Welcome to Cloudlandia Ep107: Navigating the Labyrinth of Information: Past, Present, and Future
In this episode of Cloudlandia, I accompany you on a captivating time-travel adventure to the 1930s era. We explore the nascent media landscape and how the rise of radio and television began to connect the world.
We predict how elements like technology, energy, money and labor may redefine our world. We also shed light on 1950s industries like television advertising and iconic artists that profoundly shaped society. Join Dan and me for this enlightening discussion into the past, present, and what may lie ahead.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
Links:
WelcomeToCloudlandia.com
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
ListingAgentLifestyle.com
TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Dean Jackson
Mr. Sullivan.
Dan Sullivan
Mr Jackson, are you having a good mainland day?
Dean Jackson
I am. I've been, yeah, you know, I've been having a combination of, so far today, been on the mainland and in Deanlandia and there's. That's a good combination. Now yeah, here we are in Cloudlandia.
Dan Sullivan
Yes, yeah, well, it's a beautiful day We've had. Actually, by my memory, we've had a fantastic summer in Toronto, July and August. It's really great. You know Well, when it rains, it usually rains at night, and so the grass is all green. I've never seen the trees so green, so it's been great. I've been reading about forest fires you know I've been reading about hurricanes, typhoons, volcanoes, not in Toronto.
Dean Jackson
But we're going to have a, apparently because of the ocean temperatures, we're in for a potentially turbulent hurricane season, which is just getting going here now. So everybody kind of you know straps in between now and end of October to see what happens, right Well as we've been in the news. They'll let us know what you know when they put up the big red buzzsaw making its way towards Florida to get everybody all suitably panicked.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, well, it's very interesting. The 1930s are still the hottest decade since the US has had temperature readings yeah, yeah, and the big thing is that we have so much news now. Everybody's a newscaster now with their cell phone. So what's gotten exponentially greater is actually people's first reaction to the weather, you know.
Dean Jackson
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan
And climate I've never experienced. You know, I'm 79 and to this day I've never experienced climate. I've only experienced weather. That's right. Is it my feeling? You know I don't have a climate chip in my brain. You know a climate. Actually. You do know how it's the average of a year's temperature in a particular spot.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, what's the?
Dan Sullivan
climate Right, exactly, and the spot where you're sitting is different from the year than 100 yards away from where you're sitting.
Dean Jackson
That's interesting. Yeah, the whole. It's all different, right, everything that whole. Yeah, I look at those as one of those things. We're certainly in you know an age, like you said, with the news there that everybody you know. I mean when you look at from you know I think about the big change again when we went from you know no new. You know the local town prior kind of the voice of what's going on.
Dan Sullivan
So when we got to, a unified voice of.
Dean Jackson
You know the, when the radio and the television became the unifying, that's really what it was. It was a unifying thing for the first 30 years of it and then when the affiliate you know the network kind of thing allowed local voices to be, you know, you got the in the beginning. It was when you were born all it was the national radio and national television right. The television wasn't even a thing when you were born in 1944.
Dan Sullivan
In the 40s, no 40s, so when you were a young boy, you got your first face to Howdy duty.
Dean Jackson
I mean, that was, that was something, I guess huh. Everybody got introduced to Howdy duty.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, I was, and there there was. I can figure it was like 1953, maybe 1953 that I became aware of television, because some neighbors had it and and you know, and it was the three you know ABC, cbs, nbc but then where we lived in. Ohio.
Dean Jackson
we got Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from there and so I was aware that there was this country across the lake, yeah, and so yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it, that then, you know, by the time we got to 1980, we ended up we had 13 channels. That was a big, that was a big jump in the next 30 years. But all of those 13 channels were both distributing the national content of ABC and BC and CBS, but they were also producing local content. And now we're at a situation where you had, you know, 13 channels with multiple, you know, regional voices, the market affiliate, affiliates, and now we're at a stage where there are, you know, five billion voices all going through the three you know that was funny because, we've come down to, the channels are the same in terms of Facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter.
Mr. Beans, yeah right, well, these are part of the YouTube network there, you know, but not now the platforms are there, but everybody but there's, you know, billions of voices on those same things, and that that's where I see that this next 30 years or however long, I don't know how long it'll be because you can't imagine what you can't imagine. But you know, I don't see anything on the horizon that's going to things like. It feels like all the pieces have locked into place for a period, you know, asymptotic plateau of creativity, now that everybody of reach, everybody's got access to it.
Dan Sullivan
It's really fascinating, and you're absolutely right that I have never had the experience of imagining something that I couldn't imagine Exactly.
Dean Jackson
That's right, everybody had the first thought to imagine it. You know? Yeah, I was looking.
Dan Sullivan
I had an interesting project project, a sudden project, this week. Do you know Matt up church? Have you ever? Do you remember Matthew up church?
Dean Jackson
Matt.
Dan Sullivan
Matt. Matt, the founder and owner of Virtuoso, and Virtuoso is the biggest network in the world of affluent travel agents.
Dean Jackson
I'm a member actually.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, that's good, okay, yeah, they have this very posh magazine that comes out every quarter, every month.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, I get it from the Sims.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, yeah, and he was. Matt was in the program a couple times. He was in the 90s and then early. I think he came in right around late 90s and was in the 2000s and then I think he was there in the teams and, but in 2003, so 20 years ago right about now I was guest speaker at his annual conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas and I think about 2000.
They're about 2000 travel agents there and there's a lot of travel companies there to like hotels and resorts and cruise lines, you know, and they have sort of a rapid get to know you sort of day, you know, when you meet somebody for 10 minutes and then you meet for another 10 minutes rapid work.
Yeah, so I gave a talk and I created a workbook and so it was probably about a 90 minute talk with about an hour of Q&A and then you know, then there was a half hour afterwards where people just mingled and but what I was telling them about was the, because of digitization, that so much of the standard travel agency business was going to be completely commoditized by Expedia and you know, like that type of thing.
And so and I give a set of predictions and I also said that there's a bypass to all this if you master DOS the dangers, opportunities and the strengths and you just zero in very deep on your best clients and you identify, when they're traveling, what are the dangers that they experience. In other words, they could lose something, what are the opportunities that they could gain something in the strengths that they have. And as a test example, I did it on Babs and me, showing that how we like to travel and you know experiences that we really don't like having experiences that we love happening.
And the strengths that we have to really enjoy and explore particular type of experiences. Okay, and I gave that to them and talked it through, but I gave as an example a hotel resort in Ravello in Italy.
So the Malfi Coast, you know you get South and Naples and you get you know, and you get town and Malfi and Ravello there's like four in the island of Capri is just up here.
So I'm sure really classically beautiful and luxury type of setting and it was and I'm not, I can't quite remember, but I think it was probably might have been right near the end of the 90s that we had gone there because we were going on a hiking tour with a group of people for about six days on the Amalfi coast and but before we went for about three days and stayed at the resort in Ravello which is called the Pozzo Saso and it's a beautiful. It sits way up high, it's a couple hundred feet off the water there. You know that part of the Mediterranean I don't think that's exactly called the Mediterranean there, but it's part of the Mediterranean and you can see down the coastline easily 50 miles and our staff had told the staff of the resort that it was my birthday. So the second day was my birthday and from morning till night everybody in the hotel said happy birthday, mr Sulton, happy birthday.
Dean Jackson
You know.
Dan Sullivan
And then they there were nonstop treats throughout the day breakfast dinner there were treats and they communicated the conference, the Bellagio Conference. Virtuoso, I communicated. That's how I like that type of treatment.
Dean Jackson
I like. I like that.
Dan Sullivan
I like that when my treatment is like every day's my birthday and so, anyway, a really neat little reward for my talk was that then, after I got talking, there were a lot of people came up, shook my hand and everything. And this little man came up and he had almost tears in his eyes and he says Mr Sulton, I'm the general manager of the Pozzo Saso.
And I don't I can't, I can't express to you what you've done for my trip to Las Vegas. He says everything I could have possibly hoped for here. You know, because there's competitors, the whole room is filled with competitors.
They're gonna spend their money on something you know, and so anyway, it was really funny, and that's it. I didn't remember this, really, for I never used that particular approach again. And so we got a call that they're at their same meeting this year and they have 5,000, they have 5,000 now because Virtuo so has really grown and they asked if I could do an update on what I had predicted. And I went through it and I said well, everything you know, I mean, once you grasp the technology. If you're just giving a standard service, technology is going to commoditize you.
you know there's I mean that's not such a great prediction backwards.
Dean Jackson
That's funny you know you're on the right path.
Dan Sullivan
You can't digitize that experience that you have, and so they asked me if I had any further thoughts of what the next 20 years would look like, and I'm right on the spot, I said well, the world's gonna change. Everything that you've been experiencing for the last 20 years is gonna change much more drastically than it changed over the last 20 years, and the reason is I call it the force. I just nicknamed this.
Dean Jackson
The force slowdowns Okay and I said this was the force slowdowns. This feels like breaking news right here.
Dan Sullivan
Well, this is like Cloudlandia. I mean this. I had to give you that background, just to accept it as a Cloudlandia idea. You know, I mean, there's tough standards.
There's tough standards to even be able to listen in on Cloudlandia, let alone speak on Cloudlandia. And I said the first thing is the cost of money is gonna go up and we call it in most places. We call that inflation. So right around the world there's just massive inflation, except for those places that have already been so undermined by inflation that they're now in deflation. And there's one big place where that's happening right now, and then the deflation is where you. Deflation is where the value of everything starts going down significantly. It's not just the cost of things. Inflation is really a function that things that you really want are gonna cost you more. And so for about 20 years we said that around 1%, 2%. You know it was the lowest inflation period since probably the last 20 years have been up until COVID was the lowest inflation. So the cost of money and that means borrowing money is gonna cost you a lot.
And you know, here in Canada it's around 7%, you know, 7% to get bank loans, and the US is more or less the same. Second thing is the cost of energy is going way up in most of the world. Okay, and I'm gonna make a proviso where I say in most of the world, it's going to. So, just prior to COVID, the cost of transportation, the overall cost of transportation to get anything in the world, anywhere else in the world, was 1% of final product.
So you know you get something from 10,000 miles away. The transportation cost of that was 1% of the final cost and I would say well, first of all, there's places where it's gone 100%. Russia is being one of the places Russia shipping anything in the world. It costs them 100% and the reason is they can't get insurance for any freighter. You know freighter that goes into a Russian port Automatically. None of the big global insurance companies will insure it.
You just can't get insurance, and that's not just Russian boats, that's anybody's boat If you go into Russian territory and they don't have that many ports. They've got about four points. I mean they're 11 time zones wide and they've got about four meaningful ports. And two of them are right in the war zone. Sevastopol and Odessa are two big ports and so you can't even get. Nobody will take their boats into that area, so they're in, you know. I mean, the cost of transportation is really high when you can't transport.
Dean Jackson
Right, exactly, you can't get there from here, right yeah?
Dan Sullivan
And then the third is the cost of energy, because one, the war is a particular situation, but the cost of energy has gone way, way up. We had really cheap energy over the last 20 years, so now it's gonna go up and this isn't a momentary thing, this is going to be, you know. And then the fourth one is the cost of labor. Especially skilled labor, is gonna go way up, and skilled labor covers a lot of things, but it's basically that there would be competition to hire you if you were working someplace. There would be competition from the outside that you would offer somebody more to move from where they are, and anyone who's got skills that would do that. And if you're so 18-year-old in Toronto today, if they take a 10-week industry sponsored training course, they'll get a certification at the end of 10 weeks and a year later they're making $60,000. Within three or four years they're making $100,000, and they'll never make less.
And there will be constant bidding because we've gone basically in North America, a lot of parts of the world. We've gone probably 20, 30 years without any real emphasis on skilled labor, skilled labor, Skilled main land labor.
Dean Jackson
you mean yeah, or everybody's going into the skilled club land labor.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, and a lot of them.
Dean Jackson
There's so much of it and that's being replaced by AI now, yeah, exactly, you're not gonna have a, you're not going to have an AI sneaking your toilet.
Dan Sullivan
No, there won't be AI, plumbers, ai, carpenters, ai all the skill trades that's every kind of factory work requires skill training.
Dean Jackson
So anyway, those are the four slowdowns.
Dan Sullivan
So those are the four slowdowns and the biggest thing is going to slow down as technological experimentation, innovation, that's going to change really fast and you could see at the end of starting in, probably beginning of 22 last year, there was more firings in the high tech industry than probably in any other industry, and the reason for that was they were hiring people for projects they were going to do 10 years from now and they don't have the cap. The money is too expensive to be paying for things that aren't going to get a payback in 10 years or so. So what I'm saying is and you brought this up, it got me thinking the last podcast we had you brought up that we may now be in sort of a plateau period, like you described the 50s to the 80s.
Dean Jackson
And.
Dan Sullivan
I think we're right now we're going back into a plateau period.
Dean Jackson
Where there's a lot of development.
Dan Sullivan
There's a lot of development and a lot of more productive uses of what we already have.
Dean Jackson
Yes, and that's what I think it is now. It's going to be the application through those pipes, just like the iPhone in 2007,. That laid the groundwork for the app culture that brought us Uber and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube all the big things that we use on that vehicle of the phone.
And now it's really. This is what I'm fascinated by is who were the big winners and how was the big adaptation to the tool set that was available in 1950. If you think about that, as by 1950, we had television, radio, we had the plane travel, electricity, automobiles, all of those big things that were highlighted in the big change from 1900 to 1950. Were the big winners and continue to be the big winners of that period Of an. Is it adapt, being adaptive on that? Because it wasn't a big period of invention, it was a capitalization of. You look at the packaged goods, the consumer goods really boomed in the 50s and 60s through television advertising.
You look at Procter Gamble and big packaged goods companies that knew if we just package up a product, put it in front of the audience. We know everybody. We know 50 million, 53 million people or 60 million people were watching. I love Lucy in the fifth. Those reach audiences. I think Gunsmoke was like a high watermark of the large audience. Then it started going down from there. I saw a chart where that was the peak 61 million I think was the largest television audience in 1960, something whatever Gunsmoke was at its peak.
Dan Sullivan
Then there were single events like Elvis Presley, the Beatles being on the Ed Sullivan show. You had single events. There were things like that as a series. I bet your numbers are dead on.
Dean Jackson
While the number one shows on television what did grow during that period.
Dan Sullivan
I love that period.
Dean Jackson
That's why I'm asking you and my observation.
Dan Sullivan
First of all, if you were in putting in superhighways, that was a really big deal. The Turnpike, the cross-country interstate highway system, had just crossed Ohio, probably around 1956 or 57, on its way to the west coast. The other states were building but they weren't connected. They weren't connected yet.
Dean Jackson
The.
Dan Sullivan
Ohio Turnpike was just a continuation of the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Turnpikes. These were toll roads. That was it. The other thing was an enormous movement of industry out of the big cities, the big northern cities. I grew up in northern Ohio. Ohio was the most powerful industrial state in the United States, starting probably in the 1880s. 1890s it was just a powerhouse. Pittsburgh was famous for steel, but Ohio City's young down to Cleveland. Cleveland had as much steel as Pittsburgh did, but it was spread out over three countries.
It was all geared to Detroit. All of a sudden the automobile industry really consolidated down to just the three companies.
Dean Jackson
That was just Ford and Chrysler that created the suburbs that created the suburbs.
Dan Sullivan
The other thing was retail changed because every time you put one of these interstate highways in, you bypass small towns. So small town retail started to die in the 50s because shopping centers and shopping malls may be between two small towns or three small towns but everybody went shopping in their small town, except for daily convenience. But they would go to the shopping mall.
The shopping mall went through the industry the other thing that's a whole industry but it was air conditioning. Air conditioning allowed people to move industry and commerce and everything to the south. You wouldn't want to be in Orlando in the 1950s. You weren't too warm to do productive work.
Dean Jackson
Right, I'm recognizing now the pattern of so. We went from the general store to the main street in small towns, to strip plazas in the 50s, to shopping malls in the 70s, 80s, 90s to Amazon. Now. Amazon is basically or online, where we get everything, every physical good that you could imagine. Online is really the thing. But that's an interesting evolution. Right From main street to when we had automobiles and went suburban, it was the strip mall and then where you could drive your car up into the parking lot and go to the plaza where there was all of the collection anchored around a grocery store, perhaps in a dry cleaner, and putting everything in one place and then that led to the franchise, as a great thing, because the homogen that you created a homogenous vibe in the country by unifying everybody around the television.
Everybody was seeing what leave it to be and that whole, all of those shows.
Dan Sullivan
And the other thing is that the cars became more comfortable because people could go on long trips now, so I remember when you got air conditioning in the cars and so the other thing about it was the recorded music industry went through the roof in the 50s, 60s, you got 45s, came in 33 and a third came in and 45 came in and the late 40s and 40s.
Dean Jackson
And so the recorded part of what drove the recorded music industry was that they had a discovery device of the radio that you could play music over the radio and that would draw and they would be on bandstand and be on the Ed Sullivan show and be on the thing. So everybody would gain an awareness and, you know, you could create that sensation which drove people to the local record store to buy the records. And that's where that really took off. You know, now we're in a situation where the you know it's certainly, I think, more of a meritocracy now in a way that anybody, it certainly. You look at Peter Diamandis's six D's were certainly up into the democratizing phase of that. Anybody could.
I mean you and I could make a hit song if we wanted to and put it out, and we've got as much.
Dan Sullivan
I think we could have a hit song made.
Dean Jackson
Yes we don't want to apply it ourselves. Our leadership and finance.
Dan Sullivan
I think it would upset our daily lifestyle if we were yeah, we can who, not how.
Dean Jackson
We can who, not how.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, it's long right but I had a really great example of that on Friday morning so I had a podcast to Belfast, ireland, great guy, and he's got a coaching program called, which is simple, scaling you know how, helping entrepreneurs to scale their businesses and it was great he went. We went twice the a lot of time because neither of us had a hard stop and but you know he's got a hundred thousand that download the world he's in a hundred countries, you know wow and you, and you and.
But you and I have looked at this, you know, from a cost standpoint. I mean, once you bought your computer and you've got an internet line, the rest of it's pretty. I mean there isn't a lot of cost to this. But here we guy, he's got a hundred country worldwide radio station, then he's got a audience of a hundred thousand. You know yeah, and and that my past. And I mean, if you compare that back to what that would have taken, well, let's go 25 years ago. I mean, yeah, achieve that 25 years ago.
Dean Jackson
It would have cost you so much more, you know when you look at her Carlson, that's a good example right now. Yeah, what's happening?
Dan Sullivan
I mean it's taking him about two or two or three months to sort of get used to it. And now his show is more powerful than when he was on Fox, because he got three million.
Dean Jackson
Three million to 13 million average viewer.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah yeah, and that's. He's done that in three months. You know, yeah, I mean yeah, but now you know the thing is you and I could do exactly like.
Dean Jackson
This is where the thing is. The difference is the is reach. You know it's not the capability I mean, it's certainly you and I and anybody listening right now has the capability to create a vehicle, to create the podcast, to create a show, to create let's just call it content, to create content that you know could have that kind of impact, but it's just breaches the ultimate scale of this, you know, and it's not, yeah, but that requires the interesting thing is, the more reach that you have, the more you acquire new capability to go along with it, you know and the more your vision gets bigger as your reach gets bigger.
Dan Sullivan
It was like we have the same landlord are building in Toronto. We don't own the building because they don't sell their buildings and it's a perfect building for us, but yeah, labor Day. So we're a month. Within a month, we will have been there 32 years in that building yeah, you're the you're the only tenant from about the middle of 2020 to the middle of 2022.
We were the only yeah, and the check for them was there every month, anything like that. But about 15 years in we haven't. I haven't talked to the landlord. Probably since 2000 I've talked to both of them socially. I've met them, you know, in social events, but I haven't talked to anyone, let's say around 2011. So last or 2001 I've probably talked to them in year 10 of our stay in their building and I was unusually from his perspective, I was unusually funding that day and he says I don't remember, I don't remember, I don't remember you being that funny when you moved in and I said I find my sense of humor is strictly a function of cash flow, right?
yes, there's a correlation there or the bigger the cash flow, the bigger the cash flow, that bigger my sense of humor.
Yeah so, so anyway, but it's very really interesting how I you know this is and he really we've had and the reason he did it is because of the book, the ten times since he's here at them, two times okay, and first of all, the way I did the book, you know, with Ben Hardy, that probably was not possible 20 years ago, 30 years ago right the way. I did the book. Yeah, because half the most profitable part of the book is not the book itself, it's actually the audible version of the book.
I mean once you made your first audible recording. From the standpoint of the publisher, there's not really any cost, is there? You know right, that's exactly right and yet it works out one to one for every, you know, paper book that sold. There's another sale that's a virtual. It's either Kindle, you know, it's either ebook or it's yeah, it's audible, and so that wasn't possible 20, 30 years ago.
So I think, we're pointing out a direction here is that I think there's gonna be two extraordinarily valuable world. I think high-quality mainland activities are getting going, grow and grow and do you? Mean by that, hi what? When you well, I think people had two years basically not going anywhere during COVID yeah and I think there are standards of good what they want to do. If they go so much, somewhere has gone up, I'm going to take the effort to travel. I mean we never gave any thought to travel before COVID. I mean you were all around the world.
You were in Australia.
Dean Jackson
Every year, all the time.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, yeah, and you were in Toronto. You were in other places in the United States and I think that it has to be something new, better and different for you to really get on a plane and travel somewhere. And it's the same with me and I've gotten about five. Speech. Offers big audiences 500 to 2,000. And I say I'll do it by Zoom, but I won't travel, I won't travel.
And they said but the price they're offering this year for speeches is way above what it was three years ago. And I said it's not the money, it's the time, it's the time to bother.
Dean Jackson
I said that's not the money Right exactly.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Dan Sullivan
I mean in your experience, in my experience. I think you can see a trend here. I am too.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, exactly, I'll tell you what would be a new and unique and delightful experience is my ears perked up to FreeZone in Toronto in April of next year, that might be enough to tell you I'm very excited to get me on a plane, very excited about that actually. But, D, you know, well, that's good, that's good. Yeah, well, I'm going to go back to my team.
Dan Sullivan
I said I just got word from Dean that he's really interested and we said, well, it's a lot of work. But you said we just have to have an offer for Dean that's compelling enough that he'll come to Toronto, did you see? That's it. I mean it might be a one person FreeZone, but it's worth it.
Dean Jackson
The table 10. We need anything. That's what I really miss the most the many of it.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, well, the table's still there, but it's not 10.
Dean Jackson
Hey, did anybody take?
Dan Sullivan
over Jacques.
Dean Jackson
No, it's something else.
Dan Sullivan
now it's not a restaurant anymore. Oh, that's a shame.
Dean Jackson
Well, when you were saying thinking about the high quality mainland experiences that I'm noticing here. So there seems to be a trend. Now that's happening is gathering spots in a way. Now there's almost like modern day food court type of things, where we're getting a new place.
Two of them in Winterhaven that are sort of outdoor common area with venue for live music and tables and picnic tables and that's stuff where you can kind of gather with a bunch of people but five or six restaurant concept, almost like food trucks or whatever, but in places where you can go and have five or six different food restaurant choices other than each of them opening up an individual restaurant they're sharing a common experience and architecturally they're really. They're reclaiming old warehouse space and things that are.
They're making them really architecturally interesting and integrating outdoor space to make them really like you want to be there.
Dan Sullivan
Interesting, I was thinking about that this morning because on Richmond Street West. So if you remember your map, portland, where Portland Street is in North South Street and then you have Portland and a lot of restaurants. So it's just, it's north of Adelaide Street and then you have Richmond, but what's really interesting, there's a whole factory, old factory that was taken over and it was gutted, and it's a food center, just like you say, with lots of but the anchor restaurant in there is Susar Lee, so you can say that, yeah, I was going to say I just read about Susar Lee, yeah.
And so the rent he was paying rent on just on King Street. So he's jumped out. His lease came up and he jumped and they offered him to become the anchor rest.
So he'll have his whole restaurant in there, but instead of it being out on the outside, it's the rest of the food court with smaller restaurants and there's seating areas out in the center, but he's got his own seating area, like it's like a patio, but it's so. We were thinking about going there this week because it just opened in July and we wouldn't have gone there for the sake of the food court, but we would go there because that's where Susar is.
Dean Jackson
That's really interesting, because I just like.
Dan Sullivan
I mean, it's totally what you're talking about.
Dean Jackson
And it's just so funny that you mentioned that specific place, because I was just on Toronto Life this morning looking at that, because I often go there just to see keep up with what's going on, and I saw this about about Susar Lee's new place. So yeah, that is funny, but so that is kind of like now bringing it's almost like bringing back to the mainland being the, because that's a mainland experience.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah.
Dean Jackson
Digitize that yeah.
Dan Sullivan
And I mean there's just an enormous condo building going on in that area, so the residential population is always going up in that area. As a matter of fact, suit Sasha Kersmerk. Sasha, I think you know Sasha, he might. Sasha is almost 20 years in coach. He's the number one site surveying company in Toronto. Okay, so nothing. No project starts until the site survey is approved.
Dean Jackson
Right.
Dan Sullivan
By city officials and he's got roughly 80% of all the site survey projects in the city right now. I mean he's just the dominant and he said that basically from the plan for Toronto is from the lake going north. If you have Jarvis on the east and you have Bathurst on the west, okay, so you can think of all the streets in there that would go there, from there to basically four street, davenport, you know Yorkville.
Dean Jackson
Okay, yeah.
Dan Sullivan
It'll look like a mini manhattan island in 30, 40 years.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, wow, that's very interesting. It'll be all high rise and there's still high rise, yeah, and that's kind of the thing is being able to see that if you just look with your 2040 goggles on to see where that's heading, yeah, it's probably 2050, 2060,. You know and everything like that.
Dan Sullivan
But the other thing is Toronto is becoming very quickly a major industrial city between here and so here on Lake Huron it's all the way to the bridge across to the United States at Buffalo or at you know, the bridge in St.
Dean Jackson
Catherine's that goes across, and then in Western Ontario, the.
Dan Sullivan
Windsor-Chatham area to go across the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit and half the Canadian GDP. Gdp you know, money in, money off goes across those two bridges every year yeah. And the Canadian economy and he said the price of industrial land from here to Niagara Falls is just going through the roof. And he said things that were plotted out as residential areas. You know, single family residential areas they're getting outpriced in the market now by the industrial competitors.
And it makes sense too if the Canadian dollar remains always weaker against the American dollar. It's, you know, it's $30, $34 today, you know. So there's always this big differential between the, because US is much more powerful economy you know it's got nine times the population.
You know it's got nine times. It's got probably 10 times the consumption dollars that are available in all areas of business. So so you know you'll have an American factory and they say we're going to put a factory near Toronto on the Canadian side, and we're going to manufacture everything, paying Canadian prices for the manufacturing, selling it into the United States, bringing it back from the United States.
Dean Jackson
Wait a minute. That's your playbook. That's not any of your playbook.
Dan Sullivan
Oh, Mr Sullivan, this is Revenue Canada. We want to have a chat with you.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, exactly that's funny I was listening to.
Dan Sullivan
I was listening to Cloudlandia.
Dean Jackson
Oh man, that's funny.
Dan Sullivan
I get more tricks from Cloudlandia than anything else. I listen and watch.
Dean Jackson
I wonder you know if it's so, I think now a lot of this industrialization or re-industrialization, is it, do you think, driven by automation, like robotics and you know, automating manufacturing processes, that or what is it, do you think Well?
Dan Sullivan
I would say half of it is we can't trust China for anything in the future and everything that's being manufactured in China.
We've got to bring it back. And since we're moving it out of China, we can get the same kind of deals in Mexico or even in the middle of the United States, and it will be 21st century industry, industry, and it'll be 21st century. The US has the greatest skilled population in the world. A lot of people don't think that's true, but hands down, at all levels of the economy, united States has more educated, skilled work per capita than any other country in the world. So the US there's factories in the US that can produce that the same, and it's skilled labor plus automation. So automation is definitely, I would say it's 20% of it.
But also making your staff really close to your customers has enormous savings.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating times, Dan. I mean, if you're thinking, I have really been thinking about if we are at a plateau.
Dan Sullivan
Well, I think the I mean if it costs more for money, if it costs more for transportation, it costs more for energy and it costs more for labor, things are going to slow down. Yeah, and you know just that welding example I gave you of the 18 year old who can be making. I mean, somebody goes to you know university for four and learns a lot of theory and you know, is maybe 50 or $60,000 in debt at the end of four years. The person at 18 who became a welder is already buying their first house. You know they're. You know Exactly.
Dean Jackson
Like think about how, when you take the, you know, when you take the net difference between them investing four years with no income and going into debt to get a degree that gets them an entry level job when they get out with that degree. And so you know that's not compared to coming into a training program and making $60,000 and at the end of the four years making $100,000 and not having any debt. You're so much further ahead on that foundation.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, yeah, I think there's going to be an explosive growth of community colleges that are integrated with the local business, you know, the basic industrial population and everything else. I checked the numbers about two years, the number of community colleges in the US and these would be made. These would be mainly two year, two year community colleges, yeah, and there was just under just under a thousand and two things I think are going to happen. That number will probably jump to 2000 over the next 25 years.
But even the thousand that exists will double their size. They'll double their enrollment. Yeah, that's interesting, and I wonder, though, if they're you know, because they're doing like yeah, I mean you have like George Brown and in Toronto, and you have there's about, there's probably about four community colleges. That would what do you call a community college in the United States? There are before them in the Toronto area and they're at maximum. You know, they're at maximum enrollment. As a matter of fact, they have waiting lists now to get in. Yeah, and that's all skilled.
You know it's all skilled trades.
Dean Jackson
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan
You come out being able to you graduate on a Friday and you go to work on Monday.
Dean Jackson
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan
The employers come to the colleges and they interview all work interviews are in your while you're at college. You're getting interviewed and some of you you're actually working at the place while you're in college. And you know, and yeah so I think that whole notion.
Dean Jackson
It doesn't matter how much you're working at the college.
Dan Sullivan
It doesn't matter how much you spend on college, you'll get paid, you know you'll get paid in the future, you know you'll get paid off easily in the future. I think that ended no 809 actually with the downturn there and I think that that was a huge interruption in the connection between higher education and future employment and I think that COVID put the nail in the coffin to that proposition.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, Well, yeah, I remember hearing Sheridan College, I guess is the one is yeah, share, yeah, and I remember they were. That was like the Sheridan animators were really in demand, that there was one of the places where you know Disney and others were Pixar were hiring. You know all the newly minted, you know digital animators that were coming out of that yeah. So I think that Ryerson has been another one of those.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, there's a new Sound Studio, mostly post production. One of them is just building new studios in our building, but therefore they're not. They're not for live. You know, live production, their post production. So they have editing studios, but right behind us. So Fraser is the front street for us, but behind us is one called Pardee, which is basically a parking lot, and way at the end they have a live production studio, while ours will start being built in September and we'll have it in about six months, based on all the great input by your guy there in Orlando.
Dean Jackson
You know, we've designed it.
Dan Sullivan
We can handle six different people at the same time, six different studios being used at the same time Great production. But next, you know, next March, next April. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna live a long time. What's six months? You know.
Dean Jackson
Right, exactly, yeah, yeah.
Dan Sullivan
Anyway, but I went over and we did our recording of the quarterly book because you need real top-notch studio for a court to go audible and it was really great, but the guy who was handling us was a graduate from Sheridan College.
Dean Jackson
Yeah, I'm excited, I'm really. This is my thought, for I'm gonna do some thinking about, you know, establishing this thought. If we are in a plateau period. If we are in a slowdown, but in a plateau period of what is gonna be the you know what's shaping up here to do that same thing. I love looking at things like this. We're just gonna put it together Macro level, like that.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, I'm gonna do a little thinking to a four slowdowns. You know, money, energy, transportation, labor, and I'm just going to have our clients go through it and say, if this is the obstacle, then what's the transformation? You? Know, and so, and how do you take advantage of the four slowdowns?
Dean Jackson
I think it's a neat idea I do too, Absolutely. I can't wait. I love it.
Dan Sullivan
Well, what a great way to spend the late morning on Sunday. I can't think of any better way.
Dean Jackson
It's like the perfect and there's no collection basket.
Dan Sullivan
There's no collection basket, no collection basket.
Dean Jackson
Maybe we should set some in, though without. Oh, there we go.
Dan Sullivan
Yeah, Anyway, we could have. We could have a digital collection basket at the end.
Dean Jackson
There we go. Yeah, exactly that's so funny.
Dan Sullivan
If this was useful, just you know, put your card up there next to the scanner and yeah, that's so good, I love it, no need to make change and no exactly, I'm good so funny, alrighty. I'm good for next Sunday I'll be back here.
Dean Jackson
Me too, I wouldn't miss it. Okay, okay, thanks, dan. Talk to you soon, bye, bye.