Marketing Legend: The True Future of AI in Marketing

Seth, where do people go wrong with marketing today?

I think people are misunderstanding what marketing is. It's not hype, it's not hustle, it's not crushing it, it's not elbowing people out of the way. Marketing is the work of telling a true story that spreads. It's having a strategy where the wind is at your back. It's doing work that matters for people who care. If you're doing those things, you're probably not going wrong. But if you're chasing clicks, if you're chasing short-term interactions, it's a really hard slog.

Earlier you said, when we were talking pre-show, you said marketing and strategy are the same thing. What do you mean by that?

So people ask me for marketing help now and then. I don't do any coaching or consulting, but if a friend or a nonprofit needs help, they don't have a marketing problem. They have a strategy problem. And strategy is What is the change we seek to make in the world? And what are the tools we have to make that change happen? How are we going to work with time and games and systems to help people get to where they want to go? If you can answer those questions, marketing is really easy. If you can't, then you're just chasing around for a slogan and that's not going to help you.

Got it. And you said in your book that strategy— this is interesting to me because I've always thought that strategy is a way of thinking and it helps guide the tactics at the end of the day. And it's sort of a map, right? But in the book, you You say it's actually not a map, it's a compass. So I read that little passage, it reads like your blogs, and I'm like, we need to go a little deeper on that. What does that mean, it's like a compass, not a map?

Well, I wrote the book for a lot of people, but I didn't write it for you because you already understand what I'm trying to say. Most people think strategy is, what's your plan? The reason they want to have a plan is because if you grew up in the West with the whole mindset of doing your job, A plan is if you do your job and do your job and do your job, you get the prize. And there's no risk. It's manage to the plan. And I'm not opposed to plans, but plans are not strategies, right? Strategies say the future is not here yet. I can't be sure what the future is going to bring. Resilience matters. I am probably not 100% right, but it's better to have assertions than to just go in blind. And so when we come up with a strategy, we are making assertions about how the world is and how the world will be and what the world will need, right? So you and I were talking about AI and agents. One of your assertions about the future is that talented employees are going to have plenty of AIs who are working for them with agents that they program to do things, whereas untalented or unskilled people are going to spend their time working for an AI, right? Those are assertions that you can build a strategy around.

Yep. And so you would say then, or maybe I'm putting words in your mouth here, but strategy, if I'm thinking strategy is a way of thinking, then ultimately strategy is philosophy at the end of the day, right?

Mm-hmm. That's exactly right. It is a philosophy of becoming. Who do you want to become? How is the world going to become? So the investors, when I was there at the dawn of the internet in 1993, '94, made the strategic assertion that the world is going to get more connected, connection speeds are going to get faster, and people are going to trade lots of things for convenience and connection. If that's your strategy, it makes a lot of sense to invest in Facebook and Uber. If it's not your strategy, then you should go invest in a package delivery company or something. They're different ways of looking at the world.

Right. And I think maybe this might be helpful if we dive into a little bit of your strategies. Because obviously, you know, we're coming up the elevator and I showed you a picture. I've— you're one of the first— Lynchpin was one of the first books I read as I was going into the workforce. And I mentioned to you that, you know, we have all our employees read it first thing as part of onboarding, right? But, you know, there are certain strategies in there, or we can call them philosophies. One is you don't want to be a cog in a machine, right? So, I guess, What are some of the core strategies for you? And maybe we can start with one. I'll maybe lead off here. You don't get caught up by the hype of, hey, short-form content, or you need to do this, you need to do that. It's like, I'm Seth Godin, I'm just going to focus on blogging. I'm going to do— maybe I'll do some long-form podcasts, but that's it. So can you maybe explain the marketing strategy behind that initially, and we'll kind of go deeper?

Sure. You know, I'm hesitant to talk about Seth Godin as a role model and example because we're all different, and I don't want to let anyone off the hook because Great things happened to me when I was a kid. Other things happened. That makes me me and not you. But people say, well, you can do X, Y, or Z because you're Seth. And my answer is, but I'm Seth because I did X, Y, and Z. And what I learned coming up is that chasing shiny objects doesn't work for dogs and it doesn't work for people, right? That if you catch the car, the dog is unhappy.

Yeah.

The whole idea is You find a thing you want to stand for and a place where you can stand for it, and you stick with it, and you stick with it, and you get better at it. And so my blog used to have comments on it, and I took the comments off because they were ruining my life. And everyone said, you're not allowed to do that, it's against the law, every blog has to have comments. And I was like, if you want to put comments on your blog about my posts, please feel free, but I don't have comments. And amazingly, nothing bad happened to me. And Twitter showed up and I was in the right place at the right time. I could have been very popular on Twitter. And I said, well, if I go do that, I will have less resources to spend on my blog. So do I want to be mediocre at Twitter and blogging, or do I want to be not on Twitter and good at blogging? And this focus is scary because it means you committed to something, whereas if you're always chasing the next thing, It doesn't matter if it doesn't work because there's another next thing.

Right. And you said in another interview, and I'm paraphrasing here, but you said you can be great at a lot of different things, but ultimately, it's that you're just going to be invisible, right? Versus being just amazing at one thing. Yeah.

So, what does it mean to be remarkable? Because that is the essence of modern marketing. Let's, for people who are under 50, remind them that what marketing used to be is average stuff for average people. that the goal of Heinz Ketchup is to be ketchup for everyone. Get as much shelf space in every store as you can. Kraft Singles, number one product in refrigerators around the country until recently.

Mm-hmm.

That's average cheese for average people because you have mass merchants and mass advertising. There is no mass advertising anymore. When I worked at Yahoo, it was the most popular page on the entire internet. And even on its best day, it didn't get as many views as a top TV show because mass is gone. So, what's the alternative? The alternative is to make ideas worth talking about. What makes it worth talking about? It's remarkable, worth making a remark about. It doesn't mean a gimmick or hype. It just means I will get better if I tell people about your podcast, if I tell people about your brand of sneakers. How will it help me to do that? Well, that doesn't come unless you have relentless focus and the smallest viable audience that you're willing to commit to.

And I think you said this before, and I'll paraphrase again as you get a little sip of the tea, but yesterday's remarkable is today's average, right? And so, it's— things ebb and flow and things change quickly.

Right. So, you may remember when everyone was talking about barefoot running. and Vibram FiveFinger, whatever those things are. I can't remember the last time someone brought that up. It's not a fad anymore. It's just the cycle that we live in. The cycles keep getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So that's good if you're a restless creative and you want to invent the next thing. It's good if you're an ad agency and your client can't just do plop, plop, fizz, fizz forever. It's challenging if your goal is Get it over with and then rest, because that's not happening anymore.

And I guess I want to come back to this in a second, but, um, in your, in your book— so everyone that can't see this right now, actually, if we have the wide shot, we can probably see the book. It's called This Is Strategy. So that's, that's Seth's new book that's coming out. Um, you do talk about games quite a bit in there, and, um, you know, finite games versus infinite games. Um, and then there's everything in life is a game, right? That's how I just think about life. So maybe if you can go a little deeper, because I don't know how often you talk about games in there, because I've really just looked through a couple of chapters.

Right. No, it's one of the 4 threads of the entire thinking about strategy. There are 2 kinds of people in the world, people who say, I got a new game, you want to play? Those people say yes, and other people roll their eyes and run away. This is not the kind of game I'm talking about. I'm not talking about Monopoly or Dungeons and Dragons. Games are any encounter where there's limited resources and a finite number of players and rules. And that is a job interview. That is how do you get through security at the airport. These are games. And if you try to break the rules, you go to jail, right? You can't just like, I'm going to cheat at this system. They're going to get you. So when we think about the assets we have, the moves to be made, It's helpful to call it a game for a couple of reasons. One, because game theory is a whole branch of math and science that you can learn from. And 2, because you don't have to take it so seriously that if you make a move and it doesn't work, it's not that you're a bad person, it's that you made the wrong move. And you say, oh, that's the wrong move. I'll make a different move.

Mm-hmm.

So when I'm talking to people who are trying to do useful work, I'll ask them about the game they're seeking to play. And if you've been seduced by this whole idea that you need to be authentic and all this other nonsense, you can't imagine that it's a game. But of course it's a game. What people want from us is to consistently play the game, not to bleed all over the page.

And why is being authentic nonsense?

Well, so let's say something important came up in your life. You needed a lawyer or a surgeon or even an Uber driver. Or you're going to a concert for someone you saved up money for the tickets. Do you want that person to be authentic? If they're having a really bad day, do you want them to be cranky? If they're tired, do you want them to drive erratically? No. You want them to be consistent. Professionals are consistent. They show up as the best version of themselves. Authenticity is for your friends. Consistency is for professionals.

I love that. So many good one-liners. You— I guess going back to the game thing for a second, like, I very much see this as a game, right? We're kind of playing this right now. There are limited resources. It's a 2-player game. Actually, it's a 3-player game right now with Matt over there.

Thanks, Matt. I think—

so my coach told me this. He's like, you know, the problem with you, Eric, is you look at life, everything's a game to you. Your relationships, everything is a game, and it becomes damaging at some point, right? But I'm like, but it makes everything fun at the end of the day. So what's your take on it? Because Coach is, I think, around your age too, a very mature guy, but he's like, you need to stop.

Well, I think your coach is misguided. I think your coach might accurately say sometimes you play the game in a way that doesn't get you what you're hoping for. That playing the game in a way, for example, in a relationship that doesn't feel like you are being manipulative, where your theory of the game is, how do I help this person become who they want to be? That's still a game, but it's a game And that helps you build a resilient relationship. So I'm not sure what your relationship is like with the coach. Maybe you're misquoting him, but it doesn't make any sense to say, stop playing this as a game, because that shows a misunderstanding of what a game even is.

I think so. His whole thing was, this is a real quote, he said, not everything in life is a game. But in my mind, I'm like, but it is. Because I played so many games growing up. It's just what I'm used to. So you say Dungeons and Dragons, all these things. I'm like, everything. Business is a game. Relationships are a game. But to your point, I guess maybe this is where we should talk about finite versus versus infinite games. I try to play infinite games as often as possible. So can you explain the difference there?

So James Carse wrote the original Breakthrough book in the '70s. My friend Simon Sinek updated it recently. 2 kinds of games. A finite game is the game most people think of, soccer. There's a timer and there's a team that wins. An infinite game is like playing catch with your nephew. You don't try to win catch. The purpose of a game of catch is to play more catch, is to engage with people and get closer. So, most of the things that we are doing in business are actually an infinite game. And so, when Nordstrom says, we're going to give you a refund on that snow tire even though we don't sell snow tires, they're not doing it because they're a charity.

Right.

They're doing it because they're playing an infinite game. They're saying, this investment we are making, not just in our relationship with the guy who bought the tires, but With the employee who works at the Thai counter, with the staff in Anchorage, Alaska, with the story where it'll spread, that move in the game will help us play the game even better tomorrow.

Mm-hmm.

And too often hustle culture is about the whole idea of pickup culture, which Neil Strauss called the game. That is not an infinite game. That's all about a finite manipulative game where you seek to win and leave nothing but rubble behind. And I've abhorred that my whole life. That's what my parents taught me. And we can do better than that.

All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. We're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website, and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So, if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So, singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. Going back to it and funny you mentioned the Nordstrom story. So, I was talking to this guy and we're talking, he's a businessman and then, you know, he starts talking about the Nordstrom tire thing and turns out he was the guy that came up with that. So, my main point here is he looks at life, he's in his 80s right now but everything in his life, he had no reason to get on a call with me. A 15-minute call went for 45 minutes. And he's just like, I just want to help people. And to me, and I think to you too, business is fundamentally about helping other people. Relationships are about helping other people. Well, if that's the case, then you should just keep playing the game that way and not play the zero-sum games that you're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. And so generosity is often misunderstood. Generosity is not give everything away. Generosity is Expending emotional labor to do things you don't feel like to help somebody in a transaction that is mutually beneficial. And you can charge a lot for things that are generous.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Back to the surgeon. If the surgeon says, I'm going to do heart surgery that's going to save your life compared to the other surgeon who hasn't trained the way I have, and it's $40,000, That's generous because they could put that effort into something else. They're putting that effort into you.

Right.

And so when we think about being generous, when we think about these transactions, the market shows up and says, this is what I'm interested in. Your job is not to just take notes and do it. Your job is to engage and help that person get to what they really seek. And when it turns into manipulation, that's when we're not actually getting them what they seek. We're just getting what we want and they lose. What we're looking for is empathy. I'm not you. I don't know what you know. I don't see what you see, but I'm going to make some assertions about what you want and I'll create the conditions for that to happen. Right.

So would you say ideally people are playing games that don't feel icky, right? Games that are zero-sum can feel icky. Games that aren't, where you're helping everybody, they feel good.

I don't know the story inside your head. Some of the people I know who are real hustlers don't feel icky about it. Con men don't feel icky. Con men are good con men because they don't feel icky.

Interesting. That's true. That's true. Maybe we'll come back to that thread as well. But you mentioned that games are one of the 4 pillars in your book. What are the other 3?

Empathy, systems, Time.

Right.

So, empathy, we just talked about a little bit. Systems, we could talk about for a really long time. Systems are the invisible, usually unspoken forces that drive culture and that either you work against or work for. So, the solar system is famous, and the Earth goes around the sun not because it wants to, but because of gravity. The educational industrial complex and 400 years of Harvard and people going into debt to go to a famous college, that's a system. It has many, many people playing in it.

Hmm.

People of all ages. It's been around for a very long time. And if you go to any high school and you start talking to parents, you can see how deep that system exists. So there's systems in lots of places. And the 4th one is time. And time is fascinating to me. Because everyone knows what it feels like to be here right now, as opposed to yesterday, which is a memory, and tomorrow, which is a prediction. But tomorrow, it'll be here right now, and today will be a memory. So all of this is getting shuffled all the time, and everyone's going to get tomorrow like a new card out of the deck.

Mm-hmm.

So when we build a strategy, we think about The first day that you and Neil did this podcast, how many people listened to it the first day?

We're lucky, like under 100 maybe. Yeah.

Like every podcast I've ever been on, the first day was less than 100. And now millions and millions and millions of people. So you bet on time. You said, how are we going to plant seeds on Tuesday so that 6 years from now we'll be glad we did? If you don't see time, if you don't acknowledge time, then everything's a crisis.

Yeah.

Right? So one of the rifts in the book is about doing things at the last minute, understanding the next minute, and seeking the best minute. So the last minute, if you're somebody who's always on deadline, you live your whole life in the last minute, which is really enervating. The next minute is going to be here in a minute no matter what. And the best minute is What was the 1 minute of yesterday that was the best minute of the day? How can we get more of those? And so I'm trying to help people see you don't have to live a life at the last minute if you build slack into your system.

Got it. So is it the best minute is more of a minute of reflection, but based on that reflection, you can set yourself up for the long term? Because let's use an example. You're very intentional with your time. You're very intentional about where you spend your time creating content too, right?

So, I am super lucky because I don't have a boss and because I'm going to be able to put food on the table tomorrow even if I take a day off. But for me, a best minute from today might be you and I having a conversation and you changing your mind about something and me seeing it in your face because I laid the groundwork for you to have that leap happen. That's why I came. If not for you, then maybe someone who's listening to this. That would be a best minute. Whereas sitting on the train, I could have spent a minute in reflection, but I didn't because I was busy doing something else. So we can choose what our next minute, our best minute, is going to be, but we should probably seek it out and not wait for it to happen accidentally.

Right.

Right? Like, we're only a couple blocks away from a lot of law firms, and I think if we went and talked to some 3rd-year associates at these law firms, they would have a lot of trouble thinking of a best minute they'd had at work in the last month.

Fascinating. And okay, so that's time. And obviously we don't have enough time to go through the entire book, but empathy I think is a thing that a lot of people struggle with. I definitely do. On my personality test, I'm like 14% out of 100% on empathy. So it's really low. But the good thing is I'm like 87% on helpful. So, you know, there's a little balance there. But how can people get better at empathy? Or how does empathy relate to strategy? That's a better question.

All right, well, so let's say that— well, not let's say. In the book, I'm not arguing you should be kind and soft and do this because it's good for the world. What I'm saying about empathy, which I do think you should be, but that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying about empathy is people have the freedom to buy your project or not. They have the freedom to say yes or not. They have the freedom to engage or not. Denying that freedom by acting like you're in charge And that they should do what you say lacks empathy. So let's say you're a stand-up comic and you've had a tough row of it, but your agent finally gets you a good gig. You really work on your set. You show up at the gig and it's 300 people. You bomb. There isn't a laugh in the house. And you discover on your way out that it's a tour group from Italy and no one speaks English. So whose fault is it that you bombed? Right? Well, it's your agent's fault because they didn't tell you that no one there spoke English. You were telling jokes in English insisting that they get the jokes, but they don't speak English. They're not your audience. So empathy says you get to pick your audience. Stop arguing with people who don't get the joke. Stop arguing with people who don't want to go where you're going. Pick the audience that needs you. If they don't like your work, make better work. If they do like your work, they'll tell the others. And so, empathy is this simple idea to say, if I don't get what these people want and I can't assert it, then I can't do good work.

Got it. So, empathy in this context is just really trying to understand who your audience is.

Which audience you want, and then creating the conditions for those people to show up. So, if you walk in to a gluten-free bakery and say, I really, really want a blueberry muffin, but I don't have a gluten problem. So, will you make one for wheat, with wheat in it? That's not a fit, right? You've made it very clear who this bakery is for. That's who you should try to please.

Got it. And to your point, you do have a lot of points in there around systems. So, How does that connect with strategy at the end of? I mean, kind of answering that everything in life is a system, right? Actually, so this is interesting. Have have you heard of this book called Reality Transurfing?

No.

So, and this kind of relates. So in the book, it talks about pendulums, and pendulums are basically it can be like if you join a gym, that's a system, right? Or a pendulum. If you are, if you like drinking, that's a system in itself, and they pull you in to kind of do their bidding, right? And so it's just saying that in life you have to be aware of the systems that are trying to control you, and the ones there are. You got to let the good ones in, but you have to be very mindful of all the pendulums trying to control you. Do you see that as the same thing?

Very related. So if you want to get venture funding, you're not signing up for the rational idea of someone investing in your business. You're signing up for the system of tech venture investing, the PowerPoint decks, the clothing, The timeframes, the language, all of those things are built into the system. And people who play that game often intuitively think they're really smart.

Mm-hmm.

No, they're just in a system that they match. And other people who have totally great business ideas are able to grow them without talking to those people at all. There's nothing wrong with what they did. They just did it a different way. But if you pick a system, you can't then try to change the whole system because it doesn't want to change. It's very good at sticking around. That's why it's here.

Right.

And culture is invented by systems to help them stick around. That's how we got all the cultures of our life, is that the systems that have stuck around have reinforced these beliefs. So if there's a real change you seek to make, like the climate, you can announce that you want to just tear down the whole system, that capitalism is the cause of this problem, we must live in a post-capitalistic world. Good luck with that because that system is too big for you to change. But you can use the system by helping the system get what it wants. So, in Malcolm Gladwell's new book, he talks about 50% of the people who get into Harvard Get in because of sports. This is an astonishingly large number.

Yeah.

And if you are from the right part of the world and you get really good at, say, women's rugby, the chances of you getting in are excellent because there's a person at Harvard who has a problem, and their problem is they need to find better women's rugby players. So, you see the system, you dance with the system, Then you use the system against itself to get into Harvard because that was your goal, right? And if you play rugby when you get there or not, I don't care, right? So the point is we can learn to see these systems and not say, oh, I need to be judged by them. We merely need to say, when I feed this algorithm, when I feed this filter, when I give this system what it says it wants, I get this other thing. But then I can go, Use the momentum I got to start making change happen.

And going back to the venture example, so let's say you want to play within the system of venture. You just understand that, okay, you're going to have a board now. You're going to have people on your cap table. And if you don't learn how to play the game of that system, then you are going to lose your shirt and you'll be kicked out of that system.

Correct.

Yeah.

Correct. And then when we see people who end up with multi-billion-dollar companies who have Certain kinds of control and certain— that's just because they played the game better. Yep.

I think Mark Zuckerberg did a great job of that.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so can we speak to maybe your— this is the 29th book or the 30th book?

It's hard. I was a book packager before this, before I started. I started one of the first internet companies, but before that I did 120 books. So who knows how many books I've done? I just say, This is my 22nd bestseller in a row because it sounds like a round number and it seems to be true.

Nice. So what is the strategy behind— the long-term strategy with books? Because this is something you've stuck with and it's been tried and true. This is a system you've worked.

It is a system I have tried to change and also worked. So I got Amazon into the business of publishing books. I've self-published things. I've challenged my friends in publishing on a regular basis, but then I go back to big publishing houses because I can see the system. And, uh, the, the generic advice for someone who's making a book: number one, your job is not to get on the New York Times bestseller list. We know why that is important as a system signifier, and I think it will help explain things here. So in the 1980s, Barnes Noble was dominating the book business, and they decided that any New York Times bestselling book would be 40% off, which basically was their cost. And then they would put them in a big stack. So if you got on the list, next week you would sell even more. So that became an easy status measure that book publishers decided would focus everyone's attention. That was 40 years ago. Right now, it's easily gamed. It means absolutely nothing. It doesn't get you any special treatment anywhere. It's just an ego thing. So I fired the New York Times years ago. I don't do things to get on the New York Times bestseller list because it doesn't matter. What does matter are 2 things. One, write a book that after people read it, they want to tell the others. And 2, sell the first 10,000 copies just to people you know or people who trust you. After that, as Shawn Coyne has said, it's the book's job to sell the rest. So James Clear sold 15 million books, but he didn't. James Clear sold 10,000 books, and then his book sold 15 million books. And so that's the opportunity. And in my case, my blog reaches way more people than a book does. So why bother writing a book? I only do it because I feel like I don't have a choice, that the idea demands That I tell people through my actions, this is the really important one. This one's worth taking your time reading and discussing. And if I can get away with a blog post, I always do, because then I'm over it and I can go back to whatever else I was doing. But this one wouldn't let me go, and I love the craft of it, and the people are terrific.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I talked to a couple of my friends that have done books and they have businesses too, but they're just like, man, I never want to do a book again. It's like eating glass. But you've done it a handful of times, right? So I guess it's a labor of love for you.

It is. It is not an economic transaction in any way. If you're going to be a consultant, which I'm not, or a speaker, which I am, what it does is it It's a status signifier. It says, I didn't do this by finding a shortcut. I did this by having something to say. And so that was the real benefit of my first few books. But after that, it became a craft, just like chopping a cord of wood. That's a little like eating glass too, but some people like to do it.

Got it. Talking about systems again, your philosophies around— I mean, look, you've founded— I remember using Squidoo in the past. I think you were coined as— and you can correct me if I'm wrong here— but you helped invent email marketing.

I did, in fact, invent email marketing, and I'm happy to say so. Not spam, just the good kind.

Yeah. How did you invent email marketing? I didn't even know that.

Okay, so here's the deal. It's 1989, and I had recently left a software company where I did software with Earl Stanley Gardner, Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke. And I loved that craft of being in the software business, but there were— in the late '80s, there was sort of a void there. And a startup called Prodigy called me up and they said, we're IBM, Sears, and CBS, and we're building this online thing. And it was just like the internet and definitely not like the internet. This was long before the World Wide Web. Everything was controlled in one big building in White Plains, New York. Every line that was typed into a chat or a comment board was approved before it was posted. And the thing looked really chunky and it was very slow. The problem they had at Prodigy was that it cost $10 a month to join and a lot of promotion to get you to join. If you joined and used it a lot, they lost money because they had to build a modem for every single user who was using it simultaneously. And it started to nuke.

Prodigy, back in the day, that was still an ISP, right? Internet service provider?

There was no internet.

Okay.

If you were at a college, you could use the internet, but there was no— no consumer had access to the internet. And it was before AOL, right? So if you used it a lot, they lost money. If you didn't use it at all and you quit, they lost money. So what they needed you to do is use it a little for a long time. So I invented a game for them called Guts, and it became the most popular online game of all time at the time. And you could only play for 7 minutes a week. And then next week you could come back and play for 7 more minutes. So it solved all of their problems. And I get this internet thing. We didn't call it the internet, but this— I see a system being built here. I want to make software in this world. And then AOL called and said, what can you build for us? And then Microsoft had an online service. What can you do for us? And I realized that if I was going to build software for each one of these platforms, I was going to go bankrupt because they were all different and they didn't have an API that would make it easy. But all of them enabled email. You could send an email from Prodigy to AOL. You can send an email from AOL to CompuServe. So if I could build an email engine, I could run on any service. So we built a massive email engine. We had like 4 engineers that like shoveled coal into it to keep it going. And we were getting and receiving more email every day than any entity on the internet. And I used it to make games. And the idea of the games was that each move came by email. And if you're tied for first place in a game and an email comes in, you're going to open it. So we had an 86% open rate and a 35% response rate to the emails we sent out. And these games started to work across networks. And so I said, how am I going to pay for these things? Because AOL would pay at first, but how am I going to do this? So we started getting sponsors. So we worked with Procter Gamble and other companies that would put money in to sponsor these email games. Hmm. And as I was doing this with these huge response rates, talking to these big companies, they were like, Games are fine, but how do we just get people who want to buy a pair of pants to open an email? And that led to me coining permission marketing. And I then wrote the book to broaden it from there are games to why on earth would anyone open an email from you? And spam is bad, spam is bad, spam is bad, but there's this other thing. How are we going to do that? And so, Yoyodyne became this company that companies could use before Mailchimp to do promotions. And then we sold it to Yahoo and the whole industry was born after that.

Got it. That's a great story. All right, agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills. And you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people. And you're going to be hanging out with people like Like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. And we'll see you on the other side. The reason I asked about that, so like you've done that, Scooter, you've done a handful of other companies. And where I'm going with this, because the friend I was talking to that was sitting in your seat yesterday, you know, in our mid-30s now, we're realizing the trend is you do one thing really well, and you do it for decades, right? And it goes back to the focus thing. You know, back in my 20s, I would read a lot of books. I talked to a lot of people say, yeah, you got to focus. And you know, you hear Warren Buffett. Yeah, you got to focus, right? But in your 20s, you don't want to listen to that, and you try everything. You dabble a lot, right? My friend Neil actually said this. He's like, he's like, dude, the problem you used to have was you had shiny knowledge syndrome, not even shiny object syndrome. It's you read everything, you implement everything, you're on to the next thing, on to the next thing, and you never go anywhere. And so I guess my question for you is, how did you really know when to lock? Because I feel like. Even reading your stuff in the very beginning of my career, you've always been very focused and very good at saying no, right? And so you've honed in on your system, and how did you do that is the question.

So I'm terrible at focusing, and I haven't done a great job. I would be significantly more conventionally successful if I had focused, if I had started Mailchimp. There were so many Things that were like right there. And I was like, nah, this is not interesting anymore. I've focused on being the public version of me who does interesting, productive things. And if the projects I do end up having a life after I'm done, that's fantastic, but not what I signed up for.

Mm-hmm.

What I would say, uh, back to Neil, if I were in your shoes, is What does success mean?

Hmm.

Right? So you've produced an enormous amount of value for a lot of people. If your goal is 2 more zeros, then he is correct that this shiny knowledge thing isn't going to get you there. If your goal is to win on Jeopardy, you're halfway there. You could do that, right? But what I have focused on is I don't start a project unless I think I have enough resources to get through the dip.

Yeah.

And when the project has reached the point where I don't believe more effort from me will get more returns for me, I stop.

Right.

And if I was sitting here frustrated that I haven't achieved enough, you would correctly say you're stopping at the wrong time.

Mm-hmm.

And So, I don't think you have to do a project for 30 years for it to pay off. But I do think you have to be aware of where is the slog and what are the rewards for going through the slog. Right.

It's— this is a game again. You have to, one, you have to understand the game that you're playing. So, to your point, if I had, you know, on my grave, I just want to say this guy was a good learner and a good teacher. Well, therefore, I'm doing that right now, right? So, I think it's when you have to understand the game, and if it no longer feels like a game, maybe you jump out of that system. Which goes back to your book again.

Right.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Exactly right. So, you know, I saw social media coming. Squidoo was before Pinterest. It was right at the beginning of Facebook, if not before Facebook. We were the 40th biggest website in the US. We had 9 employees and Google shut us down. That's a whole other story. But It would've been easy in that moment to shift and say, we're going to go build a Pinterest and stick with it for a decade. We're going to go build a Twitter and stick with it for a decade. And I decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, that I just didn't want to commit to that sort of enterprise. And knowing yourself is worthwhile because you only get today once.

And if we— the game that you're playing right now, if I say, okay, I want to I just want to learn and teach for the rest of my life. Maybe for someone like Anil, it's more zeros, right? What do you think it is for you? What game are you playing?

When I'm wearing my teacher hat, I would like to have the people I'm teaching teach other people. So I don't want to— I don't spend a lot of time reaching out to new people. I'm not trying to do that, but I'm trying to give the people who get the joke, Tools so they can teach other people.

That is what has happened here.

That's why I'm here.

Yes.

That's amazing. And then the bigger arc is I won the birthday lottery. I have so much privilege and opportunity, and I would like to leave things I touch better than I found them. That's great.

Again, how long do you think it took you to realize that this is the game that you're playing?

I struggled. When I went out on my own, I got 800 rejections in a row the first year. That meant 800 times someone in book publishing bought a stamp, put it on an envelope, mailed me a letter saying, we hated your idea. That adds up, right? And so this idea that you have to pay the rent was a struggle. And then I met a guy in the book business who I did a book with, and he explained to me how I was playing the game completely wrong. How my story was confused, and I was approaching it like an MBA. I wasn't approaching it like a book person. And the penny dropped and I got the joke. And the book publishing industry has been great for me because the book publishing industry until recently does not reward short-term hustle. It rewards people who are going to patiently execute the project in a way that will stand the test of time because books have been around for hundreds of years. That was a perfect balance to my short attention span. And I think ever since then, the arc— like, it would've been really easy to become a spammer in 1993. There was plenty of open space for someone who understood games so many ways that you could rip off so many people.

Mm-hmm.

And I didn't even spend 10 seconds debating whether I would do that or not. I did. There was one Usenet board where I posted one note to see what would happen, and I saw what happened. I was like, oh, I understand this. I don't want to do this ever again.

Yeah. So the book publishing industry taught you how to play long-term games.

Yeah.

I think people just need to— either they need to get punched in the face at a certain moment to learn how to play long-term games, and maybe that was it for you. Maybe that's what it is, because even if you learn that all the successful people, quote unquote, have played long-term games, I don't think that's enough. You have to actually get that punch. And so the 800 rejections was that punch for you. For me, maybe a different story, right?

Yeah. And I think that part of what I'm trying to do in the book is make it easy to talk about. And if you're not talking about your strategy, it's either because you're afraid of it or you're embarrassed by it. And you should be neither. You should be very comfortable with peers being able to say back to you, I heard your strategy. I don't understand it. I don't know why you're doing that. So in Facebook's case, when Mark and Sheryl said, we're going to take political advertising, I think they should have had a much more nuanced conversation about that strategy. I think that was a terrible strategy choice.

And so I guess going to your book and talking about good strategies, terrible strategies, This book, it doesn't just apply to marketing strategy. It's anything strategy, right? It's not just business. It's also life strategy, right?

Yes, exactly right.

Got it.

Right? If you get pulled over by a cop, what is the game you are playing? What is your goal? What is the cop's goal? How are we going to end this transaction in a way that they get status and affiliation, I get status and affiliation, I don't go to jail, right? Like, that's still a game. Yeah.

And there's the empathetic component is like, what do they need? What do they want? Are they trying to hit a quota, right? And then timing too. If you're stupid, you say something stupid, okay, you're going out. You're taken out of your other games for a while.

Exactly. Right.

Okay, I love it. Um, speaking of strategies, I mean, we would be remiss if we don't talk about AI. So you've said it's the biggest thing you've seen since maybe like, I don't know, biggest change since electricity, I think?

Correct.

Um, so, and you've said that quite a few times in other interviews. Like, what are you seeing recently, um, that is, I don't know, catching your attention?

So I think what's happening recently isn't Mm-hmm. It's thrilling, but it's not important. The path is very clear between agents, persistence, and the network. It's obvious to me that AI 5 years from now is not going to be recognizable. So let's talk about electricity for a second. Every company that when electricity arrived said, we're not going to deal with this electricity thing, Is gone, right? That it used to be there was only one electrical outlet in the house. It was a light bulb. There were no things with prongs that you could plug in. So if you got a washing machine, which was the first giant, uh, time-saving invention, you had to unscrew the light bulb and screw in the washing machine.

I didn't know that.

And it would sit in the middle of your living room, and it wasn't very well balanced, so it rocked back and forth, and sometimes it would move And more than a dozen times its movement would wrap the cord around the neck of somebody in the house and kill them slowly. And so plenty of people said electricity is horrible. We need to have nothing to do with electricity. So right now we're in the, in the washing machine phase. So AI is doing some cool things. It's not costing too many people their job yet, but it's about to be this very significant transformation. And the short version is, if you do a job that AI can do, either you're going to figure it out first and change your job so that AI works for you, or your boss is going to figure it out first and you're going to lose your job. But just like the steam shovel created more jobs than it destroyed, I believe AI is going to create more jobs than it destroys. But we can't even describe what they are.

Yeah.

It's going to be about creating value by fueling the network and helping people get to where they want to go. So if all you do as a radiologist is read X-rays, you're in big trouble because an AI can do that better than you. But if you're able to connect and inspire and educate people around you in a way that AI can't, then you can use AI as a tool.

And I think you said this best. You said that AI replaces mediocre work, and that's exactly what's going to happen. It's going to level everybody up long-term. Is that how you're seeing it?

Nothing ever levels everybody up. There are going to be people who have to go through a lot of pain because the system has pushed them into being a cog, and they haven't had the foundation to push back. That people like us who were lucky enough to grow up Knowing that we could push back against the system that wants us to do less, have. But we're going to have a massive challenge of education. The good news is I think we're very close to AI having a Diamond Age solution to education. That's going to be breathtaking.

Yeah. I mean, I invested in this company that gamifies education, and I think you combine that with an AI and everything's infinitely patient. It'll tutor you 24/7, and then you have multiple agents helping you. I think we should be able to have a renaissance when it comes to education. But to your point, talking about systems again, at least for me, the system I grew up in, the education system was completely broken. And for it to linchpin this, everything all comes around, it creates a bunch of cogs, right? So, how do we have— how does someone that was maybe trained to be a cog, how do they get out of that?

So, the educational industrial complex is filled with well-meaning people, but the gravity of it which was created by industrialists who want compliant factory workers, is hard to resist. And so what's the change agent? That's something I talk about in the book. A change agent changes the system with force. The change agent is, well, yeah, but if I hand an iPad to a kid, it's completely outside the zone of the educational industrial complex, so things are going to shift. And, you know, Sal Khan at Khan Academy Started this thing. So now some 4th grade teacher walks in and their kid— 1, 3, 4 kids already know calculus. That's because they did it outside of the system. And so I think what we need to figure out how to do is teach people resilience and initiative. If we can enroll a generation in the idea of initiative, the tools will be available. But if they don't have initiative, then we got troubles.

Got it. And you would say curiosity probably goes into initiative.

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think those are 2 ways to encapsulate it. I wish they taught us how to play poker in school. Eventually, we just went off on our own and gambled, but a lot of pain from poker.

Yeah. Annie Duke is teaching poker as a way to teach decision-making because it's— why not do that? Of course.

That was a great rebrand for her, if you even want to call it a rebrand. As we work towards wrapping up here, I mean, we would be remiss if we don't talk about storytelling, right? Because we're all emotional creatures. So what would you say, how do people get better at storytelling? Certainly people can watch how South Park does it, and I think that's a great 1-minute video. I think everyone should check that out. But how would you say people can get better at storytelling?

Well, again, the words matter. Stories aren't once upon a time and a plot. So here we are in this spectacular studio that Matt is running. There's a story. The potted fern is a story. The Shure microphone is a story. The lighting is a story. You go to a You go to an open house and it smells like apple pie in there, that's a story because it reminds you of growing up. Stories are simply little invisible hooks into the experience we already had before we encountered the story. And stories include tension. They always have tension. The tension of what's going to happen next. The tension of this might not work. The tension of am I in the right place at the right time? The tension of I'm rooting for something. If you're not doing those things, then you've willfully walked away from story and chosen to be a commodity, and you only sell a commodity if you want to.

Storytelling to me is a game that I haven't exactly mastered yet. I guess everything you're saying is true. Yes, there absolutely needs to be tension. Story is a feeling. It's very much a feeling. But where else, I guess, how did you get better at storytelling? Because for you, it seems to come so effortlessly. And maybe before you answer, I know that even with your blogging, you— I think you still blog every single day, correct?

9,000 in a row.

Okay. So, it's not just one blog. I saw another podcast you did.

It's—

you're writing 4+ a day and you're throwing most of them out. You're only picking one. Maybe you can answer this. How could— how did you become such a prolific storyteller?

I often get notes from people saying, um, how do I learn marketing? What— how do I get an internship? And my answer is, you learn marketing by doing marketing. Go raise money for a nonprofit. Go to some garage sales and sell them stuff on eBay. The way you learn to tell stories is you tell stories. I learned to tell stories in the Northwoods of Canada, 3 hours north of Toronto. Helping kids get into a 16-foot-long canoe and paddle it by themselves, creating the conditions, an aura of magic around something that could have been fairly pedestrian, stories that were silly or scary or thrilling. And when a story worked, I did it again. And when a story worked— didn't work, I never did it again.

Got it. So you never went to like those story competitions or anything like that? You just continued to hone your craft and you saw what landed, what didn't, and you just kept iterating, right?

I still do. Every single time I interact with another person, I am practicing my storytelling. Got it.

I love it. It's such an underrated thing because when you go to dinner parties or whatever, the people that command the group, they are the storytellers. And not that they're trying to command the attention of the group, but they just do. They're magnetic at the end of the day.

Yeah. Most charisma comes from curiosity and giving other people space, right? We think people are interesting when they appear to be interested. And so that's where we begin. None of my early storytelling would have worked if I wasn't interested in the people I was telling the story to.

That's a big one. Never thought about that. Um, you're okay. So we talked about kind of how you do storytelling and You're still a prolific learner, in my opinion. So what's, what's the Seth Godin learning system right now?

Oh, I am not in your league, Eric. Not even a little bit. It's semi-random. I read a ton of blogs, and if there's a new tool that makes me uncomfortable, I learn it. I made a mistake with Photoshop when it got to version 3 or 4. Like, I was good at version 1, 2, and then I was really busy. I was like, Ah, no. And I haven't caught up since. I try to avoid that. I try to say, here's a tool. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to use it productively, but I'm going to learn how to use it so then I can decide I don't want it.

Got it. You're— so this will be the last thing, I suppose, but you have this aura. You talked about auras earlier. You have this aura of wisdom and patience, right? I think you're a very patient person. And you have this quote, you say, don't hustle. What do you mean by that?

Okay, so I grew up playing hockey. My dad was the coach. Hustle in hockey or even baseball is a good thing, right? That someone who's hustling in those sports is expending unreasonable amounts of energy in short periods of time when other people aren't. But that's not real life. That is a very circumscribed game. Nobody I have ever met says, I really like that person. They hustled me. No one ever says that. We don't want a close talker, a high-pressure salesperson, someone who's all up in our face. That's not how you earn trust. It's not how you earn loyalty. And if you don't have trust and loyalty, you can't tell a story. So, when I say don't hustle, I mean don't take shortcuts at other people's expense. Take shortcuts that help you avoid places where people are hiding. I'm in favor Take shortcuts where you can skip a meeting and just claim responsibility. I'm in favor of that. But the shortcut of, I'm going to use pressure and become untrustworthy to get a sale, it's easy to make money doing that on the internet. But all the people who've done that in the 25 years, 30 years I've been online, I don't see them around anymore. Right.

And where I started this last question with you talking about kind of wisdom and patience, to me hustle seems like you're— people that hustle all the time, they're very impatient, right? They're kind of out of control a little bit. That's at least that's what it feels like. So how did you learn to kind of rein that in? Because the way you talk, it's very calm. It's slower, right? It's not out of control versus I talk very quickly, which can seem a little manic at times. So I guess I'm just curious again, where did that come from? When did that come? Did you have to get punched in the face?

No, I think as we wrap this up, there's confusion here. And again, I'm not a role model, but there's confusion between what might come across in a podcast and what is actually productively being produced. So Yoyodyne had 60 people in our New York office. 40 of them reported directly to me. So that was sort of crazy, but it kept my brain busy. We had no walls, so it was one big room. And every 3 months, everyone had to move their desk and sit somewhere else because I wanted people to get used to change. But the excuse I gave was no one should have to sit next to me for too long because my part of the office had more chaos than other parts of the office because I am extraordinarily productive at shipping the work. When you run out of time or you run out of money, you're done. Right? If it's Tuesday, there's going to be a blog post, not because it's the best blog post I ever wrote, but because it's Tuesday. We ship the work. That job interviews last 5 minutes. That we're going to have these things happening and happening. It doesn't feel manic, but it feels inevitable. There's forward motion. So I don't think you have to be manic, and I'm capable of talking as fast as you. But I don't think you have to be manic to be productive. And a lot of people I know have confused these things. They don't want to be manic, but now they're also not productive and they're still thinking about it. I went to business school with someone in 1981 who is still thinking about the startup he's going to launch.

Well, I think that's a great way to end it. There's the— it's the— we'll just leave that for maybe next time. So, Seth, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find You online and the book online?

They're aligned. Seths.blog is my posts. They're all free. Seths.blog/tis for This Is Strategy is all the information you need about the book.

All right, everyone, go pick up the book. This has been great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. You're awesome.