168. How to Build a Magnetic Brand that Sells Itself ft. Seth Godin

23:22And the answer is, you tell a story

23:25Seth Godin:and you live a story that's worth talking about. So when I'm there, there are people flown in from Japan to buy four loaves of bread and then fly home because there's something about all the pieces he and his family have put together that make it remarkable. So the story in the book is not true. And it's about me driving with the family through a pasture in rural France. And my kids for 17 hours have been making a commotion and noise. And my wife has been asleep because she has transportation narcolepsy unless there's a good movie on the plane. and we are driving through this pasture and I notice it's quiet in the backseat.

24:05Seth Godin:My kids, my five-year-old and seven-year-old have finally fallen asleep. And I look in their backseat, they're not asleep, they're staring out the window at a cow for about three seconds because cows are boring. Cows are all the same. You can say anything you want about a cow, they're the same. And then I said, but what if it had been a purple cow? If it had been a purple cow, I would have pulled over. And my wife would have woken up. She would have gotten out her phone to take pictures of the cow so she could show her friends back home. My kids would have ignored me as usual, opened the door, run across the street, hopped over the fence and rubbed the cow so that they could go to show and tell in two weeks and tell everyone that they had touched a purple cow.

24:43Seth Godin:So it's not a gimmick. It's just everyone's life would get better if they could talk about the purple cow. So we don't need more dog food or razors or over-the-counter medication. What we need is something to talk about. We need connection. We need meaning. We need a chance to get to where we're going. That's why you should start a small business, not to be a junior version of Heinz Ketchup. That was a rant, sorry. No, I loved it. Now, when it comes to personal brand versus an actual product, a store like the cafe or the bakery, do the principles just still stay the same? Or is there anything different that you tell someone who's trying to build maybe a brick and mortar or an actual physical product versus building a personal brand and trying to monetize that personal brand through digital products or something of that?

25:39Seth Godin:Or speaking or something like that. Yeah. So what do you think a brand is? Can you define that for me? I would say a brand is the gut feeling somebody gets about you or your product when they come across you in person or they come across you online. I'd second that. Yeah, I agree with that. I think we should differentiate between a brand and a logo. Because when a business or a person says I'm rebranding, what they really mean is I'm re-logoing. I'm redoing the colors. I'm doing the colors. New font, new colors. Yeah. Exactly. That's so true. So Hyatt has a logo. Nike has a brand. Because if Nike opened a hotel, you'd know exactly what it would be like to stay there.

26:24Seth Godin:But if Hyatt came out with sneakers, you have no clue what they would be like. So as a result, what we think of when we think of a brand is a promise, an expectation. What do I expect from your next post? What do I expect from your next episode? because if the next episode of this podcast included an interview with two dulcimer playing people who raise goats, folks would be very confused because that's not your brand. That's not part of your promise. So the Poulain breakery brand is very clear. And if they decided to open a sandwich shop, we know just what it would be like. A personal brand is either I have an expectation and a trust for you, or I don't.

27:10Seth Godin:And it might be that my expectation is you spout nonsense and are annoying. That's a brand. You could change it, but it would take a while. So I don't think there's any difference whatsoever between a personal brand and a business brand. And so if we think about how do you make a living as a speaker, you don't do it by giving slightly better talks than other people who give talks. because that's not what speakers get rewarded for. The market for speakers who do that for free is large. You can definitely give a lot of speeches for free if you give pretty good speeches. But if you want to get paid a lot to give a speech, it's not because you give a pretty good speech.

27:56Seth Godin:It's because the people in the audience, when they hear you're about to give a speech, are thrilled that the conference organizer hired you. So it's about your reputation. It's about the expectation. It's about all those pieces. So the single best way to make a living as a professional speaker is to be successful enough at something else that you don't need to make a living as a professional speaker. Real quick, we want to talk to our photographer and videographer listeners. If that's not you, skip forward a little bit. But this Sunday, we're hosting a live training. What are we doing? We're going to break down how you can charge more for your work and how to position yourself to start landing more deals and stop getting ghosted by these potential new clients.

28:33Dude, I don't want you guys going after the penny pinchers anymore. I want you making more bread with your camera. We want to teach you guys really how it's possible to turn your creative passion into a full-time career as a creative. That's exactly what me and Brayden have done. And we're going to walk you through the exact 10-step framework to do that this Sunday. It's literally 25 bucks. It's the second link in the description. I hope you join us. It'll be recorded and it'll be available for 24 hours. So go check that out. Let's keep going. Can you talk to me a little bit about something we chatted about in the very beginning and it was like tension and we talked a little bit about scarcity when like building out our products and thinking about the strategy behind it where does tension come into play is that the first thing you think about or is it like hey is it you know this is where we're going to be delivering this stuff it's we think this group hangs out on facebook instagram and tiktok and then does it go to the tension side of things like what is the order of operations for for you so what's tension

29:28Seth Godin:tension isn't stress stress is bad stress is wanting two things at the same time and you can't have both tension is this might not work i might get left behind they're going to sell out what will my friends think these are this is the only reason that stand-up comedy works if the comic blurts out the punchline before she tells the joke it's not funny because there's no tension. So the tension at Patagonia is different than the tension at some off-brand clothing company. At the off-brand clothing company, it's, you need clothes? We have clothes. They're cheaper than those people. There's no tension there.

30:09Seth Godin:And that's fine because if I don't care, that's what I should buy. But when a clothing designer comes out with something that's edgy that you could wear to the Met Gala, you're thinking, hmm, maybe I'll look like an idiot, but maybe people will love it. There's tension, right? If it's, oh, I wonder if other people are going to be wearing it. Would that be good or would it be bad? That's tension. So if we want change to happen, we have to willingly inflict tension. Do it as a service. So if Taylor is doing a concert, people run to get tickets because they know the tickets won't be there tomorrow.

30:49Seth Godin:There's tension. So the conversation begins at any marketer who matters, not with, oh, the sample audience is on TikTok. I want to know what's the change you seek to make? Who are you trying to change and what is the change you seek to make? And then we have to create a narrative around that change that some people will eagerly embrace and other people will eagerly run away from because if it's for everyone, it's not for anybody. We're looking for the smallest viable audience and delivering to them what they want. What does the smallest viable audience mean? Is that going, is that thinking about, you know, this is my, this is my ideal person.

31:31This is Mike. He's 35. He works at the railroad and we want to sell him these railroad pants. And he's, you know, this is the things that he does like can you explain that to our group the smiles ball yeah you're you're you're really

31:43Seth Godin:close i don't care so much about demographics i care a lot about psychographics okay this is mike he believes he's a little overweight but that if he had a better pair of pants women would think he's more attractive this is mike mike regularly daydreams about possibility this is mike mike has money to spend but only on things he's sure going to make a difference most people don't fit that definition fine right so if you go to an hermes store and look at a birkin bag and you say what this is what thirty thousand dollars they don't try to justify it by telling you that the cow was named trudy and blah blah blah they just say oh you want to go to that store seven doors down thanks for stopping by so if you're not regularly sending people to the competition you don't care about the smallest viable audience yeah hermez just calls you broke and says this is you can go to walmart down the street oh you must who let who let him in yeah how'd you get through the door have you something that i noticed a lot of people that are in the clothing industry right now they're struggling with the dupes on amazon so like people are just choosing like the lowest cost thing and maybe that's because the economy that we're in.

32:58Maybe it's because of a lot of different factors, but I'm noticing it more and more. If I go on Amazon and let's say, say you're looking for like a Lululemon shirt, the damn exact same Lululemon shirt is on there with the same photo, which should be illegal, but it's on there and people are choosing for that option. Is their brand just not strong enough, would you say, like to keep people wanting to just spend that higher number and have that status symbol of the little Lululemon logo.

33:25Seth Godin:When you choose your customers, you choose your future. When you choose your competition, you choose your future. And when you choose your marketplace, you choose your future. So if you show up on a crowded corner where everybody's selling stolen goods on bridge tables and you say, no, no, mine's really much better. It's$30 ,000. You're not you made the choice to set up on that street corner. So Lululemon, my friend Steph Corker helped build that company. Lululemon did some brilliant, brilliant marketing and business decisions. But that doesn't mean they're entitled to charge what they charge to every single human on the planet.

34:07Seth Godin:It doesn't last forever. The story they told, the change they seek to make, they got all the yoga moms, right? So now if they want to go to the next circle, they've got some challenges. And we can't as marketers be entitled. We have to be empathic. We have to say, yeah, you're right. If I were in your shoes, if I had the income you have, and the story I told myself about my income that you were telling yourself, there's no way in the world I would buy Lululemon. Of course I'd buy this knockoff. It's the right thing for them to do. Everyone does the right thing for them to do if they are informed.

34:47Seth Godin:And so the challenge you have is how do you inform people so that based on who they are and what they believe and what they see, they will make the choice that you're hoping they will make. But it's not going to happen because you tell them they're wrong. So are you saying that the people that would buy the product on Amazon aren't really your audience anyways that you're trying to attract? I'm saying that when you show up with the story you've got, people are going to make a choice. And if they're making a choice that isn't the choice you want them to make, there's nothing wrong with them. There's something wrong with your story.

35:24I see. And then I just want to take it back to what you're saying about the smallest viable audience. Is it possible to go too narrow? Is that ever a scenario?

35:32Seth Godin:It depends on what you want. So if you want to write a deeply literary novel that is depressing and elliptical and intellectual, please don't be disappointed that it doesn't sell 10 million copies. You can't have both. And if you can find the 5 ,000 people who say, this novel changed me, I think you should be happy and say that's enough because it matched the genre. It matched the possibility. Don't go build a giant factory and hire thousands of people to turn out these novels and then be disappointed that you didn't sell 10 million. So in general, my theory is this, find the 10 perfect people.

36:20Seth Godin:If it doesn't work for them, make something better. If it does work for them, perhaps they'll tell the others. If they tell the others, you grow. And some things people don't want to talk about. They don't want to talk about the fact that they signed up for pre-need cremation and that they're going to save their family all this money a thousand years from now when they're dead, right? You're just going to have a lot of trouble turning that into a purple cow because people don't want to talk about it. On the other hand, there are lots of things that people do want to talk about. One of my favorite examples, I am too old to tell you the name of the brand but you guys will know there are these people who make the little stars for folks with zits to put on their face it's amazing you see those out in public now all the time i think when we're in elementary school would have been great no it would have been great but i think that people at that time maybe wouldn't have wouldn't have adopted it i feel like interesting it became like a thing because i feel like there was this like i don't give a shit mentality of like if it's on my yeah i have a pimple like everyone has pimples you know yeah it was brilliant It's absolutely brilliant.

37:25Seth Godin:And where you get that lesson is from Alcoholics Anonymous. First, it's not anonymous. Nobody knows who's in charge. They have no ad campaign, but everyone knows what Alcoholics Anonymous is. And how do we know? We know because an alcoholic told us. And so what they did was they created a status loop for people who needed help, who wanted to offer help in return, and people talked about it. So when you find this thing that's causing some people shame and you can figure out how to build a story around it that can turn it into pride and affirmation, you can build a whole brand around that. If someone's listening to this episode and they have a brand and they're thinking to themselves, man, I don't really have any strategy when it comes to marketing.

38:10I'm kind of just winging it. I'm doing it the same way I've been doing it for the past decade. It's worked, but maybe I see bigger things for me. What would you say are those few key questions they should ask themselves, or how can they go about auditing the way they're running their business to then start implementing a strategy when it comes to marketing?

38:30Seth Godin:Yeah, it's a great question. That's what my last book is about. That's why I call it This is Strategy. And I made a Udemy course too. There are no secrets here. There are four big ideas, time, systems, games, and empathy. Time, because tomorrow is different than today. What are you doing today that tomorrow will thank you for, as opposed to racing around to do today's checklist. Systems, which we could talk about for four hours, is the invisible conspiracy that runs everything, like the TV industrial complex and the wedding industrial complex and the college industrial complex. If you've got a six-year-old and they bring home a report card, their first report card ever, do you give them feedback on their grades?

39:11Seth Godin:Why? There are six, right? You give them feedback on their grades because you've been sucked into the college industrial complex and you're already grooming them to get into Harvard. And we think that's normal, but it's not. Games, because any situation where there's humans and scarcity is a game. So if you want to build a direct-to-consumer razor business, you got to compete with Gillette and Schick and Harry's. If you do this, what are they going to do? It's a game. And the last one is empathy, which is the people you seek to serve. what do they believe because they don't care what you believe one bit but they care a lot about what they believe and if you can get clear about that then you can be of service have you always looked at everything you do as a game or is that something that came later on because i i find myself heavily gamifying like everything that i do otherwise i can't even get myself to do stuff i'm like dude if you go to the gym five days this week i don't know i'll make a weird award up that I get, but like I get, I get a gold noodle star and maybe we can go get ice cream.

40:15But you know, and I, I think that that's really like helped me. And I feel like there, there's always a game within the game as well. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about that principle.

40:25Seth Godin:Okay. So board games are different than games. Yes. And Monopoly is a stupid game, but board games, we use words like gamify and stuff. That's not what I'm talking about. Okay. Um, I started thinking this way when I was 12. My dad was my hockey coach. And one of the drills, I was the scrawny little kid easily bullied. One of the drills was there'd be two people on their little red circle and he'd throw the puck in the corner and one person would have to go and take it that way and one person would have to go and take it that way. And I realized that if I got there a half a step slower than the other person, I could knock them into the boards instead of them knocking me into the boards.

41:03Seth Godin:And so I would play the game of how, and it took them like two weeks for them to realize what I was doing. So then they started slowing down. And finally, my dad said I had to stop doing that. But the point is, that's a game. And it's a game to get into business school. And it's a game to make a sale. And it's a game to fix climate change. Because these are really important issues. But we have players, and we have rules, and we have scarcity, and we have strategies. So you don't have to take it personally when you fail. You can just say, I made the wrong moves. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, right?

41:41Seth Godin:I didn't get into Harvard. How come? I'm an idiot. No, it's not because you're an idiot. It's because you didn't play the game the way the other people played the game. They saw a system that you didn't see, and that's how they got it. Earlier in this conversation, you brought up trust, and a word that is often associated with trust is being authentic online. But I know that you claim that being authentic is fucking bullshit and you would rather be consistent and i would love to talk about this because i just i would love to hear you talk about it and then i'd love to have some discourse a little bit back and forth because i i see where you're coming from but i i also not that i disagree but i'm just curious to hear your take and then i'd love to talk a little bit about it it's such a trap i don't know why it's stuck around for so long If you're truly authentic and you get rejected, you've been actually rejected.

42:37Seth Godin:If you're truly authentic and you don't feel like it, then you shouldn't do it. If you are acting like a jerk and you say, well, I was just being authentic, the fact is you were still acting like a jerk. So what we want in every interaction except from a Kardashian is consistency, not authenticity. And consistency is make a promise and keep it. That we want Coca-Cola to be consistently Coca-Cola. And we want our chiropractor to be consistently our chiropractor. And if we have surgery, we don't want to have bad surgery because the person was authentically in a bad mood. Come on. We want a professional and professionals are consistent.

43:23Seth Godin:So if you think I talk to people in my life, like I'm talking to you two all the time like this, that's crazy. I am playing the role of Seth Godin, the author today. That's my job. I am being consistent at that. We're not having a conversation here about whether I have a little scrape on my foot because I slipped on something. That would be me whining, but that's not the consistent Seth Godin you wanted to hear from. I want to go a little bit deeper on this and I kind of want to go the route of personal brand because like with the era of ai that's at our fingertips we were talking about this before and we're saying i feel like why people gravitate towards our show is because we are so ourselves on here like you get the you meet me in person you're gonna be yes do if i go and hang out with my mom am i gonna talk to her about business and all this stuff probably not like we're gonna have a different level of conversation but i think right here we really do put our best foot forward to be ourselves.

44:22And I think it's why.

44:23Seth Godin:No, no, no. You put your best foot forward and good for you. There is alignment between who you usually are and the brand you chose to have. So what I got a phone call 20 years ago. Would I please audition to be one of the judges on the launch of Shark Tank in the United States? And I had seen the British thing. I said, oh, you want me to be the nasty judge? And they were like, yeah. Well, they picked a different bald guy because I didn't show up. And because I would have broken myself if I had to be consistently the nasty one, because it's not who I am. So, yes, please build a personal brand that rhymes with who you are comfortable being.

45:10Seth Godin:I'm not saying you should be a fraud. It's too hard to consistently be a fraud. I'm saying you should pick a brand where you can show up consistently in a way that rhymes with who you want to be. But you're not allowed to phone it in or be a jerk and claim it's because you were being authentic. Totally. I totally understand what you're saying. Yeah. I guess my mind was like, if you preach health and wellness and positivity, my mind was going to, oh, you can't share that you're having a bad day or you missed a workout or you ate pizza. That's kind of where my mind initially went to, but I totally understand.

45:50Seth Godin:I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm saying something really different than that. That Tony Robbins can consistently talk about the times he hasn't been the pinup child for any of his things. That's part of the brand. Yes. Right? And so, yes, we're all hypocrites. We shouldn't hide all of our hypocrisy, but we should lean into the parts that we can maintain over time. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. I have so many more, but I want to get you out of here in the respect. Yeah, we do want to respect your time. Yeah. So thank you so much, seriously, for coming to hang out with us today.

46:29It was awesome. An absolute pleasure. The first ever 505 Pod post pod debrief. I'm here for it on the couch. I think this couch from what everyone said, I mean, this is where we need to be hanging out. What would you rank this couch on comfiness level? Nine, four. Yeah. It's up there. Feels nice. And I think that this is what we're going to strive for as we build out the new set. Totally. We talked to you guys about this. We're going to Texas. When you listen to this, we'll be in Texas. I believe so. Yeah. To film with the Three Rocks. We got Guzman, Heidi Summers, Max Tuning. It's going to be a really fun lineup.

47:01But we need to talk about this episode. We sure do. Okay. I think it was really interesting to hear about how a lot of what started in Seth's career in the very beginning hasn't changed a ton. No, I think how he thinks about marketing hasn't changed. just the way that people get out their message and promote their product or service has changed. Yes. And I think something that we've heard him talk about in TED Talks and in his books is this concept of being remarkable. And in a sea full of crap is what he was talking about. Like everything is so mediocre that what people are putting out, the messages, they're just sharing the same regurgitated information over and over again.

47:43If you are remarkable, you will cut through the noise and people will share your message for you absolutely and i mean i even think about it with as we were trying to build out our pod i was like because we weren't remarkable obviously to start we were we thought we thought we were but we we were definitely not remarkable you talked to kosas and fig episode eight we had the biggest and best show on the internet we were like this could be this could be number one why are we not topping the charts Why are we getting 200 views? It doesn't make any sense. I think though, at the forefront of our brains, as we were making the show was always there to try to provide you guys with so much value, regardless of who it was that we had on.

48:22We're trying to extract information to then hopefully help you build your business, enhance your creativity and do something that's going to better your life in some way, shape or form. And I think now that's like, it's still working. That's not like it. That's not a new thing. like people that share great information that impacts you. Like those are the people that I talk about. Those are the people that I go share their message and spread their word for them. I think there's a book I read a really long time ago. It was like, it's called like Maven or it maybe it was had the topic of this word Maven.

48:51And it essentially was people spreading your word for you and going out and like, you know, if I had a great, a great show with you guys, or if I had a great hangout session with the two rocks, I'm going to go out and tell a friend. Cause I'm like, this was so impactful. And I really liked this one part from this guest or something like that. and with anything that you do the people that are spreading it word of mouth are your strongest people that you need to be thinking about and taking care of i even think about blue stripe and like my company and the people that come to me and say hey we chatted with this person there's no sale that has to happen there i don't have to sell ourselves at all it's like oh i know mike mike really liked you guys spoke very highly of you we want to do work for you guys absolutely and it's like there there needs to be no nothing needs to be said besides the fact of this is what we do how can i help you guys you know and it's such a different dynamic than having to go out and be like oh hey this do you need stuff like can we help you i also think taking it one step further every time you guys do a shoot and you guys bring on people it's kind of an audition to work with you guys again and the people who are remarkable at their job and that you guys enjoy working with, you guys are going to call them back.

50:03And so at level one, being remarkable, like Seth talked about, is the best marketing strategy you can have. Because even regardless of how saturated a market is, if something comes out that is just the best, there's always room for it. You see content creators popping up all the time or new businesses popping up all the time and their content's just better or their products just better and they're marketed in an interesting way and they stand out they break through the noise and i think like you brought up on the podcast in a world with ai the last podcast we did was about ai and how so much more content is going to be coming out i think at the very start at at the very basic level how can you be as remarkable as possible and you brought up our podcast when we were first starting out our show in our eyes has improved a lot since we first started and i think that it can be really daunting when you're first starting to think that that remarkable word kind of freaks you out a little bit you're like how am i supposed to be number one or the best out there if i'm just getting started and I want to remind people listening to this you get better as you go and sometimes we can let perfection get in the way of us even starting in the first place every single person Seth included or every every you know every business owner or every creator that you look up to started somewhere they were all ass exactly and so like we look back at episode one of the show and it's nowhere near what it is today.

51:51And so don't let that word remarkable stop you or scare you from starting in the first place. Start where you are and continue to improve every single day and you can work up to being remarkable. You can't be afraid to fail. I love that he shared the story of him getting kicked out of the publishing industry because that shows you someone like him who's had 21 bestsellers has had failures in his life still and you might look at Seth who's been doing it for 30 40 years and you kind of put him on a pedestal but you have to remind yourself that you know maybe he wasn't as remarkable as he is today when he was first starting out but he started somewhere I was thinking as you were saying that about LeBron James's company it's like strive for greatness and I think that's what you got to remind yourself in the very beginning is you are striving for greatness and you're trying to get better every single time like i remember when we first did the show that's what we would talk about is like oh what if we did uh what if we lit it like this or what if we had like this mic setup or what could we do with the cameras and even in my agency when we do shoots reef and i love doing this after and i read this in a book somewhere and i've taken it i don't remember what their company did but after the shoot we call each other and we were like wow what did we fuck up and what was exceptional and like what can we fix any of these things that are fucked up or some of them we just have to like deal with that and try to figure out ways to work around it and every time we do a shoot i think we do get literally like five times better because there is this review process of talking about the entire day what could the producer have done differently what could i have done to know my shots better or what could you have said to the talent that maybe made us not flow or whatever the heck the thing may be having that type of want to get better just makes everything so much better in the grand scheme of things and like look at how much our show has 10x with just overall like everything i mean now if you're if you're watching these ones from texas like now we have three camera angles and one of them doesn't shut off every 30 fucking minutes using a zve1 is not ideal for a long form podcast it is not the vibe and we're trying also okay yeah tell all my camera people out there zve1 they market it as having the same sensor as an fx3 and it's bullshit you know what that is cap look at that dude dude fucking cap okay cap city we've tested it multiple times the zve1 great fucking camera okay does not produce the same level of image quality as an fx3 It doesn't.

54:29It does not. It doesn't. Sony, stop saying that. OK, we love you, but you're kind of capping. Another thing that he talked about was how the size of the audience is totally irrelevant. And we see that with these huge tick tockers or people that, you know, are really big on short form. Most of the time, it doesn't translate to in person and it doesn't translate to YouTube. we see that we've seen that time and time again like people want to be on a long form place whether it's a podcast whether it's a youtube channel they want you to go over there because we all know like you guys listening we all know this that is where you want your community to be to be at because there's so much more connection that can develop over 20 plus minutes rather than 30 seconds like people just forget and think about i mean when you're scrolling we're scrolling for like a consistent period of time you're not scrolling you're not being like i'm scrolling for five minutes right now you're just kind of mindlessly going through there and maybe you save something but think about how much shit we've all saved yeah do you go back to it real often not super often right like the amount of recipes i have saved on tiktok is absurd i think you're right though i think he brought up the idea of focusing on false proxies meaning you're focusing on the wrong metrics so when it comes to social media you're really focused on how many followers you have or how many likes and views you have when instead you should be really focusing on what's the conversation like in your comments and are people sharing your stuff, your content with other people?

56:03He brought up the fact that marketing is creating conditions for people to spread the word about your product or service to other people. Word of mouth. I think in a digital world where so many of us are on Instagram and social media in general. The equivalent to that is the share button. So if you can create content or create a product that people want to share with other people or share on their story or share in the DMs, that is in my mind, the digital equivalent of word of mouth marketing. I think so too. And we've seen it with the posts that do well for both of us and for the pod. If something gets shares, we know it's going to go off.

56:49We know it's going to do super well. If it's that first 20, 30 minutes and there's not one share, you know the thing's not going to do super well. And then on top of that, I would argue, okay, me and you both maybe don't have the most amount of followers compared to other creators out there, or our podcast doesn't have as many subscribers or might not get as many views as the next podcast out there. But I would argue that if we do an in-person event, people are willing to come out and support us and hang out with us because of the trust that we've built and being consistent and keeping that promise like he talks about over a consistent and long period of time.

57:31And so that was something that was very interesting, just the trust being built with your group and dude trust is one of those things that takes 10 years to build and 10 seconds to lose yeah like you see it time and time again with either a quick cash grab um you know during the i'm not even going to get into it but there there's been a lot of people that we've noticed in social that have had things happen that they've said or yeah just done one stupid like ridiculously stupid thing and you're like what what was going through yeah do you guys not have anyone to talk to about this it's unbelievable yeah it's crazy it's insane when he brought up or when we brought up the fact that he believes authenticity is bullshit this was this was this is really interesting so authenticity is bullshit and consistency is more important in his eyes now me and brayden were talking before the pod i go i'm gonna call him out because i think that is ridiculous i didn't understand really what he was saying now i have a better understanding and i believe him to be true him saying that he's different online or when he's like promoting himself or having a talk he's he's a different version of himself he's still himself it's still quote-unquote authentic that's what to him that's what i was gonna say though he's still being authentic.

58:58But maybe it's just a slightly different version of him. And what he said in rebuttal to that is, I'm not telling you to be a fraud. I'm telling you to be who you are, who you show up online or in person and be that person consistently. The word for that is constancy. We love this word. Constancy is super important, which means keeping the promise, staying consistent, whatever message you're saying, saying it consistently over and over, over a long period of time. That's what constancy is. And constancy is what builds trust. And trust is what makes people show up for you in person and want to buy your products.

59:43That is the best I've ever heard you explain what that word is. Dude, I feel like I'm kind of flowing. I feel like you got that word down. Come on, dude. Yeah. I remember I see that word. I'm like, what the fuck does constancy mean? They spelled consistency. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? What else? What else we got here? Let's see. Oh, okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, go. We were thinking about this. Obviously you want people to share your stuff and creating conditions for people to share your stuff. Word of mouth is number one. I don't think there beats anything. nothing's more powerful than somebody you fuck with telling you about something that they fuck with and you're like okay i gotta go check it out whether it's another creator or a product clothing product absolutely i think as a business who has a physical product if you're listening to this in a business owner you can create conditions for people to want to share your product so if you have a clothing brand, what does the package look like when you send somebody your t-shirt or your pants or your shorts?

1:00:52You're sending out a PR package to maybe a group of influencers or you're doing a pop-up event. Do you have moments that people can capture and then want to share on their social media and share your message or product for you? And I think, yes, you want to be remarkable because the easiest way to have people talk about you is to be fucking great. But from a more tactical standpoint, I think you can create moments for yourself as a business to have people spread the message for you. I even think about when we had taken a hiatus, maybe it was after like our first season. When we came back, we had posted like a graphic and so many people shared that graphic for us of like, we're coming back for season two and tried to build up a little bit of hype around us just coming back to the show.

1:01:44And you guys really did help us. And you have no idea how many new people probably saw it and was like, what the heck is this? And maybe they check it out, maybe they don't. But at least we're doing our best to create the condition for these ideas or our pod to spread. I think of somebody, when we think about this, I think of our good buddy Sam Newton. Okay. he's got a good amount of subscribers on youtube he makes incredible work when it comes to like the travel film space he's remarkable at that he's able to have 500 people come out and come from all over not just la come from out of town fly in to come to his film festival and i would argue that there's some other creators who have more subscribers than him that can't pull in that many people to come see them in person because Sam has done such a great job of being remarkable and staying consistent over a long period of time.

1:02:44And then another thing that he's talked about, like you just brought up, is maybe he doesn't post for a week or two or maybe takes a month off because he's feeling burnt out or whatever. His audience is still going to be there for him when he comes back. And that's the scariest thing as a creator because we constantly feel like we need to be pumping out content to stay quote-unquote relevant and you're on this hamster wheel but the more remarkable you are i think about somebody like tarantino right you think about these big directors they're taking years between creating new films but because their films are so fucking good they're also going they're very unique too yeah you go to like tarantino or christopher nolan's films exactly and they're different they're different than all the stuff that we get fed on netflix on on a weekly basis they have a different look and feel to them there you can tell that there's so much craftsmanship that has gone into making the thing happen and putting it on this big screen in front of us to watch and then you go talk about it to your friends like We spread the word for them.

1:03:56I saw. Oh, my God. Who did I see talk about this? Denzel Washington. OK. Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I believe he gave Michael B. Jordan this piece of advice where he said you need to give your audience time to miss you. And you think this only works, though, for like A-list actors? Because I feel like it might. Could you? Bro, it might. If we went away for two months, no one would give a fuck. Yeah. they'd be like they'd move on to the next thing but it's an interesting point of like it's an interesting thing for the i feel like for these actors or actresses to not be as public facing because it makes you want to like they're in a movie you're like oh i want to go see them yeah scratch that shitty advice if you're making content stay consistent that was probably some of the worst advice you've ever given but i think the the thesis of it might be fair if you're an actor or an actress the more remarkable you are the less maybe super fucking in somebody's face you need to be like if you came out once a month and it was a movie yeah you'd give you give them you'd give them the grace to to be like i know okay you take somebody like sam that's exactly what i was thinking of sam calder i mean fucking remarkable youtuber filmmaker twice a year we get blessed with a little video yeah or somebody like uh do you watch andreas hem yeah andreas would go he'd be like guys i'm doing a daily vlog yeah so that's a perfect example of like youtubers or creators it was a movie every time exactly so i guess the more time you take between pieces of content the more fucking remarkable you better be or else people ain't tuning in the purple cow theory was something i want to briefly touch on because i had read that book uh quite a bit of time ago but in a sea of sameness when everyone's zigging you got to be the rock that zags you know you see like specifically right now because i've been on linkedin quite a bit and every single it's empty oh okay i thought it i thought our dog no you're good i've been on linkedin quite a bit right now and it's very similar stuff dude like all the stuff feels the exact same sure and i noticed the people that i actually do enjoy like reading some of their posts they feel very handwritten they don't feel like something that is ai generated and you can tell like you can tell immediately do people don't talk how they talk on linkedin so i think that the people that i really enjoy watching are very candid and like they'll have a typo or something it's it just feels like a much more human interaction rather than some shit that's like what's up man i'm corporate braden and i'm here to i'm here to help you learn how to market today it's just not the same like you feel like an accent just comes through when you're typing i'm just like it comes right here you know it it's just a different kind of feel on there i get you you know i'm saying i get you brother i think uh the purple cow theory is is interesting and i totally agree it's like if you saw a purple cow in a field of a ton of cows you're gonna point out the purple cow because it's different and it's unique i also think if the cow was twice the size of the other cows you're also gonna point it out and i think of that as you know if your shit is just so much fucking better than the next guy if you were looking for an editor to hire if you saw an editor and they were just dirty like they had the sauce you'd want them and it's not necessarily that they're like so unique they're just so fucking good at what they do and then they're willing to charge a premium because they're that much better at what they do we were saying this earlier before we started in like in videography and photography and podcasting like those are super saturated niches.

1:07:53Maybe when we started, it wasn't like this, like back, you know, 10 years ago. Now it's super saturated, but I'll still see a random person pop up and I'm like, this is different. This is totally different. And I bet they're booked all the time. And if they're not, give me a call. Please. I can hire you for stuff. It's so interesting though, because the amount of DMs now that I get on LinkedIn and on Instagram, they're like, hey man can you check out this edit like i'm an editor they all suck yeah they're terrible they're they're bad and then every now and then i'll get one where i'm like holy shit this is so you're you're so talented it's unbelievable think about how many dms we get on a daily basis being like hey man your clips suck i can make your clips better yeah every day every day we get one of those and their clips guess their clips are dog water yeah and i'm like you're telling me that you thought your clip was better than this clip that we that we have come on we also just like we just brought on a new clips person so it's not like the right time no that's also another thing i think timing also plays a huge part um what did you think about the part where seth was talking about the duping of different products that's yeah that was something we wanted to bring up that's really interesting so it's something that christian guzman brought up to us in our pre-show call with him and it's really interesting because there's not really much he can do but he was just super frustrated because they're should be illegal first of all i think that using the same content i also saw jacob owens post about this with prism lens effects like people are they're using his exact exact photos bro that's crazy and i think and they're big ass companies too that's even crazier part i guess it's just it's frustrating because there's nothing you can do about it but i guess it's just part of the game and maybe the person that was going to buy the knockoff just wasn't your customer in the first place.

1:09:48And maybe he just has to go harder on marketing and becoming even more remarkable, making the stuff better. Yeah. X, Y, and Z. You know, it's interesting too. One of my mom's friends used to own a very successful clothing brand and they were, they were like a knockoff brand. So they're like a Zara and it sold for tens of millions of dollars. It was, it was worth a lot of money. They would go to like Italy during, you know, during the summer and they would take pictures of what the women were wearing and what was in the designer stores because over in Europe, they were ahead of America, right? So they would set the trend and then they'd go knock it off and figure out how to make it for cheaper and bring it back over here.

1:10:27Go into Zara tomorrow. They're knocking off all of the biggest brands. That is their playbook. Is it right or wrong? It's up for you to decide. That's a topic for another day. but it's interesting because it's always been a thing i mean fashion is the king of it all right all these big players in fashion like they do that shit all the time bro if a little brand is on the come up i see this all the time on twitter but i think back to the convo that we had with gary about the mark zuckerberg saying oh i want facebook to be a place where you know we do everything and just basically it was like arbitrage the entire ad agency and put all these fuckers out of business he's like yeah fucking do it you should do it because that's the game yeah and seth talked about it briefly i wish we had way more time to talk to him about gamesmanship because he had a whole section in his book this is strategy on games and it kind of dude it's just part of the fucking game if someone ripped our pod the 405 pod and it was fucking better and they they were more entertaining dude kudos to them we'd have to figure out how to iterate and i feel like the creators that we've watched that have withstood the test of time because dude the youtube youtube creators are kind of like the nba guys man they got a little they got a few seasons in them true four years 4.4 years the average for the nba an nba player so they're not in there very long and nfl is even shorter i think it's like three point something not for long nfl not for long yeah you have to figure out a way to continuously evolve and think about how we used to not have like an intro on our show and then you go watch what dire of a ceo are doing and all the biggest players in the space you go oh shit okay that's what the tip top dogs are doing yeah we need to figure out something because we're not keeping people past 30 seconds yeah i also think you brought up the nfl or you brought up the nba and lebron i believe lebron had his highest three point percentage either this past season or the year before his game has changed so much he used to be exactly he used to be just dunking all the time and flying around and then as he got a little bit older he completely reinvented his game to shoot more threes.

1:12:30And so I think that is also part of being remarkable is knowing and understanding that what works today might not work tomorrow and having the ability to adapt. I think that that is the whole thing. If you're going to be making stuff online, it's like what worked for us in 2000, we're in 2025, what worked for us in 2022 on TikTok does not work today. It's totally different. And what might work this year might not work here in the next six to 12 months because these platforms are constantly shifting and changing. And like right now that trend is going on where people are saying like, it's like two different perspectives and on top it's a photo perspective and on bottom it's like a reframe perspective.

1:13:13That's going to work for another like day and then it'll change. It'll change to something else. And it's our jobs as creators or as entrepreneurs with our business to always be figuring out how we can change or adapt or you just fucking die and your business closes that happens all the time businesses don't adapt and they don't change and they close bringing up christian guzman something that he brought up again is that influencer marketing isn't converting as well as it maybe was in the past so he has to change his marketing strategy to go a lot more deep on just like traditional marketing and that's really interesting and that's just a that's another perfect that's another perfect example of how what worked in the past might not work today and you have to be able to to change and stay up to date with the times and you also see you know creators like you said they have seasons you know some creators you might be super into um yeah today and then you might not be into the next day i uh actually i made a video about this i thought this was really interesting I came across a girl on TikTok and she was pretty big.

1:14:25She had about 3 million followers and she had just been acquired. She sold her company. I don't even know what the company was, but she started off the video saying, hey, what's going on? I'm so-and-so. I just sold my company. I know you guys have heard this story a million times. It was my first time seeing her. So I think another really important point is that there's always a fresh set of eyes and ears to consume your content and so be remarkable but also don't be afraid to share your story and put yourself out there because you never know who's who's watching 100 percent do you believe we're we're going to texas tomorrow are you packed we're we're in texas i'm in texas right now i'm in texas texas i'm in you Haven't packed at all.

1:15:13Haven't packed. We, uh, I do think we need to go. We got to go shopping. Get some drip. Some shorts. Short drip. I want to hit, I want to hit Kith. Should we get some cool shorts? I think so. I think we should drip out. Oh, there's a Kith right around this corner, isn't it? Literally right down the street. Have you had, okay. The ice cream? Have you had Kith treats? Yeah. Kith treats. Cookies and cream. Okay. Might be the best ice cream I've ever had. It is good. It is so fucking good. I've had the cookies and cream. yeah yeah i think we do need to go get a little bit of a fit we're gonna get a lift in with with christian yeah that fires me up bomb what time i believe i don't know i gotta text him he's like it's not happening anymore i'm like okay fuck me what time's our pod with him i think our pod with him is like 11 and then we got like an hour break in between him and heidi and then we do max on friday okay dude i hit a bomb last night dude you did you went fucking bomb guys roll the clip you have no idea how far i hit this ball dude wooden bat too come on like 360 i feel like i think i could have a chance dude is their ability to walk on to like a single a team it'd be a funny piece of content oh no that's what i'm saying that's why i would want to do it just show up to spring training i like go up to the coach after like what did you rank me he's like 350 i'm like how many guys are here he's like 340 we gotta get to the lead show with my batten glove what an insane story arc from from lakers videographer to podcaster to double a baseball player yeah something about like crossing over those lines feel different man you know be like dude i was once i was the filmer guy yeah and dude i would dap up all the camera guys maybe that could be that could be the story arc of the year yeah make sure to get my angle right okay make sure that shit's in focus it's the right side i'm going yard right now could you switch that into 60 for me what's the frame rate you don't want this slow down okay this one's going in the dock anyways god this is fun this is a great pod if you guys want okay the reason full transparency the reason we're doing the pod debrief is because we only had 45 minutes with mr seth if you guys fuck with the pod debriefs let us know because i feel like we should do these yeah this is a fun 25 to 40 minute little post pod chat it also allows if you're og you know that we used to do rock talk at the beginning for like 10 15 minutes and then get into the episodes this kind of allows us to bullshit a little bit we can talk about our lives yeah and it doesn't even have to be 25 30 minutes it could be 60 minutes it could be you know a 5 to 10 minute debrief but let us know if you guys fuck with this and what you guys have been thinking of the episodes as of late.

1:18:01Dude, be a rock. Share it with a homie. And we'll see you guys all in Texas. Come on. Let's go.