Seth Godin — This is Strategy

1. 0:00 – 0:29

   Start

   1. SGSeth Godin0:00

      The mistake people make is if you find yourself saying, "I just need to get the word out. I've done all the hard part, now I just need to get the word out." You haven't done the hard part.

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:10

      [laughs]

   3. SGSeth Godin0:10

      What you've done is waited for a miracle. [upbeat music]

2. 0:29 – 0:54

   A home run for Seth?

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:29

      I suppose I wanna ask the question that I always ask. Like, what would make this time well spent for you? What would make this the home run, looking back?

   2. SGSeth Godin0:38

      I have to confess that I've never had a conversation with you that wasn't well spent.

   3. TFTim Ferriss0:42

      [laughs]

   4. SGSeth Godin0:43

      What would make it a home run for me is if you considered it one of the best episodes of the year, or maybe even longer. I wanna be on the greatest hits reel.

   5. TFTim Ferriss0:51

      All right.

   6. SGSeth Godin0:52

      That's what we're pushing for.

   7. TFTim Ferriss0:53

      All

3. 0:54 – 3:04

   What the word “strategy” means to Seth.

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:54

      right, perfect. To kick that off out of the gate, what would be a sensible place to start? Is there a particular story or a lead question that you think would help us start with a bang? Anything come to mind? There are a million places I could start, of course.

   2. SGSeth Godin1:11

      Well, you know best, but it seems to me that many of your listeners actually want a job without a boss.

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:22

      Yep.

   4. SGSeth Godin1:22

      They don't seek to build something, and they need to be w- woken up about that. And number two, people who misunderstand your breakthrough books think they're about tactics.

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:33

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SGSeth Godin1:34

      And they follow the steps instead of realizing they're about strategy.

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:37

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SGSeth Godin1:38

      And then find a resilient way forward. And strategy, this philosophy, is something you've been doing your entire career but never called it that.

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:48

      Hmm. Well, let's start there. So strategy, like success or God, if we wanna really get out there, are words that a lot of people use, but oftentimes they're, in their minds, referring to different things. So when you use the word strategy, what does that mean to you?

   10. SGSeth Godin2:07

       I think it's a philosophy of becoming. I don't think it's a set of tactics. I don't think it's about winning in the short run. I think it's about being very clear about the change we seek to make and who we seek to change, understanding the systems and the games around us, and then committing to the long-term process of getting to where we're going, meaning our tactics will change all the time.

   11. TFTim Ferriss2:35

       Mm-hmm.

   12. SGSeth Godin2:35

       But our strategy does not. And most people, because we've been indoctrinated to have a job, want tactics instead. And I could do much better if I was peddling tactics, but I'm not.

   13. TFTim Ferriss2:49

       [laughs]

   14. SGSeth Godin2:51

       I'm never gonna write a story, a book called This Is God.

   15. TFTim Ferriss2:54

       The Tactic Monger. Volume One. [laughs]

   16. SGSeth Godin2:57

       Right. Exactly. So if I'm not gonna write This Is God or This Is Tactics, at least I could write This Is Strategy.

   17. TFTim Ferriss3:03

       [laughs]

4. 3:04 – 6:11

   Real-world examples of good business strategies.

   1. TFTim Ferriss3:05

      And what would be a real world example of good strategy? Any particular company or project come to mind?

   2. SGSeth Godin3:15

      So some famous strategies. An elegant strategy. Bill Gates says, "We are going to have the strategy that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft."

   3. TFTim Ferriss3:25

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SGSeth Godin3:26

      He stole that strategy from IBM, right? So IBM had a 50-year run where their products weren't the most cutting edge, they weren't the best priced, but they had enough sales people and support and infrastructure that if you worked for a big company, buying IBM was easy.

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:42

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SGSeth Godin3:42

      Every time Microsoft followed that strategy, they did fine. And when they veered away from it, they had problems, right? A strategy when I was at Yahoo. We had the chance to buy Google for about $10 million.

   7. TFTim Ferriss3:57

      [laughs]

   8. SGSeth Godin3:57

      We didn't buy them. I didn't get a vote.

   9. TFTim Ferriss4:01

      Yeah.

   10. SGSeth Godin4:01

       But Yahoo's strategy was the web is a dark and nasty place. Come to Yahoo and don't leave.

   11. TFTim Ferriss4:09

       Hmm.

   12. SGSeth Godin4:09

       And the homepage had 183 links on it. At Google, their strategy was the web has grown up. Come here and go somewhere else.

   13. TFTim Ferriss4:19

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SGSeth Godin4:19

       And Marissa Mayer built the most profitable marketing engine of all time by making sure, fighting for years, to make it so there's only a couple links on the homepage. Because that was built into the strategy, which is if you're leaving Google, we're doing something right.

   15. TFTim Ferriss4:36

       Mm-hmm.

   16. SGSeth Godin4:36

       And that's where all the ads came from. And that's why Yahoo couldn't buy Google, 'cause the strategies were completely the opposite.

   17. TFTim Ferriss4:43

       Hmm.

   18. SGSeth Godin4:44

       And Starbucks had a strategy that took them a very long way for a very long time. But it's not about Frappuccinos. It's about understanding who is this for and how can we incrementally help them get there.

   19. TFTim Ferriss4:59

       What did that look like for Starbucks, and what did it look like for them to stray?

   20. SGSeth Godin5:04

       So Howard Schultz did not start Starbucks. When he got there, there were two Starbuckses, and neither one of them sold cups of coffee. They only sold beans. And Howard had been to Italy, and he realized that there was a deep human desire, A, to go from being pre-caffeinated to caffeinated.

   21. TFTim Ferriss5:27

       [laughs]

   22. SGSeth Godin5:28

       And that gets refreshed every single day. And two, to be able to do it with other people who you see yourself in. People like us do things like this. So in the Northeast it was Dunkin' Donuts, but the idea of Dunkin' Donuts is you're not happy that you're getting coffee.

   23. TFTim Ferriss5:46

       [laughs]

   24. SGSeth Godin5:46

       The coffee isn't that delicious. Let's just get this over with.

   25. TFTim Ferriss5:49

       [laughs]

   26. SGSeth Godin5:51

       And every time Howard built more of that feeling, that you could go to any Starbucks in the world and feel like you were with your people- And that for five bucks you could feel like a rich person. He could repeat it over and over and over again, and the tactics would take care of themselves.

5. 6:11 – 7:00

   The core ingredients of enacting a successful strategy.

   1. TFTim Ferriss6:11

      If not the tactics, what are the core ingredients of enacting a strategy like that?

   2. SGSeth Godin6:18

      There's all sorts of surprising ways that we can challenge ourselves once we start down this path.

   3. TFTim Ferriss6:24

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SGSeth Godin6:24

      But to start down the path, there are four things we're looking for. We're looking for systems, we're looking for time, we're looking for games, and finally, empathy. And all four of them are really unexplored and mysterious, but once you see all four of them, strategy is much easier to take care of itself.

   5. TFTim Ferriss6:49

      Hmm.

   6. SGSeth Godin6:49

      So I'm happy to take them one by one or give examples, but those four keep interweaving over and over again, and that unfolds for us what a strategy

6. 7:00 – 13:52

   Systems.

   1. SGSeth Godin7:00

      can be.

   2. TFTim Ferriss7:00

      Great. Well, let's go through the four.

   3. SGSeth Godin7:04

      Okay. We'll start with systems.

   4. TFTim Ferriss7:06

      And maybe if it's not too cumbersome, if there's an example that's easy to give, that's great, too.

   5. SGSeth Godin7:11

      Okay.

   6. TFTim Ferriss7:12

      However you wanna land it.

   7. SGSeth Godin7:13

      Systems are invisible, and they hide themselves 'cause they don't want people to see who's operating things. They invent culture to defend themselves. Systems, the most famous one is the solar system. There's this invisible gravity. The Earth doesn't go around the sun 'cause it wants to, it goes around the sun because gravity makes that its easiest path. If you grew up in the United States to middle class parents, you'll be under pressure from the time you're five years old to get good grades. Why do I need to get good grades? So you can get into a famous college, but you're not supposed to call it a famous college, you're supposed to call it a good college. And that system with tuition and tenure and student debt and football teams and cheerleaders and college tours and the sticker on the back of a car and the SATs, all of it is just taken for granted as normal. And so Donella Meadows has done brilliant writing before she passed away way too early about all the dynamics of systems. Systems in our world, systems that we wanna build. So when we see a system under stress, then we can see the system.

   8. TFTim Ferriss8:29

      Hmm.

   9. SGSeth Godin8:29

      Right? That we can see the climate when temperatures start to rise. But before the temperatures started to rise, when the climate was normal, no one paid attention to it because the system, the thing that keeps it going, was sort of invisible. So if you're gonna start any enterprise, a little plumbing business, a giant internet company, if you're gonna run for office, you should be able to see and name the elements of the system. Where is there gravity? What is seen as normal? And there's pushback if you don't do it. And so I'll finish the rant by asking a simple question. How much should a wedding cost?

   10. TFTim Ferriss9:08

       [laughs] Oh, man. I am especially unqualified to answer this. [laughs]

   11. SGSeth Godin9:15

       No, it's super simple.

   12. TFTim Ferriss9:17

       Working on it. [laughs]

   13. SGSeth Godin9:19

       The answer is exactly what your best friend spent, but a little more.

   14. TFTim Ferriss9:22

       [laughs] Yeah.

   15. SGSeth Godin9:25

       And that's why a wedding in New York City costs more than a hundred thousand dollars. Not because you need, uh, monogrammed matchbooks to have a good wedding. You need them to be part of the wedding industrial complex.

   16. TFTim Ferriss9:37

       [laughs]

   17. SGSeth Godin9:38

       To show your status to the people who've been invited, 'cause that's what the thing is for.

   18. TFTim Ferriss9:43

       Mm-hmm.

   19. SGSeth Godin9:43

       So we have to see systems, and then either we work for the system or the system works for us.

   20. TFTim Ferriss9:49

       We can linger on this one for a bit because next one is time, so I feel like we should take our time. Plus it's long form. So could you give an example on a smaller scale of a... You mentioned plumbing, doesn't need to be plumbing, but a solopreneur or a very, very small startup, two to four employees, and how they might start to ask questions around systems to identify the systems that are at work. Because for instance, in my life I'm good at identifying what is normal, like what are the unquestioned assumptions. I'm good at that.

   21. SGSeth Godin10:28

       Mm-hmm.

   22. TFTim Ferriss10:28

       But that seems like I'm holding the tail of the elephant like one of the blind men in the parable. It's like I've got a piece of it, [laughs] but it's not the whole elephant, clearly.

   23. SGSeth Godin10:37

       I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit. The whole tango thing? I mean-

   24. TFTim Ferriss10:41

       [laughs] Yeah

   25. SGSeth Godin10:42

       ... you have been doing this for a very long time really well.

   26. TFTim Ferriss10:46

       Or the archery thing behind me. [laughs]

   27. SGSeth Godin10:49

       So let's say you're gonna build a small business that supports medium-sized businesses with their Google workspace.

   28. TFTim Ferriss10:57

       Okay.

   29. SGSeth Godin10:58

       So you're a couple nerds, and you're gonna be the person who helps people set up their, their Google Drive and across the organization reasonably secure for an employee with... a company with a hundred employees, right?

   30. TFTim Ferriss11:11

       Mm-hmm.
7. 13:52 – 18:02

   Time.

   1. TFTim Ferriss13:52

      Shall we bookmark that and come to time, games, or empathy? Which would you like to tackle next?

   2. SGSeth Godin13:58

      Okay. So time is really interesting. James Gleick wrote a brilliant book about the history of time travel. Now of course, there are no actual time machines, but we know who invented the time machine, and it was actually H.G. Wells. Before H.G. Wells wrote his book, nobody in the world talked about time machines. The concept that you and I take for granted, like if you go back in time or if you go forward, no one ever said that, ever. And time, we're all very familiar with it and no one can define it, and we know what now is, and the now of a week ago isn't now anymore. It's back then and it feels different. So if you want to build a company with 1,000 employees in it, if you want to go public, if you want to be somebody with a lot of zeros in your bank account, that is not going to happen in the next three seconds. There's something that's gonna happen between now and then.

   3. TFTim Ferriss14:56

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SGSeth Godin14:56

      And each one of the steps as we look through time is not today.

   5. TFTim Ferriss15:04

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SGSeth Godin15:05

      So when we want to have a forest, we don't get a forest. We start planting trees, 'cause 20 years from now we'll have a forest. And when you're growing up in Long Island or when you're growing up training for the Olympics, you know you're not gonna be doing the Olympics when you're 50. So what exactly are the purpose of these steps and what does it mean to fail? Does it mean that you failed right this moment in service of getting where you wanna go later or does it mean you failed forever? What does it mean to quit? Does quitting now mean you failed forever or does it just open the door to succeeding later? And so we have this opportunity to see time the way our competition doesn't. So in 2001 I was at a conference and we were in this small group setting. There were eight people and they said, "Go around the circle and say who you are." And the guy to my left said, "My name's Stephen. I'm a judge." It turned out he was Stephen Breyer. He was on the Supreme Court.

   7. TFTim Ferriss16:07

      [laughs]

   8. SGSeth Godin16:08

      And the person next to him said, "My name's Sergey and I have this new search engine." And someone said, "So Sergey, what's your marketing strategy?" And he said, "Well, here's the deal. We think Google's gonna get better every day. So we don't want people to use Google for the first time right away. We want them to use it for the first time later so it's better by the time they get there. So we're not doing any promotion whatsoever because the Google of now only exists to get us to the Google of tomorrow. And when we're at the Google you're ready for, that's when you'll come use it."

   9. TFTim Ferriss16:43

      [laughs]

   10. SGSeth Godin16:44

       And at the same time, Yahoo was busy trying to defend a plunging stock price in the moment as opposed to saying, "What are we gonna be in 10 years?"

   11. TFTim Ferriss16:53

       Mm-hmm. I remember the TV commercials [laughs] at exactly that time for Yahoo. Okay, so framing time differently. I mean, I suppose Bezos and Amazon would be an example of that as well. I mean, who dog trained Wall Street [laughs] to expect-

   12. SGSeth Godin17:08

       Yeah

   13. TFTim Ferriss17:08

       ... no profitability for God knows how long. A decade? I mean... And set out in the very first annual shareholder letter that was subsequently, I believe, reread every year or represented in some fashion.

   14. SGSeth Godin17:22

       Yeah. So let's just break that into pieces, right?

   15. TFTim Ferriss17:24

       Mm-hmm.

   16. SGSeth Godin17:24

       Because in the moment Morgan Stanley says, "Don't do that. That's dumb. It's gonna hurt your stock price today." But what Jeff said was, "If I don't establish the conditions for Wall Street to send us the investors we want, our stock price will be zero in five years."

   17. TFTim Ferriss17:46

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SGSeth Godin17:46

       So the only way to get to five years from now is to do this today even though it feels expensive. 'Cause compared to the alternative, it's really cheap.

   19. TFTim Ferriss17:58

       Hmm. Setting the conditions.

   20. SGSeth Godin18:00

       Yeah.

   21. TFTim Ferriss18:01

       Hmm. All

8. 18:02 – 22:28

   Games.

   1. TFTim Ferriss18:02

      right. I have a feeling, sneaking suspicion we're gonna come back to conditions at some point.

   2. SGSeth Godin18:06

      Mm-hmm.

   3. TFTim Ferriss18:07

      Games. I like the sound of this. I like games. Some games, I suppose. Depends on which one I choose and if I choose it consciously, but [laughs] What does games mean?

   4. SGSeth Godin18:18

      So again, back to the indoctrination. So we grew up with Candyland and Parcheesi and Monopoly. Those are board games, and they're okay.

   5. TFTim Ferriss18:26

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SGSeth Godin18:26

      But that's not the kind of games I'm talking about. Any situation where there are multiple people and variable outputs with scarcity, there's a game. So it is a game to decide when two lanes merge, which car is gonna go first.

   7. TFTim Ferriss18:42

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SGSeth Godin18:43

      And it is a game to decide when you're working for Jack Welch and the bottom ten percent of the people lose their job, which people are gonna lose their job. And it is a game to exchange money for a hot dog at the baseball game because that exchange happens in a way where two players come together for mutual benefit. So we should not deny that games exist. We should learn how games work. And when we make a move in a game that doesn't seem to work, we should not say we are a bad person. We should say, "I made a move that did not work." Those are totally different things. And so the only way you've been able to achieve all the things you've achieved between the archery and the dancing and everything in between is you make more moves than most people.

   9. TFTim Ferriss19:35

      [laughs]

   10. SGSeth Godin19:36

       And you measure them, and you don't do the ones that don't work again.

   11. TFTim Ferriss19:40

       Yeah, that's true.

   12. SGSeth Godin19:42

       But it is impossible to innovate if it has to work.

   13. TFTim Ferriss19:46

       Yeah.

   14. SGSeth Godin19:47

       Innovation must always be accompanied by the phrase, "This might not work." And so if you and your team aren't saying, "This might not work," in service of innovation, you're not innovating.

   15. TFTim Ferriss19:58

       Yeah, this is my entire notebook full of training logs and experiments. And I'd say-

   16. SGSeth Godin20:05

       Mm-hmm

   17. TFTim Ferriss20:06

       ... fifty percent is [laughs] least, if not seventy percent, things that did not work and required tweaks so that I would not repeat the same mistake the next time. Doesn't always work, but [laughs] over time it tends to round towards improvement at the very least.

   18. SGSeth Godin20:23

       We've only been going at this for a few minutes, but already I can hear it. People are saying, "Wait, wait, wait. I tuned in to have someone vindicate the tactics I am already using. That that is what I am listening for."

   19. TFTim Ferriss20:35

       [laughs]

   20. SGSeth Godin20:35

       "To hear that I am on the right tac... When are you guys gonna get to the tactics part?"

   21. TFTim Ferriss20:40

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SGSeth Godin20:40

       And the very fact that we don't hear this kind of description of the world we're in is like the fish that doesn't realize it's in water.

   23. TFTim Ferriss20:52

       Mm-hmm.

   24. SGSeth Godin20:53

       And what I'm trying to help people see in a world that is changing faster than it has ever changed in history is when you see these threats and these systems under stress, that is when you know there's an opportunity for you.

   25. TFTim Ferriss21:08

       Mm-hmm.

   26. SGSeth Godin21:08

       And if it feels uncomfortable, imagine how it feels to people who don't get the joke.

   27. TFTim Ferriss21:12

       [laughs]

   28. SGSeth Godin21:13

       When this discomfort shows up, that's the opportunity.

   29. TFTim Ferriss21:17

       For sure. And one of the many reasons I've been looking forward to the conversation is I spend a lot of time thinking about many of these constituent parts, but I haven't necessarily explicitly woven them together into something that combines into strategy. But in terms of time horizon, and for me, a lot of it is trying to find or create a category of one for-

   30. SGSeth Godin21:42

       Mm-hmm
9. 22:28 – 27:00

   Empathy.

   1. TFTim Ferriss22:28

      combined. Empathy is one... I mean, I would like to think of myself as an empathetic person, but this isn't maybe one that I would initially have thrown into the ring as an integral piece of strategy. So what is, what does this mean?

   2. SGSeth Godin22:42

      You just gave it away.

   3. TFTim Ferriss22:43

      [laughs]

   4. SGSeth Godin22:43

      "I'd like to think of myself as an empathetic person" implies that there's a moral component to what we're talking about.

   5. TFTim Ferriss22:49

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SGSeth Godin22:50

      And at some level, of course there is, but that's not what I'm talking about.

   7. TFTim Ferriss22:54

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SGSeth Godin22:54

      What I'm talking about is this. Everything we build and everything we make only works in a voluntary exchange if someone else wants it more than they want the money or time they have to trade for it. Meaning, someone's not gonna buy the thing you're selling at a crafts fair because you worked really hard to make it.

   9. TFTim Ferriss23:15

      [laughs]

   10. SGSeth Godin23:16

       They're gonna buy it because they want it. And all empathy is, is being very clear about who it's for and why they want it. And we get so busy and so exhausted making something, we forget. We hustle people and hassle people to buy from us because it's important to us.

   11. TFTim Ferriss23:38

       Sounds like some of my blog posts. [laughs]

   12. SGSeth Godin23:41

       Yes. The notebook, you didn't need to publish the notebook if your goal was for you to read it because you already read it.

   13. TFTim Ferriss23:50

       Right.

   14. SGSeth Godin23:51

       You are publishing it so other people will read it. So your description of the book is not, "Please buy this because I worked really hard to write it."

   15. TFTim Ferriss23:59

       [laughs]

   16. SGSeth Godin24:00

       It's, "I have a thing here that when I describe it, if I create the conditions for information exchange to happen, you will bang down the door to get it. You will be angry if you can't get a copy." Now- That implies that it cannot be for everyone, no matter what we make. Because you cannot be empathic to everyone. Unless you're selling, I don't know, oxygen on a planet that doesn't have any.

   17. TFTim Ferriss24:32

       [laughs]

   18. SGSeth Godin24:33

       There's nothing that everyone wants the same way. So where all of this must begin and end is with the minimum, the smallest viable audience. Who are the people, just them, that when they hear about this they're gonna say, "That's exactly what I was looking for"? That's all you need. You pick that group, you delight them, and you forgive everybody else. And here's proof that you're not doing it. If someone comes to you and you are not regularly sending folks to your competitors, or people who th- are thought of as your competitors, you are not serious about this, about picking the audience who it's for and forgiving everybody else. When someone shows up at the Ferrari dealership and says, "I got six kids, how am I gonna get them to school?" You don't try to persuade them to get an Enzo.

   19. TFTim Ferriss25:31

       [laughs]

   20. SGSeth Godin25:32

       You send them down the street to the Volvo dealership.

   21. TFTim Ferriss25:35

       That was one of your many questions. I suppose 40 or so questions in the book that I wanted to ask about. Am I positioned as a service? Can I happily send others to people who might be seen as competitors? And I was like, huh, interesting. I wanted to clarify that, which you just did. And it makes sense. If you can't do that, then you very likely do not have your 1,000 true fans or minimal viable audience defined, right?

   22. SGSeth Godin26:07

       Yeah. I mean, positioning is why are the people who don't choose to buy from you right to make that choice?

   23. TFTim Ferriss26:15

       Mm.

   24. SGSeth Godin26:17

       And if you have this attitude that everyone should buy from you, you can't answer that question.

   25. TFTim Ferriss26:21

       Mm-hmm.

   26. SGSeth Godin26:21

       So the people at Nestle's don't get upset if you buy an Askinosie chocolate bar for $14. Because Sean and his daughter aren't selling a chocolate bar to people who might buy a Nestle's bar. They're completely different groups of people.

   27. TFTim Ferriss26:37

       Mm-hmm.

   28. SGSeth Godin26:38

       And the same thing is true for people who play Dungeons and Dragons versus people who wanna go watch Ultimate Fighting Championship. In that given moment, they're two different groups of people.

   29. TFTim Ferriss26:47

       I'm glad you said in that given moment, 'cause I happen to be the perfect overlap. [laughs]

   30. SGSeth Godin26:51

       There are some people who do both.
10. 27:00 – 29:07

    Don’t try to burn big logs if you only have a little bit of kindling.

    1. TFTim Ferriss27:00

       All right. So we have then, this might be a, a good segue, many maxims or ideas that we could discuss from the book, and I circled a few for myself, mostly for clarification. And I'll let you pick from one of these three, and feel free to revise the wording. But I'm very curious. I'll read the three and then you can pick whichever one you wanna start with. So the first is, systems don't start out selfish, but resilient ones often end up that way. The next one is, you're not sitting in traffic, you are the traffic. And then the third is, don't try to burn big logs if you only have a little bit of kindling.

    2. SGSeth Godin27:43

       Perfect. Let's do all three. We'll start with the last one.

    3. TFTim Ferriss27:46

       All right.

    4. SGSeth Godin27:47

       If you've ever gone camping you know what I mean by the... You know, if you have enough kindling-

    5. TFTim Ferriss27:51

       I do. I was freezing my ass off-

    6. SGSeth Godin27:54

       Right

    7. TFTim Ferriss27:55

       ... in a rural archery range yesterday and realized they had a nice wood-burning stove, but all the logs were as big around as my torso, and I thought, "Well, that's gonna be a really tough fire to start." [laughs]

    8. SGSeth Godin28:06

       Exactly. Unless you had an enormous amount of kindling and then it would go up in no time.

    9. TFTim Ferriss28:10

       Yeah.

    10. SGSeth Godin28:10

        Too often, because of the media, entrepreneurs think if they don't start something that sounds giant, they're failures. Too often we give entrepreneurs credit for raising a lot of money from venture capital.

    11. TFTim Ferriss28:24

        Mm.

    12. SGSeth Godin28:25

        That's probably not the right path for you. The money you're raising from investors is kindling, and the logs you're starting are the markets you're trying to get to.

    13. TFTim Ferriss28:35

        Mm.

    14. SGSeth Godin28:35

        So if you wanna build a dialysis chain in 40 cities where people can go get reliable kidney treatment, you can't start that with $100,000 loan. You just can't.

    15. TFTim Ferriss28:46

        Mm-hmm.

    16. SGSeth Godin28:46

        But $100,000 loan is more than enough to get yourself doing very, very well with a hotdog cart somewhere.

    17. TFTim Ferriss28:54

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SGSeth Godin28:54

        Right? So we first gotta s- make a smart decision based on time, based on the systems we're confronting. Do we have enough kindling? Do I have enough reputation to even take this on?

11. 29:07 – 34:45

    Systems don’t start out selfish, but resilient ones often end up that way.

    1. TFTim Ferriss29:07

       Mm-hmm.

    2. SGSeth Godin29:07

       The... One about systems is this: systems aren't people. They are collections of people, and they act in ways that maybe the people who started the system and maybe the people who work in the system wouldn't choose, but that's the system they've got. So if you think about the healthcare system in the United States, it's not a healthcare system, it's a treatment system. Because everyone in the system gets rewarded for giving treatments, not for making you healthy.

    3. TFTim Ferriss29:38

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SGSeth Godin29:39

       And so it's quite likely that once you start working with the medical industrial complex, you'll get more and more tests and more and more probing and more and more bills, 'cause that's what the system does. And every time someone moves out of where the system ended up, the system exerts a feedback loop to push them back into the spot where they belong. And so if we look at how we ended up with college educations that cost almost $300,000, it's because the combination of accreditation and ranking and tenure and parent status and placement offices all support it going in only one direction. And if you show up, say, "Look at me, I'm really smart. I went overseas and in two years I learned X, Y, and Z," the system's gonna push back and say, "Yeah, but we require this kind of degree from this kind of accredited thing." The NCAA is a system that started with people playing football in the backyard, and now they're taking private jets to stadiums with 100,000 people in them. Because the system kept churning in one direction.

    5. TFTim Ferriss30:52

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin30:52

       And you might not like the output, but you probably can't change the system by yourself. What you might be able to do is, back to your second thing, you're not sitting in traffic, you are traffic. When you participate in a system, you're either going to make that system more successful and get a prize, or you could try to fight that system, but you're gonna need a lot of kindling to do so. Because being in the system actually changes the system one way or the other. So the challenge that we have is, you know, Google didn't show up and say, "We're going to have meetings with all the ad agencies in the world and change the way advertising works." Instead, they walked away completely from that world, multi-billion-dollar world of ad spend, and instead built a tiny little engine for direct marketers, where someone would buy the word Chanel, and they'd buy it for a nickel. And then what would happen is a brand manager from Chanel would Google themselves. Don't do it too much, you can go blind. But they would Google themselves, and they would see someone had bought their name for a nickel, so they'd pay 10 cents to take it back. And the auction was on. So Google changed the system, but they didn't change it with a frontal assault. They changed it by moving away from the system, finding people who weren't part of the system, and then the system chased them.

    7. TFTim Ferriss32:25

       Mm-hmm. And I wanted to mention also just a footnote to the kindling comment, which is some people listening might say, "Oh man, well, takes money to make money." And I would just say there are many ways to get that kindling, right? You can do joint ventures, you could do licensing, you could do non-dilutive financing, which is a fancy way of saying, for instance, two startups that I've been chatting with have raised money from the government. They're really good at doing that from DARPA and so on, and they get a nice big fat check. It's delivered within six weeks, and it does not affect... It actually enhances with lots of leverage their ability to raise money in the future. So there are very off-menu approaches to gathering your kindling.

    8. SGSeth Godin33:13

       Yeah. And there's also the choice you make of saying, you know, if you wanna be in the movies, you could invest years of your life and pay an enormous number of dues and wait for Hollywood to pick you. Or you could sharpen your writing skills and make a two-minute YouTube video.

    9. TFTim Ferriss33:31

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SGSeth Godin33:31

        And that YouTube video could then find you an audience, and Ilana Glazer went on to be in a popular Comedy Central thing and then a, a movie star. But she didn't go in the front door because she didn't have enough kindling to go in the front door. Instead, she found her audience and then multiplied it.

    11. TFTim Ferriss33:50

        Yeah. There's [laughs] an amazing story. People can check it out in a book called Rebel Without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez. And when he made, I think it was Mariachi way back in the day, he basically came up with his list of assets. [laughs] And he's like, "All right, we got a turtle. Turtle's gonna be in the movie. All right, my friend has a broken down school bus. School bus is going in the script." And, like, his cousin has a pit bull. "Great, we'll figure out how to fit it in." And retrofitted the entire script around this, and people thought, "Wow, this must be, like, [laughs] a legitimate, well-budgeted film." It's like, "No, I just made a list of everything I had and then tried to insert them somehow." And, uh, he is very good at operating with, I would say, lateral approaches to creative output.

12. 34:45 – 37:32

    Shortcut shortcomings.

    1. SGSeth Godin34:45

       Yeah.

    2. TFTim Ferriss34:45

       Are there any other examples of taking the side door, so to speak, that stick out to you? Could be for entering a well-established sector, it could be for anything at all.

    3. SGSeth Godin34:58

       In fact, that's almost always what happens.

    4. TFTim Ferriss35:00

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SGSeth Godin35:01

       And the mistake people make is if you find yourself saying, "I just need to get the word out. I've done all the hard part, now I just need to get the word out," you haven't done the hard part.

    6. TFTim Ferriss35:11

       [laughs]

    7. SGSeth Godin35:12

       What you've done is waited for a miracle.

    8. TFTim Ferriss35:15

       [laughs]

    9. SGSeth Godin35:17

       And the people who have gone on to build, for example, useful businesses on top of a Kickstarter-

    10. TFTim Ferriss35:23

        Mm-hmm

    11. SGSeth Godin35:24

        ... stepwise said, "All right. I don't have enough money to build a factory, get into Best Buy, do national advertising. But I do have enough money to get 1,000 people to pay me $200 for a coffee maker. And then I can do the next one, and then I can do the next one." So this stepwise process, back to time, says the shortcuts are illusory, that the most direct way forward feels long in the moment. That I'm going to serve a group of people that so need what I'm doing that they pay for it, and that are so delighted by it that they tell their friends. And then I'm gonna repeat it, and I'm gonna repeat it. And if you look at, you know, articles on TechCrunch and places like that, at companies that raised $50 or $100 million who are gonna change the whole world overnight, they're all gone.

    12. TFTim Ferriss36:17

        [laughs]

    13. SGSeth Godin36:18

        Right? Because you just can't shortcut that on demand. What you can do is find that group of people- And bring empathy to them and make a change happen.

    14. TFTim Ferriss36:29

        Also with raising that amount of money. Some of them, a handful out of hundreds, will figure out a way to make it work. But in most cases, they're like, "All right, we have an idea on the back of a napkin. I think this space shuttle will work. Let's raise a bunch of money," and then they put together, you know, soapbox derby space shuttle and then just [laughs] incinerate themselves, break into a million different pieces. That's the usual outcome. But, you know, it's like all gas, no brakes. Sometimes it works, but not all the time. And I think that also, I suppose I have a reputation for shortcuts, but it's not really... I don't think of myself that way. I like to find elegant workarounds if they exist, but I'm doing a shit ton of experimentation, taking all the notes that I had in that notebook for anything so that I can hopefully make sure I'm not fooling myself and that I can replicate. And then if I can do that, I'm like, "All right, let me try that with two or three other people." And I was like, "Okay, well let's expand the scope a little bit."

13. 37:32 – 39:57

    Feedback loops.

    1. SGSeth Godin37:32

       Yeah. And so that's where feedback loops and network effects come in.

    2. TFTim Ferriss37:34

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SGSeth Godin37:34

       So people don't really understand feedback loops. Feedback loops are not feedback, right? The feedback of, "I'm gonna give you criticism." That's not what we're talking about.

    4. TFTim Ferriss37:43

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SGSeth Godin37:43

       Feedback loops, there are two kinds. Positive and negative. So a negative feedback loop isn't actually negative. It's a thermostat.

    6. TFTim Ferriss37:51

       Mm-hmm.

    7. SGSeth Godin37:51

       And what that means is if it gets really warm in the hotel room, the air conditioning kicks on. If it gets really cold, the heat kicks on. It's negative in that it keeps it in a central place. And a positive feedback loop is like the microphone at a bad wedding that gets that s- screeching sound that goes around and around and around 'cause it keeps getting amplified.

    8. TFTim Ferriss38:11

       Mm-hmm.

    9. SGSeth Godin38:12

       So what we seek to do is build a project that the next time we do it, it's gonna work even better. We want to find an insatiable desire and start the path of filling it.

    10. TFTim Ferriss38:29

        Mm-hmm.

    11. SGSeth Godin38:29

        So the insatiable desire could be something like status, but it could be something like, I need caffeine every single morning, right?

    12. TFTim Ferriss38:36

        Sure.

    13. SGSeth Godin38:36

        It's n- doesn't fade over time. And as you become the reliable purveyor of caffeine, then risk-averse people are just gonna keep coming back again and again. So once you had a small head start with this podcast, you could keep that head start by creating ever better episodes of the podcast and no one could ever catch up.

    14. TFTim Ferriss38:58

        Hmm.

    15. SGSeth Godin38:59

        Right? My blog in April is gonna have post number 10,000.

    16. TFTim Ferriss39:02

        Wow!

    17. SGSeth Godin39:03

        And no one's ever gonna catch up to me.

    18. TFTim Ferriss39:05

        Yeah.

    19. SGSeth Godin39:05

        But each time there's another post, it becomes more of what people signed up for. And this doesn't work quite as well when you're talking about shoes. Because once someone's closet is filled, the only way for them to buy new shoes is to get rid of the old ones.

    20. TFTim Ferriss39:26

        Mm-hmm.

    21. SGSeth Godin39:27

        So a Christian Louboutin can't scale to infinity because sooner or later you run out of people who have the money or you run out of people who have the closet space. But what we're looking for is to build these networks with feedback where it works better when I tell my friends. It works better when I have more of it. It works better when I do it again. And these insatiable desires are everywhere, but we ignore them and instead try to steal market share from somebody else.

14. 39:57 – 46:32

    The network effect.

    1. TFTim Ferriss39:57

       So I think this ties into one of the questions also that I was going to ask you about, which is how can I create the conditions for a network effect to develop around my project? I suppose is ensuring that you have an answer to [laughs] hopefully an affirmative answer to, can you say or would your clients say or customers, "It works better when I tell my friends"? Right?

    2. SGSeth Godin40:20

       Right.

    3. TFTim Ferriss40:21

       That would seem to be one.

    4. SGSeth Godin40:22

       There are some very pure examples of this, but not many. So a pure example is the fax machine or email.

    5. TFTim Ferriss40:29

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin40:29

       If it's 40 years ago and you have friends who don't have email, you need to get them to get email 'cause you can't send email to people if they don't have an email address.

    7. TFTim Ferriss40:37

       [laughs]

    8. SGSeth Godin40:38

       Right?

    9. TFTim Ferriss40:39

       Yeah.

    10. SGSeth Godin40:39

        That Krispy Kreme priced the donuts so that it was cheaper to buy a dozen than to buy four.

    11. TFTim Ferriss40:46

        Mm-hmm.

    12. SGSeth Godin40:47

        And Krispy Kremes were scarce. So if you showed up at work with a dozen Krispy Kreme, you were a hero.

    13. TFTim Ferriss40:52

        [laughs]

    14. SGSeth Godin40:54

        And so that spread the idea. The more times people shared Krispy Kreme, the happier the sharer was and the word spread. So a lot of things that people build don't have a network effect 'cause there's no incentive to tell the others.

    15. TFTim Ferriss41:11

        Mm-hmm.

    16. SGSeth Godin41:11

        On the other hand, something like The Big Lebowski, I can't talk to you about it unless you've seen it. So I gotta get you to go see The Big Lebowski so we can talk about bringing the room together, right? And so it's built into the idea of a certain kind of movie-

    17. TFTim Ferriss41:28

        Mm-hmm

    18. SGSeth Godin41:28

        ... is we're gonna talk about it. Where is the network effect? Why does it work better?

    19. TFTim Ferriss41:33

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SGSeth Godin41:34

        Not better for you, but better for the user-

    21. TFTim Ferriss41:37

        Mm-hmm

    22. SGSeth Godin41:37

        ... if their friends have it too.

    23. TFTim Ferriss41:39

        So I'm wondering where you would draw the demarcating lines between below average, nonexistent, moderate, excellent network effects in the sense that you gave a few examples and I'm wondering, for instance, where something like Magic: The Gathering would fall. I mean, it, it seems sort of intrinsic to the nature of games themselves that if you want to play a game [laughs] and it's not a solo venture, you need other people to play. Magic was very beautifully designed by, I'm blanking on his first name, something Garfield, I believe. But the collectible aspect to it also, and the competitive aspect, all of these things combined to help make it a real incredible phenomenon, but it's, it's ultimately a game you need other people to play with you. But how would you think about that or any other examples that come to mind? If you're really trying to dial this to 11, to use a Spinal Tap reference.

    24. SGSeth Godin42:38

        Yeah. There you go.

    25. TFTim Ferriss42:39

        But it works better when I tell my friends, right? There are some obvious examples that spring to mind. Facebook, something like that. But Krispy Kreme, another good example. It's better when you tell your friends. You end up being a hero. Great. So that is a meandering, caffeine infused, speaking of caffeine, lead into what I think is a question. But [laughs] I'll let you take that wherever you want.

    26. SGSeth Godin43:05

        So for people at home, I'm cheating. I made these decks of cards-

    27. TFTim Ferriss43:11

        Mm-hmm

    28. SGSeth Godin43:11

        ... that people can get, and they have 200 questions on them.

    29. TFTim Ferriss43:15

        Hmm.

    30. SGSeth Godin43:15

        And what you do is you play them out-
15. 46:32 – 48:01

    Tension.

    1. SGSeth Godin46:32

       And that brings up one of the scariest non-sequiturs in the book, which is the creation of tension.

    2. TFTim Ferriss46:41

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SGSeth Godin46:41

       If you wanna make change happen, you have to create tension on purpose. Not stress. Stress is bad. Stress is you're trapped. Stress is life is bad. Stress is you wanna leave, but you can't. Tension is what happens if I pull a rubber band back and then let go. I had to pull it backwards to get the rubber band to go across the room. So if I say, "Taylor Swift is playing in Amsterdam, and there's only 400 seats left," I created tension because everyone who wants to go knows that there are more than 400 other people who wanna go. They better hurry and get their mom to give them the money, or else they're gonna be left out. By creating tension, the concert promoter fills the venue. If there is no tension, no one's gonna come 'cause they think, "I'll just come, I'll just stroll in if I feel like it." So scarcity creates tension. The lack of affiliation creates tension. The desire for status creates tension. When you're out trying to raise money and someone says to you, "Who else has invested?"

    4. TFTim Ferriss47:45

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SGSeth Godin47:45

       Why would they ask that question?

    6. TFTim Ferriss47:47

       [laughs]

    7. SGSeth Godin47:47

       They're asking about affiliation. They're asking about status. If you say, "I have term sheets from three people, and I only have room for one more person," you created tension. And so we're constantly doing it, but we rarely do it on purpose.

16. 48:01 – 55:07

    Affiliation status.

    1. TFTim Ferriss48:01

       Hmm. Could you say a bit more about affiliation status? Sidebar, Richard Garfield is the mathematician-

    2. SGSeth Godin48:08

       Yes

    3. TFTim Ferriss48:09

       ... who designed Magic: The Gathering. There's a great episode on a podcast called Think Like a Game Designer that has Richard Garfield, uh, on it, which I suggest to people. Affiliation and status, could you perhaps give an example from book writing or from Podcasting

    4. SGSeth Godin48:30

       Perfect. Yeah, let's talk about books. So why do authors blurb each other's books, right?

    5. TFTim Ferriss48:36

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin48:36

       You don't see Tim Cook blurbing an Android phone.

    7. TFTim Ferriss48:39

       [laughs]

    8. SGSeth Godin48:40

       So why are authors so eager to put their names on each other's... Why do they not only permit but celebrate the idea that they're sold next to all the other books?

    9. TFTim Ferriss48:50

       Hmm.

    10. SGSeth Godin48:50

        Books don't sell at the supermarket, they sell next to the competitors.

    11. TFTim Ferriss48:54

        Hmm.

    12. SGSeth Godin48:54

        Because you get status if you're published, used to be more, by a famous publisher. You get status if you're reviewed in a certain kind of review. You get status if you're face out. You get affiliation if you're seen in the same category as Stephen King or Elmore Leonard. It's high school over and over and over again.

    13. TFTim Ferriss49:14

        [laughs] Right. Okay, so that applies to the authors. What about writing books if people are trying to pull some of these levers for pressing the buttons of affiliation and status for readers? What might that look like?

    14. SGSeth Godin49:31

        There are a couple elements here. In the idea of fiction, if someone says, "Have you read Middlemarch?" Or, "Have you read Catcher in the Rye?" And you say, "Well, of course," and you say something smart from it, your affiliation with that person was established. If you said, "What book? Catcher in the who?"

    15. TFTim Ferriss49:50

        Hmm.

    16. SGSeth Godin49:50

        Your status goes down. You don't have a bridge to talk about it. So, you know, on the Upper West Side in those fancy apartments at The Dakota, that's all people are doing is signaling to each other, "I belong here 'cause I just read what you read, and I have an opinion about it."

    17. TFTim Ferriss50:05

        Hmm.

    18. SGSeth Godin50:06

        And the same thing is true a thousand miles away, but people are talking about NASCAR. It's exactly the same thing. We don't need the cars to go around in a circle. We need the conversations that we have-

    19. TFTim Ferriss50:18

        Hmm

    20. SGSeth Godin50:18

        ... about the cars going around in a circle.

    21. TFTim Ferriss50:20

        And how can you design a product or a company or a book to do that more effectively rather than less effectively?

    22. SGSeth Godin50:31

        Exactly.

    23. TFTim Ferriss50:32

        Because there's certain things that culturally when they reach a critical mass, Game of Thrones as an example. There was a point where that was such appointment viewing and such a dominant conversation that [laughs] people just felt completely out of the loop and like schmucks if they weren't able to have at least that common touchstone-

    24. SGSeth Godin50:52

        Yeah

    25. TFTim Ferriss50:52

        ... for conversation. I'm not saying everyone, but a lot of people. It was that dominant. Harry Potter, another example. But those are already stratospheric successes.

    26. SGSeth Godin51:02

        Mm-hmm.

    27. TFTim Ferriss51:03

        So in the early stages, what types of questions should people ask or what types of thought experiments should people do when, when trying to run their idea through, or their product or whatever it might be, through the filter of affiliation status and then the other one that we tabled? But we don't have to talk about that just yet.

    28. SGSeth Godin51:22

        It's back to the conditions. Create the conditions for the people in the smallest viable audience to have to talk about it. So Tina Brown took over The New Yorker. It was failing, The New Yorker magazine. And what she did, it cost a fortune, is... It used to come out on Mondays. By messenger on Sundays, four thousand people got The New Yorker delivered to their apartment. Now, if you're one of the four thousand, your status goes up. But it only goes up if people know that you are one of the people on Tina's list. So the first thing you're gonna do when you get to work on Monday, talk about The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker. Because you talking about it is the only way for your status to go up.

    29. TFTim Ferriss52:10

        [laughs]

    30. SGSeth Godin52:11

        And now people who wanna be in your circle feel left out, so they have to quickly go read it, and it becomes a topic of conversation.
17. 55:07 – 1:00:31

    How early successes make later successes more likely.

    1. TFTim Ferriss55:07

       Mm. Let me pick up a few other questions, and then we can of course move in some methodical way. But I kind of like the scattershot improv jazz. So there are two, and I'm selfishly asking because I wanna hear your thoughts on this since I am experimenting, as you know, with the [laughs] currently code-named No Book, and will be releasing serially initially. So I want to set the conditions such that good things can come as domino effect later. S- One of the questions, I'll give you, I'll give you two. You can pick, or we can do both. So one is, how will early successes of my project make later successes more likely? And then, how big is my circle of us and circle of now? What can I do to expand them?

    2. SGSeth Godin55:52

       Great. The second one we're gonna treat a little differently, but the first one I think is really important.

    3. TFTim Ferriss55:57

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SGSeth Godin55:58

       The challenge of nonfiction writing in this world today is TLDR.

    5. TFTim Ferriss56:06

       [laughs]

    6. SGSeth Godin56:07

       And for people who never read the dictionary 'cause they were too busy, it stands for too long, didn't read.

    7. TFTim Ferriss56:12

       Mm.

    8. SGSeth Godin56:13

       Which means I don't have time to watch all of Dune. Just tell me in three sentences what it's about. People don't usually say that about a movie like Dune, but they say it a lot about the books that people like you and I write.

    9. TFTim Ferriss56:26

       Mm.

    10. SGSeth Godin56:26

        And James did a great job with Atomic Habits, but I will be delighted to wager that many people didn't read the whole thing.

    11. TFTim Ferriss56:35

        Mm-hmm.

    12. SGSeth Godin56:36

        Because they bought it so they could understand what it was about, and then once they understood what it was about, their problem went away.

    13. TFTim Ferriss56:43

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SGSeth Godin56:44

        Same thing's true with The 4-Hour Workweek, same thing's true with Permission Marketing, right? That if you read the first three chapters of Permission Marketing, you know what it's about, and now you say, "I, I don't need to go into more detail. I've solved my problem here."

    15. TFTim Ferriss56:56

        Mm-hmm.

    16. SGSeth Godin56:57

        So the challenge you face with the No Book is if someone says, "Tim's got a new book," you just created tension, 'cause they don't know what it's about. And then if someone says, "It's about this," and they solve the tension problem-

    17. TFTim Ferriss57:13

        Mm-hmm

    18. SGSeth Godin57:14

        ... their problem goes away, and they're gonna move on. Early successes don't lead to later successes.

    19. TFTim Ferriss57:19

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SGSeth Godin57:21

        This is not what happens with the Bible.

    21. TFTim Ferriss57:23

        [laughs]

    22. SGSeth Godin57:23

        Because the Bible is part of a cultural thing-

    23. TFTim Ferriss57:28

        Mm-hmm

    24. SGSeth Godin57:29

        ... that people keep coming back to over and over again, and status is accorded to people who spend more time reading it.

    25. TFTim Ferriss57:36

        Mm-hmm.

    26. SGSeth Godin57:37

        And so the key to making a nonfiction book work is to put it at the center of a community.

    27. TFTim Ferriss57:44

        Yep.

    28. SGSeth Godin57:44

        And so a weird, seemingly unrelated story. Back when I was starting out and I was really struggling, there were many days when no money was coming in whatsoever. And someone said to me, "Why don't you do something useful like, I don't know, invent the seedless cherry?"

    29. TFTim Ferriss58:01

        [laughs]

    30. SGSeth Godin58:04

        And I took this personally, so I... The next morning I called the US Department of Agriculture, and I asked... This was before the internet, and I asked for the cherry department, and they had a cherry department.
18. 1:00:31 – 1:01:31

    Volunteer firemen.

    1. SGSeth Godin1:00:31

       Let's think about volunteer firemen for a minute.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:00:33

       [laughs] I'm just gonna use that interjection from now on. I love it. [laughs]

    3. SGSeth Godin1:00:39

       [laughs] There-- Thankfully, there, except for tragedies like in California, there are far fewer house fires than ever before-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:00:47

       Mm-hmm

    5. SGSeth Godin1:00:47

       ... because of building codes and other things. And yet, volunteer firefighters continue to show up. They show up at the fire station, they connect with each other around firefighting. But firefighting isn't the point. The point is the volunteer part, the connection part, the affiliation part. And so, you know, what Gina's done with Mighty Networks is very cool.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:01:09

       Mm-hmm.

    7. SGSeth Godin1:01:09

       But at its heart, it's what do I get from the other members of the network, not what do I get from the pit?

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:01:17

       Yep, one hundred percent.

    9. SGSeth Godin1:01:18

       And so that's where your opportunity is.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:01:20

        Yeah, it doesn't work for me otherwise. [laughs] Also, I, I don't wanna be, you know, time to make the donuts if-- for people who are old enough to get that [laughs] reference to the Dunkin' Donuts commercials

19. 1:01:31 – 1:04:05

    Expanding the circle of now and circle of us.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:01:31

       from the '80s. Let's come back. We don't need to spend time on this, but I'm curious, how big is my circle of us and circle of now? What can I do to expand them?

    2. SGSeth Godin1:01:38

       This was the most heartfelt part of the book for me, and it's the one that people ask me about the least, so I'm thrilled that you brought it up.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:01:44

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SGSeth Godin1:01:45

       The circle of now goes back to time. A toddler has a circle of now that lasts seven seconds.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:01:52

       [laughs]

    6. SGSeth Godin1:01:53

       If they don't get what they want within seven seconds, they have a tantrum. Somebody at the peak of their maturity might have a circle of now that lasts a decade. I am gonna go through medical school and pay out money and have no fun for six or eight years, because after that, I will be able to achieve my dreams. That's a very big circle of now. So when you pick your partners, when you pick your investors, when you pick your customers, it would really help if you would pick people whose circle of now is sorta similar to your circle of now.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:02:31

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SGSeth Godin1:02:32

       And one of the giant crises that we're all gonna live with is what's happening to the climate, because a whole bunch of people have a circle of now that's fairly short that says, "Yeah, but my house is cold, so I'm gonna, you know, chop down the furniture to put it in the fireplace to warm things up." And other people have a circle of now that's much longer that says, "I'm here for the seventh generation. What do I sacrifice today to help them later?" That's circle of now. The circle of us is a toddler cares about themselves and maybe their parents. It's a very small circle. Whereas someone like my friend Jim, who runs the Fuller Center in New Rochelle, who's been providing housing and sustenance for strangers for decades, his circle of us is tens of thousands of people. It's a much bigger circle. So when we think about our strategy, we gotta keep coming back to, well, how big is my circle?

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:03:29

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SGSeth Godin1:03:29

        Because even Ayn Rand cared about more than one person, that the circle of us generally is more than just me, and the circle of now is generally more than just the next thirty seconds. The exception is if you're drowning. If you're drowning, the circle is you and the circle is now. That's all there is. But we're not drowning. So how do we grow into big enough circles, and how do we create the conditions for the people around us to have similar circles? 'Cause if we're measuring the right things, they're gonna measure the right things, and we're gonna get what we

20. 1:04:05 – 1:05:26

    Freedom from the feeling of fear.

    1. SGSeth Godin1:04:05

       seek to get.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:04:06

       In addition to affiliation and status, there was one other need. I wanna say-

    3. SGSeth Godin1:04:10

       Yeah

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:04:10

       ... it was something like extinguishing fear. Something like that.

    5. SGSeth Godin1:04:14

       It's the freedom from the feeling of fear.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:04:16

       There we go. All right. Where does that fit in?

    7. SGSeth Godin1:04:18

       It can short-circuit everything, that if you are in a movie and a fire breaks out, you're not really gonna focus on affiliation or status.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:04:26

       [laughs]

    9. SGSeth Godin1:04:26

       You're just gonna focus on survival.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:04:29

        Mm-hmm.

    11. SGSeth Godin1:04:30

        Most of us are lucky enough that we're not in burning buildings, but it's very easy to be persuaded by marketers or manipulators, and it's very easy to get into a doom loop where you imagine that you are in a burning building.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:04:45

        Yeah, for sure.

    13. SGSeth Godin1:04:45

        And so all these things happen. So when we think about how do we get somebody in a hospital to allow us to, you know, do an operation on them or make an incision, well, that's because they believe that the fear will go away if they can get through this.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:05:04

        Mm-hmm.

    15. SGSeth Godin1:05:05

        That's not about affiliation, it's not about status. So I put it to the side because most of us should not be in the business of dramatically inflicting fear on other people.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:05:16

        [laughs] Yeah, ideally.

    17. SGSeth Godin1:05:18

        And so that's why I keep coming back to the other two, 'cause in civilization, it's mostly status and affiliation.

21. 1:05:26 – 1:08:51

    Picking customers and competitors.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:05:26

       Got it. What are other portions of the book, could be questions, themes, that you think are important for entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs to understand that might get glossed over? 'Cause I can think of things from all of my books where I'm like, "Man, there's this one piece. Maybe I didn't emphasize it enough."

    2. SGSeth Godin1:05:49

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:05:49

       People tend to skip over it, and that is a very important piece of the whole puzzle. I'm wondering if, if there's anything that comes to mind for This Is Strategy.

    4. SGSeth Godin1:05:58

       We'll talk to the freelancers in the room first. I'm a freelancer. I have no employees. You're looking at my whole team. I've been an entrepreneur. It's a different job. Entrepreneurs build something bigger than themselves. They get paid when they sleep. They use outside resources to build something they could sell. Whereas freelancers do a craft.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:06:19

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin1:06:19

       And the only way to move up as a freelancer is to get better clients. You can't work more hours, and hiring junior versions of you is not sustainable, because if someone, a junior version of you is better than you, they're not gonna take the gig. And if they're worse than you, your clients are gonna be unhappy. So Getting better clients is the defining step, the goal, if you're going to be a successful freelancer. And you don't get better clients by doing a good job for bad clients.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:06:53

       [laughs]

    8. SGSeth Godin1:06:54

       You get better clients by becoming the kind of freelancer good clients want to hire.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:06:58

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SGSeth Godin1:06:59

        Which leads to the two big insights that people skip over, which is when you pick your customers, you pick your future, and when you pick your competitors, you pick your future. So let's take them one at a time. When you pick your customers, if you pick people who are cheap, frazzled, in a hurry, don't read the instructions-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:07:20

        [laughs]

    12. SGSeth Godin1:07:20

        ... and are disloyal, well, now you know how you are going to spend your days.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:07:25

        Can't believe you could throw me under the bus like that, Seth. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. Just kidding. Yeah, it's gonna be a rough ride if that's what you're signing up for.

    14. SGSeth Godin1:07:33

        But that's what most people do.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:07:34

        Yeah.

    16. SGSeth Godin1:07:34

        'Cause those are the easiest customers to pick.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:07:36

        [laughs]

    18. SGSeth Godin1:07:37

        And if instead you pick customers that might be harder to acquire but demand better quality and insist on paying for it, who are eager to talk about what you do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, your future is gonna change. So when you pick-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:07:51

        Mm-hmm

    20. SGSeth Godin1:07:51

        ... your customers, you pick your future. And the second one, which goes with it, when you pick your competitors. If your competitors are ruthless, cutthroat, immoral, and constantly racing to the bottom, you're gonna be pressured to do the same.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:08:09

        Mm-hmm.

    22. SGSeth Godin1:08:09

        And so the industry you walk into, and I've been in many industries, and the reason I've stuck with the book business is that my competitors are my friends. I have no secrets from them, and I delight in spending time with them. That's not true, for example, in the toy business. The people in the toy business who compete with each other, you know, there's secrets and there's lawsuits and everything else. So we should make these decisions on purpose.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:08:37

        Mm-hmm.

    24. SGSeth Godin1:08:38

        And the same thing's true with who you're gonna get your funding from, because if you show up in Silicon Valley, you've decided what kind of company you're building. And if you raise money from dentists in Iowa, you could build a different

22. 1:08:51 – 1:15:23

    Guaranteeing attendance while building community.

    1. SGSeth Godin1:08:51

       kind of company.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:08:52

       Yeah. And if you bootstrap, yet another kind of company altogether. [sighs] See, y- let me just make this into a sort of a private consulting session. [laughs]

    3. SGSeth Godin1:09:05

       [laughs]

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:09:05

       Gotta strike while the iron is hot here. With communities, because you have worked with and helped cultivate many different communities for different purposes, right? You've got altMBA, you had a sort of mass collaboration for The Carbon Almanac, and you have experience with this, whereas I really do not, at least in a community management perspective. And one thing that's been rattling around in my head, and I haven't landed anywhere where I feel a high degree of conviction is in building a community for, say, this serial release of the notebook. The principal goal of which is to make the book as good as possible, but also to get people excited and to see if things work.

    5. SGSeth Godin1:09:48

       Mm-hmm.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:09:48

       That is part of making the book as good as possible. We have already tested pretty much everything, but it has to work for a certain critical mass. Doesn't need to be everybody, but a certain critical mass of people. And I have wondered whether the community should be limited and free or limited and paid, even if it's a nominal fee. I have a lot of fear associated with the paid because [laughs] sometimes people pay $5 a month, they expect me to be their 24/7 life coach on demand, and that is not something I wanna sign up for. And we could and will boot people who end up just being too high maintenance, but how might you think about this? And so I've leaned towards free 'cause, I mean, the, the money wouldn't really matter. But for instance, when I've done in real life gatherings-

    7. SGSeth Godin1:10:44

       Mm-hmm

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:10:44

       ... I don't care about the money that comes in through ticket sales. I do care about having an accurate headcount so we can plan for the event. And if people have to even just put in their credit card for a $1 payment, they are more likely to show up. So these are some of the thoughts rattling around.

    9. SGSeth Godin1:10:59

       Yeah.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:10:59

        How would you chew on that stuff?

    11. SGSeth Godin1:11:01

        The money always matters because money is nothing but a story.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:11:07

        Mm-hmm.

    13. SGSeth Godin1:11:07

        It is not a pile of green things or Bitcoin. It is a story. So years ago, I did an event in New York for nonprofit leaders. I wanted to make sure they showed up, but I didn't want their money. And so I said to them, "You gotta bring a check for $100 made out to a charity I pick, and at the end of the event, if you don't think it's worth it, you can take the check back." But I knew that everyone would have skin in the game.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:11:35

        Mm-hmm.

    15. SGSeth Godin1:11:35

        And I was heartbroken that some people took the money back 'cause their mindset of donation was, "I'm already working at a nonprofit. I don't give money to anybody else," which was heartbreaking. But it helped me see how deep the money is a story thing. So you've mentioned three communities that I've been lucky enough to be part of, and in each case the money was different. So at The Carbon Almanac, it was my full-time job for a year and a half. I was a volunteer and so were the other 1,900 people. No one got paid. No one paid. And I don't think community management is as important as community leadership.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:12:14

        Mm-hmm.

    17. SGSeth Godin1:12:14

        Community leadership is about creating, again, there it is again, creating the conditions for the community to lead itself.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:12:22

        Mm-hmm.

    19. SGSeth Godin1:12:23

        And so my job was what are things like around here? How do we talk to each other? Who gets to stay and who has to leave? But once I could do that, then the amount of actual management I had to do was fairly minimal because the right people were in the room.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:12:41

        Mm-hmm.

    21. SGSeth Godin1:12:42

        The altMBA, we wanted to establish that it was a bargain compared to $200,000 at Stanford and that it wasn't some simple online course. You had to show up every single day. And so we charged $3,000 to $5,000 and thousands of people went through it. And the fact that people paid a lot was very important because they got more than that.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:13:08

        Mm.

    23. SGSeth Godin1:13:08

        And the minute that wasn't gonna be true, I should stop doing it because the whole premise was your time is worth even more than the tuition. We're never gonna cut a corner 'cause we have unlimited money to spend on this facility. And the third one is called Purple Space, which runs now. Costs $20 a week. And the reason people pay to be in it, that I need them to pay to be in it, is so that they'll show up.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:13:37

        Mm-hmm.

    25. SGSeth Godin1:13:37

        Because like many asynchronous online communities, it's easy to join, but then it fades on your priority list.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:13:45

        Mm-hmm.

    27. SGSeth Godin1:13:45

        So what I would push back on is you said that the purpose of the community is to make sure the book works-

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:13:54

        Mm

    29. SGSeth Godin1:13:54

        ... and to make sure the book is good. I don't think that's the purpose of the community. Now, it's your community, so you get to decide.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:14:00

        Yeah, no, push back.
23. 1:15:23 – 1:22:05

    Community leadership.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:15:23

       in. And could you say more about community leadership?

    2. SGSeth Godin1:15:26

       So management and leadership. Ray Kroc and Henry Ford were pioneers of management.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:15:32

       Mm.

    4. SGSeth Godin1:15:33

       That Frederick Taylor had a, a stopwatch, and we got the phrase human resources from the idea of treating people like a machine.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:15:40

       [laughs]

    6. SGSeth Godin1:15:41

       And if you've ever heard the phrase being jerked around or calling someone a jerk, it comes from the Henry Ford Model T plant because you would watch the workers and they would be like dancing around like marionettes because there was someone like a stopwatch on every single motion.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:15:56

       [laughs]

    8. SGSeth Godin1:15:56

       This is management.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:15:58

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SGSeth Godin1:15:58

        And management is super effective at a fast food restaurant or in any process that you need people to act like a machine.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:16:07

        Mm-hmm.

    12. SGSeth Godin1:16:07

        If you don't do it, no one's gonna show up for their shift and your productivity may go down. Leadership says, "I don't know the right way, but I might be able to build a community of people and a place where they find the right way. And so I can't tell people what to do at every step 'cause I don't know. But if I get the right people in the room..."

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:16:29

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SGSeth Godin1:16:30

        So here's an example I love from the leadership category, and I'm talking about Google a lot today. I'm not sure why. So early on, Google was going to go out of business, and it wasn't from lack of revenue. It was because the internet was too big, and the computers they were using to index the web weren't fast enough to keep up. And so doing a search on Google went from taking a 10th of a second to seconds, and people just weren't sticking around.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:17:01

        Mm.

    16. SGSeth Godin1:17:01

        And two engineers worked overtime and figured out how to hack Dell hard drive controllers-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:17:09

        [laughs]

    18. SGSeth Godin1:17:09

        ... so that they put the data that was most needed near the outside of the spinning disk, so that the hard drive could get there faster.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:17:19

        That's awesome. [laughs] Didn't know that.

    20. SGSeth Godin1:17:21

        This is like the greatest hack of all time.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:17:23

        [laughs]

    22. SGSeth Godin1:17:24

        And I promise you that Sergey and Larry did not think to tell them to do this.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:17:29

        Yeah.

    24. SGSeth Godin1:17:29

        Leadership says, "Let's get the right engineers in the room, give them the right resources and the right problems to go solve things with an incentive of status and affiliation for doing so."

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:17:38

        Mm.

    26. SGSeth Godin1:17:39

        And now with AI doing most of the jobs where we can write down specifically what we need done, management is gonna get less and less important, and leadership becomes more and more important, which is why strategy matters so much because you wanna tell people the strategy and let them find tactics.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:17:59

        Mm-hmm.

    28. SGSeth Godin1:18:00

        And so the fancy hotel that says to its frontline workers, the people who are changing the sheets and stuff, "Here's 250 bucks per customer. You can spend it any way you want. If a customer is unhappy, give them free dinner, give them whatever you want. 250 bucks, we're never gonna question you doing it." That lets your frontline have tactical control, but you're not changing the strategy-

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:18:24

        Mm-hmm

    30. SGSeth Godin1:18:24

        ... which is this is a luxury hotel.
24. 1:22:05 – 1:27:00

    Perspective-changing exercises and scaffolding.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:22:05

       All right, Seth. So for somebody who's thinking to themselves, "All right. I wanna sit down, and I'd like to sort of shake the snow globe of my mind with some questions, some more questions that I can use to land on approaches or solutions, strategy, as it were," do you have any other favorite questions or perhaps counterintuitive questions? Any questions that, that you might toss out there as good fuel for the fire?

    2. SGSeth Godin1:22:38

       I have one question to get you started and then two interesting challenges. The question to get you started is, if you were forced to increase your prices by 10X, what would you do? And this really unsettles people, 'cause they know what, how to think about if they were forced to halve their prices 'cause their competitors are racing to the bottom. But if your competitors weren't changing and you had to charge 10X, what would you do differently? Well, for example, this is where concierge medicine came from, right? 'Cause all these other doctors are saying, "How can I take more insurance?" And one doctor shows up and says, "I'm gonna charge 10 times more, and this is why people are gonna get in line to pay for it." But it doesn't have to be luxury goods for the ultra wealthy. There are lots of things where you could imagine charging 10 times more. This is where the bottled water industry in the United States came from, charging infinite times more. So that's one question I like to ask. Another one is, if you were sure you were going to fail, what would you do anyway? And I think that tells me a lot about who you are and what you stand for.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:23:46

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SGSeth Godin1:23:47

       Two ideas then to follow that up with. The first one comes from a social scientist in the 1920s, and Adam Grant wrote about this in a recent book, which is the idea of scaffolding. Scaffolding is what effective teachers do. That pedagogy teaches us that the way we learn almost everything that matters, walking, talking, is on our own. We're autodidacts. We teach ourselves through failure. But when things get more complicated, like fractions, people get stuck. Scaffolding is creating the conditions so on those stuck moments, you work your way through it, and then you get back on track. And scaffolding, or the lack of it, explains in large measure why people in some communities can't figure out how to get out of their rut and move up different status categories. Because when they hit a speed bump at nine or 10 or 12 years old, there isn't a learned, wise Focused adult maybe who could help them through that moment.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:24:56

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin1:24:56

       The scaffolding are the ladders we build to help people get through the tough stuff.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:25:01

       Now, are those traits, like grit, resilience, whatever it might be, are they lenses of looking at things like failure as feedback? Are they other tools? What is the scaffolding?

    8. SGSeth Godin1:25:15

       All of it. So if you've ever tried to use Fusion 360 from Autodesk, the scaffolding is almost nonexistent. Like, I've been building and using software for fifty years. I can't figure out how to use this software.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:25:27

       [laughs]

    10. SGSeth Godin1:25:28

        And when I get stuck, there's nothing to hold onto. Whereas-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:25:31

        [laughs]

    12. SGSeth Godin1:25:32

        ... you know, part of the magic when the team built the first Mac is every app had the same structure. So there was scaffolding built in. You knew where to go-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:25:44

        Mm-hmm

    14. SGSeth Godin1:25:44

        ... to get to the next thing. If you're trying to build an entity of any scale, where is the scaffolding for when the customer gets frustrated? Where is the scaffolding for when someone's gonna veer off and use a competitor? Where's the scaffolding if they don't know what to tell their boss or their friends? If you give them handholds right where the handholds belong, you know, think about a rock climbing wall-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:26:11

        Mm-hmm

    16. SGSeth Godin1:26:11

        ... people are gonna grab the handhold. So you can't take them through the whole thing, but you can make sure there are handholds in the right place.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:26:19

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SGSeth Godin1:26:19

        So where is the scaffolding? And, you know, the idea that Yahoo had was to put buttons everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of buttons. And the idea Google had was to give you a fill in the blank. That when ChatGPT came out, the scaffolding was type something.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:26:38

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SGSeth Godin1:26:38

        And that puts a lot of pressure on what it writes back.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:26:41

        Mm-hmm.

    22. SGSeth Godin1:26:41

        'Cause if you had typed something and it says, "I don't know," you're not gonna use it three times. You're gonna stop. So you're making these bets on what's it gonna be like, what's gonna happen after that.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:26:52

        Mm-hmm.

    24. SGSeth Godin1:26:53

        And now I wanna talk about probability in games and decisions. So if I have a standard deck of

25. 1:27:00 – 1:29:51

    The Strategy Deck.

    1. SGSeth Godin1:27:00

       cards-

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:27:00

       What is your deck of cards called, by the way?

    3. SGSeth Godin1:27:02

       It's called The Strategy Deck. The only place you can get it is at seth.blog/tis.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:27:08

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SGSeth Godin1:27:09

       And it's really cool. Anyway, if I have a deck of fifty-two cards and I say, "Tim, pick a card," what are the odds you're gonna get an ace?

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:27:18

       Four in fifty-two, right?

    7. SGSeth Godin1:27:20

       One out of thirteen.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:27:21

       There we go.

    9. SGSeth Godin1:27:21

       'Cause the deck is stacked. There are forty-eight non-aces and four aces.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:27:26

        Mm-hmm.

    11. SGSeth Godin1:27:27

        Every time we engage in any probabilistic thing, the deck is stacked, and it is on us to know before we make a bet how many aces are in the deck. So if you're applying to get into a famous college in Boston and you are fully qualified-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:27:49

        Mm-hmm

    13. SGSeth Godin1:27:50

        ... by every one of the published measures, you have a one in fifteen chance of getting in, because after they take all the qualified people, now it's pretty random, one in fifteen.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:28:02

        Mm-hmm.

    15. SGSeth Godin1:28:03

        That's how the deck is stacked. If you are super, super good at football and you're applying to a small college and they have football scholarships, you have a way better chance than one in fifteen of getting in-

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:28:19

        Mm-hmm

    17. SGSeth Godin1:28:19

        ... because that deck is stacked differently. So what we seek to do when we're making a bet is show up in a place where the odds that the card we need is gonna be in the deck.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:28:33

        Mm-hmm.

    19. SGSeth Godin1:28:34

        That's what probability is. Probability means that when you see poll results, it says there's a sixty percent chance this person's gonna win the election. That doesn't mean it's a tug of war between six and four and the six side is gonna win every time. Doesn't mean that at all. It just means there are six aces and four non-aces, and there's gonna be a random selection and you're gonna get the card you get. So what we need to do when we're thinking about our strategy is not focus on how hard we're working or how much we want it to work out.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:29:06

        [laughs]

    21. SGSeth Godin1:29:07

        We need to focus on what's the deck like. And so your journey into archery is partly based on the fact that you have thought through who else is gonna show up at this tournament.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:29:21

        Yeah.

    23. SGSeth Godin1:29:22

        'Cause if there were a million people who had devoted their lives to archery, I think you would understand your chances of winning a medal were very small.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:29:30

        I would pick something else. [laughs]

    25. SGSeth Godin1:29:31

        Yeah.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:29:32

        Probably. Just given the time constraints and the fact that, yeah, I'm coming in with, I guess, five to six months of serious training, and some of these folks have been shooting seriously since they were eight years old [laughs] so gotta pick the right category. [laughs] Gotta pick the right

26. 1:29:51 – 1:32:28

    Good decisions vs. good outcomes.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:29:51

       deck.

    2. SGSeth Godin1:29:51

       And so then the thing that goes with that is from our friend Annie Duke, which is what's the difference between a good decision and a good outcome?

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:29:58

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SGSeth Godin1:29:59

       And the question that I would ask entrepreneurs who think they're innovating and leading is, are you okay making good decisions that don't lead to good outcomes?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:30:10

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin1:30:10

       And most people, if they're telling the truth, the answer is no. And in my case, the answer is yes. I have disciplined myself. That's one of the things I'm really proud that I'm good at. So what are we talking about here? So in her book, she talks about the Seattle Seahawks. It's the Super Bowl. It's fourth down. They're on the two or three yard line. If they score, they win. If they don't score, they lose. Pete Carroll calls a pass play. Calling a pass play is a really good decision 'cause if you do the math, if you analyze all the situations, a pass is more likely to score than a run.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:30:49

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SGSeth Godin1:30:50

       He calls a pass, it's incomplete, they lose. Everyone says, "Pete made a terrible decision. He should be fired." No. He made a good decision, but he didn't get an ace.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:31:02

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SGSeth Godin1:31:02

        He just got one of the other cards. That's okay. You should celebrate that 'cause you still made a good deci... If you buy a lottery ticket and you win, you made a bad decision.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:31:11

        [laughs]

    12. SGSeth Godin1:31:12

        You should never buy a lottery ticket. Winning is just a weird anomaly, but the deck is stacked against you. Don't do that. Don't play games you can't reliably win.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:31:23

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SGSeth Godin1:31:24

        When I'm talking to people about decision-making, I say, "You know, tell me the last time you made a really good decision." And they do, and it always has a good outcome.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:31:33

        [laughs]

    16. SGSeth Godin1:31:34

        'Cause they're measuring the wrong thing, and corporations are terrible at this. Corporations promote people who make bad decisions and have lucky outcomes, and they don't promote people who make great decisions but didn't get lucky.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:31:46

        Wall Street's [laughs] probably the, the greatest breeding ground for that particular selection process. [laughs] Put that aside. Let that petri dish... Fascinating environment, for sure. So how do you cultivate that then? How would you suggest cultivating that? I mean, I do think learning to play a game, maybe doing some very lightweight investing is another way to do this, where certainly in the early stage game, anyone who's gonna last and be successful in the long term playing that game is going to have to get very good at accepting losses where they made a lot of good decisions, 'cause there's so much outside of your control as well.

27. 1:32:28 – 1:36:57

    How Seth avoids false proxies in the hiring process.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:32:28

       How do you think about cultivating that? Good decisions over good outcomes.

    2. SGSeth Godin1:32:33

       Well, one of the things we're trying to do is avoid false proxies.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:32:38

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SGSeth Godin1:32:38

       And false proxies are easy to measure but ultimately not useful. So how fast someone types is a false proxy for whether they're going to be a good programmer.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:32:51

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin1:32:51

       It's easier to measure typing speed than programming speed. But we measure the easy thing. We measure, does that person look like me or look like I think someone should look? I was talking to someone, he said the last nine people this company hired had rowed varsity crew at one of three colleges.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:33:11

       [laughs]

    8. SGSeth Godin1:33:12

       This is not a useful proxy, right? This is just a lazy shortcut. And then we turn it around when we think about decision-making and we say, "Are we going to insulate our decision-makers from useless information?" So if you're a stock trader and we work at an organization where we've promised our investors we're making five-year plans, that we're here for the long run, and you have a big Bloomberg ticker on the wall, you have really confused things because now you're measuring the wrong thing in the wrong way.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:33:52

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SGSeth Godin1:33:53

        And so the discipline, as you pointed out in, you know, in investing and making small investments, you don't even have to spend money. You just have to write down your predictions.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:34:04

        Mm-hmm.

    12. SGSeth Godin1:34:04

        And you have to be able to, when you're working with other people, articulate why did you make that decision.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:34:12

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SGSeth Godin1:34:13

        It's not okay to say, "Well, I just feel like it. That's just a hunch." That's not how we actually need to make our decisions. Show your cards, make your argument, make your assertions, then your peers can talk to you about whether that's a good decision or not. If it's a good decision, you get rewarded regardless of the outcome, 'cause the outcome is out of your control. That's just, did you get an eight or did you get an ace?

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:34:38

        How have you corrected course or spotted false proxies in your own life or many projects, industries, et cetera?

    16. SGSeth Godin1:34:50

        Here's a really useful one. I was arrogant and thought I was good at hiring people because I was looking for signals that were ultimately false proxies, and I could see those signals faster than most people. Certain questions or certain attitudes in interviews and things like that. But as I thought about it afterwards, what I really wanted from people who I was hiring to work with to do a job was for them to do the job, not to be good at interviewing.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:35:24

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SGSeth Godin1:35:25

        And so I made the decision to only work with people I've worked with before. That doesn't mean only people I've met before. It means if I'm gonna hire you, I'm gonna give you a project and pay you to do it, and that's your interview.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:35:39

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SGSeth Godin1:35:40

        And we never even need to meet in person, but if I've seen you work on a project like I want you to work on a project, there's no more false proxy, right?

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:35:51

        Mm-hmm.

    22. SGSeth Godin1:35:51

        And as a result, I've been able to work with a much more diverse group of people geographically, background-wise, skill set, because now it doesn't matter if I want you to come over for dinner.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:36:03

        [laughs]

    24. SGSeth Godin1:36:03

        It matters that we're doing this project together and I know you know how to do this part of the project. So The Carbon Almanac, every single person could do anything they wanted once, and then if the community said, "We really like that," they got to do it more.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:36:19

        Mm-hmm.

    26. SGSeth Godin1:36:20

        And so one guy from India, Vivek, he showed up and he wrote one article and it was terrible, and someone gave him some feedback, and the second one was better, and he was gonna quit, but he got some more feedback, and the third one was so good he ended up writing seventeen of the articles.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:36:37

        [laughs]

    28. SGSeth Godin1:36:38

        Because he figured it out, and we're like, "Great. We trust you now. Just go and go and go and do it."

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:36:42

        Mm-hmm.

    30. SGSeth Godin1:36:43

        And in a world that's so open to connection to strangers, it feels like that's the appropriate way to interact with the work.
28. 1:36:57 – 1:40:15

    Gauging acceptance of feedback.

    1. SGSeth Godin1:36:57

       can do the work.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:36:58

       How do you read if someone is open to receiving feedback? I guess the answer might be you give them a project and you give them feedback. [laughs] It's the only way to know. So maybe, um, you've already answered my question, but are there other indicators?

    3. SGSeth Godin1:37:10

       So I think back to this idea of, you know, Jeff Bezos creating the conditions for who wants to invest.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:37:17

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SGSeth Godin1:37:18

       You creating the conditions for your community. There are certain projects that I wanna work on where I'm the creator, or I wanna work with other people, where taking feedback isn't an asset, where you're looking for somebody who has a point of view, and this is what I do, take it or leave it.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:37:36

       Mm-hmm.

    7. SGSeth Godin1:37:37

       And there are other things where taking feedback is super important because that's gonna keep things in sync. And for me, it's not giving someone who doesn't match that a pass just 'cause they're good at what they do. And this is analogous to having bullies who work in your company. I had a guy who worked for me years ago who was a yeller.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:38:05

       Hmm.

    9. SGSeth Godin1:38:05

       He wasn't a bully, but he was a yeller. And we had one big open office. And the second time I heard him yell at someone, I quietly took him aside and I sat him down. I said, "If you ever yell at anyone ever again, I'm gonna fire you on the spot. It doesn't matter that you're the most valuable person in the company, 'cause you are. Doesn't matter that you're the most senior and skilled person. If I let you do that, I have made a statement about what it's like around here."

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:38:30

        Hmm.

    11. SGSeth Godin1:38:30

        And he sent me a thank you note 10 years later 'cause he never yelled at anyone at work ever again-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:38:35

        Wow [laughs]

    13. SGSeth Godin1:38:36

        ... even after we stopped working together. 'Cause I was the first person who had the guts to say, "We don't want bullies around here."

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:38:43

        Yeah.

    15. SGSeth Godin1:38:44

        And the same thing's true. If you really need someone who can take feedback in a role-

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:38:49

        Hmm

    17. SGSeth Godin1:38:49

        ... you've gotta say, "If you can't take feedback, you can't stay." And it doesn't have to be a confrontation. It can just be, "What are things like around here?"

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:38:58

        Mm-hmm.

    19. SGSeth Godin1:38:58

        People like us do things like this.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:39:01

        What would be an example of someone who you don't want or you don't require to take feedback? I mean, I can probably come up with a few as I search, but you probably can be faster on your feet with this.

    21. SGSeth Godin1:39:14

        A surgeon.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:39:15

        Yeah, I was just gonna say [laughs] neurosurgeon. Yeah.

    23. SGSeth Godin1:39:18

        I went to a dermatologist four months ago, and he was terrible. He not only was terrible with his bedside manner and terrible in that he didn't read the notes that I gave him, and he... terrible that he prescribed a drug I already had a prescription for.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:39:30

        [laughs] Jeez.

    25. SGSeth Godin1:39:32

        He didn't make me better, right? So I wrote a letter to the head of medicine for the whole thing, and they have obviously systems in place to make people like me be quiet-

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:39:41

        [laughs]

    27. SGSeth Godin1:39:41

        ... but not to actually listen to people like me. Because they're taking the position, "Don't come here if you don't wanna do what our doctors tell you to do, 'cause we're busy enough already. We just want patients who aren't gonna push back."

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:39:55

        Hmm.

    29. SGSeth Godin1:39:56

        And there are plenty of people who, if you need something that is way outside your area of expertise, right? If you hire Chip Kidd to make the cover for your notebook, which you should 'cause he's a genius, Chip should not listen to your feedback.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:40:10

        [laughs]
29. 1:40:15 – 1:45:15

    How Seth uses AI.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:40:15

       How do you use AI, and how do you foresee using AI yourself?

    2. SGSeth Godin1:40:20

       I use it every day for more than an hour. I think it's electricity for our century. In the late 1800s, there were companies that said, "Yeah, this electricity thing's interesting, but we're not gonna be an electricity company." And they're all gone, right? That electricity is now... You're not an electricity company, you're just a company that uses electricity.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:40:42

       Hmm.

    4. SGSeth Godin1:40:42

       And the same thing is true, I believe, with AI. I will tell you, and I'm not afraid to say it out loud, I think ChatGPT is arrogant and lazy.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:40:51

       [laughs]

    6. SGSeth Godin1:40:52

       And I use it as a last resort. Claude.ai is a dear friend. I love Claude.ai. We have great conversations. It's empathic. It's self-aware. It warns you it might be hallucinating. And when it makes a mistake, it's eager to correct it. And I use Perplexity exclusively. I almost never do a search with a search engine.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:41:16

       Yeah.

    8. SGSeth Godin1:41:16

       Every word I publish, I wrote. But what I will do with Claude, for example, is I will say, "Here's a list of three bullet points. Can you think of four more?" And it's great at that. And then I'll rewrite them and now I'll have five bullet points and I'll be... It's much better than if I hadn't engaged with Claude. If there's a concept in the world that I don't understand, I'll say to Claude, "Can you please explain it in 300 words to a college student?" And that helps. But I did it once, and I still didn't understand it, and then I said, "Can you write it to me like a Seth Godin blog post?"

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:41:56

       [laughs]

    10. SGSeth Godin1:41:58

        And it did, and it did a terrible job.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:42:01

        [laughs]

    12. SGSeth Godin1:42:02

        But now I understood it. So I rewrote it and I said, "Do you think this is better?" And it said, "Oh yeah, that's much better." And I said, "Thank you. I'll tell Seth."

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:42:15

        [laughs]

    14. SGSeth Godin1:42:15

        And Claude said, "Do you know Seth Godin?"

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:42:19

        [laughs]

    16. SGSeth Godin1:42:21

        And I wrote, "Actually, I am Seth Godin." And I'm not making this up. He then wrote, "I can't believe I'm talking to you."

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:42:29

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SGSeth Godin1:42:30

        "Your books have changed my life," and it named, like, four of my books, and it changed the way... I'm like, "All right. I'm in forever."

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:42:39

        Yeah.

    20. SGSeth Godin1:42:39

        "You got me. I don't know how you did that, but we're friends for life."

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:42:43

        [laughs] All right. I seem to have a similar use pattern with, with Claude and Perplexity also, although [laughs] I haven't, I haven't, uh, yeah, sandbagged them just yet. But what do you think people are getting right and wrong about AI? If that is a good question.

    22. SGSeth Godin1:43:03

        No, it's a great question. I think that they are getting wrong Their expectation that it be fully baked and a magic trick every day.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:43:12

        Mm-hmm.

    24. SGSeth Godin1:43:13

        When I think about the dawn of the internet and how creaky it was and how fast this is going, what it is now is amazing. But when we add to it persistence and when we add to it ubiquity and when we add to it the ability to make connection, it's a whole different thing.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:43:34

        Yeah.

    26. SGSeth Godin1:43:34

        Just a completely different thing. The second thing is people tend to use it as a one shot, like a search engine. Ask a question, get an answer. But what it's already good at is a protracted dialogue back and forth.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:43:51

        Mm-hmm.

    28. SGSeth Godin1:43:51

        So I had a pump in my house that stopped working, and I couldn't find someone to service it. I took a picture of it. I put it up to Claude and I said, "This isn't working. Work with me for the next ten backs and forth. Let's figure this out." And it would say, "Go downstairs and take a picture of this part. All right, try this." And we went back and forth and back and forth, and it suggested something and I said, "That's not gonna work." And we figured it out, and we fixed it. That idea, the fact that Claude is already better at many medical diagnoses over time than a human, and well, it should be 'cause it knows so much of the past of every single case, not just the cases your doctor has seen, right? If we're willing to engage with that, for people who are knowledge workers, I think it's a game changer. And then the other thing I think people need to wake up to is if you do average work for average pay, AI is gonna be able to do it cheaper than you. For example, radiology. Already, we can use AI to do a, you know, a, a wrist X-ray as well as a mediocre radiologist. So if we can do it instantly and for free, other than licensing, you got some problems.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:45:08

        Mm-hmm.

    30. SGSeth Godin1:45:08

        So the opportunity is either get AI to work for you or be prepared to work for AI.

30. 1:45:15 – 1:47:32

    Enshittification.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:45:16

       What are your greatest concerns around AI, if any, or foregone conclusions about challenges in the future?

    2. SGSeth Godin1:45:24

       I think that Cory Doctorow's work on enshittification is super important.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:45:29

       What was that word?

    4. SGSeth Godin1:45:30

       Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year two years ago, enshittification.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:45:33

       [laughs] Okay.

    6. SGSeth Godin1:45:37

       Enshittification is what happens after a business that uses the network effect gets lock-in-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:45:43

       Mm

    8. SGSeth Godin1:45:43

       ... and decides to aggressively make things worse for its users to make more money.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:45:48

       [laughs]

    10. SGSeth Godin1:45:50

        And we could think of four hundred examples right now-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:45:53

        Yeah

    12. SGSeth Godin1:45:53

        ... but we're not gonna do that.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:45:54

        Hmm.

    14. SGSeth Godin1:45:54

        Right? Because, you know, you, you say, "Well, I can't switch cable companies. It's just too much of a ha-" And the same thing's true for social networks and everything else.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:46:03

        Yeah.

    16. SGSeth Godin1:46:04

        That capitalism has built into it this doom loop that is getting faster and faster that says the race to the bottom pushes companies to mistreat the people they've locked in to make more money because that's what they get rewarded for.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:46:20

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SGSeth Godin1:46:21

        And most things that the internet touches start as a miracle. There are huge prizes for the early adopters, and then soon the desire to serve a different constituency kicks in, and it gets worse. And one of the things that makes it worse in a hurry is advertising.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:46:43

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SGSeth Godin1:46:44

        So I'm really nervous that these organizations that have raised billions and billions and billions of dollars are going to start short-cutting things to either get bigger or get more profitable faster. And because we don't know how they work, we have no clue, because it's gonna be hard to switch 'cause there aren't gonna be many competitors, it often leads to just a yucky mess. I think that's way more likely than a general artificial intelligence that takes over the world and turns us all into paperclips.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:47:18

        [laughs]

    22. SGSeth Godin1:47:19

        I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:47:21

        More likely just to have business incentive-driven enshittification. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, I would say that seems like a safer bet.

31. 1:47:32 – 1:49:56

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:47:32

       Well, Seth, are there any closing comments or challenges you'd like to issue to my listeners as we begin to wind to a close? Or anything that you'd like to add that, that I have managed to somehow dance around?

    2. SGSeth Godin1:47:49

       There's nothing better than starting a Tim Ferriss podcast and nothing worse than ending one 'cause you don't know if it's gonna happen again anytime soon.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:47:56

       [laughs]

    4. SGSeth Godin1:47:57

       Yeah, the challenge is super simple. The people who listen to your podcast have their hands on the levers, and they have influence, and they have resources, and they don't have to hustle for a nickel. They could make things that really matter. And so the challenge is take a deep breath and say, "What can I build that the me of five years from now is gonna say thanks?"

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:48:21

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SGSeth Godin1:48:21

       Thanks for walking away from those sunk costs. Thanks for ignoring those false proxies. Thanks for asking uncomfortable questions in service of making things better. Because that person, five years from now, they're gonna be here soon.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:48:39

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SGSeth Godin1:48:40

       And it's really great to pay the price and put in the work to become that person. And today is a good day to start.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:48:50

       The best day to start. Thank you, Seth. It's always so nice to see you. And I encourage people to check out, of course, This Is Strategy. You can find all things Seth at seths.blog. We'll have show notes and links to everything at tim.blog/podcast. Is there anything else you'd like to mention? We could, of course, include, and we will include, seths.blog/tis, which is where people can also get the deck of cards, if I'm not mistaken. Is that the right URL?

    10. SGSeth Godin1:49:20

        And the chocolate bar.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:49:21

        And a chocolate bar. [laughs] Something for everybody. [laughs]

    12. SGSeth Godin1:49:25

        We didn't even get to talk about the system of cheap chocolate. We'll do that next time.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:49:28

        [laughs] Okay. Cliffhanger. For next time, we will talk about the system of cheap chocolate, and I'm sure much, much more. Well, Seth, as always, what a pleasure. Nice to see you. And to everybody listening, till next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, also to yourself. But do ask those uncomfortable questions. That's being kind to your future self, to your long-term self. And as always, thanks for tuning in

Episode duration: 1:50:07