Benefit of the doubt (E)

0:00Doubt has been around for a really long time, and for a good reason. A lion, seeing a herd of antelope, has to decide which antelope to chase down. He doesn't get very many chances to exert that much energy to find dinner tonight. Some of the antelope start jumping up and down. They're pronking, displaying for the lion that they've got so much energy to spare, they're happy to waste it in a silly dance for him. Maybe they're bluffing. Maybe they're not. Hey, it's Arav, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:47Doubt goes back to the primordial soup. If you need to eat, you need to find something to eat. And if you make a mistake, you might not get fed. But doubt gets multiplied when we start adding humans to the mix. When we lived in small groups, nomadic tribes, we didn't see very many strangers. As a result, trust was inevitable because you were surrounded by people for the long haul. It became pretty clear to human beings early on in our consciousness that if you double-cross someone today, they're more likely to doubt you tomorrow. And so we end up with this bias toward good behavior to the people that we're in intimate contact with.

1:38This explains the biblical prohibition against usury, against charging interest to someone in the tribe. If someone is in your circle, your sister, your friend, your neighbor, of course you don't charge them interest because you know you're going to get paid back. I loaned you those four seeds. After your tree grows, I'll get those four seeds back. We're in it together for the long haul. On the other hand, you were welcome to charge interest or to rip people off who weren't from your circle. Buyer beware. The rules were different for outsiders. As modernity showed up, it brought with it a few things.

2:24The first thing was we figured out how to industrialize debt. The idea is that someone could produce things of value by borrowing something and then later paying back. But that brings back doubt. Will they pay me back? How do I enforce systems so that they will pay me back? How do I make a profit from people paying me back? And as David Graeber has pointed out, it's that debt that led to the creation of money. Money makes it way easier to enforce and to trade debt. That's why we did it, not because someone has a deer that they want to trade for a chicken and they need some eggs and all that stuff about barter.

3:06We did it because debt and doubt go right next to each other. But once we had money, we had to prove to people that money could be trusted because all it was was a rock. All it was was a cowrie shell or a coin. The coins started to have things printed on them so that people would come to believe that they were real. The coins started to have edges knurled all the way around them because those edges were hard to reproduce. Therefore, you couldn't shave off some of the precious metal. Modernity involved coming up with a way to trust currency, because currency was a way of trading debt, and debt was a way of figuring out how to create more value.

4:01The other thing that the modern age brought with it was the traveling salesperson. A stranger came to town. How to trust the stranger? Well, largely, we didn't. I've been canvassing in New Hampshire, and one thing I noticed in some of the towns is that houses don't have doorbells. Why is that? Well, if you're a friend, come on in. And if you're not, go away. The idea that the outsider is welcome is hard to swallow, because where is the trust? How do I know I won't get ripped off? How do I know I won't take a patent medicine that makes me sick? When L.L. Bean launched his clothing company, he picked a particularly difficult group to sell to at first.

4:58He picked Hunters in Maine. He began by buying the list of all the hunters in Maine who had a license from the state. And he sent them a small catalog with his boots listed for sale. But right there in the very first catalog, it said, and they are guaranteed forever, if they ever fail to work, I will give you all of your money back. And there are stories, some of which might even be true, of college students hard up for money, taking five-year-old chinos, ripped, torn, stained, and mailing them back to get a refund. LL Bean, at some level, really likes this. because if you can rip off L.L. Bean or Zappos or some other store with an aggressive guarantee, you're likely to tell your friends.

5:48And when you tell your friends, trust grows. The world we live in now is filled with trust overcoming doubt because we know we have to trust someone. And this is a brief podcast about the benefit of that doubt. Who gets it and why do they get it? You're walking down the street and you bump into Bill Murray and George Clooney. They're out for a night on the town. And Bill turns to you and says, Hey, can I borrow 20 bucks? I'll pay you back. Just give me your email address. Would you loan him the money? probably because he's a celebrity. Because in our culture, we've decided that at some level, we can trust celebrities.

6:41Another example, Sarah Jones, the Tony Award-winning playwright, is walking from her hotel to a studio in Los Angeles to film a TV pilot. She's walking with a friend. Sarah Jones, if you're not familiar with her work, is a 30-something black woman. She's walking down the street with her friend, and she gets pulled over by two LAPD cops who are surprised to see anyone walking in this part of Los Angeles, and on high alert, because the two people they see walking are young, attractive black women. So they proceed to arrest them for prostitution. As they come toward Sarah, she picks up her phone, and in a perfect British accent...

7:36I should tell you that when I was asked to be here, I thought to myself, well, it's Ted, and these Tedsters are, you know, as innocent as that name sounds. These are the philanthropists and artists and scientists who sort of shape our world. And what could I possibly have to say that could be distinguished enough to justify my participation in something like that? And so I thought perhaps a really civilized sounding British accent might help things a bit. And then I thought, no, no, you know, I really I should just get up there and be myself and just talk the way I really talk. Because after all, this is the great unveiling.

8:15And so I thought I'd come up here and unveil my real voice to you. Although many of you already know that I do speak the Queen's English because I am from Queens, New York. makes an imaginary phone call in which it sounds like she's talking to her boss and that she is the nanny. The cops hear the British accent, look at her, look at her confidence, give her the benefit of the doubt, which she definitely deserved, and let the two of them go. The benefit of the doubt. Consider for a second the case of the appropriately named Keith Mann, M-A-N-N. Keith, one of three co-founders of a startup called Witch Sea that set out to sell outsider art, joined with Kate Dwyer and Penelope Gazin to find funding and partners to grow the business.

9:10What Penelope and Kate found is that when they sent emails to people who they wanted to engage with, there wasn't much of a response. But when Keith was on the thread, or when the emails came from Keith, the response was totally different. Well, as you've probably guessed, there's no such person as Keith Mann. The two of them made him up. And the people who were giving them the cold shoulder weren't necessarily misogynists. They weren't necessarily people who didn't think women deserve to run a business, or even that women are all incompetent. But the people who gave them a cold shoulder were sexist in the following way.

9:55They weren't giving them the benefit of the doubt. They were saying to themselves, not consciously perhaps, I've got enough time to interact with two or ten or twenty people today, people that might be productive interactions for my selfish needs. And when I see the name Penelope show up in my email box, I'm just not giving that person the benefit of the doubt. You can see the problem here, not just for Kate and Penelope, but for our culture. The problem is that great ideas, hard work, good work, important connection and forward motion, is clearly not dependent on things like race, accents, gender, nationality.

10:44It's just not. There's no evidence to show that it is. But if we are always gravitating toward celebrities, men, white men, people with British accents, people who went to fancy colleges, not necessarily good colleges, just ones with a fancy reputation, then we are leaving behind all of the people who could contribute something. And we are corroding our culture by creating an environment where those people aren't on the road to fulfilling their magic, their dreams, their destiny of what they would like to create. But once you see it, you can start to become aware of it. when you start talking to yourself and saying, oh, well, this person is blank, despite the fact that they aren't the way I expect them to be, you've just caught yourself giving the benefit of the doubt for the wrong reason.

11:46The lion has to decide who to track down. Who do we decide to track down? Who do we decide to trust instead of doubt? Wells Fargo and Equifax have both been in the news lately for ripping off people of their privacy and their money. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Why did people trust them? If you move to a new town and you need to put your money, your hard-earned money, into a bank, how do you pick where to put it? What makes you trust the bank? What exactly are the marble pillars in the front of that building for? Why are bank branches so big? Why do bank branches look different than off-track bedding parlors or chiropractic offices?

12:38What they're trying to do is earn the benefit of the doubt because it's too expensive for any consumer to audit all the records of the bank. And so we look for a shortcut because we're afraid, because we don't want to do the wrong thing. These shortcuts, giving someone a pass because they have a British accent, failing to give someone the benefit of the doubt because they're black, are these shortcuts helping us get where we want as a culture? When you hear people talk about white privilege or male white privilege, the idea is very straightforward. Some people, like me, were born on the 95-yard line of the 100-yard football field.

13:25And scoring a touchdown is nothing compared to somebody who's had to overcome so much inequity their whole life. But what really makes it resonate is if you realize that even if one of those other people who don't look or talk like I do went to a fancy college, had a different accent, there's still the issue of the benefit of the doubt. And that has been the wind at my back and the back of so many other people for a very long time. Of course, there are skilled people, trustworthy people, hardworking people who don't look or talk like I do or maybe like you do. But we don't give them the benefit of the doubt.

14:14because given that there are lots of choices to make, the dominant cultural narrative is save time and effort, just pick somebody who reminds you of someone you've picked before. This idea of the benefit of the doubt is costing us. It's costing us time and money for sure, but it's also corroding who we are because we are making really bad choices about who to give this benefit to. That we default to someone who made a lot of money. Well, maybe they made a lot of money in a really horrible way. We default to people who have certain titles or certain backgrounds. Con men are really good at finding the signals that get us to give them the benefit of the doubt.

15:09But the thing that makes them con men is that they are not trustworthy. and that's where it comes down to. Who will we choose to engage with? And as we learned from the story of Billy Bean in Moneyball, even if you don't care about the morality of this, there's a huge economic incentive, a huge cultural incentive to find people who deserve the benefit of the doubt and haven't gotten it because they are underutilized. they are more available to work with you. They are more likely to show up and give you precisely what you need to move forward. Have you been surprised if you've seen, I don't know, someone in a wheelchair give a powerful speech?

15:57Or perhaps if you're hiring for a programmer and someone who's a woman, who's young, who's old, who doesn't match the stereotype, shows that they have real skills. Does that surprise you? Well, the surprise is a symptom that we've been trained to give the benefit of the doubt to the wrong people. That the tropes and the clues and the hints that we look for are false evidence appearing real. that fear that we have as we walk down a dark alley and then realize that the person behind us is simply trying to give you the$20 bill that you dropped a block ago, that is miswiring on your part. That is an error that corrodes how we interact with one another.

16:51So I have been so fortunate for my entire life because the dominant narrative of who gets the benefit of the doubt has been on my side. But what I have found, what we are all finding, is that competence doesn't care what the person we are engaging with looks like, talks like, or even acts like. Competence belongs to the people who have chosen to put the effort into it. That the soft skills, which I call real skills, of honesty, integrity, effort, humor, creativity, these are choices. And what we have to figure out how to do as we rewire our culture for a new age is how to undo all of those signals that were backwards so that we start giving the benefit of the doubt to the people who are actually doing the work to earn it.

17:53Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As you know, I love getting your questions. Send them in. Visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button. While you're there, check out the show notes.

18:32Hey, Seth. This is Chris out in Houston. My question is, as a marketer, when do you feel is the best time to pitch a product or service? As a consumer, I don't think there's ever the right time. And a couple of examples come to mind as far as the philosophy that Gary Vee has with his jab, jab, jab, right hook, as well as occasionally you're throwing in the Alt-MBA program. and very other services that you offer. But another example comes to mind is that I've been subscribing to an author and a public speaker for a while now to his weekly newsletter. And as he gets closer to a speaking event, he starts to send additional emails to me about this event, which I think starts to lose its generosity and tends to cause me to want to unsubscribe to his messaging going forward.

19:34And so I'm just curious as far as your take in regards to when it's the right time to be able to pitch that product or service. Thanks for all you do, Seth. There's a lot of depth and nuance to this question. So give me a couple minutes to unpack it. I'm going to start with the yellow pages. For the rational consumer, the yellow pages were the greatest marketing and advertising medium of all time. The only time you looked in the yellow pages was when you had a problem and you knew that there was a solution. Look up what you need, pizza, tire repair, whatever it is, and there are all of the providers.

20:15How to tell them apart? Well, R.R. Donnelly and AT &T figured out a method. The bigger the ad, the more money the company is spending. Implied in that is that companies with more money to spend have a better reputation. They're signaling by spending the money. So just buy from the biggest ad. There's only one color of printing. There's not a lot of creativity. You didn't have to engage in any sort of cultural dialogue to use the yellow pages. Well, the yellow pages made billions and billions of dollars, but I can't remember the last time I touched the yellow pages. Because marketing is more than advertising, and advertising is more than a directory that answers your short-term needs.

21:07Let's begin with two riffs about time. The first one is this. The other day I had to take my car in for service, went to a newly outfitted repair shop, and on the way into the repair shop, they made you drive your car over this weird tire computer. What does it do? What it does is it takes a picture of the depth of your tread and then creates a very official-looking analysis of whether or not you need new tires and why. Now, here's the thing. You don't need new tires until you have a flat. But if we shift time, it certainly makes sense to get new tires before you get a flat. How to do that? Well, the marketers, the people working with the dealership, understand that having a mechanic, perhaps a shady mechanic, say to you, well, one day soon, you're going to need new tires, there might not be enough trust there for you to believe them, because we've been trained to be skeptical of people who want to sell us something.

22:20But if it's a computer report, well, that's totally different. It's in black and white. It feels official. I feel stupid not getting new tires knowing that two months from now, I might get a flat tire on a rainy, dark night. So yeah, I am shifting my needs over time. And it's easy to see that the dealership, while making a profit, certainly had my needs in mind. If I'm the person selling the computer to the dealership, I can easily articulate that the dealership is going to make its money back on this device in just a few weeks because the device was an effective way to shift the way I think about time.

23:05The second part about time is this. We know that human beings respond to frequency. That the first time you heard about an iPhone, you didn't buy one. That the first time you heard that you could go on vacation to Italy or Ireland or Jamaica, you didn't go. That almost nothing that's on offer that could make our life better is something we bought the first time we heard about it. Which means, for example, that retailers have to spend millions and millions of dollars in rent so that the store will be seen by us on our commute day after day after day until finally, four months later, we decide to go to that business that mills, rice, fresh to order, and is now our favorite, even though we drove past it for three months.

23:58Whose fault is that? The shopkeeper was there waiting, but they had to pay rent for all those months to get the frequency to earn the attention and the trust that caused you to take action. And so now we get to this idea of attention. Attention is scarce. Attention is expensive. Attention isn't like the yellow pages where you decided to go look something up. Attention often comes to you. So if someone has a solution to a problem, a tire you're going to need in three months that's cheaper to get today, how do they get your attention? How do they earn your trust? How do they afford the frequency of showing up again and again and again in a way that will cause you to take action?

24:49you're glad you took. I differentiate this so completely from the selfish marketer who has something that if they didn't get paid to sell it, would never sell, who has something that they would never buy, who is selfishly trying to make a living by hustling people to buy a thing, who is stealing attention, who is spamming people. Spam is very simple. It's something I don't want to get from someone I don't want to get it from. It is in the eye of the recipient. I am differentiating that. I am differentiating away from spam and hustle. And instead, as we teach in the marketing seminar, which we are starting again next week, we explain to people real marketing is a service.

25:37Real marketing is something that if we didn't do it, people would say, well, why didn't you offer me that? Why didn't you come up with a better solution if you could have? I am disappointed that you didn't show up. That's real marketing. So the problem with jab, jab, jab, right hook is that people who didn't look into the nuance of what Gary was trying to describe think that right hook is the selfish poke in the face that the marketer makes to get something you don't want to give the marketer. I think that's the wrong way to think about it. I think the right way to think about it is how do we deliver anticipated personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them?

26:21How do we acknowledge that people need frequency, even though they shouldn't? As rational actors, they should say yes the first time, but we don't. I don't know anyone who does. How do we signal that we are serious about what we are doing, that we are persistently generous without showing up with frequency? So I thought long and hard about how often to mention the Alt-MBA. Who should I be telling about the new session of the marketing seminar. We've run it seven times. The eighth time is coming up now. Why couldn't everyone have just taken it the second time? I understand not taking it the first time because it was experimental, but the second time after it worked, if everyone had just taken it the second time, we could go back to inventing the next thing.

27:16But session after session, more people take it because frequency works, because people are glad to be able to get better at something. And they thank us for being persistent in our generosity of offering it again. So as long as the market is like that, as long as there is a chasm to be crossed, as long as the product adoption life cycle persists, marketers are going to show up to offer people something they might have heard of before. Now, if you are offering attention to someone who doesn't treat your attention with respect, of course you're going to unsubscribe. I totally get that. I unsubscribe all the time.

28:03If you're getting spam from people, unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk you don't want to get that's selfish, hit the block button, move to the promo folder, delete, delete, delete. For sure that when publicists send me spammy notes asking if they could be a guest on my podcast, which they have never listened to, then yeah, with all due respect, basically no due respect, I delete those emails. This is selfish on their part. They couldn't bother to take the time to think about what was good for me and my listeners. They just know what they want. That's not what we're talking about here. What I'm talking about here is if we are going to be the kind of marketer that makes things better by making better things, we have to be willing to shift time to help the short-term thinker think longer term, to offer people something that they're glad they engaged with later.

29:04So the burden is on the marketer, to actually make something worth talking about, to actually give people something they're glad they engaged with. Because the most effective marketing over and over again, whether you are running for president, for dog catcher, or selling a widget, is when people tell other people. Because when people tell other people, peer to peer, that is when the word truly spreads, when trust is truly built. That is the frequency that we really seek. So as always, I am so grateful that people bring enough trust and passion to listening to this podcast and the other work I do.

29:48I don't take it for granted, not for a second. But I think it's important as consumers who then become marketers to realize that we can market with empathy, that we can bring the right thing to the right people at the right time. it's not just an opportunity, it's an obligation. Because the only way we're going to make things better is by helping people see the long term and offering them a way to shift time so that they take action that matters now and pays off later. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.