By Motley Fool Staff
AI, marketing, brand, creativity, These are just a few of the subjects that Seth Godin can talk about with eloquence and insight. In this episode of Rule Breaker Investing, the Purple Cow author joins Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner and guest host Andy Cross, The Motley Fool’s chief investment officer, to shed light on what earns attention, transaction, and loyalty.
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Earning Attention with Seth Godin
David Gardner: This week a special treat. Seth Godin, only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.
Among the many remarkable traits of Seth Godin, one of my favourites is the power of his brevity. In honour of Seth, you just got the shortest cold open I’ve ever done. This week, I’m featuring our recent Motley Fool interview from Fool24. That’s the video channel on our website with superstar business author Seth Godin, joined by Andy Cross, as well, our Chief Investment Officer, that interview is coming right up. But first, a quick reminder next week is your mailbag. I love receiving your thoughts and questions every month. Reach us at [email protected] or tweet us at RBI podcast.
As I shared at the start of the year, my 2025 book, Rule Breaker Investing is now available for pre-order. After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus, a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide, and each week until the book launches on September 16, I’m sharing a random excerpt. I crack open the book to a random page and read a few sentences. Let’s do it. Here’s this week’s Page Breaker preview a succinct Godin-like statement, summing up my investing approach in exactly 20 words. I quote. “I try to find excellence, buy excellence, and add to excellence over time. I sell mediocrity. That’s how I invest.” That’s this week’s Page Breaker preview to pre-order my final word on stock picking shape by three decades of market crushing success. Just type Rule Breaker Investing into amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, or wherever you shop for great books. When you think about it, a great investment book literally pays for itself, and then some. To everyone who’s already pre-ordered, thanks. That means a lot to me. In the words of the poet, Taylor Allison Swift, our next guest is feeling 22. Seth Godin has 22 best sellers in 39 languages. He’s an Internet entrepreneur, best-selling author, renowned speaker and marketing. Sure, expert. He’s posted more than 9,000 times on his blog, and his 22 books, I think I have that number right. He can correct me if I’m wrong. It’ll destroy the Taylor Swift opening if I don’t have that right, Andy. His 22 books include The Dip, Linchpin, Purple Cow, and Tribes. I want to throw Free Prize inside in there as well, book I love. His newest book is the best seller, This is Strategy Make Better Plans, published last year. He’s one of the two most famous people from Mount Vernon, Virginia. Seth Godin, welcome back.
Seth Godin: You guys, you’re great. David, you’re a genius. I’m from Mount Vernon, New York, but I’ll take it.
David Gardner: I rarely do this step. I’m going to throw my producer Mac Greer under the bus for, I would say, inadequate research that caused me to make, What is an embarrassing gas?
Seth Godin: It’s not embarrassing. I just don’t want to take any credit for being from a place I’m not from and move people from Virginia down the ladder. It’s not fair. [laughs].
Andy Cross: It’s all in the storytelling, anyways, Seth.
David Gardner: Seth, let’s go right to AI because how can we not? Seven years ago, you joined me on my podcast. You were my first ever author in August. It was August 1st, 2018, and you described daily blogging back then as the best way to sharpen your thinking. Today, so many creators lean on AI assistant like ChatGPT to draft, edit, spark ideas. How has AI changed your own writing process, Seth, if at all, and what would your advice be to someone who worries that AI will cheat their way to insight?
Seth Godin: Let’s say it’s 1,900, 1905, and we’re talking about electricity. I think it’s a little bit of a trap to ask about, are you using a light bulb at night to help you type? Because electricity opened the door for so many miracles that we had no idea were coming. Claude is one of my closest compatriots. I find ChatGPT to be arrogant and lazy, but Claude and I get along great, and I never ask it to do my writing for me, but that’s a personal choice because I write because I want to, not because some teacher told me I had to. What I do with Claude that continually amazes me are two things. First, is if you have a complicated document, 30, 40 pages, I had one that was written by 10 different people over the course of a year, and you upload that document and say to Claude, “Please find the internal inconsistencies, please ask me five hard questions, please criticize the structure,” it will write you a two page memo better than most humans could do. The second thing I use it for is, I’ll come up with a list of three or four or five things and say, “Give me four more.” Of the four it gives me, at least two of them are things I never thought of that are really important. This idea of, did I think of all the things on my list, is great, but, two years from now, both of these uses are trivial compared to what AI is going to be doing to our lives.
David Gardner: Do you want to make any predictions, Seth?
Seth Godin: My prediction is this. Everything AI has done so far for the typical person in business in the developed world is solo. It’s me and the AI. But the Internet has two words in it, Inter, which means connected and net, which means connected. That’s what fuels everything that works on the Internet. Once AI says to me, “I noticed you were writing X, Y or Z, David, who’s also using the same tool is working on the same thing. Should I connect you guys?” Whoa. What happens when my databases talk to each other or my databases talk to your databases? What happens when we create this amplification of community, not just amplification of knowledge? That adds two zeros, I think, to the way the world works.
David Gardner: Seth, you’ve written about how true pros don’t fear amateurs, but I think a lot of pros are fearing ChatGPT, generative AI, Claude, whatever it is. Should we?
Seth Godin: Well, I’ve had technology put my projects out of business before, and it will do it again. What I mean by true pros, don’t fear amateurs, when the camera came along, a whole bunch of people who were painters poo putt it. When the iPhone came along, wedding photographers freaked out. How dare guests at a wedding take pictures? Don’t they know how hard I work to get all this fancy equipment? But the best wedding photographers got busier after that, not less busy because you’re now charging for something that’s not a commodity. If you made a living doing genre covers for science fiction novels, you don’t have a job anymore, because if there’s a genre, AI can do it better than you can. What it does is it requires you to go beyond genre and to be on the frontier. If I think about something like radiology, there are plenty of professional radiologists, but they’re doing genre radiology by the book. Now an X-ray machine can instantly and for free, read a wrist fracture 95% of the time. I don’t need a mediocre radiologist ever again. This is great news because now the 90% of the population that didn’t even have access to X-rays and is going to. It’s really bad news if you’re by the book anything, and so that’s what I mean by being a professional is you’re not just checking the box and handing in the form.
David Gardner: Such a good distinction. Let’s talk a little bit more about AI. I’m wondering, especially Seth, I admire so much so many of your thoughts, words, deeds, your books. I’ve read a bunch of them. Branding is always top of mind when I think about you, and obviously, I think about the Motley Fool brand. That’s just our company, but branding matters a lot to me as an investor. In fact, I think that branding is often misunderstood because there’s no number for it on the balance sheet or the income statement, and so most people calculate their valuation ratios without factoring in what, to me, might be the central asset of every great company. Every great company sets go and ends up looking overvalued because we’re not counting brand. But I care about brand. Do you think AI is being well-branded today? Does AI have a branding problem?
Seth Godin: What’s a brand? It’s not a logo. The Motley Fool logo is a tiny fraction of the goodness of Motley Fool. You didn’t win the logo sweepstakes, but you built a brand that matters. And if you look at AI logos, they’re terrible. A brand is simply the promise that an organization makes and our expectation of what to expect. Hyatt has a logo, but Nike has a brand. If Hyatt came out with a line of sneakers, we have no idea what it would be like. But if Nike opened a hotel chain, we all know what it would be like. [laughs] And so that’s the brand value, if you’re not paying extra, there is no brand value, if you’re not taking risks because you give them the benefit of the doubt, there is no brand value. Fifty years ago, the mass murderer Marlborough had an enormous brand value because people would cross the street if the convenience store was sold out of Marlborough’s and buy their brand across the street. The thing about AI is anthropic as they say 600 people in their marketing department. I have no idea what they’re doing because there’s no consistency, there’s no structure to what I should be expecting from them. It’s just engineers launch stuff, and then the marketing people go to meetings and try to catch up.
AI has a brand in the sense that more people are paying more money for this new technology than has ever happened before for any technology I can recall. We’re paying the money because of what it’s going to do for us tomorrow, and so there’s this expectation. The challenge they have, is in order to get our attention, they have made insane promises, and regularly they break those promises, and so I wouldn’t trust AI to drive my car, and I wouldn’t trust AI to write my prescriptions, and I wouldn’t trust AI to write my books. But it does a little of those things all the time. Going forward, if there’s going to be enterprise value greater than the tech value, they’re going to have to develop this soft tissue brand, because I think the tech value, as always happens, will become a commodity. That means you either have to have a network effect, or a benefit of the doubt loyalty brand, or else it’s a commodity you’re going to charge with, it costs you to make the electricity work and a penny more, but you can’t get a premium because if not, I’ll just switch to somebody else.
Andy Cross: Seth, just a quick follow up there. You’ve written a lot about authenticity of brands. Generative AI and those tools, do they have an authenticity problem? Then a parallel to that is just in general, how do you evaluate the authenticity of a brand’s marketing?
Seth Godin: I’ve written that I think authenticity is a crock, and I think it’s a trap, and I think it should be avoided. Friends should be authentic, professionals should be consistent. If I go to see Taylor Swift and I pay $2,000 for the tickets, and she has a cold, I don’t want her to act like she has a cold. I want her to fake it, and act like the best version of Taylor Swift, because she’s a professional, and the same thing is true for anything I transact with a stranger hoofer. What I want from AI is not authenticity because I don’t care if it’s authentically having a hallucination. I want it to consistently keep its promise, and part of the job the marketers have. Well, so let me explain about marketing in tech firms. The greatest value created ever by a marketer in a tech firm is not Steve Jobs, it’s Marissa Mayer. Marissa Mayer, who didn’t have marketing in her title was one of the first employees at Google. At the time I was at Yahoo. Yahoo had 183 links on its homepage. Google was heading down that path really fast, and Marissa Mayer put a stake in the ground and stopped at two, and every time the engineers tried to make Google more complicated, she made them stop. That single act, which took five plus years of diligence, created what is it now, $1 trillion worth of value, because otherwise, it would have just been another place to do search. Yahoo was lazy.
I was the third member of the marketing department after they acquired my company, and so the two people who were in the marketing department, they were just in charge of putting up a billboard here and there. That wasn’t marketing. Marketing is, what is the story we’re going to live? What are the promises we’re going to make and the promises we’re not going to make? When people think of us, what are they going to think of? This has been missing in tech for a long time, and so you end up with people who let the tech run the company, and as a result, they inevitably slam into the wall.
David Gardner: I want to make sure I have my math and my history right. Seth, when you said there are two options on the Google homepage, I think one was search, and the other was, I’m feeling lucky?
Seth Godin: Correct. They’re taking it down as of, like, the next couple of weeks.
David Gardner: I have to admit I haven’t really clicked. I’m feeling lucky for a long time, so maybe but I love the whimsy of it.
Seth Godin: They didn’t want anyone to click on it. They just wanted to show confidence. [laughs]
David Gardner: Let’s shift now from branding to permission marketing. Early on, Seth Godin coined the term permission marketing to contrast with interruption tactics. These days, we’ve got some cookies crumbling, privacy regulations, proliferating, first party data, now king. Seth, how do you see permission marketing evolving and where should marketers focus to earn genuine consent permitted consent in 2025?
Seth Godin: When you and I met, it was 1991 or ’92, and I think somewhere in there and I had just invented email marketing. Someone needed to invent it, and it was me. The whole point was, it’s not spam. I testified at the US Senate against spam and got kicked out of the Direct Marketing Association in response. The Direct Marketing Association said, how dare you invite regulation of anything any company wants to do to steal attention? I said, you’re completely missing the point. The good guys want there to be regulation. The good guys want it to be rational and quiet and trustworthy. It’s the scammers and the spammers that want it to be the Wild West. You, the DMA, you should be on my team. I was thrilled years later, they let me back in because they understood the mistake they had made. The stuff you’re talking about, it’s all ham-handed, but it’s all in response to greedy, lazy organizations skirting around the edges. Permission is simple. It’s not the fine print. It’s a simple question. If you didn’t show up tomorrow, would we miss you? Would we miss you if you didn’t send us that email? Would we miss you if you didn’t update your website? If the answer is no, then you’re a spammer, and if the answer is yes, you’ve earned permission. I’m confident that if the Fool stopped sending its fans and its subscribers your newsletter, you would hear from a lot of people within five minutes. That’s because you’ve earned their permission, not you have some legal loophole you’re exploiting.
David Gardner: I really appreciate that point, and I do think the Motley Fool does a good job in some regards, and I think we also send out a lot of emails, too. I don’t think we’re 100% yet, but I certainly think we’re on the path. Thirty-one years in since you embedded email marketing Seth, a lot of people are still just trying to figure out how to do it best. It’s funny, just a quick reflection, and then Andy’s going to have a follow up, but my reflection is that what you just said, if we didn’t send it, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? That’s exactly the question that I ask in something I call the snap test when I look at companies, and I’m thinking like, will I invest in this stock or that one? The snap test was later made popular. I first wrote about this in our 1998 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers but it was later made popular by Thanos of Marvel Avengers fame when he snapped his fingers and half of the world, including superheroes, disappeared. But literally in 1998, I said, here’s the way I think you can decide whether you should buy a stock or not. When you snap your fingers, if that company disappeared overnight, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? It has focused on impact and who’s got the love out there and it’s just fascinating to me that you basically said the same thing, and we’re using different contexts.
Seth Godin: Well, I’m just stealing all your ideas.
David Gardner: Not at all. No, we stole email marketing from you, sir. [laughs] Andy,
Andy Cross: Seth, how about the progression or the regression in permission marketing when you think about the technology of programmatic ads and cookies and targeting over the years? Where do we stand nowadays with permission marketing?
Seth Godin: Well, it’s like when one of your kids grows up and ends up in a federal prison. [laughs] When we were running Yoyodyne, we had a 82% open rate and a 33% response rate to the emails we sent. We’re the largest recipient and sender of email in the world at the time that was doing permission marketing. Those were our numbers week after week. Now, for most organizations, it’s 0.000001%, and the reason is the inevitable race to the bottom caused by people skirting around the edges to make their quarterly income go up. Because they’re like, It’s OK if I burn it down because it’s an emergency, and so they cheat. It was naïve of me when I wrote the book and in the years afterwards to not expect that that would happen because it always happens. What Google could have done is established better standards for how these interactions are going to go down so that good action would be more rewarded, and the open web is magnificent. We don’t have an open web. We have a semi-open web, and when somebody who has enough money and resources comes in and decides to bend it to their will, then the principles and ethics of what I’m talking about often go out the window because Milton Friedman was wrong. We need both independent entities they are trying to maximize their profit and their shareholder value and community action that’s organized around what’s best for the culture. The purpose of culture isn’t to enable capitalism. The purpose of capitalism is to enable culture, and so we’re going to see all of this craft and destruction, and then the next thing is going to come, and then the next thing is going to come. My hope is that AI is going to work at least as hard to defend my attention as it’s going to work to steal my attention.
David Gardner: Seth, let me shift now to something that I really appreciate about you, and that’s your terseness. That’s how concise you are. Truly, and I remember talking about this seven years ago with you on the Rule Breaker Investing podcast, for every blog you write, you’ve thrown out four or five. There’s a lot, and you probably still do that or maybe you’re more efficient. It’s just two or three of these days, but I really appreciate the effort that you’ve put in to make things as tight as possible. I would say in some ways, Seth, you’ve built a career on brevity. Today’s short form video, this is where I’m heading now, thinking TikTok I don’t actually use TikTok, but turns out a lot of people do, I think Instagram. I also don’t use it, and even punch your economy of attention, 15 seconds of content for a lot of videos. What lessons from your writing practice might you do this content yourself? If so, what translates?
Seth Godin: What do we make? I think most people who listen to this make decisions. You don’t make pottery, you don’t dig ditches, you make decisions. Maybe you make a difference, and maybe you make change happen. I’m a teacher. What I make is I help my students who have opted in to whatever we’re doing like right now, change the way they see the world, change the way they get what they’re getting. The rule is, put the effort in to make the teaching as cogent and concise as possible, but no more than that.[laughs] There are all these ancient fables of the guy who knocks on the Sage’s door and says, wise guy, while I’m standing here on one foot, teach me everything there is, the meaning of life. My response would be, if you’re only willing to wait long enough for you to stand on one foot, you don’t care enough to change, and I’m not here to entertain you.
The reason I don’t show up on TikTok is not that I couldn’t get a lot of use because I understand the medium and I understand how to do a dance there that people might click on or the algorithm would like. It’s that it wouldn’t get me anything. I don’t sell stuff online, but I know people who have had 42 million views of something and sold four units. The goal is not to make Mark Zuckerberg happy. The goal is not to make the TikTok algorithm happy. The goal is to achieve what you set out to achieve. What’s the purpose of this work? I sometimes run into people who said, I read a two-paragraph blog post of yours, and it changed my life, but I’m way more likely to run into someone who says, I read your book and it changed my life. I’m even more likely to run into someone who said I took the altMBA, which I used to run, and that changed my life. What I’m looking for are people who are ready to lean in, and the short stuff opens the door, but they’ve got to then teach themselves or it’s not going to work, and the problem with TikTok is there’s not a lot of autodidactic experience going on there. There’s just amusement.
David Gardner: Do I recall correctly that you only took one English course in high? There’s some story, I remember you telling Seth about your own schooling in English.
Seth Godin: My high school English teacher, I took all the classes in high school, but she wrote in my yearbook, you are the bane of my existence, and you will never amount to anything. I still have it. I dedicated one.
David Gardner: Is that really what a teacher wrote into all like that?
Seth Godin: I dedicated one of my books to her cause was slightly tongue in cheek. My dad made a deal with my two sisters and me. We’d have to pay room and board in college. He’d pay tuition, but we had a major in engineering in exchange. Because he said, learn to solve problems, the rest of this is a bonus. Take as many English classes as you want, but first learn to solve problems. When I got to school, I discovered a loophole in the course catalogue, so I took engineering and a lot of philosophy classes. I loved the thinking and philosophy, and I took exactly one English class. What I discovered is college-level English, at least for me, wasn’t about learning to express myself the way I wanted to in a practical way. It was about literature, and I have too short of an attention span for that. That’s correct. One English class in college.
Andy Cross: Seth, back to the, well, a little bit tied to attention spans and the marketing question that David had asked. I’m really curious about this concept between grabbing and earning someone’s attention, especially today, as David said and you all were talking about just the brevity of information out there and the volume of information out there. Explain to us how we can earn someone’s attention versus grabbing someone’s attention?
Seth Godin: Two quick case studies. This is a book that saved my career. I’d been kicked out of publishing, and then I wrote this book called Purple Cow. It came in a milk cart, and I self-published the first 10,000 copies. Now, that’s a gimmick, and I’m aware it’s a gimmick, but I was only selling it to people who already liked my work, who were reading me in Fast Company. I sold out of the 10,000 copies, five dollars a copy, broke even. How did everyone else find out about it so that it has sold millions of copies? Is it because I did stunts and hung from a building and figured out how to make a commotion? Zero people. It’s because somebody put this on their desk. They didn’t put it on their desk because they like me. They don’t know me. They put it on their desk because it would benefit them, earning them status or affiliation or the workplace they wanted to be if their co-workers knew about it. You earn attention never by doing a stunt or by grabbing it. You earn attention when someone who likes you tells someone else. If I think about David and the heritage of the Motley Fool, you had a lucky break at the beginning, which is that Ted gave you a channel on basically the pre-Internet. But that was still only what, 10,000 people at the beginning? How did you get from 10,000 people to the millions of people that know you and trust you now? Is it because you ran a billboard in Times Square? I don’t think so.
It’s because people who were on board with you told their friends, they told their spouse, they told their peers. Why did they do that? Because you did something worth talking about. This is the essence of the Purple Cow, and it is missed by almost everybody. When Apple goes out and hypes and hypes a TV show. Well, that’s because they don’t believe in themselves enough to have the show do what it could do, which is spread organically from viewer to viewer. That is how we ended up with everything that happened after the original Super Bowl ad. It wasn’t that Apple ran better ads after that. It’s that they made a product that people like me told their friends about. I think that Serrandos said Netflix understands this way better than whoever’s running Apple TV, because they’re trying to make shows that don’t make critics happy, but that people want to talk about. It’s that simple.
David Gardner: Let’s stick with Purple Cow, one of my favourite business books. Back in Purple Cow, at one point in the book, Seth, you argue that winning companies, a fun word, cheat by building unique assets. I’m going to quote because, in fact, I have a book called Rule Breaker Investing coming out this fall, and I quote directly from you, this passage because it’s so relevant for me when I think about what companies I want to be invested in. Here’s a little bit of Seth Godin. “Starbucks is cheating. The coffee bar phenomenon was invented by them, and now whenever we think coffee, we think Starbucks. Vanguard is cheating. Their low-cost index funds make it impossible for a full service broker to compete. Amazon.com is cheating. Their free shipping and huge selection give them an unfair advantage over the neighbourhood store.” A little bit later in that passage, you end up asking, “Why aren’t you cheating?” You ask rhetorically, of the reader. I will note some years later, you wrote a separate blog about how you really shouldn’t cheat. Cheating is not a good thing, and you explain very clearly the other cheating that we think of, and that’s not good. But I’ve always loved that passage, and that’s why I adduce it in my book. But Seth, I want to ask you, I don’t know how much time you spend looking at emerging businesses or industries today. I hope some because that’s my question.
Do you see anybody cheating today in a way that impresses you? They just have an unfair advantage and they’re exploding it.
Seth Godin: First, I don’t remember writing any of those words. It makes me smile to read it. It was so long ago I had to call it amazon.com.
David Gardner: It’s true.
Seth Godin: I made the decision a long time ago that I generally don’t talk about what’s going to be the next big company because every time I do, I curse them and they fail. This is your job. You are much better at it than me. [laughs] But here’s what I would say. If you think of a brand that you admire, it’s not because they have a good logo. It’s because that brand is doing something that is an unfair advantage. I am deep in on Patagonia, almost every article of clothing I own. Could I tell if my eyes were closed, if it was Patagonia? Probably not. But I like the way it makes me feel to be the person that is going to buy that item from a company that stands for that. No one’s going to be the next Patagonia because that slot is taken. Luxottica figured out how to corner the market, and it took an innovator like Neil at Warby Parker to expose the $400 premium that they had been charging as a tax to everybody. No one’s going to be the next Warby Parker. There’s no room to be the next Warby Parker. You can be a bottom fisher making a nickel at a time, but Warby Parker figured out how to play a remarkable game when the space changes.
My dad used to call this a change agent. Technology, big shifts, these are agents of change. When it shows up, we rescramble the board, and we saw this happen when we got streaming and YouTube and everything and cable before that. ABC, CBS, NBC, boom, toast because we scrambled the board. What I’m seeing right now is the biggest scramble of the board since the Internet and probably bigger, which is AI. If you have a job where you do something that someone could write down what they want, they’re probably going to get AI to do it cheaper because if that’s all the job involves is writing down the steps in the spec, I got a machine that’s going to do that for me for $20 a month. That giant scramble means a whole bunch of organizations that do something that requires judgment and insight are going to arise. I think many of them are going to have very few people who work there, and most of them aren’t going to need to go public, but some of them will choose to, and we’re not going to recognize the corporate landscape, I think, in eight years. I really don’t.
Andy Cross: Seth, when you think about remarkable companies tied to the purple cows, are there key signs of what makes in your eyes a remarkable company?
Seth Godin: Generally, there’s only a little bit about them that’s interesting, and then everything else they’re doing is boring. That they’re not trying to change everything all at once all the time. They have one principle that they stick with. In the new book, This is Strategy, I call this an elegant strategy. Microsoft said, “We’re going to be the IBM of software.” That’s it. If we do this right, if everything we do is not about making the single best product or the most cutting edge product, but just a well supported, well sold product that the Fortune 1000 wants to buy, and we just keep doing that. No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, we’ll do fine. That we can go down the list of companies for the ages. It’s not that they have a fancy elevator pitch because no one ever bought anything on an elevator. That’s not it. [laughs] It’s that they have a compass. The compass says, the more we do this, the better it goes. That’s what you need to have. At Walmart, one of the rare exceptions, Walmart’s exception was, the more we lower price, the better we do. Because lower price got the more volume, volume got the more container ships, more container ships, got the lower price, and they could repeat and repeat . But everybody else who’s remarkable has to say something other than low price. The more Shake Shack acts in a way that McDonald’s is afraid to go, they do better. Just keep going down the list. The more we do blank, the better we do. That’s what makes you remarkable.
Andy Cross: That’s great. I think that reminds me of Costco for the same reason. They’re remarkable is because they have the membership business that is so reasonably priced, and they use the advantages of their scale and their low product footprint to be able to keep prices at rock bottoms level, and they make the profit up on the membership side.
Seth Godin: Well, also, and you guys are much more expert than me. As a marketer, I think what Costco did was they created a cultural narrative that said, I’m a good parent because I’m willing to buy ridiculous quantities of ridiculous items to support my family. Having 40 pounds of Vlasic pickles in a container, that’s part of the brand ethos. They didn’t try to out Walmart . I’ll tell you one aside about this. In 1999, 2000, Walmart hired me to come give a speech to their entire digital division. I flew to Bentonville, Arkansas. The local only hotel lost my reservation. I slept on the floor in their lobby. The next morning, I went to the headquarters. There’s 400 people in the room, and there’s a banner behind me. It had been there for six months. Remember, this is 25 years ago. The banner says, “We can’t out Amazon. Twenty five years ago, they realized their strategy was their strategy, and Jeff’s was Jeff’s, and if they started chasing him, the public markets would just murder them. They had to say, “No, we got 25 years to do a different thing, and then we’ll see what happens.” You need the humility to realize you’re not going to be for everybody, but you got to be for somebody.
David Gardner: Let’s stick a little bit with stuff that’s cheap and stuff that’s increasingly free. Because Seth, I’m just curious of your thoughts on the topic of, “Hey, I’m about to lose my job because something can do it faster, cheaper, easier.” If that happens enough times, I’ve sometimes wondered whimsically, rhetorically aloud. If that happens enough times, that means so much stuff has gotten so cheap that maybe we don’t actually need full time jobs as we once did, because these days we get Khan Academy lectures for free. You and I used to have to dial, collect, mom and dad, collect call from Seth, dollar an hour international fees. That’s all free today. Google Docs, last I checked, turn-by-turn GPS navigation. There are so many things now in 2025 that are cheap or near free that we used to pay quite a bit for. I’m just curious, Seth, can you see a future where stuff keeps getting more shared, more cheaper, more free, where we don’t actually worry about being displaced from our full time job?
Seth Godin: There are a few things you’re twisting together here. Again, there are parts of this where I’m consistently wrong, so let’s just leave that aside for a second. [laughs] Historically, every piece of technology has displaced a certain labour. When the steam shovel came along, ditch diggers were not happy. When writing came along, Plato famously said it’s the end of civilization because people won’t have to memorize stuff anymore. It’s been going on for a very long time. Every single time that displacement has led to more jobs, not fewer jobs. Past performance might not be an indicator of future, but that’s been true every single time. Number 2, we keep making certain things cheaper. The amount of time somebody used to have to go to work to get an hour of light in their home in the evening was three hours of work. Now, it’s two seconds. The amount of money this pencil used to cost out of my income, it’s so vanishingly small that pencils are free. Keep going down the list. We’ve been doing this for a very long time. But at the same time, we keep inventing all of this stuff that people say they need that they actually want. Most of what we do and buy and pay attention to in 2025 didn’t exist in 1950 and no one missed it. [laughs] We’re going to keep inventing these desires because human beings want two things in all areas.
Once we have a roof over our head, and we’re not going to die tomorrow, we only want two things status and affiliation. Status is who eats lunch first? Who’s up and who’s down? Am I winning? What am I winning at? Some people get status by showing up at a board meeting in ratty clothes. Some people get status by showing up in a civil suit. Or affiliation, people like us do things like this. One of the rules apparently at the Motley Fool is you got to have those big headphones maybe with a little thing there [laughs] because people like us, that’s how we show up at these events. [laughs] Affiliation works, for example, in Disney’s favour, because if your kids are really into Mickey, it’s probably because their friends are really into Mickey. If every single person had their favourite superhero, no one could make a living selling superhero stuff. Affiliation and status. Once we don’t have to work, three hours to get an hour of electricity. Why do we still work? Why is it? David, how many billionaires do you know? 100, probably?
David Gardner: I’m invested in more than I know, I can say that.
Seth Godin: But I’m guessing you could pick up the phone and talk to 100 different billionaires, all of whom still work. What are they going to work for?
David Gardner: Good point?
Seth Godin: They’re going to work for status and affiliation. We’re not going to stop doing that. I am certain we’re not going to stop doing that. Just like in the Star Trek world, people fight to get on the enterprise. Why? They could just stay home and use the Matter thing and eat peeled grapes, but they don’t. Status and affiliation.
Andy Cross: Seth, outside of the billionaire landscape and the community, do you think that stands for everybody? Because I think there is this as we’re thinking about 2025 and AI, we talked a little bit about it earlier. Just a little bit of fear out there about what is going to take my job the white collar side, that I didn’t have even just six months ago or 12 months ago.
Seth Godin: The white collar people didn’t complain when the punch press and the robot came along and took away the blue collar jobs and certainly, they’re whining like crazy. It’s going to take away your job. I am not doubting that one bit. What’s going to happen is somebody is going to invent new jobs that offer status and affiliation for people who have pencils and light and all this other stuff they didn’t have to pay for anymore because we keep doing that. If you do average work for average pay, for average customers, be prepared to be replaced. I am really confident that is likely. I’m not in favoor of it. I wish people to have a smooth and calm life. But this is as normal as the world is ever going to be again. Today is peak normal.
Andy Cross: Seth, because you’ve written and talked so much about creativity, does that make creativity more important today or certainly as important as it was even just a few years ago?
Seth Godin: This is really cool. Do I have like four minutes to tell you the history of creativity? [laughs].
Andy Cross: Let’s go.
Seth Godin: I just learned this the other day. The word creativity only showed up in the dictionary in the last 100 years. Creativity at work was invented by the Department of Defense in the 1950s and promoted as a way to keep white collar workers from getting too antsy. They started this whole idea of the creative at the ad agency and creativity. Before that, the expectation at work was you were going to do what you’re told, and it was going to be brain dead boring. When the Industrial Revolution came to Manchester, England, they didn’t have coffee carts that went up and down the aisle. They had gin carts, because people who were used to freedom in the farm had to go for 12, 13 hours in a dark room following instructions and then we got used to it. Most people do pretend creative work. The rest of the time, they’re checking the boxes and filling out the forms and being part of the system. But now, that we’ve got a machine that’s going to check the boxes, fill out the forms, and be the system, you’re going to have to do actual creative work. That’s going to be really stressful, particularly for people who are over 15-years-old, who got successful by turning off the part of their brain that wanted to have a spark, and now they’re going to be on the hook for it. It’s going to be as big of shift as when Gutenberg came out with the Bible, which caused meltdowns all over Europe because for the first time people could read this thing, instead of having someone tell them what it said. AI is going to say, “If you can’t figure out how to do something that I haven’t already imagined, you’re going to be lower and lower in status.” That’s going to put a lot of people in a bad place for a while.
David Gardner: Seth, you referenced it briefly. Let’s talk about it. Your new book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. This is the one I haven’t read yet. Can you give us without causing our listeners not to go out and buy it a short prose, a cliffs notes version of This is Strategy: Make Better Plans.
Seth Godin: Part of my goal is that people don’t need to buy my books because the book is an excuse for me to talk about it. If you want the souvenir edition, that’s fine, and if you don’t, that’s fine. [laughs] If I could tell you everything in the book in 90 seconds, I would. The short version is tactics aren’t the same as strategy. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It’s the hard work we do before we do the hard work. If you have an elegant strategy, new tactics present themselves, that Warren Buffett told everybody his strategy and then just repeated the tactics as they shifted through the years. But the strategy stays the same, and what is missing from most people and most organizations is an ability to even talk about it. I argue that there are four surprising components which are systems because if you don’t see the system, that means it’s taking advantage of you. The college industrial complex, the wedding industrial complex, the capitalist system that drives you to think of some things as normal. It’s a non-secret conspiracy that we never notice. There’s time because tomorrow is different than today and everything the Motley Fool has ever done is about time because no one cares what a stock did yesterday, you’re only talking about what it’s going to do tomorrow. The third one games. Games are any human situation where there’s scarcity and choices to be made. The fourth one I don’t remember. But it’s important that we learn to see how these pieces fit together so that we will be ready to make the change we want to make tomorrow.
David Gardner: When did the idea for the book first present itself to you years ago? Was it in a blog? How did these things germinate?
Seth Godin: It’s all over the map. When we first met, I was in the book business, and so I went to bed every night knowing I needed to wake up in the morning with a book idea. I could only do a couple of books or one book a year, and I had to take my best shot. A book takes a really long time to write but I did it for work, and after a bunch of books, I stopped doing that because it’s too much work. It doesn’t pay to do it for a living. I only write a book when I have no choice. I write a book when it’s the best way for me to share an idea. Some books like my book, Survival Is Not Enough, took me eight hours a day every day for a year, I threw out 100,000 words before the book was finished. Other books like The Dip I wrote in an 11-day fugue state, and it just came to me one day, and then I just wrote it. This book is a love letter to my friends who are stuck and it didn’t take very long to write, but it’s heartfelt in the sense that because I don’t charge to coach my friends and because I don’t do any consulting, I said if I was going to talk to someone I care about about why they’re stuck or how the world works, what would I say? That’s what this is.
Andy Cross: Seth, we spend a lot of time as analysts studying strategic plans of the companies we follow, and I want your guidance on how we can identify companies that truly have good strategic plans versus those that do not.
Seth Godin: In my experience, the ones that have a good strategic plan, it’s really obvious that they do. Just before we got on, we were talking about that guy, Brad, who’s building the roofing company. His strategy is super simple and it’s like, on the first page of their 10K. Done. You might not agree with the strategy, but the strategy is not hidden. When Yahoo stopped being the center of the Internet, if you asked any 10 people at Yahoo, what’s your strategy, they would give you 14 different answers, and they haven’t had a strategy ever since. It’s right there. Google had a strategy. then when they invented LLMs and what became AI, they freaked out because they said, this completely undermines our existing strategy. We don’t know what to do, so they tried to keep the world from seeing AI, and now they’re toast, because they can’t do their old strategy anymore, and they’re not winning with their possible new one. That was a good long run, but they lost the thread.
David Gardner: Let’s move now to our game, buy sell or hold. Seth, you may or may not remember this. I’m springing this on you. I know you’re ready for it. The key is, and I know you appreciate this about buy, sell, or hold. These are not stocks we’re talking about.
Seth Godin: Oh, good. Then I’m fine.
David Gardner: We’re talking about things happening in the world at large. The worlds of business in life and ask if they were stocks, Seth Godin, would you be buying, selling or holding? Let me kick it off with, let’s go with this one. Is turning down more opportunities the key to doing your best work, or is that a branding luxury, Seth Godin buy, sell, or hold saying no as a growth strategy?
Seth Godin: Strong buy.
David Gardner: Why?
Seth Godin: Because no is a complete sentence. No lets you stop hiding. No puts you on the hook. No gives you the chance to become a meaningful specific instead of a wandering generality. I have never met anyone who yesed their way to where they wanted to go.
David Gardner: Brilliant. Next one up. We may have covered this one already, but let’s go there again anyway. The word authentic in 2025, has it become inauthentic, buy, sell, or hold, authentic?
Seth Godin: Short. Sell. It’s like, what a disaster.
David Gardner: Let’s keep moving. AI tools in the creative process. A brainstorming partner or the beginning of creative complacency, buy, sell, or hold the AI creative tools.
Seth Godin: Well, what you just said is both of those sentences are true. That the same way typesetting shifted when we got desktop publishing. Some people use it to make the greatest type ever set, and some people made bank ransom notes. The same thing is going to happen here.
David Gardner: This next one comes via text beforehand, Andy Cross asking me, what does Seth, does he watch this TV show? We’re about to find out. Buy, sell, or hold, Shark Tank as a lens on entrepreneurship?
Seth Godin: True story. Before they were on in the United States, the phone rang and they said, would I please audition to be the judge? I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “We want you to be the nasty, bald, possibly semitic judge.” I said, “You got the wrong guy. I’m not going to show up there and scotch people’s dreams.”
David Gardner: Love it. Great answer. Next one up. The personal newsletter Renaissance, so from Substack to Buttondown, are curated, thoughtful emails, the new social media, buy, sell or hold?
Seth Godin: I’m buying the idea that anybody who wants to be a singular voice benefits from having this newsletter. I don’t think email is the best way to deliver it, and I don’t think that Substack is your friend in the long run, but I do think no matter how many people are reading it, if you can write and leave behind a legacy of work you are proud of, I’m up to 3.4 million words, that’s a useful way for you to spend your time. Do not expect that it is going to come with prizes and cash, but it will build you the authority and consistency to stand for something, and it won’t cost you anything.
David Gardner: Well said and hear-hear., Seth, how do you count those 3.4 million words? Is there a counter? How are you doing that?
Seth Godin: Every once in a while, I download the entire blog just in case something bad happens, and then there’s something called word count because I don’t keep track of any stats. I don’t know how many people are reading it today. I don’t have comments, but the incremental thing, about 10 years ago, I realized I had a streak, and so my blogs are queued up so even after I’m dead, there’ll be new blogs coming out because I don’t want this streak to end. It’s just it’s one of the only things that I’ve got right this minute that no one’s ever going to catch up to, and I’m still going.
David Gardner: We love that about you, and I’m curious, Seth, do you find yourself attracted by streaks in other contexts in your life? Duolingo, for example, has this whole thing where if you start learning Spanish or Chinese, it’s going to say come back tomorrow, and then it’s going to start saying you’ve come back 57 days in a row, do you find yourself ever beholden to other streaks?
Seth Godin: Yeah, I have a lot of willpower, but Duolingo tried and failed, 40 days, my streak lasted, and I just couldn’t do it. But this thing on my wrist, I’m up to 450 days. It got my health back after long COVID. It’s not for everybody, but the idea that I’m going to break a 450 day streak, I’ll hook it up to one of those goodwill cats or whatever. There’s just no way this streak is ending.
David Gardner: Love it. For podcast listeners who can’t see what you just did, Seth, what product did you just influence?
Seth Godin: Oh, there was one of those watches that keeps track of your fitness.
David Gardner: A couple more for you. I mean, I could do this all day. Buy, sell, or hold is so much fun and especially with Seth Godin. Seth, crowdsource governance, algorithmic leadership, phrases that are coming to mind, things we couldn’t have imagined before, radical transparency or chaos in the C suite, buy, sell, or hold, public companies with no CEOs?
Seth Godin: There’s not going to be public companies with no CEOs. But the idea of a Dow, a DAO, the idea of new sorts of institutions, that’s inevitable, and it’s going to be great if it’s not run by a grifter or something that’s part of an MLM scam. But that hasn’t happened yet. But the idea that an entity can be true to what it said it was going to be true to and stick around for the long haul. I think that happens. Neal Stephenson wrote a book years ago that the whole idea that if you look at the longest lived institutions, they tend to be orders of monks, they tend to be places that have a constitution, a moat, and a way of governance that gives them consistency but flexibility. I think that we’re going to see more of those, but they have no need to go public. Why would they?
David Gardner: Which Neal Stephenson book was that? I read The Diamond Age, but I don’t think that was The Diamond Age.
Seth Godin: No, that wasn’t. The Diamond Age and Snow Crash should be required reading for every single person. This was another one. I don’t remember anything about it other than that it was tedious once I got the joke, so I didn’t even finish it.
David Gardner: Let’s go with this one. I think there are two more because I have a bonus one in mind. Andy, Mac Greer is going to make a toward the end of this hour together.
Andy Cross: He needs his comeback.
David Gardner: That’s right. Here’s my last official one. Seth Godin, buy, sell, or hold, branding yourself, are you with me here, as anti-hustle? Has rejecting the grind become the new grind? [laughs]
Seth Godin: What’s Hustle? Hustle, in honour of Pete Rose, hustle is not the effort one puts into winning at hockey. Hustle is shortcuts and invading other people’s space, throwing an elbow to the face and hoping you don’t get caught, hustle is spamming people, hustle is asking a friend for something that they don’t want to do for you and just piling up a whole bunch of favours. I am anti-hustle because you don’t ever want to burn trust to earn attention. Trust is worth more than attention, and it’s generative, and it lets you play the game for longer. There is this idea that shortcuts are possible and a grind is to be avoided. so the question is, is your grind additive or is it simply an endless treadmill? If you’re on an endless treadmill where the grind isn’t getting you anywhere, you’re not in a dip, you’re in a cul de sac. It’s like emphysema. It’s not going to get better. What you want is a grind that eventually is going to get you to the other side, and you want to do that grind without hurting the trust other people have in you. There are plenty of organizations that have done that, and we don’t hear from them for a long time, and then suddenly they’re an overnight success. Well, they’re not an overnight success. You’re just noticing them at the end.
David Gardner: Love it. “Trust is the coin of the realm.” wrote dearly departed George Schultz in an excellent essay that is worthy of everyone’s attention. Last one for you, Seth. He Googled you in preparation for today’s interview and discovered on the Google overview page, check it, if you Google Seth Godin, it says, Seth Godin was born in George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Mount Vernon, VA. My question, Seth is, that person is Mac Greer, buy sell or hold Mac Greer.
Seth Godin: Oh, I love Mac. We’ve never met, but I’m a fan. I have no idea how to fix the Internet. If you can get around to fixing it, please do. I never look at my Wikipedia page. It can make you go blind. If someone else wants to fix my Wikipedia page, please do.
David Gardner: Well said. Andy, last thought from both of us. I’ll let you go first.
Andy Cross: Seth, thank you so much. This has been just brilliant. The only question, a topic I wanted to talk to you about because we focused so much on decision making at the Motley Fool for investors, is this concept of the lizard brain. I know we don’t have much time, but I wanted to give you a chance to give us some guidance on how we can avoid being a lizard.
Seth Godin: Real science has said that maybe the amygdala isn’t the lizard brain, and I’m not a neurologist. But what I would say is, please go read Steve Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, and go read Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets.
Andy Cross: Yes.
Seth Godin: Before you spend $1 of your family’s savings investing in anything, understand what those two people are telling you.
David Gardner: I want to thank Seth Godin for a very special hour here on Fool 24 and some podcast-worthy stuff that we’ll be sharing throughout the fool world in the next week. Seth, I want to just say thank you, friend, and you always make me laugh, and you always make us think. Here’s to the next 3.4 million words.
Seth Godin: Thank you both.
