Seth Godin: The Smallest Viable Audience and the Work That Might Not Work [From the Archive]

14:47James Altucher:It's so funny because this brings up several things. One is Kevin Kelly's great essay, of course, A Thousand True Followers. The idea is that you need a thousand super devoted followers, basically, and you can make a living. The other is, it reminds me of your last book, which is this massive, beautiful, beautiful book. And I totally forget the title. I think I have early onset Alzheimer's. This might not work. This might not work. and it was just a beautiful book. It did blow me away and you came on the podcast to talk about it where you only sold 500 copies. How many copies?

15:21Seth Godin:There were 5 ,000 copies. 5 ,000. Right, and I refused to make more. So once you know that, once you know the revenue is going to be a million dollars, there's going to be 5 ,000 readers, it's going to be 17 and a half pounds, it's going to be 800 pages, go make something you're proud of. And that's enough because if I had tried to make it into a hit, I would have compromised every one of the elements of it. 100 ,000 people wouldn't have bought a book that big and that extraordinary, so I would have made it less of it. And then what would I have gotten in the end? Yeah, because I guess when you try to make something

15:58James Altucher:for the masses, for millions and millions of people, you might think to yourself, okay, well, if I only hit one-tenth of that, I'm still selling a lot. But the problem is you might just totally bomb. You never hit one-tenth. But okay, you bring up Psy's Gangnam Style. And I remember watching the video once, the development of Psy's Gangnam Style. And you see Psy, every quarter second of that video, he's working hard in the editing to make that quarter second funny and interesting. Sure. And he's aiming for a hit for the masses.

16:30Seth Godin:Well, but what we didn't see are the 500 videos of the 500 other people who spent even more time than he did also doing what he did and none of them succeeded. So Sai, which his video has been seen more than two billion times, right? How does that happen? We don't know how it happens and we know we cannot repeat it. It is not based on his talent because if it was, the one after that and the one after that and the one after that would be successful and he's invisible now, he's gone. Why? Did something break inside of him? No, it's that his talent was never the point. You have to be good enough.

17:09Seth Godin:And then after that, it's a giant spin of the wheel. And the arrogance of Western civilization is to say, I won the spin, therefore I must be good, right? That's not necessarily the case.

17:20James Altucher:And you mentioned the concept of whales, that there are a few people in each tale, in each platform who kind of, let's say, dominate the message of that platform. And so you look at the background of almost all these hits and there's usually someone like Justin Bieber who tweets, oh my God, I just saw the most amazing video, size Gangnam style, and then it takes off from there. And without that one tweet, it never would have caught fire.

17:46Seth Godin:Malcolm wrote about this in The Tipping Point, and it's been discussed a lot. Duncan at Columbia goes into this a lot too. There's plenty of evidence that that's not actually what happens. That Justin came later in the process for something like that. that usually it begins with people we don't expect it to begin with. Yeah, Oprah needs to anoint somebody once a month. And if you can get picked by Oprah, if you can get picked by Justin Bieber, go for it. I'm not opposed to that. But don't bet your happiness and your work on that magic happening. It's way more likely that what's going to happen is a small group of committed people are going to come out of nowhere around your thing.

18:30Seth Godin:And in epidemiology, there's this concept of R0, R with a zero after it, which is how many people who got a disease infect, how many do they infect? And if it's over one, it means you have a pandemic on your hands. So it's very rare for something to go over one, that one person gets you, one person gets you, one person, because that's infinity. For something like the flu to spread, there's moments when it goes over one, but usually it goes back down. So when we make a piece of work that we want to spread, it's a mistake to try to get the gatekeeper to like it. The correct answer is to find the 500 people or the 1 ,000 people who cannot go to bed tonight without telling somebody else.

19:12Seth Godin:Because then our knot is over one. Then we have a pandemic on our hands. And then the question is, will the people after that and the people after that? So you said Purple Cow was one of the first books of mine you read. Why did it spread? It's not better or worse written than my other books. It spread because what happened was, first I seeded it to 3 ,000 people. Those 3 ,000 people got it in a milk carton and some of them left it on their desk. You don't usually leave a book on your desk and if you do, everyone ignores it. But if there's a milk carton on your desk, your coworkers might ask about it.

19:46Seth Godin:So it was an example of what it was about. But the real win was, I gave you a term to use in a meeting. And at the meeting, you could say to your art director you're product development people, what we need here is a purple cow. And there wasn't a term for that before. But because you had the term and using the term would make you feel good, you used it. And because you used it, people talked about the term. And when people talked about the term, they needed to know what it meant. When they needed to know what it meant, they would go by the book.

20:15James Altucher:Okay, but let me question on that. So you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. I could think of other books like Freakonomics or even my book, Choose Yourself, where we sort of not quite invent a term, but create a philosophy around a term and almost define that philosophy around a specific term. Like you change the meaning of the words purple cow. Malcolm Gladwell changed the meaning of the tipping point or at least made his name associated with that phrase. So you can argue then, okay, if I want to create a hit, the very first, and you've told me this before, what makes a best-selling book, not what's inside the pages, but what people see when they first look at it, one of the things they see is the cover, one of the things they see is the title.

20:58James Altucher:So you can start to plan a hit based on what people's first reactions are to what they see.

21:05Seth Godin:Let me try it with a little more nuance, which is every hit changes the people it touches. It doesn't simply entertain them, it makes a change happen. And that's what marketers do, we make change happen. but that requires making an assertion saying I want you to feel this feeling I want you to believe this belief and once you see it you can't unsee it so that change has to happen before you slap a title on it before you make a cover what change am I trying to make here in the way someone engages with us and this runs counter to our allergy of being criticized because if you don't want to be criticized you have to be invisible.

21:51Seth Godin:You have to fit in all the way. And so if we look at what most people do on social media, what most people do in their day job is they seek to fit in. And the problem with fitting in is then you're not changing anybody.

22:05James Altucher:So let's take Akimbo as an example. What's the change you want to see? Overall with this podcast, what's the change you want to see happen?

22:13Seth Godin:I think that there are people who feel under-challenged about the way they think about culture. They would like to think about culture more deeply. They would like to change the culture. So akimbo means two things. It means standing with your arms folded in a position of power or your hands on your hips.

22:34James Altucher:Because I've seen it in a sentence, but I've never seen it by itself. Like Wonder Woman. Yeah, so on akimbo.link, you have the woman standing to the side, looking fierce, has that strong stance. Exactly.

22:47Seth Godin:But where did that come from? it comes from the idea of the bend in the river. The bend in the river is that crook akimbo from the Norse or whatever. So I am making a podcast for people who want to change the culture for the better. And if you want to change the culture for the better, it's good to know the geography of the culture and what causes it to change. And so the episode that I just finished is about how we are driven by our primary senses like smell, even though we can't narrate them. They just go straight to our amygdala and shift us. Well, once you start to see that, you will see it in a lot of places.

23:23Seth Godin:So why does your chiropractor office feel different than your surgeon's office? Because when you walk into the surgeon's office, you're in a different mental state and emotional state than when you walk into that cheap paneled chiropractor's office. So why did the chiropractor do that? Because for not a lot of money, she could have shifted your state into one where her placebo would work even better. And once you start to see these breadcrumbs that I'm leaving behind, I think you'll become better at changing the culture. That's the change I'm trying to make.

23:52James Altucher:But everything seems, I know I keep focusing on the hits, Phil, but you've inadvertently or advertently mentioned concepts from several of your other podcasts. It seems like part of the concept here is that there's a lot of randomness that happens. And how do you kind of get a little bit of control over that randomness? So again, in Hitsville, you mentioned you want to not just make a post that's a hit. You're going to also be a mini platform yourself. You're going to create 7 ,000 blog posts. And overall, your collection might be a hit collection because you have more control just by the sheer mass.

24:31James Altucher:So any one of these things could be hit or all together, they could be mini hits. And together, then the collection's a hit.

24:37Seth Godin:The tactic you're talking about is a good one, but there's a bigger thing behind it that's really insightful, which is the arc of all the work here is about two things that I believe change all of us which are fear and status. Fear, because we're all going to die, because of marketing, conflate that with we'll bring the wrong purse to a party which is the same as dying. And status, which is the flip side of it is who gets to eat lunch first? Who gets to water at the oasis? How do I move up? Where is my standing? And so my theory is that the culture is being corrupted to make us more fearful and to use status as a weapon, to bring shame associated with status.

25:18James Altucher:And this is not just a today's culture. This is history back to when we were chimpanzees.

25:23Seth Godin:But for the last 50 years, it's been commercialized and amplified. Those two things, that we do it on purpose. And so that's where a lot of public misogyny and racism starts to show its face because we're using fear and status. So what I'm trying to help people understand is, one, if a random event goes against you, do not take it personally. In fact, you should expect it, because that's what makes it a random event. That means you shouldn't then cower in fear. You should expect that that thing you're launching isn't going to be a hit. How do you organize so that it's fine that it's not? And that's the thing with 7 ,000 blog posts.

26:02Seth Godin:I've never once had a blog post that won the internet. never once had a blog post that got millions of visits. Not once, and that's fine with me because that's not what I'm trying to do. I know how to write that kind of link bait. I don't want to do that. And then the other one is status, which is when you look in the mirror and measure yourself, who are you measuring yourself with and against? So if you decide to become a stand-up comic, does it mean that you're not a good one if you're not as famous as Jerry Seinfeld? Is that your measure? Is your measure how many laughs you got tonight? because that's foolish.

26:35Seth Godin:Because maybe everyone in the audience only speaks Dutch. And that's why you didn't get a lot of laughs tonight. You have to figure out how to do it over time and measure the right things. So what we teach in the Alt MBA over and over and over again is the dance between the fear and the status. Because if you get clear about that and you can act in ways where the fear doesn't get in the way of your work and you can be generous so that status isn't the short-term goal, it's the long-term impact, you can make way more change happen than you ever expected.

27:05James Altucher:I think that's really important. And you bring that up in another podcast. All your podcasts are great, so I don't know which one it was in. But basically the idea that, let's say you write a book. You write the book, but now you have to think about what does the editor think? What does the marketing department think? What does the publisher think? What does the publishing industry magazines think? What does the bestseller list say? So there's like 19 out of 20 things that you have to think about when you write a book instead of just the craft of writing. And so the idea is people should just go back to the craft of writing, write the next book or rewrite their book or whatever.

27:40James Altucher:And I think that's really important in any situation because we can't control the 19 out of 20 things. And I think that's kind of the theme of a lot of your work.

27:49Seth Godin:And it makes it even worse when we think we can control them. So we played a lot of croquet when I was growing up on my bumpy backyard. And the thing about croquet is you've got to go left to go through that hoop and then right to go through that hoop and then left to hit that pole. And the number of people you have to have say, I love your book to get it through the traditional channel makes your book worse. And it makes your book more average because each one of those people, while they mean well, is trying to please a conservative constituency. So my argument is we just blew this whole thing up.

28:26Seth Godin:The long tail is here. So instead of racing back to the old days and worrying about getting through all the filters, let's go to a new place where we say, it's not for you, it's not for you. Here it is, it's for you, and it's pure. It's exactly what I wanted to make for you. And when we look, Sweetgreen, the salad bar chain in New York, doesn't sell French fries. Now, there's probably not a board meeting, but one could imagine one where someone on the board says, but some people love French fries. Let's also serve french fries because then those people will have something to eat. And you keep broadening it and broadening it and broadening it and the next thing you know, you're Roy Rogers, Sbarro, junkie stuff.

29:09Seth Godin:That's not what they did. They said, no, it's not for those people. It's for these people. No filters, these people. And as soon as you go public, that all gets wrecked because the public markets say you've got to get bigger and bigger and bigger so it gets averaged down.

29:23James Altucher:And then you do get compared to the ones who won the long tail like McDonald's.

29:28Seth Godin:Yeah, exactly. So I'm not in favor of most people who care having their thing eventually go public. I think if you care, keep making the thing you care about. And it's interesting to have watched Howard Schultz at Starbucks dance that dance for 20 years. I'm saying, we know we could make more money by serving soft serve. We're not gonna. We're gonna do this work we're proud of instead. And it doesn't maximize return on investment. it maximizes the cultural yield of your work.

29:58James Altucher:Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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32:11James Altucher:And I feel like you do the same thing. Like what lights your heart on fire is kind of taking these conceptions of, oh, okay, this is what makes a hit or coincidences are this or you need to have a blog for this reason or I don't know, all these things that you do. And what you do is specifically, if I'm going to try to put a formula to it, is take these things that you care about and think about and kind of twist the way people normally look at it.

32:41Seth Godin:Not on purpose. No, I don't. The formula is, here's a microphone. We gave you a microphone. And it's a special kind of open mic night because you won't get thrown off stage, but people might leave the room. But you have a microphone. What are you going to do with it? My formula is I wake up in the morning and I think about the people I seek to serve. I know I have a microphone. I am not trying to get more people to come to the club. I am not trying to generate revenue. I just want to teach the people who want to go where I want to go. That's all I do. and I don't reverse engineer and say, well, if I did this, it would work even better.

33:20Seth Godin:I say, this is an art project. This is a chance to contribute to the culture as I want it to be. And I understand that if I picked a fight with someone, my blog traffic would go up. I don't want to do that, even though it costs me approval. It costs me clicks. So I don't look at my stats. I don't know how many people visited my blog yesterday. I don't know how many copies of a book I sell. By refusing to know those things, by not reading my Amazon reviews, I make it so I can actually do my work. So if we're having a meta conversation here, the formula is no matter what it is you do, that is a good path because it makes it more likely you will get what you seek than if you try to reverse engineer random events.

34:06James Altucher:Right, so you're saying, let's say what you do is writing or what you do is a certain kind of business, get rid of distractions like, oh, what's my Amazon sales rank on my book? because that's sort of meaningless. Don't focus on the latest news about the Kardashians because that might not have nothing to do with improving my craft as a writer. Focus on what you do. And then I think also focus on, you've said it over and over, try to figure out who your audience is. And we spoke about this before the podcast, audience selection versus audience development. Don't try to educate a million people to be your fans.

34:41James Altucher:What's the audience you really are aiming for that you could really focus a message to that you know they're going to listen to? And how do you select your audience? What's the audience you're going through?

34:50Seth Godin:So if I was going to say this in six words that people could write down, it's really simple. Choose your customers, choose your future. If you're a freelancer and you have bad clients, you're going to be a bad freelancer. If you're a freelancer and you have great clients, you're going to get better clients. It goes on and on and on. If you're a doctor, it doesn't matter what it is. Choose your customers, choose your future. And who are your customers? My customers are people who are thirsty, dissatisfied, and generous.

35:17James Altucher:What do you mean by generous? Because I like that phrase.

35:21Seth Godin:I find the whole Ayn Randian Atlas Shrug thing complete nonsense. It's fine for 14-year-olds, but we had plenty of things we did when we were 14 that we don't take seriously. This idea that you need to be selfish is that some sort of way to win and that we should keep track of bank balances as some sort of indication of our worth makes no sense to me. What it means to be generous is to say, I'm going to expend emotional labor, which is not the physical labor of digging a ditch, but the difficult labor of confronting my fear, putting aside my short-term needs to help other people get where they're going.

35:59Seth Godin:Because I believe if we can go to that place, all of us will benefit. Zig Ziglar said, if you help enough other people will get what they want, you'll get what you want. I just like the first half of that. If you just help enough other people get what they want, period. That if we lived in a community where that's what was going on, I think it would be a good place because in the connection economy, connection creates value. Who connects to us? We're connected to people we're generous to. We're connected to people we see because people want to be seen. People don't want to be lonely. They don't want to be objectified.

36:31Seth Godin:They want to be seen. So my ideal reader, listener, whatever, is somebody who looks at this opportunity and says, oh, I got a mic, right? Tell me how to be generous to the people I care about. Because if we can do that, it becomes a virtuous cycle that doesn't tear everything down, it builds everything up.

36:51James Altucher:Because I think the undercurrent of a lot of what you're saying is those 5 ,000 people say, they're not, that might be the audience you're targeting, but there's something else it seems like you're targeting, which is you want to create content that's shareable. So it's easy for you to create content that those 5 ,000 people will like. And they'll consume it because they've been fans of yours for years and they've read all your books and they'll say, oh, here's another Seth Godin thing, I'll buy it. But you want to kind of always find that you do push yourself to say what's new so that they can say to their friend who might not have heard of you, hey, you have to read this.

37:28James Altucher:This will change your life.

37:30Seth Godin:Pretty close. I've said I want to be judged not by my work, but by what the people who learned from me taught other people. So I don't want people to tell other people about me. I want people to teach other people. And if I don't get credit, it's fine with me. That that second order teaching shows me that I did a good job.

37:50James Altucher:Yeah, and it's related to all this math about network effects. So for instance, a simple example of it is, if you want to use LinkedIn to get a job, you don't go to your first level connections, you go to your second level connections, your weaker ties. and they're the ones that are most likely to help you find a job. In part because A, there's more of them, but I don't know what the reason for this network effect is. But somehow if your weaker ties appreciate what you're doing, kind of the connections of your connections, then that shows you're having an impact.

38:26Seth Godin:It's even cooler than that. The people who run LinkedIn told me that more than 70 % of their revenue comes from things you don't even see. Not from in-mail and stuff like that. It comes from recruiters paying LinkedIn to help them find people like you. The best way to get a job using LinkedIn is to be amazing. Because if you are amazing and you keep doing amazing work, people will come find you. That's what makes it work. The reason that second-order effects are better than first-order effects is first-order effects are based on the connection we have with people on an emotional level who know us.

39:03Seth Godin:There is shame associated with not helping us. There are status associated in this interpersonal relationship with helping us. That disappears for second order effects because there's nothing at stake other than, wow, something amazing is happening here, I better tell other people. So that's the part that people miss. It's what they miss about SEO, it's what they miss about LinkedIn, it's what they miss about Amazon, which is the place to do the work is not in the hustle. The place to do the work happens long before the hustle where you are the person they want to find. If you become the person they want to find, you don't have to spend a lot of time getting found.

39:38James Altucher:I totally agree. I think the whole concept of SEO feels very fake to me because if you have nothing to say, there's nothing to SEO. But for you, and this sounds like a naive question, but it's a question I want to know the answer to and maybe other people, how do you become amazing? I mean, obviously those sit every day and work at your craft. You write your blog post every day. you do this podcast now on a regular basis. But what's, if you could formulize it, how do you become amazing?

40:09Seth Godin:Right, and that's the essence of the work. And so we've spent a bunch of time talking about some of the surface stuff, but the work is the emotional labor of confronting our fear. Can't make it go away, but you can dance with it. And we live in a culture with more neophiliacs than ever before. What's a neo? Neophiliac, people who like the new. And so something's new now for four days, not four months. Used to be a movie would run in the theaters for a year. Now a movie runs in the theater for two weeks. And we say, that's old. What's next? So given that there's so much neophilia, there's a demand for new.

40:49Seth Godin:That's good. But creating new is really hard because what everyone wants to do is buy a dummy's book, see the structure, follow the rules, do the bullet points, and be done knowing it's going to work. but all of the breakthroughs, all of the magic happens when you do something that might not work. And it's the things that might not work that are generous. That's where art lives. That's where innovation lives. That's where the magic happens.

41:15James Altucher:So let me think of that. The things that might not work, that's where the generous is. Right. And so give me an example because I listen to your podcast and I've listened to pretty much all of them and I always wonder, Or did he just wake up and think about this odd story of coincidences? This guy who had a baby fell on him, the same baby two years in a row. Where do these, you know, take your quote you just said and apply it to that example.

41:47Seth Godin:So let me give you a public example first and I'll talk about the baby thing. So Warby Parker is saving Americans hundreds of millions of dollars by attacking an Italian conglomerate that's a multi-billion dollar company that makes all the eyeglasses in the world. Warby was started by a bunch of kids at UPenn, at Wharton, and it worked. But all of their advisors and all the people they trusted said, nah, that's never going to work.

42:16James Altucher:Adam Grant mentions this in the original. Exactly, Adam Grant said it's never going to work.

42:20Seth Godin:So they did something that might not work. And as a result, large numbers of people benefited. Plenty of their classmates built another version of this or another version of that. Didn't work. So I got a podcast coming up. I know in the back of my head I have a microphone. What am I going to talk about? And my art director, creative director Alex Peck, mentions James Cook to me for something else that I write about. And the very next day, I run into James Cook on Wikipedia. twice in 20 years. And that's a coincidence. And I feel that feeling we all get when we get a coincidence. I say to myself, is that feeling right?

42:59Seth Godin:Is it okay that I feel this feeling? What could I teach people about coincidences that might rub them the wrong way but is actually true? So I say, all right, I'm going to need some really juicy coincidences here. So I start Googling for juicy coincidences. And then I think about, oh wait, there's that doppelganger I met and that coincidence happened. And then I got this other one. So now I got seven coincidences. Three that I found in the outside world, four that happened to me. I trough some lines between them and I say, the obvious thing to say about coincidences is this. I shouldn't say anything obvious because everyone goes, of course.

43:30Seth Godin:What's the non-obvious insight that we can tell ourselves about coincidences that might help us make better decisions going forward? Deal with con men, bring better work to the world. Oh, I need a couple more dots to make that argument. So I search some more. All right, now I got enough anecdotes. This isn't proof. I just want to describe these anecdotes to people. And if they're like me, when they hear them, they'll come to the conclusion I came to. And I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just saying, look at these dots. When you look at all these dots, what do you think? And if you, well, of course, then it was a good podcast.

44:07James Altucher:And so what's to you a bad example where you were going down an idea that you thought initially was interesting? Like for instance, this coincidence one, I thought it was a great podcast. You bring up great anecdotes. part of your amazing ability as a podcaster is your ability to tell a great story. But like the coincidences idea, you're kind of on the gray area of things people know and things people don't know. Because people know that, okay, over the course of a lifetime, odds are you're going to experience five or six coincidences. Amazing coincidences.

44:39Seth Godin:You would think, but that's not what my email says.

44:41James Altucher:Right, so that's why I say it's in the gray area. Like I had heard the concept before, but then I really appreciated your storytelling and the examples and it made me think further about the issue, whereas some people might not know the concept at all. And so the other thing I'm curious about is, are you just a massive reader so that you're being exposed to thousands of ideas that people might think are common ideas?

45:03Seth Godin:Yeah, I don't think I work as hard as people think I do and I know I don't read as much as I would like or as I used to.

45:11James Altucher:You're the first person who admits that.

45:13Seth Godin:But I'm a collector, right? So something happens to me at the DMV. And I'm like, this is going to be a blog post. It's going to be a blog post. A year from now, five years from now, I'm remembering this story. I don't remember where I parked. I don't remember this, I don't remember that. But in that moment, yeah, that one. And I feel like a talent scout. I'm guessing when a talent scout meets the next big actor or model, they remember that. That's because what they're looking for. So I'm always looking for that. most of the time it ends in a trite dead end. So you will never hear me say that the secret of success is to work harder.

45:52Seth Godin:Because we've heard that 10 ,000 times. There's nothing interesting in saying work harder. That doesn't rise to the level of me needing to teach it.

46:00James Altucher:So will you start to think, can I play with the idea the secret to success is to figure out how to work less?

46:05Seth Godin:Yeah, exactly. Not because I want to have that link bait headline, But to say, where would the nuance in that be? And then that led to the idea of emotional labor. That led to Steve Pressfield's The War of Art, which led to the idea of the resistance, which led to the amygdala, which led to the fact that the fear can't go away, which led to the fact that the reason emotional labor is so difficult is we're trying to make the fear go away because that's what we got taught to do, which led to education, which led to will this be on the test, which led to will this get me into a famous college, all in a giant circle.

46:36Seth Godin:And that's three years of my work life right there.

46:39James Altucher:And I would say a lot of it, and we'll close up. I know we have some time constraints. A lot of this is about self-awareness. So when you get into an environment, oh, I wrote a book, what's next? And then you have all of culture attacking you. Like, well, was it an Amazon bestseller? Was it a New York Times bestseller? Did everyone write you emails? Did everyone hate it? Like you get all the, you have to be aware. You have to put an arm's length distance between your belief in the craft and then society's beliefs. in the craft. Exactly.

47:10Seth Godin:Exactly right. And so, you know, the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi is fascinating.

47:14James Altucher:Yes.

47:15Seth Godin:Because for 40 years of this guy's life, he chopped wood, he carried water. For 40 years of his life, he had a craft and he didn't worry about the outside world. He did his craft at the expense of his family, but he did, and many, too many tuna, but he did his craft. And then he got a Michelin star. And suddenly the whole thing shifts to the external, right? How hard is it to get a table? What does this reviewer think of you? What does this critic think of you? For me, that's a tragedy. Because after it happened, you don't see any joy in Jiro's life anymore. Because he's always looking in the mirror.

47:53Seth Godin:He's always looking over his shoulder. It's always that. That's not what he set out to do when he started.

48:00James Altucher:It's that awareness that the award wasn't the reward.

48:05Seth Godin:Right, exactly. And so what I'm trying to say to people over and over and over again is, my opinion doesn't matter. The skeptic's opinion doesn't matter. The critic's opinion doesn't matter. Did you change someone for the better in a way that you're proud of? And if you did that, please do it again.

48:19James Altucher:And I think having the ability to change someone for the better, you're saying focus a little bit on who you want to change and that might be based on your background and your experience, your knowledge, and then build up knowledge, even more knowledge related to that. and then kind of come up with these unintuitive ways to express it combined with storytelling. I'm sorry if I'm trying to formalize you too much. No, I got it.

48:45Seth Godin:Put me down for that.

48:46James Altucher:So let me ask you two questions and then you have to go. How long have you been married? 30-ish years. 30-ish years. Can I mention your wife's bakery? Please, she would love that.

48:59Seth Godin:What's the name of it? It's called By The Way Bakery. By The Way Bakery. As in, by the way, it's gluten-free.

49:02James Altucher:Four locations, one on 90th Street here in Manhattan. What's the secret to a successful marriage? I'm engaged, I want to know.

49:11Seth Godin:I think the secret has to be that there is no secret.

49:15James Altucher:That's very unobvious.

49:19Seth Godin:The obvious things of listening and caring and creating space, that there's two different people who are doing something together, that they don't always agree, but that they always are part of the together part and the leaving space for people to be who people are. That's not going to work for everybody but that's all not a secret. It's just be a good person, keep your promises, show up with a smile on your face. These are all things that we already know.

49:51James Altucher:I love the leaving space idea because again it's related to audience selection versus audience development. Yeah, exactly. So you find the person you can leave space with.

50:01Seth Godin:Yeah, I mean, there are people who say the secret of a good marriage is marrying the right person, which is very flattering to the person that you married. And I'm so pleased that I married the person that I married. But it's not very helpful advice. Because you won't know until 20 years later if you married the right person, if that's the advice. No, I think the advice is there's 7 billion people on the planet and we ought to be able to find enough space to engage with any of them. Not necessarily in a 50-year marriage, but to be able to have the ability to see people as they wish to be seen, to tell stories that are true, to engage with others on a journey because all we have is time and we don't have that much.

50:43Seth Godin:And it's when we try to force other people using dominance, not affiliation. When we get all hung up on our status roles, there's a thing in the Times today that men are uncomfortable when their wives make more money than them. Well, that's nonsense. That's got put on you. Don't take that. That the alternative is to say, if you like being married, be married, but then like it because it's a choice. And the stories we tell ourselves matter way more than the stories other people tell.

51:16James Altucher:But you're sort of saying one can get married to anybody and make it work.

51:20Seth Godin:I'm not ready to say anybody, but I think if you look at all the data that's so easily available, there's not a lot of correlation between marriages that work and demographics or even psychographics that are easily available. If we put all the data about everyone into a computer, it's not clear it would find better spouses for each of us. What I do know about our lives is the story we tell ourselves, That narration is going 18 hours a day. And it's that narration that changes so much of how we see the world and so much of how we do it. It's all cognitive behavioral therapy is about. It's that noise in our head.

52:01Seth Godin:And so as a teacher, I don't teach about marriage, but I teach about the noise in our head. I teach about the story we tell ourselves. And it's hard to help someone change their story. But that is the kind of teaching that matters. If you want to teach someone to be a great hockey player, You don't teach them a slap shot. You teach them how to think that they're a great hockey player because then they'll make the slap shot happen.

52:24James Altucher:So other question, last question. I've been doing this podcast for five years with guests such as yourselves. I've had the most amazing guests in the world over the past five years. It's just, I feel so grateful for it. And I kind of want to change formats a little bit. Like I've been doing the same thing now for five years. How would you change the format of this podcast? What could I do better?

52:47Seth Godin:Well, it's so thrilling and challenging to have these conversations with you because you're erudite and generous and smart in these conversations. And so I wouldn't change any of that. I think if you are feeling restless, why not make one out of every four podcasts a podcast with just you? Yeah.

53:04James Altucher:Start there. I like that idea. We've been doing that a little bit, but I think I got to play with that more. So Seth, when's your next book coming out? Comes out in November. It's called This Is Marketing. This morning, will you come on the podcast again And for that, I'd love to talk about it. And Akimbo, I encourage everyone to listen to it. I think we even had Akimbo on, an episode on in the space of this podcast. And I've listened to every episode. They're brilliant. And people around me who are just casually listening are like, who is this guy? This is brilliant.

53:35Seth Godin:Thank you.

53:36James Altucher:So thanks once again, Seth, for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Keep making a ruckus. Thanks.

54:12James Altucher:The End They're free 24-7. That is so fetch. On Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.