In today's episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we unpack the fascinating story of how Toronto transformed over the decades thanks to the pivotal work of urban theorist Jane Jacobs.
As we debate whether our growing dependency on virtual spaces like "Cloudlandia" is weakening local connections, we ponder journalism's evolution from its regional roots. We reminisce about bygone media eras over a nostalgic lunch at Table 10 and trace how universities and ideological factions shaped radio's founding.
As always, we aim to provide a balanced look at technology's ability to bring people together globally while potentially distancing them locally.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
Links:
WelcomeToCloudlandia.com
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
ListingAgentLifestyle.com
TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Dean: Mr Sullivan.
Dan: Never gonna leave you. Never gonna leave you. Well come here I am. That's one thing about Cloudlandia Once you're in there, you can't leave.
Dean: It's so convenient you know it's addictive. It really is. How was your week?
Dan: I had a really super week, I have to tell you. I mean it was a four day week because of the holiday.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: And it's not so much what I'm doing, that's what the company is doing, and there's just all sorts of independent projects which have been more or less under the surface. You know, there's kind of an interesting woman from the 80s and economist by the name of Jane Jacobs have you ever heard that name? I haven't.
Dean: No.
Dan: Yeah, and you know, in Toronto, when they stopped the Spadina Expressway. Yeah, I don't know if you remember that. What seems like yeah, well, you know the Allen Expressway.
Dean: I do know the Allen.
Dan: Expressway. Yeah, that was supposed to be the Spadina Expressway and it went off. It's gonna go all the way down to the center of the city Right, right, right. Right through the center of the city and it would have gone to the Gardner, it would have hooked up and then they would have traded clover leaves down at the bottom.
Dean: And they would have had to remove.
Dan: They would have had to remove all those neighborhoods. It would have gone right through Forest Hills actually. I think that was part of the reason why it got stopped, because wealthy people have more votes than poor people. I don't know if you've noticed that Not in my backyard Right exactly. And then the other one was the Scarborough Expressway, which you know, the Gardner extension that went out to the beaches.
Dean: You know it went out and it was just called the.
Dan: Gardner yeah, it's completely gone. They tore that down one night, basically, oh my goodness. We were away for two days and we had it when we left and when we got back it was gone, you know and but that whole area of Lake now from basically charity, erie Streep, actually, you know where the Gardner goes up the Don Valley.
Dean: Yes, exactly.
Dan: Yeah, well, that's where you took the extension off and they just tore it down. They tore it down in two, two stages, once about 10 years ago, and then they tore it down again, and so, but this was all the 40 year impact of Jane Jacobs, okay, and she said that she had to preserve your neighborhoods if you're going to have a great city and to tear down I mean, and it's turned Toronto into a congestion madhouse.
I mean, that's the downside of it, but on the upside of it, toronto you know, toronto tries to call itself a world class city. Have you ever come across that? And what I noticed is that world class cities don't call themselves world class cities, they just are.
Dean: New York.
Dan: New York doesn't call itself a world class city, it just is. London doesn't call itself a world class city, it just is you know. So if you're still calling yourself a world class city. That means you're not, oh man it's a Toronto life syndrome. I mean Toronto Life Magazine.
Dean: Yeah, and they're Toronto, by a magazine. I'm very intrigued, I'm very, I am very intrigued by these micro you know economies, or micro you know global lenses. I guess that we see through and you're not kind of talked about the whether that is.
Dan: I'm talking about mainland. This is mainland stuff. Yeah, that's what I mean.
Dean: Yeah, and I wonder if that is. I wonder if that sense is diminishing now that we've fully migrated.
Dan: No, I think it's okay, I think it's coming back with, with the vengeance actually you know, and my sense is that the week that COVID started in March I think it was March 13th, friday the 13th I remember when it visited itself upon us, when clients were saying you know, we were seeing 50% drop-offs in future attendance for workshops because of COVID and it was partially, you know, but it was the lockdowns, it was the dropping off of airline flights and everything else I remember I mean all our cash flow got taken away in about a month, right Right and we had to switch.
We had to switch to Zoom, you know, and and we had about a three month period where we just had to rework our entire you know, our entire business model to take all the in-person workshops and turn them over to Zoom workshops, you know. So, that's the upside of Cloudlandia, is that if they take away your mainland existence, you have to switch to Cloudlandia to compensate, and it's a bigger opportunity, bigger, broader everything. Yeah, but one of the downsides of this is that people don't feel like traveling anymore.
Dean: I mean are you talking about me?
Dan: No, I'm talking about us and you know.
Dean: I know, yeah, exactly.
Dan: I'm talking about everyone you meet, you know.
Dean: I know exactly.
Dan: You know, our only time when we have full attendance during the week, where we have people in the office, is Wednesday, monday and Tuesday, thursday and Friday, or when there's a in-person workshop. You have to be in the, you have to be in the company on workshop days. Okay and so, but the thing, the Jane Jacobs, the people who really got involved with the number one person in Toronto was Cromby, mayor Cromby, and he was one of the forefront leaders in stopping the Spadina Expressway and the Scarborough Expressway. Okay and so I'm just showing you the interrelationship between mainland and Cloudlandia.
My feeling is that the more that Cloudlandia expands, the more people go back and start reinforcing their local areas. That's what I wonder about the whole cycle. How's that for a topic that we didn't know about five minutes ago?
Dean: Well, exactly, but I think that I think there is something to that. You know, like I look at the, I think I've been I've mentioned before, like without having moved away from Toronto, like coming into Florida and yeah, when's the last time?
Dan: when's the last time you flew to Toronto? Yeah, no, it's been three years, and three years, yeah, the next time will be whenever, april, if you April, if you decide you're coming to Toronto 12th of April is the first Toronto oh it's already set, yeah, it takes us about a year, because we've got to guarantee that we've got a date when people can also do their 10 times workshop in person. I got you, okay, yeah, so you know, I mean pre-zoners, double duty, you know, they double.
Dean: Yeah, yeah, okay. Well, this is very exciting. So April 12 is on my calendar then, okay.
Dan: I'm pretty sure you're taking a statistic from Dan Sullivan here. So yeah, we better double check on this Well, april 12 is Friday, yeah. It's in the calendar and I think the pre-zone is on or the 10 times is on the Thursday.
Dean: Okay, so the 11th and 12th.
Dan: All right.
Dean: Well, now we're talking.
Dan: Dan, and then Dan is on the Saturday and that's what I'm most excited about.
Dean: Yeah Well, this will be for those who aren't listening.
Dan: Table 10 is Dean and I met meeting for lunch on a Saturday, which really got everything we're doing together started was the table 10.
Dean: Exactly right.
Dan: Yeah, but that's a mainland, that's a mainland reality which may be possible.
Dean: Yes, that's exactly right and I think that this now this is where I can, as I've reflected, I look at where I've been spending time, taking snapshot comparisons this week of today and 25 years ago and seeing where we are. You know, if I look at 25 years and 30 years ago kind of thing, I look back at when I started my you know sort of being in the result economy or launched my entrepreneurial career in 1988. So I look at that as coming up on, you know, 35 years.
Dan: this year, 35 years, yeah, yeah, and I just want to look from there Well, it's 35 years. Right now it's 35 years. I mean, we're in the 35th year.
Dean: So yeah.
Dan: And, what's really interesting, our program where we have workshop programs, started in 1989.
Dean: So next year is our 35th year you know it's year 35.
Dan: So it's the 35th year of the program and I'll be 80 in May and I've been coaching for 50 years in August. Okay. So it's sort of an anniversary year Nashville in May we're going to have our first worldwide conference in Nashville. Coach Coach Con yeah, coach Con, coach Con, yeah, yeah you can take that in two ways. Coach Con. You can take Coach Con in two ways. Yeah, you can. It's the coach conference, or it's just shows you what 35 years of counting people will do for you.
Dean: Oh, that's so funny. Well, I'm very excited about both of those. I'm very excited about both of those things. So where I was going was, you know, in 1988, looking back at the things, it was very much a Toronto-centric kind of lens because I had spent. I left Toronto in 1984 to come down to Florida and finish up. I've been spending a lot of time down there. I spent, you know, I spent those years and driving through this I remember the first time driving down on my own.
I had a friend with me. But driving down going through the different cities, like going through Dayton, ohio, and going through Cincinnati.
Dan: Ninety-five hits in 75. That's what we took.
Dean: That's the main route to Florida. That's the main route, exactly, yeah, yeah, you crossed over at.
Dan: Detroit. You probably crossed. Did you cross over at Detroit?
Dean: We got a tip to cross over at Port Huron, so up further, which was Further north yeah.
Dan: Yeah, but then once you were across it was a straight shot superhighway all the way to Florida, and the reason is that Canadians Florida is part of their Canada. Yeah, I mean Ontario. My Florida includesmy Canada includes Florida.
Dean: Yeah, exactly that's true, isn't it? It's like the Southern Extension. You've gotten places in or things in Canadians. Have, you know, links to Florida? You're absolutely right, yeah.
Dan: Half the Canadian adult population from around November to April. Well, let's say October to April includes Florida, Scottsdale.
Dean: I was just going to say that Calgary you look at the other side, then Calgary is. Yeah, calgary is connected to Palm Springs and Phoenix.
Dan: Yes, and then Maui, because I don't know what the situation is now, but I suspect they'll go to the part that didn't burn down.
Dean:
Yeah, but what struck me was the newspapers. So this is, what struck me is the newspapers and television stations, because we would stay, you know on the road.
We would Hotels. Yeah, you would stay, yeah, we would stay in a hotel. And so I don't always, you know, get the newspaper. I've had a long time love for USA Today, which I've always kind of loved as just getting a overview of everything. But it struck me how I had grown up with the lens newspaper, lens being the globe and mail, the Toronto Sun and the Toronto Star and looking that, you know, without any sense of left and right leaning. You know, I didn't understand at that point, you know, the bent of and how that shapes things.
But, it was amazing to me that I learned I got kind of on that deep level, these regional kind of markets you know I don't know how to fully describe it, but it was an awakening that I knew that, hey, if you've got something you know that worked in, it was kind of like this franchise. I'd be seeing franchise thinking in place, you know, in different places and seeing the Cracker Barrel restaurant. You have the same exact Cracker Barrel experience at any drop off point along Highway 75, you know, and so yeah.
Dan: And that was.
Dean: Yeah, at the time the thing was I mean in those days it was the new model. Yeah, yeah, for young college students traveling abroad. Right, but it was so great and that level of you know you wouldn't have any window into Louisville, kentucky, unless you're passing through Louisville and you tune in to the Louisville Echo Chamber or ecosystem where you're seeing the. Louisville anchors and the news and the local things, and you're reading the Louisville newspaper, you know.
Dan: And then Macon Georgia.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Macon and everything.
Dean: Because you usually made.
Dan: I always remember that we shot for Louisville or Lexington on the first night. Yeah, lexington, yeah yeah, but we never saw any of the horse farms. Well, you did I mean because 75 went past the. But you never got off.
Dean: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: You had Oasis which were franchise Oasis.
Dean: Yeah, exactly, and that way you know what you're going to. You know what you're going to get you know, but now I see now how those things are like with the rise of Cloudlandia, the access to what's going on a national scale and global scale kind of thing, is what direct to the individual. You know, now you've got access to everything, and I've been. Do you follow or is on your list of news outlets? Do you come to Daily Wire? Is that part of your routine or?
Dan: are you familiar with. No, that's not one of my.
Dean: Do you know?
Dan: about the.
Dean: Daily Wire.
Dan: I've heard of it, but that's not really what I it's not.
Dean: No, I mean I'll look at it.
Dan: now that you're talking about it, I'll look at it.
Dean: Well, Ben Shapiro is the one who basically I know Ben, he's the guy that started the Daily Wire.
Dan: Yeah. I'm a Breitbart guy, I'm a Breitbart guy. I check daily caller town hall Breitbart, you know.
Dean: Yeah well, the Daily Wire is now a $200 million. They do $2 million a year now and they just Last year. If you think about the VCR formula. And the reason I'm bringing up the Daily Wire is that is a cloudland-centric, a media empire that was started 100% to be online and took advantage of one. They tapped into Facebook's reach and they funneled those people into get readership and get subscribers to their news service and use that money to buy more attention on Facebook. That was the whole very simple model and they executed it flawlessly.
And so they built this huge reach and they had a relationship with Harry's Razors. Do you remember?
Dan: Oh yeah, Like Dollar.
Dean: Shade Club and Harry's Razors. So Harry's Razors was a big advertiser on Daily Wire, doing very successfully, and then Harry's took exception to some content on the Daily Wire that suggested that men are men and women are women and that would Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Dan: That's like touching the third rail of the subway, absolutely.
Dean: And they dropped it. They stopped advertising, but what Jeremy Borencher, I think, is the president, who's the CEO of the company what they did was they started on the backs of that company called Jeremy's Razors and they built this whole. They did a whole ad launching the process because it's their own audience. They were already very successfully selling Harry's razors to their audience by letting Harry tap into their reach, and so when Harry's left, instead of looking for somebody to replace Harry's as an advertising partner, they said, well, we'll just make the razors ourselves. And they started Jeremy's razors and now Jeremy's razors is a huge subscription-based company speaking directly to the reach that they've built with the media company.
And it struck me that now we're getting to where these very specialized. I don't think we're separating geographically as much as we're ideologically now that there's brands for the right and there's brands for the left and there's you know, there's woke brands and there's I won't say successful brands. Now.
Dan: But the.
Dean: I mean the writings on the wall. I'll tell you.
Dan: I'll tell you. Can I tell you an earlier crossover that?
Dean: set that up.
Dan: Yeah Well, actually FM radio was technologically possible in the 1930s and 1940s but it was never approved by the FEC until the 1970s. Actually, there was about a 40-year thing where the federal what's the FEC, federal communications they couldn't get it passed for, even though it was available and and but FM is strictly a local radio reach. You know, during the day you can get about maybe 30 miles. You lived in Georgetown, I think, when you lived in. Toronto right. Well you could get CJRT, which was an.
FM station and you could, but once you got, let's say, up to Orangeville or Newcastle, you couldn't get CJRT anymore. Okay, Because, FM is gets interrupted by solar energy during the day. Am we? When I was growing up, I could listen to New York, I could listen to Chicago.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Remember you put on a clear night, real clear nights. I could get New Orleans, philadelphia was easy, boston was easy on. Am because it's a different bandwidth, okay, and it doesn't get interfered with by the sun, but the sun won't let FM go further than about 30 or 40 miles.
It's not true anymore, because all the FM stations now go on the internet you know, so I have an internet delivery so I can get Los Angeles Jazz Station on, you know, on the internet and they're taking advantage of the internet. But what happened was it was AT&T really controlled the AM spectrum. At&t, yeah, I mean they talked about the dominant technologies. You know Google and Meta and you know and everything they talked about it today. You know Amazon, that nobody, they didn't get up to the knees that the type of control that AT&T had. Okay, and.
AT&T didn't want any competition for its AM networks and they came in and the. But because FM is a local, it's you know, it's a region, it's where you are, you get a real. The universities are the ones who started it all. Okay, so in you know, cjrt was Ryerson and the Toronto and everywhere you went, like if you went to Louisville it would be the University of Louisville you know, and and everything else.
And so, right off the bat, the ideology of the universities by that time was left. You know, that was where the left wing people you know symphony music and it was, you know, the various FM stations, and they abandoned. Am got abandoned and the right took over AM radio, you know, and Ross Limbaugh was the first person who really took advantage of that, and this was strictly the right side of the political spectrum.
Dean: Okay so.
Dan: AM talk radio. Am talk radio. The left tried to get into talk radio and nobody would listen to it.
Dean: Okay, Nobody so the you know.
Dan: And so what happened? You already had that ideological split at the radio stage. Okay, so if you were left wing and you were driving to Florida, you would go from university town to university town and pick up the FM station, but you weren't less than the AM radio anymore. So that was the first split. Before you ever got to, you know, you got to the internet with. That split had already happened in the radio spectrum.
Dean: Yeah, amazing.
Dan: That was before you were born.
Dean: Right, right, right, that's something.
Dan: But I mean, imagine something happened in the world before you were born.
Dean: It is so funny.
But I look at that, you know, and it is like it's amazing to see how this is going, and certainly club Landia is enabling that and my, to bring it all, we're back around to the. What we started talking about with the local, saving the neighborhoods kind of thing is, yeah, I wonder if we're starting to see geography kind of shaping up here, that Florida and Texas are becoming like sort of you know conservative, you know safety and some kind of thing that they're gathering all the people there, yeah, yeah, and they've surpassed New York, they've surpassed New York state, they've surpassed Illinois, they've surpassed California.
You know the states.
Dan: People are leaving those states and going to Florida and they're going to Texas and so, but I believe in Moore's law, which essentially is the you know, the technological formula that's created Cloud Landia is Moore's law, but mainland is controlled by Newton's law and. Newton's third law I mean Moore's law is that every 18 to two years the computing power of the microchip will double and the price of it will get in half, that's the we've lived in that world for the last 50 years.
Dean: And but.
Dan: But Newton's law is for every action there's an opposite and equal reaction. Yeah, so if you yeah, so so you got to look at both laws.
Dean: And I wonder, you know one law triggers the yeah. Yeah, it is interesting to see the like. I wonder if you were to you know, are we bringing back now? The importance of the local infrastructure, the local like. What is the role of the community now in our lives, in our world? I mean, I feel like I'm it's getting narrower on less and less like inclined to have to travel to other places, and it's funny, you know, I don't know.
Dan: Well, I won't travel, I mean, except for my own workshops. I won't travel to business, I won't travel for anything. And you know and I mean all my speeches what I used to give speeches for. Now you know where I would be invited to a big conference and I cut that off in 2013. I just you know, you can have me as a speaker, but it's going to be a podcast at the conference.
Dean: Yeah right. Yeah, that's kind of the way I've been doing.
Dan: Things too is zooming in as opposed to traveling and flying in yeah, yeah and it's easy because you know you're doing whatever you're doing at the Four Seasons Valhalla and then you're someplace else in the world.
Dean: Yeah yeah that's so true right.
Dan: Yeah so, but people think that because there's a new realm available that eliminates all the previous realms, but actually just the opposite happens.
Dean: Yeah, I posted and it's so. I think about how we really have the ability to be a beacon. You know I'm Jamie Smart. I don't know if you've ever met Jamie?
Dan: Yeah, well, I know of him. I know of him, yeah.
Dean: Yeah, wrote clarity, just like when we were doing all the big seminars. You know when we stopped doing that in 2009,. That was a big, you know, big shift in our world. You know, in terms of having spent 15 years every single month doing a big event somewhere new.
Joe was having a conversation with Jamie about that and he was like because for him it had been even longer, you know, doing that with his identity of being a speaker, going to town and being on stage. And Jamie talked about it as a transition from going from being a torch bearer, where you have to take the torch and go city to city to spread the message, switching to being a lighthouse, where you stay in there and be your light from when everybody comes to you and that was a big shift.
And even then, 2009, the Internet was here and all the infrastructure and everything was here, but it certainly wasn't the same place as it is now. Zoom and all that stuff was not yet. Now it's just. I look at it and you start to see, man, there's just so many ways to reach the world from your Zoom room. You can really have a global. There's nothing stopping you from having a global broadcasting center in a 6x6 room in your house.
Dan: Yeah, it's interesting. You were very helpful to us because we had that flood in our Fraser Street building. Then we were knocked out. I mean, we had just come back from lockdown, from COVID lockdown, and we got three months in and we had the city water main next to our building when Underground just destroyed our my recording studios, our tech team, where our tech team was, where all of our materials were.
But they closed the building down because the city inspectors had to come in and they had to check out. Maybe the whole building had to come down because the support structures may have been weakened and they'll just condemn the building, but we were out for eight months before we could get back in, you know.
But, in destroying our recording studio we had a company. Toronto is a great post-production center for the film industry. So it's dependent upon the Canadian dollar. If the Canadian dollar is really weak, film studios in the United States ship their post-production work you know of editing and everything and there's about 15 movie studios, tv and movie studios in the Toronto area, all the way from Pickering to Hamilton. You know these are big studios but they do all their inside. They bring all their inside work to Toronto.
And now they're creating actual virtual towns with CGI. So did you catch any of the Jack Reacher series.
Dean: I did not.
Dan: It was a huge hit. But the town that's depicted where Jack Reacher is, it's a small town in Georgia. The first season was the small town in Georgia. It was one Lee Child book, Jack Reacher, and that entire town was created in CGI, doesn't exactly? That's crazy, right, but when you look at it. And then all the inside scenes were constructed in the film studios. You know the homes and everything like that. But that shows you the relationship between Cloudlandia and the mainland.
Okay, because once you cross an international border, you're in a different currency system. Yeah even though I mean digitally.
Dean: I mean so many things are possible now. I posted up a video.
Dan: The one thing that remains constant is the US dollar Okay. I mean the US dollar. And people say, well, why does everybody use the US dollar? And I said you just answered your question.
Dean: It's right there Back up to the first part of your sentence. Why does everybody you know that's like yeah, I mean it's like English.
Dan: Why does everybody speak English? I said you just answered your question.
Dean: That's like the Yogi Berra Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded right.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah. And so the big thing is that since 1989, the differential the average differential, between the Canadian dollar and the US dollar has been 26% in favor of the American dollar. So we get 80% of the US dollar, it's dollar 36, dollar 36 right now Are you crazy?
Dean: Well, that's crazy. So I checked the number.
Dan: I checked the number no no, because in 19, it was $5.55.
Dean: Oh, wow, yeah, but it's been hanging around in the mid 30s.
Dan: 30% now for, I would say, last three or four years it's been you know could be as low as 30% and it got up to 42% per hour, but that so we didn't plan it this way. It was just a lucky break for us that we started in. Toronto, and so 80% of our income is in US dollars, but 80% of our expenses are in Canadian dollars and basically can buy the same thing with a Canadian dollar in Canada as you can with a US dollar in the United States.
So we've got we don't have 26% because it's 80%. It's not 100, but we've averaged 20% for the four years we've averaged. So every dollar that comes across it's worth a dollar 20 if it comes across from the United States.
Dean: Yeah, right Wow. And that's kind of where we're talking about the infrastructure, you know the infrastructure thing of being able to now, you know, build with a main or a Cloudlandia audience to reach with all the but with the capabilities or the expenses and physical delivery stuff happening in the most favorable, you know, mainland place. And I wonder if that's the opportunity that geographically you know places will get, will become sort of specialist in certain things.
Dan: Well, that has been the case actually for the last 30 years. Okay, because of one factor that 90% of global trade, 90% so every day, the all the transactions in the world, it's, like you know, it can be like 4 trillion to 6 and a half trillion every day. The total value of it, well, 85% of it is in US dollars, okay, is in US dollars and all of that is.
90% of all global trade happens on water Is that right 90% of all global interactions and you know the, if you just take a look that it's water travel and that's only safe because of one factor, and that's the US Navy. And since you know since and that was. That wasn't for economic purposes for the US, it wasn't at all for you at. You know the everybody says well, the Americans, you know they just did this for their economic that actually the US. You know how much 10, how much percentage of the US economy is actually involved in cross border trade? 10%.
Wow the other 90% is just Americans making stuff and selling it to Americans.
So the US really doesn't isn't really that involved in the world but they had a problem after the Second World War and it was called the Soviet Union. And so what they did after the war said you know, we don't want to fight the Russians head on, so what we'll do? We'll just create a great economic deal with every other country in the world that's not communist and we'll promise them that we'll guarantee all their trade routes by water and they can sell anything they want into the US without any tariffs. And it was a great deal. Modern China only exists because the US guaranteed all their trade, and now the US has decided not to guarantee their trade, their water transportation and that's why.
China's hit a wall, you know, and, and so I mean.
But it's really interesting, dean, you're the one who came up with the cloud land idea on the podcast, and. But what I've been examining more and more is what happened if the cloud, if cloud land idea changes your ability to communicate and travel. You know, physically it's not like the mainland is going to be the same after that. I mean, if you make a change in one realm, it's going to make changes. I think this localization is now the, so if you're globalizing on the one hand, you're localizing on the other because you got a balance. That's what I wonder now, and I don't see.
Dean: I'm starting to see like there's some shifts in the way that you know. I think that cities or towns I'm not, I can just speak about for winter, what I'm noticing a lot of development in is winter haven is sort of focused on the downtown, on making that kind of a more vibrant gathering center. It's not, you know, spread out like within strip plazas, like it was in the 70s, and it's not about the mall. Now it's about the downtown and they're taking kind of this ghost kitchen or you know model, but building it around social spaces. So there's two or three now of these developing areas where they've got multiple restaurants in one gathering place, right, so it becomes like a social hub where you can go there and they have live music and people gathering but you can eat at whatever, whatever type of food you want.
Dan: So it's not like going inside to ask you a question I mean winter haven is a fairly small geographic area, but are there are there new residents buildings? Going up where these social centers are.
Dean: Yeah, see, that's the thing?
Dan: yeah, because the internet, you know the interstate highway system had bypassed all the downtowns.
Dean: You know back in the 50s the right.
Dan: You know the. The interstate highway system in the United States is the greatest public works project in the history of the world. It's about 63,000 miles now and they add about another 500 miles every every year. You know bypasses and connectors and everything like that, so it's a never ending project. But in the 50s it just bankrupted almost every small town in the United States when it. You had to go through the small. We went to Florida in 1956 and it was small town after small town after small town. There was no interstate. 75.
Dean: Yeah, wow, yeah, that's kind of like Route 66 was going the cross.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, you can still take Route 66, but it's small town after small town, you know yeah yeah, just listen to the words of the, the song you know, route 66 and tell you all the small and none of them were big cities. They were small towns you went through, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, so we're creating an interesting model here that Moore's Law is expanding, you know one realm.
But the Moore's Law or Newton's Law says, yeah, if you do that in Cloudlandia, then that there's going to be a decentralization that goes on in the mainland. So winter I mean, you'll probably have people you know more or less spend their life in winter. Hey, winter haven't, because anywhere they want to go else, wise, they'll do it in Cloudlandia.
Dean: Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. I just looked up the winter haven in the population right now it's 57,000.
Dan: So yeah yeah, and I see you know yeah, yeah, and the interesting thing about the malls, that Mark Mills wrote a great book. Mark Mills is an economist in the Manhattan Institute. I think it's the Manhattan Institute, which, as you the name suggests, is a think tank in New York.
City and he writes about the malls. He's got a whole chapter on the malls and he says the malls are going to, they're being abandoned. There's about a thousand failed shopping malls in the United States at any given time. There's about a thousand that have been abandoned. You know they just go bankrupt. And he says they're going to be turned into factories or they're going to be turned into warehouses shipping centers and they're beautiful because they they've got parking for all the work they've already got all the.
You know the delivery sites like they have the, the delivering docks you know loading docks, right, the loading that. They've got all the loading docks. They got massive amounts of space and he says that they're going to be robotic and automated factories it's amazing, it's so.
Dean: It's such an amazing time to be alive right now. You know, I mean, you think about where, the things that are ready to implement that are all here right now. You know, I don't know that. The next thing, like, as I mentioned, I was doing snapshot comparisons of you know day to day 1988 versus today and, as I said to Stuart Stuart, my operations guy, was with me, we were going, we went to the movie studio movie grill here in about 30, 40 minutes away and I started recounting the day with him, like as we were. I was in these comparisons. I'm saying, okay, so here's how the day started.
I him in the morning and said you know, let's go to the movie. I forget what movie was out, but it was a great movie that was had just come out that day or whatever. And so we were going to go for lunch and go to the movie there, because they have Studio Movie Grill is like a dining theater, so you go and they bring food and everything. So started out with the text of that. Then I went to the studio. My video studio recorded a video that I, stuart, and I left. From there I bought the tickets for the movie online through Fandango and, you know, bought the tickets in advance.
So we all we had to do was scan the barcode. They just scanned it on my phone when we got there, but the Tesla drove us there using the autopilot function, so we were driven to the movie. We got in our seats without having to go to the thing. We scanned a QR code for the menu of what to get. We pushed a button. They came and took our order, brought us the food. We got back in the car, had the coordinates. The car starts driving us. We were listening to a podcast on the way back and it just in that moment, just that little thing. There's not a single element of that day. That was possible in 1988.
Dan: Yeah. I will remind you that in 1988, you probably said what an amazing time to be alive. Yeah, you're probably right.
Dean: I mean the dot was like what I got.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I mean look at this.
Dan: The fact are you kidding me.
Dean: We can send a piece of paper over the telephone. What a relief it comes back.
Dan: Yeah, now I'm going to. We've got a mainland collision happening in about five minutes, Okay, okay, and that is from when we started today, the one we finished, because I'm visiting Winterhaven from. I'm in Chicago today, so I'm visiting Winterhaven, florida, from 10 o'clock to two minutes to 11. But in 11,. I have to go to Vienna, Austria, and have an hour's talk with Kim White.
Dean: Okay, right, right, right. Yeah, I got to get on the flight to Vienna, right.
Dan: Yeah Well, it's a click actually.
Dean: Yeah, the zoom I got to get in. Well, I have to switch over.
Dan: I have to switch over from my phone to my computer because it's on zoom and anyway, but that I mean what we're seeing here, is you and I are. You know we're early adapters. You know you and I are early adapters, so I say, okay, the world's changed, so how do I have to change? You know, that's my basic response and and all of us got sent to bootcamp for two years during the COVID lockdown.
And we might not have chosen the route that we're on right now, but we were forced to. You know we were forced to, right, yeah, you know, I have a goal of never being on welfare during the rest of my life. Okay, yeah, I like to make my own money and everything, but it's an interesting thing. But, more and more, I think that you have to take both Moore's law and Newton's third law into account, because one of them explains the virtual world and Cloudlandia world, but the other one explains what happens to the mainland. When the Cloudlandia keeps getting bigger and bigger, the mainland keeps getting more and more local, like winter.
Yeah, so yeah but you gotta you gotta be good at operating in both worlds.
Dean: Yeah, you're right. You know I'm staying off welfare, that's well, you know, Dan, there's this little thing. There's a thing called cash confidence, and most people think it's about having an amount of money, but what it's really about is having the ability to create value for other people. So as long, as you keep focused on that, you're going to be just fine.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: This is really yeah, and I'm feeling very good going down 80, that I'm starting to get good at living yeah.
Dean: So amazing, isn't it? What a world, yeah, the journey.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, Actually you know, the most amazing part of being alive being alive.
Dean: Yeah, that is part of it all. That is exactly right.
Dan: That is exactly right.
Dean: It beats the alternatives you know, and it's funny.
Dan: The answer. The answer is in the question. Yeah, I just heard Dion Sanders was talking about how the whole body everything about us is oriented for moving forward and it would be neat if Colorado ends up in the playoffs and the 14 playoffs, oh.
Dean: I mean, well, they just beat Nebraska yesterday, so they're two and oh, right now. Yeah, I mean, it's just. It's the most amazing thing to watch. But do you ever think we're meant for moving forward Our eyes, look forward Our ears? Are perfectly positioned to bring us all the sound and everything from in front of us. Our mouth are meant to project forward. There's only one part of our body that points backwards.
Dan: And that's the exhaust. That's where, all the way you leave all the way behind you If you keep moving forward. I guess the evolution figured this out a long time ago.
Dean: Yeah, a lot of problems. Don't worry about what's happening behind there, don't look back, just keep moving forward.
Dan: You know that's in our years of doing the podcast. I think that's the greatest closing statement we've ever had.
Dean: Well, it struck me as this that's the first time I've ever heard it explained like that, but it's absolutely true. So that's why it's even more important, to be the lead guy in the line you don't want to be that. Yeah, it's like sled dogs.
Dan: Yeah, if you're not with sled dogs. If you're not the lead dog, the future always looks the same.
Dean: Oh man, what a day. All right. Well, you have my best. We've got a date, we've got a date next.
Dan: If you're up to it, we've got a next Sunday.
Dean: Oh yeah, I'm in Chicago today.
Dan: So I'm in Chicago today, so I'll be back in Toronto next week. No, it's a permanent fixture in my calendar.
Dean: All right.
Dan: Thanks a lot, Dean.
Dean: Thanks.
Dan: bye, bye.