This Is Seth Godin

Seth: Wait a minute!

Josh: Crossface, the Daily Talk Show, a conversation sometimes worth recording with Josh Janson and Tommy Jackett. It's a daily talk show in New York with Seth Godin.

Tommy: Thanks for coming on, Seth.

Seth: Oh, thanks. Is this thing on?

Josh: Yeah.

Tommy: Okay, we're on.

Josh: It's all happening. One, two. It sounds great. You've, you've managed to create a bit of a sort of a MacGyver desk, my microphone set up. The, um, how would you describe, like, I guess you've, you've taken a traditional mic stand but just used our mic.

Seth: It's all good sound waves.

Tommy: It's what I love. I mean, walking into your office here, it's, it's what I love. Josh calls me a cowboy a lot of the time because I am just whacking stuff together and I like a bit of madness. And, and I hope that's not offensive to say.

Seth: Not at all.

Josh: I have a patina and the patina has a patina here.

Seth: On purpose.

Josh: And so for people who— for the two people who don't know who Seth Godin is, we basically, Seth, have mentioned you. I did a search on our transcripts. We've got some transcriptions done on our 185 podcasts. 15 times you've been mentioned.

Seth: That's nice.

Josh: Yeah.

Tommy: And, um, I guess the most important time was around episode 20 because I said to Josh, your challenge is to get Seth Godin on our podcast, which Which I tried, I tried in 2012.

Josh: Initially I'd emailed Seth about coming on Josh Speakey.

Tommy: We've heard about that a lot of times on the podcast.

Josh: But it's how, so for people who aren't aware of Seth Godin, 18 bestselling books translated into 35 different languages. My favorites, The Dip, Icarus Deception. When you're mentioning Purple Cow, when you're mentioning which books you sort of tell people about, Is it just purely on what people know the most? Is that how you sort of communicate what you do?

Seth: It depends on who I'm talking to.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: I mean, the books I'm most proud of might not be the books that sold the most copies. Yeah, the ones that sold the most copies are Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, and Linchpin. And I'm super proud of all of those. Yeah, but Survival Is Not Enough only sold 18,000 copies, but I worked harder on that book than any other book. So I mentioned that one sometimes. Um, the new book— you have to mention the new book because your publisher wants you to do that. It comes out in, uh, right in November called This Is Marketing.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: And, um, but it's like kids, they're all your faves.

Josh: You talk about publishers. For someone who sort of is all about picking yourself, why have a publisher?

Seth: Because I'm a hypocrite. I've, you know, the book I published, What to Do When It's Your Turn, uh never in a bookstore, sold 150,000 copies so far. It's in its 5th printing. So I know how to do it. I like doing it, but it means you are doing a lot of things that aren't directly related to the idea. And so when it was time— I hadn't written a full-length, uh, book on this kind of topic in more than 6 years. And when it occurred to me I wanted to make one based on the seminar we do, uh, called The Marketing Seminar I said, well, I know how to publish it myself, but why don't I just let some professionals do it?

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: And if you are lucky enough to be able to call Adrian Zachheim and have him say yes, then you should consider that.

Josh: Yeah. I—

Seth: my message to most people who haven't had a track record like that is Adrian's not going to call you, and you probably can't call Adrian.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: So pick yourself. Don't sit there waiting.

Tommy: With the new book, is that something you've written and you have thoughts around it will be like Purple Cow. Do you have that before you start writing a book? Do you know that the idea is—

Josh: where it's going to be placed in the market? Do you like—

Tommy: do you know that it will hit?

Seth: Do I know that it will hit? Um, if I'm sure it will hit, then I'm wrong, and I say then I have come up with something banal.

Tommy: Yeah.

Seth: The question is, if you take— if you look at it strategically, are there a group of people who when they see it will say, hell yeah. If that group of people is over a few thousand, meaning instant yes, and you write something that will make their life better if they share it, then they will share it. And now you're at 20,000. And once you're at 20,000, then it's up to the book itself. Is it resonating enough with that first and second order circle that it wants to go to the next level. So if you, you know, if you think about something like podcasting, Marc Maron was, uh, not a success as, uh, a stand-up. He couldn't get on Saturday Night Live. He was struggling. He went on talk radio. He did pretty well there, but he wasn't, you know, Rush Limbaugh, and God forbid. And, um, but he made a podcast, and the thing about the podcast is he could get 1,000 people to listen to it. There were 1,000 people who were connected enough to him that they would. Then the question was, would those 1,000 people feel a need before they went to bed tonight to tell other people? And the answer was yes. And that's how you get to 10 million listeners, right? And so the same mindset works here. So you're in my office, you can see all these books, almost all these books by other people and some by me have failed. And the reason is not that they're not good books, but because the author didn't have a platform where they could get the 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 true fans to say, "Hell yeah, I'll take it," and where the book doesn't have a built-in network effect that leads to other people telling you, talking about it. And these two elements are built into my, this new book, the This Is Marketing book. And so I have this instinct that I can get it to 20K. And then my hope is that my message is resonant enough that it will go where it wants to go. But I'm not in the book-selling business. I'm in the culture-changing business. And if a book sells, that's a side effect. It's not what I seek to do.

Josh: Are you ever paralysed by the instant yes? Because I guess you've got a lot of people who will, without even seeing— Every day.

Seth: Every day I'm paralysed by the instant yes. Every day a million people say, I'll read what you wrote, right? And I look at my post the night before and I say, is this one worth it? And at least once a week the answer is no, and I write another one or replace it with one that I've written. Because that's— I don't know, that obligation could crush me if I spent too much time thinking about it. It's very scary.

Tommy: There's a few things for certain in my day, and one of them is Josh calling me to annoy me, and the other is you, Seth, emailing me from your blog to annoy you. No, well, sometimes, sometimes. No, no, no, I love them. And you've done so many of them, and Josh and I talk a lot about, um, volume of ideas, and you've got no shortage. Do you find that when there's a volume of ideas, is there a point at some of them which you go, I'm going to hold off on that because it's not there yet, or with the volume you say, I need to get this out the door?

Seth: Okay, so the purpose of— first of all, I think everyone has a volume of ideas. I have never met anyone who who actually had nothing to say. I've met lots of people who are afraid to say something, but no one gets talker's block, right?

Josh: Your April Fools', by the way, really got me 'cause I got so, so Seth did a post saying he'd run out of ideas and I thought, I felt so good about it. I was like, you know what? I feel like I finally, I don't feel like a complete schmuck. And I read at the end, it's an April Fools' joke and I was the ultimate schmuck.

Seth: I gotta tell you that 50 people used that post as an opportunity to do something that they thought was really generous but was actually a commentary about them and their— yeah, the way you just honestly talked about it, which is they sent me these notes. Oh, have you thought about this? I feel so badly. I know what it's like to wrestle with writer's block. And they were— it was schadenfreude. They were thrilled that I was out of ideas.

Josh: People want to be around— like, misery likes company.

Tommy: Exactly.

Seth: And then they were heartbroken when I pointed out, no, no. So anyway, I don't, I don't think that people, um, have a shortage of ideas. I do believe that, for me anyway, the blog serves a huge purpose, which is if I had to wait a year between books and that was it, there would definitely be constipation of where do I put this idea? It's going to block until I get the next one. So I know that 365 days a year I get to take something that was worthy of 7 paragraphs but not worthy of a book, of a year of my life, and say to people, have you thought about this? And, um, there are at least 100 posts that are currently in gestation where they're not ready to be on the blog, but they're written down so I can make them better. Because if I don't do that This happens to me almost every day. I'll be in the shower, that is a great blog post, and I'll get out of the shower and go, I have no idea what it was. It's gone. And of course it's the perfect one because it's gone. Now that it's gone, it's like, oh, I can't believe that was the best post ever.

Tommy: Alibaba, there's probably some sort of shower notepad that you can buy.

Josh: Do you find that people get obsessed about the the rituals that people have. Like, I know that when, when you talk about what you have for breakfast— I heard on it, I think it was on Being, um, Krista Tippett, you were telling what you have for breakfast, and I got so excited by just the way that you described it. What do you think? Why is there an obsession for just across the board? It's like, what are your daily rituals? What are your habits? What do you eat?

Seth: Exactly. So this is— I have a riff on this in Your Turn, and basically It's about people asking Stephen King what kind of pencil he uses, as if knowing what— then they actually do this— as if knowing what kind of pencil Stephen King uses will make you a better writer. Yeah. And so I— Krista is a dear friend, so it was fun to riff on that, but I almost never fall into that trap because I don't want to indulge people in thinking it has anything to do with, you know, superstitions or tools or things like this, because it doesn't. Like, yeah, if you're a graphic designer and you move from freehand to Photoshop, it will change things for you. I get that. But Milton Glaser became Milton Glaser with a pen.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: So don't get hung up on, I have to do it the way that person—

Josh: adding apricots to your breakfast or something.

Seth: That's— it's just—

Tommy: so I should stop eating the oats and plums?

Seth: Exactly.

Josh: Yeah, because one, like, I was thinking about placebo effect. You know, you're talking about placebo effect a lot. Isn't there something potentially in— oh, you're Stephen King's pen and it's going to help me write better?

Seth: I, you know, a friend of mine was taking the SAT and, uh, there was a guy who sort of as a joke became the world's greatest pencil sharpener. And for $50, he would give you a custom sharpened pencil in this beautiful presentation case that would like have been sharpened to a micrometre for each purpose. And So I hand this to my friend the day before the SAT. This is the number, and it's huge. I just don't want to be in that business. Yeah, I totally get placebos are huge in that setting, but as soon as I go down that path, then I'm a faith healer, and I— that's not my approach. My approach is to, to try to approach it more strategically and less with the fairy dust.

Tommy: When it comes to, um, putting the value on yourself, I've had my own business for the majority of my working life, and I've always kind of, you know, um, set the point of which I think I'm worth, started charging that, and then thought, hang on, I could be making more money, and I'm not there internally feeling that I'm of that value, right? But then somehow, somehow I stumble and I get the value, and then I'm like, I'm worth it. How does people who are running their own business, right?

Seth: It's a great question.

Tommy: Get to that sort of feeling inside. And do you even need to have that feeling?

Seth: Okay, so first of all, price and value are totally different things, and you have to decode that if you're going to be the person who's charging for your work. What you would pay you to do it is different than what someone else would pay you.

Tommy: I'll do it for free, right?

Seth: And so We begin with price is a service, and it's a service that helps the client identify what kind of promise are you making. And so, you know, in, in India, there's an eye hospital that will— that has saved the eyesight of more people than the sum populations of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit put together. And they will do cataract surgery on you for $115. Or free if you don't want to pay. And the message of their pricing says to people in India, you can afford this, you don't have to be blind, right? So there's an absolute value of what's going on. But not 20 blocks from there, if you're a wealthy person living in India, you can buy an Hermès bag for $10,000. Is it worth it? Well, I'm not sure it's worth— what is that, 100 times as much as getting your eyesight back? How could it be, right? But if you have your eyesight and you're rich, the Hermès bag is worth way more than $10,000 because it sends a message to your friends and your family and everyone else that you're the kind of person that could have a $10,000 bag. And so Hermès is not stealing from people. They're saying, if you want to buy this symbol This is what the symbol costs. If it's not worth it to you, don't buy it, right? So when we think about, for example, those firms that do naming— when NBC wants to change its logo, they pay $100,000 to one of those firms. Turns out they got a logo that someone down the street would have built for $200,000. So were they ripped off? I don't think so, because what they got for $100,000 was all the meetings, was the fancy office, was the ability to tell their boss to hire the top of the field, blah blah blah blah blah. That's what you sell. So I don't think it's, am I worth it? It's, is my storey coherent and am I making a promise I can keep? And the last thing I'll say about this is, if you're a freelancer, the only way to, to do better is not to work more hours, because you can't work more hours. It's not to hire people to do your work because they're not going to be as good as you. It's to get better clients. Freelancers with better clients charge those clients more. Those clients demand more from them, are more likely to say yes to good work, which helps them get even better clients. So the way you get better clients is by charging more, not by charging less. Yeah.

Josh: You know, Seth, you talk about, uh, perfection and perfectionism and people seeking things to be perfect. And I've had a— I started freelancing when I was 14 doing video editing. And I started off seeking perfection, and then I slowly came around, drunk the Kool-Aid, and started to understand that minimum viable product, getting things out, testing the market. But one of the interesting things I found is when I speak to clients and I give them the realistic thing of this is not going to be perfect, there's some bullshit artist who is selling that they're going to do the perfect product, and they've actually— they see that what I'm doing is not being a craftsman and putting everything into it. How do you, how do you approach that?

Seth: I think there's some semantic issues here.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: Okay, their definition of perfect and my definition of perfect are very different things. Yeah, perfect. So if you think about To Kill a Mockingbird, right, one of the greatest books ever written, is it perfect? Well, if I line up the folios, little page numbers on each page, they're actually off from each other by less than a tenth of an inch. So the book's not perfect, is it?

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: Well, Maybe. I mean, in the paper, there could have been better paper. And yeah, so which part of To Kill a Mockingbird needs to be, quote, perfect, unquote? Then when we— the problem with, uh, people's hesitance about minimum viable product is they in their mind say, oh, that's just ship it, ship crap.

Tommy: Yeah.

Seth: No, no, I've never used the words just ship it. I said merely ship it. And what that means is to say without drama and without commentary, this, this solves that problem, and it solves that problem in a way that is complete. So could To Kill a Mockingbird be typeset better? Sure. Would it solve the problem of the reader better? No.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: So when you are talking to a client about your process, when you start using words like it's not perfect and minimum viable product and we'll put it out there, you have not solved their problem. Yeah, their problem is they need to be able to say to their boss or themselves, we bought the best for this thing. So the language we need to use with ourselves and with others is, who's it for and what's it for? And once we are clear on who we are seeking to serve, who we are trying to change, and what is the change we are trying to make— who's it for, what's it for— we will bring something to those people that is as perfect as the laws of physics permit us to be for that person with that problem. And everything else is completely irrelevant.

Josh: So we could use the language perfect within the client context.

Seth: Exactly.

Josh: With it and still keep our consciousness perfect.

Seth: All it means is it solved the problem. Yeah. Within the laws of what we were able to expend on it.

Tommy: I take solace in the fact that you said, don't— we can't work more hours. Don't work more hours. I'm tired. I've got to 19-month-old baby. Wow. And it's something—

Seth: And do your in-laws still want you to get a job? Are they over that?

Tommy: No, no, no. I've got a business, Josh and I. Yeah, but they—

Seth: you don't have a job.

Josh: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the mother-in-law did ask you, do you get the car with the company? We're not there yet.

Seth: People ask me, when are you going to get a job? For years and years and years.

Tommy: You know, my father and my mom, they both have had their own businesses all their life. And I've observed that. And I'm— I'm thinking of how I parent my son. It's a massive passion of mine to be a great dad. And I look at my parents and what they showed to me. And then I think about the landscape now. I was one that hated school from grade 1. I just refused to go.

Seth: You were consistent.

Tommy: Yeah, I was consistent all the way through until I got out of there. Thanks, Mum, at year 11. And it was a weight off my shoulders to be out of that system. And I know you talk a lot about how the system's broken. And I think about my son, Bodhi. And what's that look like for him, right? I mean, from your perspective and looking at me as a 30-year-old bloke with a 19-month-old baby, what's the future look like for my son in the context of school and university?

Seth: Yeah, I wrote a rant. Anyone who wants to get it for free, it's at stopstealingdreams.com. It's been read about 4 million times.

Josh: Good domain. I love good domain names. I like that.

Tommy: That's a great domain name.

Seth: Thank you. Um, and Uh, it asks one simple question, which is, what is school for? Because we're spending all this time and all this money, what's it for? Because I think if I asked the principal and the teacher and the superintendent and your parents and your friends what school for, I'd get 50 different answers. So why are we doing all this work if we don't even know what it's for? That's the first thing. Second thing I would say is I love public school. I think public school is a critical component of our culture, and we need something where everyone comes together regardless of their background and has a similar experience. But most schooling is homeschooling in the sense that from 3 PM till midnight, your kids are with you. From 3 PM to midnight, their experiences inform who they are and who they become. So my answer of what is school for is two things. One, solve interesting problems. What makes it an interesting problem is you can't look up the answer on the internet. If you look up on the answer on the internet, it's not an interesting problem anymore. So almost everything we teach kids in school is not an interesting problem. It's a memorization, compliance, conformance problem. Not interesting. And number 2 is how to lead. Because as we build better robots and computers, as we outsource more and more stuff, if I can write down what you are supposed to do all day, I can find someone cheaper than you to do it. And the person who does a job that is written down will likely be disrespected and not get what they actually deserve. So what school is for, for me, is to create a civil society filled with people who like to solve interesting problems, who are un— who are quite comfortable with not knowing, and who are eager to lead. And you can start teaching your kid to do that right this minute, because the cool thing that we learned when we're 18 months old is you try to stand up and walk and you fall down. And not one toddler then says, I'm done, I can't walk, and spends the rest of their life on the couch. Yeah, they fall until they fall until they fall, and then they can walk. And we do the same thing with talking, and we do the same thing with riding a bike. And then suddenly, by the time we're like 7, we stop doing that and we say, well, if I can't do it right away, I don't want to do it. And that spirit of, oh, that didn't work, that's interesting, what should I do now, is a key part of solving interesting problems. So when your kid goes to school, or when your kid has an interaction and it doesn't work, figuring out how that's a positive learning experience— yeah, it's so critical.

Tommy: Yeah, my mom was super supportive of my hate for school, which I think was the reason I've turned out all right. She supported me in whatever direction path I was paving. Um, from what you said, where does the internet and devices fit into that? Like, my son, he can— when he's watching YouTube, when we've had a disaster or last minute, he knows how to press the skip ad button. I mean, YouTube are in trouble there, but like, I just see how, um, naturally it's coming to them.

Seth: Of course, because it's optimised to do that. Uh, it's none of my business, but you asked me. I would get every device out of your house for at least 5 more years. I think the easiest thing to do as a parent who's hassled and harried is to hand that device to a kid, and I would not do it. I think we're gonna decide years from now that it was a huge mistake. There's— our brains are plastic during certain parts of our lives, first 5 years plus when we're a teenager, and And the problem with stock option motivated designers who are in the social media space is they know exactly how to maximise dopamine hits, and they're basically building a little Las Vegas for you on your screen. And I used to be in the educational software business. I was in the first generation of people who built those things, and we didn't have any of the tools that they have now. And I just got to say, It's so much better to give your kid a ball or a puzzle or something tactile, because then whenever they're— when they're older, they're going to experience it and they won't have any trouble catching up. Yeah, but if it goes in the other direction, they're never going to gain the confidence in those other sort of kinesiology-based interactions. And the frustration that comes with using other things other than your fingers. Um, so that's my rant on it. Uh, my kids grew up just as the whole thing was coming out. We did not have a TV in our house, and they, I think, hit YouTube when they were 11 or 12, and then all bets were off. Yeah, yeah, boom. I would mention Gilligan's Island, they knew exactly who Thurston Howell was. Like, wait, how did you know that?

Josh: I mean, Gilligan's Island is pretty good, like in the sense of getting them to watch content. That seems like it's pretty good stuff. That's right. What's up now?

Seth: It's like a fellow.

Tommy: Yeah, I used to watch Swiss Family Robinson. Have you seen that film? Disney? Unbelievable. And so I grew up watching those kind of things, and that was just stimulating my adventurous and seeing these people. I wanted to live in a cubby house, right? By the— I wanted to get shipwrecked. Not so much now.

Josh: So the television, I'd heard you mention it before. Do you have a TV now? So, with the— you've gotten rid of the TV, say that's like cocaine, but you've got a phone, which is sort of like heroin. How do you control that? How do you— 'Cause I guess you can get rid of the TV. I know that there's so many people, I just spent 3 months travelling around and I wanted to disconnect. That was gonna be my big thing. I also decided to have a daily podcast at the exact same time where we recorded every day.

Tommy: We did it.

Josh: We made it work.— and so we did it remotely. And so I'm feeling a bit torn in the sense of phone use and it being the biggest opportunity, but also the biggest problem. It's not like sugar, right? There's not much advantage that I'm gonna get from sugar. It's gonna give me that small thing, but I see ambition, opportunity. How do you control it?

Tommy: And Seth's blog every day.

Josh: Exactly. How do we control our cell time?

Seth: Again, everyone's mileage varies. Here's what we know for sure: if you're using Facebook and Twitter, you're not the customer, you're the product. And they are selling you and your behaviour to advertisers. And they do that by constantly reminding you that someone's talking about you behind your back and that you should go cheque just one last time to see what they're saying. Yeah. What I know is I stopped reading my Amazon reviews 5 years ago, haven't read one since then. I don't use Twitter and I don't use Facebook. It doesn't seem to have hurt.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: So if you said, I'm going to get ahead by a less direct method than the one I've seen the Kardashians use, I believe it can be accomplished. In the short run, it will definitely feel more difficult because you don't get that progress report. But my thesis is brands, organizations, and people of influence don't get that way because they have a lot of social media followers. They have a social— a lot of social media followers because they've made a change in the culture, not the other way around. And so by— I have no alerts on my phone other than texts from my family, and I admit I am an email addict. It is my single vice and—

Josh: It's impressive, your response times.

Tommy: And I appreciate it because that's how we've ended up here.

Seth: I mean, it has helped me. I'm hoping that no one who listens to this will email me, but I've answered 175,000 emails in the last 20 years.

Josh: And that was just from me. It was amazing.

Seth: And so I decided that would be the way I, when I needed to fill time with a digital box and interact with people, that's what I've consistently done. But what I don't do is I don't look at my WordPress stats. I have no idea how many people read one blog post or another. I don't know how many people are subscribing to my Akimbo podcast. I don't want to know how many copies of a book I sold, because if I knew those numbers, I would try to make them go up. Yeah. And then I wouldn't do my work.

Tommy: Well, on-the-ground stats too, from this morning's one. Maybe your son Mo, he might have got there.

Josh: What's the barometer of success for things then?

Tommy: Is it—

Josh: do you look at email as a big thing of like, if you put a blog post out and you get 100 emails in your inbox about that?

Seth: Not really. It's in quiet moments. I will run into somebody, whether I'm on my way to a speech or on— and someone will say to me, I read this 2 years ago, 4 years ago. I taught it to 6 people. This thing happened. Thank you. That is what I'm working on, which is the people I taught What will they teach other people? That's what I'm working on. And then in the marketing seminar and the Alt MBA, I can see it happening in real time because I'm like up here and in like the pharmacy looking down on— and so when I put a lesson into the marketing seminar, and one, the one that surprised me the most was I said, here's a simple shift for you: stop thinking about the people you're marketing to as prospects or or clients and use the word students instead. That's it. Students who are enrolled, they're not— it's not mandatory education, they're voluntary, and they're students and you're teaching them. And it just— like, all these people, you could just watch them interact with each other differently for the next 2 months. And I was like, that's why I have to write this book, because if I can plant a seed like that one— and so that sort of feedback, watching it happen in real life, not with someone, because usually Not usually. Often when someone sends me a nice email, then they ask me for something, and so I have to discount what the nice email means because they're actually asking me for something.

Josh: Yeah, it's interesting talking about asking for something. There's been— I know that—

Tommy: what are you asking for? You have to ask for—

Josh: I'm just gonna ask for a tea.

Seth: No, do you want a tea?

Josh: Yeah, fine. I'm absolutely—

Tommy: it was great tea, Josh.

Josh: Um, I missed out, but the, um— now I've found that my entire life I grew up as a bit of a geek, and it turns out that Geeks are fairly handy. So, when Facebook came around and Facebook Messenger came around, I would get a lot of people from high school days reaching out going, "Hey, Josh, I'm looking at getting the MacBook Pro. I know we haven't spoken in 5 years." And I was actually, I opened my Facebook a few months ago and my girlfriend said, "You've got 99 unread messages." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm just cleaning them up now." And it was sure enough, it was basically everyone that I'd interacted with in the last 10 years all asking technology questions.

Tommy: Well, I've said that Josh is like, what I am for my mother. My mum comes for me for tech support. Josh is my tech support.

Josh: Do you find— I— the thing that I loved was I, I heard a, um, a podcast, I think it might have been on Cool Tools, where you're talking about being the webmaster of your wife's, uh, bakery website. How, how much— how many bullshit little jobs do you end up getting being— having the skill set that you have? And when do you say, you know, this is family, I should be doing this stuff, I should be helping people out, versus like, actually, this is probably from a, you know, pay grade status point, probably not worth my time.

Seth: Yeah, so pressing the buttons, uh, first of all, working on my wife's bakery's website is a privilege. It's certainly not a bullshit little job, it's a privilege.

Josh: But you did end up retiring that job, didn't you?

Seth: I've gotten rid of much of the IT work way like the system we— that I built, because there are now 4 stores and 50 Whole Foods Markets and a factory. But the, the system that I originally cobbled together involved an order would come in, it would get faxed, it would end up being scanned into something, then loaded across into a Google thing. And I mean, like, there were 9 different pieces. And if there was a power blackout and a Mac rebooted somewhere in the world, the whole thing stopped working. Someone didn't get a birthday cake. I was really low quality what I built. Anyway, um, it's all fixed now. But I think each of us is super privileged compared to somebody who makes $3 a day in Tanzania, right? If we then say, oh well, me hugging your little kid is— I could have gotten $9 for my time doing something else, then you've fallen prey to the whole Milton Friedman nonsense of—

Josh: because it's $15, right?

Seth: It's— you just— when I'm working, if I'm on stage, I get an enormous hourly rate, and the rest of the time I'm a happy volunteer doing my hobbies.

Josh: So what's the difference though between— because what I find is, because where Tommy and I are dealing with clients all the time, sometimes it becomes a very blurred line of like, hang on, is this— is this a request from a friend? I should be doing this for free.

Seth: That's a different question. Yeah, that question's super important.

Josh: It's not your wife's bakery, you know.

Seth: If, if this is about the price versus the value thing, right? So I, I did a thing in the marketing seminar about how come people often will ask certain kinds of professionals for free advice, like, oh, I'm an accountant, can I ask you a quick question? But no one asks a surgeon for free surgery. Right? And, and the reason is because the surgeon, in addition to wearing a mask, she's made it really clear there's time she's doing surgery and there's time she's not. When she's doing surgery, that costs money because it's a matter of life or death. So the relationship with clients is, do you want me to be a professional right now? Because if you want me to be a professional, I think you would prefer me to be a professional. You want to hold me to a standard. You want me to scrub up and look at your problem appropriately. On the other hand, if you don't want me to be a professional, then just— we're friends. Don't ask me this little question because you want a professional answer. You don't want me to just make something up. And that's different than the relationship I have with my friend friends because I'm never professional with them. Yeah, right. That my— I, I don't do consulting for a reason, because I don't want to have to constantly be guessing Am I supposed to be charging this person for this conversation? So it's really simple, right? If I'm on stage, that's going to cost you money. If you want to read something that's on paper, that's going to cost you money. And the rest of the time, it's free because I want to be in the world. And when I'm a professional, I'm going to be a professional. And when I'm in the world, I'll be in the world. But I'm not going to mess with blurring those things.

Tommy: Is there a blurred line when it comes to creativity? Because a surgeon, you know, whereas, you know, I see a lot of people online who are freelancers complaining about this whole thing. You know, you don't ask a guy to come just dig all the holes in your backyard, right? You know, but when it's us banging away on the keyboard creating our art, right, they don't appreciate it.

Seth: How do we communicate? Because they're not— you— it's so easy to persuade yourself that what you're doing, because it's fun and because you didn't have to spend 9 years in school to learn that thing and get a license, maybe it's not worth that much. Right? On the other hand, there are certain people who are truly professionals, and of course we, we know that that's the case. So you have to believe enough in the storey that you are telling and why people are buying it that you will charge for it. So this is why it's totally different to sell an expensive service to a corporation than it is to be a wedding planner, because a wedding planner In the old days, as in up until 3 years ago, that's what we called a friend, was a wedding planner, right? Like, you call up your best friend, I'm getting engaged. She says, let's go look at venues. That's a hobby. And suddenly someone commercialised the hobby. So they shouldn't be surprised when their friends say, do you have any wedding advice for me? Because the thing they sell isn't seen by most people as being actually worth money. That's okay, but that's what you signed up for. So I guess you just need to be consistent. If you want to be a high-end wedding planner, you need to accept the fact that the only people will pay you are high-end brides. And when a non-high-end bride, someone who doesn't want to spend $140,000 to have a wedding, comes to you for advice, you have to have pre-planned what's your answer. Your answer is either sorry, I don't do work for people who don't have $140,000 weddings, but I'll connect you to some friends who do. Or you got to say, of course, because I do low-rent weddings for free for my friends. But you shouldn't have to make the decision every time.

Tommy: We've got a company together, um, and then I guess we've got our own personal brands. And I've been thinking a lot, and we talk a lot about personal brands, um, and where they sit within someone's career? Because I think it's very popular. There's a million coaches out there about personal brands.

Seth: Sure.

Tommy: And I've been quite conscious of my personal brand because I wanted to be a TV host years, years ago before I realised I could pick up a camera and make my own video. And I was a TV host. But I said, where does the importance for you sit with career and finessing your personal brand?

Seth: Okay, so what's a brand? Brand is not a logo for sure. A brand is a shorthand for the promise we expect someone has made to us. What will we get when we engage with you? So if Nike opened a hotel and that's all they told you is, we opened a hotel, you would have all these expectations about what it would be like.

Tommy: It'd be too bright colours for me.

Seth: You can imagine it, right?

Josh: There'd be a gym.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah.

Seth: But if Hyatt or Marriott made sneakers, you have no idea what they would be like. That's because Hyatt and Marriott don't have a brand and Nike does. Yeah, right. Hyatt and Marriott have logos, but if I switch the logos, you would never know which hotel you were in. So if you want to have a personal brand, what it means is I have an expectation for what I'm going to get the next time I interact with you. I have an expectation for the quality and the insight and the effort, blah blah blah. So everyone has a brand whether they want one or not. And that brand might be interchangeable cog in a corporate system, or the brand might be you disappoint people a lot, or the brand might, you know, right, blah blah blah. So you have a brand. And the question then going forward is, is the linchpin brand worth embracing early and often? So when there's an event, do you sit in the front row? When they say, are there questions, do you ask a generous question? When somebody has a problem that you can solve, do you offer to solve it? That person hasn't expended that much more energy than the back row person, but they have built a personal brand. And I think it's as simple as that. Mostly what we're seeing online is people who want their personal brand to be, I hustle and cut corners.

Josh: Yeah, well, it's the product. They're making the brand the product, like the the thing that they're doing, right, is being a brand, like doing the— like their post, they're doing marketing, right? But for the— that's the thing, it's very confusing, very meta.

Seth: But the, the shortcutting hustle thing, I'm allergic to it.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: And, you know, hi, I wrote a book, I pre-wrote the blurb for you, you don't even have to read the book, please write back, say yes, you'll sell more books. And I'm like, what? What? Why did— I didn't get in this line of work so I could trade this for that. And no, go away.

Josh: How do you push against it? Because the thing is that that is so noisy at the moment when— yeah, when— and this is the— this is why I'm a bit torn with you not being on social media, because I feel like we need some— we need some fresh air, we need some Seth in our life. We don't need—

Seth: I think there's enough in most people's lives. I, you know, the, the thing is that it's not my job to teach people a lesson.

Josh: It—

Seth: I do think it's my job to teach, to set an example, to shine a light.

Josh: What's the difference?

Seth: Well, the difference is, you know, I— and in a weak moment, which happens at least once a week, some publicist will send me a note saying, we have the perfect guest for your podcast, blah blah blah blah blah.

Tommy: And Josh tried that, it didn't work well for a guestless podcast.

Seth: I'll write back saying, which of the guests I've had before made you think this person would be a good fit? That's teaching this person a lesson, right? That's saying, not only didn't you get the guest place, but you're in my spam folder and you've blown any chance you have for forward advancement because you're too lazy and your mail merge is weak and stop this. But it doesn't work. It just does not— it doesn't change them. Yeah, they're just like bugs on a windshield. It's like, on to the next thing.

Josh: Numbers.

Seth: So I don't do that anymore. I just like, spam, got, gone, right? And if I'm trying to teach people, it's not to teach an individual a lesson, it's to more broadly say with generic or specific examples, don't do this, do this, because when you do this, magic things happen. And I am under no illusion that I am changing the majority of people., but I know I am changing some people. And if I can change some people and do it over and over and over again, it'll add up.

Josh: Talking about change, what do you think about the rebrand? You know, personal rebrand. I know in my life I've sort of— when you start young and you're freelancing young, you're the baseball cap-wearing, neckbeard sort of dude. I shaved my neckbeard specifically for today, by the way.

Seth: Tommy and I were sharing a shower.

Josh: Thank you. My girlfriend, matching beards. Yeah, well, we did it last night.

Seth: I just noticed this.

Josh: We've never done this before. I normally— it's a rebrand. It's a— we rebranded the night before.

Seth: It's a re-logo.

Josh: It's not a rebrand, but I feel like I am my neckbeard, the way that I, I sort of talk and I interact.

Seth: But do you think—

Josh: do you think that potentially what you don on, what you put, what you wear— I mean, I've—

Seth: yeah, this is simple.

Josh: The placebo—

Seth: logos don't matter that much, but Brands are built on experiences. If you start acting a different way over time, my experience with you will change, and that will add up and add up until I see you differently. And so yes, the trail we leave behind is more permanent and more vivid than ever before. And you know, there are certain situations where that should be held against you, but for most of us doing most of our work What people care about is what's my expectation of what will happen tomorrow. And if my experience with you has been a certain kind for a certain period of time, then I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. And, you know, if I think about like a big company like FedEx— when FedEx was starting out, for the first 10 or 15 years, you would call 1-800-GO-FEDEX and they would answer on the first ring, and a human being would talk to you with care and attention. And because they did that for 10 years, that's still my expectation for who FedEx is. Yeah, they haven't been like that in years. It's horrible to call them on the phone, but I still get disappointed every time because I fell in love with the old promise. And for a human, if your old thing was, you know, I'm a fraternity bro and you can always count on me to bring a keg and blah blah blah, that will be the expectation that some people have of you for many years to come. Yeah, but there are lots of people in the universe, so if you start acting a different way, new people will have that new experience and it will begin to spread to the old people and it will change.

Josh: Because we can drop our own narrative, but I guess we can't allow others to drop the narrative they've created on us.

Seth: Exactly.

Tommy: In Australia, there's a lot of discussion around tall poppy syndrome.

Seth: Ah, this comes up all the time.

Josh: Yeah.

Tommy: And, and Josh and I were thinking about what, you know, what is it and where can we go, talking to you about it. And we, and we were thinking, how can we use tall poppy syndrome to our advantage?

Seth: Yeah, so first of all, it comes up in Australia more than anywhere else in my experience, but every single country says, in our country we have this thing called— and they come up with a variation of tall poppy syndrome. It's not unique to Australians, but it's nonsense at so many levels. The first thing that's really important to understand for those of you who haven't heard before, is the tall poppy is the one that gets cut down first. So keep your head down. That's your expectation, right?

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: You know what else the tall poppy has? It gets the sun. And that in any forest, like the jack pine— the jack pine, um, if it grows 1 inch taller than the other jack pine, will end up being the only jack pine within 20 feet because all the other ones can't get any sun at all. And these are compatible and incompatible ideas that today more than ever, being ahead, being number one in Google, being the match, being the one who has innovated compounds. Because why would you want to hire the fifth best knee surgeon in Melbourne? You wouldn't. If you, you need knee surgery, you want the best one. She's going to do the surgery because why would I hire the third one. And that's happening in field after field after field. And the people who would like to cut you down, it's just noise now because there's so many people voicing whatever criticism they have. So back to, to To Kill a Mockingbird. If you look on Amazon, it has 1-star reviews. So what should Harper Lee have done about that, right? What should she have done after writing this book, this singular achievement, and someone gives her a 1-star review? Well, here's the thing, she's never going to write the book again. So there's no point in reading the review because she's never going to write the book again. And what the review says is, as a reader, this wasn't for me. It doesn't say this is a bad book. And so when someone says, you're a tall poppy, I hate what you were doing as a consultant, you say, great, it's not for you.

Josh: But isn't part of our responsibility as creators to listen? Or do you think listening is not a responsibility?

Tommy: No, absolutely not.

Seth: Your job as a creator is to solve a problem. If you have to listen to someone, listening to a specific person you seek to serve helps you solve the problem, then you must listen to them. Yeah, but that doesn't mean you need to listen to everybody else, right?

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: And, um, you know, the, the people who are making change happen are always surrounded by people who don't understand the strategic implications and the truth on the ground. And those people can get a bigger and bigger audience criticising what that leader is doing. Listening to that person is not going to help the leader solve the problem. There are other people they must listen to, but not to the critic who has nothing at stake.

Josh: How do you deal with those hustlers though? Because that's almost what's happening, is sure they understand that they can't listen to it. Like, there are people saying hustling isn't the answer. You don't need— and what that's doing is it's fueling this narrative of like, they're the haters, we don't need them, we need to shut them off and keep going. Is it just fine? That's just their journey.

Seth: Go waste your time.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: You know, here's the easy way to look at this. Go back in the archives of any social media you want, 6 years. Find somebody from 6 years ago who is articulating this shortcutting, hustling, use this social media to get that thing. Where are those people now? Because if they were so smart, why aren't they winning now? We keep this— there's this endless rotation of those people on the sides. And then there are these other people quietly, day by day, you know, Sarah Jones, Tony Award-winning actress. Sarah Jones is not a wandering generality. She's a meaningful specific. She shows up and she shows up and she shows up and she's made a difference. That's totally different. Than the people who are constantly hustling this shortcut, that shortcut. They're always starting over. Yeah, always starting over is not the way you get through the dip.

Tommy: New York's a hell of a place, uh, the city. I mean, where we are now is unbelievable. It's quiet, it's a bit like more back at home in the suburbs, and it's a, it's a beautiful place. And we were talking about, um, geography, like your geographical location and opportunity.

Seth: Sure.

Tommy: And it's It's a similar thing, I guess, to, you know, the tall poppy syndrome where we, you know, we think something's going on and it's not actually a thing. Is our geography, our location, important for our opportunities and for our success?

Seth: Well, I would say there are two pieces to that. Location and geography aren't exactly the same. Your location matters less than ever before. So one of the people on the Alt MBA team I have never met. I don't think I'll ever meet Zara because she lives thousands and thousands of miles away from here. And we hired her to do some very straightforward Fiverr-type, Upwork-type tasks. And now she's doing extraordinary work, way more sophisticated than we ever sought, because once she had a chance to show us what she could do, she took the chance and showed us what she could do. Location didn't matter. Geography is different because geography leads to culture, and culture changes everything. So if you are surrounded by people who tell you not to expect much, if you're surrounded by people who expect that you will fit in and that you will struggle, it is more likely that you will. And so this could— this podcast we're making could be listened to now by a billion and a half people who have the technology.

Tommy: It would just be a billion.

Josh: Well, we're going for minimal, minimum viable audience, so we're—

Seth: most of them won't listen to it, and they won't listen to it because culturally they're not seeking, not because technically they can't. And so what we have the chance to do is rewire our inputs. Who are you surrounding yourself by? What are you reading? And that's one of the problems with the media complex we have now, which is they get paid when more people click. And they discovered the best way to get clicks is to have gloom and doom and crisis and breaking news and now, now, now. All of which means that we're surrounding our day all day long with this fraught narrative of the end of the world is nigh, which makes it hard to say I have a 5-year plan. Why bother having a 5-year plan, right? And so surround yourself with something else. You can keep up with the news in 12 minutes a day. You don't need to to know faster than that what's happening, because no one's asking you to decide to fire missiles or not. It's not your job. So just know that today the world didn't end. Know that we need you to vote. Know this, know this, know this. Okay, 12 minutes in, I got it. That's what happened today. Now let's go make the world better.

Tommy: I love it when I stuff up my articulation of a question. Seth provides a great answer.

Seth: Good question.

Tommy: I'm out of— that was my Purpose.

Josh: The, um, akimbo, getting into podcasting, all that sort of thing.

Tommy: I—

Josh: Tommy's always telling, telling me, Josh, you're obsessing about the format. The first 20 episodes, I sort of— probably 15 minutes of the Daily Talk Show was me talking about the podcast, just being really excited about it.

Tommy: It's one of my favourite traits of Josh and one of his most annoying traits, his excitability. And excitement on this.

Josh: And so just, just to indulge me for, for the last couple of minutes, uh, podcasting, right? What have you learned through doing Akimbo? How is it different to, you know, writing the books? Have you had sort of a new energy and excitement? And what are some of the blind spots do you think that podcasters can learn from what you've been doing for all the years?

Seth: Okay, so the medium, because I'm a a media strategist and have been since I started working with like Ray Bradbury in '83. How does the media inform the content, and how does the content inform the media, and is there a business model, etc.? So the magic of podcasting is that people who care can do work that matters for very little money that's really engaging to listen to. The downside is there is no scarcity of spectrum. And as a result, it's really, really hard to do discovery. And as a result, it's not that easy to get subscriptions. And because there's no barrier to entry, the number of choices is really high, which means it's soon after someone gets into podcasting, listening, they have too many podcasts to listen to.

Josh: Yeah.

Seth: And even if you hit 2x, which I can't do, you can't listen to all the podcasts you want, which is not the way it works in text because you can scan text. All of which is a way to say that the number of people can actually make a living podcasting is vanishingly close to zero. Because it's not— you know, you used to be able to get 50 million people to watch a TV show. I would guess on average, the average podcast now has 100 listeners. And as long as you're going to have sponsors who buy ads you can't make a living. So with all that said, you should do it because you have something to say, not because you want to make a living. If you want to make a living, you need people who will happily sponsor your show, not advertise on your show, meaning they're not measuring, meaning they're not putting a special URL and counting how many people click. It's they're doing it because they want to be part of a tiny group's culture, not because they're expecting it'll pay for itself. Right, so given all that, when I do Akimbo, I said, how many of the rules can I break? So I don't read the ads, and I don't have any guests, and it's only 20 minutes long, and each episode tries to feel like you and I were just talking about a topic that you didn't know I was going to talk about that was interesting, right? So I love doing it. But I have no illusions that it will have anything near the reach or ultimately the impact of the other media that I can be in, because in those media I have an unfair advantage, and in podcasting there are very few unfair advantages.

Josh: Yeah. And can I just also compliment you on the double bass? That, that every time I hear that, yeah, it triggers a new idea. I was actually hoping that would have— there was a moment where I went a little bit too sort of wacky radio. And I thought maybe we get a live double bass player to come in, and, and every time Seth does a bit, he can, he can point at them anytime.

Seth: And it's only Davey. He's the only double bass player I work with. But I, I will tell you, this is a preview. I had a little bit of an argument with my audiobook publisher because I broke a couple of the rules of how you make an audiobook. And the, the name of the book is This Is Marketing. Yeah, so at the beginning of the book I go, hey, it's Seth, and this is marketing, because I wanted to honour the people who like akimbo.

Tommy: So I love that.

Josh: The double bass is amazing. Seth Godin, this has been so exciting for Tommy and I. We've, um, we've been talking about it since you said yes. Not only that, but we've, um, you've had such a massive impact on what we do so much. Yeah. Thank you so much. And this is The Daily Talk Show. Hi@thedailytalkshow.com if you want to send us an email. Don't send— Yeah, we need email, so that helps. Have a good one.