Your Adult Brain Is Your Last Unfair Advantage - with Dr. Michael Netzley

00:00
Dan Nestle
Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. Five years ago, and I can't believe it's been that long, I had a conversation that changed how I think about my own brain with this particular guest. We Talked about Navy SEALs learning Arabic, something called Default Network, and why everything I'd been told about cognitive decline was, to use my guest's word, rubbish. His argument is that the aging brain story is exactly backwards. Different cognitive abilities peak at different ages. Strategic attention in your late 50s, innovative cognition in your early 60s, integrative reasoning, and some of you folks might say integrative at around 62. Look, and I was skeptical. But then AI showed up and commoditized the very skills younger workers supposedly excel at. Speed, information processing, rapid adaptation. I mean, what's left?

01:09
Dan Nestle
Human judgment, the thing the aging brain actually does best. Well, my guest today, he spent five years building on this, the Executive Brain Playbook, an AI powered platform called Thrive. Faculty roles at IMD and Korn Ferry clients from BNP Paribas to Infineon. I'll tell you in his substack, which you all must read thrive after 45. He has been writing about this, his recent piece about Janus, the two faced Roman God of thresholds. One face backward, one face forward. The Romans carved him above every doorway because they understood you can't cross a threshold looking in only one direction. See, that's the midlife transition most of us get wrong. We either cling to what worked before or chase reinvention that ignores everything we've built. Meanwhile, AI keeps reshaping what organizations actually need from experienced professionals. The playbook has changed.

02:05
Dan Nestle
The question is whether we are ready to cross. Making his return to the trending communicator, or I should say his first time on the trending communicator. But his return to the hot seat in front of Dan Nestle because he was here in the early days of the Dan Nestle show, the founder and CEO of Extend My Runway, Dr. Michael Netzle.

02:30
Michael Netzley
Good evening, Dan. Or good morning from singing and from the man cave here and doing great. I am honored to be back.

02:39
Dan Nestle
It is an honor to have you back, especially because last time were on and this was really an interesting, cool opportunity for me to take a little walk down memory lane because like 5 years ago you're episode like 20 or something way back before I got my podcasting feet really and I was just sort of playing around figuring out what's what, and I somehow made this Singapore connection who Made a Singapore, another Singapore connection for me. And before I knew it, like, I, you know, Michael Netsley in front of me talk about neuroscience. And I was like, oh, neuroscience, the greatest thing. I didn't know anything about neuroscience. And in the middle of the, I think like 15 minutes into the episode, I was like, neuroscience, yeah, let's get into it. I was like, oh, here we go. And I was just.

03:25
Dan Nestle
But it was a great learning experience for me and Michael's so gracious understanding that I didn't know, like the first thing about, you know, what I was asking about at the time. But, you know, I was young then, you know, only in my very late 40s. And, you know, understanding the way that Michael has framed. The way that you framed the, the way we age and the way our brain, you know, well, for some people, I mean, it's obviously it's, it varies, your mileage may vary on it, but the way your brain evolves and changes and continues to change throughout your life. Eye opener for me.

04:01
Dan Nestle
And I'll tell you, in the five years that I've known you, and certainly, you know, in more recent, the more recent year or two, we've been really, I think, turning up the volume on our LinkedIn relationship more. It's been so rewarding and, you know, if I just say so myself, we are examples of, you know, why the nonsense of, you know, you're done after 45 or 50 is just nonsense.

04:26
Michael Netzley
That's your starting line. You're not done.

04:28
Dan Nestle
Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's the beginning. So, so tell me what you've been up to these last five years, Mike. Let's start there.

04:35
Michael Netzley
Gosh, you know, trying to, trying to take care of all the kids is the first answer. But, you know, it's really, since the first recording, I'm, I've really doubled down on this idea of how our brain can get better at different cognitive functions. What, what I like to say is how our brain can peak at business critical forms of thinking after the age of 45. If you make the investment, it is not automatic. But what's been really interesting and where I think the LinkedIn and our connection has ramped up for me is your admiration for Mark Schaefer. And so I've been digging into Mark's stuff and the connection for me was, well, wait a minute, these cognitive abilities and we'll get to that, that he can peak after 45 are exactly what AI cannot do.

05:36
Michael Netzley
And so what I've doubled Down on also over the last year is the idea that your adult brain is your last unfair advantage in the A of AI. And if you optimize these midlife strengths by making investments, you can do the things that I cannot. And in fact, we're already starting to see some evidence of this. We look at hiring patterns, we're seeing college graduates have a lot more difficulty finding those entry level jobs which are more easily automated. But a great article out of the Independent a couple of months ago out of the UK talking about how midlife employees are retaining their employment because they can do the things that AI cannot.

06:21
Michael Netzley
So it's been a really interesting journey, if you will, over these past couple of years, the rise of AI and just continuing to connect the dots and the amazing research that even further reinforces this assertion that we can get.

06:36
Dan Nestle
Better with age 100%. And let the record show that I was not the first person to mention Mark Schaer on this show today.

06:46
Michael Netzley
I stole your thunder.

06:48
Dan Nestle
No, I get some flack sometimes from some good friends because it's like you're always talking about Mark. I always talk about Mark because Mark is my friend. He is a presence in my brain and you know, he's a smart fellow and I read his stuff and I talk to him. So, you know, he's on my, he's on my mind and he deserves to be. So anybody got a problem with that out there? You know, sorry, I'm not going to say don't listen to my show. Please continue to listen. But, but yeah, go listen to Mark and read his stuff and you'll know what I'm talking about. What I wanted to. What's interesting thing is that you brought up though, talking about like this employment situation we have, you know, and the way that I think there's a lot.

07:34
Dan Nestle
There's of course uncertainty, but everybody's convinced that the game's over and everybody's losing their jobs. You know, I saw something, I think today or yesterday on Jay acunzo's feed on LinkedIn, you know, where he said something about he actually just flipped the script. And I'm surprised I haven't seen more people say this, but it's like AI is not taking your job. AI fills some certain middle things that we all do. And there's a, there's different steps and there's, you know, there's this. AI is really good on the execution, but AI is a piece of technology. It is not taking your job. You are giving at your job. Oh, 100% you're giving yourself away.

08:16
Dan Nestle
And that just got me thinking more about and Jay of course is a, you know, as another thought leader, speaker kind of, he's all, he's an incredible public speaker, but another person who's just seeing AI I think as this incredible enhancer of augmenter of the things that make us human and the things that those of us of a certain age and mental kind of model, you know, are poised to take advantage of. Your work though is I think central to this and also, you know, I should probably mention that Michael's been a communicator his whole life. Like we're. This is a trending communicator. Some people might say why are you talking to a neuroscience. I mean think. They won't say that but you know, M. Michael has been teaching communications and was a professor of communications. Are you still teaching for communications classes?

09:21
Michael Netzley
Probably mostly reduced to executive presence and influence these days. But the undergraduate writing, speaking show my age, radio skills that those choruses are in the history book at this point.

09:39
Dan Nestle
Right. But it's just, it's all about like where like I think communicators have this very, have a very special role to play in the AI age. And a lot of that is because of the way we think, because of our curiosity and the way that our brains work. But I had, I'd never really put a neuroscientific model against it and it kind of makes sense just thinking about this. So looking at communicators, Michael, and this job situation we're facing, I realize this is fairly large question, very open ended, but what is the advantage that communicators have if there is one in this crazy AI world we're living in now?

10:24
Michael Netzley
Okay, let's maybe tackle this in two ways where AI is injecting itself into our communication. Creative careers, thoughtful careers, whatever you want to call it. And the second one is going to be our understanding of audience. That'll be the second one. Now I don't know if you've had a chance to listen, but I'll say it twice. Our buddy Mark did a beautiful conversation with Mitch Joel. I think it's called thinking with Mitch Joel. Now it used to be six pixels of separation and I've been listening to that since the beginning. So we had Mitch here in Singapore, but they were asking about what really is the value or the impact of AI Now Marx argument and apparently he makes this in the book Is that look at the ways AI is making us dumber.

11:25
Michael Netzley
Where Mitch took the opposite point of view and says, well, I feel so much better because I use AI. So. So we've got this dichotomy here. Well, take that context. There was a magnificent article in time magazine about 10 days ago and Stanford professor, his name's Eric something, he had written a couple of books about the machine age and manufacturing age and how it created jobs and machine age is going to create jobs. He said, look, work has three fundamental aspects. The question at the beginning, the execution in the middle and the evaluation at the end. AI for communicators is taking the execution. Now we fret because we've always trained people how to use their voice and speak. We've always trained people how to be good writers or creative writers.

12:16
Michael Netzley
We've trained people how to create visuals or how to edit film and tell a narrative. AI can do that in a heartbeat. So we have to shift our value focus to the front end where we're dealing with the question or on the back end where we're dealing with the evaluation. And if you're going to try and compete with AI, and you taught me this, Dan, you're going to lose that battle off of your nudge. I adopted Claude. I've got about a 4,000 word preference in there about how I want this thing to write. I've created Skills MD files in Claude.

12:59
Dan Nestle
Great.

13:00
Michael Netzley
And I then started doing that using that mini rag function. So I'm uploading my branding document, uploading my publications. It's brilliant what it puts out. It gets you at least 80% of the way, if not further. So the real value, what I find doing with my own work these days, and this is still on that first question, where the value is created is I spend a lot of time in judgment. What comes out of this, okay, that's not going to resonate with my audience or this is kind of inconsistent with what I say or I don't like the feel of it. It feels empty. There's no me voice in it. So I'm doing all of that judgment and adjustment on the end. But I'm also doing massive amounts of work on the front end of all of the research.

13:50
Michael Netzley
How do I construct either an initial thesis or I've got sort of five ideas floating around. What am I trying to say? Here are the key sources I want you to use in Claude. I've actually coded per year guidance and ethics test, a relationship test. So it's a communication relationship based. I have a competitor analysis Built into it. Have I faded into competitor space or am I keeping my unique voice? So I'm running all these tests, but I'm doing all the work on the front end and back end. Now, here's the connection. All that work on the front end and back end, front end, innovative thinking and focus, backend focus, both ends of it, strategic thinking. These are the skills that you, if you invest and develop, you can get better at in the second half of life. It will never be automatic.

14:48
Michael Netzley
The mere fact that you're 55 does not make you better, or 65 or 45. You have to make the investments. But if you do these shifts in work that we see as communicators at middle age, we have the potential to be brilliantly equipped to do that kind of work and let Claude pump out the words. That's fine. That's fine.

15:15
Dan Nestle
Well, first, of course, you know, I agree with you because you even just said that you. That I nudged you sort of in this direction. And, you know, some of my approaches really do echo or sort of reflect what you're talking about. And I completely agree, like, I have an argument with people sometimes. And actually, in fact, there was a viral, almost like for LinkedIn, kind of from. By LinkedIn standards, a viral post that my friend Lee Judge put up the other day, and he was talking about AI Slop, you know, and his argument was essentially, don't blame the tool. You know, you gotta. It's. That's what it comes down to. Well, the creative set came out in force. And when I say the creative side, I don't mean like the copywriters and designers who work in commerce and in business. I mean, artists.

16:12
Dan Nestle
I mean, you know, people who write fiction and screenplays, those people. And it was a new experience. I never saw them on LinkedIn before. You know, I mean, I have. I'm assuming that many of them are there, but we're there for business, so, you know, not in the same orbit. Suddenly they're like chiming in.

16:33
Michael Netzley
Yeah.

16:34
Dan Nestle
They were so angry. They're so angry at AI and what AI does and how they took. They didn't spare any words or punches in, really. Not only saying terrible things about Lee. But, you know, I was. I was in that conversation and the vitriol was very. Was very palpable. And one of the things that I was trying to put out there was that somebody said, AI is nothing like learning the guitar. Like learning the guitar was one of the analogies that I think Lee put up there. It's like something about, you need to get skilled with your instrument. And they're like, AI is not like nothing like learning. It's guitar. You know, it's, there's. AI is just a. You put in crap and you get crap. And I didn't argue with the guitar point. You know, there's artistry involved.

17:33
Dan Nestle
But what I said was it's a new thing. There is a difference between prompting AI and prompting. Prompting. Prompting, prompting AI. And yes, any, any input you put into the machine, your first run is a prompt. So people think, okay, that's a prompt. That's not a prompt. You're Talking about your 4,000 word volumes and your frameworks. That's a prompt. And I have come so far in just like understanding that it is a new form of writing, is a new form of thinking. And even that itself can get pretty meta with the way that I can assist you with putting the logic in place. But that prompt could never, like the best and greatest prompt in the world that gets, you know, Dr. Michael Netsley's article, written well, could never happen without an abundance of number one, ideas and frameworks and knowledge from your side.

18:38
Dan Nestle
But number two, a ton of iteration and work. So I don't want anybody to tell me that it's lazy. There's no laziness about a good, about a prompt that finally works.

18:51
Michael Netzley
100%. 100%. Yeah.

18:53
Dan Nestle
I think it's a new set, a new skill or a new thing. I don't know what it is.

18:57
Michael Netzley
Yeah, our point of value creation has shifted. Yeah. It's not the picking words.

19:03
Dan Nestle
Yeah. And that, just to get you back on track there, that was where AI is injecting itself. Then the, you know, were talking about that and the second point was about the understanding from the audience side.

19:16
Michael Netzley
Yes.

19:17
Dan Nestle
So you want to kind of tie those together.

19:19
Michael Netzley
Well, that's a nice connection to what you were saying about people, you know, resisting AI. And you know, and I just, I struggle with that. You know, if you're at the hospital and a, with the help of AI, a doctor diagnoses breast cancer as stage one instead of stage four because they're working with AI and not making that human error. Are you going to be angry at the AI for that? So, so, so we're directing it at the wrong way. And we support that anger, that vitriol, by changing our description of the audience. This is critical to that anti argument. I remember about a year and a half ago, maybe it's two years ago, a gentleman Used to be with Elliman. I think his name's David Armano, if I remember correctly.

20:11
Dan Nestle
Oh, yeah, David. He's been on the show. Okay, good friend.

20:14
Michael Netzley
So he was talking about, you know, get over AI. Most of what we produce is milk toast. Let's be honest. AI can produce milk toast faster, cheaper than, maybe even better than you can get over it. But now, recently I saw Dave basically flipped that position on his head and he's arguing that AI is going to make you dumber. Just like the interview in Mark Shaffer's book. I sit back and I took my time and I listened to multiple people making these arguments. It's not just Dave and it's not just Mark. There are others making this argument. And I realized in order to justify our unhappiness with what AI is doing, all of a sudden our audience instead of. You're an I audience. Instead of producing milquetoast, we are now philosopher kings. We are thinking at the highest order.

21:13
Michael Netzley
We, you know, we are one step away from producing Pulitzer Prize winning work. And now we're just suddenly, let AI do the writing for us. And we're going to become dumber. I'm sorry, I'm serious. We have been take. Human beings have been taking shortcuts all their life, every single day, thinking fast and slow. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. You're an authority. I'll believe you. Go into the company. You've got the filing cabinet style book. How have we been doing these quarterly reports for the last 10 years? Let's do it that way for the 11th year. The brain's fundamental mode is to save energy. So if there is a structure or a form and I don't have to think about it, the brain's going to go in that direction. So people have been taking shortcuts for years.

22:09
Michael Netzley
And this is why I just cringe every time I see that MIT study rolled out again.

22:16
Dan Nestle
That's. Oh, that's so ridiculous.

22:19
Michael Netzley
Guess what?

22:19
Dan Nestle
For a lot of reasons, but in,.

22:21
Michael Netzley
In elementary school, when I copied my neighbor's paper, I didn't remember what I copied. There's nothing new here. There's nothing new here. So it is, you know, I guess my next blog post, I've got a working title. My next substack, I got a working title. That AI is probably not going to make you dumber, but the choices you make definitely can.

22:43
Dan Nestle
And that I think is the key. Yeah, right.

22:45
Michael Netzley
Yeah.

22:46
Dan Nestle
And it goes to your model. It goes, it goes to Your. To your own teaching. And, and you say straight out that, you know, the developing into a. You call it the chairman, the chairperson's.

23:00
Michael Netzley
Brain, you know, 65, 75.

23:02
Dan Nestle
Yeah, right. But. But getting there is by no means guaranteed. I think when we first talked about it, you're talking about being like the. Like the master of the chessboard or the lord of the manor. Just like when you're 60. When you're 65, 75, you can just see the whole big picture. But not everybody. That's not a guarantee. You make choices along the way.

23:25
Michael Netzley
Yeah.

23:26
Dan Nestle
And I think in the way that you're tying this to AI now, this idea that it's going to make us dumber. Well, so there's a choice, a stark choice. You can sit back and stop doing anything with the time or the kind of space that AI gives you, and then you'll get dumber because you're not filling up, you're not filling it, or you're not trying to do it, you're not trying to outpace it. You don't take that as a cue to say, well, AI can do this really well. Well, then what? How can I make that even better? You know, there's a lot of. A lot of, I think, nuance there. But I think it's. The point is that. All right, so AI can do all these things faster or better, you know, whatever they can do. Milk toast. The best.

24:15
Dan Nestle
So if you're writing corporate communications or marketing, sometimes that's all that's good enough. All right, then. Yeah. All right, then. Great. So where do I then take that? Where not only can I shape it into something that's more valuable, or I can say, okay, fine, I don't want to do that anymore. I'm going to do something different. And I see more and more people making that choice. Maybe it's a bubble, but certainly the survivors of this AI apocalypse that everybody's talking about are going to be those people who are like, all right, fine, I got a new tool. Does this part better. And now let me work on this other part. Thanks.

24:56
Michael Netzley
Bingo. And this is where I think the marriage of your thinking and Mark's thinking comes together so nicely. It's not the prompting, it's the, as you said, prompting, prompting, prompting. But in that process of prompting, prompting, prompting, you've got to hold curiosity, hold uncertainty, and allow this to be a generative process that is a cognitive endeavor. And so the people who build this and the people who operate the way you guys are talking about directionally I think those are going to be the winners. Now this may evolve and become more refined, but directionally, those are going to be your winners.

25:37
Dan Nestle
I sure hope so, because when I read Mark's book and he was on the show talking about it, this, the whole idea of. It's cognitive offload. Right? That's the, that's the term that people use. People use. That's the term. And people talked about cognitive offload with social media. They talked about it with the advent of television. Put your kids in front of the tv, they're going to turn into idiots. It's not a new thing, but AI accelerates it in so many ways.

26:06
Michael Netzley
That's right.

26:07
Dan Nestle
And depending on the age you're at, I think the effect is different. So how does one, I think, I guess it depends. Let's, let's look at people who are in communications at different phases of their career. Where does that cognitive offload become either a danger or an opportunity?

26:26
Michael Netzley
Okay. Wow. That. Now, now that to me, that's a massive question. That's, that's really tough.

26:32
Dan Nestle
I like to haul them out there. I didn't even warn you about that one.

26:36
Michael Netzley
Let's set aside the work experience and career development on the job for a moment. Okay. Because that's an issue as well. But what we have to do. Okay, let me step back in a completely different direction. The basis of this is something called neuroplasticity. Your brain changes in response to external experiences that you care about. Okay. And what needs to happen at starting in that 40 to 45 window now, even better if you could start earlier. But you know, there's, as researchers at Harvard like to say, rarely do these things show themselves before age 40 to 45. Rarely. So this midlife, you've got to start giving yourself experiences, whether they're work experiences or brain training or health and wellness foundations underpinning it. All that are going to force you to strengthen that muscle for focus.

27:44
Michael Netzley
Just like you go to the gym and do curls to strengthen a bicep. You can operate in ways that will strengthen your focus. You can strengthen your ability to strategize, you can strengthen your ability to innovate. You can strengthen your ability to engage in transformational thinking. You can strengthen your ability to get out of binaries and think about all alternate or next level up options. We can think about relationships differently. And the reason that I think is so important, whether you're a communicator in any profession, is because at the start of our career, we are given experiences, we are given work to do, we are given KPIs and so we churn it out. But at some point when we get promoted, we now have to get work done through people.

28:38
Michael Netzley
And that inherently puts us in a position of exercising judgment and giving feedback, which is a different set of neural pathways than what we've developed in order to get there. And this tends to happen again late 30s, early 40s, those promotions happen, but we don't take the time to strengthen those cognitive abilities. And so I think as we think about any career or for this audience, as we think about our PR and internal client side communication roles, whatever it's going to independent consultant, whatever you are, we have to take the time to build those cognitive abilities because those are the abilities that you use before the AI and after the AI and you can do that, but if you build it, you can do it better than the 35 year old, virtually guaranteed.

29:40
Dan Nestle
The beginning and the end. You're talking about of that process.

29:42
Michael Netzley
Yeah, yeah. That three step process I'd laid out from the Time magazine. Yeah, yeah.

29:47
Dan Nestle
I, you know, I, it's interesting. I trying, I'm trying to think of how I either exercised my brain or killed it in different ways. You know, through my life. There's different things that we do that are good things to do and not good things to do. And I wonder like it's not. I don't want to venture down the pathway of intelligence because I don't think that's fair.

30:13
Michael Netzley
That's not the path. Yeah, yeah, right.

30:16
Dan Nestle
But I do think that curiosity.

30:21
Michael Netzley
Yes.

30:23
Dan Nestle
And dare I say critical thinking and probably one comes from the other. I think they're connected, which is completely irrelevant to cognitive ability. Right. Or aptitude. It's really about your natural way of looking at the world around you. And you know, Mark has said that he believes it can be taught, that curiosity can be taught 100%. And you know, I think certainly at an early stage it can be taught. But do you think we can help those who are already in their like mid careers or who've been on a, you know, on a journey of. All I want to do is this thing and this is the only thing I want to do every day and I want to go home and get my dinner and that's it. Like can we nudge them into a curious mindset?

31:19
Michael Netzley
100%. Research from the center for Brain Health, University of Texas, Dallas. The skill that you. That has the most ability to be developed, the cognitive skill with the greatest ability to grow is the innovative and creative thinking category. And interestingly, in their research, it happens at any end. Age.

31:45
Dan Nestle
You hear that. Any age.

31:47
Michael Netzley
Any age. So that if, if creative and innovative thinking is what you're worried about, you know how. And I would say transformational thinking has to be, if not before that, immediately after it. But, but those two have to be at the top at 100%. You can develop those. You can get better. You can. And I would argue that if you take these ideas that are getting better and you plug them into AI, they will get even better still.

32:18
Dan Nestle
And. Yeah. And you absorb what AI tells you,.

32:21
Michael Netzley
Though, because you start iterating it. Yeah, yeah.

32:23
Dan Nestle
I mean, the cognitive, what is it? Cognitive offload happens when you go to AI and then you just like accept what comes out and you walk away thinking that you've done the job.

32:37
Michael Netzley
Yes.

32:38
Dan Nestle
And you haven't done the job. You've just typed the thing that I wanted, like, which about curiosity and, you know, transformational thinking. Actually, let's turn, let's talk about that for a second.

32:56
Michael Netzley
Sure.

32:56
Dan Nestle
How would you define transformational thinking? Because that's fascinating to me. I always feel like I'm a curious guy. Right. And that's always been the case. But I've never thought of it as a skill until now. Like, until like, okay, AI really makes that a skill. But transformational thinking, where do you cross the boundary into that?

33:15
Michael Netzley
So great example. I see a little hint of the. You have some of my hair color going on here. So we are a role model for this. We learned our communication skills pre AI. And I'll admit it, for me, mostly pre digital. I remember the 286 computers and the old TRS 80 from Radio Shack. Oh, okay.

33:44
Dan Nestle
I never worked on those, but I remember them.

33:46
Michael Netzley
So at least I had keyboards in front of me. But most of what I learned, communication was pre digital in the sense that we are talking about it now. All of a sudden we find ourselves in an AI world and part of our concern is that we're going to become irrelevant. But we have all this experience and we know that there has to, in fact, not that there has to be. We know there is value to that experience. So what transformational thinking does is allow you to take that experience that you have, rejig it, and apply it into today's world. Okay, so it's the process by which you update. And again, center for Brain Health at University of Texas Dallas has a brilliant phrase. Zoom in, zoom out, zoom wide, zoom in.

34:41
Michael Netzley
You zoom in on that past experience of what you think is of value, zoom out. You now rephrase it or rejig it for 20, 26. Zoom wide. You move it over to a new context, apply it, and work through the details of applying that. Transformational thinking is your platinum cognitive function. Because if you cannot do that sequence of zoom in, zoom out, zoom wide, you literally become irrelevant.

35:10
Dan Nestle
Scary.

35:11
Michael Netzley
That's your updating mechanism.

35:13
Dan Nestle
Yeah.

35:14
Michael Netzley
So if you just say, look, I learned how to write, I am a writer, I'm going to keep writing and I'm going to better than AI if you were a stock, I wouldn't buy you.

35:25
Dan Nestle
Well, certainly not in the business. In the business world, right?

35:27
Michael Netzley
Yeah. No, if you're a pure, you know, if you got two Pulitzers behind your name, maybe I do buy that stock. But for sure. But you see where I'm going with. So, so you've got to rejig what you learned for before the actual writing or after the actual writing, because that execution's been taken over. That rejigging is transformational thinking. That's your platinum cognitive function.

35:51
Dan Nestle
I, I build that into the content engines that I, that I create for people. And it, you know, I, I haven't thought of it as transformational anything really. But what I've. The way I framed it and the way I continue to frame it is AI gives you the power to suddenly mine all of the ideas and all of the things and all of the assets that you've ever had all at once, one place. You can you normally doing it with your brain and our memories are faulty and you know, one day you'll remember that file that you did or you'll remember that presentation did 15 years ago, whatever. But if it's all in one place and you've got now an incredible file system that's able to call up any of your old ideas. Right. Well, somebody says, why do I want those old ideas?

36:47
Dan Nestle
The reason you want those old ideas is because they give you a perspective on the new ideas.

36:53
Michael Netzley
Bingo.

36:54
Dan Nestle
And you can see the way that you used to think and the way that, oh, you react now. Or you can see, which often happens, that you were right 20 years ago. So then if you use AI to kind of start to surface those ideas again and then you decide to write about that stuff, well, then you're writing your own stuff. Those are your ideas.

37:16
Michael Netzley
That's right.

37:17
Dan Nestle
AI didn't make that up. That's yours. So people are like, well, but I don't want to. Like, I don't Want to pretend you're not pretending? Don't tell AI to manufacture something about you. If you tell AI hey, I want to write an essay about the neuroscience of the flamingo. It will, right? If there is even a neuroscience of flamingo.

37:45
Michael Netzley
Sorry, but it'll still write it.

37:47
Dan Nestle
It'll write it and it'll put your name on it. And you can put your name on it and you can pretend to be an expert in that sort of ornithological, neuroscientific branch. But that is clearly, you know, not you. It's, that is the kind of crap that you would fulfill your own prophecy of cheating with AI. But if it's your own stuff, why are you cheating? It's not cheating.

38:15
Michael Netzley
Not at all.

38:16
Dan Nestle
So, you know, but the transformational part of that is where is what I hadn't thought. Because essentially what you're doing is you're using AI as an aid to help you make those transformational connections, but AI isn't necessarily making them.

38:28
Michael Netzley
Yeah. And it's so important today because not only do we have that cognitive offload by choosing not to do it, the brutal fact is our lives are overwhelmed. We are constantly multitasking, we are always deadlines in front of us, there are always family issues. We always have bad days. We offload quietly without even realizing it. Just because the mental bandwidth is far more limited than most people want to admit. You know, the old model was that you could probably have about four to seven things in your brain, but after that it's just overload. I would say in today's fast paced, stressed out world, 4 is probably about your max. So we get overloaded very quickly and automatically default to those easy answers. Well, it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

39:27
Michael Netzley
If we did it that way last quarter, we'll do it way this quarter, we'll get it next time, which we never do.

39:33
Dan Nestle
Yeah.

39:35
Michael Netzley
So we're already overloading and so would you mind if I give a message to your listeners on this point?

39:41
Dan Nestle
Oh, please do.

39:43
Michael Netzley
That's listeners. Dan has put two really important posts or ideas out there. One is how to set up your Claude to work in the way we're talking about. But the other one is to use NotebookLM as this background anthropologist. Your mining system of your own work, your brain cannot operate on that level. And if you are not building the kinds of systems that Dan has been talking about today, you are going to behind very quickly. And I mean that from the heart. Your work inspired so much of what I did in December, and I'm already seeing the fruits of it and what I'm creating right now. Brilliant advice. And I just. It's not going to take long for everybody else to catch up here.

40:40
Dan Nestle
First of all, this is definitely a trending communicator first where somebody's done an advertisement for me. Appreciate that. But I have not paid Michael, and we've only been friends and talked a lot. And I want to be very clear that I solve problems for myself and I share them. And I feel like there's a new discovery being made every day. And some of it I should probably keep to myself and bank it, I don't know. But generally speaking, I just think these are important things for us to really cope with if we want to survive as communicators, if we want to survive as writers, as dare I say. I mean, I hate the word thought leaders, but that's. Let's just use the term that everybody's familiar with, right.

41:40
Dan Nestle
If you want to be a thought leader or if you are a thought leader, want to stay one, you need more like you need to be. To be able to reach into what you've already got. And I appreciate that you read those pieces and they've had an effect. And it's really. It's kind of helped me figure out where I want to go or where I am going in. In my own work. But my kind of. Not, Not. I wouldn't. I don't know, but where I. Where I've picked up a lot from you, Michael, is this. And I'll never, I never have forgotten. I've never forgotten that. That, that conversation we had five years ago where you get better strategically and, you know, and to seeing. And seeing the big picture.

42:26
Dan Nestle
From a neuroscientific standpoint, your neuroplastic plasticity may, you know, harden here and there or may have some. You may get less neuroplastic as you grow older. However, the training that you do earlier or the kind of work that you're doing earlier just. It makes itself known in different ways as you get older and you make different choices along the way to get there or not get there. And just because you drop off the bus at one point doesn't mean you can't get back on it. There's not. It. It's not like it's never too late. It's never too late to change or to. Or to. To find yourself. Holy crap. This is interesting things happening to me, but I've Always had that in mind.

43:03
Dan Nestle
Like, like I should be getting better at this thinking and trying to take a deeper pause or deeper thought, deeper kind of dive into whatever it is I'm doing at the time. And my big problem or challenge or you know, kind of, maybe it's a great thing, is I just can't stop the digging. Like, I can't like let that scab sit. I gotta keep plucking at it. So by the time I'm like, oh my gosh, I've fixed this issue, which is like, for example, we're all going to be invisible someday if we don't have something to talk about. Well, but we've been around on this earth for so long, we surely have something to talk about. Let me find out what I've done before, right?

43:52
Dan Nestle
And just now then, you know, fast forward a couple of, couple years and you have multiple frameworks, voice protocols, ethical guidelines, checklists, all this kind of stuff governing a system. Systems. That's what I was thinking, creating and thinking in systems rather than in a very simple, straightforward thing. And I find that one thing begets another. You know, doors. One, doors are always opening. Windows are always opening, whatever kind of metaphor you choose. But you dig into one thing and then you're like, okay, well wait a second, that's useful someplace else. I'm going to take that, park that. And then you're like, but wait a second, that's parked. No, no, I think I want to drive that one. And you change and you go over there and there's a little ADHD involved there. I guarantee I gave you that.

44:51
Dan Nestle
But the discovery part of this is just mind boggling to me. And AI is not my savior. It's not a savior, but it certainly makes that happen more, I think, you know, because you can get to these solutions or at least temporary fixes fast so you can move on to the next thing. Yeah, you know, I was just thinking actually, and it's every time I talk to you I have to pause and think about this because you, you really, you always blow my mind. But the, this whole idea of these, this kind of progression we make as we get older. Somebody once said to me, yeah, you're just saying that because you're getting old. Well, you know, I want to make sure, I want to be maybe, you know, hey, over here, ageism is real.

45:47
Dan Nestle
But really, you know, I was thinking about that continuum and getting to that transformative way of thinking. And you know how you really kind of Start to see bigger things. But more than that, how we feel like we're in one channel. We're communicators, we're marketers, we're a label. And we go forward in that way. Maybe because it's the path of least resistance, maybe because we love it. I don't know. But you tend to. Then the blinders develop and you're not seeing the other kind of stimuli and input that are out there. Well, then, okay, now here we are in a world where you could be anything really you want to be. And you know, you want to go back to when were kids and that's what TV used to tell us, that you could be anything you want to be.

46:39
Dan Nestle
And, and we believed it. But now I'm thinking there's something true about that. And here I am at, you know, just shy of 55. I'm not 55 yet, but in my 55th year. And what am I doing? I'm coding.

47:00
Michael Netzley
Exactly.

47:01
Dan Nestle
I'm building software applications like now, I've never done this before. I didn't set out to do it. I just had a particular problem and I came up with a solution that's really communications based, like executive position. It's related to executive positioning. Like how do we raise our executive position, our position in relative to our competitors, how do we communicate that better? What channels do we need to do that? What should I, like, what should our messaging be? And what are the things out there that we need to understand in order to do that? And you know, there's a whole profession around this or a whole branch of communications around this. So it started as a communications problem. Then, you know, you start to dig down.

47:51
Dan Nestle
It's like, well, how can you be a really well positioned person on, you know, on LinkedIn, for example, if you don't know the first thing about writing a profile, you know, you can't. And you know, so I start to go down these roads and what starts as a communications problem now it becomes, okay, I'm gonna write a program, I'm gonna write an app, create an app. I'm gonna create it. I'm going to do the upfront thinking, I'm going to then work with Claude Code, who's going to do the middle thinking. And then I'm going to just keep pushing and pushing every step of the way.

48:28
Michael Netzley
Bingo.

48:28
Dan Nestle
Because I know which questions to ask, I know what the good output looks like. So, you know, a fresh grad cannot do this. And by my relentless, you know, questioning curiosity and then at some point, at one point you gotta go, you know what? I can't be afraid of these things. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna jump in now. I'm telling you, I spend so much of my time on cloud code and then I figured, what am I now? What are these labels? So there's a question coming here and I'm sorry we're going so far.

49:04
Michael Netzley
That's all right. I'm just thinking about how similar we are. So go ahead.

49:07
Dan Nestle
Yeah, well, yeah, well, I, but, you know, so now you have all these different skills, all these different things that you're doing without supervision, without anybody telling you what the job description is, without a KPI to live up to you necessarily. Maybe that comes later. But you're writing the, it's like you're writing the map as you're driving, you're building the plane as you're flying. I don't know what the right metaphor is now. That's not definable in the world of hr, in the world of job search and employment, but I think that's going to become almost more of the reality for everybody up and down the line. So how do we deal with that? And what is that kind of. I don't know, what are the, what are the skills that we need to develop cognitively to be able to cope with that?

50:08
Dan Nestle
And can we.

50:09
Michael Netzley
Okay, wow, that's. Thank you for the tiny questions here.

50:14
Dan Nestle
I knew it was going to get there.

50:15
Michael Netzley
So, you know, so I. Something that I sat in the parking lot a minute ago, I'll just very quickly mention and then move into those skills. But you and I come from a generation where we had to earn our chops as juniors and work our way up. That is going to be harder for the people who are entering the workforce now than what HR and supervising managers are going to have to get a lot better at is creating that kind of experiential learning in the workplace. And I think that's difficult because people will say, well, you know, at this age they only stay for three or four years. Why would I give them all that experience and send it off to the competitor?

51:00
Michael Netzley
Well, because their competitors have to do the same thing and you're going to hire from the competitors and it's just a self sustaining system, so you have to do it. So you and I have an advantage there in that deep experience space. But that kind of leads to the next step that there are skills in. Maybe as a metaphor, we think about biomarkers, can we in a direct way measure this comprehensive portrait of very complex, very high level thinking that you just described. No, we cannot. But we can look at a series of biomarkers and basically say you're healthy or you're not healthy or you're capable of thinking at that higher order. You're not capable of thinking at that higher order. And so step number one, and please bear with me here, because I cannot tell you how important this is.

51:56
Michael Netzley
It begins with brain health. And in a world that is always on, where we sleep poorly, where we eat poorly, high stress, chronic stress, we don't have good brain health. We don't. So that has to be. Number one, is the health of the actual processor itself. So getting over seven hours of sleep at night, getting sufficient exercise every week, getting rid of all that processed food and eating healthy. To that I would say cut your multitasking in half, if not more, and improving the diversity of your social connections. And so I'll stop there. That is the foundation of the house. You cannot build anything on top of that without out that foundation. And modern society is designed to prevent you from having that foundation. So you must become absolutely unrelenting, uncompromising on protecting that foundation.

53:02
Michael Netzley
If you can't get that right, the rest of what I'm going to say is pointless.

53:06
Dan Nestle
I'm two for five in that one.

53:07
Michael Netzley
Yeah. I'm living this, right? I mean, I live this every. People laugh at me when I say I start my workday at 9pm because that's how serious I am about my sleep. I start with sleep.

53:18
Dan Nestle
Yeah.

53:19
Michael Netzley
So step number two becomes the brain training. All right, so we talked about zoom in, zoom out, zoom light. This is a pattern you can repeat over and over again. Another little thing I do, I have one of those Michael Hyatt full focus planners I use every day. It's got a quote in there. So I come up with five to seven alternate interpretations of that quote every single day. That forces my brain to move in different directions. And so I started off with three, but I realized very quickly I go to the same three. So I said I'm going to push it to five. Then after a while I realized my five are starting to become common. So I push it to seven, but I'm forward. I'm building those neural connections to move in different ways.

54:02
Michael Netzley
Now that along with zoom in, zoom out, zoom wide are just examples of the kind of brain training that we can adopt.

54:11
Dan Nestle
Does is. Is memorization a good memorization.

54:15
Michael Netzley
You can improve focus, you can improve stress management, you can improve curiosity, you can improve all. It's just, it's just building the neural pathways and keeping them as healthy as possible so they operate optimally.

54:33
Dan Nestle
I play the two brain games that LinkedIn sends me every morning. Does that count?

54:37
Michael Netzley
No, sorry.

54:38
Dan Nestle
Damn it.

54:40
Michael Netzley
As far as I know, there's only one in the world. There's only one in the world, actually, I'll give you two, but there's only one in the world. It's called Brain HQ by posit science.

54:50
Dan Nestle
Okay.

54:51
Michael Netzley
So built by a gentleman who did the neuroplasticity research and results in the 90s. Really a forward thinker. So, brain HQ by positive science. Now, I would be remiss if I did not mention joining the brain health project at the center for Brain Health, University of Texas at Dallas. It's still free. You, you measure your brain health about every six months and then they give you these zero cost online training modules for your brain and they also talk a lot about your work habits. Do you have five minute breaks of doing nothing five times a day? Little things like that just. I do not exactly. We overload our brain and then we default to the organizational filing cabinet style guide. We default to. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. We over cognitive overload.

55:53
Dan Nestle
Yeah, yeah.

55:54
Michael Netzley
So you can't exercise judgment. You can't. So all these higher or the. All the higher order thinking that you described, you cannot perform when you are. Your nervous system is in the sympathetic system where you're stressed out, you're overloaded, the body's zeroing in as a natural protective mechanism so that broad creative thinking doesn't happen when you're zeroed in.

56:23
Dan Nestle
Asking for a friend here. What about when you have. And this is not multitasking, trying to do all these different things at once and failing at them. But what if you have a variety of different roles that you play, for example, a variety of different jobs that you do during day. It could manifest in different projects or, you know, just different things that tickle your fancy and you decide to run down those things till you're down a rabbit hole and you're doing it for 17 hours and you. Oh, like that's what my friend tells me. Yeah, that this happens. But the variety, like, is variety the spice of life? Is it the spice of brain health as well?

57:08
Michael Netzley
Incredibly important variety. Novelty and variety are essential to brain health. This will sound like a contradiction. Your brain thrives on two things. Stability and predictability and variety and novelty. It thrives on both, but in different ways. And so you've got to have both. And as a guy who has a portfolio career at this point in my life, I also have that variety in my day. And the best advice I can share is going back to that full focus planner. There are three priorities every day, and then a whole bunch of little tasks. I monotask the three priorities every day, and then if I have to have email and chat open while I'm doing the little tasks, that's okay.

58:03
Michael Netzley
All right, but you monotask the priorities so that your brain can allocate the bandwidth that is needed to perform at the level we need to perform at.

58:14
Dan Nestle
Sometimes my brain tells me just hyper focuses anyway. And so there are, you know, there's a, A, A neurodiversity thing happening around the world, as we know. And, and the. I, I would venture to say, because I haven't asked you about this, Michael, but I venture to say that some, a lot of what you're speaking of is predicated on the like kind of the norm or the mean of, of brain behavior and brain activity.

58:43
Michael Netzley
Fair statement, right? 100. Yes. Yes.

58:46
Dan Nestle
So. So, you know, depending on where you are in different neurodiverse spec on the neurodiversity spectrum, you might be like, lean towards certain activities over others. Right? I mean, the sleep and, and food and exercise, that's a given for, I think everybody. Right? But for example, for me, I am, you know, I know that the dopamine hits are coming whenever I hear about something new. Right. It's just, it's. The novelty is extremely important. It's one of the reasons I do the show every time I talk to somebody. But I've been continuous with the show, like it's a continuous thing that I will. I mean, it's. First of all, it's important. It's important to me before it's important to anybody else. But it turns out that a lot of folks out there seem to appreciate it.

59:35
Dan Nestle
And I hope and I want to be making some kind of contribution to our profession and to who we are. And you know, by the way, what you said earlier about my articles kind of setting you off in a direction that's the kind of contribution I live for, you know, that I think we all do. So thank you for that. But the point is, right, that I do that and then I have, you know, certain, you know, jobs to do, depending on clients. Right? But then I'll find myself like I have and I Mentioned Claude code earlier. Right. I have in 53 and something years, 54 years. I wrote one or I help. I. I used one script one time for an Excel sheet. Now I have. I've spent the last six days, 16 hours a day building something.

01:00:28
Dan Nestle
And I have never had so much fun, nor have I been as frustrated sometimes. But I'm like, as I'm doing it, I'm also digging in and just trying to figure out why these things are happening. And then I'm yelling at it like I do with Claude all the time. But I know that this has to end because I know that at some point I don't want to be running beta tests, you know, run the same thing over and over again. You know, nobody wants to do that. It hasn't yet, but it will happen. So I'm preparing myself for, okay, what's next. But that's the thing is, though, that I've spent days on pretty much only that. And I don't think that's the healthiest thing from a. From a.

01:01:13
Dan Nestle
From a cognitive or from, I think, from building my cognitive capabilities or setting myself up for a future as a chair. As a, As a chairperson thinker. Was. Chair. Which, what was it again? It's chairperson.

01:01:28
Michael Netzley
The chairperson's brain.

01:01:30
Dan Nestle
Yeah, Chairperson's brain. Thank you. Yeah. But. But then again, you know, like, I've had so much fun with it and I feel like I've learned so much in such a short amount of time.

01:01:40
Michael Netzley
Can I challenge you here? Yeah. I think you're being overly apologetic and you're not seeing the silver lining here. I do the same thing. I've got a family member with a very particular kind of personality that I've always struggled with. So I went into. This was my last project in GPT before it switched claw. I built a coach in chat GPT so that I could run simulations and learn how to deal better with this family member.

01:02:10
Dan Nestle
Oh, yeah.

01:02:11
Michael Netzley
So that has been brilliant. And again, I argue with it because I go, no, I don't think you're reading human beings is correct here. So I don't just accept it in the sense that we've been criticizing. But my point is this. Once I went through that process, you know what I did? I wrote a book. Oh, I wrote a book. I've got a book sitting on this computer. It may never see the light of day, but I wrote a book about dealing with a very particular personality type and the changes that I need to make in order to deal with that individual. But I'm probably One good editor away from publishing this thing if I wanted to. Now, I didn't write it for that reason, but that's what I did. Now, here's the point.

01:02:57
Michael Netzley
At our age, is somebody going to hire me as a senior academic to call, come in and lead a department? Oh, they're going to be like, no, we don't want you. We want to, you know, we're younger. We want to build our trajectory forward. Okay. And probably the same thing with you. You're, you're getting at a point, I think about my coaches. I've got retired CEOs. Nobody wants that CEO walking into their business acting like the CEO.

01:03:27
Dan Nestle
Right.

01:03:28
Michael Netzley
We have to carry ourselves differently. We have to display something different. So the fact that you can set your ego aside and share and mentor the fact that you've got the curiosity to build something new that you've never done before, or in my case, to write a book that I've never done before, and that you're still vibrant and learning, enthusiastic and bringing positive energy into that organizational setting, now you can come in and advance advisory or developmental roles. Senior advisor, senior mentor. It's a different capacity. Yeah, but what I'm seeing in my coaching is that organizations and leaders are really open to that. When you show up as that learning, helping, supportive person rather than showing up as the senior academic showing up as a CEO or whatever.

01:04:25
Dan Nestle
Right.

01:04:26
Michael Netzley
So we've got this change in identity that has to happen, which corresponds with the cognitive changes. And I think is what you're doing is the artifacts that when people see this, we go, dan's the kind of guy we would love to have around here. He's going to be contagious in a good way. We want this. Yeah, Yeah.

01:04:47
Dan Nestle
I, you know, somebody was asking me the other day about, you know, you ever think about going back into corporate life? It's like love. I'll be clear. I was ready to leave corporate life when I did. I wanted to. I felt that AI was there for that my understanding of AI would help me to build my own practice in something I didn't know exactly. Like, it's taken me a while to define what those things are, and I'm still pivoting here and there. But, you know, if immediately after I left corporate, which was, you know, I got laid off, and that's fine, but it wasn't like I made a plan to leave corporate on a certain day. Right. So would I ever go back? I will never say no. Like, I'll never Like that's not, that's a silly question to me. What's the circumstance?

01:05:46
Dan Nestle
What's the offer? What's the job? Right. So. But would you want to be a cco? No, I don't want to be a cco. I don't want to be a role. I don't want to be a boxed in person, you know, an advisor at a VC or a startup. Yeah.

01:06:09
Michael Netzley
Or just a portfolio of six startups.

01:06:11
Dan Nestle
A portfolio of six startups.

01:06:12
Michael Netzley
Career right there.

01:06:14
Dan Nestle
All of that, like all of those things. Wonderful. Why not? Right? I mean, if somebody feels that my knowledge is worth. Is valuable for them, then by all means I will want to help you. But I don't think I need to fit into a box anymore.

01:06:29
Michael Netzley
Yeah.

01:06:29
Dan Nestle
You know, and as David Armano said on our episode, you know, we're weird unicorns, I think at this point. And you certainly are. I mean like, I am weird. Well, you're, you're a weird unicorn. Join the club. Like we just have like, I like the way you describe as a portfolio career, but it's like I want to be in the position where I can pick and choose what I do and you know, I sort of do now. But I'm far from like, candidly, like I have a ways to go before I'm just like, yeah. Ready to like say I am captain of or I'm not. Just I'm the admiral of my fleet. Right. I'm captain of my ship, but I want to be admiral of the fleet. You know, like, I want to make sure that I like that I'm kind of okay.

01:07:18
Dan Nestle
You know, I mean, sometimes it works, the cognitive stuff. But I'll tell you, man, there's a lot of stuff we didn't touch on, we didn't get to. I wanted to hear about. And I think that maybe we'll put a link to the Executive Brain Playbook. And I know they probably covered a couple of concepts, but your Executive Brain playbook, where can people find that?

01:07:41
Michael Netzley
All right.

01:07:42
Dan Nestle
Is it on your, is it on your site?

01:07:43
Michael Netzley
Yeah. So I'll give you two real quick links. So the website is extendmyrunway.com and in there you'll find everything including the, that core article that I shared with you, titled Thriving After 45, which is on I by IMD magazine.

01:08:05
Dan Nestle
And so I'll put the links in the show.

01:08:07
Michael Netzley
Yeah. But in the media section of my website that article shows up there as well, but that's the easiest way to find this and read about it. And of course, you and I are on LinkedIn all the time, so.

01:08:19
Dan Nestle
Oh, this is great. So listen, everybody out there, I mean, Michael is a communicator. I think living, breathing evidence that communicators are more than. And we have so much to contribute in this age of AI. I think we're only just starting to scratch the surface.

01:08:40
Michael Netzley
Yeah, yeah.

01:08:42
Dan Nestle
And I know big things are coming for so many of us and so many are clearly suffering because of. They're losing their jobs indirectly. It's not AI stole their jobs. It's that corporations have made decisions based on where they think AI is going.

01:09:00
Michael Netzley
100.

01:09:01
Dan Nestle
They've gotten rid of their jobs. Yeah, I, I've said this before. I think that this year, like right now, as we record this, we're in January of 2026. So this is the first recording of the year, by the way, Michael. But for me, but maybe by the time this airs in a couple months, I mean, is this going to be the year of the oops where companies and boards and executive teams are going to be like, we let all these people go. We lost all that knowledge and the AI is giving us crap because we don't know what to talk about with it. We don't know what quality is anymore. Oops. Should we hire them back? Is that going to happen? I don't know.

01:09:41
Michael Netzley
I don't know if it's going to be that simple. It's just going to be incredibly dynamic and, you know, go back to my rural upbringing in middle America. Don't put all your eggs in one basket because we don't know exactly how this is going to play out. Get those side gigs going, because we just don't know,.

01:10:02
Dan Nestle
Clearly. Well, look, everybody, I hope that, first of all, I'm sure that you got so much out of listening to Michael today. You can find him@extendmyrunway.com look for him on LinkedIn. He is also on substack. Thrive after 45. And the 45 is numerical, so thrive after at substack.com, fantastic substack. And also, clearly, Michael has good things to say about me. So I hope you can come back on the show anytime.

01:10:30
Michael Netzley
See you again soon.

01:10:32
Dan Nestle
I appreciate it, Michael. Happy New Year to you. I know that again, by the time people hear this, that'll be a little bit. It'll be a couple months in, but, man, every time I talk to you, I feel like this is ending too soon. 

01:10:44
Michael Netzley
But it's got to end, so same thing. Keep putting those great ideas in substack and I will be your guinea pig and test them. So.

01:10:53
Dan Nestle
Well, you heard it here, folks. Thanks so much. Thanks, Michael.

01:10:55
Michael Netzley
All right. Thank you. Been a pleasure.

01:11:04
Dan Nestle
Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred. It's your call. Have ideas for future guests? Want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator.