Talk Your Book: Marketing is Everything with Seth Godin

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0:30See how Wealthbox can transform your practice. Visit Wealthbox.com to get started. Again, it's wealthbox.com to learn more. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

1:09Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. My co-host Michael couldn't make it today, but I do have a very special guest. He's an author, blogger, entrepreneur, speaker, probably a few more things. Seth Godin, thanks so much for being here. Thanks, Ben. It's great to see you. I've been reading your stuff for years and years and years and listening to your talks. And as a fellow content producer, I'm not nearly as prolific as you, but I write a blog, I do a podcast, YouTube channel, all that stuff. I'm always impressed with the amount of content that you're able to produce. I know it's not easy writing religiously.

1:37Um, what 20 plus books at this point? Does that sound right? So far, so far, so good. Okay. The daily blog post, people ask me all the time, how do you constantly come up with content? I'm not going to ask you that. Um, but I do want to know, like, how did writing become this medium for you that you do on a regular basis? Um, it's just me. I have no assistance, no help. and my high school yearbook, my English teacher wrote, you are the bane of my existence and you will never amount to anything. And in college, I took exactly one English class. What I found is that talking clearly and being able to explain myself was a useful way to help bend the system, to help show up to make a difference.

2:23And writing, for me, is just writing down what I say. So what I say to people who are challenged by writing is learn to talk better and then write that down. And I was lucky enough to work with Isaac Asimov at the beginning of my career and the end of his career. He published 400 books. And what he taught me is every morning I sit at this typewriter and I have to type for five hours. It doesn't have to be good. I just have to type. And he said, if you do that, no matter how hard you try, some good stuff is going to slip through. Yeah, I like that. I looked at my WordPress draft folder the other day.

2:59I have 300 unpublished blogs on there that I started writing, and I just didn't want to put them out in the world. But I think it's kind of a muscle that you can improve upon. So I was going to ask you this. You've done a lot of TED Talks and presentations. I'm curious if writing makes you a better talker or vice versa. Is it both? Because I started blogging first, and then I got into the podcasting thing, and it was hard for me. I'm not a natural speaker. Some people, I think, just have that. I don't. And it took practice for me to become a better writer and it took practice for me to become a better talker as well.

3:30Do you think that those two go hand in hand? Public speaking is not the same as talking. And I find that my books, I don't like being a hypocrite. I don't think most people do. And so I think my books make me better. I write sometimes aspirationally and say, I'd like to become this archetype that I'm talking about. So I try to live up to that. Public speaking is a craft unto itself. Public speaking is way more about the pauses and the interactions you have in the invisible space between you and the audience than it is about the text. Because if it's just about the text, why don't you just send everybody an email and stay home?

4:12Right. I have never really loved giving speeches, and it's something that I've had to grow to love. And it's something that I think, again, you can get better at. But once you, I know, I get this feeling, I know why comedians love getting up on stage and getting the sense of the crowd. Because once you figure out that you have a good story that hooks people in, or maybe a good quip or joke, and you've used it a few times and you know it's going to work, that is the best feeling, isn't it? When people, you feel that connection with the audience, there's nothing like that. It's true. I haven't been on a plane for work in four years, and I miss that feeling because I do virtual talks all the time.

4:45But when you're doing a virtual talk, your whole affect changes because you're talking into the ether and nothing's coming back. Yes, I agree. That was a weird thing to get used to during the COVID period for me. So when I was tasked with writing my first book, I talked to a more established author to get some advice. And he said, listen, don't try to reinvent the wheel. You've already written the book. You've been writing your blog for years. Take the best of what you've written on your blog. Organize it. Make it more coherent. That's your book. Do you use your blog as a starting point and as a jumping off point for your books?

5:16Okay, so I don't think of myself as a content creator. I think of myself as a teacher. And I used to write books for a living, but I don't do that anymore. I write a book when I have no choice. So I'm not saying, oh, what material do I have? How can I turn it into a book? What I'm saying is this material demands to be a book. Even though a blog post will reach 10, 20 times as many people, a book, the new book, This is Strategy, exists so that people will have a conversation about strategy. Because if you hand someone a book, they have to respond to it in some way. Whereas when a blog post or a tweet or a TikTok lands, you can just go on to the next one.

5:59And I have done several collections of my blog posts. And what I have found is that they're good for my sense of longevity and knowing that there's going to be a thing on a bookshelf, but most people don't go out of their way to buy a collection of blog posts. I love the new book. One of the things I love about it is I really love short, digestible chapters, right? And this book feels like it's kind of a series of short blog posts. And what I love about it is, I'm an investor guy, so I'm constantly preaching the benefits of diversification. And I feel like your book is diversified in that there's wisdom and teaching, but there's also stories and anecdotes and history and examples and almost like many case studies on businesses.

6:43Where do you get all this from? Is it just experience? Is it reading? Are you constantly jotting these things down? How do you take all this? Because you weave these stories, and they're different stories as well. So how do you put it all together and get all these things from these different places? So if I see something in the world and I don't understand it, I can't just walk by. I need to understand how a refrigerator works and I need to understand why that stock just went up when there's no good reason for it, right? I come up with an explanation. I don't have the time or energy to make sure every one of my explanations is correct, but at least it's interesting.

7:20And my explanations become blog posts. That's where the blog comes from. I saw something that didn't make sense. I try to explain it. And the stories come from once I start down a path of trying to explain things to people, I look for things in the world. I don't know if that thing is going to be the story I'm looking for, but I know there's a story there. And sometimes I will write a whole section because I found a story, not vice versa. One of the things that you've taught me over the years is the fact that marketing is everything and how that is more important than ever these days. It's the work you do, getting a raise, getting a new job, getting a promotion, starting a new project, anything, I guess, finding a spouse, you're constantly marketing yourself, whatever you do.

8:06It took me far too long in my career to realize this. I am not the natural salesman, right? The story of the guy who could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves. That is not me. I have some people that I work with who are those, they just seem like they're born with it. And I'm not saying they don't work, but I am an introvert at heart. And someone once told me a while ago that blogging is sales and marketing for introverts. I think that's why I first started blogging in the first place, because I feel like I had something to say. I didn't know the right medium for it. So I started that more than a decade ago.

8:37So what advice do you have for people who are like the younger version of me, who are introverts with an aversion to sales? And that's such a big part of everything you do. It's going to be a long time before I get the story of the ketchup popsicle out of my head. That was beautiful. Thank you. I think we need to be really clear about what the words mean because they're getting in the way. Sales is not hustle. Sales is not pushing something onto someone that doesn't want to. That's what I always thought. That was my problem, is the used car. I don't want to be that. Right. Well, that's not sales.

9:08That's a different thing that some people call sales. And so the ketchup popsicle guy isn't our avatar for a good sales person. Good salesperson simply creates the conditions for somebody to get what they want because they allow them to feel comfortable going ahead to get what they want. And marketing is not spam and marketing is not a commotion. Marketing is a bigger, more universal version of sales. Marketing is how do we tell a true story that spreads? How do we create the conditions for people to find what they are looking for? So a great marketer and a great salesperson is sort of invisible.

9:52You don't notice that Patagonia is doing marketing. You just say, well, I love Patagonia stuff. Well, yeah, but the reason you love Patagonia is because Rose and other people did an enormously powerful job of marketing, right? When we say something sells itself, well, no, what really happens is a marketer had enough empathy to bring the right thing to the right people. So many of the people I see in the green room, TED speakers and stuff, are introverts. I, left to my own devices, do not walk up to people and talk to strangers all the time. that the way you show up on stage, Susan Cain, whose talk is about being an introvert, her TED Talk has been seen by more than almost any other.

10:37She showed up with energy for that group and then went back to being who she needed and wanted to be off the clock. So what it is to be a professional is not, oh, I'm a surgeon, I feel like cutting people open, I like that. It's, I can do my work and be of service and save lives and then I can get out of the operating room and go to the next thing. So if you're not eager to glad hand people and make a commotion, that's great. You might be a fantastic marketer. You just don't have to spend your time doing things like slapping people on the back. That's a myth. So the way that our firm has been built up, so we're in the wealth management space.

11:18You don't know anything about us, but we've built our whole firm on, I guess, I like the way you put it. We call it content. You call it teaching. And so we've put our thoughts out into the world because financial services is a trust-based business, right? There's no good that we're producing. We're not manufacturing something. We're giving a service to people that want or need it. And so we've done, our whole firm is based on, we have no sales or marketing team, right? That like a normal firm would have. We do, we write blog posts where we provide context and we answer people's questions. We do podcasts like this.

11:52We have people go on TV to talk about it. And we're not predicting the stock market is going to be here next week. We're trying to provide context for people, long-term thinking, and give people sane advice when there's often an insane amount of stuff that comes out of the financial services industry. And so we've built this firm on the back of it. And we have a dozen people probably who are constantly trying to put their thoughts out into the world. And so we get questions all the time from other financial advisors and wealth managers saying, I want to produce content like you guys do. I want to, what do I do?

12:25And the funny thing is, is a lot of them are trying to build an audience. How do I build an audience? Right. And my, my first advice is usually don't build an audience, answer questions for people. So I'm just curious what advice you have for people in the services industry that are trying to build trust. What's the best way to do that when you have all these different avenues to explore now and ways to get information out to people. Okay. So now we need to talk about systems. Animal spirits is a pretty fantastic name for a podcast, but spontaneous optimism would have been an even better one, which is from the same quote from Keynes.

13:02And spontaneous optimism helps us see that human beings at their best are not Mr. Spock. Human beings at their best are looking for threads of trust and connection and interest and delight. and grabbing them. And over time, we weave those threads together into our lives, but we're not sitting here looking at the last basis point. So when someone wants to show up with information, whatever, we need to begin with who's it for and what's it for. What is the change you seek to make? And if you do it selfishly, which is, my boss says I got to get my name out there. How am I going to hustle to get an audience?

13:45you're going to give yourself away immediately, right? And manipulating people doesn't help you get anywhere because in this world, you need to be at it for more than a few weeks. Otherwise, you're running FTX. And so what we're seeking to do instead is say, there are people, they're not my audience, there are just people. How can I arrive for a group of people within a system, a media system, a financial ecosystem where they would miss me if I were gone. And so a specific example, it turns out, I didn't know this, that the people who install swimming pools sometimes are a little shady. Every industry has people like that, but the swimming pool industry apparently had more than normal.

14:33And this guy started a podcast, a blog, started a blog 20 years ago. and all he did was reveal every single secret of the bad guys in his industry. Every single scam, every come on, every bait and switch. Each blog post just did it bit by bit. And his shadier peers were not happy with this. But anyone who was searching for insight in the pre-Chat GPT world about buying a swimming pool, sooner or later ended up at his blog. And the question then is, if you lived in wherever, Pennsylvania, and you needed a swimming pool, who are you going to hire to put it in? Well, it's pretty clear. The person who just told you how all the shady people do their job.

15:20So there are niches upon niches upon niches where you can show up and not say, how do I selfishly get attention? But show up and say, where are the people who need a tour guide? And what can I show them that I have expertise about? not to manipulate them, but to service, to be of help. I love it. There's this old saying that no one goes to church looking for an 11th commandment every week, right? It's the evergreen stuff that matters, right? So I'm curious where you stand on going back to old material over and over again and driving home important points and maybe telling it in a different way, because that's what I feel like with investing.

15:55There's not, no one's making up new ways of investing correctly these days. It's driving home the stuff that really matters, that everyone kind of already knows, just telling it in a different way. Okay, so now we're getting back to this spontaneous optimism, animal spirits thing. There's a difference between knowing it and doing it. And, you know, the TLDR culture of too long, didn't read, mindless clicking on the internet isn't going away. It's getting worse. and people who have a body of work that is consistent and useful have to resist that temptation of, oh, here's the new flavor. So I would say, for example, my blog is 9 ,000 posts so far in a row, and I've probably only blogged about 50 different things.

16:45And there are lots and lots of ways to look at these 50 different things. The same way everyone eats every day, but there's a lot of food in the world. And different flavors of food are interesting, but they're still basically the same foods. So human beings are looking for a new way in to basically distract them from the things that are distracting them so they can get back to what they should be doing. And consistency isn't boring, not if you're good at it. You've been writing books for a while. First book was in the early 90s, I want to say, Is that wrong? Well, I was a book packager. So my first book was in 1986, Business Rules of Thumb.

17:27I think there was a Warren Buffett quote in it. And I did 120 books, sometimes with my name, sometimes with other people's names. I did the Stanley Kaplan test prep books, the Business Almanac, books with Jay Levinson. And then I became a quote author in 1999 with permission marketing. So that was 25 years ago. So I'm curious, you said you haven't been on a plane in a while, so maybe you like this better. But I'm curious what you think of the podcasting tour like this when you're trying to market a new book. Is it better than the previous iteration of trying to get out there and do a book tour?

18:00Do you like it better or is it just different? When you find an extraordinary host like Ben and you're able to talk to him like a person, what could be better than that? I could do that all day long. Sometimes you talk to people who think they have to have a podcast but are afraid of having a podcast or don't want to put in the work to do a podcast. And that's hard because then you're doing two people's job at the same time. That's happening less and less because even though anyone can have a podcast, everyone doesn't have a podcast because the people who were just hacking at it mostly have stopped.

18:36I don't miss being on airplanes one bit. I do miss the weird serendipity that comes from being in the right place at the right time. We could have a four hour podcast about the technique of marketing and promoting a book because that has changed a lot. And most people have no clue how to do it. And they never did have a clue how to do it. And so it leads to a lot of frustration. We don't need to get totally into this, but I'm one of these people. So I've, I'm not, again, not nearly as prolific as you have written four books in my day about investing in behavioral psychology. And I have a great idea for a new book.

19:12It's my favorite idea of any book that I've, and you mentioned, like sometimes you just have to write it. And I did the outline. I did all the chapters together. I'm probably 60 % of the way there. And I've never dealt with procrastination in my life. It's never been a problem for me being a procrastinator. For whatever reason, I'm procrastinating on finishing this book and I can't get myself to get over the hump. And honestly, I think one of the reasons is I love the process of writing. I don't like the process of doing the self-promotion for a book. That's the part that scares me. I'm just, again, back to the introvert thing, that's not who I am.

19:48And I know you have to put yourself out there to do this. Do you ever get this, not like writer's block, but do you ever get that thing where you get kind of hung up on something like this? Well, first, congratulations on having the best idea you've had. Second, congratulations on caring enough about it that you're feeling resistance, which is what my friend Steve Pressfield calls it. So I wrote a book about this called The Practice. Steve's book about it is called War of Art. For anybody who's confronting a challenge, I recommend both of those books. Here's the thing. The act of publishing a book is difficult and becoming less and less attractive.

20:26The book industry after 500 years is dying and it's dying fast. More books are being published than ever before by a factor of 40. The typical lay down for a book from a New York publisher has gone from 20 ,000 books printed and distributed the first week average to 175. Think about that, right? And so what I say to people who have a book that they love to write is write the book and just give it away. Write the book, make it a PDF, and post it. If it's great, it'll spread. If it spreads, it will pay dividends. If it's not great, it won't spread, and no one will know. But you don't have to go through the public display of confidence and conversation to persuade people who don't buy books to buy a book, because you already have an audience.

21:19You already have people who trust you and give you the benefit of the doubt. It's enough. and the idea that you have to please your publisher, that's sort of old fashioned. Yes. That is one of my hangups is I've never had a good experience of any of these books with that process with a publisher, right? There's constantly people turning over and the people who published my books in the past have left. I noticed you use this new publisher, what is it? Authors' Equity? So is that a new way of doing things? To be honest, That was a new one to me. Yeah, I'm their first official book. And it's run by some extraordinary people, one of whom used to be the president of Penguin Books.

21:59And they don't pay advances. They have a radically different model. But mostly, they're my team. I don't feel like they're my customer. I'm doing nothing to make sure they're happy. I'm doing things to make sure my readers are happy. Like I made this collectible chocolate bar. Or what other publisher says, yeah, sure, go ahead and make a collectible chocolate bar. So for me, the craft of this is how do you create an artifact that 10 years from now, someone's going to bump into and say, I'm really glad you wrote that. And they're going to talk about something in the book you don't even remember writing.

22:36And that's the magic of this medium is it sticks around. So we have to raise the stakes to write something that's worth sticking around. All right, let's talk strategy. So you talk about how strategy is not like a goal. It's not a list of tasks. It's like this urgent versus important kind of thing. It's like the choices we make. So as an investing guy, I view your definition of strategy a lot like an investment plan or investing philosophy. Because people always say, like, what should I invest my money in? And the whole point is, you can't invest your money without a plan. It's like a portfolio is not the same thing as a plan.

23:09Your funds and your securities and your stocks and bonds that you hold, that's not a plan. A plan is the, what am I going to do in the decisions that I make? Is that fair to describe your definition of strategy? Yes. And great financial planners are strategic and mediocre financial planners are tactical. Yes, exactly right. I love it. And I love how you talk about the difference between getting the big things right versus the details. In one of your other books, you talk about someone had a chance to ask Stephen King a question about writing and they said, what kind of pencil do you use? It's kind of like you're starting a business and it's like, what kind of business cards should I have?

23:46I guess the problem is I'm constantly preaching the virtues of long-term investing and staying the course and being a long-term, thinking and acting for the long-term. And one of the things that people always said in the finance industry is just ignore the noise, right? The short run stuff, just ignore it. And I think it's never been harder to do that because the noise is ever, it's a fire hose. We've all, so how do you, how do you do that in today's day and age where it's literally impossible to avoid the noise because it's sitting in your pocket every day. Okay. So the strategy of being a long-term investor says, I think that there is a system at work.

24:22It's been at work for over a hundred years. And that system is productivity begets productivity. That system is that democracy begets democracy, that markets beget markets. and that if we strap in and lower our transactional costs and focus on a very long-term trend, we will come out ahead. That is a strategy. There's another strategy that says, you know, D.E. Shaw's house is just down the street from me and it's this extraordinarily large, ridiculous thing. And his strategy is there are all these discontinuities in the market, but they only last a second or half a second. And my entire model is going to be to take advantage.

25:02So those are totally different strategies. Either one might be right, but you announce what it is. And then the question is, what data are we going to incorporate to fuel our emotions and our attention? What they teach you in science class is what significant digits are. A doctor doesn't care if your temperature is 98.6 or 98.7. It doesn't matter if it's 98.6 or 98.7. And more resolution of the 10th of a degree is not helpful. And that's why thermometers, even though they're digital, do not have more digits in them. Not helpful. So if you're going to be a professional about your personal finance, part of that work is don't read that stuff.