Seth Godin: Transforming Ideas into Impactful Strategies

Guy Kawasaki:
Hello. My name is Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People Podcast. And guess what? You've heard it before, but we are on a mission to make you remarkable. And I have my friend on this episode. He is Seth Godin, one and only, drum roll, Seth Godin. He had a great concept called the Purple Cow.
And that image has stuck in my brain for years now. We first met when I was a Macintosh evangelist, and he was working for a software company in the East Coast, and we've been friends ever since. He's written, God knows, how many books and he's influenced so much marketing. So he is guaranteed to help you be remarkable.
This is the Remarkable People Podcast. And as you know, we're on a mission to make you remarkable. And who could be better to help you become remarkable than Seth Godin, “Mr. Purple Cow.” And he has a new book out. This is called, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans. And he has blessed my podcast with his presence. So, Seth, welcome to Remarkable People.
Seth Godin:
I can't believe it took me this long. What a treat. What a treat. As you know the subtitle of Purple Cow is “Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.” You can send your remarkable royalty checks to box 305 Irvington, New York.
Guy Kawasaki:
They wouldn't be very big. But, yes, I feel. Seth, we met in about 1983 and that's a long time ago.
Seth Godin:
That's true.
Guy Kawasaki:
Seth, I don't know, where have the years gone, seriously?
Seth Godin:
But they've been good years, haven't they? One of my only regrets because we live 3,000 miles apart is we've never gone surfing or hockey playing together.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, we can.
Seth Godin:
But when you showed up in my office in 1983, it laid the groundwork that changed my life. And I think of you all the time.
Guy Kawasaki:
How did showing up in your office change your life?
Seth Godin:
Because this was Spinnaker Software. We were a small software company. I was working with Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton and inventing educational computer games for kids. I was twenty-three and a half years old and everyone else had way more seniority and experience than me. And I was the only person in the office who had a Mac.
I was a Beta tester, and I had Ready, Set, Go! nine-tenths on the Mac, and I was viewed as this edge case, the wild card, and you showed up and you were there to do a deal. And you and I just instantly hit it off and my view of myself changed because what I saw in you was that I didn't have to go work at an ice cream company and be a brand manager, that there was a chance to evangelize ideas that mattered.
And I met Jay Levinson the same year, I met Tom Peters the same year, and the three of you through modeling. We didn't spend a lot of time together. Just knowing that you were there made a big difference in my life.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. I had no idea. Okay. I'm flattered. As you look back, do you think you accomplished more or less than you thought you would from that time when you were in Spinnaker Software?
Seth Godin:
Oh, so much more. My goal for my life was to have a small independent business. Maybe at the end I'd have enough money that I wouldn't need to worry about feeding my family and that the world was very small. There were only three business magazines at the time. The chances that I would have a book published were close to zero. I was peddling as fast as I could, but my expectation for my impact was small.
Guy Kawasaki:
So looking back, do you think that was a mistake that you'd advise youth to have bigger goals, “hairier goals” as Tom Peters would say, or it just works out?
Seth Godin:
So expectations are tricky. I had very high standards for myself from a very early stage in my career. So I was aware of what really good work was and I didn't want to settle. The thing that shifted was an expectation for how big the world was. And I think that people who are younger than us grew up expecting that the whole world was a couple clicks away.
And so the horizon has to feel different now. But my timing, your timing, Moore's law, the growth of, first, the personal computer and then the growth of the internet, that's been the wind at our back. That has been the shift. Now the shift is AI and climate, and it's too late for the two of us to change the world with either of those things, but clearly the door is open on both of those fronts.
Guy Kawasaki:
So looking back, to what do you attribute your success?
Seth Godin:
I think this pitch that you should be authentic is baloney. No one wants you to be authentic. Just name anything you care about. If you go to a concert or if you get or need surgery, you don't want the surgeon to be authentic. If they're having a bad day, you don't want them to do a bad job. You want them to be consistent. And so I've been playing a role consistently for forty something years. I'm not an introvert, but I'm shy.
But when I'm playing Seth Godin, the professional, that's not the way I behave. And I have played the role of someone who if he had an innovative new idea would say it out loud. That causes me to have innovative new ideas. And so I think that just consistently having a strategy of seeing the systems at work and working to make things better, that's all I do over and over again. It seems to pay off.
Guy Kawasaki:
But surely you're not saying you should set out to be inauthentic, consistency is not the flip side of authenticity?
Seth Godin:
Actually, I think that being a hustling fraud is not okay. I think that manipulating people is not okay, but I am defining the opposite of authentic as consistent if you're a professional. There are a few people, a Kardashian, Miles Davis who we will pay money for authenticity, often like Amy Winehouse, it leads to you being dead. But in general, what we want from professionals in our life is consistency. Sign up to be who you want to become and keep doing that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So looking back, last question about looking back, what beliefs that you had back then were completely wrong and you had to change them?
Seth Godin:
I thought more people were interested in change and the thrill of innovation. I thought that if we gave everyone a microphone like the internet did, it would lead to nothing but good things. I didn't realize that just a few clowns and trolls and hustlers can really mess things up.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think we're living in a simulation because of this? You don't? I do.
Seth Godin:
Well, there's an idea in philosophy called Occam's razor, and what it says is that the simplest explanation is probably correct. And the chances that we have just this little bit of awareness that we are simulations in a much higher organism's virtual reality, the chances of it being that are so slim where physics and biology all line up, that this sort of makes sense.
The thing that I don't understand is why we haven't heard from people on other planets yet. It's going to happen. But I don't know why we haven't heard them yet. We're a little off the topic Guy, but as you and I can go on all day.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right. Okay. I got to ask you; your Purple Cow concept is one of my absolutely favorite Seth Godin conventions. So do you think that Purple Cow theory is still true today?
Seth Godin:
It is misunderstood by a lot of people. They think that remarkable means having a shtick. That remarkable means having a gimmick. That's not what I said, and it's not what I mean. There's always room for something or someone who is remarkable.
What remarkable means is worth making a remark about, "Do I benefit by telling someone about you?" If I benefit from that, I will do so. And if I tell someone about you, you will be able to be of service. The word will spread. Having a gimmick is selfish. Being remarkable is a service, generous, helping somebody else get what they want.
Guy Kawasaki:
So to put it in tactical and maybe an extreme, some people might say a Tesla Cybertruck is a “Purple Cow.” Somehow, I suspect that you don't think a Cybertruck is a “Purple Cow?”
Seth Godin:
Actually, there's a section in the new book called “Ludicrous and the Clown Car.” And Ludicrous mode in the Model S is a “Purple Cow.” Here's why, you look at my, I don't have one anymore, but you look at my Tesla, you comment on the retractable door handles because it turns out that's the number one thing people said in the early years, if they saw you in the parking lot, they didn't know about any other part, all those door handles. And then you'd say, "Get in the car, let's go for a drive."
And you'd hit Ludicrous mode zero to sixty in two something seconds, and the car would scream, they would scream, and your status would go up. You had this cool thing that was fun to show off that didn't hurt anybody.
That was brilliant. That sold billions of dollars’ worth of cars. The Cybertruck is this massive missed opportunity because the kind of person that wants to buy a pickup truck wants to show utility. That's what a pickup truck stands for. And the Cybertruck is not utility unless you want to cut cucumbers with the trunk.
It's not good at what it's supposed to be good at. So he squandered this chance. So, yes. People talk about it, but they talk about it to make fun of it. They talk about it to make fun of the person who bought it. The resale value of the Cybertruck is down 50 percent because it's very hard to have your status go up if you're driving that thing around town.
Guy Kawasaki:
So mention some things that's like in the Seth Godin Purple Cow Hall of Fame. What are “Purple Cow?” Legitimate “Purple Cows?”
Seth Godin:
Okay. So Patagonia Clothing is a “Purple Cow” because it doesn't scream at people, but if someone notices that you're wearing a new thing or an old thing from Patagonia, you get to tell them a story about why you're a good person. One of the great home runs was what Blake did at TOMS Shoes to give people the short version. Fifteen years ago, it was extremely unlikely that a pair of women's shoes would have a logo on them.
And he made espadrilles in Portugal, seventy-nine dollars, and put right in the back TOMS. And the deal was if you bought a pair of TOMS Shoes, he would give an identical pair to someone in a place like Ethiopia who didn't have shoes. There's flaws in that model. We'll leave that aside. The point is, a woman who bought these at the beginning was an early adopter. She wanted to have something to talk about.
She wears those shoes. The obligation in the social circle is if your friend has new shoes, you have to say nice shoes. And she gets to say, "Really? Because I'm a philanthropist, I'm better than you. Look at these shoes. Look what I just did."
And so now the word spreads. And from that simple idea, he built a company, he sold for half a billion dollars and ended up as his model evolved in helping a lot of people, that's remarkable because they weren't talking about Blake because they liked Blake, they weren't talking about Blake because he had a gimmick, they were talking about themselves and using the shoes as a way to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. My second favorite concept of Seth Godin is this. It is the concept of the smallest viable audience or smallest viable market or whatever you call it. And just riff on that. I love this concept.
Seth Godin:
This might be my biggest idea other than email marketing. So here's the idea. The idea is society and the media keeps pushing us to make something for everyone to fit in all the way through to the other side. So we're mass, so we're Heinz Ketchup so that no one can criticize it.
That's not interesting. It's not fun and it is no longer profitable that the opportunity that the internet gives us is not to reach everyone, it's to reach someone that it is better to be known and trusted by a small group of people than to disgust a large group of people.
And if someone says, "Great news, we got guy to come speak at our conference." Many of the people say, "Guy who?" And a few people say, "That's fantastic. I'm buying extra tickets." That's enough. It's enough to be specific because if you're specific about who it's for, you're on the hook that you can say to people who don't get the joke. You don't get the joke, don't come. But if you want to be on the hook, then you better deliver for the audience you picked because you got to pick them.
Guy Kawasaki:
And so do you think that it's viable to go to potential investors and discuss your smallest viable market when all they want to hear is about minimum viable product?
Seth Godin:
I think it's essential. And smart investors understand this. Smart investors know about Steve Blank and customer traction, that if we think about a company like Canva, how many years did it take for it to be an overnight success? That the traction at the beginning was the key to the whole thing. Show me the people who would miss your brand or product if it were gone.
Show me the people who being part of that circle matters a lot to them. So what I care about if I'm investing in TED is there's 3,000 people on the waiting list to pay 6,000 dollars to come. That's enough. If I have that, then I can get the next circle and the next circle and the next circle, but first, we need the red-hot center.
Guy Kawasaki:
But don't you think that many entrepreneurs have an absolute dismal understanding of this concept? They want to just be everything to everybody?
Seth Godin:
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that our job, Guy? You and me tell things to people like that when they're wrong.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a hard job here. All right. So now, let's talk about this book. First question is, do you have a strategy to develop strategies?
Seth Godin:
Oh, yeah. Let's just, for viewers at home, what's a strategy? Strategy is not tactics. Strategy is four things woven together. It is systems, games, empathy and time. And so the strategy for finding a strategy is first, do you see the invisible systems all around you? Moore's Law is a system that Silicon Valley is a system, the College Industrial Complex is a system.
The New York City Book Publishing world is a system, unspoken rules, a culture, an economy, a market that all works together quietly turning along. If you show up and you want to change the system and you don't have a lot of help or leverage, you're not going to succeed. So first we look for existing systems, then we think about time, which is big problems demand small solutions that what we're looking for in a strategy is seeds we can plant so that a year from now or five years from now, we'll be glad we did.
We're not looking for the grand opening, we're looking for the worthwhile opening. Empathy, because if we're going to show up to make a change, no one cares about us. They care about themselves, their problems, their issues. How can we go to where they are and offer them something they want? And the last one is games, which is how many pieces do I have? How much monopoly money? What are the dice being rolled?
Don't build a fire if the logs are bigger than your kindling can handle. So when those four pieces fit together, then I look for a change agent. What's shifting that's going to make the system unstable? So AI is a change agent, climate change is a change agent, government regulation or health might be a change agent, COVID was a change agent. When the change agent shows up and it's disrupting a system, you can find a strategy.
Guy Kawasaki:
So that's your strategy to find a strategy is to put those four things together and use that filter and lens?
Seth Godin:
Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
It sounds simple, but it is very hard to do, which I think you mentioned right, that simple things, hard to do things as opposed to easy to do things, complex things.
Seth Godin:
When you come up with a good strategy, it's easy to say but hard to stick with. So I'll tell you two stories from the book. The first one is the day Netflix became Netflix. So Reed and his name just escaped my head. Reed and the other guy at Netflix are in the business of those red envelopes with the DVDs and they're doing great. Blockbuster's reeling, they're about to win the red envelope DVD thing and Ted, Reed and Ted then see that something's disrupting the system and that thing is streaming.
So they decide to build a streaming division right next to the DVD rental division, but then they make a key decision that changes everything. Every meeting they have to go over this to build the other division. No one from the DVD division is allowed to come. Even the people who run that whole line of business, they're not allowed in the room.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Seth Godin:
Because they don't want to compromise the streaming business to make the DVD people happy. It was 100 percent of their revenue, they would've compromised that decision enabled Netflix to do something really rare, which is to win twice.
And then the section in the book right after that is the day Apple became Apple, because Apple had some people who knew design had some people who definitely knew software, but what they didn't have was scaffolding, something that would create an infrastructure, a network effect of developers who wanted the machine to succeed.
And if that didn't happen, you'd have hardware but not enough software. So they tapped this young guy in his twenties, and they said, go build an ecosystem that will last for forty years. And they gave him no money, just some plane tickets. And that is why you're in the book.
Guy Kawasaki:
I've never had my career explained so succinctly and accurately. That's exactly what it was. How do you pick between strategies? Because I can see how you can say, "Yeah. That strategy was right," but at the time you make the decision between multiple strategies. What's your strategy for picking the strategy?
Seth Godin:
Yeah. Great question, you can't, but at least you can try that. Most people aren't doing that. Most people can't answer the question, who's it for and what's it for? And Steve was arrogant, but he used his arrogance as a powerful tool because if someone who it wasn't for criticized him, he would say it's not for you. And if someone said, "Why should I pay double for this?"
He was very clear about what it was for, who's it for and what's it for? I don't care if you pick the optimal strategy, but please pick a strategy. Please be able to tell me who's for and what's it for. And if you can articulate it, your good judgment will probably help you pick a better strategy. But you got to try.
Guy Kawasaki:
And then you find your minimal viable audience picking that strategy. Who's it for?
Seth Godin:
Right. You pick your customers that picks your future.
Guy Kawasaki:
And when do you know it's time to switch strategies? You could make the case you use Blockbuster, but in 1975, an engineer at Kodak invented digital photography. And if they had committed to digital photography and not invited anybody from the film business into those meetings, Kodak would own the world today, right?
Seth Godin:
So do you know my friend Lisa Gansky?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Seth Godin:
From the old days. Okay. So Lisa sold her company to Kodak and she was an advisor on the digital side. And this was right at the key moment when Kodak had to decide, they owned almost all the patents on digital photography and she's in the CEO's office or the chairman's office in Rochester. And she's arguing just like you said, "Why don't we just not invite the photo people to these meetings and go all in?"
And he said, and I wasn't there so I'm getting all the facts wrong, but he said something like, "Lisa, do you know how many steps are involved in making a roll of film?" And she said, "I have no idea." He said, "Nineteen, come over here." And he took her to the window, and he said, "How many buildings do you see on our campus?" And the answer is, nineteen. There was one entire building for every step involved in making film.
He couldn't shrink it a little bit, he couldn't back off a little bit. They had optimized everything they did around one thing. And because it was a public company, he didn't have the guts to go start a new division in Santa Clara and just start over. He couldn't keep both balls in the air. That's why most companies, when the telephone came along, AT&T was for sale, Western Union could have bought it and instead they decided to make better telegrams.
And when I was at Yahoo, we had the chance to buy Google for ten million dollars. And the people, I wasn't in the room, but the people in the room said, "Nah, we'll just put the money into building Yahoo kids out better because it's so easy to defend the thing you think you're already good at."
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So then how do you know when to switch?
Seth Godin:
In my career, I quit more than most people. That's why I wrote a book about quitting called The Dip. I take pride in quitting and every once in a while I quit too soon. And I think the cost of quitting too soon is tiny compared to the cost of quitting too late, because you don't get tomorrow over again.
And there are plenty of examples of big companies that are quitting too late and I don't have a simple answer for you except when we think about systems, if you see that the current is changing and you're going to have to paddle upstream for a really long time, but there's a downstream path that's available to you, this might be a good day to build a Skunk Works a good day to put yourself out of business with a new division that does the new thing.
But I'm going to leave it to other people to figure out exactly how to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So with that framework, do you think that Google should have stuck with Google+ longer and today with Twitter being X and now a Nazi platform, if Google+ were still around, threads would probably not be around, and Google would own social media?
Seth Godin:
Yet Google has made a boatload of mistakes in the last bunch of years, because they forgot the core mission, the strategy of organizing the world's information and instead decided because there's 10,000 people in the building who make a lot of money when the stock price goes up one dollar to day trade. I saw the same thing happen at Yahoo.
So if you think about just Google Reader could have been the heart of an ecosystem of blogs which would've become the heart of the podcasting universe, which would've become the beating heart of all this new information. But they said, "It's costing us a million dollars a month, we're not going to do it," because they got so distracted by just how much money comes in from one part of their business, which is why I wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Google should have broken itself up.
Google should not be fighting the antitrust people. They should eagerly break themselves up because each one of the pillars would end up doing a better job of their core strategy. And so part of the reason they completely left the door open to Microsoft and others on AI is they wake up every day saying, "How do we defend search?"
The same way book publishers wake up every day and say, "How do we defend paper?" And the opportunity for example, that public radio had to own a massive chunk of podcasting was huge. And they said, "We need to defend the spectrum because that's our God-given right is to be at ninety-three point nine on your dial." I'm not tuning into ninety-three point nine anymore.
Guy Kawasaki:
With that in mind, do you think Wikipedia is blowing it? Wikipedia could be the center of knowledge in the universe, but they're stuck on this model of we have individual contributors who have to cite journalistically approved sources to write entries about each subject. And to me, these LLMs, they're like instant Wikipedia on any subject anytime, any language. So do you think Wikipedia is the next Kodak?
Seth Godin:
Okay. Jimmy did something really brave and the five million people who regularly support Wikipedia have a project. They don't have a mission as much as they have a project. The project is to continue building what they've been building the way they've been building it. It is not a corporation with someone making strategy decisions.
It is a community that fuels and feeds itself on the craft of what they do. It's impossible for me to describe a future in five years where Wikipedia is as important as it was five years ago. That can't happen because to make this sort of change would require the people in the community to change why they're in the community. And that's not going to happen.
And there are plenty of spiritual institutions where the same thing is true and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's a fine way to spend your day. The interesting question to me is, "Who's going to build a different community that offers people similar status and affiliation where LLMs work with them to create some sort of special magic?"
And I don't see somebody doing that right now, but I'm hoping that it will happen. That building a community of people who show up in a certain way that builds our culture and it generally is magic when it happens.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you know what? If I'm interpreting you correct, I'll adore that idea and I'll give you an example. So right now I'm using this Shure MV7+ mic and some people have told me that my sound and my video are not quite synced up, that the sound is a little bit in front of the video or the videos in front of the sound, one of the two. So I need a way to add a few microseconds to put the two things in sync.
Seth Godin:
Yup.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I go to Claude, and I go to ChatGPT, and I say, "How do I adjust and put a delay in the audio to synchronize the audio and the video?" And both places says, "You get the app and in the app you look for something called delay and you enter the delay." And so the next question I ask both of these LLMs is, "Where is this delay feature in the app?"
And they come back and say, "Oh, we made a mistake. There is no delay in the app. I'm sorry. There is no way to delay an MV7+." Now, what you're saying, if I got you right, is we need a community of people who really know the MV7+ and its app and say, "Hey, you guys are wrong. You need to fix this in your LLM." Is that what you're saying?
Seth Godin:
Okay. First you can fix this as soon as we get off the call, just download ACam and run ACam through your video, you'll be done.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Fair enough.
Seth Godin:
I have the same problem. Number two, Reddit will walk you through it. Why is someone spending their time on Reddit answering Guy's questions? Because they're amazing when you find the right topic. You can put a picture up of four square inches of a car and say, "This car just blew by me and this is the only picture I have. What car is it?"
And someone will tell you in seven minutes, this is magic, not just for you but for the person who did it. Because people want to be of use, they want their status for being smart to go up. They want to be affiliated with the others. Okay. Reddit then says, "We got all these people, we're going to pay for it by selling their data to OpenAI."
Okay. That's fine. But if I want to go further than that, I think about the fact that Wikipedia said everyone who looks up Paris, France is going to see exactly the same article about Paris, France. That's never going to happen again with OpenAI and Claude because we're going to treat every single person differently based on who they are, where they were, where they're going.
Maybe you're asking about Paris, France, and I know you're a high school student in Oklahoma writing a paper versus this person, you get the idea. So what would a community be like if our reason for being was to create a resilient educational tool like The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson's book, and how would I move up by doing a good job at that?
And so the same way people moved up in the Linux community by doing a good job of making a printer driver, someone's going to figure out how to do a good job of parsing the work that was done in Paris, France Wikipedia to create a multiverse of Paris, France that other people can, you get the idea.
So we're going to become centaurs where half of our day we're holding hands with an LLM and the other half of the day we're out in the world looking for pictures or whatever, doing what an LLM can't do yet. But the core of it has be a spiritual practice, it has to be a community I want to be part of.
Guy Kawasaki:
Like you, I was on the board of trustees of Wikipedia and I cannot really comprehend them making such a switch. It's such a religion for them. Do you hear a buzzing? Is that your alarm?
Seth Godin:
No, that was the local volunteer fire department, which I love. I adore. They haven't discovered phones yet. So when there's a fire somewhere, they just honk that horn to tell everybody to go get in their truck.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a system. So would you explain your decision to use the riff format in your book where you have 300 short stories basically, what's the thinking there?
Seth Godin:
So how did you learn about vegetables when you were three? I think it's unlikely your mom sat you down and said, these are carrots, these are peas, this is cauliflower and went through all the vegetables. What happened is you did a couple vegetables, then you went outside to play, then you did this and then there were a couple more of it. That's how we learn. And so what I discovered is if I needed to tell the story of systems but not talk about games and not talk about empathy, I couldn't. I got stuck.
So I start talking about systems until I need to tell you about games and I talk about games, then I go back to that, and that's how I learn, that's how I teach. And the reason that the riffs are numbered in, there are no page numbers in the book.
Half of the sales for you, your books, and for me, my books are digital either Kindle or audio. So you can't say to somebody, "Did you like page forty-eight?" Because they don't have page forty-eight on an audiobook. But you can say, "We're going to talk about riff 117 because everyone has riff 117."
Guy Kawasaki:
And what's the order you put them in?
Seth Godin:
The order is if you and I were on a long boat ride, this is how I would tell you the story of strategy and if seven of them got rearranged, it wouldn't matter. But if seventy of them got out of order, it would be weird.
Guy Kawasaki:
So it's definitely not the concept of I have it organized by subject matter or I have it organized by chronological order or development path.
Seth Godin:
Correct. For example, when you show up in 1983 to pitch the graphic interface and ecosystem of the Mac, you start with some of the stuff Andy did, you start with some of the stuff Susan did, you start with some of the stuff that the exterior people did, you start with some of the stuff Regis McKenna did, and then you go back and forth based on what the audience is lighting up about.
You don't go, "Let me tell you, from the beginning to the end, every icon that's on the desktop," I think that's the way we talk to people.
Guy Kawasaki:
And how did you come up with 295 of these? Do you set yourself up and you say, "Okay. First thing in the morning I'm going to think of five riffs," or are you just constantly background processing and every time you think of a riff you send yourself a note or something like what's your writing strategy?
Seth Godin:
So my life strategy 9,000 blog posts later is if I see something in the world and I don't understand why it's working, I have a lot of trouble doing anything until I figure out a theory. Why is someone spending their life being a spammer? Why did this social network win and that one not win? Make an assertion, write it down. That's a blog post. When I'm writing a book like this, I'll write an assertion, a riff, and then I'll think, "Wait a minute, who's going to think I missed something? What's their objection?"
So that'll be the next riff. Once I had the first draft of those, I made forty-five videos to create my Udemy course on it, and I put those videos on purple.space, which is a community of people online who take care of each other and are very smart and some of them are into my work and I offered them for free 300 of them a chance to take the workshop.
So now they're watching the videos and I'm watching from over here as they're talking about the videos, they don't know they're giving me feedback, they're talking to each other about what a feedback loop is or whatever, and I see, "Oh, they keep misunderstanding feedback loops." So now, I write a different riff to answer an objection that the reader would've had but doesn't know.
And then the step after that is I take the book and I upload it to elevenlabs.ai, which I have trained in my voice, and it reads the book. I download that and I go for car rides, listening to myself, reading my book, and if I say something that sounds stupid, I write it down and when I get home I fix that part and then I run out of attention and I'm exhausted. So I just stop.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. So at any point did you or an editor say, "Riff 120 should really come after riff 255, let's move that riff."
Seth Godin:
I did it a few times.
Guy Kawasaki:
Or I'm trying to wrap my mind on how you did this.
Seth Godin:
I did that part a few times. I didn't do it a lot because every time you move one thing to another place, then something else is in the wrong place. I really don't think the order is as important as it would be if I was writing a novel. I think that what I'm trying to do is philosophy.
I'm trying to help people create a philosophy of becoming that after someone engages with work like this or with Purple Cow or The Practice, none of those books are in order. I would like to think that they will make new decisions based on who they have become.
Guy Kawasaki:
You're like Sun Tzu or something. Oh, my god. So how do you want people to read the book from cover-to-cover, front-to-back or just dive in every once in a while at random?
Seth Godin:
I honestly don't care if anyone buys my book. I really don't. I just want them to talk about it. And when you talk about it, you may find yourself saying, "I don't understand this part," and go read a few sections. Some people today I gave a speech in New York and on my way in, because it was early in the morning, I was tired.
I listened to the practice, my own book, and I gave a better speech because other things clicked in my head. So if you want to listen to the whole thing in a row, that's fine, but many of my readers will listen or read for twenty minutes, go explore and then come back in a day or two. That's fine, too.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have a book called Wise Guy, which I tell the stories of my life that shape me, and I am going to do a version of this called Wiser Guy.
Seth Godin:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
And Wise Guy is organized roughly chronologically from my family moving from Japan to my presence in Silicon Valley. But as I listen to you, I think I might do it riff style. I'll take all those stories and just throw them all up in the air and come back and put them in a completely different order. I really like your idea, Seth.
I'm going to send a copy of this to my editor and she's going to tell me all the reasons why I shouldn't do this and then I'm going to do it again anyway. So you have in your acknowledgments pretty good recognition of the contribution of Claude to this book. So can you just explain to us how you use Claude and specifically I want to know what Claude can do that you cannot and what you can do and Claude cannot.
Seth Godin:
Okay. To be very clear, every word that you see my name on, blog post or book I wrote, I could cheat, but I don't. And if you listen to the audiobook, I'm reading it myself at great personal distress. What I found Claude is great at, the two things it's best at.
One, you can upload complex business plans or entire books and say, "Where are the weak spots? Please argue with me. Tell me where the contradictions are. What did I miss?" And when a human does that, my feelings get a little hurt and I get defensive.
But when Claude does it, I feel fine because Claude is kind and no one else is watching ChatGPT on the other hand, is an arrogant jerk. I don't do that with Claude and judgment. The second thing is I will say to Claude, here are five bullet points. Please tell me four bullet points I missed. And this is just extraordinary. I'll say, "Here are five system traps, five ways systems end up not serving the people in them. Can you name some more system traps?" And it does and it's so smart at that. So I take those.
Guy Kawasaki:
And, Seth, I have to share your fascination with this. I use it in similar ways for the life of me. I know technical explanation that it's just a mathematical model and it's like figuring out what syllable to put after this syllable and all that.
But I don't understand how it comes up with such cogent and strategic and sentient answers. I really don't. I think there's no doubt in my mind it's smarter than me and all these people are saying someday it's going to be a smart and have sentience. I think its way past that already.
Seth Godin:
Okay. So when I was at Stanford, we were allowed to take courses outside the business school and I took a PhD level AI course with Douglas Knott in 1982. And I've been thinking about this for a very long time and I majored in philosophy. Here is my theory. I think this is how our brains work, too. When I make a sentence, I don't figure out the end of the sentence before I start, do you?
Guy Kawasaki:
I never thought about it before.
Seth Godin:
Right?
Guy Kawasaki:
I guess not.
Seth Godin:
We start talking in the sentence just unfolds. So we assert. This is called The Intentional Stance from Dan Dennett. We assert that other people have consciousness and a noise in their head like we do because evolutionarily it's a good survival mechanism. If you see a dog bear its teeth and make a certain noise, you're saying to yourself, "That dog is mad at me." No, the dog isn't mad at you. The dog's just wired and it's about to do a thing, but it doesn't have a voice in its head.
But the easiest way to survive is to imagine it's conscious. Claude is so complicated, we have no choice but to do the same thing. And I think it's evolving, it's thinking the way we do. But I will tell you my favorite Claude story, small amount of ego involved. I'm trying to understand something and I say to Claude, "Please explain this concept to me the way a college student would," and it does an okay job.
I say, "Okay. Please explain this to me the way Seth Godin would." And it then puts my tone of voice into it. But it didn't do a great job, but it was enough for me to rewrite it. So I rewrote it and I said, "I think Seth would prefer it like this." And I wrote it back and Claude said, "You're right. That's more like the way Seth would do it."
And I said, "Thank you. I'll tell Seth." And I said, "Actually, I am Seth," and I'm not making this up. I should go and find the screenshot of it. It said, "You are Seth? I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of yours."
Guy Kawasaki:
No.
Seth Godin:
"I've read many of your books," and it listed four of my books, and I particularly like this concept in that concept. This is it. My ego was this. I was so excited that the AI knew who I was.
Guy Kawasaki:
Seth, no shit. I think that is the greatest AI story I have ever heard. Oh, my god, it sure beats my story. When people come up to me Seth and they say, "I was lost. I didn't know what to do with my life. My career was a wreck. And then I read one of your books and it changed my life." And I say to them, which one of my sixteen books change your life? And they say, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad. So that's my experience."
Seth Godin:
That hurts, oh.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So can I have a lightning round session with you?
Seth Godin:
Okay. Bring it on. I got a couple of minutes. This is the best part of my day.
Guy Kawasaki:
Because you are like Mr. Strategy and I just want to ask you to just give simple little snippets of goodness about strategies, about specific areas, okay?
Seth Godin:
I'll try.
Guy Kawasaki:
Strategy, entering college, what should my strategy be?
Seth Godin:
Have empathy for the admissions officer and create a persona that matches the kind of person they want to let in and also see the flaw in the system and apply to the cheapest school that can solve the problem you're trying to solve.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Let's suppose I've determined which school to go, I'm about to, this is much of my strategy?
Seth Godin:
I mean, you want tactics?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Seth Godin:
Okay. The tactic is if you have any interest at all in physics or math, go to their website, find five of their professors, go find papers or books their professors have written. Go read the papers and books and send email to the professor asking an honest, insightful question about their work. Go back-and-forth for six weeks having a conversation about their work. And then say, "I'm coming to campus. Can I visit you during office hours?"
And then when you go to office hours say, "I love the University of Delaware, it's been a thrill to engage with you about this. Do you think you can help me get in?" And they have never ever had this happen to them. They will send a recommendation to the admissions office and you'll move ahead of all the football players.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. The strategy or tactics. If you are just graduating college and you're about to go out into the real-world?
Seth Godin:
You need to go start something. You can't hope to get picked out of the Flotsam and Jetsam pile that someone will give you a great gig the way I got. You got to start something. And it doesn't have to be for money. That's generous, that's brave, that earns you a reputation that probably involves connecting other people. Do those things, just every weekend for six weeks, six years, six months, whatever. The phone will ring because if you create enough goodness in the world, people will want more.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. How about if I just got laid off?
Seth Godin:
I would forgive yourself first because you didn't get fired, you got laid off. And then I would think about the systems at work and the trends at work, and I would find an area that is growing fast where you could be a narrator, curator, connector the way Esther Dyson did with the internet in the eighties where you could, my friend Dan Shipper is doing this with AI right now. And Every newsletter, it's called Every, has more and more people following it.
And those people then report back to him, and he gets endless content, again, you're going to have to go do something to make a living. I'm not saying that this will pay the bills, but it will open a path for you because if you do it for just a little while, someone in your industry will see that you are in and of the industry and will need you. Not a replacement for you, but you in the room.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I'm just about to retire. What's my strategy for the rest of my life?
Seth Godin:
So aren't we lucky that we are living in these weird, interesting times? And also if you have a roof over your head and enough time to listen to a podcast, you're one of the richest people who ever lived, even if you debt. And we have defined for only a hundred years what we do in retirement as what we were supposed to do for our whole life, but now we don't get to do it.
I think that's a mistake. I think we have all these tools now, chances to create magic. And if you have the freedom to not need to get paid to do, that's what you should do. Go create magic somewhere for someone, the smallest viable audience, even if it's only teaching four kids how to read. That's enough. Go create magic for somebody.
Guy Kawasaki:
My last question for you, Seth, is what's my strategy now for social media?
Seth Godin:
Walk away.
Guy Kawasaki:
Walk away, why?
Seth Godin:
Don't play a game. You can't win. There isn't going to be another Kardashian. There isn't going to be another Guy Kawasaki. Don't try to be someone who won on one of those platforms.
If you can have a project where the smallest viable audience is attainable and where social media will help you get there specifically, I'm in favor, but all the data I'm seeing is that trying to get undifferentiated large numbers of clicks and traffic and reading everything in social media just makes your brain a cesspool. I would walk away.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So, Seth, now, take as much time as you like and explain your book and promote your book and explain to people why they should read this book. I enjoyed it a lot and I didn't even see the section about myself because I was reading it randomly like you suggested. So we want the Seth Godin explanation of this book and why we should all go out and buy it right now?
Seth Godin:
So it's at seths.blog/TIS, which stands for This is Strategy, and you probably shouldn't go out and buy it right now, it might not be for you, if you've heard me and my friend Guy talk about this for an hour, and you're not itching to do work that matters by understanding an elegant strategy. I'm sorry that I have wasted your time.
I hope we at least amused you. It's not for you, it's for people who get the joke and for people who say, "Yeah, this is worth a couple hours in my time because then I can talk about it with my team and I can talk about it with my investors and I can talk about it with my family because who's it for? What's it for? And being smart about strategy and changing times is the best way I know to make things better."
Guy Kawasaki:
Seth, you are a man of such great wisdom and in succinct packages. So let me close here.
Seth Godin:
You make me look like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me close here. So this is the Remarkable People Podcast, and I hope you've just enjoyed, let's see, fifty-four minutes and thirty-three seconds with Seth Godin, the “Purple” Cow of Authors and the Strategy Maven, and I hope that this episode will help you be a more remarkable person. So Seth, if you got any final words, let's hear it and then we're going to sign off and let you get to your next interview.
Seth Godin:
You inscribed a book to my son and what you wrote, I'm going to change it just a little bit, I'm going to change it to listen to Guy. When in doubt, listen to Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed this episode with my buddy Seth Godin. Oh, my God, where have the years gone, Seth? Thank you so much for being on this podcast and thank you so much for making so many remarkable marketing things happen. I hope you learn how to be a remarkable marketer, brander, evangelist, sales, whatever, from Seth.
Now, let me thank the rest of the Remarkable People team. First is Madisun Nuismer, she is the producer of this podcast and she's the co-author of Think Remarkable with me. Then there's Tessa Nuismer, who does all our background research. And then we have the amazing, amazing sound design team of Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez. So this is the Remarkable People Team, and we're on a mission to make you remarkable. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.