Dave Smith - Episode #233

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show. Seth, you've been on my podcast a couple times. This is the first time in person. Thanks for coming into the city to do this. I appreciate it. So much to talk about. I've been reading you since 2003, since the Purple Cow Blew Me Away. It's still one of the best business books I recommend. But I really feel that over the past 15, 16 years, or whenever it was, I can't do math anymore, you've kind of moved from being such a great thinker about marketing to really seeing how it's not just about marketing. It's about art. It's about personal development. It's about where we're heading as a society. I mean, have you seen this transformation in in your writing and in yourself? Well, here's what happened. In 1960, TV ads were an insane bargain. And you didn't have to be good or smart, you just had to buy a lot of them. And so from 1960 to 1990, marketing and I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah. You had to buy a lot of them to achieve public notice of your brand, to sell sales? The more you bought, the better you did. The secret of Mad Men was not that they were good at advertising, just they did a lot of it. Right. And that all the brands that defined our culture from 1960 to 1990 were built on advertising, every one of them. So advertising and marketing became the same thing. And so when you said I'm in marketing, what it really meant is you were in advertising. And what happened, fortunately for me, it aligned with my work, is it all fell apart. And marketing stopped being about advertising, and marketing started being about a lot of things. And what I discovered in the process of doing my work is I had started in the square that was clearly marked as marketing. But what I discovered is every time you made that square bigger and bigger and bigger, it got more and more effective. Because marketing is everything. It's the promises we make, the work we do, the people we connect with, the folks we lead, the hard decisions we make, our values, our ability to change the status quo. That's all marketing. And so what ended up happening was in my desire to teach people how to make change happen, to teach people how to put forward the ideas that they cared about, I realized that the arc was longer than anyone expected. And that it doesn't matter what your logo looks like, and it doesn't matter what this Facebook post does or that Facebook post does. That's not marketing anymore. That's just a little bit of a souvenir on the edges. What marketing is doing Please. I I don't know if I a 100% agree, because let's say, take a Facebook post for instance. Facebook is where I'm gonna most actively engage with the people most interested in me or my outcomes or whatever. So if I write something I really believe in and put it on Facebook, this is a chance to really see, does this resonate with other people? Disagreeing. What I'm saying is at Heinz or General Foods or General Mills, where there's 20 or 30 people in a committee reviewing the polishing, the banal thing that goes into, quote, their social media strategy this week, that used to be what we called marketing. Right? It used to be that if Coke came up with a great TV commercial, it was worth a ton. What you just described isn't that. What you just described is Facebook as a lens into the person you seek to be. Facebook into as a lens, a window into what you seek to say. So what really matters isn't what time in the afternoon did you post it on Facebook. What matters is what did you care enough to say? And whether you're saying it in one medium or another medium isn't the point. The point is, what do you care enough to say? That's really interesting. So what did you care enough to say as opposed to coming up with a catchy slogan that separates out perception from reality? So for instance, Coke is it, you know, or I'd like to serve the world a Coke or whatever it was. You know, Coke's ultimately, whatever you call it, sugared water, as Steve Jobs would say. And then so that's the reality. And then advertising created this perception that was much higher than reality, much more valuable, than reality. But now are you saying marketing or advertising is more about what you know, really having something real to say that resonates with people. I'm just trying to make the the bridge. There's a lot of pressure to fit in, a lot of pressure to move to the middle, because the middle is where most people seem to be. My, my old boss, years years ago, spent a year when he worked at Lay's redesigning the bag that Lay's potato chips come in. A year. Right? That was marketing work. But now it's at the edges where interesting things happen. So what created more value? Inventing Airbnb or redesigning the Lay's potato chip bag? That's so fascinating because, I just wanna ask you a side question about the Lay's potato chip bag. Do they mix make it extra noisy when it crinkles on purpose? Oh, there's dozens of people who work on every element of when you're a big company like that and well, I'll give you a a firsthand example. There are people at Pepsi who pioneered the idea of SLAM. And what SLAM was was teenagers wanting to drink the entire bottle all at once. So they did scientific tests about how big to make the the hole at the top of the bottle so that it optimized for slamming an entire 24 ounce Pepsi at once. So okay. So separating that out from what you just said about Airbnb. So, obviously, things like Pepsi or some diaper brand or any kind of food brand, there's a perception in reality. But Airbnb creates actual value. That's like like, the first time I used Airbnb, it was like my mind was blown. Like, oh my god. I can have for a short amount for for for a small amount of money on a night, I can live the life of a, you know, billionaire potentially, like, by staying in their house or, you know, whatever. And this was like an amazing thing, this access economy. And so so now it's the the advertising is more from, like, I can share that, and that's the advertising that they really depend on. They create so much value that every all their customers share it. Well, I it's gonna go deeper than that. The idea that we could use the Internet to find someone who would rent us a room wasn't new. What they did that was new is they made it into a cause, that there's a certain kind of person that's at the core of what Airbnb wants to stand for. They're not seeking for years to come to get the traveling salesman who's gonna show up in Cleveland and just wants to fall asleep someplace. That's not their target customer. So what they really did was redefine who this is for and how we talk to each other about it. So Chip Conley, who I think you know Yes. Now, Chip and I went to business school together, so we wrote my my very first book. He was the co author. And Chip is a spiritual guy, a soulful guy who's trying in his work there to say this is more than just an algorithm. This is humans, and we see this over and over again. So the book, Tribes, was a real transition for me in the arc that you'd asked about because Purple Cow says, how do I sit in my office and make a thing that people will talk about? What Tribes says is that now that anyone can stand up and lead, because anyone can have a media channel, because anyone can make connection, will you choose to lead? And if you're going to lead, who will you lead? How will you connect the people that you are leading? That is marketing, but it's also life. You know, it's interesting. I I think a lot about the word tribes, and a lot of that comes from from your book on this where you you almost define it in this this marketing sense. But the way I think about a tribe is that, you know, historically or from an evolutionary perspective, a tribe is organized from the alpha to the omega in every primate species. And I also like to think of of the word scene, where a group of people who have similar interests and challenge each other in a similar way kinda grow up together. So you could think of, like, the Beat movement movement with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. You could think of artists with, like, Andy Warhol and Roy Licklandstein. You could think even think about podcasters, like, all of us podcasters kind of creating this new cultural or artistic movement. And so to distinguish between scene and and tribe. Well, I think And you've even created a scene. Like, the people who have attended your alt NBA courses, I see that as a a burgeoning scene over the past 10 years, really. I love the term scene. It it's got, a lot of texture to it. Here's the deal. The proof that tribes aren't about the alpha to the omega is simple, which is leaders always go away. The alpha person always dies or moves on, but the tribe doesn't. The tribe persists because culture beats everything. And it's culture. Scenes have a culture. Tribes have a culture. It's culture that determines how an organization will make its choices, how a nation will evolve. What for me, I boil it down to one simple sentence. People like us do things like this. And that is what drives almost every marketing decision going forward. Not I have enough money to buy enough ads, but that I am going to establish a culture such that people like us do things like this. And here's how to visualize it on a audio podcast. Almost nobody gets a Suzuki tattoo. Right? So what is it about Harley? I I don't know. What is it what is a zoo Suzuki tattoo? Well, my point is lots of people have Harley tattoos. You can Google it. Right? That a Harley Davidson tattoo says, I am part of this tribe. Harley makes more than half its money licensing its brand, not selling motorcycles. Suzuki will just sell you a motorcycle. But you can't show up if you're in the Harley tribe on a Suzuki because people like us don't ride a bike like that. So so that, in part, I wanna say that Harley, brand or flavor came from, groups like the Hells Angels, which were they're almost like notorious villains, you know, and people always admire the Jesse James of their society. Harley didn't invent this, and the Beatles didn't invent teenagers. I am not saying that we invent our tribe. We just show up to lead them. So when Alan and Bill started Fast Company Magazine, it quickly grew to a very important, publication. Did they invent the Fast Company tribe? Of course not. There are all these people like you and me who are in the world, who are just waiting for the magazine to organize us. And then when Fast Company stumbled after Allen and Bill left, the tribe didn't go away. They just found other ways. So I'm showing up when you talk about the Alt NBA, and these aren't my people. These are just people that I've shown up and said over here. We're gonna try this over here. And you you you've been talking a lot lately about this concept of showing up, which obviously has been around for a while. Woody Allen said, you know, 90% of success is is showing up. But it's not just showing up because you're you and, like, take the example of Fast Company just said. It's not just that they showed up and made a magazine. They also somehow touched into this zeitgeist that was happening that everybody wants to essentially create a fast company in today's fast moving, you know, economy and innovation. But not everyone. Almost no one. That's the thing we need to embrace. You know, you've written about this, and I've written about this, this idea of picking yourself, choosing yourself, raising your hand, and going forward. But there's all this cultural dynamic, and you just slipped and said it, that we need to make something for everyone because that's what everyone will notice, and that's how we'll win. Actually, you need to make something for almost no one. The smallest possible audience, not the biggest possible audience, because the keyword is possible. The smallest audience would be nobody, so that doesn't count. Smallest possible means, what's the minimum number of people you need to be able to keep doing the work? Make something for those people. I'm sure you've read Peter Thiel's 0 to 1. He basically says, don't go into an area where there's competition. Become a monopoly, and that might often mean find the smallest possible group you could be a monopoly in. And so what you're talking about is is similar to that. But, again, like, you you show up. You create your books. You're all NBA. You you blog every day. You're really an inspiration to a lot of people. How do you decide you know, it's sort of like you show up, but you also know what to show up to. Yeah. This is not true, and I refuse to embrace the mantle of special snowflake. I am not a special snowflake. Nothing special has happened to me in my life that has permitted me to do this work. And that's why I don't traffic in stories of extreme inspiration and extreme, duress and extreme anything because that's not what I believe is necessary. And I know, like you, a lot of people who have made a difference. And when you spend time with those people, they're just like us. They're just people. But the difference is they persisted. Now most of these people aren't changing everyone. They're not even known to everyone. But the work they do matters so much they would be missed if they were gone. So you are probably the kind of person who's listening to this who showed up in some place and it didn't work well enough. And then you showed up somewhere else and it didn't work well enough. And sooner or later, you say to yourself, well, I don't have what it takes. But the fact is, I got those 800 book rejections in a row, and I got the people who criticized my blog because it didn't have comments, and then the people who criticized my blog because it was a blog, and then the people who said, this will never work, and then the publisher who fired me after I wrote Survival is Not Enough and said, they never wanted to publish one of my books again. Why did they say that? Well, it was the book I worked the hardest on. Charles Darwin wrote the foreword, and that's not easy because he was dead. And, it took a year of real hard work to create, and it came out, 3 weeks after 911. And after 911, people weren't interested in hearing about how the world's gonna change, and we're all gonna think that's a good thing. Right? And it also most people don't wanna read the kind of dense book that I wrote, and that's what writing books is about. You don't know it's gonna work. But the, people in the publishing house felt like they were hoping for the next permission marketing, which is the book that they had published of mine before that. And it wasn't. So they said goodbye. And I had no publisher. And when Purple Cow came out, I published it myself because I had no publisher. I actually printed it myself, actually got it into a milk carton, actually, you know, put it into the world. And it was only after that worked that the phone rang, and I had a publisher again. So this hasn't been, oh, I see things people don't see. This is just I show up. Half my blog posts are below average. I know this for sure. Do you feel bad when you publish a post that's below average and you and you realize later that it was below average or wasn't your best? My mistakes and my failures are my prized possessions. You know, I They're the thing that separate me from everybody else. I have more failures than other people. I I sort of I you know, intellectually, I realize that, and I'm I'm definitely look. I've participated in all the failure pornography you could possibly participate in. But at the same time, when I write something that I know later, it wasn't my best work, I just feel really bad about it. Woah. Woah. Woah. You said I said 2 things that I really gotta put a pin in. Okay. The first one is this. There's this failure pornography thing that I really don't like I agree with you. Which is this whole thing of going to a Krispy Kreme and asking for a stupid thing so that the clerk will reject you. Right? That this idea of using other people, manipulating them so that you can pretend you're being rejected, it's a form of cowardice. Mhmm. Because it's not a real rejection. You just set yourself up for fake rejection. But in your head, you're saying to yourself, well, I I did it on purpose. That's not what we're talking about here. What I'm talking about is generous work with good intent that didn't work. That is what we need to do. Now you said to yourself after the fact, sometimes I feel badly if it's not my best work. What made you decide it wasn't your best work? What other people said? Sometimes what other people said because I I think that and and I see you go back and forth a little bit in your own work where, look, you have to write things or do things that other people are going to care about. So in some sense, implicitly, what you're saying is people have to either engage with it or like it or somehow even in the future, it resonates with them. But on the other hand, you say, look. You just have to keep going forward because you can't care about how many likes a Facebook post gets. So there's a little bit a tiny bit of dissonance there. Not that much, I don't think. Because I'm good at being a hypocrite, but not this time. I think the here's the thing. If you did work with good intent and it changed one person, I'm glad you did it. Right? If you did work with good intent and it didn't resonate, but you learned something so that next time you will do it better, I'm glad you did it. When you start talking about how many Facebook likes did something get, I know how to write a blog post that'll get 10,000 Facebook likes. And I have no desire to write that blog post because that's a dumb thing to keep score of. Because if we look at who's actually winning that game, they're writing stuff we would never put our name on. They're posting pictures we would never put I mean, I don't wanna be a Kardashian. Do you wanna be a Kardashian? Right? No. But you you could you know how it's done, but that's a place you don't wanna lead people. So you don't want to go post those pictures and do those things. So my argument is caring about the numbers is antithetical to caring about the impact and the quality of your work. Jackson Pollock didn't care about the numbers. No. That that's true. Although, I think in his later years, when he felt he wasn't doing the same quality of work as his peak, I think that led to depression and alcoholism for him. I I don't know if he even cares. Him decide that it's not the best quality. Of course, I'm hard on myself. You're really hard on yourself. That's our job. Right? Our job is to have enough good taste to decide when it's done. So tell me show me when you were not hard on yourself. When I was or wasn't? When you were hard on yourself. Well, every single time I post a blog post, there's a narrative in my head that says, you don't have to post anything today. Don't post something today just because you posted something yesterday. Is this worth it? And if the answer is no, then I stop. And sometimes I write another one. Sometimes I go into the basket of ones if for emergencies. But the fact is that I'm looking at this work, and I'm saying, is this going to make the change I seek, or am I just doing it because it's my job? And if it's just my job, then I I've I've deleted more than one entire book completely finished, gone, because it was I wasn't proud of it. So I actually have done that as well, and it's, it's a painful process. But I wanna I wanna I wanna break you down on this topic. So if you do publish a post every day, and they're always remarkable, they're always you know, it makes me think, what if you were posting and you saw fewer and fewer I don't know what you however you I don't know how you measure it. There's always a measurement. It's either in your head or likes or whatever, maybe a combination. What if you just felt, boy, less and less people are finding what I'm saying relevant or interesting? At what point do you get so discouraged you say, look. I'm gonna have to look for another outlet, or I'm gonna take a break, or whatever. Okay. So I'm really interested in talking about the people who are listening and less interested in talking about me. But I will tell you But I think this helps if people are listening. That's why I'm I'm I'm warming up for this. I don't look at the stats of my blog. But once a year or so, I do. And half as many people read my blog now by direct visits as read it 5 years ago. Now, the main reason for that is Google and reading habits. And then if I ran to Facebook, I could make my, readership go up, and I'm not interested in doing that. That I know that certain kinds of people who used to buy business books don't buy them anymore. That if you go to any bookstore, the size of the business book section is shrinking. Because the very first thing that business book readers did when the Internet showed up is read stuff like blogs instead. So more than cookbooks, more than any other thing, business books aren't resonating. I'm okay with that. That that's I'm not writing for a mass audience. I fired the New York Times bestseller list years ago in a long blog post because it's corrupt. I know how to buy my way onto it. I'm not interested. I don't keep score of that. I don't keep score of how many backlist books that I sell. I don't keep score of how many speaking gigs I get. That's not what this is for. And my heroes, the people who have come before in every medium I can think of, the ones who did the best work played by those same rules. It's almost like I I was watching, an interview between Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin, and and I believe it was Steve Martin who said, you have to go, to the audience that hates you. So he kinda mastered his audience in the book Born Standing Up. Right. You know? Great book. And it great book about not only art, but comedy and his life and and his development of of peak performance. And then right when the he was filling stadiums, that's when he quit. And he didn't tell he says he didn't tell anyone he quit. He just stopped doing it Yep. Because he wanted to go towards the audience, a different audience, the audience who might not have liked his stand up. And that's when he started wearing movies, writing books, writing plays, and so on. And so, you know, it's it's a challenge though. It's a scary thing to make that leap. Well, let's think about this completely differently. If you wanna build a bridge, a little a literally a figured not a literal bridge, like the Tappan Zee Bridge. Everything in the bridge has a purpose. You don't put something on the bridge for the hell of it. That that bolt holds up this beam. This beam holds up that trellis or whatever it is. Right? What's it for? What is Steve Martin's work for? What is this podcast for? What is this blog post for? What is the pavement of that street for? If we get to the what is it for question, it becomes much easier to be honest with ourselves about what we're doing. What is it for? Is it to be popular on Facebook? Because you know who wants that to happen? Mark Zuckerberg. But there's no evidence that being popular on Facebook changes the culture. So if you're really trying to change the culture, don't keep track of something that isn't measuring what your work is for. Right? So for Steve Martin, he was an amateur magician. He, you know, busked his way up and did a different kind of work because that was his narrative in his head. But along the way, he decided he needed the power of a big live audience to propel him forward. So when he adds something to his routine, what is it for? It's to make the p d people in the stadium happy. Now you can't have it both ways. You can't say, I want stadiums full of happy people, and I don't wanna do work that's for that. They have to go together. Well, once you've got stadiums of happy people and you're making 1,000,000 of dollars, Steve was mature enough to ask this question. Okay. My work now, what is it for? Is it to make more money pretending to be the Steve Martin I was yesterday? Or is my life, my work, my trajectory to explore frontiers? Because if I'm in the business of exploring frontiers, I can't do that at the same time. I make a promise to 18,000 people in a stadium because there's a mismatch. So he decided to dig in deep and go back to being an artist, not be an entertainer. You know, I this is, this is gonna segue into your book. One of one of my favorite books of yours, written in 2007, The Dip, which was I think that was sort of in the middle between your more slightly more marketing oriented books and your kind of more, hey. How do I create the greatest impact on society books? And I don't know if you distinguish those those two, eras in your writing, but I'm I'm just gonna do it for the sake of right now. So the dip has this great simple concept, which is that if you're gonna do anything hard, you're gonna have this steep learning curve where it's gonna be all exciting. Then there's gonna be the hard point where things aren't gonna always go your way because you're developing taste, or there's extra education, or you're just gonna start getting rejected. And then finally, if you get through the dip, you've survived where most people didn't, so there's scarcity. So now you're noticed again, and now you're actually creating impact and you have the skills and so on. So Steve Martin went through that dip of, am I just filling stadiums? No. I wanna be an artist and have impact. So he went through this excruciating period where he gave up doing this thing that was giving him so much short term, relevance. Right. And, you know, I'm just curious. There were so many questions that that book leads to, which is and you start to answer them in the book. But, you know, how do you I how do you truly identify in the middle? And I'm sure you've been asked this before, but how do you truly identify in the middle that, okay, this is a a dip and not failure Right. Or that I should go into some other area. And then the psychology of getting through the dip is very difficult because when you're at a low point wait. Let's say you have a business that fails, you don't automatically think, okay, this is this necessary phase I have to go through to build a successful business. You think, this sucks. I just failed at something I put my all into. Yep. And so but this is such an important concept for people to get through. I think it's maybe one of the most important concepts. It's definitely a great life life lesson. So just for, readers at home, as Terry Gross would say, if you're just joining us, the Steve Martin arc is he had a first dip, which was, how does he get on stage? Then he had a second dip, which is, how does he become the Steve Martin? And then he had a 3rd dip, which is giving up the thing he was already good at. Most entertainers stop after they become the Steve Martin. Right? Right. And I think that's difficult. That's why they that's why most artists have this 5 year period where you remember all that stuff from their 5 years, and then for the rest of their lives, all you remember is the stuff from those 5 years. Well, no. Actually, I think it's the opposite. So I would say that the Rolling Stones figured out a shtick, and they've just been doing the shtick consistently for 30, 40 years. Right. Joni Mitchell figured out how to be the Joni Mitchell. And then she intentionally made Hajira. She intentionally made Blue. She intentionally went to jazz so that the audience that was counting on her to be the Joni Mitchell would leave. And so she's made many albums since that. So she went to the audience that could hate her, and she she did her thing. Not ready to say hate her. I think that what she did instead was say, if you're used to the old Joni Mitchell, here you go. Six albums. Take them. But there's now this new person, and I'm not inviting you. I'm not tricking you into having the haters come. I mean, that's what Dylan did. Right? Dylan tricked the folk audience to come so they would boo him because and it's in Chronicles. Sure. Where he's Great book, by the way, Chronicles. Yeah. Half of which is not true. You just don't know which half. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, he makes stuff up all the time. He's such a beautiful writer, by the way, in that book. And I'm not even appreciative of his music, but as a writer, that book is an excellent book. It it's just what a great arc. But he says to the promoter, I need to come to the same cities three times for 3 years. 1st year, my fans will come. They'll hate it, but they'll have brought some friends. So the next year, just their friends will come. And it's the 3rd year with my new work that I'll have a new audience again. Right? So we intentionally went through a new dip that might not have worked. So what I didn't do in the book on purpose was answer the question, how do I know it's gonna work? I did not answer the question, how do I know if it's a dead end or a dip? Right? Because I can't answer the question. All I can do is turn on the lights. Right. Turn on the lights and say, once you see this pattern, once you see that it is possible for a comic to go from living in a van to being on Saturday Night Live, once you see that it is possible for an entrepreneur in Georgia to go from playing with email to running Mailchimp, you discover there is a valid path. And you can look at a 100 people or a 1000 people or 10 people who have been through it, and you can smell the difference between the person who's just dreaming because they like being stuck, whereas the person who's facing a dip. It's not always gonna work hardly ever. But you know it could work, and that's why it's the work of going through that dip that separates us from people who are just looking for a job. So it's almost like you have to diversify some of your endeavors at creating impact so that you're gonna be experiencing dips all the time. And then the ones where you really start to see, oh, there's, I love doing this, and there's light at the end of the tunnel. That's the dip you could survive through. As opposed to, like, I'm in a dip, but I've gotta keep I don't enjoy myself right now, but I gotta keep going even though that might be, you know, a cliff or a cul de sac or whatever. The I mean, the best tactical strategy I can think of is not to live a life of deprivation on one thing, but instead to find an audience of people who will happily pay you for the value you create in whatever minimum amount of time you can spend so that you don't have to worry about starving to death, which then frees you up to actually do the craft of getting through a dip that truly matters. I'm going to, you know, I know you you just said I don't like talking about myself because this is for I like talking about the listeners, but it's all related. Like, how we how we individually solve our problems helps everybody solve their problems. So I have a problem. Okay. I'm in a dip. Right? So for 6 years, I've been writing my personal story in a way that's really heartfelt to me, and people have resonated with it. And for better or for worse, some people haven't resonated, some people have. Mhmm. But there's only so many years in a row. Right. You could and I write every day. There's only so many stories I have. And so I am going through that experience of feeling a little burnt out on my own story and being honest about it here, and don't know how to show up for the next thing, don't know how to find that next voice. What advice would you have for me? Well, there's all sorts of questions nested within that question. So there's the tactical question, but then there's the more philosophical one. So I'll first answer the tactical question, which is that, your real work currently is for the audience of people you have permission to talk to. Can you change them in a way that they seek to be changed? That's what you do. That's what people are attracted to. You're not there to entertain them with vulnerability porn. You're there to help change them from where they are to where they desire to go. Now there are lots of ways you can do that. You have used one tactic that is particularly successful in that setting, And, it may be unsuccessful for some people, successful for others, but no tactic lasts forever. And so what you can say is my mission is still the same. My audience is still the same. I want to change those people in a way they trust me to change them. But I'm not gonna be able to keep using that tactic. I have to use a different tactic. Because I can't just keep changing them by telling my story because it runs out after a while. So there are lots of ways around that. So what Zig did was he said, I only got 50 stories, but I'm gonna keep telling them over and over and over again until it becomes a mantra for you. And so I can tell you 6 of his stories right now word for word because I heard each one a 140 times. Right? That's a different tactic than, oh, you never heard this one before about the prostitutes at 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm gonna drag that one out. Right? So if you're if if what the real issue is is you're running out of the tactic, well, yeah, that happens to all of us. Annie Leibovitz. Right? Annie Leibovitz had a tactic when she was shooting rock stars. But how many different ways can you put snakes on a naked person? So you go in a different direction. Jill Greenberg, the brilliant photographer, goes in a different direction. Jeff Koons has done it 5 times. Totally different set of tactics, all aimed at the same audience. Right? How do I wake up the art world? But what you may be hearing in your head is this audience, this promise, that might not be yours today. It was for a while, but it doesn't have to be. You were you've done many different fascinating projects, all for different audiences. And there's nothing except pop culture that says we have to keep doing the same show. So you can say, you know what? Here's my work. Take it. I'm gonna go over here and start over with a different audience I'm trying to change in a different way. Maybe I'm just trying to, you know, turn $5 into $10. Maybe I'm trying to work for social justice. Maybe I'm trying to become a surgeon. These are all valid choices because you only get to do this shtick once, and you should find dips that thrill you, dig in, and own that. The mistake so many people make, including me, everyone I know, is wanting one thing, but doing something else that isn't likely to get us the thing we said we wanted. Like, when did you do it? Well, when I was, busy trying to sell books to book publishers, I didn't say to myself, what do book publishers want to buy? I said, what is it that I need to write? And I insist that the book publishers pay me for it. Well, when they don't wanna pay you for it, it's not their fault. Right. You didn't bring what they wanted. Right? So I then made the choice to say, you know what? I care more about the book than I do about the publisher. So I'll just publish my own book because I wanna make the book I wanna make. And that's different than ranting and raving about the fact that these idiot book publishers don't wanna publish what I wanna publish. There's a mismatch there. And that's the way the world works. You're not allowed to force people to take what you offer. You just have to go to the story they tell themselves and bring them a story that resonates with their worldview. And so, in some sense, the complaining is draining. Like, rather than, complain about the publishers, how how do you know what the world wants to hear? You just said you you wanna write the story that the world wants to hear. How do you know that? So you first of all, never the whole world, but you pick your world. And within that world, what it means to have good taste is to understand what other people will look at with good favor. Right? So if you want to own a restaurant that serves the Illuminati and the Intelligentsia in Vancouver, well, looking at where they're currently eating will give you a whole bunch of hints as to what they seek. Now is it possible that they also wanna go to a roadside brisket barbecue? Yes. And you could take that huge leap. That's super leadership. If you do it, it might not work, and accept that it might not work. But as artists, we are required to understand what will resonate. So Goya lived 200 years too soon. If you look at the work of Goya, you will think he painted in 18 90. He painted in the 1600. And that's why Goya isn't as famous as Van Gogh. Because the audience in the 1600 said, what? You're not supposed to make paintings like that. So is there an absolute painting? Of course not. There's just the painting that resonates with the people who want to look at paintings right now. And if that's your goal, understand what that resonance is like. That's why Jeff Koons is a genius. Jeff Koons doesn't make the giant dogs and the bushes. He just tells people what to do. He's not a craftsman. Jeff Koons is a genius in the sense that he says, I know how to make an icon that people who are looking for an icon will wait in line to see. So, I mean, right now, when you were talking about books, you're about to launch an incredible book project. I mean, you're a real artist with books. And, yes, you blog every day and you write every day, but there's something about the the publishing of a book Yeah. That is an event. Right. And and you view a book as not just kind of a collection of pages surrounded by 2 covers. I really feel like you you make a three-dimensional object that's beautiful to look at and read. What's the title of this next book? Because I always try to remember it, and then I forget. So, the new book is, what does it sound like when you change your mind? And It's almost as this Cohen, like, race, you know, sound sounds like. And it's not new because it's the best of the last 4 years of my work. And it's illustrated with hundreds of photos by Thomas Hawk, who's the most prolific and talented, Internet photographer. And it weighs, £18, 18, and it's 800 pages long. It's so big, there are only 6 or 10 printers in the world who were even interested in printing it. And it just left China on container ships, 10 days ago. And One of them coming to me, by the way. I'm very excited about it. But here's the key thing that I would say. First of all, thank you for those kind words. I am almost done wrestling with infinity, and here's what I mean by that. I only printed 5,500 copies of the book, and I'm not gonna print anymore. There's not gonna be a second printing. There's not gonna be, oh, how do I make more of this? That's all there is. By having it be all there is, I'm not promoting the book. I'm not hawking the book. I'm not telling everyone, go go go go buy the book. I'll do another couple blog posts about it because I don't want people to feel left out. And when it's gone, it's gone. That's so freeing. It is freeing. It could be it's a whole relief. Yeah. Not where you're at. It's not an infinity of upside. I already broke even, and it'll do okay. But I got to make the book I wanted, and that's enough. And then I get to do it again. So and this is related to, another I mean, all of your books are excellent, but The Icarus Deception is is also a particularly special book where you kind of make the statement that there's a before and after, that the before was, education, job, promotions, death, so on. And then the after is we live in this connection economy where you can find your tribe and deliver to them whatever it is you want. Everybody is an artist. So it's not just the Goyas of the world. Right. It's the entrepreneurs. It's the entrepreneurs. It's the people who support their neighborhood. It's a good family member. So so to some extent, you've done that in many different ways. Like, you've created your alt MBA program. You you write these these books. It's all art to you. And so how would you define the difference so so two points. One is reinvention is a must because there is no steady path from birth to death. So now more than ever, you kinda have to look for, okay. There was 5 years of Bob Dylan's shtick here, and now he's gotta do 5 years here and then 5 years in the next thing. I don't know what 5 years of making it up. It could be 3 years, whatever. But, how have you seen your shtick change through the years? And how do you define when to go from one to the next? So here's my definition of art. Art is what we call it when a human being does something that might not work in the service of connecting or leading somebody else. How do you know in the service seems subjective? Yeah. Of course, it is. All of this is when you're in the service? Well, what I mean by that is that when we look at something that touches us, we feel different than if we look at something that's just there. That architecture can touch us. It's not just a roof. Right? That a cop who talks to a scared 4 year old girl in a way that makes her feel more safe is doing a form of art because there's a human to human connection that's not in a playbook. You can't do it the same way every time. Right? He's not merely exerting authority. He is actually building a bridge. And so there's plenty of other definitions that one can use, but that's mine. And so for me, there was there have been companies that I have built. And the purpose of those companies, what are they for? Well, there had three purposes. 1, change the people who work for me so that I can create an environment where they will grow and remember it later as an important thing. 2, change my customers so that they will say, I'm glad I interacted with that thing that company did. And 3, figure out how to do it in a way that makes a profit to return on the risk that was taken by me and the people who invested. So a properly built company feels like art to me. So when I look at the arc of a company like Apple, it's really interesting because for I I I was a beta tester of the Mac in 84, and I had an Apple 2 before that. So from all the way back there, the idea was always, how do we explore the frontier of technology to change our users into people with better taste? To change our users into people who have more power in that space in the space that they're working. So this is where it's art that might not work? Because they didn't know the answer. Right. And so if you think about the fact that every single major Mac product that was launched, and iPhone and iPad, was criticized by almost everyone when it came out. Almost everyone said, that's not gonna work. That's too expensive. That's a silly idea, etcetera, etcetera. And then what happened 5 years ago was they're the most profitable, highly valued, company in the world. That means there's 10,000 or more employees who are waiting for the stock price to go up because that's their compensation. And you're no longer in the business of exploring. You're no longer in the business of connecting. You're no longer in the business of enabling people to go forward. What you're in the business of is incremental, predictable profit increases that please the shareholders. And that shift is palpable because they're not exploring any of these fringes anymore. They're not seeking to meet to say to the tribe, and I'm one of the founding members, yes, this is something that will not only change you for the better, but that you want to talk about. Instead, they're saying, well, this cost reduces for us, or this helps us reach a slightly larger audience. Now, they're entitled to do that. Right? This is the profit taking part of the purple cow cycle. The thing that makes me sad is some people are holding that out as a role model for what we ought to do next. I don't believe that. I think most of us don't get to be Tim Cook. Most of us don't even get to be Peter Thiel. That the idea of building a $1,000,000,000 company, I'm not so interested in that. I'm really interested in helping 1 person change 20. Because if one person makes the lives of 20 people better and we spread that idea, then everybody ends up living a different, more nuanced, and connected life. And that feels to me like something that's in the service of why we're here. So in your, in your podcast and and you did an excellent podcast on it came out September 20th with, Brian Koppelman. You mentioned how because now there are the gatekeepers are down, and we have so many choices about how we can get our own message and creativity out there. So many books are self published that many of them are almost or could be unreadable. Oh, yeah. And a lot of people don't even don't have the self reflection to say, oh, I just created something that's unreadable. So so so what's what's your technique for improving when you're starting something new or when you've when you might have and you're not sure created something that's not so good? Like, what's again, this is for for the listeners. Like It's a great question. How do you improve? How do you personally improve? So there's a lot of danger here. And the danger is that, you know, when I was after I sold a book to a publisher, almost every time, the publisher made it better. Because what the publishers are good at, the thing they are the best at actually is saying back to the author, yeah. We got this joke, but this part isn't what you meant. And that idea of the generous editor, the person who knows actually how to do this, not to protect themselves, not to sand off the edges, not to make it safer, but to actually push you to make it better is a priceless gift. It's really difficult to find. So now that we've given everybody the publish button, what we're seeing is that everyone's using the publish button, and 99% of what they're publishing is dreck. It's just they shouldn't read it. No one should read it. It just because they could publish it doesn't mean they should have published it. Right? That's really different than the person who is afraid to publish. The person who's afraid to publish is a perfectionist making up all the reasons not to publish because they're hiding. And we need to be really clear with ourselves about which one is which. Right? That deep down, all of us are capable of inspiring someone, connecting to someone, making it different, and most of us hide from that. So when you feel that feeling, that, which Steve Pressfield calls the resistance, is the moment you must publish. Because that's the moment when your amygdala is trying to hide, but you need to push forward to explore what happens when you put your art in front of people. On the other hand, when the tantrum part of your brain is going, when the rage part of your brain is going, when the angry part of your brain is going, you must not publish. Because in those moments, you're not trying to hide. You're trying to hurt. What's an example? Well, Twitter. Yeah. I guess so. I guess people that that you have this gut impulse and, like, 140 characters. I'll just put it out there. Right. And our culture started for for a couple years after this happened saying, how dare you? We don't do things like that. People like us don't say things like that. But over time, particularly because it's anonymous, that social sanction gets corrupted and falls apart. And then you end up with just cesspools of hate and trolls. Right? Trolls are trolls for a reason, and they're not trying to cause positive change. They're just trying to vent their anger. That's not art. Right? That this the this act of trolling is a a little bit of a cry for help. But mostly, it's a mistake about what would help you go forward. That just because you can put it in the world and hurt somebody else, doesn't mean you should. So I guess part of improving is to kind of, let's say, shift that tantrum side of yourself to more kind of positive impact, or I don't know. Like, what how do you, again, start to improve when you So who are you trying to change? There if you think about it, the job of a receptionist, what does he do? Right? Is he really guarding the building? How you did the gender thing there. I always took a picture. Thought was a woman when you said receptionist, but you're right. You're totally right. Right? He's not guarding the building because you could just have a buzzer. So what's his actual job? His job is to be a receptionist, which means to change the person who walks into the office into someone who is more enthusiastic, more likely to tell their truth, more likely to be open to engagement. That is a huge thing for a receptionist to do. That's your job. Right? They're part of checking people in. Anyone can do that. But a great receptionist changes the person who walks in. Okay. Are they changing? If they're not, then you're not serving your audience, then you're not doing your work. Try something different tomorrow. Bring in some brownies. Try something else. Talk to the person while they're waiting in the lobby about the person they're gonna go meet. Oh, you're gonna go meet Bill? I know Bill. We played softball on Sunday. Ask him about what happened in the 3rd inning. Right? What happens when you do that? What happens when you do this? And over a week, a month, a year, you're gonna become the best receptionist anyone has ever encountered. And I think that's worth something. You know, you mentioned earlier your book, Permission Marketing, which is a great, was a great title and kind of defined a movement in in marketing. I've kind of stolen your phrase and applied it to to networking. Like, a lot of people say, oh, can you introduce me to so and so? And I always make sure I get permission on both sides before I do, so I call that permission networking. But it feels like even showing up, like and you've been writing a lot about lately the importance of of showing up. There there's probably a notion of permission showing up. It's not like you can just show up at a party you weren't invited to. You kinda have to sort of feel out where where you should show up, where you're allowed to show up. And so, again, how do you a lot of these things are so subtle and subjective, like and people don't know, psychologically don't know, where do I have permission to show up, and what will what will help me the most and help my audience the most and so on. Right. So human spam, we don't need more of it. And, clearly, there are people whose only job all day is be human spam, bothering people doing this networking thing that's not welcome at all. In New Hampshire, the last time I was there, I noticed that the how I was canvassing a a bunch of years ago for a politician. The houses that where I visited on block after block had no doorbells. So what does that mean? What it means is if you're a friend come in and if you're a stranger, go away. And I thought that was profound. Right? That what it means to have permission is to not knock on a stranger's door, but instead pay something into the community to the point where the community asks for something more from you. That's how you earn permission, that you contribute and you contribute. And then one day says someone says, wait. I missed you. What else you got? That's what permission looks like. And we see it all the time in the real world that somebody puts up a video on YouTube. That's not spam. You have to go find it. Right? That video of YouTube is so touching, so human that the comments come in, the email comes in. They say, what's your next one? So now the door is open for you to make another one. And that's how it grows bit by bit. I think that's the I think that's really important, that notion of the next one. And you've written about this as well. It's not everybody says, how can I market my new novel? And I always respond, write the next one, because that the best way to market the first novel is to write the next novel, and then you also improve as well. I think people think, oh, I just made this great post. Can you share it? Because it's gonna have so much impact. Or a Kickstarter. Yeah. Or so and, usually, the answer is no. Like, just keep on going, and that's really how you show up. Right. But what about I mean, people always say the importance of persistence. And, you know, when I see this doing a podcast, I have to do this all the time. I have to keep being in front of potential guests. Hey. I'm still here. You know, you're promoting something or whatever. Do you wanna come on my podcast? When do you know that persistence is too much? You know, when am I knocking too much on the door? You know, what So here's my version of persistence. The number of people you care about who are actually going to buy from you, and this podcast is buying from you, merely because you annoyed them into saying yes is very low. That the people you annoy with persistence who say yes, you don't wanna interact with anyway. I hope I didn't annoy you by ASR. You didn't. Because I never say yes to people who are merely persistent. As a matter of principle, never. Because it just encourages people to be annoying. That's different than earning the standing as a known quantity. Right? That what we know is that no business, no project, no novel ever started big, ever. It always starts with 3 people or 10 people or 20 people. That's the curve. Right? We know what the curve looks like every time. So instead of saying, I need to leap to the middle, you say, I'm gonna start with people who want to engage with me. But the other thing I'm gonna do, this is where the dip comes in, is, you know, Marc Maron's podcast, WTF, wasn't popular for months months months months months, maybe years, but he kept making the podcast. And as a result, when he sends an email to Steve Martin saying, you wanna be on my podcast, look at who else has already been on it, That list is the sign of persistence. Sending 50 emails to Steve Martin isn't the point. The point is, I'm not going away. I'm serious about this. I'm real. That is what people miss. So I wonder if, you know, as we're talking, one thing I noticed about you is you're so calm, and I'm sure other people have said that to you. But you've you've written also recently, like, I think you had this one great post maybe a week or so ago where it was just line after line, like, care for other people, contribute what you can. I mean, I'm I'm paraphrasing the lines. But, like, when we got in here, you you got me a water. Like, I should've gotten you a water. Like, is this is your default like, whenever you feel or recognize anxiety inside yourself, do you say, okay. I'm gonna switch from anxiety to how can I contribute a little bit more? Because that will kind of fade the anxiety. Do you have, like, a default thing going on in your head? Well, let's talk about authenticity for a minute. You know, I think the last time most humans were authentic was when they were 90 days old lying in a diaper with poop in it. Right. Everything since then is a choice, and it's work. That we put on clothes even if it's not cold out. Right? Because that's our job. That's what the only way we're gonna interact with other people. That we smile at a stranger even though we might feel like running away. Because we know that smiling at a stranger makes it more likely that we'll have an engagement with them that moves things forward. Is that inauthentic? Is that manipulative? No. It's the work of being in a civilized society. It turns out that if you adopt a pattern of positive connection toward other people, not only do doors open for you, but you will be happier. We know this. There's plenty of evidence that shows that this is correct. That every time we have a chance to indulge our amygdala, indulge rage, indulge anger, and we take it, we don't end up blowing off steam and feeling better. We end up worse. So there's a practice. And for me, part of the practice is, if I'm engaging with somebody, well, then engage with them. Right? And this idea that you're hiding in the corner and you're going to the c**ktail party because you don't want to and you're afraid to raise your hand at the end of class, all that stuff, that's just hiding. And it's not productive, and it's not generous. So for me, the daily practice is reminding myself why I'm here at all. Right? Because if it's not to make things better, then don't go. Well, Seth, this has been such an enlightening conversation. I'm so glad. Done already. You're awesome. Thank you. Yeah. You no. I I don't wanna I I know you have things to do. You were you're so great coming down in here. Of course, as I've said before too many times, I'm a huge fan of all your work. I learned you gave me a great therapy session right here. So and thank you for the water. What's okay. Let me just ask you this. What's next after after this massive, you know, 6,000 pound book and your alt MBA course that's coming up and your your constant blog posts? What are you gonna do? What's your what's your next thing? You know, the, Why don't you write a movie? I'm just throwing it out there. Me and Brian. There's a lot to be said for chopping wood and carrying water, of doing the craft. And, the alt NBA is now entering its 9th session, and we're gonna do that throughout all of next year. There's a lot of people who are hoping to turn some lights on. And as long as I can be in of service doing that, that is my practice right now. Excellent. Thank you, Seth, once again. A pleasure. Thank you.