Welcome to Cloudlandia Ep168: Why Relationships Still Beat Algorithms
Mar 18, 2026
01:04:30
AI is producing more content than ever, but the competition for real human attention has never been fiercer, and no algorithm is going to change that.
In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we open with Dean noticing a new kind of AI fatigue, the creeping discomfort of scrolling through feeds filled with emotionally manipulative, AI-generated content designed to mimic reality. Dan adds his own observation: the UN’s push to centrally control AI development, which he sees as less a threat and more an unintentional comedy. From there, the conversation gets into the economics of attention, Dean’s framing of 1,000 waking minutes per person per day as a fixed resource, and Dan’s eight years of recovered attention after cutting television (roughly 800 hours a year, or 100 full days).
We then work through the distinction between capability and ability, why giving everyone access to the same tools doesn’t level the playing field, any more than putting a grand piano in every home produces Billy Joel. Dan shares a striking data point from Strategic Coach: after 36 years in business, 85% of their 800 registrations last year still came through personal referral, no technology involved. That leads Dean to a new concept he’s developing called “REAL-ationships,” the coming premium on trust built with actual people as AI-generated mimicry becomes harder to distinguish from the real thing. Dan caps it with a sharp observation: technological mimicry is not emotionally satisfying, at least not after the first time.
This episode lands on a counterintuitive truth for any business owner: the more powerful AI gets at producing content at scale, the more valuable a genuine human relationship becomes. It's worth a listen.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
Links:
WelcomeToCloudlandia.com
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
ListingAgentLifestyle.com
TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Dean Jackson:
Welcome to Cloudlandia. Mr. Sullivan.
Dan Sullivan:
Mr. Jackson. Welcome to Cloudlandia
Dan Sullivan:
Yes. Welcome to Cloudlandia.
Dean Jackson:
So you know what's funny?
Dan Sullivan:
Is it getting congested?
Dean Jackson:
Oh, I realized, I think I've noticed that today or this week, I reached a level of AI fatigue that I'm noticing is a different sensation in that-
Dan Sullivan:
It's like the 18 mile mark of the marathon.
Dean Jackson:
I think that's true. I'll tell you what happened for me is that when I watch Reels or Instagram or Facebook, any of the things, what I'm noticing is the majority of the things that I'm seeing now are AI. And it's getting to where it's not as obvious that it's AI, but it is AI and you can tell that it's AI and it kind of is getting to where it's bothersome. And I realize that this is like we're seeing things, especially when they're trying to make things, they're using it now to create videos that tug on your heartstrings in a way like this family adopted this lion mother who laid her ... They fed the lion and now the lion brings back her cubs to meet the homeowners. And it's just so ridiculous. And everybody is ...
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. And this is in Monica Beach, right? Yeah, exactly. It's near the Ferris wheel on Monica. Yeah.
Dean Jackson:
Santa Monica here. Right. Exactly. Santa
Dan Sullivan:
Monica. Santa Monica. Yeah.
Dean Jackson:
It's
Just so ... So I realize now, and the fact is that most people don't realize it. I mean, there's so much engagement and you start to see now how just all of these situations where people are being confronted or having arguments or what looks like ... This is where it becomes troublesome is the propaganda ones where they're showing confrontations or arguments between two people. Angry Karen does this or confronts this person or all these things where it's like ... I don't know. It's like ... I always say how Jerry Spence talked about that our minds are putting out their psychic tentacles, testing everything for truth, and it can detect the thin clank of the counterfeit. And I think that that's true, but I worry that many people's counterfeit detectors are not as tuned in as ours are. And I could see that.
Dan Sullivan:
Well, there's an old phrase that nobody was ever seduced to wasn't looking for sex.
Dean Jackson:
That's true. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
In other words, you've got to be looking for ... For them to have any impact, you have to be looking for ... I mean, to a certain extent, you're only subject to propaganda if you're looking to be propagandized. I
Dean Jackson:
Don't know.
Dan Sullivan:
It's kind of funny. I had a different AI experience this week, and I think mine is more a source of humor than yours is. Tell me. And that is that the Secretary General of the UN says now that the UN has to be in control of the development and the expansion and the use of AI to guarantee that there needs to be a centralized bureaucratic control AI, otherwise it will be misused. It will be misused. And I said, "If the right team of comedians will just sort of get on this UN thing of trying to control the AI, I think there's ... At least in the short term, there's some real humor here. You can get some real
Dean Jackson:
Humor
Dan Sullivan:
Of the UN as a thought and AI as a thought." I think if you put those two together, there's immediate jokes that you can come up with. They want three billion. Now, which country has three billion to get to the UN?
Dean Jackson:
I know one.
Dan Sullivan:
Anyway, because they want to distribute it, distribute, which requires bureaucrats to third world nations, so to make sure that they can bring themselves up to speed on AI. So I think this has got some comic possibilities.
Dean Jackson:
Oh, man. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
Where's Monty Python when we need them?
Dean Jackson:
Exactly. They've been canceled. They were canceled. That's what happens. We cancel everybody who's got common sense. I think I mentioned that I saw-
Dan Sullivan:
Can I ask you a question? Are you surprised that this is happening?
Dean Jackson:
I'm not surprised. I mean, if you look at it that we're not even two and a half years into it right now, and when you see the stuff that is escalating, like now the Claude bots are this becoming agentic AI, that's the new buzzword, that it acts on its own and can do ... It's like becomes an army of who's. It's like if you just track the trajectory of where this actually goes, like if you're really ... If we're at a point right now where video and audio is already there, but if you get to a point where video is indistinguishable, like undetectable difference, that's coming. We're moments away from that. And I have a friend who was just saying she had a call from a bot, like an AI thing that's calling realtors and the ... Shortly into the conversation asked ... Caleb was the guy who was talking.
She's like, "Caleb, are you a bot?" And then he admitted that he was a bot and then she kept him on the phone for 20 minutes because they hadn't safeguarded him. So she's getting all the, what he's trained to do, like how many and like 30% of the people don't clue in that he's a bot. And that's the truth. His mission was to call these agents, to have the conversation with them just to get the interest to book an appointment with the real person, right? So these are appointment setting bots. And he said that 30% of the people that they talk to don't clue in that it's an AI and they happily set an appointment. And then on the appointment, the human then is pitching this service of, "You didn't know it was a bot, so this is like you want to use this for your business." And I thought, wow, it's very ... Yeah, it's really, it's something where we are.
So I really don't know. And you and I, you and I are kind of once removed.
Dan Sullivan:
It's interesting. I put together an article and I actually sent it to Jeff Madoff and I said 10 AI issues that are going to become very quickly political and how each of the parties, the Democratic Party and the
Dean Jackson:
Republican
Dan Sullivan:
Party would respond to it. And once the interesting thing is that with all 10, they would respond differently. So it's going to be ... And they'll ... So they're going to have a different point of view. But I think that the moment that it becomes political, then it'll be like any other technology. It'll be like industrialization,
Dean Jackson:
It'll
Dan Sullivan:
Be like television, it'll be like radio. The moment it gets fully ... The political sector of society immediately engages with it, then you'll see that it'll become even more complicated and confusing and complex than it is right now because each of the parties is going to want to utilize AI for its own electoral reasons and to get information out. The one factor though is that our brain still can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time
Dean Jackson:
And
Dan Sullivan:
I don't think AI is going to make the least bit of difference of making humans be able to engage with more than one thing at a time.
Dean Jackson:
Oh yeah, yeah. No, that's the thing. I said that. I was having a conversation-
Dan Sullivan:
No, the speed of reality. I mean, you talk about the speed
Dean Jackson:
Of
Dan Sullivan:
Reality and our attention operates at the speed of reality.
Dean Jackson:
It does. And there's a limited ... There's a finite amount of it. Eben and I realized that there are ... You have essentially a thousand waking minutes in a day. We were talking about the 100 Jacksonian units, the 10 minute units, right? So if you take that, that there is 1,000 attention units available per person, per day, that's the limit of it. And when you put that in the context of all of the content that's being created, we did the math on a global finite amount of attention units. If you take eight billion times a thousand is whatever, 800 trillion attention minutes available per day, right? And you're absolutely right. It's like such a ...
Dan Sullivan:
Very, very small amount of attention. I mean, and then a lot of that attention is already spoken for ... Yeah, we got
Dean Jackson:
Things to
Dan Sullivan:
Do every day and our attention goes up.
Dean Jackson:
That's exactly right. So that's what they ... They estimate that we have about 450 of those attention units are currently spent on screen time for most people, six, six hours or six and a half hours or something. So 450 minutes of attention available.
Dan Sullivan:
When I went off my television, watching television, I calculated and I kind of took a month of viewing and just sort of established that basically I watched television about 800 hours, 800 hours a year.
Dean Jackson:
A month? A year.
Dan Sullivan:
Oh yeah. Yeah. And I got that back. I got 800 hours back, which in eight hour days is a hundred ... It's basically a hundred days, a year of attention. And boy, that's made a huge difference. I mean, it made a huge difference. My productivity shot through the roof, I started ... Yeah, I mean, and easiest eight years of my life. It'll be eight years in July, and boy, it's been so great not to have television as part of my life.
Dean Jackson:
I mean, that's ... Yeah, I think that's wild. And then you see that you've created that, you've created other opportunities for that time.
Dan Sullivan:
About half of it's gone into reading, come back. Usually it's evening time or it's weekend time when I did this. But the thing is, you're noticing something, but how do you know ... I mean, how would you know based on what bothered you this week? You used the word bothers, so I'll use it back to you. It bothered you. How would you know that this is a problem? I mean, what would have to happen out in the world for this to be a problem? We know that everybody thinks that AI is going to solve their capturing attention.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. I think it's true. Challenge.
Dan Sullivan:
But it seems to me that everybody's going to be very frustrated because it sounds to me like the competition has gotten a lot more fierce.
Dean Jackson:
For attention, what you're competing against is you're competing ... I do watch television, but never ... It's always like select ... I watch streaming. I can't remember the last time I ever turned on a terrestrial cable television where there's a schedule and you've got to watch what's on, right? Aside from football or sports or whatever, where it's live and happening, that everything I watch is streaming. So I watch a lot of ... I watched YouTube and Netflix and I like watching series things like we just watched The Beast in Me was a show, a streaming series that was on, and it was really well done, eight episodes, but I think that that was real people doing real acting. There was something about that. I don't know that it would be as engaging by AI, but I see the things where in the marketing world, what we're seeing now is this proliferation of people showing you how to create your video clone and your audio clone and how to produce all of this content.
It's all in the name of creating more content with less effort, not better content.
It's an interesting ... So I look and everybody's buying into that, right? Like you've got kind of two things. There's always the people that get ahead of a curve, like they see a wave coming and they go up and they're just like three steps ahead of everybody, and then they show people the way, like, here's how you do this, because everybody is 100% bought into that they need to know how to do this. And then I think that the next level will be that people will create something to be who for things, so that you don't have to learn. I've already made the decision, I'm not going to spend a minute learning how to do any of this. It's like I look at it that it's really ... To me, the most important thing for me as an entrepreneur is- You're adapting
Dan Sullivan:
My role.
Dean Jackson:
I am. Absolutely. Is that-
Dan Sullivan:
Always have a smart human between you and the technology.
Dean Jackson:
That's exactly right. Yes, that's exactly right. It's more important.
Dan Sullivan:
There are people who are fully engaged with this and you don't have to motivate them to be that way. You just have to sort of tag on. Since you got to adopt the A&W root beer approach to this, do you know how A&W? No.
Dean Jackson:
A&W
Dan Sullivan:
Is a very
Dean Jackson:
Famous
Dan Sullivan:
Root beer.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. I know
Dan Sullivan:
About A&D. 100 years. They've never had a delivery system. They've never had a delivery system of their own. Well, what they do is they find a local Coke or Pepsi
Distributor and they have trucks going and they say ... And they're almost never full. They're almost never full. And they're frequent. They're every day, they're going every day. So they just said, Kevin, could you also drop off 10 cases of A&W on your route to these stores and they have them all picked up and they do. And my sense, that is done more than actually having your own delivery system. I think there's all sorts of deals that delivery services have that they'll take this along with them and everything else. But I think you don't want to spend much attention on it, you don't want to spend much effort on it, you don't want to spend much time or cost on it, and so you'll work out. Here's the thing that I've noticed that Wall Street's really worried about AI. They don't see any of the big companies getting a return on the billions that they're investing.
They're just not seeing the return coming back from all the spending on artificial intelligence.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah, I wonder because ... So that's my next thought of this, that right now it's perplexity and ChatGPT and Claude and whatever, those, they're all sort of pure in a way that you're bypassing the monetary system of if you go to Google, what you're getting are paid results, right? That you're looking at ads for these things. And as of yet, chat, GPT and perplexity I've seen has been experimenting with paid sponsored results as well, where when you ask a question and it gives you the thing, and then it asks three or four possible follow-up questions that you can go deeper with something, that I've seen situations where one of those results says sponsored, where it's a, somebody has paid to get their suggested next step placed in the stream of this perplexity conversation.
And so that is going to have to happen. There's a whole industry right now around, just like SEO happened where people ... If you look at the cat and mouse game, the back and forth over the history of search engines, that when the search engines were figuring out how to index the internet or to get it all and what to display when people search things, there's been a constant evolution of marketers trying to game the system. So when Google started out, it was using keywords and metatags to tell the bot what this website is about so that when somebody searched that thing, they would index it, right? They would be scraping all of the data and surmising that this used this keyword on the page so many times. So there was a thing where people would stuff your page with keywords and just use white text so it was invisible, but the page had all of these words in it that would be really for the audience of the search engine so that you could game the system and somebody would ... You would come up as number one and Google figured that out and then they penalize it and they said, okay, no, we're going with now linking, whatever it will look at, do other people link to your site.
So that created the whole engine of a economy around creating backlinks and you would pay marketing companies to get back links so that you would be number one. And then they caught onto that and they came out with something else that was an algorithm that ... So it's always been this back and forth, and we haven't yet gotten to the point-
Dan Sullivan:
Where
Dean Jackson:
Anybody's trying to game
Dan Sullivan:
That. I see a lot of activity going. I just don't see a lot of profitability going on.
Dean Jackson:
Right. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly that people are using it, but the- Yeah. No,
Dan Sullivan:
It's very interesting at the Free Zone Summit before last ... I just asked a general question of the audience, there's 80 Free Zone members there and I said," How many of you are using AI and are happily doing it? "As far as I could tell, every hand went up. And I said," And how many of you can already see an economic benefit? "In other words, it's saving time, it's saving money, it's all the hands went up. I said," How many of you think that your benefit that you're getting from AI is measurable somewhere and none of the hands went up?
Dean Jackson:
"Exactly.
Dan Sullivan:
I think there's an enormous amount of really great economic activity going on an individual basis. You would be an example. I would be an example, but I can't see how it would ever be measured by the people who measure economic statistics.
Dean Jackson:
Right. That's it. You're absolutely right.
Dan Sullivan:
So my sense is that this is not performing like previous, it's not performing like previous technologies. And there's a very famous thinker by the name of FA Hayek, H-A-Y-E-K, Nobel Prize winner, economist. And he says, what makes the world go around are unaccountable billions of little activities that are being done by individuals that cannot be observed or measured from on high and everything else. And I think that what's notable about AI is how empowering it is of individuals whose use of it can't be measured.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. It's very ... Yeah, I think there's a lot of activity. It's certainly getting a lot of-
Dan Sullivan:
Well, trillions. Yeah. I mean, it's trillions. It's just that what people say it's going to do or what direction it's going to be. I said," Well, you'd have to be able to measure it to even make a statement like that, and I don't think you can measure it. "I think we've lost the ability to measure economic activity with AI. I think AI defies measurement. Well, it defies observation because I can't say what's going on inside your brain, Dean, you can tell me afterwards, but I don't know when it's happening. I don't know what's going on in your brain, and I think that that activity inside your brain is an economic activity in a lot of respects. Not everything you do has an economic direct academic, but I think a lot of it does, but I don't think it's observable.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. We have ... I've shared with you before, even when we were doing the joy of procrastination, and I think about this At least once a week, I think about that article in the New York Times about the tyranny of convenience that we're ratcheting forward in our never ending pursuit of making things easier. And I noticed the things on myself, I noticed now that my behavior used to be that if I saw a book or a product or anything that I heard about, I would go to Amazon because only Amazon had one click ordering that I knew I could save the hassle of putting in my credit card to buy something. So I would see a product go to Amazon and buy it there. But now with Apple Pay, they've made it super easy that any website, like now the whole economic engine of seeing something, the TikTok shop or on Facebook or Instagram, you see these ads for a product and you want it and you click and it's automatically, it's just one click and it arrives at your door.
And that you don't have to put in your credit card, do any of that stuff. I've noticed that if any website, if I have to enter in anything, I'm less likely to
Buy it because I've already now ratcheted in the level of convenience that is I only push one button. It's like they've eliminated the friction between me getting what I want. And in many cases here where I am, and I imagine for you too, that you can often have, if I order it this morning, it can be here this afternoon, like same day logistics of that physical movement of goods. But there's a limit to that. And I always look at these, I always look at as a marketer, what are the measurable, what we've been talking about there, like to what end are we creating all of this content? Where is the impact of this going to be measured? And if I look at it in the before unit of a business, it's either going to, or is it going to end up in generating a lead, turning an invisible prospect into a visible prospect, getting more reach like a person to take an action?
Is it going to distribute something that gets somebody to take an action? I just look at it as like, where is it all going? To what end are you deploying this? Because those things aren't changing.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. But in the scheme of things, every day things are going to be bought and they're going to be sold. And my sense is it's going on today for reasons that are not measurable. I would say it's not measurable. And that's the only thing I'm getting is that the significance of AI is that far from it being able to see everything, I think it's actually seen less and less. I think it's sometimes AI is accurate about something that happened yesterday, but I don't think it has any feel for tomorrow.
Dean Jackson:
Right. I agree with you. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
Because I think human aspiration creates tomorrow. I don't think trends in the marketplace necessarily great, great, great tomorrow. So it's just an interesting thing. And my sense is that activity is not results. I think there's an enormous-
Dean Jackson:
Exactly.
Dan Sullivan:
There's an enormous amount of activity, but I don't really, really see the results. I talked to Steve Krine about this because he was successful in the. Com age at the end of the night. He got out three months before everything did well, did well and everything else. He said this has a lot of the same feel. It has
Dean Jackson:
A lot of same feel. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I look at this. We are in internet or 1998 right now, right? Just on the cusp, I would call what we're seeing is an AI boom, right? We're in like the dot com boom that everybody's race to the LLMs. But the outputs, like if you really look at it, there's only ever been four core things. It's either it's words, text, it's photos, it's audio, and it's video. That's really the modality, right? And so it's only to the degree that it's facilitating, making it easy. Like when you look at the, I look at these cascading asyntotic curves that the digitization followed, like the first thing, the easiest thing to digitize and compress and distribute is text. And that's how we started out with email and we started with PDFs and you could create a document that you could attach to a file and send it through email.
And then it went to photos, which was the next easiest thing to digitize and create, and then to audio where the MP3 became a viable thing and compressed enough that we could stream it and then video where ... And it was all driven by the bandwidth to be able to push it through the pipes in a way that we could without interruption.
Like in the very beginning of the internet, pictures that were high resolution had to buffer and it took a long time for something to download and the same thing with audio and video. But then by 2006, YouTube made it possible to now host and stream video seamlessly. And I think that once those things reached the top of the asyntonic curve of the capability, now everybody has the capability to create and distribute without friction and access to text, photos, audio, and video. And now we're getting to the point where if you look at AI, generative AI, has reached a point where it can create text at scale with no detectable difference between a human and maybe even better than humans in terms of technical writing or any of that. And the same with photos and audio. And the last thing now is the video. We're almost at the ... It's getting better and better and better, but we're very soon going to reach this, the tippy top of the asyntic curve and it's only going to be incremental improvement in our ability to, or the tools, ability to do it.
So we're going to reach this plateau where now it becomes the ... Everybody's going to have the capability, but it's going to come down
Dan Sullivan:
To- Can I hold you right there? Can I hold you? Not everybody will have the capability because capability is a human thing, not a tool description.
Dean Jackson:
Well, I don't ... So here, I'll tell you where I'm at.
Dan Sullivan:
In other words, if I go five miles from you, your house at the center, the capability to do what you're doing is totally unequal. So if somebody doesn't have the internal disposition to do it, they don't have the capability.
Dean Jackson:
Well, that's where I was going, Dan, that there's a distinction between capability and ability. So if I give you a grand piano, and there's a grand piano in every home, you have the capability to create amazing music, but if Elton John or Billy Joel comes and sits down at your piano, it's going to be a very different outcome using the same tool that you have access to, that you don't have the ability to use that tool to create the same thing. I look at those, if you think of them as tools, if you look at the first wave where every single person has the capability to create digital text documents that can be distributed for free to everybody in the world that has an internet connection, same thing with audio, pictures and video. You have the technical capability to do it, but the qualitative ability has now where the advantage comes.
That's where the future of it is, right?
Dan Sullivan:
But that's always been the case.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying is that it's always been the case. So now everybody gets all excited about this exponential curve of capability that now it's going to get to the thing where now the differentiator is going to be that the ability is what's going to matter more than the capability.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. And I think different times favor different abilities,
Dean Jackson:
Abilities,
Dan Sullivan:
Abilities, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really reason, but so what is it in this particular situation that saves it from being basically a lot of meaningless activity?
Dean Jackson:
That's it. To what end? That's where I say is now we got to get to the point of, to what end is this going to solve a problem or improve somebody's life in as much as they would be willing to exchange money for that good or service. That's the way the economy works, right? There still has to be ... That's why capitalism works. It's a free exchange of goods and services for money.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. Where the profitability keeps increasing, the amount of profitability keeps increasing. I mean, it's all very interesting me just that the ... I still have only used AI for one thing and I can't see in the future where I'll be using AI for anything except one thing. Other members of my team and the strategic coach are using AI for different reasons. And at a certain point, it might be this year, it might be next year, we're going to have to start having some structure to, where are you already using it that excites you to get a good feeling about it and do you see yourself using it to make your work better? Can you see it? In other words, work faster, work better, work, better result. And I think it's a leisurely conversation. I'm waiting two or three years before everybody's using it for something, so that way they've crossed the threshold, and then I'd say ... But I'd use some coach tools to sort of say, "What don't you like doing?
What's the activities you don't really like? " And can you talk to somebody? Is there a tool already exists, an AI tool that can do that? How much time could you save and what would you do with the saved up time? I get them in touch with what they really love doing first, and then use what they don't like doing as an obstacle. If I could get rid of what I don't like
Dean Jackson:
Doing-
Yeah, I look at that. So in the VCR formula, the progression on capability is that the core is the capability, the next is capacity, so that capability has a sort of max capacity for what you can do with it, and then ability, and then cash as the ... Ultimately, all of this combined is going to provide cash, but I look at what you were just describing is that the capability, the tool, is going to increase people's capacity as individuals that they can, as an individual, do more than what they could. I remember when I first started recording things and wanting to transcribe them, like when I wrote the Stop Your Divorce book with Homer McDonald, back in 1998, I remember that the going rate for transcribing audio was a dollar a minute of audio. So if I had a one hour recording, a real human would listen to that and transcribe it for $60.
It was a dollar a minute for the recording of the things. And that has now that everybody has the capability to get audio transcribed for free.
That's one of the tools that AI can do is transcribe something. So there's a whole generation of a whole genre of people almost be like buggy whip manufacturers or stuff as we were transitioning to cars, the need for buggy whips was way down and the same with blacksmithery became less and less. So we're seeing a real shift of that. And I think that that's if we follow that the cascading digitization pattern of text, video, or text, photo, audio, video, that once those four things are, everybody has now the ability to turn words into full cinematic video and music. It's happening now with music for sure.
You're seeing now that people are prompting things to create music. Richard Miller, who I think you know, Richard was just here and he had a song, had written a song, just had a chord progression and the melody of how this would go and he played into his iPhone with just his acoustic guitar, played that into voice memo on his iPhone, and then he uploaded it to, there's a music AI, Sono, Suno, I think, uploaded it to this and it created this amazing song following exactly his chord progressions and it wrote lyrics based on the prompts, ideas that he had and it was really like well done. And I think that we're already at the point where people can't tell whether an artist is an AI artist or a human artist in the music world. So it's just the audio portion of it. And I think that we're getting to the point where probably it's 60 or 70% undetectable.
I'm already seeing now videos of people being shown a series of videos and they have to say, "Is this real or is it AI?" And 70 plus percent of the time they're fooled, we'll call it, right? Yeah. They can't tell whether this is real or not. And I think that if you factor in any amount- Yeah, but
Dan Sullivan:
Why does that matter? Well, I'm trying to find why that matters.
Dean Jackson:
I think that because it's like there's-
Dan Sullivan:
Because the competition for attention is still exactly the same.
Dean Jackson:
Absolutely. And that's where now it's going to be the ability is going to be the distinguisher, that it's what you prompt the AI to create. It's still going to be the idea that the better ideas are going to be the win in this, knowing what's capable.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah, but it's been that way when there was no technology. There was somebody who could sing better than anyone else.
Dean Jackson:
That's exactly- Yeah, that's why I think-
Dan Sullivan:
So it doesn't seem to me that things have really shifted. It's always been inequality. There's always been inequality.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
There's great and there's mediocre and my sense is that it doesn't seem to me that ... I mean, first of all, what you're describing is real skill, that somebody who can put all these different pieces together and produce a great result, I think there's real skill there and everything like that. I just don't see that from the standpoint of individual human attention, I just don't see how it's going to change things, that's all the things that I'm saying. If anything, the competition for human attention is getting greater. Oh,
Dean Jackson:
Absolutely. And I think that's why the- But I don't think it's going to be solved through better.
Dan Sullivan:
I don't think it's going to be solved through technology.
Dean Jackson:
No.
Dan Sullivan:
I mean, here we are. We've gone through, we're 36 years, the company, and we advertise. I mean, we use social media, we do everything, but 85% of all registrations last year, there were 800 registrations, 85% of them were a personal referral.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. I think that that is ...
Dan Sullivan:
And what
Dean Jackson:
That
Dan Sullivan:
Tells me is that people check with an actual human being that they know who has experience, is this a good thing? And they say, "Yeah, I highly recommend it. " Well, no technology is involved in that whatsoever.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. I wrote in my journal just yesterday, this word of that what we're going to move towards is, I'm calling it relationships, R-E-A-L, patientships.
Dan Sullivan:
I think that's a great idea.
Dean Jackson:
Yes, absolutely. I think that's where we're headed that we would, because we can't ... That's where I'm kind of projecting the trajectory of that because we're not going to be able to trust that this is a real person, that we're going to lean on waiting even more, the value of somebody that we have a real relationship with, a relationship. And so rather than the recommendation engine of asking, I'd much prefer your recommendation than even Charlotte's recommendation. And that's because- Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
That's high praise.
Dean Jackson:
Well, because we have a relationship, you know? Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
Well, it's a different context. It's a very different context. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm feeling too, that there's an Angus Fletcher who wrote Primal Intelligence, he's heading in this direction too, that where you have the things can be moved because economics requires that things can move from here to there, whether it's a tangible or an intangible, something has to move from here to there. And it seems to me that technology is really good at that. I think that technology ... For example, to take it electric vehicles, the result on electric vehicles are very disappointing economically. Everybody's losing all the companies except ... It's hard to see with Tesla because they have companies that are mixed in with each other sort of thing, but none of the EV companies are making money. The Chinese EV companies aren't making money, but in China, you don't have to make money to produce product and everything like that.
And the reason is they're running into traffic congestion and EVs don't solve traffic congestion. An EV stuck in traffic congestion isn't any better than a gasoline car.
Dean Jackson:
Right. Exactly. Yes.
Dan Sullivan:
So there's other factors.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
So the thing that I see is you can technologize yourself to a standstill, and I think that's what you're saying here, that you get. And what becomes important, and that is getting out of the car and having an interesting discussion with the other person who's also stuck in traffic. That's actually a real relationship that the real ... I think you've got a great idea there. I think you should copyright it today.
Dean Jackson:
Yes. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, right? They write a email about it this week. It's one of my five ideas for my week
Dan Sullivan:
To- I think that's really worth developing because that seems to me to be what's happening is people are ... That these technological mimicry is not emotionally satisfying.
Dean Jackson:
Yes. That's a good one. It's true.
Dan Sullivan:
No, you can add that to your ... You can add that to your release. Yeah. So technological mimicry is not emotionally satisfying. Yes. Except the first time you do it, except the first time you do it, then the second time it's not
Dean Jackson:
So nourishing. Because the novelty of it scratches that, right? Yeah. It's like magic then, and that's something. But I think what's going to be a problem is to see these comments on the things of all the people really just taking it at face value, that it's there, it's then that you realize IQ is a quotient and the average is 100. And I think that's going to be a problem, I think. Because there's much more nuanced stuff in-
Dan Sullivan:
I don't know if the problem just emerged us here though.
Dean Jackson:
No, no, no. That's always been the problem. That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. That's not new. That's not new.
Dan Sullivan:
I was thinking of that, and you can really measure backwards, but if you go back to when it was a hundred years since the First World War started off, and the first battle that the British were in, in the First World War, this is 1914, the battle of the Som, S-O-M-M-E, I
Dean Jackson:
Think,
Dan Sullivan:
In France,
Both deaths and casualties, they lost 60,000 men in an afternoon, 60,000. And the thing about that was they weren't drafting people, these were volunteers, and they were up into the hundreds of thousands of deaths and handicaps before they had to start conscription. So people were just running off to ... And the word was priority. They had censorship, so the newspapers couldn't report on these, they couldn't report on these casualties, the number of dead and injured people, they couldn't record on them. But word of mouth was getting back that this was a meat grinder that they were sending people into and still they were going off. And I said, I think that's a good measurement of IQ in 1914.
Dean Jackson:
Right, right. Yeah. I think you're right. And you see it all the time, Dan, in the way, I mean the recruiting, the Army, Navy, Air Force, the military recruiting things are unfair in many ways. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
In what respect?
Dean Jackson:
Well, in that there was a thing where they had ... Somebody came up with the words citizen soldier. And they had these ... There was a period where they were spending millions of dollars to have real like kid rock and other rock bands create songs. They created a song called Citizen Soldier, which was like getting to the people that were most likely to be emotionally compelled to want to join the military.
Dan Sullivan:
Well, it's called marketing.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dan Sullivan:
It's not marketing.
Dean Jackson:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
Well, I mean, first of all, I think the US military is actually a pretty good deal. I think the benefits that come along with it, I mean, very few American soldiers get killed. I mean, you have
Dean Jackson:
Very
Dan Sullivan:
Few. As a matter of fact, the Russian-
Dean Jackson:
Now especially.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah, the Russians in the Ukraine war, four years old, right now, four years old, have had more soldiers killed than all Americans killed in all American wars in the last 250 years. Wild, right? Yeah. Yeah. And everything else. So actually the military is a good deal. For example, not well known, but if you're an illegal immigrant in the United States, male probably, and you go to a recruitment section and you sign up, they don't ask ... You want to tell them that you're an illegal immigrant. They won't turn you in and you don't meet the requirements and you make it into the military. Three years later, you're a US citizen.
Dean Jackson:
I see, that's underpublicized.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. I think that's a good deal.
Dean Jackson:
Yeah. Earn your way in.
Dan Sullivan:
I think an American citizenship and passport is one of the most valuable
Dean Jackson:
Pieces
Dan Sullivan:
Of intellectual
Dean Jackson:
Property
Dan Sullivan:
In the world.
Dean Jackson:
Yes, still. Absolutely.
Dan Sullivan:
Anyway, anyway, I think you should really develop this idea of real relationship. I think it's a great idea.
Dean Jackson:
I do too. I think it's just the way things are headed for sure. The power. Totally agree. The importance of it. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah. Totally agree. All right.
Dean Jackson:
All right, Dan. I will be here. I'll see you back here. A good
Dan Sullivan:
Week after. Yeah. Okay.
Dean Jackson:
Okay. Bye.