Marketing Expert Reveals Secret For Building an Audience That Buys | Seth Godin

Who are you seeking to serve? What is the change you hope to make? And these people you're serving, what is it that they need and want from you? It's not about you. It's not about what you worked so hard to make. Seth Godin is a bestselling author and marketing expert who is also the inventor of email marketing. He built a $30 million company using his marketing techniques and now shares his innovative strategies with the world. If you spread out and do a lot of things, you're going to do them all pretty well. If I

was pretty good at all of those things, no one would care. But if I only have one thing, then I could be the best in the world if I can make a difference for my audience. The money will take care of itself. Hi, it's Erica Colberg, and before we dive into today's podcast episode, I have an exciting announcement that can help you save an extra $1,000 without having to penny pinch or change your lifestyle. On Monday, I'm running my free five-day savings challenge where you'll discover simple and creative ways that you can save extra money

every month. Whatever you want to do with that extra money is up to you; I'll just show you how to save it. The challenge is totally free to join. All you need to do is go to erica.com/slgo. Erica is with a K, and you can secure your spot. By the way, these strategies that you're going to discover can help you easily save money, whether you're a budgeting novice or a finance expert. They're going to get better and better throughout the week. But I have to tell you, I'm so excited about this and don’t want you

to miss out. In November of last year, we ran a savings challenge and had over 200,000 people sign up, and on average, people saved $1,005 that month through what they learned in the challenge. That means our challengers collectively saved over $200 million. So trust me when I say you don’t want to miss out on this one, and the deadline to sign up to be part of this free challenge is Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time. So make sure you secure your spot and get free access today. Again, that's erica.com/slgo. See you inside! I'm Erica Colberg,

and you're listening to the "Erica Taught Me" podcast. I wanted to start by asking, if someone comes to you and says, "Seth, I want to become a better marketer," and you can only give them one homework assignment to go home and do, what do you give them? To learn what marketing is and what it's not, marketing used to be advertising. That was it. If you ran enough ads, you could make enough money to run more ads. Then the internet came along, and some people got confused. They think that marketing is about hype and hustle and

interrupting people and spamming them and getting a lot of social media followers, getting the word out, getting attention. It's none of those things. That's not marketing; that's promotion. The homework assignment would be: Who are you seeking to serve? What is the change you hope to make? These people you're serving—what is it that they need and want from you? It's not about you; it's not about what you worked so hard to make. It's about what are their dreams, their desires. If you can serve other people and help them get to where they want to go, marketing

looks really easy. So when you started off your companies, did you figure out the customer avatar first? I mean, in order to figure out who it is you're serving and what outcome you're getting for them, is that the first step you take? In everything we do in our lives, we begin with “who is it for?” When we are dealing with a dog or a toddler or another person, we don't speak to that person in a language they don't understand; we bring the language they speak, of course, because otherwise, they wouldn't be able to hear us.

So I've been lucky enough to do 40 years of projects, some big, some small, and every single project that has succeeded—every single one of them—begins with "who is this for?" Not "what's their name?" Not "what do they look like?" I don't care how tall they are or where they're from. I care about what do they believe, what are they afraid of, who are their friends, what does this remind them of? These yearnings are why we're here—to solve other people's problems. How do you find that out? Is that from speaking to the customers? Is that because

you were once the customer? Obviously, the easiest thing to do is to make something for yourself and assume that other people have the same problem. But ladies' pantyhose were not invented by a woman; they were invented by a guy who didn't wear pantyhose. You don't have to be a cancer survivor to be a good oncologist, and the toys at Lego and Fisher Price were not invented by three-year-olds. So empathy is the resilient, reliable thing to do, and you can learn a lot just by noticing, by watching, by asking, “Why did that person at the supermarket

grab this instead of that?” Following people around, asking them hard questions—not questions about "will you buy my product?" because people will lie when they answer that—but noticing what do they do when no one is watching. What are their habits? Where are their frustrations? Developing this empathy is not something we're born with; it's a skill, and we can learn to do it well. But are some people born as better natural marketers? And some people are learning it, or you think everyone kind of starts off at the same baseline. Some people are born with, you know, the

ability to read faces and the ability to understand interactions more easily than others, for sure. I do think we've indoctrinated people over time in issues of social class and caste so that they don't believe they have the privilege to show up and make things better. But I have seen people from lots and lots of different backgrounds show up and make a difference. The thing about charisma is: being charismatic doesn't make you a leader; being a leader makes you charismatic. People are drawn to you not because you tell funny jokes, but because you have something in

mind that you want to make better. Do you think, as we're talking about how knowing your customer and knowing what they want is really important, that AI is ultimately going to be a really good thing for marketing, where you just have so much more intelligence around who the customer is, what their behavior is, what they're doing, and can tailor the marketing around that? Or are you worried about the future of AI and marketing? I'm not worried about marketing at all. Most of the people who do marketing don't have a problem, and I'm certainly not in

charge of marketing. AI is the biggest change in our culture since electricity, and if you're not using it every day, you're going to be afraid of something you don't understand. What AI is capable of doing right now is replacing an enormous range of mediocre human work. By mediocre, I mean average. If you're a mediocre radiologist, I've got an AI that can read an X-ray faster, cheaper, maybe better than you. But it has no threat to somebody who can do things that most people can't do because that requires a nonlinear sort of approach that one day

AI might be able to figure out, but right now it can't. And so all of my writing is my writing, but I ask Claude questions every day. I say, "Here are bullet points; can you think of a fifth one?" and it can suggest something to me. So if you're a mediocre copywriter, if you're making average stuff for average people, we don't need you anymore; we've got AI. But if you want to use this magical librarian and ask it hard questions, why wouldn't you? So how are you using AI besides having the fifth bullet point auto-populated

for you? Well, it's funny; I started with ChatGPT like most people. Well, first, a little bit about my personal background: I walked here from the center of New York, and I passed the Chelsea Hotel. There's a plaque on the outside that says Arthur C. Clarke lived there and wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" while he was in that hotel, which I thought was really cool. I worked with Arthur toward the end of his career in 1983, and of course, "2001" is where everyone decided to get afraid of AI. So I've been studying AI for a very

long time, and I was eager when it finally showed up the way it did with ChatGPT. Mostly, I just argue with it. I think it's arrogant and doesn't recover well from making a mistake. I decided spending my days arguing with AI wasn't helping anybody, so I switched to Claude. Claude is kinder and gives me better insight. What I will do is give it hypotheticals and ask it to make combinations and connections. You know, "Here's three things I read over here and six things that disagree with it over there; who's got something going on?" Recently, I

gave it a 40-page business plan that had been written by five different people over the course of a year, so it was complicated. I said, "Please read this and highlight the contradictions and the hard parts," and in less than 30 seconds, it gave me a two-page MBA-quality memo that was fantastic. So how do you become someone who is mediocre and replaceable by AI to someone who cannot be replaced by AI? The most important thing is you do things that might not work. People who are mediocre aren't lazy; they're afraid. They have been pushed by this

educational industrial complex to not make a mistake, to make everything defensible, to follow the leader, to fit in all the way. And so if you walk through a shopping mall, you will see a whole bunch of people who are dressed in a mediocre style because it's deniable. They're like, "Well, that's the way everybody else is dressed; that's average." But then you will see someone who is quite dapper. That person, when they left the house, maybe they’re thinking, "Hey, maybe I'm overdressed." They were doing something that might not work. And that's what leadership is. Leadership isn't

management; leadership is leaning into something generative and generous that also might not work. I am really proud of all my failures, more proud than my successes, because the failures are hard to come by and really pay off in the long run. What would you consider your biggest failures that you're proud of? Well, there are failures of omission—people I didn't give the benefit of the doubt to, opportunities that I should have seen. Those I'm not proud of. Failures of commission—you know, I started one of the first internet companies, and I invented email marketing, and I could

have invented the search engine. I was there, but I didn't because I didn't get the joke of the World Wide Web. I'm like, "No, everyone’s going to be on AOL." I just completely missed that. I've launched projects that meant well, but either the timing was wrong or the strategy didn't quite line up. Before there was Pinterest... And social networks, we started Squidoo. There were eight of us; we grew it to the, uh, 40th biggest website in the U.S., but then it went away because Google shut us down. You look at that, and you learn from

that, and I wouldn't take any of them back because those are the things that enabled me to be sitting here talking to you today. Eric, what do you think today are the things that most people are omitting and not looking towards? I mean, I feel like AI is—most people in our space, at least, are into it. Are there things that you're looking at that you feel like people are missing? So it's not hard to manufacture things compared to the way it used to be. You can program a laser cutter and come back the next day

and all these pieces came out of it. You can go online and order something from 5,000 miles away, and it arrives. Coming up with a making-manufacturing insight is not going to be easy, but people are lonelier than they've ever been before. So who's building connection—real connection—not the fake connection of Facebook, but real connection? Who is making people feel like insiders? Who is creating the conditions for people to find hope and possibility? There's an unlimited market for that. Not enough people are doing that, and that's accomplished through authentic storytelling and, again, understanding what people's problems are

and what their desired outcome is. That's a really good way to say it; however, the word "authentic" freaks me out a little bit. Okay, um, I think authenticity is way overrated. No one wants you to be authentic when you're doing these shows because if you're having a bad day, they don't want to see cranky Erica, right? They want you to play the role of this consistent, interesting person who talks about what you talk about. That's consistency; that's not authenticity. What we need is someone who is willing to show up as a professional, and professionals do

great work even when they don't feel like it. How do you do that when you output a lot? How do you show up day in and day out and produce even sometimes when you don't want to? Well, what we're looking for as professionals is resiliency, right? So if you go to a war zone, you'll see doctors who can do extraordinary output, but they can't get away with that in a New York City hospital because there are also errors. But you get away with it in a war zone because people are dying, right? So we build

systems so that if a bad day happens, or if we get, you know, a cold, it doesn't all fall apart. In my case, I write three or four blog posts a day, but I only publish one of them, and my blog has been running for a long time because it's resilient; because I didn't establish that I have to sprint all the time, right? And saying no to a lot of things is part of the secret to being able to show up as a professional. Professionals say no all the time. For my content creation, it's quite

hard balancing between trying to stay consistent but then also staying inspired, because sometimes if it's just purely about consistency, I feel like I can put out subpar work that I'm not that proud of, and I never want to put that out. But at the same time, waiting three weeks for inspiration to strike and having one good idea that I'm really proud of does not allow me to have that consistency in those multiple touchpoints. So how do I think about that? These are great questions. Social media builds things up and then destroys them. And you know

the "Gangnam Style" video from Psy has been seen three billion times. Where's his next one? I don't know, right? Because there's a hit mindset. You can't simultaneously chase a hit and be consistent. You know, maybe Billy Joel could have done it a long time ago, the Doobie Brothers, but even they can't keep doing that forever. And now it's so much harder. So one mindset is to say there are two things that I do: I professionally show up with gems about personal finance and big ideas and thoughtful, consistent work, but there's a lot of space in

between where I'm having a different voice. And that's the voice of, "Here's something new; here's an experimental idea; here's, you know, a short form or a different platform." And by balancing those two, going back and forth, you have the chance to put fuel into the arc of what you're doing. You know, in my case, I said no to Twitter, to Facebook, to LinkedIn. I don't use those platforms for my work, so the blog is there; it's only once a day, that's it. But then I can show up on a different platform like Streamyard and say,

"I'm going to do a live conversation with somebody. I'm not promising you when I'm coming back." What made you, even as you saw, after your blog started, you saw YouTube and then TikTok and Twitter? What made you feel like you wanted to stick with the medium of blog writing? It's pretty simple. If you spread out and do a lot of things, you're going to do them all pretty well, and if I was pretty good at all of those things, no one would care. But if I only have one thing, then I could be the best

in the world at it. That's the only reason. I knew because I saw Twitter like, you know, six weeks after it started to pick up speed. I knew if I showed up on Twitter, I could... I have a lot of people following me, but then am I going to be great at tweeting or mediocre at tweeting? If I'm great at tweeting, I'm going to spend all my time reading the comments. I don't want to build that life for myself. So these are choices we have; we have more agency than we think. And what's interesting: you

and I have been talking for a few minutes, and we haven't talked at all about tactics. We haven't talked at all about hype or logos; none of this is what's important. It's who trusts you, who gives you the benefit of the doubt, and what's your strategy for making the change you want to make happen. So now there are, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people who are being more careful and thoughtful with their money because of you. That's a big thing to have accomplished. You should take credit for that; it's extraordinary. And

you don't work for TikTok. TikTok works for you, and the minute it stops working for you, you should stop using it. Something I've been thinking hard about is just my social media background. I started off on YouTube, and I was, I think, a very mediocre YouTuber. It took me six months to get 2,000 followers, one video per week. Then, after about a year, I switched to TikTok, and within 30 days, I had five million followers on TikTok. So I realized, okay, mediocre YouTuber but pretty good short-form, 60-second video creator. But now, after—it’s been two years

now—I have 21 million followers across these short-form platforms, and I’m realizing that the depth of connection that I create on these short-form sites is quite shallow. Yes. And so now I'm almost thinking about going back to YouTube, where I can have these 10- to 15-minute videos and have these really deep insights around personal finance that I can't accomplish in a 60-second video. But at the same time, I know I'm a mediocre YouTuber and an excellent TikToker, so what would you do here? Okay, this is such a useful, generous question because lots of people are watching

this think about this: you are not a mediocre YouTuber. What is true is that you weren't serving the YouTube algorithm in a way that they rewarded you, either through luck or skill, but it has nothing to do with whether watching one of your videos helped somebody. Right? So the challenge is we've got so many people busy throwing coal into the TikTok fire without thinking about why they're even doing it. So we need to keep coming back to who's it for and what's it for. The big number doesn't mean anything; it's just noise. What matters is

are you building trust, the benefit of the doubt, and are people taking action in a way that benefits you? So we haven't talked about whether you're going to make money from this; I'm putting that aside. Can you make a difference with this? Because if you're going to put on a clown suit and get more views from that, well, yeah, but why did you do it? And so what we know is that there are certain kinds of interactions that yield a lot. The relationship between a lawyer and her client that lasts for seven years has way

more impact than that same lawyer talking to somebody for seven minutes over seven years via TikTok. So that doesn't mean you should go back to being a lawyer—God forbid! What it means is you need to think about what's the smallest audience that could sustain your mission. Anybody more than that is a bonus. We need to stop putting on a show because the show isn’t serving us; it’s not nutritious. So I don’t know if I have clarity on the answer then. Well, what do you think? Well, I see I do have impact with my TikToks; I

know that—oh, for sure! Each one of them is designed to be actionable. I want people to listen to the 30 to 60 seconds and then think, “Oh, I can take action on that,” or “I feel empowered by this.” I totally agree; I didn’t mean to diminish that one bit. Thank you for letting me clear, but it’s not deep enough. Like, I want to change people’s lives. I want to help people get to financial freedom, and I’m starting to believe less and less that a 60-second TikTok is ever going to get them there. Right now, the

way it works is I have to get them truly into my email list or into my podcast. But, you know, I can get millions and millions of people to watch 60-second videos. To get them to watch a one-hour podcast episode that is with the best person in the world is much more difficult. But is it better to put my focus there, then, on changing a small number of lives? Or is it better to go wide? I'm just still conflicted, right? Well, what we're talking about here is enrollment. Enrollment isn’t the mandatory enrollment in public school;

enrollment is someone who is voluntarily exposing themselves to effort and emotional labor to get to where you hope to take them. If they sign up for that, it is much more likely that they will respond. So if you put up a billboard in Times Square, it will be seen by a million people. That's great! But the real change is only going to happen among the few who go to the next step, and the next step, and the next step. So the opportunity for you is to realize that there is a funnel here, and the funnel

is very, very leaky. 22 million. Eyeballs going at the top: well, to per person, 44 million eyeballs go at the top, and most of those people bounce off. But maybe a million consider signing up for your podcast, and maybe 100,000 actually do, and maybe 50,000 listen to more than one episode. So now we're down to 25,000 whose lives have been transformed. You’ve got to put 44 million eyeballs at the top to get 25,000 people at the bottom. That’s actually great because it didn’t cost you a lot of cash at the top of the funnel. So

when we think about this, the answer is not to put more at the top of the funnel; the answer is to make the funnel more efficient. Make it so that people who have a glancing interaction with you are more likely to send you an email. Right? What’s the email address you want them to send a note to to get to sign up? Do we know what it is? Support@er.com. So when they write to support@er.com, what do they get back? An answer to their inquiry, whatever they asked. Are you reading these emails sometimes? Well, we need

a different email address—okay, one that when someone writes to it, they get a note back that just says, “Thanks for finding out all about Erica. Here’s my podcast, here’s my YouTube channel, here’s my book.” Then they can just go to erica.com. Okay, but erica.com is different than writing an email because if they go to erica.com, they could bounce right off of that. But if they send you an email or a text—which is really cool; you can teach Twilio to do this—now they instantly get it back in the same medium, and you can follow up next

week to say, “How’d that go? What did you like?” Now permission has been granted. It’s not broadcast; it’s relationship. And what we’re trying to do, step by step, is find subscribers. They don’t have to pay you at first, but subscribers are enrolled. They’re saying, “Oh, this is part of who I am now.” It’s not what comes up next on my feed; it’s Erica reached out to me with home delivery. And so, when newspapers worked for 150 years, they only worked because of subscribers, not because of newsstand sales. And right now, you are winning at newsstand

sales, but you don’t have enough subscribers. So you’ve got to say, “How do I build these offers, these opportunities, these chances for people who care to enroll?” Okay, now you’re a teacher. You can teach them things, but you can also offer people status and connection. Those are the two things all human beings want. Affiliation is: Who’s to my left? Who’s to my right? Did I dress right? Am I using the right language? Who am I with? We have affiliation in so many areas of our lives, and status is: Who’s up and who’s down? Am I

winning or am I not? So you can talk about buying a Tesla versus buying Tesla stock. The person who buys a Tesla isn’t evil or lazy; they just got more status in the short run by being able to drive the car around. The other person got more status in the long run by making $400,000 in stock. Right? So you can adjudicate and award status to people by giving them levels, by saying, “Look, you made it this far. You achieved this.” Merit badges are a real thing, or it could be something less public than that that

they’re internalizing. And when you build these arcs the way Dave Ramsey did, you can find people who will stick with it, and you can change their lives. You can also make a living doing it, but that’s not the primary objective. The objective is: Can I undo all these years of financial indoctrination that have pushed people to be consumers to help them find what they’re actually looking for with finance? It’s going to be really hard to do that with just a 30-second video. I think I’m starting to understand the answer to this, which is that, yes,

it’s okay to have more people in the funnel, but what you really want is a more sealed funnel that you don’t have to put millions of people into to impact the lives here. Right? I see YouTube as a more sealed funnel. If people can get onto your YouTube channel and watch a 10-minute video with you, that’s the equivalent of them watching 20 TikToks with me. So I’d rather have them on YouTube. So is that my answer? That I should go back to YouTube? If it is, I see YouTube as a more skilled funnel. For example,

one way that people can get deeper with me by going on my email list is going to four of these 5-day challenges that I have. I have a 5-day investing challenge where I teach them how to go from knowing nothing about investing to being a confident investor. I have a 5-day free savings challenge where I teach them how to save money. But in order to get them into this challenge, to get them to subscribe, it takes a lot. If I get 10 million views on a video promoting my savings challenge, maybe 20,000 people sign up.

Yeah, so it takes a lot of views to get my 100,000 people to sign up. Right? Whereas I think on YouTube, the conversions are going to be higher. So is that my answer? Well, let’s break it down in the emotional mindset. Okay, it’s very unlikely that a TikTok from you is going to make someone uncomfortable because it’s going to be over in 30 seconds. So let’s just go on to the next thing. But learning always involves discomfort. Learning means... Acknowledging you are incompetent on the way to discovering you're competent: first, you have to think, "Oh,

I didn't know that," and now I do. Right? So, a 10-minute YouTube video isn't 20 times better than a TikTok; it's 200 times better because what you did was create tension, and in that tension, in that discomfort, someone grew. You didn't have the chance to do that in TikTok; you're just entertaining in a carnival. Whereas in YouTube, it's not about whether you belong on YouTube; it's about whether you belong in any medium where someone's going to experience discomfort along the way. So, you know, in New York, they have the marathon. They don't promise that you

can run the 26 miles without getting tired; in fact, they insist that you will get tired. The only difference between people who finish the marathon and people who quit at Mile 20 is that the people who quit at Mile 20 don't know where to put the tired. What you're doing is teaching people where to put the discomfort so that they can do these things. It's not like you're having breakthrough thoughts that were never thought of before; you're just teaching a generation how to deal with their discomfort about personal finance to get to the other side.

So, it could be that it's an email once a week; it could be they have to fly to Dubai and sit with you in your office; it could be that they have to watch the whole video; maybe they have to buy your book. I don't know what that thing is, but whether it's on YouTube or not is not the point. Now, YouTube offers you the chance to have some subscribers, giving you a better ability to alert them when the next video is out. So, it becomes more generative, step by step, by step; you can build

on it. But by itself, it's still going to get you back into the same rut, which is that YouTube is going to reward videos that get engagement right at the beginning, which is how do I eliminate discomfort, not create it. Right? And it's pretty trendy, and as someone who has trended, it's easy to get hooked on trending. So, what I did—and I'm not saying you should do what I did—is I refused to look at any of my stats. I refused to do any SEO of any kind for a while. I was the number one match

on Blog if you did a Google search, and then I wasn't, and I didn't care because I wasn't paying attention to that. What I was paying attention to was: did somebody subscribe to my blog, and did I get a note from them three, four, six months later? Not easy to send me a note that would say, "This is what I learned from you." I never ask anyone to do that, but when they do that, I'm like, "I am doing something that is working here." That is what I keep track of— not how do I get

more readers, because I don't want to write to get more readers; I want to write for my readers. And if my readers want to share it with other people, that's great, but that's what I am focused on when I'm doing my online work. It leads to the fact that when I write a book, enough people buy it that I could write another book. It's like I don't have to hustle to go get that first group of people because the pattern has been established. I'm not racing around saying, "How do I get the word out?" One

of the challenges you're going to have on TikTok is you can't possibly grow as much in the next two years as you grew in the last two years because otherwise you'd have every person on the planet watching you—that's not going to happen. So, now it's okay: how do we make the funnel not leaky? How do we make it empathic and generous so people want to stick with it and go down this journey? And if people don't get the joke? Good for you; thanks for checking this out. I'm not angry at you if you didn't get

the joke; it's fine—it's just not for you. Do you think for the next two years, looking forward, that what got me here is the same thing I should do? For example, I have a playbook; I know exactly how to create viral content around personal finance, but I'm finding that if I just repeat that playbook over and over and over, I'm going to get very bored. But it helps a lot of people, so that's ultimately a good thing. What should I be looking forward to in content creation? Should I be creating content that I want to

create? Should I be creating content that I know goes viral? Should I be creating content that I know will help the most people? Or should it be all of the above? Well, I don't know what you should do. "Should" is a tricky word, so we'll leave that aside. Jay Levinson, who I worked with years ago, said you shouldn't change your logo when you get bored with it; you shouldn't change your logo when your spouse gets bored with it. You should change it when your accountant gets bored with it. Professionals, like those who do corneal implant

surgeries over and over all day, should not stop doing it because they are bored. They are good at it, and they are saving people's vision. You're a professional; you should do this if it serves the mission—even and especially if you're bored with it. That doesn't mean you should spend your whole day doing things that bore you, but this... Is the work of the professional not to be a wandering generality, "Oh look, a puppy," but instead to say, "This is what the market needs in order for it to respond: 'Join my funnel.'" So that's what I'm

going to do, and that's okay. But for your creative self, for the one that wants to be on the frontier, you're going to have to find a platform or an interaction that scares you, and that will light you up the way this lit you up two years ago. But you can do both. When I look at your career, or in my space, someone like Dave Ramsey's career, which has spanned so many decades and continues to have the mission at the forefront—helping people—when I think about myself, I want to be 30 years from now still someone

people think about when it comes to helping them with their personal finances. But a lot of content creators have very short career spans, three to five years. What do you think I need to do differently to ensure that, 30 years from now, I am a Suze Orman or a Dave Ramsey, still helping people with their finances, while perhaps others who have shorter creator lifespans are not? The shorter, simpler answer is: Don't hustle. Those personal finance people who say, "Buy NFTs! Buy NFTs! You'll get rich tomorrow!" are going to be gone. The fact is, someone is

going to win the lottery—it's probably not going to be you. But if you're out there saying, "I won the lottery! I must be smart!" you'll get some traction. That's not what you're interested in—that's the short answer. That's broad in the sense it works for people who want to teach about health, want to teach about cosmetics, want to teach about anything. Just don't do that thing where you say, "I got lucky; therefore, I'm smart." That's not helpful. The bigger analysis is this: Dave showed up when the spectrum in radio was available to people like him. He

over-invested in employees to support that. From that piece of spectrum, he was then able to build the outreach programs he has in the other parts of his funnel. You don't have that ability with TikTok because TikTok owns it; he owned his show, and as long as it was on the station, he was fine. We can even go all the way back to Reverend Sheen, who was on television when Ed Sullivan was on. Having a slice of spumoni, in whatever form it is, is something that lasts for a very long time. What I taught people in

the book "Permission Marketing" is that you can build your own version of spectrum. It's your email list; it's something that you control, that no one can take away from you. If you can figure out how to use that alongside the more ephemeral YouTube or TikTok, you can start building something that's longer lasting. So, that's the end of that preface. I would say content-wise, we know that everything you need to know about personal finance can be written on five pages of paper. So that's not what this is about. This is about: What do I tell my

friends? What do I tell my spouse? How do I talk to myself when I feel like going off the path? What is that cycle like? In Warren Buffett's case, he's just an icon—he's even bigger in China than here—but Warren Buffett has basically said, "I'm living by example. Just do what I do," and that's a hard way to live a life that much in public, right? But there are other ways you can do it. Basically, what you're seeking to do is build a non-spiritual religion—one that says, "These are the precepts; these are the handshakes; these are

where we gather; this is the way we do things around here." Culture is "People like us do things like this," and what you have done on TikTok is establish for a whole generation of people that "People like Erica do things like this." You're not Erica, but you want to have a model like that. Will Erica make mistakes? Sure, she's a person. But this is the method, and this is what it means to be part of it. The step beyond it is: Where are the uniforms? Where are the phrases? Where are the gatherings? What does it

mean to stick with this? Who gets a prize for never having missed a week? Those are all buildable. I think when I look at someone like Dave Ramsey, it's apparent why he has been very successful. He has very hard and fast rules—the baby steps—that everyone needs to follow, no matter what. My style of personal finance is a little less concrete. I truly believe that personal finance is personal. If someone asks me a question like, "Should I pay off debt or should I invest first?" my answer is, "Well, it depends." It depends on telling me more

about your circumstances. But I find that, in marketing and in general, the people who are successful at building big brands have very hard and fast rules that you have to follow. So do you think that if I want to go towards the path of being relevant in 30 years and helping people in 30 years, I need to create more of these are my 10 steps to follow to achieve financial freedom? There's a little false evidence appearing real here. The singer Peter Gabriel, the entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, and I all have no hair, but there's no evidence

that being bald led any of us to succeed. Having hard and fast rules isn't why Dave Ramsey succeeded. "Succeeded, and other people didn't. There are plenty of people in personal finance who have hard and fast rules that you have never heard of. Hard and fast rules are insufficient. Dave Ramsey has succeeded because, for the audience he seeks to serve, he is great on the radio, and you can listen to his show for weeks and not get bored. That has nothing to do with hard and fast rules; that has to do with the medium—the distribution method.

Yes, there is a funnel, and his funnel is beautifully shaped. He is very clear about who it's for and who it's not. Those things are way more important than hard and fast rules. So we need to think about the people we're serving: What are they afraid of? What do they seek? What keeps them up at night? What are they yearning for, and what do they tell their friends? It's true the Atkins diet spread because the rules were really hard and fast, but the main reason it spread is that it made you lose weight quickly for

like three weeks. You had to eat like a weird person at restaurants, so you'd show up at a restaurant with your friend, and they’d say, 'You look great,' and you'd say, 'Thank you,' and then you’d order butter with bacon, and they’d say, 'What?' You'd talk about the Atkins diet, and you could explain it in four sentences and be done. So yes, the strict rules helped, but what mostly helped was the butter and the bacon and the conversation. Not that there were strict rules, but if there weren't strict rules, it would be hard; you wouldn't have

those conversations. That would be harder. If the answer is 'it depends,' it's harder, right? The fact is, if you want to be a jazz musician, I can't teach you how to play like Miles Davis when you're standing on one foot. It's complicated, right? It depends, but there's still jazz, and there's still jazz in a lot of places, even though it's complicated. So that doesn't kick you out of the game; it just means the opportunity is not quick. Erica, come up with hard and fast rules. It's about figuring out what it's like to be around Erica

and how to multiply that. I think from all of the evidence that I have seen—though of course, the three bald men doesn't equal success—but from all of the evidence that I've seen in the personal finance space, the people who truly make it and have a very long career do have essentially a playbook that can be followed. They're okay saying that it's not for everyone. Fine. Let's figure it out. Okay, let's figure it out. You have a sister? Yes? All right, you're writing a letter to your sister, and you're saying, 'Sis, I've been doing this for

years, and I've boiled it down over and over again. It turns out there are five things that, if people would just change their minds about these five things, it would make a big difference.' What's the first thing? Save more than you spend. Okay, what's the second thing? Invest part of your savings. Third thing? Don't get into bad debt. Fourth thing? Educate yourself. Fifth thing? Be smart about taxes. Okay, I'll add a sixth one: tell everybody else, because when you tell everybody else, it keeps you honest. Great! There are your rules. Perfect. Those are my six

steps, and they were vague enough that I don't think there's anybody they don't apply to. Yeah, right? It's save more than you spend—unless it's an emergency. You're not being that strict, but the fact is, the principles aren't that hard. What's hard is sticking with it when your friends are all flying to Aruba for a bachelor weekend. That's the hard part; that’s what you help with. Switching gears, how much of your time personally do you spend on the actual content creation and the thinking that goes behind it versus the marketing and the business operations and the

revenue-generating parts? Okay, so I don't usually talk about me as an example because it lets people off the hook. They think, 'Oh, well, he did that, so he doesn’t.' But I will tell you that if I am awake, I am thinking. That's my hobby. I spend no time on the business part of it. I have no employees at all, and every single time I've leaned into how I can hack this system and make it work better for some metrics, I have not been glad I did that because it doesn't fit the change I'm seeking to

make, nor does it make me sleep better or make me happy. Right, the smallest viable audience—like everyone's a hypocrite; I'm a hypocrite too—but I'm very clear about this: serve the smallest group that you can live with and ignore everybody else, because when you get jealous about the biggest group you could possibly serve, that's infinity, and you will never be done. Instead, you know I have this online community, I have these courses I've run, and I have these opportunities to talk to people. I don't do any consulting; I don't do any coaching because I could make

a living doing that, but I wouldn't find it generative for me. And blog posts? If you know there’s going to be a blog post tomorrow, you’re going to have more than one. Having a daily blog is really useful because I don’t have to say, 'Is this good enough to blog today?' I say, 'Today is Monday; there has to be a blog post.' So whatever the best one is, is the one that goes out. Okay, let me take a step..." Back, so throughout your career, you've had many employees to now just yourself. What decisions led you

to decide that being just yourself was the optimal life you wanted to create? Hardly optimal, but anyway, um, there are freelancers and there are entrepreneurs. This is lost on most people. A lot of freelancers call themselves entrepreneurs because it sounds sexier; it's French. But, in fact, they're very different. Freelancers, you and me, we get paid when we work. We have to show up in person. Entrepreneurs build something bigger than themselves, usually using someone else's money. So, Tim Cook has never written a line of programming in his life, but he runs Apple, right? When you are

an entrepreneur, your job is to hire people to do all the jobs. That's your job. If you are doing the work that people are paying for, you've made a mistake because you've hired the cheapest, best-available person to do the work instead of scaling. So, yeah, I've built companies, and when I have done it, I almost burned myself out the first time because I had 50 people reporting directly to me, and I was basically a freelancer on performance drugs. That was a bad idea. I've also been an entrepreneur, where I have created the conditions for other

people to do work that I couldn't do or I wasn't able to do. Great. So, if you're a freelancer, it's totally fine to hire people on Upwork to have an editor somewhere else where you're giving them tasks. But if you start thinking the best way for me to grow is to hire more people, you're trapped. The best way for a freelancer to grow is to get better clients because you can't work more hours, but better clients, they demand more, they pay more, they talk about you more. So, if a freelancer is listening to this, that's

what I would say to you: I'm a freelancer and proud of it. What I found in this day, when I can outsource most other things, is employees were involved in a promise that was harder and harder for me to make as I get older, which is that I'll take care of it and that we'll make this thing happen. As a freelancer, I can say I have this many hours today; where can I put them in a way that will fuel me and the people I serve? If I have work that needs to be done, I

got someone editing an audio in Pakistan right now. I will never meet him; he's not an employee; there's a task to be done. So, that's the distinction, I think, and that all comes down to getting better clients. With all of the different courses and programs and speaking events, who do you consider your clients? I gave a thousand speeches around the world for 30 years. The client is who is hiring me to come give a speech. There are the local Kiwanis Club—good for them—says, "Will you come for lunch? You can hawk new business when you're there.

We don't pay anything," and I'll get there, and there'll be a little podium and 40 people eating chips. They're not a good client for me given the work I seek to do. Right? Whereas there were, I don't know, 27,000 people in the auditorium that Zig Ziglar and I worked in Wisconsin. That was a good day because they were professionals; I was a professional; I had a chance to do my craft. How do you work your way up that speaker ladder? That's part of how you get better clients. I used to have a record label. One

of the groups on the label lived in a van. They were a very talented married couple, and they would drive to a new town. When they got to a new town, there was always a coffee shop or coffee house that would take unknown talent, pay you 15 bucks, and you could play. They would leave and go to a new town. I was like, "Guys, get out of the van; stay in one town. Go from the $15 a night to the $50 a night to the $200." That's how you work your way up—not racing around taking

the little ones. Right? So, I've had lots of different clients. That's interesting to me. Ultimately, people who pay me with their attention are my readers. I'm not seeking to get $15 from them or $100 from them; I'm seeking to make a difference for them because if I can make a difference for my audience, the money will take care of itself. Do you have to—I know you've talked about this before—but how do you, or do you have to, suppress the thoughts of "What if"? Like, what if I had a team of 20 people? Could I have

more impact and reach and money? Do you suppress those thoughts? Do those thoughts not exist for you? The "what ifs" around scaling? Oh, Erica, there's so many "what ifs." If you get started on the "what ifs," when are we going to stop? Right? What we're dealing with now is a world where each one of us has so many more options than we used to. If you want to be paralyzed, my friend Steve Pressfield calls it "resistance." All you need to do is look at how many things you could be doing today. Each one comes with

an opportunity cost because if I do that, I can't do this; if I do this, I can't do that; if I do this, I can't do that. And you're just in this endless cycle. My model is this: there's a dip in any project that's worth doing, and the dip happens when it gets really hard. When you've made 40 TikTok... Toks, and not one of them is caught on, and you feel like quitting. The time to quit is not then either; quit before you start—totally allowed—or quit after you've made it to the other side. But to

quit in the dip gets you in this endless cycle of being a wandering generality. So my analysis is yes, I could go do that, and am I willing to go through the dip and give up all the other things that would require to get to the other side of that? Right? Could I get elected to the local school board? Probably. Would I then want to get elected to this and get elected to this and become the governor? God forbid, no. But there's a dip there, and we can see what it is before we start. And

could I start using Twitter? Yeah, and it would be fun for a little while, but do I want to stick it out to get to the other side? So I guess what I would finish this with is, uh, Steve's book, *The War of Art*—strongly recommend—also Ben and Roz's book, *The Art of Possibility*, which has a similar title. Both books will change your life. Then I'll have another "Do you think?" question: Do you think that you would have been able to come to this conclusion you have now about the optimal lifestyle, work style that you have

without having tried everything? Because you have tried everything in terms of the big teams, the being the entrepreneur versus the freelancer. Well, part of my work is to tell people things I learned so they don't have to do it themselves, but the journey is priceless. To be 25 or 28 or 35 and fail and fail and learn from the failing—not to take it personally—but to say, "There's a whole bunch of keys on this keyring. There's a lock. This key did not open that lock. That doesn't mean I'm a bad person; it just means this key

did not open that lock." And that when I can find a truth from some of that that I can share with people, that's part of my work. The impact that you've had on the marketing space over these decades is, in my humble opinion, not in proportion to the money you've made from it. For the impact, the impact that you've given people, you should have billions of dollars. I don't believe you have billions of dollars in the bank. How do you think about that or reconcile that? Is that an okay position that you're in, or do

you feel like you weren't compensated accordingly for the value that you've brought to the marketing world? Or is it a great position to be in? What's the point of competing against other people to see who could make the most ridiculous amount of money? If you're going to do that, you have to focus on doing that, and I haven't focused on doing that. I am so lucky to live the life I live. It's an art project followed by an educational project, followed by an experiment, followed by "What do you think about this?" And I don't have

a board of directors, and I set up a very low-overhead life. There's no private jet; there are no butlers. What would that—wouldn't make me happier? I know people who have an enormous amount of money; they are not happy. That is not the point. It is a symptom; it is not the cause. And so if you're going to keep track of more money than you need, you better have a good reason to do so. And I haven't wrestled at all with like email marketing as a—whatever it is—$50 billion-a-year industry. I owe none of it. Fine, great!

That's terrific. It would be better than if it was a zero-billion-dollar industry and I was wrong. Great, I'm fantastic! And so that philosophy works even if you're not in this line of work. I think what we've done is we've increased the amount of resources everyone on this planet has, that anyone listening to this has more resources than the last king of France did. But we have an increased happiness. So instead of focusing on trading our happiness for stuff, it makes more sense to say, "What do I want to do in the first place for my

audience?" What would be their homework? What book would you want them to start with, or what blog post? I think the best thing you can do is find three other people you are willing to talk to about this, that if you check in with three friends once a week about what Erica is teaching you, if you check in with three friends once a week about what you read on my blog—I don't care; I'm not keeping track—but I am keeping track of the change you are making, and it's very hard to do it by yourself. Find

a few other people and do it together. We have a closing tradition. So the podcast is called *Erica Taught Me*, but today is all about *Seth Taught Me*. So what do you want people to walk away saying? "Seth taught me this," or "Seth taught me that." I'm enough if I just decide not to work for a system that doesn't have my best interests at heart and instead lean into the possibility I can create for other people. Thank you so much; that was beautifully said. Thanks, Erica! If you've enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to

leave a review; it really helps support what we're doing. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next Tuesday on a brand new episode of *Erica Taught Me*.