Ep104:The Impact of Urbanization: Toronto's Tale and Personal Growth

In this episode of Cloudlandia, Prepare to embark on an enlightening journey as we traverse the diverse landscapes of Toronto, compare it to America's NFL cities, and reflect on how major 20th-century developments in the U.S., from the GI Bill to national television, continue to shape its geography and economy.

 

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS

• The episode explores the diverse landscapes of Toronto, its vibrant neighborhoods and corporate ecosystem, and compares it to America's NFL cities.
• Dean and Dan discuss the major 20th-century developments in the U.S., such as the GI Bill and national television, and their impact on geography and economy.
• The episode highlights the potential future implications of the modern era of internet access and platform proliferation.
• They delve into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urbanization and manufacturing, drawing lessons from Japan's strategic decisions to place factories close to their customers.
• The podcast also touches on the repatriation of industry back to the U.S., and the financial implications of the Mason-Dixon line.
• Valuable insights are shared on creating a fulfilling decade of life, emphasizing the importance of creativity, productivity, and physical health.
• The "Fast Filter" tool is introduced to help listeners identify their top five strengths.
• The discussion includes how to incorporate enjoyment into life in a meaningful way.
• They reflect on the impact of defense of the French language on Montreal's dynamic spirit.
• Lastly, the podcast explores the intricate web of connections between industry, geography, and societal change.

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. Is that the Mr Jackson who hangs out in that domain?

Dan Sulllivan
That is exactly right Ambassador of Clublandia.

Dean Jackson
Writing possibility in Sunder.

Dan Sulllivan
Exactly right.

Dean Jackson
Is the.

Dan Sulllivan
Canadian ambassador to Clublandia.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, the main one. Yeah, we both are we both go both ways.

Dan Sulllivan
That is so funny, actually, because you are an American living in Canada becoming a Canadian, and I am a Canadian living in America, but I'm an actual dual citizen.

Dean Jackson
Did you ever get a Canadian citizenship? Oh sure.

Dan Sulllivan
But you had to earn it right, 1985, something like that.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, I know it's been pushing 40 years and I've been a Canadian. Yeah, and it makes crossing back and forth across the border much easier.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, exactly, I look at that as one of my most wonderful uniqueness is being a natural born dual citizen through my mother and father, so having it every way possible. Being born to a US father and a Canadian mother on a US Air Force base in Canada, so it's like talk about the triple play there. It's every way you can have it, I've got it. I look at that as a really unique asset.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, and having listened to that, I have you on duration in Canada. That's probably true. Yeah, this is my 52nd year that I've been living in Canada. Okay, okay.

Dan Sulllivan
Consequently yeah consecutively.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, I've been here. I came in 71 in June, so it's 53rd year that I'm in the 53rd year. And I came up for a job offer with big ad agency and I said why not? I put in a couple of years, see what it's like. And here I am. You fell in love with it. It's funny, you know we find places that suit us. Yeah, that is true. People say why do you live where you live? And I said it suits me. You know Toronto kind of lets you alone. You know, as a big city and the metropolitan area, the GTA greater Toronto area, is 6.6 million and a lot going on. 60% of the people who live in that GTA were not born in Canada. They were born someplace else.

And so yeah, majority of people, including myself, we were born someplace else, so it doesn't have the fervor of some other cities. You know where there's a civic spirit? I don't really detect a civic spirit in Toronto.

Dan Sulllivan
There's something. But I think it has to do with.

Dean Jackson
I think it has to do something with uniquely different neighborhoods that make up Toronto. You know, that they have character. Like I, live in an area called the beaches. There's a contention whether it's called the beach or the beaches, but I come down on the side of the beaches and it's like a close to side. It's like a small New England, you know, seaside town and it's got its own. It has a lot of different things going on during the year parades and parties and festivals and so it's got a nice quality to it.

You know boardwalk along Lake Ontario. So it takes us, you know, and that's about a two mile boardwalk which is very nice to walk on, and then two minutes the other way puts us into a neighborhood storage district you know, you know you're a residential, but you have stores, and then you have the water and there's lots of parks there.

Dan Sulllivan
And you walk all the way to. Can you walk all the way to Harborfront along the path? I don't know if you.

Dean Jackson
I don't know if you, I don't know if you would walk. I mean, it's a bicycle.

Dan Sulllivan
That's already a bicycle, but it's there.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, but it's got. Yeah, well, it goes for. It goes for long ways. It goes all the way to Niagara Falls.

Dan Sulllivan
Actually, that's what I wondered Is it unbroken? Yeah, like there's a trail or a path. Yeah, it's.

Dean Jackson
It's temporarily broken because they're all the area which is called the dock lands, which is that big and starts in. Cherry Street. It's between Cherry and Leslie and that's south of Lakeshore where big factories, cement factories and everything.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, sugar there's a well.

Dean Jackson
That's further along. That's almost a red pass. It's almost downtown. Now I'm saying that the real estate that they have their sugar factory on is probably worth more than all the sugar they've ever sold. I bet Holy cow yeah.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah.

Dean Jackson
And yeah, so it's. It's a nice city. I mean, it's a new city, you know, compared to, you know, new York or one of the other cities which go back to the 1600s. Toronto really just kind of starts in the late 1800s and so it's, and I am told, kind of a boring place. Montreal was the key exciting city in Canada up until the 70s and then it sharply changed because they put in the language laws the, you know, the French, defending the French language, and yeah, it doesn't make for a dynamic doesn't make.

Defense never makes for a dynamic spirit. You know defense is not an entertaining activity.

Dan Sulllivan
Oh right.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, you don't find defenders telling jokes, you know they're short on sense of humor. So, anyway, so anyway. But Toronto, all the big corporations that had their headquarters in Montreal quickly moved them to Toronto and it became the key thing. Yeah, it's a major city.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, I've been working, you know, on in my mind here I was looking at some projects that I'm working on that we're going to roll out. This was with a client and we're looking at rolling out in what I've identified as NFL cities, basically, like every, when you look at it, that there's, you know, 30, you know NFL cities and they all have they're all these metro areas basically the GTA I wonder, you know, having grown up, my only experience is having my childhood be filtered through the lens of the GTA.

So there's all that, what all that means? The Canadian and the specifically the Toronto sort of you know environment, everything was around you know the Toronto newspapers, the Toronto radio, you know your out. Your look to the world was CDC through, yeah, through that, and I imagine you know same thing in Canada, if we take you know NHL cities or CFL cities that you know the GTA has a different vibe than Ottawa and Montreal, and then they do have to Calgary and Regina.

Yeah, all those things, yeah, and I wonder now, like what? How is this shifting? Is it relevant now in for Generation Z on the cover of Wired magazine this month as a Gen Z theme for the whole magazine? And you know there's such a big generation I mean there's 72 million of them, which is kind of funny. They're bigger than Baby Boomers and bigger than Generation X and the millennials but I wonder you know they've been grown into a Cloudlandia first world. Yeah, that really their primary world is Cloudlandia and it's almost like the thing, the importance or interaction or sense of identity or community that shapes as you kind of grew up in that thing.

Do you think that's as relevant or do you think it makes any difference? Now, like you had the opportunity you kind of grew up in, if we take an NFL city kind of orbit or satellite, you grew up what would have been in the Cleveland the Browns.

Dean Jackson
The Browns, the Browns right. Your whole that's kind of like your satellite or orbit of Cleveland as the big city kind of thing, yeah and yeah, and that was sort of a real treat because I grew up on a farm 60 miles west of Cleveland and it was always a big treat when you got, we got to go downtown, you know to downtown Cleveland.

Dan Sulllivan
And.

Dean Jackson
Cleveland was a hopping place. I mean, I was born in the 40s and Cleveland was probably the fifth biggest American city then and a lot of wealth there. The Rockefellers are from Cleveland. And yeah, I mean, and, but then there was the Western movement, you know. But the world war.

Second world war changed, really changed a lot of things. I always say there's four things that happened in the 40s and 50s that really changed the geography of the United States as far as what you thought of as places to go. And the first one was the GI Bill. You had 16 million people who got the GI Bill and that gave them really cheap education, really cheap, really cheap home loans, and so you had a lot of blue color people who would never go to education beyond high school and suddenly the universities were filled with these veterans who came back and when they got their degree, first of all they went away. They didn't do it in their home village, hometown or the you know the neighborhood in the city. They went away someplace, to the university. They had four years away. They had already been away for three years, three or four years with the service, but with the education being cheap, and then also the home loans. They didn't go back to where they came from. And then that coincided with the interstate highway system.

Dan Sulllivan
You asked for the interstate.

Dean Jackson
Right and the suburbs, yeah, yeah, and the suburbs and the interstate highway system. So inner city people moved to the suburbs or they moved to another city and about all the westward growth was towards California, you know, was towards the south Texas, oklahoma, arizona, and so you had that. And then you had air conditioning, and then air conditioning made it possible to have business in really hot places. You know, you could, you could have factories, you could have you could have plants with air conditioning and so that's.

and the other thing is I don't include it in my for, but generally these new places were very resistant to unions. Labor union were mainly in the biggest established cities in the east and in the north, but when they got to the south and west they were were not union states. They came much later and so you could pay wages. You know that the unions would not have agreed to, but they with unions weren't there.

And then I think it was the fourth one. So we had the GI bill, we had the highway system, we had air conditioning and the fourth one was national TV and that came at 50. So you had the three you had the three networks and they were basically competing for the same audience, competing with the same themes, competing, you know, with the same kind of programming, and I think that totally changed the character of the United States from what it had been Before the Second World War, I think those four things, yeah, I mean you could add everybody would have something else to add to that, but it'd be hard to find four things more central than those four.

Dan Sulllivan
Yes, I think, and that's so all of those, and even you know, then the yeah that sense of everybody having the same experience. I think the kids now I think you think like if we were to take that, because some of those are infrastructure things right.

Dean Jackson
That you were, that you're talking about. Well, almost all four of them are infrastructure of one kind or another Communications infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, educational infrastructure. And then you know the air conditioning is. I don't know. That would fall under a technological infrastructure.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, I mean I wonder you know we're in if you take these and kind of like overlay, that's all you know circa right around 1950, all of that in place now that if we take this to today, you know, and I think when you really think about the Gen C, you know 1996 to 2010,. Those kids you know, the oldest of them now are in the workforce and in the early 20s, so it's.

But they grew up with an infrastructure that the internet was already established and then the modern internet by the time they were, you know, teenagers, the modern internet, everything was in place and I still think about the. You know that all lives were kind of on that in terms of, you know, youtube, facebook, instagram, now Twitter, and then I don't know whether you've been following threads just got released which is Facebook's sort of Twitter competitor.

Dean Jackson
And it was the fastest.

Dan Sulllivan
It's the fastest thing to go to 100 million users. They went to 100 million users in five days, right.

Dean Jackson
And that's kind of a you know, but I guess they were the same customers. That's what I mean when you start with. You start with. They were Instagram customers who just added another channel.

Dan Sulllivan
You just start with a billion already and you've got yeah yeah, now you're at 100 million, but those things it's almost like the. I start to see that all of those main platforms tend to now, you know, sort of mimic each other in that you know, whatever, whatever, anybody starts to take a lead everybody oh yeah, we've got that too.

So you know TikTok with the short form, endless scrolling videos. You know, between TikTok Reels, youtube Shorts and Instagram stories, you can't really tell which one you're on. It's all that same thing. And I think that when you look at what Threads is trying to do with Twitter because Twitter was kind of unique in a way that it was the 140 character, mostly words and comments, commentary, discussion type of thing the others haven't really yeah.

Dean Jackson
I would say there's a big fundamental change that is happening right now that probably it will give the newest generation a completely different future, and that is the notion of a global economy is disappearing. Ten years from now, there won't be a global economy and it's already starting to break apart, and that's a function of geopolitical change that is fundamentally different than anything that happened since 1945.

You go to conferences and you listen we're going all global. At a certain point we will change over where there's a single global government and borders don't really matter and everything else. That was a bad guess and that was a bad bet. That whole thing was disappearing because it was basically with the agreement of one very powerful country. That would be true. That country has changed its mind. But the other thing is that there's a much better prediction that can be made that a lot of the generation Z won't go to university. They won't go to college because the money is going to be in the trades again.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, and that's what I wonder if the? What I've been wondering about now is what is the relevance of these little You're kind of NFL cities, your MSA cultures kind of thing. I was only had the Canadian experience, but I imagine people who grew up if you live in Chicago, that's got a different vibe than living in Detroit or in Cleveland or in St Louis or Charlotte, north Carolina, all these things. I wonder what the role of these is kind of in the next 25 years, is it? We're coming back? I always remember I don't remember the exact way that you said it, but you talked about the dueling furniture stores or the best furniture store on the street or the best furniture store in town in the state, in the glow in the world that was right back around to the best one.

Dean Jackson
The best one on the street. Yeah, I haven't really given much thought to that.

Dan Sulllivan
I don't really know.

Dean Jackson
But there's an interesting thing with Chicago the Bears, who have been the most downtown of the sports franchise. The White Sox baseball team is on the south side and the Wrigley Field. The Cubs are kind of going towards the wealthy sections, the North Shore, evanston, sort of moving towards Evanston and Lake Forest and those really wealthy cities. But the Bears were right downtown. They were right on the Soldier Field, which is right near the lake. They're leaving.

They're going to go out to one of the Northwestern suburbs which is Evanston which one of them, but they'll be easily 25 miles from downtown the basketball team, and I don't think they're in the center city. The basketball and the hockey team I don't think they're center city, but they're losing population. I mean Chicago's downtown is losing.

As a matter of fact, I think Toronto's inner city now is bigger than Chicago's inner city, chicago's suburbs are bigger than Toronto and my sense is that the need to be in the most densely part of the city for business reasons has lost its force. And I think that COVID I have a huge impact on that, where people who normally commuted downtown spend a couple of years not commuting downtown and I think they had a chance to figure out maybe there's a different way of my work future than going downtown. Yeah, so I think that COVID, as we go along, as I came with, covid will be seeing year by year as we get further away from had a profound sociological.

I think it had a profound economic impact on people where they started planning out a different future that did not include every day, an hour into the city, every night, an hour out. They got those two hours back and they're kind of choosy and picky about whether they want to spend their whole future that way.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, exactly Like that was so normal. I look at growing up in Georgetown and Houghton Hills that was like a normal. Almost everybody in Georgetown commuted.

Dean Jackson
To go train an hour. That's exactly right.

Dan Sulllivan
And that was like just a normal, that's just a normal thing, or at the very least they drove to Mississauga or 30 minutes somewhere, Not a lot of indisputable.

Dean Jackson
So I think that every year the effect of those two lockdown years will be more pronounced. I think it won't go the other way. They say you know, we'll get past COVID and we'll go back to things the way they were. I don't think that's going to happen.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, I agree.

Dean Jackson
The other big thing is the repatriation of industry and manufacturing back to and I'm talking about the states here, and the US has gone through greater industrial and manufacturing growth in the last three years than it did during the three main years of the Second World War, which was, I mean, it was out of sight how much manufacturing they did.

Dan Sulllivan
And the industrial plant.

Dean Jackson
But it's not coming back to the East Coast any of the you know not the old, established New England. It's not going to the Great Lakes states. You know Chicago, buffalo, cleveland, detroit, chicago. You know it's going to places where they have Really cheap land and you can build new TSMC, which is the highest level chip makers in the world from Taiwan. They're just completing a 20,000 empoi chip factory just north of Phoenix.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, and that's the one that they're going to power with the small nuclear.

Dean Jackson
Well, I'm not sure, that's true. I was just talking to Mike Wanderl and it seems to me that a project like that would be a really good use of your new thing. No. I think they're using their own generators, but they're not nuclear generators.

Dan Sulllivan
Maybe it was solar that I thought. Do you remember something that they were going to make it?

Dean Jackson
No, it's not solar. Well, they would use solar for part of it, because they've got a pretty steady sun all year round, but anyway, I don't really know the ins and outs of it. I was just thinking that TSMC, on Taiwan and 100 miles from China, decided that 8,000 miles from China was better. Right, that's funny, and I think the other thing that you're going to see is the Japan set a model about 30 years ago, so Japan was going to take over the world, and then they didn't take over the world.

And so remember, in the 1980s we go to movies and that would be about how smart the Japanese were and how stupid the Americans were. And we'd be taking orders from the Japanese.

Well, they hit a wall at the end of the 80s and they've been essentially flat economically for the last 36 years. But what they did is they made a very strategic decision. This is companies like Toyota. They made a strategic decision that they have such a falling population. They had the fastest collapsing population in human history up until the Chinese. The Chinese now are losing population faster than any country in history. But what the Japanese sort of at the government level and at the investment level and the actual industrial level made a decision that from now on they would have their factories where their customers were and most of the customers were.

And then other I mean the top level customers who were right for the price here items, and so they have moved a large portion of their industrial base to mostly the south of the United States, south Carolina, alabama. Mississippi you know, tennessee, kentucky, but below the Mason-Dixon line, if you know, if you yeah that was the division between, essentially between, the Union and the Confederates. So all the factories are going to the former Confederate States during the Civil War.

And and. But they said they voluntarily did that. I mean well, voluntarily is that they were constrained and they said that if we're going to have future and then the money, you know a portion of the money comes back to Japan, but they're higher American. They're hiring, the people who run the factories are American, the people who work in the factories are American and you know they pay taxes in the states and to the country. But my sense is that as we go forward over the next 10 years, there will be a tariff for other countries to sell into the United States. There will be tariffs unless you move your factory to the United States.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, wow, this is, yeah, this is what I wonder now. It's like almost like the, it's almost like the wave kind of thing that the waves are shifting back into you know more. An inward, an inward shift here.

Dean Jackson
Well, I think I think yeah, I think the central thinking here is we want the supply chains to be guaranteed.

Dan Sulllivan
Yes, and that makes it if it's all in the fall.

Dean Jackson
Mexico, the United States, canada, it's all you know. All the rail lines are there, all the highways are there, you know, and they're not enemies of each other. And you know when the when the Canadians nationalized pot. You know marijuana, you knew there wasn't going to be any invasion by Canada and to the United States.

Dan Sulllivan
Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, yeah, that is funny.

Dean Jackson
For those of you you know know something about the United States and Canada. That was a joke, I just told you.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, I love that. My favorite Canadians.

Dean Jackson
Placid Canadians got more placid.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah exactly. That's so funny this was. I did hear a comedian talking about the how our friendly neighbors to the north, the Canadians, are just so chill. He's a, let's face it. Our salvation army could kick their butt.

Dean Jackson
Well here's what they just had NATO exercises Canada's part of NATO and they don't have enough working equipment that they could participate.

Dan Sulllivan
Wow, that's something, isn't it? Well, there you go.

Dean Jackson
No, I mean probably you know I mean looking at it from Canadian standpoint. I kind of understand it because nothing's going to happen in Canada that would in any way be seen as a threat to the United States and the American military would be all over it.

Dan Sulllivan
Oh absolutely yeah, but talk about one of the best, like just that's why, that's why I look at my Canadian citizenship as a gift. You know, I look at it as something that's very rare and you know, you just look at it's why Canada is always amongst the top places to live in the world. You know, yeah, it's just got so much, so much going for it.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, I mean this started with Generation Z conversation you know, yeah, started, you know, really started. You know we experienced growing up where we were in one way. But I suspect that somebody who was born in the late end of the 90s and is in their 20s and you know their take on the world would be radically different from what our take was.

Dan Sulllivan
That's. What I'm saying is that it feels like they wouldn't have that same sense of identity or association with their click. You know with that they were, because I think it was. It's less and less relevant in your daily life.

Dean Jackson
So the chances are that, first of all, that you would, for example, have to go in the military. I mean, I was born in the 40s, and when I got to the 60s and the Vietnam War started and I got my draft notice, I didn't give it a thought. Well, you know, I had one, two, three. I had three older brothers who had already served, I mean, they volunteered and mine was conscription.

I never gave it a thought because all the growing up, all the adults I talked to, had been in the military, so it didn't seem like yeah it was kind of like a tax. You know, it was two years of your life and it was kind of like a tax, but you know and there was no thought.

But then you had the anti-war period during this. But I was already back from the military when that all started and you know I didn't really pay any attention to it. I mean, it wasn't, it didn't concern me at all. And you know and you didn't get into discussions going through college that you had been in the military. You know it wasn't, it wasn't a popular topic. Right yeah so yeah, I think that's where the sharp change happened. I think it was the late 60s anti-war protests and then yeah a lot of protests.

I remember Little Abner it was a cartoon series Little Abner, al Cap and he had he was reflecting. In the late 60s, a protest group called SWINE it was the acronym was SWINE Students. Wow, they indignant about nearly everything. That's true, that's great, and they run the country. Now they're in their 60s and 70s.

Dan Sulllivan
Well, the size of the, the size of the SWINE. You know, army now is huge because it can be collective on the internet, cancel culture.

Dean Jackson
Well, and what we call woke used to be called yeah, no, I mean the. I'd say there's a you can chase, you can easily track the genealogy, the ideological genealogy of the present woke population and it. But it started with the swine population in the 1960s, you know. But students wildly indignant about nearly everything, yeah.

Dan Sulllivan
I think that's something you know. That's so great.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, yeah Well you know I mean, if you're not creative. Opposition gives you a lot of focus and identity. Being against something can give you a lot of energy. You know, and yeah, but it doesn't get you a high paycheck.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, this is. Yeah, I wonder now the whole, this whole like notion of Work and what, how that's going to shape this generation? I haven't gotten to that part in the in the magazine. Yeah yeah, but I mean it certainly. You know there's a different level of Apparently.

Dean Jackson
They're saying that we're, that it is a very entrepreneurial group which is well, there as far as I mean Just by observation, because we have I would say we certainly have 20 of our Team members out of 130. Might be more than that I have encountered, but they seem like worker bees to me.

Dan Sulllivan
Okay, interesting.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, they work real hard, they work real hard, they, you know they show up on time, they do what they say they're going to do, they finish what they start and they play. They say please and thank you, and you know, and so I have a very positive take on those individuals who we've hired, you know, and I mean we have.

There's five steps to get higher-deck coach. So there's a filtering and a screening that goes on. Yeah, it was one thing that we had a lot of millennials, for you know we had a lot of one. Yeah, some lot of them are still with us and I asked the person most in charge of hiring For a coach.

I said is there anything you're doing different with these people? Because I don't see, I don't detect any of the attitudes that are supposedly Millennial attitudes. And she said well, we have one more question we asked them and I said and it's if you come to work as strategic coach, what do you think you're entitled to?

Dan Sulllivan
and if they answer the question.

Dean Jackson
They're gone. So funny. I like that if they even know what the word entitled means. Yeah, they disqualified, they disqualified themselves. Yeah, oh that's funny. Yeah.

Dan Sulllivan
Well, I didn't. I didn't ask you, dan, but how did free-thone go this week? I know everybody was in Gathered in Chicago.

Dean Jackson
Well, I had one of my periodic last-minute creative changes, where what was the planned out workshop on Friday was completely changed on Monday. Okay, okay, and what I did was I just got a feel for it that something More is needed, and also, we had a guest speaker. For the first time, we had a guest speaker and we had. Andre Norman. We had Andre Norman come in.

And I gave Andre script in the term in the form of a fast filter and I said Andre, we're just going to talk about and we're going to divide your life into three parts. When you were a gang leader in Boston you're the boss. And when you got into Prison, and you were the prison boss. And now you're out and collaborating with Joe Polish and you do crisis Intervention with individuals and groups across the country. But you're the boss of doing that and I like you just to walk us through your three entrepreneurial stages and, looking back, things you might have done differently now from your. You know, from the. You know the advantage of backward perspective. What would you have done differently? But we had to tick to.

We had two videos and there was about a Two-minute tick tock where he's just telling the story about how he went through five guard stations and got into the kitchen to ask for a hamburger and a cheese, a cheeseburger, and was confronted by the warden, and then let the warden know who actually ran the prison and and that he had no issue getting through five gates and getting into the kitchen, but the Warden was being an issue, and that the warden had a choice of how he was going to handle this and the warden at the end goes over and says give him a second cheeseburger.

I make him do yeah, exactly and then at the end it was just the the trailer for the movie that's been made on Andre. So we that was sort of neat. One was about two minutes, the other one was about two minutes at the end, but it was a terrific hour, so that that that was a special event in the workshop.

But what I did was I drew a diagram and it's an upward arrow, you know, goes up, and it's broken down into eight arrows and there are the decades of my life. So next year I complete my eighth decade eighth arrow and I just observed that my Creativity and productivity since I was 70 was greater than the 70 previous years I've created and produced more in the last ten years.

So I had them all do that. They had to draw it out. I just drew it on the whiteboard and and then you lay down, you know everything. But just under the category of creativity and productivity, and that I had, I bet I had ten people at the end of the First hour because they just drew it out and then they went into breakout groups and then we had the general Discussion, let's say the first hour and a half. They said we could go home right now. This was worth the trip, and I said, well, that's good. And I had a prepared sheet which said what their best ever decade was going to be ahead. So mine was a bit easy because I'm going to be right at the end of a calendar decade, my chronological. Not a calendar decade, but my chronological.

So I'll be 80 next May and so it'll be 80 to 90, it'll be 20, 24, 20, 20, 23. I says, now, choose that one. And I said you may have it start right away, you may have it start in a couple of years, you know, but you're going to now start them too.

Yeah, start creating the decade. That will be your best ever. But you've seen what you've done with the best one in the past and we did that. But we're going to drag, break it into two parts. One of them is Creativity times, productivity. That'll be one side and the other side will be fitness times, health. Because I said, you know, and right now, at 80, most they get some people born in 19 in the United States, people born in 1944, 61% of them are dead, 61 and so. So you know, you got to put a bigger emphasis on your physical energy. And so I said and you won't plan for something bigger in the future if you're not in great shape, and you will not plan for greater shape in the future if you're not becoming more Creative and productive. And this was a huge, this is a huge new, a new time tool, a new time tool. And it went.

It was the whole day just that thing, yeah, we just, and then they picked three things that were most important and then they did a triple play on it. So I think we had about we had about three breakout groups and then general discussions and we had a party the night before house and on the Monday, where you have the 10 times workshop, is just free zone people in that 10 times.

There's no, nobody else in the 10 times and that really worked. And then there were people who were going to do their 10 times the day after Free zone and I had. We had another party at our house that night, and that's 10 times a week of parties. Yeah, but it's all. You know. All the success and achievement Is strictly for the parties.

Dan Sulllivan
That's exactly right. I like that.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, and being Having a seven in your print, you would appreciate parties. Yes, exactly, I love it. They're happy. Yeah, enjoying life and having fun.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, I love that. Well, I'm a guy, so we're gonna go through that same thing on you so you'll do that on.

Dean Jackson
You'll do that on the zoom yeah.

Dan Sulllivan
I like it. That's next week I think that's next week.

Dean Jackson
I think that's next week, is that next? Week no it's this week.

Dan Sulllivan
This week, I think one of these guys.

Dean Jackson
It has to be this week because we're at the cottage for two weeks. Oh yeah, there you go. I think it's the starting next week, yeah, but it went really well. Yeah, yeah yeah, so, yeah so anyway, that's, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it now Did?

Dan Sulllivan
I saw in one of the I got the prep package and stuff and I saw something that made my pupils dilate and I think it was some indication of some free zone Expansion into Toronto.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, what we want to do because it's getting big. Now we have 91 in free zone and so we want to add another available workshop day during the quarter and there's been a growing interest from people in Canada who would do it if it were in Toronto, and so we've looked at the date. It'll start in early. It'll start in early 24, 2024 and but there has to be enough interest that we would have a good size, and by good size We'd have more than 20 people there either new or existing and and but To say the other bother of going to Chicago, we're still going to charge you an American dollars.

Dan Sulllivan
Right on.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, so it's great we're not having that deeper one. Yeah, though.

Dan Sulllivan
This is great. I think it's so nice to see it expanding. I mean, the Our group in in Palm Beach was really something. I mean it's really a great energy.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, and next year the summits back in Palm Beach too.

Dan Sulllivan
I like that yeah.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, we have, well, the four seasons. You there's. You know, there's nothing you have to Think about with the four seasons right you know I mean very instant response and anything you want. That's great yeah man, we're going to have our first big global conference in Nashville Next year and it gets in May, first week of May, so be today, and it's everybody who's involved and we'll have out clients come. So we're shooting for probably 1500 1600 people and we're going to break out sessions and this is a global overall strategic coach yeah.

Yeah, so people come from overseas for it, but yes, you know, a lot of it is mingling and you know, and yeah whining and dining and everything but and I have nothing to do with this I was told it was going to happen, so you know you're just relaying the news. Yeah.

I'm usually the last one to know. And and yeah, and people say boy, how do you find time for all this stuff? And they support what stuff? And they said well, you know moving the other coaches up to ten times. I said that was 15 minutes on my part to do the whole. I simply announced that after 2023 I wasn't going to do anymore. After 2022 I wasn't going to do any more Workshops. Right, well, how we gonna? Huh, I said my security clearance is not high enough to be involved.

Dan Sulllivan
Oh, yeah, we're nothing but rave reviews for Chad.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, chad, that was really good. Yeah, and in fairness to you know, in fairness to you know someone else, they had to split their tension between free zone and ten times people on the same day and that stuff and but Chad just got the pure, the purebred lambs.

Dan Sulllivan
Oh man, that's so funny. The purebred yeah, the Mayflower yeah that is funny. Well, I you know what feel I feel good about is. I have been. I was the Mayflower of the ten times. Oh yeah made me voyage and Mayflower of free zone. That's funny.

Dean Jackson
Yeah. Yeah well, you know it, you know, I mean there's. You know. See, my whole approach is that you don't know how good your team is and you don't know how good the program is Until you're not involved in any of it. Yeah, yeah, so it's. Why don't the people say, well, all this free time? And I say they said don't you worry about the company. And I says, actually it's on my free days. Then I find out how good my company is or as a result of my free days.

They can't phone us. We don't phone them or zoom them, we don't, and they have to sort things out on their own.

Dan Sulllivan
And that's and they do they do when they grow, did you? How many days did you who up with the? You know, letting Without doing the ten times?

Dean Jackson
prepping workshops in about 60 days yeah. Yeah, and then you've already. Some of those with oh yeah, I'm Programs Less.

Dan Sulllivan
Active. I don't think I'm any right.

Dean Jackson
I'm just doing different things, but the big one for the last five years and on Tuesday will be five years Was the no television for five years and I got back about four thousand hours Over the five year, about 800 hours. So you know, I Truthfully I kind of worked like ten hour days when I'm working, so that was 880 years and 880 days a year and then I got about of work time and then I got 60.

So the big, I had a big return of Days available for doing new things, and you know. So it's that stuff works, you know.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, absolutely Well, I've been really enjoying and expanding on my adventures in Dean Landia.

Dean Jackson
Yeah.

Dan Sulllivan
Let's screen time, more team time. I'll tell you there is so much yeah, there's so much more compelling things going on in Dean Landia than in Netflix or on YouTube or, you know, tiktok, any of those things that take up all that.

Dean Jackson
well, you can be more of a coin you can be. More of a cone is, sir you know.

Dan Sulllivan
But you know, I mean.

Dean Jackson
I watch YouTube, but basically half of it is just watching Peter Zion's latest take on something, and that's Never more than about seven or eight minutes and but you begin to realize, you know that if you're truly a An entrepreneur who's expanding freedom, time, money, relationship and purpose Is that there's a lot going on the world that doesn't, or should shouldn't, really concern you.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, I think that's really the thing of being able to know that this you can let go of a lot of them, right? That's really I think that when you, when you really come to the fact that there's no way to keep up with it, there's no like all the content that's out there, it's kind of like you're saying about swimming in the ocean you know you miss a lot of it, but you really you know it was. As long as you get a good swim and that's all. Yeah, yeah, but the other thing is.

Dean Jackson
People say, well, how do you keep up with the world? And I said, if I knew what the world was, maybe I would have an answer.

But I says our world is basically a measurable number of Relationships that you have, you know. You know, I mean people say, what do you think about what's going on in Africa? And I said, well, not very much. And I mean I don't really think about it that much. And because I've got some clients I have a client clients in Botswana, I've got clients in Ghana. You know there's some clients there and we interact and I know about them. But Africa itself not really much.

And but people, I think what's happened over the last 40 years? We've had a sizable number of people who went to college with the and came out of the college with the Mission of changing the world. Yeah, but they don't know how to change the tire, you know. So they have theoretical, this theoretical sort of vision, but they don't really have any practical skills. And, and I think, as the world becomes less united and less Interconnected which I see happening already and it's going to happen more so over the next 20 years it strikes me that people will become more practical in their focus and they'll be more local. I'm not local in the sense that they're dealing with real relationships and they're creating things and producing things with real relationships.

And they're not buying into a lot of fantasies about what's going on in the world and that this is generation Z. I mean we started with this Topic, but I think they're going to turn out to be more practical than the two or three generations ahead of them.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, and they're much more there. You know they're technically fluent. I mean that's certainly a thing that they're. I think, especially now the younger ones that are going to you know they're going to grow up with their Chat GPT sidekick, you know, always available to them. I think it's going to be amazing.

Dean Jackson
I think it's, yeah, I think it's. There's some changes in the wind, uh-huh. Anyway, got a jump, oh, by the way always fun as a pick up on a previous thing, I checked with Julia Waller about the strength finder and we do not have your numbers.

Dan Sulllivan
She sent me an email. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it today. Actually, I'm gonna Okay, yeah, good the test, but I'm just gonna send you.

Dean Jackson
I have it on a draft and I'll just punch the button and you know. The thing is that you take your top five strength finders and you plop them into the fast filter. Perfect, the fast filter has five success criteria.

Dan Sulllivan
Yeah, I'm gonna just put down whatever your five are yeah and yeah it's gotta, it's got a neat outcome.

Dean Jackson
When you do that, I like it. I can't wait.

Dan Sulllivan
Well, I will. Okay, back are we, are we next?

Dean Jackson
week, next week, and then I won't at the cottage, I'm just gonna cottage, I'm just gonna cottage things.

Dan Sulllivan
Okay, great, so no podcast next week. Okay.

Dean Jackson
No, next week we have it.

Dan Sulllivan
I haven't left next week I'm here on Sunday, so would okay yeah yeah, if you would be so inclined.

Dean Jackson
Yeah, of course, always. Okay, okay, okay, then, okay, bye, okay, bye, bye.