when it's fiction, and remember fictions are stories. They have a beginning, a middle and the end. People would complete that, but non-fiction books, they found generally it's about four or five percent. The person will get into it and kind of get ... there's this famous book about four years ago, it was called Capitalism in the 21st Century by a French writer, Thomas Pikety, from Paris. And it was a raved best seller. It was the number one best seller. A lot of people had downloaded it electronically. Whether it was Amazon or whether it was Barnes and Noble with their electronic readers, the average reader read 3% of the book, yet it was ... have you read? Oh, it's fantastic. This is a fantastic book and people are recommending it, and people have read 3% of it and couldn't get any farther are recommending it to other people to download it and read 3% and not get any further.
Dean: Yes. Isn't that amazing?
Dan: I actually read the book in portions over a period of time because I wanted to see what he was saying. There were about four or five chapters in it, which if he had taken those five chapters and produced five books, he would have had a lot more impact. He would have had a lot more impact.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Breaking the chapter out. I've had people who are entrepreneurs who are five to ten years into a project, and they've got 30 chapters and they're going to ... it's bigger than warranties. It's approaching both Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible. That's how big it is. They keep learning new things and they say, "Oh, I need another chapter." In the meantime, over the last 10 years, they could have had 30 books.
Yes, I agree. That's the thing. This is the secret formula that I've discovered is that, if we talk about my eight profit activators. Select single target market, compel your prospects to raise their hand, to identify themselves. It's about turning an invisible prospect into a visible prospect. That's the purpose of a book. In profit activator two, is to compel somebody to say, "I want that book. That sounds like something I want." So if that's your purpose, if the outcome is the beginning with the end in mind, if the outcome is that you are in conversation with somebody who resonates with the title of whatever it is you're offering, then that's a win for the book. Now, all that you would need to make that happen is, you've gotta have a book, you've gotta have a title that, upon reading it, the person you want to be in conversation with, says, "I want that book." And you gotta have a way for them to get it. Those are the only three things that you need to make that, check that box and move into now profit activator three, which is about educating and motivating people.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: And there's nothing more educating and motivating than a podcast, a conversation. It's much more engaging. It's almost like ... I think about them as one unit. I think about it as one thing. That's the latest evolution that I've had is, let's use the book, short book, to get the idea across, say this is what we're about and then invite people to come and listen to this podcast as the next step in that. And then when you've got that podcast listener, now every week you get an opportunity to continue the dialogue with that person. They get to know more about you.
Dean: Well. The other thing here is that I've seen another danger of the long book approach, is that it's taking you five years to write the book, during which you've been trapped inside of your own ideas in isolation for five years. You haven't been collaborating with anyone during those five years because you didn't have something to give to someone else that you could actually get their feedback. You had the thought, "Well I can't possibly show this to someone until it's finished or else they won't get the impact." So you're trapped in your own isolation. But then, having put all that work in, you're not only trapped for the five years before delivery, you're trapped for the five years after delivery, or the ten years after... some people, like Mark, they're trapped in this ... he brought up this little book in 1848, this Carl Marks. The father of communism.
Dan: Never heard of him.
Dean: Yeah, he brought this little book out in, I think it's 1848. It's called The Communist Manifesto. You can read it-
Dan: When you say little book, are we talking about, would it be the size of a 90 minute book?
Dean: Yeah, yeah. You could read it start to finish in about an hour and a half.
Dan: Okay.
Dean: Okay. It took the world by storm. Then he starts writing these huge tomes. Tome being a monstrous, large book. Yeah, tome. And everything. And I said, "You had them with the short one." You should have gone out and you should have just started discussion groups all over the world on the book because everything that gave energy and fire to the Communist Movement came out of the Communist Manifesto. I disagree with every idea in it. I found it very inspiring.
Dan: Hmmm. That, to me, there's something about that. I've been looking for examples of movement making books, like that certainly ... I didn't know that It was that small.
Dean: The other one is Luther, Martin Luther, who is the author of the Protestant Reformation. He's the dynamite stick that produced the rebellion. This is in the early 1500's. By the way, he could only do it because of Gutenberg. Because what he did is he created pamphlets. So a pamphlet was just a huge sheet of paper that was printed on both sides and then folded into so that there were 16 pages when you folded them. That was called a pamphlet.
Dan: The Reynold's papers, or whatever the Hamilton was part of.
Dean: The Federalist paper.
Dan: Federalist paper, or pamphlets, right.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Hamilton, Madison and Jay, yeah the produced. I think there were 90 of them, 95 of them.
Dean: Yeah, there were a lot of them.
Dan: But, they were broad sheets that were just folded once then folded twice then folded three times and folded four times and you ended up with 16. But, he put actually just a broad sheet and nailed it to the door of a particular church. I think it was in Augsberg, Germany. And it was 32 demands that he made against the Catholic Church. Then it was reproduced tens of thousands of times and sent all over Europe.
Dean: What was this called?
Dan: Which one?
Dean: The one you're talking about.
Dan: It's called Luther's Edicts. I think there are 32 edicts.
Dean: That was converted into a book form?
Dan: Oh sure, oh sure. Yeah. You can go on ... it's probably just reproduced as pages on Google. But if you go Luther's 32, I think it's 32, 32 edicts. They're there. You can read the whole thing in about four or five minutes. It's just his complaints against the Catholic Church and he was the first person to do this. His first though was to reform the existing church, but then they, typically, a large bureaucracy, they responded negatively. So, he says, well I'll start my own church. Off we go.
These things are real short. These things are real short. The things that start revolutions are real short.
Dean: That's interesting. I'm going to look up both of those because that's a thought that's brewing for me. One of the things that people often have as mental blocks. They want to buy into how easy it is to do a 90 minute book, but then, some voice in their head is saying, "Well, it's gotta be more than that. It can't just be 50 pages. It's gotta be more than that." Or it can't be a conversation. I'm pretty sure that it's Orson Wells ... who would be a contemporary of Orson Wells? If there was another film maker that would be like that, of that era that wasn't Orson Wells, who else would it be?
Dan: Probably John Ford. John Ford, 30's and 40's.
Dean: Okay. Where I'm going with it is, there's a book that is one of the most coveted books among filmmakers that sells in reprints for hundreds of dollars is a book that has two names on it. Orson Wells and Trefau or somebody. And all it is, is it's a transcript of the conversation between this guy from France who got Orson Wells to agree to sit down with him for three days and just let him ask him everything about film making. About his approach.
Dan: Yeah. Okay. I've got another one for you along the short variety, not necessarily a conversation but a short one. It's Gordon Moore, who the famous Moore's Law that governs the technology world that the speed and power of the microchip will double every 18 months to two years. And the price of computing will drop in half and this seems to be an exponential trend. This was written in a magazine article in a technological magazine in 1965. All he was using was three data points over a previous data point and he said, "This is a very fascinating invention, this integrated circuit that we've created because it seems to exhibit this exponential behavior." And it caught on like wild fire and everybody just locked into it. And it was just an article that he wrote.
Dean: That's something. I love that.
Dan: So we have three of them. We have Marks, we have Luther, and have Gordon Moore so that's a nice-
Dean: I'm thinking about Machiavelli’s, The Prince.
Dan: Oh, the Prince, yeah.
Dean: That's a very short book, yeah.
Dan: Yeah. So if you really, really, really wanna create a new consciousness in the marketplace and you want to get an instant audience that has huge emotional buy-in, go short. Don't go long.
Dean: The great thing is that, I think that the long version of it is that make the rest of the book a podcast.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Because then you can spoon feed the ideas every week over the next several months or even years, if you've truly got a conversation that's worth listening in on.
Dan: Well, I have one that will be a nice test one. So, with a partner in Detroit named Mark Young, who is a member of the 10 Times program. Mark owns the advertising agency. I'd say packaged goods. He advertises for all kinds of packaged goods. I met him at Genius Network three years ago and he's got kind of a resonate political view about the United States and I ... three or four years ago, I came up with this idea of the American checklist, which is a checklist of eight mindsets that, if you're an American and you have these eight mindsets, you're going to be a happy and successful American. And if you're an American and you don't have these mindsets, you're going to be a miserable and procrastinating American. Anyway, that's the essential thing.
We started this podcast, which we're launching in January. But, Mark also has an Internet radio show with a partner, Chuck Willory. Remember Chuck Willory from the Dating Game?
Dean: I do. Yeah, yeah, right, right.
Dan: Yeah. Chuck had seven successful TV shows over a period of about 45 years. So they invited me on the show, they interviewed me on the podcast. And they have, in a single month, they have a million discreet listeners to this. In a 30 day period, they'll have a million and in the radio show, they interviewed me about the podcast. Chuck hadn't heard about it and he was fascinated that you could bypass Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative everything just by focusing on certain mindsets. It's laid out like one of my mindset score cards.
Dean: Yeah. Right.
Dan: And we're pushing the podcast that they can download the podcast, but also they can actually download the score card. Then, Chuck called a whole network of resonate type radio stations who have 4 million listeners. So they're going to replay the radio show on that network. All the networks of other shows are going to replay the one where I'm interviewed, Mark and are interviewed. So that's one million listeners plus another four million listeners, and it was just an hour of my time. It was just an hour. So it will be interesting to report on what the ... how fast it goes through because, the mindsets are real simple.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: It's individualism, ingenuity, having the feeling that what you're doing is exceptional-
Dean: Did you turn that one ... have you turned that interview, the conversation into a book yet?
Dan: No,no. But we're still building. So we're going to build the book through the podcast. So we take one mindset per show and then we talk about it and we'll just download the key points from the podcast and the book will write itself. Anyway, but it's really an interesting thing that, you can pretty well grasp the entire idea of what I'm talking about in maybe seven or eight minutes. And if you listen to the podcast, you get the feeling. But it's really demonstrating what we're talking about here.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: This is huge.
Dean: I like.
Dan: Just to pull it back to procrastination, you can see why entrepreneurs who believe that to communicate anything to the world, I've gotta spend a long time. And it has to be 100%. I can't let it go out there if it's not 100%. How that would just lead you to endless, endless procrastination.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative). This has been one of my favorite conversations.
Dan: I love this.
Dean: Yeah. It's so good. This is a new ... we created some new thoughts here out of this. I like that.
Dan: I think we did. I think we're revealing because, we're not talking just about things that are true in the 21st Century. I'm going back with Luther's the 16, Mark's it's the 19th Century. Gordon Moore is 50 years ago, and everything else. This has always been true. If you want to get something going real fast and you want to attract the people you want to attract, you've gotta go short. You can't go long.
Dean: Yep. That's exactly it.
Dan: Then you have to have the means of having a constant conversation with the people who respond to you.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Which is exactly what the podcast does. So great. I love it. I'm delighted. I'm delighted. A Sunday hour well spent.
Dan: It really is. It really is. I'm glad because it wasn't on the schedule, but I'm glad we got to squeeze in an extra Christmas bonus one. It's awesome.
Dean: Thanks Dean.
Dan: Thanks Dan. Have a great Christmas. I'll talk to you soon.
Dean: Okay. Bye.