What’s Your Strategy? How to Drive Progress in Your Business and Your Life with Seth Godin
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Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. This is Smart People Podcast. A podcast for smart people, where we talk to smart people, but not necessarily done by smart people. Hello and welcome to Smart People Podcast, conversations that satisfy your curious mind. Chris Stemp here. Thanks for tuning in. This week on the show, we have an old friend from 11 years ago. He also tends to be a little bit of a legend.

And that is Seth Godin. Now, if you don't know who Seth is, I'm not sure I can help you, but I'll give it a shot. Seth is plain and simple. One of the most prolific, successful writers of the past few decades, minimum. He's the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and think about art and life.

Some of his most popular books included Purple Cow, Tribes, Linchpin, just to name a few. And in this episode, we're talking about his brand new book called This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans. The beauty of Seth, nothing is what it seems. He fundamentally changed the way I view strategy and its use in my life, my businesses, in my career.

What you're going to take away from this episode is how to get to a strategy that will drive meaningful change and positive progress in all of the areas in your life you want to. And trust me when I say this is different from goal setting, and it is perhaps one of the most fundamental things needed to make progress.

Can't wait to bring this to you. Would love to hear what you think. And even more importantly, share it with somebody. I know there are already three friends who I sent this episode to because I knew they would like a discussion. Do them a favor. Share it out.

and start the conversation. We are at smartpeoplepodcast.com. Feel free to email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com. Let's get into it, our conversation with the one and only Seth Godin as we talk about his brand new book, This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans. Enjoy. Seth, it's so great to have you back on. It's been 13 years since we last connected. I appreciate you making the trip back. Wow, it only feels like 12. I gotta ask you this. So 13 years ago,

I believe linchpin was the book we were talking about. I believe what's changed for you since then. Well, linchpin was transformative for me because I wrote that book because I wanted to, not because I was an author who was ready to have his next book. And because I tried to go wide and deep at the same time, it taught me a lot about myself and about the work that I wanted to do. Uh,

The world then wasn't filled with media that was trying to make us divided and upset. And social media hadn't really gained any traction, which seeks to make us divided and upset. And so there was more optimism. But now the world has developed a whole new generation of technology. A new generation of people have come along. So it's possible to imagine a future where there are more linchpins, thanks to things like AI.

And on any day that I feel like it, I can be an optimist. If somebody asked you, Hey Seth, what do you do? Would you simply say I'm an author? Well, it's a worthwhile question to decode, but no, I say I'm a teacher. Uh, the thing about genre is without genre, we don't know how to navigate the world.

that if we see a snake, we put it in the rattlesnake category, even though it might not be a rattlesnake, right? If we see a teddy bear, stuffed teddy bear, we don't treat it the same way, even if it's the first teddy bear we've seen today. It's not in the same category as rattlesnake, right? So people resist genre because they don't want to be put in a box or a label. But if you're not labeled, you're ignored. So the genre of author is,

implies for a lot of people, someone who is bookish or reserved or someone who's in the library. And I don't wake up in the morning hoping to write something. I wake up in the morning hoping to teach something. And so I say I'm a teacher because it opens the door for people to then engage with me to learn something. And that's the only reason I write books, so we can have conversations and learn something. After doing it 20 plus times,

Do you like the process of writing any more or any less? All right. So the new book, This is Strategy, is probably my 140th book. I was a book packager before I was an author. So I did the Information Please Business Almanac, the People Magazine Celebrity Almanac, the Stanley Kaplan Test Prep Guides. I love making books. I don't like publishing them. The act of bringing an idea to a stranger who doesn't know it exists yet is challenging.

And, you know, every once in a while an author like J.D. Salinger can live in a cabin and not have to worry about that part. But in general, there's this slog because we resist new ideas. We resist exposing ourselves to something we don't know because it makes us feel incompetent. And so we have to use the act of publishing as a chance to explain ourselves. So I like explaining. I don't like having to earn enrollment.

that the magic of teaching is the student wants to learn. And the challenge of publishing is the public doesn't think it needs another book. Well, then coming from somebody who I know much of your career, I don't know if you still consider it, is in marketing. You are a marketing expert. That kind of sounds like what marketing is, right? It's making people aware of something. So would you say that now you don't like that aspect or the area where you initially kind of cut your teeth?

No, so marketing used to be hype and hustle and interruption. That has been fading, and I've been narrating that fade since I started my career. It is now, how do we craft a story that resonates with people and is worth spreading? So you did not hear about Google or ChatGPT or Claude or just about anything in your life from the company that made it. You heard about it from someone who used it who told you about it. And so the thing about book publishing is

is the first 10,000 copies, it's the author's job to sell them. After that, it's the book's job to sell them. So James Clear sold 15 million copies of Atomic Habits. I promise James Clear is not doing as many podcasts as me, right? Because the book is busy selling itself. But if you don't prime the pump, that doesn't happen.

So I've crafted a story. It's built into the book. It is built with scaffolding and designed to be shared, but it will do better for my partners at the publishing company if more than 20 people read it the first day. What drives you to ensure you expand that reach? Like, is it solely the impact you want to have, or do you feel the pressures of investors and money and all of that? I'm not trying to expand my reach. I decided...

15 years ago, not to try to expand my reach. It made my life better. If I write things that Chris wants to share with other people because it will make Chris's life better, that's part of my craft. But I'm not tracking how many copies I sell. I'm not tracking how many people read my blog. I'm not tracking my royalty checks. Those are sort of a side effect and they're not important to me. It's important to me that...

The people who I teach something to teach it to somebody else. It's important to me that 10 years from now, someone says, you know, I was in a jam and I read this thing and that turned out for better. That's what I'm trying to do. One question I did have written down was about something you mentioned in your new book. This is strategy, which is basically long-term planning versus short-term immediate gratification. And I want to tie this thought to,

I'm in the teaching business. I facilitate, I podcast, I do it for exactly what you're talking about. 15 years of podcasting never really cared about anything other than is this content I think is valuable for the world, is honest, is helpful. Okay. That said, I wish I could make a living off of it. So short term, I wish I could focus on expanding that reach so that I was then in the position you are to say, I don't need to expand my reach.

Do you think the way you went about it is how you have to go about it if you want to be monetarily stable and impactful in today's world? Okay, so one of the things I write about in the book is don't play a game you can't win. And I talk about good decisions and bad decisions in lotteries. There are a few people who have made a lot of money on TikTok. Someone is going to make a lot of money on TikTok, but it's probably not going to be you. And becoming unpaid labor

for bite dance or whatever they're called is not a good decision. So while it might be fun to make TikTok videos, there's no promise that that's a good way to make a living. And I would argue that to a smaller extent, podcasting is the same way. Absolutely. And so if you love making podcasts, you should make podcasts. But if you want to use your skill, your talent, your passion, your smarts to make a living, podcasting is not a good way to do that.

On the other hand, I know people, smart people who've said, you know what I can do? I can use all of those skills in addition to my public podcast to create a dozen bespoke internal podcasts for corporations that will pay me. That's a good business because it's not thrilling or exciting and it needs to get done. And you can make six figures doing that. But we got tricked 50 years ago into believing that you could make a great living being a rock star.

And sure, Van Morrison did. But this idea that do what you love and the money will take care of itself, I don't think so. I think it makes more sense to say if the money is taking care of itself, you get to do what you love by defining what you do as the thing you love. Help me with that last part by defining what you do as the thing you love. If I say I've chosen to be passionate about what I'm doing, then all day, whatever I do, I'm going to be passionate about it.

But the person who says, my life dream is to make scented candles and make a good profit selling them at craft fairs. And then they're bitter because they can't.

Well, I would argue, where did you decide that your passion was making scented candles? You backed yourself into that. That's not really what you were born to do. The same way Van Gogh wasn't born to paint. If Vincent was born today, there's no way he'd be an Impressionist oil painter. Do you think that...

First, decide that you will be passionate about what you are doing. Is that correct? Okay. First step. Okay. And then the second step is find a business where you are serving people who value what you do more than the money in their pocket. Because if you do that, they will pay you. To an extent, the hope is you get to the point we were just talking about, which is where you are. Yeah. I mean, I use this.

narrative is a fuel to do better writing. So many of my peers have sold out in the short run because, oh, well, Exxon paid me a lot of money. I got to pay the bills. Or, well, if you're not sensationalistic, you won't get followers on Twitter. So I had no choice. Well, yeah, you had a choice. You didn't have to go on Twitter and you didn't have to try to make that false metric go up. You have a bad strategy and you don't like the outcome. Okay, fine. But don't blame

anything but yourself because you picked a bad strategy. The things you talk about in this book, which we're here to dig into, how intentional were they always in your life? Or did you recognize a lot of this strategy and this specific type in arrears, looking back at your journey? Naming things is part of what authors do. And naming things gives us a place to hang our ideas, our code or whatever. And

So there are things I have done in my career and then name them afterwards. And then I do them better because they have a name. What I talk about in the book is that a strategy is made of time, empathy, games, and systems. And I have been aware of all four of them my whole life. And when I've ignored them, it's been to my own peril. And I felt the pain of ignoring them. But I didn't name them until a few months ago. And since I have named them, I'm much better at this.

It's intentionality. Well, I think that a lot of us are intuitive. And what I'm trying to do with this book, and I have a riff in this book, an intuitive strategy, an unspoken strategy is fragile. Because as soon as the world changes and you don't have a narrative for what you were doing and why, you're trapped. So I produced a record from a very well-known jazz musician, not very well-known, a very beloved and talented jazz musician. And when the world changed dramatically,

She had no way to deal with it because she refused to talk about her craft. Her craft was just all intuition. And so now what do you do? Well, you didn't put words on it, so you can't recalibrate. And I'm not opposed to intuition. I'm just saying professionals...

You don't want a surgeon who says, yeah, I just moved that thing over there because that saves their life. You want them to say, this is the aorta and it's connected to this thing. And that's why I move it over there. It's so funny. The first thing I wrote down is one of the cleanest yet thought provoking lines I've heard from you is brand new, which is authenticity is for amateurs. What does that mean? Okay. So six episodes, Chris, you came into the studio with an headache and a little bit of a cold.

You didn't get on the mic and say, hey, everybody, I have a headache and a little bit of a cold. Today's episode is going to suck because that would actually be authentic. What you did was fake it and be the best version of you you were capable of being. And then we're exhausted for the rest of the day because you're a professional. And there are a few exceptions, divas, people that we watch bleed on stage. We want those people to be actually authentic. But everybody else who's a professional

He's playing a role. Jimmy Buffett wasn't like that in real life. I was friends with Zig Ziglar. When Zig was offstage, he was not like Zig onstage. Really? Yeah, because the Zig onstage was a role he could live on, live with. He could inhabit without being deceitful, but it was aspirational. If he was like that in real life, he would have exhausted everyone he knew. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life.

Seth, we got to pause on this because, look,

You write so many blog posts and books. Maybe the words just come out. You don't realize the impact, but that is a, an incredible thought for many people. So for example, one thing I hear a lot about is imposter syndrome, right? And it ties to that. I mentioned, I do leadership development, done it for over a decade. And I remember when I get in front of a client

I am not the same person. I often will say, well, you know, it's time to put on a different cape. Yeah. I never viewed that as inauthentic. And it's funny because now your statements help me kind of clarify the difference. When you talk about the surgeon that's working on you, you don't want them to be like, ah, authentically, I don't feel great today. Yeah. I just think it's really powerful. Well, thank you. And you know, in the practice I wrote about imposter syndrome,

And most people who write about imposter syndrome tell you how to make it go away. And what I wrote is if you are at all, not a psychopath and you feel imposter syndrome, that's good because you are an imposter and you're an imposter because you're doing something new. You're doing something you haven't done before. You're doing something you can't guarantee is going to work. So when you feel imposter syndrome,

You don't fight it. You simply embrace it and say, great, that's a signal that I'm onto something generous here. How can I live into the role of this might work and this might not work in a way that's generative and positive as opposed to pretending all sorts of things? We don't need to do that. We need to simply say, yeah, this might not work, but here I am, the best person to do it in this moment. Do you think the greatest fear with that is

Simply failure? I think we evolved to not want to die and to not fail. But now that we live indoors, you're probably not going to die in the middle of a PowerPoint. So I think what people are afraid of is being called out as a fraud, being called out as someone who is manipulating others.

Because we don't want to live in a world where we have to worry about everyone around us is doing that. And unfortunately, charlatans show up and take advantage of social media. You know, con men, con men are great at avoiding imposter syndrome because they're living in a future and they're

They don't feel it. Okay, great. If you feel it, it means you're not a con man. It means you care and it means you're willing to balance what might work with being honest about the risk that's in front of you. So when you showed up early in your career and you're in your twenties, you gave yourself away when you're in your twenties, they know you're not a 60 year old expert. But if you can talk about a possible future with confidence, it's contagious.

And then the placebo effect kicks in and it's actually better than if you had showed up and said, I don't know what I'm doing. That's not helping anybody. And then oftentimes people will say, but that's just authentically me. And this brings us back. And you go, yeah, it might be, but it's literally not beneficial to anybody. I just love how that

If not analyzed effectively, the idea of authenticity can be used as a crutch that is actually unhelpful. Correct. Bingo. Yeah. Really cool. As we think about this idea of authenticity, I then want to pivot into how do we build an authentic strategy? A strategy that is ours.

And we do believe in it. We feel it's true to our core, but it is the best for what we also want to accomplish. The book is This is Strategy, Make Better Plans. You define strategy as time, empathy, game, systems. You also define strategy outside of the business realm. Why this topic in this book at this time? You know, I don't do any consulting, but I try to give people I care about free advice if they ask for it. And folks come to me with what they say is a marketing problem, but it's not. It's a strategy problem.

They come to me with a family problem, but it's not. It's a strategy problem. That strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is the elegant way to cause the change you seek to make in the world. And if your strategy is good, the tactics sort of take care of themselves. And if you don't know what strategy is, if you're faking it, if you have an intuitive strategy, everything's a slog because you're basically doing your job and hoping the world doesn't change.

as opposed to seeing what the world needs and dancing with it as it changes. Do you define strategy as, in this term, more holistic, such that it allows for change? Well, so what's the time element? If we need a forest, the best way to do it is to plant the right seeds in the right place, water and fertilize them, nurture them, and a few years from now, you'll have a forest.

The wrong way to do it is to insist that there's a forest and then truck in full-sized trees and watch them die. The time changed what you did all day because you started with seeds. You didn't start with a forest. And if we think about the first day when they launched the iPhone, the most successful consumer product in the history of the world, almost no one bought one. And many of the people who bought one gave it a lousy review.

So is the iPhone a failure or not? And the question is, when did it become a success? And you can point to certain milestones, like when they launched the App Store, but they couldn't launch the App Store if they hadn't already launched the iPhone. So we think about the steps. How is it going to resiliently shift in response to what the world does? And too often, because we've been indoctrinated by school into just doing our job,

We just do our job. So, you know, a ridiculous example, the aluminum baseball bat industry fought like crazy when little leagues said, you know what? These bats are killing kids and we need to switch to wooden bats or something else. As if the aluminum baseball bat business is in the aluminum business. They're not. They're in the kids having fun business and they happen to sell bats.

So it was a perfect opportunity for them to shift gears and say, how do we make a bat that is going to be useful, right? When the car industry in the 60s fought tooth and nail against seatbelts and they fought against steering wheel safety. But they were killing their customers. They're not in the

We don't have seatbelts business. They're in the transportation business. So once they understood what they were trying to do, they could embrace the fact that time is going to show up and change their world. That's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. Many times we think of strategy as a list of linear steps to get towards a determined outcome. And as I'm hearing it,

It can't be that because the world changes too fast where those linear steps become obsolete very quickly. So it sounds like your definition of strategy is, I don't want to say, it's just not the way we currently talk about it. Correct. That's why it's called this strategy, not that. Roger Martin says strategic planning is an oxymoron because organizations and buttoned down individuals like plans.

Plans are, if I do this, I'll get that. Plans are, if I manage my employees carefully and they do this, we'll get that. I got nothing against plans, but plans are not strategy. Strategy is what happens before plans. And I cited some research in a paper I just wrote about how little time companies spend on actual strategy, less than an hour a day at the CEO level.

and how many corporations say that they don't think they're going to be around in 10 years, more than half. So where is that coming from? It's coming from the fact that they keep focusing on, give me a plan, give me a plan, give me a plan, as opposed to taking a deep breath and saying, yeah, but what's your strategy? So I'll give you a personal, not me personal, but an example that isn't about business. You're 17 years old. You've grown up indoctrinated by the educational industrial complex.

And now it's time to go to college. You get into two schools. One of the schools you get into, one of the five most expensive schools in America, and it's going to cost you and your family $300,000 in debt by the time you're done. The other school is a state school, which has exactly the same selectivity and the same placement after school. And with this merit scholarship, it's going to cost you zero. Which one should you go to? Now, when you state it the way I stated it, I hope the answer is obvious.

But if you don't have a strategy, if you are simply listening to your peers, if you are simply looking at the stickers on the back of cars, if you're simply basing it on what was the college tour like on the day you went, you're going to go to the more expensive one because you haven't decided about who it's for or what it's for. What's the change I'm seeking to make by going to college?

And so, boom, you're going to spend the rest of your life in debt because you couldn't spend 15 minutes to talk about your strategy. How does strategy then differ from goal? So Zig taught me about goals and goals are very specific signposts that we can head toward. But when we reach them, we're not done. They're just the signpost on our way to the next one.

Right. So a goal is I want to set foot on seven continents before I'm 40 years old. OK, that gives you that. But what's your strategy to achieve that goal? Well, I'm going to need to get a job where I have flexibility because it takes a lot of time. And maybe I want to work in the transportation industry so I won't have to spend so much money.

Those are things that could inform a strategy that would help me get to a goal, but also help me achieve other things as well. I'd love to dig into this with two separate scenarios. So we'll start with the first one because we already went there, which is the iPhone. I think as you highlighted when the iPhone first launched, not successful. Eventually it became successful, largely in part, I would imagine to their strategy, not their tasks or even their goals.

How might we assume Apple used or defined the strategy for the iPhone? Okay, so what's Apple's strategy overall? Their strategy before Tim Cook was create the conditions for upper income people to demonstrate their status and to be part of their community by giving them better taste about digital stuff. That everything Apple makes, there's an alternative that costs way less

That's slightly less tasteful. And so this goes all the way back to the typefaces coming out of the laser printer for the Mac, right? Every time Apple does that, they succeed. When they try to chase something else like Apple TV, it doesn't do so well because that's not what their mission is. They make a luxury good. Tim Cook came in. His goal is to make the stock price go up full stop.

And he uses the strategy of building the biggest luxury goods company in the world to do that. But his main focus is what can we do today to make the stock price go up? So when the iPhone comes along, there isn't a phone shortage. Everyone who has the money already has a phone. Everyone who bought an iPhone gave up another phone to get it. So the strategy isn't give people phones. That's not it. It was create a thing.

that once you look at it, every other thing just feels less tasteful. It feels just a little icky. And if you can afford it, you want to pay for good taste because it increases your status and it connects you to other people. Add to that the fact that their strategy, when it works the best, has a network effect, which is when I got a Mac, I was a beta tester. Steve sent me a Mac before they shipped. My life gets better if other people have a Mac.

Because not only can we share stories and my status goes up, but we can share files. So I need to proselytize the device that the iPhone works better if you've got a blue dot versus a green dot or whatever that nonsense is. Exactly. That's why I was laughing. The network keeps going, right? And so it's status, it's affiliation, it's the network effect, it's good taste. All of those things built the most valuable company in the world.

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All of those things are part of the strategy, right? Correct. Okay, perfect. Because if we look at how you articulated their strategy at the beginning, which is of course true, but the idea of more tasteful things, it seems like, oh, so strategy is concise. Strategies are easy to talk about and hard to stick with. There you go. Love that. Right. So Howard Schultz invented a strategy for Starbucks.

When he took over, there were two Starbucks stores and they didn't sell coffee. They sold coffee beans and tea. And his strategy is help an upper income cohort of people go from a pre-caffeinated state to a caffeinated state, feeling like they got a small luxury in their life and do that by creating a place where they could hang out with other people like them. That is Starbucks's strategy. He doesn't have to be in the meetings where they invent the pumpkin frappuccino.

because it fits into the arc. But when Starbucks starts to do things that don't amplify their strategy, like they made little powdered packets for decaf that you could buy at home, that's not part of their strategy, so it didn't do as well.

Right. And so it's simple to talk about, but there's all these temptations, particularly if you're a public company. Oh, we could go do this. If we go to this, we can do this. But you discover that when you walk away from what you stand for and Nike just hit this as we're recording this, they fire their CEO. I heard because he forgot their strategy. Do you have a personal strategy for yourself?

I do. That would help us understand? Would you be willing to share it? Of course. This is not my personal life strategy. This is the Seth Godin brand strategy. Bingo. Yeah. For 20 years, I have been doing art projects that sometimes involve books but often don't that earn me the benefit of the doubt without manipulating people. And I use those projects to help my readers understand

connect with others and gain status or affiliation with others in service of their goals. So as long as I keep doing that, I get to do my work. So when Twitter showed up, it was so easy for me to say, I don't want to go on Twitter because to succeed at Twitter, I would have to not do that, right? That if I get asked to be quote an influencer, like I did a couple of weeks ago and shill for some accounting software, right?

Would I make money in the short run? For sure. Would it help me earn the benefit of the doubt? Definitely not. Do you think people should have a personal strategy as well that guides life decisions? I think you already do. You might not have words for it. Right. Right. So, you know,

What is your strategy when you are stuck at a red light? What is your strategy when you're in a business meeting or a job interview and it's not going well? What is your strategy with your family and your partner when things aren't matching what you envisioned? What tools do you go to? What is the arc of time, empathy, games, and systems? Because there are systems in your household, right?

And if you see them, you can accept them and work with them or you can change them. But changing a system is much harder than it looks. By this point, those listening, I think it's really helpful to understand this definition of strategy. Where do we start? You know, because oftentimes strategy, we're told, starts with a goal. Do you believe that's the case or starts with an end dream world? My method is a few simple questions.

Who's it for? What's it for? What's the change I seek to make? So who's it for means I'm going to ignore everyone else in the world except for the people I am here for. That's really hard. That is hard. If you've got a podcast, even if you have the most successful podcast in the world, 99% of the people in the world aren't listening to it. We have to ignore them. It's not for them. Who's it for? Then what's it for? Meaning these people.

What are they getting out of the interactions? And what is the change I seek to make? If you're not trying to make a change happen, you don't need a strategy. You're just doing your job. So the change is,

What change does Patagonia offer somebody when they trade $200 for a jacket, even though when they bought the jacket, they were already wearing a jacket? They are offering them a change. They're offering them belonging, a story, a way they can talk to themselves and to others about how they want to be seen in the world. That is the change that they are seeking to make.

And they can keep repeating that change for a very long time because they understand what it is. And once you've received it once, you're happy to receive it again because you like being part of the Patagonia family. You talk about, and when it comes to this idea of who's it for, I know in the book you mentioned smallest viable audience. I'd

I'd love to spend some time there. It's a little personal to me as well, because from the podcast perspective, forever we have thought about like, how do we do this better? I think we got ourselves into a little bit of trouble when we first started. It was conversations with smart people. As podcasting evolved, this is exactly what you're talking about. We didn't necessarily evolve with it because all of a sudden there's a million conversations with smart people. And so this is where we've been.

We interviewed Kevin Kelly, who talked about a thousand true fans. I'm curious on number one, how do you differentiate, if at all, from that vantage point of a thousand true fans? And then number two, how do you find or define that audience? Because again, speaking personally, we have found extremely difficult. Okay.

Kevin is a dear friend and the smartest person I know, so I'd never disagree with Kevin. There is a clear distinction between a true fan and the smallest viable audience. Here we go. A Thousand True Fans says, there's a level of super fandom possible out on the long tail of people who are not just fans, but patrons. Patrons are enough that you can do your work.

If you're a soloist like me, we did a seven pack of the book and I made exactly 1,000 of them because of Kevin. 1,000 people bought seven copies of Collectible Chocolate Bar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in advance, sight unseen, just because I asked them to, right? That's 7,000 books in 26 hours. Those are true fans. That's not who I wrote the book for. That's a separate thing. The smallest viable audience says,

Please, you can pick from anyone in the world who you're making this for, but you better be right in that once you pick them, they say, thank you so much. This is exactly what I was waiting for. Thank you so much. I already trusted you and now I'm eager to follow along. So if you're, you know, a comic who works blue with really horrible guttural stuff, you

And you bomb, you better be bombing in front of people who don't want that kind of humor. But if you're bombing on a fraternity party thing, you failed because they are your smallest viable audience and they didn't like you. Right. So what happened to your podcast is it's a really good podcast, but you don't know who your smallest viable audience is. Correct. And so there are substitutes for what you do.

And ideally, the smallest viable audience says there is no substitute for that. And the way you do that is by becoming more distinctive, losing some of the audience because they want something average and becoming a linchpin, indispensable, the one for which there isn't an easy substitute. And it's very hard to do.

and hard to stick with, but it's essential if you're going to do something remarkable. You know what I like? And I don't think I've heard it put this way. That's why I want to drill down on it. You said, isn't an easy substitute. What you didn't say is, is not another substitute. Because one of the things I've found difficult is when people talk about this idea of, I'm understanding smallest viable audiences as the process of niching down to an extent, right? Niching up. Let's hear it.

No, you were, I just correcting it's, it's niching up. Oh, going into a further niche instead of, okay. But you said, isn't an easy substitute. And oftentimes they say there isn't a substitute. I always found that unreasonable because there's always a substitute. Thank you. Exactly. So it's just,

I mean, this is kind of, and it's been a long time since I read it. So again, but when I think of purple cow, like there's part of it that jumps out or linchpin. Is that, is that, would you say that it's a similar message, just different or maturing in some of your other books? Purple cow is about building something remarkable worth talking about. Okay. Linchpin says, become the human for which there isn't an easy substitute.

So what do I mean by this? So if I'm in the supermarket and I'm buying mustard and there's Grey Poupon and mail next to each other, I'm saying the name wrong probably, I will buy mail even if it costs more because it's better. But if it's not there, I'll buy Grey Poupon instead of going to three more stores because there's a substitute. It's just not my favorite, right? If 99% Invisible isn't on somebody else's podcast thing, I'll listen to somebody else's podcast. But

I prefer, it's like there isn't an easy substitute for Roman Mars. He's in and of himself. And so lots of times people have come to me and said, will you write on this topic or publish a book about this or write about that? And I'm like, but if I do that, I'll just be echoing someone who's better at it than me. It'll just be a small, I need to do work that feels and sounds like me. And so as we think about AI, it's,

This is where it really kicks in because AI is free. So if you do anything for a living where AI is a reasonable substitute for what you do, your boss is going to figure that out and then you're not going to have a job anymore. I love the idea of AI, especially for someone like yourself that's in the business of teaching. How do you think about the future of what you do with AI being able to aggregate

all of the world's knowledge and present it back in a fraction of the time we can. It's really bad news for mediocre creators of content. And there's an entire swath of people who have been filling pages who aren't going to be able to do that anymore. I like the fact that I can say to AI, write this in the style of Seth Godin, and it tries. Because the fact that I have a style is important.

Will it soon be able to write in my style and actually be indistinguishable? Yeah. In which case, I better not try to sell blog posts, but that's fine because I don't try to sell blog posts. And if we think about x-ray radiologists, AI can now read a wrist x-ray better than 99% of all the radiologists in the world. So your radiologists don't do that anymore.

Figure out how to become the one that gets the x-rays that AI doesn't know what to do. And when that stops being something you can do, figure out how to change certain systems. I don't know what it is, but you can't say, yeah, I'm going to compete with AI even though AI is instant and free because you can't. And to bring this back to strategy, if you are that radiologist, if the strategy is you

help people understand the inner workings of their body using X technology, then that's what you're talking about. You can pivot with the change of AI instead of if your strategy is be able to read x-rays. Right. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Yes. Last thing I wanted to hone in on, just because I think the audience will be unsatiated if we don't touch this, is the idea of empathy. You don't, that is not a phrase you hear in strategy.

What do you mean by that? I'm not talking about anything that's soft or giving away profit. I'm talking about you don't have the power to tell people what to do and you don't have the power to tell people what to like. So if you are insisting on making what you make and forcing them to like it, that's selfish. But if you can go to market knowing that other people have the power to decide, you have to have empathy to imagine what they want.

And so, you know, a simple example, Google invented the basics of AI, LLM stuff, but Microsoft open AI totally beat them to the punch. Why? Because Google said, how do we defend the search business that's making us so much money? They were defending an asset. Open AI said, the people we seek to serve, what do they want? And when you ask that question,

You become driven by empathy, not by defending your assets. Gotcha. Kind of the definition of empathy, actually, just put in this. Seth, as always, so intuitive, so descriptive. I mean, it's the way you've been communicating for a long time. Really appreciate having you on and coming back. The new book is This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans. It will be, at the time this airs, it will be just coming out. I know it's right around the corner for you.

It's funny, right? At the end of podcasts, you know what everybody asks. Where do you want our listeners to go? Man, with you, you're everywhere. I'm curious, what's your standard go-to for that question? Well, I built a page, Seth's Stop Blog slash TIS, and that's all the stuff about the book. But I don't want them to go anywhere. I just want them to have a conversation. If you feel that you can have a comfortable conversation with other people about strategy, my work is done here.

And if you need more help, I wrote a book about it, but my mission is not to sell books. My mission is to have the conversations happen. Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation that we've had. So thank you so much for being back on the show. Thank you, Chris. Keep leading. I appreciate you.

A thank you to the goat, Seth Godin. You have to go all the way back to episode 32 to hear our first interview with Seth, which I recommend you do because it's always funny to listen to our old stuff and just hear how bad it actually sounds.

The episode was hosted, as always, by Chris Stemp and produced by yours truly, John Rojas. And now for the quick housekeeping items. If you'd ever like to reach out to the show, you can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com or message us on Twitter at smartpeoplepod. And of course, if you want to stay up to date with all things Smart People Podcast, head over to the website, smartpeoplepodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter.

All right, that's it for us this week. Make sure you stay tuned because we've got a lot of great interviews coming up and we'll see you all next episode.