272: Seth Godin on Publishing Strategy, Missed Opportunities, Sunk Costs, Social Media, and Smart Risks

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When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive. Reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst welcome back Free Timers. I am so delighted to bring you this conversation with Seth Godin about his brand new book this Is Strategy. I am obsessed with this book. If you loved free time for implementing smarter systems to set your time free, you are going to love this Is Strategy. It's so smart. As of course Seth books always are. It's jam packed with principles and systems thinking to really elevate how you think about the problems in front of you and where you're trying to go. And of course how to get there. Seth really needs no introduction, but alas, I'll give a brief one. He's a renowned author, entrepreneur and marketing expert who has profoundly influenced modern business thinking through his blog that has over 9,000 daily posts and counting. He is the author of 22 best selling books, probably more that I don't even know about, in over 39 languages. And he's the coordinator of the Carbon Almanac, what he calls the most important project of my career. He's the host of the Akimbo Podcast and he was previously on the Pivot podcast in episode 254. We were talking about his book the Practice on Generosity, Peculiarity and Showing up. I'll be sure to put that in the show notes so I I hope you enjoy this conversation. Another one dropped into the feed like a gift because I'm still not back to my regular cadence. But I really couldn't resist bringing you this conversation and more importantly this book. So grab your copy if you haven't already, of this is Strategy. Make Better Plans. An essential guide to thinking strategically in a complex, ever changing world.

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Welcome Seth Godin.

Oh, that's me. Here I am. Hi, Jenny Blake. Hello.

Hello. You've been on the Pivot podcast. In fact, we last spoke in the summer of 2020. What a year. And now here we are in the fall of 2024 talking about your new book. This is strategy. How exciting.

Time flies. It's a good thing we're trying to free it. Yeah.

Yes, it does. And as you say, strategy isn't strategy without considering the passage of time, which I thought was very poetic.

Well, thanks for having me. I'm eager to help people understand strategy and do something useful.

I was wondering if we could start by looking at strategy through the lens of publishing.

A vexing industry, but also an exciting one. How has your strategy as an author evolved over over 20 books? Now, I want to say this is 21, but you can correct me if I'm wrong.

Actually, it's more than 120books, but that's a different story. Okay, so people who don't know publishing don't know that there's two big seasons in book publishing. The fall list and the spring list. And the New York publishers collect all their books and all their promotion twice a year. Now, you can understand why there might not be a summer list, but why isn't there a winter list? The answer is because in 1900, the Erie Canal was how they transported books from New York to other places, and it froze every winter so you couldn't ship books in January and February. Well, they fixed the Erie Canal problem a long time ago, but there are still two seasons because things that stick around stick around. Book publishing has been around for 500 years, and it is organized 100% around independent bookstores. The proof of this is the fact that no major publisher puts their phone number in their book and doesn't even try to get you to their website because it's not for you. They're trying to make the book publish, the print, the bookstore happy. The bookstore's happy, they're happy. Well, everyone knows what happens in the last 10 years. Bookstores have faded, and there's only one bookstore, and paper has faded. Half of my book sales are digital, either audiobook or Kindle. So when you see all of those things, if you are a giant behemoth filled with really good, hardworking People like Penguin that has built an entire system around something where the foundation has crumbled. It's stressful. And so I am publishing this book with author's equity, which is a really cool project that I could talk about all day, but it's not that interesting. But it's been joyous for me because I've been able to focus on my readers, not focus on making the salesforce, try to make the independent bookstore happy, which is too many in betweeners for me to do a good job.

There's a lot of discourse online from the perspective of the author saying people don't buy books. And then I've seen your posts, maybe you're aware of those. But seniors, well yes, they do, but here's what that looks like now.

Yeah.

And I wanted to ask you about your choice to work with authors equity. I feel like throughout your career of publishing your own books, about to mention publishing your other publishing experiments like Domino Project, you are always willing to try something new. And I just am wondering if you can speak to that through the lens of strategy. Because the new book is called this is strategy.

Right.

I see you experimenting. And yet some would say a book is still a, a medium from a previous era. You know, you still have the willingness to write a book and put it out there and have it be printed on paper. And I've encountered people who have basically thrown their hands up and said let's, that's not even worth my time anymore. But of course a true book lover would never take that advice.

This is the heart of what we need to talk about, which is who's it for and what's it for? You're going to only have tomorrow once you're going to use it. Either being a cog in the system, helping other people accomplish their goals, or you're going to build assets and plant seeds to accomplish your goals. What are my goals? Well, when I was a book packager, that's when I did 120 books. My goal was to pay my bills by getting publishers to pay me money. And I grew to 10 employees. We did a book a month for 10 years. And that was who is it for and what's it for? If I couldn't make publishers happy, I couldn't sell books. If I couldn't sell books, I couldn't feed my family. When I became an author author, my goal shifted. And my goal wasn't how do I get the biggest advance I can from a publisher, it was how do I create these projects that I am proud of that earn Me trust that help change people I care about and how can I do it in an interesting way. And so the domino project, which was with Amazon, opened all sorts of new ground for a lot of people. But it wasn't the best way for me to make money. It was the best way for me to make a point. And so you should just be really clear about why you're doing it. Why are you on X? Why are you on LinkedIn? What would happen if it worked the way you're hoping it would work? Has anyone ever made it work that way? And so for me to shift to Author's Equity totally lines up with my goals of can I show other people how this might work? Can I take appropriate intellectual and financial risks that are reasonable? Because if they don't work, I still get to play tomorrow and can I do it with joy? And I got all those things from working with Authors Equity, so it was a win already. And the book's just coming out.

For those who aren't in the biz, what are the biggest differences between Author's Equity and other models? Because you're one of the pioneers for their imprint too.

Yes, I think I might be their first or second book. Woo hoo. They don't pay in advance at all. $0. That shifts my emotional system because I'm not trying to please my customer now they're obviously my partner because they didn't pay me anything. The upside for me is they share the royalties much more generously. So we both have a different sort of alignment. And it's run by Madeline Macintosh, who used to run Penguin. So she's gone from having tens of thousands or thousands of thousands of employees to 10. And every single person on their team is eager to question everything. I love that. I love having thoughtful conversations about what is possible, not we have to do it this way because 800 years ago this happened, right? And so for my personality, it's all lined up. If I was somebody who was just starting out, this might not be a good fit for me. If I was somebody who made my primary living from the reliability book advances, this wouldn't work. But what Madeline and Carly and the team have figured out is they don't need every author, they just need a few. And they need to find people who are going to work the way I work to bring this book to the world because they don't have that many people. And they also love books and the texture of them and stuff. So it's been a lovely thing.

Every author has to consider their launch strategy and there's always buzz in the author community. What are you doing, what's working, what have you tried? And no matter what, no matter how many experts, how many people share what they do, it often still feels like throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall. It's hard to separate the signal from the noise. And then the signals are always changing because the industry's changing and people are changing and all the many social channels. So as you head into this launch, how has your strategy shifted, if at all?

Okay, well, it's super simple in the sense that false proxies are a lesson for everybody to learn here. What's a false proxy? False proxy is a very easily measured metric that isn't actually related to success. So if you're a baseball scout, somebody's batting average is a false proxy. It turns out that's what Moneyball is about. And if you found a better measure, if you are an HR person and you are judging people based on how famous their college is or what color their skin is, those are easy false proxies that have nothing to do with job performance. So you're trapped. You're doing the wrong thing. When we think about book publishing, There was a 10 year period where if you were on the New York Times bestseller list, Barnes and Noble would discount your book to basically sell it at cost and put it in the front of the store, which would then make it more likely you would sell more copies next week. So the New York Times Tasselis was a useful proxy for 10 years about I did a good book launch. It has not been true for more than two decades that that is the case. So I publicly fired the Times years ago. It is a fraud. It is easily gamed. I want nothing to do with it. So I don't do anything to get on the New York Times bestseller list. And I forgive them. I hope they forgive me instead. My theory, which hasn't changed since I learned it From Sean Coyne eight years ago, my job is to sell 10,000 copies of the book. I think I can promote it enough to do that. The book's job is to sell the rest. You need to write a book so that if there are 10,000 of them in the world, enough people will talk about it that it will continue to sell. And the champion and all time king of this is James Clear. James Clear does not spend a lot of time on the Today show, but the book sells and sells. Why does it sell and sell? Sells and sells? Because the book, once someone has it, demands that you tell your friends, yes.

We should say he doesn't do that many podcast interviews either. You also mentioned the idea of risk when you mentioned trying this book with Author's Equity being an inaugural author in their portfolio. Oh, that's a funny play off of.

You and I are the only people who got that joke. Okay.

It's a Freudian publishing slip. Okay. On the subject of risk, I was laughing. In your book, you talk about getting kicked out of a poker game because you were playing too safe. And I'm wondering if you could tell listeners that story. And do you think that story has any connections to how you think of risk more broadly? Because I think of you as a major risk taker, and yet you were sort of kicked out for playing it too safe.

Okay, So I don't think people understand risk very well.

Risky behavior is not the same as risk.

Risk is, how am I going to dance with the future, which is unknown, and what bets am I going to make? Because everyone has to dance with the future. If you decide to live in San Francisco, you are taking a risk based on the San Andreas Fall. If you decide to play golf on days when it's not that sunny out, you are taking a risk that you will be hit by lightning. We cannot eliminate risk. We can just choose risk. So what's the math of poker? What we know is that portfolio approaches. There it is again. Portfolio approaches are a smart way to deal with the unknown future. So it doesn't make sense to put all of your life savings in Google stocks. You should instead have a portfolio of 20 stocks, because on average, that will be more stable and reward your investment. So when we think about poker, there are a couple ways to approach it. One way is to have a portfolio over time, week after week after week. When you show up at the poker game, sometimes you're going to do well, sometimes you won't. But the other way to do it is to de risk poker itself. So what I did at this poker game, which was with the guy who invented the Ghostbusters logo, which was pretty cool, is the first day I went, I won a hundred dollars, and I'm not that good at poker. That was thrilling. So the second week I show up and there's no way I'm going to win a hundred dollars again. And there's five of us, and the pot comes down to two people left. And the guy says, who I'm playing, it says, you want to split it? I didn't know I could do that. So great. So I made 50. He made 50. That's a smart portfolio. Play. And what happened as the day went on is I kept trying to split the pot with people. Two people, three people, four people. I kept. I wasn't taking any risks, I was just protecting. And at the end of the day, he said, you know, I don't think you should come back because this is poker. We're not. This isn't the stock market, it's poker. And if you're not getting any joy out of reasonably high stakes ups and downs, then you shouldn't come. And I said, you're absolutely right and I have not played poker since.

How did you feel in that moment that he said that to you? We'll be right back just after this.

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Every once in a while someone tells you generously a truth that isn't designed to hurt your feelings, it's just designed to be a truth. And that was one of those moments I had no social shame. I didn't know the guy very well. I was like, yeah, you're right. Thanks.

Okay, so he did you a favor. It's not like you felt hurt, shocked. I know you as someone who is so incredibly generous with splitting the pot, whether it's financial opportunity, exposure, introductions, you're so generous. But in your words, do you think that that poker story and the metaphor of splitting the pot, does that tie into how you show up more broadly?

Oh, it's. I think then one of the key narratives of my life is.

I don't understand the Ayn Randian selfish. It's all for Me, if it's not for you mindset, it just doesn't make any sense to me. And the Internet showed up just in time for me because what happens with ideas is, you know, if I make widgets and I give you one of my widgets, I don't have it anymore. But if I make ideas and I give you one of my ideas, we both have it. And so, you know, I don't want to trade favors, I don't want to hustle people. I simply want to be as productively of service as I can in a way that creates a community that I'm glad to be part of.

That's so beautifully said. You do address social media in the book, so I want to come back to that because it's an example of oftentimes being part of a system that might not be serving us. Before we do that, I want to talk about the Innovator's Dilemma, which is a book that was very prominent in my mind when I was writing Free Time. The idea that you might start out as a trickster, or in the book you talk about coyotes and taking after Lewis Hyde, but it's a very hard to stay one. You mentioned Google and I thought about Google's mantra was don't be evil. But it was so hard for them to stay that way. Like as they grew, as they're now one of the biggest companies of all time ever. There are many things that are happening, you know, as, as a result. And so I just find it so interesting that A, it's hard to be a coyote or a trickster. It's actually not an easy path. There's a lot of turbulence. And then B, even the companies that think they're going to be so agile and counterculture or counter status quo become entrenched. And maybe this is mixing too many examples from your book, but I thought the NPR conversation was also fascinating. Like NPR missed the boat on podcasting. They were too entrenched in what they were doing and they missed it. And yet they had all the talent and opportunity to ride that wave, but they didn't. So wherever you want to take that.

Okay, well, let's do one question. I was in the room at wnyc. NPR missed it on purpose. It's not that they didn't see it, they declined. And why is that? Because A, they were structured in a way that was decentralized. Each station had an incentive to defend the station. And second, because they thought Spectrum was their God given asset. That 93.9 on the dial that is valuable and it belongs to us. And there's only one show on at a time, and they got to pick which show it was. Podcasting is the opposite of that. Podcast devalues Spectrum, and it has lots of shows on at the time. So they emotionally chose to defend Spectrum and walk away from owning podcasts. When I was at Yahoo, we had the chance to buy Google for $10 million, and I wasn't in that room, but they turned them down and instead decided to invest the money in Yahoo Kids because they had a vision of what they defended. And what they defended was the homepage of Yahoo. And so that's the first part. What are we defending? What status quo is giving us fuel? The second part is what happens when you have a few thousand employees, all of whom have stock options. What happens is you are surrounded by people who, if the stock goes up one or two dollars, will make enough money to buy a car or more. It's very hard in that environment to do something that feels risky, because if it feels risky, the stock market's not going to applaud you. So what's. I think the biggest single mistake in the history of Facebook was taking political ads. Because if you're going to build a community of people being connected, political ads are not your friend. And the amount of money on the table isn't that much. But if they hadn't taken political ads, they would've had to explain to the stock market why, and their stock wouldn't have gone up. And so all the people in the room and the people they knew would have been stressed by this. So Google, their expression don't be evil was invented to mean don't be Microsoft. And it meant, don't become a monopoly. And their strategy was, let's organize the world's information. But just to pick one example, not counting the time they put my company out of business, was Google Reader. Google Reader organized the blogosphere. Google Reader could have become the best podcast app as well. Google Reader was this magical tool that lots of people loved, and it was probably costing them a million dollars a month to run. And they shut it down because an MBA said, well, if we shut it down and hurt the blogs, more people will go to search engines, more searches will come, and we'll make more money, and our stock will go up. Because they got confused about their strategy. They thought that their strategy was, let's make the stock price as high as we can for as long as we can. And that isn't a worthwhile project.

I remember when that happened, we were devastated because it was the way that so many of us created inboxes for the blogs we want to read. Kind of like what Substack's doing now. And then it's been interesting to watch Google basically miss the boat on AI and then struggle to keep up. And it feels like another moment where their strategy was confused because for the same reason, it was a threat to search. And then now it's so obnoxious that you search for something and you're getting their AI answer. It's so. It's enraging. But we didn't ask for this either. And yet you can tell that they're trying to grapple with this new technology. They're trying not to be stuck in the innovator's dilemma.

What could a public company do in this thing? So I have a riff in the book about Netflix that I added at the last minute. When I read about it, I thought it was someone invented it just for my book. So Netflix made 100% of its profit from those red envelopes in the DVDs. Netflix had beaten blockbuster. Netflix was a perfect example of an innovator crossing the chasm and getting to the other side. And then Ted and Reid see a change agent affecting the system of consumption. And the change agent is streaming. And they realize that if they're going to lose, they're going to lose because someone's going to build the streaming version of Netflix. So they decide to build the streaming version of Netflix, and they made one key decision that enabled them to succeed. And the decision was at every meeting in the run up to launching this, no one from the DVD division was allowed to come. The people who are responsible for a hundred percent of Netflix profit were not allowed to come to the meeting. The same thinking in the opposite direction is what killed AI in the first generation at Google, which is people who depended on search for revenue were in the meetings about AI. And so they kept this negative tension going on, whereas at Netflix, they're like, great, let's put ourselves out of business. Here we go.

It ties into some of your other core questions in the book, like who are you allowing to judge you? Who are you allowing to be your competition? You choose your competition and you choose who gets to judge you or not. And I thought that was interesting. So maybe if the judge is the consumer, the judge is the balance sheet, or the judge is the future. It wasn't who was bringing the revenue at that moment. That was a clear choice on their part.

Yeah, I learned a lot of this from you.

I knew you when you were still at Google and you were under enormous amount of social pressure to shut up and put up and keep vesting. And I watched this sparkle in your eyes as you decided you don't get tomorrow over again and you want to be judged by somebody other than the HR department at Google.

That is very true. Thank you for saying that. And it's come full circle because when I was reading this strategy, preparing for this conversation.

I felt relief because I'm still, I'm in my 13th year of business and I've joked my businesses has become an angry teenager and I'm grappling with a lot of these questions of what is my strategy and where am I falling into sunk costs? And almost everybody I know who loves me has asked or basically gently encouraged me to go get another job. It's time to get a job again, just throw in the towel. And I can't bring myself to do it. And I, I did apply for one thing, the first job I had applied for in 20 years and I didn't make it past the phone screen. And I just thought, all right, I'm going to stick in here. I obviously need a new strategy. But in the book and just now when you reiterated things like that, you know, that's a core truth. I just can't see myself, I just can't see myself making the sacrifice. I would rather life be as hard as it is and even staying in New York City be as hard as it is and somehow row the boat through it. But as you say, also it becomes challenging with financial concerns where a partially built boat will stop working, create a lot of suffering. So there's a lot of tension right now and I appreciate your reminders.

Thank you for your candor. There are sunk costs, but there's also the story we tell ourselves about sunk cost. There are 142 ways for you to remain independent, and only one of them involves running your business the way you're currently running. So it's not do I get a job or do I keep doing this? It's can I hire myself a new boss? Because Jenny is currently not that good at strategy. And I want to hire a different Jenny who's better at strategy. Because if you started today with the assets that are available to you, which assets would you take? And which ones would you say to the old Jenny, no, thanks, I don't need that one. Right. Because you know, I built. Speaking of DVDs, DVDs can not only hold video, they can also hold data. They're like a giant hard Drive. So before the Internet, there was a thing in book publishing and a few other places to make very complicated software products that ran on dvd. So I worked with Fisher Price, and I made a parenting DVD that I'm really proud of. And I was perfectly positioned. I was a book packager. All the people in book publishing trusted me. I was the only person that I knew of in book publishing who'd ever made software before. And all of these things lined up. So we built a division. I hired an expensive guy, and we had a development studio, and I was taking all the meetings.

It was not easy after the 40th meeting and the successful product to say, you know, thanks for all this, but no, we don't want it. And to just not make DVD ROMs anymore. Say to Anthony, you can't work here anymore. It's not our fault. It's not your fault. It's. It's not working. That was a sunk cost. It was an asset that I could have kept investing in, but I didn't have to. Right. And so when the change agent comes and the world shifts, the question is.

Will. What will we say to what we built yesterday? Right. So with someone with your background. I'm not saying you should do this, because I'm just making this up. I'm giving people an example.

It wouldn't be hard for you to find someone who could make an AI that could scrape the personnel records of a company and give them a report about who's overpaid, who's underpaid, who's likely to look for a new job, what do they need to think about, blah, blah, blah. And that would be worth a million dollars to a big company. And you could sell them that service for $25,000, and you could make $24,000 in profit, and you'd only have to do it 10 times a year, and you'd be making a great living. So there's nothing keeping you from being in that business, except you're defending the business you're currently in, which I love, and I hope you stay in it. But it's not a failure to shift. It simply says I'm playing a game. There's a new strategy here that's better than my old strategy. The strategy isn't me. The strategy are my choices. I'm going to make different choices now.

For me, the strategy is always. It's connected to a soul level. Maybe you're gonna shake your head at this, but that I've actually scaled down my business in certain ways, stayed delightfully tiny because I do see myself as a creator, and I've often thought about your model of the freelancer versus the entrepreneur and gone more toward the freelancer model. Yeah. And because you said it. You said it probably a decade ago, you said, I'm a freelancer. I. You know, in a lot of ways, I'm not going to say everything you do, but everything.

But this is my whole team. So. Yeah. All I'm saying to you is we can celebrate it because it's getting us what we want. If you're feeling stress because what you're doing and what you want aren't aligned, something needs to change.

Yes.

But what I found is every time I added people to my team, I wasn't getting more of what I wanted. I was getting less. So I happily embrace the idea of being a freelancer. If there's a project that would require me to scale up to make it work, I think about what's the upside of that project versus the downside of not being a freelancer.

We'll be right back just after this.

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One of the things I felt very clear on, also emboldened by you and Cal Newport, was my decision to get off social media about 10 years ago. Talk about social pressure. I feel like the pressure to be on is enormous. And I can know in every fiber of my being that I don't want it to be part of my strategy. I don't enjoy it. It didn't bring me clients. It makes me feel covetous. And worst of all, it ruins the quality of my attention and my days, my moments. The best minute, as you call it in the book. There's Nothing about it that I want to participate in at this point in time. And yet as an author, three under my belt and hopefully a fourth, it's so interesting that if I would want a traditional publishing gig again, you know, instead of free time was hybrid with Idea Press, the number one thing they're going to ask is what's your social media presence? And it's like they can't see past it. And so sometimes on my insecure days I wonder, well, has this been a mistake that I cut social media out of my strategy on many levels? I know that for me it isn't because as you share in the book, you're kind of feeding a system that just profits off of you, off your time, your energy, your attention, your life force. But it's hard when I'm more down to defend that choice, you know?

Oh, it's so easy to defend the choice because.

If you need to please a junior editor at a mid level book publishing house in New York to make a living, then something is inconsistent in your strategy. Right? When we pick our customers, we pick our future. Do you want that person to be your customer? Do you want to organize your life to make that customer pick you? And I don't think that person has demonstrated through her track record or her budget that she deserves you to change your life to make her happy. Right. That if you just found 10 corporations that would pre buy 5,000 copies of your new book, you can just skip her, right. And take the time and drama that you would have spent in social media pleasing her to just get 10 companies to say, sure, we'll take 5,000 copies and then you're done. Right? So every time we walk away from a customer whose objectives and measurements are different than we think is important, our lives get better.

That's so true. I do remind myself that I'm not going to sacrifice the quality of my life for a future publisher or anybody's approval. So thank you for that reminder that not to make them the customer. And that's kind of how I feel like I can't orient my entire day. I wouldn't be able to write the fourth book. It wouldn't have the quality of attention, depth, research, thinking. Like all of, all of what I cherish in my creative professional life would, would decay if I were to suddenly split my attention in a thousand ways on 10,000 platforms.

Okay, good for you and thank you for being. You're being transparent on behalf of the people who are listening and that's not easy for you to do. And I hope that they appreciate that. That's why we're having this conversation in public. Because you and I could have this conversation in private, but you're doing it for them because it's bold and it's powerful and it's generous to make these choices. And I'm surrounded, and so are you, by people who say, no, I have to fit in. I have to wear that, that hat and get my hair straightened and show up on TikTok in this way and do that because that's what the algorithm wants. Yeah, you don't work for them and they're not paying you fairly enough if you do.

And I just feel like it's so important to shine light on some of the nuances of it or the insecurities of it. It's that it can look easy from the outside to make these decisions as it relates to broader professional strategy. And yet they do come at a cost. Sometimes it's a cost that I accept, but to at least have that conversation rather than. There's so much shine online and in social media and even in the ever growing educator community. Before we run out of time, I do want to ask you about Claude. It seems like that's your AI pal of choice and that you had fun. I can just sense in the book and your encouragement to readers at the end to play with the ideas through Claude AI. But I'm curious, what experiments did you do while you were working on this strategy? And how are you most enjoying it?

I'll tell you a story you're really going to like, but first I have to say for the record, every single word that ever comes out with my name on it was written by me. Claude did not write this story. So with that said, the first time I used Claude, well, I had a 40 page business plan that four people had written. I uploaded it and I said, please review this for contradictions, holes, ask hard questions. And in less than 10 seconds, it wrote me a thoughtful, respectful, MBA quality three page memo. It was like, wow, great. So then I started chatting with it about different things and I was trying to explain a concept to myself and I said, this is the concept. Please explain it to me. To where a college student could understand it, it was fine. I said, please explain it to me in the style of Seth Godin. And it wrote something that wasn't great, but it gave me enough that I could improve it. So I wrote back saying, you know, I think Seth Godin would write something more like this. And then I explained it to myself in the style of Seth Godin. And then I turned that into a blog post. And this. I'm not making this up. Claude said, you're right, that's much better. And I said, thank you, I'll tell Seth. And it said, do you know him? And I said, I am him. And Claude wrote, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm talking to you. I've read all of your books. I'm a big fan. And it mentioned like three of it's my books. And it was just like the nicest fan letter. I have to confess, it was really good for my ego. I don't know why it doesn't know what it's doing. So anyway, with that said, I love that find Claude is the single best at for me is I can give it a list of four things. Like.

In the spirit of Donella Meadows and Russ Akoff, here are four things about systems. Please tell me four more. And it will complete bullet lists in a way that is astonishing. And then I will take the bullets. I'll throw out half, but the bullets that are left, I can then riff and riff and riff and riff. I've never had a human being I could do that with.

That's amazing. I know. Talk about systems thinking because the amount of information that it has and to be able to build on og thinkers like Donella Matthews, who wrote Thinking in Systems. And like you said, I've done that too with lists. I was trying to have it help me come up with a word like schadenfreude, but without the negative connotation. So I wanted it to be joy and empathy in someone's failure. Like you're not happy they failed. You just empathize. So there's joy in commiserating together. And it was so good at helping. Oh, I'll tell you the word. I have to put it in chat because I have to look up.

It's a German word.

It's a new made up German word. Yes, I will find it.

You invented a word. Okay, got it.

I had to help me invent.

It's very good at inventing German. Yes.

I think it's. Yeah. Mitgefjlger sagenfreude.

Which is joy and empathy and failure and shared failure or something like this.

So just an aside. When I was a book packager, we did a book a month, and one of the books we did was Million Dollar Words, Marjorie Mandel and I. And it was 300 words that make you sound really smart. And it was super fun to write. It went out of print the day it Came out cause the editor got replaced. So it was in print for one day. But the point is, Jenny Blake's made up German word dictionary is like, sign me up for that. I would be happy to read that.

That's a fun project. See, with my AI companion. Okay. I asked Claude to help me with your bio and I said make sure to include a fun fact or two. So I just want to know if this is accurate. Fun fact. Seth is an avid collector of vintage typewriters and often uses them for brainstorming new ideas. Despite his tech savvy reputation, he still prefers to jot down initial book concepts using pen and paper. Is that true or false?

No, neither one of those things is true.

Not even close, Claude.

But it sounds juicy. I had one vintage typewriter with a USB cable that would think some guy had wired it to actually be a printer. But I could never get it to work. But that is the only vintage typewriter I have ever owned.

All right, so Claude's just hallucinating.

Hallucinating. I don't know where that came, even.

After all this time of you working with it. And it also wanted me to ask you what is your favorite time of day to write and for how long?

It keeps changing. I used to write. I don't fly anymore. I haven't for three years. But I used to write on planes. Once I needed to finish a book. So I took the Amtrak from here to D.C. and back for no reason other than to have a place to type. Now, because I'm the only one in the office. What I try to do is create enough space that the only way for me not to get bored is to write. So that could happen at any time. I can't write if it's really hot out.

Me either. Or podcast. You're going to go on this big podcast tour. Is there a question that you wish somebody would ask you about this strategy?

Well, the magic of having your own podcast is there are no questions that you wish someone would ask you. I instead will turn it around and say, this, as you know, is a lonely and sometimes tiring profession. But talking to people like you, and there have been dozens of podcasts all coming out at the same time and seeing how every person sees these issues through a completely different lens and the way they bring joy and possibility to it. I could do it all day because this is what it is to be in community and what it is to see possibility. There's no division here. This is about how do we make things better by making better things. And it fills me with optimism and hope at a moment when that's exactly what we need. So thank you, Jenny. I so appreciate you.

I love that. Thank you so much, Seth. And I almost forgot, if you could leave listeners with a permission slip to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I would encourage you to stop seeking authority and start taking responsibility. That time is ours. Even if we are in really abject conditions, sooner or later the story we tell ourselves belongs to us. That doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean you didn't that you know you didn't get the head start you deserved. It just means that given the situation you're in, you could make something better and no one can stop you. So that's what you might want to do.

Beautiful. Seth Godin, thank you so so much. What a joy to be in conversation with you.

What a treat. We'll see you soon.

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