Rewind: How To Make Your Own Luck

Steven Krein: Hello, this is Steven Krein from StartUp Health. I'm here with my podcast partner Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach. Hi, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: How you doing, Steve?
 
Steven: I'm doing great. As we were just talking about, we're both back from some Free Days.
 
Dan: Yeah. And you're out in the ocean. And I'm beautiful lake. So I had a great time.
 
Steven: Yeah, I actually went away with some college friends, and we went down to a beautiful lake outside Atlanta. Really amazing to reconnect with old friends. But the conversation during one of the days, although it was falling on Free Days turned to "compelling offers versus convincing arguments", which has been a theme in the last couple sessions of our Free Zone workshops. And I think we did a little intro to it on our last episode, but been really intrigued by the idea of really almost reframing conversations into compelling offers versus convincing arguments. And it wasn't until you kind of outlined, I think, so specifically, the difference between the two did I realize how much time I spend making convincing arguments versus compelling offers.
 
Have you seen-- Maybe reframe it for everybody, before we dig too deeply, but I'd be interested in the entrepreneurs that are in the workshops and their reception to this concept, because I think it's a pretty transformative concept when you actually start to filter your conversations.
 
Dan: Yeah, well, back to the source, it's a Dean Jackson quote that I just snatched out of the air because he has a lot of really good one-liners. The difference is that I'll do something with Dean's ideas, Dean won't necessarily do anything with his ideas. But it struck me that a lot of the turmoil that a lot of our entrepreneurs go through is the length of time before they can get to a sale. And I think the reason is that they've been trained by their industry to actually have an argument, vis a vis, what they're offering, and they're arguing against the way things are done, and they're arguing against competitors. So it's almost like they're going through a legal process where they're trying to convince a jury that they have a more convincing set of evidence. And I think actually, the school system actually trains people, that the more convincing you are with your arguments, the further up you're going to go in the academic world. And I think it spills over into a lot of people's occupations then, especially when they're in a more or less established industry, that you're trying to make a big deal out of fairly small points.
 
The opposite of that is where somebody just has looked at all the talking that's going on in a particular area, where value can be created. And what I mean by this is that, whether it's a product that you're selling, or a service that you're offering, or anything, is that probably it's explored territory. There's already people out there doing it, and what you're using is a set of arguments to offset what they're doing that you're doing better. Okay.
 
And my sense is that a compelling offer—it's not an argument, it's basically that you're inside the other person's head, and they've already been exploring something, and they don't have a solution, and you come in with something that exactly matches their thinking. And you say, "And here's a simple way of actually pulling this off." Okay? So you're not trying to argue anything, you're not trying to prove anything. You're just taking advantage of what they're already thinking. And you know, the great examples of that are comedians who are really good. And they've got everybody going along with a story that everybody in the audience understands. But then the punchline just shocks people, okay? And it shocks them out of all their preconceptions of what they were doing before. And here's something brand new.
 
So Steve Jobs was really good at that. Steve Jobs was not a convincing argument salesman, he was a compelling offer. He said, you know, "While I was out and about outside of Apple, I got interested in music and I just noticed that if you go into the store to buy music, you're just going in because you heard a particular artist with a particular song and you want to buy that song. But in order to get the purchase, you have to buy eleven other songs, okay, that you weren't looking for. So it's kind of a negative experience as a sacrifice. You're asking people to sacrifice something to get what they want. And the other thing I noticed that the musicians you know, if a dollar is paid, the musician maybe gets a nickel or maybe gets a dime.
 
"And that didn't seem to be right. And the other thing is, unless they have 12 songs, they can't even get recorded. And he said it just seems really difficult and complicated and hard. And there's not a lot of reward for the people that you want to be rewarded. So what we thought is, since this already exists in the marketplace, that's a download machine from the internet. And it's already being done illegally by Napster. We just thought that maybe you could have a nice little machine and any song you want, you immediately access it costs you a dollar a song. And not only that, but we're going to give more than half of the money to the artist for doing the new song. And, I don't know, what do you think about that?"
 
And he said, "And by the way, it's available tomorrow." So he didn't say, "Oh, we're working on this and in a year, we'll have it." He never said anything until you could buy it tomorrow. "The packages are ready to be sent out right now, and we can do that." So the big thing is that a compelling offer doesn't ask people to change their information or anything, it's just to recognize that the way it's being made available is very, very complicated. It's very hard. It's very, very costly. And here, we just make it really simple, it's faster, it's easier, it's cheaper, and you just get what you want. And you're not really, really talking about what the competitors are doing. You're simply saying the difficulty that the person themselves, is having to get something they really want. And probably if it was this easy, you would probably get all the music you want.
 
Steven: So faster, easier, cheaper. If you use that example, and you shift it to health innovation, you're getting ready to go on to Peter Diamandis's trip over the next week, to meet entrepreneurs and innovators and scientists that are working on next-generation health innovation. I live in the world to health innovation with StartUp Health and, and backing entrepreneurs, who are many times in the very early, early, early days, have an idea for a compelling offer to truly transform a disease and illness a problem that people are experiencing.
 
I want to shift this compelling offer convincing argument into health innovation, especially early-stage health innovation. You're going to see what I live in every day. And I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
 
Dan: Yeah, and I would say that just from a customer standpoint, I'm not necessarily talking about the innovator here, I'm a customer, because at the end of the day innovations only have value if the customer says so. I mean, there's different customers, there's people who want to invest in something. And so a better offer; you're making a better offer for where they should invest their money over other possibilities.
 
But I would say and I'm going to keep this in mind as I go through the trip. And that is "How is this faster? How is this easier? I was it's cheaper. And how does this produce a much bigger, more satisfying result for myself?"
 
But if I'm an investor, then I'm wondering, I don't have to think this through, I don't have to have this checked out by a lot of people, because it's guesses and bets anyway, you're guessing that this is going to be better. And you're betting on it. That's really what an investment is. But it's all guesses and bets.
 
Thanks for giving me that structure, because I didn't really know what I was going to do there. Because there's about 45 presentations over a six-day period. So I have two Fact Finder. So that's really good. But I would say that the winners are the ones who have a cumulative 10 times breakthrough. So it's not necessarily 10 times faster, it's not necessarily 10 times easier, it's not 10 times cheaper, and it's not necessarily 10 times bigger, each of the steps of it. But if you put the faster, easier, cheaper together, it's a 10 times breakthrough over anything else that exists.
 
Steven: Yeah.
 
Dan: I think as an investor that you're looking for-- You're not going to invest in something that's twice as good.
 
Steven: Yeah, it's interesting, because you're seeing innovation in many cases—and I'm gonna bring up another tool that I think is relevant for your trip, which is The Profitability Packager: You take things from plausible and possible and all the way up to, you know, producible, preferable, palpable. We should talk a little bit about that framework today. Because what you're seeing along that spectrum over the next couple of days, what I get to see every day are things oftentimes in their infancy, and the possibilities are enormous for that 10x or 100x or 1,000x. But there's an element of getting to a place where you actually have all the data to prove it and you have all of the results to prove it and you have that but you're not seeing things at the end. You're seeing things oftentimes, maybe even where the sausage is, be still being made.
 
Dan: Yeah, there's a few things along the way. And that's a big jump from last year, the number of handheld devices that you can take home where you're getting analysis, and you're getting information that previously was only available at big medical centers, specialized medical centers. We just have arriving from the UK, some watches, which are 24-hour blood pressure monitors. And so you just wear it, there's nothing you have to do, is you just wear it. But it measures minute by minute over a 24 hour period, and just shows you where your blood pressure is. Because blood pressure is a snapshot in the moment. And I get my blood pressure taken a lot, and I do it myself. But it only tells me what's true in that moment. And it's different in the morning than it is in the afternoon. If I'm under stress, it's higher, if I'm really relaxed, it's lower. But to get a readout that shows you, day and night, how your blood pressure is is much more informative. And that's available. So he's got a number of things which are take-homes on this trip, and we get either at a very reduced cost or we get it for free—free in the sense that it's included in the investment we're making in the trip.
 
Steven: Yeah. So let's come back to "compelling offer." If you think about the entrepreneurs that you're meeting, and innovators that you're meeting, when you think about the ones that stuck out—maybe if you remember from last year, I know you said you're a big listener, you're not a note-taker. So if you kind of were to broad stroke, if you can recall the sessions from last year, the expectations for this year, how many of these entrepreneurs and innovators are making compelling offers versus convincing arguments? And how differently do you respond to them?
 
Dan: Yeah, well, some of them, I mean, when it gets into, like, they're at stage two, you know, of FDA, "We have to prove this, we have to prove that," not as an investor, because that's not really what Babs and I really invest in. Okay, that's not part of our investment. We have an investment policy, but it's in different areas.
 
But the thing about it is, if it looks like there's a lot of uncertainty ahead—and that's not just uncertainty, whether it'll actually legally be approved, but is there going to be a market for this? And do they seem to have a plan for actually identifying enough check writers that it would justify people's investment? And which means that it has to make more money that they're investing. So I think this is terrific. I mean, I couldn't have prepared better for tomorrow than by talking to you today.
 
Steven: I push on this, because I spend every day, you know, with entrepreneurs--
 
Dan: Evaluating.
 
Steven: Evaluating and seeing the difference between those that attract the capital, the customers, the team that they need to succeed, and those that don't. And the difference between the two oftentimes has little to do with the actual technology, or the actual idea and more to do with the entrepreneur who's leading it, innovating and guiding the company, all the way through. And so I was, I've become very interested in this "compelling offer versus convincing argument" filter—I'm calling it a filter.
 
Dan: Yeah, it is a filter. It is a filter.
 
Steven: You created a tool to help look at our compelling offers versus convincing arguments. But I've started to now look where it's that saying you have, which is "Your eyes only see and your ears only hear what you're looking for."
 
Dan: What your brain is looking for.
 
Steven: Yeah, what your brain is looking for. And so that's kind of like the element here for me is I'm looking at this global army of entrepreneurs, and I'm going, "Look, look at the ones that are making compelling offers, look at the ones that are trying to convince and argue." And I think I've discovered through that filter, something in addition to mindset that plays a role in their success. And it is those entrepreneurs that are able to stay in "compelling offer mode," versus get into "convincing argument"—not angry, but like almost on the edge of frustrated, that starts to turn everything they do into convincing, convincing, convincing, but I'm not compelled to do anything.
 
Dan: Yeah, and I think that's important to realize. I'll go back to, because you've done your stretch of legal training, and made the correct decision not to be a lawyer. And because it's all about argument, I mean, the law is so much about argument. My sense is that I find the breakthroughs, they're a great simplification to even manage what the problem is right now. It's very, very complicated. And it's fraught with red tape.
 
But the one thing I found, for example, one of the breakthroughs that we saw last year that we signed up almost immediately was a company that does a very simple blood test. They come to your house, they do the blood test. Three weeks later, they give you a readout.
 
Steven: InsideTracker?
 
Dan: InsideTracker, yeah, from Boston. I've had nothing but rave reviews from the Strategic Coach clients that we've recommended that they look into this. It's very reasonable. And in Canada, it has a special thing, because it doesn't require a doctor's permission slip that you can even get the blood test. The 43 markers, you don't need medical approval to actually have the blood test. But the big thing about it is it tells you what you can do to improve if you're-- They have three colors: They have green light, which means that you're doing great. Yellow light, which means you're borderline. And red light is that this is having a negative impact on your health and on your fitness. But then they give you a little coaching program for the next interval. They're trying to get you on a regular quarterly--
 
Steven: Cadence.
 
Dan: --which I totally believe in. But then they've got a real punch line to it. And that they said, "According to your readings right now, your chronological age"—mine is 78. But my last test said that my biological age, what the markers are saying, I'm actually 67.
 
Oh boy, that's great. And they say, "If you just work on these yellows and get them into the green—we'll go after the yellows, first of all, and get you into the green. And then let's take a couple of the reds, and move them towards, you know, the crossover line." And everything is tremendously motivating.
 
You know, the other thing that's even simpler is the Apple Watch with its activity app on the Apple Watch. And they give you three rings, one of them is total activity, which is the number of calories from your activity during the day, which you set. You set how many calories. So I have 600 calories, just to test it out, that I'm going to have extra activity beyond resting heart rate, I'm going to do it and 600. And then how many minutes of actual exercise, how are you doing? That's your exercise one, was 30 minutes, 30 minutes of something during the day, not just walking around, but actually lifting weights or doing aerobics, and do 30 minutes. And then how many hours did you stand up during the hour, then sit through two or three hours, which was easy to do when I was on Zoom, you know, things switched over to Zoom. And it took me about 30 days after I bought the Apple Watch to kind of get a feel for it, and the timing of the day. Yeah, but out of since July 1, I've missed three days, and I've got my three rings. And then they give you a little encouragement, and they always call me Dan. You know the "Dan, you're off to a great start. Just keep it going now." Yeah. "Oh, Dan, you know, okay, you've done three rings yesterday, let's go after three rings today."
 
So there's something very compelling about that. Because now my day is regulated, increasingly by the activity that I have to do during the day to get my three rings. Yeah. And then they say, now we'll show you your trends. But you have to do it for 180 days in a row. So I said, "I want to get to my trend lines. And I want my trend lines to be really good." So they build in a lot of psychology into it. And I would like to introduce that as a factor in the compelling offer is that you're depending on the psychology of the user.
 
Steven: Yeah.
 
Dan: It'd be a lot of the solution.
 
Steven: Those two examples you just gave. And as wonderful as a solution, like InsideTracker is, the massive leap is the mass consumer adoption. The Apple Watch is just integrating things in to your daily life and giving you that feedback and doing that. And then these other services—and I'm just using InsideTracker, because you just said it—are over and above and all data. And I think the compelling offer comes in where you start to make it just part of people's lives, right? And you don't have to have 18 more devices on your wrist or on your finger or on your neck or on your head. So there is an element here, where we are living, I think, in the golden age of health innovation over the next decade or two—more solutions, possibilities and features or products will be developed. But the question is how many of them make it into a stream of life while like you're describing.
 
Dan: They're profitable winners.
 
Steven: Yeah, you know, Apple and Amazon and some of these big tech companies are integrating a lot into their products and their devices Amazon bought a company, or is buying a company, called One Medical, which is a higher-end concierge primary care company popping up all over cities. I don't know if they're in Canada, but they're all over the US. You know, they bought a pill pack, and they're integrating the pharmacy. But you start to see some of the integrations of these things, and it really is an opportunity for us to accelerate, I think, the solutions that help turn your 67-year-old age into maybe 62, and then 57. And then as you get older, you're able to stay healthier, longer and even reverse the aging process. But I think it's going to take that mainstream piece of it to get into the flow of a compelling offer versus a convincing argument, to add one more device.
 
Dan: Yeah, and then your system in the StartUp Health, you're giving a whole series of possible positive outcomes for the entrepreneurs who are doing it. You know, first of all, they can get investment up-front to help them. That's a part of the compelling offer to be part of, plus you're going to give them, all along the way, you're going to give them an organizational coaching development program. In other words, of how they organize themselves as companies.
 
You had that to a certain extent, 2025 years ago, from your own experience in the first use of the internet for advertising. You guessed properly and you bet properly, and you beat the deadline. But you also recorded what your own experience was of thinking it through, and that naturally lend itself to a coaching program. So you brought that from when you were in your twenties, it's a key part of the coaching. The problem is if you introduce a new technology, it's always missing one thing, is that technology does not coach itself. Okay. And you understood that right from the beginning, that there's going to be healthcare startups all over the world, and they're going to have to be utilizing existing new technologies are creating their own new existing technologies. But if they've given no thought of how you actually coach people on how to use it—and I don't want to change my life to learn something new.
 
Steven: Yeah, there's an element to in healthcare in particular, and I think you'll see it over the next several days, but we see this every day as well, which is, entrepreneurs connecting with each other on similar problems that they're trying to solve, but have different solutions for attacking it. You've got this image in your collaboration model where the problem is in the middle, or the hero target is in the middle, and you've got all these collaborators around the table. So when you talk about any part of healthcare, or any disease, for that matter—our latest moonshot is type one diabetes—and bringing innovators and entrepreneurs and investors and philanthropists and stakeholders and patients around the table to talk about how to maybe prevent, manage, delay the onset, or even cure type one diabetes, you start to really see how everybody can divide and conquer and do their own little part in it, versus one person or one organization are one investor solving at all. And I think what you're just describing right now is, really, people working together and collaborating to solve the problem. And I think, for health innovation to really reach its potential, the compelling offer of faster, easier, cheaper, more productive, is to not do it alone. Simply, like, to not work in a silo, to not have a solution in a silo, to not have something that people have to do that doesn't tie into what they're already doing, or what's already at work.
 
Dan: Yeah, well, the difference between the competitive model and the collaborative model is, I mean—and there's competition at the end of the day—if you've got something new that makes other things not useful anymore, you've just competed.
 
You know, but I don't think that should be your goal. I never use the word 'disruptive' because I think, from the person who's innovating, I'd much rather transform things so that the value for everybody goes up in the world, if they're adaptable, and they're willing to learn new ways of doing things.
 
So I think one of the big things that you've done is that you've created a massive global collaboration where, if I'm an outside investor into StartUp Health, one of the problems of institutions, whether they're labs, or whether they're hospitals, or whether they're technology companies, they can't have-- I don't know, multiply your 450 startup entrepreneurs by the number of innovations and it's in the thousands of innovations. No organization can keep track of that number of innovations now, okay, but you can on their behalf, you can on their behalf, you can say, "Here's the top 10 in making real progress, you know, in the last 30 days," you know, and you can get them out to that. So you're coaching in a couple of different directions with the StartUp Health Organization, because you're coaching investors, your coaching technology companies, you're coaching big medical labs, you're looking for something right now. And you're running into a door, and I've got this guy in the south of France who's come up with something really neat.
 
Steven: Yeah, it's access. And it's access to early innovation, no matter where it exists around the world. And oftentimes, it's in an area or from a person or from an organization that nobody's either aware of, or they're not aware of the progress that's been made. And so we're really trying to make sure that the stories get told about the progress that entrepreneurs and innovators are having. And oftentimes, they're not happening in public.
 
And so as you look around for solutions, these are often things that typically would fly under the radar that we're trying to make sure have a platform to tell their stories so they can attract.
 
Dan: Yeah, the access goes both ways. I mean, you know, the innovator, in some unknown place, who's not known by anyone, has no access to the outside world in the way he would ordinarily, or she would ordinarily, proceed. They just won't get a hearing. They may be in a country whose health system, you know, the official system, the health system, is not open to innovators, period. So you're connecting innovators anywhere in the world with the sources of capital that are very eager to know about new things. Okay, and it can all be done virtually. They don't have to travel to do this.
 
Steven: Yeah. So coming back full circle to the compelling offers of these health innovators. What's your biggest expectation as you go out to meet with—you said 45 of them?
 
Dan: I think there's about 45 presentations. Yeah, some of them are [cross-talk] single individuals or teams, and we're going to a couple of big labs. I think we're going to the Gates Foundation in San Francisco. And then there's another one.
 
Dan: Yeah, yeah. And in one of those institutions there are seven people who are working on things, and they'll tell you what they're working on. But there's massive amounts of money, gravitating to this area of human innovation right now.
 
Steven: Yeah. What's your expectation for a win, a week from now, after you get through the 45, 46 presentations?
 
Dan: It'll happen when it happens. You know, I'm pretty open-minded when I go, because I just let things sink in. And there are certain themes that really emerge as you hear 10, 20 of them. One of them's talking about this, the other one's talking about-- But there's a Venn diagram in the center where they're all overlapping.
 
And you know, my trip to Boston and New York, this time last year, said "Testing, testing, testing, testing—the breakthroughs are in the testing." And most people don't know they need to be tested. And if they did know, they don't know where to go to get tested. And there seems to be enormous progress being made just in testing.
 
Steven: Early detection, which a lot of people are afraid to see or hear about...
 
Dan: Yeah.
 
Steven: ...what they might find, which is kind of a crazy-- One of the interesting push-backs now is that people don't necessarily want to know, which eventually they will, either way.
 
Dan: But that's true in every area of human activity, not just this one.
 
Steven: Unpack that one a little bit.
 
Dan: Well, the fact is that we're very unequal in our ability to visualize a future that's better than today. We're very unequal, in this, okay? And then if you also have an attitude, "I don't care who invents this, I just want to know how you get access to it," you know?
 
So we're all geared differently. I'm just talking about human beings here, not necessarily entrepreneurs, but for example, Keegan Caldwell, who was with us for three really great podcasts, and we've gotten tremendous response-- We send out those three podcasts as a unit to people, and people are just fascinated what his thinking was.
 
Keegan was making up a lot of stuff on the spot that day, you know. He had his notes all over.
 
Steven: "I need a helper!" You need a helper right next to him, right?
 
Dan: Well, yeah, and two helpers who would ask him great questions.
 
Steven: Keeping him organized.
 
Dan: The thing that really struck me, he was giving us that statistic of valuations in 1980s. And it's the 80/20 has been flipped, you know? Roughly it was 80% tangibles, 20% intangibles valuation 30 years ago, and today it's flipped. It's 80 percent intangibles. The difference-maker in-between 1980 and today is the internet, that ideas just travel a lot faster than stuff, you know, tangible stuff. So I said this, it just shows you the impact of what people are willing to invest in, at earlier and earlier stages, just because there's a great story about a new idea.
 
Steven: And he helps anchor it.
 
Dan: Yeah, well, it has to be credentialed. You know, in other words, you have to have the government say, "You created it, it's yours. And now find out if somebody would pay you for the use of your idea."
 
Steven: Right. So basically, the documentation and authentication of your compelling offer.
 
Dan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it's the first question that I was gonna ask, "I know, you created this, but do you own it?" I can't buy it if you don't own it.
 
Steven: Yeah. And what I'm gonna be talking to Keegan about next week, or the week after, is direct applicability to health innovation. Because therein lies one level of intellectual property. You know, when you're building a life science company or medicine, it's very clear, I think, when you're actually with ideas, because a lot of these are ideas and a combination of things coming together. Do you own it? And is it unique?
 
Oftentimes, what I think, and Keegan talked about this in the last episode, is just going through and actually documenting it and making sure that it's not just in your head.
 
Dan: Yeah, I mentioned in my Fast Filter that I sent you this morning, and I've noticed this since, you know, we're kind of digging into this, that the vast majority of entrepreneurs are creative without having any appreciation of what they've created. Because they see it as a transactional activity: "Somebody's got a problem, I work it out, I solve it, on to the next problem." But they don't realize that the thing that they created to solve one person's issues could solve 100,000 people's issues if it was properly authenticated, or you know, you're given legal rights to the property.
 
And then the other thing is, would they pay you to use it? I mean, an idea is worthless from the standpoint of a buyer if it's not useful. I mean, there's a lot of people who have tremendous ideas, but nobody would pay them to use their ideas. You have to have a mindset that goes way beyond your own situation to be really good at this game.
 
Steven: The game of--?
 
Dan: Creating new things that really go big. You can't be a concern in the thinking here. Your concern has to be "Who's everybody that has to be involved? And how do they benefit from having this new capability?" You know.
 
This goes back to economic history. And the person most credited with kind of laying out the basic philosophy of capitalism was Adam Smith, who was a moral philosopher. And because, you know, he wasn't in the business of creating economic systems, but he just said, "There's a fundamental morality to what happens in the marketplace, in whether something is really stagnant and fixed. There's moral reasons for this." So he's got two great books, he's got The Wealth of Nations, for which he's famous, where he simply applies Unique Ability to countries, that, "If you're really good at this, then really, really maximize how good you are, and create trading relationships with other people, where you trade what you're really good at, for what they're really good at, using money as the medium."
 
And he says, "And therefore, everybody in the marketplace who's successful, is primarily motivated by their own self interest for profit." Then he wrote another book-- It's big. These are big, thick books. Just by happen-chance I was in Glasgow, he was a Scot, and he's buried in a cemetery in Glasgow. And I saw it and it said, "Adam Smith this year to this year, birth and death, and the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments." Okay?
 
So he was already famous for the other book, but the one that they put on his gravestone was called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he said that all human beings are naturally self-interested. But he said, in order to actually work with the world, they have to be able to put themselves in other people's shoes and see the situation from the other person's-- And he says morality is the connection between your fundamental self-interest and how far you expand your self-interest to include other people's interests. And he said that's the basis for capitalism, which was what you're describing, that you have to do it together. Then you have to be tyrannical about the imposition of your innovation.
 
Steven: Well, it's interesting and we we could spend a whole episode talking about the juxtaposition of capitalism and impact and how you blend the two. And we're trying to go back to health innovation, you know, clearly the theme of what I do, what you're about to go see. And it's how do you bridge the two worlds of making sure that you can both make money and make impact and see it through, because I do believe fundamentally that over the last 50 or 60 years, a lot of innovation has been stunted in healthcare by the business models, or the capitalistic nature of how certain things are set up to work against the best breakthroughs and the most accelerated ways to make sure that, whether it be around cancer, or Alzheimer's, or diabetes, you're not seeing the best of the best make it all the way through because of the way that people prioritize the money-making peace and don't blend the two together. Thinking that you can do both, because I think farmers realize you can do both where you actually can make money and help people, but you got to be able to do both.
 
Dan: Well, I think that you know, the world I was born into, which was the 1940s, 50s. You know, I was a teenager in the 50s. I think that was the correct model because the possibility to share and combine efforts, it simply was impossible. Everybody was inside of a silo. So you had these great labs—I mean, one of the greatest labs in the United States was Bell Labs. Not too far from me, actually, in New Jersey, Bell Labs was one of the greatest research labs, but they were operating entirely within their own silo. And the government, I mean, they were connected to the government. The government was the one consulting partner with all the innovators because the big capital really had to come from the government.
 
Steven: But the innovation was centralized.
 
Dan: Very centralized, and a real pecking order of your status, of having your ideas considered, you know, everything was a hierarchical pecking order. And now, it seems to me if you just—and I pointed this out at our first Free Zone Summit in Chicago, and you came, and I said, "You know, what you've created here is the first global entrepreneurial R&D lab. It seems to me that that's what you've created here. Is that, built right into the structure, is a maximum sharing?
 
Steven: Yeah, you know, maximum sharing, early innovation, and all possibility.
 
Dan: Yeah.
 
Steven: And I think the index approach, which is not a typical approach that firms take, because most of them are just trying to pick a few of the winners, the idea of like, let the best develop and get nurtured and coached. And we subscribe wholeheartedly to the notion that over 100 quarters and 25 years, you can iterate a lot, and learn a lot, and test a lot, to get to the place you want to get to, versus making one bet and hoping it works.
 
Dan: Yeah, your nervous system has to be a real respecter of the concept of luck. And a respecter of the concept of timing, which go together. I think timing and luck go together.
 
And, you know, when I look at my own life as an individual, and also by my entrepreneurial career, I have to grant 50% of my success to luck. I had great parents, but I was the fifth child and a family. And I got the special treatment as compared with my six siblings. There's no question that I got the special treatment, because I had about a four- or five-year period, where even though I was a member of the big family, I just had my parents to myself, okay? They took me everywhere, they would talk to me about what they were doing, so I really understood what my father did. But not only that, who they were as individuals, because I talked to them.
 
I had a killer question when I was six years old: "When you're my age, what was going on in the world?" And you could get an adult to talk for two hours for that. And I just found out that I just got this opening to the world where, I don't see it in my siblings, where, all with the exception of one who died early. We're all over 70, you know, and three of them are in their 80s. So we had really good health. So there's no question about it, that all of us have, compared to the general population, I'd say we're healthy. We all have good brains, you know, we're all really smart in the way we need to be smart.
 
And I was born right at-- There's a period of about three or four years, if you were born in this period, your life is nothing but an abundance. And if you were born, basically between 1940 and 1945, there's a slice there where there was always going to be enough of everything ahead of you because it was the smallest generation in American history. So you had the big populations, and then you had the Depression and World War Two, and immediately the people born in this period, especially people near the end...
 
When you went to school, there was any amount of attention teachers would give you. Any amount of resources. When you got into the job market, the jobs came looking for you, you didn't go looking for jobs. So I've just lived in this 70-year slice of demographics where everything was a lot easier. I consider that's luck. You know? Wasn't my doing.
 
The other thing is, I never interacted with a playmate my own age until I was six years old. But I had already developed relationships with dozens of adults by that time. And when I got to first grade, I realized the playmates weren't worth talking to. They didn't have any experience and they didn't know anything. If you really wanted the real stuff, you went to the adults. So I've always had that access. And then I was in a marriage that didn't work. And I'm the one who called an end to it, without there being a lot of damage as a result of that to myself or to the other person. And I said, "I really have to have a great partner," and...
 
You know, so it's a combination of luck and it's also a combination of your brain looking to be lucky. The two go together. I mean, you have to have a-- I know luck when I see it.
 
Steven: So let's use that as the wrap up. What's your biggest insight from today's session? I think we zigzagged through compelling offer. We zigzag through, I think both things that hold back, but also the possibilities around accelerating health innovation. And then this last piece, which I think we talked about the blending of capitalism and impact, or the blending of impact investing and, and looking to bridge the two worlds. But I think this last topic you brought up, "Make your own luck."
 
Dan: Yeah, yeah. But there's two things. There's luck, because so much of your life is accidental. You know, I mean, when you arrive, where you arrived, what the setting was—there's a lot of luck in that. I mean, none of this was designed for you in mind. I always tell people that I said, "You know, don't think that you're entitled to anything, because none of this was designed for you. People were busy. They had other things on their mind when you were born."
 
But I think that there's two things here. There's a recognition of that's the way the world works. There's just a lot of luck involved. And the other thing is, "How do I make my brain something that takes advantage of luck?" Because there's very definitely mindsets. You know, one thing you can't have any envy about other people. I mean, one thing, you really have to get rid of envy, that you think there's unfairness and everything I said, "You know, you won't be lucky, if you're looking for unfairness."
 
Steven: You won't be. That's "The Gap", right? Where you kind of get in The Gap between where you want to be or others are and where you are, and how you measure yourself, which I've, I've always appreciated. But I know we're out of time. Yeah. But this was a good one. I mean, this Yeah, I feel prepared.
 
I don't know if this did you any good, but it did me a lot of good.
 
Steven: Well, I did want to dig in. And we'll do this on the next episode on The Largest Cheque, because I do think you did an exercise—it goes back easily 20 years, but maybe 25 plus years—called The Largest Cheque. And I think we're living in a moment where capital does enable and accelerate a number of things.
 
But The Largest Cheque exercise is one I want to explore. For me, I thought your discussion on the last episode around compelling offers convincing arguments, we dug deeper into it in the workshop, continues to be for me a daily transformative thinking tool and a filter that has enabled me to actually look at my portfolio differently, quite frankly. And re-filtering everything around "Which of these entrepreneurs are succeeding with compelling offers, versus struggling with convincing arguments?"
 
Dan: Yeah, yeah. And the problem is that if you're a good arguer, you can convince enough people that you can make a living and then you get hardwired that it's about convincing arguments. Okay? But if you really looked at what the breakthrough results were in your life, you'll notice that so much of it wasn't a convincing argument. You just had an offer that was very compelling.
 
Steven: Yeah. All right, Dan, great spending the time and love the free-flowing discussion. Have a great time on your trip and look forward to hearing about the breakthroughs and the experiences and your insights when you return.
 
Dan: Okay, thank you, Steve.
 
Steven: All right.