The end of the spectrum

0:01Seth Godin: What happens when the underlying foundation changes even if you're not ready? Hey, it's Seth and this is Akimbo.

0:20Seth Godin: Hi, how are you? I hope you're doing well. I know I haven't been here in a while. Media changes, our lives change, and after 250 episodes, we took a long hiatus. This is just a short interregnum. I've got a new book coming out next week. More about that soon. But today, I wanted to share with you a live Q &A I recently did with a group called Greater Public. Greater Public helps local U.S. public radio and TV stations do what they do. And like many industries, something has happened there, something they didn't ask for. In this case, spectrum, the slot on the dial. It's not worth what it used to be anymore.

1:05Seth Godin: And I think it's relevant to all of us because thanks to technology and culture changes, a piece of our foundation, whatever we're dependent on, is changing and changing fast. Here's the rant plus a Q &A. I hope it resonates. Thanks for listening.

1:52Seth Godin: before that, because of Monty Python, I can act out any skit you want word for word.

2:01Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

2:04Seth Godin: And continues to this day, Faith Saley comes over for dinner. I count Krista Tippett as one of my dearest, most inspiring friends. I'm not sure what I would do without you. If you didn't exist, I would probably try to invent you. so please know that i appreciate you and thank you for showing up the way you do and what you do and so when joyce reached out and the amazing gail and said would i come rant i said that's an instant yes so here's the rant the first question is got two parts what do you make and what do you own the station the platform because the people on this call do the really important and thankless work of making the money come in, but what does the media exist for?

2:55Seth Godin: And what exactly does the station own? And the reason that we're in this moment of time is because it's changing. And that change, it's hard to put your finger on, and I want to help you do that. So here's what I think you used to own, what you owned for 80 or 90 years. What you owned is something very difficult to visualize and incredibly valuable, which is spectrum. Carve up the electromagnetic spectrum, the frequencies of light, and you got one. Some of you have two. And they're not making any more of it, except they started making more of it. If you own a piece of spectrum, all your decisions change.

3:38Seth Godin: The first one is this. There's only one thing on at a time. And that means curation is really important. It means the people who run the station are the deciders. They decide that at five o 'clock drive time, you're going to put this on, not that on. That power comes with great responsibility. And that's what they signed up for. One thing at a time. There's only one stream going out. Number two is you measure, share. Of all the people who were sitting down live at this moment, in front of their televisions or listening on the radio, how many of them did you get? And the third thing is, as a result of those two, you have to seek the middle.

4:21If you lose people because you've offended a slice,

4:25Seth Godin: or if you lose people because you've been too specific, or if you lose people because of whatever reason and they've gone somewhere else, your share goes down. And so those three factors create this tension within the institution because you're here to make a change happen. That's what you make to change the mindset, the affect, the belief system, the knowledge of the people who are engaging with you. And you do it by owning a piece of spectrum. And you all know what happened. It's only been 25 years, but we blew up spectrum. Suddenly, someone who owns no broadcast licenses can reach a million, two million, five million people in one day.

5:11Seth Godin: Without that license, without that scarcity, so many things in the ground level of what you do and how you think about what you do change. But the people who work at the station and the people who are hardcore fans of the station don't necessarily want that change to happen. So there are three different rules. Rule number one, you have to earn permission. You have to earn the privilege, not the right, but the privilege to go back to people and bring them back. because Netflix can do that and HBO can do that and Spotify can do that. And alas, because you're underfunded and understaffed, you've often burned your permission and burned it again by spamming your listeners into submission during pledge week by showing up for a one directional interaction that pushes people to trust you less and to listen to you less.

6:14Seth Godin: permission, anticipated personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them, is at the heart of building anything for the future. Rule number two, you know what the long tale is. If someone wants to listen to Jamaican polka music, they can listen to Jamaican polka music. That if you look at how much video is uploaded every day to YouTube, there is more video uploaded every hour than can be consumed by the entire world over the course of a year. It's asymmetrical. There's too much. And so if your mindset is curation, if your mindset is we are the choosers, you have one slot. You don't need to have one slot.

6:59Seth Godin: You could have a hundred slots, a thousand slots, 5 ,000 slots. All of a sudden, the mindset of spectrum is undermining what you're doing as a station. And the third one is instead of measuring share and looking for more, because there are many, many, many, many channels. And what you really care about is mattering. You don't want the largest possible audience. You want the smallest viable audience, which audience would be enough. Who would miss you if you were gone? And so as I finish this rant, and then Joyce and I have a conversation. Here's the confession I need to make to you. I haven't listened to public radio in my car in seven years.

7:44Seth Godin: I don't need to. I miss it a little, but I don't miss it enough. I don't miss it enough to let somebody else decide what I'm going to listen to next, for someone else to decide to make me uptight or nervous or anxious. I don't miss it enough to listen to Pledge Week. And I have options. And that makes me sad because as a culture, coming together around thoughtful, generative, productive content is truly important. So here we are at this crossroads and you still have some momentum. You still have a core base who trusts you. You still have some people who are left with your spectrum. but how are you going to build a platform that pays for itself that scales that's joyous that gives you a chance to rewire the culture again the way you did in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s when you changed my life over and over and over again you're going to have to figure out where that money's coming from it's not going to come from the government as we know it these days it's going to come from the people who would miss you if you were gone and they're not going to do it because you're crying wolf.

9:00Seth Godin: They're going to do it because it gives them connection, status, belonging, affiliation, because it makes them feel better to be part of what you're building. But we have to figure out how to do that in a post-spectrum world. Thanks for being here. Thanks for leading. Over to you, Joyce.

9:24you are on mute but that was close don't be sad don't be sad kim davis we can figure this out and i'm going to uh be sharing some information about that pledge model in a little bit here sir seth um all right i've got six topics and you've started down the road on some of them and related questions lined up for you. I want to talk about audience. I want to talk about engagement and belonging, being a media company versus a public service. I want to talk about trust and attention, trying new things, and strategy. All right.

10:04Seth Godin: Okay, we've got six hours. Let's rock and roll. Let's go. Okay. Audience. You just talked about smallest viable audience. Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which birthed us, provided federal funding to increase the service of broadcasting in the public interest throughout the country with increased service defined as improving technology and production values specifically to increase audience size. Okay, we get it. Public media was built in an era of broadcast trying to reach everyone with a single signal. How? You've said we have to. How does public media as a community institution shift its mindset from maximum reach to maximum engagement or depth without losing that mission?

11:02Seth Godin: okay so we have to begin as we always do with gilligan's island the reason the boat in gilligan's island is called the minnow is it was named after the head of the fcc who led to the birth of public media he said that tv was a vast wasteland tv is not a vast wasteland unless you look in the swampy parts now because there are so many parts You can learn detailed theories of genetic evolution all day long without watching anything else. It's all there. There's a billion channels. So your mission is no longer, it cannot be, how do we use high quality HDTV signals to raise the quality of what people are watching over the air?

11:48Seth Godin: That hasn't been true for a decade or more. What matters is how do you earn enrollment so that people will choose to consume what you're offering as opposed to watching a Kardashian troll somebody. And that choice, that agency is fully American, as is the race to the bottom. And so the opportunity here is not simply to say you can pick anyone and wear anyone. the opportunity is to say people like us do things like this and because you can have as many channels as you want you can figure out who the people like us are and what the things like this are and why not have a channel that 24 hours a day teaches swahili it's not that expensive anymore you will reach enough people to make it worth doing and those people because your cost of delivery is zero, will pay you enough to make you able to do it again.

12:58So what is the cost of failing to specify who a particular project or service is actually for? Right.

13:07Seth Godin: So this is the opportunity cost problem. Because the opportunity cost in 1973 was that if you put on the wrong thing, you lost viewers maybe forever. Now the opportunity cost isn't that because there's so many channels that you're not worried about share. Now the opportunity cost is you have a limited number of people and a limited number of resources. Nobody is keeping you from publishing as many things as you want. The question is, what can you do well? So in my case, there is exactly one person in my company. You are looking at him. And I write a blog every day for 10 ,000 days in a row. Part of the way I'm able to do that is I don't tweet.

13:47Seth Godin: I don't use Facebook. I don't use LinkedIn. If I was racing around doing everything I could do, I wouldn't do anything very well. So the choices, which the people on this call must be involved in, is how do we find the nexus between people who need to hear from us, people who can afford to back what we're doing, and messages that are unique enough that it can become part of our mission. These are choices, and it's not going to be handed to you on a multiple choice thing. It's going to be you deciding our station isn't limited by geography anymore. Our station is limited by the charter we are inventing for ourselves.

14:27Seth Godin: Who's it for and what's it for? You said something interesting. You said people who can afford to support us. Don't we also want to reach people who can't afford to support us? Yes. I'm not saying that public media is for rich people, nor am I saying public media has to be paid for by every viewer. What I am saying is you could make a station that is nothing but tropical fish swimming back and forth so that people have an aquarium on their screen all day and some people would love that go ahead but my cats would watch it but but you would become insolvent because no one would fund that so i'm not saying you should be funding first but i'm saying someone in the meeting and it's probably the people on this call need to speak up and say well that might be a need but i don't know how to pay for it

15:22okay all right in the interest of getting through the topics let's move to engagement and belonging so you may have heard about this when federal funding was rescinded last year public media saw an outpouring support from new donors and long-time donors who increased their giving recent research found that engagement is more often relational and values-based than transactional and the research also found that most donors see themselves as supporters rather than members so you said people use media products to tell stories about who they are people like us do things like this. When someone tunes into local public radio or watches public television, what internal story are they telling themselves about their own identity?

16:16Seth Godin: Right. So I was at some meetings at WNYC 15 years ago where I was describing to them the doom loop that they were in. And one of the things I pointed out is you can call people members, but they don't think they're members. Because membership has its privileges. When you are a member, you go to the room and you see the other members. When you're a member, people ask you questions. When you're a member, if you stop being a member, other members miss you. That's not what's on offer here, but it could be. And if you actually created members, you could build something that was spectacular, but it would require a whole different skillset and a different relationship you have with the people you are currently calling members who don't treat like members.

17:03Seth Godin: But it's also fine to call people supporters. And if someone's a supporter, the question is why? And it's only two things, the story they tell themselves and the story they tell other people. and the story they tell themselves is you are giving them some piece of self-status some bit of meaning some solace when they think about who their parents were or where they want to go and they tell their friends tote bag because it gives them status it gives them status to walk through the farmer's market with not just a tote bag but a tote bag a different color that nobody else could get because they're at a different level.

17:45Seth Godin: And so when the fundraising people ratchet it up and start to create limited edition prizes, like you can go have dinner with Ruth Reichel, now all of a sudden you're selling a transaction. That's a third thing. That's not a story I tell myself, nor is it a story I tell the others. It's I bought something. And the problem with charity auctions is it forces people to think about, is this a good bargain? Not what kind person am I. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I mentioned research. The main finding of recent research in public media about unmet needs said that people feel disconnected and are looking for local community, not simply content about their local community, but an institution that brings them together.

18:32If you were the CEO of a local public media organization, how would you act on that finding?

18:40Seth Godin: Well, I think it's a two-step process. First, let's acknowledge that spectrum is not your barrier anymore, and you can have as many things on as you want. One of the things I pitched 15 years ago is every single zip code should have its own public media newsletter that's just about that zip code, or sub-zip code, or sub-sub-zip code. And it's easy to imagine now public access kinds of broadcast that are on the block by block or neighborhood by neighborhood basis. So I begin by saying, I am the voice of Hastings on Hudson, New York. Everything that's happening in Hastings on Hudson is coming through me.

19:19Then when I invite everybody to a community

19:23Seth Godin: town hall, a whole bunch of people are going to come. I can't start with the town hall, But the town hall can be a symptom of the fact that people who are interested in what's changing are all connected. And so now when I start being the coordinator of the town halls, summarizing the thinking of the community, amplifying various voices, and again, a real micro level, the New York Times can't compete with that. And neither can a behemoth TV network. You are saying, if we're really going to be local, let's really be local. And if you're local enough, the grassroots, which shouldn't be called the bottom, it's the foundation, will thrive.

20:09Okay, I like that. Let's hire him. All right. Media company versus public service. You've written a lot about the difference between commercial transactions and public infrastructure. And you said that true public goods like libraries, parks, public infrastructure require different math than commercial enterprises. Is public media primarily a public good or a consumer product? And can a local public media organization combine both approaches? I love this.

20:50Seth Godin: There's so much to talk about here. So you started an arc that I began to notice 20 or 25 years ago, which is that the percentage of funding that you were getting from taxpayer dollars was small. and when federal funding was cut part of me was pleased that now you didn't have to even mention that part that you could really focus on the who's it for and the what's it for that there were so many things getting in the way because two or three or five percent of the money was coming from taxpayer dollars that it was hampering you that when you can be very clear about who are we for and why are we for that, it gets you in sync.

21:37Seth Godin: In my perfect world, taxes would pay for a whole bunch of things, including this, that there's no, I don't understand any philosophical argument about why that's a bad thing. And that's a really good thing. I think public school is a really good thing. But it's not up to me. So given you are where you are and people on this call are professionals and deserve to get paid, there is going to be a transaction involved with somebody. And the question is, should it be involved with a pharmaceutical company that's sort of running an advertisement at the end of every show for as long as they possibly can for their money?

22:16Seth Godin: Or should it be with the people who are getting something out of it? And we have so much income inequality in this country. It would be a shame if all we did was make stuff that rich people could pay for and ignore people who didn't win that lottery. So I think what's incumbent is building into the system toll booths, opportunities, prorated ways of support that enable you to have a mission of serving everybody you can serve, regardless of their income, but making sure that the cash flow is coming in so you can actually do the service you want to do. The last part I'll put about this because I haven't thought through the whole sentence yet is your nonprofits, but your FCC license becomes less and less relevant when you're not broadcasting over the airwaves.

23:16Seth Godin: And that means that when we think about the fuzzy line between sponsorship, advertising, and neither, you're going to have to make some hard decisions because there is nothing wrong with the right kind of ads in front of the right kind of people. If it matches the mission that you're after, but there's a lot wrong with trying to maximize ad revenue because that's how we get in shitification and Google as we know it today. Sorry, Google. Yes. So I hear you, and that is already happening to some extent in that we, because of the type of FCC license we have, we have to abide by certain guidelines for our broadcast.

24:05However, in the other products that we produce and distribute, we have more flexibility. Right. And we're even seeing things like sponsored content that's tasteful in line with our brands, et cetera. So, yeah, point well taken. Okay. In a market driven by advertising and subscriptions, engagement is measured in clicks and dwell time. If public media shouldn't measure success by commercial engagement, what metrics do you think a mission-driven media organization should actually care about?

24:45Seth Godin: I love this question. So for those of you who are just joining us, I invented email marketing, the good kind, a long, long time ago. And so I'm intimately familiar with counting clicks. And if you start to race to the bottom two problems, you might win or you might not win. And either way, you have to live at the bottom. You don't want to do that. You get what you measure. And what you measure doesn't have to be easy to measure. It has to be useful to measure. And the problem with the craven, short-term thinking, selfish, narcissistic marketers that are dominating media is that they like things that are easy to measure.

25:26Seth Godin: And then they game them, and that's the game they play. And if public media deserves to exist at all, it has to say, we refuse all of it. You can't do it a little. You have to refuse all of it. You have to do the hard work of measuring things that actually matter. Whose lives did we change? Who is talking about this? What productive outcomes occurred because we did this? Which movements were amplified? All this is really hard to measure. Fine. Because the people who want you to measure the other stuff, there's plenty of other places for them to go.

26:03Any tips on how to measure those things, Seth?

26:08Seth Godin: But, well, so here I am with one of the most popular blogs in the world, and I have no idea how many people read it, and I don't look at my stats. And I write books, and I don't want to be on the bestseller list, and I do nothing to get on the bestseller list, and I'm not keeping track of how many books I sell. So what am I measuring? If I get a note from someone who says, I learned something from someone who learned something who learned it from you, I measure that. if i see back when my focus was more business stuff a company like mailchimp gets sold for more than 10 billion dollars based on my work oh that works right and i don't necessarily get the prizes but that's fine because what i'm looking for is did this thing i put into the world land and fertile ground and grow and so it's not that hard to find people who say sesame Street changed my life.

27:03Seth Godin: It's not that hard to find people who say, I could not be in media if I hadn't watched every episode of Monty Python. So going forward, who's it for and what's it for? Are we saying there are people in this community of folks who didn't win whatever end-term capitalism lottery was going on in the moment, who learned how to read or believe they could get somewhere better or coordinated some change in the community or figured out how to get more attention from the government because we did X. That's great. I think that's what you should do. Well, you mentioned at the top of this webinar, how public media has impacted your life and changed your life over and over.

27:52Can we come back to you and ask you for those stories?

27:55Seth Godin: okay so the first one was w and what was it called in buffalo w and what no n-e-d w-n-e-d because it's just like the one in long island but anyway they had an auction where local businesses would put stuff up for auction there were like people answering the phones up and so when i was 14 years old i had access to the computer at the university of buffalo and i wrote a program that did biorhythm charts that would show your, it was like a fad at the time. So I called up the station and they said, sure, they would auction off 10 of them. And they went for like$60 a piece. It was my first business venture.

28:36Seth Godin: And I was like watching the auction that my thing came up. So there was like that, again, that direct connection of somebody who has no business being on media, being on media, being leveraged by their spectrum. So there was that there was no question it was the intelligent tv shows i was able to watch as a teenager as opposed to the crap that was on the other three stations and then that's how i learned anything i know about classical music which is not enough um and then uh when krista tippett came along hearing her detailed conversations totally transformed my writing. And then once, uh, the time I was on, uh, speaking of faith at the time, it changed his name to I'm being, I think after that, I didn't need to ever be on a podcast again, cause that was the best one I would ever do.

29:29Seth Godin: But the last little story I'll tell you is, um, I live in this town that's just adorable and lovely. And I used to go grocery shopping on Sunday morning. I'm not sure why. And I'm in the supermarket while I'm on Chris at Tippett show because it's pre-recorded folks. And as I'm walking down the aisles, buying yogurt, people are looking at me really funny and I couldn't figure out why they were looking at me funny is because they had heard me in the car on the way to the supermarket. That's a great story. So you said earlier, you no longer listen to us in the car on the radio. do you still consume public radio content and if so where i don't think so not at all nope it doesn't show up in my random access world and i haven't been motivated to seek it out i mean the exception or uh you know every once in a while faith will tell me something about wait wait don't tell me or things and then you know car talk of course but that's long gone that um there's too many media to choose from that unless someone hands it to me it's not going to be seen if i have a direct relationship with a podcaster and the next podcast comes up there it is i'm going to listen to it but the question is what would get me to subscribe to your show on my podcast but you had the chance this was part of my thing with laura walker 15 years ago you could have been the podcast player for the nation but you were where we don't do so bad when you look at some of the npr that's not what i'm saying you could have been the entire tuner that the app would have had every podcast whether you make it or not and the problem was each station had an incentive to get credit for their broadcast of whatever the show was so no if all the stations had come together 15 years ago and said there this is the only player you need it would have worked but that ship has sailed so now there's a player you don't control it you don't control who gets to decide what gets subscribed to and so in this moment when you're in where you're behind the question is how do you um get back into the subscribe list.

31:57Seth Godin: And that's hard to do because if it's fallen out and I don't know it's there, you've got a problem. And the way you solve that problem every time is what do people tell their friends? And so this is the secret. You don't have to like them of Mr. Beast. So Mr. Beast reaches more people every week than all public media put together. and he doesn't have a giant team and they don't spend a lot of money on outreach it happened because someone who sees it sends it to someone else and that's the challenge that the april fools broadcast of i don't know what year was 2004 about the guy who made train noises with his mouth i have probably sent that to 100 people because it raised my status to prank these people with the guy who made train noises with his mouth.

32:49Seth Godin: And that doesn't mean you should be in the gimmick business. It doesn't mean you should be in the Mr. Beast business. It means you want to create things that people want to share. And that's like catching lightning in a bottle, but it's doable. So the clarity with which you saw what we should do with podcasting that you just described,

33:14what opportunity are you looking at now that public media should unite and be all over

33:24Seth Godin: um okay so first i'm trying very hard not to be distracted by the chat keep chatting keep chatting but phil 300 people compared to how many people there's already 300 people on this whole call i mean the public media has way more than 300 people but i'm not going to nitpick here Media is changing now more than it has ever changed before, including what I just said, because of AI. AI is the biggest change in our world since electricity. It is going to rewire everything we think of as normal. It's going to destroy the perfect before it enables the impossible. And as a result, consumption of media is going to be transformed as well.

34:07Seth Godin: And yet everybody who's over 30 years old and many people who are under 30 have all sorts of fear and trepidation about this. They want guardrails. They want a guide. They want community. Well, who's standing by ready to build that for us? I don't see any other media companies taking the lead in this way because they're too busy defending their ad-driven model. You don't have an ad-driven model. You have a community-driven model. So what happens when bespoke long tail instances of AI that inform and educate start coming from trusted sources like you? Now it's so far from spectrum, we don't even know what to call it.

34:54Seth Godin: But I promise in five years, it's going to be obvious. Okay, duly noted. We all have the recording. like you didn't ask for a cut of the mail chimp deal you can't come back and ask us for that's fine it succeeds all right um just a couple more questions and then i see where we've got lots going on in the q a box all right in permission marketing the book i've read them all um you talk about how um attention is earned not taken and you define good marketing as an act of generosity right yep what's the most generous thing public media could do for its audience right now okay so so far many of our conversations have been uh executive director board of directors kind of stuff so i want to first just come back to the fundraising part and then we can go broader if you want because it's so tempting to always just talk about the strategy most people's experience with fundraising at the radio level is drive week pledge week and the honest question to be asked is would your listeners miss pledge week if it went away and the answer is so obvious you guys even say it if you give enough money we'll end pledge week early, right?

36:21Seth Godin: Here we are wasting our permission, bothering you, but we'll stop bothering you as soon as you do what we ask. So it's very clear that is not attention that is earned or that would be missed if it were gone. What would be missed if it were gone is the media itself. And so you're equating the two. So the challenge going forward is to make it community connection based because people have an enormous amount of money and time to spend for that. And what happens when the event they want to go to, whether it's digital or in-person, costs money? Well, it's worth it. So the transaction becomes very clear.

37:01Seth Godin: And so the opportunity at the tactical level is to imagine that your listeners and your viewers have a choice, that they can change the channel. because guess what? They can. And so if you act that way, it turns out earning actual permission and trust is even more profitable than the other way. From a strategic point of view, again, I didn't decide to get rid of Spectrum. And getting rid of Spectrum is not something that anybody on this call asked for, but it happened. So, and this is what the new book's about. That's a situation. You can't change it. Spectrum's gone. Now, what are you going to do about it?

37:47Seth Godin: What are you connected with, entangled with? What baggage is your station carrying around that is keeping you from doing the work to be done? You have to name the baggage, drop the baggage, and then serve the people you're here to serve, ignoring the sunk costs, the critics, the things that feel risky, but are actually safe. Ignore all those feelings because you're going to have to live with them sooner or later. And the last part of my rant is let's compare Kodak and Netflix. Kodak invented digital photography. They had almost all the important patents. They knew exactly what was happening. And Kodak almost apparently willfully just went bankrupt because it was too hard to say to their sunk costs, to say to the 17 steps of producing film that led to 17 buildings in Rochester, New York, we're going to do this new thing.

38:46Seth Godin: Netflix, after destroying Blockbuster with DVDs, the executive said, you know who could kill us? someone who invented streaming. So we're going to start streaming. And they started a group to build out the streaming. And they made one key decision. No one, not one person from the DVD group, including the head of all DVDs, was allowed to come to any of the meetings. Because if they had come, everything would have been a compromise. How do we make this a little less good so that we can preserve the DVD thing because it's paying all the bills. And the only reason Netflix is in business is because the DVD people didn't come to the meetings.

39:34Heartbreaking, but true. All right. We're switching over now to your questions, peeps. So I'm just going to go in order of arrival here, Seth. discussion within public radio has been that the loss of funding, federal funding, is not a crisis but a catalyst. But this person finds donors don't necessarily see it that way. How do we continue to give a compelling case for support that is sustainable and not simply paying for a service?

40:08Seth Godin: Okay, so you may recall the cover of National Lampoon Magazine in 1972, the best magazine cover of all time. It's a picture of a beautiful dog. And it says, buy this magazine and we'll shoot this dog. And it's such a great bit, right? And when federal funding went away, you said to people who are upset by that, go teach them a lesson because you feel powerless. Sending us a donation will make you feel powerful. It will raise your status in your own eyes. That's brilliant, but you can't do it twice. You can't do it five times for sure. And so going forward, that's just a bandaid going forward. You've got to figure out what are the circles of people where their status goes up when they see that they are in a room with other people who are giving you a lot of money.

41:01Seth Godin: I know two nonprofits, both of which have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that do it by organizing dinners of eight people at a time. And they go around the room and ask how much you're committing this year. And by putting the right people in the room for the right reason on the right day, you can make half a million dollars in one night. That's not easy. The last part is easy, going around the table, but getting the right people in the room for the right reason is really hard. All of the people who put in$50 ,000 each, they thought it was a bargain because that's the cheapest way they could buy that kind of status, the cheapest way that they could buy that kind of belonging in that kind of room.

41:42Seth Godin: And you can do the same thing in a room with$20 donations because what you actually sell is not what's on the radio. They get that for free, whether they donate or not. What you sell is the feeling you get when you Send in the money. Okay, I'm going to come back to you and ask you if you have six friends that you can invite to dinner along with a public media fundraiser, TBD. All right. Is it possible to expand to emerging demographics while defining the smallest viable audience? You have to. That's the key. Because if it's a small, it's viable audience, if it's left-handed polka singers who have a bagpipe, that's, I mean, you got to pick ones that aren't currently being served.

42:31Seth Godin: If you find those audiences, they say thank you. They don't resist. They don't hide. They're standing right there, right? Where is the radio station just for people who are waiting for the new edition of Grand Theft Auto? They deserve their own radio station. Go start one. You'd have no problem finding volunteer content creators. You'd have no problem finding 50 ,000 people who would happily subscribe to that podcast instantly. And I've come up with 50 podcast ideas, and I haven't executed any of them because I'm lazy and it's just me. But - Hand them over. Podcast ideas are super simple, right?

43:13Seth Godin: Go find the kind of person who has a loyal following, but there's never going to be a biography of that person. And go make a 15-part podcast of their biography, right? The fans of that person are going to obsess about every word, and we're never going to run out of people like that, right? Charles Sumner. There's only been two books written about Charles Sumner of importance since 1960. Charles Sumner is a superhero from Boston. Where's the Charles Sumner podcast? It would do great. All right. You owe me that list. Write that down, Gail. I'm coming back to you. All right. Next, how can we best utilize the board and board members to support these ideas and concepts?

44:00Okay.

44:01Seth Godin: So why is someone on your board? right? What, what do they get at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? I'm told it costs five to$10 million to be on the board. What do you get for$10 million? Friend of mine is the curator of a well-known museum. And she goes on for board trips a year to fancy museums that the board members pay for. And also have to donate. What do you get when you're on the board? You get status and you get affiliation. So when you go to a board and say, this is the direction we want to move, they're saying to themselves, what will this do to my status or my affiliation? So that's why when there's a scandal at an organization, a small scandal at an organization that has high profile board members, they hire a law firm and they get rid of the person as fast as they can.

44:52Seth Godin: because it doesn't, they're not a judge and jury. Their only job is to worry about their status in the community and their affiliation with the other people like them. That's what they do. So I don't know any of these people personally, but I'm guessing the board of the American Heart Association, pretty conservative. Because the kind of person that gets status from being on the board of the American Heart Association isn't there because they want to make profound statements about seed oils, pro or con. they're there because it is a mark that you've made it in a certain way so the story we need to tell the board has nothing to do with media theory it has everything to do with people like us do things like this and if you're people like us here are the other people like us let's look at what they're doing we're behind people are laughing at us behind our back this is what's possible.

45:43Seth Godin: And if your executives have a lousy board, they need to get a new board or they need to move on. It's not always that easy to your university. Well, anyway, we won't go into the, read the knot. There are some things that are just situations, Seth. I'm sure you can appreciate that. Okay. Exactly. Do you foresee a near complete desertion of terrestrial FM radio? So I'm still a little puzzled when I get in an Uber, because to drive an Uber, you have to have a smartphone. And the driver's listening to the radio. And I have asked these drivers, why are you doing this? You have a radio on your phone for free with a million stations.

46:30Seth Godin: And the answer is mostly, I want to do what everybody else is doing. It's I need to stay in sync because I know that there's only 20 stations. So if we're all listening to the station, then my conversations are in sync. But that's an eroding belief because all the cool kids have already left. All the opinion leaders have already left. All the loud people have already left. And we've seen this many times before when folks who lead the conversation leave, a whole group of people are still shooting on film. And then one day they're not. and I think that's about to happen.

47:17Okay. What should we be doing differently to grow community around the type of people that our listeners and viewers believe they are? You've touched on different angles of this.

47:29Seth Godin: So organizationally, if I walked into your headquarters and I said, show me the people who do content, there's a head of that and the people who work for them. Show me the people who do fundraising. How did that? Show me the people who do the broadcast tech. And the org chart is very clear. All right, show me the people who are measured on building community. Well, they help a little and we have to organize within. Where are those people? Who's going to lose their job if you don't build community more today than you did yesterday? Show me your org chart and I'll tell you what you care about. I used to say, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you care about.

48:15Maybe both. Right? All right. How is the public media label serving us or not? Is a local nonprofit news website public media? Is a commercial radio station or YouTube channel that's largely publicly free public media?

48:36Seth Godin: these are brilliant questions by the way and i'm aware that i'm being very smart people in public media very smart and i'm aware that i'm being glib and diminishing just how hard your job is i'm doing that intentionally to help you think about this at a different level but please understand i'm well aware that what you're doing is thankless and hard and it's a grind and i I appreciate it. So with that said, I don't think most people think hard about the corporate structure of the entities that bring them this stuff in their day. That, you know, at the farmer's market, two thirds of the people in my very progressive town walk up to the fish guy and say, is the salmon local?

49:27Seth Godin: I live in New York. right? So even if at the farmer's market, people don't know where the fish comes from, people don't know where their news comes from, people don't know where their radio comes from. So you are very aware of what makes something a certain kind of public media versus a different small P public media versus pretend public media. The public just knows what they see. And so figuring out what your genre is, what does it rhyme with? When there are hundreds of you, it's always going to be different. And so I don't think you have a chance to claim a spot that no one else is allowed to claim.

50:07Seth Godin: And I don't think you have a chance to say, we always do things in our industry this way. Used to I, when I turned on NPR, it sounded like NPR, but now half the podcasts sound like NPR and NPR has nothing to do with them. They copy dust. Yeah. Well, I think cause you invented it. and and and so i think you got to give that part up and instead say among us chickens when we talk about what we're proud of what is it the same way hollywood movies look like hollywood movies most of the time no one's in charge of that but that's what gets you an academy award that's what gets you status with your co-workers that's what gets you as a director a famous star to be in your movie next time.

50:52Seth Godin: And the challenge you have is that the all things considered model is now fairly ubiquitous. So you need a new one. And it's going to come from someone who's going to lean outside the boat and do something for the first time. And then lots of you are going to copy it. From your lips to God's ears. That's the same. Okay. We have time for a few more. Our digital audience far outweighs our on-air audience, but they're slow to turn into supporters. Any tips on how to flip that switch? Because digital consumption is free. Digital consumers aren't the customer, they are the product. That if you are a digital consumer on Facebook or YouTube or any of those other places, they are manipulating you to turn you into someone they can sell to their advertiser.

51:48Seth Godin: So when a non-manipulator shows up and says, please pay us, they aren't familiar enough with what you do to cross their genre expectation because all they know is when they're clicking around, it's supposed to be free. Who figured out how to fix this problem? Kickstarter and Patreon. They figured out how to solve the problem because they changed the entire interaction flow. They didn't just say, here's a store, but you're going to pay for it a little differently. The whole way you interacted was different and the creator role was different. So when you show up with a website that's trying to give me news or education, and it's right next to five other websites that also say they're doing that, but are clearly and forever free, and you look just like them, it's really hard for you to persuade me to pay you on the other hand if it feels community driven if the interface is different if it's special because it's not for everyone it's for someone we've already started on something that's clearly dating it's not like you're just transacting in the store we're having a different kind of relationship yeah okay great all right we're going to get personal for one second we're multimedia organizations now our communities trust us for local news do you sir seth consume local news and if so how and from whom uh the five small towns where i live have come together over the last bunch of years and they have a weekly newspaper.

53:29Seth Godin: I read every single word of it every week. I'm at the top level subscriber. I probably pay$300 a year for it happily. And we're still not even touching the important news of local. There's so much opportunity there. The problem is you can't make the ads work. Great, because you don't want to be in the ad business. And that opportunity to go truly local, not just how the local softball team do, but that building that they wanted to put up behind me with 80 units in it and a pickleball court. We needed someone to be talking about pickleball courts. It turns out in my town, there's a rule that you can't have a pickleball court because the frequencies of the ball, blah, blah, blah.

54:19Seth Godin: But no one knew this, except someone who acted like a journalist who found the right stuff. Multiply that. by a million communities. There's plenty of local to do if you really want to do local. Pickleball, the root of all evil. All right. Okay. We're getting close to time here. Here's a couple more. This is so fun. Thank you for letting me rant, Chase. It's, oh, it's, it's, it's a blast. All right. Is AI our opportunity to return to our identity as a trusted source of information? And I assume that means the misuse of AI. No, it's not. AI is a magic trick that happens to work much of the time, but it doesn't have four layers of editorial hierarchy where human beings are risking their job to say something that might or might not be true.

55:15Seth Godin: but we are entering the third generation of a post-truth world and i think that people more and more are asking themselves does this work for me not would this get past the ombudsman at the boston globe and i'm not happy about that but that's clearly what's going on and so the question is when AI models spread, because they will, it's not just going to be two or three giant companies. It's going to be thousands of different models. What's the interaction profile like? Not just between me and some bot, but the community circle. So I run an online community called purple.space. And there's a couple thousand of us.

56:01Seth Godin: And inside purple.space, we have built bots that once an hour chime in on the conversation and say, wait, Joyce, you should talk to Gail because Gail was talking about something similar about this two hours ago. And that bot constantly connecting people that you could imagine working in a local space, that's just transformative because it knows everybody. It knows everything that's been written. And it's not making commentary about seed oil. It's simply saying we are at the center of this web of people. And again, I didn't make spectrum go away, but it's gone. And if you keep defending it, your job's going to get worse every day from now on.

56:48Okay. I refuse to end this webinar on that note. Okay. Let's do one more question. here we go often I think our station gets lost trying to get everyone under the tent that we lose those that were here and helped to build the tent with their loyal viewership how do we find a happy medium between and shitification and stagnation okay

57:16Seth Godin: so the short answer is build lots of tents and then you don't have a problem build lots of tents You don't have to compromise. A compromised tent, the mass market doesn't exist. Quick stat, last episode of MASH, 70 million viewers. Last episode of Secession, 3 million viewers. That's a 20 to 1 decrease. Build more tents.

57:47We can do that, can't we, people? We're good at tent making. All right. That's got to be the end. Sorry, guys. Some great questions, great interaction. Thank you so much. Seth, you know, not only do I want the list of podcasts you're too lazy to make, but I'd also love to have you back in a year, a couple of years and just ask you some more questions and hear some more of your thoughts.

58:14Seth Godin: as long as you bring such an amazing crew with you I'd be delighted thank you everybody for the ruckus you make it really matters, thank you thank you Seth and everybody enjoy The Knot I know I will be thank you everybody have a great rest of your day appreciate your being here, thank you Seth Sir Seth cheers awesome