Episode 233: Seth Godin on Climate Change

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Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Common Skew. Today we have a very special episode recorded with our friend Seth Godin, who along with 300 friends just released an incredible book, The Carbon Almanac. It's a source of reliable and easily understandable info on climate change. It features essays, short articles, beautiful illustrations, a glossary, and more. It's really an astounding project. 300 volunteers from 41 different countries put together this 97,000-word book with over 1,000 sources and completed in 120 days. And for our industry, this is just the kind of resource we needed. One place to make sense of what can sometimes be a really murky topic. Now I have the digital version and I was surprised at how compelling it is. It's the perfect resource to share with your team and to create a discussion around one of the most important topics today. Preserving our planet. And we're so excited about this resource, we're giving away 50 copies of the Carbon Almanac. You can enter to win. Register by August 5th at commonskew.com/sethgiveaway. Again, that's commonskew.com/sethgiveaway. Before we get to our chat with Seth, we launched pre-registration for our incredibly popular event, SKUCon, held in Las Vegas on January 8th. We've been working furiously behind the scenes to put together an amazing lineup of talent. If you're new to the business or new to SKUCon, SKUCON is the industry's one-day conference for innovators, explorers, and dreamers in the promotional products industry. It's an in-person, all-day fire starter meant to kick off your year right, and it always sells out quickly. So I encourage you to hop on over to skucon.com to pre-register so that when tickets become available, you'll know immediately. And one more thing before we get into our chat with Seth. At the beginning of the Carbon Almanac is a tiny section that's really important for getting our mindset right before we dive into the topic of climate. Climate change. It's a story that's less than 2 minutes long, and it's called The Wizard, the Prophet, and the Ostrich. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work using technology to revolutionize farming. The Green Revolution he pioneered is estimated to have saved 1 billion people from starvation, overcoming a chorus of predictions that population growth would bring famine. During those same decades, William Vogt kicked off the ecological movement, demonstrating that population growth was impacting the world we live. He urged humanity to restrain colonization of the planet or face certain doom. Charles C. Mann wrote about both men, describing Borlaug as the wizard who believed that technology could ensure we build a healthier, more resilient planet, and Vogt as the prophet who warned that growth inevitably brought doom. In many ways, these opposing views represent the two ways in which people view the challenges of climate change. Some argue that only technological innovation and human progress offer hope for the planet. They argue for more—more power plants, more people, more technology. Others push for less. They seek dramatic reductions in the ways that humans interact with the natural world. There's also a third group The ostrich. When faced with uncertainty and fear, sticking their head in the sand is the natural response. They say there's a possibility that the climate isn't actually changing, or if it is, it's unrelated to human activity on the planet. Some even go so far as to claim it's a good thing for certain sectors of humanity. Readers of this almanac could find themselves adopting the viewpoint of the wizard or the prophet, sometimes both in the same afternoon. What's not possible, though, is to see the world through the eyes of the ostrich. Thank you for tuning in today. This episode is brought to you by Commenscue, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commenscue.com. Now here's our chat with our good friend Seth Godin. Well, Seth, thank you for being here.

Well, thank you for having me and for leading. This is not the first episode. You guys keep showing up and showing up, and it matters.

Well, as I mentioned in the intro, 300 volunteers, 41 different countries, a 97,000-word book illustrated with over 1,000 sources completed in 120 days. And this was a monumental undertaking. And Seth, you've published 20 bestselling books translated into 40 languages. Over 60,000 people have taken your online courses, and who knows the number of people you've impacted through your blog and talks. Yet of all the work you've done, you said that this is the most important in your career. Why?

Well, I think there are two reasons. Uh, from a content point of view, because, uh, this is the only planet in the known universe that can sustain human life, and in our lifetime We are going to see hundreds of millions of people become climate refugees. And already in 2022, our lives are being significantly impacted. So I couldn't imagine a more important topic in the short run, in the long run. But also from a process point of view, to create the conditions for hundreds of people to show up without a manager, without a paycheck, to work together to make something that they were proud of, I think that's a harbinger for the future. And I learned an enormous amount from people who brought different points of view and perspectives to what we were doing. And when I put those two things together, what I come up with is this is the only way we're going to make things better, is we're going to have to not wait for some magical leader to show up and say, follow me. We're the ones who are building the system.

How did this experience challenge you?

Well, I think there were a few challenges. The first one is, as a soloist who has written every word of his own work from the first day— I have no ghostwriters, I have no staff— to let go and say, I would have probably written this section differently, but it's great. That's a leap. Um, and also being willing to lean into news that can't possibly be seen as good, lean into possibility where it doesn't feel like we should be optimistic, but where there's actually things to be done. That's different than one person who's comfortable with just riffing. And so I was aware on every day of this project that generations unborn are going to be influenced by how people today act, partly based on what we created.

It's not too late is a mantra you keep repeating, or the book keeps repeating over and over. It sounds like a protest almost against the many voices of doom that now seem more pervasive than ever. How do you encourage folks to resist defeatism?

Well, I think defeatism is a really good way to feel better in the short run, because if there is no hope, then you can't be disappointed. But I also know it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, that there is zero doubt in my mind that if we do nothing, we're going to regret it. And regret is a really powerful emotion, and I think most people would prefer to avoid regret. So what I am saying is, let's say we switch to solar and wind and build resilient systems and have clean air and create more equity and help people in poverty have choices. Let's say we do all of those things and it doesn't solve our climate problem. I'm still going to be glad we did them, and I think most people would, because just going on the journey, just trying, fills our life with possibility.

You know, you, you know, we're speaking to marketers, makers, agencies, distributors, but— and so they understand this sort of next question in the context of branding and communication. Is it safe to say that climate change and sustainability has had a branding problem? Is climate in danger of sort of being commoditized? How does it seem like sometimes that the marketing battles over this seem lost?

Well, okay, so first I'll say that marketing has had a climate problem for a really long time. Uh, we are guilty of being the, the cutting edge of the knife of the industrial complex, and too often we're very cavalier about the side effects of what we made. At the same time The people who first put these issues in front of us were scientists and people who were interested in social movements who were clueless about being marketers. And I, I wrote my first blog post about climate change 16 years ago. I pointed out that global warming is a terrible name because global is good, warming is good, and yet we're supposed to worry about it, right? What we actually have is atmosphere cancer, and it's a chronic problem that needs a systemic solution. But no one asked me 20 years ago what to name it, so we didn't call it atmosphere cancer. With all that said, I do believe that the disorganized sort of grassroots approach we've had to the climate problem is part of the problem. And the reason for the Almanac is so that smart people gain enough confidence to speak up, that the people who are listening to this are the smart people when it comes to telling stories, when it comes to building things that stick with folks. And you haven't been speaking up about climate because you're confused. And that's why I wanted to work on this, because I was confused and I learned a lot and I changed as a result.

I mentioned to you that this is the best structured— the, the way this content is structured, it flows and reads so compellingly, and it's not like anything I've ever read on climate before, and it's, it's a fantastic experience to go through because I'm learning things that I misunderstood before. Something that you repeat often is that systems problems require systemic solutions. What do you mean by that? All right.

So this is so important. If you decide to compost, if you decide to eat vegetarian lasagna on Thursdays, There's all sorts of things you can personally do that feel like you're making a difference. You are not making a difference. That carbon footprint, I think one of the two most effective marketing campaigns of the last 100 years, carbon footprint was invented by Ogilvy and Mather for British Petroleum, and it was designed to make you feel like a hypocrite. That if rich people don't go all the way to zero, they have no business speaking up. And this is nonsense. That corporations, individuals, we do what we do because we live in a system. We live in a culture. We live in a place in a world where when you're getting married, of course you're going to have 200 guests and of course you're going to serve steak because otherwise what would the men eat? And you not serving steak at your wedding will make almost no difference. But if there's a system in place such that nobody serves steak at their wedding as a matter of course, that will make a huge difference. That the huge differences are what does plastic cost? The huge differences are do we expect to get on an airplane when we're going to do an interview like this, or do we do it remotely? That when the systems and expectations change, then we're going to see the climate respond, but not one individual privately and quietly not flushing their toilet twice a day.

Um, this might seem a little random and maybe pedantic question, but once again, we're speaking to marketers and web, the Web3 world, NFTs, things like that are becoming a larger part of the cultural conversation, the marketing conversation, at least. Can you share a glimpse? We'll, we'll point listeners to the NFT post of yours in the show notes, but can you share a glimpse of your research into this and why digital experience also has a significant footprint? Okay.

So there, there are a couple things here. The first one is that if you were talking to me 4 months ago, you would say, why are you angry at NFTs? Look at all the money that's being made. It's much easier after the crash for me to point out that 2 years ago I started talking about this. Number 1, speculative bubbles always burst. Number 2, the thing that is being sold in an NFT is not actually what people think they are buying. But more important than that, Bitcoin was invented to create a system where scarcity was enforced by burning power. That is the gate that keeps people from making a million bitcoins on their own. Bitcoins are worth something because of scarcity, and the way that they adjudicate the scarcity is who can burn the most electricity. And the Bitcoin that was created and traded last year used more electricity, more carbon than New Zealand the country. That what we know is that we built a system that had as its side effect the massive creation of carbon that would alter the environment. And there are new kinds of blockchain coming along that are more efficient. I get all of that. But my point is that when we create a system that we have to live with for a long time. When King Gillette came up with the idea of disposable blades and the handle that came for free, I don't think he thought, oh, this is going to lead to a billion handles getting made, but it does. And so we just, as marketers, as people who make stuff, I think it's worth thinking about which systems are you playing with, which systems are getting better, And which systems are you perpetuating this enormous, uh, landfill-producing, climate-changing impact?

Speaking of impact, let's talk about how product design impacts sustainability, because this is a topic that everyone that's listening to this can relate to, and it's something I know that you're passionate about too. Um, you recently posted about a simple bottle design at a Hilton you stayed at that demonstrated how poor design likely ends up creating landfill. Many of us are now awakening to the fact that the materials we use are not the only way we can make an impact, but rather rather impact starts at design and intent. Can you share more thoughts on that?

Right, so let's go back to systems. The hotels are only a couple hundred years old, and the expectation in the last only 30 years is that when you went to a hotel, there would be an individual sealed bottle of shampoo for you. Well, that decision by one designer at one hotel chain led to, I don't know, 100 million, a billion bottles being created. They could have made a different decision, which is the standard's going to be there's going to be a pump on the wall and you're going to press a button and some shampoo is going to come out and we're going to refill it every year, right? That was a choice that led to a system. And so my blog post was about a particular, uh, series of choices that well-meaning, hard-working people at Hilton and Cisco made that led to a bottle that was hard to open, hard to read, hard to use, and ended up in large quantities in the trash. And this industry that you're in, that Mark is in, has some stars in it, but it also has a whole bunch of people who are victims of the system, who are making really cheap, crappy stuff that's produced offshore in large quantity because your clients want the cheapest thing they can put their logo on that lasts for 4 minutes and gets thrown in the garbage. Even if we don't care about the climate impact. As a marketer, that's lazy work. And just letting the client have what they want, which is a checkbox, isn't you being a professional. There are other items. I still have them that, you know, you got a tote bag 18 years ago at a Fast Company conference. It's one of your treasured possessions. And it replaces hundreds of bags that you could have used and disposed of. Did it cost Alan and Bill an extra $2 to make that bag? Yeah, it did, but I'm glad they did. Someone advised them, don't make crap, make something that's going to stick around because it's your brand that's on it.

I was recently talking to Katie Conivance, who owns the agency 12NYC based out of Brooklyn, and something that they emphasize was that sustainability starts with design at idea inception, just what you talked about. We're so used to focusing on materials, but when we start at intent, that's how we can help emphasize an inflection point that changes our community, it changes our colleagues, it changes our manufacturing, and it changes our customers. And that design intention all the way through to delivery.

Yeah, let's think about, um, the fact that when you have that blue bin in your office for plastic recycling, they pick it up and they burn it. Um, almost no plastic is recycled. It's not economically feasible, but it's also chemically impossible to recycle most plastic. And Plastic recycling is a myth that was invented by the plastics, uh, in a trade association so that people would leave the plastics people alone. So when I tell people this and I say, so just start throwing your plastic in the garbage, it freaks people out. It's very hard if you've been a recycler to do that. And so my second thing that I say to them is just take all the plastic and don't throw it out, just keep it in a bin forever. And it will take you a couple days to have that bin filled to overflowing. So what I would say to people listening to this podcast is every time you make something of plastic, you should have to keep 10 on your desk forever. And the first 10 will be no big deal, but when you get to 50 or 60 or 100 of them, you're going to start thinking, maybe I should just stop making things out of plastic, because the system is rewarding you for making cheap stuff out of plastic. But in the long run, the system is going to destroy us.

One example of designing and buying with intent is this book, actually. Is this correct? I read that you, the publisher, bought 100,000 trees in Madagascar and are planting 10 trees for every tree that's cut to print the book. Is that right? It's true.

We're not the publisher. The publisher is Penguin. But we are taking every penny of our advance and our royalty, because we're all volunteers, and spending it to either promote the book or, uh, deal with climate consequences. It's interesting because I don't think books are a problem, and that planting trees to make up for the impact of books matters. But I didn't want to have to argue with people about it, and I loved writing the check to plant 100,000 trees. It was super fun. What matters is, again, the system. So to give you another example, in the United States last year, American taxpayers— I'm one— spent $50 billion subsidizing beef. Beef and the production of beef uses half of all the land in the continental United States. And if everybody on Earth ate the way North Americans, including Canadians, eat beef, we would need a whole other planet just to hold the cows. This is all systemic. This is not about you going to Weber's for a hamburger. This is a systemic situation that makes beef cheap. So as a result, the Amazon rainforest is no longer a carbon sink. It is producing carbon because they're cutting parts of it down to graze cattle, which you can do for 2 generations of cows and then it becomes a desert. The point is, what we need to do is change the system so that people will make different choices across the population about what they eat. Not scold people for eating beef, but make it so that Meatless Monday is normal. Make it so that when you have a choice, the economically and conveniently smart thing to do will be to not eat beef. That if we had invented milk— I know I'm ranting, but I can't help myself— but we invented milk this year, and we had been drinking oat milk for 120 years, think about how hard the marketing problem would be. Say, okay, well, what we did was we got a cow pregnant and we kept them lactating, and we squirted out all this cow juice into a container. You should drink this instead of oat milk, but by the way, drink it right away because otherwise it'll smell like baby vomit. That would be a really hard thing to sell people, but that's what we're used to, and that's what the system rewards, so that's what we do. Hmm.

Let's talk a little bit about corporate responsibility because there are two massive shifts in buying behavior that are really helping to change our industry. One is the influx of millennial and Gen Z buyers who insist on buying conscientiously with concern for local and global impact. It's a huge sea change that we are happy to welcome and have been thrilled to welcome. Another is the influx of both manufacturers and agencies and distributors who are making tremendous strides towards sustainability impact. Just a few examples. TenTree, for every t-shirt bought, 10 trees are planted. Cotopaxi, PCNA's Proud Path, Gemline, SanMar, Cutter and Buck, some of the manufacturers in our industry. And the B Corp movement is growing, of which an increasing number in our industry are becoming certified. Um, 10 years ago, we couldn't state any of this. So I love being able to look at the progress that is being made because your book was so positive that, you know, in the sense of we can make a difference. How do we increase our momentum?

Yeah, so open capitalism with a small c is an extraordinarily powerful tool. That when you find a problem that can be solved by the market, the market solves it. That we have built more cars than there are people on the planet. We have paved the entire surface of the planet. We have fed billions and billions of people because markets work. And if you went back in time to the 1950s and look at any corporation, they would be primitive compared to the speed and the impact and the profitability of corporations today. We get better and better and better when we put our minds to solving these problems. So when I think about Patagonia today versus Patagonia 10 years ago, Patagonia 10 years from now is going to be so much further along. So the work, again, to use the system word again, we just have to keep turning a ratchet in one direction. That right now, the marketplace wants the appearance of sustainability, the appearance of corporate responsibility. This is a huge opportunity for companies that are going to actually be sustainable, that are actually going to be responsible. That's the next cycle. It's where we are right now is where the internet was when you were looking at GeoCities pages, right? That it's no, you couldn't build the GeoCities page today. And what passes for sustainable today is going to be seen as ridiculous in just 4 years.

The Supreme Court's recent EPA ruling places more restrictions on the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate CO2 emissions statewide. Many are calling this a major setback. And according to Forbes, the point you just made, quote, with neither EPA nor congressional action forthcoming, market forces and business leaders may be one of the best bets for combating climate change. If this is a trend where we have less regulatory oversight and the onus is on businesses to lead, how do we as leaders lead our organization better in this fight for our planet's survival?

So, uh, Milton Friedman was a dangerous person. He had a fake Nobel Prize, and he argued incorrectly that the only purpose of a corporation is to increase its shareholders' profit. That's been debunked up and down. I don't need to spend time on it, but it's still believed by a lot of people who want to be off the hook. They get to say, well, it's not my fault. All I'm doing is what I'm required to do, which is maximize short-term profit. And the fact is, most consumers want convenience and most consumers want cheap. And left to their own devices, they will make choices that are convenient and cheap. But what we also know is that corporations that outperform and corporations where people prefer to work don't focus on how much profit can we make tomorrow. And if you want to be an actual leader, you get the choice to turn the ratchet the other way, to establish a standard where it would be considered completely irresponsible to do things that many companies still do today. Just like you can't go to a restaurant and order monkey brains. It's just not done. It's not allowed. And I am optimistic that democratically elected governments will listen to the vast majority of their constituents and establish structures so that we don't destroy ourselves. So in some ways, getting a new mandate for the EPA, I think, will be really important because corporations want to play with a set of rules, and we need to make sure the rules are in place. But in the short run, what we also know is that the companies that have the highest return on equity are the ones that are leading, and they're leading by making things better, not by searching for the last unicorn and then killing it to make spam.

Speaking of convenience, one of the most surprising and challenging parts of the book is a really small section at the beginning called The Tyranny of Convenience. And as I read it and I was highlighting, I kept thinking, who wrote this, only to find out it was written by Tim Wu, legal scholar for technology and competition in the Biden White House. Talk to us for a minute about the tyranny of convenience and what do you think that means for us as individuals.

Yeah, so I, I came across that 5 years ago when Tim first wrote it, and I— it's one of those pieces that you read, you say, I wish I had written this one. And I reached out to him and I asked him if I could—

I thought you had written it. Yes.

And I reached out to him and said, can I help you make this into a book? But he was busy running for lieutenant governor, so that didn't happen. He was very gracious to let us reprint it. Basically, it's super simple. Consumers say they care about privacy, but they will give away all of their privacy for 5 minutes of convenience. They say they care about the planet, but they will give away all of their impact because it's more convenient to get water in a plastic bottle. That convenience which is fairly new as a competitive weapon, is just trouncing everything else. And when I wanted to include it, I didn't realize it harkened back to Al Gore's title, but that's what's going on now is the only thing that we can do for the climate is to do things that are inconvenient. We're going to have to figure out how to sacrifice 5 minutes of convenience to build 10 years of resilience. Yeah.

In 1977, when Jimmy Carter turned down the heat in the White House to fight the energy crisis, opponents thought he was melodramatic and infringing on personal rights. And thus began the misperception in the public that climate was a battle fought by the left against the right. Ultimately, Carter was right. I think he saved something like 300,000 barrels of fuel a day. The astounding memo was uncovered by The Guardian. We'll link to it in the show notes. How do we avoid further polarization around ideological lines with this topic.

Yeah, I mean, it's not ideological. Everyone has the same weather, and I have not met a single woman, not one, who says it's a political issue about whether 120 degrees outside is good or bad. Every single person says it's bad. And the story is, do you want to be beholden to big power in Texas where some giant corporation doesn't care about you, decides if you have power or not? Or would you like to make it so your home can go off the grid? Right? Do you want to be beholden to oil and gas that come from faraway places and lead to war, or do you want to drive something that is resilient and gives you freedom and independence? Do you want giant monopolies dictating what you see outside in your window, or do you want to make your own choices about the world you're going to live in? Do you want to drink clean water that happened because you spoke up Or do you want to just accept whatever was convenient for some fracking company that doesn't care about you? These stories feel to me like they're pretty aligned with folks who are in the camp of stay out of my life, leave me alone, and let me make my own choices. Because what's happening now is your choices are being taken away, not by the government, but by systems where you're the victim. And I think that when people understand that they can make their own choices. And so the Carbon Almanac makes no political statements. It just says, you can look it up, here's what is actually happening, why don't you want to know enough to make your own decision, as opposed to just parroting something you saw on some cable news network?

Yes, and that's what I loved about it too. And we'll talk about more about that in just a minute. Um, it was 112 degrees here 2 days ago, so, um, you know, unprecedented times. Of heat that we're experiencing here. Practical steps seem to fall into two categories: preventive and proactive. And the book is really good at breaking down both proactive and preventative steps. We often only think of preventive practices, but proactively, you have a lot of hope in how humanity and advances in tech will help us solve the problem. Do you have an example of, of that proactive, um, and, and good example of— we know the preventatives, I think, But what about the proactives? What are you seeing?

Well, so first I want to highlight a trap, I think, from my experience so far. There are organizations, particularly airlines, who say that we're going to be able to build machines that suck carbon out of the air. And that's that idea of direct air carbon capture. There's only 19 plants currently working. And even if you count the biggest one, add them all up, they don't even add up to 100,000 cars worth of impact. It's going to be really hard to figure out the chemistry to make that work. On the other hand, when we say to people in a city, here's an electric e-bike, they love them. They work faster, traffic jams go away, the air gets clearer, it's easier to get around town. And it turns out riding on an e-bike actually produces less carbon than walking, because to feed yourself enough to walk across town, you have to create more carbon than just getting on your e-bike and going somewhere. So this is the kind of thing where you might not choose to do it on any given day, but in any given week or a month or a year, if the system moved in that direction, all the elements of our lives get better. The idea that you need an SUV to go 3 miles to pick up a quart of oat milk is ridiculous. So there's all these new ways that we are understanding, like you and I are talking right now on Zencaster, whereas in the old days one of us would have had to get on an airplane. And I think we're only a couple years away from viewing casual business travel as insane because there are very few casual business meetings you need to go to where showing up in person is worth the 3 days it's going to take you to make that happen.

Let's use our final minute here to encourage folks to go out and buy the book. Something that you have— you are really good at doing is creating conversations around these topics and not just us sponging in the knowledge and then living our lives the way we did before. You're always talking about leveling up. You're always talking about going and making a ruckus. Final word on this: why buy multiple books and any other thoughts you have to share as we close here.

Yeah, it's super simple. The people who completely understand this don't need this book, and the people who don't want to hear about this aren't going to buy this book. We created this book so you would buy 6. Buy 6 and hand 5 out to the people you work with and say, on Monday, come in and talk about one thing that's in this book. Because if we know, then we can do something. Something. And books are this still magical totem where when someone hands you one, you just don't throw it in the trash. You browse through it, you read a couple cartoons, then you read a page or two, and now you learn something. And what we have found— it's been out a week, it's been a number one bestseller in Italy, the United States, and the Netherlands already— what we've learned is that when you hand this to somebody, they want to talk about it. And that's what we're trying to do, is just build a conversation, not an argument, not a fight, but at least get smart so you can figure out what to do about it.

Thank you, Seth. We are honored to have you join us once again. Thank you for inspiring us and encouraging us, and we'll talk to you soon again, my friend.

Oh, you're the best. Thanks for your time.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.