Special Episode - Seth Godin Marketing Insider Reveals The Truth About Marketing That Businesses Don’t Want You to Know

26:32The PowerPoint decks, the clothing, the timeframes, the language, all of those things are built into the system. And people who play that game often intuitively think they're really smart. No, they're just in a system that they match. And other people who have totally great business ideas are able to grow them without talking to those people at all. There's nothing wrong with what they did. They just did it a different way. But if you pick a system, you can't then try to change the whole system because it doesn't want to change. It's very good at sticking around. That's why it's here. And culture is invented by systems to help them stick around.

27:15That's how we got all the cultures of our life, is that the systems that have stuck around have reinforced these beliefs. So if there's a real change you seek to make, like the climate, you can announce that you want to just tear down the whole system, that capitalism is the cause of this problem, we must live in a post-capitalistic world. good luck with that because that system is too big for you to change but you can use the system by helping the system get what it wants so in malcolm gladwell's new book he talks about 50 of the people who get into harvard get in because of sports this is an astonishingly large number yeah and if you are from the right part of the world and you get really good at say women's rugby, the chances of you getting in are excellent because there's a person at Harvard who has a problem and their problem is they need to find better women's rugby players.

28:15So you see the system, you dance with the system, then you use the system against itself to get into Harvard because that was your goal, right? And if you play rugby when you get there or not, I don't care, right? So the point is we can learn to see these systems and not say, oh, I need to be judged by them. We merely need to say, when I feed this algorithm, when I feed this filter, when I give this system what it says it wants, I get this other thing, but then I can go use the momentum I got to start making change happen. And going back to the venture example, so let's say you want to play within the system of the venture, you just understand that, okay, you're going to have a board now, you're going to have people on your cap table.

28:59And if you don't learn how to play the game of that system, then you are going to lose your shirt and you'll be kicked out of that system. Correct. Yeah. Correct. And then when we see people who end up with multi-billion dollar companies who have certain kinds of control and certain, that's just because they played the game better. Yeah. I think Mark Zuckerberg did a great job of that. Yeah. Yeah. And so can we speak to maybe your, this is the 29th book or the 30th book? It's hard. You know, I was a book packager before this, before I started. I started one of the first internet companies, but before that I did 120 books.

29:35So who knows how many books I've done. I just say, this is my 22nd bestseller in a row because it sounds like a round number and it seems to be true. Nice. So what is the strategy behind the long-term strategy with books? Because this is something you've stuck with and it's been tried and true. This is a system you've worked. It is a system I have tried to change and also worked. So I got Amazon into the business of publishing books. I've self-published things. I've challenged my friends in publishing on a regular basis, but then I go back to big publishing houses because I can see the system.

30:08And the generic advice for someone who's making a book, number one, your job is not to get on the New York Times bestseller list. We know why that is important as a system signifier. And I think it will help explain things here. So in the 1980s, Barnes & Noble was dominating the book business. And they decided that any New York Times bestselling book would be 40 % off, which is basically was their cost. And then they would put them in a big stack. So if you got on the list, next week you would sell even more. So that became an easy status measure that book publishers decided would focus everyone's attention.

30:51That was 40 years ago, right? Now it's easily gamed. It means absolutely nothing. It doesn't get you any special treatment anywhere. It's just an ego thing. So I fired the New York Times years ago. I don't do things to get on the New York Times bestseller list because it doesn't matter, right? What does matter are two things. One, write a book that after people read it, they want to tell the others. And two, sell the first 10 ,000 copies just to people you know or people who trust you. After that, as Sean Coyne has said, it's the book's job to sell the rest. So James Clear sold 15 million books, but he didn't.

31:30James Clear sold 10 ,000 books, and then his book sold 15 million books. And so that's the opportunity. And in my case, my blog reaches way more people than a book does. So why bother writing a book? I only do it because I feel like I don't have a choice, that the idea demands that I tell people through my actions, this is the really important one. This one's worth taking your time reading and discussing. And if I can get away with a blog post, I always do, because then I'm over it and And I can go back to whatever else I was doing. But this one wouldn't let me go. And I love the craft of it. And the people are terrific.

32:14Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I talked to a couple of my friends that have done books. And they have businesses too. But they're just like, man, I never want to do a book again. It's like eating glass. But you've done it a handful of times, right? So I guess it's a labor of love for you. It is. It is not an economic transaction in any way. if you're going to be a consultant which i'm not or a speaker which i am what it does is it it's a status signifier it says i didn't do this by uh finding a shortcut i did this by having something to say and so that was the real benefit of my first few books but after that it became a craft just like chopping a quarter wood that's a little like eating glass too but some people like to do it all right um you're talking about systems again your philosophies are i mean look you've founded i remember using squidoo in the past um i i think i think you were coined as and you can correct me if i'm wrong here but you helped invent email marketing i did in fact invent email marketing and i'm happy to say so not spam yeah just the good kind yeah how did you invent email marketing i didn't even know that okay so here's the deal it's um 1989 and uh i had recently left a software company where i did software with uh earl stanley gardner michael crichton ray bradbury arthur c clark and i loved that craft of being in the software business but there was in the late 80s there was sort of a void there and a startup called prodigy called me up and they said we're IBM, Sears, and CBS, and we're building this online thing.

33:58And it was just like the internet and definitely not like the internet. This was long before the World Wide Web. Everything was controlled in one big building in White Plains, New York. Every line that was typed into a chat or a comment board was approved before it was posted. And the thing looked really chunky and it was very slow. The problem they had at Prodigy was that it cost$10 a month to join and a lot of promotion to get you to join. If you joined and used it a lot, they lost money because they had to build a modem for every single user who was using it simultaneously. Sorry to interrupt.

34:37Prodigy back in the day, that was still an ISP, right? Internet service provider? There was no internet. If you were at a college, you could use the internet, but there was no, no consumer had access to the internet. And it was before AOL, right? So if you used it a lot, they lost money. If you didn't use it at all, you quit, they lost money. So what they needed you to do is use it a little for a long time. So I invented a game for them called Guts and it became the most popular online game of all time at the time. And you can only play it for seven minutes a week. And then next week you can come back and play for seven more minutes.

35:12So it solved all of their problems. And I get this internet thing. We didn't call it the internet, but I see a system being built here. I want to make software in this world. And then AOL called and said, what can you build for us? And then Microsoft had an online service. What can you do for us? And I realized that if I was going to build software for each one of these platforms, I was going to go bankrupt because they were all different and they didn't have an API that would make it easy. But all of them enabled email. You could send an email from Prodigy to AOL. You can send an email from AOL to CompuServe.

35:53So if I could build an email engine, I could run on any service. So we built a massive email engine. We had like four engineers that like shoveled coal into it to keep it going. And we were getting and receiving more email every day than any entity on the internet. And I used it to make games. And the idea of the games was that each move came by email. And if you're tied for first place in the game and an email comes in, you're going to open it. So we had an 86 % open rate and a 35 % response rate to the emails we sent out. and these games started to work across networks and say how am I going to pay for these things because AOL would pay at first but how am I going to do this so we started getting sponsors so we worked with Procter & Gamble and other companies that would put money in to sponsor these email games and as I was doing this with these huge response rates talking to these big companies they were like games are fine but how do we just get people who want to buy a pair of pants to open an email.

36:57And that led to me coining permission marketing. And I then wrote the book to broaden it from their games to why on earth would anyone open an email from you? And spam is bad. Spam is bad. Spam is bad. But there's this other thing. How are we going to do that? And so Yo-Yo Dine became this company that companies could use before MailChimp to do promotions. And then we sold it to Yahoo and the whole industry was born after that. Got it. That's a great story. All right. Agency owners. If you want to grow faster, my partner, Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients.

37:37You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day to day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people. And you're going to be hanging out with people, like-minded people, such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, It's marketingschool.io slash agency. And we'll see you on the other side. The reason I asked about that. So like you've done that, you've done a handful of other companies and where I'm going with this, because the friend I was talking to that was sitting in your seat yesterday, you know, in our mid thirties now, we're realizing the trend is you do one thing really well and you do it for decades, right?

38:09And it goes back to the focus thing. And, you know, back in my twenties, I would read a lot of books. I talked to a lot of people saying, yeah, you got to focus. And you hear Warren Buffett. Yeah, you got to focus, right? But in your 20s, you don't want to listen to that. And you try everything. You dabble a lot. My friend Neil actually said this. He's like, dude, the problem you used to have was you had shiny knowledge syndrome, not even shiny object syndrome. It's you read everything, you implement everything, you're on to the next thing, on to the next thing, and you never go anywhere. And so I guess my question for you is, how did you really know when to lock?

38:38Because I feel like even reading your stuff in the very beginning of my career, you've always been very focused and very good at saying no, right? and so you've honed in on your system and how did you do that is the question. So I'm terrible at focusing and I haven't done a great job. I would be significantly more conventionally successful if I had focused, if I had started MailChimp. There were so many things that were like right there and I was like, no, this is not interesting anymore. I've focused on being the public version of me who does interesting, productive things. And if the projects I do end up having a life after I'm done, that's fantastic, but not what I signed up for.

39:26What I would say back to Neil, if I were in your shoes is, what does success mean? So you've produced an enormous amount of value for a lot of people. If your goal is two more zeros, then he is correct that this shiny knowledge thing isn't going to get you there. If your goal is to win on Jeopardy, you're halfway there. You could do that. But what I have focused on is I don't start a project unless I think I have enough resources to get through the dip. And when the project has reached the point where I don't believe more effort from me will get more returns for me, I stop. And if I was sitting here frustrated that I haven't achieved enough, you would correctly say you're stopping at the wrong time.

40:22And so I don't think you have to do a project for 30 years for it to pay off. But I do think you have to be aware of where is the slog and what are the rewards for going through the slog right it's this is a game again you have to one you have to understand the game that you're playing so to your point if i had you know on my grave i just want to say this guy was a good learner a good teacher well therefore i'm doing that right now right so i think it's when you have to understand the game and if it no longer feels like a game maybe you you jump out of that system which goes back to your book again right yeah that's amazing exactly right so you know i saw social media coming.

40:58Squidoo was before Pinterest. It was right at the beginning of Facebook, if not before Facebook. We were the 40th biggest website in the US. We had nine employees.

41:12And Google shut us down. That's a whole other story. But it would have been easy in that moment to shift and say, we're going to go build a Pinterest and stick with it for a decade. We're going to go build a Twitter and stick with it for a decade. And I decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, that I just didn't want to commit to that sort of enterprise. And knowing yourself is worthwhile because you only get today once. And if we, the game that you're playing right now, if I say, okay, I want to, I just want to learn and teach for the rest of my life. Maybe for someone like a Neo, it's more zeros, right?

41:49What do you think it is for you? What game are you playing? um when i'm wearing my teacher hat i would like to have the people i'm teaching teach other people so i don't want to i don't spend a lot of time reaching out to new people i'm not trying to do that but i'm trying to give the people who get the joke tools so they can teach other people that is what has happened here that's why i'm here yes that's me um and then the bigger arc is I won the birthday lottery. I have so much privilege and opportunity, and I would like to leave things I touch better than I found them. That's great. Again, how long do you think it took you to realize that this is the game that you're playing?

42:36I struggled when I went out on my own. I got 800 rejections in a row the first year. That meant 800 times someone in book publishing bought a stamp, put it on an envelope, mail me a letter saying, we hated your idea. That adds up, right? And so this idea that you have to pay the rent was a struggle. And then I met a guy in the book business who I did a book with, and he explained to me how I was playing the game completely wrong, how my story was confused, and I was approaching it like an MBA. I wasn't approaching it like a book person. And the penny dropped and I got the joke. And the book publishing industry has been great for me because the book publishing industry until recently does not reward short-term hustle.

43:22It rewards people who are going to patiently execute the project in a way that will stand the test of time because books have been around for hundreds of years. That was a perfect balance to my short attention span. And I think ever since then, the arc, like it would have been really easy to become a spammer in 1993. There was plenty of open space for someone who understood games, so many ways that you could rip off so many people. And I didn't even spend 10 seconds debating whether I would do that or not. I did, there was one Usenet board where I posted one note to see what would happen. And I saw what happened.

44:03And I was like, Oh, I understand this. I don't want to do this ever again. Yeah. So the book publishing industry taught you how to play long term games. Yeah. I think people just need to either they need to get punched in the face at a certain moment to learn how to play long term games. And maybe that was it for you. Maybe that's what it is. Because even if you learn that all the successful people, quote unquote, have played long term games, I don't think that's enough, you have to actually get that punch. And And so the 800 rejections was that punch for you. For me, maybe a different story, right?

44:33Yeah. And I think that part of what I'm trying to do in the book is make it easy to talk about. And if you're not talking about your strategy, it's either because you're afraid of it or you're embarrassed by it. And you should be neither. You should be very comfortable with peers being able to say back to you, I heard your strategy. I don't understand it. I don't know why you're doing that, right? So in Facebook's case, when Mark and Cheryl said, we're going to take political advertising, I think they should have had a much more nuanced conversation about that strategy. I think that was a terrible strategy choice.

45:12And so I guess going to your book and talking about good strategies, terrible strategies, this book, it doesn't just apply to marketing strategy. It's anything strategy, right? It's not just business. It's also life strategy, right? Yes, exactly right. Got it. Right. If you get pulled over by a cop, what is the game you are playing? What is your goal? What is the cop's goal? How are we going to end this transaction in a way that they get status and affiliation? I get status and affiliation. I don't go to jail. Right. Like that's still a game. Yeah. And that there's the empathetic component is like, what do they need?

45:43What do they want? Are you trying to hit a quota? Right. And then timing, too. If you if you're stupid, you say something stupid. You're going out. You're taking out of your other games for a while. Exactly. Right. Okay. I love it. Speaking of strategies, I mean, we would be remiss if we don't talk about AI. So you've said it's the biggest thing you've seen since maybe like, I don't know, biggest change since electricity, I think. Correct. And you've said that quite a few times in other interviews. What are you seeing recently that is, I don't know, catching your attention? So I think what's happening recently isn't important.

46:16It's thrilling, but it's not important. The path is very clear. Between agents, persistence, and the network, it's obvious to me that AI five years from now is not going to be recognizable. So let's talk about electricity for a second. Every company that when electricity arrived said, we're not going to deal with this electricity thing is gone, right? That it used to be there was only one electrical outlet in the house. It was a light bulb. There were no things with prongs that you could plug in. So if you got a washing machine, which was the first giant time-saving invention, you had to unscrew the light bulb and screw in the washing machine.

46:59I didn't know that. And it would sit in the middle of your living room and it wasn't very well balanced, so it rocked back and forth. And sometimes it would move. And more than a dozen times, its movement would wrap the cord around the neck of somebody in the house and kill them slowly. And so plenty people said, electricity is horrible. We need to have nothing to do with electricity. So right now we're in the washing machine phase. So AI is doing some cool things. It's not costing too many people their job yet, but it's about to be this very significant transformation. And the short version is, if you do a job that AI can do, either you're going to figure it out first and change your job so that AI works for you.

47:43Or your boss is going to figure out first and you're going to lose your job. But just like the steam shovel created more jobs than it destroyed, I believe AI is going to create more jobs than it destroyed. But we can't even describe what they are. It's going to be about creating value by fueling the network and helping people get to where they want to go. So if all you do as a radiologist is read x-rays, you're in big trouble because an AI can do that better than you. But if you're able to connect and inspire and educate people around you in a way that AI can't, then you can use AI as a tool. And I think you said this best.

48:23You said that AI replaces mediocre work, and that's exactly what's going to happen. It's going to level everybody up long term. Is that how you're seeing it? Nothing ever levels everybody up. there are going to be people who have to go through a lot of pain because the system has pushed them into being a cock and they haven't had the foundation to push back. That people like us who were lucky enough to grow up knowing that we could push back against the system that wants us to do less have, but we're going to have a massive challenge of education. The good news is I think we're very close to AI having a diamond age solution to education.

49:07That's going to be breathtaking. Yeah. I mean, I invested in this company that gamifies education. And I think you combine that with an AI and everything's infinitely patient. It'll tutor you 24 seven. And then you have multiple agents helping you. I think we should be able to have a renaissance when it comes to education. But to your point, talking about systems again, at least for me, the system I grew up in, the education system was completely broken. To linchpin, everything all comes around, it creates a bunch of cogs, right? So how does someone that was maybe trained to be a cog, how do they get out of that?

49:41So the educational industrial complex is filled with well-meaning people, but the gravity of it, which was created by industrialists who want compliant factory workers, is hard to resist. And so what's the change agent? That's something I talk about in the book. a change agent changes the system with force. The change agent is, well, yeah, but if I hand an iPad to a kid, it's completely outside the zone of the educational industrial complex. So things are going to shift. And, you know, South Carolina Khan Academy started this thing. So now some fourth grade teacher walks in and their kid wanted three, four kids already know calculus.

50:20That's because they did it outside of the system. And so I think what we need to figure out how to do is teach people resilience and initiative. If we can enroll a generation in the idea of initiative, the tools will be available. But if they don't have initiative, then we got troubles. Got it. And you would say curiosity probably goes into initiative. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I think those are two ways to encapsulate it. I wish they taught us how to play poker in school. I eventually, we just went off on our own and gambled, but a lot of pain. from poker. Yeah. I mean, Annie Duke is teaching poker as a way to teach decision-making because it's why not do that?

51:03That was a great rebrand for her. If you even want to call it a rebrand. But as we work towards wrapping up here, I mean, we would be remiss if we don't talk about storytelling, right? Because we're all emotional creatures. So what would you say, like, how do people get better at storytelling? Certainly people can watch how South Park does it. And I think that's a great one minute video. I think everyone should check that out. But how would you say people can get better at storytelling? Well, again, the words matter. Stories aren't once upon a time and a plot. So here we are in this spectacular studio that Matt is running.

51:33There's a story. The potted fern is a story. The Shure microphone is a story. The lighting is a story. You go to an open house and it smells like apple pie in there. That's a story because it reminds you of growing up, right? Stories are simply little invisible hooks into the experience we already had before we encountered the story. And stories include tension. They always have tension. The tension of what's going to happen next. The tension of this might not work. The tension of am I in the right place at the right time. The tension of I'm rooting for something. If you're not doing those things, then you willfully walked away from story and chosen to be a commodity.

52:14And you only sell a commodity if you want to. storytelling to me is a game that i haven't exactly mastered yet um the i guess everything you're saying is true yes there absolutely needs to be tension you know story is a feeling it's very much a feeling um but where else i guess how did you get better at storytelling um because for you it seems to come so effortlessly and maybe before you answer i know that even with your blogging you i think you still blog every single day correct 9 000 in a row okay so it's not just one blog i i saw another podcast you did it's you're writing four plus a day and you're throwing most of them out you're only picking one um so maybe you can answer this how could how did you become such a prolific storyteller i often get notes from people saying um how do i learn marketing?

53:09How do I get an internship? And my answer is you learn marketing by doing marketing. Go raise money for a nonprofit, go to some garage sales and sell stuff on eBay. The way you learn to tell stories is you tell stories. I learned to tell stories in the north woods of Canada, three hours north of Toronto, helping kids get into a 16-foot long canoe and paddle it by themselves, creating the conditions, an aura of magic around something that could have been fairly pedestrian. Stories that were silly or scary or thrilling. And when a story worked, I did it again. And when a story worked, I didn't work.

53:50I never did it again. So you never went to like those story competitions or anything like that. You just continue to hone your craft and you saw what landed, what didn't, and you just kept iterating, right? I still do. Every single time I interact with another person, I am practicing my storytelling. Got it. I love it. It's such an underrated thing because when you go to dinner parties or whatever, the people that command the group, they are the storytellers. And not that they're trying to command the attention of the group, but they just do. They're magnetic at the end of the day. Yeah. And most charisma comes from curiosity and giving other people space.

54:25Right. We think people are interesting when they appear to be interested. And so that's where we begin. None of my early storytelling would have worked if I wasn't interested in the people I was telling the story to. Hmm. That's a big one. Never thought about that. Um, you're okay. So we talked about kind of how you do storytelling and you're still a prolific learner in my opinion. So what's, what's the Seth Godin learning system right now? Oh, I am not in your league, Eric, not even a little bit. I, it's semi-random. I read a ton of blogs and if there's a new tool that makes me uncomfortable, I learn it.

55:07I made a mistake with Photoshop when it got to version three or four. Like I was good at version one, two. And I was really busy. I was like, ah, no. And I haven't caught up since. I try to avoid that. I try to say, here's a tool. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to use it productively, but I'm going to learn how to use it. So then I can decide I don't want it. Got it. So this will be the last thing, I suppose. But you have this aura. You talked about auras earlier. You have this aura of wisdom and patience, right? I think you're a very patient person. And you have this quote. You say, don't hustle.

55:46What do you mean by that? Okay, so I grew up playing hockey. My dad was the coach. Hustle in hockey or even baseball is a good thing, right? That someone who's hustling in those sports is expending unreasonable amounts of energy in short periods of time when other people aren't. But that's not real life. That is a very circumscribed game. Nobody I have ever met says, I really like that person. They hustled me. No one ever says that. We don't want a close talker, a high-pressure salesperson, someone who's all up in our face. That's not how you earn trust. It's not how you earn loyalty. And if you don't have trust and loyalty, you can't tell a story.

56:26So when I say don't hustle, I mean, don't take shortcuts at other people's expense. Take shortcuts that help you avoid places where people are hiding. I'm in favor of that. Take shortcuts where you can skip a meeting and just claim responsibility. I'm in favor of that. But the shortcut of I'm going to use pressure and become untrustworthy to get a sale, it's easy to make money doing that on the internet. But all the people who've done that in The 25 years, 30 years I've been online, I don't see them around anymore. Right. And where I started this last question with, you're talking about kind of wisdom and patience.

57:11To me, hustle seems like people that hustle all the time, they're very impatient, right? They're kind of out of control a little bit. At least that's what it feels like. So how did you learn to kind of rein at it? Because the way you talk, it's very calm. It's slower, right? It's not out of control versus I talk very quickly, which can seem a little manic at times. So I guess I'm just curious again, like, where did that come from? When did that come? Like, did you have to get punched in the face? No, I think as we wrap this up, there's confusion here. And again, I'm not a role model, but there's confusion between what might come across in a podcast and what is actually productively being produced.

57:51So Yo-Yo Dine had 60 people in our New York office. 40 of them reported directly to me so that was sort of crazy but it kept my brain busy and we had no walls so it was one big room and every three months everyone had to move their desk and sit somewhere else because i wanted people to get used to change but the excuse i gave was no one should have to sit next to me for too long because my part of the office had more chaos than other parts of the office because i am extraordinarily productive at shipping the work When you run out of time or you run out of money, you're done, right? If it's Tuesday, there's going to be a blog post, not because it's the best blog post I ever wrote, but because it's Tuesday.

58:32We ship the work. That job interviews are last five minutes. That we're going to have these things happening and happening. It doesn't feel manic, but it feels inevitable. There's forward motion. So I don't think you have to be manic, and I'm capable of talking as fast as you, but I don't think you have to be manic to be productive. And a lot of people I know have confused these things. They don't want to be manic, but now they're also not productive. And they're still thinking about it. I went to business school with someone in 1981 who is still thinking about the startup he's going to launch.

59:12Well, I think that's a great way to end it. We'll just leave that for maybe next time. So, Seth, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online and the book online? They're aligned. Seths.blog is my posts. They're all free. Seths.blog.com for This is Strategy is all the information you need about the book. All right, everyone, go pick up the book. This has been great. Thank you so much. Thank you. You're awesome.