The Man Who Invented Modern Marketing: How To Build A Brand That SELLS In The New Era Of AI (3 Laws) transcript

There's all these things we can build with AI. Claude could look at your spreadsheets and teach you what's wrong with your production processes, [music] and that would be worth a million dollars to you. >> At this point, you're basically synonymous with marketing. And you've written over 20 best-selling books. How can someone get their ideas to spread? People only want a few things. They want freedom from fear, they want status, and they want affiliation.

Those three things. If you can figure out a way to get them those things, they will say, "Oh, that's what I wanted all along." That's where the growth comes from. It's so good. And I and I want to go through each of them. >> Yeah. Let's leave affiliation out for now and talk about status. Status has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with luxury. It's >> So, a few weeks ago, I get on a phone call with Seth. It's a very brief call, but during this conversation, Seth shared something with me that once he said it, I knew that's where we had to take the episode.

And so simply put, because of AI, anyone is able to build things, software, apps, workflows, businesses. The problem is no longer building. It's actually getting attention and getting people to buy your stuff. And so in 2026, you will feel the pain of not understanding marketing and brand building and sales more than at any other time. And I say that because I've been in that position. And so anyway, after that call with Seth, I started reading all of his books, every single one.

And I found Seth's three simple steps to marketing and building a brand where people cannot wait to buy your stuff. And it was so good that we decided to focus the episode there. This conversation is so detailed and so indepth that you will walk away with a clear idea of how to market and build your brand, not just your business, in the age of AI. That's my promise to you. One of the things that I loved this this past weekend that I did is I went back and read this is marketing again.

And one of the things that you talk about right in the first few pages is what you call a people that have a marketing problem. You refer to like the marketing problem. And there's certain people that don't even they're not even aware that they have a marketing problem. They think it's something else. Can you talk first of all if we just start at the beginning with what is marketing? Right? I think many people just misunderstand what marketing is period.

But then if someone is listening, how can they know if they have a marketing problem? Yeah. Well, I can't blame people for misunderstanding it cuz I changed what it means about 25 years ago. For a hundred years, what it meant was hustling people, interrupting people, lying to people, running ads, running more ads, getting hype, getting more hustle, and getting your name out there. And then the internet came along and the internet undid all of that because you can't steal people's attention regularly and profitably.

Marketing isn't hustle. Marketing is telling a true story that helps people get to where they're going that they want to tell other people about. And if you make average stuff for average people, why are you surprised that no one's talking about you? Because it's average. And so one of the challenges I think people have I call the cheap pizza problem and it's this. If you make mediocre pizza in a town, there's still a need for pizza and you'll sell some pizza until someone makes mediocre pizza a little cheaper than yours.

And now the race to the bottom is on because the only way for you to recover from that is to go cheaper still. And what we end up with is cheap, mediocre pizza made by people who race to the bottom and are stuck there making something they're not proud of for people who don't care that much. Or you can make the best pizza in the world and you could say you're going to pay a lot, but you're going to get more than you pay for.

And this is a pizza worth telling your grandchildren about. There's something about the experience of coming to my shop and eating my pizza that makes you eager to do it again tomorrow. That's marketing. >> You know what? It's it's just so so interesting like the times that we're in because I think with with AI and with things like codecs or clawed code, we live in an era where non-technical people are able to build what historically would have been very technical things.

Mhm. >> And it's it's funny cuz I was actually having a conversation uh with my brother over the weekend and he's building things. He's building things with Claude code and he's struggling to get it to spread. Like he's struggling to think through like how do I actually sell these things that I'm building and when I was reading this is marketing this this quote that you had stood out to me. You said how do you know you have a marketing problem?

Well, you probably aren't busy enough. Your ideas aren't spreading. The people you care about, your customers aren't achieving everything they hope. Your customers are frustrated. If you see a way to make things better, you now have a marketing problem. I thought it was so good and it can be solved, right? That's the beauty of problems that being able to code something without knowing how to code is miracle. Just like being able to get a table in your house by just by going to IKEA is a miracle. used to be a couple hundred years ago if you wanted a table you had to make a table or find someone who knew how to make a table.

So we keep inventing new tools. We keep inventing shortcuts to make stuff but we have no progress whatsoever on empathy or trust. Those things we have to earn and we have to be able to show up for someone with a problem and say here I made this but don't admire me because I figured out how to make something. admire me because I figured out how to solve your problem because everyone has problems and if you can show up to solve their problems you're never going to be out of customers.

You know what Seth because even reading this is marketing over the weekend I'm curious to get your opinion on this of when you talk about don't just go and make things like actually solve people's problems given kind of uh what's happening with AI specifically right now when you reflect on it do you actually feel like this book and some of the principles and like the ethos of it is actually more relevant more urgent today than probably even when you wrote it and it was published in 2018.

Like how do you feel about the the application of this book speaking in 2026? Yeah. Well, one of the things that you wrestle with when you're writing books is am I writing a book for someone to read it this week or someone to read it in five years? And I'm lucky because I have a blog. So stuff that I have that's real short term, I can post on the blog on Monday and I sound smart on Tuesday. But what I've tried to do in the arc of the 20 books is say things that are just true.

And they're true no matter what happens to technology. That human nature is about trust and status and affiliation and scarcity. All those things are more important now, not less important. And it costs me in the short run because in the short run, what people click on is the thing everyone's talking about, the hot new thing, the hot new this. And I'm thrilled that I've never been clicked on for that cuz that's not the work.

The work is how do you become the person that your future self will thank you for. >> That's so good. You know what, Seth, where I want to go next, and it's funny cuz I actually mentioned this when we spoke the first time. I referred to you as like the godfather of marketing. Like the the marketing expert that I go to, like when I did my first ever job, which was in marketing, the books that they handed me on that onboarding were Seth Goden books. and you've written over 20 best-selling books.

Like you, we were speaking about this before, you've done over 10,000 blog posts. So, you're at this point, you're basically synonymous with marketing, >> right? But the where I actually wanted to go cuz I heard you talking about this in an interview. I wanted you to take us all the way back to the beginning in 1983. And there was something that you said which is in the beginning you just kept failing in the book business.

And so if we go back and we think about the Seth Goden of that time what was the struggle that you were having? Was that a marketing problem? >> All right. So in ' 83 I was making software with Isaac Azimov and Earl Stanley Gardner and Ray Bradbury. But in ' 86, I needed to leave that company to move to New York to get married. And there was no software company that could let me do the kind of stuff I wanted to do. And a friend had taught me about this business of making books that are too complicated for an individual to make like almanacs, atlases.

It's called being a book packager. You come up with complicated big books that book publishers need and you can do great with them for a while. And the beauty of it is you come up with an idea, you write a three-page proposal, you put a stamp on it, you mail it to 10 editors. It's their job to get mail from you, right? That these editors, if they don't get mail from people like me, there's nothing for them to publish.

They need proposals. And 800 times in a row, they bought a stamp, put on an envelope, and sent me a letter that said no. 800 times in a row, my book proposals were rejected. Now, if I hadn't sold my first book the first day, I would have thought this is impossible, but I knew I had done it once. Now, the good news is that the rejections kept getting better. They kept getting longer. They kept getting more detailed. They kept getting this didn't work, but we'd love to see your next thing.

So, I was learning something. But my marketing problem was simple. I was proposing books I wanted to read, that I wanted to buy, that I could prove other people would buy. But that's not what a book publisher is thinking about. The book publisher is saying, because remember, it's not their money. They have a job at a big company. They're saying, "What will I tell my boss if I publish this book?" They're saying, "What will I tell the people at a cocktail party when they ask me what book I'm working on?" They wanted to buy books that matched the way they saw the world that they were proud of that they thought bookstores would applaud because their customers the bookstore not the reader.

It took me a year to figure this out. It sounds like from your story and what I think is so good about your story is that there was this shift and this turning point when you started thinking about wait who is the person that's buying? >> Yeah. So this is one of the two big traps. Big trap number one, as you said, is you're the customer. No, you're not. Right. Steve Jobs already has a Mac. He's not the customer for the next Mac.

He already has one. The teacher is not the student. The teacher already knows how to do calculus. The only way to be a good teacher is to show up and teach calculus to people who don't know it yet. That's empathy. So, that's trap one, which is you're not the customer. And trap number two is that authenticity is a prize. Authenticity is a croc. Authenticity is overrated. No one wants you to be authentic other than your friends.

Should be authentic for your friends and your family, but for everyone else, you should be consistent. You should say, "I'm a professional. I'm going to make you a promise and I'm going to keep it." If we do those two things, we imagine the problem the other person has and then consistently solve their problem. Whether we're in a bad mood or not, whether we feel like it or not, now we can get to work. But we're distracted because the internet is this carnival of every once in a while somebody bleeding on screen and we think, "Oh, that I want to be the next Kardashian." We already have a Kardashian.

We don't need another Kardashian. You know what? Cuz you say the authenticity is overrated. Like it's a croc. And I think about the person that's listening to this that for the last I don't even know how many years, all they've heard is that, you know, the best the biggest content creators are the most authentic ones. the the brands that are emerging right now that everyone loves are the most authentic. The marketers that are doing it the best are the most authentic.

Why do you say that when you say it's actually not about authenticity, it's about consistency? What is the distinction? And then why do you say that's actually the key is the consistency piece? Okay, so this is a meeting recap that Granola created for me after a precall that I had with one of our guests. And so for context, I use Granola every day and I wanted to share this with you because this AI notepad has made me so much more creative and productive and have a feeling that it will do the same for you.

And so a little behind the scenes of the show. Before I record an episode, I get on a call with every guest to figure out what we're going to create and where we're going to take the conversation. And before Granola, I used to stress out about missing great ideas that the guest shared because I would be taking notes. And so I wanted to write everything down, but now I just have Granola open in the background while the guest is talking and I only write down the best ideas that come to me and Granola does the rest.

And so I don't have to stress anymore about losing anything good because I know while I'm not taking notes, Granola is still transcribing everything that the guest is saying. and it'll actually take the few notes that I write down and combine it with all of the other stuff that I missed and present it to me as a complete meeting recap just like this. And one more thing I love to do is that usually a few days after the precall, right as I'm creating the outline for the episode, I'll come back into the meeting recap and ask Granola a series of questions about specific things that the guest shared.

And I'll just keep going back and forth with it. and it will give me so many good ideas that I then use for the outline. And one thing that makes this so smooth is that I can actually choose what model I use. So I can use Claude Opus 4.8, I can use GPT 5.6. Whichever model I choose, I can use it directly within Granola. And so if you want to try out Granola in your next meeting, just go to the link in the description to get 100% off your first meeting today.

That's 100% off. It's pretty sweet. Anyway, thank you to Granola for sponsoring this episode. Let's get back to the show. Okay, so I'm going to take you guys behind the scenes for a second because this is Rabban 1 Million Black and I've been spraying this on before every recording lately and it's actually become a part of my routine. And so before I go into a recording, I want to make sure that I do everything to feel like the most confident version of myself.

And so if you're listening to this, you might have the same feeling when you're going into an important meeting or an important presentation at work. But for me, it means that I can fully focus on the job at hand, which is having the best conversation possible. And so I can feel the difference of when I spray it on versus when I don't. When I wear it, I feel like a more put together version of myself. And when I don't, I lose just a smidge of confidence.

And so, one of the things that I enjoy about this is that I can use it in a variety of situations, whether it be business meetings, recordings, even just in my personal day-to-day life. And so one of the things that comes to mind for me is that when I'm going into situations where I want to network with people or even meet guests, it's so important that first impression that you make and how you smell and your fragrance adds to that.

And so Rabban 1 Million Black has been a great compliment. If you want to try it out, just hit that link in the description to get a bottle today. Thank you to them for sponsoring this episode. Let's get back to the show. >> Okay, so let's say we're talking about being in front of the camera. I don't think most people should follow that path because it's a very lousy odds. Someone's gonna win the lottery. Probably not going to be you.

Keanu Reeves is not Neo, right? Neo lives in the Matrix. Ke Ree, he's just a guy who knows how to act like Neo. That's what you want from Keo Reeves. Now, it's very important that I say this. You should not adopt a persona and a posture that you cannot live with. You shouldn't be dying inside when you are playing whatever consistent role you're putting in front. So if you're deathly afraid of blood and it makes you sick, don't become an ER doctor, right?

You could probably fake it for a few months, but sooner or later you're just going to melt. So you want to find something that rhymes with who you are on your best day. But using authenticity as an excuse to be a jerk, don't do that. No one cares if you're having a bad day. That's not why you're there. Your customers are your customers because you care about them, not cuz they're wondering if you're having a bad day. >> This thing I always tell myself is um you have to give the people what they want. >> Well, that's you have to be careful with that because there are some people who want heroin, right?

There are there are some people who want the shortest possible cycle and the biggest possible treats. Leadership is more than that, >> right? Leadership says, "I'm going to give people what they're going to come to realize they wanted all along, but they don't know they want yet." >> Yeah. >> So Henry Ford did not make faster buggies. Henry Ford made a thing that no one could have told him that they wanted. And so our leadership is to say deep down people only want a few things.

They want freedom from fear. They want status and they want affiliation. Those three things. If you can figure out a way to get them those things, they will say, "Oh, that's what I wanted all along." But they can't write you the spec yet. you know, we're going to we're going to go on in this conversation to talk about uh status and affiliation and also just building like valuable brands, timeless brands even in this age of AI that we're in.

But speaking of AI and even in the preparation for this conversation, one of the things that was surprising and it was like unexpected for me is actually like your history and your background with AI and it started like at a very early point in your career and there was even I heard you say in an interview you said that in many ways you've been thinking about AI your whole life. >> Yeah. >> As I said I think people know you for marketing.

Can you just share with some with the people that are listening at home? What is that context with AI? Like where did that begin for you? So people may remember the trouble with tribles episode of Star Trek with the little fuzzy creatures like that were like gerbles. Yeah. >> The guy who wrote that wrote a novel called When Harley was one. I read it in 1974 and it's about someone engaging with an AI talking back and forth.

So that's 1974. And then I taught a science fiction course in my high school and half of it was AI kind of stuff. When I got to Stanford business school, they let us take courses in the computer science department. So I took a PhD level course with Doug Lenat, one of the fathers of AI. And so that's 1983. And then I worked with Isaac Azimov who was the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark who did 2001. So these were people who professionally were inventing what AI might be like. and I just kept waiting for it to show up because it was right on the edge but it wasn't here yet.

And so the first time I used Chat GPT but then got hooked on Claude, it didn't surprise me in the least because it was exactly like I expected it would be. And I understand how it works more than most lay people. I'm not a computer scientist anymore, but I get how it works. This is the biggest change in our world since electricity. And if you weren't here for the dawn of electricity, I wasn't, then you have no idea how big a revolution this is, but it's going to upend everything.

Number two, it's a little like a talking dog. Just because a talking dog says something doesn't mean it's right. But a talking dog is a miracle and you probably shouldn't ignore it. And so we got to make a choice right here, right now. Either you're going to work for an AI or an AI is going to work for you. If you work for an AI, you're going to hate it because it doesn't care about you. It's going to keep giving you dumber and dumber tasks and you're going to end up making cheap pizza.

It's not a good thing. But if you can get an AI to work for you, it's basically right now a high school intern who works for $20 a month. It's not that smart, but it's pretty eager and you can catch its mistakes. But soon it's going to be like a college intern and then a postcol intern and you can have a lot of them working for you. >> Yeah. But, you know, I wanted I wanted to key in on something that you mentioned and you said it earlier, which is uh you said the first thing is that it's going to be the biggest shift since electricity.

The second thing is uh basically if we're not careful that you'll end up working for AI essentially. And so I think about especially for entrepreneurs, people that want to build businesses, small business owners, what in your mind is the mentality, the way of thinking in this age of AI and operating with AI that will have those people succeed, especially when it comes to marketing, especially when it comes to people actually using your products, buying your products. >> Yeah.

All right. All right. So, the first thing to say is we're all victims of a system. None of us built the system. The system is here. It treats lots of people unfairly. It doesn't give people the benefit of the doubt or a a head a hand up when they need it. That's true. Then what are we going to do about it? So, one of the examples I can give you of someone who works for an AI is a the poor Amazon driver, right? The Amazon driver, every single step they take, every turn they take is now controlled by an AI.

They don't have time to stop to go to the bathroom because the AI has calculated everything to the microscond. There's not a lot of future in doing that for a living. I understand why someone would feel cornered enough to take that job. The question is what does that person need to know? What access does that person need to be able to have an AI work for them instead? And you know, one of the things I do in a lot of my public talks is I say to the crowd, a few thousand people, raise your right hand as high as you can.

And everyone raises their hand. And then I say, raise it higher. And everyone can raise it higher. But the instructions were really clear. We don't raise our hand as high as we can because we've been trained that if we do that, someone's going to ask for more. So, we better hold something in reserve. And what it means to be a productive entrepreneur, small business person, freelancer is you raise your hand as high as you can.

Not cuz someone asked you to, not because you're holding something back, but because you can use it to solve a problem. And leaning into that as opposed to waiting for Amazon to call you to be a driver. That's the fork in the road. You know what? When I when I hear that and when my mind goes, Seth, and I think especially for entrepreneurs or like people that have aspirations of building companies, like seeing their ideas come to life, is the impact of like fear-driven decisionm >> I really see kind of like two different worlds.

I hear from two different worlds, especially when it comes to the AI conversation right now. I think there's one group that they just hate AI and I I see it in my comments from time to time >> is just it feels like it sucks the soul out of everything this humanity it takes the creativity they are just diametrically opposed to everything that AI is and so they kind of they just completely remove themselves from it I'm not going to use it I'm not going to think about it >> that's one group the second group I see is actually seemingly on the other side of it but similarly stuck but in a different way which is they're the builders similar to my brother he's like constantly building with AI and building new things and let me build this new workflow or this new product or this new offer but like I said in the beginning it's like very difficult to get anything sold. >> Yeah, >> I don't think open AI is going to make the world a better place.

It's not up to me. I don't think that AI is going to show up and make everything better. It's not up to me. It's here the same way the weather is here, the same way the economy is here. The question on the table is what are we going to do with it? And so the people who are unalterably opposed to AI will alternate between it uses too much water, the data centers are too noisy, uses too much electricity, and it's putting all these people out of work, and it stole all this intellectual property.

There's a long list, but really what many of them are saying is I'm afraid that it's going to build a future where I will not have agency. I'm afraid because I can't see a path that all of these things are going to happen and are going to victimize me instead of amplify me. And that's an honest way to describe the objection because the problem with the other objections are, well, did you have a hamburger in the last week? because the hamburger is about a thousand times worse than your use of AI.

So, we're not having a conversation about relative damage. We're having a conversation about how does it make you feel. And so, what I say to those people is you getting really good at it will not make a material difference in anthropic or open AAI's future, but it will make a huge difference in your ability to deal with fear. Because once you know it, once you understand what it's good at and not good at, you're going to be a much better critic, and you can use the tool to stop the tool if that's helpful.

But in 60 years of watching the economy and watching the culture, generally when you offer people something that's a shortcut, that's convenient, and that increases productivity, the system embraces it. I don't see any way to make AI go away. So if AI is not going away, what are you going to do about it? The people who are buying into it first are the evil bosses who are racing to the bottom. They're saying, "I can replace 10 customer service reps with mediocre customer service.

I'll do it." Right? The same way that at the beginning the first people who used email marketing were spammers because it was just a hack shortcut. But over time, it always moves toward the center of what we need as humans. So when your brother gets really good at building things, now I would say to him, okay, spend two days away from the machine developing empathy for the people you want to solve a problem for. Sit right next to the person who's going to use this.

So, I use a email program that costs money. Most people use free email. Superhumans a dollar a day. And as someone who's answered 147,000 emails, it's totally worth it to me. The first 10,000 customers, the only way to get access to the software was that the CEO or one of the senior leaders came to your office and sat next to you for an hour. They would not let you just start using it. They sat next to you for an hour and watched you do it, taught you the key strokes, etc.

That forced empathy cycle is the secret to the entire company's success. And so, yeah, there's all these things we can build with AI. I can sit with you and look at your business and say, "Oh, you know, if we did this and this and this, uh, Claude could look at your spreadsheets and teach you what's wrong with your production processes, and that would be worth a million dollars to you, right? But I wouldn't know to say that if I hadn't sat next to you for a day.

And it's not just the productive stuff. It's the fears. It's the desire to mean something. It's our chance to be seen. Why do so many people want to be influencers? They have to know it's not a good way to make a living. It's a terrible way to make a living. They want to do it because they want to be seen. So how is in this new world are we going to help people be seen without sacrificing their soul? Because the old model, the Facebook model was you have to sacrifice your soul to be seen.

That's not a good bargain. But maybe there's a different way forward. The same way John Hammond invented modern music at Columbia Records. Once you have records and record stores, a whole bunch of things are going to change. You know who was against this? They had a strike. Every musician in America went on strike in the 1940s against the record, the entire record industry because it was going to ruin their way they make a livelihood.

You can't record musicians that we can listen to over and over again. You have to listen to it live or it doesn't count. And there's still a group that takes money from that settlement that the musicians got and uses it to pay independent musicians 80 years later. So this has been going on a bunch of times. So John Hammond sees the record thing happening and he discovers in quotation marks Bruce Springsteen, Artha Franklin, Benny Goodman and a whole host of other art Bob Dylan in between, right?

Because he said, "Oh, I got this tool. I see musicians who have a problem. I can teach them a different way to put their stuff in the world and everyone's going to come out ahead." Very few people were willing to follow John Hammond's lead in 1950. That's where we are right now. But it's not the record business. It's every business. >> Yeah. when you mention of you can learn how to build with AI, you can learn how to build with clawed code or codeex or whatever the tool is, but after you've embraced it and after you've learned how to do that, spend those two days, those 48 hours actually sitting next to someone and developing like an empathy for their problems and their experience.

And one of the things that we did when we spoke a year ago and people love that conversation that we that you and I did, but one of the things that stood out to me from that from our uh from speaking with you is when you speak about the smallest viable market. The importance of finding the smallest viable market. >> This is key. >> And honestly, that's something I think that stumps a lot of people. even people that already have businesses don't have that clarity on the smallest viable market.

And so one of the things that I want to ask you, Seth, if someone goes and does exactly what you just said, and they sit down next to who they believe their ideal customer is, what are the questions, what are the things that they should be looking to ascertain and ask that person so that they can have an understanding of who they are and how they can serve them. So, let's just take a step back and understand that it's hard to be on the hook.

If you tell me that there's only one person in your high school class you want to go to the prom with, and you ask that person to the prom, and they say, "No, that sucks." It's easier to just say, "I don't know who I want to go to the prom with, any one of these hundred people." Because now rejection doesn't hurt as much because you weren't on the hook. If you say, "As a stand-up comic, I only want to appeal to people who like these four stand-up comics, but who don't like those stand-up comics?" You, you've been very specific.

Now, if those people don't like you, you failed. Go get better. But what we do instead is we make average stuff for average people and we take all the criticism personally instead of saying it wasn't for you. Right? that there are people who are listening and watching podcasts online about bass fish bass fishing, right? They want all the insights about what kind of lure to use and where to go bass fishing. If they post in the comments, I hate this podcast.

There was no details about bass fishing here, you're allowed to say, sorry, this podcast isn't for you. It makes it so much easier to make the podcast you want to make. And so when we find someone in our audience, it's not necessarily what they look like, how much money they make, things that are easy to tell from the outside. It's what they believe, what they dream of, what they're frustrated with. So we don't really benefit from interviewing people about those things because they lie all the time. >> We have to watch what they do.

We have to give them choices. We have to say, would [snorts] it be better if this happened or that happened? We have to say, which part of what you just did scares you? Which part, if you could find the world's best operator to do this part of part of the job for free, what part would you like to get rid of? And that's how you end up with something like Uber instead of a taxi, right? Because no one was waiting for Uber when they showed up.

But if you spend time with people who are frustrated looking for transport in a strange city, you can identify which things about it are frustrating them, which things about it could magically disappear now that they have a smartphone in their hand. So when Uber first launched, it was a spectacular magic trick. I remember showing like four of my colleagues this over the course of three days because I was early into this.

I said, we had just had a lunch meeting. I said, "Watch this." And I press a button and 45 seconds later a car pulls up and the guy goes, "Seth." And like that totally raised my status. But it was magic. Why was it magic? Because all the frustrating parts of transport disappeared. The transport was identical. Once you're in it, it's taking you to the other place. No difference. >> The story around it was seductive to people.

So, when we sit with someone, whether it's a high school kid who can't figure out what to wear to school or a business person who's looking for a partner or a lawyer, go down the list. Anyone who's got a problem of any kind, what's frustrating here? Let me watch you cook dinner for your family and ask you why. Why did you just get throw the knife down in disgust? Oh, because you didn't want to have to stop everything to cut the squash into little tiny pieces.

What an idea. I'm going to sell squash that's pre-cut into pieces at the supermarket. I remember hearing someone talk about that on a podcast. They said, um, the best ideas are always magic, you know, like there's there's a there's a real magic and it's funny because you mentioned Uber and I remember my first experience of seeing someone call an Uber and once they hit that, you know, the submit or the pay on their phone, you can see the car just like slowly getting closer to the location.

And to us now, like that's normal. But at the time when you're like, you know, at the time you're just calling taxi and you have no idea when it's going to get there. That was magic. >> Yeah. >> And so my my question to you, Seth Goden, the marketer, the brand builder, the business builder, when you are sitting next to your customer, and I love the point that you make, which is that you have to observe their behavior.

You can't listen to what they say. What is the behavior that you're seeing? You even talk about like you you have to look at their frustrations, their pains. What is the moment when you tend to get excited? When you tend to feel like what I've just observed is the beginnings of a frustration that if I solve it, that could be magic. That could be the Uber experience of seeing the car get closer on the screen. Like when do you start to feel that as a marketer?

Okay, so we're going to talk about big entrepreneur versus little entrepreneur a second, but first we're going to talk about doctors. What makes someone a great doctor? If you ask people in the medical profession, they will say boardcertified, respected by their peers, puts up good numbers, and is like a super professional. If you ask patients, they will say things like, "It didn't hurt when he took blood." Or, "The nurse greeted me and didn't make me wait in the waiting room too long." Or, one of my favorites, "The day after the procedure, they called me on the phone and asked how I was feeling." Because the fact is, the patients know nothing about the things the doctors are paying attention to.

They don't know that you're up or down and board certified or whatever. All they know is their experience. So my friend Jod is a great doctor. Off the charts amazing doctor. She's probably 30 now. And what makes her a great doctor is she invited 20 of her friends to come after hours because she made some honey and she was teaching them about she has bees. She was teaching them about honey and skin and they felt seen.

They have no idea if she knows how to read whatever cat scan. It's not important. There's plenty of people who can do that. So we begin at this small level. Human beings want to be seen. They want to be understood. They want to feel safe. But now we're talking about bigsized breakthroughs. The word entrepreneur is really loaded. We call anyone who has a small business a freelancer an entrepreneur. They're different. Almost everyone listening to this is a freelancer, not an entrepreneur.

I'm a freelancer. I used to be an entrepreneur. I built one of the first internet companies. I didn't like being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs build something bigger than themselves. They make money when they sleep and they build something that they can sell one day to pay off the people who are invested in them. If you want to go do that, go do that. But then don't be a freelancer at the same time. Freelancers get paid when they work.

They say, "I made this me." Well, many small businesses that are run by people who call themselves entrepreneurs. When they are tight on money, you know who they hire? The cheapest possible person themselves who also happens to be the best possible person. So, they keep hiring themselves to do all the jobs. No wonder they're exhausted. They're doing all the jobs and they're not getting paid for it and the company's not growing because they're busy doing all the jobs.

The only job the entrepreneur has is to invent jobs and hire people to do them. That's their only job. So if you want to be an entrepreneur, be strict about it. Be clear about it. And probably don't come up with an original idea because there's not a lot of prizes. Before there was Facebook, there was Fster. Before there was Google, there was Likos. Go copy an idea, but entrepreneur it so well that you win. For the rest of us, you're a freelancer.

And the only way to move up as a freelancer is to get better clients because you can't work more hours. Can't hire junior versions of yourself. They won't work for free. Get better clients. And you don't get better clients by doing a good job with bad clients. >> You get better clients by becoming the kind of freelancer that good clients want to hire. And good clients pay you more, demand more, talk about you more, and get you to the next level.

But most freelancers when they start out, including Amazon drivers, take the easy gigs for lousy clients. If you're on Upwork or you're on Fiverr and you're getting these, you know, design a logo from me for $4, you have lousy clients because you're hiring people are hiring you because you're the cheapest. We have to dig deep and say, what do a good client want? What are they afraid of? What are the signals they're looking for?

What will a good client tell their peers after they hire me? Become that person and your freelance life gets way better. Someone listening can internalize what you just said. I think it changes things >> for them. Where my mind went is that in this age of AI that ability to have human empathy and to sit so closely next to your customer that you can understand them in this level of detail this like micro level of detail is the differentiating factor because the AI can't do that.

You can't approximate that, >> right, >> Seth? I had an interesting weekend >> because I was rereading this is marketing and I told you this actually when you walked in. I said, obviously you put out this book in 2018. I feel like the principles in are actually more relevant today than even back then like they it feels so relevant. And so there was three principles in particular that I wanted to hone in on that you mention in the book.

And I want to read you this quote and then we can just go through it step by step. And so you say you haven't made an impact until you've changed someone, changed your boss's mind, changed the school system, changed the demand for your product. And there are three ways that you can do this. One, you create and then relieve tension. The second way is that you establish cultural norms. The third way is that you see status roles and start shifting them.

And so I just wanted to start right in the beginning because I think that there's someone that's listening that they're very much tied to that almost stuck on that thing of like listen guys, I just want to sell product. Like I have a product here. I just want to sell it. I'm not trying to change anyone. I'm not trying to do any of that. Can you explain why you started there? Because you mentioned this at an early point in the book.

You said you haven't made an impact until you've changed someone. What made you say that? Okay. Marketing is about making a change happen. The change could be something trivial. You used to buy from store A. Now you buy from store B. You changed them from someone who's an A customer to a B customer. If you're not making a change happen, why are you bothering me? If you're not making a change happen, what are you doing here?

If you're just looking for a job without a boss, then you're making cheap pizza. If you're just saying you can pick anyone and I'm anyone, you're going to be struggling forever because there's always someone who's going to race to the bottom harder than you. So, we're here to make a change happen. How does that happen? Because people don't generally like change. The first thing we do is we willingly create tension. We don't relieve it.

We just by showing up in the world, tension is created. What does that mean? It means that if a hot actor shows up on the scene, every casting director has now got this moment of tension. Should I ignore this person or should I have them come to audition? Every director is facing tension because the world has just changed because a new person who's hot is on the scene. We invented tension. When you hear that Keller Williams is coming to town and performing in New York, tension is created.

Should I get a ticket? Are tickets going to be sold out? If there isn't any tension, no one's going to go to the show because no one's going to hear about the show because there wasn't a gap between where they are and where they hope to go. So tension can be a useful thing, a generous thing. When a cardiologist says to a patient, "If you don't give up cigarettes, you're probably going to die." That sentence creates tension and then the patient can move toward that by getting better or can run away from it.

But the tension caused a change to happen. >> Mhm. >> The second thing that's going on is people want to be affiliated. They want to be in sync with other people. Who's to my left? Who's to my right? What's the normal thing to do here? Any style, any fashion, any website, any YouTube video, right? If you didn't wait online at the Apple store the first day the iPhone was on sale, you're like everybody except for a few people.

You heard about the iPhone from someone who already had one. You heard about this podcast from someone who had already listened to an episode. You didn't go first. You everyone goes fifth or 50th or 500th. It becomes normal to walk around with earbuds which would have had you talking to yourself which would have had you uh sent to a mental institution 30 years ago if you were walking down the street invisibly talking to yourself.

But now it's normal. So, one of the ways we make change happen is we normalize things. And the third part, which goes right next to that, is where do I find status? Who eats lunch first? Who's up and who's down? And it goes all the way back to high school. Which table do the cool kids sit at? Did I get invited to the athletes table? Why do I want to be on the sports team? There isn't a trophy shortage. So, why don't we just have intramural sports?

Why do we need a varsity team? Because it affords status to people. Why do we have tryyouts for the play? Because there's status in getting picked or not getting picked. So, we're constantly keeping track of this in ways tiny like, "Hey, that guy got in front of me on the exit ramp." You're still going to get home within 3 seconds. That's not what it's about. It's about being a wild animal and that guy got to the oasis before you.

You can't let that stand. Status. Status. Status. Stat. Think about the meetings at work. Why are they even calling meetings? Why don't they just send everyone a memo? because the boss wants to take attendance. Because the boss wants to see everyone sitting there listening to them because they've earned the status they believe to do that. Why do some people speak up at the meeting? Not because they can't just send an email later.

They speak up because there's some status associated with that. So, human beings are complicated, but it's pretty simple. Freedom from fear, status, affiliation. If you want to make the world better, then you're a marketer because you're showing up to tell a story, to create a network, to create a product, to offer a service that solves problems around those three things. If you do that in a way you're proud of, you just made someone's life better. >> Okay.

It it's so good. And so I wanted to start where you did with the creating and relieving tension. When I heard that and I heard your explanation, two words that I wrote down in my notes, I said anticipation. You're creating anticipation and a sense of urgency. >> Yeah. >> And one of the things that I just want you to just help make this more real for people, which is if I'm a small business owner that's hearing this or like you mentioned earlier, like the freelancer, I'm I'm a coach that maybe I just have an offer that I'm trying to sell to people online.

How are we? How do those people create tension? Create and relieve tension. What does that even look like for for those categories? >> Yeah. >> So, let me give you a cool a few quick examples. Um, there's a company that makes stereo amplifiers. Cost a couple thousand dollars called Deck Wear. They made a really good amplifier. It got a really good review. and the owner decided not to ramp up production, not to move production offshore, not to hire a whole bunch more people.

And so the waiting list to get it is two years. And there's a shared Google sheet. You can see where you are on the list. And everyone who's in economics would say, "No, no, no. You should just get big, big, big, big, big. Sell all you can in one day and then make it whatever." But that's not the life he wanted to live. And the magical side effect is after making something extraordinary a two-year waiting list becomes its own version of attention loop.

The freelancer who says what do you need is basically looking for a job without a boss. The freelancer who says this is what I do and it's all that I do won't have as many yeses. But the people who say yes will be relieving the tension of maybe I won't be able to get in. I've got to go figure out how to get this person to say yes to me. But none of it works if you don't make something great first. >> You can't just start by making cheap pizza, but say I only have 10 slices because you won't even sell two.

When I hear you explain it, it has this level of like unmet demand. >> There is demand sitting there almost like latently sitting there that hasn't been met. >> Yeah. And so one of the things that I think about and I think you're so good at doing this is you kind of expose and share like forces that are happening under the surface that as a consumer I would never be aware of. >> Right. But that's my job. Yes. >> That's what you you do that at a worldclass level.

I guess my curiosity is how does someone if I'm listening to this and I'm like okay I feel like there's something that I can build which is great to a group of people. How do you get to the point though where you have unmet demand? Because to your point, I think the reason that these businesses stand out is that it's pretty rare when you come across a company that they actually have unmet they've generated so much demand that there's like this unmet demand that's just sitting there like we know it when we see it.

How does someone even go about even start thinking >> right >> about getting to that p that place, >> right? So it comes it doesn't happen unless you are specific. You cannot have a line out the door for a supermarket that's just like all the other supermarkets. There would be no reason to wait in the line. Being specific says this is what I do. I only do weddings in these three zip codes and I'm the best at it. I charge the most.

I offer the most status and I do the best job by these standards and I sign my work. So when you show people your wedding album in two years and it's not my name on it, they're going to say, "What? Why didn't you get that other guy? Right? And so, how do you create that feeling? We can talk about that, but it begins by even wanting to do it. And it doesn't have to be Supreme T-shirts. So, I tell the story of I live in a 100-y old house.

No, it's more than that. And soon after we moved in, the the heating just gave up. So, I went to the yellow pages. I called four the first four people I saw cuz they're all the same. They're in the yellow pages. And the first guy shows up and he's taking off his shoes. I said, "It's the basement. You don't have to take off your shoes." He said, "Always take off my shoes." So, I go down the basement and look around. While I'm downstairs, he hands me a clipboard.

He says, "Just look through this. It's the name and phone number of 40 of your neighbors, and all of them have agreed that you could call them for a reference." And he gets back to the top of the stairs, and I say, "You're hired." And I call the other three people, and I didn't even have them come cuz I knew I wasn't looking for the cheapest heater. I was looking to work with someone who had earned a clipboard filled with people who put their phone numbers down and said I could call them.

Do you think that's easy? That's really, really, really, really hard. But they don't teach you in HVAC school to do that. In HVAC school, they teach you to cut a few corners so you can race to the next person and offer them cheap pizza. You know, I I have to read this. The first one you say the first step is to invent a thing worth making with a story worth telling and a contribution worth talking about. That's step one.

Step two is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about. And when I just hear and and the reason I even say it in that way is when I hear the story of the person that came to your basement to fix the AC or the heating, it was like exactly that, >> right? >> Exactly those two first steps. They nailed it. >> Yeah. You'll pay a lot, but you'll get more than you pay for.

That's not everybody. Most people don't care enough to pay extra. But they're not paying extra. They're paying for the thing they wanted all along. I think the the interesting thing in where my mind goes as well when even that first line the first step is to invent a thing worth making with a story worth telling instantly in my where my mind goes is you have to make something spectacular something that's almost like entirely original but in the example that you gave it was someone that was offering a service that to your point pages and pages of other people offer exactly the same service but he still invented something that was worth making and there was a story >> right worth talking about. >> Yeah.

It's almost never spectacular. The chances that you will be uniquely able to do a spectacular thing that no one else can do are close to zero. You know, if you go look at people juggling on the internet, the YouTube has ratcheted most spectator kind of stunt sports dramatically because once someone's good at it, everyone can see they're good at it. So, now they have to get better. So, you can find people who can juggle eight balls, nine balls, 10 balls.

And it's pretty astounding to see, but that doesn't help you make a living as a juggler. You can make a living as a juggler if you only can juggle five balls. Because people aren't hiring you because you how many balls you can juggle. They're hiring you because of how you make them feel. And so, you know, Pen and Teller aren't the best magicians in the world. Not even close. And David Blaine, same thing. But they make people feel a certain way.

And there's only one of them. If you want David Blaine to come to your birthday party, it's not $100 cuz there's only one David Blaine. It's interesting because um a couple months ago I was watching the the Michael Jackson movie. >> He was like the master of this, right? When you watch Michael Jackson perform, it was like someone else could do the moonwalk, but when he does it, there's something about that when he does it.

And so I think back to what you said earlier, which is the problem that most people have when it comes to marketing is that they make average crap for average people. And so when you'll come across someone and if someone go comes to you and they want help and they're like, "Seth, the things that I'm making, they're just not selling. Like no one's buying and they think it could be because they're making average crap for average people." What is the first thing that you typically tell them to either look at or go out and do so that they can get closer to the exact scenario that you had that when you hired that person to come to your basement where it's like this is something worth making and there's a story worth telling and there's this magic that you from the experience.

Yeah. Well, now you're getting to the story we tell ourselves, right? And that's what the new book is about. You're stuck in a knot. The reason people make average stuff is not because they want to fail. It's because they also want every person they meet to say, "Yeah, it's pretty good." They don't want anybody to say, "You left me out." They don't want anybody to say, "How dare you go to that edge and ignore me." So, we want two things.

We want to be picked for the work we do. And we want nobody to be able to criticize the work we do and call us a fraud or say that we were mean to them. And so when I show up at my book publisher years ago with a 96-page book about quitting, really well-meaning people said, "Yeah, but it's really short for a book." And no one's ever written a book about quitting. Both really valid points if the goal is to make an average book for average people.

But my point was, yeah, it might fail. Plenty of people might see the dip and say, "We don't need a book about quitting, and you want me to pay money for a 96page book?" And that's fine with me because it's not for you. But someone is going to look at this and say, "I can't believe you wrote this book for me. It changed my life. It's for them." And that's why you should never read your reviews. You shouldn't read the comments on YouTube for your podcast.

And you shouldn't read your reviews on Amazon because I've never met an author who read their one-star reviews and said, "Now I'm a better author." >> And you're never going to write that book again anyway. So knowing that someone gave you one star, they're just saying it wasn't for me. Okay, now we both know it wasn't for you. What do you want me to do with that? I didn't write it for you and it wasn't for you. We're both right.

So the opportunity is to be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality, as my friend Zigg used to say, to say [snorts] some people aren't going to get this joke that there's a there's a pizza place that has a line out the door downtown and the only thing it's like a sitdown restaurant. It's not inexpensive and the only thing he's got is olives and pizza. If you don't eat cheese, I'm sorry. I can't help you. If you're gluten-free, I'm sorry.

I can't help you. If you're looking for a a restaurant experience that feels like it's worth the money, I can't help you. This is the best pizza in New York for people who like pizza like this. And this is what it costs. And if you don't like it, that's fine. And that's why looking at pizza is such a fascinating way to understand this because in every town there are some crazy pizza makers who aren't willing to compromise.

And there are crazy pizza customers who are willing to drive across town to eat pizza from a crazy pizza maker. My friend Appalonia runs the most famous bakery in the world in Paris. And a loaf of Pen bread is not like any other. And if you go into Pulen, she will not sell you a baguette because she doesn't have baguette. And it doesn't matter how much you say, "I'm a tourist and I'm in Paris and I want a baguette." She'll say, "Please go down the street." And that's the question.

How often are you telling people please go down the street? If you're hoarding and say, "I don't know anyone else who could do this," you've given yourself away. But if you're regularly sending people to the folks that think of themselves as your competitors, that's great. So, if you call up Patagonia and say, "I really want those shirts, but they're too expensive." They say, "Call Colombia. We don't care. Colombia makes a shirt.

You won't be naked. Go call Colombia." You know what's um it's interesting? I had this experience a few months ago. Uh, my brothers came to New York and uh, even though I'm not from New York, I'm from London because I live in New York, I'm now the New York tour guide. I'm the expert on New York. Um, as you do. And so I take them to this bagel shop that I've actually never been, but I've just heard so much about called Apollo Bagels. >> Apollo Bagels.

I know the guy who started it. >> Yes. And I and I walk in and I really didn't know anything about it. And I'm thinking it's going to be this great thing. and they've been telling me the my brothers have been telling me kind of some of the stuff they've want and we look at the menu and it's kind of this embarrassing moment in a way cuz we're looking at the menu and they only have a few options. I don't know if you've ever been there there's not that many options >> and as I'm looking at it I'm like my brothers are not going to like a single one of these options.

And so we left to your point we self- selected ourselves out. We're like this this is what they do. this isn't for us, right? >> And we had to leave. And I think to your point, and I've had this experience in building a business, is I remember the first time I started a clothing brand, I imagined everyone wearing my clothes. And I think it's because we have this uh and it never ended up launching because I went through so many cycles of trying to make the perfect thing that I thought everyone would like.

But as entrepreneurs, we put this pressure on ourselves of like we just want to be liked and seen and everyone to kind of have >> rejected sucks. Yeah. >> And it's like the self- selecting I I love the point that it's actually kind of a good sign if the people that it's not for, they can quickly identify it and they're like, "Okay, I'm going to leave in the exact same way as when I left Apollo Bagels. This isn't for us.

I'm going to leave." >> But the people that stayed love it. >> Yeah. Right. And what I keep trying to come back to because I will never run out of examples because I see them everywhere I go is it almost doesn't matter what you do for a living. Even if you're an undertaker, there are unmet needs. There are problems to be solved. They may not get you on the Tonight Show, which by the way is no longer important, but that used to be the model.

TV drove everything. You wanted to be on prime time TV in front of everybody. But that's not what works and it's not what makes a profit and it's not what helps people thrive. And so, you know, if we if we think about the way TV works today, a show like Secession, which everyone was talking about their finale last year, the last episode of Secession was seen by three million people. The last episode of MASH was seen by 70 million people. 20 times as many.

You can make great content without winning whatever rating system the system wants you to be rated by. So the metrics matter here. Online friends are not your friends. Online followers are not your followers. Online likes do not mean they like you. These are metrics that were invented by social media to get you to work for free for Mark, right? To get you to be stressed and to create tension to do the things they want you to do.

If you pay attention to those metrics, you'll end up just like all those other people who are chasing the very same metric, right? Linkbait headlines, putting things in a certain way, trying to guess the Tik Tok algorithm. Well, there's a reason it all looks the same. It looks the same because that's what the algorithm was designed to do. But is making the algorithm happy making you happy? Or are you fine with a thousand true fans?

As my friend Kevin says, if you have a thousand people, if you're a freelancer, if there are a thousand people who would give you a hundred bucks for something special, you never need to look for customers ever again. >> Yeah, >> that's it. A thousand. Most of the people I know who have trouble don't have three true fans. Never mind a thousand. Get to 10 true fans and see if they tell the others. If they tell the others, you're on your way.

It's such a it's such a good point and it's something um I've seen personally doing content because you see the creator that has uh millions of followers. It's actually funny because when we when we did the conversation when you and I spoke a year ago, you made the point that if it takes you 40 million views to make 200 bucks, you're in a really tough place. >> Yeah. But we've been hustled to skip the hard part. We've been hustled by people who make a living selling on the clicks, saying, "I have a shortcut.

You can once you know this one little secret, there'll be a huge list of people and you can be just like this famous podcaster or this famous YouTuber." And it's not true. Those people won the lottery and someone's going to win it and that's great. But I think that's a lousy way to plan your life. >> You know what, Seth? If some if someone's listening to this and they feel like they're kind of stuck in that virality loop, M >> where it's like, okay, my sponsors, they pay me when I get the viral video or like I only sell some of my coaching offer when the video goes viral.

And it's actually very debilitating because it's like >> as you're having those misses, which just invariably happens in any craft or sport or anything that you're doing with consistency, you're going to have misses. It's it's just getting further and further away and it feels like they're just almost hoping on a prayer, right? That one goes viral. If someone's listening and they feel stuck in that loop of chasing virality, what in your mind is even the first step, the first thing that they think about which will start to almost change the game that they're playing towards what you're mentioning, which is the the thousand, the first 10 true fans and the first hundred and the first thousand true fans.

Like, how does that even begin that switch? >> Right. This is brilliant in that you've put your finger on the hard part, which is you set out, not you personally, the person you're talking about, set out to play a game that is rigged against them. And insisting that someone tell you how to win the game that is rigged against you is just more of the trap. Name it. Say, "Oh, I get it. I did this because it feels like high school.

If I could go viral and make a living at it, I would win high school." I didn't win high school, but it would be nice to feel like I was winning now. That's what we were trained to do when we were 14 and very impressionable that the winner is the homecoming king and the homecoming queen and the quarterback of the football team and all of those things. That's winning at high school. And we carry a lot of high school scars around with us.

Real winning is being of service, making a promise to someone, keeping it, and making things better for them. And we take a deep breath and we start with the smallest viable audience. Can you build a business with just a few people mattering enough? A few might be 10,000. A few might be a hundred. I don't know how many a few is, right? A a typical doctor is doing just great if they have 300 regular patients. That's fine.

It's enough. They're not worried about solving someone's medical problems from across the country. Whereas a dermatologist who needs 10 million views on YouTube, they're constantly hustling. Who's having a better life? And so putting ourselves on the hook and saying, "I'm not going to have a number as big as the other people I went to high school with. But what I will have are people who would miss me if I were gone.

People who talk about what I do cuz they want to, not cuz I want them to. If you can achieve that in the small, you can do it a little bit more and a little bit more. That is the path. It is the path in every profession I can think of. And we got confused because the social networks have tricked us into thinking that's not the path. >> It's the path. I think it's so good of like the was like the antidote to that being stuck in that virality loop is just just going small.

Go to your smallest viable audience. And I even think back to what you mentioned in the beginning of getting next to your customer, like sitting next to your customer. You know what? So, here's where I want to go and I want to talk about principle two and and three that I mentioned earlier, which is you establish cultural norms, status, and affiliation. And then you see status roles and you start to shift them. If someone's listening to this and in their mind they're like, I own like a small business like a mom and pop shop or like a internet business or I just have dreams of one day starting something on the side of my job and it's like why would status why would cultural norms have any impact on what I'm doing on my scale?

Can you just make it clear for people what is the application and even more important the relevancy of those principles of you establish cultural norms status affiliation and then seeing status roles and starting to shift them. What is the relevance of that to someone at that scale? >> Yeah. All right. So let's leave affiliation out for now and talk about status. Status has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with luxury.

It's in everywhere we look. So, if you take your brother to a restaurant in Brooklyn that you've been before and the owner greets you by name, your brother's impressed. You have status. You're a neighbor, right? That if you're walking around Prospect Park and you wave at the crossing garden, they wave back because they recognize you. In your mind, your status went up because you're an insider. At the Park Slope Food Co-op, you can't get in unless you're a member.

And if you bring in a guest, they have to wear a big bright orange badge that they're right, their status is lower. That we create all of these circles of status. That Danny Meyer who built all these restaurants in New York City and then Shake Shack, there's a computer system that knows how often you've been. And when a regular comes back, the people at the front desk have never met you before, but they treat you like the regular that you are because your status goes up. when he tried to get rid of tipping and just go to flat fee, his regulars revolted because tipping gives them status.

It might even end up costing them more. But and they don't like to think about what they're doing when they're tipping, but that's what's happening, right? It's everywhere we look. It's in the hospital. Which doctor? And why do doctors wear stethoscopes if they're dermatologists? Dermatologists don't need a stethoscope. They're wearing a stethoscope because it's a badge that says I'm a doctor. You're not. I have status in this situation.

Handshakes. When two people meet and shake hands, someone's going to win the handshake. And you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's everywhere we look. So, when we create tension around status, we're inviting people who are looking for a certain thing, whatever that is, the kind of car they drive, how they're treated when they show up, or the way the nurses talk to them when they're dying. And we say this is going to s to help fill that bottomless hole you have of not being seen, not being understood, being the lowest person on the totem pole.

This is a service we offer people. We didn't invent the status game. Darwin did. It goes all the way down to, you know, prozzoa. It's whoever eats lunch first is going to survive. And so it's hardwired into us. And if we can offer someone who's not used to having status, the feeling, the solace, the confidence that comes from being seen, this is what a great third grade teacher does. Third grade teacher doesn't always call on the cute kid or the smart kid.

They say, "Oh, Billy, yeah, that's right. Boom. That's priceless." So, it's everywhere. I refuse to say you have to be running a giant company. affiliation and cultural norms are. You don't wear a clown suit to a funeral. Why? Because it just is not done. Go take a look at the wedding industrial complex. Look at how many rules there are in the wedding industrial complex about what you're supposed to wear and what you're not supposed to wear and what kind of photographer.

And why is it that no one ever goes to a restaurant that plays really loud music, serves bad salmon or overcooked meat and yet that's what they want their wedding to be? because that's what everyone else does. People like us do things like this. And the thing about people like us do things like this is it was the same for hundreds of years. Nothing changed. And in the last 50 years, it's been spiraling out of control.

We keep inventing new cultural norms. New expressions spread across the internet in a day. Right? So it used to be high status to say, "Okay, boomer." And now if you say, "Okay, boomer, a year and a half too late." That's a low status thing to say. affiliation, what's the secret handshake? Who's an insider? We get to do all of those things. Even if we're an accountant, right? Because guess what? Accountants have to follow the rules of accounting.

Who invented them? The people who are in charge of the rules of accounting and affiliation. And if you don't follow them, you get kicked out and your status goes down. And if you do you right, so we go down these long lists. Pay attention. What humans want is status, affiliation, and the freedom from fear. Those three things are the hole we're trying to fill for them. >> It's so good how you break it down. You know, it's um the where my mind naturally goes if understanding that that almost like at the root of everything and like driving the behavior is this urge for status.

You know, you gave the example of like the the kid in school, you know, like winning in high school. We all want to win in high school and in some ways we're still living that out but 20 years 30 years in the future. And it reminded me the question then goes like how do you start to accumulate that? Like how do you even do that [clears throat] for people? And it reminded me where my mind went was actually step three in the book which is you tell a story that matches the builtin narratives and dreams of a tiny group of people. the smallest viable market.

But it was really just how that quote began. That was the key to me is telling a story that matches the built-in narratives and dreams of a tiny group of people. >> Yeah. >> And then what you mentioned, you say people like us do things like this. >> Yeah. And so, you know, if we think about teachers and AI, when a third grade teacher turns to Bobby and says, "That's really good." the story that they're matching is your parents approve of you. >> When an AI says you got it right, doesn't mean anything because it doesn't match the story that was built into us for the last eight years, right?

And so people are walking around with these perceptions and these archetypes. Some people care very much about dominance, pro- wrestling, my hero beat your hero, therefore I'm better. Other people care very much about the long term. They sleep better knowing they have solar panels on their house. Electricity is still electricity for every all the appliances concerned, but the story you tell yourself is I'm the kind of person that does this.

So, the number one, this is an interesting aside, the number one indicator of whether you have solar panels on your house is whether your neighbors have solar panels on their house. By far, if you tell me the penetration of solar panels in a neighborhood, I can tell you what the odds of the next house having solar panels are. Has nothing to do with climate, nothing to do with geography. It has to do with the fact that people like us do things like this. >> Yeah.

You know what's funny is like now that you mention it, I start to see it everywhere. So, I'll just give like a few examples that immediately pop in my mind. There was um a few years ago, it used to be that you would hear about Tesla like on the news and then it felt like pretty quickly it went from you just hear about their stock or whatever or who's shorting the stock to like everyone has a Tesla Model 3 and you're just seeing them and the Tesla Cyber Truck, which most people think it's like kind of an ugly car, but >> the worst car ever. >> Yeah.

But yeah, >> but people still look at it and they're like, "Oh, that kind of >> it gets your attention though when you're driving down the street." And it was exactly the same with the solar panel example that you give of like I remember the first person in the neighborhood that had the solar panels on their roof and then you're like maybe I maybe we should be doing that, you know? And >> so let let me just I'm g for one second.

I want to decode the Cyber Truck thing. >> Yeah. >> Because leaving aside that it's the worst car ever made. Certainly for the money that you can slice your finger open on the trunk and that it doesn't do any of the things it's supposed to do. Why did it fail? Why is it even more than the Edel the biggest money losing car ever made? Here's why. When you show up to cardiologists in Los Angeles with the Model S, you just broke their Mercedes because their Mercedes was a signal and a symbol.

It was a message to their neighbors. But if there's a car that's safer and faster and more efficient and just as luxurious that they don't have, now their Mercedes is broken. >> So within a couple years, it became the bestselling luxury car in California. And the story that the person who's buying the Model S, the Model 3 is a little different, but at the beginning, the story that person tells themselves is this is a reliable way for me to buy a certain kind of status and to get affiliation with the kind of people I want to have affiliation with.

So far so good. Then you show up with a pickup truck. The number one bestselling car in America is not a car. It's the Ford F-150 pickup truck. By a lot, it accounts for more than 100% of Ford's profits. So, it's an obvious thing to make an electric pickup truck. What kind should you make? Well, what problem is someone with a pickup truck trying to solve? Culturally, they're trying to fit in all the way. They want the same sort of pickup truck as their neighbor.

They don't want to call attention to their pickup truck. They want the pickup truck to be sensible and have utility. That's where affiliation comes from and a certain kind of status, which is I'm not some fancy California cardiologist. I'm a working person, and I got a pickup truck that helps me do my work. And then you show up with this car that's poorly designed, costs twice as much as it should, and is really ugly.

It says, "Look at me. >> Look at me." Yeah. >> The people who want to buy a pickup truck don't want that. M >> and so the early adopters you needed to normalize it didn't show up and so it never crossed over to the public because no one wants to fly that flag with a pickup truck. That's not the problem a pickup truck solves. And if instead he had put his ego aside and made a $45,000 almost invisible high utility electric pickup truck, he would have sold millions of you think that the problem I'm even I'm thinking about the example with Elon, but just in general when people have a marketing problem, back to how we even started this conversation, a marketing problem, >> they almost just mismatch the story that they're trying to tell >> with the internal narrative of their customer.

Yeah, exactly right. >> They just get it wrong. >> Yeah, >> it's the ugly pickup truck that says, "Look at me." But then the people that buy pickup trucks want to fit in and something that's high utility, >> right? And it was so easy to solve. All you had to do was hang out at a Ford dealership for three days and listen to spouses talking to each other about which truck they're going to buy. And you would not have heard one spouse say to the other, "No, I want a purple one." No one was saying that in a Ford dealership. that if you looked at the emotions at the bucket they were trying to fill the hole that they were dealing with when they go in to buy a $65,000 pickup truck, super expensive, right?

This isn't we're not talking about marketing people around money. They have money, but they've made a choice about the story they tell themselves and the world through their vehicle. you would have heard over and over again, nobody is going to fill that hole by saying, "I want to put get a truck that everyone in the neighborhood's gonna be talking about me." You know, I thought I thought um I heard you say this and I thought it was so good and I wanted to share it with people.

You say, "As marketers, we only sell four things. Status, affiliation, the freedom from fear, and convenience." You then went on to give actually another example which is Patagonia began by selling small little metal pegs that mountain climbers would use and there were only 10,000 people in their smallest viable audience but now they're a billion dollar company. And so I think the reason I said it's so good is it's just ill ill illustrative if I can say it of the fact that even with starting with this really small almost like niche product but if you can tell the right story to that group of people that they will be delighted and love that product that can take you to billion dollar like that's a it's a billion dollar brand if there's an incentive for them to tell their friends.

That's where the growth comes from. You don't tell their friends, they tell their friends. And so, the Purple Cow book spread. I self-published the first edition, so I I know exactly how many there were. There were 5,000. It spread to a million because the first 5,000 people said, "Not I like Seth. I should talk about Seth." No one said that. They said, "My job will be better if my boss reads this book. My day will go better if my co-workers read this book.

It is selfishly good for me to talk about this. My status will go up. My affiliation will go up. My business will do better if I tell other people. That's how it spread. And so Patagonia, it's not an accident that there's a logo on the fleece because the act of wearing it, just like Tom's shoes, the act of wearing it is your chance to tell other people about how cool you are. I I actually think this is so important and I'm glad that you brought up the idea or the fact of like uh the spread of ideas, right?

Like the your product spreads. That's really when you that's really where you want to get to, right? as an entrepreneur, uh, as someone that's selling something, is like when is it just going to start to spread? And so my question to you, because you even mentioned the example, um, with the purple cow theory and like the self-publishing it out first, is that something intentionally that you are like engineering into the marketing or marketers are engineering in that it's actually easy for this product, this idea to spread or is that just by happen chance?

There's actually not really much that you can do past just create a great experience. How can someone listening at home get their ideas to spread, right? I it would be pretty foolish if I was just encouraging people to do this and say, "And then you get lucky." That's not what I'm trying to do. Most people just wait to get lucky. It's engineered in. So, I'll give you again a very simple example. Restaurant uh Broadway and 90th in New York City.

It's not easy to build a restaurant in New York City and they come up with a restaurant that has a few basic principles. Number one, you can't get a reservation unless you have a party of six or more. Number two, they use an enormous amount of garlic. It's an Italian restaurant. And number three, the portions are twice the size of any other restaurant. So, you make good food, some people come, and then you go to work the next day.

When you go to work the next day, you got to explain why you smell like garlic. You benefit from telling the story of you got there before your friends got there and huge desript descriptions of huge platters of food. And then you realize you need to bring other people with you or you can't get a reservation. So those three things engineered into carmines what built a multi-million dollar restaurant chain because they did it on purpose. >> It's so good.

It's so good. You know what? Before we get out of here, I want to share the steps in four and five from this five steps of marketing. Step four is you spread the word, which is what everyone wants to talk about, right? And you just mentioned that. And then you go on to say, and then this step, which is step five, is often overlooked. Is that you show up regularly, consistently, and generously for years and years to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make.

You know, I want to talk about this, especially in light of what's happening with AI. One thing that I've seen, especially doing content in this space, everything in relation to AI, it's happening fast. Claude and Anthropic, they're releasing updates fast. Chat GPT is updating it fast. There's like new capabilities and new agents fast. When I hear steps four and five in this book, in the steps of marketing, I hear showing up regularly, being consistent, generous, it takes years and years.

In your mind, is this still the case in this era of AI that we're in? The fact that you actually have to show up time and time again, does that take on outsized value? Is it not important anymore? What's your perspective on that? >> Yeah, well, more than ever, because you're not, no one who's listening to this is in the business of selling frontier AI models. The story of a Frontier A model is in the title, Frontier.

The story is if you pay extra and you're on the cutting edge, there's always going to be a fresh cutting edge. That's the story of what they're selling investors and the people who are paying attention. But if you're not reading the every newsletter knowing what the latest releases are, it's fine. doesn't matter. If you're someone who's going to use this as a tool, the humanity around you is going to stay the humanity around you.

So, showing up and showing up and showing up the same way a newspaper, the news changes every day, but the newspaper doesn't, right? That's what we're looking for. We're looking for subscribers, not someone who's going to buy you at the news stand because you came up with one quick I won the internet today. You want subscribers because if these people say whether they're paying you or not, I'm in. You have my attention, you have my trust.

Now, instead of looking for people for your products, you get products for your people. In the age of AI where everything is moving so fast, it's actually you double down on how can I be consistent? How can I do the thing for a long amount of time and show up for people? >> Exactly. >> You know what? Before we get out of here, Seth, because I started this conversation with a person in mind, and that person was someone that's stuck, right?

Because even though they can build things, it feels more difficult than ever and more crowded than ever to actually sell those things. >> Yeah. And what would you say, Seth Goden, with everything that you've done, if you were going to advise someone that after listening to this conversation of like take this action or this is the piece that's actually going to move you forward, what is the one thing that you're telling them that they should do this weekend that they should start looking into?

Maybe it's a mentality switch. What is the thing that they do that sticks? That's actually it's what we've been speaking out to this entire time. It's timeless in this era where everything is changing. >> I totally get being stuck. I've been stuck. I You have 100 good reasons to be stuck. And as long as you keep looking for the one thing and the thing to do this weekend, you will remain stuck because you like being stuck.

You have chosen to be stuck. You're stuck because you have baggage that you can't let go of. You're stuck because you're trying to accomplish multiple things. Maybe you're trying to accomplish something too big for the trust you already have. Maybe you're too much of a hurry. not in a hurry enough, but you're stuck because you're choosing to be stuck. Maybe the problem you're trying to solve isn't a problem at all. Go find a problem you can solve for one person.

Help one person safely cross the street. Help one person solve a problem. Get paid for it. Generous doesn't mean free, but become the kind of person when you look in the mirror, you see someone who solves problems. You don't see someone who comes up with more reasons why they're stuck. You solved a problem, a tiny problem, doesn't matter. But now you're a problem-solving person. And then you can do it again and again.

And you don't have to put your name on it at first. And you shouldn't quit your day job. Please don't quit your day job. But you can become the kind of person who looks for problems and solves them as opposed to looks for reasons to stay stuck. And the world isn't fair. And a lot of people are starting way behind others. And I I totally won the birthday lottery and I acknowledge it. This isn't something that you accomplish just through skill.

There's an enormous amount of luck. But given that, where are you going to show up? Where are you going to show up to make a difference for somebody? That matters. And then you get to do it again. And if you do that enough times, people are going to hire you to do it again. >> Yeah. Seth, you know what? This has been uh such a good conversation. I'm grateful that we got to do it in person. And I'll give you this uh I've never actually said this on the show, but one of the things that I think about behind the scenes is that I want to create I call it comprehensive conversations, which basically means if someone was going to come and listen to this to learn about the topic of marketing and it was the only conversation that they would listen to and they would just come back to it again and again and again, would it be comprehensive?

And I feel like that's what we did. >> So thank you. >> That's you, man. I was just showing up to try to keep up with you. Thank you. >> This was awesome. Thank you so much, Seth Goden. >> So, if you enjoyed this conversation and you want to hear even more stories like this, then just click here. And also, my team is going to put some more videos that you can watch here. Thank you.