The REAL Future of Marketing with Seth Godin

Seth where do people go wrong with marketing today uh I think people are misunderstanding what marketing is it's not hype it's not hustle it's not crushing it it's not elbowing people out of the way marketing is the work of telling a true story that spreads it's having a strategy where the wind is at your back it's doing work that matters for people who care if you're doing those things you're probably not going wrong but if you're chasing clicks if you're chasing short-term interactions it's a really hard slug earlier you said when we're talking pre-show you

said marketing and strategy are the same thing what do you mean by that so people ask me for marketing help now and then I don't do any coaching or Consulting but if a friend or a nonprofit needs help they don't have a marketing problem they have a strategy problem and strategy is what is the change we seek to make in the world and what are the tools we have to make that change happen how are we going to work with with time and games and systems to help people get to where they want to go

if you can answer those questions marketing is really easy if you can't then you're just chasing around for a slogan and that's not going to help you got it and you said in your book that strategy this is interesting to me because I've always thought that strategy is a way of of thinking and it helps guide to tactics at the end of the day and it's sort of a map right but in the book you actually say it's actually not a map it's a compass so um I read that little passage it reads like your

logs and I'm like we need to go a little deeper on that what does that mean it's like a compass not a map well I wrote the book for a lot of people but I didn't write it for you cuz you already understand what I'm trying to say right most people think strategy is what's your plan the reason they want to have a plan is because if you grew up in the west with the whole mindset of doing your job a plan is if you do your job and do your job and do your job

you get the prize and there's no risk it's manage to the plan and I'm not opposed to plans but plans are not strategies right strategies say the future is not here yet I can't be sure what the future is going to Brak resilience matters I am probably not 100% right but it's better to have assertions than to just go in blind and so when we come up with a strategy we are making assertions about how the world is and how the world will be and what the world will need right so you and I were

talking about Ai and agents one of your assertions about the future is that talented employees are going to have plenty of AIS who are working for them with agents that they program to do things whereas untalented or unskilled people are going to spend their time working for an AI right those are assertions that you can build a strategy around yeah and so you would say then or maybe I'm putting words in your mouth here but strategy if I'm if I'm thinking strategy is a way of thinking then ultimately strategy is philosophy at the end of

of the day right mhm that's exactly right it is a philosophy of becoming who do you want to become how is the world going to become so the investors uh when I was at there at the dawn of the internet in 1993 94 made the Strategic assertion that the world is going to get more connected connection speeds are going to get faster and people are going to trade lots of things for convenience and connection if that's your strategy it makes a lot of sense to invest in Facebook and Uber if it's not your strategy then

you should go and invest in a package delivery company or something there different ways of looking at the world right and I think maybe this might be helpful if we dive into a little bit of of your strategies because obviously you know we're coming up the elevator and I showed you a picture I I've you're one of the first lynchman was one of the first books I read as I was going into the workforce and um I mentioned to you that you know we have all our employees read it first thing as part of onboarding

right um but you know there are certain strategies in there or we can call them philosophies one is you don't want to be a cognitive machine right so I guess what are some of the core strategies for you and maybe we can start with one I'll maybe lead off here um you don't get caught up by the hype of hey short form content or you need to do this you need to do that it's like I'm Seth Goen I'm just going to focus on blogging I'm going to do me maybe I'll do some long form

podcasts but that's it so can you maybe explain the marketing strategy behind that initially and we'll kind of go deeper sure um you know I'm hesitant to talk about Seth Goden as a role model and example because we're all different and I don't want to let anyone off the hook cuz great things happened to me when I was a kid other things happened that makes me me and not you but people say well you can do X Y or Z because you're Seth and my answer is but I'm Seth because I did X Y and

Z and what I learned coming up is that chasing shiny objects doesn't work for dogs and it doesn't work for car for people right that if you catch the car the dog is unhappy the the whole idea is you find a thing you want to stand for and a place where you can stand for it and you stick with it and you stick with it and you get better at it and so my blog used to have comments on it and I took the comments off because they were ruining my life and everyone said you're

not allowed to do that it's against the law every Blog has to have comments and I was like if you want to put comments on your blog about my posts feel free but I don't have comments and amazingly nothing bad happened to me and and Twitter showed up and I was in the right place at the right time I could have been very popular on Twitter and I said well if I go do that I will have less resources to spend on my blog so do I want to be mediocre Twitter and blogging or do

I want to be not on Twitter and good at blogging and this focus is scary because it means you committed to something whereas if you're always chasing the next thing it doesn't matter if it doesn't work because there's another next thing right and you said in another another interview and I'm paraphrasing here but you said you can be great at a lot of different things but ultimately it's it's at you're just going to be invisible right versus being just amazing at one thing yeah so what does it mean to be remarkable because that is the

essence of modern marketing let's for people who are under 50 remind them that what marketing used to be is average stuff for average people that the goal of Hines ketchup is to be ketchup for everyone get as much shelf space in every store as you can cra singles number one product in in refrigerators around the country until recently MH that's average cheese for average people because you have mass merchants and mass advertising there is no Mass advertising anymore when I worked at Yahoo it was the most popular page on the entire internet and even on

its best day it didn't get as many views as a top TV show because Mass's gone so what's the alternative the alternative is to make ideas worth talking about what makes it worth talking about it's remarkable worth making a remark about doesn't mean a gimmick or a a hype it just means I will get better if I tell people about your podcast if I tell people about your brand of sneakers how will it help me to do that well that doesn't come unless you have Relentless focus and the smallest viable audience that you're willing to

commit to and I I think he said this before and I'll paraphrase again as you get a little sip of the tea um but yesterday's remarkable is today's average right and so it's things have and flow and things change quickly right so you may remember when everyone was talking about barefoot running and viam five finger whatever those things are I can't remember the last time someone brought that up it's not a fad anymore it's just the cycle that we live in the Cycles keep getting shorter and shorter and shorter so that's good if you're a

Restless creative and you want to the next thing it's good if you're an ad agency and your client can't just do plop plop fizz fizz forever it's challenging if your goal is get it over with and then rest because that's not happening anymore and I guess I want to come back to this in a second but um in your in your book so everyone that can't see this right now actually if we have the wide shot we can probably see the book it's called This is strategy so that's that's that's new book that's coming out

um you do talk about games quite a bit in there and um you know finite games versus infinite games um and then there's everything in life is a game right that's how I just think about life so um maybe if you can go a little deeper because I don't know how many often how often you talk about games in there because I've really just looked through a couple of chapters right now it's one of the four threads of the entire thinking about strategy there are two kinds of people in the world people who say I

got a new game you want to play those people say yes and other people roll their eyes and run away this is not the kind of game I'm talking about not talking about Monopoly or Dungeons and Dragons games are any encounter where there's limited resources and a finite number of players and rules and that is a job interview that is how do you get through security at the airport these are games and if you try to break the rules you go to jail right you can't just like I'm going to cheat at this system they're

going to get you so when we think about the assets we have the moves to be made it's helpful to call it a game for couple reasons one because game theory is a whole branch of math and science that you can learn from and two because you don't have to take it so seriously that if you make a move and it doesn't work it's not that you're a bad person it's that you made the wrong move and you say oh that's the wrong move I'll make a different move so when I'm talking to people who

are trying to do useful work I'll ask them about the game they are seeking to play and if you've been seduced by this whole idea that you need to be authentic and all this other nonsense you you you can't imagine that it's a game but of course it's a game what people want from us is to consistently play the game not to bleed all over the page and why is being authentic nonsense well so let's say something important came up in your life you needed a lawyer or a surgeon or even a an Uber driver

or you're going to a concert for someone you you know saved up money for the tickets do you want that person to be authentic if they're having a really bad day do you want them to be cranky if they're tired do you want them to drive erratically no you want them to be consistent professionals are consistent they show up as the best version of themselves authenticity is for your friends consistency is for professionals I love that so many good on liners so you I guess going back to the game thing for a second like I

very much see this as a game right we're kind of playing this right now there are limited resources it's a two-player game actually it's a three-player game right now um with Matt over there um thanks Matt I think I think so my coach told me this he's like you know the problem with you Eric is you look at life everything's a game to you your relationships everything is a game and it becomes damaging at some point right but I'm like but it makes everything fun at the end of the day um so what's your take

on it because coach is I think around your age too uh very mature guy but he's like you need a stuff well I think your coach is misguided I think your coach might accurately say sometimes you play the game in a way that doesn't get you what you're hoping for that playing the game in a way for example in a relationship that doesn't feel like you are being manipulative where your theory of the game is how do I help this person become who they want to be that's still a game but it's a game that

helps you build a resilient relationship so I'm not sure what your relationship is like with the coach maybe you're misquoting him but it doesn't make any sense to say stop playing this as a game because that shows a misunderstanding of what a game even is I think so his whole thing was and this is a real quote he said uh not everything in life is a game but in my mind I'm like but it is um because I played so many games growing up it's just what I'm used to right so you say Dungeons and

dragon all these things I'm like everything business is a game relationship are a game but to your point I guess maybe this is where we should talk about finite versus um infinite games um I try to play Infinite games as often as possible so can you explain the difference there so James cars wrote the original breakthrough book in the 70s my friend Simon cynic uh updated it recently two kinds of games a fin not game is the game most people think of soccer there's a timer and there's a team that wins an infinite game is

like playing catch with your nephew you don't try to win catch the purpose of a game of catch is to play more catch is to engage with people and get closer so most of the things that we are doing in business are actually an infinite game and so when Nordstrom says we're going to give you a refund on that snow tire even though we don't sell snow tires they're not doing it because they're a charity they're doing it because they're playing an infinite game they're saying this investment we are making not just in our relationship

with the guy who bought the tires but with the employee who works at the tie counter with the staff in Anchorage Alaska with the story where it'll spread that move in the game will help us play the game even better tomorrow and too often Hustle culture is about you know and the whole idea of pickup culture which Neil St called the game that is not an infinite game that's all about a finite manipulative game where you seek to win and leave nothing but Rubble behind and I've abored that my whole life that's what my parents

taught me and we can do better than that all right quick note this is about my company it's called single grain and single grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving Innovation and so when talk about a couple new strategies and if you need help with marketing great if not hear a couple new strategies that you should try out one is programmatic cro so we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site we're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates we're also Auto optimizing auto updating uh from

a from a SEO standpoint and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using Ai and so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint and our mission is just to drive more Innovation so if you want to learn more just go to single grain.com grain like rice so single grain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside going back to it and funny you mentioned the Nordstrom story so I was talking to

this guy and and um we're talking he's businessman and then um you know he's and he starts talking about the norstrom Tire thing and turns out he was the guy that came up with that he's and so my main point here is he looks at life he's in his 80s right now but everything in his life he he had no reason to get on a call with me it was like a 15-minute call went for 45 minutes and he's just like I just want to help people and to me and I think to you too

business is fundamentally about helping other people relationships are about helping other people well if that's the case then then you should just keep playing the game that way and not play the Zero Sum games that you're talking about right yeah and and so generosity is often misunderstood generosity is not give everything away generosity is expending emotional labor to do things you don't feel like to help somebody in a transaction that is mutually beneficial and you can charge a lot for things that are generous right that back to the surgeon if this if you if the

surgeon says I'm going to do heart surgery that's going to save your life compared to the other surgeon who hasn't trained the way I have and it's $40,000 that's generous because they could put that effort into something else they're putting that effort into you and so when we think about being generous when we think about these transactions the market shows up and says this is what I am interested in your job is not to just take notes and do it your job is to engage and help that person get to what they really seek and

when it turns into manipulation that's when we're not actually getting them what they seek we're just getting what we want and they lose what we're looking for is empathy I'm not you I don't know what you know I don't see what you see but I'm going to make some assertions about what you want and I'll create the conditions for that to happen right so would you say ideally people are playing games that don't feel icky right they games that are zero sum can feel icky games that aren't where you're helping everybody they feel good I

don't know the story inside your head some of the people I know who are real Hustlers don't feel icky about it conmen don't feel icky conmen are good men because they don't feel likey interesting that's true that's true um maybe we'll come back to that thre as well but you mentioned that gam games are one one of the four pillars in your book what are the other three empathy systems time right so empathy we just talked about a little bit uh systems we can talk about for a really long time systems are the invisible usually

unspoken forces that Drive culture and that either you work against or work for so the solar system is famous and the earth goes around the Sun not because it wants to but because of gravity the uh educational industrial complex and 400 years of Harvard and people going into debt to go to a famous college that's a system it has many many people playing in it people of all ages it's been around for a very long time and it's if you go to any high school and you start talking to parents you can see how deep

that system exists right so there systems in lots of places and uh the fourth one is time and time is fascinating to me because everyone knows what it feels like to be here right now as opposed to yesterday which is a memory and tomorrow which is a prediction but tomorrow it'll be here right now and today will be a memory so all of this is getting shuffled all the time and everyone's going to get tomorrow like a new card out of the deck so when we build a strategy when we think about the first day

that you you and Neil did this podcast how many people listen to it the first day we're lucky like under 100 maybe yeah yeah like every podcast I've ever been on the first day was less than 100 and now millions and millions and millions of people so you bet on time you said how are we going to plant seeds on Tuesday so that six years from now we'll be glad we did if you don't see time if you don't acknowledge time then everything's a crisis right so one of the Rifts in the book is about

doing things at the last minute understanding the next minute and seeking the best minute so the last minute if you're somebody who's always on Deadline you're live your whole life in the last minute which is really enervating the next minute is going to be here in a minute no matter what and the best minute is what was the one minute of yesterday that was the best minute of the the day how can we get more of those and so I'm trying to help people see you don't have to live a life at the last minute

if you build slack into your system got it so is it the the best minute is more of a minute of reflection but based on that reflection you can set yourself up for the long term because let's use use an example you're very intentional with your time you're very intentional about where you spend your time creating content too right so so I am super lucky because I don't have a boss and because I'm going to be able to uh put food on the table tomorrow even if I take a day off but for me a

best minute from today might be you and I having a conversation and you changing your mind about something and me seeing it in your face because I laid the groundwork for you to have that leap happen that's why I came if not for you then maybe someone who's listening to this that would be a best minute whereas sitting on the train I could have spent a minute in reflection but I didn't because I was busy doing something else so we can choose what our next minute our best minute is going to be but we should

probably seek it out and not wait for it to happen accidentally right like we're only a couple blocks away from a lot of law firms and I think if we went and talked to some third-year Associates at these law firms they would have a lot of trouble thinking of a best minute they'd had at work in the last month fascinating and okay so that's time um and obviously we don't have enough time to go through the entire book but empathy I think is a thing that a lot of people struggle with I definitely do on

my personality test I I'm like 14% out of 100% on so it's really low but the good thing is I'm like 87% unhelpful so okay you know there's a little balance there but how can people get better at empathy or what how does empathy relate to strategy that's a better question all well so let's say that well not let's say in the book I'm not arguing you should be kind and soft and do this cuz it's good for the world what I'm saying about empathy which I do think you should be but that's not what

I'm saying what I'm saying about empathy is people have the freedom to buy your project or not they have the freedom to say yes or not they have the freedom to engage or not denying that Freedom by acting like you're in charge and that they should do what you say lacks empathy so let's say you're a stand-up comic and you've had a tough row of it but your agent finally gets you a good gig you really work on your set you show up at the gig and it's 300 people you bomb there isn't a laugh

in the house and you discover on your way out that it's a tour group from Italy and no one speaks English so whose fault is it that you bombed right well it's your agent's fault because they didn't tell you that no one there spoke English you were telling jokes in English insisting that they get the jokes but they don't speak English they're not your audience so empathy says you get to pick your audience stop arguing with people who don't get the joke stop arguing with people who don't want to go where you're going pick the

audience that needs you if they don't like your work make better work if they do like your work they'll tell the others and so empathy is this simple idea to say if I don't get what these people want and I can't assert it then I can't do good work got it so empathy in this context is just really trying to understand who your audience is which audience you want and then creating the conditions for those people to show up so if you walk in to a a gluten-free bakery and say uh I really really want

a blueberry muffin but I I don't have a a gluten problem so will you make one for wheat with wheat in it that's not a fit right you've made it very clear who this Bakery is for that's who you should try to please got it and to your point you do have a lot of points in there around uh systems um so so how does that connect with strategy at the end of I mean kind of answering everything in life is a system right actually so this is interesting have have you heard of this book

called reality trans surfing no so um and this kind of relates so in the book it talks about pendulums and pendulums are basically it can be like if you join a gym that's a system right or a pendulum if you are if you like drinking that's a system in itself and they pull you in to kind of do their bidding right and so it's just saying that in life you have to be aware of the system systems that are trying to control you and the ones there are good ones but you have to you got

to let the good ones in but you have to be very mindful of all the pendulums trying to control you do you see that as the same thing very related right so if you want to get Venture funding you're not signing up for the uh rational uh idea of someone investing in your business you signing up for the system of tech Venture investing uh the PowerPoint decks the clothing the time frames the language all of those things are built into the system and people who play that game often intuitively think they're really smart M no

they're just in a system that they match and other people who have totally great business ideas are able to grow them without talking to those people at all there's nothing wrong with what they did they just did it a different way but if you pick a system you can't then try to change the whole system because it doesn't want to change it's very good at sticking around that's why it's here and culture is invented by systems to help them stick around that's how we got all the cultures of our life is that the systems that

have stuck around have reinforced these beliefs so if there's a real change you seek to make like the climate you can announce that you want to just tear down the whole system that capitalism is the the cause of this problem we must live in a post capitalistic World good luck with that because that system is too big for you to change but you can use the system by helping the system get what it wants so in Malcolm gladwell's new book he talks about uh 50% of the people who get into Harvard get in because of

sports this is an astonishingly large number yeah and if you are from the right part of the world and you get really good at say women's rugby the chance of you getting in are excellent because there's a person in Harvard who has a problem and their problem is they need to find better women's rugby players so you see the system you dance with the system then you use the system against itself to get into Harvard because that was your goal right and if you play rugby when you get there or not I don't care right

so the point is we can learn to see these systems and not say oh I need to uh be judged by them we merely need to say when I feed this algorithm when I feed this filter when I give this system what it says it wants I get this other thing but then I can go use the the momentum I got to start making change happen and it going back to the Venture example so let's say you want to play Within the system of the of venture you just understand that okay you're going to have

a board now you're going to have people on your cap table and if you don't learn how to play the game of that system then you are going to lose your shirt um and you'll be kicked out of that system correct yeah correct and then when we see people who end up with multi-billion dollar companies who have certain kinds of control and certain that's just cuz they played the the game better y I think bark Zuckerberg did a great job of that yeah yeah um and so can we speak to maybe your this is the

29th book or the 30th book it's hard you know I was a book packager before this before I started I started one of the first internet companies but before that I did 120 books so who knows how many books I've done I just say this is my 22nd bestseller in a row because it sounds like a round number and it seems to be true nice so what is the strategy behind the long-term strategy with books because this is something you've stuck with and it's been tried and true this is a system you've worked it is

a system I have tried to change and also worked so I got Amazon into the business of publishing books um I've self-published things I've uh challenged my friends in publishing on a regular basis but then I go back to Big publishing houses CU I can see the system and uh the the generic advice for someone who's making a book number one your job is not to get on the New York Times bestseller list we know why that is important as a system signifier and I think it will help explain things here so in the 1980s

Barnes & Noble was dominating the book business and they decided that any New York Times best-selling book would be 40% off which is basically was their cost and then they would put them in a big stack so if you got on the list next week you would sell even more so that became an easy status measure that book publishers decided would focus everyone's attention that was 40 years ago right now it's easily gained it means absolutely nothing it doesn't get you any special treatment anywhere it's just an ego thing so I fired the New York

Times years ago I don't do things to get on the New York Times best seller list because it doesn't matter right what does matter are two things one write a book that after people read it they want to tell the others and two sell the first 10,000 copies just to people you know or people who trust you after that as Sean coin has said it's the books job to sell the rest so James Clear sold 15 million books but he didn't James CLE sold 10,000 books and then his book sold 15 million books and so

that's the opportunity and in my case my blog reaches way more people than a book does so why bother writing a book I only do it because I feel like I don't have a choice that the idea demands that I tell people through my actions this is the really important one this one's worth taking your time reading and discussing and if I can get away with a blog post I always do because then I'm over it and and I can go back to whatever else I was doing but this one wouldn't let me go and

I love the craft of it and the people are terrific yeah I mean it's funny I talked to a couple of my friends that have done books um and and they have businesses too but they're just like mt I never want to do a book again it's like eating glass but you you've done it a handful of times right so um I guess it's a labor of love for you it is it is not an economic transaction in any way uh if you're going to be a consultant which I'm not or a speaker which I

am what it does is it it's a status signifier it says I didn't do this by uh finding a shortcut I did this by having something to say and so that was the real benefit of my first few books but after that it became a craft just like chopping a quarter wood that's a little like eating glass too but some people like to do it all right um your talking about systems again your philosophies are I mean look you've founded I remember using squidoo in the past um I I think I think you were coined

as and you can correct me if I'm wrong here but you helped invent email marketing I did in fact invent email marketing and I'm happy to say so not spam just the good kind yeah how did you invent email marketing I didn't even know that okay so here's the deal it's um 1989 and uh I had recently left a software company where I did software with uh Earl Stanley Gardner Michael kryon Ray Bradbery Arthur C Clark and I loved that craft of being in the software business but there W in the late 80s there was

sort of a void there and a startup called Prodigy called me up and they said we're IBM seers in CBS and we're building this online thing and it was just like the internet and definitely not like the internet this was long before the worldwide web every everything was controlled in one big building in White Plains New York every uh line that was typed into a chat or comment board was approved before it was posted and the thing looked really chunky and it was very slow the problem they had at Prodigy was that it cost uh

$10 a month to join and a lot of promotion to get you to join if you joined and used it a lot they lost money because they had to build a modem for every single user who was using it simultaneous sorry Prodigy back in the day that was still an ISP right internet service provider it was there was no internet okay if you worked if you were in a college you could use the internet but there was no no consumer had access to the internet and it was before AOL right so if you used it

a lot they lost money if you didn't use it at all and you quit they lost money so what they needed you to do is use it a little for a long time so I invented a game for them called guts and it became the most popular online game of all time at the time and you can only play it for seven minutes a week and then next week you can come back and play for seven more minutes so it solved all of their problems and I like I get this internet thing we didn't call

it the internet but this I I see a system being built here I want to make software in this world and then AOL called and said what can you build for us and then Microsoft had a online service what can you do for and I realized that if I was going to build software for each one of these platforms I was going to go bankrupt because they were all different and they didn't have a an API that would make it easy but all of them enabled email you could send an email from Prodigy to AOL

you can send an email from AOL to compy serve so if I could build an email engine I could run on any service so we built a massive email engine we had like four Engineers that like shoveled coal into it to keep it going and we were getting and receiving more email every day than any entity on the internet and I used it to make games and the idea of the games was that each move came by email and if you're tied for first place in a game and an email comes in you're going to

open it so we had an 86% open rate and a 35% response rate to the emails we sent out and these games started to work across Network and say I said How am I'm going to pay for these things things because AOL would pay at first but how am I going to do this so we started getting sponsors so we worked with Proctor and Gamble and other companies who would put money in to sponsor these email games and as I was doing this with these huge response rates talking to these big companies they were like

games are fine but how do we just get people who want to buy a pair of pants to open an email and that led to me coining permission marketing and I then wrote the book to broaden it from their games to why on Earth would anyone open an email from you and spam is bad spam is bad spam is bad but there's this other thing how are we going to do that and so yoyo dine became this company that companies could use before MailChimp to do promotions and then we sold it to Yahoo and the

whole industry was born after that got it that's a great story all right agency owners if you want to grow faster my partner Neil Patel and I we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills and you're going to learn how to get more clients you're going to learn how to take yourself out into day-to-day you're going to learn how to recruit the right people and you're going to be hanging out with people like-minded people such as yourself so if you want to learn more just go to marketing school.i agency again it's marketing school.i

agency and we'll see you on the other side the reason I asked about that so like you you've done that um scoo you've done a handful of other companies and where I'm going with this because um the friend I was talking to that was sitting in your seat yesterday you know in our mid-30s now we're realizing the trend is is you do one thing really well and you do it for decades right and it's it it goes back to the focus thing and you know back in my 20s I would read a lot of books

I talked to a lot of people say yeah you you got to focus and you know hear Warren Buffett yeah you got to focus right but in your 20s you don't want to listen to that and you try everything you you dabble a lot right my friend um Neil actually said this he's like he's like dude the problem you used to have was you had shiny knowledge syndrome not even shiny object syndrome it's you read everything you implement everything you're on to the next thing on to the next thing and you never go anywhere and

so I guess my question for you is how did you really know when to lock because I I feel like even you know reading your stuff um in the very beginning of my career you've always been very focused and very good at saying no right um and so you've honed in on your system and how did you do that is a question so I'm terrible at focusing and I haven't done a great job I would be significantly more com conventionally successful if I had focused if I had started MailChimp right if I there were so

many things that were like right there and I was like this is not interesting anymore I've focused on being the public version of me who does interesting productive things and if the projects I do end up having a life after I'm done that's fantastic but not what I signed up for what I would say uh back to Neil if I were in your shoes is what does success mean M right so you've produced an enormous amount of value for a lot of people if your goal is two more zeros then he is correct that this

shiny knowledge thing isn't going to get you there if your goal is to win on Jeopardy you're halfway there you could do that right but what I have focused on is I don't start a project unless I think I have enough resources to get through the dip and when the project has reached the point where I don't believe more effort from me will get more returns for me I stop and if I was sitting here frustrated that I haven't achieved enough you would correctly say you're stopping at the wrong time and so I don't think

you have to do a project for 30 years for it to pay off but I do think you have to be aware of where is the slog and what are the rewards for going through the SLO right it's this is a game again you have to one you have to understand the game that you're playing so to your point if I had you know on My Grave I just want to say this guy was a good learner and a good teacher well therefore I'm doing that right now right so I think it's when you have

to understand the game and if it no longer feels like a game maybe you you jump out of that system which goes back to your book again right yeah that's amazing exactly right so you know I saw social media coming squidoo was before Pinterest it was right at the beginning of Facebook if not before Facebook we were the 40th biggest website in the US we had nine employees and um Google shot us down that's a whole other story but um it would have been easy in that moment to shift and say we're going to go

build a Pinterest and stick with it for a decade we're going to go build a Twitter and stick with it for a decade and I decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze that I just didn't want to commit to that sort of enterprise and knowing yourself is worthwhile because you only get today once and if we the game that you're playing right now if I say okay I want to I just want to learn and teach for the rest of my life maybe for someone like a Neal it's it's more zeros right what do you

think it is for you what game are you playing um when I'm wearing my teacher hat I would like to have the people I'm teaching teach other people so I don't want to I don't spend a lot of time re reaching out to new people I'm not trying to do that but I'm trying to give the people who get the joke tools so they can teach other people that is what has happened here that's why I'm here yes that's amazing um and then the bigger Arc is I I won the birthday lottery I have so

much privilege and opportunity and I would like to leave things I touch better than I found them that's great again how long do you think it took you to realize that this is the game that you're playing I struggled when I went out on my own I got 800 rejections in a row the first year that meant 800 times someone in book publishing bought a stamp put it on an envelope mailed me a letter saying we hated your idea that adds up right and so this idea that you have to pay the rent was a

struggle and then um I met a guy in the book business who I did a book with and he explained to me how I was playing the game completely wrong how my story was confused and I was approaching it like an MBA I wasn't approaching it like a book person and the penny dropped and I got the joke and the book publishing industry has been great for me because the book publishing industry until recently does not reward short-term hustle it rewards people who are going to patiently execute the project in a way that will stand

the test of time because books have been around for hundreds of years that was a perfect balance to my short attention span and I think ever since then the ark like it would have been really easy to become a spammer in 1993 there was plenty of open space for someone who understood games so many ways that you could rip off so many people and I didn't even spend 10 seconds debating whether I would do that or not I did there was one uset board where I posted one note to see what would happen and I

saw what happened and I was like oh I understand this I don't want to do this ever again yeah so the book publishing industry taught you how to play long-term games yeah I I think people just need to either they need to get punched in the face at a certain moment to learn how to play long-term games um and maybe that was it for you um maybe that's what it is because even if you learned that all the successful people quote unquote have played long-term games I don't think that's enough you have to actually get

that punch and so the 800 rejections was that punch for you um for me maybe a different story right so yeah and I you know I think that part of what I'm trying to do in the book is make it easy to talk about and if you're not talking about your strategy it's either because you're afraid of it or you're embarrassed by it and you should be neither you should be very comfortable with peers being able to say back to you I heard your strategy I don't understand it I don't know why you're doing that

right so in Facebook's case uh when Mark and Cheryl said we're gonna take political advertising I think they should have had a much more nuanced conversation about that strategy I think that was a terrible strategy choice and so I guess going to your book and talking about good strategies terrible strategies this book it doesn't just apply to marketing strategy it's it's anything strategy right it's not just business it's also life strategy right yes exactly right got it right how if you get pulled over by a cop what is the game you are playing what is

your goal what is the cop's goal how are we going to end this transaction in a way that they get status in affiliation I get status in affiliation I don't go to jail right like that's still a game yeah and that there's the empathetic component is like what do they need what do they want are they trying to hit a quota right and then timing too if you if you're stupid you say something stupid okay you're going you're going out you're taking out of your other games for a while exactly right okay I love it

um speaking of strategies I mean we would be remiss if we don't talk about AI so you've said it's the biggest thing you've seen since maybe like I don't know biggest change since electricity I think correct um so and you've said that quite a few times in other interviews like what what are you seeing recently um that is I don't know catching your attention so I think what's happening recently isn't important it's thrilling but it's not important the path is very clear between agents persistence and the network it's obvious to me that AI 5 years

from now is not going to be recognizable so let's talk about electricity for a second every company that when electricity arrived said we're not going to deal with this electricity thing is gone right that it used to be there was only one electrical outlet in the house it was a light bulb there were no things with prongs that you could plug in so if you got a a washing machine which was the the first giant uh time-saving invention you had to unscrew the light bulb and screw in the washing machine I didn't know that and

it would sit in the middle of your living room and it wasn't very well balanced so it Rock back and forth and some sometimes it would move and more than a dozen times its movement would wrap the cord around the neck of somebody in the house and kill them slowly and so plenty of people said electricity is horrible we need to have nothing to do with electricity so right now we're in the in the washing machine phase so AI is doing some cool things it's not costing too many people their job yet but it's about

to be this very significant transformation and the short version is if you do a job that AI can do either you're going to figure it out first and change your job so that AI works for you or your boss is going to figure out first and you're going to lose your job but just like the steam shovel created more jobs than it destroyed I believe AI is going to create more jobs than but we can't even describe what they are it's going to be about creating value by fueling the network and helping people get to

where they want to go so if all you do as a radiologist is read x-rays you're in big trouble because an AI can do that better than you but if you're able to connect and Inspire and educate people around you in a way that AI can't then you can use AI as a tool and I think you said this best you said that AI replaces mediocre work and that's exactly what's going to happen it's going to level everybody up long term that's is that how you're seeing it I nothing ever levels everybody up there are

going to be people who have to go through a lot of pain because the system has pushed them into being a cog and they haven't had the foundation to push back that people like us who were lucky enough to grow up knowing that we could push back against the system that wants us to do less have but we're going to have a massive challenge of Education the good news is I think we're very close to AI having a diamond age solution to education that's going to be breathtaking yeah I mean I I invested in this

company that gamifies education and I think you combine that with an AI and everything's infinitely patient it'll tutor you 247 and then you have multiple agents helping you um I think we should be able to have a Renaissance when it comes to to education but to your point talking about systems again at least for me the system I grew up in the education system was completely broken it for it to to lynchpin this everything all comes around it creates a bunch of cogs right so how do we have how does someone that was maybe trained

to be a cog how do they get out of that so the educational industrial complex is filled with well-meaning people but the gravity of it which was created by industrialists who want compliant Factory workers is hard to resist and so what's the change agent that's something I talk about in the book A change agent changes the system with Force the change agent is well yeah but if I hand an iPad to a kid it's completely outside the zone of the educational industrial complex so things are going to shift and you know souan at Khan Academy

started this thing so now some fourth grade teacher walks in and their kid one three four kids already know calculus that's because they did it outside of the system and so I think what we need to figure out how to do is teach people resilience and initiative if we can enroll a generation in the idea of initiative the tools will be available but if they don't have initiative then we got troubles got it and you would say curiosity probably goes into initiative correct yeah yeah that's I think those are those are two ways to encapsulated

you know I I wish they taught us how to play poker in school um I eventually we just went off on our own and gambled but a lot of pain from poker yeah I mean Annie Duke is teaching poker as a way to teach decision-making because it's why not do that of course that was a great Rebrand for her if you even want to call it a Rebrand um but as we work towards wrapping up here I mean we would be remiss if we don't talk about storytelling right because we're all emotional creatures so what

would you say like how do people get better at storytelling certainly people can watch how South Park does it um and I think that's a great one minute video I think everyone should check that out but how would you say people can get better at storytelling well again the words matter stories aren't once upon a time and a plot so here we are in this spectacular Studio that Matt is running there's a story the Potted Fern is a story the sh microphone is a story The Lighting is a story you go to a an open

house and it smells like apple pie in there that's a story because it reminds you of growing up right stories are simply little invisible hooks into the experience we already had before we encountered the story and stories include tension they always have tension the tension of what's going to happen next the tension of this might not work the tension of am I in the right place at the right time intention of I'm rooting for something if you're not doing those things then you've willfully walked away from story and chosen to be a commodity and you

only sell a commodity if you want to storytelling to me is a game that I haven't exactly mastered yet um the I I guess everything you're saying is true yes there absolutely needs to be attention you know story is a feeling it's very much a feeling um but where else I guess how did you get better at storytelling um because for you it seems to come so effortlessly and maybe before you answer I know that even with your blogging you I think you still blog every single day correct 9,000 in a row okay so it's

not just one blog I I I saw another podcast you did it's you're writing four plus a day and you're throwing most of them out you're only picking one um so maybe you can answer this how could how did you become such a prolific storyteller I often get notes from people saying um how do I learn marketing what how do I get an internship and my answer is you learn marketing by doing marketing go raise money for a nonprofit go to some garage sales and sell them stuff on eBay the way you learn to tell

stories is you tell stories I learned to tell stories in the Northwoods of Canada three hours north of Toronto uh helping kids get into a 16 foot long canoe and P paddle it by themselves creating the conditions and aura of magic around something that could have been fairly pedestrian uh stories that were Silly or scary or thrilling and when a story worked I did it again and when a story worked I didn't work I never did it again got it so you never went to like those story competitions or anything like that you just continue

to hone your craft and you saw what landed what didn't and you just kept iterating right I still do every single time I interact with another person I am practicing my storytelling got it I love I it's such an under underrated thing because when you go to dinner parties or whatever the people that command the group they are the storytellers and uh not that they're trying to command the attention of the group but they they just do they're they're magnetic at the end of the day yeah and most Charisma comes from Curiosity and giving other

people space right we think people are interesting when they appear to be interested and so that's where we begin none of my early storytelling would have worked if I wasn't interested interested in the people I was telling the story to that's a big one never thought about that um you're okay so we talked about kind of how you do storytelling and you're still a prolific Learner in my opinion so what's what's the Seth Goen Seth Goden Learning System right now oh I am not in your Le Arch not even a little bit I it's semi-

random I read a ton of blogs and if there's a new tool that makes me uncomfortable I learn it um I made a mistake with Photoshop when it got to version three or four like I was good at version one two and then I was really busy I was like ah no and I haven't caught up since I try to avoid that I try to say here's a tool I'm not sure I'm going to be able to use it productively but I'm going to learn how to use it so then I can decide I don't

want it got it you're um so this will be the last thing I suppose but you you have this Aura you talked about auras earlier you have this Aura of wisdom and and patience right I I think you're very patient person um and you you have this quote um you say don't hustle what do you mean by that okay so I grew up playing hockey my dad was the coach hustle in hockey or even baseball is a good thing right that someone who's hustling in those Sports is expending unreasonable amounts of energy in short periods

of time when other people aren't but but that's not real life that is a very circumscribed game nobody I have ever met says I really like that person they hustled me no one ever says that we don't want a close talker a high press salesperson someone is all up in our face that's not how you earn trust it's not how you earn loyalty and if you don't have trust in loyalty you can't tell a story so when I say don't hustle I mean don't take shortcuts at other people's expense take shortcuts that help you avoid

places where people are hiding I'm in favor of that take shortcuts where you can skip a meeting and just claim responsibility I'm in favor of that but the shortcut of I'm going to use pressure and um become untrustworthy to get a sale it's easy to make money doing that on the internet but all the people who have done that in the 25 years i' 30 years I've been online I don't see them around anymore right and where I started this last question with you talking about kind of wisdom and and patience um to me hustle

seems like you're people that hustle all the time they're very impatient right they're kind of out of control a little bit that's at least that's what it feels like um so how did you learn to kind of rain that because the way you talk it's very calm it's slower right it's not out of control versus I talk very quickly um which can seem a little manic at times so um I I guess I'm just curious again like where did that come from when did that come like did you have to get punch the face no

I think as we wrap this up there's confusion here and again I'm not a role model but there's confusion between what might come across in a podcast and what is actually productively being produced so yod dine had 60 people in our New York office 40 of them reported directly to me so that was sort of crazy but it kept my brain busy and we had no walls so it was one big room and every 3 months everyone had to move their desk and sit somewhere else cuz I wanted people to get used to change but

the excuse I gave was no one should have to sit next to me for too long because my part of the office had more chaos than other parts of the office because I am extraordinarily productive at shipping the work when you run out of time or you run out of money you're done right if it's Tuesday there's going to be a blog post not because it's the best blog post they ever wrote but because it's Tuesday we Shi the work that job interviews are the last five minutes that um we're going to have these things

happening and happening it doesn't feel manic but it feels inevitable there's Forward Motion so I don't think you have to be Manic and I'm capable of talking as fast as you but I don't think you have to be manic to be productive and a lot of people I know have confuse these things they don't want to be manic but now they're also not productive and they're still thinking about it I went to business school with someone in 1981 who is still thinking about the startup he's going to launch ah well I think that's a great

way to to end it there's the it's the we'll just leave that for maybe next time so Seth this has been great what's the best way for people to find you online and the book online they're aligned seth. blog is my posts they're all free seth. blog for this is strategy is all the information you need about the book all right everyone go pick up the book this has been great thank you so much thank you you're awesome [Music]