Ryan Holiday on The Art and Stoicism of Digital Marketing

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1:30Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:06Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I had a very, very crazy week in September of 2022. We have a whole YouTube video about it, one crazy week in the life of a stoic basically i did a talk in denver that i came home i did a talk in austin i saw iron maiden uh play at the moody center then i did a talk in las vegas i flew out at like 5 a.m so i had to get up at like 4 or no 3 30 i had to get insanely early flew to las vegas i got to take a nap in my hotel room for like 20 minutes order room service go downstairs give a talk. And then I went up to Cerro Gordo where I ran from the bottom of Cerro Gordo to the top, basically the town of Keeler to the top of Cerro Gordo, which is this ghost town in the mountains of Inyo County.

2:57I basically did about 5 ,000 feet of elevation climb over eight miles in a little under two hours. It was grueling. But part of the reason it was so grueling is one, it took me forever to drive from Vegas to Cerro Gordo. There'd been all this crazy flooding and blah, blah, blah. But the talk I gave in Las Vegas that morning had been, I really felt it. I was like locked in, went great. And then I did like, there's a Q &A after. Anyways, it was just like sometimes you're dialed in at a level that you're not normally dialed in. It doesn't mean you're not normally dialed in, you're just really dialed in.

3:36And I was really dialed in. And I forgot got to say, all of this was for the launch of Discipline is Destiny. So it was certainly a test of my discipline and stamina and endurance in many ways. But normally on these Saturday episodes, we bring you excerpts from the classics or excerpts from some of my favorite books. And in this one, I wanted to bring you one of my talks that's tangentially connected to stoicism, but not fully connected to stoicism. This is where I get to talk about what I think about as a professional, right? Like, obviously I write and talk about stoic philosophy. It's what I apply in my life, but I have to be a professional in that thing.

4:16I have to figure out how to make that message compelling. I have to make it sustainable. I have to make it shareable. I have to make it something that connects with people, not just of the moment, but hopefully over a long period of time. I have to make something, I have to do my work at a high and elite level? How does one do that? How does one build an audience? How does one connect with the audience? How does one cultivate the audience? How does one serve the audience without being owned by the audience? These are all questions that I have to think about like when I have my technician hat on, right?

4:48My strategy hat on. And that's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode. I was in Las Vegas for this talk. I was to a digital mortgage group. and it was very nice of them to have me. And I'll let you listen in on that. We're gonna talk about how you make stuff that lasts, how you create work that addresses actual problems that real people are going through and how I work to make Stoicism relatable, practical, both timeless and timely, as Robert Greene taught me to do. And without further ado, I'll give you that talk. If you haven't read Discipline is Destiny, please do check it out. And speaking of which, The Daily Dad is available for pre-order at dailydadbook.com.

5:32That is the release cycle that I am in the middle of now. Slightly less crazy, slightly less travel, but it was a week I hope not to repeat, but in the meantime, I'll let you listen in to my talk on how you make work that lasts.

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6:53Well, it's good to be here. I don't know what your pandemic story was like, but I started March of 2020 with two kids under the age of four. And then I happened to have just begun the process in February of 2020 of opening a small town bookstore in rural Texas. So it would have been hard under ordinary circumstances. It took longer than we thought. It cost a lot more than we thought. Everything that could go wrong inevitably did go wrong on top of the fact that when we were done, it was illegal to open. And it was a little bit like Elon Musk once described starting and running a business as like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.

7:41It was a little bit like that. It was also like an arrested development. I think I've made a huge mistake. We repeated that to ourselves many, many times. But I had to apply the stuff that I write about. I write about Stoic philosophy, namely this idea from the Stoics that the obstacle is the way, that we don't control what happens, but we do control how we respond to what happens. And I feel like we did a pretty good job. Ultimately, the bookstore opened. My wife and I are still married. We didn't get divorced. So that was a success. And then I wrote myself this little note card at the early days as we had this whole thing open.

8:20or whole thing done, unable to open, a monument to my arrogance, it felt like at times. I wrote this note. I said, look, this is a test. Will it make you a better person or a worse person? Will I be a better entrepreneur, a better leader, a better writer, a better citizen, a better neighbor? If I can emerge from this better, that's great. If I can't, then I've screwed up, even if the bookstore ends up succeeding. So all of which is to say, Starting, running, operating any kind of business is extraordinarily difficult. It's always difficult. It always has been difficult. And in fact, art and work and life, they're really hard, right?

8:58And my point, what I want to talk about today is why, since it is hard, we might as well do it right, and we might as well do it in a way that lasts. So one of the things I discovered running this bookstore, obviously, I suspected and thought about it as an author, as a person in publishing industry. But I noticed something in publishing that happens to be true in almost every industry, which is that the priorities of the industry are totally screwed up and fundamentally irrational. So I'll give you a hint. This is from Seth Godin, one of the great marketers of our time. He said that book publishers make 90 % of their profit from books that are published more than six months ago.

9:36And yet, like 2 % of the effort is focused on those books. Everything is focused on what's new, right? The catalog, the library, just as it's true for movies and music, for most classic products in every industry. It's the old stuff that's profitable, that's efficient, that lasts. And yet all of the attention is on what's trendy and what's new, what everyone else is doing. And in fact, the New York Times bestseller list is fundamentally built around this bias. This is the fine print on the bestseller list, which you can look at at any time. it explicitly excludes what they call perennial sellers, books that sell week in and week out, right, as opposed to books that come in really hot out of nowhere and pop up.

10:21So for Quirk and Micrere, I sold over a million books worldwide before I appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, right? And that wasn't because cumulatively I'd sold a lot of books, but because in one concentrated week, I sold more than expected, right? So there is this fundamental bias in tech, in business, in publishing, in entertainment around what's new, because that's exciting. And what we ignore, the opportunity we leave on the table is the classic stuff that really works, right? If you think about most businesses, right? Most businesses take a while to become profitable. Most businesses lose money their first several years in business.

10:58So if we thought of the economy as a whole, it's not controversial, I don't think, to argue that the vast majority of profits in the economy are not coming from the hot new company. They're coming from established perennial companies that have figured out how to do what they do in a sustainable way aimed at longevity, which is what I want to talk about today. This idea of perennial sellers. This is my longhorn. Her name is Domino. But businesses, even a lot of the classic brands that we take for granted have been around a lot longer than we think, right? Kikumin soy sauce, over 100 years old, pretty cool.

11:39Fisker's scissors dates back to the 17th century, Zildigen symbols. They made symbols for Napoleon's army, his marching bands. And when they did that, they were already two centuries old, right? My point is we've got to radically expand our timeline when we think about the success of businesses. One of my favorite restaurants in LA, it's a greasy spoon called the Original Pantry Cafe right across the street from the Staples Center. Pandemic messed with their hours a little bit. But until 2020, they had been open 365 days a year, 24-7, since 1924. They did not have locks on the door of the restaurant because they'd literally never closed.

12:23And it's an all-cash business. So there's some advantages to this too. The point is they've lasted a very long time. The oldest continually operating business here in Nevada is the Santa Fe Club, which has been in business since 1905. Pretty cool. This hotel, 1969. Pretty good run for a place that's always based on what's trendy and new. The bank I use in Texas, 1868. Not bad. But nothing even close compared to the oldest bank in Italy, which dates to the 1400s. my bookstore in Texas is in a building that was built and opened in the late 1800s 1880s early 1890s the building next door to it the owner just the owner of the business just passed away his name was John he ran John John's hair design and I remember I walked into a couple years ago and I said wow this is really cool it looked very sort of almost trendy so retro and I said this is really cool.

13:22I like this. And he said, yeah, you know, I did all these designs myself. And I said, when was that? And he said, oh, when I opened. And I said, when was that? And he said, in 1969. He just closed after 52 years in business, which is a pretty good run. But it's an even more incredible run if you consider the fact that this building, which also opened in the 1880s, has always been a barbershop. It has been one continual barbershop for more than a century. And all of this proves what they call in economics the Lindy effect. It's named after a diner in New York City called Lindy's, which had a pretty good run.

13:57I believe it did close during the pandemic. But the Lindy effect is basically that things which last tend to continue to last. They have a long shelf life. The longer you last, the longer you'll continue to last. Basically that classics stay classic, right? So if you're trying to build a successful business, you should think about how do you make a classic? What goes in to making something that can stand the test of time? This is my donkey. His name is Buddy. I got him on Craigslist for$100. Craigslist could legally drink if it was a person, right? Almost entirely owned by one person. It makes about$900 million a year in profits.

14:37So it's not the trendiest, newest, fanciest tech startup that's breaking fundraising records, right? You won't see the owners or the founders on magazine covers or on social media, but they are cleaning up. Now let's contrast this a little bit with your industry. This is an article from October 2012. 75 % of the biggest home lenders in 2006 no longer exist. From 2006 no longer exist. I bet if we were to update this story, it'd be like 90%, 95%. Right? People don't think about making things that last, even though you're in a business that fundamentally is treating a very perennial need. So I want to poke around at this.

15:19And I want to sort of challenge you as you build your businesses, as you manage your careers, to think about how do you create something that endures and lasts? As Drake famously said, it's not who's popular now, it's who's still around a decade from now. That's the test. Can you run that gauntlet? And I think we begin there for looking at some first principles for lasting. I think we start with uniqueness, right? You could argue that every single human being, every person has totally unique DNA, totally unique set of circumstances that brought them into the world, totally unique set of experiences that they will have in their life, totally unique moment in time.

16:01And what do we do with this fundamental uniqueness is that we pretty much do what everyone else is doing, right? Peter Thiel, the economist, the tech entrepreneur, would say that competition is for losers, right? That you want to have a monopoly, that all great, truly successful business people own their space. They're the only one in it. And we have that at birth. And yet we sort of fritter it away by doing what we think we're supposed to. The other word for this is the blue ocean strategy. The blue ocean strategy means instead of competing in a red ocean where you have lots of competition, where people are just like you, you seek out the blue ocean where you're the only one, where you have no competition, right?

16:45If you're in a competition, you can lose. If you have no competition, you win by default. So where is the least competition? Where can you have a monopoly? This is the question. Where can you be fundamentally unique? Even this hotel, when it opened in 1969, was the largest hotel in the world, right? It's an interesting claim to fame. It fundamentally makes it unique. Even when I was thinking about writing my book, Perennial Seller, my publisher said, look, we think there's a really good market for a book that teaches people who write books how to market books. And I thought about that. And then I sold the proposal.

17:17They bought it. It was great. It was exciting. But then I looked at the market. And I saw a ton of other books about marketing. And it's not that these books are bad per se. but it's that they exist. And because they exist, I would have to compete by being better than them. I would have to compete by stealing attention or potential market share away from them. I would have to beat them even in an advertising match. I would have to outbid them for, say, a certain keyword. But by carving out my own niche, by writing about what we're talking about today, how you make things that last, you're the only one in that category.

17:49You want to be the only one you want to have the monopoly. This is actually one of the laws of marketing in the book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, which I very much recommend. Say it's better to be first than it is to be better. Marketing is a battle of perception, not products. Great. But what if you're in an industry where it's pretty established? It's pretty clear what it is. You're not inventing something wholly new. Well, they say invent a way to describe yourself as new, right? Invent a new category inside that niche, right? Lots of hotels, we're the world's biggest hotel. How do you target what you do so you have less competition and thus you can be more dominant over a long period of time?

18:31So the question is, as you're designing something, as you're marketing something, as you're coming up with a pitch, you've got to ask yourself, like, has anyone done this before? Or am I at least doing it in a new way? So you think about a bookstore, right? A bookstore is like the oldest business there is. It's not quite the oldest profession, but it's pretty old. Stoicism, the philosophy that I write about, was founded in a bookstore in Athens not long after Alexander the Great died, right? So it goes back a lot of years, like 23 centuries, give or take, right? That's a long time. So how do I expect to have a monopoly be a niche?

19:11Well, first off, I went to a place that doesn't have any bookstores. But when we looked at the sort of basic practices of running a bookstore, you end up contacting a wholesaler. In this case, it's a company called Ingram. You talk to the publishers, and they recommend that a bookstore of our size carries something about like 10 ,000 books. That's what a bookstore, your average independent bookstore would carry, between 10 ,000 and 15 ,000 titles. Well, that seemed very expensive and that seemed like a very high number, a lot to manage. And so what my wife and I did was settle on a fundamentally different way of running the bookstore, which is that we carry about 700 titles, right?

19:51And they all sit face out on the shelf. We don't carry every book. We don't carry the books that people think are trendy or new. We don't carry the books that publishers are pushing. We carry the books that sell consistently and have sold consistently over a very long time. some of our most popular books are 500 years old or 1 ,000 years old. Some of them are 50 years old. Some of the times the publisher doesn't think they continue to sell, but they fly off our shelves because we've read them and we actually love them. So we came up with a way of doing the bookstore that makes it unlike all other bookstores.

20:25And I was talking to someone at the store yesterday who drove from Los Angeles to come to the bookstore, right? And so when you make something that's new and different. When you own a category, when you're the only one in that category, you stand out, your marketing is easier, and thus, you also have a chance to last and endure. You, of course, do have to do the job, right? It can't be trendy and unique, this sort of made-up category that someone doesn't actually want or need. You have to do the job. These are my Red Wing boots. I bought them 13 or so years ago for$300, which seemed like an insane amount of money at the time, but they still work.

21:02I wore them yesterday. The only reason I'm not wearing them right now is I got them muddy when I was walking around on my farm. When you make something that does the job, people are willing to pay a premium for it because they know they'll continue to get value out of it, right? These shoes, I've had them resold by Red Wing. You just mail them back to the manufacturer. They put new soles on them. They clean them up. I saw a video of somebody discovering their grandfather's shoes, getting them out of the closet, and getting them looking like brand new again. But that's what happens when you make something great and you make something timeless.

21:37So the question that I see so many people with their businesses struggling with is, like, what do you do? Or what is this thing you're working on? And they're like, well, it's a... And then they launch into some, like, 20-minute explanation of a thing. And you're like, I'm actually interested in what you're talking about, why would a total stranger sit down and listen to this, right? You can't quickly and emphatically articulate what you do, and then you wonder why it doesn't resonate. You wonder why your marketing doesn't work, right? This is a blank that does blank for blank, right? Where are you creating value?

22:10What are you actually doing? You have to have clarity about this. The ultimate question in business and in marketing is, like, who are our customers? Like, who are they? I talk to authors, I go, who's this book for? And they go, I don't know, smart people. That's not a category, okay? First off, there's not that many of them, not as many as we'd like them to be. But those people don't like get together. There's not like a smart person conference, right? You have to know who your people are, what they do, how to reach them. They have to actually exist, not in some made-up spreadsheet, but in real life.

22:45How are you going to reach these people? Who are they and what do you do for them? What do you do for them? How do you create value for them? My editor once said to me, it's not what a book is, it's what a book does. It's not what I think it is. It's not my personal expression. It's why is someone paying me money for this? And why are they getting a greater return on that investment than they expected? Max Martin, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, written for every boy band you can imagine, every big rock band you can imagine, every big pop star of the moment. He subjects all the music that he writes to this thing that he calls the PCH test, right?

23:28So basically, he writes a song and doesn't go, oh, it's beautiful. I think it will work. He doesn't trust his gut, even though he has a great gut, clearly. He takes the car, he takes the song, puts it on something, gets in his car, and he drives up and down PCH, drives up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, ideally like in a convertible with the top down. And he goes, is this working? Is it enhancing this experience? Even thinking that music does a job for people, right? Even though it is artistic, even though it is a creative field and a creative bit of expression, does it do a job for people?

24:03Is it up to the environment that it's going to be consumed in? And one of the ways you have to do this is by mirroring the customer's experience. And then, And of course, also by, you know, like actually talking to the customers. I love this comic. Talk to customers. What do customers have to do with the products we want them to buy? So often, the marketing team or the sales team exists in this silo over here. Somebody's making the stuff and then they go, here, you sell this, right? As if the marketing team doesn't understand what the media wants, what the customers want, what's working in advertising and promotional channels.

24:40these things have to be integrated. There has to be a line of communication from the people on the ground interacting with the customers up through the development phase. So what gets made is marketable, most importantly, viable, right? Amazon does this. When you want to launch a service or a product inside Amazon, you have to write the press release first. Like, how are you going to announce it and explain it? Going back to that question, this is a blank that does blank for blank, right? Why does anyone give a shit? If you can't make it in a press release that's exciting or interesting, you've got to go back to the drawing board before you're going to get clearance.

25:18So instead of seeing the marketing and the sales as this afterthought, it has to be integrated into the process itself. Because ultimately, the only marketing that works is word of mouth, right? Do the people who have tried and used your product, do they tell other people about it, right? Does it do the job? And then can they explain it to other people? This is the bank that I use. I was telling you, Frost. If I didn't like Frost, if they were not a good bank, I wouldn't have included them in this slideshow, right? I wouldn't have recommended that my friends also bank there. This is my mortgage broker, Hyjin Kim and her husband, Jay.

25:54They founded JVM Lending. I've used her three or four different times. And the reason I've used her three or four different times is because on the first one we were doing, I got a referral. And then the whole thing went sideways. There was a bad appraisal. It was not going well. And she stepped in. She just solved all the problems. She made it so seamless and easy for me that when my friends have needed a mortgage broker, I said, I have exactly the person that you should talk to. Your customers are your advertisements, right? Of course, you can incentivize this. You can make it easier. But first off, it has to actually work, right?

26:29No amount of incentive is going to get someone to recommend something that doesn't work, that nobody cares about. But I like Wealthfront. Wealthfront's great. And Wealthfront pays me in free managed money if I refer other people. But over the years, I've collected, you know, you see these all the time in the emails. I've collected some of the referral programs that I love because they're so terrible. This is one from Scottrade, which is now TD Ameritrade. It's like, oh, okay, if I add some money into my account, you'll give me a little bonus. Look at this one here on the end. If I drop in a cool million dollars, they'll give me$2 ,000 cash back and 50 free trades, which were at that point worth $7 each.

27:10So people often think about incentives. They're like, we should reward people, but they don't actually think because they don't know the customers. They don't live in the real world where the customer would actually be prodded by this or be able to use it in any way. This is a mortgage statement that I got many years ago. And it said, hey, we appreciate your referrals. If one of your friends, family members, or acquaintances mentions it, I'm sure you do appreciate referrals. But you haven't made it easier for me in any way. You haven't made it clear for me in any way. And this is about the most boring pitch I've ever seen in my life.

27:41This is one from Quicken, now Rocket Mortgage. Look, there's so much going on. I don't even know what's happening. There's all these confusing codes. Then if I refer someone to buy a multi-million dollar property, I get like a Visa card with$700 on it. I mean, this is not what's going to get anyone excited. This is not going to work, right? Pitches have to be clear. They have to be simple. But most of all, they have to be tied to the fact that your product actually works for someone and has improved their life. It has to solve a problem. When I think about books, I try to write books that people that address a problem.

28:15So when someone sees one of their friends going through a problem, they go, I have just the book for you. Influencers are the same thing. People talk a lot about influencer marketing these days. But influencer marketing is just word of mouth, like on steroids. People spend a lot of money on influencer marketing because they have boring products that people don't actually like. And they have to pay celebrities or people with social media following to talk about it. Influencer marketing on my end has happened because the people like what I do. right? This is an Olympic medalist just posting about the books.

28:49These are, you know, a radio show. This is Joe Rogan. This is Lauren Bostwick, a makeup influencer. They liked this stuff. It works for them. Their job is to tell people about stuff that works for them. That's what an influencer is. So yes, there's sometimes a financial transaction. But when you've made something that really works, that solves a real problem that's interesting or exciting, the influencer marketing follows. This is Aaron Rodgers. He put it in a book club earlier this year. The New England Patriots credited it with winning the Super Bowl. Then people wrote about it. When you have something that solves a problem, the influencer stuff follows.

29:28When you have something that's boring or scammy or weird, you end up having to pay for it. So what I try to do, as I was saying, is root what I do in perennial timeless things. If you saw the movie Lady Bird, it's not really about a high school girl in 2004. It's a timeless coming-of-age story, right? The reason it wins Best Picture is because it speaks to something of that generation, as well as previous generations, as well as future generations, right? It's rooted in understanding what people have gone through and always will go through. Star Wars is not like the most successful franchise in the history of cinema.

30:08because of its fancy space lasers, right? Those effects in the old movies look comically bad now in many ways. Star Wars has lasted and created all its various spinoffs, is now worth billions of dollars, because George Lucas roots Star Wars in the hero's journey, the same journey of Gilgamesh and Odysseus. All the great stories of history are mirrored and played out in Star Wars. It's based on the hero's journey, what Joseph Campbell calls the hero of a thousand faces. That's what Luke Skywalker is. He roots it in something timeless and real.

30:53Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields.

31:33and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that.

32:14If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. The world is full of tours. But you don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places in between. The detours, where each adventure pulls you toward the next. And wrong turns turn out right. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks.

32:59It's a great book by Guy Kawasaki called Enchantment, about creating a wonderful sort of product experience. I very much recommend it. This is a book that sold well when it came out, has continued to sell. It's still relevant, even though it's 10 plus years old. I would venture to guess, though, that this book has sold much better than a book he wrote after called What the Plus, Google Plus for the rest of us. When you try to capture a trend or a moment in time, it often doesn't work. But when you root it in something that isn't going anywhere, you might not get off to as fast of a start, but you have a chance of sticking around.

33:34Like, this would be a great book to have written, right? Because people are always getting pregnant and they have no idea what to do, right? Because it's something that people want to help them with. And they go, oh, read this book, right? Even my work is based on stoicism. Stoic philosophy dates back 23 odd centuries, right? I'm not having to make this up from scratch. If it did, I'd have to be a lot smarter. I'd have to be a genius. And I am not a genius, but I am able to articulate and identify things that have worked over time. So it's about finding the timelessness in the timely, right? As Jeff Bezos would say, focus on the things that don't change, that aren't going anywhere, right?

34:18Not the fidget spinners, not cryptocurrencies or whatever is trending in the moment. I imagine his cycle of regret and excitement about this tattoo has changed a lot over the last few years. But the point is, like, rooted in something that's going to be around, that's going to stick around, right? And so I think about what you guys do, what you guys sell. And obviously it changes. The market goes up and down. There's new products, new ways of doing things, new regulations, changes all the time. But at the core, what you do is the most important, you sell the most important thing that there is, which is home, right?

34:57Which is where people live, which is what they build their life around, what they work so hard for. And when the marketing and when the products and the brand and the customer relationships are rooted in that, you'll find success. And when it's about what's trendy and new, I think you struggle with it. So we're talking about thinking about long term, not just with products, but in how we brand ourself. It's kind of crazy to think that BMW's ultimate driving machine campaign, the campaign itself is 50 years old, right? Because it speaks to something timeless. It doesn't say, oh, we have the fanciest X or this or that, right?

35:32It's the ultimate driving machine. It describes what a BMW was in 1976, describes what a BMW was in 1996, and hopefully it will describe what a BMW is in 2026, right? It's the ultimate driving machine. And when you find something that works and you continue to invest in it over time, yes, it might feel like it goes out of flavor temporarily, but you also have nostalgia working for you. You have consistency going for you. You have momentum going for you. This is the La Sangrata Familia. It's set to be finished actually in 2026, which will be the hundredth year anniversary of the architect's death.

36:13So it's a little over budget and a little behind schedule, but it takes what it takes, right? And when you think of these things in a long times and you're trying to build something that lasts for all time, you know, if it finishes a few years over schedule or a few decades over schedule, it doesn't really matter, right? They're thinking long term and it, you know, it's worth it. I think it's worth it. I love this. This is an LL Bean tag that's actually designed to assume you will pass this on to someone else, right? That one of your kids will wear it, then your younger kid will wear it, and then you'll give it to Goodwill.

36:50The idea is that over time, this will be used multiple times. I just bought a backpack from Patagonia. They actually have a used gear section of their website, right? I love the marketing of it, right? It's implying that their things stand the test of time. It's assuming that they're sustainable, that they're not just making, you know, disposable stuff. But also that they're, really investing in is developing customers of Patagonia products. They don't necessarily care if they profit off each one of those transactions. They're trying to create people who like their products and understand that they work and know from experience that it's not some piece of junk, that it can be used hard by multiple people over a long period of time.

37:38I think this is really cool. and you got to remember to all the people who aren't your customers you are new your thing is new sometimes I'll go I'll do an interview and they'll go are you okay talking about one of your older books and I go yeah of course to the people who haven't heard about it it's not old right to the people who are reading it for the first time it's brand new this newness bias is in our heads, right? Customers just want stuff that works. They just want their problems solved. Now, of course, you do have to be a creative marketer. You can have the most unique, coolest, effective, durable product in the world.

38:19But if people don't know that it exists, right, you're SOL. So I like to do controversial stuff. I do controversial stuff all the time. I once held an atheist church service for an author. I once sent a book to space with my bookstore. they started banning a bunch of books in the state of Texas so we just gave them away for free in front of the bookstore you might think that this is not great business for a bookstore our job is to sell books and here we are giving them away for free but the attention we get, the crowds that we draw from it were awesome. There's a bunch of homophobic stuff happening in the little town we were in so we held a drag reading which was really cool I donated$10 ,000 to get a Confederate monument moved from the courthouse down the street from the bookstore You can get negative attention for things that you were just following the law on, right?

39:06People get upset about things, but those people aren't your customers, and so I don't really care if I piss them off. Cards of Humanity did this awesome thing on Black Friday a couple years ago where they just sold nothing, right? They were counter-programming what everyone else was doing. They once raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to just dig a giant hole in the ground, which they live-streamed, which, of course, got a ton of attention. They ran a Super Bowl ad that was just a potato. Again, counter-programming. Pita every year designs a Super Bowl ad that they know will get banned from the Super Bowl.

39:40So then they don't have to pay to run it on the Super Bowl. And then the media talks about Pita's banned Super Bowl ad. I once sold a book via Bitcoin. We sold three copies via Bitcoin, but then the author made the front page of Yahoo and then was on CNBC about it, and we sold real copies to people with real money, and that was the whole point. This is, you know, I think more interesting than the free pens or the buying naming rights to local softball team or whatever, right? When I was looking for this picture of boring bank pens, I found this awesome McSweeney's article. We're stepping away from banking to focus on pens.

40:21The only thing I hate more than the pens is the pen on the string, right? You're not even taking the free advertisement. So the point is you can't be cheap and you can't be boring, right? When you're boring, you have to pay extra. And I would argue you don't have to pay anything at all if you have a platform, right? When Winston Churchill is driven out of power in the 1930s, this should be the end of a politician's career. Instead, he focuses on building what is basically a modern media empire. Between 1931 and 1939, Winston Churchill publishes 11 books, 400 articles all over the world in what were then the blogosphere.

41:07He writes in these magazines and newspapers, and he delivers 350 speeches, most of them via this newfangled thing called the radio. He becomes one of the most famous people in the world, one of the most influential people in the world. And although he has no political power, he's directly speaking to people all over the world, not just his small constituency inside England. And he's able to get his message out when the moment does come. He's primed the world for what it needs to hear, right? This platform is power. And as a business, we have to cultivate this. So many people, their business is cultivated on platforms that they don't control or has intermediaries between them and their customer.

41:50We think about the famous sales funnel. Right at the top is awareness. How are you developing awareness? What is your platform? How are you capturing that interest so you can drive it towards customers over a long time? So about two, two and a half years ago, my business made the decision that we were going to stop spending money on advertising entirely. We were just going to focus on we're going to take the$10 ,000,$15 ,000,$20 ,000 a month we were spending, and we were going to spend it instead on making cool stuff. It just struck me that the ads were converting, sure, but they weren't a positive good in the world.

42:25No one was like, thank you for making this Facebook ad. And were I to stop the advertising, the ROI would immediately cease, right? Because as soon as the ad isn't being served, it doesn't exist to people. So I decided instead to focus all that energy on making content. And we made videos. Right back there. Make lots of videos. Make videos. We make Instagram posts, TikToks. And these things have blown up. They do millions and millions of views on all the different platforms. And they've created a huge, huge audience for the work. So I don't have to market the work. I just have to tell my fans that new work exists.

43:08And as much as I love TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter and all the places that we make content on social media, the most powerful thing has been the email list because I own the email list. There's no one in between me and those customers. And I started an email list almost 15 years ago. I wanted to be a writer. I thought, why would anyone want to hear from me? They don't know who I am. But why would they sign up for a list from me? Also, they don't know who I am and what I offer. So I decided that one day, if I wanted to write my own book, I needed to create a list of people who bought books.

43:43So I started an email list that just recommended books. And for more than 10 years, I just recommended other people's books that I really liked. This started as 50 people in the BCC field of Gmail that I would just copy and paste each month. And it grew to 10 ,000 people by the time my first book came out and then 20 ,000 and 30 ,000. Now hundreds of thousands of people. The Daily Stoic email is about 500 ,000 people every day. The Daily Dad email that I do every day is about 100 ,000 people. So 600 ,000 people every day I send a note to. So that's the power that I have. That's the relationship I have with the audience that no one else can get between.

44:26And at the back of each one of the books that I publish is a prompt for the email list. It's where I put my energy. And then I don't have to do as much marketing. I don't have to spend money on advertising because I can just tell the people who have liked my stuff in the past that I have something new. And I even now sell most of my books directly, right? So I have not just email contact information, but I have physical addresses. I can send postcards. I can send follow-ups, right? I could just send them the book if I wanted to. I have direct access to the audience. Stefan Zweig, a great early 20th century writer, he would say, the most valuable success you can have is a faithful following, a reliable group of readers or fans or customers who look forward to what you do, who trust you, and whose trust you do not want to disappoint.

45:16I flew in this morning very early. I was very tired because I saw Iron Maiden play at the Moody Center in Austin yesterday. These are my pictures from seeing them in San Antonio before the pandemic. I didn't have time to put the new ones. But Iron Maiden, which is a band that's never really been popular, never been on the radio, is kind of absurd on their face. They have three lead guitarists. They write 12-minute songs about Alexander the Great. They have these giant scary things that come out on stage. They've never had any huge hits. They sold out the same arena that Harry Styles is playing in next week, right?

45:57This is 40-odd years into the band existing. It was crazy to see all these different people of all these different ages. I will say it was dudes. It was a lot of dudes. the band flies themselves to each show in their own jet which the lead singer flies this is just some Iron Maiden facts that has nothing to do with marketing but I love this quote this is from Bruce Dickinson the lead singer he says we have our field and we plow it that's it what's going on in the field next to us is of no interest can only plow one field at a time so this is a band that sure heavy metal was popular in the 80s then grunge came along and it stopped being popular and then indie rock came along and it was even less popular and then rap came along and it was less popular, right?

46:41They have just been focusing on what they do for who their customers are. Their manager was once approached by a fan in the industry, said, hey, you know, I love what you do. You're one of my favorite people in the music business. And he said, I'm not in the music business. He said, I'm in the iron fucking maiden business, right? He's in it for his fans, for what they do. That's what you want. I'm not in the publishing industry. I'm in my industry, me, Inc. I have my fans, my customers. I don't care what's popular. I don't care what's selling. When I walk by an airport, I don't go, oh, I wish I was there.

47:19I know who I'm speaking to, and I speak to them every single day. Lady Gaga said, I'm not the next Madonna. I'm the next Iron Maiden. You can see why she would say this. This is their 17th album. They've done multiple live albums, like 25 world tours. They've sold almost 100 million records. They've more streamed than some of the biggest acts in the world. And I didn't get to do it this time, but last time I saw them, they had this VIP package, and it was$220. And basically, they just gave you all these tchotchkes. That was probably$12 worth of stuff. And then a bunch of the fans could get together and talk.

48:00And everyone was excited to pay it, right? Tickets were already insane. But people wanted the upgraded experience. They wanted more because there was this cultivated relationship, the trust that we were talking about, the thing that you don't want to disappoint, the meaningful connection. The joke about Iron Maiden from sort of snootier people in the music industry was that this was a band that sold more t-shirts than albums, right? Which may be true, except for the margins on t-shirts are way better than the margins on albums. And as I watched them sell thousands of$50 t-shirts last night, you get the point, right?

48:39When you have that relationship, when you lock in with who your customers are, you're not worried about finding more and more and more new people who are only kind of half bought in. You sell high-end stuff, the stuff that your people want at whatever prices they think is fair, right? So you want this. The community is ultimately worth way more, and it sustains you. You evolve with them. They evolve with you, and you're immune to what's happening in the world outside. So as I wrap up here, I guess what I would say is that, look, life is very brief. We don't know how long we're here. We don't know how long we get to do this.

49:18This is why the Stoics remind themselves memento mori, right? Remember that you could die. Mark Strelitz says you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. This is an important part of the creativity process for me, the mindset that I want to have. I go, look, am I giving this moment all that I have? Am I doing my absolute best? Am I making a positive industry, a positive difference in my industry, in my space? Am I thinking long-term? Am I building something that matters, that I'm proud of? Is this the legacy that I want to leave? Memento Mori puts that in perspective because we only get to do this once.

49:59We don't know how long we get to do it. So to try to make something ephemeral, to try to make something that cashes in, to try to spend our precious time, our most precious resource, on something we don't like, on something that we wouldn't use, on something that we know isn't decent or fair or honest, right? Life is too short. Life is too short. So as you leave today, I want to leave you with this idea that none of us know how long we have and that what we spend our time on is ultimately who we are. That's the legacy that we leave. Hopefully it's a really long legacy. Hopefully it endures, not just for 40 years like a band like Iron Maiden, not just for 100 years like some of the businesses we've talked about, but for 500 years like some of the businesses we talked about.

50:49But we don't know that. All that matters, all that we control, the Stokes would say, is what we show up and do today, the attitude we bring to it, the ethics we bring to it, focus we bring to it, effort we bring to it. And that has to be enough. Thank you all very much.

51:11Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way you go is the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.

51:56We'll see you next time.

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