Seth Godin - This Is Marketing: How To Find Your Viable Audience & Win Trust From Your Target Market

Full transcript: Seth Godin on London Real

4:18 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Seth Godin, often described as the ultimate entrepreneur for the information age. You’ve written 19 books on marketing, including Linchpin, The Dip, Purple Cow, Tribes, and This Is Marketing, all worldwide bestsellers. You’ve also created the most successful marketing blog in the world, and you’ve been inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame in 2018.

4:39 You launched Akimbo, a podcast where you share ideas around business, marketing and culture. Your Akimbo workshops have changed the lives of more than 14,000 people in 70 countries, with your online altMBA, accelerating personal and professional transformation, Viper, an extensive view of leadership, organizations and change. Seth, welcome to London Real. In New York City, thank you for having me. Thanks for coming all this way.

5:01 My pleasure. It’s great to have you here. You know, as I look through all of your work, Seth, I always wonder if you might have inherited some type of marketing gene. You know, if it’s somehow in your blood. And I’m wondering if you, if you were always this way as a kid.

5:14 You know, were you eight years old giving lectures to your classmates about marketing, because it seems to be part of who you are? Well, we need to clarify something, right? For this, okay. My definition of marketing doesn’t match what some people’s definition of marketing is. I do not define marketing as hype, advertising, promotion, scamming, selfish, narcissistic, short-term thinking, which is what a lot of people think of when they do marketing, or when they are marketers.

5:40 I define marketing as anything we do that changes the culture for the better. If you’re willing to take responsibility for the work you’re doing and you’re bringing something to the world, then you’re a marketer, because if you do it better, it’s gonna work better than if you don’t. And so, yeah, I’ve written those bestsellers, but almost none of them belong in the quote marketing section, because they’re about things like culture or technology or how we organized to move forward.

6:05 So have I been a marketer my whole life? I think everyone has, but I think that I’ve been more intentional about it from a really young age, not because I was born with it. None of us were born able to walk or talk, but because I decided it was important, and I practiced it. Okay, were you always looking for ways to make yourself better or make the world better when you were a kid, or did that come later? You know, through university and after that, when you started your own businesses?

6:35 Yeah, I, you know, I was really lucky with where I grew up and how I grew up. I won the birthday lottery, and certainly with, you know, the privilege that comes from being born in 1960 and where I was born, but also my parents. My dad was the volunteer head of the United Way. My mom was the first woman on the board of the art museum in town. So Buffalo, New York is a little tiny place, not that fake a community of people who are leading, and so my parents certainly weren’t wealthy, but we grew up acting like we were leaders in the community, and so there were always people tricked in through my house, and I grew up thinking it was normal to decide to contribute in some way, through example, through direct contribution, whatever it was.

7:20 That’s was normalized in my house, and part of the work I’m trying to do in the culture is, now that we are not just in our house but online, the more we see that, the more we learn that what’s expected of you is that you will be part of something and make that thing better. The more likely people will act that way. I always watched you know, the stories of the Kennedys, and it feels like they all knew they had to contribute. When you can, you know, love or hate their politics, but it felt like on that compound they were always looking at everyone like, what are you gonna do for the world?

7:52 But that is a cultural thing, because not everyone grew up with that expectation. That’s right, and it’s still a choice, because some people who grew up with that expectation go in the opposite direction. But I think this idea of what we normalize in our culture is so important. If you think back just a hundred years ago, when women didn’t even have the right to vote yet, when it wasn’t exceptional at all to be overtly racist, that there were just expectations in our culture that we have moved past.

8:26 And the fact is that the world is changing faster than ever, and today is the slowest it’s never going to change again, and that cycle keeps accelerating. The question is, in which direction? And I think that each of us, if you’ve got a keyboard, if you’ve got a device that’s connected to a billion people, has a chance to speak up in a certain way. So I’ve blogged every day for a lot of days in a row, because it’s a privilege. I don’t get paid for it.

8:51 I don’t want ads on the blog, but the idea that you can share an idea and say, what do you think of this, or I assert that, and see how that contributes to the next thing. Why wouldn’t you? You told me that blogging every day is probably better than meditating every day, cold showers, working out. You said that’s probably one of the best things you can do as a personal practice. ID for anybody.

9:14 I think that’s true. I think everyone should blog every day, even if you do it under another, like, I get that some people don’t want to reveal their own self in this way. So great doers, that around them. Well, it depends. I mean, we live in a world where people can show up uninvited in your email box.

9:33 You don’t have to welcome them into your email box. That’s fine, but the act, you know, I don’t blog every day because I have a new blog ready. I blog every day because it’s tomorrow, and that idea that there’s going to be something from me tomorrow on the blog challenges me today to think about what’s the smartest, biggest, most generous contribution I can make tomorrow, and that pattern continues, and part of what we get stuck on is we say, I don’t feel like doing X, Y, or Z, so I don’t do it.

10:06 But the opposite is the way that habits are created. If you do something every day, then you will come to feel like doing it. So don’t wait until you feel inspired or creative. That never works. I’ve never seen that that works from anybody.

10:19 Right, it’s all about discipline. Yeah, and what about people that say they have writer’s block when they go to do that? Yeah, I’m notorious for saying there’s absolutely no such thing as writer’s block. I mean, there’s plenty of evidence to show that it was invented in the 1900s, that before then there wasn’t even a term, and it came about partly because Percy Shelley wrote a poem, short essay, that said, how dare anyone think they could be a poet. They’re the only way you could become a poet is be touched by the muse.

10:50 If you haven’t been touched by the muse, you’re out of luck. Don’t even try. And that got taken up by people who felt comfortable having writer’s block, but then it became a term, because suddenly writing could get you to be Ernest Hemingway, and you stare into that, the sunshine of that, and you blink, you walk away. I just, not in the mood. I don’t have anything to say.

11:11 But when I talk to people who say I don’t have anything to say, when I talk to me, who say they have writer’s block, I say, show me your bad writing. Show me the stuff you’ve written that’s no good. They don’t have any right, as if you show me enough bad writing, I guarantee you some good writing will slip through. You can’t help it. It will slip through.

11:30 My friend Isaac Asimov 400 books published them in the old days, when it was hard to publish that many books, and I said to him, how do you do this? And he said, every morning I get up and I go to the typewriter, and from 6:30 to noon I type. It doesn’t matter what I type. I just have to keep typing, and what happened was his brain realized he was gonna type anyway. You might as well type something good.

11:52 I’ve been told the writer’s block is when you put too much emphasis on what you’re about to create, as if it matters more than it does, and that stops you from doing it because you’re worried about the judgment or how it’s going to be. And you should just stop that and just write. Yeah, I think it’s an interesting way to get a similar idea, which is that no one gets writer’s block. No one gets writer’s block. That if you were physically fit, you can do those things, but when it comes time to put it in print, you’re saying, oh no, something big is about to happen here.

12:25 And I guess what we’re both saying is this discipline of going through the work of doing it. And when I say writing, I don’t mean writing. I mean leading, connecting, inspiring, whatever it is you think is important. It begins with the word. It begins with, what are you gonna say next?

12:43 How are you going to bring this digital idea, even if you’re speaking it? It’s still digital. It’s letters to the next person, so that it makes a difference to them, and what we’ve learned in the altMBA. So the way it works is, it’s a cohort of 120 people, and it lasts a month, two or three hours a day, for a month, around the world, and people come and I say, I’ll never be able to keep up, and I’ll never be able to do this, and I’m not in it. There’s no video of me.

13:10 It’s cohorts, video, and writing, video conferencing, and writing, and at the end of a month they’re transformed, because if you write that much every day for a month, if you give and get that kind of feedback, you can’t bluff anymore, because now you know you can do it, because you did it. Right? Does a vlog count instead of a blog? Like, can you put the camera on yourself and talk to camera for five minutes, knowing you’re gonna have to publish it? With that, I think it does, as long as you aren’t talking about what you had for dinner.

13:40 Okay, all right. I think that there’s this vanity thing that goes on on the Internet that doesn’t help anybody, and it’s just full authenticity of eavesdropping on somebody else’s life, and that’s a fine way to entertain. I don’t think it’s productive, but it works for entertainment purposes, but that’s not scary. It is not scary to say, here I am walking my dog, ha ha ha. If it doesn’t feel scary, then you haven’t trained, you haven’t moved forward.

14:08 Okay, so that writing could be a blog, or it could be some type of leadership, or writing a proposal to someone, but get and write something, which means you’re creating something, which could be judged, which means also it could be great. Exactly. It could change the world and help other people. Exactly. Which I know, one of your, the people you looked up to is Zig Ziglar, who said, I’m probably gonna totally bludgeon this, but if you want to have a meaningful life, make life meaningful for other people.

14:32 Is that right? I even like that better than what Zig Zag. I like that a lot better. Zig said, you can get anything in life you want to feel, help enough other people get what they want. And my challenge with that is the quid pro quo part, right?

14:45 Because he came from a sales background, implied in that is, well, I’m your insurance broker, and if I help you get a golf game, you’ll buy insurance from me. And that doesn’t work for me, and so I truncated it too. You can get everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough other people, right? Period, period. Right, that’s enough.

15:05 Just the privilege of being of service, and I like the fact that you added meaning to it. Very good. Well, because it can’t have a contingency, otherwise it taints. Right? original product.

15:15 Exactly. You have to literally be willing to selflessly give, not expecting anything back. You know, no payment, no congratulations, even just give it. And that’s what it becomes, its best form. Right?

15:25 You know, with all the people connected in the world that can blog or create, are you, do you feel optimistic about what we’re going, or is it, is it, look harder these days? Because there’s also an equal number of messages that are, you know, vanity and narcissistic. How do you feel right now about the world? Well, there are really big discussions to have about, you know, what’s the mean temperature of the ocean? And I think we, almost everybody is minimizing the impact it’s going to have.

15:54 One, a bill, and people lose their homes. But that was a question the idea of the media ecosystem and all the noise that’s out there. What happens when you give everyone a microphone? You know, Steve Martin famously said that half the people are below average, and it doesn’t matter what you’re measuring, they are. And the idea that we used to have a gatekeeper for who got a microphone was good and bad.

16:19 It was bad, because it silenced voices we needed to hear, but it was good, because it also kept microphones away from people who wanted to tear things down. When I think about what is on offer from the social media networks, it’s really important to decode this. you are not their customer. You are their product. You did not pay them to use Twitter or Facebook.

16:42 They are selling you to someone else. So they have created a regime where they make us feel bad all day long, and the only way to feel less bad is to click something. That’s the cycle that they’ve built, and the problem with that cycle, and the easily measured number of how many followers you have, is it pushes people to be, period, pushes people to be angry. It pushes people to tear folks down, because that’s what sells. if it bleeds, it leads, right?

17:09 But it doesn’t build a culture that we’re proud of. And the alternative is to say, I don’t care how many people are following me, and I’m never going to hit the boost button, because my job is not to make Facebook happy, nor is it to make Twitter happy. My job is to create a body of work that I’m proud of. And if we can embrace the idea of a smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience, but what’s the audience that could sustain you? So London Real has grown dramatically in eight years, and almost no one in the world knows who you are.

17:43 99.9% of the people on the planet have never heard of you, have never seen one of your videos, and that’s okay, and getting comfortable with that is the foundation we need to do our work, because otherwise you’re going to start chasing a Kardashian, and the problem of that is we have a Kardashian already. We don’t need another one of those. What we need is one of these, and the way to be one of these is to say 10 people, 100 people, a thousand people, there would be enough.

18:10 And once you can get comfortable with enough, in a world of infinity, it doesn’t really matter how noisy it is. And you talk about this new book, Tribes, about focusing on that small audience, and Kevin Kelly has the famous blog, 1,000 True Fans. we’ve had it on the show, and I try to teach my students this as well in the Academy, and when I do it, we have a big Zoom call, and their faces go blank. And, yeah, I said you gotta find a micronesia, and I’m gonna push you to go more micro, to more levels than you’re gonna want to use.

18:36 And they never want to, but you know why they don’t want to? Because I think they believe that the bigger the audience, the more successful they’ll be. But there’s probably something more subtle. I think there’s something more. So what is it?

18:47 I think we don’t want to be on the hook. On the hook, meaning, if there’s only three people in the world you’re making this for, and they don’t like it, you’re toast. Got it. Right, that this whole idea of Kanban, that the making a supply chain really thin, making sure that the quality of each piece is just right for those three people, makes it a much bigger obligation on your part. Whereas if it’s a million people, you’re like, whatever, fine, you didn’t like it, go ahead, I got others, plenty of them.

19:16 And that shift, that’s where it becomes magical. And if you name any artist who has stood the test of time in whatever field that is, that is what they did. What they did is worried about a few and ignored, shunned the non-believers. So it’s the accountability that actually makes you show up. It’s a smaller the group, the more accountability, because you can see the faces, right?

19:40 As opposed to just this mask. How dare you not know what I wanted, right? Because there’s only three of us. You have to force yourself to be in front of your ultimate clients, users. Exactly, and stare at them.

19:53 And so I, six years ago, I took the decision not to try to get any new readers from my blog, not to try to get any new readers from my books. I have enough. That’s fine. Thank you, a million, for my book. That’s, I need two million.

20:05 It would not make my work better. It would not make my work more important. It would not make my writing better. What it would do is require me to do things like listicles and have plenty of arguments and things like that, which would get me more readers. Not my job, not my goal.

20:19 My goal is how can I serve this group? It’s enough. Would you have to dilute your brand by definition to have more, more followers? Well, so dilute is a tricky word, and so is brand, so let’s decode them a little bit. Quran does not logo.

20:33 Brand is the expectation that people have when you walk into the room or when they buy your product. If Nike had a hotel, I think we could guess what it would be like. If Hyatt had a brand of sneakers, we’d have no idea what they would be like. Hyatt doesn’t have a brand. They just have a logo, whereas Nike, they have a brand.

20:51 Now, diluting it, Nike is known by everyone on the planet because they didn’t have to dilute it to be what they are, which is this sort of golden aura of effort, right? Whereas I’m a lot more particular and peculiar than that, and so I would have to maybe condense it, refine it, to be something a lot more symbolic than what I am. But I’d prefer to be the guy with enough obscure little bits around it that I’m doing the work I want to do, as opposed to looking in the rearview mirror and saying, what would get me the next zero of audience?

21:33 You mentioned your altMBA. What have you learned doing that? What were you wrong about? What were you right about? What surprised you?

21:41 So I was surprised after we ran the first one as an experiment. The goal was, the typical online course has a 97% dropout rate, and I said, if this is the future of learning, that’s not gonna be acceptable. What would I change to fix that? And I did the opposite of every other online course in, like, six different areas. Like, no video of me, and you have to apply to get in, and it’s not free, and this is it, and we have a 97 percent completion rate and a 3 percent dropout rate, which is really great.

22:16 So after the first one, which was an experiment, I said, I’m really surprised. I got a lot of these pieces right. We should do it again, and now we’re on our 38th session, because it’s working. The thing that has surprised me by far is how people talk themselves out of applying to it, that the logic and the rationale and the excuses they run so deep. Because if you go to Harvard Business School or Stanford, where I want you, can tell everybody what you did, and it costs two hundred fifty thousand dollars in tuition, an opportunity cost, and it’s worth it because you get to tell other people what you did.

22:54 And that’s really what you’re buying. And this, which cost one sixtieth the amount of money, it’s hard to tell other people, because we intentionally made it hard to talk about. What exactly is it? Where is the curriculum? Where is all the proof?

23:08 Where is the accreditation? But not any of those things, and because it’s hard to talk about, you have to talk about it to yourself, and in that moment you feel on the hook, and you feel insufficiency, and that one’s super deep with people. How do we get folks to trust themselves? And this is something you deal with all the time, which is, it’s not about more tactics. The Internet has become the sort of laundry list of, oh yeah, I read that blog post, only a paragraph of it, and I did, and it’s a wire, and I already successful.

23:36 We have all the tactics we need. People have access to way more of this information than ever before, and yet we’re not creating better work, because it was never important to know that stuff. What was important is to believe that you have something to contribute, right? And to get someone to walk into that fearful moment, correct? And these days, at a distance, without a personal meeting, have you found ways of getting people to do that?

24:02 Because I mean, that’s the essence of what I do in my Academy. I often say I have many guises of courses: public speaking, broadcasting, business, but at the end of the day, I push people into their fears to realize they’re stronger than they are, and they have a voice, and they walk out with confidence. Right. So the marketer in me, who started learning marketing from Jay Levinson and all the rest of my heroes years and years and years ago, wants there to be a top-down funnel.

24:29 And in fact, there isn’t. That the stuff I wrote about 10 books ago is the answer, which is the only way we’re gonna get more students is if our students get us more students. That it’s the peer-to-peer connection in a low-trust world that leads culture to change. You don’t change culture with the Super Bowl, whether it’s a Super Bowl ad or a Super Bowl halftime show. It has no impact whatsoever.

24:55 But if one person in your neighborhood is driving a Tesla, the chances that their next-door neighbor are going to think about driving a Tesla go up by a factor of a hundred. Peer to peer. So all we do, we have a tiny team, seven or eight people, plus 100 coaches around the world. All we do is say, this group, 100 of 120 people, how much can we help them? How can we transform them?

25:19 Because if we do, they will tell the others. It’s a slow, organic thing that is way more frustrating than raising 100 million dollars and blowing it on Super Bowl ads, but it’s actually how you change the culture. Make a great product, deliver Wow, and then wait for them to tell other people, and they will only tell other people if it helps them. You will not tell other people because it helps you, and that’s a really big transformation. So, the fax machine, the first person who had a fax, what did they do with it?

25:48 Because you can’t send a fax to yourself, because you’ll get a busy signal. What you have to do is tell everyone you know to go get a fax machine, because then your life will be better. You don’t do it to help Ricoh or Canon. You do it because your life is better if other people you work with have a fax or an email account or whatever it is. Well, the same thing is true with these kinds of transformations, which is, if I want to be able to talk to you the way I learned to talk, I need you to go do it too, because otherwise I, you won’t get where I’m going.

26:17 So it’s that selfish ratchet that’s also generous, because I want to have my friend. That’s why people talk about it. And so sometimes people who make a product that they think of as perfect, right? Like, if someone makes a coffee mug that’s better designed than any other coffee mug that has six sigma qualities, and why doesn’t anyone talk about it? Well, the reason I talk about is, it doesn’t help them to talk about your damn coffee mug, right?

26:42 And if there was a reason that I needed to talk about your coffee mug, because it would help my status, authority, or life, I’d be more likely to do it. Hmm. And so, your altMBA, ideally it’s someone in a business that takes it and then says, wow, if my colleagues only could think this way, we could get a lot more done. Or is it also, if my wife could think this way? Or like, how does that spread in the ideal world?

27:04 For so, the range has been a 16-year-old young woman, a 78- year-old woman from the Isle of Man, people who are poets and run nonprofits, people who work at Amazon, Microsoft, Chobani, name your favorite computer company or big company, and everything in between. So we, we called it the altMBA, because I had a good six-letter domain hanging around, and I used it. Not the perfect name, because of the alt part and the MBA part, but when you mission it all together, at least it’s something that’s ours.

27:42 But we don’t teach anything you learn in an MBA. That’s the point. That the point is that the MBA teaches all of the wrong things. It teaches industrial compliance. It teaches adherence to things that you can read in a book, and what we’re trying to do is say to people, you don’t need any more tactics.

28:02 We just want you to think differently, and we have found, probably our biggest resonance, 45 percent of people take it, get reimbursed by their company, but the people who go through it write to us. They’re better parents. They’re better spouses. They’re better executives. They get promoted, whatever it is that was on their agenda, and a lot of them changed their agenda.

28:23 They thought, I wanted to move up on this hierarchy, but I realized that’s a trap, and I’m gonna do this thing instead. So it’s really disruptive at changing your perception of what you even want. And so I’m not gonna pigeonhole it by demographics. We’re really focused on psychographics. What almost everyone who takes it has in common is they say to themselves, there has to be more to it than this, whatever it is.

28:47 It has to be more to life, more to work, more than my job, more than my company, than what I have right now. If that’s what you feel inside, this is for you. If you don’t feel that way, I can’t help. But a lot of people are feeling that way. I think, so, and maybe that comes from the, you know, industrial education complex, and the television education industrial complex, which I want to talk about.

29:06 You were to Stanford in for an MBA, right? Was there? What did you get from that? What did you not get from that? So, no, tested, one of the best.

29:14 Yeah, I was just the third youngest person in my class, and the third day that I got that I was really underwater, not because I couldn’t do the work, but because my peers weren’t hesitant to remind me that I hadn’t worked in an investment bank. I hadn’t worked at a commercial bank. I hadn’t paid the price they had paid, and in order to make themselves feel like that price was worth it, they were making me feel insufficient. And a guy named Chip Conley, who was my age, put him on the show, a little note in my mailbox, okay, and he did it to three other people, and he said, Tuesdays at 7 p.m. we’re gonna meet in the anthropology department.

29:53 Would you like to join our little group? And there were five of us. We met there every single Tuesday for the first year, and we just brainstormed entrepreneurial ideas. We came up with thousands of them in that room. That was the biggest thing I got out of business school, being seen by Chip, being part of that circle, realizing that I had something to contribute, was magical.

30:16 And the second thing I got out of business school was the summer job that I got, which I couldn’t have gotten without it, and that was in Boston, and the story of that is that I got a job at for the summers, the assistant to the president of Activision, in California, fastest growing company in the history of the world, assistant to the president, Activision, game company. Yeah, and they were on a rollercoaster ride. It was amazing, and at the last minute, I found out I couldn’t stay in California.

30:43 How to get back to Boston to be with my family? And so I only had four weeks to find a job, and I almost got a job offer from Lotus. Two people invented the PC spreadsheet. I almost got a job at Hayden Software. The people did Sargon, the chess program.

31:00 They, however, interviewed me at the International House of Pancakes and turned me down. So then there were two possibilities left. One was Parker Brothers, and I’m a gaming guy and have been forever. Parker Brothers offered me a job in their computer game division, which was thrilling. It was Parker Brothers, and then I got a job offer from a little tiny company called Spinnaker.

31:20 It was the 30th person, and they were inventing educational computer games, which didn’t exist at the time. And I don’t know why I turned on the Parker this job. Something inside of me just said, don’t do that. And two weeks into the summer, Parker Brothers shut down the entire division and fired every single person. So I dodged that bullet, and I get to Spinnaker, and it turns out the Chairman who had hired me forgot to tell anyone else in the company that I was coming.

31:45 So the president comes out, shakes my hand, goes back into his office, shuts the door, because the Chairman says, who’s that guy? So off to a rough start, but during that summer I learned how to be a product manager, and at the end of the summer, they took me aside, and they said, we have a secret project, but it’s gonna start right now. Are you willing to go to business school and this at the same time? So I went to class at Stanford on Monday and Tuesday, flew on the red-eye, went to work in Boston for Wednesday and Thursday, and then flew back to California.

32:18 And finally, one of the professors at Stanford took pity on me and just gave me a degree, and I never went back again, which was super nice. But that job, that job changed everything for me, and I think of it almost every day. What did, what did you learn doing that? I learned mostly that there wasn’t anyone who’s going to teach me to be a marketer or a brand manager or a negotiator, or someone who was going to deal with leading a team of engineers. I ended up having 40 people working for me, even though none of them were direct reports.

32:50 I worked with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton. Who, I liked Michael. I just called and did a deal with him. I was 24 years old, but no one was stopping me, so I just did, and this was practiced for the internet, because what it showed me was that, yes, I had the backing.

33:09 It wasn’t my money on the table, but that I was able to weave together things, products that people loved. We shipped Fahrenheit 451 based on Ray Bradbury’s novel. It was a computer game, and two days after we shipped it, I get a call in my office, because no email, and it’s Herbie Hancock, like the Herbie Hancock, and he says, man, I just want to tell you, I just finished the game. Was fat. What just happened here?

33:35 And then I was hooked. Don, I’m sorry, hooked on creating product, creating something for people that would transform them. They engage with it. Okay, yeah. Is it true that every one of your books comes from a lesson you learned in your life, or one of these experiences you had, in a corporation or on your own?

33:53 I mean, I would say that most of what I write and teach, I do because I wish someone had taught it to me a long time ago. That if I, what I do for a living is I notice things. Why is it like this? Like, why in New York City do you have to show a driver’s license to get into an office building? How is showing a driver’s license, as bad guys don’t have driver’s licenses?

34:15 If someone is going to infiltrate an office building and do an evil deed, how will a driver’s license keep them from doing that? Right? And I noticed this, and some people notice this, frustrated. I try to decode it, and sometimes if I decode something and it feels more universal than just the noise in my head, I’ll share it, because once it’s seen, then you can work with it. And I like when I learned something about how the world works from someone else, because it helps me get through a situation, because I understand it better.

34:45 And so with every book that I’ve written, what I’m saying is, I’m noticing this thing in the world, and here’s how I think it works, and here’s how I think it might help you make things better. Maybe it’s worth 20 bucks for you to find out. Hmm. Super Bowl. We just saw a lot of money spent on those ads.

35:04 Is that all a waste in your mind? Well, it depends on what you’re measuring, what you’re after. Intentional action: who’s it for, and what’s it for? So if you sell beer or chips, it has been shown that at halftime you make enough money from sales at convenience stores to pay for the ad you ran during the first quarter. So in that way, for sure that works.

35:28 But maybe who it’s for is to make people on Wall Street think your company is real. Maybe who it’s for is to make the boss know that the CMO, his office, is doing something. Maybe what it’s for is to bring in your best clients to wherever the Super Bowl’s being held, because you get to have a box. So it’s for a lot of things, but if the question is, does it sell more cars, or does it sell more anything? The answer’s no, and the reason is really simple, which is this: advertising works better when it’s specific.

35:59 Meaning, advertising cars to people who don’t know how to drive is a waste of money. Advertising chips to people who don’t eat chips is a waste of money. That’s one of the reasons why Facebook is so profitable, because you can reach exactly who you want, psychographically or demographically. Why would you pay a premium to reach everyone? You should pay less to reach everyone, because everyone is worth less than someone.

36:24 And so the thinking of advertising needs to be, who’s in the emotional state, demographically, psychographically, emotionally ready to move, that I could put an ad in front of now? What they know, it, Mercedes, is that they have to run $1,000 worth of ads to sell one Mercedes, and it’s worth it to them. They don’t know which one of those thousand dollars’ worth of ads is going to reach the right person on the right day. So they got him on all the other ones too, but it doesn’t make sense to run Mercedes ads in a country where they don’t sell Mercedes, because you’re never going to get anyone.

36:57 So being specific, again, as we said a little while ago, it’s really scary, because if you pick your audience and you’re wrong, that’s on you. The Super Bowl, way less scary. It’s not your money. Let’s reach everyone, and guess what? We’ll get to sit in the box.

37:12 When you look at the Fortune 500 companies, how many of those get it right when it comes to their marketing, their advertising? You mentioned Mercedes, right? So Fortune 500 companies are basically nation-states, that the people who run them are royalty, to have their own army and air force. They are surrounded by lieutenants, and, you know, there’s a court and the whole thing. You got to be really incompetent to screw up a Fortune 500 company in the short run.

37:41 In the short run, the market wants a boring product that’s proven, in the center, at a reasonable price, because it’s deniable. Oh, I bought what everyone else bought. So the history, almost none of the Fortune 500 is the same as it was in 1950. They get replaced. Why?

38:00 Because they keep doing what they were doing, because that’s what they’re getting paid to do, until the world changes. Is the innovator’s dilemma. Exactly. This is the innovator’s dilemma. Rest in peace.

38:10 And so then they disappear, but along the way, until recently, that was fine, because you could retire before that happened. So I worked with Kodak years ago, and a friend of mine did a lot of consulting for them, and the Kodak, most people know, invented the digital camera as well and owned all the patents. And as film was dying, Kodak was just churning into film as hard as they can, and my friend said to the CEO, you’re gonna have to scale back the film thing, and he said to her, come over here, look at the window.

38:44 He says, how many buildings do you see out there? And she started counting. He said, I’ll tell you, it’s 38. He said, now another question: how many processes are involved in making film? The answer is 38.

38:57 There was one building for each one of the processes necessary for Kodak to make film. They were optimized to do one thing, and as a result, you couldn’t slowly scale back film, because you couldn’t close any of the 38 buildings. You needed all of them. They were a dinosaur, but dinosaurs were really good at eating plants and large volume until the asteroid hit. And the same thing is true for most Fortune 500 companies.

39:21 So most of, you know, the average CMO at a Fortune 500 company lasts 18 months. The reason they last 18 months is because it takes five months for them to make promises, a year for them to have a grace period, and then a month for the CEO to realize the promises aren’t going to get kept, and they get replaced again, because unlike every other department at the company, the CMO promises to change everything. The CMO promises miracles. Accounting never promises miracles.

39:47 Production doesn’t. Right, yeah, but marketing does, and so they’re hiring the wrong people for the wrong reason. If you want a miracle, you’re not gonna change it by changing your ads. You’re gonna get the miracle by closing 19 to the 38 buildings. You can get the miracle by changing who you hire and how you hire them.

40:06 Those are marketing acts. You just don’t call them marketing, and that will never happen in a Fortune 500, because you can’t turn that ship. Innovator’s dilemma. It is done every now and then. Every now and then, it has happened, and it can happen.

40:19 We certainly saw Satya do it at Microsoft. It’s happened in Microsoft a couple of times. Apple did it right up to the edge of bankruptcy. I was right that Nintendo wasn’t a Fortune 500 company, but they make playing cards, and then they didn’t. So it can be done, but the thing is, humans shouldn’t care that much about the name on the door.

40:42 We need to care about the people, and so if the place you’re at isn’t working anymore, just leave and go to a place that is working, because there’s nothing keeping you there. The momentum, the sunk costs, should be ignored, and you should say, I’m only gonna get tomorrow one time. If I have tomorrow to do over again, how will I do it? You mentioned intentional action, right? Something you talk to people a lot about, that it’s the actions that matter, not the thoughts and not the dreams.

41:10 Can you explain that to people? Well, we’re, we’re scared of intent, because if you announce your intent, even to yourself, it makes it way more likely you’re gonna fail, right? So we go into the store, and someone says, can I help you? You say, I’m just looking. I’m just looking is a statement of no intent, and that’s the way many people have been trained to go through life, because the system wants you to have no intent and wants you to do your job, get paid, buy stuff, put it in a storage unit, watch TV, repeat.

41:38 No intent. And as soon as we start having intent, we hesitate. Just who are we to do it, right? We feel like an imposter when we have intent. But if you can announce your intent, then you can get to who exactly are you seeking to change, what change exactly are you seeking to make?

41:55 So you know who has intent? Surgeons. If you go to a surgeon, she doesn’t just accidentally cut you open. She says, you have a blocked vein, or whatever. I’m gonna go in there and fix it.

42:08 Intent. It either works or it doesn’t work, and that action, whether we work for a company or on our own, can fuel us doing ever better work, because we can say, I set out to do this, and it either worked and I’m sorry I did, or it worked and I’m glad it did, or I could’ve done better, and here’s how. And how do you set intentions? Is it goals? Is it values?

42:31 Is it a mission? For me personally, yeah. And for anyone out there who wants to do it well, I think that all of us have no place to begin but with ourselves. What turns us on? What gives us a smile?

42:45 What would make our late parents happy? What would happen to our status with our neighbors, in our role in the community of X, Y, or Z? Happen. So we always begin there. Even the most selfless person on earth, you know, you’re diving in to shark-infested waters to save someone’s life.

43:03 Well, yes, saving their life is important, but part of the reason it’s important is you want to be the kind of person that would have done that act and saved that person. Being that kind of person is better than walking away and watching them drown. So that’s where we begin, which is getting clear in our head about what are the shifts we seek to make to become the person we want to be. And then there’s a series of choices we have to make, but I think they’re easier if we have habits.

43:33 Habits get us results. Goals are results, but you can’t, having the goal of, I’m gonna make a number one bestseller, what do you do? That didn’t tell me anything, whereas having the goal of, I’m gonna write every single day and I’m gonna learn this and this, and maybe the byproduct is that there’s a bestseller. Those are different things. So I’m way more focused on habits than I am on specific goals that are out of your control.

44:01 Besides your daily writing, what are some of the other habits you’ve adopted over the years? I ask why a lot. I have rules for myself that I make once, and then I don’t negotiate them again. So I haven’t had a piece of meat or chicken since 1980. Something, because I just don’t want to keep revisiting the question.

44:24 Right? I made a good decision. The decision has served me well. I’m done with that decision. I’m gonna go on to the next one.

44:32 The habit of ignoring sunk costs, which is really hard, which is, say, doesn’t matter how much it took me to, 2x, if I don’t want X anymore, I shouldn’t keep with that. The idea of not having a meeting. I don’t have meetings. I will have one-on-one conversations all the time, but it’s very hard to persuade me to sit in a room with three or four or six people as we go around the room and do X, Y, or Z. Send me a memo.

45:04 Put it in Slack. I don’t need to do that. And as a result of no TV and no memos, I have six or seven hours every day that most people don’t have. And why don’t you like meetings? Well, I was a performance.

45:16 I worked well. I worked without Pitt and Polly on a book about this. He wrote it, called Read This Before Our Next Meeting. I published it, and the math is overwhelmingly compelling, which is that if the people in the meeting are getting billed out at 50 or $100 an hour, and there’s six of them, and you’re sitting there for an hour, not only did you just waste six, hundred dollars. You gave people a place to hide, and most meetings in most organizations are a bunch of people waiting for someone else to take responsibility.

45:50 And why did we do that? Exactly. I was talking to somebody from Prudential yesterday when I was out in California, and she goes to eight hours of meetings a day. That’s not unusual at all. Why?

46:04 What, what, where did that come from? And she can’t go to ten, because she goes home after eight and a half. So the point is, what would happen if instead we asked every time, what is this meeting for? And I’ll tell you a quick meeting. Is that a friend who runs a Fortune 1000 company.

46:22 It’s also a brilliant computer guy, and one weekend he wrote a hack in Google Calendar that erased every meeting in the entire company that was a weekly meeting that had been running for more than two months. And on Monday morning he sent the company a note. He said, look, I’ve just deleted all of the persistent weekly meetings. Let’s try for two weeks, three weeks without them, and if you still want to put it back on the calendar, go ahead. But he cleaned out all the crust, and that was brilliant, because it forced people to take responsibility for calling the meeting, as opposed to saying, well, we always have this meeting, and that it seems like trying to run a race with boots on.

47:03 I don’t know why you would do that. It’s great, way not to take ownership. It was cool. Meeting. Bezos has a famous practice think at Amazon, where if you call a meeting, you have to write a brief, like a one-page brief, three, three, Iran wanted out, really, and then what everyone gets how they have to sit and read it, in front of you, in front of you, and then make, and then it starts.

47:22 Well, it doesn’t start, right? Because if everyone in the room agrees with your conclusion, the meeting is over. What has to happen is, if someone doesn’t, if they have more questions, then they, then there can be a meeting. So the default is, okay, go ahead. So the meeting could be six minutes.

47:38 We’re done. And I went in, and there, people have played with, like, you, smaller typeface, and small, it, like in high school, and so they make rules now about how, how many of the three pages are put, laid out. All the three pages is when I worked with them on the future of the Kindle, and I had all these inventions that I wanted them to put into the Kindle and ways that the Kindle could be better. Okay, and it was super this meeting, because I was responsible until after they read the memo, and then someone else became responsible, and the responsible torch keeps passing, and at the end, if they’re not gonna do it, they got to say why they’re not gonna do it.

48:14 If they are gonna do it, they say when they’re gonna do it, and it just supercharges the whole thing. It was magic. I don’t call that a meeting. I haven’t, I need a new name for it, but if you run a meeting like that, you have my blessings. Okay, so they do it right.

48:25 They do a version of it that works in an institution that size. Okay, speaking of Amazon, how do they do on a golden scale of one to ten in marketing, if we want to call it that, or building a great company or products that make people want to? So for the first 20 years, how many ads did they run, and with, you can you remember any of them? The answer is almost none, and you can’t, because the marketing was the product. What you talked about was, can you believe I got this book, this book that I’ve been looking for for 20 years, can you believe it came in one day?

49:00 Can you believe it? Like, that is what he invested in. That was brilliant. I think that was, that because it was marketing, or because that’s what he thought would make him better than the competitors? That’s what marketing is.

49:13 Okay, stop thinking of it in this, right? That’s been defined by something old, right? Exactly. Yeah, okay. Right, what, when Tony Hsieh spent millions of dollars on customer service to build Zappos, a billion-dollar shoe store.

49:25 Can you believe his shoe stores were the billion dollars? That was a marketing choice, instead of running ads. He spent on customer service. The same thing, deliver Wow. Yeah, which is kind of what you’re saying, cuz Wow gets talked about.

49:34 Exactly. Did they return my shoes even after three days? And I did this, hour. Look, they gave me this. Exactly.

49:40 Okay, exactly. I have a couple challenges with Amazon, because public companies that are growing tend to create toxic environments, and I don’t think it’s because anyone means poorly. I think it’s because, and having worked at Yahoo, you’re sitting in the executive suite, and you are surrounded by 1,000 to 10,000 people who have stock options. Some of them have enough stock options that if the price of that stock goes up $4, they’ll make a million. Right?

50:12 So now you got to take a decision. Your Sheryl or Mark or the guys at Yahoo or whatever company it is, you got to take a decision, and you know that it’s gonna cost the people around you millions of dollars, but it’s the right thing to do. That’s really hard. The stock market is greedy and selfish and short-sighted, and it leads to corporate destruction, because companies miss opportunities. So Amazon has become an engine that I don’t think is always aware of the impacts it’s causing, where they could be leading instead.

50:47 That racing to the bottom. The problem with that is you might win or come in second, but racing to the top is way more interesting. So how do you figure out how to pay the people who work in the warehouse ever more, not ever less? How do you figure out how to create an environment where your employees are challenged, not to follow a manual, but to write a manual? And part of the challenge, so Amazon’s culture is not done, but the cloud, but Amazon’s retail culture is where store that sells everything, which is the opposite of almost every other business, which is their story, that sells something.

51:24 Then in every other business, to get on the endcap, to get on the cash register at Walmart, you have to please a buyer, and the buyer’s boss. They are putting their reputation at stake by promoting you. And so I was one of the people who persuaded Amazon to start publishing books, because they had everything that’s hard about publishing. They just weren’t doing the most useful part, which is picking authors and bringing in their work to the world. And so when they finally decided to do it, I, they called my bluff.

51:54 I had to go build an imprint with them, and what we discovered was that everything there is about, we sell everything, so they don’t have a way to promote good stuff, bad stuff. The system does it. It’s just a system, and everyone who’s working there is pedaling as fast as they can inside the system. Well, the problem with that is, again, listening to mass causes the culture to shift more toward mass, when what we really want as participants in the culture is for the culture to shift toward better, and to do that, you need leadership.

52:27 So Bloomingdale’s led with fashion taste. Amazon isn’t leaving any of the things that they choose to sell. They’re just this engine toward cheaper, deliverable quality, by the old definition of quality, which means meeting spec, and in the short run that benefits everybody, because it saves everybody money and gets people what they need. But in the long run, you’ve abdicated something really important, and I think there’s not a lot of point to having a culture if you’re gonna abdicate that, taking responsibility, being, say, here, I made this, that’s something that it’s important to me.

53:06 Will that become a problem for them in 10 years if they don’t? Well, I think it’s already a problem for us. Okay, and Amazon, you know, we always look at the Titans of whatever is in the moment and say they’re there forever. Now, know that, you know, car companies aren’t there forever. Now, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and go down the list, not there forever.

53:30 Now, even Jeff said this won’t be there forever, right? So, no, it won’t be there forever, but I don’t know if they’re gonna stumble because of this. I think it’s already clear that our culture stumbles because of this, because the long tail, as Chris Anderson has written, surfaces all of this juicy stuff that used to be invisible, but also the culture likes the short head, and what’s in the short head drives things. And if you get rid of the center, you’re just left with a doughnut, with everyone with their own thing.

54:00 Sometimes we lose a sense of us, and I think they were starting to feel that, and Amazon promotes that. So the beauty is you get that book you can never find anywhere, but the downside is no one is connecting with each other about something. Like, we like to talk about Jaws. All right, let’s try a Harry Potter. Right?

54:18 If Amazon had been dominant when J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, no one would have ever read that book. No one. It worked because independent booksellers forced children to read it. They, the right kid would walk into the store, the bookseller would walk right over to that kid and say this, and it was only that action for months that made a difference.

54:42 Whereas Fifty Shades of Grey only happened because Amazon, Fifty Shades of Grey and the Kindle, because you could read it without anybody knowing you were reading it. And that’s the two edges that I find interesting, and I see that on YouTube with my guests. My guess is that people are watching it secretly sometimes, because I’ll have someone on. I’ve told people, on my, people are gonna love you or hate you, and then they, I say, oh, they loved you. I don’t know if they love you, but they’re watching you, and they do it in private, and people stop in the streets and talk about some guests.

55:14 And my, a, my, my team is like, how can they like him? He’s horrible. But they’re giving them something that they can’t get somewhere else. Yeah, I’ve got two young boys about to turn three and four. Wow.

55:27 Congrats. Have fun. Thank you. I started very late, but I’m glad I started, but I’m thinking about their education, so I really am. And I know you have thoughts on the education system, and you said before you got the compass, not the map.

55:39 And I’m not asking you for solutions, but, right, maybe you can tell me what I should be thinking about when it comes to how I educate these boys? I spent 40 years of my life in the classic education system in America. A lot of famous colleges in your CV. Yeah, I went to MIT, and I learned there. I learned a lot of great stuff, and then I went into the, you know, the industrial complex in the banking world and the startup world, but only in the last eight years have I really started learning things from other people, through conversations and taking actions and teachings.

56:08 And so I was wondering, if I had been learning like this for 48 years as opposed to eight years, what would happen? I know this is a heavy question, but how do I educate my kids? All right, tell us that. How do we do this? So I wrote a very long manifesto called Stop Stealing Dreams.

56:25 It’s online for free. It’s been read a million times, and I condensed it into a TEDx talk. So if I’m not going to summarize the whole thing, it comes down to this: intentional action. What is school for? Education is not the same as learning.

56:39 Education is about compliance and a certificate. It’s about accreditation. We know what school is for. School was invented. Public school was invented to create compliant factory workers for the growing industrial economy, that’s why it exists, and it is organized the way it is organized, a lot like a factory, for a reason.

56:58 We process you for a year. If you’re defective, we put you back and we reprocess you. Right? You go through this whole assembly line thing, and on and on and on. So, famous colleges, which are not the same as good colleges, are the last period in that sentence, because if a parent does a good job, their status in the community, their kid will comply well enough to get into a famous college, and then the parent has succeeded.

57:25 The famous college is the signal to various elements of the industrial economy that you know how to comply at the highest level, and that you were born, probably, with privilege, and so therefore you’re one of us. And then you get slotted in. This has nothing to do with learning, and all the evidence makes this really clear, that learning kids who know how to walk, ride a bike, talk, juggle, go down the list. They learned it. If you want someone, for example, to like Indian food, what you don’t do is have them read the history of Indian food and then have them take the Indian food test, and if they do well, let them take a course in Indian food, and then take them to the restaurant.

58:06 That’s not how it works, right? Well, it works is you start eating it when you’re a kid. You learn a little bit about it. You make it. It reminds you of certain things, and on and on and on.

58:15 Well, most of the work that matters cannot be done by an AI. It cannot be easily outsourced to someone cheaper than you. It’s not work we know how to teach in an educational setting. It just isn’t that. It’s the soft skills, which I call real skills, that transform people.

58:33 It’s the choice to be optimistic, enthusiastic, punctual, hard-working, creative. These are choices. They become skills, and you can learn them, but we don’t educate people on them. So then well-meaning parents say, well, I want to educate my kids, but when the kid comes home with an A, we congratulate them, and when they come home with a D, we say you did something wrong. What are we doing?

58:57 We’re sending them really clear signals about what actually matters, instead of saying, you didn’t look me in the eye. You didn’t shake that person’s hand. You didn’t do that generous thing. in this situation, or instead of saying, wow, I just saw that thing you drew, that’s amazing, how do we expand that? How do we create an environment where you’re editing Wikipedia pages when you’re seven years old?

59:22 Why not? No one can stop you. How do we make it so that you’re organizing a fundraiser for the community when you’re nine? No one can stop you. These acts, that’s what I think of as learning.

59:34 And the commitment from parents has to be, I think, public school is really important, because it builds our culture. But we got a home-schooled kids from three o’clock in the afternoon until midnight every day. Who’s doing that? What are they consuming? How are they interacting?

59:48 Because the easiest thing is, throw the iPad into the crib, and now you don’t have to worry about it for a long time, because they’re just going to do that thing where they get reinforced. Some of the similar messages. Exactly. And so, you know, there’s a school that’s going very fast called the Acton Academy, and the folks in, hacked, and have been corresponding with me for a while. The typical Acton Academy has 40, 50, 60 kids in it and two adults, including the maintenance staff.

1:00:16 And the first rule at the Acton Academy is, if a kid asks you a question, you’re not allowed to answer them. That starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through. Kids teaching other kids. Kids taking projects. Kids making promises to each other.

1:00:30 Kids engaging in the quest for learning. And so the question I would ask an employer in the modern age is, if you got a chance to hire someone who has done that for 12 years, who has figured out how to master this craft, this craft knows this, knows this, and can look up when the War of 1812 was, do you want to hire that person, or do you want to hire a person who says, what exactly would you like me to do today? I think it’s a no-brainer. So do I have to find the right school, and or pay attention that I do my own set of educating them outside of school?

1:01:02 I think it’s the second one. It’s way more important. I think that there are plenty of examples of people who went to public school, of people who even went to a semi-famous or famous college, but whose parents so led them in a different direction that you can pull that off. It’s the right school can help a lot, right? In the school our kids went to was a mix of both, but it took a lot of effort to keep our kids and their friends on a different path, and that path is one that says, yeah, but what did you make today, and what inspired your day, and who did you help today?

1:01:39 I was just thinking about Lenny Levine this morning, coming, and he was a kindergarten teacher, passed away a couple years ago, and the rule in Lenny Levine’s kindergarten class was you can’t say you can’t play, and you just have to follow that rule. If you follow that rule, then what will happen is, when a kid comes over and says, what are you doing? Can’t say you can’t play here. Sit and join me. Let’s do this together, because it turns out interactions are at the heart of what we do now.

1:02:06 Where are those being taught? I don’t see those being taught in very many places. Can’t say you can’t play, as, and they have to contribute, talk about what they can’t, exclude other people. All right, okay, gotcha. Right, every single kid in this class deserves to be able to engage with you on that same note.

1:02:23 How does the TV industrial complex or the media complex play into that? Does it echo back the same things? Well, so TV industrial complex says, it’s hard to believe, but in 1915, in the United States, a typical household person owned two pairs of shoes, two pairs of pants, and factories were ramping up, and their biggest fear was that they could make more stuff than people could buy. That was a giant fear, and how were they gonna create a culture where status would be measured by what kind of fit anyway?

1:03:00 Well, public school helps with that, because the cafeteria, you know, in a status, Wells, and the whole thing, and how do we keep that marching forward? Well, radio, and then television became this magical engine, which is, we can, the opiate for the masses is, sit here from 7:00 p.m. to midnight, forget how much debt you’re in, forget thinking creatively. We got five hours of free entertainment, and the only thing you have to do to pay for it is go buy more stuff tomorrow.

1:03:28 And so, at work, you’re supposed to do it, your total, so we can make more stuff, so we can pay you. And at night, you’re supposed to listen to what the companies are telling you, so you can buy more stuff, so we can pay you. And the cycle continued, and for 80 years, what a run. For 80 years, we made the world safer, healthier, richer, fatter, all of these things. It was magnificent until it wasn’t.

1:03:51 And now you’ve got stress, you’ve got heart disease, and got diabetes, and you’ve got the fact that the economies can’t keep growing on the industrial track the way they could. You used to, plus robots, automation, AI. If I can tell someone exactly what I need you to do, I can find someone cheaper than you to do it. And so we have a problem, and it’s coming at the very same time that people are looking deep inside themselves and saying, is this all there is?

1:04:19 Clearly there’s more than this, and the happiest people aren’t the people who are spending all day on Facebook. They’re not the people who are spending all day trying to get more followers. They’re not the people who have the most money. And you know, we know that the richest people in the world are ten times richer than they used to be. They’re not ten times happier.

1:04:36 They’re less happy, because they’re spending all this time looking at how everybody else is, even richer than them. And this new media, play into that? Does it do the same thing? Reinforces what, multiplies it times 100, except the one thing that it took away is the Nielsen ratings. They, everyone doesn’t watch M*A*S*H, everyone doesn’t watch Friends.

1:04:55 You don’t get to work go to work tomorrow and talk about that thing you all watched, which brands hate. That’s why they love the Super Bowl, because there’s one left. But other than that, what we’ve said to people is, oh, you speak Portuguese? We have YouTube for you in Portuguese, and so now everyone can connect to the whole system. And the other thing that makes it worse is, because advertisers can measure, they can measure clicks, they can measure conversion, because Amazon is measuring it.

1:05:23 It’s all a race, race to the bottom. There’s an old saying, which is, if you optimize a website enough, it will become a porn site, because with every A/B test, just make it a little easier, make it a little bit more portney, and people will click on it, and so we’re ending up with these grease trails taking people in exactly the wrong direction. Do you ever look at this and think, like, you’re in some dystopian science fiction movie, and when’s everybody gonna wake up and see the madness?

1:05:50 You know, why not get some press? I look at this part of it, and I realize part of it’s my fault, right, that I’m the guy who invented commercial email marketing. That’s what permission marketing is about. Before that, there was a little tiny category of evil spam, and that was the only email anyone got from a company. And I said, no, no, anticipated person on relevant messages sent to people who want to get them.

1:06:12 We got Yoyodyne, got a seventy-five percent open rate and a thirty- five percent response rate on all the email we ever sent. This is what year? I wrote, I built Yoyodyne from ’92 to ’98, and sold it to Yahoo in ’98, and what I discovered after the book came out was, it was right. It was correct. It built a multi-multi-billion dollar industry, and then it would be abused, and I really thought people could act in a way that they would be proud of, and but the race to the bottom clicked in, and so, you know, in the time we’re talking, I got 400 emails that I didn’t ask for, that aren’t like spam, green card spam, spam stuff, too, but there’s spam, cuz I don’t want to get them.

1:06:53 And so again, the noise, the noise, the noise, because people persuade themselves it’s just because it’s their job, or just cuz they’re gonna make a nickel, it’s allowed. No, it’s not allowed. It’s not allowed. You’re not allowed to go into a bank with a clown mask on and try to make withdrawal. You’ll get arrested, because people with clown masks aren’t good bank customers.

1:07:14 Not allowed to do that. And no, it’s not allowed to hustle your way forward just cuz you’re gonna come out ahead. Hustle is not something we need more of. But that permission marketing is something you invented, which was a different way of marketing. So for people that understand it, it wasn’t like you got this brand new unsolicited message, right?

1:07:32 You tried to convert them. You actually got their permission to talk to the program, and then showed them something they might be interested in. And Google and Facebook optimized for these algorithms. Now it has to be a relevant ad, and relevant. Yeah, I know the Google ad model is based on permission market, right?

1:07:46 For sure, but over time, when there’s enough independent players who think they’re gonna win a jackpot, everyone will come, right? As close to the edge as they can, and so the edge keeps moving, because Google is a public company, and as a result, they don’t stand for anything like what they used to stand for. That they will, you know, they’re wrecking the search results. They’re filtering things out. They are acting as a monopolist, because they need to make their stock price go up, not because it’s the right thing to do.

1:08:16 And it’s not because they’re evil. It’s because that’s what any company does when they get big. Well, so the phrase, don’t be evil was coined to mean, don’t be Microsoft. Okay, and which was dominating, and Bill Gates was in trouble with antitrust. So imagine, okay, don’t be a monopolist, right?

1:08:34 Be open. That’s what don’t be evil was originally supposed to mean, which was in the internal tagline. Yes, right? And it worked great, because the idea of open systems is that the more people can put something into the internet, the more valuable the culture becomes. And over time, consultants, or whoever at Google, have figured out, wait, if we’re a little less open, we’ll make a lot more money.

1:08:59 And so it used to be you do a search for something like, fly to Haiti, and there’d be 18 search results there, all of which were real search results. Now there’ll be two, and the other sixteen are things that Google makes money from. And so by squeezing that down, there, acting like a monopolist, because they know people aren’t gonna switch to DuckDuckGo, which is a search engine just as good, that doesn’t track you into Sur, because they can. And so I guess the question is, when you go to work in the morning, your only two questions to ask.

1:09:30 And I, still walking through Grand Central, I said this to myself. The magic of free, open capitalism is there. All these people, Grand Central Station today, all going to work, struggling to figure out how to make something better, so that someone will pick their company. That’s how you make the culture better. But then I realized a few of them are going to work saying, how can we use the power we have to make things a little worse for people, so we can make more money?

1:09:55 And that’s where we get into trouble. What percentage of those people were doing that? Is that their evilness? Miss City. Well, it’s where big companies go.

1:10:06 Yeah, right. Yeah, no, that’s very true. All right, so Google, while you’ve just given Google rating, so this concept you have of the dip, when you see something like that and articulate it, do you feel like, I’m sure there was a Greek philosopher 2,000 years ago that had his own version of that, or do you think that maybe this is the first time someone articulated it, because it’s a powerful concept and it helps people move forward? Where’d that come from?

1:10:33 I’m in the middle of one now. So I’ve been thinking about this. Every once in a while, you can give a name to something obvious, and just naming it is sufficient. And that’s what I love about the long tail, is that what Chris Anderson did. I really wish I’d written that book.

1:10:52 There are not many books I wish I’d written, but I wrote about Zipf’s law a year before he did, but I learned about the short head, and he realized, oh, if I just name this other part and explain why it’s there, I’ve made a contribution. But then other times, like with permission marketing, everyone said I was an idiot. Everyone said, this is the stupidest thing we ever, this is, and they all said that before I named it, and once I named it, then they could see it, and it was original.

1:11:22 That was pretty cool. You don’t get many of those when you do what you do, I mean, for a living. But I was, I knew I had one with the dip. What I was encountering there was, I was trying to understand why people who put a lot of effort in keep making the same dumb mistake, and the dumb mistake is they do hard work, and hard work, and hard working, just when they get to the point where everyone else is quitting, they quit too. And if they just stuck it out for two more months, or two more years, or twenty more years, they get to the other side.

1:11:57 Now, once you see that the dip is there, you have two choices. Don’t start, or if you’re going to start, be prepared to go to the other side. And what we know, for example, last time I checked, there were 80 million blogs, and almost all of them are now defunct, because the people who started writing them didn’t realize that writing a blog means you have to do it for 10 years. Now, there are, I don’t know how many million podcasts, a bazillion podcasts. I did a search the other day for a podcast for a phrase.

1:12:25 I found 15 podcasts with the same name as their phrase. A phrase is their name. And don’t start a podcast unless you’re prepared to get to episode 100 at least, because this is not gonna work. And yet there’s all these people go away and saying, I’m gonna be an episode 30. They quit when everyone does.

1:12:43 So the purpose of the book was to say, just see that, let me name that for you. And the book’s only 90 pages long. It took me two weeks to write, and for whatever reason, it has really resonated with people, so that felt like a useful contribution. And how do people know when they’re in a dip? Well, when they’re in the dead end, right?

1:13:00 So the question that I get asked the most is that one, which is, how do I tell them apart? So we can agree that vaping is a dead end. That there’s no other side to something like vaping, whereas playing acoustic guitar and hoping to make a living as a musician, well, some people do. So is that a dip, or is it a dead end? That’s the hard part.

1:13:22 And my advice to people is, number one, you don’t have to be original. You do not have to pick a way to make a living or any fact that has never been done before in history, and to the people who’ve come before you and gotten to the other side, what path were they on? So if you want to be a successful cardiac surgeon, you probably need to go to loss to a medical school, right? That’s part of the deal. If you’re not going to go to medical school, stop telling me you’re gonna be a surgeon.

1:13:49 But if you do that, and then you get the fellowship and the intern, bubbeleh, then you’re on your path. So tell me who’s come before you who has made it through this dip, because you can follow that path, and that is the easiest way I know to tell them apart. What dip are you going through right now? So where we are with the workshops, we’re up to 21 thousand graduates now, from the altMBA, the marketing workshop, to the freelancers workshop. We run a bunch of smaller ones that are less expensive and less difficult in terms of the amount of time you have to put in.

1:14:27 Okay, and it’s not two hundred thousand. It’s not two million, and at some level that’s okay with me, because we’re proud of the work. But in order for it to change the culture at the level I want, there’s another side, and so it lines up with the Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore’s idea, which is a lot of people who took them so far, like doing things that are new, and when you sculpt someone, say, this is new. A lot of people in any population say, oh, you have new branded shoes, you got to do this and do that, show me.

1:14:59 But most people don’t. Most people want something you have to prove in something that’s effective. And in between the two is a chasm, which looks a lot like a dip, and you get there, and suddenly the new people, you’re running out of new people. You need those people to tell their friends, who are waiting for them to tell them that work. That’s where we are with these workshops.

1:15:20 So you chop wood, carry water. You show up, show up, you do your best, and sometimes you don’t get to the other side, and sometimes you do. That’s the dip that we are in, but we are super excited about that, the community that we’ve currently got. So I’m not faltering at all, but I’ve seen this path, and I know people have gone through this path before. So that’s what we’re doing.

1:15:42 The trickiest thing about the dip is, is trying to make a subjective judgment of your own situation, is almost impossible because we’re wrapped up in our own emotions, right? And then you can go back to your vision, and you can say, look, I love what I’m doing now, and I love these people. I’m gonna keep doing it regardless. But then if you really want to create the impact, you have to go back and be objective. Right?

1:16:02 And this is this internal turmoil you have in the dip situation, correct? Can I, it’s really useful to have a book, because sometimes people send me an email saying, I didn’t understand your blog today, and I write back saying, have you asked three other people? Because if you talk to each other, you’re gonna figure out way more than if you talk to me. So having a name for the dip means that you can turn to her, to him, and say, after you’ve read this and heard what I just said, do you think we’re gonna dip?

1:16:31 Who’s come before us? What is this? I talk about this. It’s the cohort that makes the difference. There isn’t one clear answer.

1:16:40 This is why this stuff McKinsey does is so ridiculous, because McKinsey thinks that just because they’re getting paid millions of dollars, they can bring you a memo with the right answer. No. It’s how do we find our way forward? What’s the wayfinding we’re gonna do from here to there together? Because all of us are smarter than any of us.

1:16:58 You cannot make an orchestra of clarinet players, and this is part of the problem with lack of diversity. Lack of diversity means you’ve got nothing but clarinet players in the room. What you really need to make sure is you got an oboe player, you got a violinist, and everyone else, people who are good at different things because of their background, because of their culture, because of whatever, who can make the thing better going forward. We see this generation war, you know, the older people shouting at the younger people, and the Millennials who don’t get it, and the privilege, and all that stuff.

1:17:31 What do you make of that? conversation out there. There are people. Missing the point, is this something that’s always cycled throughout the years, you know, or and one that we just see now because of the internet and social media? What’s your perspective?

1:17:45 Well, begin with this. My whole life, boomers have been the center of every conversation, and now that boomers are starting to die off, we’re acting like everyone’s dying off. It’s been a six, eight year lot, right? But beyond that, yes, there have always been generational struggles. I don’t think it’s helpful having just done it to characterize entire generations of people, because you’re mischaracterizing millions of people when you do that.

1:18:15 Are there some people who are 22 years old who are acting selfishly and privileged? Of course, but there are also ones who are building social entrepreneurship ventures, without a lot of fanfare, who are making things magically better. What we know is that the promise of the American Dream, compliance and persistence and consistency, gets you a mortgage and retirement, isn’t valid anymore for most people. The deal’s off. You don’t get to keep your job for 40, 50, 60 years, and most bosses aren’t acting as enlightened as bosses did back in the day, when we just digest, you know, sent people home at 4:30 in the afternoon because the day was over.

1:18:59 You have to leave. So is it surprising to me that workers are saying, I’m not taking your deal anymore? Is it surprising to me that when you’ve got websites that are begging for their services, new jobs being offered, that they want to leave because you’re not looking out for them? Doesn’t surprise me at all. So no, I don’t think we’ve created a generation of selfish people.

1:19:20 I think that there’s a lot of wisdom that’s being spread at every age group, and if you want the kind of person who’s beyond compliance, then you have to offer that person something that rewards them for the risks that they’re taking, and they’re taking emotional risks, not financial risk. I know a couple in London who gets every one of their new employees to read your book, lunch in hand, and, and they struggle to find people who finish the book. Right, and they want the linchpins.

1:19:52 Right? That’s the only way we can move forward. Do you hear this a lot? And I mean, yeah, how do you react to that, and what should they do? Right, well, so if you’ve been brainwashed for 20, 30, 40 years to not be a linchpin, why am I surprised that you don’t want to be a linchpin?

1:20:10 What is, of course you don’t want to be a linchpin. It’s an edge case, now there’s way more, but it was an edge case to say that there have been people who have denounced the book because it undermines the hierarchical structure of what they want to do and what they want to stand for. But what it doesn’t say in the book is you’re entitled to do what you want. You’re entitled to ignore the industrial structure. What it says is, the best place for you to stand to do the work you want to do, to be proud of your work, to be secure, is to be the person who’s peculiar, unique, a contribution.

1:20:45 And the mistake that a lot of organizations make, and I don’t know about this couple, is they want a higher linchpins, but they run ads and they pay people like their cogs. So if you’re going to act that way, don’t be surprised that that’s who you get. That what it means to find and recruit people who are linchpins is you have to work 20 times harder just to find them and recruit them. Years ago, Intel had a program when they were growing, where they gave their top, I don’t know, 50 executives a blue card, and they said, if you ever meet anyone at a trade show, at a conference, at an industry event, who’s the linchpin, hand in this card.

1:21:26 What the card says is, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day, and soon, you’re gonna need a job, and when you do this, it guarantees you a job at Intel, no questions asked. You’re hired. Put this card in your wallet. When you need us, we’re here. If you find enough people and give that blue card to them, go into pencil show.

1:21:46 I like that. Has anyone taken you up on that? And other companies doesn’t? I have never heard of anybody else doing that, because it’s so scary. And there’s a charity that I help out now and then called the Greyston Bakery.

1:21:58 They make all the brownies and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and their model is open hiring, and what it means is, next job goes to the next person on the waiting list. No interview. Next one, I’ve been in prison. Next one, been a drug dealer. Next one.

1:22:17 And then there’s a four-weeks training, and if you don’t do well in training, you’re right, and then you’re in, and they’ve got support, they’ve got childcare, and all this training stuff, and it works. It changes people’s lives, and their mission is getting companies to do open hiring. And other companies, we couldn’t possibly do that. We need to screen. Even though there’s no evidence they’re good at screening.

1:22:39 None. Just like colleges are terrible at screening. No evidence. They just want to feel like they did, and to give that part up. Intel gave that part up.

1:22:50 Guarantees job. Oh, what will happen? Oh no, just let them in. You already figured out that they’re a linchpin. They’ll figure it out, right?

1:22:56 And a linchpin is someone who can come in and make things happen in your organization. Yeah, be personally responsible to carry it forward, make mistakes, make decisions. Exactly. Okay, and that’s what you want. Do you want, your, some people want?

1:23:10 Yeah, lots of companies don’t know what to do with that. Like, at the beginning of FedEx, one of their legends was, there was a snowstorm, and one of their drivers, who I don’t know how he had a company card, chartered a helicopter to go across the snow, top pass to deliver a 120 dollar FedEx package. And FedEx talked about this forever. They don’t talk about anymore, because FedEx does not want drivers who are linchpins. They want compliant cogs.

1:23:38 We’re gonna hustle and do exactly what they were told, because they’re an industrial entity. If that’s what you are, don’t you dare hire a linchpin. You’ll both be unhappy. But my organization, we call it a studio. No one has a boss.

1:23:51 Everyone sitting in a circle making promises and keeping them, but no, no one works for me, because I’m a terrible manager. I don’t I’m not building an industrial entity. Building a studio, we make projects as an entrepreneur. You’ve talked about how you have to take all the responsibilities as a business owner and push them to some other people, and then if I have someone listening right now, as an entrepreneur, you’d have to stop being in your business and free up your time, and that means killing all the things you love to do.

1:24:21 Yeah, let me say it a slightly different way. There’s a division: freelancers and entrepreneurs. Freelancers do the work with their own two hands. If you hired me to give a speech, I’m showing up. If you read my blog, I wrote it, every word of it.

1:24:34 Entrepreneurs have to build something bigger than themselves. That’s why we don’t call them freelancers. Larry Ellison doesn’t do any software coding at Oracle. What is Larry Ellison’s job, exactly? His job is to hire every person you can think of to do any job he can think of.

1:24:50 That’s his only job, right? And what that means is that as a freelancer succeeds, what she tends to do is hire the best available person, who also works the cheapest. You know who that is? Her. And so we end up in this cycle of always relying on one person to do the work.

1:25:10 The keyword is, that person is always responsible, that doesn’t mean that person is doing the work. What an entrepreneur needs to do is say, if there’s a job that another human other than me can do, I need another human other than me to do it. And if entrepreneurs are honest with themselves, they’re probably not doing that. When you’re asked to speak nowadays, what it was, the big thing that people want you to talk about, is it to try to come into the organizations and get them to think like, set so I don’t do that much speaking, and I didn’t do any consulting.

1:25:47 Why? Because I think if you consult with somebody, they’re expecting you will solve their problem, and I only, I can solve anybody’s problem. I think I can turn on a light so they can solve their problem, but that’s not what people hire Arkansas. Okay, and you tried to do that with Kindle and Amazon. Well, I wasn’t even a consultant.

1:26:03 I just couldn’t help myself, but yeah, the reason that the Kindle is exactly the way the Kindle was seven years ago, with no changes whatsoever, is cuz I’m bad at getting other people to do a thing that I think is a good thing. Okay. Right, are you bad at it, or is it impossible in that corporate culture? No, I think if I hunkered down, work the system, had enough empathy for what each person in the hierarchy needed and wanted, I had enough leverage to stick around long enough to work it, but I didn’t care that much.

1:26:33 I’ve solved this problem. This was an interesting problem, but I don’t care enough about Amazon to go invest seven years of my life to work this to the end. So that was, but anyway, most people who get well compensated to speak are not getting compensated for the ideas that they say on stage, because if you want the ideas that they’re saying that stage, you can watch them for free on the TED talk. Right? You’re getting compensated for is showing up, showing up in person with your energy and your focus and your enthusiasm to help this particular entity go forward.

1:27:10 And most people, the audience, realize that they could have watched the TED talk, but they feel like this opens the door for them to go forward. It is an investment. It’s a signalling device, right? And so I’m well aware that that is what is happening when I show up live in person, and that’s what I bring. I don’t say, I, the next six sentences I’m gonna say are so unique and so rare and so extraordinary that you will never hear them anywhere else, but right this minute, from me.

1:27:40 I don’t know how to do that. Let me ask you about community, because when I started teaching, I never thought that community was gonna be part of the education of the action, but when I started doing it, especially in a group situation, I’m sure you’ve seen this at altMBA. All of a sudden, especially when people are going into their fears and questioning things, this community materialized. Exactly. And now, when they come to our, our, they come to London for a quarterly graduation.

1:28:10 People walk in my studio, and they hug each other. Yep. They’ve never seen each other on the world. They’ve told these people things they don’t even tell their husbands and wives. Other friends.

1:28:18 Exactly. Um, and it shocked me. I shouldn’t have been shocked. I should. I know.

1:28:23 I mean, how is this? It’s new. It’s magic. Okay, first, sure. Has education always had a community and cultural component to e-learning?

1:28:31 Has always had. Okay, but education, education is a little bit like going through the army. So yeah, your platoon, they’re with you forever after that, because you got, you figured out how to do it together. You survived it, but when fancy colleges switch to online learning, they’re throwing community out, because their whole mindset is, let’s put videos up of professors, let’s put tests up to prove you, you watch the videos, we’re done, and they can’t figure out why it doesn’t feel the same.

1:29:03 And so, what you know, we run some of our courses on, you to me, because some of the people say, well, I just want to watch the videos, and we say, well, if you just watch the videos, you’re not gonna learn nearly as much. And so we charge as much as we could, so you won’t pick this one. But there they are, and the dropout rate on Udemy is much lower than any other Udemy course I’m aware of, but still really high. Yeah, because they’re not part of a cohort.

1:29:28 And so we spent, you know, for me to make, we’re running the Creatives workshop right now, and it took me, you know, a hundred hours to make the videos that are in it, but two thousand hours to figure out how to make the community that’s in it, because it’s the community that’s gonna transform people. My videos are just commentary. How do you create that community? Well, we took an open source platform and customized it, and we built all sorts of you know, those dark patterns that get you hooked on Twitter or get you hooked on Facebook.

1:29:59 We’ve built bright patterns to get you hooked on each other inside our communities. Okay, and so there’s streaks of people who have shown up. They’re learning groups. There’s homeroom groups. There’s mastermind groups.

1:30:11 There’s in the altMBA, you will give and get more feedback in one month than you have ever gotten in your whole life, and when you give and give again, get feedback from other people, community forms. I force people to upload videos of themselves. Yeah, lots of it. Yeah, and sometimes on my Zoom calls, people are uncomfortable, even on the Zoom video call, and I say, who’s one couple, even being here? All the hands come up, and so when I asked them to put a video of themselves, eat them in a private Facebook group.

1:30:37 Yeah, they freaked out, but since everyone’s doing it, they do it. Peer pressure. And but over time, they get used to it, and then they get so much feedback. There’s a one-minute video of you talking. That’s right, you probably a thousand things to observe there and give feedback.

1:30:51 Yeah, and then they find that if some lady in Canada is doing it well, why can’t I do it? If some 16-year-old kid is doing it, me, I mean, you have to, the idea of quantity is, the first few, the masks are really obvious. There’s gimmicks. There’s all this stuff, and one of the gimmicks is faux vulnerability and faux authenticity, but these are all still gimmicks, but if you’ve done it enough times, sooner or later you get to adopt a consistent posture that you can live.

1:31:17 You mentioned faux vulnerability and, and profiting authenticity. You see a lot of that these days. I think authenticity is a crock. I think that authenticity is dramatically overrated. Authenticity is an excuse.

1:31:29 The last time people were truly authentic is when they were 90 days old and diapers. Everything after that, you’re doing something to get something. Everything you wore closed today, you went to work today. That’s not the authentic you, right? The authentic you didn’t feel like going to work.

1:31:45 They just, what, sit home and take a tub, but you went to work. So when we say something offensive and people criticize, I was just being authentic. No, you’re just regretting the fact that you didn’t get what you wanted from what you said. What we want from you is consistency, not authenticity. Consistency of, what did I expect?

1:32:03 What promise did you make to me? Did you keep it? That when we go to any professional, right? You got a traffic ticket, lawyer shows up, he says, I had a really bad day today. Yeah, I don’t care.

1:32:15 I hired the best lawyer. Be him, right? I don’t want to hear the authentic lawyer talking. I want the best one. And in everything we do, where there were being someone’s colleague or making lunch for someone, what humans want from us is to put emotional labor, that effort into it, to see them.

1:32:33 The practical empathy of seeing them and what they need, regardless of whether we have a headache or not. So I think if you’re hiding behind authenticity, it’s probably a mistake. Just be consistent. Do what you say. Come with emotional content.

1:32:46 That is what people want. I think so. Okay, what about vulnerability? So vulnerability is different. I don’t, I think that if you’re going to do your best work and be open to feedback, then you’re being vulnerable.

1:33:04 The, the act is to pick who you were being open to hear from. So I haven’t read an Amazon review in seven years, because I had never met an author who said, I read all my one-star reviews, and now I’m a better writer. Doesn’t make you a better writer. So why are you vulnerable and open to hearing the one-star reviews? They’re not telling you anything about your book.

1:33:25 To tell you something about the one-star reviewer, you don’t need to know anything about them other than the book wasn’t for them. Let’s move on. Whereas if you can build the circle of people that you can be open with, because their feedback actually is what you need, yes, then you have to be vulnerable in that state, because you haven’t shut those people out. You’ve invited them in to make your work better. What about when you’re vulnerable, is do you find that you can get your points across better?

1:33:50 I mean, you’ve talked about the early days online and you wrote a book, and the other guys made Yahoo. You know, I mean, people appreciate that, right? Especially Seth. I mean, you know, they look up to you and be like, wow, you’d never fail and don’t do anything wrong. And use that also vulnerability or is that vulnerability with her?

1:34:06 I think when I tell the Yahoo story, I am no longer. I’m repeating a version of an earlier me telling that story, right? it. I, anybody who is in front of the public would probably be fibbing to you if they told you that every single time they did that. Like Bruce Springsteen isn’t singing from the heart every single time he sings Born to Run.

1:34:29 How could he be? Yeah, right. And so part of what we do when we create is we find something in ourselves that will give others a hook to hold on to, but if we have to do it again, then we’re recreating that. The first time we do it, then I think we are truly vulnerable in that moment, because we don’t know what’s gonna happen, and it’s that this might not work mindset. That’s part of where creativity lies.

1:34:58 That’s why when someone’s told a story for the hundredth time, it just doesn’t always feel very good. Know they might not be good at it. I think that’s different. Yeah, right, that part of what it means to be a professional today. You’re not a perfect, like the person who’s putting the screws into the boxes all day long, does it exactly the same way every time, because that’s what the industrial system demands.

1:35:23 But we have to acknowledge that the person who is singing on Broadway eight days a week, it’s also an industrial system that they better sing Hamilton the way they say Hamilton yesterday, because that’s what we went to see. Writing it for the first time, Lin-Manuel Miranda, writing it for the first time, how to bring a different thing to the table. So in this post-industrial world, when I’m arguing for, is not that there is no industrial practice. There is, but then there are these magical moments, post-industrial practice, and those require a different sort of presence and confidence.

1:36:01 What did you learn from those early days with the internet? I learned everything from those early days. If the internet hadn’t been invented, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I had my first email account in 1976. 76.

1:36:15 Yeah, and I university at high school. High school, but every time I needed the next magical invention, somehow showed up, because I have a short attention span, because I like living on certain kinds of frontiers, because interaction and community has always been at the heart of this. So I met in the most popular computer game in the world, for Prodigy, in 1990, 1989. I like watching it all grow and unfold. It has been extraordinary, and just in time for me, but bad news for people who need the industrial system to be stable.

1:36:56 And I don’t know where it goes from here. It’s always figured out how’d it go in a place we’re glad it went, but this is really the first time I’m seeing people who have such regret about that phone in their pocket, about the three hours they spent last night online, and so something is going to change, because you can’t torture two billion people for very long when they have choices. So this is the most critical, dire point that you’ve seen. It’s internet in the last 50 years.

1:37:27 Wow, and you saw it before the World Wide Web? Oh, long before that, right? And before browsers. So you saw it at that weird inflection point? Yeah, I missed it.

1:37:37 Late ’80s, mid-’80s, no, the browser was 1993, right? I missed it, and it cost me a billion, 40 billion dollars to miss that, because you could have started Yahoo or a bunch of other things. I could. I started Yahoo in no time, right? I just didn’t get it.

1:37:50 I was already running an internet company. How many people were running an internet company in 1991? Right, 20 of us. But you didn’t know it was an internet company. No, I knew it as an internet, you know, as a web company, right?

1:38:02 The Internet’s been around since 1966, and so you have the hammer, and you saw the nails, and you wrote a book, like, kind of a directory about the internet, right? Which seemed like a good idea at the time. Did would it, but would your life be a bit better with a bit, the billions? And with that creation, my life is great. I have no airplanes.

1:38:22 It’s a good story. It’s a good story, and our lessons in that story permeated in all your business. When I feel like I’m about to dismiss something because I don’t know what to do with the blank sheet of paper, I stop myself every time. Like, I don’t want to be on Twitter. I’m not on Twitter, but when Twitter showed up, I figured out what it was for and how it worked before I dismissed it.

1:38:47 Whereas the old me would have said, yeah, well, why would anyone, 140 characters? Bye. And he said, why would anyone? Part of it. That’s where we get stuck.

1:38:58 There’s a beginning. Why would I want that? And why would anyone want that? So now you try to be open-minded and say, let’s see what’s going on here, as opposed to, that silly, is not for me, let’s write gone. Why on earth would someone want this?

1:39:10 There has to be a reason, because they want it. So let’s decode that and figure out where that takes us next. Why do your students, and my food, my students feel like imposters? So imposter syndrome, which was coined a bunch of years ago, is this feeling that many people get, which is that they’re a fraud, and there’s a lot of writing and talking about how to make it go away. And my controversial answer is, of course you’re a fraud.

1:39:38 And if you didn’t feel like a fraud, you’re either not trying very hard or you’re a psychopath, that when you are talking about what’s going to happen next, how can you be an authority on that? It hasn’t happened yet. When you’re talking about, oh, we’re gonna do it, the best job we can, and you’re gonna come out of the surgery just fine, well, you’re being a little bit of a fraud, because you don’t know that, but you’re acting as if. And so that feeling, when it shows up, is a sign that you’re onto something.

1:40:07 Now, if it turns out that your judgment is poor, and when you think you’re onto something you’re not, over and over again, you have a different problem, but the feeling of an impostor is not the problem. The feeling of the posture is a signal that you’re onto something. All right, so that’s natural. Just like the dip, be ready for it, accept it, and then move on, because you know what’s gonna be there. Dance with it.

1:40:29 All right, every day, get up and be ready to write, to fail, but you don’t look at it as failure. No, to produce, and that’s how you’re gonna get to where you want to go. Exactly. What’s tough, doing in 10 years from now? Yeah, I haven’t asked myself that question since I was 25.

1:40:46 It’s just the time frames keep getting shorter, and also I think it gets me out of a mindful state. This is what I decided to do right now, right here. Let me do this, and I know all the things I’m not doing, but the more I think about them, the less present I am for the things I am doing. So it will be different than what I am doing now, because I’ve never done anything for 10 years, but this is a hell of a ride, and I’m not in any hurry to get distracted from it.

1:41:17 And you set up the habits that make you very happy with where you’re going. Yeah, habits don’t have to change for the work to change. Yeah, right. So you have the habits. I feel like I’m doing this, which means you could be going here, but that’s where you want to go.

1:41:32 You don’t have to know where you’re going, but the habits. Because I don’t, I think external validation is largely overrated, and it’s easier for me to say that, because I don’t need external validation to put food on the table. But the work you need to do to put food on the table, if you’re deliberate about it, will give you plenty of time every day to do work where you don’t need external validation. How does an author remove external validation? It’s hard.

1:41:59 Well, again, until 1925, almost nobody made a living with music or art. There’s no guarantee that you can, but you can make a difference. So maybe you need to work three or four hours a day being extraordinarily good at something, so that you can have seven hours a day to write what needs to be written. Can you tell me what the best day of your life was, and the worst day? So, yeah, I didn’t know you don’t like looking back.

1:42:36 Yeah. And this isn’t really about me. Yeah, this is about the people I’m trying to teach, and what I discovered is there’s a lot of demand for this sort of personal narrative thing, but I find that the personal narrative left a lot of people off the hook, because their narrative is different than my narrative, so therefore what I’m doing isn’t relevant to who they are. And so I try to make it as widely applicable, a series of physical laws, as possible, not about, well, I did this, so therefore you can.

1:43:06 Hmm. Do you think there’s too much personalities in brands these days, in that sense, as opposed to ideas? I mean, humans want to see other humans. A snowman doesn’t really look like a person, but we think it does. You don’t need very much to make something look like a person, so we personalize all of this, and we personalize the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, and, well, people are upset that Cop, and they’re talking like it’s their friend that let them down.

1:43:35 So that’s a natural instinct. The question is, is it of service? Is it helping the brand achieve its goals and keep its promises? Because the alternative could be that the thing you pick to stand for doesn’t work anymore, and then you’re in a box. Does the state of the world, were you, I mean, I, you mentioned, won’t global warming?

1:43:59 When you see politics, does that worry you, or do you think we lack perspective when 1968 was worse? Probably ’59 for sure was worse. ’59, we were 15 minutes away from nuclear war. All right, I’m 68. There was people getting shot in Chicago.

1:44:16 Yeah, protest. So here’s, there’s a distinction, I think, between things the media needs us to worry about today, because they’re gonna make money if we do, and long-term trends that are really a problem, and that’s why the the shifts in the environment are a huge problem, because you can’t just fix them by focusing on them for a week and have them go away, which you can for the typical political disaster. So I tried to, like, I don’t watch any TV. I don’t listen to the news on the radio, because I can, I can be literate about the news in ten minutes a day.

1:44:58 The rest of it is just the media trying to profit from my anxiety. On the other hand, the long-term stuff, if I thought worrying would help, I would worry a lot, but I don’t think worrying helps. The question is, what actions will we take, and how will we create a system in an environment where the ratchet moves toward dealing with the climate emergency, as opposed to making it worse? And the work you do should empower people to go out there and ask those questions.

1:45:24 I’m trying. I mean, I think that teaching leaders to tell better stories is a great way to do this. For example, I wrote a blog post nine years ago that said global warming is a really stupid name, because global is good and warming is good. It should be called atmosphere cancer, because if we had started calling it atmosphere cancer a decade ago, I really think there, like, there are no cancer deniers. Everyone acknowledges the cancer is real.

1:45:51 Atmosphere, atmosphere is real and measurable and scientific. Atmosphere cancer makes it really clear to us what’s going on, and if we could get a hundred Hollywood stars, male and female, to shave their head like they were in chemo, all of a sudden we’d look around saying, wow, the earth starts to have a problem, and you start to create this dynamic where it’s socially unacceptable to stand up and say we don’t have a problem. Right? Like, I get that we can argue about how to solve the problem, but first let’s acknowledge that we have a problem.

1:46:25 You better be able to go to New Orleans and look people in the eye and say, your house is gone, and it’s gone because of something we did, and then you’re gonna have to go to Bangladesh and say, if to 100 million people, because it’s gonna happen there really soon, and on and on. And I don’t have any grandchildren, but it’s not gonna change my point of view, which is, at this point, boomers like you and me, I think this is our obligation. We should leave it in the disastrous state that we’re leaving.

1:46:53 Hmm. And what about politics? Is that a carryover from that old system, the industrial complex? And well so politics has been ugly for thousands of years. It just gets amplified by the media, and it’s, that’s how they make money.

1:47:05 Right. Right. And it’s more media now than it ever was. Oh yeah, right. I mean, the newspaper used to come to my house once a day in Buffalo when I was growing up.

1:47:15 That’s all you got, and if you wanted to turn the radio, you would hear the Rolling Stones. That’s all you got. Now the newspaper comes to my house every 14 seconds. Do the math. And also, politics is now such a bigger portion of what the media used to talk about, which was basically sports, where they don’t have to pay the players, right?

1:47:35 I interviewed a member of Parliament in London, and he said, Brian, politics is show business for ugly people. Sure. Seth, I was really finished with a couple questions. If you can pick up the phone and ring up twenty-year-old Seth at Tufts, studying to that University, and, you know, based on everything you know now, give him some advice. I mean, what would you tell him?

1:47:56 Would he listen? Would it be relevant? So, I wouldn’t change the course of my life, because I’ve been so, so fortunate. So I would only say one thing, which can people find out about Akimbo, altMBA, everything? So if you go to a Kimbo calm, a ki MBO, there’s all our workshops.

1:48:39 The podcast is at akimbo dot link, and my blog, just type Seth into any search engine. How is podcasting going? Do you enjoy that? For me, yeah, I just do it for fun. It’s been, I don’t have any guests, and I’ve done 110 so far, so it’s 20 minutes of me riffing or ranting about something, with a Q&A at the end from listeners, and I just go into the shower in the back of my, which I lined with foam, and I close the door, and I record it.

1:49:07 Some people like it. Perfect, having your own studio just like that, right? No more career anymore, set. Thanks so much. But a big fan.

1:49:14 I, work for a long time, real so many people that I’ve spoken to, talk to you. I think people are gonna want to touch me when I get back to London, because I got shot. But I literally, people asking me questions. One guy text me a question for you. He said, why does Seth think that marketing will, will change is the way to change the world?

1:49:30 I think you answer that right in the beginning, because it’s not your traditional original marketing. If the marketing is JJ, the world’s changing, the world, and making us better. So thank you so much for that. I appreciate what you do with your content and your altMBA, and until next time. Thank you.