Dan's been hunting for a historical parallel to AI for a while.
He found it in the number zero.
Not the technology of zero. The idea of it.
Reading a book on the history of money, he landed on how zero spread through Europe around 1300. It jumped from Sicily's trading centers across the continent in about a decade. Traders could suddenly do in seconds what used to take all afternoon.
That's his read on AI. It didn't arrive as a new machine. It arrived as a new way to think.
He's been writing his next quarterly book with Claude. It offered to build him a tool that formats every paragraph as an axiom plus a sales hook. Then it spun up a one-year app to track his Vasper and Power Plate sessions, projected gains and all.
"This is like discovering zero."
What you're reaching for isn't artificial intelligence, he says. It's total intelligence. The best human thinking, on tap.
The catch is you still have to know what you want. And wanting is a real skill.
We opened on CoachCon in Orlando, where Strategic Coach had turned 30 years of old tools into a hall of history. That one landed for me. I've been journaling since April 1996, and there was my own trail of decisions, lined up in one place.
From there we wandered. The fall of the Roman numeral system. Guessing versus betting. The news that we'd lost a good friend that week.
That's the show.
Listen for the moment Dan turns AI into the return of zero... and why he thinks knowing what to want is the one thing no machine can hand you.
Show highlights
Links
Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/wtc/177-discovering-zero/