Why Wasting Energy Is the Secret to Human Progress

What if wasting energy is the most productive thing humanity has ever done? In this episode of Capability Amplifier, Dan Sullivan and I explore the radical idea that conservation holds progress back - and that every breakthrough civilization has ever made came from consuming more energy, not less.

Dan introduces the work of Mark Mills from the Manhattan Institute and his book "The Bottomless," which argues that using energy to create higher forms of energy is the engine of all human advancement. From the laser to nuclear power to Ai, the pattern is the same - massive energy input produces exponential capability output.

We also get into how Ai is already running out of human-generated data to train on and is now producing its own synthetic training data. Mike draws a parallel to drug development, where Ai-powered simulations could eventually compress decades of human trials into hours. Dan connects all of it to his own life - at 81 years old, his biological age tests at 59, which he attributes entirely to regular and comprehensive medical testing over the last two decades.

The conversation also touches on SpaceX's first-principles approach to building rockets, the real state of nuclear energy in 2025, the energy limitations of solar in places like Germany, and two separate moments in history where individual decisions by Soviet officers may have prevented nuclear war.

At the close of the episode, Mike demos a new Ai-powered tool he's been using to compress hours of content into minutes each morning - and explains how anyone can use the same approach to accelerate their own learning.

The core idea running through all of it: you can't build lasers by conserving candles.

In this episode, Dan and I break down:

• Why conservation slows progress and strategic energy use is what drives human civilization forward
• The four high-density energy sources - coal, oil, gas, and nuclear - and why Dan says Ai is now a fifth
• How SpaceX's willingness to burn a million gallons of fuel per launch compressed 50 years of NASA progress into three
• Dan's view that people don't die of disease - they die of late testing or no testing
• Why Ai generating synthetic training data is a logical and necessary next step, not a gimmick
• The "Available on Monday" filter Dan uses to evaluate any new technology or idea
• Why only 5% of the population being entrepreneurs is exactly the right number
• How Mike is consuming 20 to 30 hours of content per morning in 20 to 30 minutes using Ai tools
  
  

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Introduction to creating a great yesterday

01:11 – The power of simple tools

03:09 – Dan’s 63-day time experiment

05:02 – Focus on today for a better yesterday

06:22 – Creating consciousness in daily activities

08:52 – Nostalgia vs. creative momentum

10:15 – The impact of focusing on the present

12:30 – How Dan's scattered thinking quietly disappeared

14:00 – Why the point system works

16:00 – Tracking conscious actions for momentum

17:30 – How nostalgia limits progress

19:10 – The role of Ai in amplifying creativity

21:00 – Ai as a creative multiplier for entrepreneurs

23:00 – The freedom of time and what it brings

24:45 – Dan’s final thoughts on his experiment and method

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Creators and Guests

Host

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach

Dan Sullivan is founder and president of The Strategic Coach Inc. A visionary, an innovator, and a gifted conceptual thinker, Dan has over 40 years’ experience as a highly regarded speaker, consultant, strategic planner, and coach to entrepreneurial individuals and groups.

Host

Mike Koenigs

Mike Koenigs helps business owners and entrepreneurs get paid for BEING, instead of DOING by becoming Transformational Business Influencers, authorities and thought-leaders to create impact, income and a great lifestyle.

What is Capability Amplifier?

Join the eternally curious, interested, and interesting hosts, Mike Koenigs of the SuperPower Accelerator and Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach®, to amplify your capabilities, value, status, and authority on the Capability Amplifier podcast. Ever episode focuses on a new mindset, shortcut or deep thinking exercise that will improve your performance and lifespan. Learn more at: https://www.CapabilityAmplifier.com

Mike Koenigs [00:00:00]:
Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and this is Capability Amplifier. And today we're going to talk about how human progress requires massive wasting of energy. This cuts the wrong way against a lot of people out there, but I think we'll make a plausible, convincing and compelling argument for why energy waste is the secret of a bigger and better future.

Mike Koenigs [00:00:24]:
So one of the seeds I'll plant inside that is every time you do a prompt using ChatGPT, you're using the equivalent of 100 homes worth of electricity for the lifetime of that home. Now that could terrify you or you could say, wow, how am I using it? But historically speaking, every single industrial revolution is a byproduct of massive consumption of energy. This is controversial. So we're going to go through the mindsets that progressive minded innovators use and how they contain maybe the pain and the idea of whether or not energy usage is good, bad, right or wrong. And we talk about specific forms of energy and how that's going to affect us in the future. So we know we're going to love this episode. We'll see on the inside and there is a really, really cool takeaway that you want to wait for. Make sure you watch and listen all the way to the end because we're going to give you a really, really cool tool.

Mike Koenigs [00:01:22]:
So we'll see on the inside. Thanks for watching and make sure you like and share this with someone. You know, The most important thing about our future cells is energy production. And if you think about it, that's what propels humanity forward. All of our tools, all of our industrialization, where we've had the greatest breakthroughs in terms of population increase, food production increase. You look at what has happened over the past hundred years. It all comes down to how we're using energy. And Dan's going to talk a little bit about someone that he discovered recently.

Mike Koenigs [00:02:12]:
He's been reading and he says something really controversial, which is it's all about wasting as much energy as possible. Is that was the fundamental statement he made. And I just want to talk a little bit about how important this is, especially now because if AI is going to get anywhere, we need a lot more energy, we need a lot more electricity. Where's it all going to come from and what's the controversy surrounding this?

Dan Sullivan [00:02:39]:
Yeah, well, I think that the big thing is that, you know, the, it's been a political discussion, you know, sort of an ideological discussion certainly over the last 20 years that we have to conserve energy. And he said conserving energy doesn't really get you Anywhere. After a while you just have less and less energy if you conserve it. And he says the real reason is that you want to use energy to create higher, higher levels of energy. And you just need a lot of what looks like the wastage of energy to get higher levels of energy. Okay? And he uses the laser as an example. The laser which of all the creations that we have, uses the most amount of energy just to get that little beam, you know, that little beam of energy. It's just enormous amounts of energy.

Dan Sullivan [00:03:36]:
Have to get you just to create the equipment, you know, to create all the facilities that have lasers and, and everything like that. But he says what we can do with lasers is just amazing. He said there's thousands of uses of lasers that we don't even know about. You know, and so the whole point about it is that once we have an energy source, we want to use that energy source to create even higher levels of energy. Okay? And that's, that's his basic thesis and his. The. Why I read the book. It's called the Bottomless and it's not an easy, it's not an easy read.

Dan Sullivan [00:04:17]:
I read it 20 years ago and I came back across it again because I wanted to go. He wrote an article about this that he says, I think that what AI is really is a new form of energy, okay? And we're, we're now using AI to go back to all the previous energy sources to make them more abundant, you know, and, but he doesn't spend much time talking about solar, he doesn't spend much time talking about wind or anything. He says, but let's take the high density energy that we have right now and there's four, four of them. The coal, oil, gas and nuclear are the four most dense energy. In other words, a little bit of it gives you an enormous amount of power. And he said, and he said it really isn't about energy, it's about power. What kind of power do you actually get? And I've been thinking about that. And he said that we will discover over the next 10 years that 40% of all the AI in the world is actually used to create more powerful forms of energy.

Dan Sullivan [00:05:27]:
The reason being we want to create more AI and unless we have a lot more power, we can't create more AI And I found it very compelling. I just found this whole thing compelling because I can see it in human terms, you know, because I've been, I've been. My life for the last 50 years is about creating a certain form of energy in the world which is entrepreneurial energy. Okay? And it takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of energy to get entrepreneurial innovation. So that's, that's why I'm so interested in it because I can see it in sort of a human form about what I've been up to for the last 50 years, that if you can bring a lot of entrepreneurial energy together, you can create entrepreneurial power.

Mike Koenigs [00:06:24]:
This is great. So I've got a couple citations that I pulled up in the background that go along with this and I'm going to frame this also by. There were a couple speakers at an event I was at this past weekend called Summit Series and one of the speakers went to walk through the history of humanity and there were periods of time during the Primitive man series where non humans, the pre human species, but they had tools like the shape of a stone ax, didn't change for a million years and then suddenly there were huge spikes and changes in what occurred. And ultimately it had to do with the use of fire and different forms of energy. So here's an interesting thing. A single GPT4 training run. So it's like sending a prompt to OpenAI running that prompt uses the electricity, the lifetime electricity of a hundred U.S. homes.

Mike Koenigs [00:07:32]:
That's according to MIT Tech Review. And so the energy spike, and you know the one of the quotes that it, it, it's they they came up with is wasting energy is how you build lasers, not candles. But if you look at every single industrial revolution that's ever occurred was an energy revolution. So from going from steam to coal and then coal to oil to electricity to fission and now we're anticipating that we're not too far off from AI powered fusion. If you would have conserved energy or if the energy protectors would have won, we wouldn't have had technological revolutions. We certainly wouldn't have all of this stuff that's going on. So when you look at the payoff for what may appear to be energy waste, and an example of that right now would be someone might look at SpaceX and all the launches that are taking place now. That's a million gallons of fuel get used in a starship launch.

Mike Koenigs [00:08:44]:
And Kiko Donchev is a friend of mine, he's one of the reasons I went to this event. I wanted to go see him speak and hang out with him and. And yet the progress they've made in terms of the cost to put stuff in space has been so unbelievable, unbelievably dramatic and without their mindset, which is a first principle thought of you know, blowing stuff up and testing things. You've got to be willing to blow up a lot of rockets, but the speed of, of progress they've made inside of a three year period of time took NASA 50. And what I project will happen. This is going to get a little bit meta is what's happening with AI right now is AI is effectively run out of human knowledge to digest. You know, we're, we're producing more knowledge these days in 12 minutes than, I can't remember the exact quote. But the whole point is it's years worth of stuff that's happening inside of minutes.

Mike Koenigs [00:09:54]:
And AIs now are generating synthetic data to train itself, which sounds totally crazy, but here's how to frame it. I'll use a drug testing text test as an example, but I think the same will apply to, to energy production. So right now, if you look at the fda, if you want to bring a drug to market, you've got to start with animal tests and then human tests. And you got to go through all kinds of regulation, all sorts of tests. And along the way, mistakes can happen. Someone with who forgets to wash their hands after they poop might come in and mess up a whole test that could set you back years. But if you've got a computer running, you could create a simulation of 10,000 humans that'll be significantly more accurate. And as soon as we've got quantum computers and we can run a test, we'd be able to run probably 100 years on a million simulated humans and get that done in a matter of hours.

Mike Koenigs [00:10:53]:
And our ability to produce life saving or life extending drugs is going to hockey stick in no time. The same is happening with AI and power because the amount of simulated data that can be created based upon real world systems that'll be more accurate and less problematic than a human. Now, are there chances for terrible things to happen? Well, yeah, but you could run 10 different simulations simultaneously in completely different systems. And if something breaks in the simulation, human lives are not destroyed and human lives are not lost due to time.

Dan Sullivan [00:11:35]:
Yeah, yeah. And you know, I mean as a, not being an expert on any of that, but I can just see in my own interface and Babs, Babs and I, our own interface with the medical community, the, the biggest noticeable improvement that I've seen in the last 10 years is in the testing. Okay? And I, I've got a statement now. People only die of two things these days, okay? The only thing you die of is late testing or no testing. Yes, okay, but if you had tested all along they would have caught this in time. You know, when I, you know, you have someone, all of a sudden they're famous, they're a celebrity, and all of a sudden they die of prostate cancer. And I say he didn't die of prostate cancer. He, he, he died of no testing.

Dan Sullivan [00:12:38]:
That's what he died. Because they could have caught that, you know, they, they could have caught. If you take advantage of the leading edge of testing on the human body, they're probably going to catch, they're going to catch it and they can reverse the problem simultaneously. I'm 81, but my biological age is 59. And that's strictly a function of the last 20 years of testing that things have been caught. You know, I get full body everything every 90 days. And every 90 days the testing is better.

Mike Koenigs [00:13:22]:
Right, right. And it takes a lot of energy to make that happen.

Dan Sullivan [00:13:29]:
Well, it's not your machine, it's the whole system that created the machine. That's the, you know. Yeah.

Mike Koenigs [00:13:38]:
So here's just a grass Keeping up

Dan Sullivan [00:13:41]:
to date with my test is there's more energy than the human race had 100 years ago to, you know, to, to find out things.

Mike Koenigs [00:13:50]:
So yeah, and in the meantime you get more life, more productivity, more outcome, more results, more relevance. You know, it is, I think it is easy to measure the output benefit results of a healthy functional Dan and this is when you brought up Mark Mills from the Manhattan Institute, here was one of the quotes that I found was conserving energy doesn't get you anywhere. Progress depends on consuming more energy, strategically wasting it to innovate, accelerate and amplify human capability. So that's really good. And. What I loved is if you look at here was another quote, it had to do. Oh, here it is. Does increasing energy usage correlate with human thriving? Can we prove that energy surplus drives better education, lifespan, food security and innovation? When it's put that way, we couldn't have an educational system with computers and technology progressing as fast as it is without a lot of energy behind it.

Mike Koenigs [00:15:07]:
And theoretically, here's what I think the conflict occurs with people who are anti is what they're afraid about is the economic disasters that can be caused by overuse or the pollution. But historically speaking, there's now more cleanup occurring and we have the technology to clean up the messes. Those who are future focused are betting on the future getting better and having better technology to clean up the waste and produce cleaner forms of energy. That's a byproduct, but it certainly doesn't happen when there isn't a risk mindset. And I think that is the conflict that often occurs is this fear of running out. But if you travel to, you know, different countries that are low on the tech and have low energy, they also have the biggest and the worst pollution

Dan Sullivan [00:16:09]:
problems, worst health problems, worth poverty, worth nutrition problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing. I mean it's one of those what I'd say it's what Mark Mills, why I was so fascinated with it. It's just the opposite of what, of what most people believe, you know, and, you know, and I think it's an interesting thing. But he said, you know, our entire lives are about how we turn available energy into the power to make great quality of living changes that we have in our, in our life. But I, I certainly see it just in the. What we Babs and I've experienced in the medical industry over the last 35 years.

Dan Sullivan [00:17:08]:
Yeah, yeah. And we've spent a lot, I mean, we've spent a lot of money, we've spent a lot of time, which is energy, you know, energy to, to get to this point. But you can see every political issue, every economic issue, every cultural issue along this discussion. Is it better to conserve energy or is it better to waste energy? Waste energy in the pursuit of higher energy.

Mike Koenigs [00:17:41]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the. Again, I saw the data. I can't make all the quotes right now, but I can dig them up pretty quickly. But there were a couple speakers, of course, Peter Zion talks about this frequently, but there were several other speakers at this event. And at this time, solar has the biggest issue with solar is nighttime and bad weather. And this guy showed a graph because it turns out in Germany they are one of the most, they've added the most progress to solar technology as a country. Solar is cheaper and better because of the Germans.

Mike Koenigs [00:18:27]:
And when you look at what right

Dan Sullivan [00:18:31]:
now, they're running out of energy.

Mike Koenigs [00:18:33]:
They are, and solar can't help them because of their. Where they're located. So location matters. So do clouds and so do seasons. And there's. It's impossible to produce the amount of batteries required. And the closest thing that would actually work is having solar capture arrays in space that are beaming energy down via radio. But that's decades away.

Dan Sullivan [00:19:01]:
Yeah.

Mike Koenigs [00:19:03]:
And the old story, which is generally speaking some form of a lie right now about coal is coal is not necessarily Chinese coal plants, which are coming on online at an incredible pace. But the coal plants we have here are incredibly clean and well scrubbed. And when people talk about nukes and are anti nuke. It's because they're comparing the fact that old nukes, it turns out, out of every nuke that's in the United States, all of them are bespoke devices. Every part is unique. They were all built within a. They're built by a specialized organization using specialized parts. There's no interchangeability.

Mike Koenigs [00:19:50]:
The current new generation of nukes are, yes, they're self contained and as produced, modular. They've got, you know, they're built inside molten salt. Salt. So they, if there were a meltdown, first of all, they'd catch it so fast. They're the parts last for decades. And one of the presentations I saw is this a gentleman named Pablo. They're designing a certain type of nuke that they actually sink into the ground because we're really good at digging holes. Okay, we're really good at making holes to put, to dig for oil.

Mike Koenigs [00:20:29]:
But they'd actually put nukes below ground so far that if there were a problem, it would be insignificant. And I put that in quotes because I don't know how insignificant it would be. But the point being, they've got these little mechanical doodads and they're like putting big LP gas containers down a hole and, and they shoot electricity up. But they last for decades. You know, they're clean, they're cheap.

Dan Sullivan [00:20:56]:
I have a nephew who was on a nuclear sub for 25 years and you know, I, I'll see him, I'll see him in about 10 days because I have a sister who's turning 90, his mother, it's his mother. And I always like talking to him about the nuclear subs. Yeah, this is a long time ago. I mean, he's in his 60s now, but he was doing it and he said, you know, it's really interesting with the subs because they, they produce their own water. You know, they, they have, they. In order to keep the nuclear reactor from overheating, you have to run ocean water. So they're constantly burning and then it condenses. And they create their own water supply.

Dan Sullivan [00:21:44]:
They create their own water supplies and then create their own air supply, well out of the water because it's oxygen and. But he said, with the exception of food, he said that. I said, how long have you gone without coming up? And he said the longest is about 90 days. We've gone about 90 days without coming up. It takes a special kind of personality and nervous system to be under the water. But he said that at that time they could go six years without refueling. They didn't need any more fuel for six years now. It's over 10 years.

Dan Sullivan [00:22:23]:
It's 12, 13 years since 1953. Every submarine the US has produced has been nuclear. Every aircraft carrier has been nuclear. And they've had no, no lives lost. I mean, they've had a little bit of sickness here and there, but actually it's been one of the safest forms of energy on the planet for the last 70 years. 70 years. And you know, but what I, the all this comes down to, I mean, everybody says, and we can do this and we can do this and we can do this and we can do this and everything else. And I, I always have a question.

Dan Sullivan [00:23:04]:
I said, will it be available on Monday? Because if it's not available on Monday, I'm going to go for the one that's available on Monday. And they said, well, it will be available on Monday. And I said, yeah, but I want to know how many years off Monday is. Yeah, which, which Monday, which Monday are we talking about? And I said, if we're going to use it, it has to be available Monday. Yeah, this coming Monday. It has to be available and it has to be at a reasonable, it has to be, you know, affordable. That has to be easy to use and everything like that. And that's the big problem.

Dan Sullivan [00:23:43]:
You can talk all you want about, you know, Ray, you know, mirrors in space. I mean, is it going to be available Monday? I don't think so, you know, and everything like that. So the things we need on Monday are available right now. Let's, let's improve them and back to the thesis here that I will be the thing that actually improves the thing that we already have on Monday. So the following Monday it'll be better.

Mike Koenigs [00:24:11]:
Yes, Well, I think two, two things that I take out of that, Dan. One of them are. When you look back in time when I brought up the thing about coal, in the meantime, we're stuck with coal and we're stuck with oil. And there's a little dirty little secret where we've been living in Baja, Mexico now for. It'll be, it'll turn out to be a half a year. And it really is a beautiful, breathtaking place. But the dirty little secrets are Baja runs on diesel. That's how they generate electricity.

Mike Koenigs [00:24:48]:
They've had solar before, but a hurricane wiped it out and they didn't have the infrastructure cost to fix it again. And their grid can't take it. So unless you have your own money, which there's a lot of people down there, we almost bought a home down there that is completely off grid. So they truck in water and then it ran on batteries and solar. And it's not that expensive to do it these days. You know, for about 30 grand you can get enough panels and batteries and be totally self sufficient. And if you negotiate a well, for example, which costs tens of thousands of dollars, you got water, food, not a big problem, and you can be reasonably self sufficient. So it doesn't cost that much, at least in our terms.

Mike Koenigs [00:25:34]:
You know, we're the top 1 percenters, I recognize that. But down there, besides the energy, they burn their garbage still. And again, that's a dirty little secret. There is no a public garbage pickup now. The taxes are low, so everything's a trade off. And in the meantime, that is this interesting psychological gap that I would love to understand more is there's a mindset of conservation at all costs. And those are people who have never been hungry before or gone without for a week. But I guarantee you they'd cave real fast if they didn't have their cars and their iPhone and their electricity.

Mike Koenigs [00:26:19]:
They'd be the, the first to complain, are going to be the first ones to fold. I think that's just the character of whatever that thing is and the character of innovators. The nature of being a great entrepreneur and an inventor is being able to deal with a lot of psychological and oftentimes physical pain. And I'm just curious what that character makeup is. You know, there seems to be a character that makes up even a political party or a religious party. And I wonder what that is. And I know it's been studied, I'm certain of it, but I don't understand or comprehend what's the anti progression versus the pro progression.

Dan Sullivan [00:27:11]:
Yeah, well, my sense is that, that, you know, humans now do a better job of communicating with each other than in previous ages. Okay. And first of all, there's a lot more of us, you know, and my feeling is that there are kinds of communication that go on among human beings that are not currently measurable. You can't detect them and you can't measure them. And my sense is that there's a distribution of people whose default position is fear. And there's a portion of humanity is their default position is alert, curious, responsive and resourceful. And it's at all times you're, you're in one of the groups or another. Okay.

Dan Sullivan [00:28:11]:
And I can see it in my own family. I can, I can see it in my own family, you know, like, you know, I'm, you know that I'm Much more exploring new things my entire life than my siblings and everything else. And it's cool. It's cool because there's enough other people like me. You're one of them. And other people that we're kind of curious and we're alert and you need a certain number of these people to kind of keep things going. And I, I've been looking at the numbers for entrepreneurism since I started coaching entrepreneurs in 1974. You know what the percentage of the working population of Entrepreneurs was in 1974? You know what it is today? It's a trick question.

Dan Sullivan [00:29:12]:
Yeah, it's 5%.

Mike Koenigs [00:29:14]:
Okay.

Dan Sullivan [00:29:14]:
Yeah. And the reason is. That's all that's needed. Yeah, it's all that's needed. You only need 5% who are interested in creating new things. You don't. You don't need any. I mean, if you had 95 entrepreneurs, it would be like you on one of your worst asset trips.

Mike Koenigs [00:29:37]:
Yeah, yeah. Me and acid aren't growing.

Dan Sullivan [00:29:40]:
I'm not saying this, this was a metaphor. I, I'm not saying.

Mike Koenigs [00:29:44]:
I understand, I understand. That's not the first time someone said that to me. And I'm like, man, me, me. And psychedelics can be problematic.

Dan Sullivan [00:29:54]:
Yeah. But I get what I mean is only a certain percentage of humanity is necessary, that everything kind of works out.

Mike Koenigs [00:30:03]:
Yes, yes. Well, what you reminded me of there, on an almost serious tone, I have been thanked. What was actually Kiko, the guy I told you about who's the lunch director of SpaceX, I had him speak at one of my events, and he met a whole bunch of our kind of people. So I'm going to say crazy entrepreneurs. He's a rocket scientist. And his statement to me on the way out is, thank you, Mike, for including me on one of your acid trips. Because that's what it felt like to him. And In a way, SpaceX is an incredibly entrepreneurial environment, and yet it isn't.

Mike Koenigs [00:30:44]:
And it does take. Scientists don't get us any more than bureaucrats do. Yeah, bureaucrats and academics. Yeah, it's really, really interesting.

Dan Sullivan [00:31:00]:
Well, and you need that, you know, I mean, Newton, you know, basically, for every action, there's an opposite and equal reaction, and that operates on a cosmic level, you know, and humans are, you know, humans are part of that. So if you have people who are into action, you know, new kinds of action, you're going to have those humans who are reacting to that new kind of action. And it's the negotiation between action and reaction which actually breaks things open.

Mike Koenigs [00:31:37]:
Yeah, Very, very Good.

Dan Sullivan [00:31:41]:
It's like in Colby, you know, our team, you know, I'm 10 quick start using the Colby terms. You know, I'm a two fact finder to follow through. I'm at ten quick start, and nothing works if I'm not surrounded with 7 and 8 fact finder follow throughs. Nothing gets done unless I'm surrounded by people who have said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay, that's 20 things you want us to do in the time that we have for two things.

Mike Koenigs [00:32:12]:
Yeah.

Dan Sullivan [00:32:12]:
Then I said, good, tell me what the schedule is.

Mike Koenigs [00:32:18]:
I'll help you pick. I'll, I'll help you order, make them,

Dan Sullivan [00:32:20]:
put them in order of priority. You need the resistance. You need the resistance.

Mike Koenigs [00:32:25]:
It's. That's what I say to, to the team now. I said, this is the opening salvo to a heated conversation about what we're going to do. I'm just thinking out loud. I didn't say do it. And, and that changes the. That changes everybody.

Dan Sullivan [00:32:42]:
I did a perplexity search and I said, and I said, there's been a lot of talk, There's a lot of talk in Canada about this, about Trump's trade war, Trump's state war. And so I, I went to Perplexity And I said, 10 ways that you can explain Trump's trade war. That actually isn't war, it's negotiated settlements. And it's 10 things. And said all he wanted to do was get your attention. He wants a new trade agreement, and he wants it with 200 countries, because that's how many countries are in the United nations is 200 countries. And he said, every country in the world, we want to have a separate trade agreement with you. And I'm just putting out a tariff number that's going to get your attention.

Dan Sullivan [00:33:38]:
Now, let's have a discussion, and you tell me how we're going to work this out. Okay. And so I'll give you an example of what's happening in Canada. A lot of people don't know this, but the provinces in Canada, there are 10 of them. So Americans can understand this as states, but there's 10 of them, and they all have trade barriers that if you make something in one province, you can't ship it across the borderline into another province. Okay? So, for example, beer. If you make beer in one province in Canada, you can't sell that beer into another province. Well, Americans would be outraged by that because America has no trade barriers between states.

Dan Sullivan [00:34:23]:
There's no trade barriers at all. Between states. So this has been a problem in Canada. I've been there for 50 years. And there's no discussions about getting rid of the trade barriers. And then Trump comes in line and says, we're just going to place a 25% tariff on everything coming into the United States from tariff. And all of a sudden the provinces are saying we have to get rid of our trade barriers.

Mike Koenigs [00:34:48]:
Yeah, that could be considered a waste of energy, Dan. That could be a waste of energy.

Dan Sullivan [00:34:57]:
His trade war has actually created peace among the provinces of Canada just by mentioning. All he did is say a word, you know, and everything like that. I'm not saying this from a political standpoint. I'm saying this from a basic sense of physics that where you have an action, you're always going to get a reaction to it. Okay,

Mike Koenigs [00:35:25]:
I got it.

Dan Sullivan [00:35:26]:
Yeah. And. And we all choose our own tribe, you know, we all choose and say, why if the whole world could be like this? And I said, we, we won't get anything done if the whole world would is like us.

Mike Koenigs [00:35:38]:
Yeah.

Dan Sullivan [00:35:39]:
We need people who are very different from us for the world to work.

Mike Koenigs [00:35:46]:
God, that's true. Yes. And you have to waste a lot of energy to get there.

Dan Sullivan [00:35:50]:
And you have to waste a lot

Mike Koenigs [00:35:51]:
of energy because you got to try stuff out and have the courage test. And I think nature, by its very nature, when you think about how it works, it's constantly split testing. It just so happens it costs lives. Lives of creatures and critters. I'm not talking about human lives, but that's the nature of the beast. It's a perfect machine. And I think, you know, when we, we look at like, what makes, what makes for the most successful. They're really good at efficiently using energy.

Mike Koenigs [00:36:28]:
There's a really fascinating episode of a show that I watch on, on YouTube. It's called the why Files. And for the most part, it's a little bit of hoo ha and you know, like ghosts and goblins and UFOs and, and so on and so forth. It's good entertainment. But one of the episodes was on about a type of rock that is on the deepest levels of the. The ocean floor that produce electricity. And not only do they produce electricity, but the water converts into oxygen. And there are animals that live on the energy produced by the rocks.

Mike Koenigs [00:37:13]:
Some of them don't have mouths. They absorb electricity. And the problem that's going on right now is these rocks because they have really special properties and they also contain or really valuable ore. And there's a whole bunch of Them down there, they're being mined and picked up. And the question, the controversy is, could this cause some sort of ecological disaster by stuff dying or changing? Because they also have found that where these rocks lay are known as ley lines as well. So they've noticed other patterns picked up by electronic equipment. And maybe the. Just the Earth's own systems are dependent on the placement or the volume of these rocks, and moving stuff around might be damaging.

Mike Koenigs [00:38:17]:
So again, I'm all for doing lots of tests before stupid stuff's done.

Dan Sullivan [00:38:24]:
Well, it's like. Yeah, well, you know, it's kind of like the Oppenheimer movie a couple years ago that there was this huge concern on the part of the scientists.

Mike Koenigs [00:38:39]:
Yeah. With the whole world blow up. Right. Yeah.

Dan Sullivan [00:38:42]:
That would it release a reaction that the entire world would go up. And. And it turns out that it was a calculation that one of the scientists had made, and everybody was, you know, kind of took it at face value and they. They were all scientists. So, you know, it was in scientific language. And they, they. Oppenheimer got this guy who was just a real fact finder. They're all finder.

Dan Sullivan [00:39:13]:
He went there and he went through and he said. He put the decimal point in the wrong place. He said, there's no problem. The decimal point was. Yeah, place. And. But that was a big concern. That was a big concern, you know.

Mike Koenigs [00:39:30]:
Yeah.

Dan Sullivan [00:39:31]:
And, you know, there. There's stories of two Russians that, you know, once at the Cuban Missile crisis and another one In, I think 19, that was in the 60s, the missile. The another in the 70s, and that if the Americans in the Cuban Missile crisis, if they went across a certain line. A Soviet submarine was supposed to send a nuclear weapon to wipe out Washington, and it required three. Three people on board the nuke to actually be in agreement with it. And one of them said, no, I don't think so. I don't think we should do that. That's how close we came.

Dan Sullivan [00:40:16]:
And the other one was. It was a. That the missile defense system outside of Moscow, they picked up that there had been a major launch of American missiles. Okay.

Mike Koenigs [00:40:29]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that. Yep.

Dan Sullivan [00:40:31]:
And he was in charge and, you know, and he was watching the monitors and you could see these missiles that had been. That they had been launched from the, you know, the United States across Canada going into. And he just sat there and everybody was looking at him and he said, nah. He said, I just. I don't think it's true. And it turned out it was a rare angle of the sun that had triggered Something in the electronics of the Soviet missile system. And after about 15 minutes it went away. And, and he reported to the Kremlin the next day that he did.

Dan Sullivan [00:41:14]:
He was immediately fired because he didn't phone the Kremlin. And he said, he said, I just, I just don't buy it. I just don't buy it. So it was two Russians who didn't buy something and just made a decision, no, no, we're not going to do this. You know, that's how close we, that's how close we had. We came and you know, then here we are. Yeah, here we are. Here we are talking about AI happy little accidents.

Mike Koenigs [00:41:44]:
We are energy wasting accidents.

Dan Sullivan [00:41:49]:
Yeah.

Mike Koenigs [00:41:49]:
Well, this was a super fascinating.

Dan Sullivan [00:41:56]:
Well, it's a real mind twister because waste just has a bad name. But yeah, you have to waste to get higher forms of capability.

Mike Koenigs [00:42:08]:
Yes. And so, So should we call this episode why Waste is a good thing? Yeah, waste.

Dan Sullivan [00:42:20]:
Why we can't live without waste.

Mike Koenigs [00:42:22]:
Yeah, I like that.

Dan Sullivan [00:42:24]:
We can't make progress without wasting energy.

Mike Koenigs [00:42:27]:
Well, let's wrap up this episode. We'll officially end this and say, as usual, we've got show notes for you. One of the things that I haven't shown you yet, Dan, but I'm going to do with the episodes is I, I have a new tool that I run an episode inside a tool called genspark. And one of the things that it does that's super exciting is. And I'll show you an example of it because I'll do it for this episode and hopefully I can find one of the examples that's particularly good. Here it is. So I can take a transcript from any video and I give it some instructions. And this is, this is something that I made from one of my presentations I did this weekend.

Mike Koenigs [00:43:16]:
So I did this teaching on the four quadrants and I fed in the transcript and I said now make it look like my websites and my content and it basically builds a beautiful presentation that we can hand out. So each one of our episodes, oh, great conversation. Into a beautiful presentation that's valuable and that we drive people to learn more. So I'm going to just tell, tell you that if you want this really cool presentation, head over to capabilityamplifier.com freestuff okay, so I'm going to have my team build that. But what I've been doing now with this, with this technique is I consume somewhere in the neighborhood of, I'd say 20 to 30 hours worth of content per morning in 20 to 30 minutes. So this is a guy named Ross Love Grove on the top 10 evolution patterns. Someone told me about this guy and he's an industrial designer to an evolutionary biologist. I wanted to learn everything I could about him.

Mike Koenigs [00:44:30]:
Actually. I sat next to a guy who's worked with him and he told me about him and I said, well, I don't have time to fully digest them, but I want to learn everything about them. And he designs products based on biomimicry. So now I can digest this, but here's how I've been using it. I'll tell it to go out, learn everything about any topic and I'll say, now write it in my voice and make everything about this research about me and how I can use it in my business. So if you think about it, the future of education, which started with me wasting a little bit of energy to learn a little bit more, comes from being able to take any content on any topic, make the colors and the style match me and my voice and what I need it for. How can school compete with this? I think that's exciting. An exciting waste of energy.

Dan Sullivan [00:45:32]:
Yeah. You know what I notice about the websites and all the information? That it's not interesting if the typeface isn't Helvetica.

Mike Koenigs [00:45:43]:
Oh, well, here's one of the things we get to do. We get to say, use the Helvetica typeface.

Dan Sullivan [00:45:49]:
Yep, yep.

Mike Koenigs [00:45:51]:
So that's what I'll do. I'll tell it to make all of our.

Dan Sullivan [00:45:54]:
Everything you showed me today is Helvetica.

Mike Koenigs [00:45:57]:
Yeah.

Dan Sullivan [00:45:58]:
Yep. Well, I mean, helvetica comes in 100 different forms, but there's, there's an essential. It's created about 1940s, I think, by a Swiss in Switzerland. And it's just the great, greatest typeface. It's greatest.

Mike Koenigs [00:46:14]:
I agree. I use Helvetica new is my, my favorite one.

Dan Sullivan [00:46:17]:
I use Helvetica new standard. Everything in Strategic Coach is Helvetica new standard.

Mike Koenigs [00:46:22]:
It's easy to read, easy to digest, doesn't hurt the eyes, and you can make it big, you can make it small. I agree.

Dan Sullivan [00:46:29]:
Well, we agree it doesn't call any attention to itself.

Mike Koenigs [00:46:33]:
Yes. So we can absorb the information that it's sharing with us. Another great episode. Let's wrap this up, Head on over to Capability Amplifier.

Dan Sullivan [00:46:47]:
I'm not going to have dessert. The meal was so good.

Mike Koenigs [00:46:50]:
Awesome. Awesome. Okay, well, that's it for Dan and me again. Head on over to capabilityamplifier.com freestuff we're going to give you a really good AI generated summary of this episode that you'll be able to digest at a glance really, really quickly. We'll make a point of doing that in the future. So I just created a little more extra energy homework, but I think it's going to create a lot more value too.

Dan Sullivan [00:47:13]:
Okay, see you in the next episode.