Exploring Future Possibilities with Julian Bleecker

[00:00:00] Dave: I’ve got two AI note takers and a screen recording going, so make sure you don’t have anything in your teeth.

[00:00:06] Julian: Is it going to be like a video thing?

[00:00:08] Dave: My plan is to make it a video. It’s a face to face conversation. I don’t anticipate doing a lot of video editing. Part of my goal is to make it as easy as I schedule an hour and I publish a podcast.

I don’t want to have to do a lot of, yeah, good luck

[00:00:25] Julian: with that. See the biggest. feature. So I’m looking at you. I’m not distracted by looking at myself. I also have a teleprompter so I can look right at you, looking right at you.

[00:00:37] Dave: Do you want to try doing the podcast?

[00:00:39] Julian: Totally.

[00:00:40] Dave: I can introduce you as my guest today is Julian Bleeker, a friend of many years.

[00:00:44] Julian: Are we doing this now? Is it happening?

[00:00:45] Dave: I found her near future laboratory.

[00:00:51] Julian: Let’s see what my little short bio says nowadays. Oh, this is like those long things. So it’s just Julian Bleeker, founder of New Future Laboratory, because the rest of it’s packed up into, you got to listen to the podcast. You want to really know.

Yeah, exactly.

[00:01:04] Dave: My guest today is Julian Bleeker. Welcome Julian. How about that? He needs no introduction.

[00:01:09] No One: Yeah.

[00:01:10] Dave: Okay. I’m going to be reading here. So I’m going to give it a shot. Let me know when you feel ready. Put your crackers away, please. Yeah.

[00:01:18] Julian: My crackers are crackers. Put them under your chair.

[00:01:24] Dave: Hi, I’m Dave Gray, founder of the school of the possible, where we were exploring a new approach to learning. Most schools focus on teaching existing facts in the school of the possible. Okay. We focus on possible facts, things that do not yet exist, but could be so. The school is about creating the future, but it is rooted in the present.

For

who you are, or where you are, there is a best next step for you. A step that you can take. A step toward a better, more fulfilling, more meaningful life and work. A step toward a better world. That’s the art of the possible. The art of the best next step. And it starts Now,

I’m Dave Gray, your host, and this is the first edition of the show. My guest today is Julian Bleeker. Welcome, Julian.

[00:02:33] Julian: Thanks. Great to be here, Dave.

[00:02:36] Dave: For those people who have not followed your work as for many years as I have, what’s the most important thing that they should know about you? What would you like to share about yourself?

[00:02:48] Julian: I’m an engineer and a technologist with a PhD in history of consciousness. So I have no idea what I do.

[00:02:56] Dave: That’s interesting. Cause my introduction would have been Gillian Bleecker is a fiercely independent thinker, creator, and researcher. He’s the founder of the near future laboratory and a design futurist.

In fact, he’s one of the people who coined the term design fiction. Welcome Julian.

[00:03:20] Julian: That’s awesome. I like that one.

[00:03:24] Dave: Let’s talk about creating a customer. Let’s start with the very highest level. When I say the purpose of businesses to create a customer. What does it mean to you when you hear that, those words create a customer?

[00:03:36] Julian: That’s it’s super resonant. I’d never heard that before. I guess probably heard it in one way or another, but to identify it and tie it so tightly to the, what the purpose of business is, it’s exceptionally helpful. If I think back to my experience with my company, Amita, and I feel like I learned that I came to appreciate that in the process of building the business.

I wonder if I had felt that more strongly at the outset, what the shape of the business would have been. I’m not saying that would have been better or worse because the outcome was fine. I sold the business.

[00:04:11] Dave: I think it’s a great story. An interesting one.

[00:04:14] Julian: Yeah. So. The idea to imagine the future of the bicycle computer.

I know it sounds weird. It’s not like the future of the refrigerator or the car, but the bicycle computer, cause that was something where my attention was very much focused at that particular time. This is around 2013, 2014 and being like a engineer and product guy. You look at a bicycle computer, you can imagine it’s like a sports tracker.

Many people are probably familiar with that. They usually like rectangular plastic things with a digital display and a couple buttons on the side and they beep at you and they’re meant to give you some kind of analytic sense of your accomplishment or achievement in run or your bicycle ride or whatever it might be.

If there was an evolution of that, What might it be? And if you don’t imagine as hard as you possibly could, the evolution of that is it should get a little bit smaller, maybe thinner, use less battery power, and have a color display. I start in these other weird ways. Suppose it wasn’t a square. Suppose it was a circle.

Because there are lots of things on a bicycle that are circular, so that kind of makes sense. Suppose it wasn’t made of plastic. Suppose it was made of machined aluminum. Because aluminum and steel has heritage and tradition. In that world, a beautiful steel bike is meaningful to someone who associates strongly with material.

So for this particular kind of person, how do you resonate along those kinds of value lines, that sense of belonging to a specific kind of community with a heritage and all that, and they want a bicycle computer. You do things like make it out of steel, you make it circular, you make it with a mechanical movement.

So rather than watching a digital booping display, you see this lovely kind of serenade of movement with these articulated hands. And you play around with things like font and color. So now it’s speaking to a different set of sensitivities. So you go ahead and you have the mechanical display, but just underneath you put all the digital components, the microprocessor, the satellite GPS connectivity, you make it able to pair with an app that you can have on your device so that you can extract the data at some point.

So that’s the Amada one.

[00:06:20] Dave: Okay. Let me stop you there. You’ve got this thing. It’s for bicycle owners. You probably don’t have in your back pocket, a big mailing list of bicycle owners. Right. You’re a product guy and you have a cool product. How do you go from there to creating a customer?

[00:06:43] Julian: I can tell you how I did.

[00:06:44] No One: Yeah.

[00:06:48] Julian: You’re creating as, as best as one can connections within the industry. If a couple of people in the industry, you get them to follow you on Instagram, this is, yeah, it’s totally clumsy and you start beginning to intimate. That there’s something coming. Right. I’m not saying I’m great at that. There’s something coming and people wonder what it could be.

You get a little bit of interest like that and then did Kickstarter and the Kickstarter served two functions. One was purely marketing function. Now people can see it. So you have a beautiful representation of the values and the object itself, and you fetishize the aesthetic value of it as best you can cinematically.

And then you create connections and associations with the values that you think the customer that you’re trying to create feels on the other side. And that’s all touching people in the heart. And then you also speak to the head, you speak to the head by pointing out the characteristics and features of it.

This is not just a beautiful thing. It does the things that you expect a bicycle computer to do. It just looks different and it looks beautiful. And then you get people to sign up on kickstart to pre order it. And then mailing list starts to grow and it’ll grow even more because people will pre order it.

They’re able to, what is it? Support it or something with a few or 400. And then there are other people. Yeah, this is cool. I like what’s going on here. Let me also go to the website. So you create a website that a lot of people to see more details about the product and sign up on the mailing list. Now, you mailing list is even.

A little bit bigger.

[00:08:24] Dave: Here’s one way I think about it. I had a mentor. His name was Randy Root, who was a guy that I learned a lot from an entrepreneur. And one of the things he said to me that always resonated, stuck in my head is nothing happens till somebody sells something. And I never thought of myself as a salesperson.

I think of myself as a creator. It made me realize we buy stuff all the time. We go around to the grocery store, get a coffee, you go to Amazon, you go to the bookstore, browsing around, you go to the gap, whatever you’re buying stuff. And on the other side of every single transaction, there’s somebody selling something.

And as buyers, we like to have choices, but in the end of the day, it’s the sellers who create the choices of what we buy, you go into a mall and you have the choice of what’s in the mall, right? You’re not creating choices, but if you start this process of creating customers. You’re actually creating choices for other people and also you’re creating more freedom of choice for yourself You can choose what you bring to the world.

What’s your uniqueness? Whatever that might be your special recipe for chicken or whatever it is How do you think about it? How do you go about it? How do you make that? A part of your life, you live and survive because of customers, right? Because of an offer or offers that you put out there in the world.

You’re one of those people selling things. You’ve create choices for people. How do you think about it? How can we get inside your head? If people want to learn how to do that. How do we do it the bleaker way? How do we learn what’s the bleaker method?

[00:10:12] Julian: Don’t listen to what I say.

I guess the thing that I’ve learned later in my professional life is to, is that it’s, it starts from my instinct and desire to create something unusual, unexpected. That’s what really drives me. I do like customers. It’s a great challenge to the artistic sensibility. I think many art people will be like, I will not.

Sell the product of my imagination that is despicable to me. I will not transact in your baser forms of commerce. I create to express the purity of my soul and my vision. And you’ll find folks who are very much on that side of the. The spectrum between imagination and transactional commerce or capitalism, whatever you want to call it, but do not function well in the world because they cannot recognize the for better or worse that we live in a world where various aspects of survival, unless you’re well adjusted around it will mean that it’ll be a hard go.

I’m not saying that you’ll live a life of ruin. I think you can live a beautiful, expansive life. If you’re able to come to terms with that. And your life will look very different, and people who are on the transaction side will look at you with wonder and awe. Look how happy they are. Look how effervescent their life is.

Look at what they’re able to do. I wish I could live that way. But here I am, trapped in this world of structure and containment, and these shoes hurt, I don’t have to wear them, and I’m pretending that I’m happy, and now I’m on my third marriage because I haven’t figured out where my heart is. I’ve ignored my heart and it’s a, that was a whole thing.

So I think that if we’re able to accept and embrace, almost collaborate with the notion of customer and identify it, not as people coming to you because they just want to extract your value and then just kick you and tell you to go away. Okay. They’re, they’re coming to you in a sense of I love what you do, whatever it might be, it could be selling like pencils or newsstands, you know, They’re coming to you because you give me something every day.

And I know it looks like just a pure transaction because here’s the 5 for the newspaper. And now I grab it from you. And now I walk away, but they’re coming there every day. They’re coming to you. If you can associate your relationship with them at that, it’s like a beautiful customers that if you probably bring something more to them, they get the newspaper, but I’ll tell you what.

They’re also like, yeah. They go to Dave every morning. I don’t know. I just don’t, I could go to the guy across the street, but I just like him. And they might say it’s more convenient because I don’t have to cross the street. But I think if you can identify with that, this is what happened with Amita. Like people were sending me fucking chocolates.

I didn’t ask for a chocolate. They’re sending me chocolates. It was like, Hey dude, this is the best chocolate. I went on a big cycling trip and went through Belgium and I brought these chocolates back for you. Send me literally like on the wall over there. It’s like a crayon drawing. Someone’s kid. Drew a crayon drawing on the back of the letter that the person sent me to thank, thank, thank me for the product.

That’s a customer that is a customer with

[00:13:33] No One: a

[00:13:34] Julian: very deep and rich relationship. And it gets to the point where you start feeling as the creator or everyone call it as the business proprietor, as the owner that, yeah, this is the value exchange. They get the hard thing or they get the memo or they get the newsletter or they get the email or the whatever.

They get the t shirt. But it’s not because they needed to cover themselves up with a t shirt because they didn’t have anything else to wear. The value exchange is what they’re there for. I give you something, I get something back. And it just so happens we live in a world where I can give you this folding money, and I’m going to get the thing back, and I know the thing only cost you 4 to make, and you’re selling it for 40.

But I felt 40 of value out of this.

[00:14:19] Dave: Okay, so question for you. Like many creative people, Curious investigative type people. You have business customers, you have corporate customers and you provide services, but you also make products and you have a foot in the, call it the consumer retail world, a foot in the corporate consulting world.

Tell us a little bit about that, how you balance all that. Who do you think of when I say who’s your customer, Julian?

[00:14:50] Julian: Yeah. So the way I look at it. And playing around with some of the terms that people will use to describe this. Are you a B2B company or B2C company? There’s a B2C division and that’s business to community and B2B division, which is commercial engagements with enterprise scale clients.

[00:15:11] Dave: And when you talk about divisions, you’re dividing yourself here.

[00:15:13] Julian: I’m totally by myself. Yeah. I play around with that notion, just trying to imagine the organization as something with multiple divisions and there’s something on the third floor and there’s a whole cast of fictional characters as Eugene, Edgar.

Eugene. Yeah.

[00:15:28] Dave: And a near future laboratory is a place where you are exploring the near future through the creation and design of Artifacts that we might find if we went to the future in a time machine and came back.

[00:15:42] Julian: Yeah, that’s it. Yes. Artifacts from possible futures is sometimes how I think about it.

And essentially conversation starters. It was like curious. Yeah, I wonder what this is about. And someone be like, oh, I don’t know. So are you the

[00:15:55] Dave: dungeon master of. The near future game. Is that how you think of it?

[00:16:01] Julian: Yeah. don’t go to the dungeon and dragon scenes, but it’s too biblical, but sometimes I think it’s like a shepherd, mostly because I have trouble saying I’m a leader, but I am a leader.

Sometimes people say he’s the godfather of design fiction. Also because the in Dungeons and Dragons, you have to immerse yourself in the world, put on a level of, yeah, of role playing, your consciousness needs to sink into the world to the degree that you can imagine happens when people sit down to play Dungeons and Dragons.

[00:16:29] No One: Yeah.

[00:16:30] Julian: Which is, and now in this world, I’m assuming this role is character. So you have a Chris Butler is running a project in the discord that is to imagine the future of the organization. He’s fascinated with that as a question. What is the organization, the place that we go to create value as like economic units of value that gets sold in the marketplace?

What does that look like? Interesting. So he does that. By creating the employee manual. From this possible future. And so to do that, you have to play the part. I’m the HR person of this future organization responsible for pulling together all the components that would go into this employee manual.

Organizations do, if they have to have an employee manual, at some point they get to the size where they have a head of procurement and then they have a head of HR So where’s your employee manual? They’re like, I don’t know. We don’t have one.

[00:17:19] Dave: Another word that comes to mind is like an artist colony, because it feels like it’s a group of creative.

Makers, designers that are interested in exploring these possible through future, through the act of making objects or pictures or catalogs or what have you.

[00:17:45] Julian: I think that is a significant portion of people because I think that they just think the idea is cool. You

[00:17:52] Dave: provide tools for the people in this community, right? You provide a toolkit.

[00:17:57] Julian: Yes. They’re literally tools. And then there’s the manuals and then the artifacts. And so that creates these indices into what this could be.

And it’s another way for people to have it explained to them in a tangible form. What it is that’s going on, what our sensibility, what our vibe is, how we go about these things. Here are a bunch of examples of things we’ve done. And those things resonate as. It’s not just an example, but it is the thing, this is what we create, taking the TBD catalog, for example, or the projects that come from these worlds.

And that just becomes this like, all these elements around, like the people, they feel, I want to be a part of this, associated with it. Now here are a bunch of things that I can have that are richer than just merchandise. I don’t sell t shirts that say near future laboratory. I sell things that near future laboratory has found in these possible futures.

And that resonates again with people. I guess also thinking about the nature of your show, what do we call it again?

[00:19:00] Dave: It’s called create a customer show,

[00:19:02] Julian: create a customer show. There’s a heavy emphasis almost to the point where it’s like, I’m taking the digital stuff off the website that they are tangible things, they are material things.

So the value of that is that you can have it on your desk. And someone’s going to walk by, and they’re going to be like, they’re going to double take, because they’re going to be like, what is this? And they’re going to pick it up, and the person’s going to snatch it back. Don’t take that, that’s mine. Where did you get it?

Near future laboratory, go get your own, get out of here. So it becomes a way of, and he’s making the object the tangible thing. And, this is a totally technical point, but, And there was an instinct in a phase in your future laptop, which this is, this stuff shouldn’t be transactional because it’s all about, it’s got an educational component.

Somehow people think that education should be free. I think it should be free, but I paid, I paid the bills. And so we had a bunch of free download stuff. Why not just turn it into a PDF and people can download it and they can get the value of the work you put in. And I just points like now, man. Now there is value in here and you can’t get it for free.

If you get it for free, you’re not going to care about it.

[00:20:11] Dave: You can’t download the Mona Lisa Kenya. You have to go see it.

[00:20:15] Julian: Yeah. From a building customers. And the customer, the kind of customers you’ll want, you don’t want a lot of corrupt in your customer database. You don’t want a lot of, that’s a quote.

That’s an

[00:20:24] Dave: overheard. You don’t want a lot of cruft in your customer database.

[00:20:28] Julian: No, because the people who don’t pay for something, they don’t come back and pay for something. They don’t come back and pay for something.

[00:20:34] Dave: Interesting.

[00:20:35] Julian: It’s a, to me, it’s a waste and I’m comfortable with that now.

[00:20:39] Dave: That gets to another one of the things that I think is really important and valuable about creating a customer.

When you just have an audience, there’s no way to filter the, you get likes on your LinkedIn page, right? There’s no way to filter. What are the more, what’s a good and a bad and what someone just clicked it. That’s it. Didn’t take them any effort. When you have an email list and which 10 percent of them decided to pay you 5 a week.

A month or whatever to get your email, even though maybe you’re not even offering any anything special. You just turn on the payment button. They’ve given you a signal, right? Haven’t they? Wow. This is a person who’s like a good tipper. Let’s say at a restaurant, you’re going to recognize them next.

Hopefully maybe you recognize them the next time they come in. Now you can say, okay, here are the 50 people that I do really want to focus on that I am going to invest in. So it helped one of the, one of the real benefits of creating a customer is helping you segment the people who are paying attention to you by what they’re telling you.

[00:21:57] Julian: And I think it’s really important because again, it’s one of those things like you’re talking about the 80 20 rule, like where do I need to be focused in my time and energy and effort? And how can I get to a state where I’m comfortable? I would rather have a thousand deeply engaged customers than a 10, 000 person audience who just wants to show up and maybe not look, if you’re not feeling the value of what I’m doing, that’s totally cool.

That’s beautiful that you can recognize that in yourself. Now, could you get out of the chair, please? Someone else wants to sit there and not in an antagonistic way. It’s just, if you’re not feeling this, that’s fine. Move along. Cool.

[00:22:33] Dave: So question, you have business customers, you have corporate clients. Tell us a little bit about that and how that feeds the creative energy of your life and all the other things that you’re doing, what do you do for companies?

[00:22:47] Julian: We help them imagine into their futures by creating artifacts from their possible future. And there are a few kind of, um, ways in which we do that. It typically, it happens such that they are trying to tap into what is oftentimes for organizations, the nebulous thing, like they’ll have a vision usually comes down from the C suite.

About what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. And it’s usually very prosaic. It’s a thing that the CEO says at the whole hands when they get up there on the little riser and say, we are here to X our purposes to X. And it oftentimes it can be very good rhetoric, like words, and it can be resonating people like, yeah, I want to be a part of that.

We’re here to make the world a better place. Let’s do this. And there’s a huge gap between the statement of the vision and it’s implementation, the gap between yammering and actually now we’re going to actually build the house. Right. I want a beautiful house. That makes me feel right at home and is warm and welcoming to myself.

[00:23:54] Dave: Or like Exxon, we’re going to be totally green energy by 2030. Okay. What does that annual report look like from 2030?

[00:24:02] Julian: What is the website

[00:24:03] Dave: looks like? What are you selling?

[00:24:05] Julian: What is the issue of the economists look like when you’re, you know, from the future, when they’re talking about, look how Exxon has evolved and developed, look at the things that they’ve done.

And I think it’s that gap that now, increasingly, Is being understood to be a failure to communicate in concrete terms, what that means, and it’s just this middle management layers, I don’t know how we translate that and where I’m accountable for it because I’ve got these crazy KPIs. That indicate whether or not I’m succeeding, but I don’t know how to imagine into that vision statement in a way that gives me a clear sense of how I direct my division or my team.

[00:24:43] Dave: You’re almost role playing your customer’s point of view. And you’ve told us a little bit about your business customer. But let’s say if someone’s out there watching this show right now and they want to know, okay, Julian, I want to be your customer. I think I’m gonna understand if I’m in a role in a company, that job is to think about the future and pull people into that future and get people excited about that future.

I can hire you to help me make that more tangible. That’s the one thing I had heard. Okay. What if I’m not a business person? What if I’m just interested in curious about what you’re doing? What can I buy from you? How can I become your customer? What’s an idea? What’s your ideal, what’s your ideal customer look

[00:25:24] Julian: like?

So we already did the enterprise customer. If you’re a person who maybe you are within enterprise, but you’re not quite sure, I don’t get what this, what’s going on here. So those are way to almost get a taste of what. This practice is while also learning what it is and how to do it and examples of it. So they’re essentially three of them.

One is general seminar, which is broadly a public way to engage in and sensing the things, and we’ll take a question that an enterprise customer might ask, but it’s a rapid, it’s like a 90 minute thing. What is the future of AI? So everyone’s wondering, so we’ll actually take that on. And that’s the, in the context of the salon.

So we’ll ask ourselves a question and no, one’s there to be an expert. I’m not there to say, here’s what the future of AI is. I’m there to prompt you into wondering about it and allow you to go into that future and one of the characteristics of design fiction that you’ll learn if you go to a general seminar is that it’s not about the broad big scale prediction, it’s about trying to make sense of what it possibly might be in the context of like everyday life.

So sometimes the prompt for the question is what is the future of AI? Let’s start with what’s for breakfast in the AI future. How do you make breakfast in this world? What is my pan? What’s my frying pan in that future? Is it somehow AI augmented? Am I getting recipes through an interface that is built into my magic chef oven?

Is my magic chef oven talking to me and asking me about what I want to make today and how I can make it? All these things to me seem eminently plausible and like a little bit of funny and interesting and weird. It’s no weirder than us talking to televisions as we do now. So that’s general seminar. Then there’s super seminar, which is where we bring in experts.

From a particular domain of practice. We just did a couple on generative AI. So we brought actual people who are fairly well accomplished to the degree that anyone can be nowadays with generative AI to talk about how they’re using it in their practice and mostly right now. It’s coming from the creative realm.

But then we also have 2 people from more in the enterprise. How is. An enterprise company like Arup was one of the speakers, one of the speakers came from Arup, who’s a knowledge manager, who’s using generative AI. It’s very practical from the point of view of someone who is in a big organization. Wow, I would love to know how to better manage the terabytes of knowledge that exists within my organization.

Let me pop into this session and see how that’s, see how that happens. So in my mind, that is, there’s a future there that this one particular individual I come in is right at the edge of. The job wasn’t, Hey, we want someone who knows generative AI to come into our organization, help us figure out knowledge management.

They happen to be a really amazing knowledge manager who was, Hey, we need to look into this generative AI stuff and I will explore it to no rules. And there’s no guidance. I don’t have a manager who’s telling me what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m just doing it. And so that gives people a sense of like how you can be futures oriented.

Person that you can live at the vanguard of what’s possible, even if it’s not your job description and essentially teach your organization from inside.

[00:28:20] Dave: That’s interesting. Okay. Just to start wrapping it up here, a couple of thoughts, a couple of questions. If you were to look across your life and your daily habits, your weekly habits, what’s the number one kind of like habit that you would recommend people get into if you’re They want to get better at creating customers for a customer creating habit.

What’s the one thing that you definitely are going to always keep doing, because it is a great habit and it helps you create customers.

[00:28:59] Julian: Is it silly answer says I create things that I feel like I would want it here. It’s not through like a say out or something, but I feel like I am creating for myself.

What do I want to do that I think would be a value. And what I think what I learned is that if I thought too much about, Expectations or tried to imagine a fictional customer as opposed to myself. It became a lot harder to do that work of, you know, the newsletter. So this

[00:29:25] Dave: is, I would say this sounds a lot like what Jason Fried says when he talks about scratch your own itch, start with yourself, be your own customer.

What would you want to buy? What do you want that doesn’t exist?

[00:29:38] Julian: I think that’s it. Yes, we did this. The latest artifact in the future is this book, Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. And so for anyone who’s a P. K. Dick fan, it’s the declarative as opposed to the question. It’s not do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

And this came up in a conversation with a friend. And I thought it was like, man, I would love to have that book on the shelf. I want that right next to do Andrew’s dream. So you can, cause I imagine someone coming into the library and being like, wait a minute, what’s going on here? What is this book? And that’s what it started from.

It became much more than that, but that was the kind of quote unquote joke that you chuckle at.

[00:30:10] Dave: What’s your biggest takeaway from this conversation? If I was going to do a tagline or a title for this conversation, what’s your takeaway?

[00:30:18] Julian: There are two things that I wrote down, noteworthy little things. One was the purpose of business is to create a customer.

That’s really helpful to me because as I’m going to go into this process of what is the purpose in your future laboratory, the kind of ideating that, we’ve had some calls and talks and it’s been very generative. So now I can think about how do I translate that? So that was, that’s, that stood out and create something worth following.

Especially if you’re going to be like an independent, small, potentially solo operator. The other thought that’s related to that is sticking with me is the, there’s something about being the face of the thing that’s worth following that I think connects with people in a way that it is part of that unique value proposition, unique selling proposition.

It’s Dave. Oh my gosh, it’s the man, the myth, the legend, there he is. And I think all this stuff around community and I think something happens and you probably experienced it with explain when the organization becomes bigger and you’re less able to be the face. What happens at Google when Sergei and the other guy are no longer, they’re not there at all.

But when they start transitioning out, it’s the beginning of the end.

[00:31:34] Dave: Critical. Error recording has to

[00:31:39] Julian: stop.

[00:31:41] Dave: Yeah. The zoom is probably still going, but this is really, this ticks me off. My first podcast courses has to happen. Julian, if people who are watching this want to find out more about you and connect with you, what’s the best place to go?

[00:31:58] Julian: Julian bleaker. com or near future laboratory.

com.

[00:32:02] Dave: All right. Okay. Thanks for joining me on the show. I really appreciate your time. And thanks a lot.

[00:32:10] Julian: It’s been a pleasure. Super fun, Dave. As always.

[00:32:16] Dave: Bye everybody. Thank you for joining us on the art of the possible to learn more and discover your best next step, come visit us at school of the possible.

com. See you next time. Was that fun?

[00:32:33] Julian: Yeah, it was super fun. It was super fun.

[00:32:37] Dave: Thank you, Jillian. I appreciate it. Yeah. Anyway, thanks so much. And I’m glad that was a fun time of I’m learning how to do podcasts, but I guess I like working out loud, learning in public,

[00:32:50] Julian: totally nothing

[00:32:50] Dave: wrong with it.

[00:32:51] Julian: Yeah. And it’ll evolve and it’ll get awesome.

[00:32:56] Dave: This was great. And I really appreciate it. Any, do you have any thoughts for me or but

[00:33:03] Julian: I have noticed that I figured out the shape of them differently. To make it less work. I was used to be like top 10 things from the future laboratory and the entire Sunday shot, just trying to get that together to now where it’s just, you could be one thing.

It doesn’t matter. It could be two things. It doesn’t have to be tons of things. And that gets a little bit easier. I’ve noticed that I’m like unstructured guys. So I don’t really have a good format for my shows. That is repeatable. At least for the podcast. It’s just two people having coffee. It’s a little bit like Seinfeld’s.

Comedians in cars thing. We’re just going to talk a little bit scripted, but the counterpoint is, yeah, but that’s

[00:33:41] Dave: also the charm of

[00:33:43] Julian: it.

[00:33:43] Dave: Yeah.

[00:33:44] Julian: Yeah. So I think if I were to do a show, I think I’d probably set it up like that. Sit in a diner. Yeah. And roll out a nice car. Bring the 59, 69 GTO. We’ll drive that thing.

And he probably just said, I think I’d like to do a show. And then the next day his creative assistant came back with, here’s the whole thing, I’ll plot it out. Please, we’ll send a car for you. And we’ll get you there. Yeah, I would just make it the Dave show just do whatever feels what your heart is telling you to do

[00:34:12] Dave: Yeah, for me, it was actually quite a revelatory discovery when I realized.

Oh, yeah What is it that I am passionate about have fun with love to share? want for everybody that I know is This habit of creating a customer, it’s keeps it real. It keeps your life real. It keeps you on track. It’s good for your self esteem. It helps you feel appreciated. It’s scary. It creates a service mindset, puts you in a service mentality.

It helps you understand your value. It creates freedom. It creates choices for yourself, creates choices for other people. You don’t think of sales as being a selfless. Profession, but providing a service is, and if it’s a service that people want to buy, then of course you’re selling it. Julian has a service.

Dave is a service as opposed to Julian as an employee working for big company.

[00:35:16] Julian: Yeah. Jobby

[00:35:16] Dave: job. That’s a big, it’s a different mindset, isn’t it?

[00:35:19] Julian: It’s helpful.

[00:35:22] Dave: All right, man.

[00:35:23] Julian: Okay. That was fun. Thanks for

[00:35:25] Dave: being my guinea pig.

[00:35:26] Julian: Like I said, you got any questions, whether they’re technical or existential, I’m here.

[00:35:33] Dave: Awesome. Very cool. All right. All right, Julian.

[00:35:36] Julian: All right, my friend.

[00:35:37] Dave: Take care.

[00:35:38] Julian: Take care.