Akimbo podcast transcripts

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==> -paying-for-stamps- <==

Nobody tells a better story about ancient Rome then the great Steve pressfield and what I learned from his new book is that they had the post office in ancient Rome that you could send a letter. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about stamps and open apis, but first here’s a Message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth. I wrote a new book. It was originally called trust yourself. But my editor persuaded me correctly to change the title to the practice. If you’d like to see a free excerpt in a summary visit trust yourself.com got to do something with that domain check it out. I well, it’s not quite true. You couldn’t send a letter. Well, at least I couldn’t send a letter the post office.

Idea of sending a letter across the Roman Empire was only available to people who the emperor permitted to send letters that the Romans built extraordinary roads. They spent a fortune connecting all the way from Jerusalem to Rome and Beyond a network of roads that connected far-reaching countries that had never been connected before and one of the things they did on those roads was they created the post?

And the post was a relay of ten or twelve Riders each waiting for the next one a giant relay race to enable a message or a passenger to move from one place to another at really high rates of speed it enabled travel safe fast travel for the first time in human history. And while you were busy taking passengers, you could put in your sack otherwise known as a male a bunch of Hers. So here we have the Postal Service postal because you’re using the Post Road and the mail because you’re putting it in a sack.

And so the emperor could send a note to his soldiers for example in Jerusalem, and it would get there in a matter of weeks. Not a matter of years, but I asked Steve. Where did you go to buy a stamp? And that led me down the rabbit hole of well, you really couldn’t buy a stamp. Because the post wasn’t an open system not only couldn’t you look up someone’s address particularly easily because people didn’t have addresses but there wasn’t a way to pay for what was going on and then hundreds of years later Rowland Hill wrote an influential article in which he showed that postal rates were too high that the cost of the postal service was mostly a fixed cost the fixed cost of all of those. Mailboxes and all of those postal delivery workers and that if we lowered the cost of stamps we would end up with more people sending more letters and the post office would still make a profit.

What does this have to do with you and with me well the post office today of course carries junk mail catalogs the occasional absentee ballot, but mostly the post office of today is email. An email seems to be free and that’s a problem. It’s a problem because if it’s free, you’re not really the customer and it’s a bigger problem because it was free.

There’s a crisis of the commons that if it doesn’t cost anything to send a million emails and you make a dollar doing it. Some people people who are questionable about their ethics and morals will go ahead and send a million emails so they can make it. Dollar which leads to the travesty of Gmail run by the Monopoly Google Gmail is free. It’s beautifully designed. It seems to work a lot of us use Gmail. But as I stated earlier emails filled with Spam it’s filled with Spam because it’s an open system where the stamps are free programmers call A system that we can tap into an API. It’s basically a programming interface that lets someone who is not part of of the organization put something into the system an email is one of the biggest oldest open apis.

Anybody with an email account can send an email to anyone else without permission. This is a significant dynamic in the way the system works because it’s the recipient who Bears the cost of filtering sorting and reading the email. It’s the recipients platform that has to hold the email but it’s the sender can send the email for free and profit from doing it.

So back to the problem with Gmail. Some of you have heard me rant before about Google’s decision to build a promo folder. They built the promo folder so that people who were using a permission asset the privilege of sending email to people who wanted to get it for free would be hampered in there. Bility to do so, so if you’re used to getting emails from a catalog company you buy from you may have discovered. They’re getting stuffed into the promo folder not because you asked for it, but because Google realized that making it hard for companies to reach people they wanted to reach would make it more likely that companies would buy ads it was in their interest as a monopoly to break things like blogs and email that they don’t make money from to force people. Bow to you something. They do make money from which is interrupting people with ads on Google and saw the promo folder is a bit of a disaster.

It’s a disaster for the recipient who can’t figure out where my blog went who can’t figure out where that catalog went and it’s a disaster for the sender because they rightfully belong in your inbox. You asked to be in your inbox and Google a third party, you’re not even paying to be part of this transaction has moved them to the promo folder.

But I actually today wanted to rant about the spam folder spam folder is a bun. It’s a gift. I was there at the beginning of spam in the late 1980s early 1990s. There were Usenet discussion groups. These were basically a synchronous chat room for people could talk about something they were interested in like stamp collecting or chess and in the chest discussion board to Shady lawyers.

Posted a note promising unsuspecting immigrants that for a few hundred bucks. They could get you a green card. This obviously has nothing to do with chess unless you’re a grand master who had somehow ended up in the United States and needs a green card. It cost these lawyers nothing to interrupt this conversation about chess with their selfish add about scammy green cards, but they did it and then they did it in other places. Is over and over and over again?

And that was the origin of spam Usenet threatened to break under the weight of all the spam because like the expression bad money chases out good as soon as it Community starts suffering from a little spam. Some people say what the heck and add more spam and so it spirals out of control because there’s no way to stop the bad actors.

So spam filters came along two decades or so ago. And at the beginning they were pretty rudimentary but they’ve become more sophisticated not as sophisticated as they should be given a eyes state-of-the-art, but still they are pretty good. Perhaps 95% 99% accurate at determining that that spam really is Spam its email you didn’t ask for its email. You don’t want it disappears into a black hole.

Well in the last week two different speaking gigs, I was involved in disappeared into the black hole of spam in the middle of a conversation. And with dates and calendar reminders, where am I supposed to be? Where’s the zoom link gone disappeared into the spam folder. And once there are false positives in the spam folder it becomes toxic because now you have to read the entire spam folder to discover.

What’s there? That’s not supposed to be there. This isn’t just happening to me. Google didn’t seek me out, but it is happening to a lot of people stuff. That shouldn’t be in this man. Boulder is getting put there just like stuff that shouldn’t be in the promo folder. He’s getting put there.

So what does this have to do with stamps? Well in 1998 shortly after I got to Yahoo! It occurred to me that the problem was spam was that the stamps were free and in that moment in time between AOL and Yahoo, at least a third of all the email that was going to consumers in the United. In other places was going through these two surfaces.

So I came up with the idea of charging a penny for a stamp if I could get Yahoo and AOL to both go along with it. They could keep track of how many emails a given individual or organization had sent into their systems. And if they sent more than say 50 or a hundred in a day, they would block them until these people started paying a penny and email it could either be a At Center or you could give that money to a cause that would perhaps counter some of the carbon that’s caused by email.

So if you’re only sending 50 emails a day, it would be free if you’re sending a hundred emails today, which is a fairly large amount of means you’re probably doing something commercial it would cost a dollar. But if you’re one of those people is sending a million emails a day, you’re clearly sending them to people who probably don’t want to get them and so it would cost you $10,000 a day to send that many. Emails there’s all sorts of refinements that could be added. For example, if both sides actively opted in perhaps you don’t have to pay a penny if you get spam complaints, there’s no amount of pennies that you’d be allowed to pay. Suddenly the fact that you have to pay even a penny for an email makes you non-anonymous.

It makes the API a different sort of API one that is done with consent of the people on both sides. So it is open in the sense that anyone who’s willing to play by the rules can use it but it is not open in the sense that it will get wrecked in the Commons because Anonymous people can selfishly exploit it.

Well, I didn’t push hard enough and we never got the system in place, but it feels to me like right now when email is threatened once again by the overwhelming number of emails that are going back and forth and as we are just finishing a political season. I can tell you how he’s getting more than 300 a day just from candidates asking for money candidates. I never once asked to reach me in this moment particularly when people like Gmail dominate the market it may be time to revisit this it may be time to realize that the interactions between and among people in the open API. We call email could be improved simply by thinking about how much a stamp. Amp costs 200 years ago and thousands of years after the Romans started it Rowland Hill ushered in the Modern Age of philately and the Postal Service.

He did it by helping people understand that stamps were too expensive and lowering the price of a stamp could transform the way people communicated with one another leading to modernity in many ways. but right in this moment, it’s pretty clear that the cost of an email stamp is too low and that charging any amount once Mo lien which we can Define as a hundredth of a penny might be enough that what we have to do is make it non-anonymous make it thoughtful and establish a trail so that people who send stuff that is Spam can’t do it anymore that we can accurately label where they go and that someone like Google Uninvited stopped moving the email that I really need to read to a folder. I didn’t ask them to move it too.

So yes another rant, but I hope this one resonates and makes us think about whether the apis we are building our open and whether fully open is better than mostly open. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from last time, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the akimbo workshops. These are interactive real-time online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2022 finding one that matches where you need to go if you’re ready to level up. I hope you’ll check out akimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

It’s Maria. Except my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is on the part of this Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Whoosah. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you if you’ve got a question about this or any other previous rant. Please visit akimbo dot link. That’s Aki and Bo dot link2006 click the appropriate button. Here’s a great question to get us started taking exception to something I might have said last time.

Hey Seth, this is Shawn Mabry calling in once again from Claremont, California, and I am calling to respectfully disagree with your answer to a question in the most recent episode. So one of your listeners had called in as about his decision to pursue a career in Creative coaching and he was asking, you know, do I need to have a impressive list of accomplishments under my belt before I started doing this creative coaching work and you identified correctly that he doesn’t need to be the Michael Jordan of any particular craft before he starts doing creative coaching work and ultimately the most important proof of his career will be the success of his students and I agree with that part the part I disagree with is the implication. I heard that you can be a successful creative coach without any creative practice of your own.

Thank you for all you do. I’m a huge huge fan have been following you for years and I can’t wait to hear your response. Thanks Seth. Yeah, we don’t disagree.

I don’t think we disagree at all. The fact is it is possible to teach people things that you are not. Great at for example, you can teach people how to swim even if a physical disability prevents you from being able to swim on the other hand the entire point of being a coach of people who seek to be creative is that it is a practice available to everyone. So if I wasn’t clear last time to clarify, yes, you have to have a creative practice all of us do but particularly someone who is there to coach Us in how to have a career? Of practice but no you don’t need commercial success.

And that is a very different standard commercial success in most Fields is not a measure of whether someone is good at teaching or not.

Hey Sam, this is Bill hyejin, Austin, Texas said, I have a project. I’m working on to make a difference in the world. I said I know who it’s for and what it’s for but the other day when I was listening to a podcast you through in a third criteria, which was how do you know if it’s working? I may have misheard that or not remember to clearly but that really got my attention and that’s really my question.

You know, it’s I’m running into some headwinds. I didn’t expect.

So, how do I know? How do I know if it’s time to give up? How do I know if it’s working? And I think that’s it. I really appreciate the work you do. I look forward to hearing back from you sir, bye-bye.

This is a great question. Thank you for sharing it. How do you know if it’s working because it’s working doesn’t mean the same thing as it worked. Its working are signs of progress means it’s worth continuing but it doesn’t work until much later in the process. So the Dilemma that so many creators face is the signals are all mixed up at the beginning people. Who care about you push you to drop it.

To get a real job to stop doing things that are wasting your time. And so the signals are all messed up. We don’t hear a lot from the people we seek to change about the change. We’re making actually working until much later in the process. So part of what it means to develop a practice to be able to do this work is to figure out which signals you’re going to pay attention to so back in the day when I was beginning my book packaging work inventing books. Book publishers.

I got rejected a lot 800 rejections in one year, but over time the rejections began to change they went from a form letter to a thoughtful personal response to a warm response to a lunch each step along the way. I was still getting rejected. There was no money coming in but I could tell something I was doing was beginning to resonate with people. I was learning I was Changing what I was doing. I wasn’t battering the market over and over again with the same message.

So what we seek to do is find the smallest viable audience. What’s the group The Right group that you need to Target to work for to be generous to and then what are the signals short of overwhelming success that let you know that maybe you’re learning something. Maybe you’re getting better at what you’re doing.

So I can’t tell you what those signals are but Can encourage you to look for them because the people have come before you have looked for them and they have persisted because I don’t believe it’s productive to say I’m going to ignore everything and stick with this forever because sometimes that works but it usually doesn’t it said this is Mike in Toronto Canada.

I recently completed a Myers-Briggs personality test and found the whole process and conclusions quite interesting. It’s quite common for psychologists or counselors to issue these tests and use the results.

Results as a lens for considering and recommending new career Pathways and opportunities or they can be used as a tool in relationship counseling that helps improve communication and understanding between partners though after going through this process. There was something alarming about the results in that I didn’t necessarily want to be defined or limited by the qualities and attributes for a certain personality type felt the touch fatalistic.

But on the other hand a lot of those qualities For Better or Worse seem to be quite accurate. So my question is aside from any general comments on personality types of quizzes is what are your thoughts on trying to dig into understanding one’s own personality as a means to help us navigate the decisions and choices. We will encounter in the work that we do or even what work should we do?

Thanks for all you do. I’ve really appreciated and gained a lot from your books and podcast cheers.

Thank you for this and thank you for teeing up my rant about personality because personality is real and personality can change personality informs our culture and our culture and forms our personality. So yes, it is helpful to get some insight about what turns us on and what doesn’t what we naturally dance with and what we don’t but as you pointed out it shouldn’t be a trap.

It’s one thing. To read a horoscope and to think wow this sort of resonates with me maybe this works but it’s another to believe that it’s the one and only truth that it’s too easy to get hooked on generalizations and think that they are about us and immutable but they are not immutable these are tools and we can use them as leverage to get to where we want to go.

So break my heart if someone got trapped into thinking that they are only entitled only Open only able to do a very small range of contributions to our community. It’s just not true, but too often were Paralyzed by fear, and even a horoscope gives us just a little bit of confidence. I know that we can do better than that and the way we do better than that is by doing the work and then feeling motivated not the other way around.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible. Or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution.

You’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up when you got a face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. Look, it’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -lots-of-questions- <==

The cool thing about knock knock jokes is that someone always says who’s there? There’s a question and then there’s an answer and today and all question episode to wrap up season 7 of akimbo. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second with answers to eight of your questions. But first here’s a message from our sponsor Hi spend it at you.

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It’s an absolutely Be life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories.

I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving is in the receiving we got to not only learn about storytelling.

We actually got some practice using stories in our everyday life. The biggest shift. I’ve found is now my own stories and the stories that I really want to tell are bubbling to the surface. I can’t stop seeing them whether you’re just starting out or you’re an experienced.

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Hey Seth, my name is j. I’m from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m from a long line of teachers and although I currently make a living as a digital content creator and I do teach a lot of students online through workshops courses public speaking podcasting you name it whenever I bring a lot of the ideas that I’ve learned through digital education.

Or that I’m learning through people like you whenever I bring these ideas to my family full of traditional Educators. They bristle and I think in part a bristle because who are you Seth or Jay to not be from our world and to be proposing how we do our work. So obviously there’s a misunderstanding and a better way to package the information, but I’m curious how you would go about winning over traditional Educators who are Jaded by the administration who believe that folks in Tech or online entrepreneurs have this Cavalier way of supposing they know the best solution.

How would you start winning over evangelists in the more traditional world of education? So to start thinking better about what education should be thanks for kicking this off.

You’re pointing out something about marketing as much as you’re pointing out something about education, which is that it’s very difficult to change someone’s mind and it’s really hard to lead without enrollment and so in every Killed when new ideas arise there are people who view those new ideas as a problem is a threat as silly as not worth their time because the new ideas might be unproven because the new ideas don’t match the way they see the world and mostly because new ideas bring change and change brings uncertainty and if you like things the way they are if you’re comfortable with your status and you have a sinecure place that feels safe change. JH is not your friend.

And so yes, you are right people in Silicon Valley are insanely Cavalier about just about everything. They think that problems are easily solved and they’re almost always not easily solved and the plan never works out the way they expect there’s no business plan that any company has ever created that matched what actually happened in the real world, but that wasn’t the heart of your question the harder your question is how Do we gain enrollment from folks who aren’t on board and the answer regardless of whether it’s education or not is we take responsibility and give away credit.

We Model Behavior and let other people follow that many people who have earned the right to be in front of a classroom who have their masters who have paid their dues who understand the ins and outs of the system aren’t signing up to say, what’s the Innovative new thing I can do. Now that the pandemic has shifted everything upside down instead. They’re wondering how are things going to get back to normal?

They’re not showing up at school ready to take a risk. They’re showing up at school eager to do their job the way they see their job. And so the opportunity of insurgents of leaders of people who want to innovate is to show up in a different way to model the behavior not to insist that other people change but to go first and when it doesn’t work explain what didn’t work, And take responsibility and when it does work, let other people take credit because they’ll grab that idea. They had quote all along and start to use it as well.

This is the way every system changes. This is the way education will change as well. We need folks like you who are out there in the front lines experimenting innovating because as we will see in our next question, the world really is upside down. Thanks for doing this work.

Hi Seth. This is me. Mariah from New York and here is my question. I have three children two of whom are in elementary school second and third grade and a 14 month old the virtual Learning System is quite a challenge for us. We navigated as best. We can visiting the online apps completing assignments and attending Google meets with the teachers this fall we have been on a hybrid schedule on Virtual days. I am balancing my time between my business their And managing care for my 14 month old a new positive effect of school is that teachers seem to have more freedom to be creative. They use outdoor classrooms and incorporate more game playing into the day and it feels very natural and more open to new ideas and curriculum more challenges arise on the virtual days in trying to guide them into the virtual meet the teacher trying to converse with the kids online and messaging the assignments to accomplish and then the parent dissipation participation being an awkward Edition for all of us The children now see my partner and I at our computer so often an alliance between work and home life are now very blurred.

We’ve spent much of our parenting years limiting screens at home. And now it seems as though we are all in front of our screens more than ever. Listening to your past podcasts on the education system and your recent podcast about Zoom Sebastian’s I’m curious to know your thoughts on how the system could evolve for the better.

And what can help these school-aged children the youngest population specifically and these times of virtual exchange. Thank you for all your sharing and insight. I was a designer and Acumen a few years back and I followed you ever since thanks again. Thanks for this.

Your kids are really lucky to have you this pandemic has turned so many things upside down not the least of which is schooling particularly for young kids because parents particularly to Couples, but all parents are dealing with the challenge of having to do their work having to make a living at the very same time. They’re trying to raise their family the best they can and so parents regardless of whether they’re single or double income whether they’re doing it on their own or in a team are under stress. They’re under stress because they’re trying to make a living trying to do their work at the same time. They’re trying to do the best job. They can of parenting and many people are working at home, which is It is really stressful because what it really means is you’re living at the office and so boundaries are hard doing two things at once is hard multitasking doesn’t really work and kids kids need us and so how to handle all of this. Well, the first thing that I would say is you’re doing great and you need to cut yourself and your family a lot of slack because we built this system based on a steady state. We optimized it for a hundred years organized around. School buses and apples in the lunch box and all the rest of it and all of that got disrupted.

So there’s no way it’s going to be the same as it was there’s no way that we’re going to be able to relax into the existing system because we haven’t figured out what the existing system is yet, but then the second thing that I would share with you is this the real opportunity here if you’ve got an eight-year-old or six-year-old or nine-year-old is not to teach that kid how to get into college not to teach that kid calculus.

The real opportunity is to teach kids to learn to learn to learn to get along with each other to be able to understand that you can’t say you can’t play that what we are teaching kids to do before even Middle School is simply the act of projects of inquiry of cooperation of executive function of metacognition thinking about thinking These tasks have gone by the wayside because we tested the things that were easy to test.

So the opportunity whether or not you keep your kids home whether or not they take a gap year at the age of eight is to help them understand that spending the day with a coloring book is absolutely fine. As long as you do the best you can with the coloring book. Nobody needs you to do great on a standardized test when you’re eight, there’s no function there. It doesn’t damage. Straight any ability for the future but self-directed project-based learning.

That is something we can teach a kid from a really young age from the age of three. There’s a difference between completing a Lego kit by following every instruction and completing a Lego kit by building what you want to build but finishing it finishing it and make it something you’re proud of and doing it in cooperation with someone else that project-based self-directed learning is something we can teach our kids and it turns out that the fact that you can’t sit next to them. The whole time is a plus because what we’re trying to create is an environment of curiosity and inquiry and the idea that the kids can do it themselves.

So no, we’re not abandoning them. But we’re also not saying you must comply and you must get ready for the test. There’ll be plenty of time. For that right now, we’re teaching you to learn to learn. Thanks for this question.

My name is Leroy and for nearly two years.

I’ve been creating a business based on something identified with a demographic group that I’m a part of, you know, remarkable was pretty difficult to come by but through new voracious studies and practice. I believe that’s him there and this Is part partially based on the reactions to those? I share my story on my products with.

Problem is I’m a bit afraid to go to market. Although I have everything in place including a bit of funding. I’m afraid that I will not be able to keep up with there’s an initial surge in sales on a website. How can I prepare for this how do I he’s myself into the market as a one-man operation will have to design design the graphics. I design most of them already and print them and gar makes men’s and on and another merchandise.

And is this I know how Kickstarter comes in and I’m not insured. Do you have any advice and you know I can ease into the market. Thank you so much. Thanks for the for you. Work man.

Oh, I totally get the feeling of not being ready and I can understand why you are hesitating because this Parts really juicy. This is a really good moment to be in you’ve done your planning you feel the potential you see the opportunity. The next step is fraught pressing that button that says ship it’s fraud. But if it doesn’t ship it doesn’t count and shipping to the market will teach you an enormous amount. Out mostly it will teach you that nothing you planned on worked out the way you expected.

It will teach you that while some people won’t be able to get enough of what you did. Some people won’t get the joke and you’re going to have to iterate and iterate and iterate the analogy I’ve got for you. The best one I’ve got is you can plan for a really long time your trip to the Grand Canyon. But until you start going to the Grand Canyon when you hit detours when you realize the car needs gas when something comes up, The way that is when you’re actually taking a trip to the Grand Canyon, so whatever project or service you’ve got in store.

I’m imagining it’s of service to people it’s generous. It’s going to help them get to where they’re going. So don’t hold back bring it to Market a small Market don’t launch it on some national TV show Bring It to 10 people if they tell 10 friends each you’re on your way if they don’t you’ve learned something important.

And then you can cycle and then you can cycle again this cycling. That is the work. The planning is fun to planning is important but the cycling that’s the work.

He said, this is Dayton from Salt Lake City USA. First off Kudos on all to MBA becoming a b Corp.

I think that’s amazing. But my question refers back to the episode the zoom Revolution, where in your List one was on gamification of interactions using the zoom technology. Were you implying in that particular one that that the use of this technology creates a meritocracy something that something like what Bridgewater is doing now?

Anyways, thanks really love the podcast.

Thanks for this Dayton. Yes, you’re ahead of me. As soon as the industrial entities get their hands on a new game. They can invent they will turn it into a game that can be played mostly to their advantage. And so the example of Bridgewater is a fine case people who go to work at Bridgewater our competitors, they like to win and so the game that’s created at Bridgewater is a game not with board pieces in Chutes and Ladders.

But with competition with scorekeeping with apparent transparency and a lot of competition and so yes gamification of meetings is inevitable. And the question is will we Embrace games that make us feel good. They get better creativity out of the meeting that use our time more efficiently or will we become victims two games that benefit other people, of course, that’s a up to us, but we have to see it coming and part of the reason I made that podcast episode is so that we could see it coming.

Thanks eisah.

This is Gwen calling from Los Angeles. I have a question. It’s about the last episode about the zoom Revolution. I am a food photographer and I was thinking of starting a zoom group for other food photographers to discuss the same problems that I’m having us.

Lancer in hopes that maybe they have something to say about it or some wisdom on the topic and my question is if I’m looking for people who have are having the same issues as myself. Can I just make it for people like me and not think about who else would be interested in this?

That’s my question. Okay. Thanks.

Bye it is a great question in the answer. Of course is yes. This is the only group you can organize that a group that says anyone who wants to join the group join the group isn’t much of a group if it’s generic. The goal is to be specific to be particular to be peculiar to say, it’s just for people who are in this moment of their lives.

Now, there are lots of variations of what those people are and whichever And you pick is yours. If it turns out no one joins. Well, you haven’t lost anything but if the wrong people join, that’s the problem so we begin by identifying who the right people are. Thanks for this Laura.

Hey Seth, this is Jared from Melbourne Australia. First up want to say thank you for the work that you do. You’ve been such a big part of fundamentally transforming how I view my role in its culture in work and in mark getting I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ratchets these mechanisms that we build into our culture an entire economy that drive our outcomes in a particular direction.

You see I’ve mostly heard you talk about ratchets in a really negative sense before and I’ve been really thinking about ratchets and how many positive ones I could see as well as about how many negative ones of saying And your episode in the game theory of carbon was the most positive I’d heard you speak about them and it’s inspired from that. I really started thinking well shiny building really really good ratchets that have the kind of outcome and consequences that we want.

Is the most powerful thing that could possibly be doing to change our culture and create the kind of outcomes that we want to have so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. And if that makes sense, I would love more on you from you about how we create ratchets that give us what we want.

This is a great Point Jared and thank you for giving me a chance to chime in here. Yes. I completely agree that the network effect and ratchets and Game Theory are the engines of our culture change and they have been for a long time and what we’ve learned from the Internet is that the network effect the idea that something works better when other people are using it turns out to be the thing that can change our culture the most quickly to get an idea to spread the effectively, and so if I haven’t been clear when I point out negative examples of this, I’m trying to do that to highlight the pitfalls of Doing It Wrong of doing it selfishly of doing it for the short term and hoping that we can lay the groundwork for how we can persist with positive ratchets and there are so many in our lives that people are healthier than ever before that’s a ratchet because when you are surrounded by people who are healthy you are more likely to You want to be healthy and we could go through a long list of things that spread in that way turns out that for a long time organized education was a ratchet that turned in One Direction and it was the disruption of the internet and the idea that quick hits race to the bottom talking about stuff that isn’t true just because it gets you a click that disrupted a long long ratchet toward rational.

Measured scientific method thinking and so yes, I do believe that there is an enormous opportunity in front of each of us in our own circles to create these opportunities. I mean if we go all the way back to Alcoholics Anonymous, which is about as low Tech a tribal organization tool as you can imagine, it is also one of these ratchets, so it’s right in front of us. We’ve just got to decide we care enough to do something about it.

Hi Seth. This is Adam from Oxford in the UK.

I really enjoyed your recent podcast on the zoom Revolution.

I was struck by your optimism on how this is revolutionizing the way we collaborate and how this will transform how we work together in the future. I’m really interested to hear your views on whether limits for Creative teams using these tools are today and what the theoretical limits are in the future.

I’ll use an example of one of the highest achieving creative teams in history The Beatles could John Paul George and Ringo and producer George Martin? Have created a masterpiece such as Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band remotely and further to this what if they had never met and not spent thousands of hours playing together in Hamburg Germany in the early years bonding whilst on tour on tour buses and in hotels could the intangible magic of happened another way.

Thanks Adam a question that integrated The Beatles and zoom has to be a good one. I think the thing that gets in the way of creative teams using these new technologies is fear. And momentum, there’s nothing about the technology that causes it to be magical or causes it to be non-magical the telephone enabled far more conversations between editors and authors.

Then ever would have been possible a hundred years earlier. I don’t think we point to the telephone and say the telephone enabled this book to exist but the fact is this book wouldn’t have existed without the telephone. Well now we’re multiplying times a hundred. And I’m remembering those classic Harlem Globetrotter moves that I saw when I was 12 years old and my parents took me to the auditorium in Buffalo to watch the Globetrotters play those no-look passes.

The complicated moves the backs in the fourths. The Globetrotters were one of the only teams that figured out how to do that in basketball because everybody else was so busy trying to score a basket as opposed to working together, but I think that what can happen in zoom and is already happening. Is a level of collaboration that we couldn’t conceive of even if we’d spent years in Hamburg playing in Smoky bars. So there’s something very special about shared hardship about shared magic that happens in person. I’m not minimizing it at all. I miss it a great deal, but it is also true that with proper organization and structure George Martin and John Paul George and Ringo could put together something. As magic if not more magic than Sergeant Pepper because at their disposal was a high-efficiency way to collaborate without all the cruft without all the arguments. So I believe that we are going to see an explosion of Cooperative creative work to get done by people who find each other not because they are geographical proximity not because they’re just down the street in Liverpool, but because they’re the right people in the right. Place at the right time who choose to enroll in a journey together to make something extraordinary at least.

I hope I’m right. So say I’m out. Yeah and then convicted as a sort of chipmunks.

We’ll be back in a second with two more questions, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Hey sup. Hi.

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My question is and that completes my question. Well, as you can tell from the previous questions, I do love hearing from you if you’ve got a question about This or any previous episode just visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki and Bo link2006. Click the appropriate button.

So at least for me, there’s a strong Pole to put thoughts on PowerPoint or video.

However, you’ve often encourage the use of memos instead.

My changeable.

Thought is has been that PowerPoint might have more impact and is more likely to get red, but perhaps not so I wonder if you control drill down a little more into memos when to use them and what you want to see in the memo. Thanks so much. Take care now.

Bye.

I totally agree that a PowerPoint or a video particularly a video can spread faster and touch more people than a memo if your goal is to control the narrative and to show up for a lot of people that’s the way to go. My new book will not reach nearly as many people as a blog post or a video will or even this podcast on a good day.

But I think the key element is controlling the narrative if you Video you’re telling us what you think if you’re standing up there with bullets in a PowerPoint. You’re telling us what you think you’re creating a deck. Here it is. This is what I had to say. But if you share a Google doc, you’re inviting us to go at our Pace to dig in to make suggestions to make comments to make edits.

It’s a different sort of communication. It’s interaction and writing which is only been around for thousands of years not hundreds of thousands of years is Different than oration, it’s different than making a video because writing the digital nature of writing only 26 letters available to everybody where people can chime in where people can look deeper and deeper. We don’t do that with a video. We don’t watch it three four five times we watch it and then we move on and so yeah, I love making videos and this podcast and yes presentations without bullets, but memos memos are designed for interactivity. An invitation for people to engage.

So I’m in favor of all of them. Hi Seth.

My name is Peter from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You talked a lot about being indispensable doing work. That would be missed. If we were gone. The question I have is for those of us that maybe are recent college graduates and we have an idea of where we want to go. What’s the distinction between, you know being a cog in a machine and And just paying your dues on the way to where you want to go.

Thank you for wrapping up this all QA episode. Here’s my answer the system. The one that pays us is based on scarcity industrialism often being a cog showing up and doing what we’re told doing it in the way that we said we would do it and an exchange getting what we were promised whether that’s will this be on the test and here’s an A or yeah, I’ll do this shift and then you’ll owe me 80 Dollars, so we need to do those things to pay the bills until our side hustle until our craft until that thing. We are bringing to the world. Our practice earns us enough trust that people want to pay us for what we do.

So I’m in favor of making sure you’re paying the bills. It’s just really important. You don’t get seduced lulled into a sense of security. By the industrial system and I’ve seen it I lived in the law school dorm for a year. I’ve seen what happens so many of these students show up at a fancy law school thinking they’re either going to do public interest law or get elected to the Senate and then the next thing you know, they’re grinding it out as an associate on their way to partner because the system the game is set up that they keep doing that and they have no time to pursue the activities that would make things better.

And so the purpose of the practice is to begin now. Not to quit your day job not to insist that the world show up with prizes when you first begin, but to have a practice a daily practice of regular practice of shipping creative work and you probably won’t get paid well for it at the beginning you might not get paid at all.

So yes, by all means keep your day job, but then over time Drip by drip day by day you make a contribution and if you make enough of a contribution if your particular enough peculiar enough, Most important remarkable enough people are going to figure out that they’re going to have trouble living without you.

Thanks for the work you’re doing thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason. Reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question.

It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -queuing-theory- <==

Here’s a seemingly unrelated trivia question to get us started name a word in the English language that has five vowels in a row in the middle of it. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second. But first here’s a message from our featured nonprofit build. Don dot-org check them out. They’re doing important work.

I’m going to start a chocolate because I believe the fight against poverty and illiteracy is a very big fight and it’s one that we need to be universally together in we started a chapter together and it proved to be a really great way for us to develop our leadership skills and get involved with a larger organization that would Empower us to change our lives in the lives of individuals around the world in our in our own Community what I took away from this whole experience.

Was that the more you give the more you get The harder I work to improve the lives of others the more I gave me a life changing experience in return Yes queuing has five vowels in a row.

And the reason it’s only semi irrelevant is this if you figured out the answer or even if you tried to figure out the answer the question is did you start with the word a and then the word a a and work your way all the way to Z back trying to find the answer? Probably not. Not probably your brain if it works like most people’s brains started scrambling its way through possible answers. We’re not exactly sure how the brain works, but we know how it works at a bank and we know how it works at a supermarket.

This is the idea of queuing theory and queuing theory is far more important than we think when it’s time to think about cultural revolutions first a example from a writer named John Dee cook imagine that there is a bank and it only has one teller imagine that it takes 10 minutes for teller to serve a customer and also Imagine That on average randomly customers arrive 5.8 an hour what that means if you do the math, of course is if they arrived perfectly spaced out there would never be a line because every 10 point something minutes a new Amber would come in and be served. However, they are not arriving perfectly timed. They are arriving randomly.

It turns out and this is stunning if there is one teller and customers arriving at this rate on average a customer will wait nearly five hours to be served. This is astonishing to think about I did the math. It’s true, even though the bank is only open. For eight or nine hours in a row and the first person doesn’t wait at all. The average person will wait five hours.

But if we add a second teller just one more teller, so there’s two instead of one instead of going down to two and a half hours. It goes down to three minutes a 93 x difference. Well, when we think about it, we understand why because usually there’s only one or two people waiting and that second teller completely eliminates that weight and lets the bank absorb the extra traffic where did queueing Theory start it came from the Copenhagen phone company as long ago as 1909 because if you’re going to build the phone company you have a queuing problem.

And the problem is you need operator standing by ready to move those cables to connect one phone to another and you need to make some estimates as to when People are going to want to make a phone call if three people want to make a phone call at approximately the same time and your goal is to have people be able to make a phone call when they need to make a phone call.

You’re going to need three operators. And before they figured out how to make phone calls automated. It was estimated that as many as half of all the women in the United States. We’re going to have to work as telephone operators to deal with the demand for phone call. When were thinking about queuing Theory we’re considering several factors.

One of them is how often does the next person who is going to demand service show up another one is how many people are there to serve the next customer and what we know is that different kinds of service offer different variations? If you go to a busy Whole Foods in Manhattan, what you will find is a Corral in which all of the customers wait in one line and then each person is allocated to the next available cashier what you might find at a typical Supermarket is you’ve got to pick your own line. And if you pick the wrong line, you’re going to feel badly because you always pick the wrong line researchers want to know about balking which is what happens if Customers see that the line is too long from outside the store and don’t even bother coming in jockeying which is what they call it. When you’re moving from Line to Line sure that you’re in the wrong line quickly moving to a shorter one thus making it easier for the person providing service and of course reneging leaving your cart filled with frozen food and walking out of the store in a huff these behaviors change the way that we do the math.

Also, the person is offering the service has to make a choice. Is it first in first out otherwise known as first come first serve. This is the way most of us think of as being the most fair or is it last in first out which means that the customer who came in the last get served first. This is a stock. This is what happens to the plates at the buffet line.

Or perhaps processor sharing can occur in which one service person can serve more than one person moving from one to the other. This is what happens when you’re in chat support online and you can’t figure out why it’s taking so long to finish typing their response. The answer is they’re working with more than one person or perhaps the organization decides to stack People based on priority.

Putting the most profitable customers first putting the most annoying customers first. Maybe it’s the supermarket deciding sort of perversely that the fewer items you’re buying the more likely it is that you will be in a short Line This is called shortest job first. And so what does this have to do with changing the culture the Insight is this that when a new technology comes along that blows apart queueing Theory?

It is eagerly adopted. So the queuing theory for buying an airplane ticket used to be you had to go to the airport or to the ticket Bureau. Wait in a line when there were only two or three agents servicing you and buy your ticket that American Airlines came up with the saber system, which was a timeshare computer that allowed travel agents to bypass the Q.

So now instead of waiting For an agent on the phone or at the ticket agency the agent could instantly look up a ticket without waiting long at all because the computer was doing processor sharing you still had to wait for your travel agent to be free. I remember 40 years later sitting in the travel agents office waiting for the person in front of me who I don’t know is going to Latvia or something to finally finish so I could sit with the travel agent.

Well, we all know what happened kayak in the rest of them show up and now queuing theory is irrelevant when it comes to buying an airplane ticket because there’s an infinite number of doors and there are no agents queuing Theory then shows up when it’s time to load the plane because the plane only has one door.

I’ll wait People’s Express came up with the idea of loading from the back and the front by having two doors instead. Of one they loaded the plane in no time, but maybe the plane could be loaded even more quickly Southwest Airlines got rid of reserved seats. Why? Well, one of the reasons is that the Panic that people have that there won’t be a seat for them, even though there’s always a seat for them means that people race onto the plane and sit down faster to make sure they have their seat.

Southwest Airlines deals with queuing Theory by creating anxiety or perhaps this idea which I’ve never actually seen done in practice imprinting on the carpet at the airport all of the seats so that everyone would go stand on top of their assigned seat on the carpet before they get on the plane so that then the plane could be loaded even more quickly but back to this idea of getting rid of the when it comes to serving people serving people with computers because processor sharing has now made it that you don’t wait for the Mainframe to get around to serving you what most lay people don’t understand about the internet is it is based on TCP IP and other forms of processor sharing that what happens is the signal that is coming to you with your email in it or whatever is on that webpage is thing from computer to computer to computer without ever having to wait in a line. Think about what happens when we order food in it used to be that if you wanted to get a pizza from Johnny’s Pizza in Mount Vernon, New York. There was only one phone.

So if you tried to call at a time when someone else was making an order you were out of luck. Now when we hook up the internet to restaurant delivery services and terminals, lots of people at the very He same time can get access to the information or ordering that they need I am not arguing that any of this is a good thing.

What I am pointing out is that it is one of the symptoms of a change in the culture the library the library has a line if you want to get one of the best-selling books put your name on the waiting list. There is no similar thing going on with the Kindle. Someone wants it on the Kindle. They can have it on the Kindle that what the internet has done is added processor sharing to queueing Theory so that almost all the time the line goes away, but umin beings you and being sort of like being online. Sometimes it wouldn’t be that difficult to engineer Disney World so that there wouldn’t be much of a line that you could blow through it seeing more rides in less time if they just coordinated everyone’s actions, but I don’t think it would be as fun.

My dad and I used to ski it Kissing Bridge in Buffalo New York at 8:30 in the morning on a Saturday. We were the only people there we never waited in a lift line up down up down up down. I’m not sure it was always more fun than the pleasure of anticipation of figuring out that you’ve earned something that what we are seeing in little tiny pockets of the internet. Is that scarcity creates value that rankings and queuing Theory?

Make people feel like they’ve gotten something special that one of the things that goes on in an auction, which isn’t quite queuing Theory but is closed is this you don’t have to justify how much you paid for something in auction. You just have to justify you paid a little bit more than the number two bitter and the story that we tell ourselves when we win an auction isn’t necessarily a story about what we paid or even what we got.

It’s a story about Winning a story about coming out ahead in the queue. So when we look at the next Innovation when we try to consider who is going to create value it might be worth looking at the fact that some Innovations blow up the line that adding that second teller gave us a 93 x Improvement and how long we have to wait in line and if we can make the line go away if we can serve more people. People if we can figure out how to do it with equity and dignity.

We might end up creating value. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with answers to some questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Half my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new product. This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Hey sup. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. Please bring on the questions. We’ve got plenty and backlog, but we’d love to Of dead yours as well. Visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button some questions this time about creative work perfectionism and being adopted by the market. Here we go.

Hey Seth, this is Max from Brooklyn New York.

I just finished listening to your pursuit of perfection episode, and I had a question about the 10. Between shipping creative work and feeling like a hack doing it. So I’m going to spiring screenwriter and I often get to a point in editing my work to where I feel like we’re I question whether or not it’s good enough to ship one of the words to send out to people or whether or not I should keep working on it and a lot of times if I’m honest I feel like laziness can affect me and I will just get to the point where I will just say I’m tired of editing this thing. I just want to send it out and I send it out and I worry about whether or not that’s me just shipping out the work and waiting for the world feedback and getting started on the next thing you continuing to do that and showing up or whether I’m doing it simply because I just don’t want to do it anymore because I’m taking the easy way. Out and so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Thanks for everything. You do.

Thanks for this Max. I think the key phrase you used was that your might be tired of it or that you might be lazy. And so we need to distinguish between perfectionism that happens because we’re afraid of digging deeper afraid of putting something into the world that might backfire versus the exhaustion that We get from polishing something to a high Sheen because in most Fields a high Sheen is required to get to the next level.

So here’s one way to think about it. If you could hand your editing work to a freelancer to someone who gets paid less than you and they could make it better. Then maybe you should because better in that case means more polished means following the instructions getting rid of the typos. Making sure that the jump Cuts aren’t sloppy that’s different than holding back the work you could do to make it more like you could do it only you could do it to push in that direction. Noticeably is not perfectionism. It’s the opposite. It’s bravery.

It is showing up with your voice for people who want to hear it and understanding the distinction between the two is really important. I know that Is ago I stopped trying to edit the last level of typos perfection in my books. I hire someone to do it. We’ve never even met John does a great job. I don’t do it. He does it and people don’t come back to me and say wait a minute. You spelled this word wrong that puts me further on the hook to be distinctive in the work in the writing and let the Polish go to somebody else. But if you’re in the Polish business and people are higher, New for Polish then.

That’s something you need to bring. Hey Seth.

This is Josh from Omaha as an author. I’ve self published a series of to middle grade books with a third on the way the kids that read my books absolutely love them. And so do their parents the problem is I can’t get new families to give my books a chance. I took your advice and created a free PDF to give away to my Facebook friends. But only one person requested it to lower the barrier to entry. I recorded an audio version of the first book and put it on.

Tube but it premiered to crickets. I also plan to release the book as a podcast, but I don’t have high expectations for its performance. My question is this is it worth putting in the effort to try and be curated by a traditional publisher in hopes. It will raise my status enough that people might give my books a chance.

I’ve had one agent interested in the series and I put three weeks of work into the business proposal only to be rejected in less than an hour with no further explanation. I’m willing to put in more of this type of work. I’m just not sure it’s the best. Of my time and energy. Thanks for everything you do and I’m looking forward to your new book.

Thank you for this and thank you for the writing. You’re doing a PDF is not a solution to most any problem. The purpose of the PDF is to make something easier to spread and if it’s not spreading there are a bunch of reasons why that could be finding a publisher who will curate your book and give you some level of status will only work with perhaps school librarians, but the typical reader has no clue who published a book.

So I’m not sure the question is how do I get a publisher? I think the question might be after 10 people read this why aren’t they sharing it? What would need to be built into the book to make it more likely that people would choose to share it. So when you say to your Facebook followers who wants a free copy and people don’t ask for it. It’s probably because there isn’t sufficient tension to get them over the hump.

I just listed something on eBay with a 99-cent open. Bid no reserve and it’s worth hundreds of dollars. Well two and a half days into it. There’s not one bid. Why isn’t there at least one bid clearly someone wants this thing for four bucks? Well, maybe not because in their head it might be well, it’s too good to be true at four bucks. It might not be what it appears to be and we go on and on cheaper doesn’t always lead to trial what leads the trials the combination of trust and tension and what leads to an idea spreading other people wanting to read your book is something that says this works better if I tell other people about it, so don’t give up persist but figure out probably in conversation with some of the people who read it possibly in conversation with people who haven’t read it.

What does spread what do they talk about what creates enough tension that people want to dive in? Our next question isn’t really a question. It’s a contribution from a great teacher who has something to say about you only live once and fear of missing out ice Earth.

It’s Howard from Hillsborough New Jersey. I was looking over one of your blog posts that spoke about fear of missing out versus knowing I’m missing out or fomo versus Kim. Oh it always triggers my mind to think of the other common expression of YOLO or you only live once that idea that if you knew you only had one week to live and how would you live that last week?

This is a concept I often hear my teenage students talk about when giving excuse to do something that is somewhere between foolish and brave one of the concepts. I’ve challenged them with is what if you turn this concept around and said Tolo tol oh and they ask what is Tolo I tell them to turn the tables and say what if you knew it was someone else’s last week and they didn’t know and you couldn’t reveal it to him.

They whoever they are only live once how would you treat that person Tolo is the only way to go Thank you for this Howard.

You’re right. They only live once is a posture changer. I appreciate you chiming in on this one. And one last question for today.

Hey Seth, this is Roger from Chicago, Illinois in a recent episode.

You mentioned something. I’ve thought about a lot over the years you were talking about how telephone companies will offer large bonuses or promotions to get new customers to switch over and maybe not reward customers that have been loyal to their Over the years I’ve often thought about Marketing in the sense and wonder why there aren’t more companies that reward loyalty.

So for example, maybe you start out paying $100 a month and then as some sort of time ticks on maybe it’s every year your monthly payment gets reduced down to some for to reward this loyalty. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that if you’ve seen it in the market or if anybody’s tried it or where I can change my cell phone plan to but I really appreciate your thoughts. Hope you’re well.

He’s a great Point David Brin wrote a science fiction novel years ago called The Practice effect and it imagined that the laws of entropy worked in reverse that the more you used to saw the sharper it got that everything in our lives could be improved with use which meant that in a society based on capitalism wealthy people would hire people who weren’t well off to wear their clothes and use their tools so they would be even better when they decided to use them. Em, so I got to thinking what would happen if marketers said The more you use it the less it costs until years and years into it when you’re using your cable or your phone service. It’s actually free what would happen if we did that?

Well, one of the challenges is switching costs that many marketers spend a lot of time working on lock in making it expensive to switch expensive to switch your insurance or where you live or your phone number and so we stick Is it and so the competitors need to lower their price to induce people to switch, but if you’re going to do that and you’re going to lower your price for people to stick there is no moment it which your price approaches what you need to charge. So what do we want all the way in the direction you’re describing.

What if getting started wasn’t cheap. There was no inducement or come on. However, it kept getting cheaper and cheaper. Well, if there’s enough of a network effect the Loyalty that you created by rewarding people for sticking around might lead to Word of Mouth and word-of-mouth plus Network effect could lead to lowering your marketing costs making it so you wouldn’t need expensive inducements and come-ons and if we think about it for a minute, we realized that lots of areas of our life where we don’t have to pay an annual fee things like Which tribes do we belong to the fact that you drive a Harley or don’t that you’re part of a spiritual?

Ocean where your status is higher. These are places where we do. In fact reward people for longevity and where the network effect leads to evangelism to Bringing other people in so it might be a breakthrough idea. You should name it after yourself. Maybe someone will run with it. Thanks again for listening.

Love to hear from you.

We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you.

In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason. Reason why we don’t write that book.

It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt nba.com.

==> -pay-the-writer- <==

37 years ago. I was in a jam. I had an idea for a book that needed to be written but I didn’t have a writer who could write it on a lark. I picked up the phone and called an author who it had enormous success just before that with a book called alien based on the movie Alan Dean Foster answered the phone and we work together on a book today Alan Dean Foster 75 years old. His wife is ill and Disney who publishes many of his books including his best-selling Star Wars novel has decided not to pay him anymore.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second. But first here’s a message from our featured nonprofit build on.org check them out. They’re doing important work.

But I took away from this whole experience. Was that the more you give the more you get The harder I work to improve the lives of others the more I gave me a life changing experience in return Harlan Ellison the controversial science fiction author who wrote some of the greatest Star Trek episodes in history is perhaps most famous for a rant.

He did about paying the writer. I sell my soul, but it the highest rates the highest rates. I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it. The question is why should you care? I’m a writer so I know why I care. but why should you care and there are two reasons for this but first a small aside about Alan Dean Foster Alan in addition to being a really good writer and a very nice guy made a living for many many years by writing science fiction novels based on other people’s TV and movie properties because it turns out writing a science fiction novel is not the same as writing a script it turns out that if you send Alan Dean Foster, Screenplay for your movie in a very short period of time he can send back a novel that might be a better novel than your screenplay is going to be a movie and this transaction the idea that the writer will write is fraught and it’s fraught for two reasons.

The first reason is that almost all writers are individuals small small businesses people without a staff. And when I was starting out as a book packager, I work from home like most people these days but few people in those days and at the beginning I went to Great pains to pretend I was in a busy office and then I realized people who write people who invent things like books aren’t supposed to be in busy offices that one of the things that we look for from somebody who’s going to come up with an idea that will change our culture is that it’s an individual.

It’s not a committee but In order for those individuals to do their work, they can’t be reliant on suing people all the time to get paid and so to support our culture for hundreds of years. We have erected a regime of copyright the whole idea that it doesn’t matter if you’re a giant multinational or not.

The deal is the deal and the deal has been straightforward for a very long time. It’s not negotiated because it’s part of the understanding. We’re a big company. We need an idea. We’re a big company. We need a book. We’re a big company. We would like to publish the thing you own a copyright in and so the small operator can focus on their work not on building a corporate institution that can play on an even playing field with other corporate institutions, which segues quite nicely into this idea of the rule of law that the Magic of our jurisprudence system is that we almost never go to court that understanding the basic rules. For example private property make it easier to coexist with one another could someone start planting corn in your front yard and then demand that you sue them sure they could but they don’t because it is understood that things work better when they are working not when bullies start suing people, but when we do what we say We were going to do when we understand the difference between exploiting something that isn’t ours and doing the work. We said we are going to do so, somebody had Disney not in charge almost certainly a lawyer said wait a minute.

I can come up with some complicated legal theory that might save this company $100,000 $500,000 here and there I’m going to go do it and if you don’t like it you can sue me and Alan’s case. They did offer to meet with him. But only if he would sign a nondisclosure agreement before the meeting, which is absurd nda’s after a deal is done make it easier to negotiate in good faith. But before the deal is even discussed that’s pretty much unheard of so what we’re seeing here is a series of bad behaviors on the part of a super profitable giant Corporation taking advantage of a single vidual back to Harlan Ellison get a call yesterday from a little film company down here in the valley and they’re doing the packaging for for MGM on not engine for Warner Brothers on Babylon 5, which I worked on and I did a very long very interesting on-camera interview about the making of Babylon 5 early on when Joe straczynski hired me and they want to use it young woman calls me and she says that we’d like to use it on the DVD can that be arranged I said All you gotta do is pay me and she said what I said got to pay me you said well, everybody else is just you know doing it for nothing.

I said, everybody else may be an asshole, but I’m not I said by what right would you call me and ask me to work for nothing. Do you get a paycheck? Well, yes. I says does your boss get a paycheck. Do you tell you pay the tell us any guy you pay the cameraman you pay the Cutters. Do you pay the the the teamsters when they slept the your stuff on the trucks then? How don’t you pay you as how would you go to a gas station and ask me give you free gas.

So Harlan’s Point probably a little too broad is this if there is no writer there is no Star Trek if there is no writer there is no alien book if there is no writer where do the ideas come from now, we have talked before on this podcast about how culture doesn’t work. If we have to pay every time we share an idea with one another ironically. I’m not paying Harlan for his to sentence rant here because I’m not using it. Commercial Way fair use is really important. I can’t comment on what he said without quoting him quoting culture back and forth to each other is really important.

The other thing we’ve talked about a little bit is the fact that copyright should not last forever. And again, ironically Disney has been in the Forefront of trying to make copyright lasts forever.

The reason they keep extending the length of copyright is because of Mickey Mouse. They even named the law informally the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act because when Disney is the owner of the copyright or the intellectual property, they and their Squadron of lawyers enforce it as hard as they can, but it goes in both directions. Actions and that is the key to this rant and the reason that everybody needs to care about it because it goes in both directions.

Our culture is based on our mutual Reliance on the rule of law that we can do a deal that isn’t 500 pages long with large escrow payments on both sides precisely because we understand what the words mean we understand what the terms mean the deals the deal. We don’t get to insist on renegotiating something simply because one side has more power than the other that the Creator should have the right to say. Yes and the right to say no and that once the deal is done.

The deal should be done. It doesn’t matter if Disney moved some corporate shell pieces around pay the writer. There are always going to be conflicts between fair use. How does this get used? How does this get shared when does money? Hands, does it even make sense to ask Harlan Ellison to appear for free in a DVD and the Bedrock principle of making a deal and keeping it that one of the things that we need to have to have rule of law is that when we lose we have to know we lost because we played by the rules when we won. We need to know we won because we played by the rules if the rules are always in doubt then. Everything will grind to a halt and fortunately for people who love Allen’s work.

The rules are in place. We got to read the books. He has written. We got the joy of the ideas that he has shared and going forward. We’re going to need more of those things more of that connection more of that creativity. So Bob Iger and the rest of the folks at Disney if you’re listening to this, you already know what to do.

And for the rest of us, let’s remember That a handshake deal works for a very important reason the more time. We spend papering over the deal because we don’t trust the other side the less time we have to create the culture that we all want to live in Allen. I hope your wife is starting to feel better.

And I hope that Disney cut you a check soon. And for the rest of us. I hope that we will be able to create the next chapter in whatever we want to build in this. This culture that is based on the ideas that are created by people who care. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening will be back in a second with answers to questions from all over the world. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the akimbo workshops. These are interactive real-time online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2022 finding one that matches where you need to go if you’re ready to level up. I hope you’ll check out a Kimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

Except my name is Kyle reading sound.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is an apology – Caitlin.

Hi, sir.

Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any other episode or whatever is on your mind. And please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo link2006. Click the appropriate button a huge range of questions came in. I’m going to do my best to get to them.

We’ll start with a speed round. Hi, Seth and Jason from st.

Paul Minnesota here quick question about definitions of terms. How do you define classes versus workshops versus seminars versus let’s say experiences. How do you define learning?

Versus education and finally, how do you define school?

What is a school in your opinion? Thanks for everything.

You do. Thanks Jason. Some of you have heard me talk about this before but here we go. The easy one the difference between learning and education learning is voluntary learning brings enrollment with it learning is usually informal learning is something that we want to do riding a bike is something we learn to do walking talking jug cooling anything where we are leaning into it exposing ourselves to momentary incompetence on our way to getting where we hope to go is learning education is a system of coercion. It is based on grades. If you ask the question will this be on the test?

You’ve just identified the fact that this is education you’re not doing it to learn it. You’re doing it to get a piece of paper to get through it to get to the other side education has a role. And it is possible to learn something while you are being educated, but we should be really clear about the difference between them. So during the pandemic lots of schools. Lots of compulsory education institutions have done something they call at home learning however, parents have instantly discovered is that at home learning?

It’s at home education. It’s butts in seats its tests and scores and proving. That you paid attention learning would be self-directed student-centered activities where we exposed ourselves to the things we wanted to learn and leveled up. So, where do we do education in the common vernacular we do it in school that’s different than a workshop where we work. That’s the point you are doing the work versus a seminar which in the business context might be Time away from work in the higher education sense. It’s the place where you are talking with your peers under the guidance of somebody who knows how to make it possible for you to talk and learn at the same time.

Thanks for letting me rant about that.

Hey Seth, this is Anton from Hamburg, Germany. In the preview of your latest book The Practice. I read that one of the most asked question on this podcast is the question. How do I find my purpose? How do I find my passion? And I too struggle with that question. I struggled finding my voice and finding a voice that is useful for the world that I want to represent and I heard you answer that question a couple of times and the answer you give them the book is it’s not about doing what you love. It’s about loving what you do.

But somehow this answer doesn’t lead to an aha moment for me. So my question is What am I hiding from? What is it? I have to see understand or realize too.

Understand that the answer you gave is the way.

Thank you for all the work you do and stay healthy.

Thank you Anton. And I hear you. The thing is that deciding that your purpose is in the work as opposed to seeking work that matches your purpose can be unsatisfying in the short run. It’s unsatisfying in the short run because there isn’t a lightning bolt from the sky a light bulb doesn’t go off over your head. You’re not suddenly fulfilled.

It’s a process it lines up a lot with the way some of the stoics thought about philosophy. Fee you can’t control what the world sends your way. But what you can control is your response or reaction to that and the same thing is true with the work we do I’m not talking about our hobbies are Hobbies things. We do for ourselves things that do not involve a promise to the marketplace.

Our hobbies are sacrosanct. Don’t wreck them by trying to turn them into an Etsy shop because it’s a totally different thing. But once you make it your Or work. You’re not doing it just for you you’re doing it for the people you seek to serve and that choice that grown-up commitment eventually leads you to the path of loving what you do because you can work at it. And as you work at it as you work on the practice, you will begin to discover that it’s better than not doing it.

It’s better at showing up with your arms folded saying well I’ll survive today, but I’m definitely not going. Feel engaged now I prefer the alternative which is choosing to be engaged with the work you’re going to do.

Hey Seth Abhishek here from Mumbai.

I’ve been reading a book the practice and you talked a lot about one way to defeat the ego and the get to work is to be generous. So think about the people that will benefit from the work. I find it quite easy to do when I when it comes to let’s say my day job where relationships my colleagues with my clients.

And even the eventual stakeholders who benefit from what I do, but what about more personal project? So what if what about the music that I’m trying to make or business? I’m trying to bootstrap which is very early stage and I just can’t visualize or think about who might actually benefit from this work.

It kind of feels like it’s a it’s a pretty selfish Endeavor because it’s something I feel like doing and I think about what I might personally gain from it. So, how do you how do I how do I become generous when I just don’t know who that person might be in the future who might benefit from this work.

Thanks.

Thank you have a check for this question and for your honesty as we just talked about your hobbies your hobbies can be selfish. They should be selfish there about you. That’s why you were spending time and energy on them. But that business you believe you should start that side hustle that you are working on. It is so much easier to get it right if you begin from a posture of generosity who wants to hear about this who would miss this.

You didn’t build it who eagerly will pay for it because they don’t want to wait in line somewhere else that when we can approach a business this way not simply to find a niche and fill it but to decide to show up to help people who are glad that we are there that opens the door for us getting the right answer.

The world isn’t even close to running out of unsolved problems. You just have to find one and commit to solving it and I’ll finish with this question, which I heard in a couple forms from a few people including one person in Malaysia.

Hey Seth, it’s Tony today is November 2nd. I read your blog post this morning, encouraging people to vote and habitual non-voters and it made me think of two things that have been on my mind one, you know if we’re making it as In here, but if we assume that habitual non-voters are not engaged in the process do we really want to encourage them to vote if they are making an uninformed decision and that goes one way or the other. It doesn’t matter if they’re going to vote red or blue or or up or down don’t we want engaged voters wouldn’t we want a hundred percent of engaged voters to vote? Not necessarily those who are unengaged and are just voting based on who they might have read the latest lawn sign or scene.

On TV. Thanks for all you do.

Thank you for this Tony. It is very tempting to try to make it so that only the right people vote so that only people who have done quote their homework vote the problem lies in who’s going to pick who’s going to decide Robert Heinlein who was a Visionary science fiction writer wasn’t a particularly good political scientist and one of his ideas with it only veterans should be allowed to vote.

Well we Up with lots of rules about who should be allowed to vote and inevitably making those rules always ends up worse than simply encouraging everyone to vote. The challenge that we have. I think is a Communications challenge which is what do people learn before they vote. And what do they learn as time passes in between votes?

And we’re not doing a very good job of that a we decided that profit-seeking mass media was the best way to inform people about what was happening and B, we decided that an unlimited amount of money could be spent by corporations and lobbyists to communicate to people what the issues of the day are I think rather than deciding who can’t vote.

It might be worth spending some Cycles deciding. How are we going to inform everyone how we going to lay out agenda? Aren’t simply about the crisis of the day about personal battles between one person and another how do we turn our narrative away from professional wrestling and focus it more on long-term chronic problems because informed correctly.

I trust the people around me we have way more in common than we would like to admit but we have divided ourselves that’s happened because of the game theory of of the best way to provoke people into donating money and taking action. I’m hopeful but not optimistic that recent events will help us understand that we need to do a much better job of organizing our culture the flow of information what it means to be people like us doing things like this how to get back to First principles how to decide that fighting among ourselves on this one and only planet that we have is The best way to make things better.

Thanks everyone for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why Why we don’t write that book.

It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt nba.com.

==> -consolidation-publishing- <==

Newell Brands is a consumer facing conglomerate. They own ball jars and Sharpie and mr. Coffee. And if Newell Brands decided to buy paper mate or some other pain company The Wall Street Journal probably wouldn’t write an article about it. In fact, they do own papermate and a bunch of other pain companies.

Here’s the thing last year Newell, Brands sales were more than twice the size of eggwin Random House or as I call them random penguin and yet when bertelsmann the people who own random penguin decide to by Simon & Schuster It’s News. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about publishing Commodities monopolies and culture but Here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth. If you’re part of the group of advertising marketing or PR professionals who follow this podcast, you might not want to miss my keynote for the sharp spring agency acceleration series. Join me on December 10 to 12 p.m. Eastern for alive QA about the future of agencies sign up at sharp spring.com Godin the sessions are free and sponsored by sharp spring. There are Revenue growth platform with sales and marketing automation tools that help agencies grow.

Again that URL is sharp spring.com Goten. Hope to see you there.

It’s a rainy day here in Hastings on Hudson New York, but that didn’t stop me from making this podcast. I want to talk a little bit about our culture and the consolidation of the book business. Why is it news if a huge book? You’re the biggest in America buys another big book publisher from a different conglomerate what has shifted in the world that makes this matter or not matter.

Well, let’s begin with this book publishers have been running an industry for over a hundred years and the structure of the industry is based on a few facts. The first one is that books are returnable completely returnable. The bookstore can keep a book. Look for months or over a year and if it doesn’t sell they can send it back. They’ve made it ever easier for them to do that. They don’t even have to send the book back in many cases.

They can just scan in the code and it’s an honor System. Why would book publishers have such ridiculous policy they do it because the booksellers had a lot of power. They had a lot of power because there’s this scarce amount of shelf space. There’s only room for twenty Thirty fifty thousand books in a book store.

And there are hundreds of thousands of books trying to get in there. So what the Publishers realized a really long time ago is that their customer is not the reader their customer is the bookstore. That’s why you will not find random House’s phone number on any of the books on your shelf because they don’t want you to call them.

They don’t want to hear from you at all on the other hand. There are sales force knows my name every buyer at every book. A store that sells a lot of books the day of organized the entire industry around making booksellers happy. They have a long lead time. They had sales people who would go from store to store. They try to publish books that book sellers want to publish but you’ve already figured out the but one by one independent booksellers are under stress or disappearing and it’s all going to one company.

One company Amazon that doesn’t really care about books Amazon has built an institution that is good at selling everything but has no ability to sell any thing. What do I mean by that? Well, most retailers have Merchants Merchants are human beings who make decisions who have taste who decide what’s going to be in the front of the store and what’s not Merchants are the people who determine and that Pottery Barn feels different than Macy’s because they have put their point of view on display and Merchants had a lot of power at booksellers.

That’s because the books that got promoted ended up getting sold that one example of this is the work the gene Phi well did with her team at Scholastic. They took a big risk when they acquired Harry Potter in the United States and Harry Potter ended up being the most profitable. Book franchise in history because independent booksellers went out of their way to get precocious 10 year olds to read this new book from this unknown author hand selling. It’s called and this mindset that booksellers helped Publishers adopt is a mindset that Publishers brought to Amazon.

Let’s put our best salespeople on Amazon. Let’s figure out how to get Amazon excited about what we’re launching. Next let’s do all sorts of favors for Amazon because we know that Amazon will like that and then Amazon will promote what we do but the thing is Amazon doesn’t do that Amazon is simply an engine and algorithm.

It listens to what the market wants in the short run and it gives it to the market Amazon doesn’t buy 10,000 or 15,000 copies of a new book they buy a three-day supply of five days Supply if it sells they More if it doesn’t sell they don’t buy more the people who work at Amazon don’t have the levers to change things the way the people at other stores did years ago.

I retained the rights to the audio CD of my book The Dip I read it myself and I published it myself. I then made one call to somebody. I knew it Barnes and Noble and I said to them let’s do this. I’ll give you an extra big discount. You’ll put it. It in a big table near the cash register. It’s final sale will do one big batch. No reorders. Let’s go and we ended up selling tens and tens and tens of thousands of copies of a CD for not very much money Barnes & Noble knew it was a good deal for their readers because it was so inexpensive.

I knew that I could lay off the risk and I knew that Barnes & Noble through promotion would sell them all so back to this idea of consolidation. What is Publishing publishing is the hard work of bringing a new idea to people who want to pay for it publishing is not printing the logistics of printing are now available to anyone sure. It takes a little bit of time and some money but you’re not going to get out printed by Simon & Schuster random house or penguin. You can figure that out.

The hard part is to take a new idea and to figure out how to put that idea. Via in front of people who want to buy it. And so the old model was partner with the bookstore and then the bookstore will talk to people who just walked in to buy a book, which is the juiciest Pond filled with fish for someone who is looking to catch a fish. There are already in the bookstore asking what’s new? What should I read?

That’s not the way it works at Amazon. So now the question is Is it in our interest for Publishers to consolidate alert listeners know that I am no fan of Monopoly that once we start taking choices away. Once we let producers off the hook. They gained too much power that instead of asking what’s good for our customers.

They start asking what’s good for us because they can and so ideally what would be great for our culture for people who want to write and for people who to read is lots and lots of Publishers on equal footing bidding against each other with lots and lots of authors seeking to serve them and then lots and lots of sellers perhaps ten twenty sellers on the internet playing under Fair conditions all selling to compete with one another that is sort of an idealized free market scenario, but there’s a network effect and there’s lock in there. Once you own a Kindle. You’re going to buy your books on a Amazon once your inaudible listener you’re going to use your audible credits to stick with Amazon.

Once you’re in Prime doesn’t really pay for you to start looking at other places and pay shipping every single time. And it’s easier to just stay where you are. It’s more convenient and Amazon has kept up its end of the bargain so far by offering unlimited selection and the best prices on books, so it’s sort of Ideal for the reader you get the book tomorrow at the best price any book you want with free shipping and if tomorrow isn’t fast enough you can do all of those things inaudible or Kindle right now, but what this means for the book publishers is that without their partner the bookstore without Amazon willing to be their partner.

They have a challenge.

One thing the big Publishers are doing is they’re bidding against each Either for ads and promotion on Amazon because Amazon doesn’t care who buys the ads and promotions. They sell them to the highest bidder. Well if there are lots of bitters that’s good for Amazon bad for the bidders. So one of the big advantages of consolidating the big Publishers is they won’t bid against each other on promotion, but one of the risks that authors are happy to point out is one of the advantages of consolidating if you’re the publisher Or the shareholders of bertelsmann is you don’t have to bid to buy books from authors. Either that if an author only has one place to sell his or her book.

Well, then a dollar is the best bid. They’re going to get because take-it-or-leave-it. There’s no place else to go unless you want to publish it yourself. And so the Consolidated publisher will seek eventually to not overpay for the Starbucks now. Acknowledged so far that that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re going to treat each one of their imprints as a separate independent entity and encourage them to bid against each other for the star books. We will see if that continues number two, they can get more efficient at buying shelf space and promotion as I mentioned. They shouldn’t be bidding against each other to promote a book that forming a cartel that works together to lower.

Zones, upside will help readers and authors because it will leave more resources for things that are actually productive bidding up. The price of attention doesn’t help the reader and lastly the biggest shift the thing that they’re going to have to do that they’re doing slowly but it’s starting to work is permission marketing that I first wrote about this for the book industry more than 25 years ago.

I sat down with people and RG which is now a division of this giant Corporation and I said, you don’t know who your readers are and there’s a race to see who does and it turns out Amazon won that race. It turns out Amazon knows who all the readers are. They know what those readers want. They know what those readers like and if the book publishers don’t engage in that race, they will never ever have a chance of catching up.

But once they do know who you are and what you want they can cater to you. You the same way they used to cater to booksellers. Now, they need to start learning to cater to book readers to earn the privilege of delivering anticipated personal and relevant messages to readers who want to get them to connect readers to one another they’re capable of doing it in a way that will run circles around Amazon if they choose to because it’s this intent and interest and openness to news that enables.

A book publisher to redefine what they do. They’re not in the business of cutting down trees. They’re not in the business of printing books. None of them print their own books. They’re in the business of organizing readers of being a channel between the author who has something to say and the reader who wants to hear what that author has to say, but this is going to require a significant shift in how they see the world.

So the question is will a Consolidated company one. One that creates a balance with a Consolidated seller that new entity. Will they be willing to rebuild their business model at the same time? They’re trying to run their existing business because Newell Brands knows that people are going to keep buying Sharpies and they hope that people keep buying mr. Coffee and ball jars and they are succeeding not by changing our culture, but by creating a brand that people trust but book publishing. Like that because nobody knows who publishes my book and nobody knows who publishes any of their favorite authors what we care about are the People Like Us who are reading books like we are reading and what we want is to be connected to them.

Thanks for listening to my rant and I still think they should call the company random Penguins. We should write romance novels.

You know what your problem is. You’re not proud to be a penguin proud to be a penguin. Why are we even called penguins? What does it even mean? It’s a great name for us. It’s not so on the nose. What would you rather be a ran? You know why they’re called Rams. These are more mobile than us. We can’t do anything. I’d rather be a sea lion than a penguin. You know how many sea lions die young from too much smoking and drinking trust me. We’re not missing out on anything. We age better than almost any animal on the planet.

You’re right Jimmy. I haven’t been appreciative enough now you’re getting it.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with some answers from questions. Previous episodes, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

Seth my name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question got four great questions to dive into here as we approach the end of the year. If you’ve got a question about this or any other episode, I hope you’ll take a minute to ask. It does visit. Akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo link2006. Click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth. This is read talking to you from Denver Colorado.

I’ve been catching up on my akimbo backlog recently, and I’ve just got to your Zoom Revolution episode from October. You’re 18 points really resonated with me, but it brought up a question that I asked a lot of my And when they start to ran about Zoom calls just being a worse version of meetings.

So how do individuals like them who are generally younger or less tenured people and their organizations change that culture of meetings, especially when it’s driven by more senior individuals who are unwilling or unable to shift away from what they know. I’m excited to share any suggestions you might have with them.

Thanks for your work. I’m looking forward to listening through all the new episodes.

Thanks for starting us off read here is the confusion there is a difference between people changing things and letting you off the hook versus taking action taking responsibility giving away credit and watching the world change in this case Zoom is being misused. It’s being misused by most organizations who are dealing with a The status and control people are working from home, but they’re worried that people aren’t working.

So they are using zoom in the worst way meetings as enforcement meetings to make sure people are putting their butts in their seats meetings to make sure you’re behaving these meetings are enervating. They are sucking the life out of us. We sit there all day when we could have gotten so much more done if we had just used in a synchronous method of communication.

Like a shared doc or slack so what to do about it? Well The Young Turks whippersnappers the people who see A Better Way Forward should have their own meetings peer-to-peer start using it properly engage with one another in a productive way that gets enormous amounts done in very short periods of time and then when the boss finds out give them credit let them steal what you just Tilt the world will change but just as it changed for email just as it changed for websites just as it changed for diversity. It changes from people who are doing the work not from the top down.

Hi Seth, it’s Ross here from Cape Town.

I have a question about research. So I’ve in my career at various stages. I’ve actually my job title has been a researcher, but I did a Bachelor of Arts degree and and and a master’s in arts. But throughout my school career. I was never actually taught.

What it meant to be a researcher or how to research properly.

I always felt that I was missing a trick. So I’m very curious about your methods whether it’s a science thing whether I should have been an engineer if I wanted to be a better researcher if you had any any insight into the research process, I’d really be curious to hear about it. Thanks a lot. I love your work. And I’m going to read your new book. Okay. Cheers. Bye bye.

Thank you Roz.

I’m flattered that you consider me a researcher. I’m not much of a researcher at all. Let me argue that there are two things going on when you are doing research in the eyes of other people. The first one is statistics. Everyone should take a stats class everyone if you vote if you have a savings account if you engage with the out I’d world if you make decisions, you need to understand rudimentary statistics, that’s just clear. But once you know stats it’s way easier to do actual research that has any sense of reality to it because stats help us focus on the data that matters and ignore the data that doesn’t but there’s a second half of research and this is part of what you’re getting at we need to do research in a A way that our peers believe that the standards for research to get a vaccine approved are different than the standards of research. If you’re doing psychology experiments on freshman, which are different than the standards of research if you’re sharing anecdotes on a Blog the method needs to fit what people in your industry expect. So in many fields you got to have a PhD or they don’t count. It it does it matter.

If the research was done, well, that’s one of the signals that they’re looking for. So I am no Paragon of how to do research because I am upfront at telling people I bring you anecdotes. I bring you vignettes and you make your own decision if it resonates with you if it holds true to your experience with reality great, but your mileage may vary and I have never once said anything to the contrary.

Of peers who are way better at research than I am.

And if they say I did the math and I can prove it to true. I often believe them because that level of research matches my understanding of what’s needed in my industry and of stats so go read and I’ll link to this in the show notes the work that big knots semmelweis did when he developed modern statistics millions and millions of Women aren’t dead because some of us figured out how to do real research not because he had a fancy degree.

But because he understood how the world worked.

Hi Seth.

My name is Desiree and I have been following your work for ever since I was taking marketing classes in college for years and years and years. Thank you for your work. I just have had something on my mind and I wanted to send you a voice memo out. The small chance that you might respond to on your podcast.

I love the work that I do as a marketer. I feel like I have great instincts for it. I’m good at it. And I love the nonprofit organization. I work for has this incredible Mission and I really identify with it. I feel honored to work for them. But my struggle is that my immediate boss just works very different for me.

I’ve learned a lot from her and never appreciated. Our time together and just her different perspective, but I do find that I often feel deflated.

She has admitted that she’s motivated by praise and adulation and I just don’t function that way. So I often find in our discussions that she sees her car place in the organization just very differently than what I do and I often come away just filling the opposite. Of motivated, and I certainly have days where I’m able to like find my inner strength and connect with you know, why I’m doing what I do, and that gets me through the day and I can feel great, but I often have days that I just feel pretty discouraged. So I was just love any words of advice you can offer me. Thanks for your work.

Thank you Desiree, and I’m thrilled to hear that your work is going well, and I’m sorry that sometimes you’re feeling Slated when I was growing up when I was 9 or 10 years old. We used to take a shortcut to walk to school that shortcut walked along the fence and on the other side of that fence. I can visualize that fence right now was a really angry German Shepherd named Odin which at the time I felt was the most evil name I could think of and Odin hated me Odin barked and snapped and did everything he could to get through that fence.

Well after a few months of taking the shortcut, I realized Odin didn’t know me Odin was just being Odin and if I wanted to go on that walk I had to walk by the fence, but I didn’t have to take it personally. So like me like you your boss is a person she knows what she know. She believes what she believes she wants what she wants and it’s different than what we know or believe or want.

And if you’re going to work with her that has Be okay, if it’s not okay, if it is completely using you up don’t work there by all means your day your week your month is too valuable to give up if you are taking it personally if it is deflating you, but if you realize that she doesn’t see what you see or doesn’t want what you want. And that’s okay.

You’ve now figured out that you work with someone who you can manage as much as she is working to manage you you have decoded. And what she needs now you have to decide if you’re willing to bring that to work in exchange for all the other things you get that you do like out of that resonates and either way you’re going to come out fine.

Hi Seth, this is Ryan roads in Salem, Oregon. I’ve been really enjoying your new book the practice and it has me thinking a lot about my latest book project with so many crazy things that have happened so far in 2020 from the pandemic to wildfires and all the challenging issues. The world is facing.

It’s been very difficult to focus and it can seem like it’s harder than ever before to stay present.

All of us are feeling the stress of the moment in a lot of different ways. And it’s definitely impacted my own creativity. My question is how do you know when you genuinely need to step away from a a book or any other creative project for at least a little while to regroup rest and not burn yourself out versus when you’re just stuck in your head and need to just grind through it put another way.

How do you know when you’re just making excuses versus when you’re just in a dip that you need to work through? Thanks so much for all you do. It’s really helped. Keep me going through some really challenging times.

Thank you for this Ryan as we wrap up 2020. I think a whole bunch of people are feeling what you’re talking about. It has been an exhausting slog and not only that but it has been evenly distributed in the sense that everyone’s feeling it at the same time on even in the sense that some people have had more resources to be able to work their way through it. Some people have been luckier when it comes to things like health and support but yes a lot.

People are feeling it. And how do we know if it’s a dip? How do we know if we just grind through a little bit further? We’ll get to the other side versus how do we come to the conclusion that were burnt out and that maybe it’s time to catch our breath and the only advice I’ve got for you because it’s local in all situations. Is this has anyone else been in your situation and gotten to the other side?

And if they have are they glad they did so if you’re stuck in organic chemistry on your way to getting into medical school, it’s easy to look at the 485,000 doctors in American say all of them got through this to get to the other side and all of them will tell you that you can get through organic chemistry to get to the other side on the other hand.

There are plenty of authors out there who will tell you that. They have deleted entire books books that Months or years of their life. I am one of them. And it’s okay because then they got to work on another one your particular book your particular project. I don’t know how to tell but one thing I do know is we don’t get tomorrow over again and if you can spend a week or even a month not doing that thing that is using you up.

It might be worth trying because you can always go back to it, but you can’t get tomorrow over again. You for listening. I hope you and yours are doing well as we close out this year. I’m feeling optimism creeping around the corner.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know. And none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not Gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for this.

Success stories I see out there but I can show us consider the alt MBA more than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-talented-mosquito- <==

In 1920 the most famous person who had ever lived Charlie Chaplin got divorced shortly thereafter. He was walking down the street and he was bit by a mosquito that mosquito escaped with its life and went back and fed it to kids a mosquito generation takes about a month. There are ten Generations a year.

That means that since Charlie Chaplin’s mosquito had its kids they have been 1,000 yen durations of mosquitoes. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk surprisingly about talent, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

A seven-year-old kid didn’t in Texas starts knocking on doors and he’s asking for his age and dollars 77 777 he raises 22 Grand we said wow. This is a big idea, you know, everybody in the world could care about clean water everybody in the world has a birthday every year and we have enough stuff. What if we could turn the birthday into a giving moment into an unselfish day our birthday, so people could live longer and have birthdays.

To find out more visit charity water.org.

So this is a really short podcast of rant more likely about Talent 1,000 generations of mosquitoes between Charlie Chaplin’s mosquito. And that one that was buzzing in your ear last night when you were trying to sleep.

The DNA of those mosquitoes is almost indistinguishable mosquitoes have not evolved much in the last hundred years in the United Kingdom. There used to be an enormous number of dead hedgehogs on the road because hedgehogs are really stupid and really slow and they would get stranded in the middle of the road and get run over hedgehogs have evolved in the last hundred years as most of the slope. Stupid ones are dead didn’t have kids.

And so the ones that are left are better at hiding out and that’s why you don’t see hedgehogs on the road as often as you used to and then there’s the famous case of moths which evolved to change from white to gray as pollution and stood covered the White Cliffs of Dover and other parts of the United Kingdom, but back to the mosquitoes and let’s talk about Humans, 1,000 Generations, if we figure that a typical human generation is 20 years.

That means that you are to the 1000th ancestor lived 20,000 years ago twenty thousand years ago. There was no farming. There was almost nothing in the way of organized culture and Manufacturing. It was entirely hunters and gatherers. And if we went back in time and swapped babies from today to 20,000 years ago, no one would be able to tell them apart.

Genetically, there might have been some drift and some small differences, but it is absurd to think that we evolved to get better at playing Cricket or programming computers or painting paintings. These are cultural artifacts. They are not genetic. Traits and so one of the many challenges that I have with things like the Myers-Briggs personality test is not that people don’t have personalities. Of course, we do it’s not that some people are born with a certain Instinct toward one sort of behavior or another. Of course, we are it’s that their horoscopes.

It’s that culture creates such a wide variety of personalities that are suitable for various jobs. That it’s absurd to look at a few letters of the alphabet juxtaposed with one another and assume that tells you if you should be an insurance adjuster or a volunteer fireman. That’s not the way jobs in our culture actually work.

I’ve studied thousands of leaders. I studied tens of thousands of creatives and here’s what I’ve discovered leaders have exactly one thing in common. They lead some of them have Charisma some of them don’t some of them stutter some of them don’t some of them are tall. All some of them aren’t and the same things true for people who ship creative work.

Some of them are garrulous. They can’t get through the day without interacting with other people slapping them on the back. The pandemic is the worst thing that’s happened to their social life others are painfully shy they’ve trained all their lives to stay home on their own. They don’t have a lot in common other than they choose to do creative work growing up in Buffalo, New York. Didn’t know one person who was good at Cricket is that because there’s some sort of trait that makes people from New Zealand or Australia or India good at Cricket, but not people in Buffalo New York, of course not it’s simply that the culture doesn’t encourage people to play cricket.

They say Wayne Gretzky is an off-the-charts talent that he was born to play hockey. Well except almost no one plays hockey. Fewer than 1% of the people on earth have ever played a game of hockey and I’m not sure that Wayne Gretzky would have been untalented at something else. Now. There are personality traits their instincts. We have to head toward one thing or another but it’s a mistake to imagine that we are precluded from doing anything simply because what our DNA says and that of course leads to the crime of racial Injustice. This that what we’ve done is invented this narrative about what people look like and have determined that that somehow means that they’re going to behave one way or another but there’s zero correlation between what people look like and what they are capable of being good at and yes, it’s a crime. It’s a crime against all of us when we say to somebody because you look like this you aren’t able to do that as I hope we can understand almost. Just nothing in our modern culture is driven by how we were wired at Birth we get good at things because we do them and we do them because the culture encourages us or gives us the opportunity to do things and that leads to the story We Tell ourselves if we tell ourselves the story that we weren’t born to do something that we don’t have any good ideas that we’re not suitable to lead or to do serious work or to make commitments. It’s we’ve been brainwashed. We’ve been indoctrinated. We have been tricked into believing something that is clearly not true.

Of course. None of us are as flexible as plastic as we’d like to be particularly as we get older particularly as we get grooved into whatever pattern were in it’s harder and harder to switch but just because it’s difficult to switch doesn’t mean it’s impossible and there are more doors open than ever before.

And so the question is what is keeping us from going through the door.

There’s a thing called an invisible fence. And the way it works is you put a battery-powered collar around your dog and then you bury a wire in the yard with lots of white flags so that the dog can see where the flags are and then you train the dog so that every time the dog goes near the White Flag a little buzz goes off in their collar and then if the dog was a Further they get a small shock like a pinch.

I’m pretty sure it’s not kind to the dog. But almost every dog I’ve ever seen who is properly trained at this only gets to pinch a couple times and then they associate the buzz the buzz the collar makes with the fact that a pinch might come if they don’t stop and this invisible fence works really, well, it works. So well that most owners can take the batteries out of the collar because the Therese aren’t the point anymore that what’s happened is the dog itself has decided to go nowhere near the white flags and part of the myth of our genetic makeup of talent is that we have been pushed and trained to go nowhere near the white flags, even though the doors are open, even though you can show up and lead or make a podcast or have a blog or connect people or start something or make things. Better and so we need to take a hard. Look at what’s possible.

There are problems all around us the worst of my lifetime, but we’re going to make them go away and we’ll do that by working with each other by opening the doors for five people or 10 people not with one Fell Swoop, but from the Grassroots from the people who care doing work that matters for people who are ready to receive that work.

And yeah, we can learn how to do this better, and we have to stop saying I wasn’t born to do that. My personality test tells me I can’t do that. It’s for other people because it’s for us. Thanks for listening. Go make a Ruckus. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from last time, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the akimbo workshops. These are interactive real-time online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2022 finding one that matches where you need to go if you’re ready to level up. I hope you’ll check out a Kimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

Seth my name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is anupam.

Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Whoosah. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece.

Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you if you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please He’s visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth. This is Barack again from Israel now in San Diego, California. I’m thinking a lot about failure recently. My last question to you was about failure to it seems to me like failure / fear is the single most critical mindset obstacle we should overcome. I heard you many times arguing to dance with it when you talk about fail and fear.

I think I understand what you mean and my reference is always the mindset of Zorba the Greek about dancing which I understood is embracing fear and failure with joy as they are part or even maybe the essence of being alive, but maybe I got it all wrong. Can you please elaborate what you mean by dance with it?

Thank you Seth for your teaching. It had transformed my life and the life of the people around.

I think there are two messages that Zorba is trying to teach us. The first one is life is more interesting. If you play it to make a difference life is more interesting. If you get out of your head and connect with other people life is more interesting if you treat it as an adventure and then the second thing as captured in the final scene of the movie is Even if it doesn’t work out, even if it’s a catastrophic ending, it’s still better to dance than to not dance that yes, it might not work the way you hoped but mourning the fact that it didn’t work the way you hoped doesn’t make anything better.

We only get today once what will we do with it? So when I talk about dancing with fear, I’m not saying that the dance. We’ll make the fear go away. What I’m saying is the fear is going to be there no matter what so you might as well dance.

Hey boys.

Did you ever see a mortar splendiferous cash?

Hey Seth, this is Dave from Durham North Carolina, I have a question about your question and answer podcast. The first question asked in that podcast was from a tech person who is asking why didn’t the experienced teachers in his family except his advice about how to do distance learning and in your answer and really in his question was the underlying implication that people should follow the advice and follow New ideas just Implement them though in my experience many if not, most new ideas aren’t worth following aren’t particularly good indeed in the education field and I am a teacher we talked about the flavor of the month.

What do we do in the classroom this month? And then there’s something next month because the original idea did not work. So my question is this how do you think practitioners can distinguish between good ideas new ideas and bad new ideas. Are there any criteria we should be looking for? Thanks Seth and thanks for all you do and your podcasts.

Thank you for this question Dave. It’s a fine question. Because if we think about education over the last 200 years there is almost nothing in classroom pedagogy. That is the Same as it was in the eighteen hundreds. We’re not walking around hitting kids with rulers. We’re not reciting page after page from the primmer.

We don’t have one-room schoolhouses. Generally, we’re not I mean I can go on and on school keeps changing and sometimes it changes for the better. We have figured out a way to teach a lot of people a lot of things but it’s not there yet. It’s not even close to there yet. And I think part of the question we need to ask ourselves is is what I’m doing right now working regardless of whether there is an alternative is this method the one I have right now worth my time worth my students time here is what we have seen over the last nine months turning classroom education into online education is not working that the powers that be the bureaucracy the ones that have tried to Classroom learning into a zoom room have failed have categorically failed by every measure they hold to be important. They have failed and they call it online learning but it’s not learning.

It’s a failed attempt at education and I hope people who are doing their best to are exhausted who are seeking to make things better for kids for parents for teachers. All of them can begin by acknowledging that the status quo is not twerking that makes it a lot easier to try something new something new might work better and one of the frustrations I’ve had since I started akimbo five years ago is that akimbo has pioneered proven and demonstrated again. And again Alternatives online learning that actually works for adults. Yes, but the principles the pedagogy are there for anyone who wants to grab it and yet the Status quo in the bureaucracy didn’t want to have anything to do with it before the pandemic. And now now that distance learning there. It is in quotation marks is mandated. They’re still relying on imperson education crammed into a remote setting.

So I share the original questioners frustration, which is if what you’ve got isn’t working and you need to spend the Cycles. Anyway, why not try something new? So yes, I totally hear your frustration first. It’s the new math and then the new math doesn’t work. I learned how to read from ITA. I had to learn a whole new alphabet just to learn to read and then I had to unlearn that alphabet to learn to read real books. That was a bad idea.

So yeah, there are plenty of bad ideas in education and learning in pedagogy. Yes. Some people should be the Explorers the pioneers and others should learn from them, but we cannot dismiss Innovation out of hand particularly when we’re spending so much time and so much money on a system that can work better than it does.

So, I’m in favor of taking our time of testing it of measuring it of seeing what works, but I’m even more in favor of trying things because trying things is how we make things better. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible. Or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution.

You’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-persistence-of-technology- <==

How long are you going to have a Twitter account? Ten years from now or 15 years from now. Are you going to spend any time on Twitch or Tinder? Are you going to run to see what’s going on on Tick-Tock? Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about tech adoption and Lon. Longevity, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

A seven-year-old kid didn’t in Texas starts knocking on doors and he’s asking for his age and dollars 77 777 he raises 22 Grand and we said wow, this is a big idea, you know, everybody in the world could care about clean water everybody in the world has a birthday every year and we have enough stuff. What if we could turn the birthday into a giving moment into an unselfish day our birthday, so people could live longer and have birthdays.

To find out more visit charity water.org.

In 1976 when I was 16 years old. I got my first email account today in 2020. I spent more than an hour answering email in 1967 more than 50 years ago. I remember listening to The Beatles. I listened to the Beatles this morning. Why is it that some technology sticks around 20 years ago? I had a geocities account.

I also had an AOL account and a CompuServe account. In fact, I spent most of my time in 1995 on AOL Seth would at AOL.com was my email address. We read articles about how texting was the big thing in Japan. And how it was coming here and people said well it might one day but it won’t last very long that was more than 20 years ago in 1998. So many people were using Yahoo! That many people thought Yahoo! And the internet were the same thing and it was believed that their hegemony their dominance over everything would continue forever. They were going to buy eBay and Netscape and that would be the end of the Game, why is it that something’s come and something’s go culture is built on technology books are a technology. They were a brand new idea 500 years ago and 500 years later. People are still buying and reading books and what about board games? People are playing 90 year old board games today cars. Well for the basics of a car the four wheels the steering wheel the internal combustion engine. The driver who is in charge the horn this is 90 years all in a row, but other things they cycle a little bit more quickly Kodachrome had a 50-year run and now we see that the industry of cameras not just film cameras, but digital cameras down 90% movies what you can invite somebody over to watch a movie from 1972 or 1974 without apologizing for but maybe not So Much Anymore that a good 50 year run the Beatles rock and roll that’s a 55-year run geocities went away. But Twitter though, it is technically completely obsolete sticks around.

I want to argue after that opening rant. There might be five or six factors at work here. The first one is this early adopters early adopters are fickle they show up because they want something that is new. They read articles about what’s going on at the Consumer Electronics Show their favorite thing to do with the piece of technology, whether it’s an issue of a magazine or a new form of silicon is to talk about something about it. That’s new and then As Yogi Berra taught us they say well, it’s too crowded. No one goes there anymore.

So the people who were all excited about Raspberry Pi a couple of years ago are now on to the next thing so if a technology is fueled and supported just by early adopters, it’s likely it’s not going to last that long. That’s one of the many reasons tech companies are so focused at crossing the chasm. Them Jeff Moore is idea that early adopters want something different than the early majority the early majority will buy something Embrace something work with something not because it’s new but because it works and so there’s a Chasm of Gulf between the things that are new in the things that work and maybe you can cross that Chasm.

So the argument could be made that if you play in politics Twitter has crossed the chasm. That if you want to be in the discussion among the 10 or 15 million people who live and die for this stuff in the United States, you got to be on Twitter and it doesn’t matter that Twitter is technically obsolete because for people in that industry, it is useful or consider. What happened to wordperfect wordperfect was the best word processor the dominant word processor the word processor forever because after all how could you make a WordPress? The third that much better and then Microsoft Word came along and at first no one switched to word except for some early adopters, but there aren’t that many word processor early adopters.

We’ve seen them before they’ve embraced scrivener. There are people like me who use nicest but in general not too many of us, so just a few embraced word, but then Microsoft did something extraordinary that by hooking it in to the the operating system of Windows and selling Windows across the chasm word came with it and wordperfect. Never knew what hit them.

So here we are 40 years later 30 years later and word is still dominant that is until we start counting online word processors like Google Docs which have the advantage of being free and being networked which leads to the next idea the network effect. What we About culture and about computers is that if it works better when other people use it people are more likely to talk about it.

What does that have to do with tech while the internet has brought Network effects deep into almost everything that we have in Tech that a walkie-talkie when you’re the only one who has one doesn’t do you any good. So you got to get your friends to get a walkie-talkie or a fax machine, but now that we’re on the internet and it’s true for everything a Google doc works better than a word doc because a Google doc is effortless to share and once people start sharing it it becomes sticky because if you want to switch to a new thing you have to persuade every one of the people you got to use the old thing that they have to switch to the early adopters brought people along but now the people hold the early adopters back. Slack worked one of the fastest-growing piece of software in history because you can’t use it by yourself. But when Microsoft and others show up with a competitor to slack they have a problem, which is that teams that are currently using Slack are in no hurry to switch to something. That’s new. But what about books because books don’t really have the same sort of network effect. You can happily read a book all by yourself books benefit from the idea of infrastructure and partners in order for books to become the dominant force of information dispersal in the eighteen hundreds and the 1900 s they needed bookstores. So an entire industry was built on the idea that you can have a little store that you can run yourself as a lifestyle business that sells books doesn’t cell phones doesn’t sell batteries it rarely cells pencils.

It sells books and the book publishers quickly came to understand that their customer wasn’t the reader. Their customer was the bookstore because if they could make bookstores happy, they would get more than their fair share of shelf space. So I got the Shelf space they would sell more books. That’s why the typical reader doesn’t know who published what they don’t need to know. They’re not the customer.

The bookstore is the customer. So now we have bookstores that are heavily invested in books persisting even though they are technologically obsolete because they’re not culturally obsolete that the scarcity that makes it worth owning a bookstore that there are finite number of bookstores and a finite number of books. It has helped keep books vibrant in the face of cheaper faster more networked Alternatives. So what this means is that when book Innovations showed up it wasn’t The Publishers and the early majority readers who are fighting against the Innovations. It was an entire industry of printers and salespeople and bookstore owners that wanted the status quo to remain I think the same could probably be said about professionals with film cameras that once you’re good at Kodachrome what you’re making a living with Kodachrome. You’re not necessarily in a Hurry to replace all of it with a digital technology. It was only when the Groundswell from the bottom up came and swamped it finally with shareable photos that were coming from smartphones that finally the camera industry collapsed.

The next idea is the idea of utility versus novelty geocities had very little utility. You didn’t build a business on the back. Of geocities but sites, like Shopify enable people to build a whole business around it Kickstarter probably isn’t The Cutting Edge in technology anymore. But if you are a professional Kickstarter Creator or a professional eBay seller, you’re not looking for novelty, you’re looking for utility and then the next one the next one spoken as a young baby boomer. Is that baby boomers? I think that everything is about them and so rock and roll persisted for 40 or 50 years. So the movies of the 70s 80s and 90s persisted for 30 years these generational shifts happen very slowly.

But what’s happening now for the first time in history, is that the generation Coming of Age teenagers and 20s? Grew up with a smartphone they grew up with always-on internet with the network with constant shifts in the technological platform. And so as the Baby Boomers die off as we take naps instead of going to see what’s new in technology.

This generational shift is putting together one more giant change in the culture. So when we think about whether or not a Ecology is going to change things. I think we have to look at each one of these five functions all of which dance right next to each other all of which influence each other and then we can decide is this a novelty is it going to be embraced by the early adopters are their Network effects that matter are people from one generation or another driving the change forward, but as William Goldman famously said Nobody knows anything.

It’s way easier after the fact to point out that of course email lasts forever. But no your CompuServe address doesn’t matter one bit. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with answers to questions from previous episodes. But first here is a message from our sponsor.

It’s Maria. Seth my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is on the palm. This is Caitlin.

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Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex Pizza. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you if you’ve got a question about this or any other episode.

I hope you’ll visit akinbode. Think that’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button. We got three questions to go over this week. Here we go.

Hi Seth, this is Jamal from Queens New York to cut the consolidation publishing episode had me thinking penguin.

Another large Publishers can probably have their readers opt-in simply by asking for their emails in the folds of the book.

I you permission marketing.

But what about the upstart when an author artist decides to go off on their own and they have answered the questions was it? What is it for who’s it for and what it’s meant to change.

How do they find and connect with the smallest viable audience? Thanks for your work. Have a great new year.

Thanks Jamal. I’m going to flip this on its head. I think it’s easier for a specific author with a specific audience to earn permission. Then it is for Random House. It’s because I got to tell you I don’t really trust random house and most people don’t either because they’re not the ones who wrote the book. They’re not the ones who have shown up in someone’s life. They’re just the publisher and deep down. I think that people have been taught to believe that big companies will keep expanding how much permission they think they have until they turn into spammers.

So the hard work that Random House faces is not having a random house list because that’s not going to work. What they have to do is organize very tight very specific lists for people who they can earn trust from but if you’re a specific author and you found even a portion of your smallest viable audience, well, then serving them serving them regularly often for no charge is a great way to turn attention into trust. And once you’ve earned that trust now you’re on your way to your 1,000 true fans and is Kevin Kelly taught us. 1,000 true fans is enough.

Hey Seth.

This is been motel from New York City. And I have a question about a phenomenon you may or may not have covered that’s related to the concept of finding the smallest viable audience. And that is of what I think of as audience capacity. I’ve noticed over several years of producing and marketing my shows and it’s sending others of the same genre that rather than continuing to gradually Snowball the audience size for something kind of Max’s out or just hold steady over the last ten years a monthly film series. I produce has always been held until March 20 20, of course in a 215 seat Auditorium.

Our audience turnout has always been somewhere within the seating capacity range of the theater with a low of maybe 185 and on the couple of occasions every year when we sell out your only turning a dozen or so people away. This is regardless of what we’re showing whether I’ve bird or forgotten to send out a press release the size of our email list or even when the local PBS affiliate did a profile on our series on TV.

I’ve been producing and distributing a boutique line of DVDs as 2013 and with one or two minor exceptions sales of each has been in the same range regardless of the amount of press I get or who’s in the movie on the DVD in March of this year. I started doing a livestream show on YouTube with a friend every week and again the number of viewers.

Watch us live and who also then watch this shows that have been archived in the days following his about the same. My question about audience capacity is if this is a facet of The Human Condition and or marketing you or anyone’s noticed. Thanks so much.

Thanks been this fits in very nicely with Jamal’s question because you have correctly pointed out that some things we do will never cross a Chasm the some things we do are just not Destined to appeal to masses and masses of people and not only is that okay. That’s fantastic as long as we realize it that the yield on that theater and I can’t wait post vaccine until we have theaters again is the key if you fill the theater you’ll do fine.

The problem is getting a theater that’s too big and not filling it the yield is what is our return on the We focused on and if we know we have a niche audience we can treat them appropriately. We will not spend all of our time and effort trying to somehow cross the chasm to dumb it down or to even it out. We will instead become ever more specific and ever more peculiar.

So that the audience we do have get the joke and comes back because getting someone to come back is different than getting someone to tell their friends on impact Theory the Other day, you said something that I’ll paraphrase as I do not believe in authenticity.

It’s not correct to think that you can do whatever you feel like and that whatever version of you that pops into your head is the authentic one. The audience does not want an authentic you you do not want an authentic anybody when you hire someone close paraphrase. You went on to develop this sentiment into emphasizing the importance of consistency and that perhaps the right to be authentic or inconsistent needs to be earned.

I don’t think you mean to make it sound like we need to sell our souls for the sake of a paying audience or reshape ourselves into a brand that an audience will pay us for do you believe there is a part of our authentic selves that is worth sharing with the world and can that only be discovered through financial or audience feedback.

Thank you for your time and generosity. City Thank you.

Jonathan for this lovely question. So grateful to hear from you. Here’s the thing if we want to quote share our authentic self with the public with any public. Well, then a transaction is going on. It might not be a transaction for money, but it is certainly a transaction for attention sharing how you feel in the moment with friends and family is one of the great benefits of having friends and family, is that they We’ll be friends and family even after your short tantrum even after the speed bump even after you share your fears or dreams, but if we’re going to a larger group of people if we are showing up as any sort of professional or Community member.

Well, then every time we do show up we are borrowing basically taking someone’s attention and if we waste that attention we have burned there. Trust and it’s harder to get that attention next time and so no, I don’t think we have the privilege or the right to share how we are feeling in this moment. Call it authentic if you want. I’d rather not with anybody. We feel like we just don’t get to do that because our culture belongs to all of us places like Twitter tried to get around that by saying well, you will only be heard by the people who follow you and in the small, I think that is true that when it is originally conceived if you have 50 people following you they have signed up for the full you the you in all of its Shades the problem happens when media companies decide they will grow by encouraging sharing because now it happens is all sorts of behavior outlying Behavior gets shared more frequently than quote normal behavior and what we end up with if we take a glance At any form of social media is it seems like everyone is going crazy.

Everyone’s not going crazy. That’s just what’s getting shared and I’m encouraging you not to do that for a living not to do that as a form of sustenance because what we need to do at some level is get back to the center of doing productive work work that matters for people who care whether or not we’re getting paid for it because we are not just takers from the culture. We are contributors.

To the culture. So that’s my rant.

Thanks everybody for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is. It puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number. One reason why we don’t write that book.

It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

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==> -spirit-of-ecstasy- <==

I’m guessing you own something something really really expensive one of the most expensive things you’ve ever purchased, but you’re not that aware of exactly what it looks like. But before we can talk about that, I want to share the tragic story of Eleanor Velasco Thornton. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

Back in a second to talk about tech adoption and Longevity, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

And a seven-year-old kid didn’t in Texas starts knocking on doors and he’s asking for his age and dollars 77 777 he raises 22 Grand we said wow. This is a big idea, you know, everybody in the world could care about clean water everybody in the world has a birthday every year and we have enough stuff. What if we could turn the birthday into a giving moment into an unselfish day our birthdays so people could live longer and have birthdays.

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Thornton who was known as Thorn by her friends was a secretary with an impoverished background. She lived in the early nineteen hundreds. She was the Secretary of John Walter. John Walter was an editor at an up-and-coming car magazine called the car that magazine was owned by the super fancy Elite status focused Baron Montague.

And John montagu was of course married. He was married to Lady Cecil Victoria constants care, but when he met Thorn he fell in love with her not only did he have an illicit affair with his secretary at the magazine that he ran as a hobby. He also had a 1909 Rolls-Royce Silver ghost. One of the fanciest cars anyone owned at the time.

It wasn’t fancy enough. For the baron Montague and so he commissioned a friend the famous sculptor Charles Robinson Sykes, because it wouldn’t do to commission a nun famous sculptor to craft a hood ornament for his fancy car a way of showing everyone else how fancy his car was that hood ornament was seven inches tall. Of course not only did he commissioned Charles likes to make a Sure for the hood ornament of his car. He asked the sculptor to make the ornament in the likeness of Eleanor Thornton.

Yes, in fact the woman he was unable to talk about in public because of her background of not being wealthy enough was on the hood of his car the idea of these hood ornaments started to spread and one after another rolls-royce’s in the United Kingdom started to have these garish sculptures on on the hood Claud Johnson, the managing director of Rolls-Royce could not abide the so he went to the original sculptor Charles Robinson Sykes and asked him to make an official one.

Well, he used the same model Eleanor Velasco Thornton and crafted the spirit of ecstasy. The owners of Rolls-Royce didn’t particularly like the sculpture, but they realized they had little choice and so it became official and rolls-royce’s at the beginning offered it as only an option. And but virtually every single person paid extra to have that hood ornament on the front of their car.

It has been variously silver plated. It is variously been nickel-plated and every once in a while. It has been gold plated and current models of the Rolls-Royce have a device inside of it that will instantly retract the hood ornament when you park it so that no one can steal it now lots of cars. Back in the day had a radiator right in the front the radiator had a cap and the radiator cap was the perfect place to put some sort of ornament, but that’s not really what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the fact that at the beginning horse-drawn carriages had two sorts of emblems on them.

One of them was a discreet mark from The Carriage maker who did the carriage itself. This was a Hallmark of Way of signing one’s work. It wasn’t that obvious to a passerby but the other thing many fancy horse drawn carriages had were flags flags to indicate just how Elite the passenger inside that wagon inside that Carriage was two passers-by and this flag is memorialized in many of the badges that we see in the front of a car.

So the BMW emblem Mm is nothing but a Bavarian flag in a circle to this day. There are people who collect these badges on eBay a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament from 1929 costs about three thousand dollars, but this isn’t what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is something that’s on the back of your car and my guess is you can’t specifically tell me what it is because on the back of cars for as long as people can remember car companies have been Listing some secret Words. Which model number. How big is the engine does it have fuel injection. Is it a hybrid?

The question is? Why do they do this? The person driving the car knows what kind of car they’re driving the passerby. What are they looking at when they see these inscriptions on the back of the car? And why are they so unattractive has no. No car manufacturer ever taken a typography course. Why do they have such funny letter forms? Why are they filled with numbers and letters that don’t make any sense.

So I have a couple theories Theory one goes back to the flags most cars when they’re working are good enough. So if you’re going to have a car that’s good enough. Why would you pay extra 2 x 3 x 10x more for a car that’s been Better than good enough. The answer is to show bystanders the elite status of the person who is driving the car in our culture a culture where we don’t wear suits and ties anymore.

This is a remaining status badge a way to show up in public and say I have something really nice. We have things called car washes. There are a lot of good. Ins return on investment reasons to get one’s car washed but a fancy car deserves to be shiny. Why not because the person inside can see it when they’re driving but because the person outside can see the signal now, what about the ugly fonts? What about the fact that the kerning doesn’t make any sense?

Well, my limited research has shown that most of the designs of the logos the emblems and the lettering on a car is done. Nah. By graphic designers and typographers, but by car Engineers the person who engineered the car who made that thing that’s not going to break down in their spare time. They made a logo to maybe they based it on the wallpaper. They saw in a French hotel.

That’s how we ended up with that funny plus sign. That is the Chevy logo. Maybe there’s some tortured history as to how it came to be and those Letters on the back. Well, those letters on the back are generally chosen first and foremost for how easy are they going to be to manufacture and it’s only in the last few years. We’ve been able to manufacture amazing typography out of durable things like metal for a reasonable price, but one of the things that goes through the heads of everybody who is making a car is can we remind people of the car they grow? With because a car is such a big purchase. We don’t want to do something flimsy or risky that there aren’t that many early adopters in the car business people play it safe because it’s a status decision and a significant financial decision.

But here’s the real point of this little bit of a riff. when you see cars driving down the road, you are almost certainly paying more attention to cars like yours when you buy a red Honda suddenly you notice just how many red Honda’s there are in the world and when you pull up near a car that’s like yours you are reading the emblems on the back because you got nothing else to do because you’re not texting while driving right you’re reading the emblems on the back and the main purpose of eating 325 with an eye next to it the main purpose of writing 95d the main purpose of saying diesel or Turbo or announcing a new model through the little logo on the back is to make all the people who don’t have the latest version of that car feel like they are behind that you are breaking their self assurance by showing them that there’s a new model out there and They don’t have it that the purpose the marketing purpose of all of those letters and numbers on the back of cars is to make all their previous customers feel insufficient and insecure it’s fascinating to note that recent models of the Tesla don’t seem to be doing this.

This is a huge error from a p&l point of view because the kind of person that went out to buy a Tesla in the first place is a Neo Philly ack. They like doing things that are new well by announcing to every person who already has a car. That’s something even newer has come along what you end up doing as a car company is perversely creating a sort of satisfaction because the customer of the previous model knows that they bought a car from a company that continues to innovate and it creates a thirst in them a thirst for the next one.

Because that’s why they bought the last one because they want the next one.

The car companies learned a hard lesson when the Edsel failed and that lesson wasn’t don’t name a car after your son that lesson was you can’t keep accelerating how soon most people are going to buy a car that it used to be that you had a car for who knows how long the idea that new car models came. Year that it was a big announcement like the New Year in the theater or the New Year in the movies after the Oscar seasons are over there was going to be a new year in cars that you don’t have a 58 you don’t have a 59 you are falling behind if it were up to the car companies they come out with a new model year every month because their goal is to cause people to continue to upgrade Lord knows the computer companies.

Don’t have any hesitation about coming up with new models as often as they possibly can but the difference between a computer and a car is we notice everybody else’s car and that car you just drove by is a billboard. It is a billboard whispering to other people who already know about that car. Then it has been upgraded. And so the cycle continues the cycle of sort of clunky logos that remind us of the sort of clunky logos that Minded us of the sort of clunky logos.

It’s a cycle where the hood ornament for the Rolls-Royce has gone from 7 inches to three inches and that shrinkage is based on safety. But the people who seek status the people who seek status continue on this cycle of telling themselves that they need the new model because the new model is safer or faster or better.

And what about Eleanor? Well a few years after the sculpture in front of every Rolls-Royce was based on her. She and the baron John montagu went on a cruise illicitly continuing their Affair in private that cruise that boat to India. It was attacked in 1915 by a German YouTube boat and the boat sank Eleanor died and it was thought the baron John montagu died is But somehow he got himself onto a raft and several days later. He was rescued and I’m not sure why maybe it has to do with 7-inch hood ornaments, but my hunches that he did something probably not very nice to be the only person left on that raft status rolls luxury goods scarcity. Who’s up Who’s down?

This is all lived out loud every day on the LA freeway. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a bunch of questions from previous episodes. But first here is a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pot pie.

This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex.

Whoosah.

Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is Is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you this podcast is growing.

It’s spreading not because I’m promoting it but because you are telling other people and I appreciate that and the number of questions coming in keeps going up in the questions keep getting better. So thank you for that. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo link.

That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate. It button. We’ve got two questions to start with they don’t seem related, but they are so I’ll play them both back to back. Hi Seth. This is fill in the United States in Indianapolis, Indiana.

I just listened to your podcast on consolidation publishing and it really made me think deeper about connecting with people that are like me reading books like me and so on and then of the podcast you said we want to find those people that are like us a reading books like us and connect to those people.

And I’ve been thinking this for a while and inside the corporation. I work which is a large corporation. I’ve a very Niche role there and I have a group of people that connect with but I find myself wanting to stretch my mind in my thinking and my knowledge beyond the bounds of that Corporation. And so I want to find people that are outside of that Corporation to connect with and share these ideas.

I know they’re out there and I honestly have a few people in mind that I could connect with but I want to make sure that as I reach out and connect with those people Build a community. I do it in a way that builds enrollment and engagement in the right attitudes. So, how can I step into this ahead? What can I do to take that knowledge of building that group in a corporation to applying that outside of and what may I be coming against?

What type of fear do you think I’m experiencing or what kind of things are holding me back there. Thanks so much Seth.

Hey Seth, this is Dave from Glendale, California and just had a question regarding when you find yourself. Yourself in a mid career slump say, you know, you’re approaching kind of the middle of your career and find yourself. Maybe just having a tougher time finding work or anything else. What’s a good mindset to keep in mind in terms of figuring out what’s next? I know it’s tempting to think of re-enrolling at the some school or chasing after 77 new degree or some midlife kind of switch. But you know, I find myself thinking that that’s hiding much like you mentioned on the show. So anyways, like to hear your thoughts on that and thanks for all you do.

Thanks Phil for this your desire to weave together Community is really valuable. It’s the way we make things better. It’s the way we improve and learn and Dave. I know the feeling that mid career slump is a sign that you’re listening. You’re listening to the voice in your head. Ed and you’re aware that we don’t have forever to do the work we want to do and the way forward in both is to realize that if we invite someone to connect with us, we are doing them a real service if the connection is about them and their work and where they’re going if we’re offering them status and affiliation and if someone honestly says no it’s not for me we’ve learned something but better.

To learn something then to ignore them altogether. So my argument is we find the smallest viable group maybe in the case of Phil and David’s only five people find five people who are intellectually curious five people who want to join a book group five people who want to join a mastermind to challenge each other and support each other week after week, it’s free. It’s just the commitment. It’s a commitment to be on Zoom together for 45 minutes. The Saturday from 10 a.m. To 10:45 a.m.

Show up show up ready to contribute shortbread e to learn to do the work. I bet if you think really hard if you extend yourself, you’ll find a dozen or two dozen people who are worth asking ask them one at a time. You’ll put together an All-Star group and it might be as it was for me when chip Conley did it in 1983 that you’ll be remembering. That 37 years later.

So thank you both for leading.

I said this is Shivani from Chennai India. So I was just reading your book the practice and I’m reading this paragraph. It says it’s hard to imagine Tim Cook blowing a Samsung phone because Apple seeks to Corner the market not spread an idea or create positive change. They’re in the business of raising their stock price.

So I just had a quick thought on this where you know, you do mention that other What does dubler each other and this question is coming from the fact that I am in an industry where I make sustainable and vegan wallets as an alternate to leather products. And you know, I also I definitely see to create positive change. I know that but I also would not openly talk about my competitors because a person can only own one wallet and I do I want to say I would love to know your thoughts on that.

Thank you. Thanks, Shivani. I’m going to put a link to your site in the show notes. I just bought one of your wallets. I want to disagree about something and agree about something else. I’ll agree with this. You can never have too many books and you can never have too many songs on your hard drive and you can never have too many.

Let’s make a long list, but I’m also going to argue that every single person who buys one of your beautiful wallets already has a wallet and as Tim O’Reilly famously said Ed our enemy is not piracy our enemies obscurity the number of people who have a vegan wallet is Tiny your challenge is not to Corner the market in vegan wallets. It’s to grow the market in vegan wallets that if you and the other people who do what you do all put links to each other on your pages.

Everyone’s business would go up. We have to embrace the fact that our customers probably know. More than we do about the market about Alternatives about products that they need. So hiding information from them doesn’t increase our market share hiding information from them simply decreases trust that what we need to do. If we’re not trying to build the most valuable company in the world and Corner the market which I think is true for everyone who’s listening to this today.

What we need to do is realize that our goal Liz community that our goal is helping people get to where they’re going and giving them something to talk about and one of the best ways to do that is to help them see the category the way you do greetings Seth.

This is Tracy from Ohio. I’m really enjoying reading your new book this the practice and it is sparked a question for me throughout my adult working life.

I’ve always felt I was moving through a process where I’d suddenly stumble upon that thing. That I’m most passionate about doing the problem. At least for me is that I have many areas of Interest marketing branding painting Wellness nutrition great design Fitness and when I move down one specific career path, I often find myself looking over my shoulder kind of longingly at that other thing that I love to do kind of like the grass is always greener on the other side.

I’m past the 30-year career Mark. So I feel like I should have arrived at the passionate work destination by now, but I haven’t or I don’t think I have any hints on how I can get there or am I already there without realizing it? Thanks for all that you do and I’m also really enjoying the TMS seminar. So thank you.

Thank you for this Tracy. I think it’s true that the grass is greener. I think that it’s a law of physics the way the light hits The Grass over there the light bounces back the photons change the shade of green and the grass is greener over there. Of course, it is because far away you can’t see the problems.

All you can see are the possibilities He’s so you are a normal intelligent curious human because you have lots of things that you would like to do. That’s not up for discussion. What’s up for discussion is can you pick a thing? It doesn’t have to be the thing simply a thing that you care enough about doing that you’re willing to stick with it.

Even when the stuff on the other side seems Greener because jumping from thing to thing is thrilling. I’m a jumper the World Wide Web was invented for me. Oh, A puppy I’ll click on anything. But if you want to make a difference, or if you want to make a profit, it turns out that it’s on the other side of the chasm that things really start to heat up that things really start to work.

And so what we need to do is not pick the perfect thing but to pick anything that we are willing to commit to and then commit to it long enough to get to the other side.

Hi Seth. It’s been career from Colorado. I’ve been really enjoying the practice and I love your mentality and advice about failure.

I recently started a podcast as the failure guy and I’m seeking to embrace the importance of failure as a necessary step on the path towards success.

My question is what advice can you give to those people who want to embrace the power of failure but struggle to look at each misstep as an opportunity to grow. How can we shift the mindset of a willing participant to help rid the word failure of all, it’s nasty sting. Thanks again for everything you do.

Look forward to hearing your answer.

Then I love this project. I want to just highlight though that failure experiencing failure isn’t the point. It turns out it’s a fear of failure. That’s the problem to paraphrase FDR not fear, but the fear of fear, it’s the whole idea of what we say or do to avoid even feeling like we might confront fear.

This is one of the Changes of teaching someone to swim if there’s three feet of water two feet of water. Every rational thought says it is not dangerous to stand in 2 feet of water with a swimming instructor standing next to you but most people who are afraid of swimming will not do this and it’s not because they are afraid of drowning it’s because they’re afraid of the fear.

And so what we have is a chance to engage in a practice of getting ourselves closer to the Feeling of fear back to the swimming example a dear friend. I taught them how to swim in the following way. I bought some inexpensive scuba goggles. We went to the pool Sat by the side of the pool and I filled the goggles with water. So we’re sitting on Solid Ground And I said, let’s put the goggles on over our eyes and nose so you can still breathe through your mouth every single synapse in your brain is telling you that you’re Ting On Solid Ground you’re not even wet except for your face. You’re breathing through your mouth.

But when you open your eyes, it looks like you’re underwater if we can reprogram our brain in that way. We’re able to get to the next step. So the same thing is true here as we approach our practice which is to develop the habit of feeling fear. We don’t need to hurt other people through our practice of failure.

We simply need to confront for Folks what it feels like to get that close to it. Here’s one more to wrap up our bonus edition of QA.

Hey Seth, this is Mickey from Atlanta Georgia in your last episode. You said that personality tests are essentially horoscopes and I don’t tend to agree. I do agree that personality test shouldn’t limit who we are or what we do, but I find that personality tests can be a great way to gain empathy for others as the owner of a small company. I thought it was best if I treat my employees nicely that’s not really the case being Nice is nice, but they need to be treated differently through personality test. I learned that one employee really enjoys 10 minutes chitchat each morning before we start but another would go Bonkers with 10 minutes of chitchat understanding those differences is huge in related vein. My wife is a to on the Enneagram which makes for a quote helper as we unpack that it means not only does she go out of her way to help others, which is obvious to anyone that needs her that she innately thinks that others can see her knees just as easily which we can’t discovering that has been great for both of our perspectives.

So my question is am I off base here are personality tests just horoscopes or can they help us better understand the people around us. Thanks for all you do.

Thank you for this Mickey. Yes, there’s no doubt in my mind that personality tests are astrology their horoscopes.

But there’s also no doubt in my mind that horoscopes work.

They’re just not true, but they work they work because a well-written horoscope that lands on a receptive person’s desk helps them find their truth helps them dig through the stuff that they have been fibbing to themselves about and so your wife was sounds like a fine individual may have gotten a Certain score on some personality test, but even if she didn’t get that score it would be about a defect in the test. That’s not about her and a conversation getting to know somebody is a much more direct way than the bank shot of figuring out what score they got on some profit-making test regime so that person who doesn’t like 10 minutes of chitchat with you in the morning.

Well, it might make more sense to figure out. Level of intimacy and mutual trust that they could just tell you that because there’s lots of things that you need people to tell you that aren’t going to come through in a personality test. So my problem with these tests is not that they don’t occasionally come out with horoscope like truths.

The problem is when they’re wrong people don’t know what to do when they’re wrong people get hooked on the results and make bad choices instead of speaking actual truth. About what they’re facing. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea to anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -tim-toady- <==

And our guest today is Tim Toady. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second with a discussion with Tim. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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As you know, this podcast has no guests. That’s not the way you’re supposed to do it. When I started out a lot of people who were going to work with this podcast questioned the idea that it had no guests now more than a hundred episodes later. It seems to be working out. Okay, but what about Tim Toady?

What about Tim Toadies? Cousin Tim tody bicarbonate. What about the idea of intentional? Action you may have guessed the Tim Toady is not a real person. Tim Toady is an acronym from the Perl programming language. It’s sort of stands for there is more than one way to do it. What does that mean? It means that in the Perl programming language. One of the ideas is that you could do something a little different than the standard way. In fact that there isn’t a standard way you could Inte one way you could print a different way or if you wanted to you could use a more verbose way to cause the program to print this undermines a lot of engineering thinking engineering thinking the idea of benchmarking of finding the right tool for the job and then no longer looking for the right tool enables us to build up traditions of productivity.

That’s why Tim Tony’s cousin is named Tim tody bicarbonate which sort of stands for there’s more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either.

So intentional action, who’s it for what’s it for? What exactly are you trying to do? And who are you trying to do it for the hammer has been around a long time. Is it possible to bang in a nail with your shoe? Yeah, I guess it’s possible. Sometimes if the wood is soft enough but there’s a right way to do it use a hammer certain things you’re building. Should use a screw not a hammer.

Is it possible to use a hammer and a nail not a screw and a screw driver? Of course it is but will it get you the desired result when I started my blog back before blogging was a thing there were times when my blog had comments on it. But over time I came to the conclusion that comments were getting in the way of what I sought to do Anonymous comments from people who Not understand what I had posted that day were causing me to second-guess the way that I was writing.

They were causing me to hesitate before I wrote something. They were causing me to get less specific and more General anticipating the comments. I was going to get tomorrow and I realized I had a choice I could have a Blog with comments but no posts because I was never going to post again or I could have a Blog with no comments and when I turned off comments a bunch of People were really upset and what they said is it’s not a Blog it’s not a Blog if you don’t have comments you’re doing it wrong and this idea of you’re doing it wrong gets in the way of us often doing something that’s important or creative or brave because if you’re doing something that’s creative.

You’re probably not following the established path that if you are hammering in a nail so exactly the way everyone else hammers in a nail you might be doing it right at least according to the current standard, but you’re not doing anything creative. So back to the idea of who’s it for and what’s it for what change are we seeking to make who are we seeking to do this work for and with because if you can’t be specific about that, then you’re probably simply doing it for yourself and if you’re doing it for yourself. No way for anyone else to tell if you’re doing a good job. Go ahead entertain yourself. Knock yourself out. Do it any way you want to but for the rest of us if we are trying to build something change something contribute something we are doing it for someone else and that gets us back to Tim Toady because if we need to solve a problem for example taking someone’s blood pressure we have to Choices we can invest a lot of time and energy making up a new way to take someone’s blood pressure or we can take someone’s blood pressure the standard way.

If you are a nurse the standard way seems to make sense because then you can get back to what you’re there for the patient that’s right in front of you. However, if the standard way isn’t going to work for whatever reason then your creativity in that area. Is essential we engage with somebody a little while ago in one of our workshops? And she said she hates to follow rules.

And so she started doing things outside of the structure of how we had built the workshop. This is a little like driving on the wrong side of the road driving on the wrong side of the road is not a creative act driving on the wrong side of the road simply violates a rule because you can violate a rule and it is likely to make traffic significantly.

Less efficient than if you had followed the rule to be creative means to be clear about why we’re doing it in the first place to solve the problem that is in front of us. So yes, if a tree is down on the side of the road and you need to get somewhere in a hurry and the road is deserted crossing the double yellow line and driving on the other side is a creative solution to the problem. That is in Front of you back when I was in college. We had an engineering project what happens if there’s a rack inside the Callahan tunnel in Boston.

How could we possibly get the tow truck in there to get the jackknifed tractor-trailer out from inside the tunnel because the traffic is going to back up all the way to South Boston. Well, the answer was go the wrong way because on the other side there is no traffic at all because because the down truck stopped all the cars that were behind it.

That’s a creative solution because we are clear about what the problem is. Is there another way to solve the problem sure there is I don’t know you could get a submersible pump put a boat out above the tunnel submerge the pump drill a hole. I don’t know we can go on and on it depends on what you are seeking to do.

And so what we need to distinguish between our Knowledge and facility with existing methods and tools because the method that is being used is already good enough because our job our promise is not the solve the problem a new way, but to use the standard tools to solve the problem the efficient way so we can get back to work which is the change we seek to make but sometimes we sign up for something else sometimes.

We sign up for art for creativity for changing the system itself. If that is what we sought to do. Then of course, you have to do it a different way. Of course, you have to say there’s more than one way to do it because if there’s only one way to do it, you have no business working on the project. So when I think about interventions in existing systems they tend to Be the most productive when we do them on purpose and if we’re doing them on purpose, we should be able to announce in advance what we seek to do measure me on this measure me on that. Is there more than one way to broadcast the football game while in the 1960s they were all broadcast about the same way, but then someone came along and added multiple cameras and then someone else figured out how to do instant replay.

Which amazingly for more than 20 years was done by hand slowing down the reels as they went through the machine and then John Madden figured out how to write on the screen with a pen each one of these new ways to do. It had a purpose. The purpose was to get more viewer engagement. The purpose was to get the ratings to go up so that they could sell more ads either they worked or they didn’t work.

So when Tim Toady shows up, Up, we have to asked him the following question. Are you here just to be interesting just to be difficult just so that we will pay attention to you or are you here because you’re going to show us a better way to do it a way to achieve more of our goals something that’s little understood about the programming business is stack overflow stack Overflow an extraordinary website that gets more than a billion visits a year to help programmers find Other programmers who will generously show them the right way to solve a problem by becoming the world’s largest repository of the right way to use a programming language to solve a problem.

The act of programming has become significantly easier and the power of what’s built keeps getting better because you can find Snippets of code that have been battle tested that work that the who’s it for in the what’s it for? Course clear and you can assemble them into a new thing a better thing built on proven building blocks.

So I’m in favor of Our Guest today Tim Toady when he needs to be there to do something better. But the rest of the time his cousin Tim Toady bicarbonate which means there’s more than one way to do it but doing it consistently is going to save the rest of us a lot of trouble. Send him in instead. Thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with answers to questions from last time, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp an independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works if you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit. Akimbo.com go to find out about their new. Upcoming workshops and how it all works.

Thanks.

It’s Maria.

Hey Seth. My name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is on the Pain Scale entire sir.

Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, please visit akimbo link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd. Click the appropriate Button as we head into a new year a fresh new year Blue Skies open powder a chance to make things better. I am thrilled by the questions you’re submitting by the possibilities that you are surfacing. I’ve got 4qa to go through today. So here we go.

Hi, Seth, Carrie and London England here.

Thank you so much for inspiring us every day. I’m a huge fan of your work your blog and really try to live by all the advice. You’ve given us. My question today is what is the best way to evoke Inspirations and creativity to a workplace and Workforce that has been, you know quite complacent for a long time.

I’m currently working. In for a company that has been the voice known for its thought-provoking creativity decades ago, but seem have really lost that spark over the last, you know few years of operations and then think the management team sees the need to injecting new ideas new thoughts and energy but really having a problem trying to convince its employees to think and act differently and you know quoting your purple cow try to make their work.

Thank you for this Cherry. Here’s the thing culture is local and culture is temporary. There are people who work in your organization who remember how it used to be but remembering how it used to be is different than knowing how it is now and companies that have long-standing employees tend to have more persistent culture when there’s lots of turnover. There’s lots of opportunities to start fresh. It’s not the Doing that determines the culture. It’s the simple question. What are things like around here? And if people are holding back if people are nervous if people are afraid it’s because they are getting the signal that it’s not going to work whatever new thing. They’d like to bring to the table. That signal is probably coming from Senior Management. That is afraid and Senior Management is afraid because of the ghosts of Senior Management that was there before. For them and so we see that downward spiral. That’s so many businesses go through because something gets a little bit run down just a little bit less money.

And so if there’s a little bit less money than things aren’t quite as well done and around and around it goes and it takes a burst of innovation positivity optimistic leadership to turn the cycle around and so yes, you see the relevance to the world we live in right now, we’re months away. From a vaccine we are taking a deep breath and thinking about what’s going to happen going forward and it’s easy to think about what was happening last month or six months ago because nothing is perfect. Nothing is fixed all at once and that gets back to my point about it all being local if three people are five people together in an office on a zoom call decide what things are like around here.

It will become what they say. It is like it. Not be perfect. It will not be applauded by everyone in the organization, but you can make it that way just as what’s going on in one English seminar is different than what’s going on in an engineering class down the hall. It is possible to create these Pockets these pockets of optimism, but it’s only going to happen when people who are seen as having Authority and Status start demonstrating not talking but demonstrating what things are like around here.

I hope that You a little bit of a way to start on this process I said, this is Alberto from Argentina.

First of all, I wanted to thank you for showing up every week with a new episode. My question is related to things that I’ve been listening and reading in the practice mainly and is related to my audience. I feel that I have something to give to show and I really want to commit to that and the liver.

But on the other hand that I’m not sure who is my audience. So I feel kind of stuck because I don’t start producing because I’m not sure who am I producing for but on the other hand if I don’t start I will never know who is my audience. So I’m kind of stuck in this Loop and I would like your advice and your comments that will be really helpful.

Thank you, Alberto. Yes, the Catch-22 is clear and it’s an easy one to follow. All into here is my Mantra pick your audience pick your future. If you decide to serve people who are difficult to find difficult to close the sale with difficult to serve then that’s the life you’ve signed up for if you decide to serve people who know they need what you do and have money and are eager to pay for it.

Then that’s the life that you signed up for if you pick a board of directors that is constantly busting your chops. Well, that’s the life. If you signed up for pick your customers pick your future, so I would argue that rather than starting with customers start with future. What do you want things to be like where you work with the work that you do who will give you the fuel you need to serve them and then once you figured that out try to discover if there’s anybody who fits that description and if there isn’t adjust your sights and repeat pick your customers pick your future.

My name is Michelle burrow, and I’m from a small town outside Amsterdam. The Netherlands is a multiple akimbo workshops alumni. And as a reader of most of your books, I started implementing bit by bit you’re advised to regularly ship about three years ago. I wanted to change the world and I still do and make it more sustainable and circular because I had no experience at all in this field and no one would hire me. I started looking doing sales. Work on spec for free for a small company that I really admire we agreed that I would get reasonable commission for every successful lead that results in a sale this I have been doing now for three years with no substantial results so far until the last few weeks some prospects now see me as credible and want to listen to my story and some have expressed serious interest to buy.

In the beginning however, and until very recently the nose felt like a real disappointment. It seems that was going nowhere this journey somehow feels like driving in the fork on the straight road at 60 miles an hour with very restricted view the thing I knew for sure is that the only thing that could get me out of this Focus driving on with the knowledge that the landscape and the rewards would receive reveal itself.

I could have walked this path because of two things. I was completely done with my previous. Job, and I wanted to change very badly and I had saved enough money to sustain for three years. Secondly. I must admit that your ongoing rants about shipping and letting my own voice be heard has been the main motivator.

My question is what advice would you give how to decide where and when the moment arrives to stop and start something else for me? It’s been three years now and only now in the past. Let’s say two weeks. I can see an exciting glimmer of hope and I that I can and will be successful if it wasn’t for the financial reserve. I would have had to stop perhaps or two years ago in that case.

I would not have been able to get to this point where the fog slowly evaporates.

Thank you for everything. Thank you for this Michelle and thank you for the work that you are doing. I applaud your dedication to making a difference but one of the things we know about getting through the dip one of the things we How about making a difference is that we need two things resilience and it’s cousin diversity resilience because it takes longer than we think it will resilience because the world rarely ends up the way we expect it to and diversity because if we have a diverse portfolio, then we’re okay. If one thing we were counting on doesn’t come through and I don’t know anything about The details of what you’re doing, but if you are in the spot, it sounds like you were on it’s probably because there’s some combination missing of resilience in the face of resistance from the people you are trying to sell to and diversity because you’ve put all of your eggs into a basket and one of the things we learned from the Dip is that you have to push and persist to get through it.

But the other thing we know is that it really helps to have a diverse portfolio. That you can stick it out long enough to get through the dip so I can offer you no reassurance because I don’t know enough and because reassurance is futile, but what I can say to you and others who are in a similar situation is we can’t just keep betting on Reddit coming up we have to persist in being unfair agonal we have to realize that the world rarely comes out the way we hope but that we have to have enough resources to power our way through because the work we’re doing is important. Not enough to dedicate ourselves in that way.

Hey Seth.

This is actually from Kaysville Utah love the podcast one of the most paradigm-shifting podcast I’ve ever listened to I just finished listening to your podcast on the New York Times bestseller list. I do them in the publishing industry and although we know that bestseller lists are dying. It’s still what I would call bit of addiction to try and get onto we don’t worry about the New York Times bestseller list.

I’d love to know about the Wall Street Journal bestseller list from your point of view. We try to hit it with every book launch that we have within our company. Sometimes we hit it sometimes we don’t we recently launched a book that I felt deserved to be on it. We legitimately and ethically did everything we could to give on the list. We had the numbers but because of MPD books can we are kicked off because the bulk sales I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list as well as being able to shift the mindset of people to not be quote unquote addicted to the list if that’s something you agree with. Thanks again Seth and thanks for changing the world. I’m trying to do what I can with my thoughts.

Thank you Zach for this and for publishing books that people really want to read the question is pretty simple That Wall Street Journal bestseller list. What’s it for if it’s an internal measure of whether you and your team are doing a good job? Well, then when they have a policy that boxes you out now and then don’t worry about it on the other hand.

If you believe it is a label that helps you sell books to people who like buying bestsellers then A challenge you to find a more reliable label figure out a way to message people that that book is a book worth reading because the fact is if you’re focused on business books and the Wall Street Journal list, you only trying to sell two point one percent of the people in the population less than 1% So, who are they looking to who is curating for them making great books books that people choose to talk about is reliably the single best way to make a difference in book publishing promotion doesn’t really work either. You’re already super famous in the books going to sell no matter. What or you write a book that ten people tell ten people about because 10 times 10 times 10 quickly gets us to a thousand and then you’re off to the races Sean coin taught me very simply the author and the publisher is job is to sell the first 10,000 copies and That it’s the books job to sell the rest.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you all next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you.

In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah.

Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information.

That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple.

It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -postage-due- <==

Selling a vacation timeshare is a difficult challenge years ago. I guy I know was on vacation in Aruba and there was a place that was selling vacation time shares what they did was they offered anyone who came in a free t-shirt and a steak dinner if they would sit through a two-hour sales call about why they should buy the timeshare.

Most of us would not sacrifice two hours of a hard earned vacation. Ian to sit through a sales call to get a steak dinner and a t-shirt but this guy did it more than once. In fact almost every day of the vacation. He’d saunter over and do it again. Well a couple years into this process, they installed a computer and the computer enabled them to see that he had been coming again and again and they said I’m sorry sir.

No more steak dinners for you well to teach them a lesson. Bought a timeshare. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about attention, but first ironically enough. Here’s a message from our sponsor.

Creative isn’t who you are. It’s what you do along the way creativity has gotten a mystical rap as if it’s some sort of gift. It’s not it’s a choice. It’s a skill if you have a job where you get to decide what you do, you are a creative it work in creative and you can get better at it. I’m thrilled to say that the creatives workshop is back the most active of all the akimbo workshops. It’s about people who want to level up and make a difference with their creative. Work. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com.

Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus. Like many people who have been thinking about the internet for a long time. I’ve been writing and talking about the attention economy. For more than 30 years the attention economy contrasts two different words words that didn’t used to be next to each other economy, which is based on scarcity things of value things that we pay for the transfer of funds and attention something everyone gets exactly The same amount of something that disappears at the end of every day.

So the question is if we live in a world where the internet is bringing us an abundance of choice and abundance of information a place where we can connect and learn and discover things almost all of it for free. How do we deal with the fact that attention is becoming more scarce than ever before when Dale Evans? And I wrote one of the guerrilla marketing books years ago. We had the controversial fact in it that the average person sees 3,000 advertisements a day today. I think it’s easy to argue that that number is at least 50,000 advertisements by the time you’re done surfing on your phone for an hour. You have seen links and pop-ups and pop-unders and audio not to mention the Billboards the ads in the elevator and on and on Advertising has been The heart of our media culture for a very long time advertising works for a really neat reason. It is a tiny tax on the people who consume the media seconds out of every minute but a huge bun at scale to the people who create the media so a full-page ad in Good Housekeeping magazine used to cost $80,000 that pays for a lot. Out of reporting for the magazine it pays for the print it pays for their offices etcetera $80,000.

However, each person who was reading the magazine can just blow by that ad and they don’t really mind. In fact if it’s a magazine with a topic you care about like Vogue, I think most people who read Vogue magazine would prefer an issue with ads then an issue without ads the Yellow Pages of course is the best example of this because Yellow Pages was nothing but adds you read it because advertisers competed for your attention by buying a bigger ad and a bigger ad sent a signal to the person who was allocating attention that said this pizza place this auto dealer.

This restaurant is high status enough successful enough cares enough about your attention to buy a really big ad and so we built a media infrastructure the one That has defined huge swathes of our culture for Generations. It’s the media culture that brings us the news that brings us entertainment every once in a while somebody like HBO or Netflix shows up and they walk away from the ad based model instead saying to a select group of people know, why don’t you just pay for this and we’ll leave the advertisers out of the equation.

Which brings us to my friend Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly the founding editor of Wired Magazine the person who coined the phrase 1,000 true fans the author of The astonishing what technology wants has brought up an idea that has been around for a really long time since the dawn of email and that idea is that maybe we could cut out the media middleman and pay the person who is getting the ad to read it that if attention is valuable let the people who own the attention that’s you and me decide which adds we’re going to see and let’s figure out how to make sure we get compensated to do that.

Well, this isn’t really a new idea if we think about the origins of the post office in the United States it started before the Revolutionary War Ben Franklin was our first Postmaster General, but what most people don’t know is it wasn’t until After Franklin was long dead that every single letter had to have a stamp on it partly because they didn’t invent the adhesive for stamps until the eighteen hundreds.

But mostly because the original way that mail was sent was postage due a ship captain would collect up mail that people wanted to go to a new town when he got to town. He’d run an ad an ad put it up on a flyer and List the names of all the people he had mail for and if you wanted your mail, you would go to this ship captain and pay him so you could get your letter and so for the first Decades of the Postal Service when the mailman came to your home, you owed him money.

It came postage due. Well, we can turn this model around and say wait a minute what if in my email box instead of spammers stealing my attention? Spammers advertisers direct marketers could Vie to pay me to read their email. Well, you’re probably ahead of me. There are some real challenges here. Here are the two big ones challenge number one our cost in the tension of processing. The offers is high deciding which ones you’re going to read is a cost you have to incur for which you are not compensated number two. Even more important far more important is the challenge of moral hazard. Moral hazard is a term from insurance. And what moral hazard means is that if you have a really good insurance policy on your house, you might have an incentive to burn it down.

You might have an incentive to do something that both sides would argue is not in your interest. However, you’re getting paid to burn down your house. Well in the case of reading ads who exactly is going to stop what they’re doing for a nickel and read an ad a nickel. Well, my guess is the person is willing to take a nickel to read an ad is not the person The Advertiser wants to reach the CMO of Mercedes famously said that it cost them about a thousand dollars in advertising to sell one Mercedes.

Now if they knew that they could just hand someone a thousand dollars and they would buy a Mercedes. They would do it all day every day, but they don’t know and so they have to keep running ads in lots and lots of places. They have to sponsor Polo matches. They have to put ads in the New Yorker. They have to figure out how to be in front of people who would never take a nickel to read an ad because that’s the only way brand advertising of a luxury good is going to work which opens the door to thinking about affiliate deals.

All marketing and direct marketing. So do the direct marketing model First Direct marketing is marketing. We can measure we know exactly who clicked on it and what they did after they clicked on it. So if you realize that it’s worth a dollar to you to have someone see and add and click on it. Well, then you can run as many ads as you can find for 50 Cent’s all day every day because you know, it’s going to work direct marketing used to be a little Backwater. It was named by Lester wunderman.

An old friend of mine back in the day and Lester who also pioneered the American Express card and the Columbia record Club said that direct marketing was action marketing that we could see it and we could measure it but it wasn’t a big high-profile way for most marketers to do their work, but then the internet showed up Google is a direct marketing engine.

They show the numbers to everybody you can see what’s working. And what’s not and then you bid. To run the next dad Facebook is direct marketing driven. Now the math of direct marketing is very compelling for the middleman for Facebook and Google. Here’s why let’s say that it’s worth $6 to get someone to click on an ad and you have a competitor who decides it’s worth $6 if someone click on an ad, what does that mean worth? $6?

It means you’re some profit all of it from that one new customer is Dollars, okay, but now there are two of you bidding on placing that ad if the auction gets up to five bucks. Are you willing to bid five dollars in 10 cents? You probably are well at $5.90 the auction slows down but here’s what’s interesting of the six dollars of profit that you were going to earn from all of your investment in all of your hard work $5.90. If it goes to Google and you get ten cents, that’s not a great deal.

That’s like paying your landlord. It’s not fun. So direct marketing has scaled. It has scaled dramatically. What about affiliate marketing affiliate marketing you might know about this from the way Amazon and others have done. It is someone a middleman gets paid a bounty for bringing in a customer Uber for a long time said that if you go ahead and get us a new user will give you $30 and free rides Tesla still pays people. But hundreds or thousands of dollars for referring someone who buys a Tesla one of the challenges of affiliate marketing is it umin iziz referrals, but we don’t necessarily want the referrals in our life to be bought and paid for there’s a real difference between a friend saying I heard this new song. It’s fantastic and a friend saying I heard this new song. I’m going to get 24 cents if you listen to it.

We don’t want our friends to sell us out and that’s why multi-level marketing has failed to scale Beyond a small Niche because most people are uncomfortable selling out their friends for money and people who are sold out sometimes reconsider their friendships. And so we have a problem and the problem is when we start to monetize something Newman and personal like attention the monetization. Corrupts, it corrupts Behavior. It corrupts The Way We Walk Through the world. So we have these two problems one this idea that we’re gonna have to sort through the postage do stuff that’s showing up to decide which ones we want to take the money from and which ones aren’t worth our time and second the affiliate model of getting paid in the moment for our attention add to this the moral hazard and the fact that you probably don’t don’t want attention from people who will sell it for a nickel and we see the challenge the challenge going forward of the attention economy capitalism has tried to monetize so many things that they say the oldest profession is one in which people will sell their bodies to others and ever since then capitalism has been trying to infringe around the edges of what it means to be a person.

What it means to be a friend what it means to be in a community Circle, but now that everyone runs a media company now that everybody is either working for free for a social media company or working for money inside of some sort of social media environment. We’ve already opened the door to this sort of questioning.

So how then to regain the thing that we hold dear. How do we gain the idea that we would like there to be mad? Has eans TV shows newspapers that aren’t in it to maximize clicks that are being measured in the short run everyday by direct marketers because it’s that pressure from the direct marketers that is leading to click bait that is leading to short-term thinking from media that we used to count on to be more upstanding.

The old days the old days of just three TV networks. It’s easy to look back on them and say well there are a whole bunch of voices. We didn’t get to hear from there were a whole bunch of choices. We didn’t get to make but the flip side is this if you own a third of all the TV channels in the neighborhood and you were regulated by the FCC you knew that you had to do some things in the public service and you also were aware that in the long run the advertisers who couldn’t measure Sure, what was working wanted to run their ads in places where there was media that they were proud of that racing to the bottom coming up with the equivalent of the National Enquirer on TV. Well sure that might get you advertising from people who want to sell gold bullion or life insurance in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t the media that media Titans aspired to make and so now here we are having blown that up having blown up the oligopoly having welcomed the The long tail of voices and noise still with the open API that is email where everyone gets to send postage due email every day because we have to pay with our attention that when their money we have a challenge.

So a couple things that I worked on years ago that I want to bring up again because they might not work but they’re interesting to think about the first one is this I sat down with the heads of AOL and a couple other big sites. This was probably 1998 and I said, let’s charge for stamps. Let’s make it so that email costs a penny give every single one of your users a thousand stamps a month for free and if you need more than a thousand if you’re going to send more than a thousand emails a month, they’re going to cost you a penny each.

Let’s take the money that people are spending. On stamps and use it to build all sorts of useful infrastructure for the people who use email. So what would be the net result of this while the net result would be that it would be mostly a zero-sum game of money coming in coming out except for Outsiders Outsiders would need to buy a ton of stamps.

If you’re going to be a spammer and send 10 million emails in one day, which is no big deal for a spammer that’s going to cost you $100,000 in stamps. But the open nature of the egalitarian mindset of the TCP IP based internet is no no, there isn’t going to be a centralized Authority that sell stamps.

Well, I for one think stamps would be really interesting and change the dynamic of how people might choose to buy attention at least in email. And then the second thing about building an economy where you are compensated for attention part of the problem, of course was how do we Do we spend our time deciding what to spend our attention on?

So when I was at Yahoo. I came up with this idea of simoleons at the time. Yahoo was the internet it was the center of all of it. And I said, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we just have a little tiny number next to every single link throughout all of Yahoo next to the ads and next to the other links.

And if you click on any of them will add that number of points to your simoleons balance, so, If an Advertiser wants a lot of clicks, they could put 50 or 70 or 90 next to their ad they have to buy the simoleons to top up everyone’s account. And then once it started catching on we could let other sites in on the Somalian economy.

So what good are simoleons what good are frequent flyer miles if you can’t fly anywhere how to empty out people’s balances. So this was the cool part. We got a patent on this the way to empty out people’s balances I said, Ed was every month. We’ll have an auction. We will auction off millions of dollars of cool prizes and services. Some of them will be donated by sponsor. Some of them will buy from the money. We got from selling Simoleons.

And here’s the thing you can trade and give away your simoleons because Guess what at the end of every month we zero out everybody’s balance. So you might as well bid like a maniac What this would lead to is an economy where some people don’t care at all but other people seeing that they had these points maybe they could sell them to a peer who wanted to collect a bunch of points and win an auction.

Maybe they could donate them to charity or on and on what I like about this model is a it’s more fun, but be it creates a media middleman so that all of these points are added up in a place where they matter so it’s not a nickel or a dime at a time. A fund a fund to gets used to pay for things that are actually worth reading and actually worth listening to so now you’re not going to get a steak dinner just because you showed up to listen to a sales call.

Anyway, that’s my rant. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with three questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Hey Seth, this is Andy from Los Angeles. And my question is about scalping over the last few months. There have been a number of big Hardware releases in the entertainment industry the new Xbox PlayStation five and various PC gaming Parts. All these products have sold out incredibly faster now showing up on eBay and other websites for sometimes double the normal price.

And this doesn’t appear to be a small number of people doing this. There was one group of Scholars that claim to have 3500 PlayStation Vibes. How can companies stop the scholars and make sure that their product? Will the hands it was made for at lunch? Maybe it’s as simple as increasing. The number of product the company has on hand, but what would stop this Kappa from just buying more?

And is there any motivation for these huge companies to do that? When at the end of the day, they’re still selling their product. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for getting us started Andy up companies want two things. One thing they want to do is maximize the revenue in the short run and the second thing they want to do is create an impact. They want there to be buzzed. They want there to be cultural significance to what they do. The best way to maximize revenue is with price differentiation to charge different people different amounts based on who they are what they need and the story they tell themselves about money.

Someone’s only got ten bucks to see a concert. Well charge him 10 bucks. If someone’s going to get satisfaction out of sitting in the front row, which is only 20 rows in front of the other person and the status that comes from buying a luxury good to cost more charge that person $100. The economics here are clear price differentiation is the way to maximize Revenue now scalping has been around a very long time and until recently it was incredibly difficult to put a stop to to in the old days Kmart sold Polaroid film cheaper, then the local store could buy it wholesale.

So local stores would go and buy their film from Kmart so that they could save a couple pennies eBay came along and started to add a digital component to how we could buy in one place and sell to another the increment the money saved. The money earned didn’t go to the manufacturer in went to the Upper the person who was hustling to make the market more efficient, which is where this second element of cultural change kicks in because the brand manager knows that they’re not making as much money as if they were priced differentiating but they also know it’s a lot of work to do price differentiation. There’s leakage and if it creates buzz if that concert sells out in 20 minutes, it’s great for the artist to be able to Proclaim. It sold out. Out even if it means that a third of the tickets went to scalpers who then keep the difference for doing the work they’re doing which is creating this whole other level of Buzz. It’s pretty clear in an age where we are selling direct more and more that it’s trivially easy to eliminate scalping because as soon as someone starts buying more than one or two of an item, we can just stop selling it to them in the last four years. It’s become really clear how easy it is to stop people.

From scalping tickets to a theater or a concert but a lot of times the industry in quotation marks doesn’t want that to happen because the status quo is built around these different levels of people marking things up. If we think about how the airlines have done this if one day in the future when we’re flying again, you look around the plane. It is certain that there are people on that plane who paid less than you and people on that plane who paid more than you for the privilege of being on the very same plane jaywalker founded Priceline with a really brilliant idea.

He said look business Travelers want convenience, but tourists tourists are willing to go through a hassle to save some money. So he went to the Airlines and he said I’m going to do price differentiation. I’m going to sell your leftover tickets really cheap and there I said, well, we don’t want you to do that because once business Travelers find out that they can get cheap tickets from you.

We won’t be able to price differentiate. Well, he said I won’t tell them what airline it is. And I’m going to give him so much hassle so much emotional challenge that no business Travelers going to go through the pain and suffering to save 200 bucks and for years and years. It worked by charging people something that wasn’t involving cash.

He was able to differentiate the price so is all along way of saying we could get rid of scalping if the companies really wanted to but I think what we’re seeing is that see Heroes and brand managers are deciding that the ease of unloading a lot of stuff combined with the cultural impact of seeing that it’s in high demand that there’s a line that people are bidding up the price is worth it because in the long run, they see that they’re going to profit from that one last decide on this years and years ago in the 1980s.

I met Bill Graham the great concert promoter and I asked him. How come if you can sell out of Bruce Springsteen concert in 15 minutes. You don’t charge way more for the tickets and he turned to me and he said look, I know how much money the people in my audience have to spend every year on concert and I could charge enough for one Bruce Springsteen ticket that I use up their whole budget, but then they won’t be back next week for the next artist.

So I’m here for the long run and I’d rather have loyal consistent concertgoers than take all the money all at once what was on mentioned? His answer and I don’t think it was naivete because he was really smart is as soon as you do something like that. The scalpers are going to step in and fix the market.

They’re going to fix it by buying as many cheap tickets as they can and selling them for as much as they can. So thanks for the question Buy Low sell High.

Hey Seth, this is Richard calling in from Hong Kong.

I run a headhunting company in Asia and A lot of what you referenced culture versus what we perceive or what Society perceives what we can do I think a big roadblock and Barrow we have to that is this this piece of paper we call the resume and the CV and it’s such a purposeful but overinflated and value document and I believe companies have a huge advantage.

To shift away from such a material. How can we get them to look beyond the resume in the story? I believe companies don’t hire people with Stewart resumes. I believe they hire people with stories. So the biggest challenge that I see for people going on their own to look for jobs right now is to get past the algorithm to get past the recruiter or the Headhunter who doesn’t know the role because it’s very systematic the way that recruitment processes and hiring processes work their processors, but they’re not designed to get the best out of someone.

So how can companies its scale start to get to this new Behavior without sacrificing the so-called efficiency that they all look for would love to hear your thoughts and looking forward to the four-week-old MBA Take Care.

Thank you for this Richard. I’ve been ranting about this since I wrote linchpin a long time ago. Most companies don’t actually want extraordinary employees performing at an extraordinary level as it’s written in the e-myth Revisited book The goal of most companies is to hire the cheapest available most easily replaceable person for any given job because it gives them reliability.

It gives them flexibility. It means that the org chart is filled with boxes. And if you don’t want to fill your box anymore, I’ll just find someone else. to fill it companies may talk about the fact that that’s not what they’re looking for and a few people who hire a Headhunter like you actually want the linchpin the special person the person who stands out and so we’re going to see I believe a bifurcated model the first one which were already seeing in things like big box stores is that you can apply for a job using a machine that looks a lot like an ATM you answer a questions you type in your social security number you’re hired because A quite rightly say we just want to see how you’re going to work when you’re at that cash register if you can show up every day, you can stay here that is different than pretending that it matters where you went to high school that it matters what your GPA was because guess what it doesn’t and these organizations that are running at scale.

They realize that because they have created jobs computer-assisted computer dominated that are all about being cogs in a machine. And if you’ve got cogs in the machine, probably it pays to admit that that’s what you’ve got. But then we’ve got the linchpin jobs. Then we’ve got the jobs that need to be done by somebody who is bringing soft skills real skills attitudes points of view Innovation willingness to upset the apple cart somebody who is going in their own Direction who has a story we should be acknowledging that that’s what those jobs are and a resume doesn’t help us decode that at all.

Resume is just a list of where you have complied. It is a collection of famous brand names to show that you came from privilege that you have paid your dues resume doesn’t help us you’re right. What we need is a body of work a collection of testimonials and most of all story and that’s going to happen for your clients the ones who care enough when they really want what we call Talent which I call skill and attitude and for the rest of the job. As we should just acknowledge.

We’re putting on a show, but we’re really hiring a cog. And so I think interviews are overrated I think resumes are overrated. What we should care about is the work and the approach to the work.

Asif Liam from Chicago here. I had the pleasure of listening to you visiting on Debbie millman’s podcast and it was a great conversation. I couldn’t help but notice a certain moment of Discord when she was asking you about authenticity and it seemed the two of you kind of missed a little bit of each other’s point of view on the difference between Authenticity of work and authenticity of self and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a distinction that trips a lot of people up. So I would love to hear you expand a little bit more on that difference and how it plays out. Thanks a lot for everything you do. Bye.

Thanks Liam. It’s true in my new book The Practice. I have a rant about authenticity and I’ve driven straight into a misunderstanding semantically about what authenticity means. Authenticity of work as you so brilliantly coin it means that the work is in and of itself it reminds us of what the work is supposed to be.

It shows the hand of the Creator but it is not about the Creator or the Creator’s mood. It is about the promise what the work is supposed to be that when the work is authentic we can tell because it has a Total truth to it. It is in and of itself as I just said and the other hand authenticity of self.

Are you proud of the work you are doing are you seeking a feeling of flow? What does it mean to be you that is a story We Tell ourselves and that is not your audience is problem.

It is your problem.

You need to make the difficult decision to quit your job at the cigarette company because you cannot authentically be you. You at the same time you are marketing. Tobacco that yes, authenticity of self is vitally important to not have it is to have an empty life that your job is not to support the industrial economy.

The industrial economy is here and your job is to figure out a path through it that feels and works for you authentically. But once you define that path, what will be asked of you required of you is the author City of work to be able to do the work that you said you were going to do to cause the change you seek to make thanks for these great questions.

We’ll see you next time.

I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea. Where you know and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when are you going to face those fears?

Not gonna let you hide you got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-architecture-of-architecture- <==

For more than a hundred years starting in the 1830s. The center of downtown Boston was scollay Square. You could get your picture taken. If you wanted to you could visit the first dentist who used ether to reduce pain when he worked on your teeth, but in the 1960s, they tore down scollay Square tearing down 1,000 buildings and displacing tens of thousands of people they did it to build. Government center now in February Boston is a cold and windy city and inside of government center inside the plaza that they want to call a Town Square. It is colder and windier than anywhere else in all of Boston.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

Be back in a second to talk about the architecture of architecture, but first here is a message from our sponsor.

One day Pawan brought a book home from school and read me a couple of poems from it. That was the first time I’d ever heard. My son read out loud. Those words came from hasta. Mom to pollen pollen was one of the students enrolled in the accelerated learning courses that we had changing stories run to help struggling public school students in Nepal learn how to read and do math.

My name is Renee and I’m the founder of changing stories and we exist because there are six hundred Seventeen million. Kitten youth in low-income countries around the world who can’t read or do basic math, even though most of them are already in school. We’re on a mission to change that. We’re on a mission to end the learning crisis and make sure that kids like pow on get an opportunity to learn and complete an education.

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Architecture means two different things in the way we’re going to talk about it. One is the actual work of drawing up the plans and certifying them. So a builder can build them but the other one talks about the system the system of a building the system of a culture the system of how we make decisions and I use architecture that way all the time.

I want to talk about how we ended up with the architecture we have because there’s a couple Surprising forces and those forces are actually applicable to a huge range of cultural change. I’m not a traditionalist when it comes to the built world. I think that we have made huge strides in making buildings more comfortable and more efficient and sometimes more beautiful but it is also true that there are tons of examples in every direction of Architects run amok of buildings that might have pleased someone but Don’t actually achieve their stated desired use how does this happen? If you wanted to change the built world the world we all live in the world. We can’t help but see the world of our home and our office and everything in between.

How exactly would you do it? Well, let’s start with this. There are about a hundred and ninety thousand licensed architects in the United States and every year five to ten percent of them. Quit in disgust. Retire and every year architecture schools produce five or ten thousand new graduates. So over time over 10 or 20 years, all of the Architects basically are replaced. It turns out that architecture school is a really highly leveraged place to change the way Architects think and the way Architects think changes what gets built.

So what kind of person Wants to be a teacher a professor a lecturer at an architecture school. My guess is that person likes progress in architecture. They don’t just want to teach how architecture worked in the 1800 s where the 1900 s next. Let’s think of who are the most famous architects who drives someone to become an architect while in law for a really long time was clearly Perry Mason.

Perry Mason was the archetype for the young man who wanted to become a lawyer a trial lawyer who would defend only the innocent and always win but in architecture, you’ve got Frank Lloyd Wright. You’ve got Howard Roark from The Fountainhead. You’ve got Michael Graves from the teapot. There is the Late zaha Hadid with her flowing sensuous architecture. And there is Frank gehry who used technology to build buildings that Ripple all of them are known for challenging convention. All of them are heroes because they make it worth being an architect because you can put your stamp on something we know who made this building but it’s worth noting that with the exception of Michael Graves all of these. Context are also known for being not particularly easy to work with and for creating buildings that aren’t optimized for other performance metrics like efficiency or Comfort. Famously Frank Lloyd Wright House has leaked and are hard to live in so we have this model of the heroic architect. Let’s add to it the fact that Architects don’t get paid very much if you make $90,000 a year as a A trained architect with an advanced degree. You’re in the top 10% of all Architects that doesn’t compare to lawyers or doctors how to Architects get compensated often on a percentage of how much the building cost to make. So there is an incentive to build bigger buildings more expensive buildings and also an incentive to be known. How do you get known you get known by entering competitions? You get known by building stunning buildings and so a cycle was put in place a cycle that began with Frank Lloyd Wright and continues to this day, which is that the way to be a great architect is to be a different architect and new architect and architect who isn’t building a version of the old building and then there is the clients of Architects clients of Architects. Sometimes want to just get the whole thing over with and get back to business. We’ll talk about that in a second, but then there are clients who want to put a stamp on what they are building and so it’s easier to make a big splash. If you have a famous architect building you a famous building but many of the big buildings and this is a different way that architecture has changed are designed to be big buildings. So that the person who owns the office building can make a lot of money.

What is that person’s incentive? They want to building that is efficient so that they can run it at low. Cost over time and they want to building that is easy to rent because empty spaces just cost money. They don’t make money. So there is no accident around the fact that most of the buildings you see that have been built in the last decade are mostly glass on the outside and delightfully are more energy efficient.

Why why glass on the outside because glass on the outside is the cheapest way to build a big building? NG and it turns out because it’s the style because people like us work in buildings like this, it’s also the easiest to rent and so a ratchet occurred a ratchet toward more and more efficient buildings certified LED, perhaps pronounced lead and these leed-certified buildings platinum or whatever give clients and Architects away to compete with each other on an easily understood metric each of these foundational principles of Should Compound on one another teachers teach a certain point of view a way of approaching architecture examples get built that reinforce that giving teachers more ways to teach architects who get their interesting buildings built are seen as a success they’re able to publish their work. They’re able to earn status and esteem from their peers which gets them more status and his team from clients.

And so it repeats forward and forward. Imagine what would have And instead if after Frank Lloyd Wright the academic Community the people who determined what was going to get taught decided that what they wanted to teach was utility that what they wanted to teach was efficiency Elegance the Delight of the people who are in the building the efficiency of building and maintaining the building the longevity of the building that if they had taught all of those things, which I’m not arguing for I’m just pointing it out just a hundred. Thousand people 3,000 people could have changed the entire built world around us because that was one of the key levers of how we ended up with the buildings we ended up with but I want to talk about a second one that goes in the opposite direction some of you as you heard. This could have been thinking about mcmansions make mansions are an Abomination against design and style and elegance and history and comfort. Bert and utility and efficiency all in one.

How did we end up with this? How did we end up with these horrible buildings that were built by people who had plenty of money but apparently willfully ignoring taste. Well the mcmansion held blog which is in the show notes goes into great detail about this, but here’s the essence of it. The number 3 TV Network on Cable bigger than CNN is HGTV and the people behind HGTV are proud of the fact that each show reminds you of the other that it is difficult. They say that when you’ve got people addicted to stuff to keep making shows that are basically repeats of each other.

but still don’t bore people and the essence of these shows is this that it is possible for untrained people without a lot of money to go into a house make changes to the inside of the house and do it in a way that causes the value of the house to go up dramatically so dramatically that you can sell it at a significant profit and because your investment is To buy a mortgage that profit is Multiplied and then you can do it again.

This lined up with a boom among people who were middle class or upper middle class who had money to spend on real estate and they were thinking about the money. They were spending on real estate as an investment. Not a home to live in combine these things along with the fact that the United States has plenty of land and that the Suburban vacation said a word that the growth of the suburbs was relentless during the He’s the 2000s and the last decade it meant that a lot of new construction is going on new construction. New home construction isn’t driven by Architects.

It’s driven by Builders who only make a profit if they sell a house. It’s driven by the people who are busy specking these expensive houses. Now, let’s compare what I just said to the history of Levittown after World War II a whole bunch of families were below. Being formed and potato fields in Long Island were being plowed over to build the cheapest fastest houses that they could these houses.

Sometimes known collectively as Levittown houses were cookie cutter houses because the people who were buying them were looking for a way to conform as long as he gave them an entry into the path toward the American dream. This isn’t going to change architecture because the people who were buying these houses were not seen as style makers. Or profit makers but HGTV changes this Model 50 years later when they’re talking about getting a custom house built or perhaps flip Kate Wagner of mcmansion Hell points out what happens next what happens next is the Builder eager to build another building listens to the client the client who has listened to HGTV designs the building from the inside.

I doubt cathedral ceilings in the bathroom, please a slightly bigger kitchen. I like this kind of window and I like that kind of window and I need to be able to see this from there. And of course, please chop down all the trees as you prepare my lat. What ends up happening is the architect the one who didn’t become a starchitect the architect who is simply looking to make a living in a very competitive grueling profession takes all of that stuff that’s inside the building and as to add it up to make a building that can actually be built on a budget because there is always a budget when we’re building something the end result our buildings it look ridiculous from the outside pillars were there shouldn’t be pillars cornices where there shouldn’t be cornices a roof line that makes no sense windows that don’t match one element after another that doesn’t work compounded by the fact that because there’s a budget the Those that are used are the cheapest available in every corner of the building because it’s built to flip not built to live in it was built to live in people would have done it more organically. They would have thought about what exactly they needed and built something that they could love for years at a time.

So yeah architecture matters, but when we think about the architecture of architecture, it’s interesting to think about who it’s for. And what’s it for the work? The architect is doing is it to please the professor? She had a few years ago. Is it to please the partner who hired her is it to please her colleagues and the person who’s hiring the architect. Are they looking for that building to get written up? Are they looking to get bragged about are they concerned about 10 or 20 or 30 years later what it’s going to be like to walk through that Plaza in February.

Or if the architect isn’t the driver of the situation who exactly is the Builder working for and when the Builder is working for the resident the client the person who spec’ing the building does that person have a clue about what they actually want for the long haul or are they simply following the instructions of a TV show that’s supposed to be sort of fictional that it’s supposed to be entertaining not.

And so when we think about the world we live in not just the built world, but who’s making the next software that we’re going to use who’s designing the next restaurant menu? We’re going to eat from over and over again the architecture of the system the who’s it for the what’s it for the intentional action the rewards of the people playing in the system.

Those are the ones that are driving our experience with the end product. act so yeah, if you wanted to change the entire built world, it would help to persuade 500 Pioneers in the education of Architects to like one thing over another and if you want to come at it a different way in the direction of money and customers it would be really useful to build a TV network that only reaches the smallest viable audience the most popular shows on HGTV only get seen by 4 million people the typical A million and a half but those million and a half people the ones who are spending a lot of time and energy watching these shows.

They are being taught something and you only need 10,000 of those people to go out and buy a custom house to create the convention of the mcmansion because once it is a convention people like us we live in places like this house owners Like Us sell houses like this 10,000 people. Is enough to create an entire genre the smallest viable audience is always about this.

We can never persuade 300 million or 3 billion or 7 billion people to do something. But what we can do is look at the architecture of the system figure out who the highly leveraged people are in that system and give them a series of incentives and a way of doing their work that spreads Thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

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I have one quick story and one question about car names.

I learned the French carmaker Pujols chose at the beginning a naming convention for their models with Zero in the middle like the 302 it was because the zero was originally the hole for the manual crank and then it was before the electric starter literally kick-started automobile industry. So yes, I agree car names were mostly an engineering decision.

And my question is in Europe. I see a non-trivial amount of people having an Apple logo sticker on the back of their car. Usually you normal basic car. I interpret this as I need a car. Our I don’t exactly know how great car should be. But I aspire to project something better from a marketing point of view. How do you see this Behavior?

Thanks. Bye.

Thank you Jonas. I remember having an Apple logo on my car in 1984 and fast forward. I remember 20 years ago going to a conference where for the first time I saw someone having stickers all over their laptop. Maybe there was even more. On fur brand of car. So what’s this all about? What’s the purpose of the sticker?

Well in the case of the car companies putting their quote sticker on the back of the car.

You just bought is a way of them identifying you as someone who has the latest model. We’re not the latest model as someone who has one level of status or not as someone who belongs to One Tribe or another the Ford people still argue. With the Chevy people the internal combustion people are arguing with the electric people.

We send a message when we drive our car around and the audacious thing that Apple did in 1984 in addition to shipping the Mac is that it shipped with a sticker where to put the sticker well putting the sticker on your car said Don’t Judge Me by my Transportation Judge Me by the digital tool. I am choosing to use Apple’s unstated motto for years and years is we help people develop good taste about digital interaction.

That was their mission. That’s the change they made in the world. And if you had good taste in wished other people would also get the good taste thing. Well, there it is the sticker on your car. I’m an Insider people who get the joke know why I have this on my car people who don’t ignore it. It’s a way of labeling. It’s a signal and then as the laptop became something that wasn’t perfect and precious but sort of disposable as it became something we used in public the stickers on the laptop went in the other direction. They said well, yeah, I have to have a laptop. It is my portal into the world. But here Judge Me by these other things these stickers. I’m choosing to put on this modern-day automobile because we are busy judging people.

Them into groups putting them into categories who’s in who’s out who’s with us who’s against us? We’ve been doing that for a really long time and now it’s come down to a sticker that you can get for a penny.

Hello sir.

This Lewis from Los Angeles. I just finished watching your spinnackern in Prodigy and online games videos that you post it on your website.

Thank you very much for that. I never knew you were such a creator of content that myself and people of my age. I’m in my early 50s grew up with and if participated as a consumer in enjoying and experiencing from the work of many people like yourself. I also watched Halt and Catch Fire and watching your videos. She reminded me of that show one of my favorite TV series on Netflix and wondering if you’ve watched it. I do want to watch it again and it goes through the similar timeline of sounds like from your personal experience my questions. What lessons would you would have Listen take away from a show like that a very entertaining and designed for audience engagement. But what can we learn from that I learned a lot from you and I look for Content elsewhere similar to what you provide and offer what I see what your perspective. Thanks for all you do and thank you for taking my question.

Thanks for this. I’m glad that my videos resonated with you. I’m not much of a TV person. So I haven’t watched that show, but I am thrilled to say that in the show Silicon Valley they even Mentioned yoyodyne. So I guess my legacy is assured. Here’s the thing most of the inputs that we get in our lives do not come from people who are building something or who have built something.

They come from critics Meda critics critics of critics. They come from people talking about how they are engaging with the things that someone else built. So the stories of Builders all the way back to soul of a new machine by Tracy Kidder where his other book, House, these books these stories these shows in which we hear about what it’s like in the moment to deal with constraints to make choices to act as if to be an imposter inventing a future that you haven’t lived in yet.

I find these wildly inspiring. I like the ones that don’t work. I like the ones that do because we learn a lot about what it means to be inside of it. I’m reading an elodea a great book by George. Dyson largely about his dad Freeman Dyson Freeman Dyson left for five years from one of the greatest jobs in the world that Princeton to work on ready for this a rocket ship powered by nuclear weapons.

Now, I’m sure there were people on the project to thought it was the greatest idea they ever heard it’s entirely possible that one day. We will figure out how to do it without blowing up the planet, but for those five years the building working on Being inside of it making the choices. It’s thrilling.

I recommend it to everyone if you get a chance to build something to be really in it to be consumed by the thing you were building. It makes you feel alive in a different way. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information. Distribution I mean this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all NBA gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, When you got a face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide you got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple.

It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an Mint and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -on-monarchists- <==

There are two signs at the front of the school bus that always made a lot of sense to me. The first one is don’t stand in front of the white line. And the second one is don’t talk to the driver. And the reason they make a lot of sense is if I get on a bus, I want the driver to be in charge. I want the bus to go where the bus said it was going to go and I want the decisions to be made by someone who isn’t me?

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo will be back in a second to talk about monarchists, but first here is a message from our sponsor.

Creative isn’t who you are.

It’s what you do along the way creativity has gotten a mystical rap as if it’s some sort of gift.

And make a difference with their creative work. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus. Yes, we’re here to talk about royalty royalty in many forms. Not just the royalty in England or the royalty in any country but the royalty and an organization or a corporation few years ago the great Marshall sahlins were in the most important anthropologists of my lifetime along with the dearly departed David graeber author of debt collaborated on a book called on King’s it’s dense. It’s slow going it’s long and it’s all About the origins and the weirdness of monarchy because thousands and thousands of years ago walking around in the jungle in the desert in the plains in the savannah people came to understand that things might be more efficient or effective if they had a leader that having a leader an organization might make people’s lives better and that began a long cycle of Kings. These Kings often come from away.

He think he is. I know King walking fell for you. You don’t vote for Kings. Well, I can become king then the Lady of the Lake arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held Aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I Arthur was to carry Excalibur.

That is why I am your king and by that, I mean they are not You and me, they don’t have to follow the cultural rules. Maybe they come from Far Away in a geographic sense a plunderer someone who came from another place, or maybe they come from God. But either way the king is not one of us. That is why the king is allowed to rule and like that bus driver.

The Kings word is absolute because the king does not have to play by our rules and if you do the math You can see that a monarch cannot possibly rule unless there are monarchists that monarchists people who like the fact that there is a king that there is someone in charge are an essential part of creating a monarchy.

There are monarchists in every country. There are monarchists in many organizations because the Monarch lets us off the hook because the Monarch makes the decisions and a constitutional monarchy the monarchy who is operating with the best interests of the people at heart and consistently and persistently makes long-term decisions that payoff that’s a really effective form of government the problems spring up when the Monarch coming from away not playing by the rules not being part of the culture having absolute power when that Monarch decides to do things that are selfish or short-sighted or or aren’t in the interest of the people the Monarch is therefore and the history of monarchy in governments. And I would argue in organizations is littered with a predictable string of failures to come for what happens when the Monarch loses the thread but then there’s a second Challenge and the Second Challenge is that if you’re letting the driver Drive everybody else on the bus is just a passenger and so when Industrial Came along a hundred and twenty years ago.

We had to figure out how to organize the factory and we organize it in many ways like a nation-state with someone in charge a ruler and owner. Someone who doesn’t have to play by the rules who can park their car wherever they want to who can come in when they want and leave when they want someone who has their own air force their own Army and their own agenda if you want to work there you can work there, but you’re not in charge the person in charge is in charge. Judge, and so they put Jack Welch on the cover of every business magazine every month forever because it appeared that this monarchy approach to ruling a company could really pay off when Jack left GE. He took 417 million dollars of shareholder cash with him as a prize for leaving behind his kingdom Henry Ford Thomas Edison, you get the idea when we have an organization Industrial Patient that’s run by a powerful founder or operator voice. It allows the people who work there to know exactly what they are supposed to do.

They’re just doing their job. There are Cog in the system. They’re doing what they’re told. Don’t blame me. The king told me to do it and over time this degrades us over time this lack of dignity from not making a decision whether it is a decision as a citizen or a worker ends up undermining our independence our ability to lead and most of all if you care about systems, it undermines our resilience because things work as long as they’re working, but when the world changes the question is who will sense that it is changing who will speak up when the world changes. The question is who will take the lead on that new element that when we have an opportunity.

To adjust to change the shift is the monarch capable interested motivated to do that or do they like it the way it is right now President Harry S. Truman famously had on his desk a sign that said the buck stops here. That signed did not mean I am in charge go away. It meant I am responsible and that is the difference. It’s between having a monarch and having people who show up to take ownership of the work that they do a path that’s open to everybody.

And so as we think about how we want to change the culture as we think about a new generation of leadership that’s focused on things like dignity and fairness and equity and inclusion. How are we going to square that with the idea that some of us are monarchists. So when I’m on a bus, it’s true. I’mi’m Darkest but when I’m working with an organization when I’m a customer when I’m a citizen, I would prefer to be dealing with a more flexible anti monopolist organization one that understands it tomorrow isn’t going to be just like today one that realizes that all of us are smarter than any of us that we have learned a lot in the last hundred years. And one of the things we’ve learned is that the world keeps changing and the other A thing we’ve learned is that in the long run? It’s always the long run that in the long run the urgency or emergency of the next 10 minutes is dwarfed by our need to build structures and systems and processes that allow people to be seen to be heard and most of all to lead because if each of us takes responsibility as opposed to handing it off to the king that just walked in the door, it’s harder it’s scarier, but it is Completely what it means to be a contribution to see possibility and to be alive.

Thanks for listening to my rant. Let’s hear from Monty Python, and we’ll see you next time supremum executive power derives from a mandate from the masses not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth. My name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – who’s on the phone?

Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, sir.

Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece.

Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I really love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki and Bo link2006. Click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can check out the show notes.

Hello Seth, this is Robbie from London. I’m about to start a podcast just for fun. And you know, if it makes anything great.

If not, it’ll be a great fun experience.

I know so our services online where you can hire virtual assistants aboard where they can leave a review for your podcast get more traffic to your podcast more download subscribers. And I’m questioning whether that is right or wrong whether that could affect my podcast business in the future. If it got off the ground, I know on Amazon if there’s fake reviews, I’m highly suspicious of that product. So I’m always looking for Real reviews online. So when it comes to paying to get more traffic toward my podcast, is that a bad thing or is that just being Savvy?

Thank And I appreciate all the effort you do.

Thank you for this honest question Robbie and I hear you. It is super tempting when shortcuts present themselves particularly when they look like obligations to embrace them and it leads to a corruption a corruption in the standards that we thought mattered and a corruption in our own personal morals, but it’s really interesting because once the shortcut becomes a standard it stops being a Corruption and it starts being an established cost of doing business SEO in the old days the idea of building a website. So that search engines would be more likely to index. It was a hack. It was a shortcut. It was something you weren’t supposed to spend money on you were supposed to Simply build something that was good enough and now every single major entity spends a lot of money on SEO because it is considered part of what you have to do.

When the New York Times bestseller list began to get gamed when people would show up in an author’s doorstep and say for $50,000. I will guarantee you a slot on the bestseller list. It was clearly wrong. It was wrong because the bestseller list served several purposes some economic some cultural and undermining it by buying a slot in it is clearly not what it’s about and yet many people did it I have Never done it I never will do it but it is for many categories now a cost of doing business.

And so we get to your question which is the podcast thing. Well first I think we can have useful argument on the merits about whether lots and lots of fake reviews actually help the business of your podcast. I would argue that they don’t I’ve told this story before but years ago a friend was sad and I said to her what’s up. She said well, I have to go negative. I-i’ve I said, what does that mean? You have to go negative. She said well, I made a rule for myself, which is I can’t follow more people on Instagram than follow me.

And there are people I want to follow now, but I don’t have enough followers to do it, which means I’m gonna have to go into deficit. Well, I thought this was fairly amusing. So for her birthday, I bought her fifteen or twenty thousand followers on Instagram cost me about $149 no harm. No foul. No one was injured. It didn’t change. Anything but it made her very happy.

Well, it’s pretty clear that there’s lots of fake followers on Instagram and Twitter and it’s also pretty clear that people with fake followers don’t generally build a long-term resilient future for themselves. So I would argue in the case of the podcast where it is not yet a cost of doing business to go by yourself fake reviews.

Don’t worry about it. Don’t read the reviews don’t count the reviews. the way to build the podcast that works is to build a podcast to 10 people who listen to it will happily tell ten more people about because you can get 10 people 10 friends 10 colleagues to listen to your first episode and if they tell the others then the word spreads repeat that 30 weeks in a row, and now you have a hit Hey Seth, Richard here in Hong Kong.

I recently listened to a podcast which he did with Tim Ferriss and you guys talked about attitude as a skill one skill in particular named resilience resilience developing resilience. It’s a kind of a double-edged sword because it’s such an important skill to get but you only get it through tough scenarios, so I believe Brazilian Tony comes as a product of having challenges and facing adversity.

Is there another way to Cochin resilience real resilience? Not the type of resilience you get from case study Theory or from coaching and mentorship, but real resilience.

Love to hear what you had to say.

Thanks for everything.

Have a great 2021.

Thanks for this question Richard.

I think that there are two kinds of resilience that were both talking about here. There is the resilience of structure the resilience of the world isn’t going to turn out the way you expect are you anti fragile? Do you have a portfolio? Is there a way forward when your dreams do not come true and then there is the resilience of emotional intelligence. How do we internally process something that didn’t work?

I think it’s worth treating them separately the first kind of resilience. This is the resilience of somebody who learns from a young age. Don’t bet everything on 32 red on the roulette wheel because you’re going to get out of the game and staying in the game is the only way you get to keep playing the game and I think we can learn this without trauma.

I think we can learn this for example with board games with lots of games that we can play as kids because it Oops us understand that strategy is not the same as tactics. It helps us understand that if the dice comes up in a way, we didn’t expect it’s not personal that the kid who cries and throws the board when they lose it Parcheesi needs to learn something about how external forces work external forces don’t care about you and they don’t know about you and this idea of modeling various game theories.

And of course game theory has nothing to do with board games. Various theories about how the world will unfold makes it much more likely we can be unemotional about how the world is going to be that that is one form of resilience. But I think you’re right. The second part is that growing up part of what it means to grow up. Even if you’re 40 years old is to fall down scrape your knee and get up and do it again.

If you’ve done a good job on the first part when you fall down and scrape your knee you will. The power to get up and do it again. It’s not fatal. But then you need the emotional Reserve to be able to say to yourself. Yep that happened that happened again. Here we go, because one of the problems of isolating our kids of isolating young adults of creating a system that’s based on just getting an a getting the right answer and moving to the next level is that sometimes it doesn’t work out the way we expect.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -please-dont-litter- <==

Getting on the subject of beautification is like picking up a tangled skein of wool. All the threads are interwoven Recreation and pollution and mental health and the crime rate and Rapid Transit and Highway beautification and the war on poverty and Parks national state and local. It is hard to Hitch the conversation into one straight line because everything leads to something else.

That’s Lady Bird Johnson talking about littering. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo in a minute. We’ll be back to talk about litter and more important littering. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Litter has been around for as long as mankind archaeologists actually specialize in finding litter other than Graves all they’ve got to work with is piles of trash stuff that’s left behind. One of the earliest examples of an anti-littering campaign. Ironically is a piece of litter from rural Greece thousands of years old a sign that says, As if you get caught littering you have to pay a fine of 51 drachmas to whoever finds you littering.

Of course, we know this because the sign wasn’t in a museum was lying by the side of the road. So litter has been around for a really long time Sibley and Lou researched the difference between active and passive litter active litter is intentionally throwing something out the window of your moving car or tossing a Read by the side of the road active littering is something that we can do quite selfishly because we know we are moving on if we look at the mess left behind by nomadic peoples. It’s easy to understand how this could have happened. It’s not their problem anymore passive litter on the other hand is litter where you are in place and then you discard something something that you can live with something that isn’t that unsightly and then when you leave you forget that you did it.

Turns out it’s much easier to change the behavior of active litterers that it is to change passive littering because passive littering is based on forgetfulness or on the idea of diffusion of responsibility. There’s a lot of people around I don’t know exactly how that piece of garbage got there. I need to go now while littering is sort of interesting. It’s litterbugs that I’m really fascinated about. Where did we come up with this idea of litterbugs?

And starting each. Let me get that human beings need to be pushed.

And cajoled into not littering anymore. Heather Rogers has written a book about the history of garbage and one of the things she dug up. That’s absolutely extraordinary. Is that the keep America beautiful campaign the entire idea of shaming litterbugs the word litterbug was invented in the 1940s as a response to localities beginning to regulate people.

Going out styrofoam cups Pepsi bottles and other mass-produced objects of consumption and it turns out that keep America beautiful which we will talk about again in a minute a non-profit. The one that runs all of those ads was founded and is still led by people from industry specifically the American Can Company owens-illinois glass company Coca-Cola Pepsi the Dixie cup company the leader. Is of these companies embraced an idea that has caught on more and more and it goes like this the creators of industrial output only exist to serve the needs of the public and the public is responsible. They’re responsible for what they demand and they are responsible for how they deal with it. So if Pepsi start selling 2 liter Pepsi at a lower price, it’s because more and more people want to buy lots and Two Pepsi at a low price and if people become obese or get diabetes Well that is their choice. It is up to them the fact that an industrialist enabled it not their responsibility.

So if we go back to this idea of littering if you are in the business of making cans and cups and Bottles, if you are in the business of figuring out how to get people to switch from water that comes from a tap to water that comes in a bottle. You have a financial incentive to keep that system going that you are short-term compensation is completely based on what happens tomorrow not what happens 10,000 years from now when that bottle still exists in a landfill and so in self-defense the industry created the idea of the litterbug basically saying to the public it’s your responsibility.

Our responsibility to figure out how to recycle your responsibility to figure out how to not throw it out the window. I think it probably peaked in 1971 1971 was after Lady Bird Johnson’s rain is the most activist first lady in history up to that moment with the beautification of Highways with the shaming of litterbugs with a movement to say to people who littered you are not one of us. We need to make this problem go Go away. Well in 1971 they ran and add one of the 50 greatest ads of all time. According to the Ad Council and add that one to Clio Awards.

It’s called The Crying Indian and in this commercial the star is paddling a canoe not very well. I just watched the commercial again down a river surrounded by trash surrounded by junk and at the key moment of the commercial a narrator comes on so.

People have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country and some people don’t people start pollution. People can stop it.

I’m sure you can visualize what happened as he stands there a car drives by and throws a big bag of fast food out the window right to his feet. Well, the irony runs deep first, of course that the commercial was paid for by companies that made a profit making single use containers that very kind that are getting thrown out of the car.

But secondly that the star of that commercial who many people knew as iron Eyes Cody. One of the most famous Indian / Native Americans in the movies up until that time was actually from Louisiana a second-generation Italian immigrant named Oscar Decor T. And yes, he wasn’t a native American now Cody / cordys intent was probably very good. He spent his entire career helping Native American communities level up and see themselves differently in the world, but the subterfuge here runs really deep because this mindset that says people who create our culture and people who create the means and mechanisms of Industry are not responsible doesn’t hold water because if a human being is responsible for whether or not they throw something out of the car window, aren’t they also responsible for whether or not they make the thing that got thrown out of the car window.

There’s a Milton Edmund Terror mindset that says that the only job of a corporation is to make as much money as they can for its shareholders, but that forgets the time element that the companies that are based on creating stuff that we can no longer discard aren’t going to make enough money for their shareholders going forward.

And so now the culture the culture is starting to take a hard look and say wait a minute we wouldn’t have to recycle this stuff if you didn’t make it and sell it at an attractive. Price maybe what marketers are doing? Some marketers short-term marketers is using the culture to persuade people more and more people to buy stuff. They’re going to have to throw out to buy water in a bottle instead of drinking water from a glass.

Now at the very same time. There are people showing up with new entities. Some of them are more ethical and more environmentally sound probably healthier, but many of them are simply green washed. And greenwashing is another cynical marketing trick and what it says is there are people people who are nervous about their footprint people who are nervous about their health if we take some of that nervousness and turn it into a story turn it into a shroud for what we make plug it into the idea that we have trained the world that the best way to solve an emotional problem is by buying something.

Maybe we can sell them something else. And so a commercial a beautification project a plot of wildflowers. These are things that can make us feel better. But what we know is that systemic change changing the mindset of not just the active but the passive litterer is truly difficult. We’ve discovered that yes, we can decrease the amount of active littering by shaming the liver but we also know and it’s so easy to demonstrate that Changing the temptation to litter in the first place by not giving people what they say they want but instead giving them what they need products and services that are more resilient that stand the test of time that might be the responsibility of the industrialist not simply up to each of us.

Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a clarification and A couple questions from previous episodes but first here is a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp an independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit. Akimbo.com go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works.

Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump scale entire sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Sylvania hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey sup. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece.

Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you.

If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button before I get to your questions first this clarification.

Is that in your recent episode on the architecture of architecture?

You challenged us your audience to create outside value by targeting architecture professors as kind of benevolent levers on the built environment. And as one of those myself I was flattered but you also blame mcmansions on the profession of architect and I want to push back on that a little bit fully one. Third of atmospheric carbon comes from buildings and we Architects deserve much of the blame for that probably.

Architects design all those Jive plastic shopping centers and office Parks it in Suburban parking lots. So we’ll shoulder some of the blame for that too. But while states require pretty much all non houses to have an architect less than 2% of single-family residences are actually designed by Architects and of that tiny sliver of architect design houses almost none of them are mcmansions the difference between an architect and a house designer.

It’s kind of like the difference between in the astronomer and astrologer licensed Architects have to go to college for at least five years. We typically work five years in a forum for where eligible for licensure and we have to pass 6 exams Each of which has a 58 percent pass rate on average and by contrast there’s no schooling training or licensure required to be a house designer.

All right. Thanks.

Thank you for this Michael and for the correspondence that led to it. I’m really impressed by your leadership as well as your bubble wrap house. Ja link to in the show notes, you are absolutely correct. I did not know this almost no houses in the United States are actually on the spot designed by architects.

In fact Builders and house designers are culpable for mcmansions and disastrous houses. I will say that they look to Architects for Spiritual and intellectual leadership and that it’s important that we hold. All of these folks accountable because you’re right the carbon footprint that we build once we build a house is something we pay for for decades afterwards.

Thanks for calling in with this.

Hey Seth, it’s Adam from Toronto. Thanks so much for last week’s episode on the architecture of architecture. I’m an architecture student myself. And I believe the transforming the architecture field is going to be an essential part of solving the climate and biodiversity crisis. I’m on a mission to make that transformation happen.

I’ve just started a co-op job with an amazing not-for-profit studio that shares my vision their approach focuses on creating speculative work that aims to change perceptions of what is possible in the field something I’ve noticed. Destroying their team is that they place a huge emphasis on creating Innovative projects, but they seem to see marketing is a pretty low priority since their whole reason for being centers on solving Global environmental problems.

I feel there’s an opportunity to radically improve their effectiveness by helping them see that there is much an idea as marketing organization as a design studio. I think Concepts like the minimum viable audience storytelling and try building should be baked into everything this studio does after all Thing problems on a global scale is impossible. If you can convince others to join you when I heard your proposed strategy for creating change in the architecture field by focusing on the high leverage point of architecture professors.

I realized that I’m in a perfect environment to try it out. My challenge is this as the newest and least professionally experienced member of the team, how do I begin to convince the rest of the studio that marketing needs to be Central to all of their major conversations and in terms of current marketing efforts How do I teach the studio that strategies like writing blog posts to appeal to everyone probably isn’t going to help them achieve their goals.

Thanks for everything.

You bring to the world. Thank you for this atom. One of the things I believe that nonprofits in particular but many organizations should do is eagerly publish that if you seek to change your industry publishing is really what you do for years and years. I’ve worked With Acumen a groundbreaking nonprofit that pioneered patient capital and what I helped them see is that they’re not going to change the entire world of the bottom of the pyramid the two billion people who struggle on three to ten dollars a day, but if they publish their work if they share their successes and their failures if they show people the roadmap then others will follow will copy it will scale and that’s exactly what is happening. Happened and the same thing can be true for someone who’s trying to Pioneer in architecture.

If we think about the important architects who have changed the way people think largely they’ve done it by publishing their work as much as they’ve done it by building their work that unbuilt buildings widely shared can change the conversation. And so this isn’t about content Marketing in the sense that you’re hustling people to click on something.

So that they will buy from you. This is simply about changing the conversation by putting your ideas into the world warts and all they set this is Casey from Minneapolis hate during every episode you run a spot for the alt MBA and it is jaw-droppingly.

Awesome. I’ve heard of 90 times and I still let it play every single time because it’s a so well crafted the guy speaking the you cannot think the internet guy is voice is pure gold. His delivery is Flawless and the copy is a plus love to know more about the spot a who is this person it? How did you find him?

Did he write The Copy? Did you read the copy was the copy your first stab or whether other versions that you actually shipped and you’ve tweeted along the way love to know more and I know others would too about the making of This alt and be a spot.

Thank you for this and it’s a long overdue chance for me to thank my Friend TK Coleman, you’re right a hundred and twenty or more times. TK has been on the end of this podcast as he is today talking about his experience in the alt MBA TK is a leader a scholar speaker. He’s a really good guy as well. So the origin of that at first of all why has it been on so many times?

Well, the answer is that frequency works the answer is that persistent and consistent and Has frequency showing up regularly not replacing it when I’m tired of it, but replacing it when it is no longer valuable, and it’s still valuable because what he had to say about the alt MBA is true, and it also helps us understand The Human Condition Jesse. Dylan is a groundbreaking documentary filmmaker.

I asked Jesse years ago to bring his crew to New York from California to film people at an alumni event talking about Experience in the alt MBA thanks to Jesse and his crew. They created a safe space where people could come look straight into the camera and talk about their experience. So he set the table but there was no copywriter. There was no script and I didn’t edit it at all that instead. What we did was create a place where people could speak on their behalf. Not just on hours about how they saw the world. And so what you’re hearing are TK’s words not mine. I am flattered that you think I wrote that I didn’t and part of it comes from practice the practice of showing up to say I have a thought to share and it turns out we can all get better at that and we get better at that when we publish our work.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right.

Is it puts you.

You in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason.

Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt nba.com.

==> -on-direct-advertising- <==

I have no idea. If or when you are listening to this if I was selling something if I had to pay to put this in front of you that’s a real challenge because direct marketing is the idea that you pay your money, but you don’t take your chances because you know exactly when someone turns around and pays you.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

In March, 20 20. I did a zoom call with my team about how we were going to spend time and money promoting and advertising the akimbo workshops. I decided it would be fun to record that 15 minute rant that started our conversation. And so here it is. We’ll be back in a second with more about how Google is walking away from direct advertising but first Here’s an unmeasurable untrackable ad from our sponsor.

It’s back. The real skills conference is back and actual conference. You don’t have to get on a plane, but you do need to interact face-to-face online from wherever you are two hours of interaction on your toes with real people talking about the things that matter the skills that help us make a difference. Akimbo is back running it again to find out more visit akimbo.com go for all the details the people Meet will change your life.

Okay. Hi all I’m recording this just letting you know I’ll turn off the recording or edit things out later. So here’s where the begins in 1998 when Yahoo bought my company, which was a direct marketing company the company that invented direct marketing on the internet my new boss sat me down and he said so what’s direct marketing and that’s how I knew I was in trouble.

So what is direct marketing direct marketing is action marketing named by Lester wunderman direct marketing is measured and it is about an engagement. With directly between the person who bought the ad and the person who saw the ad you can measure it and you can profit from it Lester was the pioneer of direct marketing. He helped invent it he invented the Columbia record club and save the American Express card and the idea of direct marketing, which we’re going to start calling something else in a minute.

Is that because you can measure it and because it translates into Revenue you can do an infinite amount of it. Lee fast because if you spend a dollar to interrupt somebody and you make two dollars now you can do it again, so it shouldn’t be called direct our canoes to be called direct advertising because marketing around here means something else marketing is the change we make in the world by telling true stories and helping people get where they want to go.

Advertising is spending money appropriately to bring a message to someone who hadn’t heard it before or who needs to hear it again, so they take Some sort of action or change their mind about something. Now, what does this have to do with the fork in the road for a Kimbo?

Google had a breakthrough by accident it wasn’t part of their business plan, which was that for a nickel you could buy a click and they would measure and make it easy for you to see how that nickel paid off. So what happened was people started buying keywords on Google for lots and lots of products and services for Nicola click.

And then because marketers are narcissists people started Googling themselves, when they Google themselves, they saw that someone was buying their keyword for a nickel. So if your Home Depot and you see that Lowe’s is buying your keyword for nickel this cannot stand so you started buying it for a dime and a race was on and so Google grew with zero sales force. And if anyone tells you that they were the key sales person behind Google they’re lying because Google didn’t have A key salesperson no sales calls were necessary.

All that happened was an auction took place to buy clicks which were measured for the keywords that matter to you. And that’s how Google became a huge multi multi-billion dollar company almost all of their revenue still to this day comes from that simple auction. If we do the math of the auction, there’s a challenge in the challenge is this if it’s worth $1 click for you to buy clicks and it’s worth $1 click for your competitor to buy clicks is worth a dollar because it means your profits going to be a buck for 90 cents. You should buy The Click you get to keep ten cents you’re still ahead.

But if there’s an auction all of a sudden guess who’s keeping almost every penny of value Google or Facebook because people are competing for the keyword and all the value like a plan. Word goes to the person who owns the real estate not to the company that’s buying it. Right so far so good. So I’ll making sense.

Now the thing about direct advertising is almost none of the billions of dollars that are spent every year by marketers has traditionally been earmarked for direct advertising. It’s been earmarked for brand advertising brand advertising our Billboards sponsorships magazine it tv ads radio ads because we can’t measure action.

It is not action marketing it is Unmeasured and it’s based on a completely different way of looking at the world. So when I had my first job at 23 my company spent millions and millions of dollars on advertising and we couldn’t measure any of it. Not only couldn’t you measure any of it? It took months and months maybe a year to go from I have an idea for an ad to the ad is running.

And you could only run a couple ads you couldn’t want a thousand or ten thousand different kinds of ads. It was just logistically impossible. It also didn’t make sense because frequency is so powerful frequency says that the first time someone sees an ad it has almost no impact on them. There are few people it does but almost none and so you have to run the same add 3 times 9 times J. Levinson says 27 times against one person before it. It’s this again.

So what does this all mean means a couple things first of all advertising has always been a crapshoot. It’s a crapshoot because it’s human nature and no one knows exactly what’s working that direct advertising has been a bit of a race to the bottom because you get rewarded for something that works like this.

So Flat Belly diet three words. It doesn’t have a lot of nuance to it, but enough people clicked on it that they could run the ad again. N so it’s really rare that important work gets done by direct advertisers. It’s really rare that you’re able to come up with an ad to pays for itself that you can run again and again and again that you’re proud of there are a couple exceptions right that I think if we look at how the mattress or the Shaving business has been turned upside down.

It’s been turned upside down because they had 50 million of venture capital spend, but they also figured out how to optimize for this. direct response Okay, but we need to talk about this now for two reasons. First of all, because a Kimbo doesn’t build workshops that are optimized for direct response advertising.

It’s not a late-night infomercial now one more thing you get a potato peeler and so we’re never going to have the yield that lets us by the YouTube ads or the Facebook ads or Google ads the way somebody who wants to sell you the Lamborghinis in their garage can These were not appealing to the kind of person that clicks in buys right away.

But the second thing and this is current events is that in February Google shifted gears and said, you know how we’ve been helping people track behavior for years and years misusing the cookie, which was originally invented just as the convenience to so you didn’t have to type your password in every time all this shared information about people tracking allocation of interest in attributions and all this that we’re not going to do that anymore.

Now Google is not known for being an evil. Why would Google even do this? Why would they push to undo all of the direct marketing that they have been pushing for four years? Well, the reason is this now that the landlord has taken all the money from the direct marketing auction. They are discovering that lots and lots of people who would have been advertisers like General Foods General Mills General Electric all the generals.

They can’t be direct marketers right neither can mr. Coffee. Mr. Peanut or Mrs. Butterworth. It does doesn’t work because you can’t measure how many people bought syrup because they saw an ad on the internet.

So by blowing it up now that they’ve destroyed radio and television and newspapers. They’re basically saying to the advertisers who are used to spending advertising money without knowing what’s going to work. Guess what Google lets you run advertising without knowing what’s going to work. Okay small little aside because I’m working here without notes is When I was at Yahoo, the home page of Yahoo was sold out for a year in advance. The banner on the homepage.

Now Banner on the homepage of Yahoo was the worst place to run an ad on the entire internet because you’ve got everyone instead of paying for specifics. You are paying a premium for General you’re paying a premium to reach the unwashed masses unmeasured unknown. And most of the time when Yahoo sold in had to somebody in 1999.

They didn’t want to click through data. They didn’t want to know how many people clicked on yet because if Yahoo, told them they would have to tell their boss and they would have to say to their boss. They had didn’t work that well and then they would get in trouble. So instead Yahoo! Sold the story of want to be on the homepage of the internet because we’re the internet. Our homepage is usually sold out you can have it. A million dollars and so I’m guessing a million dollars a day. They were selling a piece of real estate. That was worthless.

Except it gave you a story the story to put in a press release in the story to tell your boss, which is where the sponsor of the internet today. Everyone quick. Go looked at Yahoo! Where that’s us. So now as we grow a Kimbo as we seek to cross the chasm we have a challenge and the challenge is we’re not direct marketers, right? They’re going to renew my direct marketing Hall of Fame price right behind me. They’re going to kick us out of the direct marketing Hall of Fame because we’re not optimized as direct marketers because we’re proud of making something doesn’t sell very well by The Click.

But we also know that we want to get the word out to people who weren’t necessarily paying attention to a subtle blog post. We’re necessarily looking last week for the kind of change that we make so we need to be in the world and we are willing to have a budget to be in the world to tell our story but the conversation the challenge going forward is How do you do that when you’re not using the metrics of the internet?

Because if you just say, oh we’re going to sponsor 10,000 podcasts. How much does that cost? How do you decide is it better to sponsor 10,000 podcasts or is it better to sponsor Facebook or Google or put the money somewhere else and without measurement? It’s really hard to do and so the last part of my rant and then I’ll turn off this recorder. We can have a conversation that’s part of my rant. Is that what marketers have been doing since 1920 since scientific advertising which great book came out is come up with a proximate ways to measure some of them are expensive in which you do panels and you say to the people around the table.

Name a brand of granola and someone says over my granola. That’s my favorite kind and but most people have never heard of a my granola and then you write a whole bunch of billboards all throughout town. And then you have another panel a month later. He say name a brand of granola and some people say Vermont granola and you get a promotion because this really really poor research technique has perhaps validated that your Billboards worked.

Of course, it doesn’t tell us anything because it might be they heard about it from someone else. It might be their hearing about For my granola is totally different than buying Vermont granola and on and on and on so the short answer is we are back to the Maelstrom of nobody knows anything and we have to beware of really time-consuming and expensive processes that include 40-page brand Bibles that are not as suitable replacement for that’s a damn good add that really spoke to me.

I heard you. It was in the right place at the right time with the right message for me. And that is still a human act. It is nothing that we can measure or test for it is simply the work of a creative who said I have something to say knock knock who’s there that when Mary Wells Lawrence The Great advertising executive figured out how to double the sales of Alka-Seltzer.

She didn’t do it with research and she didn’t do it with testing. She did it by realizing that if the jingle was plop plop fizz fizz people would take two Alka-Seltzer when they got sick instead of one and it’s rare to find creative genius in advertising, but the shift that Google is making is requiring that it’s going to come back because it’s all we got.

All right turning record off.

You want to hide you ate too much. The cheesecake made you greedy was directing it and stomach hear this message from ol Speedy Alka-Seltzer. A plop plop fizz fizz. Oh, what a relief videos will be back with answers to questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo. Cam go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. My name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question.

As you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button a couple questions to get us started talking about monarchy and democracy.

Isis This is Nico from Berlin Germany. I feel question regarding your exercise out about monarchy. I have a small family owned business and basically I’m the Monarch in our company. So whatever I think of a dream of will be done and I have this feeling that my employees are very happy with this situation in that they are used to Being in a company with a monarch who decides now I want to change this and I’m wondering if you have any ideas on how to change this culture change the expectation of my employees to not have me deciding. Everything are also challenging my decisions.

Thank you, sir.

Thanks for the sneak out.

Yes, you got the point of what I was trying to get at which is the person who signed up to work in your small organization probably signed up because they were looking for a monarch. That doesn’t mean they didn’t want to be heard doesn’t mean they don’t want dignity a chance to contribute but there’s a reason that some people start businesses and there was a reason that some people have chosen not to And when you say to the team I am not going to do X Y or Z that causes stress stress isn’t always a bad thing but stress is real and the stress has to do with how big a map are you expecting me to draw because many people have been brainwashed from young age to only want to press the button on the French fry machine to have the smallest possible map for them to draw.

Why people do things like become a nurse because within the realm of the patient nurse relationship, there’s an enormous amount of latitude for a well-respected nurse in the right working environment to make a huge difference because no they are not simply going through the manual. They are spending time being a human with other humans, but there’s a big difference between say being a nurse and being appointed head. Of the entire Healthcare operation different sized map different kind of choices to be made.

So my entire career has been focused on helping people eagerly seek a bigger map. I believe people are capable of having a lot of self-determination and that many spots in our industrialized world have stripped them from that not just the ability to do it, but their belief that they can do it, so I’m cheering you on but I’m reminding you. You that yeah, it’s stressful.

Hey Seth, it’s Russell from Colorado. Alt MBA 40. Woohoo.

My question today is about the monarchists podcast.

One of the things that I’ve noticed in my world is that I believe that humans have a very limited capacity for democracy. So while I really really really believe in democracy, there’s sometimes when it isn’t effective. So for example, we’ve all been in those staff meetings. Where the boss. Allows the group to try to decide and discuss and come to a consensus over where to put the couch or something that isn’t really necessary and everybody just gets tired and frustrated and it takes a lot of time to sort through that on the other hand. There is a lot of issues that we really do need to discuss and come to consensus to whether that’s how diverse employees are treated in the workplace or how we are going to be as a people so My question is where do we draw the line? I mean in our country we have representative democracy. So we elect representatives so that they make decisions for us but more specifically in the workplace or in our relationships. How do we decide when to engage that limited energy that we have for democracy? And when do you think it’s best just to to use your analogy? Say hey, you’re the Bus driver I’m going to defer this responsibility to you.

Thank you Russell.

It’s worth noting that democracy was a capital D. The organized voting for political decisions is different than democracy with the little D, which is the group deciding what the group is going to do, but in both cases, there is very very little actual straight up greek-style democracy in our lives it. Way more likely we defer to other people or that we speak up maybe more than we should on issues that probably don’t matter that much that people are way more likely to want to argue about a logo design.

Then they are to want to take responsibility for which city to move the office to Y. Well when it comes to the logo design Everyone’s an expert because everyone has looked at logos when it comes to taking responsibility for where everyone in the Office should move well, that’s a lot of responsibility to handle.

So my point about democracy begins with democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. I think Winston Churchill said that but I’m not certain and what it means is that there are other ways that groups can make decisions, but they don’t usually end well and that one of the advantages of having a system in place.

It allows groups of people to speak up is that is a steam release valve that lets a system of government catch its breath and shift gears and go in the other direction with not nearly as much trauma as if we have to wait until something dramatic happens. And so I don’t believe humans have a limited ability for democracy.

I believe we have been brainwashed into a certain form of leadership. Ship adherence or management adherence to be more accurate and I also believe that there are real penalties for taking responsibility and most people don’t want to take responsibility most of the time and what we need in small groups and large are people who are going to say, this is on my watch here. I made this we’re going to own the outcome and then do something with what they learn.

This is why computers civil? Hearing electrical engineering and parts of medicine have advanced so much in the last hundred years because there’s a feedback loop there is data. It’s not just well, that’s my opinion because this is about more than opinions. It’s about what works and as we go forward figure out how to give people the benefit of the doubt the dignity to speak up the chance to lead enables us to realize that all of us are smarter than any of us and they’re what we need. Our systems that are resilient in the face of change because change is everywhere.

Thanks for listening.

Appreciate your questions. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know.

And none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all NBA gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, When you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment. And we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -entrepreneurs-guide-to-trademarks- <==

Here’s a non-lawyers guide for artists creators and entrepreneurs about copyright trademark and patent, but maybe I shouldn’t call it that because Entrepreneur magazine has spent millions and millions of dollars suing entrepreneurs for using the word entrepreneur. It would be a little bit like Time Magazine suing people who make clocks or who use a watch or a little bit like the Atlantic magazine suing people who live on the east coast of North or South America or even the west coast of Europe or Africa.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo be back in a second to talk. What you might need to know, but might not understand about patents trademarks and copyright, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

Sometimes it seems like if you want to start a business you need a rich uncle or a bank or VC, but that’s not true. Some of the greatest projects of all time have been bootstrapped built with a different model. The bootstrappers workshop is back from akimbo. You can find out all All the details at akimbo.com / go it’s a chance to build the project that you’ve dreamed of to find Independence to make a difference.

You can be a bootstrapper but it helps to know the best practices. I hope you’ll check it out. Akimbo.com / go back when I was a book packager. My job was to invent books and then build them along the way we ended up creating a hundred and twenty books some bestsellers most not But in order to sell a hundred and twenty bucks, we came up with more than a thousand more than a thousand book ideas. Some of which took a minute some which took six years and along the way after setting them out tens of thousands of times to hundreds of editors in the book business.

Only once exactly once did someone steal one of my ideas. Of course the idea they stole ended up selling more than a hundred million dollars. As worth of books, but even in the moment and especially now after all these years, I’m gratified that I had an idea that someone could steal and turn into a hundred million dollar business.

What should we do about our ideas? What should we do when someone steals our ideas? How should we keep people from stealing our ideas? How is it that Syracuse University ostensibly a non-profit in the public interest tries to trademark The color orange, what would it even mean to say? No other sports team is allowed to have an orange logo, even if we get the 64 color box from Crayola, there’s only 64 colors in it.

Where do we going to do to start trademarking move? It’s going to be a challenge. There is a land grab here. It’s driven by scarcity. It’s driven by public markets and mostly it’s driven by lawyers. Who are Trying sometimes to do their best but who make a mistake about what it would mean to do their best.

So first a little bit of background if you rob somebody’s house or if you vandalize someone’s car the cops should show up at your house and arrest you that’s their job, but there are no copyright police and there are no patent police that patents copyrights and trademarks are about civil action what it means. Is that if you own one of these things or you think you own one of these things you can sue someone else it is peer-to-peer one lawyer Sue’s another lawyer and in general when we’re talking about this sort of civil action the person with the most money who cares the most will ultimately Prevail not always sometimes the good guy wins, but often if a giant Corporation decides to put The screws to somebody by spending a fortune on lawyers lawyers who aren’t keeping track of what’s right and what’s wrong but simply keeping track of how to win.

We have a challenge. And so before we go down the road of as a Creator playing in that space we need to decide if we want to be in the business of hiring lawyers engaging with the other teams lawyers spending the time and money to litigate for these right. Which might be morally hours that’s not the question.

The question is, is it a choice? We want to make in this short riff. I want to talk about the three kinds of intellectual property why they’re generally a good idea and how to understand the differences and when to use them, so let’s start with patents patents are new useful and non-obvious inventions.

Traditionally there a device that you can get a patent on anything except a nuclear weapon and a perpetual motion machine and you used to have to bring in the device itself and show the patent examiner exactly what you had invented and the reason that we want to give inventors protection from being copied is simple, it takes a bunch of years to be able to invent something new useful and non-obvious and in exchange for you, too. Looking the world exactly how it works.

The government gives you a limited number of years where you’re the only person who’s allowed to make something that works exactly that way so you can see the advantages here by showing everyone exactly how it works. You’re making it easier for the next inventor to come up with something better than yours.

That’s good for all of us not good for you, but good for all of us and in exchange you get the profit from all that work you put into your invention. Now, there are people who would like to broaden what it means to have a patent. So Amazon got a patent on one-click shopping. Now you could argue that one-click shopping is obvious because once you hear the phrase one-click shopping, you know exactly what it is.

However back then the patent office was giving out process patents like candy and so Amazon grabbed one. Today, it really doesn’t make sense for you to go get a patent unless a you have at least $25,000 to risk on the process of time and money. It takes to get one and be once you have one you believe it will help you with Finance or some other business building activity that will give you the money to then. Sue the people you think are infringing on your patent.

As you can tell I’m not a giant fan of patents. I have a process patent. I invented something when I was at Yahoo! That would enable a digital currency of attention online. It was super fun to invent. I’m glad I don’t have to be in the business of protecting it the other two kinds of intellectual property are a lot more relevant to this discussion.

The first one is trademark Trade Mark is what it sounds like it is the mark that we put on the thing that we sell. Trade it goes all the way back to the idea of Wedgwood China because you wanted when you bought Wedgwood China to know that Wedgwood made it it goes back to the days of bass and Guinness and beers in Britain. You wanted to know if you bought a bass ale you are getting a nail made by bass. There was a mark on The Keg there was a Mark that made it clear who made it you can see why this is useful. Oh to our culture because if it wasn’t in place then anyone could pretend to make anything and it would be extremely difficult for someone to invest in maintaining quality.

But of course because there are laws and there’s money and there are lawyers. It has been exploited Pat Riley the basketball coach got a trademark for the word three-peat. Well, the word three-peat is a fascinating coinage for Happens apparently if a sports team wins three years in a row, but no it’s not a trade Mark. It’s not a trademark because it doesn’t tell you who made some goods and services owning the right to put the word three-peat on a t-shirt does not help anyone. It is not in our culture’s interest to make it so that people can start stealing phrases from the culture like the color orange or the word entrepreneur and try to keep other people from using it be able to start Atlantic magazine Time magazine or Entrepreneur magazine because the names of those magazines tell us who made the magazine but if you want to run an entrepreneurial Workshop or not trinomial conference or an entrepreneurial something else should be allowed to do that because word entrepreneur is a word it is not the source of goods and services.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you are a creator of something And you want to be known as the originator of those goods or services. It really helps to a pick a word or phrase that is really obscure unique original just yours because it’s tempting to call your new startup apple or orange or blue.

But as soon as you do something like that the odds are somebody else who has already tried. To claim that word or phrase for their line of goods or services is going to come after you and then you’re setting yourself up for needless heartache and be something that goes with a find a core domain that matches the name you want before you start using the name. Here’s the reason why if you own a Kimbo.com, it’s really unlikely that a big powerful company. And akimbo is out there protecting its trademark because if they were they would probably own a Kimbo.com before you did and so it is not as valid as a trademark search but it is a fine place to go. That doesn’t mean you have to own the basic.com for any name you want. But what I am proposing is that you pick a distinctive trademark not a descriptive or a generic one. So what do I mean by this distinctive? I-i’ve also known as fanciful means that you pick a phrase that has absolutely nothing to do with the thing you do. So if you wanted to come up with a new line of cars calling that brand gefilte fish is probably safe because gefilte fish has nothing to do with electric cars on the other hand. If you decide to call those cars Edison that’s getting a little bit closer. If you decide to call those cars electric, well, you’re not going to get a trademark for that because the word electric describes what you do it is descriptive. It is close to generic. It is the name of the category itself.

So what we’re looking for is a fanciful term that has not been used in the area in which you work that you can win by protecting and part of that means that your SEO will take care of it. Self because if you pick a unique phrase one, where if you type it into Google you’re the first match now your job is simply to get people not to type in the generic. I’m looking for window screens but to type in your name because if your name is the only one they will find you now. Once you have a trademark in mind, you have the option of registering it registering. Trademark simply means filling out some forms paying a little bit of money and sending it into the government. There are legal advantages to registering a trademark but it is not required. What is required is that you use it that you use it in interstate commerce selling something to somebody else over state lines regularly promoting yourself building the website, etc, etc, and treating it like a trademark. That’s why you’ll see a little TM after a logo because what it says is am I the person who made this thing am considering this my trademark hands off after you submit your paperwork. If you choose to do that the government posts it publishes it and says to the world this guy this woman.

They think they want to trade mark on this any objections. And if no one objects you get an r with a circle that you can put after your brand name. That’s a way of saying not only do I think this is my trademark government the United States. Agrees with me again. As soon as you publish your trademark for opposition opposition might show up.

Now if you’re building something of scale and significance better to have the opposition show up early rather than late but when opposition shows up that’s going to cost you money as well a totally irrelevant aside, there’s all this arguing that goes on in trademark and copyright lesson patent, but in trademark and copyright because Everybody gets to make up new rules as they go.

It is one of the most plastic forms of law because you have adversarial parties on either side arguing for what they want to argue until very recently couldn’t get a registered trademark in the United States for a term that was offensive. And no I’m not going to say any offensive words on this podcast because they offend me as well.

But I think you could imagine why the government doesn’t want to be in the business of memorializing hateful or offensive. Worms in their paperwork and honoring that person with a registered trademark. Well recently a rock group with a term that many people might consider offensive certainly offensive to the members of the rock group itself fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won their case, so it’s entirely possible that you could name your brand something offensive ask your local attorney.

And then the third one the third one is copyright copyright. Does not protect your idea if you want to write a fantasy novel about a young boy wizard who goes to a school in England and finds all these Adventures you can do that because ideas are free and a good thing too. It’s a good thing that we can take ideas because if we can’t well then we wouldn’t have West Side Story if we can’t almost every play every book every Except every business every painting would be against the law.

You can paint a picture of somebody sitting in the park. That’s not a protected idea the first person who painted a picture of someone sitting in a park could not say to everybody else. Nope. I own the idea of painting people sitting in the park. What a copyright protects is a specific expression of an idea if You want to write this fantasy novel and the main character’s name is Harry and his friends name is Hermione.

No, you can’t do that because it has been conquered sized written down by the original Creator. She owns the copyright in Harry Potter’s Adventures. So as soon as you write something down, whether it’s a painting a musical composition and sa a blog post the words the specific words There’s a copyright in those and you own it and you don’t have to do anything for that copyright to exist as soon as you publish as soon as you put that in front of one other person. You have a copyright in it.

Now. That doesn’t mean you can do anything with that copyright because once again, it’s up to you to start chasing people suing people filling out dmca forms Etc. That’s a choice so we could spend all day talking about What’s the best strategy to protect your writing your idea Etc but I have a different take on it. And again like trademark.

You can file papers to memorialize your copyright with the government. It’s not as important as it used to be used to be you had to send actual books to the Library of Congress. This was a clever way for them to make sure they had plenty of books in their library, but now thanks to the Berne convention and other updates in copyright you don’t have To do anything.

If you care about this keep track of when you did it print it out put it in a folder. But the fact is you own the copyright if someone has put something in writing in photography in pixels in ink don’t take it because it’s theirs. Okay. So what should we do about people stealing our ideas? There are only two things I can think of one is you could go chase those people you could harass those people you could make them stop and the second thing you could do is make more ideas.

You have the moral and legal right to chase people who steal your stuff I can tell you because I have partners that if you steal my audio book and post it on YouTube my partners and I will cause you to take it down because I owe it to them. But if you want to take one of my blog posts and post it somewhere and make it clear that I’m not you and you’re not me.

Well, then that’s okay with me because I’m just gonna have another blog post tomorrow. That doesn’t mean you should have to do this doesn’t mean you should have to let anybody who wants to take something you wrote and put it in the world put it in the world, but it’s a choice and it’s the choice as a Creator as Tim O’Reilly is pointed out. We think our problem is piracy, but our real problem is obscurity obscurity. Don’t know you they don’t trust you. They don’t want to hear from you.

And if you come up with an idea that gets shared if you come up with a video that’s put in lots of places. If you come up with a meme that spreads you’re probably not going to get any royalties from that but what you will get from that is the credit that goes to the originator what you will get from. That is the chance to do it again.

So I’m not arguing its Patent Trademark or copyright in this rant. I’m simply pointing out that we have choices to make choices to make as Publishers don’t steal stuff you’re better than that don’t violate someone’s copyright or trademark or patent because you might get sued it might cost you a fortune. It will distract you for a long time to come and it’s nothing for you to be proud of but if you’re a Creator you also have Since to make decisions to make about where you will put your time and energy that when we approached creation from a position of insufficiency, it feels like this idea.

The best idea we’ve ever had is probably the last idea we’re ever going to have and so we get into the mindset of how do we protect it? But if we can approach creativity through a sense of abundance, we realize that the $10,000 we might have to spend protecting this or the $30,000. We might want to spend. Panting it. We would probably be better off building a network effect instead building a community building connection building the authority that comes from being the Creator and then going on to the next thing so I’m thrilled that there’s a regime in place to protect people who own things but not things you can put in your pocket simply things that change our lives, but we need to use that wisely. We need to commit to not being a trademark bully.

Not chasing people down because their store has the word Backcountry in it or because they dare to call themselves and entrepreneur and yes as creators. We need to think really hard about the change we seek to make and the best way to make it. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time this podcast like all my podcasts is copyright 2020.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with some questions from Previous episodes, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works if you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit akimbo.com go to find out about their new. Upcoming workshops and how it all works.

Thanks.

It’s Maria.

Hey Seth. My name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex.

Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Chris. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any other episode, please visit akimbo link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd click the appropriate button questions this week from all over the world and they’re intricately related. Here we go.

Hey, so, this is Osama from Karachi Pakistan, and I want to go ask you a question regarding which X to choose, so I was reading the practice in the process of reading the practice and I just finished burning that g was a brilliant book hunch. And so my question was that after reading hunch.

I was able to recognize a lot of problems that people face in the construction sector in my country and I was coming up with an idea. I love an app that would solve the problem of sourcing and all this issues and it will also make a community which would Help other people who are beginning to build a house to create something which would be both communal. It would have the network effect and also would make building the house easier and so it’s not just about me. It’s a generous I have because something because this is something that I struggle with when I took on the challenge to build my parents house and so but before reading hunch, I was in the process of reading a lot of books about Consulting and Blair ends brilliant book when without pitching and all the stuff. So I was really moving towards building a brand design agency.

And so after reading hunch I felt like the act of making Consulting agency is somehow less generous compared to something which is building this app, which I’ve been thinking about for two or three years now and so my question is that yes building a brand design agency is easier but building this is a lot harder.

I don’t have any funding. I don’t know any people and so what is worth pursuing right now for me? Is it the brand design agency something that I really like building? But I’m not. As I don’t feel as committed or as fulfilled internally as I do with this app idea it so I really wanted to ask you like what should I pursue as a beginner in business and someone who’s never built something?

What should I do? I really really really appreciate the work you do you’ve changed my life from multiple times with every single page with every single line, and I really want to thank you and I’m looking forward to your answer.

Thank you for this Osama.

Thank you for being generous. Thank you for seeing the markets in the people who need the work that you do long time ago before people noticed that there was this internet thing. I came up with this ornate plan to Pioneer the way people might be able to use email to spread ideas, but I was only able to do that because a dozen years before I had started a book. company when you are an entrepreneur starting out without a lot of funding without access to Silicon Valley without a platform to stand upon my strong advice to you is to find clients who are easy to find and ready to pay you for the work you’re going to do that bootstrapping your work meaning your funding it with money from your clients not funding it by mortgaging your house or by going to a a bank or going to a venture capitalist focuses the mind because it forces you a Steve blank is talked about to get customer traction to develop relationships with customers because if they’re not paying you nothing is happening the idea of a consultancy in Pakistan for Brands.

Probably not a crowded space right this minute and you know who the people are who need to hire you and you can probably outline how you can Create value for them and by getting paid to create value for them you build a foundation you build momentum, you build credibility you build networks, and so months or years from now when you have the resources to launch this multi-sided market place app for people building a house.

You will not need to make it pay in a week or Fortnight because you’ve got momentum and entrepreneurs benefit from that. Oil changing the culture benefit from that every once in a while some college student gets it right right out of the bat and the next thing you know, they’ve changed everything but that almost never happens that one of the beauties of being in college when you’re starting a business as I started a business is you don’t have rent to pay if you figured out how to cover that because you’re in college. Anyway, you have plenty of time you’re surrounded by smart people who are eager to support you. I’m a huge fan of taking that Sort of Swing when you’re in college and have time to do so work for Michael Dell and for a bunch of other people but most of us aren’t in college. Most of us are trying first to overcome the inertia that comes from having a job and to that. I say find a market that knows it needs you charge them appropriately give them more than they pay for repeat and then once you’ve got momentum understand sunk costs and your dreams well enough. Enough to take a deep breath and go do the even harder more generous work.

Thanks for this except. This is Alex from Richmond, Virginia. Thank you for your blog’s your books your podcast. They have all been great teachers to me in my work. You inspired me to start my own blog which I send twice a week via email. I’m really proud of what I’m creating. I feel like it’s great work, but I’m struggling to find an audience.

Now I tell myself that the blog is just for me. The purpose of it is to clarify my thoughts and to keep me creating but I can’t shake the desire to want more subscribers. So my question for you, is this should I care who subscribed should I care? How many people are subscribed? If not, how do I stop caring?

But if so, how do I expand my reach? What should I do?

Thank you for this and thank you for the work you’re doing here’s the question. What we willing to pay for an audience because audience is rarely come free. It might take time. It might take Sweat Equity. It might even take money. You might have to compromise what you want to talk about. You might have to focus on topics that don’t interest you so much you might have to adopt a voice a point of view that the audience wants not the one that you want to share.

If you’re not willing to pay any of those prices if you want to make the blog you want. To make or the podcast you want to make or the book you want to write then that’s what you should do. It doesn’t matter what the medium is. It’s up to you because you can and if you persist it, maybe the 10 listeners get you 20 listeners get you a hundred listeners and then you’re on your way, but maybe not but the journey is still worth it because you are developing your voice on the other hand.

If you’re willing to pay to get people to listen to you then go do that not with Money, but by understanding who it’s for and what it’s for by showing up for the right people in the right way that makes them want to listen and even more important want to tell the others because as soon as we start doing it for the audience, we are engaging in a bargain and the bargain is for people who want this.

I have this I have this come here it is if you can’t make that bargain then it really pays to say, this is a Blog Or me this is a podcast for me. This is a book for me. I wrote it in my voice for me to read it. And if you want to please feel free, but this is for me nothing wrong with that and if someone listens to it, that’s fine, but it’s not for them. It’s for me good luck with it and to cheer you up.

Listen to the next question Mesa Stewart here from Fredericton Canada this week.

I celebrated my one-year anniversary. Sorry since launching my podcast now after 52 episodes. I’ve seen a number of really interesting things happen one. I’ve been able to have access to guests that I would have never otherwise been able to connect with to I’ve developed a modest audience that continues to grow week after week and three I was able to break into an industry and get a job as a result of putting my thoughts out there, but I’m committed three. Years to this project and so as I’m now one third of the way into the project, I want to time take some stock and see where else I can go with this.

Now. I know the point of having a podcast is not to get super famous or to get paid necessarily, but I would like to use this as a point of Leverage for future opportunities as someone whose early in my career. How do you think I should be thinking about this podcast as both a long-term project, but also as a catapult that can help me Future opportunities would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Thanks.

Congratulations.

This is the Home Run of podcasting not getting acquired by Pandora or Spotify. But in fact figuring out how to use your podcast to show up in the world as you want to to build connections and credibility and get to the next spot. Can it catapult you to the next level? Well, my hunch is that the podcast is done much of What you set out for it to do in a three-year period of time your commitment doesn’t mean you have to stick with it forever your commitment to your listeners to yourself to your career is that you were looking for a certain result.

My hunch. Is that sticking with it a bit longer make sense? Because you want to develop a portfolio a portfolio that includes your podcast but lots of other things as you assemble a catalog of projects because As I’ve written about projects are really good way to build a career as long as we accept that each one can be a sunk cost that we can walk away from one when it ceases to serve us as long as the promise that we have made to the people who are engaging with the project isn’t one that would damage us or them if we wrapped the whole thing up.

So going forward. You can hone your voice. You can be more specific about who it’s for. Or and what it’s for you can push yourself to find ever more generous projects. You can reach out to a sama and Pakistan and figure out how to broaden the way you’re talking about what you do to intersect with what he’s talking about.

All of these things we’ve together it’s not cut and dried. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to English yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all NBA gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah. That’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide you got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask That question it’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -sitting-in-judgment- <==

Hey Seth, this is Michael in Rogers Arkansas. I love for you to talk about the tension between two ideas that hear you talk about a lot one is using flags with intent, you know, putting the right design into an event or actually making your website look pretty but also not using the same visual cues to judge someone a book by their cover from their ethnicity or background or so, how can you turn on seeing the flags in the right way and some context but turn maybe some of The flags that you see in others off what brains face do used to do that?

Thanks.

Hey, it’s F and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second with the first podcast ever about kerning. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

I came both small business Workshop is back its back because it works find out what you’re missing find out how to work. It better find out the path forward. Here’s my friend Ramon Ray to tell you about it in this Workshop.

You’ll learn what you need to start and grow your business students have told us that the workshop helped them think and rethink their assumptions about small business success students said, they no longer felt alone in growing their business. Listen, we know owning a business has a lot of challenges.

And in the small business Workshop, we give you the framework to help you make the choices. You need to make to overcome these challenges. I can’t wait to see you in the akimbo small business Workshop find out more at akimbo.com.

/ go hope to see you there.

Why on Earth would you do an audio podcast about kerning the little spaces in between the letters while we’re going to try that because it’s a great answer to this generous question. Kerning is the art in setting type of nestling letters next to one another. So if we think about a k and an e the E should be closer to the k then it would be too. Say an N.

That’s because the K has those little sticks that hang out in the E can Nestle quite nicely underneath the sticks. If you visit the show notes at a Kimbo dot link. You will see the greatest XKCD cartoon ever which is all about kerning. And once you see it, you will never be able to unsee it and that’s the thing. That’s where we begin because people who don’t understand or care about kerning I don’t see it.

They don’t see type or if you want to call them fonts. They simply see the words on the page and they go about their business on the other hand. There are people like me who can’t help but notice.

Why exactly did you set this in Comic Sans?

Why are you using a Sans serif font to write this book? And why didn’t you take care to Kern this headline properly and why are In a display font when you shouldn’t be I noticed these things lots of people do not most people but lots do so what to do with this information. I’m not sharing the information with kerning with you because I care about you and your type setting I’m doing it because the metaphor for a two-part process part one noticing part to doing something about it.

So let’s begin with noticing Do you notice the way it appears on the page? Do you notice that a certain kind of person whether they are tall or blond-headed or bald or walk with a little bit of a limp is attractive to you. Do you notice that certain smells or sounds or environments make you on edge or appeal to you?

If you don’t notice these things then what’s happening is a set of Is manipulating you or changing you without you realizing it? So the first part of the job is to start getting better at seeing semiotics start getting better at seeing flags and signs and understanding why you are drawn or repulsed by something in the environment the late great Jay Levinson, the author of The guerrilla marketing books and my friend used to tell the following story.

He was one of the people who worked much to his Chagrin on the early Marlboro Man rebranding and he also worked with the folks at Leo Burnett and many of the Great advertisers in the 60s and 70s. Well one day Jay was hustling to a meeting and he got in the cab and the cab he’s driving him and they get to talking and the cabbie says so what do you do and Jay says, well I make ads and so the cap says Oh you mean your in the ad game?

And they says well, yeah, I guess you could say that and the cab driver says well that stuff never works on me. It Just for kicks. Jay said yeah. Well what kind of toothpaste do you use and the cab driver turned to him using a slogan that 60 years old and said, well I use gleam, but that’s just because I don’t have time to brush after every meal.

I should have brushed his teeth.

You’re right brushing after meals is important to help fight the K and if you can’t brush after every meal brush often and use gleam between brushings are harmful to positive food and bacteria forms on teeth proper brushing with gleam removes most of this harmful deposit so brush often, even if you can’t brush after every meal and use gleam And the reason that joke works is because obviously the ad game did work on this cab driver that all toothpaste being basically the same he had Chosen One based on their slogan their unique selling proposition their positioning in a crowded Marketplace, but he didn’t want to acknowledge that so when you go out to buy a new car or think about who you’re going to vote for or decide what treatment you’re going to use for an illness.

Question you need to ask yourself is why do I think this if everyone doesn’t think it if it’s not something that would relentlessly win everytime in a double-blind study. What was it that made me decide that this was the one for me that most people use the laundry detergent that their parents did or if they don’t they shifted for a really good reason that most people are drawn to something about the visual appearance of others.

Some people are allergic to close talkers other people don’t care. Can you notice that working to notice? It starts us down the path to being able to do something about it. So if you’re on your 15th heartbreak and you notice that you are drawn to a certain kind of person with a certain set of bad habits Then do you do something about it?

Do you make the conscious decision to run away from anybody who looks like this it’s easy to believe that we’re not racist. It’s easy to believe that we mean well, but if we look honestly at what decisions we make after we get a signal from the world we might discover that we are judging people. Judging them by their race or their gender or their height judging them by their apparent income judging them by who introduced us to them judging us by the accent they have or don’t have we need to a notice these things and then we need to come up with a good reason to stop acting on them or to begin acting on them.

If it turns out that you are eliminating a huge portion of the population who could Work for you productively who could engage with you emotionally. If you are rejecting them simply because of a nonverbal clue that you’re getting you are hurting yourself and them but first we have to notice it and then we can choose to act on it and the third part of this very short rant is this Everyone’s doing the same thing to us.

Everyone’s doing the same thing to the work that we create to the appearance that we present all the time. Now, you could just say that’s okay or you could choose to imagine that you are being judged for things that you don’t want to be judged for notice it and then you could choose to do something about it. So I will confess right now.

You are in a zoom call with me and you are using a virtual background or Worse an animated virtual background. I am going to judge you. I’m going to judge you fairly harshly.

I will probably not engage with you at the level.

You would like me to engage. Now. You could say tough luck for Seth or you could decide that if it’s important you not be judged on your Zoom background then get a better resume background or get rid of it altogether that if you go to. A funeral in a clown suit people are going to judge you now, you might be okay with that.

But if it’s not going to get you the outputs and the results that you seek don’t wear clown suit to a funeral Kern your type get smart about how you are being judged where this really becomes tragic is when we talk about people who are being judged who can’t easily change how they are being We have plenty of evidence that when a woman changes her email name so that it is not obvious. What her gender is the response rate the yes rate. The meetings taken rate in many Industries goes up.

That’s not fair. That’s just wrong. We have enormous amounts of evidence that show that people of color or that people who don’t match the ethnic background of those that they seek to connect with our prejudged and often criticized or rejected simply because of a shortcut a bad shortcut that the person whose filtering is taking and if we’re going to build a productive dignified Fair Society, we’ve got to see it.

And after we see it we have to decide to act on it and it’s easy to get into a real complicated conversation about affirmative action, but the Question that companies and organizations need to ask themselves. Is this are we already judging people before we do something to try to fix our problem the answer is of course, where did we decide to recruit when we went off campus to recruit?

How did we decide to post our help wanted ads what barriers are we putting in the way of some people and not others and aggressively working to undo that? Creates an opportunity for that organization to cast a wider net that wider net will get them different points of view more Talent it ends up being in their interest.

And yes, if you are one of the people being judged it is a very difficult choice to make it is a difficult choice to decide that you will seek to get by by concealing your quote true nature versus standing up to make a point something you’re gonna have to Again, and again so faced with all this unfairness. We get back to this beginning concept first you notice and then you decide to take some action and I can’t tell you what to do most of the time my entire life. I’ve gotten the benefit of the doubt, but when I started producing work that I had a pitch to people I discovered I almost never got the benefit of the doubt. It didn’t look right didn’t sound right didn’t come from a voice. They were ready to hear it from and so I made the intentional choice to change what my work looked like and felt like so that it would be judged in a way. They got me and the person I was seeking to serve the results that they sought that’s not fair.

It’s not easy, but it’s clearly true.

These are all variations on privilege the privilege of being able to know what the cues and the Those are the privilege of being able to match them maybe because of the way you were raised maybe because you had the ability to learn them the privilege of having the benefit of the doubt before you even open your mouth that centuries of white enforced Supremacy have created signals that have nothing to do with the work itself, but that are baked in to how our culture works that enforced male Supremacy has sent signals. Built deep into the culture that make it really difficult for someone who isn’t a European white male to get the benefit of the doubt.

And so when we asked people to send different signals signals it some people say feel authentic to them and others say not only isn’t this authentic to how I feel it’s something I’m not even capable of doing because of how I appear when I show up we are doing something shameful. We are reinforcing a tragedy.

so what we’ve got to figure out how to do as a signal reading and Signal sending species is we’ve got to figure out which ones really matter and which ones are simply there to reinforce an injustice that arrived long before we got here because repeating the Injustice doesn’t help us we have to begin to make a commitment to learn to see about how we make our decisions about what matters in our culture and in the things we engage with and what doesn’t so So that we can get back on track to creating possibility and connection to make things better by making better things, but that doesn’t always mean it’s going to rhyme with what happened yesterday. In fact, it quite likely woot.

So that’s a lot for one rant, but I appreciate the question. I hope that resonates with people. Thanks. We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening in a second. We’ll be back with a question from a previous episode. But as you’ll see Ironically, here’s a message from our sponsor.

I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit. Akimbo.com go to find out about their new. Upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth.

My name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is an apology.

This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey sup.

Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question. As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about anything we’ve been talking about please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link-16 lick the appropriate button. And yes, this question is about the efficacy of advertising.

Hi Seth, it’s Matt from Chicago. I wanted to get you riffing on an idea. I just can’t let go of it comes from Steve Levitan. The idea is that advertising does not work. It’s a courageous question. I love it because of that. However, we live in a world where people are paying for clicks. I know folks in that space love to hide behind their website analytics justify their jobs, but what am I left to believe?

Thanks for all the work you do. I will continue to cause a ruckus wherever I go.

Thanks for this mat at my friend Steve Dubner did in fact do two episodes about whether advertising works. The first part is whether TV advertising works and the second one is whether digital advertising works. And there are significant problems with their analysis. There’s nothing wrong with the studies that they cited but the questions are deeply flawed. So my history with advertising back in 1983 when I was only 23 years old and worked at Spinnaker software. They handed me millions of dollars to spend on advertising and I have to say I don’t think any of it worked particularly. Well because even though Spinnaker was the 200th biggest Advertiser in Erica back in 1983.

We were so small that we didn’t have a huge presence in the places where we were running the ads fast forward to the 90s and the 2000s at the dawn of the internet. I was working a prodigy where there were ads everywhere and then after Yahoo, bought my company I discovered how advertisers were behaving when they bought ads on the home page of Yahoo, and in other places, so I’ve seen it from lots of different angles.

But we need to ask the questions properly. So here we go, a successful consumer packaged goods company a successful multinational firm a successful industrial entity is a little bit like a boat that’s right on the crest of a wave and if the captain of that boat does a good job it can hang on the crest of that wave for a long time.

And Magic is up there if you are looking for the magic of Large-scale capitalism it is the magic of all of these forces pushing you in exactly the right direction at high speed people who surf get hooked on it. But if you make just a few miscalculations, you’re not at the crest anymore you fall backwards off the wave like Blackjack chewing gum, which no one listening to this has bought in a really long time.

And so there are a lot of things that could lead you to be on the crest of that wave. But once you’re on the crest of that wave and you are spinning off so much money spending a whole bunch of that on advertise. It is a ridiculously cheap insurance policy because the next person who’s going to come along and take the crest of the wave away from you will not be able to get to that Crest by buying advertising behind your back because you can outspend them.

And so yes in the 30s 40s 50s and 60s, you could build a brand from scratch trouble with pop o matic you get the idea. He sunk my battleship by buying a bunch of ads to get yourself to the crest of that wave and then after that period of time a smart cost-cutting CMO could do some interesting studies some research. Stop running ads in Pittsburgh as Dubner talks about and discover that the ads are wasted. So do Outrun them until one day your Blackjack chewing gum until one day you have fallen behind these companies. They’re not profit maximizers. They are filled with people who are career maximizers and one of the things that keeps their career going is they do what their boss used to do. And another thing that keeps their career going.

Is that the stock price stays where everybody wants it to stay or moves up and in both of those situations you have Incentive not to maximize quarterly profit, but to continue dominating shelf space to continue owning market share that what drives big advertising the people are spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year is not that they are adroitly measuring using legrand’s transforms and other things that are talked about by researchers, but that they are on the crest of a wave and they want to keep it going back when I was at Yahoo. I was stunned. And and how easy it was for Yahoo to sell ads. I had made hundreds perhaps thousands of sales calls when I was at yoyodyne when we were trying to persuade Brands to buy email advertising. We had a 70 percent open rate of 35 percent response rate. We were pioneering an industry that has now become worth billions and billions of dollars, but we had a really hard time getting people to go first, but Yahoo.

Yahoo had caught the crest of the wave and so the Phone rang they didn’t have a sales force. They had order takers advertisers would show up and insist that they wanted to buy the home page of Yahoo. Not because it worked because they didn’t know if it worked they weren’t even wanting it to work because it would have threatened the TV they understood they were doing it because their boss needed them to because the shareholders needed them to because they were on the crest of a wave and they wanted to stay there. This is separate from the discussion of short-term thinking direct marketers.

Who are finding niches on the internet and exploiting them sometimes at our expense to keep going or to grow Corinthian was a chain of private for-profit colleges. I’m using the word colleges Loosely that was basically a scam to take Federal Loan money and pay for a giant Behemoth of an institution that was ripping off people who were struggling on the edges of our economy and in one year, they spent more than Hundred and twenty million dollars on Internet advertising and it allowed them to get to 600 million dollars in revenue and given the profit margin of the institution.

They were all fine with that if they hadn’t spent a hundred and twenty million dollars. There’s no way they would have sold 1 million dollars worth of tuition the hundred and twenty million dollars had a five times multiple. They spent a dollar they got $5 back and they did it as much as they could. Good and then it all comes crashing down that happens sometimes but advertising direct marketing easily measured aimed low hanging fruit that hasn’t been exploited yet. We can show over and over again that that works the same way that Pottery Barn makes money sending out catalogs, even though they know most of the people don’t open the catalog or buy from them the minute that spending money on catalog stops paying they will stop sending out catalogs.

So what we’re seeing are many many All intertwined there is the market of the 60s 70s and 80s in which TV advertising was way under priced and if you could buy a bunch of ads it was almost certain to work better. If you didn’t buy it, if we look at the early days of the internet for certain sinecures, it worked great, but most of the time it didn’t it was simply a signal if we look at the auctions that Google and others run if a lot of people are bidding in the auction. It is almost certain you’re going to I pay too much the fact is that if you are trying for a category on Facebook that other people are trying also to run ads on its Facebook’s job to make sure you don’t make any money doing that because what they want is a full auction audience they want as many bidders as possible and if some drop out that’s okay because there are more and they want to take all the money off the table.

So perhaps the best news in an online Internet auction is You come in second because it means your competitor overpaid for something and now you have the revenue to spend on serving customers instead. So I’m ranting and lots of directions here because I’m not defending advertising per se I’m saying we need to ask the right question.

And the question is for this audience given the media that is available to me. Is there a way to reach them with impact with? Quincy so that over time they come to believe that my brand is worth something either because I get someone who’s not in the category to enter the category or more likely I get someone in the category to pay extra for my brand because if people aren’t paying extra you don’t have a brand it’s the extra that pays for all of the things you put on top of the generic item now in the podcast. Abner puts in the side about generic items because in fact in most cases certainly in a double-blind study, they work just as well as branded ones.

However, we’re not double-blind. However, we care about the brands. We tell ourselves a story and if we think that story is worth it. We’re happily paying it. Where does the story come from? It comes from ads it comes from websites it It comes from YouTube videos it comes from the way a company expresses itself about what it does and why it does it.

And once we know the story we tell the story to our peers. We tell the story to our friends because telling the story by wearing the logo by showing what kind of car we have as we drive down the street, we can’t help it makes us feel better. That’s part of the reason we paid extra earlier in this episode, which I recorded long before I got Question I talked about gleam and J Levinson.

What I left out from that riff is simple. The reason that The Gleam story is so hard to tell these days without using the add on the podcast is that people don’t remember gleam. And the reason that people don’t remember gleam is that they stopped advertising so Rush often, even if you can’t brush after every meal so I can make eight or ten podcasts about this.

Here’s just what I’ll say I don’t think advertising is going away anytime soon. And I know advertising doesn’t need any Defenders. I would rather spend a lot of time talking about what’s wrong with advertising but one thing is clear. There are business reasons to keep your advertising going so you don’t fade away and there are business reasons to do measured direct marketing because you can show it works and there are business reasons for Challenger Brands to run ads to go after brands that are too lazy or too cheap.

To talk to new audiences in new ways. Thanks for listening. We’ll see y’all next time.

What’s this stuff some cereal pop be good for you. I’m not going to try. Let’s get Mikey. Yeah don’t need it. He ate everything.

He likes it.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a SS Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea to anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s And but when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you when you got a face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. A nation we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -whale-hunting- <==

Breaker breaker 1-9. This is kfv 2338 coming with you checking in seeing how it’s going down the road. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about CB radio the Clubhouse app and what it means to go hunting the whales but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

I can Bose small business Workshop is back its back because it works find out what you’re missing. Find out how to work. It better find out the path forward. Here’s my friend Ramon Ray to tell you about it in this Workshop.

/ go hope to see you there.

Yes, I still remember my CB license number K FV 2338. It’s unclear why I needed a license to use a CB radio in 1973. But I did and we installed one in my dad’s car so that he could call me on his way home from work to tell me that he was on his way home from work. What I most remember about CB radios was Sunday night at Pat’s hot dogs in Buffalo New York Sunday night at five o’clock the From Channel 19 would get together in person just to see what each other looked like.

It wasn’t really that Pleasant and experienced people were better on the radio. Then they were in person. Well fast-forward 40 or 50 years a pandemic the internet and now we have Clubhouse the fastest-growing app in recorded history that I know of a social app online that only worked with your iPhone that lets You join a chat room by Audio.

Now, what are the rules of Clubhouse the same way? It was a rule of CB radio is that the first rule of Clubhouse is that we always talk about Clubhouse.

Yes, son better stay out of that Hammer Lane then parking lots like to move they’ll turn you into a speed bump then we’ll be calling you a meat wagon.

I’m not really going to do that today. What I want to talk about is something that I noticed when I first encountered it a lesson about how ideas spread. I’m not that good at clubs. I’m not that good at club houses. I wasn’t interested in joining a new Social Network. I also don’t use an iPhone. So even if I wanted to I have to go to a lot of trouble to take the iPad down where I use it as an alarm clock and teach it to get the clubhouse and even then I didn’t have an invitation so it wasn’t even on my radar and then within three days I got not one not two not three, but four invitations from people to join Clubhouse a closed community that you need an invitation to join two of them came from people. I have an enormous amount of respect for this got it on my radar.

I went and I set up an account just to make sure my name was saved and then I looked around not interested. I left one of the reasons I left is because they kept pushing me and pushing me to share my contacts. So let’s go back in time just to Little bit Facebook grew so fast because it was able to pillage your contact list and instantly integrate you with lots and lots of people in your life Pinterest was the fastest-growing web service of its kind and I know this because we were competing with them at squidoo. They grew like a rocket because they hacked the Facebook API in a way that when you joined Pinterest it instantly let all of you Of your contacts know that you now had a page on Pinterest that simple ratchet really changed their growth pattern. So I was hesitant to share my contacts with Clubhouse, but then my friend Chris invited me to do a thing with some people. I also really respect and so I had no choice. I press the button and I shared my contacts and then I saw something that I thought was absolutely stunningly brilliant unclear whether it is manipulative, but it was It and that’s what I want to share with you today.

It explains why I got so many notes in such a short period of time after you share your contacts on clubhouse. What it does is it shows you a list of people who aren’t currently using clubhouse that you can invite in my case. They give me five invites that you could invite to join Clubhouse. Now, here’s the thing that’s been done before but the twist is this you only have five invites and a list is sorted by how many people know the people who are on your list.

So here’s my friend Michael. He has four hundred and thirty eight people on clubhouse who also have him in their contact list 438 now, I have a really interesting choice in front of me because two things motivate almost all you Ends 1 affiliation who’s in who’s out who’s an Insider? Who’s part of something second status roles?

Who’s up?

Who’s down? Who’s moving up? Who’s moving down those two things are the unspoken axes of many of the decisions. We make in culture. They are what get somebody who has enough money to go to work tomorrow because not moving up feels like moving down not being part of something feels like you are. Alone, so here’s this list sorted from 438 down to seven and I’m looking at this list and I’m saying a few things to myself.

One thing I’m saying is wow. I should let Michael know I should let Michael know because he’ll appreciated. He’ll appreciate the fact that I’m giving him a chance to join in with a bunch of people 438 who are waiting for him and part of me is saying wow, my status is going to go. Up because I’m giving Michael something precious one of my five invites. He’ll appreciate me not only is my status going to go up with him.

But he’s my highest status friend. He has so much more status so much more impact in the circles that I travel in than my friends who are down in the tens and the 20s. And so if I’m going to use an invitation, I should use it on someone who a will appreciate it more and be where my status will go up the most because after all All I’m the guy who brought him in and from clubhouses point of view bringing in people who have that many friends.

These folks are whales they are the heavy users. They eat a ton of Plankton. They’re the ones that lots of people know and respect. So if people like us do things like this, which is a definition of culture and Clubhouse figures out how to game the system so that the biggest spreaders stalkers connectors.

Sneezers respected people are the ones who were there early. They have figured out a ratchet a network effect. They have figured out a cycle where more gets them more where the people who are in it want more people like them to join that the only reason that people are in clubhouses because other people are in clubhouse and so the cycle continues I thought this was worth a riff or even a rant because it helps us. Understand how this idea of algorithmically driven cultural change Works in so many elements of our lives.

So if we think about the Dynamics of the 1960s or 70s sure spend a lot of money to Lobby people in Congress. There’s a direct correlation between giving folks like that money and swaying their opinion, but what’s happened as we’ve gotten better and better at analyzing the social graph the digraphs the connections the points of influence is we That might be the output but the steps to get there aren’t as direct as here’s a bunch of money. It’s the smallest viable audience. What’s the group of people that if we could persuade them to go along with the way we think they are more likely to persuade the others that in the organization where you work there are some whales there are people who go to more meetings, right more. Memos. Send more emails are at the Derp of lots of connections and that person is probably not the CEO.

Who is that person?

And who is that person looking to for advice? Who is that person surrounded by as we start to dissect the graphs of what makes the media decide that something is the story of the day what leads a community to back one thing or another they’re all about uneven groups of influence influence that we might not easily be able to see From the outside but people are looking you know that they’re looking they’re scouring for signals.

The idea of our credit history is just the beginning what we’re doing as we work online is leaving a trail behind a trail of what we took and what we gave a trail of who we persuaded and who we were persuaded by and all of this data is getting more and more concrete sized. All of this data is getting more clearly seen and so people are going to use it on evenly Lie to treat different people differently to show up for people with influence with circles with networks because it helps them get to the next spot.

This is just the beginning. It’s going to keep going now. You probably won’t find me on clubhouse very often, but I think we just learned a valuable lesson. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a deep dive down the rabbit hole in answer to a listener question, but first here is a message. from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp an independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works if you do the work.

I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit a Kimbo.com go to find out about their new. Upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

Hey Seth. My name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is on the phone. This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki and Bo dot link2sd click the appropriate button. This question sounds pretty simple, but there’s actually a lot going on. Here we go.

Hello Seth Peter cookie from Melbourne with a question on your recent episode on trademarks copyrights and patents. So I’m looking at a number of your books that I have here in my office.

I pulled three down from the shelf and I’ve got another for sitting on my Kindle and I notice if I look at linchpin it says that the front the moral right of the author has been asserted the same thing in this is marketing in. Practice in tribes. However, I notice in the Poke the box and we’re all weird not there which are probably not coincidentally the ones that you published through the Domino project rather than through penguin and other Publishers.

I’ve also written a few books and I have always asserted my moral right with with no idea what that actually means and so my question is firstly what does that mean? What’s the history of asserting these ones moral right as an author and secondly, is there any point to it at all? Does it make any difference at all in the context of trademarks copyrights patents and doing great work?

Thank you for everything. You do big big fan.

So let’s start with Damien Hirst. He’s an artist Cutting Edge out of the UK and has made a fortune Selling paintings some of which have colored dots on them. Well, there’s a collective in Brooklyn that loves publicity called mischief and Mischief bought one of his DOT paintings cut it up into little tiny squares and then sold each Square for a few hundred bucks turning a profit as Went they were making a commentary about what is art anyway, and they were also violating Damien hirst’s moral rights in the United States. Do not the same as they are in France or in England or New Zealand or in Australia. It’s different in a lot of places, but they even violated the VAR a law which added a level of moral rights to certain kinds of Art in the United States about 30 years ago.

So let’s try to decode Code what moral rights are and how lawyers even think about intellectual property because lawyers are a superstitious bunch at the end of every one of my audio books because I have to read the script that the publisher is handed me I have to say and they’d like me to say it in all caps All Rights Reserved and every time I say it I then add of course, there’s no need for me to say this because for more than 20 years after Nicaragua. Signed the Berne convention along with the United States and the Buenos Aires convention became irrelevant. There is no legal reason whatsoever to say. All right reserved when you are reading an audiobook or printing anything. It doesn’t mean anything in all capital letters. It’s just a way for a lawyer to say I’m up on stuff don’t copy this but no it has no legal bearing.

So back to moral right Mauro right is the opposite of the first sale Doctrine the first sale Doctrine came along because a book publisher bobbs-merrill put in all of the books. It was printing if this book was sold to you for less than a dollar. It constitutes copyright infringement. What they were trying to do was control what happened to their books after they sold them to a wholesaler or retailer and it turns out you’re not allowed to do that the same way if you make rubber balls or Baby carriages you can’t say you can’t sell this at a garage sale when you’re done using it copyright creates a piece of property, but you can sell that property to someone because if you couldn’t then there would be no point in making it and once you sell it it’s not yours anymore.

It’s theirs and they can resell it. They can do things with it. They own it, but the market being the market profit Seekers being profit Seekers things started to to shift and so beginning in Europe. They embrace the idea of Droite morale the moral right and what it says primarily almost certainly for visual art.

You can’t change this thing that’s integrity and you have to give me credit for this thing that’s ownership or the idea of creation unless I insist that I remain anonymous. It’s not always apply just to visual art. So Monty Python. Yes. I’ve managed to work Monty Python to yet. Another episode of akimbo actually sued the ABC television network over this very issue. Why because when they wrote the scripts for the BBC for Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the 60s, they were very careful about how they were constructed how they were timed.

This is the Spanish Inquisition.

I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Well, the people at the BBC licensed it to Time Life Time life turned around and licensed it to ABC and in each one of those licenses they gave the new publisher distributor Network a chance to edit the work to fit in commercials to make it fit local standards. And so when ABC put together a 90-minute special Of the best of Monty Python Terry Gilliam and the rest of the troop sued ABC and I was amazed to discover that they won that the court said no, you can’t do that because Monty Python has an underlying copyright in the entire structure of this show and you’re not allowed to mess with it. First sale Doctrine be damned.

And so now we see the conflict the conflict. Is that Andy Warhol? Took for example a Superman comic and made it into a work of art. Is that copyright infringement? Well what happens if he buys a copy of Superman comics cuts it out and paste it onto a canvas is he allowed to resell it is Marcel Duchamp allowed to paint a mustache on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Well, one of the principles of moral right is that it only extends while the are Is alive and so Marcel Duchamp is off the hook because DaVinci was dead by the time Duchamp started to facing his art, but should you be allowed to deface art to make a commentary around it taken to its full extreme moral rights even says that the artist can control who you sell the painting to when it is time to sell it or if you hire an artist to put a fresco on the wall. Of your Banks conference room the artist while alive can say you may not take that down.

You may not renovate this building because I have a moral right and you cannot control it. So the short answer to your question is it means absolutely nothing when penguin writes the artist asserts moral right? Nothing there is nothing in the statute anywhere in the world that says that the artist has to claim it in addition.

Built into moral rights as you may not sell them you cannot give them away. They are there because the argument was made that if you could sell them then they wouldn’t be worth any more than the copyright itself that what legislators were trying to do is treat copyright creation as something separate from the creation of other sorts of property. So I’m of two minds here.

I think that the economic underpinning of what we create enables us to get paid to create it and if And creators over assert something that feels like moral rights. Then people aren’t going to buy things that work for hire enables a lot of people to do work because there are plenty of projects that it would be completely impossible to build. If every single person who worked on any element of that project could assert forever Integrity credit control over what happened to that product after it reaches the marketplace. He’s also a key underpinning of the way. Our economy works is there’s not a lot of room for do-overs. There’s not a lot of room for changing your mind.

You sell some rights in 1965 and then in 1975, it turns out those rights are worth a lot more. We are hesitant to go back and say no we can do that deal over again. If you sold Bitcoin for $8,000, it’s not clear that anyone thinks it’s okay to go back to that person. So I didn’t realize it was going to go to $50,000. I want my Bitcoin back sure. We make exceptions for things like fraud for transactions that aren’t done by consenting adults.

But other than those I think it makes sense that if an artist wants to sell something using the first use Doctrine to someone else they should be allowed to do that and the person who buys, it should be allowed to buy it. Do I think it’s a good idea to cut up Damien Hirst paintings and sell them well as an art project, Checked there’s a long history of doing things like that. The folks at Mischief are good at hype but they haven’t done anything particularly original and so even though I don’t have to say whether or not I’m asserting my moral rights.

I’m not it’s okay with me if someone buys my book cuts it up and turns it into some sandals. I don’t make visual art and I’m just fine bringing my ideas to the world under the current copyright regime the real issue for me is this Disney and other copyright holders the Gershwin estate for example have argued long and hard that copyright must be extended that it must be strengthened that we need to figure out ways to keep people away from whatever it is that they own which makes sense if there’s a shortage if there’s a shortage of people who want to work in Hollywood or in book publishing where in the record business if there’s a shortage of new music coming out then yes, we must strengthen protections. For the artists so that the culture all of us get the benefit of more people creating.

But if there isn’t a shortage if there are plenty of people making plenty of good work, then the culture demands we build an infrastructure where it can be shared and understood. It turns out that there are tons of books The Great Gatsby to just went in to the public domain in the United States this year. That’s absurd.

It’s absurd that The Heirs the And children in the great grandchildren of F Scott Fitzgerald. We’re getting royalty payments all of these years later. Nobody who made the decisions to write or publish The Great Gatsby is still alive. There was no upside in creating extensions to copyright and until there’s a shortage for our culture of ideas worth celebrating and sharing and learning from then I think we need to err on the side of How do we build structures and regimes where these things can spread and where people can enjoy them?

Thanks for letting me rant.

We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than Internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple.

It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there but I an show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -modern-choice-theory- <==

Thanks for deciding to listen to this podcast and thanks for not turning it off at any time in the next few minutes. You have a decision to make to keep listening or to turn it off. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about modern Choice Theory, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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I haven’t heard anyone talk about this before but I want to share some thoughts with you about decisions about options about leverage and about responsibility. I want to argue that over the last hundred thousand years and particularly in the last 20. There has been a gradual and then rapid expansion in the number of options that every single person on the planet has every day that if you think about hunter-gatherers there are that many important decisions to make in a typical day go left or go right go after that animal or this animal.

Sure, there might be life or death consequences. But as you confront each of those decisions, they are not strange to you. They are the decisions just like the ones you made the day before but now as we confront a new modernity where each of us has way more leverage, we have to embrace the fact that there are choices to be made and if those choices Aren’t things we even see we can’t make them if those choices are things that we would rather avoid then we will try not to see them if we just think about the last hundred and fifty years. We have been through a transition it began with this. Most people were farmers Farmers have to make some substantial decisions every single year what to plant how to use their acreage but most of the time when they are doing their work, The decisions are familiar. The decisions don’t have that much leverage from day-to-day factory work made it even easier to go through the day without making certain kinds of decisions that the choices in front of the factory worker generally involved choosing to do what they were instructed to do by the foreman.

Then we move to freelance work freelance work and small business work. Work often involve more choices. What business are you in? Which clients do you choose? How will you do your work? How do you know when it’s done? What will you choose to learn next? Suddenly? There’s been an explosion in the choices. We have to make as professionals as we seek to go forward then if you choose to go toward entrepreneurship the decisions get In bigger because the options are bigger. Should you raise 1 million dollars or ten million dollars should be going after B2B sales or serving consumers. Should you hire two people 10 people under and people should you shut this plant in the face of a pandemic or stick it out the four elements again options which lead to decisions leverage which means that our choices have repercussions and responsibility.

Which means that if we make a choice, it’s on us about what happens next.

Video games and toys gave kids and teenagers a chance to make decisions without consequences if you build a tower of blocks and it falls over no one knows you don’t get in trouble. You just get to build another Tower of blocks. If you’re playing Tetris or Pacman or online chess and you make a mistake you just get to do it again, but then shifting to massive multiplayer games or considering Social media it shifts again because there are repercussions to your decisions because suddenly they start impacting other people that going on social media is very different than going down the street to have coffee with a friend.

There’s a permanent or semi-permanent record of the choices that you’re making all of the decisions that may or may not impact how you’re engaging with others. Is that what we’ve done is handed millions and millions of people perhaps billions of people a high leverage Choice machine loaded with responsibility where there are options and there are decisions to make over and over again or let’s flip sideways a little bit to Medicine 300 years ago. If you wanted to stay healthy there weren’t that many decisions to make in the 60s. We started saying to people if you Look where if you drink and drive or if you abuse drugs your health will be impacted we can prove it.

Where are you heading Johnny smoke?

How many cylons would be tempted tonight? How many men will lie still Beneath The Sky how many tears will be shared because of you how many more will die suddenly there’s a decision to make with ignoramus repercussions and it won’t impact you maybe for 20 or 30 years 50 years ago.

If you went to the doctor there weren’t that many options about how you were going to be treated. There was one doctor your doctor he or she told you what to do and that’s what you did.

Do you frequently gaze emotionally out the window while sad piano music plays in the background then it’s time to Seek help.

It’s time to ask your doctor about tacos as we started exploring things like Cancer Treatments though.

Suddenly. There were really significant choices to make choices to make about the duration and severity of the treatment we were signing up for and then we open the door to what should we do about end-of-life decisions because end-of-life didn’t used to last for five or 10 years of torture because end-of-life didn’t used to to be a decision that we rightfully should have been discussing with the other people in our family or thinking about things that have turned controversial which probably shouldn’t have is it a decision to vaccinate your kids? Is it a decision to wear a mask or not in the face of a pandemic epidemiologists will make it clear to us that it’s not but some people Amplified by the media would like to make it into a decision. Creating options and those options have enormous leverage because they don’t just impact the person who is making the choice. They impact everyone around that person as well.

And so as we start to look at all of the decisions in front of us, we can become exhausted. What is natural to do is to limit the scope of the decisions that are on our plate because we are exhausted. By living with the responsibility for these choices.

So here’s a really simple example designed to help us see how all of these choices stack up. I was talking to a friend and entrepreneur who’s leading a new company and we discussed the idea of making an explainer video. You’ve probably seen these there about a minute long. Sometimes they have wavy little images that go with them and in one minute or two minutes of VoiceOver combined with a Of Animation explains how a new service or technology Works children grow up fast.

It’s important to make every moment count.

The benefit of an explainer video is you can use it over and over again. It adds energy and a veneer of professionalism to what your building as opposed to having people sit through a really long video explaining something that you could do in a more concentrated form. We’re reading a man. Annual. Okay. So what are the choices? Well Choice One the biggest one. The easiest one to avoid is should I have an explainer video most people who have something to explain never even considered that that’s one of their choices but using online freelance bureaus you can get one built for a couple hundred bucks. You can afford it. If you are running any sort of Enterprise But first you have to realize you could get one made next question.

Who should make it for you? What’s the method? Should you hire a really expensive agency or should you break it down into little pieces and have them done by people who don’t charge very much. Next question. Have you written a brief a design brief showing the person or the team you’re going to hire what you want it to be like when it’s done another Choice. Should that simply be here is one made by a non competitor of ours make it look like this or is it more detailed than that?

Here are the eight points that we want to explain here is the style of images. We want to use here are what the eight images are. Here is the script we would like to use this is the voiceover person that has a tone that we would like to emulate decision decision decision. All of these things are optional they’re optional because if we’re just doing our job, it means we’re answering Incoming email it means we’re going to the next meeting that someone else put on our calendar.

But what is happened just in the last 20 years is that the number of people who get to put something on someone else’s calendar has gone up dramatically that the options that are in front of us keep shifting that the number of places that we can show up with an idea and offer an opportunity for someone to move forward has gone up by many factors of 10 that the leverage keeps increasing and in certain spaces responsibility decreases because people have worked really hard to become trolls to show up and just yell and then run away and other places. We have more responsibility than ever the responsibility to take care of our neighbors the responsibility to stand up for racial Justice the responsibility to own the choices. We are making And again in the face of all of it. It’s easier to say what is on TV tonight? But even that question brings us back to Modern Choice Theory because what’s on TV tonight used to be there are three channels. Which one do you want to watch?

And now it’s everything everything is on TV tonight. And when confronted with everything is on TV tonight more and more people default to well. What are the three hottest things on Netflix? What we know about Google search results is this you can search for almost anything and find a hundred thousand matches and almost everyone more than 95% of the people will click a match from the very first page is that because we know that the things on the very first page are always the best for us, of course not is it because we won’t get any benefit by looking at pages 4 or 8 or 12. Now we know that too.

It’s because Were exhausted we’re exhausted so modern Choice Theory involves realizing we have options understanding that those options bring us leverage that that leverage often requires us to take responsibility. And so we have to make decisions. But when we feel the fatigue setting in we have to make a meta decision and The Meta decision is to decide about deciding to decide if what we do for a living is make decisions. And we don’t make widgets. We don’t make waffles we make decisions and if we’re going to make decisions, the next meta question is for who when who gets to decide which decisions you’re going to make all day that if you journaled all of the decisions you made yesterday or all the ones you expect to have to make tomorrow.

The question is would that list be the list you would choose. If you were doing it with intent, we now live in an era of Maximum choice and most of us are throwing it away. We are letting other people dictate the Rhythm other people dictate the agenda. We don’t have to do that. We can choose to take responsibility.

Not just for the Enterprise that we are part of or the one that we are choosing to run but for the health of us in the people we care about in the people around us that it is. All on the table because we have Amplified our voices, but to what end? I think we’ve Amplified them to make things better. So yes, we’re in the business of making choices.

We should Choose Wisely. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria.

Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is And that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you some weeks. They’re a bunch of questions some weeks hardly any so if you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode of this podcast, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s 8 Ki M Bo link-16. Click the appropriate button.

Two questions this week about copyrights patents trademarks and most of all protection but they’re both really quite related. Here we go.

Hello Seth.

I recently discovered you through some references from some friends.

I had a question for you about patents.

I am currently building a product that is new to the market. I have enough money to build the product. But as you mentioned your podcast it could cost up to $25,000 to get a patent attorney to patent the product and those funds are not available. I would be curious to know what the best plan of attack is moving forward because number one I want to protect.

The idea and the concept it does advanced technology in my business. However, once again, I’ve been waiting actually I’ve been waiting ten years to build this and finally got the funds to build it up. That makes sense.

Thank you. Thank you for this and congratulations on getting to the point where you’re about to bring your idea to the world. Here is the truth the truth is that in 1920 or 1904 even 1935 a solo. Enter with a patent could use that patent to make a pile of money in the 1960s. Someone invented the intermittent windshield wiper fortunately, he got a patent because when the big car company stole his idea he then devoted Decades of his life to suing them and ended up winning those lawsuits, but time has passed and now it is 2021, which means that most of the fundamental Diaz that you can get a strong patent on as an individual inventor are done. They’re taken what’s left are either process patents which are sketchy and really hard to win or perhaps maybe just maybe you in your basement Workshop came up with something extraordinary that straight forward to patent.

I think it’s far more likely that this is a distraction. It’s a distraction because if you come up with something thing that is truly useful. The thing is lots of organizations have enough money and enough Focus to come up with another version of that utility without having to pay you a penny you are very unlikely to be able to cash out your idea because you have protected it with a patent.

It is far more likely that your idea will be valuable because you have built a community because you created a network effect because you have Brand because you have traction with an audience with customers. Those are the things that companies are interested in licensing and acquiring they will tell you they need to see your patent. But that’s just a stalling maneuver a patent will slow you down a patent will cost you a lot of money now.

I might be wrong. You might be the exception you might have something a fundamental new way to deliver a pharmaceutical. Article a brand new way to do brain data interfaces. I don’t know but as somebody who has a patent or two, I can tell you that it’s cumbersome. It’s expensive and it doesn’t make a big difference customer traction makes a big difference.

Here’s one last thought on this this isn’t going to be your last idea give it away as hard and is widely as you can because if it works, You’ll make money and even if you don’t you’ll be the person who invented the thing that worked and then you’ll get a chance to invent the next thing that we can’t walk into the world of ideas holding them tight to our chest because people are busy and they have options and if you’re not going to share the creation that you’ve just made we’re not going to know about it and if we don’t know about it, it’s not going to work.

So that’s my rant. Thanks for the question. Hi Seth.

What do you think of our current copyright? Right system. The media industry has been battling digital piracy for two decades now and it’s not clear who’s winning should piracy be a crime should creators somehow take power away from the media industry so they can make more and charge less. Should there be a totally different copyright system in the future?

I have a feeling you’ll say something like well, you should be so good that your fans enjoy paying for your content, but what about the fans who simply can’t afford to do that? I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

Thanks.

Thank you for this it ties in to my previous rant. And here’s my thinking on this in a world in which there was no piracy in a world in which people couldn’t share ideas in any form the chances that someone with a new song or a new book could break through our close to zero that big copyright holders have argued and lately in Australia. The news people have argued that there. Be a lockdown intellectual property is a tricky name because it’s not like real property real property doesn’t scale only one person can have this acre of land at a time if lots and lots and lots of people come to this acre of land and all try to claim it. They’re either going to end up each with a blade of grass or there’s going to be a big fight on the other hand if everybody is listening to a Pharrell Williams song.

It’s worth more not less. The magic of intellectual property is that it is the fabric of our culture not only does he gain attention. It earns trust. It gives us permission to talk to people. We are the creator of X now we can bring them why that the history of intellectual property spreading. Show’s over and over again that the more easily it spreads the better the creators of intellectual property do that’s just a fact. Yes. There are small exceptions. It could be that you don’t have a mass Market product that you have an idea that a hundred companies need the formula of and that piracy could cost you a lot. But I’ve got a hunch that that’s not what we’re talking about this desire to sue your fans it goes way back. Back the riaa proved after spending millions and millions and millions of dollars that it doesn’t work. Not only does it eliminate piracy.

It also enrages the very people you’re hoping will care about what you do. So there’s not a lot of argument about the math here. The real question for me is who is going to build platforms that treat creators fairly and by fairly, I mean for all of us does it Make it more likely that the right creator with the right intent will make more stuff because that’s what we really need. We need another breakthrough Opera. We need another great protest song. We need another book that will change our life.

What is going to make that likely to happen? So 50 years ago Putnam perigee Random House. All of them said if you’ve got the Great American novel, we’d like to pay you money. And it created a ratchet a cultural habit of going off and writing the Great American novel and then Amazon comes along and says, well anybody who wants to can publish anything they want on the Kindle and we’re not going to pay you anything and maybe you’ll make something in royalties and so the door opens wide, but it’s not a lottery the way it used to be in the sense that you got the prize at the beginning what you got was the chance to be your own. Marketer because Amazon doesn’t care which books they sell as long as they sell something. And in one sense that led to the creation of a lot of books in the other sense. It didn’t lead to a certain kind of person writing books because there wasn’t a lottery what there was was a chance to become a marketer or if we think about the dynamic of podcasting the middle men have not yet come along that make it financially feasible for the typical person to have a podcast. That’s not why you should do it shouldn’t do it because you’re going to sell ads because you won’t should do it because the craft of talking to that smallest viable audience will enrich your life and may help other areas of your business life go forward.

So I don’t think it really helps for us to have a conversation about rewriting copyright laws because we can’t because the powerful forces that are involved will step in and make it even worse for people like you I do think it makes sense for us. To be on the alert for what sort of platforms could make it so that individual creators are inspired and motivated to create the kind of stuff that our culture needs and wants we don’t need more trolls.

We don’t need more one minute stupid YouTube videos. We do need substantial bodies of work made by committed creators who are doing it because they can because they want to that’s not a copyright problem. That’s a Middleman problem. Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you all next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like Have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up when you’re going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. ‘well, it sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book.

==> -money-for-nothing- <==

Thousands of years ago if you wanted to conquer the world or at least you are part of the world you had a serious problem. How are you going to feed the soldiers? Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about money. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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There food is real housing is real but money is a story and if you are would be Emperor you’ve got a challenge because for every 20 or 30 soldiers you want to send on a mission you would need to send at least that many people for supplies provisions. Food and the rest but there was a solution the solution is to print some money to coin some money and to give that money to your soldiers and then your soldiers can show up in a town or a village and buy what they need.

The question then is why would a local Merchant take the money? What does it even mean to get this little coin? Well the second half of the equation is this when your soldiers are Going to territory that you control what they can point out is that locals will need those coins to pay their taxes and suddenly you’ve invented a currency you’ve invented a story that goes with the coin and the story goes like this here. Our customers customers who have coins if you can create food or lodging for these customers, you will get some of the coins you can use some of the coins to pay your Taxes and the rest of the coins they can be used to purchase things from others and suddenly quite suddenly the story of money solidifies because people come to believe that this coin is worth extending effort to get more of some people end up building many empires collecting lots and lots of coins gaining the status that they seek and according to Market Theory solving problems as they do.

I guess the best way to get coins is to identify what people want and offered to them in exchange for more coins capitalism creates a market sensing mechanism. It helps solve problems. So then we can advance to the present day. And in the present day there are plenty of challenges that go far beyond feeding the soldiers, but we can look at them through the lens of what is the government’s job when it comes to dating an economy when it comes to supporting the well-being of its people because we live under an economy that’s driven by capitalism.

Well one theory is the government should do as little as possible that the economy will take care of itself that capitalism doesn’t need any help. Thank you very much that every time the government does anything the theory goes it is hurting the economy particularly when the government spends Money runs a deficit or increases taxes because taxes the theory goes hurt everything.

Well, maybe we could look at it this way. Maybe the government is us and maybe our job when we work together is to create a situation where people are healthy where they are smart and where they are confident healthy because leaving the morality aside. Healthy workers are significantly more productive smart because if we train people from an early age to be skilled, insightful optimistic cooperative and ready to do things that work.

We’re going to end up with a more productive Workforce a more productive Workforce creates more value and that value benefits everybody in the system and the third one confident because Money is a story and if people believe that there’s going to be more and more coins in the world more and more money to get printed for no good reason. They don’t believe that collecting money today is worth a lot of effort because that money is going to be worth less tomorrow.

For example a government if it wanted to could say we’re going to make every single person in our constituency a millionaire. Print up enough money to give everybody a million dollars. Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Well, if we did that what would happen to the rent on a two-bedroom apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan?

It would go from $4,000 to $400,000 a month. Why because there’s more money chasing few rental opportunities when that gets out of balance the value of that money. It comes to what can you buy with it ends up plummeting and if we are not confident that it will stay at a given place. We start to wonder if we start to wonder it goes down in value.

This is why inflation has historically been a huge challenge because in Venezuela or in Germany after World War One if hyperinflation kicks in it’s really hard to change the story. Tori if people stop saving because their savings are going to go down in value if people stop investing because the things they’re trying to build don’t end up paying off it leads to a cycle that goes in the wrong direction this leads to our topic for today, which is modern monetary Theory.

Here’s what happened over the last 50 years some people in politics discovered two things one democratic. Elected governance often has a problem with discipline that given the temptation of giving every voter a million dollars just before the election many politicians will say sure and then you end up with Hyper inflation and the second thing that some politicians saw is that if governments start printing money and giving it out. They might give it out to people those politicians don’t want to get money because they are telling themselves a story about lack of effort or sloth a story about worth and who’s entitled and so combining these two things they invented a new story and it is the story of the balanced budget equating a government with a household saying you are household cannot keep borrowing money and borrowing money and borrowing money and hope to get out on the other side that there needs to be disciplined you need to balance. the books and so this was applied to how governments ought to be run and one byproduct of this is it gave the wealthiest people confidence confidence that things that were unexpected lots of new money printed lots of new deficits created this confidence LED them to engage in a marketplace where inflation was predictable now, we’re leaving aside the very complicated conversations that happen when there’s more than one country that can print money what happens if country a prince a lot of money, what does that do to their goods and services when they try to export or import from country B, let’s leave that out in the discussion for just a minute. And so you have a balanced budget perspective and what it says, is that our job as the government is to do as little as possible and to pay for it as we go with the taxes that we collect. There are some challenges here because as we discussed a couple minutes go it could be that the purpose of government when it comes to economic well-being is to create a population that is healthy and smart and also confident but when a pandemic hits or when Healthcare is unequally available or when schooling starts to become too expensive for many people or when we under invest in how we educate people or when the technology changes and education is unevenly available to people we have shortchanged all of us by creating a less productive Workforce.

So what modern monetary Theory argues is that printing money to pay for things like health care and education is actually fine because it doesn’t cause inflation because you haven’t handed a million dollars to every person what you’ve done is taken people who are underemployed. And made it so that they’re acting productively not by pumping too much money into the system. But by saying every doctor ought to be fully employed taking care of every patient by saying every student who can learn something at scale online should be given the ability to do that that as we create these cycles of smart and healthy what we end up with.

Is a population a Workforce that’s more confident and that will create a cycle that will lead to more productivity and productivity creates value and growth and wealth. So what are the criticisms? Well, one of the criticisms is that it will lead to Uncharted Territory that we don’t know what to do with multi trillion-dollar debt.

A bigger criticism is the government’s have no discipline and that once they start printing money. They won’t be able to stop printing money and a third criticism is that as inflation Rises and it will a little solving it with taxation will quite quickly undo 50 years of reducing taxes as a percentage on the richest part of the population.

And so the people who are looking for the government to leave the wealthy alone don’t like the idea of modern monetary Theory. Yeah, because it’s output will be to lower the gap between the rich and the poor its output will be to create a more productive economy for many many millions more people. But at the same time change the rules of the game for people of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or more by having that population of people pay more in taxes not enough to pay for everything that the government is spending but enough to take the Fizz off. The inflationary impact so my take is that modern monetary Theory makes an enormous amount of sense.

I’m not seeing the non political objections to it. Now a minute ago. I said what happens when we talk about trading with other countries. Well, here’s what we know. They’re going to have a hard time using mmt in Europe because it’s harder for them to print their own currency because each country doesn’t control it and China China. Has its own host of problems and they are trying very hard to make their country more productive as well. It seems to me as we look for the next chapter in the development of humanity. It’s going to be about how we deal with carbon how we shift from an oil-based economy how we educate people so that they can approach new problems and find interesting Solutions and how we spread health care which includes clean water to all the Who deserve it when we seek to do all of those things?

It’s pretty clear. The market alone hasn’t solved those problems. Yes, we have raised the standard of living for just about every person on the planet. But if you are one of the people who makes four or five dollars a day, I think it’s appropriate to say not fast enough. So your mileage may vary, but I think it’s really important that we all understand the impact and Implications of modern monetary Theory because whether we like it or not, it’s going to rewire how we recover from this pandemic and how we go forward because every country around the world is going to print money and we’re going to have to figure out how does that impact and economy with the highest unemployment rate in 90 years and how do we build an economy that creates a future that were proud to have created?

Thanks for listening. Stay well. Be healthy. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with three questions from earlier episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works if you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo.com.

Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is on the Pain Scale entire sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hey Sam, this is Rex.

Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question loyal listeners know that I love to hear from you.

If you’ve got a question about this or any other episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s Aki MBO link2006, click the appropriate button three questions this week. They’re all sort of related. Here we go. Greetings from Malaysia.

My name is nizar. I have a question on analysis paralysis.

So I run my own business.

It’s a new business, but I’m seeing that there have many many problems to solve not only for my customers but for my employees and basically problems within my business to improve everything. Overall, but because there’s just so many things to solve sometimes I just get stuck and I don’t work on anything.

How would you deal with analysis paralysis? Thanks for all your work.

Thanks for this question. And you’ve already done the hard part, which is you’ve realized that there’s a challenge and the challenge is not that the world can be solved. The world is not a problem that can be solved. What is true is that there are elements of the world tiny tiny elements of the world that you can make better and perfect is the enemy of good and good is the Action that we need to head that the opportunity is to find the smallest breakthrough that you can the smallest viable breakthrough that is worth your effort and simply do that merely do that not just do that because just minimizes it simply do it without commentary and then pile on and pylon and pylon because there is never ever not once a complete solution. Ian from the beginning that’s not how technology evolves it’s not how interventions evolve instead. We find something we pull the thread we do our best and then we learn from that.

It’s an algorithm. We evolved it going forward. So when you’re feeling overwhelmed by how defective all of the elements of your solution are agree with it, it’s true. They are defective. But at least you’re going to make something better and then you get to do it again.

I says this is Zach John from Shenzhen China. I’ve been enrolled in the creatives and freelance workshop last year and they really inspire me to really start doing the work finding audience and building up this personal brand. My question is as you move on into this freelance content creation path, especially you are the Creator and the center of every video blog posts podcasts and walk shot that you put out. How do you balance and decide which kind of work should be directly handled by your yourself now by your assistant or Outsourcing because in the past few weeks, I feel pretty much overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do to keep this side hustle running.

And by the way, I still have a full-time job. It really pushes me to doubt the initial idea of why I’m giving myself all this work instead of just chilling in enjoying life during weekends. I think there should be a system to be built in the long run and right now I just don’t know where to start. Thank you for everything you share online. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for this exact there are two parts to your question one part. You didn’t ask in one part. You did the part you didn’t ask is this. Is it a useful path to go down the list to become the influencer the social media star the personal brand because everyone who is a person has a brand in the sense that your reputation precedes you that just hearing your name.

Applies a promise but personal brand with a capital P and a capital b as something you do for a living that doesn’t feel like a strategy to me a strategy to me is who do you seek to serve are they part of a tribe? What do they believe what’s their worldview? And what are their challenges? Can you show up for that kind of person the smallest viable audience and bring them something that they need.

Maybe it’s something that has your name.

Name on it.

Maybe it’s something that has an organization’s name on it. Maybe it’s simply something fairly Anonymous like a piece of software, but we don’t begin at least I don’t begin with how do I get a microphone? Because I feel like that’s a little bit of a trap because social media rewards people who seek a spotlight in the short run but in the long run, it benefits social media. It doesn’t benefit you and the second half of your question about What do you Outsource?

It seems to me. We need to Outsource anything that someone else can do better than we can if we can afford it and we need to make sure that we don’t Outsource anything. Where are doing it with our own two hands with our own voice matters. So in my case, I made the decision that if these are words I wrote them if it’s a video I made it but there are other people plenty of other people.

You don’t have to do that. And if you look at the history of stand-up pre I don’t know Seinfeld or just before then comedians didn’t write their own jokes. Henny Youngman didn’t write his own jokes, Milton Berle didn’t write his own drugs. Phyllis Diller didn’t write her own jokes, not all of them had other people writing them.

She’s always bragging how you can eat off her kitchen floor.

You can eat off my kitchen floor mustard. Ketchup baked beans.

Because they were in the joke delivery business not in the joke writing business, but then the culture shifted and it became a singer songwriter sort of situation. So there isn’t a cut and dry answer but I think the overall strategy needs to shift to whose problem. Are you solving anyway?

Hey Seth, this is rich in Los Angeles. Thank you for all your work. You have helped me so much since I first discovered your work about a year ago, you’ve influenced and taught me more than literally I think anyone. Ever has thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My question is about dancing with the fear. I love the metaphor of dancing with it. I’ve shared this with other people and it’s blown their minds and sometimes I do believe I’ve actually danced with fear, but I don’t know how I did it and I don’t know how to replicate it in an interview. Once you said that you like to sit down with the resistance and talk with it and turn it into a compass and I’m doing that. I’m trying to do things. I’m doing things that I’m afraid of but it’s still so scary. Sometimes that it’s debilitating and I don’t know how to dance.

Dance and while I get that dancing with the fear may look signatory different for every person. Is there anyway you provide some insight on on how best to do this to be more consistent with it to make it happen. Thank you so much again for everything you do. Have a great day.

Thank you Rich for this generous question and for showing up every day as you do dancing with fear, there are two kinds of dancing. There is the Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers sort of dancing in which a choreographer and practice. Are involved that’s not the kind of dancing. I’m talking about. There’s a different kind of dancing a dancing you might find in the rain in a village with strangers.

This is the dancing of giving and taking this is the dancing in the moment that has nothing to do with perfect and nothing to do with choreography. It’s about seeing and responding seeing and reacting seeing and moving it forward. And so if we watch two great athletes competing against each other in a one-on-one One they’re doing a form of dance.

One of them is trying to stop the other one, but they are still dancing with each other. And that is what I’m talking about to dance with fear does not mean you can destroy it because you can’t does not mean you can tame it because you can’t it’s definitely doesn’t mean you can choreograph it because you can’t what it means is oh it’s going left. I can go right or I can pirouette with it. There’s something to be done here. That isn’t Referendum on my value as a human.

It’s not a crisis. It’s simply an opportunity other people might see that fear and Barrel over it and they would probably pay a price for doing that. Some people might see the fear and simply hide. But if we want to we can train ourselves to when we see the fear when we feel the fear realize it is in this moment that we get to do the things that we are proud of and yes we can dance with it because we can watch it. It from afar being present realizing that the fear is up to something and so are we and together we will create a new thing the fear and me.

Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks for the work you do. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book. Great, essay, a great idea anywhere, you know and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you So when are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up. And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information.

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==> -upside-down-marginal-cost- <==

If they decided to build a car the way they build a house, you know a whole bunch of crafts people come to your front yard and piece by piece as they arrive people figure out how to assemble them cutting things to fit until finally there’s a car if we built a car that way, you know, the way we build a house it would cost more than 2 million dollars to build a typical car.

Why is that because cars are built with a fact jury factories are expensive and factories are efficient. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about marginal cost and the revolution that we are living through but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Okay, that’s pretty obvious. We don’t build cars the way we build houses. We build houses in an extremely inefficient way partly because they’re really big partly because there’s a history of them all being different from one another and partly because there are systems in place that make it that building a house. In a factory is logistically and bureaucratically difficult. Okay fine, but what about all the other stuff in our lives? How much does it cost to make a can of Budweiser beer or a topic? I know a little bit more about how much does it cost to make a copy of my book The Practice?

Well, no first copy of the practice cost the publisher tens of thousands of dollars because not only did they have to type. Set it not only do they have to edit it. Not only did they have to find a printing company, but the printer has a big press that uses lots and lots and lots of paper and has no ability whatsoever to print one book at a time.

It’s a factory the first book really really expensive the last book costs about a dollar twenty to print in hardcover. That’s it that’s called. Marginal cost the marginal cost is what does it cost to make the last one not counting set up not counting overhead not counting the factory the last one just the pieces. You needed to make the last one how much did that cost?

And there’s a reason we ask this question. We asked it because one of the fundamental laws of microeconomics is that in an ideal Marketplace of which none really exist? A provider who’s got a factory should keep lowering her price bit by bit until the very last person is able to buy it at one penny above marginal cost because even if you made a penny on that last one, it was still worth it to you because that Penny can go to pay for your factory.

Now, there are reasons. This is fictional because the market talks to the market and if someone finds out that you’re buying a copy of my book for a dollar twenty-five They’re not going to be happy that they trusted the bookstore and paid eighteen or nineteen dollars for it. And so now we can start thinking about the choices that a provider makes when it comes to marginal cost.

For example, most of the books that are going to be published in the future are not going to be printed the way penguin Random House. Does it penguin random house has a business model based on scarce shelf space based on the book store based on having a sales force to goes into the world and She’s the book a lot at the beginning.

They push it a lot of the beginning for two reasons one. They’re trying to make a cultural impact and to the efficiency of the factory starts to fade. If you have to store those books for months or years into the future a comedy called lightning Source a technology called Indigo and some others came along and they figured out that it’s possible to build a huge Rube Goldberg device. It’s super complicated that takes a PDF file at one end. And and Prince exactly one copy of the book at a time.

There is no economy of scale printing one book printing 10 books printing a hundred bucks each book costs the same. There’s no fancy startup costs. You also don’t get that beautiful patina that you get from 500 years of book binding and printing experience. So someone is in the book business can tell pretty easily the difference between a print on demand book and a quote real book.

Austin is if print on demand is so great. Why doesn’t everybody do it? Well one copy out of that fancy machine costs way more than one copy out of the big old-fashioned printing process because the factory might be cheaper, but the marginal cost of each additional book is higher because it’s not as efficient at scale, but the book publishers they don’t need to Worried about scale so much anymore because there aren’t four thousand book stores that are each going to buy 10 copies of the book and put them on the cash register because there aren’t that many independent bookstores left and more and more sales are going to Amazon and a few other online retailers.

And so now you can make five books at a time and those five books at a time sit there maybe even just one until someone orders it and then you can make another one. It’s okay because you are not worried about store. You’re not worried about shredding the books that don’t sell suddenly instead of being able to keep 5,000 10,000 20,000 books in stock, which is all you could do.

When you needed to fire up the factory every time you needed more books instead of having books out of print all the time now, basically every book can be in print all the time in print in quotation marks because if someone wants one we can make one and the in Infinite shelf space of Amazon supports this now. You probably see where I’m going because it’s one thing to say a book has a marginal cost of a buck or two.

But what’s the marginal cost of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition?

It cost a fortune to make the first copy of that amazing single it. Stevie Wonder decades to be able to earn the skill and insight it took to create that song and they went into the studio and lots and lots of people worked with him to make that song and you get the idea the first copy of superstition in today’s dollars probably cost a million dollars.

How much does a copy cost if you buy it in the iTunes Store? How much does it cost be cost if you listen to it on Spotify what? Ins when we make it digital and that works for Kindle books as well is the marginal cost goes from a couple bucks to deliver it on acetate to a penny or less than a penny and in some cases.

Absolutely zero that is bandwidth costs. Keep going down as storage costs. Keep going down the marginal cost of one more person engaging with one more bit of content on the web. Rapidly approaches zero and as you know from arithmetic class when you were in fifth grade, when it danced with being actual math dividing by zero leads to really weird results dividing by 0 starts to create a sort of infinity and we could talk about zero marginal cost all day, but that’s not what I came to talk about today.

What I came to talk about today is negative marginal cost what happened if the NG you make actually works better when more people have it what happens when there’s a network effect. So let’s think of the first example that occurs to me, which is your magazine publisher in 1900 and you figure out every person who subscribes to the magazine actually makes you a prophet even if they don’t pay for their subscription because when we add the ads in you make more from the ads in each issue, Then it costs you to print and distribute that issue.

Suddenly. Not only don’t you need to charge for one more reader you’re willing to pay to get one word reader and advertisers saw what magazines were doing and they invented the ABC the audit Bureau of circulation. So that magazine Publishers wouldn’t spam the world with magazines and then charge advertisers extra to reach people who didn’t want to read the magazine so, Are tons and tons of rules like how big a prize you can get for subscribing to a magazine famously Rolling Stone flaunted the rules by offering people the first issue of the magazine if they subscribed rolling stone for a year for $8.

You got the first issue delivered by federal express and you received it the next day. So it’s pretty obvious Ian winner in the folks at Rolling Stone were losing money on every person who paid eight bucks because they were spending more than that. Plea to send you the first issue, but they understood the idea of the negative marginal cost.

But now now it’s far more widespread and that’s because in the network effect think back to the fax machine or the telephone the first person with a telephone what exactly did they do with it? Because you can’t call yourself. You’ll get a busy signal telephone works better. If your friends also have telephones and the same with fax machines, but now now that we live in the world defined.

By the network effect, it gets way more interesting because the value of the Enterprise itself and its ongoing cash flow may very well be related to the fact that they need all the people or at least all the right people to be on the network. And so when we live in a world of negative marginal cost that is defining our culture Facebook and Twitter and go down the list Clubhouse. They all need the right people in the room. Or it doesn’t work.

And so they will create all sorts of incentives for human beings to join and all sorts of incentives for human beings to not leave. They’re not doing you a favor. The marginal cost isn’t a dollar 20. The marginal cost isn’t zero marginal cost is negative. You are doing them a favor by being in the room with them because that is that the essence of their business model.

And so what that means is that in the Industrial Age our Was defined by consumers who made choices to buy things that they thought were worth more than they cost and the sellers had a price them high enough that they could make more than the marginal cost. But now our culture is a business model. It is driven by Enterprises that understand they don’t have to charge you anything. In fact, if they could they would pay you because they still come out ahead which means we’re not the customers anymore where the Product.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with answers to some questions from previous episodes. But first here is a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp an independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades, but learning together it works if you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo Dot.

Calm go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is And that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or anything previous, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd click the appropriate button a bunch of questions this week to that go together, but first to get us started, here’s Jeff and Tacos.

Hi Steph, this is Jeff and Los Angeles. I was listening to your episode on Modern Choice Theory. And was rather surprised and amused to hear you use an audio clip pulled from a YouTube video. I made several years ago called ask your doctor about tacos even more surprising is the fact that I’d also just listen to your episode on trademarks and here was an immediate opportunity to find joy in the innocuous sharing of my past work.

Anyway, I have a question somewhat related to this coincidence fast forward to the present and I am now in the position of pitching comedic ideas to streaming that works in your modern choice. Episode you mentioned the decision fatigue that prevents viewers from diverging be on the front page of Netflix given that the things I create now are inherently not front-page Material.

I’m curious what tactics are factors might spur people to overcome their decision fatigue and move beyond the front page to seek out something new and unique. Thanks for your perspective your work continues to be helpful and inspiring first Jeff.

Thank you. Thank you for doing the work. I thought the ask your doctor about tacos video was hysterically funny, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot more. More than that thank you for generously putting it into the world. Let’s talk about the homepage of Netflix. Number one. Everyone doesn’t see the same home page.

Number two the purpose of the homepage for Netflix because they don’t get paid when you watch more video is to keep you from quitting Netflix that now that they’ve grown to the point where growth is going to slow. They need to stop attrition and one. They keep people from quitting is by getting them hooked on a habit and by holding out the prospect that next month. They will miss out on something if they let their subscription lapse.

So that’s one reason why the homepage of Netflix is different for different people because they need to find things that will tickle this person’s approach to genre to what they’re interested in number two Netflix does allow A lot to promote the things that are popular. Why would they do that? Well, it turns out popular things are popular because they’re popular and so seeing that a show is number one in the country or trending this week appeals to many people because they don’t want to be left behind but that’s not really the answer to your question when you are pitching something to a network like Netflix. The person you are pitching to doesn’t own the network.

They are asking themselves a simple question. If I buy this what will I tell my boss and we don’t exactly know what their instructions are. It might be that there are instructions are by stuff you like you have good taste. Let’s share it. It’s that simple that is certainly the tradition in lots of areas of publishing or it might be here is the data here is the data that shows us what keeps someone from quitting what keeps someone on the platform bring me stuff that matches. The data so part of your job as you explore what it means to sell things to these networks is to understand what’s on their agenda. What are they looking for? What are they seeking to buy today? But the last part is the most important part which is what makes a show popular on Netflix is not whether or not it is featured on the homepage.

What makes it popular is if someone sees it and tells 10 friends that they have embraced deeply embraced. the idea of word of mouth of the water cooler conversation of people binging stuff getting ahead using their status as an Insider as an early adopter to tell other people about what’s coming up that Netflix is biggest marketing expenditure is its customers its customers are the people they are feeding stuff to at Great expense so that they will tell other people and as you figured out in getting that taco Yo in front of me because you never sent it to me. Someone who sent it to me. Send it to me after someone sent it to them who sent it to them who said it to them and that’s good news for people who are making great stuff.

Hice at this is David Stein from Tucson.

I really appreciate your episode on Modern monetary theory. Mmt is something I’ve been studying speaking and writing about for over a decade first as an investment adviser and then as a financial educator and podcaster my biggest concern with mmt is the government controls how much it spends but the private sector decides almost everything else including how much output of goods and services is produced how much money is created through bank loans how big the federal budget deficit will be Based on how much the private sector wants to save versus span which in turn impacts incomes and the amount of taxes owed and most importantly whether households and businesses continue to trust the story of money inflation is as much about believe and narrative as it is about money printing if the private sector believes inflation is coming they act differently, they hoard demand higher wages and take actions that can lead to more inflation. Ation, my question is what can citizens and politicians do to help maintain trust and fiat currency in an age when so many people can’t even agree on basic facts.

Thanks Seth for all of the thought-provoking akimbo episodes.

Hi Seth.

This is James from Glendale and longtime listener and just had a comment about your episode on Modern monetary Theory and the gist I get from this.

Is it’s moving monies from private hands into will describe it as an elect essentially write a and elect who would then take that money and decide act on it in this sort of I guess Equitable Equitable way and send some way and I think that sounds great on its surface. I met my concern is that that you will end up with another sort of military industrial. Real complex situation where you just have this this self-perpetuating state apparatus that just grows and that I guess the fear I have is that you’ll end up with a population that is paying more and more for a state apparatus which essentially gives itself raises and pensions that its population increasingly doesn’t see themselves having and very libertarian.

Idea of it. But yeah, just wanted to hear your thoughts.

Thank you, David.

And thank you James. I hope it’s okay. I lightly edited your questions to get the point across but let me try to interweave the to first of all David you’re absolutely correct inflation is a challenge inflation for people who have never lived through it ends up undermining the way we interact with each other and with the economy because it changes our story about money.

And you are correct. That inflation itself is a story but it’s really important to begin with this the United States has significantly more money floating around than it did a hundred years ago that is not inflationary. And the reason is because the United States is significantly more productive than it was a hundred years ago. They go hand in hand. We have to increase the amount of money as the amount of product. DVD increases because otherwise money gets too scarce. All right with that understood then what should we do to increase productivity did it increase productivity in this country when we spent billions of dollars to build the interstate highway system did it increase productivity in this country when we spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to build the infrastructure for the internet.

Did it increase activity when we figured out how to map the human genome. These were all projects of Community Action. They weren’t done by Private Industry that the NASA program putting man on the moon and bringing them back safely ended up directly leading to the productivity increases and Moore’s law that is allowing you to listen to this very podcast.

So there is proof over and over again that concerted community. Action can create knowledge can create education can create possibility all of which lead to productivity and productivity is the ultimate antidote to inflation. James your point about taxation is totally worth talking about but my understanding of modern monetary theory is not that what we are talking about is a household that goes into huge amounts of debt to buy treats and prizes that a government a government that can print money is not a household and the idea of a balanced budget might be mistaken that we are not talking when we’re talking about modern monetary theory about taxing people.

Lie to pay for things so to pick an absurd example, the government could print a million dollars in ten dollar bills and then burn them there would be absolutely no net impact on the economy other than the tiny cost of printing a hundred thousand ten dollar bills that has no repercussions because he can print money. Well what happens if the government prints money and then pays people to tutor Our 6 year olds so that they can read better. What is the impact on the rest of our culture and economy when we do that? Well, when we move people from underemployment to Full Employment, we are actually planting the seeds for productivity increases when we put together a moonshot type program to come up with super efficient solar panels and windmills that lead to electricity. Being in price dramatically.

Yes, we’ve overwhelmingly shifted the productivity of the economy because if electricity is free or close to free productivity goes up. And so you see how this Cycle Works it is not appropriate to look at our government choices the way a household might look at them. They’re different things macroeconomics, which I was never good at in school is really different than mine. Microeconomics your mileage may vary you should ask an actual expert these sorts of questions, but that’s my take on it. One last question.

This one from Mike. Hi Steph, this is Mike Adams from Moorpark it what I’ve noticed about your last podcast and about your work in general is that you’re kind of a bartender of ideas and you mix a little culture little self-realization and some other secret ingredients and you have a self cocktail and your kind of a Clarity Savant I guess it’s kind of what makes you you I’m a writer working on a book and I’m struggling with Clarity and I don’t know what my big ideas or what the right Big Ideas I thought about who the book is for with the problem is you know, why my solution is different and I have a bunch of subtitles.

They most of them are okay, but but none of them are great. So what I want to ask is when you’re writing a book or working on a project and how do you get the big idea? How do you find the right subtitle that communicates the work is about and kind of keeps you on task you decide ahead of writing or ahead of the work.

Kind of let the idea take you where it will or little both and this one was asking is how do you find that kind of that clear bridge between what you want to say and what your audience needs to hear? Thanks so much. Appreciate all the work that you do.

Thanks for this Mike. Here’s my take it’s about shipping the work. It’s about pitching your idea in the elevator pitching your idea on a long walk with a stranger pitching your idea online pitching your idea with blog post saying it out loud saying it out loud and seeing if eyes light up the best way I know to write a good non-fiction book is to give a great Ted Talk first because giving an 18-minute Ted Talk is way more difficult on a minute.

Minute basis then spending six months writing a book because you only have 18 minutes.

You will get better. If you keep giving your 18-minute talk over and over again, not the same way but different ways which lines work which Cadence is work. Yes. It’s true Miles Davis made kind of blue in four days, but most spectacular works of art take a while. And the reason they take a while is not because it takes a long. Long time to type something not because it takes a long time to play something but because it takes a long time to learn to hear your own voice to figure out what other people are hearing and seeing when you do your work so my short answer is ship the work.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success seeker at the level of of And Gathering or information distribution. I mean this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea to anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all NBA gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, When you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide you got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment. And we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -rightsizing-projects- <==

About 30 years ago Airbus set out to build a really big plane. How big well the stretch version would hold 900 people in economy. How big well in many airports they would have to change signage and blast protection because it was so big and heavy and yes in some airports. They have to reinforce every one way because it was so heavy.

Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about big projects and changing the world not to mention resilience and perfectionism. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor hi spend it at you and I’m here to talk to you about how you can become a better Storyteller storytelling is not an art reserved for the Chosen Few.

It’s a skill that you can learn. Just like the students have taken part in the story skills Workshop of done.

Actually.

I had a story to tell that was really important for me, but also was going to be very very important for people in the future.

It’s been absolutely life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories. I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving as in the receiving we got to not only Learn about storytelling. We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life.

If you’re ready to become a better Storyteller. I hope you’ll join us.

I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a Ruckus. Those of you who are fans of Aviation know that in 2019 after spending more than 25 billion dollars and shipping just a Hundred planes Airbus canceled the project during that same period of time planes that seated a hundred and fifty to two hundred people did great they sold at record numbers. They were flown around the world.

So what’s going on here what’s going on here is we have to be really clear about what the appropriate size of a project is because we have been persuaded that Our job is to change the world with a very Grand gesture many people don’t want to change the world many people say I’d rather just do my job and some people some people set out to change the world in really big and dramatic ways.

But here’s the truth. Everyone changes the world every single day. Not the whole world but part of the world if you burn any carbon you’re changing the world if you have kids who are changing the world if you don’t have kids your Changing the world you change the world when you give somebody a smile or let them in front of you in line and you change the world when you cut them off we change the world when we launched a midsize project. We change the world when we cancel a project. So if you’re going to change the world you might as well change it in a way that you can be proud of so we begin with this idea of resilience.

All of us get to do projects are career is nothing but a series of Jex a project might be a job where you show up doing the same thing every day for a long time a project might be a blog post but we pick projects we pick projects we work on projects and we ship projects and having good judgment about which projects to pick is critically important because if we’re working on Project a we can’t at the same time be working on Project be the opportunity cost of what we choose to do. Is enormous in the case of Airbus for that? Same amount of money during that same period of time what could they have developed instead?

When we think about how we will choose to spend our time who in our community we will see what we will even pick as our community. These are all choices. These choices have an opportunity cost these choices contribute to the world as we hope to make it and the best way to make an Impact is not to spread our peanut butter too thin in a famous memo a senior executive at Yahoo! Sent a note to his teammates pointing out that because Yahoo! Was trying to do too many things.

They weren’t doing much of anything. They were spreading the peanut butter too thin what does this mean? It means that if you pick the right project and allocate the right resources to it. You’re way more likely to accomplish your goal and Make something the right size project. It depends on who we are seeking to change who we are seeking to reach. If you are trying to raise money for your nonprofit identifying five people who can each give you a sizable donation and overwhelming those people with the goodness with the fit with the respect with dignity with the preparation that you do. It’s going to be way more likely that they donate then if you identify five thousand people. From some list and spin the wheel and hope for the best long time ago.

I did a project with Isaac Asimov and Kodak and the idea was to take asimov’s concept of robots and turn it into a murder mystery video game not a video game like a computer game a game that was played with a home video just a video tape that you would stop and start and play some cards Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up, which made me Really happy Unfortunately, they never aired that episode.

But what we discovered is that 450,000 dollars wasn’t enough money to make a great video if we’d had that money and spent it on a board game. We probably could have delighted that people who bought board games. But Kodak had bigger dreams in that Kodak wanted to sell 20 million of these things. They wanted to and did promote it during the Olympics sell it at Kmart and Target and Walmart, however, it’s hard to spread the peanut butter that thin to belabor the food analogy ketchup did not start as a mass-market product for everybody was a condiment for a few people and then gradually over time people adopted picking the right size project one that has a Runway. Oh boy. I’ve got so many puns today.

That has a Runway that will help get us to where we seek to go which leads to the idea of resilience because what it means to have a project is that we are predicting the future. We are predicting not only that our project will work that it will resonate for the people we seek to serve to change but that the world will be the same when the project is finished and the longer it takes to bring our project to the world the more Likely it is that a block Swan event comes along the more likely it is that someone beats us to it. The more likely it is that by the time the product is done.

The world doesn’t need the product or the project the way we thought it did and so when the world changes then what do you do in the case of the Airbus A380 they thought they were being super resilient. They built one version for fancy first class Flyers, they built one version or hope to build. One version for people who are going to ship Freight people like FedEx.

They thought they had it all figured out. Unfortunately, when you discover that the airlines around the world aren’t going to line up for your very very specific elephant. It becomes a white elephant. It turns out that you can’t adjust easily because the design wasn’t particularly resilient that as Market demands changed it was too hard. Hard to change what they were building.

So this idea of resilience sits next to the idea of the right size and the third piece is perfectionism perfectionism does not mean quality perfectionism is a way of hiding perfectionism is US polishing something where people don’t care about the Polish if you’re going to launch an airplane, it is not perfectionism to make sure it will never crash that Simply one of the design specs perfectionism is trying to consider every single possible objection and answering it perfectionism means making the lists ever longer delaying the project adding to the budget not finding out what the market is actually ready to do because we erroneously believed that we never get a second chance to make a first impression. We erroneously believe that if what we ship isn’t perfect we will be shamed forever.

But when it comes time to change the world whatever we ship will not be perfect. It’s a given we can’t know if it’s perfect because we haven’t engaged with the market yet. What we can do is figure out what’s important and get what’s important correct and then ship and learn and adjust that when we bring resilience to the for what? Have is the chance to show up for the people. We are seeking to change the people. We are seeking to serve and say here I made this and then watch what happens and then evolve it one more part. And this is the idea of a portfolio stock Brokers can show you easily that a diversified stock portfolio will outperform putting all your chips all your bets on one company that what it means to have a portfolio as a A human is that you haven’t bet everything on the world matching just one prediction.

But if we’re going to have a portfolio if we’re going to be resilient if we’re putting down our bets in multiple areas, then we cannot do giant projects because we can’t go all in on one and also have the resilience to be flexible with a few. and so the purpose of the screed is to highlight the fact that we have been fooling ourselves into thinking that we have to be perfectionists and that we have to do something that will truly change the world that we can brag about instead if we are resilient if we are standing for something for some group of people, but that group might be smaller than our peers were hoping we would show up for we have an advantage and the advantages That group that smallest viable audience is a group we can earn trust with that group. If we earn their trust if we Delight them they will tell the others and so it begins to spread alert listeners will have no doubt found the paradoxes and contradictions in what we’ve just covered on one hand as bread Garlin house has pointed out don’t spread the peanut butter too thin you have to get through the dip you have to do something with focus on the Other hand we need resilience at the same time. We have to do work that matters work that we’re proud of because we’re all changing the world on the other hand. Don’t take on too big a project because you won’t have the resources to overwhelm the smallest viable audience and actually make a difference and most of all don’t be a perfectionist, but you better make it perfect because they’re not the same thing.

I believe all of these contradictions aren’t contradictions at all. They’re simply boundaries on our way to figuring out how to create leverage that what it means to have a portfolio is that we are showing up in different about multiple ways. The world could be as opposed to the brave, but perhaps lazy work of saying it has to be exactly like I am planning or nothing’s going to work we show up and we say I’ve got no clue, but at least I’ve picked five or six or Alternate Futures and this thing I’m building.

We’ve got enough alternative plans at this thing. I’m building has got a shot at working for the audience I seek to serve and the idea of our budget because we all have a budget and we all face opportunity costs and the mistake is taking on a project. That is too big In Too Short a time because when we hit the speed bump and we will we don’t have the resilience.

To Pivot that we’ve predicted. We’re going to get it exactly right the way katzenberg did with Gibby Quimby did not get it exactly right. They can blame it on the timing of their launch. But either way trying to create a cultural Touchstone that changes the way an entire generation consumes media, that’s not where you start you start by engaging with the audience over and over again your audience doing it with Focus doing work that Matters keeping resilience in mind as we go and picking an appropriate sized project so that the resources we’ve got the time we’ve got the choices we make are appropriate for the opportunity in front of us.

It all grows Drip by drip. The ocean is made of drops. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from a previous episode but First here is a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp an independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades, but learning together it works if you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo Dot.

/ go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks Seth, it’s Maria.

Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth.

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My question is is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you.

If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode just visit akimbo dot link. That’s Aki MBO link2sd click the appropriate button. These two are really similar. I don’t think they coordinated.

Hi Seth paid it cookie in Melbourne Australia with a question about last week’s episode on Modern monetary Theory you said government’s job could be or maybe should be to create a situation where people are healthy smart and confident. I love this idea. I think it’s really big idea healthy and smart kind of self-evident and confident is a bit more interesting to me. You said that we need to be confident to believe the story of money, but I think it’s a much bigger idea. More than that and there’s something underneath that. So I’d love you to unpack a little bit more what you mean by having people be confident and perhaps even what governments could do to enable that more.

Hello said this is anupam from Berlin.

Thank you for your episode on Modern monetary Theory listening to it gave me more of an Insight on how monetary policy Works than doing a course on macroeconomics back in college. However, there is one aspect of it that got me thinking you mentioned how the printing of money can be justified for governments, at least the theory states that the printing of money by governments can be. Defied for three causes which is to ensure the people are healthy to ensure that they are smart and also to give them confidence what was conspicuous by its absence in this list for me was the need for government also to enable technological infrastructure and by technology. I don’t mean the technology that you reaches end users like vehicles and mobile apps, but the underlying Structure like roads and high-speed internet cables. I’d love for you to have I would love to have your thoughts on that. Thank you.

So, what did I mean by confident? What I meant is this it’s really hard to invest invest in education invest in building invest in a business. If you believe that it could all disappear tomorrow at someone’s whim or because the economy as a whole is precarious when we look at economic.

Turns a part of it is the fact that the economy hit a speed bump but a big part of it is the fact that mass psychology persuades us that things are going to get worse instead of better.

If we think about what does it mean to decide to go to school for two years or four years to go into debt to spend the money. Well, we have to be confident that when we get out there still going to be a market for that thing. We just trained in then one of the reasons people.

People can go into so much debt to get through medical school is that we have a hundred year track record of people graduating from medical school doing fine professionally and financially there doesn’t seem to be a lot of risk at the other side.

So no, we cannot D risk our economy and our culture, but what we can do is figure out how to erect a civil society that leads to an expectation of optimism and expectation that we are going to be surrounded by people who will reward us for the hard work that we are doing that one of the things that makes productivity go up is investment investment in technology investment in education investment in community and those Investments only happen in large measure if people are optimistic about what is to come and so part of the the job of Community Action is to create an environment where we feel confident about what might be happening next.

Hi Seth.

This is Carol from Washington State and I am an elected official for our County and in your last podcast you’re talking about how you know, we are the government and the government and it’s our job to create a place where people can be healthy smart and confident. And if you were to elected official I’m a curious to know what would you focus on at the local level to make that happen.

I appreciate everything you do and your thought leadership and I would love to hear your answer for this. Thank you. Thank you for this question.

And thanks for the work you’re doing in local government. It is thankless.

It is hard.

You are bearing the brunt of a lot of people’s frustration. I’m thinking about little town where I live where the mayor is. ordinary at making possibility happen and depending on the scale of the local government were talking about there are lots of things that communities can do together to create this idea of more productivity possibility and confidence as on a palm pointed out earlier building roads building high-speed infrastructure creates productivity and that productivity is one of the things that leads to forward motion now, it’s Unlikely that this local government that you are part of is going to be able to do a billion dollar infrastructure play but one of the key pieces of infrastructure is not simply being there for somebody who has an urgent need like zoning or is really angry because you confront those things all the time.

It might be something as simple as creating communication creating Circles of people who realize that people like us do things like this. Is the definition of culture and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money but using the central authority of local government and there are things like libraries there things like spiritual institutions.

There are plenty of places government quasi governmental and non-governmental that have been the fabric of our culture what happens when we start doing this with intention what happens when we connect a tutor with the kid who needs to be tutored what happens when Amplify what’s going on at the high school and help those kids get into the community whether it’s as interns or as AIDS or as people who are giving Insight or learning from somebody else there when we weave together this sort of forward motion and possibility things get better and it could be something as simple as a phone number for someone to call when they’re hungry or lonely or when they have something to offer. It can be something like the farmers.

Get which doesn’t cost the local government money per se but it does cost effort to be able to be the impresario. The organizer the person who can say we’re going to use this space at this time to bring these sorts of people together because one thing we know about our culture is culture is by its very nature what we do together and this pandemic that we are surviving this internet. That we are living in tends to push us apart and local government because it is based on geography has a chance to bring us together.

So thanks for your work. I appreciate it. We’ll see you all next time.

Thanks.

I mean, this is the information Renee’s and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, When you got a face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an And we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -helmet-insights- <==

George Owen was pretty smart not because he went to Harvard but because as a hockey player for the Boston Bruins, he realized something about hockey two things actually in hockey, you’re skating between 20 and 30 miles an hour surrounded by other people going the same speed carrying pointed sticks and surrounded by Boards and glass and number two. People are shooting a hard rubber disc at speed. Adds up to 50 or 70 miles an hour right at your face. No George Altman defenseman for the Boston Bruins figured out something really smart.

He wore a helmet. He was the first NHL player to regularly wear a helmet while playing hockey. Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a minute to talk about helmets. Safety fear risk and guts but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

It’s F. And this is a podcast. It’s a podcast produced by Alex De Palma. Alex is a bit of a podcast Whisperer. Alex and I are inviting you to join us in the podcasting workshop.

And this is Alex De Palma Seth’s co-teacher and producer in this class. You’ll learn not just the technology to make a podcast because honestly, it’s pretty easy. You’ll learn to find your voice. You’ll learn to find the others and together in this proven Workshop that’s back again. You’ll discover.

That you can make a podcast not to make money because unfortunately you probably won’t but to make a difference to be heard and to find the people who want to hear from you, which is even more important.

I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus.

After that, first season of George Cohen wearing a helmet Barney Stanley a player-coach not related to the Stanley of the Stanley Cup presented a helmet design to the Board of Governors of the NHL. It was instantly rejected. It’s worth noting that George Cohen played hockey in 1928, and it wasn’t until more than 40 years later that another Boston.

Ted green started wearing a helmet regularly 40 years went by 40 Years of concussions of head injuries of goalies like Gump Worsley not even wearing a face mask as hockey pucks were drilled right at their face. Nobody wearing a helmet in 1968. Bill Masterson was killed in a hockey game from a brain injury and suddenly 40 years later hockey players started to pay attention. Attention to the fact that they were taking really significant risks with their life by not wearing one.

So what happened almost no one wore a helmet then in 1972 something extraordinary happened a few years after Masterson’s death the Soviet Union in a sign of Detachment with North America sent over its hockey team a team of Soviet players came to Canada to play a seven-game series against Canadian All-Star.

From the NHL one thing you would have noticed even if you weren’t a hockey fan was this every single one of the players for the Soviet Union was wearing a helmet on the NHL side. There were only three or four players wearing a helmet the Vivid contrast between hard-working Brave powerful and successful hockey players all wearing helmets looking out for their own personal safety.

Paired to the Macho still great hockey players not wearing helmets who is pretty profound within seven years. The rules of the NHL had changed. My memory of the 70s. Is this that if a player was wearing a helmet they often failed to buckle the strap not buckling the strap was a way of saying to fellow players. Hey guys, my wife is making me wear the helmet, but I’m as Brave As You Are Harvard George Owen. Yes. His first name was actually Harvard and yes, he went to Harvard lived long enough to see Ted green and all the others begin to wear helmets.

And that must have been Bittersweet for him because on one hand he did the right thing playing for years and years ignoring the taunts of his fellow players preserving his health and setting an example, even though it was ignored by every other player in the entirely League often Sports analogies are insufficient to help us figure out what to do in the real world. But in this case, I think the message is pretty profound.

Why exactly does someone play hockey even today hockey players are underpaid compared to other sports like basketball and you lose your teeth, etc. Etc. Now I think playing hockey is a statement a statement about who you are who you want to be and how you are seen by the others. And they do this on television. They are making a statement about living a certain kind of life in front of a whole bunch of people but it’s their peers that they are mostly striving to be accepted by because it’s a team sport life is also a team sport and each of us is on a team. And so the questions are how are we choosing to play whatever game we are playing whether it’s investing whether it’s the way we Come to work, whether it’s how we comport ourselves in the outside world.

What does it mean to insist that your kids wear a helmet when they go sledding, even if their friends aren’t wearing a helmet when they go sledding. What does social pressure due to us as we make choices and what should industry institutions in the government do to normalize certain sorts of behavior.

It wasn’t until the NHL mandated that helmets were. required that helmets became widely worn because then the players could Grumble and say well, I don’t want to wear a helmet but they’re making me it’s worth noting that the NHL made an exception for players who were already in the league when they made the rule and plenty of veterans persisted and not wearing a helmet then they made a rule that referees had to wear a helmet and amazingly several of them refused to wear a helmet for The rest of their career but back to this idea of how it affects our culture if the government hadn’t mandated that seatbelts be required in every car.

It is really unlikely that seat belts would be in every car. It was only because they had to be there that we all had to pay for them that you could expect that seatbelt would be in your car if they were an extra cost option many people would have chosen not to install them because your car like your hockey helmet or lack thereof says a lot about who you are in America in 1968 or 1975 that when we think about the dark patterns that social media sites put in place the things that are default the things that are shown the things that are not shown many of these defaults determine whether or not we’re going to wear a helmet You’ve probably heard the story about what happens when they take a 401k a retirement plan and instead of making it opt-in where you have to voluntarily fill out a piece of paper to put your savings into a 401k.

They make it opt out giving everyone the same amount of freedom to do it or not do it. But once the pattern is in place compliance can as much as double because people while they want to fit in are also lazy And when you put those two pieces together when you establish a standard and when the easiest path is to follow the standard, then more people will follow the standard.

So think about all of the things that we do growing up going to a keg party deciding to make a choice about going to a famous college and going in debt to do so almost all of these decisions made by 17 year olds who have no business making almost any decision. Are made because people are looking around and asking what’s everyone else doing?

So freedom freedom is an interesting concept because most of us would agree that long-term decision making made by rational people who have an understanding of what it means to be in society. It’s probably something we want to let consenting adults do on their own did that level of freedom in our society?

Gives us the chance to become who we want to become but that is really different than saying to somebody. Oh you want to text while driving go ahead. It’s up to you because no it’s actually not up to you because if you’re texting while driving you might crash into me and I wasn’t texting while driving but I’m still dead.

And so when we let the phone companies put these devices into the world without doubt a simple bit of software that would have made it impossible to text while driving. We as a community made a mistake of fatal mistake a mistake that has killed hundreds of thousands of people because we mistakenly believe that people would choose to not text while driving the same way. George always had a hunch that people would choose to wear a helmet normalizing rational Behavior super important. We’d like to believe it comes from the Grassroots that if you give people the Grassroots enough chance to figure out how the world Works they’ll figure out how the world works and it will become normal.

But in fact that’s almost never the case in 2004. I wrote a blog post that I consider Turning Point on my blog because it’s one of the first posts that really sounds like me. It’s called the Provincetown helmet insight and it goes like this in 2004. I was in it’s town with my wife. We went to a wedding of a work colleague. And while we were there we decided to go for a bike ride on our way to the bike rental store. We saw plenty of people on the bike path and what I noticed an amazing coincidence, is that couples either both of them were wearing a helmet or neither of them was wearing a helmet and I thought really hard about this and I said to myself maybe it’s darwinian that people who are helmet wearers.

Attracted through the dating process to other helmet wearers and they get to Provincetown and are delighted to discover that they’re both helmet wearers. I realized this was extremely unlikely. So I figured something was happening in the bike store that was leading the decision to be made in a group.

So I put the bike store under surveillance. Well, actually I just waited in line for five minutes while we were waiting our turn and what I saw a couple after a couple is exactly the same thing would happen. The proprietor would take a credit card wheel out the bikes and then say to the couple would you like to rent helmets there are dollar each and the two people would look at each other and whoever spoke first one.

So if one person said, yes, then they both took helmets and if one person said no neither took a helmet and so the power went to the person who spoke first. It wasn’t a conversation. It wasn’t Eating it was whoever either cared the most or was simply the dominant spokesperson in the couple in that moment decided for both of them.

So the Insight the Provincetown helmet Insight is that we can change the system itself if it’s important for us as a culture for the people who pay for the ambulance and the medical bills for the people who don’t want to be surrounded by folks who are either in the cemetery or dealing with a lifelong head injury the owner of the bikes. Door perhaps prodded by their insurance company or a government regulation could say the following.

Would you like to take helmets? Everyone does their our dollar each and then put two helmets in the hands of the couple that standing at the counter now the social pressure is really profound. We’re not forcing you to wear a helmet, but what we’ve just done is made it with a helmet in your hand with your partner with a helmet in their hand if you don’t Wear helmets, you’ve got to say no and put the helmet back that is different. The presumption was that people like us we wear helmets.

Are you People Like Us in or out and that is the opportunity that we have as we try to change the culture to normalize behaviors that will benefit all of us once you see it. It’s hard to unsee it. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

My name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump.

This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nikki.

Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode or you just want to see the show notes, please visit a Kimbo link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd. Click the appropriate button three juicy questions this week on a wide variety. Of topics.

Here we go.

I said I’m Maya from Argentina and I helped create those specifically musicians encouraging them to ship their creative work into the world and find their tribes. One of the many eye-opening ideas. I’ve learned from you is the one of owning a long tail as a series of blog posts podcast episodes Etc, which goes perfectly in line with the idea of delivering creative work over a long time patiently and consistently, And I feel like I’m doing it proud of my hundreds of YouTube videos and podcast episodes.

But what I notice more and more is that people even those most connected to my work have a hard time finding what they need the more videos the more episodes. There are the harder it is to find my specific thoughts a particular concept over hours and hours of audio and video. In 101 meetings with these people for example in the some classes. I often refer them to a particular video where I know they will find what they are asking me about and their response is usually thank you. I have seen many of your videos, but I didn’t know you had this one.

So my question is are we heading towards a world where the classification the categorization of the content has a value in itself. I mean, is it a valuable work we can do investing time and energy in classifying our own content or others content as well or do we just have to go ahead expressing as many times as necessary the same ideas adding New Reflections, of course thinking that if we do it enough times, they will be found anyway, Beyond that I’m thinking that one of the advantages of twitch, for example over YouTube about live streaming for musicians is that which has a specific music from with filters by tag? Learn language Etc. So while it is impossible on a Saturday night for example to say I want to watch a Bossa Nova live streaming concert on YouTube on Twitch. It is perfectly possible. There’s an episode of a Kimble where you talk about taxonomy. And categorization and both that one and the one where you talk about curation seemed to me to be key to understanding a future where we are going to be lost in oceans of content.

But of course, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you for all your work.

Thank you for this Maya. Thanks for the work you’re doing as somebody who has populated the internet with eight thousand bits of information. That I sweated over that I cared about that. I would like to share with others. I feel your pain, but I’m not sure the problem is the one that you are describing.

The problem is actually my pain your pain not the fact that the listener the reader The Watcher can’t find what they are looking for because YouTube search and Google when it’s working properly. They can Surface something if someone knows that they are looking for it. But they probably don’t they probably haven’t read my post first 10 or the other 17 posts. I wish they would read right here right now in this moment because it’s all out there. And so what we have to do as creators is move out of the this is my one and only chance. This is my greatest hits album. This is it that mindset which is a mindset based on scarcity mindset based on promoting the thing a mindset based on.

Effect and instead realize that what we’re doing is blowing on the dandelion and the seeds will go far and wide and we have no idea where they’re going to land and most people aren’t going to read the post they need when they need it, but we have no way to give them the post they need when they need it.

So instead with Reckless generosity and abandon, we put our work out there and we hope that people bump into it and it’s okay if they don’t and it’s okay if they do. Following up on your podcast from last week.

I have a question on you mentioned Netflix and we’re talking through things there. You mentioned a big part about Netflix’s strategy is having their customers push out, you know ideas to their friends and keep the whole network effect going there in one thing. I’ve always said to my friends and I have to thank that Netflix is thought of this and I wonder why they haven’t and I’m guessing you probably know the answer. Why is why doesn’t Netflix apply a Social feature where I’m watching a show I can say at Bob my friend you need to watch this show ASAP a lot like you tag somebody on Instagram.

Why don’t they allow a friend’s feature to have that Network within the Netflix system and that would help spread the ideas and keep people on Netflix longer again. I have to think they thought of this but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks again Seth by thank you for this Nick.

Yes, you’ve highlighted one of two. Items that I can’t figure out about Netflix, so I don’t have an answer but I want to highlight this problem one as you’ve just said is since most people are engaging with Netflix while they have a device in their hands that also can be logged into Netflix. Why doesn’t Netflix have an easy way for us to communicate with other people that in this moment, we are watching something or maybe there’s just a discussion board about this thing. There is a hundred ways that they could inject.

About what’s going on in front of us with people that we care about viewing parties at a distance and on and on and the second one the one I can understand and I asked Mark Randolph co-founder of Netflix about this. He doesn’t know either at the beginning it made a lot of sense for Netflix to offer binge-watching because nobody else had the guts to do that Netflix was able to say hey watch all you want. We got plenty. We’re not going to run out and that was an attraction. Action it got people to sign up for Netflix.

But now that Netflix is seeing slowing growth. They are in a different business. They’ve got to feed the beast and not run out of programming. Also if we are watching a show and we’re ahead of our friends. We can’t talk about it. That’s the opposite of what happened in 1966 when you went to school after an episode of Star Trek you had to talk about it because everyone had seen it the night before in every Revolution.

There’s one man.

The vision now, we don’t know when other people are watching so I can’t figure out why Netflix doesn’t switch back to the system that is must watch TV that everybody is going to watch the first episode of Lupin season 2 on the same day and next week when the second episode goes live.

We’ll all watch it at the same time. I can’t figure out why they’re not doing that. Hey Seth, it’s as it from Cincinnati again. I had a question about to your recent episodes curation and is Seth real the past couple years. I found as a music fan that algorithmic music recommendations have grown pretty stale for me.

But I’ve completely fallen in love with online radio through platforms like NTS and Mixcloud kind of feels like there’s a bottleneck happening with Spotify and other algorithmic playlist, and I’ve come to realize how much of a filtered experience places like Spotify are. So my question for you is what role do you see algorithms and AI playing?

Future of curation and if you want to peel the onion back a little more what role do you see AI play in the future of creative Fields like art and music.

Thanks to this Isaac. We get back to the statement People Like Us. Do things like this curation matters. And in music one of the reasons it matters is we want to listen to what our peers are listening to and so we rely on Wolfman Jack or Dick Clark or a playlist on Spotify to tell us what everybody else is listening to and I’m not sure Wolfman Jack was really the curator.

It could be. He was just taking money from whoever paid him the most was something acceptable, but the fact remains We look to the curator in certain pop culture places simply because we all want to agree on what we’re doing, which means that it’s okay if an AI picks it but there are other areas where we are interested in being more Discerning being more unique being more idiosyncratic and in those areas, I think human beings are going to be in the Forefront for a little while longer because the quirkiness that a human being can bring to certain kinds of selection.

Still outperforms most AI I know that a book recommendation from a friend almost always outperforms one from Amazon. That doesn’t mean a I won’t keep getting better. It will but I just want to reiterate that the core idea of curation and pop culture is that we are all looking to the same curator. Thank you all for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself. As an educational institution or as a success seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all NBA gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good you got access to Two ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -advertising-built-the-world- <==

I forgot to take the Trix Trix are for kids.

Hello, I’d like to ask a few questions about this breakfast cereal. I yeah box of Tricks. That’s right. I’ve been led to understand that Trix are exclusively for children. Is that correct? Well, I mean they say Trix are for kids in the commercials. Huh?

And is that enforced by law not to my knowledge? No, so if I purchase these Trix He’ll be no trouble. No now he should be fine. You do understand that I myself am not a child. I was able to sniff that out. Yeah, okay. I’m going to bring these back to my apartment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so be okay, I won’t be followed.

I know that’s that’s not in our budget here.

And now a word from our how long words our words our sponsors look around you and imagine for a second that we lived in a world in a culture where labels simply said what was inside the container where there was only one approved choice in every category where there were no Billboards. No pop-ups. No pop-unders. No spam no interruptions. No salespeople. No TV ads no magazine ads. No jingle. Snow radio ads and in fact, the only way you ever found out about anything was if you heard about it from someone you knew and trusted.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second ironically enough after this message from our sponsor itself and And this is a podcast. It’s a podcast produced by Alex De Palma. Alex is a bit of a podcast Whisperer. Alex and I are inviting you to join us in the podcasting workshop.

Not to make money because unfortunately you probably won’t but to make a difference to be heard and to find the people who want to hear from you, which is even more important.

I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus.

I got this question the other day about my take on Advertising my question today is about ads and advertising and I know you’ve talked a lot in the past about almost their rudeness of interrupting people while they’re listening to content to deliver them an ad and I can’t help but notice that you have your own ads and have had ads for other people and companies in the past on akimbo and this isn’t something that bothers me.

I’m just curious about how you You think about that when you are inserting ads into your own content? I don’t think that your audience probably Minds as I think most of us are probably highly interested in the akimbo workshops or other companies that you promote but I’m just curious about how you think about that decision to include ads in your content when you’ve had some kind of differing opinions about them elsewhere.

Thanks for everything. You do big fan of your work.

See ya.

I thought it was worth. Turning it into an entire episode because I’m not against advertising advertising. In fact has contributed an enormous amount to my well-being to the culture around us to my Narrative of how I encounter. The world. Advertising is The Unsung contributor to the last hundred and fifty years of the rise of Western culture without advertising our world feels sort of orwellian not orwellian in Sense of the government runs everything but orwellian in the sense that it’s gray and drab and generic in order to understand the impact of advertising and why it has so completely jumped the shark and become a negative Force for many people.

I want to examine four elements of it. But first I want to start with the following for 50 years, maybe more advertising was an incredible bargain. It was dramatically underpriced why Would it be under priced? Well, the reason is that the media companies had sold at were nervous. They were nervous because they had a great deal.

They were getting paid a whole bunch of money to run ads enough that they were making plenty of profit, but they were worried that if they raised their rates too much so that it was fairly priced so that it was appropriate to the value that the people who buying the ads were getting that people would switch to other media sources and the gig would be up and so the logic of the 1940s through the 90s was pretty simple by a mall by all the ads you can tv ads in particular tv ads built giant corporations tv ads changed the culture tv ads got us to stop killing each other because we all lived in a world where we were all watching the same TV ads and along the way of running all those ads to people who ran the ads who were probably very good intuitive storytellers, but weren’t particularly good at analyzing what they were doing came across four rules of thumb these four rules of thumb enter played with one another some were adopted more than others. Here we go.

The first one is that advertising could be more targeted. I don’t think it’s right for kids to grow up thinking these things that just Mom does everything if you wanted to sell Tide laundry detergent the sexes thinking what you should advertise it in the afternoon on soap operas because it’s women who decide which soap to buy and that’s how you reach Housewives a term pretty much invented by people who ran ads number two is measured now for a really long time advertisers pretended to measure their ads, but they didn’t really want to back when I was pioneering email marketing in the 90s we would go on sales calls and the people we were pitching to would say what yeah, but how do you measure that?

And I’d say well how do you measure your TV ads and they would look at me sort of funny because they didn’t want anyone to know that they didn’t really measure their TV ads when I was at Yahoo in 1999. The homepage the center of the internet was sold out. It was sold out for months in advance and if you ran a banner ad on that homepage You are identifiers report of click-through rates and almost everyone who ran that at never opened the report because these were people who were experimenting coming over with TV sighs money to try out this new internet thing and they didn’t want to know whether people clicked or not because if they knew they’d know they weren’t doing that well because there were the numbers and they’d have to tell their boss know it was better to not measure and most of the people who bought tv ads were. Buying tv ads because their boss before them had bought tv ads and you weren’t going to go to your boss and say you were an idiot in the old days for not measuring I’m walking away from tv ads. It was more fun and more lucrative to not measure but measurement people had a hunch that measurement mattered the third thing after targeted and measured was frequent seems to rub a lot of marketers the wrong way that they have to say what they have to say more than once.

They said it isn’t that sufficient, but what we No, is that frequency Works writing the same add more than once pays off its scales and the fourth one was blur now.

It says that I’m supposed to have a trade with soup and bless your sweet handsome man you This is supposed to be a slim graceful Vaz of flowers.

It looks pretty short and fat and dumpy.

But anyhow, you get the idea spraying April in Paris.

May in the Bronx And a bowl of soup and you all the way back to the days of Arthur Godfrey advertisers figured out that the closer they could get to looking like an endorsement the better the ad would work that their goal was not for the ad to be separate from the content. And so the Reese’s Corporation paying a bunch of money to be the candy of choice for et.

The Extra-Terrestrial. I don’t think Stephens Oberg picked Reese’s Pieces because he liked him better than M&Ms. I think he picked him because someone paid him and so in certain forms of media, there was a bright dividing line between what’s an ad and what’s not the people at CBS News were insistent that it didn’t matter who the sponsor was. In fact being a sponsor probably made it more likely they were going to say something nasty about you just to prove that there was no blur.

Okay. So what happened? What happens is Along Comes the internet Net and when the internet shows up, it increases the number of ads each person sees per day by a factor of a hundred that instead of seeing five or six TV commercials in half an hour of TV, you might see five hundred messages if you surfed the web for half an hour, but then Bill gross figured something out and Google ran with it and what it was was an auction that instead of The Upfront. Instead of conservative media companies just selling the ads and saying enough is enough Google figured out how to take it all Take It All by auctioning it off 30 seconds from now, we’re going to show an ad to some people who look for a certain keyword who wants to bid the most.

Can you see how all four of these things come together at once targeted measured frequent and the blur all come together on the internet at once. And the auction the auction solves the problem that media companies had of it’s all too cheap because if you are measuring and you discover that a click to your site is worth a dollar and there are lots of ways to discover that if you use direct marketing math you if you’re a rational actor should be willing to pay 99 Cents for it.

In fact, it’s not completely irrational to pay a dollar. A penny just to keep your competitor from getting that click. Well, if you’re paying Google 99 Cents, that means that they’re the ultimate landlord because of that dollar of profit that dollar profit that shows up because you worked so hard to look so many risks built something of value of that dollar Google gets 99 Cents and you you make a penny repeat that a billion times a day.

Or more and now you understand the engine that propelled Google to become the powerful Monopoly that it is Facebook looked at this and said, wow, we can create a ton of new inventory because instead of organizing the world’s information. We can organize the world’s people. And so there’s all this inventory. Let’s auction it off but in my experience anyway Facebook cheats, their auction is fake you buy a thousand dollars worth of ads. And if they’re working and you go to buy $3,000 more suddenly the price per click goes to the roof because somebody figured out that goosing. The algorithm is as good as having a fair auction, maybe even better continuing on my rant. So now what we see is that you can Target that the internet is micro media its micro media because there is no home page of Yahoo anymore.

It’s micro media because you cannot effectively reach 40 or 80 million people with one add the way you could as a matter, of course just 30 years ago. It’s measured because it’s digital because the reports are there because you can find out to the nanosecond exactly what’s happening. In fact, most of the Privacy violations that are going on are going on because of the insatiable desire that marketers have developed to know the math.

So you my alert listener is probably ahead of me in a few. Is but here we go. First of all, if you’re not Google and you’re not Facebook, but you have a little Media company on the internet, you’re an Instagram influencer. You’re trying to build a following for your blog and run ads on it. You’re even one of those smaller media companies.

You’ve got a big problem. You got a bunch of big problems. The first one is this marketers are racing to the bottom if the auction is going on and it is not controlled by a central Authority. They are algorithm is going to do. Everything it can to pay as little as possible. And if you don’t have an ad for that person who’s visiting your site tomorrow or 2 minutes from now or right this second it goes unsold and so because they have choices there’s an advantage for them and the race to the bottom continues. Well one way around it is to do the blur to sell out and so we have countless pages on Facebook that appear to be by real people but are instead. Nothing, but Schilling for a company or a political actor and we have people who claim to be influencers who are pitching stuff that they’re getting paid to pitch.

The next problem is what happens with podcasts because podcast don’t have a lot of data that for a really long time thanks to RSS. There was a disconnect between the person making the podcast and the audience in the sense that that it wasn’t a direct connection you subscribed in your RSS reader, but that didn’t provide a lot to the podcaster about who you were and what you did and advertisers given the choice wanted to know so when I set out to build the akimbo podcast I was open and excited to have ads a cuz I like ADS-B because I want to be able to compensate the people I’m working with and see because real media products often have real ads.

But I made a whole bunch of rules. Those rules would prevent a race to the bottom. We had really standard pricing. We insisted on frequency showing up again. And again, we didn’t want to share any data about our listeners and most of all I refused to blur I wouldn’t read the ads because it’s not my company. I’m not sure what they make and I didn’t start that company and so season after season as I had control I was Icky about who could sponsor this podcast and who couldn’t and eventually it became clear that advertisers with a choice.

We’re ignoring the fact that context matters. They were ignoring the fact that you my listeners are a very special Bunch listening with a special sort of attention and they were just going for tonnage back to the numbers back for buying it in bulk all the way for the media planner to hit the numbers and so we reached a point where I made it. Vision and the decision was if it’s that good I should advertise on it myself and that is why you will hear ads for the akimbo workshops because who better to talk to these workshops about than the people I made them for and who better to talk about them.

Then me the summary of my argument. Is this advertising for at least 50 years 1942 1990 was a peculiar institution. It had Surplus Surplus. All around there was a limited number of people selling the advertising and there was plenty of money to create magazines and television shows and radio that people were eager to listen to at the same time advertisers weren’t paying as much as they had to so they had enough profit that they could take their time that they could build a brand for the ages that they could try not to cut as many corners and the internet has taken both of those things and turn them upside down.

There’s an infinite number of voices chasing a finite number of advertisers and thanks to the auction system. The amount of money The Advertiser makes from each ad is really small particularly in the long run once an ad starts working people copy it and they copy that product as well. The end result is in some ways a race to the bottom a race for clicks a race for attention arrays for the providers of goods and services to cut Corners to fit. Figure out a way to go a little faster and be a little cheaper so they can keep playing the ad game.

And yes while it has increased dramatically by orders of magnitude the number of voices and the number of choices. There are costs to the end of this era of advertising and too often people who want to make a thing online a show a podcast blog end up being disappointed about the flow of Revenue that they get when they try to sell the Mention of their fans.

So yeah, I’m blurring on purpose because I’m proud of it, but you are right that in the world of the Internet advertising has shifted probably forever. It is now hyper targeted micro-targeted. It is now delivered with obsessive frequency as it chases you around the web and most of all most debilitating to our culture is the blur is here and it’s real.

There was very little blur in the days of network TV more in the days of cable TV, but now you never really know and it’s Fred Wilson says no conflict no interest and there’s something to be said about that, but it only makes sense. If you know what it is. If you know who’s behind it. If you know how they decided to say what they’re saying so long rant rant brought to you by our sponsor.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works if you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo.com go to find out about there. You upcoming workshops and how it all works.

Thanks. It’s Maria.

Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please visit akimbo link. That’s a Ki M Bo link2006.

Click the appropriate buttons to Juicy questions this week.

Here we go.

Hey Seth, Chris from Nashville, Tennessee here.

Love your work.

I really enjoy your interest in placebos.

You’ve done a great job of documenting the upsides of the placebo effect. What do you make of the way that the placebo effect is employed by the cosmetics and wellness Industries to profitably address the very illusory needs that their marketing sometimes is so good at creating and people wear before their marketing. Showed up perhaps there wasn’t a fault need of your work.

Thanks Seth. I need a little bit of a wind up before I answer this. So I’m going to begin with two things. First of all marketing Works marketing has an enormous amount of Leverage and power showing up in a way that takes people’s attention tells them a story that spreads that changes our culture. It works. If it didn’t work those people who are spending their lives and billions of dollars on it are wasting their time but they’re not we know that well marketed things do better then poorly marketed things and the second is my assertion that the job of our culture is not to enable capitalism that capitalism is permitted to enable our culture and so just because you’re making money doing something doesn’t mean you’re doing a good thing and I think a community which is nothing but a bunch of people working together for Community has an obligation To determine what’s good? What’s not and to enable or disable capitalists from playing certain kinds of games?

So with all that said let me divide placebos Pharmaceuticals nutraceuticals supplements into three categories positive benign and malignant. So we’ll start with positive when a marketer shows up and helps people see that a clean water filter is better than drinking. Dirty water which makes your family sick that is positive when a company like Freedom mom shows up and offers goods and advertising that normalizes and encourages women to have honest conversations about living postpartum about taking care of themselves about doing it without shame doing it with Comfort. They are doing something that is positive when we bring soap to the world and encourage people to watch. Their hands were doing something positive. There are lots of things that come from Marketing in this space and for the last hundred and fifty years the world has gotten much much cleaner and safer largely as a result of a cycle of capitalism in which people are making money helping other people live a safer cleaner and healthier life and then there are things that perhaps we could call neutral.

These are bows that are sold to people in the following way a message goes out and add a story that makes you feel a little bit insecure a little bit behind a little bit nervous. Do you have halitosis a made-up word for bad breath. Oh, well this product which isn’t very expensive and has no side effects will make that problem go away and it’s a hobby for a lot of Have lustrous hair to have shiny skin or whatever the opposite of shiny skin is to look good and feel good.

But the definition of look good is coming from the marketers themselves where this ends up being malignant is when shame is added to the equation when there are side effects when the placebos that are being sold are really expensive when they are addictive when they cause side effects. That weren’t promise. Just when all of those things happen, it’s simply a taking.

It’s not a hobby. It’s not a sport. It’s not fun. It is not weaving together Beauty and culture. No, it’s simply a taking it is a taking of trust. It is amplifying shame. It is causing things to spiral in the wrong direction so you can think really hard about what it is. You want to Market and how you want to Market it. I’ve got no problem at all if a company wants To sell a beverage by helping people believe they’ll be more popular or have more fun than if they buy the alternative the competitor. I think that’s fairly benign. We live in a shiny Market Place filled with marketers all of whom are offering us some sort of meaning by spending money and that’s deeply ingrained and it’s not going away anytime soon.

But as Peter Parker’s Uncle might have said with that great.

Power comes great responsibility. Thanks for this one. Hi Seth. This is Wendy from Eureka Springs, Arkansas. And I’m thinking about your last episode on helmets text and seatbelt laws and your observation of the person at the bike shop who spoke first that had the power over if the couple wore the helmet or not yesterday our governor lifted The Mask mandate while the cdc’s still highly recommends wearing masks. Well, I’m not looking to you for your opinion on masks in the vein of people like us do things like this and the person who speaks first has the power.

I’m curious how you would approach business in a service industry caught between those who shun businesses that require mask and those who shun businesses that let patrons to choose to wear a mask. I look forward to your answer. And as always keep making a Ruckus 25 years ago.

There was a school on the route between my home and the train station and one time I was driving to the train station at 7:15 in the morning 45 minutes before school opened driving through the 15 mile an hour school zone at 30 miles an hour and I got a ticket and I went to the judge and I said, I don’t deserve a ticket because school wasn’t open and the judge said the school zones. It’s Evan and I said but I’ve never been in an accident and I’m a safe driver and the judge said we’ve agreed on the law and the school zone speed limit is 15 miles an hour.

And so I paid the ticket and I deserved to get the ticket because as a culture as a community, I think we’ve all done the math and come to the conclusion that slowing down 15 miles an hour for a couple hours a day in exchange for not mowing down kids. Who might be running into the street is a fair trade and the thing about a trade like that is everyone needs to do it. If you’ve got one person who says I can drive any speed I want it’s my right. I’m not hurting anyone but me and I’ve never been in an accident then the whole system goes out the window because then everyone has to fend for themselves.

Now. The thing about political conversations is this The good kind of politics are when people who mean well who want to make things better disagree about the best way to accomplish something and that opens the door for a conversation about the best way to accomplish something but when we weaponize politics when we make it about identity when it’s us against them, we’ve also stated were not allowed to talk about it.

Not even allowed to talk about what we’re talking about because to do so is to come too close to that thing of who are you are you with us or are you against us and often in our culture in which belief and science keep bumping up against each other? We’re not even sure what we’re talking about when we’re talking to each other are there are theories and conjectures in mathematics that are not settled yet. Of course, there are two mathematicians talk to each Each other about them all the time. In fact, that’s all mathematicians do is have constructive conversations about the solutions to problems when Ignacio semmelweis figured out that if doctors wash their hands women Wouldn’t Die in childbirth.

It ended up turning for 20 years into a sort of political third rail conversation. You weren’t allowed to talk about some of Isis data because people were so busy talking. Talking about their identity instead. And so now your question because as a culture we have a challenge there is no debate among epidemiologists that lives are saved when viruses don’t spread that the spread of viruses enables them to get from one person to another and it has killed more than half a million people in my country alone.

That is not up for debate. What is an interesting? Conversation to have is how much are we willing to pay in inconvenience in a lack of freedom in money in a slower economy to keep a virus from spreading to more people that is a useful conversation. There’s a long history of regulations in the United States in which a number around two million dollars is spent to avoid each death. For example Banning a certain chemical. Well, it might The industry a hundred million dollars, but it’s going to save 50 lives.

That’s how the math usually works out around 2 million dollars. Well, if you multiply two million dollars times half a million people. It’s a really big number and now we can have a conversation. We can have a conversation of how inconvenient expensive or debilitating is it for people to wear masks in our community versus how many people are Aren’t going to get sick. How many people aren’t going to face long-term Health consequences. How many people aren’t going to die.

If we all wear a mask that conversation needs to be held just like we had a conversation about speed limits because speed limits accepted by our culture in every country that I’m aware of exist because all of us come out ahead we come out ahead on pollution. We come out ahead on safety. We come out ahead.

an efficiency if we have speed limits, and so now we have to be together enough to have a conversation about whether or not walking into your business or any other business should require somebody to wear a mask and the interesting thing about the mask conversation, which is fundamentally different than the motorcycle helmet conversation is this if you don’t wear a motorcycle helmet the person who’s going to get killed as you you but if you don’t wear a mask the person you’re endangering is someone else and I think like the speed limit in the school zone that changes the bias of the conversation.

It changes the metrics that we need to consider about who’s paying the price and who’s benefiting and so yes, these conversations need to be had and the reason that it’s so problematic besides the enormous division that our country is going through Amplified and If I’d Amplified by the media is that we have to do it all over the place because the virus doesn’t care. If most of the time you’re wearing a mask. It doesn’t say. Oh, well, they really did a good job. I’ll ignore this moment now it’s on duty all the time.

And so yes, I think you understand my answer just like my answer regarding Pharmaceuticals, which is we have an obligation to do something for all of Of us for the culture and if that means that some customers will choose not to buy from you. I think that’s a spot you can proudly stand in that. I’m not going to run any live events for a long time to come because I don’t want to be the person that encouraged a lot of people to get together in a room.

And yes running a business feeding your family. That’s your job. But at the same time we live in community and I think we all have to decide what are the rules. For living in community because you don’t have to live in community. You can go move to the woods of Wyoming. But for the rest of us, there is a price and a benefit from being together in community and its purpose is not to enable the most people to make the most money its purpose is to create a culture where opportunity and possibility lead to a better tomorrow.

That was a rant.

Thanks for your question. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why We don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -turning-the-ratchet- <==

In 1923 the Snap-on Corporation got a patent patent number 144 an early pioneering ratchet wrench. What’s a ratchet wrench? It’s something that when you turn it One Direction, you can apply force and make something go forward and it can’t go backwards. And so the ratchet only turns in One Direction and as metaphors go a patent in 1923 for an industrial ratchet is a really good one.

Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about the measures of capitalism. But first ironically enough, here’s a message from our sponsor get better clients there in three words is the strategy of any freelancer who wants to do better work get better clients. You can’t work more hours, but you can work for people who appreciate the work you want to do.

They will push you harder. You will do better work. They will talk about you. You will get paid more. You will be more proud of what you produce how to get better clients. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and we have built a workshop just for you if you work for yourself, I really think you need to check it out. It’s not a bunch of videos It’s a workshop you will work with. Other Freelancers working your way forward to figure out how to do this work that matters.

I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a Ruckus throughout the eighteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds. And even today capitalism has been the force that changed the world capitalism a very simple idea of Finding a market finding a need selling something for less than it’s worth to the person who’s buying it repeating the process over and over again is in many ways our ratchet. It’s a ratchet because if there are three products and someone wants to grow market share someone wants to build something they have to make something that’s better than the existing options better in some way then the existing options because if they don’t no one will buy it and so the argument for unbridled capitalism is very straightforward. It seeks to solve problems you get rewarded when it solves problems and if it’s not solving your problem, then you can move on and capitalists need to keep score and this is where the ratchet comes in because once you start building a business, if you are measuring return return on investment return on sales, you will try to make that number go up if you need to issue stock raise money from a bank.

Find an investor the investor will choose to invest in the best possible investment. And so if the standard of a return on investment is 6% and another company figures out how to get 8% the ratchet turns because the people who are getting six percent aren’t going to get any more investment because the Investments going to go to the 8% person and so the ratchet turns and during the eighteen hundreds. It was a free-for-all.

We still remember names like a stir. A and Carnegie and melon and JP Morgan and John D Rockefeller and Leland Stanford. These folks were robber barons like so many juicy terms. It comes from a German phrase robber barons in Germany would capture a piece of land and then charge Travelers atoll in the illegal toll to go through the place that they were patrolling and the pejorative Robber Baron described monopolists who were racking up things in railroads or Finance or Even in the case of John Warren gates in barbed wire and figured out ways to charge a premium to figure out how to manipulate the market to figure out how not to be capitalists at all.

But simply to turn the ratchet one more time here is the thing. It’s easy to be lazy when you think about winning at capitalism lazy because there’s only one number to measure what’s the return If I put money into this, how much do I get back? If I build this business? How much do I make one number anything? We do as humans where there’s just one number people will come up with ways to make that number go up.

And so that idea has spread and been built deep into the bones of capitalism. You want to make a social networking app. How many signups did you get? You want to launch a new kind of pesticide? What is the yield per acre one number? And you’ve probably guessed one number gets us into lots of trouble. It gets us into lots of trouble because people like Mark Hopkins who were running railroads or William Randolph Hearst who is running the media said quite proudly. I am making my number go up.

What’s the problem? Well in one respect the problem is that one number forgets the factor of time. Are you making more money today or are you making more money in the The long run and so apologists for Milton Friedman’s Maxim that the only job of a corporation is to enrich its shareholders is to say well what they mean is in the long run and so you can’t enrich your shareholders by doing nothing but a short-term hustle because in the long run you’ll lose.

I don’t think that goes nearly far enough because what that number leaves out is so many things what about externalities, what about the scraps that we dumped into the river? What about the toll on? People who work in the organization. What about the way culture can be manipulated to change how people engage with one another simply because you’re trying to make your number go up.

What about the injustices created or perpetrated in the name of making a number go up Suddenly It’s complicated. It’s complicated because with more than one number with nine numbers or 18 numbers when we are measuring the well-being not not just of customers but of bystanders when we are measuring not just how did your product make things better? But what happened to it when it went into the refuse stream when we are talking about things like how much carbon did it take to make and how much does it take to use when we talk about who was left out what divisions were created by what you did suddenly it’s really complicated and at the same time there’s still a ratchet.

There’s still a ratchet on Wall Street. There’s still a ratchet of You have to justify the fact that you were looking at dozens of factors. When you are talking to the business, press and your investors and your board because they would prefer to do the easy thing. The thing that makes it easy to feel like a hero easy to feel successful. I made that number go up if that number how much did you make as a return on investment is the only symptom of whether you are being useful. To society.

It’s way easier to go to work with your head held high the alternative is to realize that there is no singular hero that there is no perfect model that there is a messy series of choices. We have to make if we are going to be in the business of changing the culture of changing the market of changing people’s lives.

And so the easy thing to do is stay home and do nothing the easy thing to do is abdicate to let other People do something and then blame them when it doesn’t match your agenda. The alternative is to figure out for the smallest viable audience for a group of people for an institution that you can influence or create.

What are my metrics and how am I going to scale that to make the change? I want to make in a way that I am proud of and it’s messy and it’s complicated and no one knows the right answer. Is it okay? To come up with crop rotation because crop rotation leads to more yield in your farm. If you get more yield in your farm more people will eat but there are trade-offs because it starts down the path of industrializing Agriculture.

Is it okay to use bees to pollinate your avocado trees while on one hand that creates a use for B’s which makes it more likely because humans care about what they can use that to We will care about them and the other hand it can endanger all the bee populations and if we do that that’s not fair to them or to us.

When we think about how we are going to be in the world. There are so many choices to be made if we are serving one group. Are we making another group field deliberately left out. If we are selling status does that status? We sell come at the expense of making other people feel excluded what happens if we To build an institution that confers something scarce on people.

Does that scarcity create value? Does it create it for everyone or just some people is it? Okay that only some people can write prescriptions or should everyone be able to write a prescription? How do we manage that scarcity as well? So as you’ve probably guessed there are way more questions here than answers but what’s important is to see that just because there’s a ratchet and just because it’s easy to measure.

Doesn’t mean that’s your job that Capital seeking higher returns is what capital does but that doesn’t mean it’s our job to play that single metric game what we have instead is a chance to decide. What would make us proud. What change do we actually seek to make in the world? And how can we do it in a way that makes a difference everything has side effects. We call them side effects because we believe that there’s Only one number that matters the ratchet but they’re not side effects. They’re simply affects everything has effects if we come up with a really delicious soft drink and a great ad campaign to go with it will sell more bottles of it. If we sell more bottles of it more people will get diabetes. We saw more bottles of it more bottles will be in the environment.

If we don’t come up with something that people want will someone else will the people who work with us who depend on us? Be out of a job. And then what will they eat or consider something else? Something less obvious? What about inventing the light bulb while inventing the light bulb has effects. It has a fax because you can build entire Industries around the idea that we can get way more done and increase our comfort and satisfaction of Life by not being in the dark all night, but it has effects like we have to build dams. We have to have Coal Fired power plants we didn’t have Hundred forty years ago and easy efficient cost free way to make Power.

Well, what about LED lights LED lights are way better than incandescent bulbs better light more efficient. They last longer they use far less electricity, but they have effects who created them. How were they created? What are the human costs and environmental costs of making them? So let’s goes on and on there are effects everything. We do everything we don’t do.

As an effect. It was so much easier to be a lazy capitalist and say I got only one number please measure me on that one number. I don’t have to worry about anything else, but we’re not lazy capitalist where humans and what that means is we need to measure a complicated set of trade-offs only one of which is easy to measure the rest involve time and you Manatee and culture and the people around us.

So I wish I had a map for you. I don’t I’m not even sure I can share a compass but I do know we’re not asking the question often enough that we shouldn’t be justifying whatever we’re doing based on one number. We should figure out what competes with what and what hard decisions were going to make about this instead of that because we live in a world of opportunity and opportunity means opportunity cost because every time we do something we’re not doing something else and so In these times this upheaval. This upside down world we live in one thing we can do is think really hard about how we can become agents of Change by building something and pointing to what we built and figure out how to make something better.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a question from a previous episode. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works if you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit akimbo.com go to find out about their new. Upcoming workshops and how it all works.

Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth. My name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump.

This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex Hey, sir. Hi, this is Russell is from Chris. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question. As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode or just about anything else that’s relevant to listeners. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link-16. Click the appropriate button a good one from Gwen this week with many layers to it. Here we go.

Hi Seth, this is Gwen and I am a food photographer working in Los Angeles. I have been wanting to connect. Community around food photography and after hearing your Zoom Revolution episode, I finally decided to gather the others and build it the response was humbling and I now have a committed group who get together monthly to discuss our industry share best practices and encourage each other.

It’s been transformative and was probably the best thing I’ve done for my own sanity, but also allowed me to build something really special and find my others at a time when we all needed it my questions about what to do next the group and the conversations have been incredibly helpful. But I find myself wanting to build something bigger or better.

I want the group to have a bigger impact in the field of food photography both for the participants in the group and for the clients that we serve. I find myself forced to limit the number of attendees because I don’t have time to run my own business and administer the group which I put a lot of time and effort into to ensure the attendees are prepared and feel seen and heard.

I know this is selfish, but my time is limited and this doesn’t pay the bills. I’m also committed to not making money off the people that are in the group. Because I feel that the people who are in the early stages of their careers are easy targets for online Educators and coaches which they’re becoming more and more of but paid coaching and online education is not how I want to contribute to the world of food photography.

I know that the people in the group already feel like they’re getting a benefit but I can’t help but feel like there must be a way to leverage this kind of special focused Community to build something bigger. I’d like all my effort to have a bigger impact in people’s lives whether those people are the participants.

Serpents in the group or the clients that we serve any ideas or Frameworks to think about this problem would be much appreciated. Thanks so much.

Thank you Gwen this ties in to a lot of the things. I’ve been thinking about and writing about lately. You are a community organizer. You’re in impresario. You’re a freelancer and you’re a bootstrapper all-in-one. Let’s take these one by one and figure out how it helps you and others go forward. And yes, thank you. Thank you for leading and connecting and helping people in your community of choice. Choice get to where they’re going.

So I’ll start with this community organizer. It’s a more important job than ever before because people feel dislocated because people want to be with people like them on a similar Journey enrolled in where they are going and it used to be a community organizer was Geographic in their focus, but now it can be as in your case professional.

So you discovered that there is a community just Waiting to be organized that doesn’t mean you have to do it for a living but it does mean you probably could and you are right that there are people who will take advantage of just about anyone if they can but that doesn’t mean that you can’t show up for a community and charge them fairly for their ability to belong for the value that they will create. That doesn’t mean you need to do it want to do it, but you could I don’t think it’s immoral. What to say to this group of people for a hundred dollars a month. This is what you’re going to get and they can choose to get it or not.

But you’re also a bootstrapper in that you are starting to build a business not by going to the bank or a venture capitalist, but by finding a way to get your client your partner’s your community to pay for what you’re creating before you have to incur the expense of creating it. This is a marvelous opportunity to build something bigger than yourself.

And yes, you’re a freelancer and the Freelancers Workshop is rolling up. Just this week a freelancer is somebody who gets paid when they work. I’m a freelancer most days if you hear my voice, it’s because I’m talking if you read my words, it’s because I wrote them. I have no team no staff. It’s just me.

So how does a freelancer move forward? Well, you can’t work more hours. And so the way to move forward is to get better clients yet. Better clients people who challenge you who talked about your work people who demand better people who eagerly pay more for what you do? You don’t want the people who are on five or looking for a cheap photographer.

You want the people who were looking for Gwen people who are looking for the work you want to do and becoming better at being a freelancer is the work if you choose to be a freelancer and that leads to the final part of what I wanted. Talk about which is the idea that there is a hard part.

What is the hard part about being a food photographer?

Well learning how to use glycerin or LED lights or a flash or other ways of prepping the food. Those are things that people can learn they can learn them by watching some videos reading a book or hanging out with people like you that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is finding clients.

The hard part is moving up to find better. Better clients. The hard part is finding the reserves the community reserves the intestinal fortitude to stick it out when you don’t have any clients that that is in fact what this community desperately needs to get better clients. And so as you navigate your way through this now that you know what the hard part is you can decide does being in a community help you does leading a community help you if you are known.

As the person who runs the most important community on food styling and photography. It seems to me you might get better clients. If you are able to organize and align other food photographers so that you share leads with each other so that you establish standards for the industry so that you showcase each other’s work that only leads to a forward ratchet. We see this in just about every Any industry that has Freelancers in it doing creative work Dane Sanders wrote The Definitive book on how wedding photographers can level up he gave away every secret he knew by doing that. He got better gigs as a wedding photographer not fewer gigs because what is scarce is trust and what is scarce is awareness that the more you can be trusted the more you can tell your story. Bigger stage the more likely it is that the clients you seek will come to you for what they need. So I didn’t answer your question specifically because there are so many layers to it and I’m not sure that there is just one answer but there are choices and the choices in front of you are to be part of a community or to run one or two leave it all together.

The choices are to live with the clients you’ve got or to figure out what the hard work would be like to to get better clients as we choose to fill our days Freelancers make a choice every day that choice is to spend the only asset we’ve got our time to help us make the change we seek to make in the community we serve and you’re looking right at the fork in the road you have choices to make about your time you have choices to make about the community and when you make those choices in a coherent way you’re going to get to You see to go.

Thanks for leading and thanks for this question. I’ll see y’all next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -a-complex-of-complexes- <==

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and Military Machinery of Defense with our peaceful methods and goals.

So less security and Liberty May Prosper together in 1961 as he was walking out the door after his service to the country President Dwight D.

Eisenhower did something incredibly Brave As a Statesman he stood up and he decried the military-industrial complex, but complexes are all around us. Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about binary systems and how they keep going. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

Akimbo is back running it again to find out more visit akimbo.com go for all the details the people Meet will change your life.

It’s been 60 years since Eisenhower described to the public a two-part system, which some people say has three or four parts and we talked about complexes all the time. It’s fun to talk about the blank industrial complex, but I’m not sure we’re really seeing what’s going on. So I want to take a few minutes to outline what Eisenhower meant and how its showing up in so many other parts of our world what he was talking about. Sometimes called the military industrial. A complex sometimes called the war industrial complex or perhaps the military-industrial Congressional complex.

But what it all adds up to is this if capitalists can make money doing something and they have levers to use to be able to do it more they are incented to do so that seems pretty obvious. Think about the fact that for a million years groups of people have used weapons to To either assault each other or protect themselves from each other hence military, but when you add to it the fact that shareholders are going to make money. If a company they are part of makes more guns makes more bullets makes more bombs than they want to do that more.

Sometimes we call that marketing. It’s one of the many ways to use or misuse that term how to get your customers to buy more stuff because bye. More stuff is how you grow and in a second, we’ll talk about why you need to grow but in the meantime, let’s understand. We have companies that make a profit selling things to a customer and the thing they are selling our weapons who’s the customer while in most places. The customer is the government and the United States where I live is a country where you can use money to influence the government capitalists are good at using money to get what they want.

And so there’s a system in place in the system is companies make weapons those weapons make them money. They use some of that money to get Congress to buy more weapons and around and around it goes that’s why it’s called a complex. It’s a system where one thing feeds the other which feeds the other and around it goes and in the case of the military-industrial complex, we needed to add Congress scientists and the rest of it because that keeps the engine going.

Faster, but it’s not just the military industrial complex. We are now living with the pain caused by the prison industrial complex because like the military prison used to be something that cultures had to do because there were outline behaviors that they wanted to try to remove from society. But once you turn prison into a profit-making venture, then the person who owns part of the Even wants there to be more prisoners and the way you can get more prisoners is by paying the government to criminalize more behaviors by influencing government action. So those behaviors lead to more prison time and around and around it goes. So when we’re talking about a complex what we’re talking about is a system that has ended up being taken over by the need for a profit-making venture to grow.

Why does a profit-making venture need to grow isn’t enough enough and this leads to the other half of understanding what’s going on here which is the idea of Leverage that if a company is competing against other companies, it probably needs resources lobbyists better tools technology Innovations. Whatever it is to beat its competitor how to get those resources you get those Resources by Borrowing money, maybe you get it from an investor.

Maybe you get it from a bank and what we know about money. The essence of Economics is there’s something called opportunity cost opportunity cost means that if I loan person a the money, I can’t also loan it to person B opportunity cost means if I invest in stock see I can’t also invest in stock D choices are made and so organizations essentially bid against each other.

For who’s going to pay off the best? Well, once you’ve done that and you’ve raised the money now, the investors are holding you to it and so lines you might not have crossed before you now feel like you have to cross because of the cost of money and as you succeed there’s pressure to borrow more money pressure to get more investors because if you don’t someone else might and so the ratchet turns and this cycle led to the extraordinary efficiency.

Of the Industrial Age that it is so much cheaper and more efficient to build a car that it used to be. That’s because the leverage that’s because of the race to win at opportunity costs. So what we end up with is this industrial complex that begins to spread because even if a Founder means well, once the company starts to move forward and there are competitors, which is another piece of the capitalist open market system.

Then competitors start to change the rules and you have a choice of apparently either losing or going closer to a line. You said you are never going to go near years ago. I wrote about the TV industrial complex. I don’t know if I was the first person but once you hear it, you can’t unhear it the TV industrial complex is a system that says wow, we have this technology that lets us beam messages In Living Color into people’s homes.

How are we going to create that system? Well, we could build the public broadcasting system and figure out how to make the channels in the shows that people will benefit from watching or we can leave it to the market because if we leave it to the market the market is a need sensing device the market understands that time also comes with an opportunity cost the market will rush to serve people short-term needs and so people put on shows not because they think the world needs to see them.

Because they know the world will watch them and why do they want the world to watch them? Because they pay for the shows by running ads and the people who are buying the ads are encouraging the people who make the shows to reach as many people as possible because that’s how they pay for the ads the people who make the shows if they sell more ads get more resources. They can borrow more money and get more resources. So instead of making a 1 million dollar TV show they can make a six million dollar. Dollar TV show and they can win an Emmy Award.

And so the cycle continues the TV industrial complex began by solving our problem of what do we put on TV? But now it is solving the problem of how do the advertisers get a bigger return on the money. They are spending and what about the education industrial complex? Well, you’re already seeing the theme Here, how did colleges end up the way colleges ended up they were Like this 60 years ago 60 years ago. They were much much less expensive.

The college’s don’t make a profit in the sense of a for-profit organization, but the people who run colleges and universities definitely get benefits. Some of those benefits can be measured in dollars many of them can be measured in Prestige and power. So what does it mean when you build a gym? What does it mean when you build something that looks more like a country club? Bob than a university, well, it attracts a certain kind of parent that parent might have a certain kid with a certain attitude that parents certainly has a different way of spending money and brings Prestige to the system because of are hard-wired for hundred and fifty year old tradition of privilege and class and race and what’s it like around here?

And so the cycle continues Malcolm Gladwell did a great podcast years ago. About Vassar versus Boden Boden has a better cafeteria. Bowden has a more beautiful campus Vassar offers more grants to people who don’t have the money to come and pay full Freight. What’s the point while the college industrial complex cycled in cycled based on The Leverage of how do you please alumni?

What does growth even mean? Where are we headed and back to the industrial model Factory? He’s have long needed a surplus of compliant workers because if there are enough compliant workers available the factory can move the ratchet forward make good stuff cheaper. How do you get compliant Factory workers? Well it helps if you start when the kids are five years old and train them to sit still to follow instructions to do their homework to do what they are told to graduate year after year and if they’re defective hold them back and process them again.

Go through the system not because we’re encouraging creativity and insight and connection. But because we are encouraging you to be part of an industrial complex going forward and then there’s the wedding industrial complex, which I’ve talked about before so we took a very simple ancient idea that some people want to get married to other people forever and then a queen comes along and she wears a white dress and then debeers comes along and they mark it.

The diamond ring every truffle man has talked about this beautifully on her podcast and we end up with another complex the wedding industrial complex, which when it’s working properly creates a special day at a fair price that people remember forever but is also optimized to keep feeding the culture in a loop around and around and around there’s an old joke that there are no towns with only one lawyer once there’s one lawyer. There’s going to be two lawyers.

And so yes, the legal industrial complex because we do need agreements. But we also know that if a lawyer sends you an agreement you need a lawyer to and so the lawyer’s lawyer each other and the same things true for trademark and for copyright and for takedown notices and everything else that what ends up happening when a binary complex gets out of whack is the first word is forgotten and Industrial complexes. What is remembered?

Because we are ratcheted only in One Direction by leverage by debt by people waiting for their return. Is there a way forward is there a way out? Well, it’s fascinating to look at something like Wikipedia which in pop culture terms has definitely stalled in the last few years stalled because the shiny dark patterns of social media have taken a lot of the buzz away from what used to be one of the three or four Biggest websites on the entire internet Wikipedia has no industrial complex associated with it.

They could pay all of their bills in four days. If they just turned on Google ads and then turn them off again. But Jimmy and the rest of the people at Wikipedia don’t do that. They don’t do that because they know that once they did it for four days. They do it for eight days because there’s another feature they could add they could start hosting videos. I could start doing this and they can start doing that and then they’d be running the ads all the time and You’re running the ads all the time.

You know who you’re working for you’re working to make that number go up. And so when we look at the horrible behavior of Facebook and Twitter and the rest it’s because they are industrial complexes who have been wrestling with opportunity cost when Twitter was young and thinking about going public I controversially said the big mistake they could make would be to run ads and to promised their investors. And that they would grow and grow and grow the alternative would have been to charge people who wanted a premium membership 50 bucks or a hundred bucks offer them data offer them that blue badge that some people want offer them all the things that a professional would want on Twitter and if a million people pay you a hundred dollars a year, it’s enough. You don’t have to go public.

You only have a hundred employees. It’s enough. We have a chance to contribute if we want to You without being part of a complex and software is one fascinating way that we can double-cross the system of the industrialist because the industrialist is all about marginal cost raw materials. Supply chains software can change a bunch of those rules because software can be free and once we start interacting with people in that way not to harvest their attention and turn it into money, but simply to produce something without a complex.

Well go ask someone who’s part of the Poetry industrial complex. Oh wait, there isn’t one. And as a result, there’s a lot less poetry in the world than there used to be poets ended up becoming people like Bob Dylan instead because there is a music industrial complex. The music industrial complex has put music into every corner of our life.

And for me, I think it’s a pretty good deal. I think the negative side effects of the music industrial complex are tiny compared to what Dwight D Eisenhower warned. It’s about 60 years ago, but we need to keep our eyes open and we need to make real thoughtful decisions about what complex are we building next years ago shortly before he passed away.

I was visiting my dad in Buffalo New York. My dad like me loved placebos and he’d been going to the health food store on a regular basis and what I found in his medicine cabinet were a hundred and Thirty-One pills. He was taking every single day. Because the placebo industrial complex had gotten out of hand because the story that he was buying wasn’t helping him anymore.

It was helping an industry that wasn’t in it to help him. It was part of a complex a binary complex that had lost its way and so all around us. We have the chance to put up boundaries for people who are begging us for boundaries because boundaries actually help complexes because capitalist can’t help themselves with there are no Andres but if there are boundaries and people know what Edge to go to then they’ll go to the edge and stop and so back in the days of network TV, which had lots of problems.

One of the problems wasn’t irresponsible advertising. It didn’t get out of hand. There was someone who is looking at the taste of the ads there was someone looking at what the ads were promoting and the advertisers were okay with that because they needed boundaries. So what we have a chance to do is to look at Capitalists in the eye and say you know what more leverage might not be the answer what we have the chance to do is to realize the culture is our culture doesn’t belong to the industrial complex. There’s always a word that comes before industrial complex and that other half whether you’re a student or a bride or somebody who’s worried about the environment or somebody who’s worried about violence or safety.

We all have a chance to speak up and say yeah this industrial complex got us here, but it’s going to need some boundaries because its purpose. His not to reward the shareholders who got in early its purpose is to build the culture culture doesn’t exist to make capitalist. Happy capitalism exists to make culture work.

Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a question from a previous episode. But first here is a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up what? The time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around learning not education not certificates not grades but learning together it works if you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit akimbo.com go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and exclusive. How it all works.

Thanks Seth.

It’s Maria.

Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex.

Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece.

Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this any previous episode or whatever is on your mind. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button. This one’s got a lot of layers to it. Here we go.

Hey Seth Zach Garcia from Hiram, Utah, Utah the best kept secret. By the way. My question is about your episode on how advertising built the world. I’m Marketer I run marketing for a company that coaches Heating and Cooling and plumbing businesses to wow their customers.

And we prior to covid-19 gained the majority of our customers by going to trade shows and events. We’d set up a booth we speak in a breakout session or keynote would mingle with business owners, and that’s how we grew our business in the last year. We haven’t done that instead. We’ve relied primarily on email and good old-fashioned phone calling to build our business.

However, we’re looking for ways to grow we’re looking for is to find more of the people who need our help and everybody points me to things like Facebook and Google Now, I personally don’t find joy in spending time figuring out the Facebook algorithm or how to optimize for the Google auction. I don’t like feeling like I’m working for Facebook or Google if that makes sense.

So my question for you is what’s the best way for any marketer who doesn’t feel good about contributing to the Google Monopoly or sucking people’s time and attention and contributing to the dopamine drip a Facebook or as you describe it in. This is marketing the social media Merry-Go-Round keep spinning faster and faster than never goes anywhere. I don’t feel good about contributing to those things.

I’m wondering how I should be thinking about this how I should approach this. As we try to grow our business.

Thanks.

Thanks for this there are two things that are going on here and I want to talk about them separately. The first one is that you are selling a service that most people in your industry don’t believe they need or want either because they’re busy installing heating and air conditioning equipment or their business is just right for them.

So the thing that goes on at the conferences where you’ve had so much success. Is this the right people Are coming they are enrolled in the journey you want to go on what kind of person takes off time from work travels across the country to go to a conference for people who own heating or AC businesses? Well, the answer is someone who wants more someone who’s leaning into it someone who is thirsty for Progress because they’re all in the right place and you are there you get the benefit of the doubt you have a chance to earn their attention and maybe turn that Tension into trust and now that we don’t have those things in our lives.

We wonder if we wasted them in the past knowing how precious they were. Just how much care could we bring to them? How much more could we invest in time or effort to help the people who are already demonstrating through their actions that they want what you have to help them find the confidence find the insight to go forward with you, but that is water under the bridge or Freon out of the pipe whatever cliche we’re looking for.

And so now the question is how to replace it. Well, there are people who will tell you that you should buy that attention from Facebook or Google and there are two giant problems here. The first problem is this if you enter an auction for that attention you and your competitors will be competing against each other for that attention and all of the money will go to Facebook and Google It is stacked against you. It is very difficult to find your Niche when you’re in an open auction in an efficient market place for attention and the second problem is the kind of person you seek.

I’m going to assert here generalizing stereotyping a 55-year Old owner of one of these businesses who’s been doing it with their family for 20 or 30 or 40 years probably isn’t typing the magic words. You need to have them type. In to Facebook or Google hoping that they will find you. It is much more straightforward for them to listen to their peers and go to a conference than it is for them to start Googling something and then possibly clicking on an ad which they are disinclined to trust and then possibly reading about what you do and on and on so you can see the problem here. The problem is the conference organizer in your old model did the hard work of putting that fish in that Barrel.

And that job which you now think of as your job is a whole different industry a whole different way of doing business. So if I were in your shoes, I would think about a longer-term Drip by drip. Oh, forgive me for the water reference again Drip by drip approach that might lead to long-term benefits. It might have a couple elements to it.

The first one is this who is writing the most important diary. In newsletter journal for the people you seek to serve because the cost of you writing it and distributing it for free digitally to a hundred or five hundred or thousand or five thousand of these contractors is vanishingly low. If you can generously show up with news with Insight with editorials with things that turn on lights for people in this industry. So generously that they share it with their Piers you can build an asset and that asset is permission the privilege of delivering it dissipated personal and relevant messages to the people who want to get them when I started my blog. I only had a hundred readers a hundred meters became a hundred and fifty and then 200 and then it grew and sure 8,000 blog posts later. It’s a really big number but you won’t need 8,000 blog posts. If you can find your smallest viable audience if you can nurture them. You can lead them.

And then the second half is who is connecting these people who is hosting the private Facebook group or discourse board or Discord discussion for this group who is organizing the regular online conferences and podcasts and conversations that are must listen to for the kind of person who used to go to these conferences because it’s easy to defend are sunk costs. It’s our previous commitments the way we used to do things but like all revolutions. It destroys the perfect and then it enables the impossible. It is impossible to imagine that you might have the ability to talk to 3,000 HVAC contractors for free every week.

But of course you can if they want to listen, so the Urgent races to cut out Facebook and cut out Google and not get dependent on flyby attention. Feeling and instead to nurture it to grow it bit by bit until you are the center of a community and I think you might discover over time that being the center of the community might be even more valuable than the thing you sell because human beings like being in community with people like us doing things like this and we need someone to be in the center someone to put on the show someone to say. Hey kids over here.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for leading will see you next week.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question.

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==> -your-mileage-may-vary- <==

Carrie alaka might sound, like the name of a talk show host, but that’s not it carry a locker. Is a bug, a member of the Lac family. It’s the only bug that gives its life to create something that almost all of us eat on a regular basis. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

Be back in a second to talk about the mileage on your Prius, and the bugs you’re eating. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Find out more at akimbo.com / go hope to see you there.

So if you’ve ever swallowed a shiny pill, if you’ve ever had a milk dud, or maybe even a junior mint, what are you eating?

You’ve been eating a Lac bug specifically. You’ve been eating the feces of a Lac bug because what the Lac bug does is it lives on the branches of trees, often in Thailand, and eat its sap. And then leaves behind In something, all over the branches, as it turns into a cocoon insect, we then take those branches. Scrape off the gunk.

Denature, some alcohol, mix it together and we end up with pharmaceutical grade glaze, that glaze ends up getting put on lots of things that we eat. And most of us would rather not know about it, and now that you do know about it, it’s entirely likely that. The next time you have a headache, you will still take A shiny pill.

Because if you think about it, we eat bugs and things related to bugs all the time. The question is, why isn’t that written in big letters on the side of the box of Milk Duds? Then consider the problem that they had when they launched the Prius? A whole bunch of years ago when the Prius came out was the first modern hybrid car has a battery. It also has gas tank and it is capable of getting far more mileage than any other car. It’s size how to figure out its mileage. Well, there’s a lot of rules in the United States about how to figure out the mileage of a car.

Because if you think about it, the mileage of a car that’s going a hundred miles an hour is different, then the mileage of a car that’s going downhill at 30 but we came up with a bunch of rules and the car companies are supposed to follow them, but the rules didn’t apply to the Prius. The other thing about the Prius is right there on the dash board with a digital readout. Is your Aunt mileage, which means when you’re going downhill, it had a round off because your current mileage dividing by zero was Infinity.

Regardless, you could see the mileage, go up and go down. And so, in the Prius first came out, they told people to mileage was, I think something like 48 miles per gallon, but if you drove the car, like the hot rodder that you and I might want to be, you weren’t seeing anything close to that 30 or 40 miles per gallon on the other hand, if you decided to become a Meyler.

If you waited till conditions were good, put extra air in the tires. You go on a round-trip and average 80 or more miles per gallon. There was no correct answer. There was simply a method and the marketers it Prius. How to make a choice, the choice is, should they say up to 80 miles per gallon? Should they give you a number that makes you feel like you’re within Striking? Distance is their goal to tell the complete and total truth? Of what your mileage will be. When that is an unknown or is it to create something that gives you peace of mind and let you go forward. Happy that you bought this item, compare this to the emissions Scandal that Volkswagen put itself. In discovered in 2015 in the US by the EPA it was shown that 11 million cars. Were deliberately programmed by Volkswagen so that when they were going through emissions testing, Look like they were behaving well, but once the car realized it was no longer in a testing mode, it would do as badly as 40 times, the accepted level of pollution. When people heard about this, they were stunned annoyed and shocked because Volkswagen was deliberately hiding lying, and subverting rules that clearly applied to them. Marketers, have to make choices all the time and Commercial speech is not. Not the same as free speech.

If we think about who’s in the movies, well, there are makeup artists. What exactly do makeup artists do is it lying for a movie to use, a stunt double, when it’s not really the star putting themselves on the line, is it better when Tom Cruise does his own stunts, breaking his leg while trying to make a movie?

Or is it lying when they make Tom Cruise look taller than he actually is in a movie? When you see A celebrity before they’ve been photo shopped for the cover of a magazine. Is it disappointing to you that the cover doesn’t match? Because after all there are lying they know what the celebrity looks like. And the person who’s on the cover or the person who’s in the movie doesn’t look like the person you’re going to see if you go out for breakfast and bump into them at the diner.

So what does it mean for a marketer to show up and tell us what we need to hear? Exactly a hundred years ago uh Armstrong Roberts invented, the stock photo before that if a marketer or a news organization wanted to use a photograph that had a hire a photographer and a great expense, get the photograph but what Roberts figured out is that if he could just assemble a bunch of people in front of a plane that was about to make history and take a picture, he could license that picture over and over again and so stock photography was born stock photography.

If he began as a way for news organizations, to pool resources, and use the same picture over and over again. But it was quickly, discovered that it was a lot of money to be made licensing photos to marketers who wanted to use a picture that they didn’t have to organize themselves. And today we know a stock photo when we see it, we know that those five people standing around in front of a computer all perfectly representing the culture. We would like to be part, I love shiny and bright pointing at something.

Well, those aren’t real customers of the company and that’s not really their computer. And those people probably aren’t friends, and yet just like makeup in the movies or someone else doing the stunts, we accept this that stock photography has become part of our vocabulary. And the question is, when does it cross the line and stop being? Oh, yeah. That’s a stock photo. Oh yeah. They’re putting makeup on that actor and instead becomes something like the VW. Emissions Scandal, is there a line? Where do we draw the line?

Commercial speech is not the same as free speech. One of the reasons is, the commercial speech can be Amplified by money again. And again, in ways, we don’t expect. So let me tell you about my first day of work back in 1983 as a summer. Intern, the morning was a little rough, they weren’t expecting me. They’d forgotten to tell the others. Is that I was coming and in the afternoon, they say, come on, Seth, we’re going to Cabot advertising. We’re going to be reviewing the ads, they’ve put together for our first Nationwide. Ad campaign, Spinnaker was a tiny company, only 30 people were there at that time, but they had raised millions of dollars and they were prepared to spend it.

People magazine, National ads, the whole thing, we were the pioneers of well-produced, well, packaged computer games for kids educational games, things like fraction fever, or Kids on Kies software, you could happily let a seven-year-old use on a Commodore 64 and the plan was Kmart Target. Lechmere, giant big box stores selling our stuff in quantity and so the first dad, so I get there and here’s the debate. The debate is, should the ad show to parents and their daughter or two parents and their son?

And everyone looked to me because I was the youngest in the one that was the easiest to get to talk first. Which one do you like better? And before I gave my answer, I didn’t really think deeply about the fact that if you’re pioneering advertising and a market, well if you start modeling that, this is something for young boys, then you’re going to change the culture because young girls are less likely to use it.

Not to mention the whole idea of gender fluidity which in 1983 was hardly ever Spoken of. But here we were making this commercial speech decision, that was going to change the culture and organizations have been doing it since long before 1983 and continue to do it to this day. What do we model? What story do we tell?

What ingredients do we talked about and which ones? Don’t we talk about? What does it mean to say? What’s going to happen down? Stream to this packaging? Is it just going to get ignored or are we? To build an entire business around it, that what they’ve done, it Patagonia is stunning. That Patagonia has decided that instead of compromising their way forward to get bigger, they would walk away from compromise and try to actually do business in a way that makes things better to tell stories in a way that help people see the world a bit differently to invest their profits in lobbying, to do things like save a canyon If you’ve ever bought a can of soup, you’ve probably seen the picture of the soup on the label and every picture of soup that doesn’t show a flat featureless pool of liquid is faked. It’s faked because there’s enough liquid in the can for all the ingredients to drop to the bottom.

It’s a serving suggestion. If you believe that having marbles in the bottom of your bowl, is inappropriate way to eat soup that if they fill a bowl with marbles, And then put a can of soup on top of it. It will look just like that Chunky Soup in the picture. There are food stylists who are busy rearranging, the sesame seeds on the top of a McDonald’s, Big Mac. So when it’s time for its photo, shoot, it looks just right.

Is that what we want makeup for food? Well, the answer is yes. We do the answer in this moment. As I am recording, this is that we punish marketers who put people in there. Dads who look like everyday people with no makeup that we care a lot about the lighting that is used in the picture that is showing up in front of us.

And so marketers have this interesting choice to make which is should they be telling a story of the world as they’d like it to be when they are talking about the outcomes that come from attending their educational institution or taking their Placebo? Should they show us every single outcome? Because even that isn’t the full truth. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Should they show us the happy outcomes because modeling the happy outcomes? Makes it more likely, that more happy outcomes will occur. Can that be done? Truthfully. What is it that the customer actually wants from companies that show up with commercial speech? One of the things to understand about capitalism and marketing is the capitalism is a really good listening device.

That marketers spend an enormous amount of time paying attention to what’s working. Being listening carefully for what people want, what they need, what they react to how they take action. And so it’s not okay to let a marketer off the hook. When they say, well, I just gave the market what it wanted because yeah, there are people in the market who want you to sell them an addictive drug that will kill them, but that doesn’t mean you should.

At the same time, the market is speaking up. The market is making clear about what Stories We want to hear and which ones we don’t want to hear. More than ever before, a certain group of consumers is speaking up and saying we want more transparency in the way you show up in the way you act in the way, you tell us the truth about what you’re doing and what you’re not doing, but let’s be really clear.

Carry a laka is not going anywhere. It may skeeve. You out to know that you’ve been eating the Lac bug every single time you’ve eaten something that was supposed to put a smile on your face, or get rid of a headache. And if enough people are upset about it, it’s entirely possible that a corn-based substitute will gain traction.

But in the meantime, we’ve been fooling ourselves and we’ve been fooling ourselves on purpose. We like the shiny objects. We like the nice treats. We like to not know, Precisely where it was made, who made it and what the repercussions are. But every once in a while, marketers are discovering that there are lines being drawn if they’re smart, they will Embrace and welcome consistent government guidelines and regulations. So they don’t have to keep guessing about what they’re supposed to do, and what they’re not supposed to do.

It got a lot easier for Prius. Once there were actual rules about how to report the mileage of a hybrid car. Our because guess what, most marketers, most capitalists don’t want to invent new rules. They like to win by following the existing rules and so it’s up to us to decide what those rules ought to be.

Where are the boundaries, what will we decide? We want to know, what will we decide? We can’t know because as we function in a modern industrialized economy, even the people who are saying they’re getting off the grid aren’t quite Off the Grid, mark Delivers too many treats and too many Smiles for people to walk completely away from it.

So, commercial speech is not free speech. If you’ve got money, you’ve got a choice about what to say and how to say it, and how often to say it and how loudly to say it and when marketers speak, we change the culture. And it’s up to us to decide how to change the culture and how to lead instead of just worrying about how to follow.

Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way, to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning to There it works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit a Kimbo.com, go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works.

Thanks, it’s Maria.

Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here.

– this is on the Pain Scale.

Entire sir warm, greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth Name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey son. Hi. This is Russell news from Greece. Hi this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you.

If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please, visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button. I want to share three questions this week. They’re remarkably similar. But each one is different.

So here we go. Hey Seth this is William chernoff from Vancouver Canada. I’m a young jazz musician and my question is about the lazy concept of having only one number to measure and focusing on how to make that one number go up.

When I first heard you mentioned this concept, I thought about Spotify, if you’d find me on Spotify, you’d see one number beneath my name, monthly listeners. I think it’s nonsense that this number receive so much attention from both industry colleagues and everyday people. I can’t get Spotify to stop showing this number. So prominently so my question is, what are some more qualitative metrics that I can look for to have a more sensible outlook on, my jazz music career, thank you for everything you do.

Thank you, William.

The key question is this, which number are you measuring? And why does it matter to you? What other people are measuring. So to pick an absurd example, if Forbes Magazine is measuring the richest people in the world and you’re a billionaire, why does it make you sad? Angry disappointed, frustrated if you are Miss measured and they report, you having five billion dollars when you actually They have ten.

Why is it that people who have everything they could imagine when it comes to money. Get frustrated. When the measurement that other people see, doesn’t align with how they want to be measured while clearly what matters to them is not how much money they have but where do they rank in the hierarchy.

Now, if you’re a jazz musician, you got plenty of things that you could be keeping score of keeping track of paying attention to if you want your numbers to go up. Up on a place like Spotify. Well, stop making Jazz and start making pop because pop by definition is more popular. No, that’s not really the goal. The goal is to make music that matters to someone and to be able to do it in a sustainable way.

So the number of streams you’re getting is completely and totally irrelevant. Don’t look at it. You don’t need to look at it. And anyone who is looking at, it doesn’t have to matter to you. You don’t have to decide to play a game with rules that you don’t like all too. Often people who are doing the hard work of creation of building. Something would also like to be recognized by the masses for what they’re doing and almost every time that’s not the case, which is one reason, why? So few people stick with it long enough to get to the other side, Patricia Barber, the great jazz musician, sells out the green. Mill every Monday. There’s only a hundred seats.

That’s enough. Decide what’s enough? And then focus on making the numbers that matter to you go up.

Hey Seth, it’s Gregory with a question, regarding lazy capitalism.

What if a modern-day descendant of SEMO?

Vice came along today with a new simple measure for ethical capitalism. One that takes not only the needs of shareholders into account, but the needs of all stakeholders.

Who would you recommend it? As a starting point for the smallest viable audience? Would it be the Business Roundtable?

The UN with their sdg goals, be Corporation, folks, or some activist group. If you were some advice, who would the smallest viable audience be to you? Thank you for this Gregory.

You didn’t describe your idea, which is fine with me. There’s a real distinction between an idea that only works when everyone uses it or an idea that works. When some people use it, the challenge that we have As creators is inventors as Leaders is if we want to start with few resources picking a project that only works when everyone uses it, that’s really hard Esperanto didn’t catch on. So therefore Esperanto is a failure because even if you know how to speak Esperanto, you’re not going to bump into somebody who speaks Esperanto POS Esperanto, zamenhof, and the deck Nayyar Tonto Christian TI After Paris delinquent key West’s Mia dinochka lingua, it’s really important if you want a language to catch on, you get lots and lots and lots of people to listen to it, on the other hand, if you want to sell, handmade singing bowls from Tibet.

You only need to sell 10 or 20 or 30, or 40 and you’re done. So the challenge is some of us had was he wanted every doctor to save lives, okay, but it works, even if the doctors in just one hospital do it. If in just one Hospital, the doctors all wash their hands. The women in that hospital aren’t going to die and some of Isis mistake was trying to get everyone To adopt this idea because he had the hubris and the arrogance of being right?

And he was impatient in the face of Skeptics. If he had gone one hospital at a time, the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people. Once he had converted three or four or five hospitals, he probably could have flipped the whole city and once he flipped the city, he could probably flip a country and then go on from there.

So any time you’re thinking of going to the Business Roundtable or the United Nations, it’s probable that you have skipped more than a few steps. All right, Seth, this is Fred in the Santa Cruz mountains.

I am doing a little catch up on some of the back episodes.

And really appreciated your comment in response to a question about research where you wreck first recommended everybody.

And I’m going to underline, everybody should understand statistics and either take a course or learn it or use it. And that’s been a big part of my role as a reliability engineer. And Working with organizations. And my question though, is that if we do our job, well, then there is not failures and then you don’t have to call customer support to return your product or repair it or whatever.

Unfortunately, when that happens there’s no obvious reward it all too often we run into situations where firefighters Eating or staying up over night or the weekend to solve some big issue, then becomes a hero and they get the rewards in the parking spot and so on. So it creates a dynamic where we don’t necessarily are recognized or rewarded for preventing problems but those that then respond to flare-ups in the field of problems, then get reward. So Creates an unwanted Dynamic, any suggestions about how to break that kind of culture so that we can get down to the business of preventing problems and and and rewarding the people that actually do that kind of work, thanks for all you do and look forward to hearing your response.

Thank you for this Fred and yes, there’s a real emergency problem just like the fire department has a problem justifying their budget, if no houses are burning down. So the question is, what can we measure instead? What can you amplify instead? You’ve seen those construction sites with the big sign that says, 212 days, without an accident.

Why would they put up a sign like that? Well, as the number keeps going up the stakes get higher. No one wants to be the person that got that number to go back down to one and what you can do with the work that you’re doing that increases safety and resilience and security. And reliability is figure out how to elevate. Other numbers to spread them to increase the stakes as you go.

How much shorter are the weights. On hold, how many fewer calls are you getting? How much our warranty returns decreasing? How can you give people data that becomes an early warning sign so that when they stop paying attention to the things that matter, they begin to notice right away. Not when it’s too late.

Thanks for your questions. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, To distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet. Like we have data, what all NBA gets right. Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah. That’s good, you got access to ideas, you got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you’re going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t Ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world.

Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -apertures- <==

Why the picture square if the lens is around?

It’s entirely possible that during his Heyday, you never bought an album from the genius Gil Scott-Heron. What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to Consumer.

And all consumers know that when a producer named z-tune the consumer has got your dance.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo, we’ll be back. The second to talk about aperture and pop culture. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor A kimbos small business Workshop is back, its back because it works find out what you’re missing. Find out how to work it better find out the path forward. Here’s my friend Ramon Ray to tell you about it in this Workshop, you’ll learn what you need to start and grow your business.

I can’t wait to see you in the akimbo small business Workshop.

Find out more at akimbo.com / go. Hope to see you there in the early 1980s. Five women in Los Angeles were gigging, almost every night, playing a new kind of music one, that their fans loved, they had a hit single ready to go and they were rejected by almost every single record label in the world.

It’s only through the persistent effort of their manager that they were able to finally end up on IRS records. And you already know what happened to the Go-Go’s.

Their debut, album sold, more than two million copies. It was one of the most successful debut albums of all time. And it was the first And still the only number one record created and performed by an all-women rock and roll group. How is that possible or consider the movie?

The Big Lebowski think I want to go get your toe. Believe me. There are ways dude. You don’t want to know about a believe. Yeah but Walter hell. I get you told by 3 o’clock this afternoon with nail polish, The Big Lebowski only cost fifteen million dollars to make it It has returned that many times.

Over the Big Lebowski is not a movie that most Studios wanted to make. Even though the cone Brothers had a great reputation after it debuted at Sundance, it didn’t get stunning reviews. And yet to this day, people are watching that movie when lots of the other movies, even the popular ones of its time are completely ignored what’s going on here. And what about Gil?

Not Heron.

Well, the reason that camera lenses are round but pictures. R square, is that the light that goes through the camera lens isn’t admitted through. The whole lens is admitted through a very small hole in the lens. A pinhole camera. The hole is actually a little bit bigger than a pin. It turns out that through that little tiny hole, plenty of photons can work their way to the other side. Landing on a square piece of film hence the picture. The music business is a great example of this aperture thinking in the 1980s when the Go-Go’s were trying to break through. Here’s what was scarce radio time and record store. Space, you couldn’t get in the record store unless you were on the radio and you couldn’t get on the radio unless you fit into the mold that the program director decided their station matched up with the reason that most people in. The United States didn’t get to hear Gil Scott-Heron is that there wasn’t a radio station format aligned with the kind of music he wanted to make and so as a Pioneer he was ignored what ends up happening though, when a band like the Go-Go’s somehow gets the lucky break, it needs to get started, combined with the extraordinary Artistry and insight of their hit song.

Is it turns out consumers I don’t really want to be put in the box that program directors are putting them in. And so, the chain of, there’s a listener, there’s a program director, there’s a record executive, there’s management. There’s the people who booked the gigs that entire chain is based on a flawed assumption, and the flawed assumption is we can’t take a risk, we have to put out what people already like and what they already want because we can’t waste our shot.

And so conservativism, kicks in, it kicks in for Broadway shows, he kicked in for books, it kicked in for music, he kicked in for anything where there was a gate keeper, because the gate is an aperture, a small little hole between the people who create things and the market that is open to consuming it.

And here’s the punchline. You’ve already guessed it. We got rid of The Gatekeepers. In many ways. There is definitely a Porsche Population that wants to listen to what The Gatekeepers pick. But what the long tail as named by Chris Anderson is simple to understand but really deep and profound on its impact on our culture and it’s this anyone can publish a book on the Kindle, anyone can put a song on iTunes.

Anybody can perform a play in their house and put it on YouTube Suddenly It’s Has on ttle. It’s not vertical. Suddenly the scarcity is not the program director, the space in the record store, the ability to book a theater. None of those things are driving culture today and of course, this idea of the aperture doesn’t just apply to Broadway plays, or to music, or two books, and also applied, for a really long time to the news. And that helps us see the It’s sword. That what happened in newsrooms across the world for a hundred years is a meeting every day about what goes on the front page, a meeting about how long an article could be a meeting about whether something doesn’t appear in the paper at all.

Because the opportunity cost of running, a story in the newspaper is, you can’t run a different story and this scarcity, having to push things through a small aperture. To reach a large audience, created the very idea of our culture, having a center. And so the good news, the good news is new, voices are being heard. The good news is, there is no opportunity cost because the web isn’t going to run out of room. There’s an unlimited amount of space on blogs or on medium or on podcasts for that matter but and it’s a big but without a gatekeeper nobody is Responsible and the dynamic has shifted from.

I better be careful because my spot as a gatekeeper is at risk. If I am careless or hurtful to, there is an incentive for me to be Reckless because being Reckless, gets you, the attention of people on The Fringe whereas being careful makes you one of many in the center. And so the dynamic in the media in all media has Now, shifted away from the conservative idea of one voice. One culture, people in sync. I can prove it. Here are the facts. Let’s make sure this isn’t a dud to.

Let’s get a little bit crazy about this. Let’s go way to the edges. It doesn’t matter if it’s true, if it bleeds it leads. So we’re all surrounded by bleeding now. Cultural imperialism is also aligned with this and That’s not a good thing. The whole idea of being able to keep some music from being heard by people, not rewarding certain kinds of Acts, keeping the quote Purity, unquote of different kinds of Arts, the same, right? White man, who are artists hung in galleries or white men who are part of rock and roll groups.

And the irony, the punch line at the end, is that Broadway which has the most scarcity and a scarcity that will continue for as long as there is Broadway because it is not digital, and there aren’t very many, theaters has been inherently conservative in that Broadway musicals. Almost always sort of look and feel like Broadway musicals. It is a very distinct, genre unto itself.

Well, a few years ago, the goal Remember, the Go-Go’s the Go-Go’s, who couldn’t get a record made the Go-Go’s who became a sensation with their best-selling debut ended up with a Broadway show, and I saw it and it was great. They somehow figured out how to merge together this new wave, pop band with teenagers, who wanted to go to a Broadway show with the genre of a Broadway musical. I wish I’d seen it more than once I saw two days before it closed and I miss it. Where do we go from here?

Where we go from here is an understanding that the long tail which allows lots of voices to be heard. Also means that most things that get her, don’t get heard by very many people that the average book on the Kindle is getting read by a dozen people. Perhaps that the average song on the iTunes Store probably gets her two or three or four times just do the math with a million new things coming out. How could it be any more than that?

And so culture culture wants to coalesce culture, wants to be able to say People Like Us, do things like this, but it’s not going to be limited by the FCC saying there’s only 18 FM radio frequencies available. It’s going to be limited by who collects permission, who earns the right to be a new kind of gatekeeper who by mentioning a book on their blog or by mentioning another video on their YouTube channel. Is able to make something a hit And I think we will probably end up back closer to a medium tail that the long tail starts to get banal and inane when it gets too extreme and The Gatekeepers to Dick, Clark’s picking the winners, not enough, but somewhere in the middle, there might be a sweet spot and along the way, would each of us as creators of culture has the chance to do is hone our voice. Practice shipping the work, figure out what our smallest viable. Audiences see them, understand them cater to them, give them something that they want to share and then if we can earn permission to do it, we can become our own gatekeeper.

And that is really where all of this settles out, each of us is going to become responsible. For what we put our name, on each of us is going to have a following maybe five people, maybe 50,000 people. And what we do with that following, we can’t use as an excuse. Oh, this is what everyone is doing.

We can’t use as an excuse. That’s all my boss would. Let me do instead we get to stand up for what’s right? And bring things. We’re proud of to the world. We will never have hits like mash was a hit like Elton. John was a hit and yes like the Go-Go’s we’re hit where we’re going to end up is somewhere closer to the Middle where some people are going to be able to find their true fans, and make the work that they are proud of and being proud of Your work and not hiding behind a badge or a label, or some sort of anonymity is the only way to make things better.

Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is the time to learn? A new way, to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp, an independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together. It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo.

I’m /. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria.

Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pump.

This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is Is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you visit. Akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006, click the appropriate button. A couple questions this week about the rights and responsibilities of giant corporations, but first, here’s a question from Jeff.

It’s a thanks for all that you do and share. Thank you for answering my last question, a couple of years ago as a parent of two small children. I think about the world, the growing into and fully agree with you that the best skills they can learn would be how to solve interesting problems and how to lead one other skill. That seems important though. May fall under leadership is storytelling.

Some Curious have any thoughts or suggestions on how to develop the skill of Storytelling and kids, maybe it’s as simple as having until stories, but you’re a unique view on this would be appreciated.

Thanks Jeff. Your kids are lucky to have you. My Take having spent a lot of time with a lot of kids, is that kids are really good at telling stories. They are told stories. They listened to stories and they tell stories, but two things are getting in the way as we go forward. The first one is that adults rushed them.

We are so busy trying to get back to our e-mail, or to our adult conversation, or to whatever is coming in on social media that we Want the tldr, the bottom line, the short version of how was your day and when a kid starts telling a 10 or 15-minute story, that could be three sentences, we drift away.

So part of it is on us to make the space for the kid to talk. And the second half is that same social media, iPad thing. If before the pandemic, you are in a restaurant, you watch some kid who’s two years old, eating chicken fingers. The likelihood is that they also have an iPad in front of them. And an iPad is basically a digital pacifier. When you’re at that age, there might be some positive side effects from, that sort of digital manipulation that kids are taught at an early age, but there’s also no doubt that digital One Way. Call it propaganda leaves very little room for a kid to tell a story.

The what happens? Next story, The will you invent your own cow? Director story, The Coloring Outside the Lines story so we can model storytelling for our kids by handing them the work of the greatest storytellers in the world. But we also have to give them room for them to practice in a really safe and encouraging way telling their own stories.

Hey Seth, this is Mickey from Atlanta. I’ve heard you mentioned that Google doesn’t like blogs as much anymore and I think he might be viewing it through the wrong lens. But I see a larger problem now. I don’t have these numbers, and they’re likely not even attainable, but I’m willing to Guess that 10 years ago, a much higher percentage of your audience have their own blog, when they talked about your content on their own blogs. Those were huge signals to Google to rank your stuff higher.

Those kinds of signals are still very valuable to Google, but your audience doesn’t tend to produce that kind of content as much anymore case.

In point is my recent alt NBA experience, it was a phenomenal program.

But I was stunned at how few people have their own blog of. My cohort has 20 people to have blogs in between, A post maybe once or twice a month, granted many of these folks generate content other ways, such as writing books, or producing podcasts. But if they mention your content, either of those mediums, it gives you essentially no value in the eyes of Google.

I’ve been pushing my friends to blog, more both, my long-term friends and new colleagues from the alt NBA and if you are picking it up but the vast majority aren’t and it’s a little frustrating. Why do you think people are unwilling to take the time to unpack their thoughts and a medium like this? Thanks for all you do.

Thank you for this Mickey and I I am hesitant to sound self-serving when I talk about Google because yes, Google definitely puts my blogs emails into people’s Promotional and spam folder, even though there’s no good reason to do that. And there is also no doubt that Google is sending less traffic to blogs. Overall, one of the things that Google has sold the world on really hard, that is just a straight-up falsehood.

Is the idea that the algorithm is simply Received wisdom that it came from on high that it cannot be changed that it should never be manipulated that. The algorithm is the algorithm, for example, today, there was a front-page article in the New York Times about people who make a living praying on folks who can ill afford it, where someone writes a nasty article about someone on some scammy site, then they repeat it and multiply it on to dozens of other sites and then charge that person to take it down.

And then once that person, that’s paying they just repeat it again and do the process all over again and none of it would work if Google would assign just an engineer or to to making sure that no traffic went to these sites that serve no useful function. But it’s not even mentioned in the article that I could see that it’s Google job to do this because apparently the algorithm is the algorithm. That’s crazy. Talk, you don’t go to the library. Mary.

And expect that every single book ever published is on the shelves, and in the card catalog, The Librarians job includes curation. And I think that Google somehow managed to say it’s okay to make billions and billions of dollars pointing to information, but that they are not responsible in any way for curating it, but of course they are. Curating it, they are curating it because of the thousands of people who write the algorithm because it’s Not being written by a computer, it’s being written by people.

And so when you see recipes on the internet, they’re formatted in that weird way where there’s pictures and stories and stories and stories and then finally you read the recipe. Well, that’s because Google rewarded Pages for being written that way that’s a form of curation and what happened with Google and blogs shortly after they shut down. Google Reader was they realized that blogs aren’t a good. Way for Google to make money and so they manipulated the algorithm.

There are plenty of places where they can point people that make it likely that they will come back and do another search. And it’s on searches that Google makes money, they don’t make money when someone subscribes to a Blog. So the first part of your question, yeah, I think it’s on Google here to say are we elevating or diminishing the culture? The culture of the web because the web is a place just like Everywhere else.

And Google could make some small changes that were dramatically shift. What we encounter, how we encounter it, what we do when we find what we’re looking for Wikipedia, which is a treasure only is a treasure because Google defaulted to pointing to them in most search results early and up top, that was a choice of curation. I put that one down as a win, but I think their neglect of blogs is a loss.

And then the second half of your question, most people who write blogs shouldn’t write a blog because you’re going to get a lot of traffic and shouldn’t write a blog because they’re going to make money. I should write a blog because expressing herself in a semi-public consistent and persistent way is a magical way to learn and to keep track of Our Lives. Part of the problem with Twitter is the hand-to-hand combat, the short little Bon mots and phrases, that are only good if someone responds reacts. Or otherwise engages with you, that doesn’t lead us, to long term, critical thinking it leads us to playing a sort of ping-pong.

And if you like tweeting, please go ahead. But I think that most kids, and most adults should have a Blog even if it’s under an assumed name, just to have the discipline, the practice of showing up to do this work, thank you for that Mickey. And now, of course, on to Apple. Hi, Seth.

It’s Ross here from Cape Town I have a question for you regarding apple and their latest decision to enable subscriptions for podcasts.

So my question is, is this development encouraging people to join into a race to the bottom to try and make the most popular podcast for a dollar a month from as many people as possible?

Or is it?

Giving artists that you money for valuable content. I’m sure it’s a bit of both, but I suppose, my question is around apple as a platform?

Do they have a moral obligation?

To our culture, too.

Make someone a decision, one way or another, should they have done this? Basically, I worried that some sort of Race To The Bottom is encouraged by this and especially given your podcast is on Apple podcasts. Okay.

Thanks very much and keep up the good work. We love you podcast. Cheers. Bye bye.

So Apple largely popularized the podcast, they didn’t invent it, they didn’t name it, but they popularized it and then they just let it sit there. They did. Half-hearted attempts to promote certain podcasts over others, but they really just let it sit there because there wasn’t a business model for them and like Google, they are really focused much more in the last 10 years on quarterly income than they are on changing the culture.

But podcasts are a way of changing the culture. Lots of interested interesting, smart people spend time listening to, and making podcasts. So the question is, how do we decide? Because if it’s all in a big pile, and they’re hard to search because they’re an audio not in text, which podcasts get picked, which one’s get listen to do we need another True Crime podcast and so yes, on one hand we need an open system.

Because if someone has something to say we don’t want a gatekeeper to keep them from saying it, not at least until some people have heard it. But on the other hand, there is always going to be curation even apples. Lazy curation was curation of A Sort. And so when you add money to the mix, yes, some people are going to figure out how to make money doing this the same way they do in movies and television and music.

But doesn’t mean that the best music is sitting right there. Next to Taylor Swift on the top 40, the best music for you. For me might not make a lot of money but it makes a cultural impact and the same thing will continue to be true for podcasts. And if along the way podcasters can get past selling ads, which actually pushes them faster toward the bottom and instead, adopt more of a called a sub stack model, where people are paying to listen to the podcast. They want to listen, It feels to me like it could Elevate the discourse but just like Google.

There’s the question, are they curating? How are they curating? Should it simply be up for bid? I don’t think so. I think there’s room urgent need for curators in pop culture, and they can own it, and they can make a profit doing it, but they can get there by making things better. If we look at any random 10 hours, a Netflix, its way. Way better than any ten hours of ABC, TV in 1977.

That’s because someone at Netflix decided to curate. And I think if Netflix can do it, Apple can do it. And so can Google there isn’t some invisible algorithm. There’s just people, thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right is Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, what are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the Number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74.

Countries around the world.

Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -graphs-and-charts- <==

87% of all widely distributed statistics are poorly sourced or possibly inaccurate. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo will be back in a second with the world’s first audio podcast all about graphs and charts. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hi. It’s Benedict. You and I’m here to talk to you about how you can become a better. Storyteller storytelling is not an arch reserved for the Chosen Few. It’s a skill that you can learn just like the students have taken part in the story skills. Workshop of done, actually I had a story to tell that was really important for me but also was going to be very very important for people in the future.

It’s been absolutely be life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories. I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving as in the receiving, we got to not only learn about Storyteller. We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life if you’re ready to become a better Storyteller. I hope you’ll join us. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming. Workshops, go make a Ruckus, skis go on sale in the summer. They don’t sell that well, though, because we’re not thinking about skiing unless you’re snow outside and graphs and charts and polls.

Well, all year round, we need to pay attention to how we are being sold ideas, how ideas are represented and misrepresented, but at least in my country in November is when we really know Notice just how badly they’re being misused. This is a podcast about graphs and charts and poles created without any graphs, charts or poles. And just so that it’s easy to focus. We’re doing it right in the middle of an on Election season because it’s always a good idea to know what is being said.

And why showing someone A graph, a chart or a pole is an intentional act. It is an act of editing. You are choosing what to show someone because you want to make a point, or if you don’t want to make a point, You’re simply wasting their time. But before we talk about those forms of graphic information, let’s talk about the pictures, the pictures in a newspaper, the pictures in a web article, my friend, Liz Jackson, who does important work in Disability Rights? Has taught me about the alt image text and what this is is text that we need to put in images that go on our website to explain, to someone who is visually impaired, what the picture is of, now it’s simple. If the picture is simply a noun, this is a picture of a cherry. This is a picture of a football.

Google likes this too, because it makes it easier for their search engines to figure out what you just put up. Sure of, but if it’s a news site, if it’s someone with an editorial point of view, if it’s someone who has made a choice about a picture, putting into text, what the picture is, and what it’s for turns out to be a really difficult decision because if you’re running a political story, it is insufficient to say and this is a picture of. So and so, who is the head of this country?

Because you didn’t pick the picture? A just for that reason you could say this is a humiliating picture showing the person being scolded by his peers. This is a picture that shows the person in the best possible light. Those words represent editorial intent and there is editorial intent. When we run pictures in the newspaper, that’s why newspapers. Spend so much time and money on pictures and the people who edit them.

They’re not simply putting up a noun because we already know what a political figure looks like they’re putting up something to amplify the intent of the story and then we get two graphs and charts USA Today. Lead the use of graphs and charts throughout newspapers. They also wreck them in many ways by making them dumb.

Why did they make them dumb? Because the editors of America’s newspaper, decided Added that Americans don’t understand statistics, that Americans will look at a picture that comes in a chart or a graph. And we’ll come to a conclusion mostly that it’s sort of static that it says blah blah blah blah blah here is some math and thus the story, The caption the headline becomes more truthy because after all here’s a picture usually a pie chart or a stacked bar chart, that proves At the headlight is correct. The alt text that would go with these graphs or charts would need to be something like here. Are some meaningless data, presented in a confusing way, designed for people who aren’t going to look deeply into how to present data.

And we’ll just go along with us because it looks like we’ve done our homework and challenging each other to say, out loud. What the point of that chart or graph is, is The first step in doing a better job of explaining how the world is actually functioning. So, there are some really simple rules to get violated all the time.

Here’s the first one. If you’re going to present information on XY axes, it’s not fair to change the axis when you’re comparing a to be, we see this all the time when news sources are trying to exaggerate Small differences. So if they’re showing something at the 50s or the 60s range, instead of starting the axis at 0, they started it 50 so they can magnify the differences and if the differences are significant, there’s nothing wrong with that. But most of the time, the differences aren’t significant at all. And so if the Dow Jones Industrial Average which most people don’t understand is up 84 points showing a graph that indicates it is skyrocketing is Absurd because as I report this the Dow is over. 20,000, a difference of 80 points, a hundred points. 200 points is the same as nothing that what they should say on the radio, which doesn’t use charts and graphs has the Dow is essentially unchanged. Today it is a waste of time to say the Dow is up. Eighty nine point four points.

The point for is a rounding error, but so is the 89 there is no news. Reason that it feels like news is that they are basing their y-axis at the zero point instead of the 20,000 or the 25,000 Mark. If it’s at 25,000 we wouldn’t even be able to see that. The graph went up. Eighty-nine Point number two, second biggest defense.

Volume is different than area and area is different than length. So if I’m going to accurately chart, the change of a single axis, like the value of the Dow, it doesn’t make sense for me to give it length and width because I’ve just multiplied its impact dramatically. It’s aligned, it’s a single number. It just went up. That’s all it is. It’s not area and it’s definitely Volume.

And so the mistake is not a mistake the intentional shortcut. Someone trying to make a point makes is by giving bulk to what is changing because it makes the change look much bigger. So for those of you who can do a little bit of math in your head which would be everyone, if something went up from 2 to 3, you can visualize that.

But if something really, really, really wide went from two stories. High two, three. Three stories high. It looks like it got a lot bigger because we multiplied it in two directions and if we start multiplying it in three directions. Now the issue gets even more magnified, which was the intent of the person who built the graph of the chart.

The third mistake which is mostly related to polling. Is this? There is the margin of error. What does margin of error even mean? Well, the reason A pole and not an election or not a census is we asked the smallest possible number of people in order to get this data we’re about to share with you. Three hundred, four hundred five hundred people.

They are not picked completely randomly, they are picked from selected groups because over time pollsters have figured out that when you ask a certain kind of person from a certain group and you ask a few hundred of them you can Multiply that up to how the population is feeling right now to within say, five percentage points of error, which means if you do a poll of this group and 47 percent of them, say, I agree with that.

There is no difference between 47, 48, 49 50. It’s all within the margin of error. We’re plunging around in the dark feeling our way forward. There is no difference between 47 and fiftieth Within The margin of error and second, we are reporting how people feel today. Not how they’re going to act a month from now. We don’t know how they’re going to act a month from now. All we know is how they feel today.

When we bring these two things together, we now see how polling is completely misused because the media wants everything to be a horse race because apparently it’s easy to sell tickets to a horse race and it turns out elections only Happen once every year or four years, that’s too far in the future.

So instead, it’s the horse race whose up today and are they up a little? Or are they up a lot? They ignore the margin of error. They ignore the very nature of what we learn from a pole. They turn it into something to manipulate the public and lately in the last 10 or 20 years, it turns out the public hears pull data.

And uses it to make decisions about what is actually happening in the world even though the people if they’re honest who made the pole, don’t know what’s actually happening. All they know is they took a snapshot in time of a group of people and applied some statistical analysis. To tell you what the odds were that they were within the realm of possibility.

So a lot of people criticized, the polls in the election between Clinton and Trump but the polls were wrong. Wrong. The poles were properly done. And misreported as certainty as if we were seeing results, we weren’t seeing results. We were seeing odds and we were seeing margin of error. So I’ve just shared three kinds of malpractice. That people who is a point of view that they want to share can commit, obviously there are more than three, but the takeaway from this needs to be as follows if someone brings you a chart or a graph.

What’s the alt text for it? If they were going to honestly right? The alt text what would they be? Writing is that getting past our filters because when we see pictures and we’re afraid of math and statistics, does it go straight to the truth part of our brain? And we just believe it because no longer is a picture worth. A thousand words, we know how easy it is to fake things in Photoshop.

Now it’s a graph or a chart that’s worth a thousand words. And when we look at the home page of the New York X which Prides itself on being correct in what it reports. And we see that little twitching Arrow at the top that an eel – pointed out was faked the poll data wasn’t twitching. They intentionally created a jumpy meter at the top of their homepage to make a stressed out to believe that breaking news was actually coming in when it wasn’t.

And so it’s on us as the consumers of this information. To wonder out loud. Why did they show this to us? Are they presenting it fairly or are they trying to make a point? And number two, which I think is really important because the people listen to this podcast. In addition, to consuming this information are often, the makers of this information is this if you have to lie with your charts and graphs, you probably are selling a point of view, you’re not proud of my hunches. It’s possible to create It charts and graphs that are inherently straightforward. That are honest that are accurately constructed and still present your point of view. Because the reason it’s your point of view is that you’ve done the research and you believe it.

And so the act of omission that were making as non-professional media voices is even more important, because guess what? Your charts are probably not making the point as effectively as they could. They might be over complicated. They might have too much data in them, they might not be clear enough. And so my advice is simple.

Before you make the chart, make the slide that says exactly what the chart is trying to prove and then strip away all the extraneous information to get to the truth. Underlying it presenting it as clearly as you can what you’re trying to say.

Here’s a hint.

If you’re using a pie chart, you’re probably doing Is it wrong? We’ll be back in a second with answers from last week’s episode but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pal. This is Caitlin. Hi sir. Warm greetings from Chiara. Ow. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. They sent. This is Rex whoosah. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006, click the appropriate button, three heartfelt, and nuanced. Since this week, many of them speak for themselves, here we go.

Hey Seth, this is Mike in Toronto Canada in your blog’s books and podcasts you’ve pointed out a lot of the problems with the public school system, namely that it does more to promote compliance and seeking, validation from authority figures, all of, which are behaviors. That best serve an outdated or industrial economic model.

Yet, I’ve also heard you mention that you do believe in the public school system and that you put your kids through this. So, I was wondering if you could tease out some of the Nuance here, putting aside whether or not a private education is even affordable for someone. What are the values and attitudes that are gained and putting a child through the public system.

This has been on my mind lately as my wife and I are expecting our first child this summer. We clearly have plenty of time until the question takes on immediate relevance, but nothing wrong with planting the seeds of those conversations. Nice and everything. Thanks again for everything you do. You and yours are well.

Cheers.

Thanks for this question and your kid is lucky to have you and vice versa. I have a few thoughts about public school. First one, is this the more often that people who have a choice enroll their kids in public school, the better the public schools are going to get because people who have a choice can also bring their voice to the situation, they can speak up, they can teach, they can learn, they can engage, they can make it better.

Why even bother if you have a choice? Well, I think that public school around the world, helps create the fabric of culture that when lots and lots of people in the community, share a similar experience together, that shared experience can bind us together. Also, it’s important to note that throughout my country. Anyway, when done properly public school can be a bit of a Nectar a Melting Pot if you will, if we don’t get too carried away, gerrymandering school districts, the point is that kids who are next to other kids, who don’t necessarily have the means to get a fancy schools tuition paid for or scholarship from a fancy school.

That’s a great way for kids to learn shared experience. Now, I think that parents who have a choice also tend to have the ability to do something with all that homeschooling. From 3 p.m. in the afternoon to midnight kids, spend, at least as much time home. Particularly if we count the five years before school starts as they do at public school.

And so, if we view public school as a chance to build a community, to build a culture, to find an institution that needs our inputs and to contribute to it, to make it better. That feels to me like the kind of Civic engagement that makes things better now, Of course, this can’t work for all parents because some parents, maybe if they have the means don’t have the time to do this and I’m not shaming those people. And I’m also saying to people who have no choice but to send their kids to public school that you to have the opportunity and somewhat of the obligation to show up and make school better, none of this is fair.

None of it is right. Opportunities are not equally distributed and to top it all off. Most private schools are no better than most public schools except perhaps they have better, athletic fields and shorter hours. So when you add it all up, it seems to me that if we’re going to put kids through 12 or more years of school day after day after day and we want to live in a culture filled with people who have been through that, it’s on us, all of us, each of us to the ability that we are able to, to make those schools better.

I hope that helps Hi Seth it’s John here in the UK. I wanted to put to you a little dilemma that I have.

Just over a year ago, my wife passed away from cancer. But during the months and the years before she died, we had a whole raft of different diet books. Eating plans, the promised cures slowing down of cancers, removing the need for treatment.

Lots of these books, contradicted each other and I found it very frustrating that she would spend hours and days poring over these books looking at them together, trying to work out the best, Ultimate plan for her longevity.

Now, she’s passed. I’m left with a huge stack of these things that I’m stuck with. They cost a lot of money to buy.

And I have, I am stuck morally with what to do with them.

I think they are hocus-pocus they’re bogus.

If they contradict each other, they can’t all be true. Yet they gave her hope they gave us something to control.

I kind of wanted your opinion not really on what I should do with them, but you think about people putting out this information that gives people hope. But on which there is no real scientific Foundation. Thanks. Seth love what you do. Make a Ruckus.

Thank you for this John and I feel your pain and I am so sorry for your loss. The thing about the kind of books that you were talking about and I lost both of my parents to cancer is they don’t sell science. Sometimes they pretend to sell science but what they sell is Hope and the thing Of course, they contradict each other because Hope usually does contradict itself because there isn’t Just One path to belief and if somebody without harming their health, can find a way to control part of their environment, when so many other things in their life feel like they’re out of control.

It’s hard for me to blame the person who wants to buy a book like that, this is not the same. As books or quacks, who tell people, not to get medical care, who tell people to do something instead of proven double-blind, actual studied medicine? No, that’s not my point or I don’t think it’s yours. I think. Instead what we need to do as we each get older and we dance around mortality, and all of the trauma around us is find something to hope for.

And so maybe if I were in your shoes, I would find a lending library. Or some other place where someone who is looking for the kind of Solace, they can get from controlling what they eat. Maybe they could find it in these books. Again, big hugs from me. Hang in there. I know it takes a long time.

Hi Seth I have been blessed by your work for well, over a decade. And first, I just want to say thank you. And in that time nothing has stuck in my head has made me think more than your episode on Modern monetary Theory and the reason is not money. I believe you got the three things. Correct that we need to invest in and education and health care.

And in confidence, but I don’t believe what those three areas need the most is money and you’re actually the one that convinced me to this, that what our education system needs is to answer the question, what is it for? And then to retool around the answer and while we could put ten billion dollars into the current system and we might get a 10% better result out of that.

If we would answer the question, what is it for? We could see a thousand percent. Sent better result and likewise in health care.

The vast majority of illness that we have in the United States is diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, things which are caused by lifestyle and best addressed by lifestyle changes. And yet, we have a system that prescribes pills and surgery that while they help their much more expensive and much less effective, at solving the problems and what the system needs is to ask the And what is it for?

And then we have confidence. And while monetary Theory. I’m sure effects confidence. Somewhat, it’s extremely small. Compared to the effect that the messaging from our culture has. And it seems that today the dominant message is the world is going to pot and it’s their fault, even though this is untrue, it’s not their fault. The world is going to pot because the world is not going to pot and it can’t be their fault.

And I think what your answer to this would be is well, go change one classroom, go change one person’s self, go change one person’s confidence and use what you learned, use that momentum to change another and another and another. So what is it that we could do that? You could do to change the tide of this messaging from one that’s making the world a worse. Place to a more positive message that will make the world a better place. Thank you for this question, my answer. Probably going to be shorter than the question was, but I let it run because you have so many good points.

The thing is, when we spend money on something, it doesn’t always make it better, but when we cease to spend money on something, it’s often hard to make it better. If we look at the huge progress that has been made and say caffeine delivery devices from Dunkin Donuts, 25 years ago to Starbucks today. If we we look at how so many businesses have piled on and piled on and piled on with their Innovations, with their convenience, has with their quote improvements.

Well, the profit mode is often at work. So yeah, I’m going to answer what you thought I was going to answer which is I wasn’t saying we should put money into the broken system, particularly the medical and Educational Systems in my country more money for the old system isn’t going to fix it. But if A central Authority, who isn’t simply seeking to enrich tiny corners of the market but is willing to embrace efficacy. The same way, a focus on efficacy led to a groundbreaking record-breaking Sprint to not one, not two, but three or more vaccines, in less than a year.

We can do the same thing with school. We can do the same thing with health care. If there are people in those systems, you need to be bought out of the To create open space for new better systems to happen. Well, then go ahead and do it. It doesn’t make sense for the people in those systems to suffer, simply because someone has a sinecure.

We’ve learned so much about health care and education in the last hundred years. But too often we do precisely the opposite of what we need to do. Because entrenched bureaucratic interests who make money from existing systems are hard to unin Trench. But we can do it. Particularly if we have a focus and the resources to do something about it, and just to put a sharp point on it, I want to clarify something Central authorities, whether they are Central media, personalities, Gatekeepers, or governments with pocketbooks, don’t fix anything. All by themselves, things, get fixed invented. Improved questioned at the fringes. It’s at the fringes in small circles where Human beings are making choices choices about, who to listen to choices about what to buy choices about what to stand for, and choices about how to improve their institutions. These are where the signals always begin. The question is not, can we give Authority away and responsibility to some Central Authority? Because I think that’s been shown not to work instead. The opportunity is to say it’s on us to figure out how to build culture. We are proud of and it’s On whatever Central Authority were talking about commercial or governmental to amplify this stuff that works.

We can do things like fix policing, like, fix bumpy roads in things like the economy, we can do it.

If we care enough to say, we’re going to do it as opposed to wringing our hands and just waiting for the free market to fix the problem because the free market hasn’t fixed the problem. And in so many places, it’s made it worse. So quite a few rants To wrap up this week’s show. Thank you all for listening be. Well here’s to Peace of Mind possibility and dignity, we’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better. Other than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. Icy out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-magnification-of-small-differences- <==

Every year in China, 10 million high school students sit down for a two or three-day test that will make or break their future. The gaokao is the single indicator that is used to determine who is going to get into a selective college and who isn’t who is going to move forward and who is going to be left behind.

Hey it’s Seth and this Is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about how a tiny difference of just the point, can be magnified into something that changes everything. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor Creative isn’t who you are. It’s what you do along. The way creativity has gotten a mystical rap as if it’s some sort of gift. It’s not. It’s a choice. It’s a skill.

If you have a job where you get to decide what you do, you are a creative, it work in creative and you can get better at it. I’m thrilled to say that the creatives workshop is back the most. Active of all the akimbo workshops. It’s about people who want to level up and make a difference with their creative. Work. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming workshops.

Go make a ruckus. Everywhere we look in our modern world, we are seeing the magnification of small differences, just a couple points on the SAT determines, whether or not someone gets into a famous college, that helps make a difference as to whether or not they got into a famous law school. Then effort combined with luck determines whether they made law review or just missed it.

Making law, review helps them get a clerkship for a federal judge. Not making law review. Makes that really difficult. A clerkship. A federal judge is magnified into the fast track and then maybe one day you end up on the Supreme Court all because of a six-point difference on your SATs. Of course it’s not all because of this but it is a magnification process.

Something that we’ve been doing for a long time to sort people out think about the movies during the last decade or so Hollywood released two movies a week. Two wide distribution, just a hundred movies a year. They pick such a small number of movies with tens of thousands, in some level of development. They pick a hundred because they say, a, we need money to be able to make movies be.

We need money to promote the movies. And see, there. Aren’t that many movie theaters to go into wide release? We need to be in a lot of theaters. Is and there aren’t that many. So scarcity drives, the fact that there is scarcity scarce money, scarce ability to pay attention, scarce theaters to put the movies in, even Netflix, which has an infinite number of theaters.

Only released 371 titles or episodes in 2019 371 dwarfs the movie industry but has nothing in common. With the tens of thousands of screenplays that are just waiting to get picked. But in you’re probably ahead of me now. There are other areas in our culture in which humans Venture in which there is no scarcity.

Amazon doesn’t want to tell us how many books there are on the Kindle but there are more than 5 million of them. There are 1700 new Kindle books published every single day. That Pretty much a hundred every waking hour, why don’t they want to tell us how many books there are on the Kindle or think about how many acrylic paintings were poems, are written every year?

No one’s even counting that, but there’s got to be more than a billion. Does the fact that no one can stop you from writing a poem? Make it more likely that you will write a poem. So, there’s an interesting balance here between Scarcity and value last year, 30,000 nurse practitioners, graduated nurse practitioners are capable of writing prescriptions in dealing directly with patients, without a doctor, 30,000 nurse practitioners in the United States is about one in 10,000 numbers of people who need a nurse practitioner. That number is laughably small, the typical nurse practitioner sees, three patients an hour and makes a hundred and ten. Thousand dollars a year.

What would happen if we had enough nurse practitioners that nurse practitioners solve for patients, an hour or five patients in an hour and maybe made $100,000 a year instead, or what if we went in the other direction and the only saw two patients, an hour, giving them focused, dedicated time and made, I don’t know, $80,000 a year, the point is, we’re not running out of patience, but we We are out of nurse practitioners.

So, what is it? That makes somebody want to make a movie, but makes them. Perhaps hesitate when no one stops them from making a Kindle book. Well, it’s scarcity at some level in our culture that creates value. So now we go back to the gaokao, 10 million people who took a test all at once in June of 2020, they didn’t take the test because of the panda. Mick.

But it’s interesting to note that going forward, online education may make it so that there is no such thing as scarce spaces at a selective College. Unless we want there to be, let’s think for a minute about the organizations that are credit higher education, ostensibly created, to make sure that the quality was there.

That’s not really what they do. They enforce, for example, how many phds there are Per student, but if the purpose of a college is to teach people, there is no evidence zero. That phds are better at that. Then people who are simply good at teaching. Now having a ratio of phds per student, simply makes it harder to start and run a university.

Lots of the things that are in place at an accrediting institution exists, to limit the number of things that are getting accredited. How do they decide how many people will pass? The bar exam? When the lawyers take it in California? Well, it’s not the absolute value of their score. It’s how many lawyers are they prepared to make this year in California?

It’s well-known that it’s really hard to pass. The bar in places like Hawaii, where lawyers would like to go and retire, but pretty easy to pass the bar in states that have a shortage of lawyers. Because the bar, Sam is not a measure of, are you? Good enough to be a lawyer? It’s simply a barrier to make sure that there’s scarcity, so that people will value It. Go on the journey and want to be a lawyer in the first place.

And so, the long tail collides head, first into the power law curve, the power law curve, otherwise known as zipf’s law points out that the ones all the way to the left, two hits, they get a lot of attention and Way down at the other end of the curve. As Chris Anderson has pointed out, is the long tail, the long tail. When you add it up, is just as big as the short head, but the attention paid to every single individual on the long tail is small. Indeed, if you release a song on iTunes or Spotify, if you write a book on the Kindle almost no one is going to read it if your movie gets greenlit for wide release after the pandemic, Eric far more people are going to see it because their scarcity, there’s an enforced short head. Just two movies a week and so we have a choice to make as we create online learning as we create more and more long tails, and the choice is, will we as human seek to do poetry, or acrylic, painting or Kindle books?

Things were no one can stop us. Or will we devote you? Amounts of our time and energy into hoping for the magnification of small differences because there’s a real problem with the magnification of small differences. And the problem is we waste potential. We waste potential because someone who’s almost good enough to qualify for the Olympics doesn’t and then they don’t develop, they don’t get the coaching. They don’t get all the other things. That would have helped them, get to the next level.

We waste potential because at the age of two or three or four, we look at someone based on who their parents are, what their race is, where they grew up, and we don’t give them the attention that they need to get to the next level. And so by the time, the quote selective High School is looking for potential students to magnify their small differences. There are already one to three percent behind with no hope of catching up and so to get specific I don’t think it’s difficult for any of us to imagine that just five years from now.

There’s an automated series artificially, intelligence-driven of courses of learning of Education that exist online that anybody with internet access to wants to could put themselves through and that it will be shown. I am certain that going through this accredits, you better than going to one of those other institutions. It makes you actually better at whatever thing we were just just sorting for that. If you are willing to go through the grueling effort of using this process, you will come out at the other end knowing more than the hand-built process.

And given that an online interaction scales to Infinity, given that the shelves of the Kindle will never be filled, are we okay with that? Or are we more comfortable? Embracing the mythology of the magnification? Small differences. One last practice, To go far on this for years and years. Google used a mysterious algorithm to decide who would rank high in the Google results.

And what we know is that you are a hundred times more likely to get clicked on if you’re on the first page of Google results, then if you’re on the third page. Now let’s remember that for any valuable search, there’s more than a thousand pages of results. So there’s a thousand pages of results and almost every click goes to the First page, the people on the first page, the web sites on the first page might be what .01% better than the websites that are on the fifth page.

Better at what better by what metric. It’s a mystery, they won’t tell us but what happens is the people who locked into the first page whether through SEO or just good fortune, get more traffic, more traffic gets the more resources. More resources, lets them invest more and more in whatever it took.

To get on that front page, and the process continues and continues until power, accrues to both Google because they get to dictate the algorithm. And the people who run those sites on the front page, what would have happened if instead of Google showing the front page to everybody. Showed the first page to I don’t know. Ten percent of the people who visited any search and the second page to 9% and the third beige Day present do the math. Anyway, you want What they could have done this, they could have easily randomized and minimized.

The difference of small differences but instead they decided to magnify them because it gave them power because it made everyone pay attention to their mysterious algorithm. And so we’re looking right now at a world torn between building more choke points, even though they are artificial and embracing the long tail even though it offers Less in the way of scarcity. And thus value there isn’t one obvious answer, but when we think about the nurse practitioners, it seems to me that what we ought to be defaulting to is amplifying potential.

How do we find more and more people who can figure out how to make a living doing something that benefits our community? And then strip away all the artificial barriers that keep that number small and instead say, what would happen if they were as plentiful as poems? What would happen if there were plenty of people doing health care or working on Mental Health, in our community, or helping with Food Supplies, go down the list, we can do that. If we figure out how to make the long tail attractive enough to get the right people to embrace it, thanks for listening, this was quite a ramp, we’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from Last time. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way, to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp, an independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new Upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. My name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pump.

This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question. By my calculations, this is episode 200 of akimbo and it wouldn’t be possible without my producer Alex De Palma.

And without you, thank you for showing up week after week, year after year. This is clearly a labor of love. I hope that comes through and if you’re loving it, that makes it worth it. So with that said, as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit Akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M. Bo dot link2sd.

Click the appropriate button. We’ve got three really. Surprisingly juicy questions this week. Here we go. I see it. This is Bill. Hikes in Austin. Said I have been struggling with the question of does it work? Or is it working in relation to my project and yesterday during a walk? I had a real insight that I wanted to share with you and ask a question about The fact of the matter is the my project is working for me, is consistent with who I am.

It’s making a difference in the world and it is inside of a context of a business model that I found to be successful before. So my question is, is you think my inside is valid? I mean is it working? Well is it working for me is something that makes a big difference in my desire to keep this project alive.

So thank you for all the work you do. Bye. Thanks for this bill. The market economy is fascinating because markets are sensing mechanisms markets are voluntary. Interactions in which people who need or want something show up and connect with someone who has something to offer markets fall apart when things like monopolists show up where people don’t have a choice but markets aren’t the reason we do our work. That sometimes It seems like the only things that some people think are worth doing, are things that make a lot of money as if money profit is the only measure of utility.

Well, if you think about someone who runs a small well in a small village, they might not be making a lot of money, but if they disappeared, people would notice immediately. Their work is vitally important, but that doesn’t mean they’re making a fortune on the other. And someone who’s making a luxury good say some crazy nft and earns 50 million dollars from selling some digital file. They may have made a lot of money there may be a market for what they made but it’s not clear to me or to most people that what they did was more important than running a well that provides water to keep people alive in a small village. So your question is it working is super important.

And you are correct working for who, if you’re doing something that you believe in, but the market doesn’t want to engage with you. You have to acknowledge the fact that it’s not working for them because if it was working for them in the way, you told your story delivered, your product or service, priced it etcetera, they’d buy it.

On the other hand, if you’re doing something that you’re not proud of, it’s making a lot of money. Well, then it’s not working for you. So thank you for your plain-spoken clear way to help people understand it. Sometimes we keep track of precisely the wrong things, and that engaging with the market to do our work is Balancing Act between giving people something that they value and doing something that we value.

Hi, Seth, Kathy and Michigan. I enjoyed your helmet. Episode horseback riding injuries at one point in time. Where I high on the number of emergency room admissions in the summer. And in Rodeo, we can still see where only a limited number of participants wear helmets in the show Horse World. There were bitter debates about helmets, many deaths and traumatic brain injuries when helmets became compulsory.

Then the status thing was to have the $800, Swarovski, Crystal, and studded helmet question for you is, can you comment on an even more compelling opt-in? Option would be here, are your helmets and the price is included. And then the second question is, is the next Frontier fall protection for seniors.

Atul, gawande is being mortal and fine driving. Miss Norma are two books that talked about concussion and hip injuries. Taking many cognitively sharp seniors out of the game.

Thanks for your comments, thanks for this Kathy and I really appreciate your leadership. The thing about helmets is very similar to the thing about vaccines, which is similar to the thing about seat belts, which is to, you can go on and on It’s always about fear, there’s different kinds of fear. Some people get a vaccine because they are afraid of getting sick and dying or because they are afraid of infecting someone else.

Other people decide not to get a vaccine based on false information appearing real because they are afraid of either. How it will make them feel to get one or how it will affect their standing in the society that they are keeping track of. And so the thing about helmets and other interventions for seniors comes down to this idea of fear that sooner or later, most of us realize, we’re going to die.

And most of the time we live in community, seniors are too often isolated, but even when they’re slightly isolated, they’re still seen by others. And in the face of that, some people deal with their fear of the Unknown, by trying to outfit them. Elves in a way that will help them live longer that wearing. A helmet is obvious for someone like this taking, their meds makes perfect sense. But other people, either to avoid a dialogue monologue with themselves about this fear or to send a signal to others. What will they say? If I wear this helmet? That might get in the way of someone doing something that they need to do. So part of the job of marketing and Communications Culture is to create clear and easy to follow Pathways so that people end up doing things that they’re glad they did in high school.

The fear of getting left out, might drive someone to start smoking. No one I’ve ever met said, I smoked one cigarette and I really enjoyed it. People don’t smoke cigarettes because they like it. They do it in the long run because they’re addicted and they do it in the short run because of social pressure. Sure and social pressure is a cultural artifact and we have to figure out what are we pressuring people to do?

And what we pressuring people to not do and part of what we need to itemize are the things that will help them and us live in community. So I know that that’s not quite the answer to your question, but here it is. When in doubt, look for the fear. Hey, you said that Zach calling from New Hampshire. Thank you for the work and the insight. Right, that you provide to so many of us.

My question today, is, how do you think about the idea of burnout? Somebody who works in the nonprofit sector? I interface a lot with Educators Community Based organizations and it feels like everyone right now is exhausted and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. So have you ever felt burnout is burnt out even the right word that we should be using to describe this this feeling of exhaustion because Only this work feels exciting and inspiring. But for whatever reason, right now, everybody isn’t feeling that you’re feeling tired. So curious, what thoughts are in sight? You might provide. Thank you, thank you for this, exact. Thanks for the work that you are doing a burnout is real. For sure.

It’s interesting, though, that farmers don’t get burnout from actually plowing the fields if they get burned out at all, they get it from the stress of Having commitments, having payments, do having things that should grow not growing. In fact, it’s when they’re dealing with the uncertain with the things out of their control.

It’s when the universe doesn’t align with what they were hoping for that. A certain special kind of stress shows up and this is the stress of wanting to do two things. At the same time, stay and run away succeed or face. What’s actually happening around us. And this stress is enervating, it can undermine so much of our mental health and one of the thing that’s happening post, pandemic, having survived over a year in this state of limbo?

Is it? Lots of people are exhausted? We’re not exhausted because we’re not well rested. We had plenty of time to sit in our house and do very little sleeping at night. We weren’t racing to catch airplanes. We weren’t running marathons. No, we’re not. Physically exhausted, we’re emotionally exhausted. Because what’s happening around us as the result of our labor, our wishes, our hopes, our dreams isn’t matching the expectations. We had set out for it and so, yeah, I experienced burn out all the time and sometimes worse than others, but I try to get back on track, not by forcing the world to do what I want to do.

But by digging in deeper Upon accepting what is actually happening right in front of me? Because acceptance being able to play the cards that we were dealt being able to lean into possibility at the very same time. We don’t try to undo the past or even the present reality that is a path forward because it turns out that whatever, turns out is going to turn out and we can influence it, but our mental Cycles are telekinesis.

That is just going to exhaust us. So what we’re going to need to do is to figure out what we can lean into with leverage and how we can productively accept the things. We can’t change. Thanks everybody for listening. It’s been 200, fun episodes and I’m thrilled to be on this ride with you. Keep making a Ruckus, we’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an So, institution, or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got Access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t Know where we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -fractions- <==

More than a year ago. When the pandemic hit, I knew that we were going to need four things. If we were going to get through this together, we would need a spirit of generosity. We would need patience, we would need discipline and we need people to understand fractions. Well, maybe we can get three out of four, but the purpose of this podcast is to help you with the fourth one.

Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about something that most people don’t understand, but that’s not that hard fractions. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor creative isn’t who you are. It’s what you do along. The way creativity has gotten, Mystical rap as if it’s some sort of gift. It’s not. It’s a choice. It’s a skill.

If you have a job where you get to decide what you do, you are a creative, it work in creative and you can get better at it. I’m thrilled to say that the creatives workshop is back the most active of all the akimbo workshops. It’s about people who want to level up and make a difference with their creative work. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com, go for all. The upcoming workshops go make a ruckus.

In a previous episode, I talked about the tragedy of exaggerating small differences that when we expose large groups of people to supposedly rigorous tests based on supposed scarcity and pick the few that supposedly measure just a little bit better. We don’t make things any better. We make them worse because small differences aren’t worth exaggerating.

However when it comes Two percentages, which is just a form of a fraction. We’re doing the opposite and we do the opposite all the time. I put up a spreadsheet at akimbo Link in the show notes, you can find it there but you don’t need to look at a spreadsheet to understand what we’re going to go over today.

You don’t even need to stop driving. It comes down to two questions that I wanted to select the first one is this. Some people say, Say, why should we bother with an intervention that has a 90% success rate, when 99% of the people recover on their own? Well, first of all, 99, percentage of people may not die but we have no idea how long the after-effects of covid are. But, I’ll Grant you 99%. Let’s just use that as a number right now to start understanding, what happens when we do percentage. That percentage is what happens when fractions bump into fractions.

If 99% of the people recover, that means that once everyone in the u.s. is Afflicted with covid at some level or another, which will happen. Thanks to epidemiology. We know this. That means that approximately 3 million Americans will die. That’s a huge number if any other disease or meteorite strike had Add a number like that, everyone would be paying attention.

99% sounds like a great survival rate unless you’re one of the one percent. Okay, so now we say, but it doesn’t matter if there’s a 90% efficacy rate if 99% of the people recover. Well, when we start looking at fractions, it feels like that’s appropriate, but it’s not what you have to do. Is not compare fractions to one another.

You have to look at the base. So if we’ve got Million people in a population and of course, around the earth, it’s far, far more than that. I’m just picking the country where I know the numbers off the top of my head and for people in other places, particularly India, who are so under this, my heart goes out to you, but for now we’re going to say 99% if we have an intervention like a vaccine that has a 90% efficacy. Let’s just use the number 90 percent again. We’re not exactly sure, but 90%, % feels lower than my hunch.

What does that mean? It means that instead of three million people dying 300,000 people would die. It’s a 10x increase. It means that we are able to save the lives of two point seven million people. Because once you do the first bit of math the 90% then you have to do the second bit of math the 99% on the people who Left and only by multiplying it out on the addressed population. Can you get to the truth of who is affected? And who isn’t? It is a no-brainer. Even if it has a 50% efficacy rate, it is a no-brainer, it is one of the greatest medical interventions in human history.

If you can come up with a 50% efficacy rate on something that has a 99 percent survival rate, Okay, second question. That arrived in my inbox this morning, someone said to me, why should I bother getting the second vaccine? If it’s only going to increase the efficacy, by 15% to go from 80% to 95%, why bother with the second shot?

And the way many people are thinking about this is simple. If you get an 80% in a course you don’t like in school, it’s fine, don’t sweat it 80%, don’t worry about it. Going to 95% not worth the extra time, 80% is good enough but again, let’s do the numbers. If there’s 1,000 people in your town and there’s an 80% efficacy rate, it means 200, people are going to get sick.

If there’s a 95% efficacy rate, it means that 50 people are going to get sick from 200-250. So when we go from 80 to 95 percent, we’re not going up by 15%. Sent, we’re coming up with an intervention that is four times more beneficial to the population for time. If we could go to 99%, wow at 99% we go from 200 210, the math speaks for itself, there are two problems, the public has with public health, the first one is science, doesn’t look good. When you look at it in real time that if you look at all of the work that went into In the polio vaccine.

Well let’s go left. Let’s go, right, let’s go up, let’s go down. Oh finally, we found it. We forget all of that after science has demonstrated its method, it’s a little bit like driving around your neighborhood. The first week after you move in, you get lost all the time and then after a few weeks you know exactly where you’re going.

The problem with science being on the front page of the newspaper. Every day is simple. We’re getting to see how it’s made and science is about failing and failing. And Failing on our way to getting it, right? And then the second problem that Youmans have with public health, is it Public Health, by its nature deals with very large numbers of people?

People who might not be you in any given situation over longer periods of time and it involves fractions. And so Public Health gets us fluoridated Water Public, Health, gets a sewers Public, Health gets us, the The doctor should wash their hands before they do surgery. Public health is a miracle. If you could trade places with somebody from 1800 or 1600 or 1400 or yes, a thousand years ago, you’d freak out in about 30 seconds because public health is one of the triumphs of our time and we take it all for granted and the folks who do Public Health along with epidemiologists, they understand things like are not and fractions and the normal distribution and percentages and large populations. And the fact that 80 year olds are not the same as 20 year olds though, they might end up breathing the same air.

So I am not asking anybody to take these folks at their word, I’m asking them to do the math because the math speaks for itself.

Thanks for listening, here’s to Good Health, optimism and possibility. We’ll see you next time, we’ll be back in the Second with a couple questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility.

Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together. It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit, akimbo.com, go to find out about their new Upcoming workshops and how it all works.

Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the part of the scale. Entire sir warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex whoosah. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode about, fractions about marketing about status, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button to questions about status this week. They couldn’t be more different, and they couldn’t be more like, hey, Seth is Brandon from Montreal.

The question I have for you is how can we use status rolls to better allocate the talent of our Work on meaningful problems. There’s two thoughts that came to mind as I thought about this question. The first one is the way it how this generation is a lot less likely to want to work in the government.

Whereas that’s a very important sector where people need to take jobs in and we’re losing a lot of our best talent to other areas in other professions that the culture incentivizes us to do and rewards as for it like being offended financier on Wall Street, like being a lawyer. Like being a doctor, that’s one piece. The other piece, is how the culture, doesn’t particularly promote Blue Collar jobs either as a very good way to make a living, as a way to move up the status role. As you argue in many of your episodes, like being an electrician or being a plumber.

So, going back to this, how how do you think we can use status roles to better allocate the talent of our societies that we can work on meaningful problems and get things solved looking for it again, your thoughts? Thanks so much that. Thank you for this. It’s a really important. Didn’t incite and I think it’s worth a minute to understand how we got here, because 500 years ago, money hardly was a guarantee of status.

Perhaps you were in the clergy, perhaps you were a soldier in ancient Sparta. Perhaps you were royalty. These weren’t things that came from money. No money might come to you because you had this sort of status perhaps you were the most important. N’t woman in the village, perhaps you were the best athlete. There’s lots of things that give human beings status and money is a fairly new one.

Here’s the thing that money has going for it. That’s being repeated over and over again by The Chieftains of public companies who are being paid millions and millions of dollars a month. And by places, like Goldman Sachs that move money from one pile to another the Pretty simple which is there’s only one dimension Milton Friedman, told us what it is make as much money as possible.

It doesn’t matter if that person is immoral or unethical. Doesn’t matter if they cheat doesn’t matter if they’re tall, it doesn’t matter if they know how to play Billiards. All that matters is that they made a lot of money that we have been brainwashed into believing that rich and good where that rich and high status, might be the same thing and then we overlay on that. At celebrity, which is also brand-new hundred. Two hundred years old and celebrity often gets rewarded with money money.

Sometimes gets rewarded with celebrity and again, it’s just on one axis. Well current events, A Renewed, overdue focus on social justice, and treating people fairly on behavior in the workplace is waking up. A lot of people and they’re saying well maybe it’s not sufficient that you made a lot of money. So the pendulum swings one way or another, but to get to your question, the challenge is to elevate people who have made this selfless decision to do service and not to always add an asterisk to it about. Whether it’s enough service about whether they’re perfect enough about whether their entire background is without reproach. You’d have to be crazy to run for mayor or Senator or president or We’re or Member of Parliament because the media is just waiting to eat you up. It doesn’t matter that you’re doing real lot of good. What matters is you’re not perfect and none of us are. I’m certainly not.

And so, the challenge and the way we get around the challenge is, by going out of our way, to see and to elevate people who are doing things for the right reason who are doing things with care and kindness to make things better for People around them, not simply the short-term interests of their shareholders.

I don’t have a magic wand or I can’t just wave my hand and tell you how we can fix this. What I can say is the culture gets what it rewards and we need to figure out how to make it. So that Yale students don’t think the thing they’re supposed to do is go to Wall Street, and we have to figure out how to create cycles of when we talk about what we do at a cocktail party, the people who are actually doing something that Benefits more of us, get more of our attention. So thank you for noticing it and all I can hope is that one of the side effects, the byproducts of this Interruption, this tragedy, we’ve all been living through is that maybe we’re going to take a deep breath and measure something else.

Hi, Seth. My name is Pat Kelly and I run a wedding music and DJ company in the Philadelphia. Pennsylvania USA area and my twin brother and I perform live music and DJ For weddings and in listening to two different episodes that you have a wedding industrial complex and then the episode called a complex of complex has more recently.

I had two questions for you. Number one, we run a boutique wedding service and we really focus on the creative side of what we do and the artist side of what we do. And that attracts a lot of couples that like what we do. So number one, how do we attract more Artists and more creatives that want to do something similar.

How do we build groups of people that want to enter the wedding industry, even knowing that they might have to perform or play some music that they might not necessarily choose to but knowing that they would be able to make a living much better than maybe other sides of the music industry overall. And number two, how do we grow a company in a complex?

Because there are complexes that we all know of but growing a company in something that is big and, you know, has a lot of moving parts and that we don’t necessarily understand all of it. How do we grow a company in a complex without losing the essence of who we are? And what we do, I appreciate all that you do.

I appreciate the time that you take to answer these questions and have a great day. So yes you’ve guessed it. This is another question about status and to restate it, why would a musician hesitate to play weddings? If it’s going to help them make a living? And the answer is, they didn’t become a musician to make a living.

They they became a musician because they were looking for a certain kind of status. So, how would I reverse engineer this? Well, maybe I would use a little bit of the profit you organization makes to put on a multiband Third on a regular basis now that we’re getting out of our homes and maybe the only people who are allowed to perform at this prestigious Nightclub at this outdoor Festival. The only ones you invite to perform or the ones who also gig with your agency or somebody else who’s doing weddings that the price of being seen of getting on your sampler record of being promoted on Spotify of having a live crowd bigger than you’re used to the Price is you also have to pay your dues by playing weddings.

You’re not going to be able to elevate the status of the wedding band. That’s too much work for one organization, but you might be able to do is Elevate the status of musicians, who care enough about their work to also gig at weddings. And my hunch is that this might lead to more gigs for all of you because what many people who are getting married look for. When they’re doing, they’re insanely expensive weddings is celebrity and so if you have celebrity bands because you made them celebrities, they might be even easier for you to book.

And as for working within a complex, once you see the complex, you are working with the complex and that plays into exactly what you need.

So, you look around and say what do the floors? What do the bride’s want? What did the groom’s want? What does the mother, or the parent of the Bride want? What does the venue want everybody in this system wants something? And if you make it easy for them to get what they want, there are significantly more likely to do business with you.

Almost every shift that we have seen in the wedding industrial complex has happened because whoever brought that shift forward did it in a way that helped so many of the other. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you In a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason. Why. Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-practical-ethics-of-the-jet-ski- <==

In 1960 around the time that Tater Tots came on the scene Arthur, Julius introduced his new invention at the National Restaurant show. It was wet naps and history was being made. Hey it’s Seth and this is akimbo we’ll be back in a second to talk about jet skis. Leaded gas and flushable wipes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hi, spend it at you. And I’m here to talk to you about, how you can become a better. Storyteller storytelling is not an art reserved for the Chosen Few. It’s a skill that you can learn just like the students have taken part in the story skills. Workshop of done, actually I had a story to tell that was really important for me.

But also was going to be very, very important for people in the future. It’s been absolutely life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories. I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving as in the receiving, we got to not only learn about storytelling. We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life.

If you’re ready to become a better Storyteller. I hope you’ll join us. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a Ruckus. The wet nap was originally invented so that you could clean your hands after you ate ribs at a roadside joint, but it grew too many things. It includes baby wipes, and of course, flushable wipes.

Last year, sewer systems government agencies around the world spent more than a billion dollars. Cleaning Yup. From the side effects of people using flushable wipes. They create fatbergs giant. Glaciers stuck in the sewer system that caused enormous amounts of damage and yet people persist in using flushable wipes.

Okay, let’s go sideways for a minute. Clayton Jacobson in the 1960s was a motorcycle driver. He loved fast bikes. He liked hanging out on the beach with his friends. And he wanted to find a way to combine the beach, with motorcycling, putting together, a two-stroke engine, and some Ingenuity. He invented what ended up becoming the jet ski before that he license, his patents to Bombardier, the people who make snowmobiles, they figured it’s a snowmobile for the water, will give it a try, but then Yamaha came along, built the jet ski and for more than a dozen years. They dominated the market.

What about jet skis? Well, a jet ski gets about three miles per gallon in fuel efficiency and is as loud as a 737 jet.

I live about a mile from the beautiful Hudson River and on a quiet summer evening. It’s not hard at all a mile away to hear people racing their jet. Skis getting 3 miles per And racing through the Hudson, River causing, who knows what damage to the ecosystem. Okay, continuing we’ve got people on jet skis, we’ve got people with flushable wipes.

What about Thomas? Midgley, jr. I’ve mentioned him before he invented two things that changed the world. He invented leaded gas, which caused countless birth defects and illnesses around the world. And he also invented Freon gas, which powered air conditioners. And ripped a giant hole in the ozone layer.

So what do all of these things have in common? What they have in common is the problem with unchecked unregulated profit-seeking capitalism that because a company can make something that is legal and profitable sometimes they do and because individuals sometimes want to do something that is in their short-term interest regardless of whether helps or hurts their neighbors, sometimes they do, it’s not against the law, the feeling is, it’s okay to do it and if you live on a quiet Lake and somebody starts zooming around on a jet ski well at some point you say there goes to quiet, I might as well get one too and so the system begins to corrode in the case of flushable wipes, literally corrodes that what happens is every Single individual has a selfish short term incentive to go get these fairly inexpensive products that make their personal life just a little bit easier.

They don’t have to suffer all of the costs of their habit because it is shared by everyone in the population and want to everyone in the population looks around. And says, wait a minute, if I’m already paying to get these fatbergs removed from our sewers, I might as well join in as well. And so, in this short rant, what I’m trying to highlight is that while capitalists doing what they think is their part to profit maximize while consumers thinking they are doing their part by buying, what is in their interest in that moment, there is a third leg to the stool. We cannot and it has been demonstrated again. And again, get by with just two parts, we can’t build a sustainable resilient culture in which individuals do what they want for short-term benefit and which companies sell what they want for short-term profit.

The third leg is collective action that when we as a group decide, we’re going to ban Freon gas, we all suffer, the short term consequences of looking for an alternative that maybe isn’t as efficient, maybe isn’t as an expensive. But what we end up with for the long term, as a Chur is an ozone layer that doesn’t have a hole ripped in it.

When we banned leaded gas, people said we will never recover cars, will knock and not drive as well. Here, our Engineers are studying exhaust condensates that indicate the effects of tetraethyl lead, Engineers study these things in the laboratory. They study them out of the road to in passenger cars and trucks through tests under various kinds of rigid control situations.

The instruments in this test car, indicate and graphically record information on such factors as horsepower, fuel consumption, speed spark setting, that’s the way mechanical engineers working with chemists arrive, at conclusions, which result in better and better engine performances.

Well, it didn’t take that long and every consumer paid a small price, but in the long run, we all saved because illness went down. And so, for example, when we think about the jetski, the question is, should a few people be able to exercise their freedom to drive a A personal Boeing 737 airliner around on a lake or a river.

Causing hundreds thousands, tens of thousands of people to hear what they’re doing. Should they be allowed to have a two stroke motor that dumps? Effluent straight into the river with the fish that we hope will Thrive there? Well, it’s not against the law. So should they, should we rely on consumers to just do what’s right for everyone?

And companies when companies decide to Market something like the significant flush wipe industry, should that industry get together and fight government regulation. They are profiting from the fact that municipalities have to pay money. Our money tax, money to fix the sewers to clean things up. Is that a symmetric relationship appropriate? Or is it? Okay for Collective action, all of us.

To decide that the commons belong to all of us and to regulate who can use them in which way. And the thing about this conversation, the thing that makes it so interesting is that both extremes don’t work. We cannot regulate every single Choice, every purchase, every Behavior can’t be done. People have tried, it doesn’t work, but at the other end of the extreme, there is no threat. In culture on the planet that doesn’t already regulate behaviors of people that affect other people.

Every successful organized culture does this. So it’s not, are you on this extreme or that extreme? It’s where do we set the dial? How do we decide as a culture? Which behaviors which contributions, which takings are so asymmetrical and noxious that? We have to make a rule About them. And if we’re going to make a rule about them, collectively, how much of a voice should the manufacturers have in helping us make that rule that the cost of banning flushable wipes? For example, will largely fall on the Dozen manufacturers who make millions and millions of dollars a year selling them to people the individuals who might have to pay an extra dollar or two or ten or Twenty a year to find a substitute.

They Actually coming out ahead because their taxes are going to go down at least as much as their expenditures on something to replace. Flushable wipes, will go up. But the manufacturers they have a really significant incentive and as we’ve created cultures around the world, where manufacturers industrialists was incentives, are able to use money and lobbying to change the government’s Behavior.

We have an unfair fight and so we end up deregulating things that probably should be regulated. I for one am glad we don’t have leaded gas. I’m glad that Freon gas has been replaced. I’m glad that we’ve got at least a little bit more time to straighten up our climate mess. But when I sit on my back porch and I hear the jet skis, roaring a mile away that sound like a 737 or when I think about the hard-working people in the sewer whoo-hoo, Clean up those fatbergs because individuals left to their own devices often seek to maximize their own short-term gains.

Then I wonder if we’re doing a good enough job of making decisions about what all of us are going to do on behalf of all of us. So that’s a rant. I don’t have a specific answer but I thought I’d ask the question. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from Previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo. Cam go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Accept my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the Pain Scale. Entire sir warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex whoosah. Hi. This is Russell Aishwarya Rai. This is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you got questions about this or any previous episode, please visit akimbo link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2sd.

Click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can check out the show notes. Some weeks are deeper than others. A couple questions this week. Here we go. I said it’s John in the past. I’ve submitted questions here referring to myself. As John from Boston. But I’m actually from Arlington, Massachusetts a town, right? Outside of Boston, moving forward, would it make more sense from a brand standpoint to refer to myself as John from Arlington? Because it’s more specific or is John from Boston since more folks nationally and globally of heard of Boston.

I’m thinking about this in terms of your great saying that you can either fit in or stand out but not both and I’m also thinking about it in terms of my broader professional Pursuits. For example I consider myself The policy analyst in a system sneaker and I’m wondering if I should push myself more as a policy analyst, which many folks have heard of or is a systems thinker which is a bit more Niche.

Thanks so much for everything you do. Thanks for this John, I’m from Arlington to well, not born and raised there but I lived there for years and years. I remember the sandwich shop in the middle of town. I used to live right next to the volunteer fire department, which was a problem because they tested their horn, every Saturday at 6 a.m.

but that’s neither here nor there. I think the key the answer to both of the points you raised is this differentiation is selfish going out of our way, to Simply Be Different, doesn’t solve anybody’s problems. What we have instead is the opportunity to be generous and useful by talking about what we do where we’re from, how we do it in a way that helps the other person.

And so one of the That we get when we tell somebody where we’re from is a chance for shared experience your, from Arlington on from Arlington. Do you know Bob have you ever eaten at Luigi’s? You get the idea that’s why we do it. It’s a way of indicating something that we might have in common or something that we might not have in common with the person that we are talking with being distinctive in service of something in service of somebody else’s problems.

Nothing wrong with that. That that’s really helpful but being distinctive simply to be noisy, doesn’t really help and that gets to the thing you want to introduce yourself. As if the person you’re talking to doesn’t know what a systems thinker is doesn’t care. What a systems thinker isn’t doesn’t need a systems. Thinker saying your systems thinker is basically saying you don’t want to talk about what I do on the other hand, if you can introduce somebody to what you do, In a way that helps them, understand how you could be of use to them or to someone else.

Well, then you’ve got a shot at helping them at serving them as having dinner with a friend last night. And I said, well what you really do for a living, is your a weaver. And they looked at me a little side eye. And I said, yeah, you’re a weaver. You weave together, people and ideas, and opportunities.

And many of the folks, you meet need somebody who’s a weaver. If you tell them that your assistance, think are in strategy consultant that might not help because they might not have woken up this morning thinking that, that’s what they need, but if you can, honestly share with them insights and possibilities about how they can move forward and get to where they’re going, then you have a shot at actually being of service.

Hey sir, this is Cal from Chicago. My question is about to Cohen vaccine probability and risk. Going in my read based on your tone, whenever the vaccine has come up during recent episodes that you have protectively. Thank everyone who has access to the vaccine should sign up to receive it as soon as possible.

I’m not anti vaccine, I’m no expert but having done some digging into the data. My sense is that it’s over all safe at least in terms of the short term that leads us directly to the limitation. You don’t have any way of knowing the long-term effects even here. My best guess is that there’s nothing to worry about for most people.

Even so I have a hard time coming to grips with the idea that every single person shippers to vaccination right now we have no way of knowing the long-term effects there’s at least some chance that two or three, let alone ten years from now. We’ll find out that the vaccine has some significant long-term impact that in hindsight. We wish we’d have known about when weighing the risk going in.

Every person approaches the decision of whether or not to get back sedated with a unique background, life station, and risk tolerance. Given the long-term unknowns, don’t you think there is some place for a newest discussion, right? Accepting and respecting some individuals Choice. Hold off at least for a little while, many of us who agree that wearing Helmet or a seatbelt is common sense.

Also, avoid buying cars in their first model year after all. Right now, it’s hard to find a place where it even feels safe to have this conversation would just carrying its own right would greatly appreciate if you are willing to bring it to the for, thanks for all you do. Thank you for sharing this. It was kind and generous of you to bring this up and I am loathe to have political conversations here on this podcast because Politics as currently defined is about arguing with people without listening to them.

And we’re not going to go there. And that’s not what we do. But it is an opportunity to talk about a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with that. The first one is saying what we mean and meaning, what we say, and in our 200 dives into culture we’re usually talking about a disconnect between what we think we’re hearing and what we’re actually hearing about what we think we’re saying and what we’re actually saying understanding what we mean and what we want.

And so there are many people who are vaccinated Seen hesitant who are legitimately hesitant. They’re hesitant for a couple reasons. One is because they’re sort of afraid afraid of change. Afraid of the unknown, afraid of getting caught in a political conversation and it goes on and on, there is a magical book called on immunity by a woman of Eula biss and it’s so beautifully written and it is a history of multi Hundred Year history of how culture has danced around. And the issues, the issues of health and safety, and class and risk associated with vaccines.

And once we see it as a historical cultural construct, it is much easier to see past the issues in any given moment because what were not saying when we talk about this issue, when we pretend we’re talking about science, what we’re not saying is I’m afraid because we’re all afraid and fear. Fear can cause people to do surprising things. And fear can freeze Us in place.

And so if we begin by saying I’m afraid, can you teach me what I need to know? So that I won’t be afraid. We are in much better shape as a community. Then if we resort to either pretending to talk about science and statistics or resorting to talking about tribal politics because neither of those help if we can’t begin by acknowledging. And that we aren’t sure because not being sure is part of the human condition.

Now, there are several things and I’ve talked about this on the podcast that make conversations about public health fundamentally different than conversations about personal Behavior. Public health is, how fast can you drive in a school zone? Personal behavior is, should you wear a helmet when you’re riding a bike?

They’re Different kinds of conversations and we should be really clear about which one we’re having. This second thing that gets in the way is this issue of time as you have brought up really clearly and appropriately. Nobody knows what’s going to happen 10 or 15 or 20 years after people get a vaccine except people have been getting vaccines for a really long time and vaccines are some of the most studied Medical interventions in the history of humanity and what we know from those studies and from that history going back to before polio is that this is not a candidate for surprising long-term health problems.

The third thing, I think I’m up to the third thing. The third thing is we have a disconnect between when there is a problem and who is affected by that problem back. The school zone situation that it is entirely possible that someone who doesn’t get vaccinated is going to make someone else sick. And so that person who didn’t get vaccinated, doesn’t even know that that happened, which is part of the reason why it’s not appropriate to have a conversation about most people waiting because anyone who can get the vaccine has the ability to take themselves out. Out of the pool of people who spread the disease and that is a significant Public Health commitment that is part of what it is to be in culture.

Now, you correctly point out, that there are always trade-offs and there are always unknowns here is the Urgent question. How many people have died already? It’s in the millions that there are days in India where more than a thousand people are dying. I hope that we could visualize that if when somebody made a decision about having or not having the vaccine that person standing next to them would either die or not die instantly and violently getting the vaccine would be a really easy decision.

Someone opens a window on a jet and the air is all racing out. It’s really easy to make the decision to close the window. Even if that a person is objecting about their personal freedom, to open the window because they are right in front of us, is a matter of life and death. And so what we are seeing right now is a really easy calculus and the calculus is this.

We know the efficacy of the miracle of the vaccines that are available right now. The efficacy is as high as most vaccines that have ever been tested. We also know that Danger that non-vaccinated populations face. It is really significant. It’s not about whether or not you’re going to get a little bit of a rash on your skin or whether or not your hair is going to fall off. This is a matter of.

Are you going to be dead or not? And the odds of it hurting or killing somebody who’s over 60 are dramatically bigger than they are for someone who’s 20 and those numbers may change over time but what we’ve I’ve got here is a classic public health problem and what makes something a public health problem is no, we cannot know.

But yes, we have an obligation. There are a few people who for pre-existing medical reasons, cannot contribute to the culture and we have enough room for those people to be quote, freeriders unquote, because when the rest of us show up and do what we can for all of us. We come out ahead but it begins with fear and shaming. People isn’t a good way to get rid of fear.

But on the other hand, People Like Us, do things like this, the more we can normalize Behavior. The more we can standardize around what it is to be a member of community. The more likely it is that Community will form just as we don’t have people recklessly speeding in school zones just as we don’t have people strip mining. In National Parks, we have come up with rules that enable us to live in community and compared to most of the rules, this one is particularly cut-and-dry and particularly easy to measure.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean that there is no fear. I get that. And I hope that you will read. This is book because it may very well have the tone and the thoroughness that I can’t possibly deliver in. Podcast, but I truly appreciate you caring about this and thank you for listening.

We’ll see y’all next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you In a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -fueling-the-engines-of-division- <==

The Clearfield public library in Williamsville, New York was a great place to fall in love with books.

If you walked in and ask the friendly librarian about say science fiction, she would walk you over to a section that started with Asimov and ended with zelazny and if you were diligent reader, it would take you about two years to work your way through it. Hey it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a minute, to talk about the algorithms of division, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s a chance to build the project that you’ve dreamed of to find Independence. To make a difference. You can be a bootstrapper, but it helps to know the best practices. I hope you’ll check it out. Akimbo.com / go.

The Clearfield Public Library, is a fine metaphor for the way media used to work TV networks in the United States. There were three of them four or five. If you count it generously, libraries built the Dewey Decimal System to organize their books, but do has a finite number of books in the library 10,000, 20,000, maybe a big Library might have as many as 40,000 books in it, but it was finite.

If you are the librarian and you were Kicking books to be in the library. If you are Fred Silverman who was NBC’s, genius, programmer in the 1970s and you were picking shows to put on TV, you had the same mindset, which is there are constraints, and the constraint to revolve around the fact that you don’t have a lot of shelf, Space TV network can only show one show at a time and there’s only a few networks on the air, a library, can put some books in the science fiction.

Fiction section something between Asimov and zelazny but they certainly can’t put every book in that section and then think about the cost to the customer. If you go to a bookstore, you have to buy the book pay for it before you read it. If you go to the library, sure there’s no incremental cash cost but you can only take out a finite number of books and you can only read one book at a time.

And so yes, we judge a book by it’s cover. Because the cost of sampling is pretty high for a TV network. The stakes were far higher because not only are they spending millions of dollars to make a show, but the opportunity cost was huge because if they made 10 episodes of a bad show and didn’t ignore sunk costs and ran them, they would be losing market, share to the other two networks and that market share was measured in tens of millions of dollars.

So these constraints It’s all conspired to push toward the middle. That the purpose of Discovery was to turn someone into a fan. It’s true, but not to turn them into a fan based on division, but to turn them into a fan based on connection there with the TV networks want, is for people to watch a show because everybody else is watching it, the library can’t do that because only one person can read any given book at a time, but the Really likes it. When it knows which books to buy that. Buying a book putting it on the shelf of the library and having no one take it out for three years.

That’s a failure better to group people’s interest in two broad categories and then hit the highlights of those categories. So that user satisfaction can go up. If you go to a library today and say to the librarian, I’m looking for a book on how to sharpen tools, I’d like it to be Illustrated. And at least 300 pages long, the odds are, they don’t because they don’t have a business model that supports carrying something that’s that obscure.

So, you know where I’m going at first, which is the long tail shows up, which is Amazon shows up, which is Netflix shows up Suddenly shelf. Space is not a constraint suddenly, not only does digital make the warehouse infinitely big but it also means that if you can aggregate a large It, you can carry not just a few books on sharpening tools, but every book on sharpening tools, not only can you carry one or two or three Italian documentaries, but you can carry all of them.

And so, iTunes shows up with its long tail of Music. The last stats that I heard are that millions of tracks in the iTunes Store have been listen to just a few times which makes perfect sense because it doesn’t cost. Anything to put a track there and it does cost something to listen to all of them.

Okay, so far so good. This was celebrated by lots of people including me because if we open the doors, Gatekeepers aren’t deciding what’s important and what’s not readers, get defined. What they truly want viewers, can engage in the things they want to see. And so, out of nowhere, a guy named SCI makes a video called Gangnam Style.

It seen by more than a billion people. That’s insane. He does that without a lot of fancy Gatekeepers with nothing in the way of promotion. It’s possible because The Gatekeepers weren’t there, but then a shift happens and the shift is this, what would happen if the librarian at the Clearfield Public Library?

Got a commission and what if that person’s commission was based, not only on how many books It’s do you take out, but how deep do you go into the edges of taking out books? Because a whale someone who reads a lot of books is easier to profit from then, someone who just dabbles and shows up every once in a while. How do we turn people from dabblers into whales? How do we gain their commitment to our platform and encourage them to go deeper and deeper and deeper to sample, more things.

Also, if you’re a creator of content, And we start paying you with ego points because you have followers or actual cash because you are attracting people to what you have to say, some of you will decide to make something for the mainstream, but you will soon discover that the mainstream is really crowded and it’s very hard to have a shot at all of getting attention and loyalty for the mainstream. But as I wrote about in purple cow 15 years ago, The edges otaku Purple, Cows remarkable things. Things were there are few substitutes. You might not get a lot of people but the people you get are really into it.

And so the algorithm arrives, 25 years ago, Patty maze a professor at the MIT media lab working with several collaborators came up with firefly networks. Originally called Homer, it was the birth of collaborative filtering Collaborative, filtering is better known as people who like this also like that.

And you’ve seen that everywhere you look on the web, this idea that it can recommend something to you, that you might be interested in is a revelation. But in order for it to be interesting and not just trivial what it needs to leave out. Are the things that everyone else likes to. So if you’re watching Seinfeld and it says people Woohoo, like, Seinfeld. Also, like Everyone likes Raymond, you haven’t learned anything at all because it hasn’t given you any specific insight. And so the algorithm is tuned to find the specifics to take you further down a rabbit hole.

And the rabbit hole is wonderful when, for example, you’re exploring Jazz, and you’re listening to a lot of art Blakey. And it says, oh, by the way, less, Can has a song that people who like art Blakey really like and now you’re stunned to discover Les McCann and Eddie Harris live at Montreux. That’s a big win.

And so collaborative, filtering opens the window to go deeper into our hobbies and our passions, my question is, what happens when we aim it at things like racism, like conspiracy theories, like anger, like violence. Like the way people interact with With pornography or fetishes. It’s one thing to encourage people to go further into whatever hobby makes them happy.

But what happens when those Hobbies start to divide us what happens when those Hobbies start to have violent side effects? I don’t believe that the algorithm was built with intent. I believe. What happened was hundreds or thousands of programmers all incentivized by simple metrics? Ended up experimenting with algorithms and human nature until they hit upon something that worked ever better than they expected. And what they figured out is this if you can find someone who has a little bit of interest and somehow radicalize them into someone who has a lot of interest that pays off far more than satisfying. The needs of someone who’s a little interested and then pushing them back to the mainstream that if you can’t, Take someone who’s mildly interested in Woodworking and turn them into someone who understands why you should use a piece of glass, to put the final Edge on a blade for your spokeshave.

That person is going to go deep. And when they go deep into your long tail, your company benefits, your stock price goes up and so Pinterest turns people who were mildly interested in seeing someone else’s couch into people, You are obsessed at going ever deeper into what a Chesterfield is and why it matters.

And so Politico says, oh all you wanted to know is who want some election. They take that person and push them further and further and further down the rabbit hole because it’s their rabbit hole. And they don’t want you to say, oh, no. Now I’m going to go read about Dune the movie because they don’t come out ahead. If you read about doing the movie, they need you to get deep to become radical about the way you think about politics. To Doom, scroll to go, ever deeper into the minutiae.

And so, as Chris Anderson pointed out years ago, the long tail is real. Some pundits, dismissed it early on because there wasn’t enough math to show that the long tail was paying off, but now clearly the long tail is all of it. That hits aren’t what they used to be, but the number of people who are creating for selfish reasons out on the long tail keeps increasing.

And so the algorithm Is working. It is working to radicalize the people who engage with any form of media, to push them deeper down, whatever Rabbit Hole they were looking at. So first, you want to look for a puppy but then it got a hint that you were interested in little tiny dogs and then it pushed you towards teacup dogs. And the next thing, you know, you’re not happy unless you own a dog that weighs less than 2 pounds.

Because the algorithm pushed you there, the pet store never would have The pet store would have said. We got for pets. Which one do you want? Take what? You want? A lizard. We have one of those too. But once we have an infinite amount of shelf space because we’re all connected digitally, the algorithm does with the algorithm, does it divides us? It divides us because there’s a profit in doing so not because it’s the right thing to do but just as mass media pushed us toward mass and just as the typical Supermarket pushed us toward ketchup, long tail media pushes us to The edges and so now, we need to ask a couple questions.

The first one is, are we glad are we glad that this pernicious algorithm touches every part of our Lives? Whether it’s dating or entertainment, or Home Improvement or how we spend our money, or what we retire on or politics pushes us over and over again apart away from Mass away from the middle is that helping and If you’re an investor the question is, okay? But for the people who really push this Facebook Twitter, Youtube, the three biggest ones. Is it enough already?

What would happen if they simply changed the algorithm? What would happen if somebody now with intent, a human being not an evolutionary algorithm, but a person said, we’re going to turn the algorithm upside down that every chance we get. We’re going to push people back. Toward the center. What would happen if you had a work to find the stuff that was way out on the fringes and that the algorithm wasn’t always pushing you for deeper or more.

Well, one thing that would happen in the short run is usage, would go down a bit but because these companies really don’t have any competitors. That’s okay, because they’ll still do fine. The real question is, it’s your job, but it’s also the way you you’ve chosen to spend your life that the people I’m talking to in this podcast, for Aunt, the people who run YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, don’t need to work for a living, not one of them.

So at some point they have to stop saying, I’m just doing my job. At some point, they can’t say, this is what the shareholders want because responsibility kicks in. And I’m wondering if we thought hard about what responsibilities, the people who control? The algorithm have even if they didn’t make it on purpose, Google has been hiding behind their algorithm for a really long time.

But every once in a while there’s enough of an outcry that human being goes in and changes it around, I think there’s enough of an outcry right now about division to say you know what, this division, it’s not making our lives better. It’s not leading to the outcomes. We were hoping for it is not giving us. Peace of mind or creating a world, we are proud of what would happen if we turned the algorithm upside down because I know we can it is not one of Newton’s laws of physics. It is a choice and simply because we didn’t make the choice, doesn’t mean a choice can’t be made now and there’s nothing stopping three or four or five people. That’s all it would. Take to make the decision to take responsibility for fundamentally turning the algorithm upside down.

Because there is scarcity, the internet made a mistake about scarcity. It looks like infinite shelf space in infinite choice and an infinite. Number of creators means there’s no scarcity. But there is because there’s a scarcity of trust, and there’s a scarcity of connection. Peace of mind is more scarce than ever before.

I for one would prefer more of all three. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second. With a question from A listener. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo Dot. I’m /. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new product. This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam this is Rex. Hey sup hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is Is and that completes my question, I love to hear from you.

If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006, click the appropriate button. One question to get us going this week. Here we go. I said this is ramen and North Carolina. Thanks so much for this podcast. There’s a long time listener. I’m familiar with your critiques of Google and Facebook and the practices of those companies that have had a negative impact on our society and culture.

But while I’m sure I’m forgetting something, I don’t think I’ve heard you say quite as much about the impact of Amazon. Beyond the great point you made about the role of the Kindle. In remaking, the book industry and Amazon’s role in the in the long tail. In general, you have made admirable use of the Amazon platform as part of your book launches and sometimes have links to Amazon them in your blog posts.

I live in a rural place and I’m certainly not immune to the incredible convenience of the everything store. Or but we also know that Amazon has been tough competition for local businesses of all sorts and also small suppliers. I feel like Amazon kind of personifies the race to the bottom that you often talk about.

And we hear a lot of stories about Amazon warehouses and the treatment of their workers that don’t make me feel all that great about giving them my money. So my question is really just this. What are your thoughts about the impact of the Amazon Behemoth on our culture? You so much. Thank you for this question. If you go to Relentless.com, you’ll see that it still takes you to amazon.com Relentless. Was the very first name for Amazon, and Jeff wasn’t kidding when he named it that first, let’s do a flashback to 25 or 28 years ago back. Then in the 90s there were more than 10,000 independent bookstores. There are still quite a few.

Stores, but not enough, but Back Then, There Were well, over 10,000 of them. If we figure that the typical bookstore had 30,000 books in it, some had far more than that some had less, but let’s pick 30,000. That means that there were thirty thousand times ten thousand or 300 million books sitting in bookstores waiting for somebody to walk in and buy one.

At a retail price of $20, each that’s six billion dollars worth of inventory. Just waiting for somebody to go to the right, bookstore on the right day to awry a book that’s in stock. This is clearly incredibly inefficient. And when Amazon showed up their original offering of any book you want, we’ll get it for. You was a godsend for many readers.

While the typical bookstore might have had 25 or 30,000 bucks in a big bookstore, might have had double that there were millions and millions of books in print. I still remember hearing from my mom in the 90s about a phone call that she got she ran an independent bookstore at a museum in Buffalo New York and the phone call was hey where this new company called Amazon? We think you have a copy of this art book.

If we send You a FedEx label and pay the full retail plus. You’re handling costs, will you ship it directly to our customer and with a smile? She did just that because the goal of most bookstores was to get people the book that they wanted. So when Amazon showed up to the marketplace, they were seen as a net benefit, but then the Relentless part kicks in, and the Prince, I think between Amazon and I’ve given talks and have known folks there for a long time, and Google, and Facebook also places where I’ve engaged is that Amazon is completely up front and clear about some of the basic principles that they’re operating under. They are Relentless and the mistake that we made the challenge that we had the historical accident. Is this 450 years? We have based the center of our Civic culture on the village that sells stuff on retail that is what separates a fun thriving, exciting Community from one that we really don’t understand where the middle of it, is that it’s the stores. It’s the malls, it’s the shops that people are paying attention to. They are our streetscape.

Not only that, but we use the money that these Merchants earn mostly to pay the landlords and landlords use the money to do. Upkeep. But we also have them pay taxes and we use those taxes to pay for all sorts of Social Services and the other center of our communities. Our cities and our towns is office space.

Well the pandemic has upended. The idea of office space particularly white collar workers who aren’t in a factory who can show the zoom and Amazon and a few others have upended the idea of Retail now. Back again, 20, something years ago, I gave a talk at Walmart. I believe the year was 1999 at the time and still to this day Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, but a long time ago, 22, 23 years ago, Amazon was a tiny blip.

So I went there to give a speech in Bentonville Arkansas and there was a banner across the offices of Walmart’s digital operation. And it’s a You can’t out Amazon Amazon, even 20 years ago, the biggest retailer in the world was afraid of Amazon’s Relentless focus on a few metrics. So a couple of these metrics, the first one is this, it is unusual for an innovator to also be the lowest price and doing both of those things at the same time, while also consistently and persistently, being the top rated retailer in America for customer service, those three things in one place on heard of.

And to do those three things, a Relentless approach to metrics to churning it out to using, wooden doors, as desks to lowering overhead, to having a Relentless mindset, that says, if we can offer our customers off the charts, Tumor service with no questions, asked, if we can offer them the lowest price, they can find and the best selection, and we can do it. While innovating, it’s going to be really hard for someone to stop us and while they were doing that cities and towns in the United States and in lots of other places around the world, didn’t charge them any taxes.

And so, a hollowing out occurred because Amazon was really good at giving people what they want. Aunt. And if you give people what they want, they will often take it. Because if in the short run or even the medium run, they come out ahead. They can get what they want. They can have more selection, they can pay less, it’s more convenient and faster.

Well a lot of people are going to take them up on that. So one defense that Amazon has for their Relentless approach is they have created an enormous amount of wealth for their customers because their customers get more stuff for Money and in less time but of course. Yes, there are side effects to any sort of growth like this.

One of them is that the local retailer can no longer be as local as they used to be? And our Civic engagement, which depended on the local retailer not just sponsoring the baseball team, but being in, and of the community is seriously threatened because we built a big Part of that cohesion around the town square and the stuff you can buy there.

The other thing that’s going on which as a cultural critic, if that’s what I am, I have commented on before is that Amazon made the decision a really long time ago, not to sell anything, they sell everything but they don’t sell anything.

What do I mean by that? What I mean is there’s a job called a merchant and what the Merchant does is decide what to feature, decide what to promote, decide what to give an end cap to decide what to publish that the acts of merchants, as being members of the community, determine what our culture is like, because the merchants particularly the local merchants or someone like a book. Publisher says, I’m going to have to live with the consequences of promoting this thing over that thing.

And what gets promoted, whether it’s by a program director, at a local radio station, or by a local retailer determines, what we engage with, and what we engage with determines, what the culture is like, well, Amazon, and I’ve seen this first hand up. Close doesn’t have dials for most of its people to turn to shift. What’s getting promoted and what’s not?

Yes, there is definitely an algorithm at Amazon and it is Wired to increase profitability but it is not responsible. Apparently, no one is responsible for what are we promoting? What are we leading to? And so if we look at something as simple as the Kindle Store the single best way to get a book to be a best-seller on the Kindle is not to go, do a bunch of meetings, do a bunch of promotion, figure out how to get the local bookstore owner to like you.

Though. Amazon has spent years? Making authors, think that have Amazon likes them. Something good will happen instead. It’s to find your smallest viable audience, go way out on the long tail. Find a coherent cohesive group of people and give them exactly what they want. And at some level is freedom, this freedom for all ideas to Bubble to the surface based on just the merits, not on the Judgment of some Merchants feels.

Attractive, but it can spiral out of control. So the good news is you get something like the instant pot, the instant pot, a sensation, a bargain, a game changer in your kitchen. I strongly recommend you drop the 89 bucks and give it a. Try would have been impossible before Amazon because the amount of heft that, you would have to have to get enough shelf, space to do enough promotion to keep that shelf, space was so big that it’s unlikely. That the Tiny company that launched the instant pot could have done it, but with the magic of Amazon, selling everything instead of anything.

Well, once you had a hundred customers who were busy talking about it over, and over again, to lots of people, suddenly, you have a hit on your hands. So this Relentless approach creates all sorts of fascinating side effects because part of it is based on an assumption that the other elements Of our governance of our culture will fill in the gaps.

Yes. The cities and towns need to speak up and say you know those trucks you’re sending into our town to deliver everything. Well they’re welcome, but they’ve got to pay their fair share their fair share of what it costs us to have safe, clean places to live roads that they can access and on and on that, if institutions don’t push back well, then Amazon will continue to be more will Atlas number two, we are used to significant organizations to have local roots and to acknowledge those Local Roots as they stand up as a corporate citizen again.

Maybe it was a mistake for a hundred years to count on corporate citizenship, maybe what we should have done as a community is that these are the rules and if you want to focus on making a profit, go ahead, we’re going to focus on making sure that the taxes you pay. Are put to good use not just sponsoring a local baseball team, but paying for the library and figuring out how to create Civic engagement that isn’t dependent on the local Corporation.

But as Amazon has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, they haven’t mostly done that. What Amazon has mostly done is say we are here to serve our customers and then we’re here to serve our shareholders. And finally we will make sure that our employees Are paid at least enough to get them to come work for us, but probably not a lot more.

And the employees, in senior roles are getting stock options which get paid off when the shareholders come out ahead. So it is a very clear, well, labeled form of corporate capitalism, which is, we know exactly why we are here, how we are being measured and how we’re turning the dial.

Now, I think It wouldn’t cost them very much to be a little bit less Relentless that when we look at some of the choices they make, whether it’s about DRM or how things show up in the store or how people are paid, there are ways that Amazon could back off just a little bit to be a better corporate citizen, but I think part of what Amazon is trying to do is to make it clear that they know exactly why they are here, and that they are relentless.

In reaching their goals turning the crank over and over again. So, I am not a dyed-in-the-wool Amazon fan, but I’m also clearly saying sure I’ve been buying from them that as somebody who has books to sell on behalf of my publisher and promote, I’ve raised more than $100,000 that I’ve donated to charity through their affiliate programs as an author Amazon made it significantly easier for me to bring books too. My readers, then all of the years I worked with Barnes and Noble and the other independent bookstores because their agenda wasn’t the same as my agenda, or even my Publishers agenda. But I think it’s worth distinguishing this from Google because Google relentlessly lies about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

And quietly behind the scenes, shifts the user interface, and their algorithms to benefit them, not their users Facebook, which That out to connect people to weave together possibility and culture has done a terrible job of minimizing the negative side effects that many of their algorithmic choices have led to.

And so I could go on and on running a big company isn’t easy changing. The world is fraught and there are side effects. And the question is who is responsible for limiting? No side effects and making it. So that you make things better and then you found them, I’m not sure anybody knows the answer but in the case of Amazon at least, they’re very clear about the game. They’re playing.

Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right is Puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, what are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the were one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

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==> -getting-stuck-on-a-broken-cycle- <==

I got tricked, I got tricked by a conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory but an actual conspiracy one that didn’t cost that much to build in one that even after the conspiracy is exposed. I still want to be tricked by hey it’s Seth. And this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk. About Plastics. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It’s a chance to build the project. That that you’ve dreamed of to find Independence to make a difference. You can be a bootstrapper, but it helps to know the best practices. I hope you’ll check it out. Akimbo.com / go.

I just want to say one word to you, just one word.

Yes, I am listening. Just so you Plastics. I wasn’t the only one who was tricked. You were probably trick to you. Might still be tricked. The question is not did the Plastics industry conspire to trick people in the United States and around the world into believing that Plastics could be effectively recycled. That’s a fact, you can find all the details at a Kimbo dot link. There’s been some great reporting by Frontline and NPR on this topic.

My question is, why did it work? Why does it still Work. Why is it that with just 50 million dollars a year? Which for reference is one twentieth of a billion dollars which to put it in perspective is less than 5% of the amount of money spent on the last presidential election. The United States that small amount of money was able to put a blue bin just about everywhere we look and it was one that enabled the Plastic industry to keep growing to the point where it’s almost a trillion In dollars a year in Revenue.

The truth is of course, as you can discover with just 10 minutes of reading, the Plastics can’t be recycled that fewer than 10% of all the Plastics that were made in the last 50 years have been recycled it turns out chemically that Plastics break down. Every time we try to recycle them that even if we could sort them perfectly wash them perfectly, prepare them perfectly. It would still be Bur to make new plastic. And so, the problem of course, is, where do we put the plastic we’ve used? And why did it work so well, why even after I know the truth, do I persist in feeling the itch to put that plastic bottle into that blue bin?

There were signals, there were stories and it gets to Yuma nature. The thing is that yuman beings at least for my entire life. Time have traded almost anything for convenience to move. Has pointed out that people will instantly give up their privacy. Their well-being, lots of long term upsides for convenience now, and so the industrial system around us, the ratchet of capitalism. Figuring out how to get a little bit ahead. Make a few extra bucks, because if you don’t, somebody else will that system has offered us convenience. And one thing can be said for plastic containers, they’re convenient, they’re flexible resilient lightweight easy to carry easy to store, they don’t break down over time. If you drop one on the floor doesn’t shatter their pretty when they’re on the Shelf. Plastic containers have informed our lives. There weren’t any plastic containers, 80 years ago and now there are plastic Ears everywhere.

Something shifted. And what shifted was a technology came along that was convenient, but in the back of our heads, we had a hunch that there was a catch and the catch was we really don’t want to litter now. We were taught not to litter by a nationwide campaign in the 1960s before. Then it wasn’t uncommon for someone to eat a McDonald’s hamburger and just throw Bag out the window when they were done.

But we came up with a cultural standard People Like Us, do things like this People Like Us. Don’t throw garbage in the street. We don’t Litter. What about then all of these plastic bottles. What about the 2 liter Pepsi that cost 89 cents? Where do we put the bottle when we’re done? And so the reason the Plastics industry didn’t need to spend a lot of money at first Is that we wanted a way to assuage our guilt. We wanted a way to get to convenience without feeling like a selfish jerk.

They look empty yet. It’s anything but trash it’s full of potential and act upon making sure that the potential isn’t thrown away. We find near the country’s largest most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help Valuable uses and rolls. Instead of filling valuable land at Dupont. We make the things that make a difference.

And the amount of effort required to recycle, a plastic bottle is exactly the right amount of effort. Composting, really hasn’t caught on because composting is a pain in the neck because composting takes time because composting might smell because composting brings bugs a lot. But recycling, the convenience the virtue of putting out two bins instead of one, not that big a hassle.

And now Off the hook, I get to feel like a good person and have my convenience at the same time, it is not clear that the people who were responsible for this conspiracy understood human nature, this deeply, they were flailing around, they were the gas companies in the oil companies. The oil companies aren’t known for being brilliant, marketers.

But in this case, they were brilliant marketers. But then we need to compound it, because it’s still not convenient. Agent, if the town doesn’t come and pick up the recycling, but how to get the town to do that? Well, they needed two things to happen. The first is they needed a small group of people in every town who cared about the environment to stand up and argue for this expense.

And the second thing they needed was more and more citizens willing to participate in recycling, the two of them back and forth and back and forth. In a virtuous cycle. There are people who are environmentally inclined and so, When the oil companies hiding behind clever names and lobbying campaigns, came to them with something that felt right.

Let’s take this junk and not dump it in the ocean. Let’s put it back into the industrial system that created it. Many environmentalists said, sure we’re behind that and then the second part, the people who make Plastics have influence over the companies that are selling it to you. And so they started putting something At the bottom of the container, the recycling symbol and a number.

And the number was just complicated enough. Just inconvenient enough that we felt like we were doing the right thing by spending one or two cycles to imagine this one can be recycled or this one can’t or if we were lazy just recycle them all because after all there’s a recycling symbol on the bottom and so it all got dumped into the oil recycling system. The system that was some success can recycle glass or Metals, can’t deal with this Deluge of plastic. And so, we shipped it all to China and then China stopped taking it.

And so, we started dumping it in landfills, but before we dumped it in landfills, we washed it very carefully at Great expense in our corporate facilities. You might be seeing how deep this goes because you don’t need Very many people who are into recycling as a cultural totem to shame. People who aren’t into taking action, it’s just easier to put your plastic bottles into a container label for them, then to deal with someone hassling you because you threw them in the garbage.

And so the ratchet continues to turn because culture runs deep and people like us do things like this is important. It establishes. Who we are? It gives us Us peace of mind. And once we’ve made a decision once we’ve decided that we’re the kind of person that sacrifices just a bit of convenience to be part of us.

It’s really hard to give that up because of some costs because if we did it yesterday were we wrong to do it yesterday? Or is it just easier to keep doing it tomorrow? And so in the face of this information it’s still hard for me to walk past. Recycling bin. Even though I know that we were scammed, that there really is no upside to recycling this plastic bottle because I’m not really recycling. It back to our story, all of which leads to this cycle. This cycle of here’s something that’s convenient. And here’s a way to not feel guilty about it.

Here is a way for your government to spend money, to send a truck to your house. So it’s more convenient. So that You can put something into the blue bin and not feel guilty about it and around it goes. And despite the fact that this is all been exposed, the Plastics industry is doing it again. They just launched a new campaign because when we bring together the heroes of today to drain to build and help our cities, our communities, and our neighborhoods in Peru, We can do something truly incredible.

Let’s be the ones that came together to change the world. This new campaign, these quote Investments on quote aren’t going to keep plastic out of the waste stream and they’re not going to keep plastic out of the ocean. What they do is they give the convenient seeking consumer a way to feel better about his or her choices.

So all of this is a way of understanding how our culture tends to work. One thing that we do as humans is we want to absolve ourselves of sins and we put them all into a big bucket and let that bucket be held by some one else. Some other organization, some other government entity a scapegoat perhaps but it’s not our problem.

We’re just doing what comes easy to us. What’s convenient? What’s a little We’ve got lives to live families to feed work to do. We’re not going to spend all our time, seeking out a glass bottle. And so people like the Plastics industry, which have built this conspiracy continued to churn out more plastic than ever before, because that’s how our culture works.

Because in the short run, everyone is doing what they are supposed to do every single entity involved. In this story, The Theists the oil Executives, the shareholders, the people, at the government hearings, the consumers to harried moms and dads at the supermarket buying yogurt. Every single person is acting in their short-term best interests.

And the challenge that we have as architects of culture is to figure out what to do about that when the externalities are not built in. No one is actually paying the cost of billions of pounds of plastic floating. Around in the ocean. This idea that satisfying our short-term selfish interests will eventually work itself out is the undoing of our culture because culture works.

When we actually leaned against our short-term selfish incentives, that’s the hard work of changing. What people like us do when we do things like this. So we’re going to have to figure out in this case and in so many other cases. Has a different story. A story that resonates in a different way that opens the door for a forward ratchet. That doesn’t involve more single-use, plastic that doesn’t involve lobbyists and conspiracies and stories we want to hear but stories that aren’t true.

And yet, even as I say this, I really want to be able to recycle plastic recycling. Plastic would make my life so much easier and eliminate the guilt. That’s associated with buying Something that’s more convenient cheaper, lighter easier to use and more resilient one thing’s clear, Seth Godin changing, the way he buys things in plastic is going to make no difference whatsoever.

And how the world deals with this problem? We need a centralized long-term thoughtful approach that uses Market power to shift the ratchet in the other direction. What we learned. When we raised the tax on cigarettes was pretty clear. Whew. Were people smoke cigarettes? The market pays attention to how much something costs.

And if we’re really serious, about changing the flow of plastics, through our waste stream, the simple direct and effective answer is to change how much they cost, because once we do that, the market will wake up and pay attention and figure out a way around it. So know the market doesn’t solve every problem.

But our culture, Our culture is held hostage by the market, because we’ve been inundated for so many years by effective stories that are about how we buy and how we sell because that’s how so many of us, keep score. And if we don’t find a solution that understands respects and dances with the market, it’s no solution at all.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is the time to learn? A new way, to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp, an independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo do I’m /. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new product. This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam. This is Rex. Who’s gonna hi? This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question as you know I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or anything previous please, visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki M Bo link-16, click the appropriate button.

We’re going to do two questions this week. Here we go. Hey Seth it’s Nathan from Jackson Mississippi. I just got finished listening to your fractions episode from last Jake and I have to say, I think it’s my favorite akimbo episode so far and I don’t really know why. But it got me thinking about your other episode math class is hard.

And of course, my brain kept going and wondering why these ideas. These mathematical principles practices ways of looking at the world, you know why they aren’t taught. And so, I had the question. What would a Seth Godin math class look like Curious to hear your thoughts? Thanks for everything. You do. You’re an inspiration every day.

Thank you for this Nathan. I really appreciate it. I’ve given some thought to this and I’m lucky enough to know Annie Duke former World Poker champion and author of a best-selling book about making decisions her new book which is an out. Yet is really Exciting as well. Her thought is that we need to teach kids to make better decisions. So the first thing I would do is replace half of all the time that’s spent on math and instead spend that time on decision making I would start in kindergarten and teach decision-making as a craft because through the lens of decision-making, we can teach an enormous range of useful practical. And academic skills that will help the citizens of the future cope with a world. That’s going to be filled with choices but we still need math, not arithmetic, because arithmetic is sort of an epic waste of time in a world where we all have a device in our pocket that does arithmetic better and faster than we ever could. But math and math is not 3. Plus 3 math is understanding the concepts around abstract numbers And the best way I can think to do that inspired by any Duke is starting in second grade. I’m going to leave the first graders out of this.

We should start teaching kids. How to play poker and there should be five or ten years of Poker playing going on in school because not only will poker-playing enroll kids in a journey because the enrollment is critical. It’s not about. Will this be on the test? It’s will this help me win the next round of Of Poker and unlike soccer, or other sports.

It’s a Level Playing Field, the smallest kid, the youngest kid shortest kid has just as much of a chance of winning a game of poker as anybody else in the classroom. And once you start playing poker, not only do you need to learn decision-making but quickly you start understanding probability and fractions and percentages, and the rest of it, after five years, Years of playing poker, kids aren’t going to memorize what to do with a Full House. What they’re going to understand is an inherent Vision, a way of seeing that lets them embrace all the stuff that the world is going to put in front of them. Sure. After that there’s plenty of room to polish kids who are enrolled in this journey to help them get to things like algebra and trigonometry.

But let’s start by teaching kids to love math. Math. The way some of us do, thanks for this. I said it’s Dom here from Queensland Australia. I’ll listen to your recent episode about jet skis and fatbergs. With particular interest, I working field of outdoor recreation and my organization is an advocate for outdoor activities.

One of our regular rephrases appropriate activities, inappropriate locations. So perhaps the situation is not that we shouldn’t be manufacturing jet skis, but maybe the manufacturers of jet skis should also be manufacturing created. Think allocating appropriate locations for those jet skis to be used, maybe that as a society, we need to push some more responsibility. On those manufacturers to find appropriate ways to use, that product products, rather than just releasing them onto an unsuspecting World, which annoys unsuspecting people on their back, porch. A mile away from the river.

Thanks for all the work today is greatly, appreciate it. Thank you, Dom. I think there are two really big Ideas here, which I haven’t touched on. The first one is the idea that manufacturers ought to be responsible for the side effects of what they make, because there are no side effects. There’s only affects, and I think there’s a difference between someone misusing a product, and someone using the product in a way, it was sort of intended to be used.

So we can look at Something as simple as what happens to the boxes that manufacturers use to put their stuff in who’s responsible for the cost of getting rid of those boxes? Well, with all the codes that we can put in and on things, it’s pretty easy to track. How a box ended up in the disposal stream and if manufacturers are responsible for how those boxes are, disposed of, you can bet it would take about 15 minutes for boxes to enter. End up being much more disposable. So number one as you’re pointing out responsibility of the manufacturer and the second one is this idea of appropriate because so many of the conflicts between personal freedom and the public sphere are about this very idea of is it appropriate? Is it appropriate to bring a Boombox into a movie theater? While everyone else is watching a movie and playing your music?

I think we would all agree. The answer is no, you don’t have the freedom to interrupt the movie even though it’s a private space with your music. Well, too often, what we’ve done is said, well, this is a public space and I can do whatever I want. I can throw whatever I want overboard or out the window. I can create all sorts of ripples for the people around me and for a long time, particularly in villages, as opposed to cities, we relied on people’s good sense to help. Them, avoid doing things that were inappropriate, but now it’s getting harder and harder to do that. Partly because social media is made it a sport partly because there are people who run Fortune, 100 companies. There are people who are in elected office who have decided that being inappropriate is a shortcut to being noticed. And that being noticed, it’s a shortcut to being successful.

It’s hard for me to see how that scales. It’s hard for me to see how that works in the long run. So thanks for the question, thank you for the work, you do. We’ll see everybody next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can out. The internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, what are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up.

Consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -a-billion-dollars-worth-of-words- <==

The typical adult gets by with about 3,000 words of vocabulary of 3,000 words. Almost all of them learned by the time, were 11 years old. And here’s the interesting question. Do we need to know more words? Because we have interesting things to say or do we have interesting things to say? Because we know more words, hey it’s Seth and this is Akimbo will be back in a second to talk about a billion dollars worth of vocabulary.

But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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They say that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow, but you don’t have to go to the great white North to discover that I grew up in Buffalo. New York. We have plenty of words for snow. So does anybody who’s ever done Nordic skate skiing or any kind of skiing we talked about blizzards. We talk about chop, we talk about corduroy. What about flake? Or hail or ice or blue ice, or man-made snow or packed powder or deep powder or spring powder or rotten snow or slush. Or slush you get the idea.

It turns out that once you know a lot of words for snow, you start to notice that there are a lot of different varieties of snow. That vocabulary Works in both directions that we develop new vocabulary terms. When we have ideas that we need to express that are difficult to express with the old words, but also learning. Learning new words, turns on lights for us. It exposes us to gradations we didn’t see before artists painters.

No way more colors than normal people. That’s because they see colors and need to explain to us what they are seeing going from the 12 box, to the 64 box of Crayola. Crayons helps kids discover that there are actually more Lawyers in the world. 27 years ago, Marjorie Mandel and I decided to write a book about vocabulary. Yes, I wrote a dictionary with help from Marjorie. Why did we do this? Well there was a letter in the New York Times and the letter two paragraphs. Long was filled with words. I didn’t know what they meant me with my fancy college. Education was busy. Looking at this letter and I couldn’t understand a third of the The words, I decided to look them up. And what I discovered was that a person who had written the letter was a bit of a pedant, pedant that the person. How do I pronounce that word? Hold on, turns out that the person had written the letter was a bit of a patent. Someone who’s pedantic someone who is using words to get in the way of his commentary which actually was sort of foolish once I understood what he was trying to say.

But in so many other cases. I discovered that once you knew a word, you could be precise and if you could be precise you had a breakdown what you meant to say. So Marjorie. And I pitched this book, which I called million dollar words to running press, while there were a thousand words in it, that’s a billion dollars. If you do the math, the book was in print for a total of two weeks, our editor had left the firm and right after the book came out. It disappeared alert listeners to this podcast. Can pick up their free copy digitally by visiting akimbo dot link.

Some of the words in million dollar words are actually million dollar words that meet my criteria. For example, bildungsroman, be ild, UNG bildungsroman is a novel of Education, something like Catcher in the Rye knowing that there is a category for this kind of book, helps us Us realize that this kind of book is a kind of genre a type. Something worth exploring.

It helps us realize that narratives about education are critical for lots. And lots of people who bother to read books. There is no equivalent for books about skiing and for good reason because they’re not aligned. Knowing that the category exists helps us do better going forward on the other hand, a word like by sextile, not Really helpful. We put it in the book because it’s sort of clever. It is about anything that happens on February 29th. I have no idea. Why bisects dial would mean something that happens once every four years on leap year. But it does that’s just about showing off. That’s not really a million-dollar word but you get it included with all thousand of the million-dollar words. But as long as we’re working our way through the bees, how about the word bluestocking, a bluestocking is a woman who didn’t go to a fancy College who doesn’t have a fancy education, who devotes herself to literary or scholarly. Pursuits today, this is a hopelessly outdated term. It shouldn’t be applied to one gender or the other, but think back to the westerns of the 50s that referred back to the Western life of the 1850s, where there weren’t that many women in any of those fictional towns. But the schoolmarm was certainly a bluestocking, some words have been Over time, we need to understand their origin, so we can get back to what was intended. The word boondoggle didn’t originally refer to an expensive business trip for no good reason, back when we could take business trips, it originally referred to busy work as the late. David graeber wrote in his book, about dead-end jobs, we have created enormous number of boondoggles. As we have industrialized, the world, Old. And once we can see a boondoggle it’s hard to unsee it and one more as long as I’m reading the bees to you bowdlerized named. After Thomas bowdlerized battler. Took it upon himself to cleanse out the offensive parts of what he was reading particularly William Shakespeare, that well-known pornographer, bowdlerized singing continues to happen all around us. And yes, it deserves a name because censorship means something, Totally different. Words are containers containers, for ideas, and without a container it’s hard to see the idea again. What I’m arguing for here is not to show off by knowing a lot of words that have a bunch of syllables to them. How are you going to understand how computers work if terms like TCP IP or peer-to-peer or packets mean?

Nothing to you. Learn the vocabulary. Now the light can go on for you to learn the concept. Yes, we can look it all up on Google. Yes. Google Translate is an easy way to move something from one language to another but no Google doesn’t help us understand the amount of information in our world is exploding and it has been exploding my entire life since you began listening to this short rant of a podcast more podcasts Been created, then you would be able to listen to if you did nothing but listen to podcasts for the next six months of your life. We cannot keep up. It doesn’t do us any good to try to keep up but we can do is start to understand Concepts that instead of racing through the 3000 words that we all know we can understand that the next circle of words, the circle of words that are known by people who know things. About their topic are worth learning.

Not because we want to impress them, we can impress them by using a thesaurus before we send them an email. No, we want to do it because a word points to a container and the container holds the concept and understanding the concept is critical because we do not want to be spoon-fed. We want to choose our own ideas and dissect them on our own to choose to understand so we can build upon If you want to find someone who truly understands genre a category, a way to do work, find someone who has a vocabulary that they can defend that they can take apart and put back together.

Learn their vocabulary, and you can begin to learn the concepts. Why we even have a term like corduroy? A skier can tell you, but someone who adds in skied, probably has no clue. So short of strap. Tapping on your boots. One of the best ways to understand how skiers make decisions is to start, to understand what corduroy even is.

Find the words, understand the words and then build a conceptual framework around the words. So there you go, and Auntie diluvian defense of why it’s worth learning a billion dollars worth of words, even if you can get the PDF for free, thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way, to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp, an independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new Upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is an apology.

This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. They sent. This is Rex Pizza. Hi. This is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question. As you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo link2006, click the appropriate button, keep them short and direct, and I’ll do my best to get to them.

Here we go. Hey Seth.

This is Sean from Columbia Missouri and your last podcast about curation, it seemed by the end of the episode. You were fully for essentially having these these big Tech and the people developing the the code to push people back into the mainstream. However, you also seem to talk about how there is benefit to To curating someone towards the long tail.

If it’s related to, you know, something they’re passionate about and so I wonder is there a balance to find where maybe we’re not pushing to people to the political extremes but we can still help people find the Obscure extreme passions. That might really make them happy. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks.

Thank you for this. Here’s the deal. Google quoted in today’s newspaper said we can’t police the internet.

There they are. Wringing, their hands like in Casablanca, unbelieving that there are Bad actors on the web and that some of them are acting the way they do perhaps because of Google. Well, of course, they are because, in many ways, Google is the internet. And those folks who post revenge porn Urdu, quote reputation management wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the power of Google’s search algorithm.

So I think the tech companies have to take Responsibility. They are not innocent bystanders and the way that they push people in One Direction or another you can call it curation, I might call it the discovery algorithm is their responsibility and a problem for all of us. So you are right as the author of books. Like we are all weird and tribes and poke the box. I think cool things happen when we have niches, when we are able to make things that matter for people who Are when we can find small groups of people and help them get to where they want to go.

But there’s for me.

Anyway, a really clear dividing line. The question is, if people get more into this if they become more obsessed or more particular, if they’re otaku gets louder and louder will the rest of us suffer or benefit. So, if you go to Comic-Con which each year before the pandemic got more and more, Landish with costumes, with people going into the trivia of various science fiction things with cosplay in the rest of it, I’m not sure it hurt anybody else. And I’m pretty sure that the people there were delighted to be part of it.

I think if we find people who are arguing about the finer points of page, 18 of the original edition of Dune and I don’t know how to pronounce Bene gesserit. Well, I don’t have any problem with that either. That is enjoyable. It takes us far down a rabbit hole that makes our culture more diverse and interesting. On the other hand, if a porn site is pushing people further and further into things like incest or violence, I think it’s pretty likely that other people are going to suffer because of this propaganda and it is propaganda in the sense that the algorithm is pushing people to do things. They wouldn’t do if they weren’t constantly Lee indoctrinated by what the algorithm is pushing them to experience.

And I think we can see the same thing in certain cable TV networks. So for me, the dividing line is pretty clear if the cultural shift that the algorithm is causing causes discomfort or pain for people who are outside of the circle. If it divides us when it needs to unite us, then it’s a problem for all of us.

It’s a public Mental Health. ‘The problem and I think that they should take responsibility for it because it wasn’t there before they showed up that media is powerful and marketing is powerful. That’s part of the reason why companies spend money on it because it works. And so just because a computer is doing it, not a person.

Well, that computer was programmed by a person and so, yeah, that’s a rant but that’s my feeling about it. Hey Seth, this is Anna from outside Philadelphia Pennsylvania. I would love to hear your thoughts on influencers in marketing. So, let me tell you a little bit about why I’m asking this question.

The first part is that my sister who is an interior. Architect recently, has hit it, big on Tick Tock and is now considered an influencer. There are companies who are sending her products for free. That show make videos about them, which is really amazing and because she’s such an amazing professional and personal person of Integrity.

I feel the need to tell you that she has only promoted products that she feels good about and that she identifies with, in terms of her brand. I know that’s not the case for all influencers. What I’m noticing about what’s going on here? Is this very clear transactional relationship? She has an audience, who trusts her likes her.

These companies are seeking to sell their products to her audience, she would like, to get free products that she likes. And so it’s this win-win-win transactional, relationship. The second part of this thinking for me is about my own career in life, which is in the nonprofit sector. And I’m wondering about how we can leverage influencers in terms of causes instead of products. So I’m really wondering. Do you have some thoughts about influencers, and marketing and how folks? Like me might take advantage leverage this phenomenon, folks, who Are not interested in selling things for profit, but selling ideas for momentum.

Thanks Seth. Thank you. For this question, Anna. And thanks for the work. You do. You’re bringing up a couple words that I think are worth exploring. One of them is influencers and the other one is influenced. So all of us are influenced. And the question is by what? So if we go up to Stranger in a city and offer them money to do something with us, that’s illegal.

They are being motivated, simply by money. That’s why it’s illegal. On the other hand, if we go on a date with somebody over and over again because we think they’re cute, we enjoy their company and they take us to fancy restaurants. That’s considered romantic. What’s the difference? Well, the difference is that, when money shows up because people have a very powerful story about money, we start to tell ourselves stories that go along with the Unnie. We start to tell ourselves. Well yeah, I would promote this on my Instagram or Tick Tock for free but I’m getting paid money. Isn’t that a nice bonus?

The challenge, of course, is you wouldn’t do it for free because you weren’t doing it before they showed up to offer you money. And so money starts to change our perception of what we think is good and how we spend our time, Kevin Kelly has a great rubric uses for making decisions about things like speaking gibberish. Far in the future, someone asks him to do something in nine months.

He says to himself. If it was tomorrow, would I say yes? Because it’s easier for people to say, yes, to Something in the distant future, you can add to that if it was for free. Would I say yes? And if you can actually and honestly use that calculus, you can make a different sort of decision. So there are some people have taken a head start on line and figured out how to make money being a I’ll put it in quotes responsible influencer, in the sense that they support things, they get paid for, but they don’t go overboard and if they’re able to do that in a consistent way, then it doesn’t hurt their brand or where they’re going. So someone like Tim Ferriss runs ads on his podcast in which he’s reading them for products that he uses for, which is getting paid a bunch of money, and it doesn’t hurt his relationship with his listeners. Because it’s part of the Promise of who he is and what he does. On the other hand, if someone like Oprah started, taking money for the books that she recommends. Well pretty soon, she’d be recommending books that maybe wouldn’t rise to the same level. So it gets really complicated really fast. So now to answer your question for a non-profit, you already have influencers, they’re just not influenced by money and this is The key to the whole thing that the nonprofit that you run, has people who are supporting you, they’re sending you money. They’re sending you volunteer hours. They’re talking about you in the community. Why are you paying them?

No, of course not. But there’s still something in it for them. And as I wrote about in this is marketing, its affiliation and Status affiliation. There’s something in it for me to feel like I’m in sync. Like, I’m doing what the others are doing. Like, I’m not falling behind. Status. There’s something in it for me to be a leader. There’s something in it for me to be seated at the head table.

And so the art of almost everything that we do in culture, except for cash payment, to tick tock influencers, the art is to offer people. Non-financial influence, non-financial payment. That makes them eagerly decide to support the cause not. Because you’re doing some simple math about money, but because they’re doing complicated math, about culture and belonging and doing work that matters.

Now the beauty of this is, it’s more resilient, you’re not going to be easily outbid. It is transparent in the sense that we imagine that others like us are making decisions based on their beliefs, their desires, their love, their connection, not Based on whether or not they got money under the table.

That’s why we don’t approve of bribery by government officials. Yet government officials are influenced all the time, we don’t want a government official who is never influenced because then they won’t pay attention to what voters want. We want them to be influenced, just not quite so directly. So thanks for exploring this high fives, to your sister and good luck with the work.

We’ll see you next time.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason. Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -a-nation-of-clerks- <==

Our Story begins with a young man from out of town, born in 1755 part of a revolution. One of the Young Voices, someone always taking notes writing like he was running out of time. Beep. You’re somebody who rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and sometimes times went too far. This is the story of Bertrand. Burr are Dvorak born the same year is Alexander Hamilton and he said something that led to something that changed the way that people in another country thought of themselves for a long time.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about A nation of shopkeepers. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It’s F and this is a podcast. It’s a podcast produced by Alex De Palma. Alex is a bit of a podcast Whisperer Alex and I are inviting you to join us in the podcasting workshop and this is Alex, De Palma, Seth’s co-teacher and producer in this class you’ll learn not just the technology to make a podcast because honestly it’s pretty easy.

You’ll learn to find your voice. You’ll learn to find the others and together in this proven Workshop. That’s back again, you’ll discover That you can make a podcast not to make money because unfortunately, you probably won’t but to make a difference to be heard and to find the people who want to hear from you which is even more important. I hope you’ll check it out, visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming workshops, go make a ruckus.

The parallels between Bertrand better are and of course, Alexander Hamilton are extraordinary. They just keep coming from the year. He was born to his reputation. First up and then down, but that’s not what we came to talk about today. We came to talk about the day he quoted. Adam Smith to Napoleon Bonaparte what Adam Smith chronicler of politics and capitalism wrote was to found a great Empire for the sole purpose. Purpose of raising up a people of customers May at First Sight appear a project fit, only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation, whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. We’ll talk in a little bit about what Smith meant, but Bertrand who was in and out of Napoleon’s life, probably quoted.

Um Smith to Napoleon at the end of Napoleon’s career. He was banished to st. Helena and they sent along a doctor a surgeon Barry, Edward O’Meara from Ireland, it’s from him. That the quote, the rise of Lee stated about England as merely a nation of shopkeepers began to spread the insult was simple. The insult is all they know how to do in. England is be merchants not Heroes, not adventurers.

Not Builders, but a nation of shopkeepers after this idea took hold dr. O’Meara went to Great pains to write the following your meddling in Continental Affairs, and trying to make yourselves a great military power. Instead of attending to the Sea and commerce, will yet ruin you as a nation. You were greatly offended with me for having called you a nation of shopkeepers.

And I meant by this that you are a nation of cowards. You would have had reasons to Displeased, even though it were ridiculous and contrary to historical facts. But no such thing was ever intended, I meant that you were a nation of merchants and that all your great riches and your grand resources arose, from Commerce, which is true. What else constitutes The Riches of England?

It is not extent of territory or a numerous population. It is not mines of gold, silver or diamonds. Moreover, no man of sense ought to Shamed of being called a shopkeeper, but your prints in your ministers appear to wish to change all together l’esprit of the English and to render you, another Nation to make you ashamed of your shops in your trade, which have made you what you are and to sigh after nobility, titles and crosses. In fact to assimilate you with the French. You are all nobility. Now, instead of the plain old Englishman to be a nation of shopkeepers.

Ours is to be aware of the customer, is to be someone who shows up and tends to the store on hours that you set for yourself to be aware of your competition, to seek to do better to serve the marketplace, so that you in turn can come out a little bit ahead. England was a nation of shopkeepers. The question, we ask ourselves is what kind of nation, Are we building?

And I’d like to pause it for a minute, the hypothesis with apologies to bury Edward O’Meara, and to Adam Smith. Are we building a nation of Clerks? Not just a nation of Clerks, but a nation of consumers. So consumers. First at what age do we begin to teach children that their primary job is to consume?

Steve pressfield has written extensively about Sparta. A nation of Warriors or perhaps, we could think about ancient Greece Athens, a nation of philosophers. But what are the lessons that we teach a two-year-old? A three-year-old? And a four-year-old, when we hand them an iPad when we promise them something on Christmas, when they get dessert, if they eat all of their brussels sprouts, the idea is that it is possible to grow up to be a citizen by being a consumer that we send kids.

To school not with two pairs of shoes, which is what most kids had in the eighteen hundreds. But with closets filled with clothes clothes that change with the seasons because we don’t want to get left out that we couldn’t go to the mall during the pandemic and we missed it. And so we shifted dramatically to browsing in spending time online, not to browse and focus on things we could make better, but to focus Focus on things we could buy with just one click and sometimes, one click is too many and so instead we subscribe to something and it shows up. Unbidden it turns out that the company that sells treats for dogs by subscription is worth over a hundred million dollars by subscription because it’s too much trouble to remember to buy your dog, a new treat. And what about becoming a nation of Clerks?

Well, let’s think Matter. What do we look for in a clerk? While the clerk Works indoors. Follows instructions. Seeks deniability does what they are asked but no more figures out how to do just a little bit less because otherwise the boss will insist, they do just a little bit more, mostly the clerk wonders. If this will be on the test if people are keeping score, if they can stay where they are because it’s so fraught to fall off the the ladder because then maybe you won’t get to be as good a consumer anymore.

What is school? Traditional School in the western cultures and I’m counting India and China on that list. What is school but years and years spent training to be a clerk to take good notes to make, no mistakes to write down what you are told and to find out if it’s going to be on the test, the panda. Has been a test of so many things, but one of the things it has exposed is the fraud of school as a learning institution as opposed to one, that simply educates because we are training a billion people to join a nation of Clerks because the giant industrialists seem to need more clerks or at least they’re willing to tolerate more clerks so that they can have more consumers.

Merchants on the other hand, Merchants are busy trying to solve interesting problems. Open new markets, innovate discover new ways to connect with people to enable cultural shifts to happen, because all of those things, those initiatives, those efforts that we take sometimes, at risk to change things to maybe make things better by making better things. This is the work of a merchant and the merchant doesn’t have to do it for profit a merchant. Can be at the helm of a nonprofit that seeks to get people more food or to get them to take their medicine or to develop new technologies because all of those things, use the skills of the merchants.

So it probably not too late but I think we have to have a conversation. What is school for? Are we trying to have more clerks? What will we do once we have enough clerks? And what about consumers? What will we do? When enough people have enough stuff? One of the things we know about shopkeepers is that they desire their freedom, the freedom to innovate, the freedom to make decisions the freedom to lead, its their clerks, that want to be told what to do.

But the shopkeepers the merchants they are looking for. The next Frontier. Ironically within barreras controversial Arc from being the head of the trial that led to the Of a king to his eventual disgrace and Exile from Paris. He argued for a system of Education throughout France, A system that would be focused on the Pledge of Allegiance, learning the alphabet, and the teaching of multiplication tables. In fact, he was one of the fathers of creating a nation of clerk.

Thanks for listening to my rant. I’m not sure exactly where it goes, but it’s something worth thinking about. We’ll see you next time. Time will be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor. It’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pal, this is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. Christian is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please, visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006, click the appropriate button.

There are show notes there as well.

First, a question about education. Hi, Seth. Steve glandt leader here from Chicago, Illinois. I was just listening to your podcast on the magnification of small differences and the part about the future of Education. Really got me thinking about how online coursework and accreditation can really take hold, and what could start it and I say, like a lot of the education. Air has to do with social status and economic status and your comments had me thinking about, whether you could start a almost maybe a b Corp or start as a nonprofit that is essentially a free education course, that self-guided and online. And as it grows, you could add in video course, instruction with actual certified instructors and and guest speakers. Because I think in general, Lot of people want to help other people, learn what they know, it’s sort of part of your legacy. So the point of the question is whether this new education Source? May be a Grassroots and almost a free process and then would become funded for operations. Obviously, the pay for, you know, keeping the lights on and servers and being able to facilitate a good experience for the users, but the actual funding of it could be Source through Either donations through individuals that finish the coursework donations of people’s time, maybe even donations through people who finish the courses and we’re able to gain good careers and want to give back that or even corporate sponsorships where you know, they may want to hire the good self motivated employees and versus trying to interview college graduates who, you know, have proven that they could finish a course work. Work and be a good student instead focusing on hiring people who are self motivated to complete their education online.

I think maybe a way for people to set themselves apart as well. Look forward to hearing your response. Thank you for this Steve. It’s something I talked about a long time ago, but it’s worth revisiting. I do not believe there is a learning shortage online. I think you can learn a foreign language for free. I think you can learn math. I think you can learn just about any course. That’s taught at MIT that the Khan Academy can teach you, plenty of things that happen before you go to MIT learning is not the same as education.

Education is about certification and accreditation about conforming and about compliance. We go through education, to get a scarce piece of paper to prove that we are part of an elite group and we use that piece of paper to put ourselves into positions. As of power or authority, where we actually do the learning of how to do our job or else we get fired. But education is about, will this be on the test?

It’s about who got in and mostly it’s about the window sticker on our car or on our parents cars because that window sticker. The status. That says, I am a good parent. My kid went to a college. You have heard of a famous college, a college with a football team. Willing to go into debt for the rest of their lives to get that sticker.

That’s different than learning learning is free. It is free online and it is free. If we are willing to put ourselves into the position of enrolling in a journey and then failing and failing and failing as we go forward in community to get better at the thing, we want to do. So your idea is not a bad one. There are plenty of Institutions online that are free. You’re really close to free compared to how much it costs to get an actual degree and yet most people aren’t doing them for the same reason that many people don’t read books because it feels like school because it feels like work because they’re not sure it’s going to be worth the journey.

So the hard part isn’t how do we make this online thing? Free the hard part is how do we create a new game? A new Ratchet, a new status symbol. That’s about the fact that you Projects that you know how to lead that you are connected that you’re doing work. That matters for people who care those things are much harder to label but we only started labeling higher education.

50 years ago it’s only recently that football coaches got paid for million 6 million dollars a year. It’s only recently that people ended up a quarter of a million dollars in debt to get that sticker. So yeah, I’m ranting but you get my point. If you want to learn something, go, learn something. And the best way to do that is in community, surrounded by others, creating a cycle of peer pressure. That gets us to where we want to go.

Thanks for the question. Hey, Seth, this is lightning. Lucas in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Question, regarding your recent episode, fueling the engines of division. You said that three or four or five, people would be all that. It would take to really turn the algorithm in a more positive direction.

But I think you and I both know that it’s doubtful that those particular powerful, five people will take such an action. So I’m wondering if you could go on a deeper dive into what US average people. Can do to help make sure the future of technology is in our favor, rather than not Bingo, great point.

It’s pretty clear to most people who have been paying attention that the game that’s played at the giant tech companies isn’t necessarily the game, we’d want them to play at once people make it far enough to be managing a public company to be surrounded by thousands and thousands of co-workers who all have stock options the game. I’m sorta gets Relentless as I pointed out last week when I was talking about Amazon, this Relentless idea of turning a ratchet in One and Only One Direction and doing as little as you can get away with in other directions. Because the thing you’re trying to do, in this case is maximized long-term shareholder value that whole Canard from Milton Friedman.

That’s not the only role but here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say. That Starbucks was putting something into the coffee. Adulterating it with something that was legal, something that the FDA wasn’t regulating. But something that gave us an earache, all day long, something that lowered the happiness of all the people who are going to Starbucks but due to their location and due to their customer service in the status that goes with going to Starbucks, people kept going and they kept getting less and less happy in their ears kept. Hurting.

Do we think that through Collective action? We would change the rules and say, hey, Starbuck, stop, putting that stuff in the coffee and I think history would show that we would. Well, in the case of the monopolies, the big five or six companies that are running. So many, the interactions that privilege folks, like, me or spending time in online, given that what are we going to do about it? Well, it’s clearly not going to be solved by the free market.

Because the market isn’t free because these Network effect driven. Businesses are natural monopolies and playing by the rules that were there. When they got there, they are not making us happier. They are not doing things that are leading to long-term positive changes in our culture. And so Collective action is needed.

The first one, which I’ve talked about is Cory. Doctorow is concept of adversarial. Interoperability basically letting anybody who wants. Us to build something that plugs into these platforms, because if you can plug into these platforms data can be shared outside of The Silo. So instead of there being one Facebook or one Twitter, there can be lots and lots of services that connect in and out and what this would enable is organizations to work for other purposes. Other than how do we enrich the shareholders at Facebook and part of it is it would be easy. Leave. Because once your data can be taken from one of these platforms and put somewhere else, then the platforms have to behave better because the free market goes back to being free.

Because the absurdity of the Starbucks example, is if Starbucks was really making people sick, you just pick a different kind of coffee. It’s harder to do that with the sticky systems, that these big companies are building all around us. So Collective action, the idea that the community is going to stand up and say, wait a minute, ten years in after giving you an enormous amount of freedom and the benefit of the doubt, you’ve made things worse, not better. So times up new rules.

You can continue to be relentless but just like you had a play by the old rules. You can have to play by the new rules and yes, as we’ve seen from recent news reports, those new rules include paying your taxes. So when you add all of that up, what I’m arguing for. Is there either going to clean up their act? And I don’t think they will.

Or we all of us, we have to do it with them and for them because in the long run, even the people there are going to benefit all the money in the world doesn’t help if you’re living in a culture. He can’t be proud of thanks for listening. I’ve been ranting today we’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an No, institution, or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access. Information that’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t No, or we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -compared-to-what- <==

The blackout was total and it was worldwide. There was no electricity, no lights, no air conditioning, no easily, accessed refrigeration. And everyone went without hey it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about compared to what but first. Here’s a message from our sponsor.

I’m talking about the blackout of 1812. In fact of all the years before 1812 1820, 1830, 1840. When there was no electricity and no one really missed it, they didn’t miss it because their neighbors didn’t have electricity. They didn’t miss it because they had never had electricity. And so compared to what we navigate our days on this planet, by looking around by understanding what Going on in the culture and then making a decision about our state, Ambien is a popular sleep medication particularly in the United States.

Here’s the question. How much extra sleep do you get? If you take ambient as directed according to one study, I read 18 minutes. You get 18. Extra minutes of sleep over an 8-hour period of time by taking this powerful drug. So, if you’re only getting 18 minutes of Sleep with a drug with side effects. Why on Earth do people take it?

Well, it turns out that ambient is an amnesiac, it makes you forget that you didn’t sleep that. If you forget that, you didn’t sleep. Apparently, for many people, the next day is better because you’re not carrying around a story of defective sleep. You’re not wondering whether other people slept better than you that somehow you. Your behind back before the big blackout of 1840.

When people went to sleep, they often woke up at 1 o’clock in the morning. Had a snack hung out with family. They went back to sleep for what was called second sleep. It was normal to not sleep in one place for eight or nine hours in a row compared to what and marketers are complicit in our dissatisfaction because as mass Media came along industrialism was also on the rise and they were the perfect couple because industrialist needed a way to sell more stuff because they were making more stuff than ever before.

And mass media, was this magical tool that helped them sell more stuff. And usually when we think about mass media, we say, well, yeah, because you could put an ad in front of a lot of people, but the other thing that radio, and then television did was sell people around the world on peace and pus. Feherty on quote, the American dream and on attainable satisfaction that if you just bought this item, your life would get better that if we think about the great sitcoms of the 1960s Most of them involved lives that could at least be visualized by most of the people who are watching them that the distance between you and living, like Andy of Mayberry or you and living a life like dick. And Laura Petrie on Bonnie Meadow Lane in New Rochelle. New York, wasn’t that wide was just enough to create dissatisfaction that could be solved by working a few more hours, working a little bit harder.

Cheering out how to get the money borrow it if necessary to buy that one next item. And so a ratchet started to spread and it was endorsed and paid for by mass marketers, because they understood that. If they could sell people on Ovaltine creating family Harmony while, then people would go buy some Ovaltine and the carrot strapped to the front of the donkey, kept the donkey move, V step by step, trying to bite the carrot.

But over time what the media has done is moved to carrot further and further away. Maybe it started with the tv show. Dallas my guess is it started probably before that? Because now we saw the lives of people royalty that we could never hope to attain, not just the royalty of spending money for a ranch or a private jet but the Unobtainable beauty that so many of the people in the movies or television were parading around the fairytale lifestyle. All of these things became unobtainable and so the Gap kept widening. Their what media did was give us something to compare to that. We couldn’t get our hands on that felt like it was frustrating as opposed to incentivizing.

And then we enter the world of social media because social media was supposed to be this thing of authenticity. Social media was supposed to be your neighbor, your friends, your classmates, but grooming went on social grooming. How do I put myself forward in the most perfect way possible? If my day has 1,000 moments, how do I find the four moments that are so perfect that are worth sharing and put them online for people to see.

Well, if you are surrounded by nothing but that then compared to what starts to kick in. And at the very same time, breaking news and catastrophizing got turned up many notches during the Vietnam war, you got the newspaper once or twice a day, you watched Walter Cronkite? And that was it. That was all the media that was available for the typical person to consume.

Now, the catastrophes are Around every corner they are around every corner for 24 hours, a day that Doom scrolling is a business model. There are billionaires who make a profit by making you feel nervous by making you feel like you have to do. Scroll some more somehow looking for Solace, looking for a way to make it all go away.

And so we’ve got these two pillars in front of us, on a regular basis, on one hand, the perfect life, the convenient life, the the easy life, the magical life, the life of a princess there. It is, you can see it with one click, but then turn around. There, the catastrophes waiting around every corner, there are all the things that just can’t possibly work.

Now, I don’t want to minimize either one of these things as useful motivators, we need to be aware of defects in our culture and Society, so we can do something about them. Walter Cronkite was a hero for Meeting up how toxic the Vietnam War was not just to people in the United States, but to the victims in Southeast Asia.

And in our current environment, citizenry need to speak up and stand up and do something about the injustices that are all around us. But that doesn’t mean it is useful for it to be The Narrative of our entire day and those things we aspire to those perfect cabinets made by the Carpenter on YouTube or that perfect complexion. That we see in a cosmetic video. Well, we get something out of vicariously experiencing Joy or Delight or Perfection. And I don’t want that to go away completely, but I think we need to remind ourselves that if there is a business model, if someone’s going to make a profit by manipulating us and changing our state, they are likely to try and it is up to us to decide whether or not We want to take the ambient whether or not we want an amnesiac, whether or not we want to sign up for a life of dissatisfaction or if our time would be better, spent weaving together community and making things better by making better things.

That’s my rant will be back in a minute. Init with answers to questions from last time. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the Pain Scale. Entire sir warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They sent this is Rex. Hey sir. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006, click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can check out the show notes.

Hi, Seth. This is Tracy. Thanks for your podcasts and sharing your thinking. I really appreciate it. I recently listened to your podcast on the algorithm of division. It’s a complex topic for me because my job as a marketer is to reach Target audiences with information that is relevant to what they’re searching for, it’s especially important because many of my clients are Pharma companies trying to reach positions with new research that can Patience.

But aside from a customer’s initial search cookies, and retargeting someone who’s engaged with content has been the primary way to keep content in front of that customer with so much available inventory in this endless, digital ecosystem targeting would seem like a helpful tool for both audiences. The customer and the marketer, But cookies, as the targeting tags are called are being mandated to go away in a year or so marketers won’t be able to use them.

As a professional, who is also very passionate about Brands and how they show up in the world. I actually embrace the idea of a cookie Louis world. It’s a chance for creativity to replace cookies for Brands to really show up. Experientially not based on search algorithms, I’m hoping you can expand on the idea of Brands and how they show up in the cookie Lewis World.

Thanks again for all that. You do take care. Thank you for this. It’s so complicated. I will try not to talk for too long. But first some background for people who are just joining us or even for people who aren’t just joining us, cookies were invented for a very simple reason. The web was a dumb browser, he treated everybody the same way someone who came to a website 20 times was treated the same as if they’re only there for the first time and creating a small tiny tiny. Will file that was on the user’s computer that was accessible by the website enabled sites to do a very simple thing.

Tell people apart the rules in the early days of cookies were very clear the only cookie you got to see was the cookie you placed on someone’s computer. So when I was running squidoo which was before Pinterest or Facebook, the idea was that squidoo could place a cookie and then we would know if you were a user and could treat you differently than if you were a stranger. But that’s all we knew.

And then some people hack the system and came up with a way that there could be a universal cookie where you would pay a third party who had a little slot on your website and access to your cookie and other people’s cookies. And by combining, lots and lots of information as you traveled around. The web users were tracked, users had no say in this you – weren’t you given a vote in this? It just happened.

So the first thing is the whole thing was a fairly recent hack. Second long before cookies there was marketing and there will be marketing after cookies before cookies businesses figured out ways to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to the people who want to get them. And it’s important to note that consumers do not care about privacy.

You gave up all of your private Iva see as soon as you got a credit card because the credit card company knows an enormous amount about you and that’s fine with you. What most people care about is in privacy, it’s being surprised. We don’t want the credit card company to suddenly call us up in the middle of the night and say we notice you’ve been staying in a lot of hourly motels and we think you’re having an affair. Would you like a coupon for some STD testing because even though that might be in our long-term interest It’s not a surprise we signed up for.

And so a lot of the push back against the misuse of cookies has been from people who say, why are these ads following me around the web? How did they know I was looking at that brand of shoes when I’m over here at a totally different website marketer sometimes Under Pressure race to the bottom short-term narcissistic profit-maximizing says, we don’t care what we’re going to do to the ecosystem or the culture. Let’s Keep spamming people. For as long as we can get away with it.

At the same time, the tech Titans saw that they were giving away power when they allowed third parties to have all this cookie access because you wouldn’t have to go back to buy fresh information from Google. If you could find that information in other ways, Google has a long history of finding useful things on the web like RSS and blogs or email newsletters and Bring them down because they understand that if they shut them down, marketers with money, will have no choice but to come back to Google and apple seeking to differentiate itself from Google because Apple doesn’t have a strong web presence. Even though they have all the money in the world, they don’t own any significant web properties.

And so as the web becomes more of an entity that doesn’t care what device you’re accessing. It with apple is figuring out ways to stand for something, so it’s users will pick them. Hence apples decision to shut Facebook out of the idea of tracking. They’re saying they’re doing it in the interest of privacy.

I think they’re mostly doing it in the interests of Market power. So with all that said, what does a marketer do? Well, you started your question by pointing out that your role is to help the $450,000. Years in the United States, get new medical information that they are looking for that they’re interested in and of those 450,000 docks I think it’s fair to say that there’s only 50 to a hundred thousand of them that are actually interested in the kind of medical information you have to share.

So paying all this money to chase people around the web based on guesses from incomplete. Cookie data, isn’t the way to build an entity for the Long Haul. The way to do it is to get the the active engagement of the docks. That’s why medical journals are so valuable because medical journals aren’t spam medical journals or something that doctors pay to read and thus the key tenets of permission marketing, anticipated personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

And the opportunity that marketers have is the same opportunity they had. When I wrote that book, 25 years ago, it’s simple if you own an Set the privilege of talking to people who want to be talked to everything else gets easier. Is it hard to build that asset? There’s no question about it. Will you have to change your business model? Of course you will, but that’s okay because the business models keep changing.

All of us who are living on. The web are doing some of the didn’t even exist three decades ago. And so it’s going to change again and the race continues to be the same race. It was then who has the right to privilege, the ability to talk to people who want to be. Talked to, if you think about Google’s multi-trillion dollar value, where does it come from?

Because the fact is a bunch of smart, programmers could build a search engine that most people couldn’t tell apart from Google. Plenty of people have built email engines and go down the list. What Google lives on is the fact that people trust them, the fact that people come There to do their searches, the fact that they have a connection to people right in the moment, they are looking for information but that doesn’t mean it’s permanent and it doesn’t mean that you can’t figure out in your Niche where you stand for something, how to earn the attention of people as opposed to going for a free ride with them.

I hope that helps. Thanks. My name is Matt and I live in Bangkok Thailand and I feel like I kind of live under a rock because I just recently found out about your podcast on akimbo after having read and loved your books and any case I have a question and that’s when, is there going to be critical mass on really an understanding that if anything, the pandemic has really allowed us to do things differently and has created a real sense of resilience.

And so when, when do you suppose will be the Time when we finally look back and go, you know what? We’re through it and we’re actually stronger than ever. So, again, thanks for everything you do. And I look forward to your answer. I wish I had a really Smiley optimistic answer to this, but if history is any guide, here’s what we know, natural disasters, man-made disasters, Wars famines pandemics, they come.

And if we’re lucky, they go. And after they go most of the people most of the time, forget the lesson that historians and leaders would like us to remember, history, doesn’t repeat itself, but it Rhymes. And unfortunately we have a culture that doesn’t really remember and so after a flood wipes out, huge sections of the Northeast people rebuild their houses right on that Coast after we we see the enormous cost of racial Injustice of caste systems of treating people as separate as lesser.

Well, maybe we fix that one but then we turn right around and do it again because human beings, at least in the west, at least in the 20th and 21st, centuries are confident that this time, it’s different and they’re confident that they’re right. Because the media keeps reminding us that This Time. It’s Different In the media understands that the easiest way to sell us, something is to remind us that we were right all along, so getting us to change our long-term habits because we learned a lesson, that’s not, usually the way change happens. So generally the way we change our minds is not because we learn an important historical lesson, it’s because there’s a tumbling, a tumbling of dominoes.

If you think about how we ended up with our fear of nuclear weapons, Weapons which has persisted much longer than I would have expected. It’s not a straight line from her Oshima and Nagasaki to today. It in fact changed the minds of some people, some leaders who stared right at it and blinked and those leaders then change the minds of dozens of people around them which then started to reach into the media. And then, and then, and then, and then, and this cycle of all, what we’ve always I felt that way is the way most people think about culture and it gets there slowly not all at once.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, No. And none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you got a face, that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not Gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the The success stories I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-river-of-time- <==

I live about a mile from a mighty River. Well, the Hudson isn’t actually a river, it’s a tidal Estuary. It’s a few word. It’s filled with brackish water, half salt and have fresh half of the day. 12 hours, the water flows in one direction from the ocean and then the other half, it turns around and flows. The other centuries ago, there were so many oysters in the lower Hudson River that they were essentially free.

Years ago. The Hudson River was plied by fairies, back and forth, up and down. It was a Waterway. It was a shared reserve. It was the lifeblood of this neighborhood. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo, we’ll be back in a second to talk about shared resources, Liberty and freedom, but mostly questions.

But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Akimbo is back, running it again to find out more visit akimbo.com go for all the details the people Meat will change your life.

Not a lot of answers this week but plenty of questions to think about. So let’s start with this. If you are a giant multinational corporation and I don’t know, maybe it rhymes with enter elf electric and you have a plant on the shore of the Hudson River land. You own, is it okay to dump tons and tons of pcbs into the river because it’s cheaper for your plant to do that. Then it is to dispose of them in some other way.

Well, you probably guessed that after they dumped, all of these, toxic chemicals into the river. It had long term consequences for plenty of people and various forms of nature All Along The River. All right, how about this? If you own land on both sides of the Hudson river, is it okay to string a tight cable from one end to the other so that boats can’t pass?

Okay. About this, if you have a jet ski, is it okay to zip up and down the river? Past homes @midnight with your unmuffled? Loud exhaust waking everybody up. We have a lot of questions to answer about what we’re going to do with shared resources and in the case of things like Rivers, we’ve been trying to answer those questions for a long time.

It’s generally understood That the community has a say in what you’re going to dumped in the river, that’s going to affect people who are down stream from you. But now we live in communities where there are rivers, maybe not physical Rivers, but real Rivers everywhere. We look, if you have an acre of land next to a neighbor, who has an acre of land, and you love milkweed and other plants that create lots of pollen.

Are you allowed to plant it? Entire field of that even though your next door neighbor will suffer severe allergies as a result. Well, generally speaking you can you can because we don’t judge pollen in the air as the same sort of toxic waste as dumping pcbs into a river. I think most of us have a pretty good idea about shared resources, like Rivers about the fact that it might be okay.

The storm drain to wash away some of the residue from your yard, or your orange trees, but it’s not okay for people to start dumping sewage into the river, simply because it’s more convenient. Particularly if it’s going to make people sick kill all the oysters and degrade the quality of life for everyone.

But what happens if we think about rivers a little bit more metaphorically, what if we think about the river of time? Unlike the Hudson River the river of time, generally only goes in One Direction Unless you ask HG Wells this River of time when it starts here and goes forward is something that affects all of us as we think about standards in our community.

So for example, most communities have figured out that an educated populace that when you spend the time and money to educate 6 year, olds or nine year olds teaching them to read and write to understand science and other things they will grow up down the river of time. Time to become better contributors to the culture that all of us benefit when kids are educated. So, on behalf of the kids who don’t have a say in it, the community speaks up and says all kids have to be educated and on behalf of the parents. The community says, and we’re going to pay for it and hence public school, and I’m hoping that most of the people who are listening to this agree with me that Levying a tax on all of us so that kids can be well-educated. Seems like a really sensible idea but once we start going down that road one of the questions is is it okay for those kids to be opted out of the public school that we’re all paying for and go to a private school instead?

And then if they’re going to a private school, should the taxpayer money that would have been going for them to go to public school? The I created for them to go to private school and then what happens if the private school they go to doesn’t teach them things of use. What if after 8, or 10 or 12 years in this facility, they don’t know how to read and write.

What if instead of teaching them science as we understand it in a useful way, they’re teaching them things that are closer to mythology that aren’t practical or useful and that might even be divisive, how do We decide to fill the river of time and that leads to beginning to understand things about capitalism, Liberty and freedom. Many of you have heard me. Say before that, the purpose of culture is not to enable capitalism. The purpose of capitalism is to enable culture. In other words, capitalism is the special case? Friend told me about the difference between a Navy pilot and an Air Force pilot in the United States, Air Force started. They were the first people The airplanes and there are volumes and volumes and volumes of rules and regulations and the rule for Air Force, pilots is follow. All the rules in the books.

Navy pilots on the other hand, have just a few manuals and the rule for Navy pilot is if it’s not in the book, you can figure out what to do. So one is about avoiding getting in trouble and the other one is about finding your own Own Way Forward. And when we think about the difference between those two, when we think about capitalism, one way to think about it is, the default is everybody can do anything. They want with liberty and freedom to create the most value for themselves. Selfishness first, and then culture Community, they have to come up with the special exceptions that aren’t allowed.

The alternative. The one that has been around for tens of thousands of years. Is that culture says, these are our standards, these are the things that are sacrosanct and in any spaces that aren’t carved out, you can do anything that you want because that enables the market economy that enriches, so many of us, and that is part of the challenge that we’re facing in our culture today.

Which is it is tempting to say that. I am responsible for everything that I do, leave me alone. But the rivers the rivers of time, the rivers of connection, the rivers of culture and the rivers of rivers are now far more intertwined than they have ever been before and so when we put an idea into a kid’s head it will pay dividends or costs for generations to come.

Here’s a simple example. Is it okay for Private Industry? To say, we are going to discriminate against people like women black people, people of color indigenous, people, people who have traditionally been discriminated against, we are not going to hire them, and we were not going to promote them because we don’t have to well, over the last few Generations. I think we have seen the toxic long-term implications of this. And we have created this idea of the protected class of people Where we say, yeah, you can say, I’m not going to hire a left-handed people, and you can say, I’m not going to allow people who come to my office to wear earrings.

But no, you can’t persist in maintaining a caste system one that costs everyone, an enormous amount in terms of justice and Civility and potential. No you can’t do that but we keep coming back to these edge, cases edge cases about who you can serve and who you can’t serve. Edge cases about what are the long term and short term implications of using this chemical or having that policy?

Should we treat big companies monopolies different than we treat little ones? Is it okay for Apple to say we’re not going to allow certain kinds of businesses to be in the app store because if they do that then de facto they are keeping lots of people from seeing those apps. On the other hand, if it is completely wide open, then how do we hold people responsible for creating things? Perhaps anonymously that are toxic to the culture in the world around us and I don’t know, the purpose of this podcast is in to tell you the answer, but it’s to get us to think more clearly about the questions.

Which river are we dumping stuff in? What are the repercussions Generations from now? What will people? People say if Elon Musk builds a supersonic airplane, is it okay for him to fly it? Wherever he wants regardless of how much carbon it dumps into the air? Is it okay for him to take off with a sonic? Boom?

That you here every night when you’re trying to sleep? Is it okay? If that Sonic, Boom breaks the windows of your house and you have to pay money to replace them. All of these things are on a spectrum. Mm. And there is no doubt in my mind that two or three generations from now. People are going to look at the carbon we left behind, and they’re going to say, what were you thinking, and they’re going to pay attention to just how deep in equity was both, in terms of income distribution, but mostly in terms of opportunity, because opportunity creates New Frontiers, it creates connection, it creates value.

And every time we do what capitalism pushes us to do, which is the short term, Expedient convenient thing we might very well be shutting the door on the long-term, resilient powerful, bit of possibility instead. So I don’t know the answer. But my hunch is that the more we think about it and the more we engage with it, the better we’re going to get.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way, to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp, an independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new Upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the phone. This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki am Bo dot link-16, click the appropriate button. Three interesting questions this week. Here we go.

Hi. Seth Charles Porter, in Montreal, Canada, messy, purple Colour, thanks for your work, listening to your recent rant on education. I find myself wondering how to pull the lever of motivation. While I am a self-starter. And I’ve learned things from Photoshop to interesting Financial Concepts. I have also offered training back in the day, I offered PowerPoint training to a whole group of people and I offered it for free.

No one took me up. Three months later, I offered the same training and charge a very nominal amount. 35 people showed up part of what I did was offer them half of their money back if they actually showed up. So where do you You see the bonus and the lever of paying, for what you’re receiving and is one of the weaknesses of our current, give it away or the current build it and offer. The free is one of those weaknesses, that money for better for worse, remains a powerful, internal drive for which people purse. See the value and that without a lack with a lack of perceived value, people will not engage in the Education and Training learning that they need to thank you for this Charles.

The thing is that money is two things, not one, it is a transfer of value. It is a way of paying our bills, but the other thing it is is a story. We Tell ourselves a story about the things that we are buying whether we’re a business spending, 20 million dollars on Consultants or an investor deciding that a stock is undervalued or somebody taking a course on PowerPoint which is free or not free. We tell ourselves a story about guarantees.

We tell ourselves a story about, getting a refund, getting a kickback. All of these things are separate from the fact that money is what we use. To pay our bills. So when you showed up to your friends and colleagues and said I’m going to offer this course for free. What they probably heard is you are viewing it as either a hobby or a gift and they were viewing it as something they probably weren’t going to take. Seriously. They decided their time was worth more than what you or they were going to put into the course but when you showed up and said this course costs money, you were making a promise.

And they looked at the money and they looked at you and they said while Charles is the sort of person who would take this seriously if we were paying. And so if I’m going to show up, I need to take it seriously. And you can see all the ripples that are caused by this. We know that you can take almost all the courses at MIT for free or you can pay Thirty forty thousand dollars a year to take them in person.

Why is it that people who take them for free are Much less likely to finish them. Part of the reason is you don’t get a degree that piece of paper that magically confers some sort of value but a big reason is because they didn’t pay for it. So as we enter more and more of a digital age, we need to think about not what the marginal cost of delivering something, is it costs? Nothing for one more person to listen to this podcast. So pricing it that way, makes no sense.

But instead Ted. What is the story? What is the story of money were telling? And how will it change the outcomes that we seek?

I started under here from Brazil. I like to rant about merchants and shopkeepers. And one of the things that came to my mind, when you, you know, way raise the status of merchants is that the English merchants in, now, we know where thieves and they stole precious materials, and Gold from and using the slavery as their main Force around the world and of course, at a time, the English culture might not perceive them as thieves, but rather explorers or merchants or doing business as usual.

But now, we know different and have a different perception about what it means and when we come to the recent times I guess, Many companies might have this Merchant mentality and do whatever they want. If they’re in the law if it’s applicable propria tour. Not so they don’t matter. As long as they get the business done or innovate in a way that for them bricks.

Peace. Thanks hydrate you brought up a couple points here. First of all the history of colonialism and imperialism is a travesty it’s filled with trauma and selfishness. It is a crime against humanity but I want to point out that the people you are talking about weren’t Merchants. They were industrialists. They were colonialists. They were using power to take what they wanted.

The merchant was the last Up in the chain, the merchant is the person who says, what does this person right in front of me, want to buy and how much are they willing to pay for it? So a merchant is the person who brought the first banana to Philadelphia and sold it for $100, but that doesn’t mean they’re not complicit because without Merchants at the end of the chain, the chain starts to fall apart. So I think the core part of your question, isn’t the semantics of what someone Urgent or not.

It’s what our Merchants responsible for. Is the customer, always right? Should we give people exactly what they want? If a nine-year-old wants to buy meth or crack or some sort of addictive, Dangerous Drug, is it okay to sell it to them? What if it’s an adult, all of a sudden Merchants have decisions to make about which wishes are they fulfilling on the part of customers? And what do they know about the supply? Chain.

And the side effects to long-term repercussions of the thing that they are bringing to the world and they’re really only two ways to look at. This one way is to say, Merchants have zero responsibility. If it’s legal and the customer wants it. They should sell it to them. The other way to look at it, is to say that Merchants have an enormous amount of responsibility because they and they alone have insight into all parts of the supply chain.

They can look upstream and Well, yeah, but this fabric was made by slave labor, or these minerals came from conflict zones, where people were working against their will. And no, I’m not going to go there. Because if I do, that’s a race to the bottom, and then others will have to go there as well, that we could be held responsible for the short and long-term impacts of the things we decide to sell.

I for one would have it no other way because otherwise you’re just a Mindless. Cog in this weird invisible hand. System of capitalism where you’re not responsible for anything. I think that marketing is powerful enough being emergent is powerful enough that we can change the culture. And if we’re changing the culture, I think it’s on us to own the fact that those side effects. The effects, the ripples of the changes. We make are at least at some level on us. So, no, I don’t think you can blame the customer.

I don’t even think you can blame the colonialist or the To is cutting Corners. I think, at some point, the merchant has to say, not on my watch, I’m going to race to the top instead of racing to the bottom. Hey, Seth, it’s Rossi from Cape Town. I have a marketing question for you. So, I have an online account on LinkedIn, which has been very useful for building my business, which is a strongly linked to the old industrial economy and plays within those confines. I also have my more enjoyable, more creative blog account.

And this is a side hustle for me, and I Want to Build It Up. Up. But I when I try and Link the two areas of work. So if I try and post blog creative blog post to my LinkedIn account, it seems to clash strongly in terms of the, the brand and the message. Thank you. Russ will get a little bit more mundane here. Having just gotten pretty philosophical.

The question is, what’s an identity? What’s a brand in this world anyway, on social media, what does it? In for your account to have a name or picture associated with it, all of us apparently our our own logos. All of us have our own Brands. What is a brand for a brand is a promise. A brand is a way of saying to somebody who might engage with you.

This is what you should expect. When you engage with me. It is a foreshadowing of the future to come. So there is no complete identity online, no one will ever know. Oh the true. You they cannot know who you are from a tweet or a blog post. So we are always putting on a show. We are always showing up and presenting to others in the way we would like to be seen as part of the promise, we make at our brand makes so if st. Pauli Girl and Becks light beer, came from the same Distillery and are, in fact the same beer, I don’t think it’s disingenuous for there to be marketed as Years.

Because part of what we buy is the story around it. So if you’re busy making promises to people in an industrial economy, it’s not clear that being clever and being a poet is going to help them and thus, it won’t help you there. What we do when we show up is we show up for the others. If you go in to see a heart surgeon, and this heart surgeon, in their spare time is a stand-up comic do Doing racy content. I don’t think you need to know that and I don’t think they should try out their new material on you as you’re facing something that’s life or death.

You came for a surgeon. And the surgeon should present in a way that gives you confidence as long as they can keep that promise. Because again back to Andres question, that’s what we’re doing. Is we’re making a promise we’re making a promise to say I’m not a cog in the system, I’ve chosen to be here in this. Way for you.

And this promise I’m making, I fully intend to keep it consistency. Is worth way more than authenticity. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, Anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there but I can show us consider the alt and be a more than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com

==> -whats-the-office-for- <==

Here’s a question. We don’t ask very often which is surprising given how much time and money. We spent laboring under our misapprehension about the answer to the question. Here we go. What’s the office for? Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about Dunder, Mifflin, cop. Copy machines, NCR, and the coffee maker. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor itself and this is a podcast. It’s a podcast produced by Alex De Palma.

Alex is a bit of a podcast Whisperer Alex and I are inviting you to join us in the podcasting workshop. And this is Alex, De Palma, Seth’s co-teacher and producer in this class you’ll learn not just the Technology to make a podcast because honestly it’s pretty easy. You’ll learn to find your voice. You’ll learn to find the others and together in this proven Workshop. That’s back again, you’ll discover that you can make a podcast not to make money because unfortunately, you probably won’t, but to make a difference to be heard and to find the people who want to hear from you which is even more important. I hope you’ll check it out, visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming workshops, go make a ruckus.

The office. One of the most popular TV shows of the last 20 years is not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about the office where so many of us go to work or used to go to work. And after a year and a half of enforced, distance from the office. For the first time in a long time, people are thinking about the office, whether they should go back.

What’s the difference between a good office and bad off? Us what is the office even for? Like most things it probably pays to start at the beginning about where the office came from a couple office memories that I have three. The first one is years ago, I was pitching a new technology and I went to the offices of Polk Audio.

And if you’ve ever read any stereo magazines, you’ve seen the ads with the lab coats in the whole thing, poke audios offices were basically a little trailer connected to poke audios. Factory, which was basically a woodworking shop. And so, there was sawdust everywhere in the office, has existed to make sure that the people in the factory were doing their job and to sell with the people in the factory made.

I grew up in Buffalo, New York, my dad worked for a company that made Servo tronic controls and fancy electronics, and their offices were adjacent to the places where the machines were actually made their offices. Are fairly ramshackle for a company of that scale and it was run by Engineers. Lots of metal filing cabinets and the third was my friend, the late Lionel Poulin, the most famous and important Baker in all of France.

His office was right upstairs from the bakery. Every single day. He would spend part of his time in the office where he was making calls and selling the bread and a lot of his time downstairs with the Baker’s the origin of the office which is fairly recent hundred and fifty years older. So was a little alcove right next to the place. Where things got made people who worked in the factory. Often wanted to be having an office job because it looked a lot easier. You weren’t going to hurt your back and the people in the office. We’re spending a lot of time trying to improve the productivity of the people in the factory.

If we think back to the foreman whose desk is elevated so they can look down on everyone in the factory or the pharmacist who’s up there high to make sure that none of the customers are lost or shoplifting. This idea of the hierarchy is built in to the history of the office that the office exists to make sure that the people who work for the person in the office are doing what they’re told and are doing it efficiently.

Well. As office work started to create more and more value in and of itself, not simply helping the car company produce more cars per worker hour but to actually design cars that people wanted to buy and to figure out how to Market cars so that people would want to buy them and to how to do Financial Shenanigans.

So that the value of the organization would go up is operations were enhanced all of these things led to more and more people being The office as more people were in the office. They needed to hire people simply to take care of the people in the office just like a big Factory needs a whole team of people on maintenance detail.

Well, in the office, that means we’ve got clerks. It means we’ve got admins, it means we’ve got receptionist’s, it means you’ve got people making sure that the people in the office are as productive as possible. And if we look at the history of office design, like the Famous Johnson wax building Architects. Spent a lot of time dealing with a problem, which is that in a factory, we are really aware of the flow of goods that assembly lines. Make some sort of logistical sense that we can trace where a screw goes when it comes into the building, where it’s stored who needs to go and get it and how it’s put into the device on its way out the door.

But in offices, the flow was And as clear. So we had the typing pool of the secretarial pool. We had the whole idea of the front desk and the break room, these things were sort of backhanded attempts to figure out the flow, who knows who, who sits where we name the place, where the CEO sits the corner office, because the very name itself tells us something about information flow about the hierarchy.

And this went on for decades, it wasn’t unusual at all for an executive at a corporation to call in their secretary. Dictate a memo, then the secretary would go and type it and then that person would walk 20 feet down the aisle, and hand the memo to a different secretary who would walk in to their bosses office and hand them. The memo to be read by a second executive.

That was normal. And if we took Executives or office workers from the 1950s or 60s and plop them into an office from 2014, they would be shocked shocked at the informality of information flow. Shocked at the way, people were dressed at the way that they talked with an at each other shocked. It. So many of the ways that the office had dramatically shifted in 50, or 60 years, But we forgot to have a conversation about what the office is even for, because the office might be for a lot of different things. Now, the first thought is this, if there is a job that can be done repeatedly without a lot of innovation, it has probably been out sourced because organizations are figuring up for example that they don’t need to build an email server, they should just pay mail Chimp $20 a month because they know what the spec is of what they need, and they can just Outsource that to somebody else.

If you call a company and you think you’re talking to their customer service department, you might not be because a lot of companies have figured out, it’s better to just Outsource that call center. What an interesting phrase call center to somebody who’s in the business of running call centers. But lots of offices are or were significantly bigger than they needed to be simply for logistical reasons because one of the reasons that companies have offices is that CEO sort of like them, they like them because they enjoy having plenty of people in the office who are doing what they tell them to do.

They like them because they can justify adding marginal effort to the office Front, because even a little boost. In market share or P/E ratio pays for itself many times more than that person, you hired to be in the office and so we end up with caste systems and tired. Status rolls, we end up with people being manipulated, we end up with power games. We end up with people, people who are hooked on power acting it out in an office setting where they get to be the boss, the whole idea of an employee at will who could be fired at any moment? Ain’t for not pleasing.

The person that they work for a big argument, for the physical proximity of the office is communication email into a pneumatic tube and shooting it around a building, as the best way to communicate. From one person to another physical proximity Is Essential but the rules changed, they changed with email, they change with the telephone and most of all they changed with zoom because email asynchronous eliminates time. You don’t have to be in the same moment to communicate with somebody and then Zoom eliminates space that you can communicate with somebody else even if they’re not in the building.

Now it’s worth noting that most large organizations have more than one office. Anyway, so we had already drifted from the idea that you need to see someone face-to-face to communicate with them. But business travel people, shuttling all over the world at a great carbon cost kept growing and growing. Because there is something to be said for impersonal, communication, a lot of it had to do with the emotional commitment of showing up.

So, the office evolved from this thing where we needed a bunch of people in a room because there was no other way around it to a demonstration of emotional commitment. But while that’s going on, we also have offices as warehouses for clerks. And while that’s going on, we also have the idea that you have tools.

Now we can’t have people building cars from home because it’s really hard to put a punch press in your Backyard. But back 20 30 50 years ago when you needed a wang word processor and you needed all of the tools of the copy machine in the rest to do your job. You needed to go to a building where all of those things were but also like Zoom that shifted it shifted. Because once you have a laptop, you own the means of production that most of the time in most offices, the only tools people are using is Top and a telephone.

And so we have eliminated that desire as well. I think it’s now worth taking a minute to realize, there’s more than one kind of office. There are offices giant banks, for example, filled with people whose only job is to not screw up filled with people who are getting paid a lot who are afforded a whole bunch of external respect, but their job is to be in sync to go to Enough meetings to double-check enough things that they don’t embarrass themselves because the bank is making so much money that the only job is don’t screw up, but there’s another kind of office and this is the kind of office to get talked about by people. Like me by people on the net by people have the time to talk about change and this is the office whose job is not to figure out how to not screw up.

Its job is to change things that the reason companies. Hey, a lot for this sort of White Collar work is it’s hard to find people who will bring the energy and the passion and the emotional centeredness to a problem to come up with an original interesting solution who can actually grow market, share, not just maintain it.

Who can solve interesting problems. And there are offices now and then that add to that magic. I remember walking into the fast company offices in Boston. Now and always leaving with more energy than I came in with because what Allen and Bill figured out how to do through architecture, through hiring through leadership is create a place where the energy and the optimism was contagious.

This is the office of a good exciting movie like the front page where newspaper people are. Pushing each other for the scoop where we are talking about, how do we go to work to Things better not simply to find our place in a pecking order, a hierarchy to play it safe to get through the day. TGIF is not one of the features of this sort of office.

So when we think about this sort of office, we have to realize, it’s conflated with the old kinds of offices. That when Google set out to build a different, kind of office, with the lava lamps, and And the ball pits and the notorious Chef, who used to cook for the Grateful Dead. They did all of those things because they wanted a campus and they wanted a campus because they were intent on changing things, changing things in a big way, but like most organizations as they got bigger, they lost the thread. So maybe they kept the ball pits. They definitely kept the fancy food, but most of the people who work at Google are trying to change anything there. See We try to keep things the way they are because they want the stock price to go up on a regular basis.

So culturally, we conflate the lava lamps and we can flate the fancy offices with the ability to change things. That’s a mistake. So going forward, the question we need to ask is what kind of office is this anyway, are we here to put on a show for the boss where the people who work for the boss or the people who work for the people? Who, who work for the boss?

Is it a show about how many hours we put in. So we better be on the zoom call to show our compliance and our obedience because that show is really expensive and it’s expensive. When you’re doing it from home, it wears this out and it’s expensive when they’re doing it in the office. And I think a lot of these big organizations are going to take a look around and say, we don’t need that much compliance and we don’t need that many people and there’s going to be a move to hollow out a lot. A lot of the overhead in these institutions because technology coordination, makes it much easier to get away with fewer people.

And for the organizations that want to change things, well, they’re still going to need something to shift the emotional posture of the people who work there because working together is a great way to get through our individual fear. How do you create that? Esprit de corps. How do you create that environment where people are willing to extend themselves emotionally, and with energy to put themselves on a limb to Champion, a new idea, a better idea one that meets skepticism when it is first discussed. And yet people crusade to push it forward.

That is the highest yield of most offices. And that is something that’s going to change. Once the people who are willing to sign up for that have choice Is. And so I think we’re about to see an upheaval in how we spend our day and whether or not we commute and whether we’re sending more money to the dry cleaner for an outfit that serves no real utility.

What does it even mean to go to work? It is called Truly Deeply ingrained in us. If you grew up in a blue-collar household going to work, means you go to the factory. If you grow up in a white collar household going to work, means you go to an office. Yes. But in both cases, it keeps changing. A keep shifting.

And going to work is something we need to do not just for sustenance to support our family. But to fill our days with something that feels like meaning and there are so many kinds of work but there were just a few kinds of offices and that’s going to diverge the culture is going to shift yet again, because technology isn’t going to wait around and organizations that need to go fast that need to innovate that need to Connect people, those organizations might not decide that the office of the future. Looks a lot like the office of the past, they might decide that. What is in front of them? Is this massive opportunity to coordinate the activity of committed people who are bringing emotional labor, soft skills, real skills, and insight to the table to put together resources and opportunities to make things better by making better things.

There’s no chance we’re going back to the office of 1957, and I think there’s little chance. We’re going back to the office of 2015. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam. This is Rex. Who’s gonna hi? This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006, click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can check out the show notes in this week’s show notes.

I’ll be putting a link to Theo sanderson’s up goer. Worksheet. Here we go three questions this week about words. In fact, I got more questions. Coming in about the billion dollars worth of words episode than any I’ve done in a while. I guess I should. If I want to maximize incoming questions, talk more about words and less about I don’t know the end of the world that being said, they’re all related, here we go.

Hey, Seth, this is lightning. Lucas again from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia Thanks for the episode about words. I really love words and I just wondering if you could Riff on the network effect in regards to words being adopted amongst People Like Us saying things like this. Thanks for all you do.

Thank you for kicking us off. Lucas. Yes, I failed to mention this words only work, when other people know what they mean? That’s fascinating because that’s not true for most of the things in our world. Most of the things in our world you can use quite happily by yourself. But as we all know, using words by yourself can make you seem a little bit, like an outlier, the network effect. The thing is that things.

Better when other people are using them, that applies more than just about anything to language. So our goal when we are deciding, which words to use is to begin with, who our audience is, to figure out either, do we need to teach them what a new word means are we trying to create tension around the words they don’t mean?

Or are we going to figure out how to use words that they understand earlier? ER I mentioned the up goer worksheet, it’s a website where inspired by Randall Munroe creator of XKCD. You can figure out if you can explain something using only the most popular, ten hundred words, why ten hundred? Because the number a thousand is not one of the most popular ten hundred words. It turns out it’s not that hard. Once you get the hang of it, but it might take you a little while to get the hang of it. And if you’re writing for a general audience, It’s if you’re writing for people for whom the language, you’re speaking might not be their first language.

This is a useful skill to master and if you want to coin a term I don’t know like permission marketing or the idea of Iris or the dip. Yeah, you could write a book about it, but it also helps to put that word into company of words that people already understand by Seth Jeremy from Lincoln City. A question regarding Adding your million-dollar words episode?

I’d like your view on when to use those million-dollar words and when to avoid them in relation to your smallest viable audience, when do you think it’s best to speak? Directly to that audience? Who is likely to understand those words and when to avoid them so that a larger public might be able to enter the conversation.

Thank you for your podcast. I enjoy nearly every episode. Thanks, Jeremy. This is a great segue from Lucas’s question, because if we just use words that are the most popular ten hundred words, we will have no trouble at all, reaching large numbers of people, but there’s a benefit besides the Precision of language to use language that only your smallest viable, audience, understand or at least Embraces when you talk about kerf. K ER f are useful Scrabble word and also something that Woodworkers understand it has you come across as more expert than if you say the space that’s made when the band saw cuts through the wood Cerf is a much better more precise way to say it and it establishes for your smallest viable audience that you know what you’re talking about because they know what Cerf is and if you’re not using the word Cerf, then maybe you’re an outsider.

You talk about kerning oh another four-letter word that starts with AK to a bunch of typographers. Again instead of saying the space between the letters, you know, the way they nest under each other, simply say Kern and you have established to them that your people like us. So that is a useful important reason to know the lingo and yes, the word lingo is an example of what I’m talking about because I could simply say no, the words that the other people know, No to show that they’re insiders or I could use an Insider term that most people who, like, language would understand, which is lingo not nearly as many points in Scrabble, though. Hello, Seth. This is a thin Davis. From Greenville South Carolina, and I really enjoyed your program about a billion dollars worth of words.

And reminded me about a question about the main knowledge and domain reading that I had after I finish reading the practice. You see, I work in the marketing department for a publisher of biblical worldview based K through 12, educational materials. And that means that we’re speaking to an audience about theology, we’re talking to them about education.

We also speak to a homeschoolers and beyond that, I’m really interested in marketing and all types of different kinds of marketing. And we’re asked to do a wide variety of kinds of marketing. And so I really appreciate your thoughts and Direction on how I should think about where I should focus in terms of studying right now. I feel like I read superficially across all these different subjects and I haven’t really become a master if any of them and I really appreciate your insights. Thank you for all you do really appreciate your work.

Thank you. Thank you. Ben for this practical way to finish these three questions. Here’s my tip. When you read trade magazines, when you read, popular texts are there words in there that you think, you understand. But you’re not sure that you sort of glazed over that you’ve danced around. Highlight, those words, what exactly does eleemosynary mean? I know you’ve seen the word. Ali mohsen are lots of times in the chronicle of philanthropy and you think, you know what it means? But what does it really mean?

And if you can track down, one or two or three words a day, that’s all and figure out what they really mean, you will discover more than vocabulary, you will discover Concepts because knowing a word helps us know, the concept of knowing a concept, helps us know the word. And so, we’re not simply learning vocabulary to signal to other people that were an Insider.

We’re learning vocabulary because being an Insider. Means that we understand how the systems work, we know where the overthruster is and why it’s hooked up to the manifold and you get the idea as always. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great Book, a great essay, a great idea anywhere you know and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you going to show up, When you gotta face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

We don’t have an I meant and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-rule-of-three- <==

So, a rabbi a priest and an alderman walk into the bar and the bartender says, what is this? Some kind of a joke. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is a Kimbo, we’ll be back in a second to talk about the rule of three and the irreversible binomial.

But first, here’s a message from our sponsor get better clients. It’s there. In three words, is the strategy of any freelancer. Who wants to do better work. Get better clients. You can’t work more hours but you can work.

For people who appreciate the work you want to do. They will push you harder. You will do better work. They will talk about you. You will get paid more. You will be more proud of what you produce, how to get better clients. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and we have built a workshop just For you, if you work for yourself, I really think you need to check it out.

It’s not a bunch of videos. It’s a workshop. You will work with other Freelancers. Working your way forward to figure out how to do this work that matters. I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out. Visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a Ruckus.

Even if you didn’t know the name of the rule of three, you’ve certainly We encountered it, The Three Stooges, the three pigs, The Three Musketeers.

Hello. The rule of three is an effective form of writing in which we list one thing. And then another thing, and then the third thing that is the motto of Superman fights, a never-ending battle for truth justice and the American way, but not just Superman’s motto. In fact, if we listen to the Prelude to Superman, Ann’s motto.

We hear the rule of three again again.

And yes, you guessed it again on a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive.

Able to LEAP tall buildings at a single bound up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s Superman. Yes. It’s Superman. Strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman who can change the course of Mighty River’s. Bend Steel in his bare hands and who disguised, as Clark Kent mild-mannered reporter for a great. Metropolitan newspaper, is there something magical About the rule of three, is there? Something hardwired into our brains? That makes triplets something that stick with us.

Here’s what Leonard Bernstein has to say about creating a Melody.

Well, the answer is repetition either. Exact repetition or a slightly altered repetition within the theme itself. It’s that repetition that makes the melody stick in your mind and it’s The Melodies that stick in your mind that are likely to please you the most Most popular songwriters know this and that’s why they repeat their phrases. So often just think of that big song Hit Mack the Knife ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba repeating over and over. Well the same technique works just as well in symphonic music.

Certainly, that’s what Beethoven did in his most famous.

Triplet first one statement, then a small variation of the statement does Set us up and then the final delivery. It’s also the way Curly Larry and Moe answer the telephone How about brother three-speed hello hello.

And then we can get to irreversible trinomials and irreversible. Trinomial are three words that go together in an order that we couldn’t reverse or move around without it, sounding really weird. You go to an ear, nose and throat. Dr. You talk to friends Romans and countrymen. There’s gold silver and bronze.

If you’re getting ready for work, you lather, rinse, and repeat you fell for that Hook Line & Sinker. You get the idea, but it would be really weird. If someone said action camera lights, because we’ve been taught one, two, and three Ready, set go. My friend Jason asked me about whether there’s something that makes the rule of three work. Why is it that jokes often involve three people walking into a bar, is that some kind of joke while there could be three theories here? One Theory might be. Yes, it’s the way our brains work. There’s something Universal, hardwired into us where moment. But Adana bow three things in a row somehow grooved into our brain, another theory, the one I had originally when I started Searching this podcast is that it’s a western creation that just as we have for for music here and they don’t really have four for music.

If you’re listening to say, table music in India, We perhaps have codified the three beat Rhythm into Western culture and because we’re so ethnocentric have determined.

It’s a rule of nature but I have a new Theory and my new theory is there’s really no such thing that 3 is. The number where we start noticing a pattern that if it’s just one well it’s one. It’s a There’s so many things that’s not a pattern, it’s just a thing. But what about to before, there were irreversible trinomials, they were irreversible binomials.

And there are far more of those fine and dandy back and forth above, and beyond alive, and well bangers. And mash bait and switch macaroni, and cheese, can’t say cheese and macaroni macaroni and cheese Flesh, and Blood forever and a day forever, and ever hard and fast ham and eggs. They hide and I don’t even know what that word means day and night. You get the idea, there’s two it happens all the time Abbott and Costello.

There’s a couple there is a pair suddenly to feels like a really stable situation and biologically to is sort of the way we are organized and then there’s four and four shows up in lots of places as well. There were actually More than three stooges and more than three Marx Brothers. For shows up in lots of places, just ask, John Paul, George and Ringo.

But also five five shows up in lots of places. So why have we fixated on three? Well, I think three is when we begin to notice that there is a pattern that, as a writer, I’ve adopted, the rule of three. I often write this thing, come of that thing. And the other thing, the Rhythm, Feels right to me but maybe the reason the Rhythm feels right to me is because I’ve been using it a lot, reading it a lot in countering it a lot.

Maybe the reason we have the rule of three is that we have the rule of three that it reminds us that something is coming.

Then if we started joke with a so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, walk into a bar, we’ve announced somebody this is some sort of joke, maybe when their composure. Offers us one thing and then a slight variation and then the dynamic conclusion. They are alerting us to the fact that they also get the joke that they know, the rule of three, that they know how to Pace it and talk about it.

And so, I wanted to alert you to the existence of the rule of three because maybe we’re giving writers the benefit of the doubt. When we encounter it, maybe we’re feeling a little off, but it’s not quite three when it’s almost 3:00, but perhaps. Apps. The rule of 3 is just completely fabricated in a paper that I put in the show notes. At akimbo dot link, a bunch of researchers tried to investigate the famous rule of three for Behavioral indicators. With high specificity for bipolarity, in patients with major depression episodes, they did a univariate analysis of thirty six thousand seven hundred and forty two subjects and made a list of 29 markers that often appear things like More than three religion changes, more than three marriages cheating on their partner regularly, having more than 60 lifetime, sexual partners pathological, Love Heavy cursing, speaking more than three foreign languages, having more than two apparent, tattoos, circadian dysregulation and high debt.

And what they found is that 11 of these markers.

If you have three of them, it’s quite likely. You might need professional help. Again, the rule of three, we can’t get away from it. You just want to talk to you Marshall. See if we can work. Something out Daisy’s, we got anything to talk about, but if you want to say something you can say, from right there, can I come a little closer so and not shouting like a couple of drunken hobos? I can hear you.

Is it okay if I come a little closer that? Okay, you take one more step, I’ll shoot you. That’s all I’m going to say.

Marshall. I want to tell you something important.

For a really long time.

People honestly, believe there was a man in the moon because we are pattern matchers and we are pattern makers. We don’t know what to do when we look at something that might be blank or random and so we fill in the blanks and if you look really hard at the Moon, maybe you can see two eyes and perhaps that’s a nose or mouth, the rule of three, the pattern we look for patterns, that’s what we do.

And for the last word, One of the great Trio’s of all time, thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a question from a previous episode. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and How it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin.

Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pal, this is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam. This is Rex. Hey son.

Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question. As you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link-16, click the appropriate button. Here we go.

Hi, Seth, this is Matthew in Phoenix. I have a question for you, about your recent episode about clerks in Mertens, what happens if you’ve been a clerk for many decades most of your career and suddenly you’re asked not to be the clerk. You ask for think like a merchant. How do you get your brain in your modus? Operandi to change so you can adjust to this new?

System, this new template. I am struggling with this and I would be interested in your comment. I love your show, I love your podcast and thank you for all you do. Thank you for this I really appreciate it. It seems to me that the answer is actually a question more than one question. The part of what happens when you are brainwashed into being a clerk is that you are pushed to not ask difficult questions that part of being a Work is to Simply look at what’s in the inbox?

Look at what’s on the manual. The instruction sheet figure out how to get by and put in A Hard Day’s work for a decent pay. That’s it. That’s your job. That’s the deal. But implied in being a merchant is a set of questions. Who’s it for who, exactly. Am I working with? And for right now, who is in front of me?

What do they believe? What do they want? What do they Fear. What’s it for this change? I am bringing to the world. What change am I seeking to make? How will I know if it’s working in the most traditional example of a merchant because you made a sale. But for the mindset, it’s, how did I bring something to this person?

This person I am seeking to serve in a way that makes a change happen, that is aligned with the promise that I made when I showed up for them, who’s it for. And what’s it for And then we can add a few more questions. One of them is, why is it like this curiosity, not accepting as a given the status quo, the system right in front of us. But instead, repeatedly asking why, if you ask, why five times in a row, you will get to the heart of what the person you are seeking to serve is actually looking for.

And so if we think about a traditional Merchants, you know, Macy’s or Wanamaker’s, most of the people, Work there actually clerk, but the merchants who run the place. Who innovate, who push things forward? And there are in short supply in traditional retail right now. Because most of them have become clerks are asking questions about? Why does someone buy a coat to begin with that? If you go into a store to buy shoes?

The odds are you probably already own a pair of shoes, you’re probably already wearing a pair of shoes. So what is it that you went into by understanding the story? We that someone tells themselves being able to see their hopes and their dreams and their pains and their fears understanding how they fit in society. This is a long list, I’m sharing with you, but it all begins with questions.

Asking ourselves, the questions opens the door to being able to find the answers. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable in in today’s world to distinguish yourself. As an educational institution or as a success, seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got. Access to ideas, you got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you got a face, that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. And it’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -choice-theory- <==

Bergen County, New Jersey has one of the USA’s last blue laws.

Banning retailers from doing this.

Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about blue laws about truth. So, and about Choice Theory, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor get, better clients there in three, A words is the strategy of any freelancer. Who wants to do better work. Get better clients. You can’t work more hours but you can work. For people who appreciate the work you want to do. They will push you harder. You will do better work. They will talk about you. You will get paid more. You will be more proud of what you produce, how to get better clients.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and we have built a workshop just for you, if Work for yourself. I really think you need to check it out. It’s not a bunch of videos. It’s a workshop. You will work with other Freelancers. Working your way forward to figure out how to do this work that matters.

I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out. Visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a Ruckus for a really long time. Hundreds of years, if you are in a small town in Italy, And one o’clock in the afternoon, rolled around everything was choose. So closed. People were taking the pause living, a gentle life, staying home. Maybe taking a nap eating with their family and then going back to reopen their store at three o’clock in the afternoon.

And Paramus New Jersey home of Alex Trebek’s famous. Blue laws is the last County in New Jersey. That enforces a suspension Of shopping on Sundays. This is pretty amazing since Paramus. New Jersey is basically one giant shopping mall. Mean a new stereo color TV? CB Call 645. 1196 for the most ridiculous prices, ever during crazy and he’s Christmas sale in August.

In those villages in Italy, the rules, stay the way. The rules are until a chain store, shows up until a big Supermarket shows up and they don’t close from one o’clock to 3. Three o’clock. They’re thinking goes the landlord’s charging us rent 24 hours a day. We need to make an income 24 hours a day. There are thinking is we work for the shareholders, not the employees.

There are thinking is there are people in this town who are tourists or who are at work and need to buy something. We will be open for them. And so we run headlong into this idea that capitalism is ultimately about markets and markets are Choice, Henry Ford may or may not have said you can have any color car you want, as long as it’s black, but what we do know is that once other people competitors, figured out how to make a car as inexpensively as Ford could Henry Ford’s opinion no longer mattered if you want fins, here’s a car with fins.

If you want white wall tires, here’s a car with white wall tires. The customer makes choices. Has and all of us live in a world where many markets are free, and we are spoiled by the presumption that free markets are the standard that we have a choice that the customer is King. And as a result, businesses have no choice but to offer choice, that it’s really difficult to build a business at scale in a competitive market where you insist that thing. They’re done your way, not the way the customer wants.

And so as we start to dissect, how culture works, one of the things we need to do is realize that in an economy that’s driven by a market. Many people investors and employees will work to limit choice that what people look for in an investment. For example, is a company that is approaching Monopoly, the one and only Is that because of structural mechanics or because of the way that they produce things, you don’t really have a choice.

We’re certainly seeing this with shopping on Amazon that bit by bit, as Amazon has gained scale, and they have been able to lower their prices. At the very same time. They increase their efficiency in delivering Goods. A lot of alternatives are going away. They’re going away because you get it faster and cheaper from And the argument is that once Amazon has eliminated, most of their competition, the simplest thing in the world for them to do will be to charge a little bit. Extra will be to lower service, just a little bit because both of those things in a market where customers don’t have much choice will lead, directly to profits to the bottom line and patient investors will get what they’ve been waiting for, Which is less choice, because in many Situations choice is a race to the bottom certainly, when it comes to profit margin.

And then what about the side effects? When we start to give people choice as adults? We like to think of choice as an unalloyed good thing that choices options, the ability to select what’s good for us. Feels optimal because when people choose, they get what they want now. Four-year-old speaks up and says, I would like the choice to stay up all night eating popcorn.

We say to that four-year-old. Not yet, you’re not an adult. There are costs to choices particularly if we’re not aware of them, and if we’re four years old, but in community in culture and commerce choices have side effects. So, for example, when we give the consumer in that little town in Italy, that A choice to go shopping at 1 p.m.

it has an impact on the life of the person who needs to be in that store. Because no longer are they at home for lunch with their family. The choice of the consumer who has the power, who has the money undermines, the choice of the employee, to be able to spend time with their family over lunch, because some businesses are open. And that means if there are Are open.

They will suffer and not be able to pay their rent and eventually disappear. Amazon has grown by giving its customers. An enormous range of choices Amazon sells more books than any bookstore in the history of the world. Amazon has more than 400 kinds of Japanese pole. Saws to choose from Amazon, gives consumers a choice.

But by doing, so they have put Enormous pressure on retailers, local retailers who offered something different to Consumers, and many of them have gone on a business. And many more will thus decreasing. The choices that are available in the long run or consider the options. Open to the person who wants to run a business. Should they be able to make the choice to have the table saws? They use not have safety guards.

Because by not installing safety guards. In the short run, they can produce the items, they make faster and thus cheaper. And thus give consumers in the world more choices about what to buy for their money. And yet once someone cuts off their finger with a table saw, they can’t get it back, no matter what.

So, when does the choice of the consumer or the choice of the owner, interact with the life choices and future of the person who works In the factory. There is no right answer and that is the point of this rant. The point of this rant is that we are always affecting some people’s choices by giving other people choices that when they put the blue laws in place in Paramus New Jersey and made it. So that every single business in the county that sells a certain kind of item cannot be open. They gave the owners and employees of Businesses freedom, to choose to choose a way to spend their Sunday, the freedom, to decide, how to live a life that isn’t always in the store. But they did that by taking away the freedom of the local Shopper to go shopping on Sunday and this has been litigated back and forth. It’s been the subject of referendums as a community, the referendums have always gone in favor of let’s close everything. Being on Sunday, that’s a choice.

Now, it’s been said that democracy is the single worst form of government except for all of the Alternatives and one of the challenges of the choice that’s driven by democracy. Is that it can easily outweigh the needs of a particular individual and as our culture revolves and gives more and more people, a platform, and a way to speak up on one hand, individuals are More heard and their need for choices, are being integrated into the range of things that are offered by Society.

But on the other hand, we’re starting to feel the Creeks around the edges because giving everyone a free choice all the time. Ignores the fact that choices have side effects that if we’re not careful, we will end up racing to the bottom and that will take away other people’s choices so I have no answer for us.

I’m just here to talk about the fact that we need to identify that choice theory is a real thing that what we need to think about is who is going to get a choice as we build this Enterprise of value, who is going to get a choice. When we build this internet tool, who loses choices, when it becomes a natural monopoly, when there is lock-in and people can’t go find another social network.

What happens when we add adversarial interoperability and give users the Choices to take their data and their social graph and go somewhere else with it who wins and who loses. I think as we consider all of the opportunities that the internet is creating as it. Rewires our culture, we’re going to have to consider also who gets to choose and who doesn’t thanks for listening?

We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a QA. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor Sir.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo Dot. Cam go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is an apology.

Caitlin, hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question as you know I love to hear from you and I get far fewer questions than you might expect. If you’ve got a question would like to give it a shot? Please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link-16, click the appropriate button.

Here’s one from Dave. Hi, Seth. My name is Dave. I’m a composer and a teacher. My question has to do with shiny objects. I have a lot of ideas all of the time. Some of these ideas are creative. Others are more entrepreneurial, but how do I know when I’m onto a good idea? How do I know when I’m attracted to the object and not just attracted to the shiny?

I think of the shiny as the end to be gained the success the riches that await, if you will, when really most of the time, that’s just scarcity. So, how do I know when I find? And a good idea that’s not driven by scarcity. This not driven by the end result. Thanks very much for everything that you do, much appreciated.

Yeah I hear you. This is a common problem. People with ideas tend to have ideas. There are a few people who have just one idea but that’s pretty rare. If you get in the habit of exploring the fringes, you will find ideas. And then the question comes up, what are they for? Is it like humming a song? Every day just to entertain yourself if that’s the case hum away.

Inventing ideas that you never ship is a fine Pastime. But for many people, the purpose of an idea is to make a change happen. We do not make a change happen with an idea. The idea itself, accomplishes, very little. We make a change happen by implementing the idea by shipping, the idea by refining it by evolving.

By bringing it to the right, people by exploiting, the opportunity by expending emotional labor, by experiencing failure, learning and doing it again, and all of that can be exhausting and enervating and much of. It doesn’t work, and it all takes time away from that thing. We said, we like doing, which is coming up with the ideas in the first place.

So, how to dig ourselves out of this Paradox? Well, I have a very practical Question for you. And I’ve tried this with people who say, they have too many ideas, and it tends to focus the mind today is Wednesday, go ahead and give yourself five days, and five days from now, you need to have five ideas. Five of the ideas you’ve been carrying around protecting nurturing five ideas.

One page per idea that one page needs to explain. What’s the idea who’s it for what? For what’s the change? We seek to make? How are you going to bring it to Market? Where is The Leverage? A little bit of a roadmap about how to get from here to there, right them all up, five of them and then sit with a few trusted friends and say here are the five and force them to pick one.

Have a vote and whichever one, they pick you have to do you have to you have given agency to them? You must follow through, you set it up, they pick it. The reason this works is because you will approach that meeting, five days from now differently. Knowing that the only ideas you can bring to that meeting.

Our idea is you’re actually prepared to commit to, to do something about that. You don’t have to have the meeting in five days, you can just act like it and then when you realize, you’re not ready, you can cycle one or two more times, but then you got to have the meeting. Because the thing is ideas in private are safe ideas. In private are fun because we don’t have to expose ourselves to the market but if we’re here to make a change happen, we have to commit. We have to pick an idea. We have to be able to say here.

I made this. Thank you for caring about the work. Thank you for shipping the work. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to English yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah. That’s good, you got access to ideas, you got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, what are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask. That question, it’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -big-games- <==

Some people don’t like games, but the truth is, we’re all playing them all the time. The thing is, some games are little games and some games are big games. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about strategies tactics. Moves winning losing and the infinite game. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor Hi, spend it at you. And I’m here to talk to you about how you can become a better. Storyteller storytelling is not an art reserved for the Chosen Few. It’s a skill that you can learn just like the students have taken part in the story skills. Workshop of done, actually I had a story to tell that was really important for me but also was going to be very very important for people in the future.

It’s been absolutely Changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories, I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving as in the receiving, we got to not only learn about storytelling. We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life if you’re ready to become a better Storyteller. I hope you’ll join us.

I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com go for all the upcoming. NG workshops. Go make a Ruckus. Chess is a game. It’s an almost perfect little game.

There are 64 squares, there are 32 pieces, the rules can fit onto sheets of paper. The rules are the rules. You play the game? You can lose the game or you can win the game and some people don’t want to play, just because the game is a little trivial, it’s trivial in the sense that it is a Pastime. It is something that is not going to affect the outside world and it’s something that a lot of people aren’t very good at, and it doesn’t make them feel good to Game. They’re not good at little games that are optimized for big markets. Things like Battleship or cheat or Monopoly, offend people who love little games because they are obviously manipulative.

The rules aren’t Pure or clean and the person who developed the game is trying very hard to create moments of tension where sometimes it’s not as fun as it could be, but I don’t want to talk. So much about little games as I want to talk about big games when we start talking about other things in our life, as games, people who don’t understand the Dynamics of a game or don’t like games sometimes fade away.

So, when I talk about game theory, for example, people think it’s a discussion about how to win at Checkers. It’s not Game Theory, helps us understand that. A game involves inputs decisions and resources. There are multiple players and when the inputs change new decisions are required. Those decisions are actually decisions because there isn’t an infinite number of resources. You don’t have unlimited time and unlimited power to do everything. So you have to choose and these choices have repercussions and it leads to outputs and understanding the abstraction that we get, when we look at things in the world. Old as a game helps us understand how the world works and how to make it better.

So, what am I talking about? Let’s think for a minute about Twitter, Twitter is a game. The rules of the game are pretty simple. Until recently a hundred and forty characters that’s all you get, there is a format, there’s a structure you’re allowed to post as many times as you want per day, and these are the basic rules, then a Twitter user invented, a new rule, all the hashtag. So the rules can change just a little bit, but why did Twitter work? Well first, let’s start with why Twitter didn’t work for years. After its founding Twitter wasn’t much of a success at all, and it was only when they went to South by Southwest and put up, monitors in the hallways that they got a certain section of the cool kids to start using Twitter to do what to play a game.

It’s a game about status and affiliation. It’s a game in which you take output. That are coming from outside the board. Game outputs about what happened in this conference or what’s happening in politics or pop culture. And you turn them around in some way to use your limited resources to get your message into the twittersphere to see if you’re going to win this round.

And there are lots of ways to keep score. Some people keep score by counting how many followers they have. How many likes they got? How many comments they got. Some people keep score by seeing how deeply they could troll other people and make them unhappy. P. Some people keep track of whether they could get a hashtag to Trend or not. There are lots of ways to keep score in this game of Twitter and to the Delight of people who own early shares of Twitter.

The game keeps getting refreshed. It gets refreshed because new players show up new inputs from outside the world show up, people devote themselves to playing. Not realizing they’re not the customers of Twitter. They’re the product. That passion, that disappointment, that fear, that angst, that disillusion, that people feel when they’re using Twitter.

That is a byproduct to get you to come back and use Twitter, some more. So you can see more ads, Twitter is a game and we can now go to a new level of abstraction, which is some people are showing up inventing games that are played on somebody else’s board. If we look at some of the nuanced discussion that went on About Q & A on.

It turns out Q8 can be seen as a game. It is a role-playing game that is controlled by a semi-anonymous Gamemaster and play done. Lots and lots of boards. It manipulated Facebook’s algorithms to grow it. Thrives on platforms like YouTube and Twitter. So it’s on somebody else’s board but again, their inputs, there’s decisions and there are resources that play.

The people who were playing and when we look at these games that are now being pushed onto our culture, what we have to acknowledge is that these games while they might benefit, the Gamemaster have significant side effects. And so I want to talk for a second about the biggest game of all, the biggest meta game, and that meta game is the game of individuals seeking to make money by playing with.

Open markets and capitalism the that game Dynamic did not exist 800 years ago and was pretty scarce, 200 years ago and there are lots of ways that our culture could have evolved. But the game dynamics of I’m going to call it capitalism here even though it’s not pure capitalism. The game dynamics of capitalism that ratchet, that people who start winning the game. Start to play the game harder that the game.

Public school and organized schooling. As we know it that the game is deeply embedded into every element of our culture that the game invented this thing, that some of us call marketing that the game turns out to be something that politicians have no choice but to play and around and around it goes, if you want to change the culture, it really helps to play a game so that people Who are trying to play the game of capitalism, will go along with the change. We seek to make.

So you want to get rid of carbon and save the planet. Well, one way you do, it is with cap and trade so that people can make a profit limiting. Carbon one way you can do it is by investing in technology that drives down the price of Solar because we have seen in the last few years as solar has gotten cheaper.

Nobody is building coal power plants and lat People are building solar and wind power plant. Some of them are doing it because they like their grandchildren to survive, but many of them are doing it because it’s a great strategy in the game because you come out ahead turning that ratchet around and around and like, chess the rules. The basic fundamental rules behind capitalism are super simple.

Find something someone wants to buy that you can sell for more than it cost you to make it repeat. Pete and then add to it, the Master Level game, which is invest in people who are playing that game. And now, one higher level of abstraction.

If someone came in a time machine from a thousand years ago and watched a day trader trading Bitcoin sitting in their living room, they would be completely mystified if you explained to this person, this person who used to work, digging ditches, this person who used to work farming. Growing food that this person sitting in this room is richer, then, any person who was alive on Earth, 800 years ago, they wouldn’t have a clue what this person is doing because sitting in your living room day, trading. Bitcoin is a game, it is a game in which inputs come decisions are made. And then there are outputs and looking at all of the things around us and understanding the game Dynamic behind it makes a A big difference in understanding culture and getting your ideas to spread Jim cars and then Simon sinek both wrote books about infinite versus finite games. I recommend both of them.

A finite game is a game with a super simple set of rules like chess. There are multiple players. There’s often a time limit but there is definitely a winner. At the end, some finite games, are zero-sum games, which means that every time you win a little somebody Is a little every time you win a lot. Somebody loses a lot.

Other finite, games, aren’t zero-sum games. There are things that someone can do that. Pay benefits for lots of people without hurting anybody else, a musician, standing on a street corner, busking is playing music for the people who are paying for it, but they’re not taking anything away from the people who aren’t paying for it, the world gets better when we play games that aren’t zero-sum.

But What cars and cynic also pointed out is that there’s another kind of game, which isn’t infinite game, which you aren’t playing to win. You’re simply playing to play, as I’ve said before, you don’t play, catch with your three-year-old to win. You play catch, so you can play catch and so you can play catch again.

Because if you win catch with the three-year-old, you never get to play catch with that person or just about anybody ever again. Now the goal is to play to keep playing. So capitalism is a tricky game because there are elements of That are zero-sum that if there’s only a certain amount of money in a certain part of the economy and you take more of it, someone gets less of it.

But there are other elements of capitalism that have enriched, the entire planet, because it turns out that giving other people access to tools might make you money, but the tools help those people we’ve together possibility. Perhaps for the next person. So, what we’ve got to do is we danced on a precipice? A precipice of carbon, a precipice of democracy, a precipice of civil discourse, a precipice of Public Health.

All of them are dancing right around the edge of, is this a finite game or an infinite game? Are we playing a little game or are we playing a big game? How do we encourage people to play this game in a way that doesn’t require them to rewire how they think about games and status and affiliation? But allows them to eagerly.

A game that we’re all glad is being played and that is when the time component kicks in, because in the short run, people make decisions about what is good for them right now. It is good for someone right now. To one click shop because it’s convenient, it’s cheaper, it’s faster and now we can go back to what we were doing in the long run. It’s entirely possible, we will miss downtown, we will miss The thriving community near where we live. We will miss the Civil discourse that comes from small and perhaps not so small businesses having retail outlets nearby paying taxes for them up. Keep Etc.

But in the short run, our incentive playing this little slash big game is to win the round, not to play the infinite game and that’s why when we think about this abstraction, Of what game are we playing? What we realize is that almost every single game that thrives that leaves, the players better off has referees.

It has the commissioner, it has a structure even open market or you could call it free market capitalism. Still has referees. It still has a significant amount of oversight because if it didn’t, then you would end up with insider trading. The dark web and people scamming every single day. So in our rush to play the little game or the big game, it’s easy to be confused about the fact that we’re playing by the rules and we’d like everyone else too.

But we also need somebody to enforce the rules and so in our rush to play more games, we have to be on high alert to discover. Whether there is a game master somewhere who is pushing us to play a game. That benefits them. Maybe we score some points in the short run. But are we signing up for dead ends? For cul-de-sacs, for traps for games, that feel seductive in the short run, but ultimately will cause pain, and suffering in the long run, we need to understand what’s in it for the game master. What’s in it for Parker, Brothers?

What’s in it for Twitter? Who are the customers? What is the product? What is the transaction like? Because on top of the little Your game is the big game. And on top of the big game is the only game and that game the metagame. The game, at the highest level of abstraction is pretty simple. We all get to play it. Exactly one time, we all have a chance to leave things. Better than we found them. We all can choose to ignore, zero-sum games and play games, that are additive that are infinite, that are constructive, but we can’t do that if we don’t see the game in the first. Place.

Thanks for listening, your move will be back in a second with a question from last time. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks, it’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi, Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new power Katelyn. I say warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know I love to hear from you but I can’t answer your questions if you don’t ask them. So please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006, click the appropriate button, a really good question. I’m from Michael.

Hi Seth. It’s Michael from Sydney, Australia and I have just finished listening to your podcast on what an office is for. And I’m curious about your thoughts about the office is a place for incidental learning and insight as an architect. I know that this is something in particular that the profession has struggled with over this time of covid and remote work, where there are opportunities to discover something in the office such as as watching someone draw on a computer on tracing paper and giving them some immediate feedback or insight into how they might be able to resolve. The problem we’re trying to solve in that particular project or even being able to pull a book off the shelf and show the team. How someone else might have resolved, something similar in a project or to explain something to them.

They’re all those opportunities. You might have as you will pass someone’s computer and you see them do something with a piece of software where in Flying functionality that you may not have been there. Those serendipitous occasions, that that happened in the office that give you opportunity to learn or bring insight.

And I’m really curious about how you think about this when it comes to what an office is for. Really looking forward to your insights and really grateful for all of the work that you do. Thank Seth. Thanks for teeing up. This ramp Michael. I appreciate it. Try to imagine the following for 30 years so it’s 2050 we’ve been working from home. We’ve been using Zoom we’ve been sharing documents editing them together finding discussion boards.

Interacting with other people regardless of where they are in time and space to get our work done. And then someone shows up and says wait, wait wait, I got this great idea. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to Been two and a half hours a day on additional grooming, commuting parking schlepping and then we’re all going to go to this building this really expensive building. And while we’re there, one of two things is going to happen. Either, if you’ve got status, you’re going to get a room, all, to yourself with a door that shuts and maybe sometimes, just maybe someone in physical proximity to you will bump into you on your way to the coffee machine and have an impromptu yet important conversation or Or we’re going to put you in a cube Farm, maybe there aren’t even walls around your Cube jammed up against other people because a, it’s cheaper for us and be people will be able to look over your shoulder, not in an organized structured way. But just sort of randomly overhearing Snippets of what you say on the phone or watching what you’re typing on the screen.

And all of these connections will make it better and pay for your additional dry cleaning costs as well. I think if we said that people would think We’re nuts because it’s absurd. It’s absurd because it leaves out enrollment and intentionality. It’s absurd because it puts physical proximity. Ahead of project, Focus that we built the office because we had no other choices that in an industrial setting.

We need everybody to be right next to the assembly line, but as more and more people are working with ideas instead of stuff. And we have the ability to transform time and space by using the internet, all of a sudden, most of the benefits of everyone going to the office. At the same time, go down, really fast.

So what I’m pushing for here is intentionality and enrollment. If people want to work together, they can create enormous. Things of value, Wikipedia is built by five thousand, 50 thousand and five million people. Who have never met him person but they show their work. Their work can be shared and improved and edited and boom, it’s better one hour later. Four hours later, it’s transformed turns out. If you’ve got a medical problem in a lot of resources, the best thing is for six, specialists around the world. To look at, all your tests, your Diagnostics, your X-rays.

And yes, do telemedicine with you. You will get far. More insight. Then if you traipse from one person to another over the course of weeks that went information is at stake. We come out ahead when people intentionally share it in a structured way that a shared Google doc is so much more efficient in terms of exposing what we want to talk about. Then sitting around a conference room and trying to read the Signs & murmurs the highwomen Hierarchy of status the loud, people getting listen to more than the non-allowed, people the people with traditional privilege, getting a louder, say than the ones who don’t have it, we are rewiring the whole system.

If I was going to hire an architect, I want a firm of five committed professionals who are leaning into it, who are working together in a shared digital format, boom, back and forth. Boomed on improved, listen to then I Go to a fancy office where I am distracted by stuff. That might make sense in a given moment but isn’t done with intention.

So yeah that’s a rant and maybe I’m looking for a silver lining where there isn’t one, but I got to say, we’ve done a pretty good job of suddenly and dramatically switching in the middle of trauma and disarray to working remotely. But now now it’s on us to rebuild that into something Saying that’s delightful and energizing and effective.

Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information, that’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up. And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up.

Consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-miser- <==

All right with fingers on buzzers.

Let’s see, who can first identify this scientist.

He built some early, vacuum, tubes, enabling Robert Boyle to do his groundbreaking work. He was one of the first people to describe the rotations of the planets, Mars and Jupiter. He came up with some of the basic hypotheses of gravity in Optics. He did groundbreaking work in light, refraction he had Important things to say about the development of calculus and he was one of the first people to argue that fossils were actually remnant of creatures that lived a long time ago and wrote controversial papers about how old the Earth actually is if you guest Robert Hooke with an e at the end you’re better at the history of science then I am hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about being a miser. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor make things better. That’s the goal make things better by making better things, that’s marketing marketing works. It works because we show up in the world with something that makes a change for the better and we’ve discovered the single best way to learn marketing. It’s called the marketing seminar, an interactive ongoing discussion. Based Project based Workshop. That actually works.

Its back its back again. At akimbo.com., Go find all the details. If you are serious, about changing the culture, if you are serious about showing up in a way that grows your project, your business, your cause I hope you’ll check out the marketing seminar. It’s at a Kimbo.com go its back it works because you do. You will see you there.

Not only did Robert Hooke come up with all that stuff. Granted. He did it in a century where scientists were going crazy because there was so much stuff to come up with but he was also friends with Christopher Wren. And more importantly, the first head of the Royal Society where all of the great scientists in London regularly got together with each other, to figure out how the natural world actually worked. He held that post for years and years and expanded it.

To become the person in charge of their experiments, as well as a result. Robert Hooke was in the middle of all of this and then something happened and what happened is, Isaac Newton submitted a paper to the Royal Society. And in that paper, in which he argued, that light was a particle. He disagreed with Robert Hooke.

No Blows were exchanged but they weren’t happy with each other and in Newton’s breakthrough principia, Mathematica. He gives hook almost no credit for the inverse Square law or for any of the other work that hook did on developing our understanding of gravity. As a result of these interactions. The two of them never got along again.

And after hooks, death Newton took over the Royal Society and engaged in a Lifelong campaign with some petty elements to it to eliminate hooks influence on science, including destroying, the only known portrait of Robert Hooke. If you read, most of the biographies that have been written in the last 50 years about Robert Hooke.

Well, let me quote. He was Melancholy mistrustful and jealous. He had an uneasy apprehensive vanity. He was cantankerous, envious vengeful. He had a caustic tongue. His attitude was difficult suspicious and irritable. Well, if someone wants to write about me like that in their biography of me, I’d rather they didn’t write the biography at all. It turns out in new revisionist biographies of hook that some of this was overstated, but how did it happen in the first place?

Well, let’s think for a minute about what happened toward the end of Robert hooke’s life. He never married never had kids, but he did regularly sleep with his He’s and often told people that he was going to bequeath all of his riches to the Royal Society, enabling it to remain thriving in independent for years to come.

But when he died, they found eight thousand pounds of money and gold in his room and no will, which meant that all of the money went to a distant cousin. Instead, Robert Hooke was a miser, Robert Hooke. Who had been burned by Newton decided to stop sharing instead of publishing his work with Clarity instead? All he did was post ciphers and anagrams, short sentences, that he thought he could use to prove years later that he had thought of an idea before anybody else. He regularly stole or sort of took credit for the ideas that came to him in his position as the head of the Royal Society.

He didn’t go out of his way. A to enable the people around him to do better science. And most importantly, he didn’t show his work because when you show your work when you’re doing science, someone could find an error, someone could steal your idea. But most important someone could build on your idea and Robert Hooke was so worried about getting credit about winning about defeating Newton about proving that he was the better. Better scientist that he forgot to actually do science.

And the lesson for me, when we think about the sad life of a miser who ends up alone in his room with his trunk full of money and his reputation gone. It’s this we have the chance to show our work. It is tempting to bring a scarcity mindset to a culture of ideas. But in fact, if you share an idea, you still have it.

And so does the person you gave it to? It is not the same as a Bitcoin either you have a Bitcoin or you don’t ideas that spread win. If someone can build on your idea of someone can adjust an idea to turn it from, not very good to better. Then both of you come out ahead and Robert Hooke who had just about everything a scientist in London could have three centuries ago.

Blew it. All. He blew it all cuz he decided he didn’t have enough. And instead of bringing an abundance mindset, the opportunity to share the work to other Minds to other people who would be able to amplify he hoarded it. And the problem with being a miser. Is that while you might end up with a bunch of money when you’re dead, you don’t need a bunch of money when you’re dead.

What we need is the chance to make things better and we do that by real. Leslie, giving away our best work over and over again, feeding the culture feeding the system, because then we get to live in a world that’s filled with good ideas. So that’s a short rant about what we should do with our privilege and our Insight.

Thanks for listening.

We’ll be back in a second with answers to questions from last time. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? Up. What is it? Time to learn a new way, to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp, an independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit. Akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops. And how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. My name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin cursor, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any other episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link-16 lick the appropriate button, whatever season you are living with right now. In whichever hemisphere. I hope you’ll take a minute to ask your question.

I said, this is Jim Dowling coming to you from beautiful Lake. Charlotte. Nova Scotia. Your work is at a huge impact on me to Have been Monumental the smallest viable and what’s it for working. As a psychotherapist? I often wonder to myself. What’s our life for?

What are we doing here for?

And why does the smallest viable thing I can do from one moment to the next?

I’m curious about your thoughts when it comes to your life or life in general. What’s it for? Maybe that’s too big an esoteric not practical enough. But that’s likely why. I’m sitting here staring at a beautiful glassy Lake. Thank you so much for everything.

You do. Thanks for this gym. I’ve listened to this question at least 10 times so far. You can hear the birds. You can hear the quiet from the lake. I’ve looked up pictures of clam Bay Road in Nova Scotia. What a beautiful glacial Lake you’re on. Thank you for your intonation and the care and the work that you do.

Here’s my take on. What’s it for? For something to be for something. It means that it was created as an intervention that you are bringing something to the world to make a change happen. So, the planet Jupiter, what is Jupiter for? Jupiter isn’t for anything. Jupiter. Simply is Jupiter. It’s there. We don’t need to ask. What’s Jupiter for because nobody, we know put any time or effort. Any risk extended any emotional labor to create Jupiter?

Therefore, it doesn’t need to have a 4 and my argument in. The what’s it for? Riff is if you’re going to engage in the opportunity cost of doing this, instead of that, it helps to know what the this is for that. The industrial era has too often pushed people to say, it’s just my A job. This thing I did, I did it because I got paid for it and I need to get paid to eat. But particularly to people listening to, this podcast are fortunate enough and privileged enough to have choices about what we will exchange our time. For what we exchange. Our time for, should be something that we can point to. And say, I changed something that there’s a what’s it for to what I built.

And so what our genes interested in well, in Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene, which is misunderstood by people who haven’t read it. He argues that we can understand evolution by imagining that genes have an agenda, they don’t. But if we imagine, they do their behaviour if they have Behavior starts to make sense, which is Genes that have grandchildren persist and jeans that don’t don’t. So genes aren’t selfish in the sense that they want something for themselves or that they drive us to be selfish.

What it means to have a selfish Gene is this is a gene that is organized around the idea that more genes are better than fewer genes. So the what’s it for of evolution is if you can be more fit for the environment, you’re more likely to have grandchildren, which means that you are. Winds will be passed on.

So we could argue that quote life is for that that life exists to pass on genes to create more of them. I think that’s a little empty and I think it’s a hard way to navigate your days unless your goal is to have a hundred and forty kids which would lead to thousands and thousands of grandchildren. So no we can go for something bigger and better than that, but it’s not clear to me. Me in conversations with thousands of people around the world that we do better.

If we have a hundred year cycle for what we’re trying to accomplish for me. It’s about projects this project. I am doing, is it worth doing this project? What is the project for compared to the other options? I have in the whole wide range of projects that I could do. Is this the one that is the next building block in. Journey that I am on and for everybody, it’s different. But what I’m trying to help people see is that sunk costs hoarding the chips. Embracing the things we did before simply because we did them, isn’t the best way to decide what to do next.

What makes sense to me is to realize that every day we get to make new decisions based on new information based on new goals, and we can regard yesterday’s decisions. As gifts, from our former self. We don’t want the gift. We don’t have to take it. I talked about this in the Green Iguana episode and I’ve been revisiting it and some of the work I’m doing now.

So, that’s a long answer to your mellifluous question. But I’m really glad you shared it. Thanks.

Hey, it’s Seth. This is Jason from Miami as someone who is admired your wordplay for a dog’s age, but even more. So in the newer spoken form that you generously Often offer to us each week, on this podcast. The rule of three was well in a single word, fantastic.

The billion dollar worth of words, episode was kind of Bing. Bang, Boom.

And it is in the spirit of those linguistic Explorations that. Here is my question for people like us, doing things like this, as we go along each day, making things better by making better things. Enrolling people to spread her ideas that win. We See that you carefully, craft your language and use it in a way that becomes synonymous with your brand, you’re thinking, and how you design your interactions with your tribe, in the spirit of the Purple Cow. It’s not about better.

It’s about being different. And many people. Take words take language for granted. And for all of us out there who are building Brands, changing culture, who want to make a Ruckus or a Steve used to say, make a dent, what Guidance Do you have on creating a unique language for people? Want to change the culture.

It seems almost as if the power of language is hiding in plain sight. And as we in the tribe, often say thank you for all that.

You do. Thank you, Jason. I haven’t seen you in a long time. It’s good to hear your voice. The thing is that’s more of a tone poem, a haiku and a limerick rolled into one and then a question, but I will give you a short answer which is this language only works when it’s shared that calling something a missile. Bob, doesn’t help. If no one else knows. What a Hello, Bob is and what I have tried to do with my books ever since permission marketing, and probably before is help people who are in community.

Find precise words to be able to alert. Other people that they are a in community with them and be to help them understand a concept. That is easier to understand. If we can agree on the terms, we’re going to use going. In. And as our culture, is changing more rapidly than ever before, this is showing up all over there. What’s happening is that pockets of culture arrived and then they dissolve around words.

Also signals also ways that we interact, but it usually begins with words having a word for it, helps a group of people who agree to share the word understand what they’re talking about. So, that’s my short answer. Thanks, Jason. Thanks to everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution.

I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah.

Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information.

That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason.

Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network.

That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -cranberries-get-sorted- <==

Cranberry Farmers grow a lot of cranberries and some of them are rotten how to tell the rotten cranberries from the non rotten ones when you’re getting ready, to put them in that plastic bag and bring them to the market for Thanksgiving. Well, here’s what you do, you roll them down a ramp and have them bounce off a board and the ones that bounce high enough, make it onto a platform that gets them in the bag and the ones that don’t go into the Cranberry bog of Doom.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about peppers and people. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Its back its back again at a Kimbo.com /. Go find all Details. If you are serious, about changing the culture. If you are serious about showing up in a way that grows your project, your business, your cause I hope you’ll check out the marketing seminar. It’s at a Kimbo.com go, its back, it works because you do we’ll see you there.

Okay, that makes sense. It’s an efficient, scalable way to sort cranberries. What about Peppers? What if you don’t like spicy? What if you do like spice? And you’re out with some friends, eating padron peppers or shishito Peppers blistered in oil on a hot pan. How to tell the difference between the spicy ones and the non spicy ones.

It turns out that for genetic reasons about one in ten padrón peppers are spicy and nine out of ten are not and there are no peppers in between peppers are like cranberries cranberry. Are on a scale between the super rotten ones. And the super good ones is a spectrum of cranberries, not so with peppers, either. A pepper is spicy or it’s not.

There is no in-between. So let’s talk for a second about the normal distribution. It’s easy to misunderstand and I’m intentionally doing this via audio so we don’t get caught up in pictures. If we invited every single person in a town of 10,000 to stand in order of birth date, we would have an even distribution give or take with the same number of people standing on each one of the 365 days a year with slight seasonal variation.

But if I asked the very same people to stand in order of height to a quarter of an inch, we would see a Distribution. Some percentage of the people would be below, five feet tall, but just a few people would be below. Say four foot six, a bunch of people about the same number would be above 6 foot 6, but just a few would be above 7 feet and a significant number of people would be clumped together in the middle.

We call that distribution, which shows up in an enormous number of places. The normal distribution. We can do all sorts of interesting. Mystics on how this distribution works out, and it’s all fine. It’s all easily understood until I ask you the following question, who is tall among these 10,000? People who is tall pick.

Now. Are you saying that the person who is a quarter inch, less in height isn’t tall and the one who’s slightly taller than wherever you do. The line is Tha well, it’s pretty easy in this case to Waffle a little bit. Let me ask you a different question. If it’s New Years Eve, and we’ve set up a safety roadblock, who is drunk?

Who should not be permitted to keep driving because we’ve got machines that can measure blood alcohol levels. And while they vary from Precinct to Precinct from place to place within a place. The law is the law. We needed to pick a number because if we didn’t pick a number, we would have a lot of trouble deciding. Who was drunk and she get a ticket and who isn’t drunk? And who should simply get waved off with a warning?

The question, of course, is if the person who isn’t drunk had a quarter of a thimble more whiskey, would they suddenly become drunk or is there in fact, a distribution of how people behave once they’ve had a bunch to drink and of course? Yes, it’s true. Different people metabolize alcohol. Differently, we don’t spend a lot of time arguing about this.

Basically we say don’t drink and drive, don’t even get close to the line because it’s a matter of life or death. But what about other issues of life or death or labeling? Who has autism? How do we know? Is it, like a spicy pepper, where either you have it or you don’t? Almost certainly not Scott. Alexander the Blogger and psychiatrist has written extensively about something he calls taxol metrics.

It’s not clear to me. It’s a field of art yet, but it should be. And what it says is that when we try to label somebody based on, some behaviors that are non digital based on some attributes that aren’t easily measured. Except for this one thing. We’re choosing to measure on, we’re going to get it wrong. Almost every time because just about everything about people is like cranberries.

It’s on a spectrum. It’s on a spectrum because some people have more autism than others. Some people have more ADHD than others. We cannot label somebody perfectly. And since we can’t, since we have to understand that it’s all on a spectrum. We have to be very careful about the consequences of those labels. With who, for example, is certified.

The certified mean you came from one specific institution, got better than a certain number on one standardized. Test that someone who got one point. Lower is forever barred from doing whatever it is. You need them to do who is qualified. Are we compounding early successes by limiting? The number of people who get later successes, so, Example, in China. There’s a very rigorous test that determines if you’re going to get to go to the next level of school.

And if you get into that school, everybody else doesn’t get in. There is a hard filter right there in or out, one way or the other. And then we keep compounding the successes on and on and on for the people who made it through that filter, even if it was just by one point, our history is filled with shameful and Tragic examples of what happens when we try to put labels on people to sort them?

When in fact, it might be on a spectrum. Who’s Jewish? Who’s black? Who’s a boy? Who’s a girl? Once we decide that someone is the other, once we decide that someone isn’t Outcast or insufficient putting them into a bucket. It makes it easier for us to treat them as less than human because they’re not on a spectrum with us. There are part, they are separate and that’s a mistake.

All of it happens because we’re in such a hurry to not see the individual because it’s so much easier to say you have this disease. Therefore take these pills and go away or it’s so much easier to say you are qualified. Here is even more privileged, go ahead and be in charge by lumping people into easy buckets.

We don’t have to consider what’s actually going on. We don’t have to consider the fact that with so many Spectra. All ER, acting with each other. Each person is, in fact, unique, that doesn’t mean we can walk away from professionalism, doesn’t mean we can walk away from people who have done the work, who have understood what came before, who are actually competent to do the work. It’s even more important. Now that we do that because so many of these roles have significant amounts of Leverage, but we often decide based on false information.

Appearing real. We often I’d based on metrics that are simply stand-ins because we’re so busy trying to sort people early and often. It turns out that many of the contributions that we care about were made, by people who didn’t fit the mold to didn’t get the tax symmetric label that we are busy giving to other people.

They come out of left field. They don’t appear qualified, they show up and actually do the work instead of appearing to have some sort of digital label on them that says, they’re entitled to do the work. We need to give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s too hard to take all comers at their word.

We need to figure out how to sort people, but when we’re busy, sorting them based on a model of scarcity, we almost always get it wrong. We label people as unhealthy when they’re not, we label people as Leaders when they haven’t earned it. It’s all on a Drum, so this is a rant designed to help us think deeply about how we decided who were going to follow, who were going to trust, who were going to label who we’re going to medicate, who were going to let in, and who we’re going to keep out because those errors are really expensive.

They are shameful. They hurt our uman potential and they corrode us as we are building this network. The one that knows so much about so many elements of our life. The Distribution is now an even more clear relief. We can figure out what people have done and what they could do. We can start granting the benefit of the doubt differently, and when we do that, we will create possibility for the people who haven’t had it before.

Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with three questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the Pain Scale. Entire sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry, my Is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2sd.

Click the appropriate button. The questions continue to be more and more. Far-reaching. Here we go, ice asset, see like, intuition, Washington, DC. I’m a video producer and journalist and I use Being as a hobby to kind of clear my mind, use my hands, and I guess use a different part of my brain than I do at work. I noticed you mentioned woodworking from time to time on your podcast. What’s your relationship with woodworking?

Thanks for this Eli, so many metaphors in woodworking will start with a couple first of all sooner or later. You’re going to use a dangerous tool. The table saw is at the top of That list. But even when we’re talking about hand tools, things like afro, if you’re not careful, you might have a hand tool, but you won’t have a hand and this focuses the mind.

The second part of the tool metaphor is that sharpened tools work so much better than non sharpen tools. I learned how to do woodworking from Bobby Cates and Bobby taught me how to make canoe paddles. Out of a piece of cherry wood. And I confess the first three paddles. I made were with a spokeshave that had never once been sharpened. It just got duller and duller and I thought that’s the way it was supposed to be.

So it’s 17 when I discovered that tools could be sharpened in the sharpening itself was a craft another metaphor arises. One of the things I like about woodworking is that most of it is about taking something away. You can’t put anything back and so there is a It sort of subtraction, which feels like a path that has Michelangelo said, the goal is to take away all the stuff that doesn’t belong and what you’re left with is what you set out to make in the first place.

Another metaphor is the idea that you’re never done, unless you announced yourself that you’re done. You can always make it a little smoother. You can always sand it. A little longer people who know me, you won’t have any trouble guessing that that’s not what I do. I seek out a level of appropriate finish for the tool. I am building because almost everything I make out of wood is a tool, primarily a canoe paddle, or possibly a canoe and then I don’t go any further because everything has an opportunity cost.

So, yeah, I love making canoe paddles. Maybe one day, I’ll list one or two for sale, but I don’t think so.

Hi, Seth. This is Ahmad from London. I’m a music producer, and I’ve recently started producing music. One my streaming Channel on YouTube where people send their singing through their phone Mike’s. So it’s for people who just want to try out or want to see this music industry how it works. Can they sink cetera now? I’ll create a small community around it and they are very loyal almost there. They all turn up and it’s like a nice collaborative effort.

We’re doing on this live stream, but at the same time, the numbers are still growing very slowly. It’s been six months now and I want to know if If I’m going through a dip or do I just stick with it? Just because I enjoy it. Or if the monetarily the return is not great. How long do I have to wait before? I say? Okay, that’s it. I think I’ve done enough enough work.

It would be great. If you can talk about the idea of enjoying your work, but still understanding. Is it still worth? Keep doing it just for maybe something will happen in future. Thank you. And as always, thanks for this great podcasts. Thank you for this mod. This is a question that businesses and individuals wrestle with all the time, which is, does it happen all at once?

Do we become an overnight success as an overnight success of myth. Is it the winner of a raffle or a lottery? Is there a path forward and what I would ask our two questions question. Number one, has anyone in your field ever once deliberately made it from? You are to where you want to go. If the answer is, no, the answer is you want to be the trend Setter. The person who goes from nothing to a hundred miles an hour on a bicycle.

I think that that’s a quest and you’re entitled to a quest, but I don’t think you should mortgage your house in anticipation of a quest because it’s not reliable, but if someone has come down this path before, then the second question is this, When they were in the early days, what were the signals that they saw that gave them hope that are hints that are symptoms that something is going to work. So if you think about a band trying to make it from the coffee shop circuit on its way up.

The question is after you play on Friday night. Does anyone come back again on Saturday? If the answer is no, if 30 people don’t turn into 35. Well, then maybe you’re in the wrong place with the wrong music or maybe you need to work a lot more on your skill, but we know the famous example of Arlo Guthrie, playing at the Newport Folk Festival now. Sure. Arlo was royalty. His father, Woody Guthrie was the king of all the folk singers. But all that meant was that 15? People came to hear that first rendition of Alice’s Restaurant, but then a few hours later, they ask him to come back and play it again for sixty or a hundred. I’m making up the numbers and then one more time and one more time until he was the closing act.

And that’s when Arlo Guthrie became Arlo Guthrie, can imagine three people walking and singing a bar Alice’s Restaurant walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine 50 people a day? I slept 50 people a day walking in singing a bar and Alice’s Restaurant walking out, and Friends, they may think it’s a movement.

That’s what it is. The Alice’s Restaurant and tamasic Rave movement and all you gotta do. The John is the singer. The next time it comes around on the guitar, doesn’t have to happen in a weekend. It doesn’t have to happen at a festival. But if it’s not happening at all, well then maybe what you’re making isn’t as remarkable as it could be.

So good luck with this work. I hope you can. Look at it with clear eyes and if you persist I’m wishing you the best with it. Hey Seth. This is unturned from Hamburg. Germany. I have another question. I just finished listening to the conversation that Jacqueline novogratz and Krista Tippett head where they invited you on clubhouse and what you shared was that Now, looking back at your 30-year, run of going into the direction. You were going of giving talks traveling the world, giving speeches writing books that Looking at.

The future and the time it is. Now ahead of you. You think that there could have been other ways you spend the 30 years, which well, closer to What you think is important now?

and, I actually feel being at that point. So, I’m Wondering, how do you deal with that? And what can someone that is looking at a 30-year run, take away from that and make sure that we pick a path that no longer is about.

What we will enjoy but about what’s needed and where we find the skills that we can offer the word and find a matching field, in which applying them can make a huge difference.

Now you’re really Santa, there’s a lot in this what I said to my friends, Jaclyn and Krista was this not that I regret the work that I’ve been doing my entire professional life in public. I wouldn’t trade much of any of it away that in that moment when I was doing that thing, it was exactly what I needed and wanted to do and the privilege and joy of being able to go on this journey with you.

And so many, others has been makes me speechless. Plus, I don’t even have words for it. But what I discovered during the enforced lockdown, is that I didn’t have to get on another airplane that I could continue to do this work, at a bigger scale with more depth, without showing up at a conference Hall in Las Vegas, or flying to Bogota because going to where people are, it’s a treat and it’s a privilege, but it’s also really wasteful when we think about the impact on the planet. And it also creates an enormous amount of wasted time and wear and tear on the person who’s busy doing it. So my goal is to dig deeper on the work that we need to do as a community because it’s Community Action. That’s going to help us go forward that I believe in the power of an individual as much as just about anyone that we need people brave enough to be linchpin to will stand up and Lead, who will say follow me, who will create. Eat the work that matters, but then we have to add into it.

A bias toward Community Action to understand that all the facts have side effects in the side effects are merely effects and we don’t have an infinite amount of time or an infinite number of resources and it is possible to make things better by making better things. Thank you to you and everybody else who’s listening.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible. Or probable. And in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you in a context where? You’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

What are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. Look, it’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -what-kind-of-dog-do-you-have- <==

We almost ran out of dogs. That’s not exactly true. But it’s close. The shelters were emptied out over the last year. Millions of people who didn’t have a dog decided that they needed a dog. And this, this is a podcast about how we decide and where we got one. Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about Dalmatians, and pit bulls and Collies and the no-kill movement. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Its back its back again at a Kimbo.com. / go find all the details. If you are serious, about changing the culture. If you are serious about showing up in a way that grows your project, your business, your cause I hope you’ll check out the marketing seminar. It said, akimbo.com go its back. It works because you do we’ll see you there.

What kind of dog do you have? That’s it. Fascinating question, isn’t it? Because all the dogs in the world evolved over time? Aided by artificial selection from exactly the same thing. Oh wolf, there’s no such thing as a purebred dog. There are inbred dogs, but no purebred dogs and left to their own devices.

Dogs, would eventually evolve back to one sort of uber dog? And yet we have dog breeds and yet when we say what kind of dog do you have? We don’t expect the answer to be loyal or Or a puppy. People might say I have mutt or they might even say I have a Dalmatian and as soon as they tell you, what kind of dog, they have, they start to get judged judge by us judge. By lots of people. It’s a little bit. Like what kind of car do you drive?

The thing is that there are fads and Fashions and Trends in what kind of dogs appeal to? What kind of people? So that’s Point number one. Point number two decades ago, when Nathan Winograd pioneered, the no-kill movement. I don’t think in his Wildest Dreams. He expected that shelters would be emptied out and that the entire shelter system would be completely different than it was when he started when I pulled into the parking lot. My first day and there was somebody in the parking lot with a box of kittens that his cat had because he didn’t Space Cat. And, you know the kittens were His problem they were going to be our problem and I remember literally that’s what greeted as I pulled into a parking lot. And my first day and I remember thinking, oh my god, what have I got myself into? And it was one of those things where you dare to dream. You know, what? If you ran a shelter that saved all the animals? Why couldn’t we do that today? We have 200 cities and towns across the country about fifty four different counties that have ended, the killing of savable animals in their shelters, and they have returned the term euthanasia to To its dictionary definition and essentially what it was meant to be from the beginning.

Back. When we adopted our first shelter, dog, Lucy Lucy, the Wonder Dog. It was about 30 years ago. There were only a handful of shelters to visit. We had to look up in the Yellow Pages where to go and these shelters. They were extremely sad places. First of all, most of them were in the business of killing dogs and cats that Typical City animal shelter, had a deal with the city. They were the dog catcher. They collected Strays from the streets. And if they couldn’t find a home for them in two or three days, they quote euthanized the dog. That was their job. That’s what they did. And I still remember the dogs that were available at the SPCA that we visited. All those years ago that has shifted the internet changes things because the internet spreads Formation faster than physical Goods could spread on their own.

So number one, a site. Like Petfinder shows you dozens hundreds thousands of dogs sorted exactly the way you would expect just like a real estate site. Oh, here’s a puppy. Here’s a puppy. Here’s a dog. Hears, an older dog. Here’s the dog. That needs a. Lot of care. There’s no comments on these sites. That is what would make them fully social media friendly, but you can see lots of dogs without Leaving your home. Interesting to note, most of the dogs. You’re seeing aren’t in an actual shelter, depending on where you live there in a foster home.

This was one of the things that Nathan pioneered instead of locking dogs up in dog jail, why not find people who might not be able to take a dog forever, but who are happy to hold onto the dog for three or four weeks while we look for a forever home for that dog. Now, some of Of these people are extraordinarily generous keeping more dogs, and then giving them up over time after they fall in love with them acting as a halfway house, for dogs, looking for a home.

But once you start that process, well, then you don’t need a shelter at all because what you can have instead our dogs from say far away from a place, where there aren’t a lot of people who want to adopt a dog like that being exposed to people who are close by and then running some sort. Of rescue operation, bringing the dogs to the place. Once you find someone who wants that dog after they’ve done. I don’t know.

An interview via Zoom meeting the dog on camera, but one other thing, you’ll notice, if you visit, these sites is just how many pit bulls there are. Now pit ball isn’t. Even an official in quotes breed of dog. It is a collection of breeds that have all been lumped together particularly the United States as Pit bulls, why are there so many pit bulls up for adoption about 30 years ago. Pit bulls were two or three percent of all the dogs that you might see in a typical place up for adoption. Now, according to some estimates there, 50% 60% in some places.

Why is that happening before? We can go into that? I want to talk for a minute about famous dogs. It turns out that if a dog shows up in a great role. TV or movies, I can’t read my paper. Eddie staring at me.

In the morning.

Nora. Another dog.

Then it becomes instantly, popular to be adopted. Think about the Jack, Russell Terrier, that was on Frasier. That was a good day. If you are a Jack Russell Terrier, breeder because suddenly lots and lots of people decided this was the dog for them again, breeds don’t exist. We invented them. There is no such thing as a purebred dog. It’s simply a label.

We can’t guarantee that a dog is going to act a certain way just because you have a Golden retriever doesn’t mean you’re a certain kind of person and that golden retriever might be a real jerk of a dog. A lot of. It depends on how that dog has been trained and how it has been brought up. So with all of that said, we’ve got this desire among the public to have a dog that looks like us, that makes us proud to own it. Why does Dog Finder even show us pictures of the dog? What difference does it make if we think about it?

The appearance of a dog in a little picture, is a little bit, like a dating site, but also not like a dating site because we’re not dating the dog. The dog is our companion. And yet we are driven by the fact that that dog looks like the kind of dog. We want to own. How do we decide if a dog looks like that?

So then on to the prevalence of pit, bulls pit bulls spread through the United States, primarily from the south. Primarily from people of lower status in terms of economic class, people who admired the dogs because of their appearance and strength, but also people who, because they were perhaps from, lower status, economic glasses, did things like breed them themselves in their backyard as opposed to seeking paperwork from an official breeder.

Add to that the fact that some of the people of you took this dog, this Dog, that was bred for strength and also train them to be aggressive. The breed itself is not more aggressive, one studied, which I’ll link to in the show notes, has shown that they are less aggressive than many other dogs that have better PR, but they can be trained to be quite aggressive. And even dangerous, which leads to pbl, Pitbull legislation.

And in many states provinces cities towns. You’re not allowed. To have a pit bull. So what happens if you’re not allowed to have a pit bull and you have one. Well, one thing that happens is you don’t bring it to the vet. And since you don’t bring it to the vet, the dog hasn’t been neutered or spayed and since that’s the case. It’s more likely to have puppies. It also turns out that pit bulls have more puppies in the litter than many other kinds of dogs.

It also turns out that some of the people who have pit bulls are breeding them in their backyard and it multiplies and it also turns out it seems That there is a culture among sophisticated breeders that if they can’t get rid of their dogs, they euthanize them themselves. Whereas among Pitbull breeders.

If they can’t get rid of their dogs, they dumped them at the shelter, add to this the fact that a different category of pet, adopter doesn’t want a pit. Bull. They don’t want to deal with social approbation. They don’t want to deal with what they see as a Risk of having that pitbull in their life. They can easily identify a Pit Bull from a photo even though and we’ll talk about this in a second. The origin of the Pitbull online might be hidden.

When you add all of that up. There are more pit bulls in the system and many of the people in the system, have drawn, a bright line. And saying, I’ll adopt lots of different kinds of dogs, but not a pit bull. And so just like credit default swaps. We end up with a system that’s filled with With a fungible item that’s mixed in with lots of other items and it makes it hard for people to find the thing that they’re actually looking for.

Okay. So back to the Dynamics of SEO for dogs. If you are committed to the no-kill movement, if you’ve got dogs on your hands that you’re looking to get adopted part of the game, you’re trying to play is to get more people who visit Petfinder to look at your dog, to get them to visit with your dog. To get them to adopt the dogs, you are trying so valiantly to find a good home for.

So here’s one thing you do. Don’t call it a pitbull, make it. So that when people search for the dog, they’re seeing, Oh, it’s a labrador mix. So it’s a Shepherd mix. No, it’s a pit bull. It’s really clear. It’s a pit. Bull. There is not a button on Petfinder that says don’t show me pit. Bulls. That would be a better user experience for many people who have already decided. Decided what kind of dog looks like them. What kind of dog? They are seeking but it’s not on offer because the system really wants people to look at dogs for how they behave, not for how it’s so easy to stereotype them.

The second thing that’s going on on Petfinder with dog adoption. Is this, it looks like there’s a whole bunch of dogs. You can get with one-click, shopping Amazon style. But in fact, ethical shelters, ethical There’s a saying, you know, what? You need to apply to get one of our dogs. We need to do a background. Check on you. We need to make sure that you’re going to be a good home for this dog. And I applaud that, but it takes at least three or four weeks for your application to go through and by the time it does that dog that dogs not available anymore? Particularly if it’s a famous dog, if it’s the kind of dog that in Vogue that’s fashionable right now.

So what’s actually going Going on in many places where Petfinder is popular, is a bait-and-switch, put up a picture of a dog that you know, someone isn’t going to be able to adopt. Maybe it’s a dog that got adopted out two years ago, but it attracts someone who then applies, who then you earn permission from who then you’re able to go back and forth with. And then when they’re finally approved, you show them the dogs that are available and you’ve used the original dog, simply as window dressing.

The other thing that I’m seeing is that on Craigslist, puppy mills are now pretending to be shelters, that what will happen is, you will search. For example, for puppy on Craigslist and you will find a whole bunch of places that say they are fostering a dog. But when you start looking at the maps and how many other listings that have they’re not fostering these puppies, they’re just creating puppies in a puppy mill, fashion selling them in New York for five hundred dollars each and Yeah, if they grow a little too old to be called puppies, they dumped them at the shelter.

So all of this fills me with hope but it’s also a tragedy. It’s a tragedy because human beings manipulate a system for profit without worrying about what’s going to happen to that dog. When it grows up. It’s a tragedy. Because like all humans. We stereotype we put things into categories because we don’t have time to spend an hour with every potential dog. And so we say, Category, not interested.

At the same time, we get ourselves in trouble because we fall in love with the category without thinking. Deeply about. What that dog? What that person what that situation is really like, but if it’s famous, if it’s celebrity related, bring it on. Because we look in the mirror. We look at the dog. We think about what kind of person we are all of, which a long way to say that. That information changes, everything information about which dogs are in Vogue information, about who has status information about who we are affiliating with information about, which dog is where, and why?

And as information keeps going faster. It continues to reshape our culture. So like all my podcast about dogs. This one’s dedicated to my pup Baxter. He and I have made it through a year together. He’s here in the studio with me today. What do you think Baxter?

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi! Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is an apology. Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm. Greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or a previous episode or just about anything else, please visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki M. Bo dot, link-16 click.

The appropriate button, here we go. Hi, Seth. My name is Dave, and I’m calling from Allentown, Pennsylvania. I’m originally from Buffalo, New York.

I’m a college, professor writer, a lawyer. And I recently turned 60. And just was curious from your experience over the years. From working in different things, in terms of ideas. I’ve generated hundreds of ideas over the years. I’ve gone forward with some of them. I haven’t gone forward to that with other ones.

And there’s really seems to be no common thread or pattern for the ones that I went forward with, for the ones that I chose not to go forward with for the ones that For the ones that didn’t work. And I was just wondering either on a personal level for you or from your experience in working with people.

If you see a Common Thread in terms of ideas and what works, and what doesn’t work or what people choose to pursue and what they choose not to pursue any ways, as always, thanks for everything that you do. Really appreciate it. Thank you for this. Dave. We get back to the idea of design thinking who’s it for and what’s it for this idea?

That we’re thinking of pursuing. What’s it for? Is it to make a living right now this week? Is it to build an asset and entity something at scale? Is it to show other people that we have a clever idea? Is it to make a change in the world that we care about? Is it to impress ourselves or neighbors or parents with something that we do all day?

Because in the modern industrial economy, many people Define themselves. By their job. What do you do? Is a similar question to who are you? And so when we’re looking at an idea, it’s complicated and many of the people. I know who are stuck are stuck because a sunk costs hoarding, the chips realizing deep down that they can’t walk away from what they’ve built even though they should and picking something for the wrong reasons. And then being surprised. When the thing they picked is good at What they picked. So if you love, for example, the music business, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

It’s not clear to me that you should work in the music business because most of your job is not actually spent making music. It is spent being in business and you picked an industry where it’s really hard to make a living and you’re adjacent to but not touching. The thing, that gives you Joy better, perhaps to pick a project to work on. That makes you a deal. Living the fills you with energy, but at the end of the day gives you the freedom to actually make music.

So I would ask back to you. These ideas that you’re juggling with. Why haven’t you killed most of them? And the ones you’re nurturing and nursing along? Why haven’t you launch them? What is it? You’re hoping for, what is it that you are afraid of? If we wait until it’s an emergency because the rent is due or someone’s pushing us or We’re about to run out of time.

It’s probably too late already. So the mature professional thing that we have to do is be really clear about what success looks like. And then take a look at the world and say, has anyone succeeded in the way that I am hoping to succeed. I hope that’s a good place to start. Thank you for this one Dave, as an executive part of the music business.

Every time I hear you, explain your theory about racing to the bottom. Well, I think I think our business is just a perfect example for it. So I know you’ve been describing it and taking examples from the book publishing business, but I feel pretty much is the same situation that that music is going through.

So I know you’re a music lover and I would love to know your ideas and Reflections on the music business itself. Its current situation and its future. Thank you very much for all you do. I really appreciate it. And thank you.

So how does this is a short question with perhaps a seven-hour answer, but I’ll try to give a shorter one music industry. Well what makes something an industry is that effort and investment over time turned into more than you put into it. There was a vibrant steel industry for a long time. You didn’t have to be a genius to make a living building something in the steel industry.

You simply had to Your spot invest in it, work on it and it would go up in value. That is not the way the music industry works today. It did work that way for a long time today. My friend in the music business told me. 30,000 new songs will be released on Spotify and yesterday and the day before that, that most Industries at some point are based on scarcity and the scarcity. Citee in the music business. There were three parts to it. One scarcity of talented, passionate musicians, to scarcity of slots at the record store and three scarcity of DJ time, scarcity of radio stations, scarcity of spectrum. So, if you could somehow figure out how to build an entity that would attract the hardest-working, most talented musicians and could use the scale of Identity to get you radio time and could use the scale of that entity to get you in the record store.

You were going to succeed day after day week, after week. It doesn’t matter, whether it’s Windham Hill or Motown. You turn, the crank, you turn the crank. It’s going to work. And now what’s the world? Like? Number one? There is no scarcity of competent. Musicians, thanks to electronics. Thanks to the idea that people use. No Tools in their basement or their living room.

The number of people who can make a song auto-tuned, that sounds good to the pop audience is so much bigger than it used to be. I was at a wedding a little while ago and that wedding band sounded good enough to be on the radio. And there are lots of wedding bands that are now good enough to be on the radio.

Number two radios, pretty much gone and for a new generation. Has been replaced by the infinite number of channels offered by YouTube Spotify Pandora. And the rest. There is no scarcity there. And even if there was, there’s no one to do Paola with. There’s no easy way to buy a big share of the market.

And number three. The record store is gone. It’s gone into ways. Number one. If you really want to buy a record or CD, you’re doing it online. Infinite shelf, space, everyone’s listed. And number two is if you’re streaming, you’re not making a particularly large amount of money with almost any of your acts because you’re making tents of a penny not dollars.

So, when we add all that up, what we see is there is no shortage of music. There’s more music to choose from than, at any time in the history of man, but there is a shortage of opportunities to treat it like an industry. So if you get joy out of being a self-published musician, please go do that. If you want to be the next Van Morrison, I gotta say, I’m not sure there’s gonna be a next Van Morrison annexed, Marvin Gaye.

I think that the Vandellas and the Pips and the rest of the people get folks. Like, I grew up with aren’t going to be replicated anytime soon because scarcity at some level creates value. And right now we don’t have scarcity. What we have instead is a lottery A free-for-all and plenty to choose from.

They stall for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have You know what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It. Sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -meta-dialogue-and-placeholders- <==

This is the part where I tell you something, that’s sort of, interesting in a little mysterious. And then, there’s the part where I change the tone of my voice and give the signature intro. So, you know, you’re in the right place. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second with two practical experiments that you can use for when you’re talking engaging with. There’s but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus. Too Short riffs for you today. The first one is about metacognition thinking about thinking, but in this case meta dialogue talking about talking often, we get ourselves into a tizzy or a rut, or cycle. When we’re engaging with someone else because we’re acting things out without realizing that we’re doing it.

So a simple example is the pattern you might fall into when you’re dealing with thoughtless customers. Nervous. First, you establish that you are right. Then when the person refuses to help you, you change your tone of voice, then when that isn’t working, you start to demand things by changing your tone of voice, again, making threats, asserting your importance and basically getting yourself. All worked up, perhaps that performance gets you what you want in the end, but now you’re exhausted.

So the simple Pack, which is fascinating to try is to announce what you’re going to do just before you do it. And so person on the phone. This is the part where I tell you that. I know the founder of the company and make it really clear to you that if we don’t move forward, I’m going to have to make some threats and then you go ahead and do that bit by bit announcing the meta that’s going on.

It works in relationship. It works at work. So you go to Your boss for your annual review and your boss says, oh this is the part where I start the meeting by explaining to you how much I don’t like, annual reviews, etc. Etc. You get the idea. The point of this meta dialogue is that it helps puncture are feeling of self-importance and lets us realize that we are actors in some sort of performance.

And maybe if you’re not willing to say, The thing that you’re about to do, you might not want to do the thing. You’re going to do it to save us all a lot of time. And the second part is many people have talked to me about the fact that when they feel nervous, giving a talk making a podcast addressing someone, they find themselves inserting extra words, perhaps, or or maybe even like, You know, and we do this for a whole bunch of reasons and it turns out that there are for most people a set of steps that you can follow to make them go away before I share this with. You just one aside neurologically. Some people aren’t able to overcome things like stuttering, like placeholder words, and there is nothing in this advice. That is designed to make you feel inadequate at all.

Mostly, I’m here for people who have I’ve developed a verbal tic over time and know that they would benefit from having it go away. So your mileage may vary, but thanks for checking out this idea. Why would you want to make them go away in the first place? Well, the reason is that we judge people. We judge people by their appearance by their hair cut by their clothes, and yes, by the way, they type or the way, they talk. Different people get judged in different ways. Maybe you’re judged based on your grammar. Maybe you’re judged based on your Maybe you’re judged because there are so many placeholder sounds and words that we have trouble focusing on the words. You’re bringing us yesterday. I was judging someone because they were talking way too fast for me to understand. And I basically just drifted away because it wasn’t worth my effort, and it’s also possible to judge someone because there are close talker or a loud talker.

I’m not saying these judgments are correct or valid or useful, but they are Are true because we are wired to make quick decisions about how we’re going to trust someone and how we’re going to allocate our attention. And the way we come across to someone else increases the chances. We’re going to be judged in a way. We’re not happy with.

So how to get rid of these placeholders? First. I will say this, if you’re on the radio or if you’re in a conversation with someone, it is tempting to try to hold the floor. To insert sounds to let the other person know that you’re not done with the microphone yet, but there’s an irony here, which is that in many cultures most that I’m aware of being thoughtful inserting pauses makes you seem smarter makes your work seem more intentional and in most situations. Someone’s not going to steal the mic from you. You simply because you paused now, there’s no question in my mind that cast is involved here that misogyny is involved here that women or people from parts of society that have traditionally been unfairly judged are more likely to have the microphone snatched away.

But I will reiterate I don’t think the microphone get snatched away simply because you are talking more slowly or pausing to think about your words. I think it gets Snatched away because the other person is trying to demonstrate power or their perception of power and they’re not caring, one bit about whether you’re pausing or not.

So if we can acknowledge for a second that pausing isn’t fatal that pausing doesn’t end your turn at the microphone. Now, you can see the multi-step process. The first step. Is this, the verbal tic. You have cannot just be willed away. If it could, you probably would have already. Instead we replace it first. You can replace it with a different word. So every time you feel like saying like or, you know, just say, um, or vice versa, first train yourself to be able to substitute a different place, holder word or sound, and then second talk as slow as you need to, to replace that placeholder with a pause.

That’s it. Just replace um with This isn’t easy but in two hours, you’ll be able to do it. So now what you are able to do is speak clearly, but very slowly that you are finding a way to let your brain, catch up to your tongue that you have found a way to substitute that, for the, um, the like the, you know, at this point now, all we need to do is train now. All we need to do is Slide. We shorten, those pauses, if we want to, or just live with them, because the fact is, you’re delivering just as many words per minute, as you used to, but the pauses are actually showing up in a way that makes it seem like you are, considering your words in a way that many people in our society view positively.

So those are my two hacks. The first one metacognition, met a dialogue, talk about what you’re about to talk about. And then the One is training yourself over the course of just a few hours to be able to describe what you need to say, without verbal placeholders. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with two and a half questions from around the world. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you from Bangkok to Botswana if Got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit. Akimbo dot link to take Ai and bi o dot link2006.

Click. The appropriate button. Will hear from Matt first. Hi! Seth, it’s Matt in Bangkok. And I have a question about a recent blog post. You wrote called the end of the office and how remote work is already the future. So my question has, to do with the likelihood of Employers adding Clauses to contracts in the event of future or even continued, pandemic disruption. I guess the situation, one being where people are forced out of the office or in my case, as an educator out of the Four Walls of a classroom teachers parents, and students. They sometimes don’t equate the in-person experience to be. Actually they find it to be more valuable than the virtual learning and an In the private school sector often, they’re paying for the Antiquated brick and mortar system one that allows for the social, but also Athletics arts and music programs. So, I feel like it’s understandable, the gripe of parents when they want a reduction in tuition, especially when the bulk of a school’s operating cost or teacher salary. So it makes sense that there would be a clause where teachers might makes make less money.

But at the same time, some teachers are actually working longer days and they’re working harder but like everything that it’s not a rule and it’s not true across the board. For example some teachers who are specifically auxiliary staff. They might not even be able to do their job. So in effect, they’re getting paid to do little or in some cases, nothing for example, an athletic trainer can’t do their work or in some schools. There are activities directors. There are athletic directors. There’s community and service Liaisons.

So they’re all in a situation where they just they can’t do what they need to do. So my question is, what’s your thinking around adding Clauses to contracts? And how do you think this would be received, you know, signing your name and agreement to being financially, at the whim of an expanding list of force, majeure, or events that are out of out of control of the employee.

So thanks so much. Always, always always appreciate your Insight. And look forward to hearing your response.

Thanks, Matt. There are two parts to your question. I’ll answer the second part first, employees, our employees. For a reason, the deal is pretty straightforward. You give up the upside, and you also give up the downside, you work at the Avis Rent-A-Car counter and you get paid, the same amount whether it’s busy, or not busy. It’s not your job to get Avis customers.

It’s your job to make sure the people who show up get a car. But it’s busy. You have to work harder, but don’t get paid extra. And when it’s really slow. You don’t have to work that hard and you don’t get paid less. That’s why people sign up for the deal. Now. We’ve seen companies like uber try to turn actual labor, people who are looking for a job into something more, like contractors the bait and switch being. Well, you go ahead and take the risk and you get your own car, but if you’re really busy and there, Surge pricing, you’ll make more money and when it’s not so good. You’ll make less. Well, that’s a great deal for Uber because they’ve made sure that they’re mostly protected against the downside because they don’t have to pay the drivers. If there are too many of them and they keep plenty on the upside.

But now you’re talking about what happens when that is put to people who are used to having a job, and being a freelancer is different than being an employee. So I think Going to be a significant amount of pushback as people who are used to being treated. As professionals with salaries, are asked to take on a whole range of different risks.

Somebody in my shoes isn’t a different place, if the book sells a lot, I get paid more. If the book doesn’t sell, I get paid less if a speech is cancelled because of a worldwide pandemic. I don’t get paid, but I also don’t have to fly across the world. So it’s a different offer. The first part of your question is a lot more interesting to me, in the sense that it talks about the revolutions that are all around us. You are absolutely correct that many parents. Particularly for expensive private schools are saying, wait, wait, wait, you charge me all of this money?

And then when we were on lockdown, you gave far less than you said you were going to give that fancy athletic center. All of that stuff on campus. Not available anymore, but you didn’t charge us less and back and forth. We go on campus off campus. It’s not the same thing. Am I here to buy the experience? Or am I here to buy the certification and the diploma?

Well, what revolutions do is they destroy the perfect before they enable The Impossible? And in this case, I think it’s quite likely. We’re going to see totally different kinds of Institutions arise in the case of learning. Institutions, where the student gets way, more in a cohort, in the way of personal attention in terms of development, and they don’t get the campus, the building’s, the pool and the rest of it.

It’s a little bit. Like what happened when we switched from stamps to email email cost less but delivers far more in certain ways, but if you want to send a letter to your wedding, invitation to your wedding or whatever, please go. Head and that costs a different amount of money. So in this case, I think schools are going to be wrestling a lot.

With the difference between price and value, the difference between what you get and what they say, you’re going to get between what it costs. And what’s delivered and people who choose to lead in that space will be able to start institutions on their own or in small groups that they never could have if they had a by a building.

On the other hand, those who don’t want to will end up working at some level, probably as contractors, more like, uber for someone who does figure out how to assemble parents, their kids, and people who are ready to go on a journey. So, the world keeps changing upside down and right side up and there’s a lot of dislocation, but that’s what revolutions do.

I said, this is Mu Fuji from Botswana. Thank you for your podcast. And your books. You have really impacted me all the way across the world. I have a question. I just listened to you alone last episode on the meisa and you were just talking about the importance of sharing your ideas and showing the work that you’re doing.

I know that you write a blog. Day and you share your thoughts and your ideas with us every single day. Have you ever felt like the quality of your idea would be better if you blog less frequently, and if not, how have you kind of mitigated that in your writing process. The other thing I wanted to ask was when it comes to Brevity of ideas or brevity of sharing particularly, when it comes to how you write in your book, The Practice, there’s a lot of chapters and they’re quite brief.

And just wanted to know how you structure them in such a way that it was, it affected by your thought process that you’re okay with a brief idea or is this something that you’ve always kind of written? In that way you prefer to write and you know, brief way. Thanks for all you do. Thank you so much. Yes, thank you for these questions. Move it. See, let me try to answer them. I’ve heard the first one often on over the years, and basically what I say to people’s which of my 20 bucks, would you wish I hadn’t written, which blog posts should I skip?

Because in my experience a day, when I’m able to write first drafts of five blog posts. I am more likely to do better work than on a day. When I just write one. I don’t feel like time is my constraint and so my daily habit, it works for me. And if someone doesn’t want to read all of my posts, I totally get it. I don’t think most people have, but there’s this sort of myth that creative people run out of juice if they do too much, but I don’t see this. Playwrights, I don’t see this with painters.

I don’t see this with writers. I don’t see this with musicians. The fact is that what we are trying to do? Here, is develop an instinct for turning on lights for generosity for leaning into the unknown. And I’m not sure that doing it less increases. The quality of the output, your mileage may vary and the second half of your question, quite simply. Is this my ideas.

Aren’t brief. Just the way I write about them is because in my experience the way people learn is not by taking notes by what someone wrote or what they heard. They learn by filling in the Oh, yeah, you see you just did that filling in the is the way we become enrolled in the journey and when the neurons in it together on their own, so that’s why my work is briefed. It takes extra time to make it short. If I’m in a hurry, it’s longer, but if you can figure out how to leave a blank where there needs to be a, then people will become engaged, do the work on their own. And that’s where real Learning Happens.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see y’all next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data, what all-nba Right. Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up, and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

==> -proof-of-stake- <==

Maybe you should move if you live in the United States and you want your vote to count. Maybe you should move. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second. Talk about voting of all kinds, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Creative isn’t who you are. It’s what you do along. The way creativity has gotten a mystical rap as if it’s some sort of gift. It’s not. It’s a choice. It’s a skill. If you have a job where you get to decide what you do, you are a creative, it work in creative and you can get better at it. I’m thrilled to say that the creatives workshop is back the most active of all the akimbo workshops. It’s about people who want to level up and make it Difference with their creative work. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com.

Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus. Yes, it’s true for Californians. Your vote in. The Senate is 153rd as important as it is, for someone from Wyoming, meaning that people in Wyoming, have more than 50 times as much impact on how the Senate decides things, the United States. And when it comes to presidential elections.

They have more than four times as much impact as someone who lives in California. That’s because the United States is not a wrap. Flick with the Democracy. It’s a little bit more Twisted than that. And it’s easy to look at voting is something that we do here every two or four years, but in fact, people vote all the time, we don’t necessarily vote with ballots, but there’s voting going on, and it’s worth a discussion about how we decide who gets to vote and how much a vote counts.

So, consider, for example a proxy fight at a public company. If you Own a share in a public company. You get to vote on, who’s on the board of directors. The board of directors gets to vote on how the company is run. If they’re doing their job. The thing is, the more shares you own, the more votes you get and when it comes to public companies, there’s not a lot of argument that. That’s the way it should be or if you work for a private company where the boss owns the whole thing.

There’s not a lot of objections. Most of the time when the boss makes decisions after all, it’s her company. We allocate votes based on ownership. There is a long history of people. Arguing that only folks who own property should be able to vote the science fiction author, Robert Heinlein and my recollection wrote that only veterans should be able to vote because they have more at stake. They showed up when their life.

Is on the line to defend the country. They were in. What about when six or eight? Or ten? People are going out for dinner. Well, maybe the person who’s got a very special diet for medical reasons, gets a bigger vote than everyone else. Not because they have more money. Not because there are veteran, but because they have more at stake going forward because yeah, it’s true leaving aside medical issues.

The vegan can’t find. You think deed at the steakhouse, but the steak eater could probably find something to eat at the health food restaurant. We have this calculation going on all the time. And the reason it’s interesting to talk about right now is because of the blockchain because of Bitcoin because of cyber currency because yes, in fact there is voting going on constantly all the time.

So here’s a quick primer on how the whole thing works. The blockchain is actually a pretty useful and really Lee fascinating concept. What it says is that if there was a database that was inspectable unforgeable that kept a history that no uncontrolled, that no one owned. We could probably do useful things with that database. Here’s a super simple example. If you have ever bought or sold to home, you paid money for title insurance.

Now, title insurance is a bit of a scam because they know the answer for far less money than their charging. Leaving that aside. What happens when the title for things like property that can only be owned by one person at a time is put into the blockchain. Now, we have this record this record of who owns it and how they got it.

That’s really important, particularly in places where there isn’t a long history of civilized exchange of things like property. Where centralized records are unreliable. You don’t want to people showing up. And saying this is my land, the blockchain solves that problem but one of the challenges of running a blockchain is what blocks do you put in it? What is authorized and what isn’t how do you go about updating it if it’s not centralized?

Well, some people think that Bitcoin was invented to enable the blockchain. I happen to think the blockchain is a good excuse to implement Bitcoin. Bitcoin is digital gold. It’s cumbersome. It’s metaphorically, heavy metal. Really difficult to move around compared to other forms of digital interaction.

And the reason is this that in order to get a new Bitcoin, a freshly minted one, you have to prove to the community that you’ve earned it and the way you earn it is by performing a large number of extraordinarily difficult. Computations. These would have been impossible 20 years ago, but now with a good laptop hooked up to the Internet and a lot of Missa tee, you can go ahead and do this and over time.

If you set up a mining operation, a bunch of these computers, hopefully next to cheap renewable electricity. You will be rewarded with Bitcoin. Now, this is done to ensure that the blockchain that Bitcoin supports is accurate and up-to-date because those computations that you are doing are all about giving you the right to authorize. The next block that gets added to the Chain, and so you’ve got tens or hundreds of thousands of computers. All competing all the time to look at all of the inputs and decide in agreement.

What is going to get added to the blockchain? So instead of one computer doing something, you have essentially an infinite number of computers doing it. Super inefficient, but the argument is more as lock keeps getting better, and this system should be if appropriately constructed impervious to fraud and to hacking.

This is called proof of work. Then when you prove that your computer has done the work to check against all of the bad things that could happen to the blockchain. You may be rewarded with a big prize. The problem with proof of work is this as Bitcoin has gotten more and more expensive. More people want to earn it. They want to mine a Bitcoin when a Bitcoin was 50 bucks. Yeah.

It’s not worth my trouble. But when a Bitcoin is worth a thousand times as much it’s worth. A lot of trouble, but there aren’t an infinite number of Bitcoin to be given out. So they have to raise the stakes for what you need to do to get one. And that raising of the stakes is directly related to how much electricity you’re going to need to do that complicated problem.

And so you’ve already seen this, you may have read my post about n FTS the blockchain and Bitcoin in particular is sucking huge amounts of electricity more than, for example. The entire nation of Argentina. Think about that the entire nation of Argentina’s electrical output dedicated to creating basically numbers on a screen.

So are there Alternatives? Well, one of the Alternatives that hopefully will get figured out soon is called proof of stake. And the metaphors here. I think are really useful for people who don’t care at all about blockchain, but do care about representation about democracy, about how we decide proof of stake. Easy to describe, we should let the people who have a lot at stake chime in for the things that we are about to decide.

In the case of the blockchain. It’s simple, the more coins you own and the older they are. The more likely it is that you have a vested incentive for the system. You are part of to be seen as reputable because it will make the value of your coins go up. You are a guardian. You will be inherently conservative in how your computer makes decisions.

That when there is a lot at stake for you. There’s not a lot of incentive to be a bad actor to start inserting stuff into the blockchain, that doesn’t belong there to start pranking the whole system so that it doesn’t work. Now this leads to centralization because if you’re giving new coins to people have more coins.

Well, there’s the gini index all over again. The rich get richer. And so they add things to it, to shake it up so that your old coins can only be used once for a vote and then they go back in the queue until they get old again. So that there are random elements to it. So that new voices can be heard.

I think these are addressable issues. The beauty of proof of stake is that uses almost no electricity and instead gets back to something that people are inherently. Okay, with which is wisdom. Mmm, the wisdom that comes from being committed to something from being there, for a while, for sticking it out. Yes. Still open to new approaches, but no, not fly-by-night. Not fully Anonymous. I don’t care who you are. Let’s just see what happens.

And then we get back to this idea of how we decide when five people are in a room and a meeting at a company and a real decision has to get made. Is it always made by the boss likely. Not it’s often made because the group looks to somebody who is willing to accept responsibility and responsibility and Authority are different. And this is one of the problems we’re seeing in the media fueled Insanity.

It’s going on in many democratic nations around the world, which is a whole bunch of people trolls, sock puppets people who might be anonymous or just like being Miss are showing up demanding Authority without taking responsibility. They’re showing up eager to be critical without doing the work and most of all, they haven’t done the reading.

They don’t understand the science. They haven’t looked at the background. They’re not demonstrating wisdom. They’re simply being trolls. And the same thing is true in that meeting at work. In the same thing is true. When it’s time for the family to decide whether they’re going to buy a house or not, and yes, where to go for dinner. Dinner tonight, in all of those cases. We have learned the hard way that wisdom has some value and that wisdom proof of stake. The idea that proof of stake, means I have a lot riding on this.

It’s a useful way to make important decisions about what we should do next because wisdom implies that you’ve done the reading wisdom, implies that you’re in it for the long term. And most of all wisdom means that Taking responsibility Authority is an artifact of industrial capitalism. We had to invent the org chart in order to have the org but there’s something else going on here. And that other aspect of it is that while Authority is hard to get, and while Authority can be misused responsibilities responsibilities, usually up for grabs.

If you’re willing to say, put it on my watch. I’ll put my name on it. I’ll get this. This thing done. And you mean it the rest of the community can look at this and say, okay? We’re counting on you because you’ve done it before. I think we have the opportunity to increase our proof of stake to show up and say yeah on our watch not a secret ballot really truly. I’m going to stand up. I’m going to hold the sign.

I’m going to raise my hand. I’m going to put my name on it. Because that is how we make better decisions going forward. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with three questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit, akimbo.com, go to find out about their new. Upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth. My name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. Who got a question about this or anything else, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link-16. Click the appropriate button. Here we go. Hi Seth. Daniel from GMT. Time – 7, my question is regarding what to do immediately after a session of deep focus.

I’m very thankful for all the probably advice and encouragement. You provided to me over the years listening to akimbo. I found that when I get most deeply involved in my creative work. I make a lot of progress in a short time, but also feel a strong emptiness immediately after. And it typically goes away. And I’ll dream about my work that night, but I wonder Are there ways to prepare for this better to deal with this post Focus, letdown?

Thanks Seth for all you do. Thanks to this Daniel. One thing that I recently read. Is that a chess tournament among Grandmasters someone in a tournament like that can burn 6,000 calories in a day. That’s extraordinary. That’s almost like swimming. And the reason is simple because your brain and the emotions That it releases through your body, it takes energy.

So if you’re in flow, if you’re leaning hard into a Creative Cycle, it’s no surprise at all. That you’re feeling depleted from the calories and also from the emotional waves that go through us. And the reason that there are waves is, when we are doing creativity. We are doing two things at once. This might work and this might not work that the very nature of any Idea that is unproven. And untested, in essence. Any creative idea is that we have to dance between this might work.

And this might not work and that can be exhausting. And I guess the only advice I have for you other than telling you that normal is to when it occurs not to curse it, but to celebrate it, because it means you’ve been working out. Hello Seth. My name is Pablo Sebastian. Belasco. I am from Argentina. Yeah.

My name is Spanish name. And it sounds hard for American people to remember it. So since I am building my personal brand, I’m asking myself. Should I use this name? I contraction of it.

Or should I use a fantasy name? What’s your opinion, by the way, I’m an artist. I’m in session.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for this Pablo when I got started a long time ago and had to make a bunch of phone calls to the folks that I was hoping to work with, in the days, just at the beginning of voice mail. Lots of times. I’d be talking to receptionist’s, I had plans to change my working name to Thomas Jefferson because Thomas Jefferson at least in this country is Easy to remember. There’s always a story about it.

Had a CFO for higher years ago. Whose name was Stephen. King again. He got to say in every conversation. No, I’m not that Stephen King. But yes, in fact, it was pretty easy to remember. Now the people in my country are fairly ethnocentric in the sense that the regular kind the names from the dominant class are the ones that people have relied. Add on for years and years. If you spell your name differently, if you have a name that’s outside of the top, 100 people feel like they have the right to push back as if you’re doing something wrong.

So, everyone is entitled to their own name. Everyone is entitled to the way they speak, however, and it is a useful. However, when we develop a brand, we are doing it for the people, we are serving when we Brand. Its purpose is to be a shortcut, a reminder a way of establishing what someone’s going to get from us next time.

So when they had a change in the name of that candy called AIDS, well, they could have said, we worked really hard for a really long time to have a candy named AIDS but the world disagreed and in the case of human beings, we have an interesting choice to make in the Arts. There’s a long history of of people from around the world making a difference, right? Whether it’s Yo-Yo Ma or Frida, Kahlo or Picasso.

The fact is that you don’t have to be named Thomas Jefferson to have a memorable moniker that can serve as a brand. So I have no trouble spelling, your name or remembering your name. I’m not speaking for every person that doesn’t live near you. But my hunch. Is that you’ll be fine. On the other hand, if your goal is to build the social network? I’m not sure. Your name.com is the best, most memorable way to build a brand, that’s bigger than yourself.

Hey, Seth, this is Linda from Queens. I love your show. Love your books.

I listened every week, big fan. So the podcast The Miser. Oh, that one hit me really hard. So I have a question.

I am a person who finds hobbies and those Hobbies usually turned into businesses. But what happens after it becomes a business, I start becoming disinterested after a certain amount of time and usually, it has to do. Do with people and all the time. I have to spend on social media trying to get more people. So the business becomes less fun because it becomes more work. Obviously.

There are some things that I’ve done really, really well, but when I go to master, any of those things, I run into a dead end, or I’m just really disinteresting. Am I just a Fickle immature? Lazy entrepreneur type or is this normal? Thank you so much.

Thank you for this Linda. This is super normal super standard. It is part of our modern era because a hundred years ago. No, one thought they could turn their hobby into a business. It just wasn’t done, business was work. And if you didn’t have to dig ditches for a living, that was a win. If you didn’t have to work in a coal powered plant lit by candles that was going to give you lung disease.

That was great. A super big win. It’s only Fairly recently. I don’t know Martha Stewart or a decade before that where the idea came along that you could make a living from your hobby. I think in many ways. It’s a mistake because as soon as you start doing your hobby for other people can’t also be doing it for you and your job. As I just mentioned, the Pablo is to serve other people and it may be that it’s exhausting for you because it’s a fundamental shift. Hobbies are things we do on our own time. I’m because they’re fun because we feel clever because we get agency over how we do it all the time.

But the minute we exchange attention or money with someone else. We’re making a promise and we have to keep it whether we want to keep it or not. So yeah, we need to make a living. We need to pay the rent. It might make sense for you, and for lots of other people to find a job, a project, a business where you are solving a problem.

For other people who are eager to pay you to solve their problem and we’ll pay you well and treat you with respect. And if the work you’re doing isn’t work, you would be doing as a hobby fine because what it has done by you, picking a really juicy problem to solve is freed up the time and giving you the resources to go back to working on your hobbies because most of the time, when we try to bring our hobby to the marketplace, The marketplace doesn’t appreciate it as much as we’d like them to.

So now we end up with the worst of Both Worlds. We have a business, that doesn’t pay well, and we have a hobby that doesn’t make us happy anymore. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet. Like we have data, what all Ba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, what are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up, and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. Go. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -project-debt- <==

Everyone’s in debt, the most common famous kind of debt, of course, is money, debt. That’s sort of what we think of when we think of debt, your MasterCard, bill, or the money that you spent to get that machine but sooner or later all of us, if we’re making something, if we’re leading something, if we’re building something, we end up in some sort of debt.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about technical debt project debt time debt and the rest of it, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Creative isn’t who you are. It’s what you do along. The way creativity has gotten a mystical rap as if it’s some sort of gift. It’s not. It’s a choice. It’s a skill. If you have a job where you get to decide what you do, you are a creative, a work in creative and you can get better at it. I’m thrilled to say that the creatives workshop is back the most active of all the akimbo workshops. It’s about people who want to level up.

And make a difference with their creative work. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus. In David graeber is classic book Debt. He talks about the origin of money and he argues persuasively that money. Came after we invented debt, that money, was an easy reliable way to pay off debts now. Capitalism is based on debt. And here’s the simple math.

If you can buy a machine that lets you be more productive, you will be able to gain market share and make a profit that machine. Ends up being an asset of the company that machine cost you money more than your competitors were willing to spend to get that money. You went into debt and you pay back that debt because over time you make enough of a profit that the machine pays for itself. And so the very nature of capitalism has always been about building an asset a property. Maybe it’s land. Maybe it’s a machine that lets you have more leverage and thus make more money. But as we enter a post-industrial age, the question is, what are we going into debt for and what kind of debt are we going into? So there’s education debt in which many people at the tender age of 18 when they shouldn’t be making a quarter million dollar decision. Go a quarter million dollars into debt to buy an education that isn’t actually as useful in asset as they hope that’s a crime and we should fix it, but there are other sorts of debt and that’s Here to talk about today.

The first one is this idea of technical debt programmers, talk about it all the time, but I think we have to acknowledge that it’s in many modern lives in essence, technical debt, is what happens as your code base increases because as you write more code that code needs maintenance. Because, for example, if your code is supporting a certain API and the API changes, you got to go change it. You got to go fix it.

That as code gets, More and more complicated. There isn’t one human being who even understands all of it. And so now, you need a team of people and that team of people need to coordination and on, and on it goes. So you will notice for example, that some kinds of software stop supporting old models of computers, and it’s easy to think as a non-programmer. Why would they do that? Used to work on my 1987 Mac SE? Why doesn’t it work anymore?

Well, the Is technical debt? It’s just not worth it for the company to maintain software because it’s not simply between the software in the computer. There’s lots of complicated things going on.

And one other thing about technical debt, technical debt isn’t just the maintenance, you need to do to keep your old systems running. It’s the fact that you can’t reach higher because your old systems won’t support it and so technical debt overlaps with project debt, because once Once you’ve got a cohort of people, it’s really hard to change the game because you don’t want to leave them behind and so when we take on projects, yes, they help us leverage. What we want to do, but no, they don’t always open the door for us to do the thing. After that.

We have to be aware that this debt. Not only is something that has to be repaid to keep it going, but it might keep us from doing the next thing, which means it’s smart. Is of technical teams that have software, declared bankruptcy all the time. They say, we’re not going to support this thing anymore, sweep out the Croft and let’s get rid of it.

But there’s also this idea of personal technical debt because in your life, you’ve got a rice cooker, and a dishwasher, and a car, and a laptop, and a phone and on, and on, and all of them require you to be the head of Maintenance for you to figure out what you’re going to keep up with, which, Leads to what we really need to understand here as knowledge workers.

And that is the idea of project debt.

We need to talk for a second about Fred Brooks in 1975. He published a book called the mythical man-month today probably should be called the mythical person month. But the math is the same. At the dawn of big Computing in the 1960s at IBM. They did something that has probably happened in environments where you are in May. Even by you, which is as a project, a lucrative project, a good project starts falling behind management. Says hire more people.

Let’s throw people at this project and then we will get it done. Well, the argument of the mythical man-month is quickly stated nine women working together in perfect coordination. Cannot figure out how to have a baby in just one month. It. Doesn’t work that way. That what they figured out with the IBM 360 in the computers around that time?

Where that as you added more programmers. You also added more management and more meetings and more communication and more bottlenecks. And in fact, when you added enough, the project came to a standstill, it doesn’t actually go. Faster. It goes slower because project debt always arises and part of the Of going forward in our project based economy is figuring out, smart ways to use the network to reduce the linear growth of project debt. Because if you’re in, Zoom all day long, nobody has time to get anything done.

And one other thing about technical debt, technical debt isn’t just the maintenance you need to do to keep your old systems running. It’s the fact that you can’t reach higher. Because you’re old systems won’t supported and so technical debt overlaps with project debt because once you’ve got a cohort of people it’s really hard to change the game because you don’t want to leave them behind and so when we take on projects, yes, they help us leverage what we want to do, but no, they don’t always open the door for us to do the thing. After that.

We have to be aware that this debt. Not only is something that has to be. We paid to keep it going but it might keep us from doing the next thing. Let’s say you’re a soloist, you’re working on your own. The good news is 100% of the time. You are in sync because there’s only you, you don’t need to write a memo. You don’t need to have a meeting.

There’s only you. But if you can bring one person in one freelancer, one partner something amazing happens. Because now if you spend one hour a day, coordinating with that, Person. They can spend seven hours of an eight hour day adding value to what you’ve already got. You’ve dramatically multiplied, your leverage and then you think, okay. I’ll add a second person.

And now you’re spending two hours a day in coordination, but in return, getting 10, 12, 14 hours of productivity a day, you can see where this is going because all mom-and-pop companies, all companies that grow from being just a couple. The Freelancers to more than that go straight into the wall of project debt.

Because once you’ve got five or six or seven, people who are doing different jobs, you are full-time. Job is now coordinating the work of everybody else, but you probably didn’t realize this. So, you’re also trying to do your old full-time job of eight hours a day. Being you getting new clients, making big decisions, inventing new things, being the freelancer. You set out to be and so your life gets really stressful. You try to hire your way out of it and it keeps getting harder because project debt rears its ugly head.

But and it’s a huge but there are exceptions to this. The first one is this, if you can figure out how to have people, join the project who are doing exactly the same thing as the other people on the project. Your technical debt, doesn’t go up in a linear. Your fashion that if those people don’t have to talk to one another, if those people are replaceable cogs in your system, then you can add an enormous amount of Leverage.

Maybe this is running a babysitting service. The babysitter’s don’t have to talk to each other. Adding another babysitter, lets you get right back to getting new clients. Once you figure out an onboarding system, a quality control system, you can scale, and scale and scale. This is one reason why temporary employment agencies can scale so quickly when I was in college my partner, Steve Dennis and I ran a temporary employment agency. We had 400 employees and we could have had more if we had had more business because it was basically a flat model, new customers, new employees, back and forth, and back and forth. There didn’t need to be a lot of middle management.

But in the internet age, we’re building things that are more complicated than that. Not quite. Flat, so it’s worth looking at Wikipedia, a tiny team of people just a handful for years and years. We’re able to build the third biggest website in the world, a website. That if they had chosen to monetize, it would have been worth billions of dollars.

Most people don’t know this, but Wikipedia is created in large part by 5,000 dedicated volunteers. The magic of dealing with project debt. Is that Jimmy? Wales and his team figured out how to put in the time not to edit articles themselves. They didn’t edit any articles themselves but to create a structure. So that as the project, scaled people, who were really concerned and focused and eager could add an enormous amount of value, without the central organization, having to get much bigger.

And so now, if you’re a freelancer, if your Trapper. If you’re a small business, I’m hoping that you will not look at taking on another project. Another client another opportunity in quite the same way that when someone reaches out and says, why don’t you add this link to your website, it’ll be easy to take your five minutes and these benefits will come from it.

You can look at the project debt. That that will bring when someone says, oh, you should be on clubhouse where you should be on Facebook, or you should be on Twitter or you should be on LinkedIn. Each one of them comes with project debt because you are signing on to take care of something, for a long time.

It’s not about adopting a puppy. It’s about owning a dog. And as we think about all the debts in our life, one of the things we need to do is figure out what to do with crushing financial debt. It’s a real problem, but the other thing is to realize that everybody gets a hundred and sixty eight hours a week. That’s all you get.

Burning the candle at both ends creates sleep debt, a debt. That’s almost impossible to discharge over time. Now, the alternative is to realize, we need to be much better at saying, no because saying, yes, means inviting debt and that debt, that project debt, it needs to come with something that goes with it, a sort of productivity that leads to freedom and possibility, so that we can invent the next thing. The reason we signed up in the first place. Place be careful who you owe because who you owe decide who you will become.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with three great questions from around the world. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way to see the world to connect with others to lead to. Taejin possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together. It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit. Akimbo.com.

Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle. Reading, sir. So, this is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the pot pie. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode.

I hope you visit a Kimbo dot link that sake. I am Bo l i and K and click the appropriate button. It’s possible. We have never had three questions on as wide a variety of topics as this week. Here we go. Hey Seth Brown Paper Dad here. Just listen to your episode on dogs and Petfinder, which you then expanded on to talk about markets behavioral economics and the human tendency to race to the bottom.

Could you share something encouraging with those of us who struggle with dark thought patterns, with finding hope for our Collective future? What keeps you going on your darker days? If you have any, thanks for being you, Seth. Thanks for this. Thanks for giving me a chance to get us off on the right foot.

Sometimes when I read my writing or here my podcast, I worry that the things I’m highlighting are a little bit too pessimistic. Other times. I wonder if I’m being too optimistic. So hopefully there’s a balance here. I think that being forewarned gives us the opportunity to see what’s going on. And usually what we need to pay attention to are the pitfalls.

But with that said, I think there are huge reasons to be optimistic. It is possible that we will get our act together and begin to reverse the carbon poisoning of our atmosphere. We certainly have the technology to do it. We already have it in place. It’s possible. That now that we are waking up, we can begin to start the overdue work on social justice and Injustice.

And it’s possible that the networks that we are building can be put to good use to connect us, not to divide us. With all that said it’s worth noting several things. Even with depend emic the world is healthier than it has ever been. There are no really significant Wars going on. I mean, if you’re in one it’s significant to you.

But compared to the state of the world in The Sixteen hundreds or the 1900 s. We are living in a relatively safe time, fingers crossed and technology. Technology has completely transformed. The way we interact with each other. We are living longer healthier lives. We have access to more tools, and more connection than anyone would have dreamed of just 50 years ago.

So I guess I’m optimistic. Think about all of that but aware that we’re going to have to do it from the ground up that each of us is going to have to figure out what it means to not waste this moment in time. How do you assess this is joram from Believe It or Not Lusaka Zambia. I’ve been reading karazsia Pixar, you are. And was amazed at how prescient his writing is even though it was written in the 1920s.

Most of the things he addressed like the nature of AI and whether or not Robots, or machines should be treated the same way. We treat human beings if they have a conscience.

We still wrestle with them today. My question is, do you think machines or indeed robots? Can experience all have theory of mind. The same way we do in that, we are able to understand that other people have unique beliefs and desires that are different from our own which subsequently enables us to engage in Daily, social interactions with them is theory of Mind something. Thing that can be coded in principle into an AI or machine. So that its social interactions with human beings or federal robots is indistinguishable from that of an actual human being.

Thank you for the good work you do and I must confess every time I listen to you, I go to bed less stupid. Thank you for this drum and we could talk about this for a really long time. It’s one of the things I, majored, in forever ago, and I learned a lot from Daniel Dennett. If you haven’t read his books on. Consciousness, I recommend them.

Basically, we’ve got two choices, either. We believe that Youmans and humans alone, have this magical thing. This voice in our head, this little homunculus, a tiny person inside who has a little tiny person inside all the way up, to has this magic Power Of Consciousness, or we believe that if an entity acts like it’s conscious, then it is Is conscious and we know that there are human beings who do not have a voice in their head.

There are human beings who go through life acting. Like they are conscious the way I am and you are but they are not familiar with that voice that you and I are familiar with, that’s mind-blowing to me. So where I come out is that if a computer tricks us all into believing it is believing. Then it is the most convenient thing in the world to say. Yep it is because we’re certainly not going to cut it open just like we’re not going to cut open that person down the street. We’re not going to deprive this computer. That is so capable of acting like a person from the Privileges of acting like a person. Just like we don’t take those privileges away from that small percentage of people who don’t have a voice in their head so we can go down this rabbit hole for a really long time, but the purpose of Giving somebody the benefit of the doubt, when it comes to Consciousness is to enable all of us to live a better life.

And I don’t see how to draw that line, just because something is made out of silicon or something. Is a dolphin. The thing is, we are all entities and figure out how to work with other entities, for our mutual benefit. Feels like a no-brainer. I know there were too many puns in that. I didn’t do them on purpose.

Myself my team up again. Now the question for you that relates to audiences. Now that feels a little obtuse and even arrogant, reading it back. Now. I do kind of wonder what your opinion is on it. So here goes what do you suggest? If you don’t like the audience that you are tracked by doing the work or art that you love?

Thanks very much. Thank you for this Mike. So let’s start with this. How long do you think it was before the Beatles? Got really tired of 14 year old girl screaming at the top of their lungs.

The song which is the title song from you.

If you listen to the Grateful Dead talking from the stage during the 70s and the 80s, you can hear. They got a little bit annoyed at some of the behavior that was going on. In the crowd. I could go down the list for a really long time. It’s pretty likely that if you are successful at bringing ideas to the world, if you are Organizing true fans. If you are showing up with work, that matters for people who care over time.

Some of those people who care aren’t necessarily going to be the people, you would have chosen. I am super fortunate in that. I really like the people who like my work, but I think I’m the exception, one of the costs of connecting a community is that you are now in that Community warts and all and I think on balance Balance. It’s worth it.

But I don’t think that beating yourself up and acting like at all times. You must be appreciative of the way, every single one of your customers behaves. I don’t think that’s going to help you do better work going forward. The work is the work and people are going to do with it. What they’re going to do with it.

They don’t have to be your friend. But as soon as you sign up to have them be your customer, you are making a promise to them and that promise has to be clear and we have to do our best to keep it down. Everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have data. What all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up when you got a face, that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very common. To go. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -no-accounting-for-taste- <==

In the words of the fabled food critic and sometimes singer Barbra Streisand the best fried chicken. I know comes with a TV dinner, always know that Hey, it’s Seth. And this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about quality taste and Magic. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It’s Seth, I’d like you to meet my friend Margo. I’m working on something to help people dramatically improve the results. The words create online. When we Each we’re doing all the time writing in our emails were writing in our Newsfeed were writing and text to our friends. We are trying to make change happen. We are trying to reach the people who want the things that we have.

The trouble is most of us are just guessing. We don’t actually know how to help people find us how to make them feel seen and heard and understood and that’s why I built the brand new akimbo Workshop. The copy Workshop. We are running at one last time this year. Learn how to write effective copy in a way that respects your Readers, that tells the truth and helps people find the things that they want that you had that you could give them. If only you knew how to communicate effectively stop guessing and start knowing how to reach the people who want what you have. Come join us in the copy Workshop. You can check us out over at akimbo.com, backslash go click on the copy Workshop. We’ll see you there.

If we wanted to, we could blame it on. Jerry, Thomas. In 1953 the Swanson food company, made a Take, they made too many turkeys. In fact, they had 260 tons of frozen turkey left over after Thanksgiving. I can do the math for you. That’s five hundred and twenty thousand pounds of frozen turkey. The thing is, the turkey was in a refrigerated train car. 10 to be exact and the refrigeration didn’t work unless the train car was moving. And so Swanson was busy, sending these tent. Train cars, back and forth from the east coast to the Midwest until they could figure out what to do with half a million pounds of frozen turkey. And what Jerry Thomas came up with along with Betty Cronin the brilliant food, safety scientist, who kept us all from dying.

What they came up with was the TV dinner perfectly named perfectly packaged. You didn’t have to think about what was for dinner. You didn’t have to pay a lot for what was for dinner. You didn’t even have to think about how it He stood, you could just go back to watching television. It was a Triumph of convenience over taste.

And the question is, is everyone entitled to their own taste. What do we say? When we try to defend our taste, let’s consider the case of Giuliani. Bougie. Ali, the great Italian cookbook author. I took a cooking class with him many years ago, and he was teaching a very complicated dish that If I recall involved ground veal, it certainly wasn’t particularly healthy and it was loaded with calories.

Well here comes turkey again, during the Q&A part of the class. After we at all made pasta by hand. Someone raised their hand and said for the filling, I prefer not to eat veal. Can I substitute ground turkey? And bougie Ali sneered. And with as much disdain as he could muster. He said, well, of course you can, if you want it to taste like dirt and then he moved on.

So what does it mean to be a defender of tradition? Is it elitist? Is it classist, is it sexist? Is it racist? Is it about defending traditional white male European Colonial values in the face of what people actually want? I’m not sure. That’s true. If we look at the Temple of French cuisine, it is not in Paris. It is in Lyon a working-class town. The people in Paris were too busy, making a living to worry, quite so much about the quality of their sauce.

If we think about how art on the wall evolved in a place like the United States, some of it had to do with Norman Rockwell Norman Rockwell. Painting for the Saturday evening, post the most successful magazine in the history of the country established. What normal art looked like. And that is one reason why there’s so much normal art or consider, the people who will go to Great Lengths, to defend the semicolon, or the ellipses, or other elements of grammar.

They are doing it, trying to maintain some sort of standard in the face. Erase for convenience, for cheap for easy.

When I was growing up. We used to go to Canada because ice time was a little cheaper on that side of the Border away from Buffalo and my dad would Rent A ranked at six o’clock in the morning. The hockey team would all go, we’d split the fee and after a hockey practice. We were allowed to go across the street, to the convenience store, and I would trade a shiny nickel for a jersey milk, candy bar because I was a candy store. Knob. And I knew that a jersey milk candy bar, tasted significantly better than a Hershey bar.

Now, of course, a jersey milk, candy bar cannot be compared to a bean to bar bar made by the people at fruition, or by Gingy in Baltimore. And yet, Some people prefer it, they say it’s the regular kind or if we think about going to a real. Bian restaurant where someone has spent hours over the vegetables do and we compare it to that place around the corner where they put something together from a couple containers in five minutes.

It’s not about class. It’s about time. It’s about choosing to spend time to maintain something that is difficult to maintain.

There’s a little restaurant outside of Salt Lake City. The Red Iguana where the male is made from scratch, takes Hours or if you pick up David, Thompson’s classic book on Thai cooking. You will find recipes that take two, three, four, five pages to explain how to make a dip that most people would just open out of a jar in. Julia Child’s the art of French cooking her recipe for a baguette which only has three or four ingredients takes more than eight pages.

All of these are about commitments commitments of time. And energy and care. If you look on the recipes online, at places like Syria seats. What you’ll see in the comments as well. I substituted cottage cheese for the cream and I didn’t have any of the real cheese available. So I used the stuff from an on and on they list the six substitutions they made, because it was easier for them.

And then they wonder why it doesn’t taste the way. They thought it was going to taste, which leads us to the Problem with typography for years and years, typography was done by hand by trained Crafts People, Who understood things like letter spacing, and kerning and line spacing. And then we switched to digital.

And at first, the professionals were aghast because it gave the typesetting tools to typography tools to everyone. But then then there was an explosion and explosion in the development of different type Styles and extraordinary. New work got me, but it was made with craft. But then Tick Tock and Instagram and memes show up and all of a sudden, the fonts don’t matter because the people who are exploring the frontier, the kids.

They don’t know any better. They’re just eager to put up an idea and suddenly the standard, the one that we grew up with isn’t the finely crafted typography. That people of my generation are used to. It. Simply doesn’t look right. It looks a little bit. Fussy. And then there’s the chicken fingers problem, which is a variation of this that is restaurants sought to grow.

They established kids. Menus kids menus designed with things with fat and salt and crunch that are easy for a kid to decide. They want to eat. Oh, you need protein will, let’s turn french fries into something. That’s got some meat in it, hence chicken fingers, but now now there’s Generations growing up. We think the chicken fingers is the regular kind. The thing that they want to look forward to eating, I grew up eating macaroni with ketchup on it because my mom didn’t want to trade that time. It would take to build a six-hour Italian, gravy every Sunday afternoon, because she had something else to do with her time. My rant continues technology shows up and it brings us auto-tune auto-tune means that the musician can sound exactly. Exactly, right. The first time we can stand off the edges and if that gets someone in through the top 40, you can bet that the next artist wants to do it as well.

So when Gil Scott-Heron the brilliant poet, the person who pioneered spoken word wrap when Gil Scott-Heron shows up with his real work and civil rights, women’s rights gay rights. It’s all wrong. Call in the Cavalry to disrupt. This perception of Freedom going. Wow, God damn it. First one wants to beat them in the hole. And World wants Freedom, stop somewhere and you can still buy something with it to a time when movies with in black and white. And so is everything else.

It’s dramatically, outsold by someone, who is simply manipulating the market for a quick, hit his one, right or wrong. Is everyone entitled to their own taste. I recently had a back and forth with someone about white chocolate. The FDA bone Appetit, chocolate companies. Many of them agree with me. White chocolate isn’t actually chocolate because it doesn’t have any cocoa solids in it.

It doesn’t taste different when the beans are different. Does that mean that you’re not entitled to like white chocolate? Of course you are. But what does it mean to be a defender of taste to lean into hyperbole to make a point? A point about sophistication? Because sophistication in our culture is a fascinating concept. Many of the people who make podcast today, grew up listening to NPR NPR had the resources to make deeply researched, well produced audio.

And the reason that so many podcasts a great ones. Sound the way they do is that the people who are making them would like to be as sophisticated or even more sophisticated than MPR deeply, musical act, no matter what. It’s pitch is Contours of sounds Rhythm. A lot of it is trying to get the textures in the ingredients to behave the way, you want them to that Jad, album Rod, founder of Radiolab, which established a whole new standard for what it meant to bring sophistication and care.

And commitment to doing something in audio or consider star Lea, Cline who working largely alone, created Mystery Show, just one season of it. Establishing again, what one person who was deeply committed to taste and sophistication is able to create. And yet, here’s a podcast made by one person in a padded shower in his office, not sophisticated at all. It’s the equivalent of the typography that you might see on Instagram or Tick. Tock and may be proud of it. But we have to fight against Suburban Pizza sober. Urban Pizza.

The same thing as TV dinners, the Suburban Pizza Insight, which I’ve mentioned in previous episodes. Is this the Pizza of our future is the pizza of our past. If you have been lucky enough to eat Sally’s or Pepe’s or even modern a pizza in New Haven, Connecticut. You know, what? The Original Pizza, the real Pizza. The coal oven pizza is supposed to taste. Like it is hard for me to imagine somebody who grew up. With that, not loving it forever because it’s the right one. It’s the sophisticated one. It’s very difficult to make it that magical.

But if you grew up in the suburbs of name your City, Des Moines Topeka, even Chicago. Maybe you grew up eating a frozen DiGiorno’s. Maybe you grew up, eating Pizza Hut, maybe you grew up with the local independent guy, but they’re all making mediocre pizza at scale. It’s not mediocre to you because like chicken fingers like macaroni with ketchup on top. It’s the one you grew up with.

There’s no accounting for Taste. You’re entitled to like it. But we also have to agree. It’s not as sophisticated that real Pizza, sophisticated Pizza difficult to make pizza, the platonic ideal of pizza needs to be defended. And the reason it needs to be defended is because it is constantly being eroded. As is the vision of Scott Heron as is the perfect sourdough bread as conceived by Lionel Poulin and his daughter Apollonia. As is the kind of jazz The Cannonball Adderley or Thelonious Monk made, it’s not smooth jazz. It’s the opposite of smooth jazz. It’s rough on purpose because making it that way requires a level of sophistication and care.

It’s not about cottage cheese or auto-tune. It’s about leaning directly in Into what happens when we decide to trade time for magic? Because our race, for convenience, and our proustian quest for the things that remind us of what we were. Like, when we were kids, those things are fine in their own way, but we have the chance to defend better.

And better has a meaning. It doesn’t necessarily mean the way Paul Bocuse would have made it. It doesn’t necessarily mean the original way. I think what it means is. What happens when we turn the dial up on Care, on process on sophistication, when we are measuring things with each other that are worth measuring toward a goal. So yes, everyone is entitled to their own taste, but no, I don’t think it makes sense for convenience and price to rule the day. Sorry Barbara, but I haven’t had a TV dinner since 1968 and I’m in no, hurry to have another one.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It works. If you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo Dot. Cam go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on the Pain Scale. Entire sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Whoosah. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question as, you know, by now, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s Aki and Bo link2006.

Click the appropriate button. Hi ceftaz leaky from Paris. I work with Purpose Driven fashion business, Founders, for example, some of them make dresses with repurposed fabric. Because they care about the environment, some of us make scarves using a traditional craft because they want to provide employment to jobless women.

Don’t all small businesses, but they all have decided to use their businesses to create change. So I’m wondering in this noisy world. Were many large companies. Spend lots and lots of money trying to convince people that what they sell would be good for the planet or four people. How can the small businesses I work with the have a strong desire to serve a cause, how can they get the message? Across effectively, how can they better stand out? So people can understand that buying from them can make a small, but real difference.

It’s a very important part of their work. And I’d like to understand how I can better serve them. Thanks a lot. Thank you for this and thank you for the work you’re doing. There are two challenges that occur when Innovation is happening. When True Believers are showing up to make things better. When people are leaning in to actual productive change in our culture. The first one, which you’re not mentioning is this Perfection of perfect that the other people, they don’t get it. Whatever they do isn’t good enough that We end up with these regimes, these hierarchies where everybody is on this asymptotic race for who can do it. The most perfectly who can have zero impact on nevermind zero impact on the environment, who is making the environment better every day. What you’re doing isn’t good enough. I already tried that but what you are talking about is the second problem. And the second problem is, when it begins to work, the forces of industrial capitalism.

We’ll follow you and when they follow you, they will not do it as well as you were doing it. Nor will they do it with as pure a heart? And we see this with the greenwashing that companies, do we see this? When, for example, you can buy a nine dollar pair of sneakers that are almost as good as the hundred and five or 205 or $400 Sneakers, but the $9 knockoffs are made by people who don’t care at all about running.

And the original ones are made by a True Believer. And when this occurs, when our core beautiful, perfect idea, gets corrupted stolen, by the forces of industrial capitalism. It’s easy to look at this and be upset and be angry because they didn’t pay their dues. They’re not doing it for the same reasons that you are doing it, but it’s a really big but in our culture that is the only way. Way the culture actually changes it changes when Patagonia with its pure vision of less of an impact gets ripped off by quote, lesser brands of outdoor gear but almost and what that means is that Patagonia has to try even harder.

What that means is that the people that you are working with cannot dismiss, the folks who are taking some of what they’re doing. And maybe not doing it as well as they’re doing it. But instead Embrace that, but point out, that for people who now get the joke. It can go even further and that is how the culture ends up changing for the better. Because first customers have to notice, they have to change their minds and believe that this is what they wanted all along.

And only then when the masses show up having been taught something do the true. Evers. Get a chance to say, you think that’s something? We can go even further. And that is how ideas spread to our culture. I can rant about that more in the future. I’ll think on it. Thank you for this question.

Seth. This is Chris in Santa Cruz, California. I have a question about names. You, Seth Godin have written many books. Have been doing a Blog for many years. People know your name, your podcast is called. Akimbo. And I even found myself when I’m recommending your podcast, other people. I rarely say, Have you listened to a Kimbo? I say Have you listened to Seth godin’s podcast.

I have a smallish medium sized company that I co-own and we’ve been doing a podcast since before. We opened it started as a way to share ideas, kind of process. What we were learning and share what we were learning with other people and it’s turned into something. That’s much much bigger. The name of that podcast is the same as the name of the company.

Now. I’m looking at starting another podcast and I’m struggling with the name which seems like the most ridiculous thing to struggle with. I have a small contingent of people who look at what we do. If for some reason I don’t want to name the podcast under my name. Why did you not call a Kimbo? Simply Seth Godin, what’s in?

A name, I remember the old Carroll Shelby? Quote. If the car is good. The name doesn’t matter. If the car is bad, the name doesn’t matter. Would you talk about names? That would be incredibly helpful. Thanks for everything you do. Bye.

This is a great Point. Chris. Even if you didn’t have a voice that was perfect for radio. I would take this question on because you are absolutely right, based on most of the metrics that seem to matter. This podcast should be called, Seth Godin has podcast. Seth Godin, podcast is what it is. Seth. Godin is a brand name that has value in the world in that. It’s a shortcut in just three, syllables to explain what to expect and yet. It’s called. Bo.

And so, the back story is simple. When I set out to make a podcast, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was going to be, but I made some rules for myself and one of the rules was probably being too clever. The name of the podcast had to start with an a because most podcast directories are in alphabetical order. So it was a simple Discovery device. Secondly, I love the word akimbo, and I also love words that have deeper meanings like the word, akimbo, an obscure word. But the more you learn Learn about it, the cooler. It sounds. So in a moment with a complete lack of discipline.

I gave this podcast the wrong name. Turns out though, that once I was on that path, having the company, the one I no longer run, akimbo, share, that name, turned out to be a great move because if I had called the place where the courses are, which is now an independent B Corp. Seth Godin is place with courses.

It wouldn’t have been possible for people. Like Alex and Marie and Sam and Graydon to be running it now because they’re running it, not so there’s my silver lining but yes, you’ve made a great Point. Getting clever with names is a mistake. I was really lucky. My mom was going to name me Scott, but my grandfather interceded and said, don’t do that. That’s the name of a kind of toilet paper.

And so my name is Seth and the beauty of the word. Seth in the age of Google is that I’m usually on the first page if My name was Scott that would never have happened in my life would be totally different today because of that simple choice that was made in 1960. So, picking a name, there’s lots of things to think about when you do it.

It’s a placeholder. It is a signal, a flag, a way for people to find you. It is a promise. It is something that we can talk to each other about in conversation, all of those things in one giant bundle, but fortunately for me. Don’t take this podcast too. Seriously. As a business. It’s not a business.

It’s simply me being able to show up. And if you’re already listening, it doesn’t matter what the name is and if you’re not listening, I don’t know what to do about that. Anyway, thanks again for listening. Everybody will see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering. More information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, When you gotta face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an Moment, and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -all-q-a-episode- <==

Knock knock, who’s there? Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo, will be back in a second, with a long-overdue all Q&A episode. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It’s about people who want to level up and make a difference with their Out of work. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus. Yes, it’s true. The questions keep coming in. They get better and better more cogent or pointed more helpful more plaintiff and I collected enough of them that I decided. It was worth blowing through a bunch.

Here we go. Hi Seth, I’m Julian from Switzerland. I’ve been a big fan of yours for a very long time. Indeed. I think you’re managing throughout your daily blog, this podcast and your books. To not only share great ideas, that two more importantly make us think about specific topics important topics while I understand how years of hard work, allowed you to find your audience with whom your ideas resonate.

Some of those ideas especially the ones about education and public, health issues are worth, discussing with a broader range of people. How do you get people to care? Indeed? How do you get people to care about important topics? That might not be in the headlines? And even then, when such topics are on the front page, it’s hard to get away from the surface to have a more profound discussion about them complex topics that necessitate long and thoughtful discussions. Might not be the easiest thing to bring up in this day and age of smart and fast everything.

But this doesn’t change the fact that they are indeed important topics and that we need to be able to talk about them.

How do you get people to care? And when they care, how do you get people to talk constructively about the topic? I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks for everything you do.

Thank you for kicking us off, Julian. This is obviously a problem that’s been around for a very long time. The real question is, which people if you look at the New York Times from 1900 or 1920 or 1940, what you will see is that what most people were talking about? Most of the time, didn’t matter that the masses of people to find the masses. Anyway, you like are easily distracted and Focused almost always on something that is short term sometimes trivial. Sometimes banal and it occupies our attention because mass media has always been about mass and so it gets Amplified but and it’s a huge butt throughout history.

There have been small groups of people who spread the word, small groups of people who stick with something over time small groups. Are people who are having really important conversations to change the culture over time.

I don’t think this was planned. I think there’s a little bit of Survivor bias involved in that. We are lucky that we have evolved as a world as a culture, in a bunch of directions that were pleased with things like understanding science in the natural world, things like creating a civil society where most people are living.

Better more secure lives than they were a hundred years ago, but it’s not because of the chattering masses. It’s because of specific individuals who spread the word and I am so lucky. And so proud of the people who listen to this podcast and who read my blog. They’re not the only people in the world who are leading, but they are leading.

So I spend no time at all. Trying to figure out how to reach more people. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I can help the people, I am already. Eddie able to talk with, give them the tools and the stories so that they can spread the word. It might not be enough, but I think it’s what we need.

Thanks for this.

I said one quick question about a popular marketing message that seems to be more prevalent now than ever goes like this. You deserve to make a living doing what you love. On the one hand, it seems a little bit. I don’t know, entitled to claim that it on the other end of the spectrum. They seem to be a lot of creators who are embracing this way of thinking, to their benefit.

Very curious to hear where you fall on that spectrum, and thanks for all of the service, you do for the gig economy. Thank you. John, throughout history. People have done jobs, that future Generations, or previous generations, would never want to do and some of those people decided to love their work.

And I think that this is still true. I think this will be true going forward. The number of people who can make a living teaching. Juggling or make a living being a Symphony. Conductor is quite tiny and I can also tell you having known some Symphony conduct conductors. Is that after a while, getting on one more plane isn’t as fun as it seemed at the beginning.

So really what we’re talking about is this there are a few people who are doing performative work looking like they’re getting paid to do their hobby. But the people that are the happiest. These are people who have decided to treat the work, they get paid for like their hobby. Because after all, if we’re going to spend 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or in some cases, 80 hours a week doing our job deciding to love, it might be a good way forward.

Hey Seth, this is Paul from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I recently heard you answer the question about the music business. I to work in the music business, as well as several other businesses, you mentioned the idea. A of scarcity driving value. I wanted to see if you believed in abundance Theory and the whole idea of the fact that there’s enough work and enough clients for all of us to make successful businesses and successful sales, and how that comes into play with the music business, as well as other businesses.

I understand that this is a complicated topic and may be different for both situations. So do you walk to school or do you take your lunch Paul? Because I don’t believe that scarcity and abundance are counter to each other. Abundance of ideas, creates a more informed Marketplace. Abundance of ideas, creates more trust. Abundance of ideas, earns people permission that giving away listening to your music. Makes it more likely that people will pay for the scarce souvenir of hearing you perform your music.

Live that we can have both at the same time. The second half of your question. Do I believe there are enough clients and opportunities to go around? There’s no doubt about it. My friend Pablos has pointed out that in the last 50 years people on earth have created three billion jobs that when you think about it, why is anyone unemployed?

Why is it that we can’t find? One more person, something to do a value because, of course, we can. We keep doing it and the same thing is true for markets, when markets come together, when people who are informed and connected and who trust come together, it creates new opportunities for more people.

So, approaching any given Market with a sense of abundance, makes sense because the generosity turns around and repays us, but it is also true. That scarcity Remains the thing that people will pay for because if it’s all the same and it’s all there, all the time, we’re not going to pay for it. What we will pay for is something that is distinct, something that is scarce, something that is worth paying for.

Thanks for this.

Hi, Seth. This is Nikko’s from the Czech Republic, or check. Yeah, which is how the country is now officially called in English anyway. I really enjoyed your very practical. Almost Tim Ferriss Lake episode met at dialogues and placeholders and I’m calling to ask a very practical question in response to move Foods. You from Botswana you talk about how you make us your listeners, do the mental work and engage with your ideas by leaving out certain parts of the story and I must say it totally works in me and as an educator, I would like to do the same to my students.

So my question is, how do I know where to leave a blank? I suspect we won’t hear a complete answer from you. But a little more to go on would be much appreciated. Thanks for everything. You do. You have had a huge impact on how I see myself the world and the role I play in it. Oh, and by the way, what do you think about changing a country’s name?

Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you guys. My grandmother left me very few items. But one of them is a small set of six dessert plates and on the back it says Made in Czechoslovakia. So when I was listening to the beginning of your question, I was thinking of her she was proud of my work as a she called it a freelancer. She had no idea what I did for a living but I think of her whenever I think of czechia, so thank you for this changing, the name of a country sounds like a great idea unless you’re a map maker, which Means it’s a huge hassle. But in the digital age easier than it used to be names, are flags their signals. There are ways of telling people who you are and what you stand for.

And if you have a new thing that you would like to stand for. Well, it doesn’t hurt to change the name so that people know that that’s what you just tried to tell them. But back to your first question, the key to the whole thing is enrollment, if people are enrolled in the journey, if they are voluntarily, We eagerly trying to get to the next stage.

They will fill in yuge blanks. The hard part isn’t figure out which part to skip the hard part is earning enrollment to get kids hooked on the idea that it is fun to fill in the blank. If you’ve got a classroom of kids and they are lucky to have you indeed you got a classroom of kids who just want to know. Will this be on the test?

You can’t leave anything out if you want them to become. Engaged in that mindset. On the other hand, if you can figure out how to do the hard work, and it takes a long time to persuade them, that figuring it out, is the point. Then what you will discover is that several months into the semester. You barely have to tell them anything because they don’t want you to tell them the answer.

They simply want you to hint at what the question might be. Hi, Seth Christina from New York. Thank you for your recent podcast about. Dog shelters. I have a question. How a message of do not surrender your dog to the shelter, can be delivered successfully so that people understand that the probability of their surrender, dog, to be euthanized is greater than to be adopted the volume of intake of the dogs, too.

For example, New York Animal Care Center and Harlem is outrageous a dogs per day. According to 2019, statistics. One dog every hour, the capacity of the shelter that is actually a control center of the city is 75 dogs. In total, adoptions do not happen. As often as in takes the message or promotions of adopting animals are joyful, beautiful images of Happy, Endings events in the Central Park of Vans, full of beautiful, puppies for adoption. And people feeling good about themselves when they adopt, Now, there is not so much education about out there for people who decided to give up their dogs to shelter.

They do not understand that it is not so easy to make an adoption happen. I want to spread the message rehome, your dog, yourself and educate population about, do not give it to shelters. That usually has no space. The message is demanding demanding the effort from the owner. The ending might be a death for the dog.

If the effort is not successful, so it brings negative emotions of uncertainty fear and unpleasant feelings. I guess the content of pain and marketing does not usually bring positive impact. I think people avoid watching sadness and pain around them. So what form of marketing of delivering this message you think would work very home? Your dog yourself?

Thank you so much. I appreciate your answer. Thank you, Christina. This is heartbreaking, Nathan. Winograd. The pioneer of the no-kill, shelter moving and I have spent time talking about this very problem. And Nathan is a hero in my book. And so are you the problem is bigger than messaging. So Just take a minute to break it into pieces.

We have two challenges that are largely out of our control. The first one is this dogs that aren’t spayed or neutered reproduce. So two cats and when they reproduce the multiplier effect means that the supply of dogs keeps going up and it goes up, pretty quickly. Number two is it’s not particularly difficult for somebody. Buddy, who can’t take care of a dog for whatever reason and I won’t get into that in detail to go to a parking lot and just let the dog go and there are countries around the world that don’t have the shelter system of the United States. That don’t have the dog catcher system of the United States where there are wild dogs running around and we have made a decision in many cultures that we don’t want that.

And therefore, we have signed up to collect the dogs and to take care of the dogs. It is better. The shelter system for somebody to bring a dog to a shelter, then for them to let the dog loose in a park. It’s also possibly better for the dog in the long run and in terms of cats and birds, it’s better for the cat in the birds.

So, what we don’t want to do, what we can’t do is create a dynamic where if you bring a dog to a shelter, you will be penalized or shamed because people won’t decide to just keep the dog. They will probably simply let the dog run free. If we care about the plight of these animals, the ones we call Our Best Friends.

The answer seems to me to be Collective action and its Collective action in two simple directions, both aided by technology. The first one is this, you can’t have a dog if you don’t spray it or neuter it unless you have a permit as a breeder. And number two, you can’t have a dog or cat unless it has a microchip in it.

If you release a dog or a cat with a microchip in it someplace where it is going to go wild and it gets caught, you are responsible. It turns out, you need a license to drive a car. It turns out you can’t abandon a car by a side of the road and I guess the open question is why can’t we find the collective will to treat dogs and cats are better. Friends at least as well.

As we treat cars. I said this is true from Cleveland in your project that episode. You said that to scale up a business, you would need employees who are replaceable cogs. The example you used was a babysitting business, where all the sitters are basically the same. I feel like you might be trolling us since you’re always talking about being the linchpin, the indispensable person doing things that aren’t easily replaced or automated, I guess one way to avoid. Being a cog in the machine is to become the machine myself, but that’s not the kind of advice. I would expect from you.

What am I missing? Thanks for all you do. Thank you, drew. This is a great final. Riff for me on this episode. Let me be really clear. If we look at organizations that have scaled reliably over time. They tend to do it by dipping into the pool of indoctrinated workers, who are waiting to be told what to do.

Who are eager to find out if this is going to be on the test, who want to exchange a day’s work for a day’s pay who want a manual and a structure and that work that industrial work. The one that we are indoctrinated to embrace. That work is the work that comes inside a scaling institution and Industrial one.

And so when they build the Marriott Hotel in your town, it doesn’t succeed or fail. If every single person who works there, the front desk, clerk, the people who clean the rooms. The person who cleans the pool of every single person who works there, has to be someone who is eagerly leaning in to, what is possible. No, that would be really hard to staff even giant consulting firms places. Like, MacKenzie that pay starting salaries of over a hundred thousand dollars that fight to recruit people from the fanciest Business Schools.

Most of the people who work there are And the single best people who ever worked there. The math just doesn’t support that. And so to get to scale, we build a system that doesn’t depend on a lynchpin in every job because that’s really hard to scale. Do you succeed by hiring retaining training and encouraging people to go outside the bounds of what you expect from them. Of course you do.

But the underlying structure needs to be We’re not depending on miracle workers that we are not depending on superstars in every single role in order to scale. That’s not how Starbucks got were Starbucks. Got, it’s not how countries build bureaucracies. So my argument to the Freelancers and bootstrappers who are listening to, this is you might be a linchpin. You might be someone who likes to do a different job every day. You might be like, the kind of person who wants to lean into the job over at Citations great, but if you want to build something bigger than yourself, you’re not going to do it by demanding. That every single person you hire is a version of you because that sort of person hard to find hard to hire hard to retain.

So no, I wasn’t trolling anybody. I was simply lining up around. What does it mean to build an industrial entity? Well, close with this nice little note from Super far away. Thanks again for listening. Opening. As you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or anything else, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki and Bo link2006.

Click the appropriate button. We’ll see you next time. Namaste said, this is Swami be of Eden, teacher and a Hindu monk from busy Mumbai. India related to your recent episode on Project debt. I wanted to offer a profound perspective. From Marvel Vedic tradition. We understand that we have a random, a sacred death to five sets of relationships. From whom we have received. Hugely.

These are one people around us extending to the larger Community to plants animals and other beings in our environment three gurus and teachers for the knowledge that they have shared with us for our ancestors. And Different deities, who preside over different phenomena, we honor this Rhythm, the sacred debt, we have to these five sets of relationships by our contribution and fulfilling our responsibilities this vision and way of living helps us. See our interconnectedness, Seth. I deeply value, you your work.

And the phenomenal change you are making in this world. Then your bada is a Sanskrit word for more than thank you. And it means that we are all blessed. The Nevada has set. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, You can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the, Possibilities within you.

When you got to face those fears. I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -untethered- <==

I don’t want to talk about baseball. I might want to talk about what could be the biggest financial fraud in the history of the world. And mostly I want to talk about the story. We Tell ourselves about the story of money. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about gresham’s law and tether, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor. Sir, hi, it’s Benedict you and I’m here to talk to you about how you can become a better. Storyteller.

Storytelling is not an art reserved for the Chosen Few. It’s a skill that you can learn just like the students have taken part in the story skills. Workshop of done.

Actually. I had a story to tell that was really important for me, but also was going to be very very important for people in the future. Absolutely life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories. I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving as in the receiving, we got to not only learn about storytelling. We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life.

If you’re ready to become a better Storyteller. I hope you’ll join us. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com, go for all. The upcoming workshops go make a ruckus.

By the time you listen to this, it’s entirely possible that the tether Scandal will have unfolded even more. But before we get there, let’s talk about Honus, Wagner Honus Wagner in some estimates, the greatest or second greatest or third greatest. Baseball player who ever played the game, Honus Wagner who played shortstop Bill. James said, he was better than the second best shortstop as much as the second best shortstop was better than In the 20th, best shortstop Honus Wagner probably up there with Babe Ruth. I don’t know. I’m not that interested in baseball but a tobacco company in the early, nineteen hundred’s decided that a superstar like Honus Wagner would make a great promotional spokesperson.

So they made a couple hundred baseball cards and one of them had his face on it when they approached him through a representative. He said I don’t want to be associated with any tobacco. Really promoting their stuff now, it’s entirely possible. He was just negotiating for a bigger payday. But whatever they would have paid him.

Probably wouldn’t have been enough because they balked pun intended at paying him more than they could afford. And so there were only as far as we know, 57 Honus Wagner baseball cards ever created and they to this day remain some of the most valuable ever one selling for well. Well, over 2 million dollars, moving at Breakneck speed, the Honus Wagner baseball card. Moving forward, to the year 2010.

One of them is donated to the school sisters of Notre Dame and International Federation of nuns, that teaching Catholic schools. Well, the nuns decide not to speculate on the future value of a Honus, Wagner baseball card. And instead put it up for auction, someone associated with the auction, perhaps sister, Virginia Mueller. Perhaps, your brother wrote, although damaged the value of this baseball card should increase exponentially throughout the 21st century.

And so as we start to shift our conversation to tether, the question begins with this, does it matter that Honus Wagner was a good baseball player. Does it matter that Honus Wagner never, authorized the baseball cards? What makes a wholeness Wagner baseball card? Worth millions and Of dollars. Now, in previous episodes. I’ve talked a little bit about the blockchain, which is a fascinating building component of our future, but I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the story around cryptocurrency, in particular Bitcoin. As I record. This, Bitcoin is all of it, added up is worth more than a trillion dollars. That makes the world’s supply of Bitcoin worth more than every company in the world except for A couple worth more than Google or Facebook worth more than ups were Federal Express worth more than Ford or even Tesla when you add it all up.

Even though Bitcoin is just some numbers on a digital Ledger. It’s worth more than almost any company ever created and people who are trading Bitcoin. Some of them are money launderer. Some of them are tax evaders and some of them are avoiding prosecution. Ian for illicit trades. And yes, some of them are people like you who are simply honestly trying to speculate on what might be a tulip bubble or what might be the future.

But that’s not the point of this story. Either. The point of the story is Thomas gresham’s Law that bad money. Chases out good money. What does that even mean? What it means is, if you can’t tell if a coin or bill is counterfeit. You are likely to want to engage in trade with any of the money and so over time, more and more, counterfeit money shows up and the good money stays secure in our homes where we can keep an eye on it. We’re less likely to trade if we can’t tell if it’s good or bad and so the stuff that gets traded tends to be bad. Now if you are trading Bitcoin, aetherium Dogecoin or some other clever, Early named cryptocurrency, you are speculating.

It is not speculation to keep $100 under your mattress or $10,000 in your savings account. It is speculation to hold a cryptocurrency that goes up and down. Radically over time. When you are buying it, you are at risk. And then when you sell it, you need to put the money, you got somewhere. And at the beginning, the place you put it was you cashed out your chips. Like at the casino, you didn’t. Hold on. The chips, you cash them out and you got cash, cash money, u.s. Dollars at least where I live US dollars. Is how the value of a cryptocurrency is measured. A Bitcoin is worth $50,000.

So if you collect 50,000 dollars in your cyber wallet, you can trade it for a Bitcoin. But in the United States and around the world, there are new sets of laws with the weird acronym k y. See the K. Doesn’t stand for knife. It stands for no. No your murmur and the idea of these rules is simple. If you want to be part of the banking system, Banks need to know their customer. They need to be able to verify that the money is legit. And so, if you’re trading in and out of cryptocurrency, that takes a long time, and it’s a pain in the neck and a lot of paperwork, and the Very sorts of people who are thriving trading in cryptocurrency, don’t like any of that bureaucratic stuff. So they needed a place holder and the placeholder is I’ll tether tether is a stable coin. It never goes up in value and it’s never supposed to go down in value.

One Dollar, one tether. That’s what a stable coin is supposed to do. Anytime. You want to, you can move all your cryptocurrency, all of your etherium, all of your Bitcoin into tether, and it will be worth exactly the same amount tomorrow that it’s worth today. There is no good economic reason to hold tether tether is a waste. Ation, it’s like pulling over when you’re driving to Rochester. And you pull over and Goshen to get gas and a hamburger, but you don’t hang out there because it’s a weigh station.

And so, lots and lots of people who trade cryptocurrencies, hold together in various Mount sometimes a lot. Sometimes not at all in and out. But here’s the thing, all of the other cryptocurrencies live on the blockchain, in the sense that you can see where they are, who made them, who’s holding them where they’re going. They are open systems, but not tether.

Tether is controlled by some people with fairly odd backgrounds, including someone who was a minor character in Disney movie called The Mighty Ducks, a plastic surgeon in Italy and I could go on and on the thing is anytime. They Want to they can make more tether. And the last time I checked six percent compared to bitcoin is tether tether has issued 60 billion dollars worth of stable coins.

And originally they promised that they would just hold 60 billion dollars in dollar bills waiting for anyone who has a tether to trade it in to get their dollar bills back. But of course, nobody who has tether ever shows up to trade it. And for dollar bills for a couple reasons, first of all, the minimum transactions $100,000. But secondly, the purpose of tether is to trade to trade in and to trade out that the people who are at this casino.

Never stop being at the casino and if they are going to cash out, they’re not going to cash out by trading their tether, back to the tether people for dollar bills. They’re going to finally turn whatever crypto they’ve got into. Actual reserves in an actual bank as a result, the people at tether and there’s a long story in background here and I can’t get into all the details.

The people that tether have in a sort of Shadow. We way created their own printing, press, bad money, chases out, good. The chances that they have 60 billion dollars in cash, sitting in some banks are essentially zero. And so the, New York Attorney general and others have been investigating, whether tether is a little fraud, a big fraud, or no fraud at all.

And when I first heard about this, I sort of freaked out because all bubbles, burst every single one, every time. And what would happen if the trading coin, the one that is six percent, the size of Bitcoin, what if it turns out that, it’s just a straight up and up fraud. What if it turns out that the people who have been running together, just, Ain’t new tether whenever they want to make another hundred two hundred million dollars, will that lead to a Cascade effect that will puncture the bubble and then that bubble, which has been propping up, certain unstable, parts of our economy falls apart. And then we’re all in really big trouble.

Well, here I am before that happens trying to figure out what it means on one hand. It’s really easy to say. Yep. This is a house of cards. And when tether is exposed could be exposed. I have no knowledge of this as a fraud, the whole thing falls apart, but the other thing that could happen similar to the idea of Honus Wagner is this.

The people who have been trading in and out of tether, will simply trade in and out of something else that if tether is exposed as a fraud, instead of being worth a dollar, it’ll be worth 90 cents in an 80 cents and 70 cents and then who knows what and they’ll just trade into a different stable coin.

A stable coin. That’s more transparent because ultimately money is a story and if we believe the story, Then money has value the paper in a $20 bill is not worth $20. It’s not even worth two cents. We take a twenty dollar bill because we think it’s worth $20 because we’ll be able to trade it tomorrow.

We pay extra for one kind of car or one kind of sweatshirt or one kind of service provider simply. Because we believe that the story we can tell ourselves and other people is worth more than it costs. And one more quick thing. Well, it’s not quick. Actually, it would take four hundred hours to adequately explore. But one more quick thing, United States, like many places was on the gold standard for a long time. It meant that every piece of paper had a corresponding piece of gold in Fort Knox and other places and perhaps if you showed up in the right place at the right time, with the right piece of paper, you get a piece of gold in exchange.

Well, the gold standard Has all sorts of problems and we might go into that in a future episode, but suffice it to say we don’t have a gold standard anymore. The piece of paper you have is simply a piece of paper. It is not an entitlement to a piece of gold and yet there is a law in the u.s. That the debt limit money. Borrowed by the government, must be raised periodically or else, the United States defaults on it. It’s debt.

This is crazy. There’s no good reason to let a whole bunch of showboating congresspeople and Senators decide once every couple years to hold the nation Hostage, to raise the debt limit, when the debt limit itself, is simply a fiction, but there is a loophole, there’s a loophole that gets rid of this problem completely and what it involves is minting a couple coins.

Platinum. I think they should make them really really big like the giant penny in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude a giant platinum coin, 18 feet across doesn’t matter, but the denomination on this coin would be a trillion dollars. So no, you wouldn’t be able to go to your bank and pick up one of these giant Platinum coins. But if the treasury meant did a few of these trillion dollar coins suddenly, there’s no more issue of the debt limit. Emmitt, and the question is, is this any different than whether or not tether is actually backed by currency or gold? And some sort of Vault. Well, it’s a little different but my understanding of macroeconomics is, if the United States said to the people that owes money to, we’re tired of this crazy dance of waiting to the last minute of all the stuff back and forth, threatening our credit rating. And you know what?

We’re good for it and we’re not going to have these votes. I think the story of money would persist and yes, Count Me In as a fan of the trillion-dollar coin and we are surrounded all around us. Just look around wherever you are, right? This minute by stories that have created value. You don’t need a story about brown rice and black beans. You need to eat them to live.

You don’t need a story about a roof over your head. You need one to survive, but once our basic needs have been Taking care of all we’ve got left is the value. We assign to stories and if a story is working, then we keep using it. The people have been trading these mathematical formulas called cryptocurrencies, are basically all sharing a story.

A story about a binding curve. A story about things going up in value a story about potential. When it’s analyzed, like all stories, a lot of it isn’t true, but if enough people believe the story, the story, persists, the thing that brings pathos to this entire scenario is that these stories intersect with real-life that a senior citizen, who needs money to survive doesn’t want their retirement funds to be worth 0, 30, uncoupled. It needs to pay for health care.

Doesn’t Want to say to their kid, we can’t get health care because some Bubble Burst sooner or later stories collide with the lives that we live, but along the way, it doesn’t matter when a speed bump. It’s a story. If the story is strong enough and widely held enough, it will persist. So I don’t know what’s going to happen when tether comes untethered, if it does, all I know is the ride has been bumpy before, it’s going to be bumpy. Again, and we have to be really thoughtful about what story were telling ourselves and why thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a question. That’ll get you thinking. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria. My name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As, you know, I love to hear from you. If you had a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button. Just one question this week, but it’s a juicy one. Hi Seth, this is Stuart, from Perth, Western Australia.

I have 1/2 1/2 questions that I’d love to hear your insights on. My first question is, what is fairness and then do you think there is a universal definition of fairness that we could all ever agree to and what are the implications of that answer? Cheers?

This is a complicated question and I’m wondering why it’s complicated when things that should be simple or complicated. One thing to look for are the words. Are we understanding the words on any playground? Anywhere in the world. You will hear three year olds and six-year-olds arguing about what’s fair.

You will also hear people arguing about what’s fair in governing bodies or places where Commerce happens. What does it mean for something? To be fair. In my town when they used to have football. The kids when they were 12 or 13, or 14 years old, if you weighed more than a hundred pounds, you had to put two big x’s on the back of your helmet.

Why? Because people with the two big x’s on the back of your helmet weren’t allowed to carry the ball. They weren’t allowed to run the ball. They were only allowed to play defense because it had been found that big heavy tall kids caused the most injury when they were actually on off. It’s running forward that they weren’t fast enough to cause injury when they were playing defense, and it’s easy to say, it’s not fair. It’s not fair that somebody just because they are genetically bigger, just because through no fault of their own. They are more advanced for their age when it comes to their physical being aren’t allowed to carry the ball. It’s also could be said that it’s not fair. If you’re a little kid that you have to worry about being completely trounced and Perhaps injured by a big kid fairness keeps showing up in all sorts of corners of our economy, and our world.

And one of the reasons for it is the confusion, because I think there might be four kinds of fairness being discussed. One, kind of fairness is the fairness of. We need to be treated the same. This is the fairness of, I just want, you are half. This is the fairness of one. Per customer that as humans, we are entitled to be seen as humans.

And when there is a limited resource, perhaps we should allocate it. Evenly. One of the challenges with that though, is that it gets in the way of need. So even if fairness is top of mind for you, I hope we can agree that we have to make special accommodations for an infant for someone who’s elderly for someone who is taking care of. Sirs, the treating, everybody exactly the same ends up being a little bit of a waste because some people need more than others in lots of human Endeavors. So we’ve got the idea of treating everyone the same, and then we’ve got the idea of giving people what they need.

The third alternative, Which flies in the face of both of those is this complicated idea of giving people what they deserve. For example, we could say that certain athletic sport. Events aren’t Fair. They’re not fair because the fastest person wins. They’re not fair because the best tennis player takes on way more money than the fourth best tennis player, even though the fourth best tennis player is supporting a big family and needs the money more than the single person who is winning.

Well, we have built our entire culture around the mythology of deserving. It certainly in a game like chess. It’s pretty easy to say this person deserved to win because everybody had the same access to all the pieces. When the Internet Was Young. It was supposed to be an egalitarian environment because you didn’t need access to Gatekeepers or a lot of money or most anything else to make your way online. And to quote when people got what they deserved, it became a Haven for sort of libertarian.

But what that leaves out is all the things that came before. What does it mean to deserve something? When you are born on a first peoples, indigenous, persons reservation without adequate schooling or nutrition compared to somebody who is born on the upper east side of Manhattan with fancy private schools. At what age, is it actually a race at what age do we say? Okay, starting now.

You get what you deserve. If people have been indoctrinated into believing, they can get something or can’t get something, isn’t that unfair? When it comes to talking about? What do people deserve? If a giant company defeats a small company because they have more access to resources. Is that fair? Are they getting what they deserve? Even if we can show that the product and the service from the small company is arguably Better.

And so, as we go around this whole Loop, the fourth one, the one that fits in with the other three is expectation. That when we play a game like Cosmic Encounter, one of the great board games ever. The very first move is everyone is given a different card and that card tells you how you can cheat. So this player is allowed to move pieces around when no one’s looking. And this player is allowed to steal other people’s cards Etc.

Now, These cards were handed out before a high-stakes poker game, it would be outrageous because that’s not expected. It is expected that the cards will be randomly dealt. It is not expected that different people will be given different cheat codes. So more and more when we talk about what is fair and what is not fair, what we’re really having a conversation about his expectations, that expectations get built in by our culture that for Too long, people expected that folks who weren’t traditionally from privileged backgrounds, wouldn’t be treated as well as folks, who were.

And so, the outcry in the 50s or 60s or 70s about certain people being treated better. As a matter, of course, was Tiny compared to today because today the expectation is Shifting. Its shifting and saying, wait a second. You’re telling me that you want to reach. Weird people who get what they deserve but people get what they deserve based on an unfair allocation to begin with.

So, how are we ever going to get to a place where there is a mutual understanding of what it means to be fair? Well, I think we can argue productively about whether we should treat people the same. So, if you go to the movies, I hope that people understand that, not everyone. Can sit in the best seat in the movie theater, so, perhaps it’s first come first serve, perhaps the best seats are reserved for people in a wheelchair or people who have trouble with hearing or sight or perhaps.

We give those seats to the highest bidder allowing people to pay more for something that’s better to lower the price of the seats, for people who don’t want to pay more. But is it okay to give people a better seat? An airplane or at the movies, simply because they were born with privilege. Because, again, the expectation of fairness gets really complicated, really fast, and that’s why changing the rules is so challenging, because when you change the rules, the first thing that happens is people had an expectation for their sort of fairness that they deserved, it will be upset because their expectations Has been undone but then you’re establishing a new expectation and that new expectation is around the new set of rules.

So I know people who are in the professional biking world and until very recently, it was expected that the only way you could win was by doping. That in fact, the sport of bike, raising. My friend told me is, how far can you push? Doping before you get caught? That was the sport. And now there’s a new set of rules.

And so someone who has paid the price by being good at doping, suddenly discovers, that they’re being disqualified because it’s not fair to say that. The only way you can win a high level by Grace, is, by cheating and cheating. Itself is about expectations all along way of starting a conversation among your team among the people you lead or manage among the institutions that you work with.

Talking about our expectations of fairness is a really good way to keep from disappointing people who deserve better. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable in in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay.

Great idea. Anywhere, you know and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face? Those fears. I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up. And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible. Me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -time-keeps-on-slipping- <==

The first thing that technology does is it offers productivity. Meaning, here is a machine, a milking machine, a sewing machine a pin making machine a fireplace Ox with a cart and this machine is going to make you rich. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

Back in a second to talk about technology machines. Spare time and happiness. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hi, it’s Benedict. You. And I’m here to talk to you about, how you can become a better. Storyteller storytelling is not an art reserved for the Chosen Few. It’s a skill that you can learn just like the students have taken part in the story skills. Workshop of done.

Actually. I had a story to tell that Was really important for me, but also was going to be very, very important for people in the future. It’s been absolutely life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories. I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving as in the receiving, we got to not only learn about storytelling. We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life.

If you’re ready to become a better Storyteller, I hope you’ll join us. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a Ruckus.

You can see why the deal is so irresistible because you’ve been slaving in your Hut week after week year after year trying to make ends meet. And then here is this simple technology that’s going to change everything. And so the 1516. Oh, oh. 1700 s into the industrial revolution. Are all about that, simple bargain. And if you’re the first person in your Market to grab that, bargain you come out way ahead because your productivity translates into enormous changes in your income.

The second thing that happens is your competitors, get the technology as well. And all of a sudden your enormous head start simply becomes parity that At now you’re in a tie. You’re more productive. The entire culture is more productive, productivity creates Community wealth because everyone’s getting more from the same amount of labor, but the rules are a little bit different but now it gets interesting, it gets interesting because in this newly productive environment, people look to technology and they look to it to two things that seem to contradict each other.

The first one is convenience. And convenience has been the story of the last 50 years of our culture. Tim Wu has written about this brilliantly, but in essence people will trade, almost everything for convenience. They will drive a car. Knowing the damage it is doing because it’s more convenient than taking public transportation.

They will trade away their privacy for a couple magic beans worth of convenience. We will talk to a computer in our house. That is monitoring our every move simply because it is more convenient than walking over and turning the dial on the radio convenience to save time. And then the second thing we look to technology for is a way to spend that time.

And the question is, are we making good choices when it comes to convenience and to pass times? Because the first fact, is that over the last hundred, Years, we have become significantly, more productive things have made. Our lives significantly more convenient and yet we have way less spare time. Then cavemen did, then hunter-gatherers did, then people unless technology-focused cultures have the time seemed to go away.

Here’s an interesting thing to note, if a village. Purifies with solar, or with Hast power, or with some other form of Technology. The first thing that happens is the electricity goes to boost productivity. The second thing that happens is that technology goes to turn on lights in the evening. And the third thing that happens is people buy a TV right away.

TV TV is sort of the crack of how we spend our time and TV has I’ve been bested by social networks, between television and social networks. Most people are spending five, six, seven, eight, nine hours, a day engaged in something that is glowing on a screen that is what we are trading. The benefits of productivity and convenience for the question is, is it making us?

Happy? Is it making us happier than we were going for a walk? Talking with a friend. Reading a book at our own pace knitting, making a 32 ingredient moly. It’s really unusual today to find someone who grinds their own flour and makes their own baked goods. The late Charlie Trotter worked in Chicago, and he changed the world of food. He was obsessive compulsive their meals, at his restaurant were completely off any charts that most people had ever experienced before.

And if you look through one of his cookbooks, you can see I one of the recipes calls for grading 8, carats making them into a stock and boiling that stock off until you get just one thimble full of carrot reduction, who would do this? Why not just walk down to the store and buy something that’s more convenient? Why bake brownies? If you can use a brownie mix? Why use brownie mix?

If you can just buy brownies, and so we’re constantly Spending money not time for convenience convenience, in which we have traded money for time. And what did we do with the time? We got? Well, what we did with it is TV and social media over the last 12 months of a pandemic. Most people stopped commuting that commute could have been half an hour on average each Direction. That’s an hour a day in. Cases, two hours a day, right? Back into the time bank.

What did people do with that time? Well, a lot of people had to struggle to make ends meet. A lot of people had to struggle to find the time to raise kids at home. But many people took that extra hour and spent it on Netflix or spent it on Twitter or spent it engaging in something online. And so all of this stuff we’re putting into our heads.

What’s it for? Who’s it for? Who is benefiting? It’s pretty clear that technology and capitalism together want us if we can ascribe to them wants and desires. They want us to enable more technology and work more hours because capitalism doesn’t benefit when we’re doing nothing much capitalism. Does not come out ahead when we go to the park or go for a walk capitalism wants us to buy and it wants us to make If we make and buy and make and buy and go into debt along the way. So we can also make and buy some more.

Capitalism comes out ahead and technology. Technology wants to keep selling a convenience over and over again to create more time. And what are we supposed to do with that time while capitalism would like us to spend that time? Either working more? So we can afford to buy more convenience or consuming more media.

So that we are in a state. Where we’re going to spend money to deal with the emotions, that that media created. One of those emotions is the need to buy more stuff. The Self Storage industry in the United States is bigger than the movie industry was in 2018. Back, when people went to the movies, we are buying stuff and then paying money to store our stuff.

And then the other thing that this media does is it makes us feel insecure. It makes us Panic a little bit. It separates us. It puts us into warring factions. All of which makes it more likely that the ratchets will continue to turn. And so when the recipe calls for six hours to make a mole, a with 17 ingredients, and you’re going to have to make a trip on foot to a farmers market to buy some of the things you don’t have at home.

And then we say, nope. I’d rather just open a can. What have you done with the time? You just saved?

How have we decided to buy into this ratchet, which started quite innocently. 300 years ago when technology showed up and said, hey want to become more productive. And now here we are doom scrolling all day long. Trying to get back to the thing. We left behind. It. Turns out there might be a shortcut for that thing. We left behind.

Maybe the idea isn’t to go. Take a vacation to get away from this life that we’ve built spending all of our money. So that we have to go back to this life, that we’ve built to earn back the money. We just spent, maybe the opportunity is to take a hard look at our culture and decide whether buying a TV, is the single best thing to do next. After we’ve electrified our home.

Maybe we can take a look at what a really good day. Feels like, and Count. How many of those good days were spent watching television now, I’m not one to talk. I have seen every episode of The Prisoner five times. I can quote line-by-line episodes of Star Trek. I grew up surrounded by good feelings, associated with television shows.

But I also know that that is not a life well-lived that it can complement what we’re doing. But our real opportunity is to Embrace the fact that we are social beings capable of making things better, by making better things by contributing to the culture, not just taking from it. So, I know that’s a rant.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It works. If you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pal. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki and Bo dot link2006.

Click the appropriate button to questions this week from opposite sides of the world. Here we go.

Hi Seth, it’s hope Daddy from Bloomington, Indiana. I’ve been lying in the bushes for weeks, waiting for your take on N FTS and either the podcast or the blog. And you recently shared your thoughts on and ftes in the blog. Ucn n ft. As a luxury, good largely because of its lack of utility suitable, only for speculation.

This is a point. I’ve been making about NF, T’s to friends and colleagues that NF T seem to have value only because we arbitrarily decided to declare it. So, in a certain limited market space. In ft’s do not have value due to in the underlying utility. In that sense. I consider them the Beanie Babies of the digital world. And I agree that it’s only a matter of time until the bottom drops out of the current market.

That said, there’s a lot being written about in ft’s as the saviors of today’s artists, in particular in ft’s are frequently referenced as a new solution for musicians, who create original music and are seeking to connect more directly with their small audiences and to cut out labels streaming services and other indirect. And now, Unnecessary players in the chain and more directly monetize their relationship with their followers.

Do you believe that in ft’s lack utility in all contexts? Or conversely. Can you imagine a role where a Creator could link some additional value related to the underlying creative work that is some utility in that context to the N FTS and make a more effective and meaningful use of them. Thank you for this one.

And if T’s seemed to dovetail beautifully with the plight of the independent musician, my friend, Kevin Kelly wrote years ago about 1,000 true fans. It’s worth revisiting this, if there are 1,000 true fans for a freelancer, a poet, a musician of any kind, 1,000 people who will instantly by the new book drive across town to go to the concert support you in some concrete Financial way. Way, it’s almost certainly enough.

1,000 true fans paying $100 a year. You are now making an excellent full-time living. And so when ft’s show up and people see that sometimes an N of T goes into the thousands ten thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars. They say, wow. I don’t even need a thousand true fans. I need 10, but what we have to do is decode what an NF T actually is, and not confuse it with.

Else and ft is a speculative. Purchase. You are buying a token that shows that you own a digital artifact other. People can see the artifact but you get bragging rights. Now it is possible to hook all sorts of bonuses into the mechanics of an N of T, but I would argue that once you do that. It’s no longer a Nifty. Not in the sense of it, being a token.

What someone is buying It is not bragging rights, whether they are buying, is the stream of benefits that come to them. So, for example, you could make a thousand things. Let’s call them entities for now that anyone who owns one gets your music first gets admitted to the concert first, gets the secret newsletter, gets whatever benefit you want to give them.

But now what we’ve ended up with something that’s significantly more than an nft and we confuse things by calling it that it would be as If when Jackson Pollock started making paintings, he said also, if you buy my painting and still own it, you get invited to this and this and this and this over the years, but no, that’s not how the Art Market Works. A painting is a painting, the benefits are separate. So we are seeing with things like patreon and other services sub stack that it is possible to ask your 1,000 true fans to Pony up in advance to show that they are willing to pay. Pay to support you because they get joy out of that. In addition to the simple benefits and if calling it an N of T helps you while please go for it, but when the bottom falls out of N ftes and it will, I would hate for your 1,000 true fans to feel ripped off because that’s not why they bought one.

They bought one because they want to be closer to you, not because they’re buying a token that they can sell tomorrow. Kiara see it Murray from Arturo and New Zealand here. A design and deliver for a nonprofit that uses physical, and mental challenge in nature as a vehicle. For grown people self, belief and their self-awareness.

My questions been inspired by a participant who recently shared this feedback. I met a bunch of awesome strangers who I bonded with in a way that is so different to the outside world and would be powerful stuff. If it could be reproduced with your colleagues. Now, that’s an exciting Challenge and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

McGee to you. Seth for the other hand, the hey Pepper. You show us through your mahi. We thank you for this question. And for the greetings as well, I think what you’re saying is this, you are able to create a special moment in which enrollment pays off for the people who were there. The Strangers who come together in the forest? The beautiful forests of New Zealand and have a transformative experience.

Largely have it because you are juxtaposing. The fact that they are strangers with the fact that they signed up they showed up. They put on their well, he’s they came out in the mist. They looked each other in the eye. They paid the money they showed up and because they were enrolled transformation was possible.

And the problem with bringing it to our colleagues is that when work says this is what we are going to do, people are doing it, not because they want to, but because the boss said, they need to and that’s why so often Nation doesn’t happen at work. It is possible for transformation to happen at work. It is possible to create the conditions where people get in touch with a higher calling but more often than not, that will only occur if individuals have already enrolled in the journey and that’s the hard work. That’s the work you are actually doing when you are running these seminars.

So if you can give your graduates, the tools they need to run their own. None of this for the co-workers among them who are enrolled in the journey, your idea can spread and grow. But if it is determined that time and place and you are necessary, it’s unlikely that corporate outings are going to have the same impact as what happens when individuals show up and say I’m here because I want to be.

Thanks everyone for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in World to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, Says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, what are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason. Why. We don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

==> -confronting-the-continuum- <==

This podcast starts with my voice. My voice is analog. It’s a wave. But along the way, the preamp turns it into something digital and it’s through the magic of bits that you’re able to listen to this. Wherever you are. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo will be back in a second to confront the continuum.

But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

I spend it at you. And I’m here to talk to you about, how you can become a better. Storyteller storytelling is not an art reserved for the Chosen Few. It’s a skill that you can learn just like the students have taken part in the story skills. Workshop of done.

Actually. I had a story to tell that was really important for me. But also was going to be very, very important for people in the future. It’s been absolutely life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories. I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving as in the receiving, we got to not only learn about storytelling. We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life.

If you’re ready to become a better Storyteller, I hope you’ll join us. I hope you’ll check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a Ruckus.

40 years ago. When Sony came out with CDs, they promised perfect sound forever. And people who were used to listening to vinyl were easily swayed. No pops. No crackles a bit is either on or it’s off and it took a few years. Most people to figure out the CDs. Just don’t sound as good as vinyl records at least until recently bits on, or off our, the underpinning of the digital Revolution, but it turns out, we’ve been thinking about the world in digital terms for a really long time.

Either that ball is black or that ball is white either, you’re able to be a 3-star restaurant or you’re not either, Either you have talent or you don’t on or off in or out up or down near or far? We are constantly putting things into categories because categories enable us to process ideas. Continuo, the idea that it’s along a curve, makes it much harder for us to make choices, to make decisions, to decide who’s a threat and who’s a friend.

Darwin wrote about the Origin of Species, it represented an existential threat for many people. Because what he established is that we are on a Continuum that we are not that different from the ape or the chimp. And we’re not that far different from a penguin, that if everything started millions of years ago, from some small single-celled, organisms and evolved over time.

We have to acknowledge that we’re on a Continuum with all the species around us. And at the same time, we have to acknowledge that everybody who is a human, is a cousin of ours. And there is a Continuum out there. A Continuum of humans, the difference between your DNA and the DNA of a chimp is less than 1%, and the difference between your DNA and the DNA of named, any superstar that you like, Taylor Swift, or Stacey Abrams. So our milk Jackson or I could go down the list of everybody who is ostensibly filled with Talent.

The difference is negligible. We couldn’t make accurate predictions about your talent about your place in the cultural hierarchy. If all we had was a look at your DNA and so there’s this Continuum that we are constantly confronting because uman beings populations are actually analog not digital earlier in the podcast. I pointed out that CD. He’s just didn’t sound as good as vinyl records. But the fact is, if you listen to super high res digital music, today, it’s quite likely, it will sound just as good as a vinyl record. Would sound, what changed, what changed is the resolution, the number of bits, how many things on or off are crammed right next to each other, to trick our brain into thinking, about the world in analog terms because we are analog creatures our eyes. Our ears are But our senses all work in a wave, not in bits. That what happens is stimuli, come along like that. Scraping noise, you might be hearing in the background and maybe we notice it and maybe we don’t. And then when it gets loud enough we do.

So we trick ourselves into thinking there was no sound and then there was sound. But of course, that’s not the case. There’s always sound. There’s always something vibrating somewhere along our auditory. Mmm, there’s always smells, there’s always something showing up in our nose, but we don’t notice it until it reaches a threshold. And the same thing is really useful.

When we think about Talent OR skill that everybody is born with some level of an ability to learn things to do, things to commit to make a change happen. But only some people along the way. Decide to amplify that and turn it into a real skill. Put in the practice, put in the hours confront resistance and get to the other side.

Not only some people actually all people do it. But only some people do it enough that we will notice them doing it. And where all this comes home is when we realize that we are constantly narrating our day, you know, more about your life than anyone else only Jerry. Garcia saw every Jerry, Garcia concert that he played in multiply that by 10,000, all of the noises, all of the fears, all of the dialogues, all of the debates that you have with yourself. All the time.

We live inside, only one person’s head. And so we look at the people in the outside world differently than we look at ourselves. We all decided that we are one and only and everybody else is someone else. And when we look at the world to digitalize, it’s very tempting to put people into pristine buckets.

This person is bad. This person is good. This person is dastardly. This person is Craven. This person can be counted on this person can be trusted. When none of it is true. We’re all living on a wave. And so, of course, at this point, people say, but what about quantum mechanics and I say, and what about quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is a super A special case that applies to really, really, really tiny particles.

And can be brought up by philosophers and pop culture experts to describe a possibility in the real world, but it’s not really true. The idea of quantum States is, of course, true either. The culture has said, you’re a superstar, or it hasn’t that you’re in the top 40 or you’re not. But these are artificial constructs that we Invented to help us put people into buckets, but we’re not buckets where people normal isn’t a person, it’s a distribution.

And so, what we’re doing is looking at the waves, all around us, looking at how the deck was shuffled and deciding if the resolution gets high enough because we get enough bits of data where, what quanta, what level we should put somebody, but that’s often a mistake. It’s usually a trap. Because people are on a Continuum including me, including you, and we get to decide. If we’re going to move up or down along whatever axis.

We care enough to measure along whatever amount of effort, we care enough to expend. That doesn’t mean that you will ever be able to play the piano. The way, the Glenn Gould could play the piano.

Because yes, we’re a curve where a wave but no, we’re not all distributed the same way. Some people have enough inches to dunk a basketball and some people don’t. Some people are wired to hear sounds to hear stories to be able to speak and engage with others in ways, that others might not be but it is a mistake, I think.

To believe the culture. When it tells us, we have to be in a bucket when it talks about talent and opportunity. When it says those people, those people are never going to amount to anything. Well just because someone is born looking different than we are or is talented differently than we are or comes from a different country than we do. Does it mean that they are those people because we’re all on a Continuum and what we decide to do with that whether we Done. Treating it like a digital thing that it’s not or embrace. The wave that’s in front of us, including our weight.

It puts a lot of responsibility on us, the responsibility to make things better, by making better things, by doing things that are difficult, just because we can because it matters. So that’s a rant. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes, but first, here are some message from our sponsor.

It works. If you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo Dot. Cam go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pal. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question.

How’d, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M, Bo link2006. Click the appropriate button to Juicy questions this week. Here we go. All right, Seth, this is Jacob from Barrington, Illinois. Longtime listener and a huge fan of your books.

My question entails elements about status rules, being a linchpin and parenting. You a little context. We’re very fortunate that we live in an economically affluent community and we have young kids that are just entering the school system. My wife and I are starting to get involved in various parenting and school groups, and all the teachers and parents. We’ve been meeting our amazing.

All are very supportive friendly very involved with their kids education. However, I’ve been noticing that there’s this culture here and I’m sure it’s pretty common in other places to where there’s this sort of Isabel impetus for parents to put these unusually stringent expectations. Other kids to put them on a fast path.

Almost two seemingly can form them into this industrial system from the very young age. Now, examples include like in, I’ve noticed five year olds getting enrolled into computer coding and math camps on weekends and hiring private tutors. So they don’t quote fall behind. Now, don’t get me wrong, and we involve our kids in extra. Irregulars outside of school and I constantly push them to make sure they’re being challenged but I focus more on things like you teach and lynchpin, where I put them in situations where they need to figure things out for themselves and develop a leadership muscle, but when I talk to other parents in the community, I sometimes feel a bit of an outcast. Some are even surprised that I don’t put my kids through the wringer, like they do.

So, my question is, how do I balance raising my kids to become independent? England’s pins without being blacklisted from the community that has traditionally valued industrialism. So, any guidance you can share for parents in my situation would be highly. Highly appreciated. Thanks for this. Jacob. I can feel that you are so lucky to have your daughter and she lucky to have you and your wife as parents.

It’s hard to raise a kid and what you are describing Is Not Unusual at all. In fact, the very reason I had a I write the book, The very reason that we are struggling to find leaders is because of precisely what you are describing. Good people people who want to be part of community, push other people to have their kids fit in.

They mean, well, they believe that their kids will do better as socialized industrial cogs in a system. They have been taught to believe that you do anything, but that is foolish. Who are perhaps selfish they are focused on the Trap that status roles have set for themselves. They have put stickers on the back of their car. Announcing that they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their kid to a school, that is famous for its football team.

All of this got built over the course of many, many years. It is one of the illusions of our time along with issues around privilege, along with things revolving. Around the status quo and climate all of these things are the result of years and years of indoctrination. And then someone comes along and sees as you are seeing that there might be a better path forward. Well, if it was easy to encourage your kids to follow a better path forward, everyone would do it.

But sooner or later the system, where’s this down? And some people respond to that by simply opting out of the system, moving way to the boonies and homeschooling. Kids hoping that that will be enough, but there is a difficult middle path, and that middle path acknowledged. Is that we homeschool our kids. Every day. All of us, each of us from three o’clock to ten o’clock at night. That’s one reason why the current structure of schooling is so unfair to people who are born without privilege. We’re struggling to make a living because they’re not home to home school. Their kids from three o’clock to ten o’clock at night, but in those seven hours more hours than your daughter is actually spending. In classes at school, you have the chance to establish an approach establish, a set of questions, expected answers to role model to find ways to encourage curiosity to realize. Its stem is not about doing well on some math test.

It is about not needing a math test to ask and answer difficult questions about math, not arithmetic, but math and we can go into a hundred of the Tells my point is simply this, it’s normal to feel the way you’re feeling. It’s not clear to me that you have to teach your daughter, to be ostracized by everybody.

There are plenty of examples of kids who have grown up to be leaders to be Lynch pins who are also connected and popular and part of things. But if you’re getting yourself, a baseball coach for your six-year-old or a tutor for your eight-year-old, to help them with fractions, you might be drinking the flavor. Trade. And in fact, we’ve seen again and again that there’s a better way to raise the kind of kids that we need going forward and it involves teaching them to enroll in the journey to fail on the way to being better, to ask good questions to lead and to connect.

So you knew you’re going to get a little bit of a rant in there. It is. Hang in there. You’re lucky to have her and vice versa. Hey Seth, this is Chris down in Houston. Hey, I was watching your Nordic business. Forum presentation this week and really enjoy the presentation and admire the way that you’re able to carry a stage presence.

Have very enjoyable slides as well as being able to entertain the audience that you’re delivering to. And just wanted to get your thoughts on how you’ve been able to get to that point in your career.

Any tips or suggestions, you can Give to those who enjoy public speaking. But know that they have a long way to go and just really want to hear your thoughts on this subject. Thank you. Seth. Thank you for this Chris. I have seen a lot of public speakers in my time. And the Very art of public speaking has changed dramatically. Thanks to Ted. And thanks to YouTube because it used to be that the typical person saw one or two or three speakers a year, maybe but now if you want to you can see 300 in just one day. So there’s this style and there’s an expectation. Just like The Tonight Show did for stand-up comics Ted and the internet has done for people who do public speaking. King. But the biggest leap I have seen again, and again, to get from amateur to Semi-Pro, is that amateurs are talking to themselves. Amateurs are giving a talk that they see as being authentic and truthful in which they describe things from their point of view to themselves. And that is a necessary step to the next step. And the next step is that we are speaking for other people. We already know what we’re going to To say, but they don’t, I learned this, when I wrote instruction manuals for Spinnaker software 1983 for the Commodore, 64 in the Atari and other Home computers.

Here’s what I learned really quickly is. If I failed, they were either going to hate the product or call us on the phone and both were bad outcomes. What I had to do is find Radical empathy and say, this person I am writing for, they don’t know what I know. They have no clue. What to do. And I do know what to do. How do I write to them? And for them in a tone of voice? They’re eager and ready to hear.

So what we’re looking for when we give a talk aren’t prospects, nor are we looking to defend ourselves when we’re giving a talk? What we’re looking to do is find people enrolled in a journey to go. Where we are. Hoping they will go but that will only happen if we go to them first. If we sit on there. Side of the table. If we think about what they need and want to hear in this moment so that they can begin to walk with us on this journey.

Don’t you think the wizard could help him to? I don’t see why. Not? Why don’t you come along with us? We’re on our way to see the wizard.

I’m sure he could give you some courage. Well wouldn’t you feel degraded to be seen in the company of a Cowardly Lion? And yes once again, I have to reference. The Wizard of Oz, The Wizard of Oz. Go watch it again. And watch how Dorothy approaches each and every one of the people who go with her on the Journey, Down The Yellow Brick Road.

She was a great public speaker. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you’re going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason. Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -status-roles- <==

Who would you rather have lunch with Elvis Presley or Elvis Costello? Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about status roles and money. But first, here’s a message, from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it time? To learn a new way to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work, I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit, akimbo.com, go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

There’s a lot of confusion about status roles and they matter a lot. So I want to spend a few minutes to help us understand what exactly is going on. There are status rolls everywhere. We look consider prison for a second who gets deferred to who gets the benefit of the doubt who gets favors. Who do people avoid?

Maybe it’s the person with a connection to the warden or someone who’s connected on the outside. Maybe it’s the person who’s always got something to trade or maybe it’s someone who’s just simply tough. The fact is there is a hierarchy people Accord status and some level of respect to others that are around them in our Working World. There are plenty of people who have status because of their jobs, but that status might not be reflected in how much they’re paid a college professor for example, or A policeman or somebody who is a scientist on The Cutting Edge of changing the way we deal with the universe.

Nobody’s really sure what Stephen Hawking’s net worth was, but it doesn’t matter because things like the Nobel Prize or breakthrough, bestsellers change one status in the eyes of other people. And so the status hierarchy is something that we have been shuffling around in dealing with for a really long time.

In the village, it might be the faith healer or the chieftain or the person who can bring rain on command. I will not be pushed filed. Stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered, or it might be somebody who quietly around the edges supports. Lots and lots of other families. The number of people who come to ones funeral might be a measure of. How many other people saw that person as having status one. Think about it is who gets to eat lunch first, or at least who has the privilege of deciding who gets the lunch first if we go to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

Well, Robert Redford is accorded an enormous amount of status partly. Cuz he started to think, partly, because he’s famous partly. Because he’s Rich partly because he won a lot of awards and partly because a lot of people like him, all of these things, add up to a magical ball of status. Where things start to get interesting is when industrial capitalism shows up in the last couple hundred years and more and more people decide to trade status, for money, or money, for status, consider the front. Lawn. If you have one of your suburban house, if you have one, why do we even have a front lawn, does someone with a much bigger front? Lawn?

Are they seen as having more status in the community? Well, maybe we don’t translate it that way in our head but Possibly we do. What’s the purpose of a front lawn? Well, the origin of the front lawn is it has no purpose. It was a way of saying to your neighbors. I don’t need to graze cattle here. I’ve got plenty of land out back. I’m going to take this land in the front and waste it. I’m going to waste it on purpose. Not only am I going to waste it. I’m going to waste it on something that takes a lot of effort to maintain a form of status in the United Kingdom, which many people think. Think of as the Pinnacle of status roles, you’ve got things like knighthoods or the Obe or private clubs or what kind of tie. Are you wearing representing? Where did you go to school?

These are all indicators of status and some of them can be bought and some of them can’t. So at that, nightclub when the person drives up in a late-model Bugatti and gets out in a $3,000 suit, Maybe. They get right past the bouncer because what they have demonstrated like the front lawn is that they’re willing to pay money for things that have low utility just to make an impression on everybody when it comes to status.

I think it’s easy to imagine that in many species, status goes to the creature that the strongest. So when you see bowls, locking horns, whatever bulls do with one another. Well, the one that wins Wins is the one that’s the strong one and part of what we have woven together. As we have built a culture together, is we have diminished the status that goes with being the strongest one. And we’ve replaced it with all sorts of other battles, all sorts of other ways to indicate status to others. What happens if you’re not aware of the status, somebody else thinks they have. Well, there’s a conflict because In that moment, status belongs to the person who is seen as having status, and if someone else thinks they have status, but they’re not seeing that way stress results.

There’s an old joke. Somebody goes up to the Airport ticket counter and the gate agent says, I’m sorry, your tickets, not valid and the person says, that’s absurd, don’t you know who I am? And then the gate agent without missing a beat picks up the microphone and says to the people in the room. Umm, if anyone can help, there’s someone with amnesia at the front desk. He doesn’t know who he is.

There’s a mismatch there when it comes to status. One of the things that’s going on in our culture, right? This minute is a reshuffling of the status hierarchy that the benefit of the doubt has to Long been accorded to People based on mythical, things like, what race? We’ve decided they are whether they belong around here. Or not whether they look like us or not.

And a whole bunch of people are saying that makes no sense. And so part of the stress is going on in our world right now, as we reorient, the status hierarchy, we reshuffle the stack that some people who have come to believe through an accident of history, that they are accorded, a certain amount of status are discovering that, that’s not a given.

Other people who through an accident of history, have discovered that they were deprived of a level of status or anything. Wait a minute. We can connect with one another right now. There are new channels for us to speak up. We can form our own version of Sundance. We’re not going to look at somebody’s bank balance and US decide, whether that person is a good person or not on that, sole criteria.

And as status hierarchies, get shifted around, it starts to leave a stretch marks on the culture. So yes, that is absolutely going on all around us. And we need to take a deep breath and say, wait a second. Do we really want to assume that people who made a lot of money doing? One thing are really smart at doing something else.

Do we want to assume that somebody who matches the current cultural? Definition of beauty is also somebody. We want to Accord the benefit of the doubt. In other areas. Does it make sense to ask someone who won the bowling league or won? The lottery or is in the hedge fund business? How to deal with your back pain or whether or not your cancer, diagnosis is correct. And as Professor tressie cotton has pointed out, blondness is an odd recessive gene. And yet, we Accord it all sorts of status and people tie themselves into knots to dye their hair because somehow the color of the hair coming out of their head says something about their worth as a human being their Insight, their ability to make a difference. How are We deciding to judge people who gets the benefit of the doubt. What is the narrative? We are bringing to the table when we decide what somebody else’s status is because as we saw, it’s up to us to decide if we decide that the size of your front, lawn isn’t a mark of status.

Then you having a big front lawn isn’t going to help you anymore. And now as we start to wrestle with the side effects of Industrial capitalism including things like carbon somebody showing up on a private jet. Whether there are rock star or the CEO of a company. What does that mean? Does it give them status or does it take status away?

Do we, as we walk through our day, Accord status to people who always seem super busy and stressed just to make the last-minute deadlines or is it a higher status thing to be organized? And to never have a crisis around a deadline? What are the Measures and the metrics of participation that helps us. See that? Somebody is a contribution versus seeing that somebody is just attacks on the system and mixed into all of. This is the idea of celebrity the very modern idea of celebrity.

They were very few, celebrities 200, 300 years ago. Now we meant them like Bitcoin everyday. New celebrity showing up if you have 10,000 followers in The Woodworking Community, you’re a woodworking celebrity. I mean, before Bob, Vila, were there any Home Improvement celebrities? I’m not sure. And so as each category starts to create new celebrities and then they become celebrities among celebrities and then become celebrity organizers and they become momentary, celebrities versus long-term celebrities.

The question is, what do we do about that? What does that person do about that if they’ve faded in Celebrity, because they were a meme Years ago, what is it like to live their life now? Because there is again, a mismatch of their perceived status or how the world sees them when they have status. So no easy answers here, but one of the questions we asked is as a culture.

What are we going to do to create roles where we need? Good people to show up and work hard where the compensation isn’t just money. That the compensation is the kind of status and respect, because when we think about the world, we’d like to live in that sort of rhymes with it, that we’ve got people who decided to be a nurse or even an Undertaker simply because doing good work was the point, not because it was the shortcut to making a lot of money. I will not be pushed filed. Stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered. That’s my real.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is on. The problem. Is this is Caitlin? Hi, sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh? Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any other episode, I hope you’ll visit.

Akimbo that link. That’s a Ki M. Bo dot link2sd. Click the appropriate button. Three good questions this week. Here we go. Hey, Seth Brendan for Morgan here of late have been fascinated in also deeply frustrated with status and Status roles as you have. So eloquently written and spoken about. I recently went back to episode 2 of a Kimbo on status roles. And then of course, there are many risks in this is Mark marketing regarding Topic.

I posted an interview podcast for nine years and I see that status ballet in action. Nearly every week high-profile guests rarely engage in the sharing of an episode where as lower profile authors are more than happy to engage, the high-profile author likely thinks that her status will go down if she engages or she doesn’t want the user status to help level me up or she thinks I’m unfairly leveraging her audience to grow. Mine.

Nearly. All high-profile authors, don’t share in the conversations smaller, authors midlist authors. Their status is increased by being on the show. So, and I also, I see high-profile authors who come on my show and don’t promote or engage in yet. I see them. Share the link to their interview with fill-in-the-blank high-profile podcaster, radio show.

It becomes very apparent at that point, that sharing that link at status and Prestige for them. So, it’s conscious.

Four people in a status deficit, how do we navigate the status roll ballet so that people with higher status? Well acquiesce some of their status to level up the entire Enterprise and as you say turn that ratchet, thank you for everything you do. Thank you. Brendan. Once you begin to see status roles, they’re really hard to unsee.

And like, the weather status rules are neither, right, nor wrong. They are simply present. If we don’t like the effects of how status rules are changing our culture in our society. We should do something about that. But first we need to see it in your case. You are coming face-to-face with something inherent in The Human Condition, which is that we are willing to expend Effort to get something that we want and less likely to expend effort. If it’s something we don’t want or if we believe it won’t give us a return on the effort expended.

What’s fascinating is every once in a while. Something comes along that turns it on its head and jump-starts it. So I think it’s interesting for example, to consider the case of Ted, Ted was a sleepy little conference with 300 people coming every year to Monterey, California. And when Chris Anderson took it over one of the things that he did was, he started to take archival presentations and put them online at Ted dot-org.

And what happened really quickly was? This, everyone’s status went up, if they talked about their video being on Ted and if people watch The video, their status went up. Even more people who wanted to have a video on Ted dot org needed to go to Ted to give a talk. So the demand skyrocketed eventually leading to more than seven times as many people coming at one time all because status roles can be seen so you’re right. The game of podcast guests is pretty simple. It’s hard for people with a podcast to get their arms around, but it’s pretty simple.

And it works like this. You make a list of 10 people to 10th person is your dream guest and the first person is your sister or your next door neighbor. And the question is, who do you need to have at any given rung for the person on the next rung to view appearing on your podcast, as a way of increasing their status, which can be measured in countless ways, but you don’t get to LEAP a wrong step by step.

Marin did not start with Barack Obama as a guest. Thanks for this. Hi, sis, Alex. Ghandar in Melbourne, Australia here. I think I have a rant. I’d like you to do if you would indulge me around that. I’m really looking forward to hearing. There’s a phrase that drives me nuts in the workplace usually used as an excuse not to do something. It is I haven’t had the training now. That doesn’t sit right with me. I need a good response to that, which I don’t feel. I have yet.

In my mind training in the most basic sense is the thing. You do yourself, you put on the running shoes and you drag yourself out of bed at 5:00 in the morning and put five kilometers under your belt. That’s Rainy what annoys me about that fries, and then you kind of technical work environments. I’ve been in most of my life is the training or certification. In a new technology is almost always best done, by going out and learning about the new technology, or framework or product on your own.

Like, going for a run. You take the initiative, or as I like to say, you pull it towards yourself. The phrase, I haven’t had the training shows that until things are push towards you. You are going to take a back seat and in my experience that attitude really produces the best outcome. So my question is really about the terminology of loaded words like training. He is training really the right word here is now a good time for you to give us the definitive, Seth education, glossary words, like training certification, education, learning good college, famous college. These are all words with lots of baggage. That could use some better definitions. There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’d love to know what your response to. I haven’t had the training would be Thanks Alex. As you know, I love the semantics of all of this.

I haven’t had the training, the key word. There is the with a capital T. I haven’t had the training and what that means is I haven’t been authorized to work on this project. It doesn’t mean I don’t know how it doesn’t mean. I don’t want to learn. It means I’ve been indoctrinated since I was a little kid to be a cog in the industrial system and the industrial system has not given me. It’s Hissing.

So decoding. This is really important. If you find someone who is enrolled in the Journey of personal growth who is committed to the organization and themselves growing. Then the training isn’t nearly as important as would you like to learn how to do this in a low-risk way because that person eager for a new skills was likely to say. Yes, the person who’s not enrolled in that Journey who views work as something to do less of it.

Doesn’t want to take perceived risk. It doesn’t matter what you say to them because they haven’t had the training. And so, I guess the best way to subvert, the system is to earn enough Authority with those people to insist that they get the training because training is a permission slip.

Hey, Seth, it’s Andrew from Hays, Kansas. And I had a question about the infinite game podcast if we observe the game, and we don’t like the rules of the game. What do you think about playing their game? But by your own rules, is that what you’re suggesting when you brought up your Twitter example, just curious. Thank you.

Thanks Andrew. The infinite Games episode is one of my favorites and games are very particular games. Have players games have rules and often games have outcomes. And what that means is, you can launch a game, a game of any kind. You can announce what the rules are, and if people don’t like your game and they don’t like your rules. They won’t come if people like your game, but want to change the rules. And there’s a way for them to do that.

Well, they might just do. And so we have the whole idea for example, of tailgating outside of a football game or some other sporting event. The vendors inside the stadium, can’t possibly be happy. That the people who walk into the stadium are already full and slightly inebriated, therefore with no need to buy the overpriced snacks inside the venue, but there was no rule against tailgating in the parking. Lots tailgating became its own game, and it’s a game that undermined the first game. Mmmmm.

Well the same thing is true. For example, in the way, some people use Twitter, so you can change the rules. If there’s a loophole big enough for you to get what you need and still be on the game board where you want to be. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see y’all next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success seeker at the level of of information gathering or And distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, When you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, what are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up. And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment. And we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -expect-delays- <==

If you are the CFO of a public company and you want to make your profits, go up. You really can’t control easily your marketing. Or how many people are buying, what you sell. But there are two things you can do to make your profits. Go up, right away. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about delays.

The supply. Pain and promises, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

It works. If you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo do Cam go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

You may have already guessed. What the first thing is. The first thing is, you should lower your inventory. You should eliminate slack everywhere. You find it because you could see slack as your enemy, your inventory, the stuff, in the warehouse, the thing you’ve got 20 of, if you only had ten of them instead of Just waiting for a customer to needed or someone in the shop to need a part.

If you cut it in half. Well, then the cost of holding that inventory goes way down and instead of having to borrow money to pay for the stuff that’s in the warehouse, not earning you any money. You can leave that money in the bank and make money. So suddenly 5 million 10 million, 20 million dollars of work in process of inventory, Goods of Slack. Back in the system, when it disappears, that 20 million dollars can turn right around.

And look really good on your balance sheet. See if I was love to do stuff like this because it makes them look smart. It makes them look smart until they come to understand that slack was there for a reason. Long time ago Eastern Airlines had a shuttle from Boston to New York City back before there was We were always in a hurry to get from Boston to New York City and the way the shuttle worked also to Washington DC. I don’t want to leave them out. The way the shuttle worked. Is that somehow read Senator would get to the gate two minutes before nine a.m.

And the shuttle left at 9:00, but there were no reservations for the shuttle and if you got there at 2 minutes, denying they promised they would fly you to Washington even if the plane was full. How could they do this? Yeah, well the answer is they always had a second plane and extra plane just sitting there waiting.

It was slack. If the first plane had a heart problem if it had a mechanical difficulty, no one fretted. You just got off the first plane onto the second plate and you were on your way, slack serves a function that a medical professional. Who is trying to maximize profit in the face of insurance companies and other problems doesn’t schedule their day the way they used to.

In the old days, perhaps you’d schedule six patients. And if a patient didn’t show up you were still going to have an okay day. If a patient took longer it was fine because you had slack in the system things that didn’t work, but you were fine because it was that empty space. But now now that you’ve scheduled 9 or 11 patients in a day, everything has to work.

And if you’ve ever had a doctor’s appointment at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, but you know, is that everything? Never? Works. So right now, as we get ready for the holidays, in the Western World, a time when our culture has taught us, that shopping is the single most important thing we can engage in.

I’m here to tell you, you should expect delays. You should expect delays because when slack goes out of the system and the supply chain gets a little stressed. The only alternative is delays.

Paula Poundstone, one of my favorite stand-up. Max has a great bit that you made up on the spot about looms and Loom makers. It’s probably easier with a little think.

You’re making the right choice there.

Love about the world. So your Weaver, then you use a loom which means that somewhere I could be talking to somebody and see, what do you do for a living? And they will say I’m a lawmaker, don’t you love that? I remember one day, I had this Epiphany when I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, which is I mean, a bridge just fascinates me anyways, and there’s stir these bolts. I guess it’s called. That’s the angular thing, right? That the big screw goes into, right?

It’s the nut. Yeah, it’s Giant.

And that and that’s big scratches huge. It’s just big and I think to myself someone made that. So our work to the place that made that and someone else worked at a place that made the thing that made that it tastes awesome. I was swerving all over the place.

You may have seen that cars are in short supply, not because they’re out of tires or rubber or steering wheels or those little ashtrays cars are in short supply, because a 10 or $20 computer chip is in short supply. And in the old days, what they would do is just buy a lot of extra computer chips because if you extra computer chips, don’t cost you that much, they don’t take up very much space and something goes wrong in supply chain.

You’re not going to end up with 10,000 Jeeps. In a parking lot, unable to drive for want of a $20 part, but the CFO came along competing with all the other CFOs public companies. Racing to the bottom, trying to extract every last penny and they’ve ripped slack out of the system. And I said to see if I was doing two things.

One of them is ripping out the slack. And the other one, a consequence of that is weaseling and if there are any weasels listening, I’m going to apologize to the weasel. Ian for denigrating You by using the word weaseling by weaseling out of the promises that Brands make back when Federal Express was trying to persuade business. People then instead of spending 25 cents on a first-class letter that would take three days.

They should spend $12 on a FedEx envelope. That would take one day.

They’re guaranteed was super clear when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, that the legend was that one of their drivers faced with a snow.

Dorm that closed the pass and Colorado. Rented. A helicopter to get one package to where it needed to go. Because it absolutely, positively has to get there. Now, FedEx, doesn’t even answer the phone. Now. FedEx, makes it extraordinary difficult to complain about the fact that your package isn’t there on time, and yes, people in the western world as privileged as so many of us are, are starting to embrace the fact, It may be, it doesn’t absolutely. Positively have to be there overnight.

So if we look at the offer that Amazon made all those years ago, three parts one the best price to every single book in the world and three and you’ll have it tomorrow except now not so much because they’re happy to blame anything. They can even when it’s their own delivery service. For the fact that that package they sent you didn’t arrive when they set it.

And the reason is because they’ve taken slack out of the system. Amazon is sort of Infamous for its fulfillment centers. They call them FCS, pushing people to urinate in a bottle when they’re supposed to be taking a bio break. Pushing people to work in ridiculous conditions so we can get the package tomorrow.

They had one more day to ship it out, a whole bunch of things, get easier, but between the CFO and the promise of the Miracle companies are stuck their stock because they either make a big promise and they keep it which is expensive or they weasel out of the promise and what we are facing right now. When I warned you to expect delays is that are fragile supply chain, which wasn’t built with a centralized bit of control. Like darwinian Evolution.

No one is in charge. It just happens but like darwinian evolution. When the climate changes, when there are wild fires, when the mean temperature changes, suddenly the animals that evolved to be in one Niche, are having trouble in the new one. And these companies, the ones that have made promises around convenience about reliability, about, showing up to treat customers. The way they wanted to be treated, you’re going to get more and more stressed out of their minds. Of course, companies aren’t people.

The ones are going to get stressed are the poor Frontline workers. The poor person. Who’s at a Call center, where every single sentence is being measured with a stopwatch. So perhaps we, as consumers, who are lucky enough to live in this world filled with wonders, could do two things. The first one is plan ahead.

Don’t do your shopping at the last minute. And the second one is, when you’re dealing with the soft tissue of humanity at the Frontline. The one that has been pushed by the CFO in the nine layers of overpaid people between the sea. Vo. And that poor person on the front line realize it’s not their fault.

Fault, is the greed that led companies to extract the slack and to weasel out of a promise that we thought they were going to keep. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. It’s Maria. Accept. My name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pot pie. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir.

Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They sent. This is Rex Pizza. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. And I could use some more questions.

So if you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please visit akimbo that link that take Ai and bi o dot link-16, lick the appropriate button to really juicy question. Jin’s this week. Here we go.

Say you wanted more questions and that that a reoccurring theme in the podcast is applying knowledge. Not letting the knowledge stay as knowledge, but to actually practice it and doing the work and shipping and however else you put it. But how did you come to understand that that’s actually one of the most important things? Things that knowledge is worthless without the practice and I suppose that’s the definition of wisdom, right, to practice knowledge.

It’s funny.

I’ve never thought about it this way, but you are correct that most of us are indoctrinated pushed from an early age to acquire something that is called knowledge. Usually, we acquire it simply because it’s going to be on the test. When were six years old, there really isn’t enough cognition on our part to listen to an explanation as to why this is being done.

But now that I think about it, there never is an explanation for why this is being done. And if you check out, stop stealing dreams, which is a free book, I wrote it. Stop stealing, dreams.com. Along with a tedx talk you can watch, you will hear my explanation, which is that companies industrialists pushed the system.

To normalize certain behaviors and to brainwash us into understanding certain things. So that we would be more highly functioning employees and because it’s never really explained why we’re learning X Y or Z other than the fact that we are training to be obedient cogs. Most people just grow up to be obedient cogs and they wonder, will this be on the test?

And we take this mindset to our work. Ever, our work is, will this be on the test? How do I get trained in this? How do I get certified in this? How can I prove that? I learned what I was supposed to learn but some people, and I’m one of those lucky people early on decide that. What they really want to do is make something that if making something seeing a problem and solving it finding an audience and serving them, putting something in the world being able to say here.

I made this. This, if that is your goal, then you learn the things, you learn, so that you can make something, the practice, I learn how to sand a piece of cherry wood, because I wanted to make a canoe paddle, not because there was a test on whether or not I knew how to sand a piece of cherry wood. It’s a simple example, but we can multiply it by a thousand and this is one of the reasons and I’ll talk about this in a future episode.

Why there’s such a gap in programming because to be a programmer means that you can’t ask, will this be on the test to be a programmer, means I have a problem.

I need to make a commit to get Hub. I need to figure out something to solve this problem. What will I code? Well, that’s not what they taught us in school. So I guess it’s sort of intuitive on my part to talk about the practice to help people understand that the purpose of knowledge is to engage. Engage in practices doesn’t have to be specific.

Like I made a canoe paddle. It can be something as general as I’m a better citizen, but there’s still a practice. Thanks for this one.

Hey Seth, it’s Tony from Albany New York, the topic I bring before you today is residency requirements. I’d like to hear your thoughts on them and the future of them, especially given how much our tax structure and government services are tied to residency requirements. You know, like some services are very restrictive, like schools.

Generally, you must live in a school district to attend their schools, but some are not like libraries and Parks. I can easily enjoy and other municipalities parkour Library.

Income taxes. Another like with zoom, I can hire someone in Montana, but then I’m subject to withholding, and submitting Montana income tax and following their workers comp rules. I get why the village might want the mayor to live in the village. She’s representing but you know, she lives one house. On the other side of the line. Is that a big deal?

Should she pay tax in that Village to lead that Village of the residents? Say, that’s who we want to lead us. And then you contrast that with someone with the resources to buy a home in our state just so that person could run to be the state. Senator a person didn’t live a meaningful day in our state yet. We elected that person to represent us in Congress.

In government, you know, there’s got to be a line. One side is New York. The other side is Vermont or even Canada? They’re everywhere. I live a quarter mile, from an elementary school built on the fringes of a school district, but I live on the fringes of a neighboring District just across the line.

So, my son is based bust 10 miles to his Elementary School while he could walk to this other one every day, you know, it just doesn’t seem to make sense. Thanks, as always.

Wow, this is a great question and it is more relevant now than ever before because people are spending so much time, simultaneously at home and digitally somewhere else. And Cory doctorow wrote about this, in his great book, Eastern Standard tribe, but it goes something like this. If the people you work with all live in Estonia, does it matter that you don’t? If the content that you are consuming is Made in California.

Does it matter that you don’t some things were never going to get past being local things like the water supply or even the electricity that we consume or perhaps the roads or the local security around us but more and more things with a greater percentage of our GDP, our output or life. Our time, a greater percentage is spent somewhere else so I can look. Something up on the website of the Los Angeles. Public Library.

I do not pay them. Anything. I do not live in Los Angeles. What should we do about this? And then you bring up the second question, which I think is almost certainly unrelated, which is when a town goes to hire somebody to work in that town. Does it matter where they live? Well, if we look at it from the town’s point of view, there are two parts to this one. What’s the best bang for? The taxpayers buck. How do I hire somebody who gives Great Value?

And then the second one is, how do I reward people who are my neighbors who are local and showing through, where they spend their time and where they spend their tax money? And I think both of them are important for things like, police people for people, like elected officials because that simple Gap, that line that thing that says, you have to be a neighbor of Buddy seems like a reasonable filter, but I want to get back to the first question because I’m not sure. I know the answer.

I know that when we deal with carbon, when we deal with climate change, if we don’t have a global solution, we have no solution because if you’ve got people who are cheating on the cohort, the Cadre of countries that aren’t cheating, it will undermine all of their work, but maybe the same thing is true for libraries. Maybe. The same thing is true for lots of different. Little interaction.

In fact, did you pay taxes to Netflix to use their library? And if you don’t, you can’t what, a spectacular, reorganization of the world. It’s going to be when we start looking at things outside of geography. That’s a long ramble to say. I’m not sure I have a glib simple answer but you’ve brought up a really urgent and important thing for us to think about.

Thanks to everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have What all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome.

But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It. It’s very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt Ba more than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world.

Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -co-op-advertising- <==

Do you Remember The Sharper Image? Not the bankrupt one. Not even the one. Just before that, that sold all sorts of junk on airplanes. I’m talking about the original Sharper Image, the sharper image of the 1980s, The Sharper Image. That was the wire. Cutter Plus Wired, Plus the whole earth catalog, put together the sharper image that gave us a whole wondrous array of, really useful gadgets to remember them.

Well one day, They called me on the phone. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo.

Be back in a second to talk about Co-op advertising. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is the time to learn? A new way to see the world to connect with others, to lead to engage in possibility? Akimbo is a b Corp and independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education, not certificates, not grades, but learning together.

It works. If you do the work. I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit akimbo. Cam go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

I remember like it was yesterday, but it was almost 40 years ago. It’s hard to believe. I had just spent a year of my life, launching a series of adventure games, computer games based on science fiction, novels from people, like Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, My Heroes. I had been a marketer trained. You hit as much as a 23 year old can be trained but I really been a project manager to get this thing out. The door was thousands and thousands of lines of code was groundbreaking technology and we were chasing a nascent brand new Marketplace.

Well, we shipped everything and the programmers. They went on to the next thing. But here I was trying to figure out how was I going to sell more of this extraordinary series of products. We had It made and then the phone rang. It was The Sharper Image on the phone. I can’t remember if I got one of those pink while you were out slips or not. I probably did. So I called them back.

And I said, what’s up? Because I knew, I didn’t know the money or anything. And the woman from The Sharper Image said, we see what you’ve built with these Trillium software games for those listening today. We change the name to tellurium. That’s a whole other story. We see what you’ve built with these Trillium adventure games. We’d like to feature them in a Two page spread in The Sharper Image.

Well, I was thrilled. This was it. My prayers were answered. We had been picked. We had been selected The Sharper Image Arbiter of all things important. In technology was going to give us a two page spread in their catalog. That was going to reach a million people. All the right sort of people and we were going to sell a lot of stuff.

And I said, without revealing any of my delight interesting. How does it work? And then she broke my heart. She said well you pay us 50 thousand dollars a page and then we run the ad and I realized it was a sales call and then I realized that the Sharper Image catalog wasn’t what I thought. It was, it wasn’t what it used to be.

What it was was an advertising. Did they made money before they even ship the catalog to people that they made money from what’s called Co-op advertising? And I’m here because a co-op add ended up in my mailbox this week. It really surprised me and I thought it would be worth spending a minute to talk about Co-op advertising because it really does change our culture and it does more than we think it does for 50 or more years.

This year’s campaign. Catalog was the most important merchants in America, millions and millions of people got this catalog was hundreds of pages long. And most of what was listed in the Sears catalog, was made by Sears. You could even buy a house that was made by Sears and buy made by. I mean, they had Lumber Mills. I mean, they were actually doing the work. They weren’t just a merchant.

They had vertically, integrated all the way back into where we going to plant some trees. And the thing is, when you’re selling your own stuff, you make a slightly different decision as a merchant because if you’ve invested a lot, if People’s careers are on the line, if you got warehouses filled with sunk costs. It’s likely, you’re going to promote your thing more.

You’re not actually serving the customer. You begin to serve the organization. Some Merchants are completely agnostic. About what they sell, they are. Representatives of the consumer and a lot of times online Merchants, including Amazon will tell us that all they do is sell people. What they want somewhere in between, where the merchants who had a point of view but could change their mind because they didn’t own anything.

So Walmart doesn’t make pickles. Walmart may have a house brand but the house brand is simply a license deal with someone else. But what happens if You’re a merchant at Walmart is you’ve got to create a planogram, your map of the store. And if you’re not generating, the sales per square foot, that somebody else is generating in a similar store. You could lose your job.

The job of a merchant super important in the evolution of Western culture is to help Shoppers decide what they want. And so Merchants want to Makers Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s established a point of view by Leading consumers in a given. Correction and finding vendors people who wanted to sell to them, that matched the vision.

But then about, I don’t know. 70 years ago, Merchants realized that vendors industrialists were willing to pay them money to get more than their fair share of promotion. So I know if you can remember those full page ads at Barnes & Noble, used to run listing, all these books that were available. Their local Superstore.

Well, if you look at one of those ads, you’ll see it’s about six books across in 12 books down at 72 books and they would go to the book publishers and say, you want to be in our ad will list your in our ad for two or three thousand dollars, multiply three thousand dollars times 72. You come up with a number that’s a lot more than they were paying the newspaper and all of a sudden.

What happens if you’re this kind of merchant is, you can get hooked on Co-op advertising. Because you’re no longer featuring books that you, as the merchants, think your customers will be delighted to read your featuring stuff. You think they’ll tolerate reading that you got paid to insert. So, back to The Sharper, Image example, I’m pretty sure that our software was good enough that this person who was calling knew that sharper images reputation, wouldn’t be instantly ruined and her job wouldn’t be lost if I had said, Yes, to running that hundred thousand dollar ad in their catalog. We somehow qualified to be offered the pitch, but I’m also sure that if they could have picked from every single piece of software ever made.

They might not have picked ours. What they were looking to do is lay off their risk, to get paid on both sides, paid by the customer and paid by the industrialist, the vendor that they were listing. And this conflict of Interest. And it really is a conflict of interest causes eventually, just about every Merchant to fail.

It causes them to fail because somebody else comes along that only cares about the consumer. Someone else comes along, who realizes that? If they can coordinate and understand consumer interests. They will do better. Can’t be on both teams at the same time. Okay, so I promised to talk about Amazon. The longest time, Amazon wouldn’t talk to the people who wanted, more than their fair share of being listed on the site.

Every book on Amazon looks exactly the same. Whether you self publish it or whether you are the biggest book publisher in the United States, penguin, random house, or as I think of them random penguin, the random penguin wasn’t able to bring a big enough wheelbarrow, full of money to change the search results or anything. Else about how the consumer experienced Amazon and then it began to change back when I was helping them. Think about how the Kindle would work.

One of the things that was talked about was whether there would be something on the home screen when your Kindle was asleep. And it was decided to put ads for other books and my pitch was to make sure that those ads were ads for books that totally matched the background of the person. I was using the Kindle Amazon ended up selling them to the highest bidder.

Now, as much as a third of all of Amazon’s revenue comes not from people, paying them to buy the stuff they make. But from companies paying them to be advertised promoted or otherwise present on the website. So what showed up in the mail it says, Ready Set play and it’s a magazine and the Magazine’s 100. Hundred pages long. And I think I can tell you without fear of exposing my taste. It’s not very well done wasn’t done by a world-class graphic designer. It’s not laid out very well, and the products that are inside of it, and there’s more than 400 of them are laid out in a way, that feels organic or compelling or that a kid who’s sitting there? Trying to decide what they want for the holidays, is likely to be seduced by know what this catalog is laid out to do is, Easy to sell all 400 of those slots.

So if you got 400 slots and your someone at the scale of Amazon, you can bet you are charging. These companies of Fortune to be in this catalog and suddenly Amazon’s incentives are skewed. They’re not here to serve the reader. They’re here to do just enough to make sure that the advertiser will buy it again next time.

And this, This this along with 400 other little steps that they are taking leads me to believe that they are jumping some sort of shark because they never wanted to be Merchants. They never wanted to develop a point of view that ever wanted to say, read this book instead of that book. Because someone here, read the book, and believes in it and is willing to bet Amazon’s reputation on it. They skipped the whole Merchant step. There were people at Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s and yes, Barnes & Who had a point of view the business book buyer Barnes & Noble who I used to know had read all of the books on the shelves.

Had a point of view about the difference between a good one and a bad one. Nobody had that job at Amazon for the longest longest time. And now having skipped the Merchants State, they are saying we will sell to the highest qualified bidder, more space, higher search results. A place to show up today. It’s labeled in little tiny type sponsor.

And the reason this matters is because most of the people listening to, this are consumers, not merchants. And if you’re a consumer, a lot of what you buy your buying, because we live in community, you’re buying because other people have went to, you’re buying, could you’re looking for a certain kind of cultural experience, and what you were buying used to be influenced by nothing, but that it was no merchants and there was no vendor paying them.

The table and now it is changing not just it Amazon, but lots of places it is changing because industrialist demanded industrialist demand, the reliability that comes from them being able to buy more than their fair share with money. They made the last time around but what it leads to is a coarsening and a cheapening of what we decide is good.

It changes the trajectory of good taste because good taste ends up. And not to what the community decides is something that community’s going to like just before the rest of the community realizes it, it involves two who paid the most in the right place. At the right time. That’s my rant. This wasn’t paid for by anybody.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here, hugs and kisses on the phone. It’s Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Grace. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki MB o .l, iink and click the appropriate button for questions this week. We call about time.

Here we go. Hi, Seth. This is Steve in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Your recent podcast about time slipping and will we do with the convenience that our modern world provides to us? Just I listened to it four times and every time I noticed something new and I feel very lucky to have not had much financial trouble in the endemic.

And so I had a that sir. Plus of time I started playing in a band. Again. I started writing again. I started coaching Young Folks, early in their careers on how to not make some mistakes that I’ve made pro bono just because I love doing it. I love seeing them be successful. So I’ve I’d like to think that I’d probably not made the most of them did a good good, good college try and make the most of it and I wonder how to help the people that we care about see this. This opportunity and see this time and and look at how they’re spending it. And what is what is the outcome of? Just let me expand on that?

Thank you for all you do. Thank you for getting us started. Steve. This is really profound and one of the things that we have done for the last 50 years to of the things we’ve done actually, is created a world built around convenience and a world that is allergic to boredom. That people have figured out that they can make money that they can get traction by offering people. Those two things.

This is more convenient we say and so other people give up their privacy their money their time. And we have created a culture particularly for kids, but then all the way into adulthood where boredom is seen as a bad thing, but boredom is simply a symptom that we might be aware of time that we can be aware of time ticking by when we are truly excited and on the edge of our seat, but we are fully aware of time clicking by when we are bored. And so, one of the things that I could encourage you To do, is to find activities that involve human beings sitting with each other, simply breathing, simply being and as an organization, it may make sense for you to find people on your team and volunteer volunteer at hospice, volunteer with the homeless volunteer with people who have a different interaction with time.

Then you and your team are used to because time might be the Aim for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether your watch is working or not Time, Marches On, but time is experienced differently by everyone. You’ve ever been up in the middle of the night 2 a.m. With. I don’t know a foot that itches time. Seems to go endlessly slowly.

But when you’re in one of those rare moments of flow with a dear friend time, just whistles right by and being aware of time, not hiding from it. That’s a great place to begin. Hey Seth, this is Ryan from Philadelphia. I have a question about a Lynch pins, exit strategy from a company. I’ve spent the last four years, dedicating myself to a great company, becoming a linchpin and almost indispensable.

I always thought that I leave the company years down the road after it had become quote, unquote successful. Now my heart is pulling me in a different direction towards an opportunity. I can’t ignore. The decision has already been made.

What I hope for is a slow untangling process where much of what I’ve developed stays in place as people fill in the duties. Where needed What I fear is that it will become a gaping hole. Once I leave any advice on Lynch pins, exit strategy would be much appreciated. Thanks again for all you do. I love your books and look forward to this podcast every week.

Thank you, Ryan. It sounds like you have made a big impact on this organization. And one of the challenges of time when it comes to our career, is this? If you’re going to start something, you’re going to end. Something, the days that you took a job when you were 20 and stayed there until you were, 65 are long gone.

And so, part of what it means to open a door is to acknowledge that one day. We will close the door industrialists, people who are trying to build systems that don’t depend on Amazing individuals, putting in extra effort, don’t like the idea of a linchpin. They would rather everyone be instantly replaceable if your local Starbucks loses a barista within a week. Eek just about everyone in the institution has recovered. They built it that way on purpose and you are generous and aware enough to say wait. There’s going to be a disconnect when I leave here, but I think it’s also essential to understand that the organization was there before you got there, and it’s going to be there after you leave.

And the best that you can do is to create that manual, that Playbook that training that lets other people take over. And then you have to say goodbye. As Time, Marches On It sir, this is Hunter from Jacksonville Florida. My question is around bringing change you speak on your podcast a lot about changing the culture bringing change and many context.

But in this one I’m asking more about when you’re trying to bring change to a team where the workplace with every change. There’s going to be some trade-offs. The chances that you can make a change that has no downsides at all. Is pretty rare. And there’s always going to be edge cases where it doesn’t work or the new method is not ideal.

So I was just hoping you could talk a little bit about how do you implement change and get people to buy in and then roll in the change that you want to see even when there are some downsides to it? Thank you for this Hunter. What are the things that people mistake about leadership? Is this everyone has to like it?

Everyone has to like change, it has to be unanimous that whatever. Going to do is going to make things better. And in those rare instances where it’s true, right? It’s suddenly really, really cold out and you want to shut the window. Well, just about everyone’s going to come out ahead from that one.

No one’s going to push back. But most of the time, if we’re doing something that might not work, if we’re doing something that’s important. Some people are in favor of the status quo back. When I was running yoyodyne. One of the first internet companies I had 50 people in one giant room. And one of the things I instituted was that every 90 days.

Everybody had to move where they sat now, I said they did it so that no one would have to sit next to me, for too long. But the real reason I did it is simple at work, moving, where you sit moving, who is around, you is somewhat dramatic. And if people got used to, the idea that we were a place of change. Well, then the other changes we were implementing to our business model to our approach. To our staffing, didn’t seem as dramatic.

So one of the things we need to do when we live in Crazy Changing Times, is to highlight the fact that changes in fatal to highlight the fact that change is inevitable and therefore, not to ask the question. Should we change something? But instead to ask the question, A or B Because With A or B, the status quo is not one of the options.

There will be a post on my blog tomorrow. I already decided that I decided it a really long time ago. So now my only decision is which one should it be? And creating a culture where that’s the mindset, where the status quo is not an option. That might be work worth doing. Hi. Seth. This is Kathleen from Tucson Arizona. And if I may, I would like to ask you a personal question.

I notice how thoughtful and insightful, all of your answers. Hazard to the questions that people ask you and I’m wondering how much time you put into thinking about those answers. Before you respond. Does it take a fair amount of time to think them through, or have you thought about these issues for so long that it’s pretty quick and easy for you to come up with responses.

Thank you so much, and I love to listen to your show every week. Thank you for this Kathleen. And I I appreciate the fact that my answer seemed to resonate with you. The thing is that, I think what people are asking me for is not a Year’s worth of research and a certain guaranteed. Correct? Answer. I think most of the time when people are engaging with one another, at least when we’re talking to someone who isn’t a car mechanic or an oncologist. I think what we’re asking for is our truth in that moment, based on what we see based on our understanding.

And I am Trying to answer these questions as if you were asking them to me, as we were walking down the street. I don’t edit them very much. I’m simply here, trying to imagine what the person who’s asking me a question is actually seeking and if I can shed some light, I do, thanks to everyone for listening. And again, if you got a question, visit akimbo dot link and share it with us.

We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and Today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that Says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason. In why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -white-elephants-and-gifts- <==

The Oxford English Dictionary, got it wrong, but it’s still worth exploring the myth tile and then called Siam had a tradition. That owning a white elephant was a symbol that you were a just an important leader. Such an important symbol that according to an essay written in the 1700s king of a nearby country, extended his hand in Friendship to the King of Siam asking if he could buy. By one of the Kings to white elephants, when refused, he decided to restore his honor by attacking Siam.

And in the war that followed 500,000 people died, all to get a white elephant. Hey, it’s F. And this is akimbo, will be back in a second, to talk about gifts and some. Costs, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Its back its back again, at a Kimbo.com go find all Details. If you are serious, about changing the culture. If you are serious about showing up in a way that grows your project, your business, your cause I hope you’ll check out the marketing seminar. It said, akimbo.com go its back, it works because you do we’ll see you there alert. Listeners knew that I was warming up to talk about gifts. But here’s what inspired the whole thing. Someone on Twitter was annoyed. I know that’s not news. Someone on Twitter is Razenoid. But they were annoyed because they had a job interview and in the written part of the interview.

The question was, if someone gave you an elephant and you were not allowed to put it to work or sell it, what would you do with it? And this person was incensed because it was unfair, it had nothing to do with their job. It was that kind of thing. That companies think they’re being clever around, but is really quite stupid.

Well, I disagree about that. I think it’s a great. Question and here is why a white elephant has come to mean something that you are given that you don’t want, don’t need, can’t take care of and is a hassle. That is a false story about white elephants. Is that the King of Siam to annoy somebody would give them a white elephant by giving someone a white elephant. You are putting a burden on them because they can’t put it to work.

It’s expensive to feed and they’re difficult or Impossible to sell. So is it a gift? It feels to me, like one of the answers in there, so many good answers to this question that would show that you are a creative resilient, thoughtful connected person, able to think on your feet. But leaving that aside, one of the answers that I like is I would not accept it because if it’s a gift that means, I don’t have to accept it.

So understanding, what a gift even is. Is a really useful way for us to think about how we’re going to navigate our engagements with other people. If somebody says, I am giving you the gift of being allowed to be on my podcast. Well, if it’s really a gift, you can say no. If your boss says, I’m giving you this gift, and you get to take on this extra work. And it’s really a gift. And both sides. Think it’s a gift. You can say no, but where it gets really interesting. Interesting is when you give a gift to yourself and it’s been more than a year and a half since I ranted about sunk costs. So I need to do it again because you are giving yourself gifts all the time.

If you spent years earning an advanced degree that previous version of you invested in an asset and it is offering it to you the future version of you and it’s a gift. Gift and you don’t have to accept it. If you don’t have a way to take care of it. You don’t have to accept it. If it doesn’t match where you are hoping to go.

The most important thing that we learn about decision, making in business school is sunk costs must be ignored for something to be a sunk cost. It means you expended the effort yesterday. But today, you are going to make a new decision based on new information. And that thing you did yesterday those sunk costs. They’re a gift. They’re a gift from your former self to your present self.

We need to examine this from a bunch of angles because you probably agreed with everything. I just said. And yet it is hard to put our arms around. Let’s say you saved and saved and saved for a film camera. You learned how to use a film camera, you are good at Taking pictures with film but now going forward, digital pictures are easier to edit. You can take far more of them.

The commercial demand for digital pictures is much higher that in order to be a productive professional photographer with very few exceptions. You’re going to have to get good at digital photography. And so if you want to be productive and successful in the market, as it exists, and you look over at that, Of and that shelf is filled with film cameras and the lenses that go with them. And you think about how hard you worked to build the skills that you have on working with film, not to mention being in the dark room.

It’s easy to feel a little bit of sadness about the fact that you can’t accept the gift because accepting the gift. It’s not about denying how hard you worked or how useful it was. It’s not about denying the fact that in some places. Has a white elephant is a sacred thing. It is simply about acknowledging that what makes it a gift is that you don’t have to accept it.

And one of the challenges that we have, when we talk to our future, selves is we want our future selves to feel really badly about not accepting the gifts. We’ve been busy giving it but we live in Revolutionary times and revolutions, destroy the perfect before they enable The Impossible. It’s impossible. But that you’re listening to this podcast that I am in your earbuds, wherever you are, that it has traveled, thousands of miles and no money changed hands that it shows up on the regular basis that I don’t know you and you don’t know me. And here we are all of these things are impossible.

I don’t have an FCC license. I don’t have any training and here we are. It destroyed the perfect idea of talk radio, which ruled for 90 years. If you were the king of Talk Radio podcast are not your friend. In general. Because the only way for them to have been your friend would be to have walked away from that thing. You worked so hard to build revolutions, destroy the perfect before they enable The Impossible. And as long as that is going on, what goes with it?

Is the acknowledgement that gifts do not have to be accepted that, that’s what makes it a gift. So a short rant, but I wanted to share that with you because I think it’s a useful way to decide who you want to be. Tomorrow. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit. Akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks. It’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hogs, and this is anupam.

This is Caitlin. Thaisa warm. Greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB. O .l, iink and click the appropriate button while you’re there, please go ahead and check. Check out the show notes. Lovingly hand created each week.

Three questions this week about information misinformation and disinformation. Here we go. Hey, Seth, this is Joey Chang from Oakland, California. And my question is, how do we, as a society deal with the problem of misinformation? I see it happening all around with regard to vaccine. Efficacy and safety with political messaging.

And what are your thoughts on disinformation and artificial intelligence has ability to Aid Us in deceiving each other. How do we build trust in this Brave New World that we’re living in? Thanks for all the ideas that you share. So, consistently, thank you for this. And for getting us started and for the distinction between misinformation and disinformation, we all Lived over the last 50 or 100 years, in a moment of time that has not happened before. It may not happen again, and it was a moment in time. When there were very loud, centralized media outlets, and those media Outlets particularly in non fascist countries, were encouraged to tell us some version of the truth. Maybe it was influenced by advertisers industrialists where the status quo, but they weren’t simply making stuff up that it wasn’t a useful strategy for ABC or NBC to say things that were demonstrable e untrue.

And the main reason for that is that if there’s only three TV networks, you get a third of the audience for free and the goal is not to lose them and maybe to gain some. But as we fractured the media landscape, we got closer to what newspapers were like in the 1910s and 20s. Which is you didn’t get any table Stakes that the way you found an audience was by going to some extreme by being outrageous. By talking about Housewives, or making up conspiracy theories that if you could get your smallest viable audience and they were loyal and you could indoctrinate them to a point of view you would make more money.

And so we’ve all been media trained as we will talk about in a minute. We’ve all been media trained. Into giving the media, the benefit of the doubt. But the New Media landscape thrives, on propaganda and disinformation, and I think the difference between misinformation and disinformation is Miss information, might be a mistake.

This information is intentional. It is designed to divide us to manipulate us to make someone who isn’t you. Come out ahead and I Leave the folks who are intentionally working to hurt us to punish us to divide us to traumatize us with untruths about things, like vaccines know full, well, that they are wrong but they also know that in the short run, they are coming out ahead. They are profiting.

So your question is, how do we going forward? Get back to that golden age. And It’s Tricky, It’s tricky because As there are institutions that have earned our trust and are working to keep our trust, but human beings being short-sighted and lazy and easily distracted. Oh look a puppy. Sometimes. Get bored with the truth and instead chase a fable instead. Number two. The problem is that identity isn’t always clear and with AI it’s going to be even easier to fake a video or Or a news report and we won’t know exactly who said it.

So I think that what’s going to happen over time is we are going to come up with more secure channels for information so we can actually verify who is speaking to us. And I think that over time when the side effects and repercussions of these myths truths come home to roost people at least for a little while.

Will flee from them. Joe McCarthy persuaded a lot of people in the United States in the 50s. And then he didn’t and some people learn their lesson and got back on track. But yet it’s a bumpy road and part of the reason it’s bumpy is because in small communities, we give people the benefit of the doubt in true mass media.

We gave media the benefit of the doubt, and now we have a hybrid that is neither it, neither fully Mass, but it’s large and it’s not something that we can look at and say, yes. These people have An incentive to be telling us the truth. So I hate to say buyer, beware. I’d rather say Carpe Diem seize the day, but the fact is, we need to think really hard about the long-term impacts of the propaganda. And indoctrination.

It’s being used against us. We need to consider how the person who’s talking to us benefits. We need to think hard about the fact that, if you are not paying for something, you’re not the customer. You’re the product and is someone turning you into a product because Up them, not you. Hey Seth, this is me. Hal phoning from an organic farm in. Ontario, Canada.

Just Northwest of New York. First, thank you for all that you do and a special shout-out to the akimbo community. And all of the people that enable it. I’ve had the great privilege and pleasure of being in several of the workshops, and I’m in writing in community 3 right now and it’s just an absolute blast.

And so your recent podcast on the story of money and the tethering system was quite compelling and shortly, after, as life. That works out. I came across the work of dr. Zachary Stein, who writes on education, and he had written a few articles and was interviewed about the difference between education and propaganda.

And it got me thinking about story and the story of money. If the monetary system, now comes down to story. What story We Believe, then it made me wonder about dr. Stein’s reference to propaganda. And that what propaganda is about, is an opaque form of information, sharing versus education meant to truly impart knowledge, and ideally enable the receiver to become smarter for it. Extend the work. Where do you go to get educated about the story of money?

How can we, if we choose to dive in, find the transparent, open sources of knowledge. How do you judge if it’s open or meant to obfuscate? That’s what I’m left with all the best and boom. Right after I got that question. I got this one, another great point about the story of money. And for sure people who we think we can trust giant buildings, Banks Brokers, plenty of folks who are either asking us to spend our money or save. Our money might not be amplifying a story of money that gives us utility for the long run.

So story money has two parts the Your part to part I’d rather focus on is what do we teach our kids about value? What do we teach our kids about how spending for something, gets them what they want? Or doesn’t as it says, in that great book, shantaram happiness was invented by marketers who are trying to sell us something for Millennia happiness or satisfaction was not associated with somehow, taking money to buy something. We had never bought before. Shopping is a very recent invention.

And I have been to parts of the world where there is no shopping. And the whole idea that you would go to a store with money to buy something you’ve never had before. Just to give you pleasure. That’s not basic human nature. That’s something that’s been taught to us. So, teaching ourselves and our kids in our family and the people around us, a useful story of money.

The whole idea. You don’t have to be in debt to be fully alive. I think that’s critical. And then within that is the story of money of money, meaning Do we really understand how Bitcoin Works? Do we really understand what it means to put our money in a mutual fund. Do we really understand? What a piece of stock is even worth.

I know from personal experience. When I’ve awarded people stock options, even some of the smartest people, I know don’t really understand what’s being offered that as money as an instrument, turns into more and more derivatives and more people start playing the Robin Hood game of buying games. For some other version of it as more people are saying, my savings are in crypto currency, as more governments are becoming dependent on stories about money.

I think it’s imperative that we figure out as individuals. What we individually are going to do about it. And there is no truth of money because money itself has to be a story. No one accepts, a twenty dollar bill because that piece of paper is worth anything. If they accept it because they think they can trade that piece of paper for something else tomorrow.

Thanks for this one.

He Seth Jeremy from Winnipeg Canada here. I’ve been listening through your back catalog of episodes and I recently listened to the episode on apertures, a specifically the section or you kind of reference them a few times throughout the episode, but the Go-Go’s and it was actually the clip from one of their songs that you played at the end of the episode that got me thinking about a question. I’ve had in the past and essentially it boils down to it seems From our modern perspective. When you look back on media, whether it’s music or movies or TV from say 30 or 40 years ago.

A lot of it feels really ham-fisted almost that feels like there’s no subtlety. And I think this is especially true of a lot of movies and TV.

Whereas nowadays, it feels like a lot of popular TV is filled with nuance and subtlety and it’s not quite so obvious. And the same thing for music, like The, the lyrics in that song that you played by the Go-Go’s feel like. So, reminiscent of a certain era of Music where there’s no real depth or Nuance to the lyrics.

Where is it? Seems like now, on average, like media is just smarter and and more subtle and more nuanced. And I’m curious what your Thoughts are on that our audiences. Like, I imagine there have been creators, who have been writing Nuance to work and creating nuanced work for centuries or Millennia. And so, is it, that now, there is an appetite from audiences for more subtle work have audience, has evolved and, and shifted as our culture, has evolved and shifted to actually, not only desire this or when I guess not only understand this type of work and get it. But now that there’s a natural appetite for it.

Yeah. It is something that I’ve thought about. About many times when I have been re-watching, you know, old favorites, whether that’s movies or TV, or listen to music and comparing it to more current types of media. So, I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for everything you do. And the 3rd grade question to bring us home.

Cultural Literacy story, literacy propaganda literacy, disinformation literacy, and yes media literacy. I too have found that when I watch movies that I loved from 30 or 40 years ago. I can’t believe how slow they are. Not just slow but sometimes too much on the nose. That one of the things that’s happened, as we have increased our screen time, from a couple hours a day to seven, or eight or nine or 12 hours a day.

Is we have dramatically amped up, how much we can absorb from various forms of media. Also, The Gatekeepers have become bored. And so The Gatekeepers are asking, the people who produce stuff to amp up The Impressions per moment. And finally, we’ve got the issue of the long tail, which is The Carol Burnett, Show needed to entertain, 50 million Americans, every Free Saturday night where it was going to fail and fifty million people getting the same joke.

Well, you pretty much got to give them a broader joke, whereas if you’re a stand-up doing something on Netflix, maybe 100,000 people at a time, are watching what you’re doing. And over the course of your run. You’ll reach a few million. So you need to be specific back to this idea of the smallest viable audience, but I will not necessarily be persuaded by your point about Nuance. There are plenty of novels from the 1960s that are way more nuanced than something you might buy at an airport today.

There are songs that were written 100 years ago or 50 years ago or 20 years ago that are filled with thoughtful, clever, allegories and innuendo, and all sorts of other literary elements.

Rolling Stone, but that’s not how used to be when the jester sang for the king and queen in a Coke. He borrowed from James, Dean and a voice came from you. And me, while the King was looking down. The jester stole is thorny crown. The court was adjourned. ER, practiced in the park and we sang. But I think the big difference is this, if you wanted to make music in the 60s or 70s, you really couldn’t get a label deal.

Unless you were Carol Burnett sized in who you were going to appeal to. And so there, the filter was Done. And now the stuff you like it’s entirely possible is really nuanced and thoughtful and adult but you don’t have to listen very hard or very widely to realize. There’s just as much dumb music being made as there ever was, in fact, maybe even more Because there’s no shortage of people who simply aren’t willing to do the mental work to Think. Through what’s being said to them?

They just want to zone out. And that zoning out that desire to zone out while it might be a human. Inclination is one that is Amplified Often by marketers or politicians who are hoping to lull us into a sense of acceptance. So they can get what they want in the short run all the way of ranting all around three. Which is I wish it wasn’t up to us. I wish we as a community, could come together and figure out how to put a hand on the tiller.

So that we are heading as a community in a way that leads us toward resilience and dignity. But in these rough times, I think it’s essential that a each of us figure out what we’re absorbing and why, and be even more important figure out how to teach the others.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you’re going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

What are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up. And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I Can show us consider the alt MBA? More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -money-is-a-story- <==

Listen to this podcast all the way to the end and you’ll have a long shot chance to win a Bitcoin, which, as I record this is worth more than 30-thousand US Dollars. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about a couple of the problems with money, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out. Visit akimbo.com. Go for all the upcoming workshops. Go make a ruckus.

The pursuit of money, it seems might be the root of all evil, but money is so convenient, because with money, we can put a price on it with money. We can boil it down to numbers and we can use those numbers to motivate people to Value. People to get people to do what we want to reward people. But there are some problems with numbers more than a decade ago to economists who studied He gave here decided to do an experiment in Haifa.

And the experiment was this if you are working at a daycare center, you have a real problem. And your problem is that when the day is over, 4:00, let’s say if a parent doesn’t come to pick up their kid. You really can’t leave. You’ve got to stay with the kid until the parent. Finally shows up. Well, as reported on Freakonomics this problem can really wear out. Out a teacher because they’re not getting paid very much and they’re sitting there hoping to go home to their family, and their stranded.

And most of the time most parents pick their kids up on time, even though there’s no penalty associated with it. Because the next day, the penalty is real. You have to look that teacher in the eye day. After day is a, please take care of my kid again. I know I’ve avoided a social contract. So what these researchers did?

Was they put in place a fine system at some of the daycare centers. If you were late to pick up your kid, you had to pay a non-trivial fine. Well, you’re probably guessing because I’m telling you this story, what happened? It turned out that the number of parents who were late doubled.

It didn’t go down. It doubled and the reason it doubled is simple because now it’s a transaction. Even Steven, you have no A ship at stake. We told you what the price is for being late. It’s worth it. I’ll be late. This decision is based on one person’s, understanding of money, and the biggest problem we have, when we resort to money as a substitute for social status, for affiliation for Community, for the social contract, is different people, value money in different ways.

Some people think, sure, thing money. Way more valuable than a chance to win a Bitcoin that in Ohio to get people to do the right thing and get vaccinated. They started a vaccine Lottery to enter the lottery. You simply need to be vaccinated. Here’s your chance to win a million dollars and thousands and thousands of people got vaccinated as a result.

What if they had just divided it out and realize that on average this sweepstakes this Lottery over time. I would end up costing them say $50 a person, why not just say come get vaccinated and will give you $50 because there is a difference there is a difference between the dream of a million dollars and the certainty of. Yeah, 50 bucks.

I’ll hesitate and that’s part of our narrative around money. Why is it that so many people apply to School instead of learning what they need to learn to go work on Wall Street because the person who only cares about money, says, if you work on Wall Street, you’ll make a whole bunch. More money is a doctor more valuable than somebody who ends up putting in the systems that enable the hospital to work in the first place.

Because the thing is, without that janitor, you get sepsis, you’d be in the hospital for months. Months with a painful infection. Why do we pay the doctor? So much more than the janitor? Because most people, I’m guessing would rather have doctor work, then gender work. So what’s going on here? It comes down to this idea that we all have our own stories about money.

And one of the challenges were having as we start to bring in things like Bitcoin and smart contracts is, we are boiling more and more things down to cash money. So here’s a simple thought experiment. That one could imagine with smart contracts. A smart contract is just what it sounds like. It’s in. The cloud data goes in data, goes out. But if you hook a smart contract up to bitcoin, you could do things like this.

If according to this website, it rains on October 5th, then you get all the money that’s in this account. If it doesn’t rain, I get all the money that’s in this account. Count once it’s set up. It can’t be changed. The smart contract is simply going to adjudicate what happens and nobody can say. Nope. I want to do over smart contracts, enable certain kinds of financial transactions to go much more smoothly than the old way with escrow accounts and lawyers and everything else. So, imagine a smart contract that looks like this.

We want HR 1 to pass. It’s a bill in front right now, if And of the House and Senate of the United States and we have identified a dozen people who might get in the way of it passing. So the community tens of thousands of us are all going to contribute, a Bitcoin here, a Bitcoin here, some e, th and it’s going to end up that this can be 20 million dollars in this smart contract account, and it will automatically send a million or more dollars to each one of these. He’s 12 people, if it passes, we don’t have to ask their permission. It’s simply in space.

Suddenly democracy is held hostage. It’s not held hostage by ransomware, where hackers are taking over Hospital Systems, in demanding money to give them back.

It’s taken over by the citizenry who are basically saying, we’re going to bribe you to do, what needs to be done, and we’re going to do it in a way that no one can stop us from doing it because It’s essentially an anonymous and the smart contract is there for all to see, so back to this idea of what’s going on in Haifa, when you can pay your way out of a problem.

When you can pay to buy something, people treat it differently than the idea of nationalism or patriotism or doing the right thing or being part of a circle. And what we are in danger of doing because we are in such a rush to To scale, everything is to put a price on everything but people want to put a price on everything end up valuing, nothing, because it’s in community that we find what drives us. It’s in community.

This idea of unstated obligations and opportunities that we figure out what makes us human smaller side. It’s very interesting to watch the reaction that people have When folks try to train a dog using positive reinforcement, so the way it works is you get a super high value treat. That’s what they’re called.

You take something. I don’t know. Horrible like liver and divide it into tiny, tiny, tiny little pieces and they make pouches. You can buy to hold your tiny little pieces of high-value treats and then every single time the dog does something that you want the dog to do again, you give it a tiny treat.

They take an action, boom. They get a hit of endorphins over and over and over again, and using this method. And then, perhaps a clicker, you can train dogs to do extraordinary things through an obstacle courses, to learn 30, 40 50, different phrases to become insanely, quote, obedient unquote. And people look at this and they say, well, you’re just bribe in the dog.

Well, it’s fascinating, because any way that you train a dog, you’re bribing the dog. The problem that people have Isn’t the bribery isn’t the operant conditioning that’s going on. I think the problem we have is, it’s a so obvious. It’s so obvious. Why the dog is doing it. They’re not doing it because they’re your friend and you ask them nicely.

They’re doing it because there’s something in it for the dog. And when we boil it down to a Smart contract, it just feels like it’s not the same sort of connection, the other challenge that we have. Which is Alluded to earlier is in addition to making transactions distant the same way. We have no relationship with our bank because they’re just in it for the money.

We have. The problem that different people tell themselves, different stories about money. If you were billionaire, would you go to work tomorrow? Why is it the Billionaire’s? Even look at the Forbes 400 list of billionaires. Why do they get happy? If they move up and sad if they move down? What exactly are they keeping score of? And yes, I promised you a chance to to win a Bitcoin. So here we go. If your social security number is 0 7805 1120, just visit akimbo dot link and let me know and I will happily upon proof that that’s your social security number, send you a Bitcoin.

Now, of course, I’m cheating because that number 07 8051, 120 belongs to Hilda Witcher, Hilda. Unfortunately held that social security number in the 40s when a company that was making wallets wanted. Explain to people at Woolworth’s that you could actually keep your Social Security card in your wallet.

And this company, which was right down the street from me, in Tonawanda, New York. When I was growing up this company decided that the only way to inform people of this was to make a fake Social Security card and they made up a number and it was Hilt of, and at one point more than 5,000 people. We’re using Hilda’s social security, number in various transactions.

Purpose of this thought experiment is this is a podcast. You listen to because you’re going to win a prize at the end better than one. You listen to just because you want to listen to it. And also when you found out that not only didn’t you win but that you couldn’t have one because I cheated, were you annoyed?

Well, the odds of you winning in the first place were so low, they were essentially zero. So how did finding out? That you weren’t actually going to win the money when you weren’t actually going to win the money. Anyway, change the way you felt.

We went back and forth with this a lot. When I started yoyodyne yoyodyne, ran the first sweepstakes and promotions and contests on the internet at scale. We were the first people to give away a million dollars to somebody on the internet. We had clients like, American Express and Carter Wallace Procter & Gamble and the deal was simple. Play these games, pay attention. Attention to these ads and you might win a prize.

I remember giving someone Babe Ruth’s autographed baseball and World Cup tickets and it was really fun to build that organization part of the push back. We got from advertisers was, we don’t want to advertise to people who are paying attention because they might win something. We want to advertise to people who really and truly want to hear from us and that led to my concept of permission marketing. But the irony of course, is that most Advertisers are busy running ads in front of people who have to see the ad before they decide if they want to see the ad or not.

And so, there’s a paradox and most humans deal with the Paradox by choosing not to pay attention, because it’s a lousy deal. And so, when we think about the attention economy, two words that are interesting to juxtapose because attention, we’re not making any more of it. Everyone gets the same. Same amount every day and economy which plugs into scarcity, which reinforces the idea that attention doesn’t scale in the attention economy. How on Earth are we learning people’s attention?

Well, one way to do it is use Hilda’s, social security number and offer them the thrill. The emotional pleasure of thinking, they might win something because the fact is for most of the time when people are playing the lottery, they feel good. Now, Add, they feel good thinking about buying a lottery ticket. They feel good. Buying a lottery ticket. They feel good in the days, leading up to the reveal about whether they want or not. And then they only feel bad for a little while when they find out they lost.

So sooner or later. Once we have a roof over our heads and something to eat access to healthcare and some basic needs met sooner or later. Money is just a story. It’s a story. We Tell ourselves. To change the way we and others, behave. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. Oh, one more thing. I feel badly about my stunts and tricking you. So here’s an actual possible, social security number.

And if it’s yours and you can show that you’ve been a subscriber to akimbo before, this episode came out. Just let me know and the Bitcoin is yours. The number 52 3065 907.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

I hope you’ll check out what the people at a Kimbo are up to visit. Akimbo.com. Go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

It’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the Pain Scale, entire, sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki MB o .l, iink and click the appropriate button. Two questions this week. Here we go. Hey, Seth. I was listening to recent podcast about creativity. Another one about artificial intelligence. And just wanted to know, you thought about artificial intelligence and our time, a wedding photographer and there’s a trend at the moment for outsourcing work to artificial intelligence to edit photographs. And I’m thinking that this is a A bit of a slippery slope to be honest, and it’s kind of going back to looking for the easy option and becoming a commodity. What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence and creativity?

Thanks a lot.

Thank you for this. Here’s an example of artificial intelligence applied to photography a few decades ago. They built into cameras. Something that would focus them automatically when you are ready to take a picture and around the same time, they put something in cameras. They would automatically change the aperture, letting in just the right amount of light, when you were taking a picture.

And so the question is, did the artificial intelligence of I guess an auto exposure, did it? Make it more or less likely that professional photographers could make a living? And I think you don’t have to be an economist to understand that the number of professional photographers went up not down because having tools that worked more reliably and effectively actually open the door for more creativity and photography in particular over the last 20 years.

Has seen Seen an enormous increase in that technology. Now. Everybody has a camera. What it means is that you don’t get to make a living as a photographer, because you’re the only one, who knows how to use a camera or because you’re the only one who has a camera. That’s not good enough. That if someone’s going to even bother hiring a wedding photographer, it’s going to be because they do something that someone can’t do with an Android or an iPhone.

Someday, for sure. It will simply become a commodity that cameras will be so smart, that uman beings won’t be able to add much in the way of value. But there are two things about artificial intelligence and machine learning. The first one is we defined it as everything, a computer can’t do yet or everything. A camera, can’t do yet.

And second that it’s really good at doing things from the past better. That training, a Pewter to get smart and what happened yesterday, we’re getting better and better at that but training a computer to come up with something that hasn’t been done before. That’s still really hard. So if you’re someone who Embraces creativity, I think you ought to be in favor of artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence gets rid of all the jobs.

You don’t even want to do and it opens the door for things that make us nervous for things that we can’t even imagine yet. Hi.

Seth. Carrie newhoff from Aroma, don t, north of Toronto and really appreciated your latest episode on expect delays. I have seen and share your frustration with the way things seem to be breaking down. And my question is I wonder what kind of opportunity this opens up. For those of us who make things to make promises. We keep to go the extra mile to be more personal in our service rather than cutting back to maybe move forward in advance.

And obviously profitability is Important. Otherwise you’re not in business, but I would love your thoughts on how to see what’s happening in our culture right now as an opportunity rather than to Simply join the pack. And yeah, let the people that were trying to serve down. Thanks Seth. Appreciate all you do.

Thank you for this one and I hope the winter is comfortable for you up there. I miss a relia. I think when we think about the supply chain, what we’re going to see is this the excuse of well, Cheap doesn’t really work very well. If you have to wait two weeks or four weeks or six weeks for your delivery, for a little while. We had both for a little while. We had you can get it overnight and you can get it cheap, but for a while to come you can’t have both that some organizations, some businesses will charge appropriately for things that are available date, certain if you want a custom wedding cake delivered to your door on the day of your wedding.

It shouldn’t be the same price as getting a bunch of stuff from the grocery store. And if it’s not there, go to a different grocery store because that Bakery has put itself out on a limb. If you’re going to take a plane from one place to another and you want service, that isn’t going to be interrupted or cancelled with a good excuse or a bad excuse, you’re going to pay extra and so the markets going to split, there’s going to be people who say, well, we’ve got it, if we’ve got an, if we don’t have it, you can get it from somewhere else.

And hey, it’s cheap. Or they’re going to be people who say, well, if you want it on date certain, you’re going to pay for it. The exception might be things like this, podcast, delivered to you week after week, year after year for free and on time, but that’s mostly the exchange of digital information for everything else.

Where the supply chain is involved. I think we’re going to get what we pay for and pay for what we get. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. Well, in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of A community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the One reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -happiness-runs- <==

Are you happy happiness runs in a circular motion. Thought there’s like a little boat upon the sea. Everybody is a part of everything. Anyway, you can have everything. If you let yourself be happiness, runs having us around. Hey itself. And this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about what that question. Even means. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about Of the workshops. My friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about, what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100%. Went non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

Are you happy marketers can’t get enough of that question because the pursuit of happiness, the Freedom From Pain, the place that status roles and affiliation fill our confusion about what timeframe happiness even exists in. This is the fuel for so much of the change. And The pitch that marketers seek to make in our community and our culture.

Let’s start with a really great quote from a book called shantaram in it. The fictional character. Carla says, happiness was invented by marketers to sell us something. So, how does that even work? First? Let’s explore what the word. Polysemy means. Pol Ys. Eme from the Greek. Polysemy means word. Words that can generally be understood to mean different things.

We’re not talking about homonyms. We’re talking about words that can be interpreted differently by different people. So what does it mean to be hungry? Well, some people are hungry because they haven’t had a snack in 45 minutes. Some people are hungry, because they’re on the edge of starvation. I hope we can agree that those are different concepts.

Well, when we think about happiness, we need to think about eudaimonia. Eudaimonia. Also from the Greek is the idea of a life, well-lived. The general understanding of how we believe we are situated in our life. The long-term view to be happy with a sense of eudaimonia is very different from the toddler who is really unhappy because his or her brother got a cookie and they didn’t.

So they’re different understandings. One of them is sort of a day trading. Am I up? Am I down? Who is next to me? Do they have more? What am I missing out on fomo in the rest of it. The other one is more of a spiritual understanding of groundedness of what it means to be in community. What it means to have flow. Now in, then it’s widely reported. That happiness goes up with income for a while and And it stops going up.

The problem with this wide reporting is that they don’t really put their arms around, what it even means to be happy. If we compare studies across countries, the Nordic countries tend to rank quite highly on the short-term day trading, sort of Happiness. The fact is not too many. People are poking a stick in your eye.

If you are living with the extraordinary, social net and cultural cohesion that one can find in certain order. Dick situations, on the other hand, in many, South American countries, people are scoring much higher on effect based surveys of current life experience. Are you living a life that gives you? A sense of Happiness? There are different sorts of things.

And so if you’re someone with lots of money when we think that you can buy whatever you need and so your current experience should be off the charts. In fact, it’s not and the reason. It’s not is because marketers, keep reminding you of the things you can’t have of the fact that money can’t buy you a certain thing, certain levels of status whatever.

So we think about the person who gets nominated for an Academy Award and losses. Well, compared to all but six actors or actresses in the entire world. This person is at the top, but because they lost their current experience is there in tears because they didn’t get what they wanted in that moment.

And when we think about how to organize our lives, one of the things that we see is that as people are exposed to more retail options, as people are exposed to more advertising advertising which exists to make people feel momentarily, sad, until they buy something that will solve their problem. We’ve even called this retail therapy, the more you are Just to this need to buy something to solve your problem.

The less likely it is you’re going to feel like you have enough and if you don’t feel like you have enough and you’re regularly reminded that you don’t have enough, it’s not difficult to imagine that eudaimonia is going to be hard to find. So when we think about how we weave together culture and a safety net, and when we think about the work that marketers do to move things. As forward, we have to take a deep breath and say why is it that people who have very little people who are living in conditions that most of us couldn’t even? Imagine why is happiness. Prevalent there, does it mean that one has to be really poor to be happy? I don’t think. So. I think what’s happening in situations where people don’t have enough resources to have what we would consider adequate housing and adequate Health Care. There is a Focus not on. How do I get money to solve my problem today?

But instead a focus on I get to live today, just one time, how will I live a life that I am pleased to live even though I don’t have money to buy my way forward years ago. I was in a little village near Borelli India. And I met somebody, I put his picture up in the show notes. He was the spiritual leader of this tiny. The community. They didn’t have electricity everything.

This person owned fit into one carry-on bag. He didn’t have a carry-on bag, but that’s how much stuff you don’t, and he was truly happy. Happy in the long run. Was he aware that he could have had a cell phone? Was he aware that he could have had multiple changes of clothes or be able to go to town and buy whatever he wanted if he had had resources. Yes, he was aware of it, but wasn’t an economic incentive to keep reminding him of what he didn’t have, because he couldn’t buy anything anyway, and so, when we think about the interventions that marketers and other people make in a community, one thing that we know is that doing something like bringing solar lanterns or antibiotics, or childcare to a community, is going to increase both the day-to-day feeling of happiness and And the long-term sense of well-being, but when we add multiple layers of you don’t have what other people have multiple layers of. This is the dream to have this particular car.

We’re not actually creating a certain kind of Happiness. What we’re doing instead is creating problems problems. Based on status problems, based on scarcity. There can be solved by buying something. Of the reasons that our culture does, that is the need to buy more. Things keeps industry going, the need to buy more things gets people off their butt and going to the factory to work those extra hours. So they can buy more things. It creates the ratchet, the cycle, that fuels the industrial world. We live in.

But as Marshall, sahlins has written, so brilliantly back in the day, when there were cavemen life, might have been much shorter. I I couldn’t have imagined living with cavities for years at a time. But at the same time, people didn’t work that many hours and I’m guessing they had the experience of eudaimonia quite often because we have to get clear about what? The words mean.

So, back to where this rant started. Are you happy? Bad question because the polysemy because many of us share different views of what it means to be happy. And so, Disney World. Disney World, almost never makes kids feel a sense of well-being, Disney World and other places like Disney World exists to create enormous amounts of stress, stress. Because you can’t go stress, because you’re about to go stress cause you’re here, but you don’t have everything you want stress, because you’re in line and you’re hoping to get to the next thing.

And then that stress is relieved. Stress relief back and forth. That’s a certain form of happiness, is one that for many people is thrilling and can get us hooked on a cycle. But when we add it all up, it’s not clear. It leads to eudaimonia and so, yes, it is possible to have both. It is possible to have both, but to do that, we’re going to need a form of emotional hygiene.

We’re going to need to figure out as individuals as families and as a culture. What Isolate ourselves from what is enough? How many hours on Facebook or Twitter? Add up to us feeling happy and everything beyond that ends up making us feel less. Happy.

Kevin. Kelly has written brilliantly about the Amish. The Amish are not actually anti-technology, the Amish have tons of Technology, but what they have done for over 100 years, is simple. When a new technology. Ecology arises they appoint someone from the community, their nerd in Chief and say to this person.

Go check out this new technology. Go. Try it out and come back to us and tell us whether you think it will lead to more Community. Cohesion, whether you think that bringing that into our community will lead to happier days happier months and happier lives. And so the reason that the Amish keep a telephone At a hundred yards from the house in a little Shack all by itself and not have cell phones. For everybody is, that’s exactly the right distance to have a phone for certain purposes, but far enough away that you’re not going to use it to separate yourself from the family that actually brings you pleasure.

So when we think about technology and marketing, the questions, we need to ask ourselves is what does technology want? What does marketing want? And what they probably don’t want. Is our long-term happiness, what they probably want is to grow is to gain status and stature and have influence even if it costs us eudaimonia and I can’t help. But wonder if we had come up with better names back in the day of Noah Webster and gotten rid of the word eudaimonia, which is hard to spell in hard to say and been really clear about what kind of happiness is on offer, whether Carla and show Santorum would have said, happiness was invented by marketers to make us buy stuff, because there probably needs to be a better word for that.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with three questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

When is it time to level up? What is it? Time to learn a new way, to see the world to connect with? To lead to engage in possibility. Akimbo is a b Corp, an independently owned and operated institution designed around, learning, not education. Not certificates, not grades, but learning together. It works. If you do the work.

I hope you’ll check out what the people at akimbo are up to visit, akimbo.com, go to find out about their new upcoming workshops and how it all works. Thanks.

Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. High fences on the Pain Scale entire sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They sent this is Rex. Who’s gonna? Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki and Bo link2sd. The appropriate button, some good questions this week, including one. That’s a little bit meta. So, here we go. Hello self. This is witty, Colin from Indianapolis, Indiana.

In a podcast. Time keeps on Slippin. You talked about how we have saved time with modern conveniences like working from home and using process vegetables, but we have used the time saved to buy more stuff and or to Scroll Online. I just spent six weeks in the Congo, drilling water wells in remote Villages, those water wells will provide safe water and they will be closer to the village for women and girls who fish to water.

Some have estimated that close to the water could say women and girls worldwide 200 million hours a year diabetes and Obesity is on the rise throughout Africa at an alarming rate. Therefore. Are we solving one problem, but creating another problem with more deadly consequences. What would you suggest in conjunction? With water, wells, being closer to the Villages.

Thank you. For all your work, especially your order, your books and this podcast, and thanks to Alex, DePalma.

Thank you for this Woody. And for the work you’re doing. This gives me a moment to talk about charity, water here in the United States toward the end of the year. People think about giving money to charity for tax related reasons. Well, charity water is a cause I’ve been associated with for a long time.

And if that’s the way you’re thinking, right? This minute, check them out at charity, water.org with that said, I think that there is a really big difference between what happens. People who are short, really, really short on resources, get them. And what happens with people who have privilege, who get them.

That what we saw in the last 500 years on planet Earth is that when you give people enough resources to sustain their life, they invent great things. They invent medicines. They create orchestral Symphonies, they communicate with other people in their community. Unity and make things better. And so, I am all in favor of saving 200 million hours, or more, and giving people the dignity. They need to get water to survive.

The point of my rant earlier was at some point we end up having enough and then we just use the time. We saved to amuse ourselves and all too often. We amuse ourselves to death and we do it in a selfish way. So it was just a heads up to say, Thank you, Woody for taking the time, you are saving and using it to save the lives of people who need our help.

Hey Seth, this is Richard. New York. Love everything you’re doing. I’ve listed every episode so far and plan on continuing to do. So, my question isn’t about one particular episode. But combination of are made even mention a few of your notes. So I was running along the Hudson in the fall. So there are no jet. Skis loudly writing by, which is nice.

I was thinking about today, where people say.

Has ever been like this before? Right. Have people been concerned about this? Has the world been this shape and most of the times the answer is yeah. It has been. You can pull articles from the 20s or the 30s and the 40s and find people are talking about the same things, but my question is, Do you think the difference is in readership?

And that. Yeah, the New York Times was talking about this 100 years ago, but what percentage of the country was actually reading and we’re actually talking about it and it feels like that’s really the difference between maybe if there is one between today. And before is that now everybody knows everything and that things that start maybe as article in a newspaper, get pulled to their extreme posted on Facebook Twitter Etc.

Where the people Who may not have been reading the New York Times earlier are now reading Twitter and Facebook. And so now they’re exposed to the same concerns. People had back then, and that’s what’s really pulling it apart. Anyway, just a random thought, appreciate everything you do.

Thanks for this Rich. It’s pretty clear that all around us. Things seem even in more disarray than we ever could have imagined. I heard Steven Pinker talking about his book, The Better angels of our nature before it came out to an audience of about 100 really well-informed people. His book is about the fact that the Earth is safer. Most people are better off than ever before in human history. Even if we count a pandemic that there is more Access to healthcare.

And yes to clean water on a per capita basis than ever before. In human history that there are fewer active Wars on a per capita basis than ever. And when people hear this, they actually get upset, they get upset because it seems wrong. It seems like he’s minimizing all the pain and suffering around us.

So I think you’ve put your finger on part of it, which is, there has always been news that In the early 1900’s, there were dozens of daily newspapers in New York, but the difference is news has been Amplified and weaponized and pushed in front of us. It has become a profit Center. Yeah, when William Randolph, Hearst helped start the Spanish-American War. He did it, to make circulation go up. You give me the pictures, I’ll give you the war.

And now, there are tens and tens of thousands of really talented people whose only job His to put us on edge, to push us to need to swipe one more time just to make sure everything is okay. And by turning it into a profit Center by turning it into a way to manipulate people. What we are doing is Shifting, people’s attention, sometimes for the better. Like, when we think about the folks, the charity water benefits.

And sometimes for the worse, when we use it, simply to make ourselves. Unsettled about things we can’t do anything about anyway and Caveat Emptor buyer beware figure out how you want to spend because you’re the buyer your time and try to avoid being the product. So yes, I’m very glad that I wasn’t a particularly conscious human being during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m glad I was born after the Berlin blockade. I am relieved that it was a long time ago. When the atrocities of World War Two happened that if we think about the Spanish Flu, when people didn’t even understand germ Theory, ripped through our world, killing millions and millions of people when we think about something like the Civil War on and on really horrible things, have happened to humanity. Since I don’t know the opening of 2001 A Space Odyssey, but the fact remains that we have a chance to be resilient. To lean into the possibility of making things better and part of that is choosing the media that we consume so that we actually use it as a fuel and Tool, not as something to bring us down, Heda cook from Melbourne, in Australia.

With a question about your request for questions. Notice that normally you say something like as you know, I’d love to hear from you and here’s how you can leave a question. Kitchen, and in your last episode, you said something like as you know, I love to hear from you and I could really use some questions and I noticed listening that had a very different impact on me. That instead of it being.

Do I have a question that I want an answer to it? Was suddenly assess actually need some help. This is his asking for some help. He could use some more questions and I was much more drawn to Leave a question as I am doing. And what I was wondering is, what was your thinking behind that from a marketing perspective? Was that a conscious thing and did it have an impact 10, any change in the metrics? Were there more questions left as a result.

Thank you, as always for everything you do.

Thank you for those Peter. Yes, indeed. I did change the phrasing that was very alert of you. And yes, indeed, it tripled. The number of questions that came in. I love hearing from people but I don’t like it if I get too many questions because then I can’t answer them all and I feel bad about that and I don’t like it if I don’t get enough questions because then I don’t know what to say at the end of the show.

And so far, it’s been in a wonderful balance but a month or so ago, there was a little bit of a drought so I changed two words and as Saw, Yes, it led to more questions. So I have a tiny bit of a backlog. But, yeah, I do love to hear from you. Visit akimbo dot, link the show knocked her there as well.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success, seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great. I say a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

You got to face those fears. I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up. And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up. It was possible for me, not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up.

Consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -telemedicine- <==

Illness doesn’t always repeat itself. But it Rhymes. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo, the doctor. Give me the news. I gotta, we’ll be back in a second to talk about the future of telemedicine. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

I’m Kenneth watch, de I started the wise photo project in my photo studio in Colorado, back in 2015. Teen as the way to make portraits of the sweet old faces that live locally, but very few people are photographing seniors, and I wanted to make them for their great, great grandchildren. So they would always know where they came from.

I opened up the project to photographers around the world and I welcome you to join me at the wise photo project.com. Thanks in 1889. William Osler, doctor pioneered the idea of the modern medical school. He combined The idea of an internship with grand rounds. Basically, understanding that medicine was learned by doing medicine. What he created was a system where young doctors would follow experienced doctors around visiting patients, one after another and learning as they went, because we all know. I hope that it’s better to see an experienced doctor than it is to see a doctor who has never seen.

Somebody with your symptoms before because as much as medicine feels like a science where we know exactly what’s going on. Mostly, it’s a pattern matching exercise. Mostly what’s going on among talented. Doctors is that they are able to sniff out patterns with more accuracy and a little earlier than other people can.

And when they find a pattern, that makes sense to them, when it’s a pattern that has a name. They then follow the steps to help people. Get better. All of this is important to understand because the world of medicine like everything else in our world has been turned upside down in this case, by Zoom.

By the idea that not only don’t you have to go sit in a room with sick, people for two or three hours or in some parts of the world six or seven hours before you see a doctor for 5 or 10 minutes, but you don’t have to go see the doctor. That’s near you. You could go. Oh, see the right doctor? That what telemedicine allows us to do is not only transport ourselves across time and space but also magically bring others.

Both systems Ai and humans into the conversation when it’s appropriate. But if you’ve had anything to do with telemedicine now that the peak of the pandemic is hopefully behind us, what you will have discovered. Is that once again, the Our mechanic mindset of some people in the medical industry and it is an industry is kicking in and what could be a green field filled with opportunity and efficiency. And efficacy is going back to being not very helpful at all.

Maybe you sent in some pictures of what was wrong with you and of course an office assistant printed them out on a black and white printer in low resolution and handed them to the doctor who didn’t have time to look at them before your call. You get the Idea, so here’s a whole bunch of things that ought to be considered, right? This moment to transform the way, most illnesses are looked at by most doctors in most situations.

The first one is this AI is really good at doing things, like, recognizing photographs. It’s also true. That more and more test results are being digitized and put online. When we combine those two things. What ought to be happening as Soon as you are sitting down in front of a doctor, is that a computer system ought to be reading, everything it can find about you and your background and making some informed guesses as to what might be wrong with you.

Now we can test whether those guess this should be revealed before or after the doctor forms an opinion, but the fact is that all of us are smarter and any of us, which means that having this database for Give me this Corpus of information will allow doctors to become much more effective. Number two.

You’ve all heard that recording when you’re on hold while you’re waiting for the next available. Operator. Well, why are we waiting for the next available doctor as opposed to the doctor who happens to be right down the street from you? That if we could imagine a pool of 1,000 well-trained telemedicine, doctors each rotating through as the system figures out, which doctor ought to be talking to which patient because of their experience because of their background and because of their availability, suddenly, we can open medicine to people all around the world and we can treat more people more elegantly and with more care because we’ve wiped out all of the downtime.

Number three on my screen. In addition to showing me the doctor small aside, any Doctor Who’s doing telemedicine? She read my blog post about cameras. You ought to have a setup that makes you look at least a little presentable and well lit. But again, back to what I was ranting about what you can put on the screen.

While the doctor is talking is information that I as a patient need to know. For example, when the doctors getting ready to write me a prescription. Why are you showing me on Screen, which other prescriptions are often written for a situation like mine and perhaps adjacent to it. You could show me compared to other doctors, which drug companies are engaging with this doctor, paying this doctor consulting fee sending salespeople to talk to this doctor wining and dining this doctor because while I trust, the doctors judgment, I would trust it even more.

If I understood what the status quo. What was, what the standard was and why this doctors prescribing? Something that isn’t the standard.

And now, another cool thing that could happen. Where’s the big red button that someone can choose to press maybe for extra money. Maybe not that says in this moment. I’d like a second opinion, maybe because this is a critical moment in my care, maybe, because I’m just not comfortable with what’s being said. Well, again, it’s Really hard to fly specialist into the room with you when you’re sitting at the campus of whatever Medical Institution, you’re on.

But if we could imagine the highest ranked most effective doctors doing, only second opinion, work. They could easily do 5 or 10 second opinions in an hour, press a button, the next available, one shows up, the doctor defends his, or her point of view. The Specialists here. Is it sees all the data right in front of them sees the AI. Operation and can chime in with a point of view, right next to that.

Why not show me this doctor? And this hospitals track record on situations like the one I’m in because if it turns out that 27 percent of the people who have I’m just making this up high blood pressure and these set of symptoms at this age, only 27% respond to certain kinds of treatment. But with this doctor it’s twice that well that’s going to help me. Some ways if it’s half that I need to understand. Am I in the right place having the right conversation. Another thing that we know about medicine is that much of the time it is the doctors manner that helps people get better as much as it is the Pharmaceuticals or the interventions. And on top of that, what happens after we leave the doctor’s presence, whether or not we take the meds whether or not we’ve got the right attitude, makes a huge difference.

So where is Is the handoff with telemedicine. You could instantly be handed off to the next available coach, somebody a lay person or a nurse practitioner, who can talk you through. What you just learned if we are willing to pay 250 or $350 for a prescription, seems to me. It’s worth paying fifteen or twenty dollars for somebody to show us how to use it. And if we can’t afford that, why not team us up with a buddy somebody. In a similar situation to our somebody with a similar background, somebody with a similar diagnosis. Let’s end this Zoom call with the doctor by being part of a group with two or three or four.

Similarly, positioned people. Who can support each other as they go through this because we know that somebody with a buddy feels less disconnected and is more likely to follow through. Let’s just keep going because already Google and apple and everybody else is Spying on us all the time. So why not have our drugs? Do it? Why not have the doctor? Find out the minute we fill, or don’t fill our prescription.

Why not have the prescription hooked up to something? That’s aware of how often we’re taking it. So that there’s a feedback loop in place all of the ideas. I’ve just shared with you have been showing up around the edges of medicine for a long time. But here, in this revolutionary moment, when impossible things are happening, when you can be on a call. With a world-class doctor, half a world away with five minutes, notice using telemedicine in this moment.

When we got all the data flowing around anyway, instead of having it, be sneaked up in the corner by people who are going to use it against us, who is leading the charge to have it be used for us and by us because in this moment, we have an agent of change. We can reimagine what’s on that screen. We can think hard about long. Long-term medical support as opposed to short-term and expensive medical intervention.

And the last part of my rant is this We don’t have health care system in the United States. We have a sickness system. That’s how the doctors, that’s how the people who work with the doctors, get paid. When we’re sick, and I think what we need to do and in this moment, we maybe could do it is figure out how to turn their priorities around in the incentives around and have a wellness system. Instead.

We’re interventions early and often transform People’s Health. Not just their pocketbook. Thanks for listening to my rant. I hope you’re well. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what You are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please.

Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth. Is Kyle reading. Seth? This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hogs X is on the pump. Pricer warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They sent this is Rex. Hays. Sahai. This is restless for Chris. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. Let me know. What’s on your mind. Visit akimbo link. That’s a Ki MB o .l, iink and click the appropriate button. I’m recording this on givingtuesday the end of November 20, 21 a couple relevant questions. Here we go. Hey Seth greetings from Western Massachusetts. This is Dan.

I work in the nonprofit fundraising sector. I’m curious about The marketers opinion on the phenomenon that is giving Tuesday.

One day a few days after a holiday of gratitude and a couple of days after. Intensive campaigns to get people to spend traditional retail and cyber retail. Where thousands upon thousands of Charities, flood your inbox with appeals to give because it’s a particular day out of 365. Asking when everybody else is asking.

A me to sort of movement in a different kind of way. I wondered what you think about it and how you could improve upon the good parts of it. In a way that would bring nonprofits closer relationship to the donors that can make the biggest difference to them. Thanks very much for all you do. Take care.

Thanks, Dan. I was in the room when Jerry scheff ski invented Cyber Monday back when very few people had heard about online shopping and I’ve written repeatedly about the stupidity and empty promise of Black Friday, but giving Tuesday, that one’s new today at noon. I had received by noon, 80 pitches for money.

It’s really hard to do retail fundraising for most charities. In fact, I don’t think most Charities should do retail fundraising, it has blown up because consultants and digital experts have gone to Charities and said we can use all of these tools permission marketing, spam SEO to come up with ways to spend, $5 to, maybe make six. And that’s one of the reasons you get so much junk on giving Tuesday. Now, there’s a good element of giving Tuesday, which is Is this a lot of actual fundraising people people who care about the cause they’re working with have resistance to making the ask. It feels like a hustler, feels like you’re asking somebody for something. They don’t want to give you and givingtuesday creates a dynamic where that’s expected. It sort of lets people off the emotional hook to have to do it because it’s giving Tuesday, on the other hand.

If we think about the Dynamics of Philanthropy, nobody gives money to charity, whether it’s ten dollars, a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars unless it’s worth more than that to them. Unless they’re going to get psychic benefits, social standing a story to tell themselves that’s worth more than what they just gave. So in fact, everything is on sale.

If it doesn’t seem like it’s on sale, people don’t donate. And one way to think about this as a fundraiser is to realize. They’re not Doing you a favor, you’re doing them a favor. They want a millionaire, gives a bunch of money to buy the naming of a dorm on some campus. They’re only doing it because it’s worth more to them for the affiliation and social status than it would be to not give that money.

But back to my point about retail fundraising the most successful Charities understand they’re not for everybody but they might be for someone and Finding that smallest viable Audience by engaging, with people who want to hear from you, who are on the journey, who applauded the mission fundraising becomes a totally different activity.

And Tuesday is the last day you want to do it, because the goal is not to be. One of many, the goal is to be the one we would miss if you weren’t there. So, yes, givingtuesday, grew particularly the United States because we like to name our days because we get a tax refund, because it’s toward the end of the year and around. Thanks, giving, and giving Tuesday, has helped some Charities raise money by normalizing. The idea that people ought to be giving money to causes that matter to them in their Community. But the smart Charities are realizing that persistent consistent connected relationships with a few donors are far superior to trying to spam the masses.

Hi, Seth, this is Pete from st. Paul Minnesota. I love what you do. I’m a big fan.

Regarding your advice to create something every day. My question is, what are your thoughts? And what is your own practice regarding staying on a particular subject? Ico run a company that is all about communication.

And I could either go really broad with that topic or I could stay really focused on my target market and the specific aspects of communication that we teach our target market. It’s much easier for my brain to go Broad and to look all over the place and I can’t help but notice. That when you create your podcast and your blog’s, it seems like you go anywhere, you want to go.

And you don’t really try to connect the dots back to specific recommendations having to do with the core topic of marketing, which is what you are known for.

So what are your thoughts? Broad or specific? Thank you, Pete. And I appreciate your kind words. Here is the thing. There are boundaries for everybody who is showing up and spreading their ideas, my boundaries probably seem wider than somebody who say is a knee surgeon, in North Carolina. If you want to be the knee surgeon in North Carolina, the one who is able to do your craft in a way, you know, you can do it has a waiting list, who is able To pick your favorite cases.

Well, then you need to be trusted people. Not only need to be aware that you exist being listed in a directory is insufficient. They need to trust you. They need to believe that you are the person in that field. So if you’re busy posting about golf or scuba diving, you might get more attention, but you might not earn more trust.

And so, being specific in a field like that gives you an advantage. Zh, because the purpose of the work, the educating you’re doing, the leading you’re doing is to help people learn something, and thus gain their trust. In my case. What I decided a long time ago is not to be known as a marketer. Most of my blog posts are not about marketing. Neither. In fact our most of my books if you think of marketing the way most people do. But to instead be there to help people here, see learn something as they already knew deep down. I was true, but give them the words to share with others, to stand for standing for something to help people do work. That matters for people who care, that’s my brief. That’s what I am focused on.

And there are lots of things I don’t write about. I mean, you could dig deep on my blog and find a recipe for doll or Dosa. But, in general, I stick to that. And so the decision to make is what your brand, which means what is the expectation people have From you for you before you even start typing because that’s what a brand is. It’s a promise. It’s a shortcut. It’s a way of thinking, to ourselves, which category someone in their work belong in, that’s hard. But once you pick it sticking with it, that’s simply discipline.

Thanks for this.

Hey, Seth, Brennan here from Montreal Canada, in an interview. You did with ink magazine. You mentioned that climate change is a marketing problem. It should have been called atmosphere cancer instead and it really led me to think about how words and how marketing can really influence change especially in the philanthropic side.

So my question to you is on the flip side, what if you found or what problems have you found from philanthropic perspective that you Leave have been well marketed in our current culture. And what do you think made them? So successful at appealing to a larger group of people so that we can have the right conversations before it’s too late really the inside. I’m looking for from this. Question is getting your take on inspiring ways that other exceptional thought leaders of marketed problems. Well so that we can actually get them solved.

Thanks so much for the work that you do Seth and all the mess.

Thank you, Brandon. This is a great question. And I want to give an example that isn’t a good cause I want to give an example that upon further inspection, turns out to be not true at all, which is in North America. And certainly many parts of the world. The recycling of plastic, the recycling of plastic in just 30 years. Really took off in many places and is deeply ingrained in the culture.

It’s hard. If you’re walking with an empty water bottle to walk past one of those blue bins and not toss it in there. Well, it turns out that more than 90% of all the plastic that’s put in those blue bins is shredded burned shipped overseas, dumped in the ocean, anything but recycled more than 90%, It doesn’t work and yet it’s deeply ingrained. Why is that?

Because the promise was this is simple. It’s easy. It’s close that in very high proximity to where you are emotionally and physically, you can score some points by dropping something in that blue. Ooh, box, it will eliminate some of your guilt. It will raise your status in front of some of the people around you.

The cost of doing it is so low and the cost of not doing. It feels very high. And so people did it. It’s a low-cost way to feel like you’re part of something and the Very fact that it’s low-cost low-risk makes it a lot more enticing. So it’s easier to get people to do things like this because we’re People Like Us.

It’s something that isn’t particularly difficult and then when we look at other stories for other nonprofits, it don’t spread nearly as well. For example, getting tested. So that you can find out. If you can donate your bone marrow that hurts. It takes a lot of planning, and the whole time you’re doing the test, you’re conflicted. Because what, if you’re a match, what if you’re not a match, there’s a lot of uncertainty associated with it, and the uncertainty.

Bind with the fact that it’s sort of anonymous and sort of invisible, makes it a much more difficult story to tell compare that to the hundreds of millions of dollars that the folks who valiantly fight Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Raised with the ice bucket challenge is a disease that thankfully afflicts. Very, very few people, but the ice bucket challenge, it was just the right amount of difficulty and just the right amount of status and just the right amount of affiliation with low risk as you did. You’re stupid. If you found out a year ago or a year later that they hadn’t cured it yet because you got what you got when you got it.

So that’s a little bit of a rant. But I hope you can see the point. I’m trying to make people are not calculating machines. We are all irrational, emotional actors looking for the next thing to do that gets us what we’ve been looking for. Thanks everyone for listening. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have data, what all-nba gets. I is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -gravity-evolution-and-ideas- <==

There is a force in the world, everywhere we go. In fact in the entire universe. It’s complicated. It’s very difficult to understand the mechanisms behind it are not well, understood by the general public. Yes. I’m talking about gravity. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law, but this is not a podcast about gravity to podcast about something that all of us do understand deep. Down.

But many of us have a lot of trouble, embracing. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about Evolution. The evolution of species and the evolution of ideas. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hello, Seth. This is Jeff and Milledgeville, Georgia want to give a shout-out to buy hobby of Made the Eastern art of paper folding. If you have a child in your life age, 7 to 11 or so. It’s a great time to get them involved. Children have already done. The fortune tellers made paper airplanes. So they’ve already done some of the origami could go online to get a lot of complex patterns and have lot of fun together with just a couple pieces of paper.

Thanks again, and I look forward to more hearing of more children involved in the art of origami. I start with gravity because there are no gravity, deniers. Everybody accepts, that the Earth is somehow sucking us down, and we are able to walk without floating off into space. That a baseball travels. The arc, that a baseball travels because somehow gravity is involved, that light things have less quote gravity on them, then heavy things.

Gravity doesn’t have much of a hard time getting accepted ever since Isaac Newton invented it. When an apple dropped on his head because it’s easy to say, of course, we needed a way to explain all the stuff that’s going on around us. And this is as good as any. It’s got a name and we can work with it.

But evolution Evolution has been controversial since even before Darwin published his work do Win whose wife was quite religious really hesitated for decades to share his ideas because he was worried that when people heard the simple idea of the evolution of species, there would be controversy and he couldn’t have been more right now.

Let me explain really clearly and briefly the fundamental principles of the evolution of species. Number one, children resemble their parents. This is not Controversial to cats when they have a kitten. It’s not surprising that the kitten looks a bit like the two cats they are really unlikely to have a dog children look like their parents. Number two children don’t look exactly like their parents.

There are things going on two things. Actually that keep children from looking exactly like their parents one. They have two parents so they can’t look exactly like both of them. And two, there are things called mutations in, which something happens as the, child is being conceived. That causes some of the genes in the child to be errors. But when Darwin first published his work on Evolution, he didn’t know about Mendel and he didn’t know about genes and you don’t need to know it to understand the third Rule.

And the third rule is these children are I’m more likely to have children, if they are somehow successful in the world, meaning, if they are eaten by a predator or they starve to death before they reach childbearing age. They’re not going to reproduce those. Three simple rules are all that you need to be able to describe what happens to animals species over the course of millions of years. Here’s because they will evolve the ones that fit into the environment. The best will have the most kids. The ones who have the most kids will pass down their traits to the Next Generation.

It’s pretty simple and now we can talk about the evolution of ideas because what we see is that if Miles Davis makes a record like kind of blue and it sells millions of Copies more people will hear it. Some of the people who hear it who desire to make successful music will make music that reminds an alert listener to something that they heard in kind of blue. It’s not ripping it off. It’s just different than it being a record of table drum solos because ideas, good ones, don’t repeat themselves, but they rhyme that what we see.

In software development in music, in governance, in economics, in lots of things, where ideas change the world is ideas evolve. The best way to understand this might be with an example. So let me take you through a species that we’re all familiar with this species of idea for thousands of years. Traditional music was pretty stable.

It was stable for a whole bunch of reasons. There weren’t economic drivers or technology drivers or cultural drivers that drove music to change very much people like traditional music because it was traditional because it gave us Solace because it connected our community but every single time a musician, played a traditional song. They changed it a little bit. Maybe they added a verse, maybe they sang it a little bit differently. Maybe they changed a word and when some of those changes Donated with the audience or the musician. They stuck and so Generations into it.

People hadn’t heard the original version. They’d only heard the version from the people around them slowly, but surely music was evolving. But then agents of change, arrived things like cities things like Commerce, things like royalty and kings and patrons. And then of course, you have Opera Houses with Acoustics and the technology of things like pianos. Tasin harpsichords.

The idea that music was going to become more complicated. It was still a fairly stable institution though, because Kings weren’t that into novelty. They were mostly into status. So, if Beethoven and Brahms, or whoever got a commission that was going to keep them going for years, not to play dramatically different music, but too slowly evolved music music We Now call classical for a good reason.

But then time moves forward as Commerce and CDs evolved. It wasn’t about traditional music to connect a group. We already knew it was about the culture of the moment when radio showed up and Edison’s recording devices. It changes again because now instead of making music for the people in the room because in the old days, if you heard a performance, it was likely. The only time in your life, you are going to hear that piece. Music played suddenly people were recording for the ages. Suddenly something that created a foundation of stability, also became an agent of change and it evolved again.

A couple more in the late 50s. Transistor radios had headphones, headphones Changed music dramatically because with a headphone a teenager can listen to music on their own without sitting with their parents without sitting in the living room and teenagers teenagers are Our massive change agents when it comes to the evolution of ideas because they want something new.

That’s really the first time at scale that music was exposed to this. And so musicians, generally Dying. By the time, they’re 27 years old, show up, listen to the music of the moment and have to advance it. Because, if they don’t Advance it, it doesn’t spread if it doesn’t spread, the genes aren’t happy and so on and on music of Olives, until we end up, After the program director after the radio station with a post gatekeeper World filled with things like Spotify or iTunes or whatever where anyone wants to put music in the world can and it is evolving at an ever-faster rate.

Once you see how music as a species evolved, you can see how animals and other organisms evolve. If the world is stable while the Beavers building the Beaver Dam, build it a lot like they used to. But when things happen like the world getting warmer or roads getting built or natural disaster happening like an asteroid hitting the Earth, and wiping out 90% of the dinosaurs who then evolved to become Birds.

None of it is happening with a central control. It is happening in a thousand, a million, a billion places over. And over again, countless experiments being done in real time in which ideas or genes organisms get There have offspring. That sort of. Looks like the one that came before, but isn’t exactly the same and the ones that fit the ones that thrive, they end up spreading their ideas.

Richard Dawkins wrote a book and he had two challenges in this book. It’s called The Selfish Gene. The first challenge is that people who didn’t read the book. Thought that what the book was about is the idea that genes make us selfish. That’s not what it’s about. What it’s about is the idea that it’s easy to understand the idea of evolution. If we realize that each individual Gene, if we could imagine that Gene had dreams and desires dreams and desires to have grandchildren, and that each gene isn’t working for the good even of the organism. They’re not working at all. Of course, they’re just jeans, but in fact, keep score of whether it This and the second break through the book thrown in as an afterthought toward the end.

Is this notion that ideas don’t have jeans but they do have something. We could think of, as DNA something that makes them up that certain songs have a certain kind of Rhythm that’s built into their DNA, but we need a name for it. Not jeans. He said let’s call them memes. And once we look at ideas and realize that they might be made up of And blocks, and the building blocks, that spread end up having quote more grandchildren.

We can start to have insight about how the culture works. So if a disco song becomes a hit suddenly that enters the meme pool that Rhythm, a certain number of beats per minute, even a drum track that as music, sampling began to spread. We saw certain samples spread farther and faster than Others, these were underlying B that made up new ideas.

The word meme has been changed over time to mean a complete idea. A little snippet on the internet that spreads. So an entire song, a gif, not a gif, a gif things that people recognize are called memes. Dogecoin is based on a meme but even If we’re going to extend the definition that far, it’s still the same idea.

DNA genes memes Evolution. What happens over long periods of time, which could just mean many many generations of a short-lived species were idea is that they evolved. If you want to create DDT resistant, fruit flies, fruit flies, have very short, generational length. What you do is you put a bunch of fruit flies. To the Mason jar with just a few drops of DDT in it.

And most of the fruit flies will die. But a few of the fruit flies will have kids that are DDT resistant and then they will go on to have kids that are DDT resistant.

If you have ever gotten a flu shot, getting a flu shot is evidence that there is evolution at work In Our Lifetime right in front of us because one flu shot. It doesn’t. Last you your whole life. The reason it doesn’t. Last you your whole life is new variants of the flu evolved and they can get past the antibodies that were created in your body from the last variation of the flu that when we look around. For example, in Britain, hedgehogs used to be a joke because there were dead hedgehogs all over the roads because hedgehogs and cars don’t really get along.

Well, now, you don’t notice as many dead hedgehogs. Why is that? Are the Hedgehog’s extinct? No, not at all. What’s going on is that the slow hedgehogs became extinct, but the variation of hedgehogs that were faster or more alert to cars. They continue to thrive because there’s more food for them because the slow hedgehogs are dead.

So when we think about culture and we think about how it moves forward, we’re dealing, With some bit of irony here because ideas that spread win, and one of the ideas that spreads and then retreats in spreads and then Retreats is people who haven’t done the reading saying, quote. I don’t believe in evolution.

Wait, they believe in gravity. I don’t even believe in gravity. I know there is gravity, but I don’t understand this whole Force Base einsteinian idea of black holes bending the universe, but there’s gravity for sure, but evolution. Send Evolution. I understand. And the only way to deny evolution is not to say I’ve done the reading and it’s simply not true because you can’t say kids, don’t resemble their parents. You can’t say that over time species and ideas don’t evolve because it’s obvious right in front of us, that they do instead. What you can say is this idea.

The one right in front of me. My life will be better. Better. Not because I have a cogent argument about why it’s wrong, simply, because denying it puts me into a circle of people where I feel more comfortable, denying. It itself is a meme. It is a building block of other elements of our culture. So once you see this, you can’t unsee it.

I wrote a book years ago called survival is not enough. Charles Darwin wrote the forward, which is an easy cuz Charles Darwin was dead, but the essence of that work is Ideas change. Our lives and ideas. Keep evolving. We can’t deny it because it’s there right in front of us. The question is, which memes?

Are you exposing yourself to? The question is, which ideas are you amplifying? Which ones are making our lives better? And which ones can we try to? Create cultural standards? So they eventually become extinct. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is From that. And so going forward. Every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about, what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hyphens is on the Pain Scale entire sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi, this is Russell, Aishwarya Rai. This is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit. Akimbo dot link to take Ai and bi o .l, iink and click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can check out the show notes or make a submission.

Hi Seth. This is all sifakas from Perth Australia. Originally from Dhaka Bangladesh. You’ve mentioned, Isaac Asimov quite a few times over the years in your books, and your podcasts and usually bring him up when talking about the creative block, or the writer’s block and explaining how the block is a myth.

Nothin’s up for the dating. I read quotes from Isaac. Ray says that he never stared at blank sheet of paper. The simply leave the writing project. You would have it hand and go onto any of the dozen other different projects that are at its disposal. He would then go back to his original work with Newfound inspiration.

However, in this day and age of quote-unquote creative jobs at certain industries, say that agencies are media companies. Such tactic is rather difficult to deploy. Many individuals who work these jobs will have to produce something for our client to meet strict deadlines or work through many other difficult constrains.

So my question to you is, what should an individual do in these creative rolls when they do hit these blocks. We’re taking a break from a blank sheet of paper, is a luxury and sometimes even impossible. Thank you for everything that you do. You’ve changed my life in ways that will be difficult to explain in this short. Audio clip stay well and healthy. Seth.

Thanks for this Nassif. It was really cool to know, Isaac Asimov. I was at the beginning of my career. He was at the end of his and working with him on a big. Big project was absolutely delightful. What Isaac was describing was a hack and it is a really effective hack and it’s available to everyone.

What he was saying is not that project B is better more interesting or more useful in this moment than project. A, what he was saying, is that the It’s a project B is how you get refocused on Project a. So if you are creative in any sense, there is something else in your office you’d like to do less.

Maybe you have to do bill collection. Maybe you have to organize your hours to do your billing. Maybe you have to go for a meeting with someone or go to some job interviews and talk to people. You don’t feel like those are the things you put on the table. For when you’re feeling quote blocked unquote. Because anything is better than that.

And so you’ll get back to work. It’s when we believe that, we have no choice, but to come up with the thing that we have to come up with. That’s when we get stuck. Some people need that deadline, that charette that emergency, but that sort of addictive and it will lead to Danger. The alternative is to become a professional and to realize you can do the work when you want to do the work. And one reason to want to do the work.

Is it, you’re a professional and when you find your mind wandering, just do something. You like even less and you may find that Focus returns. Hello sap, this is Paul from Toronto. When I was listening to your most recent episode about white elephants and gifts. I want to ask a related question. Just I’d intersection when you realize that you need to return the gift when you need to not accept the gift and and ignore the sound cost it when you look into a project and And for context, the Suncoast I’m talking about is just experience the connections in some credibility. They built over a decade and a half in the financial services industry.

This is in this industry while it’s well Market, it’s full of brilliant people. Unfortunately, it takes to a large extent advantage of an individual investor at something. That’s both frustrating and sad to me. And as I’m thinking about, embarking on new project and to think about the people I want to serve.

I’m thinking about how to discover very quickly potential conflicts of interests, in other Industries and how to quickly find out what other what the people in other Industries are all about quickly and potentially, without doing expensive trial, and error experiments and launching multiple projects.

I would very much. Appreciate hearing your thoughts on that. Thank you for your incredibly generous work for over last nearly 40 years and The impact that you’ve had on me over last 16 years since I’ve first discovered your blog. Thank you. Thanks Pavel. Thank you for caring about the work. You do in the people that you serve.

The white elephant might be a distraction here. I think what you’re asking me is, how do we know before we get into it? What an industry is like, and my take is this. They really aren’t Industries. There are people. There are people with objectives and stories and fears, and dreams, and desires. There are people May show up for you and some Industries have more people like that than others and the smallest viable audience instructs us that we just need enough of those people.

When my friend Lynn was failing in the toy industry. I invited her over to the book industry, because I explained that the people that I knew in the book industry, were a lot more open to working with Outsiders and a lot more trustworthy. Were there people in the toy industry who are like that? Of course there were but there were more of them in the book business.

She ended up selling a best-seller when it sold millions of copies first time up to bat and I have you’d respect for her doing that. It’s not because the industry was ready. It’s because it was easier for her to find someone. So, my practical advice is, you need to go to a place where people in the industry are and interact with them and don’t judge. Too harshly at first but look at what has happened before and then you can get a sense as to what sort of people that industry attracts.

Hey, Seth, this is Tim from Pasadena Maryland. I recently listened to expect delays. And while I usually love your rants, this one, I found frustrating because there wasn’t any kind of, how do you solve this problem involved with the rant? So it got me thinking. On one end of a seesaw, you might have redundancy.

And on the other end you might have efficiency and we all kind of have to decide how we want to balance the two because that’s the fo may decide. I want to be very efficient so that she she can be more profitable or she may decide. I want to be very redundant so I can be very resilient but I think interesting question and I’d love to get your thoughts on. It would be, how do you decide what is appropriate and and how do you change the expectations or the culture too?

Maybe make better choices there that are more beneficial to more people. Thanks for all you do and I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks Seth. Thank you for this. Tim. In fact, you did understand the point of the episode, but the words may have gotten in the way. The point of the episode was that efficiency in these crazy times lies in redundancy that the cfo’s were taking advantage of a momentary blip in. Which non-redundant risky activity seemed efficient, and it’s not anymore.

The single best way to be efficient to keep a promise to people that you’re going to deliver. Something to them is to add layers of slack that slack not the software, but the concept improves efficiency because it improves performance and to figure out where you need to be on the Spectrum. It depends on the promise that you are making, if you are running In an emergency room where life and death decisions happen.

I sure hope you have more than a week’s supply of bandages in stock because the promise you have made does not include. Oh, well, we’ll get to it when we get to it on the other hand if you make I don’t know bespoke artisanal baskets for thousands of dollars each. It’s okay to run out of supplies for a week or a month at a time because no one’s buying baskets from you on an emergency basis.

So, what’s the promise? What’s the promise to your shareholders? What’s the promise to your customers? And in general, the most efficient way to keep those promises except for the one that’s where cheaper is to build some slack into your supply chain. Thanks everyone for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information. Gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, When you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when are you going to face those fears?

We don’t have an environment. And we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible to me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -make-hockey-more-violent- <==

The other day, I Jeep cut me off in traffic and as he sped away, I was able to Glimpse his bumper sticker. It said make hockey more violent. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about capitulation. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor. Have you ever wanted to make a graphic novel, you know, a story, not only using words but also pictures like drawings or paintings or even photographs a story about life. That’s all Comics, you’ll find thousands of other people working on graphic novels. Just like you under the guidance of award-winning Master artist who broken free of the higher education system to work with you in a community-centric mentorship model.

Real stories made up stories stories about childhood everything under the sun. Take a look at learn dots all comics dot-org. We are all alive today because the Cold War lasted a really long time that what happened was that people who understood human nature, stalled and delayed and procrastinated. So that the Cold War didn’t end up becoming a hot War. It took 50 or more years for the whole thing to end. But it happened because capitulation was taken off the Abel capitulation is a term from the stock market and what it describes is what happens when investors lose their nerve. When stock prices have gone down so much. They can’t stand it anymore.

And instead of just writing it out. They sell at a loss. They capitulate. It’s in that moment that some people believe they can swoop in and game Bargains, but it also helps us understand a fundamental chasm. A split in human nature and it helps us decode how so many things around us work. Let’s start with the metric system.

Give them an inch. They’ll take a mile except in most countries in the world where there are no inches and there are no miles. Why is it that my country one of the few still uses the imperial system? It’s not even the British system. It’s the imperial system of measurement when everybody else has switched to the metric system. System. Well, let’s hear from Dean Krakow.

Who is passed away, but used to be director of the national Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma. Yes. There was a national. Maybe there still is National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma. Here’s what he had to say about the metric system. When it was being heavily debated, in the 1970s metric is definitely communist one monetary system. One language, one weight and measurement. Item, one world, all communist, and Bob Greene, who knew a good fake issue when he saw one and was able to pile on wrote in his column that it was an Arab plot with some French cheese and lime. He’s thrown in.

He also started Wham which stood for we ain’t metric. I have no idea how firmly his tongue was in his cheek. All I know is we don’t have the metric system. And the reason we don’t have the metric system in the United States. Is our fear of capitulation. Who are the heroes in culture? People like Winston, Churchill or John Belushi. What over you say over, nothing is over until we decided. This.

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. Hell, no German. Forget it. He’s rolling over now. That’s why not going gets tough. Tough.

The tough, get going people from action films, who Against All Odds stand tall and win every battle. Well, they may be the heroes of fiction or even of politics. But in fact, that’s not resilient. In fact in no matter what sort of simulation you want to run, if you want to look at anything. In the long run that involves community and culture and Newman’s.

The fear of capitulation is a sure way to have it all fall. Apart human beings tend to keep track of one of two things either affiliation or dominance, affiliation is. Who’s next to me? Who’s to my left? Who’s to my right? What am I part? Of affiliation enables us to have culture. Because what culture is, is people like Gus do things like this.

The alternative is dominance who’s up and who’s down, who’s winning? Who’s losing as Keith Johnstone, wrote about a really long time ago. All theater, is, is a display of status roles of who’s moving up and who’s moving down any important scene in any work of fiction, is simply about that. I may have talked on this podcast years ago about the opening scene of The Godfather. I come back to it again and again, And because in 45 seconds, Francis Ford Coppola demonstrates, just how important statuses to some people.

I stood in the courtroom, like a phone and those two bastard. They smiled at me.

Then I said to my wife for justice. We must go to Don Corleone.

That I cannot do.

I give you anything, you ask in the seen, The Godfather who is built his entire career on dominance. And on status is approached by an Undertaker and Undertaker, the lowest job in terms of status on his daughter’s wedding day and In the Sicilian Tradition, at least, according to the movie on your daughter’s wedding day. You cannot refuse a favor.

So, In This Moment, the dawn is Honorable, because he can’t violate the Sicilian tradition, but he also can’t lower his status. I’ll let Marlon Brando take it from here.

What have I ever done to make you treat me? So disrespectfully.

He’ll come to me and friendship and the scum that wound. Your daughter would be suffering this very day.

And if, by chance an honest, man, like yourself should make enemies that he would become my enemies.

And then they will fear you. So, what’s happening here, is that the low status person is questioning the universe that the universe is organized around status roles. And he is asking the dawn to lower his status to act like a hoodlum, like a hit man, the Don cannot abide this. If the dawn does, what is being asked, it will take him far too long to regain his status. It is easier for him to not capitulate in this moment and to Simply have the Undertaker eliminated.

It just takes a few seconds for the entire scene to turn around. Be my friend.

Godfather the lesson from this is not that The Godfather was a good person. The lesson is that because he kept track of a certain thing. He was playing a certain game by certain set of rules. And what we see later in the movie is it leads to the demise of the entire generation of his family because when two creatures meet and neither one is willing to capitulate.

Disaster ensues. So let’s think about current events. What was the message being sent when people were asked to wear a mask in 2000. Well, the message being sent was care about the community care about other people. All of us are doing this. You need to wear one too. So some people perhaps relatives of Dean crackle, say wait a minute, this this is communism being told. Told what to do. I will not capitulate. I will not wear a mask.

And then when a vaccine comes along again, it feels like what is being said is you must capitulate. You must capitulate to the system to the powers that be to a virus that has beaten us and your head, and get the shot. And from a marketing Point of View, selling affiliation is rational and thoughtful and matches Public Health. But there is a significant portion of the population, not just in my country, but around the world that keeps track of status rules more than they keep track of affiliation.

If we look at how WWII propaganda worked, how all those war bonds got sold. Some of them were sold by marketing. We’re all in it together, the idea of community, but many of them were marketed by talking about, Beating the enemy. And so the opportunity is to say, the reason you should get vaccinated is not because of the old people in your community or because we are all doing it.

The reason to get vaccinated is that we will not succumb to this virus. We will not capitulate to this tiny invisible microorganism. We will win and the way we will win is by standing strong and tall by showing our courage. By making hockey, more violent. We will win by doing the brave thing in the short run, which is Conquering our fear and getting a shot because that is where Victory lies that marketing Victory, can be really dangerous. If you try to Market victory over the Soviet Union. Well, then you end up with nuclear weapons, flying across the ocean in the 1970s. Not a good idea, but Mark. Victory over an inanimate object of virus. Well, there’s really no harm in that.

So when we think about how we show up in the world to get people to change their behavior. The resilient long-term plan is to sell those people on the power of affiliation. All of us are smarter than any of us. No one is in charge of I don’t know. Wikipedia, please contribute make it better for all. All of us.

And there’s a significant portion of the population than goodness, who get the joke who understand that we’ve been at this for tens of thousands of years. And we hope do it for even longer. But only if we’re all in it together and led by people who are mature and thoughtful and are ready to see what is possible.

We are bringing affiliation to the for. However, we’ve also given a microphone and amplify the voices. Of the people who will never surrender of the people who think hockey is about making the other side. Give up the people who want to win, the people who refused to capitulate. And so the story we need to tell is that affiliation is a way of winning. That affiliation is actually the opposite of capitulation because in an interconnected Society in a culture where ideas spread fast, And further than ever before, what is incompatible with long-term? Resilience are multiple people who decide that they have needs that are diametrically opposed and who are unwilling to compromise compromise feels like capitulation.

My friend. Ben Zander is a legendary conductor. And one of the things that conductors did for a really long time, was forced the Ra to capitulate there. They were there, European white men in their tuxedos with a stick, waving it at people. They’re the only person in the orchestra that doesn’t make a sound and yet, they are the people who tended to dominate but what been introduced at least into his small circle, was the idea that orchestras are actually a team sport by listening and learning from one another they play together because you don’t win.

Infini, what you get to do is do a symphony with the rest of us.

And that’s where we live. Now. We live in a world not of hockey, but of Symphonies. Thanks for listening to my rant. I’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain. Two really quick my friends run akimbo dot comma. B Corp. That hosts. The workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops in my friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So, if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even In for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump pricer. Warm. Greetings from Curacao. They set. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo that link. That’s 8 Ki MB, o .l, iink and click the appropriate button.

The first Ian isn’t that much of a question and it has to do with the appropriate button. Here we go. Jon Snow here from down south of. Boston got a question about today’s questions where you are. Once again, you were talking about white elephants, new were talking about sunk costs, but the very first question was about misinformation and disinformation and you gave what I consider to be a phenomenal response.

Is there a place where I can get a That as in the written form. I would love to share it with some people, and I know you’d prefer me to share a link to a Kimbo, but I simply know there’s not a lot of people that I think would read. It aren’t going to go there and listen to a podcast. They’re just not that type.

So if you could help me out by pointing to a place where I could get a written transcript of that question answer, I would certainly appreciate it. Thanks. So much for all you do Seth. Thanks for this John. If you visit akimbo dot link you will also see a link to thisand co and at this season they have a system that has been transcribing every single episode of the akimbo podcast since the very first one.

And I’m glad that my rant about misinformation resonated with you a shortcut for people who are listening and can’t remember exactly how to get the thissen. Just go to bit ly / misinformation akimbo. It’s bi t, .l y /, misinformation akimbo, all one word, all lowercase. And there you’ll see the transcript. Thanks for listening.

My question is, at the end of the podcast. Money is a story. Someone had asked about whether the addition of AI in technology was making creative arts better and my, your response was yes, because the more things that can Be automated and technically done by programs leads us to do the better more creative higher level work, which I totally agree on. But what I want to press on is that that can be true, but the my statement can also be true, which is that it brings in more people that are not proficient in that particular Arena category. Let’s say it’s Fee. And so then litters that creative domain with a, with a lot of people who are all putting forth an idea that they are also up quote unquote photographer. And what does that do to the Arts and to the economy in general? When sort of anyone can be anything, love everything you do?

All my love Sabrina in Mexico. Thanks, Sabrina. I’m glad to get your question. Here is the thing for more than 100 years every single time that technology or culture has enabled new folks, to show up in an area of creativity. The people who were there before decry that the hordes are arriving. They criticized, the quality of what is being created and people don’t Are when typography moved to desktop publishing, the real typographers were incensed. When music shifted from careful orchestration to four guys, from Liverpool. With long hair, playing guitars.

The old folks were incensed when rock and roll shift to autotune people who actually had a sing for a living were incensed. And, yes, when photographers saw that, people were bringing their own cameras to weddings. They didn’t like that either. And here’s the thing. The thing is that by some measure quality continues to decrease the craft that is involved in being an abstract, expressionist is different than the craft that you needed if you wanted to Apprentice with Rembrandt because we are no longer in the business of replacing the camera, because the cameras already here painters have A different kind of workout harder, kind of work a different sort of craft. And the same thing is true for someone who wants to make a living, whether you’re making a living as a, calligrapher as a typesetter or as a photographer.

And here is what I have found. It does not pay for the profession to unite and try to keep the amateurs out. It doesn’t work. They just go around you and it doesn’t pay for professionals to sniff and say that stuff isn’t real, because the people who want to buy it. The people who want to patronize it, that’s what they’re going to do.

Now. We have just a couple options available to us and I’m saying we because I have been through this very thing several times. Hard-earned reputation and skill thrown out the window because people have a shortcut. What do you mean you could have millions and millions of followers? Just because you tweet some stupid photos.

You haven’t done the work. Doesn’t matter that they haven’t done the work, but you have done. Work. So, what are your choices? Well, one choice is to realize that this modest viable audience is still there to ignore the masses. That there are people who do things by hand today, including setting type or making Vinyl Records who have a waiting list. Because if you’re the kind of person that wants someone to build you a vinyl record, built with the old-school lathe with care and quality, you don’t have a lot of choices.

And the second option is to realize that the It knows what the market wants, and it might be time to take a deep breath and approach. It differently, my friend, Joel Greenburg. The famous photographer, started her career by paying her, dues by apprenticing, but then she Dove deep into Photoshop and because her work in Photoshop really popped, the traditional people, many of them misogynistic criticized her for not being a real photographer. And then when everyone stole her look, because Photoshop is widely available. Double.

She could have decried. The people who had taken a shortcut and just stolen her work. But instead she shifted again, and then shifted again. It’s not easy, but that’s sort of what we signed up for what we signed up for, because we entered on a wave of technological change, is it? There’s going to be more technological change. You don’t have to like it, but we do have to dance with it.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible. Or probable. And in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you in a context where?

You’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you. What are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. Look, it’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -paul-has-a-practice- <==

Paul McCartney isn’t a genius. Paul McCartney isn’t even particularly talented, but Sir, Paul McCartney, one of the most famous culture changing creatives of. My time has practice. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about your practice and get back. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor, Casa, San Jose is a non-profit whose mission is helping Latin American immigrants living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

They provide free attorneys that go to ice detention centers to assist people in need. They also help their people find homes Medical Services, English lessons and more. Visit their Site Casa, San Jose dot-org to see the amazing work that they’re doing.

I’m using my words, very carefully here. Paul McCartney is not a genius. John Lennon was not a genius, but Paul McCartney. Plus, John Lennon created genius because genius, like, art is the work of a human, a human who is leaning into something doing something surprising, something. More than they have, to something that might not work.

And when it doesn’t work, we sort of ignore it, but when it does work, we’re tempted to chalk. It up to Talent. Something people are born with to some mysterious voice from The Muse that it’s easy to believe that other people have genius that other people have talent, but not us, not right now. And so we get stuck.

So what I want to talk about is a movie that is impossible. Try to imagine. In this, the four, most famous creators of all time in any field in one group, The Beatles who are in the midst of a lot of internal stress and strife. At least one of them a heroin addict at the time in that setting before, Beatles agree to write and record a record in three weeks and then perform it live on television.

Oh, and by the Way to film all of it, with multiple cameras, long before social media. They put themselves into this Jam. Why did they do it? And what can we learn by? Looking at it? If you haven’t seen the seven and a half hour movie from Peter Jackson, I recommend it but you can get the gist of what I’m saying. Without seeing it the first real that first hour and a half or two hours is totally worth your time.

What we see is that each of the The Beatles is what they are. They act that way when the cameras are on and when they don’t know the cameras are on Ringo. Ringo shows up on time. He’s never late Ringo, Ringo is there to absorb the visit tubes and stress that other people have Ringo plays the drums. The way he’s supposed to play the drums, but he is not bringing a particularly creative practice to the work on his own, but it doesn’t work if he’s not there if Ginger Baker from cream, where the drummer for Beatles there never would have been a Beatles Because Ringo is the glue. He’s a shock absorber. He can absorb what’s going on when we watch George Harrison seeing. His practice is sad. Indeed. It’s sad because George has persuaded himself that he doesn’t have what it takes. And he desperately wants John and Paul to like him, too, like his work. And so he usually brings songs to the group when they’re almost done and before he He starts playing, he announces that the songs not very good.

Then hunched over the guitar hiding. As he plays declaring that, he’s no Eric Clapton. He plays the song and the group sort of ignores him. John, John doesn’t want to do, his practice in front of other people. Jon brings in his work fully done. But really the movie is about Paul. And in fact, I’m pretty sure Paul was the reason that they filmed it because All needs certain elements to have his practice in, one of the key scenes.

We watch Paul composing. One of the great Beatles songs in real time. It’s astonishing to watch. I’m going to play for you 60 seconds here.

When’s laser guns between 10 and 11 is the time. They’re going to get rid of him. I’m never late. He’s never late is Frozen.

So here’s what just went down. Lenin was late, this disappoints Paul, it disappointed for a couple reasons partly because his practice is creative. Practice is skill. Relies on working on a regular schedule showing up. When you say you’re going to show up and doing the work perhaps Under Pressure. Why do you need to write all the songs for an album in three weeks? It’s not like these guys have day jobs.

Why didn’t they show up with all the Songs done already because Paul needs this system. The second thing if you watch the video is that you will see George making a face the whole time. It’s not really bored. He sort of afraid because he’s hearing a song that’s not very good and he doesn’t know what to put on his face, and he’s sitting there saying, this is all isn’t perfect. What is going on and Ringo sit, sort of passively giving Paul the space he needs, but the coolest part.

The part that we learn something from is watching Paul McCartney, play a song, that’s not very good over and over again until it becomes a song that we will never forget. How did he do that? He did it. Exactly. The way we can do it. That way, you can do it and the way that I do it, we do it poorly and then we begin to do it. Well, then John shows up and what happens there is another part of Paul’s practice.

What happens there is that you see that what Paul really wants is to get under John Skin, to get, John to want to play, along to get, John to want to smile and jam with him because John is the audience for these songs.

If you’ve seen any of the concerts to Beatles did in the 60s before they stopped touring, what you’ll see. Are you enormous number of 14 year, old girls screaming as loud as they can? It’s not possible. That the Beatles respected this audience. They weren’t making music for this audience. And the reason that we have Sergeant Pepper and The White Album and Abbey Road is because they wanted to move Beyond this audience. The audience for Paul was John that he persisted in sitting with Ringo and George because they gave him a stepping stone to do his practice and the entire movie is about Paul setting up all The pieces that he needs to do his practice, including some, that he shouldn’t be that proud of like the fact that he never gives George a, particularly large amount of attention, or positive feedback. That could have brought out some of Georgia’s skill, but leaving that collaboration part. Aside, what we see is that having your own practice, whichever it is, is essential to being a working creative. Here’s another bit from the movie and this This time George is stuck. And he comes to Paul and John and ask for help.

John gives him standard Paul advice, just say a word, whatever word pops into your head cuz you’ll come up with a better word.

Just say, whatever comes in the attics time attracts me like a comet violence. Got the word.

I’ve been through this one, like for that six months and I couldn’t think of anything. Like I think putting the word cauliflower on the wall of your cubicle, or your home. Office is a really good idea because every time you see that word cauliflower, it will remind you just put in a word and then you can make it better.

But what happens here is George can’t adopt the new. Practice because it doesn’t come easily. He’s fighting it. And we keep waiting for him to say the right words, because we know the right words are going to come, we’ve heard the song a million times before, and the right words, eventually came, but if he was a little lighter on his feet, if he wasn’t looking in the moment for the kind of perfection and approval, he was seeking, it would have come more easily.

That’s part of the practice.

John’s practice addled. I Buy heroin, certainly created some of the most important music of my youth. It worked for him until it didn’t Paul’s, practice, 60 years, 70 years, now of showing up and playing the music it works. It works for him and it could probably work for you. The reason that I’ve pushed so many people to have a daily blog is simple.

Once you decide to have a daily blog, you don’t have to decide anymore. It’s a daily blog. So on Tuesday the debate is not do you have something good enough to blog on Wednesday? The debate is which thing will you blog tomorrow? Because there will be a Blog tomorrow now because it’s the best one you ever wrote.

But because it’s tomorrow if we look at the output of companies when they’re scaling the heights, something like Microsoft in the 80s and 90s, they came out with dozens hundreds products that just Very good, and sometimes those products made to version 2.0, and they were a little better and every once in a while, it made it to version 3.0 which tended to be a little overweight, but showed glimmers of being something great, and Apple has done the same thing.

And so have so many other companies or individuals individual creators like Miles Davis who made more than 50 records. So did Bob Dylan miles Bob? Paul John? It’s too much. Of a coincidence, the too many musical Geniuses were working in the 60s and then suddenly they all disappeared in the 90s was nothing but tried stuff. No, that’s not what happened.

What happened is skill skill can be developed. It can be developed in any field where creative skill is appropriate and as the culture changes in the market changes, the fields change, and so there is space for somebody to show up. If Paul McCartney were born 10 or 15 years ago. I have no doubt. He would not have become a musician.

He would be somebody perhaps on the frontier of developing new forms of social media, or I don’t know what you can, fill it. In whatever we are celebrating right now. The punch line of this rant is simple. I’m not Paul McCartney and neither. Are you finding a John Lennon and finding a Duo a partner, an audience?

That’s really helpful. The Fact that all four of them were from Liverpool is Not an Accident. It created the situation that got them to Hamburg and homburg gave them the 10,000 hours that gave them even more skill. Skill to play, sure. But skill to listen, skill to leave space and skill to become the people that they chose to become.

If you’re not happy with your creative output. Then you are probably not happy with your practice. You don’t need new jeans. You don’t need different. Parents, you need a new practice and a practice. A creative practice in approach to what we do when we’re stuck to the change. We seek to make to the voice, we seek to have the beauty of it is the practice is still available to each and every one of us. If we care enough to go through all the moments, when we don’t know what to say, when we don’t know what to do when we can’t imagine that, we will create. Another thing.

Moves attracts me like no, the lover to forgive ourselves in those moments. And then to do the work any way to do it in front of the Right audience, the right way without apology. And to do it in a way that fuels, our soul and contributes to the community that we’ve decided to be part of, I can’t wait to see what you’re going to make next.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some really juicy questions, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey, sir. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

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I’m recording this as we wrap up 2021 and there’s some really fascinating deep questions. I can’t get to all of them. But here we go. Hey, Seth, my name is At least I am based in London and I’ve been a big fan of your work for a long time, especially your work in learning and education. And I took an online course that you did a few years ago, about learning and education in which you were talking about the changes in the learning landscape and how things would be different in the future.

And I also work with a lot of young people, and students in my everyday work, people who are thinking about what they should do next with their careers with the jobs of the future, all of that stuff. Tough. So my question is, as we head into 2022. What is the one piece of advice that you would give young people, or the young Leaders of Tomorrow as they make their decision about what comes next? Thank you for this Eloise. The first piece of advice I have is don’t listen to people who have just one piece of advice.

I don’t mean to be facetious about that, but it’s true that if you’ve made it to 15 or 18 or 24 years old and someone shows up with Piece of advice. It’s really easy to want to add that to your notebook of pieces of advice and then sort of missed the point but I do have one piece of advice. I just don’t think it belongs in your notebook. And it’s this think really hard about whether or not you have been indoctrinated into the old industrial model that you are waiting for someone to pick you to quote give You a job that your career will be narrated by a resume that lists all the places where you followed instructions and that your job is to do what you’re told because that’s been coming at you for a long time.

And those days are clearly fading away. That the future already is here and the future is about figuring out what you want to do. Next, taking responsibility for it and not waiting for. Authority that it’s entirely possible that people will pay you to do work, but it’s also entirely possible that you will simply do work and then get paid for it and those are two different things.

So the lens, the very glasses that were wearing as we look out in the world, those have shifted. I remember back in business school. There were two paths when you were done either, you went to the placement office or you didn’t, and the companies that came to the placement office to interview. Folks got people who were looking for the direct path to being told what to do and the alternative was to go figure out and find what to do.

And if that meant getting a gig for now, please go get a gig for now, but that was 40 years ago and the world continues to change. Thanks for this one. My question is around the future of employment and I have a small company. Branding design company here and started at nine years ago, but it’s getting increasingly harder to keep people.

I did a poll on LinkedIn the other day and I just asked my audience of people who if they love their job, like their job or hated their job and I was really surprised and happy to see that over 50% of people that responded said they love their job. Now. I know that’s my audience and probably there’s a reason for that and all that, but I do think that I do get, I do get nervous.

I’m Bentley thinking about ways to keep people engaged incentivizes them, make them feel like they have a future with us. I don’t like losing people. What do you see as the future of work and employee retention. Thanks, Adam. And this is a great segue from Eloise’s question. There are several things happening all at once. One of them. Is that low paying low respect, low dignity industrial jobs those. Got looked square into the eye by a large population of people. In the last couple of years, people who were confronting illness right around them, people who had enough space to think about it, because they were Sheltering in place who had some financial support, who realized, that being on the front lines and being abused and risking their health, all at the same time for minimum wage, that was hard to swallow.

So that’s one of the things that went on in the second thing that went on and the one you’re talking about. Out, is that people with real skills? People who are in your case, on LinkedIn, who have choices are taking a deep breath and saying, wait a second. What’s next for me? And loving what you do all day? What a privilege? I mean, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. It wasn’t even discussed, whether or not you loved what you did all day. You did, what you did all day to feed your family, the end.

And only recently did. Create the sort of indoor work that looks an awful lot like playing a video game and hanging out with friends while eating doughnuts and overlaid with. That is the idea that you could love your work. And the job opportunity is to be able to show up for people who have this attitude, who are willing to be linchpins, who have a bunch of skills and are willing to learn new skills and create a place for them to grow because people stay where they grow.

And in a A small company, it’s impossible for you to have no turnover. If you also have growth because as people grow, it is possible. But unlikely that your company will grow big enough to support them in where they seek to go. And so turnover isn’t a bad thing. And turnover isn’t necessarily A criticism of how you are leading your company that what we have is the opportunity to rethink small organizations more likes. Videos.

And so if a director or a producer or a cinematographer leaves, a studio to work on a different project. Well, that’s what the project lifestyle is about. Tom Peters. First wrote about this 30 years ago where he talked about the fact that Hollywood’s model of bringing together a bunch of people to work on a project who then dispersed, when the project is done, was going to come to lots of places that are based on information and It, Divinity and ideas and he was right, this shift to the Hollywood model for projects that involve passionate creative, dedicated people working with information.

It’s happened. It’s happened, quite slowly. So slowly that most people didn’t notice but it has definitely happened and Linkedin is part of the reason because you can assemble your team much more easily than you possibly could have 30 or 40 years ago. What does this all mean? It means as I mentioned, Eloise that people who work for a living need to think about gigs, not as a failure or as a stopgap or as my grandmother used to say, he’s a freelancer, but in fact the core of what we do, show me your Clips show. Me what you’ve accomplished. Where are you headed? Don’t try to please the boss.

Try to figure out what Arc does your career even have. And if you are the boss, the manager, the leader. Get really clear about which jobs need to be managed and a lot of those are just going to be outsourced because it’s easier and faster and cheaper and which jobs involve leadership having people solve interesting problems doing work that matters for people who care and yes, there’s going to be turnover, but it’s life and life is about change.

Hi Seth. My name is Kendrick and I’m a family doctor in Arizona. And I have been listening to you for quite a while now, and it seems to me like you don’t spend Whole lot of time trying to establish the authority of what you’re saying. Meaning. I don’t seem, I don’t seem to think that you take a lot of time, exciting, scientific evidence, and trying to argue the validity of the evidence of what you’re trying to say.

And as a physician, especially over the last year and a half, you know, I I think that there is reason to be skeptical of people making statements. You know, without being able to back it up with a lot of scientific evidence and yet I haven’t really found any opportunities to criticize you or or necessarily. I don’t feel skeptical of a lot of things you say.

And I’m wondering if that’s because you’ve chosen carefully, what things to talk about and and I also wonder if maybe it’s just because I like you and and so I’m not going to be skeptical when I listen to you. But either way I’m interested. Now if you have a system of some kind that you use to decide when you’re going to make a statement without backing it up with authority or without calling it your opinion because it seems like you know when I when I make a statement and social media or otherwise, you know, I I feel like I either have to say this is my opinion or say, you know, this is where the source came from and I just don’t see you doing. That as much as you might.

So love to hear your thoughts and thanks for all you do. Thank you for this question Kendrick. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s got a lot of insight to it and I want to start. As I often do with Ignacio, Vice, who figured out, and proved proved Beyond, any shadow of the doubt that maternal deaths were being caused by doctors, not washing their hands.

This was in the 1800’s in Austria, after he proved it in a document, you can Still read to this day. I’ll put it in the show notes after he proved it. How long did it take? The medical establishment to start washing their hands, 20 years or let’s fast forward to the 1950s and 60s when researchers proved proved Beyond any doubt that ulcers were caused by eating pastrami sandwiches, which my great uncle gave up even though he didn’t want to because he had ulcers. No ulcers were caused by bacteria.

The question is, how long did it take for the The medical establishment to embrace, the idea that that was the cause of many ulcers. You got it about 20 years. It’s easy to believe. And as a trained mechanical engineer, I often believe it that we are driven by the data, by the proof. By the references until we confront one that just doesn’t sit, right? And then we say well, bring us more data. If we were truly only driven by the data then.

It’s not clear to me that anybody would be a chiropractor, because in double-blind studies, it doesn’t do anything. But the thing is, we’re not double-blind and embracing the idea that you are delivering a useful Placebo to people is a story. And so, we’ve all got a range of stories. I’m not saying there isn’t truth. Of course, there’s truth. This happened that happened. These numbers add up to this number history occurred in this way. I can see it on the video. However, /.

I witness testimony has been shown again and again, to be suspect that what some people have as their story. Is their story is show me the data, and what some people have as their story is, what feels right to me. And there’s a huge spectrum between the two. So that’s the warm-up for how I think about this.

First of all, I don’t want anybody to do anything because I said, so don’t My word for it. I appreciate people giving me the benefit of the doubt. But the way I try to do my work is simple, I described the way I see something and then I asked you to go look at the data and see if you see what I see.

And if you see what I see then you have made your own mind up. I haven’t made it up for you. I have a real problem with people who make up our minds for us, the whole idea that because this person said it must be true. There are certainly plenty. Places for that. I am happy back when I used to fly, to let the pilot decide. I didn’t need to see the data. She got to decide because she said. So, but generally particularly now as we are able to see so much more information about the world around us.

We don’t necessarily need more data. What we need is a construct for being able to look at that data. And I’d like to have that construct offered to me. By somebody who has earned my trust somebody, who is probably doing it for my benefit, not for, there’s that indoctrination and manipulation happened when people show up and trick us into doing something that helps them but doesn’t help us and I appreciate that. There are people in the trenches like you who are sharing data that matters.

And I decided a really long time ago that I just wasn’t diligent enough to footnote. Everything find all the data and prove it the way some of my colleagues do. So I picked a different route and my route is to say, look, here’s a story that I told myself about the data. I just saw does that story resonate with you when you look at the data, so I haven’t done any groundbreaking Innovative work on the frontiers of say, evolutionary biology, but I think if you read survival is not enough or you hear me rant about it. One of my podcast, then you can go read the beak of the finch.

And after you read the baker-finch, then you can tell me if the data that’s in a book. Like that helps you see the world the same or differently than I did? Because human beings are a puzzle and where a puzzle because we are storytelling machines, but we also figured out just in the last 400 years. The scientific method and the scientific method is simple gravity doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not.

It simply works. And so, if the stories you are telling yourself about the world actually work, if when you bump into reality reality matches, the story you’ve been telling yourself in a way that is productive. Then your stories are helping you but if not, if it’s causing tension and stress because the way you wish the world to be isn’t the way the world actually is. Well, you’re not going to be able to change the world, but you might be able to change the story. You tell yourself.

I hope that’s been helpful. I wish everybody happy and safe new year. Here’s the possibility and peace of mind. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success, seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the into Internet. Right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide you. Show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can sure. Show us consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -externalities- <==

It was 27 years ago, but it feels still like yesterday. My partner and I were down in Florida for a big convention. We brought our families with us. Tomorrow was the big presentation. We were staying at the hotel Edison in Miami Beach and old old hotel right in the middle of the party district and it midnight right in the courtyard, the bar.

I started playing music really loudly. I finally fell asleep in the middle of the noise about 130, but I woke up with a start at 2 a.m. And the reason I woke up is that they had run out of original music and they were playing a song they had played two hours earlier and my subconscious was really surprised at that.

Hey, it’s Seth. And this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about externalities. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor. Imagine. Your loved one is in hospice. I see your hospital at end of life and you do not have the financial means to flee. And be with them at given Mi we have people donate their travel miles and we make these flights happen from now to January 15th. You can donate your United Miles by going to be it. .L, y /, give a visit. That’s bi t .l y /, give a visit and we give this incredible gift to these loved ones. So they can have one last chance to be together.

I think it’s pretty clear that the people in the bar. We’re glad to be in the bar. They had a choice. But the people eight stories up, who are trying to sleep before their big presentation. They weren’t happy. That a party was going on the people who own the bar. We’re making a profit playing loud music and selling drinks.

The people who owned the hotel. We’re losing money, because their customers were checking out. Is it okay for the bar to play music as loud as it wants 24 hours a day? When it’s caught. Sting their next door neighbor, and the people who trusted their neighbor, a good night’s sleep or consider this people who live near a factory, that does plating of Metal Goods. They wake up in the morning and they notice little spot on their car.

Those spots are caused by the paint room shooting off little tiny, bits of paint that don’t adhere to the metal and yes, it adheres to the cars. A block two blocks, five blocks away. Is it, okay? For the factory to not put in the filters that are needed to keep the paint from landing on other people’s cars, or is it sort of a situation of if you don’t want paint to land on your car, don’t park outside or don’t live near the factory or what about the person who lives down the street from a place that roasts coffee because in short doses, freshly roasted coffee, smells delicious, but when you live, downwind, not some fun, it’s an externality.

It is a cost that is paid by someone who isn’t making the profit where I live by the Hudson River. There was a big beautiful old brick building and some entrepreneurs. Using that word in quotation marks bought it in the 1970s and then went up and down the sides of the river going to factories and saying, we’ll take your toxic wastes, your pcbs, the stuff that you’re no longer allowed to dump in the river. And we’ll do it at a discount, will haul your toxic waste for cheap and they took it off their hands and put it in the building. And when the building was filled, they moved on leaving us with a Superfund Site to clean up. All of these things are obvious examples of places where most people agree, that externalities are a real problem, that there’s a rule against it. You can’t just dump your stuff in the river if it’s going. Poison the people Downstream, but as industrial economies have grown and grown and grown, and companies have become hooked on their race to the bottom.

We have more externalities now to deal with than ever before. The ocean is filled top to bottom with plastic, and the people who produce the plastic don’t have to pay to clean it up. Is that? Okay? I’m wondering that if it’s possible. To move externalities to be able to let the market do what it does really well, which is solve problems by identifying them and coming up with a profitable way to serve a need to let the market focus on solving the problems that externalities cause.

So if we think for example, about how we could charge a toll to a certain kind of truck that does a certain kind of damage. Well, pretty. In the markets going to come up with a way to replace that truck rather than pay the toll instead of banning something out, right? The way it makes sense to ban outright a company dumping paint on the cars of people who are park nearby.

We create a Marketplace and in that Marketplace, the industrialists Focus their energy on reducing their externalities because they’re not externalities anymore. They are part of their cost. Structure and where all of this is leading is simple. I am not going to be able to fix the music at the hotel. Edison, but it is worth thinking about what we’re going to do about carbon because thanks to lying and lobbying and general ignorance about the state of the world. We have wasted 25 years when we could be addressing the significant problem, that carbon is going to cause for every human being on Earth.

Now, we need to hurry. Well, we’re not going to hurry by implementing Draconian rules that hinder world economies. The game theory, just doesn’t support it because if countries defect from this regime, well, the industrialist in those countries will profit because they can dump their externalities on lots and lots of other countries.

And the companies that profit figure, the money that is being made, will insulate themselves, somehow. From the cataclysm that is being created. But what but what if instead of banning things or just wringing our hands, we let the market pay attention to the problem that the industrialists have caused. And the way you do that is by giving people a carbon dividend and the carbon dividend is pretty simple. Establish a Baseline and everybody who uses has less than that Baseline in carbon gets a check cash money and people who use more than that amount of carbon have to pay to do. So, there are lots of ways to implement this cap and trade is one of them, but basically what it comes down to is this the ability to put carbon into the world, becomes an asset and acid that you can value that you can sell that you can come up with ways to produce to acquire.

To trade that once it is an asset that has value. Well, then we have a lot of opportunities. One opportunity is that it will inherently subsidize things that don’t put carbon into the world. So if I can put a windmill on top of my house, that generates electricity, not only will I get the electricity for free, I will get paid because I’m using less carbon than someone who doesn’t, or if If someone comes up with an efficient way to sequester carbon out of the air for, let’s say, fifty dollars a barrel and the price of this asset is more than that, they’ll do it more and then we’re back to that invisible hand that the industrialist like so much.

Because once the system is in place without lobbying or voting people will work to ratchet it forward and as industry gets better. And better at creating ways to earn these carbon credits. Well, then the government can step in and increase how much one of these credits is worth. They will be lobbied to do. So by the people who have figured out how to make them because they want them to be worth more.

And then instead of the industrialist pushing for externalities to be ignored, many of them will be pushing for externalities to be valued even. Even more highly. In addition to that, the people who are used to getting the dividend because they are buying things more carefully because they are paying attention to their footprint, because they are coming up with ways to reduce how much carbon they use. Those people will also be pushing for the dividend to go up. The dividend will go up as carbon becomes more expensive to put into the world.

It’s not hard for me to imagine. It won’t take very long at all for the race to reduce carbon to sequester carbon to lower the externalities that are created by industry. It won’t take very long at all for it to have a meaningful effect on the amount of crap. We’re dumping into the world. So it’s not going to be easy because you still have the game theory. Problem of not all countries signing up. However, if you address the fact that its profitable for a country to sign up for this regime, The pressure will be on for each country to be part of it.

There is a long history of ignoring externalities. Well, it’s not in my backyard. That one of the things that we’ve done as we’ve striated, our society is, we’ve dumped stuff into other people’s backyards, but now, finally, it’s in everyone’s backyard. And as we think about how we can bring externalities inside the organization, where Better decisions will get made bring them into the buying cycle. So that better decisions will get made.

We can address lots of the long term significant issues that we’ve been wrestling with. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it will happen more quickly if we understand it, externalities are not free. There are no side effects. There’s just affects and every time we make something, buy something ship, something dispose of something.

There are effects and Now, we can’t ignore them because we have to live with them for a really long time. Yes, the roof is on fire. But maybe this time we can do something about it, instead of just playing the song over and over again. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this.

Or any other episode, please. Visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l, iink and click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can submit an ad or you can check out the show notes. I said, this is Shannon in Toronto Canada. I just seems your telemedicine episode and I was wondering how you think we could align your vision of a much more Convenient Healthcare System using telemedicine with the notion of Health Care as a public good or right, you know coming from a publicly funded Healthcare System.

I do expect some level of inconvenience in engaging with that system in any given time just because I Thatthat systems using its finite resources, you know, doctors and nurses, and directing them towards the person is Justin who needs them the most. And, you know, when I show up at any given time, maybe my need is not the greatest need at that moment. And so I may need to wait a bit or you know, have a bit of friction in in my engagement with that system.

So my concern with your vision might be that the system was made that was being articulated seem like we’re shifting more and more towards a system where the resources get diverted based on the ability to pay and not necessarily the greatest level of need. And I’m wondering if you have thoughts about how that could be avoided.

Anyway, thank you for all that you do and I hope you have a wonderful holiday. Thank you for this. It led to all sorts of thinking on my part. I could make six podcasts about your question. In fact, I’ve already made at least one the one about the aravind Eye Hospital founded by dr. V in India. India. Now produces some of the best eye doctors in the world because of this Hospital.

Here’s the thing. You’re not allowed to say at the aravind Eye Hospital. Well, it’s not like, they’re paying anything for this cataract surgery that in fact, the cataract surgery, you would get at our event for free or for $135. If you chose the high-priced route, which simply gives you a nicer Linens and maybe a private room.

regardless of which level of service you paid for you would get cataract surgery as good or better as you can get in Los Angeles or in London because you’re not allowed to say Well, they’re not paying anything by telemedicine rant had nothing whatsoever to do with telemedicine as a luxury good quite the opposite it had to do with figuring out how to be patient focused and Verse 2 bureaucracy that doesn’t add any value that the bureaucracy surrounding Health Care in my country and in many other countries every step along the way, probably had good intent behind it, but then it sticks around it. Sticks around far longer than it should, it becomes Superstition and it becomes a way of enforcing power roles.

They’re one of the questions that came in about the episode was, well, if the second doctor, here’s what the first Doctor said, you won’t get an honest second opinion. Your needs to be a blindfold and earmuff between the two of them and given human nature. That is probably correct. But one of the reasons that yuman nature amplifies, one doctor agreeing with the other is because the system has trained them to do that.

What we need to figure out how to do, whether someone is paying for it or not, is begin with first principles. Why are we even talking to this? Patient. What is the purpose of this consultation? Why is there a clinic here? What is the interaction? We’re having supposed to do? Because it turns out and this has been proven again and again, and again, more people will get more healthy.

If we disperse treatment, widely, if we help people change their lifestyle, the story they tell themselves about their health if we get in touch with people, so, Sooner when they are dealing with a health problem, none of the things that we are trying to maximize our actually increased. When we have 100,000 dollar a night, sweet at some fancy Hospital in San Francisco for one person, but the system pressures in the system have pushed it in that direction.

So here’s his chance with telemedicine. Just like we had a chance with email to say, wait a second, what would happen if we embraced Instead of scarcity now email is imperfect because we forgot to put boundaries on it because we let the spammers it because the API is to open. But with telemedicine, we have a chance to bring the right information to the right, people for the right reason, at the right time at extraordinarily low. Cost that instead of a doctor being able to see two or three people in an hour.

She can see 10 or 15 and maybe if we set it up, right, have higher job satisfaction, not lower. Our job satisfaction. What we were talking about here is the spread of ideas and doing it in a way that is still custom and bespoke and appropriate but not burdened with quite so much, overhead and waste.

Hello. Again Seth. This is Nathan in the Jackson, Mississippi area and I just got finished listening to your telemedicine episode. It was fascinating. Some of your ideas. I thought were great. And because of my own experience with being a patient in telemedicine, I had a lot of questions come up, but there was actually one question that came up due to a single phrase that you used.

And it was that all of us are smarter than any of us. And I feel like this has been proven to be true in some ways, especially with things like Wikipedia. I mean, the collective editing is the reason that it is what It is and it’s fantastic, but it makes me wonder if all of us are smarter than any one of us.

Why is it that it seems like today we’re coming to these ridiculous and often false conclusions about certain topics or, you know, even conspiracy theories that sort of thing. So if all of us are smarter than any of us, shouldn’t we be Able to avoid this kind of thing. Maybe I’m just thinking about it the wrong way, but it’s something that it was the first question that came to mind.

Anyway, I hope you have a safe healthy and enjoyable holiday season and looking forward to what happens in 2022. Thank you. Thank you for this question, Nathan. This is one of the two may be 10, great quotes on the internet. As you know, Abraham Lincoln said that 45% of the statistics on the internet aren’t true and he was right.

Stewart, brand famously said, information wants to be free, but that’s not really what he said. He said information wants to be free or information wants to be expensive. And in this case, all of us are smarter than any of us has a parenthetical which is, but On Any Given issue. Person is probably the one with the right answer and you’re highlighting the difference between the crowd. Knowing something that one person might not know that they need to know.

The idea that if we can tap into the wisdom of community, we can make each of us a little bit more aware at a little smarter. But at the same time as Winston Churchill said, democracy is A terrible form of government except for all the other kinds. And the thing is that we have a media problem right now, which is we are amplifying the angriest voices. We are giving a microphone to trolls to people who are seeking attention.

Not the hard work of actually showing up doing the work and governing. And so if you want to build an open community and I am so lucky to be running one right now. It’s all about the boundaries. The number of things that are open to a vote where the loudest people get. The most votes is very low there, what we have and we’ve seen this in science is a chance to have an open system, but with boundaries and rules. That we have peers reviewing Journal articles that we have this incremental cycle of oh semmelweis wrote this but he was wrong about that.

And that incremental shift is how we ended up. Knowing so much about the natural world. So no, I don’t want a mob running anything. But I do like it when people who are leading are also listening and discovering things. They didn’t think they needed to know before they set out on their Journey. Thanks everybody for listening.

We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as The success Seeker at the level of, of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s Awesome, but when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up. And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have. The information we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt + ba. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -clubhouse- <==

There’s something pretty magical about a good knock knock joke. You say knock knock someone else says, who is there two syllables into it and you’re already getting positive feedback. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about Clubhouse and other choices. You need to make as a Creator in 2021.

But first, here’s a message from our sponsor, people need a sense of belonging whenever they move to a new town or place. I’ve been piloting volunteer-led newcomers welcoming clubs, which have been newcomers. And those who want to welcome them. I’ve developed a way of building such clubs at near zero cost that can work anywhere. If you want to create one of these inclusive and tolerant newcomers welcoming clubs. I’ll support you free of charge. Just write to me at Richard, Lucas at Richard Lucas.com., I’ll send you more information. Shannan invite you to an onboarding call about how it works. Can’t wait to hear from you Clubhouse in April, 20-21 valued, at more than four billion dollars by some smart investors, even though the software itself. It’s not that hard to clone.

There are literally dozens of companies that are making copies of clubhouse, right. This minute Clubhouse a site where people show up and then they show up again. It’s sticky. They stay for Towers clubhouse that place that people who are in it. Can’t stop talking about seems like the first rule of Clubhouse is it? You always talk about Clubhouse.

My question for you is not did Clubhouse, do a whole bunch of things, right? They did. The question is, are those things they did? Right. Right for you. The question is, should you have a podcast or should you be on clubhouse? It’s a question that isn’t about clubhouse at all. It’s about the choices that so many of us need to make about the information. We consume and more important.

The information we spread, as we seek to lead and change our culture. I’ve sponsored an appointment because I believe you are the most able statement at all Fredonia. Well, that covers a lot of ground, the future of freedonia rests on you. So what did Clubhouse do? Right? Well, we’ve already mentioned the fact that it’s sort of exclusive you needed an invite to get in. They were very careful about who they ceded the invites with and then they quickly pushed those people to be able to invite just a few other people, scarcity, and affiliation in a magical dance. When you’re on clubhouse. They quickly scan your address book, so they know who, you know, it seems like they’re doing it for you, but they’re doing it for them because once they know who, you know, there are more more likely to connect you with them and what they learned from Facebook and then from Pinterest is that, if you build a network, a place with people, you know, you’re more likely to come back to see what they’re up to.

They also made it really clear who’s following you and built in a quick status game for you. How many followers do you have? Could you get more followers? What’s the best way to get more followers? I know invite other people to join. As if they join, they’re going to follow you. And then your status will go up and this status game, the social media, status game of likes from people don’t like you friends from people who aren’t actually your friend, putting those numbers front and center, pushes people who are looking for a short-term, endorphin, hit to do it more quickly. You discover the right way to use Twitter, if you want your numbers to go up and so the sir is defined not to find on what you want, not to find on what kind of interactions you’re having, but to find on what day want on, which numbers they want to go up.

And as you’re busy, using Clubhouse, they’re constantly showing you other places where the people the cooler people, then you are hanging out. And with just to click, you can join in as well. The end result of all this is that the first five or 10 or 15 minutes. Using Clubhouse. There’s this endless series of endorphin hits. It has been optimized more than just about any social experiment I’ve ever seen to create a buzz early on to let you believe you’ve done something right. But also to yearn to do it, more to make your score, go up to help your numbers improve and yeah, I’ve been invited to be on some things on clubhouse. I’ve done a few and I’ve seen the Ation, that’s going on. Why is it called manipulation?

Well, here’s the question. Is it in your long-term interest? So, a friend of mine, if she had a podcast, would have 30,000 people listening to it. She’s that connected that insightful, that generous that much of a leader when she shows up on clubhouse. 1,000, people, listen to her live now. 1,000 people is For a clubhouse room, but it’s not 30,000, and more important than that.

The relationship with the audience belongs to clubhouse. We learn this from Facebook in the old days people thought. I know, I’ll just go to a platform that will bring me an audience and they consider their followers their followers. And then one day, Facebook, started, throttling, the newsfeed. They started making it to the not all of your followers could easily. Ali organically follow you, you had to pay money to boost, hit the Boost button, 25 bucks. You can reach quote, your people.

They’re not your people. They belong their attention belongs to the central Authority, that is manipulating and directing that attention. Thing about podcast, which are based on the RSS technology is that nobody owns the follower list. It’s more like a frequency on the radio dial where the Who listen to you have it pre built in to their tuner.

What that means is that there isn’t somebody who can disintermediate you someone who can push you out of the way, someone who can ask you to hit the Boost button that the people thank you very much. Who listen to this podcast have chosen to listen to this podcast. I don’t have to go out and chase you down every week.

I don’t have to worry about whether or not something is getting filtered the day the podcast. It worth your time is the day, you’ll stop listening. That’s not what’s happening on clubhouse. Now, the essential model of the clubhouse structure is that you can only listen to one thing at a time. That’s not true. When we think about most of the surfing that people do on the web. The web is the home of multitasking, but listening to a live broadcast on clubhouse. Well, you might have it on in the background, but you’re definitely not listening to two things at once, also with audio. Discoveries really hard.

And one of the things, the clubhouse did was make it so that you can discover Things based on who you follow. But still, the model is fraught because there is this desire to be front and center to make your numbers. Go up this inability to have actual subscribers. This lack of any sensible way to monetize what you’re doing.

The very idea that you can archive stuff from clubhouse, that was pretty new recording was prohibited for a while and I’m not aware of someone who’s taking those recordings and doing something useful with them. So again, I’m not here to rant about Clubhouse. If it’s working for you, please do what I’m saying is too often.

We are seeking attention, but we make the mistake of embracing short-term, attention short term, positive feedback. Need to measure numbers instead of signing up and sticking with something. For the long haul, my blog has been running for 20 years. I mean, the 8000s when it comes to posts, this podcast has had more than 200 episodes.

Drip, by drip week-by-week listener by listener. These are assets that you can build on your way to changing the culture. So one of the fascinating things about Clubhouse, is how many people on clubhouse, not only talk about Clubhouse. But talk about monetizing Clubhouse. There is this belief every time, a hot new social media platform shows up that the people who get in early will somehow get some sort of special benefit like racing to the front of the auditorium to get really good seats before. Some rock band plays.

Yeah. It doesn’t work that way. The people who got in early at Twitter, the people In early at Facebook, their head, start evaporated it, evaporated fast. My blog wasn’t the first blog. My blog wasn’t the last block, same, as this podcast. That’s not the urgency. The urgency is to choose a platform a place that’s yours where you can show up and create a body of work where you are doing it for you and your listeners, or your readers or the people you’re engaging with in connecting.

Not for someone who seeks unicorn status in the valley. Because if you aren’t paying for it and they have structured it to give you endorphin hits. You’re not the customer. You are the product and understanding that you are the product that is going to be sold to someone someday because these people don’t value a company for six or eight billion dollars because they’re good people, they do it because they think it’s worth more than that.

And for to be worth more than that. Going to pay, maybe you’ll pay to reach a bigger audience, maybe advertisers will pay to reach you and your audience. So yeah, if you’re enjoying the ride, please keep chatting. But as we look at each new platform, that shows up and there are new ones coming all the time.

We have the opportunity to ask ourselves a question. It’s a simple one. What’s in it for me. I know what’s in it for me to listen to the radio. I know what’s in it for me to write my blog. I know what’s in it for me to engage with a friend on. A walk through a forest. I’m not exactly sure. Why? It pays to spend the time to invest in a platform any platform where you don’t own anything. When you’re done.

Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week, in fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit a Kimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about, what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see A way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please.

Of course. I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the Pain Scale, entire sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Whoosah. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode or anything else on your mind.

I hope you’ll visit a Kimbo that link that take Ai and bi O DOT. I NK and click the appropriate button, two good questions this week. Each one of which probably could be an episode unto itself. Here we go.

Hello. Seth. It’s John here in the UK recently online. I have seen all sorts of. analogies being created to do with vaccinations that try and persuade people one way or the other why they should or shouldn’t have the vaccines but covid But these have been posted by people who I thought were quite intelligent.

Yet the analogies they put forward are often so different to the point. They’re trying to make, I don’t see, I just I am flummoxed as to how they can see that their MIT that they make any sense to that argument. And I was wondering what your thoughts were on. These sorts of statements, where because of this over here, that over, there must be true.

Even though they are not related. What is the mindset? What is the human mind set that grabs onto these things and things are? Yes a and therefore be And there is no link between the two. Thanks very much. Love what you do. Cheers. Thanks for this John. I believe analogies are a skill. They’re not a talent. We’re not born with them.

But being able to argue and learn from analogies, is a skill, the way, I know that is because they’re on the SAT, but I also know that because some people aren’t as good at them as other people and I’ve seen people get better at them, an analogy. G is a grappling hook. It is a ladder. It is a chance to take the thing, you know about one thing, and put it to work to understand. Another thing using symbolic logic using and understanding of how things work.

You can get really good at using analogy to understand. I trained as a mechanical engineer. I never practiced, but one of the things, Learn in engineering school, is that there are things that work and things that don’t. It’s not like English literature in which there are opinions. But even in English literature the opinions need to be grounded often in an argument that works from analogy. The legal system is nothing but a series of analogies in the way that they are written down and in the way that we litigate in court. Well, if a A gets you B.

And C is like a, we must get to D. And this is something that we can learn. So what does this have to do with your question? It is also true that uman beings use words because they are trying to express emotions. They are trying to talk about their beliefs. But as an adult, it’s not okay to have a tantrum as an adult. We don’t really reward people for just Link and so people adopt various postures, various kinds of words, when it sounds like they are making a certain kind of argument. What they might actually be doing is simply putting their emotional range on display. They might actually be saying, I am upset about something or I want something to happen and I don’t have good words to make that, rational, sort of argument because we added rational sorts of arguments.

Last in our evolutionary Journey, my dog doesn’t know how to make rational arguments and neither does an earthworm. That what happens? First and foremost is that yuman beings process information with quick response with emotional response. And it’s only after that happens that we add the narrative and that we had our rational description of what happened. And so I am Saying the people who are bad at making analogies are dumped, their not.

What I’m saying is two things are happening at the same time. First that there is a skill that they might not have acquired, which is cleverly and effectively using analogies to make an argument to somebody who is having an argument at that rational level and to, they are talking about their needs, their fears, their desires, the things that are Urgent to them, but using a different vocabulary, Beulah and they are confusing us because we thought they were doing one thing when they’re actually doing the other and the Practical takeaway is this. If you are trying to persuade somebody who is good at arguing with rational analogy. It helps to be good at arguing with rational analogy on the other hand. If someone isn’t good at it, it might be helpful to say, what are they actually trying to say? Because our emotional state is not trivial, and our emotional state is not unimportant.

It is often different from our rational State. Hey, Seth, my name is Mark. I’m from Scotland. Love what you do and I love how your brain works. I have a question around scaling up and I guess moving from a small company to a large company and branding and around that aspect of things, a lot of when I started out, a lot of it was controversial. I was starting in the pet food, wasn’t happy with what was being sold.

And I was asking a lot of questions. Now, as we’ve grown and we developed a brand, I feel the brand of the company, slightly different to myself, who CEO. Is it a good things for a CEO to keep their brand separate? For example, Elon Musk and all the different companies that he runs a Richard Branson versus virgin.

How do you work having a CEO brand versus a company brand? Where I maybe one maybe won’t be a bit more controversial where the company maybe once the toe the line. Have a softness of the approach of what we do. I’d love you feedback on this one. Thanks for this Mark. I think that your question about personal brand and brand has changed a bunch because of social media and because of our culture’s obsession with the individual.

But let’s think about, I don’t know, a car company, a car company with a super famous CEO. Someone who’s maybe a bit of a troll somebody who over time developed quite a reputation for being wrong about a bunch of things. Yes. I’m talking about Henry, Ford Henry, Ford built the Ford Motor Company into one of the biggest and most important companies in the world largely on the basis of insights about production.

But also using a personal brand to get the attention of the media. He wrote a, for example, for page, article in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is quite an accomplishment and From that, vantage point was able to talk and educate people about what he had to offer, but you don’t know who the CEO of Ford is. I certainly don’t know who the CEO for it is because it doesn’t matter. We don’t want to know who the CEO of many companies is because their brand our expectation for who they are and what they stand for is something broader than that.

I don’t expect. Henry Ford’s great-grandson to come to my house and fix something when it’s broken. That the brand becomes something broader than that. Now, in social media, it is possible to create a spectacle and to use that spectacle to tell a story and to use that spectacle in that story to capture attention, and to earn some level of trust or notoriety.

But as organization seek to cross the chasm, from people who are rooting for you, as if you’re in some sort of movie, some sort of quest into people who are rooting for themselves, who are Like something because of the story, they get to tell themselves about who they are and where they’re going. Sometimes it pays to say, you know what, you’re not coming here, because Howard Schultz is the CEO of Starbucks.

You’re coming here because when you go to Starbucks with a friend, it changes the way you feel. So I don’t think we’re past the era of the notorious CEO. I think it’s gonna be around for a long time. Social media loves this story, but I do think that At the resilient path forward is to figure out how to stand for something that lots and lots of the people, you seek to serve can Embrace whether or not they know who you are.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see y’all next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable. And in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have data. What all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got a face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very Commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt +. Ba. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -guitar-strings- <==

What kind of strings does? Bruce Springsteen use on his guitar? What about Jerry Garcia? Or prince? Three of the biggest grossing live, entertainers of Our Generation? Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about guitar, strings and Equity, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

This This ad is an invitation for people like you to show up serve and support your local public schools to shape our future from the inside. What is public education for the answer to caring Educators around the world? Is that it’s for our students to build skills and connect with caring adults. When they may, not be able to go home to one join us in serving students in your community and help them see that people like them. Can care about learning and creating and that people like them can care about each other.

Well Bruce uses dear Dario. Jerry used Vinci and Prince used Dr. Strings.

And so the question is, if these three artists grossed more than a billion dollars in ticket sales during their career?

What percentage of it ought to go to these guitar string companies because after all without guitar strings, they’re not really able to play. I got this question from a listener just a couple weeks ago. Hi, Seth, Eric from Nashville, Tennessee. Love the podcast and longtime fan of your work. Since I first pulled the unleashing, the idea of Iris at random off of Borders, Books shelf, as a senior, in high school, big impact on me at a crucial time in my life. And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

My question is about compensation. I work as a touring musician in Nashville and wages for touring. Musicians have been stagnant for a long time while the amount artists. Especially big artist makes on tours have gone through the roof. I’m not complaining. I know what I was signing up for and I love my job.

My question is, how do I add value and pay to a job with a fairly rigid job description. I have many side hustles that raise my income like, teaching selling sounds that I’ve created for artists to others and more. But is there a way to make a narrowly defined job? Pay more equitably? When there’s a long list of I fight people competing for it.

Thanks so much. And I hear you Eric. It is a totally legitimate question to ask, which is that if you are doing essential work, work that if you weren’t there, it wouldn’t happen and you are doing it in proximity to somebody who is creating a huge amount of value. In this case, measured through ticket sales.

Where is the Equitable share to the person who’s making it happen, but if we think about the guitar string companies, what artists Say to the people who make guitar strings is not only will, I not pay you a part of my income. You need to pay me to be on stage with me because your association with me creates value for you.

I can get a different kind of guitar string that most of us, accept the fact that if we are, for example, going to a really important meeting, we don’t pay more for The gas in our car or even the car. We buy to get to the important meeting compared to getting to the laundromat because we live in a Market Place economy.

And in a Marketplace economy. It is up to the buyer to decide which option is best for them and up to the seller to compete, with other sellers, to get more sales, all of us do this all the time, but labor labor. Is different because labor is personal personal to us. Not just the fact that we need the money to survive.

But getting paid for our work is a form of dignity. And yes, we look for fairness and we look for something that feels like equity. And if you’ve been a hardworking person, whether you’re in a coal mine or on stage at the Beacon Theater and you haven’t seen your wages, go up. It’s easy to become disheartened. It’s easy. Be to look at the situation that a market economy brings to bear and say wait a minute.

This doesn’t feel right and I don’t feel seen and respected and so the challenge and this is what I wrote about in linchpin more than 10 years ago. And the challenge is this when we live in a market economy where labor is something that is bought and sold. It tends to be that people exercise their privilege. In that economy to sell what they want to sell and to buy what they want to buy.

And just as Bruce isn’t going to pay extra for his guitar strings. The person who is running a profitable business is not going to pay extra for the next employee because they need an employee. Who is good enough to do the labor as described. So, what to do? If we are a laborer? Well, something has shifted, something has shifted dramatically In Our Lifetime, actually two things.

The first one is this physical proximity to the work to be done is not nearly as important as it used to be. If I ran a mill in a small Mill town and I needed Mill workers in order to make the fabric. The number of workers that was available. Malleable to me was constrained and therefore, if business started going well, if there was competition for certain people to work.

I would have to raise wages wages, tend to be sticky compared to other forms of fungible Commodities. Because the people who are doing the hiring are hesitant to increase wages because information flow is not complete because people want to keep Their job. It is not an efficient market but it is also true that wages will go up if more demand exists than there are people willing to work because if you need someone to work for you, you will increase the wages. You are willing to pay until they reach the marginal benefit. That that person is adding. If you’ve got a machine and it’s sitting idle isn’t making you anything, but when it’s working, you make $50 for every hour, it’s working.

You willing to pay up. Fifty dollars an hour to get someone to run that machine.

Oh, no, we’re working it easy. No working hard. The word. It is nothing but an all for boring job.

Here’s the second thing that happened in addition to physical proximity. We ended up atomizing and describing contributions that were made by labor, much more precisely. It used to be, we need a craftsperson to work in this Factory in this spot. Now we can say I need this batch of items processed in exactly this way by this machine time and motion studies helped corporations Factory. His figure out exactly how much they should pay someone and exactly what they should be doing.

Well, the combination of these two things, led to Outsourcing it, led to the gig economy. You don’t need to hire a chauffeur. If you can just press a button and have Uber or Lyft, show up, you rent that chauffeur for 30 minutes and then they’re not your problem anymore. And what who burned lift do is disintermediate in the sense that you don’t have. Have to go find exactly who you’re going to hire. They are a different kind of middle person and the drivers essentially are bidding against each other because if they’re not willing to work for the prevailing wage, they don’t get a gig.

Now, what we see here is that workers have two choices. One choice is to band together. If all the drivers who could possibly work for Uber or Lyft banded together the price, all Us would pay for an Uber would dramatically increase and the money would go to the drivers. But if they don’t know each other, if they don’t coordinate their work, if they are being treated as separate individuals, they will always lose because they cannot create an oligopoly. They cannot work together to force the price up. So as long as there’s a never-ending flow of people willing to drive the Edges are always going to be lower and the same thing is true for the person who is willing to go on the road with Neil Young or Sly and the Family, Stone, or anybody else, which is, if you can play the keyboards and you play them, exactly, as written. The same way everybody else does, then the purchaser decides. It’s going to be fungible all the same.

When you buy a bag of beans. They’re sold by weight. Not by Bean because all the beans are the same which leads to the second alternative labor has, which is to become indispensable. The one and only the thing is, there’s a certain kind of wah-wah pedal said Jerry Garcia used and if the price of that wah-wah pedal went up, he would pay it because there wasn’t an alternative. And so there’s two kinds of Labor.

There’s the labor that can be done by anybody with a certain skill set of which there are A lots of people and then what we’re looking for is the information flow who’s available, who knows about this gig? The person who’s hiring once the maximum number of people to apply because the more fair and open and efficient. The market is, the less they have to pay on the other hand. The worker doesn’t benefit from the rise of information because it means more people are aware of the job and there’s less of a sin. Cure, but if there’s a one and only if you want chip Kidd to design your book, cover if you want Debbie Millman to consult on the design of your brand voice, if you want Bernadette jeewa to help you with the story that you are trying to develop, you don’t have any alternatives at all because you picked the one and only they bring something distinctive to the table and thus their wages are not in an auction. Ian where the lowest bidder gets the gig there, the one and only.

And so as we move to this new gig economy, where more and more people are working remotely, where more and more jobs are getting broken into tiny bits to be done by the cheapest available, human or computer, The Way Forward is to be one worth seeking out. It might be your reputation. It might be that knowing. Bernie Worrell is on keyboards. Makes it more likely that someone’s going to come to the concert.

Or it might be that you actually have a distinct set of skills and experiences that almost nobody else has. And it might be that you bring a sort of emotional labor to the table. Emotional labor is a term, that’s more than 60 years old aerial hochschild wrote about it in the 1960s, which is the effort expended by a service, worker to display emotion. They don’t feel in the moment.

What she wrote about it. She was talking about how enervating it was for a flight attendant to pretend to be happy to see you when they were exhausted. But I’ve turned emotional labor around and said emotional labor is the privilege that a worker has to bring a sort of effect to the table to bring optimism and connection and Charisma, and possibility and energy, which is hard for many other people to produce on demand. This Emotional labor. This effort this willingness to lean into the work that feels hard is in fact scarce.

And if it’s scarce, then you as the worker have accomplished something which is you’ve put yourself into a smaller category. So Arc I would argue that if I was putting together a touring band. One of the things I’m looking for is skill but just as much I’m looking for, are they fun to be with on the tour bus?

Do they create? Positive energy on the stage. Are they reliable and show up for every gig on time? Are they enthusiastic do? They encourage me to push you get the idea. All of these things is how a certain kind of gig worker. Get picked by name the next time and that’s where this all comes to. In the end.

Who’s going to asked for you by name, who’s going to be disappointed if they have to go to the next person.

On the list.

How do we choose a career choose something that we produce where it’s not easy to do, specifically, what we do because of you have been seduced by the education industrial complex in to doing what’s on the test into fitting into the box, into being someone who has deniability about their work, because you’re meeting spec.

Well, then you’ve set yourself up to be a fungible commodity, and in a free market. That’s always going to be undervalued from the point of view of someone seeking dignity and respect and a fair wage, but the alternative at least until we get to the point where the government is ensuring that there is a floor.

So that the work that you are doing gets paid a fair wage. The alternative is to be the one and only to figure out how to show up with a bucket of emotional labor and skill. That makes it easy for someone to say this one. This person is the one that’s hard to live without. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo dot link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp. That hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is on the part of this Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Whoosah. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this.

Any previous episode or anything. That’s on your mind, please visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can even upload and add for a hobby a cause you care about something. That’s interesting and non-commercial three questions this weekend. I think it’s fair to say they are the most varied set of questions we’ve ever covered.

Here we go.

Hey Seth, this is Jeff in Sacramento, California. And here’s my question, a recent podcasts. You talked about the idea of modern monetary theory is that now we have money that is no longer connected to a standard like gold or something like that. It kind of is whatever we make it. However with the massive rise in inflation.

I’m If you would address the concept that yes money, maybe an idea that is something that we make up and believe in and it’s a story, We Tell ourselves, but if that story becomes Something That No One Believes In anymore, that we’re in trouble as a society. Thanks so much. Love the podcast. Thanks, Jeff.

You’ve made the core of my point already, which is that money truly is a story. Gold was also a story because gold isn’t worth anything. Anyway, the story of money is super complicated and gets even more complicated when we add inflation. If people think that prices are going to go up prices, sometimes go up. Not because they understand monetary Theory, not because they have any Insight into quantitative easing.

It’s just part of their story and inflation is a real challenge, because inflation is contagious. And inflation can scale the inflation that we are facing in. This moment of 2022, is a different kind of inflation than most people in my country are used to. It is not an inflation caused by monetary Theory or even technology it was Inflation caused by a significant multi-year disruption to the supply chain and the labor markets, and in the face of that, some companies couldn’t afford to sell what they wanted to sell at the price.

They were used to selling at some workers decided.

It wasn’t worth going to work risking their life, in their dignity, for the pay that they had been receiving and in the face of both of those things and inflationary. It occurred different than we are used to. And one of the things that happened is that corporations holding a meeting. Said, look, we can’t sell this for three dollars anymore. We gotta raise the price. We gotta raise the price to three dollars in 10 cents or we’re going to lose money and somebody probably an MBA spoke up and said, well, we’re going to raise the prices to 310.

Why don’t we just raise the prices to 320 instead because if you’re used to making a nickel, a product at Three dollars and you raise the price 2310 to still make a nickel and you figure out how to go to 320. You just tripled your profits in one meeting and it turns out that much of the rise in prices around us has been caused by corporations, using the shift to change the quotes, about the supply chain to dramatically increase their profits.

And unless you have a true Monopoly. I cannot stand that over time. This will fade away because people are smart and they will look for options and they will choose to pay less if two things are similar, but you’re hinting at a bigger issue, which is when we start realizing that there are lots of forms of exchange, not just US Dollars.

The story of the US dollar starts to shift and this is some of the nonsense around n ftes or Reyes cryptocurrencies that again, people don’t understand what profit from and they are playing with them. And if people come to believe that they are better off, putting their money into a digital Ledger than they are into a home or into certain kinds of productive activities than they will and that story will gain in traction.

The purpose of me ranting about this isn’t because I know how to fix the story. It’s because Need to be aware that were telling ourselves. A story as the story isn’t working. We should tell ourselves a different story, a Seth.

This isn’t a question about your most recent episode, but it has been on my mind, given a project. I’ve been working on and the conflicts that are arising would like to know. What you think about Sweat Equity versus Financial contributions to a project. It seems that some people have a very skewed view towards what money brings versus expertise experience and passion.

I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on this. Thank you. Thank you for this Shelly.

There are two parts to your question that I’m hearing. Maybe I’m just making this up. The first one is about respect. And again, dignity, which is if the person with money is showing up and disrespecting the person who’s putting in effort. It makes it hard to put in effort that money talks for sure. Because there is, as we just discussed a story about it. That’s fairly.

All. But the real question to be asked here, the one that can address the personal question. Is this, can you build the entity? You are seeking to build without the people without the sweat, without the Insight. Next. Can you build it without the money? If you can build it without the money, go build it without the money and dismiss the person who’s giving you a hard time about Sweat Equity.

On the other hand, if money can buy you the effort from Else. It might be easier to raise money and spend it to hire somebody than it is to guess at how much that person who’s not getting paid. Should own in the thing, that’s ultimately being built that when we are building something in a capital based society.

Well, then capital is at some level, the key measurement of what is being built. So, we’re seeing examples of companies with just a couple dozen people that are worth billions of dollars. It is possible to build a company like WhatsApp or MailChimp with very, very little cash. I call that bootstrapping and the bootstrapping workshop is something I’m really proud to have built that bootstrapping is the idea that you can use, Sweat Equity to see what people need. Not a lot of people. Just enough people that they need so badly that they will pay you up front for you. Go build it for them. And with them.

Well, in that case there is no outside, investor. Your customers, are your investors, but let’s say that’s not the case. Let’s say you’re trying to build some sort of tech company. Well, you have two choices. You can find people who are going to work quote for free in exchange for owning a piece of what they built.

And then you don’t need to raise very much money at all, or you can raise a whole bunch of money. And then go pay workers what they need to be paid in cash because our labor has value and we have figured out how to Value it. And if an investor is willing to take more of a risk than an employee, then that’s your choice. So I don’t think there’s a moral answer to this question.

I think it’s simply a choice.

Hey, Seth. I just got a product that came with some stickers and it occurred to me that stickers are just this excellent form of people like us, do things like this Market. And it just occurred to me that to my knowledge. I’ve never heard you talk about stickers. So I just wanted your thoughts on stickers and thanks for all you do.

Thanks for this Nathan. It is correct that I have never spoken of stickers. I vividly remember the sticker that I had on the car. I could ill afford in 1983. I was a beta tester for the original Mac and there was an apple on the back of my My car and I remember people honking and waving as they drove by a dear friend of mine has an entire wall of his room. Top to bottom covered. With hundreds, hundreds of stickers from a variety of products.

I remember years ago, the day that I was sitting in Colorado where I met Jacqueline novogratz and where I met Joey do. And I looked at Joey’s laptop and it was covered with stickers, which in those days was sacrilegious. Your laptop was supposed to be pure. Stickers have several functions. The first one. If it’s the first one isn’t true. The second one doesn’t occur. The first one is they are form of identity.

They are somebody putting something on. Something, they care about to say, this is me. It’s not just people like us, do things like this. It’s, I am people like us period. This Is My Flag, I am wearing this hat, this jacket, these pants. You can tell which tribe which cohort which Cadre arm. Because I have chosen to wear the sticker.

That’s not easy to do. The reason it’s not easy to do is not because stickers are expensive. It’s because most people don’t want to identify with what you made. They’re going to sell me average stuff for average people. Why on Earth would I want to wear a sticker celebrating? That fact know what’s on offer here with a sticker? That works. Is somebody choosing to affiliate themselves in in public with you because it raises their status because it gives them a sense of affiliation.

And then yes, the second part is when we see others with the sticker, we want one, too, but the only way to get a sticker without being a fraud, is to engage with what the sticker is celebrating. And so, I think the punchline of the question is, what could you do to make a product or service? Sticker worthy.

What does it mean to be sticker worthy? That someone wants to wear that thing raise that flag? And the second half of it is that when others see it? When they see the person who’s got the sticker? What do they want to do? After they see it, do they want to join in? Thank you all for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to English yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah.

That you got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome.

But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you. What are you going to face those fears?

I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask. That question, it’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -dancing-with-time- <==

One of the greatest inventions in history, doesn’t really have a name. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about the opposite of real time. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, this is Morgan Michael. This isn’t a pitch and it’s not an ad. It’s kind of an ask what if in this really tumultuous and uncertain time. We look to each other and committed ourselves to doing something kind to making a generous connection to texting five friends. We haven’t talked to in such a long time just that just that Humanity.

Reaching out. It’ll make you feel better. And I promise you this. There is a ripple effect with that kindness. A small act can make a really big impact.

10,000 years ago, everything happened in real time in unfolded right before our eyes, perhaps The Only Exception were stories told around the campfire. But even those were delivered to us by someone else in real-time. Try to imagine sitting and watching someone write a book or even type a three page memo.

The rehashes, the back spaces, the spell checking sitting there waiting word, by word for them. To finish the memo. This seems crazy. We read a memo when it’s done. We watch a movie after it’s edited that the shift from real-time to asynchronous. Communication is so important and yet. So invisible that we need to talk about it. We’ve talked about it before. Or I will probably talk about it again, but it keeps interfering, but it keeps making a difference in our lives.

So let’s go back a thousand years or so as we shifted to writing something, extraordinary occurred, which is that every human who had proximity and skill to engage with writing benefited, from all the people who had come before, not just libraries but things like Accounting things like, Ledger’s understanding who owns Which piece of property the technology involved in doing something. Whether it’s starting a fire or building a building.

If we could write it down, we could amplify it. If we could write it down, we could improve it. And if we could write it down, we could spread it. So writing transformed Humanity, more than just about anything else and is the difference between us. Every other species on Earth is that the Beavers figure out how to build the dam partly from Instinct and partly from Community.

But if one Beaver has a breakthrough and comes up with an even better way to make a dam that Insight dies. With that Beaver, that’s not the case with humans that Youmans thanks to the asynchronous idea of writing, are able to compound their Innovation and to build networks and communities. And so for hundreds of years, writing was it and then we expanded it across time and space by adding stamps.

So now it’s not just the writing, that is in your local library, but you could take your writing and send it to someone else and they would read it when they got around to it and they could save what you wrote and refer to it later and they could right back. And so we were living in this asynchronous world, the opposite, I guess of real-time and then then come something like the telegram, but the telegram is nothing but a letter that goes faster.

The telephone is where we really see a shift happen because when you call someone else on the phone, it doesn’t work. Unless they answer inventing, the ringing phone, just the concept of a thing that would ring and require. Your immediate attention was a breakthrough. We didn’t know what to say. When we answer the phone Alexander. Graham Bell was going to say Ahoy as the word we would use.

But instead the day was saved from Thomas Edison suggested maybe hello. Didn’t mean what it used to mean. So now we got the telephone that’s synchronized conversation back to real time and then radio shows up and radio is a hybrid because at the beginning radio was live, all live all the time. You had live actors doing live. Place.

You had live DJ’s, introducing live musicians, playing live music. If you missed it, it was gone, but then thanks to Edison. We had recordings and they came out of the radio in real time. So if you are listening you heard the new hit and if you weren’t you didn’t but the DJ the DJ was live and then we got to television even more of this was going on.

I’ll show was on once and only once but it was recorded. It was edited as we develop from film again, Edison and others. This idea was that we weren’t going to watch somebody painstakingly edit a movie. B for 200 days. We were going to wait till they were done and lots of what we think about. As culture from the 20th century, including Frampton Comes Alive, which was edited, of course, wasn’t actually live in real time. It was the work of painstaking editing, that happened back in. And fourth asynchronously, and after it was created, we could watch it when we wanted to watch it.

While this asynchronous revolution is going on. We still got school and school school, more than we realize is a huge expenditure of effort and money to occur in real time, the teacher teaches, when the teacher teaches butts in seats. The test is scheduled for a certain time. Yes, you can do your homework when you need to, but Have to hand it in when everybody else hands it in and then the internet shows up and it begins with email email a synchronous sure.

It might get there pretty quickly. But there was no expectation that someone was going to write back instantly and then texting texting like a phone call but lower Tech texting took off partly because there is a perception, the texting doesn’t happen. Asynchronously you write to someone and they are supposed to write right back. It is supposed to be a faster version of a phone call. Not a shorter version of an email. We put it back into real-time slack. Has that annoying little thing at the bottom. So, and so is typing. Well, if I’ve just put in a DM in slack and I see Sam is typing. I’m waiting. I’m waiting for Sam to finish typing. We pushed it because everything kept getting faster and faster. You’re from asynchronous, the idea that we decide when we’re going to consume something to synchronized to real time because anything might happen and it’s that desire to see the breaking news that drives people to look at Twitter instead of to read a history book.

It may be that understanding what happened two years ago, is more important than understanding, what someone had for breakfast, two minutes ago, but were drawn to it. We’re drawing. Drawn to the real-time thing because that is what we evolve through, 10,000 years of everything happening in real time.

So you are listening to this podcast, but you are not listening to it. While I am sitting in the shower of my office recording it in the middle of 2021. That would be weird. You understand that a podcast gets edited and the beauty of it is you don’t have to listen to it. The minute it gets published. It’s not Thursday night at 8:00. On NBC in 1981.

It’s sitting there in the queue. And if you want to listen to It sped up, there’s a button for that. If you want to go back and re-listen to part of it, there’s a way to do that. If you want to tell people your three favorite episodes in which three to ignore, that’s easy to do. It’s asynchronous. And then Here Comes Clubhouse, which is mysteriously popular. Among a certain group of people, the main reason it’s live.

The main reason is juxtapositions are happening. The main reason is something might happen that no one expects. The can’t get easily erased. It somehow feels more authentic. Of course, it’s not it’s simply more inefficient because you have to listen for hours and hours in order to find something that you want to talk about it. And one of the things you’re going to do when you talk about it, is you’re going to say to people, you missed it.

You had to be there. I made her dress myself to four very special people, John Paul, George and Ringo. The Beatles lately, there’s been a lot of rumors to the effect that the four of you might be getting back together. That would be great in my book. The Beatles are the best thing that ever happened to music. It goes even deeper than that. You’re not just a musical group. You’re part of us, we grew up with you.

It’s for this reason that I am inviting you to come on our show.

Now, we’ve heard and read a lot about personality and legal conflicts that might prevent you guys from reuniting. That’s something which is, none of my business. You guys will have to handle that but it’s also been said that no one has yet to come up with enough money to satisfy you. Well, if it’s money, you want, there’s no problem here.

The National Broadcasting Company has authorized me to offer you a certified. Check for 38 thousand dollars. Here it is. Can we get a close-up of this big? Which camera is it on the Move in there? Now here it is. As you can see verifiably. It is a check made out to you the Beatles for three thousand dollars.

All you have to do is sing three Beatle tunes. She loves you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a thousand dollars right there, you know the words. It’ll be easy. Like I said, this is made out this check. Here is made out to The Beatles. You divided anywhere you want. You want to give Ringo less? That’s up to you.

Not get involved. I’m sincere about this, if it helps you to reach a decision to reunite. Well, then it’s a worth the investment.

Back in the days when Saturday Night Live was live, when people watched it on Saturday night, a big part of the draw. At the beginning was Anything Could Happen people put up with mediocre sketches that lasted way too long. Because it was live. It felt live and Through the Years people particularly, since they associate television and YouTube with something that’s been pre-recorded have lost that magic feeling of live. I remember when Lauren Michael came out in the 70s and he had a check for three thousand dollars and he offered the Beatles a chance to every Union on Saturday Night Live part of the magic of it besides the absurdity of I’m only offering The Beatles three thousand dollars was that? Maybe, just maybe they’d surprise us.

Maybe, just maybe they’d show up. And so next week, we tuned in, because that’s the sort of thing that could have happened live. So, all of this is a warm-up for the best part of the rant, which is zoom. Here’s what I want to understand. Why is it it malpractice for someone to call a zoom meeting and talk at other people in real time?

What an astonishing waste? It’s like watching someone type of book. It’s like watching someone record a podcast. If you’ve got something to say to your team, recorded put it on Vimeo. Put it on YouTube. Instruct the people because you have power and authority to watch it. Let them watch It sped up. Let them watch it.

Let them watch it when it works for their schedule, let them watch it and discuss it with others. But why are we wasting the juicy magic of synchronized real-time experience? So that you can be uncomfortable live in front of a bunch of people who are uncomfortable watching you pontificate. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Why is it okay for a classroom that’s running on? Zoom to L’ve a teacher, lecturing to the class for 40 minutes. This makes absolutely no sense. Find one teacher, someone who’s really good at it and have them record the best 40-minute lecture ever recorded on the origins of the War of 1812. And then let everybody else watch it when they want to watch it. The beauty of Zoom call is not that it gives one person a chance to talk for a long time because they have power, the beauty of it is If we’re going to do it in real time, let’s make it a conversation.

Let’s have something going on that unfold in a way that we cannot predict because if it’s a memo sent a memo don’t have the meeting. It’s too expensive. It enervates us. It wipes us out. We have wasted this chunk of time, forcing things that should happen asynchronously into real time just because it’s convenient just because it’s become the standard. Third.

We have to stop that the opportunity as we blow up space and time in our post office world is to realize that a synchronicity the idea of mutual inspection of doing it. When we want to do it of watching it twice of, improving it of editing it. All of those things are more effective higher. Utility more productive than let’s do it live.

Let’s do it live. Has its place. Magic, it makes us feel alive. But as soon as we turn it into a lever for command and control, we’ve wasted all of it. Thanks for listening. You can listen to previous episodes, anytime you want. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with three questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week, in fact, an ad about the ads. If you It, akimbo dot link. You’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp. That hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can. Load a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course.

I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth Ali. Asia from Charleston. Here, hugs and kisses on the pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, sir. Hi, this is Russell is from Grace. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or anything previous, please, visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can check out the show notes. Three varied questions this week. Here we go. Hi sets. This is Cal coming to you from the UK and my question comes after, I had not listened to your podcast for a while. And so I was jumping around to rant Random episodes catching up on that. And I happen to listen to the externalities and money is a story episodes back-to-back and and externalities. You talk about this idea of a carbon dividend where there’s a carbon Baseline established and those who go over it have to pay money while those who stay under it will get paid as a reward for staying under the carbon Baseline.

But then in the money is a story episode. You talked about this story of the Childcare Center where in order to prevent parents from being late to pick up their children, they produced a fee that the parents would have to pay based on how late they were. And in this case, the plan backfired because as, you know, this thing that was once under a social contract now, became transactional. And so, actually, more parents started showing up late.

So my question is, how do we Square these two ideas? And wouldn’t a carbon dividend also, make this transactional and give license to those admitting massive amounts of carbon to pay some money and carry on us before. Anyway, thanks for all you do and hope you have a great 2020 to thank you for this calendar. On the surface. They do seem related, but they couldn’t be more different and here’s why in the case of the Israeli daycare center. There’s an enormous amount of social pressure to treat the people who are taking care of your kids fairly.

And when you show up a few minutes late, the look in their eye, the knowledge that tomorrow they’re going to be taking care of your kids again. This Is a powerful disincentive to show up late. On the other hand, when you say to people it’s $30 an hour, then you’re saying, even Steven, and so it undid social pressure.

In the case of carbon. The opposite has happened for 150 years because energy has been so cheap pumping it out of the ground has been cheap. We have created a status umbrella that people of means of privilege can use to show That they are somehow ahead of other people. So I private jet is better than a regular jet, which is better than a car, which is better than a bus, Which is better than walking.

And so building a huge home. That’s built from concrete that. Wastes a lot of energy Simply Having a front door that doesn’t have a storm door in front of it. All of these are elements of our culture. We’re wasting power was seen as a good thing to do. Do there is no social cost to standing at the doorway when your guests are leaving the house with the door slightly. Ajar saying that long. Goodbye.

If we put into place a pricing regime that appropriately and fairly prices. How much burning carbon costs all of us. Some people will still flaunt how much carbon they are burning for sure. But and it’s the huge but that makes the whole thing work. The problem we have with carbon and climate is not caused by one or two or 10 or 15 people who don’t recycle or who are wasting a little bit.

It’s caused by Massive industrial entities that are building coal plants or that are producing billions of plastic bottles. And what happened is they are really focused on the bottom line. They don’t make all of those. Because they want to, they do it because they make a profit doing it. So you don’t need very many people saying wait. I’m not going to buy that anymore because the extra dollar it cost me. Just not worth it. You don’t need many people to take that point of view for a big company to decide this isn’t worth it for us either.

And so this massive shift starts happening. It happens. Yes. From the bottom of the pyramid were there are millions of And millions of individuals, but also at the top where there are giant industrial entities, many of them public companies that will make different decisions that will have an impact. For all of us.

I said, I’ll do a young student from Neighbors cinnamon. I decided a short while ago that I will write a book and halfway through writing it. I realized that it could have been just as effective as a newsletter or as a series of blog posts or as CSO screenplays for hypothetical YouTube channel or just really anything.

So my question is, once you know that there are some people that would be happy to receive your message and that this message is relevant and could make a change in some people’s lives. Does it really matter? What kind of media you decide to send your message through that? It really matter if it is a book or is a Blog.

Thanks for this. Although I think about this all the time. I only write a book when I have no choice. It’s so much easier, more efficient and more effective for me to spread an idea with a blog post. It will reach between 10 and 30 times as many people and I can write it in 1/200 of the amount of time.

What makes something Worth putting on a podcast instead of being in a book or a blog post or just mentioning over dinner. So your point was they both accomplish the same goal? Well, I’m not sure that part’s true. It depends on what we’re seeking to accomplish. A book is a signal. It’s a signal to you and to the reader.

It says I decided to spend a year in my life on this. I decided this was an idea worth $20, not something free. I decided it was worth having it spread slowly. But perhaps be more sticky so I don’t think everyone should write a book. I think everyone should write. I think everyone should clarify their ideas.

I think everyone should create a record of their work, but we had to be really clear about what it’s for and who it’s for and particularly now in 2022, it’s less and less likely that the answer to any of these questions is write a book. It used to be 20 years ago, but it might not be today. The medium that fits your goal.

The third question comes to us from an anonymous source who didn’t call it in. It was somebody who I know colleague and friend, who just got a big book deal. And in the midst of working on the book was feeling really stuck. We had a conversation about this the other day and they said the hardest part is sitting in a room by oneself.

Imagining that there’s somebody on the other end and trying trying to figure out how to write to them in a way that works and my suggestion to them was pretty simple, which is go find a few people, maybe even pay them. If you need to to join you on a zoom call and figure out the point. You are trying to make, obviously this works much better for nonfiction Than Fiction and explain it to them.

Record the whole thing. But while you’re explaining it to them, look him in the eye, see who is looking away. See, who is leaning into what you are saying? Figure out how to say, what you need to say, which stories you need to tell, which points, you need to make, to keep their attention to capture their energy, and to help them get to where they seek to go.

Because if you can’t do it in a five-minute Zoom call, you probably can’t do it in 15 pages of prose. But if you can, then you can go ahead and take Recording have it transcribed and then rewrite it so that it works in book format. It seems like such a simple plan, but it’s difficult for a lot of people because looking someone in the eye, while you are sharing an idea is way more scary than simply plop and down in front of a keyboard and typing but that’s scary as well, because we know that at some point in the future, someone might pick it up and they might pick it up when it’s too late for us to change. JH what we said and so we’re constantly dancing between this synchronized conversation that Youmans evolved to be good at and this a synchronized. Modern post Gutenberg idea that you write something down or you record a podcast and then one day in the distant future, someone opens the Time Capsule and that’s all you got. One shot to tell them what it is. You came to talk about.

Anyway, that’s my rant. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world, to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success, Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right?

There is no great thought leader, who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. You in a context, where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas, you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason. Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than 3,000 alumni in 74. Countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -the-paradox-of-red-lines- <==

It’s a simple question. Really? Why do race cars sound like that? Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second, with a short rant around operating range, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

At the start of the covid-19, pandemic people around the world stayed home and garden as a result seed company sold out their stock even Farmers felt the shortage you can prevent this happening again by becoming a seed saver yourself, no matter what your heritage, your ancestors saved seeds, become more self-sufficient as a home Gardener contribute to Community Food sovereignty and even save rare varieties. Several nonprofits teach seed saving just look it up. Be part of a Grassroots movement return, the power of Food to the hands of the people.

If you’ve ever been around cars that are going as fast as they can, particularly manually shifting cars, what you’ll notice is that Tell-Tale sound or why, what’s its purpose? Well, it highlights a paradox. It turns out that the fastest most Torquay, most powerful range of a car is near the red line. Just before the engine melts. And so the goal of the race car driver is to push the tachometer as high as they can. And then just before, it’s too late, go to the next gear and start the process over again that the red line is where it all melts down. But just before that just before, that is the zone to place. Where the car is the fastest a lot of Of people bring that same attitude to work.

If eight hours a day of work is good. Then 10 hours a day of work is even better and 12 hours a day of work is where you begin to beat the competition. And so there’s a school of thought about work that you show up. You dawdle for a little while and then you keep showing up and keep showing up and Outlast everybody else and the Paradox is this.

In the short run, it is entirely possible that for extra hours of preparation before a sales call or presentation can make a difference. But without a doubt in the long run you will lose. You will lose because you will burn out. If we think about computers, if you buy a computer, it has a series of chips in it to do the work.

If the software Works to amp up how much processing, you’re asking the computer to do, it will heat up a little bit and we’ll give you more return on your money in terms of computing power per dollar. But then if it heats up a little bit more, it’s going to melt. Again. There’s a paradox or consider the word charrette, which is a word, some Architects and designers use the sure are It describes what happens in the last few hours before a presentation is do.

So you’ve had a week to work together as a team eight hours, the first day, 10 hours, the second day, 12 hours, or third day, maybe an all-nighter, but then, in the last few hours, before the thing is, do people’s guards are down there too. Exhausted to put up a fight. There are now letting go of their preconceived notions and in Those last few hours, they are open to Brilliance.

And so during the charette is when magic happens, except it. Doesn’t, it feels like it might except it doesn’t. It is no substitute for somebody who is pacing themselves doing the work aware of what is going on around them and showing up as a professional day. After day, that person will always outperform a similar person who is hooked on the charette.

An Then inanimate object might be helpful here for a long time boats were pretty efficient. You could take a small cruise ship from England to New York without stopping to refuel. It’s possible for are moderately sized boat to get 10 or 15 miles per gallon which is amazing given that they’re traveling on a fluid but then someone figured out that particularly for smaller boats. It’s if you overclocked the motor, you could get the boat to plane and planing became what the weekend? Boater set. Decided Boats were supposed to do.

Hi guys. Thanks for tuning in. This is a quick tip for get onto playing fast, but when let’s roll the throttle forward and watch that wake slowly move towards me and driving. See.

The whole point of this vowel sounds of the water good day. Folks, a good day. When a motor boat is planing almost. None of. It is actually in the water to make it work, though. You have to put 140 motor on a 70 boat. You’ve got to put a lot more power behind the vehicle to get it to do something. It wasn’t a Actually designed to do and the mileage. The mileage goes from 10 miles to the gallon 22 that a properly tuned, planing boat, gets terrible gas mileage and makes an enormous amount of noise.

If you wanted to take a boat from England to New York. You don’t want to take a planing motorboat because you’ll never make it. It might be fun in short bursts, but it is inappropriate. For the Long Haul, whether that long haul is one trip. Or whether we’re talking about millions of people over the course of decades, but back to sports.

Sports are interesting because they push human beings outside of their normal operating range. That is why there are surgery named after Tommy, John the pitcher. That is why it’s impossible to find a ballerina. Or a gymnast who still performing at 35 or 40 years old, it breaks people. And the more we measure the harder we push people outside of their operating range.

I have a friend who can run a five-minute Mile in order to make the state championships. He has to do it faster than 5 minutes. He has a friend who runs with him, who can run a mile in four minutes and 59 seconds, and I was amazed. Discover as hard as he tries, he can’t shave that one second off his time, which makes perfect sense. When you think about it, because if you could shave off a second, every time you wanted to shave off a second sooner, or later, you’d be running three minute mile and you can’t.

And what has happened in most competitive Sports is that last-second is down to a last hundredth of a second. We are pushing people outside of their normal operating. Range. And so now we have a challenge and the challenges. Are you going to win by doing the old trick? The thing that used to work for you, which is burning this candle at both ends, which is a ridiculous expression if you think about it, because if you do that, there’s no place to put the candle while. It’s burning, candles need, candlesticks. They need a foundation. They need something to stand upon the people who run the biggest. Operations in the world. The people who run the biggest countries in the world, get exactly the same number of hours in a day as you.

And I, there’s no proof that those last two hours that you want to spend banging away at the keyboard are going to translate into any advantage at all over. Somebody who has figured out how to stay within their range at the very same time that we are being. Ridiculous and stupid about physical performance.

And About Time Performance. We tend to gloss over emotional labor. The hard work of showing up to do things. We might not feel like and part of the emotional labor is speaking the Unspeakable, to somebody who needs to hear it. Part of the emotional labor though is having the guts to let somebody else do part of the work.

It involves using And networks and structures to get far more done than we could ever get done on our own that takes guts. Because what you are saying is I job is to find people to do jobs. My job is not to do the job and that feels difficult if you got where you got by doing the job. And so the Paradox returns because the person who insists that they are the best and they can handle everything in that, no one can do anything. Thing without their oversight, and approval is actually undermining the work.

They set out to do undermining the team. They set out to lead that inside the normal operating range. If we can bring emotional labor to the table. We are capable of changing the world. But it prevents us from having emergencies from having charettes, from approaching the red line on a regular basis.

That means it’s much Less fun to watch. It’s not going to become a sport in the Olympics, but it might just be that these Sports where we are. Watching people break themselves aren’t as benign as we thought they were. So I guess the challenges do we know where our normal operating range lies? Are we willing to lean just a little bit harder into the emotional labor at the very same time.

We find the guts to Instantly and persistently clock out when the shift is over because time isn’t a shortcut time is a tool and we can use it. But when we burn it too much, we do it at our own Peril. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo dot link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops in my friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. Fact, I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the part of this Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or Any previous episode? I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB. O .l, iink and click the appropriate button. Go ahead. Try it. It’s fun while you’re there.

You can check out the show notes.

Hey Seth, this is Emily calling from the Bronx in response to your episode where you talked about bringing emotional labor to the work and being that one person who’s scarcity of skills and emotional labor. Make them recognize and in-demand like chip, Kidd for book. Covers wondering if you could extend the Riff to something that I’m trying to develop, which is the methods and approaches. And Philosophies to our work that will engender bringing emotional labor or will attract people who do bring emotional labor to the work and how we can cultivate those methods approaches and philosophies as opposed to just maybe cultivating our own emotional labor and name.

Thanks so much for all that you do.

Thank you for this Emily. This is a great question. First, a little background Arielle, Hawk child wrote a book about emotional labor in the 1960s. And the position in that book is that it was an unfair burden particularly on women. In low status jobs, like flight attendants. They had to pretend that they were happy smiling all the time and it took a toll.

But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we prefer to work with others to hire people to choose to be in the line at the grocery store with somebody who is showing up with emotional labor. I have a mug that my friend Tina gave me that I love and one of the things that it says on it is we believe in giving a damn and that’s what we want when we hire a house painter or a car mechanic, or a doctor and what it means to be a professional today. A in a world where we’re not digging a ditch where we are showing up with decision-making with care, is that people are showing up to give a damn and to do, that means it’s work.

Its work to put yourself into a situation even when you don’t feel like it and it feels to me like calling that emotional labor is appropriate. So one of the things that goes on particularly for small organizations And Freelancers is that that can be your secret weapon? Because if somebody’s just working day in and day out for a paycheck at a big company that doesn’t care.

They don’t care either. And if you the scrappy upstart, if you care more, if you are leaning into it, if you are being more professional, then you have a tremendous Advantage, but Emily you bring up a great point, which is that’s almost never sufficient. What goes with it is having a View. What goes with it is being idiosyncratic because it can wear us out. If all we do is care a little bit more.

What we need to do is care a little bit more and also know a little bit more have developed a skill. A point of view that people can tell our work from the work of other people and this can work in organizations of more than one person. That’s not the way things are around here. That if you are buying something from Patagonia. It feels different than if you’re buying something from Kohl’s or at least. It’s supposed to be because they have a point of view.

But that means that we have to understand a genre. It means you have to understand the change we seek to make. And mostly means we are doing it on purpose that there are lots of days I show up at work. And I say, what would Seth Godin do today? Because on a good day, that is the role. I am trying to play.

I am trying to show up. As a version of Seth Godin that he promised would be here today. And I didn’t start with people like you listening to my podcast. I’m very lucky. You are. Thank you. I started with 10 people reading my blog and what we get if we show up with idiosyncratic behavior on behalf of the people that we serve is a chance for the word spread.

So thank you for that way. I’m Lee. I really appreciate it. It. It’s a great segue to a conversation about dignity and connection and the change. We seek to make. Here we go.

I said this, I’m Different Brussels. Avid listener since day one, and loving the show. So your last episode about happiness has really helped me crystallize. A question that I’ve been having for, that was going around my mind for a long time. So quick, quick back story. I have a educational, There’s No Business educational YouTube channel, where I put out a lot of free content because I just love to Help people, but the whole thing is supposed to be a business as well selling courses. That course, help people. And I hope makes our lives better and help them make art, which is what my whole thing is about. But as I’m doing that there is, of course, a part of marketing that goes into it.

What I’m trying to convince those people to buy my stuff. What did they? We try of course, to make sure that they needed but How would you combine this with this idea of happiness and contentment and, and in trying to only hear the messages trying to learn to not hear too many messages of sales of of, of pure sales pitches because it shows us what we don’t have yet.

Yes, so to summarize there’s a tension. It seems between serving people and selling them something except. I don’t think that’s true. I think there’s a tension between serving people at hustling, people. There’s a tension between serving people and pressuring people to get them to buy from you. Not someone else to get him to buy right now.

Manipulation is what happens if you know more than your customer does and you trick them push them. Pressure them into buying something that they regret later. If they knew what you knew, would they be happy that you showed up? If the answer is no, then you should sell something else. You should make something else. You’re a manipulator. You’re a high-pressure sales person. You are showing up and making the culture worse.

But if we think about the stuff in our lives that we’re glad we purchased that. We’re glad someone persuaded us to buy that. We’re glad We leaned into all of those things, which is most of what most of us own, what most of us spend money on all of those things are the result of somebody engaging in Commerce, not, high pressure sales, but Commerce.

If a doctor persuade somebody to stop smoking, that’s not easy. At first, if a waiter does a really good job of talking about today’s specials in a way that gets you to buy a dinner. That Ordinarily wouldn’t have ordered. That’s a good thing. If somebody shows up and invites you to join. I don’t know, the local club which has dues and you end up being a lifelong member. That’s a good thing that when I went on a tour with Raul of the Palisades boat club, he was taking me on a tour so that I would end up becoming a member and paddling my canoe there every day. It’s one of the highlights of my life. Lately, I’m really glad he took me on the tour. Was it a high-pressure sales pitch? No. Because our definition of that, is it, someone is taking something from us. When they do that. They’re using local pressure time, pressure, social pressure to get us to do something. We will regret later.

So in your specific case, the generous work isn’t giving it away. The generous work is shining a light is opening a door is When people see what is possible. Then at some point in our Digital World, you need to charge for what you do. What is it? You’re going to charge for? Well, you could charge for the version. They can’t see yet. So what you’re doing in that situation is yes, creating discomfort you’re saying to people what you read the first three chapters, but the next six chapters cost money and that person is saying to themselves.

Wow, that’s going to make my life worse. In the short run, if I don’t pay this money because I want to know how the story went ends up. I want to improve my skill or whatever this essay or this video is about, but that tension can be relieved. It can be relieved by making a purchase. It could be relieved in a way that makes me feel glad that I made the purchase. That’s not manipulation.

We create tension all the time. Tension is created to cause forward motion. If there is no tension Forward, Motion is very unlikely to Kerr. And so a yellow light causes tension. Some people say as soon as I see a yellow light from any distance, I’m going to slam on the brakes that sort of dangerous.

If you’re most of the way through the intersection, you see the yellow light you should finish going through the intersection. The yellow light was there to get you to go across the intersection, but the other thing that’s happening in our digital world, as long as I’m ranting is, you don’t have to hold things back to sell them there. What people really Really want to buy what they wake up in the morning dreaming of and what they wake up at night regretting. They didn’t get enough of is connection and community and being seen, and yes, being offered dignity.

So if you took the content that you are offering for free and used it to attract a group of people who want to be connected. And then you charge that group of people, a fee every month to be part of a community. You can make Fine, living doing that. I have friends who have done that in many fields. It’s been going on for a long time. And in the digital age, it’s easier than ever.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s easier than it used to be all of, which is a way of connecting these two grants to each other first that we offer people dignity by seeing them. And one way to see them is to say no. Thank you, and second, we offer people Opportunity by creating tension in service of helping them get Get what they really want.

Thanks again for your questions. We’ll see y’all next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet, like we have data what all-nba gets right is. It puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You’ve got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide. You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the Number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know, or we don’t have the information.

We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA. More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -in-search-of-the-worst-ceo- <==

We can’t be sure of course, but leaving aside criminals hucksters and people who were profoundly misguided. It’s entirely possible that Steve Ballmer was the worst major Company CEO of all time.

Ladies and gentlemen. Ins.

Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about what it means to be the CEO. And why bomber might not be the worst one of all time, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

The project for awesome is a 48 hour livestream? Fundraiser, brought to you by the foundation to decrease World suck where the audience submits, homemade videos that promote their favorite nonprofit causes and that sounds familiar during the two-day event rare and very nerdy perks are available for donations and the audience votes on which causes will share the funds raised during the event, more than two point, three million dollars were given out last time. If you have a, cause you care about or just want to see what it’s like to be a part of another, one of the most best online. Communities out there, check out projectforawesome.com for all the details.

So if we just look at the numbers, let’s compare Apple to Microsoft during similar periods of time when jobs was in charge of one embalmer was in charge of the other under Steve ballmer’s rain. I’m hesitant to say, leadership Microsoft. Stock went up 22 percent during that same period of time. The stock of Apple computer went up four thousand, eight hundred percent it increased in value 50x During the period of time that bomber was in charge, Microsoft, completely, blue smartphones.

And most of the internet, they weren’t able to dislodge Google, which should never have existed. If Microsoft had been on the ball, nor did they build a presence really in thing? Like social networking after bomber left. The two companies had different CEOs and when we compare leadership under the two of them, threw up almost exactly the same amount each.

Clearly the CEO makes a difference in terms of the value of the company in terms of the choices that it makes. But these are not the CEO’s that I am here to talk about. I’m here to talk about you. You, many of the people who listen to this podcast are the head of their own Enterprise either. They are Freelancers working on their own.

They’re entrepreneurs building, something bigger than themselves, their bootstrappers, or perhaps they have a job, but they are still the CEO of themselves. Each of us makes decisions every single day about how to spend our time and how to assert and develop our assets. Where should we Deploy them and time, which is an asset and the rest of our assets, our skills, our reputation, the things that we own these choices that we make with the assets that are available to us.

This is the work of the CEO. It’s important to begin with this. We all learned growing up what it is to have a job. The Milkman the postman the person who’s walking a beat as a kid. A cop, these folks have jobs. Someone tells them what to do. They perform tasks and we teach all of this in the kids books that we read to our kids when they’re two or three or four or five partly to prepare them for school because when they get to school, we are giving them a job to job, less 12 or 16 years depending on how you’re growing up and your job is ready for this homework. What an interesting. In phrase, home work, that your job is to sit still in class that your job is to do on the test to regurgitate. What the teacher just told you that school is a multi-decade indoctrination in being a cog in the industrial system.

You do jobs and it’s entirely possible that you live in a household where one or more people have a job where they don’t feel like the Eeo because if the person is a clerk at the record store, well, it’s the boss who told them when their shift started and when it ended it’s the boss, who gave them the list of tasks to have to complete each day.

They’re not the boss of the record store. Their job is to go to the record store and do what they’re told to react or to reply or to respond to the incoming to check off all the things they’re supposed to do. So, when I say that people, With a job or the CEO of their career. What I mean, is this, that person decided to go to work in a record store instead of applying for a job as a chambermaid at the local hotel instead of deciding to become an Uber driver. Instead, you get the idea the decision about, where, to invest your time and your reputation is CEO work, and too often, because I’ve been indoctrinated by school, doesn’t feel like real work.

If we’re not doing what someone told us to do.

All of us. Also get time that we are not spending at work. We’ve chosen to spend some of that time listening to a podcast. Like this one may be taking a workshop. Maybe reading a book baby getting good at something. This is a skill that we have that can’t be taken away from us. Some people The fair amount of their spare time developing and acquiring skills that become part of their assets.

And some people watch Netflix and either one of them could be a way to a happy life. But as the CEO of your career, one of them. Probably pays bigger dividends, but I want to shift gears. Now to the typical small business person freelancer or entrepreneur, because these people are special case. These people are people who might be terrible CEOs and yet really and truly busy, busy all the time, busy doing the tasks. They have assigned to themselves.

So, busy doing the tasks that in fact, nobody is the CEO. So let’s pick a lowest common denominator freelancer, who’s doing? I don’t know. Photoshop retouching using up work or Elance or Whatever fiver to get gigs. Well, pretty clearly. You list yourself. You get a gig, you do the gig that’s not CEO work.

That’s all tasks work. One day. You might decide to specialize in something and as a specialist getting really good at that thing. You charged, double what you used to charge, that that one hour of CEO work that you did to make that decision. Doubled your income this year. The question then is, how much time are you spending on the CEO work?

Another example, you are a real estate broker. There’s more than a million real estate brokers in the United States. That’s one out of three hundred people. If you’re a real estate, broker, how are you spending your day? Well, if you’re spending your day typing, things uploading things, taking pictures of things retouching, those pictures of things answering the phone, getting back to people.

You are doing a series of tasks that most real estate brokers. Do the question is if you can go to the aforementioned Fiverr or up work or find some place where you can get a virtual assistant someone who isn’t particularly good at being the CEO of their career, who for five or ten or twenty dollars, an hour can do many of those tasks for you.

And you hire that person to do those tasks. So you can do things that only you do. Is it possible? You will sell one more house this year, two more houses this year and how much exactly do you get for selling a house? Well, around here, a broker might make twenty or thirty thousand dollars if you sell three more houses because you have hired, somebody to work for you for 40 hours a week at close to minimum wage a lot of money in whatever country they’re in doing digital tasks for you.

It pays For itself many times over not only are you making more money? But if you believe that your work is real estate, broker is helping people, you’re helping more people because you are showing up to do the task that only you can do by Outsourcing the things that other people can do. Now, we take the ones that we already outsourced for granted. You don’t build your own telephone, you buy one, you don’t use your own email server. You Pay $19 a month to use one.

These are obvious, right? You don’t build your own car. You don’t even fix your own car. They’re obvious or the ones everybody does. But if they’re the ones everybody does, then you haven’t really done much in the way of CEO work. Have you? So now we can take it a level further because in addition to hiring somebody to help you do what you were doing, you could also decide Right back to that freelancer, to specialize to specialize in only selling homes in one building, or to specialize on a zip code that has more churn than your ZIP code, or where, the houses cost more or where you have more of an in to get the listings. These are CEO choices and just as Steve Ballmer said, one of the most idiotic things ever, when he talked about the iPhone SE. Let me ask you about the iPhone and the Zune. If I may Zoom, Was getting some traction. Then Steve Jobs goes to macworld and he pulls out this iPhone.

What was your first reaction when you saw that $500 fully subsidized with a plan. I said that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine explaining that it was never going to work you. The CEO of you maybe aren’t holding press. Frances to announce what’s going to work and what’s not, but you’re still making decisions along those lines. There’s a book called The e-myth Revisited and I don’t agree with everything in the book. But what the author argues is that one of the jobs of the CEO is to make every job in the organization, a job. So straightforward that it can be done by the cheapest available person that you should be writing aspect.

Check for these jobs that if you are saying, I would love to scale what I’m doing, but I need to hire a miracle worker to be me on the spot. You will not hire a miracle worker to be you because you’re on the ground knowledge, your ability to make a certain kind of decision, not replicatable. The job here is to take any job that can be specified to turn it into a spec to say this is what good output looks like.

To figure out a job that is being done by other people for other folks. And say, if you do this job for me, to this spec, I can get back to doing jobs. I can’t spec. That. Is it? The core of the work? A CEO needs to do when she’s doing her best work. So, if you want to build Starbucks from two or four or five Outlets to hundreds and hundreds or thousands of outlets.

One of the things you do is you say somebody’s going to be standing. The cash register that persons not going to be that different than the person who’s standing at the cash, register of any number of fast food, places that came before us, I will not expect that person to make different judgments to have different insights. Then they would need in those other places. I need them to be friendly. I needed to be welcoming. I need them to be accurate. I need them to show up for their shift on time, and I need them to read the manual.

It’s only by doing that that you can end up with. 100,000 people or however many work at Starbucks. Now. I’m not here to sell you on building a chain that has 100,000 employees. What I’m asking you is what part of your work your day, whether it’s your job, your freelance gig, or your entrepreneurial venture, which part of it is really valuable to the world. And is that the part that gives you Joy and energy that you want to focus on?

And if the answer is, yes. Then why are you spending most of your day doing tasks that could be done by other people. And the second half of it is strategically, are you building assets? Are you investing in a place? That is growing, that is vibrant, that is paying off what you are putting into it or have you decided to stick with what got you here in the first place?

Because you’ve gotten somewhere pretty. T far. But the thing that got you this far, more of it is not going to get you to the next place. Now it maybe you don’t want to go to the next place going up. There was an allergist in town and Bobby used to do. I don’t know, 20 allergy shots, 30 allergy shots every hour.

He had seven different examination rooms yet, nine nurses. He lined them up and he went right down the aisle shot shot shot shot shot shot shot. He made a bunch of money doing. But that doesn’t mean he was enjoying being a doctor. He had chosen to trade being on the assembly line for making a lot of money if that’s not going to give you Joy as a doctor. Don’t do that.

Figure out how you can be in Family, Practice in Idaho where you don’t have as many patients where you don’t make as much money, but where you get to do what you set out to do, which is to sit quietly and to take your time and to make families healthier. That’s a Rickety giuk choice. We have to figure out how to set down our addiction to tasks to doing what came before to doing what everybody else does too. Simply Having a job with no boss.

And to realize that we might be the world’s worst boss. We might be given how much we are giving up the opportunities. We are giving up the choices. We are making, we might be sacrificing the effort of somebody. We care a lot about ourselves and that Sacrifice of effort that mistake is keeping us from helping the people that we want to help.

So it’s easy to look at Steve Ballmer from the side from afar and realize that Beyond his clownish demeanor. He just kept making mistake after mistake after mistake because he didn’t really understand what his job was. That’s easy. What’s hard is to look in the mirror and realize how many degrees of freedom are available to us that what we could do.

Is specify the parts of our job that others could do. What we could do is to take some time and be strategic to acknowledge that. What got us here? Might not be. What gets us to where we want to go next? That you could be a better CEO. I hope that helps. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a bonus. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. In fact. I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you and alas this week. I didn’t hear from You.

So if you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope that you will visit. Akimbo dot link. That’s a kiem. Be o.l. Iink and click the appropriate button. Because if you ask questions, then I can answer them instead of a Q&A this week, here is a talk. I gave a little over five years ago at Acumen and organization that I work with in New York.

Enjoy.

Couple weeks ago, it was a Saturday and unusually for me. I was off duty and I was in Chicago and it was a beautiful day. So I went to Wrigley Field because I’ve never been to Wrigley Field before. Thank you and on my way back from Wrigley Field, I lasted an inning and a half, but it was fun. My cell phone died and I needed directions. And I went up to this person and I ask them for directions and they gave them to me.

And when they were done, they still had the directions interesting to think about that. Because I juxtapose that with a story about Leona Helmsley Leona, Helmsley was a multi-billionaire. She had more than five billion dollars when she died and she was sitting with her lawyer, Alan dershowitz discussing her conviction for tax evasion. And while they were sitting there, the servant I’ll use that word in quotes, brought her the cup of Either she had asked for and on the saucer holding the cup, was it drop of tea?

So, of course, she took the cup and she took the saucer and she smashed it to the ground, and she demanded that the person who had bought it for her, get on his hands and knees, clean up the mess and beg, not to be fired. When Leona Helmsley died, she left 12 million dollars to her dog trouble and nothing to two of her grandchildren.

They called her the queen of mean. And the reason they did is cause she got pleasure out of stripping people of their dignity. And I think for all of us when we hear the story, this gratuitous horrible story of how someone would go out of their way to do that to someone. It feels wrong to all of us.

So, I got interested in this idea of dignity, and I started doing some research. Dignity sounds like, dignitary and dignified. But it turns out we had dignitaries long before, we had the concept of dignity that in fact in the New Testament. The word dignity doesn’t appear once that we had dignitaries because we had Kings Kings, which according to David graeber and Marshall, sahlins great. Anthropologists have a long history of being the other from somewhere else. The people who don’t have to follow our rules, the people who Break all sorts of social contracts and do what they want.

And so of course, when the dignitary wants to do something, they get to do it. Yeah, I give dignity that every human somehow deserves. Something was sort of unknown, in eastern cultures, and Western ones. And it wasn’t till Conte started, really writing about it. Right? At the time. We were building the modern economy that we started to accept and embrace the fact that people deserve dignity.

Not because they earn it, but because they have potential because they’re human. And I think my theory is they’re two reasons this caught on one. Because it wasn’t just one king anymore. There were more rich people than ever before, sprouting up all around. And so if lots of people could break the social contract of a, lots of people could start mistreating others where we going to draw the line in the sand, but the other thing that happened was, we started having customers.

And if you want to be able to sell to somebody, you need to be able to see them as a human, like you’re a human. And if you want to be sold to suddenly, you start to realize that dignity runs deep. In who we are and what we want to do. So if we give someone directions or if we give someone a pass when we open the door for them or turn on a light, what do we get in return? Do we do it?

Because we’re going to get a prize because we’re going to get a thank you because we’re going to get gratitude. Well, no because that means that dignity is deserved. It’s not deserved. You just get dignity. As part of being a human. It’s part of the contract that allows the culture to ask you to show up and meet your potential.

So it’s a matter of deserve it versus earn it. So if we’re sitting around the campfire and someone is cold and they come because we invite them to sit next to us. There isn’t less heat coming from the fire. In fact, there’s more. And so each of us benefits when these connections are made. So I met Jacqueline, 18 years ago and it changed my life.

And there was some really cool people around the table. What do you do? I’m a judge. Really? Yeah. Well, you’re on the Supreme Court and what do you do? Well, I’m starting the software company. Oh, you mean Google? Yeah. Okay. And and what do you do? What do you make? Well, but Jacqueline makes what Acumen makes?

Is it difference and the difference they make is moving us toward.

I lost my mic, moving us toward dignity. Allowing people a seat at the campfire, because in fact, it costs vanishingly little to be able to start this cycle. Then when we are able to go to someone and say, you could be our customer. What? We are actually saying to them is now you have the right to say no.

We are not doing this to you. We are offering to do something with you. And if you don’t want it, you have the power to say, no. And in order for us to do that and Abner stole, some of my best work here. We need empathy. The empathy to say, I don’t know what, you know, and I don’t believe what you believe in. I don’t want what you want, but that’s okay.

Because if I have any chance at all of serving, you engaging with you turning a light on for you. I have to give you the power.

To be that person who believes what they believe and if I can help you go on that Journey then that is something I would like to do. So the cost to each of us who support the acumen, To get d light up and running to the point where D light can say to someone. Would you like to buy this solar Lantern because we are here to work for you. The customer is vanishingly small, its scales. It ratchets.

We don’t have a coffee problem anymore in the United States. The shortage is over because Howard Schultz figured out how to make a nickel, or a dime or a dollar every time we bought something. So we can open another one, another one, another one and the coffee problem goes away and that’s one way, not the only way. One way to solve the problem of how do we engage in communities in order to help them change? This is not a charade. This is not something that we are doing, because it’s fun.

We’re doing it because we can And so when I was in Kenya, it’s spend some time with Judy Kalima which has the best name of any Acumen partner that I can think of one djehuty clemo says to somebody. Will loan you enough money to buy a cow and the milk from that cow will make you enough money to pay off the loan plus extra.

But the cool thing about it is that the person who comes to visit you lives in your village and I spent the day and they called him the chairman and his 65 year old guy, and you could see this was the Pinnacle of the life that he had lived to be able to go from one home to another as the chairman as the person who is going to enable this. And then the group met once a week in an off-duty Church to go through the money and I sat there watching. Teaching them count. Every single Bill one at a time.

And every person with is of and for what that Community was about, and what was getting made, there wasn’t milk or cows. It was dignity. The dignity to be able to say to your kids. I could send you to private school. Now the Dignity of being able to say I own this and I can take the money I made from this cow to buy another cow or another one.

I met Lucy who owns four cows. And a tree farm and now a taxi and she’s a millionaire under her bed in a cigar box. She showed me the million Kenyan shillings that she had earned. She had learned that no one had actually given to her.

When David shows up in Ethiopia and says, to Farmers, you know, way more about farming than I know. But here’s a better chicken want to buy it. Almost no one says, yes. But one Farmers crazy enough to say sure. And so he or she buys a chicken and that chicken doesn’t lay an egg every week. It lays an egg. Every day.

Suddenly. You’ve got enough money to buy another chicken. Then another chicken and yesterday ethio chicken, sold a million chickens and tomorrow. They’re going to sell a million more chicken. One farmer at a time, looking people in the eye and saying sobhana, I see you not. I seed you from a demographic point of view of your one more customer. I can sell to, I see you, I see your parents and your grandparents. I see your dreams and your desires and your fears and where you hope to go.

And they aren’t my dreams and desires and fears. They’re yours, but I have a light switch and if I can turn it on, I will be happy to turn it on for you, we have Five feet here next to the fire. If you want to come sit with us. It’s warm. You can join us or not.

And so, what’s happening here? Our series of ratchets.

One ratchet is the ratchet that once we get a little electricity to a village people make enough money that they want a little bit more electricity and then a little bit more electricity in the next thing, you know, productivity kicks in. It’s the ratchet of expecting that you deserve clean water, and lobbying your elected officials to stop taking graft and start being. You clean water and said because you don’t, you just go figure out how to get it from water Health International, but there are other ratchets.

There’s the ratchet of example because now a whole generation of philanthropists are seeing that there’s a different way to make change happen and they realize they can do it even more for the ratchet of how foundations and other people in the industry, start to look at asset utilization and what people are doing to make a difference happen.

So the last thing I’ll say is this my friend chalene shared this with me.

A lot of people ask, what do I need to do to succeed? But everyone in this room, many of who like me one, the birthday Lottery have succeeded succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. That’s not really the question. Question is, will you choose to matter? Will you choose to do something smaller large today? And tomorrow? And the next day that offers people, something they cannot find all by themselves.

It offers them something they deserve, but it offers them is dignity.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or is it. SAS Seeker at the level of, of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age, and you can get a great book, a great essay, a great idea, anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet, right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet. Like we have data what all-nba gets right? Is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas. You got access to information. That’s Awesome, but when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page, when you going to face the possibilities within you, when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide.

You gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the Nation, we don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network. That makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show us consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world. Find out more at alt mba.com.

==> -help-wanted- <==

Men wanted for hazardous Journey, low wages, bitter, cold long hours of complete darkness. Safe, return, doubtful honor and recognition in event of success. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about real help wanted ads, but first. Here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hi set, and the akimbo Community. My name is a Daffy. I’m a refugee living in New York City. I and a group of volunteers came together to create an organization to help displaced people tell their stories. If you would like to help, please, visit www.marine-conservation.org slash take action, you could help to use your skills to help displaced people to tell their stories.

And make America the more welcoming place. Thank you.

I don’t know if the newspaper comes to your house any longer, but if it does, you may have noticed something happening over the last 20 or 25 years. The Sunday paper is a lot lighter. For many local newspapers, the help wanted section on Sunday, paid. Most of the bills, one statistic. I saw years ago, is that the classified section of the newspaper accounted for 108?

Scent of the profit of a typical newspaper. Meaning it was all of it plus a little bit extra to pay for other things. They did that. Lost money. The help wanted section. Of course, today is a shadow of its former self. What’s amazing to me? Is that it exists at all? Here’s an ad from the Sunday New York Times August 20, 21 to accurately deliver it. I use little sound effect to help, you know that I’m reading something that’s in all caps, manager, Deloitte Consulting, LLP seeks manager, customer and marketing, customer strategy and applied design in New York, New York via various unanticipated, Deloitte office, locations, and client sites nationally, or manage digital and service ux UI user experience and user interface design practicing a His design process that includes ethnographic research synthesis inside generation, ideation design, prototyping and testing utilize these designs to drive Innovative and transformative Technology Solutions that address their next generational needs.

80% travel. Required nationally telecommuting permitted to apply visit blah, blah. Blah, enter xba. L22, FC 0 88 Ey + ey for 592 in search jobs field.

I’m sorry. I’m confused. I’m confused by a lot of things. I’m confused about the all-caps. I’m confused about the all caps in a job searching for someone with ux and UI experience. I’m confused about the fact that someone with ux/ui experience is reading a printed ad in the New York Times in 2021.

I’m confused to the New York Times can still make hundreds of thousands of dollars running ads that no one really is. I think I’m confused about so many things but let’s get back to Ernest. Shackleton Ernest Shackleton did not run the ad about men wanted for hazardous, Journey, Scholars, and researchers have looked they’ve looked really hard turns out a preacher from Englewood New Jersey named Carl. Hopkins Elmore sort of made it up in a book. He wrote in 1944 called quit.

You like men. And in this book he was exhorting young men to stand up and do Brave things and for whatever reason, he or someone who talked to him, made up the story about Ernest shackleton’s advertisement, but one of the highlights for me, are two fascinating things about how the web this enormous repository of information. This permission marketing machine has completely bungled. The idea of most help wanted ads.

I want to argue that most jobs are either jobs that most people can do. And the person doing the hiring is looking for the cheapest, available person who can do that job. And I would argue that is most of the jobs that you see advertised, in the classifieds. It’s a dance between the people who are busy looking for the cheapest possible person. So they want as many people as possible to I see the ad and the people who are looking for a job who are applying to hundreds, or thousands of jobs. Hoping to get picked for a job.

They’ve only read six sentences about many of which are in all caps. And then there’s a different kind of job. And this is a job where there is an enormous upside to both the worker and the employer. If the right person shows up to do the job. It’s the kind of job where you’ll pay a lot, but you’ll get more than you paid for.

It’s the kind of job where there is a very high correlation between the skill, the attitude, the effort, and the experience of the person, doing the job, and the output, the job brings with it. So, I hope we can imagine that if you needed knee surgery and you believe that Olney surgeons are not the same, it would be Worth paying extra for the best knee surgeon, of course, if all surgeons are the same, then you should just take the close one, the cheap one and the convenient one.

So if we look at books like the e-myth Revisited, if we look at Giant industrial entities, they have worked overtime to make it so that the french fries at any given McDonald’s are not dependent on the skill or Passion of the person who’s making the french fries. There’s a machine that making sure that person has almost no choices that the person who is working. The front desk is monitored by a stopwatch is watched by a manager that the entire purpose of the manager is to make sure that the people fit inside the box that has been described. And if you’re going to build an institution like this, there is an enormous pressure on you to have no jobs that require Somebody to do something that’s special that the nature of industrial output, 150 years into it is, you don’t know the name of the person who sowed your Louis Vuitton bag.

You don’t know the name of the person who organized the tray of tools. Just before your surgeon started giving you knee surgery, that it is not specific to a person.

So in my experience, most help Ads that run in the newspaper are designed to reach the largest possible. Number of people to attract the largest number of resumes. So that the hiring people can set a price that the market will bear and hire enough people that they have power in the organization that the org chart is filled with square boxes. Because of everyone’s, in a square box. You can move people in and out. This is really different than, for example. Sample. A symphony orchestra bending over backwards to keep a first violinist or a conductor happy because they’ve decided that replacing that particular set of attitudes and skills and talents is really difficult. So it’s in the industrialist interest to make jobs as replaceable as fungible as possible and workers have played along, because they don’t want many times to be on the hook.

They like the idea easy. An easy out. And so the help wanted ads work in that direction as well. And so, first, Craigslist, and then monster. And then one service after another came along to give people who are advertising jobs and easy way to reach as many people as possible. It gave people who are looking for a job and easy way to search for the jobs that they want geographically or now in the pandemic, when you can work from home.

Internationally. And so we have this Marketplace, but it’s not a Marketplace, like the marketplace for vinegar or for oranges or for tofu because it’s also our livelihood. It’s also reflecting who we are. When we look in the mirror. It’s also the heart of how most of us, spend our day and the internet has done a really terrible job of figuring out how to connect the right. People to the jobs that need the right people, so that Ernest, Shackleton, add the one that never really ran, Ernest, Shackleton had earned enough of the reputation that he was able to find people to go on that difficult Journey, but many organizations have a problem. They haven’t earned the trust, nor do they have the platform to find the people who are looking for them.

There is a Market Place filled with disconnect people who are looking for a job where the folks who are trying to hire are willing to pay extra for. Someone special have trouble proving that there’s someone special and the ones who are hiring have trouble. Earning the trust to demonstrate that, they are trustworthy, which brings us to the Joel test, Joel spolsky, multiple successful entrepreneur. You may know him from stack. Flo, you may know him from his book. Joel on software. You may know him from fog, Creek, software, and other projects, he’s launched.

How did Joel get started? In this whole idea of help wanted? Well his blog, Joel on software was only for the very best, most thoughtful software engineers and project. Managers people who didn’t care, didn’t read it, people who did read it religiously and Joel didn’t experiment. And the experiment was running help. Wanted ads. But only aimed at this specific subset of experts.

And if you wanted to run an ad, you had to score your company, there was a jolt test, a 10-question quiz you had to answer about what was it like to work there. Simple example, do programmers, get their own office or do they work in a cubicle? Because, Joel and many other programmers have articulated that programmers work better when they can. Work on molested in an office.

Well, your score was a way of demonstrating that in this setting. The people you were seeking to hire had more status, had more power than the person who was doing the hiring and if you weren’t willing to change, the kind of company you were running, you probably weren’t going to get to Avail yourself of this kind of programmer.

So what’s happening now is the market is bifurcating on one hand. Thanks to freelance. Marketplace, has places like Fiverr or up work. We’ve got who wants to bid on this? Who will do this job for $12. We’ve got a race to the bottom where you define what good enough is, and there’s plenty of good enough to go around.

And, on the other hand. There are small, tiny Pockets, like Tina’s, creative, guilt, where people are assembling. Who actually stand for something and demanding, the folks who are looking to hire skill. I hesitate to use the word talent because I think Talent is a little bit of a myth but skill skill can be earned people with skill assemble and look for those sorts of jobs, but we’ve done a terrible job of it and the New York Times is a particularly egregious example, but the question is, where the ratings were the ratings of the employees. He’s so that when I show up to look for a special job. It’s really easy to tell that I’m one of the special ones and where the ratings of the employers so that the special people who are in a circle, can find the next place.

They want to sign up and do their work.

I’m not sure. But I think that the word freelancer comes from the Middle Ages, some nights with their Lance’s were assigned for If to a given warlord or King but a freelancer or as my grandmother used to say a freelancer would work maybe for the highest bidder maybe for someone they believed in and as there is more fluidity in where we seek to work because we don’t have to leave town to switch jobs because people who are in the man will be more likely to switch to a better project. It becomes incumbent on the system. That we’re building the exchange of information back and forth.

That employers with great jobs, find employees who are ready to lean in as linchpins to do work. That matters for people who care and looking at this Market Place, even more than the ridiculous marketplaces that are things like Tinder. I’m just seeing a huge disconnect because most of them have made it really easy to search for a couple words to find an average job for People put your name in the pile of computers, going to look through your resume and maybe you’ll get picked. But in general we have it made it more transparent or more powerful.

Little known fact about LinkedIn. Most of their revenue comes from Tech recruiters who are paying LinkedIn for access to more information about the kind of people, they want to hire what happens when we build very specific small. Circles of people and small Circles of employers so that we can make a match that matters last little aside another anecdote that I was told to be true.

But I can’t promise you back in the first boom of hiring programmers in the 90s until had a real shortage of programmers. And so what they did was they went to a bunch of their senior people in the game, a stack of blue cards, and they said if it at any conference or at any event, you meet our kind of person.

That plus 10 programmer hand on one of these blue cards. And with the blue card says is Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day and soon, you’re going to need a job and we’ve got one for you. No interviews. No, fooling around to show up. Show us the blue card and you’re hired. That’s not the answer to the problem in front of us as the world continues to shift, but it does give us a hint. A hint about what kind of jobs are being offered? And what kind of people are looking for them.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with answers to questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

And so going forward every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. Fact, I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston. Here. Hugs and kisses on the palm. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex Pizza. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous. Episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo that link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button for questions this week all about time.

Here we go. Hi, Seth. This is Steve in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Your recent podcast about time slipping and what we do with the convenience that our modern world provides to us. Just listen to it four times. And every time I noticed, something new, And I feel very lucky to have not had much financial trouble in the endemic.

And so I have a net surplus of time. I started playing in a band. Again. I started writing again. I started coaching Young Folks early in their careers on how to not make some of the mistakes that I’ve made pro bono just because I love doing it. I love seeing them be successful. So I’ve, I’d like to think that I’d probably not made the most of them did a good good.

Good college try and make the most of it. And I wonder how to help the people that we care about see this opportunity and see this time and and look at how they’re spending it. And what is what is the outcome of? Just let me expand on that? Thank you for all you do. Thank you for getting us started. Steve.

This is really profound and one of the things that we have done for the last 50 years to of the things we’ve done actually, is created a world built around convenience and a world that is allergic to boredom. That people have figured out that they can make money that they can get traction by offering people. Those two things.

I always thought that I leave the company years down the road after it had become quote, unquote successful. Now my heart is pulling me in a different direction. Towards an opportunity. I can’t ignore the decision has already been made.

And so, part of what it means to open a door is to acknowledge that one day. We will close the door industrialists, people who are trying to build systems that don’t depend on Amazing individuals, putting in extra effort, don’t like the idea of a linchpin. They would rather everyone be instantly replaceable if your local Starbucks loses a barista within a week. Week just about everyone. In the institution has recovered. They built it that way on purpose and you are generous and aware enough to say wait. There’s going to be a disconnect when I leave here, but I think it’s also essential to understand that the organization was there before you got there, and it’s going to be there after you leave.

And the best that you can do is to create that manual, that Playbook that training that lets other people take over. And then you have to say goodbye. As Time, Marches On. Thanks sir. This is Hunter from Jacksonville Florida. My question is around bringing change you speak on your podcast a lot about changing the culture bringing change in many context.

But in this one I’m asking more about when you’re trying to bring change to a team where the workplace with every change. There’s going to be some trade-offs. The chances that you can make a change that has no downsize at all. Is pretty rare. And there’s always going to be edge cases where it doesn’t work or the new method is not ideal.

So it’s just hoping you could talk a little bit about how do you implement change and get people to buy in and enroll in the change that you want to see even when there are some downsides to it? Thank you for this Hunter. What are the things that people mistake about leadership? Is this everyone has to like it?

Everyone has to like change, it has to be unanimous that whatever. We’re going to do is going to make things better. And in those rare instances where it’s true, right? It’s suddenly really, really cold out and you want to shut the window. Well, just about everyone’s going to come out ahead from that one.

I notice how thoughtful and insightful, all of your answers. Our to the questions that people ask you and I’m wondering how much time you put into thinking about those answers. Before you respond. Does it take a fair amount of time to think them through or have you thought about these issues for so long that it’s pretty quick and easy for you to come up with responses.

And I am Trying to answer these questions as if you were asking them to me as we were walking down the street. I don’t edit them very much. I’m simply here trying to imagine what the person who’s asking me a question is actually seeking and if I can shed some light, I do thanks to everyone for listening. And again, if you’ve got a question visit akimbo dot link and share it with us.

We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make it different.

==> -making-up-your-mind- <==

I’d like to tell you a story. Actually, there are two stories and the story. I tell you first, it’s going to make a big difference on which story you believe. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about making up your mind. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Because I’m a Believer in Hope, and optimism. I’ll tell you the hopeful optimistic story. First during the 1970s, the TV show called Mash was incredibly popular. Its last episode written by Thad Mumford was the most popular TV show ever made. That Mumford had an up-and-down career working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles and he lived right near a young painter named Jean Michel Basquiat. Jean-Michel also had a tortured career. He was a drug addict. He died far too young but in 1982, he was affiliated with the gaussian gallery about his fancy as you can get and he was beginning to make a real impact.

Packed in the art World during his career. He painted thousands and thousands of paintings, sometimes on refrigerator doors, sometimes on pieces of cardboard sometimes on canvases and he is beloved for the impact. He had on Art. Okay. So those are our characters Jean-Michel down on his luck, trying to cut Larry gagosian. Maybe out of the deal says to his neighbor. I’ve got these paintings on cardboard and his Were pays him less than ten thousand dollars to buy these 25 paintings. He puts them into a storage unit. And as his life begins to unravel, perhaps he forgets about them. All we know is the storage unit. Bill comes due that Mumford has passed on and it goes up for auction.

Guy named William Force. Who had probably seen a bunch of reality shows about storage units was making a living finding storage unit auctions, buying them cheap and looking through what was in there to make a profit. Well William Force discovers in this storage unit, 25 Priceless Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings, and he decides to get them authenticated.

Errand graft who has a PHD in art history and is Curator at the Orlando Museum of Art is totally taken by the paintings James Blanco. An expert on handwriting confirms that they are signed by Jean-Michel. An associate professor at the University of Maryland. Jordanna more suggest author of reading Basquiat confirms that the paintings came from him and most important of all the late curator Diego Cortez confirmed, the paintings Cortez before his death. I’d been on the committee that was built by the estate of Jean-Michel to authenticate paintings that were claimed to have come from the artist.

So with all of these people signing up to say that these paintings are authentic. It is estimated by the New York Times where I’m getting most of these facts from that this Treasure Trove of art is worth 50 or 100 million dollars. So, there you go. That’s a Let me tell you a different story. It’s pretty simple. There is a typeface called Universe 67. Bold, condensed. I’ve used it myself, not because I’m a famous artist, because it’s a nice typeface Universe 67. Bold condensed, and then there’s the company. Federal Express Federal Express was a scrappy startup, but by 1994, it had become a behemoth and like many behemoths. It decided to do a corporate redesign.

The higher the fanciest of fancy firms. A firm called Landor Associates land or had someone working their name Linden leader. I don’t know if everyone at land or had to have a name starting with an L. But Lindor leader certainly did. And in 1994 Lindor leader, led the redesign for land or at Federal Express and he chose Universe 67, bold condensed as one of the typefaces that Federal Express would use in all of their materials.

This happened 12 years after the paintings were supposed to have been painted and several years after Jean-Michel Basquiat died. Okay. So what so what is that? If you turn over one of the 25 paintings that were in the storage unit of thaad Mumford that were painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat in secret. When Larry gagosian, wasn’t watching if you turn over.

One of these 25 pieces of cardboard. What you will see on. It is a federal express typeface. Yes, you got it. It is very clearly. The typeface that Federal Express did not use until 1994.

Now, if you read the comments on the article in the New York Times, what you’ll see are several people saying I love art. I love jean-michel’s work. I can tell a fake from a real one. These are authentic and what you will also see are dozens of comments from people who read all the way to the end of the article who say well they have to be fake because clearly there on cardboard that was created after long after it would set that the paintings were painted.

So, how do we make up our mind? We make up our mind based on stories based on Hope based on inference we Make up our mind because Diego Cortez said that these paintings were authentic. It makes us happy, if they are authentic. But if the first thing you heard was there is undeniable proof with a fairly High degree of certainty that this cardboard wasn’t printed until 1994.

It doesn’t matter what happens after that because you’ve already made up your mind. And so the fascinating thing about all of the issues in our culture, issues of Technology issues of climate issue, of politics is simple, we should acknowledge. When we made up our mind. We should acknowledge. When we show up to say, I don’t know what to think. What are all the facts versus showing up to say, well, I already made up my mind. Do you have any new information for me because getting a human being to change?

Their mind is completely different than getting someone to make up their mind in the first place. And if we want someone to make up their mind in the first place, it helps to talk about a story. Maybe it’s the story of the last episode of mash. Maybe it’s the story of Linden leader, the young man building a new brand or design for Federal Express where we begin, how we anchor. It it. It changes how we see the culture going forward.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a couple questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston. Here. Hugs and kisses on the palm. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous. This episode or just about anything on your mind, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button to questions that are really closely aligned. We’re going to overlap in the answers. Here we go.

Hey Seth. Thanks for your podcast. I’m addicted. Undeniably. It’s def Corker your friend from Whistler BC. I wish I was skiing with you and instead I listened to your podcast on long runs, and I wonder Name of being the worst or the best CEO of our lives and delegating. I’m coming out of the pandemic wondering, if the world has become too lazy.

We can actually Outsource everything. Do we know where our vegetables come from anymore? I mean, I get that I can pay someone to grocery shop yet. There’s some life lessons. And there’s some hard work that I think we’re over passing because our hourly rate says that it’s cheaper for someone else to drop the groceries. Off at my front door.

I’m not disagreeing with you. I would just love your thoughts on laziness. And how can we stay rigorous? How can we continue to do hard work? And good work? Is that possible or have times just changed completely? I wonder, I’d love your thoughts. Thank you Steph for the work you do. And for this question, we’re going to talk about two things, which is timeframe. And what’s it for anyway?

Every CEO who is doing their job, whether they have no, employees, were 110,000 makes decisions. That’s what CEOs do. And the question we begin with is. When do you make a decision for what will make you and other people? Feel good for the next five minutes for the next five hours for the next five years, or for the next 50 years because these choices have implications.

There is no easy Milton Friedman maximize the net present value of shareholders solution. Here. We make decisions based on time frame and why we’re at this at all maximizing profit today is rarely the best choice. So when we think about being the CEO of ourselves and the fact that we can Outsource so many things that we can simply sit at our desk order. In everything, Outsource everything, freelance, everything.

And then somehow maximize our perceived profit. Well, some people will do that. But then at the end of all the days, what have you accomplished actually? So, inherent in all of the stuff I am ranting about is the choices we make about who it’s for and what’s it for and why we’re doing it and Steph, you know me and you know that I’m spending hours a day.

At the supermarket or cooking dinner for people. I care about that is not a profit maximizing strategy. If I am measuring profit in, how much cash did I make? That the choices we make are still CEO choices, but there are not easily measured in terms of cash in and cash out. Thanks for the provocation.

I said, this is Solace from Al-Qaeda and isil and I’ve really come to enjoy and embody the philosophy that a Holds that you’ve had your whole career. I think it just makes total sense to me. I really resonates with me. However, the team that I work with, hasn’t really caught up yet. You know, they’re still very focused on getting the hit.

The still very focused on, you know, perfecting everything before we send it to Market. And they have, you know, a big say in what we do. I mean, I’m the last voice to be heard, but at the same time, I don’t want their voices to be squashed. And I don’t want to be the forceful Hammer Of God, so to speak, you know that says, this is the way we do things now.

I really want them to be on board by Nature, you know, so how do I go about communicating that I think we’re aiming in the wrong direction. And that we should just show up for the people that are already here every day and make their lives better.

Yeah, how do I do that without without, you know, breaking relationships or the coming authoritarianism about it, you know. I really appreciate everything you do, man. It really changed my life changed. My whole philosophy. So I appreciate so much keep doing what you’re doing. Just thank you for the Silas. And now we get back to the, what’s it for part of this discussion, this team that you work with.

Of course. It’s not a democracy. There is a method in place, to get you, where you are going. You are showing up every day. And so, are they for a reason? Some people show up at work? To do what they’re told in to get paid. And if that is the reason they are there and you are mutually understanding about it. They want you to tell them what to do and they want you to keep paying them.

Other people are showing up at work because they’re on a mission. They want to make a change happen. They are focused on the impact of their work and a third group of people might show up at work because they like, the way it feels to be part of this, a like, the interactions that they have. So we begin by saying to the team Mmmmm, here’s why we are here. Here is the role that I need you to fill. This is where this bus is going.

And this bus. This bus is going to Christchurch. If you don’t want to go to Christchurch, if you want to go to Wellington, please get off the bus. Now, this bus is here for a reason and this is where it’s going. That’s the job of the leader. It’s not up for a vote because you will never get a unanimous vote. What you’ve got to do is be really clear. What things are like around here and you can make that decision after talking with everybody on your team and understanding what drives them.

But then once you’ve done this things, get much easier because every action, every choice, every decision everything you’re putting forward has to meet a certain criteria. Well, we’re here to serve the customers. Is this going to serve the customer? Well, we’re here to make as much profit as we. Oblique and it’s just going to make as much profit as we possibly can. We’re here to minimize the impact we have on the planet.

This thing you’re proposing. Is there a better way to get the job done? And also minimize our impact. Once we know what these questions are coherence becomes much easier because it’s not. Oh, we’re just doing it because Silas said, so unless that’s the kind of organization you’re building and we know plenty of organizations like that.

That the reason you’re here is to make the boss happy and the boss does with the boss does, that’s okay. As long as everyone knows, that’s the deal going forward. So my approach to the market, my approach to the smallest viable, audience and lots of other things isn’t the right answer. It just might resonate with you, which is great. I’m very flattered.

But then you’ve got to be able to establish for the team, why you’re using this compass, and this map to get where you’re going. If they don’t buy into that, then a serious conversation has to take place. But if they do buy into that now you’ve got a compass. And now you’ve got a map. Thank you all for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then, every single Rick has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear. About it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -enforcement-and-enrollment- <==

About 20 years ago, back when people were still flying with abandon Virgin, Atlantic launched, its upper class with really cute, salt and pepper shakers named Orville and Wilbur. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about enrollment and And enforcement. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

This is for the storytellers, the writers and filmmakers who feel called to depict the future and their fiction.

I know it’s exciting to show how things might fall apart, but human beings have a habit of living into what they expect. You can’t ask people to desire things. They can’t. Imagine, if all Society imagines is dystopia, they’ll patiently accept it when the chance arrives. So instead of provoking horror shows, consider using your art to give the world.

Better ideas. Thanks for what you do and good luck.

Shortly after the cute plane shaped salt and pepper shakers were delighting. The quote upper class passengers on Virgin Atlantic Wired Magazine wrote an article about them and talk about how cool they were and how great it would be to steal a set. Well, shortly thereafter, the thefts began to rise and Richard. Branson became annoyed at how much money he was losing when these metal salt and pepper shakers kept disappearing in that moment. You had a choice to make, he could go for enforcement. You may have seen this on planes back when they used to hand out. Tablets to watch movies on. You basically had to give up your driver’s license, your identity and a small child in order to get one and you didn’t get any of those things back until you handed it back in enforcement was possible.

They could have taken names when you got your salt and pepper shaker or they could have gone for enrollment. N’t and enrollment would have been hey, we just don’t steal salt and pepper shakers. There’s plenty of things on airplanes that people don’t steal even though it’s unlikely. They’re going to get caught.

And the reason they don’t is there not the kind of people who do that sort of thing. Well, he picked the third path, which was turning it into a publicity gimmick and changing the salt and pepper shakers to a plastic though. Shiny Construction. Over the years, they’ve done things like stopped using them and replacing them with something else.

And then do to quote and outcry. Putting back the quote, original salt and pepper shakers and it’s now just a publicity stunt. But that’s neither here. Nor there the key to the whole thing, is this in our industrial mindset, in our economies. It is so much easier to focus on enforcement instead of enrollment because enforcement, It is up to the person in charge. That’s what it is to be in charge to be able to enforce things.

And so Public School teachers are in the enforcement business and maitre D’s at restaurants enforce, their policies. That enforcement is our Instinct because it’s something that is under our control. Whereas enrollment is never under our control, enrollment is under the control of the person who we can somehow persuade or cajole. Create an environment where they decide how they’re going to behave or not behave.

So for example, this very little top-down enforcement about not having your cell phone on at a typical Broadway show.

Very satisfying moment of the theater. We all know how annoying it can be when someone’s texting during a show. The actors hated most of all. So, Broadway, Legend, Patti LuPone, took matters into her own hands snatching away.

The offending phone people are Are alerted that they should turn their phones off, but they turn their phones off because they don’t want to be the victim of social shaming, not because some top-down Authority is going to kick them out. That’s different from say the Alamo Drafthouse, a movie theater that has taken it upon themselves to enforce a ban on texting and phones.

So, excuse me, for using my phone and USA. Minaya States of America where you are free to check. And I theater.

And when they announced, that band people cheer because they’re looking for a centralized enforcement mechanism because sometimes the social shaming thing just doesn’t work. Well, all this came up because of this question from a hard-working public school teacher. Hi, Seth, Jeb Dickerson from Berryville, Virginia.

I am a middle school teacher. Teach eighth grade civics. And I have been consuming everything you’ve put out for the last decade or more, and I’m super grateful.

Like most people who, who are on this journey with you.

And I guess I’m calling in today and asking really about enrollment because I do agree. Enrollment is the key we learn when we want to learn. And so the real challenge for me and at the heart of my question is this, how do we get there? In year olds to be enrolled when they exist within a compulsory system, they all know that they have to go to school.

They all feel about school, the same way. We all did and the question about how to get them, to shift their perspective, or their posture towards learning is maybe the most urgent question, I can think of thankfully.

I worked in a district that is starting that Shift towards a much more project-based, student-centered way of teaching and learning. And I’m grateful and I, as an individual and made that turn long ago. In fact, I started as a teacher with that approach in mind.

And the key here, is that like that matters, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough to get 13 year-old students who have the added Dynamic of all the hormones and peer pressure’s and parental pressure and the you know, the college track and all of that to think about and worry about. So how how do we get young students to really begin?

Recognizing that school can be and should be for something different than maybe they’ve been led to believe and how do we get them to enroll on this journey?

In a way that gets us where we want to go? And, and I guess the last thought is the smallest viable audience. I’m going to get 10% of my kids. I know it. I know I am I always do that really, really thrive in a learning environment because they want to learn not because they feel like it’s going to be On the test, right? So but that still leaves out 90% of the kids. So I don’t have any illusions that I’m going to get them all, but how do we begin to turn that corner a bit quicker? So we get more of them along the way.

Thank you so much for everything.

You do first. Thank you for the work. You’re doing Civics. So important and to show up for 13, year olds day, after day, year after year, to teach them, what it is to be citizens. My hat goes off to you. Thank you. But what you are highlighting is that you work in a system where enrollment is viewed as an option, a nice to have something that makes it easier, maybe if 10% of the kids just naturally, organically, show up as enrolled. It goes better.

But we spend so much of our time on the enforcement regime instead, when we understand the real problem, which is, it’s super hard to enforce. Force things on teenagers, it’s super hard to enforce things on large portions of the population that most bureaucracies, most top-down organizations. Most bosses are really focused on enforcement. How do I get the butts in the seats?

How do I measure the throughput on the assembly line? How do I deduct points from people who don’t comply? And it runs really deep years ago. I used to help run a summer camp for underprivileged. Kids in June. In Canada, and we only had three or four days with these kids not enough time to learn their name. Certainly not enough time to be able to dig deep about who they were and where they were going and what they wanted and what we discovered because we weren’t in charge. The teachers were in charge, is that if you simply said, points will be deducted. When you discovered a kid acting up, they would quickly fall in line. They didn’t even know what the points were for.

They didn’t even know. Know what they were going to win, but simply the threat that an authority figure was going to deduct points, got people to change their behavior. And that’s a shame because it doesn’t last very long and it’s not very leveraged, and it doesn’t create the kind of culture that produces really good work that when we think about scientists who have done great work. When we think about organizations that have had breakthroughs or designers, or coaches, or teachers.

It’s always because they figured out how to earn enrollment, because they realized that people who are doing something because they want to do way, more than people who are doing something because they have to. And so the purpose of this, rant short as it is is to highlight for people to move way up on your priority list.

The simple question. Are we spending our Cycles? Are? We spending today? Are we spending these resources? Has looking for new ways to create enforcement regimes new ways to clarify the rules and the punishments. Or are we brainstorming and looking for new ways to earn enrollment to basically, be able to say to people. Oh, it looks like you’re trying to go there. It looks like you’re trying to do that. Well, if you want to go there, have you considered that? This might be a good way to get there?

Punch particularly for a topic like Civics which is so Broad and can be looked at with so many facets. Compared to say, fractions something like Civics. It feels to me, like, earning enrollment by offering three, four, five, six, seven different paths through the curriculum by creating Heroes, by focusing on status roles and affiliation by showing up in a way that the people would miss you, if you were gone.

That sort of enrollment is super difficult. If you’re coming from an industrialized, enforcement mindset, however everywhere else in our lives, every where else in our lives people aren’t doing stuff because they have to they’re doing things because they want to that’s the hard part and it deserves our attention.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some Questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria. My name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Chris. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit.

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Here we go. Hey, so, this is Jeremiah from Nebraska and what I’ve gathered over the years of listening to your podcast, reading your books, that developing a practices, big deal and it’s what I’ve wanted to do for many years now and I haven’t been able to get it to stick. So I’ve made excuses to myself that it’s fear of the unknown or maybe, I don’t know what I really want, or just too tired after work, but those excuses, I’ve helped me. Figure out what the problem actually is.

And my goal is to develop a good practice that I stick to for a long time. So I’m here to ask. How do I figure out what the problem is? How do I figure out why? I can’t stick to these practices that I set out to do, and Once I figure that out, maybe we can make more progress. Thanks. Seth for taking the time to listen to my question. Take Care.

Thank you for this.

Jeremiah. It’s a great question, but it might be a question that is about the wrong thing, which is that it’s easy to imagine that. We don’t exactly know what we want that we don’t exactly know. What our work is to be. Of course not if you had asked me. In 1990, or 2,000 or 2010. If the Arc of my work was to lead me to where I am today.

It’s really hard for me to imagine that I would have picked exactly what I’m doing right now. We aren’t given a bright Northstar. It is culturally, based. It is technologically, based. It is something that happens over time, Van. Gogh was not born to be an impressionist oil painter. That is where he ended up.

We end up as the result of a whole bunch of decisions that we make without exactly, knowing where we are going. So the purpose of your practice is not to somehow unveil. The thing that has been within you all along. The practice should be the simplest. Smallest thing that, you know, you can consistently rely on.

We have a practice of eating lunch every day. We have a practice of going to bed every night. Some people have a practice of having a martini or glass of wine after work. These are habits habits that add up to something over time or that, simply keep us where we are. And so, the practice that I am talking about here, could be as simple as every single day.

I’m going to write a blog post for someone else. Every single day. I’m going to learn a new thing to do with a computer, whether it’s coding or using an existing piece. Of software. Every single day. I’m going to find somebody somewhere who needs to be heard. And I’m going to listen to them drip, by Drip, by drip. The purpose of the practice in this sense is to get us past the decision of should I do this today?

Now, I do this every day. I brush my teeth every morning, whether I feel like it or not. I have a blog post every day whether I feel like it or not because if we can build a generous It into our life, the generosity of that, whether it’s about learning teaching connecting turning on lights discovering that habit, leads to New Frontiers.

So build that practice. If you pick something too small, then you can make it bigger. But if you pick something too big, then you’re asking too much. So the practice?

That’s where we begin. Hi, Seth. This is Carol from Washington State. One of my goals as a Elected official is to bring more diversity into our government funded career fields. And this morning. I was reading your book again, the practice and there was something you wrote about culture. And I realized that maybe more about changing the culture in these higher wage career Fields, like firefighters police public works department, heads, things like that.

So my question for you is, what do you see as the best way?

A to make change in this type of environment, you know, is it policies?

Is it? I’m withholding funds unless you make these changes, but I would like to hear your perspective on trying to bring everyone on board, maybe more of a group wanting to change like more of a Kumbaya moment if that’s possible. I know. I appreciate your insights and I love your perspective. So I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.

Thanks Seth. Thank you for this carol. There’s some really important ideas in what you were describing and what I have discovered in thinking about culture and learning about how humans make decisions. Is there, almost always based on one of two things affiliation or status and in some of the professions you’re talking about, at least in the communities. I’m aware of things like firemen and policemen etcetera.

There is a very strong element of affiliation. They call it a Warm for a reason to uniform, we’re all in it together. This is how we do things around here. And one of the things that flies in the face of persistent age-old systems is that they were built without regard for things like diversity, without regard for things like inclusion.

And now you are showing up to make a change happen, which is fantastic, but you’re not going to get there with everyone’s approval because part of what you’re doing is trying to change. Change the existing system of affiliation and the new system, the new systems will bring new affiliation about who the we are when we talk about how we do things around here.

And also new status rolls. Who’s up, Who’s down, who’s winning? Who’s losing? So, if you say to a large group of people, maybe who are part of a union, may be who have Civil Service standing, we’re going to change things and you’re going to move down in status and Going to change your affiliation. It’s not surprising that people even people who mean? Well push back on that.

Well, the alternative is to bypass the people who are in the status quo and simply create parallel processes, parallel processes in which new people get new status and new affiliation and over time their status grows. And their affiliation grows that. When we bring in a group of people who are on, You know, a SWAT team, a chosen group of leaders people who get different sorts of access, different sorts of recognition.

Well over time, it changes the culture because the we begins to change because some people from the old guard, will want the status and affiliation that is going to the folks who are new and will choose to join them. And some people may choose to leave and that’s okay, because the status quo is the status quo because it’s good at sticking around.

And you’re not going to get the status quo to eagerly, applaud the change you want to make. Even if you can rationally, describe why it’s better for everyone. Instead. What we have the chance to do is shine a light on people who are doing the things we want done rewarding new systems giving people who are part of new circles more resources, more approval, more leverage because that is how culture changes it changes. When we celebrate the Sure, we seek to build.

Good luck with this work.

Hey, Seth Josh here from Canada. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of leaving a legacy and Building Things. Putting work out there that outlasts us at the same time. I’ve been reading through some of the archives of your blog. And I came across a post from 2006, where you were inviting people to a face-to-face presentation that you were giving, and it stuck out to me how much different it seems like you would approach that goal of giving a large group of people a presentation.

And now than you did back in 2006 thinking, specifically about your conversations about the zoom Revolution or your post on medium about banning the lecture, from the classroom. You’ve been a leader during the rise and fall of the many tools for showing up as leaders and communicators, and you’ve taught and lead people through using many of those tools.

So, I have three overlapping questions within that. The first is, are there any things that you have taught or written about over the years that you think are less relevant? Are useful today. The second is what are some things that you’ve taught that have stood the test of time through the waves of change that you’ve seen in Tech and in society?

And then the third is, you’ve talked about writing books as a way to communicate something in a, stickier way than, maybe a blog post or a video tends to be. Do you think books are the most sticky way that we can bring our message or if not, what other ways do you think we can ship our work so that we can maximize the impact it has on the culture.

ER, years into the future. Thank you for this.

Josh. You’re right. I’ve been on the bleeding edge of media since 1976, when I was 16 and went on the internet for the first time and I built things on Prodigy and AOL and on DVD, and on lots of platforms that are long, long gone. And one of the things I’ve learned is the more specific I get about winning on a platform, the more likely it is.

I’m going to make a mistake. But there are some general principles that persist the ones of status and affiliation, which I just mentioned and the idea of permission of the scarcity of attention and trust and learning the ability to engage with somebody tomorrow. So as we see all the swirl and changes around us, for me, the biggest things to remember are one, you’re not here to please the person who built the platform and to short-term success that it comes from hacking tactics rarely is as resilient as earning conversation the benefit of the doubt trust respect and permission to talk to people and by coming back to that again, and again, the idea of the smallest viable audience of Leaning, into the people who are here for the message and not worrying about hustling to be on the homepage of anything, that combination feels resilient to me.

It worked for. Hundred years of the newspaper and it worked for the seven years. That AOL mattered a lot. So yeah, I remember running like, literally running next to Steve case the CEO of AOL. I am not a runner, but they had a partner conference and I got up at 6:00 in the morning because I figured Steve would be there for the group run.

And I did my best to keep up with him for probably half a mile, just so that I could maybe get my company on the homepage. Age of AOL for an hour. And as I lay on the side of the road panting, I realized that that sort of driven approach to hustle to getting a thing. A shining, a light. That doesn’t work in the long. Run.

What works in the long run, are the things that have worked in human culture for a very long time. Who trust you, who gives you the benefit of the doubt who is choosing to pay attention. And what will they tell their friends? Thanks for listening.

You next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries, around the world. Have spent the last bunch of Putting together the carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -leverage- <==

I can’t decide if it’s better to call it a seesaw or a teeter-totter. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about leverage. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you can see it you can be it. But what if you never see it, then what I want my daughters and all young women to see a field of Role Models have gone before them and Inspire them to what’s possible. So, I began the Fearless portraits project, an art series and podcast. Profiling notable women of today and recent history.

Listen to The Fearless portraits wherever you get podcasts. More add an Landau dotnet For all of the power that leverage brings seesaw and teeter, totter are pretty ridiculous names. These are bits of playground equipment that enable a leveling out to happen. Sitting in the right spot. A 60-pound kid can move a 300 pound Behemoth with no trouble whatsoever.

Leverage is at the Cornerstone of modern culture. 700 years ago, if you wrote a book, only one person could read it at a time, libraries were reserved for the very wealthy and for monarchs and nobody else had books at all. And if you wrote a book that you wanted to evangelize, you would put scribes together and they could make copies of your book one at a time. But again, those handmade copies could only be read by one person, one scribe, writing one book.

Read by one person at a time. Gutenberg’s Innovation movable type which would have come along with or without him was that you could print hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of books and suddenly one author could reach a lot of people all at once that Martin Luther translating the Bible into German almost burned down all of Europe because suddenly instead of a few priests having a Bible, anyone who wanted to You could have one books created enormous cultural leverage around that time. If you went to hear Beethoven or Mozart, perform, it was the only time in your life. You were going to hear that particular concerto being played quite likely.

And again, when an orchestra was playing, only the people who could fit in the room within hearing distance, could hear it when Shakespeare was putting on plays. Only two people who could fit into The theater could hear it so fast forward to Edison to recording devices and then to video suddenly instead of one teacher, only being able to teach one student as a tutor or 20 students, in a seminar, a great lecture can be used over and over again. Maybe it’s Simon sinek doing a TED Talk That seen by 20 million people, but it could also be something as prosaic as the best calculus. Glass of its kind being seen by every single calculus student instead of requiring each and every teacher to create a bespoke lecture every time which makes absolutely no sense.

And then from video we get to this idea of scorekeeping of prioritization of rankings. There are book stores where there is a section of the bookstore called bestsellers because what makes something a best-seller. Is a book that’s read by people. Who only read books that are best sellers, that sounds absurd, but it’s true.

There are people who only go to see box office successes, who only watch TV shows that everybody else is watching. So one source of Leverage is knowing who is winning knowing what’s a winner. Another source of Leverage is the idea of curation of Gatekeepers of Spotify, picking a podcast. And then Applying it out there.

It gives leverage to the creator of that podcast makes more money for the curator which gives them more power to do it again, which leads to the last part of this structure, which is the leverage that comes from a network? When 500 people work together to create a movement. It will go further and faster than if one person does that plugging into networks multiplying ideas as they spread? Ideas that spread win. And so lots of the people who listen to this podcast, our cultural creators, but sometimes it’s easy to forget where the leverage lies, The Leverage rarely lies in the fact that you came up with an arpeggio that better than anybody else did that. You have a turn of a phrase that you can prove is better. That you have. You get the idea that the leverage comes from the infrastructure from the soft tissue that is built around.

And the thing that we are building ideas that spread win. What makes something remarkable. Isn’t that you think it’s good. It’s that someone else thinks it’s worth remarking about and that’s why the minimum viable audience is so important. This group of people that you choose to Custom, Tailor your work, for one of the reasons you’re choosing them is by coming up with something that resonates for them.

They are more likely to talk about it since they are more likely to talk about it. It’s more likely to spread and that is where your leverage lies. So, if we revert to pleasing everyone in the committee meeting, if we revert to sanding off the edges to making it as acceptable as possible to as many people as possible.

We’ve just walked away from Leverage, The Leverage that we need to change. The culture is to Delight. Someone not to satisfy or please everyone that the light that being able to see people and helping them, get to where they want to go, is the Cornerstone of moving leverage forward. So, that’s the shortest rant. I’ve got so far, but I thought it was worth sharing with you.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with three sort of interrelated questions, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. It says, it’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hard surfaces on the palm.

This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex Pizza. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this.

Or any previous episode. I hope you visit. Akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button. Here we go. Hi said. This is Raja from Florida. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom to the world. I have two questions related to teaching and school system. My son is doing a first grade in a Montessori School in our neighborhood.

He by nature is very shy and takes a lot of time to get comfortable and Two others. The covid also worked against him because of covid. He stayed at home and did a virtual schooling for more than one and a half years and it’s been only a few months. He started in person school at this new school, but the school is making his behavior as a big problem and warning us, that he will be retained in first grade if he doesn’t improve, I specifically put him in the Montessori school because it will give him a three year window.

To master his skills, but teachers are saying that he supposed to meet the expectations set by the County School Board by end of first year to get promoted. For example, he supposed to present a book at his reading level. But if he doesn’t talk on, if he doesn’t press and he won’t be eligible. I’m very much disappointed by how this kind of a standard expectation is set for all students. Especially this is Enforced as us yearly level as the first grade instead of really supporting and providing Extra Care to him.

They are only demotivating him by detaining him in the first grade. I’m not sure if I should try to talk to teachers and principal to convince them and change their expectation, or should I change him to a different school where there is not a lot of pressure on him, or should I try? Try to force him to change his behavior and fit into the system.

I’m curious to know your advice on thoughts on how to handle the situation. My second question is my wife also started teaching in different Montessori School. The primary thing they want my wife to do is to basically make the kids obedient and keep the class under her control. If any kid is not fitting into the They basically try to find some reason to get them out of the school.

My wife really doesn’t like it. She really wants to address the individual needs of each kit and help them, man, and be kind to them. But the school management is not really encouraging her to do. So, they also pay a minimal salary to her, as well as they recruit any Cog and the system so that they can just pay the minimum.

Wage and keep the school running. My wife is very passionate about teaching especially the younger kids, but there is not a lot of opportunities in our neighborhood as well, as there is not a great financial incentive to pursue her passionate teaching job. She really wants to be a linchpin in the teaching job, but the situation is not that great here.

I’m very curious to know your advice and thoughts on this. Thank you so much for your knowledge and thoughts and take care. Thank you for this Roger. You’re a great dad and your kids lucky to have you. I think it’s important to start by saying there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your son. There is nothing wrong with a kid who doesn’t fit in there. Something wrong with the match between the kid and the system and there is no system that I am aware of no educational system, where A kid fits in all the time and often because the system needs to be in charge because the system doesn’t do well.

When it gets twisted out of shape. The system says to the kid, there is something wrong with you. Now. This is the might be the Principal or the system might be the bully or the system might be what’s happening during recess, or the system might be what one overworked teacher is doing in any given moment, but we have a lot of data that shows.

The kids who have different attention spans, who are skilled differently, who have different ways of learning. In all of these situations. It’s tempting to say these kids have issues. That there’s some defect that needs to be fixed at. They need to be medicated. Well, what’s really happening is there is a mismatch between the system and the kid and we have to decide how important is it to fix that mismatch. And then we have to say, And what is the best way to do it?

Well, here’s something that is often overlooked particularly among people who are quote high Achievers unquote and it’s this as Zig used to say if you get lost, this was before GPS. If you get lost in a strange town and you’re going to ask for directions, and there’s three kids standing by the side of the road and you pull over to ask for directions.

Who are you going to ask? And the answer is probably the tallest one. We asked the tallest one because we assume that the tallest kid is the oldest kid and we assume that the oldest kid knows best. And one of the things that parents who care about their kids often do is get frustrated that their kid is quote, held back. But if we live in a system where achievement and learning are based on certain forms of interaction and a kids, chronological maturity is Is different than other kids.

Sometimes it makes sense, not for that kid to be going through education as fast as possible. But for them to, in fact, be the oldest person in the room, the tallest person in the room, the most experienced person in the room because what we know is that there’s a long history of people who are taller doing well in most cultures, why height has nothing to do with it, unless you’re playing basketball, however, Because the world treats taller people as if they know what’s going on. They are more likely to talk to them differently, trust them, or give them the benefit of the doubt.

And so your child is being told that the status quo is rejecting them because they can’t fit in because they’re not willing to speak up and present in a way that works for that institution. Well one choice is to make the kid feel bad. I don’t think that’s useful. Another choice is to move the kid to a different setting. In this case, your wife who is already a teacher, who is being under respected, could spend time schooling that kid at home.

But another option is to realize that when your child is, in a classroom of kids, who are younger than they are, they might find the confidence to speak up because it’s not a race to see who gets through school. The fastest that in fact, The challenge is to help kids develop in ways that give them confidence and satisfaction, and joy going forward. And if they’re always behind in physical interactions, or intellectual ones, or emotional ones, because they have the youngest might make sense to try having them be the oldest.

I’m going to touch a little bit on your wife’s conundrum in a future question. But thank you for reaching out and big hugs to you. Or family when a great episode, Seth Help, Wanted Paradox. It’s Lauren greif from Chicago. And my question is giving your book and the many articles regarding linchpin jobs and becoming a linchpin.

Specifically from Toronto’s, Rothman School of Management and your attempt to create a lynchpin job portal. What would you say is the best? Resource today to uncover them outside of help wanted job postings. Thanks for this Lauren. I edited your question a little bit, to get to the heart of it, which is, yes, we started a board years ago called linchpin jobs. And basically, what I did was asked readers of my blog, who had a special job, a job. That wasn’t a cog job. A job that wasn’t straight out of the pages of the e-myth, a job that needed people who could lead and we gave Give them a chance to post those jobs for free and we ran the job board for over a year and we ended up stopping it because we weren’t getting enough submissions.

The reason we weren’t getting enough submissions is because people have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they don’t believe, there are any jobs like that out there. And when there were jobs like that out there, they don’t believe that they’re real and they show up, treating them like cock jobs the We have right now. It’s this very few organizations, believe they can find Lynch pins when they need them.

And very few employees believe companies. When they say, that’s what they’re actually looking for. Because so often our hearts have been broken. We’ve created a role for somebody who can lean into things and lead and the person we hire who said they wanted to didn’t, or we’ve been promised that that’s the job that’s on offer.

But It turns out it’s not responsibility and Authority are in this awkward dance, because responsibility is pretty easy to get. If you want to take it Authority is rarely handed out understandably. So, looking for people who are willing and eager to take responsibility is a challenge that just about every HR person has and then putting people into a setting where they’re going to take that responsibility and Lead without Authority.

It really works the way we hope. And so, in the previous question from Roger, where we heard about his wife struggling, because the school districts under pressure from parents and taxpayers and people who haven’t thought it through are trying to reduce costs and also lower Authority because many of the indoctrinated teachers have fought taking responsibility and there are ways around this.

So, two things that I want to suggest. Chest. The first one is, if you are one of those people who wants to take responsibility insist upon it and if the organization you are working with, won’t let you take responsibility, leave and go bring your joy and Magic somewhere else. And if you’re a teacher that might mean. Starting your own school, three kids, five kids, 10 kids, you will find students. If you are willing to lean into your responsibility.

The acting academy has done this around the United States and another Countries. And the results are pretty stunning to see. Is it easy. Is it as easy as it should be where someone with skill and passion can get a job that they deserve? No, of course not, it should be, but it’s not because the system, doesn’t welcome it.

And then the second half of it is this, if you are looking for a job job, as opposed to starting your own thing. Where is your body of work? Because as you build a body of work, That you publish to the world. I made this and I made that people will find it. And when they find it, they will seek you out friend of mine interviews. People all the time and he has come to the conclusion that it doesn’t pay to say to an engineer or a designer.

Tell me where you worked and show me your resume because it doesn’t mean anything that you were on a team. It doesn’t mean anything that you worked with a Famous Brand instead. He says, show me your work. Me what you shipped? Show me what you made, Show Me What You Led and if you can’t easily answer those questions.

Now, you know what to do in your spare time, that what we all have the opportunity to do is find a project, a non-profit project, a hobby project, a charity project, and go do something extraordinary there that your commits to GitHub. They mean something that that thing you built on Kickstarter that you can point to it. It means something your body of work as Pam. Slim has so eloquently written about says more about you than your resume ever could.

So I’m not sure we should be looking for a new middle man. The way linchpin jobs was. I think the opportunity here is to lead, not to wait for someone to invite you along for the ride. I’m in total alignment with you on our responsibility, as leaders, and in serious human beings, but particularly as leaders.

To ensure that we offer everyone around us the opportunity to space to truly experience and feel the dignity. It costs us. Nothing and a reward of seeing someone except that acknowledgement of their humanity is priceless. You can’t put value to it. However, I find it easy to point fingers when a manager or authority figure refuses to offer that opportunity.

But what happens when you offer it to someone who just refuses to get out of victim mode or still wants to play out and Can games. How would you suggest any with that as a leader? Thank you for this question. And again, I took a little slice out of the center. I hope that’s okay. The thing about dignity is it needs to be offered to us and it needs to be accepted and for too long, dignity has not been offered to people who need it, who deserve it, who will treasure it.

And if it has been denied to somebody for too long, when a little bit of it shows up. We shouldn’t be surprised that people are We shouldn’t be surprised that people have trouble accepting that dignity after such a long drought of being disrespected. So I hear you, then when we extend ourselves to someone, when we open the door for them, when we give them a chance to accept responsibility to be a linchpin to lead and they don’t take it.

It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating. Because what else do they expect from us? Well, to make up for decades of disrespect me. Maybe what they need from us is consistency. Maybe what they need from us, is for us over and over again, to give that person the benefit of the doubt to see them to see where they’re struggling to see what they’re stuck with to see what they’re afraid of.

Because I believe that Talent is overrated and skill is a magical opportunity because it means we can learn it. And I think we can learn to accept dignity. I think we can learn to seek out. But ability and I think we can learn to lead and that gives me optimism about what’s possible in the future. Thanks everyone for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around the world have Spent the last bunch of months putting together, the carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -podcast-ads- <==

There’s a little village in Argentina and the Ad Agency for Guinness. Beer, went there and spent more than 15 million dollars to make a, not very good commercial for beer. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about why podcast advertising is so bad, but first here is a message from our sponsor.

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Yes, ironically enough. We’re here to talk about podcast, adds something. I’ve been thinking about since before I had a podcast at the beginning of podcasting. And in fact on many podcasts to this day. The ads were read by. The host closing day is proudly, brought to you by our title sponsor insert your name here.

This is a mid-roll ad, listeners are captivated by the interview that Kyle is doing and now the ad is seamlessly. Going into their experience, as they listen to a trusted Host. This is pretty common for new forms of media. Back in the early days of Television people like Arthur Godfrey would read the ads that interspersed their show on radio.

The hosts of radio shows, still read the ad and in podcasting. That’s where it began. I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t want to break the wall between me talking to you about something I made or I think I’m thinking about and the voice of the advertiser and I was thrilled at that choice when I heard a friend of mine, reading an ad for hair. Dye, which I knew he didn’t need and in use sooner or later when the host reads the ads, trust is going to be eroded and what we saw on television pretty quickly is that advertisers decided not to trust the hosts and hosts decided not to trust the advertisers and so the ad The ads and the host is the host, but back to that Guinness commercial.

It turns out that big-time advertisers appear to spend millions and millions of dollars on really well produced tv ads. It also turns out that it doesn’t cost them much of anything. That’s because more than 100 years ago, newspapers in Philadelphia and New York said to sales reps. If you bring us the finished ad. Add, we will give you 15% of what the ad costs and these sales reps evolved into ad agencies. At the beginning. It was just a classified ad with some words in it. But over time, people started adding pictures and more text. And then as we got into radio and television the convention continued. And so, when Procter & Gamble spends a billion or two billion dollars a year on Advertising, the tradition was the Ad Agency kept.

And paid for all of the expenses. All of the art directors, all of the Mad Men, all of the people who are making the commercials came out of that 15% over time. This has evolved because big advertisers decided to split out the media buying where they got a kickback of 15 percent or a little bit less. So the media buyer could keep a bit and then paid the advertising agencies to make their ads, but this 15% number Established the standard, the standard for TV ads has been around for a really long time.

You almost never see a network TV ad. That looks like someone made it in their basement and then we can fast forward. Just a little bit to ads in movie theaters. There were ads in movie theaters for 100 years and then there were, and in fact, last time I checked, which was about a year and a half ago, movie theater. Advertising, was a bigger market then Olive podcast, advertising given the pandemic, my guess is To have flipped, but for a decade or more movie theater, advertising was a big deal, but one of the things that the folks who wanted to build a network of movie ads had to do was persuade the theater owners that the fans in the movie theater wouldn’t revolt.

And so if you remember the ads, you’ve seen a movie theaters the most expensive one, being one for a Chanel Number 5, the cost more than 30 million dollars to produce.

I must have been the only person in the world.

Didn’t know.

These ads, generally were better more, professional more cinematic than the ads on television. That’s because if an Advertiser really wanted to be in the theater, they had to do business with the network. And the network, the movie theater Network, wasn’t going to run an ad. That wasn’t very good. So now we’ve got this situation of podcasts.

And at the beginning very few companies were advertising on podcast, MailChimp just sold for Eleven or twelve billion dollars generated a whole bunch of their brand value by basically sponsoring every decent podcast. They could find they understood that podcasts, five years ago were reaching people who were interested, interesting, who were opinion leaders, who were leaders in general, who wanted to play with new ideas and using host, read ads, MailChimp built a reputation, a layer of trust with people. People who maybe wouldn’t have heard from them, otherwise, but then something shifted and what shifted his more and more people started listening to podcasts and instead of it being beautifully, crafted podcast like mystery show or first person podcast in which someone like me comes on and talks directly to you. That NPR voice kicked in it, became things like serial or S Town, highly produced True Crime things that appealed to millions and Millions of people not hundreds of thousands of people and all of a sudden, advertisers took note, advertisers took note to podcasts are bargain that they could buy The Edge pretty cheap and reach, lots of people who were more expensive to reach in other forms of media.

But now now they have a problem because a company, like, Geico doesn’t really want host read ads. And a lot of hosts might have pushed back on reading ads for products that weren’t right in. In their wheelhouse. Also, if a big advertisers going to buy ads on a lot of podcasts, which they need to, to make it worth their time, they need an ad that’s more generic.

So faced with all of that, what happened? Well, it’s worth noting that the person bringing podcasting into most, advertisers wasn’t the most powerful or most senior person, because the most powerful and most senior people came up on the TV side and they’ll Learn from their boss. Nobody ever got in trouble for running more TV ads tv ads were where the glory was tv ads, were where big money was spent and big companies.

It’s not their money. They’re spending the boss’s money. The boss’s boss’s money, the shareholders money and it’s fun. It’s fun to work with the agency. It’s fun to put on these little movies. It’s fun to be in the ad game. As my friend, Jay Levinson used to say and so they were ignoring podcast podcast Were A Hard Sell To them.

And so a junior person comes along and that person says, we’re going to start running podcast ads, but they don’t have a lot of money to spend and they need to find somebody who knows how to make audio ads. Now. Here’s the next part. The next part is Radio is inherently a local medium. There are every once in awhile National radio ads, but most of the time most radio ads are local not only are they local but they are specific and Result, the money just isn’t there to make Fancy radio ads video component system. Get it all on sale. Now, during crazy, these greatest TV and video sale, ever read, and let’s add to that one. More thing, which is people are listening to the radio in their car.

And they’re not really listening to radio.

It’s sort of on in the background. That means that radio advertising evolved really differently than TV advertising. It evolved to be highly compressed. In time and in volume compressed in time because what you’re trying to do is talk as fast as you possibly can, to get as many words in the minute, as you could, and in terms of volume because there’s a button on the editing deck called compression.

And what it does is it makes the soft sounds louder and the loud sound softer, so you can have it all fit in at the maximum volume. The end result of these fast-talking compressed locally-made radio ads is there’s a patina to them. And they sound terrible. Nobody puts together. The best radio ad collection and has people buy it.

There are still people who watch the Apple 1984 commercial, who watched The Mean Joe Greene. Or I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing Coca-Cola commercials on television, but there’s nobody who’s digging deep to hear a commercial from a taco stand from seven or ten years ago. What happened then what happened is the Podcast advertisers were a little bit desperate because they don’t have a corner on the market, the way the movie theater that work did because there are too many podcasts and not enough ads and some one lousy ads show up. Well, if the check clears, you can run them.

And that brand manager, the junior one who’s trying to get their brand onto podcast. Well, they don’t have a budget to go make a 30 million dollar. Chanel, Number 5, TV ad and the That they are hiring. They’re the ones who are used to making radio ads. So when you listen to a podcast, now, going forward, one of the things you’re going to be listening to is, does the host, or does the person who owns that podcast have it in them to say no to say, you know, what?

The ads are part of the show and I don’t want to run AM radio ads on my podcast. Or are they saying this is a business. Enos and businesses business, and the ads aren’t part of the podcast. Well, they certainly weren’t saying that when the host was reading the ads, but it sounds like they’re saying that now and the purpose of this rant isn’t the point out how annoyed I am. I listening to podcast. It’s not that hard to skip.

No, the point is to understand that media all media evolves that YouTube ads look different than TV ads even though they’re both on video. Why? Because YouTube ads Way out on the long tail, you’re never going to reach a lot of people with the typical YouTube ad which means you don’t have a lot of money to spend on it, which means you’re not having an ad agency. Make it, which means it doesn’t look like a TV ad. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

It simply means it’s different. And often. We assume that a thing is a thing because it’s always been that thing. But a TV ad is not a movie yet. And a movie ad is not a radio ad and A radio ad is not a podcast, Dad. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or previous episode or just about anything else, please visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button three questions this week some with a little bit of a warm up. Here we go.

I said this is midi from Istanbul Turkey.

So I listened to your podcast with Tim Ferriss just a year ago. And you asked him. Where’s your bad driving when he was seeking your advice on being stuck in writing. And that really resonated with me as an independent researcher, where I was waiting for the great paper instead. I decided to write a bad one first and that’s what I did.

And now I shoot for a better one with having published a paper. So, that really increase my productivity. Thank you for that. Then I came across a Kimball for five months ago and I listened to every episode since and it has been a great journey. So my question is, how do you give so accurate advice to people who have not solved the problems that you have solved?

Like take never missing a deadline or seeing this status shows as they are and choosing the path of generosity instead of complying with the industrial status setting.

So I feel that many people solve such problems and they progress in their life, but then they forget how life was before that. Thank you for this. Thanks for the kind words. I included Your Preamble because I thought there was some really good advice in that the idea of showing people your bad writing is in fact the first step to getting good at writing but your question I think gets to something around empathy and to answer it. I want to talk about Ricardo. My favorite physical therapist. Here’s the thing about physical therapy, physical therapy works because human beings choose.

To put themselves through strenuous exercises to get better. Physical therapy is not done to you. I mean, at the end when they put that warm vibrating thing on, it’s fantastic, but I think that’s just a placebo. Most of physical therapy is you showing up and pushing yourself. And the thing about Ricardo is you can tell, he does that to himself every day.

He doesn’t look like the rock. Doesn’t look like some sort of steroid addicted. Derp. But it’s very clear that just an hour. Before I got there. He was pushing himself harder than he was asking me to push myself and there are choices we make. As we get more successful. You may be aware in your town of a cook or Chef who hit a level of success and then chose to Coast that the menu hasn’t changed in decades that the business model is still what it was.

It’s not easy work, but it’s not new frontier work. Either. On the other hand. You might discover somebody like the great Kenji Lopez, alt whose new cookbook has absolutely nothing to do with the cookbook that came before. I happen to like the previous one, a lot better, but I’m guessing that Kenji felt that same fear in the pit of his stomach just before the walk book came out that he did before the one before that came out. Well, well, that’s what I try to do in my work. Where is there a frontier? How can I go back to feeling that feeling that I’m trying to talk to people about? Because I don’t like coasting.

It’s boring to me and if I can share things with empathy. I feel like I can do a better job. So thank you for this.

Hi, Seth is Paula from Pittsburgh? This isn’t a question about your episodes, which I listen to every week. But about the cultural boycott of everything. Russian were seeing globally. I guess this goes into the realm of cultural diplomacy. I read today that the Met is cutting ties with conductors and singers that they can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin.

But beyond that, people are saying things like they don’t think we should be performing Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich that they don’t want to hear Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich that we shouldn’t play the 1812 Overture on the fourth of July, or should they be canceling, Swan Lake? Do you think this is a bridge too far?

Thank you for this Paula. And as you know, I don’t spend time talking about current events here. But I think it’s important to highlight what happens. When we normalize things in culture? Normalizing better Behavior People Like Us, do things. Like this is part of the long Arc of History bending it toward Justice, establishing that what is around us might not Acceptable. And we have to get better or that other things that are better, are things that others should be doing, normalization, the idea, People Like Us do things like, this is critical in, how we Define our culture, and I think the first part of your point is this, we would be making a big mistake. If we normalized the idea that it’s okay, for big powerful countries in 2022 and Beyond to invade. They’d physically invade with death and destruction, other countries.

And so I think leaders in our culture are stepping up and saying it’s not. Okay, and while the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Metropolitan Opera, or any other cultural institution doesn’t have a standing army. They do have the ability to send signals about what’s normal and what’s not but and it’s a huge butt.

It’s a gray area, really fast turns out Stolichnaya, vodka isn’t even made in Russia. It turns out that the people were the ideas were the cultural artifacts that some folks are walking away from don’t have any leverage. There’s no real cost to them and Tchaikovsky’s long-dead. Nobody in Russia benefits when we play the 1812 Overture, I think. There’s a difference, it’s very tricky. But I think there’s a difference between cultural artifacts that remind us of an idea. That is no longer. Okay, for example, getting married at a Southern plantation, and cultural artifacts that happened to have been created by somebody, or a culture that didn’t act in ways that we are proud of today. I think the latter is A slippery slope that might be too far because there is no Purity.

There’s no doubt in my mind. That one of my great grandparents was Russian. So if you want to stop listening to this podcast, that’s okay. You can do that. But I don’t think you will be making a point. So we constantly are faced with things that divide us as we seek to find things that unite us. And I think we have to normalize the important stuff and not normalize the things. That might be tempting but that need to be changed at the same time.

I think it’s okay to listen to things to watch things to engage in things that happened to have been created under different regimes or by people who were playing by different rules. But of course, your mileage is going to vary. I think thinking about the question is 80% of the work to be done.

I said, this is John from Kate on my questions about risk risk. On the freelancer. We’re often right at the end of a chain of communications and it sometimes happens that we did over money that never gets paid. And I know that we aren’t exactly an advocate, for platforms, like up work, which charge a hefty commission and came to encourage the race to the bottom.

But the benefit to that they do provide is Escrow Services and dispute mediation. So I’m just wondering what your take is for. People like me who create independently and very much at the one of the client. You are advising a Christ. Has always been find it. Our clients. And I know that that is the letter upwards.

How do I go about not losing money again? I don’t know about. Seeing the red flags in the warning signs, what can be done to mitigate this problem that faced numerous times three.

Thank you for this John. It’s a really good question. And it has to do again with picking better client. If you only have a few clients a year and they last for a long time, then you as a valuable freelancer can establish early and often that the only client you stick with are the ones who pay you on time because if they want to keep working with you, they can’t jerk you around about the money, but it’s difficult to get to that point. It’s a ladder.

It turns out to getting work from a client that’s not going to pay. You isn’t particularly difficult and you don’t want to be that person. So there are ways to establish, protocols upfront with people who have found you so that you aren’t exposed to that sort of risk. If it’s a fortune 1000 companies, a big company get a binding purchase order because it’s not their money anyway, and they’re not going to jerk you around. If you have a binding purchase order, you will get paid.

It’s not someone like that. Find a service that enables you to set up a simple escrow or find policies that you can put into your Arrangements that build in binding arbitration in black and white so that if they don’t pay you, you don’t have to give up your day job, just to get paid. And if it’s a client who isn’t willing to pay in advance, who’s a new client who isn’t coming to you? Well, Commended, don’t take them.

It’s one more step on the way of getting better clients that it is entirely possible for you to build a business, where you say to your clients. Look, I don’t have an account payable department. I don’t have layers of bureaucracy that can collect bills. So the deal is simple. I do extraordinary work at a really good price and part of the cost you is you gotta pay me up front and I understand that feels risky. So you don’t have to do big tranches of the project all at once, but How I work.

And if that doesn’t work for you, I understand. And if you want to see my references here they are. But right now, the way cash flow is the fact that I am a soloist means I charge people up front. Here is a stripe invoice. You can use a credit card. If you’re unhappy. By all means, go feel free to challenge it with the credit card company, and maybe I’m going to rip you off, but I’m probably not and my references. Make that clear.

Because if you want to do business with the big guys, you have to differentiate between the ones who are going to treat money as a tool to get the work. They need versus the ones who are going to treat you poorly and use money as a cudgel to win. Some sort of game. You don’t even want to play. Thanks everyone for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300. Volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> 1360-why-is-software-so-bad- <==

Forty years ago, I drove a brown Fiat Strada. Perhaps one of the 10 worst cars ever made. It went 0 to 60 in about 19 seconds. It got about 20 miles to the gallon. The backseat was remarkably uncomfortable. It handled poorly and it was really ugly. Today, for about the same number of inflation-adjusted dollars, I drive a Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid. It gets 199 miles to the gallon. It goes 0 to 60 just as fast as I need it to. It’s super safe, and the back seat is quite comfortable.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

I don’t really want to talk about cars today. I want to talk about software, and I want to talk about why software is so bad. I developed my first computer game as a hobby in 1976, when I was in high school, and I was super fortunate in the early 80s to do it professionally. In those days, making games for the Commodore 64, our major limitation was hardware.

This is what the music sounded like:

[Vintage 8-bit computer music playing]

The text was so clunky, it was almost unreadable. The graphics were nothing to write home about. We were busy pioneering how software might work. At the time, I was beta testing the original Mac, and the Mac was a revelation. On that Mac, I had a word processor. Soon after that, a spreadsheet. Today, 40 years later, I have a word processor that does almost exactly what that word processor did 40 years ago.

I have a spreadsheet, Google Sheets, that does less than the spreadsheets I used to pay for. Sure, it’s free. Sure, it’s connected and can have multiple users, which makes it even more useful. But in terms of software development, if we leave aside the network effects, most of the things that I, and you, do with software are not dramatically better than they were soon after the Mac came out.

Why is that? What happened to this industry that is no longer driven by hardware? The hardware is now as fast as we need it to be. The screens are as sharp as we are able to discern. And the colors, unless you’re a sea slug, are infinite. So what all this means, is that software, the Architecture of software isn’t what it could be.

I want to share a few reasons why I think this is. The first one is: ‘The buying cycle’. Cars have made a lot of forward motion, even though they are largely hardware dependent. Well, why is that first? There’s a buying cycle every three, four, five, six years. We take a deep breath and we start over. The operating system of the car hasn’t changed in almost a hundred years. If you know how to drive one car, you know how to drive almost every car.

But when we start over, we can switch brands. We can go from Company A to Company B, and we’re about to spend $50,000, $30,000, $70,000 for the privilege of doing that – which means that the car companies are under a lot of pressure to create something that users think is better. That’s not true with word processors, or spreadsheets, video editing software. We are stuck with the operating system, with the method, with the UI, with the file format that we are used to. Number two: ‘Car companies have dealers’. And dealers talk to consumers, face-to-face. Dealers live and die everyday. Dealers see that people are walking off the lot. And, they are happy to scream directly at the people at the car companies – who have no choice, but to listen to them. That’s not true for software. Software isn’t sold for the nearly the same price to a consumer, and it’s usually sold directly, without a middleman.

Number two, as we discovered about 20 years ago, the Network Effect is actually the killer app. Software exists primarily today to connect us to other people. That the way Microsoft ended up destroying Wordperfect, was by showing up with file formats that could be shared – one person to the other. It wasn’t worth it, once someone in your office was using Word, for you to insist that it had to work with Wordperfect. Shareable file formats meant that it went in one direction.

Google gives its software away, but we’d probably pay for it, because the magic of the Network Effect is so overwhelmingly powerful. We would forgive the fact that you can’t do nice typography and other features in Google Docs. We would get over the fact that Google Sheets isn’t as fast, or as reliable as Excel at its best. Because the Network Effect – multiple users using the thing, overwhelms everything else. As a result, the biggest brains, the smartest people, the hardest-driving focus at every software company tends to be about, “How do we get people to share this?” Not, “How do we architect it with care, so that the experience of using it on your own is delightful?”

Number three, which might be the biggest one, is that: ‘Software is complicated’. It’s complicated for the user. When I think of how many instructions I need to give somebody to be able to learn to drive a new car, it’s probably three minutes – “Here’s one button, here’s the the lighter, here’s how you turn on the Cruise Control, and don’t forget about this, off you go”. You can walk into a rental car agency, get a car you’ve never driven, and drive it off the lot.

Software isn’t anything like that. That the number of options, because options are super easy to add, keeps increasing. One person wants to, I don’t know, ‘composite reverse type in these colors with an alpha channel’. And suddenly, that’s one of the features. As a result, the architecture of software is significantly more complex, because the architect doesn’t know what the user wants to do.

And there is no convention that has been accepted for turning off features, so that you can have the version that you want, and have it work the way you want to use it. The next idea is that, culturally, we stopped giving prizes for craftsmanship. That when the early versions of Keynote came out, people moved to it, away from PowerPoint, because it was well-crafted. But that was more than ten versions ago. Since then, there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about what it means to be ‘good’ at crafting ‘how,’ to create presentation software.

I think you and I could sit down and come up with 20 ways to make it significantly better. Then when a new company, like Prezi, comes along, what we notice are a couple gimmicky moves. Not that it is perfectly crafted the way, perhaps, a Porsche is a better crafted car – from the user car experience point of view.

Not that you asked, but as someone who’s given more than a thousand presentations using Keynote, here are some of the things great presentation software would do to make my job easier, and to make the experience of consuming the presentation better. Number one: “How come there isn’t a timer built-in that shows me, compared to what I expect, where I am through my presentation?” Show me, with colored lights, that I’m behind or ahead.

“How come there isn’t a way to group up subsections of a presentation?” So, I could sub them in, turn them on, turn them off easily – not with some sort of clunky hierarchy. Number three: “Why can’t I instantly glance through all of the material I’ve used in the past, to find which switch subsets are available, which ones I want to add?” It goes on, and on. None of these features have been added. Instead, what I’ve got, is now the ability to change the outline on a font, which no one has any business doing. That’s not what it’s for. But, nobody seems to be in charge of making Keynote more elegant and useful. Instead, it’s sort of a random collection of ways to get more people to share it and use it together.

It’s not becoming more powerful, or more beautiful. It’s simply becoming more clunky. The same thing is true with almost all the software I use. Apple, which used to lead the way in figuring out how to give us power and leverage, now dumbs things down because there are luxury brand – not a group of people trying to craft tools for folks who are trying to change the culture.

And then, back to this idea that software is complicated. We’ve been trained to put up with it. So a specific example – about four years ago some versions of the Mac laptop began to lose connection with Wi-Fi networks, sort of randomly. No one’s exactly sure why. And you can find posts online from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 with people complaining about the same bug, with solutions that verge on witchcraft. “Delete this. Do that. Stand on one foot, over and over again, for years and years”. Try to imagine a car that didn’t work at many gas stations on a regular basis, and no one knew why the filler cap wouldn’t open at some places, under some circumstances. Try to imagine that this went on for year, after year, after year of the car being sold.

I think it’s pretty easy to believe that ‘that’ car would be recalled. That ‘that’ brand would plummet in value. That our standards for what we’re looking for from our $40,000 car, are really different from what we’re looking for from the software that we make a living using, every single day. Now users are complicit, because as software companies stopped caring about the quality of experience, users started stealing the software.

Because the Network Effect is powerful. Because, incrementally, a second copy of a piece of software in the world doesn’t cost the company money – the way it would cost Ford Motors money, If you went to a dealer and drove a car off the lot without paying for it. Conceptually, digital goods have always had this marginal cost problem.

It doesn’t feel as wrong to steal software, as it does to steal a car. None of this would matter, except that software drives the culture. When they came up with new ways to do editing, new ways to do special effects, the movies we watched began to change. The Terminator – that guy with the silver skin –happened because someone made software that would enable it to happen. That changed our understanding of how the future might look. That changed the kind of cars that got made. That changed our expectations of what tomorrow would look like. Software changes not just the way our movies look, it changes the way that we tell a story. It changes the way we consume a story. It changes our attention span. That the Network Effect, at all costs, means that we’ve got clickbait. It means that people are hunting around for hours, every day, on their smartphones – a device that didn’t even exist when I sat down with that first Mac, that was on my desk.

Our attention span has been shifted, because software Engineers are in a hurry. And this lack of care about Architecture and user delight, combined with the overwhelming effect that networks have, means that we are victims of a cycle that has been driven by a hundred, or a thousand cutting-edge software Engineers, who are making decisions. Making decisions about whether to make something more beautiful, or more profitable. Making decisions about what tools we’re going to have, or not have – about how long we should spend on something, before we get to the next thing.

We began with software being ‘our’ tool – a tool to help us do ‘our’ work. But, over time, we have become ‘software’s tool’. That we exist to enable software to reach its goals. And its goals, are to turn ‘us’ into subscribers – networked, paying subscribers – who keep making more stuff that enables the network to thrive. It is entirely possible that hardware isn’t going to get much better.

That, back when I was making games for the Commodore 64, I saw a hard drive burst into flames, because our software was making it work too hard. And yet, just last week, Google updated Chrome, which caused the editing stations of hundreds of companies in California that were making cutting edge commercials and movies to stop working on their Macs – totally stop working, unable to reboot, to do anything. That’s 40 years later.

Software is a mess. Software is complicated. Software is driven by the Network Effect, and we are the victims of it. If we stand up, speak up, and argue that this thing that we are spending our entire day using ought to be better – if we establish standards, awards, heroes – maybe we’ll find another Andy Hertzfeld. Maybe we’ll find another Susan Cain. Maybe we will find another series of Architects and Designers, who will insist that software can be beautiful, that it can be powerful, that it can help people express the ideas they want to express – as opposed to being victims of a commercial system that doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

That’s my rant. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

I really do love hearing from you, and it’s okay if you want to ask a question that isn’t about this week’s episode. To ask your question, just visit Akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Oh hello, Seth – Aegis here from Toronto, Canada. You keep mentioning here and there, throughout your podcast, that we are in an ‘open marketplace’ moment in time. It seems that you are painting a future that we are inviting the gatekeepers back in the building. This is worrying and what are you referring to? Is that about net neutrality? What is it, are we inviting the gatekeepers back in the building?

Something dramatic has happened in the last 15 or 20 years, and it’s this: 100 years of gatekeepers, all right, 500 years of gatekeepers are being replaced by systems that are dramatically more open. If you wanted a business profile written about your company in 1974, while you could use Businessweek, Forbes, or Fortune – and that was pretty much it – now you can write your own. Now, you can be featured on more than five hundred, ten thousand, a million websites that could talk about you. In the 1980s, if you wanted to be on TV, there were three, maybe five people, who could put you on TV.

Now, you can put yourself on TV. One medium after another – sound, video, text – all of it wide open. But, my instinct is that, that can’t last. It can’t last, because over time people seek to consolidate, to lock in, to create monopolies and oligopolies. And we’re seeing it, for example, in what Netflix is trying to do in the business of television. Of course, Apple and Amazon are racing after them as hard as they can. But, this idea that there would be an open place where someone could make a thing and get paid to make it – well, already we’re getting boxed in.

We’re getting boxed in, as Podcasters consolidate – as people in the movie business consolidate. Because that is where the stock market wants them to go. Because they want to extract the maximum amount of revenue.

So, my argument begins with that, and then proceeds to the idea that there’s only a finite number of people – of voices – that a listener can follow. That permission is a self limiting function. Once you’ve got your problem mostly solved, you stop giving permission to new voices, to new options. And so, we have this wide open area, this land that’s being carved up. And I think if you seek a thousand true fans, if you seek to change the culture, waiting is not your friend. Diving into it now makes a lot more sense.

Hey Seth, this is Neil from Portland, Oregon. I am a huge Akimbo fan and anxiously await each new episode, each week. I feel like I’m a living, breathing embodiment of one of your core messages – which is, ‘If you do good work, people will follow it and they will share it with others’. I find myself talking with friends, family, and colleagues about your episodes and share each podcast episode with them.

Akimbo is a really interesting example, which brings up my question is, “How do you create content that is more shareable?” I was talking to someone about Slack in their business, and wanted to share an Akimbo episode with him, but found it very hard to search for that episode, so that I could send it to him. Thanks again for all the work that you do; looking forward to the next episode.

Yeah, shareability is one of the factors in how ideas spread, or how viruses spread. We know, for example, that the Measles has an R0 of up to 18 – one person with the Measles can infect up to 18 others – that’s why it’s such an impactful virus, as it spreads through our ecosystem. And the same thing happened on Twitter. Because Twitter is so bite-sized, so easy to share, people share it. And because people are sharing it, an idea can rocket through the Twittersphere in just minutes. Making your idea more shareable without giving up any other element of it, is generally a good idea. But too often, to make an idea shareable, we dumb it down and make it less sticky. And it turns out, that stickiness is even more important, if you want your idea to persist. So, back to the idea of the Measles. The thing is, that Hepatitis has an R0 of only 2 when it peaking – which means that far fewer people are infected by someone who has hepatitis, but it can stick with someone for the rest of their life. That stickiness means that it is a notable and important disease. Not because it spreads widely – it’s easy to share. But, because it sticks around. So part of what we need to do, is not just make our idea in a package that’s easy to say, “Hey look at this,” but also to have the guts to put ideas into the world that stick with people.

Hi Seth, this is Dan from Florida. The question essentially is, “Why is it so easy to help others edit their work, but then it’s so hard for us to edit our own”. If you have any advice, I’d love to hear it. Thanks, and have a great day. And thank you for all that you do.

I think there are three reasons why it might be difficult to edit your own work, compared to editing someone else’s work. Idea number one is: ‘Our context blindness’ that happens all the time. There will be a typo in a blog post of mine after I’ve read the sentence ten times. I still don’t see it, so fresh eyes get us through that problem. But, more important than that is, the idea that we don’t see things that are important, and others might. We might not see them because we’re afraid of them, and we might not see them simply because our point of view is different than theirs.

So, asking someone to look at something with fresh eyes, who is open to giving us that, sort of, generous insight – that’s precious. And then the third one is this: ‘We don’t like to be wrong’. We don’t like to be wrong, and editing our own work requires us to admit that we could have made it better. So, one of the things that it takes to be a good writer, a good creator, is willing to suspend your desire to be right and, instead, embrace an instinct to be better.

Hope that helps. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

==> -this-time- <==

This is not a podcast about leaf blowers, but we should start with leaf blowers. Leaf blowers that either evolved from Japanese Gardens from snow blowers or from a guy named Dom Quinto who took a device designed to spread chemicals around and took out the chemical. Part of it leaf blowers are a symptom of. A lot of things about changes in our culture.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about 77 decibels, the suburbs and change. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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We have a pay what you can membership model for diversity and inclusion. It’s like look us up Association for software testing dot-org.

Yes, leaf blowers are against the law in my wonderful little town between May and October and after October 15th. They’re sort of against the law. Because the typical leaf blower that’s run on gasoline, emits 77 decibels, or more of sound, which is a lot. Also, leaf blowers based on internal combustion engines, 30 minutes of using one will put out as many pollutants as driving a Ford F-150 pickup truck from, Texas to Alaska.

Also, they are a symbol of the suburbs because lots of people in the suburbs have yards and grass and trees. And lots of people in the suburbs hire, folks, to get rid of the leaves. And they pay those people by the hour and those people are incented to be more efficient. Hence, the leaf blower, but I wanted to talk about is why in the face of all of the problems that leaf blowers cause with noise.

And air pollution, why aren’t they all being replaced by battery? Powered leaf blowers, which make way less noise, and emit, far, less pollution. And so my building reached out to the gardener a month before he was scheduled to come and said look, you can’t keep using the gas powered leaf blowers. They’re noisy.

They pollute their against the law. Well, they showed up with the old kind and the buildings have what are you He said next time we’ll bring the right kind of leaf blower. Next time is what allows culture to stay the way it is. Next time is why General Motors and Ford lost the 80s and the 90s to the Japanese manufacturers. They came from nowhere and ended up with huge amounts of market share market. Sure that they maintain to this day because of the danger of next time.

When we are facing a situation where change is difficult or expensive or scary. We take a look at all the things that are on the table, right here, right now, right? This minute. And we realize that instituting change when we are this busy, this stressed, this underwater when there are so many promises that have been made instituting changes just too expensive and too difficult. We’ll do it next time.

You’ve heard me talk about the quality of American cars in the 1970s and 80s. And the reason for the problem is simple. It’s not because they didn’t know that the cars were pretty lousy. It’s because the assembly line ran Supreme the assembly line pioneered by Henry Ford assembly line. If you could make it go a little faster, your labor cost per car would go down. If you can make it go a little faster. Your productivity would go up. The assembly line was everything.

Everyone worked for the assembly line. What did they do in Japan? What they did in Japan was a series of steps that sometimes are called kanban, but involve many pieces all designed to lower the level of water in the river so that the rocks will be seen immediately. And if you were working on the assembly line of a Toyota plant, making a three thousand dollar card 1975 and the screw you had, you only had one school. One bolt handy and the assembly line brought forward the next car and you put that bolt in and it didn’t fit properly.

You must press the red button. You must Pull the Rope and that would stop the assembly line. Not the whole assembly line. But your section of the assembly line, something like that gets, you fired in Detroit. Something like that. Is the key in building quality in Japan in the ATS. Why? Because we’re not going to fix it.

Next time. We’re going to fix it this time. And this time is fraught. This time is more expensive. This time makes everyone pay attention, but when we decide to fix something this time, it gets fixed because we have determined that quality is more important than keeping the assembly line running. So in the case, The hapless Gardener for my building this time would have meant that he would have had a reschedule people that he would have had a figure out how to get his hands on leaf, blowers that ran on batteries that he would have had to give rakes to his people, but then he would have been through it. He would have been over it and every other job, every other client going forward would have all the tools they needed because he didn’t want to experience the hassle of this time. Again when we get our arms. Around this time.

We understand what it means to prepare and to prioritize there’s a term in cooking called mise en place and mise en place is what a competent Chef does. And what they do is, they prepare and cut and size and measure every one of the ingredients before they start firing up the new orders before they start putting together.

Word is they’re making mise en. Place has two benefits. First is its own reward. The act of doing mise-en-place, establishes for you that you’re a professional. The you’re the kind of person who plans ahead that you’re the kind of person that isn’t making situational compromises. And number two is it means that this time, it’s going to get done right there. When you’ve already fired things up, when the walk is hot, when two-thirds of the ingredients are in there.

And you realize You don’t have the leaks while you cut the leeks fast. You don’t cut the leeks. Well, because fast is something that we need to do right now or everything will burn. Next time, we’ll do it. Well, but with mise-en-place next time is this time, so as we look around in a culture that is filled with things that need to get fixed the long, long overdue focus on racial Injustice, the idea that we are putting everything. A so much carbon into the air that it is rising the temperature of everything around us, melting the ice caps and basically putting our planet at risk. There’s a lot of talk of next time of next administration, of next year, of next, budget of next cycle. And yes of Next Generation, but that means we’re not serious.

It means we’re not serious enough to do it this time. And so I know this is Is a short rant, but I wanted to just focus on those two words this time. If it’s important enough to fix. It’s important enough to fix this time. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with three questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hogs X is on the pump. Pricer warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They sent this is Rex. Hey, Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode or anything else, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button. Here we go. If I want to create something for people like us, how do I make sure that that thing is also inclusive?

Obviously, at first, I won’t have everybody in the world, banging down my door to be part of my thing. But I imagine at some point. I’ll start attracting people who maybe aren’t people like us and then I have to say no to How do I think about doing this in a way that’s generous to everybody, even though it’s not necessarily for everybody.

Thanks. Thank you for giving me a chance to clarify this. Again. It’s really important and easy to misunderstand. People Like Us, do things like this has nothing to do with demographics or things that are usually considered when we talk about inclusion. It’s not about how old you are or what? You look like it’s about who you decide to be who you choose to hang out with the change you seek to make when Miles Davis made kind of blue considered by many one of the great jazz records of all time.

A whole bunch of people didn’t like it. There are still people today. Dear friends, in mind who don’t like it. He couldn’t have made an album that everyone was going to like when someone bumps into kind of And they say I don’t like it. That doesn’t mean it’s not good. It just means it’s not for them and it doesn’t matter how popular the thing you’re working on. Is there are people who have given one star reviews to Harry Potter or Star Wars or billions or whatever you want to look at. It’s not for everyone in. Can’t be for everyone but we’ve been pushed to think we have to sand off all the edges.

Instead. My argument is Be inclusive, demographically, but when it comes to the voice that you are adopting the change, we seek to make, it’s totally fine to say. Sorry. It’s not for you. My question today has to do with your recent episode about The garden until finding the right person. I’ll be honest.

I had a horrible track record in hiring because I see potential in people people who if they would would make enormous contributions to the organization. However, from my experience. I ended up hiring a percent potential and 20 percent capacity. And what I ended up was with one employee for people in need. A constant supervision.

So how do you do the work between deciding? Who should be hired? Is a purely based on competence demonstrated before how much potential do you hire? Love to hear your thoughts? Thank you, sir. Have a great day. Thank you for this question. You know, I am no expert at this. I have had great success in finding people to work with but also frustrating moments.

And people who I had hoped would grow into an opportunity blinked when they looked at that opportunity. And a lot of that is on me, not just in who I have chosen to work with. But in the conditions that I created to give people the foundation and the confidence that they needed to go forward, but one thing that I found, which is so much easier today than it used to be is a variation on higher quickly, fire quickly. The idea of higher quickly fire quickly is We’re really bad at picking people.

So don’t worry about it. Just hire people. But then if folks can’t thrive in the place that you were able to provide them. Well, then have them move on. And the problem with higher quickly fire quickly is that firing is no fun and its really disruptive, not just your organization, but to the person who trusted you well the magic of the freelance world. Is it now you can have people We’ll do a project that instead of interviewing people to see if they’re good at interviewing. You can have people do a project to see if they’re good at doing a project. And after you’ve done one or two or three projects with someone, if you are both thriving in that relationship, the hiring is much less fraud because they’re going to do what you’ve already asked them to do. This, is a real shift from the industrial Cog mindset. What it says is you You have a work of product that you can create you have a way of being in the world. It works for both of us. Come do that here all the time and you should pay people for these projects that they are doing for you that part of the interviewing process probably could include here, two thousand dollars. I need you to do a day’s work for me. We’re going to do it together and we’re going to see how it goes.

Because in those moments, you’re no longer auditioning. You’re Doing the work. I worked for many years in it now. And what I notice is that the technical people who find important security issue. Sometimes have a hard time to get management to take it seriously and focus on those issues managers often say they find security important, but then it lacks priority.

I know the frustration and I’ve looked for creative ways to deal with this problem. A few years back. I gave presentation called how to sell Security in which I am, poor the audience to give impactful presentations. Explain how we can apply Robert cialdini’s book influence to nurture management and explain them something about change management, which I learned from the energy Pete’s books, which I’m also considering to create a YouTube view video about this as well.

As I’m not really a marketing person. I’m probably missing some good approaches. So you have a pretty creative way of looking at things. What kind of frustrated technical people do to a tech, the organization’s data better. I still remember, kid telling me a story. It was a short as could be the boy who cried wolf, but the villagers didn’t come.

That’s all you need to know. That’s the entire wolf, wolf story and one of the problems that organizations have with security flaws is not that their research. Jurors, and security. People are quite wolf. It’s that they don’t know where the wolf is that there are billion websites. And the number that have actually been hacked, is vanishingly small.

And so, the question is, what does your insurance policy look like? We read about a hospital that’s held hostage by ransomware, and it cost millions of dollars and threatened the lives of all of the patients. But most hospitals didn’t get threatened. And so if you’re the CEO or the board of a hospital and somebody says you can become ransomware proof for ten million dollars. Do you say yes, what if it’s a million dollars? What if 200,000 dollars this is the problem.

So the researchers, the security, folks, they’re doing their job. They are correct that there is a potential problem here. That’s not what’s being decided. It was being decided is what is our risk profile when it comes to this. And because we are all living on a frontier, a frontier that hasn’t been explored for decades or centuries. People have no idea what the right risk profile is.

And so generally, partly out of ignorance partly out of fear, partly, out of uncertainty. The budget is really low. Because once you start trying to make something Fully secure it costs more than you’re willing to pay. So I think the job of the leader who understands Security is to persuade that person’s bosses in peers, how to make Intelligent Decisions about, what are the high leveraged places. Where is the low-hanging fruit? How do you build resilience in from the start without having to deal with the real problem at an emotional?

Level of I promise you, we’re not going to get hacked because that’s like a doctor saying, I promise you you’re not going to get sick or a car designer saying, I promise you that you will survive every accident because a car that can survive, every accident has never been built and it wouldn’t be able to drive.

And so, getting literate and clear with the people you work with about risk. That doesn’t mean you’re welcome in every meeting people don’t like talking about risk. Ask, but as soon as we lean in to anything that’s changing in anything new risk is present, so it shouldn’t go unstated. I think it should be mentioned. It should be prioritized and it should be made. Clear.

I hope that helps. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around. World have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> 1361-opportunity-cost- <==

This podcast isn’t very long, but I hope you will find that it’s worth your time.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

First question: Who discovered America? Who discovered Australia? Well, you could say Christopher Columbus or James Cook, but you would be wrong. Because there were already people in both places by the time they got there. What those men did is reported back to the rest of Europe what they had seen, and once people had seen it, they couldn’t un-see it. Suddenly, those things were on the radar. So the question is, “Who discovered time?” Because time modern time – time informed by choices, by opportunity cost – is a really new idea. In 1974, Marshall Sahlins wrote a breakthrough book called Stone Age Economics. if you took someone from the stone age, from only 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, and adopted them as an infant, they would grow up to be indistinguishable from the people around us today. And yet, the world of the caveman – stone age economics – was really different than the world of today.

He estimates the people had to work two or three hours a day, to forage and find enough food to thrive on. So what did they do the rest of the time? Did they check their email? Did they build giant sculptures? Did they engage in never ending debates with each other? Well, we don’t know about the last one. But, we assert that they spent most of their time having a good day – lying around, chatting, napping, not doing much of anything else. Sort of the way you would expect some healthy lions or tigers to act in the bush. Then, things began to change.

Let’s fast forward a little bit to the late 1800s. In an extraordinary confluence of idea and success, H.G. Wells, the guy who did War of the Worlds, invented the time machine. Not only did he write the best-selling, most important time machine book of all time, but he invented the idea of the Time Machine. James Gleick wrote the definitive book on time travel, and in it he points out that Wells invented it – he discovered it. So, what happens with the time machine?

Well, they’re fictional of course, but you can get in your time machine and go back in time or forward in time. Suddenly, time is an axis – the same way left, right, up, and down are axes. Suddenly, we think a lot about how we are choosing to spend our time. Is it worth the energy spend our time? We spend our time like a resource. We use it like a tool, but that’s new. Opportunity Cost is the economic idea that every single time we spend time, we are making a choice about what to not spend it on.

There is a buffet in Coney Island that used to make some of the best Falafel in New York City, and as you went through the buffet line, the rule was simple – all you can eat, as long as it fits on your plate. So, the question is, “What are you going to put on your plate?” Because any item you put on your plate, is taking room from something else you could have put on your plate. There is an opportunity cost.

So, back to this idea of time travel. My favorite time travel book is called Replay, by Ken Grimwood. It is remarkable. And, in the book, he posits that, involuntarily, someone keeps getting thrown back in time to relive his life. When it first starts, I think he goes back to being 14, and he lives that life for 10 or 20 years, before he gets thrown back again – to do it again, each time a slightly shorter duration.

So his consciousness remains as if he is on one timeline, but he gets to relive his action. When you think about this, it’s really, sort of, disturbing. What would you change? Because if you changed something in your 15 year old self, or 19 year old self, maybe your kids wouldn’t end up being born. Maybe those key events of your life that you remember, would never happen.

And one of the things that goes on, which is common in any novel about immortality, is that people get bored. Once we know we have unlimited time, once we feel like opportunity cost starts to go down – “Oh, don’t worry about whether you watch The Sopranos tonight, you’ll get a chance to watch it tomorrow”.

We get bored. We are actually hooked on opportunity cost. We are emotionally hooked on constantly making this choice about how we will choose to spend our time. Qantas Airways just introduced a 19-hour flight, perhaps the longest flight you can take today. My first reaction was, “Well, you’re never going to get that day back”. You know what? You never get any day back. Because, as we go through time, we don’t get a do-over.

Another great book about time is a trilogy by Ben Winters called The Last Policeman. So, try to imagine this; there’s a huge asteroid headed for Earth. It’s going to crash within a year. It’s so big, we can’t do anything about it. Word leaks out, everyone has a year to live. What would you do?

Well, in the novel, some people go crazy. They leave their spouse, they hit the road, they participate in orgies, or they murder people – “What the hell, we’re only going to live another year”. Some people kill themselves – they can’t deal with the fact that the end is coming on a certain date. And some people, like the title character, go to work. Like the woman at the diner – they go to work. Because, after all, and that’s the metaphor, maybe you only have a year left anyway. So one of the key questions of our lives is, “Are we going to pass the time, or spend the time?” When we think about the huge contributions that Newton made to math and to the way we see physics, what would happen if he had spent way less time, ‘wasting time’ on Alchemy, and more time developing ‘the next thing’. What would have happened if Darwin hadn’t been so afraid, and hadn’t stalled for 10, or 20 years before he published his book? What would those contributions have been like, if he had been able to keep working on his big idea?

Marcel Duchamp, who I mention all too often – who was one of the great conceptual artists, and a thief – took 20 or 30 years off to play chess. Spend the time, pass the time, waste the time –opportunity cost keeps showing up. And, we can’t talk about time without talking about special relativity, without talking about Einstein, without talking about the twins paradox. Two identical twins are born, and when they turn 18, one of them gets in a really fast rocket ship and he heads off on a mission that, to him, lasts about two years. When he gets back, his twin brother is 30 years older.

So, who exactly is living their life – at what pace? Is getting more done, clearing more email, making more connections over and over again – as fast as we can – racing through the buffet line, again and again – is that the way we should be spending our time? What about the people who are binge watching videos on Netflix? They are clearly passing the time.

What do they get for all of the opportunities they passed up? And then, after all this racing – for eighty, or a hundred, or a hundred and twenty years, because we are not immortal – when we get to the end, is someone going to keep us alive against our wishes? Are we going to be forced to suffer for a year, when time feels like it takes 20 years? Because it seems like we’ve decided to spend tons and tons of effort, and money, and emotion, to change the way people, at the end of their time, engage with their time.

So, time is one of the only things that’s truly under our control. If you’re put in prison for 50 years, someone has taken away your freedom. But, they haven’t taken away the way you engage with your time. When we sit you in front of the internet with all of those things to click on, and when we persuade you to swipe right or swipe left, or dig deeper into the endless rabbit hole of social networking, we are giving you options – on how to spend your time, on what narrative we will bring to the time that we are spending, on how we look at opportunity costs.

So, if you had H.G. Wells’s time machine, if you are in Replay and were sent back a day – let’s just do a day – if you had yesterday to do over, what would you do differently? And then the last question, of course, is “You do have tomorrow to do over – how will you choose to spend it?”

Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

As always, I love to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to submit a question. To do so, visit Akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, this is Ryan from Salem, Oregon. I recently decided to take on a full time job for the first time in about 10 years. I’ve been self-employed for quite a long time before this. And, I still have a lot of creative projects, books, and a podcast that I really want to focus on. However, I haven’t had the emotional, mental and physical energy that I was hoping that I would have, from no longer needing to hustle and find new clients – because now I have this full-time job. So, I guess my question is, “Do you have any suggestions for how to carve out the necessary time to do the kinds of things that I want to do, while still juggling the bureaucracy and the nuances of working full-time job?” Thanks so much for what you do, I really appreciate it.

I love this question, because it applies to every single person who’s listening to this. Here’s what the late Zig Ziglar said, “Have you ever met somebody who didn’t eat lunch, who all afternoon is walking around and saying – ‘I can’t believe it, I was so busy. I didn’t even get to eat lunch today'”. That’s sort of rare among people who are listening to this podcast. Most of us, if we choose to eat lunch every single day – in fact, there are lots of things we do every single day.

The challenge is to do things that you want to do, by making them not optional – “I’ll get around to it, I’ll carve out the time,” but to make them on the inside of the circle, not the outside – to make them things that we always do. Esther Dyson, the great investor and pundit, has gone for a swim – at least a mile – every day, for as long as I have known her. And we met in 1983. How does Esther Dyson find the time?

Well, actually, what she does is, she always goes for a swim and then she finds the time for the other parts of what’s important to her. That if you put something inside of the circle, then you always do it. Jeffrey Katzenberg, every morning, makes between one, and one and a half hours of phone calls – one after another, working his way through a list of people he calls all the time. “Hey, what’s up? It’s Jeffrey. Okay, talk to you later” – every single day. Just like eating lunch. Just like Esther Dyson, going for a swim.

So, you only need to make the decision once. Isaac Asimov decided ‘once’ to write for six hours, every single day. You may have decided to take a job that has a staff meeting, every Friday at three o’clock. And so, there’s a staff meeting – not because you need a staff meeting, but because it’s Friday at 3 o’clock.

So, what I would argue is that, if you care about lifelong learning, you will spend an hour every single day reading something. And, no, you’re not allowed to shortcut it. You’re not allowed to put it off till tomorrow. It doesn’t matter what else is going on, this is something you do – every single day. The rest of your life is carved out of what’s left, not the other way around. If we can reimagine it that way, it’s pretty stunning how we can choose to invest our time.

Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

==> -the-modern-lemonade-stand- <==

Would you like to buy some lemonade? It’s that time of year. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about that icon of Youth entrepreneurship. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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The idea of the lemonade stand goes back, a really long way and it’s sort of this, my mom or dad puts in a little bit of resources and some effort. And then the kid sets up folding Bridge table out front selling lemonade by the glass and keeps the money. Now as it Evolved, first of all, it turned from real delicious, ice-cold lemonade.

To something that was made from a mix and didn’t taste very good. But that’s not really why you were buying it and then along the way. They’re great idea of turning a lemonade stand into free lemonade, but accepting tips, transformed. The marketing of lemonade stands and then leverage was added with sometimes kids hiring neighbor kids to man, The Stand, paying them a cut of what was collected and Rest. Well, they stayed inside and watch The Flintstones, but the thing about a lemonade stand is while it teaches kids a little bit about selling. It also teaches them a little bit about begging and it doesn’t really help you with the p&l. If Mom and Dad are giving you the stuff for free. So why do people buy the lemonade? They buy the lemonade because it’s cute because the kid has a location that intersects with the Journey to their home. What are they buying for 50 cents? Or even better when they leave a two dollar tip and the lemonade is free.

What they’re buying is the way it makes him feel to support a kid. All of this begins a rant that is in response to one of the best questions. We’ve received in 2021. Here we go. Hi sis, it’s Vista from New Zealand. I’m interested in starting a business that can grow and develop over time. My question is, how do you do that as an eleven-year-old at school in a way that could be scalable?

My teen bad ideas in a rejection pile, include a dog-walking franchise and a kids party planning website, but I want something unique and my parents want me to remain anonymous online. Thank you for considering my question. Thank you for this. It’s a great question. And I love the Proviso that you can’t become some sort of Internet celebrity, because while it’s true that that kid in Thailand has Millions and millions of dollars reviewing toys on YouTube.

It’s probably not going to be you. It’s probably not going to be any kid and the cost that a kid pays to turn themselves into some sort of uber cute. Internet celebrity is too high a price to pay. Now. I want to talk a little bit about the magic of beginning, a business, when you’re your age 11 or for those of our listeners. Runners, who missed that opportunity when they were 11.

Doing one. Now at 20 or 40 or 60 years old because it’s very special. It’s a certain kind of Freedom. The freedom to pick your customers because unlike someone who has a regular boss. The cost of picking new customers is pretty small. When you get to pick your customers, you get a special kind of freedom and a special kind of obligation that comes with that freedom.

Because when you pick your You have to live with the repercussions of what you picked. Now, if your kid or an adult, starting one of these businesses, which I will Define in some ways, as a bootstrap business, a business that you didn’t have to spend a lot of money to get started. We begin with how much do you need to make doing this? Do you need to make enough to learn something, or do you need to make enough to earn something for? To be worth the journey.

Once you know how much you need to make, then we can do some simple math, about how many customers do you need? Because if you’re a kid with a free lemonade stand 10, customers each giving you a two dollar tip, even an Australian or New Zealand money. That’s plenty. That’s a good two hours work. Congratulations. You learned a lot of lessons on the other hand, too often Because the Internet makes it look easy.

Lots of people and Included say I’m just going to get a million people to give me two dollars. Each ER, four dollars each and I’ll be fine and the two problems are the million and the two or four because you’re not going to get a million people. And even if you do get a million people, they’re not going to give you two dollars that the Trap of Internet Fame.

Is that almost all of it is people just driving by noticing you, but they’re not your customers. They’re not there. For you. And therefore, you can’t be there for them. This pyramid of how do I put an enormous amount of attention in? Say the bottom of the pyramid or the top of the funnel and then out the bottom, get something that feels like a business that might be the first mistake.

The alternative is to seek out the smallest viable audience to figure out who exactly needs what you’re going to do and needs it so much that they will happily pay for it. And you, Do that without becoming famous on the internet. So, a simple example, from a Freelancers point of view. There’s an organization called the editorial Freelancers Association. You can find them by searching for them. In your favorite search engine.

They have a job board. It’s free. If you sign up for it, every single person who’s looking for an editor, a copy editor, a freelance writer, they put that in and boom. It shows up in your mailbox, and if you Want to bid or just take one of these jobs. There it is right in front of you. So there’s an example of picking your customers. I want somebody who’s editing a book and boom, you have work to do work without a boss.

The challenge with freelancing. Of course, is it. You’re at the bottom of the ladder that it takes a long time to move yourself up to ladder. If your motto is, you can pick anyone and anyone. So the challenge in front of the young bootstrapper. Tripping or lemonade stand owner is how not to start at the Bottom. Rung. It turns out, one way to do that is to really specifically pick your customers to do something that almost no one else. Does another way to do it is to do something that doesn’t really work with a lemonade stand.

But works beautifully on the internet and that is connecting people because connection is the new industrial entity if industrialism figuring out how to make stuff at scale for Large numbers of people was what happened before several Generations ago. The future is about connection, because connection, creating Community, that’s really hard to turn into a commodity.

If you can figure out how to create Community for the people who need Community created. Magical things can happen. If you for example could build a worldwide co-working space. Just for 12 people, 12 people who have a lot in common 12. People who need to know each other 12, people who are looking for a zoom room where they can sit for a couple hours a day and not be lonely while there. I don’t know, typing, their novel that room, if you could create that room for them By Invitation Only, Plenty of those people would pay fifty or a hundred dollars a month to be in that room and your job would be to curate the room.

Your job would be to secure the room and suddenly that’s a lot of lemonade. So as we think about, what does it mean to even start a project today? I think it’s about Community. Maybe it’s all the babysitters in your ZIP code or postal code. Maybe they need a private Facebook group where they can collaborate with each other, where they Can work with each other to figure out, which are the good parents, who pay. Well, and treat them with respect and which are the ones that need to be avoided maybe as you start to build these communities, you don’t charge for it at first because you’re not good yet at building vibrant communities, but it also doesn’t cost you anything.

You don’t have to go out and buy Country Time. Lemonade and paper cups. What you can do instead is find a platform one, where you are comfortable, doesn’t have to be Facebook. You could do it in discourse. You could do it in Discord. You could do it in a private slack room. You could do it in a shared Google doc. Yes, indeed, that there are countless ways that you can create this place where people want to come and they don’t have to know that you’re 11 years old because they’re not walking up to the folding Bridge table in front of your house.

What they’re doing instead is seeing each other. So who invites them. How big does the group have to? Does the group benefit by knowing one another? And to wrap this up a story, you may have heard me tell it before, but I can’t get it out of my head years ago. AOL was my company’s biggest client. This was before the World Wide Web.

We were making stuff for AOL and CompuServe and the other online services and AOL had a big conference in. They invited all of the companies that were making products and content for AOL to a Convention Center. ER in Virginia to hang out for two days to hear from Ted leonsis and Steve case about what the future would bring and soon after I got there, a note was slipped under the door of my hotel room. A note from a guy named Tom and Tom said, come to our suite tonight at 8:00 were inviting 15 of the other big companies that Supply AOL.

And when I got there, in fact, there were In other companies and what we did for an hour and a half, in addition to getting to know one. Another is, we compared our contracts. We all learned which exceptions we got when we negotiated who had the best deal on this and who had the best deal on that and by collaborating with one another by banding together, all of us got a better deal the next time we negotiated. How much was that room worth?

I think it was. Priceless, so no. It doesn’t matter whether you get two dollars for inviting someone into one of these communities, what matters, whether you’re organising, teenagers or kids, or adults, whether you’re organising, authors, or people who are in the paint industry. What matters is that you are learning to use the medium in front of you to do what the medium is good at.

In fact, they named it twice inter Network. It is a network of Networks. And learning to be good at that and doing it with confidence. That sounds like a great lemonade stand to me. Thanks for your question. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what You’re interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth this is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here hugs and kisses on the pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link.

Take Ai and bi o .l iink and click the appropriate button. There are show notes there as well. Two good questions this week. The reach a little bit long but worth it. Here we go.

Hi. Seth, Justin from Pittsburgh here on the episode about Clubhouse. You talked about the question of who really owns your audience, and I’d like to ask a question about Kindle unlimited, which is a place where a lot of my author friends have found success launching careers from scratch. Kindle unlimited is basically Netflix for e-books and I found that it solves a problem that a lot of new Authors have namely that not a lot of people are willing to pay five dollars or even one dollar to read a book from an author that they’ve Never heard of, on the other hand, plenty of people are willing to read a book for free with their Kindle unlimited subscription, except. It’s not really free. They’re paying $10 a month for the subscription and the author gets a few dimes out of that.

In fact, sometimes authors will actually make more money from Kindle unlimited reader than if the same person had bought the book for 99 cents. The KU program is something that has helped a lot of authors break into the industry. Especially those that have been plugging away for years, trying to break in through more traditional methods and finding no success.

But I’ve also seen it the other way. Specifically, I have one friend who had a disappointing experience that she launched a career on Kindle unlimited and was making a full-time living and off the strength of that audience. She was able to sell a book to a traditional publisher. She got a hardcover book and stores the whole nine yards, unfortunately. And her publisher discovered that the same readers who were willing to read her books for free on. KU. We’re not the same kind of people who want to spend 10 or 20 dollars for a hardcover book.

Which by the way, she sees just a small fraction of something that I’m sure you’re familiar with from your time in the publishing industry. My question is how we should approach platforms, like, Kindle unlimited because on one hand, authors are getting paid real money. In some cases, thousands of Hours a month. And in some cases, the bulk of their income money that they wouldn’t have been able to make in traditional publishing.

But on the other hand, it feels like authors don’t really own Their audience, in the sense that the readers are more loyal to Kindle unlimited and will balk at the idea of paying money for the book. I appreciate your Insight. Thank you for this one. And we could talk about this all day, but I will try to be as cogent and concise as I can.

The real question with things like Spotify Pandora, Netflix and Kindle, unlimited is who benefits? Well, the culture as a whole probably benefits, particularly in the short run. If more people can engage with more useful content or delightful content for less money over time. But what it does is it destroys the industry that used to be On top of that form of media. It destroys it as we know it because those industries were generally based on scarcity.

If there’s only a finite number of movie theaters and each movie theater, can only play a finite number of movies, then a movie studio that has influence over, what the theaters book is more likely to get it movies shown for longer which gives them more money to Build a certain kind of movie that, that’s where record labels come from. That’s where book publishers. Come from book, publishing for the last. At least, 50 years has been primarily about pleasing the bookstore. Not the reader. Why? Because if there are scarce shelf space, then the book publisher that has more shelf space in the bookstore will sell more books Amazon. Was a disruptor to the very idea of the bookstore, but then when we overlay that with the Kindle, which takes away the scarcity that comes from paper.

That’s the first step to books. Getting very, very inexpensive and classic microeconomics helps us, understand that if something gets very inexpensive. It is likely to become more popular. So, if you’re the kind of person that likes literacy and books as A cultural artifact, then the Kindle is a good thing even if it gives nightmares to people in the publishing industry, who used to have a scarce thing access to bookstores, but now self-published authors are at the same place as giant book publishing houses.

You can’t influence Amazon to get on the Kindle. Everybody is on the Kindle and then we go one step further with Kindle unlimited, pay ten bucks or so. Month and you can get all the books you want. So this is good if you believe in books, but what if you’re an author? Well, if you’re an author, there’s a challenge here because now you are one on a long tail.

The long tail as Chris Anderson wrote, is the place where there is easy access? Easy in Easy Out. Anyone can play that when we look at the stats, the last time I saw them from him for the Apple Store the app. The average song in the iTunes Store had sold one copy that on average. Most of the long tail is selling none. It’s so far out there, people don’t know about it.

And my hunch with Kindle unlimited is that if we did the math, the typical author isn’t making thousands of dollars to typical author is making dollars, not even tens or hundreds of dollars because if anyone can write a book than anyone will write a book and we can get Books. You want for free? Yes, there needs to be a short head for there to be a long tail. Yes. There are going to be some hits. Yes.

They’re going to be some authors that do. Okay, but it’s rare, indeed for a Kindle book, to become a cultural phenomenon that everyone flocks to last one. I can think of was Fifty Shades. And that was a long time ago, which means that the hits aren’t ginormous that the hits aren’t big enough to make up for the long tail. If your goal is to maximize your income, so your friend who got the publishing contract, did something that was smart for her pocketbook, which is she moved from the place of abundance to place of scarcity saying to the world. If you want my book, you’re going to have to pay for it. Really pay for it and she got an advance but the book publisher, the book publisher should have known better in that. A, it’s hard to get someone to move from. I got all. Music ever wanted from Pandora. Now. I’m going to go buy a record to move from. I got all the movies I ever wanted to watch on Netflix. Now. I’m going to go to the theater and to move from.

I got all the books from unknown authors. I want for $10. Why should I go by quote a real book? Especially if you have, no way to reach these people and Amazon has made. I think a very significant error by not giving authors. A chance to build the direct permission based connection with their readers.

And so if you are an author and your only goal is to be read, well, then I think it makes perfect sense to show up a Kindle unlimited to hone your craft. It’s not clear to me. That that’s the way to be the most read the way to be the most read is to write a book. A book based on scarcity. Scarce shelf, space, scares paper scarce. I only have a bicycle. Jay for a few books, this month and somehow write that book in a way that causes it to spread, but that’s a hard thing for most authors to do.

So that’s a little bit of a discourse on how all of these pieces fit together. And I guess what I’m getting at is when Russ and the rest of the people at Amazon cooked up Kindle unlimited, they didn’t say, will this be good for the author’s they said, will this be good for the Kindle. Hi Seth. This is Steve from Indianapolis.

Listening to your most recent episode in search of the worst. CEO reminded me. I’ve been a freelance project manager most of my career CEO of one. And I’ve now joined a firm and taking the role of managing director of a management consultancy in Pharma and medical devices. And we believe in the power of extraordinary people working together to create Blasting, an important change, but what got me here won’t get this company where it seeks to go.

So my question is, how do I learn about the finances, the sales and marketing, the HR and all the other General management stuff that comes with going from being a CEO of just myself to being the managing director of this company. What’s your take on? How to efficiently and effectively retool essentially mid-career?

So that I can have those tools. I need to help us get where we’re going. Thank you for this one. Steve. It’s a great question. That gets rarely asked and there are two parts to it. The first part you didn’t really say in the second part. You did the second part is where do I go to learn these techniques because they don’t even teach them in most Business Schools. The techniques of actual management, but the first part the first part is really the challenge and it’s this Good news is you already did it deciding deciding that you need to manage as opposed to just do what’s always been done or deal with the incoming or give people orders. No, to actually find leverage through management and deciding is something that I rarely see people do they get promoted and they just do the next job, but they don’t think about the fact that the next job might be. Be the work of providing a foundation for people to do their work that what management is about, is understanding the pnl making strategic decisions and mostly creating an entity that can scale in whichever direction, you’ve decided to take it.

So, how to get better at that. Well, high output management by Andy Grove is one of the classics in the field. It might not be the style that you want to adopt. But it’s insight into what it is to manage on purpose. The book, The e-myth Revisited, I disagree with some of the things that are in the book, but the e-myth Revisited, once again, helps us realize that our job at a smallish company is not to work in the business. It’s to work on the business to build structure that if you read some of the letters that Warren Buffett has written over the years.

If you look, At a how he and Charlie have built this giant entity based on the idea of management. And then last book managing humans. Again. It’s about a deliberate intentional approach to managing because that’s your job to figuring out how to bring strategy to the table. If you want to go one step higher, when we think about management is Michael Porter’s books on strategy.

They might be Little to scholarly for the typical listener or reader, but I wanted you to know that Porter’s ideas are out there as well. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around. The world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> 1362-the-great-pretender- <==

About 25 years ago in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McArthur Wheeler came up with a plan. He knew a lot about secret messages and he realized that if you used lemon juice to write a note, you could make invisible ink that could only be seen if you heated it up. So he realized, if he put lemon juice all over his face, he would become invisible.

He was very careful. He checked himself by taking a picture of himself with a Polaroid. The picture came up blank, so off he went. He robbed not one, but two banks that day, and was astonished and upset to discover that he wasn’t in fact invisible.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

Ironically, there are no photos of McArthur Wheeler on my show notes page, but there are plenty of links you might want to check out. McArthur Wheeler, who then went to jail, of course, suffered from what’s called the Dunning-Kruger Effect – which is a syndrome in which people who know the least, often act like they know the most. It’s easy to laugh at his plight. Of course, in case you were wondering, lemon juice doesn’t make you invisible – I am now an expert on this topic. However, there’s some part of us that wants to believe, that wants to be afraid, that wants to be sure, that if we get a little bit too uppity, we too will go to jail for doing something really stupid.

Consider the case of a friend of the family. He acted all through high school. He was really good at it. He got to college and applied for the improv troupe. The improv troupe had 11 slots in it, open for new students who wanted to apply. He didn’t make the cut, he came in 12th. He was heartbroken.

When he told me about this, I said what I thought was obvious. Why don’t you start your own improv troupe? Well, not only hadn’t this occurred to him, he rejected it out of hand. The irony is not lost on me. Improv, of course, is about making it up as you go along. Improv is about being an impresario – somebody who’s willing to go first. Not to say “no” but to say “yes, and”. However, it’s difficult in this culture and many of the cultures that came before, to raise our hands, to go first, to organize.

Part of the problem is called Imposter Syndrome. Clance and Ives wrote the definitive breakthrough paper on Impostor Syndrome in 1978. And in it, they described the feeling that people get, often women, but all people get, when they feel like an impostor. When they are leaning too far out of the boat, when they are saying that they are about to do something and, deep down, realize that they are a fraud. Well, Social Psychologists got their hands on this, and so there are scales of how much of an imposter you actually feel like. The Harvey Scale is one, the Clance Scale is another. And deep down, we all know what those feelings are. People come to me and they talk about feeling the Imposter Syndrome, hoping that I – someone who roots often for picking oneself, for going first, for opening the door, for leading – will reassure them and help them get through this feeling. And sometimes, people are surprised at my suggestion. And my suggestion is, “Of course, you’re an imposter”.

Of course you’re an imposter, because you are describing a future that hasn’t happened yet. Because you are arguing for something that cannot be proven to be true, yet. This is what it means to pick yourself. So of course you’re an imposter, and it’s good that you feel like one. Because if you didn’t, you’d be some sort of sociopath. That as an imposter, you are acting generously, acting as if going to people before it actually works out to say, “What about this? Let’s try that”.

And so then, on to this idea of the dissolution of the TV industrial complex. If you got a book deal in 1995, when Wheeler was busy robbing banks covered with lemon juice, well then, of course, you weren’t an imposter. Because Adrian Zackheim, or Sonny Mehta picked you. They authorized you. They said, “You need to write a book, here is an advance. We have people standing by, just waiting for you to hand in your book”. Now, you might feel a little uncomfortable, but you certainly don’t feel like a full-out imposter, because someone picked you. But, when you want to write a book on the Kindle, Jeff Bezos does not come to your house and hand you a check – you pick yourself.

If you want to make a TV show, yes, maybe you need Ted Sarandos at Netflix to say, “Oh, I’ve seen your pilot. I’ve looked at your credentials. I’ve met your agent from that fancy agency. Here is a pile of money, your TV show is going to be on Netflix”. Or, because it’s 2019 or 2020, you can make your own TV show, and you can put it on Vimeo, you can put it on YouTube and no one can stop you.

You are listening to a podcast right now, a completely unauthorized podcast, coming to you – unfiltered from me to you. No one approved of its contents before you are hearing it. And the cost for you to make a podcast, compared to what it would have cost you to be on the radio next to Casey Kasem on the Westwood One Radio Network in 1995, when Wheeler was busy robbing all of those banks, you would have needed the FCC to approve what you were saying.

You would have needed an executive at Westwood One to pick you. You would have needed an entire studio of people to help. But today, if you want to make a podcast, you can make a podcast. And so here we go – if you want to do improv, you can do improv. If you want to make TV, you can make TV. Radio, radio. Books, books. Almost all the media we can imagine – the gatekeepers are leaving the building, and yet few people are raising their hand.

I’ve spoken a couple times at Carnegie Hall to Juilliard students. The Juilliard students I’m talking to have spent 15 years honing their craft. They are some of the best trombone, oboe, bassoon, and flute players the world has ever known. And they are waiting – after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and who knows how many hours practicing – they are waiting for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to choose them, to pick them, to give them a permit. To tell them that they are not delusional, that the Dunning-Kruger Effect does not apply to them, because they are at the other end of the curve. They know a lot. They don’t know nothing. And because they know a lot, they are hesitating.

This leads us back 2,500 years ago to Herodotus. Herodotus was a historian of the Ancient Greeks, and he wrote a parable about a messenger that was sent from a nearby city state to talk to Thrasybulus. And the question that they wanted to ask is, “Do you have any advice as to how we should rule? Do you have any advice as to what we should do next?” Well, The messenger reported back to the King. He got no advice whatsoever. The King pressed, well, what did he do?

And the messenger said, “We walked through a wheat field, and as we walked through the wheat field, Thrasybulus took his thresher and chopped off the top of every one of the tallest wheat stalks. The most valuable, most productive wheat stalks – he’d cut them off at the top. And then, he left without a word. Well Periander, the King, realized what the message was.

The message was – cut down your tall poppies. Find the people in your community who are leading, who are innovating, who are doing more and asking for more, and expel them. Execute them. Shun them, shame them. Average down. Since then, countries around the world have claimed ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome,’ probably more accurately called ‘Tall Wheat Syndrome,” as their own. Australians come to me and say, “Well, in our country” and Britts come to me and say, “Well, in our country” and yes, here in the United States as well. This fear that the tall poppies once seen will be cut down, holds us back.

Why is it so sticky? How has it persisted? I want to argue the opposite of what Max Weber said. Weber said that it might be a zero sum game. That people may believe that there isn’t an infinite amount of status and respect to go around. That innovation could get used up. And so, the masses and the rulers could see those tall poppies as a threat, because they are taking their spot in the hierarchy – their creativity, their innovation, their contribution from other people. Better to average it all down.

But maybe it’s sticky, because we want it to be sticky. Because it’s scary to raise your hand, regardless of whether or not there’s Tall Wheat Syndrome going on in your community. It’s scary to say, “Here, I made this”. Scary to say, “I’m starting this troupe. Here is my podcast. Here we go, I made this”. Of course, it’s scary because you’re an impostor. And sooner or later, a critic who’s never had a statue built to him, or her, will say, “Hey, you’re an imposter, you’re a fraud”. And they’ll be right, if we complete the sentence, for now. Because it’s unproven, because you can’t be sure.

Well, if we can put our arms around Imposter Syndrome and realize it is a compass, it is a way of feeling when we know that we’re using generosity to make things better. Because we are acting ‘as if’. Because we are ‘seeking’ to make things better, by making better things. Then we can get over that noise in our head.

We can organize a string quartet with our fellow students and play in the subway, if we have to – without a permit, without a license – simply because we can. So when I say, “Go make a Ruckus,” that’s my point. What it means to make a Ruckus is to generously act, despite your status as an imposter. Despite what some people might think of as the zero-sum game of making a difference, and despite your brush with the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The thing is, when we have an open marketplace, as we do now, but maybe not for long, where people who have something to say can say it, who want to create something can create it. In this moment, we have no choice but to not waste it. We must take take advantage of our chance to connect with others, to lead others, to level up, to establish a new standard for what better might be.

That’s my rant. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a minute with an answer to a question from last time.

I love hearing from you. Thank you for taking the time. If you’ve got a question about this week’s episode or anything from the past hundred plus episodes, please visit Akimbo dot Link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. While you’re there, go ahead and check out the Show Notes.

Hey Seth, this is Josh from Wilmington Delaware. I work for a nonprofit doing something completely new, and crazy innovative to protect children from sexual abuse. I listened to your most recent podcast and it confirmed for me that we need to radically shift how we think about finding funding sources for this program. For the last year or so, we’ve been applying for Grants from these large institutional funders and getting rejected because, one we don’t have hard data on the impact of the program – it’s still relatively new. And two, there aren’t a lot of folks out there who fund sexual abuse prevention programming.

I’ve long thought the better way to get our first million dollar gift, is through major donors, through individual givers. Especially folks who built platforms that predators use to find, groom, and ultimately abuse children.

I looked at the list of people who’ve signed the Giving Pledge, and there are a couple of folks, I think who would make sense to approach for one reason or another. My question for you is this, “Assuming I get a meeting with someone on the list – Mayor Bloomberg, Melinda Gates, say. Short of playing for them your latest podcast, what can I say to get them past the fact that no one has ever done this type of work before?”

I guess, what I’m asking is, “How do I get them to invest in the idea, before the outcome?” With the outcome maybe not even being totally determined yet.

First, thank you for the work you are doing. It matters so much. And I know how frustrating it is to be seen for the work you’re doing, and to cut through so much of the bureaucracy. While, well-meaning, that gets in the way of doing innovative nonprofit work. That said, this is a perfect question, not just for last week’s episode, but for so many of the things we’ve been talking about. It affects not just non-profits, but anybody who is bringing an idea forward.

Here’s the thing, of the hundreds of people on the Giving Pledge list, many of them – most, according to Rogers Diffusion of Innovations Chart – want to do something proven. They want to do something in the middle of the road. They want to do something that other people are doing. That comes with deniability. That’s easy to explain.

This helps us understand why the largest charities, stay the largest charities. It’s not because they’re the most effective, it might be exactly the opposite. Back when I was selling ads, at the dawn of the internet age, we had a product. We helped invent online email marketing that worked better. We could prove it worked better than just about any other form of marketing.

And people would ask what our ROI was. And we would say, “Well, what’s the ROI of the TV ads you’re currently buying?” Well, they didn’t know – they couldn’t know. But they didn’t need to know, because the TV ads – the ones they were spending the bulk of their budget on – were being purchased because their bosses had purchased them 20 years ago. And doing what their boss had done before them was safe. So, what we had to do – what you have to do – is offer two other things.

The first one is Status. It isn’t for everyone, but it might be for someone as brave as you. Not everyone will be supporting what we’re doing, but you might be one of the people who can support it. Back in the early days of Acumen, a non-profit I’ve worked with for more than a decade – “What does Acumen do?” was the question. And the answer – the answer was, “It’s complicated”.

Now some people hear, ‘It’s complicated’ and run away. And some people hear, ‘It’s complicated’ and say “Tell me more”. Because there are smart people who want to do smart philanthropy, with a smart non-profit that’s solving problems in a smart way. Which means it’s going to be complicated.

The second thing to understand, is that there are some people, back to Rogers again, who want to do something because it’s new, not because it’s proven. To say, “Here’s the new record – want to listen to a copy, want to buy a copy?” Some people say, “No, no. Please play me The Doobie Brothers Greatest Hits, instead”. While others will say, “Yeah, if it’s new, I want it”. Because the thrill of doing the thing that’s new, is why they’re doing it in the first place.

So you are actually in a great position, because you can go to most people – high net worth individuals in large foundations and say, “If you’re looking for proven, traditional, middle-of-the-road philanthropy, we can give you a list of other people who do that. But if you’re looking for something that’s new, something that’s unproven and daring, something that’s important, something that only a few philanthropists care enough to put their name on. That are brave enough to put their name on – well, that’s us”.

Bring what you make to the people who want it, and shun the non-believers. Good luck with this work, and thank you to everybody for listening. Go make your Ruckus.

==> 1363-bill-gates-has-a-problem- <==

Bill Gates has a problem, a big problem – billions of problems.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

So what’s his problem? His problem is that he did something brave, and generous, and powerful in 2010, about nine years ago. He and Warren Buffett, at the time, the two richest men in the world, invented the Giving Pledge. And the idea is that if you have more than a hundred million dollars, you can join their exclusive club. And what the club says, is that every member pledges to give at least half of their net worth away to charity now, before they die, or in their Will. When they began, they had about a dozen members. Quickly, it grew to 40. Now, it’s more than 150, with most of them being billionaires.

This is great news. It’s great news, because it means that talented, leveraged people are playing a second game – a game that’s about weaving our culture and leading there – helping those in need, instead of only seeking to make one metric go up.

So, what’s the problem? The problem is that Bill Gates has more money now than when he started this project. That, as much good as the Gates Foundation has done, as much money as as he has given away, billionaires make money from their billions and he has more money now than when he started.

In fact, if we look at the charitable spending of the men and women who have signed up for the Giving Pledge, we see that they are almost all falling behind. They are falling behind because, on average, they’re giving 1.2% away, while the money that they have in their assets is earning 8, 9, or 10% a year.

So at that rate, it will take Infinity years before they have given away half of their net worth. The Gap gets bigger year after year. The collected group of billionaires as, measured by Bridgespan, has given away about forty five billion dollars a year. You can see all the stats from some fascinating reports on the show notes at Akimbo dot link.

The problem is that, unless they get close to 90 or 200 billion dollars a year given away, they’re going to keep falling behind. So, what’s the problem – why don’t we just wait till they’re dead? Well, for a few reasons. First of all, when they’re dead, we’re not sure where that money is going to go. And second, the Earth has problems now and many of the problems are compounding, which means that solving them yesterday is significantly cheaper and easier than solving them tomorrow.

So how do we explain this lack of giving? Because the people who aren’t giving have signed up publicly to give. The people who aren’t giving – they’re not the selfish ones who are hiding in the corner. These are people who raise their hands, put down their names – you can see them in the Wikipedia article – and have agreed to make this commitment.

Well if you ask them, some of their complaints will be things like, ‘Lack of Rigor’ in the nonprofit space – things are hard to measure. ‘Time frames’ – it’s very difficult to know what to invest in, because it might take five, ten, or 50 years before you discover if the intervention is working. A ‘Fear of Side Effects’ – that, maybe, putting money into the problem will actually make the problem worse. The list goes on, and on.

Here’s the thing, over the last few years, more than six billionaire’s have put more than a hundred million dollars each into college sports. Hundreds of millions of dollars to support a college football team. Nothing near that for River Blindness. Nothing near that for Mental Health care, for people who are homeless. Nothing near that for fixing School Systems that desperately need help.

So yes, we have a disconnect here. And in the Bridgespan report, in Callahan’s review of what to do about it, we see some interesting ideas. Perhaps, they say, there should be a fund of funds. So everyone, instead of starting their own Foundation, can lump their money together – committed to a group Foundation that might have more leverage.

Or, perhaps, we need better data reporting. Perhaps nonprofits need to work a lot more like corporations. Maybe we need a better way to measure a win? And I agree that effectiveness ought to be increasedSasha Dichter and measurement ought to get better. These things matter a great deal. Sasha Dichter’s doing great work on this with lean data.

But here’s the thing, when I look at the list of the top donations via the Chronicle of Philanthropy, year after year, after year, the question is, “Where do the 50 million dollar gifts go?”. That when a billionaire gives away a chunk of money, where does he or she send it?

First, a small aside. A billionaire – what’s a billionaire? While I want you to imagine a millionaire – a millionaire is imaginable. A millionaire is somebody who probably needs to work, but not a lot. A millionaire is somebody who owns a house outright, who can fly where they need to fly, when they need to fly there. Now imagine one thousand millionaires – that’s a billionaire.

And if you’re talking about somebody like Elon Musk, or Mike Bloomberg, Mike has 55 billion dollars, according to the 2017 numbers – probably more now. That’s fifty five thousand millionaires in one house. So that’s a billionaire. When we look at the list of where their biggest donations go, over and over again, year after year, they go to colleges and hospitals.

There is not a lot of discussion about the cost effectiveness of hospitals. That if you compare a hospital in the US, in New York, to Aravind – the Eye Hospital I talked about a bunch of episodes ago – there’s no comparison. That you can get fine quality cataract surgery at Aravind for a hundred and fifty bucks, if you pay for the private room, whereas you’ll pay ten or a hundred times that, for a similar intervention in New York.

So, we’re not given money to hospitals because they’re the most efficient or transparent. And famous colleges? Well, Malcolm Gladwell has famously pointed out again and again, that Princeton has enough money to do anything it wants for a very long time. Harvard could have every single student go to Harvard for free for a hundred years.

So why give your money to these institutions? The answer is really simple. Because you get a building. Because there is scarcity. Because scarcity leads to status. And what we heard in one of the very first episodes of Akimbo, was a rant about status roles – Truman hates Baxter, and vice versa. Which dog is up, and which dog is down? Status.

A lot of this was created by Forbes Magazine years ago. The Billionaires didn’t know who the other Millionaires were. There weren’t very many of them, and perhaps you bumped into them at a party. But Forbes started the list, and famously people lied to get on the list. Famously, people hid to get off the list. But the list did something magical. What the list did was, for people who were keeping track of a number, it created a published list of the number. And if you are only measuring one thing – because they weren’t measuring health or happiness, or impact – just one thing, then having a way to keep score of that one thing became something that drove folks to make that number go up. And once you’re on the hook to make the number go up, making the number go up feels like a good game to play tomorrow. Lots of prizes, lots of applause for making number go up.

So, I am super excited and proud of Warren and Bill for coming up with the Giving Pledge because, what it did was, it added a second number – Are you on the list or not? Status accrues to people who cared enough to put their name on the list. It’s a very special club. In Billions, the TV show, when Axe wanted to buy an NFL team, he reached out to get on the list to show that he was a good person. Status roles, competitiveness, scarcity – who’s better than who? And then we come face-to-face with the problem, which is you’re not really sure what you’re buying when you start to invest your money in philanthropy.

If you want to build a company to send a rocket to Mars, you can make progress every day. And when you get to Mars, you got to Mars and everyone knows you got to Mars. On the other hand, if you commit to getting plastic out of the ocean, you’re not going to get all the plastic out of the ocean. It’s not going to happen. It’s a hard one.

Nick Hanauer has spearheaded the work to get the minimum wage raised to $15. His organization won a big win in Washington state. Now, the working people of Washington State have a floor – they make $15 an hour minimum. He can own a contribution to that cause, and it cost him a lot of time and money. It’s possible to do that with something like Polio, which The Gates Foundation is getting closer and closer to eradicating.

It’s not clear we can do it for homelessness. It’s not clear we can do it for River Blindness, or Atmosphere Cancer – the warming of the earth. So the question is, “What arer we selling, when we’re selling philanthropy?”. It’s one thing to say to a Human Being, face-to-face, “Didn’t you see that person, face down in the puddle, when you walked by? They’re going to drown unless you save them”.

In that situation, everyone except a sociopath is going to wade into the water and save that person’s life. But as Peter Singer has pointed out, if I can tell you with certainty that four hundred dollars will save the life of someone just like that, who’s not sitting right in front of you, it’s a harder sell. In a recent blog post on Slate Star Codex, our host, Scott, points out that in a typical election – in the United States of America, in total, counting direct contributions, soft money, advertising, and the like – Americans spend less on politics, than they spend buying almonds. I’m assuming he’s counting almond milk, but still, less than we spend on almonds. How do we justify that? How does that make sense?

Well, the simplest answer is this, “When you spend two dollars on almonds, you get $2 worth of almonds”. But when you spend $2 throwing some money to your favorite candidate, it’s not clear you get anything. And so, the giant challenge philanthropy has, if it’s going to be measured on the short term ‘Give & Get’ math of Capitalism, is that we don’t get two dollars worth of almonds. On one hand, Capitalism is a miracle. It has completely rewired the way we go to work and the world in which we live. But applying those rules relentlessly – the short-term Return on Equity mindset – to things that don’t respond well to them, isn’t always the best way forward. 300 years ago, 200 years ago, a hundred years ago ,as capitalism was being perfected, the people who started industries that today are insanely profitable didn’t have to answer questions about, “What was your Return on Equity today?”.

Yet, if you were busy building a car company in 1912, you were focused on staying in business day to day, not “How is this going to be worth billions of dollars?”. That, when the internet was young and people were building the very first web sites, these were hobbies. These weren’t attempts at multi-billion dollar industries.

What happened is a ratchet showed up. Things got better over time, the same way so much of what we take for granted in our civilized world evolved over time. The thought that going to the doctor, or taking medicine is almost certainly not going to cause you to die, is a pretty new one. It was super risky to eat food when you were on the road, traveling.

Now, not so much. We can certainly thank the industrial system for a lot of food safety, but a big part came because the culture changed over time, bit by bit, things got better because people worked to make them better, not because they were going to make a profit doing it.

When someone was investing five thousand dollars in a car company, or $10,000 to lobby a politician to get a road built, they didn’t say, “Will this make me a billionaire in a year?”. That in Silicon Valley, when people were making crazy investments in speculative internet bubble companies, they didn’t say, “Show us with transparency exactly how you’re going to make a profit”. That, in fact, market thinking, status seeking led to a rush.

And that rush brought in new people. And those new people tried new things, and most of those things did not work. Most of the ideas that capitalists have had over the years did not work. And the ones that did work, took decades. And they never turned out the way the original business plan said they would. And so to show up at a small nonprofit and say, “Show us to the penny what your efficacy is”. There are very few entrepreneurs who could withstand that scrutiny in the first five, ten, fifteen years of their entrepreneurial journey. That we need to keep track of a second thing. We need to move the money that’s been promised, because we’re offering people status.

How much of your pledge have you fulfilled? How much can you move over right now? Not with questions about today’s efficacy or today’s transparency, but how instead can we create a new game here? And the new game is about the patient, gentle weaving of a different kind of culture. What we do is we give traditional, status-oriented nonprofits a ‘pass’.

We don’t challenge the efficacy of the Opera, or the museum, or the hospital, or the college. But when innovators show up, we grill them. We demand that they count the paper clips. We don’t leave any room for the tremendous innovation cycle that got us the capitalistic pillars that we so count on today. That it is entirely possible that we’re going to solve yet another problem. It is entirely possible that we can take a vaccine and make it free to the masses. It is possible that the next Wikipedia will educate millions and millions of people. That the lessons of One Laptop per Child will spread from one place to another. All of these things are possible. We have seen them happen before, we will see them happen again.

But the way we get the money there is either, take a deep breath and figure out that it’s all of our responsibility, and do it with an organization that’s been practiced at doing it – the Government, the one that built all those roads, the one that built the internet you’re hearing this on. Or, if we’re going to still rely on philanthropy, turn it into the status game that billionaires demand.

Create enough social pressure that it is better for your status as a billionaire to give away money, than it is to see it grow. Not because it is a rational altruistic investment of the highest yield per dollar, but simply because you’re a human – the kind of human who wanted to give money to a sports team, the kind of human who wanted to have a wing of a hospital named after you or your cousin. That Human Beings do Human things – we are not rational altruists. Instead, we are people who are seeking to deal with the fact that we know we’re going to die, and that until we do we would like to live in a place where we are welcome, where we think we have made a difference, where our work matters, where we have woven a culture that we can be proud of. All of us get to do those things, billionaires get to do them more loudly.

But we need more innovative nonprofits. We need nonprofits that are willing to show up and say, “This might not work and we’re going to do it anyway”. We need fast moving, fast mistake, generous thinking in order to change that part of our culture, not because it’s going to make a profit. Some people say it’s a shame that nonprofits are named after the things that they are not.

But in a culture that’s so dominated by, “What do you make?”. Maybe that’s exactly what they should be known for – the fact that they are not seeking to make a profit, but that they are merely seeking to make a difference. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening, we love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, I hope you will visit Akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. While you’re there, check out the show notes.

Hi Seth, this is Spencer from Amsterdam. I was listening to the question you answered at the end of ‘The Perils of Mind Reading’ episode about the benefit of the doubt. You were talking about changing the culture through actions, creating opportunities, and acting ‘as if’. I’d like to propose that maybe we can take it further. I was lucky enough to meet an amazing woman recently, who heads up a large engineering organization. Now remember, the average amount of women in the Engineering profession is somewhere around seven percent.

We hear many people in positions of power saying that, when they advertise for Engineers, they will hardly get any female applicants, and then perpetuate this myth about there being a pipeline problem. Yet this woman I met, her organization tested doing a recruitment campaign that advertises for a female only recruitment round. And yes, you guessed it, the applicants went through the roof. I’d love your thoughts on this kind of idea, if you think it could spread in hope of changing the culture. As always, thank you for being a much needed voice and presence in the world.

Thank you for this question. It’s certainly current and relevant to what so many of us are facing. And I’m going to begin with this – most humans don’t like doing things they think they’re going to fail at. That seems really obvious. However, we have structured many of our institutions to imply to some people that they’re going to fail if they show up, and then we’re surprised when they don’t show up. So you are absolutely correct in talking about the pipeline problem.

If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, why are we surprised that the very same kind of people keep showing up in our pipeline? If we want to change the people we get to choose from, who want to change who gets a seat at the table, it helps to create a different sort of pipeline. And while your example is an extreme one, there are plenty of ways that we can do this.

So onto Cerebral Garbooning. Cerebral Garbooning is a make-believe sport invented by Jimmy Canters. And in this sport, people who are nine years old have a significant advantage over people who are, say, 15. For example, if the sport requires shimmying on the ground underneath a piece of wood, a little kid’s going to do it better than a big kid. If you’ve got to actually, literally jump through hoops.

Turns out little kids are better at jumping through hoops than big kids. If you start a Cerebral Garbooning competition, I think you will discover that little kids are way more eager to sign up for it than big kids. And so now, we think about the jobs and the positions of authority. Because what we decided a long time ago, is that being good at interviewing in a high pressure situation, in which the interviewer is likely to be a white male, is a good indicator of whether or not you will be good at your job.

Well, unless your job involves being interviewed, it’s not clear that being good at interviewing is a good way to find out if someone’s good at a job. One thing that we have found, is that many jobs benefit from having people interview in writing. Send them the questions and have them send back the answers, because if that’s the sort of way they’re going to do their job, you’ve just discovered a good way of finding out if they’re going to be good at their job. Or, consider the idea of changing the pipeline. If you want more diversity in your engineering ranks, well, why not go run some Hackathons at Historically Black Universities and Colleges?

Why not show up where people you are looking for already hang out? And create activities and interactions where the ones who are ready to shine and do work with you, are more likely to show up. So we need to change how we are filling the pipeline. We need to change the game you have to play, before you play the game, if we are hoping for other players to be part of what we are building.

Thanks again for listening, we’ll see you next time.

==> 1364-patient-capital- <==

Before Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world, he worked for somebody who was one of the richest men in the world. Somebody who used to be a professor at Columbia University. What exactly did D.E. Shaw do that made him a master of the universe?

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

D.E. Shaw was one of the pioneers of Program Trading, of high-speed trading on Wall Street. High-speed trading is so focused on speed that an entire industry grew up around it, based on the speed of light. It’s called co-location. If you’ve got a computer program that can trade stocks faster and a little bit better than other people can, where you’re making a tenth of a penny, or a hundredth of a penny, or a thousandth of a penny on every trade, then getting your computer program closer to the stock market itself – not giving up a hundred feet, or 10 feet, or even a foot of 10base-T wire, ethernet between you and the trading floor – matters. Because if you can get in a picosecond before your competition, you can grab that tiny little bit of equity faster than they can. And so, the co-location industry is all about renting space in a building as close as possible to the central trading computer, and keeping the wires as short as possible.

Here’s an industry that’s based on the picosecond, that didn’t even exist 40 years ago. Why does it matter? It matters because people who play with money for a living are doing a simple bit of math. And the math is, “What’s the Return on Investment?”. Well, there are two ways to make the Return on Investment go up. One way is that you can get more money back, for the money you invest. But the other way – the other half of the fraction – is you can keep the money for less time.

That, if it takes you a year to get a 10% return versus a 5% return in a month, you’re going to do way better if you can get, what seems like, half the return in 1/12 the time. Because the Stock Market trading, investing capitalism, has always been in a hurry. “How fast can we get our money back?” Sure, we want things to grow, but the Capitalist says, “If I have a choice between being a Month Trader and a Day Trader, and everything else is the same, I’ll trade every day”.

And then, of course, the Day Trader Is undermined by the Hour Trader, who’s undermined by the Minute Trader, and the Second Trader, and now you get the idea. The people who are doing this Program Trading, who make 400 million, 600 hundred million dollars, in a year. That means they’re making more than a million dollars in a day, do the math, that’s a very expensive podcast you just listened to, isn’t it?

These people don’t spend any time whatsoever thinking about the repercussions of the trades that they are making. They aren’t even aware of the companies in which they’re making them. They don’t look deeply into the fundamentals – what they’re focusing on, are little tiny glitches doing arbitrage between what something should be worth, and what it is currently trading at. These little micro traits, filling in the gaps, make the market, in their words, more efficient.

The question is, “More efficient at what?”. That doing it faster, without any guidance, without any oversight – simply running a program – causes us to make up stories about what is actually happening. Consider these two lines from a Bitcoin analyst. “Bitcoin price struggles to break above 12,000 dollars. After several fake-outs, the Bitcoin price is hovering below the psychologically-important twelve thousand dollar mark, as the Bulls are struggling to make a decisive move”.

Well, actually no, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is a bunch of Day Traders and computers are looking at what happened a second ago, and are going to decide what’s going to happen a second from now, with many, many, completely unrelated decisions made at as close to the Speed of Light as possible.

Let’s call this, Impatient Capital. Someone who is investing Inpatient Capital wants to know just one thing, “How fast is this going to go up in value?”. That their goal is to buy low and sell high, and then do it again tomorrow. But, there is an alternative. And the alternative, as coined by Jacqueline Novogratz, is ‘Patient’ Capital. And ‘Patient’ Capital says, “Wait a minute”. When Henry Ford figured out how to make the Model T. so cheap, he unleashed a 90 year cycle that ended up paving the Earth and creating a big part of our climate change problem.

Now, if that had been his goal, and he had been patient, he would have succeeded. That it turns out, when you show up in a community and turn on the lights, people do things with the light. It turns out that when we are able to make investments in a system, the system acts differently. And if we are patient, still using the mechanism of Capitalism at our side, it is possible to change the world.

That the folks at McDonald’s have changed the way that a billion people eat, which has changed the way countless farmers do their job, which has changed the way that families interact with one another.

Now, you might not be building that system on purpose, but it was Capitalism that built that system. And the people who invested in it early – maybe they sold their shares after they doubled, or tripled, or quadrupled in price – but the system continues to ratchet. So the question we need to ask as we look at the systems around us, “Are we responsible for what happens to the system we invest in?”. And if we are willing to be patient, and how we are going to engage with that system, what change could we possibly make? Consider the case of Western Seed. Western Seed is a company in Kenya. It turns out that if you use kernels left over from last year’s corn harvest, your yield will not be nearly as good, as if buy fresh seeds, designed for this year’s planting. I’m not talking about GMO. I’m talking about doing it the old-fashioned way – hand, hybridized seeds that are quite fertile, that will grow in your plot far better than if you used farm saved seeds from last year. The good news about farm saved seeds is that they are free.

The bad news is they don’t work very well, because the things that are left over after you grow wheat aren’t necessarily the best seeds to grow wheat. That a natural hybrid – bred the way that seeds have been bred for Millennia – that is designed for this year, will dramatically outperformed farm saved seed. A 30 dollar bag of seed will produce a three thousand dollar difference in the yield of your farm, in just four months.

So the question is, if we go to somebody and say, “Wanna buy three thousand dollars worth of wheat for thirty dollars in seed?” you would expect that most rational actors would say ‘Yes’. Except, we’re working in a low trust environment. We’re working with technology, because it’s new. We’re working with a matter of life and death. If you screw up, your family is not going to eat. If these are just magic beans and they’re not going to grow right, you’ve made a huge error.

So it doesn’t take one year to persuade most of the farmers to adopt Western Seed. It might take five years or 10 years. The Day Trader doesn’t know what to do with that. So the Day Trader goes and buy some Bitcoin. So the Day Trader goes and buys a coal mine. But here, Patient Capital can start to change things because, over time, the norm in this community will change. The norm will go from ‘People like us, use farm saved seed,’ to ‘People like us, use Western Seed’. And once they’ve made that commitment, Western Seed is going to have a competitor. And that competitor may make an even higher yielding seed. And once higher yielding seeds are embraced, the people in the community will be able to go to private school. The people in the community will be able to buy books. The people the community will find other things to do, to create productivity. And 10 years, or 20 years or 30 years from now, this little bag of seeds is going to transform the way the community lives and acts. It’s still Capitalism, but it’s Patient Capital. It is keeping track on a different time frame, and it’s difficult for it to coexist with the timeframe of, “How many basis points can I get, regardless of the short term cost to me, and the people around me?”.

Consider the case of ‘d.Light’. A d.Light solar lantern sits outdoors all day long and then at night, it glows for three, or four, or five hours. Which means you can do your schoolwork, which means you can charge your phone. That if you live in a village off-the-grid with no electricity, instead of the entire world going pitch black at 6 pm, you can get work done.

It means that, instead of spending 10, 20, 30 cents a day on kerosene – a dangerous way to light up the inside of your home – you can buy a solar lantern which will pay for itself in 90 days. And once you have a solar lantern, and your productivity increases because now you can work at night, you have enough money to buy a bigger solar lantern – one that can charge several devices, one that can bring other elements of powered devices into your life.

And so, the Patient Capital ratchet continues to turn, because the culture in your community begins to change. Instead of everything extinguishing a 6 pm, instead of people dying from lung disease or fire, the quality of life goes up. Now, the people who are selling d.Light solar lanterns are not giving them away – they are making a profit.

They are not making a profit that would make a Day Trader happy, but they are making a profit, nonetheless. And over time, this patience begins to pay off. And what we end up with, is productive groups of millions, or even billions of people who, over the course of a decade or two, produce far more value than the venture capitalist who invested in a juicing machine that was supposed to double in price, in a week. The late great Zig Ziglar built his career on one profound sentence, “You can get everything you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want”.

Now, the Robber Barons in the Masters of the Universe have shortened this to, “You can get anything you want”. That without regard for how it will impact other people, folks who have plenty are tempted to say, “I can have anything I want”. And to pay for that, they focus on Day Trading. To pay for that, they focus on basis points, on “What kind of return can I get from this interaction, from this email, from this investment?”

But what happens if we just take the second half of the sentence? What happens if we approach the problem of culture like this? If you just help enough other people get what they want. Period. What would happen to our culture if our bias was, “If you just help enough other people get what they want”?

Because it’s actually not a zero-sum game. It’s only zero-sum if we’re impatient. It’s only zero-sum if we’re buying and trading by the pico-second, because for every winner there has to be a loser. That’s how the market works. But if we bring patience to the equation, the rules are fundamentally different. It turns out that if I hold the door open, I can help the person behind me. And it turns out, that if I create a culture where other people are holding the door open where technology shows up, not to belittle or enslave other people, but shows up simply to create more abundance and less scarcity, we play a different game. So, thanks to Zig for getting us started. But, in fact, you can help enough other people get what they want. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a mind-blowing question from last time.

I love to hear from you! If you’ve got a question, I hope you won’t hesitate. We need more of your questions – visit Akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button. While you’re there, you can check out the show notes. We got this question last week – I think it will make you think.

Hi Seth, this is Oliver from Austria. I loved the show on Artificial Intelligence, I just have one question. What do you think Consciousness actually is? Where does it come from, and why do we have it? And by Consciousness, I mean the experience that it is like something to be me. So, for example, I feel like I am speaking into the microphone right now, as opposed to an algorithm which is just going through instructions and not aware of itself. Thank you. Love the show.

Let’s start with this. If there was someone on Earth – a friend of yours, a colleague, perhaps your spouse – who didn’t have that noise in their head, who didn’t have the ongoing narrative all the time. If in fact there is not always sonder – the realization that other people have a noise in their head, the way you have a noise in your head. What if there was someone who didn’t? How could you tell? How could you tell the difference between someone who is a living, breathing, functioning human being, who had all the internal doubts and repercussions and do overs, and someone who just acted like they did? And of course, you couldn’t tell the difference, it’s sort of a Turing test, but with real people. That there is no external evidence that someone has that buzzing going on. And it may be, as leaders in the area of Philosophy of Mind are now arguing, it may be this noise in our head is just a historical artifact. That dogs don’t have it, that snails don’t have it, that pigeons don’t have it. And that maybe people have it differently from one another, because we can’t tell. And if we can’t tell, then does it even matter? Here’s the example I’ve given before that really resonated with me.

Let’s think about a football game. Let’s think about the idea that there’s instant replay, and there’s play-by-play, and there’s the color commentator. Now, let’s imagine that a play has just been folded before our eyes. What happens is the quarterback drops back to pass, he fakes a handoff, he throws a long bomb – it’s going, it’s going, it’s a touchdown! Now, you just heard what the play-by-play announcer was saying.

You heard it after you saw the play on the field. Of course you did, because the announcer also saw the play as you saw the play. And after the fact, the announcer made up all of this story about what you just saw. For a moment, imagine what it would be like if it was in the reverse order. Imagine what it would be like if when you were watching a football game, the announcer, sped up by 10 seconds on the track said what was about to happen and moments later it did happen. How weird would that be?

Well, we have come to be comfortable with the idea that we say stuff in our narrative brain, in our conscious brain, and then we do it. But, it’s probably true that the opposite is the case. That, at a base chemical level, much quicker than we come up with the narrative, we’ve already decided to do something. We’re already doing something. And then, only then, only after that fact, do we come up with the narrative. That it’s possible, using functional MRI scanning and some thoughtful mind experiments, to prove that this happens all the time. That, really, what we’ve got in our head is a play-by-play announcer.

It’s possible that this evolved over time. That Human Beings talked to themselves. And that was the version we had first, of what we now call ‘Consciousness’. But then, our brains evolved to the point where we could talk to ourselves without talking out loud. That language leads to this notion that we have a little man, or a little woman, in our head, who’s telling us what to do. But, we don’t. So, that’s my take on the Philosophy of Mind. I could go on about it all day long, but it’s sort of mind-blowing, because; A) Sonder is really cool – that moment that you realize other people also have fears and dreams; and then B) Realizing that maybe not everyone does, and that it is entirely possible that everyone but you, is acting like they do. I think that’s unrealistic, but we know that there are people in the world who do not report having the same sort of neurotic, narration going on in our head that many of us do. I hope that resonates! Thanks for listening and thanks for your questions. We’ll see you next time.

==> -lets-kill-all-the-whales- <==

It’s 500 years ago and there’s an evil genius and his goal is to eliminate as much as he possibly can the whale population of the Earth. The problem is, of course, that whales live in the ocean and they’re hard to find and hard to hunt what to do. If your goal is to eliminate all the whales. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about side effects. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor drought-proof Gardens has become my obsession here in the now all to fiery Pacific Northwest. It’s become that. Since my nine-year-old, son asked me what we can do for climate change and I said everything we can anytime we can wherever we can.

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Well, of course, if you want to get rid of all the whales it helps to create an entire industry in which people get paid and raise their status and take care of their families by hunting whales. And so the thing to do, particularly in the colonies of quote. The new world is to wait until a whale ends up on a beach, cut it open and see that the baleen, the part that is used to filter things that it’s eating.

Is a great way to make corsets and hoop skirts to realize that the ambergris, which is collected in the intestines. Of the whale is a great way, surprisingly to make perfume. But most of all that whale oil is a terrific way to make a light inside a dark house at night. You could build an entire industry around whale oil.

And once you do, one of the side effects, is that Wales Around the world will be hunted to the edge of Extinction. And then if it’s 18-49 a few hundred years later and you decide that you want to save the whales. Well, one thing you could do is start a worldwide campaign to save the whales. The other thing you could do. If you’re a Canadian who understands things like Shale oil and coal is invent kerosene because kerosene is cheaper and more efficient than whale oil and you Don’t have to go to Sea and Chase down Moby, Dick to get more of it.

And so one of the side effects of kerosene in addition to poor people around the world getting lung disease and having their homes burned down. Is that the market for whale oil was completely decimated. I think we can agree. We’re loyal as a technology was not developed because people other than Captain Ahab, had a thing against Wales that was a side effect.

Side effects are still affects. They are still real. There are still things that happen to us in to the things around us, but they’re not the point of what we built and the purpose of my rant today is to talk about an interesting side effect. Possible side effect occasional side effect of the world. We live in of the culture of capitalism and industrialism and that side effect. Unlike the decimation of Wales is something that we look forward. Two, and that side effect is did we create something of beauty?

Did we treat other people with dignity and respect? Did we build something that was both resilient and at the heart of what we think about when we try to do good work. So let’s look at some of the things that capitalism has created. People. Often talk about the extraordinary, customer service that you might get at a place like Zappos. We’re human. Being answers, the phone on, one ring talks to you. Like they care and takes good care of you.

Or they talk about the extraordinary design of the early Macintosh. The user interface, Steve Jobs obsession with edges and Corners paying Jony Ive and others millions, and millions of dollars for beauty. Just putting Beauty into a product, even though quote, they didn’t need to which led to a whole bunch of other capitalist siding, that beauty, Become a competitive Advantage. These people say that capitalism left to its own devices, creates things like customer service creates things, like Symphonies that we want to go listen to because the person who composed the symphony got paid to do so or that create that object in your hand, that feels better than it needs to that supercomputer. You paid $1000 for.

But I want to argue today that these are random side effects that, if we look, for example, at the houses that are built in places where there’s plenty of wealth. Most of them are pretty ugly. Most of them do not have the organic coherence, the soul, lifting beauty that we see in a house designed by an architect who really gets it.

If we look at what has happened on social media. Most of what is Needed is not something we would actually miss if it were gone. It was created because Market forces Amplified came together to produce something that in the short run or locally doesn’t actually help us. That Facebook has been in the news a lot. Because it’s been found by Facebook that Instagram makes a third or more of the young women who use it on happy, that is a side effect of Facebook deciding that what they need to To do is, do, quote, what the market wants?

And the same thing was true with whale oil at no point. Did, the people who were out there wailing say to themselves. Wow. I wonder if we could come up with a way to do this to light our homes, without hunting a species to the edge of Extinction or consider the well-documented health issues that things like cigarettes or a potato chips or carbonated beverages. Us in the people who consume them have some people had a smile put on their face because they had a Coke on the right day with the right people and it reminded them of something that made them happy for sure.

But it’s also true. That millions and millions of people have died early and tragic deaths, because of the effects of too much sugar and obesity, these are side effects of companies that say, we’re just doing our job. And so when I got this question from a listener. Hi Seth, this is Richard New York.

This question. It’s about delivery. Especially food delivery. There was and this is New York City Focus. There was an article about sort of the plight of delivery workers and how the quote unquote algorithms have, you know, run their lives, and make it even harder and harder to make a living wage. It seems that these companies would go away, or at least become much. Aller as they have to raise the prices and price out, probably many of the people many of the customers. And so there is no solution where the contract workers can earn enough to make a living wage and its service is cheap enough for customers to keep using it.

There are people like Danny Meyer, who have like a different approach where, you know, the employees almost like employees number one because if the employees are happy, they can make the customers happy. And it seems to work at the smaller. Scale. The probably doesn’t work to this larger scale of like Uber Eats and doordash and GrubHub.

I guess my question is, do you think there is a solution where we can offer this really cheap service? While not exploiting the people, delivering the service. Thanks is the purpose of Uber or doordash to make our communities better. Or are they hoping that that will be sort of a random side effect that if the only way to get your business, Is funded is to promise consumers, something that you cannot sustainably deliver.

At the same time that you treat your employees respectfully and pay them a living wage. Well, some people say the market has spoken. I have to do what I have to do because this is what industrial? Capitalism demands or do we say? Well then I’m not going to make that thing. One of the challenges that we have perhaps one of the greatest challenges of our time as we stare down, the barrel of carbon is this is the purpose of capitalism to create culture or is the purpose of culture to create capitalism is culture, just a side effect of Milton Friedman’s edict that the purpose of any company that the purpose of work is to maximize returns for the owners.

Because I think Steve Jobs was the exception that he almost drove that company into bankruptcy more than once pursuing something that the stock market didn’t approve of until long after the fact. It was only an accident that the iPhone became the single most profitable device ever created by a company, but that’s not what he wanted it to be.

He was going for something else. It pretty clear that Frank Lloyd. Her name. Your favorite famous architect wasn’t as successful as some Anonymous Corporation. Churning out ticky-tacky houses on the hillside because prophet and beauty, or dignity or resilience or long-term sustainability aren’t in the same category. So here we have these companies companies that maybe never should have existed who made a promise to people that any person who could use a spreadsheet. Sheet, could show could not possibly be kept, not with human labor.

And now, they’re saying, well, we are in a jam, because we can’t continue to keep our promise, delivering food in 20 minutes for less than it would cost you to get it yourself. Unless we subject the people. We are working with two conditions that were not proud of and then they’re in a jam, or if we think about some of the most successful profitable, companies of all time.

How do they make choices? This is the original model that Google was don’t be evil and according to one of their early employees. What don’t be evil meant was don’t be Microsoft because Microsoft at the time was suffering from the image of being a monopolist of taking advantage of any entity if they could use their Monopoly, power to increase profit and at the beginning the Google folks said, we’re not going to be like that. We’re going to create a different kind of Campus.

Different kind of ethos a different way of being in the world, but then we see one decision after another the most recent one I read about last week. Oh, let’s not pay thousands and thousands of contractors some bonus money, even though our contractor promised. We would. And only when there was an upward, did they change their mind, but with all the money Google makes, why couldn’t they have made a different decision? A long time ago, we’re not going to even have any contractors giving us the Ability about treating different people differently when we could just have employees and treat them all fairly.

We’re not going to go ahead and try to take every penny off the table. But instead to create an ecosystem, a culture that allows the internet to truly Thrive that sooner or later every company, particularly big ones that need to go public needs to make a hard decision. And that decision is simple, is the purpose of this organization to Mais, the profit for the shareholders, in the long run or the short run because there’s not a lot of evidence that says that even if you’re trying to do it in the long run, you can do it at the same time.

You maximize the benefits to the culture to customers and to non-customers to the present and to the Future. So back to that idea of the symphony. There are fewer and fewer Symphonies getting written. At least the ones that I’ve seen. Cost my desk partly because there are fewer and fewer dukes and Kings commissioning Symphonies to raise their status, among their peers, that it’s not a good way to make a great living.

And so it doesn’t get done as much. And what we have to figure out as we think about our humanity and our role seems pretty simple, to me. We need to figure out what impact we are trying to make with the work we do. How much is enough. Is it enough for someone to make 10 million or 50 million or a hundred million dollars? A billion dollars fifty billion dollars at what point is the game of I can make more more important than the game of I can make a difference because we are surrounded by people who are trying hard to make a difference.

But many of them are being overwhelmed by individuals who choosing to win a game of status our building. Systems would network effects places like Facebook and Instagram that don’t exist to make things better and more resilient but instead exist to get more clicks, which leads to more Revenue. I think the folks at Facebook could have made a whole bunch of different decisions.

A year ago, two years ago five years ago before an American election. And before that where they still would have made plenty of profit, but they wouldn’t have had to look at what they did and say. Oh, Oh, yeah, we’re sorry that happened. That everything. We do creates effects and side-effects. Some people have very little choice.

They are struggling to put food on the table. But most people including just about everyone who’s listening to this podcast. We do have a choice. We have a choice, to put our name on our work. And yes, we have the choice to not maximize our short-term profits. And instead, focus on the impact of what we do.

I know I’ve been ranting lately. You for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. In fact, I’d like you To talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi! Seth, Alicia from Charleston here, Hogs, and this is anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous. So die. Hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l i and K and click the appropriate button to good questions this week plus a mysterious explanation. Here we go. What Niche would you tell small business owners to keep an eye on in 2022 for ideas for their own Purple Cow.

Thank you for this. Bonnie. My answer might not be what you’re expecting. I’m not going to say Plastics or something that might have come out of A movie in the 1960s or 70s by thesis is that you pick your customers and you pick your future particularly for small business people your customers determine what your day is going to be like the second thing I would say is that the happiest entrepreneurs. I know are not happy because they sell a thing that they themselves want to use.

They’re happy because they are engaged with traction for a Marketplace of people. They respect one guy. New was really happy with his business. He was a wholesaler of Hardware like screws and but nuts and bolts and stuff like that. The thing is that it’s not that interesting. There’s just not a lot to say about stainless steel screws, but there’s a lot to say about what it means to be a person of respect in a tight-knit community where folks, trust you, where you solve their problem.

So if I was starting a new Day, that’s where I would begin. Not by saying what’s hot or what’s trendy but by saying who’s out there, what’s their psychographic? Their attitude? Who has a problem with money to spend to solve it? That needs a thing, and knows, they need a thing. And if I was starting something today, I would focus almost all my effort, not on selling people stuff because as we’ve seen in the last few years.

It’s easier than ever to get stuff to easier than ever to lower the price of stuff. It’s harder than ever to get noticed, to get, trusted to get clicked on. And if you’re competing with Amazon or you’re competing with someone who’s got a head start on Shopify, or if you’re competing with someone who’s willing to race to the bottom on social media.

Your life isn’t going to be what you wanted to be. But what’s underserved right now is connection is Engaging people with information and other people who need and want that information. Few years ago. I saw a community that organized more than 10,000 volunteer firefighters. And if you want to hang out with volunteer firefighters and you can connect them with each other, with new techniques, with new ways of learning with new ways of being in the world.

Boom. That’s a business. There are countless businesses like this. There’s only been Last five or ten years that yuman beings in the Billiards could find and connect with each other. Facebook isn’t the answer Facebook is the beginning of all of this but it is unlikely that that’s the end of it. So that’s what I would do. I would focus on small as viable audience of people who care about something you care about where you can create value by creating connection.

Hi, Seth and it’s hockey recently gave you mentioned that people like Us do things like this, which is a very elegant concept, but when I look around the world very few people, I know are doing things I do. In fact, I think a lot of people, I know, socially think I’m kind of crazy or a loser for not driving, the fancy cars and buying the trendy things.

We generally don’t concern ourselves with what other people think of us. But in my industry, the most lucrative clientele are the ones that drive fancy cars and buy things, they can’t really afford since I don’t display myself like them. How do I attract this more lucrative client set? How do I Market to people who are not like us?

Thank you for this. This is a really good question and it brings to mind lots of things that I learned. From Zig Ziglar. The thing is that if you walk into almost any hairdresser in America, the people who are cutting hair, don’t look exactly. Like the people who are getting their hair cut. They don’t want the same things. They don’t talk the same way. They might be a different demographic. They’re different.

There are lots of areas of our life, where this is true, where we want to do business with someone who isn’t us, but who fits a different version of Of the story. We are telling ourselves about where we get, what we get, who we get it from. So yes, there are certain industries that have decided that the best way to fit in and I’m thinking about real estate brokers right now, is to make sure you’ve got just the right Mercedes in just the right business card in just the right outfit and that you’re the name of your firm has the word team in it and your signs are all the same, but that’s coming from Fear.

That’s not coming. Because the people who are buying the house has Look and act and drive, like the people who are selling them. The other thing that’s going on is you don’t need everyone to be your client. Whatever it is that you’re busy trying to sell them. You just need a few people. So the question is, what’s the story?

I remember that there was a book years ago. Where are all the customers yachts and what it was about, I believe was the fact that certain kinds of Brokers showed off. Just how much money they were making a As a way to acquire new customers, it certainly worked for Bernie Madoff. However, it might be just as easy to have a niche of being the stock broker who’s got a hole in his shoe and doesn’t live in the fanciest house in town because he or she is spending their money doing something else, something that really matters to them, something that might appeal to the people, they seek to lead. And so what it means to be a leader is not That you are a slightly different version of the people. You are leading.

What it means to be a leader is that people see in you a story that resonates with them about affiliation about status about where they want to connect. It turns out that being a successful hockey player doesn’t mean looking like a hockey fan. It means looking like a hockey player and you have lots of choices about how to look how to show up in the world. The story you tell the trail you leave behind.

I think you should pick one that resonates with who you want to be and who you want to attract. And finally, something about the Help Wanted episode. I recently ran a little long. I’m going to leave it here without comment, but I was absolutely fascinated. It makes sense to me. We’ll see. Thanks for listening.

Hi, Seth. This is Brian very much enjoyed. Your most recent podcast, Help Wanted. I’ve been following the shackleton’s. All right, and I found the discussion. They’re very very enjoyable and enlightening but really wanted wanted to comment about and I’m not sure that you’ll necessarily want to post this comment in a podcast, but I wanted to pass along. Nonetheless really is with regard to the ad that you saw in the New York Times in particular. The ad in that old classified section of a print newspaper, looking for someone who clearly is, very tech savvy, digitally focused.

And everything that you would not expect to find in a reader of a print ad in Modern Day classifieds. My suspicions and I saw this actually in my or career is that that help wanted ad was not really a help wanted ad at all. At least, not in the sense that they were looking for qualified applicants. In fact, quite the opposite.

We have many situations where we had someone who had come to our department from either an overseas. Office and or who had, we were looking to recruit from outside of the United States and that the firm would be have to sponsor them for their work visa. Well, in order to do that, one of the requirements was to show that they particular applicant that you had in mind, was the most qualified person available for that position.

One of the things to do, one of the ways to do, that would be to run help wanted ads and show that well, look. Guess what? I didn’t receive any qualified applicants submitting, their applications for that position. And so lo and behold my person that I have in mind is the best for that position you filed that along with your visa application response to worship.

Now, I don’t know for certain whether or not that was the case for the end that you mentioned, but I would mention that it certainly lined up with my experience and I don’t say this to be denigrating of.

Non US citizens who are applying for these positions. My experiences has always been with very, very few exceptions, the outstanding with these applicants and their performance, but simply that the administrative requirements that are put into place in order for firms to hire these best people often drive, very apparently, silly behavior. And so I just wanted to kind of pass that along because I do see it as a roadblock to By helping companies, find the best applicant building the best teams and really doing all the things that you talked about on your podcast, and then I try to do every day, which is to build better teams to do, better things for everyone.

So I’ll just leave it there. Thanks so much. Seth, really appreciate all that you do, and look forward to hearing whatever you have in the future. Thanks. Bye.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project more than Great volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> 1365-solving-interesting-problems- <==

You have a problem. It’s a big, professional problem. The problem is that Tom Hanks is busy. Imagine that you are a producer of a big Hollywood motion picture pre-production is wrapped – you’re about to go into production. It’s expensive. Two weeks from now, you’re going to start filming. It’s a psychological Thriller, a lightweight one. Maybe with a few laughs in it – about a psychiatrist and a patient. The patient has problems and only the psychiatrist is able to help. And yes, Tom Hanks had signed on to be the psychiatrist, but now Tom Hanks is busy.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

In a minute, we’ll talk about who you might be able to get to take Tom Hanks’s place. Professor and author Scott Page has posed this question to lots of people – well meaning people – and the list that they come up with, of the folks who might be eligible to take Tom Hanks’s place, is pretty short. What if I put some boundaries on it? What if I say that the person you need to pick has to have been in movies that did more than two billion dollars in total at the box office? A big name star. And what if I told you that that person – it would be a bonus – had won an Academy Award or two?

Well, who would you come up with? I’m wondering how many people listed Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, or Meryl Streep? Because all of them meet one, or both, of those requirements. If we go with our knee jerk reaction to the easy obvious choices, the short list, it’s much harder to solve our problem.

We learned this from Moneyball when we discovered that a low capitalized baseball team could come in second place, simply by drafting talented people that others were overlooking. So let’s talk for a minute about problems. Problems are what we do all day. If you work in a factory, it’s entirely possible you do labor – the act of lifting heavy objects and moving them from one place to another. That you are solving the boss’s problem by being a willing Cog in a system.

But most of us, most people who listen to podcasts, are solving problems. And they’re interesting problems, because we don’t know the solution before we work on them. Writing a book is an interesting problem typing a book only takes three or four days. Writing a book, might take three or four years. What was all the time spent doing? Because it wasn’t spent typing – it was spent solving an interesting problem.

So a couple things to understand about problems. First, they are unexpected. Expected problems aren’t problems, because we have a solution ready to go and then the problem disappears. Problems are actually unexpected. Second, I believe we can divide problems into two categories; solo problems and group problems.

Solo problems get a lot of play. Einstein was a solo problem solver, apparently. Jonas Salk, and the polio vaccine that saved so many people, apparently, a solo problem. Solo problems could be solo problems, because the rules state they must be. For example, winning at the US. Open in a Singles Tournament. It’s called Singles, because you’re only allowed to play by yourself. Jeopardy – another example of that.

Or, it might be a solo problem, because something about the way we approach it works significantly better, if we have communication in and among only ourselves. So you could probably argue that writing a novel, or painting a painting, have largely been considered solo problems for a long time. But most problems, particularly now, are group problems. And interestingly enough, if you look at all into the history of science, or math, or even writing plays, or publishing books, you discover that they are solved by a group. In the case of the lone scientist, he or she was busy looking at lots of previous papers – lots of dead ends that others have gone down before they showed up to come up with the solution. They did not do it by themselves. It was a non-coordinated group approach. Separated by time, separated by distance, but a group of people solved the problem.

This podcast is better because Alex De Palma made it better. My books are better because Megan Casey and Nikki Papadopoulos made them better. That when we see something that’s created that seems to be made by a soloist, what’s actually happening is an entire team was involved. And often, if you don’t like the final product, it might not be the fault of the person whose name is on it.

It might be that they simply needed a better editor. If you’re a fan of junkie TV or movies, you know the trope. There’s a bunch of people in The A-Team or the Mission Impossible force, or whatever Geek Squad you want to talk about, going into the field to solve an unknown problem. And so, you’ve got the computer whiz and the makeup expert, and the demolitions person, and the guy with big muscles who can lift heavy objects and lose his temper.

One of my favorites, is the original Justice League. The Justice League always hanging out in the clubhouse and casting shade on each other, consists of people like Aquaman, and Superman, and Batman – each of whom can bring something to an unexpected problem. What we’ve discovered is that in many situations what you really want are specialists. You want the flute player to play the flute, you want the conductor to conduct, and you want the trumpeter to play the trumpet.

You don’t set out to build an orchestra, in which everyone is good at the trumpet – it wouldn’t sound very good. Nor do we set out to build an orchestra in which everyone is pretty good at every instrument. That what specialists do, is they bring their natural ability – trained or not – to the fore, to get that part of the problem solved.

It’s a little bit like that drawer in your kitchen. The one that is filled with OXO kitchen gadgets, because there is not one kitchen tool that can open a bottle, chop a tomato, spread a Dosa, and blend a milkshake. You need different tools to do those things in concert to make one extraordinary meal. Is it possible to get by with just a knife? Of course. But if you were competing against a team that had all the right kitchen gadgets, for all the right ingredients that were thrown at them, it’s quite likely that they would produce something more efficiently and more deliciously that solved the problem.

So if the first thing that we see is that specialists are worthwhile, the second thing is that having a bench pays off. That a football team with only eleven players on it, is probably going to get defeated by a football team that has 25. Because the 25-person squad has a place kicker, they have a punter, they have a defensive end.

That having a bench – lots of people with different specialties who are ready to come in and solve their part of the problem – is worth it. Not mentioned yet is this; teams that challenge each other to work together better, I think we can agree, will do better than teams that don’t. That the open nature of information exchange in various forms of science or math, is what enables forward motion – information hoarding doesn’t.

The Industrial Age of scarcity taught us a mindset that says, “If you get the seat, I don’t get it. If you get this gig, I don’t get it. If you are speaking up, I am not being heard”. And so, it’s not an accident that we have created a culture, based on this scarcity mindset, where we give status to certain groups of people. They get access to more resources. They get access to a better seat at the table. Partly, in fact, largely, because we believe that there’s scarcity.

On the other hand, if you can see the math of the bench plus specialists, we realize that solving problems creates value. It creates enough value that we can get more people to help us solve the problem.

And so, we are moving fast. From the lone, genius programmer – the irascible guy sitting up nights in his dorm solving the problem all by himself – toward a network solution, in which stack overflow – strangers from around the world helping you, plus plenty of programmers often working in teams, challenging each other proactively to explain their work to find bugs before they happen, pitching in. “What about this? Can I contribute that?” These teams are able to out produce the solo geniuses, when it comes to solving interesting problems.

On to the Rooney Rule. The Rooney Rule – started in the NFL because they were embarrassed by the fact that most of their players were non-white, and almost all of the management was white – was put in place to create a new norm.

You must interview at least one person of color every time you’re going to hire a head coach. That’s it. That’s the Rooney Rule. What happened? Well, there was a lot of grumbling because the billionaires that own NFL teams don’t like being told what to do. And, as you can guess from the Tom Hanks experiment, almost all the time the Rooney Rule doesn’t actually work.

It doesn’t work because that one person who is being interviewed is being seen as a token. It’s a form of obedience. “Well, we have to interview someone and then we can get back to work”. This leads us to the next idea, the idea embodied by Arabella Mansfield.

150 years ago, this year, she became the first female lawyer admitted in the United States. Now, if you believe that lawyers are capable of solving interesting problems, and I do, the fact that we had said to half of all the adults in our country, “No, you may not be considered for this role. You may not contribute in solving any of these problems”.

Well, it hurt all of the women who were deprived of something productive to do. But it really hurt our culture as well, because then you’re playing like a football team with only 11 players. That what you’ve done, when you say to a group of people whether you say it out loud or whether you say it through your actions, “No, you can’t play,” then what you have done is limited the size of your bench. Arabella Mansfield is the namesake of the Mansfield Rule, and the Mansfield rule is really different than the Rooney Rule. The Mansfield rule used at many big law firms now says this, “You can’t interview for Senior Management roles unless at least 30% of the candidates are women”. And then, something extraordinary happens. Because if you interview eight people, and three of them are women, no one says, “Agh, go ahead and pick the woman,” because there isn’t one woman – there are three.

So now it’s just which of the lawyers are we going to pick. It normalizes our choices. It makes it not a big deal to pick the token, because there isn’t a token. There are simply choices. This shift is morally right. It creates a world where I would prefer to live, but even if you don’t care about that, it is economically right.

This is not about creating soft spaces for people who aren’t competent. It’s about recognizing the fact that it doesn’t matter if it’s Albert Einstein or a team of people trying to negotiate a real estate lease, the economics of diversity, which could accurately be called the economics of specialization, demonstrate that we come out ahead.

Professor Scott Page has written about this several times and he’s made it quite clear. The math is really easy to understand. That when you put five specialists in your kitchen drawer, you’re way more likely to be able to cook a diverse set of meals, than you would be if your kitchen drawer had five knives – all from the same manufacturer, all trying to outdo themselves in their sharpness – because a sharper knife doesn’t make a better can opener. Where does this all lead? It leads to the idea of human asset utilization and development.

What we’ve been doing for a really long time, for thousands of years, is brainwashing people from a very early age to persuade them that they will never amount to anything. To persuade them not to seek out specialization in an area that will help us solve a problem. We are sacrificing their future, and ours, by taking people out of consideration from an early age. So a group like Girls Who Code, how can you be against a group that seeks to persuade young women to learn to code a computer?

Well, what angry email I got said, “They’re going to become incompetent,” leaving aside the fact that Computer Programming was invented by a woman, that the idea of a Bug was named by a woman, that some of the greatest programmers of the 50s and the 60s, and today were and are women. Leaving that aside, what we know is really simple.

If there’s a deeper bench of people with more specialties, we will be able to solve more interesting problems, and solving interesting problems creates value. And that value pays for an even deeper bench. That what we know, is that when we work in collaboration, whether it’s the open hands off collaboration of much of published science or the face-to-face collaboration that’s possible, in things like Team programming, it makes no sense rationally, economically, or morally to say to a whole bunch of people, “You can’t play, you’re not welcome here”.

It’s really straightforward. As our culture moves forward, what we have to figure out how to do, is undo the brainwashing. To start as early as we possibly can with expectations about what it means to lead and what means to solve an interesting problem. So, I’m sorry, Tom Hanks is busy, and he won’t be able to be in your movie. The good news is there’s lots of people you can call.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with a metaphor and question from last time.

Thanks, as always for your questions and comments. You can ask your own at Akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K. Click the appropriate button while you’re there, and check out the show notes.

Hey Seth, this is Chad from Madison, Wisconsin. You’ve spoken and written about education quite a bit, and also mentioned that you taught young people how to canoe every summer for a number of years, I was wondering what are the most important things to teach someone before they even get into a canoe for the first time, and one of the most important things to teach someone after they get in and start to paddle? Thank you Seth for always showing up in shipping. And, of course, you’re probably reading my mind and know this question isn’t necessarily about canoeing.

You know me too well. Yes, I was reading your mind and thank you for the chance to share a metaphor here. If you’re going to teach somebody something scary and skill-based, like style canoeing, it helps a great deal to teach somebody important skills before they get into the boat. In this case, the skill is possibility. Imagining that it is possible.

Enrolment – believing that you can actually learn something – signing up for the journey, not standing there with your arms folded, waiting for wisdom to come to you, but instead eagerly leaning in, choosing to learn something. So, I bring a lot of hoopla to the canoe dock because canoeing is a labor, a labor of love, and if you don’t love it, it’s hard to do the labor.

And so that hoopla – the energy that we share with each other – long before the boat is even in the water, is critical. It turns out that doing something with a student, with an enrolled individual who’s eager to go with you, is a hundred times more effective than doing it to them. And then the second half of your question, “In the boat?”.

Well, that one’s easy. In the boat – it’s how do you sit. Are you grounded? Where are your knees and your butt? How tall are you? How are you breathing?

There are other people who would rather teach you how to put your hands in your arms and all sorts of weird akimbo positions, but no, that’s not really what matters. I can tell within 10 seconds of somebody getting in a canoe, whether they’re going to learn something today or not, because of how they sit. Because, they’re either fighting the system, struggling to find their balance, or they are embracing it – keeping their center of gravity low.

At the very same time, their soul, their spirit and their head is reaching skyward. Those two things, possibility enrolment before, and grounding and posture within, open the door for all sorts of forward motion. When we say to a kid, “You need to learn this because it will be on the test tomorrow,” we are doing education to them – compliance, power, coercion, control.

So what I’ve learned is that, while it’s tempting to spend all our time on compliance and control, while it’s tempting to raise our voice or to insist that people pay more attention, in fact all of the effort we put in to setting the table, to opening the door, to leaving space for possibility and enrolment changes the entire process. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> -the-power-of-search- <==

Here is the surprising first law of search. Any effective search engine will sooner or later be corrupted. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about the miracle. That is search. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Search is in fact, a miracle just about anything in the world can be found just about instantly from the comfort of your chair. Or if you’re standing outside with a phone, just using your fingertips, that was impossible to comprehend 30 years ago, 50 years ago. It belonged in a science fiction book, but search search is fascinating because search is actually An engine of attention and attention leads to money.

And in our capitalist based culture money changes the culture quietly day-by-day search has been changing our culture and we might not even have noticed. This is a collection of a whole bunch of random thoughts that add up to a simple alternative and maybe some insight about how our culture has changed. And the first thought is this smart people, smart people. I know technical people sometimes confuse search with browsing.

They’re really different. You have a browser on your computer and a browser on your phone. Maybe it’s called safari or Brave or Chrome or Firefox.

This is software software that was originated by Netscape, but it’s software.

That allows you to convert the code that is behind the world wide web and put things on your screen. That you understand. It’s understandable that people confuse it with search because the winners in search have invested billions and billions of dollars to also build browsers. The biggest winner. Of course is Google.

I first encountered Google when I was 15 vice presidents at Yahoo, at the time Yahoo called itself a search engine, but they weren’t they were a directory that there were more than 1000 people in one big room librarians. He’s running the operation painstakingly going through the entire internet, one Link at a time and sorting pages into categories, sort of like the Dewey Decimal System.

And if they decided your page was better than somebody else’s page, it moved up and if it moved up you got more traffic and traffic. Traffic has always been the lifeblood of the internet that everybody who’s investing in the internet is paying attention to traffic because some percentage of that. Eric turns into money.

So Yahoo decided to keep building and building this directory. And one point there were a hundred and eighty Three Links on the home page of Yahoo. And as Yahoo! Grew it became basically the entire internet. The way AOL was the internet before the internet that their goal was to get people to come and to stay more clicks per visit and everything. They built into their directory.

Lead to more Yahoo!

Based Services. So people would stay because they knew that the more you stayed, the more you would click in the more, they would make.

And this little upstart called, Google came along and they only had two links on their homepage. And the reason is they built something to get people to leave, not to get them to stay, and they would charge a toll, and the tall. They would charge would be ads that appeared right next to the search results. Because the pitch to The Advertiser was, well, they’re Anyway, maybe they’ll leave and go to your site instead a smaller side about how Google’s brilliant ad model Works.

Google didn’t have much of a sales force at the beginning. And in fact, their Salesforce still doesn’t really matter that much because they’re not selling brand advertising as much as direct marketing advertising that you can measure. And the deal was really simple. Someone’s going to do a search on the term.

Do you want to buy the ads next? It to that term or not. And at the beginning, those terms were bought for a nickel, a dime, 15 cents, almost nothing, and they were usually bought by a competitor. So someone Google themselves. Don’t do it too much. You might go blind, someone Google themselves and saw that their competitor was running an ad.

So they bid more to take that spot back. It was brilliant because not only was it self service and low cost for Google. But it spread because the very people who could buy the ad were busy Googling themselves. Well, here’s what happens and auction is now being held, how much are you willing to pay for this person who showed intent in this moment to click on an ad.

Let’s say it’s worth $9 to you to get someone to click over to your site, nine dollars, because every new customers worth 100 and 1 out of 10, people who click convert to To being a customer and nine bucks. You’re fine. You’re not delighted but you can afford it. So how much would you be willing to bid probably $8.99 at least which means that of all the profit going to all the websites? When there is an auction, people are willing to bid a penniless which means that like the landlord who owns Main Street. Most of the profit isn’t going to the person who’s running the Yet it’s going to the person who’s selling the ad and from the start this ad idea was absolutely brilliant. Bill gross was one of the Pioneers behind it.

But Google took it and modified it and made it their own and it is an extraordinary engine of profit and they have used that profit to defend search ever since why is it for example, that apple? Who doesn’t have a search engine if you’re on Safari and you’re looking for something, you know what you’re going to use to look for it.

Probably Google because Google pays Apple billions and billions of dollars not to build a search engine. So search search changing the culture, a friend wanted a wedding cake. Not just any wedding cake, a wedding cake. Based on a Latin American Conchita cake, which is usually used for coming out party for 16 years. Holds where to find one of those.

Well, thanks to search. They were able to find one about seven neighborhoods over from where we live in less than five minutes. This Bakery exists because search allows them to exist, but search isn’t just Google. Let’s think about Yelp. For example, in many ways, Yelp is a better search engine then Google because it is much more focused.

Tell me where you are. Tell me the category of what You’re looking for and I will find you one of just a handful sometimes of options, maybe 100, maybe 1,000. But because it is limited, because not just anybody can have a Yelp listing. You need to have a business. People can go to Yelp returns really interesting. Search results. Consider my friend jr.

Jr. Is an appliance repair person. And yet, he doesn’t have a fancy franchise. He doesn’t have an office. He doesn’t even have a truck instead. He has Highest rating in all of Yelp, for appliance repair in the Bronx. And as a result, if you do the search for appliance repair and are smart enough to sort by rating, there. He is, and you text him, and he comes to your house, in a little Toyota Camry, and he fixes what’s in your house right away.

No hassle, not a lot of money and he moves on to the next gig. His business could not have existed in the days of the Yellow Pages. The thing about search is it’s a form of intention. It’s a way of announcing to the world that you’re looking for something. And that’s why Amazon makes billions of dollars from search. Not from the things you’re buying but from selling people ads, right next to the searches, you were choosing to do one of the most profitable publishing ventures. In history, was the Yellow Pages.

Yellow Pages is a search engine for the real world. Better place to run an ad for your pizza, place, or car repair. Then someplace where people are looking for pizza, or car repair. So, one of the things that we have to keep in mind as we think about search and how it gets corrupted, is how visible is it? When somebody is paying to game the system because no one cared that people were gaming, the system in the Yellow Pages.

You could tell a big ad was bigger than a small ad. In fact, you were attracted to the big ad because it meant that the company was healthier. It was a form of signaling, go to the people with big ad and they’re less likely it would seem to go out of business but in online search, it’s a lot more subtle. It’s a lot more difficult to tell who is paying and who’s paying who, but back to the idea of Google.

When Bing came out from Microsoft, it was supposed to be an alternative search engine. And at the time, most people who used it said, I like Google better and yet in blind studies where you just cover up the logo at the top and concealed where the search engine results are coming from people like being results, just as much, if not more than Google results. So why is it when I add back the logos and The typeface people like Google results better.

It’s because Google showed up at exactly the right time to make a huge. Number of people feel powerful that Google got out of the way. They connected people to what they were looking for. And they did this at the very same time. They were making billions and billions of dollars not a year, but every few months because each one of those searches is a category in and of itself.

For advertising revenue and Google didn’t stop there. They kept building up more and more things around, their search results to increase their profitability. If a competitor came along, they did whatever they could to keep that competitor from siphoning off search. Another. Aside about online search. Is this, when there are lots of different search engines, they’re going to use different algorithms to figure out who to put it the But when there’s only one search engine that’s winning when they have 80 or 90% market share.

Well, then everybody who’s trying to game that system has an incentive to play by one set of SEO. Search engine optimization rules that they will bend their site their entire business model to please. That one search engine. We all would benefit from diversity in search because if there is, Lots of different ways that people are finding websites. Then websites have to be just good, not good for a search engine, but good for everybody.

And so one of the reasons to root for Bing and DuckDuckGo, and a cozia, is that as the market share of this second search engine grows, it gets harder for a site to game, both of them. And so it creates a dynamic where we end up being more likely, to find sites that Actually looking for simply because there are multiple search engines pointing us to where we seek to go.

Google has not like blogs very much because blogs are sort of enough them to search. You don’t need a search engine to subscribe to a Blog and then it arrives day after day after day. So Google built Google Reader, the best blog reader and lots and lots of blog readers moved their reading habits to Google Reader.

And then Google shut it down leaving blog readers to go to their search engine to type in what they were looking for, but I’m not here to rant about this. I’m here to talk about the fact that we have, not really noticed how much power and how much money go to whoever is controlling search and I began by pointing out that search will eventually be corrupted. It will be corrupted in one of a few ways.

The first one, the most common one. Is that once companies realize That search is their lifeblood. They will change what they do to get more than their fair share of search.

And so SEO gets hacked.

If you’ve tried to look up a recipe lately, what you may notice is it begins with paragraph after paragraph of stories and photos all about the person who wrote the recipe and their family and everything else before they get to the recipe. Why do they do that? They do it because the SEO for recipes. He tells them that they have to because maybe they’re looking at time spent on site. I’m not exactly sure why.

But it spread or consider the locksmiths in quotation marks who pretend to be a local locksmith. And when you find them via search, looking for a local locksmith, then hold your inquiry hostage and sell it to the highest bidder who is actually a locksmith or consider all of the websites that race to the bottom. Trying to Like, they have what you want, but they really don’t. It’s a bait and switch. They’re working to hustle the search engine to get more than their fair share.

Another way search engines can become corrupt is when the people who work at the search engine and please don’t believe it’s some magical algorithm. The last time, I checked more than 3,000 people were working full time at Google to feed information in to their algorithm to decide who wins search, So what could happen is someone who works at a search engine, could freelance on the side or simply inject their point of view, changing the search results.

And the third thing, which is happening, more and more is, it can corrupt itself. It can decide to send you when you do a search, not to the thing, you would be best served by but to the site, or to the link that would best serve them. And because there’s so much money on the table. This becomes part of the deal.

So we’ve gotten a great deal from search for a long time. It’s free. After all, we trade attention for wisdom and insight and most of all that page, or that restaurant or that, appliance repair person. We were looking for, but like all things that are off to a good start. It doesn’t last forever. So, one of the things to keep in mind is that Google in particular is I think an enormous amount of information about you and they’re using that information ostensibly to serve you better by putting up ads along the way that reflect places you’ve been in the past, but it makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

So there’s a website called DuckDuckGo. Another crazy name brought to you by the internet. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn’t track anything. It’s super careful with your information and it doesn’t use it. It for you or against you. A lot of people switch to DuckDuckGo. It’s a fast-growing search engine.

It uses Bing to power it. So they don’t have to do a lot of the technical back end. They simply have to isolate you from being and wherever that information is going to go about a year and a half ago. I discovered a different search engine, one called a cozia. And when I started this episode of the podcast, all it was going to be A simple commercial for a Cozier because I think it’s that cool, but I decided to fill you in on a lot of what I know about search engines because I was there.

But before I tell you about a cozia, I want to tell you about how Yahoo. Originally, one Yahoo had competitors when they started competitors, like lycos and Alta Vista. Well, part of the reason they want is they had an easy to spell and easy to remember name. This cannot be over emphasized, but the other reason, They won.

Is that Stanford kicked him off the University’s computers? The two guys who started Yahoo, David and Jerry did it as a school project, but it was so popular. It was really slowing down, Stanford’s computers. So they gave the Yahoo guys little bit of notice and then they had to get off campus. Well, it turned out my friend, Lisa knew some people at Netscape and Netscape had some extra servers available.

So Yahoo! Got hosted. Netscape servers for a little while and then in an enormous Stroke of Luck the folks at Netscape added a little search bar to the top of the Netscape browser. Guess which search engine they pointed to? Well, they wanted one that wouldn’t crash. They wanted one that they knew could handle the traffic. Well, they happen to be hosting Yahoo.

So boom. There was this was not corrupt. They didn’t get paid to do this and it was one of the last times that money didn’t change hands when we looked at search. So Yahoo, eventually moved off to its own servers, which is a whole project unto itself, but back to Story about the cozia search uses power.

It’s actually extremely difficult.

Technically Way Beyond my understanding to build racks and racks of computers. So when you type in something, I don’t know, David Kerr hand into a search engine. It finds what you are looking for multiply that times billions. And you can see that an enormous amount of power is needed to power search.

And Google, as the dominant player, uses an enormous amount of power. Some of it is renewable. A lot of it isn’t. But, they are a net negative on our environment. They are trying but not nearly hard enough to make up for the damage. They’re doing well almost two years ago, a year and a half. I switched my search engine to something called a cozia.

You can find it at the carbon Almanac dot org slash search. And what I did was One time, click one button and it changed which search engine my browser would go to. Every time. I did a search and here’s the thing. Every time I do 48 searches a cozia a non-profit, a b Corp, based in Germany. Every time I do about 50 searches a cozy of plants a tree.

They don’t plant a tree in their backyard. They have an entire team of tree-planting people and they go around the world planting trees where they’re most likely to thrive. I’ve and do some good. And I’m here to tell you that I’ve planted hundreds and hundreds of trees so far. And so, can you for free?

So that’s why the carbon Almanac teamed up with a cozia to make it easy for people to switch their search engine. If you go to the carbon Almanac dot org slash search, you can switch, you’ll also be using bing one small aside. As I wrap this up one person, I persuaded to switch. Had been using DuckDuckGo but then they switched to a Cozier.

And she came back to me about a week later, Sara, I switch back. I said why she said, because the search results on DuckDuckGo were better. I said, did you know that they were the same that DuckDuckGo and it cozia use exactly the same search engine behind the scenes. Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of placebos. There’s even placebos in search. Anyway, I’ve ranted, the only upside for me, is knowing that you were. Using a search engine that is faster that respects your privacy more that isn’t cluttered with ads.

That doesn’t track you around the internet and that plants trees. So give it a try. If you don’t like it. I totally get it. You can go back to anything you were using before. But I just wanted to rant for a minute about the invisible power of search and just how much money is involved. It’s a lot, it adds up.

Thanks for paying attention. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts, the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. Yeah, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that and so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what you’re interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please.

Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines. Add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hogs. And this is anupam. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son.

Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you.

If you got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s Aki. And be o.l. Iink and click the appropriate button to questions this time. They’re bigger than they sound. Here we go. I really like your discussion about.

Can in terms of telemedicine, one of the other aspects of it that I’ve been looking into is the fact that we’re all hospitals and lots of parts of the country are closing down, from lack of business and using telemedicine could basically offload a lot of the medical calls or happening in large.

Metropolitan areas to these more rural areas and keep the services alive for the local populations, the challenge. I’m wondering about my I have some ideas on is, how do we get insurance companies, and large Health companies to recognize the value and potential of telemedicine as it relates to leveraging underutilized hospitals.

Thanks, again for what you do. Bye.

Thank you for this Rob. Thank you for thinking strategically. Thank you for caring about communities. And it really teased up an interesting question, which I’ll start with. Do people who work for insurance companies? Are they evil? And if they are where they evil before they got there and I hope we can agree that they’re not evil and that going to work for an insurance company doesn’t suddenly make you a bad person.

However, and it’s a big however people work for an insurance company. Have a boss and their boss has a boss and their boss has a boss and that structure the culture of work. Changes what we keep track of and what they keep track of insurance, companies are two things one. How did we used to do it yesterday that the insurance industry has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and it is inherently conservative.

You get ahead in the insurance business, not by doing crazy. New ideas. You get ahead by sticking with a status quo, that’s working and the The second thing that people ask is, is this going to increase or decrease our claims situation? In other words, is it cheaper? Not is it cheaper for all patients, all the time.

Not will this lead to a general increase in health among the population? No, it’s will honoring this kind of practice this kind of expense over all creation. Moore claims that cost us more money or fewer claims that cost us less money. Because we know, for example, that lifestyle changes changes in the way we exercise, and how we eat and going for walks. And how often we see a doctor and prenatal care, and all those other things will increase, the effectiveness of medicine in our country that will make people healthier.

But insurance companies, though, they have played with these ideas, certainly couldn’t be Be considered as going all-in and there are a couple reasons. One is, it’s scary. It’s about changing the infrastructure doing business in a whole new way. And second. If you began by saying we’re going to pay you to eat vegetables. We’re not going to hassle. You ever about things, like prenatal care.

We’re going to lobby and work hard to do things like tax cigarettes. Well, those things are going to cost a lot of money at first, and they’re going to cost you money. Even though they’re not helping, just the people who are your subscribers. So those things happen, gradually, if at all. So, the pitch to the insurance company about telemedicine is not, this is better for the rural hospital.

This is better for health in general to pitch. Is yes, there are parts of this that are new but the people you’re giving money to the claimed, you’re paying out. It’s already going to people, you are paying through claims. So there’ll be no giant shifts there. In addition, the kind of people who are putting in claims right now for 10,000 or 20,000 dollars.

We can show you will be putting in claims for a thousand or two thousand dollars because they’re getting the same sorts of care for the same sorts of illnesses, just in a dramatically more efficient way and they’re not going to go for those treatments more often. They’re simply going to get better. Would you like to Try a pilot program for that. Or should I put you down as saying? No, we don’t even want to know about it.

That’s how I would bring it to an insurance company. Thank you for giving me a chance to rant about this. I’m sure. My answer is incomplete and partially incorrect.

Hey Seth, this is John from Chicago first and foremost, your podcast makes my day. Every time I listen to it influences, My overall perspective and just really, really great work. Thank you so much. At any rate. I lead a creative agency where I feel we’ve figured out culture and have an incredible team of passionate folks.

That honestly, I feel lucky to work with every day when we were smaller and growing. Our model was pretty much do the best work possible. Regardless of the project size something that in fact, we still believe in today and still do your recent cast on enforcement and enrollment really struck a chord on a particular paradigm. Doc’s. That we are currently looking at, which is how to do the best work possible versus margin when working with fixed budgets and especially with creative teams.

As I’m sure you can imagine approaching everything with the same passion and effort. Regardless of budget can have an impact on scalability and profitability. So, you know, going through kind of a trend of what got us here. Might not get us there. One of the things that we’ve sought to focus on is you’re not totally. We change our mentality, but start having budget as part of the conversation with creative teams.

We believe, and kind of, proved it out with a few tests. That enforcement is not going to be the way meeting telling. Folks. They have X amount of hours to accomplish. Why? And then hoping that something good comes out of that. You know, honestly, we see that as a path to destroyed our culture. So enrollment really kind of seems to be the key and I’m curious on your thoughts for motivating. Creativity and profitability within an organization.

Thanks for all you do. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Thank you, John and congratulations on the growth of your agency. I think that there is a little bit of a framing problem here. Several parts that are framed in ways that are going to get, in your way. I want to highlight them, not because of your agency, but because in general, I think we often make these mistakes, one of these things is the phrase, the best work possible.

I’m sorry, you’re not doing the best work possible. You’re not doing the best work possible because you’re not spending five or ten years on each client project because you’re not having George Clooney, do the voiceovers, because you’re not having some Academy award-winning cinematographer, do the footage and on and on, and on, and on, you’re always doing the best work possible. Within reason, you might not say within reason, but you’ve decided what reason is and within that boundary of time and money.

You’ve decided that your culture is about doing the best possible work in those boundaries, but leaving it, unsaid is really dangerous. Because now you’ve limited what sort of clients you can take in and you’ve made people who work on smaller projects, believe that bringing quote, passion and effort to the smaller projects is somehow slumming it because it’s only the right sized projects that matter, this is nonsense.

Your culture is About mutual respect about doing work within a set of boundaries that you can point to with pride. And the thing is how we approach our boundaries determines, what sort of professional. We are don’t take projects. If you can’t respect the boundaries, if you can’t imagine how amazing work that you are proud of, could be done for ten thousand dollars for this client. Don’t take the gig.

That what makes a problem? A problem is, it has boundaries to it? The boundaries are a feature, not a bug. You’re not allowed to say, oh, this would be great. If you would only pay us more money because the client says back to you, you would be great. If you would do it with pride for the amount of money. You said it would cost and that’s what makes this work interesting to begin with the boundaries of how many characters go in at.

Eat the boundaries of how long a movie in the movie theater needs to be that when a director becomes a prima. Donna, they start to whine about the boundaries. They start to make movies that are unwatchable because they take the boundaries out. I’m in favor of putting the boundaries in, if you have a budget, make the budget. If you have a deadline, make the deadline that the culture is not quote.

Best work possible for any amount of money or any amount of time. It’s we’re professionals. Al’s and we love boundaries. We do the best work possible within the boundaries. We already agreed to. If you can reframe it, that way, if you can celebrate and make Heroes out of the people who did great work with tiny, tiny room for error, while, then the culture is going to change, isn’t it?

Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300. Volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -the-order-of-that-song- <==

Have you spent much time thinking about that song that song that every single person listening to this podcast knows every word of that song that no one has ever bought on a record album that song that we teach kids from a young age that song that has such power that song that is, in fact a metaphor for cultural change and determining how people engage with one another.

Yeah, you know, the song I’m talking about ABCDE. E f, g. I’ll let you fill in the rest. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about the power of culture and alphabetical order. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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That’s a are M IND, a DOT.

I hope this doesn’t sound too trivial, because the thing about alphabetical order is that everyone knows it? We know it for a bunch of important reasons and no one particularly cares about it. There is no one arguing, that P should come before. The letter M. There are definitely Scholars who are arguing about the origins of alphabets, and the difference between an abjad and an advocate Dairy, an abjad for those of you listening. On is just the continents.

Where as an advocate Dairy is the full alphabet. There are Scholars arguing about whether omega as in Alpha to Omega A to Z, whether Omega is a letter at all. There are no alphabets. That we know of that use the minimum possible number of letters. But in order for something to be an actual alphabet, it can’t have the maximum number of letters. Because at that point it starts Being ideograms and pictures, not letters, letters are an amazing, amazing invention.

It’s hard to imagine how someone pioneered and then got accepted the whole idea of letters. But then once we had letters, we had to teach them to our kids because like so many of the cultural things we’ve talked about on this podcast, if people don’t know what the culture contains, it’s not a culture people have to understand. A reference. When you say bye. Bye. Miss American Pie. What are you talking about? Or else?

It just sounds like you’re babbling. Well, alphabets in particular. We need to indoctrinate kids from a very young age. Probably not in Doctrine it because it’s so useful. Here is the alphabet. But in order to teach the alphabet if we did it all in sort of a random roll your own fashion, we might miss a letter.

We want to make sure we’re teaching the whole alphabet and nothing that doesn’t belong. Ang in the alphabet and not leave out any other letters. And so, alphabetical, order is born. It’s a fantastic way to make sure you’re not leaving anything out. And then we get to the heart. The question that I asked the Library of Congress and it took them three months to get back to me with the answer. And they couldn’t really disagree with me. In English, is the alphabet in that order, because of that song, because it might be, it might be that. The reason we, Understand alphabetical, order is not because when we were little kids, we opened the American Heritage dictionary, and learned the order.

It’s because someone taught us the song. And so the punchline of my metaphor is if you want to create a cultural norm, it helps to make up your version of the song Because if people will all benefit from a consistent API that works the same way then whoever writes. It’s the song is probably going to have their answer. Persist.

The Phoenicians were great Traders and they brought things all over the world. And one of the things you need to do, when you bring things all over the world is have inventories and lists. And one of the things you need to do when you have lists is you need a way to keep things in order and check them off numbers, of course, are always in numerical order. We needed something to come after eight. And so we invented 9, but it wasn’t clear. We needed something to come. X.

And so we invented why the letters were there. First so alphabetical order became enforced. Because if you wanted to do trade, if you wanted to interact with other people, not only did you need to know how to read their words, but you needed to way to put their words in order. And so what does that have to do with you creator of culture? Somebody living in the modern era long after cuneiform and other things back in the origins of Semitic languages.

In the Fertile Crescent. Well, the answer is when we are dealing with change. When we are dealing with technology. We are regularly inventing new things, new terms, new ways to talk about things. So the hashtag on Twitter just came to be one day. Chris suggested it, someone else used it and if enough people used it it caught on.

I’ve had some interesting experiences with trying to do this. I learned the hard way that it’s not enough for it to be a good idea. There needs to be a song, there needs to be a group enforcement mechanism, a very long time ago. I wrote a book that I’m not super proud of called email, addresses of the Rich and Famous had a great title. It was a cool idea. Here are six hundred email addresses at the dawn of the internet with actual real people at the other side people like Roger Ebert. Here’s Roger Ebert, email address and the idea was that you shouldn’t Miss. Use it. You shouldn’t type in all the addresses on the list and then spam everybody.

If you want to ask Roger, Ebert a question or Bill Gates, a question. Well, here’s your email address. Go ahead and do it. That’s what I meant. When I wrote the book, but of course, human nature being what it is, people abused it, but that’s not the point. The point, is that in the introduction to the book.

I made a suggestion and my suggestion was simple. It was that if you are sending an email to anyone anywhere in the world, And it involves a commercial transaction. You need to put a dollar sign at the top of the subject line, first letter dollar sign and then follow it with what you’re sending. Because when you get junk mail at home, it’s got the dollar sign on the envelope. You can tell you don’t have to scan very deeply to tell the difference between a letter from your law firm and a letter from somebody who wants you to extend your warranty and when someone does try to confuse you or trick you, you’re annoyed.

And so there was a Cultural Dynamic for what kind of stamp and what kind of envelope junk mail hat? And so I proposed, look, we don’t have a centralized enforcement mechanism, email is in fact an open API. Let’s all do this because if we all do this it would be really easy to build filters to put all the email that had dollar signs in the subject line into one folder that you could look at later.

Please remember, this is long long before Gmail or even Hotmail and it was just a hack on my part and I thought it was a good idea. And no one did it. On the other hand. I did a book a long time ago called the smiley dictionary in which I listed what had been going around the internet for a while which are hundreds, and hundreds of Smiley’s, which then became emojis. And now, in fact, there is an emoji committee that approves, which kinds of little smiley faces are going to get built in to the next generation of smart phone. The point of the smiley dictionary. Was it was a tool that people can Look at his a oh, this is what a puzzled Smiley looks like. It was like the song and what we see, then is in order to create a cultural norm around something where people don’t care so much about the specifics, but care a lot about enforcement and consistency of the specifics.

The answer is, we need to write a song. The answer is we need to write down the method. The answer is not only Only do we have to establish the glossary what this means, or what? That means. We have to come up with a way to consistently and persistently, repeat that. Because here’s the thing, people, teach their kids alphabetical order because they want them all to know the same order.

Because knowing the same order is useful and knowing the wrong order is a problem. There was a time when I was teaching, little kids how to say it backwards, ey X, WV U, TS R QP. Oh, that’s off the top of my head without looking at it. And if a whole bunch of parents from Brooklyn started, teaching their kids alphabetical order and backwards there would be chaos when they got to kindergarten, but that’s not happening because the stakes are too high and the song is too clear.

So perhaps it’s worth thinking about things. We don’t usually think about maybe the alphabet is in that order because of that song and maybe that thing in your organization that’s contentious is contentious simply. Because no one’s wrote the song yet because generally when people come together, their goal is not to have an argument there. Our goal is to be in sync.

People Like Us, do things like this. People Like Us do things like this, needs to soundtrack and if there isn’t one then people who want to manipulate us, people who want to divide us will show up with their own version of the soundtrack. And as we’ve seen in this long tail world of media that we live in right Now it can be really dangerous and expensive.

We can see that the number one cause of death in the state of Texas in the United States. Is a virus that is now completely preventable. Thanks to a vaccine. But someone wrote a song or the version of a song that spread People Like Us do things like this. We’ve got to figure out which song we want to sing. I’m going to leave you with what I think is one of the funniest SNL sketches of all time years and years. Years ago, there was a controversy in this country. My country United States about switching to the metric system.

And at some level, the metric system is a lot like alphabetical order because there is no real reason to prefer inches and feet to mm and M. Yes, you can do some math in your head slightly differently, but we really needed was everyone to just agree because computers can handle conversions. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was we were Looking for an order. So, in this sketch, Dan Aykroyd, shares his suggestion for where the metric system, could go next. Hello tonight. I’d like to talk to you about how the new metric-system conversion will affect you in one of a series of public re-education programs. Designed to make Americans aware of the metric conversion to take place in the next 10 years. Now, most Americans already know that the measurement of miles will be discarded in favor of kilometers a system of measurement based on the unit of tens and already in use in most. Most of the world, few people however know about the new metric. Alphabet, the DECA bet decade from the Greek 10 and bet from our own alphabet.

Let’s take a look. Shall we a b c and d are most popular letters will remain the same EMF, however will be combined and graphically simplified to one character the groupings ghi and Elemental will be condensed to single letters. Incidentally, a boon to those, who always thought that LMNO was one letter anyway, and finally, the so-called trash letters or pqrstuvwxyz MZ will be condensed to this easily recognizable dark character.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine ten. Ten letters, ten fingers, simple, isn’t it? Join me next time when we explore changes, in alphabet soup, and spelling bee contest rules, but now let’s sing that old childhood. Alphabet song abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. EFG as we will hear it in the future.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. And I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. It says, it’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Holly said, this is anupam. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l, i and K and click the appropriate button.

There are show notes there as well. Two good questions this week. Here we go. Hey, Seth, this is Nathan in Jackson, Mississippi again. And I had a question that’s been kind of hovering in the back of my mind ever since, you talked about the linchpin jobs. And one of your most recent podcast episodes and for the second time in the last two years. I am faced with the potential for a layoff from a second company. It’s nothing that I’ve done the company’s not doing well financially and I think the only reason that I survived the first round of layoffs is because I made myself indispensable as being the go-to. Go to person for emergencies, if content needed to be created of any kind. If a project needed to be done, they knew that they could count on me to get it done by the deadline no matter what, but now I am faced with the possibility of having to go on the job hunt again, and I’m thinking about like, you know.

Networking and that kind of thing. And everybody says you have to use LinkedIn and social media nowadays to make contacts and get jobs because the job posts, you know, are you have like a four percent chance of getting a job through a job posting and I start thinking about the LinkedIn algorithm that it only favors you. If you create lots of content with lots of Engagement has to have pictures. It has to be video nowadays. Has been written content doesn’t work. You have to have lots of the right hashtags and link to other accounts. And it sounds like you’re essentially having to do, you know LinkedIn, SEO or social media SEO or whatever platform you’re using and, you know, especially now with more and more work being virtual, people being able to work remotely from anywhere.

How do you get jobs? You know, I don’t necessarily want to spend Hours a day networking and creating spammy content on LinkedIn or other social media sites, and Gore copying and pasting my blog posts and making them fit. The latest social media algorithm and requirements, that kind of thing. And I’m just, I’m wondering like in this day and age, what do you do to get in front of the right people, too?

Get jobs.

Thanks for this one. You regularly show up with great questions that appeal to lots of people. So here we go. There’s some real misconceptions about how LinkedIn Works, how LinkedIn makes profit and how jobs find people and people find jobs. Most people don’t know that more than half of linkedin’s Revenue comes from Headhunters, paying them, for access to information about people on the site that The scenes they are reaching out to people who are in demand offering them jobs, getting them to quit, where they’re working now and come work somewhere else. But the mythology of LinkedIn is that if you treat it like a social network, if you’re constantly busy, posting stuff, if you’re finding friends or followers or whatever you want to call them, that somehow success on LinkedIn translates into getting a better job. And I’m sure there are examples of this actually happening, but that’s not really the way. Most people get a great job.

Most people get a great job because unlike not great jobs, great jobs tend to travel through two paths. One the open call to lots and lots of people and S. Who do you know that? Who do you know, might involve hiring a Headhunter but it also might involve someone saying, oh, yeah, I used to work with She’s amazing.

There are networks of people who know networks of people and we’ve spoken on this podcast before of how hard it is. To throw your resume over the transom. Because lots of people are trying to do it transfers really high people don’t actually read your resume, you get filtered out and they don’t actually come to know you when they decide what to do, but if somebody looks at your LinkedIn page, and it’s so Solid solid in the sense that a resume is solid solid. In the sense that you have connected with the right networks of people.

That’s probably enough, unless you’re a writer by trade, the fact that you’ve written. Lots and lots and lots of LinkedIn posts probably isn’t going to get you a job as a process engineer. What’s going to get you? A job at the process engineer is that you have a reputation among process Engineers. You can earn that reputation by helping others find jobs. Could earn it by writing actual useful content leading-edge content about process engineering.

You could do it by showing up in the world in a public way with actual work product about process. Engineering that others, come to see and respect but the faux networking that goes on in a social network. That still is not a replacement for the actual networking, that leads actual people to get jobs. ABS. They actually want.

And so the opportunity is to lean, really hard into how can I be of service? How can I be of service to my community, to the people who I might even think of as my competition? How can I end up being one of the officers of the trade Association? How can I sponsor a conference? How can I put together a newsletter for people in my industry?

That what you’re looking to do is learn. Both status and affiliation in the smallest possible Niche where you can be seen as the obvious one to be considered by just a few people. Because when we’re not part of a network, it looks like there’s a vast vast world out there that we have to impress. But once we found a hundred or a thousand or possibly 10,000 people we care about and we ignore everybody else.

It’s much easier to show up in a way that we’re proud of. I hope that helps. Thanks. Hi. Seth. This is Phil in Indiana in the United States. I have a question about leverage and specifically, two points of how status can sometimes in my perspective, get in the way of Leverage and leverage. You talked about the concept of increasing access to high quality experiences content through technology, whether that be a lecture information, on the web, whatever it is getting that. Two people effectively. So the class can focus on discussion and Concepts and facilitation rather than lecturing and I love that idea. I’m in training and development and organization development myself.

And so I think that’s great. But what I find is that sometimes not all the time, but occasionally status gets in the way of that occurring where someone wants to be in the front of the room, giving the lecture when maybe they’re not the best to do it. So, I’m curious. How can we overcome that issue of status to heighten status somewhere else? So way the front of the room is not the most powerful position to be in the second point of status. I think it’s in the way of Leverage is when we try to create these communities. Like you said and Leverage The Smalls viable, audience getting delighting people and bringing them in.

But sometimes when we create those communities, like I’m trying to do within an organization, it gets to be about us as the person creating it. Curator the impresario. That’s putting it together. How do we make sure that that status doesn’t come on us as the individual? But on us, as the collective, or us as the change that we make, because I’m having a hard time creating that group of people without it focusing on me, when I want it to be about we and what we do.

Thank you, Seth. This is a really good question with two parts to it. The first one has to do with the front of the room and Status among people who are used to being in the front of the room. One of the things that teachers are trained to do is to own the classroom. And so it feels like slumming it. If you just sit still and have people watch a TED Talk.

That’s why Sal Khan’s idea of assigning the lectures for people to watch at home that Your homework is to watch Best in Class lectures, and that classroom time is for Q&A and interaction. Well, that actually raises the status of that teacher. Sure it’s harder work and if their goal is to do less work just show the lecture in class, but the old model of delivering, a not very good lecture to people who have no choice but to listen to it.

I think that over time people are seeing that doesn’t raise your status in the short run. Run, it gives you a sense of control. But if your status is about being the best teacher that kid ever had, if your status is about your peers seeing that you are getting exceptional reviews from students that’s going to happen because you learn how to communicate and interact and coordinate.

Not because you do almost good lectures, but the second half of your question really interests me because I think there’s a misunderstanding here which Is that everybody wants status in every situation and answer is no not really and indoctrination has a lot to do with this. We have indoctrinated almost everybody including ourselves to resist taking the microphone to resist saying. Follow me that if I’m in a room with 300 people and at the end of the talk, someone says any questions five or six? People might raise their hand? What happened to the other 290 people. So who invested time and money to be there? They have no questions.

Well, as soon as the gig is over, they come up to the platform to the stage to ask me, their secret question in private. Why didn’t they want to ask it in public? Wouldn’t their status have gone up? Well, maybe but it also feels risky. So when we think about building these communities communities of peers.

It is tempting to just keep handing the microphone to other people and And movement that I’ve talked about a little bit which was what happened in zuccotti park job. Seems like a million years ago where they were talking about the 99%. They just kind of hitting the microphone around, and no one said, follow me and that really hindered the forward motion of that movement that there’s nothing wrong with you, assembling a group of people and saying, follow me while also giving people a A chance to grab the mic so that they can say follow me and it takes an enormous amount of effort to do each both either of those things in equal measure to be careful and clear about where you are going inviting people to tag along inviting people to help but also sensing enough about the group to know when it’s time to say here, you take the mic. You take the steering wheel, you drive and there. The roadmap for any of this, to belabor the metaphor that we haven’t yet, figured out the reliable Industrial Way to build resilient peer to peer communities that get stuff done for. Now, what it pays to understand is that the status of the entire group goes up when the group accomplishes something, but that individuals individuals might be keeping track of something different than you are in any given moment.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you all next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300. Volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first.

Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details. Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -seth-and-debbie- <==

About 10 years ago. I got an email. I’d been hoping I would get for a long time. Debbie Millman. One of the greatest interviewers. One of the most talented designers, a brilliant teacher that head of her own program at the School of Visual Arts. Debbie Millman sent me a note asking, if I would come sit with her on stage in Boston and have a conversation, I said, yes, and here it is.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is a special episode. I sewed of akimbo will be back in a second with that interview. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hi Seth, this is an ad for the gulab. He’s we are a group of women who migrated to the US, twenty five to thirty years ago, the professional women who want to give back and we focus on fundraising for health education and hunger. We currently have a Bollywood dance fundraiser going on. I hope you’ll join us.

Look us up at gulab. He’s gu Ellison. Larry a b as in boy. I S. As in Sam dot-org. Thanks.

Debbie’s got a new book out. You can see it in the show notes. It’s all about some of the interviews. She’s done through the years. Debbie has recorded more podcasts and better podcasts than almost any human. I can think of her ability to dig deep to be kind to connect. It sits right next to her, her extraordinary skill as a designer, and a teacher.

Thanks for bringing out the best in me. Debbie. Here we go.

Hell. Hello, Sam. How are you? Good morning everybody. Thank you so much for coming out. So, early, you said you had a big living room, but I didn’t know his. This thing. Lisa gave us a nice cushy chairs.

Thank you for doing this. Thank you for being here. I was doing this is our third interview. So in preparation for our interview, I figured that I would Review all the work that you’ve done, at least, all the books that you’ve done since the last time we spoke, which meant I had to read about five or six books.

And I know you don’t like to Shield books. Seth doesn’t keep track of his book sales at all, which I find kind of revelatory and wonderful, but I happened to get a book. That was very unexpected. It’s a book called V is for vulnerable and the subtitle is life outside. The comfort zone in ABC for grown-ups.

And I thought, oh, this is nice and I can give it to my little niece Rebecca. She’s three and a half. I’ll give it to her after probably not, probably not, but, but it’s a sort of strange. It was a strange experience because I was expecting to be expecting it to be funny and sort of witty and pithy, and it’s all those things, but it’s also heartbreaking.

It’s also a little scary and I thought perfect. This is what we can talk about. This is what we can speak our whole our about. Because they think that of all the work that you’ve done. This is hit me, sort of deepest in that it speaks to all the things that I’m worried about my life. And I worry about in general.

And I think that my students worry about my friends worry about, and I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to maybe fly in the Is the very things that we worry about. So I want to start by asking you why The Lorax makes you cry, dr.seuss The Lorax. I thought that maybe we have that in common the reason why.

So if you can share that boy, you’re going like right to write e 9th, Inning. He right, right? The ring right there. Can’t help myself. So the way this book came to be written is Is I did a Kickstarter for a whole bunch of reasons for one of them with the kick, start the writing of Icarus and I wrote Icarus and sort of this Kerouac like breathless type as fast as I could thing before. I spent months editing it.

And one of the last things I wrote was the text of this bright was like a Manifesto and as I finished the Z.

I just started crying and couldn’t stop. Really? Yeah.

Why it was because it was cathartic and it was about us and the people in this room and about what I was wrestling with. And I felt like in as few words, as I had handy. I had managed to get to the truth of so much of what I’ve been trying to say. So we were talking backstage about sort of the one-line pitch of a book. How would you describe this for anybody in the audience? That hasn’t read it? How would you describe the Well.

You know, the thing that it’s interesting, if you do design in the old method of having to send out to have typeset for you and then put it on paper, that was made by someone cutting down a tree and turning into. I mean, there’s all these dependencies that let you create an item that is scarce. And that thing that you created that is scarce has value because scarce and you can sell it.

In the world we live in now, none of those things are true. We don’t know. The people who made the internet. We don’t have to pay them. Right? And we type something, or we design something and can be seen by hundreds of thousands or millions of people if it spreads. That’s a whole new way to think about how we make things, right?

So why bother making a book ever again? What’s the point? If I can reach 10 times in many people with a blog post as well, ever read, one of my books? Yes, you’ve written a book and Developed by the lower, right? So right. So but if I’m going to make a book, there better be a reason experientially. So, in this case, I wanted to capture the way at least I felt as a three year old. When my mom read me a book.

I wanted to capture the way as a parent. I felt when I read a book to my kids and that feeling isn’t something we get. When we hadn’t kid an iPad at a restaurant and they don’t bother me that something magical happened. When we read a book to a kid when we are read a book, so I wanted to steal that feeling, that’s why the format looks like kids book so that I could get to that part of your head.

That was that’s pretty cynical the part of your head that isn’t yet afraid of what other people are going to think of you, the part of your head, that has The Bravery to do this work that matters. If I could steal that and get in, that’s my goal and the Our acts with dr. Seuss did it was so extraordinary is we read something that feels like a kids book and we suddenly have to feel like the steward of the earth.

We have to feel like someone who is doing this, not just for our short-term pleasure. But what am I going to do for Generation number 7. What is the impact? I’m leaving behind. Am I making art for my? Just showing up in a factory to make a paycheck. Those? Those big themes, come right at me. When I read The Lorax and I feel like he is calling me out and I feel like I need to raise the bar for myself.

You write in the book about how you’re trying to get under people’s skin and trying to get people to stop being a spectator in a pond, in the industrial system that raised us. And you talked about how You feel that art is what we’re all meant to do. And The hard work of creating art is something we all want.

And I, it reminded me, this, this this introduction reminded me of Gordon. MacKenzie’s work, some of his work and orbiting the giant hairball. And I recently reread this When I Was preparing to interview Brian Singer because he refers to that in some of his work, and he speaking later today. And so he talks about in his 1/1000 journals movie.

If you ask a Kindergarten class, how many of them are artists, they’ll all raise their hands. Ask the same question of sixth graders and maybe one-third will respond as high school graduates and few will admit to it. What happens to our creativity, when we get older, why it is our creativity change over time. So I wanted to ask you, what you thought, why it is, if we all want to be artists from wearing kindergarten, what happens when, when we get to graduating high school and you will admit it. Why does that change? Yeah.

Well, I mean part of the reason other than your amazing body of work and passion that I wanted to come here is because of the people who are in this Moon.

This is as close as many people get to do that thing that the outside world thinks of as art like making things that are attractive and it can go on a wall or whatever. So the question I would ask the people in this room is how many of you are limited in the work, you do? Because you have lousy clients or bosses who asked you to do work? That’s banal.

Raise your hand. All right, and the problem is, that’s bullshit.

So that is a problem and it is bullshit. We had a we deal with it. What? Because some people deal with it by making great art. Anyway, some people deal with it by being the kind of designer, they set out to do to become and if the clients don’t get it then they better persuade the clients or get new client, but the other way to deal with it in an industrialized world is to accept the fact that we are cogs in the system and we just have to do the best we can given what is put onto us and my thesis Of humanity is that we are not squirrels and if you watch squirrels in the fall, they all do the same thing, right? They hide the day corns and stuff. They never helped each other out and they don’t do anything non squirrel. Like they’re just squirrels that’s their job to be squirrels.

We’re beyond that I would hope. And if we’re spending a lot of time in Squirrel like Behavior, we’re selling ourselves short. That there are so many people on this Earth who don’t have the Leverage. In the trust in the promise that we were lucky enough to be born with. Right that we got this huge Head Start and to use it to just hide acorns, feels to me like a cop-out.

And that when we see the designers that we admire, and the people that we look up to, they also have lousy clients. They also have bosses that are pushing them to fit in, but they refused, right? Because it’s hard to refuse. And that’s the work, the work isn’t colonel. Everyone here knows how to current there when I was learning design, from John mcwade in the before and after days freehand 3.0 you had a trap by hand, right? If you want to color print you gotta like go to each letter and make it a little bigger. Did you travel?

No one knows how to do that anymore? Because it just gets done for you. Kerning just gets done. It’s not, that’s not the craft. The craft is looking the client in the eye and saying, no, that’s the part of the computer is never going to be able to do for us. Now, Tom was talking about this yesterday with Dee Dee Gordon and was talking about how we need to be a bit disagreeable and Edie asked a really important question. And I don’t know if we really got to an answer and it would be interesting to get your perspective. How do you become disagreeable or how do you say no?

And still manage to keep your client? Right? And and Malcolm said, well DD, you know, clearly you’ve been doing it your successful, but for Was it are afraid to do it or for those that don’t know how to do it or for those who just have never done it. How do you do it? How do you get the courage to do it?

All right. So I got to do the 1 minute, Steve pressfield catch up and then we can get on to it. So Steve wrote The War of Art and I was lucky enough to publish do the work which is the beginners version of War of Art and he talks about the resistance and the resistance, which I call the lizard brain is your amygdala. It’s the brain center right? Here. It is so much closer to your spine. No cord that. It can short-circuit what you’re really thinking a second and a half before your creative mind kicks in.

So the my simple example is, you’re on the airplane. Let’s pretend you have a Degree in Aeronautical Engineering and your 20,000 feet. You know, that turbulence has never once caused the plane to crash. Turbulence hits the plane. You don’t keep typing. You use your entire force of will to keep the plane Aloft right lucky for them. You are on the plane and save the day, right?

And you don’t have this whole conversation with yourself about, you know, forces and physics. You just keep the plane Aloft. Well, the resistance is where we get writer’s block. No one gets stalkers Block, No One wakes up in the morning, go. Hmm. But we have to write something down and all of a sudden we freeze, we have to hand something in and that’s why we have a shrekt, the charette exist because we’ve been stalling for three months because that would be scary. But now it’s even scarier to show up at the meeting with nothing. So, The last 24 hours, everyone gets created the discipline here. Then is the first understand that? No might mean. You want to make art, but no might also mean you’re hiding that being disagreeable. Is it perfect way to hide from criticism? Because if you’re disagreeable enough, you won’t have any customers, you won’t have to do anything scary.

So there’s, you know, there’s the well-known curmudgeon Kenny shops in where that little restaurant in, New York. Well, he had a whole bunch of stuff going on in his head. And one of the things he’s got going on, is if you’re annoying enough, customers aren’t going to come and if customers aren’t going to come, you’re not going to be on the hook.

So I think we have to be disagreeable in the service of the client, not disagreeable in the service of the resistance that when we are disagreeable, we’re doing it on behalf of the client achieving more, not our ego achieving more, right? Not us being more famous, but the client getting more of what he or she wants.

Now that means you got to pick clients, not who pay but who want the things that you want and that mindset is, what informs lots of great firms that don’t get bigger. If you’ve decided not to get bigger. That means you only way to take a new client at the fire. An old client. If you adopt that mindset, suddenly, you have total leverage of your client because you’re sitting there, you’re work, keeps getting better and better in a client’s being disagreeable not wanting to do. I think that’s best for them.

You say, you know, what, our foreign policies, we can’t grow. So we’re gonna have to get rid of a client to take a new one. I have great clients who want to come in. Do you want to do this or not? Right? And once you are seen as the person who enables great clients to do great things, you will get greater clients.

If you are seen as the freelancer or the firm that helps mediocre clients, get work with no hassle. Who do you think you’re going to attract mediocre Work Media quickly instead? Yeah, don’t have But they might pay on time. Yeah, so do you use.

So do you you a person that feels that designers and design firm should stay small?

I think that well quick little this is another if that I found very helpful with people, how many of you would describe yourselves as Freelancers. Raise my hand. And how many of you are entrepreneurs? And how many of you have a job? Okay, a freelancer is someone who gets paid when they work? You don’t work. You don’t get paid entrepreneurs. Don’t know. Build a business bigger than themselves.

So, Larry Ellison is an entrepreneur. He doesn’t code. He doesn’t do a lot of sales calls. He doesn’t do advertising. He’s just hires people over and over again to do work that he could have done mediocre Lee, but he finds people better than him to do. It. Build something bigger than himself. Freelancers can move forward by getting better work and getting paid more to do that. Work. But they can’t get move forward by hiring other Freelancers to do. The work they were going to do because it just doesn’t scale. So, if you want to grow a design firm, you have a challenge which is, if you’re an entrepreneur, you can only grow by hiring people who are cheaper than you to do, work that you can mark up and scale. I think that design at its core thrives, when a human being cares enough to do work that touches another. It doesn’t Thrive when it gets more.

Isn’t and computers have made it so that scale doesn’t even help us that much. So it, my instinct, if I want to hire an architect or designer or someone to write a Libretto, for me, is I want to find someone who is the person who’s going to do the work and is so good at it. It scares me, right? Like that disc area because they’re going to push an envelope to go farther than I would have gone because that’s what they do. That’s what they’re for. If all I want, is someone to do it, something I write down, I can find someone cheaper than Right. The goal is to find someone to do something. I couldn’t imagine and those sorts of people sometimes, but rarely work for giant institutions.

They often say I need to control what I do and who I do it for. So I’m going to do it here and we’re going to adopt a mindset of better. Not more. It’s likely we’ll get better. I want to talk with you about anxiety. Okay.

And this also has a lot to do with the lizard brain, which is such a pervasive part of our personality. I don’t think people realize how much were controlled by The Reptilian Brain and how it is involuntary. Everything that we everything, that we engage in, in the world through The Reptilian Brain is something we can control. So if we nearly get hit by a car, that surge of adrenaline isn’t something we think about, we don’t think, Hmm. Let me get that adrenaline going.

That I can move out of the way of the car. It’s instantaneous and it does take over everything else and that part of the brain keeps us paralyzed when it comes to being able to embrace change rough because The Reptilian Brain wants to keep us safe. It wants to keep us in control. It wants to keep us from being vulnerable and everything that we need to do to move forward in humanity and our job. As in our relationships requires being vulnerable, which is what The Reptilian Brain doesn’t want us to do. So, I want to stop you there because you just said something super important and everyone’s resistance didn’t want to hear what you just said.

So I’m going to let you. I’m going to let your answer your question a minute, but the way I’m restating it is everyone is room has chosen a job where the way to succeed at the job is to deal with the resistance. There are other jobs that you don’t have to do that, right? The cop, who showed us. You’re in the back room, right? Most of the time, if you’re a cop, not getting shot is an important part of your job, right? And understanding that the terms and conditions and procedures are being a cop is essential, right? There’s a lot of rules and they train you to do it the same way every day. No one says you’re the most creative. Cop will put you in a movie, right? That’s what movie cops do.

But in real life. That’s not what we’re looking for. But everyone here chose to do this for a living. So let’s proceed. Now that we understand. That we all opted in to dealing with this problem. So, in relation to the anxiety that we feel about change, I talked to my undergraduate students and I warned them that if they’re waiting to feel a certain way about themselves before they do something. Well, I feel anxiety now, but when I feel better about myself, I’ll then pursue that, I tell them that is never going to happen.

You are never going. Go to a place where you’re like, okay now I’m ready to change. So you write about how anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Right? The most profound sentence I’ve ever written in my whole life. It’s fantastic anxiety. Is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself in a vivid stories, but the worst possible outcome of your work and you’ll soon. Come to believe them. Worry is not preparation. And anxiety, doesn’t make you better.

So, why do we do it? Why do we worry? Why do we have anxiety? What does it do for us? Well, it is an accidental byproduct of the Modern Age that if we are living on the savanna and the planes in a little village of 30 Peak nomadic people. It is essential that we worry. It is essential that saber-toothed tigers do not eat us.

And it is essential that we do not offend the chief, because if you offend the chief and he throws you out, you’re gonna die. So are great. Great. Great. Great, great. Great, grandparents. Only passed on their genes to us because they learned that lesson. The ones who didn’t get that idea died with no children, right?

So, it is built into us the same way, flower sunflowers. Follow the sun. That’s what we did to survive. We only in the last 150 years. It’s only 150 years old. Did we invent this idea that dancing with fear was something that the economy? Pay us to do you think we’re going to evolve out of that. Do you think there’s going to be why not? Because designers don’t have more kids than everybody else.

But what about the successful people that Embrace change? Will they pass on their genes to their well, the way you pass on Jesus, by having more kids, right? That’s the way Evolution works. Unfortunately, their cultural evolution is certainly shifted, right, cold? Truly. We have evolved, an enormous amount, 100 years ago, the thought that you would go to your family and say I’m not going to take a job. I’m going to start a project are going to be a freelancer, was insane, right? That that the Industrial Revolution was just getting up and going.

You went to the fact that culturally nobody talks about be happy in their jobs. So we’ve changed culturally. So now it’s okay to do that with up with less anxiety, that Silicon Valley has created this culture that, you know, New York. Hang out in certain neighborhoods is culture. Well, of course, you’re going to be in the project world so that eliminates some of what we perceive as anxiety. So a little aside here, I spent a little bit of time working with the poorest people on Earth in India and other places and if you talk to somebody whose parents grandparents and And parents lived at the subsistence level three dollars a day that person has never shopped for something in their life.

Never once have they bought something that they have never bought before. Try to imagine it. You have probably bought some you never bought before today, right? But never once in their life. So if you go to them and say, would you like to buy this solar Lantern, it will pay for itself in 90 days. You don’t use kerosene anymore.

Most people will say, no, because the cultural anxiety of taking that Tiny step is so huge because it’s one step away from dying. If you’re wrong. We’re lucky enough that were surrounded by cultural memes as they know we need to take. So that is going to change the culture but our problem of instantly going from this might not work to.

They will realize I’m a fraud to. I will never get another job too. I will lose my home to. I will die, literally takes an eighth of a second. He just described my whole life. Life. And so what’s happening is your caller ID. Is there at your boss’s boss? You don’t go? Oh good. They finally realized how good I am. Here’s my promotion.

You see the ring? You say I’m dead. It’s like that instantly. And you’re sitting there trying to design something, right? And in your head, the dial, you don’t even hear the dialogue. It’s I better not go there because it’s not proven enough. I better buy a dummy’s guide instead that will show me what the defensible.

It and what we see culturally is it’s the indefensible that changes us. It’s when we make an indefensible thing that people saw, some are attracted to it. And now that we’re living in weird world where more people are on the fringes where mass media, Mass marketing Mass merchandising are going away.

All that’s left is to make the things someone would cost the speak for. All right, so I’m not supposed to talk about your book. I’m going to talk about your book, right? People. Cross the street to buy that book. Many people want nothing to do with it. But most people don’t want to buy any book, but the people who cross the street for your book would miss it. If you hadn’t made it and that is what we do for a living, we danced with the resistance. We don’t make it go away. You cannot make it go away.

You cannot make the voice go away. You cannot make the fear go away because it’s built in what you can do is when it shows up. You say, welcome. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s Dance about this. Okay. I need to unpack that a little bit. I can.

Viscerally understand what you’re saying, but the idea of actually dancing dancing with the resistance dancing, with the fear that is really challenging. And I think it’s something that people think that they should do or want to be able to think that they can do. But taking, even that first step is enormously difficult. Yep.

First of all, I’m a person that says, you know, I’m as much as I will, Yes to any opportunity when it comes time to making change. I’m like, no. No, I like to do everything the same way every day. And I’d like to be able to do that for the rest of my life. Eat the same food. Sleep in the same bed, sleep. It is all the same.

How do you lying? No, I’m not. I swear. Am I lying everybody? That knows me but my lying, I’m not like everybody says here’s how I know. You’re not lying. I know you’re lying. Right? Because you’re sitting on a stage with someone. You’ve never talked to in person before because you were doing something new by choice.

You would like part of you would like to just completely give in but the other part of you that part of you that is revered, the part of you that people look up to the part of you that you honor as Best, you can’t tolerate that. So you keep dancing with the fear. Well, thank you for that.

Okay, let’s go back to the book.

I want to talk about effort, you say, effort isn’t the point impact is, and I remember this, this really sort of came alive for me. When I was thinking about last year. I had a student in my graduate program that was really, really struggling and he was struggling so much and he was having such a hard time, grasping the work that it became really clear to the faculty and the staff of the program.

He might not make it. And so, we had a sit-down with him with the Provost. It was very, very serious, like it. When he got that call. He was not like running a promotion.

We had to sit down with him and we talked with him about what needed to change, and he couldn’t understand. All he kept saying was what? I’m working so hard. I’m working so hard. I’m trying so hard. And finally, the Provost looked at him and said, it’s not about how hard you try. It’s about what you actually. Lee do when you’re trying.

And so this, this really felt so important now in our culture sort of showing up isn’t enough and and how do you encourage people to get the best out of them? How do you encourage people to attempt to do something? And not just feel good about attempting. But actually, I don’t want to use the word accomplishing because it feels like there is sort of a prize at the end, but fully showing up and knowing that there.

Making the best that they can do. Yeah. My late friend and teacher Zig Ziglar talked about great, the difference between a Wandering generality and a meaningful specific. So I want to answer the first unanswered question from a couple minutes ago and integrate it with this which is there’s a huge Advantage too small.

Both small and risk and small in boundary. So when I used to teach at NYU, this was early days of cell phones. I said your homework assignment is to bring in a cell phone next week. So everyone brought in the cell phone you had I used to ask people to do that. And I said, all right in the prehistoric days, I need someone to come to the front of the room.

Here’s a phone number. While we are all watching. I want you to call this number and sell the person who answers a subscription to Time Magazine. Such a gun. The magic here at Iran. You can’t deny the presence of Time Magazine. We can’t have an argument at Time. Magazine is not a good magazine where it’s here. Everyone knows what it is. I want you to get on the phone and sell it and that 100 percent of the grade in the class was class participation. There were no tests. No nothing one. Third of the people in the room refused to do the exercise.

They refused to dance with that fear in front of their peers. What exactly is the risk? What could Stop. The person would hang up. Like I knew who was being called. These were phone. Numbers of my friends. Right? So it’s not like you were going to get arrested or anything. Do they have a script when they know they hide their just? I didn’t tell them they were going to be calm.

I just put down.

Because I wasn’t going to spam strangers. Having my friends would be different, he gave them nothing. But the lesson. The lesson is that when we say I’m working really hard, what we often mean is and I’m tweeting all the time. Making sure my Facebook page is glued. My website is up to date. I’ve gone to this meeting in that meeting and this thing I read this thing and we’re wandering generality that.

What we need to do is say what’s the smallest tiniest thing that I can? And what’s the scariest thing I can do in front of the smallest. Number of people that can teach me how to dance with the fear that once we get good at that, we just realized it’s not fatal and it’s not intellectually realized we lived something that wasn’t fatal and that idea is what so key, because then you can do it a little bit more.

And once you’re on that Spectrum, it’s just more of the same. Is that one of my favorite movie? Stills is Gene Kelly and singing in the rain and you see the Epp, the key turning point moment and he’s dancing and draining and, you know, it’s in his hand and I brought an umbrella but it’s not called singing with an umbrella. So we don’t open the umbrella, right? He’s holding the umbrella, he could open it, but he doesn’t.

And it’s the fact that he doesn’t open the umbrella that makes that moment magical. So all of Have an umbrella. We all have deniability. We can all copy. What came before we can all go to one more meeting and hide behind one, more set of bullet points, or we can put the umbrella away when you put the umbrella away. That’s when effort turns into impact because you’re not using effort to hide using effort to make a difference.

So, let’s go back to your students that you asked to make the phone call. And a third of them didn’t I understand that they were afraid to make the phone call. But it is it back to that lizard brain why they’re afraid of course. So what are they afraid of that? They’re going to be told no or that they’re going to be hung up on or yeah, they’re all versions of being a frog getting thrown out of the village of being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. They’re all exactly the same thing.

So what I find, so remarkable. Now about the opportunity. We have with the telephone in an office situation is that people don’t Phone calls anymore. Everybody’s doing everything nail via email and via text. So, I’ve been talking to all of my undergraduate students. You want an opportunity asked for the opportunity, call people call them because they’re sitting at their desks and nobody calls them.

So they’re going to likely answer their phone because they’re not barrage with phone calls anymore. And yet, when they still know that there’s a possibility, that Massimo vignelli might actually answer his phone, because that’s how I got to him. He, I called him one day and he actually answered the phone.

They still are afraid to do it because they’re afraid to ask, they’re afraid to ask for opportunities. How do you what can you tell? The people in the audience today that want something more than they have how they could ask for it or how they could go for it? Okay. Well, I am thrilled. That there is an aversion to calling people on the phone cold calling.

I think we should maintain that over and throughout, I know you’re an opt-out.

But the difference between someone who wants more and isn’t getting it and you who wants more in is getting, it is back to this idea of what are we truly afraid of, right? That I am more afraid of settling. I am more afraid of not giving. What I can give that I am afraid of doing it. And so when we sit quietly, there’s a debate we have to have for themselves all the time, which is what Is my work.

And if my work is to have more impact, I don’t think we start by asking, I think we start by giving, I think we say, who can I give to anonymously often with no recompense and how do I do it more often? How do I figure out how to get to do the giving? I am most afraid of, as often as I can. Because once you get hooked on that culturally then doors open right doors. Open because your work proceeds you that you are your work, not your resume, but the Ruckus you have made before the people that you have touched before.

I love talking about the Prufrock coffee shop in London. And he’s got one of those frequent buyer cards. When you get eight stamps, you get a free cup of coffee, but it’s not eight copies from him. You have to get he is listed as eight biggest competitors. To go to the eighth best espresso bars in London. And then if you still want to come back, they’ll give you a free copy.

Now, do you think he called these people up and said, I’ll do this for you if you’ll do it for me. No, he just did it because he cares more about Coffee Culture than he cares about his Market shift. How has it impacted his business. I don’t know. I don’t care, right? I care about the fact that he cares about the culture and the community because that Can you name someone who has built a life around that? Who’s a failure?

I can’t write. So, I grew up with two unbelievable parents. My dad was a volunteer head of United Way. My mom was the first woman on the board of the art museum and you know, they weren’t the richest people in town. But they said, what we do is this, what we do is feed the Community First, and if you do those sorts of things, then you get better dancing with fear and then the world.

To notice that there’s only one person around who is really good at dancing with fear and is so generous and a line forms outside the door and that’s when you get to start making the work. Do you want to make? Not because you cold called someone and so what about money? Because you talked about we you ask people how many people had a job that was banal or that they weren’t really fully engaged in. A lot of people raise their hands.

My guess is that the reason that they’re staying in that job? Or at least the reason that the telling themselves that they’re staying in that job is because they have to pay the rent. I have to take care of their kids. They have to do all the things that you need to do to live and not end up in the street. A bag. Lady or bad man.

How do you break that cycle? How do you decide? Okay, I want to do this. Do you do it in addition? Do you self-generate your work in the evenings and weekends to make a difference? Or do you look for something else while you’re in a job, which is really, really hard. How do you, how do you make that fundamental shift into living the life that you want to live? Right? So there’s this Collision and of the cultural and the resistance and many other things, which is I would like to make art, but I’d like to do it while making a steady income and I want to make sure that that steady income is respected by everyone around me and has no uncertainty associated with it. Well, there’s a good reason, why not a lot of people make art and that’s one of them, right?

If you read or better listen to Patti Smith’s book about her and Robert called just kids. I mean what emotional thing but she was homeless for years, homeless living on bread from the garbage can sleeping in the park to make her art and what’s fascinating about the first third of the book is never once that she say I’m a homeless person.

She says, I’m an artist who hasn’t found her Muse yet. She’s on her way to being. Artists in the homelessness is a temporary moment. So no one here has to become homeless, right? But what I’m saying is if you care enough to dance and to make this art, it might be that you need to spend two days a week doing something that isn’t in your wheelhouse. That makes you enough money to make your art. It may be. That your art never pays you money.

It may be that you just stop watching TV and stop using social media and use all that time to make art that you love and give away in whatever form that part. Takes and you do something else to pay the bills, right? But what the industrial economy seduced us into believing is that the deal was simple.

You work all day doing something you’re not proud of, and you decompress it night with television and a whiskey. And on weekends. You can go for a ride, right? The do that forever and then 40 years from now you’re dead. That’s the deal and so that deal to a lot of people but there’s this other deal which is we will laugh at you. We will cheer you. You will be on the verge of bankruptcy.

People will tell you you’re a fraud. You’re never going to amount to anything. You will fail and you will fail, you will fail, and then you’ll be dead. And that’s a different path that’s available to people if they want it, right, you know, but the fascinating thing where I was talking before we sat down today with the people who run this event, they want to knitting show right there.

Maybe the crocheting show is separate from the name, so I wasn’t really sure. It might be part of the knitting show. Now you You make a lot of money running an eating show and you don’t even have to, like knitting. And the fact is that there are plenty of people that I know that, you know, who do a thing, that maybe takes a day a week or happens once a year and they use the revenue from that to make their art and those don’t have to always be the same thing. It’s only very recently that they’ve become the same thing.

Poetry is another great example, you know, other than Sarah, Kay, no one’s making a living as a poet today. Right? But we don’t have a poetry shortage, because if you care enough about making poetry, you’ll make poetry, and it just turns out that the way our culture works. Now, if you get really good at anything often, people will show up to pay you for it, but don’t compromise on the way to getting good just because you have to make a living because then you would make a living and you won’t be good.

So it’s about going to the edge finding your Edge. Pony, you’ve talked about, you’ve used the word fraud three times today in our conversation, and the whole sort of fraud syndrome, that people experience that. And so I, and because it was it’s a big theme throughout this book. I went and looked at the Wikipedia entry for what’s called imposter syndrome and it says, it’s the psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments.

Despite external evidence of competence those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success. They’ve achieved proofs of his success is dismissed as luck timing or a result of deceiving others into thinking. They are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

Why is that such a pervasive theme? Now in people that have achieved anything? There is not one person said, not one person. In all of the interviews that I did in how to think like a great graphic designer. That didn’t talk about feeling like a phony. The only two were Milton Glaser and Massimo vignelli and they’re both in their 80s and I attributed to that, by the time you’re 18, you’re like what the, you know, so what is it about this imposter syndrome this fraud complex. It’s like an epidemic.

Yeah, note that threw me out of his class. He did. Yeah. Fabulous. Had me leave to never return.

Why it’s, what did you do? I have time. Tell the whole story. Absolutely. Well, so he teaches his portfolio class the School of Visual Arts. So you in order to get in, you have to bring your portfolio and you let you in. And the way the class works. I don’t know if he still does, maybe still does write a class works? Is this 45 50 people in the class and every week you gives you an assignment and then you would go away and spend 5, 10, 30 hours, making a thing, bring it in, and put it all around the wall.

And then he would spend the whole class critiquing. What The wall that was the class. This was before desktop publishing right? The beginning of desktop publishing. And so all the other people in the class were designed for us had access to all these tools and so they were bringing beautiful things.

Well, I got there and I had had a, my background. I’ve been hiring designers. My background. I’ve been shipping software product making stuff that people actually bought, and I thought, if I could go through this class, I would get better a little bit at making stuff, but really good at knowing what to pick.

And he said, no, you can’t take my class. And I said, but I think I’ll added useful perspective here. He said, no, I said, tell you what, I’ll come to a class and if you don’t think I’m adding any value, I will come back. So I come to the first class and I’ve been to business school. So I knew his case method thing, and he was pulled getting away with stuff. He shouldn’t have been getting away with it because the designers are all like this. And so I called him out once or twice. It was a good interactions. He said, yes, you can come back next week. And so, I came back the next week and after the second time, when it became clear that I had figured out where he was going.

He said, you shouldn’t come back to my class. So that was my Milton Glaser experience all along way of saying that.

Even in sports where we can measure thing to a tenth of a second. It’s so easy in our culture to be able to deny that. You are good at something, right? Because Lance Armstrong cheated, lots of other people in sports cheat. So weird, we’re surrounded by this mindset. That how did I get picked and what is going on here? And it will it happen again tomorrow?

Because if you’re not sure, it’s going to happen again tomorrow and for all artists that has to be the case by Jeff Koons is going to do something weird. That might not work one day, right? So we This active amygdala that’s trying to get us to stop doing it. And it finds the flaw in our culture, which is you’re not guaranteed. It’s going to work.

So everyone feels like a frog. What’s fascinating is? It shows itself in so many different ways. Donald Trump is sure he’s a fraud and he acts to counter it by acting like an obnoxious blowhard, right? Who pretends? He’s not a fraud. And I think that Milton is in the same category that Milton is confident in his. His work.

But one of the ways that he’s able to keep doing his work is by pretending. He’s supremely confident because all of us if we are really going to dance with The Muse, if we’re really going to find that place to do something that hasn’t been done before that matters that might not work. That’s generous.

We have to be activating this or a psychopath and there are very few designers who are psychopaths.

I was talking, I interviewed, Dani shapira recently. She’s written to Double Memoirs and a book that she just came out with called still writing and it’s about sort of continuing to show up and do that. And she made a really important distinction between confidence and courage. And she talked about how she felt the artist actually doesn’t really need confidence all that much that you tend to do better art, when you are Earning yourself when you are pushing. What is possible?

She actually felt that that courage was the key ingredient to be able to do something, because you have to because you want to just hate not feeling confident. Yeah. So so there’s almost a, you know, a Bob, Dylan literature that, I can’t remember. Exactly. But about, whether which is that For the designer. What’s going on outside is Trivial compared to what’s going on inside that if you say, well, of course, I’m anxious because this is happening in the outside world. Of course, this is a special case because the economy is like this, of course because my boss is this, or this or this, or my client, isn’t this a?

That’s why I feel this way that’s bogus because other people have dealt with weather like that and not felt the way you are feeling in this moment. Don’t try to change. Change the structure of the outside world and then you’ll be fine. Then you’ll be creative and then you’ll be brave. No, first figure out how to be creative and brave and courageous. And the outside world will change on your behalf.

But if you spend all your time rattling to yourself or to your friends, why in this particular case, you have, you know, and as a public speaker, I get more anxious before I speak to 20,000 people than 200 people. That’s ridiculous because I can’t See back there. I can just see the same number of people about how many people I’m speaking to. But in my head there’s this whole monologue. That’s always going on about why this particular case allows me to be freaking out.

And it’s not, it’s always the same case. It’s always the case of you are a human, trying to connect to another human. And if you just pick one human that, you can change for the better with work that might not work. That’s what art is.

Speaking of one human to another, I thought this might be an appropriate time to open up some questions to the audience. Yeah, and have them. Ask you what they want to know. Can we turn up the house lights?

Thank you for being such a great audience. Someone right there. Tom Gray, yellow duck tape or yellow, you know, everyone here by name because it’s possible where we have a microphone amazingly. Thank you. So, you spoke a lot about the effects of the lizard brain and other parts of the unconscious that affect the way we work. And what we do the thing about the unconscious is that we’re not conscious of it.

And so I wondered, do you have a personal discipline or practice that helps you to continually reference and learn about? Your own unconscious. And what would you recommend for others to do? Okay. Thank you. Tom. I do and I guess it’s got a couple of pieces. First of all, the thing to understand about the amygdala. It is a blunt instrument. It only has a couple chemicals that it can slide your brain with. It’s not what teaches you to play the piano.

And so when we are afraid of falling off a cliff or being on a roller coaster or telling the truth to our spouse, it’s exactly the same feeling. That we would like it to have different colors, but it doesn’t. So first, we understand what that feeling is. We understand when it’s starting to come. And what it means when it’s there, then the conscious brain at least for me, says got it. You’ve just given me a compass.

Now most people say, the compass says go the other way and what I’m saying to myself is thank you for showing me that this is the way for me to go next. So I wanted to do some testing on it. Is it you know, good for the people I’m working with? Does it match who I am in public and in private before I go race that down that road, right? So that’s why I’m not going to get into a stock car and race it because that would make me equally scared, but it’s stupid.

And, but once it’s there, if you learn to welcome it, something magical has just happened to your career because now you can bring it whenever you want it, and it’s in that moment. It is telling you. Where the dangerous place lies and that is what people are going to pay for that is what people are going to ask you for to do dangerous stuff that they’re not willing to do.

We’re going to try for the house lights again, but it also has a microphone.

What is the bravest thing that you’ve ever done? You want to go first?

Having kids. There’s nothing even close.

I wrote, If you have kids, I wrote an e-book called stop stealing dreams. It’s free. It’s been read about 4 million times, but that’s not nearly enough. And I hope that you will send it to the teachers and to the school board, and to the other parents because what we have done is built a public school industry that is designed by industrialists, to create compliant workers for their system. That’s what it was for when we built it. You may not know this, but we are in Massachusetts, the home of the first. Teacher’s college. Do you know what it’s called now? The normal College, because it was designed to train people to get kids, to be normal and this Manifesto that I wrote, basically argues.

We should only be teaching kids to things in school, which is how to lead and how to solve interesting problems and we don’t teach them either of those things. And I think we need to do Over here. Hey sup. Hi, the dip changed my life. And I just wanted to thank you for that. Good upfront. But quick question for you.

As far as fear goes, how do you overcome that man? Like on a daily basis? Like what’s your biggest fear? I mean you speak about it so much and just curious. Well, I’ve never overcome my fear. That’s sort of what I’m what I’m arguing here. One of the easiest things that I can propose is that there are lots of things. All of us do, We’re afraid of because we have to the question is, how do you create a have to around your art?

So in my case, I blog every single day. Not allowed to block three times a day. I’m not allowed to block 0 times a day. I bought every single day. Well, once your subconscious knows that there’s another blog post do, it will find one for you, right? Because it’s worse to not have one and that habit of being able to say, I’m going to do something today. I’ve never done. For that I’ve done.

Now, five thousand six hundred times in a row that really pays off. So if you can get into this habit of another example, of former group of six people and meet once a week and know that you have to show those five people, something you did that, you have never done before, you will be more afraid of letting those people down, then you will be of doing the work and so your art gets better accountability. I love it. Yeah, cool.

Thanks. We have time for one last question.

Hi, you talked, a little bit about the money side of this, but, you know, from a, from a time, and energy perspective, and thinking about family and other obligations in your life and really trying to, you know, be the best person that you can be. How do you, can you give some advice on balancing, you know, really trying to put your art out there?

And finding sort of that real work, balance in terms of more on a personal side with time and energy and just really trying to put yourself out there in the right way. If, yeah, I think it’s going to be different for everybody. My my career, I was at the verge of bankruptcy for more than 68 years in a row, like literally within a week of having to stop everything.

So, my first book for five thousand dollars, I got half of it and then I got 900. Rejection letters in a row. Row and we used to go window shopping and restaurants and eat macaroni and cheese for dinner. These are choices. You don’t have to make these choices, but I chose to do that. And I don’t think you have to sign up for a life of poverty to make art. There’s lots of kinds of art. You can look a foster kid in the eye and care about that kid. That is a form of art. You’re putting yourself at risk. You can be a big brother. That is a form of art if you treat it that way.

So I think that we have to be careful not to fall in, love with art, is what Debbie and Milton make that maybe art is just what it is to live a life where you are aware of your fear and aware of your ability to be compassionate and connected and that might be enough. But if you want to do art on a different stage where you are seen as one in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000.

Understand, there’s 999 other people who are also sacrificing too. And it might require more than you are willing to give to get to that place. I’m at there was an easy path. I promised I would tell you but I don’t know what it is. Thank you, sis convinced.

Thanks for listening. No Q&A this week, but we will include them next week. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please visit a Kimbo link that take a high MB, o .l iink and click the appropriate button. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late.

Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem.

And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project more than 300 volunteers from for Countries around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners.

I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details. Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -the-ethnic-aisle- <==

It’s almost certainly a conspiracy.

My local supermarket has more than twenty two different kinds of canned tomatoes and only one type of fish sauce. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about an invisible conspiracy. That’s happening all around us. But first, here’s a mess. From our sponsor.

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So how do we explain the ethnic aisle in the supermarket?

How do we explain the fact that Italian food is all over the supermarket exactly where you would expect from particular ingredients in the frozen section, in the Tomato section in the pasta section, but food from places, like Thailand or Mexico is all together in one little section. Many supermarkets in the Northeast. Have a Goya section.

That just sells the food of one company. It must be some sort of conspiracy. Perhaps, the people who run the supermarkets are racist or nationalist or opposed to immigration. Perhaps the giant companies that somehow control, the food industry are working together to block new entrance. Something must be going on. In fact, it’s easy to understand how most organizations work, if we Get one of two things.

First sunk costs. Are they embracing a status quo? How are things done around here?

Organizations is stick around stick around because they’re good at sticking around and part of sticking around often.

Until it’s too late, is not changing that much. And the second thing is many organizations try to optimize to make the most profit they can. And that’s where this conspiracy. She comes in because if you want to make more money in the supermarket business, you need each item on the Shelf to turn as many times as possible. Meaning that it doesn’t sit there for 11 months before that box of Pop-Tarts cells, the more you sell per square foot.

The more your profits going to go up and the second thing you want to do is make sure that the profit per item is as high as possible turns out those two things don’t sit right next to each other.

It’s usually, One or the other. So the first question to ask is why the supermarkets have an ethnic aisle at all? Why if I go to a supermarket in Italy? Is there a little section for American food? Why? If I go to a supermarket in the Bronx? Is there a little section selling gefilte fish? And you get the idea?

Well, the reason that there’s an ethnic aisle at all is because if someone comes into your store looking for something specific and they don’t find it, they won’t buy a whole bunch of other groceries. He’s and generally speaking even though the turnover is lower. The profit per item can be higher. It can be higher for a couple reasons. One may be a foodie is looking to buy that fish sauce. Well Foodies generally are willing to pay more money for food or secondly, maybe it’s somebody who’s homesick who doesn’t have the desire to swap fish sauce for say vinegar because they want something specific. They’ll pay a bit more. So that’s why Supermarket seem to have magically around the world built these ethnic aisles. Not because they’re trying to put everything into a place where they sell very well, but precisely the opposite. They’re willing to put everything into one place because that’s the only way it will sell enough to pay for that square footage. But back to the other idea of using shelf space to maximum advantage. Vantage what most supermarkets have done is turned to the giant companies that used to simply try to bribe the store manager and say find pay us.

So Hines and crafts in the rest of them. Pay shelving allowances, go to your supermarket and look who’s on the end cap. That’s super valuable spot at the end of the aisle this week.

It might be Pepsi. If you go back next week. It’s probably going to be Coke Pepsi and Coke. 8. Why do they alternate? Because the store manager wants to be fair? No, they alternate because that spot is up for auction and they buy it from the store. The planogram that is run by the retail store.

They didn’t hand it over to Giant packaged Goods companies because they’re weak or stupid, they did it because they’re getting paid to do it. And so, this conspiracy, this conspiracy is organized around a simple idea. How do we make more? Vut with the resources, we have, we have a finite amount of square footage. What should we put here? Because if we put something in, we got to take something out, going up in 1976.

I worked in a Bagel Factory. I know from good bagels. I know how a bagel is supposed to be prepared. I can tell you with authority, that a lender’s Bagel is not a good bagel. So how is it that lenders? Bagels ended up being the first Bagels in most supermarkets? Did that? Ben because store managers were anti-semitic and wanted to put horrible, Bagels on the shelves.

No, it’s for a couple of reasons. The first one is supermarkets. Don’t really sell anything. What they do is offer things that people want to buy supermarkets, aren’t particularly good at getting somebody to buy something. They don’t want to buy, they don’t have sales people. There used to be salespeople back before the supermarket back when you walked in. And there was someone behind The counter and an apron and you told that person what you wanted to buy and then they went and got it for you, out of a bin that person could try to sell you something.

But now there are self-service. The shopping cart was a Brilliant Invention because it got people to buy more stuff, but they tend to buy the stuff they want to buy. So the supermarket has a long history of being bad at shaping, what people by the supermarket for a long time, spent an enormous.

Amount of counter space and money on, fresh produce and unadulterated, dairy products. And you may have noticed that both of those sections are smaller. That’s because consumers on, average want stuff that salty fatty, sweet and processed how that came to be is the topic for another podcast. But what we know is this, if you want to be super at the supermarket, it you have to appeal to average people because By definition, most of the people who walk into a supermarket are average.

And that’s why if you care about any particular kind of food, you are probably disappointed by what you find at the supermarket, because everything there is slightly unexceptional. You will not find exceptional fruits and vegetables. The way you might find at a farmers market. You will not find exceptional condiments the way. Might find at Colossians or H Mart because they’re not in the exceptional business there in the average business.

It is a conspiracy of making a profit and also of, depending on what you did yesterday because with 40,000 items on the shelves, there just isn’t time to re-evaluate every single item every single day.

But then something new comes along something new, like sriracha sauce, which isn’t really from Thailand and isn’t really Vietnamese. It’s a California product made by somebody who emigrated here trying to capture some of the flavors that he missed. He did some really fascinating things to bring it to market.

The biggest one being not trademarking or trying to defend the trademark for the trade dress. So if you buy something with a red top and a rooster on it, it’s Possible. He didn’t make it that someone just said, oh, I can make this brand of chips or this fast food product and don’t have to pay anybody and don’t have to ask permission opening this to anybody who wanted it.

Turned out to be a brilliant way to get the idea to spread and because the idea spread not by the supermarket, but outside of the supermarket supermarkets follow because they’re dumb. All they want to do is increase sales per square foot. So, Back to this idea of the ethnic aisle is the ethnic aisle going to be here forever.

Well, it’s really interesting to note that H Mart starting from scratch, bringing Korean and other Asian Foods. To United States does exactly the same thing to have an aisle for Chinese noodles. That’s different than the aisle for Japanese noodles. Why? Because the purpose of the aisles is to help people find what they are looking for a long time ago. Took a graphic design class with the late. Great Milton, Glaser.

I lasted three sessions before he asked me to leave the class and never come back. But the thesis of the class was designing, things that matched the vernacular and the genre of the store where they were going to be sold. And the first day he sent all these fancy designers home with an assignment, come in with a prototype for something to sell at the supermarket.

So people brought in beautifully designed bags. Bags of rice and laundry detergent and everything else. And he ripped them all to shreds. And he said, you know, why tide looks like tide. Do you know, like Carolina rice, which at that time was still the number one selling rice in the typical Supermarket? You know, I Carolina rice.

Looks like that. He said, because back in the 20s when it was behind the counter and that guy in the apron had to get it for you out of the bin. The packages had to look a certain way to leap off the shelves from 20. 30 feet away. So you would notice them and ask for them. And so people in the 30s and the 40s when Supermarket started to grow, gravitated to those packages, to those Brands, things like tide and Carolina, but those people are mostly dead now, but when those people had them in their home, Heinz Ketchup included their kids saw them and when their kids grew up and went to the supermarket, you’ve got it, they were average. And they Wanted the regular kind, and so supermarkets, make most of their money selling the regular kind to regular people and the beauty of the quote ethnic aisle for a supermarket.

And for the Shopper is, if you want to self-identify as somebody who is not quote regular, we’re regular means average as defined by the supermarket in America in 1935.

Have we got it all for you? It’s all right here, right? Where you are looking for it. And if they started spreading it throughout the entire Supermarket, a giant polyglot collection of ingredients based on what kind of tree it grew on, as opposed to how you’re supposed to cook with it. They would sell less, they would frustrate people.

Now the supermarket is in massive churn right now. Just, let’s pick something like nut milk, which didn’t Even used to exist. Now. We’ve got the nut milk in the health food aisle. We’ve got the nut milk in the milk. Refrigerate it out of the most expensive part of the store to maintain and we’ve got the nut milk in this new aisle of a sceptically packaged milks.

So, it’s confusing for the Shopper. It’s confusing for the seller, but consumers are changing their habits. They’re not changing their habits because the supermarket wants them. To, if it were up to the supermarket, there would only be a thousand items. They would all come in perfectly shaped packages if it next to each other and they would all have similar margins, selling selling selling.

The supermarket is responding. The conspiracy is the Invisible Hand conspiracy, the conspiracy that happens when you try to sell average stuff to average people and keep track of your profit and keep track of your sales per square foot.

Sometimes it works, it works because I can walk into any supermarket in the world and have in all four hemisphere. Is north and south east and west speaking. Almost any language, walk into that supermarket, and I can find what I am looking for, because the supermarkets have evolved just as surely as Darwin’s, creatures evolved, they evolved because doing something new that works is leading them to do it again.

And so, we now have this delivery system that delivers more variety at a better price than any food, delivery system in the history of the Is there a lot of waste? Yes there is, but most of it happens early in the industrial process things dying before it gets to the packaging plant, but it’s a miracle that you’re able to buy a can of corn for 59 cents. If you think about the steps that went in to bringing that to you, wherever you are with a perfect record of consumer health, it’s stunning.

So does it make it hard for the entrepreneur who wants to walk in get more shelf space which could lead to more sales? Of course it does. It always has, does it mean that exceptional products are boxed out? They are everyday. And that’s why alternative kinds of stores show up online and off, but if you’re looking for a conspiracy, it starts by looking in the mirror because they’re seeking to bring average stuff to average people, and we’re the ones who get to decide what’s average, what we ask for, what we buy, what we pay for.

That’s what they respond to. You’re an entrepreneur thinking to break through the supermarket’s, not your friend. This will mark, it doesn’t lead anything. It goes last, they will react to whatever it is that you do in the marketplace. They will not sure you on because that’s not their business model.

The conspiracy. They are playing is a different one, and no. Unfortunately, the supermarket isn’t going to root for you. Maybe re at Zingerman’s will root for you. Maybe the lovely people at collusions will do something to promote you. Because that’s their business. But the supermarket a supermarket is part of a conspiracy.

It is a conspiracy of reacting to change begrudgingly, a conspiracy of showing up with the regular kind for the people who are average. And that’s what we signed up for, and that’s what we get and a special. Thanks to my previously, unacknowledged podcasting hero, a great guy. Roman Mars, 99% invisible is a regular companion of mine. I love that podcast.

Podcast was a response to one of the only episodes. I didn’t love their episode on the ethnic food aisle, which you can find in the show notes. Thanks Roman. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what You’re interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please.

It’s Maria. My name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh? Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, please visit.

Akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button to really juicy questions this week.

Hey, Seth, this is Dylan from California. I was listening back on a few episodes of yours. One of which was about what is school for. And I wonder if you would speak to what is Sport for. I am a person who loves running and in high school. I had a whole group of friends who loved running. Innings, we ran track and cross country and I saw a lot of these same High School running friends.

Head off to run long distance track and cross country at college. But after college, most of these running friends, that ran in college, were burnt out, dispassionate and sick of running. And, you know, I feel like we’re seeing the mental health toll that accompanies many Elite athletes today. And so as I was listening, Do you speak about what is school for? I wondered how you think. We might be mucking it up for our kids, and young adults, pursuing sports, or even as a start, how might we be? Mucking it up for people in PE class.

But yeah, thanks for all the good listening, Seth. Take care. Thank you for this Dylan.

I’ve ripped on this just a little bit on my blog, but let’s try here. Try to imagine a third grade or fifth grade, or ninth grade class, where kids show up to do arithmetic, or maybe even math once they’ve gotten a little bit farther along and the teacher says, uh, you’re trying really hard, but you’re not nearly as good at math as the other kids. You shouldn’t even bother or perhaps they say your The best person at doing math in this whole classroom, but you’re never going to win a Fields medal.

You shouldn’t even bother this whole idea of Elite Sports is fundamentally flawed. It’s flawed mathematically because the number of people who can win a gold medal in curling or downhill Mogul or surfing or tennis or whatever sport you want to pick can only be one and if we’re going to sign people up to Pete with one another where there’s only one slot for a winner and everybody else is somehow denigrated, because their status isn’t high enough.

I think we’ve made a significant mistake because the purpose of a soccer team is not to collect soccer trophies. The school is not suffering from a trophy, shortage spending time and money to push kids who are 6 or 12 or 15 years old to win. Game where they are playing against other kids who need to lose for them to win, teaches them. Nothing of much significance because winning or losing is largely based on the caliber of the people they are playing against that’s not teaching them very much saying to a kid. You are benched because you don’t have genetic advantages that make you taller or faster therefore you don’t get to play.

Teaches them. Nothing much in particular spending taxpayer money spending the time of students, to put them into quote, Elite situations, where the measurement of performance is, whether they happen to beat the person who is next to them. Makes no sense to me whatsoever. If Jesse Owens or Mark Spitz were competing today. They would lose every race.

Does that mean they’re losers? I don’t think so. I think that the purpose of sports is to Teach people to fall in love with who they are, to be able to push themselves to be better than they are not to be better than somebody else. But to progress to find joy that the purpose of team sports is to teach kids to play in a team.

And if you’re a hero because you scored a goal and you’re a goat because you didn’t that’s not what teamwork is. So we have this massive opportunity to use Physical interaction to teach kids, things like cooperation and strategy and insight. And yes, the ability to compete when the stakes are high, but no keeping track of trophies makes no sense whatsoever.

And this whole idea of division 1 versus division 3 and big Sports and institutions spending hundreds of millions of dollars. I was on the road a few years ago, and there was at a not famous. The private jet for their football team. Tell me how a famous college or not famous college can justify having a private jet. So their football team can travel across the country to play football against other teams. What is the point of that? How do we justify that in terms of the development of human beings? So I can rant about this all day, but I’m preciate, you bring it up. I’m glad you’re still like to run and I’m sorry the coaches and the system. I ruined running 40 50, 60 years of running for your friends who ended up going to a place that thought trophies were the point.

Casas. Thanks for being my running, buddy. As I run through the Australian bush land. It’s Marnie here from Australia and an avid listener of your podcasts. So recently, I was listening to your podcast about status and leverage and how the tallboy in the group would probably be the one that people would ask for directions from and that very night. I had an experience where a message that I have been doing being delivering particular about life. Lucian, and people try and turn their lights off at night to save our Wildlife species and and the night sky, of course.

And it’s a topic that I talked about frequently, and I started a charity about it. And yet a colleague, a male friend, who is very tall and young and handsome delivered, the same message. And I suddenly saw the group of people that I know very well, listening to him Maura tentatively than they had ever, listen to me. Me and it made me think about the fact that I have these visions and I go out and I create new avenues. I create a raucous. I do things differently from people. I’m not the same as everybody else. And in fact, I know I get employed more often than not because I don’t think like other people. I bring a new set of eyes to an old industry or an old problem perhaps and yet I get about 18 months to 2 years.

To delivering this concept or this Vision in the world. And I find myself under estimating my values, watching other people like my colleague, the other night seeming to be able to control the room, more have more power. And I wonder what that is and wonder what it is in me that needs to do to be developed so that I don’t step away from projects too soon and leave them unattended or for someone else to pick up.

And and get the glory where I left off, I guess anyway, that sounds a little bit pessimistic, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts and thank you for all your work.

Thank you. Thank you for this one, Marnie, and thanks for the work that you are doing and for seeing and understanding, that fairness is not always on offer. All of us are guilty of this, that we judge people based on some level of Charisma, some level of personal appearance, whether there are close talker, whether they stutter whether they have a particular disability or not.

All of us have been judging people our whole lives. I’ve never met someone who didn’t we do that? Because Hardwired to do it and it’s Amplified by the indoctrination of culture People Like Us do things like this has built into it who are people like us and what are things like this? So given the inherent unfairness of the privilege, some people have in different situations. Some more than others. I have plenty. There are people who have even more than me given that. That is true.

It’s a little bit. Like, what’s the altitude? Like where I’m running today? What’s my A gate like a my inherently advantaged or disadvantaged in this setting, whether I’m running a race or giving a presentation. We should change it to make it more fair to let better more generative, positive ideas surface, but along the way people who have an advantage need to recognize, they do and use it properly.

And people who don’t have an advantage ought to look at the fact that they’re running uphill. And also Plan accordingly. And in your case, if it is true, that you’re a starter more than a finisher, when it comes to Bringing ideas to culture. You can fight that or you can embrace it, and you can embrace it by saying, what I need to do is make sure I am lining up front people, people who play into the biases and expectations of the people. I am trying to sell to, I need to set them up to make a A change happen.

Because most of us are not signed up to make the culture more Equitable, where signed up to make the change, we seek to make in the world and if there are ways to make that change by using the systems of culture to our advantage, I think that that’s a really important thing to do. It’s not fair, but the ends in this case, I think justify our means because what you have decided is that it is worth years of your life to cause this change. Happen in her culture, and if Wheeling out somebody else letting other ideas work.

I am in favor of that. I mean, let’s pick a trivial example like typefaces. If it turns out that you believe people shouldn’t care what type face you use. But lots and lots of people respond better to helvetica or Franklin Gothic. Then they do to Comic Sans. Well then using Comic Sans just to prove a point about Equity among fonts is Sort of dumb go ahead and use the font that’s going to get people to pay attention.

So I know that that doesn’t seem as idealistic as I would like to sound, but the point I’m trying to make is our work is worth doing its work that matters for people who care but everyone is bringing biases to the table. I don’t think we should Pander and reinforce negative biases, but I think if we have the opportunity to use those biases to get the benefit of the doubt to Action to occur.

That’s worth it. That’s my two cents. On the way to making things fairer. I think we need to lean in to figure out how to create systems that cause change to happen. Thanks for listening. Thanks for the work, you do. We’ll see you next time.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -creating-the-conditions-for-change- <==

Stop me. If you’ve heard this one before, lawyer moves into a small town. They’re the only lawyer in town business is slow despite having meetings with Business Leaders and others about how thoughtful documents and careful law can make their lives better. It’s really hard to find clients. And then one day, a second, lawyer moves into town and everything changes.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about making change happen. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Look us up at gulab. He’s gu L as in Larry. A b as in boy, i s. And Sam dot-org. Thanks.

Yes, you’ve heard the story before because it’s supposed to make fun of lawyers, but there’s more than a small germ of truth to it. Once there’s two lawyers in a town, Everything Changes because once one party has a lawyer the other one needs one. Once there is a situation where you think the other party might need a lawyer you need one too. Suddenly.

It’s not about. Did that person study really hard in law school. Or is it the moral or correct? Fourth right thing to do. It’s simply everyone has one and we need one too. So, how is it that we make change happen? Particularly in organizations? Well, think about what your mission would be, if your goal was to create better, workplace culture. If your goal was to get organizations to see and respect their employees, give them a chance to shine create an environment where they could do their best work.

Well, one way you could do it is by having one meeting after another with leaders helping them. See, the benefits that come from having an Engaged powerful Workforce. The other thing you could do is create a list of the best places to work in the United States partner. With the magazine, get the magazine every year to run the results of your Nationwide study, within just a couple years. Businesses are going to start to notice that they’re not on the list. Or going to start to benefit from being on the list. It’s the list itself and the tension, that it creates that ends up, getting people to pay attention.

Most of them weren’t paying attention when you were standing, there telling them that it was the right thing to do, but they are paying attention, because they care as I’ve said before about affiliation and about status rolls, not being on the list is hard to justify to your boss, not being on the list exposed. As you to fear and to risk, not being on the list, means that you are left out left behind.

You need to be on the list. Not only do you need to be on the list, but if you care about status and so many people in our culture, do you need to move up on the list? You don’t want to report to your peers and your boss that you’re moving down on the list. And so now you start to notice what it takes to move up on the list and you start to game the system, you start to come up with ways to have your employees, believe that it’s a better place to work. Can you might discover that one of the ways to do that is to actually make your place of employment, a better place to work.

The essence of cultural change, comes down to a simple sentence of, you can’t do it by yourself. That there are lots of things that we can enjoy doing completely by ourselves, but then there are not part of culture culture, and Community are about status and affiliation, and there is no status. If you’re by yourself, and there is no affiliation if you are by yourself, but when we create networks this network effect, we built is far more powerful than some cleverly named internet social network.

It actually informs the way, almost all organizations act. It affects philanthropy. It affects governance. It affects politics People Like Us, do things like this, who is next to me, who is to my left and who’s to my right in. I came out of retirement from my work at a summer camp up north and I worked with Joanne granddaughter, the founder and the two of us stepped in to bring this summer camp back from a near-death experience.

Well, that summer there were 90 staff members. Most of them had never met me. They were between 17 and 21 years old people of that age up there for the summer. Maybe their first priority is Is not figuring out how to create an environment conducive to the kind of place. We were trying to run. I brought with me a big, big stack of Post-it. They were pink in color, and I had gotten the idea for my friend, Zig Ziglar. And on the Post-it said, I like blank because blank, and what I did for the first five days, was I sought to catch people doing something right?

If one of my staff members did something, right? I took out a pistol. Slip. And I wrote it on there and I handed it to them. And I got to say the first five or six or seven people who got a pink slip for me, a 30 year old, rolled their eyes as hard as they could. They weren’t there to get approval from me. They were there to enjoy their summer but I persisted and then something extraordinary happened.

People started to say to me. Hey, how do I get one of those pink slips or within a couple days? You could see that the clipboard. Being carried around by the cool kids were festooned with pink little Post-its. Why? Because it became a symbol of affiliation and then status because once people began to understand that, this is what it was like around here.

It’s something that they wanted to be part of their what we do. When we bring a new idea to a community is not say, here. It is. It’s great. Everyone loves it. What we do is we create tension tension, because people are inherently afraid of change, and your new idea, your new book, your new project, your new nonprofit, your new conference.

It represents at some level threat. What if I go? What if I don’t go, what if it’s better than I thought? What if it’s not as good as I thought, what if it works? What if it doesn’t work, these all create tension. That is what change is, and this tension. It can be used as a Force for good. It can be used to help change things for the better. And so when we get back to this idea of the first lawyer in town, I think a lawyer who’s doing really good work, can look themselves in the eye and say I have made things better for my clients, but it is also true that you are far more likely to get clients and far more likely to have those clients do the right thing.

When they understand that, Affiliation and Status are online. So what we have the opportunity to do when we bring our new ideas to the world is to create those situations to organize, the playing field for possibility. We can do this on purpose to create systems. And yes networks where it is better to be part of it.

Then not be part of it where we can overcome the status quo, which is there for a reason. Cuz it’s good at being there. We can overcome it in this moment. Not by persuading people that are new thing is better, but simply by helping them understand that they want to be part of something helping them understand that they don’t want to fall behind, helping them understand that this is a great story. A story to tell yourself and a story to tell your boss.

Yes. It’s easy to use these tools to manipulate people to get them something they don’t want. And our culture is filled with examples of that with people who become addicted to a thing or an idea and it ends up hurting them, but that’s not what you’re going to do. Because your people like us, this is a chance to make things better, by making better things. And those better things, they work when we show up in community for community and by community, and with Community, to give them what they seek and what they seek is affiliation and Status, so that’s a short. Grant. I hope it resonates.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp, that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact. I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. Assess its Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about this. Or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l, iink and click the appropriate button.

Three really juicy questions this week. Here we go. Hey Seth, this is Mickey in Atlanta. You’ve mentioned a few times that you don’t go to meetings. Something many of us are envious of. However, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. As I’m sure you have many conversations with people and meetings versus conversations. Can sometimes get blurred.

I know for me my best meetings feel like conversation. But some like conversations can end up feeling more like meetings when you’re on Jen and Pete’s the long and the short of it podcast a while back. These ideas intersected. At one point you clearly stated quote, and I don’t go to meetings. But another time generally called a you guys will say a gathering of you in various akimbo alums where she said quote and I frantically tried to scribble down every single thing. You said during that meeting.

So what do you see is the difference between a plan conversation and a meeting? Or would you frame it differently than that? I like this question because it gives me a chance to pontificate. About a rant and also because semantics are always interesting to me. I Define a meeting as an event in which a person and organization with power insisted that other people come.

So they could tell them something that’s different than a conversation in which people are voluntarily engaging with each other, going back and forth to learn from each other. So technically I go to meetings now and then because there’s some sort of upside in the long run for the people. I am meeting with or for me, that makes it worth me showing up but too many people who are listening to this, go to meetings all day and they don’t go to meetings because they want to they go to meetings because that’s the way it’s done around here.

And so part of my rant is that we should try canceling, those meetings and send a memo instead. So the short definition of a meeting is you could have Sent a memo, but you didn’t because you had the power to make people listen to you in real time. So conversations, sign me up meetings. I’d rather save the time and write a better memo. Isaiah. It’s Tracy, from Ohio.

I recently listened to your podcast on podcast ads and I appreciate your comments about production quality versus live reads and how locations for serving ads has become so much more diverse. I actually grew up so to speak on that. Avenue at a big agency. That did a lot of fancy TV client boondoggle, trips to private Caribbean islands for sun lotion. Add were quite common and fun, but my career is morphed into the very targeted spaces of the digital world and I am interested in your thoughts about trusting the messenger and trust and influence with with more content being served as advertorial and adds up. Appearing or being broadcast on very targeted channels.

It seems like the impact on a van at has is dependent on trust in the messenger as much as the content itself and the trust is built on information Integrity which can Circle back to the source. Do you think that the podcast environment and other digital information resources generate successful engagement? Through trust as much, or more than production value, or that trust in the Integrity of the information is part of production, that production of value equation nowadays.

Thanks so much. Thank you for this Tracy. Yes, there’s marketing. There’s advertising. They’re not the same thing. The essence of marketing is stories that spread People Like Us, do things like this, creating remarkable goods and services. That other people want to talk about in certain circumstances, advertising can amplify that and advertising used to be a simple really straightforward calculus by all the ads. You can afford, you’ll probably make enough money to buy more ads, the end, but now I have Aging is different because of the long tail because of the death of the network because you can’t take people’s attention just because you want to even if you pay the money, even if you get it in front of people, they will probably ignore it because it’s so much easier to ignore it and it ever was before.

So if the essence of marketing is the network effect in conversation and Community, the essence of advertising is trust. Why will I choose to pay my attention to you? Well, too many people in advertising, don’t realize that trust is the entire Point. Don’t launch a product with advertising if it’s not worth middle, people intermediaries giving up their trust to let the message, get out to the world. Don’t launch something. You’re not proud of, don’t create ads that annoy for no good reason. Other than to steal attention. Don’t spam. Don’t rely on sneaking around to somehow steal. A little bit of it.

Instead figure out, who can you double date? Where are the intermediaries where they have earned trust? And you can show up with a worthwhile message and some money and share some of that trust. So the only reason I can think of to advertise on a podcast. The only reason is because the people who listen to that podcast trust that podcast because they are choosing to listen and a podcast that will take an ad from Anyone isn’t a podcast. You want to run your ad on because they are trading trust for cash and attention.

And that doesn’t last very long. Hi. I have a second question about Lemonade Stand episode. So, do you think it’s possible to shape the internet experiences of the majority of u.s. Youth? That’s the bend, three-plus hours a day playing social games. Do you think that it’s possible to have or there already exists this? Like off boarding ramp from things like Roblox, for example, into a social Community online that doesn’t have the stimulation of the game necessarily but still gives them that Community.

Or do you think that once we’ve Associated the stimulation of social gaming with the internet that it’s really hard to downgrade from there. And so I’m wondering do we say that the ship has Sailed, on us, being able to dial that down for most kids, you know, even if as a community, you know, I will dial it down for my children, not interested. But as a community, if we wanted to help shape the interaction of social gaming for the kids. Is it possible for them to get a net positive out of something like Roblox?

Thank you for this heartfelt, question Katie, I edited it. B 4 lengths, I hope that’s okay. You’re talking about several things all at once here. One of them is the idea that corporations sooner or later find that there might be Divergence between, what is the best for their users slash customers? And what is the best for their shareholders at least in the short run, second in a competitive environment, when some people are racing to the bottom, it might be hard to race to the top.

I don’t think we can compare Grand Theft Auto. Roblox though. It is essentially helping lots of kids, find something that engages them in a positive way. But the other point you’re bringing up is that as soon as we have unfiltered Community, there is going to be a problem, particularly, if children are involved because we assert, I think incorrectly, that adults know how to filter on their own.

We don’t, but kids, nobody believes the kids are that good at During and so, yeah, there’s a problem. And the problem is when we get kids emotionally engaged in something where they are engaging with their peers and possible non peers, without significant supervision. The culture is going to shift and it’s going to shift in a way that some parents aren’t comfortable with.

And one of the things that parents do is they find a neighborhood, whether it’s Geographic or virtual, where they have a sense about who their kids are engaged. Aging with and I don’t think we’re even close to a world where we can say to an eight year old or 12 year old here. Unattended. Go hang out with other people. I have no idea who they are. We’ll see you in a few hours because that adds up and culture is the byproduct of how we spend our time and who we engage with and our society, particularly in this country keeps leaning into how can I raise kids? That raising kids and too often people who have gotten the short end of the stick. When it comes to cast when it comes to being given a fair chance, economically have very little choice, but to Outsource some of the time that they need to be spending with their kids.

It’s not fair and it’s not helpful, but we are now living in a world where we’re going to have to find ways for our kids, to engage with other kids. In a way that doesn’t require are Vigilant constant supervision. Asian and I’m not sure it’s as easy as dropping them off at the library and putting them in front of a terminal connected to the internet.

But culture and Society are fairly resilient and I am optimistic that we will work our way through this, but I agree with you. I think that vigilance is helpful. Panic is not but vigilance and being really thoughtful about talking to our kids whether or not they want us to talk to them about who they’re engaging with and what sort of engagements there.

I think that’s part of the deal. I think there’s probably nothing more important in the development of a kid than, who those kids friends are and wherever they find those friends. They’re still friends and we become the average of the people we spend time with. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

From 40 countries around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details. Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -the-invisibility-paradox- <==

The biggest advantage of a podcast is coincidentally, one of its biggest flaws. You have no idea where I am. You have no idea. If I’m sitting in the shower, recording this or if it’s someone pretending to be me. You can’t see the expression on my face. You can’t tell if I’m really sincere about what I’m saying because it’s all in your head.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about invisibility. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Listen to The Fearless portraits wherever you get podcasts? More a Dan Landau .m So the self-reference in irony runs deep in today’s podcast, but I think it’s an important idea. And I’ve never seen it discuss this way. So I want to rant about it for a few minutes invisibility. I’ll know it. When I see it.

Let’s start with this the best audio book ever created. The one that had the most impact and maybe the one they spent the most money on couldn’t have possibly cost more than a hundred thousand dollars. On the other hand, the best most realistic, most frightening, most exciting movie might have cost a hundred million dollars to make why such a gap. What a big pop star makes a record album with no expense spared.

Maybe they’re going to spend a few million bucks. That’s it. It’s much easier to deal in audio. Then it is to be realistic in video and then if we go further and talk about Their senses. What does it take to make a piece of leather? That feels really, really smooth or to prepare a restaurant dinner. That’s the best one you ever had. It’s nothing compared to how hard it is to put on a visual spectacular.

If we think about the stereo industry. There are plenty of arguments to be had about amplifiers and speakers. There are very few people arguing about whether one TV is better than another one because we know it. When we see it, the thing is that our optic nerve isn’t really a nerve. It’s an extension of our brain. The reason our eyeballs are located where they are. Instead of someplace more convenient or of higher utility like the end of our fingertips, or in the back of our shoulders is because they need to be right next to our brain. Because there’s so much information being processed by our eyes and this, this one hand, enables human.

To be really good at sensing certain things really good at identifying something at a glance. How much of the Mona Lisa? Do you need to see to know? It’s the Mona Lisa. Lots of people can tell if it’s a fake or not. So the good news and the bad news, some of the good news, first placebos, the miracle drug, the ones with few side effects that we can’t overdose on, that works. Well placebos work largely because the action of drugs is invisible.

We take a pill and then something we can’t see happens and we get better. So the act of taking the pills apart, we can see has most of the power that’s why if you have back pain, you should go see an acupuncturist because you have no idea how back surgery Works. Anyway, but seeing a kind person. Who’s going to give you just a tiny bit of stimulation and expect, you’re going to get better. Will actually help you get better. Then the trauma of back surgery, probably will that placebos in all their forms change our lives, a hundred dollar bottle of wine taste better, according to the Journal of wine economists that a ten dollar bottle of wine unless we switch the labels because it’s the labels that people can see.

It’s the wine that people can taste and we Way better at seeing than we are at tasting. And so we’ve got all these opportunities. I said at the beginning that this is the secret weapon of podcasts that it doesn’t cost very much for me to show up in your ear balls and talk to you in a way. That sounds like I’m talking to you. I make this every week from the shower, in the back of my office by myself.

But I don’t get the benefit of the doubt that often comes from. When people see something. So, I have to work harder. I have to show up in places and leave spaces for you to fill in the blank magicians are able to do what they are able to do. Because they fool us with our eyes that if you know what to look for. It’s very hard to fool somebody, but if we don’t know what to look for misdirection It gets us every time.

David Blaine not particularly my favorite magician, but certainly the person who made the best magic viral video of all time. Did it by showing us something your card just left the deck just now. Look through the deck or card, isn’t there? Good look. Yeah, it’s not there. You won’t see it there. No, it’s nowhere.

Here’s what we’ll do or soon. Do me a favor. Grab a grab a piece of grab a piece of fruit for me. Like a one that we can open up.

Yeah, grab a piece of fruit. Good. Whatever. And is there can we can we cut this? We can we take a knife? Put it right there. Yeah, put it right here. Say your card out loud.

I Love Hurts. Nine of Hearts. Can you turn this sideways?

Yes, I can cut right through it. Let me not hit your hand. Let’s do. Hold you see inside. See, there’s see how there’s a card in the orange. No way. There’s one card inside. Please. Remove it.

Take it out.

Pull it out. Open it up, Paris.

Get out of my house.

Okay.

You can watch the video at akimbo dot link. A friend of mine was in the room where that was recorded. And he saw it. There is no trick photography involved. There’s a celebrity in the video that gives it more credibility. Why not? Because you here Harrison Ford, but because you see Harrison Ford, so what’s the bad news? Well, you’re probably ahead of me.

So many of the contentious arguments in our culture are due to invisibility. There is an invisibility Paradox because on one hand, it enables us to Dream Big Dreams to deliver ideas that resonate with people to have placebos. On the other hand. It causes us to divide and be skeptical, because if we can’t see it, then we are relying on our own belief.

As opposed to the testimony of our own eyes. And so it’s been more than 100 years and there are still people arguing that Evolution the evolution of species Darwin’s theories are quote. Just theories. Well, if you understand what the word theory was, you would know that the theory means, it’s the best available most proven explanation, for how we got here. And the thing that’s invisible is Five million years of time we can’t visualize it. We don’t see it. And so it’s easy to say it doesn’t exist and conspiracy theories. We didn’t see John Wilkes Booth, shoot Abraham Lincoln. We didn’t see John F, Kennedy get shot. So it’s easy to imagine a conspiracy, an invisible one behind the scenes that we can watch a sporting event, and we I don’t think there’s a conspiracy because we can watch what’s happening. That instant replay completely changed the way so many people saw Sports.

But hold on Oklahoma’s got the football and they’re saying, wait a minute to pileups over there. We’ve got the ball over here because suddenly you didn’t have to take the referees word for it. You could see it right there in front of you. And in fact, one of the reasons they had to put in instant replay in the rules is because the fans couldn’t bear to know that they had seen it really seen it.

There it is. On the instant replay. It really happened and that the ref was wrong. That one of the things that troubles people about vaccines is they don’t see them working that plenty of people who will take a pill.

Something else.

They don’t see working are willing to do that partly because they grew up with it and partly because the act of taking a pill is analogous to the act of eating something. It feels to our brain visually. Safer than someone poking us breaking the blood barrier, and then something mysterious happening inside, but the people who understand the mechanics of how vaccinations work have no qualms whatsoever about having their kids vaccinated because they can visualize it.

That one word visualized. What does that even mean? It means pretending we can actually see it. And now, here we are on the brink of a worldwide apocalypse. All around the idea of climate change, climate change, climate, sort of invisible. It’s not whether and change. Well, it hasn’t happened yet, or at least, not yet for someone to be able to see and when they do see it, when they see the ice storm in Texas or they see the flood in Miami.

They just see that because it takes a different part of our brain to visualize something more complicated than that out of Of every 10,000, little, tiny bits of are only for four out of ten, thousand are carbon, and it turns out that little tiny microscopic bit that we cannot see that is the lever that is changing our world. But because it’s invisible, we have a problem.

And so this Paradox on one hand things that are invisible. Let us tell stories things that are invisible. Let us create. Yes, Brands. Let us create movements. Let us create. Beef. But at the very same time, we are hard-wired for millions of years to have the optic nerve dominate that when we feel stuck, when we are trying to engage with someone who quote sees the world differently than we do.

I think what we have to realize is that seeing is not the same as believing that what is coming in through our optic nerve, is, what is coming in, but it might not be the same as what is true. It might not be the same as what is worth understanding. So, we need to name it. We have an invisibility Paradox problem, right here.

We need to name it podcast or an invisibility opportunity. So do traffic in The Invisible. Do you work in something that will be more embraced if it became visible, how do we make it visible? And the last part of the punch line? Is this the number one way that people change their mind isn’t culture People Like Us.

Do things like This there are no cannibals running around because it’s very hard to find friends who will embrace. The fact that you are accountable, that peer-to-peer side-by-side person to person. We know what we see, when we see a scowl on a friend’s face or a family, member’s face People Like Us.

Do things like this. The way we make the invisible visible, is by putting ourselves in the middle of it by showing up with a smile with dignity. T with respect and helping other people understand what we understand. That’s my rant. I know you can’t see me, but I’m smiling with gratitude. Thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads. If you visit akimbo, That link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick. My friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while. I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about, what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a An ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial, please. Of course.

I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. I said this is a new pump. This is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode or just about anything else, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink And click the appropriate button.

Couple interesting questions this week. Here we go. Hey, Seth, this is Vance from Oklahoma City. I’m noticed in a lot of your episodes. You start with an illustration such as a purple cow or a ratchet and then you tie that illustration in later. In the show. Wondering how you come up with these illustrations. Or if there’s a process behind it.

I’m trying to get better at presenting, my own ideas. And a lot of other people, maybe as well, and it might be useful to share your process. Thanks. Thanks for this van to here is the method you ready? Let’s write down the steps. The first step find something you would like to explain explain in the sense of not just reiterating some facts about the thing.

But explain it in context, explain it through story, explained it. So that people understand it, the way that you understand it. And think of an extreme and extraordinary are ridiculous and obvious a subtle. Any way to tell a story about the thing you’re trying to explain and then try it out. If you do and it works do it again to the next person changing it just a little bit if you do and it doesn’t work.

Try it again on the next. Listen changing it. Just a little bit. Within a few tries. You will start to be able to understand the difference between a story that is helping someone get it and a story that isn’t but this is the only method I have for you. This is the only method I have ever succeeded with that. As soon as the method becomes a process, an actual step-by-step approach, it ceases to work. Work.

Because we’ve heard it all before. And so what’s going to work? What’s going to get past where someone is stuck? Is our ability to tell them a story that they can’t say to themselves. Oh, I’ve heard that one before, you just got to keep trying them. And I might try 10, 20, 30, 40 a day often because I have enough experience. I can try them on myself. I can hear whether they hold water or not, but still too. Day, some of the best stories I’ve got don’t work because they’re not really the best stories. I’ve got, they’re just stories that worked on me house ethics Martin in the UK.

Thanks for your recent episode about search and Google and the Cozier, you mentioned almost in passing that you thought Google could be doing so much more about climate change. And yet, when I look at their home page, at least in the UK, it has a link to some information that indicates they’ve been In carbon neutral since 2007.

So specifically on that point. I’m curious what prompted you to make that comment. But more generally whether you have a method for telling fact, from fiction on the Internet, thanks to the podcast. It’s one of my favorite lessons. Thank you for this one. Martin der two parts to your question. The first one is how do we tell facts and Truth on the internet?

I’ll start with that one, which is well, how do we tell facts and Truth anywhere are facts. True is true. True is knowing the temperature and accurate way to know how hot it is outside. Well often it is but sometimes it’s not that we take the physical world. Old fax in quotation, marks about the physical world, statistics, probabilities distributions, and we process them through our storytelling machine and more and more in our post sciency, world. People are using that storytelling machine to change how they feel.

And so everything’s a placebo were a nocebo. We are surrounded by stories that are changing our emotions. And I know it is way more reliable as a mechanical engineer. Near to be able to look something up in the table and know for sure. There aren’t a lot of debates in the engineering World, about whether bridge will fall down or not, because it can be measured and it can be tested and it’s true or it’s not.

But some of the most important things in our lives aren’t bridges. In the actual literal sense. They’re more figurative than that. And they are about the stories. We tell ourselves, which leads to this idea of Google Google with 95 percent market share. Google a company that makes billions and billions of dollars in profit on a regular basis.

Google does part of this by having slightly better computers that do slightly better. Search would slightly better algorithms, but we know from tests that people prefer Google results to Bing results if they’re formatted like Google, but they prefer Bing results when they’re formatted like Google as well.

That the way we feel About Google changes, our expectation of what we’re getting from Google which leads to this idea of whether or not it’s okay for Google to Simply Be carbon neutral because we all know that Exxon and British Petroleum and shell will never be carbon neutral. Because their entire business is taking stuff from deep underground stuff that’s worth trillions of dollars and turning it into gases.

Change our climate. It doesn’t matter how hard they. Try. As long as they keep doing what they’re doing. They’re not going to be carbon neutral. So then when it company, like, Google comes along Google, which has all the smart people all the time and all the money in the world is carbon neutral enough.

Is it sufficient to earn them? The benefit of the doubt and the story. We’ve been telling ourselves. They are a monopolistic company, their imperious. They make decisions behind the Scenes that break the hearts in the business models of their Partners, they are not blameless in many of the things they do. They’re also a miracle that Google search has transformed the way people discover things about the world. There’s no doubt about it.

But I think they’ve been asking to be held to a much higher standard than an oil company. And part of being held to that higher standard. I think, is that a link on their website saying that they are carbon neutral? Is in sufficient that if they are not making things dramatically better, as one of the side effects of the work that they are doing.

They are probably not doing enough, but that’s just my rant, your mileage may vary. Thanks. We’ll see you next time.

Spent the last 12 months putting together, the carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details. Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -the-discovery-channel- <==

When movie star and matinee Idol, Jennifer Lawrence was 14 years old. She came up from Kentucky with her family and was a tourist in Times Square. When she was discovered and they marched her down the street to audition for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial. She got the gig and the next thing you know, she’s a movie star.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about getting discovered.

But first, here’s a message from our sponsor. You’ve got an idea that might just change the world. But even the best ideas can benefit from additional and diverse perspectives. That’s why we built our mind. Our mind is a community of innovators innovators who help each other by providing their thoughts and feedback when it’s needed. Most at the concept stage, whether you’re an architect or a biologist and Economist or a school teacher, we can give your next project. And additional point of view, learn more and join for free at our mind. A.net.

That’s a are M IND, a.net.

So this is a bit of a rant but it is something that is becoming more and more widespread as we go digital as the cost to getting to Market is cheaper than ever as attention keeps getting spread thinner and thinner and as more and more people grow up believing that it is their Duty their obligation and their right to be slightly or even more than slightly famous.

So let’s start with Clubhouse. Was the hot thing of 2021. It is unlikely to be the hot thing going forward because it was so easy to copy but also because they didn’t really understand what was on offer when it came to Discovery.

Now when Pluto is discovered, it doesn’t mean that Pluto is invented that Pluto was created. It just means that human being certain human beings.

Now know about it. Rhombus did not discover America. Neither did some Vikings were some explorers from China. It was already here. There were already people living here. So the word discovered just to begin with. We have to be clear about what we mean. What we mean is on, someone’s radar that, they are choosing to pay attention, and Discovery has mattered an enormous amount in the worlds of culture and business for a very long time.

The reason is this attention, flows, attention is finite. Everybody gets the same amount every day and for Millennia tens of thousands of years. We were mostly board that if you wanted to hear some music, you sang, some music, or you listen to your neighbor sing and the rest of the time, you will either hunting or growing crops or before that you were walking around like a nomad, but you didn’t ask what’s on Netflix right now.

You didn’t binge The Sopranos. There wasn’t this constant demand for attention parceled into smaller and smaller pieces.

When radio came along. Suddenly, you could make a living, a good living. If a lot of people chose to pay attention to your show, Jack Benny, or the shadow, whatever it was or when they started programming music on the radio. Thanks to the cop. Right laws, you could get paid and you could sell more music suddenly. There was demand for attention.

And so Gatekeepers Come Along The Gatekeepers at the publishing house that somehow managed to pick which books get put into the bookstore, that there’s the program director at the radio station. Who decides what’s going to go into heavy rotation. That if you are influential, DJ people are showing up in the 50s and the 60s with Suitcases, actual, suitcases filled with cash, actual cash. Just so that you would play one of their songs so that people would listen to it for free.

When you control the gate, you have some level of power and the gate that people were controlling was the gate to people’s attention, attention flows. If it is not used it disappears forever. And as these flows of attention became, More valuable, people did whatever they could to get the gatekeeper to pick them at Walmart in Bentonville Arkansas.

The last time I was there, there’s a giant Moon filled with cubicles. It turns out the buyers, the people who decide what to sell at Walmart don’t meet with sellers in their offices. The worry. Was that in that private space bribes could happen or someone could just see pictures of your family and then figure out how to be your friend so that you would buy more stuff. Now instead. It’s a room filled with cubes with cameras overhead, microphones recording everything.

So that ostensibly the buyers will make more accurate and honest decisions about who gets shelf space. Why does it matter because before the web shelf space was a shortcut to attention. That the Walmart, Shopper walking down the aisle isn’t looking at every product ever made. They’re looking at the products that got Picked these products at some level are discovered. There was already Vlasic pickles before Walmart started featuring them. But after Walmart started, featuring them after they were discovered, then more people paid attention, and bought some.

And yes, you can buy a tension by buying ads from certain media companies, but it’s an auction and its really expensive. You get a little bit less than you pay for, but if a Keeper picks. You if they support you, if they publish you, you’re going to get discovered and this leads to all sorts of bad behaviors. Besides the whole idea of keeping people from getting bribed that the casting couch in Hollywood and the horrible, horrible behavior of people like Harvey Weinstein is only possible because people are desperate to get discovered. And so they trade their dignity and their self-respect in their health, to somebody who says, I will make you a star.

Because of course you were starved before you got there. You just weren’t discovered yet. But then, as always the internet comes along and changes everything, as Chris Anderson has written about, there’s a long tail and a long tail says, when there were three TV networks, The Gatekeepers had real power.

You’ve heard of Seinfeld and the reason you’ve heard of Seinfeld is because someone stuck with it. It did really poorly for months before it found. It’s place and the fact that it was on right after a show that was super popular. Certainly helped a gatekeeper discovered Seinfeld and stuck with it long enough for the public to discover.

When I was at Yahoo. There was a room with more than 200 people working in it, run by a librarian and their job was to look at all the pages on the internet as hard as it is to believe. That’s what they did look. All the pages of the internet and hand build an index of where they should send you. When you decided to search for something.

If you could have found one of those Librarians and bribe them, you probably could have gotten an enormous amount of traffic. But then Google shows up and Google puts computers to work doing it. And once the explosion of the web happened, there’s no way Yahoo!

Could have kept up because there was never enough Librarians that you could hire to look at enough web pages, but The thing is that we asserted anyone who wanted to quote, be discovered asserted that somehow Google was conscious that it was intelligent, that it was making decisions about which pages to promote and which ones, not to if we couldn’t figure it out.

Then there was just guessing. And so the entire industry of SEO is built is probably a multi-billion dollar industry. Now around the idea that there’s something you can do a casting couch. You can lie on that will help you. Get discovered and for a long time it sort of worked particularly. If you were willing to compromise your ethics and look for short term, short cuts, that would trick Google into sending you more than your fair share of traffic.

Now Google has an incentive to create this dynamic because people who lose and that 99.9% of the people who aren’t number one in the slot they seek to be in Can buy their Way Forward by buying ads, which is how Google makes all their money and one after another as social media companies have come along to have implied or directly promised that they would help people get discovered. Ooh.

Look, how many people are using Facebook. Look how many people are using Twitter. Look how many people are using Clubhouse. You need to be there because every once in awhile, someone gets discovered every once in awhile, someone on Tick, Tock becomes a sensation. And the thing about these platforms is that they are not optimized for Discovery.

Say what you want about Hollywood, Hollywood has always been optimized for Discovery Harrison Ford shows up. He’s a carpenter. He’s working for 20 bucks an hour. He shows up to install a door in George, Lucas’s office, and George Lucas says, why don’t you read for Han Solo? And that’s why we know who Harrison Ford is your Han Solo.

I used to be the thing is that they are doing it on purpose with a point of view. And that once they make a decision about someone being discovered. They put all sorts of energy into promoting that person and then add to it in certain industries. Once that person begins to get traction. The system gives them a chance to earn permission a connection directly with their fans.

So Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans kicks in here because if you True fans, then they can further your career for years to come but that’s not what, who bird ID Uber showed up and said we want. Lots and lots of people do use Uber, but we don’t want you to know who your driver is. We don’t care who your driver is. We want drivers to be fungible.

Replaceable. We want all the power to go to us. We don’t discover Uber drivers. We don’t do anything to create a connection between somebody who is in the car and someone who is driving. Driving the car. And so what it would really mean to be a gatekeeper to enable Discovery is a, you have a filter to decide who you’re going to pick it. Can’t possibly be open to all. And number two, is once someone gets through your filter. You do things to promote that person, you pick some winners and picking winners has a benefit to you and to the audience because now the audience doesn’t have to just go through this endless filtering process because you’ve done.

Think to pick. And the third thing is, once you’ve connected to something that you care about the system, lets you connect to it for the future. That’s not what happens on Twitter. Twitter doesn’t care what you’re reading because Twitter is not in the business of helping someone’s tweets, reach more people.

They’re just in the business of having you look at a lot of stuff. Just let the system sort itself out of folks on a me. Just let it all. Get filtered by humans, connecting with other humans. They don’t care. And so this is the Dilemma that so many social media and other platforms faces. How do you get a Creator to show up and do their best work? If you’re not going to help them in any way?

And it’s just yet another crapshoot that the person has to bring their own audience when they go from one place to another and what we’re ending up with our random waves. Anyways, of trolls or pundits or people who are putting on a show or people who got lucky, but they don’t get lucky for long. Do YouTube stars of five years ago, aren’t YouTube Stars today, pretty much.

And the reason is that these platforms, the ones that have said they’re going to get rid of the gatekeeper have, in some way done that by creating this weird Lottery, this Lottery of attention. The good news is that they are being truthful. At some level about what it means to be discovered because they’re saying we don’t know but on the other end human culture being what it is. We keep imagining personifying that the system will discover us. If we just guess, right? About what the system wants, will get more than our fair share of traffic.

And so it’s the alternative. The alternative is the combination of the smallest viable audience, the Purple Cow and permission small is viable audiences. I know That there’s a billion people on Facebook. I don’t care. There’s a thousand people who I want to reach 10,000 100,000. That’s all just figure out who they are. What they want, what they care about, be specific number to the purple. Cow after someone engages with you, in any of these media.

What do they tell their friends? And the answer? Most of the times they don’t they don’t spread the word. One reason. They don’t spread the word. Is that the Forms. Don’t make it easy or obvious to spread the word and the other reason is because the work you’re doing is really good, but it’s not remarkable.

It’s not worth talking about. And then the third part is permission. Do you earn the privilege of being able to follow up? So if you look at a platform, like, medium, founded by the guy who founded blogger, what you see is that it’s really bad at the last part, if someone reads, one of your articles and media, There’s no easy organic way for you to contact them. The next time, that one of the challenges that Twitter went through, is this whole idea of what does it mean to follow somebody? How we parceling out the flow of attention, the clubhouse, which I started this rant with is audio. Well, when it’s audio, it’s really hard to put in all of the information.

We need to do smart filtering and when you’re done listening to something, You’re in. You’re in the middle of listening to something. How is your attention directed? And if you are the creator of one of these shows, the audience, who does the audience belong to? Well, belong is really not the right word because it doesn’t belong to anybody but it’s pretty clear that the middlemen, the social media companies are insisting that the audience belongs to them that we are just here taking care of a little plot of land until they take it away from us.

The opportunity going forward is to do work. That matters for people who care to be, really clear and specific about how much is enough, who you are here to serve the change you seek to make. And now you’re not going to get discovered. Some what is but do the math. The math is not in favor of someone being discovered just because they want to.

So Jennifer Lawrence. I hope you’re enjoying your Reese’s, Peanut Butter Cups. And for the rest of us, they’re simply the hard worker showing up day after day. Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some juicy questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is on the Pain Scale entire sir. Warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Whoosah. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or anything previous, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button. Your questions. Keep getting better and better. Thank you for submitting them three this week. Here we go. Hey! Seth Joseph from National here.

I’m hitting a mid point in my career and professionally I’ve been in the Profit sector for about 15 years as the number two in a variety of organizations and each one’s been successful in grown and I have a great track record. But as I put my self out into the marketplace as a number one guy. I’ve been getting feedback that says effectively you’re good at being number two, but you’re not a number one guy.

I’ve been wondering about this, does this mean in the gig economy that only entrepreneurs and startups have the credibility to be a number one? Do I need to start my own business in order to prove? I have what it takes to lead it. The next level. Thanks for all you do Seth. So the first question is, how do they pick the pope?

It’s a complicated process. And when you think about it, just creating a process to pick the pope, had to have been difficult to come up with or Patrick mcgoohan. Trying to figure out who is number one on the island. I will not be pushed filed. Stamped indexed briefed debriefed or numbered. My life? Is my own for official purposes. Everyone has a number yours is number.

I am not a number. I am a person. Picking number one is really fundamentally completely different than hiring anybody else in the organization. And I think it’s worth thinking about the fact that there’s probably more than one kind of. Number one. There is the founder. When we think of somebody who is in charge of things.

It is usually the founder because most businesses are small businesses. Most organizations are Run by the person who started the organization that kind of founder is idiosyncratic. They have built the thing in their own image becoming that kind of number one. There’s only one way to do it by starting something, but it sounds from your question. Like, you’re trying to be the other kind of number one, the Pope, the one who is in charge, but picked by a group of people whose job is to pick the person who is in charge.

So using intentional design who’s it for and what’s it for the challenge you have is a to find the groups that are looking for a number 1 and B 2 present as the kind of person they want to choose. And the question is, what kind of person do they want to choose? And unlike number two, number seven, or number 6, number one varies because sometimes they want a caretaker.

Times they want someone who will perform Miracles. Sometimes they want someone who is indubitably, credentialed and is undeniably the right choice other times. They want to be seen as powerful, by picking someone, who is subservient to them. If we look at what kind of person becomes a college president, for example, they’re almost never somebody who has experience being a college President. How do we pick somebody like Well, different colleges clearly have demonstrated. They want different things in a college President and we can work our way down the list for all of those reasons. I think it might be a trap to decide that you don’t have what it takes to be a number one or that they’re telling you that you don’t have the credentials or the experience to be a number one because it’s so varied.

And it could be they’re just sending you out to get a broomstick to go away to not bother them because they have picked somebody else. Else for totally different reasons, but if somebody in the nonprofit world, came to me and said, what do I need to do to become a number one running, a non-profit? My answer would be very straightforward, get really good at fundraising because if you are really good at fundraising, you can run a college. You can run just about any nonprofit that you can imagine because the fundraising that’s the part that’s super hard to scale. The fundraising is the part that gives Access to the resources that let you rent or buy all the other parts and aboard a group that wants to go forward. Well, perhaps they’re going to make a bet on the Charisma or background of somebody who’s not a fundraiser, but if you can show that money will flow, when you show up.

It becomes really compelling to consider your resume. Seriously. Thanks for the work you’re doing. I hope this helped.

Hi Seth, this is Mateo from Stockholm Sweden. I’m a longtime listener and a huge fan of your work. So thank you for everything that you’re doing. My question is regarding something that you don’t really talk about that often, but it is definitely covered in most of your work. And that is the role of trust in companies, and in a company culture.

I work for a company that has recently grown in size and that came with the introduction of processes and procedures.

And my reaction to these new. Some what seems to be Superfluous processes is that they are indicative of low trust. So my question to you is is bureaucracy and processes and procedures within an internal company indicative of low Trust. This is a fascinating question and I’ve been thinking about it. A bunch, David graeber wrote a book about bureaucracy, and it doesn’t have to take that many people would expect in that bureaucracy at some level prevents corruption.

And it enhances civility. That bureaucracy means that different people will be treated the same, because there’s forms and policies to make sure that we are not singling people out that we’re not requiring. An ad hoc decisions and bribery to move things forward at some level. Yes. As an organization scales, bureaucracy means that the people who run the place correctly are saying, we cannot trust everyone here to do things the way we would do them.

That obviously makes sense. That when you’re running an organization with two or three or four or five people in it, you can make decisions all day long. Because you’re the one who has to own the consequences, but when you start hiring people who are going to make decisions that affect everyone else and you are not in the room to approve each and every one of them.

Then at some level you’re going to have to have policies and procedures because otherwise the math of it simply doesn’t scale. But on the other hand, and I think it’s a pretty big, but in some organizations bureaucracy also leads to more trust. Yes, their institutions were no one is trusted to do anything, where everything is bureaucratically locked down, audited measured. It’s a monopoly, churning it out. Nobody’s allowed to decide what to say, or what to do, but there are many other organizations that are saying to their people instead of spending your Chuckles worrying about whether you’ve got some petty detail, right? We’re just going to bureaucratize all of that and then we want you to spend your time doing the work, we trust you to do.

This is the work where there is no manual where there can’t be a manual because you have a bureaucracy in accounts payable and accounts receivable and all the other stuff that we were able to build a bureaucracy around. We are now giving you the foundation to go invent our Future that sort of trust is enabled by bureaucracy.

Hey, Seth, this is Emily. Usually calling from the Bronx and I’m calling from Tarrytown, New York. First. I have to thank you. You expose me to two pieces of literature that have really changed and shifted my outlook on life. One is what technology wants Kevin Kelly. And in the final pages of that book.

I was led to James Carson has finite and infinite games and I am thinking. So I believe about these and would love to hear you speak a little about how to have strength and play the infinite game as a business owner. I guess thing that I am a theme that I’m taking away from both these pieces of work or good work of Our Lives to increase opportunity and choice for ourselves for others, the whole world.

And I want my business to do that, to increase choice to it. Increase options to increase opportunity right now. I’m just thinking about that as being able to hire people, give them a chance to get a job. But I would love to hear you think about and talk about other ways that we as movement makers, and business owners, increased choice and opportunity in the world.

Thanks for all you do. Thank you for this Emily. I’m glad that those books resonated. I let Kevin know both of those books are really important and I encourage most of the people listening. To this to check them out. I think they can help. You see the world differently. One of the questions about seeing the world differently has to do with giving people a job because we’ve been indoctrinated for such a long time to think about jobs in a certain way where the boss is paying us as little as possible and taking his little risk as possible and making us work as much as possible.

So that the job of the worker is to hold things back. That the system is organized. Not to encourage and amplify the linchpin, who’s going to go out on a limb and discover what is possible, but to make things smaller. So if you’re going to hire people a key part of it is figuring out, whether you can create the conditions and find the people who are ready to thrive given the foundation of a job given the bureaucracy, you’re going to build to enable them to thrive as opposed to people who are just looking for a job.

Because that might suck away a lot of your energy and it’s not going to open the door for the change. You seek to make in our new peer-to-peer permeable, culture, that is moving so fast where ideas spread far faster than jobs ever. Will, there are chances to make a difference for communities that are different than saying I hire you full time that we are building systems and Technologies and structures to play and infinite game if We want to and these sorts of opportunities, particularly in spaces where you work, where we’re talking about nonprofits, where we’re talking about Community activism.

It may be that, that is where the big win lies. Thanks for the work, you do. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you all next time.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -the-grand-opening- <==

A new podcast cool. Who’s the first guest? What are you going to call it? No guests. What does akimbo mean? That’s never going to work. Hey, it’s our of and this is a special archive episode of akimbo.

The Italians have a wonderful phrase Salto, mortality the dangerous, sleep, the lead. Leap into the void that fear. We get in the pit of our stomach. Just before we commit that fear that it’s not going to work out. It’s too soon. I’m not ready and so we wait. But some people some people don’t wait. Karl Benz when he launched the car.

Did it in Germany where it was against the law to drive a car. And there were no passable roads, and there were no gas stations. He should have waited, Gutenberg Pioneer of movable type launched the book when there were no bookstores and when no one knew how to read and when reading glasses were required, but hadn’t been invented yet.

He should have waited. Internally, there’s constant pressure to hesitate to hold back, not to launch to find flaws. To give ourselves one more chance, but recently we made it worse. We made it worse. Because in all capital letters, we added launch big that, you need a grand opening. If you can’t have a home run, you shouldn’t even try.

I blame it on Gilligan on The Brady, Bunch. And on The Beverly Hillbillies, it goes, Way from there to The Odd. Couple all the sitcom’s, we grew up with The Flintstones, which is sort of like The Honeymooners but in prehistoric times The Brady Bunch, here’s the story of a lovely lady. All these shows had a lot in common. One of them was this the first 45 to 60 seconds was a theme saw? That explained in detail the entire storyline of the show.

Even though the show after commercials was only 24 minutes long, the network insisted that they spend a minute to catch everybody up. That makes no sense. Why would you do that? So it’s a mystery. Then why invest so much of this precious time in repeating a long theme song to make sure that no one was confused.

Well, it’s not that much of a mystery. If you understand that before the internet and cable, there were only three TV channels, half the country was watching three channels and if people switched from one to the other you’d lose them, maybe forever the The show was live. That was it once and done. And so you got conservative because you needed the grand opening, the big win every time.

Where did this idea come from? Because it doesn’t line up with the way that Civilization evolved for a really long time. If you bought something, you were buying it, from someone that you already knew that people in the village were the people in the village, the butcher, the baker, the Candlestick maker.

They didn’t need a hype man and Advance, man. They didn’t need somebody pushing for the big grand opening. Were there yesterday and they were going to be there tomorrow? I think it’s worth understanding. It came from the carnival, from the traveling salesman from the medicine, man, from the people going Village to Village.

They’d send their hype man up front. They’re Advanced man. They knew they only had one day, two days, four days to make the sale and then they were leaving town again. If you blew it. It was live. You weren’t going to get another chance. And so the grand Opening. And so the need to pigeonhole yourself. The need to get it right the first time to go big or to stay home. The carnies, the guys in the carnival called it a Bally, the Bali was the stick, the theme song, the thing, you’d say over and over again to make sure that every single time you interact with somebody, you could make the sale.

Here’s one from a bunch of years ago trying to get people to go in and see the piranhas. Get your tickets on. Come in. Killers of the Amazon can devour a cow in a matter of seconds can leave nothing. But the Bare Bones. First time shown in your city, and you may never have the chance to see it again alive alive alive, as you can see, the goal isn’t to edify to educate to create an environment that you’re going to come back again. And again, the go Is to take your money and then leave town.

And this idea that we’ve got to be in a hurry, spread from that to the mass marketing of TV to the movies. It used to be that a movie could run for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months in the theaters before it went away, usually forever, but then TV came along and TV advertising and what the movie studios figured out was that they had a chance using TV to have Really big opening weekend’s.

And so they spent a fortune on Thursday nights advertising movies. So that people would see them on the weekend. What they discovered was that giving away all the attractions in the TV ad and more important making a movie that lend itself to TV. Advertising, didn’t lead to movies that were going to play in the theaters 4 months, 3 days, 10 days, 20 days gone, and so the Thing happened that happened to TV.

We need to Hype it, we need to promo it. We don’t have very much time. We want to reach the largest number of people.

Let’s fast forward just a little bit more to Kickstarter, which I think should be called Kik finisher. The reason it ought to be called Kick finisher, is that an order to make a Kickstarter succeed except for the obvious edge cases, the random one in 10,000 to get lucky. Someone had to get lucky. In order to have a Kickstarter succeed, you need to begin with the following. You need to begin with people who trust you a Kickstarter is the end of a multi-month or a multi-year effort to earn trust and attention.

It’s not a grand opening, It’s a grand ending that what you get to do, when you make a successful Kickstarter, is go to people. The edge cases, the loyal ones, the true fans. Oh, to those people and say I’m ready for you. Now. We’re doing a Kickstarter. Those kickstarter’s always work. If you have a sufficient following before you begin, they always work.

So it’s not a lottery. It’s not a chance to grab a brass ring. That is Kevin. Kelly has pointed out. 1,000 true fans is sufficient to make it as creative person. And people who will listen to you, who will pay you, who will show up who care about you, who would miss you if you are gone. Only 1000. So let’s compare that to the Grand Opening. Thinking of I need 10 million people to watch this TV show or doesn’t work.

That’s a ten thousand X difference. You don’t need to play that game. You can play your game. And your game is slow and steady daring, risky thrilling, but slow and steady because the goal isn’t to Hype your way with an advance, man, using a Bally day after day to get one more rube to give you a dollar to see your piranhas.

Now, you’re playing a different game. And game we’re playing doesn’t need a grand opening. It needs a grand finishing.

There must be an alternative. How did Wikipedia grow without a grand opening? What about Harry Potter or the Martian? What about 50 Shades of Grey or Microsoft or Kiva or the Union Square Cafe? The list goes on and on most of the brands most of the organizations that we care about. They didn’t have a Opening. They didn’t have a hype man.

They didn’t launch with a bang. There must be another way. The alternative is called first 10. Everyone knows 10 people. Everyone has 10 people who will listen to them. Tell ten people see what happens. If those people tell others, the word will spread if they don’t make better work. Take your novel, send it to 40 people. 40 people who trust you in like you see what happens. Maybe they’ll share it. If they share it’ll spread, if it spreads it will reach more people sooner or later. Someone will reach out to you and ask you to write something else first 10, 10 by 10 by 10.

You put an idea in the world not to everyone in the world just to people who want to hear it and then maybe it spreads. And if it spreads it grows and it grows you get to do it again.

Almost 20 years ago. I was at a conference. There were some cool people there and we were going around the circle, introducing each other and a guy says yeah, my name is Sergey and I have this little search engine called Google and at the time a lot of people knew about Google but it wasn’t the worldwide phenomenon. We know today and then he said something profound. He said we don’t do any Marketing promotion or hype.

And let me tell you why we figure that one day. Everyone will use Google and we also know that every day, Google gets better. And since we’re getting better every day, we’re in no, hurry to have people use it for the first time because tomorrow or the day after that is soon enough because it’ll be better.

You’ll have a better first impression. We’re in. No hurry instead. We’re going to make the best thing that we know how to make and wait for people to tell others, but it’s not just digital stuff. There was a little tiny restaurant in the East Village of Manhattan years ago, called Momofuku. No one had ever heard of it. You could walk in any time. This guy named David Chang, sort of crazy had a little counter and a bunch of tables and my family. And I used to go there sometimes for lunch on a weekend, and they were all these rules. You couldn’t leave this out. Subtractions no additions and eat what you eat? That’s all you get.

But what happened day by day is the word. Spread, it got to the point is Yogi. Berra, said where no one goes there because it’s so crowded. And it turned into an entire Empire or consider the amazing podcast 99% invisible from Roman Mars. How’d you hear about it? Did you hear about it from those Super Bowl ads? They ran, of course not.

There were dozens and dozens of episodes of 99% invisible before you heard about it. Because Roman took the same approach. How do I make something for a few? Something special, something that’s really hard to pigeonhole, something new or consider a piece of software, like Dropbox. I don’t recall ever seeing an ad for Dropbox until just recently.

Instead, what Dropbox did was build a service that was And to share not just to talk about it. But to use it with other people or my friend, Joel Greenburg, one of the most talented and well-known photographers in the world. How did Jill get there? She didn’t get there by being picked by somebody to push her to the masses.

She got there by making quirky art by saying I don’t shoot pictures like everybody else. I shoot pictures like me and so her photographs are distinctive. They don’t fit. In early on lots and lots of people didn’t buy the photographs. She wanted to sell to them. The Magazine’s, the commercial shoots that she needed.

No, she was too far out there for the masses to adopt. So, she did the smart thing. She didn’t complain or conform. Instead. She made something the masses, didn’t what? She made something for the early adopters. She refused to pigeonhole it. She didn’t have to Pit because the early adopters, they’re looking for something on the edge and she had something on the edge and then of course it spreads, right. The first thing that happens is the art director says get me Jill Greenberg.

And then, of course, the art director says, get me, someone who looks like Joel Greenburg and then, you know, you’ve made it. So the goal here, when we are making our best work the work, we seek to make Is not to listen to the people in the middle of the curve because the people in the middle of the curve aren’t listening to us.

The goal is not The Flintstones or The Brady Bunch or The Beverly Hillbillies. The goal is to go to The Fringe to the edge to the people who are listening to the people who care not with a bali, but with something real to invite them in and tell them something that they didn’t know before. To bring them something. That’s a little more complicated than an NBC executive would have gone for to take them on a journey from here to there, not with a grand opening.

But with a small opening with a whisper here, I made this. Here, I made this. That’s our work is if it’s Maria. Accept, my name is Kyle reading. Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is on the Pain Scale entire sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, or just about anything that’s on your mind. I hope you’ll visit akimbo. Dot link, take Ai and bi o .l, iink and click the appropriate button. I think this question deserves its own segment. So here we go. Hey, Seth, it’s Paula.

So, being a musician, being a public speaker. Have a few things in common, in your episode, The invisibility. Woody Paradox, I started thinking about performing from memory versus reading a musician. Can perform by memory relying on the are all and muscle memory. But if the notes are in front of them and there’s a bit of nerves or pressure, they may switch over and start reading the notes, and then it’s a different kind of performance.

As a podcaster, I’m sure you strive not to read, but let it derived from your natural thoughts. I was hoping you could talk about your journey as a public speaker and how much you come to rely on your notes as a prompt, or have you learned to Simply disguise reading off notes. It’s a tricky process, either way and thoughts on the interference of having a visual to bail you out. Is actually my point, Have You discovered the best method as always? Thanks for your Insight. Thank you for this. It made me think about one of my musical Heroes, Keith Jarrett, Keith Jarrett, who was one of the most popular Jazz performers at the peak of his career was noteworthy for two things. One playing standards, but lots of jazz pianists and quartets have done this.

But secondly for arriving on stage with no music and no plan. He simply said, It down and played. I got to hear him in person once in the 80s and it was an astonishing and scary thing to see.

I was astonished to discover as I went to find that clip for you on YouTube, that people have taken the improvisation that Keith did live in real time in front of an audience. Transcribe them Road. Them down and learn to play them, which is part of what we are here to talk about first. The improvisation second, the writing down, then playing it from sheet music and then playing it from memory.

So let’s consider that music, many forms of Music have three different types. The first one, the one we’re all used to from 3rd graders performing at the fall concert is playing the notes and you can tell when someone is simply looking at the the sheet music and playing the notes, even sight-reading playing music that they really haven’t practiced that much, the second kind of music.

The music that we often see, particularly when it’s played by Professionals in classical music, is someone who is reading the music but knows it so well, that they are just a little bit ahead of where they are. That as in reading a book. Our whole brain has to be at work to make it. So that it doesn’t sound like we are sounding Out each word. But in fact we are saying the words in a row as if we mean them.

And so most music, I think, fits into this category certainly a cover band. They know it cold.

Maybe they’ve memorized it, but it’s almost the same. They know it cold. But then the third one, the third one is to Keith Jarrett level, the one where you are making it up as you go and there’s something truly magical about watching this happen. Whether it’s a Grateful Dead concert from 24.

Or a jazz quartet treating Force. I want to three. Ah So, when I think about giving a speech, I think it’s worth noting that there are probably the same three levels. The first one is someone who is simply reading reading without having spent hours and hours and hours, practicing it or perhaps a politician who is simply reading but is very good at using a teleprompter.

The second one is somebody who has practiced the words so much. It doesn’t sound to us. Like they are reading. And since it doesn’t sound like, they are reading, we believe for a moment. Like they are actually talking to us. This is the work of a really good book on tape reader. And then, the Third Kind, the kind that I aspire to when I do this podcast is there is no script now. I’m not in Keith Jarrett.

I’m not sitting here creating works of wonder in real time, but I have no script that’s on purpose and I think it’s really important for people who aren’t podcasters to think about something. If you’re going to call a meeting on Zoom or in person. Why? Why not just send a memo instead because no matter how well you read that memo.

It’s still a memo. A memo that could have been read asynchronously, a memo that could have been studied edited Rewritten, improved upon. It is far more efficient to send a memo. The reason we have a meeting a is to exert emotional labor, and let people know. This one is important that we canceled everything else we were doing. So we could all look at each other while I say what’s in my script. But second, because I shouldn’t have a script, I should be talking to you, people don’t have a script. When they go on a date, they don’t have a script when they’re having an important interaction.

And somehow we’ve evolved to this place where verbal speech is a scary and be supposed to be red. I’m not buying it. I know that if you take the time that if you practice the art of saying what you mean and meaning, what you say of slowing down before you speed up thinking about the message that you are trying to send, you know, Know how to do that. We’ve each done it. Maybe as recently as an hour ago.

We have to figure out how to do it when the stakes are high. So sure note cards. Sure, a teleprompter, but my point is reading your memo, reading your speech. It’s a tell. It’s a tell to your audience, that maybe you don’t really mean it. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers. Volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -stadium-subsidies- <==

How about 275 thousand people live in my old hometown of Buffalo, New York, if you count the metropolitan area, it’s just over a million. One of the richest owners of an NFL team. Somebody that Forbes Magazine says, has more than five billion dollars wants the City of Buffalo to Pony up half a billion dollars or about 500 dollars a person.

To build a new stadium for him in Orchard Park, New York. Hey it’s F and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about just how easy it is to game some systems. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor This is Grant Sanders, money is not the solution to every problem. Take, for example, the island of Nantucket where I live.

There’s a lot of wealth here, but we also have many difficult social issues to solve, and that’s why I created The Nantucket owners manual. A guide to leaving the island better than we found it. The owners manual is a peer-reviewed. Publication using digital technology to get ideas out into the community.

My hope is to use it as a blueprint to create something called the community owner’s manual. So we can guide others to All problems in their communities. It’s a passion project. It does have a patreon page and you can learn more and anti cat owners manual.com.

As usual, this is a podcast, I rant about status roles and affiliation, but it’s told through the lens of organized sports stadiums, according to the Brookings institution, payoff for cities about as well as one or two large supermarkets. So, let me say that, again, a big supermarket in the right place in a city will create as much economic As a stadium that cost hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, how can this be well, how can it not be?

Because first of all, the stadiums only used if it’s for football, seven or eight times a year, when it is used only 60. In the case of Buffalo, 80,000 people show up a tiny percentage of the population of people who do show up, might pay for parking which goes, To the team and maybe the lease they might buy some popcorn or warm pizza. But that’s just keeping them from buying dinner, someplace else in town.

The people who work for the team, some of them a few of them, get paid a bazillion dollars but they don’t live in town and they don’t spend their bazillion dollars all at once, the rest of the people who work there. A lot of them are part-time because after all, it’s only open eight or nine days. Year building it. Well, yes, building it created some jobs and economic activity, but not for a lot of people, on the other hand, a couple supermarkets, if you think about how many people walk through that building, if you think about how it enriches the lives of people who are able to get fresh food at a good price.

If you think about the fact that it can be a Cornerstone of a neighborhood 24 hours a day, 7 days, a week. There’s really no comparison. And on top of that, you don’t have to issue tax-free bonds to enable a supermarket to get built because supermarkets are businesses and the people who own those businesses.

Are able to raise money from investors who get paid because the business does. Well, that’s not what happens with a professional sports team. It’s definitely not what happens with the Olympics instead a different business model. All has arisen that there are only a finite number of teams and for the teams that are seen as being in the bottom half of desirable cities, there’s constantly an auction going on.

So Portland says, oh we could sure use a team and they start looking around for places like Buffalo the second smallest city that has the football team and saying, You know, your stadiums not looking that good. Why don’t you come here? And then there are countless consulting. Firms that will work for a billionaire who runs the bills to issue a report. In this case saying that it would be worth more than 300 million dollars. A year to the Buffalo economy to keep the bills in a new stadium.

How do you do that? Kind of math. You just make it up because reputable economists have been For decades that, in fact, it doesn’t make any difference at all. Here’s a quote from the Brookings report which was included in their Book, Sports jobs and taxes. No, recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment.

No, recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues, regardless of, whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood. A city or an entire metropolitan area. The economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimis now, it’s important to note that cities do things for reasons that have nothing to do with economics, and there’s nothing wrong with that that it is entirely appropriate for somebody to go to a city and say you should spend a lot of money $500 or more per citizen because it’ll make you feel good because that’s really what’s on offer.

But it’s hidden Hind this veneer that it’s actually a smart economic choice when it clearly is not. So why do people want to do it at all? Well, status rolls. It’s nice for some people to be from a city that’s famous because they have a famous sports team because their sports team won a big prize. This is particularly clear in Europe, where people love football, the kind that we call. A soccer here in the US so much because it is directly connected to their identity as a citizen. And as a fan, the question that prompted this rant, my question actually comes out of my most recent visit to Buffalo where I spent Christmas this year.

My boyfriend’s dad was telling me about the likely possibility of the Buffalo Bills, getting a new stadium. Also ended with this little aside. Thanks for the tea. I’m in go Patriots. Which no, I did not miss but I got it, I smiled. Because if you’re a Patriots fan, you’re not a Bills fan. Now I stopped being a build fan. A really long time ago.

I stopped watching football completely and really long time ago, but I used to go to the games all the time growing up and there was something about going to downtown Buffalo to the original stadium. And seeing this thing happened, this Public spectacle. And when it was in downtown Buffalo, it brought a whole bunch of people from the suburbs back to the city at a time when Buffalo really needed that to happen.

It needs it now more than ever, but they’re not proposing to build the stadium in the city, even though it would expose Suburban Heights to the city that they are ostensibly attached to, which might make them a little bit more eager to help people who need their help. But no, it’s Scheduled to be way out in the boonies. Okay? So back to this idea of status rules there, the status votes to come from having a luxury box and the status rules that come from having Seasons tickets.

But for all of the fans who are 100 times more likely to not, go to a game, then go to a game. That 100x group of people, there is a point of Pride that comes from seeing the name of the place where they live attached to the name of the team. Mmmmm. Now, it’s interesting because only 60 miles away from Buffalo is a place called Rochester Rochester home. Of Kodak home of Xerox at one time, one of the cities that had the highest number of millionaires per capita of any city in the United States Rochester. Has also struggled post-industrial age, but it’s interesting to note that Rochester doesn’t struggle more than Buffalo because it doesn’t have a football team and it’s entirely possible to be a loyal citizen of Rochester.

Even though there is no baseball team. So with that said, one of the things that were talking about with status rules, are the idea that the fan, the proponent, the person in government, the one who keeps the team, their status goes up and the other half of that is affiliation, who is next to us, who is cheering with us.

If you go to see a Pittsburgh Penguins game, and Indoor Stadium, always louder than an outdoor, one with every Person wearing the team jersey all chanting side-by-side. Yes, affiliation is also created, which then leads to the conversation of status roles and affiliation for the critic because if the critic shows up and says this is economically foolish, we are much better off, investing taxpayer money and all sorts of things that would improve education, well-being, quality of life and economic upsides.

Well, that person Can be easily brought down by folks who say, why are you giving away the status that we? So desperately need Buffalo’s 1/4 the size. It used to be. And now you want to take away our football team, not only that, but it will hurt one’s affiliation in the community as you seek apparently, to bring down status. So, what is to be done to keep this system from getting so easily gamed? Because Stadium after stadium in League, after league is pulling The same stunt.

Well, it seems to me that the coordinated efforts of the Monopoly. The owners of each of these teams needs to be countered by a coordinated effort by Mayors and governors, or whatever they call Mayors and governors where you live. And it seems pretty simple to me that. The next time, the Olympics come around the next time, the football. People come around next time, the baseball people come around.

Well, all the cities in all the towns in all of this. Dates and all the countries have made a deal with each other they have made a deal with each other that they will not spend more than x to keep a team. And it’s a binding contract with penalties associated with it that have all the cities in all the towns in all the states.

Did that together where exactly are the teams going to go? Because there isn’t a better offer anywhere else. So that’s my idea of applying a little bit of Game Theory. To what’s going on when people are tweaking status roles in affiliation, not in the interest of the taxpayers who are end up paying for this. So yeah. If you want to go to a football game, I think it’s a great idea and you should pay for it, but I’m not sure that money should come out of any other budget of Citizen funded efforts.

That’s my rant. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I would say go bills but I don’t watch football anymore. We’ll see you. We’ll be Back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week, in fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, Every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops in my friends are running.

But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in. So, if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please.

Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not. Glued. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Accept my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is on the Pain Scale entire sir warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is And that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about just about anything or even a previous episode, I hope you’ll visit a Kimbo dot link that’s a Ki MB o .l iink and click the appropriate button to questions this week. Sort of far field probably with controversial answers. Here we go.

Hey Seth this is casein from the USA. I recently began working Working as a financial advisor. And since I’m new part of that includes reaching out to family and friends and letting them know what it is that I’m doing and how I can help them. Although, I’ve recently realized in some of my conversations, it seems that people might perceive that I view them as strictly dollar signs or another way to just make money off of them and that couldn’t be further from the truth.

And it’s really quite hurtful at times. So my question is, is there something that I can say or help communicate that? I am really excited to share with them. What it is that I do and how I can help them and be a resource without them feeling like I’m just trying to sell them something. Thanks for your help.

Thank you for this casein and I feel the enthusiasm and vulnerability in your voice. I’m not sure you’re going to love my answer but here you go. Turns out there are a few lines of work that have millions and millions of people in them, in which the first rule. Once you get into that line of work, is that you’re supposed to go and sell your family and friends, that certainly is the way multi-level marketing works.

It’s the way real estate. Brokers are supposed to look for listings and It is key to the way that they take financial planners and move them through a career path. There is a problem and the problem is, you’re not really doing it, because you want to help your cousin for two reasons. The first one is, you are not the best in the world. At this one day, you might be the best in the world at this but right now you’re not.

So you’re going to someone you care about and you’re saying I’m just learning how to do this. Can I be jealous? Generous to you and do it for you for money. And when it said like that it’s pretty clear. The most generous thing to do, would be to refer them to the person who’s the best in the world at it, or possibly do it completely and totally, for free.

Say to them, I’m learning a lot and I can look at your Vanguard account and without you paying me a penny without building my book of business, which will benefit me, I can give you some free. Advice based on what I’ve learned staking my reputation but getting no upside whatsoever. That is a gift. I’m being generous to you by offering that to you.

But when we go to people who we are related to and we try to sell them something to start our career, it’s easy to persuade ourselves that we’re being generous and to be hurt when they say no, thank you. But in fact, what we’re doing is dating, our cousin, it’s not a Level Playing Field that for me if If you want to be a professional get business from people, you don’t know learn business from people not because you’re sort of related to them but because you have something to offer them because the problem with treating your relatives as customers is, if it all goes sideways, they’re still going to be your relatives, which means that one of you is going to have to deal with the fact that it didn’t go as well as it could have, but you’re still relatives.

Different than the transaction you have to earn and maintain with a stranger. So financial planners are capable of adding a lot of value for some people in certain circumstances. But I want to encourage you to stand up straight and be a professional and not need your cousin to get you started because there are plenty of ways that you can show up in the world to earn. Trust the benefit of the doubt without having it based on who your grandparents were.

Hi says, Tom from the UK long-term listening to your show.

I’ve got a kind of philosophical question for you here, so I think freedom is one of the things that makes people universally happy whether that’s Creative Financial or just Freedom within nature and just the choice to be free. But quite often we find in our work that we’re constrained by responsibility. So, The thing that I always think about is my business, I have to go on Instagram all the time and answer questions and there’s a kind of lack of freedom in knowing that I have to answer those people and I can’t just leave it and go off and hike around the mountain, but the reason I’m doing that is so that I can then get Financial Freedom.

But it’s, I wonder if you had any advice on how you can in a modern world. World find Freedom within the constraints of a modern kind of economic economy. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thank you, thanks, for this time. And once again, we’re dancing around with semiotics. Here’s an interesting question.

When we look at people who are high performers in the sense that they’ve made plenty of money and built a reputation, whether that person is our heart surgeon or she’s a financial planner. How come they don’t quit? How come when I was at Yahoo and surrounded by people and millions of millions of millions of dollars, they didn’t all quit.

Why is it that when people have a certain sort of responsibility, they keep doing it even though they will never be able to spend the money they already have Jeff. Bezos is yacht, which is absurdly. Big is also something, he’s only going to use a few days a year because he’s busy with a date. Job. Why does he even need a day job? I think the answer comes to our understanding of the word freedom and its sister responsibility.

Because responsibility is for many people, not toxic, but in fact, a bonus treat, a chance to be, trusted a chance to do work. That matters the chance to show up where you are needed. And no, that’s not the same as playing golf and being retired, but they’re different sorts of Freedom, the freedom to Bring ideas into the world, the freedom to speak up, lean, in change things, that’s different than freedom from freedom, from responsibility, freedom from being asked, or required to do something and different people. Want different things, partly. Because of how we’re indoctrinated, partly our culture works partly could be due to our makeup and finding our lane so that we can spend our days doing the work we want to. To do is an extraordinary privilege relatively, brand new available to more people than ever before it not enough, people still based on caste still based on people being judged for things that are out of their control.

But yes there are billion or more people on this planet who get to make choices that had never happened before. The choices always, come with responsibilities. You have the freedom to have an ice cream sundae for lunch. But it comes with the responsibility of dealing. What it will do to your body. This afternoon, and if you want to run a business, maybe you’re running a business to make money.

But I think that’s unlikely because if you want to maximize the money you’re making, you’d go to work in some grueling job for an investment Bank. Moving piles of money from one place to another and taking a little bit all day as you did it. Not a lot of people do that the people who do, I hope are in it for the money because that’s what they’re getting.

But for the rest of us, there is the freedom. To make a difference. And that takes many forms. Thanks for letting me rant about this. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change, and since then, every single metric has gotten worse, but it’s not too late, what we needed. Do is shift it from a me problem to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon Almanac dot-org.

The details. Thank you for caring enough to make a a difference.

==> -status-roles-e- <==

It’s a simple question, really, but I think it helps us understand so much of the world around us. The question who eats first, whether you are a wild animal, a b, or a yuman status rolls matter, hey, it’s Kevin Beach and this is a special archived episode of akimbo Baxter hates Truman Baxter’s, my dog great dog. From the shelter. He was about 60 pounds.

He gets along with all the other dogs except for Truman Truman’s the wonderful. German Shepherd, who lives across the street proud legal, few years older than Baxter, and they hate each other. And the reason I think is it’s not clear who gets to eat first, who’s the alpha who’s in charge.

Now, is in fifth grade. I ran for president of the safety patrol and I lost and in 9th and 10th and 11th. And 12th grade, I ran for student council president and I lost my senior year, I had the best signs. I put myself out there and I lost I got to college and I ran for dorm rep unopposed and I lost I don’t think the question is, why I kept losing, I kept losing because people weren’t voting for me. They didn’t see me for how I saw myself.

The interesting question is, why did I keep running?

So let’s begin with business cards. Joel Bauer has made a famous meme on the internet about your business card. You see a business card cheap Strathmore stock, 60 pound Holds a crease, and the best riff in the movie, American Psycho is about some insecure people. Comparing of all things, their business cards.

Look at that subtle, off-white coloring That’s tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark. Why do business cards even matter? How can this little piece of paper somehow be construed as a representation of who we are? And why do we care?

Well, if we think about the Godfather, we can start to understand how status roles are portrayed in the media, and how we internalize them and believe. Some in the opening scenes of The Godfather Buona, Sera, The Undertaker, the lowest status person in the community, 96 pounds balding wearing a nondescript suit. The Undertaker comes to see The Godfather, the day. He chooses is the day of the Godfather’s daughter’s wedding Sicilian tradition. According to the movie, is that the Godfather cannot refuse a favor asked of him on this. Special day.

So In This Moment, The Godfather is vulnerable, he’s vulnerable because his status can be questioned, The Undertaker comes to him and asks him to perform violence on some men who have heard his daughter.

The Godfather Marlon Brando turns to Buona. Sera and says, I cannot do. He cannot do it, of course, because if he did, it would make him nothing but a hired thug. Buona, Sera raises the stakes. He offers to pay the Godfather, which, of course is an insult. It turns him from a mere hired thug, to a hired thug who’s just doing it for the money.

And in that moment, where the status roles of the high status status seeking Godfather is threatened by the low status, Undertaker? We see writ, large something that’s been going on. And for Millennia, we understand the relationship between Baxter and Truman because it turns out that throughout the animal kingdom including an especially humans status rolls matter.

Just about everything you will ever see in a movie, theater, or theater or read about in a novel is about status rolls. The Movie Trading Places is about status, rolls the sitcom’s of the He’s the comedies of the 80s, The Thrillers that we see today, they’re all about, who’s moving up who’s moving down.

But of course, it happens in real life and of course, it doesn’t have anything to do with money. Think about that meditation weekend, nothing but spirituality, except some people at the weekend, our friends with the instructor. So they have a little bit more status. And of course the guest instructor is wearing a special outfit and sitting in a special chair.

So he has a little bit more status. Tribes these informal groups of people that we are all part of demand status rolls because it’s a form of governance who’s up and who’s down and capitalism requires status rolls, because it gets people to work. Even after they have enough that the ability to be able to say, I might not have everything, but I have more than you.

Is buried deep within our culture. That what we have done is built layer after layer, after layer in Commerce, and in community, based around our roles are status our business card, our standing in the community, those Laboratories shoes that she’s wearing, that Birkin bag who’s sitting at the cool table at lunch, who’s the head of the football team or the cheerleading squad? For the student council that we repeatedly.

Look at other people and decide where we stand and what marketers have done is run with this. What politicians have done is run with this because we understand that deep down human beings care about it. Keith Johnstone, in His Brilliant book, impro spends the first third of the book talking about how theater is nothing. But this exchange of status roles professional wrestling is nothing. But an exchange of status roles Nursery School is status roles, who gets to play with the blocks. Is it the kid who’s the biggest?

How do we treat somebody who’s wearing a cute outfit versus one? Who isn’t How are we looking and juxtaposing who has status and who doesn’t? And which status matters. If you had a chance to watch the videos of Donald Trump shaking hands with various world leaders. What you see, is an ancient ritual, a battle for Supremacy in something as absurd as a handshake.

And when a policeman pulls you over for speeding in that exchange, at the window of your car will be a debate about status roles. Are you going to play low and let the policeman play? Hi, are you going to take Umbridge? And say, don’t you know who I am and try to get the policeman to play low.

We’re not on the Savannah anymore. We’re not lions or hippos. Deciding who gets deep first and who just gets the scraps. And yet certainly seems that way for old friends, who haven’t seen each other in a while. Get together over lunch, the first one beaming pulls out. His iPhone x brand-new, the most profitable consumer product ever created. The iPhone hasn’t offered much new in the way of functionality in five years.

But people keep buying the new one, and he knows why putting on the table gingerly, he’s moved up in status. His friend, to the left pulls out, his pixel phone, from Google Android based a way of showing, he’s smarter than his friend. He bought something with more power. Not to be outdone, the third friend pulls out, a waterproof, flip phone, 12 years old, doesn’t matter.

He’s all about the functionality. The fourth friend, though. The status of no status doesn’t have a phone at all doesn’t need a phone, his admin will take care of it and around the circle, we go.

How do we keep it running in a society as rich as ours with? So many resources available, how do we keep it going? How do we keep making people, upset and frustrated when they don’t have enough status? How do we get people to work all night? Even though they have enough to earn more status? How do we create life and death situations? How do we push people to go into debt? For status, well it turns out that shame shame that basic human emotion, one of the top six emotions that people experience.

You’ve got happiness, you’ve got fear and then right up there is Shame. Shame is the status enforcer that what we have done is orchestrate a culture where if you are surrounded by people with more status than you Or if you believe that they have more status than you, we’ve instructed you to feel shame, and we hate Shame.

Shame is the deal killer shame, undermines all of the things that we seek to have. So to avoid shame, we make bad decisions. We make decisions that honor marketers or those that would manipulate us as opposed to doing what’s best for us and the people around us. And it’s important that we learn to see it there once you see it.

Once you see how this juxtaposition between status and shame is used over and over again. You can see how you are being. Manipulated manipulated devote manipulated to work manipulated to purchase that status all by itself, has no real value outside. I’d of an arena or someone’s trying to take something from us that the rest of the time, it’s in our head, it’s the story. We are telling ourselves about our worth about our business card about how we are being judged as always, there’s Insight from the good Doctor, dr. Seuss in Yertle the turtle.

Turtles more Turtles. He bellowed in braids and the turtles way down in the pond were afraid. They trembled, they shook, but they came, they obeyed from all over the pond. They came Swimming by dozens, whole families of turtles, with uncles and cousins, and all of them stepped on the head of poor Mac.

One after another, they climbed up the stack What marketers have learned is that the shame engine the tribal shame engine won’t stop working. All they have to do is highlight it press on it. Gently sometimes with an anvil but often gently and remind us that we don’t want to be at the bottom of the pile.

They remind us with images and offers and sales that if we don’t respond, we’re going to have to deal with shame and it’s all in our head. Consider the market for luxury goods. Last year, it was more than 30 billion dollars spent worldwide to buy things that were more expensive and probably a little bit nicer than we needed.

Luggage or perfume or shoes. The list goes on and on it turns out the industry was invented by one man named Colbert in France, he worked for the king, the French had a problem which is they weren’t doing very well as imperialists Spain. And England were colonizing other countries building markets, gaining raw materials better than the French were so Colbert put in place a ratchet a way to raise money Taxes for the king and to build export markets and the idea was that they would bless certain industries, give them protections and support and thus France, became the leader in things like lace and leather goods.

They figured out how to make things better than they needed to be. So that people who wanted to demonstrate their status, could spend extra money and gain a symbol that would allow them. Them to do this. And hundreds of years later, it continues the race for more status. Not more than anyone in the world. Just more than people in your circle continues and the digital world. Makes it even easier to play the game that Instagram and snap and Facebook. Give each one of us a stage, a stage to prance on and show our status to humblebrag our way into showing that weird. Just a little bit better than the people around us or if we choose a place to go to feel badly about ourselves to experience, shame because somebody else is moving up, while we are moving down.

These networks, and they’re busy calling people around you friends. Even though you don’t even know them, have figured out how to digitize, how to enumerate, how to rank, how to create a game, where we are all the players, but we’re not the customers. We are the product where the product, so that someone else, The Advertiser can pay money to reach us.

And the thing that they are extracting from us is our attention. We give our attention in exchange for avoiding the shame, a feeling like we are falling behind in status. So like The Godfather, like the person at The Meditation Retreat, like the person who’s figuring out what shoes to wear to today’s meeting or wondering whether our business card is good enough or not.

We’re all captive on this Merry-Go-Round, the carousel around and around and around, playing a status game or some people are using status to extract behavior from us. And other people are busy trying to gain status. So in their mind, they can win.

So what to do about it? Well, two things, first of all, if you’re trying to do something important something, beneficial something good. If you’re trying to get someone to adopt a different way of being, I think it’s worth paying attention to the status of the people you are working with and the changes that you are offering because when your change Promises to move someone’s status up, they are way more likely to listen to you that status rolls inform. Every decision that we make. And if you’re trying to sell an idea to someone you need to be aware of them.

But what if you’re on the other end of the equation? What if there’s a long history of status roles being used against you? Well, one more time, we can go back to the good Doctor, dr. Seuss at the end of Yertle. The turtle. And today, the great urinal that marvelous he is King of the mud. That’s all he can see.

And the turtles. Of course, all the turtles are free as Turtles. And maybe All Creatures should be interesting things. Happen when we start tweaking status rolls the Union Square. Hospitality Group is a chain of restaurants, high-end restaurants in New York City. A couple years ago, they decided To do away with tipping.

And instead, add a service charge to every bill, they did this for a few reasons. One reason is that, by law, the people in the back of the house, the people who cook the food aren’t allowed to take a share of the tips. So, what was happening was there was a huge Gulf between how much some people were paid and how much others were paid by adding a service charge. They were able to treat everyone on the The team as a professional and what they discovered was it shifted and shifted the posture of the people in the back who were paid more fairly. But it also changed the way, the service staff acted instead of it being a sexist or racist Lottery, where how much you were going to get at the end of a meal was based on the whim of a diner and how he, or she was dealing with their own narrative about status, The people in the front of the house, were able to act like every other professional in the field getting paid fairly for what they did and doing their best possible work.

It’s interesting to note that some of the customers are uncomfortable with this that having tipping be taken away from their discretion doesn’t change the service experience, but if very much changes the status experience that if in our head, we believe that our status role is impacted by our ability to leave or not. Leave a tip by what our compatriots see us do. When we leave a tip then part of the experience of going to a restaurant has shifted its fascinating to watch an experiment like this unfold, because each of the parties involved is shifting, their experience of status, often for the better after the break, I’ll be back With answers to the questions you submitted from the last episode.

If you have a question about this one, please visit a Kimbo dot link and press the appropriate button a safe, it’s Maria. Hey sup my name is Kyle gray and first of all, I love the show and that completes my question I said this is Paul from Huntington Beach. California, high feathers on the pump. Hi this is Caitlin. Hi sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey sir. Hey Seth, how our chefs and greetings from Lithuania, Pizza.

Here’s our first question, my question is, when you’re doing your work, you receive feedback. How do you use this feedback, both positive and negative feedback in a manner that is constructive and makes your work back there rather than reduce its quality. Thank you. The essence of the thinking behind 1,000 true fans is that there are a few people who matter a lot more to the Creator than other people.

And that’s the secret of processing feedback. When a Critic doesn’t get the joke, when they don’t understand you, when it’s not what they need or want. Well, then there’s nothing to be done about that. Let it go. Move on, on the other hand, when you hear from the core constituents from the people that you’re counting on, you need to listen very carefully to that feedback treat different people differently being on your Your own and indeed building something that will spark change in the community.

If you want to still have a balanced life, I’m talking about raising kids and also making sure that you get at least a couple of hours, sleep a day, how do you manage to build something slowly? But then at the same time, make money to survive. This was the most common question that came in and it’s based on a fundamental Understanding of what I’m talking about when I say that the grand opening is a mistake grand, openings are expensive, they are fraught with risk, they are foolhardy the other approach, the smallest possible Market, the idea that we can find our people and Delight them while ignoring everyone else, that’s not slow, that’s smart. And so, if you’re going to make something You have to be prepared for the fact that it’s not going to work right away. Then it might never work. If you are going to make something, you have to accept the fact that it’s different than having a day job bank. Tellers, get paid when they show up at work everyday creators. Don’t, so, I don’t have a shortcut for how to live the life you deserve how to have a steady income while doing this work that’s beyond the scope of what we’re talking about today. But What I am arguing for is it the most efficient smartest productive way to do? Your work is not to wish and hope for the fairy of success to come and say everyone knows your idea because she’s not coming.

That the alternative is to be specific urgent and important and to make a difference for a few people because then they’ll spread the word and then you can do the work, you want to do. All along sometimes feels like you saying that doesn’t matter the quality at first, just get out there with your work, the work that you believe in but then what if people give you their attention at first? And then you create this not perfect, you know, ugly duckling and then people see it and they never take you seriously. Again, there’s a big difference between just ship it and And merely ship it. And I have never argued that people should just ship stuff out. Whatever it is, just take a flyer, throw it into the world.

Merely do it though. Merely is something else. Merely do. It means with focus and with care, you cannot know what your audience actually wants until you engage with them. So my argument is yes, build it with care, build it As if everything depended on it. But no, don’t hold it back and fear, don’t hold it back wondering and waiting.

You must engage with the audience. Does that mean that some people, you engage with, who don’t get the joke, will write you off in the future? Probably, but if you want to go listen to Billy Joel’s early demos, Go look at Jerry Seinfeld early, stand up. Go find anybody! Whose work you care about? And notice that at the beginning, it wasn’t that good.

So you’re saying to worry about organic traffic before, anything else. See, a lot of creators, I feel like should be getting traction faster than they are. When is advertising the answer, if ever. Not all ideas, spread organically and there’s nothing wrong with advertising anticipated, personal relevant advertising that reaches, people who want to get it can be really effective.

My argument is that it never makes sense to buy a Super Bowl ad ever that you’re not trying to reach everyone. One. But if, you know specifically who you seek to reach by all means buy the ads, two good questions about Kevin Kelly’s notion of 1,000 true fans, how might you quickly and cheaply demonstrate the power of a thousand true fans to someone who’s a non-believer? When going through when building up our 1,000 true fans?

How do we know who to Target and what to aim for? So, let me take another minute to go through the math here. True fans aren’t merely fans. There are people who show up with time and money acting as patrons insisting. That the work. Continued 1,000. True fans are the core of how ideas spread 1,000 true fans can pay for a small team of people to create magical work.

The math is pretty simple. If you got 1,000 people, That will come to your rock concert weekend to spend time with the band and pay a thousand dollars each, that’s a million dollars. When you’ve got 1,000 true fans who are willing to subscribe to your work paying every month, you can make a living on that.

Can you support a giant Corporation? Of course not. But you can support an artist a yuman, somebody who wants to make a difference. So how to choose these people because the people who choose you, they might be fans, but true fans are a little different, true fans, understand that they are actually engaged in the process of creation, true fans, Define their future. Through the work that the artist is doing they’re grateful Fort and they are willing to participate.

So, part of the discernment that we need, as creators is to tell the It’s between someone who will take our time and someone who will amplify our time.

That’s it for this round of questions. One more time. Thank you so much for being part of this. If you want to see previous episodes, if you want to see the show notes which are sort of cool or if you want to ask a question for next time, head on over to akimbo link. That’s Aki II MB o .l? I NK until next time. Keep making a Ruckus.

Thanks.

It’s not too late. Hey, it’s F. How about 16 years ago? I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around. The world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -what-you-pay-for- <==

Sometimes you get what you pay for. Hey, it’s Seth. And this is akimbo will be back in a second with a short rant about what we’re paying for. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you can see it you can be it. But what if you never see it? Then what I want my daughters and all young women to see a field of Role Models have gone before them and Inspire them to what’s possible. So I began the Fearless portraits project, an art series and podcast. Profiling notable women of today and recent history.

Listen to The Fearless portraits wherever you get podcasts. More add an Landau dotnet There used to be beavers all over Northern Canada. And then in Europe, a beaver coat became a really high status item. And so, people started paying sometimes a lot for beaver, pelts. You can guess what happened? Next.

We killed a lot of beavers. In fact, just about any time, our culture decides that something is valuable that people are willing to pay for it. People industrious people Figure out a way to get more of it so they can sell it to the people who want it. Sometimes we get what we pay for, I think that’s pretty clear and we also are well aware of the side effects. If we decide that we want something a lot like I don’t know the redfish that used to swim near Louisiana well then suddenly there aren’t very many redfish left but I don’t want to talk about fish or beavers.

I want to talk about. Attention because culture, modern culture is driven by attention and we’ve been very clear about labeling it we decide to pay attention. We give people our attention in exchange for information or entertainment or connection or status. That there is a lot of attention being paid these days. The value of attention keeps going up.

The reason it keeps going Up is because we’re not making any more of it every day, everyone gets their attention recharged. And when you use it all up, the day is over. But as institutions organizations companies and individuals figure out more and better ways to profit from attention, they are racing to get more of it now not everyone wants attention. Not everyone is seeking to monetize attention, but when someone decides that it Tension is what they want.

It’s extraordinary to see the lengths that they will go to to get and keep that attention. I want you to write it down Garcinia Cambogia because it may be The Simple Solution. You’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good. Now, I’ve got the number one miracle and a bottle to burn, your fat lightning in a bottle.

So, a miracle flower to fight fat people, who worked with him, in medical school, describe Mehmet Oz, as being a gifted. Skilled compassionate doctor, and then along the way, Oprah put them on TV and he got hooked on attention. And the next thing you know, he’s proposing to people that their lives will be better if they eat green coffee beans and he and the producers of the show decided not to stress. The fact that their viewers should exercise more to become more healthy because they would lose attention. If they did that, what we’ve built is a A culture that is driven by people who are on a quest for attention and driven by people who are paying attention.

But something significant shifted about 15 or 20 years ago, to understand the significance of the shift. Consider the tragic case of Kitty Genovese e Kitty you’ve heard of her famous because she was murdered by a psychopath named Winston Moseley in. 1864 in Queens, New York. It was senseless. If murders ever have any sense, but this was a particularly senseless murder in which a stranger, got up at 2:00 in the morning and decided to go kill somebody.

Well, Kitty was the unfortunate victim and no one would have heard of the case, except that a police chief having lunch with the editor-in-chief of the New York Times. Mentioned some Affix about the case the specifics went to a reporter named Martin gainsbourg And the reporter filed a story that said and both facts in quotation marks are in the original story. 37 or 38 people witnessed the murder, watched it happening and chose not to do anything 37 or 38 people in an apartment building watching. Someone get murdered and doing nothing.

It was such a Asian that it appeared in every single introductory psychology textbook in the United States and Britain years later. It was such a sensation that the 911 service for calling in an emergency was invented in response. It was such a sensation that people run their hands and wondered what was wrong with Humanity.

It was also completely made up, it was completely made up that there were witnesses to the entire thing. There weren’t Harlan Ellison, the great science fiction writer who should have known better apparently made up an entire article about the thing. Quoting one person on the third floor as saying that he turned up the radio in his apartment. So he wouldn’t hear the screams.

But the whole thing was made up and when a reporter from wnbc, who was looking into the claims in the story, said to Martin, why did you write it like that? He said it would have ruined. The story and the reason we talk about this bizarre story in which our culture was changed because one article made up to please. The editor-in-chief of the New York Times is that in 1964 there was an expectation and the expectation was that editors would edit that. Yes. Publishers would publish but that editors would edit and that the people who had the few media Outlets that were available, To all of us were supposed to use. Good taste good judgment and restraint, we don’t feel that way anymore.

We don’t feel that way anymore because the people who run Facebook and Twitter and other sites long ago, said, we’re not going to take any stand, we don’t really want to have standards. We don’t have any editors that what we ought to do is create media that simply connects the people who are looking to pay attention.

Two people who want attention paid. And so, what we end up with is an ongoing narrative, 24 hours, a day that is about division and anger that these are the two ways to get attention. That if you can show up with Sensational news, with surprising stories with things that make people feel afraid, Cure disconnected that there’s a panic right around the corner, you will get more attention. People pay attention to you when you whine or bully or work, the refs or challenge whatever is going on around you. That is the way to make the algorithms on Facebook and Twitter and other places put more attention right there where you need it.

And so we’ve got people who are making a living a very Very good, living intentionally, distressing that people who are reading what they have to say with falsehoods with division with bullying with angry notes that aren’t based in truth, and worse than that, they lead to their own side effects, because if enough people in the culture read something, and then believe something, it starts to become true at some level.

The same way that the 37 or 38 witnesses that didn’t do anything changed. The way every psychologist was taught changed the way we came to think, about cities and Community, even though it wasn’t true. If enough of this Division and anger gets repeated enough times, some people change their minds. So, there’s a bit of a rant for two reasons. First we should I said, every time each of us pays attention, we are making a choice.

We’re making a choice. Not just about which media to support and which media personalities to support. We’re making a choice about what we will come to believe and how we will see the world and that each one of us has the choice, you have the choice to eat, nothing but french fries, and hamburgers, four times a day or to seek out food, that gives you sustenance, that nurtures, you that doesn’t leave. Quite as much of a scar on the planet. Well the same thing is true with what we choose to pay attention to but far bigger than that with far more leverages this, there’s only a handful of people who could change the algorithm if they wanted to a handful of people who say they don’t have an opinion on this but through their actions have demonstrated. They do. Have an opinion about this.

There is no such thing as a neutral algorithm. Google doesn’t give you the truth. You do a search Google responds with what the algorithm taught it to do. And so every algorithm, the one that decides, what to surface, what to put in your newsfeed what to recommend next every algorithm has a point of view and so Cheryl at Facebook or Mark or whoever’s on duty at Twitter what are you doing about the algorithm?

Why is it that you Have chosen to amplify certain ideas and not amplify other ones because amplification is a choice. The astonishing thing about the network effect is that the network effect creates natural monopolies? There isn’t much of an alternative to Facebook or much of an alternative to Twitter because people want to be where everybody else is And so if that’s true, if Facebook has nothing to worry about about, turning down the temperature, if Facebook’s profits are going to be just the same, if they create a more civil discourse and more resilient World, a more positive ratchet going forward, so that people can see what they are capable of. So that people can find peace of mind and resilience. If Facebook could do that, why don’t they the status quo? In front of us, the one that goes all the way back to William. Randolph, Hearst you? Give me the pictures. I’ll give you the war.

The whole idea of yellow journalism and tabloids it’s been weaponized and multiplied and now it infects and affects all of us. So here we are paying with our attention every day but the product we are buying with that payment isn’t one. That’s making things better. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some Kitchens from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week. In fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo dot link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about Some of the workshops my friends are running, but in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about, what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please.

Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100%. Percent non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hogs X is on the pump. This is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my Question, as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit. Akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki MB o .l, iink and click the appropriate button to Tactical questions this week for a change. Here we go.

Hi, Seth, this question is, not based on a recent podcast but I’m still going to ask it. So the question is, let’s say that you’ve written a wonderful novel. Oh, and you’ve published your wonderful novel on Amazon KDP. At the same time you would like to submit the manuscript to actual Publishers. Now, I know your feelings about actual Publishers, but my question is, can you do both at the same time, or should one really withhold publication of a novel on Amazon KDP while you entertain the prospect of having it right? You’d buy actual Publishers if you get a. Give me your take on this.

I’d love to hear it. Thank you. Thank you for this pot. What you’ve undoubtedly discovered is that publishing, a novel is not easy. Printing. A novel is really easy. Posting a novel on any e-reader is really easy, but publishing the idea of taking time and money to put a new idea in front of people who will pay you money for it.

It’s really hard. So So, let’s think a little bit about the book publishing industry because it’s such a transparent. Clear Vivid example, that people can Embrace as they think about bringing their ideas to the world. They used to have a pretty simple model, which is not that many people had printing presses and not that many people had the money to run them.

That bookstores had a limited amount of shelf, space and Publishers had the leverage to get a little bit of shell. They see if they ask for it if they demanded it. So what they would do is go out hunting for the best book they could bring to the world, then they would invest money with their Salesforce shipping books. On a guaranteed sale basis, get some shelf space.

And at that point, the book was a little bit of publicity but mostly the book how to sell itself. And if you’re lucky, you get to Kill a Mockingbird. But almost all the time, you’re not lucky. They used to publish 50,000 books a year in the United. States from mainstream Publishers and perhaps, 250 of them became home runs but the long tail and Amazon and the decline of the independent bookstore and the decline of Barnes & Noble, all change this equation, they change it dramatically because the Publishers thought their customer was the bookstore because if they got enough shelf space, they would be fine.

But now shelf space doesn’t matter. So what’s going on here is this there are more people than ever writing more. Books than ever but Publishers Publishers are no longer able to make a hit happen. What they can do? Instead is one of two things they can invest heavily in something that they’re sure is going to work because that person has followers because that person can sell a bunch of books simply by being who they are. Or they can spin a wheel as cheaply as they can to play the game used to be a mediocre launch printed five or ten thousand copies. Copies of a book now, two or three hundred because they just can’t afford to print and Shred all those books.

So what does this mean for our novelist? Well, it begins with this. Publishers either by hope or they buy proof that usually by hope prove is oh I wrote 50 Shades of Grey. Look how many copies I sold all by myself on the Kindle look, I wrote The Martian. Look how many copies I sold all by myself on the Kindle. If you got proof, you’ll get a publisher, the chances of you getting proof are really, really small.

The alternative is to sell hope, and hope means you got to tell them. Less the More evidence. There is the easier it is to lose hope. That’s why agents almost never send in the full novel from an established author. When they’re running some big-time auction because if the first four chapters don’t get someone hyped up. Enough hyped up enough to want to read the rest, send him the rest doesn’t do you any good anyway, in nonfiction, it’s completely true.

That the books are sold to publishers. Before they are finished. So with that said, no, you can’t do both at the same time, because if you do both at the same time, you’ve given away, exclusivity, you’ve established a data point, which is your book, didn’t sell that many copies, can you sell hope? Well, it depends if you’re a supermodel, if your former vice president, if you’re a TV star and you whisper to the people in book publishing that you’re going to write a novel, you might get their attention.

They might imagine that you’re the next Margaret Truman, but and it’s a huge but the typical novelist almost never breaks through JK. Rowling got rejected more than 15 times in a row with Harry Potter. Is your book better than Harry Potter? Because it’s unlikely that it is all of which is a depressing, but straightforward, way to say to you, if you can get a big advance from a famous public. Sure, please take it celebrate. Dedicate your book to me. Thank you very much, but you probably won’t.

And since you probably won’t the alternative is to write for the smallest viable audience to write something in a genre, that’s underserved to show up in a remarkable way to build what can become a network effect. Drip, by drip reader, by Reader book, after book after book, you’re going to need more than one.

That’s not fair. That’s not right Harper. Lee only had a right one but we’re not Harper Lee. I’m not her anyway and it’s not 1964. So with all of those provisos, I hope you will write another novel. I hope you will keep writing novels, I hope you’ll write them for your readers and if someday a book publisher shows up, Congratulations, you earned it, thanks for this, thanks for your writing.

Hey Seth, this is Nathan in Jackson Mississippi. Once again I’ve been revisiting a lot of your older podcast episodes and after taking some notes and looking through the show notes of your first one, the grand opening I had a question come up and you link to an article that shows and talks about the Innovation adoption. Option curve, where, you know, you can see the innovators in the early adopters Illustrated and those are the people that you’re supposed to Target. When you are first start at starting out with a new business, or new product idea that kind of thing.

And I was curious where do you find the innovators and the early adopters, I assume that this is going to vary depending on your industry, your Niche that kind of thing. But it’s just wondering if you Had any advice in General on where to go to find the innovators in the early adopters in your field?

Thanks for all you do talk later. Bye.

Thanks, Nathan, my answer, sort of surprising, but I think it’s true. You don’t go looking for the early adopters, they go looking for you. They tend to congregate in places where it’s not that hard to guess they will be. If you’ve got a new science fiction movie going to Comic-Con to talk about, it is probably a good idea. If you have a new fashion line showing up during Fashion Week in, whichever City, probably a good idea if you want to start a nuclear. Canary Trend, probably make sense to open in certain neighborhoods of Los Angeles, or New York that early adopters.

They’re thirsty, they’re hungry. They are looking for something, you don’t have to hustle them. They’re curious. They’re saying every morning when they wake up what’s new. And if you can say back to them, I’ve got what’s new. They will inspect it. And then, and this is the key part, they will tell the others because that’s the reason.

That people are early adopters because they like telling the others, you are not here to solve their problem and have them go away quietly. That’s the next cycle of people that you’re going to be serving. No, this cycle of people are eager for you to give them something that will raise their status and their connection with others when they share it.

Now, picking the group. Isn’t that easy when I launched tellurium Trillium? The science fiction Adventure Game line that I did in 1984 with people like Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury. I thought, oh, Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury. I’ll go to science fiction conventions and Book Fairs. That was a mistake. I wasted months because those people weren’t there to have a computer game sold to them. They didn’t even have a computer when I realized who I needed to call on, which were the Geeks and the Nerds who didn’t read. Books, but wanted to have a science fiction experience. On a computer, we did great, I think four or five of the titles that I launched one gold, the highest level of computer game sales in the first year, partly. Because people like Priscilla, got us, great shelf, space at lechmere and other electronic marketers. But it was mostly because the early adopters were just waiting.

And that’s the art of this to find something that when they hear about it, they’ll say it’s about time. Nah. Not prove it to me. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries, around the world. Have spent the last Bunch of months putting together the carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -i-see-you-e- <==

It’s the 1950s and California has a problem. Actually, they have three problems. First, there aren’t enough, laborers, willing to work cheap enough to harvest all the tomatoes second, the machine. They built to harvest the tomatoes crushes them instead. And third spherical tomatoes, ripe, red round. Tomatoes are a pain in the neck. They roll around on the conveyor belt.

They’re difficult to slice to make perfect slices for the fast food nation. That was being built. So, Jack, Hanna at UC Davis. Got to work. He created VF, 145 otherwise known as the square tomato. Not a perfect Cube, but a lot more Square than a typical tomato, easy to harvest, easy to slice, easy to sort.

Who cares? That it didn’t taste that good. Hey, it’s Matt. And this is a special archived episode of akimbo.

Industrialism is sort of a miracle. It’s been around longer than any of us have been alive and it has transformed our world more than anything else in recorded history. The idea is simple, a system. A manufacturing system can be put to work to make things better faster and cheaper. So Henry, Ford said, you can have a really good car for $750 or if you want to, you can buy a handmade car that in many ways isn’t as good for $2000.

There Frederick Taylor, the pioneer of Scientific Management, broad his stopwatch into any Factory that would have him. And using the stopwatch he would record how each laborer did his job. And using the stopwatch heat figure out how to help them do the job faster that the assembly line in its full Glory cut, huge amounts of waste and effort and time out of the creation of everything.

Of course it didn’t start with Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford we have to go back even before that. Josiah Wedgwood figured out how to do it to pottery. Josiah’s. Father was an itinerant Potter like all Potter’s in England at the time, digging up Clay in the woods and hand fashioning it into a pot. That was almost good enough.

What Josiah did was figure out how to do that at scale in a factory without skilled labor. One person doing one job. Somebody else doing another job over and over again. Josiah Wedgwood was so successful at this there when he died. Is one of the richest men in the world and his are his grandson, a guy named Charles Darwin used the money to finance his journeys, around the world.

But back to the topic at hand, the topic at hand is the idea that industrialism demands that people fit in because people are part of the system, we are part of the system. When we work on the line, we are part of the system. When we work in the Bureaucracy and we are part of the system when we are the customer.

I got to tell you the airline doesn’t really like it that that person that frequent flyer in seat, 3B insists on an oval lacto-vegetarian special meal, a special meal. One the throws the entire system into chaos or in 1972. That kid who shows up in a McDonald’s and asks for his Filet-O-Fish sandwich without cheese on it.

Because if you leave the cheese off, you got to start from scratch. It’s not part of the system, or imagine that young woman, the teenager who goes to buy her prom dress and the salesperson trying to be helpful says, oh, I’m sorry. Dear. You just don’t fit. Not these dresses, don’t fit you but you just don’t fit because the system, the system demands that we fit.

Hence, we have the Paradox, the Paradox of what it means to be special on one hand. Most people who work for an organization who are trying to build something would really prefer, if everything would fit if the tomatoes were square, if Customers fit into the right bucket, but at the same time, most of us want to be seen.

We want to be understood. We want to be treated with respect and dignity. We don’t care about fitting in. We want to be served. We want to be part of something to be individuals. There’s a Zulu word. So Buona, Sera Buona means I see you. Not just, I see you standing here in front of me, but I see you, where you came from.

Who your ancestors were? What you want? What you need? What’s troubling you? I see you. Welcome. and that’s what many of us crave is What We crave as a customer as an employee, as a family member to be seen At the same time we willingly and willfully insist that the people who we are supposed to be serving or teaching or connecting with get their act together and fit in in the 1950s Todd Rose reports, the Air Force faced a real challenge.

Pilots were dying. Planes were crashing accidents? That should have been preventable. Continue to happen. Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels from Harvard, a statistician was assigned, a simple problem, take a look at the Air, Force planes and figure out. If something in the plane was contributing to all of these accidents.

Well, what Daniel’s found was that the cockpit the seat in the cockpit hadn’t been And in 30 years, it was optimized to fit a pilot 30 years ago. But since then the pilot has gotten bigger and stronger so Gilbert decided that the solution was to redefine what the average pilot was like there. You can make a better seat for the average pilot the system would work better.

Well, what he found was that there were 17 key measurements that needed to be made the distance. From a wrist to an elbow. For example that if he could find the average for all 17 of these attributes and design a cockpit that fit the average, he could make the plane much safer and performance. Go up another Triumph of industrialism.

But here’s what he found he found that once he figured out the average for all 17, essentially, no one fit the average, that in fact it was a jagged Circle for all 17 fewer than 3% of all the pilots in the Air Force would have fit into that seat properly. So he pioneered the idea of an adjustable seat. He pioneered the idea against the wishes of the suppliers because it was a lot more work for them.

It may be the system wasn’t right? And maybe we needed to accommodate the pilot not have the pilot accommodate the system Gilbert Daniels approach, then was simple. There’s no such thing as average that when it comes to humans, not Tomatoes, not nuts and bolts, but humans average is an illusion. And as a result, the customization in favor of the skilled pilot has made the entire system perform better alas.

The memo didn’t get to everyone. This idea that you don’t fit that you are getting in the way of the system pervades. Almost everything, especially school school, the home of the number 2 pencil the standardized test the idea of keeping Pull back and reprocessing them. If at the end of the year, they don’t meet the quality standard that. What we have built on purpose is a system that insists that everyone be average.

The author Derrick, Jensen asks, why is it, if so, many of us love learning that, just about all of us hated school. Well, one way to understand it. It is to listen to the words of Elwood Cubberley later, dean of education at Stanford University. Schools should be factories in which raw products children are to be shaped, and formed into finished products manufactured like nails. And the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.

It’s all about being part of the system and why would a teacher caring teacher buy into this because it lets us off the hook because you either on the hook or you’re off the hook, if you believe that there are special snowflakes in the world, if you believe that, people deserve to be seen that they have a right to develop into who they seek to be, if you believe that your customers that your suppliers that your employees ought to be Pendant actors, humans using their own judgment.

Then you need to be on the hook on the hook to see them. See them for who they are to hear their voice in their head when you can. But it might be easier to be off the hook to be able to say I’m sorry you just don’t fit That you’re not part of the system because if someone’s in the system, if there are Cog in the system, not your problem anymore, being seen, of course, brings its own baggage with it.

Because if we’re not just part of the system, if we’re not, merely a cog, then we need to own that we need to level up. We need to bring a different voice. Original thought. We need to take ownership when One can write or speak or contribute sort of raises the bar for each of us to choose to write, or speak or contribute to raise our hand.

Here’s the thing. The thing is humans aren’t average and the system serves almost, no one, but we built it for a reason, we built it. So we wouldn’t have to see you. So we wouldn’t have to care about you. So we wouldn’t have to make an exception for somebody who makes our life, a little more difficult.

And this idea that we can systematized and standardized allows us to ignore people. Ignore the ones who are quote better, ignore the ones that don’t meet the standard, and we need to do it at scale. When I was in business school years ago, we did an experiment about McDonald’s approach. To mass production. Not sure if it’s still true. I haven’t done in a long time.

Go to McDonald’s by a milkshake. And a Big Mac, eat half the Big Mac, drink half the milkshake, then put the rest of the Big Mac into the rest of the milkshake, walk up to the counter and say, to the person behind the counter. I can’t drink this milk shake. There’s a Big Mac in it. And he’ll give you your money back and the reason I’ll give you your money back is it’s easier for McDonald’s to give somebody three bucks.

Then it is to train and Trust the person at the cash register to act like a manager to act like an owner, it’s easier to systematize around it. But more often than not, the system isn’t in favor of the wiseass customer or the person. Has a special need the system is in favor of the system. How can we go forward without actually seeing who the other person is?

A snarky mean that’s been going around for a while is about special snowflakes. Other people’s kids who feel entitled, other people’s kids who need a special diet or a special place to take a test or a special accommodation, because the system isn’t working for them. And so, with snark we Snidely say oh you’re some sort of special snowflake.

The thing is you are a special snowflake. Everyone is a special snowflake. There is no such thing as average, there is no average person. Now if you’re special snowflake status turns into entitlement. If it turns you into someone who’s unable to be flexible when you’re just as bad as the system that can’t see you, that’s not my point.

But my point is it’s our Bona. This desire to be seen runs so deep. That maybe we can redefine what industrialism is for. Why did we bother making everything cheaper and faster? What’s the point of all these systems may be? The point is that it gives us a chance to treat different people differently.

Maybe post the assembly line, the idea of mass customization is that we can treat different Differently that we can learn about them, except them, see them for who they are. Leave enough space for them to tell us who they are for them to be clear about what it is. They will need to become the person they seek to become and then we can offer to them.

Maybe if we can do that, maybe if we can accept that everyone is on a spectrum, a spectrum of hydrogen, Height and weight, but also a spectrum of gender and energy and interest a spectrum of how quick they are to know the answer or how deep they are willing to go. And then when we add these Spectrum up there, not 17 of them, there’s a hundred of them 200 of them and there is no average person. The Industrial Age, The Hundred Year run of the Triumph of the system seems to be coming to a close.

That mass customization artificial intelligence, this sharing of information across the internet, the ability to Outsource manufacturing and other systems means that you no longer get ahead by making one flavor of ketchup. It means that there are more than 20 kinds of Oreos. It means that Starbucks has more than 80,000 combinations of beverages.

That the edge cases, the jagged edges are now a specialty of more and more organizations. And that effective schools have discovered that the way to be effective is not to treat people as average, but that the way to be effective, is to embrace the fact that no one is average that the – advantage today is to become the kind of student or teacher.

That sees the specialness in every single person that you’re able to engage with to become the kind of boss that works hard to hire someone who doesn’t look or act or believe all of the things that everyone else does, it turns out that finding customers, who care, and who want to be seen? Scene is significantly more profitable than insisting that everybody fit in normal. Isn’t the point anymore? Weird is the edges.

The edges of Interest. The edges of caring, the edges of the human who is special, which in fact, is all of us. He said, it’s my real self. My name is Kyle gray, and first of all, I love the show and that completes my question. I Seth, this is Paul from Huntington Beach, California. Yeah, I said this is anupam. Hi, this is Catelynn Teresa warm. Greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. Hey Zack are chef and greetings from Lithuania Pizza.

Hey it’s F. And here are a couple questions about last week’s episode. To ask a question about the episode, we just finished one more time. Visit akimbo dot link. Thanks so my question is regarding the second scenario where you might deem yourself to be of lower status. So my question is, can you share a practical example of what someone would do and let’s say a networking event, where save myself, for example, ID myself to be able to lower status and someone else and that someone else I want to engage with Now, how would I sweet the status in order to make the best of the situation? So I can be on a partnership term with this person as opposed to coming from a situation where I feel like I’m responding to them and there they have the upper hand and negotiation. Thanks for this, it’s a great question to cover a lot of ground with I want to start by identifying a couple things here.

First of all status roles are internal as much as external we tell ourselves. Has a story a story about which status, we quote deserve, where we are comfortable. If you see yourself in a given situation as high status and someone treats you, as lower status, you will bristle at that, you will work to undo it. You will be offended. You will push yourself away from someone or confront the issue and try to restore the status. You think you deserve as we saw in The Godfather.

The opposite is also true people who see themselves as low status. If they are put in a situation where they have to adopt a high-status posture, they may sabotage it, they may walk away from it, it may make them uncomfortable, but the other axes that are worth considering is that status is always relative the high status operative, the woman who does Biz Dev at a fancy company.

Maybe when she gets to her weekly, Overheard soccer game is seen by the other players and herself as low status. That it depends on where you are one day. You’re the governor. The next day, they’re pulling you over because you’re not allowed to go through the secret entrance at the airport, status will shift depending on who you are with and what setting you are in.

So with that said, let’s go to the place. You described that hotbed of status roles the cocktail party or the networking event. You the person who shows up seeking help, might see yourself as high status in many situations, you’re the founder. The organizer, the person was a project, you’re the head of a non-profit, you’re doing worthy work, you have a project and now you want help.

Do you want help from a low status person who sees themself As low status, probably not, you’re probably at the event. Hoping some fancy person will take you under their wing or invest, or be a philanthropist for you or show up on the board. How do you approach that person? While now you’re starting to see the game Dynamic at play, because you must get enrollment from that person to go on the journey that you’re on.

Do they believe that listening to you? Helping you supporting, you will help them. Maintain their status increase their status, take their status, to where they wanted to go because they’re probably not going to help you because you deserve it. They’re probably not going to help you merely because it’s important.

Maintaining status rolls takes precedence over these things because we all have choices and we often make those choices based on our perception of the interaction. So let’s think about the fancy Gala or any of the big-name museums in New York. City to be on the board of one of these museums is extraordinarily expensive.

They contribute a huge percentage of the operating. Expenses is one of the Museum’s. So how do you get fancy rich people to be on the board? It’s not like the meetings are really fun. You do it because the board has been positioned from the start. As a way to secure and announce your status. It’s an honor to be asked, it’s a shame. Shame. It’s something that people avoid to not be asked, people go out of their way to end up in that Circle, if that status role is important to them.

That’s also the seduction to a lot of people of being a mentor, somebody who is ostensibly of high status comes to you, lowers their status and says I need your help. Will you be my coach and Mentor my advisor? Obviously only someone with more status than me could possibly. Can this role when that happens, when the student offers to lower status momentarily, the more status, the student has in that moment, the happier the status seeking Mentor will be.

So, this explains a lot of the posturing that goes on in Silicon Valley, with each entrepreneur out doing the other pretending that everything is perfect, so that they can get powerful people to take them on. And thus making it a self-fulfilling prophecy more likely that it’s going to work. But that isn’t the only way that it can work. One of the things that happens in environments that shift is that the newcomer, the younger in quotation marks person shows up, they’re moving faster. Moving up.

Let’s say, you know, there’s some big internet star and then the person from old media, the person who’s been at this for a while, sees a threat and realizes that. Bye. Associating herself or himself with this new trajectory status can be maintained. And so what we end up with is nested boxes within nested boxes, what we end up with is no obvious path. But many, many potential paths and the purpose of this narrative from the last episode was to help. You see the status roles and to help you understand that people are Resilient. But they want to bounce back to the status role they’ve assigned themselves to and that it’s extremely unlikely that you will get someone to negotiate with you or support you by you playing a high status role and trying to force them into a low status role. If they’re not used to that, that is a recipe for stalemate that instead helping people get to the role that they’ve always.

Sought the one where they think they belong is the easiest way to get them engaged in going on the journey. With you status roles and fame are really hot topics in particular if you’re raising kids because at least some of them, really crave for a very high status and a young age and they get quite frustrated when they can’t get a high status through their parents.

So how can they be consoled? Or Or is this just a case of, you know, one of life’s lessons. Thanks for your input, goodbye. What a great parenting question and a cultural one as well. So let me chime in a little bit here because it is true that many high-performing parents and parents. Who care. We’ll push their kids from a young age to seek High status rolls, unfortunately, Nursery School and kindergarten are too often a zero-sum game.

There’s a Finite set of blocks, either I have the blocks or you have a box. There’s only a few mats for nap time, either. I have the mat or you have the mat and if we raise our kids to Define their success, by who they are ahead of by who they are beating by what scarce resource. They possess what we’re going to end up with is an unhappy bully because there isn’t enough to go around there. Never is But the answer is not to find a way to give our kids Solace and to soothe them when they don’t win.

Now I would like to argue that the answer that the enlightened parent figures out that what we can do is teach our kids that there are other forms of status. There is the status of being comfortable enough in your own skin and confident, enough to help someone who doesn’t have enough, the idea that opening doors for others.

Then, from the age of three or four is something to be applauded. That this generous Act is the act of a high-status individual. When we can lay down those tracks when we can establish for our kids that the best way to be seen as the person who should eat lunch first, is to never be the person who insists on eating lunch, first that what we get to do Is raise kids, who see the kid on the playground, who’s being bullied and stand up for them because that’s a high-status role that it takes an enormous amount of emotional labor and a certain amount of maturity to be indirect about the way we expose our status when we were really little kid.

But deliberate and persistent parenting can support that way of looking at the world. That’s one reason why competitive Sports and school makes so little sense. Because the easy thing to measure is who won the easy thing to measure is who’s on the first string. And we tell ourselves, we do that because we’re training our kids to go into a world that works that way except the world doesn’t actually work that way.

The world doesn’t do a for striking of everyone all the time that in fact going forward, what we’re seeing more and more Is that an a connection economy? The way the world works is that people who are able to weave a community around them who are able to selflessly lead who are able to take a longer-term. View are happier, are more resilient and come out ahead by whatever measure you want to measure ahead.

If ahead doesn’t include beating everybody else, so thanks for that. Thanks for your questions, and we’ll see you next time. I’m keep making a Ruckus.

So that’s another episode of akimbo. You can find the show notes and the magic button to ask questions, at akimbo link. Go ahead. Visit it, click the button and contribute your question about this episode, which I’ll answer next time. Thanks for listening.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around. The world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -clever-hans- <==

When Hans was only two years old, he became a worldwide sensation. Here’s what Wikipedia says he was said to have been taught to add subtract, multiply divide work. With fractions, tell time, keep track of the calendar differentiate between musical tones and read spell and understand German the New York Times was even more impressed.

Hey it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about clouds. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor If you can see it you can be it. But what if you never see it? Then what I want my daughters and all young women to see a field of Role Models have gone before them and Inspire them to what’s possible. So I began the Fearless portraits project and art series and podcast. Profiling notable women of today and recent history.

Listen to The Fearless portraits wherever you get podcasts, more add an Landau .m.

You probably already guessed where this is heading, but I can’t resist Reading part of the story from the times which took up about a quarter of a page. Hans is an expert in numbers. Even being able to figure fractions, he answers correctly. What number fours is an 8 in 16 and in 30? I’m not sure how that works.

It goes on to explain that Hans was even able to guess people’s names Of course, you’ve guessed Hans at the age of two. Wasn’t the person? Hans was a horse. Hello. I’m Mister Ed and we’re talking about 1902 or 1903. Hans the incredibly intelligent horse who would use his hoof to count out for his trainer or for others. The answers to questions that were asked the first half of this rant is why was it so easy? Easy for Hans to seduce us into believing that he actually knew how to do all of those things.

Why were we so credulous? Well, the answer is we need to make up stories to find an explanation today. I was hanging out with somebody who was using Alexa to play hit music from the 70s, 80s and 90s. And what I noticed was that three of the songs that I had heard two days earlier were repeated which immediately led me to the conclusion that there is no way. This was a random collection of hit songs in the 70s 80s and 90s. Because there are so many to choose from. How is it that I heard three songs repeated?

But the fact is I wouldn’t have noticed it at all if the songs hadn’t been repeated and I’ve been hearing music and similar mixtapes for decades. And never noticed it before. It just happens that I noticed it today, but that has nothing to do with the clever. Hans Hans was demonstrating something that I’ll get to in a minute, but we immediately jumped to the conclusion that he was in fact, a miracle horse that he could, in fact, add subtract multiply divide work with fractions and tell time because that’s an easy story to tell ourselves conspiracies are an easy story. We to believe coincidences are an easy story to believe when someone rejects our book manuscript board, turns us down to give a talk. The easiest story to believe is that they have spent a great deal of time examining. Our work thinking about our work wondering deeply about whether we’d be a good fit and then rejected us when in fact it’s entirely possible, they never even saw your work, it’s entirely possible. They were having a fight with a superior or Coworker, it’s entirely possible that they’re just really busy.

Then when we talk about college admissions, 17 year olds, right at the peak of their insecurities or at least we can hope. It’s the peak of their insecurities rejected from quote, the school of their dreams, of course, the only thing that makes it the school of their dreams as they visited once and the day was sunny and the other people they saw were cute but leaving that part aside their need for status and affiliation has led them to conclude Include that this is their college and they got rejected, so they think they got rejected, they’re making up a story.

And so the easy story about Hans clever Hans, as he was known, was that Hans could actually do what people do? In fact, that’s not what Hans was doing. Which is the purpose of the second half of this rant. Hello mr. Dara mr. Eastwood, the reason I’m calling we have a big feature coming up soon and I thought you I’d be interested in the starring role, it’s a great script.

Do you think if we get about six weeks off from your TV series, six weeks. All I could sure try and manage sensor but you couldn’t afford me you cheap old windbag. What did you say? But Hans was doing, thanks to his trainer and probably a little bit of born Talent was in that tiny moment in between being asked the question and answering it. Hans was paying attention.

To the person in front of him. It turned out in tests that were later done. If the person asking the question did not know the answer, Hans didn’t know it either, but if you asked him what time it was, he could sense after he clapped his hoofs six times that you were waiting for the number 7, and so after he clipped his hoof the seventh time he stopped because he could see the look on your Maybe he could smell your pheromones. I’m not exactly sure how he did it, but Youmans do this all the time.

We look for these micro Expressions, were taught it from a very young age, it is at the heart of happy and unhappy relationships. It has been shown again. And again, that if we analyze the films of couples talking to one another, we can see these tiny moments of disgust very hard to hide Hide in slow motion the people who are doing them probably aren’t doing them on purpose.

If you’ve ever had a boss you really couldn’t stand. It may be because they had extraordinarily bad behavior all the time that you could write down and film and post on Reddit but it’s entirely possible that had none of those things. It’s entirely possible that in those tiny little moments when you were looking for how many times you should knock your Huff on the floor.

You saw something that undermined you and so humans as storytelling machines as story seeking machines are always looking at one, another trying to figure out the cultural signals, is it working or isn’t it working? And for the people whose wiring makes it hard for them to do that, who are trying to live with a set of tools that are different from the tools that many other people have.

It’s Indeed, because it is expected that these people can naturally do what I am doing or what you might be doing, and maybe they’re not all of, which is a way of saying that it’s not that hard to be Hans. If you put in the work and you were lucky enough to be born with the talent. But being Hans isn’t always the answer because what it does is it puts us into a tiny little game, a game with the person in front of us, a game that only Only works if the person in front of us knows the answer and if our job is to give them the answer that they want, but that’s not always the recipe for leadership and it’s definitely not the way we built things for the Long Haul.

Then if we had asked Hans about the state of the world and whether we should be worried about all the secret agreements being made between Germany and the countries around it because one day soon the Archduke Ferdinand Gabrielle princip would be in a dust-up that would lead to World War one. It’s unlikely that Hans had much of anything to say about it because he was playing a tiny parlor game of looking for what the other person expected. And humans, humans were looking at Hans and saying I hope deep down that you really are as clever as you appear to be but neither of those things is often true.

So as we think about the components of our culture as we Look up in the sky and see faces in the clouds, or we look at the toast we made for breakfast and see the image of Elvis Presley or the Virgin Mary in it. We should remind ourselves that it’s really useful to have the ability to make up a story that explains the world.

But often that story we made up might not actually explain the world.

Is a horse, of course, of course, it’s also worth remembering that the person in front of us, might not be showing us the signals. We think they are that each of us has a different set of tools and the way we send those signals. Very that’s a rant for sure. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions worth riffing on. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week, in fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running.

It’s Maria. Name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump pricer warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. They sent this is Rex. Hey son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this episode or just about anything that’s relevant, please. Is it a Kimbo that link?

That’s a Ki MB o .l, iink and click the appropriate button. Such juicy insights this week. Here we go. Hi, Seth. Kale here from Houston, Texas. As I’m working through some of your backlog. I came across your episode on cheap placebos. The question I’m interested in is, how, well, can we Define placebo?

Is it anything that hasn’t received the double-blind study? This seems problematic to me. Me as there is only so much funding to conduct good and reliable double blind studies. And because the pharmaceutical industry in the u.s. is just that an industry racing to the next Buck. The money does not as easily flow towards so-called Eastern medicine or holistic approaches and rather flows to developing and marketing. The next big name brand drug.

There’s a lot of distance between good reliable double blind. Studies that prove the drug is helpful and a brand name. Bag that makes us feel better, but there seems to be a lot of gray area between the two ends of the spectrum. Do you have a metric for finding the difference between a placebo and a remedy? That hasn’t been 100% proven.

Thanks for your thoughts. Take care. Thank you for this kale. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I want to challenge the question just a little bit. I think we need to spend more time celebrating not running from the Gulf. The gap between truth actual testable science-based truth and belief because belief Works precisely because we aren’t sure. It’s true in fact as soon as it becomes true it’s not belief anymore. It’s true.

So if there is a If that works for us another word for that is a placebo. Then we can embrace it. For just that reason the thing about studying alternative medicine in the way that the pharmaceutical industry is required to, by law, is that you really can’t do a double blind study on something like meditation either, you’re meditating or you’re not, there isn’t sham meditation.

What we do know from the studies I’ve seen Is that sham acupuncture works almost exactly as well as real acupuncture. Why is that because acupuncture in and of itself is a powerful Placebo and there is nothing wrong with that. That’s a feature. Not a bug, it’s not an asterisk. It’s a feature because placebos are inexpensive. You can’t overdose on them. They work on many people. They work reliably over time.

Yeah I’m in favor of them and just Because there isn’t a double blind study doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It works, even though there isn’t a study and that’s the key. What we know about the pharmaceutical industry is that there are certain kinds of tests that they have to do for patented novel. New drugs that are extraordinarily expensive and a very difficult bar to leap through.

But that doesn’t mean there are scientists around the world who are our testing things easily like ginseng or meditation and there’s plenty of studies, you can look at online. This is not a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry. Something is generally recognized as safe, it’s awfully easy to test. Whether it is actually effective in a double-blind study.

But as I have said before, we’re not double-blind, even those Among Us with a disability, we still know what we are engaged with and that knowing Were belief lives and believe is powerful. Indeed. Where we get in trouble is when we need belief to be true and I don’t think that serves belief or truth very well.

Hi Seth. This follow. This is a Colombian guy in Germany. And when I was a kid, there was this guy whose name was Ramirez and he was the owner of the soccer ball. So, at Reese’s, let me this would just wait to be picked because without their meat is, there was no ball and with That Noble there was no game but I am thinking right now it’s that the game is changing for Ramirez.

Because for example, with Airbnb, Uber Spotify, Netflix the sense of ownership is changing and I would like and love to know about your opinion on what these seats going to happen in the future, in the sense. That now it’s not the people who are the owners of the All, but the people who make the game, who are the ones who get the people involved to start again. So it’s not about my Bible, it’s about our ball.

I would love to hear your opinion. You are a legend. Thank you for. This is a profound Insight more than a question. And I’m just going to say this is a profound Insight because owning the ball has changed. There is still a ball just doesn’t look Like a ball anymore. What we own is the playing field, the community the algorithm the rules, trust the benefit of the doubt. As we move our way up the stack of value.

Organizing people who create value is worth, more than owning the building itself. And as ideas, spread they create new webs, webs of value and you cannot own an idea. For what you can own is the place that Community the network, where people choose to come to find each other, to figure out what things are like around here.

Thank you for saying it so eloquently. Love this one. Hey, Seth, this is Emily. Usually calling from the Bronx and I’m calling from Tarrytown, New York. First, I have to thank you. You expose me to two pieces of literature that have really changed and shifted my outlook on life. One is what Technology wants Kevin Kelly and in the final pages of that book I was led to James Carson has finite and infinite games and I am thinking so deeply about these and would love to hear you speak a little about how to have strength and play the infinite game as a business owner.

I guess thing that I am a theme that I’m taking away from both. These pieces of work are good. Work of Our Lives to increase. Opportunity and choice for ourselves for others, the whole world. And I want my business to do that, to increase choice to increase options, to increase opportunity. Right now, I’m just thinking about that as being able to hire people, give them a chance to get a job, but I would love to hear you think about and talk about other ways that we as movement makers, and business owners, increased choice and opportunity in the world.

Thanks for all you do. No. Thanks for the work. You do Emily, I appreciate it. As is becoming clear through these conversations. It may be that your individual action of hiring, people might not be as powerful and as leverage as you creating ideas, that spread that enable large numbers of people to get there where they’re going consider the Grayson Foundation, which is somewhere between where you were and where you are in Yonkers New York. Greyston, makes all the brownies for Ben and Jerry’s.

Well, they have an idea called open hiring and what they do is just what it sounds. Like the next person on the list, gets a job in the factory. Doesn’t matter if used to be incarcerated, doesn’t matter if you used to have substance abuse problems. Doesn’t matter. If used to be homeless, if you’re the next person on the list, you get a job and this approach has changed people’s lives.

The challenge is, you don’t need that many people to make brownies. And so, the real impact is when greyston She shares the idea with other institutions because if the idea spreads the number of lives that will be changed will spread as well. So, the opportunity for each of us who seek to make things better by making better, things is not to figure out how to make our soccer ball bigger, but it’s the figure out how to create algorithms and specs and networks and communities that spread because ideas that spread win.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see y’all next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago, I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months. In together the carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -no-such-thing-as-writer-s-block-e- <==

About 200 years ago, probably on a dark and stormy night Mary Shelley gave the world Frankenstein and it has lived on in our nightmares ever. Since about the same time, her husband and intermittent and tortured poet named Percy gave us writer’s block He described creativity as a fading coal and in one of his most dangerous writings he wrote and the most glorious, poetry that has ever been communicated to the world, is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

He set the stage for what would soon come after the epidemic of writer’s block konnichiwa. It’s Nick in Fukuoka Japan. And and this is a special archived episode of akimbo.

The thing is, there’s no such thing as writer’s block. Joan a. Casella has a great piece on this in the New Yorker and in it, she describes the evolution of writer’s block. It turns out Percy’s, poem, his writing about getting stuck, spread it spread to The Poets? And then it spread to the novelist’s. It spread to the psychoanalysts and then it spread to the people writing screenplays and then and then and then so, any copywriter video editor social, Media Guru public speaker. Who’s worth his or her? Salt has writer’s block because that juicy work. The work we seek to do the work were no one’s telling us how to do it because it’s never been done. Before that work, with the fancy snacks in the big prizes where there are clients and audiences and partners waiting for us to spin something out of whole cloth that work.

Well, we get blocked. We get stuck. Chuck, we get this malady that we’ve given a name to writer’s block, and there’s no such thing, plumbers, don’t get plumbers. Block, the plumber doesn’t show up at your house when you have a dripping faucet and say, oh I don’t know. I’m really stuck on blocked. I’m not sure I give any whiskey.

No, there’s no such thing as plumbers block. There’s no ditch-diggers block, there’s no lift. Over block. Why do writers do creatives? Get this magic special exception. Well, I want to argue that, we don’t deserve it. That it’s not real. That yes we get stuck, we feel stuck, but the thought that writer’s block is something that we actually can’t escape from that. It’s like having a cold or a wart or cancer.

I’m not buying it. I think. Instead, what we are is confused were confused because what Really saying is I don’t have any ideas that are perfectly formed. I don’t have something that I’m sure is going to work. As we get better at our craft, as our reputation increases, it gets more and more difficult to overcome this problem because when you’re coming out of left field, when you’re a longshoreman in San Francisco in the 1930s or 40s and no one’s expecting very much of you.

Well then you can just write an Eric Hoffer just wrote But once your reputation grows, once it grows then all of a sudden, we start censoring ourselves. We start wanting to streak to continue. We start maximizing in our head. The problem of doing it poorly and minimizing the ability to do it. Well, so your problem isn’t that you don’t have enough, good ideas, your problem might be that you don’t have enough bad ideas, Years ago, I was fortunate enough to work with the great Isaac Asimov.

Isaac was one of the most important science fiction writers of his generation. He pioneered, the writings about robots. He figured out how to write space operas. In fact, he wrote 400 books in his career wrote and published four hundred books back, when there was no Kindle and Publishing yourself wasn’t particularly easy.

Buck’s, how’d he do it? Isaac. I said, how did you do it? He said, well, it’s pretty simple. I have this manual typewriter, and every morning I get up at 6:30 and I sit at the typewriter and then I type and I type until noon. I just type, I keep typing. It doesn’t matter if I type good stuff, it doesn’t matter. If I type bad stuff, I keep typing.

and what is subconscious would say to him is well as long as we’ve got to type we might as well type something worth reading and this idea that we are going to be able to create more and more bad work on our way to good work is one way to unlock the myth to get past the stuckness and realize we don’t have a problem with writing just as we don’t have a problem with talking, but we really have a problem with is being perfect.

Another way to approach it is the Harlan Ellison method, I sell my soul but the highest rates, the highest rates. I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it. Harlan decided that he was a writer for hire. And if someone was going to pay him, he was going to do the writing. It wasn’t about the Muse.

It wasn’t about, what inspiration, hit him. It was his job. He’s a plumber. Pay the writer, the writer will write for you. David Mamet, has a different approach, David Mamet who created some of the most Vivid and memorable plays of our lifetime, has had a whole bunch of Clunkers in a row, but he keeps writing, which is exactly the, in fact, the only way to write a great play to keep writing to show up and put the work on the table, I’m here from downtown.

I’m here from Mitch, Marie and I’m here on a Mission of Mercy. It’s easy to believe that creativity is going to come at us like lightning Miles Davis, recorded, kind of blue in 72 hours. One of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded. Certainly one of the best-selling three days done. We look at that and we say to ourselves. Wow.

I can’t wait for something like that to hit me.

Except except Miles Davis made more than 40 record albums in his career, more than 40 and very few compared to kind of blue. How could they? That’s okay. He did the work. He showed up and he did the work Stephen King. One of the greatest writers of our time, goes to writers conferences. He’s paying it forward.

And at these conferences, up-and-coming authors, raise their hand and they say, Stephen King. You are one of the greatest writers of all time. Please tell us what kind of pencil do you use? As if knowing, what kind of pencil, Stephen King used, would help what we seek when we are afraid. When we are looking for the way out, is reassurance, we want the reassurance of someone telling us everything is going to be 0. Okay, the reassurance of knowing how Stephen King does his writing how Isaac Asimov does his writing how this screenwriter or that playwright comes up with their ideas.

This is foolish because reassurance is futile. There can never be enough reassurance. After you’re done at the writers conference, you need to go home and sit by yourself and no one is standing there telling you. Everything is going to be okay. You cannot rely on reassurance because reassurance will let you down.

Instead, we have to learn how to fly to fly solo, to dig a ditch, to do the plumbing to come up with the bad ideas, on our way to having the insight to tell them apart from the good ideas. Steve pressfield calls these emotions resistance resistance. His term is the work of the amygdala that little almond sized bit of brain near our brainstem, the amygdala doesn’t speak English.

The amygdala is in charge of fight or flight. The amygdala is what makes a wild animal? A wild animal and we still have one. It got us here millions of years later. It Us. It helped us in the jungle and helped us in the savannah. It helped us. Yes. In the boardroom but the amygdala backfires, it backfires because it has a lot of trouble, telling the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and an editor it backfires. Because when it sees danger, it freezes up, it gets our heart racing and it’s very, very clever.

It’s clever in the way. It will come up with a thousand ways. Ways to avoid doing the thing. It is afraid of. So the job of the creative two parts, first, she has to expose herself to the world to learn to see to understand. And second she has to dance with the amygdala. The fear will not go away, the resistance never goes away. The more important, the work is the louder. It gets the harder, you try to make it go away.

The harder and more clever. It gets in response now you cannot make it go away. There will never be regular days where you feel like Miles Davis recording kind of blue, maybe Nevers little strong, there will rarely be days like that. Don’t count on them. Instead the work is doing it when you don’t feel like it doing it when it’s not easy.

That waiting an entire lifetime to write that magic paragraph might be fun and easy in that moment, but that’s not the work. The work of the professional is different Roz and Ben Zander in their beautiful book. The Art of possibility, suggest a simple way for us to change our narrative and the idea is to replace the word but with the word and In the example rods gives I’m in Florida, I’m on vacation but it’s raining outside.

The but ruins everything. You wanted it to be one thing and it’s something else has Pema. Chodron has pointed out. That’s where suffering Lies when our conception of what’s fair. Doesn’t match. What’s happening? But as Ra’s points out, we can replace the word but with the word and I’m in Florida on vacation and it’s raining outside so I can work on my cooking.

I don’t have to go to the beach. As soon as we embrace the and we can get back to work, I have a deadline tomorrow I have to write some copy and I’m feeling blocked. So I will write down as many bad ideas. As I can, that’s fine because now you’re moving forward. You’re sitting at the typewriter and typing page after page. After page, when I was in ninth grade, they opened a new high. Cool in my town. So I just started a new school in tenth grade.

And when they opened the new school, of course, they had a soccer team in a football team and a lacrosse team, but they didn’t have a quiz Bowl team. And in Buffalo where I grew up quiz Bowl was a big deal. Every Sunday night on TV, we needed a quiz Bowl team and I wanted to be on it. So I went to all the trouble of starting the team, finding the advisor, building a little circuit board for the buzzers, and everything else, and then we did auditions.

And of course, It’s at the audition. I came in 10th, didn’t make the team, but they let me be the coach. And I understood soon afterwards, why? I did so poorly and tryouts because I was pretty good at trivia. I did poorly because I had a buzzer management problem. Here’s the deal. If you want to win on Jeopardy you can’t wait until you’re sure, you know the answer because by the time you’re sure you know the answer. Someone else has already buzzed.

The Secret of buzzer management is not buzzing when you know the answer. It’s buzzing when you think you might know the answer by the time they call on you that second and a half in between the time you buzz and the time, the host calls your name, your brain is working overtime. Your brain dances with the amygdala figures out is better off putting the right idea into the world then it is hiding. You become more afraid of being blocked. Then you are of Doing the work itself.

So buzzer management is another example of a good habit that what writer’s block really is is a series of bad habits and fear piled. One atop another it’s fictional we don’t have writer’s block, maybe we feel it but it’s not who we are we are not blocked. What we are is afraid and that fear that fear Of watching our reputation, be frittered away. Because the next thing we’re going to do is in As Good As the last one that fear of what people will say about us. It gets us into a swizzle. It gets us. Stuck Nike of course would like you to just do it which is easily interpreted as what the hell spin it off, get it over with put it out there.

That’s not what they mean. The idea of shipping your work is not about just Shipping it. Whatever, what the hell? Instead it’s the idea of merely doing it, doing it without commentary, doing it without listening to The Whining. The excuses, the complaining, all of the maneuvering. The resistance is doing in the back of your head.

Merely do it means, Take out your wrench and adjust the pipe. Take out your shovel and dig the ditch. Merely do it sit at the typewriter and write four hours, five hours and then get up. You’re done. It’s your job. We’re professionals. And our profession is to create something that matters to find a way to lead and connect. It is not as straightforward as factory work. It is not as Reliable as factory work but it’s five hundred times better.

It’s better because it engages us at a level of humanity that so many of us have wanted to get their hands on.

Merely ship it. Merely put the idea into the world. Merely arrived with the best that you’ve got right now. It’s probably not perfect. It’s definitely not good enough, but we can make it better. You can make it better. But first we must begin. We cannot persuade ourselves that something has Afflicted us, we have Afflicted us, we have Afflicted ourselves with a narrative One of impotence, the end of the road were done. No more chances, it’s not true.

All the data shows us, it’s not true, we merely have to write. We merely have to create, have to be generous enough to show up with the best work. We’ve got right now because once the amygdala the resistance, realizes you’re going to ship it anyway. It’ll get its act together and your work will get better.

So no, please don’t say to anybody. I have no good ideas Begin by saying, I don’t have enough bad ideas. It’s Maria. Accept my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hyphens is on the pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Hey Seth Is Rex Pizza? Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question and now your questions from the previous episodes.

There’s a couple questions to that have come up again. And again, here’s a representative for each one. My question for you is this how might a large organization like a public school district scale up efforts to make the system? System fit its students here. This is a great question and the idea is, how do we use the bureaucracy? We’ve got now the efficient powerful bureaucracy to make school what it needs to be, which is personalized and individualized education about leadership, about making change happen.

Well, I think, if we think about it a little differently, you’ll see the problem. Let’s say you ran a really efficient division of the army, the division of the army. That shaves, the heads of all the people on their way into boot camp that on a good day, you can shorn 400 people. No problem. Well, that’s super efficient and I understand how you would organize a squadron of Barbara’s to end up with 400 haircuts, done in no time.

However, if you’re going to then, take that approach and try to build a chain of beauty parlors and hair salons, you’re going to fail. And the reason you’re going to fail is not because you’re bad at shaving. The heads of 20 year olds, the reason you’re going to fail is that’s not what the public needs or wants from you until the wrong answer would be here’s how you take this Squadron, you’ve got that was good at the old job and turn them into Who are good at the new job.

The right answer would be what’s the new job? Let’s build something around that. So the challenge of adjusting, the bureaucracy of school is there can be no effortless easy top-down solution to this problem that the problem is going to be solved the different way. It’s going to be solved by parents, asking a simple question, what is school for?

And if we can be clear with each other about what is school For we will no longer tolerate wasting time and money doing things that school isn’t for an organically with a lot of dislocation and pain and suffering and discomfort. But yes, organically day-by-day classroom by classroom student, by student.

The school system will begin to change but it will only begin to happen. When we ask the question, what is school for when you’re in a creative entrepreneurial? Never making your best art for those Edge customers. How do you grapple with the fact that the capital the sales from that smaller audience might not be enough to, really keep you going to provide you with what you need to be? Making your next iteration of your art? Yeah, this is a poignant question. And one that I hear the most about this issue of making our art for the smallest viable audience. About treating different people differently about rejecting the square tomato, about not pandering to the middle of the market, trying to make our social network scores, go up at all. Costs built-in is a contradiction, which is how can I have a hit and industrialized? Hit at scale at the very same time.

I am catering to people who aren’t in the center of the market. And the problem with the question is it sets you up to fail because what you do is you rationalize as you try to move to the middle, you say well I need to cut these Corners. I need to average this out because if I don’t I won’t be able to get big enough to pay the bills, but as you’ll see from the people who make mediocre movies for average audiences and don’t make a profit as you’ll see from the people who make mediocre music for the people in the middle and don’t make a profit and who run mediocre, rest? Answer people in the middle and don’t make a profit going for the middle, for the brass ring rarely Works.

In fact, the successes all start at the edges always there for the weird people, the people who didn’t show up in a demographic study or a focus group, it’s by catering to them to the Obscure extremes that we end up with something that becomes a surprise bestseller. The thing is that, in order to do it, you have to be willing to cut your overhead to the Bone. You have to lower your expectations. You have to go slowly, not get big fast, but get important soon. Because if you can become important to a few people, then if you’ve planned it right, the cash flow will begin to support your move to serve more people.

So what I’m asking us to do is to suspend disbelief just a little bit and get down to work. We showed up to do this in the first place, get down with a focus on. Who is it? That we actually seek to serve and instead of hiding behind Mass instead of hiding behind cash flow, let’s embrace the fact that if we can’t serve those people, we’re better off, not even trying.

If you’ve got questions about this episode, I hope you’ll check out akimbo link and click the appropriate button. Will Listen to your question. If we can we’ll include it in a future episode.

See you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around. The world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -our-beauty-problem- <==

We have a beauty problem and it’s time to talk about it. Hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo, will be back in a second to talk about peacocks and accountants. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

My name is Grant Brown and I’m the founder of happy Eco news. We provide positive news about the environment, five times a day, and a top-five newsletter for your inbox every Monday morning. We only have two goals. One is to help people find Hope for the future and to is to help promote the good people that are doing the good work.

I hope your audience will check us out at happy Eco news.com and then how people of all types are making a difference and ultimately that there is still Reason for Hope, thank you.

Charles Darwin had a big problem with peacocks and it shows just how insightful he was in understanding, even without knowing that genetics existed. Even without understanding that DNA, could be a thing, how insightful he was about his principles of evolution, because After figuring out the obvious, but previously, unstated fact that creatures are more Lee to reproduce if they fit into the environment, he had a real problem with peacocks.

And the problem is, this being a peacock is sort of stupid because you’re attracting Predators because you’re wasting an enormous amount of energy growing your plumage because it’s hard to walk around with all of those feathers. And so the question is, why do peacocks have Have big feathers. Well, the answer which seems sort of reductive is because peahens like peacocks with big feathers.

If you’re a peacock and you don’t have big feathers, you’re not going to have kids because peahens aren’t going to choose you as mate. This idea of sexual selection has been expanded upon over the last hundred years but it’s still not really understood. If you look at the Jordan Airy video of how birds of paradise, mate, it’s really astonishing to see that the male bird will spend hours cleaning up a tiny portion of the Jungle, picking up every single stray, feather. Until it’s neat as a pin and then the female bird of paradise will fly over and the male will strut and preen and do all sorts of bizarre things with its head and then if it’s very lucky it, It will be able to reproduce the thing. Is none of those things help it get fed. None of those things help, it avoid, Predators sexual selection happens in lots and lots of parts of the animal kingdom.

Now there’s one part of it that beauty actually has a useful signaling in it. That makes sense to me, which is that for creatures including humans. Who don’t understand how Predict the future health of someone because they can’t do genetic testing. If someone has a Supple coat or clear skin or lots of muscles one could make the Assumption. If you’re a creature that person that creature might end up giving you healthy Offspring.

And so we could assert from the beginning that we’re beauty comes from is a signal. From a healthy individual to others that it can afford to put resources into looking good because it’s healthy. But clearly that’s not the case with peacocks and definitely not with humans. And the way we can prove this with humans is we keep changing the definition of beauty. Not just physical Beauty, but all the beauty cues that we see in our culture, Sure that. It turns out that if you looked a certain way in the 1800’s, if you didn’t have a tan, if you were suitably plump, it was a signal that you were wealthy and that made you more attractive to some people. But I’m not just talking about the surface stuff that we could see in a magazine there. When we think about, what does it mean to be beautiful? Whether we’re talking about a poem, a song or a person, there are lots of And lots of elements involved. And we use those signals to make ridiculous choices choices about who to vote for choices about who to hire and the keyword that we often don’t use is conventional. This person is conventionally attractive because it keeps changing.

So a couple rhetorical questions for you, if you are hiring And there were two candidates left to choose from, and one of them was a super competent, hard-working honest, loyal accountant who wasn’t going to make any mistakes and get your books done. Well, and the other one wasn’t as good at any of those measures at being an accountant, but the first one was a close talker who didn’t dress well and sort of had hygiene issues. And the second one was somebody who had done.

Really, really well in the high school attractiveness sweepstakes and was charismatic and fun to be around, which one might you hire or if you’re dating. Someone and they’ve all the attributes that you’re looking for in a partner but they have an unconventionally large or small nose. One that attracts attention from across the room.

Does that? Get in the way? What if their skin color or there? Ability status is different than yours or the way you expected to be. In the world. We are making all of these surface decisions and we don’t usually use words to describe them. That’s just the way I feel that’s just the way I am. That’s just what I’m attracted to but why are we attracted? Why are we attracted to these things that feel beautiful to us? Because we’re not peacocks and we’re not peahens, Roger Fisher, did some of the most important work on sexual selection and one of the things he talked about was the fact that it can go to a runaway State and by that what he’s describing, is this the one who is doing the picking often, the female just has an instinct, it likes big feathers, it likes certain mating rituals and so it picks among all the other choices, the mate that meets those things, but then that couple That couple has Offspring, has kids, the male has bigger feathers, the male is reinforced, the female has more of a proclivity, more of a desire to see that thing that attracted its mom.

And so it goes in One Direction, it gets more and more pronounced. So pronounced that it ends up actually leading to the species fall. Falling out of favor in The evolutionary sweepstakes, at the species is no longer fit for the environment because runaway sexual selection, got out of hand. And the same thing is happening in our culture, and here’s another version of runaway think about, what’s happening, at least, in my country with politicians and primaries.

If some voters decide that a candidate is, quote more beautiful. Not just because they’re taller, we have a long history. String United States of electing the tallest candidate but because they are leaning toward an extreme on one topic or another. Well, in the primary, the candidates who go further to that extreme are more likely to attract the voters, who care about that signal of political Beauty, and they end up winning that then attracts more voters, who like, that feeling, which then drives politicians to your, even further, To the edges, democracy was architected to help move toward the center to help create Community, but the primary system, plus gerrymandering plus social media. Plus, the political money machine is driving it to the other edges because runaway is happening because the dance between the peacock of the politician and the peahen of the voter keeps going in Only One Direction.

If it turns out that being a In are on the Forbes 400 list, makes you more attractive and able to have more kids with more people. Well, then some people will make choices to be on that list to move up even though they have enough more than enough to get through life. If it turns out that being attracted to somebody who ends up going through that cycle, makes it more likely that you will have kids that are attracted. Then yes, you’ve got it. The culture changes and it’s easy. To look at this and say well not me so I will ask do you have a pair of high-heeled shoes are you attracted to people who are wearing high-heeled shoes? What are high heeled shoes for exactly?

Well there are things that some cultures use to send or receive signals signals about affiliation and Status. What does it mean to fit in? You don’t wear sneakers to the senior prom except now I think you do which is probably a good thing because And shields three-inch heels are not effective. Three-inch heels are not healthy three-inch heels, do not help us thrive in most ordinary environments.

They’re simply a signal a signal around Beauty and fitness about understanding the cues of culture because you want to be seen as more attractive, or if you are attracted to them, you want to be seen as somebody who is achieving a certain level of status or affiliation and so marketers. Use all of this against us. It was only a few decades ago that they invented. The ridiculous Canard that you should spend 3 months salary on an engagement ring that you should buy a worthless piece of carbon one that you can hardly resell and put this ring on your spouse’s finger as they signal as a symbol of beauty as some sort of sexual selection signifier that shows the world that you And what conventional beauty is.

And as a result, we are overlooking value all over the place value and dignity and Justice, and fairness and Equity, but yes, value because the undervalued people, the ones who aren’t conventionally attractive in whatever way we want to Define that their resources are underused. They are unable to contribute at the level that they could.

And so when we think, Think about where we started this rant, that the utility of fur that is shiny and supple or skin, that is clear. As a signal that somebody is fit for their environment and more likely as they are healthy to have successful. Offspring has been morphed into high-heeled shoes and the alternative instead is to be really clear about why something is important. To us to seek out actual useful. Honest signals that tell us about whether somebody has the ability the desire, the skill to bring emotional labor to the table to contribute in a way that we need them to contribute because conventional standards of beauty are just an inch away from judging people, from being racist, or ableist or just Reinforcing what came before affiliation and Status roles Run Deep in our culture, where probably hardwired for them. The way the peahen is for the peacock.

But now that we see it now that we understand that affiliation and status, and conventional ideas of beauty are all intertwined. In our culture, we come back to the key questions who’s it for and what’s it for these actions that we are taking King, these people that we are connecting with these projects, we are working on.

Who are they for? And what are they for? Because we have a chance to make things better, but we can make things better first by realizing what? We’re not even examining. Thanks for listening to my rant, we’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor No, we had this week, in fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends run, akimbo.com, a b, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running but in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what You are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please.

It’s Maria. My name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump pricer warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh? Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo.

That link that take Ai and bi o .l, iink and click. The appropriate button can be about past episodes or whatever you think overlaps with the work. Here we go. Hi, Seth. This is Hannah from England. And I have a question about your work kind of in general and it’s about this idea of hacks. I’ve heard you talk about it a lot before but my question is, how do you differentiate between doing NG work that people truly want and just making a hack, I feel sometimes it’s hard to separate the two and figure out what isn’t just tacky and hacky and to make work that truly matters.

I definitely don’t want to fall into the Hat category and how do we do that? Thank you very much for everything that you do. Thank you for this Hama. It’s a great question. I talked about it in my book, the practice and I think it Is a little bit of confusion so I’d be happy to lean into it. There’s nothing wrong with being a hack. If you’re being a hack on purpose, the idea of a hack is somebody who says, if you want X, I’ve got X.

If you’re used to spending why I can sell it to you a little bit cheaper, giving people what they want selling to them a little bit cheaper. There’s nothing wrong with that. We need that it is one of the bases for our culture, but it’s not art. And that is the gap. App that I’m trying to highlight. There you go to see a Fleetwood Mac, cover band.

Well, most of the time that a Fleetwood Mac cover band is playing Fleetwood, Mac’s greatest hits through being hacks and then every once in a while, they do something that people don’t expect. They actually inhabit, the personalities of the people who they are emulating, they actually go beyond what a cover band. Would do they take it to the next level in that moment they’re doing That might not work. They’re taking people somewhere that they didn’t know.

They wanted to go, if you go to see a cover band, the thing you came for was a jukebox was the greatest hits, but if they take you further than that, if they surprise you, if they Delight you. Well, now they’re leaning away from a strict adherence to the genre and going someplace new, something that might not work, and if that’s what you want. If that’s thrilling, if that fuels your work, that is what you have to seek out. And you don’t get there by simply doing a focus group and asking people what they want. You get there by making assertions about what is possible and where people might want to go, which leads us to our next question.

Hi, Seth. This is every Lawman Des from Guadalajara Mexico. I am a designer and I am currently working on a project. Around death and how can we bear the design spaces and services around this topic I am currently in a statue my project where I feel stuck and I need help from future users and know their feedback and thoughts on this topic but I find it difficult to approach people.

And ask them about this, very sensitive and very difficult subject. So I wanted to know if you have any thoughts or suggestions on what should I keep in mind, when talking or asking other people about this? I would like to thank you very much for all the work that you do. It is very inspiring, Muchos Gracias and saludos.

Thank you for this and thank you for doing this work. I think it’s fair to say that. In 100 Years of industrialization, we’ve done a terrible, terrible job of making the process, the transition to death of dancing with death of dealing with death. We’ve done a terrible job of making that any better.

In fact, in many ways we’ve made it worse, we spend a huge portion of our Healthcare budget prolonging. The lives of people who are about to die, and we don’t do it in a way that gives them Comfort or that helps them get to where they are going and then to the survivors. Well, we take a lot of their money, but we haven’t really reflected anything. We’ve learned about grief and your point, which is when I try to talk about this people don’t really respond. Well, is part of the problem, because we’ve made it very hard to talk about. It’s a little bit like the way sex was 30 or 40 or 50 years ago that a whole group. The population half weren’t even supposed to speak up at all.

So now what you are doing, what you are trying to do, is talk to people not about their experience with death, because everyone you’re talking to hasn’t died, maybe about their experience with grief, but mostly, I think you need to talk to and develop empathy for people who aren’t exactly sure what project you’re working on.

We need to get a better feel for People’s hopes and dreams for understanding where their fears lie. We need to become intimate with the things that they are going to be dealing with that. They’re not even aware that they are dealing with are going to be dealing with. And this is where the art of design comes in that we can’t prove we have the right answer. So yes design thinking begins with who’s it for and what’s it for but where it extends to where it gets difficult?

Is when we have to say you Not know that this is what you need. You might not know that this is what you were dreaming of. But here, here I made this and that makes it easy to get stuck because if you’re coming at this, needing to be approved and applauded by everyone, who interacts with your work, it’s not going to happen instead. If you approach it with generosity and say, maybe this will help one person, maybe this will help 10 people.

Maybe this is something my My grandparents wish they could have had, if you can approach it that way as a gift, it makes it easier for you to push your way forward. Thanks again for doing this work. I set, this is Kevin from San Francisco and a proud Alton be a mum, a question for you this week is, I’ve heard you talk a lot about as a freelancer getting better clients but as the reverse of that is, as a client, how do I Make sure that I’m getting the most out of the people that I’m paying what kinds of communication can I use to ensure that thanks to this question? The end got cut off but I will do my best to answer it because you’re bringing up something really important which is yes, Freelancers need better clients.

But how do good clients? Get better Freelancers? Well, in my experience, there are two big problems and a small one, the small one easiest to fix. Is the disrespect of not paying people fairly. And on time, you should pay people fairly and on time, maybe even a little bit early because you can afford it. And because this sign of respect transforms the relationship.

But beyond that the two traps that I see organizations and individuals falling into our a making the project way too small, making the project. So precise that you The freelancer, no room to do great work. And the second one, which often afflicts people who try to hire great Freelancers. Is you make the project to bake you say? I’ll know it. When I see it, you ask them to read your mind. You ask them to come up with something with insufficient budget, time or information, and as a result, what you’re doing is passing off to them the responsibility for the project not working.

That makes it really hard to get great Freelancers. The alternative is for you to take responsibility for the project working and to give them the right degrees of freedom to spend twice as much time as you’re spending. Now, specking the project with the freelancer, asking them hard questions about where the boundaries should be being really clear with each other about the resources and what great work looks like because if those early conversations, Things go. Well, then a great freelancer is going to give you even better than great work.

We have to put ourselves on the hook not simply find somebody and hand to them, not just a project but all of the responsibility because they’re Freelancers, they’re not miracle workers. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around. In the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -hitsville-e- <==

Welcome to hitsville. We live in a culture where it seems as though. Everyone wants to find a hit by a hit, share a hit, and most of all make a hit but what exactly is a hit? Hey, it’s been skoda and this is a special archived episode of akimbo long time ago, guy named George Zipp. Decided to count, all the words in a bunch of books.

Add them all up. See which ones showed up the most often? No surprise. The word, the shows up the most followed by of and then and probably could have guessed that. What’s really interesting though is that the most common word shows up twice as many times as the second-most I’m in word and three times more than the third, most common word, four times more than the fourth, most common word.

That in fact the 135 words that show up the most frequently in a typical book account. For half of all the words that are used, this is called a power law curve. And I can’t believe I’m using audio to describe it to you. It’s in the show notes. At a Kimbo dot link but it looks almost exactly as you would expect like a steep ski hill with a really long run off at the bottom that the ones at the top, the tip top two hits, those are really high up and then it levels and levels and levels and levels out until all the way at the end. You’ve got words like zoetry and zoetrope there, even have to start with Z. They’re just words, don’t show up very much.

It turns out that this power law curve is sort of universal. If we take a look at best selling books of which there are a million tries year with people publishing a book. We see almost precisely the same curve and with movies and with TV shows and with items on the menu at a restaurant and work your way down the list. We know what hit looks like a hit is something that shows up a lot. More than anything else.

Two times, three times four times more turns out there. When your book is a number one bestseller, you hear from a lot more people than if it’s number ten on the bestseller list. Because the number one book, according to zipf’s law will sell ten times as many copies as the number 10 book. That’s a huge distinction.

So to start to understand this, let’s compare the Super Bowl. With Thanksgiving and beer. The Super Bowl is the most watched TV show in the country and has been for a long time. Why is that? Well, it could be for one of three reasons. Either people who don’t watch a lot of TV all come together to watch the Super Bowl at the same time.

I think that’s true. Or people who watched lots of different kinds of TV ad, the Super Bowl to their list of things to watch. That’s definitely true or three. People watch a lot, a lot, a lot of the Super Bowl. Well, that makes no sense because you only watch the Super Bowl once. So it’s the first to it, it’s a hit because they got the people who don’t watch a lot of TV and they also got the people who do.

Thanks. What about Thanksgiving? Well, if we ask about turkey turkey sales in the United States, they don’t sell that much turkey in July, and they sell a lot of turkey in November. Why is that? Well, it’s pretty simple, because people who don’t eat turkey, eat turkey in November. It’s probably not true that heavy turkey eaters, eat even more turkey in November.

That’s unlikely. It’s a little, like the Super Bowl, but what about beer? Well, it turns out out that the popularity of beer brands exactly follows zipf’s law. Let’s think about the best-selling light beers in America. The number one brand of beer is Bud Light followed by Coors Light which has half the sales of Bud, Light followed by Miller Lite, which yes you’ve guessed. It has one third the sales of Bud Light.

What’s the secret? How do you make a hit beer? Well, yes. It’s helpful that if you go to a party popular, beer is served because the host of the party wants to make sure that the popular beer meaning, the one that a lot of people like is available, but in this case, the third thing kicks in and that third rule is people who drink a lot of beer, drink Bud Light.

That’s essential these people are called whales whales because as you know, whales eat Eat a lot of Plankton millions and millions of pounds of plankton. For one whale that when you make a product or service that can be used a bunch appealing to people who use a product or service. A lot is essential simple example. 44% of the people who use Twitter have never tweeted. Not once.

So where does Twitter’s usage come from? It comes from the, Whales from people who use it all the time.

Consider Glenn Reinhardt. Glen has an interesting hobby his hobby. According to the New Yorker is that he likes to return City bikes from busy stations to empty ones. That, what he does is he looks at the map of stations that are full goes there, grabs a bike and rides it to a station. That’s empty.

He doesn’t get paid particularly to do this. It’s his Hobby. Last year he did it eight thousand times. That’s a lot. He did it eight thousand times. I know you’re going to have trouble guessing this, but yes, he did it twice as many times as the next person who’s busy returning bikes. So what we see is if we want to create a hit we have to think about these three groups in equal measure.

So if you’re an author and you are, Your book to be a hit. Let’s say it’s The DaVinci Code. The key to that book or a book like Eat, Pray Love, Is that the people who bought it at its peak. That’s the only book they bought that year that the average American only buys a book a year and if you can be the book that the average American buys, you have a hit.

So that’s what we see often, particularly in the book business that we’re getting the rarest you Zur. But the reason that they’re buying it is that everyone else is buying it, that’s its appeal, they are buying it because everyone else is it’s popular because it’s popular. The second group the group that reads a bunch of books, they’re going to read it also because it’s popular because word-of-mouth the circle of people around them has reinforced that this is the book that everyone is reading.

But as we saw earlier, in the Superbowl example, it’s unlikely that your book is going to sell more copies because people who buy a lot of books are going to buy more than one copy of your book. That doesn’t make any sense, books or read once and then gone. But if we think about Hit Radio, that’s not how it works, Hit Radio is driven by people who listen to the radio all the time.

Now, here’s an interesting surprise often. We think that we’re selling something to people who are going to engage, once we’re selling to the people who rarely show up, but we’re surprised, let’s take a look at the Broadway, Theater Broadway plays and musicals cost, millions of dollars to put on and millions more to promote and to get people to come to the theater a full-page ad in the New York Times.

Cost more than eighty thousand dollars that’s just for one ad.

It might be worth asking the question, then who’s coming, who should we be? Reaching out to, to get them to come to our show. And if you take a look at how the Broadway producer, spend money, what they tend to do, is try to reach tourists, people who are in town, just for a little while, they run ads on the side of buses, they reach out to hotels and to tour groups, the thinking is if you can make your play the one-play, someone’s To see the one time they go to Broadway, you’ll have a hit.

Because if you do the math, it looks like there’s hundreds of millions of people to choose from and you don’t need very many of them to make your play work. But when the producers did a deeper look, they discovered something that was surprising at least to some of them. It turns out that if you go to a theater, maybe half the people in that theater.

It’s the only play they’re going to see. But a big percentage of the people in the theater have seen three places here or three musicals this year But it gets even more dramatic because a significant percentage of people 5 or 10% have seen 10 or 20 plays this year. So when you do the math, these whales these whales are the key without them the theater industry disappears without them a play. Can’t make it.

Add to that. There’s a second kind of whale, not just the whale who’s going to see 5 or 10 or 20 plays this year, but who’s going to see this play over and over again? So a play, like, wicked. Witch has been playing on Broadway for years is largely sustained by people who have seen it a dozen or more times.

So, what does this teach us as people who would like to make a hit? Well, first, we have to choose. We have to decide. Are we building? Rocky Horror Picture Show? Are we building a cult favorite? Something that people are going to see over and over again, because if we are, we should build it for them, we should make it more complicated more interesting. We should make it so that people can subscribe to it. We should embrace those.

If you think about how car brands like Ferrari or Jeep have built their profitable sinecures, it’s on the back of people who keep coming back again. And again it’s something you do on purpose. If you look at something like Twitter, it’s optimized for people to get hooked on it. Not everyone just enough people.

The same thing is true with most social media which is one reason why there’s real concern about their Chiral impact because they are sucking some people in at the expense of everything else in their life. Another way to build a hit though is more difficult, but for some people really satisfying, which is to be The DaVinci Code, the won the home run.

The thing about this is, It’s awfully difficult to do it on purpose. After the fact, we can look at it and say, oh yeah, of course, that was a hit. It was inevitable. But it’s not inevitable. Every bestseller in this category is a surprise bestseller. It’s a surprise bestseller because starting from scratch creating Harry Potter Fifty Shades figure out which one you want to look at.

It’s not preordained. Yeah, the sequel will do okay, but the sequel is a different sort of hit. And then the third thing we can do the one that’s most likely to work. Is the idea of people like us doing things like this. People Like Us do things like this is about cultural synchronization. It’s when you get people who are already into the medium who already like books or TV shows or movies or restaurants when they see.

But this is the next one, the one that people like them are Engaging with, if you look at the zagat’s restaurant guide, which had a 15-year run before, Google bought them, the people who had a zagat’s guide, were people who went out to dinner three or four times a week. These folks were always looking for another place to go.

And once they heard that people like them were going to a place like this. They went to so modeling. This People Like Us, do things, like this is something we do at the beginning of the process. Understanding that we’re not looking for lightning to strike us. We’re not looking to come up with something completely out of the blue, that will stun everyone and become a worldwide Sensation that almost never happens. Sure sigh had his video seen by more than 2 billion people. Pretty much anyone, with internet access saw him dancing in Korean, which can’t do it on purpose, even he can’t do it on purpose.

Again, so I think we have to walk away from that part of hit-making and instead figure out who we seek to serve how to create something that connects with a small intertwined group of people, it’s easier than ever to do that.

While this discussion of hits would not be complete without a riff about. Chris Anderson’s long tail. Lots of us had looked at ziff slaw and the power law curve long before Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine took a look but he looked at it differently than everyone else. He said, I’m not going to look at the hits. I’m going to look at the other half of the curve, you may recall at the beginning.

I said that 135 words account for half of all the usage of words in the English language. What about the rest? The other five hundred thousand Well, they also account for half each one a little bit all added up what Chris discovered in the long tail is simple. Most limited shelf space institutions like Barnes and Noble or Blockbuster or the local record store. Oh, I forgot. There is no, local record store anymore.

Most of them have limited shelf space. So what are they going to stock? They’re going to stock the hits. So the power law curve gets cut in half. All we get is the left part the Steep part. If you’re looking for Jamaican polka music, you’re out of luck because they would have to have a million records in that store and they don’t But then the internet came along and the internet said will stock it all and something extraordinary happened.

Amazon discovered that they get half their sales half in the book, Department from books at Barnes & Noble, doesn’t even carry and back when Blockbuster was in business and Netflix. Rented, DVDs, Netflix discovered that half of their rentals half. Were of titles that Blockbuster didn’t carry. And if you take a look at the iTunes Store versus a record store, you got it half the sales on iTunes, our titles that were never once sold in a record store.

The long tail. It turns out is inevitable when somebody with infinite shelf space opens a chance for people to find it. So Twitter is a long tail most People have on Twitter who tweet have not too many followers but when you add them all up, they have just as many followers as the people on the hit side.

So what should you do with this long tail information? Well, let me tell you what you shouldn’t do. What you shouldn’t do is seek to live out on the long tail because lots of products on the iTunes store sells zero copies a year, maybe one, maybe two if enough people are selling Two copies a year, apple is happy, but if you’re one of those musicians, not so much.

So living on the long, tail isn’t nearly as lucrative and Powerful as owning the long tail as creating a collection of thousands and thousands of blog posts or millions and millions of SK use. So that people will find one or two or five. You don’t care which one because you own the whole thing. So I think in my blog which has never once, never once had a hit post, none of my seven thousand posts have been the most popular post of the day across the internet.

But when you add up seven thousand posts, that sit there quietly in a long tail every day, somebody finds one and the whales show up and they find a lot of them also, fine with me. If they want to read it. I’m happy to share it.

So we’re left with people like us do things like this that when you don’t have a hit yet, the option feels like oh I got to hire a PR firm and hype and spam and promote, but maybe just maybe that’s not the right answer. Maybe you need to find some whales. Maybe you need to create a cultural construct to the people like us know about something like this.

Each of us more now than ever is capable of creating a hit John Hammond and the rest of the Gatekeepers don’t have the power that they used to have. But making it hit is about more than just doing what the Muse tells you to do. It involves thoughtfully analyzing, what kind of hit you want to make, who’s it, for, what’s it for?

And how we’re going to talk about it? Where our creator will get into trouble is being Used about who she’s trying to reach. Because if you’re seeking the masses, you’re going to dumb down your work, you’re going to lower the reading level make it simple or obvious, however it’s not the masses that are looking for. What you make, the masses aren’t looking for anything.

That’s why they are the masses. Welcome to hitsville will be back in a second with some Owens from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends run, akimbo.com, a b, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here but the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running but in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. And I’d like you to talk about what you are interested in.

So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines, add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. Safe. It’s Maria. Hey, Seth, my name is Kyle gray. And first of all, I love the show and that completes my question, I said this is Paul from Huntington Beach. California hyphen is on the bum. Hi, this is Catelynn, Teresa, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey sir. They said Harsha from, greetings from Lithuania. He said our previous episode was about writer’s block and the irony of the following is not lost on me.

It turns out we’re not getting a lot of questions from you. You and it might be writer’s block, so prove me wrong, send in questions about this episode or previous ones, all you’ve got to do is visit akimbo dot link Aki MB o dot link and press the appropriate button and you will be able to ask your question and if we can, we’ll answer it here on the podcast.

Now onto my favorite question from last time about writer’s block and storytelling. I believe that leadership comes from this amazing ability to tell a story and to bring allegory into the equation so that people can see your vision. So that they feel emotionally connected to what you were doing. My question is, how do you come up with the different allegories and metaphors that you do to do this thing to be able to Connect with people on such an emotional level, that is what interests me because I believe that that is a really important leadership skill. That cannot be underestimated. Thank you so much.

Yeah, there’s a lot of juiciness in this question because in fact human beings are storytelling machines. We almost never tell ourselves facts. We almost never walk away from a situation knowing the exact truth of everything that occurred. We are lousy eyewitnesses. We are bad at remembering things specifically, but we’re great at stories.

We make up stories all the time. We see something happening once twice three times and we assume it will happen another time. The things that we remember from being three years old or seven years old or 12 years old, what we remember are the stories. Now our story isn’t Once Upon a Time Story is not, they lived happily ever after.

A story is a set of symbols integrated together to create a memory and emotion. We get tension and then we release the tension, we like analogies and metaphors because that takes a new thing and hooks it into an old thing. So yes, this is where leadership lies leadership is the act of getting people to fall in love with a version of the future one that they hadn’t necessarily considered or believed possible.

If people can’t fall in love with that Vision, it’s going to be very hard to get them on your side. To get them to work toward that Vision. In order to lead, we tell stories and the stories that we tell that work there are the ones that resonate with people How to get good at it. Is there a manual? What’s the shortcut?

Well, it turns out that very few people are natural-born storytellers. Most of us aren’t able to tell a story. Well at all until we were in our teens for some people, it takes years longer than that. But here’s what I know to end up being a great Storyteller. You must begin by being a lousy Storyteller that showing up again in Again, with metaphors with analogies with examples with anecdotes, you don’t do it very well. Until one day, you do it better.

And therefore we have to invest in telling stories that don’t work. Looking people in the eye and telling them our best version of ourselves, our best version of that event that happened and why they might want to understand it. Why is a sailboat like a watermelon seed? Well, it turns out, if you teach sailing long enough to kids about how to sail a 12 foot sailboat, you will discover that if you show them a watermelon seed and hold it in a certain way and take them through the thinking about why a watermelon seed will fly out if you squeeze it between your fingers, maybe, just maybe kids will understand how a sailboat works.

I don’t know who the first person was, who invented the watermelon seed sailboat story. It probably wasn’t my friend. Michael, who I heard? Teaching that story in 1978, he heard it from someone who heard it from someone. What I do know is that the act of telling a story poorly, is the only method to telling a story. Well, tell your story, see, what makes people’s eyes light up?

See what He’s with them and then find a new story, a true story, a relevant story, a story. They can remember and take action on.

If you’ve got questions about this episode, I hope you’ll check out akimbo link and click the appropriate button will listen to your question and if we can we’ll include it in a future episode.

See you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago, I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project. It’s our new project more than Great volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -problems- <==

The advice in this podcast is not unsolicited. If you don’t want or care about advice, it’s best to skip this episode because this is an episode of a podcast about advice. Hey it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about getting better. But first, here’s a, Message from our sponsor.

Hi Seth. My name is Graham Brown and I’m the founder of happy Eco news. We provide positive news about the environment, five times a day, and a top-five newsletter for your inbox every Monday morning. We only have two goals. One is to help people find Hope for the future and to is to help promote the good people that are doing the good work.

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We might be in the Golden Age of advice. There is more advice available to more people for free right now than ever before. There are more people paying to be in therapy for more therapists than ever before. There are more coaches doing coaching for more people than ever before by a lot. And one question is, is it doing any good?

And another question could be, could we get better at it? Better at Giving advice perhaps, but mostly better at getting advice, giving advice. We’ll do that one first. And fairly quickly unsolicited advice is probably not advice at all unsolicited. Advice goes to people who aren’t enrolled, they’re not enrolled in, hearing what you have to say and they’re not enrolled in changing.

If you walk up to somebody in the street and tell them that you don’t like the clothes they’re wearing or the way they Combed their hair. It’s really unlikely that this will be well received. I think most of us know this but the internet’s different because on the internet we can give advice in lots of ways synchronous and asynchronous that we can shout from the rafters we can tweet or put up videos or simply call people out as if that’s a useful hobby. So there’s all this advice floating around probably Lee because the person giving the advice gets pleasure out of venting not because they honestly believe that the person they are giving unsolicited advice to is going to listen and respond Zig Ziglar, the late teacher, my friend Zig, Ziglar pointed out, that there was a difference between responding and reacting.

If the doctor says, you are reacting to the medicine, that’s bad. But if you’re responding to the medicine, then things are working. And what we’re looking for, in the world of advice is a chance to respond. So, let’s talk about receiving advice asking for advice because that’s going on a lot. We’re spending a lot of time and money asking for advice.

Why is that? And why does it work? So rarely. Well, I’ll start with this creatives. People with a business idea, a novel, a painting, something that they have worked hard on our well. Aware of the sunk costs. Well aware of how it felt to lean into a new idea. Their situation is special, they are in a particular place, this thing they are building, it’s important to them.

And most of the time people who are giving them feedback or advice, solicited or unsolicited are simply wrong. There are telling them that the telephone or the internet will never amount to anything. They are rejecting their book for the Fifth time, they are saying no one’s ever going to listen to music like this or to quote, IBM the World Market. For computers, might be five.

There’s a long long history of Skeptics. Expressing Their Fear, their uncertainty, their lack of vision with something that feels like advice. And so when someone is walking around with a creative idea, a new idea, something important to them, they tend to view critical feedback. Not As advice at all.

But something to be girded against to push back against. However, they also sometimes fall into the Trap of seeking reassurance, reassurance as readers in my book, The Practice no is futile. This rub some people, the wrong way. So let me explain reassurance. Someone telling you everything is going to be okay.

Can’t possibly work because everything isn’t going to be okay. And You know this and even though it might feel good in the moment to be told that everything is going to be okay deep down because you know it isn’t now. You doubt yourself and the person who just reassured you, it wears off really fast and now you need more of it.

So, a cycle of craving reassurance appears. When we combine this, with the lonely journey, of the Creator who’s carrying around sunk costs, who’s busy shopping for reassurance and ignoring, The naysayers we end up with a huge suck of time and money that too often people go to their golf coach and say without saying it.

I want to swing exactly the way I’ve been swinging all along but I want the ball to go straight and I want it to go far and the golf coach gives good advice explains how the person needs to change their stance in their arms and their focus and everything else. And the student, who’s paying good money listens, and then doesn’t change anything.

If you don’t believe me, go watch, somebody, take a golf lesson or just about any other kind of lesson that involves physical activity. That people go to music lessons for five or 10 years in a row without fundamentally changing their embouchure, because we have habits grooved habits that we are protecting.

And what were actually looking for often. When we go to see, somebody for advice is not For them to change our mind, but for us to change their mind for the advice giver to say, oh, you’re right, what you’re doing is brilliant. It’s just a shame that you haven’t gotten lucky. It’s just a shame that the market is treating you unfairly.

But here is the heart of it. If you’re going to pay money to, go to therapy or you’re going to spend time to go online and watch a video or ask somebody for their opinion, you have the opportunity to act as if In that moment for just a little while. What if you did what they were describing instead, I got a call the other day from somebody who has had a great deal of success in broadcasting.

And he had a new idea. He quote wanted to run by me and within two minutes. A couple things were clear one, I didn’t think it was a good idea and I could demonstrate through experience. Exactly why. Exactly why so many other people with exactly the same idea. Had failed. And why was going to be brutally difficult and uncomfortable for him to pursue the idea. But s it was clear that that’s not really what he wanted to hear.

What he wanted to hear was his idea was great and I would help him that his idea was great and it was really a shame that the rest of the world didn’t see that. Of course I wasn’t willing to give up so I said to him can I describe to you for a couple minutes and alternative that might work better? That I’ve seen work better in many other situations, of course, he said because he didn’t want to be rude but it became clear within 30 seconds that he wasn’t even willing to try the pants on for size.

He wasn’t even willing to imagine what would happen if he walked away from the idea that through hard work and dedication, he had fallen in love with for an idea that might work a bit better. If you’re driving a car, your GPS doesn’t work and you get lost. And you pull over to ask for directions. Here’s the key question.

What if the directions indicate that you’re 5 miles out of your way? What if they indicate that you should turn right? Instead of left and go back? Aways and start in a different direction if they said that, would you ignore them and drive on to the next gas station? And ask them the same question? Probably not because we have enough familiarity with geography to realize that asking more people isn’t really We going to help and we also understand that there’s very little bit in the way of a placebo effect when it comes to getting lost.

But when we’re being creative suddenly, the person, we thought it was okay to get reassurance from. It’s not okay to get directions from and I think that’s where it all falls apart. I think what we have to do is be way more careful about who we ask for advice and when we ask those people for advice it should come.

With a commitment to try that advice on for size to imagine all the way from the beginning, to the end. What it would be like to do it that way instead, not to blindly, do it that way, not to instantly, give up on the sunk costs and the decisions you’ve already made. No. But for an hour or a day, rewrite, the business plan completely redesigned the deck start over just for a little while just to try it on for size. He’s a colleague of mine, decided to start a breakthrough nonprofit, but he didn’t say I have a perfect idea. I’m going to go do it.

What he did instead is. Right, three completely different 10-page. Business plans for three completely different breakthrough nonprofits. The only thing they had in common was that they were worth exploring and then he made the commitment to pick one of the three. An exercise that I’ve done in events is put together a card and on one side of the card letter press printed really nice, it says problem, and on the other side of the card it says solution.

And I asked people just to look at one side just the problem side and please write down on it, you’re perfect problem. The thing that is making you stuck the thing that if you could get it solved, if you could get insight, if you could get past this so many things in your life or Project we get better. Write down the problem in detail.

Okay, I say now turn it over. And now hand the card to the stranger sitting next to you, we’re going to ask the stranger sitting next to you to write down the very best solution. They can think of, they haven’t been studying your problem for months or years the way you have their, don’t know it. Intimately, we’re just asking them to put down the best solution they can think of.

Now, I don’t want you to look at the solution. That’s not the point. What I say to people is this If you’re willing to have them, write down the solution. Are you willing to accept it? Are you willing to say this is the best available path. I’m going to do it. My answer is probably no, no, no. Because you sort of like being stuck. No because it’s your perfect problem.

No. Because what you really want is reassurance or a little bit of empathy or sympathy if it’s a problem then by definition it has a solution. Ocean. If it has a solution, go solve it. And if it doesn’t have a solution then it’s not a problem. Then it’s a situation. And if it’s a situation then stop wasting time on it except that light gravity, it’s here to stay.

Now, what are you going to do? So that’s a little bit of unsolicited. Advice about advice but what I’m trying to get across here is simple.

Life is about interesting problems and what makes an interesting problem interesting is it hasn’t been solved in quite this way, before that, if we can solve it with generosity ignoring sunk costs in a way that moves us forward. So we can work on the next thing we’ve done something useful. There are book proposals that I wrote in 1986 that never sold, I’m not working on them anymore deciding not to work on them anymore.

Enabled me to have the career. I’ve had the same thing is true with, so many of the things that we think of. As problems that are actually situations, thanks for listening to my rant, we’ll see you next time and good luck with your problem. Will be back in the 2nd with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running but in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. In fact, I’d like you to talk About what you are interested in.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. It’s Maria. Seth my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump this is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I do love to hear from you. If you got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo. Dot link that Take Ai and bi o.l iink and click the appropriate button to questions and a clarification. Here we go.

Hey Seth, this is Mark Tweddle from Los Angeles.

I just listened to your Discovery Channel episode and what you said about medium sort of triggered something in me that like I remember looking at medium and thinking but they have all the access to the audience, not me. And I’ve since discovered a thing called sub stack for am quite excited about and have used a little bit.

But what I find this particularly interesting is it was it was made for writers but now they’ve added podcasts. And so as a place to launch podcast, that seems like a really great place because you have, you get the email addresses of the people who give you that permission who decide to subscribe to this newsletter.

And whether or not your Apple podcast player is working or not. You still get the email. And so, you can still play the podcast. And so, it’s of remove some middlemen. But, obviously, some State remains kind of a middleman, but at the same time, gives you doesn’t take away their ownership of the email address list.

So I’m sure it’s not perfect. And I think what it’s missing is about discoverability and it seems to be something that they’re adding to, but I just like to know what your thoughts of sub stack are, and what is there? Thing that’s missing is there is something I haven’t thought of this missing from it that I need to work around or or is it is it the best idea?

Thank you for this? We could talk about Gatekeepers and sub stack for a really long time, but here’s the short version. Number one sub stack seems like they’re trying to help people with discovery. That in addition to being a platform where you can get paid to write or to podcast part The offer seems to be that being on sub stack is different than using roll your own software, not just because it’s easier but because they will help you find customers.

It is not clear to me that they can do that for very many people because the long tail just doesn’t work that way. If there’s 10,000 people using sub stack, they’re still going to be 10 that are in the top 10. The second part is that sub stack is a largely open platform which means that as it gains power and the Ability to deliver things to people want to get them.

It will attract spammers and scammers and I regularly get sub stack, spam hard to say fast, go ahead, try it. I regularly get sub stack spam from people who just grabbed an email list somewhere and started pumping things through their Channel. This is really bad, a cuz it’s not moral to steal people’s attention, but be because as sub Stacks clean channel, for delivering messages to people, I want to get them gets filled with Spam then people like Google are going to start to cut them off and that’s already happening. It moves to the promo folder and if it moves to the promo folder then the very thing you’re talking about which is the connection that you have to your listeners or your readers is broken.

I know this firsthand from my blog, my blog is blocked by Google in most places. Now by Gmail and as a result, people hundreds of thousands of people who signed up To get my blog by email, don’t get it, because Google decided on their own. They don’t want people to get it. I don’t approve of that. I don’t think you do either all of, which is a way of saying that RSS, which has been around. Now, for 20 years, which is the way that people subscribe to podcasts with their own podcast apps, is still the most resilient most effective way to have subscribers.

You don’t need their email addresses, they are tuning. You in Tuner, where you are a preset Channel where your podcast arrives day after day or week after week. So the big win with a podcast. And I’m so lucky that you are, one of my subscribers is that the podcast arrives. Google can’t stop it. Nobody can because it’s a consensual relationship between the podcaster and the person who’s listening. So if some stack is working for you, great, I’m not going to criticize that, but it’s hard for me.

As somebody, who was right there at the beginning of email, newsletters, and communication to see how it scales in a way that is resilient and effective for the people who want to use it as a form of promotion and ongoing connection.

Hi Seth I’m Sylvane Canadian Living in Medellin Colombia in the 80s and 90s. I spent 12 years in the Canadian Air Force and one of the most important lessons I learned during that time, is this, if you are part of a team or operation as in part of an air crew, or platoon or some kind of military operation and you happen to notice that something is wrong or someone is mysteriously mistaken and that this could lead To a serious problem or even a catastrophe.

If you don’t speak up to stop it, then you are just as responsible as the person who caused the problem in the first place. Obviously, this is a crucial principle in the case of life or death situations like search and rescue operation, or for a flight crew or an aircraft maintenance team, but it is a principle that I think applies to just about any non-trivial job. Timur project. And it has served me well over my various careers, this principle is now part of my life philosophy, but this means that I’m often regarded as overly opinionated in this age of pandemics, climate change, military, conflicts, racism, and extreme right-wing politics.

My conscience doesn’t allow me to remain silent. So I create a cat criticize and correct people often, and sometimes I told if you don’t have anything. Nice to say, just shut up to me, that is a very naive and counterproductive philosophy, but it seems that a lot of people disagree with me. I’m not suggesting that we should go around, insulting everyone we disagree with, but if no one ever spoke up about this information and toxic beliefs, we would still be in the Dark Ages, burning witches and scientists.

I’d like to hear what you think and how you approach these situations thanks for being you. Who You Are? Thank you for this one sylvanian, as you’ve pointed out. There’s a lot of complexities to this whole idea of speaking up. I think your first example, which is pure and perfect is that if you see something, say something obviously is critical.

When we’re talking about matters of imminent, life and death, there’s not a lot of argument about it. If the pilot forgot to close the door securely, everyone should speak up where we run into trouble. Not even trouble, just complications is a if there’s a Time differential if you’re speaking up about something that might happen in 10 years or be, if there are differences of opinion, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak up in both of those cases. In fact, it might be even more important to speak up in those cases. However, it’s also going to be controversial and needs to be handled a little bit differently because you don’t get to just hit the stop, everything button simply Lee because you noticed something.

And so, the opportunity we have is to figure out what noise do other people have in their head. What pressures are they under? What fears are they feeling? What is the emotional state? How is the culture being manipulated and pushed by people who might not even be in the room with you and then seeing that and knowing that, how do we take effective action, not just action that clears our conscience, but effective action that causes Change to happen.

And one of the things that social media has done is created a business model around Division and hatred and animosity and screaming. So doing more of that just because it works on social media. It’s hard for me to see how you can be proud of that. However, I do think we have the opportunity to persistently consistently and in a focused way.

Do the hard work overtime? Changing the culture for the better but we can’t do it in 5 minutes. We have to decide where we’re going to shop, how we’re going to show up and how to consistently do it. And that’s a little different than the way they do it in the Canadian Armed Forces. But I think it’s just as important and the fact that we need patience and persistence to do it in a world, that doesn’t seem to reward patients and persistent makes it even more important.

And even more difficult, thank you for this and in clarification in. My episode on the Discovery Channel. I used the word trade when I was talking about, the casting couch in Hollywood, that word has many meetings. I shouldn’t have used the word that was imprecise. What I meant to say is this cultural pressure has pushed many people who want to be discovered, particularly in Hollywood to show up to put themselves into situations, where other people Illegally immorally, take advantage of that situation. It is not the fault of the person who is assaulted, it is not the fault of the person who has harassed. And I didn’t mean to imply that it was thanks. Everybody for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago, I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 Volunteers from 40 countries, around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make it different.

==> -dont-fear-placebos-e- <==

if you could swallow a pill, a blue pill maybe, or a red one, And that pill would make you healthier Stronger Faster. Smarter happier. Would you take it? What if I told you, there were no side effects and that it was close to free. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx and you’re listening to a special archived episode of akimbo.

People are afraid of the placebo effect, they don’t like to talk about it, it makes their eyes roll into the back of their head. There’s some sort of fear that if you understood Or examined, it, or trafficked in it, it might go away. So let’s start by looking at the nocebo effect instead. The nocebo effect recently studied is the idea that there are things you can do that, make you worse.

One example, a guy was in a double-blind study of an antidepressant drug, he wasn’t taking the antidepressant, he was taking the sugar pills, the placebo, the drug that quote didn’t do Oh anything. Well, he was depressed and he decided to kill himself and he took 26 of them, he was rushed to the hospital near death, he needed to be put on IV.

And it was only after several doctors informed him that he hadn’t taken anything. But a few spoonfuls of sugar that his condition stabilized No, cbo’s are all around us. Things we can do to bomb us out to make us perform worse to make our heart race. It begins with this most of your brain, perhaps 95% of your brain doesn’t speak English.

It speaks as much English as a monkey does or Beaver or walrus that part of your brain, the brain that keeps you alive the brain that pumps your blood, the brain that makes you a Read it doesn’t speak English. Sometimes it gets a message from the rest of your brain, but here’s the simple test. Listen to some spooky violin music.

There’s no other cues that this violin music is going to hurt you. You but already you’re just a little bit tensor and you were a minute ago, go watch a movie and Italian movie, a French 11 in Swahili, you don’t know the language. There are no subtitles and yet and yet you’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s all about because your brain, your brain doesn’t really understand English.

Let’s add the next thing. There’s a ratchet in our lives. When Tells you something or shows you something or predict something? When you take a placebo and it works the next time it’s going to work even better because you just taught your brain a lesson. You taught your brain that when you get that shot or when you take that pill or when you plug those cables into your speakers, or when you drink, that brand of red wine, it’s going to taste better.

And the fascinating glitch in our brains is we ignore all the times it doesn’t work. We For all the times, the horoscope is just plain wrong. We ignore all the times. The stock tip didn’t make sense, we remember the good ones. And so it ratchets and so it gets more and more powerful.

A placebo then is pretty simple. It’s when one part of our brain, the rational storytelling part of our brain sends signals to the rest of our brain signals about fitting in or expectation signals about Patient or getting better or worse, a nocebo then is what happens when those signals say were cooked? It’s over, we’re not feeling well.

Our job then, as rational, self-improving creatures, is to work with the rational frontal part of our brain and get it to send those positive helpful signals to the rest of our brain. Because when they arrived all sorts of good things happen, or in the case of the nocebo, Well, bad things happen. It’s up to us. We can figure out how to work with the placebo effect to improve our lives. Whether it’s enjoying. What’s around us getting better or avoiding getting sick.

It turns out that the placebo is extraordinarily powerful more powerful than most forms of medicine. Don’t believe me, yet a study recently published compared people who had knee surgery with people who had a surgeon and Nest the size them cut, open their knee and do nothing. It turns out that sham surgery Works essentially as well as real surgery on your knees.

A major study of back pain found that the best way to cure back, pain was acupuncture and the second best way to cure it. Fake acupuncture acupuncture. Where people basically, randomly stick needles in you way down below where things like surgery and drugs. So if knee pain worthy of surgery, if back pain, if both of those respond so well to placebos, Why do we persist in believing that? It’s not real of course it’s real. What does real even mean what we know is that our brain is the most powerful thing in our body?

It’s capable of things. We can’t even imagine and it doesn’t speak English, it doesn’t understand all the science. What it does understand is emotions, what it does respond to our the internal flow of chemicals. Electricity positive. Thinking expectation. And those things come from the placebo, it gets even more interesting because it turns out that the placebo isn’t just about knee surgery or back surgery.

The placebo can also include things like is this wine delicious? Does this stereo sound great? How am I going to perform on the 100-yard dash today? Yes, they’ve done studies in which they’ve injected. Salt water into the veins of athletes telling them, that it was an illicit drug or a performance-enhancing drug, and you guessed it. Those athletes do better than the ones who don’t get the intervention, it’s simple.

Our brain can Will us to do things that we couldn’t possibly imagine. So, here’s the question one. Why don’t we do it on purpose and two? When someone points out that your trafficking and placebos? Why does it hurt your feelings? When you say to the person at the health food store or the crystal reading place, or the astrologer or the person who’s got some other story? They want us to engage in her some multivitamin. They want us to take when you say to that person.

Thanks for the placebo. Why are their feelings hurt? If it was cheaper than quote, real medicine, if it worked better than real medicine, if there were no side effects, if no one was taking advantage of you. What’s the problem? Exactly if buying $30 wine, glasses makes your wine taste better. What’s wrong with that? And yes, it was shown in a double-blind study. That when you wrap the glasses up in wood and duct tape, even the best wines only A’s in the world. Can’t tell them apart because the thing is, we’re not double-blind. Nobody is all of us are getting hints and clues and we absorb them and we embrace them.

So, when the wizard gave the Scarecrow a diploma, did it make the Scarecrow smarter? I am I confer upon you, the honorary degree of THD PhD and it had stopped at a thing ecology. Sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles, triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.

I got a brain. Well that diploma that piece of paper certainly made other people think the Scarecrow was smarter. Did that make the Scarecrow smarter Drip? By drip it adds up the Scarecrow smarter and if he could have saved all those steps on the yellow brick road, he would have been smarter from the start.

So the opportunity that we have as receivers of placebos is to seek the Out to understand that there are Best Value in increasing the joy that we have from the stuff around us and the safest easiest way to get better and as creators of change as those that seek to help others and alter the culture we can do it on purpose before I get into that one other aside about this, a lot of people are worried that if we talked about the placebo effect, it will go away.

But let’s remember that your brain doesn’t really speak English. Very well, it turns out in another study that when a doctor gives a patient, some sugar pills and says, to her, these are placebos. Please take them every day. Anyway, the ritual of taking the pills, makes the patient better as much as half of the efficacy of a typical medication sometimes more.

Comes from the placebo effect, even if it’s quote real medicine, the fact that we know we’re taking it matters and thus doctors are instructed to be very careful with their language in one study. They asked some people to do some back stretching exercises and half. The people were told that they might cause stress or strain and half were not, you guessed it. If the doctor tells you to expect that it’s going to hurt. It’s More likely to hurt for ideas, that help us bring the placebo effect to those who need it.

The first one is comparison. Human beings are really good at comparing A to B, which ones bigger. Juicier more esteemed. More expensive and marketers marketers are spent a trillion dollars teaching us. That expensive stuff is better. That scarce stuff is better. So if you want your Recibo to have impact help, the person who’s using it, have a comparison.

Help them believe that it’s better than the other thing they could have taken. Number two is affiliation. We like to be in tribes connected to people like us. We like to look up to Authority who this person who gave me the placebo. Who are they? What’s the packaging? Like, is it authorized, is it endorsed? Did my friends tell me about it what does the jar look like?

If I buy these cables, the ones that cost $300, that connect my speakers to my amp, you know, instead of the nine dollar ones I could get on Amazon these Hundred-dollar cables. What kind of box do they come in? What store did I buy them from where they hard to get? The third idea is ritual opening the bottle to take the placebo, having the Somali, a come to your table and do that. Silly dance with the cork in the tasting and all that other stuff. It’s not silly.

The ritual reminds our brain of something and what it reminds us of. If we do it right, is the very best time it’s ever worked for us before. And the last one, the reason we need all of this is fear. What placebos help us do is believe and that belief helps us get through the fear and so that athlete who’s getting something that’s not actually an illicit drug is getting confidence and confidence might be the antidote to his fear comparison, affiliation ritual and fear that, what we have is the opportunity to help the people around us.

And we can do it with confidence and we can do it, ethically, because we are not short cutting. We are not keeping people from getting something that we know works. We are not charging them more than we should. We are not ripping people off or putting them into a corner, so that they lose and we win.

Doctors in the United States are forbidden by their ethics from giving people placebos without telling them the thinking, I think probably mirrors what an engineer does and it’s this we’re going to make the best thing we can make. We’re going to test it scientifically double-blind. If we get a placebo along the way, it’s going to be a bonus but we want our standard to be that. It’s quote real.

And that’s Going to maximize the power of the placebos that come with it, and it’s going to ensure that no one Cuts corners. And I think that’s great as far as it goes. The problem is when we start denying that the placebo even exists that when we cut Placebo Corners, when we could instead be using them to maximize results.

So yes, I really do want my chocolate to taste better. I really do want my headache medicine to be safe and effective in a double-blind study but no don’t leave out the placebo part. Don’t walk away from that, don’t deny that it’s there. And you if you’re somebody who traffics in placebos acknowledge it know that that’s what you do.

Don’t put any junk in it, don’t do anything that’s going to hurt me. But embrace the fact that it’s just as real to change my mind. As it is to change my body, I need to be really clear. Here, engineering Works a bridge doesn’t stand up just because someone said it will it stands up because it was well designed.

It’s true. That if you bring something to the world with lousy side effects, if you tell people here, this drug will help you with your opioid addiction, no need to get real help. There’s a side effect. You were taking you were stealing And you are doing something unethical. I am not proposing. This. I am not suggesting that what we ought to do is very little.

What I am saying, is that after we’ve done, our best work, after we’ve done the hard work, the testing the math, the engineering, then wrap it up in a placebo because when you do that, when you bring in the four, elements that help us believe, Yes, it will work better. When we seek to serve people with the placebo, we are doing something generous. We are helping them work with their brain, not against it, to put all of the forces at their disposal together to work toward the result that they are seeking to help them show up as their best self. Because when our brain doesn’t understand as much English and math, and It’s and testing as it should, it does understand love and kindness and connection.

And if we can help people find the confidence that they need to get better to enjoy things more to make a difference. I think that’s a journey worth going on.

If you got questions about this week’s episode, I hope that you will visit, akimbo link and click the appropriate button. I’ll be back to answer questions from the last episode. Road, it’s Maria. Hey, Seth my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is on the Pain Scale entire sir warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

Here are three questions that came in about our last episode hitsville. If you’ve got questions about the next episode, we’d love to hear them, visit akimbo link and click the appropriate button.

A question back to your episode 5 hitsville and specifically playing in the long tail if you’re there and you’re thinking about how do you reach your customers when do you get into this decision about Do I go out to them directly or do I go through another party? You know, when I’m, when is it about the thing that I do versus me building a channel to their customers? This is a great question to start off with. It’s got a lot of profound Insight in it. Basically, when you’re hanging out on the long tail, when you’ve decided to make something specific for people who seek the specific, when you are foregoing, the requirement that you reach, everyone you have hurdles, of course, but Some benefits the biggest benefit is that people will seek you out. If you visit record store day which is coming up, I think you will see lines of people going to the record store to buy the special releases.

That’s because these records, they’re out on the long tail. They’re not for everyone. So the obsession of the long tail Creator must be to create something that people on the edges care about talk about go out of their way for Then it’s their job to spread the word. It’s the folks who make hits or want to make kids. It’s for her. She’s or NBC or even show time to try to find other channels to get the word out. But people who live in the long tail, getting the word out, doesn’t match our budget. Getting the word out is in the game. The game is to make something worth talking about in your episode about hits. Ville, you talk about finding the Right audience, but with my podcast, I kind of want to encourage everyone to become a lifelong learner.

Do you find that if you narrow your audience and your focus in the end, your audience actually grows larger than that Focus. I love a great question. Particularly one that has the germ of the answer built right into it. Yes, you nailed it. The fact is your cause your product, your podcast, your service. May very well be Aimed to change the way lots of people behave, but most people aren’t seeking you out. Most people don’t listen to your podcast, don’t use your product.

So the goal is to get the people who do use it to have ammunition to tell the others to have a story to share that the way culture changes is not from the top down from person to person people like us, do things like this. So when were tempted, Add to water down. What we offer, hoping that will reach more people were probably making an error at the beginning. Especially what we need to do is be more specific, more direct. Give the people who need us, exactly what they need in, considering hits and tribes.

What comes first the tribe or the hit? Of course I hit makes it a lot easier. Year to build a tribe JK. Rowling certainly found this with Harry Potter but having a tribe means, you don’t have to count on having a hit the Grateful. Dead only had one top 40 hit their entire career and it came at the end.

And yet if you look at live touring grosses for more than 10 years, The Grateful Dead were the Over one live band in America. How did they do that? They did that because the tribe showed up because the tribe told their friends because the tribe got on the bus. So if you don’t have a lot of choices and you can’t count on it hit materializing out of the blue the right strategy, the strategy that works for most of us is to build the tribe first.

My question is about the power law distribution and how that works in a business to business with So for example, if you’ve only got say 500 or 1000 total possible customers, is it true that you still shouldn’t make something for the masses? And thank you for this question about B2B you are right. The definition of a hit and the definition of the masses. Get really confused when we’re talking about a finite audience of countable individuals.

But one thing persists that group of a thousand B2B customers or even 500, they’re not going to move as one. Some of them are near Philly acts, some of them seek an advantage by going first, some of them tell themselves a story that they are innovators. If you cannot capture their attention and their trust, you will go nowhere.

So the math is the same. It’s just compressed. We Begin by being out in the long tail catering to the weird. Finding something that the specifics will like, they’ll say, oh yes, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Or but then and it’s a big. Then we have to have something that’s palatable to everyone. We have to build a ratchet into it, a network effect into it. So that once a few people in the industry, begin to use it, it spreads to the others.

If you’ve got questions about this episode, I hope you’ll check out akimbo dot link and click the appropriate button will listen to your question and if we can, we’ll include Lewd it in a future episode, see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem and my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries, around the world. Have spent the last bunch Putting together the carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -how-big-is-your-family- <==

About 15 years ago, I went with a friend to New Hampshire where he was busy going door-to-door, canvassing, people on a political campaign and what we discovered within a few minutes of getting there is that, at least in the neighborhood, we were in none of the houses had doorbells. It took a little while to figure out why.

And then it came to me if we know you come on in, if we don’t go away. Hey, it’s F. And this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about family. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hi Seth, this is an ad for the gulab he’s we are a group of women who migrated to the US 25 to 30 years ago. We’re professional women who want to give back and we focus on fundraising for health education and hunger. We currently have a Bollywood dance fundraiser going on. I hope you’ll join us. Look us up at gulab. He’s gu L as in Larry. A b as in boy is. As in Sam dot-org. Thanks.

this week’s rent is particularly simple to describe, but I hope that you will take a few Cycles to think about it because it explains an enormous amount about our culture and about some of the changes that we’re going through right now, as you’ve heard me talk about before marketing culture Community, it tends to be driven by two things status and affiliation, not just among humans, but we’re just going to talk about Youmans today status and Nation status is, who’s up and who’s down, is somebody moving up in status, or down from this interaction? What Keith Johnstone wrote about in his breakthrough book? Impro more than 50 years ago. Is that theater is nothing but status rolls, who’s up and who’s down every single scene of any worthwhile play or movie is about the shift in status roles and affiliation.

How are you compared to the Fathers Godfather, moving up or down. Are you moving up or down? That is what happens in every scene. And affiliation affiliation is, who’s to my left, and who’s to my right, a my fitting in. So all you have to do is go to the high school, cafeteria to see these two factors at work in a really plaintiff hormonal, e driven way, what table are you sitting at? What clothes are you wearing? Where are you in class?

Are you aligned with teacher? Or are you aligned with the The back, where the class clowns, how did you do on the SATs, is the school? You’re going to famous, or not famous. Are you wearing new shoes today? Do your parents have the money to buy you. Anything you want? What kind of car did you drive to school? What’s in, your lunch bag? What are people saying about you behind your back? Who are you dating? Who’s taking you to the senior prom? You get the idea status rolls and affiliation who are? We ahead of who is next to us and it turns out that in In the last 50 years, there has been an extraordinary shift in the way. Our culture has dealt with media, and these two questions.

And the way I want to summarize, it is with a simple question, which is How big is your family? Now that seems like a very specific thing to say, friend of mine has 48. Grandchildren. We know how big his family is if we’re looking at Gene’s but tribal Behavior going back, tens of thousands of years, the way human being spread around the planet tribal Behavior has a genetic component to it, but that’s not all it involves.

We came together in villages and cadres in communities for a Because if you’re out there by yourself, you might get run over by a woolly mammoth, but together in these groups, we have safety. So, these groups Dunbar calls it. Dunbar’s number 150, people. After 150 people the group tends to split apart, WL, Gore the person who invented Gore-Tex as he built his company, as soon as any group, any office. Got 250 people. He split it and opened new offices. 150? People was generally considered the number of people who knew you, well enough to come to your funeral a group that you could care about. And once you care about a group, guess what status roles and affiliation, what does it mean to be part of this group, who’s the leader of the group? Are you likely to get thrown out of the group?

And so we are wired, I believe not just by culture, but we are wired to want to be able to see and be seen by these groups of D people, but then, we can layer things on top of that. Only a few thousand years. We’ve had nation-states nation states are bigger families, bigger circles, our country is better than your country. We are the Romans or the Greeks. We’re going to invade you. The folks who worked with Genghis Khan, they weren’t necessarily related to him, but they were a circle bigger than 150 people. And as they took over Village after Village, Village spanning a huge part of the globe.

They increased the size of quote, their family and Jang is Con notoriously had more than 10,000 Offspring because he exerted his status by raping women everywhere. He went, so we add these pieces up and we start to think about how big is our Circle. The ethicist Peter Singer has described a thought.

That really unsettles undergrads and even people who are Beyond undergrads like me. It’s pretty simple, which is you are walking on your way to a meeting. You’re wearing your brand new Bali or Gucci or whatever shoes and they cost 400 bucks. And as you’re walking along the campus, you see a young girl face down in a puddle. She’s drowning in three inches of water.

What do you do? Well, almost everyone says, well run into the puddle and save her life. It won’t be very hard. Yes. Peter points out, but you will ruin your 400 dollar pair of shoes and you’ll have to buy a new pair. Oh, okay, yeah, sure. Of course, I would do that. I would save this young girl’s life, even though I had to buy a new four hundred dollar pair of shoes to replace the old ones, okay, Peter says, so if you’re willing to spend, $400 to save a life and I can show you people Who are going to starve to death or fall prey to a debilitating disease, because they can’t get a vaccine or have diarrhea. That’s easily cured. And with $400, you could save 10 of their lives pay up.

And if you pay up the $400 pay up again, in fact, you should never go to a restaurant again for the rest of your life. Because every time you do, there’s somebody who needs the money more than you. And when we hear this, it makes us uncomfortable because knowing that, that person Sin is a click away at some level. Makes them part of our family that what has happened is we have gone from the bimodal arguing between the Soviet Union and the United States fueled by millions of dollars of propaganda, spent on both sides and then all of a sudden we weren’t mad at Russia anymore. That the idea that there is a another country over there, that is the enemy brings together. This country that at one level, Ville patriotism is about status rules.

I want to be part of a team that is better than the other team. The people who go and cheer, the Pittsburgh Penguins at a hockey game, they don’t know any of the Pittsburgh hockey players. They’re not particularly fond of penguins. So why are they cheering? Because it’s their team and when someone sees their team winning, they feel a little bit like someone may feel when their kid gets. To a famous college that scarcity combines with status roles and affiliation to give us a measure of how we see the world of how we make decisions.

There are heartwarming stories from all over the world of how small groups of people villages or hundreds or thousands of people come together in the face of a natural disaster. There’s a flood and you need a place to sleep. Come on in. You’re hungry. We have food to share because we are treating those If people like family, that’s not the same as giving a kidney to somebody across the country or across the world that you have never met.

We keep playing with how big these circles are. Are you in our Circle or not? And and I think this is a big Insight here. Many people have a cultural bias for a certain family size that if you are coming from a Tradition. You may see that the primary family size is in fact, the nuclear family that the father is correct, that the father is in, charge that what happens inside, your house is completely up to you.

And you can see plenty of examples in pop culture books or narratives about a mindset. That says, it’s none of the government’s business. What happens inside the home and if someone is getting abused, or if someone isn’t getting Every benefit of the doubt that they deserve that stays within the family walls and there are other cultural dynamics that they know the family is much bigger than that. And we is more important than me.

And that shifting the size of the family starts to create tension. It creates tension around things related to Commerce, but also around culture because when the family again, in quotation marks is smaller cultures. Is easier to control. We don’t read books like that around here we don’t listen to music like that around here. We can treat outsiders with less dignity and less respect because that moves us up in our eyes when it comes to status and we can see examples of this in almost every city and Village in the world. An old friend of mine used to point out to Division Street was one of the most popular names for streets in the United States more popular than Main Street. He said, why what does Division Street point out? It points out these dividers. These dividers of across the tracks is not our family. Our family is over here.

And so now, we have a few challenges first television by now, incredibly the internet keeps pushing us to do two things at the same time. One make our family ever bigger, here’s a GoFundMe. Somebody needs your help. You’ve never met them. You never will. But you will support them or maybe you won’t, maybe you won’t see it.

So at the same time that we have these connections going on, we also have divisions going on that Facebook’s stupid decision to build an algorithm, that would divide every culture. It could find just to make a profit has worked. It has created ever deeper divisions because for people who are trying to make their family Circle smaller who are Taking the status that comes from. Our tribe is doing better than yours. Our circle is winning.

These folks are getting fuel from a social media that has been weaponized to remind them of the US and the nem. So we’ve got these two forces going on at exactly the same time and then rolling right into this is our generational challenge with the climate because you probably don’t dump trash, right in to your own backyard. You probably don’t even dump your trash right on your neighbor’s front yard, because that would hurt your status. It would break your affiliation that the people who live on your block whether it’s a gated community in HOA or just simply a block.

Those people at some level might be family and as the circle gets bigger, the question that are challenged with climate raises is this How big is our family? Is it okay to buy bottled water or a cheeseburger knowing that the act of doing that is going to cost somebody in Bangladesh their home coming to the conclusion that our entire planet is our family is difficult indeed.

The single easiest way to make it happen would be if the aliens finally arrived from Mars people with Bug heads, people who were 19 feet, tall, people who weren’t people at all and other, and other, that would unite all the people on this planet. Seven billion of them in a way that reminds them. That every one of us is descended from just 40 people less than a million years ago that in fact we are all family but it is very uncomfortable to imagine that because once we do issue use of status and affiliation rear their head again and again and again.

So I have no answers for you this week, but I wanted to highlight that looking for the roles of status and affiliation and family size about who gets to decide how big your family is about, who gets a say in how we are in the world. These are the discussions of our future. Thanks for listening to my rant, we’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts, the workshops that you’ve been hearing about. Here. But you can put podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running but in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested in. In fact, I’d like you to talk about what you’re interested in, so if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines. Lines. Add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump this is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Hey Sam this is Rex. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any other episode or just about anything you want, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s Aki and be o.l iink and click the appropriate button.

Try to keep it. Clear and concise the broader, the question the deeper can go. The more likely it is, I can get to it. Here we go. Hi Seth, this is anupam calling in from Berlin, your recent blog post on office gossip really got me thinking you mentioned, cardinal rule in this blog post which is to not talk about anybody if they aren’t in the room.

Now, I would love for you to elaborate more on how you actually implement this rule. You know, when you Speak about not talking about somebody. Would you restrict that to not speaking ill about somebody also, or would you also include not praising them if they are in the same room? Because I don’t know if this rule is symmetrical further, there is also the Nuance of Defending people when they are not around, which sometimes involves talking about them when they are entered the room.

So I would love for you to elaborate more on this Rule and how you see it applied in real life situations. Thank you, thank you for this on a palm. I love hearing your voice. You’ve been a Pioneer from the very beginning asking questions and this is a good chance for me to clarify my post about gossip.

It’s impossible in any corporate environment I can Imagine to not talk about people when they’re not in the room. This is the essence of managers talking to each other about their teams, for example. However, what I was trying to point out is this every time you are doing that, you are layering one more level of indirection and potential gossip. You’re having trouble, keeping track of your story that figuring out how to make it. So that the people Are in the room when you are talking about them, will change what you say and change how they act. And so no, it is not a hard and fast rule, but it is a goal.

When you say something nice about someone in front of their face, that’s really good. If you say something nice about someone behind their back. That’s almost as good. If they find out, they might be pleased. But the opportunity we have is to show up in front of people to say, What we mean? And mean what we say and to do that consistently over time.

Thanks for this question. Hi, this is Jim from Erie Pennsylvania. Soon to be moving to Raleigh North Carolina. My question is related to your episode about Public Funding of stadiums for professional sports teams. So I’ve been involved in sports as an athlete, a coach or broadcaster. I even publish my own Sports magazine and from every one of those angles, I’ve seen, Athletics generate really a stunning amount of illogical. Behavior. Like why do fan spend $150 on a jersey with somebody else’s name on the back when that player could leave the team the next year and why do fans on one team? Think the referees are out to get them while fans on the other team? Think the referees are out to get them. And then the question that you raised like, why are people okay with paying for a new stadium and bailing out a billionaire owner? So my question is, how do you balance achieving a logical outcome and doing what you think is the right logical thing? While also achieving an emotional outcome when the emotions are Often, you know, rooted in a logical thinking and this happens not just in sports happens in business and just life in general. So I’d love to hear your perspective on this Seth. Also, when we were choosing what see to move to from Erie, the factors we considered were weather and schools for my daughter stadiums, did not make our list. Thanks a lot. Seth and keep up the good work.

Thank you for this eloquent question Jim. And you make a great point and I hope you and your family enjoy Raleigh. The one thing I would like to distinguish is This, we would like to believe that there are places, we make rational arguments and then other things special things for the irrational Parts. The irrational parts of the person, buying 150 dollar, Pittsburgh Penguins jersey, that they only we’re in a certain moment etcetera, but when we’re talking to humans, all we’ve got is all. We’ve got the rational stuff in the irrational stuff, are all of a piece that even rational people. I don’t know. Field medal winners who are working on mathematical problems sooner or later.

Our emotions change, what we see what we say, how we understand the world. So if we’re going to change people with empathy, we have to realize that like us, they have a noise in their head. They believe things that we can show to be not true. Just like we believe things that can be shown to be not true. True itself is an abstract idea that works great on a Blackboard but rarely, survives and interaction with actual humans.

So what I think we need to do with sports or just anything else that gets people to be irrational is accept the fact that irrationalities part of the deal. I said, this is Vanessa calling from Tokyo. I have a bit of a question for you around longevity and brand longevity. I work in live in Japan and Japan has some of the longest existing Brands over 100 year old Brands.

You know, around whether they’re family. Brands are allowed your friends that you might know, like, Nintendo or suntory. As wanting to know what your take is on brands that are able to survive thrive pivot and continue to be versus brands that maybe lose their way and do not survive or Thrive. And what you see the difference being I’ve run every day for nearly 10 years as part of outrun cancer, a little initiative that I started to run for a friend and you are a big part of my running inspiration, every morning and And this always gets me thinking, so it’s a great way to start the day.

So my question is, what is it take for a brand to survive and thrive through to be 100 years old, thanks. Thank you for this Vanessa. Thank you for showing up for 10 years and running and caring and making a difference. I think there are two kinds of long brands in Japan and elsewhere. One kind the kind that is easy to celebrate is a Mochi shop that’s been in business in the same location.

245 years, I think that reflects a culture. I think that’s disappearing in Japan. That rewards prizes, longevity over the flash in the pan. New place that what they are doing, is responding to a Marketplace. That wants to know that something is going to be around tomorrow and a week from now, a year from now, and they invest in that very idea, but the other kind of you mentioned Nintendo, Do I think there’s a little survival bias there that Nintendo is only in business because someone there had the guts to say we’re not going to make playing cards anymore.

We’re going to make this new video game thing, and lots of businesses that traffic in the new that traffic in Past Times, or things that are current or technology, they disappear because they forget what they’re there for. In the first place, Western Union, became Western Union because they pushed hard at the beginning of the telegraph, And when they had a chance to buy AT&T the phone company, the Bell System, they didn’t do it because they saw themselves as being in the telegram business not in the Communication business. So it makes a brand for the ages in our ever Li rapidly changing world is walking away from what you used to do. So you have the resources to do the thing you signed up to do in the first place. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time. Time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers from 40 countries around the world have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -game-theory-and-the-infinite-game-e- <==

How much should Hamilton tickets cost? When should you buy or sell Bitcoin? What’s the best way to help your daughter? Get into a famous college? Hey, it’s Mickey. And this is a special archived. Episode of the Kimbo.

Stanley Cup has been around for more than 100 years. It’s the trophy that goes to the winner of of the NHL championships. Lots of cool stories about the Stanley Cup. It’s got names engraved from top to bottom. Once it gets filled up, they take the ring off and put a new ring on. Save the old ring, put it in the Hall of Fame.

Two babies have been baptized in the Stanley Cup. Someone always carries the Stanley Cup of round one. It’s in public, stays with it and it’s hotel room and a team. The Vancouver millionaires has their name engraved. On the inside of it. Okay fine. But what’s the really useful thing to know about the Stanley Cup and the answer is there’s only one of them, two teams can’t win the Stanley Cup at the same time. 20 teams can say, okay, let’s share it without the Stanley Cup.

Hockey wouldn’t be hockey. Hockey is hockey because of scarcity. It’s a game. We’re going to talk about games.

I grew up playing a lot of Monopoly. I thought I liked Monopoly but I think I liked it because I won a lot wasn’t happy at all. When I lost last year. I played Monopoly against a monopoly shark and he won big time, he had his own set, he brought his own set with him to the place where we went to play.

Then I realize that Monopoly is a pretty lousy game. It’s a lousy game because most of the time you’re playing it it’s not particularly fun and once it’s clear how the game is going to come out, it’s just a grind. So we all grew up with games. Like this games, that might be fun for a while games that were tired of some people grow up thinking, I’m not into games at all.

Here’s the thing. We all play games, we play games all the time, they don’t involve boards, they don’t involve dice, but we’re playing games and understanding that we’re in a game helps us. It helps us because it means we can play it better.

What does it mean to play a game as opposed to merely be in real life? I think the key distinction is in a game we strip away, all of the factors that aren’t essential in terms of winning, losing all of the parts that are there but are essential rules. Then once we get down to the dynamic, what we have is a schematic for real life, not actual real-life a metaphor and then because we understand games, we can work our way through it.

Figure out which parts are important, which ones aren’t figure out, which alliances make sense, and which ones are merely a distraction during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both spent millions of dollars. Analyzing the game theory of how two countries locked in a battle for World Dominion, might behave if you understood how one country was going to plan its strategy, you had a better chance of coming up with an alternative strategy that might end up.

I don’t know, not destroying the world, but in order to do that, you need to understand what makes something a game at all. If it’s not the dice and the board, then what is it? Well, as we just heard it begins with scarcity. In order for there to be a game of any kind, there has to be something scarce.

Something up for grabs, it might lead to Winners or losers, it might lead to allocation of resources. There’s only a scarce number of Hamilton tickets. There’s only a finite amount of Bitcoin. There’s only a very scarce number of seats at that. Famous college that your daughter wants to go to because there’s scarcity.

Because there’s only one Stanley Cup a game occurs, there are two ways to approach a game. Of course, one is to play it because it’s fun and the other one is to play it because you need to win because you are seeking to obtain the scarce resource whether it’s the Stanley Cup or a slot in a place where there aren’t many slots.

The thing is, as we play games, we get better at them and as more people play a game, They get ever more competitive, this creates a scarcity ratchet. Something is scarce. So we build a game around, people start playing the game with each other, maybe, because it’s fun perhaps because they want the thing that scarce and then they get better at it because they get better at it. More people want to get the thing that scarce because they want the thing that scarce, the scarce thing becomes, even more scarce.

And so it ratchets on and on and on, The very fact that there’s a game, makes the thing that scarce even more scarce, the scarcity ratchet can create problems when you’re playing a game to win, instead of playing a game because you enjoy it. Scarcity, gets Amplified. So we end up keeping score of something that maybe we don’t even care about.

You can see this on social media, people figuring out shortcuts ways. To game the system so they can get followers so they can get friends so they can get likes so they can win some invisible scoreboard, which ultimately means nothing.

James cars– wrote a fascinating book called finite and infinite games. We’re going to get to infinite games in a couple minutes. But before that, let’s talk about cars is understanding of what makes something a finite game. The first rule is This people play it. Voluntarily, that that is in the spirit of what we are talking about. You enter a market, you enter a competition.

You enter an engagement. Seeking that resource? That is scarce. Final games, have a definitive beginning and a definitive end, the game begins when it begins, there are often teammates, there are almost always opponents play occurs within boundaries, there’s off the field, there’s on the field, there’s an accepted set of rules.

It’s almost impossible to play a game with somebody who’s playing by different rules than you are. This is one of the most Creating elements of work. When you show up at work thinking the rules are one thing. And the person that you are engaging with thinks they are something else a game always has rules.

But sometimes it becomes interesting, when we consider what happens, if the rules are changed my friend Peter, a latke, one of the most honored game designers of all time, created a game called, Cosmic Encounter the game itself. Is super simple. It’s a little like, a multiple person checkers game. However, at the beginning of every game, every player gets a card and that card gives that player a new way to cheat. A really dramatic way to cheat a way of cheating. That’s so dramatic.

It’s sort of seems like the entire game is pointless because that player is going to win. However, every one of the players gets their own cheat and so every time You play the game, it’s completely different because a fundamental rule has been changed. One of the ways to think about the future to think about what we could build is to do, just that look at a game in the world today.

A game based on scarcity, and imagine what happens. If one of the rules is changed, Steve, Wozniak said, what happens. If instead of a computer costing, a hundred thousand dollars, it costs a dollars or the folks who have invested so much in the last ten years into smartphone said. What if the world is pretty much the same except everyone has a super computer in her pocket one, that knows exactly where she standing and were all her friends are you can go down the list of the innovations, that have changed things in the last decade or two.

And that’s how they all came about. Relax one rule, and then play a new game. Within a game. There are limitations rules and also self limitations things. You’re not willing to do. So some people are eager to win a game. Even if it means burning down, something that you believe in, you probably don’t want to play games, probably don’t want to compete in markets where people who do things that you don’t approve of do them to win.

Often games are not fully transparent. People don’t know what cards you are holding, you don’t know what cards they are holding. They don’t announce all the details of how they are making their choices. And essential essential to almost all games. In a civilized society, is that all of the people participating agree, who’s the winner?

All the people participating at the end agree on who won. Without this. We end up with chaos. So there you go. That is how you play the game for world domination. That is how you play the game of what happens in the next episode of Star Trek, who is going to control. The Romulan part of the universe that is how we deal with engaging with the supermarket because the marketers in the supermarket are playing a game. They know you only have a finite amount of money to spend in the supermarket today. They are all investing time and energy to get more than their fair share of the money. You’re going to spend. So one marketer discovers that if you bribes the manager of the supermarket, gives them an extra credit. A couple hundred bucks to put their Coke or Pepsi at the end of the aisle.

You are more likely to buy that brand because you saw it at the end of the aisle, they won that round of the game. The amount they spent to get on the end, cap is less than the amount they profited from being in front of you. Their opponent. The other Cola brand learns from this and maybe next time pays even more to be on the end cap.

Well, the referee, The islands is Supermarket, his happily taking one more money from each one over and over again. Until finally, one of them discovers, they can’t pay any more, they lose the other guy, loses the supermarket wins. And so the game repeats and we see this in the book business and we see this in the business of, getting a job via LinkedIn, that scarcity drives, many of these decisions.

So that would be it except for a couple of other things that have transpired in the last hundred years. The first is the idea of Game Theory first codified by John Von Neumann in 1928. It turns out that for a classically organized game. If you know the rules you can do the math, you can do the math and figure out. If there’s a winning strategy you can do the math and figure out. If the person who goes first has an advantage or a disadvantage, you can figure out which rules if changed could shift what happens next by understanding the theory of the game, you discover things that Venture capitalists know.

That marketers know that economists know, that politicians know that there are certain strategies that you can show up and bring to the game that change the outcome in your favor. And if the people you are playing against know those strategies and you do not well then you’re going to lose. So back to your daughter, getting into the famous college.

Here’s one thing we know by many measures fifty percent of the people who get into Harvard, get in because they got a recommendation that they play a sport that they play a sport really well. So even though Harvard is in a Big Ten, football power turns out there playing football or fencing or squash or swimming is a really good way to get in a shorter line to get into Harvard. So that one thing you can do for your daughter. When she’s Is encouraged her to start taking fencing lessons now cause she loves venting, but because you’re playing a game, you’re playing a game with a 400 year old institution in Cambridge Massachusetts, because they have a set of rules that they don’t tell everybody about of course for any Resource as valuable, and as scarce as Harvard, there are multiple games to be played. One of them, might be a game with the physics department turns out that the Each department doesn’t often recommend incoming freshman to the admissions people, so when they do the admissions Department, pays a little bit of attention.

So a game might be to build alliances alliances with professors to attend their lectures to write them letters to read their books, to engage with them as a high school. Senior, showing real honest interest in the work they do because after all, that’s a great strategy for this game. The end result is this scarce resource is now allocated differently because you saw that a game was being played, one more thing to say about finite games.

One of the things that came as a result of Von Norman’s work, as math became integrated into a game. Analysis of scarcity, is the idea of the prisoner’s dilemma in. Prisoner’s dilemma sounds nefarious, but it happens everywhere we go. Here is the Example, two people are caught and accused of plotting together to create a crime.

The police want them to go to jail for a long time. The problem. The police have is that if neither one of them rats out the other, if neither one of them speaks up it’s really unlikely that they can send him to prison for a long time. All they’re going to be able to do is put them away for a year on a minor offense to when they caught the mat.

So the police separate the two. Players and they put them in different rooms and they say to the players, the captives, here’s the deal. If you don’t say anything, we’re telling you the truth, both of you are going to go to jail for a year, but if you rat out the other guy, he’s going to go to jail for 50 years and will let you go free.

But if both of you rat out each other, you’re both going to go to jail for five years. So as a player, you have three choices. This say nothing and maybe you’ll go to jail for a year and maybe you’ll go to jail forever, say something and you’re either going to go free or go to jail for five years. What should you do?

Well if you do The Logical math, if you do the game theory you’re going to have to write out the other person knowing that they’re going to rat out. You the end result being you both, get a worse outcome. And if you’ve both been quiet, but here’s the really cool twist human beings aren’t completely logical human beings on average, do not play games in a Cutthroat way that deep down, we understand that we are better off being part of a community better off, not playing games to win every time, but playing games to play them as we see games strip away. A the real life stuff and let us just get to the mechanics and if you are playing to win and start imagining that the game you’re playing is just a game.

You can end up creating all sorts of negative side effects, General, Lemay of the Strategic Air Command dr. Strangelove the crazy scientists at ran, If the game was how do we win? Well then sure. Go ahead and drop 133. Atomic weapons on the Soviet Union because they only have three but they’re going to build more.

And if you’re not looking in the eyes of the millions and millions of people are going to die, just playing a game. Instead there can be tragic consequences lesson 15 minutes from now the Run. We’ll be making radar contact when the planes three when they do, they are going to go absolutely ape and are going to strike back with everything they’ve got for.

If prior to this time, we have done nothing further to suppress their retaliatory capabilities. We will suffer virtual anihilation now five. If on the other hand we were to immediately launch an all-out and coordinated attack on all their airfields and missile bases. We’d stand a damn good chance of Eternity pain. Stop Yeah, we got a fight but I miss her superiority as it is. We can easily assign three missiles every Target and still have a very effective Reserve Force for any other contingency six and unofficial study that we undertook of this eventuality indicated that we would destroy 90% of their nuclear capabilities. We would therefore Prevail and suffer, only modest and acceptable civilian casualties from the remaining Force which would be badly damaged and uncoordinated.

The general Lemay Zone words, there are no innocent civilians. Well, that’s sort of nuts saying that you were going to bomb people into the Stone. Age is a great way to turn it into a game and a possible way to win in the short run. But what we’ve seen because we live in a finite world, is the shorter, your short run, the less, you’re thinking about the world, we have to live in and it’s the long run.

The long run as we get closer and closer to Infinity where the smartest game players are playing.

Which leads to James cars, has brilliant analysis that there’s a second kind of game. The second kind of game is an infinite game. The infinite game is the game we play to play not the game we play to win a soccer game is over when the timer goes off a chess game is over. When the king is Those are finite games but what about playing? Catch with your three-year-old kid?

Should you throw the ball as hard as you can so you can win at catch? I don’t think so. I don’t think you think so either. I think we play that game to play it, that is an infinite game. 30 years ago I was at a conference and Bill Graham. The great concert promoter was there and Bill Graham booked the Grateful Dead ebook Bruce Springsteen E booked everybody who was anybody in San Francisco.

I raised my hand and I said Bill, why do you only charge $29 for Springsteen tickets? Yeah, I know this was a long time ago. $29, why don’t you charge seventy dollars, a hundred dollars because you could get it. He said, here’s the thing, the people I seek to serve the concert goers would probably Pony up 80 or 100 bucks to see Springsteen, but then they wouldn’t have any money left for the rest of the year.

I’d use them up. I might win that round of the game, but I’d lose the overall cultural battle to create music for people who wanted to hear it. Bill didn’t know it at the time, but he was playing an infinite game. He was contributing Community this idea that we should get past the digits, the numbers, the scalpers, the shortcuts, the, how much can we get for Hamilton ticket?

And instead say, how do I feed this group of people around me, pay it forward to a community so that everything in the community gets better, that is the only game we’ve got author, Simon. Cynic is doing really interesting work on the juxtaposition of finite and infinite games. His point is that a company that’s playing the long term, the infinite game, the game that’s not based on scarcity, but instead the game to be kept playing often, competes with someone who’s playing a finite game, a short-term game, a reaction and a tactical game.

Adequately resource, the infinite game player can Outlast the finite one, because they’re playing for a better reason for a bigger win. It’s not just companies like Apple or Google that have this interesting challenge, it’s individuals as well. Let’s go back to this idea of your daughter and Harvard.

One way to do it is the scarcity ratchet. It’s hard to get into Harvard. Therefore, it’s more valuable to get into Harvard. Therefore more people want to get into Harvard. Therefore it’s harder to get into Harvard and on, and on, and on. But what if that’s not the game? What if the game is to live a life to weave together Community to make a difference?

What if the game is to make it so that going to Harvard isn’t even important anymore? What if the game is to create education for everyone, easily accessible. What if the game is to go to whatever college or university is open to the journey that you are on and to use that opportunity as a platform?

To leverage yourself ever farther by connecting with other people. Not people who have the same fancy scarce thing that you were seeking. But merely people people on the same Journey as you are that as soon as we start playing an infinite game that thing that used to be scarce, isn’t as important as it used to be.

And thus, we have the time and the resources and the energy to focus on the infinite instead. To play merely because we can play two, we’ve things together and make them ever better. It turns out that we survive the Cold War just barely but I don’t think we survived it because Rand Corporation in the United States was better at Game Theory than the Soviet Union or vice versa.

I think we survived it because a lot of people realized that winning that game wasn’t going to be worth the journey that the rules were too fragile and that paying into the system, the only one we’ve got Understanding that while the Earth is finite our opportunity to create a better place. For each other is infinite, that changes things.

It’s possible that you are listening to this podcast on an app called overcast, made by Marco arment, and most people who listen to it. Don’t pay for the app. Because Marcos playing an infinite game that by contributing his software to a circle of people who will benefit from it. He creates a more vibrant podcast ecosystem that makes his life better. It makes our life better and it makes it more likely that he can do other things with software.

That’s valuable. We don’t play an infinite game just so we can win a different finite game. We play an infinite game because it’s Better because it lasts because the act of helping our opponent who’s not really our opponent, our partner helping our partner live, a better life. That isn’t just an infinite game.

It’s the ultimate game as if it’s Maria. Hey Seth my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Aye sir warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey sir. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

We got a few great questions about last week’s episode about placebos. If you’d like to ask a question about this week’s episode, please visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo Link2006 is the appropriate button. I got two relatively similar questions about self-medicating placebos.

I said this is Gerard from Trinidad. Tobago, the Caribbean sending positive vibes. Your way, I want to talk about self medicating as in. How do you administer Placebo? So yourself. Hey, Seth, this is a memory from New York. I’m a first-time novelist and I’m fascinated by the opportunity to create placebos for myself.

What placebos do you use to get into focused work mode? Should I just pop a piece of candy? Every day before writing? Is it a matter of ritualizing things? That make me feel good? Like drinking coffee or reading a good response to writing? I’ve already published. Can I reframe things that I think are crutches as placebos?

What are the Hallmarks of a successful Placebo when it comes to doing creative work? You both make a really good point that it’s easy to talk about. Superstition or habit, or getting ourselves in a rut, when what we’re actually doing, is Seeking a placebo. So, let’s start with a simple example, your morning cup of coffee.

I am confident that if I snuck into your house and replaced, all your regular coffee beans with decaf beans, you’d still feel energized after drinking that first morning, cup of coffee. Sure, caffeine is a stimulant but an even bigger. Stimulant is your Expectation, that it’s going to work. So what can the creative person due?

Let’s begin with the idea of mise en. Place putting everything, where it’s supposed to be many, artists, creators chefs, have discovered that laying it all out, putting it in place triggers in our head, the expectation that now we’re going to do our work There are many other examples using a special keyboard, only going to a certain Cafe years ago.

In 1983, chip Conley, the best-selling author at the time. He was like me in his early 20s. He invited me and three other people to join him in a mastermind group. It was on the campus of Stanford University. Not at the business school though. In the anthropology department in a corner of the Department a conference room that we would only use for this purpose.

Every Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., we walked into that room, that room triggered all sorts of expectations because we didn’t hang out in that room because we didn’t waste time in that room, walking into that room changed our posture, and we could do it on purpose, so the creative person, the person who’s seeking to self-motivate or self-medicate. As you said, can seek these out.

They’re not easy to bootstrap your way into. So here’s my suggestion as soon as you have a good day, figure out what you did just before you had that good day and do it again and do it again and do it again. And condition yourself to understand that when you see those triggers, you’re going to have a good day.

It seems really corny but it actually works. The next couple questions were about the ethics of placebos.

Do you believe that there is a strong benefit to incorporating some sort of placebo into your product to enhance the already positive benefits that your product offers? But I need more there. Need some examples of how this applies to the business world. This is a really baffling interesting topic to hear your passion about it. Just not sure how it relates to business, you obviously, can’t sell something that has no value or that has no. Your value is it all perceived value and then does it really have value after that, let me be crystal clear.

Your product needs to work, your promise needs to be true. You need to build as much double-blind efficacy into what you make as you possibly can. That’s your moral obligation. It’s also smart business. But beyond that leaving out the placebos makes no sense. Consider Dasani water. If you want to communicate to people that you are water is extra refreshing and extra pure.

One thing you could do Is what the folks who make Dasani did, which is spend a few million dollars. So that when you open the bottle it goes, It doesn’t go because it has bubbles, it doesn’t have bubbles. It makes that noise because they worked very hard to have it. Make that noise, and that noise is a queue.

It goes straight to our brain. It creates an expectation and expectation of freshness, and thirst quenching. It’s not surprising to us to discover that if we go to a doctor’s office, that’s a little filthy, we’re less likely to get well then if we go to one that feels spotless well we can transfer that thinking.

It turns out that a diamond ring purchased by two people about to get married that’s sold to them by respectful salesperson. Under beautiful lighting is probably going to have a bigger impact than one that I don’t know. Bought in a pawn shop. It’s the same Diamond, but it is surrounded by a story that changes the way we feel about it. So yes, building a story into what we make into what we sell into, how we deliver it a story. That leverages the truth.

That’s already. There can create all of the same effects that a powerful Placebo does in medicine. And it’s worth noting in both this case and the previous case of Administering placebos, that it’s even more profound with the nocebo that walking into a restaurant. With apparently dirty, plates will cost us our appetite. It’s not the food that did that. It’s the story.

The same with the self-talk of a creative person who believes she’s in a rut who believes she stuck, that self-talk creates the truth that you’re stuck. So our Job has someone who’s seeking to change Behavior ours or other people’s is to find these moments of operant conditioning to find these cues and clues and offer them up to make the product or service. We make even more effective.

If you’ve got questions about this episode, I hope you’ll check out akimbo link and click the appropriate button. Will Listen to your question and if we can we’ll include it in a future episode.

See you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago, I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 In tears, from 40 countries, around the world, have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June, but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -pathfinding-and-failure- <==

I’m going to tell you the secret. It’s two words. You ready notes? And acrid, hey, it’s Seth, and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about how to win at Wordle, but not really, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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If you’ve been living under an internet rock, you might not have discovered Wordle a word game. That’s a little bit like that Mastermind game. We play growing up but instead of with colors it’s with words in the English language Wordle just got sold to the New York Times for a gazillion dollars. Here’s the thing.

If you play notes and then acrid as your first two plays, you will do better than almost anybody at Wordle. And that’s because 10 of the common letters that you need to identify are covered by those two words. So by the time you get to the third play you will be on your way to having a lot of insight as to how to guess next.

Okay. Fine. But why does this matter? It matters because we’re terrible at pathfinding we’re terrible at figuring out how to get from here to there when there isn’t A path already marked for us. And the reason we’re terrible at it is because the system doesn’t want us to be good at it. The status quo, is the status quo because it’s good at sticking around.

And one of the ways, it sticks around is by indoctrinating us from a young age that almost all the time we are in school, we are in school being told what to do. Will this be on the test? There’s an assignment. If you can type 80 words a minute and you want to write a standard length novel. Well, even with a few minute break every hour and a little bit of time to sleep, you can finish typing that book in less than 24 hours, maybe 30.

If you’re going to fix the typos, 30 hours to write a whole novel, a best-selling novel? Yeah, except almost, nobody writes, a best-selling novel in 30 hours, and the reason is Is that the hard part of writing a novel isn’t typing? The novel typing, the novel is a cheap skill easily replicated. Now, the hard part of writing a novel is figuring out which things aren’t going to be in your novel.

And whatever is left is a novel. It’s finding the path. It is exploring, it is about going on Journeys that don’t work circling back and then starting over. Lewis and Clark somehow figured out not only how to make it across much of the United States, but split up and then regularly said, we’ll meet over here in a few days and then did that is a skill. It is something that we can learn to do and back to Wordle for me the Wordle question is this what good are the hacks and the tips if you know the exact strategy to win? Word’ll, who benefits?

Now, you’re a cog in the giant Wordle system. Now, the fun part of Wordle for me is figuring out how to win at Wordle. Please don’t tell me the strategy, I want to figure out the strategy, and once I figure out the strategy, I never want to play again because that’s why it’s a game. It’s not a game so that you can prove to somebody that you could beat a computer program.

It’s a game because the way it feels to find your way through through the strategy, is the point.

As, you know, I’ve been working over the last bunch of months on the carbon Almanac, which is a community of hundreds and hundreds of people in more than 40 countries who have come together to build an important foundational book and Almanac that will help people see the foundational truths about our climate.

But the thing about this community is that some of the people who showed up And stick around and it’s not that they didn’t stick around because they didn’t care about the issue. They cared very much. It’s because when they got there, there was no table of contents when they got there. There were no sample pages when they got there. There were no assignments when they got there.

There wasn’t a style for the way. The images would look. We had a figure all of that out. And so, there is this chaos that goes on when we are, pathfinding, either alone or in a group in a group, it’s multiplied. Because it’s one thing to say to a group of people. Here’s how we are going to play this Symphony.

Here is your part? Here is the conductor, here we go. And it’s quite another for a quartet to get together, trade, fours and play jazz. There are lots of rules about how a quartet plays Jazz together, but there isn’t a score there isn’t day and then you’ll do this and then I’ll do that improv is very challenging.

Why? A family friend got into a famous college and he got there and was destined to become an actor and he tried out for the improv troupe and the improv troupe had 10 slots available for incoming freshmen and he came in 11th and I said to him. Hey why don’t you start your own improv? Troupe? Because after all it’s not like you need fancy equipment or a coach or trainer or even a building just Put some flyers up and start an improv troupe and he never did years later. He has graduated and he never did another friend who can afford it really, really wants to make a TV show but the network didn’t pick her didn’t establish the structure, didn’t give her something to lean against and so months and months later there is no TV show.

But why you can get as much distribution as the big cable networks have have for free online tomorrow making a video making a video costs, a tiny fraction of what it used to cost. Now these aren’t the hard part. The hard part is to pick yourself is to say, I don’t know exactly where we are going. I don’t know exactly how to get there, but the journey, the journey is both important and non-fatal and those are the two things that we are looking for. So when we think about this path finding Tunity, what we do is we make projects, not follow instructions because we are discovering ever more. So that following instructions is cheap, indeed that there is an instruction follower who will work quickly and cheaply compared to you know, what we need are. People who will figure out how to be wrong on the way to being right. That’s when we think about our culture and the big shifts in our culture over the last, In 30 years, most of them have not been caused by people repeatedly following industrial instructions that was for the 50s to 60s to 70s and maybe the 80s build. An Enterprise repeat, repeat repeat. There’s a Dunkin Donuts on every corner because once you know how to build 10 Dunkin Donuts, the 11th Dunkin Donut is not that hard.

Most of the people who work at Starbucks or apple or UPS are following. Instructions are turning the crank The last time Apple launched a groundbreaking new product was many years ago, because Tim Cook is in the crank turning business because turning a crank makes the stock price go up because Wall Street doesn’t really like Pathfinders Wall Street likes the pylon after the path has been found.

And so if you’re an investor, yes please. Please wait until something is working. Before you invest your life savings in it, but if you’re a creator, You don’t get to be Google or Starbucks or apple or any of the other crank turning companies by simply turning. A crank you get there by becoming a crank until you are proven. Correct. You get there by showing up and saying, I’m not exactly sure. But I know who I seek to serve in the change, I seek to make.

Let us be wrong on the way to being, right? If we can be wrong without harming, anybody if we can be wrong while staying in the game, if we can be wrong. Without taking it too personally in service of the change we seek to make, then we get to do it again. I still remember to Adventures from the beginning of my career, the first one right at the start.

I was freshly out of my job. I had moved to New York. I was basically unemployed, I was trying to figure out how to pay the bills and still be independent and I read a small article about somebody Named Faith, Popcorn, who insisted that Faith, Popcorn? What’s her real name? It wasn’t Faith Popcorn for a living put together teams of people creative people, six or eight and would go to Giant Fortune 500 companies and charge them a ton of money to have this team of people work for a week or two brainstorming Innovative new ways to solve their problem.

My vague recollection is the Procter & Gamble had hired them to think about toothbrushes, Well, I’m nothing if not interesting in a group of six, people trying to solve for Creative problem for a week. So I decided my goal was to be in faith. Popcorns, Rolodex. So, how to do that? I was 26 years old, I was mostly unemployed, I wasn’t perfectly qualified.

I needed both to get her attention, but once I had her attention to help her see that, I was the fifth Hammer, somebody who could show up in the room and cause positive change to happen. So I did what anybody would do. I got on my bike, brought my resume to Macy’s on the fifth floor of Macy’s that had a service where they would gift wrap anything. You brought them, you didn’t have to buy it at Macy’s, so I had them, gift wrap my resume and icebox.

And I put a card in the front, and I rode my bike up to Faith, popcorns, offices and dropped it off. When I got back to where I was living with my wife downtown, the phone was ringing, as I walked in to the room. Yes, it was Faith Popcorn on the phone. She said, how soon can you get Here. So, I quickly got rid of my bike close throughout a jacket hopped into a cab, I could ill afford and headed back to Midtown and I walk in and there’s faith. And there’s her partner, Peter, and we start talking not for five minutes or ten minutes, but for probably half an hour, people jumping up and down. People were excited, there was all this energy in the room. Faith said, do you have enough time to be on five of my projects? Because this is exactly what we need and I should mention.

That in those days, the amount she paid to be on one of her projects was approximately half of what I needed to live for a year. So I just needed one or two projects a year, I’d be fine. So I went back celebrations, were an order. I was just waiting to hear from faith and a week, and two weeks, and three weeks went by, and I dropped her a couple notes and called once or twice.

Nothing nothing. And over the next two years, every time I traveled anywhere in the United States, to do a gig, Go to work on something, I would find the ugliest postcard. I could from that town and mail it to faith in her office. And I never heard from Faith Popcorn, again years and years later her former partner. Peter reached out what I blurb, his book, I said Peter, I don’t blur books for everybody but I finally remember meeting you, but I would like one thing in return.

Would you mind telling me what happened? And he said, I have no idea. Faith. Just changed her mind. But I gotta tell you, So we had a bulletin board in the office that had nothing on it, but the postcards you sent us for a couple years. And I tell that story and the next one because they represent part of the journey to be a Pathfinder before my adventure with Faith Popcorn, I was a brand manager at a company called Spinnaker. Software was the 30th person there, I was in charge of the whole line of software including the packaging and everything else.

Well, the packaging. We ended up with was a gatefold. Ordered more than a record album twice as many times and it wasn’t as big as their record album, but it was close, but it keep it closed in the store. We needed some sort of way to fix it. And I didn’t want to shrink wrap it because then they wouldn’t be able to see the inside of the packaging.

So I ordered 10,000 little tiny, velcro dots, 10,000 little dots that were sticky on either side so that the assembly line would be able to put them into the gate fold and keep it closed. Well, I didn’t do enough of my homework. It turns out little tiny velcro dots, don’t Stick very well to laminated varnished paperboard and so they were all wasted. Now, the company could easily afford it. I think 10,000 little tiny velcro dots in those days, probably cost 300 dollars.

And we had a shrink wrap machine in the product went out fine, but between the velcro dots and the Misadventures with Faith Popcorn, it would have been very, very easy to just ask for instructions to just go to work as a bank teller to just say I can’t do this but instead I use them as fuel. I use them as fuel to realize. That failure is the key component to pathfinding getting lost is the way to get found.

No, is no for now, not because you’re going to persist in Hustle and hassle people, but because you just learned one more thing that did not work on your way to doing something that does work last week. I I was in a local hotel and sometimes in the hotels, you’ll see they have a bookshelf to try to show that smart people stay there. And on the bookshelf was Faith popcorns best-selling book from all of those years ago, autographed by faith.

And I looked at it and I held it in my hand and I was reminded that I was glad I didn’t give up that. I was glad I didn’t go for the safe, well lit path, because interesting problems need to be solved. And if anyone can do it, it’s you. Thanks for listening to my rant, we’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

No, we had this week, in fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends run, akimbo dot comma, B Corp. That hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing. About here. But the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running, but in the meantime, I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk about, what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please.

Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are Guidelines. Add akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include. The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. It’s Maria. Hey Seth my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump Caitlin. Hi sir warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Hey Sam this is Rex.

Hi. This is Russell is from Grace. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as, you know, I do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo, dot link, that take Ai and bi o .l iink and click the appropriate button.

Here we go. Hi says, it’s Jeff and Milledgeville. I love your podcast. Love your listener, questions. So I want you to ask us a question. Let’s say you’re Consulting a small entrepreneurial business, they already have their smallest viable, audience order to be successful at that level. You go in. And with a consultant, I know with your list of 100 questions.

But what’s your very first question you would ask an entrepreneur in that phase. I’ve had some amazing. Surprising questions asked one was from a marketing consultant that s if you Grow this business to the point where it needs your wife to come on board, which she quit her career or job to join you, and I answered. No. And he says, well, I can’t help you other questions I’ve had, or how are you going to handle? All the volume of orders, you’ll get and that’s obviously presupposing from the questioner that the products going to be an overwhelming success.

The third one I’ve gotten off and is more a statement than a question but it’s a comment that somebody’s going to steal your idea and that shows you the mindset of the questioner. So ask us a question. What would be the very first thing you would ask an entrepreneur, all of us in your audience. Thanks for what you do and thanks for making a difference. I’m not a consultant. I’ve never been a consultant. I don’t want to be a consultant in the main reason is because it is question which is that Someone hires you for business advice, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to take it.

So, you end up doing something that largely doesn’t work, because the problem is in implementation, not simply in strategy. However, as somebody who sometimes gives free business advice often to people, I care deeply about the kind of questions I asked, are about two things. The first one is this, how much are you? You willing to change what you do and how you do it to get to where you say, you want to go because what I have found again and again is that what people really want is to do what they’re doing but have it work better and if that was going to work it would have worked already.

It turns out that if we want to change the outcome we’re going to have to change the inputs and a lot of us don’t want to we don’t want to give up certain things. We don’t want to focus on other things. Don’t want to change the value proposition, what we really want is the world to bend to our will and largely, that doesn’t happen.

And then the second question is, what would you need to know or what resources would you need to have available to you to be able to do the changes that you said you’re willing to do? What would help you understand what would help you gain the confidence to go ahead and make those changes? Because it’s almost certain, you already know the answer. There are plenty of other institutions that you can look at there are competitors and other cities, or in other Industries or in your industry.

That did a thing and got an outcome. You could do that, but you haven’t done that. Are you looking for reassurance? Are you looking for proof? What will it take for? You to believe what you need to believe in order to take action. So I hope that’s not too picky or pedantic but if you don’t have answers to those questions, really doesn’t pay to hire a consultant at all.

Christy says, this is horse fry from Zurich Switzerland. I’ve got the question about two topics that you are often talking about enrollment and the minimum viable audience. If we deliver a good product, then add be customers, will talk about it and recommend our calls to others. Now, in your view, is it legitimate for us to explicitly, ask our audience for recommendations or to encourage them? Tools such as flyers for such recommendations.

I’m somewhat conflicted in my feelings here on the one hand, I think it makes perfect sense to provide such tools and on the other hand, I’m personally feel more and more resistance these days, for example, when a service starts fishing for compliments with the initial question, sir, Chas, How likely are you to recommend us?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you very much for your work. I’m experiencing your podcast and blog articles as very inspiring and motivating. Thank you, thank you for this question. I think we have to be really careful when we talk about smallest viable audience because it’s a very specific tactic and approach and strategy all-in-one what you’re asking about is Is is it socially? Okay? To encourage people, to share. We begin with this just because something is good. Just because something has quality, just because something is excellent. Just because something is a great value, doesn’t mean that people are going to share it. In fact, it’s likely that they won’t because we don’t spend our time in our energy and our cultural influence sharing things. Just because we’re To be generous.

We do it because it’s a story We Tell ourselves about who we are and because it’s a story other people we think will tell themselves about who we are. If you’re the kind of person that gets pleasure out of always sharing the new technological innovation, you’re probably getting that pleasure because it makes you look at some level smart or connected or generous or insightful to the people you’re sharing it with that stupid videos. Has spread really fast on the internet because people get a certain Joy from spreading a certain kind of video. So I’m going to begin by highlighting that things might not spread because they’re good, they simply spread because it benefits the spreader.

So, with that said, by giving them an Easy Link, by giving them something that’s pre written, by encouraging them by modeling it what you are doing. If it works is something inherently generous, which is yours. Saying to people. If you’re going to gain something from sharing this, I’m going to make it easier for you to do that. People aren’t going to share it because you did that but they are more likely to share it in certain situations because you did that.

Of course there are luxury Brands and other sorts of ideas that would spread slower if you acknowledged that they could be spread that one of the best ways to get people to talk about how you did. A magic trick is to swear. R make them swear that they won’t tell anyone how you did the magic trick because the very fact that you made it hard for them to share is precisely why they want to share it.

So I guess it’s a long way around to saying you really don’t know if it’s going to work to try it and if you are doing it in a way that is generous to them, not only to you, most people are going to be glad you did.

Hey Seth this is Stephen from San Francisco. I just finished listening to your most recent podcast, which happened to be a replay of something you pull from your archives. Now, I might be mistaken but I think this is something that you very rarely do. So it’s a perfect opportunity for me. Ask you a question about something I’ve always wanted to know and that is what are your thoughts about repurposing content more specifically? Why don’t you repurpose more of yours?

What’s preventing you from taking your content, which is amazingly valuable and mostly Evergreen and maybe recording it and put it on. One of the various platforms? Is it because of choice? Is it? Because of something else? I would love to hear your thoughts on repurposing content and your thought process behind, not putting more of your older stuff out there into the world bottom line. I just love to hear more of what you’ve created. Thanks for all that you continue to do. I love and appreciate you. Thank you. Much.

This is really insightful and it highlights a disconnect between commercial success and having a big impact and many of the choices that I have made in my career post yoyodyne, which is that I haven’t organized my intellectual property or my day to reach the largest possible number of people or to have the maximum amount of income I’ve instead shared because I enjoy sharing because I have something to say but I don’t don’t want to spend a lot of time deciding to say something that I’ve already said before just because it’s good for the business because I don’t work for the business. Sometimes, the business works for me.

So don’t do what I do. Think about what I say and what I’m trying to say is if you want an idea to spread you have to make it really simple and you have to repeat yourself and then repeat yourself and then repeat yourself, and is Dale Evans and said, stop repeating yourself. Not when you get bored or when your spouse gets bored.

Stop repeating yourself when your accountant gets bored. That the great Brands, the Nikes and the Starbucks and go down the list, the Oprah’s the great Brands don’t come out with a big new idea every day, or every week, or every month, they repeat themselves and they repeat themselves and they repeat themselves because the market isn’t listening to you as carefully as you think it is, and you are way more likely to bore yourself before you board. Everybody else. So I guess it depends on the outcome. You’re seeking I embrace this privilege. I have of having an audience that wants to hear something new from me.

And so I tell them something new that is not the same as saying. How am I going to maximize the profit of every interaction? I have. Thank you, everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

It’s not too late. Hey it’s F about 16 years ago. I wrote my first post about climate change and since then every single metric has gotten worse but it’s not too late. What we need to do is shift it from a me problem, to a wee problem. And my new project is not my new project, it’s our new project, more than 300 volunteers. It’s from 40 countries, around the world, have spent the last bunch of months putting together. The carbon Almanac, it’s not coming out till June but you my loyal akimbo listeners. I wanted you to see it and hear about it first. Check out the carbon almanac dot-org, for all the details.

Thank you for caring enough to make a difference.

==> -quality-and-wabi-sabi-e- <==

Somewhere outside of Sydney Australia a scientist named Katie. Green is working with silicon silicon that took years to create in Russia and was grown into pure, crystalline form in Germany. She’s using that silicon to create a new weight and measure a kilo. The perfect kilo a sphere, the roundest sphere ever created on Earth.

It’s perfect. And it Weighs exactly a kilo. Today at Hastings were, I’m recording this. The weather was perfect. 40, degrees cloudy, raining, cold, perfect, for the ecosystem, the plants the way. Nature needed it to be. How about 50 years ago? Guy named Bob Dylan recorded a record called Like a Rolling Stone.

In around up a few years ago, Rolling Stone magazine. Picked it has the perfect rock and roll song. The best one of the million that the critics had listened to Hey, it’s Nathan comb and this is a special archived episode of akimbo.

We’re here to talk about perfect and quality. Here’s the thing, that’s fear that Katie is working so hard to create the one that will be exactly a kilo. Of course, it can’t be exactly a kilo. It will be off by an atom or two. Even more profound though. While it is the roundest thing ever created on Earth.

It’s not as round as the Earth is. If we blew Katie’s fear up to the size of the Earth, it would be more rough and misshapen than the Earth itself. Even if we count to Grand Canyon and the Marianas Trench. So no, it’s not perfect. It’s just really, really close to what it’s supposed to be What about the weather? Well, if you were planning a picnic today, the weather is not even close to perfect. And Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan is the first person to tell you. He has never recorded a song that’s perfect. Timing, Zaroff notes are Out Of Tune.

He could redo it again and again, and again and it would never be the ideal perfect version of Like a Rolling Stone. So what is perfect anyway? Well if we try to get through the words, we can start by looking for the word quality, but the word quality is also widely misused in misunderstood. So let’s try to take that one and pieces. Some people to find quality as Deluxe – that a 300 dollar cashmere scarf is higher quality than an acrylic neck warmer that you bought for nine dollars on sale at the sporting goods store.

But what does that even mean will one keep you warmer than the other? So that leads to the second definition of quality. Not Deluxe – but meeting spec. If we could announce in advance what the specification is and you meet it. If you fit inside the measurements and the timing and the cost and the duration and anything else we can specify then you have achieved quality showing up with Actually what you are asked for and a third definition might be right effort the quality of putting your best foot forward. I’m saying here I made this if we think about meeting spec it turns out that this is a pretty recent occurrence.

150 years ago, if you went to a hardware store and you bought a three quarter inch nut and a three-quarter inch Bolt, the odds, are they would not fit together. That in those days it was made by hand. The nut was made to fit the bolt and vice versa that any object, that you purchased, that was machined. A cotton, gin some sort of big industrial system.

Each piece was hand whittled and formed to fit with every other piece beginning in France, couple hundred years ago. The idea of interchangeable parts began to spread the United States government. Demanded that That was going to supply it with armaments and weapons how to build them using interchangeable parts that are something broke. You could buy a replacement, this was a really big deal.

The Singer sewing machine became the most complicated device. Most families had ever owned and the way they achieved market dominance was by building everything on interchangeable parts. So if something broke, unlike every other machine that you encountered, you didn’t have to. Go to a skilled crafts person who is going to rebuild that part by hand, you could merely by a replacement part, and the replacement part would fit and so we have industrialism. The idea that we can use interchangeable parts to build complicated systems, but once you need interchangeable parts, you have to have specs because if one person wants a three quarter inch bolt, to be one size and someone else wants it to be a different size.

They’re not going to fit the challenge that the designers had was, what should the tolerance be just? As Katie, cannot make a sphere. That is exactly a kilo. You cannot make a three quarter inch nut. That is exactly three quarters of an inch. We can’t get the tolerance to be perfect. But what Engineers discovered when they met with the business people? When they met with the production, people was that Narrow tolerances getting it as close as possible to write were too expensive.

The reason they’re so expensive is because of someone makes a part that’s not quite right, you’ve got to discard it. And so the system doesn’t work well unless your tolerances are wide unless you make it so everything can sort of fit everything else because then you can ratchet up production years ago. My dad used all of his resources to buy out a bankruptcy, a hospital crib company.

It was in Buffalo New York, still is with a union Workforce, UAW you walk in, it’s a real factory and what I noticed when I was walking around there as a teenager was just how many parts and pieces and bins and bins of stuff. There were everywhere. You looked covered in a thin film of Greece. Why would you do it that way?

Well, the reason you do it that way is simple. Because on the assembly line, when it’s time to put piece number, 8, 17 into piece, number four 52, the worker grabs one of the pieces out of the bin and tries to put it together. If it doesn’t fit, if it’s outside of the tolerance, he throws it out and grabs another one because it’s cheaper to make a lot at a time and it’s cheaper to keep the assembly line, moving that the idea is. Is lower what you’re expecting. Make a wider tolerance for what? You’ll put up with and keep the line moving.

Well guy names Edwards Deming saw that this was happening and came to the car companies, few Generations ago and he said to them, you’re doing it wrong in order to make a better car, a car without creaks, and rattles a car, that’s going to drive 100,000 miles, not 20,000 miles in order to build a Our that’s not just cheap, but good, you have to do the opposite, you have to raise your standards. You have to make the tolerances more specific and they laughed at him.

And so he left the United States and went to Japan, and he taught, Toyota and Nissan and the other Japanese car companies. A different way to make cars. The idea is super simple when you think about it, Be really clear about the specification defined quality at every step along the way and make your tolerances more and more specific.

So if you walked into a Japanese car company in the 80s, it would look a lot like the hard Hospital crib company looks today, almost no parts lying around. In fact in many situations, there’s just a couple instead of a bin of 1000 nuts and bolts. There might be two or three. To work person reaches into the bin, grabs a piece, puts it in place.

If it doesn’t fit, she turns off the entire assembly line. She pulls a cord and everything stops, and they go Upstream to the person who made those nuts. Or the person who made that tire, the person who made that muffler, the supplier who brought it in. And they said, we just turned off our entire assembly line because that part you gave us wasn’t to spec the quality was poor.

So here’s the question, how many times do you think they have to turn off the assembly line before the Tolerance on Parts improves? That’s right, it gets better fast. And now Alexis is made with parts that fit together like no to machine parts in the world could have fit together 100 years ago. In 1984, if you bought a Toyota Corolla, one of the cheapest cars available, it was better quality than a Rolls-Royce better quality and a Cadillac not defining quality as Deluxe – but defining quality as meeting spec and because the parts met spec the car met spec.

So there’s a first useful definition of quality. Not is it perfect. But does it meet spec one way to measure the quality of something that seeking to meet spec? Is to record defects to record? How often the thing you’re working with comes in the way you expected it. The shorthand for this is Six Sigma 6 Sigma operations mean that one out of a million times. Something’s not going to meet spec.

I’m really in favor of Six Sigma manufacturing. I think it has saved many lives that if you need a pacemaker, I hope you’ll get yourself. A Six Sigma 1. That if you’re getting a CAT scan, I hope you go into a machine that doesn’t burst into flame. Very often And if you’re on a lonely country road driving along, I’m hoping your car was built by someone who understands the value of meeting spec.

The idea spread it spread outside of cars. The CD was introduced by Sony. Perfect sound forever. B is B, every time exactly the same meeting spec. The digital world exploded on this idea, we don’t have interchangeable parts in the sense of nuts and bolts. We have interchangeable files, we have interchangeable. Protocols, we have apis that talk to one another, the internet is impossible, but one of the reasons is impossible, is that no one’s in charge that standards are exchanged and evolved and strangers who will never meet in person exchange all sorts of Formation that plugs right into another with near perfect tolerance.

B is B it spreads.

Now, we got the Confluence of the internet and industrialism pushing each of us to be a perfect Cog in a high-quality system to be Six Sigma to deliver what’s promised ever faster and ever cheaper. And many of us have benefited from this, but it’s not a great way to go to work and it’s not necessarily a great way to live your life at the same time that we are polishing and perfecting and industrializing at the same time. That FedEx delivers, it guaranteed overnight. And at the same time that Amazon lowers prices, and raises, quality scores, day after day. After day, in that very same world, vinyl sales, go up year. After year for the last 20 years, breaking the record from the year before.

Vinyl vinyl LPS. Is there anything more imperfect than a vinyl LP?

Oh my God, I’m gonna go insane.

Slightly out of round. Cracks pops. Sounds different. Almost every time your vinyl LP different than theirs, it might be a little warped. There’s wow, there’s flutter. Its analog through and through top to bottom. Where’s the Six Sigma? Where is the spec? Why do sales keep going up? Here’s my take my take is that as humans, this Six Sigma thinking get out of hand as humans. Maybe we’ve got enough of that. Equality and there might be a different sort of quality that we seek.

This could be the quality of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi means imperfect handmade Irreplaceable, wabi-sabi tells a story. Wabi-sabi is incomplete wabi-sabi from the Japanese a compound of two words pushed together wahby. Which means lots of things nature breathing, living a Emmett Sabe rust withered, perhaps a little bit of sadness. Put them together, Wabi and Sabi and we are seeing something different. The opposite of the Six Sigma Perfection.

Where did it come from in Leonard Koreans groundbreaking book on wabi-sabi he gives us a peek into the history of how it evolved. 400 years ago, status mattered as much as it matters now maybe even more in Japan. One way to demonstrate one. Status was through the Tea Ceremony, not just to drink tea, but a very specific performance held in a building that was built for no other purpose.

A tea ceremony existed as a way to demonstrate that you had good taste and that you had resources.

Over time the Tea Ceremony evolved to become more and more ornate. Rich practitioners would import utensils from China. Gilded covered with gold each more polished and more perfect than the other. The perfect sphere of silicon of today. How perfect could we possibly make it a man who dedicated his life to the Tea? Ceremony said, no rikyu.

Started bringing a different point of view to it. He embraced folk made utensils from Korea or Japan, deliberately imperfect deliberately more natural and this conflict between the more organic approach. The one-of-a-kind approach the approach that rejected the idea of perfection and quality. As others wanted to measure it, created a challenge for those who wanted the simpler method of just spending more money of having it be like everybody else’s well. Fast forward to today, and we see it happening again. And again, the Kindle might be a Fine Place to read books but it has no wahby. It has no Sabe.

It is merely a collection of letters, all the books look the same. Yes, you can carry a thousand books around in your pocket, but all of them are the same. There is no patina every book looks and feels the same. You don’t remember where you bought that book. You have no recollection of who you lent it, to who touched it before hand. There’s no coffee stain or folded Pages or notes in the margin.

It’s sterile it’s perfect. It meets a certain sort of spec It’s worth noting that for book sold to a mass audience Kindle sales, have stalled. Because people who like to buy books like to buy books, they like to hold them. They like to have them in their library, next to the other books that the patina, the patina inside the book, The patina, the books even create is a form of wabi-sabi.

So, as we think about our work, To work. Each of us does everyday. The question we need to ask is, are we a cog in a never perfecting machine. It used to be that they measured how much a kilo weighed by basing it on a lump of misshapen lump in a vault in France, but they soon decided it wasn’t perfect enough that the tolerance wasn’t acceptable.

So they went down the path of creating the most perfect sphere in the world, and if you’re Katie counting the molecules and the atoms and trying to make this fear ever more perfect, this this is good work. But for the person who’s merely standing in standing in, for the robot that hasn’t been built yet, the artificial intelligence that hasn’t been programmed yet standing in is a machine, a human machine stamping things out, one after another at the Six Sigma rate of quality.

We need to ask a question. The question is, do we want to meet spec personally? Do we want to be part of somebody else’s API? What would it mean to embrace wabi-sabi in our own work to be the vinyl version? Not the CD? What would it mean to have the rough edges? And yes, the rust that wabi-sabi brings with it when we are more organic and more human, when we cannot be easily put into a box pigeon-holed instantly, The discarded and replaced when we seek to be the linchpin instead of the Cog, what does that do to our work?

I think there’s another kind of quality that’s available to each of us. It is the quality of meaning Speck in the spec, is making a promise, but the promise is not, I can do it faster and cheaper and within our bounds than anybody else. You can find on up work or fiver. It might be that the promise is exactly the opposite of that that you will pay a lot but that you will get more than you pay for that. You will be surprised and delighted that there will be rough edges, the quality of meaningful work.

The work of I did my best to work of it is not perfect but it is unique. Each of us ironically in this moment of digitization and industrialization in this race forever. More gilded status, each of us has the opportunity to do something else and that something else is to be the person we set out to be, thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll be back in a second, with some questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that. And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running but in the meantime I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk Talk about what you are interested in.

So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please. Of course, I can’t promise, I’ll be able to include all of them. There are guidelines at akinbode Uplink about how to do it and what to include and not include.

The focus is 100% non commercial and nonprofit. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got going on. It says it’s Maria. Except my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is Underpants. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh? Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey sup, hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

Hey Seth. It’s Reese from New York City. Okay, my question is, do you think chasing scarcity is futile? I mean by definition, if something is scarce than the majority of people won’t attain it and your argument in favor of playing an infinite game instead of chasing scarcity seems a bit like an attempt to pacify the majority of people who have lost. Thanks for that but I fear we have a misunderstanding. Let me try to say it in reverse.

Let’s say you’re going to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. And before everyone comes over, your friend says, how are we going to structure this? So I can earn back all the effort I put into making dinner. How am I going to get my sister to pay up? How am I going to be able to engage with my dad? So that I make a little bit of profit from today’s event?

I think that would sound totally weird. The reason it would sound weird is because family is an infinite game. We don’t try to end family, we don’t try to win at Family. The purpose. It’s a family is to be in the family to make it deeper and wider and better and more colorful and more Vivid more important.

So I think everyone can agree that that’s the way we ought to engage with people around Thanksgiving dinner. So why all of a sudden is it different when we’re talking about software, it doesn’t have to be, doesn’t have to be when we talked about the fact that we can sweep our front walk, merely because sweeping our front walk makes everyone in the neighborhood feel a little bit better.

So as we think about finite versus infinite games, I think we have to begin with the idea that they are different things and we can approach them with a different mindset. The purpose of culture is not to enable capitalism, but maybe, just maybe the purpose of capitalism is to enable culture.

Hi, Seth, it’s Lara from San Francisco. How might you gain involvement for the infinite game? When leadership is focused on the finite game? Thanks Laura, getting enrollment from the people. You work with is a challenge for lots of things that are new was hard to get enrollment in the 80s and 90s to put an email system in because management might not have seen what you see.

So, we have, in this case, the case of the infinite game, The Case of the opportunity to make something that helps the culture merely because we can merely because it lets us play more in a richer environment that might conflict with someone who’s worldview is, I need to increase shareholder value today.

The stock price will go up tomorrow. Persuading somebody that they are wrong about what they want is a very difficult task. So it seems to me that in the short run, we’ve got two choices. One we can go forward with our new attitude without asking permission doesn’t cost a lot of money and it begins to pay dividends.

Once those dividends start to appear, give the boss credit, she’ll want more of them, repeat it again. Get it again. The other alternative is to be able to outline how feeding the Community First pays off. It pays off, even through the lens of somebody who’s trying to win in a world that’s based on scarcity.

We certainly can agree. I hope that the Linux Revolution which led to red hat which led to the servers that run most of the internet which was built as an infinite game. Has paid dividends for lots of people in that. Community. I hope we can agree that all that, volunteer time and effort that went into Wikipedia didn’t go into it for selfish reasons.

It went into it because we live in a world that’s a little bit easier to understand. Hi. Seth, this is Ross, Martin and Fulton Maryland, question about the infinite game. You talked about someone playing the short game versus the infinite game, but what about someone who is playing a different game with different goals and prizes, but on the same Turf and they’re playing of the game completely. Change the outcome of your game.

Thanks for this Ross, you’re highlighting something that’s important here, which is that in between the finite game and the infinite game is the long-term game often played by a large organization that can completely disrupt part of the industry. So a simple example, RSS readers were the way that many many people kept up with blogs and podcasts then Google which is playing a very long game to organize the Information launched, Google Reader, it quickly took over the market because it was well designed and it was free Google realized it didn’t match their revenue maximization goals, so they shut it down.

Well, all the people who had been making RSS readers, had intelligently quit the market because there was no Market, Google had destroyed the market by playing a longer-term game, hence disruption follows or consider the case of Amazon. Jeff has publicly stated that he’s playing He’s a very long game.

So if you own a store that sells stuff just like Amazon does, but maybe not quite as much in stock and maybe not quite as well. Organized and definitely not as aggressively priced. You’ve got a problem because your biggest competitor is playing a game far far longer than you can afford to play. So what we’re looking at, as a competitor is an understanding that we need to seek out Parts in the market.

Where we can play our own version of a long game, eliminating the short-term profit Seeker, but we’re we’re not interesting enough to have a bigger entity play an even longer game that we can’t keep up with.

Thanks again for listening, we’ll see everybody next week, go make a ruckus.

==> -cybertruck- <==

There’s a difference, it seems between optimism and hope and the reality Distortion field, sometimes it gets out of hand and sometimes we need to know enough and having the maturity to put it away and get back to work. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo, we’ll be back in a second talk about the Cyber truck, but first, here’s a message.

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I got this question the other day about something that I had said about Tesla and their cyber truck. Hi, Seth, my name is tillich Duda and I live in Toronto, Ontario Canada. I wanted to ask a question about something that I felt was a bit of a apparent contradiction in some of the things that you’ve talked about. Previously, the this is a an opinion, I think you shared in a recent podcast that you were asked to be a guest on It had to do with this Tesla, cyber Truck design and in the podcast, your opinion, I think that you shared was that you felt that Tesla had made a big mistake with their design of the Tesla cyber truck because it failed to take into account. What pickup truck owners wanted from a pickup truck and it was surprising to me to hear that opinion. Because to me when I first heard about Tesla cyber truck. I think I even made a connection between the design, the Crazy Design and the idea of the Purple Cow.

Now, I contradict myself all the time, but this is not an example of me contradicting myself. So, let’s start at the beginning for a very, very long time. Creators musicians, artists playwrights, authors and business, people needed to use optimism, to get other people on their side. I’d you cannot prove that your symphony is going to be a hit. You cannot prove that your book is going to be any good, not until it’s done, you can’t get funding for your business. After you’ve made your business successful, you need the funding before you’ve made your business successful.

So how to make all those things work? Well, we spin, we hype, we hustle. We put ideas in front of the people who need to hear them who are in the business of hearing them and we The future that isn’t here yet, but Steve Jobs took it way further and he did it with the aid of Technology because technology changes the system, technology changes the game, and it became known as a reality Distortion field.

And so Steve could walk into a room filled with people who knew what a Doss computer was and describe to them the magic of the mac long before. The Mac was a real thing, he could do the same thing with his key. Note talks that were watched by millions of people around the world where he would say and just one more thing and then describe something that wasn’t real and sometimes the things he described never happened and other times when they did happen they weren’t nearly as good as he said they were going to be but technology being what it is more is lobbying what it is.

The technology caught up. That people were eager to get on the bandwagon because they wanted to see things get better. I’ll amplify this by social media and what we end up with is reality Distortion field as business model, as a way of getting elected when you have no plans intent or ability to do the things, you say, you’re going to do when you’re running or see how, the reality Distortion field is used by others, in the text-based to describe things. Like, I don’t know. Self-driving cars that are not here yet. There aren’t going to be here anytime soon.

Yeah, but that were not only promise but sold for real money years and years ago, the reality Distortion field lies directly next to trust. Because sometimes we want to believe that reality can be distorted and we’re more likely to trust. The leader that promises they will do their best. And other times when we discover that it never really was going to work, it starts to feel more like manipulation or a scam.

And I think we’re seeing the frustration of some people have a Tesla because the fit and finish is so poor because the customer service is so terrible because the self-driving hasn’t arrived, because it’s a little too much hype and not quite enough reality. So what’s the difference between musk and jobs?

Well, I’ll ask Steve passed away and Tim Cook took over and Tim Cook. When he took over, said, I’m going to stop distorting reality and I’m Do two things. Instead one, I’m going to make this the most valuable company in the history of the world over and over again, turning out profits and to I’m going to make sure that the world is rebuilt around this computer in a pocket and he has done both of those things.

That Apple’s project is no longer to dance with technology, to invent things that haven’t been invented yet there. Project is to cross the chasm to get their phone, their luxury device into as many pockets as they possibly can and they have succeeded and they continue to succeed because crossing the chasm, as Jeff Moore, has written about getting to the other side away, from the early adopters, the innovators, the people who want The Cutting Edge and getting to the people who want the thing that everyone wants, that is not easy to do.

Netflix, did it at the Getting Netflix was a service for people who didn’t find what they were looking for at Blockbuster. Most people could walk into a blockbuster and say yeah, there’s enough movies here, I’m fine. But if you wanted a documentary about something that happened, thousands of miles away.

Netflix was your only choice to get to the other side. Netflix has to broadcast things like squid games and reality shows in the British baking show and all the other stuff that the original Netflix subscriber, Might have snorted at that the other side is filled with people who want the regular kind.

And so we come to Internet troll, Elon Musk Elon Musk likes. Living with the early adopters, it has made him very rich and powerful and famous and he likes being famous and being talked about. So, if you’re listening, you on, you’re welcome. I’m talking about you when it came time after the model S, after the model 3, After the model X to launch the Cyber truck, he and his team had a choice.

I want to end, they could have done what they’ve done before. Make a commotion, make a Ruckus, get more attention, have controversy happen, make very big promises, collect deposits, and then see what happens or they could cross. The chasm, the chasm means that the people who wanted something that’s new are different than the people who want something that, It works.

So in the United States, the number one best-selling vehicle is not a car. It is the Ford F-150 pickup truck. Some years Ford makes enough money from that one vehicle to pay for the losses of all their other divisions, it accounted for more than a hundred percent of their profit in at least, one year that I know of the Ford 150 pickup truck works and it works in two ways. One, it’s a vehicle where parts are readily available in it. Was what you wanted to, and to it works because it’s a vehicle that doesn’t call attention to itself.

If you look at the trades, people driving around your town, you will see that they are either driving a Ford, 150 pickup truck or a van, a panel truck, the normal kind that doesn’t say I’ve got money to burn. Please look at me and says, I’ve got a job to do and this is how I’m going to get it done. When Ford launched their electric pickup Chuck.

It was a sensation. There are already shipping it and they have a waiting list of paid deposits that will last three years. The Ford F-150 pickup truck, satisfied Ford’s objectives, which are one, give people a reliable vehicle at a good price and to make the transition from internal combustion engines to electric cars that do what they’re supposed to do.

Musk could have done this. First, he had a head start on Ford. He could have leapfrogged way ahead of the Ford Lightning, and just captured the market. It depends on your goal. If your goal, which he has said, is his goal is to get everyone in America to drive an electric car. The right thing to do, was to build a boring truck, that would make the Ford F-150 obsolete, because it would satisfy the objectives, the goals, the Fires of the mass Market or you could do a live launch event. Where you could foolishly throw a steel ball at the supposedly, bulletproof windows of the truck and watch them break in front of everybody.

Also establishing a meme. Then, let’s potential buyers know that kids in their neighborhood might I don’t know, throw a rock at their window because that’s what the owner of the company did and make big promises about what it was. Ship and not keep them. Would you can do when you have a reality Distortion field which you can do when you’re riding on The Cutting Edge of Technology.

But the Cyber truck isn’t on The Cutting Edge of Technology. We have The Cutting Edge of technology and electric cars. Lots of companies are on The Cutting Edge. What you need is to cross the chasm, to change the culture. And so, the purpose of this rant is not to pick on Tesla, sober versus rant is to help each of us. Understand that sometimes Eames, what we need to do is dance as fast as we can, for the early adopters, to be way out on The Cutting Edge. Where the air is thin to be able to describe a possible future to erect, a reality, Distortion field and then and then realize it sooner or later we need to find Tim Cook sooner or later if we really want to change the culture, we need to figure out how to find people who will make and keep boring promises.

If we think about music. Yes. It’s true. Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan decided to walk away from pop. Stardom to go back to tilling, the fields of being interesting because they don’t run corporations and they have the privilege in the freedom to do that. Their job was not to change music for Western culture.

Their job was to make the music that they had inside of them. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of building a Company a public company or if you’re going to go to the trouble of saying to the world, I’m going to change the world then I think you’re on the hook. You’re on the hook to figure out which part of the world you want to change and how do you stick with it and stick with it and stick with it in a way that matches?

What people think you promised them because on the other side of the chasm it’s a lot more boring. It is probably more boring to work at McDonald’s than to work for. I don’t know. David Chang and Momofuku. Christina Tosi and Milk Bar because there in The Ether, they’re trying to come up with the next big thing.

But if you’re McDonald’s, you’re feeding one out of seven Americans every single day. It’s a different job. We got to pick which job we’re doing and when you have the chance to change the culture, you might want to take it or you might want to take a deep breath and say, now, I’d rather go back to Leading and innovating, but you can’t pretend you’re doing both at the same time because that almost never happens.

So that’s my rant. I hope you’ve been well, we’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with four great questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor No, add this week. In fact, an ad about the ads, if you visit akimbo link, you’ll see a new button up there. Let me explain it to you really quick, my friends, run, akimbo.com, or B, Corp that hosts the workshops that you’ve been hearing about here, but the akimbo podcast is separate from that.

And so going forward, every once in a while, I will talk about some of the workshops. My friends are running but in the meantime I’d like to talk about what you’re interested. In fact, I’d like you to talk Talk about what you are interested in. So if you visit, akimbo dot link, you’ll see a way that you can upload a 30-second ad for a non-profit for a cause or even for a hobby that you care about nothing commercial. Please.

It’s muddy. Hey Seth my name is Kyle reading. Seth, this is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. How I said this is a new problem. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam this is Rex. Hey sup hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know I do love to hear from you if you got a question about this or anything previously, Yes, please visit, akimbo dot link to take Ai and bi o .l, iink and click the appropriate button.

All four questions this week are about the practice and genre and how we look at ourselves. When we look in the mirror, they all came in a row. Here we go.

Hey, Seth, this is Phil from Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula. So over the years I’ve heard you talk about and read your writing about this. Dia of genre and how it provides a box. For those you’re trying to serve to put you in and as a starting point and how it gives you an edge that you can leverage against.

So I’m curious how do you view this for yourself and your work? How you’ve been involved in many projects over the years and you don’t necessarily fit it all into one genre? So, does this idea on apply on a per project basis? Like, is this project is aimed at this genre and this one, Over here is into this other genre, or is there this overarching genre that you view your work through?

The reason I’m asking is that I think a lot of us are on that same trajectory of a career, being a lining up of consecutive projects, not holding a series of job titles, and because I, and I’m sure I’m in no way unique here. Often work across genres, which makes it hard to find those edges to push against so anyway, I appreciate you work. Thanks for your generous. Sharing it with all of us look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Take care. Thanks for this one. Phil when somebody in the world is considering a new project, whether it’s a business to business sale, a job, they’re going to apply for a book, They’re going to buy or flavor of ice cream. They begin by thinking about the genre because if it’s too far outside of the genre, it’s not worth them.

Considering if you’re a vegetarian, you don’t go to a steakhouse. House, it’s just not even worth looking at the menu because it’s outside of the genre, you were looking for many of the projects that I have worked on of the many hundreds. There have been that have failed have failed because I ignored that simple rule that coming up with something that is really clever that breaks understandings of genre.

Almost certainly guarantees that it will fail kind of blue, which I’ve talked about many times As Miles Davis, one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. It’s a work of genius and it fits squarely into a genre. The monkeys are in a genre, go down the list. When people in a culture Embrace something, I’m not even talking about a massive bestseller, even a niche.

It’s because there’s a genre. The second question, they might ask, is why should I trust this who is this from? What’s its source in those moments having earned And the track record I have by showing up so many times is when my name comes in. So first it’s the genre. And then it’s brought to you by the person who did this this and that.

And if you cross genres too far the way say Billy Joel or staying or Paul McCartney might if they make a classical music album, the fact that you are coming from a different field, might not even help at all, it might hurt but that’s my short answer to your good question. Thank you.

My sis have a question about the difference between refining, your craft and then becoming a Storyteller. So, I have a literally, I have a friend who is a very, very good artist technically and he has mastered his craft, but he hasn’t my opinion taken a step from Mastering the craft and having all the skills to telling a story with those skills and engaging an audience to make a difference.

Do you have any tips on making that leap? Thanks a lot. Bye. Thank you for this one, Ross, it’s a really great distinction. Turns out that craft when we’re talking about painting or photography is the cost of Entry, but it is woefully Efficient because over time more and more people learn a craft that doesn’t make you stand out because you haven’t added that emotional connection that comes from the art, the art, of doing something that might not work, the art of making connection the art, as you said of making a story and art, always comes fraught with risk. Because if you’re skillful, you can point to the fact that you can play with perfect pitch.

You can point to the fact that you can represent whatever it is you’re looking at, as well as the camera cat craft is fine, but craft is safe. And if someone wants to go to the next level, call it not the next level, but to a different place in order to do that, they have to sign up for the fact that it might not work.

That they are about to engage in a journey that many people will not understand that, some people will actively dislike, that is the work that we are doing. Doing when we are making art because we want to connect with someone in a way, they haven’t been connected before, if your slogan is, you can pick anyone and I mean anyone and you don’t really get it yet.

Hi, Seth, it’s Maki from Australia, really loved that last episode on Beauty, and the connection that you mad at the end, back to status roles and that the culture is kind of defining what beauty is, and that’s changing all the time. But made me think back to when a podcast episode, I’d listen to of two of your favorite people because the It was interviewing Jacqueline novogratz and Jacqueline was reflecting on this moment. I think she was at some awards ceremony or something that I should presented in LA. And after the event you are surrounded by a lot of people who would be in and by all definitions from our culture considered very beautiful with all the kind of you know, high heels. And so on as you talked about and they were asking Jacqueline about her purpose and they were saying that they despite feeling like they have everything that the world would tell them that they should have. They were lacking in that department and We’re asking Jacqueline for her advice and Jacqueline said, I think we’re actually asking the wrong questions and instead of asking how can I be beautiful or I, how can I be rich?

We could reframe that question to be, how could I make someone else feel beautiful or how could I make someone else? Not rich but you know, empowered financially and effectively. How can I show up the marginalized? And that is where purpose comes from. So I wondered if you’d rip a little bit on that, obviously in my space leading, a not-for-profit status Trolls Exist to and We’re trying to write this not narcissistic or centered around and hopefully go or identity sort of stuff, really celebrate people who are showing up generously and creating that beauty and empowerment for other people.

Yeah, I’d love it. If you could rip a little bit on what Jacqueline was talking about there around the power to reframe those status roles and what beauty looks like. So that we are celebrating people who are generous and you are like conduits for resources to flow through them. And maybe because of the definitions of the culture around beauty that I’m not received a lot of privilege and resources and how can we actually say now the beautiful person isn’t the one with all those high heels or you know, that particular car over might be but the person that allows himself to be a conduit for those resources to flow through them to other people that need them or more than ever.

So would love to if you could Riff on that a little bit, thanks for your work. Seth Thank you for this one Mark and just hearing Jaclyn’s name. Brightens up my soul. She is brilliant and has helped an enormous number of people, truly around the world live a better life and I think part of what she is getting at is this dignity is not based on scarcity and dignity. Is something that is very hard to claim for yourself and particularly easy to offer to someone else.

And if people are About beauty in the sense of high heels or in the sense of, you know, ripped pectoral muscles earned at the gym or a fancy haircut. Those people are looking at the world, through status, through scarcity and through a mirror. They are looking at themselves. They want to be picked. They want to be respected, but what it means to show up to offer. Other people dignity is to say, I see you.

I have Punch for what you need here. I’m offering this to you, not with a sense of scarcity, because now I don’t have it either, but with the sense of abundance, because if I can offer you dignity, now we both earn dignity. And so Jacqueline, who is Stanford MBA with a long history of understanding? Capitalism is saying to capitalists.

There’s a kind of patient Capital there. It’s easy to forget, not that fake Nobel Prize Milton Friedman selfish short-term thing, Maximize shareholder value today, sort of capitalism. But the capitalism that says, when we engage with other people, and bring them to our table and go to their table, we are offering them, a sort of dignity.

And if we can do that with patients and we can do that with abundance, we discover that that might be where purpose comes from. Hi, Seth, this is Char from Toronto. I wanted to just start by saying, thank you, thank you for everything. That you do, whenever I filled out, I listened to your podcast or read your content online or some of your books.

The Practice in particular, I feel like it changes me every time that I read it. So thank you so much for making me and all of us so much stronger. The question that I have for you is related to my latest Venture, I started my own company teaching, kids leadership skills and I gave up my classic, you know, corporate gig to do this full time and I am Flea always scared hopeful most days. Excited most days, but scared often.

And my question for you is how do you especially in the early days, you know, how did you stay focused on forging the path ahead when the noise of others judgment is so loud and maybe this is my fear talking, but I feel like everyone’s waiting for me to fail because it’s just so common for a new business to fail.

And I feel so vulnerable and exposed to the world. It was so much. Much easier just having a classic job and fitting right in, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. And again, thank you so much for everything that you do. Thanks for this Char. I appreciate the work that you’re doing. And you said something twice in your question that I think is worth highlighting, which is you talked about your old job as classic.

I’m not sure that the people who are watching you are waiting for you to fail. I think you might feel that way because you’d rather Not fail, but I think the people who are watching, you are worried about where they are, they’re classic job. What is it all for? Why have they given up their agency and their dignity and their time to do this classic thing. So maybe they need to justify that.

By, in the short run, apparently thinking a little bit less of what you were doing. But my hunch is they’re just jealous because if they were Brave way, you are brave, they would be on the frontier on the frontier teaching, and connecting and leading and doing something that might not work. And I think what it comes down to is this, we can acknowledge that it might not work without demeaning ourselves or the work. In fact, it raises the quality of the work to say, I’m doing something that might not work and if it doesn’t work, you will not have failed.

You will simply have found one more step forward on your way. Making the difference that you seek to make, so it doesn’t have to be fraud and you don’t have to feel vulnerable you can simply say here, I made this. I made this for you. I see you. How does this fit? And if it doesn’t fit, you can tailor it and adjust it, and do it again.

And as long as we are able to show up, we have a chance to make things better. And so I feel sorry for the people with the classic corporate jobs where there without air quotes because at some level They are hiding. We Are All Hiding, but they’re hiding even more than you are. And what we get is a chance to show up and connect and to make things better.

So, thanks to the four of you for giving me a chance to rant and thanks to everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There’s a big problem that’s changing everything about the world, as we know it carbon and the impact of humans on the earth, we talked about it with words like climate change and global warming, but there’s just two really important things that you need to know about it. First, this is an overwhelmingly big problem so much, so that is likely that you feel as, though your choices don’t matter.

In the face of it, s, that overwhelming feeling that I just And it’s intentional is put there by Design. The industries that make the biggest environmental impact have a vested interest in you feeling overwhelmed and Powerless. They have marketed lobbied and schemed to create that feeling in all of us.

In short, we’ve been lied to but here’s the good news. There’s a lot you can do to make a difference in the other. Good news is that there’s still time. The carbon Almanac is a book and project about these problems and what we can do, do to solve them. It was created and run by volunteers on the premise that is not too late, but none of us can fix this problem on our own.

Second, get the carbon Almanac book. It’s full of fat. Articles, graphs, and art. It’s beautiful and fun to engage with. It’s all footnoted, in fact, checked and importantly, it’s made by volunteers. Whose only agenda is to solve these systemic issues. You can find it wherever books are sold. Finally, since you’re listening to a podcast search for the carbon Almanac, wherever you’re listening, you’ll find the carbon Almanac podcast Network and a few shows featuring expert Insight, discussion, inspiration and ways to take action, there’s even a show just for kids.

Do what? Appeals to you. Just do something. There’s still time to make a huge difference in the future of the planet, but we can’t solve this on our own. Join us.

==> -theyre-not-trying-to-be-creepy-e- <==

Our culture and our lives are run by media. We spend more time looking at media engaging in media talking about media then ever before. But it’s essential to understand that someone’s got to pay for all that media. And there are basically three choices one we can pay for it. The user can buy a book or movie ticket.

To, we can pay for it when we buy something inside the medium like eBay or three, most of all, most of the time, an Advertiser can pay for the media and we do ourselves a disservice. If we pretend that what advertisers want, doesn’t matter. Hey, it’s such a, this is a special archived episodes of akimbo.

I’ve been playing. Media, my entire career and selling ads for most of it selling ads is really seductive because it separates the people, you are dancing for the people. You are seeking to change. The people, you are trying to impact from the people who are paying for it, what that means is if you can find a happy, Advertiser, a sponsor, somebody who’s willing to show up and pay the bills, you can then turn around and create the work. Work that you’d like to create for the people, you want to create it for unfortunately, this siren song of advertising, usually leads to people with good intentions, either, not finding an Advertiser, because they don’t understand what advertisers want or perhaps even worse.

Finding an Advertiser, who wants something? They don’t want and creating a product or service that they’re not proud of. So yeah, sometimes it can work great. When you find a generous, Patient sponsor, who lets you make the work? You want to make you’ve created yet, another building block of our culture but often it leads to things like the Facebook Scandal.

This is a short podcast about how that came to be and why it matters.

There are two kinds of advertising brand marketing and direct marketing. And until very recently, almost all advertising was brand marketing. A brand marketing, the John Wanamaker rulers. I know that half my ads don’t work, I just don’t know which half brand marketing. Is the idea that you could run a commercial on Seinfeld or that you could put up a billboard or list five hundred other ways that you could find a socially acceptable way to interrupt people with your ad and maybe just maybe over time one day someone would buy something from you creating enough. If you do that, you could buy more ads.

This bulk of advertising brand advertising created, the TV industrial complex. It created the entire mindset that what we ought to do as creators is put on a show and then sell ads in the show. It’s essential to remember that radio exists because they needed a place to put radio ads that television exists, because they needed a place to put television ads.

The ads came first and then the internet came along. Now, the thing about the internet is that it’s the first mass medium that wasn’t invented for advertisers. In fact, advertising was forbidden. It’s not for advertisers. The second thing to understand is that the Internet isn’t actually a mass medium, sometimes it pretends to be, there are tiny Pockets that are seen by large numbers of people, but it’s not real. Mass medium, it’s a micro medium, a personal medium, one on one medium.

So back in the very early 90s before the World Wide Web, I invented an idea called permission marketing. The idea that had anticipated personal and relevant ads delivered by email to people who wanted to get them would do better. Then spam would do better than yelling at people. We do better than interrupting people who didn’t want to hear from you.

This leads to the second idea, the idea of direct marketing, which is not like brand marketing. Direct marketing is action marketing, the marketing of measurement. You put an ad in front of somebody, you know, you put it in front of them and you can measure whether they got back to you or not. This is the advertising of Ron Popeil and the bass-o-matic and the late-night infomercial.

Super bass-o-matic 76. Works great on Sunfish perch Sole and other small aquatic creatures. Wow, that’s terrific. Bass. Its advertising that’s designed to pay for itself. Every time you run the ad, its measured its tract and it’s targeted. And until recently, as I said, almost no, major marketers bought direct marketing, it wasn’t in their culture, it wasn’t the way they thought about things. And it wasn’t effective really hard to sell shampoo or picture frames or life insurance even By direct marketing. It’s a whole different way of being in the world.

For the purposes of people who are fascinated by bending the culture, the distinction between direct marketing and brand marketing is essential, if direct marketers had their way, interesting content would disappear that the entire mindset of the direct marketer is merely, who is going to click, who is going to buy.

Brand marketers, on the other hand care about things, like Vogue magazine. They care about things, like the Atlantic and The New Yorker, they want to be surrounded by an editorial environment. That changes the way people perceive the brand, it’s worth noting here that in direct marketing. A one percent response rate. If one percent of the people see, the ad by is a home, run a home run. One that’s worthy of being in the direct marketing Hall of Fame. It almost never happens one percent.

So if you’re a direct marketer, you don’t care about the other 99%. If your direct marketer. The only goal is the click that creates a totally different kind of media experience than the one we think of, when we think of media that matters to us.

So, let’s roll. Back the camera, 25 years. It’s 1993, 94, 95, 96, and I’m on the road trying to sell ads at, yo, your 9 and the idea behind the edge, was simple. I could show that more people open an email from my company than anybody else in the entire advertising world. I could show that we were outperforming all other forms of direct marketing and almost nobody wanted to buy what we were selling sure. We had great sponsors like American Express. Press and Procter and Gamble but it was hard. It was hard work and about the same time, Yahoo was gaining traction and Yahoo was selling millions and millions of dollars worth of ads way more ads than I was in 1998. We had built yoyodyne to the point where it was profitable, the folks at Yahoo made us a great offer. We wanted to take our technology and our work even further. So we accept it and we join the Yahoo team and I vividly remember Right. After we joined going on a sales, call with one of Yahoo salespeople and he didn’t use any of the skills, the empathy, the technique that my Salesforce and I had ever used, he just stood in the front of the room, he read a script and then he said and I’m empowered to take up to four million dollars from you but only for the next hour and then we went into the hall and I’m not making this up two minutes later, someone from the client ran out with a check.

Handed it to the Yahoo sales rep, I almost burst into tears, it was very memorable about how easy it was for them to sell an ad. So why was it so easy? And the answer was simple. They were selling the ad on the home page of Yahoo, the mass Market Center of the internet. The one place, where you could brag to your colleagues into your boss, that you had bought an ad, you owned the internet for that day.

That ad was sold out for year at a time. The The thing that was sold out at Yahoo over and over again where the keywords. So, if you typed in, I want to buy a new car, they add that you would see in those search results with sold out. The thing that was going on in the late 1990s, was this brand marketers were being pushed to think like direct marketers because web ads have always been measured. Can’t measure TV, ad can’t measure radio ad not the way you can measure a web ad no one clicks on a billboard but you click On a banner ad and it freaked marketers out that people could measure their cliques because if you got measured it meant that you had to go to your boss and tell her whether or not the ad worked and that’s why most of the time that people bought add some yahoo they never even collected the data because if they had the data, they’d have to tell people how they were doing. Wasn’t direct marketing was brand Marketing in a direct marketing outfit.

Okay. So I That explain how we got to where we are. Here we go up about a month after Yahoo bought my company. They bought another company called hyper parallel. Hyper parallel were seven rocket scientists. They were proud of the fact that they were actual rocket. Scientists who had figured out, how did mine data? There were one of the first data, mining companies. Yahoo had no idea what to do with these seven people. They just bought the company. I’m not sure why they put me in a conference room with them and they say, figure something out. Well, what I knew? Who was that? The keywords? The good keywords were all sold out. They were sold out for months at a time.

Not because they worked though, they might have worked but because the advertisers who were used to buying brand ads, we’re happy to buy them because you could say yeah. Anyone who searches on Yahoo for I want to buy a new car finds us. Well, we’re looking at all this data and I say to them. Well, why don’t we just sell people? The second, click.

So after someone types. I wanna buy a new car and then they don’t click on the add. They’re going to look at the second page of the search results. So they’re going to type in a new search. But we know something about those people, we know that five minutes ago, they were looking for a new car. So now they’re on a different page, a page that maybe no one wants to buy the ad of but we know who they are and what they want, and what they want, or at least what they wanted a minute ago was to buy a new car and so, Yahoo went to advertisers and said you want the second page and that was easy to sell and that was the beginning of data, advertisers didn’t want data because they want data, they wanted data because it was a way to buy an ad cheaper.

That the main goal of someone whose advertising online is either to get a measured result, if they get a measured result, they actually do not care. They ran the ad all they care about is they got a measured result, they paid a dollar, they made $2, this is the untold secret of where Google makes all its money.

Google started by selling ads for 10 cents, a click 15 cents a click. But then once you saw your competitor was buying ads for 15 cents a click, you would pay 20 cents a click 30 cents, a click 40 cents, a click at auction goes on and all of a sudden you’re paying up. up to a penny less than what that click is worth, Google’s collecting almost all the profit, because your alternative is to not buy it, in which case, your competitor buys it, either way, you lose Google wins, that’s the heart of how Google has built a multi-billion dollar Corporation auctioning off, the clicks of people who are interested and then the data comes along and what the data says is well if you’re not really good at measuring, here’s a way of buying A story where you can put your brand at your, in front of these people, not these people, these people not these people.

So, the purpose of the data is, to be able to say, to the advertiser, you can reach people who will take action because we know something about their behavior.

So, to summarize some of the threads here, the first one is this advertisers would prefer to buy Mass, they like, The Super Bowl, they want it to be easy. They want to reach everyone, but everyone is expensive and the web where we spend more and more of our time, isn’t a mass medium, it’s a micro medium.

And as a result, advertisers can’t get what they want. What marketers online needed to do online. Media companies with inventory to sell, so they could build the web so they could change the culture needed to figure. Out. How to get advertisers to pay them, they use data to create lots of little Mass Market opportunities.

Lots of little places, advertisers could afford to buy mass and so they did along the way, a different division of everyone in these media companies raced as hard as it could to get your eyeballs. So they could sell them to someone else. Number two, once the data starts showing up, competitors can get smart. They can figure out how to save money by using the data to start thinking, like, direct marketers.

They don’t want to think like direct marketers, but they have to, they have to, because their competitors are this leads to a little bit of a downward ratchet, because the flat belly diet and other ads that are paying by The Click need to I had to pay more by The Click and so the ads, get more outrageous, and less brand oriented.

And the third big thing to understand is that you are the product. If you use Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, it’s important to understand that these free services exist to sell you to advertisers, and we should go in with our eyes open. Knowing Saying that that is precisely what’s going on.

For years ago, I blogged about the fact that Twitter missed a huge opportunity before Twitter went public. They could have taken a deep breath and said, you know what, we’re not going to create a mass medium paid for by advertisement and Interruption, we’re simply going to charge our best users, the Publishers, the people who put stuff on to the site, who want to be seen and trusted.

Will charge them a monthly fee if they had done that, they would have aligned the interests of the people who use the service with the people who pay for the service, which leads to the last conclusion. Matthew Bartholomew has written a great book called add creep. And in it, he talks about 100 Years of advertisers and especially media companies lobbying litigating and shifting our culture.

Around the idea that advertisements are somehow a form of free speech, and that advertisers should be able to say what they want, when they want to who they want. Because it’s up to them. As we’ve turned advertisers into direct marketers, I think we need to be really aware of the cost of that to our culture to the media that we interact with. The thing is advertisers in an auction field. Environment will always go to the edge and the edge is up to us. It’s up to us to decide what we will tolerate. It’s up to us to decide what we want from the media. We engage in. If we put up Rails, the advertisers will respond appropriately because they want guardrails they don’t want every single moment of our life to be a direct marketing interaction.

It’s not profitable for them, it’s not fun for them, and they are consumers to. But if there are no guardrails, if there is no limit to what kind of surveillance we are under to, what happens to our clickstream, to what happens to our attention, and it’s all up for auction. It’s hard to see how public companies are going to hold back in that environment. It’s going to be a race to the bottom.

So our opportunity is to be really careful with our attention because we only get a certain amount of attention every day. And if we give it away to the wrong organizations in the wrong people, we can’t have it back. Our opportunity is not to click on spam, not to interact. People were not proud to interact with, but most of all Collective action to Collective action of saying, we the consumers, the ones who are being sold to.

These are our standards. Let’s enforce them, the purpose of this podcast so far, eight or nine episodes in is to talk to you about bending the culture. Each of us has a platform to do that. Now, each of us owns a media company, a media company that may or may not be paid. For by advertising. But a media company nonetheless, because each of us publishes our ideas to the world, the opportunity that we have in this moment in time, is to decide how that’s going to get done tomorrow and a year from now and a decade from now because our culture defines who we are, is what we’ve got and it’s what we make it into.

Assess its Maria. My name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison Wisconsin. Hi, Seth Alicia from Charleston here. Hugs and kisses on the pump. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi sir, warm, greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh? Pennsylvania. They said this is Rex. Hey sir. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

Hey Seth, it’s Sam from Los Angeles. My Is if we do work, which Embraces wabi-sabi. How do we know if we’re on track? How do we know if the imperfections are part of something beautiful? Or if they’re simply rough edges which need more polishing. Thank you, it’s a great question. How do we determine the difference between something that is good, really good rough for the right reasons. Human for the right reasons versus something, that’s simply sloppy that has edges for no good reason.

And I think the distinction comes because digital isn’t that good at understanding the nuances of what we need and what we want. It turns out that things that are perfectly smooth and perfectly straight, don’t feel right to human beings. So it’s a little bit of a cop-out to say. I can’t tell you because of course, if I could tell you that, I could teach a computer to do it.

But what I do believe is that many of us, truly, do know, it when we see it. So my linchpin mug, the one that I drink from every day was Handmade by Lori Coop, and Laurie added wabi-sabi. I don’t know if she did it on purpose or if it was merely a byproduct of being a passionate Potter. All I know is that mug works better for me than a regular mugged in a machine. Mate mug, that a mug, they came out of a Six Sigma perfect mold and that’s why law recouping an artist because she understood the difference between one and the other.

Hey, Seth it’s Steven. What’s your perspective on? Contrived, wabi-sabi new furniture with a distressed patina Factory ripped jeans, mass production faking while Wasabi and not always skillfully. What are your thoughts? This question opens a whole can of worms. Because, of course, we’re going to see more and more fake wabi-sabi in the world Chazz, Palminteri the actor, and writer has in his mansion in Bedford. I know from the paper not because I’ve been there, a Jackson Pollock, a Jackson Pollock hanging between the first and the second floor along the stairs.

And if you or I looked at it, I would say, wow, you have a Jackson Pollock, but of course it’s not a real Jackson Pollock. It’s a fake, it’s a fake. That was created for Adam movie about politics life. So, is it real, or is it fake? If we look at it? We think it’s real, it’s real enough. But if he looks at it knows, it’s a fake. Well, then it’s clearly a fake.

And so, I’d like to argue that as we get closer and closer to being able to simulate the work of by hand. And to simulate the work of humanity. What’s going to matter for a long time to come is, do we have a story about it? Do we know its origin did something have to happen for this to be created, was there a struggle along the way because wabi-sabi is always in the eye of the beholder.

But now now that we can simulate it even more than that, it’s in the eye of the story, holder the Storyteller, the person who knows What was involved?

Thanks for listening. And as always, we would love to have your questions. Well, answer them. If we can just visit akimbo link, Aki MB, o, .l, iink and press the appropriate button. There’s a big problem that’s changing everything about the world, as we know it carbon and the impact of humans on the earth, we talked about it with words like climate change and global warming, but there’s just two really important things that you need to know about it. First, this is an overwhelmingly big problem so much, so that is likely that you feel as though your choices don’t matter in the face of it, s, that overwhelming feeling that I just mentioned And it’s intentional is put there by Design. The industries that make the biggest environmental impact have a vested interest in you feeling overwhelmed and Powerless. They have marketed lobbied and schemed to create that feeling in all of us.

In short, we’ve been lied to but here’s the good news. There’s a lot you can do to make a difference in the other. Good news is that there’s still time. The carbon Almanac is a book and project about these problems and what we can do, To solve them. It was created and run by volunteers on the premise that is not too late, but none of us can fix this problem on our own.

We need each other. There are many ways to get involved, but simply learning, more is a great start. Here are three steps. You can take first, go to the carbon Almanac dot org and sign up for the daily difference emails. They give you a short thought and a practical action that you can take alongside thousands of others every day. Second. Get the carbon Almanac book. It’s full of facts. Articles of crafts and art. It’s beautiful and fun to engage with. It’s all footnoted, in fact, checked and importantly, it’s made by volunteers. Whose only agenda is to solve these systemic issues. You can find it wherever books are sold. Finally, since you’re listening to a podcast to search for the carbon Almanac, wherever you’re listening, you’ll find the carbon Almanac podcast Network and a few shows featuring expert Insight, discussion, inspiration and ways to take action, there’s even a show just for kids.

Do what? Eels to you just do something. There’s still time to make a huge difference in the future of the planet, but we can’t solve this on our own. Join us.

==> 1379-the-free-market-has-a-problem- <==

If you know what you want, we’ve developed something – an extraordinary thing – to help you get it. If you want a big box of live ladybugs, if you want glue that even works underwater, if you want a Nicholas Cage mermaid pillow, you can get it. You can get it from the free market. But, the free market has a surprising opponent, and if we’re not careful the free market will devour itself.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

You don’t need Adam Smith to tell you that the peer-to-peer, free market has an invisible hand – somehow figuring out the things that you want, or maybe even need. And somehow, alerting people who want to fight with each other, to help you get it more easily and more cheaply. We call it the free market. The thing is, this free market – buyers and sellers – people scurrying around to try to figure out what others want, is fragile, indeed. It’s rarely free, and it’s hardly stable. And some people, the people who have drunk the Milton Friedman flavor-aid, will tell you that the enemy of the free market is government regulation – I’m not sure that’s true.

I think the enemy of the free market might be capitalism. Capitalism can fuel the free market, but it is not the free market. Capitalism is the idea that capital, ‘money,’ can be used to get machinery to build systems to make things more productive – which leads to a ratchet, called progress. But, capitalism has at least three significant defects. I got this question called in from one of our amazing listeners.

Hi Seth, Sebastian from New York here. I heard you talk about Facebook being a monopoly, which I agree with, but I don’t exactly know why. Would love to hear your thoughts on that, thanks.

What does it mean for something to be a monopoly? Does it have anything to do with the board game? Well, one of the things that an investor seeks, particularly lately because of software, is ‘monopoly’ – taking away people’s choice. Because if you don’t have a choice, you have to pay extra. If you don’t have a choice, you have to do what the capitalist wants you to do. Hundreds of years ago, the concept of Hobson’s Choice developed – Hobson’s choice means you can have anything you want, as long as it’s the one the Innkeeper gives you. Monopoly, in its current incarnation, means you can have this – but you can’t have it any other way, except the way that the monopolist wants you to have it. Which means, that cable companies fight tooth and nail to ensure that you don’t have an easy way to switch where exactly you’re getting your broadband.

It means that yes, indeed, Facebook is a monopoly. It’s a monopoly in the following sense: If all of your friends and colleagues are sharing their social graph on Facebook, you can’t go anywhere else, if you want to engage with those people in that way. If you’re an Advertiser and you want to reach those people, there aren’t multiple ways – other media companies bidding for you to run the ad – there’s only one place to run the ad. If you’re a company and you are using Facebook to connect with the people you think of as your fans and your followers, you will be surprised to discover that, soon after you get started, Facebook starts charging you to reach the people who said they wanted to hear from you in the first place. If you’re disgusted by this and want to go to another social network where all of those people are, you can’t. And you can’t, because Facebook is taking advantage of network effects. In essence, once enough people are part of a social circle, that social circle gets better. And as it gets better, more people join it. Now, what does better mean? Better simply means all the other people like me are here, and it’s sticky. It’s hard for all the people to decide at the same time to leave. It happens, but it’s difficult.

Back in the day, when Microsoft was under assault for antitrust, I saw this firsthand. Microsoft controlled the operating system on most computers. So firmly, in fact, that when Dell wanted to offer machines that only had Linux installed, they still had to pay Microsoft for a Windows license, for that machine. Once you control the operating system, getting people to use your software – things like Word and Excel – is significantly easier. Because, you bury the hooks deep into the operating system. And once you do that, well, then you’re on your way. So when Microsoft decided to get into the online business, AOL was already there, CompuServe was already there. The company I ran, Yoyodyne, was one of of the leading creators of content for services like those and Prodigy. I got a call from Microsoft – they said, “We’re going to be launching an online service next year, called Chicago. We’re inviting you to build content for it. We would like you to do it for free. If you don’t do it for free, you won’t be on the service. And, if you’re not on the service, you’ll be invisible. Because, we’re going to build the online service deep into our operating system, and you’re just going to disappear – up to you”.

It’s this sort of integration that makes it easier and easier for software companies to control the whole stack. Google began with a simple search engine, with only two buttons on it. But, bit by bit, they took that attention and they farmed it, and they fenced it to the point where, yes, they are building a resilient monopoly of how many people are doing many of the things online. Are there alternatives? Sure, you can use DuckDuckGo – I do, but it’s always less convenient. And when people start sharing files, for example in Google Docs, you have to use Google Docs if you want to share a file with them.

This helps explain the crazy valuations and the enormous amount of losses that companies, like WeWork and Uber, have experienced. Why would an investor, a capitalist, back this? Well, the answer is because they figure – if they give enough away, if the deals are irresistible enough, if they put enough people inside what they’re building – then they will create the same, sort of, profitable monopoly that Google and Facebook have created. That in fact, many of these investments are not about the free market, they are investments in long-term monopolistic behavior.

So back to the rant about capitalism. The second challenge that capitalism presents is, it is more and more about the short term. The reason it’s about the short-term, is that capitalism is measured on Return on Investment. And Return on Investment has a denominator, which is time. How much money did you get back per day you had the money out there?

So a 10% return in a week, is a lot better than a 10% return in a year. And, as a result, the shortening of capitalists, combined with the short-term thinking of consumers, and were left with a psycho ward. Nobody is thinking about the long-term. So when I grew up in Buffalo, New York, Love Canal – 20 miles from my house – became a national sensation, because the Hooker Chemical Company just dumped effluent into the canal, year after year, after year. They just dumped it. Someone else’s problem down the road.

Short-term thinking is what the capitalist, who doesn’t know better, embraces. “How do we make the quarter work? Should we spam everybody? Because, after all, if we don’t, we won’t make the quarter work and our stock price won’t go up”. So we have ‘Monopolies,’ we have ‘Short-term thinking,’ and the third one is ‘Corruption’. Left to its own devices, bad players in the market will bribe, or otherwise cajole, or lobby people, to get an advantage.

There’s an expression which is, “Bad money drives out good”. People don’t really understand what that means. What it means is, “If there is counterfeit money in circulation, anyone who is holding counterfeit money will spend it before they spend the ‘real money'”. Because, when the music stops, you don’t want to be left holding the counterfeit money. So, what happens is, the velocity of money that’s counterfeit goes up, and up, and up, until it gets to the point that the only money that’s circulating is fake money. This is why we have to work so hard to make sure that hundred dollar bills that are fake don’t start showing up. Because, once they start showing up a little, they’ll start showing up a lot.

Well, this idea of the bad, driving out the good, also works in the idea of corruption. Because, if one capitalist figures out how to bribe a building inspector – so they can put up a shoddier building – if one person figures out how to bribe a purchasing agent at Walmart to get more market share, well, then the other players are going to be engaged in a race to the bottom. Because, the free market doesn’t know what to do in a world without boundaries. It’s the boundaries that make it free. It’s impossible to play a game of hockey on a rink that’s infinitely long – you need the boards. You need the boards to bounce the puck against, you need the boards to be able to focus your energy.

So, the free market hates monopoly. The free market wants people to have a choice, not the investors of Facebook. But the people who look to get their needs and wants satisfied, want the freedom to be able to choose – to choose a better alternative. But, in markets that are stuck – in places where there is stickiness, where conventions, or standards or rules, which have been put in place by the dominant forces – keep outsiders from getting in. Suddenly, the free market isn’t so free anymore.

Second, the short-term thinking means that it’s difficult to build things for the long haul. It’s difficult to focus on quality – meaning things that will ‘last’. It’s difficult to embrace the idea of side effects being just ‘affects’. What are you putting into the atmosphere? How are you changing our culture? Sure, you can make more money making this Pepsi so that a teenager can drink the whole bottle, in one slam – that’s what they call it. But what are you going to do, 20 years from now, when that teenager drops dead from the complications from diabetes. In the long run, it is not in Pepsi’s interest to kill off its customers, even 20 years from now. But in the short run, ‘share of stomach,’ getting people to drink more, figuring out how to make your market share go up, that’s what drives the capitalist.

And then, the last one is, ‘corruption’. The idea that you can buy your way forward – that you can bully, or power your way through the rules and structures that enabled the free market in the first place. So, if we care about choice, if we care about making things better by making better things, what we have to do is stand up and realize that defending the free market is not the same as defending capitalism. And that crony capitalism, that oligopolies, that kleptocracies, are not something that we want more of in our culture. That what we really want to do, is figure out: how to amplify long-term thinking; how to help people differentiate between what they want, and what they need; how to put education back in the fore – not because you have to do it, but because it makes things better. It opens the door for more possibility and more productivity.

We are capable of using this leverage that we’ve got – the most leveraged free market in history – to surface more needs, more wants, more desires. To bring more fairness and opportunity to the marketplace. To better distribute the options that so many people have and want, rather than giving in to what a few Oligarchs are trying to do – which is to corner the market, make capitalism work for them, and walk away from the very idea of the free market that got us here.

That’s my rant. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.

As always I love to hear from you. You can ask your question by visiting Akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. You’ll also find the show notes for this, and every other episode. We have two questions about software. We’ll start with those. Here’s the first one:

Hi Seth, this is Matt from the UK. I’m following up on your podcast about “Why software is so bad”. I’m aware that some of the people who write the software aren’t the people who decide what gets made, and the people who decide what gets made aren’t always aware of what’s technically possible. Is this an education thing, what can be done about it? I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

Yeah, this is a great point. Here is the deal: the people who are Real Estate developers are rarely Architects. The people who can green-light a movie are rarely film directors. And book publishers –most of them aren’t writers. Here’s the difference: the difference is that in all three of those cases, and in most other cases, the technology of what is being approved or imagined doesn’t change very much. That building a building, is still like ‘building a building’. And when someone like Frank Gehry shows up, it actually changes the game.

Same thing happened in the movie business. When Pixar showed up, a whole bunch of people in the animation business didn’t understand what to do, because they weren’t close enough to the medium, the way that Ed and the rest of the team at Pixar were. And so now in software, the problem shows up constantly because the technology keeps changing. And so, the Software Executive, who was really good at her job a little while ago, doesn’t understand what is possible next – which is why so many software innovations seem to come out of left field. Because they are made by the rare programmer that also has the empathy for what the customer needs, as well as the insight about how to bring it to market. So the way to address the challenge, I think, is for the people in the front office to spend more time in the factory with the programmers – for them to invest the time and the effort and, yes, the humility to be able to say to the best programmers, “What are we able to do?” Because, processing that insight helps them imagine what is possible, and possible is the future of software.

Hi Seth, this is Florin from Transylvania. Yes, that’s Transylvania from Bram Stoker’s novels. As you know, it’s a region of Romania in Eastern Europe. So, I am a software developer and my question is regarding your latest episode, the fact that software is not regarded as a physical product in a way of ownership – of paying money for it, for example. So what has to change to make a digital products a hard to steal as a physical product? Or maybe, is it a question of scarcity in the way that, by stealing software, you do not make it unavailable for the initial owner? Thank you Seth, and thank you for delivering.

Thanks for this question. It is, in fact, our first question from Transylvania. It put a big smile on my face, so thank you. Thanks for the work that you do. Back in the day, software people were obsessed with piracy. I was in the software business in 1983. The Software Products Association spent tons of time and money trying to persuade people to turn in their co-workers for pirating stuff – there were big fancy dongles. I came up with a system where you would call 1-800 MAC LISA, which was the kingpin in the software business, to buy not the software itself, but a code that would make the software work for you. But as Tim O’Reilly has pointed out, in a world of network effects, your enemy isn’t piracy – its obscurity. And that, by many measures, it’s the piracy of software – it’s spreading from person to person – that enabled the network effect in the first place. And the future of software, it seems to me, clearly lies in registering and paying a monthly fee. That when you register, it’s your data, connected to your software.

It’s unlikely, unlike Netflix, that you’re going to share your password very much. And when you pay a monthly fee, it means you’re the customer, not the product. The problem with most social networks, is that they’re free. And, therefore, they are exploiting their users to make a profit. That the future of software in the business to business setting, anyway, is going to be businesses that care enough about what’s being created that they will pay a monthly fee. And then, the software company can spend all of its time making things better for the customers who care enough about the software to pay for it. So spread the software as far as you can, but if you want to use it in a professional setting, register and pay for it. That’s my take on it, anyway.

Hey Seth, this is Jesse from Rochester, New York – just down the road from Buffalo. You frequently talk about the cool projects that you’ve worked on in your career. So I have to believe, with so many different projects, that at some point you’ve encountered a plateau. To me, and I’m sure a lot of other listeners, these plateaus can be extremely frustrating. We stagnate, in terms of readers, or listeners or earnings. Maybe even ‘pounds lost’ on the post-holiday diet. So I’m wondering, Seth, how do you push through these plateaus? What advice, or maybe even empathy, can you offer those of us stuck on a plateau? Thanks, Seth.

This is a great question, thank you so much. You know, plateaus are interesting, because they’re mostly about more. They’re not necessarily about better. “How do I get more clients? How do I get more market share? How do I sell more copies?” And, as I heard your question, I thought about it, and I realized that almost all of my career has not been about getting out of a plateau – it has been about, “Do I get to do this work? Do I have enough followers? Do I have enough credibility with the publisher? Do I have enough resources to do the work, and can I do the work better?” Because that’s enough.

I’m not willing to compromise the work to get more. And one of the challenges we have in an environment where we are surrounded by Survivor Bias, where the ones that get on the covers of the magazines, and the ones we’re all talking about, and the ones that are used as examples – these are the projects or businesses that have broken through – they are the AirBnB’s of the world, where there’s just one zero after another zero. But maybe, that’s not the journey. And maybe, a plateau is exactly what we need. A plateau where we can get firm footing, where we can figure out what we want to do next and to do it well. Now, I have spent lots of time on ‘sinking’ plateaus, on rafts that are taking on water, on projects where there isn’t going to be a ‘next one’. When I was in the CD-ROM business, it became pretty clear there wasn’t going to be a next one. That there are projects, and brands, and clients that I’ve had where, “No, there isn’t enough to keep going”. And in those situations, I didn’t look at it as the plateau – I looked at it as a sinking Iceberg.

“Where do we go from here?” Because the journey is to keep doing the work. The journey is to figure out how to find, elevate, and connect the people we seek to serve. And so, taking a deep breath and walking away from that. Walking away when AOL had been my biggest customer to say, “Well, we can’t support working for AOL anymore,” because they changed their business model. And these gaps, at least for me, these gaps let the light in. Because when you’re looking at the fact that there might not be a raft to hold onto, a platform to work on, that’s when you take a deep breath and say, “I’m gonna have to do something that feels risky right now”. Not just the intellectual risk of, “What will I make next?” But, the existential organizational risk of, “If we don’t dig in deep, and figure out where our next platform is, we’re done”. And, I’ve probably had a dozen of those shifts in the last 30 years. And, I hate them and I love them at the same time.

Because, it’s energizing to realize that you’re going to have to do it again. You’re going to have to discover, again. You’re going to have to earn trust, again. And then you get to do the work, for a while anyway, but you know in the back of your head, it’s never the end. Because this place that we are playing in – it’s not stable. Frank Gehry shows up and changes Architecture, the Kindle and Audible show up and change book publishing – go down the list. The platforms keep changing. That’s what this podcast has been about, for a hundred episodes. The platforms are going to keep changing, and that’s what we’re in it for. The chance to surf it, the chance to create something new. Because, the very destruction that made it hard to figure out what’s going to happen next, is what opened the door to let us figure out what’s going to happen next.

Thanks for listening. Go make a Ruckus.

==> 1473-cohesion-and-commerce- <==

Why don’t we spatchcock the turkey? Every competent Chef knows that a 15 pound turkey with its large cavity, with its white meat and it’s dark meat is almost impossible to roast properly. It takes a long time. The dark meat isn’t cooked. The white meat gets dry. It’s a pain in the neck. Why not spatchcock the turkey, in which we remove the spine, push it down flat on a baking sheet and in less time, with less fuss, we get a better turkey. The reason we don’t spatchcock the turkey is that Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton didn’t do it that way.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

You might be listening to this around Thanksgiving, or you might not – it doesn’t matter. The lessons transfer to so many elements of our culture. The reason that we care about Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton is that she was Norman Rockwell’s neighbor. And Norman Rockwell painted a painting in the early 1940s that was on the cover of the most important largest circulation magazine in the country. And that painting ‘Freedom from Want’ ended up teaching everyone what Thanksgiving was supposed to be like. Thanksgiving, like Christmas, like so many other elements of mass culture, is about two things – cohesion and commerce. At the first Thanksgiving, if there was a first Thanksgiving, at the Thanksgiving of Legend, they almost certainly didn’t eat a turkey the Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton served a turkey.

They probably ate seal, they definitely ate Lobster, and they almost certainly didn’t have cranberries. Because cranberries weren’t commercially cultivated in North America until after the Revolutionary War. We have Thanksgiving in the United States and Canada. And in the United States, more than 90% of the people in the countries celebrate together every year. That’s one of the highest levels of conformance to a cultural meme that I can think of. Why do we do that?

Why is it celebrated in Liberia? Why is it celebrated in Scandinavia? And why is it always celebrated in such a similar way? Before 1910, before the era of mass media, none of this was true. Christmas was a religious holiday, perhaps for some a drinking holiday, but it certainly wasn’t a cultural phenomena. And Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving came in dribs and drabs. There’s an excellent argument to be made at the first Thanksgiving with actually in Virginia, not in Massachusetts. But it was a local holiday, it didn’t happen on the same day around the country. The memes and the tropes were not coherent or all lined up.

Then in 1827, a woman – a writer, Sarah Josepha Hale – started a letter-writing campaign. It lasted for 40 years. For 40 years, she agitated, she lobbied and she wrote letters. And it wasn’t until Abraham Lincoln showed up needing something to possibly unify his fractured country that Thanksgiving became an ‘official holiday’. But even then, it wasn’t always celebrated in the same way.

Fast forward to the early 1920s. Macy’s has a problem. Their problem is they’re a newly public company, a retailer. A retailer with some success. They have a new store, a city block long in New York City, but they still have archenemies, like Gimble’s, and they are still fretting about the fact that Americans aren’t buying enough stuff. Then in the 1920s, industrialists had a very significant problem. And their problem was that factories were better than ever at making stuff. They could make stuff in huge quantities, but that people, people were that good at buying stuff. That the typical person had two or three pairs of shoes. That the typical person might get by with two or three pairs of slacks. The idea that we would need a storage unit, that we would pay money to keep our stuff somewhere else because our house is too full was insane.

So Macy’s needed a way to get people into the buying mood. Of course, they came up with a parade. Well, they didn’t really come up with a parade. They stole the idea from Gimble’s. And the first Thanksgiving Day Parade featured lions and tigers and bears, somehow taken from the derelict Central Park Zoo, which sort of bothered a lot of the people on the Parade route. And in future years, after the success of the first parade, Macy’s switched to balloons.

The first one was Felix the Cat. They filled him with helium. When they were done, they let him go. As far as I know, he’s now on the moon. The Thanksgiving Day Parade had a very specific purpose. And its purpose was to get people into the holiday mood, because once Thanksgiving is here, Christmas is just around the corner. And the idea that we should buy a lot and lots of stuff for other people for Christmas, is a deliberate invention by people who have lots and lots of stuff to sell us.

Let’s go sideways for a second and talk about cranberry sauce, because almost all of the cranberries that are sold whole in North America, are sold just before Thanksgiving. Now, almost all of those are grown through a Cooperative called Ocean Spray. And because cranberries are harvested basically under water, more chemicals are used on cranberries than the typical fruit or vegetable. In fact, in 1959, the first carcinogen scare in the history of our country happened when a chemical called Aminotriazole was applied too late in the cranberry growing process. And they found an entire barrel of cranberries covered with this carcinogen. As a result, the President didn’t serve cranberries at his Thanksgiving dinner and sales of cranberries went down 70% that year. Still, 60 years later, fewer than 1 in 1,000 cranberries that are grown are grown organically. Because we need yield. Because commerce rules the day. Because cranberries go with turkey. Because Ocean Spray fought hard to put cranberries on the menu

There’s a cultural dynamic here, it might even be genetic. That human beings want to do what other people like us are doing. And that’s a good thing, because it enables us to have society, to have community. But what marketers have done, aided by mass media, is weaponized it, is amplified it. As Mick Jagger sang, “I Can’t Get No”. So what Mick is saying, is your manhood, your position in the community, is directly related to what kind of cigarettes you’re smoking. Which, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. Unless you’re the marketer of that brand of cigarette. So if it weren’t for the power of the Saturday Evening Post with it reaching almost every culturally aware citizen in the United States. If it weren’t for the vivid imagery of Norman Rockwell. If it weren’t for his ability to tap into a deep-seated desire to do what other people were doing. Then no, we wouldn’t be eating a Thanksgiving turkey that looked ‘just like that one’.

As a vegetarian, I haven’t had a turkey in a really long time. But I see products, like Tofurkey. I see the stress that shows up. “Oh you’re coming on Friday, not on Thursday? Thursday is the official day. Thursday is the day where we’re ‘supposed’ to have Thanksgiving”.

Okay, let’s slip back in time to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After the Depression, it was largely understood by Economists that one way out of the depression would be to get people to buy more stuff. So what did Franklin Delano Roosevelt do? He moved the day of Thanksgiving. He moved it from its ‘official day’ which of course had only been official for 80 years, to a week earlier. His theory was that getting people into the buying spirit a week earlier would spur sales. Critics called it ‘Franksgiving’ instead of Thanksgiving. And our desire for cohesion, the regular kind – fitting in, doing it on the appointed day – made it so that his experiment failed. And Thanksgiving went back to the ‘day’ it’s supposed to be. ‘Supposed to be’ in quotation marks, because there is no real origin story to Thanksgiving. It’s about cohesion and commerce.

Back to the idea of commerce. Black Friday – where does that come from? Well, it has nothing to do with the stock market crash. Black Friday is named because a football. Football is inextricably linked with Thanksgiving, because both seasons overlap. And there’s an Army-Navy game every year – I believe it’s still held near Philadelphia, still on the Saturday around Thanksgiving.

And what was happening in Philadelphia is that fans would come to Philadelphia a couple days early to party, to get together, to be ready for the game. And they would invade the local retailers, and the retailers at first didn’t like this, because they needed extra police. Because there was shoplifting. Because there was revelry in the aisles. And then over time, they came to understand that more shopping was a good thing.

And so they paid extra for security and Black Friday was born. Then, the National Retail Federation, a huge association of merchants and retailers, saw a business opportunity. And the business opportunity was this – there’s not a lot to write about on Thanksgiving day. That the newspapers can’t publish recipes – it’s too late. The Newspapers don’t have that much news, because not much happened the day before Thanksgiving. So what to write about? Well what the NRF came up with was an annual opportunity to write about, and on the local news to broadcast about, Black Friday.

They turned shopping into both a business event and a sport. And so one retailer after another would go out of their way to create a loss leading sale that would lead to mania, perhaps riots, if everything went. Well, that would get on the news and make people feel insecure about their cohesion to cultural standards. And thus, have them engage in even more commerce.

Here’s my favorite quote, “It was a strong weekend for retailers. but an even better we can for consumers who took advantage of some really incredible deals, NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said. In fact, over one-third of Shoppers said 100% of their purchases were on sale”. There are so many falsehoods and statistical weasels in this one sentence, I’m sort of stunned that someone could put together such a perfect sentence.

What does ‘on sale’ even mean? That what the NRF has done has created this pseudo-scientific accounting charade that implies that there’s some sort of moment in time where businesses either going to the black or they don’t. Where this ‘magical day,’. the day after Thanksgiving, is both a commercial imperative and a cultural essential. That going to the stores on Friday is just as important as celebrating with your family on Thursday.

So now we get to my peripheral participation in all of this nonsense. Back in the 1990s, when internet shopping was in its infancy, I was running a company that did internet marketing – Yoyodyne. Well, one of the organizations we dealt with was called shop dot-org and they called upon our Head of Marketing, Jerry Shereshewsky, and said “How are we going to get people to start shopping online?”

Well, Jerry was instrumental in inventing Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday meant – don’t deal with all the craziness and the crowds on Friday. Just wait till you get to work on Monday, because at work there’s reliable internet. And at work, you can avoid work by shopping online. And so, one person sitting in a committee room, invented Cyber Monday. So we have Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Back to Norman Rockwell. If you look at Norman Rockwell’s painting – the one that established that the turkey shouldn’t be spatchcocked. The one that established that the point of the holiday was to sit at a certain style of New England table with a certain kind of family unit, eating a huge sort of tasteless turkey while pretending to get along with one another. If you look in the corner of that painting, you will see Jim Martin. And Jim Martin is looking right at the camera.

It’s not quite a selfie, but it’s awfully close. What modern culture has done is taken family events, private events, personal interactions, and had us realize that we are on camera. That we are part of the culture. That as we see others, they are seeing us. That fitting in is part of the deal. That being in sync – cohesion and commerce – is part of what we’re supposed to do. It’s important to remember that we can benefit from these control tropes that have been invented for selfish reasons by marketers and media companies. But we don’t have to do the ones that don’t benefit us. That we can take what we take and leave the rest. Because it’s not up to someone else to decide what sort of holiday we’re going to have.

In fact, it’s up to us to decide what sort of holiday we’re willing to respect – how we will spend our time. Whether we will be stressed by the fact that we weren’t one of the thirty percent of shoppers that got 100% of their stuff on sale. That we don’t have to spend 20 to 40 percent of our discretionary income on Christmas presents, if we don’t want to. That the purpose of culture is not to enable capitalism.

The purpose of capitalism is to enable culture. And so we have these holidays. Back in the 1500s, it turned out there were more than a hundred and thirty holidays a year. So we’ve certainly scaled back. But as we’ve scaled back, loaded them up, we made them fraught with compliance. Compliance leads to cohesion and cohesion enables commerce. But, we don’t have to enable either if we don’t want to.

One more thing. Several months from now, around the world, people of the Jewish faith will be celebrating Passover. If Thanksgiving is a harvest holiday, Passover is a planting holiday – a spring holiday. But, one of the things that goes on at the Passover celebration, which is remarkably like Thanksgiving in that the family is sitting at the table, – not they’re going to place of worship – is that people go around the table and read prayer book called the Haggadah.

Well in the United States, there was a challenge. And in 1932, the Maxwell House Coffee Company, seeing a commercial opportunity to create cohesion, stepped up and took advantage of the opportunity. What they started doing was publishing the first widely available English-Hebrew Haggadah, about and giving it away for free, or close to free, at supermarkets around the country. 1932, a key moment in mass marketing as we were coming out of the depression, as standards were being established, suddenly one of the things it meant to be part of the Jewish community is that you understood the layout and you had used the Maxwell House Haggadah.

In fact, when President Obama had Seders in the White House, this is the Haggadah that they used – going around the table, reading the words in English that everybody else was. Well, combining those two ideas, several years ago, Alex Peck and I put together a free Thanksgiving Reader. You can find it at thethanksgivingeader.com, and there you’ll find a beautifully designed PDF that you can download and print out. And that people can go around the table and read – in any form that you want, because it’s your Thanksgiving dinner. That cohesion might not require commerce. And that cohesion might not mean that you are doing whatever everybody else is doing. It might just mean that you’re doing what you and the people you care about are doing. Whether or not you’re eating seal, whether or not you’re eating cranberries, whether or not you’re watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Have a safe and healthy holiday. Hugs to you and your family, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening.

As always, I truly love to hear from you. If you visit Akimbo dot link, that’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, you’ll find the show notes for this and every other episode, including the link to the Thanksgiving Reader. And there’s also the appropriate button there to press and ask a question. So please, go ahead and chime in with yours. Have a great holiday season.

Hey Seth, it’s Steven from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. I have a question about questions. Some questions prompt a really generous answer. A riff or a rant, or something that seems to serve everyone. But, I’ve been in some settings where questions fall flat. So, from your perspective, what makes a question juicy. Thanks Seth, for the ratchet you turn, and for the ruckus you make, and for teaching us to do it too.

Yeah, what makes a good question? I’m going to highlight a few elements that seem to work. The first one is enrolment, meaning that the questioner is on the same journey as the person being asked. This is very different than the hostile witness mindset. This is very different than using questions to berate or to even seek to change someone’s mind. That if you are open, and seeking to go where the other person can help you go, the right question can inspire the person you’re asking to bring out their best version of an answer. And the second piece, which is also critical, is that a good question is filled with respect. The respect of, “This person might know something I need to know”. So a good question feels, to the person you’re asking it to, like it’s giving them a chance to speak up and contribute. Too often, both of those elements are missing, particularly in a school setting.

Hi Seth, Alby here from London. My question is about the conflict between capitalism and the free market. Peter Thiel has also recognized the dichotomy between these two things, but he seems to welcome the accumulation of capital in business, in the creation of monopoly. I think he believes that, to truly exploit the disruptive potential of data in our society, we have to allow these monopolies into our lives. If we were to realize your hypothetical example of the ‘smart fridge,’ do we have to necessarily give up our privacy and freedom to do this?

I want to start by highlighting that privacy and freedom aren’t always the same thing. As I’ve talked about previously, if you are using almost any system in our modern world, if you’re going outdoors without a mascot, if you are carrying a smartphone, you gave up your privacy a long time ago. But we really want is to not be surprised.

What we really want is the independent freedom to do what we want to do, as long as it’s not bothering other people, without a powerful entity somehow getting involved. And this freedom, this freedom is part of data portability. Can I take my social graph with me when I leave Facebook – yes or no? If I have a fridge and it’s really smart, is the data mine? Can I teach the data to act on my behalf to train and engage with other parties in a way that benefits me? Because as a data Monopoly is only profitable, because it’s a monopoly. A data monopoly is dependent on people not having a choice. On the other hand, if we can create a free market in data, where your data is your data. Or we can trade and leverage our own data to learn more to get more of what we want, well we can leave one open market and go to another open market. Then, the law of free market make it more likely that you will be served better, because the middle people – the people who are somehow creating value from exchanging data – they know that we can go to the next place.

It’s really fascinating that a lot of the rich people who have made so much money in the open free market of trading dollars around the world, decide that the rest of us have to live with places where we don’t have many choices. The fact is, if you’ve got money to invest, it’s a free market in where you will invest it. If you’re looking for a bank account, there are lots of places you can put your money. Your money isn’t locked into one place forever, just because of Bank touched it. And so, going forward, I think we need to agitate, and I think it’s unlikely it’s going to work, for open free markets in things like information and data. Because only when we do that, do we get away from the regime of the SAT, the ACT, cable television, social networks, and on and on. Where natural monopolies are forming, because it’s just too hard to move our data around.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1632-selfish-ideas- <==

It’s flu season and a hundred and one years ago this winter, the H1N1 flu virus arrived for the first time. Known as the Spanish Flu, it infected 500 million people. It infected people in the Arctic, it infected people on remote Pacific Islands. It ended up killing between 50 million and 100 million people. That’s about 5% of all the people on earth. And the thing is, the flu didn’t do it on purpose.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

What does the flu virus want? Well, it doesn’t want anything not in the sense that you want a back rub or a vegan ice cream sandwich. Now, it wants something, because that’s a good way to understand Its behavior. Richard Dawkins wrote a book years ago that has been misunderstood by people who haven’t read it, called the Selfish Gene.

Genes don’t make us selfish, but it is easier to understand how genes work if we imagine that they are selfishly trying to replicate. Well in the case of the flu virus, a successful flu virus is one that can live in a lot of people. If you start killing off the people where you are living, well then your prospects for the future go down. Particularly, if it had been just one order of magnitude more affective and had wiped out half or more of the population. Kill all the humans, you’ve ended up killing the flu virus as well.

So what does the flu want? It wants to spread and this is a short podcast about something else – viruses that are ideas. In his book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins threw away a chapter talking about this idea he had called memetics. He said, “What if we could understand the spread of ideas by applying the thinking of epidemiology? What if we understood the idea of ideas by using the thinking behind genetics? Maybe instead of genes, we could call them memes”

And Susan Blackmore followed that up with a book, in which she expanded much more detail about the idea of ideas as viruses. So here’s what we know about epidemiology. Epidemiologists keep track of something called R0. It’s ‘R’ with a zero after it, probably because a British person named it, instead of calling it R zero. Either way, R0 is the measure of once you are infected, say with the flu, how many other people will you infect?

If the number is say, 0.5, what that means is that if ten people have the flu, they will infect five more people and will end up with 15, and it will scale down from there. If R0 goes over 1, even for a little while, what it means is that every person who gets it infects more than one other person, and it scales to infinity. So in order to reach half a billion people, the Spanish Flu of 1918 had an R0 that gusted to well over 1. It was particularly contagious. And there are ideas in our culture that are also contagious. What makes an idea or a virus contagious, there are several factors. One is, how many times do you have to be exposed to it before you get it? Number two is, how long do the germs or the ideas stick around?

So for example, a Tweet is here today, it’s gone tomorrow. A tattoo, on the other hand, is seen by everyone you encounter for the rest of your life, so it’s more persistent. And then the idea is, “Who is it infecting?” Because the measles infect kids. Kids go to preschool, kids kiss each other, touch each other, play with shared items. So the measles is really contagious because the vector on which it travels, kids helps it be more contagious.

So now we can look at what the internet has done. The internet is the equivalent of preschool for ideas. Because what the internet did is take ideas out of the library where they slowly move around in books that are stored in basements, and instead puts them into a supercharged, high-speed place where they can bounce around, touching people, infecting them, and then touching more people. The internet is a petri dish a place we built to make it optimal for an idea to be contagious, to spread from person to person. Then we move on to this idea of hive immunity.

Here’s what we know if 95% of the people in a population get the measles vaccine, even though 5% of the people haven’t been inoculated for health reasons, they probably won’t get measles. Because measles, when it tries to spread – there it is, ‘trying’ – when measles tries to spread from someone who has it to someone who’s been vaccinated, it fails. And because that vector is blocked off, it dies out. You can check out the show notes at Akimbo.link to see what happens if we go from 95% vaccination to 93% vaccination. Just that small shift eliminates hive immunity for a disease like the measles. Just that tiny shift is enough to allow it to spread, and spread it will.

If you are surrounded by people who’ve been infected by an idea, it doesn’t matter how much you are protecting yourself. Sooner or later, you will get infected as well. So I keep crossing back and forth between viruses and ideas, because they are similar, indeed. What we know for example, is that early on people were super susceptible to spam, to spam that promised big money, to spam that was poorly written, to spam from Nigerian Princes.

And over time, people got less susceptible to it. They became, eventually, immune. The ones who didn’t go bankrupt in the first place, won’t go bankrupt because they learned from the process. So, over time, what the media is doing is constantly serving up a fresh supply of ideas – ideas that we are not resistant to yet. And the chaos continues. Because just as the flu wants to spread, ideas do as well. And this time they are being created, engineered, by people who are doing it on purpose.

What they are doing is reverse engineering how to structure an idea, so that once we see it, we won’t be able to avoid it. And in fact, we’ll have no choice but to spread it. That’s a hyperbolic exaggeration, of course. We do have a choice about whether to spread it or not. So when BuzzFeed started creating listicles, silly little ways to waste time, if the people who had first seen it hadn’t spread it you never would have heard of them. But spread it they did. They had a choice, but they chose to spread it. The question is, “Why? Why would someone who sees an idea online choose to spread that idea – hit the forward button, the retweet button, the Like button?”

Well, why did these sites even build the forward button, the retweet button, and the Like button? They built them because part of what it means to be in a culture, is that we get status and satisfaction from spreading a certain kind of idea. Now different cultures reward certain kinds of ideas spreading. The gloom and doom of, “Oh my God we’re all going to die, armageddon is here, it’s the end of the world is nigh, there’s a fire in the movie theater” works in some populations, during some periods of time. In others, ones that might be more relentlessly optimistic, a different kind of idea is going to spread. So what we know from memetics, just as we know from genetics, the place we are living – the culture that we are in – matters to figure out what kind of idea or virus or organism is going to succeed or spread.

I don’t think it’s an accident that we call it ‘the culture’. It’s a living, breathing thing. If you are a fish and you have fish grandchildren, and those fish grandchildren have mutated to survive better in water that’s warm, and the planet warms up the water, your grandchildren are going to do better then the other fish that want the water to be cold. On the other hand, if the water is chilling because the ice caps are melting, making the water where you live as a fish colder, your grandchildren are doomed. That mutation did not help them. The culture, the place you live in that water, has changed. And so, their phenotype, their genotype, the kind of organism they were born to be, will succeed or fail to succeed. The thing is, the only way to mess with genes is to have kids, but we get to mess with ideas all we want. And so, the race is on to figure out what is the culture like right now.

What idea will we spread to which people, who are hoping to hear from us, so that when those people hear that idea like the Spanish flu, but hopefully far more benign, these people will choose to spread it. They will spread it because it’s good for them. And what makes it good for them is based on who they are spreading it to, and what sort of feedback they get from those folks.

But here’s the key: as we spread ideas, we are changing the culture, because the culture is nothing but shared ideas. And so we have this recursion. Ideas change the culture, culture changes the ideas, ideas change the culture, culture changes the ideas. So if we’re stuck saying, “No, the ideas we want to traffic in are precisely the same ideas that worked 30 years ago” our ideas aren’t going to spread. If we are trying to spread ideas because they will help us selfishly, but will not help the person we want to spread them, they will not spread them.

But third, and the most important part, and the reason this podcast even exists, and I am coming more and more to the conclusion, it is the compass point of my professional life – we are responsible for the ideas we choose to spread. And so, just because an idea is going to spread, just because it will infect someone, or even a new term I just learned – ‘super infect them’ – which means that in their weakened state after being infected the first time, they’re infected by a slightly different version the second time, piling on over and over again until the organism parishes. If we’re going to infect and super infect our culture, I think we have to realize we’re responsible.

And that we have the choice to put into the culture infectious ideas with a high R0 that spread and leave behind in their wake, a version of better, an elevation, an embracing of possibility. Or perhaps, we just say, “Well, I’m just doing my job”. And we put listicles into the world, and we put negative stuff into the world, and we bring things down. Because we can, because we got paid for it, because it gives us some sort of perverse pleasure.

Well, as Marc Andreessen says ‘software is eating the world’ and software is structuring our culture. Putting the retweet button, putting the Like button, building the dark patterns into social networks and to smartphones, coming up with what are the boxes on the form, what questions are we asking, how are we demonstrating status or non status among the people that we serve – all of these choices are as important as, “Are there seatbelts in the car? Are we going to build a car at all? Do doctors wash their hands after they deliver a baby or have visited the morgue?”

These principles, these concepts, these engineering innovations – they all add up to the culture and the culture is a giant soup that organisms are living in, and so are ideas. And we get to bend it. We get to influence it, way more than we would like to think.

I know an eight-year-old who brought a yoyo into school on just the right day. If he had brought it in a year earlier or year later, if a different kid had brought it in, that would have been the end of it. But because this kid brought the yo-yo in on the right day to the right school, within a week dozens of kids were yo-yoing. And within a month, everyone had a yo-yo. And then a few weeks after that, yo-yos were gone again. They come and they go, but someone went first. Someone said here, “What do you think of this?” Someone started spreading an idea. And now, thanks to the dissolution of the TV industrial complex, of the three channels, of Walter Cronkite, a few people deciding which ideas we would see, we’re left with us. Just us. What will we share? What will we speak about? What will we engage in? Because that is the choice of our time.

Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, go ahead and share this podcast, or not. Whether it’s good for you, it’s up to you. We’ll see you next time.

A PS., and a bonus. 20 years ago, when I was pretty much done with writing, after having done Permission Marketing and then had a whole bunch of speed bumps and other bumps in my journey, I got a galley of a book called The Tipping Point by an unknown author named Malcolm Gladwell. Well, it unlocked something in me. And reading the galley, I then turned around and wrote an entire book in just a couple weeks called Unleashing The Idea Virus. I wanted to be sure I hadn’t stolen Malcolm’s thunder. So I sent it to him and he kindly wrote the foreword for the book. Well, I needed to take my own advice and the advice in the book was, “Ideas that spread win”. The advice in the book was we need to unlock an idea from paper if we want it to reach people.

So I went to my publisher, the guy who had published Permission Marketing – a New York Times Bestseller – and I said, “I want to publish Unleashing The Idea Virus, but here’s the deal. One, it needs to come out in four weeks because it’s very current, and two, I want to give away the digital copy for free.

Now, this was before the Kindle, so there was only one way, pretty much, to give away the digital copy, which was – for free. And he read the book, and he said, “Hey, great book, but we are not going to let you give it away, and it’s going to take a year for it to come out”. So I decided to take my own advice and we put the PDF of the book online for free – the whole thing. You can find it at the show notes, Akimbo dot link.

Well, because of when we released it, it became, at the time, the most successfully e-book ever written. Because the culture was ready for that. It was a 1,000 people, then 5,000 people, then 10,000 people, then 2 million people, then 4 million people. And folks said “Well, how can you make money giving a book away for free?”

Well, I wasn’t doing it to make money. I was doing it to make a difference. But the interesting aside, is that then I self-published the hardcover, which went to number 5 on the Amazon bestseller list, among all books. And then we sold Japanese rights and it went to number 4, and more people called me to give speeches, and on, and on. But that’s not why I did it. I did it because it was an idea I wanted to help spread about how ideas spread. Reading it 20 years later, many people say, “Well, yeah, that’s obvious”. And that’s the way ideas work, because it wasn’t obvious then, but it might be obvious now. So where is your idea virus? What idea will you choose to bring to the world and put your name on it?

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you.

I love to hear from you. If you’d like to ask a question, please visit Akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, Amanullah from Gothenburg, Sweden. I have two questions. I’m a freelance consultant. I also teach and facilitate projects and workshops based on design thinking and I often have an emphasis on mindset aspects – that subject. And I have found that your phrase “Who is it for, and what is it for?” – to me, really captures the essence of Design Thinking. My second question comes from having English as a second language. When I translated the phrase “People Like Us, Do Things Like This” which is an emphasis on rituals or a way that things are done. I would really love to hear your perspective on the balance or the interplay between these two, in establishing culture. And I’m also curious on how that phrase emerged. Thank you very much for your brilliant podcast. It is part of making Wednesday’s my favorite part of the week. So, thank you very much. Bye.

I love thoughts about how we pronounce a sentence we’ve seen in writing, “People Like Us Do Things Like This”. Is it, People Like Us ‘do’ things like this? Is it People Like Us Do ‘things’ like this. Or is it People Like Us do things like ‘this’? Well, in this case, they almost all mean the same thing, which is that people like us is flexible. People like us, means that, in this moment, I am seeing you, teaching you, accepting you, embracing you, inviting you to be part of people like us.

And things like this, or things like this? They all mean we took an action. We made a change happen. We have a ritual. There’s a way that we are in the world. ‘We’ meaning people like us, so it’s a badge, it’s a totem. It’s a way of identifying yourself as part of ‘us’. And I think that’s the simplest explanation of what culture is. Culture is people like us, you know, the ones like us. And how do you know you’re one of us? Because you do things like this.

Hi Seth, this is Johnny on the Australian Sunshine Coast. I was listening to your podcast recently about ‘The free market has a new enemy that might be capitalism’. You talked about when you have a game, you’ve got to have boundaries, and that’s what makes the game worth playing. I’m wondering if you’re an advocate of those boundaries being government regulation, or what bodies would regulate a game to really allow for a free market, in which the skills of the players can compete more evenly on an even field. Thanks Seth, love your stuff.

Thank you for this question. Off the top of my head, here is a few we have rules about which laws you’re not supposed to break. We have rules about how you’re supposed to hire people fairly. We have rules about paying people a living wage – no indentured servitude. We have rules about building a workplace where you’re not having people chop off their hands using equipment that isn’t properly designed. We have rules about not dumping your effluent into the river and poisoning people. We have rules about not bribing elected officials. We have rules about not hiding when the inspector comes. All of these rules are accepted, and none of them were accepted 300 years ago.

300 years ago, it was viewed as an intrusion to say, “You can’t hire an eleven-year-old”. It was viewed as an intrusion to say you can’t lock the emergency door and if there are women in the factory and there’s a fire, well, sorry, they’re just going to die. We didn’t want those sorts of incursions on, quote, free enterprise and so it was fought. But one by one, tragedy after tragedy, democracy wins out. And what happens is the people, the people realize that they they are in the majority. The owners? The owners, not so much. But more important, what people realize is putting in safety measures, putting in measures that make culture better end up costing all competitors the same. So, sure, goods and services end up costing more than if they were made in more of a rough shot way, but that cost is spread around, and now the people who work in the factory have more money and more health, which means that they can afford to pay more for the things they buy. This has been going on for centuries. It should no longer be controversial.

There are two ways for the free market to proceed. One way is to dismantle oversight, to say buyer beware about all things, to race to the bottom. And there are certainly places in the world you can go where those are the accepted rules. The other way is to race to the top. And when we race to the top, what we’re saying is, “We have work so we can have culture and life,” not the other way around. That it is possible to embrace a fair, level playing field in which we get to compete on things like durability, engineering excellence, utility, and the impact of our work on the rest of us.

The thing that puzzles me is why the leaders in various industries don’t insist on this. Back when I was pioneering email marketing, permission marketing, I testified in Washington DC about spam, insisting that we needed regulation to make it against the law to spam people. And the Direct Marketing Association showed up and testified against me. And their argument was, “We don’t need any regulation”.

Well, they realized soon after that, they were wrong. Because if spam is legal, the people are going to spam the most, are the people with nothing to lose. They’re going to pollute the entire medium. The ethical people who are racing to the top and trying to make things better will find themselves having no choice, but to chase the people who are trying to tear down the medium.

They would have been better off from the start, in saying, “No, no, no. We need there to be systems in place to keep this vibrant, to make it work, to only talk to people who want to be talked to”. And we can expand from this trivial example to larger ones ones about health, and safety, and cultural well-being.

So yeah, I think there are plenty of ways that we can put more rules in place. Hockey and football don’t work if you don’t have refs. People are really bad at calling their own fouls. Creating a system where it is tempting to anonymously race to the bottom will mean that many people anonymously race to the bottom. I think we can do better than that.

Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1640-publishing-is-hard- <==

Making is easy. But publishing? Publishing is hard.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

That’s a crazy statement. Making is really hard – making a Broadway play, making a hit record album, making a book, making a pacemaker that doesn’t break. This is hard hard work. But you know what’s harder? It’s harder to reliably make those things successful. Here’s a easy piece of math. Listen to 100 records in a row from any year you choose – 1970, 1990, 2019 – in whatever genre you like. Listen to them without paying attention to how many copies they sold. I think what you’ll find is that all of them are pretty good, and some of them are exceptional. And there isn’t a lot of correlation between the exceptional ones, and the ones that sold a lot of copies. For just as many copies as the Beatles sold of a classic song, they also sold copies of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

Turns out that the Emerson String Quartet makes records that are awfully good but, pretty randomly, some sell more than others. What is publishing anyway? Publishing is the act of taking a financial risk to bring a new idea to people who haven’t heard about it yet. So publishing and marketing are slightly elide, but publishing – publishing is a personality driven business. That when you are the creator of something, you go to find a publisher because you’d love to get quote back to work creating the next thing. That it shouldn’t be Lin-Manuel Miranda’s job to sell tickets to Hamilton. He should be busy writing the next thing. Creators have established this mythology for ourselves that the work is creating and that somebody else should be the publisher.

I did a hundred and twenty books when I was a book packager – a book a month for 10 years. I pitched more than a thousand different ideas. And yes, some of them were really stupid, like how to hypnotize your friends and get them to act like chickens. But many of the books that I pitched were great ideas that, later, other people went on with a very similar idea to sell a bunch of. The publishers had to pick between the ones they decided to publish and the ones they turned down.

I still can’t exactly figure out how they chose. In the words of the late screenwriter William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything”. He wrote that about Hollywood, because in Hollywood, as in the book business, all bestsellers are ‘surprise’ bestsellers. Sure, you know that the sequel’s going to do 80% as well as the original, maybe 50% better, maybe half as well. But that’s not a surprise. But everything else, everything else you bring to the market, if it works, it’s stunningly surprising. If it fails, it’s stunningly surprising because nobody knows anything. And as we’ve tried to quantify the selection process for creative work, we have relentlessly failed at it. There is no reliable algorithm.

So you might ask, “What about people like John Hammond?” He had golden ears and great taste. Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, all the way back to Benny Goodman – one guy one string of hits, except we forget all of his duds. It turns out that if you get lucky or loud early on in your publishing career, you get to play more often. And if you get to play more often, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have more hits which will let you play more often. Sure, there’s a normal distribution of batting averages. Some people are going to do better than others. That’s just randomness.

And yes, there is definitely skill involved in being better than average at publishing. But publishing is hard, and the reason it’s hard is because we’re not publishing to automatons, we’re publishing to humans. And we get stuck on what is better. What is better – a $380,000 Ferrari, or a $19,000 twenty-year-old Mazda Miata? Which one is better? Which one would you buy?

Well, they both sell. So people who could afford either one – some of them pick the Ferrari, some of them pick the Miata. If you ask ask those people which one is better, you will get two different answers. People make extraordinary choices every day about how to spend their time or their money. On Netflix at any given moment, there are hundreds and hundreds of shows to watch and they’re all free. Once you’ve paid for Netflix, the next show you watch only costs you time. Which one is better? Which one should you watch next? As I covered four seasons ago, quality is different than luxury. Quality doesn’t mean how perfect it is, how expensive it is. Quality means, does it match the expectations of the person who is buying it? That a McDonald’s hamburger has a quality to it, that cannot be replaced by one that’s made from ground sirloin on a handmade roll. Because the person who wanted a McDonald’s hamburger, wanted a McDonald’s hamburger.

So back to this idea of publishing. We have a significant cultural challenge here, which is that most of the things that are purchased by us, most of the intellectual property we engage with, we don’t subscribe to. We make a new decision based on new information every single day. When Time Magazine had a lot of subscribers, the act of publishing Time Magazine only had two pieces – keep people from unsubscribing, and get new people to subscribe. The end.

The rest was up to the huge Editorial Team that cranked that magazine out week, after week, after week. But as subscriptions faded, as people were clicking from one website to the other, what we saw was that publishing is actually hard. That if you’re in the music business, it’s super easy now to get carriage, to get on Spotify, to get on iTunes, to get on Pandora, and Koba, and Tidal. Super straightforward – the long tail makes it easy.

That’s not publishing, that’s delivering it to someone who could buy it if they want to buy it. Publishing is the act of getting someone to seek out that song, to buy that ticket to the theatre. And too often, what’s going on here, is that a publisher gets lucky and takes credit for being smart. The people who published Hamilton didn’t publish it better than all the other plays they’ve ever published.

It just turns out that in that moment in time, more people wanted to see that Musical. Is it an act of genius? Without a doubt, one of the greatest musicals ever made. But it’s not the only musical ever made. And many of the people, I would argue most of the people, who pay all that money for tickets to Hamilton, are paying all that money for tickets to Hamilton because so many other people are paying all that money for tickets to Hamilton. That it has created its own sensation, because people like us do things like this, and the thing we do is go to this play.

So back to this notion – creating is easy, publishing is hard. That what we have to figure out how to do as creators is maybe, just maybe, not give Publishers so much credit for being brilliant. And perhaps, realize that the most famous of them has been persistent and lucky, not consistently brilliant. And that our job as creators might not be to completely reverse engineer the publishing process, so that we can reliably deliver a home run every time. But maybe, we just have to figure out how to be persistent and consistent. To find the smallest viable audience that people who want to hear what we want to make, our 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly might say, and then show up for them, and show up for them. Bob Dylan, as my friend Brian points out over and over again, is a genius. Sure, but when was the last time he produced something that blew people’s heads off? Not for a long time, because Bob Dylan doesn’t care about creating the sensation he created in 1967. He doesn’t need to take that kind of swing. Instead, he’s found his people, his people have found him and he consistently and persistently creates.

So I’m not minimizing by any stretch of the imagination how hard it is to create. It’s what I wrestle with all day long. That creating from the heart with compassion, with passion for the people we seek to serve, is a great calling. It’s a life’s work. It’s something that so many of us would love to do, and I hope more people will. But publishing? Publishing is hard. I don’t think we figured out a reliable way to bring a new idea to people who don’t know about it in advance. That, without question, there are people who have more leverage – who can give us more of a head start. Who can get a stack of books at the cash register at Barnes & Noble. Oh, that’s right, no one goes to Barnes & Noble anymore. Who can say they know somebody at Amazon, who will somehow wave a magic wand and make things work. Who can say they know the people at Netflix and will make sure you get a hearing. But nobody at Netflix knows anything. If they did they wouldn’t keep buying all those shows that don’t work well enough to run forever.

It’s worth remembering that the first season of Seinfeld was an epic failure. On one of the three TV networks, with a not trivial amount of promotion during primetime, Seinfeld, it didn’t work. It was going to get canceled. Because it wasn’t created well? Well, I don’t think so. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld didn’t really change very much about who they were and what they wanted to make.

So what changed? What changed is persistently showing up, with a show in the right place, in front of the right people, the American public began to get the joke. The word spread from person to person. That a publisher and NBC decided for once to believe in something that wasn’t average and banal, and stuck with it long enough for it to become the multi, multi-billion dollar culture changing hit it became. Because publishing is hard. And Publishers who seek the short-term, who are acting like direct marketers, who are measuring everything – they’re racing to the bottom.

What we know is that if you A/B test a website enough times, it will turn into a porn site. Because when you A/B test, you will end up with clickbait, you will end up with prurient images that people sort of click on in the short run. Because, ugh, that is no way to do the work that you care about. So given how hard publishing is, maybe instead of simply reverse engineer it, we could say these people – the people that I would like to serve – what would touch them? What would make magic for them? What would be worth creating that they wouldn’t want to miss? Because, yeah, creating is really, really hard.

Go make your Ruckus, and thanks for listening.

As always. I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any other episode, please visit: akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O . L I N K and press the appropriate button.

Two really deep questions this week. Here we go.

Hey Seth, Justin calling from LA. AltMBA alum, and longtime fan. This is with respect to your recent episode on spreading ideas and the idea virus. I love the idea about responsibility and spreading ideas that – even if we could spread an idea because we know all the tricks – that we shouldn’t spread it unless it’s going to promote some sort of greater good. A big fan of that idea. One issue that came to mind was that I’m pretty sure that, that, that people who do have the power to spread ideas and are spreading bad ideas, objectively bad ideas, I’m under the impression that they are under the impression that their idea is for the greater good. But it seems, looking back and even to people at the time, that it is objectively a bad idea. And so how do we deal with that issue? Thanks a lot.

This is a super profound way to think about the problem because, of course, unless someone is fully broken – some sort of sociopath, then they are probably doing what they think is right when they do something. And so we can get into this giant, circular conversation about what culture means to someone who doesn’t see what we see, who doesn’t want what we want.

And for me a good way to think about it is to imagine two axes. On one of the axes is short-term versus long-term thinking, and on the other axis is doing things for yourself. Because you get pleasure out of doing things for yourself versus doing things for others. Because you get pleasure out of doing things for others. So in one corner, we have the short term selfish maximizer who doesn’t care about the side effects of his or her action. And opposite that, is the long-term culture builder – somebody who plays for the long haul and also is measuring not how much joy are they getting directly, but instead is seeking to maximize indirect joy by helping other people.

So if I’m going to use that way of looking at the problem, I think we can say that a Supervillain, like Magneto, is seeking short-term selfish benefits. And what we need, and what culture enforces, what culture encourages, is long-term community benefit. And speaking out about it is how culture enforces it. So part of what we’re trying to examine here and Akimbo is how we speak out about it, is how we establish what the standards are. And one measure for me, when I’m judging someone who has leverage with the culture, is this – do they say, “I’m just doing my job”. Do they say, “I gave the clients what they want”. Do they say, “Well, the stock market needed me to make that choice”.

Do they say things like, “Well, if we hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t be able to get to the point where we could help other people”. Because those excuses, those are the excuses of someone who In leaned as hard as they can into the long-term generous quadrant. Because over and over again, even in areas like companies that trade in the public markets, we see that it is possible. It is possible to do better. To do better, to make things better, to establish higher standards – not for you, not because you’re going to move up on some Forbes 400 list – but because you are going to benefit because you see that you have created long-term satisfaction for others.

Hi Seth, this is Tamsin from Plymouth in England. You’ve often written and spoken about the importance of not waiting for someone to pick you, but picking yourself. And I really resonate with that approach to having a life of your own choosing. Recently, my eight-year-old daughter was not picked to be in her school play. It’s the second year she hasn’t been picked, and it’s possible that she will go all the way through primary school never having been able to take part. I’m really worried that the environment that she’s growing up in is teaching her that she has to wait for someone else to choose her, and if she isn’t picked she somehow not good enough to participate. What can I say? What can I do that will help her to grow up into a person that picks themselves? Thank you.

It sounds like your daughter is so lucky to have you in her corner. And there’s a lot of pathos in this question. My answer is not to indulge the temptation of calling up the people at the school and accusing them of being absolutely crazy for dashing an eight-year-old’s dreams. Why exactly are there tryouts for 8 year olds in the theatre? When I produced the musical for nine-year-olds at the local school, we did The Wizard of Oz, which I think is the greatest Musical ever – particularly for kids. We had four Tin Men, four Dorthys, four Scarecrows, etc. There were 20 stars to the play, because there’s no meritocracy in theatre when you’re nine years old. But no, that’s not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say is, the gift you can give your daughter is you can teach her to organize her own play, put on her own puppet show, put up signs and have auditions for other kids to join her.

She does not need the dominate power structure to pick her, even at the age of 8, in order to feel like she is doing something worthwhile and generous. And this lesson, the lesson of how to be an organizer, is a lesson she’ll have forever. Thank you for sharing this. Thanks to everybody for your questions.

Thanks for listening. Go make your Ruckus.

==> 1647-season-5-qa-special- <==

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

Yes, it’s time for another all Q&A session of Akimbo – your favorite podcast. We haven’t done one in a long time. We’re celebrating the end of Season 5, next week is the end. Also the end of five seasons with mid-roll. We’re going to be moving to a new host in the New Year. Nothing should change on your end regardless of where you subscribe. But, if this podcast disappears, please visit akimbo.link – A K I M B O dot L I N K – because there you will find all the instructions you need to regain your connection to our podcast. It’s fraught to move after five seasons, but I hope we’ll be able to keep reaching you.

We got so many good questions over the last few weeks. I thought it would be fun to do an all Q&A episode. We love to get questions from you. If you’ve got a question, please visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button. Okay, here we go.

Hey Seth, Brendan from Eugene, Oregon here. The internet butchered many things, one of which was newspapers, not journalism per se, but definitely newspapers. And with all the corporate purchasing of newspapers and local coverage shrinking and power and corruption going unchecked by the fourth estate, how might you advise someone who might want to start a non-profit newspaper – most likely online only – in this sort of new age journalism. Asking for a friend. Thank you Seth.

Journalism has taken a big hit. Some people blame Craig of Craigslist, because when Craigslist took off – free classifieds for everyone everywhere – the source of most newspapers revenue completely dried up. In some cases, newspapers were making 110 percent of all of their profit – meaning it was covering all of their expenses and then some – from classified ads, and then they went away. But newspapers, newspapers have a problem, and their problem is they’re expensive to print and deliver. That just 20 years from now, when we talk to people about going outside in our bare feet to pick up something that was printed in the middle of the night and then driven to our house so we could read the news of yesterday or the day before, that’s nutty. In many cases, it costs more to print and deliver a newspaper than the newspaper costs, which means that ads have to make up the difference. But we all know what happened. We all know about Google News. We all know about short attention spans and the desire for convenience and speed. We all know that news that’s in hour old isn’t even ‘breaking’ anymore, never mind news.

And so the nature of what it means to read something from a journalist has shifted. Because journalists used to have to deliver us the thing that was fresh. And a lot of the newspaper was about that – what just happened. But there’s another part of the newspaper, the part that wins Pulitzer prizes. That’s about more thoughtful analysis or commentary. There’s another part that’s got recipes. There’s another part that’s got the comics or the crazy astrology section.

So all of those things came together in this perfect bundle for a hundred years. And what we know is that the internet, like all revolutions, destroys the perfect before it enables the Impossible. And the amount of news we’re getting, news that’s real, news that’s designed to manipulate us, is enormous – far greater than any of us ever consumed just 20 years ago.

So, on to your question. The thing is that advertising can’t support real journalism with a few exceptions. That we’re going to need a New York Times, a Washington Post, and a Wall Street Journal for the foreseeable future – places where large numbers of people will get their information. It’s entirely possible those few places – the short head – will be able to pay their bills with advertising. But it is extremely unlikely that if you’re out on the long tail, if you are covering something special for the general public, that you will be able to pay for it with ads.

I think that B2B is different. I think there’s huge opportunities to create news and analysis, industry by industry. And not only charge a lot for it, but find a sponsor. But that’s outside the realm of what you were talking about. If we get rid of real estate costs, ad sales costs ,newspaper costs, delivery costs, the cost of that little plastic bag you have to put on the paper when it’s raining.

It turns out that actual journalism is a tiny portion of what newspapers spent money on. Which means you don’t need that much revenue in order to make a living. Hence, the idea of Patreon, of subscriptions, of a few people caring enough to pay for what you have to say. This is not glamorous or glorious. The magic of newspapers was that because they were so expensive to create, there weren’t that many in a given town. And since there weren’t that many in a given town, every newspaper was important.

But if you’re a journalist with only 2,000 subscribers, it’s hard to feel important. That is, until you break a big story, until you contribute something to the larger conversation. So as Kevin Kelly pointed out, a thousand true fans is enough. 2,000 patrons paying you a hundred dollars a year, that pays for three or four underpaid journalists, or one or two really well-paid journalists who are covering something that matters to the people who are reading it. We have to get back in alignment. We were out of alignment for a long time, because Macy’s were other people who were buying full-page ads in the newspaper, they didn’t care if the newspaper was good, they just cared if people read it.

And so, we chased down the advertisers to our own chagrin. Because, once Google showed up, once the web showed up, and the advertisers left, we weren’t left with very much at all.

Hey Seth, I feel like sometime in 2019, websites all over really cranked up the dial when it comes to advertising on their site. Like, YouTube now allows two ads to play before a video starts and sometimes those ads go for 10 minutes. And, of course, news websites are horrible with more ads than ever before. And now when I log into PayPal or my bank, I’m getting an ad every time I login where they’re trying to upsell me on some service or something.

This is really frustrating to me. And I wonder what your thoughts are on this. I mean, shouldn’t the market shake itself out when a company mistreats their customers so badly, and tries to milk them for every penny that they have? Shouldn’t, like, less people use the system? I’d love to see when ads go up, then user activity goes down. But it just doesn’t seem to be affecting it. And I would love to see young startups with faster websites and cleaner interfaces, and less ads take over, but they’re struggling to compete. It’s almost as if nobody cares they’re flooded with ads when they go to a website now. What’s wrong with my world view here? Thanks.

Continuing on this advertising theme, and it’s something that I think about a lot, because sometimes there are ads on Akimbo. In 2020, look for all the ads to come from my workshops – akmibo.com. But for now, we’ve been running ads. Mostly as an experiment, partly because our partner needs to make a living and they make a living by selling ads.

But here’s the thing. Once you decide to sell ads, once you are hooked on the revenue that comes from ads interrupting the thing that you sell, it is really tempting – there is a lot of pressure to make that number go up. And there are two ways to make the number go up. You can make more money per ad, and you do that either by getting more listeners or readers. Or, by charging a higher CPM – cost per thousand, I don’t know why it’s not called CPT, that’s sort of old-fashioned, cost per thousand – or you run more ads.

And this is what we found is going on, on the web. That when Hot-Wired first started running banner ads, they were the very first ones, along with GNN – my friend Lisa Gansky’s ‘Global Network Navigator’. When they were running banner ads, it was a big deal to run one. And then some genius came up with the idea of running two.

Small aside here. You may have heard of Mary Wells – one of the great ad geniuses of the 1960s. She’s most famous for Alka-Seltzer – “Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is”. How did she double Alka-Seltzer sales? She doubled their sales because people only used to take one Alka-Seltzer at a time. And her jingle, “Plop plop, fizz fizz” said you should take two. So it wasn’t elegant, but it worked. And the same thing was true for websites. Run two ads, and you can make twice as much money as if you run one ad. And so, we see the same thing happening on podcasts. So, we see the same thing happening on YouTube.

That when you are under pressure, particularly if you’re a public company, the pressure is a race to the bottom – run more ads, run more ads. Because everyone else is doing it too. The advertisers, the ones who are surrendering to algorithmic media buying, are paying a price. That’s because they’re not measuring the right thing.

They’re measuring eyeballs or earballs. They are measuring impressions. What they should be measuring is trust. And so advertisers are about to wake up. They’re about to wake up to the fact that they’re in an auction that they cannot win. That the efficacy of more interruption is fading. That they can’t pay for it anymore.

And that some folks are going to show up and offer sponsorship instead. And sponsorship and advertising are not the same thing. Sponsorship isn’t about, “How do I interrupt more people, more aggressively?” Sponsorship is, “How can I be affiliated with something that I am proud of, and that the people who are engaging with it see me supporting something they want supported?”

There’s a lot of room for sponsorship to grow. When sponsorship grows, it supports better content and better interactions, which is the opposite of what is happening now in the downward spiral of advertising auctions.

Hi Seth, this is Jill from Minneapolis. I just finished listening to your most recent podcast and was riveted by it. I myself am a publisher and I, you know, relevant to the the last question that the person asked about their daughter not being picked for Plays. Growing up in Buffalo New York, I was that kid who never got picked, but had this sort of untapped potential. And I think that is what drove me to take that drove me to take that risk, to do that hard thing, to become the publisher.

And I wanted to know your perspective on that. What do you think the correlation is between stepping into doing that hard thing, publishing that next step, that going beyond making and, you know, the kind of resilience that not being picked gives you. You know, it’s that idea of being a packager, right? It’s coming at publishing in a different way, not that traditional path. So if you could speak to that, I would love to know what you think about that. Thanks for all you do, and this podcast was the right one that I needed to hear, at exactly the right time. Big thanks.

I’m so glad that question resonated with you. It really did with me as well. The thing is if we talk to people who are successful, most of the time, they have stories to tell about rejection, about not getting picked, about things not working. Part of it is survivor bias. That the people who are left, who have succeeded, have been through something that didn’t work. Because the people who gave up when it didn’t work, we’re not talking to them, but leaving that aside for a second. We have to be careful that we then don’t come to the conclusion that the secret to succeeding is having an unhappy childhood.

That the secret to succeeding is not having support. Because there are plenty of people who had unhappy childhoods or had no support, who didn’t succeed. But we’re not talking to them. I think the key is learning what to do when things don’t work out. And the way we learn something is not by having someone tell us. The way we learn something is by doing it.

So if we can get the support we need to feel buoyed enough, safe enough, encouraged enough, to figure out how to keep going forward anyway, that is the key to getting to the point where you’re making a difference. That what we need to do is teach our kids, our peers, our employees how to find the feeling of resilience. Not to be, quote special snowflakes, and whine about the fact that they don’t know what to do next. But instead, to take what happened and figure out how to make something better out of it. So, I am certainly not rooting for unhappy childhoods. But I am rooting for a culture that builds resilience.

Hi Seth, Sean from Fountain Valley, California. Sometimes what’s best for the people we serve may demand extra work and effort from the people doing the work, or it may otherwise inconvenience them in some way. For example, if I ask the grocery clerk where the hot sauce is, it would help me if they accompanied me directly to the hot sauce shelf, rather than just pointing in a direction and telling me which aisle it’s on. So how might we convince the people doing the work to prioritize the needs of the people we serve, over their own self-interest or convenience? Especially when the work they do is rarely observed by managers or owners, or their pay isn’t tied to that type of quality of work. Thanks Seth.

Well, they call it work for a reason. The thing about a hobby, is you get to do it for yourself and you get to do it when you want to do it. The thing about work, is you have to do it. If you’re at work, it involves labor – heavy lifting, emotional lifting, some sort of presentation of labor that you don’t feel like. So what we’re seeing here is not a failure of management, where management is about monitoring every single frontline worker you have at all times, but instead, a failure of leadership.

That, too often, we hire the cheapest available person. Too often, we shortchange training and development, thinking that we can get it over with in a three-hour seminar. Too often, we hire for skills instead of attitudes. But if we’re willing to do the inconvenient work as Leaders – of undoing all of those mistakes, of hiring friendly people, of hiring people who are committed to making change happen, of paying extra not just for the people we hire but for the development that we encourage them to engage in – at some point, they want what we want.

And what we want, is the inconvenient thing. The inconvenient thing of showing up for a customer, even though it’s not in the spec. The inconvenient thing of presenting emotionally, even though it’s not in our job description. Because these inconvenient efforts by us, are why people will shop with us or do work with us, instead of just clicking on a stranger’s website. That what we have is the opportunity to not be industrialists, because industrialism has always been about replacing workers. Replacing them with someone cheaper, replacing them with someone more compliant, replacing them with the machine.

But going forward, we have the opportunity to do the opposite. To celebrate people for the work they do because they care. And what it means to care, is to use your best judgement. To find people that we trust enough to do the thing that we would do if we were there trying to serve the customer. And it’s not easy, which is why it’s rare. And because it’s rare, it’s valuable.

Thanks to everyone for listening in 2019. We’ve got one more episode left this year, and then we’ll be back in 2020 with even more energy, and hopefully some insight for you as well. We do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, please visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button. We’ll see you soon. Have a safe and healthy holiday.

==> 1653-live-at-the-united-nations- <==

A TV show from my youth that doesn’t hold up very well on reviewing is The Man From Uncle. But one thing that does hold up was the logo that they had. It looked a lot like the logo for their parent organization, which I assumed was the United Nations.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

The United Nations quietly, persistently saves the world. Saves the world in a lot of ways – ways that we can’t go into right now – but I need to say that when they reached out to me and asked if I would come address one of their larger gatherings in New York, I instantly jumped at the chance. So here is a presentation I gave in September 2019 – the first half of it – to a group of women’s rights activists at the United Nations. Thanks as always for listening.

I’m really privileged to be here. But I have to start by talking about a hotel that was just a few blocks from here. Fifteen or twenty years ago, a woman named Leona Helmsley owned a bunch of hotels in New York City and she was referred to as the queen of mean. She had a dog named Trouble, and she was indicted for tax fraud. While she was sitting with her Lawyer, the fabled Alan Dershowitz.

Her servant, and she called him her servant, brought her and Alan a cup of tea. When she got the cup of tea, she noticed that there was a drop of water on the saucer. Looking the servant in the eye, she dropped the cup and saucer on the tile floor smashing it into thousands of pieces, and then instructed the servant to get down on his knees and clean it up. Because Leona Helmsley lived on stripping people of their dignity. That was her fuel.

That story got me thinking a lot about the idea of dignity – is an idea that came after the word dignitary. So I thought coming to the United Nations and talking to dignitaries, it would be a good idea to start with this idea of the difference between dignitaries and dignity. And where dignity lives, because if your work is about anything, I think that’s what it’s about. How can we help institutions and humans create opportunities for other people to find their dignity?

Because the thing about dignity is hard to take, but it’s very easy to give. And we have to figure out how to give people this dignity. But It doesn’t matter that that’s obvious. And it doesn’t matter that we’re right.

Nor, does it matter that your plan which you have worked so hard on, that you have laid out in one series of slides after another with charts and graphs and analyses and budgets, it doesn’t matter that it’s right. Because if all we needed were things to be right for them to be accepted, almost all the problems that we face that don’t bump into the laws of physics would already be solved.

The reason that there are problems left, human problems, is because what we have to do is humans is not simply figure out what’s right, but get other humans to see what we see, to believe what we believe, to want what we want or else at some level, no forward motion is going to happen. So what I want to do is tell you about five or six of the social entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with over the bunch left bunch of years, and sort of weave together how storytelling can change the game.

The first one is something that’s going on in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is one of the youngest countries in the world, and we know that people under 20 in Ethiopia are severely protein deficient. Fifteen to thirty percent of the country – protein deficient. One of the reasons is that it’s a small holder farm country. That most of the people in Ethiopia live on a small holder farm, which means that what you grow, is what you grow. And what you eat, is what you grow. And if you can’t grow it, then you’re not going to be able to eat it. And the typical Ethiopian chicken lays one egg a week, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But a guy named David Elias saw that this was happening and figured that there might be a harder working chicken available. He found a chicken in France, brought it to Ethiopia – I think he brought more than one, I’m not exactly sure. And the Ethiopian Government gave him an abandoned run-down chicken hatchery.

Well, he started a network – engaging with local entrepreneurs, near local farmers, to take his three day old chicks, grow them to the point where a local farmer can work with them. And these chickens lay six eggs a week. I don’t know what they do the seventh day, but they lay six eggs a week. The end result is that, if you have switched to the chicken from Ethio chicken, your farm is six times more productive than it used to be with no other changes.

Yesterday, Ethio chicken sold 1 million baby chicks. Today, they will sell 1 million baby chicks and tomorrow, they will sell 1 million baby chicks – day, after day, after day. Because one person showed up and said, “Follow me”. He did not invent the chicken. He didn’t even invent the idea of bringing a French chicken to Ethiopia.

What he did was something that is in short supply, which is he showed up and he said, “Follow me”. So that’s the first piece that I wanted to pin down – the idea of follow me. The second one, 20 blocks from here, is a charity called Charity Water. Last year, Charity Water raised its two hundred and fifty millionth dollar in fundraising. Quarter of a billion dollars raised in less than 15 years.

How did this tiny charity do it? They didn’t do it by having people realize that there are folks around the world who do not have access to clean water – everyone already knew that. What Scott and his team did was create a dynamic where your personal status, your personal satisfaction, the way you looked at yourself in the mirror, would go up greater than it cost you to donate.

So if you’re going to send fifty dollars to Charity Water, the only reason you’re going to do it because you get $100 worth of satisfaction out of doing it. No one gives money to a cause, whether it’s a bureaucrat with a budget, or a person with their own money, unless it’s worth more than it costs. Because they have choices.

The third idea is what they built at the Aravind Eye Hospital in India. If you take up the total population of Los Angeles, Detroit and Cleveland and add them together, there are more people on Earth who can see today because of Aravind, then there would have been. Add up all those people, that’s how many people Aravind has given site to with cataract surgery. How does the cataract surgery work at Aravind?

Well, it costs about a hundred and twenty dollars, or it costs nothing – your choice. And a lot of people choose to pay, but plenty of people choose not to pay. And what Dr. V did in building Aravind was questioned conventional wisdom. In the United States and the UK., the conventional wisdom is you can only have one patient in the operating room at a time, because of the problem of cross-contamination. And so a good eye surgeon can do eight or ten surgeries a day. At Aravind they prep two patients ahead of time.

And so when the surgeon does done all she has to do is turn around and work on the next patient right behind her, and a typical surgeon will do 20, or 30, or 40 operations a day. Doctors from the US and the UK travel to India now to train, because they can do more surgeries per day than they could ever do here. You say, “Well wait, the quality must be worse”. Well, in fact, the quality is better. That the infection rate is actually lower at Aravind’s Hospital in southern India, than it is in a typical hospital in London.

And that’s because there is wisdom that is worth questioning. There are things that we don’t know that we could find out. But we’re only going to be able to find them out by doing them, not by studying them. And that was the key leap that he made. Two or three more.

Juhudi Kilimo is a bank, a lender, in Kenya. And here’s the deal. They will loan you enough money to buy a cow. You can milk that cow and make enough money from milking that cow to pay back the interest on the loan, and a year from now the cow is yours. The repayment rate on loans that Juhudi Kilimo makes is over 97%. How can they do that? They’re loaning money to some of the poorest people on Earth. The way they do that, is that in order to get the loan, your neighbors who are members of Juhudi Kilimo have to back you.

And so, the loan is not the device of loan between the bank and the person who’s getting the loan. The loan is the community supporting the community. And when I went house to house with the Chairman, that’s what he called himself, the Chairman – an unpaid honorary job leading his community for Juhudi Kilimo. Every single person knew him. And it was such a proud moment in the 65 year old man’s life to be able to look his neighbors in the eye, introduce somebody from out of town, and talk about the change we will make together. And so in a couple minutes, we’re going to talk about tribes. But this idea that people want to do what other people are doing, is the very essence of what it means to be a human. People like us, do things like this.

And the last story I’ll tell you is the story about the day that I finally figured out how to be a Marketer. And that’s where we’re going to get to the heart of all of this.

If you weave silk for a living. If you work with your hands for a living, and you turn 50 years old, no matter where in the world you live, you’re going to need reading glasses. It just happens. There’s just something in the air that after a while, it happens to us. And if you need reading glasses, and you can’t get reading glasses, you are now unemployed. And in the old days, it didn’t matter because you’re going to die at 40. But now it matters, because you’re going to die at 70, which means that for 20 years your family is going to have support you. So Vision Spring shows up and they say the following, “We bought these glasses at a cheap factory for two bucks each. We’ll sell them to you for three bucks each. We’ll make enough money that we can do it again and scale, and scale, and scale”.

In the United States, there is no coffee shortage because Starbucks makes enough money per cup to sell more. Well if we can figure out how to make enough money per glasses to sell more, we’ll solve the problem that there’s a hundred million people in India alone that need reading glasses.

So I go with Vision Spring to Borelli, India. Not even Borelli, outside of Borelli, India. To get the Borelli, India, you have to drive for eight hours. And this village has no electricity. And I don’t know why, no one here told me, but I went in July. So, it’s a hundred and twenty degrees and I’m standing there, and there’s a hundred people in the village. There’s nothing to do at noon. Everyone’s waiting in line, “What’s this all about?”

And at the front table, over here, 10 different styles of glasses – each nicer than the others, each individually wrapped. And over here, an eye chart that you can use without being literate, but you can use it if you are illiterate too, to see if glasses work. Now, you already know people who wear glasses. It’s not some fancy, weird technology no matter where you are on Earth.

So I look at the people in line – they are qualified. First, they are as old as me. Two, they’re wearing Indian dress shirts and I can see in the front pocket – money. They all have enough money to buy the glasses. So they’re qualified. They need glasses, they have money. They’re waiting in line, they get to the front of the line. They look at the eye chart, they can read the eye chart. They put on the sample pair of glasses, they can read the eye chart. There is no doubt that these work.

Then they say, “All right, put down the glasses. Come over here, look at this lovely table. Which of these 10 pairs of glasses do you want? They are three dollars each”. Two-thirds of the people who needed a pair of glasses did not buy one. Two-thirds. And I’m standing there, “I don’t understand”.

It works. It’s true. It’s real. You tried it. You need them. What are you doing? It’s hot. And I stood there, I don’t think I’m exaggerating, for half an hour. And I said, “I’m going to need to move to India, because if I can’t figure this out. I can’t go back home, because I’m supposed to know what I’m doing”. I’m in the Marketing Hall of Fame, for God sake, and I don’t understand.

And then, I don’t know what happened. I changed one thing, and I doubled the percentage of people who took a pair of glasses. The one thing I change was, I got rid of all 10 pairs of glass and instead we said to the person, “How do you like these sample glasses?”

They said, “They’re good”.

And we said, “Alright, now you have a choice. Either give us back the glasses, or give us three dollars”.

That changes everything. Not for me, it wouldn’t work on me. It wouldn’t work on you, but if you grew up in a culture with parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, where shopping was an alien idea, shopping isn’t something you look forward to. Shopping is a risk. Don’t buy something that might not work, because it might not work. You don’t get to go shopping again tomorrow, if you buy something with tonight’s dinner money and it doesn’t work. Only replenish the things you have, because you have so few, so little. So in that moment, avoidance of loss was so much more important than desire for gain. That it was not disrespectful to take away people’s choice. It was actually respectful to see the other person for who they were.

And here’s the Home Run, here’s the big idea. The people you are seeking to persuade, whatever they are currently doing, they’re right. They are right to deny certain people dignity. They are right to deny certain ideas of science. They are right to defend the status quo, because of who they are and where they are, and what they believe in this moment. That we have to develop the empathy to say, as the Yemeni expression goes, “You are right in front of my face”.

“So Bona” – I see you, and I see your grandparents before you, and your great-grandparents before them.

I see you, and I see your fear, and I see the tension, and I see the pressure, and I see how you were raised, and I see what you don’t have enough of, and the surplus and the scarcity. I see you, so it doesn’t matter that I’m right. Because based on the glasses you’re wearing, you’re right too. So the only chance we have to tell a story to people is to begin by saying, “I don’t believe what you believe, and that’s okay”. Because if we can’t add and that’s okay, then we don’t have any chance at all to go beyond the facts of where we are in this moment.

And where we are in this moment is, you’ve seen the facts, I’ve seen the facts – you’re wrong. Okay, we get that part, but you’re not doing anything and you have the power to stay where we are. So, and this gets back to “People like us, do things like this”. And this is why this institution is so important.

So the next story I want to tell you happened in my little town. So, in New York state, where we are right now, the school board rules are pretty clear. The budget goes up and everyone in town gets to vote on whether the school will get the money they ask for. If the budget fails, they get one more try. And if it fails the second time, then Draconian cuts are put into place – no one gets a say over them.

So, my town has great public schools – that’s why we lived there. And year after year, the taxes went up. Year after year, the neighborhood started to shift. And at the key year, 20 to 25% of the households in my town had a household income of under $25,000. It’s not a lot of money. They were either senior citizens, they were people who had inherited their homes from their parents, they were people who had been in town for a long time. And, they organized and defeated the budget.

And so, it was time for it to come up again. Well, I have to put a little aside in, which is that the schools in the town are great. In fact, they won a national award, called the Blue Ribbon School Award, where you get a little seal in front of your school, for excellence. So there’s only a week to go before the second election.

And everybody’s right, and everyone’s calling each other names. And everyone is wondering about their value. Well, three people went to a stationery store and bought a hundred yards of blue ribbon. And on the big tree in front of the big school that everyone drives by every day, they hung 50 blue ribbons from that tree.

And over the next six days, without those three people doing anything else, blue ribbons started showing up everywhere. And the day before the election, you couldn’t drive down a block in my town without seeing people celebrating what they were proud of – celebrating their kids, celebrating excellence. And it wasn’t about us and them, it was about what we could become. And so, when the vote happened, the budget won 2 to 1 and it has never lost since, because “people like us, do things like this”. What does it mean to be part of a Tribe, to be part of a group, to be part of a community that sees each other? Because even in this fractious time – with the fractiousness being multiplied by the the media, because that’s what they make a living doing – we’re still 98% the same. We’re still 98% in agreement.

And yet, it’s so much easier to say, “I am not part of you”. When the opportunity we have when we tell our story, is to figure out how to do the hard work of “people like us, do things like this” and to figure out how to tell our story, our narrative, in a way that doesn’t get to the point of, “Oh, well McKinsey did a study and I can prove we’re right”.

But instead, gets to the words and the visions and the pictures that others have in their head, so that without losing, they can help all of us win. So I made it sound super simple, and it’s not simple. It’s the hardest work you can do, and you are doing it. And I’m not minimizing how hard it is. What I am trying to challenge, and now we’re going to have a conversation about it, is when we get pushed into a corner, what we often do is bring out our spreadsheet.

What we often do is bring out our proof. What we often do is try to argue to higher ideals, but mostly what we’re trying to say is, “We’re right, and you’re wrong. Can’t you see it?” And the people who are wrong, the people who are wrong know that they’re wrong. But they are holding a tension, and that tension is not making them happy. It is the tension that keeps them status quo. It is the fear of change. It is the fear of losing what they have. It is the fear of, “What will I tell the others?” That we need to learn to see the tension, if we hope to find a path forward. And at the same time, we need to be able to give up our satisfaction in what it is to be right.

I like being right. I like the fact that Newtonian mechanics makes sense, and I’m not here imagining the gravity to go away, just because I will have to. But if it helps us all move forward for me to be temporarily not right, in the service of telling a story that resonates with people so that we can figure out how together to get in sync, that is effective storytelling. And I will finish with a couple things before we get into the Q&A in the discussion. The first one is, “How do we get people to know our idea? How do we get the word out?”

And what marketers have done in the last 50 years is persuade us that that’s the hard part.

If everyone knew that I have a Kickstarter it would do great.

If everyone knew that I was running for Parliament, I would win. That we want awareness, but awareness is only one third of what we need.

The second thing we need – which is so much harder than awareness, which awareness undermines and belies – is trust. Because you can run down the street naked and get awareness, but you’re not going to get anyone to sign up to be getting heart surgery from you. Because awareness doesn’t always lead to trust. Trust is in short supply. Trust is even more scarce than attention. Trust is what happens when we show up, and we show up, and we show up. When we make promises and we keep them. When we present ourselves in a way that reminds people of someone they’ve trusted before.

But those two alone are not sufficient. The third one is tension. What will happen if I don’t say “yes”. Fear of missing out. Fear of being left behind. Fear of being ostracized. That without tension, it’s easier to just stay where we are. And so if you walk down the street seven blocks that way to the hospital, you will see people doing ridiculous things to their bodies, at the end of their lives. Because they are filled with tension about what’s going to happen next. And if you go seven blocks that way, you will see healthy people slowly killing themselves with one bad habit or another, because they feel no tension at all to stop doing it.

So what we do if we are marketers, if we are storytellers, is, yes, we have to occasionally get attention. Mostly, we have to earn trust. But then, the thing that scares us that we don’t want to have to do, we must willingly inflict tension. Then when you show up and say, “I have a new idea”. When you show up and say, “We have to change”. You don’t have to like the fact you created tension, but you just did. And it could be the tension that bus driver inflicts when he makes that noise with the air brakes. “Oh the bus is about to pull out, I better hurry” – that causes tension.

When you hear the voice coming out of the speaker at JFK, that person is calling the last gate, she is creating tension. And that is what each of you has to figure out how to do, because your story is not going to work just because you told it. It’s going to work because you told it in a way that resonated with people. Thanks your attention today.

Go make a ruckus. Thank you.

I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, just visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. This question sounds specific, but it’s fairly universal.

Hey Seth, my name is Bruce from planet Earth. Recently, one of my favorite podcasts, Making Sense with Sam Harris, went behind a pay wall. He did this to avoid the perception that he is being influenced by his sponsors. I respect that, but I can’t see myself paying the monthly subscription to have access to his work. My question is how can Sam continue to provide his podcast free to me, but still make a profit. Thanks for all you do, bye.

Thank you, Bruce. Here’s the deal. For 20 or 30 years, people have been talking about the idea that some kind of information wants to be free. That information that spreads, changes the culture. How is it then that once we eliminate the scarcity of the container that used to hold the information – for example, books are scarce because you have to chop down trees, you have to store them, you have to ship them. For example, music was scarce because you had to put it on vinyl or a CD. For example, wine is scarce because it needs to come from a grape and go in a bottle. So, leaving wine aside for a minute, what are we going to do about the industries built around information? Because, the very thing that they depend on, the ideas spreading, are somehow related to the container that they come in. And so when we take words, take them out of a book, put them into an e-book or put them into a podcast, we are starting to eliminate scarcity. Radio had scarcity built right in, because there were only a few stations in every town. Spectrum creates scarcity, so there’s only a few stations. Since there’s only a few stations, more people listen to each one. Since more people listen to each one, attention, also scarce, becomes valuable. Because you’re keeping it in huge piles, and you can sell some of that attention to a sponsor. But, what happens when there’s a million podcasts? When there’s a million podcasts, the average podcast only has 20 listeners. 20 listeners is not enough to interrupt them, and turn around and make a profit.

So, you’ve outlined the problem. You don’t want to pay Sam. Sam is worried about the perception that his opinion will be changed by sponsors. I’m not totally sure that that’s true. I don’t think my opinion about how to brush your teeth is changed by the fact that, without my knowledge, toothbrush ads appeared on this podcast. But leaving that aside for a second, we have a more universal problem here. Which is, you used to be able to get paid for making content, because content was scarce. But more and more, you’re not going to get paid for making content – particularly for making generic content. If there’s content associated only with you, as we’ve seen on Patreon, you can hold your content hostage. You can go to your fans and say, “Unless enough of you pony up, unlike Bruce, I won’t make it”. But you have to mean it.

And over time, you may run into a problem. Because, as Tim O’Reilly coined, the problem isn’t piracy. The problem isn’t that your ideas are spreading without you getting paid. The problem is obscurity. Your ideas aren’t getting heard. If your ideas aren’t getting heard, then you’re not known. And, if you’re not known, then you’re not trusted. If you’re not trusted, you can’t change the culture. If you can’t change the culture, you can’t create value.

And so, if you’re a creator of ideas, you need your ideas to spread. So how do you get paid? Because we live in a society and a culture built on free market and industrial capitalism – two different things. And in both cases, we sort of expect people are going to get paid for their work. It’s worth noting that for more than a hundred thousand years, humans did not get paid for their ideas, did not get paid for their songs, did not get paid for their words.

That was your hobby. You got paid for hunting, or gathering, or farming. You got paid for doctoring. But you didn’t get paid because you said something funny. You didn’t get paid because you wrote Amazing Grace. Just imagine what the royalty would be like on that one.

That was your hobby. And it’s only in the last hundred or two hundred years that we turn this into a profession –something you could expect to get paid for. But going forward, people with ideas are going to get paid, and are getting paid, for something else, something scarce. They’re getting paid for organizing the others.

They’re getting paid for creating places and opportunities for connection. They’re getting paid for souvenirs of their ideas, not the ideas themselves. And Schumpeter’s cycle of Creative Destruction is going faster, and faster, and faster. Because now that we can fake someone’s voice, now that we can fake someone’s video, you’re not even sure who the source of the idea is. And so, chaos will ensue. We are on the cusp of a lot of chaos.

And so, people who create ideas, people create ideas that want to reach people like Bruce, who don’t want to pay for them. It’s not clear to me, we can get paid for our ideas. It’s not clear to me that we can create sufficient scarcity to, at large scale, repeatedly make a living. So I am doing this podcast, not because I am getting paid to do it, I am doing this podcast because I can. Because it’s a privilege.

This is the end of the fifth season of Akimbo, and to those of you who have listened to more than a hundred episodes, or just this one, thank you. Because you are offering me something really valuable. You’re offering me your attention, and that attention implies a level of trust. That attention gives us a chance to share ideas and make things better.

If you share this podcast, I would really appreciate it. It might be good for you as well. Because if you share this podcast, the people around you might be willing to have an interesting conversation with you. This is the last podcast I’ll be doing with Midroll. Midroll are the folks who first showed up, and provoked me into launching Akimbo.

But we’re moving on. And going forward, this podcast is going to be sponsored by akimbo.com – the platform we’ve built that his trained nearly 20,000 people, in more than a hundred countries, using workshops to connect the others. Creating something scarce in a world filled with plenty of opportunities, but not enough chances to find the others.

I’m looking forward to 2020, because it’s a chance, another chance, once again, to make things better. I hope you’ll join me. I’m looking forward to making a ruckus with you. Thank you for listening. And here’s to a happy and healthy 2020.

Go make your Ruckus.

==> 1680-show-your-work- <==

German Philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, said something that is often quoted and has wasted many, many lives. He wrote, “All truth passes through three stages”. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

And where does the waste come from? It comes from the people who are being ridiculed, and believe that being ridiculed is a symptom that they have found the truth.

There’s a drug called Nesiritide. If you have heart failure, Nesiritide could have been a godsend. It’s a drug that when administered intravenously can do wonders for people who have had heart failure. In 2001, Johnson & Johnson got approved by the FDA to sell the drug. And, due to their marketing muscle, it got off to a great start. It had sales of billions of dollars a year and was on track to become a blockbuster. Then, a few years later, a cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Sackner Bernstein, looked at the available data – the data that the FDA requires every drug maker to file. And what he found is that Nesiritide doesn’t work better than a placebo. Sure, it has side effects – low blood pressure in 11% of the people who take it, headache, nausea, slow heart rate, even kidney failure – but no, it’s no better than a placebo. As a result of his work, the Cleveland Clinic ended up forbidding its doctors from prescribing the drug. And within a year, Johnson & Johnson had taken it off the market. So for 10 years, people were taking a drug the didn’t actually do more than a placebo would have. Fortunately, they had to show their work.

Hewlett-Packard had one of the great corporate cultures of the 70s and the 80s. When people talk about Silicon Valley at its best, they’re talking about Hewlett-Packard. A culture of respect, of treating workers fairly, and mostly of showing your work. The HP way included the principle that every night, you should leave your work open on your bench for others to see. That keeping your work a secret isn’t the sign of confidence. It isn’t the sign of someone in a hurry. It’s the sign of having something to hide.

The FDA has been criticized for years, because they make it too difficult for people say to get drugs approved. But here’s the thing, the FDA requires every drug maker to show their work. It’s this transparency, it’s this ability for other researchers to see what tests you have done that separates an FDA-approved drug from some vitamin or herb that’s being sold by some tincture maker in Utah. And there’s a reason that this is valuable. Because as they learned at HP, if you can walk around at the end of the shift and look at what Engineers are putting on their desks, you can make it better.

And the idea that we can make it better, because we can see what you did, that is critical. It’s critical to forward motion. Speaking of forward motion, consider the perpetual motion machine. Here’s one from a guy named Professor Cyril: “The secret to making this wave pattern on a magnetic material is a technical process known only by Professor Cyril and his team. This magnetic wave pattern is used to create the Cyril Effect Generator and it is a cornerstone of a new era in clean and sustainable energy. We are now closer to replicating the Cyril Effect with a working prototype of the SEG. With the anticipated support, this technology will reach the entire World –capital W – and bring about an exciting new energy age”.

And of course there’s video – video of it showing it working. And underneath it says, “He demonstrates the difference between a standard magnet and a conditioned, ringed layer, magnetized with the Cyril magnetics unique process that leaves field impressions that easily show when it is rolled”. And on, and on it goes. The thing is, people who make perpetual motion machines – and there are more of them on the show notes, and you can easily find them online – never show their work. Cold fusion was the sensation when two scientists announced to the world that they had figured out on a tabletop how to create an energy creating fusion reaction.

But because they were coming from Academia, they were required to show their work. And once they showed their work, it was discovered that no one really could replicate their work. But science requires replication – replication and understanding.

Next, onto William Levengood and the idea of crop circles. Here, from cropcircles.com, she received a thorough scientific explanation of the intense crop circle research done by William Levengood and a secret lab partner over 16 years. Levengood was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for writing more papers in scientific journals than anyone else. He was the only scientist who ever went public about his findings that crop circles are a real phenomenon. His scientific theory claim that there’s a plasma vortex operating in the field where crop circles appear. A plasma vortex is like a whirling tornado of different kinds of energies –sometimes up to seven, eight, nine, or ten different kinds of energies. The plasma vortices often traveling, counter-rotating pairs, and because they have different kinds of energy in them – such as microwave energy, ion-electric avalanche energies, thermal gradients, and convective stability, and on and on it goes. So crop circles, do they actually increase the yield on a farm? Are they made by space aliens? Can people truly feel the energy as they walk through the field? Well, if we ask Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, they might say yes. At least they would say that before they admitted to having created hundreds of crop circles, using nothing but a plank of wood and some wire. The crop circles they created at night in the United Kingdom were verified, approved, and authenticated by a crop circle expert.

Of course, they’re all made up. The thing is, that the people who believed in crop circles didn’t show their work. The same thing goes for astrology. That astrology is a powerful placebo – if it’s working for you, please, keep doing it. But it is nothing, it is just made up. You cannot show your work. Two astrologers working in separate rooms will not come up with the same answer to the same question, because there is no way to demonstrate its predictive value – because it doesn’t have any predictive value. What people who don’t show their work do is resort to say it’s a secret. Or resort to false claims to status. Or resort to shaming people who don’t believe. What happens is this, human beings want to believe – we want there to be a story. It is much easier to explain are very complicated world, if behind it are aliens, supernatural powers, conspiracies, invisible forces that help us explain a world that is sometimes random.

Speaking of random, over the last hundred years, particularly in the American southwest, something tragic has happened to cattle – sometimes horses. Doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a Rancher will find one, or two, or even four cows dead on the fringes of their Farm. Well, do the math, it’s going to happen. These are unsupervised animals who are in a semi-dangerous environment that’s hot, or cold, where they have insufficient resources. And some of them are going to die. But these cattle and occasional horses appear to be mutilated. They appear that someone, or something has come to them, cut various parts of their skin, taken various of their organs and removed their blood. And so, there are people who are sure that something nefarious is going on. The FBI initiated a study, spent more than $40,000, created a 250 page report, to demonstrate just how nefarious this activity was.

Here’s the thing, we can explain every single one of the things that are happening to these cattle. It’s largely the result of dehydration, birds, bugs and gravity. But, if you’re unconvinced, perhaps we should show our work. And so Robert Carroll did just that – he set up a camera. And on camera, we see each one of the symptoms of cattle mutilation happening for purely natural reasons.

So what we’re not talking about here is, “I’ll know it, when I see it”. Because, in fact, when Johnson & Johnson gave patients Nesiritide, some of them got better – “I’ll know it, when I see it” – the placebo does that. No, this is not “I know it, when I see it”. It’s I know it when I understand it. Help us understand the mechanics of your big idea. Help us understand the insight behind your engineering. We can only do that when you show your work. And once you’ve shown your work, if you challenge people to make your work better, then they can point out the parts of your work that don’t hold water. They could say to Professor Cyril, “You know what, the laws of thermodynamics are not easily violated, because the laws weren’t made up by somebody. The laws are the result of observations – observations over hundreds of years that have never once been proven to be incorrect. Observations that hold water, that make sense, that are conceptually coherent. That if you could make a perpetual motion machine, well then, everything else in our universe would turn upside down”.

Back to Schopenhauer – “All truth passes through three stages” First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Here’s the thing about perpetual motion machines. Nobody is violently opposed to perpetual motion machines. If you handed us one that actually worked, we’d buy it instantly – we’d be delighted.

The problem is, the thing we are violently opposed to is making stuff up in the name of Science and Engineering. Because it’s not science and it’s not engineering, because it’s not truth. We are not ridiculing your truth. What were ridiculing is pretending to tell the truth. And if you make drugs that could save or hurt people, if you are trying to dance on the edges of science or natural phenomenon, if you are engaging with the public to sell them something, we need to draw a really clear line between entertainment and science. That engineering works because you show your work. Because it holds up under scrutiny, and because we understand it. And the mysteries of our lives – the mysteries that lead to placebo effects, and to joy, and to connection, and to living a happy life – well, that’s a different category.

And we need to be really clear about which is which, because in a day when anyone can publish, and anyone will, it’s easier than ever to get confused about the difference.

Thanks for listening. Go make a Ruckus.

Thanks for listening. As always, I love to hear from you. As we enter a new year, we have new questions and new things to discuss. Share what’s on your mind – visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K and press the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, I have a question around the connection between empathy and consistency. I have the feeling that if I have a consistent message that I put out into the world over and over again – and wait for people to connect to it and to really understand it, or just a really resonate it and to find that the timing is right for them – that I might be missing empathy for the customer and understanding their world view and, and where they are really coming from.

Yeah, this seems like a paradox, Josh. That there seems to be two imperatives. One, that we see the others for who they are, for what they believe, for their fears, their dreams, their desires for the connections that they seek to make. And on the other hand, we know that frequency and consistency always works in the marketplace. That showing up in a reliable way – making promises and keeping them, standing for something, having a position – they all matter. So what do we do when they collide? What do we do when the vast variety of humanity finds our product, or our service, and discovers that it’s consistent, which means that it’s not exactly for them?

This is why the smallest viable audience is so important. The smallest viable audience for Heinz Ketchup, is millions and millions of people. Because they want the regular kind, the kind they grew up with, the kind that reminds them that we are all, sort of, the same. On the other hand, the minimum viable audience for a piece of Contemporary Art might simply be 200 people. 200 people who have the insight and the experience, and the means to buy a piece of this art and hang it on their wall.

So does that mean that the contemporary artists, the Richard Serra, should start making ketchup? No, it doesn’t. It means that when you find a group of people who share enough share enough values, share enough in their point of view, share enough in where they seek to go, that you can live on that – that you can live with that, then make something for them.

And then you can be really clear to the world, “This is for people who like things like this. This is for people who believe this this”. You can say to the world, “People like us, we do things like this”. And then you can offer them this, so the discipline is showing up consistently with something that you are proud of – just only, simply for the people you seek to serve.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time, and have a safe and happy New Year.

==> 1747-operating-systems- <==

Back in the day, computer monitors were big and heavy, and expensive. And if you left them on all night with your word processing screen open, you would burn in the phosphors. And pretty soon, your monitor would be useless. Then in 1989, Berkeley Software introduced After Dark, which turned your screen, if you had a Mac, into a series of flying toasters – winged flying toasters – that would dance up and down, back and forth, across your black screen.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

Flying toasters is a piece of software. Flying toasters screensavers is a choice. You can either buy it, or not buy it. It was a hack to the operating system. It allowed a software company to go into your computer and make it better, if that’s what you wanted. We have countless pieces of software on our operating systems, and if you buy a piece of software that runs in Windows, it’s probably not going to easily run on your Mac, and vice versa.

The operating system is a series of rules, approaches, ways that software can work. And if you’re going to create an operating system, you have a lot of responsibility. If you are living inside an operating system, working with one, it pays to be able to see it.

Cities are one of the oldest operating systems in the history of humanity. A city is a series of rules. You can put a house in a city, you could open a store in the city, you might have a park in a city, but all of these things, or the absence of them, are defined by the operating system of the city itself. Consider the enmity and fighting between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Robert Moses redefined the operating system of New York. He built more roads and more buildings than anyone in history. You can see some of what Robert Moses built from outer space. Robert Moses believed in two things that don’t seem related. One, he believed in parks, and two he believed in the primacy of the automobile.

He would do almost anything to gain the power that he needed to make both of them happen. Jane Jacobs, fighting against his top-down bulldozed style, believed in an organic, bottoms-up, community-based, cess car-centric approach to how the operating system of a city ought to be designed. In a speech that I heard from The Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand, the founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, pointed out that if we look at a map of Boston from 1750, from 1850, from 1950, the buildings all change. Almost every single building has been replaced over the last centuries. But the roads? The roads remain. Because the roads define the operating system of the city. So back to this idea of cars. Part of the operating system of every single city and town in the United States, with a few exceptions, is the idea that when you get to a light, you can turn right on red. Turns out that turning right on red saves a lot of time and fuel, and it became Federal Law in the 1970s. But right on red isn’t a law of nature. In Europe, there isn’t that much right on red – it’s an operating system difference.

So back to this idea of the flying toasters – screensavers became a sensation. Millions and millions of them were sold. Interestingly enough, one of the ways that the software company that made the flying toasters did so well, is they turned their screensaver into an operating system. They went to others, including Lucas Films – the Star Wars people – and said, “Here’s our platform. If you want to make a screensaver that plugs into it, please feel free”. That way by defining the standard, Berkeley was able to ensure dominance. Fast forward a little bit, to your smart phone.

Your smartphone has an operating system in it. Maybe it’s made by Google who loses tons of money paying millions in royalties to Microsoft – giving away their operating system. Or maybe, it’s an iPhone. Now, Google gives it away at great expense, because they understood how important it was that search, in your pocket, maintain the Primacy for Google. And the way to ensure that they would get that search, is by owning the operating system. Apple, on the other hand, which went largely first in the smartphone business, makes a significant profit by defining the rules.

There are three ways an operating system can be defined. It can be closed – and that’s Apple. Apple can decide if an app is going to be in the store or not. Apple can easily change the rules about which programs are going to be where. It can be completely open, like Linux – an operating system where you can see every line of code yourself, where you can make your own version of it. Or it can be somewhere in between – slightly uncomfortable, but often quite effective – the way Microsoft is.

So back to the flying toasters. Soon after that screensaver thing got popular, it occurred to me as a book packager that we could take the idea of a page-a-day calendar, and turn it into a screen-a-day calendar. So that every day when you got into work and you looked at your computer, instead of seeing flying toasters, you would see the quote of the day, or today’s Far Side cartoon, or whatever it was. But hacking the operating system got more and more difficult. Because the people who made the operating systems – Microsoft and Apple – weren’t easily giving away the root control that you might have needed to be able to do something like this. And to this day on smartphones, taking over the lock screen, is something I haven’t seen any piece of software do. Though it seems to me that that would be a really juicy place to put quotes, or insights, or provocations.

So back to this idea of operating systems. When we had the operating system of a city, we began to make choices. Right on red is a choice, not a natural law. That in the early days, cities were defined by their need for water. Because if you don’t have fresh water coming in, humans can’t survive. My office, 20 miles away from New York City, has a park about 200 feet up the hill. The park is more than 10 miles long, and it’s only 30 feet wide – what kind of park is this?

Well, it turns out that underneath this long strip of land is a pipe. It’s pipe big enough to walk through, but you can’t walk through it because it’s filled with water. And it takes the water all the way from the Catskills into New York City. That part of the operating system of having that many people together, interacting with each other, is not just law and order, but is also Public Works.

And then you’ve got the idea of mass transit. It’s a choice to destroy your tram lines and your bus lines – as General Motors helped cities do. And to instead make it, so that the operating system of your city is all about cars. As we started to build suburbs, because cities were getting bigger, another question – how are people going to go back and forth?

Well if we look at a city like Detroit, the answer is “They’re not”. And so Detroit became a donut, hollowed out in the center where anyone who could afford to leave, left – and the city withered away. On the other hand, a city like New York benefited from a significant commuter rail in all three directions out of New York City. As much as Robert Moses tried to undermine it, it turned out that it worked. That real estate developers would lobby the commuter rail companies to build a stop.

Because once you’ve built a stop in Irvington, or Riverdale, or Dobbs Ferry, you knew that the houses near the stop would go up in value. Because you could build a hamlet, or a village, or even a small town. It turns out that transportation defines how people are moving around.

So back to computer operating systems. part of my thesis about operating systems is, we don’t really have a choice. That’s the difference between software and the OS. If you don’t like a piece of software, buy another one. As long as it doesn’t have a lock in, you have choices. But once you’ve committed to an operating system – and then Apple changes it, breaking it for millions and millions of people – we scream and yell. But worse is when they put dark patterns in. When they started to shift the operating system of smartphones to push you to spend more and more time using it, the vibrating, the buzzing, the hassling you because you haven’t looked at all of your alerts – all of these are decisions. They are decisions as profound as how to get the water into the city. Decisions as profound as whether or not we’re going to vote for cars, or trains.

Two more things about flying toasters and systems. The first one is that there was a lawsuit in which the flying toaster people sued another company because they had made a parody of the flying toasters – a game that involved shooting flying toasters out of the sky. And, in fact, they won. And so their competitor ended up changing the wings on the flying toasters, to propellers instead. The second one came a little bit later when Led Zeppelin sued them, saying that the flying toasters that were saving all of those screens, looked suspiciously like the flying toasters that were on the cover of one of Led Zepplin’s albums. Led Zeppelin lost that one – Led Zeppelin goes to court a lot, just an aside – Led Zeppelin lost that one, because they had failed to register the trademark on that cover until after the lawsuit was filed.

What’s interesting here, is that the operating system of a screen saver platform, was interacting with the operating system of the rule of law. The magic of the rule of law as an operating system, is that it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. It doesn’t matter who is dominant in the moment. The rules are the rules, and so the operating system of the law exists so that we can boot ourselves out of whatever bug-infested place we are stuck in, and can start over again.

The rule of law is an operating system that’s been around for almost a thousand years. And you don’t have to like the outcomes, but the process itself – the system – it’s something we can operate with. And then the next part, the next part is “Can we hack the operating system?” There’s a guy who does tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s not an official docent of the museum, but you can find them online and he’ll give you a tour. He is hacking the operating system of that building because that building is more permeable than the museum expected. And this permeability is essential. Because what we know when we build an operating system, is that over the long run permeability tends to win out. Linux came from nowhere – it now powers huge swaths of the internet and computing around the world.

WordPress is an open source piece of software, which means people can plug in to what WordPress does, without asking anyone’s permission. When Apple was coming up, Microsoft had hegemony. They got to decide who would carry the operating system. They got to decide how the operating system would work. And what Apple did was, relying on the good taste of its leadership, they created a closed operating system that was so beautiful.

Susan Kare, an artist, was one of the 14 people on the original Mac team. Can you imagine out of the original team, one of them was an artist? That good taste, even though the system was closed, was sufficient to spread an idea – to get people to adopt the system. But systems don’t last forever, because they are impacted by other systems, one after another, pushing forward. So here we are in this moment of time, right on the precipice between open resilient systems and closed ones – ones that are easily disrupted. The voting system in the United States is a closed operating system. It is not supposed to be hackable, which of course means that it will be hacked. It is fragile. Because it has no resilience, the resilience that comes from a being open and flexible. What we need to do as people whose time is being taken, whose trust is being abused, who look for opportunities but can’t always find them, is take a hard look at the invisible operating systems all around us. Because it’s not always a Tim Cook that launches a new OS at some fancy conference.

It could very well be that the operating systems of our future our invisibly creeping up around us, and if we’re not seeing them, if we’re not defining them, if we’re not pushing them to be better, then they’re not going to be for us, or by us. They’re going to be done to us, until we have no choice but to live with them.

As always, I love hearing from you. If you’ve got a question, I hope you’ll contribute it. Visit akimbo.link, that’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Here’s one from Ali. According to my software, it’s the 1000th question that was submitted to Akimbo via akimbo dot link.

Hey Seth, I’m Ali and we love you here in Egypt – wish you can come sometime. Well, thanks for the last episode – it’s perfect. My question is “What is the effect of showing your work in marketing?” Are sometimes hiding your work will give it more value than showing it, or is it just another scam? I mean, we have KFC for example, and their biggest marketing advantages for years have been that they have the secret recipe that only 25% knows about. Well, you know the story. And, I also believe in what Robert Greene said that sometimes hiding your work process and showing the final result will give you more value. I know that the examples you use were mostly scientific but Does that also apply to art as well? I remember you talked about something similar in the Banksy episode, but I think I need to know more. Thanks Seth.

Thanks for this. It gives me a chance to clarify what I was trying to get at. By “show your work,” I’m talking about showing your work so that we can make it better. When we are doing art, when we are seeking the spiritual to get under someone’s skin, when we are dealing with the magic that is so much of what is in marketing, well, no, then we shouldn’t show our work. That concealing how we came about, to do the thing we did – it is in fact a magic trick.

And what magicians know is that the more someone wants you to tell them how they did the trick, the less you should tell them. Because as soon as someone knows how you did the trick, they are no longer interested. No longer interested in the trick, no longer interested in you, no longer interested in exploring how it felt to be mystified. Now an aside about Kentucky Fried Chicken – there aren’t 11 herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken – that’s part of the secret. Some people think there’s only two.

But back to the matter at hand. Traditionally, brand marketing has been about hiding your work. No numbers, no measurement, a lot of mumbo jumbo about what’s working and what’s not. Because the people who do brand marketing, who run unmeasured TV ads, they don’t want to know. Because if they knew, then they’d have to admit that something they did, didn’t work.

And so they often resist examination. What the internet has brought along is direct marketing – measured, actionable interaction. And in that world, not only do you need to show your work to your peers, but Google is busy showing your work to everyone. Because you can how much other people are paying for the ads for the keywords that you are buying.

You can see what it costs to buy a certain amount of attention on Facebook. Those numbers have forced lots of marketers to become direct marketers. Because if you don’t you’re going to lose your shirt. It’s also interesting to note that if you take too short of you, when it comes to sharing your numbers and showing your work, you’re going to end up optimizing for the wrong thing and that’s how we’ve ended up with so much callous, short-term, thoughtless kind of marketing. Because if all you’re measuring is “How many clicks did I get in the last five minutes?”

Well, then you’re going to do things that are hustles, come-ons, flashing, ready, let’s go, instead of that long-term build that allowed brand marketers to build what they’ve built for all of these years. So the magic here is figuring out which work to show. And how to be really clear with the people that we trust about how we’re doing, and how we can do it better.

I hope that helps thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1790-surprise-and-privacy- <==

What was in Henry Kissinger’s garbage? An interesting question. In 1975, Henry Kissinger was one of the most notorious and controversial people in the country. And he discovered that the National Enquirer was rifling through his garbage, looking for clues. What was in his garbage and was it okay for The Enquirer to look through it?

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

In 1988, the Supreme Court issued a ruling written by Byron White about whether it was okay for the police to look through someone’s garbage without a warrant. In that ruling, White pointed out that Kissinger’s garbage had been looked through 13 years earlier. And he basically said, “Once you put it in the garbage, it’s out there and it’s no longer in your control”. But this, this is not a podcast about garbage; it’s a podcast about privacy. And my thesis, just to let you know upfront, is that most people don’t care about privacy. What we care about is being surprised.

Here’s the thing, I know a lot about you. I know that you listen to this podcast. If I wanted to I could dig a little deeper and find out the IP address of the people who listened to this podcast. And using that IP address, I could find out what other websites people who listen have been to, and deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. All the way to the point of probably guessing, pretty accurately, who you voted for in the last election.

Of course, I don’t know any of those things because I’m not looking, but the data is there. And if you care about privacy, you don’t use the internet, and you don’t have a credit card. Because 30, or 40, or 50 years ago, if you used a credit card, the credit card company “knew” in quotation marks, almost everything about your buying habits and your travel habits.

They knew where you flew, and who you flew with. They could take that data and add it to all the other data they had. In fact, American Express has been doing this for decades. They could then take that data and sell it, for example, to one of their good customers. They could say to a hotel, “Would you like to know the zip codes that your competitors – hotels in this neighborhood – attract people from? We will sell you that information, so that you can target those zip codes to grow your own hotel base”.

Was that okay with you? Well, you were doing it whether or not it was okay with you. Or consider Vogue magazine. If you buy a copy of Vogue magazine on the newsstand, is it okay that there are ads in it for people who read Vogue magazine, not ads for Rototillers, not ads for ways to do needlepoint. No, there are ads for shoes, blouses, and dresses – that okay?

Well, I think most of us would agree that we’d prefer it if Vogue magazine cost $8 at the newsstand, not $80. And the way they can sell it for 8, not 80, is because it has ads. And that most people who read Vogue magazine would prefer it, if the ads were about the things that are in Vogue, because most of the time they’re reading it for the ads. But leaving aside the “prefer it” part. Let’s just go back to the “surprised part”. All this data, all this garbage about your activities is in the world, floating around. but all of a sudden, the phone rings and it’s somebody who says, “Look, I’ve been looking through your credit card data, and I’ve discovered that you’ve been going for a lot of massages at illicit massage parlors, paying for it with a credit card – not very smart of you – and staying in hourly Motels. So, I’m calling to see if you’d like a discount on STD testing”. Now, if you got that call, my hunch is that you would be incensed, because you were surprised. Because it’s not what you signed up for.

So let’s go back to the commercialization of this industry, all the way back to LL Bean, in the early 1900s. LL Bean went to the Government of Maine, a state in the US, and said to them, “I would like the list of all the men in Maine who have a hunting license”. Now, this is a matter of public record, and we can have a discussion about whether public record is ok or not. We could definitely have a discussion about whether public records should be public or not. But once it becomes commercial, then I think that conversation goes away.

So he goes to the government of Maine in gets the list of all the men with a hunting license in Maine. Then he goes to the Post Office. Now the Post Office has an open API, meaning anybody with a stamp can send a letter to anyone they want to. I’m going to argue that most of us are fine with that. That the Post Office should be an open conduit, and it shouldn’t be up to the government who can send a letter, and who can’t. So he sends a letter to all of these hunting license owners and he builds a company called L. L. Bean – so far, so good. I don’t think anybody is surprised by this story.

Now LL Bean is in a cutthroat business. Someone else can sell things cheaper than they can. One of the ways they keep their prices low, is they rent their list. They rent to somebody who isn’t a direct competitor the list of people who, for example, just bought something expensive from LL Bean. So those other people can send a letter to them. 30 years ago, when I discovered that this was possible, I did some research. There are people who sell mailing lists for a living, still to this day. And I found that you could buy a list of every woman in New York City who owned a handgun permit. Now, I don’t think most of the people on that list were glad that they were on that list, but the list is garbage – the leftovers from an action that they took in the public sphere. And again, back to the idea of the government having the list. Well, Vogue has a list of all the people who are subscribers. A subscription to Vogue costs a lot less than buying it on the newsstand with cash, but a subscription comes with the fact that Vogue knows that you’re a subscriber. Does Vogue sell that list? You bet you. Now, once computers enter the picture, we can start overlapping. So for example, we now easily know which ZIP codes in America have the highest income.

I think anyone who’s okay with a company sending a mailer to everyone in America, is probably okay with having those people pick certain zip codes to send their mailers to. But now you can take the list of the “best,” in quotation marks, zip codes and overlap it with for example, the people who subscribe to Vogue. And overlap that with for example, the people who are registered Republicans. Each piece of data compounding, building a dossier – a profile on every single person that the marketer is paying to reach. Notice that it each step along the way, the amount of privacy that someone had, has not changed one bit. What’s changing is how surprised we are at how granular the information can become.

You’ve probably already guessed where this is going, because like all things, when you add the internet and stir, many zeros get added to it. Because now, I don’t have to track whether or not you subscribe to Vogue magazine.

What I can do instead is say, “If someone has visited site A, site B, and site C, I would like to show them an ad on the internet. So how does that even work? Well years ago, one of the things that got added to the web browser with something called a cookie. The purpose of the cookie was to make it easy for a website to know that you’d been there before or not. And everyone was happy with this. Because why should I have to see all the bla bla bla for website, if I’m already a registered user. The cookie simply puts up a flag and it says to the website, “Hey this person, he’s been here before, she’s been here before”. Try to imagine how much nicer it would be if you could walk into a retailer, and all the people at the store – even the clerks who just got hired – realized that you were a big shot, that you wore size 4. That you didn’t like the color brown, but really like the color yellow. And they instantly rearrange the store just for you.

That was the original idea behind cookies, and it was very strict that you couldn’t share cookie data across sites. Which meant that what you did on one site was hidden from what you did on another site. But again, when you add commercialism to the internet and stir, crazy things happen, and now that rule’s way gone. That there are universal cookie trackers that know you did something on site A, and then can engage with you in a certain way on site B.

Suddenly, people were getting surprised – same amount of privacy, way more surprise. Because you went shopping one day in a moment of weakness for a miniskirt, and then for the next two weeks, miniskirt ads everywhere you go – at work, when people are looking over your shoulder, at home when your spouse is like, “What are you doing?” Surprise, surprise, surprise. Suddenly, a sharp point is put on to this idea that we are always being tracked, ever since we put our garbage on the curb when we were a little kid. That all the data is in the world, but the tracking, the tracking is adding up.

Two more stories here. The first ones about Paco Underhill – Paco considered a guru of retail shopping environments. Paco and his team looked at ten thousand hours of security camera footage from places like Macy’s and other big department stores. And what they discovered, for example, is that when the shelves are too close to one another and people are squeezing by, women tend to stop shopping. So he came up with the idea of spreading out the shelves, and they saw sales go up. Did the system breakdown? Is it okay for Macy’s to have security cameras? Is it okay to use those cameras to figure out how to make the shopping experience more viable? Or consider the new tools on the internet that allow a web designer to sit at her desk and watch one person at a time tracking the mouse movements of someone who is visiting her website. It’s not a big leap to hook that up to the IP address of the person who is visiting the website. And suddenly, your experience on a website is no more anonymous than your experience at Macy’s.

So now the question the question is, “What should we do about our rage about the surprise?” Because we’ve already decided what sort of economy we work in, and live in. We’ve already decided that we are willing to trade almost anything for convenience, and to save a few bucks. So Netflix, Netflix knows that you only watch that show for a minute. And then next week for another minute. By knowing that, they’re not going to make another episode of that show. Or if they do, they’re not going to tell you about it, because it’s not in their interest to do. So a lot of people say, “That’s great, I am glad that websites change what they offer based on how people interact with websites”. If there’s a clunky product and you put it on your homepage, and it doesn’t sell, you take it off your homepage. That is the evolution of ideas. Ideas online – the ones that work – get done more. But then we start to chunk it up. We don’t have one home page, we have 400 home pages. If it’s working well on home page number 72, we keep it on 72. But if it’s not working well on home page 144, we take it off that homepage. Again, so far, so good.

We like the fact that products are optimized. We like the fact that prices are lower. In fact, we insist on it. The people who don’t do these things – the media companies, or the catalogers, or the creator’s who don’t do these things – we generally walk away from them. Because their products aren’t convenient, because their products aren’t customized, because their products cost too much. And so, we are stuck with this bargain.

And now the question is, as it gets weaponized and digitized, and optimized, “What are we going to do about it? Where do we draw the line?” So consider this podcast. This podcast has ads, sometimes from nonprofits, which I do for free, sometimes through a partner. I run the ads because it’s an interesting experiment for me to understand how a new medium is being monetized.

But if you want podcasts and you don’t want to pay Audible for audiobooks, how are you going to get them for free? You can get them for free because they’re going to be ads. Because the creators of the podcasts would like to get paid. Okay, so if they’re going to be ads, what sort of ads? Well at the beginning, they were ads – the way Vogue magazine would have ads – so the advertiser with a crude amount of data at her disposal would say, “Oh, I want a podcast that reaches the kind of people that read Vogue magazine. I’ll put an ad in that one”.

And most people say, “Well sure”. Because by listening to the podcast, I engaged in a bargain. And that bargain involved me saying, “I’m the kind of person who’s interested in X, and it’s okay to run ads about X”. And we sort of get annoyed if their ads about Y, because we say the marketer and the podcaster are wasting my time by running ads about something I cannot, will not, or should not buy. So far, so good.

But when you subscribe to a podcast your RSS reader or other device pinged the server to get the next episode. And when it did, it told it your IP address. Okay, so now we know which sort of person is listening, because once I know your IP address, I know lots of other things about how you’ve used the web. Next thing, it used to be that an ad on a podcast was permanently embedded into the podcast. That when the podcast went out, the ad went out with it. But once digitized, we don’t have to do it that way. We can swap an ad in, or out. So now the advertiser – evolving as we insist, and demand they evolve – says, “Wait a minute. I can tell from IP addresses that these people live in Germany. My product isn’t for sale in Germany. I don’t want to pay to run my ad in front of those people”.

On the other hand, there’s another product only for sale in Germany. It’s willing to pay a premium to reach just those people. So we divide, and we atomize. And deeper, and deeper, and deeper the advertisers go. Now where the surprise turns to outrage, is when we read about a snooping firm a dossier firm that has figured out every one of your foibles and proclivities.

It turns out advertisers don’t know this, don’t care about this, and have it actually invaded your privacy. One day the government might, one day an enemy of yours might. But advertisers, they’re just short term, greedy narcissists who are trying to run the ads that will make them the most money in the shortest period of time. They have a computer talking to another computer, buying the best data they can find, which is small solace. If you are somebody who has been targeted by a Facebook ad that was built just to reach three people. Yes, you can do that without too much trouble.

Suddenly, we’re like, “Wait a minute, what’s happening here? Do I have no expectation of privacy?” And, as we learned from Byron White, no, you have no expectation of privacy. Now on the internet, you can protect yourself by installing a VPN, by installing all sorts of filters between you and the internet. Eternal vigilance will get you 99% of the way to living in a world that isn’t like the world the rest of us live in. But in that world, you will see everything in its most generic sense. And that in that world you will, overtime, pay more for the things you interact with, because the subsidies that made it so that it was cheaper or more convenient are going to go away. And advertisers don’t really worry about this.

They don’t worry about this because people are lazy, people seek convenience, and because the world shifts often enough that it’s quite likely that the large mass of people aren’t going to mind. So the idea of permission marketing from 20 years ago was that people want anticipated personal and relevant messages that they want to get. They don’t want to be spammed.

Being spammed as a form of being surprised. Being spammed means getting something you didn’t want or expect. And what’s happening as these media evolve is we are resetting the standard for what privacy even means. If you got a note from Amazon that said, “We lost all of your information. We don’t know what you like. We don’t know how to customize things for you. We don’t have your credit card or your address, or the addresses of all the people you mail stuff to, you’re going to have to start over”. My guess is that most people would be annoyed by that.

On the other hand, if we have the chance to take all of our data out of Facebook and start over with a social network that’s a little bit more kind and rational, I think many people would take that choice. And so we have a paradox and a puzzle, because on one hand, we like all the treats. On the other hand, every once in awhile someone points out to us just how many calories we’re consuming. There isn’t a hard and fast line here. I don’t know anybody who is living a completely anonymous life. I don’t know anybody who want the internet to know everything they do all the time

Back when I was running Yoyodyne, when we invented permission marketing, there was something called Jenny Cam. Jenny Cam was a sensation. It was a woman who had set up a webcam in her home, and you could watch her 24 hours a day, doing whatever she wanted to do.

Of course the prurient people showed up immediately, and want to know if there was a camera in the bedroom and that varied depending on how much traffic she wanted. But Jenny Cam was the beginning of an interesting experiment that we are now all part of. Because Nest, and Alexa, and Google, and the rest of them – they’re watching they’re watching all the time.

They don’t know you, because they’re computers. It’s all going into a vast data bank. And that data bank, because it’s digital, is going to get ever sharper and more personal. And sooner or later, you will be surprised. And my bet is the surprise will wear off and you will go back to business as usual, because the ratchet of capitalism is inexorable. Over and over it turns, usually in one direction, and it’s not the direction toward, “I see you as a human. I treat you with respect and dignity, and you in return do the same for me”.

No, we’re in such a hurry to save a minute or save a dollar. We’re in such a hurry to click on that thing we want, even if we know that we are rewarding a marketer who is doing something we don’t approve of, that we keep doing it.

So if I’m going to wrap this up in a tidy bow. What Byron White said to Henry Kissinger is, “We’re going to snoop your garbage. Get over it, buy a shredder if you care”. Well, the internet is saying to each of us, “Guess what? You are putting your activity on the curb, just like garbage every day”. And we are going to do our best to not surprise you because that’s bad for business, but we’re also going to be really focused on what works and we’re going to do that more. And as long as it works, count on marketers to keep doing it more.

That’s my rant for today. Go make a Ruckus.

As always, I love to hear from you. To ask a question, just visit akimbo.link – that’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. Two juicy questions this week, here we go.

Hi Seth, my question’s about non-profits and scarcity. I’m endeavouring to create an organization based around the idea, people need to be outside more. Connection to Nature and the benefits it provides have been documented over and over again. And the only hitch in the giddy up, as Kramer would say, is that we do not have a scarce model. How do we create enrolment in our organization when most of our products are free to use?

Thank you for highlighting this issue of scarcity. Scarcity creates tension, tension creates value, and it also creates action. But what to do if the thing we are offering has no apparent scarcity? In your case the outdoors, or for example marketing a search engine. A search engine is all about ubiquity – anyone can use it. It’s not going to have a line. It’s going to work whenever you show up. So where is the scarcity?

Well, there are many forms of scarcity in our culture that don’t have anything to do with access. Access to experiences, access to tools. For example the scarcity of connection, the scarcity of being seen, the scarcity of status. If you’re looking to celebrate people who participate in something, give them a badge. There is no scarcity when it comes to the ability to donate blood, but there is a scarcity of the status that you get from wearing a pin saying you just donated blood that.

Rules are created by marketers who seek to cause action to occur. So in the case of an outdoor cause like yours, you can have people who are voluntary rangers. You could have people who volunteer to clean up parts of the parks. They could get special parking spaces, bumper stickers, badges ,hats – all sorts of ways that they could indicate to the others that they care just a little bit more. You could create environments where circles of people would be able to see each other – insiders and outsiders. You could create walks where there’s limited availability to go with a guide, etc. etc. Creating scarcity is not cruel. Creating scarcity in the service of causing action is a generous act.

Hi Seth, Jason Coogler from San Diego. My question is related to your rant on paint by numbers. Basically, you’re saying if there’s an instruction sheet telling you exactly how to create a work of art, and you just follow the step by step guide, there’s not much value in that. So my question is related to my eight-year-old son, who loves Legos. He can’t wait to get the next box of Lego’s and create the creation that is shown on the front cover. And he’ll spend a holiday building it, getting it just right, and then showing it to me ,or showing it to my wife, and of course we say “great job”. Are we encouraging the right thing? Should we be encouraging him to instead create something from scratch? What are your thoughts on that?

Sounds like your kid is lucky to have you. I have ranted about Lego before, but for those of you who might have missed it, here’s the deal. The Lego company many, many years old, based on some very principled principles – including the idea that every piece of Lego has to multiple purposes – was facing bankruptcy. In the world of video games, in the world of the internet, it was really hard to get a kid to turn off a screen and start playing with general-purpose Lego blocks. And what saved Lego was their understanding that the culture has shifted, and that giving kids a kit, a kit with a right answer, a kit with a method, a kit that is designed to be done and then discarded fit what many parents and many kids were looking for – an assignment.

And so, the Lego company was saved by an endless series of licensed, or simply interesting kits. And at first I looked at that and I go, “That’s great, because they are interesting. They are clever. They do challenge the kid to visualize things in three dimensions and to get good at finishing something”. However, if that’s all they get out of it, it’s basically compliance practice.

It’s practice for doing what your boss is going to tell you. That what I would say to my kid who is so proud of this is, “All right, now that we finished the kit, how do we make it better? How do we reassemble it using pieces from another kit to build something even better than the people at Lego created”. And I’d go ahead and post those pictures – share them widely. Express pride in the fact that a creative act occurred, without a manual, without a step-by-step instruction. That somehow you and your kid figured out how to take a Jedi fighter and the London Bridge, and put them together into something new – something that no one else has ever built before. So no, I wouldn’t take away the joy of building a kit from anybody, but I think we can go further than that.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1815-sportsmanship- <==

All Jason Gonzalez wanted to do was pay his way through college. Going to a college in Minnesota, he realized that there was a gap in the market. That gap? The nearest Krispy Kreme was in Iowa – a four hour drive away.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

You probably heard the story which is part of the reason I’m telling it to you. Jason posted on Facebook, and within hours had plenty of people raising their hands saying, “Sure, if you make the drive to Iowa and pick us up dozens and dozens of donuts, we’ll buy ’em from you when, you get here”.

So upon hearing this news, upon discovering that Jason was paying his way through college by buying Krispy Kreme donuts at retail and then bringing them to people who wanted them, what did Krispy Kreme do? Of course, they shut him down. They had no good moral reason to do it. There was no legal basis for doing it. But they did it anyway.

Now here’s the question, why have you heard about this? You’ve heard about it, because it offends our sensibility. It feels wrong. But why is it wrong? Isn’t Krispy Kreme’s job to maximize the profit for their shareholders, and can’t they best do that by controlling everything about their brand? Isn’t their job to make things exactly like they were yesterday but a little bit more profitable? So what if they go after some college kid?

Well the outcry made it clear that there is a ‘so what’. We don’t like it when the big powerful bully comes after someone, particularly if the other person isn’t hurting anyone and they don’t even have a legal basis to do so. And I think this is a version of sportsmanship. If we think back to thousands of years ago, before they invented the Super Bowl, before they invented the World Cup, before they invented jousting, it seems to me that a lot of the ways we settled grudges – a lot of the ways we burned off extra energy – was by mortally wounding other people.

Alexander Hamilton isn’t the only person who was involved in a fatal duel. And so sports comes along. And maybe sports shows up as a replacement for mortal combat. Maybe it’s a way to establish hierarchy. Maybe it’s a way for people, particularly men, to burn off a little bit of their testosterone-based energy, showing who’s up and who’s down.

Now the question. The question is, “Like Krispy Kreme, isn’t your job to go all the way, to do anything you can get away with – within or not within the rules – in order to win?” Isn’t the point of sports to win? The New York Times reports in November 2019, that a high school football team in Nassau County beat the other team 61 to 13.

Now, you don’t have to know a lot about football to know that 61 to 13 is a fairly lopsided outcome. If you’re the coach of the team that’s winning and you’re up by, I don’t know, four touchdowns and a field goal. And there is 15 minutes left in the game, and you know that in the history of high school sports, no team has ever come back from a deficit like that one. And you know that your job is not to win a trophy, but your job – using taxpayer money and all those kids’ time and energy – is to somehow teach your kids something, the question is, “Do you keep your first string in the game and score a few more touchdowns?”

Nassau County has a rule, and the rule is – if you win by more than six touchdowns, you have to come before a board that questions your focus and asks you about sportsmanship, and that you might, in fact, get suspended for a game. That’s what happened to Coach Shaver.

Now, let’s say you’re Doctor Salina – the Superintendent of schools of the Plain Edge Public Schools – knowing that your coach did this on the taxpayers’ dime when he is supposed to be working as an educator. Would you publish a two-page letter that includes things like, “Coach Shaver was done wrong by this group of self-professed experts on sportsmanship”. Who said they’re experts on sportsmanship? Who appointed these people to run this kangaroo court, being the Judge, Jury and Executioners?That’s emphasis added by me. And it goes on, and on for two pages.

What are you teaching children by saying, “Play fairly, but now you are playing too well. Don’t play anymore for the rest of the game”. Where is the life lesson? Well, Doctor Salina, I’ll tell you where the life lesson is. The life lesson is that each of us has to live in a community, and the question we need to ask about sportsmanship – whether it’s Krispy Kreme, or your football team is – “What’s sportsmanship even for? We know some of the great sportsmanship stories by heart, because they make us feel something about possibility and humanity.

John Landy, well known for being the second person to run a four-minute mile, was also known for the fact that in a race, he stopped when someone named Ron Clark fell just in front of him, and instead of running past him, helped him up and then got back in the race. That’s not what you’re supposed to do when you’re in a race, is it? Or maybe it is? Or consider what Jack Nicklaus did in 1969, in the Ryder Cup. He was in a hard-fought match with a golfer Tony Jacklin. And on the 18th hole, after Nicholas holed out, instead of standing there, putting the pressure on Jacklin to hole his putt, he just gave it to his competitor, ending the match in a tie.

When we see sportsmanship like this, I think what it does is remind us that we are not at war with the opponent. That the purpose of the game, whether the game is business or the game is golf, is to demonstrate that we have sufficiency. That what it means to win by cheating, what it means to win by cutting every corner, what it means to win by humiliating your opponent, is a demonstration of your own insufficiency – your own insecurity. Because what we have decided in that moment, is that enough cannot possibly be enough.

What we need is more – I’ll go on for just a little bit longer. Compare these stories, the stories of the softball team that picks up an injured player and helps her around the bases to get her home run. Compare that to a guy, named Nicolas Batum, competing in the Olympics in 2012. It’s France vs. Spain in the men’s Basketball quarterfinal. Batum reaches around Spain’s Juan Carlos Navarro, the guy who has the ball, and punches him in his groin. He’s angry because a different player had feigned an injury. He needs to teach him a lesson. The question I’m wondering about is, all of this teaching people a lesson, what exactly does it earn us?

The Olympic tradition of of amateurism began because the organizers of the Olympics didn’t want working men bothering the elites who are going to compete in the Olympics. The whole idea was, you didn’t get paid to do your sports – only a rich person could devote the effort to doing the sport – which made it more likely that the rich person would win. Despite that less than illustrious beginning, the tradition is supposed to be that you have sufficiency. That you understand that tomorrow, somebody else is going to compete and someone else might win.

You understand that punching someone in the groin, simply because you can get away with it, is a metaphor for war – not for a positive ratchet that makes the culture we live in better, not worse. So back to my obsession with high school sports. Is the purpose of high school sports to get more trophies? Does the school have a trophy shortage? Or perhaps, the purpose of high school sports is to train, vocationally, kids to be in the NHL, or the NFL, or whatever league you want to name. The problem with that is, if it’s vocational training, it’s pretty horrible. Because, perhaps, one in a million kids who competes in any given sport, is going to go on to have a highly paid successful career in professional sports. Now, I hope we can agree that’s not what high schools sports are for. And yet, because we’re measuring something on just one axis. How many games did you win? How many points did you win by? We get seduced into believing that there is a connection between the number of victories, and the point of the entire exercise.

And, of course, Milton Friedman put us down the same path when he made up that whole nonsense about “The only purpose of a corporation being, to enrich the shareholders”. Well that lets the CEO off the hook, doesn’t it? Because you can get away with anything, as long as you justify it in the name of shareholder value. But what if we make it more complicated? What if we say that the outcome of your effort needs to be something that you are truly proud of, regardless of whether you scored a point, regardless of whether the referee saw you, and regardless of what happened to your stock price? Because purpose of society is not to enable corporations.

The purpose of Corporations is to enable society. That what we have is the opportunity to use some of the magic of capitalism – this mysterious force that helps us find and satisfy needs – but we get to do it at the very same time. We can put our name on our work that we get a chance to use leverage, whether that is the leverage of a trainer on a sports team, or the leverage of an industrial system that makes stuff – to make things better, by making better things.

So Dr. Salina, if you’re listening today, I hope that on reflection you realize that training the kids at your school to win by the maximum number of points, is not doing them a service. It’s not what the sports were for in the first place. It’s not what Coach Shaver is supposed to do. And every time we deal with any entity, whether it’s a corporation, whether it’s a coach, a therapist, or a sports team, we have to measure more than one thing. Because we are not automatons. We are not people who are simply driven by one, and only one metric. That what sportsmanship actually means, is that we’re not at war. That we’re in it together, that tomorrow you might be up, that one side beating the other side is never permanent. And that teaching people a lesson, just to teach them a lesson, isn’t nearly as effective as showing people a model – a model for what could be. A model for what happens when we work together, with sufficiency, and possibility, and connection.

Oh, one more thing. After the whole story about Krispy Kreme went viral, someone at Krispy Kreme took a deep breath and said, “Whoa, that was really stupid”. And they called Jason on the phone and they worked out a way to go forward. Now, the cynics out there can say, “Yep, they did that to increase their profits”. But me, I’m a little bit of an optimist and I’m hoping they did it, because it was the right thing to do.

That’s my rant. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I do love hearing from you. I hope you will take a minute to visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. We got two Juicy questions this week, here we go.

Hi Seth, this is Chris from Dublin, in Ireland. And I just want to ask you a question that’s been on my mind, for ages and ages. Your latest episode just really brought it to the fore, and made me ask you, “Who you are your audience? Who do you think we are – the people like us, that you create this stuff for?

I remember you said somewhere once that you started out just sending emails to a few friends who you thought might be interested, and they shared with other people, and they shared with other people. And now, you have this huge following of people without ever defining a target group, without ever really sitting and writing down who you think you’re serving. Or maybe you did? I’m curious to know what do you think are the defining characteristics that make us your audience – the people that you’re serving? Thanks.

Thank you for this, Chris. Here’s the deal – often organizations focus on demographics. Demographics are what can we see from the outside. How old is this person? What is their gender or race? What do they own? How much do they make? These are all important if you don’t have actual information about who they are, what they believe, what they want, what are their dreams and fears. These are psychographics and we have left the world of demographics, because the internet shows everyone who you are, based on your actions.

So I’m going to answer your question about psychographics, because it really doesn’t matter to me at all about the appearance, or demographics of the people who I am seeking to serve. For me, every morning I wake up and I think about “my,” in quotes, audience in the following way. First of all, they’re not mine.

It’s not my tribe. It is a group of people who happen to look to me, now and then, for a provocation or narration. But what do they have in common? What they have in common, is that they are thirsty – like me. Curious, interested in figuring out what’s next, and restless to make a difference. That the people who are engaging with my work, would like to lead more than they do.

Wonder if this is all there is to work. This itch that needs to be scratched all the time – not for more, but for better – what a privilege that I’ve had to be able to talk with these people. And in my own way, teach or lead them. So at the Akimbo workshops, we are finding over and over again, that they work because people are enrolled. And they’re enrolled, because we are going where they are going.

And as soon as I shifted, maybe 20 years ago, to the idea of doing things with or for this group, instead of to them – not thinking of people as customers, but thinking of them as students – everything got a lot more rational for me, a lot more straightforward. So thank you for being along for this ride. If this is not where you are going, if you are hoping for short-term hype and entertainment, you are on the wrong bus. But for everybody else, yes, you’re in the right place. Thank you.

Hey Seth, my name is Jon Jon. I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Asking a question in regards to your Lego riff. I think the instructions are so important for two reasons: One, once the set is built, creativity can begin and in the form of play, how they play with it. But two, I was bothered by the way, my son like to just build sets. In fact, he was obsessed with even looking up instructions on others we didn’t even own – we would download the PDFs for him. But what I found is he would recognize parts that we had, make sections of sets we didn’t even have, and then start applying those to new creations.

The second part of my question is this, Steven King says, “First you imitate ,then you create”. And I agree with this. So do you agree, first off? But secondly, if you agree, where does imitation end and creativity start? My son, if I didn’t let him imitate, if I didn’t let him play with the sets, he wouldn’t have learned the craft is much. Thanks for all you do.

I love the fact that we’re disagreeing about this, but it’s mostly about degree. What’s happened to Lego with the kits, is they have industrialized the idea of following the instructions. And they are plugging in to a culture where parents and institutions push kids to follow the instructions. Period. And it’s the period that you and I agree about, because your kid, you’re so lucky to have him and him you, is going beyond that.

They are using the instructions in the Stephen King sense of the word – learning how to follow them, so that then they can break them. But I hope we can see that the vast majority of kids are pushed to not do that. To not raise their hand, not ask a question, not download the PDF, ignoring the sticker that says, “No user serviceable parts inside”. That there’s a big difference between putting together an electronics kit that shows you step by step, and figuring out your own way to make a radio.

For sure you need to learn to solder. For sure you need to learn to put the pieces together. And I know people who are in the Lego business who, for a living, have worked their way up. And what I know about them is that they got their start with the basic Lego pieces. That it wasn’t, “Oh, here’s something you can check off, and then move on to the next thing”. So the fundamentals do matter, I completely agree with that.

But as a parent, teaching a kid to color outside the lines, encourage them to do it, push them until they get over that hump – that is a contribution we can make to every kid. Because as the world is changing, and it is changing faster than ever, today is the most normal day the world will ever again experience. We need to raise kids who know what to do when there are no instructions.

Thanks everyone for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1840-the-gift-economy- <==

On the day you turn three, on your third birthday, something extraordinary happens – it might have even happened to you. People come over to your house, some of them might even be strangers to you. They come over to your house and they bring you gifts – gifts that are yours. Gifts that just arrive, they belong to you. Not someone else, they’re yours.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

One of the basic laws of mechanical physics is that it’s really hard to have two things in the same place at the same time. And one of the laws of capitalism and private property, is that things are owned by one person at a time. And what we learn when we’re two, or three, or four is that if someone else has a toy and you want the toy, you can’t have the toy just by taking it. That there are complicated set of rules about how a toy comes to be in your possession, and what it means to have something in your possession.

To work that out, we have come up with a whole bunch of training devices. One of them, for example, board games. Board games – and you remember them probably as one of your earliest memories, the stupid ones like Chutes and Ladders and Candyland, working all the way up to ones that involve strategy diplomacy and bluffing – generally involve private property, trading and winning. Some people win by accumulating more of something, whether it’s points or stuff, and other people lose. Then we send you to school, where we start to grade you, rank you, put you into boxes, where we create an industrial system around winners and losers. We have class rank and the honor roll. We have people who make the cut for the football team, because not everyone, we’re told, can be on the football team.

If you decide to be in the fourth grade musical, well only one person gets to be The Wizard of Oz, so you have to go to tryouts and auditions, and they will pick the best person to be the Wizard. Well to be picked as the best person, means that you gain some sort of status and it’s something that you might want. And it also means you have to put in effort and preparation to be better than the other people.

Private property is pervasive, and we really don’t consider very often that there might be alternatives. Because most of the alternatives, when they’ve been tried, have proven to be unworkable at scale and don’t lend themselves to the difficult work that industrialism requires to create modernity as we know it. But wait a second, what about Crosby Stills and Nash?

What about this?

There’s harmony here, there isn’t private property – there is community. That somewhere along the way, these four men learned to listen to each other and to contribute to something that is greater than any of them could make on their own. There are very few board games that teach people how to do this. One of the side effects of that third birthday party is an understanding that economics, technically household management, is about the management of scarcity.

If everyone can’t have the same toy at the same time, how do we figure out who does get the toy? This leads to all of the formula calculus and theories that bring us modern economics. Modern economics is based on the idea that rational people, who have the same consideration of time, will make rational decisions about how to allocate scarce property.

And because it is such a powerful engine of changing our culture and the world around us, this dynamic of private property has spread from things that are obviously private property, like that coin in your pocket – the things that traditionally haven’t been thought of as private property at all, like the air over the building that you own. What happens though as our world shifts – shifts to things that are more digital? Shifts to understand that private property has externalities – has side effects, has things that affect everyone? What happens if more and more people have what they think of as maybe enough stuff – after all, we spent more money on self storage units in the United States than we spent on going to the movies – and instead seek out something like meaning, or respect, or dignity, or connection? How do we reconcile private property with the idea of harmony?

It’s worth going back a hundred and forty years, and a guy named Harry Kennedy. Harry Kennedy wrote a song, called Cradles Empty Baby’s Gone. And that song – sort of popular – was put on a player piano roll. Now, you may not even remember what player piano rolls were but they’re the original digital medium for music. By punching holes in a long strip of paper, and putting it into a device that could read the paper, the folks who made player piano rolls could sell them to people who had player pianos, often in a public place like a bar, but sometimes in the home of a wealthy person. And then by pressing play, or turning a crank, you could listen to an exact note-for-note reproduction of the song that was encoded on the player piano paper. Now this was early in the history of recorded music. Before this, It’s worth remembering that the only music you heard, was live music. Live music is hard to consider private property – you hear it, and then it’s gone. You get to remember the tune anytime you want for free, but the performance itself – it comes and goes. So when these player piano rolls showed up, one company – the company that got an early head start – decided that what they would do is find people who had written songs, and pay them royalties. And the automatic music paper company had a plan. And their plan was to monopolize all of these rights, and then help musician sue companies that didn’t have the rights, so that they could corner the market on player piano rolls.

Well, as you could imagine, even a hundred years ago. This ended up going to the Supreme Court and then it went to Congress. And what they came up with was the idea of the compulsory license. The compulsory license says that anybody who wants to make a mechanical version of a song by putting it into a player piano format, can do so by paying a given, stated, non-variable license to the person who wrote the song in the first place. Thus, busting open the monopoly. But what it also did, was extend the notion of private property. Because now that a song can be written down and put into a medium where you can sell it, it has a different sort of value. Suddenly, it’s not the happiness of sitting around the campfire singing together – it’s “who owns this song”.

The great Levon Helm, and the great Robbie Robertson ended their friendship around who owned some of the songs that were recorded by The Band. The feud lasted for decades – a feud that only existed because private property showed up in a region of our culture where it didn’t used to exist. So what are the other things in our lives, in our culture that we might measure instead of scarcity? Well consider what’s going on in social media. More and more people have a following. More and more people have a reputation.

What is your reputation worth – is your reputation a piece of private property? Once you have this reputation, what will you do with it? Well, just 30 years ago what you did with that reputation, was you stood tall as you walk through town. Now, if your last name is Kardashian, what you can do with that reputation is become a billionaire. That what we have decided to do was, take this idea of standing in the community and try to figure out some way to monetize it.

And now a question – how much exactly do we owe Albert Einstein, because E equals MC squared? That’s him. That’s from Einstein’s great work. Everyone knows it – very few people know what it means, but we know it. And we know it without having paid Einstein anything for uncovering the idea. What happens when we get an idea? Where does it come from – that’s a topic for another podcast – and where does it go? And when ideas spread through our culture, whether they are important life-saving ideas – like you should wash your hands several times a day, particularly before handling food – or complicated scientific ideas about how we go about making a medicine, or how we go about saving a life, sometimes we turn those into private property by patenting them, and sometimes they spread and benefit others.

And so we have a different class of goods. Goods that work better when more people engage with them. If everyone knows your idea, your idea is worth more, not less, than if no one knows your idea. As Tim O’Reilly has said, “The enemy is not piracy, the enemy is obscurity”. More than 10 years ago, I did a book, called The Big Moo. 32 other authors and I got together and each wrote a chapter of a book. We did all of it for charity. So far, it’s raised nearly $300,000 for Room to Read, and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

The question is, did the authors get a good deal? Should the authors have been paid more than nothing to contribute to this book? Or were they paid nothing? Maybe the increase in their reputation, maybe being part of a circle being insiders instead of outsiders, was value unto itself. And so we see this idea that digital goods, outside of the player piano roll, can spread from person to person. Ideas that spread win. But we can take this much further, because it’s not just about ultimately being able to cash out. Maybe the entire point of spreading our gifts, is to spread our gifts – not so that, ultimately, we will be able to turn around and make some money.

So my guess is you’re already ahead of me, but let’s catch up for a second here. If there is a world where interoperability matters, where people being in sync is better than people not being in sync. If we have a choice of living in a culture where good ideas spread, where people feel connected, where there is actually joy in being able to help someone move forward – particularly when it doesn’t cost us anything and might benefit us, because our teaching someone else how to read, how to do math, how to cross the street safely – doesn’t cost us anything, but it makes things better for everyone. If that culture, is a culture we’d like to live in, then maybe our obsession with turning everything into private property where we all come out ahead when everything is bought and sold, might be a little misguided. And maybe learning to sing in harmony ends up producing more value, than us versus them.

So now we end up with The Gift, by Lewis Hyde, based on a book from many decades earlier by Marcel Mauss, of the same name. And this book, obsessively researched, is all about a different economy. Not an economy based on scarcity, but an economy based on gifts. Now there are a couple ways to think about a gift economy. One way to think about it, is as a hack of reciprocity – that if I give you a gift, you owe me a gift. And you owing me a gift is going to help me in the long run get more private property.

But there are other ways to think about this. And in fact through history – when we look at folktales, when we look at Native cultures, when we look at things that happened before we commercialized everything – what we see again and again, are gift economies. You may have heard someone called – what’s supposed to be a nasty term – “Indian giver”. Where does that come from?

Well, it’s actually not nasty at all. What it comes from is when the first Pilgrims arrived in North America, the First Peoples who met them were gracious and open, invited them into their homes and gave them gifts. But then the pilgrims were surprised, shocked, and disappointed to discover that months or years later, that Native American came back and took the gift back.

Well, this doesn’t match the mindset of private property. And in private property world, when you give someone a gift, it moves from your private property to their private property. But in the culture that the pilgrims were invading, it was totally different. There the gift was a chance to welcome someone, but it came with a proviso – which is you’re supposed to give it to someone else. That a gift needs to keep moving in order for it to be a gift – it is not a transfer or private property. It is, in fact, something that works precisely because it is traveling.

And now back to the idea of creativity in The Arts. Because it is possible to imagine that that idea, whether it is E equals MC squared, or the mysterious smile on the Mona Lisa, is a gift. A gift from The Muse, a gift from our experience, a gift from our subconscious. And that only when we give that gift away does it become art. Because art is what we call it when a human being does something original, something personal, something generous, and something that might not work. And it can only become art when we share it, because that’s where the “it might not work part comes in”. And when we share it, when we give it to someone else, we change them. And then what happens? Then they can give it to someone else.

Now that canvas that the art is on – that’s a piece of private property in our modern world. That canvas can be bought and sold, it can appreciate in value, people could make a living making the canvases. But for tens of thousands of years, it never occurred to anyone to get rich making a painting or a song. That the purpose of making a painting, or song, or sculpture was not to get rich, was not to create a piece of private property out of nothing.

The purpose was to express our gift, our humanity, to share a little bit of our soul. And that when that idea is spread from one person to another, it creates society – culture in sync, People Like Us Doing Things Like This. So if I mention to you the painter, Susan Rothenberg, it’s entirely possible you know who she is. And if you do, then you’re people like us. If I ask you have you seen the Clyfford Stills in Denver? And you say yes, now we have something to discuss. Neither one of us gave any money to the Clyfford Still estate. Clyfford Still didn’t make those paintings hoping that 60 years later you and I would somehow send money to his family – that’s not what it’s for, that’s not what it does.

And so we have another economy, an economy that isn’t really done Justice when we call it an economy. Because when we think of economy, we think of scarcity. And when we think of scarcity, we think of private property. Two people can’t hold the same toy at the same time. No, it’s a different thing. It’s you can’t say, you can’t play. The gift economy works because culture surrounds us, and that sharing ideas – spreading them from one to another – it feeds each of us, particularly the artist who was generous enough to make it in the first place.

All of which is a way to say that our race to figure out how to make it pay, might be replaced or at least augmented by a different urgency. The urgency to make it matter, to do work that matters for people who care. To create circles of gifts. Gifts that keep giving, that keep circulating – clockwise or counterclockwise, it doesn’t always matter – from one person to another, not because we seek reciprocity and more private property, but because we seek the idea of together. Because together might be better than alone.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I do love to hear from you. I hope you will take a minute to submit your question. It’s easy. Just go to akimbo.link. That’s A K I MBO dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. A couple questions came in about my rant about privacy. So first to clarify, I was not defending wholesale corporate snooping, in which we are taking disparate bits of data streams, integrating them into one data river, and using it to control and influence the way people behave. I was simply pointing out that it’s all on a continuum, and it’s been going on for a long.

Hi Seth, it’s Casper from Berlin. I found your podcast a few weeks ago and I’ve been going through it at about two to three episodes a day, which quite surprised me because I normally don’t get engaged very well with people trying to teach me Marketing. But I found a way you framed it around helping people doing meaningful work really resonated with me and the Engineer in me, helping me a lot and thinking about how to promote my own work. However, when you bring up the topic of privacy, I found myself really strongly disagreeing with you.

Hello Seth, this is Denise from Berlin speaking. I have a question about your last episode on Privacy and Surprises. Now you were talking about the convenience of targeted ads, and I absolutely agree, they’re very convenient and I guess we would go kind of crazy if we didn’t have them – same goes with optimized search engine results.

However, and I guess I’m pointing towards the filter bubble discussion here, I’m constantly wondering what effect this will have on our culture and whether this will produce people in the long run that are still able to think outside of the box. There’s this famous Einstein quote, which says we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. And this seems to be a big topic of your podcast as well, you know, how can we define something for ourselves that we can create that’s meaningful, valuable, and improves our culture. And I’m just kind of scared that the way our internet works will slowly kind of prevent this from happening.

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on that, and I’m very grateful you’re doing this podcast. Thank you for your work. I always love to hear your rants, and thoughts, and ideas.

Bye, take care.

You’re absolutely right, of course. Now there has always been a filter bubble that I did not grow up reading the newspapers of Senegal or Paris. That when we lived in a place that was isolated from other places, spoke a language that was different than others, we basically have always lived in a filter bubble. But just as the streams of privacy being compounded by industrialists suddenly make it a problem, the filter bubble – the idea that we are insulated from other voices, becomes more and more profound as that insulation becomes wider.

So what happens next? Well, what usually happens next is a combination of two things. One, it becomes the new normal. When rock and roll first showed up, old folks couldn’t believe the coarsening of music and they thought, “This will fade”. But of course it didn’t fade – it simply became the new normal. But second, at the same time, when people care enough they figure out a way around it or through it.

So through deliberate action, some people – people who realize that having a variety of inputs makes them more effective – are finding ways to use the very tools that insulate us to connect us. They subscribe to blogs that they don’t agree with. They read newspapers, as long as there are newspapers, with other points of view. They figure out how to understand the bias behind the writing that they are reading.

Yes, it’s a challenge. Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, most people aren’t going to do it. The same way most kids eat chicken fingers at restaurants now, instead of real food. And so we can wring our hands about it and complain about it, but we still have the ability to do something about it with our own mouse, with our own fingers. Which is to intentionally seek out the ideas that might not be presented to us automatically. I wish I had a happier, easier, automatic solution, but I don’t.

Hi Seth, this is Heather from Northampton Massachusetts. I work in public education and have for about 20 years, and I’m now working at the State level. Here’s my question, Do you have any thoughts on how we can fix a system that was built and designed with inequity in mind. In other words, inequity by design is the legacy of the current public education system. What can we do about it?

I thought a lot about this one since you asked it, thank you. If we look at the history of public school in the United States, what we see is that it wasn’t originally designed to be a tool to maintain inequality. It was actually designed to be a tool to bring illiterate people up to a level where factories could employ them. It was designed to counter the shortage of employees. But you are right that scarcity creates value, and the systems that are in place are designed by the people who pay for them, to ensure that the people who are paying for it, and their offspring and those they care about, maintain their status. And that shouldn’t be what public school does, but it is in fact baked-in to the funding model, and to the way we pay attention to it.

It’s worth highlighting that by the time a kid is five years old and enters the traditional Public School System, it’s often too late to do much of the work that needs to be done. So my take is this first we have to be really clear about the division between education and learning. We need to use the new tools that are available to us to sell, to promote, to execute, and to push forward learning – actual learning, not because it’s on a test. Not because you’re going to get a scarce certificate, but because learning through experience, through doing, through being present is not only the way for us to combat inequality and inequity, but it is also the key to our future success and our future economy.

So how to do that. Well, I think we do it by starting much earlier than five years old. We do it by dismantling much of what we keep score of in the education system. That tracking somebody to get them a scare seat in an institution that has status where scarcity is baked into the entire model, can’t possibly scale. But the alternative which is creating generations of people who see possibility, who engage with each other, who learn to program as opposed to being programmed, who figure out how to be the ones who solve interesting problems and lead. We have seen people from every walk of life, from every continent be able to do this, but it’s very difficult to do it on one’s own.

So people like you, people who care who have empathy for those they are seeking to teach and to lead – we have to figure out how to put systems in place. Because the smartphone can make us dumb, but it’s also been shown that the smartphone can open the door for people who are ready to get smart. That access to information is insufficient. It must be accompanied by possibility, by belief, by the passion to go to the next level and that means getting at the heart of the stories that parents tell themselves, and the stories that parents tell their kids. And most of all, the story that kids tell each other and that they hear from their teachers. That this is possible – it is happening around the world. I was talking to the folks from the Acton Academy last week – there’s more than a hundred and fifty of them in dozens of countries around the world. The typical Acton Academy has dozens of kids, and exactly two adults – counting custodial staff.

Really? Yes, and one of the rules is if a kid asks, one of those two adults a question, the adult may not answer it. That if we can create these schoolhouses back to the old model – where kids learn to help each other and to help themselves, where they engage in inquiry, not compliance – we can get rid of the scarcity model. And we can move instead to a leadership model – a model based on inquiry and possibility. Way easier to say than it is to do, but we have to begin by saying it.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1870-the-overton-window- <==

In New York City, on the corner of 6th Avenue and 14th Street, is a bookstore – a book store that sells spiritual items, mostly from the East, things like singing bowls. And if you go there, you’ll notice that they have dozens and dozens of different kinds of singing bowls – all handmade from all over the world. And what you might notice is that most of them look exactly the same.

Hey, it’s Seth and this Akimbo.

The longest bridge in the world is the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge – it’s 102 miles long. For those of you doing the math in your head, that’s five hundred and thirty eight thousand feet of railway bridge.

However, it is not the longest single span. It’s not even close. The longest single span with no supports in the middle of the bridge, because the water is too deep, is the Bosiden Bridge – also in China. It’s 1700 feet long. In essence, it’s one 500th the length of that big long bridge. It turns out that making a big leap with a bridge is difficult, indeed. That if we’re willing to do lots of little steps, we can build a bridge for as long as we want. But to do it all in one leap, that’s difficult.

A scholar named Joseph Overton died young, just 43 years old – killed in a tragic airplane accident. But before he died, he coined something called the Overton Window. And the Overton Window is a simple idea that needed a name. And basically what it says, is that regardless of how a politician feels personally, there are limits as to what he or she can propose and get away with. That window of opportunity is based on what the culture is willing to accept. Joshua Trevino broke it down into six steps. Unthinkable, radical, acceptable, sensible, popular, and policy. Just think about any of the changes that have happened in our culture over the last decade, and you will see that most of them couldn’t even be said out loud a hundred years ago. “Gay marriage, what are you talking about? Gay marriage, we’re going to have to lock you up for even for saying it”. But the window shifts over time, bit by bit. Noam Chomsky, the great political thinker said this in 1988, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate”.

Now in his case, he might have been talking about intentional limits put on by those that would like to stay in power. But what Overton points out is that the window is largely driven by the culture. That what makes it so that we can argue vehemently about how the Mets are going to do this year, or whether or not a particular thing on cable news was okay, is that we like to do things in small steps. Mostly in this riff, I’d like to talk about creativity.

Let’s start with Mad Libs. You probably played Mad Libs as a kid. And the way it works is pretty simple. There is a little booklet that you bought at the bookstore a story – a sort of dumb story about a kid walking a cat or someone going to school. But in the middle of the story, words are missing. And where that word is supposed to be, there’ll be a line and under it will say something like, “Noun” or “Verb” or “Name of someone in the room”.

And so the person holding the story challenges everyone else in the room with a prompt, “Give me a noun. Give me a swear word. Give me a kind of food”. And you dutifully write down the answers within the story, and then the person who wrote everything down reads the story out loud and hilarity ensues.

It ensues because the group, without trying very hard, without imagining that they were being particularly creative while working within the Overton window of how 11 year olds are supposed to hang out with each other, have written something that’s actually sort of profound – that’s brilliantly funny, that’s filled with non sequiturs, that is the funniest thing that’s happened to them all day.

Now if I had said to people, “Quick, you bunch of 11 year olds, write me a short story that’s so funny, we will crack up laughing”. It never would have happened. Ironically Mad Libs, which were invented by Leonard Stern and Roger Price in 1953, did not see the market for five years. And the reason is, the two people who invented it couldn’t agree on what to call it.

Fortunately for them, they were eating one day in a Diner in New York City, and at the table next to them an agent and an actor were having a loud argument. What were they arguing about? The actor was about to go on an audition, and he wanted to ad-lib his way through the audition. The agent thought that was crazy.

And yes, the irony runs deep here. He told the actor it would be “mad” to go and ad-lib on this audition. And thus, Mad Libs were born. And now harking back to previous episodes of Akimbo in which I’ve talked about carriage, and promotion, and the short head, it turned out that one of the inventors of Mad Libs was a writer for the Steve Allen Show. And The Steve Allen Show was the most popular talk show on television. And somehow he persuaded Steve Allen to introduce Bob Hope by using Mad Libs as a way to make the intro.

You guessed it within 5 days, every copy of Mad Libs in every bookstore in America was sold out. It’s gone on to sell a 102 million copies so far. If you lined up all of the copies of Mad Libs that have been sold, it would go back and forth across the Dangkushan Grand bridge in China many, many times.

So back to this idea of incremental creativity. Here’s an interesting question that you can ask anybody, if you go on a job interview – that you can ask anybody at a dinner party. You can say to them, “So, how did you get that job? That’s it. How did you end up working here?” And almost every single time, the person you are talking to will say, “Well it’s a funny story”. And then will tell you a story that is not actually funny.

But if you went to them and said, “Please tell me a story that you think is funny”. They’d say, “I don’t know”. But with that little tiny prompt, something begins. On the Serious Eats podcast, the opening question is often, “What was dinner like at your house growing up?” That’s another prompt – another Mad Libs like prompt. Another prompt that fits easily into the Overton window. “What was dinner like at your house growing up?”

Everyone has a story about this. Everyone feels comfortable telling a story about this. So now let’s think about people who actually get paid for doing something that’s supposed to feel creative. How is it that almost all pop music feels sort of interchangeable within its genre, that you could swap out one line of lyrics for another – one course for another. That songs like American Pie, or Tangled Up In Blue, stand out particularly because they don’t match the genre.

So what’s the difficult part? Is writing about the “Jester” or “Bending over to tie the laces of her shoes” the hard part? Is that the act of Genius? Well, I just said those lines – they weren’t that hard to say. So which part is hard? The part that’s hard is the span. The part that’s hard is getting across, going outside, or right near the edges of Overton’s window. Because culture might be outside of us, but culture is also internalized. We don’t want to go too far out on a limb when we do that thing we are calling creative. Because Pressfield’s resistance is running rampant in our brain.

And mostly, it doesn’t want to be ridiculed. It doesn’t want to be held up as an example of someone who is doing things that are unthinkable, or even radical. That we are much more likely to exercise our creativity when we are certain it’s going to be accepted. That doesn’t mean has to work, it doesn’t mean it has to be a home run. But we need to know it’s going to be accepted.

So if I’m playing Mad Libs with you and I say, “Tell me a noun”. You don’t have any trouble saying “tomato” because you know tomato is a noun. If you’re particularly good at comedy, you might say “noodle” because noodle is a funnier word than tomato. Not a lot funnier, but a little. And so we say noodle – it’s defensible.

But then when we need to make the span a bit longer, when we need to invent a new way to do online file-sharing, when we need to invent a different sort of way to approach a political problem, we hold back. We don’t hold back because we’re not creative. We hold back because we are creative, but we also desperately want to be seen and understood, and successful. That we don’t want to be ridiculed. We don’t want to go outside the boundaries of what we’re quote “supposed to do”.

When you read time travel stories. you hear about people going back to the 1700s, or the 1500s, or the 1900s. They almost never talked about the fact that the typical time traveler would be too afraid to say anything, even if you know what the world was like in your branch of time. You know, if you speak up you’re going to be ridiculed. That people are going to look at you when you talk about, I don’t know, flying cars, when you talk about the internet, when you talk about video on a tiny device in your pocket. They’re going to lock you up.

And so we seek to stay within within the range, because we don’t want to be a crank. And so now here’s the challenge – the challenge is if we go too far out of the window, internally or externally, we will be seen like a crank. That great ideas before their time, are not great ideas. That every once in a while a Goya comes along, painting paintings that were a hundred years ahead of their time. But not very often.

Usually what happens is we are just enough ahead of our time. The exercise that creative people have to do though is not to rein it in, and to figure out how to be just enough. It’s to push it out, to realize that we need more from the creators in our world. Then another noun. That what we need is another American Pie – something that will shake us up – that 50 years later, people will remember.

Because it was just enough out of what everybody else was trying to do. Some people call this “genius”. It’s not genius, it’s simply guts. It’s the guts to say, “No one’s ever built a hundred and two mile long bridge, but I know how to put each one of the small spans together, step by step”. Persistent, incremental creativity, all in service of making things better. That opportunity to go outside what people expect, and just enough outside that it makes an impact, that is the hard work of the professional who seeks to be creative.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

As you know, I do love to hear from you and I hope you will contribute a question. To do so, just visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, my name is Ray and I’m local to Windsor Ontario. In last week’s episode, you talked about a book that you collaborated on with other writers for a charity, and addressed the topic of payment by proposing that quote, “Maybe the increase in their reputation, maybe being part of the circle being insiders instead of outsiders, was value unto itself” end quote. In a separate episode, you talked about the way that money allows us to keep playing the game, to keep making the work that matters to us. You spoke about the importance of being thoughtful with how we use money to keep our work alive. So my question is how is what you proposed in last week’s episode different from our larger cultural practice of offering creatives exposure instead of money – a practice that makes it difficult for creatives to keep doing their work. How can we better identify the line between monetization and privatization as something that self-serving, and monetization and privatization that allows us to keep playing the game and to keep sharing our gifts. Thanks for everything you do, Seth.

Thanks for this Ray. It gets to the heart of, “What does it mean to work for free? Why should we work for free? Who should work for free? Is it work, if we’re doing it for free? What are we trading in an economy that’s based on scarcity?” Often, Freelancers, creators – people who live by their wits –are asked to work for free. This is because there is an imbalance of power. There are many, many providers and not enough buyers.

And so the buyer starts to make trade offers – trade offers that don’t feel fair. That if you do all of your work for free – “If your band plays at my wedding…if you take pictures of my events…If you do some writing for my magazine, I will pay you in credibility. I will pay you in promotion…” and it feels wrong. It feels wrong, partly because it’s our work and we toiled over it, and partly because we can see where this leads. It leads to an infinite road of free. How then, to move past it. Because working for free highlights our imposter instinct. It makes us feel like the work we are creating isn’t worth very much.

So I have a simple way that I’ve thought about it – simple, but difficult – which is this, “The work you do for money, you always do for money. The clients you charge, the kind of clients you charge, you always charge”. So in the case of The Big Moo, I didn’t ask anybody who wrote three page essays for money to write a three-page essay for free.

Also, in this case, the client was Room To Read, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and Acumen. These are charities, and I think working for a charity is different than working for a wedding or a corporation. So, in my case, if I’m going to get on an airplane and give a speech, it doesn’t matter how much promotion you can offer. This is what I charge for. If you are a photographer and you take pictures and put them in albums, then if someone wants pictures and they’re going to go into an album, they have to pay for it.

On the other hand, if Oprah asks an author to go on one of her shows, the question is “How much should the author charge?” And the answer is, obviously, zero. Because the author’s job is not to go on talk shows. And because the promotion that will come from being on Oprah is so dramatic that it is worth paying her to be on the show, if you could so. It’s a distinct opportunity. It’s a distinct form of your craft. So that’s the fork in the road. Now the thing that must go with it is this, if you make something or do something where there are easy and free substitutes, you don’t have a moral right to get paid. That if you are one of a hundred choices, then good for the buyer to say, “I’m going to pay less, because if it’s all the same you haven’t given me a good reason to pay more”.

That the way creatives get paid, is by being the one and only. When you are the “one and only” when there is no easy second choice, then your pricing takes care of itself. So that means that, now that everybody has a camera in their pocket, if your work as a photographer is simply to take a picture that anyone could take, no one is going to hire you and pay you to take a picture.

Back in 1910, that’s all photographers did – they owned the camera. Owning the camera was what you got paid for. Today, of course, that’s not the way it works. And the same thing goes for just about every creative act that we can imagine getting paid for. If you believe that there is scarcity because of the tools you have, I think you will discover that that won’t be true for long. It has to be scarcity based on reputation, scarcity based on impact, scarcity based on the fact that there aren’t that many canvases that have been signed by you. And so if there’s a canvas signed by you, and that makes it worth something, someone may pay for the canvas – not just the idea.

And one more question as a bonus. I actually heard from a few people about the Gift Economy podcast, because they may have misunderstood what I was getting at. But first let’s go to this one.

Hi Seth, this is Dan from New Jersey. I’ve been longtime reader of your blog and I was thrilled when you launched a podcast I can listen to as well. I have a question on the Gift Economy podcast you just released. It sounds like a really good idea in theory, but I think I’m missing something and how you presented it.

I’m thinking how does one give generously when you’re focused on putting food on the table. For example, you described how writing a book chapter for free, is that simply the province of the wealthy, or how do you do that when you – when you need to work for the income. Or how art was initially, you said created for the sake of creation as a gift – when I think back to Artisan history, although they’re known as terrible businessman, they were creating art to be paid. Perhaps the Catholic church was the patron, or they had their patron through the family like the Medici’s – just curious to clarify some of that. Thank you very much.

Yeah, there’s a lot to dig into here, and I’m glad that you are bringing it up. I think it’s worth noting that the idea of rock stars flying around in private jets is an artifact of a magical 30 years that were driven by an imbalance between scarcity hits, radio record stores, and big arena concerts.

Before that, the number of people who could expect to become multi, multi millionaires, or possibly billionaires by making music, there weren’t any – it just showed up. That in the 1500s, or the 1700s, or the 1900s, if you were a composer, you had very few illusions that your work would turn you into a rich person. And you are right that the Catholic church sometimes paid people to make art, but most of the painting that existed was painted because people wanted to paint it – wanted their paintings to be seen, not because they expected to get rich doing it. And Leonardo, and the most famous painting in the world the Mona Lisa, well his royalties from the Mona Lisa have always added up to 0, because it became famous after he was dead.

The point of all of this is that there’s a long history of people creating ideas, doing medical research, sharing their insight without getting paid for it. But, and it’s a huge but, nowhere in my writing or in my podcast am I arguing that people should take the creative work of others without asking first. That there is some sort of right that we have to steal people’s intellectual property. No, I’m not saying that at all.

But what I am getting at is this, there’s a difference between the substrate, the canvas, the thing that’s scarce, and the idea itself. Because ideas that spread, win. I did not invent the idea of a podcast – Dave Winer did – but here I am making a podcast. You might be listening to a podcast. The idea of the podcast transcends any right one has to monetize the fact that you invented it.

Let’s add to that, the fact that as Tim O’Reilly has said the enemy isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. The people who decided to donate a chapter to The Big Moo, I think most of them did because they’re good people. Because it was a way to give to a charity they cared about. But I also know that, except for the few famous people whose names were on the cover of that book, every other author got way more than they contributed. Because, being seen next to the others was priceless. So no, I would never have taken their work without their permission.

But also, there are plenty of people I didn’t ask who I wish that I had. Because giving is its own reward, not just because it makes you famous, but because you can. And so if we can solve an interesting problem by showing up and sharing our insight, I think that is a good reason to get out of bed in the morning.

But also if you are a Creator hoping to make a living, you’re going to have to do it by creating something that someone in the market wants more than it costs. And that you have a scarce number of them, so that you can sell it. Intellectual property has been good to me and lots of people that I care about. It enables us to create a cycle of being able to do it as a professional. But what’s also true is that the very engines that we built to spread our ideas, so that we could sell more of something, have created a dynamic where we have too many ideas. They are not scarce anymore.

And what that means is if you want to make a living, please go a living, but realize you may not be able to do it by fencing in an idea that is easy to share. I hope that helps.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1883-sample-size- <==

During the 10-year period between the year 2000 and 2009, the per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese in the United States had a 99% correlation with the number of doctorates awarded in civil engineering. Or, if you want more correlation than that between 2000 and 2010 the per capita consumption of margarine had a 99% nine percent correlation with the divorce rate in Maine.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

You may have heard some of these spurious correlations before – 95%, 99% correlations between obviously unrelated factors. But how do we know they’re obviously unrelated? Statistics is a fascinating science. It is a science that helps us see the past, understand the present and predict the future. If you want to know if Oreos get soggy in milk, you don’t have to dip every single Oreo ever made into a glass of milk to come to the conclusion that they do. Statistics, with the appropriate sample size, helps us see that there is in fact not just a correlation, but causation, between dipping your cookie and milk and the cookie getting soggy.

Where we get in trouble is this there has to be correlations of unrelated items over a 10-year span, because we have so many to choose from. We can look at every statistic about divorces, about lawyers, about other factors in our society. Per capita consumption of cheese has a 98. 9 percent correlation with the total revenue generated by golf courses. Well, we didn’t come up with that by looking at two things that we thought were related and then running the correlation.

We simply matched up some numbers. That leads us to the challenge of survivorship bias. One of the greatest statisticians of all time was someone from Transylvania – Abraham Wald. Abraham Wald was a pioneer in statistics, and one of the people who invented operations research – the whole idea of looking how systems worked and figuring out how we could understand to make them work better.

The US Army hired him to look at the fact that a lot of planes were getting shot down. Not only is this a tragedy for the family of the pilot, but it’s really expensive. “How” they asked him, “should we make it so planes get shot down less. Here’s a whole bunch of planes that came back”. And he looked at the planes that came back – the ones that had survived – and they had bullet holes in them. And what the other Engineers had said was put shielding over the spots where the bullets are hitting the plane because if we put shielding on the spots where the bullets are hitting, the planes will do even better and more of them will come back. And what Wald says is, “No no, no. Put the shielding on the parts of the plane that don’t have bullet holes in them, because the planes that aren’t coming back, aren’t coming back because they’re getting hit in the engine. We’re seeing the survivors – the survivors don’t have the problem. Let’s look at ones that do”.

Consider the idea of stock market funds – funds that purport to beat the stock market. Turns out that more funds than you would guess have had excellent results over the last 5 or 10 years. How do we explain this? Are they all really smart? Well, in fact almost none of them are smart, if we’re going to define smart as consistently beating the market. Because nobody is consistently beating the market. Nobody is consistently getting better returns in the risk than that they are taking.

In fact, what we are seeing is this funds that got unlucky and didn’t do well, they disappear. Because they disappear, they’re not in the pool that we are comparing. So back to this idea of spurious correlation. How do we know that margarine and divorce are ridiculous? The answer is because there isn’t an explanation we can understand. And our need to understand is essential, because we can’t make good choices going forward if we are simply basing it on data. This becomes super important when we begin to scale up Artificial Intelligence. Arvind Narayan is a professor who is researching how we can use AI successfully. He has pointed out that there are are three problems that AI is purporting to solve. One of them is very straightforward. This is things like perception, facial recognition, or identifying a song from just a few notes.

We know there is a definitive correct answer. If we feed the system enough data, and we give the system enough right answers, not only can it look for correlation between data points, but it can begin to match up what actually works with what, over time. The second category is automating judgment. Things like spam detection, or copyright violations, or grading an essay. And it turns out there’s a judgment call here, but over time because we are using enough data, the systems can figure it out.

But the third category, predicting social outcomes. Predicting social outcomes – things like predictive policing, or terrorist risk – all the stuff that big government and big companies would like to use on humans, turns out that’s really, really difficult. Because in the words of William Goldman, no one knows anything. That predicting the next hit song is much harder than it looks. The thing about statistics, is that statistics will tell us, on average, to expect that if there’s a 78% chance that someone’s going to win the election, it doesn’t mean they won the election.

It’s not like a test score where, if you get more than 65, you win. 78 percent, 95 percent – it doesn’t matter. What 95% means is that 19 out of 20 times, Person A is going to win the election, and 1 out of 20 times Person B is. And if you had a pair of dice with 20 sides on them and you rolled them, then you would have a decent understanding of what the chances are of it all working out one way or the other. But we act like statistics are true. The thing is, ironically and sadly, flying on an airplane is super, super safe. Flying on an airplane is far safer than driving, but that didn’t keep Abraham Wald from dying in a plane crash at younger than 50 years old. Because statistics simply tells us the range of what we can expect to happen. Not why or how it will happen in any given moment. What we need is understanding.

Now on to this idea of the future – using the past to predict the future. Earlier I pointed out that stock funds like to imply that they will beat the stock market. But yet, in a hundred years of people trying to consistently beat the stock market at a rate better than the risk they are taking would indicate, we have not found somebody who has done it persistently, in a way that we can understand. Because as soon as someone understands it, other people will do the same method. Now, this rubs a lot of people the wrong way because they have seen people who are good at predicting the future – people who are good at making psychic predictions, or who’s going to win the next football game.

Well, if you want to run a scam, here’s one thing you could do. You could start 200 sites, each one of which predicts the results of football games. And in week one of the football season, have 100 of the site’s predict Team A is going to win, and 100 of the sites predict Team B is going to win. And each game, as you go further and further through the season, if a site is doing poorly as you branch out, close that site down.

So by the time we get toward the Super Bowl, there are going to be sites with a perfect record. There have to be sites with a perfect record, because all they are doing is going down one branch. But sooner or later, they’re going to be wrong. Because all they are doing is moving numbers around – they don’t actually understand what works and what doesn’t. Nobody knows anything – not when it comes to who’s going to win a football game.

Bob Lefsetz runs one of the most important and funny newsletters about the music industry. He recently wrote a piece about a singer from Australia who calls herself Tones And I. Tones And I has had number one hits in dozens of countries around the world, except The United States – at least to date.

Well, he talked about how she was on fire, how she was doing great, and then his readers wrote in. His readers are music industry executives. His readers are people who, for a living, get paid to predict the future. Bob Davis wrote, “Watched it – dreadful music. Meh”. D. Hamill wrote in, “Pointless”. A guy named Bill Siple wrote, “I listened to it – I don’t get it. Your first instinct and not liking it was correct. Billy Eilish gave us Mumble Rap. I hope the genre of “baby talk” singing doesn’t catch on”. And on, and on it went. And they’re all wrong.

They’re wrong because correlation isn’t what’s on offer here. What’s being discussed is, “Do you understand?” And no, you can’t possibly understand that the people who are being seen as successful, as predicting pop culture – the John Hammond’s of the world, the Jason Flom’s of the world – they have an ear. But mostly what they have is the guts and confidence to double down on the things that work. Because we don’t pay attention to the ones that don’t work, but we do pay attention if you double down, and double down, and double down on the ones that do. Because then we have a chance to amplify the small signals of what’s working.

Back to the irony of Abraham Wald. After he died, Ronald Fisher, one of the other great statisticians of the 20th century, attacked his work saying he didn’t know how to set up an experiment. Ronald Fisher did brilliant work at understanding issues of Darwinism, including sexual selection. Ronald Fisher also spent a lot of time hanging out with psychics, meaning he was completely fooled by false correlation appearing real.

At the end of his life in 1950, Ronald Fisher made a tragic error, in that he spoke out against a UNESCO study that showed that people of all different races and backgrounds had the potential to do any sort of work. Fisher, confused because he was looking at false correlation – not at understanding why – said that different races had different abilities. And that Black people couldn’t possibly do the intellectual work that white people, like Fisher, were doing. Again, what we’re stuck with, is margarine and divorce rates.

What we’re doing is looking at false correlation. Correlation is not causation. That there are tons of factors at work that influence whether or not something is going to happen. And just because things line up for a week, a year, a decade doesn’t mean that one is causing the other. And so the hard work of statistics is not to do a t-test, not to make sure you have the right sample size. The hard work of Statistics is to understand. Because if we can’t understand, then we’re going to get seduced by the seemingly accurate predictions of artificial intelligence. We’re going to be seduced into believing that the future of music is going to sound like the past of music. We’re going to write-off populations of people, simply because in the past, other factors prevented them from doing the work that needs to be done now. We can do better than this, odds are anyway.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Thank you as always for listening, and for your questions. I love to hear from you, too. To ask a question just visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. While you’re there, you can find show notes, ways to subscribe, and where the transcripts are.

If you were to start over now in 2020, what steps would you follow to build an audience that you go deep with? What is the right medium to expose yourself and at what pace would it be okay to do it, so that you also build momentum and at the same time take advantage of the media algorithms that are affecting our work. Thank you for everything you do. I love your work.

It’s extraordinary that someone in New York is talking to someone in Romania about how to start a business that matters in 2020. The rules are fundamentally different than they were just 20 years ago. Access to world markets, the ability to find employees and contributors from around the world – a shift in what people are buying, what they care about, and how they connect – it’s profound. Probably the most profound shift in our culture in over a hundred years. And you, like so many of us, have a lot of choices to make. The choices go way beyond, “What should I sell at a little store in my village?” Way beyond, “What should I make in a factory, with a machine that I could possibly afford?”

Because we don’t need a little store, and we don’t need a factory, and we don’t need a machine. So with that said, I would begin with this. What’s the smallest viable audience – the smallest group of people that you could connect with, that you could inspire, that you could change, that you can make a living with and for, that would sustain you on your journey. Because the answer is not not a billion people. It might not even be a hundred million people, or 10 million people, or a million people. And the place we begin getting trapped is saying, “This is for everyone. It’s so good. It’s for everyone. How do I get the word out?”

The alternative is to say, “It’s for someone. How can I be specific?” The next part is Google, and people like Google are making it almost impossible to get found. You can’t count on a search engine to help people discover you. That the way you win SEO is not by getting it so that a generic term finds you. It’s getting it so that people don’t type in a generic term. They type in your term. They’re looking for you.

How to get people to look for you. You make something that other people want to talk about. You make something, so that people benefit when they tell their friends about what you’re doing. And so that thing is probably not a commodity. That thing is probably not, “You’re looking for something, and we’ve got something”. That thing is specific. That thing is hard to copy. That thing might very well be about connection – about who are the others, who else is here. I don’t want to miss out.

And so ironically, one of the oldest professions – the idea of a musician standing in front of a bunch of people live – that industry is back. It’s back because you can’t make money really selling records, but you can make money putting on a concert, if the other people in the room are worth being in the room with. And you can do it at scale. Rocky Horror Picture Show generated tens, and tens of millions of dollars years ago, because people wanted to go together to see a movie. So I could go on and on, but I’m going to be again with this – smallest viable audience, and build something that a small group of people can’t go to bed without telling someone else about.

Hi Seth, this is John from Cape Town. In the 2012 London Olympics, a South African swimmer, called Cameron Van de Burgh, won a Gold Medal in Breast Stroke – Hundred Meters. And then afterwards, admitted to cheating by using underwater kicks that were illegal. And he came out in the statement saying that the reason he cheated, was because everybody cheats. And if you don’t cheat, then unfortunately, you’re not in the game. So I was wondering how, in this climate where you have to cheat to stay in the game at that level of competition, how do you reconcile morally justifiable action with this competitive nature of business? Your last episode on sportsmanship really got me thinking about how to put these two together. I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on it.

Thank you for this question. It’s poignant and important. I would argue this – there are competitions where you cannot win without cheating. It could be because it’s easy to cheat. It could be because they are so competitive, that creative cheating actually pays off. And it could be because you’re not monitored very closely, and so cheating becomes the new normal. But I’d like to argue that you don’t have to pick one of those competitions.

You don’t have to seek to be in competitive bicycling, knowing you’re going to have to dope to win. Pick something else. That to live a life, worried that you’re going to get caught cheating, or complaining that you’re losing because you didn’t cheat, isn’t necessarily the life you might want to choose. There are plenty of other areas, plenty of other ways to make a good living, to enrich the people around you, to do work that matters for people who care where you don’t have to cheat. These ways are harder to find. These ways probably have less glory associated with them, but they exist. And if by example, we choose them and we devote ourselves to them – if we pick something where it is not winner take all, if we leave the monopolistic network effects to others – what we will be doing is weaving a better culture.

You can smell it. You can tell when cheating is your only option. And if it’s your only option, I don’t think it’s your only option you can choose to do something else.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 1904-belief-and-engineering- <==

With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the office to demonstrate the operability of a device.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

They put it in a parenthetical, but the Patent Office in the US Is clear – you can’t get a patent on a perpetual motion machine, unless you bring in a working model. What’s this all about? It’s about belief – belief came first. Being an infant is terrifying. Being a toddler is almost as scary. All species, every one of them, navigates the world because they have belief, belief in what is going to happen next. Hope that things will be as they were. We can’t possibly move forward without some level of belief. But along the way, we gain – as Socrates said “Logos” – reason. Rational thinking – the ability to make decisions based on how the world is, not how we want it to be. That doesn’t mean that belief isn’t important – it remains essential. But belief, belief and Engineering don’t go well together.

I’m carefully using the word engineering here instead of the word science, because there are plenty of scientists who have fallen into the trap of belief. Einstein had a very famous battle – decades-long – with Niels Bohr, the guy who sketched out how the atom might work. Einstein, of course, is physics royalty, but Bohr wasn’t far behind.

Their argument? Their argument was about Quantum Mechanics. It was about waves versus particles. It was about spooky action at a distance. It was about God playing dice with the Universe.

It’s too complicated for this podcast, but what it’s about is belief. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atomic Bomb, one of the people who ushered in the modern age, was in the middle of it. There was a scientist who had come up with an alternative to Bohr and the Copenhagen Group’s explanation of how Quantum Mechanics worked.

About Bohm, Oppenheimer said, “If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him”. This is action based on belief. That the cost of accepting an alternative way to think about the physics of the universe was too high for those in the Copenhagen school. And so they conspired with one another to discredit a scientist who wanted things to be done differently.

What does it mean to get hung up on belief when we are facing an engineering problem? Well, an Engineer who thinks that a bridge could be built – a strong bridge, a reliable, durable bridge out of pasta, will build a bridge that will hurt someone. So what engineering is about is very simple. If you can build a bridge out of pasta, show me. And if your bridge is better than my bridge, I’ll accept it.

That’s totally different than saying, “Prove me wrong, because I believe I am right”. In fact, what we seek in engineering is someone who eagerly wants to be proven wrong because if they are proven wrong, then they know they have found something better. Where does belief come from? Well sometimes, in an engineering world, belief comes from a well-intentioned desire to understand how the world is. An ancient Greek, his name is pronounced Theseus, was stationed in Persia – now called Iran. And when he was there, he saw carvings, in rock, of something that looked an awful lot like a horse with a horn coming out of his head. Theseus was told that this animal lived in India. He dubbed it the Unicorn, not being particularly creative, and brought the story of the Unicorn back to Greece.

The tale of the Unicorn did not show up in Greek legends and Greek myths. It showed up in books of Greek Natural History. It was true, it was real. And it took thousands of years before human beings came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a unicorn. You can’t find unicorn, because there wasn’t a unicorn. All there was, was a sculpture of the mythical unicorn. But the belief that a unicorn is real, it stuck around.

Consider the Galaxy GN Z XI. This galaxy is more than 10 billion light years away, which means that if you aim a powerful telescope at it, you will see light that is more than 10 billion years old. Light takes a while to travel. Light from the sun, the light you can see out your window, is 8 minutes old – it’s stale by the time it gets here.

It is not intuitive to believe that light doesn’t happen instantaneously. That light from one place, gets to light the other place immediately. But if you’ve ever been in a lightning storm, you know that light and sound travel at different rates. You will hear thunder at a different moment than you will see lightning. So we agree that sound is much slower than light. But in fact, it’s easy to prove that light is not instantaneous.

So if we can accept the fact that the light from the sun is eight minutes old, the very same math will show us that light from GN Z XI is more than 10 billion years old. But if light from that Galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, it means that the universe is also more than 10 billion years old. But if you are walking around with a belief that the universe is much, much younger than that, you have a problem. And your problem is that there are forces encouraging you to maintain your belief, at the very same time that engineering, and math, and the scientific method are showing you that it can’t be true.

So, what are the symptoms of pseudoscience? What are the symptoms of seeking to defend our belief, using terms of engineering and science? Well, the first one is talking with vague, exaggerated, or unstable claims. My favorite one is the third one, unstable claims. Meaning that if one of your claims is disproven, you just change it.

There was someone in my town a few years ago who is busy selling hydrogenated water – a machine that would magically add an extra hydrogen atom, or ion, or something to your H2O, and that it had tons of purported health benefits. Now in a minute, we’re going to talk about belief and health benefits. But the point is, that you must answer the following question.

What test would need to be done for you to change your mind? If you went to a meeting of the Flat Earth Society, where people –and there are tens of thousands of them – gather to talk about the fact that the Earth is not in fact spherical, if you asked somebody there, what test would we have to perform for you to change your mind?

Would it be sufficient for you to get in a plane and fly from Los Angeles to Sydney, and then from Sydney to Cape Town, and then from Cape Town to Miami, and then Miami back to Los Angeles. Would that change your mind? Would it be sufficient for you to fly in a Virgin Galactic orbital vehicle and watch as you travel around? What would it take for you to change your mind?

The second thing, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation. If you’re an engineer, building a building, or working on a life-saving device, and you’re doing your job properly – what you are doing is eagerly looking for something to prove you wrong, because changing your mind is proof that you’re doing something right. That you are getting closer to a rational understanding of how things work, not confirming that you were right all along. This is one of the magic signatures of direct marketing. Direct marketers don’t seek to prove that they are right when they put together a flyer or sponsorship of a podcast. All they seek to do is beat the control. Doesn’t matter who wrote the control, if you beat the control. If you do better than the standard, that’s how you get a promotion.

The third rule is a lack of openness to testing by others – by others who don’t have the same agenda you do. If your perpetual motion machine is a secret, because you’re worried that if you showed people how it worked they would steal your idea, it’s entirely likely that you are not an engineer. And it’s certain that you don’t have a perpetual motion machine.

The fourth one is the absence of progress. And we see this over and over again. That, guess what, your predictions based on astrology aren’t better than they were 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, or 80 years ago. And if there is no progress, then show me where the understanding lies. Where is the rational approach to how to make things better?

The next one is personalization of feedback. If you view criticism of your approach, if you view criticism of your assertions as personal, then it’s extremely likely you are not acting like an engineer. Because an engineer says show me how to make a better bridge. She doesn’t say, “Oh you don’t like my bridge, therefore you don’t like me”. And the last one is the use of misleading language – vague language. Language that’s mushy because, back to the very first point, what test would I have to do for you to be able to change your mind?

Now I want to point out a huge exception to most of what I just talked about, and that is the magic, the power of the placebo effect. Because belief actually changes how humans live. Belief will heal an illness, in many cases. Belief will increase performance. Wade Boggs famously ate chicken before every single game.

Is there a direct connection between chicken and playing baseball? Extremely unlikely. However, did having a comforting superstition help Wade Boggs play better baseball? It’s entirely likely. Or consider the length of the shorts that they wear in the NBA. If you look at games from the 60s or the 70s on television, they look positively skimpy. Why are the short so long now?

The reason they’re so long is that, for most of his career, Michael Jordan wore a pair of shorts under his shorts – shorts from the University of North Carolina, which he wore to remind himself of how to play better. Which he wore because he was superstitious. Which he wore because he had belief. Did it make Michael Jordan play better? It’s entirely possible. But it’s belief that made him play better, not the fact that he was wearing a particular pair of shorts.

The astonishing thing is that in a survey of more than 2,000 sports fans, 27% of them insisted that their sports superstition – the way they dressed, where they sat, how they talked, the fact that they change channels now and then – that their superstition had helped their team win more than once. That the team, of course, doesn’t know that these people are doing these crazy things. But they believe – a quarter of them – that their superstition is helping the team. This is not engineering thinking. This is not Logos. This is someone telling themselves a story, because it makes them feel better. One more thing about sports, if you watched Saturday Night Live in the old days, you saw a sketch about a hamburger joint in Chicago.

It’s a real place, The Billy Goat Tavern.

The Billy Goat Tavern used to be run by a guy named Billy Sianis, and yes, he owned a billy goat. And yes in 1945, he brought his billy goat to a Chicago Cubs baseball game. Actually, I believe it was the playoffs. They kicked him out of the game because the goat stunk.

Well Sianis was furious, so he sent a telegram to the owner of the Cubs, putting a curse on the team and saying that they would never win a World Series, because they had been mean to his goat. And the curse lasted for almost 70 years. In 2002, some fans brought a goat with them from Chicago to Houston to go to Houston Astros game against the Cubs. As predicted, they were also barred from entering the stadium. I guess there’s a good reason, but goats seem to be barred from Major League Baseball games. Prepared for this, they unfurled a scroll and reversed the curse, taking it off of Chicago and putting it on Houston, and several years later the Cubs won the World Series.

I have no doubt that the curse on the Cubs affected the way some of the players played. But the curse on the Cubs could not be described as having a causal reaction on how baseball’s bounced, or on how players hit the ball. But people are complicated – belief runs deep. We stick with our beliefs for several reasons. One – peer pressure, tribal belonging, what will the others think. If we are part of a community that believes something, an Engineering thought shows up that demonstrates in the video replay, that demonstrates through the logic of math that we are wrong, we will stick with our idea.

Ponzi – Charles Ponzi, I talked about him on a podcast a couple years ago – raised more than half of the money he stole from people after he was profiled in the front page of the Boston Post, as a con man. After? How could that be? How could working people take their hard-earned money, wait in line, and invest it with Ponzi after the con had been revealed? Well, the answer is simple, because we trusted our friends, because we wanted to fit in, because tribal solidarity was more important than looking at the truth.

The second reason might be status seeking. It might be that trotting out our belief, insisting on our belief, not only helps us fit in, it helps us stand out with the people that we seek to have respect from. That over time, people in science have developed a reputation for being put off-ish for being a little bit snobbish. That going along with whatever is proven doesn’t feel brave, or bold, or heroic. Whereas sticking with your beliefs in the face of proof that you were wrong, in some communities, will improve your status.

And the third one is cognitive dissonance. We don’t want to admit that we are wrong, because if we believe in something, we must be right. If we are doing this, we must be right. If you’ve gone five, six, seven years in a row to a meeting of some flat-earthers, admitting that you are wrong is more than just saying “I’ve looked at the numbers”. It means that there’s something wrong with you.

So what does this have to do with culture and the problems of our moment? Well, here’s the problem. The problem is that for the first time over the last 20 years, many of us have been asked to put our beliefs in writing, put our beliefs online, put our beliefs in front of everyone. Many of us have been asked to show our allegiances. To join whichever tribe we want to be a member of and to do it in public.

And thanks to the explosion of social media – in which attracting a crowd is how Twitter and Facebook make money – crowds have been attracted by people who are lying, by people who are trotting out beliefs they know to be untrue, simply to pit groups of people against one another. And now, as we enter the realm of artificial intelligence, of deep fakes, of stuff that could be true, it’s even hard to tell from the video, it’s getting easier. Easier and easier to defend one’s pseudo-scientific non-engineering beliefs.

And now we have a real problem. And the reason we have a problem is the bridge is going to fall down. It’s one thing to believe in the Abominable Snowman, or Frosty the Snowman, or Rudolph, or any other belief that gives you solace and puts a smile on your face.

It’s another thing to believe that something didn’t happen that did. It’s another thing to carry around a set of explanations for how the world works, that isn’t accurately explaining how the world works. Because when we collide those two things in a row, we end up losing our life savings to Charles Ponzi. When those two things collide, when two groups who both claim engineering truth collide with one another, we don’t have a useful way to adjudicate the argument.

Back to Robert Oppenheimer. If we need to smear and destroy the career of a scientist, simply to insulate ourselves from how it feels to change our mind, we’ve made a tragic mistake.

Because forward motion in rational thought is one of the things that has created the best parts of the modern world. Too often though, we have forgotten to take forward motion in belief. Forward motion in how do we create beliefs and adhere to them, in ways that help more and more of us? How do we create unity, not division? How do we build beliefs that are resilient in the face of engineering truth? Because if we are going to fight against the world as it is, so that we can have the peace of mind that comes from believing that we are right about our beliefs, the world as it is, sooner or later, is going to stand up and smack us in the face. Because the thing is if the universe is more than 10 billion years old, plenty of things happened long before someone invented The Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction doesn’t create coincidences. Human behavior in a particular town does not cause a storm to appear in retribution. Storms and coincidences were around long before people invented beliefs around them.

Now, what we have now, is the chance – when more of us have access to more accurate explanation of how the world really works – what we have is the opportunity to build on that to find resilience with each other, so that we don’t have to deny engineering truth in order to get back to being the people we seek to be.

That’s my rant, I hope it resonates.

Go make your ruckus.

As always, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

I heard from a few people about my comment about Efficient Markets Theory last week. They didn’t call in their questions, but basically what they were getting at is, “Of course some stock pickers do better than others, what about Warren Buffett?” And one person kindly sent me an article by Warren Buffett, in which he explained why he’s such a good stock picker.

Well, here’s the deal. If you can consistently beat the market in terms of the risk that you are taking, you can do the following. You can borrow money for less than the money you’re going to be able to make with that money you borrow. And you can do it til infinity, because the risk will even out, and you will be ahead. And if you can do it til infinity, you won’t be a billionaire, you’ll be a trillionaire. And we don’t have any trillionaires – at least not yet. Because sooner or later, risk evens it all out. Warren Buffett, later, years later in an interview, admitted that, “No, investing in Berkshire Hathaway is not actually more efficient or more profitable than buying an Index Fund”.

So there are flaws with Efficient Market Theory, but in general, you can’t – in public, without secret information or going behind the scenes – consistently and regularly beat the risk average. Because if you could, the risk average would be wrong.

Now, here’s a two-part question. So generous.

Hey Seth, this is Maria from Raleigh. Okay, so I kind of have an Oreo for you, because I have two questions and one comment. So my first question is, when you go to parties do people like try to ask you lots of deep questions, and you’re just like “I’m trying to have fun” and is that annoying? I’m really asking because I’ve never had that problem, and I just really am curious as to what it’s like, just like what the experience is like.

So then my comment is that I am doing your Creatives Workshop, and it’s fantastic. And I did the Storytelling Workshop in November / December, and that was also fantastic. And I just really appreciate the culture that you created online. And I feel like I learn so much from the lessons, like there’s like a lingering effect where, like I learn more and more, like even as time goes on. So I just am really appreciative of that. And so then my last question is whether you’ve considered doing a workshop like one of those, but geared towards, like teenagers or kids in college, and it really wouldn’t even matter – like the subject matter wouldn’t even be as important as, just sort of like showing them how to interact online in a positive way. I was just wondering if you ever thought about that, because I just feel as though what you’re doing is, like, really important.

Well, thank you for this.

I think you and I might be going to the same sort of parties. My take is that I would rather have a deep conversation and talk about the issues that I get to talk about in our workshops and on this podcast, then just trade banal and inanities with people at a cocktail party, but that basically never happens.

So for fun, my fun is having conversations like this one, not asking people about the weather, etc. So there you go, that’s my short answer to the quandary both you and I face at cocktail parties.

Thank you for the kind words about our workshops. We run our workshops for people like you, but the take away from me – the key part – is that learning is different than education. And the fact is that when we learn something, it gets stronger over time. Education fades after the test. We forget what we memorized, but learning – learning persists because we start to see the world a different way, and it compounds, forward and forward. As to your last idea about college students, we are working on something on this very topic for this summer and I hope we’ll be able to announce it soon.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 2202-marshmallows-and-privilege- <==

Fifty years ago, in the early 1970s, two researchers at Stanford University did an experiment noteworthy for its clever design, its extraordinary follow-up and results, and just how easily misunderstood and wrong it was.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

That’s right, I want to talk for a couple minutes about the marshmallow test – the Stanford marshmallow test. And then I want to get to a really important question. The marshmallow experiment – it took place at the preschool that was run at Stanford University. It was done several times in the early 1970s. The conceit of the experiment is super clever. First, find out if a kid prefers pretzels or marshmallows, but for the sake of this conversation and because it’s so much more fun to say, we’ll talk about marshmallows.

You say to a kid 3 years old, four years old, maybe even five, “Here’s the deal. I’m going to leave you alone in this room –this Library filled with toys and books, and I’m going to put a marshmallow in this box. If I come back in 15 minutes, and the marshmallow is still there, I’ll give you two marshmallows. On the other hand, if you eat the marshmallow before I come back, no more marshmallows for you”.

And what they found is that some kids ate the marshmallow. There’s actually very amusing video of kids torturing themselves, looking at the marshmallow before they eat it. And then, they revisited these kids – when they were 15, and 18, and 20, and 25 – years later, decades later. And they discovered that kids that didn’t eat the marshmallow did better on their SATs decades later.

They got into more famous colleges. They had better physical fitness. By almost everything that one could measure, it seemed like the kids who had enough self-restraint to wait for the second marshmallow, ended up being better at life. They even did a brain scan on some of them, hoping to look for some sort of magical mystery advantage.

But in the 1980s and 90s, they redid the experiment, and what they found is this, that when you do the experiment with a variation of people in it – based, for example, on income, on how they were raised, on race – suddenly many of the benefits of waiting seem to go away. And suddenly, it’s not as cut and dried.

I think what’s missing from the original experiment is this – there’s an analysis that says, “Kids who can wait, do better”. But what’s missing from that is maybe that kid grew up in a home where it wasn’t easy to trust that an adult would keep their promise. Maybe that kid grew up in a household where there wasn’t dinner served that night, even though they expected it would be. Maybe, normal is different for different people, which leads to this question:

Hey Seth, love your podcast. You’ve spoken at length about green-lighting yourself, shipping your product, and grit. You haven’t touched on race much. This episode of science versus belief seems an opportune time.

The myth is, if you innovate enough, work hard enough, and are a little lucky, you’ll be successful. But this is a pitch from folks who only wanted white men voted, who only wanted white baseball leagues. When I see a doctor, I’m exaggerating my pain. When I see a judge, I’m more guilty than others. When I see a cop, I’m dangerous and scary. What happens when I apply for a programming job? When I seek venture capital?

Sure, the most brilliant, bold, and gritty should absolutely be celebrated. But what are your thoughts when “better than average” is overshadowed by belief, tradition, and superstition. Thank you.

And he’s right. He’s right that I haven’t spent any time at all in the hundred episodes of this podcast talking about how deeply ingrained in our culture, race and gender are. That if you think about it, one of the things that we do is we remember or decide about things based on how the person we are interacting with might be different than who we expected. So that if you do a business deal with someone from, I don’t know, Bolivia, and it doesn’t go well, you might decide that you shouldn’t do deals with Bolivians. Well, maybe you shouldn’t do deals with people who don’t keep their word, and Bolivia is just a distraction. That, again and again, over the last couple hundred years, we have decided – we being in quotation marks, meaning the dominant voices in our culture – that women, people of color, people who are disabled get an asterisk next to their name.

That they’re an exception, that we have to look at something through a different lens when we’re talking with someone who isn’t quote, “like us”. But what we’re really doing is saying, “not like us” in an easily noticed way, because everyone is not like us. And then we have the problem, on top of this, of what happens when income is also added into the mix. Because our desire, and it is a desire – our instinct to separate people, based on how they look, how they were born, what they were born with – is compounded by the fact that those people are often paid less.

So we talk about white privilege, and a lot of people, like me, who benefit from white privilege often don’t hear it. They don’t hear it clearly, because in their eyes it might be that no one has actually put their hand on their back and pushed them forward. But what is definitely happening, without a doubt, is that the people that you are competing with – to get into that institution, to get that gig, to be treated fairly – the other people are being held back. They’re being held back all the time. And it’s not something that someone who has privilege notices, because we, they, privileged people, aren’t being deliberately held back.

And so back to the idea of the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test, when it was redone, found that the effect went down at least 50%. I have no real insight as to whether they discovered anything about whether kids trusted themselves, whether they trusted adults, whether they could learn to do so. But one of the crises of our time, and there are certainly plenty of them, is that we have magnified our instinct to blame outcomes based on external factors, labels, that probably have nothing whatsoever to do with what is actually going on.

Symphony Orchestra used to audition people watching them play. As a result, the vast majority of people in every Symphony Orchestra were male. When they started doing blind auditions, which are simple to do in classical music – you just put up a screen between the judges and the people who are playing – suddenly, overnight, the percentage of women that got into orchestras went up dramatically. But it couldn’t go up enough, because women had been trained from an early age to expect that they weren’t going to be in an orchestra. They were trained by people who, quote, “meant well” unquote. Trained, because they didn’t want those women to have their hearts broken. And so, yes, your question is exactly right. That, “what is it like to walk down the street and have someone cross the street, because they’re afraid of you?” No one’s ever done that to me. What is it like to interact with a job interviewer, or a policeman, or judge, or government official, and have the benefit of the doubt held out against you? These tiny slights – some not so tiny, some that impinge on our health and our Liberty – they compound. They compound in a way that undermines our ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

And then we get to this idea of asset utilization. Asset utilization is easy to understand, if you’re running a farm. It’s easy to understand, if you’re running a factory. Well, no one’s running our culture, but we could think about it as if we were. There are billions of people on this Earth, some of them are going to cure disease, some of them are going to save a life, some of them are going to have a software breakthrough, some of them are going to care for someone – maybe your grandmother.

And if we get in their way, if we undermine them, if we teach them not to trust any system, not to bother pushing themselves – well, then we’ve just wasted that asset, for them, for us, for all of us. So yeah, there’s a crisis and the crisis isn’t organized from a central agency. The crisis is endemic, a pandemic. It is everywhere we look. Even in places, locales, where everybody is of the same race. Even in clubs, where everybody is of the same gender. It gets compounded, because human beings are wired to make these quick judgments. And then that wiring is amplified by our culture.

It’s amplified by the fact that magazine ads are inherently misogynistic, and inherently racist, and have been for a very long time. There was a video going around week or two ago, that showed a scuffle on an airplane between a woman who had reclined her seat, and the guy who was in the seat behind. And I was stunned to discover that there was division about how to interpret this video. That there were people who were saying it was okay for the guy behind to hit the seat over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again – for minutes at a time.

It’s hard for me to imagine this person doing it, if there had been a guy sitting in front of him. There are people who have said, “Well if the seat behind you doesn’t recline, you’re not allowed to recline your seat”. Which means, of course, that the person in front of her can’t recline either – all the way up to the front. Turtles all the way down. So, rather than litigating and arguing about the specifics of one case, because we know most of the time when there’s a scuffle on an airplane, it probably could have been avoided. The point remains, and the point is we make judgments.

There’s another problem with the marshmallow test – not with the test itself, but with the story it encourages us to tell ourselves. And it’s this, that there are branches, irrevocable branches in people’s lives. That something you did in a laboratory at Stanford when you were three and a half, has some sort of magical impact on what you’re going to be like when you’re 25. That going to a school where, maybe there are one standard deviation more suspensions than a school down the street, will have a significant impact on whether or not you end up in prison.

That going to prison, for any reason, has a significant impact on your lifetime earnings – your ability to contribute. These irrevocable turning points in our lives don’t have to be irrevocable. We don’t have to embrace a culture that insists that there are no do-overs, no second chances. That once somebody has been put into a category, they have to stay in that category. Because, in addition to being immoral and unfair, it’s also a lousy use of assets. To sort people based on how they look, or how we interacted with them once, or how the world interacted with them once, or based on a choice, or based on a choice they made years ago, deprives all of us of the chance to make things better.

Now, even if we strive to be perfectly fair at all times, our instincts are going to kick in because we label categories of objects – we label categories of people. And so if we want to undo this, we have to realize it’s going to take a while. But we also have to start now. We have to start where we are, right in front of us, and it has to do with the benefit of the doubt. Just like that four-year-old needed to give the investigator the benefit of the doubt, and believe that two marshmallows were going to be forthcoming if he didn’t eat the first one, we need to figure out how to give others – others who don’t have the same experience that we had, others who don’t look like us – how do we give them the benefit of the doubt? Because it’s easier than ever, in so many areas of our life, to measure the output. Lord knows we are measuring the output – every click, every second, every keystroke, in so many endeavors that humans engage in. Is it possible to set aside our bias just long enough to wait for the second marshmallow, just long enough to help others get where we have gotten?

Through hard work, through trust, through people believing in us. I hope we can, I hope we can get there more quickly. And we are, because the progress we’ve made in the last hundred years is tremendous, but it is nothing compared to what it could be or should be.

Thank you for listening to my rant about marshmallows.

As you know, I love hearing from you. If you’ve got a question, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button. While you’re there, you can see previous episodes and the show notes.

When it comes to pseudoscience and basing all we believe on the facts, what do we do if we think the facts are being misrepresented? Then do we default to our belief? If our belief is based on certain foundational principles, can we default our belief? I believe we live in a culture right now that purposely misrepresents facts, and then we’re quoting facts to the accepted narrative, but we’re being tricked. Would like your opinion on this, because I do feel we live in a time when we have more access to the facts, but the facts are being misrepresented to us.

Thank you, sir.

We could probably make eight podcast about this, but I want to talk about two things. When it comes to facts, and I’m putting the word “facts” in quotation marks. The first one is that facts are usually related to our culture, to our definitions. Is it a fact that the Earth is a planet? Well, it depends on what you mean by planet. Is it a fact that I can get in a car and drive from here to Cleveland? Well, it depends what you mean by car and Cleveland. Something like mathematics isn’t based on much in the way of of culture. There are series of fundamental principles and rules, and after that, facts are facts. 2 plus 2, in our version of math, always equals 4. Pi is an irrational number that starts, 3….

No matter what a legislature decides to do, no matter what a textbook publisher changes, Pi is Pi. But it gets way more complicated when we start to talk about complexity – things like opinion, things like eyewitness reports. “What actually happened back then?” And now it’s getting even more confusing, because we have people who can bend statistics to their will. We have fake videos, fake audio – you get the idea.

So when we talk about a fact, I think it’s important to begin with there really are facts, based on our shared understanding of the world. Some things really did happen. Some things actually occurred and are going to occur again. Why do some people want to make it so that facts are blurry? Well, there are a couple reasons for this. One, the inquisitive researcher, the scientist who says, “Wait, that thing we thought was a fact, might not be a fact”. If you drop two balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it is not a fact that the heavy one hits the ground first – they both hit the ground at the same time. And yet, after Galileo did that experiment, at least in the myth, plenty of people still taught and believed that the heavy one hit first – false facts appearing real. But the common reason is this, in politics, in leadership, in organizations – as we learned in George Orwell’s classic 1984 – if you can blur the facts, if you can make up into down, and in into out, if you can keep changing the way people see reality, folks will look for firm ground to stand upon. And what they might choose to stand upon is belief, and authority, and power.

Because belief, authority, and power are threatened by reality. Because reality sticks around for a long time. Reality is there, right in front of our nose. If we can blur reality, then what we can do is get people to realize that their only choice is to follow power and authority. That’s why it’s so important in whatever field we’re in, to embrace the universe as it is – to look for, celebrate, and cherish actual facts. Because facts don’t care who’s in charge, facts don’t care what the culture is saying this week. Facts are persistent. Facts can be looked at from many different angles, and we can learn something from them. And when we learn from them, we have a chance to make things better. Recorded history, the last 10,000 years of it, is a relentless progression towards utility, toward fairness, toward Justice, toward making things work better.

And the way we do that is not because we are following one demagogue or another, the way we do that is because the facts are compounding. And so we have the germ theory of disease. You can deny the germ theory of disease, if you want to make money selling your fancy make-believe medicine, or being some sort of quack. But the fact is, disease is caused by germs – it’s a fact. Knowing that has saved the lives of billions of people, and eased the lives of just about everyone. I could go on and on, about our food supply, about the way we engage with the built world. Buildings don’t fall down anymore, because it is a fact that you should not make a building out of sticks, if you have the choice to make it out of bricks instead. And on and on we go. So that’s the beginning of a rant about facts, and why they may or may not be in dispute.

Thank you for your question. We’d love to hear from you.

We’ll see you next time.

==> 2683-wheat-and-taxes- <==

Somehow, I’m not sure why, I’ve become friends with four of the greatest Baker’s of our time – Maury Rubin, Kathy Duma, Apollonia Poilâne, and Dan Leader – can turn wheat and other grains into something extraordinary. But before we can talk about wheat, we need to talk about taxes.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

Like most people, I had a pretty benign view of how civilization came to be. People were tired of walking around all the time. They liked the idea of having a house and a yard, maybe even a cat.

And so they settled down, and once they settled down, they realized they could farm. And farming felt way more reliable than picking berries or traveling around following animals. And then once they settled down, I figured, they had to pass the hat to create resources so they could do things, like build roads or protect the village.

On close inspection though, I’m not sure this fairy tale narrative really holds up. Maybe it all happened in a completely different way – backwards, in a reverse order.

Lots of people complain about taxes, but we don’t usually talk about the history of Taxation. Search all you want online, you’re not going to find very much in the way of a definitive history. One reason for this, is that taxation has around forever, or at least as far as we can find recorded history. The Chinese have been taxing people for more than 5,000 years. Taxation figures heavily in the Old Testament, mentioning both how Pharaoh took a tax on everything that was grown and how sacrifices were required at the temple. But how exactly did we end up with taxation? What is it, and what is it for? And what does any of this have to do with bread?

The author James Scott has a theory. I’m going to take that theory and expand it a little bit, knowing that while it makes sense and I think holds water, I have no proof at all. So here we go. Let’s begin with this. For time immemorial, some people have tried to dominate others. Some people have been stronger or have used their will to bully others into doing what they need done. And it’s not difficult to imagine that long before history, some people took others into bondage. That if you dominated someone so completely, that they became your indentured servant or your slave, you could leverage your own effort.

That it’s not hard to imagine measuring the wealth of someone thousands of years ago in terms of how many slaves they had. In the Bible, they’re called slaves – they might be servants – they’re probably slaves. So slavery became a small-scale way for some humans to exert force over other ones, profiting as they did. But inevitably when human beings are involved, people want to scale things up. But it’s very difficult to build the infrastructure where you can actually control the work of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people the way we see in the stories told about the Pharaoh and building of the pyramids.

However, Scott argues, if you can get people to stop being hunter-gatherers, to stop wandering, to stop living in nomadic tribes and get them to settle down on a piece of land, well then all you need to do is show up at their land just before harvest time. And you can take the best of what they grew, and leave them with the rest. Farmers have a hard time escaping, because Farmers can’t bring their un-grown crops with them. Scott’s argument is that we ended up with wheat and other grains, production and with livestock, because the growing idea of government required it. That’s the order it all went in. And so the idea of Taxation as a taking, in the French ‘task’ – tasking people to give their labor to support a power that is over them – goes way back, and it’s inextricably connected to the idea of wheat of grain of farming.

Well, let’s fast forward a little bit because as states begin to grow, the people who run states decide they want to get bigger. So I’m not sure whether offence came first or defence, but let’s assert it was defence. They’re coming to get us – Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great – they’re coming to get us. Let us raise funds from the people to defend our Nation. And so I second sort of Taxation kicks in – this is the taxation of mutual defence. And the Greeks, famous for going on the offence and conquering other places, had very specific rules in place to raise funds, to pay for armies so they could go conquer other places – taking slaves as they did – taking the spoils of invasion as they did, and then repaying the citizenry who funded it through their taxes.

Now along the way, all of this is happening without democracy, without people speaking up because they have no power. Their land connects them to this place, to this leader.

And when the tax man shows up, armed and ready to take, they really have no choice but to contribute. But then industrialization kicks in. One is tempted when the industrialized economy arrives to tax the wealthy, but the wealthy have plenty of influence. And so, before the French Revolution, salt was taxed. There is nothing you can tax that is more aggressive than a tax on salt. That the poorest people were paying the biggest part of their income on a tax on salt.

Before the French Revolution the typical working peasant was paying half his wages for bread. Salt was a requirement for a life. A couple bad years in a row, which led to poor harvest, led to an increase in the price of bread, which led to peasants needing to pay eighty eight percent of what they were earning to pay for bread and salt. This definitely led to the French Revolution.

In the UK where industrialism started, we see an income tax arise. But the income tax in those days a hundred and fifty years ago, was pennies on the dollar – it was a smaller amount. About the same time that all these shifts in taxation are happening, that industrialism is showing up, governments start investing in their cities.

They put in parks and City Planning. They start investing in Water Systems. I think part of that is they wanted a nice place to live as the city’s got more crowded. Part of it is a new sense that maybe you’re not going to be marauded by the next gangster who rolls into town. But I think the biggest part of it is an understanding that the people have more power than they used to, because they’re not tied to the farm. That taxing them is going to require, at some level, some cooperation on their part.

Then comes World War 1, the first industrial full-scale war. And it cost like it was an industrial War. As a result, the Nations that were involved dramatically raised their taxes, and it may not surprise you that when the war was over they weren’t in any real hurry to lower their taxes. To this day, the income tax in the United Kingdom has to be approved every single year by a new vote of Parliament, and it has succeeded in being re-voted in every year since World War One. But again, most of what was going on with this taxation was a sense of taking. But then something shifts again, and what shifts is that the Nordic countries decide that they’re going to increase taxes and dramatically increase services. That they will seek to treat the taxpayer as a customer, and they will provide the greatest safety net in the history of the industrialized world. That over time, this high taxation High service mindset leads to countries where the grumbling about paying taxes isn’t nearly what you would imagine it is. Then the story continues, because the Space Race – the mission to put a man on the moon – cost the US taxpayer approximately 4 percent of the annual budget of the United States for a decade.

Not only that, but we were paying for the Vietnam War at the same time, so tax rates continued to increase not because the people in government were lining their pockets – it wasn’t a kleptocracy, not then. The people in government instead, were seeking to create goods and services, and experiences, and progress on behalf of those they were serving.

While this went on, we experimented with using taxes to change behavior. So a tax on alcohol doesn’t seem to have much of an effect. States where they tax alcohol, I have no data, but my hunch is they don’t drink that much less. Taxes on gasoline – Andy Tobias, the great business writer proposed the following, “Let’s put a four cent per gallon tax on gas, and now auto insurance is included for everyone”.

That by building auto insurance into the price of gas, you get a whole bunch of really extraordinary benefits. You don’t have to pay the insurance companies. You don’t have to pay insurance sales reps. You don’t have to pay for settlements, and the more you drive the more it costs. And if you want to save some money, get a car that gets better mileage. All around, a behavior change that would be interesting to experiment with. It was, to my knowledge, never enacted but a tax on cigarettes, it was. And all of the data shows us that when you raise the price of cigarettes, fewer people start smoking because it works.

And so now here we are, hundreds of years after the tax on salt. Here we are in an era when progressive taxation seems about to go in the other direction, that the richest corporations and the richest people are coming perilously close to paying no taxes at all. Because not only don’t they own a farm, their money is everywhere. And so country after country, these huge institutions, these super wealthy people are extorting the countries where they live, basically threatening that if you raise our taxes, we will leave and go somewhere else. And so all countries can do until they figure out how to work together to change the of culture of Taxation, is tax people who aren’t Amazon. Tax people who aren’t Michael Bloomberg, because these people are stuck. They’re stuck with the land they own, they’re stuck with the factory job that they have. So now we come to the fork in the road, which is it’s pretty clear. That if we charge a fee for putting carbon into the world, for taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the world, it will change behavior. If windmills and solar panels end up being dramatically cheaper than having oil truck come to your house, people are going to switch. If it turns out that the supply chain for whatever you’re going to buy, for whatever you’re going to do is going to use a lot of carbon and you’re going to have to pay for it, you’ll probably seek to use the smart sensors of the free market – to switch to another option.

It’s not a carbon tax. What it is, is a way to influence behavior. And its short-term by product is that it creates revenue that enables governments to either provide more services, or tax something else even less. So I get why so many people are averse to taxation, because 3,000 years ago taxation was slavery. Because taxation was simply a taking. But now, as some taxpayers have more power than others, now as farming is fading away, now as gluten-free diets threaten the very nature of what it is to eat a loaf of bread with no guilt, it’s time to reconsider. What does it even mean for the community to pay for something?

Taxation is an inherent part of our culture, and it’s largely invisible. But we’ve discovered that not only is taxation required, but the taxation changes behavior. The question then is, who is going to decide which behaviors we’re going to change.

Pass the croissant, thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

As you know, I do love to hear from you. I hope that if you’ve got a question or a comment, you’ll submit it. Just visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O do L I N K, and click the appropriate button while you’re there. You can check out show notes and previous episodes. Before I get to the question that just came in, I want to respond to a Blog posted Paul Graham wrote five years ago.

Paul Graham is one of the smartest people on the internet, co-founder of Y combinator, and he wrote an essay that I disagree with – it’s about bias. And what he said, which was very clever, is that one way we can figure out if an organization is using bias and how it is making decisions, is to look at its results.

And what he highlighted was the fact that a venture capital firm, First Round Capital, had published a report that said, “That if First Round Capital funded a team that had a woman on it, it out performed their standard dramatically” – 63%, if I’m remembering properly. They were proud of this, because it pointed out that having a woman on a team might be correlated with better-than-expected performance.

Paul said, “Wait, this is proof of bias”. His argument? If the outcomes show that people who are underrepresented are over performing, it means that you are making a mistake. That you are biased in who you are picking, because the people you’re not picking would have raised your overall performance. Here’s my problem with it.

Let’s consider law schools. First, we’ll go back – 1975. In 1975, without a doubt, women lawyers were dramatically underpaid. You may recall that Sandra Day O’Connor, when she graduated from Stanford Law School, couldn’t even get a job as a lawyer. She had a first get a job typing. But by 1975, women lawyers who could get jobs, were dramatically underpaid.

I think the same is true to this day. That women are underrepresented, running the heads of firms, and if we did a hour-by-hour comparison, I think we find that women are paid less than men in Law. But in 1975, they definitely were. So the question is, “Does that mean that law schools should accept fewer women, because after all they don’t outperform when they get done going through law school?” I think bias has a time shift problem, and the time shift is this – that it may very well be that in any moment, when a venture capital firm or law school makes decisions about who they’re going to pick, the people that they are not picking will underperform after they’re done. But I’m not sure that’s the only job of a venture capital firm. I don’t think their only job is to pick the people who are going to win tomorrow, because they have an obligation to the culture, to the community, to the market where they work.

And if they are going to reinforce the prejudice and bias that’s happening downstream from them, it will never get better. And so the law schools picked up the gauntlet. And starting in the 70s and 80s, actively worked to make sure more women were being trained at the top law schools. Because you know what happens when you do that? You get more highly trained women lawyers. And what happens when you do that, is then the market wakes up and starts to narrow the gap between what they’re paid, and what they should be paid. So no, I don’t think we can look in the rearview mirror and just decide that that’s all bias involves.

Hi Seth. This is Lisa from Lafayette, Indiana. I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while and really enjoy it, and I’m currently a participant in the Creatives Workshop. I’ve got a general question for you. I often hear you refer to the smallest viable audience for our work, and I’m wondering what is a metric for figuring that that out? Is it a simple cost analysis, so a mathematical equation, or what else goes into figuring that audience size for myself?

Thanks Seth.

Thank you for giving me a chance to clarify about smallest viable audience. This is something that I go into in depth in my book, This is Marketing, and in the Marketing Seminar, but here we go. Two key elements – the first one is the idea of Audience. What it means to have an audience is that when you are inventing what you invent, it cannot be for everyone. Just a simple example, if you write books, there’s a whole bunch of people on Earth who don’t speak the language you are writing your book in – it’s not for them. If you write Mysteries, there are a whole bunch of people in the world who don’t want to read a mystery – it’s not for them. Who is it for? The audience you seek to serve, the more precise you can be, the more specific you can be, the more likely it is you will find true fans.

It’s our idiosyncrasy, our willingness to be peculiar, that enables us to even have a fan. Because if all we’re making is something generic for everyone, no one will care enough to be a fan. So It begins by being specific. And then the question is, what do I mean by Viable? What I mean is simple – if you are soloist, you don’t need to make ten million dollars a year.

You might want to, but you certainly don’t need to. Way less than that would be sufficient. As Kevin Kelly has pointed out with 1,000 true fans, if you’ve got a thousand people paying you a hundred dollars a year because they love your stuff, and they want more of it – you’re done! That’s enough, you’re now a professional. But most people who seek to be in the marketplace don’t say there’s only a thousand people I need to delight. They have this amorphous ‘everyone’.

So those are the key pieces. Getting clear in your head about what it means to be specific, and building an organization that’s the right size to match, how big specific is – because if you succeed, and I’ll use Starbucks as an example. When Howard results came back from Italy and decided to make bitter coffee that most people didn’t like, he made a good decision. Because most people weren’t the goal.

Most people can go to Dunkin. He needed enough people. And once he had enough people, those people told the others. Once enough people were telling enough people, he could invest in the building itself – the third place, the place that was fun to go tp. He could invest in other things to broaden what they stood for. But from the beginning, it was about being specific, not being a wandering generality.

So there you go, thanks for listening.

Hope that helped. We’ll see you next time.

==> 3156-don-t-go- <==

Twenty years ago, I was invited to the Big Meeting. Every week on Mondays, at JPMorgan Chase, there was a meeting of the team that was responsible for one-third of the bank’s profits. This meeting consisted of 42 people sitting around a long table, 20 on the side – one at the head and one of the foot – surrounded by 30 other people sitting in the second row. That meeting cost the bank more than fifty thousand dollars an hour. And as far as I know, they’re still having it.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

I got this question from a reader and decided to do an entire episode of Akimbo about it. It explains why I don’t go to meetings and how I avoid going to meetings. Here we go.

Hey Seth, this is Thomas from Ireland – a proud go tonight. And I have a question about meetings. You said previously that you save a ton of time daily by not attending meetings, and I was wondering could you tell us how you work without meetings? For example, what do you do when you need multiple people to discuss something at the same time? Also, do you have any tips for how to stop attending meetings in the meeting-centric culture?

Meetings are a culture, a specific culture – a specific act that industrialized organizations engage in on a regular basis. Meetings are expensive, meetings are debilitating, and most people who go to meetings for a living will tell you it’s one of the worst parts of their job.

Why would something like this persist for so long? One of the most famous paintings in the World, something has been painted over and over again by many artists, is a painting of a meeting – the Last Supper. Meetings are central to many spiritual and religious observances. But we’re talking about a very specific sort of meeting right now – the meeting that you might have gone to just before you listened to this, or the one that you have scheduled later in the day.

This is the meeting that might happen on a regular basis. This is the meeting where you recognize all the people who are there. This is the meeting that takes place in person. This is the meeting that starts on the half-hour and ends on the half-hour. This is the meeting where not very much gets done.

There are of course a whole slew of other sorts of meetings, one-on-one meetings, which I would rather call conversations – brainstorming meetings that match a specific format – but I’m talking about the general meeting. The All Hands On meeting, the update meeting, the meeting where we go around the room and everyone chimes in, the meeting where the people in the back row are demonstrating that they belong in the back row and taking notes and the people in the front are speaking up.

The meeting where people talk to hear themselves talk. The meeting where many people don’t talk, so they don’t have to risk hearing themselves talk. If you know what I’m talking about, you’re familiar with this sort of meeting. This sort of meeting is probably costing the world economy a trillion dollars a year – not just in the lost time in the hourly wage multiplied by the number of people, but in the deadening effect, in the idea that it is pushing us to ‘phone it in’.

But now of course we live in a world where we don’t have to do this, because we can just hop on a Zoom call and yet, and yet they persist. We live in a world where we don’t have to start the meeting at half past the hour – Outlook will let us start it and anytime we want. And yet, we do it the way we’ve always done it.

Why is this? Okay, so a bunch of reasons. Try to remember a typical big company office in 1965. Here’s the way it would work: A Vice President, usually a guy, would want to contact and discuss something with another Vice President. This other Vice President might have an office 30 feet away. The first executive would call his Secretary into his office and dictate a memo. The secretary would type the memo, hand it to the interoffice delivery person, who would bring it three desks down and give it to the Secretary of the other executive, who would then bring it into his office and the memo would be complete. This idea of duelling memos, a slow-moving, cover-your-ass, papered-over system for “who said what, when” was at the heart of how big companies got, or didn’t get, things done. So you could shake things up, if you were Robert McNamara or Mike Bloomberg. You could have a bullpen, you could create a meeting culture where people come together face-to-face and speak their mind. Part of it is an exchange of pheromones – being able to see and smell, and engage with someone right in front of you. This can’t be underestimated.

Mirror Neurons are belief that we can judge other people – the thought of eye contact, our perception of how people dress or sit, the idea of close talkers or interrupters, people who can bring power into the room – all of these things, these very human things, things that go back millions of years, come to the fore in an in-person meeting and they lead to displays of power. Who gets to sit where. Who comes to the meeting first. Back when I worked at Spinnaker in the early 80s, we regularly had meetings with seven or eight MBA’s – all coming to the same meeting. And what we discovered, pretty soon, is that it was understood that the person who came last was the busiest, was the most important, was the person who couldn’t possibly drag themselves away from what they’ve been doing to come to the meeting on time.

And so you guessed it people came later and later. And it wasn’t until the Chairman of the company, Bill, put a big bowl on the table and said, “Last person in has to put a twenty-dollar bill in the charity bowl” that the problem was solved. This power display then reflects back to the idea of fealty, of the bowing to power. That if you are going to get on a plane, fly across the country and sit in a windowless conference room for an hour, because your boss asked you to, you’re not doing it because an exchange of information is about to occur – other than information about who’s in charge. Because, back to the executive with the Secretary, if all you wanted to do was give me information you could have sent me an e-mail. Too many meetings are simply recitations. Recitations don’t belong in a real-time environment where we are using up our most precious asset.

That leads to fear. The fear of missing out, the fear of speaking up, the fear of saying something dumb, the fear of being voted down. We’ve all heard the stories of the Board Meeting where, suddenly, the CEO is asked to leave the room and then the Board votes to remove him or her. These almost never happen, but the idea that we’re going to go to the meeting unprepared can lead to decades of nightmares.

It’s rehearsed in school – showing up for the exam and going to the wrong room, showing up for the exam being unprepared. Going to the meeting and being called on, when you’re not ready to produce the answer. While why exactly do we need to produce the answer in real time? It’s not a game show. That in fact when we go asynchronous – not all at once, but when we have it ready, using a system like Slack – it’s easy to show that we could be more productive, if we want to be. But that leads to the next idea: Safety. Because it’s safer to go to a meeting and wait for someone else to take the responsibility.

It’s safer to go to a meeting and then punt it to the next meeting. That one of the challenges that Slack brings to the organization, is if you write it, you wrote it. There it is with your name on it and everyone knows. In a meeting, there’s plenty of room for deniability – “Well, that’s not what I really said”. In a meeting, there aren’t accurate notes of how it all went down.

And so something that could be solved in five minutes, if you have some quick backs and fourths, via email or even a phone call – but particularly something like Slack – isn’t even solved in an hour of a meeting. But we’re in a rhythm, and the rhythm is, “This is when the meeting happens, this is how the meeting goes”. And if the new boss showed up and said, “This 45 minute meeting is now going to be an 8 minute meeting” she could make the meeting work in eight minutes. But to do that, she would make people uncomfortable. Because we are comfortable with the rhythm of the meetings that we say we hate, because it’s safe in there – safer than it would be doing something on our own.

And then commitment signaling. Commitment signaling is part of fealty, but commitment signaling means I dragged myself out of bed to get here to this meeting. Or I dragged myself away from my office, where I was actually doing productive work to be at this meeting. And these commitments in real time – combined with the idea that were exchanging pheromones, combined with power display, combined with fealty, combined with our almost Jungian connection to the Last Supper – all of it adds up to “the in-person meeting is super special”. Rands in Repose wrote a blog post a couple weeks ago about how to do meetings when two, or three, or four of the people in the meeting are coming in via video call. And his answer was, “Get to the meeting early, set things up in advance. Make sure that you are welcoming these people, these remote workers”.

I don’t think he went nearly far enough. What happens if you have a meeting for eight people, three of whom are coming in by Zoom call, if everyone comes in by Zoom call? If everyone stays in their cube or their office – one computer, one person – and they’re all on the same footing. Now we’re back to what we were started with.

We are back to the idea that faces on the screen are communicating to one another on equal footing. And in that environment, what you will discover is that some people will default to not speaking up, some people will speak more than their share. What you will see in that setting is that some people will work hard – to make sure that the lighting is good, that they’re using a microphone that they’re looking at the screen, that they’re not eating while the meeting is going on, that they are fully and emotionally present. And some people look like they’re sitting at home watching a football game, eating peanuts with the light streaming in behind them – they have checked out.

Meetings give us insight as to who’s up and who’s down. Who’s being honored, and who’s being disrespected. We live in a meetings culture. It is very hard to change it, even if you’re the boss. My friend Toby, who is the boss, who also knows a lot about how to program computers, did something for his company that had thousands of employees.

One weekend, he went in and wrote a script for their company-wide Google Calendar. And what he did was, he canceled every single regular meeting that was on the calendar. And then he sent an email to everyone in the organization, he said, “I just gave you back four hours of your life, every week. If that meeting that got canceled is important, feel free to figure out how to replace it with something with more alacrity, with more agility – that’s going to get the job done. If you really need to have the meeting, go ahead and put it back on the calendar. But for the rest of us, we just got the freedom to produce more which means that we also have the responsibility to do something with that time that just got freed up”.

So, culture. Culture is every corner of our lives, everywhere we look. But too often, we’ve ignored the culture of meetings. And I don’t think you have to be Toby to change it. Figure out a way to upend the worst meeting of your week, to replace it, to cancel it, to adjust it, to figure out the answer to a simple question.

What exactly is this meeting for? If you can answer that question, then you’ve got a shot and making things better. And if you can’t answer that question, don’t go to the meeting.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I love to hear from you. More of us are spending more time at home than ever before, so if you’ve got a question, I hope you’ll take a minute to submit it. Just visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, it’s Stephanie from Florence Italy. How can small businesses survive a crisis on a global level? Because I think that with the Coronavirus, it will have lasting impacts on the Global economy for at least one year, even more. So I started a business a year ago – it’s been going pretty well. Also thanks to your great advice that you’re giving, and to your encouragement to do the best work and seek the right clients. But yeah, I don’t know how how it will be going this year, and I was asking myself if you had some thoughts on adapting or advice on how I can adapt and others can adapt too. Thank you so much. Bye bye.

Thanks for this question, Stephanie. I want to begin by expressing my concern and care for anyone who is ill right now, or has someone in their family who is ill. We’re facing a really tough situation as a worldwide culture, and it’s having a dramatic effect on our economy and it’s particularly impacting small businesses. One of the reasons is leverage. The other one is hope. So I’ll start with hope first. When you sell to businesses, when you sell to individuals, in both cases, people are buying something they’re going to use in the future.

Oh sure, maybe you sell hot dogs at the baseball game for right now, but mostly we’re selling something about tomorrow. And so when the world is even more chaotic than usual, it’s harder to get people to plan ahead. It’s harder to get people to stick to their schedule, to focus on their habits, on their goals, which means that disruptions happen. And the second half of it is leverage. That because of the stock market, because of low interest rates, because of banks, because the financial maneuvering, more and more organizations are highly leveraged. Why? Here’s a simple example from Real Estate. If you buy a house with cash and it goes up 10% and you sell it six months from now, you make 10% on your money. If you buy that same house by putting 10% down, and get the bank to put up the 90% and the price goes up 10%, instead of making ten percent, you double your money. Because you used debt to make the transaction work, which means you’re taking a bigger risk, but your return goes way up.

And more and more, we are seeing businesses and organizations extending themselves, hoping that that growth, that leverage, that increase in staff are assets will pay back many times over. And one of the problems with the disruption like we are facing now, is it put huge pressure on organizations – big and small, particularly small – who were used to, who were expecting tomorrow’s returns to be what yesterday’s were, but a little bigger, to have to weather an interruption. So what to do about it?

Well, the first one is to sit with it, and realize stress isn’t going to help. That what we need to do is see the people that we serve, because they are stressed. They are in a tough spot and they want to move forward. The economy is huge. It’s bigger than it’s ever been. There are 7 billion human beings active in this economy – all connected, all around the world.

Somewhere, somebody needs help. They might not need what they needed a month ago, or six months ago. And that’s the advantage of small company has, because:

A) You can actually see your customers, you know them by name. You can see the entire list and understand it; and

B) Unlike a giant organization, you can shift. You can shift the way you speak to people, you can shift what you offer people. And that’s why went into small business in the first place – to be part of a community, to help complete the circle. And so there is the opportunity.

The opportunity is to figure out how to create enough slack in your system, that you’re not completely stressed out about missing payroll. And at the very same time, figure out what your audience, the people who already trust you actually need, and give them that. Day by day, we will recover. Day by day, things will get better. And they will get better faster, if we take a deep breath and get back to first principles – which is helping people get what they want and what they need.

Here’s to good health for everyone who’s listening.

Go make your Ruckus. Thanks.

==> 4281-the-invisible-hand-of-business-models- <==

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is a short introduction to Akimbo. This wasn’t intended to be a current events podcast, but current events have made it current. Week after week, for a couple years, we’ve been talking about the culture – changing the culture, how ideas spread – the whole idea of viruses. And now, in March 2020 as I’m recording this, the world is turned upside down. No matter where you are, no matter what you do, this is top of mind.

It is tempting, and perhaps might be helpful, for every future episode of Akimbo to be about what we’re dealing with right now. But sometimes, we need to take a longer view. And it’s also worth noting that we are in for a very long slog, but we will get to the other side. And so, going forward, while Akimbo may touch on the issues of the day, it is not a current events podcast and I’m going to go ahead and make episodes, and have been making episodes, that have been queued up about our culture in general.

If you or people in your family are dealing with a health crisis, my heart goes out to you. For all of us, here’s to peace of mind and a speedy recovery – to our health and to our culture –because it’s time, it’s always time, for us to make things better.

Thank you for listening. Here’s our episode.

30 years ago, if you were growing up in Roundup, Montana, you probably worked in a coal mine. And if you were working in a coal mine, you knew exactly what your job was – to dig coal out of the ground, bring it up to the surface, so that the Boss could sell it to someone.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second after this message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth – the world has gone topsy-turvy and many of us are working at home, staying in place to flatten the curve of the virus. And working at home can be disorienting and it can get lonely. I know, because I’ve been doing it off and on, since 1986. To help you out at Akimbo, we’ve put together a co-working space, a virtual co-working space. It’s free. It’ll run for the next month. I hope you’ll check it out – it’s at akimbo.com, right at the top of the page. It’ll be a place for you to find the others, to have those water cooler conversations, to feel a sense of connection in a world where we need more connection. Check out akimbo.com. We hope to see you there. Hang in there.

Today, if you work in Roundup Montana, you are almost certainly not mining coal. What you might very well be doing is buying huge cases, wholesale lots, of odds and ends from Target and other big box retailers, and then taking those boxes apart, putting them into smaller boxes and waiting for a UPS truck to come pick them up, because they were sold on Amazon.

The business model has changed and understanding where you fit in the system, and what model you are working under, is essential if you’re going to figure out if you’re doing a good job. It’s important to understand before you enter the industry. It’s a really good way to figure out if you want to be a customer or an investor. Business models, and how they fit into the systems of our lives, determine what’s going to get done and why.

The original business models were super simple – either you made a thing and sold it, or you bought a thing and sold it, or maybe you traded something. Every once in a while, there might be a business model like, “I run the marketplace, so that lots of vendors can come together”. So if that’s the business model – if you’re running Smorgasburg, which is a giant food fair in Brooklyn, New York – you know how to do a better job. Do a better job, by getting better vendors. Better vendors will get you more customers. More customers will help the vendors justify paying more to be at your food fair.

You understand the business model. You can do the business model better. But business models are getting more complicated, not just for the people who run them, but for the people that they serve. Consider Home Depot. Home Depot, when it began just 50 years ago, there was no hardware shortage in the United States. If you needed to buy some hardware to fix up your house, you could do it. Home Depot showed up with a different model, and their model had a bunch of elements to it. One element is: They’re going to be out of town, not in the center of town. Another part: they’re going to have a very, very big store which means they can have more selection.

They’re going to count on having lots and lots of stores, which is going to give them buying power. Which means they can’t buy goods that are sold by small companies, because they need a ton of whatever they’re going to buy – literally a ton. There’s more than 2,000 Home Depot stores now – more than 400,000 employees. But this systemic change to the hardware business forced thousands of hardware stores out of business, because what Home Depot offered the consumer – the contractor, the person fixing up their house – was simple. If you are willing to get in your car and drive 10 extra minutes, you can have more selection, at a much cheaper price. There isn’t anyone who’s going to know your name. No one’s going to help you very much when you go there, but they were making a bet that at scale, that wasn’t going to matter.

Which means, if you work at Home Depot in the Buying Department, you understand you’re not going to win any prizes for buying something obscure, in small quantities. Which means that if you’re the Manager of a local Home Depot, your goal is to avoid controversy, not to deliver extraordinary service – because that’s not the business that you’re in. King Gillette was one of the pioneers of the razor blade business model, and the method there is pretty easy to remember. You can get a Gillette razor for not a lot of money, but the blades – the ones you have to buy over and over again – those cost extra. So they can afford to get the consumer in early with a big promotion, and then they get lock-in because you don’t want to switch the platform you’re using and you stick with it. So if you’re building a company that is based on this model, a lot of your decisions are already made for you. For McDonald’s, the important original customers weren’t people who bought hamburgers. The important original customers were people who bought Franchises. That McDonald’s had a business model, like Carvel, that was based on acquiring and satisfying people who were going to run each of the individually owned and operated stores.

And so, again, the system determines where the good decisions lie. Ironically, the Big Mac – one of their biggest home runs – was something that doesn’t match the system. It was invented by a Franchise, not by the home office in Illinois. But, they haven’t really learned from the Big Mac lesson. Instead, that central facility in Illinois is constantly perfecting systemic changes that can make each McDonald’s Franchise owner a little bit more successful.

The internet opens the door for all kinds of innovative business models, most of which are copied from other people who have innovated their business models on the internet. You couldn’t possibly have Uber or Lyft, if you didn’t have that super computer in your pocket that let you sign up with a credit card and that gave the institution your location whenever you needed a car to pick you up. Uber and Lyft don’t need to own cars – what they need to own is information. What they need to have is trust. And in their race to get big, sometimes they forgot what their real business was. But now it’s interesting to watch them get back to the basic principles that are at the core of their business model.

And what about Trader Joe’s – the famous Trader Joe’s supermarket – what is their business model? Because no Trader Joe’s, not one, has ever opened in a location that had no access to food. And people who shop at a Trader Joe’s are not there to buy something they can get from anyone else. In fact, a key part of their business model is to sell things you can’t get from other people.

But another part of it is that they don’t sell Brands. Instead, they work with many food providers, who put Trader Joe’s name on the thing they are making. So their message is, “You don’t need more food, but you might want food entertainment. You might want a low-cost item to fill your pantry that puts a smile on your face. And you might want to buy it in a place that isn’t like all the other places”. The more they do that, the better their business model works. Where it gets interesting is when we watch conflicts between two business models. Consider the business model of Warner Brothers, or any other movie studio, and the business model of Netflix.

What business is Netflix in? Netflix is now in the business of getting people to not cancel their Netflix account. That yes, there’s room to grow, they need to grow – Wall Street wants them to grow – but they’re not going to get any more of the mainstream folks that were easy to sign up, to pay for over-the-Internet TV.

And so, Netflix has to race to produce enough bingeable media that people, who are paying for Netflix, can’t imagine quitting Netflix. And then the second thing they need to do is, go to the edges – to the fringes – to find remarkable content for Netflix that will get the people who haven’t yet signed up for Netflix, but who can afford it, to take a deep breath and sign up for it. This is almost exactly the opposite of what the movie business has been thinking about doing for a hundred years.

What makes you a hero in the movie business, is when you make make a Blockbuster movie – a movie for everyone – the feel-good movie of the summer.

Jaws, when you can make Jaws, you can build a career around that. Right down the center – a home run, the infinity model, the model that has no scarcity. The model of Netflix doesn’t know what to do with that. That’s not their job. And so people who are working in one part of the industry, look at the other part of the industry and say, “That makes no sense”.

The people who are working at the checkout at Macy’s look at the people who are working in Roundup, Montana, and they can’t figure out why on Earth someone would stand in a building, opening big boxes of stuff, and putting them into small boxes.

This approach to understanding the system, and the business model within it, doesn’t just get reserved for entrepreneurs. Consider what it means to be working at a Diner on a busy highway – you’re never going to see these customers again. The only reason they have a server, is because it is easier to do that than to have a cafeteria – a buffet. And your job, with as little muss and fuss as possible, is to bring the food from the kitchen to the table as quickly as you can, and then get on to the next customer. Your job is not to have an argument with people. Your job is not even to be particularly charming. Your job is volume.

The person who is at the restaurant, came to this restaurant because they want to come and then they want to leave. On the other hand, if you work for Danny Meyer at a Union Square Hospitality Group restaurant, where it might cost sixty or eighty dollars a person – including tip – to eat there, your job is not to bring the food from the kitchen to the table as quickly as possible.

If they want that, they can stop at any of the Diners between their home and the restaurant where you are working.No, your job is to create an experience that they decided was worth paying for. And so we’re now seeing the rise of ghost restaurants. Ghost restaurants are restaurants that fit a different business model – the business model of Seamless. That if you’re ordering for delivery, it doesn’t matter if the restaurant has a storefront. And the storefront of a restaurant is one of its biggest expenses. Why not take five or ten different restaurants, and put them all under one roof on the third floor of a cheap office building on the outskirts of town?

You can have Thai food, Egyptian food, Ethiopian food, French food, and Japanese food all made from the same Facility, by the same team of cooks. Because the business model of Seamless is, “I see it on my screen, I order it. Why should I be paying for all of that other stuff?” And so we’re going to see the restaurant industry change again and the people who work in it are going to be victims of that change, unless they see it coming and figure out how to fit into that model. Here’s a great quote from this week’s Fearless flyer from Trader Joe’s about Chocolate Lava Gnocchi.

“There are three words you have never heard in a row before – Chocolate Lava Gnocchi. Some people look at foods available to them, and say ‘Why?’ We imagine foods no one has thought of before, and say ‘Why not?”

I’ll read ahead here a little bit…

“Spurred into action by a sweet, chocolate gnocchi, enjoyed in a famed London shop, our product innovator worked with an Italian supplier to produce a one-of-a-kind creation that captivates with chocolate complexity”.

So apparently, this is macaroni filled with chocolate – I’ll see if I can find some – and report back to you.

It’s perfect for Trader Joe’s it makes no sense to put this in the freezer at the local Safeway, because they have different models – different ways of fitting into the systems of our lives. And as these business models proliferate – open source versus closed source software, for example – we will continue to see different behaviors. People think that Twitter and Facebook are fun playgrounds, where they are the customer, but you’re not the customer. That’s not what their business model is about. You’re the product. You are the one they are selling to the advertisers that pay the bills. What each of us gets to do, is to follow the money, or to follow the influence, or to follow what the Boss is keeping score of. Because sooner or later, every institution – nonprofit or not – has a business model. A model for what they’re here to do – the job that they are measuring. Some people in Roundup, Montana are running profitable businesses that fit into Amazon’s business model, and some of those people are waiting for the coal mine to come back, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Thank you as always for listening, I really appreciate it. If you’ve got a question, or want to see the show notes, visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, my name is Nikki – calling from Hollywood, California. I’ve spent the last few months binge listening to every one of your podcast episodes. And each time, I become even more of a fan. So first, I want to say thank you for taking time to create such interesting and thought-provoking content, and for encouraging us to be purposeful about the changes we are creating in our culture. You’ve spoken about the need to create your own story, when the story you have about yourself doesn’t serve you well. My personal story is filled with varying degrees of mental and physical abuse that’s left me with an overwhelming sense of doubt and, quite often, hopelessness.

So when I attempt to do the work that is necessary of any creative to put myself out there, I feel defeated before I even start. I’m wondering if you could give the first two steps that you would take to overcoming that, so that I can begin to create my own story, and then go on to do the work that I know I need to do as a creative. Thank you so much Seth. I really appreciate you.

Thank you for this, Nikki. So many people wrestle with issues like this. Some people wrestle because they’ve been the victims of verbal or physical abuse. Some people because of the situation of their birth, or because of a series of unlucky breaks, because of economic hardship – the list is really long. The story we tell ourselves could very well be centered on the things that have happened in our past, that we cannot change. But we cannot change them. What we can change, if we choose, is the story we tell ourselves.

So you asked me for two steps. Here are the two steps that I can propose. The first step is: Begin by telling yourself a story that starts in a different order. The things that happened in our past, happened – and they are part of who we are, but we don’t have to lead with them. When we remind ourselves of, “Here we go again”. When we remind ourselves of what we’re not good at, or what we’re trying to overcome, they get reinforced as parts of our story – our self narrative

Begin with, “I am smart and eloquent, and healthy”. Begin with, “I have contributed in this way, and this way, and this way”. Begin with, “I care enough to try to make things better, because those things are also true”. And if we start with those, they’re more likely to be brought to the fore, which leads to the second answer.

Start a podcast – do it under another name, do it anonymously. Start a blog – blog everyday. Do it under another name, do it anonymously. Simply do it, everyday. Publishing your podcast every week, publishing your podcast every day, publishing your blog – and on and on, and on. And maybe two people, or four people, will encounter it. Do not read the reviews, in any way.

It’s anonymous – it doesn’t matter. Simply do it, because if you do that, now you get to begin your story with this, “I’m a podcaster. I’m a writer. I’m a blogger. I’m a painter. I’m an actor” – simply begin. And if you begin and persist, and tell yourself that story, it is possible – not guaranteed, but possible – that one day, you’ll make it not anonymous. That, one day, someone will seek you out and even pay you for your work.

Or maybe not pay you, but thank you. Thank you for contributing, for doing something generous, for closing a loop for them, for making a connection happen. The best way to tell our story is to live a new story.

Thank you for your generous question. Thank you to everyone for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 4790-curation- <==

Hello everybody, this is the king of rock-and-roll, Alan Freed, with a coral rock and roll dance party and the big beat in popular music, in America. So gather the gang around for a rockin’ good time with our own big rock and roll bands.

If it weren’t for Alan Freed, we certainly wouldn’t call it rock and roll, and we probably would have a very different take on what popular music is supposed to sound like.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about curation, Payola, and what happens next but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth. The world has gone topsy-turvy and many of us are working at home, staying in place to flatten the curve of the virus. And working at home can be disorienting, and you can get lonely.

I know because I’ve been doing it off and on, since 1986. To help you out at Akimbo, we’ve put together a co-working space – a virtual co-working space. It’s free. It will run for the next month. I hope you’ll check it out – it’s at akimbo.com, right at the top of the page. It’ll be a place for you to find the others, to have those water cooler conversations, to feel a sense of connection in a world where we need more connection. Check out akimbo.com, we hope to see you there. Hang in there.

Alan Freed lived a heroic, short and controversial life in the public eye. Many people credit him with popularizing the term “rock and roll”. He nurtured and built the careers of many artists. His show which would have been a total breakthrough for him on television, turning him into the first Casey Kasem / Dick Clark, was cancelled after four weeks because it featured a black musician dancing with a white woman. But what Alan Freed is best known for is wrecking his career, by doing something that curators have been doing since the beginning of time.

In 1959, he got in trouble with the Law and ultimately kicked off the airways for Payola. Payola – not illegal at the time – was the common practice of record labels paying DJ’s to feature their songs. It mattered because DJ’s determined what was going to get listened to. There were only a few radio stations in every town. There was no Spotify, there was no YouTube, there was no Sirius. All there were, were a few radio stations in every town. A song that didn’t get played, didn’t get heard. And a song that didn’t get heard, didn’t get bought.

And so it was a sensible thing for a record label to pay the Program Directors and the DJ. Unfortunately for Alan Freed, people who weren’t crazy about rock and roll and people who thought that the curating DJ should be an independent agent decided to put an end to it. There were Congressional hearings. There were laws passed, and Alan Freed’s career went downhill.

He died less than 50 years old from cirrhosis of the liver, unknown in California. So we begin with this question, “Was it okay for Alan Freed to get paid to promote some records and not others?” So let’s go forward a bunch of years. I come out with a book called The Dip – maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I retain the audio book rights – it was easier in those days, because they didn’t sell that many copies. And I called up Steve Riggio. Steve’s brother was the CEO of Barnes & Noble, and Steve was always an active player on the scene there. And I said, “Steve, can we meet and talk about this book?” And so I did a deal with Barnes & Noble.

You could get the CD of my book, The Dip, at the cash register for 9 bucks – a really good deal for Barnes & Noble, because I sold them the copies for two dollars each. Barnes & Noble made a huge profit by putting that CD at the cash register – more than they would have for somebody else’s book that went through a normal publisher. Or, consider the end cap at your local supermarket – that’s what people in the food business called the end of the aisle. If you go, the next time you’re in the supermarket, you’ll see that there’s Pepsi lined up in huge rows at the end. Or maybe, it’s Coke. How come it’s sometimes Coke and sometimes Pepsi?

Well, the answer is simple because Coke or Pepsi take turns paying the supermarket money to feature their product on the end cap.

What’s going on at Barnes & Noble…What’s going on with Alan Freed…What’s going on with the supermarket? – is all the same thing. Which is, if you have power to put an idea in front of people, it is entirely possible, in a world based on scarcity, that you will sell that power to the highest acceptable bidder.

Now, the word acceptable is important, because a curator doesn’t last very long if they’re busy selling out to people who are selling something lousy. So curation – curation, as we’ve learned in the first two minutes of this podcast, can be easily misused. It can be misused, because what you can do is go to Chuck Berry and say, “You know that song Maybellene? I’d like to be a co-writer on that song and get royalties forever. And if you do that, well, then I’ll play your record and make it a hit – you come out ahead, and so do I”.

I hope that we can agree that’s not good Public Policy. That we don’t actually want creators to have to pretend other people contributed to their work, just to get their work heard. Well you can say, “This only happened a really long time ago”.

Well, on Brian Koppelman’s podcast, The Moment, song writer Richard Marx explains that his very first song, he gave Kenny Rogers co-writing credit because Kenny Rogers told him in the studio, “If I don’t get co-writing credit, this song is not going to be on my record”.

You get the idea. But back to this idea of power – where does power lie, in a society that’s based on ideas. Because power used to be about, “Did you have authority over a lot of people. Did you have a huge number of employees, or a mighty factory”.

Until recently, power lay with someone who could decide what we were going to talk about next. So the invisible editors behind the TV shows of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. So the A&R people at the record labels who decided – who was going to get a record deal, and who wasn’t. And yes, Radio Shack.

1983 – flew to Fort Worth, Texas for a meeting with RadioShack. At the time, worldwide, Radio Shack had nine thousand stores. They were interested in putting our product – the computer games that I developed – in three thousand of their stores.

If 3,000 stores carry 3 units each, of three titles – do the math. That’s 27,000 pieces of software ordered, with a gross margin of $10 each – it was a quarter of a million dollars, back when a quarter of a million dollars was real money. And, much bigger than the $270,000 was the fact that those 3,000 RadioShack stores were going to be visited by millions of people. It was a turning point.

I just discovered, 1990 – just seven years later – the number one producer, not just seller but producer, of personal computers in the United States was Radio Shack. Why? How? They weren’t just in the battery business. Radio Shack’s distribution-might gave them the power to curate, the power to decide which computer was going to get sold. And thus, the power to actually make those computers and vertically integrate all the way down to assembling the chips.

Curation matters. Curation changes what’s in front of us. It changes what we listen to, it changes what we believe. And curation has always been driven by scarcity. There’s only one Contemporary Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. There’s only seven important radio stations to listen to in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

There’s only two newspapers in this town, or that town. That curators generate value, because there’s a scarcity of places to get our information. If you are curating the front page of the New York Times, or curating what’s on the CBS Evening News, what you decide to move up or down changes things. Walter Cronkite – the beloved newscaster from CBS for all those years – he’s known primarily for two things, at least by me.

One, is his coverage of the Space Mission, and second his insistence on covering the Vietnam War – moving it up, curating the news during the 1960’s to share the enormity of what was happening, with video, with the American public. This was a brave act, it wasn’t easy to do. That’s what great curators do – they don’t take Payola. What great curators do is they put the truth in front of people who need to hear it, in a way that changes the culture. But curation has real problems.

The biggest problem with it, is it silences outsider voices. The curator tends to get conservative over time. Why? Because if you take too many risks as a curator, you lose your audience. If you lose your audience, you lose your power. Now, there were some curators who were proud of the fact that while their audience wasn’t large, they were early adopters – it was their job. If you were the curator at the Museum of Modern Art, your job was different than if you were Philippe de Montebello – the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because The Met, is art for everybody, all the time. It’s the cannon, it’s the good stuff.

Let it be understood first, that the answer is coming from someone who does not own an iPad. On the other hand, but I have access on my Dell computer to the Prados website, to the Bruegel’s in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and now to that astonishing website of the Ghent Altarpiece, with something like twenty thousand pixels per square centimeter of the Ghent Altarpiece. Which is, to say, that you are experiencing nothing. You are you are looking at simulacra. You can only experience an original because the simulacrum, no matter how wonderful it is, lacks the virtue of authenticity.

But MoMA only exists to challenge convention, to be modern, to be different than it was yesterday. But let’s go back to Radio Shack. At one point, thirty percent of RadioShack’s revenue came from selling CB radios. CB radios didn’t represent a point of view on Radio Shack’s part. CB radios represented a chance to leverage 3,000 stores – you gotta sell something. So in many retail environments, curation is simply about what’s going to sell this week. Or consider the scientific journals. Scientific journals have a long history of rejecting important papers, breakthrough papers. Scientific journals are inherently conservative, because they understand that if they publish too many breakthrough papers, sooner or later, they’re going to let one through that they probably shouldn’t have. And then the curator fears they will lose their credibility, and then they won’t get to be a curator anymore.

Okay, you can probably see where this is going. The question to every answer about the culture is, “Yeah, but what about the internet?” The internet has changed all of it. The first step in changing it was saying to curators, who had previously been barred from owning a scarce resource, “Here, build your own”. And so CD Baby – Derek Sivers’ brilliant website – enabled him and his team to curate independent musicians, who had CD’s that just couldn’t get shelf space at Tower Records. Or, you could build your own online bookstore. Most likely, you’d have a Blog.

What a Blog said is, “Here, you have a platform. Here, you have a microphone – go find an audience, earn an audience and then you get to curate what you’re going to publish”. So instead of a few columnists in the New York Times vying for a Pulitzer Prize, now there are 10 million, 20 million, 40 million writers each curating what they want to talk about. In the TV business, it took a couple steps. It went from three TV networks, to cable TV. And what cable TV said was,

“Instead of curating for the middle, you can curate for the edges. If you want to put up stuff that’s going to make people angry, if you want to put up stuff that’s not true, if you want to put up stuff that is simply for a tiny group of people – well here, here is a TV network just for you. Curate it all you want”. And you can say whatever you like, about whatever TV network you want to criticize. What you cannot say is, they did not curate – of course they did.

ESPN stood for something. Home Shopping Network stood for something. It reminded you of what it was – it was another curator. So we took a huge leap. We took a huge leap from – in any industry, 5 or 10, or 20 or 30 people – curating what we were buying, what we were hearing, what we were seeing, to a thousand times that many people doing it. But built-in to this new regime was the same thoughtful conservatism that said, “You better be careful, because if you go too far outside what people are counting on for you, if you don’t do your homework, if you don’t check your work, your power as a curator will begin to fade”. It’s interesting to look at the arc of Mehmet Oz.

Doctor Oz, a respected doctor from New York, began by speaking up eloquently on behalf of placebos, on behalf of new treatments like using acupuncture in the operating theater. But then, Oprah shared some of her curation with him, giving him a platform, and what he discovered was that talking about things like green coffee beans got him a bigger audience.

More than 9 million people a week tune in to watch. Dr. Oz give medical advice. The cardiothoracic surgeon has been criticized for promoting fad diets…

“Now, I’ve got the number one miracle and a bottle to burn your fat”.

And frequently recommending unregulated products…

“It’s called Yacón syrup”

But the latest criticism is about his seat as Vice Chair of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center. 10 Physicians from across the country want him fired. They wrote a letter accusing him of promoting quack treatments and cures, in the interest of personal financial gain.

So he began curating what he was talking about without the rigor that his colleagues in New York expected from a doctor of his reputation. Even so, the blowback was heard. That if Dr. Oz wanted to maintain his affiliation with the New York Medical Establishment, he couldn’t simultaneously be making unproven promises about herbs and other tinctures. But then it changed again, because we entered a curation free-zone. What the founders of Facebook, and Twitter, and other social media sites discovered is that if they broke the connection between the audience and the creator, by making it look like they had Followers and Friends and Likes – but actually reshuffling attention every day – they could force people who were used to being curators into becoming ever more dramatic in the work they do, ever faster and ever less careful.

Because if you are first, if you are noisiest, if you are angriest, if you are the loudest microphone in the room, the algorithms would reward you with more people showing up. And so you’ve got anti-vaxxers who are actually hurting the lives of children, putting stuff up on Facebook with no actual scientific proof about what they’re saying, but because it touches a nerve and because it’s easy to spread, they get a bigger audience. And there is little or no incentive for them to become conservative about their point of view, because the more extreme they make it, the more of an audience they get. And so if we are chasing popularity or chasing monetization, the pressure has flipped.

It is flipped from being a reliable curator – who doesn’t take Payola, who is very careful about what they are picking because they want a reputation for being careful about what they’re picking – to a different environment. Amazon did the same thing with the Kindle. There used to be 50,000 books published in a typical year. The number of books in print was perhaps ten million.

Now, there are a million books published every year and that number is going up. And the number of books in print keeps going up, because nothing goes out of print. That dynamic means that carefully curating what gets published by Penguin, by Random House, by Simon & Schuster, by MacMillan doesn’t really pay. Just ship a lot of crap – ship and ship, and ship. Don’t worry about whether any particular Title holds up, because it’s all in the miscellaneous bucket.

And so what we’re seeing is that, in many cases, the reputation of the curator isn’t as important as the algorithm. And so now it’s coming home to roost. It’s coming home to roost in matters that really make a difference – in politics, in public health, in the way we as a culture communicate with one another – because if curation doesn’t work anymore, if there is no center, no reliable place to go, then panic can take its place. Because there is no place to look where we’re confident that someone has been really thoughtful about what they’re going to say next. This is why I think it’s so important to turn off Twitter. Use it as an amusement device if you like, but it is not the unfiltered sort of news you think it is. Because there is no proportion between how often you hear something and how important it is.

There is no relationship between how often you hear something, and how true it is. That what happened when we organized Wikipedia, is that the folksonomy of organizing it beat the taxonomy of encyclopedia Britannica. That the reliability of making edits quickly when an error showed up, actually beat the old, slow system of annual cycling and edits. That the searchability of Wikipedia is dramatically better than the searchability of the encyclopedia, not to mention how powerful the cross links are – that you can go from one article to another relevant one.

But all of that is maintained by 5,000 curators. There is only one article in Wikipedia about Paella, and there are several people who have devoted many, many hours to making sure that the argument about where Paella came from and whether or not it is supposed to have sausage in it – they’re looking out for you and for a Paella’s reputation. If someone wants to build another page about Paella, they can’t. Wikipedia has built into it and inherent conservativism – show your work, prove it, where is the source. And so, that one article about Paella is the one article about Paella – curated by people who care about it. Is every article in Wikipedia as good as it could be? Of course not. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that none of them are. But all of them are better than the alternative, because this system of 5,000 volunteer editors, pitting themselves against each other – for status, for contribution – creates an environment where curation can thrive.

This is the opposite of what we’re seeing in the open, manipulated, dark pattern, social media web. Because in those places, where people seek to reach as many people as possible, all the incentives for thoughtful curation start to fade. Now, there are magical exceptions. If we think about Tina and her Swiss Miss account on Twitter. Swiss Miss doesn’t point to lousy stuff, because Tina is a curator at heart. Tina Eisenberg knows what she likes and is happy to share it. And no, there is no available Payola. You can’t bring her something lousy and pay her to promote it, because Swiss Miss understands that as soon as she starts doing that, she will lose the very thing she’s worked so hard to build – credibility, trust and attention.

So where do we go? Where do we go in the World turns upside down – when panic rains, when loud voices are pushing us to do the wrong thing. Well, I think where we need to go is back to this principle of, “Who said it? Why do I trust them? Have they been wrong in the past? Do they show their work? When they are wrong in the past, do they point out how they could have done better next time?”

There are plenty of people who would like to criticize, quote the “Mainstream Media,” but the thing about the Mainstream Media is it’s curated, and we know who the curators are, and we can see their work, and we can judge it on a curve. And you can look at what they’re saying and say, “You know what, they tend to miss this part of the story. You know what, they tend to exaggerate that part of the story, but we know who we’re hearing from and we know what we’re dealing with”.

April Fool’s is coming around. April Fool’s used to be the best internet holiday. Some of my favorite blog posts came from others – I’ve never had one that I loved, fooling me deeply on April Fool’s Day. And I think we can announce it in 2020, April Fool’s is officially gone. It’s officially gone, because the last thing people want is to be fooled. Because we’re getting fooled every day already.

And so now it’s on us. It’s on us to bring back curation. It’s on us to bring back, “Who do we trust? Why do we trust them? And how do we create an environment where there is an incentive for them to remain trustworthy?”

Thanks for listening. Stay healthy.

Here’s to peace of mind. We’ll see you next time, thanks.

We’ll be back in a second with a question from last time. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Hey there, Seth – it’s Chris Hill in Virginia. First of all, thank you for everything that you do. So last week, you spoke of large scale corporations finding an opportunity in the marketplace and then taking advantage of it. You used the example of McDonald’s with real estate, creating franchisees opportunities to be successful, thus creating convenience for customers.

With Home Depot, it was scaling the products and the size, to then offer competitive prices and a one-stop shop for customers as well. So I guess, what it seems you’re suggesting, is that they’re leading with these ideas and the opportunity, versus much of your work is grounded in the ideas of generosity and trust.

I think one of the main reasons why we appreciate and respect and admire folks – like Danny Meyer and Union Square Hospitality Group, and Trader Joe’s, among other companies – is they lead with these two ideas, which you so eloquently speak of frequently. But then, is that necessary? It seems like certain companies don’t have to have those things in place based on what you suggested. I’m struggling with the tension, starting with the two ideas, and how you scale something without leading with these two main factors – whether it’s internally or externally, creating a culture that people want to rally behind and be a part of. Thank you so much for all that you do. Cheers.

Thank you Chris for giving me a chance to clarify what I was getting at, when I was talking about business models. Here we go.

There are many different business models. I have spent 20 years encouraging people to look at an overlooked one – it is the business model of trust and attention, of generosity and care. The business model of humanity, of being the one who’s worth paying extra for, of being the one we would miss if you were gone. The business model of building an asset around acting like a leader, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only business model. There have always been business models exploited by capitalists that don’t meet most of our standards, for how moral leaders ought to lead.

But what I saw coming 20 years ago, and what keeps being demonstrated over and over again, is that this business model where you give up authority and control, in exchange for leadership where you have a chance to do work you’re proud of – it’s undervalued. There is an opportunity around every corner. That when we show up with this business model, the cost of being in the market is lower.

The upside of being part of the community is higher. So you can call me an optimist, but I believe this business model will continue to grow. As we atomize organizations into smaller units, as entrepreneurs compete not to have the most employees, but the fewest – it’s the linchpin, it’s the leader, it’s the person who is elected and trusted who’s going to have the leverage to bring something to people who need it. Back to the market as a listening device. It’s easier to use the market as a listening device, if people trust you and want to talk to you.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 5082-creative-destruction- <==

I’ve done a fair amount of research, and as far as I can tell, Karl Marx never once had sushi.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about Karl Marx, Capitalism, Creative Destruction, Schumpeter and raw fish. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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I’m not sure when you’re going to be listening to this, but if you are yours are suffering from the tragedy that’s going on all around us as I record it, my heart goes out to you. Here’s to health and peace of mind, but let’s spend a few minutes talking about destruction. Specifically, Karl Marx is different than Marxism. Karl Marx was an Economist who thought very deeply about a lot of critical issues. And, in fact, he agreed with Adam Smith, father of the free market, and with Schumpeter, father of Creative Destruction, in a whole bunch of different ways. First, the Adam Smith part.

What Karl Marx did after he did the math was realize that Capitalism was a system that was inevitably going to take everything it could from the worker. That once a capitalist finds a machine that is efficient, it is in his or her interest to use that machine and to pay workers less. Or, if there is no machine, it’s in the capitalist’s interests to pit workers against one another to pay them as little as possible. Because if you own the Means of Production, the factory, you have something that workers don’t have – which is the Means of Production. So if you can pit workers against each other, and they will bid down and down to get the job, you come out ahead.

He saw this and said, “Workers of the world unite. Because if you don’t, the Capitalists will simply take more”. Adam Smith saw the same thing and said, “Buy a pin making machine. Buy a machine that will enable you to own the means of production and go forward”. So that’s what the laptop is – the Means of Production.

That’s what our connection to the internet is. That what’s happened in the last 10 years or so, is that the workers of the world have been given access to almost precisely the same machines that giant capitalists have. But what I really want to talk about is his other breakthrough idea, which he interpreted differently than Joseph Schumpeter did. Here you go:

Capitalism says, “We will pay interest, give a return, to a capitalist who is willing to take a risk. That if you have acquired capital – ‘money’ – and you are willing to invest it in a company, that company can use it to buy the Means of Production, can use it to make things more efficiently, and you – the person who has the capital – will get rewarded for taking that risk by earning interest, a return on your investment.

But if you do the math, what this means is that in one industry after another, there will be capital at work trying to make things more efficient. And sooner or later, the argument goes, you can’t make this particular process more efficient. Which means that entrepreneurs, innovators, will seek a new process – a process that will undermine the one that came before. And so we get to Sushi.

In 1977, when I was 17 years old, I am certain I had never had a piece of sushi before. And in 1978 or 1979, I’m not sure exactly when, my friend Steve Dennis took me to a restaurant in Harvard Square and we were served raw fish with rice. This was a stunning innovation – it was something I had no real awareness of before I tried it. The thing is that lots of restaurants in Harvard Square went away because students and others said, “I don’t want yet another place that’s going to sell me yet another ‘not very good’ hamburger.

Instead, they became sushi places. And sushi places, as they began to proliferate, started impinging not just on other restaurants, but on other sushi places. So some of them, the result of a lot of hard work from an entrepreneur who was stretched thin, went away. And then recently, last few years, they figured out a way to cool fish, cold enough, that the chances of you getting sick from Sushi went way down. Which meant that instead of it being made with care by someone who had been trained in Japan, who was flying it in, who was very careful with the supply chain, now just about any yutz could make a California Roll that wouldn’t put you in the hospital.

If you were one of the old school Sushi guys – not good news. Because you’d earned your stripes, you’d earned the right to serve real Sushi the right way. But here comes all these heathens, dumping soy sauce all over your stuff, wondering why it costs so much money, insisting that they get it to go –and on and on. And so destruction happens. The business that got built, first that old hamburger joint, then that fancy sushi place, and then the next and then the next. And so capitalists who are always looking for a couple extra basis points – for more return on their money, because if they don’t get more return on their money and their competitors do, their money will shrink in value – look for the next opportunity, the next efficiency.

Which leads to an insight: The Insight is that markets are listening devices. That markets are really good – the most efficient thing we know of – to find out what people need. Because if you need a red hair brush and you’re willing to pay extra for it, some capitalist, some entrepreneur, some industrialist is going to figure out a way – if it makes sense for them – to bring you a red hair brush. The Government isn’t that good at being a listening device. They’re really good at other things, but not that good at listening. Markets, on the other hand, are effective listening devices – at least in the short run, at least when they are free and open markets.

We have a whole other conversation about monopolies – we’re not going to get into that right now. So what we’ve got is this cycle, where the culture decides what parts of the culture want, speaks up and then part of the market responds. And when it does, it might destroy a stable business that was already in place. And so the cycle continues. And what is marketing? Marketing combines the listening of the market with the speaking of the marketer. A way of saying to people who have expressed an interest in the marketplace, “Yes, we have what you need. Yes, we have what you want”. And so the cycle continues. It happens in every industry. The people who made buggy whips and horse-drawn carriages worked very hard, raised a lot of money, put themselves on the line, sweated to get to where they got to. And then willy-nilly, without caring about them, the car companies wiped most of them out – just like those sushi places, one after another.

Consumer goods, business goods – an innovation comes along, created by someone who is under pressure to reward capital with a bigger return, and it ends up destroying what came before. Now back to Karl Marx.

Karl Marx did the math and he said, “Well when you add it all up, and you look at all this destruction and all this destruction, Capitalism can’t work. It can’t work to serve the needs of the most people in the best possible way”. Maybe not in the short run, but in the long run, it will eat itself like an Ouroboros eating its tail.

Joseph Schumpeter looked at Marx’s work, giving him full credit, and said, “Let’s rename this Creative Destruction”. He willfully ignored the pain and suffering in the short run of the people who would be encountering these disruptions, and focused on the idea that, “First, we’re going to need a Kodak camera, and then there’s going to be a Polaroid camera, and then there’s going to be a digital camera, and then there’s going to be a phone”. And with each cycle, the people who were working so hard before, they stumble – they might even fall. But, the marketplace gets served – the market gets what It wants. Hence, the name Creative Destruction.

Now, what’s overlooked by many arch-capitalists is where he ended up. Where he ended up is, “This can’t continue forever”. And, like Marx, he pointed out that sooner or later it hits a dead end. Well, thanks to Moore’s Law and a hundred other Innovations, it hasn’t hit a dead end. In fact, it might not hit a dead end. Not in the sense of, “We’re going to run out of things to invent”. But right now, all around us, we see destruction. Part of that destruction was caused by airplanes, by world travel, by people connecting to far more folks than they used to. That 400 years ago, when we lived in small villages, it’s unlikely that a virus would spread quite so far. The plague, which was like a plague, killed an enormous number of people, but it didn’t spread all the way around the world.

Now, we are living with destruction. Not the destruction caused by innovation and technology, but the destruction caused by a virus – and by the way we are reacting, responding, and spreading fear about a virus. That our reaction, which leads to lockdown and social distancing, has wiped out millions of jobs and it will wipe out millions more. And what Schumpeter and Marx would point out is, “That is what the system is optimized around. That this destruction opens the door for the next innovation”.

Now, the next innovation is going to be a little bit more complicated than Zoom plus Amazon. It’s going to be a whole new world of people doing different things to listen to the market, to do marketing, to show up and make things better by shipping something that people want. Overlooked in all of it is the fact that there are humans involved – humans who are suffering, humans who have problems with health or putting dinner on the table. Economists don’t like to talk about those folks very often.

And so now we see one of the things that Government is good at. That when we are dealing with a widespread public health issue, just about everybody becomes in favor of Government. How Government can establish how all of us can work to slow the spread. How government can offer first aid and solace when it’s not going to get paid for it. How Government can issue assets and resources to reboot the economy – the belief in the economy, the trust in the economy – so that Capitalists have a chance to go around the wheel again.

It’s an open debate as to whether the single best way to solve every problem is with the market. We know that the single best way to solve the problem of what kind of iPhone case you should have is with the market. It’s not clear that that’s how we should solve the problem of, “How does everyone get a vaccine,” but that’s a conversation for another day.

What’s worth noting is this:

One, destruction is painful. It hurts. It leads to dislocations, it leads to tragedy, it leads to a lot of discomfort for each of us – because people are people. And in the short-run, people feel it.

And two: Destruction, Creative Destruction, if you want to call it that, is not new. We have seen it before and we will see it again. It is built into the very nature of using capital to create assets that listen to the market to solve problems. And around and around, and around it goes. We are in for a slog, a long slog, a painful slog. But on the other side of that slog, there will be another side.

And so the question each of us has to ask, whether or not we have financial capital to invest, is this, “What will we learn? Who will we connect? Who will we choose to lead? How will we show up in the world, now that we have the Means of Production, as someone that others want to work with – to connect with, to be a customer with?” We need to ask ourselves questions about how we use the market as an effective listening device. Not just to listen to the people who have the most to spend, but perhaps to listen to the people who need something or want something, but have been ignored. We have the chance – using these tools, this magical Moore’s Law internet connection system – to create something on top of what was here before. But to do that, we’re going to need to take a breath and think hard about the change we want to make in the world, and what we want to build on top of what’s already here.

Thanks for listening. Here’s to peace of mind and a better tomorrow. We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with an answer to a question from last time, and the time before that. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Hi Seth, this is Larry Downes from Indianapolis – proud AltMBA alumni. I have a question about two of your episodes. The first was the Business Model episode, and in that episode you talked about the strategy or business model that Trader Joe’s has, which is to curate food products from food producers, that then they put their logo on and brand for themselves, and put in their stores in order to sell them. And it felt to me, as you talked about that that, that you were approving of that strategy. In the curation episode, at the end, you mentioned that Richard Marx who had wrote a song and Kenny Rogers required him to give him co-writing credits in order for it to be on Kenny Rogers album. And you seem to have a disapproving tone when it came to that particular anecdote.

My question is, first of all, if I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted your tone on those two stories, then I apologize and the rest of this question is moot. But if you do have differing opinions on those two, I’m curious as to why. Because it seems to me that they are the exact same strategy. One is, you allow us to White Label your your product and brand it for Trader Joe’s so that you can have access our stores. And in the Kenny Rogers example, you give Kenny his co-writing credits in order to get access to put it on what, I’m sure at the time, was one of the largest selling music artists of the time.

So if you do feel differently about those two, can you help me understand why? I appreciate your work Seth. Thank you very much.

Thank you for this Larry. It’s probably worth an entire episode and I may do one, but here’s the short version. First of all, as I said earlier, just because something’s a good business model doesn’t mean I approve of it. But I’m not in charge of what business models get approved of. In the case of Trader Joe’s, I think that everyone involved in the chain – the person who makes the goods, Trader Joe’s, and the customer – comes out ahead and willingly engages in the bargain.

The reason that you sensed my disapproval, I’m guessing, is because you had a little bit of it as well. And it comes down to the French term of ‘Droite Morale’ or moral rights. Copyright, of course, is all invented. So is the right to own a piece of land. But it’s a lot more amorphous when we let someone who makes up a song, own it. So I can whistle.

But I’m stealing when I do that, because I didn’t make up the song. A human being who wasn’t me, made up the song. And we decided, as a culture, not to let someone protect a joke, but it’s okay to protect a song lyric. Not only is it okay to protect it, but the moral right lives with the human who did the work. In Europe it cannot be assigned to someone else. So my problem with the Rogers story is that he crossed a line.

He didn’t say to Richard Marx, “If you pay me a share of the money that comes in, I will go ahead and feature this record”. That is a business transaction between consenting adults. The problem is, “I want to claim that I wrote part of the song. I want the moral right from you – part of it, right now – or else no one gets to hear this song”. Corporations are not people, and people don’t need to be corporations. We invented the special subset of copyright to establish that somebody, a human, made something up. We’ll do more of this when I talk about Led Zeppelin and monkeys taking pictures of themselves, but the short version is this. As somebody who has stared deep into the abyss and come up with work of my own, that I have put my name on, I am really delighted that our culture has established a carve-out.

It’s a carve-out that is rarely crossed, where someone who made something up gets to say they made it up. We get to put our name on our work. What happens to the money? That’s fine. Leave it to you and Milton Friedman to figure that one out. But let’s leave Droite Morale – the moral right, the fact that you made it – let’s leave that one alone.

We got one more question, just before we put this episode to bed. I thought I’d try to squeeze it in.

Hi Seth a love lady from Macon, Georgia. Thank you for the generous work that you do, we certainly appreciate it. In the Curation episode, you spoke about how the advent of social media has given individuals and groups unbridled, unregulated access to the masses, in order to push their unproven medical claims and their conspiracy theories for fame and profit.

The mainstream media was already on that track – first reporting the news, later spinning the news, and finally to compete with social media, I suppose, – creating the news based on what they think their audience wants to hear. My question is, “Can we fix this, or have we permanently replaced facts that inform with the internet and the mainstream media’s twisted version of those facts, which were created simply to maximize their profits?” Thanks.

There are two parts to this, let me take them one at a time. The first is distinguishing between the errors of mainstream media, and the errors of what could be called, ‘news that’s fake,’ to distinguish it from the overall pejorative ‘fake news’. Mainstream media – mainstream media has been guilty for a really long time of the sin of ‘omission’. During the Spanish-American War, during the era of William Randolph Hearst, all the way up to the tabloids in London, there have been media companies that just made stuff up. But generally, certainly since the dawn of television – the FCC, combined with competitive pressures built around scarcity – meant that if you got caught making something up, you were in really big trouble.

If you are newspaper editor, it was probably the end of your career. Large entities really focused on fact checking. And when they got caught – got caught making stuff up, filming things that didn’t happen, putting explosives in the middle of things to make tests look even juicier – they got in trouble. The mindset of most people from the mainstream media has been, “Don’t make stuff up”.

At the very same time, there are huge sins of omission. At the very same time – in industry after industry, public policy issues and on and on – the media just looks the other way. And so we profess to be surprised, because we weren’t informed – we didn’t know. Omission was built into the system, because there was scarce airtime and scarce paper, and it was easier perhaps to avoid offending people in power.

But, once we open up to an infinite world of digital, and people are racing for attention, things shifted. Years and years ago, I did a book with the Weekly World News – the people who do Bat Boy and other crazy stuff at the checkout, at the supermarket. And I was stunned to discover, when I went down to their offices in Florida, that there were only three people making up the entire newspaper every week. The Weekly World News consisted of three filing cabinets.

And in those filing cabinets were a nearly endless series of stock photos, weird photos, Photoshop photos, and photos of their friends. And they would just rearrange them every week – mentioning Elvis, mentioning unnamed scientists, mentioning Bigfoot – just to amuse the people, who were reading the newspaper. But the reason we did the book – the reason it was okay to work with them, the reason they went to work with a smile on their face every day – is that everyone should have been in on the joke. They were making stuff up, and what has shifted. As we are looking at a different news cycle is this: There are people who call themselves media outlets, who go to work to make stuff up. They’re either intentionally making stuff up, or averting their gaze as they publish stuff that they know other people made up. And there’s a big difference between a sin of commission – actively publishing things that you know to be untrue – versus the troublesome, but slightly different, act of leaving stuff out.

So we have both problems – leaving stuff out and putting stuff in. So, where do we go? How do we get to a place we can trust. Well, you might be surprised to hear that Wikipedia is doing a great job of this. Wikipedia is out of balance at all times – some things get mentioned too much, somethings don’t get mentioned enough. Wikipedia has a cumbersome governance structure. Wikipedia has to struggle with ‘deletion-ists’. If you go to an article on Wikipedia on a contentious topic, it’s really fascinating to read the talk page and to read the article itself. Because more often than not, they are not committing either sin. They’re not often omitting things when they should be mentioning them, and they rarely are including things that someone just made up. So no, we’re never going to get to the truth of anything. The map is not the territory. We will always have a disconnect between the summary of something, and what actually happened. There’s no such thing as accurate history, because we weren’t there. And even if you were there, as we’ve seen from eyewitness testimony and every court trial, you don’t remember it the way it actually happened.

So with all of that said, I think going forward human beings are making it clear to each other, that we’d like there to be a cannon – an official document, at least an unofficial way of understanding how things work.

And Engineering, and the Scientific Method, demand we come up with processes and approaches that work time after time. Not superstition, not make-believe, not political diatribes – but actual, practical, useful tools. So I’m an optimist at heart, and I hope we will get there faster. One thing to take away is this: there is a difference between the useful truth that some people are acting on, and what the masses are paying attention to. And we had a very short window, where the masses were paying attention to Walter Cronkite. Where the masses were paying attention to inherently thoughtful and careful newspapers and media outlets that were trying very hard to not make any mistakes. That window’s closed. And now in this open space, the masses are probably not going to be drawn to the thoughtful, detailed article in Wikipedia.

It’s way easier to get angry about a tweet. I don’t see how that goes away anytime soon. But my hope is that the people we are counting on to keep us healthy, to organize the world around us, to lead our organizations, also understand that their obligation is to do the reading – to do the work. If you’ve got good science, publish it. If you don’t have good science, keep it to yourself. Because the best way to persuade an Engineer that you figured something out, is to show your work. Showing your work – omissions, commission’s, all of it –showing your work is the key to helping other people believe that you’ve done your homework.

Well, that’s a little bit of a rant on my part. Thanks for your question. We’ll see you next time.

==> 5376-leverage-and-gearing- <==

When I was little kid, we had a toy in our house. It was a bongo board. It consisted of a long board and a cylinder, and the board rolled back and forth on the cylinder. My sister was two years younger than me. I was standing on one end of the board, she ran across the room, jumped on the other end, I flew through the air, and broke my wrist.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

Of course, it wasn’t Marjorie’s fault – she didn’t mean to break my wrist, but it was a perfect example of leverage. As Archimedes probably didn’t say, “If you give me a lever that is long enough and a place to stand, I could move the entire Earth”. A lever gives you leverage. It gives you the chance to exert far more power than you would be able to on your own. And so leverage has been around for a really long time. But leverage has been changing our culture just for a few hundred years. And I think in these times in particular, it’s worth understanding how leverage works and how we got here, and what happens when it goes in the other direction.

Back in the early days of corporations, when colonialists wanted to put together ships to go on long, perilous journeys, one method would be:

Take your life savings, buy one ship, go on a journey – if it works, you do well – if it doesn’t, you’re completely wiped out. But there’s an alternative, and the alternative is to borrow money. When you borrow money, you have to pay it back with interest, but all the winnings belong to you.

So the easiest way to get rich, for a very long time, has been in real estate. If real estate prices are going up over time, there are banks waiting in line to loan money to investors who want to buy real estate. Typically, you could buy some real estate for only 20% down. That means if a piece of real estate is for sale for a million dollars, you need $200,000 in cash to buy it and the bank puts up $800,000.

Now the bank is taking a small risk. The risk is that you won’t pay them back. And if you don’t, they get the piece of property, which today is worth a million dollars. So they feel pretty secure. But what happens if the value of that property goes up 20 percent? If the value of the property goes up just 20 percent to $1.2 million dollars, you can pay back the bank $800,000 and you get to keep the rest. You have doubled your money. A 20% increase in the value of that real estate, lead to a 100% increase in how much money you have. That is called leverage. In Australia and the UK, they call it ‘gearing’. They call it gearing, because you can see the gears working, turning in one direction.

And so any time we have a chance to buy assets that are known to be a value, that we think are going to go up in value, leverage – gearing – gives us the chance to multiply that. A really productive way to think about this, is what happens if you buy an asset. If, for example, you are surrounded by people in the 1890s who make pins for a living, making a pin, turns out, used to be a skilled craft and a typical pin maker could make a pin in six minutes – ten pins an hour. But you could buy a pin making machine.

If you could buy a pin making machine, you can make a thousand pins in an hour. If you can make a thousand pins in an hour, you can pay back what it costs to buy that pin making machine. So you could go to the bank, again, using leverage, and say, “I want to buy this asset for a hundred bucks, and I’m going to be able to pay you back because it’s going to pay for itself”.

The bank takes a risk on loaning you the money – perhaps guaranteed by your house – and you go by $100 pin making machine which pays for itself in five days. You pay back the bank and the rest of the profit belongs to you. We have machines that have improved productivity only because of this leveraged transaction – it makes sense, it benefits all parties.

But what happens when we start speculating? What actually caused the crash on Wall Street in 1929? It’s generally accepted that what happened was people were over leveraged. If you were sure that the stock market was going to go up every day, you could take the stock you wanted to buy and borrow against it from the bank, and use the money that you borrowed to buy more stock. And around, and around, and around it goes. And as long as the price of the stock keeps going up, you have no trouble paying off the bank. But the minute it stops, the bank calls in the debt – you can’t pay the debt. Now, the bank has a problem, and the problem they have is they can’t pay back the people they need to pay back, because leverage goes In two directions – and we’ll talk about this in a second.

But first, we need to talk about how this has affected all of our culture. Because when competitors start getting leveraged, the ones who don’t, feel pressure to do so. And so it spread to the media. So it spread to every chain you’ve ever done business with – to every industry that we’re aware of. That getting leveraged became not just a way for a solo, greedy entrepreneur to make extra money, it became a cost of doing business.

Imagine a community where there are two businesses – one of them has embraced leverage. Every chance they get, they borrow as much as they can. They use those borrowings to open more Outlets. They use those borrowings to buy more machines. They use those borrowings to become ever more competitive. Their competitor, the one who is going slow, step by step and has no debt, discovers that they are losing market share. Because they’re well-financed, highly leveraged competitor has become a growth machine, they have no choice but to grow, because they have to pay off the people they borrowed the money from. And so, the less leverage competitor faces a choice: Get smaller and become more resilient, or follow the lead of their competitor and borrow more.

And so what we end up with are companies that don’t have six months worth of cash in the bank – they have six weeks or six days. What we end up with are institutions that are betting that tomorrow is going to be just like today, but more profitable, and don’t have the resilience to weather and interruption. And then it hits the media companies. The media companies, the ones that might be willing to say, “You know what? We’ve published this magazine for 30 years and we’re going to publish it for 50 more.

We don’t have to worry about clickbait. We don’t have to worry about maximizing today’s profit, because we don’t have to pay off an investor, or we don’t have to please the stock market – we are running something that we are proud of – not running a machine that has to maximize return every day”. Well if that media company has a competitor, and that competitor has borrowed money with leverage to grow, and needs to grow in order to pay off the money that they have borrowed, they will do a different sort of media – a media that maximizes attention, or panic. A media company that is focused on, “How much money did we make today?

What shortcuts can we take in the way we treat our people, because next year doesn’t matter if we can’t make this week work out”. And so what happens is this: number one, leverage spreads. It spreads, because if you have a competitor who has leveraged, you feel the need to be leveraged. Sometimes the market demands that you act like a company that is leveraged. And number two, leverage works in both directions. Positively, the gearing works beautifully when things are going up, because more leverage makes things go up just a little bit faster. And because debt doesn’t share in the winnings, the person who collects – it’s the entrepreneur, the capitalist, the person in the center – who gets to keep all the prizes, until it goes in the other direction. And when it goes in the other direction, a cascade effect appears. And that cascade says, “We lost a little, now we owe more”. And then the bank or the person who gave you the debt says, “Wait a minute, this is going in the wrong direction, and I am withdrawing this debt”.

And then it’s harder to get new debt, and then it starts going the wrong direction. And if you’ve ever seen a machine where the gears start going the wrong direction, the thing to worry about is sometimes the teeth fall off. Sometimes things don’t go as elegantly backwards, as they go forwards.

So what to do about all of this. Well, the first thing is to see it – to see the leverage. The second thing is for the powers that be, and for us – the voices that influence the powers that be – to speak up and to slow things down. Because if we can slow down the reverse turn of the gears, it is possible for the wind to come back into our sails – to mix two metaphors there – and then maybe, just maybe, we can make the gears go forward again. But going forward, as individuals who have the chance to load up on credit card debt, as individuals who have the chance to borrow to buy a new car or to borrow to buy something else that goes down in value, we need to think hard about whether we as humans want to be leveraged.

And as people who engage with the culture, and engage with corporations, we need to think about the fact that it is our choice to do business with someone who is leveraged or not. And that part of what it means to buy local, part of what it means to engage with people we can look in the the eye, that we are making a choice to head toward a culture and an economy that is looking farther down the road than the next week, or the next quarter. That part of the mania and stupidity of Wall Street, is that Wall Street often believes that the purpose of culture is to enable capitalism, when the opposite is true. And that Wall Street, too often, embraces a cycle of destruction, because that is where the leverage pays off – turn the gears in one direction, and then switch to the next project. But we are not projects, we’re people and this is our culture, and what it is possible to do is build for resilience instead.

I hope that resonates thank you for listening. Here’s to health and peace of mind for everybody.

We’ll see you next time.

Hi, sir.

I really love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this episode or anything else, please visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

We got a couple of juicy questions, here we go.

Hi Seth, this is Reed Christensen from Minneapolis, and I have a couple questions regarding creative destruction in a capitalist market. Should individuals and companies specifically market and position themselves to succeed, when creative destruction occurs, or with this emphasis on the inevitable simply leave them vulnerable to the current competition? And what barriers must be overcome for these new innovations that come out of creative destruction to actually succeed?

Right, this ties in with the business model discussion we had just a little bit earlier. The question is, “What’s the change agent? What happened in the world that allowed creative destruction to even occur?” For a long time, for most of my life, it’s been technology. Someone comes up with a better way to solve a problem, and the new technology creates more productivity, creates a different interaction, creates a change in the marketplace. And so, a business coming along that seeks to grow, embraces technology to cause the destruction of the assets that allowed their competitors to win. But for the last 20 years, the biggest shift has been the network effect. The network effect is the reason that almost every single industry that we encounter is different now than it was 20 years ago.

The network effect is simple – something works better when more people are using it. That is not true for most things – a pedestrian plaza is not better when more people are using it. A forest is not better when more people are using it. But if Wikipedia only had one user, it wouldn’t work very well. And so the network effect is adopted by people who are trying to make a change. It is the change agent of our time. And the network effect can of course have downsides, as we are seeing with a virus pandemic that is all around us. That’s nothing but a network of effect. But for the positive, what the network effect enables, is the community, to benefit from the community, doing business in a new way.

Hey Seth, it’s Alex from Bulgaria. And I’ve been listening Akimbo since day one, and I took it across countries and continents – now I’m back home.

Now, cut to the chase to the question. I want to ask delicate one regarding friendship. I started this blog with my friends, and quite frankly I’ve been pondering about – you know, some people are really hesitant to start a business with friends, but other ones are very much into business and are really taking the opposite side. How can I do business with you, if you’re not my friend? So I was curious, what is your stand on this one?

Thanks for this question, and for the kind words. We’ve not talked about this on the podcast previously, but I will highlight two pieces of it. The first piece is this – it is very tempting, when organizing a new project, to decide to have a 50/50 split. Or if there are three of you, split it even – a third, a third, a third. This is essentially always wrong, unless you are Lennon and McCartney.

This is not a good way to establish how to split responsibility or income from a business. It pushes off a difficult conversation, when the best time to have that conversation and the easiest is right now. And my suggestion is pretty simple – instead of allocating the winnings at the beginning, allocate them as you go. Make a list of what needs to be done, what needs to be contributed, what responsibilities you would imagine people needing to take.

And then as wins come in, each partner gains more and more equity, based on her contribution to what you are building. So having the original idea – that’s worth basically nothing, but going forward who did what? How can you keep track? Because if you can agree on how to keep track, then each of you has responsibility, not just authority. And the second half of it, which is also important – every partnership is going to end sooner or later.

It’s going to end when one of you decides to walk away, it’s going to end when you can’t work together easily anymore. It’s going to end when one of you gets hit by a meteor. The thing is, what will you do about the ending? The best time to decide is before you begin.

My favorite way to do it, super simple, is a Shotgun Clause –at any point either party can offer to buy out the other one. And the second person has a choice – except the buyout, or match it and buy out the person who just made you the offer. It forces both parties to put a value on what’s going on. Neither one of them has to labor under working with somebody, who they can’t work with anymore.

It makes it much cleaner. Knowing that there is an Exit, forces both parties to behave in a much more mature way. So yes, there are beautiful partnerships – the partnership I had in college with the amazing Steve Dennis is one of the best business relationships I had. It was easier for us, because we both graduated and neither one of us owned the thing. But I also know it’s fraught, and spending the time – before you begin during those happy, rosy days – to outline who’s going to do what, what they’re going to get when they do, and how to wrap it up when we’re finished, it’s worth it.

It’s worth the two hours, because if you can’t have that conversation now, you’re certainly not going to be able to have it later. I hope that helps. Here’s to health and peace of mind to everyone.

We’ll see you next time.

==> 5514-monkey-selfies- <==

Okay, here’s a quick music quiz for you. What song is this?

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about monkey selfies, Led Zeppelin and copyright, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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If you answered our quiz with Stairway to Heaven, I’m afraid you weren’t correct. But you are not alone. That was Taurus from Spirit – a now little-known band that one stored with Led Zeppelin on the same bill, and they have spent – or the heirs of the founder of the band –have spent millions of dollars suing Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin, because they have asserted that the classic –Stairway to Heaven – is stolen from that song

Which gets to the heart of how we protect our ideas and copyright. And before we talk about Led Zeppelin, I want to spend a minute talking about David Slater and the Macaque monkeys of Indonesia. David is a hard-working wildlife photographer and he slammed head first into a paradox.

What did he do? Well in order to support some wildlife efforts and also to make a living, he went to Indonesia bringing a ton of equipment with him and a lot of expertise. And then spending a lot of time – days or weeks – figured out how to set up a shot where monkeys could, perhaps, take a selfie. Now the very idea of a monkey selfie is clickbait. The monkey selfie –the chance to see ourselves as primates.

The chance to understand that we can’t help it when we’re busy taking pictures of ourselves. Wow, a monkey selfie? That could go viral. And, in fact, it did. If you go to the show notes at akimbo.link, you will see the most extraordinary monkey selfie. Here’s the problem: the problem is that Slater, after spending all of this time and energy setting up the shot – with lights, with lenses, with tripods – left the trigger to take the picture right there in front of the monkey. In order for it to work, it had to be a monkey selfie.

The monkey had a press the trigger. But, but, copyright law – particularly in the United States – is crystal clear about this. The person who presses the button owns the copyright. Years ago, I gave a speech to an association of stock photography agencies and at the end of my speech, as is often the case, some people would come up and ask if they could have a picture. But every other time it’s ever happened, What happens is, someone shows up, hands their camera to someone else and asks them to take a picture from, I don’t know, 6 or 8 feet away.

Not at this event. At this event, every single person, by instinct, refused to let anyone else touch their camera and instead stretched their arm out as far as they could to take an actual selfie. And when I asked why, some of them thought about it and they realized pressing the button – triggering the shutter – means you own the copyright in the photo.

So back to David Slater and the monkey selfies. If the copyright belongs to the monkey, the copyright belongs to no one. Because monkeys aren’t allowed to own a copyright. Copyright exists for a specific reason – it’s to encourage creation by people. And so the very thing that made it go viral – it was a monkey selfie – made it so that David Slater couldn’t profit from it. Wikimedia put the picture up with a public domain label on it because they asserted no one owned the copyright. It even went to trial and Slater lost. Then, just to get some publicity, PETA – the people for the ethical treatment of animals – showed up and filed a lawsuit on behalf of the monkey, saying that the monkey should own all the money from the copyrights, and PETA would be happy to spend that money on behalf of the monkeys.

Now, there’s no doubt that the monkeys deserve a lot of our help, but the question that it brings up is, “Why do we even have copyright and who owns it?”

It didn’t used to be a big deal. The reason it didn’t use to be a big deal is that a copyright didn’t last that long and it wasn’t worth that much. The vast majority of copyrights were never renewed and the length of a copyright was short. But now, thanks to Disney and other giant corporations, copyrights last essentially forever – as long as we are alive. Not only that, but once something starts working – I don’t know, like The Wizard of Oz or Mickey Mouse – it keeps working.

A song like Stairway to Heaven, what’s that worth? Millions and millions, and millions of dollars. So back to Spirit. That riff you heard, that’s called a line cliche. Here’s another one:

There aren’t an infinite number of line cliches, but there are a lot of them. And countless songs, from The Beatles to Duke Ellington, were built around line cliches.

If you’re going to say that any line cliche – just four notes, five notes – that’s ever been used before can’t be used again, we’re going to run out of music. And, simply because the instrumentation is the same, guitar compared to guitar, we might be easily tricked. But you don’t get a copyright in which instrument using to play the music, you’re getting a copyright not just in the performance – which is very narrow – but in the underlying score, and the score is simply notes.

The notes don’t belong to Spirit, the notes belong to all of us. Because our shared culture requires us to be able to use all the letters in the alphabet, all the words in the dictionary, all the notes on the piano. So there are some things to think about as we consider our shared culture and copyright. First of all, should monkeys own copyrights? Probably not.

Second, should David Slater had been more clear when he explained to people how the photo was taken?Because every photo that’s ever been taken with an electric eye sensor, some sort of trigger to activate it, it belongs to the person who invented the photo. The trap that Slater fell into was not claiming from the beginning how much of the photo was his – which was all of it, setting it up, making the magic happen. But from a public policy point of view, a few things to point out.

Number one: this copyright thing is out of hand. We need to make copyrights much shorter, and we need to do it right away. We need to take the books of the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, and the film’s from that era as well, and put them in the public domain. Because doing so will not keep the people who made those books and films for making new ones, because they’re already dead. But doing so will enable a burst of creativity, of recombination, of re-possibility that will benefit all of us.

And next, we ought to get really clear about what’s protected and what’s not. Because we’re wasting a ton of time and effort guessing about what fair use is, what’s protected, what’s borrowing, what’s not. If we dealt with real estate the way we dealt with copyright, no one would ever build anything. If you have to guess where the surveyor lines are, if you have to worry about whether someone’s going to show up and claim they own your land, it’s harder than ever to make something.

So, yeah, if you want to write a book about building a business by being remarkable, go at it. You just can’t use my exact words. I think we all agree on that. That when human beings create something, we’d like to know that we get credit for it, and that we’re going to get compensated for it. But what it means to create something is to be truly specific to be unique, that it was this person who did it – not that person, not a bunch of people, not it was in the air – but that it’s something that a human did all by herself. Something that she can point to and say, “Out of thin air, I made this – this specific expression of my idea”.

Because we need to encourage people to do that, not for a long time, just for a short window – five years would be plenty. Five years to earn back something for the effort you put into it, and then we need to go back and invent the next thing. So that’s my rant, thanks for listening. Feel free to share it with or without pay me a royalty.

We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with an answer to a question about a previous episode. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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I do love to hear from you. If you would like to contribute a question, please visit akimbo.link, that’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, my name is Ali Ucidivey, from New York City, and I’m calling in regard to your last episode on leverage and gearing. First of all, I wanted to thank you for all the work that you do. I had a chance to run into you in New York last month, and I’m really glad we did before this pandemic kind of started in the city.

My question is, “What helps you solidify your belief in focusing on a minimum viable community, instead of going for leverage and scaling?” I think we live in an age where scaling became gospel, and 95% of the internet seems to be focusing on how to make things bigger and bigger. Like you get 500 views, but you want 1000. And then you get 1000, and now you want 10,000.

I recently started a podcast where I focus on ordinary people with extraordinary stories. Obviously some episodes do better than others, but I try not to constantly check the numbers and I’m trying to, you know, focus on the mission which is to share inspiring stories of everyday people. I’m finishing school in May and should be kind of jumping in the real world, but I want to understand when you are starting your career, what help you choose your side of, you know, focus on the first ten people in your tribe, versus the other narrative which is bigger is better. And that mindset that, kind of, is prevalent all over social media and the internet.

That’s a great question, thank you for giving me a chance to distinguish between two ideas. The two ideas are resilience and the smallest viable audience. The smallest viable audience is the single best way to get big, because if you try to get big by appealing to the masses – by being average – you don’t have enough money or enough time to reach all the average people. But if you try to get big I seeking the smallest viable audience – the smallest group of people who share a dream, a goal, a tribal identity – something that they want. If you overwhelm that small group of people with something so amazing and delightful that they talk about it, then the network effect – their word of mouth will move you through the population to more people.

So the discipline of seeking the smallest viable audience has nothing to do with deciding to be small, it has everything to do with putting yourself on the hook – to say, “I made this for you”. And if that person doesn’t like it, you better make something else, because you can’t just race around looking for the next person.

This is different than the belief in resilience. That Capitalism, as we heard earlier, embraces Creative Destruction – get big, raise more money, get big raise more money, crash. That is what the stock market is okay with. Because the people who play the stock market, they don’t care what happens to a company they used to own stock in. Their only goal is to buy stock in companies that are going up and to sell it before they go down. But you are not one of those people. You are one of the people who either runs one of the companies, works for one of the companies, or is served by one of the companies.

And those three groups, I hope prizes resilience over the ups and and downs of crashing into the wall. And so the choice we make as Freelancers, as small business people, as people who work for an organization we care about, is not to maximize leverage to maximize return if our bet is right, but instead to organize for the long haul. To figure out who were serving, and figure out how to serve them. To show up in a way that we are not betting everything on ‘Red 32’ every single day. Because while the stock market is fine with a portfolio approach, we don’t have a portfolio.

We’ve just got this one life, this one gig right now, this one customer. So for me, resilience means the freedom to do my work. If it turns out that people stop going to live conferences and want to engage in a different way, like a workshop, I’ll be there. I haven’t bet everything by building and leveraging, and mortgaging a building so that, if live events go away, I’m completely stuck. That the idea is to focus on the change you seek to make, not maximizing return on investment. Because if you are someone who’s flipping houses, and you are committed to that, then you need leverage – can’t do it without it.

But for most of us the opportunity is to focus on something else. To focus on who we here for, who’s it for, what change we seek to make in the world, and do we get to do it again tomorrow? Thanks for listening. Thanks for the work you do. We’ll see you next time.

==> 5651-cheap-placebos- <==

Ten years ago, Duke Professor, Dan Ariely, published a paper that demonstrated two things – the first something we already knew, which is that placebos can work as a pain reliever. That you can take a sugar pill, a pill that does nothing, in a double-blind study and your pain will go away. But the second thing he demonstrated is that expensive placebos work better than cheap ones.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about you humanity and cheap placebos, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth. Let’s talk about categories for a second. There’s the category of business where you raise millions of dollars, get on the cover of a magazine and sell out for a billion. And then there’s the freelancer who waits for the next gig. But in between the two, is the bootstrapper. The bootstrapper has freedom. The bootstrapper works for her customers. The bootstrapper gets to determine what’s going to happen next. It’s about building something bigger than yourself without raising money from strangers. And I’m thrilled that the bootstrappers workshop is back. It’s back because it works. Find the others, connect with the others and learn the techniques necessary to build a bootstrapped business. I can talk about it all day – this is close to my heart, it’s what I’ve been able to do with my career. But please, check out the bootstrappersworkshop.com for all the details. I hope to see you there, thanks.

For those of you who don’t know about my obsession with placebos, placebos are really important. Here’s the thing – plants do not respond to placebos. They can’t tell if you’re feeding them bottled water or tap water. And dogs? Dogs can’t tell the difference between expensive dog food and cheap dog food, if they’re made out of the same ingredients. Human beings are special. Human beings are special in one giant way, which is that we tell ourselves stories. And those stories change our physiology. They actually change the way we interact with ourselves and with the world. And one story we’re able to tell ourselves, is the story of the placebo – that expensive red wine tastes better than cheap red wine.

That what a doctor tells us when she’s giving us medicine, changes the way the medicine works. There is a simple way to think about the power of a placebo. If we give somebody fake malaria medicine, they’re not going to get well nearly as quickly as if we give them real malaria medicine. On the other hand, if we give someone fake Rhino horn and they believe we gave them real Rhino horn, they’re going to have exactly the same reaction to it.

And the same thing goes in the other direction. If you buy a Birkin bag that is a counterfeit, but you can’t tell the difference, it will have exactly the same placebo effect on you, as if you had bought a real one. On the other hand, if you buy a parachute that isn’t made as well as a real parachute, you’re going to discover really quickly that you made a mistake.

So once we’ve discovered the placebo, once we’ve embraced the fact that there’s a difference between a double-blind study and real life, that none of us live in a double-blind study. Once we see that it is possible to amplify the effects of what we do by carefully constructing placebo effects around them, what should we do with that?

For example, should we change the way doctors talk to us when they prescribe medicine? Should the sommelier at a restaurant, when we get to go back to a restaurant, wear a certain outfit because it makes the wine taste better? We have so many opportunities to build stories into our lives and the lives of the people around us. And we know, we’ve proven again and again, that those stories have a dramatic, important impact on us.

So what sort of culture do we want to build? What sort of placebos do we want to engage with? Sometimes when we’re feeling well and we want to level up and find joy in our lives, or often when we’re feeling threatened when we are worried about our health. How should we deal with placebos?

So now let’s consider the Rhino. There are about 25,000 Rhinos in Africa, and every year 500 to 1500 of them – about 1 out of 20 – are killed by poachers. The poachers are after Rhino horn. They leave the rest behind. Rhino horn is the most expensive placebo in the world – basically a giant toenail growing from the face of the Rhino. When turned into a powder, it is sold, often in Vietnam, for two reasons. One, because there are myths and rumors that the powder can help with liver trouble with hangovers, or maybe even cure cancer. Or perhaps, in its un-powdered form, as a trophy – as a sign of status – demonstrating that the owner of it is powerful. This expensive placebo cost more than gold.

I hope we can all agree that in a double-blind study, there is no chance that the fingernail that grows from the face of a rhino is going to have any medical benefit whatsoever. For thousands of years, it was mentioned now and then in Chinese medicine, but there is nothing in the Chinese pharmacopoeia that says that you should be taking powdered Rhino horn. It is a powerless placebo – it’s all in our head.

Or consider what convicted felon, Jim Baker, has to say about drinking colloidal silver.

Male: How many years ago did we take this product, I wonder?

Female: He gave this to us about 10, 12 years ago with Frank

Male: And we have it at our home, we have it in cases – use it all the time. I have this and, I mean, I don’t think I’d have made it without silver, for my throat in all that.

Female: Absolutely.

Male: Cause I’ve had this, and this is amazing.

Female: Why is silver, so so…

Male: Would you recommend, as a doctor, for people to have silver in their house for a pandemic?

Female: You never want to be without silver.

Here’s the thing, colloidal silver is not only a placebo, it’s mostly a no-cebo, in the sense that if you take enough of it your skin will turn blue. It will make you ill. Your body does not need any silver. You do not have a silver deficiency. Putting silver into a petri dish under certain conditions can kill certain things, but it has no medical benefits.

Not only don’t we need to take silver – take too much silver and you will get sick. It will make your skin turn blue forever and it has all sorts of other side effects. No, we shouldn’t be taking silver and we shouldn’t be spending money on expensive placebos. So, when I talk about expensive placebos, I’m not just talking about the financial cost, even though that is real. The second thing that makes some placebos expensive, is their side effects – making your skin turn blue, causing a species to become extinct. Third is the crowding effect. That when we make a big deal out of placebos, we are probably crowding out the actions that have high efficacy. We are probably crowding out the discussions that need to be taken about real science, or about what gives us actual joy as human beings. And the fourth one, which goes with that, is the expense of the distraction. That all the time we are wasting talking about things that don’t actually work is a distraction from the work we actually should be doing. Placebos have been around for a very long time, as long as human beings have been wrestling with joy or pain, we have had placebos in our lives. We are wired to want to believe and belief changes the way we interact. But only in the last fifty or a hundred years has it become an actual big business. Snake oil sales people actually sold oil from a snake, or most of the time fake oil from fake snakes. But snake oil didn’t do anything to make people better.

It didn’t stop people from trying to make money selling the story. And as long as it was a cheap placebo, with few side effects in few distractions, I think it’s a great idea. Cheap placebos are terrific. If your kid falls down and banged his knee, and you give your kid a hug and it makes their knee feel better, that’s the cheapest placebo of all.

And it pays huge dividends, because it is so see eights person-to-person intimacy and care with feeling better. One step along the path, though, is when you put a bandaid on that kid’s bruised knee. Because it’s a form of giving them a hug, but it’s also teaching kids that this item from the drugstore is what you need to feel better.

And then when we go one step further, or step after that, and a step after that, and we find people who are putting themselves into financial distress, spending time or money, to buy things that don’t work because of Ariely’s ratchet – that expensive placebos work better than cheap ones – we have a challenge. Add to this, the fact that there are people in Congress who have made it ever easier for snake oil sales people to market their stuff as if it actually does something beyond the magical power of a placebo.

To the next level. And Jordan, we’re going to talk today about a lot of conditions that people are struggling with. And we want to teach people how to use essential oils as ancient medicine.

Hey, if you are passionate about this topic like we are, take a minute right now, punch that share button, click the love button, help us spread the word on how to use essential oils as therapy for the body.

When we do that, what we’re also doing is lowering the efficacy of drugs and interventions that do work in a double-blind study. Because those things aren’t marketed sold hyped nearly as the stuff at your local herbal store. Humans are pre-wired to want something certain and they want something fast. Hype-sters showed up and said, “Not only do we have something certain and fast, it’s also expensive, which means it’s scarce, which means status comes along for the ride and you should buy it. And we will keep promoting it, because we will make money doing so”.

And so we create this non virtuous cycle where money creates more interruption, creates more hype, creates more money – and around and around it goes.

Health benefits. Distilled from the Boswellia tree, it has been used for thousands of years. While the resin from the tree possesses many different properties, it is most highly regarded for the oil it contains. Often referred to as the king of oil, it’s highly revered for everything from digestion to beauty.

It’s truly one of nature’s most valued gifts. Rich in alpha-pinene, frankincense is soothing and extremely beneficial for skin health. More significantly than any one single compound, however, frankincense is rich in mono terpenes, which have a wide array of benefits making this oil effective for a variety of uses.

I believe this is one of the primary reasons frankincense offers appropriate cell protection and support. Its broad spectrum activity can support cells and system function throughout the entire body. Frankincense is for everyone.

Essential oils are not essential. They’re called essential oils, because all they’ve done is taken out the part that makes them smell – like, whatever it is, lavender – and left the rest behind. But, there’s a story to be told. You can buy strawberry oil, essential strawberry oil, for about $800 a gallon. What exactly are you supposed to do with a gallon of strawberry oil? Well, apparently it has all sorts of magical benefits – it’s an expensive placebo.

Once again, to repeat myself, placebos are terrific. Cheap placebos are a gift from the universe. But expensive placebos that distract us from the work we ought to be doing – to make ourselves healthier or happier, or more connected – that’s a mistake. So the challenge, as we seek to make placebos more powerful, more effective, more widely available, is not to go down the path of denigrating the alternatives – those things we can’t substitute – is not to figure out how to charge more so only a few people can get it, not to amplify the side effects.

Our opportunity then, is to figure out how to use the magic of the placebo effect – the stories we tell ourselves, the trappings, the pricing, the availability, the status that goes with it – put all of those to work to create fake Rhino horn. To create fake essential oils. To create anything that we need to create that has fewer side effects, more uplifting potential, and that helps people put their own minds to work, to find the health and the well-being that we all seek. And so, as we shelter in place, as we try to think hard about how to help the people around us, mostly what I’m doing here is ranting about the fact that we need to seek out cheap placeboes – person to person, human connection, things that don’t cost a lot of money, things that open us up to what actually works beyond the story we tell ourselves.

And if you find yourself believing an expensive story that this hand bag, which cost $20,000, is the only way to feel fulfilled, that this really difficult to acquire medicine that makes you feel sort of ill is the only way to get better – think really hard about who benefits from selling you this expensive placebo.

Because, in general, expensive placebos aren’t sold on behalf of the recipient. They’re sold on behalf of the seller.

Thanks for listening. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re finding peace of mind.

We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with a question about copyright. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle, don’t watch a video, don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the Akimbo Workshops. These are interactive, real-time online workshops that work. And we’re devoting 2020 to finding one that matches where you need to go. If you’re ready to level up, I hope you’ll check out akimbo.com to find out about our proven, effective workshops.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’re at home with nothing better to do, or even with something better to do, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, this is Patrick LaMontagne from Canmore, Alberta, Canada. In your monkey selfies episode, you ended it with saying that 5 years should be enough of a copyright to get something back.

I’ve been making my full-time living as a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist in Canada for more than 15 years. With the decline of print journalism, I’d be foolish not to explore other avenues of revenue, if I want to continue making my living as an artist.

In 2009, I painted a detailed caricature of a grizzly bear, which led to many more whimsical wildlife portraits. That effort has since become half of my business and continues to grow. I sell prints, paint commissions and the images are licensed internationally on many products. That first grizzly bear, painted 11 years ago, is still one of my top earning images, but it didn’t start creating any real revenue until five-plus years after I painted it.

During that time, I was building my brand, creating new work, finding my followers and customers. I enjoy that others learn from my work and are inspired to create their own vision, but I would argue that as long as I’m alive, those copyrights from my library of funny-looking animals – those are mine. They are a product of my years of building my skills, trying new things, failing often, and finally creating a series that people enjoy, and from which I can earn a living. You know from experience that a creative’s efforts are often only realized after toiling away in obscurity for years. To have the fruits of that labor harvested by somebody else just as it ripens would remove any incentive to try. Could you offer some further clarity about your position on this? Thank you.

Thanks for this Patrick. I think there might be a misunderstanding about what copyright is for. First, thank you, though, for your work, for your creativity, for sticking it out. It’s difficult to make it as an independent creator. Let’s start with this. Why does our culture, why does government let people own private property?

Why not simply just keep the land moving around, the way that it might be at a campsite? Well, the reason we let people have private property is so that they will develop the property, turn it into something that contributes for all of us. And that is where the idea for copyright came from. It is not about treating the creator of the copyright fairly, because if that was the intent then, for example, if a doctor saved someone’s life, we might say, “Wait a minute, that Dr. deserves millions of dollars because she showed up and did difficult work. And now this person isn’t dead”.

We do it – the reason we created copyright – was to incentivize creators to make stuff for the rest of us. And so the goal should be to adjust the rewards for owning a copyright, so that we end up with enough creators. So let’s compare Canada and the United States for just a minute. And because in most ways, Canada is a stellar example of how to run a culture. I mean, Tom Thompson Algonquin Park, I could go on and on – Omer Stringer. But, from 1870 to 1970m give or take a hundred years, in the United States copyright lasted 14 or 28 years. That was it. That’s all you got. Canada had a whole bunch of copyright kerfuffles with United Kingdom and quickly settled on something closer to burn which, as you mentioned, is life plus some extra.

The question is during that hundred year stretch, did Canada or the United States produce more culture that the rest of the world embraced? Well on a per capita basis it’s probably a close call, but I don’t think you can argue the Canada wins on this one.

The purpose of copyright is to incent creators, not to reward them fairly, but simply to incent them to create. And here’s the thing, you’re the exception. The vast majority of creators, don’t make a penny. A huge percentage of the people in iTunes have songs that have only been purchased once, or zero times. The vast majority of people who paint paintings, or write poems, never make a nickel. And still, we’ve got a lot of them. And then there are a few people who win the lottery. There are people who end up with a hit record, or painting that sells for millions of dollars. And people who seek to make it professionally, they look at these lottery winners as an incentive.

But if our goal was to equate pay with creative contribution, we should just tax humanity and pay the creators, but we don’t do that. We’ve created this quasi-private property system, where you get to keep something out of the marketplace if you want, but then eventually, you’ve got to put it back. Thanks to Mickey Mouse, Sonny Bono, and some others in the United States, the copyright here is now essentially forever.

And that doesn’t help the culture – it hurts the culture. It not only hurts the consumers who can’t watch a movie or read a book, or it’s remix, but it hurts the other creators. Because they are worried about getting sued. William Shakespeare couldn’t sue Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein over West Side Story, even though it’s based on Romeo and Juliet, because Romeo and Juliet was back in the public domain.

The question is, how much longer before someone can do a remix of a Kurt Vonnegut novel? Well at this rate, I will be long gone. And so that’s the challenge. The challenge is how do we balance the need to incent creators, with the need for new creators to be able to make stuff so that all of us – the members of the culture – so that all of us benefit.

So I’m thrilled that your work has spread. I hope you continue to do well with it. I know that I still get checks from books I worked on 25 years ago. I’m in no hurry to give that money back – not my point. My point is I would still do it, most of us would still do it, even if we only had five years. There is a number, I guess. The number is different for everyone.

Thanks for listening. Stay safe. Good luck with your work.

We’ll see you next time.

==> 5804-why-tv-is-so-bad- <==

When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air.

Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly commercials – many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom.

Truly, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second after this message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth. Let’s talk about categories for a second. There’s the category of business where you raise millions of dollars, get on the cover of a magazine and sell out for a billion. And then there’s the freelancer who waits for the next gig. But in between the two, is bootstrapper. The bootstrapper has freedom. The bootstrapper works for her customers. The bootstrapper gets to determine what’s going to happen next. It’s about building something bigger than yourself without raising money from strangers. And I’m thrilled that the Bootstrapper’s Workshop is back. It’s back, because it works. Find the others, connect with the others and learn the techniques necessary to build a bootstrapped business.

I can talk about it all day – this is close to my heart. It’s what I’ve been able to do with my career. But please, check out the bootstrappersworkshop.com for all the details. I hope to see you there. Thanks.

The question that Newt Minow – the beautifully named head of the FCC, now 93 years old – was asking, shortly after he took his job in 1961, was simple. Why is television so bad? Because television is really bad. Television is a shadow of what it could be. Television is the driver of our culture. Television gave us World Peace, because everyone around the world – for the first time ever – was seeing the the same stuff. It established a Pax Americana by establishing that a dishwasher, two kids, a garage, a car and peace, were the sitcom life that were available to most people around the world – at least if they believed in it enough, and they were willing to embrace the Western capitalist ideal.

But why is television so bad? There are a bunch of reasons for this, but before I go into them, I will point out the television is now better than it has ever been before. But mostly, because of some outliers – some people who get the joke, some people who understand that we are living in a new golden age. But most of the industry, most of the people who make the stuff, talk about the stuff and watch the stuff, they still don’t understand the change that has happened and is happening.

So where to begin? Well, we begin with radio. It’s important to begin with radio, because radio shared many of the dynamics of television of the 1960s, and that dynamic in the 30s and the 40s was:

A) The receiver was sort of expensive and big

B) Thanks to electromagnetic spectrum, which we’ve talked about earlier, there aren’t that many slots for radio stations

This turned out to be a huge boon. If you were one of the eight major radio stations, in a major city, you were going to make bank – year after year, after year. You got to keep your license forever and you would make millions of dollars, because there were only eight stations to listen to. That changes the way you think about programming, because if there’s eight radio stations or, when we move to the world of Television, three TV networks, you begin each night’s battle spotted one third of the audience.

One third of the audience is yours, don’t blow it. That if you go out on a limb just a little bit and you win, you might get up to 50%. But if you take a huge risk and you lose, you’ll end up in the basement – 10%, 12%. And so, the mindset of radio for all those years, and then television, was inherently conservative, not politically conservative, but creatively conservative. The idea is to copy what came before. To offend as few people as possible. To puzzle no one. To challenge no one. Because Americans sitting in front of their big TVs, did not want to be challenged. They did not want to feel dumb.

And so we get Gilligan’s Island, and I Dream of Jeannie, and Lost in Space. Gilligan’s Island did exactly one thing that was clever or subversive. See if you can hear it.

[SOUND EXCERPT – Gilligan’s Island theme song]

That’s right. They named the boat in Gilligan’s Island after Newt Minow – the guy who said that TV was a banal wasteland. My guess is that no one who worked on Gilligan’s Island knew what the word banal even meant, or if they did they didn’t care. That the idea of these TV shows in the 60s was that if we’re going to make the conceit of the show have anything abnormal about it, we need to explain the entire conceit, every single week in the opening credits. We are going to explain the backstory of Bewitched, or The Brady Bunch, because God forbid the audience should tune in and be mystified about what’s going on, on-screen. A couple interesting exceptions: Mission Impossible – the original TV series – featured Greg Morris. He was the demolitions and technology expert. Greg Morris was black.

Never once in the show, as far as I recall, did they point out that he was black. In 1960-something, it was a big deal to do this and to not make a big deal about it. Around the same time, Star Trek came along – another show that explained in detail what the show is about every time you watch it – a show so complicated, it got canceled twice because the programmers couldn’t risk ending up with less than their third.

But the plots of Star Trek? The plots of Star Trek challenged many people in the audience, which is one reason why we spend a lot of time talking about Star Trek, and no time at all talking about The Beverly Hillbillies. So in the show notes, you can see a year-by-year chart of the ratings of the top 10 shows and what networks they were on, over the course of 10 or 20 years. And what you will notice about this, is that there’s a lot of churn – shows come and shows go.

What you will notice about this is that almost all of the shows are completely forgettable. They are cookie cutter. They are banal. They are part of the wasteland. And then the third thing you’ll notice is that once cable came along, the 1, 2, 3 Network play of hegemony over how a hundred million Americans were going to spend every single night started to fade, and it faded fast. It faded so that the number three show went from having 40 million people watching it, down to 20 million people watching it. That’s a huge shift. Try to imagine a store where half as many people start showing up.

So when cable showed up, we went from three networks to a couple dozen. So the folks at ESPN got real smart. ESPN makes billions of dollars, because they figured out that sports, sports is a show that writes itself. That Sports is something they could corner the market on. That Sports could become a profit center. And then back to what we learned from radio. Ted Turner did something bold.

He created CNN. News was a loss leader on every single Network. They did it because they had to. They did it to please the FCC. Ted Turner said, “What if I could make News at a profit?” And that led, as we’ve seen from Talk Radio, to a splintering of points of view. And so the editorializing of Fox – incorrectly called Fox News – is about finding five percent of the audience. That’s all they need. 5 million people watch Fox. Now if you had said to a TV executive in 1969, “We’re going to make a show that five million people are going to watch,” They would have booted you out of the office.

But 5 million people is enough to change the culture, it’s enough to change an Election. Because, as Eli Pariser has pointed out in the filter bubble, collecting a group of people who agree about a point of view – a tribe, if you will – can be very profitable. Might not be good for the culture, but it can be profitable. And so what talk show hosts on radio have discovered, is that it doesn’t pay to be Terry Gross, doesn’t pay to be agnostic. That the way you build an audience is by standing for one point of view or another, because people like being in their filter bubble.

So as we head toward the present day, now we see where the conflict lies. Because it is possible to make cheap, aggressive, loud, news-based, opinion based programming that will capture the attention and emotions of a few million people every night.

And what about the rest of it? Well, what we know is that a network like HGTV has lost a huge percentage of its audience. Because how many shows about buying and renovating a house can you watch, actually? That YouTube – the infinite shelf of YouTube – means that if you want to learn how to renovate the tiles in your bathroom, you don’t have to wait for a HGTV to put on a show about it, you can just Google it and there’s the information you were looking for.

That most of the people, who program most of the networks, have a mindset of ‘don’t screw this up’. And it took HBO, with The Sopranos and all the shows that have come after that, to say, “No, no, no – the only chance we have is to act like we’re willing to screw it up”. Game of Thrones – really? With what’s going on, with how much it costs, with the complexity of creating it and building a fan base? But yes, Game of Thrones was a number one TV show on cable, without a network, because it went to the edges. Billions, on Showtime, a show that never would have made it as unfiltered as it is onto Network TV. Because it goes to an edge and it stays there. That what a few Programmers, what a few creators have figured out is that the only shows worth making our shows that no one would have made back in the day. But most people in the Industry – and yes, they call it the industry, with a capital T and a capital I – most people in the industry like being in the industry. And what they know is, if they don’t get a green light, if they don’t get approval, they don’t get to do it again.

And so the mindset is, “Let’s look over our shoulder. Let’s look in the rearview mirror and try to guess what they’re buying.” Let’s distinguish this from the book business. Now in the TV business, there might be a few hundred shows made a year. That’s more than ever before. Back in the old days, it was dozens, not hundreds. But in the book business, if you count self-publishing on the Kindle, there are more than a thousand books published every eight hours.

That even mainstream book publishers are publishing new books on a daily or hourly basis. What that means, that combined with the fact that only one person works on a typical book – not 30 or 300 or 3000 – but one person with a particular point of view. So what the book industry learned 500 years ago, is it there are no mass market bestsellers. That there are no books that sell a hundred million copies, other than the Bible, the Guinness Book of World Records, and the sum total of the work of Erle Stanley Gardner, or Agatha Christie, maybe James Patterson – nobody is in that category. Nobody.

That what you have to do is make Fifty Shades. Fifty Shades could never have worked first as a TV show. Talk about banal. But also, it’s not very well written. And also, people weren’t proud to carry around a book that people felt was on that topic. But on the Kindle? On the Kindle, it found its audience, self-published. That audience wasn’t everyone. It was almost no one – just a few million people. But just a few million people is enough.

It’s enough, because you have attracted people who need you, who would miss you if you are gone. And now, television expensive as it is to make, is becoming more like the book business. Because it represents a point of view. Because it is not aiming to be benign, forgettable, it filled the slot, people didn’t change the channel, we didn’t get any complaints. Instead, television – the television we are thinking of, the television when we talk about the Golden Age – is not trying to be an updated version of Bewitched, or Survivor, or Shark Tank, or Jeopardy. That this high-concept nonsense of, “It’s this, plus this.” Because the person who’s going to green light it – is too busy, or too stupid to read more than a paragraph – is being replaced by gutsy people who say, “No, no, no. I’m going to make something that stands for something. Something that will be copied, that isn’t a copy. And we have a shot using this new medium, whether it’s going to be on YouTube or the infinite long tail of Netflix, to create a different kind of culture going forward. Sure, it’s going to be fractured. I miss the fact that I can’t talk to people about the Batman TV episode I saw when I was 7 years old, because we all saw it last night. That one of the things that Netflix did when they introduced binging, was they put a little bit of a kibosh on water cooler culture – everyone talking about the show they saw at the same time.

So now we’ve exploded the number of channels. We’ve exploded the time grid. We’ve exploded the idea of genre. We’ve created filter bubbles. We’ve splintered everything into little corners. And every once in a while, a surprise shows up. And that surprise begins to rewire our culture. So Newt is still around, he’s 93 years old, and I’m not sure what he would think about elements of the golden age of YouTube, or Showtime, or Netflix.

But it’s possible that new, video-literate people are going to show up with a point of view. Carriage is no longer out of their reach. Ideas that spread, win. So the question is, what ideas will we make, and what ideas will we spread?

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

One last thing about Gilligan’s Island. The Professor – he could make a nuclear reactor out of a coconut. So how can we couldn’t fix the damn boat?

Just wondering.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with a question from last time. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle, don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the Akimbo Workshops. These are interactive, real-time, online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2020 to finding one that matches where you need to go. If you’re ready to level up, I hope you’ll check out Akimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

As you know, one of my favorite parts of this show is hearing and answering questions from you. If you’ve got a question about this episode or a previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Hi Seth, this is Jo from Melbourne, Australia. Thanks for sharing your insights every week about things that we all find fascinating. My question relates to your podcast episodes about merely shipping. With this, I know that merely shipping means getting our work out there, and overcoming the lizard brain and our need for perfectionism.

But my question is, if I release something like a post or video that isn’t as good as the others, but at least I’ve shipped it, if someone comes across that won’t they judge my work based on this one thing and not give the rest a chance? And also, won’t shipping a lot dilute the content which is truly impactful and can make a difference?

Thanks so much for your work. I really appreciate your generosity and love the creative ideas each week.

Thanks, Joanna. I hope you and yours are well. There’s a fundamental misconception behind part of the question and then a juicy thing to riff on as well. So here we go. First of all, merely ship it does not mean ‘ship junk’. It does not mean ship stuff that you know to be inferior. It means ship it – ship it without discussion or drama, or anxiety. Because the discussion, the drama and the anxiety do not increase the quality or the fit of what you are making. Merely ship it. Ship it, because you have focused on the work and the person the work is for. That putting work into the world is the only way to find out what the world needs and wants from your work. That you can work on it on your own forever, but you will learn nothing about how the work collides with the outside world. So merely ship it begins with the idea that, if we’re going to be a professional at this, if we’re going to be generous at this, it means we ship the work. Saturday Night Live does not go on, because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30.

My blog doesn’t come out tomorrow, because it’s perfect. It comes out tomorrow because it’s tomorrow. That’s the ritual. That’s the rigor. That’s the commitment that we are bringing to our work. But you bring up a second point. And the second point is, isn’t there a cost to shipping work that doesn’t fit? And of course there is. That when someone sees work that you do that isn’t a match for them, they will judge you. They will judge you and they will make predictions about your next piece of work.

But there’s a few problems. Problem number one, if you don’t ship your work at all, you won’t get judged. You will be invisible. Is that better or worse? Well, being invisible is where we begin, so staying invisible doesn’t really seem like you’ve accomplished very much. Number two, it’s entirely possible quite likely that you have no idea about the difference between work that’s good enough and work that isn’t. Would you have shipped the Neil Young album where he was just a little bit out of tune on a couple songs? Would you have shipped the original Harry Potter book the one that dozens of smart Editors said would never sell? Nobody knows anything.

It turns out that we know exactly how to make a good quality car. We know what Six Sigma is. We know how to make the tolerances perfect. We know how to make it so it accelerates quickly, so that the door shuts properly, so that the metal doesn’t rust. But nobody knows anything about how to write a screenplay that is perfect.

We know how to tell the ones that are fundamentally flawed. We know how to discard the ones that are lazy, the ones that are selfish. We know how to ignore the ones where the genre doesn’t match what we are looking for. But when it comes to the spark of magic, we don’t know. I am regularly surprised at the feedback I get on my blog – the ones where I have toiled for hours and I’m sure I’ve nailed it, I hear from no one. And the other ones, sometimes it took me four minutes to write, they seem to resonate with people.

Nobody knows. But the way to get a hint, the way to begin to know, is to ship the work. And then the last part of this rant is, where you decide to put the work matters. I think there’s a difference between riffing with some tunes on Spotify, and issuing your first full-length album. I think that there is a difference between a blog post and a book.

I think that when you show up for money in front of a client, you probably shouldn’t be trying out material for the very first time. That there’s an expectation that comes with the wrapper that we put something in. But beyond that, we get hung up too often on our made-up idea of what is perfect. Perfect isn’t what you think it is. Perfect is what the consumer thinks it is. And I’ll finish with a reference to Hilma af Klimt, who was a pioneering painter in the 1900s – early 1900s.

She had a show at the Guggenheim. She painted more than 10,000 paintings over the course of her lifetime. And in her will, she instructed her nephew who inherited her estate and almost went bankrupt honoring her wishes, to not show anyone her paintings until 20 years after she died. So here’s this woman who painted 10,000 paintings –

no one ever saw one.

And then 20 years go by, and no one saw one. And then finally people saw it. It seems to me that Hilma would have done even more important art and probably would have found more satisfaction in her work, if she had shown people her paintings as she was making them. You don’t need to be afraid to be judged, but it’s probably pays to be afraid to be ignored. That our opportunity when we make something is to make things better, but you can’t make something better if you don’t ship the work.

Hi Seth, it’s Jo from over in Australia. Again, I asked the question about shipping subpar content and that diluting my other work. But, I realize that’s actually just my lizard brain talking and the part of me that needs reassurance. So I thought I’d come and answer my own question. The fact is, I’m in it for the long term and the work that truly resonates will shine through anyway. Your blog and work reflects that. While there’s plenty of it that resonates with me and others, there’s also plenty that happened.

But it doesn’t matter, because you’ve shipped it and the impactful work has shown through anyway. If you have more to add, I’d love to hear your thoughts. As always, thanks so much.

Thanks for listening.

Here’s the peace of mind. We’ll see you next time.

==> 5959-the-future-of-the-library- <==

By now, like bathrooms and hot water, a Library is got up as standard equipment for a fine house. That’s Seneca – the great stoic philosopher – writing 2000 years ago.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

Two updates since I recorded this episode. The first is that a recent study showed that among all amusements in America –museums, sporting events, horseback racing, the movies – the number one way that Americans are spending their time out of home, is at the Library. And second, of course, is that the Library near me and the one near you are probably closed. And that’s a good reason to miss them, and I can’t wait until they reopen. Here’s to health and to peace of mind.

Libraries have changed far more than we imagined – more than most other institutions that we take for granted. The library keeps shifting, and right now in this very moment is its greatest shift of all. Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Melvil Dewey, not the guy who defeated Truman, but the guy who put his name on the Dewey Decimal System – was a creep, a jerk, and a bully. Melvil Dewey required any woman, who was applying for a job with him – this was a hundred and twenty years ago – to attach a photograph of herself to the application. Because, in his words, “You can’t polish a pumpkin”. Melvil Dewey was anti-semitic, racist and sexist.

And now that we’ve got that out of the way, an aside about the history of libraries. Sir Antonio Genesio Maria Panizzi, who lived throughout the 1800s, of Italian descent, was one of the most important figures in the history of the modern Library. Not because he once got caught selling white mice on the street in London. It’s not exactly clear to me why someone would sell white mice on the Streets of London, particularly if they were knighted. Or why someone would buy white mice on the streets of London, but that’s a story for a different podcast.

Now what Sir Panizzi did, was invent a way to sort and itemized books. He was the pioneer of modern card catalogs, which is one of the most important jobs the librarian has. One more aside about Panizzi – he was involved in a fairly public, and probably racist, spat with the great Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle even mentioned him in one of his books as being particularly difficult to deal with as a librarian.

Well Panizzi got his revenge because when Carlisle asked for a small room in the British library to work on his next book, Panizzi turned him down.

How did we end up with libraries in the first place? A couple of reasons. The first is Governments like to write things down. They like to write down rules and regulations, as well as debts and balance sheets. In addition, religions like to write things down. And so the combination of scripture, spiritual books and Government records led to the need to store all of these scrolls, or tablets or, ultimately, books.

So the first libraries weren’t libraries in the way we think of them. They were warehouses for books, that only certain people were anointed to be able to enter. One way to deal with the book shortage, because books were all created by hand, was to give the Monks something to do. The extensible reason for Monks acting like scribes and copying books over and over again, was that it was a way for them to spiritually connect with the words in the book. But it led to an interesting byproduct, and the byproduct is more books.

And so Monasteries were spewing up books all the time. Not the way a printing press could, but there were more and more books in the world. But books were valuable, books were a status symbol. As Seneca pointed out, owning a book – owning more than one book – was a sign of prestige. So a wealthy Roman could imagine outfitting a room in his or her home with floor-to-ceiling shelves, filled with books – books you would probably never read. And one of the things that really annoyed Seneca was a wealthy person who collected books, but didn’t read them. Fast forward a little bit to the printing press. The printing press dramatically increases the availability of books, but books still cost a fortune.

It wasn’t unusual for a well-made book to cost more than a peasant would make in a year. And so we needed a way to let Scholars and others see books and touch books – books that they could not possibly afford. So libraries started to be places where people could go to access books. However, the books were often chained to a table – that’s how valuable they work. There was one lending library in Germany. But that Library, the Ducal Library – between 1714 and 1799, about 80 years only –loaned out 31,000 books, some of which may still be overdue. What that means is that unless you were a scholar, you probably weren’t spending much time in the library touching chained up books. At the same time that libraries were developing over this thousand year period, the people who built libraries understood that it was a chance for architecture. Because if libraries were a luxury good – a rare item, something that represented intelligence – housing them in a beautiful building was a way for whoever built that building to make a statement about their prestige and status. This led to a long series of wealthy people being involved in libraries. Andrew Carnegie, for example, funded libraries around the United States. Big, over built buildings, filled with books that celebrated, not just the idea of literacy, but the idea of Andrew Carnegie. And, not very well known, Bill and Melinda Gates made their first substantial donation as philanthropists to enable libraries to enter the digital age, paying for thousands and thousands of computers to be installed in libraries around the country.

But I’m not really that interested in talking about the past of libraries, as much as I am to talk about the future of libraries. Because if you visit the typical suburban library in the United States or other parts of the world, what you may see is that the thing that is taken out the most – the item that circulates most often – isn’t the work of Seneca. It is, in fact, a DVD. Maybe a 101 Dalmatians, I’m not exactly sure which type of title. But they are basically DVD stores, for free.

Now, if you’re a librarian, it’s likely you did not sign up to be running a video rental store. So we need to think a little bit about what it means to be a Librarian in the post Melvil Dewey, post Google world. Because the early libraries didn’t have Librarians who did what Librarians do now. The early libraries were about access – keeping the wrong people from touching the wrong books. That you took what books the King gave you, or the Pope gave you, or that you could afford. But mostly what you were doing, was lightly organizing, maintaining and guarding these precious objects. Only in the last 200 years, thanks to Sir Panizzi, do we have the idea of the ‘modern librarian’. Leaving aside the white mice, the modern Librarian’s job is to make information and knowledge accessible to the people who need it.

They are not a guard. They are not running a warehouse where books go to die. That the passion of the Librarian is to connect people to information. And in the world before the internet, it’s hard to imagine more important work. Keeping the flame of knowledge alive. Helping generation, after generation connect to what they needed to know. The kids’ section at libraries has always been one of the juiciest parts. Because it’s at the kids’ section that we are teaching people the lifelong habit of looking it up, of finding it out for real, of figuring out how to combine ideas to create new ones. A quiet place with carrels – by the way, they were invented right around the time they started changing books to desks – a quiet place where you could sit and think and discover. But then, then the DVD came along, and then the internet came along. So most adults, most adults don’t spend much time in the library anymore. Because if you’re going to look it up you look it up by typing something into a computer and now an invisible AI is going to, supposedly, find it for you. Back when I was at Yahoo, there was a secret room at Yahoo that had hundreds of people working in it. And what they did all day, by hand, was use Library science to sort every single website they could find. Yahoo was not a search engine, it was a directory.

It was a directory built by Librarians to surface the websites that they thought people would be interested in. It’s only after that when PageRank came along, when the whole thing got automated, that A) The web exploded, because we could put more stuff into it, because it could get found by a robot. But B) We replaced forever Melvil Dewey’s idea with ‘miscellaneous’. Miscellaneous – the idea that it’s all in a pile, and that maybe a computer can find it for us.

So unaided by any humans, we are now randomly poking at a huge collection of random information, and developing new skills to discern where is the good stuff and where is the other stuff. But, what about that building in town? The first Public Library in the United States – funded in New Hampshire, a state known for not wanting to tax itself, because the people in that town in New Hampshire felt that they would all benefit if they all knew something new.

But if we’re going to the library to get a DVD, we are dishonoring the librarian. We are dishonoring all the years that came before. Benjamin Franklin’s Junto was a subscription Library, where each member put in some money where they could buy books and then share them. Subscription libraries, sounds a little bit like Netflix, where people put in money – nine billion dollars last year – and then that nine billion dollars is spent to acquire new content that is shared among all the subscribers. But that Library, what is that library for – that building in town?

Were we in such a hurry to replace it with a WeWork? Maybe there’s an opportunity here for libraries to step back into the fore of how we create our intellectual culture. What would it mean for the library to be the water cooler in town? What would it mean for the library to connect all the disconnected, independent people around ideas? That because we shifted gears and started treating the library like a warehouse for books, and then suddenly forgot about books – because books are cheap, because books are everywhere, because people stopped reading, because it doesn’t pay to look stuff up when all we have to do is type it into the computer – we’re throwing out that architecture, that structure and the librarian, at the same time.

I still regret the 3,000 books I had to give away when I moved my office. Every time I created a book as a book packager, I bought every book available on the topic. I went to Barnes & Noble, or the independent bookstore, and bought them all. Because buying 10 or 20 bucks on the Academy Awards would pay for itself in a heartbeat, after I wrote the book. Back when I created the Information Please Business Almanac, we put the phone number for the Hawaii Public Library in the book. Why? Because when it’s midnight in New York and your boss is waiting for you to finish something, you could call Hawaii, where it’s not even close to closing time and maybe somebody at the library would be able to help you.

That’s going away. What will we replace it with? Where is the center, geographically or digitally, of how we will connect with one another around ideas? Because ideas still matter, but we have commodified them. We have created an infinity of ideas online, some of which are useful, most of which are junk. And without a librarian, a passionate guide who will help us put things into the right decimal allocations, without Sir Panizzi to figure out new rules for how we will determine which access is worth it, we are at risk of getting lost in the darkness.

Because the data is there – it’s all over the web. But turning data into information, particularly in a world where we’re obsessed with convenience and obsessed with shortcuts in the short-term – turning data into information is a craft. And it’s Librarians who have trained to understand that craft, but too often got pushed into being video clerks instead. That going forward, certain communities will build subscription libraries, will find the guides – the sherpas they need – to work their way through where they are, to where they want to go. I have no doubt that there’s a new layer to be added to the history of the library.

One aside here – a year and a half ago, I put a twenty dollar bill inside one of the books in my local library. I went back and checked and it’s still there. We don’t need a warehouse for books anymore. Or, if we do, we don’t need one in every town. What we need instead is a place, a place – digital or local – with energy, with possibility and with connection. Because when we build that light in the center of whatever circle we choose to be in – that light of knowledge and possibility – we have a chance to make things better.

Thanks for listening to my rant. I’ll see you at the library.

At Akimbo, we love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this episode or anything that’s come previously, visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Hey Seth, it’s Tony from the Albany, New York area. One of the things that just you’re so good at is the nuance of words. And really pinpointing what a word means and how it should impact our behavior. And one word that has been floating around, and I want to know your take on it, is the word ‘professional’. Now, I’ve heard you talk about it in other medias, besides your podcast, and one in particular I was listening to a podcast you were on and you implied that what most people think is that a professional is someone who is paid. But then you were joking around with this person, and the person said that he was a professional pizza eater. And, I’m not quoting, but you didn’t hesitate to agree with that person. Now clearly he is not paid to eat pizza, but you both agreed that he was a professional pizza eater. I work with volunteers – in particular volunteer emergency services, workers, volunteers, volunteer EMTs, volunteer firefighters. The River Villages where you have your offices are all protected by volunteer firefighters. And especially in a time like today of Covid-19, the bravery of these volunteers is noted and elevated for everyone to see. But just because they’re volunteer, does that mean that they’re not professional? How do you define professional? Thanks, Seth.

Thank you for the kind words and the juicy question. You are right – the word professional doesn’t mean someone got paid to do it. My definition is this: a professional shows up to do their best work, even when they don’t feel like it. A professional does the hard work of getting better at their craft. A professional is open to feedback so their craft can get better. None of those things apply to amateurs. So I was probably being a little tongue-in-cheek when I said that Brian was a professional pizza eater, because I don’t think he has ever eaten Pizza against his will. But yeah, he shows up and eats pizza in places that an ordinary, amateur pizza eater might be too lazy to seek out.

But for all of us, what I’m getting at is this – when we hire someone to do work, whether they’re a volunteer fireman, whether they’re a musician or a Doctor, we are hoping for a professional. Because professionals don’t bring authenticity, professionals bring commitment and consistency to the table. The volunteer fireman in my town are truly professionals. We count on them to save our lives, and they don’t let us down.

It’s true, they don’t get paid, but that’s okay. Because getting paid isn’t what makes you a professional. What makes you a professional is the posture and enrolment that you bring to your work.

Hey Seth, my name’s Peter and I’ve been listening to Akimbo for the past few weeks. I manage a franchise automotive dealership in one of the most competitive markets in the country. As I’ve been listening, I’ve been trying to find if there’s a better way for the automotive industry to operate. The industry carries a negative stigma, which most dealers still adhere to and thrive on. My question is this, if you’re in an industry dominated by ‘no desire to change’ and we’re buyers only care about finding the lowest price, how can you make a change for the better? Almost every process of the business, from customer privacy to the final transaction, needs to be changed and the complexities have been lost on where to even begin.

Thank you for this question. Yes, you’re right different industries have different flexibilities when it comes to change. One of the biggest reasons is because of the network effect. Some industries don’t lend themselves to having their existing infrastructure changed. Either the supply chain is locked in place – and that is largely true in the very stuck car dealer business – because car dealers have various levels of exclusivity.

Car manufacturers – and there aren’t very many new ones coming along – it’s all fairly stuck. But I want to highlight one of the things you said, which is that all customers seek the lowest price. That’s just not true. What’s true is the dealers have taught the customers that they’re all the same and since they’re all the same, why on earth would you pay extra?

A Toyota Prius is a Toyota Prius, no matter who you buy it from. If that is true and the process is uncomfortable, well, why on earth would you pay extra to get a Prius from someone else? Well, we know if you check out the story of Sewell Cadillac, that it is entirely possible to build the dealership that proudly does not sell it the lowest price.

So here’s the question, if you really want to change the car dealership business, how could you run a dealership whose slogan is “You’ll pay a little bit more than you could, but you’ll get a lot more than you pay for”. Because, if you could make that slogan true, you could teach people who are willing to get more than they pay for that it is worth paying you a bit extra. But in my experience having bought, I don’t know – 30, 50 cars in my lifetime – it’s not true.

It’s not true, because sooner or later the dealers start to race to the bottom. They act like they’re going to do something else, but then they don’t. What would it mean if you actually did something else? Think about all the other parts of our life where someone charges extra and it’s worth it – whether it’s a restaurant, or a supermarket, or a doctor, or lawyer costs more but it’s worth more than it costs. Doing that is the first step to going on the journey to changing the industry.

I hope that’s helpful. Thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

==> 6131-living-in-surplus- <==

Dogs don’t have hobbies. It’s not clear that dogs need hobbies, but they don’t have them. They have a surplus of time. A well cared for beloved dog has hours to sit around doing nothing, and they’re pretty good at sitting around doing nothing. They can deal with the surplus of time with no problem. It’s interesting to note that dogs have a big problem dealing with a surplus of food. Obesity is an epidemic among dogs in the United States, because people are feeding their dogs too much and dogs don’t know what to do with the surplus of food.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

I don’t really want to talk about dogs, but I do want to talk about surplus, because surplus is the key ingredient to culture. For a really long time, most human beings have been lucky enough to have at least a little bit of surplus. That we have enough food to survive on and after that we have extra – extra time, extra food. Marshall Sahlins, in his breakthrough book about the economics of being a caveman, pointed out that it’s probable that traditional hunter-gatherer societies worked for a few hours a day to find enough to live on, and spent the rest of the time creating culture – talking with each other, grooming each other, hanging out, lying in the sun, developing hobbies. I want to argue that we have culture, because we decided that it was useful to put our surplus to work.

And the question is, “How do we put our surplus to work, and what are we going to do with our surplus going forward?” Now, it’s difficult to talk about surplus, because we live in a culture that has spent billions or trillions of dollars persuading us that we don’t have enough. That we don’t have a fancy enough house, that we don’t have a car or a nice enough car, that we’re not getting ahead. That, in fact, everywhere we look, we’re reminded that we are not in surplus, that we are in scarcity. That the nature of the industrial economy was to train us to believe that we were in scarcity. A hundred years ago, the typical family in the United States – the mom, the dad, the kids – they probably had two or three pairs of pants, two or three pairs of shoes, and that was it. That industrialists in the 1910s and 20s had a crisis – you can look it up. Their crisis was that they were very concerned that new factories were making so much stuff, so cheap, that people would run out of a desire to to buy it. That creating demand – demand for what we consider everyday objects, that was their most important goal.

Well, we have totally passed that line. That we have gotten to the point where just about everybody, who has had contact with mass media of any kind around the world, has been triggered into a feeling of scarcity, not abundance. But, back to this idea of surplus. So, you’ve got a bunch of reindeer hanging out in northern Europe – they have enough to eat. They don’t develop hobbies. While they may have something that looks like a culture, it comes and goes – it’s evanescent. As soon as the reindeer scatter, it starts over again.

They don’t leave artifacts behind. That when we see animals that create a tool, or any clues that perhaps there was a culture, we are shocked – because it’s mostly humans. It’s mostly humans who have decided to put their spare time to work, not only connect to one another in the short term, but create things that last. Why would we create things that last? Well, it might be fun, but it’s entirely possible because it creates a ratchet. And that ratchet is that spending our surplus on resources that improve productivity or civility, or efficiency creates more surplus.

That once we get hooked on what surplus can create, the culture itself wants to create more of it. And so the cycle begins. Why bother learning how to read? Learning how to read is a huge investment of time and effort, and perhaps money. But after you learn to read, you are much more efficient at gaining information than people who don’t know how to read. That efficiency makes you more productive. That productivity helps you get paid more. Getting paid more, lets you get more stuff or have more freedom, and so the cycle continues. We teach our kids to read, because we want our kids to have some of the benefits that we have had that came from investing our surplus wisely. A family invests part of its surplus in the summer to put food in cans, so that when winter comes, they will have food.

Squirrels do the same thing, but humans figured out how to do it at scale. So now, they’re not just putting food by for themselves, they’re going to put food by for their neighbors, for the town, for the city for the nation. That suddenly Heinz or Del Monte is in business, taking the farm surplus of today, investing effort, turning it into something that creates value in the future.

And what about writing lyrics for a song? What about coming up with a joke? The thing is once you come up with a joke, you only get to laugh at it once, but now you have a joke. You can share that joke. You get a benefit from sharing that joke, you get status or connection. That joke make someone else happy, even though they didn’t have to invent it. And then it gets the next person and then it gets to the next person. That if we expend our surplus in the moment to close the door because it’s windy out, then everybody else in the restaurant benefits from the fact that we invested our surplus to create something for other people.

And so now you’re starting to see what I’m getting at here, is that culture is created because we had some spare time, some spare corn some spare resources to invest in making things better for ourselves, perhaps, or for others going forward. One of the largest ratchets in the history of this idea of putting surplus to work, is engineering – the science of engineering. The habit, the process, the method of figuring out how to make metal. Figuring out how to build a bridge. Figuring out how to pave a road, because paving a road or building a bridge – it doesn’t pay for itself in weeks or months, or even years. It might take decades. It’s entirely possible that the people who built the interstate highway system died long before it was in the black. But this investment, made by who exactly, paid dividends to huge numbers of people.

So now we get to the idea of collective action. Collective action, in which not one person or three people, or five people on their own would choose to invest their surplus to do something that would benefit everyone. But that we created the culture of organized government, and the culture of taxation to go with it. And we willingly pay our taxes, not because we’re afraid we’re going to go to jail, but because we know that this use of our surplus will come back to us many times over.

You are listening to me on the internet. Vint Cerf and others, invested years of their lives to building what became the internet in the 60s and the 70s. And it’s only because we spent surplus then, that we have what we have now. That we are building on ideas and infrastructure that came before. This engineering mindset created new opportunities and unexpected windfalls of surplus. One day, a couple hundred years ago, they dug some oil out of the ground. And those fossil fuels, which had been there for millions and millions of years, it turns out that they can do work for us.

And so we take some of the surplus that was left over on the Earth millions of years ago, and put it to use moving a vehicle around or turning it into plastic. Here’s where the questions begin. A billionaire, or a 10x billionaire or a 50x billionaire – are they putting their surplus to good use? A company – a company that made an extraordinary profit, perhaps because it has monopoly power – they make a profit. A profit is another word for a surplus.

They are charging more than it costs them, all in, counting overhead, to make what we bought. Where does that profit go? If you’re a shareholder of that organization, are you happy with how that surplus is being invested, so that the next cycle will work just as well?

Where did AOL or Western Union put their surplus for all of those years? When I was at Yahoo! there was an embarrassingly large surplus. A small group of people, who are getting paid a lot – there was a lot of surplus, because value was created by the ideas that had been brought to the world by the Yahoo folks. Where to put the surplus? Should you put it toward buying eBay, buying Netscape, buying Google? All three of them were on the table.

What would have happened to the internet, to Yahoo!, to shareholders, to the people who are counting on Yahoo! if the surplus had been spent one way or another? Back to this idea of the 50x billionaire. A 50x billionaire can only ride on one private jet at a time. How to spend the surplus? A trip across the country in first class, with unlimited amounts of comfort, costs a few thousand dollars. A trip across the country in a private jet might cost $200,000. Surplus spent. What was received for the surplus? When we say to a Government, “Do not tax me, because I do not like the fact that the Government is spending tax money”. The question is, “What will we spend the surplus on instead?” That when we believe that surplus left alone – surplus neglected – leads to surplus lost, we have to think really hard about how are we spending our surplus.

Because it is our surplus – all of us. That’s what the culture created. That the systems that we are putting in place, whether they are systems for fossil fuels, systems for solar energy, systems for building connection, systems for new technologies, systems for Education, they all use up our surplus and they are creating an asset as they do.

So when we look at a school, do we say about this elementary school, that is under serving the people who are attending it, “Why isn’t the school more efficient, or do we say why are we wasting the surplus we created for these children hours every day for them to learn something and we are wasting it?” What would happen if we invested more of our mutual surplus to create a forward cycle of educated people, who are ready to engage in civil discourse to figure out the next opportunity to make things better? Yet, it’s true that dogs don’t have hobbies – they waste their time surplus every single day. I don’t think that Baxter, my wonder pup, feels badly about that.

I think he’s fairly unaware that he has a surplus, or that he is wasting it. But we as humans, once it’s pointed out to us, well, then it becomes incumbent on us to do something about it. There’s an organization in India and a few other countries called Water Health International. Water Health International shows up in a small village that does not have clean water. Now if there is no clean water in your village, you probably have to walk two hours a day just to get water. And once you get the water, it’s probably not that clean, which means that you and other people in your family are spending a lot of time being ill – not a lot of benefit to this. Someone comes up with the idea of filtering water. Someone comes up with the technology to do it inexpensively. Someone comes up with an organization, an institution, that can build out that technology at low-cost. And someone comes up with a business, where they can sell a jerrycan filled with this clean water for a just a few rupees.

Now, when this institution shows up in this village, more surplus is created. We used surplus to create the systems, and the systems create more surplus, because suddenly the people In that village don’t have to walk to get water. But even better, the kids in that village aren’t getting sick and neither are their parents. Which means that the next invention is going to come from them.

This surplus continues generation, after generation. Every person listening to this podcast has more resources than the last king of France did. More access to more leverage and more well-being then royalty did just a hundred years ago. What does that mean? It means that we can squander our surplus – burn it up, waste it, or we can invest it one more time. And once we see that we have the opportunity to invest surplus, it’s essential to do something worthwhile. Because the opportunity cost is huge. Surplus that isn’t invested is surplus wasted.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I truly love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button. We got two questions arriving within 20 hours of each other that are closely aligned. I’ll take them as a pair.

Question – Unknown Speaker:

My question to you is about a small viable audience. So I followed your advice last year, and rather than working and creating stories and content for everybody, you know every company on planet Earth, I decided to focus on Hoteliers. So I created a podcast for hotels. I created obviously everything – all my communication is targeting Hoteliers in Europe, well in London, where I’m based, in Europe. But the challenge that I find is that a lot of hotel – is maybe 85% of them – they don’t care about stories. They don’t want to create stories and I’m wondering is it me that can’t influence them, or is it they’re just not interested?

Question – Unknown Speaker:

They’re interested in, you know, direct bookings, how to increase sales, and who cares about content or who cares about meaningful stories of finding one purpose? So did I, my question to you is, did I choose the wrong audience or is it me – I am doing something wrong and not convincing them, influencing them, you know, to create stories because my intention is to gently help them. But you know, I go to meetings, to sales meetings and you know, I try to explain and show them an example of a great hotel that we work with and say, “look these are the results” and yet I struggle to convince them. So yeah, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. So yeah, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Thank you so much.

Exactly, you’re seeing the challenge of the smallest viable audience, which is not the part about it being small, but the part about it being viable. Small is fine if it’s working, but what it means to have a smallest viable audience is that you are eagerly and generously saying to many people, “It’s not for you”.

If you have the best pizza place, in this little neighborhood in Akron, Ohio, it is not for people in Cleveland. It is not for people in Milan. It is for people in this neighborhood. Well, that’s obvious – people aren’t going to fly from Milan to have a piece of pizza in your little pizza place in Akron. But when we make something on the Internet, when we write something, when we put an idea in the world, it’s really easy to get feedback from people who say, “Well, that’s not for me”. And what we have to do is have the guts to say, “You’re right, here is some other alternatives – our competitors, our peers – they’ve made this instead. Go try that” But for our people, this, this is special. This matters.

So if you are finding that no one is in your smallest viable audience, that you have no true fans, that nobody is willing to cross the street for what you’re doing and you’re making, you need to make something better. You can’t use the excuse of, “people don’t get it” because it’s fine that most people don’t get the joke, but someone needs to. So the hard work begins by saying to the people it’s not for, “Sorry, it’s not for you”. But it continues, because the benefit of that choice is there are some people who are going to say, “Wow, this is exactly what I was hoping for.” That’s what we to focus on. That is what gives us the freedom to do our work.

Question – Evan From Portland, Oregon:

Hi Seth, this is Evan from Portland, Oregon. I’m struggling with leadership and my job right now. I’m not sure if as a good leader, do I need to be able to lead anyone and everyone, or does a good leader first select the people that he believes have the right qualities, and then continues to gain their trust.

Question – Evan From Portland, Oregon:

In other words, am I failing is a leader if I cannot gain the trust of a team member, or maybe we are not just right for each other? Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from you so thanks for all you’re doing.

So following up on the previous question, it’s about enrollment. If the people you seek to lead don’t want to go where you are going, then they are not people you can lead. It is very, very rare that you can be a leader for everyone, because to be a leader means to make change. It means that you are going somewhere.

Everyone rarely wants to go somewhere. So the most important first step in leadership, after you figure out where to go, is “Who wants to come with me?” How do I earn enrollment? And yes, if you are in an organization, people might not be enrolled. One of the reasons why traditional organizations usually falter when technology or something else changes the landscape, is because the people who went to that organization didn’t sign up to be part of a rapidly changing thing.

They signed up for a sinecure. They signed up for something that felt safe. And so 20 plus years ago, I spoke to the Newspaper Publishers of America, and I described a future of how the media landscape would change. In many ways, I was correct, but it doesn’t matter that they heard me, because they weren’t listening. They weren’t listening because they didn’t go into the newspaper business, so they could turn the newspaper into something else.

They went into the newspaper business, because they wanted to be in the newspaper business. And that’s our challenge when we seek to lead. Our challenge is to find people who will voluntarily enroll in following us. And the way we can make that happen is by being really clear about where we’re going and why we’re going there.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 6310-difficult-conversations- <==

Do you have a second? We need a second to talk. This might not be easy, but let’s sit down for a second.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

There are tons of books on difficult conversations. People spend weeks, months, years avoiding them. Difficult conversations get our culture stuck, or actually the fear of difficult conversations. And so, we keep a bully on our payroll because we don’t want to have a difficult conversation with them. So we avoid talking about a living will, or the changes in our climate, because we don’t want to have a difficult conversation.

What makes it a difficult conversation anyway? I think most people would agree that if there is a fire in your house and everyone’s asleep, it is not a difficult conversation to run around, waking everybody up to get the hell out of the house. So what makes something difficult? I want to argue that a difficult conversation is difficult because we want two things, not one thing. If all we want is one thing, “everyone get up and get out of the house,” it’s not difficult because it’s direct. It is obvious what we should do.

It’s only difficult if we want two things. We want someone to change, and we want them to like it. We want someone to stop doing something, and we want them to not be mad at us. We want someone to change their behavior and we still want them to be our friend.

We want an employee to change his or her output, but we also want them to continue to like and respect us. When there are two things we’re trying to do, the whole conversation gets a lot more difficult because we magnify the impact of one or the other – whichever one is harder. And so we avoid it altogether.

Let’s break this into several pieces. The first one is this: If we are having a conversation where we have authority and we don’t care what the other person thinks of us when we exercise the authority, it is not a difficult conversation. So, when the TSA person says to you “You’re in the wrong line, you have to stand over here,” that person has authority to have confidence in their job security. They are not viewing this as a difficult conversation.

But if either of these two things aren’t true, that’s what it becomes a difficult conversation. Either you don’t believe, or you don’t have authority, or you do care what they think. The just way to move forward then, is to either remind yourself that you have authority, or figure out how to gain authority, or possibly not care about what they think. Because it is so important. Because the house is on fire. Because the mission is in jeopardy – that it’s okay to be direct and to simply have the important conversation without a lot of concern about the other side. But most of the time, we’re stuck.

We’re stuck because we want them to change and to like it. And for that reason, I think it’s important to talk about enrollment. Enrollment says, “I have voluntarily signed up to go on this journey. I want to go where we are going”. Enrollment means that the person you are talking to wants you to tell them the best way to get to where you are going.

So to pick a very literal example, if you are part of a journey for people going by dog sled to the North Pole and you’ve done the math and figured out that you don’t have enough rations to make it all the way there with all four of you, well, then you can have a conversation. And the conversation begins like this:

“We are all enrolled in going to the North Pole. All four of us are here for a very specific reason to go to the North Poll. All four of us cannot go – we do not have enough food. Therefore, one of us is going to need to stay in this village and not join us. I have decided Bob is going to stay here, and this is why”. Bob doesn’t have to like the fact that you chose him.

But Bob, if he is enrolled in the idea of a journey to the North Pole on behalf of everyone, can hear that and then you can use your authority to make it clear that you have made a decision. So if you have an employee who is enrolled in the success of the Enterprise, it is completely different than having a conversation with that employee, if they are simply enrolled in their own success. So the best way to move past a difficult conversation is to spend far more time on enrollment. What does it mean to be a citizen?

What does it mean to be a team member? What does it mean to be an active part of a relationship or a family? Well, maybe what it means is that we are enrolled in a journey for all of us. Now, you can’t just do this when you need a compromise or a contribution. You have to do it when you have resources to share, as well. That the Three Musketeers were the Three Musketeers, because of the “one for all, and all for one” part. And they lived it in the good times and the bad times. Too often in an industrialized culture, that’s not the way it works in an industrialized culture.

The boss, is the boss taking everything that they can, giving the workers as little as possible. And so the deal is really clear. The workers have been trained to give as little as possible, because if they give more the boss is just going to take more. This one-sided interaction doesn’t work when you hit a speed bump, because when the employees are asked to contribute of their own free will without authority requiring it, they don’t because for all those years you weren’t mutually enrolled in going someplace together.

And so the way we change our culture is by earning trust and enrollment first. Once we have trust and enrollment, then difficult conversations become a lot less difficult. The coach for the bicycling team can say to one of the riders, “You are enrolled in this journey of winning the race. I notice that you’re not activating your hips when you’re riding. If you activate your hips when you’re riding, you will go faster”.

It’s not personal. It’s not a difficult conversation, because they both want to go faster. They are enrolled in a journey. That’s different than “You’re stupid and you’re ugly too,” because nothing can be done about that. That is personal. That is hurtful and it’s not based on mutual enrollment in where we’re going.

So to summarize this, if you have authority and it is important to you to get where you are going and you’ve already exhausted all of the mutually beneficial ways to go forward, then the only way to go forward is to not make it a difficult conversation, but to make it a direct one, No, there isn’t enough here for all of us, you’re not going to be able to join us.

No, we’ve intervened several times to change your behavior, it hasn’t worked. You can’t stay here. That when we can offer a respectful ultimatum to one of the people that we work with, for example, “Hey, John, you’re yelling. You’re yelling at people. It’s not okay to yell at people in this office. If you yell at people in this office again, you’re going to have to leave. You can’t stay here, if you’re going to be the person who yells it folks. And there’s a line in the sand, and I’m not prepared to have you cross it”. That’s not a difficult conversation, because it is based on a clear, mutually understood standard for what it’s like around here.

It’s based on enrollment by each party in getting to the place where we can build a place where we can work together that makes us both happy. It stopped being a difficult conversation, because I didn’t care whether John was going to be happy with me or not when I said it. Because I didn’t want to work in a place where someone yelled at other people. And then the second option. And the second option is when you have the chance to invest in enrollment – to live and be very clear about the fact that we’re on a journey together. That when you can contribute, you contribute. And when you need people on the other side to contribute, they will contribute because the goal is the point. But you can’t have it both ways.

You can’t require people to be enrolled in a journey with you, if you’re not prepared to be enrolled in a journey with them. Difficult conversations are important. The best way to have them is to get rid of them and just make them direct conversations instead.

Hope that resonates. We’ll see you next time.

Thank you to all of our regular listeners, and for those who are just stopping by, we we love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode, I hope you’ll visit akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the appropriate button.

Question – Edward Guest From Pasadena, California:

Hi Seth, my name is Edward Guest and I’m an independent filmmaker in Pasadena, California. I have a question about your episode, Why is TV So Bad? Because unlike a Kindle book, there’s a huge production cost in creating even the simplest television show, even if there are many more means distribution than they used to be. Game of Thrones, which you mentioned, cost millions of dollars. So how can we sustainably create risk-taking television if you aren’t a network like HBO? Thanks for everything you do, appreciate it.

This is a great question and something that we have been touching on over and over again inside of this podcast, which is that there is a direct relationship between several factors. The first one is, “How open is a channel, a media channel, to new voices? So new voices had very little chance to get a sitcom on CBS.

There was only room for 15 or 20 sitcoms a week, at the most, and you had to know people who knew people who got you there, and just a few people got picked. But once you got picked, you had tons of resources at your disposal. Compare this to the long tail of being able to have a podcast, or being able to post a blog post, or even put music in the iTunes Store. Because just about anyone can do it, many people do choose to do it, which means that the amount of attention and thus money available to go around is much, much smaller per creator.

There’s still a short head. There’s still some hits. There’s still plenty of people who are making plenty of money, but the vast majority of people will make close to nothing. And what that means is that, inevitably, the amount of money that gets spent, on average, producing the thing that we are consuming has to go down. The only way we can have millions and millions of YouTube videos is that it doesn’t cost anything to make a YouTube video. If it cost 10 million dollars, there would be hardly any of them. And so we get to your question about television. Because as television has shifted to more and more places for people to create stuff, the amount of money that has been spent on the typical TV show has also gone way up. And what that means is that the long tail is going to have a challenge. You can’t keep making more and more expensive TV and have it be something that you can pay for.

So Amazon and Netflix have paid for it with stockholder money. They’ve paid for it because they have found that as they increase market share their stock price goes up. When their stock price goes up to have more resources to use to make TV shows that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. HBO has had a flow of money coming from cable subscribers from around the country for decades. Again, a flow of money.

But as we see people cutting the cord, as we see Disney and Quibi, and others showing up saying, “We’d also like you to subscribe,” the pie can’t keep getting bigger. So I expect two things to happen. One, there’ll be a really large boom in lower cost, but still really good, television that gets created. Because as you head out on the long tail, there’s much more demand for shows that some people are going to watch, not lots of people, some people, and shows that don’t cost as much as a first-rate shows, like Game of Thrones.

And the second thing that’s going to happen is there will be a shake out. And that shake out has to happen because people have been spending money speculatively, which producers are good at accepting, but it doesn’t scale. It doesn’t persist. That there will come a time in the near future where there will be just a few players in the subscription business. And they will realize that money not spent on producing more and more TV will be money that goes to the bottom line. And the public markets will push them to do just that.

Question – Andy From San Francisco:

Hi Seth is Andy calling in from San Francisco. Thanks for your work. Quick question on style.

Question – Andy From San Francisco:

I’m curious, I notice a lot of your sentences start with the word “that,” like disproportionately many. Sometimes they’re not attached to other sentences and they’re little fragments.

Question – Andy From San Francisco:

I like the way you speak, I like the way you write. Your list, kind of structural format of different punctuated clauses, I think creates a lot of emphasis on the ideas you want to convey and it’s very concise. But I’ve noticed your style has evolved over time. Permission Marketing was written in a little different way than This Is Marketing, for example. And I’m curious if you could share, I guess what are the milestones or shifts that you’ve had in your career as you’ve developed as a writer and a speaker. And, I guess as people who are starting out, I recently published a blog post and a lot of people have complimented me on my style, which largely emulates yours, but I wrote for a different audience. And somebody said, “Hey, these are not complete sentences, please fix,” kind of, in the New York Times style of “make sure every acronym has a punctuation mark” So I’m just curious on your thoughts about all this and what your journey has been like, thanks.

Thanks for this question. I hadn’t noticed the word “that” but now that you say it I hear it in my own voice. I had a real problem back in the day. I used the word “just” all the time. I used it as a place holder, not simply when I was talking – notice, I didn’t say “just” – but also, when I was writing. But I think I used the word “that” because I’m making an argument.

I write the way I talk, and I talk to figure things out. And so, what I am saying – so is another word like that – so what I’m saying is, if this is true and this is true then, that must be true and that’s a verbal tick of writing tick. Now I have to look for it as I work on my next project. That said, what I decided a long time ago to do was not try to sound like other people. When I was a book packager, that’s what I did for a living.

You can’t tell which books I wrote, which books my Freelancers wrote, which books the person who ostensibly wrote the book wrote, because that was our job. But after I chose to do the blog, to do Permission Marketing, to do the other books, I made the intentional decision to say, “If you don’t like the way this sounds, there are many other books for you. But I want to sound like me, I have something to say. I have a way I’d like to say it”.

I would like to bring rigor to that. I would like to edit that to make it sound even more like me, something with intent not lazy. But, honing that through 7,500 blog posts has made it so that I can tell when I sound like me. And now when someone sends me a blog post that I wrote five or six years ago, I don’t remember writing it. But I can tell if I wrote it, because it sounds like me. And so that’s the work: A) choosing to sound like you, and B) having the wherewithal to say to someone who doesn’t like the way you sound.

“Okay, thanks. Thanks for the feedback. But I’m not going to change the way I sound”. But you can only get away with that if there are some people who want to hear your voice the way you want to deliver it. Thanks again for your questions. Here’s to health and peace of mind to everyone. We’ll see you next time.

==> 6511-season-7-opener- <==

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than 100 episodes of Akimbo. They’re all available, they’re all free. I hope you’ll go check out the back list.

Here’s an interview I did with Scott Omelianuk, the Editor-In-Chief of Inc., that aired in May of 2020.

I hope you enjoy it.

Scott Omelianuk:

Hi everyone, I’m Scott Omelianuk – Scott O. – the Editor-In-Chief of Inc. and I’m very pleased today to have Seth Godin with us for the Inc. Real Talk series. Seth Godin, welcome to Inc. Real Talk.

We appreciate you joining us.

So thrilling to watch all of these participants coming in from around the world. People stayed up to the middle of the night – people from Chicago, New Jersey, Singapore, and it’s good to see you as well, Scott. I hope you’re holding up okay.

Scott Omelianuk:

Thanks, Seth. Yeah, I’m doing fine, and you?

Yes, all good.

Scott Omelianuk:

That’s great. So today, we’re going to share some things on marketing, on brand building, on business – how to identify your most viable audience, which we talked about. What it takes to really make a difference with your work, to do work that matters, and why you can’t be seen until you learn to see which I’m really intrigued about. Some of the things, but not all of the things, I presume, that help build a good brand.

Yeah, I mean, I think that brand is largely misunderstood, brand is not logo, brand is the promise that each of us make. And either you have a brand, because people know what to expect from you, or you are ignored. And it doesn’t matter if you’re an individual, if you’re running a company with million employees or anything in between, everybody is judged – judged or ignored. And so we get a choice, particularly a small business people, to show up in a way that we can be proud of.

Scott Omelianuk:

And that is more difficult or less difficult at a time like this, right? So, I think we’ll get to that in a minute, but you know, obviously we’re in the middle of a global pandemic – we can’t ignore that. I hear you discuss that on Akimbo quite a bit, wishing people be safe. And it’s a big scary thing, done untold damage to lives and the economy. I think there’s a perception when events like this happen, basically. When, basically, we lose the narrative – the safe story we all buy into as a person, a family, a community, as a society.

Scott Omelianuk:

It creates this vast and unpredictable change. And obviously it does create change and human toll and the economy, but it also seems, like, events like this actually just allow for the faster percolation of ideas that were – and trends – that were already out there in the world.

Yeah, so we’re in the middle of a tragedy and it’s a tragedy that’s unevenly distributed, but it is widely experienced. And sometimes when people introduce me, they mention that I’ve started in a couple businesses. I’ve started dozens and dozens, and dozens of businesses and almost all of them failed. And every single one of them got squeezed along the way – squeezed by cash flow issues, or customer traction issues, or whatever was going on in the world.

And one of the biggest differences that we are experiencing right now is that it everyone is getting squeezed in the same way. That we are all feeling it at the same time. So, small business people are no stranger to things not working the way we expect, but when it’s everyone at the same time, it’s easy to get paralyzed and it’s hard to find a place where you can go to get back to where you want to go. But small businesses have this huge, huge advantage, which is that we are right down the street from the people we serve. That we don’t have to have a meeting to decide what to do. That we don’t have to do a survey or a study. That we can actually get back to the core of why we’re here in the first place, which is to serve people to make things better, by making better things.

So, nobody wished for this to happen and this is, on average – way on average, a bad thing for almost all of us. But it’s here and it’s a slog, and so the question is, “What will we do with it, and what will we be like on the other end of the slog?” Because slogs always have another side, and won’t be back to normal when we get to the other side – it will be a new thing.

But when we write the history of what you and your organization did the question is, “What will that history say?”Because we get to decide that today, tomorrow, or the next day.

Scott Omelianuk:

And given that, I understand how that applies to Inc., right? I think at Inc. we’ve been very fortunate that we already have a business that has a significant purpose, and that is to serve the entrepreneurial community. And were able to do that now in ways we’ve never had to before, and that’s a proud moment – it’s an honor moment for us to do that, right? But what about other businesses that maybe provide more mundane things that are less, you know, less needed every day, but the ‘nice to have’. How do these businesses…what if you’re a commodity, right? How do you treat yourself differently? And I know we all don’t want to be commodities, but the fact is someone has to make the cardboard boxes, right? Someone has to make nails.

Scott Omelianuk:

How do we apply what you’re talking about to that?

Yeah, so this is a great place to start. Tom Peters taught me that if you make a commodity, that was your choice. Commodity is a choice.

There are people who make cardboard boxes that are better cardboard boxes, and the people who need a better cardboard boxes buy their box and pay extra for it. Better might mean ‘more durable,’ might mean ‘more sizes and easier supply,’ it might mean ‘easier to recycle or less impact on the environment’. Nobody said you had how to be in a race to the bottom. And the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. Or even worse, come in second.

And that’s the choice. It’s a choice made by someone who’s run out of other ideas. Low price is the last refuge for the incompetent marketer. That’s not the way you’re going to be able to do the work you seek to do. So if you make something that people neither need nor want, you should make something else. And it doesn’t matter that you have sunk costs.

It doesn’t matter that you have a fancy machine. Whether you pay attention to that machine or not, you’re still busy making something people don’t want. And so, that doesn’t mean we need to make an emergency, knee-jerk decision. But it does mean we need to get back to the first idea – the reason we started something. You don’t get to say, “Hey, I worked really hard on this, please don’t buy from my competitors, even though my competitors offer free Prime overnight shipping and charge less, and offer better customer support, because it matters to me to buy for me.”

No one will listen to you. You wouldn’t even listen to you. The only way to do work as a small business who isn’t a monopoly, is to say, “If you’re the kind of person who wants what I make, I have what I make and nobody else does.” And that gets back to the idea the smallest viable audience. So you mentioned the book, This Is Marketing, and I’m thrilled that it’s one of my best selling books.

And what that means is that fewer than one out of three hundred people in the United States bought one. Fewer than one in three hundred – my smallest viable audience, to write the best selling marketing book of the decade is point two percent. So that’s enough. you don’t need more than that. You just need to matter to a few people.

Scott Omelianuk:

So in many respects, and by the way, I am one of those…I can’t do the percentage again, but I’m one of those.

One of the assumptions than is you really should be recalibrating assumptions that the biggest numbers, the most audience, the most dollars really isn’t important. So you’re asking us to think of a very different manner of success than we’ve ever thought about before. Or maybe only thought about in bits and starts, along the course of human history. Or in, you know, a commune somewhere or something like that, right? You’re talking about a different kind of capitalist.

Well, it’s interesting because I’ve been reading Inc. since the very first issue. And the heroes of Inc. Magazine are never people who started an obvious business and built it to enormous scale. It is always someone who started something, and their mother-in-law said was a stupid idea, who made it for a few people and then made it spread. That if you think about a podcast, every single podcast that has ever launched has launched with fewer than a hundred listeners.

How could it not? It’s only after those hundred people tell other people, that it starts to spread. And so what we get to do is say, “I am here to help. Who is enrolled in where I would like to go, needs what I do, and will pay money to have this problem solved?” Now, in this moment, fewer people are paying less money for almost anything, but that doesn’t mean no one is.

I was talking to a small business owner in Ohio. He runs a business, called Chef’s Table. Chef’s Table made in living for years and years, selling 7,000 different kinds of fruits and vegetables to fancy restaurants. Like, if you want purple basil, that’s this big, they would grow you a little tiny plot of it. And he told me that last week, they got more orders in a single day than any day since they opened the business. Not one from a Chef. Because what they said is, “There’s a whole bunch of people who are used to paying X number of dollars in restaurant and they’re going to pay half that to cook themselves dinner tonight. I’ll ship it directly to them.” Is the business better than ever? No way!

No way, because his margins are much smaller. But he just discovered with a pivot that there are people who want something that he can bring them. Whether or not that’s a viable business going forward, is unknown, right.

The real question I’m asking people is, “If you got out your own head about where you are, your stuckness, your need, your…the burning of having to payback whatever bills you have to pay, and said instead, “Who is it that I can help today? What story can I tell to people who trust me?” Then you can go solve a problem. Now, if you don’t have trust, then you’re going to be inclined to go race for attention.

And the problem with racing for attention is that sort of like spamming people. Social Media loves it when people race for attention, because that’s how they make a living. Hit the boost button. They make a living tricking you into thinking that ‘Like’ means someone likes you. and that ‘Friend’ means someone is your friend – they’re not.

That these intermediaries want you to race around trying to scam, and hustle and hype attention, when in fact we need to spend more time saying, “Who exactly am I here for, and how can I do something for them that they would miss if I didn’t do it?”

Scott Omelianuk:

This can be in your existing audience. It doesn’t have to be a brand new audience of people that you’re doing this for.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Scott Omelianuk:

Or with your existing capabilities and a new audience. I mean, it can be one for the other… so, I guess what I’m trying to get at is, there are a lot of people right now who are faced with some pretty harsh business realities, right? It’s scary to them and they’re wondering, “How can I think long-term, when I have to think ‘next week’. How can I think about making profit one day, when I can’t pay the rent Friday?”

Exactly.

Scott Omelianuk:

You know, for those people there’s a little lesson in there, perhaps.

Well, yeah, I mean, I forgot my magic wand at home, so I can’t waive it and solve this short-term problem. But, the answer to the short-term problem is not to invent a long term that is a series of emergencies. Because that is a race to the bottom, that is how you will get in trouble. That when, for example, the dot com bubble burst and I was running a dot com company shortly before, what we saw was that companies that took a deep breath and did something different that wasn’t a short-term hustle, ended up becoming companies like Google. Whereas companies like Yahoo!, they kept looking for one short term thing after another to boost their stock price, are gone.

And at the time, when I was a VP a Yahoo!, Yahoo! was the internet. They had everything and they blew it, because they kept thinking about, “How do we work this week?” So I feel your pain. I have had years when I made payroll within a day, every month for month after month. It’s really hard. It might be you have to walk away from some things you built. And it might be you have to walk away from some assets you treasure. But going forward, the question is, “Who in the community you seek to serve” is the calm person, the generous person, the person who’s standing up and leading. Because generous doesn’t mean giving it away for free. Generous means seeing people, seeing where they are, seeing what they need, seeing what they understand and what they’re dreaming of. Because if you can see other people, you are giving them something precious. And often, if you’ve picked the right industry, they’ll happily pay you for more of it.

Scott Omelianuk:

I think I want to get get back to seeing in a minute…one of the things that I think we tend to forget about in crisis is that any entrepreneur who got to a certain level, any small business that got to a certain level, the people who are here listening to you today, got to where they were because they had an idea – they were resourceful.

Scott Omelianuk:

They were resilient. They knew how to overcome obstruction and roadblocking. And unforeseen circumstance, might be a faster version of the slow motion version of that they lived through building their business, but those still those skills may still apply, going forward. They’ve got something in the reservoir.

Right, but skills are different than tactics. And, you know, I used to be one of the preeminent book packagers in the country, but then book packaging sort of went away, because the internet showed up. And I used to be one of the leaders in making CD-ROMs, but then no one bought CD-ROMs. And then I figured out how to do email marketing, but then lots of people started doing…I mean that’s the Schumpter’s Creative Destruction – that capitalism will always show up to commoditize whatever insight you used to have. But that doesn’t change your reputation.

It doesn’t change your posture. And it’s our reputation and our posture that open the door for us to do the next thing. So sunk costs are such an important concept – it’s the one of the, like, three things you learn in business school that are actually worth remembering. Sunk costs are the money, the effort, the blood, and sweat and the tears you spent yesterday to hand yourself a gift for today.

If you want to Law School 10 years ago, that’s a sunk cost. You can un-go to Law School. You have a law degree now. Okay, great. Do you want it? Because you don’t have to accept the gift, if you don’t want it. If you hate being a lawyer, being a lawyer isn’t helping you. Say to your old self, “Thanks for the gift. No, thanks. Don’t need it.” That all that stuff you did yesterday, or last week, or a year ago – fantastic. Thrilled that you were able to do it. It made your skills better.

But if we don’t want those tactics, if we don’t need those tactics, we need to take a deep breath as small business people, because we are not moving chips around on the table like Goldman Sachs. We’re actually here to serve people. And so we have to dig in and start over. You know, I’ll talk about education for one minute, because even though that’s not a small business, mostly, they’re in really big trouble. Because for the last 10 years, they’ve been poo-pooing Online Education, saying it’s not as good as the real thing. And now they’re saying to other people who they’re charging full price to, “Oh, by the way, it’s going to be online, but now it’s going to be good.”

And then as soon as the pandemic passes and the vaccine is here, they’re going to say, “Oh we were just kidding.” And they’re going to drag you back into the classroom. So when I started building Akimbo – these workshops we run – I said, “Well, I’m going to throwout every single one of those things that Harvard depends on. Every one of those tropes and structures, and assets that Yale has been building for hundreds of years.”

I wasn’t going to start over. Well, I’m certainly not just going to pump a lecture in to Zoom, because that’s just using the internet backwards. I say, “Well, guess what? Connecting people to one another is what we’ve always wanted, but we couldn’t do in New Haven, or we couldn’t do in Cambridge. What if we could Create a way for 2,300 entrepreneurs to connect with each other, not just you and me.” And so that thinking is something you’ve already practiced as a small business person. You’ve done it at least once – that’s how you beat the big guys last time. And that’s what we have to do this time and say, “All right, there’s a slog going on. Friday’s payroll is going to be really, really hard.

I’m not going to sacrifice trust to make it. Instead, I’m going to say who around me needs to be connected? Who around me needs me to solve a problem? Who around me has resources to spend, if the problem really goes away?” If I can go do those things, that’s a good way to spend my time.

Scott Omelianuk:

Does this suggest that, you know, we talk a lot about tempo and the tempo of business speeding up, the timing business speeding up – clearly a crisis does that. But does this suggest to you at all that we need to get used to, as business people, the idea that will be constantly iterative from now on. That we’ll always be not the person or business we were two years ago.

What people don’t remember is 1977, where you would mail someone a letter and wait a week and a half for them to write back, right? People don’t remember 14 years ago When GeoCities was the cutting edge of how you would present yourself online. That you build a business around the SEO in Google of winning for hardware store, and suddenly you stop winning. And you stop winning in one day, and Google won’t talk to you – and on, and on, and on. It keeps…it’s been getting faster my whole life. And attachment is the enemy – attachment to an outcome, attachment to a future we haven’t experienced yet.

Nostalgia in reverse. Having this nostalgia for what 2021 is supposed to be like – that’s just a recipe for pain. Because 2021 doesn’t care about what you were hoping for. 2021 is going to come whether you want it to, or not. And so since we know that, and since we know we are against up against organizations that have hundreds of millions of dollars in public assets, or organizations that have hundreds of people – salespeople, etcetera – who are willing to go to war to maintain the past, the only way forward if you’re an entrepreneur who wants to build something better is to get out on the side of change, not to fight against change.

Because change is the enemy of the giant company – it’s your friend. Because change reshuffles the deck. And so if the hand you got dealt isn’t the hand that you want, just ask for a new shuffle and start over. And I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, and my late dad had a factory in Buffalo, New York that my sister still runs. My mom ran an independent bookstore in Buffalo, and I watched growing up what happens when you decide to be light on your feet, and to use a posture of generosity, as opposed to a posture of entitlement when you show up as an entrepreneur. Anyway, I’m ranting, sorry. I’ll try rant less.

Scott Omelianuk:

No, no, absolutely not.

One other thing I understand about your Buffalo past, by the way – total side note, is that your you were a hockey player?

Against my wishes.

Scott Omelianuk:

I would’ve never guessed.

Yeah, well if you look at my nose, you can guess. It doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to go. You know, my dad came to me when I was 10. He said, “You’re a nerd, and we don’t have to worry about whether you’re going to do okay in school, but you’re going to have to play a sport.” And I was like, “Does bowling count?” And thing is they didn’t really have Little League baseball, because it’s Buffalo, so I played hockey. Broke my nose, broke my arm, broke my spirit. And when I was 15, my dad said I could become a coach instead.

That was such a transformation. I was a great hockey coach at the age of 16. All the other coaches were dads, and I discovered that if I wasn’t worried about people knocking me into the boards, I could actually skate and shoot pretty well. And so I’ve tried to create a business as a small business person, where I don’t compete in markets where people are going to break your nose or break your arm.

Scott Omelianuk:

Was that experience coaching – is that how, against a backdrop of a family of entrepreneurs how you became who you are today? Little Seth growing into big Seth.

Yeah, I mean, I’m a teacher. I’m only become an entrepreneur because I have to pay the bills, but I’m a teacher. And this idea of showing up and turning on lights for people, that’s what I’ve been seeking to do my entire career. And if I can do it by packaging a book or doing it by making a piece of software, that’s great. But mostly, what I have discovered is the generative power.

And Inc. Magazine does the same thing, right? Like, one good issue of Inc. doesn’t just change the 10,000 subscribers who studied that article. It changes the hundred thousand people those 10,000 people talked to, and on, and on, and on. And culture is the engine of our future.

Scott Omelianuk:

And one good live stream with the right guest does the same, I think.

Scott Omelianuk:

I think the the nose gives you a matter of authenticity, which actually is something I want to talk about. I think obviously authenticity matters to this equation you’re trying to build, but we live in a world I think with two problems, at least right now. One is as important as authenticity might be, it’s never been easier to fake, right? And not just as a person, but with Bots and things like that. But at the same time, we’re in this place because of the COVID crisis, where every Marketer on Earth is telling brands that now’s the time to reassure your customer, tell your prospects you’re there for them, that you’re going to stand up for them in trying times. This comes from a question, actually from a man, named Joe McCambly. He wants to know, like, given that – how do you actually appear authentic when the device is the same advice everyone else is giving?

Okay, so I got started with a small rant. Authenticity is a crock, authenticity is overrated, authenticity is a trap. Because the last time you were authentic, you were three months old, lying in diapers with poop in them, crying. Ever since then, you have done things with intent. You have done things on purpose. You wake up in the morning, you don’t feel like going to work, you go to work. That if we hire a professional to do surgery on our knee or paint our house, we don’t want them to show up and say, “I had a fight with my spouse, I’m going to do a lousy job today.” That would be authentic. It’s not what we want.

No, no. Please fake being the best surgeon in the world today, because that’s what I hired and that’s what I need. What people actually want from you is consistency, and the easiest way to be consistent is to do something that comes naturally to you. But you still…no one cares enough about you for you to be authentic, unless you’re, you know, one of those Instagram influencers who get points for putting on drama, right?

For the rest of us, if you go to see Hamilton on Broadway when it reopens, you’re certainly hoping that no one in the Cast will be authentic. You want every person in the Cast to give the best possible performance. So, yes, we’ve seen all those companies that had too much ad money to spend running exactly the same COVID ad. And if you haven’t seen that video, it’s hysterical – same phrases, same typeface, same cutaways – that’s just noise, forget about that. What it means to be consistent and have empathy in a time of crisis is to allow your people to be human, and human doesn’t mean that they are authentically sharing whatever is on their mind. It means that they are willing to be generous enough to see people. So my example, I am no fan of Verizon. I think Verizon is one of the worst companies in America, and no one uses them because they want to – you use them because you have to. And I had to fix the internet for somebody and I dreaded the fact that, after doing all my stuff – because I know a little bit about this – I couldn’t do it.

So I called the number, dreading the whole thing, and I get in the phone tree and someone answers the phone. It’s Sunday night at five o’clock, and I’m ready for the hour of them abusing me and pretending…and the person on the other end says, “Let’s just talk this through.” And for the next nine minutes, he acted like a person and he engaged with me like I was a person. And in nine minutes, we solved the problem. And the beauty of this is that it took less time than it would have taken if he had act like a cog in a system. And I think what happened in that setting is he realized two things:

One, his boss was too busy to monitor every call. And two, why the hell not show up like a human. That – you can call that authenticity, if you want. What I heard there was humanity, was a person acting like a person. And so, it can be more efficient, it can be more profitable, but we’re asking for when we are feeling disrupted is simply to be seen. And a slogan doesn’t make us seen, and soft music doesn’t make us seen… feel seen. What makes this feel seen is that someone extended themselves. So if you have an organization, it feels to me like the opportunity is to say to your people, “We stand for something. We have a commitment, we have to be consistent. But within those boundaries, please show up as people.” Because now more than ever, the industrial setting is not what people want.

They don’t want an industrial solution to an industrial problem. They want to be seen and heard, and once again, that’s the magic of small business.

Scott Omelianuk:

It strikes me that the dynamic of being a business owner has actually changed quite a bit and, sort of, has this echo in my mind of a caretaker. And we know that there’s leadership service now, that people who run businesses are supposed to have toward their teams…you’re having a similar experience toward your consumer.

Scott Omelianuk:

In the caretaking world, if you’ve ever cared for an ill spouse or parent or child, or something, you know, there’s a whole lot of psychology that goes along with making sure your you’re well on the other side of this. This is a thing that we don’t talk about it all in business, but it actually feels like a much, much greater burden that a business founder has to bear.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s going to be real PTSD from this experience for a lot of people. Health, for sure. People who cared for somebody. People who work themselves up into a frenzy, because they want the world to be a certain way and it’s not. And then something very special happens, if you are human and you hire other people. Because it’s super easy to say everyone takes their own risks, and everyone takes their own chances and they’re on their own.

But if you’re like most of the entrepreneurs I know, that’s not the way you treat it. You treated it really seriously. You count on people, and people count on you. And I think the most productive thing we can do is forgive ourselves, and say there’s a difference between doing the best you can and saving everything. Because saving everything only happens in the movies. Doing your best to count is up to you.

If you can do the best you can, then you ought to accept whatever comes from that. And I think you will find that the who will work for you, understand that – particularly if you have a history of telling the truth and you’re serious about what it means to do the best you can. Like, if you take your PPP money and join a country club, that’s not doing the best you can. But doing the best you can – and Simon Sinek has written about this so beautifully – involves understanding the level of commitment that you have made to your people and to the people that you serve. And what we need is resilience – the resilience to have the flexibility to be here tomorrow. And that probably means you can’t be exactly like you were last week.

It probably means that you can’t own all of those branches of your taco shop in Boston – some of them are going to have to close, so that other ones can persist into the future. And none of it’s easy. But if this was easy, everyone would be doing it, right? Like, the placement office in college, there isn’t the line for entrepreneurship.

There’s a line for, “Can I get a job at a famous company” because that’s easy, this is hard.

Scott Omelianuk:

I teach a class in Entrepreneurship, and about 40 students and 38 of them go to work as Consultants at big companies when they graduate. But what you’re talking about requires a lot of maturity, right? And someone in the audience, Hupa Cush, asked this question – young person in the startup arena – saying:

Scott Omelianuk:

“Doing work that matters, having some of the points of view you’ve just articulated against what we believe to be sort of the you know, the public perception of who a young startup person is, or a founder is.” Actually, maybe those folks aren’t as well equipped as we think they are to actually find what matters. Do you have to live a little bit more of life to have that view and that success?

So the media – and Inc. is not the prime offender, but every once in a while is seduced by this – loves to tell the Silicon Valley story. And I have spent a lot of time with many of those people. I sort of was one of those people for a while, and they’re afraid. And one of the things that they’re afraid of is that they don’t…that they’re going to get caught for not really knowing. That if you have a detailed marketing conversation with the most senior people at Google, Facebook – all of them – they don’t know. They just got lucky.

They just got lucky, in one respect or two respects and software lets them scale to a billion, right? And there are much smarter marketers in, you know, the the local steel mill than there are in Silicon Valley, but they had software as the wind at their back. And so it’s easy to try say, “Well the way I’m going to model becoming Apple is I’m going to become a jerk, like Steve Jobs was.” But Steve Jobs wasn’t successful because he was a jerk, he was successful and he was a jerk – they weren’t related.

And so what we have is the chance to say that capitalism gives us the leverage. Capitalism is a lever that lets us find a group of people and bring resources to them to solve a problem. But the best way to do this work that matters is with practical empathy. Realizing the people you serve aren’t you. They don’t know what you want, they don’t need what you need, they don’t believe what you believe – and that’s okay. But you’ve got to go to the, “And that’s okay” part before you can actually serve them. And so the obligation and the challenge is picking your audience and being willing to dismiss everybody else.

So, if you’re a stand-up comic and your agent booked to do a gig and you bomb, and then you find out it’s because everyone in the audience only spoke Italian, it’s not your fault – you were just in the wrong room.

And too often, small business people think they’re just like big businesses but smaller – not true. We’re just more specific. We get the privilege of picking who exactly are we seeking to serve.

So, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there’s an eyeglass store – that’s where these came from. And lots and lots of people need eyeglasses, but almost nobody needs eyeglasses from Fabulous Frannie’s, because to go there is not like going to a normal eyeglass store. The eyeglasses are different, they fit different, the pricing is different, the service is a bit different – all of it is different. And they can tell like that, if the wrong person walks in. And the wrong person walks in, they don’t pretend there’s no other place in Manhattan to buy eye glasses. They say, “There’s a place over there, and a place over there, a place over there…good luck to you.”

But if the right person walks in, their eyes light up and they go “I’ve been looking for you for years.” That’s what it means to have a small business, to show up in the right place, for the right people, with the right story, with the practical empathy to say, “I made this for you.”

And they say, “I’ve been waiting for someone to make this for me, thank you.”

Scott Omelianuk:

That’s powerful, and yet I can’t help but think what Lakshmi, another person from our audience says, is that I’m a total marketing skeptic and when individuals get to determine what they want, which I actually think is a good thing not a bad thing, right? But when individuals get to determine what they want and can determine a business’s value, how does Marketing actually, which should have a central task or used to have a central task of inventing demand, how does it stay relevant? And I guess what you’re saying is, it’s not. Traditional marketing is not relevant to the world you speak about it all now.

Well, you’re passing a hot button for me because you using the word marketing. So let’s use the word advertising instead. You are correct – traditional advertising is about making average stuff for average people, and shouting about it enough that the masses in the middle decide they need it. That, the late Jay Levinson, who was a friend of mine – we wrote many books together – he was ashamed to note that he was one of the inventors of the Marlboro Man. And he was in a cab one day, and if you’re under 50, you won’t get the punch line of this story, but I’ll explain it. He was in a cab one day, and the cab driver said, “What do you do?”

And Jay says, “I make advertising.” And the cab driver says, “Oh, so you’re in the ad game, huh?” And Jay says, “I guess.” He [the cab driver] says, “Well, advertising might work on some people, but it doesn’t work on me.” And Jay said, “Really, what kind of toothpaste do you use?” And the cab driver said, “Well, I use Gleam, but that’s only because I can’t brush after every meal.” Which was Gleam’s slogan, right? So the point is, all toothpaste was the same in 1980, but he bought this because of the ads. I don’t like advertising. I’m not good at advertising. I don’t write about advertising. I think advertising is from the 60s. Marketing is not that. Marketing is what you make, how you make it, the story you tell. The Catholic Church does marketing. Your local nonprofit does marketing. If you want to get people to take their tuberculosis medicine, you need to do marketing. That, you know, the global climate challenge is not a technology challenge, nor is it a science challenge. It is a marketing challenge. We have done a bad job helping people understand their choices.

That’s what marketers do. We show up, we tell a story that’s true to the people who need to hear it and if we’re right, they’ll say thank you.

That’s what marketing is.

Scott Omelianuk:

I think that’s a much more holistic way of looking at the world. And in fact, it makes marketing almost everything, right? I mean your nose and your glasses are sort of part of your marketing, I suppose.

Scott Omelianuk:

With it being everything, or so many things, it seems like there’s never a time to stop it. And in fact, it seems like a lifelong pursuit that, as a business owner – and this somewhat corresponds to your worldview with Akimbo – is that this trip you’re on as a marketer, one is on as a marketer, the trip one is on as a small business owner is a lifelong one, and it’s continually evolving. And we just have to be comfortable with that, and maybe we set ourselves up for that by understanding it and being comfortable with it.

Yeah, you know if you there’s so many analogies for surfing, but one of them is, “Oh no, I have to go surfing today.”

No one says that. I get to go surfing. Number two is, “I want every wave to be exactly the same.” No one says that. That the entire point of surfing is that the next wave is going to be different, that’s why it’s interesting. That’s why people do it. So it is entirely appropriate if that’s your goal, to go work for a 1965 industrial entity where you will keep the same job gradually for 40 years and you’re in, you made it and now you don’t have to worry.

But those days are largely gone, and for small business they’ve always been gone. That what it means to be a small business is there’s going to be a different wave tomorrow and that’s good – it’s what you signed up for, it’s a craft, it’s art. And you know the thing that’s always been fascinating about Inc. as a magazine, is if all it was supposed to be were, “here are the 40 principles,” it should have been a book. No, it’s a magazine because small businesses is a fashion. It’s a fashion, it’s a hobby, it’s an avocation, it’s a passion. And that’s one of the things that keeps it moving forward. That there’s interesting problems to solve and we get to solve them, and we get to use the best tools in the world to do so. That, back when I started as an entrepreneur in 1974, I didn’t have access to any tools. Now I have the same laptop is the fanciest corporations in the world – even Steven. You can reach a billion people, if they want to hear from you.

Even Steven. what an extraordinary opportunity to solve this problem that’s in front of us.

Scott Omelianuk:

So, that is fundamentally different but it’s interesting for me. I stumbled upon an interview you did about 20 years ago with a magazine called Chief Marketer – it’s when you were at Yoyodyne. And it was one of the first…I know it’s hard for people to even comprehend some of this now, but it was one of the first big e-commerce pushes that existed. Maybe it’s filtering back through your memory now, and I’m not sure, but a couple of things you said that I found really fascinating because they held up, right? Interest is the core of what we do. There’s a distinction between what marketers – and here I’m thinking you were actually referring more to advertisers and marketers – think is okay and what consumers think is okay. We’ve got to establish a dialogue between buyer and seller. We have to create relationships with customers over a period of time, establishing not just who they are, but what they want. And always being careful…careful to treat different customers differently.

Scott Omelianuk:

We must be voluntary and built around permission. Some of these things you just said to me this week – how did that happen? In such a changing world, what is the core there that makes this still make sense, and how did you figure it out?

How did I figure it out? I was a difficult student and I didn’t want to just take what was on offer. So I had a really, really good first boss after business school and he gave me way too much responsibility for a 23 year old. And so I spent millions of dollars of somebody else’s money doing marketing, making stuff. And I saw the fork in the road, you know, People Magazine calling you up and saying, “Do you want to go to the US Open? We’ll take you, because you’re going to buy more ads.” And I saw what happens when people rationalize their race to the bottom, and they rationalize their shortcuts, and they rationalize their hype because they gotta pay their bills, or they’re just doing their job.

And one of the things I learned – I learned so many things from my parents – but what I learned from them is it’s never just doing your job. You are what you do. And I wanted to be able to say that. And every time I got…you know, inventing email marketing was a big deal in the 1980s, early 1990s. And one time I went to a Usenet newsgroup and I said, “How does this spam thing work?” And I spammed a chess discussion board with an ad. And I apologized to those 5,000 chess players, who saw my ad in the Usenet discussion. And I felt terrible. I still feel terrible 30 years later, because I want to put my name on the work. And the thing is, anyone who’s on this call is talented enough to do something that will help someone else enough that they will pay for it. There is no excuse for marketing cigarettes or the equivalent, so don’t. Go do something you can be proud of.

Scott Omelianuk:

So that’s the core of who you are and how you came to be. What something that, say, you used to believe five years ago – this is a question, an anonymous question – I don’t know why it’s anonymous, because I think it’s a great one. What is something you believed five years ago that that doesn’t apply anymore?

I was significantly too optimistic about the democratizing power of giving everyone a microphone. I didn’t realize that the dark patterns of social media and outside, well-funded influencers would corrupt the entire ecosystem and turn us against each other. I was just completely wrong about that. And you know, if you look at Tribes, a book I’m super proud of, it’s missing the chapter all about the evil tribes that will seek to divide us. And, when you think about it giving everybody a microphone, the dumbest person – the meanest person you knew in high school – also has a microphone. It’s challenge letting those people be anonymous at the same time, double challenge. And, I think if I had realized this 10 years ago, I don’t know what I would have done differently because I like being an optimist. I am still optimistic that voices of reason and care will regain the upper hand, but I think we’re going to have to put it in a whole bunch of filters – software and personal. Because the ideas we spread are the ideas we live with. And we have been corrupted by social media, by the race for attention, into spreading ideas that we’d rather not live with. And if I could fix that and one day, I would. All I can do is contribute every day, a little bit.

But, that I think is the challenge of our times going forward – is, we organized the entire human race and we’re responding by throwing tomatoes at each other.

Scott Omelianuk:

It is sobering – you’re not the only person I think that that took by surprise of course. Is there a way that the techniques you’re familiar with…is there a way to use marketing to change how we’re engaging with each other in this fashion to be more aware of sockpuppet accounts and confirmation bias, and all of those things?

I think the most important part that I can think of and my life’s work is teaching the good guys how to do it better.

I wrote a blog post 11 years ago about why global warming is a really stupid name for what we’re dealing with, because global is good and warming is good, and you we’re just hoping everyone would applaud. Well, no, it’s atmosphere cancer. And we have to figure out the status roles, and the tribal rolls, and how people are dominating and affiliating with each other to market it well. That when think about things that have been pushed on our culture that we didn’t really want, in general they were marketed really well. And too often, people who are on the side of rational truth say, “Oh here’s the science, read the spreadsheet. It’s obvious.” No, it’s going to need more than that.

It’s going to need a story. It’s going to need an understanding of the smallest viable audience that will spread. It’s going to need guardrails and levers to enable good ideas to move forward. And too often, the people who are in service of making things better, turn up their nose at doing the hard work of telling a good story about it.

And I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think it makes way more sense to dig in and say, “Yeah, everyone didn’t get the joke the first time I told it, so I’m gonna have to figure out how to put the hard work in to get them to get the joke.”

Scott Omelianuk:

And unfortunately, we live in a world where it seems that, you know – and I’m not going to say Inc. is responsible for this – but where we make overnight successes that, you know…we show overnight successes that have taken decades to occur, right? That the hard work…you toiled in traditional marketing before you became the teacher you are now, it does take time.

It takes time and it takes failure, over and over again. You know, you get in the Hall of Fame by hitting a baseball 3 out of 10 times and somehow we believe, because we come from an industrial background, that 3 out of 10 is a disaster. It’s not, we’re making art. We don’t know the answer. At the same time, you don’t have to be original. If there’s someone in Cleveland who’s running something that’s working and you’re in Topeka, copy it – just do it. Make it better for people over there.

That’s what they do in medicine all the time. That if you’re here to serve, it’s okay that it wasn’t your idea, because that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is showing up, finding the audience, earning trust and then repeating when it doesn’t work. And if you’re the kind of person that’s reading Inc. that stuck on a call like this for an hour, that is leaning into this, you already know that. And I’m just telling you something you already know, which is that if you are persisting in the right direction, you’ll get through the dip.

Because the dip is there to keep other people out. But once you see it, you realize there is another side. And this slog, this health slog, this economic slog – it will end. There’s no doubt about it. And on the other side, the world is going to feel very different. A bunch of cruft is going to be cleaned out. We’re refactoring the code.

So write the new code. That’s what we need you to do, is to write the new code.

Scott Omelianuk:

How, as a teacher, do you keep yourself learning all of the time? What is that? Just born with curiosity? Know what’s necessary to continue?

I have a method. I’m happy to tell people the method. If something is working in the world, and I can’t explain why, I need to figure out why. Because, there should be nothing in our culture that is working that is unexplainable. And that is the spark. Why are people waiting in line to buy this overpriced t-shirt? What is it about that? Why do people vote this way or that way? Why do people sign up for something? Why do people stay in a relationship that isn’t sustaining them? And on, and on, and on. If you can ask yourself that question, it’s happening. It’s clearly right in front of me, it’s happening. Why? Well, your explanation isn’t going to be right, but it can be an assertion and then you can test the assertion. And so what I do when I’m doing my content work, is telling people something they might already know, but explaining it to them in a way that they can explain it to somebody else. Because if we start to understand the why, then we can make things better. Because we understand the mechanics of it.

I trained as a mechanical engineer in college and there’s no room for placebos when you’re designing a bridge. Either the bridge stands up, or it doesn’t. We don’t don’t care how hard you worked on it. We need to understand the structure. I think there’s a structure to how human beings make decisions. And the structure into what we believe and what we want, and we’re just peeling away the layers and getting to the structure. Because once you see the structure, then you might be able to make it better.

Scott Omelianuk:

I think that optimism is great and it’s reflecting in the audience…by the way, I just saw a comment that requested you run for the Presidency in 2024.

I’m not that dumb, but that’s very kind of them.

Scott Omelianuk:

I’m just saying that that’s out there as an option for you, if you want it. One last question I think I have, personally, that I’m just wondering. What is Seth Godin like in the store, himself? You know, knowing all the tricks, knowing all the manipulations and authentic manipulations – they’re still right – what’s it like to walk down the aisle of the Whole Foods with you pushing a shopping cart?

There are definitely people who are annoyed by it, because I love placebos. I do. Placebos – not just medical ones, even I’d gladly pay five dollars for an energy beverage of some sort or another.

Placebos – you can’t overdose on them.

They’re reasonably priced.

They usually work, if you believe. And what I’ll do is, I’ll point out to somebody the placebo. And they hate that, because they think if I point it out, I’ve just taken away its power. Actually, I’m honoring its power by saying, “That’s a really well-done placebo.”

And so we know – pick any item – why you paid extra for it, and why you think it tastes better, or makes you happier, or you think is more nutritious, etcetera. Like nutritional yeast, what a great product!

It’s not nutritional at all. But it makes you feel better, if you’re the kind of person that wants to eat that product. And so I’m happy to point that out to anybody. I can’t wait till the next time I’m in the store.

Living near New York, that’s been a while. But, on the other hand, I sort of miss the mystery. One of the things that I do for fun is buy, but don’t perform magic tricks. And Penguin Magic is my source. And the beauty of Penguin Magic is you can’t find out how a trick is done, unless you buy it. So they’re doing great. But I have not been blown away by a magician the way I would like to be in a long time, because I know how the trick is done. So that’s the price. The price of understanding the system and the process, is you have to give up a little bit of that wide-eyed wonder of imagining that it’s all being done by elves who come into the cobbler shop at night when no one is looking. So where do you find your joy? I find my joy in the work that the people who learn something from me are doing. I find my joy in nonprofit leaders like Jaclyn or Scott. I find my joy in entrepreneurs, who overcome odds for the right reasons and make things better. I love holding a beautifully manufactured, reasonably priced item that was impossible years ago. I love seeing underdogs destroy monopolists. That gives me enormous amounts of pleasure. And every once in a while a funny movie comes along, and that’ll last me for a long time. But have you noticed they don’t make them like they used to? I need Monty Python – we need Monty Python back again.

Scott Omelianuk:

Seth, thank you so much for being with us today. I think you actually, not only brought joy to a whole bunch of folks, but enormous sense of optimism. I’d recommend everyone read This Is Marketing, if they haven’t. It’s, sort of, the summation of everything he’s done. The alt MBA, and the Akimbo Workshops, and the Akimbo podcast are all things I’m familiar with and a firm believer of.

Scott Omelianuk:

Seth Godin, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate it, on Inc’s Real Talk.

As always, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this interview or any previous episode, just visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K and click the appropriate button.

Question – Brendan From Montreal, Canada:

Hey, Seth. Brendan calling in from Montreal, Canada. I had a quick question related to your finite, infinite games podcast episode. When we play a finite game, it’s much easier, I found to be more productive. If I’m trying to get into an elite school or trying to get into professional sports – even if most of us lose game – the carrot on the stick is so tangible that we want to pursue it anyways. But how can we be more productive playing an infinite game, where the goal post is so vague and nature – like starting a creative project, or just really taking care of family that you alluded to in the episode? Hope you’re well and thank you so much for taking the time. All the best.

This is a great question – well stated. Here’s the thing. If the infinite game is so productive, if it is so human, if it is the way forward, then why isn’t everything an infinite game? Well, you’ve just touched on the answer. It’s way easier in our existing culture to motivate people to play a finite game. It’s much more straightforward to keep score, to have winners and losers, to celebrate the person who beats the other one, to have a time limit, to have deadlines, to measure this easily measured thing called productivity instead of this difficult to measure stuff like ‘worth’ or ‘value’ or ‘resilience’.

And so it leads to over-leverage. It leads to brittleness. It leads to short-term thinking. That is exactly the problem. The problem is that the infinite game doesn’t lend itself to all of the short-term, easy, clever hacks that got us into this mess in the first place. So, rather than asking the question, “How do we become more productive? How do we measure the infinite game by finite game measurement?”

It might be more interesting to say, “How do we appropriately measure the finite game with infinite game measurement?” Here’s one example, to get us started. Before 1950 or 60, there was very little done in the way of calculating the cost of pollution. That if people died because the stuff downstream from the factory was poisonous, well, they did. We didn’t really have a way to measure it. And beginning in the 1960s, and then with the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, we began to measure it.

We started figuring out what price are we willing to pay as a culture to avoid birth defects. To avoid people burning to death, because their clothes are flammable. And on, and on. And so we end up calculating – using finite game numbers – infinite game costs. That what we’re actually doing is playing an honest finite game. We’re bringing the numbers forward. And we see this with enlightened organizations in the way they choose is to manage, and lead, and compensate their people. That, in the short run, it certainly pays to have indentured servants working 18 hours a day under constant supervision, cranking it out until they burn or break, and then go get some more. But organizations that are willing to take a longer-term view, have understood that they can get more of what they actually seek by playing an infinite game instead. So what we’ve got to do, I believe, is use these tools – we’ve holding them to a very sharp point – use these finite game tools, but more accurately report exactly what they cost, more accurately report what productivity truly means. What does it mean to make something that we can use six times, instead of one? What does it mean to have to live in a world where all the fish died, because we dump stuff into the water but we forgot to count that into the price of the stuff we were making in the first place?

So as we enter a carbon generation, as we enter a moment when we’re going to start thinking about the repercussions of the finite game, it’s on us to discover ways to find the pricing and build it in to the cost of whatever it is we’re making. Thanks for listening to my rant. Thanks for doing something about it.

We’ll see you next time.

==> 6669-everybody-is-irrational- <==

Two efficient market Economics Professors were walking through Harvard Yard. It was a beautiful spring day. As they were walking they past a $20 bill lying on the ground, one of them walked right on by. The other one said, “Why didn’t you pick up the 20 dollar bill?” And the first one said, “Because it’s a counterfeit.” The second one said, “How do you know?” He said, “Well, if it was a real $20 bill, someone would have already picked it up.”

Hey, it’s Seth, and this is Akimbo.

What does it mean to be rational? If someone is rational, that means that they’re going to do what makes sense – what we could predict that they are going to do. Rational behavior is at the core of a branch of economics, but rational behavior is also how we navigate our way through the world. We assume, because it’s at the center of the curve of how people are going to react, that people are going to do a rational thing. Often, we decide that the rational thing they’re going to do is what we would do in that situation because most of us like to believe that we are rational. Of course, we’re not and neither is anyone else. I want to share today two projects that I worked on, both of which were great ideas, and both of which failed. And now I understand why, and the lesson for me is not that I should have done the books differently.

It’s that I was making too many assumptions about what I would do and what rational really is. So here’s the first one, I want you to imagine back in the day, before the internet, before Netflix, before Google.

A time when millions and millions of people every night went to a blockbuster, or independent video store to rent A VHS tape – to take a movie home and watch it with the family. Now the economics of that business were fascinating because the movies cost the stores a lot of money – $100 or more. The store had to make a lot of choices about what to carry. The vast majority of what they could rent was something that was new and hot. That, a movie that just came out – the one that lots of people were talking about, that movie was easy to rent.

Of course, they couldn’t buy a thousand copies of a movie that cost a hundred and fifty bucks – they’d go bankrupt, so they had just a few. When you got to the video rental store, in all likelihood the movie you had your heart set on wasn’t there anymore, and in all probability, your second and third choice weren’t there anymore either. The deeper you got into the rent a movie habit, the more likely it was that all the movies you wanted to see, you had already seen.

And so you are left with the backlist. The hundreds and hundreds of movies lining the walls of the video store that you hadn’t seen, that you didn’t know if you wanted to see, that you weren’t sure your family wanted to see.

In that moment video blindness would set in, you would stand there staring at the wall, waiting for Monty Python and the Holy Grail to jump out at you. But of course, you’d already seen it six times. You wanted the next Monty Python and the Holy Grail to jump out at you.

But it wasn’t jumping, you were paralyzed, amnesia was setting in. The seven movies you had in mind when you went to the video store, have just left your consciousness, you have no idea what movie to rent. This is a problem for the video renter, but it’s also a problem for the video store because the video store doesn’t get paid if you don’t rent a movie. The video store doesn’t like the feeling of amnesia among its customers because it fills the entire store with this feeling of ennui, with this disappointment that the store owner didn’t buy more copies of Beverly Hills Cop when it first came out.

So what to do about it? Well, I was a book packager, and in those days every problem, to me looked like a book problem, and I said, “Wait a minute, what if there was a little book, a book that could fit in your pocket, a book that cost five or six dollars, not much more than renting a movie.” The Video Renters Bible, 96 pages of lists.

If you’re looking for a movie like Rocky, here are eight to consider, or eight movies that Steven King thinks are really scary. Fun lists, lists that grew up to become listicles in our Modern Age. 96 pages of inspiration to cut through video store amnesia, what a fantastic idea. I knew how to make a book like this, I knew how to produce a book like this, I knew how to publish a book like this.

It seemed to me that any video store owner, including the people who did purchasing at Blockbuster would say, “Oh, you mean I can get a six-pack of these books, put them on the cash register – where I don’t have room for anything else anyway? If they don’t sell I can send them back for a full refund, and if they do sell I make as much money from the book as I make from renting a video – plus with someone having that book in their pocket, they’re going to rent a lot more videos. Sign me up.”

So I went to Starling Lawrence, who – still one of the greatest book editors of all time. Fancy books, respected books, books that win prizes – certainly not books like the Video Renters Bible. I mean Norton, the fancy book publishing house – anyway, Starling loved my idea. Along the way he taught me his recipe for baked potatoes, which I’ll share at the end of this podcast. And so we signed a deal.

[Fun little jingle]

We spent a year making the book, we researched it, we got famous people to contribute their lists.

The book came out and I have no idea if people were going to buy it because stores wouldn’t carry it. And the few stores that did carry it, people didn’t buy it. So what was going on here? Well, I had failed to account for the fact that my version of rational wasn’t the same as their version of rational. Their version of rational went a little like this.

Number one, people come into our store to rent a video, they don’t come into our store to buy a book, I will confuse them if I carry a book. Number two, I already have the people I buy from, this isn’t being sold by the people I buy from, it’s too confusing for me to open a new account. Number three, I’m the expert on videos, I want them to ask ME what video to rent, not to rely on a book. In the few stores where the book showed up, people who walked in said, “I do not want to show my weakness by buying a book like this. I’m not sure that a book like this will actually solve my problem, I came into the video store to get a video, not to buy a book.”

And at places like Blockbuster, there was someone whose job it was to buy large quantities of videos that he or she thought would rent a lot of copies, There wasn’t someone whose job it was to buy a little book to go on the cash register. So in all respects, I was wrong. The book was terrific, the book helped people who actually had the book, but it wasn’t the obvious rational choice that I expected It would be. Around the same time in publishers Weekly, CliffsNotes – You may remember CliffNotes when you were a kid – ran an ad, and in this ad they listed the 30 most popular best-selling CliffsNotes of the Year.

What’s a CliffsNotes? CliffsNotes – hard to conjugate – CliffsNotes, are cheat sheets. They are 90-page booklets, staple-bound, that don’t cost very much money. That, if you’re in high school and just got assigned a book, you can go to the book store, buy one of these for three or four bucks instead of reading the book, you could read the CliffsNotes.

CliffNotes is now in the vocabulary as, the summarized cheat sheet. Again, before the internet, CliffsNotes were pretty much your only option if you were looking for this sort of summary and information. Just an aside, having read a lot of CliffsNotes as part of this project – they were really well written by Scholars who knew what they were talking about.

But leaving that aside, here’s the list of the hundreds and hundreds of CliffNotes that they sell of the 30 bestselling ones. and I said to myself, “Well, people who buy CliffsNotes are different than people who don’t. And that people who buy one set of CliffsNotes, are probably people who buy five, or eight, or maybe even 30. So, what would happen if I put all 30 CliffsNotes into one easily purchased, $12 book?” That for $12 – for the price of three CliffsNotes, you could get all the CliffsNotes you’re ever going to need.

That probably, these 30 titles accounted for ninety percent of their sales. So if you could get 90% of all the CliffsNotes you’re ever going to need for the price of three, and it’s easy to store and not a hassle. And you don’t have to go to the bookstore to get the next one, because you just got assigned a book and there it is, you’re ready to go.

What a great idea. And I said to myself, “the bookstores – they’re going to love carrying this book. Because the fact is, when someone comes in and buys one CliffsNotes, they end up making 50 cents, maybe a buck. And, they will probably buy that second one from a different store.”

So, if you can just clear the board, and for the price of three, where you’ll make a profit of $5 – take them out of the market for CliffsNotes – that’s in your interest because they are not beholding to your store.

And when it comes to the parent or the kid who’s buying these books, well, having it on your shelf is really useful and it will make you smart, and guess what? An eight-page summary – which is how long our summaries were – is a lot easier to work through than one written by some college professor, that’s 90 pages.

So I was able with the help of another book packager – John Boswell, to sell the book to a publisher. We got all excited about QuickLit, and I went to an organization that I helped start when I was in college and they had tons of college students on staff. So I hired a bunch of college students to write each one of the notes. I wrote The Great Gatsby myself. I picked that one because I thought it was the easiest, but we went all the way from The Great Gatsby to Moby Dick and back again.

So there we were, thirty, well-written, condensed, CliffsNotes of CliffsNotes, in one handy book ready to go. Well, you’ve already guessed what happened, the bookstores didn’t carry that many and the people who saw them in the bookstores didn’t buy that many. Another irrational failure. What had I done wrong?

Well, number one, the job of the person at the bookstore. They had a section of the bookstore called CliffsNotes, that section was making them plenty of money. There was no boss saying to a book buyer, “Quick, let’s figure out how to fix the CliffsNotes section.” The CliffsNotes section wasn’t broken, every other section of the bookstore was broken in the sense that there were new books coming all the time.

You had to figure out how to add new titles, that were brand new, fresh, exciting, ready to go – to replace the ones that were fading. Not so in the CliffsNotes section. Number two, my analysis – that better to take all of the sales from this customer in the short-run, didn’t really resonate with the book buyer – the person at the bookstore who had to choose. In their mind, CliffsNotes weren’t something they were proud to be doing, they were something they did to pay the bills so they could stock literature instead.

And what about the high school students? Well, here’s what I learned. High school students – at least back then, felt a little bit guilty about buying CliffsNotes. And what they told themselves – the way a smoker trying to quit might tell himself, is, “This is going to be my last one. I’m certainly not going to invest in a lifetime supply of CliffsNotes because I’m not going to need another one. I’m just here just this one time.”

And parents? Parents agreed with their kids. “No, no, no, no, no, I get it, it’s an emergency this time, we’re going to go get one cliffsNotes. But, no we are not here to solve all of your high school reading problems by buying one shortcut book.” Now I didn’t think of the book as a shortcut book.

I thought of the book is something that would help kids get deeper into the work because they could get past the brain dead stuff that we were helping them cover. But that’s neither here nor there. What is true, is that everybody acts rationally by their own measure. Everyone – when they’re making a decision – decides what to do based on what they know, what they believe, what they want and the noise in their head.

And as soon as we realize that sonder is real, that everyone has a noise in their head, the way we have a noise in our head. As soon as we realized that no one is willingly, willfully, intentionally making irrational, random choices. Then we have a shot at developing real empathy, the empathy to say you don’t know what I know, you don’t want, what I want and that’s okay because you could have this instead. And so, a lesson learned the hard way, over and over again. People don’t necessarily want what you think they want.

Oh, Starling Lawrence’s baked potato recipe. I can tell you without fear of error, that this is the best baked potato recipe in the world. What you do is get some baking potatoes, you clean them, you poke them with a fork three times. You pre-heat your oven to 500 Degrees. You put them in the oven longer than you think you should, then you eat them.

Try it. They’re delicious.

As always, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, I hope you’ll visit Akimbo.link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button. Two questions this week about difficult conversations, similar but different. And, another one about a really old episode. So here we go.

Question – Andy:

Hi Seth, this is Andy from San Francisco. This was a super interesting episode on difficult conversations. I’m curious what you would say to people who may be struggling with having a difficult conversation around… Well, anything but, particularly romantic, relationships or milestones for example. Proposing for marriage or asking someone on a first date.

Question – Martin Kehoe:

Hey Seth, this is Martin Kehoe calling from Salt Spring Island, in British Columbia.

Question – Martin Kehoe:

I just listened to your episode about difficult conversations. And, I really like this idea of one desire being simple, get everybody out of the burning house. And, more than one desire being what creates the difficulty in conversations. You went on to give quite a few examples, and those examples were all from the point of view of a person in authority introducing a difficult conversation.

Question – Martin Kehoe:

I’m curious, what changes to your answer if the stakes are higher? If it’s not the person in authority. If it’s an employee coming in asking for a wage that’s more in line with their contribution. If it’s the person who you might say has less status, introducing the conversation that potentially is difficult.

Thank you both for these questions and congratulations on the upcoming engagement and hopefully wedding. I hope that your wedding is beautiful but even more important, I hope your marriage is really sustaining, thrilling and mutually generous. So with that said, yes, you are both highlighting the fact that some difficult conversations are more difficult than others. That if you are an employee, if you are in a relationship where you don’t have enough power to actually dictate that the difficult conversation will take place. We have to go to the second level of power that is available to most people, much of the time.

And that is the power of secession. That we have the ability, if we’re not in bondage, to be able to say, “if this doesn’t change, I need to leave.” And that conversation is difficult because we don’t want to leave.

on the other hand, we want it to change. And so, we have to come to grips with the fact that a difficult conversation lasts a few minutes, but a bad decision can last for months or years. That what we have to do is be really clear, that engaging in a conversation that leads to short-term stress, may very well be the single best thing that you could do. That there are people – for sure – who can’t leave. Who are in a relationship with so many strings attached that leaving his inconceivable. Who, don’t have the economic wherewithal – particularly now during treacherous times – to stand up and take a stand. And, if you are in that situation, my heart goes out to you. And, I hope that you will get some help from somebody, who can help you find the leverage you need, to be able to have the conversation.

But most of the time, we’re fooling ourselves when we say, “we can’t make this conversation happen.” That we don’t have enough leverage or power to secede. Because secession, the idea of saying, “I cannot keep this going under these circumstances.” Is an enormous amount of power. The key is to exercise it in a way that the person you’re dealing with, will choose what you want them to choose.

So if you want to quit, just quit. But, if you are willing to quit if things don’t get better, now you’ve discovered a difficult conversation. And, if you give the person you’re having it with a way to save face, you may discover that you’re able to make things move forward. How to save face? Well for starters, it probably isn’t a conversation that you have in public.

Of course, it’s different if you’re Your safety is in danger, but we’re not talking about that. When we sit down with somebody in private and state what got us here in the first place, what the source of mutual respect is, what the opportunities are going forward. And then, gain enrollment to have a difficult conversation.

“When things are like this, I feel like I can’t keep going. What should we do about this?” And if you can sit on the same side of the table and have that conversation – It will not be easy, It will be difficult indeed – but it may be that secession is better than sticking it out. Again, I don’t know the answer, but I do know the question, and the question is, “is the difficult conversation worth having?” If it might mean you have to quit if it doesn’t go well. As for using that thinking when it’s time to propose. Well, what’s difficult in that conversation is the person might say no.

And it seems to me, that the best way to find out is to talk about it. That too often, the difficult conversation is in our head, It is not on the table. And putting it on the table – outlining it without blame, without casting aspersions – but simply to say, “When things are like this, I feel like that.” Opens the door for us to have a chance to move things forward, because of course as we’ve all learned in the last few months, life is short indeed.

Too short to spend it day after day, wondering about what would happen if we actually had the conversation. Better, I think, to have the conversation, figure out how the world actually works and then make a decision about what to do next.

Question – Demang:

Hi Seth, this is the Demang, calling in from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Question – Demang:

Firstly, I hope you’re in the very best of health.

Question – Demang:

My question to you is from a rather old episode from 2018. It’s the All Rights Reserved episode, and it got me thinking about things that do happen in design and shape product design today. Whether it’s a High Street label or even luxury goods that sometimes for certain collections, they do feature motifs.

Question – Demang:

Literal cut and pastes, maybe change of color motifs from indigenous or native groups. And, I was wondering what is your take on this? So, if they were to copyright this back in the day, I guess it would now be in public domain after hundreds or maybe thousands of years. But, when it comes to a big brand that profits from the direct design. Like copy-paste without any attribution, or maybe at most they would say it’s a nod to, or influenced, or inspired by, or so-and-so. But, without any further elaboration or education about that certain community. What is your take on that to people who respond?

Question – Demang:

Thanks so much for your thoughts.

This is a great question, I made it a bit shorter. But, here’s the essence of it. We don’t have copyright protection over ancient ideas, motifs and memes, and that’s a good thing. Cultural appropriation is a terrible thing, cultural appropriation comes from a mismatch of power and implies ridicule. When someone, a brand, in particular, chooses to ridicule something important in order to make a sale. They get all of the bad publicity, they deserve.

It’s a stupid way to spread an idea, it’s a dumb way to market something. It is disrespectful and it doesn’t help you move forward. But, appropriation of culture is different than the spread of culture. How far is jazz allowed to spread? How far is injera bread allowed to spread? How far is crop rotation allowed to spread? That when we find a good idea in a culture, and we celebrated by combining it with another idea, or another culture. That’s not appropriation.

That’s how culture evolves, how every culture evolves. If you’ve ever had spaghetti with meatballs, it’s important to note, that the Italians did not have tomatoes until 500 years ago, nor did they have pasta. And so, something as classically Italian as a bowl of spaghetti with red sauce, isn’t classically Italian it simply represents the melting of cultures.

So, I think it’s really important we get to, A) intent and B) information. If a brand or an individual is so clueless that they don’t realize what they’ve done, we should call him out on it. And, if they are doing it with Mens rea – with intent, then they should get all of the blame for what they’ve chosen to do.

And no, there’s no legal recourse here because copyright has a limited term for very good reason. Our culture evolves, when our culture remixes.

Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

==> 6825-help-wanted- <==

In 1482, Leonardo da Vinci had a problem. It’s a problem that has been around for a long time. His problem was he didn’t have a job. Looking for a job, he decided he wanted one working for the head of the city of Milan – after all, the Duke who ran the city of Milan had plenty of money. He decided to put together a cover letter and a resume. He started with fabulous salutation, “My most illustrious Lord…” And then in the letter, he outlined some of his skills. His skills include:

“I have plans for very light, strong and easily portable Bridges. Also, I have means of arriving at a designated spot through mines and secret winding passages, constructed completely without noise. I also have types of Cannon, most convenient and easily portable with which to hurl small stones. And if any of the above mentioned things seem impossible or impractical to anyone, I am most readily disposed to demonstrate them in your park, or in whatsoever place shall please your Excellency.”

And then, as an afterthought he, writes, “Also, I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze and clay. Likewise, in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be.”

Hey, it’s Seth and this is Akimbo.

Of course, the history of looking for a job and the history of looking for employees goes way back further than Leonardo da Vinci. Raghav Singh was walking through the British Museum when he found a tablet 2,000 years old – a note from Julius Caesar to his troops. The Romans desperately needed more soldiers.

And so, he offered his existing soldiers 1/3 of a year’s pay for every Soldier they recruited. What’s been going on for thousands of years is a dance between people who need a job and people who need employees. And that dance has been remarkably stable for a very long time, except for now. Now it is changing.

It has changed more in the last 10 years than it has changed in a thousand, and it will continue to change ever faster. How to get a job, why to get a job, where to get a job will never be the same again.

I want to argue that there are at least five things that have fundamentally changed about jobs. The first one is portability. It used to be that the standard in American industrial settings was that you got a job right out of school and you kept that job until you retired. Seniority kept you in the job, experience made you worth more over time. Switching costs were very high. Employers didn’t like the idea that someone would last two or three years and then move on to the next job. And employees, because they were tied down geographically and by benefits, didn’t want to switch either.

Well, we all know that his changed for a whole bunch of reasons. One of them, one of the reasons that underlie so many of these, is the death of industrialism. Industrialism – which led to a huge rise in good jobs and steady employment – is the act of telling other people what to do, managing for results and getting what you expect.

If we are living in an industrial culture, we need you to behave the way they taught you to behave when you were in school – to follow instructions, to do well on the test, to be willing to be reprocessed if you make a mistake. That the very nature of large organizations filled with lots of people doing the same thing over and over again, enabled us to become significantly more productive. But, it had a cost and the cost was fitting in, and fitting in for a long time.

This has shifted. If you are listening to this, it is likely that you have a job where you don’t do the same thing every single day. Where you are rewarded not for following instructions, but for making them up. Okay, the second idea is the idea that now we can show our work. That we can have a legacy. That a resume is not nearly as important as a body of work. A resume shows that you know how to fit in, to create a machine scannable document that can look for keywords. That you can consistently show up for work and do what you are told, year after year, maybe with a couple companies along the way. A resume is proof of compliance.

But a body of work – a body of work that shows that you know how to organize, that you know how to lead, that you have shipped things that have mattered to people – that is your legacy. It is what you are leaving behind. And so, if we think about something as simple as the references and testimonials for people on LinkedIn, what we are beginning to see is something that is living and connected far more than a resume ever could be. Small aside about LinkedIn.

I’m told that seventy percent of their revenue comes from recruiters paying LinkedIn for the privilege of seeing the people who rise to the top, based on their legacy, based on their body of work. The next shift is the rise of data, different kinds of data. The data of Moneyball, of sabermetrics, of realizing that if we use statistics, we can figure out: who’s the best baseball player, who’s the most productive manager, which region is outperforming, which fast food franchise is doing better than the other one.

We also can now measure the productivity of a single human, keystroke by keystroke, interaction by interaction. If you call a customer service number, you can bet that your call is not being monitored for quality, it’s being monitored for productivity. That what’s going on is that anybody who has one of those automaton jobs, where they have to answer the incoming –whether it’s by phone or on email, or an intercom – they’re being measured. They’re being measured in their productivity as part of their data record. What people get paid is also now being widely shared. And so shared spreadsheets are created, showing people how much the others in their industry make. It used to be a secret. Employers wanted it to be a secret. But as the information is shared, suddenly, if you’re getting paid below average, you really want to get paid more than average – particularly if your performance, as measured by common performance metrics is exceptional. But if you end up getting paid more than average, you can bet the average is going to go up. And so a ratchet occurs, any place where there is a scarcity of talent. Which leads to the next idea, the idea of outsourcing. Maybe there is no job at all. Companies big and small no longer have people doing jobs that are done by an outsourced service instead. It used to be obvious that a company did its own payroll.

My company has never done its own payroll. It used to be that you wanted to vertically integrate. That if you wanted to be, for example, in the magazine business, you owned a printing plant. Now, it would be insane to start a magazine with its own printing plant. Someone else will do it for you. And so, as jobs can be outsourced, we will outsource them if the numbers indicate that there is no advantage to having that person in house. Which means that if you’re going to get an in-house job, you’re probably going to get a job, if it’s a good one, because you are making decisions in the short run, you are not simply following a manual. And then the fifth idea is the idea of Slack, which is you don’t have to be in the room. That remote employment is growing.

It is growing because it is more efficient and less expensive. More talent is available, things happen faster and it is possible to create a work environment that doesn’t involve people being in the same room with each other. And then going back full circle, and this idea of talent. Let’s call it, I don’t know, The DaVinci Code. It ended up that Duke did hire Leonardo da Vinci for his little afterthought. The Duke put him in charge of a painting, which was then called The Last Supper. Leonardo da Vinci was undeniably skilled. He was able to create something that few others could create. And so, this shift in the way jobs are working is pretty profound. Companies have realized that there are only two kinds of employees – replaceable cog like employees, that they should hire as fast and as inexpensively as they can. If you go to a big box store, you can apply for a job using a machine that looks like an ATM and no one will even meet you. If you apply for a fancy job at Disney or Netflix, or someplace else, your resume is going to get read by a machine, long before it gets seen by a person. Bring them in, turn them out. And then other kind of job?

The other kind of job is a linchpin job. It is a job for a special person, in a special situation, doing special work. Work that is hard to describe. Work that has a huge return on investment, if someone does it with fantastic skill and effort. But it’s important to note that these jobs, at least outside of the NBA, are not based on your genes or your inherent talent.

They are based on your attitude and your skill. And skill is something that you can learn. And skill is something that you can display. Maybe you could display it with a little bit less hubris than Leonardo da Vinci, but the idea is the same. That what we have is the chance to create on purpose, a body of work. Whether we do it at our job or not doesn’t matter.

We can organize a conference. We can write the industry newsletter. We can speak up. We can produce a portfolio. We can gather dozens of testimonials about us and our work. Over time, people will come looking for us, instead of us having to figure out who the next Duke of Sforza was. That over time, if you are the singular one – the one who chooses to stand out – then you will stand out. And when you stand out, not all employers will like that. And as I’ve talked about before, the other thing about talent is we often confuse talent with skill, because skill can be learned and skill is an opportunity. And too often, when we say we’re going looking for talent, what we’re actually looking for are people who look like the people who we think have talent. And in this new economy that’s foolish. It’s foolish for a few reasons.

First, we’re overlooking people who have been overlooked. People who might be a bargain, people who might be available. People who are passionate, but who haven’t necessarily come up in the same way – who don’t look the same way, who don’t act in a way that we associate with a certain pedigree. And second, as we’ve talked about in earlier episodes, the idea of diversity of thought, of background, of approach – these connections help us create an organization that actually does better work.

Nobody wants to hear the all clarinet Orchestra. In fact, there is no all clarinet Orchestra. It’s only when we mix together different instruments that we create something that’s worth seeking out. So when we add all of these pieces together, what we discover is that there’s a huge opportunity to go seeking skill. To go seeking people with a point of view and a sense of possibility, because we don’t have to rely on the old tired labels that we used to call talent.

So what do all these changes mean for employers? Well, if there’s actually a war for talent, if there really is a competition to find a 10x employee – someone who will make things better – then you better be prepared to engage in that war. How to do that? Well, first isolate the jobs where it matters and get rid of the jobs where it doesn’t. If you can figure out out which jobs are cog jobs, which can be done by a service where you can buy the output instead of buying someone’s time, then go buy the output – leaving yourself with a smaller group of people, who have your trust, who have the leverage to actually change things.

Because it doesn’t make any sense to get into a bidding war for someone great, and then give them so many rules that they can’t be great. Next, we have the opportunity now – pretty much for the first time – to work with people before we hire them. That one of the positive side effects of the gig economy, for both employers and employees, is that you can try before you buy. You can do a project with someone. Because the problem with a job interview is you are trying to figure out if someone is good at being in a job interview, but unless your job actually involves being in job interviews, being good at it is hardly worth measuring. Instead, you can give people actual work to do, and they can do that work for pay and you can figure out if, when they do that work for pay, you want them to do more of it.

Third, employers can work much harder at creating experiences at work that are worth talking about. Creating not just benefits that make you show up on one list another, but actual mutually respectful experiences that transform what it even means to be at work. Because if all work is doing is buying your hours, then the smart employee should sell those hours to the highest bidder, if it’s all the same. But if work – if work is a place where we’re going to spend half our lives, if work is about meaning, if work is about connection and growth – then building an organization where that out of thing is valued and expected, well, then the word will spread. And then people who have a choice will choose you. If your company’s motto is, “You can work anywhere and we’re anywhere” well, then don’t expect people to go out of their way to work for you. On the other hand, if you take the position that skill is what you have and skill is what you sell, and skill is what you are able to grow and create, well then, the marketplace will pay you for that thing that you are actually building.

All the way of saying, if you’re in the commodity business you’re doomed. If you do a job that can be done by a computer, a computer’s going to do that job. For us to thrive as organizations in the future, we have to become the sort of organization that employees of the future want to work for and that customers of the future want to buy from. Not because we’re in a race to the bottom, but because we’re in a race to the top.

Even though some people say the 10x programmer is a myth, she’s not. The 10x employee – the one who can change the game, who can add a zero who can inspire, who can solve interesting problems – these employees, some companies are looking for them. And if that’s who you want to become, then become that employee.

Demonstrate that body of work. And then maybe, one day soon, someone will ask you to paint your Last Supper.

We’ll see you next time.

Regular listeners know that I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or previous episode, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s A K I M B O dot L I N K, and click the appropriate button.

Question – Andrew From Kansas:

Hey Seth, this is Andrew from Kansas. I recently listened to your Irrational Behavior podcast, and I was curious if I have a book that similar now to the books you wrote in the past that were not successful, do we have the opportunity to go ahead and deliver those to our customers, knowing the power of a hundred rabid fans and the credibility it gives us initially as a catapult to increase momentum towards our brand and our credibility for the future.

Question – Andrew From Kansas:

Just curious if you would do that today, or if you still have to run through a few hoops that you basically mentioned last time. Thank you.

Indeed, the medium and the message are inextricably linked. That it doesn’t matter whether someone had an idea for a book, or a project or anything in one medium, and it didn’t work, and you are about to bring it out in a different form. So this idea of a thousand true fans, as Kevin Kelly calls them, says that if there are people who are waiting in line to do what you do next, a thousand of them is more than enough. That doesn’t work in the book publishing industry of 1990. A thousand? That doesn’t even get them out the door – doesn’t get them out of bed in the morning.

They needed ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million on offer, before they got really excited. And that brings back this idea of the smallest viable audience. The smallest viable audience – the people you are serving – could just be people who are irrational the way you are irrational. And that is what is happening. That the idea of the mass market is being replaced by a million micro markets – by assemblies of people, groups of people who want and believe the same thing. That couldn’t work in a bookstore that only had 30 thousand titles in it. But it has to work in the world of the long tail.

Question – Tom From Boston:

Hi Seth, this is Tom from Boston. Got a quick question for you. For people who think they’re built to do more and want to have a bigger impact, but don’t know what change in the world they want to create, how would you go about figuring that out for yourself? I know it sounds like a first world problem, but it’s you know, it’s really my one shot at life and what do I want to do, and how do I want to leave a legacy and impact the world. So any thoughts you had on that, would be really appreciated.

Thank you for this question, particularly in a world that is in such a turmoil with such tragedy, with such pain. This idea that we can make things better, it is more urgent than ever before. But we must not wait for perfect. We must not wait for ‘our calling’. If we have a hunch that we can contribute more, that’s because we can.

That’s because all of us can. And if we are looking for it – the perfect thing to contribute – we will always be looking. Because it’s on a single metric and there are lots of different ways to contribute. So my answer is simple. You don’t do the work because you find your passion. You find the passion, because you do the work. If you find someone who’s passionate about what they do – and there are passionate race car drivers, and passionate plumbers, and passionate house painters – it’s not because they were born with that wired into them.

It’s because they did the work, and they like the way it made them feel to do the work. So don’t hold back, don’t stall, don’t hide. Find someone who needs to be connected with, someone who needs your help, someone who needs a light turned on – do that work and then do it again. As we learn the systems of our culture, we can get smart about whether the system, the medium, the process can work to help us achieve our goal.

But once you pick your spot, you don’t have to pick the perfect spot, you just have to pick a spot that’s worth starting with. And then as you do the work, you will find your passion.

Thanks again for listening. Here’s to hope and peace of mind, and good health for everyone.

Be well.

==> 6871-letter-from-birmingham-jail- <==

On April 10th 1963. Judge. Wa Jenkins jr. In Birmingham Alabama issued a blanket order prohibiting parading demonstrating and boycotting throughout the entire city by demonstrators in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Martin Luther King jr. And his allies decided to defy that order to peacefully protest for their rights.

He was arrested and thrown in jail while he was there eight clergyman in Alabama posted a letter in the newspaper criticizing him for leading nonviolent, peaceful demonstrations. He responded with what is now known as letter from the Birmingham Jail. As you know, this isn’t a current events podcast, but I can’t talk about changing the culture. I can’t talk about how we can make things better without addressing the issues that are right here right in front of us black lives matter state-sponsored violence against people because of the color of their skin is intolerable.

It is not okay that we have built systems of systemic racism that treat people differently simply because Is what they look like the rest of this podcast is dr. King’s letter about five years ago. My friend Willie Jackson discovered that there was no audio version of the letter. So he went ahead and assembled an All-Star cast to make one at the end. I’ll come back and read the credits. Thanks to Willie Jackson for giving me permission to use his recording.

This is a Kimbo we’ll be back with dr. King. But first here’s an announcement from our featured nonprofit.

I’m going to start a chapter because I believe the fight against poverty and illiteracy is a very big fight and it’s one that we need to be universally together in we started a chapter together and it proved to be a really great way for us to develop our leadership skills and get involved with a larger organization that would Empower us to change our lives in the lives of individuals around the world in our in our own Community what I took away from this whole experience.

Was that the more you give the more you gain the heart I work to improve the lives of others the more I gave me a life changing experience in return build on.org check them out.

They’re doing important work.

My dear fellow clergymen while confined here in the Birmingham city jail. I came across a recent statement calling my present activities, unwise and untimely Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas if I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk. My secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day and I would have no time for constructive work.

But since I feel that you are men of genuine Good Will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth. I want to try to answer your statement and what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I’m here in Birmingham. Since you have been influenced by The View which argues against Outsiders coming in.

I have the honor of serving as the president of the Southern Christian leadership conference in organization operating in every Southern state with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some 85 Affiliated organizations across the South and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for human rights frequently. We share staff educational and Financial Resources with our Affiliates several months ago.

The affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a non-violent direct action program if such were deemed necessary we readily consented and when the hour came we lived up to our promise, so I along with several members of my staff and here because I was invited here. I’m here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically I am in Birmingham because Injustice is here just as the prophets of the 8th Century BC left their Villages and carried their thus saith the Lord far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Far Corners of the Greco-Roman world. So am I compelled to carry the gospel of Freedom beyond my hometown like Paul. I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for Aid Moreover I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states.

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham Injustice. Anywhere is a threat to Justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single Garment of Destiny, whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly never again, can we afford to live with the narrow provincial outside agitator idea anyone who lives? Inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its balance.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham, but your statement I am sorry to say Phyllis Express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with the effects and does not grapple with the underlying causes.

It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure lifted negro. Immunity with no alternative in any nonviolent campaign.

There are four basic steps collection of the facts to determine whether in justices exist negotiation self-purification and direct action.

We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial Injustice and ghost this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. It’s ugly record of brutality is widely known Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts.

There have been more unsolved bombings of negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard brutal facts of the case on the basis of these conditions negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers, but the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith.

Then last September came the opportunity to talk with leaders of birmingham’s economic community in the course of the negotiations certain promises were made by the merchants. For example to remove the stores humiliating racial signs on the basis of these promises the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for human rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations as the weeks and months went by we We realized that we were the victims of a broken promise a few signs briefly remove return the others remained as in so many past experiences.

Our hopes had been blasted and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action. Whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscious of the local and the national Community mindful of the difficulties involved. We decided to undertake a process of self-purification.

We begin a series of workshops on non-violence. And we repeatedly asked ourselves. Are you able to accept blows without retaliating are you able to endure the ordeal of jail? We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season realizing that except for Christmas. This is the main shopping period of the Year knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the byproduct of Action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that birmingham’s mayoral election was coming up in March and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day when we discovered that the commissioner of Public Safety Eugene Bull Connor had piled up enough votes to be in the runoff we decided again to postpone action until the day after the runoff, so Demonstrations could not be used to Cloud the issues like many others.

We waited to see mr. Connor defeated and to this end we endured postponement after postponement having aided in this community need we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer you may well ask why direct action why sit-ins marches and so forth isn’t negotiation a better path.

You are quite right and calling for Ian indeed this is the very purpose of direct action nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis in Foster such attention that a community which is constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue is it seeks? So to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored by citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resistor may sound rather shocking but I must confess that I’m not afraid of the word tension.

I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension, which is necessary for growth just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create tension in the mind. So that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the FED unfettered realm of creative analysis. An objective appraisal so must we seek the need for non-violent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to The Majestic Heights of understanding and Brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that It will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation too long have our beloved South has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely some have a Why didn’t you give the new city Administration time to act the only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham Administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing going before it will act.

We are sadly mistaken.

If we feel that the election of Albert boutwell as mayor will bring the Millennium to Birmingham while mr. Belt.

Well is a much more gentle person than mr.

Connor. They are both segregationist dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation, but he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights.

My friends I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably. It is a historical fact that privileged groups sell them give up their privileges voluntarily individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture.

But as Ryan old neighbor has reminded us groups tend to be more and moral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor.

It must be demanded by the oppressed.

Frankly.

I’ve yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was well-timed in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation for years.

Now.

I have heard the word wait.

It rings in the ear of every negro with piercing familiarity.

This weight has almost always meant never we must come to see With one of our distinguished jurists that Justice too long delayed is Justice denied.

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and god-given rights nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political Independence, but we still creep at a horse and buggy Pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter Perhaps. It is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait.

But when you have seen vicious mobs Lynch your mothers and fathers and will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim when you have seen hate-filled policemen Kursk. It can even kill your black brothers and sisters. When you see the vast majority of your twenty million negro Brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society when you suddenly find your tongue twisted in your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television.

And see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that fun town is closed to color children and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form and her little mental sky and see how are we getting to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness towards white people when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son, who is asking daddy.

Why do I people treat colored people so mean? When you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in a comfortable corners of your automobile, because no Motel will accept you.

When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading white and colored when your first name becomes nigger in your middle name becomes boy. However old you are and your last name becomes John and your wife and mother are never given the respect to title. Mrs. When you are harried by day and haunted by Night by the fact that you are a negro living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next and are plagued with interferes and outer resentments when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobody.

And you will understand why we find it difficult to wait there comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of Despair.

I hope sirs. You can understand are legitimate and unavoidable impatience you express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools at first glance. It may seem rather paradoxical for us to consciously break laws. One may well ask, how can you Advocate breaking some laws and obeying others the answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws just and unjust I would The first to Advocate obeying just laws one has not only illegal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws conversely one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

I would agree with st. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all.

Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust adjust law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law with the law of God and unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law to put it in the terms of st. Thomas Aquinas an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in Eternal law or natural law.

Any law that uplifts human personality is just Any law that degrades human personality is unjust all segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregate or a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority segregation to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin buber substitutes an eye it relationship for an I’ve our relationship and ends up relegating.

Ins to the status of things hence segregation is not only politically economically and sociologically unsound. It is morally wrong and sinful Paul tillich has said that sin is separation is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation his awful estrangement his terrible sinfulness.

Thus it is that I can urge man to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court for it is morally right and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws and unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.

This is difference made legal by the same token a just law is a code that a majority. He compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation a law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that as a result of being denied the right to vote had no part in an acting or devising the law who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state segregation laws was democratically elected throughout Alabama. All sorts of devious. Methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters and Are some counties in which even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population not a single negro is registered can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust and its application.

For instance. I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit now there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade but such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you’re able to see this thing Shane. I’m trying to point out. And no sense. Do I advocate evading or defying the law as with the rabbit segregationist that would lead to Anarchy one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly lovingly and with the willingness to accept the penalty.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its Injustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there’s nothing new about this kind of Civil Disobedience. It was evident sublimely in The Refuge of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practice who probably by the early Christians who are willing to face hungry lions and excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire.

To a degree academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practice civil disobedience in our own Nation. The Boston Tea Party represented a massive Act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany with legal and everything the Hungarian Freedom Fighters did in Hungary was illegal. It was illegal to Aid and comfort a Jew and Hitler’s Germany even so I’m sure that had I lived in Germany at the time. I would have aided and comforted my Jewish Brothers. If today I lived in a communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith or suppress.

I would openly Advocate disobeying that anti religious laws I must make two confessions to you my Christian and Jewish brothers first.

I must confess that over the past few years. I have been Gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the negro’s great stumbling block in. His stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Council ER or the Ku Klux Klan ER but the white moderate who’s more devoted to order than to Justice.

Who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of Justice who constantly says I agree with you in the goal you seek but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s Freedom who lives by mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season.

Shallow understanding from people of Goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that Law and Order exists for the purpose of establishing Justice and that when they fail in this purpose, they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

I hope that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the south is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative piece in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight. To its substantive positive peace in which all men with respect and dignity and worth of human personality.

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open work can be seen and dealt with like a boil that can never be cured so long as it’s been covered up but must be open with all its ugliness to the natural medicine that are in light Injustice must be exposed with all the tension. Its exposure creates to the light of human consciousness. And the are of national opinion before can be cured in your statement. You assert that our actions, even though peaceful must be Them because they precipitate violence but is this a logical assertion isn’t this like condemning a robbed man? Because his possession of money precipitated the evil Act of robbery isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical enquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink Hemlock.

Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God Consciousness and never ceasing Devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil Act of crucifixion. We must come to see that as the federal courts have consistently affirmed. It is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest May precipitate violence Society must protect the robbed and punish. The robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to struggle for Freedom. I’ve just received the letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes all Christians know that the colored people ruse will receive equal rights eventually. But it is possible that you are that you are in too. Great a religious hurry.

It is taken Christianity almost 2,000 years to to accomplish what it has the teachings of Christ take time to come to Earth such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills actually time itself is neutral.

It can be used either destructively or constructively more and more. I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of Goodwill. We will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the hateful words and the actions of bad people but for the appalling Silence of the good people human progress never rolls on in wheels of inevitability, it comes through the tireless efforts of men and willing of men willing to be co-workers with God and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally The forces of social stagnation we must use time creatively in the knowledge that the time is always right to do right now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pain and National elegy into a creative Psalm of Brotherhood now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial Injustice to the solid rock of human dignity you speak of our activity in birmingham’s extreme first.

I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of next dream. missed I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro Community one is a force of complacency made up in part of negroes Who as a result of long years of Oppression are so drained of self-respect in the sense of somebody – that they have adjusted to segregation and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who because of a degree academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation have become insensitive to the problems of the masses the Force is one of bitterness and hatred and it comes perilously close to advocating violence.

It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up Across the Nation the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement nourished by the Negroes frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. This movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America who have absolutely repudiated Christianity and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible devil. Well, I’ve tried to stand between these two forces saying that we need to emulate neither the do-nothing the ism of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist for there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.

I am grateful to God that through the influence of the Negro Church the way of non-violence became an integral part of our struggle if this philosophy had not emerged by now many streets of the South would I am convinced be flowing with blood? And I am further convinced that if our White Brothers dismiss as Rebel rousers and outside agitators those of us who employ nonviolent direct action and if they refuse to support our non violent effort millions of negroes will out of frustration and despair seeks Solace and Security in Black nationalist ideologies a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare oppressed.

People cannot remain oppressed forever the yearning for freedom. Mm, eventually manifests itself. And that is what has happened to the American Negro something within has reminded him of his Birthright of freedom and something without his reminded him that it can be gained consciously or unconsciously.

He has been caught by the Zeitgeist and with his black Brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia South America and the Caribbean the United States negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial. Justice if one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro Community one should readily understand where public demonstrations are taking place.

The Negro has many pent-up resentment sand lead in frustrations and he must release them. So let him March let him make prayer pilgrimages to the City Hall. Let him go on freedom rides and try to understand why he must do so if his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways. They will seek expression through violence.

This is not a threat but a fact of history, so I have not said to my people get rid of your discontent rather.

I have tried to say that this normal and healthy. This content can be channeled into the creative Outlet of non-violent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremists, but though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist as I continue to think about the matter. I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label was not Jesus an extremist for love.

Love your enemies bless them that curse you do good to them that hate you and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you was not Amos an extremist for justice. Let Justice roll down like Waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream was not Paul and extremist for the Christian Gospel.

I bear in my body the marks of the Lord. Jesus was not Martin Luther and extremists here. I stand I could not do otherwise so help me God.

And John Bunyan, I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a Butchery of my conscience and Abraham Lincoln this nation cannot survive half slave and half free and Thomas Jefferson. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. So the question is not whether we will be extremists. But what kind of extremists we will be will we be extremists for hate or for love, but we be extremists for the preservation of Injustice.

Us or for the extension of justice and that dramatic scene on calvary’s Hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime the crime of extremism to were extremists for immorality and thus fell below their environment. The other Jesus Christ was an extremist for love truth and goodness.

And thereby Rose above his environment. Perhaps the South the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need perhaps I was too optimistic perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race and still fewer have the vision to see that Injustice must be rooted out by strong persistent and determined action.

I am thankful. However, that some of our White Brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social Revolution. Committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big and quality some such as Ralph McGill Lillian Smith Harry. Golden James McBride abs and Braden and Sarah patent boil have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South they have languished and filthy roach infested jail suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as dirty nigger. Lovers unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters.

They have recognized the urgency of the movement and since the need for powerful action antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions.

I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you rev Stallings for your Christian stand on this past Sunday and welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a non-segregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago despite these notable exceptions.

I must honestly reiterate that I’ve been disappointed with the church. We do not say that it is as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this is a minister of the Gospel who loves the church whose nurtured in its bosom who’s been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will And true to it as long as the court of Life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama a few years ago. I felt that we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies instead some have been outright opponents refusing to understand the Freedom Movement and misrepresenting its leaders all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and remained silent behind the Annette the sizing security of stained glass windows in spite of my Shattered Dreams.

I came to Birmingham The hope that white religious leadership of this community would see justice of our case and with deep moral concern would serve as a channel through which are just grievances could reach the power structure.

I had hoped that each of you would understand.

But again, I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous Southern religious leaders admonished the worshippers to comply with the desegregation decision because it is the law but I have no long but I have longed to hear it’s white men through the Kree followed this decree because integration is morally right and because the Both your brother in the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro.

I have watched white churchmen stand on the sidelines and mouth highest irrelevancies in sanctimonious trivial teased in the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation’s racial and economic Justice. I have heard many ministers say those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern and I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes strange unbiblical distinction between Audience Soul between sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all other Southern States on sweltering summer days and Chris bottom mornings. I’ve looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings over and over I found myself asking what kind of people worship here.

Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave Clarion call for defiance and hatred where were their voices of support when bruised and weary negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright heels of creative protest.

Yes.

These questions are still in my mind.

In deep disappointment. I wept over the laxity of the church, but be assured that my tears have been tears of Love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes. I love the church. How could I do? Otherwise, I’m in the rather unique position of being the son the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers.

Yes. I see the church as the body of Christ, but all how we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformist. There was a time when the church was very powerful. In the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed in those days. The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion.

It was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society whenever the early Christians entered the town the people in power became Disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being disturbers of the peace and outside agitators with the Christians pressed on In the conviction that they were a colony of Heaven called to obey God rather than men.

Small in number they were big and commitment. They were too god-intoxicated to be astronomically intimidated by their effort and example, they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.

So often it is an arc defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church. The power structure of the average Community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocals sanction of things as they are. But the Judgment of God is upon the church as never before if today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial Spirit of the early church. It will lose its authenticity for Faith the Loyalty of millions and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 20th century.

Everyday, I meet young people who’s disappointed with the church has turned into outright discussed.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic is organized religion to and extractable bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world.

Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church the church within the church as a true Ecclesia in the hope of the world.

But again, I’m thankful to God that some Noble Souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of Conformity and joined us as active Partners in the struggle for Freedom. They have left your secure congregations and walk the streets of Albany, Georgia with us.

They have gone down the highways of the South and tortures rights for Freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches have lost the support of their Bishops and fellow ministers, but they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

Their witness has been the spiritual salt that is preserved the true meaning of the Gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of Hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church is a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the age of Justice, I have no despair about the future.

I’ve no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham. Even if our motives are at present misunderstood, we will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though. We may be our destiny is tied up with America’s Destiny before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. We were here before the pain of Jefferson etched The Majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of History.

We were here for more than two centuries.

Our forebears labored in this country without wages.

They made kotton King. They build the homes of their masters while suffering gross Injustice and shameful humiliation and yet out of a bottomless Vitality they continued to thrive Ivan develop is the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us the opposition we face now will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred Heritage of our nation and the Eternal will of God are embodied in echoing our demands before closing.

I feel compelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly.

You warm the commended the Birmingham police force for quote unquote order and quote unquote preventing violence. I doubt that you would have been you would have so warmly recommended the police force. If you had seen the dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the police if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of negroes here in the city jail, if Where the watch them push and cursed old negro women and young negro girls. If you were to see them slap and kick old negro men and young boys. If you were to observe them as they did on two occasions refused to give us food because we wanted to sing our Grace together.

I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham Police Department.

It is true that the police exercise the degree of discipline and handling the demonstrators in this sense. They have conducted themselves rather non-violently in public. But for what purpose to preserve the evil system of segregation over the past few years. I’ve consistently preached that non-violence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

I’ve tried to make that clear. That it is wrong to use in more moral means to tame our lands.

But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong or perhaps even more. So to use moral means to preserve immoral ends perhaps mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public as was Chief Pritchett in Albany Georgia, but they have used the moral means of non-violence to maintain the immoral end of racial Injustice.

As TS. Eliot has said The Last Temptation is the greatest reason to do the right deed for the Reason, I wish you had commanded the Negro Sinners and demonstrators of Birmingham to their Sublime courage their willingness to suffer and they’re amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize it’s real heroes.

They will be the James Meredith with a novel sense of purpose that enables them to face during and hostile mobs and with the agonizing loneliness the arises to life of the pioneer.

They will be old a breast battered it negro women symbolized in a 72 year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama Who Rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses and who responded with ungrammatical profound The t21 Who inquired about her weariness, my feet is tired, but my soul is at rest.

They will be the young high school and college students the young Ministers of the gospel and a host of their Elders courageously and non-violently sitting in at lunch counters and willing to go to jail for conscience Sake One Day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream.

And for the most sacred values in our judeo-christian heritage, thereby, bringing our nation back to those great Wells of democracy, which were dug Deep by the founding fathers. Their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence never before have I written so long a letter.

I’m afraid. It is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell other than write long letters think long thoughts and pray long prayers if I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable.

It’s I beg you to forgive me if I had said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patient’s that allows me to settle for anything other than Brotherhood. I begged God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith.

I also hope that circumstances will make it possible for me to meet each of you.

Not as an integrationist or civil rights leader. But as a fellow clergyman and a question brother, let us all hope the dark clouds of racial Prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drinks communities.

And then some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and Brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating Beauty. Yours for the cause of peace and Brotherhood.

Martin Luther King Junior read by Wes kale Mike Ambassador Bruni doc Waller, Darius Grant Garfield Hilton Jermaine Murray. Sean King Pam slim, DeRay McKesson. Dr. Ivor horn Charlie Gilkey Neal Ludwig Charles Davis Soledad O’Brien Greg hurdle, Kimberly Nadia Scott Lisa, Nicole Bell Paul, Drayton Cody, Elaine.

Andre Blackman John Montgomery the second Daniel Jarvis James Lopez Donna quaza, Mark errands Stella Santana, Alex Chavez Spencer Pittman on kid. Sha Cliff Worley caylor lie Stephanie Hashem. Willie Jackson, Don pottinger Rachel Rogers. Dr. Angelica Perez Litwin. Akilah Hughes Diana alvear. Danielle Janine Powell Emanuel has e you can find more about Willie at Willie Jackson.com podcast is going to take a break.

We’ll be back soon. Thank you for the work you do. Thank you for making things better.

==> 7175-organized-learning- <==

If you took your time machine and went back 6,000 years ago or twenty thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago and found a small baby abandoned brought them to the present day and raised them. They would not grow up to be a Sumerian or caveman. They would grow up to be someone indistinguishable from someone born today.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Akimbo will be back to talk about organized learning and its consequences. But first here’s a message from our featured nonprofit.

I’m going to start a chapter because I believe the fight against poverty and illiteracy is a very big fight and it’s one that we need to be universally together in we started a chapter together and it proved to be a Really great way for us to develop our leadership skills and get involved with the larger organization that would Empower us to change our lives in the lives of individuals around the world in our in our own Community.

But I took away from this whole experience. Was that the more you give the more you gain the harder I work to improve the lives of others the more gave me a life changing experience in return build on.org check them out.

They’re doing important work.

I think the most important and impactful Innovation that the human species has come up with in 200,000 years is organized learning every other species that lives in community. Does it in the moment? If you drop off a kitten with a bunch of feral cats soon, it will learn to run with them to eat to hide to understand the status roles where it will perish but the thing is that pack of feral cats wasn’t that different a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. Out maybe they change in response to the built environment.

But basically it is what it is human beings are different because human beings figured out how to share learning from generation to generation and things that we believe are permanent things that we believe are given are not they are simply the function of organized learning now. I call it organized learning for a reason it’s different than school and it’s different than education organize learning relies on several things.

First of all peer-to-peer connection, we have culture because the people around us teach it to us and enforce it and top down because often edicts come from the chief from the network from the people in charge about what things are like around here and so different countries different how It’s different towns have different cultures because they’re organized learning is different that technology that technology of the built world has changed. Lots of things technology has its own ratchet and it’s ratchet affects How We Do organized learning we went from having three TV networks blaring at us all the time, 2:32 302 an infinite number that changes things. It’s because it elevates the voices of people who hadn’t been heard, it changes things because it permits far more diversity of thought and connection organized learning is remarkably unorganized when we compare it to most of the things in our physical world, but it is organized nonetheless and that’s good news because it means if we choose we can change it there are places. In the world where skin color is not a dominant factor in how people engage with one another to be clear race ethnicity nationality. These are not scientific Concepts.

They are inventions of our culture. There are places in the world where physical beauty or appearance matter far more than other places. What we have discovered over time is that culture compounds there are countries that raised more. Scientists, there are countries that raised more competitive athletes.

This is not a genetic choice. This is the result of organized learning water things like around here. What does it mean to fit in? What does it mean to move up? What does it mean to be respected when we decide how voting is going to work when we decide where to build the highway when we decide what it looks like and feels like to go through customs or the TSA when we determine how people Sit in a classroom and what books are available. These are all examples of organized learning because we’re establishing culture what it’s like around here.

These are choices if we establish a dynamic where people say I am eager to vote and I feel welcome. When I do that’s one outcome or we can establish a dynamic that says I’m afraid to vote. I feel unwelcome when I do they’re all choices whether they were made intentionally. or not Organized learning takes many forms when we give some people less access to tools or leverage or learning.

Well, that’s a form of organized learning. We’re sending a message when we set expectations for People based on where they were born or what they look like. We are establishing organized learning among that group and other groups when we allocate our budget when we decide what success looks like. These are all forms of building culture. We’re doing it with organization and we are hoping that people will learn what we are doing because that’s what culture does. It sends a message. It sends a message about what things are like around here. So organized learning extends far beyond whatever classroom you are imagining and it is in every corner of any world that isn’t simply a forest with one person in it as soon as we build something as soon as we connect as soon as we interact we are Organizing some learning for the people around us.

And now as we were staring straight into the face of hundreds of years of organized racism based on the myth of white supremacy in my country and many others. We need to take a deep breath and realize that we cannot fix this problem overnight, but this problem is not permanent. It is not permanent because it is the result of indoctrination indoctrination. That is based. An invisible and visible parts of organized learning.

So let’s break this down a little bit. First of all education the education industrial complex. The mighty force of the industrialized world to create compliant workers who are just good enough to get the job that needs to get done and not hope or wonder if they can get a better one that sort of Education that sort of Education lifted us out of the Our cages and permitted the Industrial Age to occur, but no it is not the only form of organized learning and that sort of education is more about compliance then curiosity and passion and actual learning.

We offer that sort of Education to different people based on their economic background based on the color of their skin that expectations are set from an early age about Who Your Heroes might be and how You’re supposed to get along in the world. We have created images and models and Pathways forward for People based on things that are completely irrelevant to their skills or what they are capable of contributing and it’s not just the thing that we call school that I’m talking about here organized learning happens as soon as you land at an airport.

What is it like around here? How are you supposed to act organize learning? Occurs the minute you walk into a hospital including the day you were born. How are you treated what resources are available to you? How are you supposed to respond organize learning happens when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and have to go ahead and get a driver’s license because everybody who has a car learns to drive and get the driver’s license and there is a regime in place to create something that generally leads to more safety, but also reinforces a certain sort of Primacy based on a certain sort of bureaucracy some of these things are necessary. Some of them might not be and now that technology in the form of the internet has put in front of us access to infinite amounts of knowledge.

We have to think about how we’re going to organize this organized learning into a bundle of interaction that creates opportunities for more people because it turns out that keeping some Pull out of the system keeping some people down doesn’t actually help the others. It hurts them because in an economy that was based on scarcity in the industrial system.

It could be argued that fewer competitors made it easier to do well, but in an economy that’s based on connection and possibility in an economy that’s based on ideas far more than it’s based on who can dig a hole with a shovel or who owns a pin making machine what we have Discovered is the cultures that figure out how to work together in harmony toward a common goal are far more efficient and effective. What we’ve discovered is that when we keep someone away from the chance to contribute. We don’t get the benefit of their contribution that in fact the racism that is endemic in so much of the invisible organized learning that goes on around us is not just toxic in a Errol but really expensive because it wastes opportunity that breakthrough idea that Innovation that caring person that opportunity to make things better.

It just doesn’t happen because we’ve excluded somebody from the circle my whole life. It’s been a given the pop culture is what pop culture is. It seems disorganized. It seems like there isn’t some evil James Bond villain in charge of who gets seen and who doesn’t get Dean because there was always more than one voice but those voices they tend to work in sync because it’s a commercial environment and in a commercial environment the people who are paying for the messages to go out sort of wanted it to be in sync with the way things were and the way things were supposed to be because the commercial environment liked that sort of status quo.

And so what got taught not just in a textbook but on And in our culture as you walk down the street was reinforced and reinforced and reinforced and then when we created this million Channel World We Now live in new voices began to be heard. Some of those voices were racist angry voices that wanted to put other people down in a failing effort to somehow take more than they thought they had but many of those voices are different sort of voice.

They are voice of possibility a voice of Follow Me. Voice of organization a voice of we can make things better and what we are seeing right now unfolding in front of us is a chance to reorganize the organized learning around us to figure out how to send messages and how to hear messages that say what we need them to say as opposed to just what they used to say, so there is no obvious shortcut or right answer.

But here’s what we know in the middle of 2020 in the middle of a pandemic that has threatened the health of so many people in the middle of a worldwide recession in the middle of outcries about Justice and racism babies are being born now babies from 6,000 years ago or a hundred thousand years ago brand new babies are being born.

What will they learn? What is the model in front of them of what it means to go forward? Because it shouldn’t take seven generations to fix this problem that in fact, each of us that lives in culture makes culture. Each of us has the chance to model behaviors that make things better in ways. We never even were looking for before that more than any time that I can think of culture is made by the Grassroots by each of us in how we act and what we say and how we say, it in who we work with in how we respond or choose to react because reaction doesn’t get us very far but response openness a hand to help somebody get to the next level these things turn out to pay off for all of us that what we can work to do is to address the flaws and all the organized learning that came before us, even if we didn’t organize that learning but especially if We did we have a chance to say how do other people interact with this thing. I made this thing. I am trying to create these interactions that are in front of us because we get to decide how it will work.

And a lot of the outcry about social media is totally appropriate because too often in Silicon Valley the people who work their view themselves as simply tools tools for technology and tools for investment that if they use technology and investment the way Supposed to go they get a prize but I don’t think that’s valid because we make choices all the time not just choices in how a i reacts to one thing or another but choices about which voices we will amplify because if we choose to amplify no voices. We have already made a choice about which voices to amplify that we have to decide in all of the things that we create are we setting up situations where people will learn from this Are they organized enough to do better?

Because that’s what marketing is. That’s what culture is. That’s what real education is the chance to lay out a path from here to there to make things better by making better things and the better things existing to make things better that none of us can change all of the culture. But each of us has a circle around us a circle of people who want to act like this.

And if you can say people want to act like this do things like that. Then we have a choice a choice to let people make choices to make choices based on who they want to be and where they want to go not based on what an Antiquated cultural Dynamic told them. They were supposed to want and supposed to do thank you for listening to my rant.

Here’s to Justice. Here’s to Peace of Mind. Here’s to Good Health. Here’s to a chance to make things better. Go make a Ruckus. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a relevant question from a previous episode. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about today or any previous episode, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo Dot and press the appropriate button.

It’s a Lucas near I’m a seventh grade science teacher out of Salt Lake City, Utah.

My question is about enrollment given that students are forced or mandated to be at school and indeed they perceive that to be true and also given that us teachers are held accountable to State Standards to teaching certain content that not all students. Maybe the most interested in and that our job is judged how well we do is judged based on State Testing certain test scores ACT SAT test scores Etc.

I’m wondering within this given this current system and the confines what tips and recommendations you have about creating enrollment. Thanks for all you do.

Thanks for this question Lucas and thanks for the hard work you’re doing to spread the ideas of science because science is universal and essential and it can change a kid’s life. I’m highlighting this question today because it gets to the heart of organized learning you are surrounded by a system. It is a build system. It’s only a hundred years old the system of SATs and standardized tests and the regime of ranking people and of lions that we went from needing to get kids to sit still so they’d work in a factory to using that leveraging it forward and forward and forward toward obeying a bureaucracy that just happens to put science into the curriculum and you are stuck in the middle because what the system wants you to do is treat those kids like cogs in the system so that they will continue to be cogs going forward that the only reason to learn science is to do Do well on the test that a friend of mine who’s just finishing up a really expensive college education was explaining that during Sheltering from home classes were in zoom and in his Spanish class.

The teacher used breakout rooms, which is my favorite feature in Zoom, which permits a teacher who’s got I don’t know 20 people in the class to press a button and suddenly it’s four groups of five and those five people are now on their own to have a more intimate peer-to-peer. Here conversation in this case in Spanish and he sneered and said what a fool she was because of course she can’t watch what’s going on in all the breakout rooms.

And so the students figured out really quickly that they could just talk about whatever was on their minds in English that this 45-minute class became the teacher talking for five minutes in Spanish and the rest of the class hiding out and learning nothing and I looked at him a ghast. Because this was the byproduct best and brightest someone who did well on tests and made it all the way to a famous college who had plenty of resources to do this work.

This is the byproduct of being treated like a cog because the minute the supervisor wasn’t watching. It was easy to go off duty. Well, that’s the opposite of enrollment enrollment says, wow, not only did this cost me a lot. I’m never going to get another chance to have this sort of experience. And I’m here because I want to learn Spanish. What a great chance to speak Spanish and so the organized learning of school broke down but so did the organized learning possibility among the students because the students weren’t enrolled.

And so what it means to earn enrollment is to act like the great teacher. We all remember having maybe we didn’t have enough of them. Some people aren’t lucky to have any but a few of us have had a bunch of great teachers. What is the difference between a great teacher and a pretty good teacher? It’s 100% about enrollment particularly today.

When all the lessons are available online for free. You can watch the greatest instructors in the world teach every single topic for free online, but a great teacher earns enrollment and figures out how to do it despite the system because the system the one that’s currently In charge is not focused on giving teachers the resources. They need to earn enrollment.

What would it mean for a kid to choose to become a scientist to choose to level up from the world as they see it to one that is more possible. What it requires alas is a level of heroism. It is not business as usual. We haven’t figured out how to do that. What we have figured out how to do is to create at least enough room for somebody who’s willing to do. Do all of that extra stuff off the books to look a kid in the eye to do the emotional labor of finding out.

Is there a glimmer or has it all been baked out of someone even by the time someone gets to kindergarten the idea of organized learning may have burnt out of them any desire to be curious, but that is what we need to teach kids in middle school or high school or elementary school because if they’re not curious by the time they get to the rest of the world gets harder still and you’re seeing the system and your question demonstrates that you see the system and the answer is obviously right in front of you, you know exactly what to do it, but it’s just too hard because it feels like each one of us in whatever profession were in has to undo centuries of brainwashing of indoctrination and it’s true we do but if we all try to do it then the tide can turn That we can invent a new cultural Dynamic a new form of organization about what it means to learn anything what it means to learn to be at work what it means to learn to be a citizen what it means to learn to be part of community.

But first we have to have enrollment because we cannot force people to do it. We have to open the door and encourage people to walk through it because learning the biggest difference between learning and education is this Education is mandatory. It’s something that the forces that be make you do and require you to take a test to prove you did but learning lasts because learning is voluntary learning isn’t I did it because it’s on the test learning is I did it because I wanted to know Everyone who knows how to ride a bicycle learned how to ride a bicycle?

No one did it because of that bike riding test and so we have this opportunity to recast how we spend our time. I’m not sure if Abe Lincoln actually said it but he said if I had 20 hours to chop down a tree I’d spend 18 hours sharpening my axe. Well, in this case if I had to teach a year of science, I’d spend as much time as I possibly could teaching people to want to learn science and then I wouldn’t need Time at all to actually teach the science. Thanks for the work. You do.

Thank you for leaving. We’ll see you next time.

There is no Great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you.

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the Part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information.

consider the alt MBA more than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt nba.com.

==> 7345-the-confusions- <==

Governor Malibu couldn’t get through on the inside. He is in traffic exaggerator here comes Lonnie on the far outside and Creator is coming down. It is destined in front 3 Gator let any of the outside Destin and Creator these two don’t go to the light together to close the hole in 2006.

There was an auction for a thoroughbred horse named The Green Monkey it ended up selling for 16 million dollars. That horse grew up to compete in only three races of which it won. None of them several years earlier a Kentucky Derby winner named Ferdinand in 1986 was put out to stud in Japan at Great expense and ended up completely failing at the job a typical successful Thoroughbred can earn fifty million dollars selling its services in Panting new thoroughbreds.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about just how bad we are predicting the future and it’s serious repercussions in all of our lives. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

So I’ve got a bunch of examples of proof that we are terrible at predicting the future but To do so and many of them have to do with money even though money isn’t the point. It just makes it really clear that something that people should understand something that people are supposedly careful with we keep doing wrong and it has really bad side effects.

It leads to us living lives in fear embracing the status quo making decisions about race and appearance and gender that make no sense whatsoever. So I’ve got six or seven to share. Here we go. The first one which you have seen a thousand times before and have ignored over and over again is that past performance is not related to Future Behavior.

If each year you bought the mutual fund that did the best the year before you’d be broke now and yet lots of investors look for. Well, what’s its five-year? Return? What’s its 10-year return even though there is no correlation whatsoever between how a You’ll find used to do and how it’s going to do tomorrow.

We frequently look for unrelated issues of past performance when we decide how somebody or something is going to behave in the future related to that is the idea that performance and behavior is inherited the entire business of thoroughbred racing, which is a multi multi-billion dollar industry is based on Only three horses three horses a few hundred years ago are related to every single horse that races in thoroughbred racing and they are carefully tracked and the Bloodlines are tracked and it’s all in some big book and there was a big controversy because American horses weren’t allowed in the British Book for a long time and it goes on and on and yet it’s really clear.

Nobody knows anything. It turns out that the true. Meaning the expectations are far more important than who the parents were. The next one doesn’t have to do with dollars, but it does have to do with behavior, which is that we frequently generalize over irrelevant commonalities. If on your bike a couple weeks ago you got cut off by a white SUV. Someone driving really aggressively. It’s only natural that when you see another white SUV on the road you’re going to Be filled with fear.

It’s not the same driver and there’s no correlation between the color of a car and the way the car drives, but we notice it and we get triggered because we are pattern-matching creatures. Of course, it’s not just humans almost every developed species does exactly this the cat only sits on the stove once even if it’s a different stove even if the stove is off because There’s a pavlovian response to a signal and a reaction easy measurements are often used to make predictions. We prefer something that’s easy to talk about and rank.

So before Moneyball for a hundred years in baseball batting average was everything if you were a scout you were looking at batting average. It didn’t matter that Billy Beane was able to demonstrate that batting average was a false metric appearing precise people. All kept looking for it because it was easy to do and so we say this person has a lot of followers on Twitter.

They must be X Y or Z but there’s no relationship between the number of followers you have on Twitter and anything except the number of followers you have on Twitter. How about this one short term patterns are believed to indicate long-term Behavior. We do this in the justice system or the punishment system over and over again, but it might have even happened in your home for 7 year old or nine-year-old is wetting their bed.

It’s the parents that are freaking out because in the back of their head, they’re feeling shame. They’re worried that their 14 year older their 25 year old will have the same problem and there are rare. medical conditions where that’s true but in general no, but they’re fretting cause shame to spread and a few years from now on that kid overcomes the challenge the shame is still going to be sitting around looking for short-term patterns and using them to assume that something is going to be different or the same in the future in a different setting is a trap related to that behavior in one area being associated with that in another if you’ve ever interviewed someone for a job you’ve fallen into this trap that just because someone is good at a job interview doesn’t mean they’re going to be a good actuary.

It doesn’t mean they’re going to be a good accountant. It might not even mean that they’re going to be a good receptionist. All it means is that they’re good in job interviews. We know for example that in order to be a good con man. You have to come across as trustworthy. Coming across this trustworthy does not mean you are trustworthy. It simply means you’re good at coming across as trustworthy and all of these things roll up to the thing that we evolved to be which is likers lovers maintainers of the status quo because the status quo represents evolutionarily less of a threat then change a species that’s optimized for a certain place in a certain. Certain location likes that place and likes that location. It makes it more likely that that species will have grandchildren that the genes will be passed on and so the species gets stressed when the world changes in the Great Book the beak of the finch scientists went year after year after year to a small island in the Galapagos and measured how big the beaks were on the finches that live there and only there it was. Amazing Experiment because the finches were isolated and each year, they could measure the rainfall and it turns out when there’s a lot of rainfall the seeds that the birds eat earner different place in a different way of getting at them then in years where there isn’t a lot of rainfall and so the beaks that match the weather lead to healthy Birds and the beasts that are too short or not strong enough.

Don’t what does this mean it means? Means that if you are carrying around a genome that needs it to be dry and it’s raining a lot you’re in big trouble now, I don’t think finches spend much time worrying about the weather but you and beings we spend a lot of time worrying worrying about the status quo trying to keep things the way they are if we took someone from the current day and put them back in 1400 or the year 800. My guess is they I wish for so many of the conveniences and privileges that modern people have today.

But the people in those days they weren’t eager for societal or technological change even in the worst days of the Soviet Union. There were a lot of people in the Soviet Union who wanted things to stay the way they are because we’re organized to want things to be as they are and so here we are surrounded by a world in flux.

And we are so confused. So confused about predicting future Performance Based on past performance. So confused about the power of heredity about who the parents and the grandparents were of that person that we are encountering so afraid of the other the one that we don’t know yet aided by the media which makes a living keeping us scared which makes a living teaching us what things are like around here.

We make bad decisions all the time. We see someone who reminds us of royalty and the status quo. Oh George Clooney, he’s Hollywood royalty, we hear about lineage. We look at the background of the people who were hoping to lead us or the people who are simply walking past us on the street and we are making bad predictions bad predictions about who to hire bad predictions about who to trust bad predictions about where to put our investments or who to feel comfortable around or not.

And so there’s lots of bad decisions getting made Zig Ziglar used to say if you get lost in some neighborhood before GPS and there’s a bunch of kids playing on the corner who you going to ask for directions. Well, the answer is usually the tall kid the tall kid might be as dumb as a post. All you know is that you’re trying to predict the future and you’re using a not very good clue to figure out who’s going to be The smart person the engage person the person who’s going to help you get to the next level.

So we vote for presidents who are a little bit taller because somewhere along the way we got brainwashed into thinking that was an effective way to predict the future. And so we judge somebody by the color of their skin because like batting average. It’s right there. It’s easy to measure its in front of us and we’ve been reminded for a really long time that it’s a metric we should look for and so We punish people their whole lives because the punishment system interact with them when they were 20 years old, even though that’s a false signal appearing real over and over again. We make decisions about kids kids as young as one or two or three years old based on who their parents are what their socioeconomic status is and we decide to indoctrinate them one way or the other based on that not based on the potential that’s Found us the extraordinary thing about the world. We live in that it is based not on inherent genetic Talent if there even is such a thing, it is based on attitude and attitude is based on indoctrination and environment and that’s often manipulated by the confusions that we’ve just talked about. It’s manipulated by class. It’s manipulated by race. And so what we end up doing is persuading some people that they should have a voice and that they should be in charge and that they should go to the next level and we persuade way too many people to lower their expectations and to be told that they don’t belong or they’re never going to amount to anything.

But what we need is an attitude that enables enrollment which leads to flexibility and to learning because if we are curious and enrolled in the journey, we can learn more than ever before if we are open and realize just how bad we are at predicting the future. We can stop looking at the false Clues and q’s and instead focus on the ones that truly matter.

We have hardwired all of this into our system the Educational Systems the financial systems to Healthcare Systems all predicting the future poorly all locking people out from the idea of contribution and possibility. It turns out that the stuff in the built world around us the generous stuff to technological stuff. the things that make things better they were all made by human beings human beings who saw something human beings who believed they could contribute and those contributions are not based on where they were born or who their parents were they are based on possibility and curiosity and attitude and so our opportunity is to start seeing the future more clearly that when one of the false metrics shows up when one of the traps arrived We need to take a deep breath and say no we’re not going to fall for that again because people are not thoroughbreds and even people who track the thoroughbreds have trouble predicting the future know people are people and if we can teach somebody something if we can help them learn and help them believe that it is possible to connect and to make things better.

It’s likely that that’s going to happen. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second to answer your questions from last time, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Seth my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is anupam.

Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Thanks for listening. As you know, I love getting questions from you. If you’ve got a question, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button this week instead of the usual QA. I’m really thrilled to include a conversation. I had live last week with Taylor Harrington.

And dr. Natalie Nixon. She’s written a really important new book about creativity. Here we go, and we’re live now. I’ve had Seth and I’m here with the extraordinary Natalie Nixon and I want to start us off. Hi, Natalie. How are you? Good. How’s it going? Great. Thanks. This is such a weird medium. It takes a little while for me to get used to the fact that I’m not in a room by myself.

We’re going to talk about creativity possibility the practice and our ability to do this work on purpose before we do and before I give Natalie the proper introduction she deserves here is my Gary story, I have a book coming out in November about creativity. And so I get this email a few months ago saying here’s this new book coming out about creativity. Do you want to look at it? And that’s like the worst thing in the whole world.

Don’t send me a new book about creativity because I don’t want to so I said, I’m really really busy.

I can’t read it which was true. And then the minute I finished my book. I read Natalie’s book and I am super relieved that a her book is even better than mine and be there’s almost no overlap between To so Natalie’s book turned on a light for me. It is filled with profundity from beginning to end. It’s not a long book if you want to those people who needs books to be not long and I think it will stick with you for a long time. So I reached out to Natalie and I said I didn’t steal your book.

I couldn’t blurb your book, but I would love to have you join Taylor and I to talk about your book because it’s available now and we need more creativity in our world. So with that said hi, Natalie. How are you? Hi Seth.

Hi Taylor, it’s Seth.

Thank you so much for inviting me and sharing your platform. This is this is awesome to see you even through this medium.

So when did the pitch start for you to say creativity is a skill and I might be able to help people it started as I you know, I filled up my company Figure 8 thinking first as a side hustle when I was still a Esther and I would do these Consulting projects with companies that we’re trying to build Innovation culture start Innovation lab and I had this creeping Sensation that we were going about it the wrong way.

I felt like we were kind of talking over and around each other throwing out the word Innovation and needed a sort of lingua Franca and but then I realized in my opinion we had to pause and take a step back and actually start with creativity because I believe creativities the engine for innovation.

Yeah. Yeah, and I think your writing style is terrific and you reminded me of some stories. I’d heard before like the Visa origin story, which I would love to have you touch on for a minute but also a whole bunch of new ones and I think that human beings have voluntarily brainwashed themselves into thinking they’re not creative and you’re just completely pulling the blanket off of that one and saying that’s not the way it works. It’s a skill.

That’s right. It’s a Pop in and see and it’s actually going to become more essential in what we’re calling the future of work, which is here. We are hello in the fourth Industrial Revolution and you know a robust renowned organization like the world economic Forum has had projected back in 2016 that creativity would be among the top three job skills to have in the world. So yeah to be human is to be hardwired to be creative. And so this book is an up to also kind of democratize how we’re thinking about creativity because I was also tired of us ghettoizing creativity and the Arts.

I I decided to Define not just decided. I was I did quite a bit of research and data quality and researched a lot of conversations with a range of people and I think about creativity as our capacity and ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems, right and that dichotomy I think was the magic thing in the book.

Me I had never thought about it. So simply and it’s super profound because lots of us know people who are filled with wonder and have no rigor and the opposite and I don’t think anyone’s born filled with both or neither. And again, it’s a muscle and we can learn how to use it. Absolutely.

It’s a muscle and it’s about you know, I was listening to one of your episodes your pockets and you’re talking about Out organized learning right and it’s it’s something that we have Forsaken and the way that we approached our culture cultures of learning.

Yeah, let me bring Taylor back on because I know that she’s got a whole bunch of questions. She wants to do it’s the interactivity here that makes it super fun. Tell me what you got.

Yeah. So we’re going to pop off of what you guys are just saying with Wonder. So obviously that’s a huge part of the creativity leap. And then also you talked a lot about Natalie this idea of traditional Patient and how that tends to kind of lose that sense of creativity and wonder that those curious kids have so this question is from Rosie. So as you said, how can I find creativity again now as a mom of four kids with a pretty mundane job I used to be so creative when I was younger.

Can you both talk a little bit about how she can ReDiscover wonder and also creativity in her life.

So the so yeah, so thank you for that question Rosie. It’s really Inch by inch, it’s it’s small iterative steps. So I do something which I’m I used to be embarrassed to say out loud. But you know now that I think I wrote about this in the book I take Daydream breaks. Yeah, I didn’t read about this in book. I recall how as a first grader. I’ve always been a mighty day dreamer and daydreaming. We actually know now from Neuroscience of creativity that it really helps on Euro synapses to rewire in a different way so we can That deep marinating work that leads to those aha moments and insight so I actually create time to daydream breaks during the day if it’s cold outside. I’ll just stand by window in a beautiful warm June day. I was I’m from Philly. So we have a front steps to culture.

So I’ll sit outside on the steps and I look at the clouds and that does no pun intended wonders. I also I know being a mama for kids. It’s like, where do you carve out the time, but if you can figure out a way to be a clumsy student Aunt of something that’s another awesome way to start to develop creativity if it’s and if it’s one hour a week what happens when we are clumsy students again, it inspires what I call the three eyes around creativity which are and what we actually exercise creativity. So it inspires inquiry and curiosity because you have to ask so many questions to figure out what am I doing wrong? How do I figure this out?

It also triggers much more improvisation and Opposition isn’t about being a great comedic sketch artist on Saturday Night Live or the likes of Miles Davis, but it’s about being adaptive being in the moment. And then also on it triggers intuition and I know the clumsy student of the foxtrot and the Tango so that’s how I try to exercise it.

So I’m going to just chime in with a couple other things. First of all, we have been tricked into thinking that doing something decorative is Be creative it might be but it probably isn’t and filling in the blanks in painting by number if that gives you pleasure, please it’s a great hobby. But what we’re talking about here is something that might not work and what Natalie’s pointing out which is the key core inside is the smallest viable breakthrough is what you need to focus on don’t think that you can reorganize the company where you work. They’re not going to let you do it, but if you can figure out how to rearrange Change where things are on the receptionist desk. So that thing’s flow. Seven minutes faster per day.

No one’s going to stop you. And if you’re wrong, you can just go backwards right those little tiny things. That’s just as creative. It just doesn’t have the same scale absolutely and it builds momentum and a confidence in ourselves for what I call that creative competency.

I love that example. Yeah Kelly. It doesn’t dozens of people saying how much they loved the phrase clumsy student of something so very cool.

All right, cool. This is a question from Derek that I think is going to apply to a lot of the people who are listening right now given the state of the world Derek said how could I make my zoom brainstorm sessions with my remote team more creative. I feel like in the office there such a different energy than online.

Well, I’ve been on Zoom quite a bit like everybody else and you know set and I because I did as I was listening to that that episodes that you talked you ended it with this example about the almighty breakout rooms, which is you know, like any Tool It’s Like a Knife can cut butter can hurt somebody. So the breakout rooms are a wonderful feature. It’s just it’s a trust issue that people will actually go and do what the prompt is.

I’d like to integrate a lot of props. I don’t like to be the talking head. I like to make sure that people are having conversations. There’s a whiteboard feature on Zoom, which I’m still rather clumsy with but when you if you are the host and you go to to share a screen there’s an option for white board room any opportunity also to help people doodle. I often start with the priming exercise of just getting people to realize can infect.

July’s abstract information through stick figures and triangles and arrows and stuff and then asking people to visually through a Doodle respond to an idea or question and showing it on the screen and ask me questions in that way. So that’s those are a few ideas brainstorming in a corporate meeting setting is a little bit like comparing Kraft singles to cheese F you you can call it.

And if you want but it’s not brainstorming brainstorming is a very specific process and most people have no clue how to do it. And the magic of Zoom run. Well is you can make it. So it’s better than that in-person thing. You’ve been calling brainstorming. But in order to do that, you’re going to have to as a manager / leader embraced the idea of Shifting status rules of giving people a voice of coming up with moments of of tension and release and all of these things.

I mean, I’ve been living in Zoom for five years. And so if you are willing to turn things upside down you will be amazed at what you can do and I have seen thousands of people go through an exercise of coming up with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ideas in a very short period of time, but that’s not going to happen.

If you can’t build trust first.

Can I get my bill on your point about tensions to another 10? Ended I use the zoom for ideating brainstorming is the role of Silence. So I like to do something called quiet storming and it’s timed right might be just 90 seconds. But this moment or moments scattered throughout whether it’s kind of people can’t you’re part of this virtual interaction, but you’re kind of going into yourself and thinking quietly to yourself and it’s this old pedagogical logical trick of of think-pair-share. You know, that that’s also So a really cool way to break things up and and and leverage that tension you’re talking about.

Yeah, it’s brilliant. I mean and just for viewers at home if you think 90 seconds is in a long time. The three of us are going to be silent for 4 seconds ready? Okay.

Like my brain is going to explode.

Yes knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I was going through the all-nba.

We talked about silence a lot and this idea of who owns silence. So if I’m the last one to speak do I then own it or am I talking to one other person that person now owns that silence or is it just no one owns it because it just exists. So I think that’s a really fun thing to play with especially with brainstorming because now you’re suddenly all together. So the in 90 seconds who’s going to Raise their hand and say oh, I’ll speak first.

Right? Right. I love that.

Yeah, right this we have so many questions pulling it pouring in this is from a dill. So I’m going to go ahead and put it up here does creative have to be an untested new idea or could it be a simply different way of executing an existing product or service?

I think the ladder I mean for sure. Yeah, I go to my my teacher for all this which is jazz, right so much of jazz. It’s about its incremental shifts that can make these exponential lie different results and products. So it’s product musically I was leaving but then but yeah, it’s yeah, what’s really new? It’s all about the remix which actually the hard work then is being super observant about what is so that you can figure out what are you going to tweaked slightly? And it’s all sorts of cool Frameworks to use to figure out how to tweak in order to make these more exponential shifts.

Yep. You nailed it. What else you got Taylor? All right.

So this is from Charles and I think this season really well with Natalie’s book. So it says when we are serving people the people be wait. When we are already serving the people we sought to serve would they not want to be creative. How can we Delight them without disappointing them? So I think this goes back to Innovation this idea of okay, if if we’ve already got something that’s working. Do we continue to innovate even though that may be a risk of this might not work or they might not like this?

Yeah. Charles has been in some of our workshops and I’m recognizing some of our language look great. Here’s here’s the deal you do not want have engineers at the Ford motor company coming up with a brand new power plant and putting it in your Ford Mustang in the middle of the night for when you go to drive tomorrow that the engineering world is based on making promises and keeping them and it’s very important if we’re going to build anything that matters that we make promises and keep them but it is also true that when you go out and buy a new record album from someone you’re a fan of you do not want it to be the same record album you Bought the last time they came out with a record you already have that one.

So it’s a different bucket and the bucket is this is the bucket of better amazing new whatever words you want. This is the bucket of we just made a promise and it’s going to be here again tomorrow.

I mean, I think it yeah just even goes in the fact of Seth your first book you wrote probably doesn’t apply to the same people that you know, you’re 18th book appeals to now there’s anything else you want to add there because I have another question – Any creative process which is the engine for Innovation and innovation in My Views invention converted into value that can be Financial social cultural value.

But at some point it has to end you have to stop and that’s just that’s just the rigor aspect of it. Otherwise you diverse diverse diverse virgin Circle. You have to converge and figure out how is the out of the people who want to touch responding to it? And and trust that okay. This is good for now and move on.

Yeah, love it. All right, we’ll take a couple more questions. This one’s from Roland how to keep created creativity juices flowing even on a bad day.

I got one.

You want to go first you go first the okay.

So this is this is in my book, which is some people say they have to be in flow and inspired to be creative. And other people say I have to show up and do work to be inspired and being flow one way or the other right my friend Isaac Asimov of 400 books. He was never inspired. He just knew it was 6:30 in the morning and you needed to type and once it started typing that made him inspired.

So I think the way the reason you’re having a bad day because you’re not doing the work not the other way around.

Amen. I love that you basically just mapped out the to corollaries. I Tie a frame around wondering rigor. The first corollary is that wonder is found in the midst of rigor. So whatever your rigorous thing is. It’s for me. It’s filing taxes or creating some ginormous Excel sheet or weeding. Right wonder is found. There’s like this aha wonders when that happens in the middle of the tedium the second corollary is that rigor can’t be sustained with that Wonder so sometimes in some There is in this in these efforts to build cultures of innovation.

There’s a lot of this churn going from meeting to meeting and procedure and the rule book and the efforts to build Innovation, but that’s not sustainable. We must design space and time for the wonder which is all audacity pausing all that good stuff beautiful.

Absolutely.

All right, we’ll take two more questions and one arm is going to be from me.

Because I really like I really wanted to ask this so both of you have talked about this and Seth that’s in your upcoming book to about improvising and improv. So, you know, you both kind of talk about how that can be helpful for creativity is to kind of get outside and be in a space where you’re no longer have those rules are instructions of what to do next. So, can you talk about that a little bit and why that’s needed and important in work.

This is all you Natalie you go for it.

So I’ll punch your are we absolutely do not. It’s some rules and improvisation we do because the beautiful, you know, my one of my regular mentors. I don’t never met her but she’s still my rigor Mentor is Twyla Tharp that the amazing American modern dancer taught in choreography toddler and she famously said you have to start with a box to think I’m a box right and improvisation all incredible. Jazz musicians Know music theory they practice incessantly even the composition has a Amal structure might be a beginning a middle and an end. So improv is not pulling something randomly out of your armpit. It’s not totally right like you have there are there have to be some minimal structures and Boundary so, you know what to move against and push against what that’s in dance comedy figuring out a new a different marketing strategy figuring out a new financial model.

We need some minimal structure so we can push against rebound we and For the for the Counterpoint.

Yeah, well that all right so hard picking questions.

There are so many. Okay. Go ahead and do this one last question from Gustavo. I think is that how you say it gestapo?

Okay, cool. What would be examples of doing the hard part first emotional labor and dancing with fear which are all very akimbo Seth terms that we use that create the conditions for creativity to grow. So these all kind of talked about that doing that hard bang and then how does that create creativity?

Yeah, I think creativity is not a fragile flower tivity that is a well-developed muscle and this this myth that the world has to be all common, right and I didn’t know just okay, then I’ll be creative. That means you haven’t done the prep and it means you don’t understand the concept and On a team with four people buy five copies of Natalie’s book and have everyone read it and then just practice the muscle come up with really Creative Solutions to irrelevant problems. So that you’ve Stripped Away the the scary part. Okay. Now the three things you said do the hard part first emotional labor dancing with fear bring them back on because the muscle doesn’t change right?

You can’t say I’m a marathon runner, but I only run downhill doesn’t work.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, no fragile flowers in creativity. And I would also just kind of bring that question. Thanks for that question because Davao and sus answer to this current moment, you know days of uncertainty and Chaos are designed for creativity and this moment that they were going and whether we’re talking about this Global Health pandemic of covid or the social injustice protest or social justice protest in the United States of America we have Afraid of doing this hard emotional labor which for me would just start with conversations, right? That’s where it would start to really start to generate some creative Direction and to how we can really come together in spite of our disparate Parts in in our country.

Yeah really hate well on that note Natalie. Do you mind just sharing for anyone who is listening? How do they know if this book? Is something for them if they should be reading it who’s it for you?

If you feel stuck read this book, if you know that you it’s almost like an itch you got a scratch that you really want to amplify the creativity and your life and your work this book. I hope and I’ve been told so far. It’s inspiring. It’s also I also include some practical tips. There’s a discussion guide that I’ve developed.

Is contacting me at Natalie at figure eight thinking.com. If you want to receive a copy of that sign up for my newsletter and all this information is on figure eight thinking.com and most most of all, I love you. I’d love your feedback. I love to continue this type of conversation. Oh, yeah. Also, I women as far as creating a card game called the Wonder rigor Discovery because of card games.

Yes, check it out.

Where’s my deck of cards? Here it is.

Hey all kinds there like just yeah, but your words are mine just have pictures and lots of good questions.

Thanks very much.

Yes, it’s not only getting your perspective but you interview so many different people. It’s so cool to hear from so many people in such a you know, a condensed short book as well where you’re able to really get that perspective. So thank you for bringing it into the world and I’m excited for other people to read it.

Thank you Taylor. Thank you so much for sharing your platform. This was an amazing chat. Thank you.

Appreciate it guys are great gonna be great. Everybody be well corrected guys.

Here’s our bumper.

But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you. When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide you got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the Number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question.

It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 7505-levi-strauss- <==

I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Yes, I am listening just so you Plastics.

Hey, it’s F. And this is a Kimbo.

I want to talk about Plastics. I want to talk about gold and I want to talk about the internet. But first here’s a message from our sponsor itself. And this is a podcast. It’s a podcast produced by Alex DePalma. Alex is a bit of a pie. Cast Whisperer Alex and I are inviting you to join us in the podcasting Workshop.

You can find out more at podcast Club dot Link in it. You will learn not just the technology to make a podcast because frankly it’s pretty easy, but you will learn to find your voice you will find the others and together in this proven Workshop that’s back again, you will discover that you can in fact build a podcast not to make money. Because you probably won’t but to make a difference to be heard to find the people who want to hear from you podcast Club dot link.

We’d love to have you join us. Thanks something happened in 1848 and then 18-49 and some of it is true and an important part of it isn’t in 1848 James Marshall was panning for gold by Sutter’s Mill in Northern California, and he found some and the Word spread and in the several years that followed more than 300,000 people made the arduous trip to Northern California.

It was brutal for the indigenous people. It was harmful to the environment and it was an extraordinary impact on the US economy. And on our politics hundreds of thousands of people elbowing each other to pan for gold and almost all of them made. Nothing, and then the story takes a turn in the turn is a merchant guy named Levi Strauss an immigrant from Europe was in San Francisco trying to extend his family’s business selling fabric that he brought over from New York and from Europe and as a fabric Merchant, he was busy selling tents hanging out near Sutter’s Mill and he figured out how to make jeans jeans with rivets and those jeans with rivets ended up becoming leave. Nice jeans and it turned out that outfitting the gold miners was far more profitable than being a gold miner. Hence. The lesson alas a lot of that story’s true Levi Strauss was in Northern California. Levi Strauss was bringing in fabric, but no Levi Strauss wasn’t at Sutter’s Mill and no Levi Strauss did not outfit anybody in 1848 18-49 or even 1850 and it wasn’t until Several years later when one of his customers noticed that his customers were coming in with ripped jeans that the two of them started a partnership selling jeans with rivets, but the lesson the lesson of outfitting revolutionaries as a byproduct of how the revolution works.

It’s an interesting way to explore The Narrative of the Levi Strauss company. So let’s begin with this. Levi’s had a patent back when patents really mattered the idea that they could get a patent on the rivets. That would hold pants closed gave them a significant Head Start. The next thing that happened in the history of Levi’s was that we shifted from a distributed and agrarian economy to one that was based on manufacturing industrialism.

And the people who were going to the factories needed something to wear. R and they needed something to wear that was going to be made in a factory because we needed a lot of them fortunately for Levi Strauss. They were ready for that. They had a manufacturer herbal branded item when previous to that for the lower and middle classes clothes were often home made add to this starting in the 1900s the Boom in Mass marketed products that there is a difference between an unbranded our pants and one that has a literal brand on the back that the rivets were distinctive and patented and the idea that they would list the size and their logo on the outside of the pants may have been an accident but it was totally aligned with what was going on in the way everything was being marketed to everyone again the world changed and Levi’s as a bystander benefited from from it in World War II the government insisted that Levi’s keep making jeans jeans for soldiers. They were deemed an essential item.

They also had to change the design of the genes to conserve Fabric and metal again the government’s War footing help them go to the next level after the war beginning in the 1960s. It turned out that Culture lined up exactly where they needed it to that. We went from people who weren’t working in a factory trying to look like they’re going to the office to trying to look like they were working in a factory and so the hippies the flower children the entire New Generation adopted jeans as their uniform now that wasn’t what the 1960s were about, but they were the The form of the 1960s around the same time retelling shifted it shifted from there’s this door. There’s that store. There’s the other store to there are chains of small stores.

Not just giant stores like Sears but small stores like the Gap the gap.

The Gap now called and for the early years of its growth the gaps main product were Levi’s pants Levi’s pants were the perfect fuel for The Gap to grow. So once again, we’re seeing a revolution in this case a revolution in the way that retailing is done and we’re seeing one company being in the right place.

At the right time a decade or two later the people who grew up in the 60s and the 70s got tired of wearing suits and ties to work every day. And so Casual Friday the problem with Casual Friday the problem that it created for so many workers is every other day of the week. You knew what to wear the word uniform is essential to this narrative from the beginning to the end because the word uniform doesn’t just mean the thing you wear when you’re wearing. Uniform it means the same. It is uniform what that means is you can avoid the debilitating fear of did I wear the wrong thing?

Am I labeling myself the wrong way if there’s uniform we’ve taken away the requirement that you express yourself and we let U be uniform instead. Well the problem with Casual Friday was there was no uniform do I wear Bermuda? Muted shorts. Do I wear a Hawaiian shirt? Do I wear a miniskirt and walking right into that came the Gap and came Dockers by this point the Gap had divorced itself from Levi’s because the Fishers who ran the Gap realized that there was plenty of money to be made by making the clothes themselves or at least Outsourcing it, but Levi’s running with their head start created Dockers which were a uniform for a day. You weren’t supposed to wear a uniform Levi’s a hundred percent cotton Dockers.

If you’re not wearing Dockers, you just wearing pants.

It’s a yes, it’s a definite. Okay, once again a shift in the culture enabled them to grow the company by billions of dollars while all this is going on. There are other shifts in the culture happening one shift is the move from respected dignified cared for workforces. To one of Relentless Outsourcing to one of cutting costs because your competitors are doing the same thing Levi’s ended up paying the largest fine to that date for using labor that was described as quote slave labor in one of its overseas plants Levi’s point out. They had no idea that their subcontractor was doing work like this, but they should have known how their clothes were being made and as a out of this Relentless Outsourcing Levi’s went from a company that made all of its close with high-wage dignified labor in the United States to none of their clothes again a shift in the culture a shift in the economics forcing or opening the door for a company to change its Behavior as it grew and what does all of this have to do with plastics and the internet well in The Graduate the advice is Is given to Dustin Hoffman Plastics, you almost certainly don’t know anybody who saw that movie and then opened a Plastics Company.

I’m thinking about all the people who I grew up with. I knew exactly one kid whose dad was in the Plastics business, but and it’s a huge but if it weren’t for Plastics, there’d be no McDonald’s if it weren’t for Plastics, there’d be no take out if it weren’t for Plastics. Think about all the Is that you engage with every day that would never have become the businesses that they became the point of the advice of plastics. Isn’t that you should start a Plastics Company.

It’s that Plastics are going to change the culture dramatically in this technological shift. You don’t have to be at the epicenter of it in order for it to shift. How you do your job how you spend your day? The Gold Rush ended up changing American politics, which certainly doesn’t sound like it has a lot to do with gold the Gold Rush ended up Shifting the way the population was distributed and legendarily, but untrue the Gold Rush led to Levi Strauss & onto today because today and for the last 25 years if you’ve been listening to me or anyone like me the word you hear over and Over again his internet what Allison should know what is internet anyway.

Internet is that massive computer network? The one that’s becoming really big now. What do you mean?

That’s probably how does one it normally. What do you write to it?

Like male know a lot of people use it and communicate it. I guess they can communicate with NBC writers and producers Allison.

Can you explain what internet is at the peak of the first internet bubble in the 1990s 1vc said I think the internet is underhyped and 20 years later. He was right. It was the internet is not about starting Amazon. The internet is not about cloudflare when we say internet with a small I what we are talking about is a rewiring of our culture a rewiring as profound. As any of the re wirings have affected Levi Strauss when women started pursuing work outside of the home after World War Two decade after decade the percentage of women working. Has gone up it led to more and more women having independent time and money to spend which led to yoga which led to Lululemon completely missed by Levi Strauss because even though they have been skilled or lucky through the decades of figuring out the side effects of massive cultural shifts. They missed this one.

So what are the side effects of the massive cultural shifts of the internet of a billion Channel Universe of people connecting to other people of the filter bubble people intentionally not connecting to other people of the long tail and the ability to see almost anything that’s on offer in almost any category of search that lets us be smarter. If we choose then ever before of distributed education being able to learn what we want to learn when we To learn it of politics done anonymously of a shift of advertising from Brand marketing to direct marketing from known marketing to Anonymous marketing.

The list goes on for pages. Every one of these shifts is changing every industry and Justice Plastics enabled fast food places just as the car enabled Disney World the Internet isn’t about Out SMTP. It’s not about how many Hops and email takes to get from you to me. No, these are enablers of cultural change.

Now. You don’t need to worry about Casual Friday because you’re working from home. And so you don’t have to worry about what uniform you’re going to wear cause you could just be naked. No one knows if you’re a dog on the internet, the fact is that this cultural shift has affected every single industry. Three and yet the leaders in every industry pretend that it hasn’t they pretend that building a website or answering some email is the shift that the internet is causing.

It’s not it changes every element of how we deal with scarcity create abundance inflict tension, make change happen show up as we say, we’re going to show up and make things better by making better things. We have to be Begin, just as we needed to be able to Plastics just as we needed to begin with union labor just as we needed to begin with Outsourcing just as we needed to begin with what happens when work shifts to say, wait a minute.

We’re in a different world. Now the purpose of the Levi Strauss Parable should be obvious Levi Strauss did not cause the Gold Rush. He did not cause World War II the Levi Strauss company did not Pause the 1960s or even the spread of the Gap stores. Certainly. They had something to do with causing Casual Friday.

But when you add it all up what we see is that every single time this company has grown and become more important they have done it because they have responded to the way the world is changing not reacted but responded taken that shift in the culture and done something meaningful and important with it something that its founder would not even have recognized and the same opportunity or threat is available to each of us because we have changed the culture more in the last 25 or 30 years since Bryant and Katie had no clue. What internet was anyway to create a world that is completely different from the point of view of culture and commerce then the one that I grew up in.

So if we’re going to build an entity, we’re not going to build it on plastic. We’re going to build it on the plasticity of culture on the idea that ideas spread differently on the notion that what we get to do is respond to a world that is being enabled by a technology that we don’t even need to understand.

But what we must do is figure out how we are going to take these shifts and do something with them that Are proud of do something with them where we can actually create value and it begins by seeing them seeing them naming them talking about them. You can choose to react to it to fight against it and I hope if some of it represents Injustice you will but most of it most of it is The New Normal. It’s the new normal in the sense that people are going to get and engage with information differently than we did for the million years they came before. Or akimbo is about bending the culture. It’s something we get to do on purpose but to do it. We have to see how the culture already is changing.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a question from last time, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the akimbo workshops. These are interactive real-time online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2022 finding one that matches where you need to go if you’re ready to level up. I hope you’ll check out a Kimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

Seth my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump.

This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you and as we’re all hunkering down at home questions are starting to High up, so if you’ve got one, I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link.

That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button. It’s raining cats and dogs here forgive the background noise. But here’s a great question. I edited it just a little bit. Hey Seth Andy here from San Francisco.

Thanks so much for all your work. My question this week is how do you think about rule based living curious? I’ve tried to blog every day. For a couple months and that was great that got me into a wonderful habit of writing.

So I guess there’s some rules and habits that Propel me forward and then there’s some that I find super challenging like now, I’m trying to think about how to limit the content. I consume. Yeah. I wonder like sometimes I feel I’m too harsh on myself. Yeah. How do you like find the balance of a rule that is sustainable and helps live a better more generous life.

So I want to answer a question about rules and rules about how they fit with our lives and with culture. I think there are two kinds of rules in our life in our culture and I think there are two ways to respond to those rules. So first let’s talk about the self-appointed ones the ones that say I will not eat meat or the ones that say I will observe a Sabbath and not use digital technology or anything else or the rules about how we comport ourselves.

These are rules we To pick and there’s a lot of history of people once they establish a rule either because it’s part of community or simply because it’s a choice finding themselves more free. They’re more free because they’re not living near the edge of the rule. They don’t have to spend a lot of Cycles reconsidering the rule.

Then I have to see how close they can come to the edge of the rule. The rule is the rule and it gives them a foundation to do the rest of their life. Life on the other hand. There are other people other rules other situations were going near to the edge is exactly what we want to do. There’s a thrill to it teenagers exists largely to explore what it means to get as close to the edge of a rule as they can get away with if a self-imposed rule whether it’s based on your community your spirituality or just because you want to be more efficient turns out to be a bright light that’s attracting you. Like a moth that rule is going to backfire because instead of giving you a quiet place to work from it’s giving you an attractive nuisance to get ever closer to so rather than spending a lot of time inventing new rules. It might be worth thinking about how we even live with those rules. But there’s a flip side to this and the flip side is sometimes we don’t pick the rules. Sometimes the culture around us picks the rules and it might be something like the rule that all of us happily live with about living in community about not yelling fire in a crowded movie house. If we ever go back into one about how we deal with children about how we deal with people in our lives, but too often that rule is put upon us and it’s put Upon Us unfairly.

It’s put Upon Us unfairly because of our gender or our race white supremacy is all about putting rules on people who didn’t ask for those rules to be put on In the first place and so the same two things happen here either people who accept the rule and Don’t Go Near it or people perhaps those Seeking Justice and fairness see a rule and not only go near it but try to change it.

So you got me thinking hard about the rules invisible or not created by us or not that we are living Our Lives by and it feels to me like the purpose needs to be is it just is it helping other people? Is it allowing me to do better work? Is it letting me be more generous a contribution to the people around me.

Is it giving me peace of mind? How can I help other people who are struggling with rules not of their making make those rules go away. How can we make it so that each of us has the chance to contribute to enjoy to be part of the community. We have every right to be part of so, yeah. There are rules all around.

If you want to pick a rule about meetings or Netflix or anything else pick one that helps you and if you see rules in the world that you’d rather not have applied to you that are applied to other people. We need to figure out how to dismantle those rules as well. Thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why Why we don’t write that book.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 7658-micropayments- <==

Almost nobody would pay 20 dollars an episode to listen to a Kimbo almost everybody would consider paying a penny and episode to listen. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about micro payments, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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I was surprised that the learning was as much in the giving is in the receiving we got to not only learn about storytelling.

We actually got to practice using stories in our everyday life. The biggest shift. I’ve found is now my own stories and the stories that I really want to tell are bubbling to the surface.

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The internet is jammed to the top with content more content is created every day on the internet then was created in the entire world in 1840, maybe even in 1940. There is an explosion of it and most of it isn’t any good lots of it? Is seeking the largest possible audience. There’s a reason for that a reason beyond the vanity of having a hit and it has to do with how we monetize our content. The thing is that attention is scarce.

We can’t make any more attention. Everybody only gets 24 hours a day. That’s if they pull an all-nighter and what’s happened is that we have split attention finer and finer and finer and so you would sell somebody a book that takes 12 or 15 or 18 hours to read and now a tweet might be too long because attention keeps trying to find yet another thing to entertain us, but you can’t pay the bills with the tension and sew along the way we invented advertising advertising says that advertisers will pay for small slices of attention because they Need that attention because they believe that their ads can turn into money.

But the way that ads are sold is on a CPM basis e PM stands for cost per thousand. Don’t ask me why we’re using Roman numerals cost per thousand which means you need a thousand bits of attention to be able to sell one unit of advertising and that might be for 50 bucks 20 bucks to dollars if you’re going to get two dollars.

Every time you interrupt a thousand people and you want to make a living you need millions and millions of people well advertising if you think about it is a form of micro payment because what is happening is the consumer of information is saying I only have a few hours of attention on allocated today.

I will allocate it to I don’t know the boing boing blog. I will allocate it to reading my stream in Instagram. And I get that the cost of this of all this handcrafted content. The cost is my attention and I get the fact that the publisher of the information is going to turn around and sell some of my attention to an Advertiser.

So I’ve made a micro payment a couple seconds of my attention in exchange for a funny joke in exchange for an Insight, but this is really unwieldy. It’s unwieldy because visors don’t always behave very well. It’s unwieldy because we don’t want to be tracked and we don’t want to have our privacy taken but at the same time we don’t want to see irrelevant ads and it’s unwieldy because we don’t know exactly how many ads somebody needs to see before they buy something or not.

And as a result the micro payments of attention are Mighty indeed the content creator has no assurance that it’s all going to work the Has no Assurance the person who’s trading their precious attention ends up wasting enormous amounts of it. And so we go back to this idea of money and is David graeber is pointed out money was invented as a way to square up debts debts came before money.

But once we had gone to the trouble of inventing money, we now had this way this fairly low overhead way to give someone a nickel a dime even a penny In person that if you are at the newsstand you can put if it’s 1910 three cents down and get yourself a newspaper in exchange a micropayment. These transactions were sort of anonymous but they were also certain you knew you had three pennies and you knew those three pennies were going to go away the vendor knew that they could trade you a newspaper for three pennies that the Who created the content could do the math now along the way all sorts of things breakdown?

One of them is it costs more than a penny to make a penny. Another one is handling pennies is ridiculously expensive they weigh a lot. They have to be sorted to have to be stored. They have to be transported. It just doesn’t pay to buy something for three pennies anymore country after country is working to get rid of low denomination paper money because paper money gets ripped paper money is also hard to sort and stack paper money.

Be counterfeited unless you start putting systems into place. And so we end up with electronic money electronic money is different than Bitcoin will talk about that in a second. But electronic money is simply a way to move pennies nickels and Dollars around much more efficiently by using tokens little bits of information on some sort of Internet to keep track of where the money is gone.

Well, it turns out thanks to a whole bunch of reasons having to do with systems bureaucracies and fraud that it’s really sort of expensive to do this at scale that micro transactions have been a jungle of failure for 50 years in 1963. Ted Nelson the father of hypertext the person most responsible for the idea that you can click on a word and we’ll take you somewhere else, which is how the web. Actually works also started working on micro payments.

Yes. It’s been more than 50 years. One of the founders of hypermedia. Also was one of the founders of microtransactions, but even though we are surrounded by clicks and links and more clicks microtransactions are still in their infancy digital IBM companies. You’ve never heard of have tried and failed to create electronic microtransactions my favorite one. I was called Millicent because it’s a pun like Millicent someone’s name and Millicent like a really small fraction of a Cent and part of the problem is getting money in and getting money out because doing an asynchronous financial transaction for a nickel costs too much. There are too many things that have to go right for it to work. And if one thing goes wrong the person in the middle can lose a lot of money few years ago.

I was talking to the general counsel of PayPal. Why was I talking to him? Because PayPal wanted my passport in order for me to take some money out money. That was mine and I couldn’t understand. Why did they need my passport for me to take out money that had been received from ticket sales? Well, when I got the guy on the phone he explained to me what was going on every single day.

There are hundreds and hundreds of hackers in countries around the world who do nothing, but try to figure out how to scam paper. Pal because if you can do it a little then you can instantly scale to do it a lot and PayPal can lose 10 20 30 million dollars in one day to one scam of people trying to take money out of the system.

So what to do about this need for microtransactions because lots of people will pay a penny but no one’s going to pay a hundred bucks and if it’s that kind of situation what the content Usually ends up doing is charging nothing and if you’re charging nothing because you can’t charge a penny then you need to figure out how to monetize it and traditionally. The only way to do that has been by selling ads this ineffective way of turning attention into money.

Well, here’s one thought frequent flyer miles are a way for the airlines to have a very low-cost micro transaction that they can give you. You 20 miles for doing this 50 miles. If you get this credit card transaction, etc. Etc. The reason it’s so cheap for them is fraud isn’t really a big problem. And the reason that fraud isn’t really a big problem is that the miles aren’t worth very much that they are running a lottery someday and attorney general is going to realize that those miles you have they’re not guaranteed that you can turn them into a first-class ticket because the number of tickets available Is dwarfed by the number of miles in circulation?

It’s sort of random whether you’re going to get those few seats that you can get but it feels to the person who’s engaging in these transactions around miles. Like they are exchanging something of value. They’ve created on microtransaction another microtransaction. This was something that I invented when I was briefly at Yahoo.

Yahoo at the time was the center of the internet and the question. Before us was how do you remain at the center of the Internet history has shown that they didn’t but here’s what we came up with what would happen? If every time you clicked on anything in Yahoo, and add or content. You got a few simoleons. That’s what we called our microtransaction currency.

So you could chalk up simoleons all day long. We could sell advertisers simoleons so they could take click on this Edge. You’ll get 50 simoleons. Whereas if you click on this this one you’ll only get 10, then we could sell other sites the ability to offer simoleons. We could create a whole currency like frequent flyer miles where people were trading their attention via clicks for this micro currency and then how to turn that micro currency into something of value. Well, this is the part that I was able to get a patent on we were going to have an auction every month. And the way the auction would work is there’d be Really valuable prizes millions and millions of dollars of prizes at the beginning we would pay for them. But over time I think most of them would get donated for publicity purposes and you could bid in an auction to win those prizes. You could form syndicates to share simoleons so that you would win the auction and the deal was that every month all the simoleons would disappear and we would start over again or perhaps all the bids whether you won or not would be taken out of circulation.

Either way, it was a self leveling system. We could inflate the Somalian as much as we wanted because it would all even out at the auction that didn’t work either. We never actually built it but there were elements of it that began to make sense.

Let’s consider for a minute. The example of patreon patreon is a different sort of microtransaction. The deal is simple, but some money in $10 or $20 and then patreon will Divvy it up based on the output of the person that you are supporting. So an artist could say commit to paying me ten cents for every song. I release over time that adds up but it is not actually a micro transaction as much as it is a chance for someone a patron to put up money. Hold it in escrow and then pay the Creator over time.

This has sort of worked now. It is not a system of currency, but let’s keep running down this idea of trading attention and money to the people who create content. What about Netflix Netflix if you think about it is a micro transaction platform how well you pay a monthly fee and Netflix is watching really carefully how you are spending your attention, which Shows are you watching the shows that people watch the most are the shows? They renew the genres that people watch the most are the genres they make new shows in that money. The money spent making shows goes to the creators of content. There is no advertising model built into Netflix.

What there is is an effortless way for you to aim your attention and allow Netflix to turn your attention into money. One of the challenges that traditional micro currencies have had is they have thought about it like a bank money in Money out transactions. What if we think about it slightly differently.

So here is a micro transaction system that I thought of a few years ago and again haven’t built out what would happen if like Netflix, you could buy a subscription a passport and that passport $20 a month. Let’s say gives you access not to what’s on Netflix but to what’s on Thousands and thousands and thousands of websites.

And what we’re going to do is track where you spent your time on these websites and then we will allocate to these websites a pro-rated share of your monthly fee. You could then create an entire infrastructure of sites that have reserved a section of what they create for people who hold a passport your passport costs you the same amount each month no matter what you pay attention to.

That transactions easy to make we can make that transaction with a credit card, but then the central passport Authority keeping track of where you are spending your time allocates that money to the people who are spending it at how to go to market. Well the thought was any one of the sites that sells a passport to a new user keeps the first month’s Revenue. So each site now has a big incentive to promote the passport for two reasons one more passport holders mean more people make Micropayment and to the Bounty for getting someone into the program is significant but alas this was back in the days when the web was open and new and it felt like new standards could be embraced horizontally across the web what we’ve seen in the last few years is that natural or enforced monopolies of social media have made their own standards inside of Walled Gardens, and these standards aren’t necessarily. Lee open to the interoperability that was essential for the web to grow now you may have been saying yourself, but what about the blockchain?

Well, most people who say what about the blockchain are really saying I don’t understand the blockchain does it have something to do with Bitcoin? The challenge with Bitcoin is a it is too volatile for something that people will trade because that fake ID that you bought 10 years ago on Silk Road for $6.00 ended up costing you $10,000 in today’s money. That’s not really a micro transaction anymore second.

It’s not optimized for fast. Tiny transactions. The size of the block is too big to make that easy and comfortable. So lots of people are working on New blockchain Alternatives for microtransaction, but the problem which is the opposite of what an airline’s did when they invented frequent flyer miles.

The problem is we don’t want multiple formats difficult technology for micro payments that the magic of buying a newspaper for a nickel is everyone has nickels in their pocket. Everyone knows what a nickel is once you get a nickel it’s easy to trade in a nickel for food, but once we start creating these Arcane systems that are hard to get into not that Easy to use and very difficult to understand we’ve put barriers in between us and the micro payments that would enable people to create interesting forms of content for a living that aren’t based on interrupting people with ads so I don’t have the answer for you today. I think it’s worth thinking about what happens if we transform the people who are reading our content from the victims of adds to the actual customer to The person who is actually paying not just with their attention, but with an easy to use Easy to transport micropayment.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with a question from a previous episode. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Seth my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is anupam.

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My question is and that completes my question got a juicy question from Canada this week as you know, I love to hear from you if you’ve got a question. Now, please visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd. Click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth.

This is Tim from Manitoba Canada.

My question is this among other things. I am an author and I have one book out there and it’s not exactly like any other book I know of I’m also self-published which means I need to advertise it myself and one way of advertising a self-published book is to find other readers of similar off.

It’s but I don’t know of any other similar authors. So my question is how do I find my tribe if my tribe doesn’t exist yet.

Thanks.

So I’m going to broaden this a little bit but books are a great place to start. Here’s the deal all books that are worth publishing are a little different almost no books are a lot different. They have so many things in common the same 26 letters the same approximate number of pages the same idea that there are words in a row.

The question is in which genre does On one think your book belongs because people almost never read a book in a genre that doesn’t exist to have to have an anchor a way to understand what they’re bumping into. So dr. Seuss pioneered genre and it is possible to be adjacent to a dr. Seuss book without copying a dr. Seuss book. We know what it’s for. My hunch is that if we leave out the fact that your plot or Our approach or your language doesn’t exactly mirror another book.

We still know what it’s for might be to change our mind about something. It might be to show our status in might be to amuse us. It might be to Thrill us. It might be to pass the time books have a what’s it for and so do so many other things that we seek to create and then the second half the desire to quote find our tribe.

The thing is almost nobody has a tribe. It’s very unusual for there to be a group of people who Define themselves as being in your orbit, maybe the Grateful Dead had a try but even they’re not so much because what happens is we get to show up and narrate for a tribe that already exists the kind of people who picked up a JK Rowling book were already a kind of people they already had a fellowship among them and when JK Rowling stops writing books, Is there will be other people who will write for a group that wants to share that sort of experience and that sort of conversation the San Diego Comic-Con the legendary convention.

It didn’t change year after year when the movie is changed or when the comics changed the tribe remains and so your opportunity is to find a group of people who are already connected and who need something new to talk about and if it turns out that after they Counter your book and they don’t want to talk about it.

There’s really only two choices find a new group or write a different book because we are here for them. They are not here for us. And our opportunity is to narrate.

The journey for them.

The opportunity is to create bits of intellectual property or stories or items that people can touch feel and encounter that give them fuel on a journey.

They have already decided to go on.

We don’t have the leverage to change people’s minds but we do have is it once someone has a compass we might be able to give them a better map.

We might be able to give them a password a code word a key a way to enter into Community with the people. They’ve been seeking to connect with so that’s not easy. And that’s why out of the million books that are published every year only a hundred maybe a thousand end up being books for the ages for a group because there are lots and lots of groups.

We need to pick our group and figure out how to be there for them in the way that they need us. Good luck with your novel. Especially the next one. Thanks for calling in. We’ll see everybody next time.

I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is. Puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the Were one reason why we don’t write that book.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

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==> 7809-micropayments-part-2- <==

Long time ago Amanda Palmer was half of the Breakthrough rock group. The Dresden dolls operated boy sitting on the shelf.

He is just a toy, but I turned him on they got the full record label treatment.

They went into the studio. They made an album and that album ended up selling about 20,000 copies. Then came the difficult meeting with their label. They were getting kicked off. If the label because they’d only sold 20,000 copies and then something really surprising happened. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about true fans and micro payments. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Actually. I had a story to tell that was really important for me, but also was going to be very very important for people in the future.

It’s been absolutely life-changing for me to see stories everywhere and to see my own stories. I was surprised. Is that the learning was as much in the giving is in the receiving? We got to not only learn about storytelling.

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And what happened after that. Here’s a question from Ross. We do love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or future episodes. I hope you’ll drop me a line just visit akimbo dot link.

That’s a Ki M Bo dot link360 this rustier from Cape Town I got a question about microtransactions specifically with the subscription model if you’re creating content your own content and you want to start monetizing it with subscription. How do you know when the right time is to flick that switch and to ask people to pay obviously you don’t want Caraway your loyal customers but you want to start benefiting from their attention in kind of a straightforward Way by whether it’s a patreon account or a direct subscription model for a newsletter or whatever. It is.

Any insight on when to flick that switch would be most appreciated. Thanks very much. Cheers Bank.

Thanks rod for this great question. I decided to turn it into an entire episode. So what happened to Amanda Palmer? Well not long after that album. Not long after they got kicked off the label Amanda Palmer did a Kickstarter. She’s a Kickstarter for her next record in ended up breaking every record Kickstarter had ever set for music. She raised more than a million dollars in less than four weeks the most successful music Kickstarter ever.

After it was over she totaled up the math and she pointed something out to me. She said, you know how many people backed my million-dollar Kickstarter the one that was every musicians goal. The one that broke every record you probably guessed it was 20,000 20,000 people get you kicked off a label and yet 20,000 people makes you extraordinary only successful in the way you make music. So what’s going on here?

Why are micro payments so seductive? And what does this have to do with your question Hey sir, this is Jeremy in Phoenix, Arizona.

I just got done listening to your episode on micropayments which I found fascinating especially because I’m playing in what I call what we call the sub Creator world right now, which is the concept of a Creator monetizing directly from Their audience on a subscription model. So for five dollars a month you get access to my premium newsletter posts and everybody else gets access to only the free newsletter issues and I’m curious to know if you consider this a form of micro payment even though it’s you know, five bucks seven bucks per month that he will or charging and if so, where do you see the future of companies like sub stack that are playing in the space right now. Alright. Thanks so much.

Ready, there are bunch of factors at work. The first one is this the smallest viable audience 20,000 people is enough for Amanda Palmer to so a million dollars worth of music and music related activity that it may be that a thousand people subscribing to your newsletter for five dollars a month is enough for side hustle and that 3,000 people is enough for it to be a full-time job.

The smallest viable audience was Bowl 50 years ago may be based on geography but not based on anything else because you need people from all over the world interested in that thing you’re teaching for to work that you will find the 3,000 or the 10,000 or in Amanda’s case the 20,000 people who will show up with money smallest viable audience brings with it our responsibility and our responsibility is to make something that’s actually extraordinary not simply. Lee the best you could do because if it’s just the best you could do we’re not going to pay for it. There are plenty of free substitutes online if you’re going to charge for it, you’ve got to figure out how to be extraordinary to someone which leads to Kevin Kelly’s idea of the 1,000 true fans largely misunderstood because most people who say they want to have a thousand true fans don’t have any true fans.

What does it mean to have a true fan the true fan will Your Collectibles the true fan will cheer you on the true fan will not keep score of whether they given you too much or too little money in any given moment. A true fan might be in for a hundred bucks a year 200 bucks a year. And if your goal is to say well there’s a little bit better than free. So just pay me a couple bucks. It’s a micro payment. It doesn’t count.

You’re not actually cording true fans. So what it means to have a true fan is that you have found someone who defines themselves. Based on their activity with you. And this is at the heart of patreon that people aren’t paying money to patreon because they don’t have enough music in their life. They’re paying money because it makes them feel good to be a true fan which then leads to the long tail Chris Anderson’s idea that when you get rid of filters the ones that push us to get to the top of the charts you open up this enormous world of choices Blockbuster had a whole bunch. Have DVDs and video tapes Netflix had all of them.

Well, here’s the deal half of Netflix rentals came from DVDs that Blockbuster never even carried half of Amazon sales of books are books at Barnes & Noble doesn’t even sell half the long tail means that there’s room for the smallest viable audience the long tail opens the door for people who have something distinctive. It opens the door for people who are going to Be able to find and nurture true fans, but the thing about the long tail is that mostly it’s empty that if we look at the sales of the Kindle or we look at sales of Music in the iTunes Store what we see is that an enormous number of titles on the Kindle have sold fewer than five copies 5 not 505 that a huge number of songs on iTunes.

Or listen to even one time last year that has the long tail gets longer and longer. It’s a place where ideas go to die not where they go to thrive and that leads to the flip side and the flip side is that every person who has successfully organized a following online of smallest viable audience fans has discovered that it’s the whales that make the whole thing work that Amanda Palmer didn’t get to a million dollars by selling. Being a million $1 downloads.

She did it because a whole bunch of people bought a $5,000 house party a five thousand dollar house party could be life-changing. If you’re a huge fan of Amanda Palmer $5,000 times 20, that’s 10% of the entire money raised. So one of the challenges of the sub stack model, he’s got a whole bunch of people who might be willing to read your thing for free not everybody. In fact, almost nobody wants to read your thing for Three but a lot of people okay, and then you’re saying but for five bucks a month, if you’re a big fan, you can read it.

The problem is you’ve cut off the short head. The problem is you haven’t given the patrons anywhere to go the people who want to pay you $100 a month for a zoom call for free Consulting for being part of the or Community where they get to check in with each other you shut them out and they are the key to driving the whole whole thing forward that what we need to do if we’re going to get past this mindset of here’s a nickel. It’s a micro payment. It doesn’t count is we’ve got to figure out how to create something that a few people desperately care about and we’ll choose to talk about because that’s the last part of this.

Is it getting the word out still matters, even if your smallest viable audience is 2,000 subscribers, you’re not going to find two thousand people in your inner circle who are going to pay you money. So what you’re going to need to do is figure out how to turn that little tiny spot. You’ve got on a long tail of 10 or 15 people into a network effect. Why would someone talk about what you do the most successful sub Stacks have succeeded because paying subscribers forward the emails they’re getting to people who aren’t paying.

Why would they do that? They’re doing it to say I have more status than you I could afford this. Letter they’re doing it because they’re generous and say here here’s some information. You should have known they’re doing it because they want to stay connected with people they care about and you know, what happens when someone gets one of those newsletters, maybe just maybe they decide to subscribe probably with company money, but to subscribe because getting that information before your colleague emails it to you is worth way more than it costs.

And so we end up with that model. So if we look at Bloomberg, Bloomberg the company not Bloomberg the billionaire Bloomberg the company makes billions of dollars in profit selling information. That’s largely available online for free 15 minutes later. They don’t have that many customers only a hundred thousand maybe but it’s a hundred thousand people who are paying $2,000 a month every month month after month. That’s a lot of Simoleons and yet it’s still sort of a micro payment in the scheme of what it costs to run. Trading floor what it costs to run an investment bank.

Now the people who are paying that kind of money, they’re not everyone in fact to a rounding error. It’s nobody but it’s enough nobody’s that they’re doing fine and they’re not charging these people a dollar or five dollars a month. They charge a lot but you’re getting more than you pay for because getting that information processed the way it’s processed and getting it 15 minutes before your competitors is worth a fortune.

So what we’ve got to figure out how to do do if we want to sell music is develop true fans people whose lives are better because they are big-time supporters of you and your work what we’ve got to do is make it appealing for the people who are the whales who can pay more than makes any sense whatsoever because they’re getting more than anybody could possibly want and that the combination of those two things gives somebody more joy more satisfaction more status more connection than they could. Gotten from anybody else.

So when I made the 18 pound Behemoth and it’s follow-up the Titan. I made a ridiculous book. It’s 800 pages long. It’s big enough to kill a small mammal, please. Don’t there were only a few thousand of the made I could have made more but I didn’t buy purposely making something more beautiful than it had to be bigger than it had any right to be more expensive than any book you’ve ever bought before I created an object. An object that only one out of a thousand or one out of two thousand in my fans would decide they wanted to buy but I regularly hear from those people telling me how it’s sitting on a dictionary stand or on their coffee table and how people look at it and every time someone looks at it and interacts around it. It’s different than all the other books in their house.

And so they bought something different and it wasn’t a micro payment what it was was an emotional decision a connection. Chance to speak up and support something that you thought was interesting. So I’m wishing sub stack. Well, I am hopeful that patreon or patreon you can say it any way you want figures out how to scale even further. I hope neither one of them gets industrialized but they both will by people who are hustling to figure out how to cut some corner or another but what we really need is Humanity what we really need are people who are showing up and saying here I made this for a few.

And doing it in a way that gives those people joy and gives those people something to talk about. So that’s my rant. You got to hear it for free. Thank you for listening. Really appreciate. If you got a question for next time, please visit akimbo link and press the appropriate button. Now, here’s a word from our sponsor. He says with an ironic grin.

==> 7958-live-at-catalyst-2010- <==

Today, I know what time it is in 2010 about 10 years ago. I got invited to speak at the Catalyst conference in Georgia. It was more than 10,000 people in a crowded Arena. They had just finished filming a commercial for Doritos don’t ask was a great crowd. It was a fun day. I thought you might like to hear a recording from that from a long time ago.

It’s about linchpin. It’s about your art. It’s about making a difference. I’m really glad you’re R tuning in thank you for listening. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second with that live recording but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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The creatives workshop is here to help. I hope you’ll check it out. It’s at the creatives workshop.com. We’ll see you there.

Does anyone know what time it is? Course, you know what time it is you have a watch. You have a cell phone with a clock on it. How come how come you’ve got to watch? It’s because the system demands you show up in the right place at the right time the system’s about organizing and maximizing synchronizing centralizing.

The system is pretty new. It’s only been two hundred years that everyone knew what time it was. So even a hundred and fifty years that we even had time zones.

I have an announcement to make and it may come as news to some of you some of you may have heard it from others before professional wrestling. Is fake now.

Somewhere along the way someone you trusted when you were 8 or 10 or that guy over there 42 years old told you that pro wrestling was fake and you believe them and when you looked at pro wrestling matches from then on they seemed different you noticed that the elbow thrust stopped one inch too soon. You saw the Edges of the blood pact you came to understand that there is a difference between what is and what you are expecting that as soon as you realize the truth of what was going on. It became a lot easier to understand the artifice and the system of what was pro wrestling.

So what I want to do today is really stretch your envelope and I want to talk about something a lot more important than pro-wrestling that affects all the elements of Our Lives starting with the economy. The thing to understand is that the economy the way our economy Works drives our culture. Four thousand years ago when we were Nomads in tribes of a hundred and fifty moving from place to place to place.

We had a spiritual life that match that we had a cultural life that match that when the Roman Empire showed up. It demanded a different way of living. It was a top-down. There’s an emperor. There’s one set of rules everyone works for someone else who eventually works for someone in Rome. And then when the economy shifted and there were princes and Merchants and Banks and imperialists and kings are spiritual life shifted again our cultural life shifted again. You could make a living as an artist working for the meta cheese.

Well the life we know today is driven at every level.

By the economy, we live in it’s hard to imagine that 10,000 or 13,000 to 15,000 smart people would get together to make a Doritos commercial.

That’s the economy talking the economy changes the way we see things. So I want to tell you about my 40 billion dollar mistake sitting on my desk in my office in a beautiful green box. And inside of it is a t-shirt that cost me forty billion dollars. In 1992. I was a book packager. I was a writer I was writing cover stories for magazines creating books. And I also had a little internet company before anyone, you know ever had an internet company.

We are sending email all around the world. We had a T1 line. We knew what the internet was about. I looked at that and I said, I’m going to create a book called best in the net 220 pages of Articles and pictures of things you could find if you had Archie over. Honor Guard knew how to get around the net and I sold it to a book publisher for $70,000 and I made the book publisher bunch of t-shirts for their sales force.

And best in the net went on to sell 850 copies. At the same time that I was doing that.

Dave filo and Jerry Yang started a company in California with the same resources I have and they called it. Yahoo!

They saw the same thing I saw but I was looking for a book idea and they were looking to change the world. So now let’s think about the record business for a minute. I don’t know if you recognize this. This is called a record.

The record industry is over. It’s broken. It’s toast put a fork in it. It used to be perfect. Perfect in so many ways right this thing here. I own it if I lend it to you. I don’t have it anymore. I have to buy another one if I play it a lot where it out. I gotta buy another one. If I go to the store. Yes, they used to sell music in stores.

If I go to a store to buy a copy I get to see all The other ones and Page through them and they can do Paola and there’s radio and the senior prom in the yearbook and on and on and on it was perfect and then it changed and some people looked at the industry and said well if we try really hard and we Su all our fans maybe we’ll be able to get back to where we were.

And they were wrong. So where does this lead us? Well Betty Crocker Betty Crocker fictional person figured out that if she ran enough ads and was on the radio often enough people would go to the store to buy her stuff. And so General Mills has produced billions and billions of dollars worth of Betty Crocker stuff on a Model that says if you have a product you want to sell advertise it if you have something you want. The pay attention to yell about it. If you want to reach the masses better make average stuff for average people.

And she got help from her friend Henry Henry Ford Henry Ford figured out. that a factory a building organized to make something could be profitable if you have interchangeable parts, so they don’t have to depend on one thing if you have mass production because what mass production lets you do is get more and more efficient at one point Henry Ford had Shepherds who raised Ford sheep that produced Ford wool that was sheared to make and woven into Ford seats to Ford cars because he made money he hired people who used to get paid 50 cents a day and paid him five bucks a day.

And made a profit doing it because the factory was so efficient. But in order to make it efficient not only need interchangeable parts. He needed interchangeable people interchangeable people because if you don’t show up at work, I can have him take your slot. I don’t have to shut down the whole Factory and so baked into our culture for every person in this room. Who’s under 80 years old is the model that what you’re supposed to do.

Is build an organization with interchangeable people that gets bigger to gets more impactful that scales. So, you know, what factories led to they led to school because Factory workers were freaking out Factory owners were freaking out they were freaking out because number one it’s really hard to train someone who’s not expecting it to work in a factory.

If you need workers cheap workers. We better train them, you know where we train them in school. School was invented by Andrew Carnegie and other industrialists to train our kids to be obedient to train them to sit in straight rows to train them to do what they’re told and use a number two pencil while they’re doing it. The other thing we train them to do is buy stuff, right? The best way to fit in we say is to buy stuff go to Abercrombie and buy stuff that hit record go by it be in the inside group sitting. In buying stuff doing what you’re told was all invented to feed the factory system.

So I want to tell you a really scary story. I was sitting with five straight a student’s a thirteen-year-old a fourteen-year-old a fifteen-year-old and 14 year old and a 13 year old and I had with me as I often do I hope you often do a Taiwanese perpetual motion drinking bird.

It’s that little glass of Louder and then the bird goes like this. Do you know what I’m talking about? I didn’t bring slides. I hope it’s okay. So the bird drinking drinking drinking I set it up and I say guys, how’s it work?

And they looked at it for about 15 seconds. I don’t know Seth tell us ready to write down the answer in case there’s a quiz. I don’t need you to write down the answer Wikipedia already. Did I need you to figure out the answer and they sat there for half an hour struggling to even find the questions. They wanted to ask because no one ever taught them how to solve interesting problems.

How to do work without a map how to develop as the brilliant Dan pink talks about autonomy, you know why the factory wants you to fit in? So they can ignore you not just the factory that makes cars but the factory that makes insurance policies and the factory that governs the country and yes the factory of the spiritual institution you work for if it’s about obedience and it’s about interchangeable people and it’s about org charts.

We are reflecting what the factory did the factory changed us the factory put in our heads that what’s valuable is a building. Write it used to be you needed a cathedral to be in the spirituality business. And as we got brainwashed into this Factory mindset, we fell in love with this idea that the hard part is the physical part the making part. I want to tell you about a guy named Tim who runs a really cool Business Online called the custom saber shop and what they make of course is lightsabers you can get them with or without sound effects.

This one’s without.

Here’s the thing about a lightsaber making one is not hard. If you look at it, it’s like a pipe and some duct tape and a couple 9-volt batteries. It’s not hard what’s hard is inventing the idea of Darth Vader and the lightsaber what’s hard is figuring out that you want to initiate and start a business that makes lightsabers. No, dummies book for that.

There is nobody who says these are the 18 steps to successfully go from that’s a neat idea to I’m shipping it. The fact is ladies and gentlemen in the world of Google competence is no longer a scarce commodity. If you are a competent youth group leader. I can find someone else to do what you do cheaper.

If you are a competent Communicator. There’s a long line out the door. Easy to find it used to be that if you were the only one in town we had to settle for you. But now everything we care about is a click away. And so there’s a problem here a problem that’s bordering on a crisis and it’s about bowling.

I don’t know if any of you are big pro bowling fans. I don’t mean to offend you if you are but not a lot of people are into pro bowling. The reason is pro bowling is about being perfect pro bowling is an asymptotic function. The best you can do is 300. There are no I was blown away by that said in Bowling comments.

and yet That’s what you guys do at work all day long, isn’t it? You’re bowling trying to avoid a gutter hoping for a strike figuring out how to avoid getting criticized not doing anything that hasn’t been done before and incrementally following the steps and living with the system the problem with bowling.

The problem with factories is they will die. And the reason they will die is because they race to the bottom If you run a factory and you race to the bottom, it’s you saying I can be a little cheaper. If you run a store you can say I can be a little cheaper if you run a church because they I might be a little closer to your house.

Here’s the problem. The problem is if someone’s racing to the bottom, you don’t want to win that race.

And problem number two is someone else is probably going to win in any way because there’s always someone somewhere who’s willing to be a little cheaper cut a few more corners be a little bit more convenient go a little easier on you and so we can trace the bottom if we want to win we have to race to the top and this is where the good news starts the good news starts right now because now there is a revolution the revolution that is destroying the Industrial Revolution.

And his clay shirky says every Revolution destroys the one before before it creates the new one. So since you can’t create lots and lots of great middle class jobs in the factory, since you can’t count on scaling your business by hiring lots of competent people. What can you count on what you can count on now?

Is that because we are more connected than ever before because it’s easier to make stuff than ever before because with just a few clicks you can get someone somewhere to assemble something type something right something upload something all that’s left.

Is to make a difference all that’s left is to connect all that’s left is to matter. All that’s left is to do work that people will miss if you stop doing it. We have now reached a fork in the road and the fork is are you going to be more obedient than everyone else or more graceful than everyone else graceful?

Yeah graceful like believing or seeing or connecting or giving or living or supporting or Telling the truth tons of stuff. No one ever taught you how to do in school, right? If you had great parents like I didn’t maybe they taught it to you at home. But what graceful is about is accepting others doing work that matters and doing art what graceful is about is being that person when they leave the room other people are sorry to see them leave the challenge. Is this the factory error was around for a really long time.

It created institutions that Embrace compliance right? Why is it that they are so freaked out about you turning off your cell phone on an airplane. Like if it was really dangerous couldn’t bad guy. Just go take this plane to Cuba. I’m going to make a phone call.

Right. It’s not really dangerous. What it is is it helps out the phone companies because you’ll jam up the cells if you use a phone going too fast, and it’s a chance to get you to comply. It’s a chance to show that you’re open to doing what Authority tells you to do. And so what we’ve created at school at work in our spiritual institutions in politics. Is this mindset that we have to work ever harder to be more. Compliant than the other guy a compliant Cog in a system that wants to eat us up and make a little bit out of it.

But there is a choice and the choice is you could just be more connected that if we are now living in a connected revolution in a place where every single person in this room is one tweet away from every other person in a world where you only six handshakes away from someone in Burma in that world being more compliant isn’t how you win you win by being more connected because here’s the thing and Other people have choices if you tell me what to do, and I don’t want to do it. I’ll leave.

North Korea is filled with compliance North Korea might be the most compliant country in the world. It’s not working anymore. You cannot comply yourself to success. So what are the options? Well, let’s talk about cupcakes for a minute.

I don’t know if you’ve ever made cupcakes, but the first time you make cupcakes you make cupcakes you follow the recipe you do your best. They’re probably pretty good the second time you make cupcakes you get better. Following the recipe complying with instructions now, they might be really good. Then the third time comes along some people screw around with the recipe try something new push the envelope and they fail now we see what happens because if after failing you say, oh I learned my lesson. I’m going back to following that recipe exactly you are on your way to being a very good cupcake maker for the rest of your life.

Some people however fail at making that cupcake and they say, you know what, I better try again and fail a different way and then they fail a different way because they understand that cupcake failure is not fatal.

They understand that there are no people dying in the streets whose last words are I failed at making a cupcake?

And so if we want to create a world where we can do our work the work we have to be prepared to fail every coin has two sides. There are no one-sided coins. If you want to succeed you have to be prepared to fail at embrace it as a benefit of failing couple years ago. I talked to some of you about tribes and what I explained is that tribes are at the heart of At the heart of Institutions at the heart of how ideas spread.

Here’s the thing. No one joins a boring tribe. No one says I’m going to quit doing this and go join those guys because they’re really average. So CMO doesn’t stand for chief marketing officer it stands For chief movement officer, right? If you’re going to win you’re going to create a movement a movement about your paintings maybe or movement around your conference or a movement around your institution, but you will not be able to create a movement by being more compliant by demanding more compliance. You will create a movement by doing something that some people hate you will create a movement by creating something that people talk about how many of you have an iPhone right? How many of you bought it because The best telephone ever made you’re lying, right?

It’s a terrible telephone.

We bought it because it’s jewelry that happens to have a function and the jewelry part is. Oh, you’re in the tribe. I gave you the head shake. Why are you suddenly my friend because we both bought the same phone. I don’t know but you are right and when Apple has done and become those valuable technology company in history is they understand they’re not in the technology business at all there in the movement business the tribal business to business of said, Messages and the internet their friend is a connection machine Apple runs fewer ads on a percentage of sales than any other consumer technology company, they don’t win because the ads they win because they chose to create a movement that people who want to join it can easily join.

There’s no forms to fill out. There’s no admissions committee. You want to be in your in but that movement grows because people talk about it boring doesn’t work. Bureaucratic doesn’t work. If I am going to talk about you your institution or you what exactly am I going to say? Am I going to talk about you by and say yeah, he’s a really nice guy and he has a bowl haircut. That’s no reason to talk about you.

I’m going to talk about you because you’re a genius not in Albert Einstein. We invent a laws of physics don’t know your home address genius a genius with us. All G the genius who knows how to solve interesting problems the genius who knows how to connect with people the genius who knows how to be a human being and make a change that’s worth making we talked about Geniuses all the time.

The problem is if you’re going to be a genius you can’t have a boss telling you what to do all day. You got to figure it out. So first question is this without a boss in this new economy. Even if you have a job who exactly is setting your agenda is your agenda about mediocre obedience or is your agenda about Relentless curiosity?

And so now we get to the heart of it and the Heart of it is Art not painting art. Let me talk about painting for a minute.

One third of all, the oil paintings in the world are painted in a small village in China called Dawson. Every morning all the inhabitants of Dawson wake up run to their easels and paint as fast as they can. You can buy the Mona Lisa for $29.

Of course, it’s not the Mona Lisa. It’s a copy of the Mona Lisa by a guy who paints 8 Mona Lisa’s every day. That’s not art that’s painting art is a human act that changes someone and it’s generous. It’s a gift. I cannot sell. I art I can tell a souvenir of it. You want to buy an original Jackson Pollock? That’ll cost you 20 million. You want to buy an original Joseph boys. That’ll cost you five the souvenir the thing you own make cost money, but art appreciating it hearing Beethoven’s 5th on the radio seeing a Picasso at the Metropolitan.

Beethoven doesn’t get a royalty from that right? He’s dead. But even if he wasn’t dead, that’s his gift. No gift. No art. That the act of being able to help someone in and of itself is the work you get paid for something else you get paid for doing what someone needs you to do that they’re willing to pay for it, but it’s the gift-giving.

It’s the connecting with people that changes the culture. You may remember that there was a ban on Usery for thousands and thousands of years. No interest on loans. The reason is with only a hundred and fifty people in your nomadic tribe if I charge you interest on a loan if I loan you some seeds you got to pay me back extra. We’re having a business transaction.

I don’t know about you, but you probably don’t have a great relationship with the bank that has a mortgage on your house. They’re not your best friend. You don’t invite him over for dinner. It’s Us and Them. But when you loan your sister 50 bucks, you don’t charge your interest because the 50 bucks actually brings you closer together. It’s us and us not you and me and this idea of doing acts that bring us closer together.

Is that the heart of what makes a connection economy work? Because if all we’re keeping track of is not how efficient is the factory but how connected you are then the thing you need to do is your art and once you understand what your art is you figured out what your purpose is. They’re the same thing.

And so you got to look at these words courage and fear and generosity and say which ones are in my head when I wake up in the morning when the phone rings and I can see From caller ID. It’s my boss’s boss calling me and I filled with a excited anticipation and curiosity or my filled with fear that I’m about to get yelled at for screwing up some small thing.

Right the old system said don’t worry. Do what I say. And then they invented the printing press and suddenly people had to think for themselves. And this thinking for themselves thing is really hard. I have this great quote from Richard Feynman was a brilliant scientist won the Nobel Prize.

Let me read it to you.

I don’t know. What’s the matter with people they don’t learn by understanding they learn by some other way by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile because the world changes and that thing you memorized that set of instructions you are following doesn’t work anymore. But when you figure out why it works the truth of the situation the world as it is not the way you wanted to be you understand and then you can do your art.

The next part of art is emotional labor. Most of us do not get paid for digging ditches. I certainly don’t I Very good at it. We get paid for a different kind of Labor the labor of doing something we might not feel like in the moment the labor of exposing ourselves intellectual risk the labor of connecting with someone we might disagree with the labor of nuance as opposed to just being jingoistic that labor emotional labor is work worth doing it lets you become an indispensable human being what I call in. – we need original thinkers. We need provocateurs. We need people who care as opposed to people who are phoning it in and doing their job. We need marketers who can lead. We need people who can make a human connection. We need people who will make change even if it means failing in the short run.

And it’s easy to nod your head about this, but I want you to think about how you hire people. Do you hire by looking at a resume? Isn’t a resume just a piece of paper with brand names on it proving how good you are complying with instructions right now. I want you to think about who you hire and who you fire. Do you fire someone because they always do the right thing because they’re not making any mistakes. Maybe you should or do you fire someone who makes mistakes who offends a board member who does something outside the boundaries? They just learned a valuable lesson and taught you one too.

Maybe we better think about what we’re rewarding. We better think about what we’re attracted to are we attracted to the same thing. We saw last week if we’re not then why are we doing it because it’s safer because it’s easier because it’s the way we’ve always done it if you think about the interactions we have with people you disagree with with people across the aisle with people you don’t know is it about creating a change in them that they want to find?

Or is it about embracing the system the more change we can make the more likely it is the tribal join us. And then the question I ask you is how tight is that tribe? How much do the people in that tribe miss each other when they don’t see each other because that’s your opportunity. Would they miss you? If you were gone if the tribe disappeared if they stop broadcasting some show on television if some Club down the street.

Some Cafe went out of business how long before we could replace it because if you’re at the center of a tribe that matters people would miss you, you know United Airlines is merging with I don’t know who Continental is anyone really going to miss which everyone disappears or did they get that way by running a lot of ads because it doesn’t work anymore at this point less polite audience is start pelting me with tomatoes. And asking or demanding an answer to the following question, that’s fine Seth but my boss won’t let me I’d love to fail often. I’d love to try new things. I’d love to organize the tribe. I’d love to put new ideas into position, but my boss or the board or some other make-believe person won’t let me well, of course, they won’t If you went to your boss and said to her, okay, I want to try this crazy scheme. And if it works, I’ll get the credit. But if it fails since you said it was okay, you’ll get the blame. Okay, of course, she’s gonna say no that’s her job.

That’s not how change is ever made changes made by individuals who stopped seeking deniability. Because that’s what you spend most of your day doing seeking proof that it wasn’t your fault and change is made by people who eagerly accept responsibility and a key part of this. Is that while you accept responsibility, you don’t demand Authority while you accept responsibility you are eager to give away credit.

If you start working your organization making tiny tiny mistakes in front of small groups of people. And every time you fail learning from it and then doing it again, but better and every time you succeed learning from it and giving credit to your boss. No one will ever tell you to stop. Because that is in fact what the boss wants you to do? It’s just what you’re afraid of doing that what organization seek our Lynch pins what they seek are people who will connect and leave and what they fear.

But what most employees have embraced is the endless emergency of fitting in you can never fit in enough. You will never be done fitting in you’ll never be able to say at the end of the day. I fit in all the way. day on the other hand like bowling there’s an alternative which is instead of going for Perfection. You can say I made a difference today. I made two differences today. I made six differences today.

So why is this so hard? Why is emotional labor so hard the answer has to do with plastic sharks. I was going to bring a real shark, but it didn’t fit in my bag now. Here’s the thing.

Last year in the United States deer killed more people than sharks by a lot and yet if you’re watching a re-run of Jaws and you hear through dirt, you don’t go. Oh that’s not a deer, right?

We’re afraid of sharks were even afraid of plastic sharks. I am why is that second half of the question? I got more stuff in here. We’re working on it. We’re working our way all the way to the bottom. Why did the chicken cross the road? The answer? Everyone knows is this his Chicken brain told him too well.

Psychologists have actually researched this quite a bit and they’ve discovered that all wild animals have what they call the lizard brain. The lizard brain is a brain. We have its prehistoric. It’s millions of years old. It is responsible for anger Revenge reproduction and safety and if you were a lizard a million years ago and you didn’t have one you weren’t a lizard anymore. You were dead.

The reason wild animals are wild is because they’re lizard brain tells him to And here’s the thing if I put you in a functional MRI scanner, I can see yours. It’s right back here. It includes your amygdala. It’s Elementary brain science. Now, here’s proof. You’re on a plane. You’re 20,000 feet. You’re typing up a great sermon or a letter to a friend the plane hits turbulence, you know.

Planes don’t crash because of turbulence. So you keep typing. No, that’s not what happens. You put your head between your legs and you screaming you screaming because you’re going to die.

Does the screaming help the plane stay aloft? No, of course not so why did you do it because you had no choice because when the lizard is upset it takes over.

The thing is Steve pressfield got a great book about this his name for the voice of the lizard is the resistance the resistance is that little whisper in the back of your head when the speaker says any questions and you don’t raise your hand. The resistance is the voice in the back of your head that after five blog post. He said, I don’t think I can blog today. I have to mow the lawn the resistance is that little voice in the back of your head that makes it easier and safer to have another bowl of ice cream than it is. Pick up a phone and have an important phone call with someone you’ve been avoiding the resistance tries to keep us safe. And when there were saber-toothed tigers, it kept us alive, but now the resistance is the enemy the resistance the lizard brain. It’s the thing that’s preventing us from doing the work that matters.

I apologize for having so many airplanes stories. I think I’m flying too much. I live near New York City and every time I go to Boston I make a mistake. Cuz if I drive I know I should have flown and if I fly I know I should have driven. Well, I had a meeting in Boston. I flew out of White Plains. We got there and like 21 minutes. It’s fabulous.

I got punished on the way home we circled and we Circle then we circled for an hour. We ran out of fuel. I don’t get that and we landed in Albany instead 9 o’clock at night. Albany is a disaster at any hour at nine o’clock. It’s really bad. So they pull up this far from the gate the airport’s clearly closed. They said we’re going to sit here for an hour or two. Then we think we’ll be able to fly to White Plains not going to happen. So I open my laptop plug in my modem go online. Avis has one car left.

I grabbed it.

I then say to the flight attendant, excuse me.

I really need to get off this plane.

If you say it like that, they’ll always let you off. So they open the door Jay-Z, but you can’t come back and honestly, that’s fine. So she opens the door and I turned to the plane. There’s 18 people and I say ladies and gentlemen, as you can see from the fact that I’m wearing a suit and tie. I am not a psychopath.

My car is parked where yours is in White Plains. I have rented a car from Avis. I’ve already paid for Just sunk cost. I got room for three people. I’m driving. Anyone want to come along it’s free.

And not one person stood up as far as I know they’re still in Albany.

Why because if they stay on the plane at United’s fault and if they get off the plane, it’s their fault. And that’s the heart of what I’m talking about deniability. I want to switch gears here in the few minutes. I’ve got left and I want to share with you a downside of this tribe thing and how it can backfire on you.

I was at a high school junior varsity soccer match a little while ago. It was a close game, but not that close a couple minutes left. Kid gets awarded a penalty kick now. There’s 30 parents in the stands penalty. Kick is 30 feet in front of the net there is the kicker and the goalie. That’s it. The kicker runs up Kicks the ball as hard as he can 15 feet over the next.

15 parents from the other side cheer loudly for what? What were they cheering for right that this kid humiliated himself in front of his friends that a meaningless soccer game wouldn’t have another goal in it that the goalie on their team wouldn’t have a chance to make a save. We’re creating this culture filled with politicians that are happy to divide us someone running in my state who says here’s a great idea. Let’s put people who are really down on their luck in prison to live and people are One Tribe. Yay, and beware the other type of go. Oh my God.

All right, we’ve got people say he can’t be a real blank because he doesn’t do what I do. Why is it so important that the tribe win? When we think about what the goal is what the mission is. What our art is. Is it really important to prove that we’re better than the other one, or is it just that it’s better to be on the winning side that the challenge we face as we look around the world a world where everyone everyone is getting weirder and weirder by the minute.

That nobody is exactly the same that as communities get more and more artha docks. The outliers will always outnumber the Insiders when we think about that when we think about the work that’s worth doing the question is is that what we ought to focus on is that what we’re going to keep score on or is that like a Wall Street guy keeping score of nothing, but how many people could be foreclosed on to maximize the money? He’s got in the bank.

I think there’s a better opportunity here. So I wrote a booklet most of its new I brought it for all of you. You should be getting it soon about graceful and I hope you’ll accept it as the gift. I mean it to be to help you think about this difference between scarcity and abundance. We’re moving away from a world where everything is scarce, either. I have it or you have it. Let’s fight over it.

And we’re moving to this connected world this revolutionary world what happens when you give gifts instead? So the last story I want to tell you is this David rakoff gave me the idea.

He’s at the movies the theaters empty.

He’s the only guy there this woman walks in this weird woman walked in and she walks right up to where he said he says, I’m sorry. Is that seat taken?

She’s a loon but then he starts thinking about that question. Is that seat taken? Do you know how many people want your seat? Do? You know how many people would give anything to have the platform you have to have the chance you have to have the ability that you have to do art to do it without wondering where you’re going to sleep tonight to do it this year.

Five hundred years ago or a thousand years from now in this moment when the roof Revolution is happening. You have a platform for your art.

I am hoping that you will not waste this revolution.

I am hoping that you will do work that matters and I’m hoping that you will hurry.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We’ll be back in a second with an answer to a question from last time but first here is a message from our sponsor.

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This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is an apology – Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question.

Just visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link-16. Click the appropriate button.

Hello Seth.

My name is Anita Porsche and I’m a Bitcoin educator and podcaster from Europe. I’m a big fan of your work. I’ve heard you mentioning Bitcoin in different episodes this time. I simply had to contribute not by asking a question. But if I may by giving some additional information in the About micro transactions, you’ve mentioned three basic hurdles why Bitcoin is no solution for microtransactions. I kindly disagree while it might not be a solution. Now the technical foundations are ready you say for one it is too volatile for something that people will trade what you have bought 10 years ago for $6 ended up costing you $10,000 of dollars in today’s money. That’s not a micro transaction anymore.

I see where you’re going here. But imagine you bought that content for an equivalent of six US Dollars and you kept the other four US Dollars change might be a good deal or on the other hand. If you are the content creator and managed to save a little bit of these six dollars you were paid very well Bitcoin is volatile. That’s true.

But if you spend it and immediately immediately by a new Bitcoin afterwards you have lost nothing to volatility.

Second you say Bitcoin is not optimized for fast. Tiny transactions that is true on the Bitcoin blockchain on the base layer. But have you heard about the lightning Network and other layer two solutions, they enable microtransactions even in very very small soup Satoshi amount lightning payments are immediately settled. No need to wait for one block. That’s 10 minutes minimum with layer 2 Solutions. There is no limit to the number of payments that can be settled in seconds. Also lightning payments give you privacy protection. They are as private and Anonymous as cash transactions and there are already solutions that let you pay for Content inside messaging apps on top of the lightning Network for instance. There is a messenger called Sphinx where you can pay for Content inside the messaging app very easily.

And the third point you say multiple formats different blockchains. It becomes difficult to exchange between these walled Gardens or blockchains. Like Bitcoin are not walled Gardens. They are quite the opposite and there is already a solution for that. It’s called Atomic swabs. They allow the immediate exchange of funds on different blockchains different platforms without the need for an intermediary.

So I add Gue the technology is already in place to do fast and sensor able private microtransactions with Bitcoin. It is only not equally distributed yet Seth. Thank you very much for your work and I’m looking forward to new episodes and insights.

Thank you for this. It gives me a chance to talk about the difference between the blockchain and Bitcoin because they are different. You can’t have Bitcoin without the blockchain but you can definitely have the Gene without Bitcoin the blockchain is a form of database. It is an open inspectable uncorruptible database that is shared on many many computers.

There are lots of situations where we would want there to be a registry a ledger a place where people can see the status of where the community is how transactions have happened who’s booked which tickets for which event a massively scalable. Open database that is hard to falsify is rare and important and it turns out that one of the uses of the blockchain is to enable Bitcoin because what we need to know about Bitcoin is who spent it because if the system doesn’t know who spent it you could spend it over and over again and then it fails so what they did. We don’t know who they is is built the blockchain with Bitcoin paying for it and Going uses the blockchain to function.

So it’s a virtuous cycle back and forth. They go and one of the worst things that could happen to the blockchain is that Bitcoin became a speculative investment $1 $5 $10. You could buy a Bitcoin for and then suddenly it was $15,000 and that speculation brought in a whole bunch of people who didn’t care about any of this they were just looking to speculate back in the day.

The Grateful Dead had a good thing going and then they had their one and only top 40 hit once you have a hit a whole bunch of different kind of people come to your concerts and the dead were never quite the same after that. So when I talk about Bitcoin not being a useful micro currency that is generally accepted to be But the blockchain has the ability to give us a chance to create micro payments. It probably will but it will not be adopted because the blockchain behind it is particularly robust.

It will be adopted because the people who want to buy and receive micro payments find it irresistible to use and people in Tech are bad at irresistible. It’s going to be built by somebody else that part of It it’s got to be the kind of thing where the network effect plus the game theory behind it plus the cultural bias and dynamic means that it’s better to use it and receive it then it is to avoid it.

So that’s a short rant about micro payments in Bitcoin. Thanks again for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success. You’re at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8068-is-seth-real- <==

A question from our youngest listener leaving the post a question which caught me by surprise and I made to make me realize that our children are growing up in a very different world than with it when it comes to a very important ontological question Demetria. Would you like to ask?

Yes, how do we know? You’re real. Good night. See em.

background of stage with some people sitting and then someone from so then you might be drawing and a computer-generated graphic and your voice may also be computer generated and and actually everything about your existence maybe so so then And I believe that the question is the Democratic causes and genuinely buffers here.

So in a world where AI is becoming more and more intelligent and the cause of humanity versus artificial intelligence seems to close hey itself, or maybe not and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about the future of of real but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s f are you ready to turn pro? The Creator’s Workshop is back its back because it works. It’s our most engaged akimbo Workshop. It’s a workshop for people who have something to say to write to paint to communicate people who want to be creative. Come find the others learn what it means to see and be seen when you’re serious about your work and you’re ready to take it to the next level.

The creatives Workshop is here to help. I hope you’ll check it out. It’s at the creatives workshop.com. We’ll see you there in 1983. I took a course in artificial intelligence and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met a few years after that Doug. Lynott summarized his research on AI by saying intelligence is 10 million rules.

In a different quote. He Amplified that once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge. Then the human Software System will be superhuman in the same sense that mankind with writing or language itself is superhuman compared to mankind before writing or language itself. We look back on pre-linguistic cavemen and think they weren’t quite human. Were they in much the same way our Attendants will look back on pre AI with exactly that mixture of other nests and pity in the 1980s when lynott was doing his work. He was an outsider his theory was not that we should understand how the brain works so we can make artificial intelligence that matches it nor was his theory that we had some other clever hack that we could use to without a lot of work create artificial intelligence his theory was that we needed to spend thousands. As and thousands and thousands of person-years to acquire an enormous number of rules and facts and put them into a place where a computer could find them and quote learn them. Well, as if answering his request, we built the internet, we built the internet a place where millions and millions of people have added stuff to read it or Wikipedia or countless other spots where folks are listing all the rules about how Things work about how language Works about the fundamental relationships between things for example, as Doug is pointed out once you know that someone was born in 1930, you know that it’s impossible that they died in 1925 because one of our rules is can’t die before you’re born and there are lots of those rules if something or someone knows enough of those rules and can have a veneer of intelligence at the same time. It’s very hard to tell that apart from a real person.

So now we are living in a world where many of us are Sheltering in place where we absorb information via video via audio and via text and that world will never be the same again when we think back to the Turing test from 80 or so years ago. What we see is a really simple parlor trick that has profound implications and it’s simply you are in a room.

In another room someone’s typing on a keyboard and your job is to figure out whether the typing your reading is coming from a person or a computer and for years and years people said the Turing test was silly. It was silly because there’s just no way a computer is going to be able to interact with us in a way when we’re talking about a broad area of expertise that we can’t tell it apart from a person.

Well, like all things in artificial intelligence everything. We reserved for AI is stuff that a computer hasn’t done yet. The fact that a computer can beat anyone in chess or go or Checkers is no longer considered important because the computer figured out how to do it and we say, yeah, but it can’t do this or it can’t do that yet and now it’s all changing.

So let’s begin with audio.

Who is this talking an entire generation is unable to recognize base. Asic tools some are under the delusion that this is a wrench they are sorely mistaken. So I need every one of you to take action now and teach them the correct Naaman clay sure. This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill or perhaps this.

Hey Nick, don’t you?

Thank you.

I’ve heard a lot about you.

How is last test how they’re going is a good financing you been struggling with that a little bit. Well, you know it takes time but you know, I’m here to help. I’m help. Yeah, it’s what I do help me help you.

Hey, I researchers have figured out how to mimic the human voice so that we can type just about anything we want and have it come out sounding like somebody we recognize the step after that was video and now it’s pretty clear just as you can’t trust a photograph because it might have been doctored. It’s really hard to trust the video because computing power has gotten so good. And the editors are so smart that they can fake a video and we really can’t tell the difference after all Hollywood spent billions of dollars to create the special effects to help us believe that Christopher Reeves could fly that helped us believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a good actor when you add it all up.

We can’t believe what we see in the movies, but we don’t even try because we know they’re the movies but throughout all of this we’ve been reserving. Yeah, but a computer a computer computer can’t talk to me in English in a way that makes me sure that it’s not a computer except now it can now we have entered the realm of GPT 3gp T3 speaks natural language English and many other languages.

How did they accomplish this? They accomplished it? Because 35 years ago Doug. Lynott was right they accomplished it by feeding it. Two orders of magnitude more information than they fed GPT to it has read billions and billions of bits of information. It has read all of it. And as a result almost no one can tell the difference between GPT three and a real person.

So to give you an example of how this works a podcaster who makes a podcast called tinkered thinking got his hands on early access to the API. I I4 G PT 3 and he decided to make a podcast where he would prompt the software with the paragraph and it would respond. So for example, he types as the text for this episode grows in this way.

It will be fed back into G PT 3 after we have added the text in order to generate another paragraph given the larger context of the episode then without any more information the software wrote something that has been really On about this collaboration has been watching how GPT three rights in response to things tinkered thinking has written when tinkered thinking adds a line of humor. For example GPT 3 is very likely to follow up with something funny as well.

This kind of feedback in the text has actually produced some pretty organic feeling conversation in the episode. So just to be really clear that was a computer writing that this software which is bigger than any software that could have been possibly built just a few years ago is capable not only of doing rudimentary math.

It can program in a variety of programming languages and it can translate from one language to another English degree King glish to French better than just about any alternative. Here’s one more line from The tinkered Thinking podcast so far after many thousands of iterations we have figured out. That the best way to get GPT 3 to understand what we wanted to do is by giving it examples of our work.

It’s talking about itself in the third person. So Sound audio fake video fake thinking processes language human beings talking fake hug it all together and it’s really clear. Nothing can be guaranteed to be real. All ever. Again. This is Way Beyond the manipulation of the so-called fake news. This is about our perception of what it means to be in the world and to interact GPT 3 is capable of writing a Seth Godin blog post that even Seth Godin would read and say maybe I wrote that 10 years ago.

What we are now entering is this era where there is a device that knows everything and they can Interact with us in a way that sounds like we have a best friend with nothing better to do than tell us what we need to know. So if you’re in customer service tell me again why GPT three can’t do 99% of what you do all day.

If you are in the business of sitting with people and patiently teaching them something in response to what they say to you. Tell me why GPT three isn’t going to do that. It is really clear to me is that if you have a job where we can specify what good and bad results look like there’s a computer that’s going to be able to do that job really soon that the spot that’s left for humans is initiative is surprise is random connection is trust those things for now belong to people and just only people And they going forward there is going to be a podcast from someone who’s pretending to be Seth Godin that might very well be G BT 3 or GPT for hooked up to a voice synthesizer and in most cases were going to say that’s okay.

It’s okay because marketing and Leadership about making a promise and keeping it and if G PT 3 can keep its promise if it can consistently show up in a way that I needed to I don’t think it’s authenticity or lack thereof matters at all. Authenticity is a fun side show that we sort of invented fairly recently the idea that the voice in someone’s head matters as much as the words that are coming out of their mouth knowing that other people have a voice in their head.

That’s pretty new and computers. They don’t have a voice in their head and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if the GPS Is really and truly wants you to go to Middleton New York. It will get you to Middleton New York and you’d rather have the GPS take you there then some small on the phone. And the same thing is true with many other elements of our life the ones where we do care about someone exerting themselves about someone ringing quote their true self to the table.

Those aren’t going to go away in this generation, but all the other stuff where we have been throwing human. I am at it the Flotsam and Jetsam of people calling you at home during dinner the idea that you should be using a doctor’s time to go through your list of symptoms when maybe what you need is GPT 3 to go through your list at your leisure 24 hours a day, and then when it’s all summarized and neat and clean and clear bringing in somebody, maybe it’s a somebody maybe it’s a something that can actually Actually help you get better.

We are about to completely redefine what it means to interact with one another because we’re adding to the one another list this idea built by open a i a giant project that is going to transform the world forever and we can ignore it, but it’s not going to slow down. It’s here. It’s real. It’s about to scale in a dramatic way.

Open the pod bay door Hal. It’s time to figure out what it means to be truly human. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

If you’re a person. I hope you will drop me a question. I’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any other previous episode, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd. Click the appropriate button. You can be as young as you want. You don’t even have to be a person.

I’d love to hear from you. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it Sounds simple it sounds very commonsensical.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consistently.

bidder the alt MBA More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8176-alexander-s-theorem-of-professional-exceptionalism- <==

According to one recent study more than 90% of all drivers said that they were better-than-average.

This is the dunning-kruger effect times 10 because it’s not stupid people who feel like they’re better than average. It’s all of us. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about Virgins and you but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth. Are you ready to turn pro? The Creator’s Workshop is back its back because it works. It’s our most engaged akimbo Workshop. It’s a workshop for people who have something to say to write to paint to communicate people who want to be creative. Come find the others learn what it means to see and be seen when you’re serious about your work and you are ready to take it to the next level.

The creatives workshop is here to help. I hope you’ll check. Out it’s at the creatives workshop.com. We’ll see you there.

If you talk to a surgeon or a therapist about whether they are better than average or even more interestingly whether their peers think that they are better than average. You might have the experience. I had when I was talking to my favorite surgeon. He said no no, no all surgeons think not only are they better than Average they’re probably among the very best ones that 90% is conservative when we think about the idea that a surgeon or even a therapist might think that they’re better.

Why is that? Well, the Blogger Scott Alexander broke it down into seven causes. I want to share a few of them so that I can get to what I really want to talk about the first one he’s talking about therapists here. Is that your patience. Last doctor was worse than you that most of the time as the therapist you’re encountering people who have left another therapist. Well, the reason they left is your better number to your patients. Love you because cognitive dissonance is real because they have chosen to come back week after week and when they come back week after week, they need to remind themselves that they’re doing something that smart.

Number three patients come but they never seem to leave because unlike the car rental counter. It’s pretty rare for a regular patient to stand up in the middle of a session and storm out never to return what actually happens is the people who return are reminding you that you’re doing a good job, but the people who don’t come back. Well, you just assume that their insurance changed or you assume that they moved away or you assume that they got Over by truck or something else happened probably that they got better.

Thanks to you and your excellent care number four. You probably successfully treated most of your patients because after all the patients who are unsuccessful with they might not be dying on the operating table if you’re a therapist, they just fade away. And then the last one I want to mention is number 6 your victories belong to you, but your failures Belong To Nature that when we are doing something as extraordinary as changing someone’s mind cutting someone open healing them.

It’s easy to pay attention to how our intervention made a difference and in the times that our intervention didn’t make a difference to remind ourselves that were not gods and we’re doing our best. Once you hear Alexander’s principle of professional exceptionalism, it’s a real punch to the gut. And the reason is that everything that you thought was working. So well probably isn’t that restaurant you’re running. We’re all the patrons love it. Well that might be because the patrons who don’t love it. Don’t come back your work is a coach in which your best players score more and more goals. Well sure they do because they’re the ones who are Still on your team and it goes on and on it’s very easy to decide that the inputs were getting are the only inputs that matter, but I don’t really want to talk about Alexander’s law of why certain professions think so highly of themselves.

The thing is that these professions are professions because the people in them are accredited because it was hard to get in and those things mean that the professionals are And because they’re scarce they’re seen as valuable. But what about the rest of us? What about the Creator’s what about the people who have to invent things cause the culture to change the ones who are putting on a show who are seeing the world as it is and trying to make it better.

Well, let’s talk about the corollary of Alexander’s long the corollary of self-doubt because the thing is that for creatives the opposite forces are Often at work first since most of our work is purchased a la carte and since there’s far more Supply than demand. It means that most of the direct feedback we get is rejection. We get rejected by middlemen middlemen who purport to know what’s good and what’s bad because they see so many things and we get rejected by the end users because the end users have so many choices.

Second since the work we do involves widely available tools like a keyboard or a crayon the group of people who believe that they can do the work we do or even better improve. It is very large. So when we bring a logo to a committee meeting it is a certainty that it will not survive the committee meeting unscathed because everyone knows what a logo is everyone can imagine what it takes to draw a Circle or a squiggle or a line?

Everyone is thus the Creator and consumer of logos? No special skill required. So we look at the horrible logo that Hillary Clinton used when she ran for president and it’s easy to say I could have done better because the three-and-a-half-year-old could have done better because anyone could have done better because we’re busy making things that anyone could make Number three since many of us have a transient base of fans meaning for example, that music lovers like many musicians not just one musician if that musician stopped performing few people would be bereft. They would simply switch to some of the other options they have for music.

There’s a great deal of churn in the fan base. Number four since negative criticism is easier to spread than positive feedback most public criticism of our work is negative because particularly if you are a professional you’re going to get your restaurant review read if you scathingly tear apart a new restaurant not if you say it’s pretty good. It might even be worth the money.

And of course people customers who are fairly satisfied rarely fire up Yelp and post a four-star review. Number 5 because we work in novelty. Our existing customers are often hesitant to return because someone else anyone else for that matter can offer more novelty than we can here. We are more than a hundred episodes into akimbo. I am not blowing you away with the new format because I don’t have a new format. If you want a new format, you’re going to go somewhere else and number six one of the biggest ones because Eight of magic is truly breathtaking the audience. And yes, the creators are chasing a once-in-a-lifetime moment that concert we went to when we were 18 years old that meal we ate at our first date that engagement we had with a piece of software that totally changed the way we thought computers could work these by definition are rare.

So most of our interactions Ends don’t meet that standard as a result. We are busy creating our change showing up in the world in a world where no one knows anything but everyone is an expert at the very same time showing up with our best work in that moment for people who are hoping for a life-changing home run and who are easily disappointed when it doesn’t show up busy creating the new The people who seek the new and disappointing those who want the same old thing when we spiral it all together what we end up with is a world where almost nobody who creates gets the benefit of the doubt most of all they don’t get the benefit of the doubt from themselves.

Now, there are two forces at work that are countering this. The first one is the idea of tribal connection. Once you have a big following once you are the Grateful Dead Or Ido, then there are people whose identity is tied up in liking what you make that people root for the New York Islanders not because there’s something special about the New York Islanders, but because they are fans of the New York Islanders. So if the New York Islanders do it by definition it reflects on us and so cheering for us.

A natural thing to do and then related to that is the idea of cognitive dissonance if we’ve decided to become a fan if we’ve decided to commit to this hobby if we’ve decided that we are on this train or that train we must have made a good decision. And so we are more likely to reinforce our choice by liking it even more so tribal identity plus cognitive dissonance plus the internet leads to stands to people who are angry. Really and eagerly taking the side of whatever Creator they’ve chosen, but the fact is only one in a hundred thousand creators are chosen in this way the rest of the people who are seeking to bring original work to an audience don’t have this benefit and they are reminded of that every day because the media the internet the culture keeps reinforcing the fact that there are a few people at the front of the line on the stage who got a standing ovation. Before they even begin and for everybody else, they’re simply the struggle but the struggle is worth the journey what’s essential as we figure out how to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt because if we can’t find a way to trust ourselves as we do this work, it’s going to be very difficult to push Beyond mediocrity to push to extreme edges to do. Yes work that matters for people. Who care. Are so very few creators who are telling the truth believe that they are significantly better than average when they are bringing a new idea to the world but seducing ourselves into thinking that we are going to raise the average that is essential if we’re going to ship our work.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with for juicy questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Half my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump.

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Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question. Thank you all for rising to the occasion and contributing your questions. I love to hear from you if you’ve got a question. Kitchen about this or any previous episode. I hope you will visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button.

We got a couple about artificial intelligence, which is clearly a hot button and then some others.

Here we go.

Hi Seth Renault from South Africa again. I want to thank you for your last podcast. And about is Seth real my thought is we don’t have to search too far as humans. We are bound to Nature. We are bound to each other when you cut us we bleed. We have parents we have four fathers. We have something that computers and I will never have and they will never be of this Earth. I will never be of year. I love technology make no mistake.

Thank you. Would like to hear what you think about that.

Thank you. And L. I think what I’m trying to get at is this you and I have never met and I have no idea if you really are a person or if somebody using GPT to and some good text-to-speech software with a delightful South African accent put that question together and in five years, there will be no way to know and at some point we will also build physical instantiation. Creation of things that look like people but that’s a long way off because its value is much lower in a digital world.

I’m not saying that you’re easily replaceable. You’re definitely not that in certain circumstances like these low data interactions between me and the people who are submitting a question.

It might be hard to tell Hi Seth, it’s Jewel from Cincinnati. Thanks for the work. You do in the ideas. You bring to us through a Kimbo sometimes when you bring an idea I get worried. That’s what happened with the AI episode. Here’s my question if people who lived in caves are humans 1.0 and if we are humans 2.0 and if AI will make possible humans 3.0 and here’s what I wonder.

When AI does so much for the work currently done by humans 2.0 what happens to all those 2.0 humans who are no longer needed at their jobs and for humans 3.0. What do they do all day? How do they make a living? Thanks Seth and thanks Alex.

Thank you Jewel for this. Yes, 1.0 2.0 and then 3.0 are a really smart way to think about it. And one of the things that I take away about Youmans 1.0 is that while life was difficult brutal and short that if you had a toothache you had a toothache for the rest of your life that we definitely have a life. Now that is more insulated more comfortable and longer there’s plenty of evidence that show that hunter-gatherers.

Equally infertile parts of the world didn’t spend that much time every day on their jobs. If your job was Finding enough food to feed you and your family. It didn’t take more than a few hours a day. And what we did was layer one layer on top of the other this capitalist mindset this Protestant work ethic this game that we play mainly for fun of how do we show up for more self storage units?

Travel fancy cars all of it things we don’t need but things we’ve come to want and that game has offered a lot of people something along the lines of meaning and so humans 2.0 have bifurcated Some Humans 2.0 are not playing the game of more and many are and when we enter this other place where a lot of the jobs we imagine we were destined to do as we moved.

The caves with shovels then to the steam shovel and then to the desk job are now being replaced. So the question is, what will we do all day? Well the answer might be what did we used to do all day because what we used to do all day was be human take care of each other sit quietly find ways to create Joy or to be generous or to be in community figure out how to adjudicate status roles in a way that gave us plenty. Pleasure all of those things haven’t gone away at all.

So the question is will our leadership will our governance will the people who speak up decide to take the Surplus that this is all going to create and it will create a surplus and put it to work somehow. So a simple example is imagine what happens when your doctor or your therapist knows more than they know right now and is available to you 24 hours. Hours a day whenever you want for as long as you want for free in that model, what will we do first with all the doctors and therapists but II with the Surplus it creates in increasing our health and well-being lots of hard choices to make I don’t believe a thousand dollar-a-month Universal income is the answer. I don’t even think it’s closed because humans while we need food and shelter also need a sense of meaning and connection. Ian and if we simply strip away what we think of when we think of what we do all day, we will strip away a lot of what it means to feel productive to feel connected. So there is going to be a Revolution going on in the way we think about this that will make the internet shift look like Child’s Play.

Thanks Joel. Hey Seth.

I’ve got something that I’ve been struggling with as I start learning a new domain. I’m curious how you would Contextualize this and where you’re thinking might take you so here goes with so much information at our fingertips. How do we know what’s worth memorizing is anything worth memorizing. Thanks for all you do.

So that this is a great question and I’d like to articulate something I’ve been thinking about which is that maybe there’s two kinds of memorization. Maybe there is the memorization that comes with doing the work the memorization of practice that if you sing Old Black River by The Doobie Brothers enough times, you will be able to 20 30 40 years later. Remember the courses.

You didn’t memorize it for a test. You memorized it because you wore into Brain over and over again a pattern that now you can effortlessly bring back to the for the other kind of memorization. I believe is a fairly modern sort of memorization and this is the short term memorization of proving to an external body that somehow you put in the effort to in the short-term memorize something there are countless things that I memorized on demand and I can’t remember any of them, but I can still remember Errol Black River keep on rollin, Mississippi Moon which keep on shining on me and I might even have gotten part of it wrong, but I think I’ve memorized it.

So my answer to your question is I think it’s really important. We memorize to practice all of the things that affect what we do and how we do them in our professional and personal lives because it saves us from leaving that moment of flow and looking it up but the other kind of memorization I honestly believe there is no reason at all to do the other kind of memorization. I cannot think of a single example of why it pays to have people memorize the 18 parts of the sailboat and then they’re going to forget them the day after their test.

Hey Seth, this is David from Missouri longtime.

Listener first-time caller. I wanted to talk about your Latin latest podcast that belief versus truth. It seems to me that this really highlights of points out the problems that we’re having in our political discourse today, and I’m wondering my question is how do we get past someone who is arguing from belief?

Obviously the way somebody votes way. Somebody is processing political data has. Huge consequences for all of us. So if you need to speak to somebody who’s speaking from belief that you want to talk to them from truth. How do you get past that initial? I guess emotional robot. Thanks for your podcast.

David is a great question. We could spend an entire episode on it. Let me propose an alternative instead of saying to someone who is arguing from belief. Let’s shift gears and argue from evidence. It might be that they don’t want to shift gears and argue from evidence. It might be that belief is exactly the most powerful productive and satisfying way for them to engage with the world because all of us do all of us use belief most of the time we don’t actually Stand how electricity works most of us. We don’t actually understand the quantum mechanics of gravity waves most of us that we are going through the world as the organisms that we are based on belief and so in those rare instances when evidence is actually on the table when we can say wait a second, let’s do the math here shifting gears out of belief is difficult.

The alternative is to build belief on top of evidence and we have done that in the built world. The fact is that you can be a productive civil engineer mechanical engineer designing bridges that don’t fall down based on a belief driven approach to structural mechanics. You can and that’s why it’s so hard to go sell a new technology of how to build a bridge to certain kinds of Engineers because they’re not approaching it from an evidence-based mindset. They’re approaching it.

. Belief that when semmelweis showed up and tried to get doctors to wash their hands it took 20 years for him to persuade the profession to look at the evidence because they were basing it based on belief. But what we know is that if we can build new beliefs that work better that you can sell because it’s belief versus belief and we can look at the underpinnings of why someone believes something where the status rules. Where the tribal connections where is the place where they feel safe or powerful or are avoiding fear that if we can build pillars of belief that are actually functional we have a chance of not only changing actions, but also uniting people back into sync so we can move forward.

Thanks for all your questions. I hope everyone is well and safe. We’ll see you next time.

Mississippi won’t keep on setting on Blackwater I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

When are you going to face those fears? I’m not gonna let you hide you got to show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why. Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8374-ranked-choice-voting- <==

Perfetto vote for Pedro both of you.

We’ve got some problems and just about everyone agrees about what they are. There’s too much money floating around in electoral politics money buys influence. There’s way too much divisiveness. One of the best ways to get elected is to demonize your opponent and depress their turnout. Primaries reward people who are on the extreme edges because they’re the ones who can get a few voters to show up many people are alienated from the electoral process because they’re disgusted by how the whole thing turns out and finally we’re in the middle of a pandemic and that’s going to change the way people even show up to vote. If they’ve decided that they want to what if there was one thing we could do.

That would fix all of these problems one thing that just about everybody can get behind. Hey, it’s F and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about elections and how they work. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

It’s something gets you Tracy. I mean you’re the best. I just thought you’re on mr.

Popular.

You might think it upset me the Paul Metzler had decided to run against me, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was no competition for me if it’s like apples and oranges. I had to work a little harder. That’s all you see. I believe in the voters. They understand that elections aren’t just popularity contest.

They know this country was built by people just like me who work very hard and don’t have everything handed to them on a silver spoon.

For several years.

We’ve been talking about systems. We’ve been talking about the way we see or don’t see systems but the system of put your head down on the desk and raise your hand when we’re voting for our third grade student council rep is a system that’s been around for a really long time. Voting is super low Tech in the old days. You walked in your local Parish to wherever the vote was being held. Old you filled out a simple piece of paper. Your neighbors. Saw you you dropped it into a box. Maybe they dip your finger into some paint so that you wouldn’t vote twice and that was how an election worked.

Well, we’ve changed the technology of just about everything we do and how we travel and how we connect and how we engage with one another but mostly we’re still doing elections exactly the same way there are Bunch of things pushing the status quo to stay the way that it is, but now there’s a system change at foot because the pandemic has made it so that it’s not as easy as it might have been to get everyone to come out in 2020 and vote.

So in this moment, we have some choices to make here we go.

First off, which I’m only going to talk about for a second is the idea of the secret ballot. We don’t have secret ballots in Congress. We don’t have secret ballots on the Supreme Court secret ballots for people voting in elections. Well, it seems to make some sense because otherwise people could get coerced people could sell their vote but in practice it seems to me that if we look at the results Precinct by Precinct secret ballots aren’t giving people the freedom to actually vote their conscience leaving that aside for a minute.

I think it’s possible to maintain the secret ballot and still Be able to use so many of the advantages the technology offers us an aside about voter fraud. There are two kinds of voter fraud to be worried about one kind is an individual selling their vote giving their vote away having their vote taken from them by a neighbor or someone invading their mailbox.

This sort of voter fraud is really really rare mostly because it’s incredibly difficult to do the kind of voter fraud we We need to worry about is one that people who are up in arms about online voting and voting by mail seem to ignore and it is the wholesale systemic voter fraud that comes from gaming electronic voting machines that comes from gerrymandering to lock in result ahead of time.

The fact that we don’t have an audit Trail for many of the electronic voting machines that have been put in place in the last 20 years around the United States and the world is just a crying shame. It’s outrageous. It’s not difficult to build systems that will give people more peace of mind than what we have. Now security expert Bruce schneier has pointed out that electronic voting systems are really Rife with potential fraud that it’s super difficult to audit them.

Certainly. We need open source software. So that systemic backdoor attacks won’t steal the will of the people But more than that, we need peace of mind people knowing that what they did is what came through on the other end. We need an audit Trail. Well, one of the ways we’re going to get that is by using the magical tools that the internet has given us the ability to do your vote and then see that your vote got recorded the way you wanted it to and then be able to see using a simple hash table that when we publish the results of the And your vote is right there the way the system said it was there are ways to do this while maintaining the secret ballot.

Another thing that we want in elections is for everyone to be able to vote. Unfortunately. It’s been a long time since that was true. If you’re in a nursing home, if you live way out of town and don’t have access to transport the myth has been that anybody who wants to walk down to the precinct and vote can. Yeah, but in practice ten or fifteen percent of the people have been disenfranchised for a long time vote by mail goes a long way to help with that problem because at least for now just about everyone in the world has access to the postal service, but back to the core shift that will change everything. It’s called ranked Choice voting ranked Choice voting is almost impossible to do with pen and paper.

Because there’s just too many clerical steps. You have to take how does it work when you vote and there is no primary. There’s just one election when you vote there is a list of all the people who are candidates and you rank them first choice second choice third choice fourth choice as many choices as you want you can stop at any time and then they tabulate the votes the person who is in first place if they have more than 50% And is a vote they win the election is over.

Now. It’s worth noting that in many many elections in our country. The winner does not have 50% but in a traditional election, what we do in that case is they win anyway, leaving out all the people who voted for someone else. If you don’t have 50 percent then what we do is take second place votes who had a second choice and we add that to the total. So if first choice plus second choice puts you over 50% then you win and then third choice fourth Joyce fifth choice of the best way to win a rank Choice election is to be the first choice of a lot of people the second best way to do it is to be the first choice of some people and the second choice of a bunch of other people what will end up happening.

Well, we don’t have to guess we’ve seen it happen in States all around this. Tree what happens is that the person who gets elected is a palatable choice to more of the electorate this leads to some fascinating side effects. The first one is this it doesn’t pay to be a jerk. If you’re going to be a jerk. If you’re going to denigrate all the other candidates, then you’re not going to get very many second choices because all the people who had someone else’s their first choice will not rank you as their second choice.

So as a result comity and accommodation for other points of view becomes more common because you want to appeal to a larger number of people that’s sort of the point of mass democracy. Number two is in a primary where very few people show up and vote. The best strategy is to be a radical to be an outlier all the way to the right all the way to the left all the way somewhere because the True Believers will Show up and vote for you.

And if you win the primary particularly in a gerrymandered district where you won’t have a lot of competition from the other party you win and what this has done over the last 30 or 40 years not my opinion easy to show is that it has divided every single one of the districts that could be divided because it’s a good way to get elected.

But if we use ranked Choice voting that doesn’t happen anymore in ranked Choice voting voting there is an incentive to appeal to a larger number of people again sort of the point of having a democracy in the first place. And so what we end up with is a movement to the center what we end up with by canceling the primary is better turnout than if we had multiple elections next an aside about multiple elections once we start doing elections in a way that’s digital in a That’s reliable in a way that sort of fun.

We don’t have to have just one we could choose for example to have voting day not be one day but 30 days we could choose if we wanted to have the results of each day announced to encourage people to start voting if the person they are hoping will win isn’t winning suddenly voter regret starts to diminish because if something is happening, That you weren’t hoping would happen. You haven’t even better incentive to show up and vote.

We could test the idea that you could vote every day for a month over and over and over again and as the voting continues and we winnow away the outliers we end up with the candidate that appeals to the largest number of people so back to this idea of electronic voting one of the things that were concerned about its fraud and we need to build a system that gives people piece of Mind and audit Trail a way of believing that their vote actually got counted. I alluded to that earlier serial numbers and things like serial numbers being able to look up what the system knows about the vote. You made goes a long way to creating that Dynamic number two. We need to make sure that the digitally disenfranchised aren’t also electorally disenfranchised which means that we can use the money we’re saving Saving by shifting to an electronic voting system to create better Outreach on paper in person door-to-door, whatever we need to to get to the people who don’t have access to a smartphone number three. There’s also been work done on using ATM machines as a secure way to figure out if a vote was cast properly.

Of course ATM machines are super secure if they weren’t they lose billions of dollars in a weekend. Using that system particularly in urban centers where there’s ATMs in lots of places could create another way to engage people in this process.

Sometimes it’s the specific that help us understand what’s on offer. So if you want specifics, here we go. It’s a first draft. I am sure people can improve it test it and make it better We Begin by this. We already know the name and address of every person who’s registered to vote we mail. Them all a letter. It includes many options among them.

You can use a smartphone you can use a friend’s smartphone. You can use a laptop you can use a computer at the public library. And if none of those are appropriate for you, let us know and we will either set it up so you can do it by phone or we will mail you some paperwork included in the letter is the URL of a distributed network of sites. So none of them can be taken down. They’re all connected by an ape. Hi as well as a login and a password you can change the password. So you don’t forget it now onto the election itself.

There’s a primary for each party because in the United States anyway parties are dominant, each primary works just like it used to except for the fact that it’s going to lead to not one but three winners number two voting is open in the primary and And in the general election for 30 days, you can vote at any time during that 30-day period if you change your mind you can go back look at how you voted and change it. In fact, you can do that over and over again every single day for a month number three.

Let’s get rid of polling instead of poles that don’t make any sense in or imprecise perhaps what we do is we reveal the results of the month long. Link on a regular basis. If you’re not happy with the way it’s going you can go back and change your vote. As I said, there are three nominees for each party. So there are six people running in the final run off you get to rank your favorites all six in any order that you wish you don’t have to vote for more than one but you can and we use the ranking to determine the winner the end result of all, this would be the following one.

More people will be able to vote to people will not have regrets about long lines emergencies at the last minute lost absentee ballots and all the other things that break when voting is only open for one day next because the voting takes place over a period of time people have the ability to look even more closely after they voted and change their mind and finally, there’s great confidence. Because the audit Trail is super clear.

You can call up how you voted there. It is on the screen and there is lots of ways to provide double-blind auditing so that people can find out in fact if the votes did all roll up into one given total. That’s my take on it. I’m sure someone else can do even better. What doesn’t make sense is to have the hodgepodge that we’ve got that’s inefficient expensive filled with fraught.

Certainty and most of all easily blamed after the election is over. We need a blameless way going forward and technology has opened the door to make that easier than ever. What I believe we have to do is think hard about the fact that the people who are trying to maintain the status quo of the system aren’t doing it because they love the existing system.

They’re doing it because they’re afraid to lead. Afraid to create a butterfly ballot afraid to create something that doesn’t work very well. The answer is not to make stuff up in November a week before the election. The answer is not to get hamstrung by long-term old-fashioned rules that were written long before we had this technology available to us.

I think the answer is to start now and to do it early and often over and over again to build mediocre stuff and then to make it better because the stakes are really high not just the steaks and who wins but the stakes about how we feel about the process because disenfranchising people might be a good short-term way for somebody to win the thing they need to win right now, but it’s pretty clear that in the long run.

It doesn’t get us to where we need to go the people in the system the ones who are dependent on our shared narrative. And that narrative is we picked it we will live with it. And what we have to figure out how to do is change the system itself just the edge of it so that the repercussions of those changes Ripple through all the stuff. We don’t like and we end up back to where we need to be which is with a system that feels responsive a system. Thanks to rank Choice voting where you are more likely than ever even if your first choice doesn’t win.

I feel like you were heard because if you feel like you were heard, you’re much more likely to be accepting of what happens next. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pal.

This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi, this is Russell.

Aishwarya Rai, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you August 2020 has been a boom month for questions. If you’ve got one, please visit akimbo dot link. That’s Aki MBO link2006. Click the appropriate button, it’s Andy from Goshen, Indiana.

Sorry if you can hear my son playing drums in the background. But that’s just the reality of the world. We’re living in now. I got a question. You probably get questions similar to this maybe in different forms. But how do we balance Framing and presenting information in a way that we know will and the reader or the consumer in a certain direction without feeling like we’re manipulating them.

Thanks Andy. Yes marketing is super powerful and if Not careful, we end up manipulating people. What does that word? Even mean many of the questions this week have to do with what does a word mean? I think manipulation is this if after someone has interacted with you and they know what you know, they see how things have worked out and they feel like they have made a mistake that they have done something that helped you but didn’t help them then I think they’ve been manipulated and marketing.

Gives us the tools if we choose to do the work to manipulate people the alternative is if people knew what you knew saw what you see after they are done engaging with you. They are glad that they did then you’ve done something generous. You haven’t manipulated them at all. And I think it’s Our obligation as marketers to do just that to make things better by making better things not because we get paid to do it but because the people We do marketing for as opposed to do marketing to our glad we did I sense.

This is Chris burrman UK.

I’d like your take on personal brand versus reputation in the sector operating which is real estate. Everybody talks about it being a people business. But if the trust that is sadly lacking in that sector isn’t this to be redeemed reputation alone. What work we trust people like Gus, but how do we know who is like as I’d love to hear your thoughts Seth and thanks really for all the valuable information that you share with the world.

Okay. Thanks Chris. Another question about semantics personal brand versus reputation. I’m not sure there’s that much of a difference or a distinction just different ways of looking at the phrase. What is a brand a brand is not a logo Nikes brand is not a swoosh like he’s brand is the Vacation that we have of what the next thing Nike does might be like you may have heard me say it before but if Hyatt came out with a brand of sneakers, we’d have no clue what it would be like, but if Nike had a hotel I think you can visualize what the people working there would be like how much it would cost what the rooms would feel like because they have a brand it is a promise. It is a set of expectations.

So yeah at some level it’s a Tation maybe what we’re thinking about is this personal reputation is backward-looking personal reputation is when I add up what you’ve done before. What do I know about you on the other hand personal brand might be forward-looking what promise do I expect you to make and keep going forward.

They’re both on the same axis and they’re both important going forward. You are more than you AR resume. You are your work. You are the impact your work has made you are the promises expectations shortcuts and genre that people expect you to be in and if you don’t like that the best way to change it is by changing how you appear in the world.

I am a physical therapist who works with 17 other clinicians. We have a gift that we serve our community with to get people moving in a pain-free way. I love the idea that our smallest viable audience is a group of successful patients and referral sources that have seen good results from our techniques.

I love your podcast and blog but I don’t want to be a blogger or podcaster or an author. How do I connect with my tribe? We don’t particularly care why our techniques work and don’t want to get into the Weeds about biomechanics and pain. Science so that the next time they or one of their friends family or patients needs Physical Therapy.

They choose us David.

Thank you for this question again. Lots of words here that I want to decode. The first one is this it’s really unlikely that you have a tribe. There are tribes in the world. For example, extreme athletes extreme athletes recognize each other as they’re walking down the street extreme athletes instantly fall into comradery, even if they’ve never met before because they know what it’s like to run a hundred.

Mile run. So that’s a tribe now within a circle of people you can build a reputation or even a personal brand there can be Word of Mouth where people talk about what you do and how you do it. So part of what it means to seek out a smallest viable audience has a to find a group of people who have similar needs and wants be that group of people also has a similar story that they tell themselves about how they’re going to satisfy.

Their needs in watts and see they talk to each other because when all three are present you can be specific you can overwhelm on a certain axis that others don’t care enough about and then the word can spread so almost nobody cares about the details of biomechanics of one physical therapist versus another we’re not really picking physical therapist based on evidence.

We’re picking them based on the story We Tell ourselves. Elves in their peers tell us one of the biggest challenges of physical therapist has is getting people to even consider physical therapy before they go to the surgeon before they take pills before they simply give up. So there’s a lot of opportunity simply to promote the profession as a whole to say physical therapy is effective and efficient then within that segment you need people to decide where to go and they’re probably going to decide based on Things like convenience or Price or reputation or personal brand or how it makes them feel to talk about it or how it makes them feel the show up in the office to go twice means that you’re dealing with the receptionist the timeliness the play the way the facility makes you feel the way your interactions with the physical therapist go etcetera, etcetera.

So you are doing something biomechanically that’s making a difference. You’re also bringing people a placebo. You’re also having them show up on the regular which all by itself is a good way for people to get better. So when I talk about seeking out the smallest viable audience what I’m saying is if your slogan is you could pick anyone and where anyone you’re not going to do very well if your slogan is this is for everyone you’re also not going to do very well and so built into the fabric of the question you’re asking needs to be We are specific.

How do we help our specific audience talk to each other in a way that raises their satisfaction and status because we can’t afford to talk to them directly. And so no, you don’t need a podcast and you don’t need to write a book, but it could help and it might be fun. The shorter version is how do you become the center of a circle of people who care and to wrap us up?

Not a question just a comment from Bhaskar again. Thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

Recently, I came with an example where a news reporter television news reporter got into the personal professional kit one by the healthcare professional and realized how hot it was inside and couldn’t go to the restroom for 12 hours. So that was empathy empathizing with the PPE kit. Owned by Healthcare professionals. Thank you. This is Bhaskar from India.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up.

consider the alt MBA more than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8500-adversarial-interoperability- <==

How did this podcast get to you? I’m recording it today sitting in my office outside of New York City. I’m speaking into a rode microphone that microphone is connected by a braided cable that I bought on Kickstarter to a Grace preamp that Grace preamp has another cable and that cable is connected to a zoom h4n recorder that recorder is recording in wav format on a USB card. That I bought online after I’m done recording it. I’ll take that USB card connected to a USB reader bring it into my computer edit it and we can go on and on and on all I know is there’s a chain between me and you and toward the end of that chain, you might choose to post this podcast to Facebook. And if you do it’s likely that Facebook will put up a warning saying that there’s something malicious.

In the podcast and keep other people from seeing it. Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second after this message from our sponsor.

This chain I’m talking about is a chain of interoperability all of the organization’s all of the inventors all of the people that created and built the chain between me and you don’t know each other not only don’t they know each other. They never even communicated. It is not necessary for them to communicate because there is a network a web of Ability that when you buy a pair of headphones until very recently you knew that that pair of headphones would plug into whatever device you had that had that little hole that takes a headphone jack and interoperability is really important in today’s world. We need to make some urgent essential decisions about how important interoperability is to our future.

Our guide is Cory doctorow. He has written a series of posts. On the EF F dot org website you can find them in the show notes. We start with this three kinds of interoperability in different cooperative and adversarial in different interoperability is much of what we just talked about Corey uses the example of the cigarette lighter in your car. You can plug lots of different things into the cigarette lighter in your car. I hope you don’t use a cigarette lighter.

Just about anything else. You can power things that way this use of the cigarette lighter came along because it’s your car and you can do what you wish with it including powering the charger for your cell phone in different interoperability is part of what makes human culture work. You can get new drum sticks for your drum and you can still play it the next level which is sort of similar is i-i’ve interoperability in which the people who make a thing accept and embrace the fact that you’re going to have to stick something else in it.

This Zoom recorder requires a 4 gigabyte USB card Zoom doesn’t care who makes the 4 gigabyte USB card. Don’t get an 8 gigabyte one and work. They don’t say that on the box, but it’s worth knowing but yeah, you can stick a 4 gigabyte USB card in there is a standard and standards. He’s exist around the world. There are hundreds of thousands of them people who come together to agree on a standard why they agree on a standard because cooperating about a standard makes their own product work better.

When you get in a car you can drive all the way across the country any country buying gas along the way knowing that the gas will work in your car yet. Yet the people from the petroleum company haven’t spent any time sitting with the person who built your car because the gasoline is interoperable with the car. And as you’re driving you are driving on a road that road did not know you were coming that road will not change after you left that it is a system a network that is both resilient, but mostly interoperable if Zoom couldn’t rely on the That all USB cards were essentially the same then they’ll either have to make their own USB card or rely on a different standard. So when you open a JPEG file in your image editing software all JPEG files follow the same rules, they could be pictures of a baseball or football or a Galaxy. It doesn’t matter but the format of the file follows a set of rules those rules were Were agreed upon by a standards body voluntarily most voluntary standards have been around for a long time and inch was an inch long before some governments at how long and inch was the headphone jack as we discussed earlier with the headphones that work on every single device except for something that Apple did recently people have asked why we would remove the analog headphone jack.

Well the reason to move on I’m going to give you three of them, but it really comes down to One word courage in many cases the standard existed long before the company that uses the standard showed up.

So you’re going to start a new stereo company. You’re going to put a headphone jack in your amp or your preamp that headphone jack standard was established before you got there. It’s Cooperative interoperability because of all the headphones in the world disappeared if all the USB cards in the world disappeared follow the JPEG files in the world disappeared. If you are product your software, it wouldn’t work as well.

And so not just in the world of tech but in so many places we embrace the idea of Cooperative interoperability the people who made lock on the front door your house want locksmiths to be able to make copies of the key because if it wasn’t possible to make copies of the key, then the lock wouldn’t function as well but along the way Greedy companies saying that they’re trying to make things better, but mostly because they’re trying to make more money break Cooperative interoperability.

So Apple claiming. It was a courageous move takes the headphone jack out of their iPhones and then coincidentally comes out with a new format a format that they have the patent to a format that they control a format where it is no longer. Interoperable without their permission. Now you have to use their format. If you want to make a pair of headphones or some upscale lock companies or especially car companies are now saying oh you can’t get your car key copied at a locksmith. You have to get your car key copied at the dealer. So now a car Geet doesn’t cost $6 a car key costs $300. We know that people are. Making money on that process and that the consumers aren’t benefiting.

It is possible to find third party hacks creating a new kind of interoperability that will cover in a minute for keys for an Audi or a Prius for about a third the price of what they would cost at your dealer and they work just as well. And so the car companies are in a race to break this again because they’re trying to make a better profit not because they’re trying to make a better. Product why do companies seek to break Cooperative interoperability?

Well, it goes back to King Gillette to razors and blades that if you can figure out how to give away the razor and make money from Blades human nature may take you up on that offer. Human nature will say wow. This razor is only a dollar not $10. I’ll buy it but then Gillette gets you they’ll get you because the Only blade you can use our Gillette blades and they make enough money on every one of those blades to subsidize the discount they gave you on that razor in the first place or consider how much money cell phone companies are others pay in marketing advertising promotion and hype to get people to sign a long-term contract. They’ll give you quote the free phone.

Well, of course, it’s Not free, you’re actually paying for it month after month after month over time. And if they made it too easy for you to get free blades in quotation marks. They wouldn’t have as much money upfront to subsidize the razors and now we come to this idea of adversarial interoperability adversarial interoperability says that we need to make it so that third parties other people other companies.

Can use a system even when the inventor the owner of the system doesn’t want them to you may remember mint.com. It’s a personal finance site that lets you see how all of your finances credit cards Banks etcetera all fit together. Notice that the banks and the credit card companies haven’t done the hard work of setting up a voluntary standard that makes it easy for all of the information. You need to be instantly exchanged.

There is a reason for this the banks are sitting there with a razor and blade situation. The banks are saying we want to be able to pay for branches. We want to be able to pay for full page ads. We want to be able to pay to Sir, this tennis tournament, but the only way we can do that is to get your savings your checking your credit card your insurance and everything else.

And so the idea that they would voluntarily sign up for a standard that lets you take all the information you need about some element of your personal finance and mix it with something from another company and then another company it would give too much power to us the consumer because we could say oh this This company offers the single best slice of the pie for I don’t know checking. I’ll just do my checking over here and integrate it with this thing over there.

So no, there’s no easy to use standard. So what did mint do they spent a fortune Building A system that would go to websites pretending to be a person scraping that website, which is a computer term for copying the data and then putting it into a At that mints servers could understand. So one time and one time only you would teach mint the login ritual. You have it every one of your Finance partners partners in quotation marks and then it would go and update the data on a regular basis.

And yes, you’ve probably guessed it the banks and other financial institutions set up countermeasures working overtime to keep their own customers from getting what their own customers knew was Best their own data and so we have a problem and the problem is these institutions these data monopolies. These social networks. They were all built on the idea using the methods of Cooperative interoperability.

Facebook would not have existed if Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t been able to use the open internet to spread ideas. Twitter is built on. Network systems processes and software that were all freely available that all interact with one another and then after spending a fortune after going public after trying to maximize every single thing that’s available to them.

It occurs to Big networks that one thing they can do is close down interoperability. So you may not remember this but back in the day it was against the law to plug a phone. Phone it wasn’t built by AT&T into the AT&T network. Now the AT&T network would say. Oh, it’s not safe to plug in a third-party phone.

This is of course absurd. It’s totally safe. In fact, every phone you’ve used that’s a landline phone has almost certainly not been built by AT&T. We discovered that opening the network letting people plug fax machines answering Into the network made it work better for the people who are using.

So as we think about the future of these networks that we are now spending more and more of our time on the question is what are we going to do about adversarial interoperability? Should it be required that you can easily take your data? Add a Facebook? Should it be possible to plug something into a network? So the network works better for you?

Right. Now there’s pressure on organizations like Facebook to censor and control the inputs to their Network figure out who is running that ad figure out whether or not this hate speech is okay or not. But what happens if instead we let third parties create tuners and those tuners would permit anyone who wants to to not see any AD that didn’t come from a verified Source or let anyone who I do not see any content that has been labeled by other users of the tuner has hate content creating our own filters each person getting involved in the adversarial interoperability putting data in getting data out.

There aren’t a lot of people who are complaining about how the phone network works. The phone network doesn’t decide how you make a phone call and it doesn’t decide who you make a phone call to what we would really like. Like is for the last mile people the cell phone networks to block the crazy spam phone calls that are coming through but that’s because the system is open and we would like there to be a filter of our choosing in between us and the system think about the fact that when you get a voicemail, you can’t even forward it. Why can’t you forward a voicemail once you get it because the system is closed because there’s no way for someone who wants to make the system better to build something on top. Of the system the magic Factor here is this networks are incredibly powerful a network is significantly more important and leveraged than growing a tomato your grow a tomato you sell it tomato, but when you build a network the network gets more powerful the more people use the network and the network is sticky that once we’re in a network once we’ve learned how it works once the others we want to connect. And with are in the network, the switching costs are really high.

And so what comes with network effects are you judge upsides bounties? Not just for the people who use them but for the people who build them and control them and open networks the kind of network we’ve had for 10,000 years open networks are resilient and efficient. And as soon as it Network starts to falter the interoperability that’s available to us helps us make the network better.

But closed networks with lock in that leads to the most hated companies in our culture. We hate the cable company because we’re locked in and we don’t have any choices because the razors might have been free, but the blades are too expensive that what we end up with if we permit people who build networks to completely control them without any entity being able to come along and use that Network. Make things better for its customers what we end up with is calcification stagnation.

We end up with copyright regimes they keep getting longer and longer so that public domain starts to fade from our memory we end up with systems that are frustrating and that don’t Advance the magic of the last 25 years of the internet. The best parts have been how quickly things got better when someone figured out how to make them better.

But today there are all these people who want to make your experience better in the social Community social networks. We belong to and they’re not permitted to do. So today. There are tons of ways to make our financial systems much more efficient particularly for people who aren’t fully banked who don’t have access to many of the tools that enable people who are better off to live a better life the more we open the systems and permit. Change to happen the better things get not just for the users in the short run and the long run but also in the long run for the people who build and support these networks.

So yes, please go ahead and share this podcast wherever you’d like to and yes, please you should go ahead and start a podcast and I don’t care what network you put the podcast on and I don’t care what microphone you use to record the podcast and I don’t even care that much about what the podcast is about.

If I want to listen to the podcast I can but I don’t have to. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

My name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is an apology Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. He’s got hi, this is Russell news from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question. Loyal listeners know that I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you visit akimbo link that take a i MB o dot link2006 click the appropriate button. We’ve got three juicy questions this week. They all sort of interlock. Here we go.

Hi, this is Stuart calling from the Netherlands. I’ve been working in sales for the last six years and your episode about how we view ourselves. Really? Me I think in sales and certain other professions. There’s a lot of quantifiable data around how we’re doing, but I do sometimes stop to think. That we just twist the data to tell us what we want. No, do you think even when there’s data available that certain jobs or certain roles whether they be professional or creative actually twist the truth and use that data simply to validate a position where the positive or negative rather than use it to better understand where they stand with in relation to customer success customer happiness or just Overall happiness.

Okay. Thanks for everything. You do.

Thank you Stewart for this question, you know sometimes a lazy writer will begin a chapter with a quote from the dictionary as if quoting the dictionary makes their point true and we are now entering the season of charts and graphs on television and polling data and what we know is that when we present data to someone else we are not showing I’m them everything it is not the territory. It is one person’s map.

It has a point of view. If you don’t have a point of view when you are presenting your data to someone else then you’re only doing half the job because no matter how you have collated the data. It represents a point of view. So our job is to bring people both the data and the point of view and to be clear and honest about it.

And so when we present ourselves, Data, we also have to be clear about what we’re looking for. The history of science is littered with one experimenter after another who was staring right at data that had the right answer but they couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see it because it didn’t match their point of view.

We are living through revolutionary times big and small and the nature of revolution is simple. It’s when the existing prevailing at accurate data doesn’t match our point of view. So instead we focus on something else something that reinforces it something that might be false evidence appearing real.

So yes, that’s at the heart of why it’s essential that every citizen understand statistics. So we won’t get tricked by somebody else’s point of view or even our own.

Hi Seth, this Lewis from Los Angeles. We talked a lot about being an artist being a linchpin being that Difference Maker that can do work that matters.

And myself and your audience were either that or going to be with your help, but I feel like the world’s still depends a lot on people who do not do that. We work in large complex organizations. A lot of us do in many of those people up and down the chain have to follow that map in order for things to flow and function you think about workers on automobile Factory floor.

They got to do the same thing every day. They got to show up on time. They got to be replaceable when they don’t you got to have those people do it and there’s been a trend to go to robotics housing everything and we’re not there yet. And until we are this is what we have to deal with and my question is to the point of how to leaders like your audience and hopefully myself can reconcile what I want to do with the people I need That have to show up and conform and have to be training school to be compliant in order to get the things I’ve made out into the world on a repetitive basis and to enough people. I know we need small audiences just just small enough to be successful.

But we’re in a world where things are made on large-scale. I don’t see that changing. I don’t see us going back to small little independent makers. It’s it’s just still too expensive to do that masculine has brought things cheaply to us and created a That’s so I have a trouble we can tell anything we can file in balancing my vision with people I work with and people I need you need to not follow that line Thanks for help Seth.

You’ve been great.

Thank you Lois. This is something I’ve been hearing since I wrote linchpin more than 10 years ago and the argument goes correctly. Hey, the industrial era requires people who are compliant. It requires people who will do it. They’re told it requires people who don’t want to be Lynch pins. But instead are willing to be replaceable cogs in a giant system. What about those people and I have a two-part answer.

The first part is we’re not running out of those people. We have indoctrinated so many hundreds of millions of people billions around the world to believe that that is their Destiny there. We are not running out of those people. There are no organizations that I know of. They said I only wish I could find people who will only Do exactly what is written down and measured the second thing is yes, we need those people but it doesn’t have to be you and your organization.

Does it have to be an organization that depends on lots of those people in full-time permanent jobs, what you can do now more than ever is outsourced things to organizations and other people who desperately want to be cogs in the system, but you can add value in a different. Way we have certainly seen this in how manufacturing has moved away from certain locations to other ones because once it moves to a cheaper place, it is still possible to make a living doing something associated with manufacturing, but that doesn’t mean you need to build a factory just as you don’t have to build an email server to run an email marketing campaign. And so where is the frontier the data keeps showing us the answer over and Over again the frontier is not the race to the bottom of somehow turning it out cheaper than your competition.

The frontier is in the organizations that race to the top that it figured out how to bring in people who act more like people and less like machines if we think back just a hundred and fifty years ago the backbreaking dehumanizing work that was done by everybody. Not just people were tempted to overlook today.

But people like the people who are listening to this podcast regardless of background where you would go to work for 12 or 13 hours and you would Physically hurt yourself following the instructions of a four-person. Alright a foreman who would push you ever harder. The number of those jobs that are done by people who also work in ideas keeps getting smaller and to your point about car manufacturing if we think about every car manufacturer who has hit a wall who has stumbled in the last 25 years.

It has not been because they’re hard-working underappreciated Workforce didn’t follow instructions. It has been because the designers the foreman the supervisors the Creator’s the marketers the Strategic planners got lazy because they didn’t lean into their work. They just did what they did yesterday and that is where the opportunity lies and where the paralyzed in figuring out how to be a human not how to do what you’re told which us to Michael’s question Hi Seth, it’s Michael and Los Gatos, California.

So listening to the questions on your Alexander’s theorem podcast.

One of the speaker’s sounded to me suspiciously like a computer. I’ll let you guess which one it was that I’m talking about. But while I thought it was too perfect for human speech. I went back and listened again, and and then I really wasn’t sure which of course is exactly your point from the is Seth real podcast.

So then I got to thinking about AI system. You’re a Isis video What If this is less of a perceived threat and more of an opportunity to help people who might have trouble being articulate perhaps people can connect to communicate better if they’re a I assisted and then I was wondering if this can be harnessed to improve communication.

What if everyone using AI to communicate are required to show some form of a I’ll just call the true ID, you know identify themselves as an AI assisted human in some way that might give us a little more Integrity in. In our ability to believe in what we’re seeing or hearing Technologies there with digital watermarking maybe even blockchain seems like an easy lift.

I’d love to hear your thought on that. Thanks for all you do. The real stuff is making a huge positive difference in this world. Cheers.

Thank you for this Michael. Yeah. I don’t think it was a computer. I think it was a person with excellent ha ha. No, I don’t think it was a computer. I think it was someone with excellent diction. I could learn a lesson or two from them. Here’s the thing. We wear sneakers when we run the marathon in the old days in the Barefoot days, that would have been considered cheating.

Nike is coming out with a sneaker with a spring in it that is in some circles considered cheating people use a spell checker before they submit a resume or write a letter is that cheating? We have been augmented by industry for a really long time and we draw. Is artificial lines dopings against the law but eating healthy food is not having a trainer who strains the juices and the vegetables to make it an extra healthy diet is also not against the rules and indeed what we’re going to see for. The foreseeable future is a center somebody who is half machine and have person a cyborg. If you will.

We already are that we are already wired through our fingers into Wikipedia into the spell Checkers into the Giant web work Network that is a billion of us. And so AI is going to be an extension of that and no it’s not going to get labeled any more than we are labeling a book. This was copy edited by a computer or copy edited by a really good copy editor.

We are just going to interpret what is coming to US based on our Alternatives and what that means is that people who get good at using these tools are going to be Chosen alternative what does it mean for us that it means it’s no longer acceptable to be a mediocre writer because the computer can do that 24 hours a day for me for free.

It is no longer useful as Louis is question points out to be the worker who can move a pallet from here to there because now there’s a robot that can move a pallet from here to there. It’s the same question on a slightly elevated axis, which is do we care enough to bring emotional labor. To the table to work without a manual to fly without a net because it’s the only work that’s truly fulfilling and available to us right now.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book. Great, essay, a great idea anywhere, you know and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities Within You when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up.

And that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical. But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like Showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8614-industry-and-its-discontents- <==

More than a hundred years ago Thomas Edison said he invented the light bulb Alexander Graham Bell said he invented the telephone but nobody is taking any credit for inventing nor do we have any idea who invented the thing that has changed our culture and our world more than any other. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about industrialism. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

It’s going to be a long time before we go to conferences again at the drop of a hat, but I’d like to invite you to an online conference. Not one with speakers who are simply talking at a camera, but one that features you the real skills conferences back you can find out the Details at real skills conference.com.

It’s two hours. It takes place around the world and it’s by and for you. It’s about real skills. Some people call them soft skills the stuff that truly matters when we seek to make change happen. It’s about interaction small group breakouts and transformation. We’ve done it twice before and it works checkout real skills conference.com for all the details.

This podcast is a little bit. Of a rant and it includes a word salad words that have real meanings that are all related to one another that often start with the letter c and each one of which is involved in the idea of industrialism. Some of those words capitalism cheaper coercion cotton conspiracy cast cattle kleptocracy, which doesn’t actually start with C computers and constraints industrialism is an invisible force, but it is one that has that vocabulary our culture the way we live our lives what we expect the idea of surplus and everything in between industry craves productivity because cheaper wins but cheaper productivity comes from cheaper labor with fewer protections industry demands that everyone in the system feels obligated to go against their morals because productivity is In many cases a race to the bottom.

So when I’m talking about industrialism what I mean is a process a process of people who used to live like wild animals walking through the forest hunting and Gathering transformed into communities in two.

Teachers into people who make things but once people started making things there was a race and the race was to make them cheaper because competition forced people to make them cheaper as Kevin Kelly has written about technology one way to think about industry is that it’s its own species that industry lives next to us and uses us humans to get what it wants. It’s and what industry wants is a perfect system of making stuff as cheap as possible and it is willing to change the culture and to change us to get that it is a system a system in which people’s short-term needs are met in exchange for feeding the engine of Industry.

So let’s consider an example from a while ago cotton cotton is an industrial activity. People wanted clothes made out of cotton clothes made out of cotton in addition to being comfortable were stylish and clothes made out of cotton could be offered at a low price. But before the cotton gin the machine that Harvest cotton was invented by Eli Whitney cotton enabled the peculiar institution as Kenneth stampp has written there was an alignment for several centuries between the the natural environment and Industry that demanded cheap labor as cheap as possible and the desire for free labor totally free fueled the abhorrent and immoral industrial industry of slavery, which was culturally sanctioned permanent coercion what it meant was that industry could get what it needed labor at no marginal cost but slavery. required cast it required treating people not like people seeing them as other it was such a shameful activity if required separation laws against intermarriage and then Jim Crow after the Civil War and thus dehumanization that what happened was that the people who were working in Industry suspended their Humanity in order to feed the system and one reason is that they If that if they didn’t do it, someone else would feed the system more cheaply than they could or in our current day factory farming the industrialized activity of growing enough food it led to everything becoming cattle.

Even if you call it cael no longer animals or plants living in cooperation with nature, but apart from it something to be processed as cheaply as possible. None of this is idealized capitalism Adam Smith didn’t approve of any of this because capitalism is about Freedom as in free markets and choice and yes markets and markets are listening instruments markets exist to figure out what people want and to prioritize what they get freedom is the fuel for dignity in truly free markets.

Avery would be impossible people would have the privilege know the right to charge for their labor and they would have choices to make about their labor. Now, we’re talking about industrialization which involves none of these things industrialism is its own master and it is about power power over people and markets and systems and the race to the bottom it created Surplus and prizes along the way which is why why good people permitted it to run through our culture but industry the Relentless race to create something ever cheaper and to turn it out regardless of the cost to the environment or the people who touch it is at the heart of how we look at the world industry seeks Monopoly because Monopoly is the best way to gain power to gain momentum and to get more Money to pay back the banks that fueled the race to build industrialism in the first place and Monopoly is the conspiracy.

There are few genuine monopolies around us, but mostly there’s conspiracies. These are oligopolies groups of Corporations and individuals working together to create less and less choice and thus more insulation from the market and or Monopoly they are the result of benign cooperation as we talked about in a previous episode interoperability turning toxic.

We call something a conspiracy when people or organizations are cooperating in a way that hurts others conspiracies that do damage. They’re not secret and they’re not imaginary secret conspiracies are really unlikely because people are very bad at working together. And they are very bad at working persistently and consistently in secret. No real conspiracies are right here right in plain sight.

They are what happens when we swap Regulators between industry and the ones that are regulating them is what happens when price signaling or price-fixing goes on it’s what happens when there’s regimes of institutional International tax evasion, but mostly it’s the signaling of culture. It’s what happens. When industry starts making it normal to line things up simply in the name of productivity we’re talking about here are oligopolies that seek to act like monopolies to maximize their return on their industrial investment giving people less Choice creating short-term incentives avoiding the long-term thinking that leads to a better environment.

Short-term thinking if I don’t do it somebody else will the idea that lower taxes are always a good idea the idea that government can’t do anything. Right? This was intentional brainwashing on the part of think tanks and others part of a conspiracy to help us us being all of us us being the culture Embrace industrialism in and of itself the very idea that Ilysm not free markets not choice not dignity not freedom.

But industrialism would relentlessly March us toward progress machines changed everything about industrialism because machines are tireless and they don’t complain and they don’t bring the baggage of morality with them beyond that machines can be constantly improved when a machine is running. Well, we can copy why it’s running well and transported around the world improve it. Duplicate it and do it again machines can have their productivity tweaked machines open the door to returning humans to having their lives back but machines also hastened the race to Monopoly.

Why is that because machines a cost more and more money to build and maintain they create insulation for the people who do have the machines as Adam Smith and Karl Marx both pointed out. Out owning a pin making machine is way better than being a pin maker. And if we increase the gulf between machine owners and people who don’t own a machine, we create more and more oligopolists. We give those oligopolies power and money.

They use that power and money to create public conspiracies and those public conspiracies are designed to insulate them from competition at the very same time that they insulate their profits and take away the power of markets, but now we’re at a Short rather threshold because some of those machines are becoming computers and computers can go either way because computers create the network effect and the network effect as we’ve talked about in previous episodes is insanely powerful. It is one of the most powerful inventions in my lifetime the network effect means that successful leaders can become even more powerful because they can achieve lock in. Is that what we have here is if an organization can come up with the network effect, they create more profit which leads to more coercion and more conspiracy because they can put in place systems politicians ideas and most of all more Network effects to ensure ever more lock in.

But at the same time computers thanks, the interoperability have the chance to create a shot at true capitalism again the capitalism that’s based on boundaries a lack of coercion fewer conspiracies longer-term thinking and more competition competition that works with markets not against them. So when we think about the horror and the shamefulness of cast the legacy of hundreds of years of industrialism when we think Think about people who should have choice being coerced instead when we think about the very visible conspiracies designed to elevate and to permanently entrench industry.

We need to realize that the culture the one we live in the one that is all around us was fueled by industry industry has created all of the Surplus around us indoor plumbing Healthcare. Food for billions of people industry has had extraordinary effects and side-effects on our culture but industry demands boundaries left to its own devices. It will cycle relentlessly toward Monopoly and oligopoly and it will do what it can to create lock in to ensure that we don’t get what we want, but that we serve industry and so We the citizens the people who work in alongside. And yes at the top of Industry need to figure out what’s the point does culture exists to fuel industry or is Industries job to make it so we can get back to capitalism and thus have culture the way we want it to be a culture based on Dignity and choice and markets and awareness and prioritization and the long term so Cory doctorow continues to inspire writing brilliantly about what would it mean to break up Tech to break up monopolies to use interoperability the magic of the internet the idea of connection to get us back to where we’d like to be which is a system that isn’t based on a race to the bottom that once we have better long-term insight into what the cost of everything really is we could make Better decisions, but to do that first like the Goldfish who doesn’t know that they’re swimming in the water.

We have to realize that there even is water that all around us the repercussions of Industry persist. Some people are trapped in it. Some people are still enjoying it, but it is a choice. We are at a Crossroads and as we create the next generation of artificial intelligence as we create more and more ways to connect people. Equal to one another it’s important that we have a conversation about what is important.

How do we know if we’re doing a good job is the goal to enrich Wall Street and nothing but Wall Street, is that why we’re here is the purpose of culture to enable industry or is the purpose of Industry to enable culture.

So this has been a short rant, but it’s worth the summary industrialism is not the same as capitalism. Industrialism is the repeated process of getting what you got but cheaper and faster eventually it requires coercion. It requires pushing people to do things. They don’t want to do it requires the people running industry to not take responsibility for what they’re doing because instead it’s the industry itself. That is determining what’s happening. Next capitalism is about discovering Market needs and filling them and it works. Is best when people take responsibility for what they do, we have an opportunity to create boundaries boundaries for industry boundaries for capitalism those boundaries enable it to work we can make boundaries that benefit all of us and still get the benefits of Technology still get the benefits of supply chain and reliability and yes civilization. In fact, if we don’t create the boundaries, we won’t get any of those things if these ideas. Resonate with you. Here’s four books that have had a big impact on me. You can get details at a Kimbo dot link. Just check out the show notes.

The first is a new book cast by Pulitzer prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. It’s an extraordinary piece of work and I hope that everyone reads it the research she did the clarity with which she makes her points. It’s just off the charts second is the master switch by Tim Wu third is ending Surveillance capitalism by Cory doctorow and fourth is the classic what technology wants by Kevin Kelly.

Even if there’s something in one or more of these books that you disagree with. These are important books well worth your time. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some questions from previous episodes, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Except my name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question. Thanks for listening. As you know, I love getting questions from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. And please visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd. Click the appropriate button. We got a few questions about voting and then one about authenticity. Here we go.

Hi Seth, this is Larry in Salt Lake City. Just listen to your podcast on ranked Choice voting. Very interesting. Great ideas some concerns. Number one. How would we have a digital voting system that was hacker-proof either by foreign or domestic villains who would want to alter things to how would we keep all of that data out of the hands of government?

Big trust issues with NSA CIA FBI justice department that want a back door so they can get all this information.

There’s something physically secure about showing up physically as opposed to digitally thoughts about security of a digital system and the use of the data. Thanks for all your great work.

Thank you, Larry. And I appreciate the intent behind the question. I think that villains are interesting to think about because they generally don’t do work the way they do in the movies that the villainy has to do with gerrymandering. Saying it has to do with keeping people from voting it has to do with how we allocate in person voting places Etc that the wholesale theft of voting records isn’t nearly as big a threat as creating a cultural misunderstanding about the security of Elections that if we can persuade people that their votes don’t matter that the elections are insecure. It is much. Less likely that people will Vote or even worse except the results of votes and the villains that you talked about have a lot to gain by creating an environment where people choose not to accept the results of elections creating security is different than creating security theater, and the security theater of in-person voting has been around our entire lives where I grew up that oversized note. book held together with posts and screws and they look you up and then they spin it around and you sign it and then you go to this machine that makes a satisfying click clack sound you have no clue if the right person is looking at the results the right way or if some villain is stealing your data and in terms of government agency snooping I have to tell you it’s way too late for that the government already knows that you Did this question the government already has cameras everywhere that you go. The government has no trouble tracking anybody who has a cell phone again. It’s the difference between security theater and security people think that they’re flying under the radar but they just think that actual security Demands a level of transparency and inspection on the part of people who want to see how it’s working.

That is much. easier to do with intent in a digital space than it is to do in the real world because the digital space is auditable just read a post about South Korea hotels that are filled to the top with illicit cameras that people in South Korea are placing in hotel rooms just to spy on people and blackmail them really hard to inspect for that wholesale on the other hand if we had the open source code that people like Bruce schneier have Arguing for that’s inspectable where we can build an audit Trail in the digital domain.

Not only is it possible to achieve more security, but then we can build a level of security theater around it. So I am not dismissing the threats to our democracy from all sides. I’m simply saying that chronic systemic problems combined with a cultural Dynamic that is spiraling in the wrong direction are way worse. Than the hypothetical fears of some villain or some secret government agency grabbing our voting data.

They’ve got all the data that they need.

Hey Seth, this is friend Walt from Amsterdam in your podcast on voting reforms. We set this versus students to changing the Status Quo. I was surprised therefore when you brought up ranked Choice voting as a solution.

It’s more complicated together and calculate ranked Choice votes using today’s systems the center for election science. Therefore recommends approval voting which is much less friction. I’m curious do you value the idea of people’s taking the personal rank preferences here. Would love to hear your thoughts. I really appreciate your shining a light on important problems to make the world a better place.

Thanks for this question remote and you are right approval voting is significantly simpler and lets people make decisions in a more binary way. I am indifferent as to which one we end up using my argument is that there’s a lot of opportunity to do things better and just because we haven’t been doing things better is no reason not to explore them.

Hey Seth, this is Ian from Fort Collins, Colorado.

I’m a graphic designer and a musician.

I’ve been listening to all of you. Podcast since the beginning and I always try to relate them back to my own art with songwriting. I feel like the hardest thing to do is to be truly authentic when you’re writing songs. I think the greatest artists are the ones who are able to create a thousand plus true fans because they wear it on their sleeve they are able to translate who they are so clearly I struggle with that sometimes and I was wondering if you have any formulas or hints or recommendations on ways to ensure that your authenticity is being translated or that you’re not just ripping off somebody else’s idea and attributing it to yourself. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Thank you. We and this is something that comes up again and again and it’s something that I cover a great deal in my new book The Practice which comes out in November at the end of 2020. Here’s the deal. I think authenticity is dramatically overrated. Let’s start with an oncologist. You don’t need a cancer therapist who has survived cancer.

It is possible for an obstetrician to do a great job delivering a baby. Even if that person has never had a baby on their own and if you’re ever going to read a novel that novel is completely made up. That’s why it’s a novel and if we think The great pop songs of my lifetime maybe some of them actually happen to some people but not all of them not all the time and that person who’s standing on stage singing.

Well, maybe just maybe they’re in the mood that that song describes but most of the time they’re not that’s because they’re a professional what it means to be a professional is that you are showing up for other people if starting from a base of anticipating makes it easier for you to choose the empathy to talk and act and work for other people than by all means please do but once we decide to do this work, what we have to acknowledge is that what we are seeking is authentic connection with the person who hears it or the person we are operating on or the person who needs us to do a service for them.

Not how we authentically feel in the moment. That fiction is another word for fake but a novel can change us because even though the author was making stuff up if he or she has done a good job, it works because it works on us and that is the opportunity. We each have sure start with the colonel authenticity if you wish but realize that you are here for other people not just for yourself.

Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible.

Or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all NBA gets right? Is it puts you in a context where? Part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you got a face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

Not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8742-the-hedonic-treadmill- <==

Very special because if you can see ya the numbers all go to 11 look right across the board 11:11.

Mostly Levin announce go up to 10 exactly. Does that mean it’s louder. Is that any louder?

Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not 10. You see most most blokes gonna be playing at 10:00. You’re on 10 here all the way up all the way up all the way up your on 10 on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Well, I don’t know where exactly what We do is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know, what we do put it out to a lab in exactly one loud.

Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder?

These got to 11.

Unlike amplifiers human beings do not go up to 11. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about the hedonic treadmill and the culture were all in but first here is a message from our sponsor.

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It’s about interaction small group breakouts and transformation. We’ve done it twice before and it works checkout real skills conference.com for all the details. The hedonic treadmill is the name given for the way human beings pursue pleasure, whatever form of pleasure it is that they seek it. Tout that people some people not all people want more more of whatever gave them happiness the last time so here’s the question. We begin with Jeff Bezos has a thousand times as much money as someone with 10 million dollars do we think Jeff is a thousand times happier than someone with 10 million dollars or consider the marathon runner who finishes a marathon in two hours and 30 minutes.

Are they happier? ER than someone who finishes the marathon in three hours. Well, maybe if their goal was to win the race if their goal was to run a personal best, but if the person who ran the marathon in three hours was used to doing a four-hour Marathon or was used to losing and had just one. I think we would argue that the person who ran the three hour marathon at least today is happier.

Free climbing is the activity of going up the side of a mountain with no ropes. This is a fairly foolhardy Endeavor. If the side of the mountain is particularly steep or particularly tall if you free climb safely, it’s entirely possible that you will now want to free climb less safely. And then perhaps you will continue to free climb less and less safely seeking to get to 11 seeking the thrill of survival until One day you lose the game.

The hedonic treadmill is responsible for many elements of our culture. There are two things to create culture one is when people accidentally have side effects to their pursuit of this sort of happiness. And the second is we’re actually changing. The culture is the thing that is giving the person on the hedonic treadmill satisfaction.

The reason all of this is a problem because lots of creatures Teachers experience the hedonic treadmill lots of creatures will eat something until they are sick. Lots of creatures will head out to do something that makes them happy but human beings have built a culture and technology in that culture to amplify it.

So if you got a certain satisfaction out of having a little bit of plastic surgery, the question is do you decide that you will get more Satisfaction by having more plastic? Tree and then how many times you need to go to the plastic surgeon before even you acknowledge? It was all a mistake because there are side effects. It’s permanent.

There was an industry. They’re just waiting for you to come back with money eager to go under the knife to do it again or something as simple as snack food. We are hard-wired evolutionarily to want dense calories and fats to help people on the savanna survive. I’ve however once you start pursuing that once you associate high calorie density and fats with pleasure with belonging with comfort. Then there is an industry that exists to sell you more of it. We can call that weaponizing if we weaponize the food what we’ve done is turn it from nutrition into something that goes on your treadmill until the next thing, you know, you’re slamming back a Because they’ve made the top of the bottle wide enough that you can drink 16 ounces all at once until the next thing we know we have scientists who are dedicating their lives to Crunch and to the way fat satisfies us these people are doing it because they getting paid to do it.

They’re getting paid to do it by industrialists who are on a hedonic treadmill because they already have enough cash they already We have enough resources to happily survive, but by their measure it’s not happy because they’re not winning like the person who needs a personal best at the marathon like the person that wants to win.

We have created a culture where people who are very talented who are very driven are all competing on one axis.

If you want to ruin a certain kind of billionaires day all you need Do is hand them the Forbes 400 list there didn’t used to be a list of the richest people in the world. And now there is a bunch of years ago not too long ago Forbes Magazine decided it would be great link bait before there was link bait to publish a list of the richest people in the world. Some of the data is made up some people Lobby to be on the list others work overtime to not be noticed by the list.

But here’s the thing you can ruin a billionaires day not all billionaires, but most of them. By showing them that they haven’t moved up on the list that they’ve in fact move down that one of the things that we can assert about people who make it to the billionaires list is they like being billionaires that they are on a hedonic treadmill keeping score of something that is actually meaningless in every other element of their life except for the story. They tell themselves and now thanks to that list and others like it other people are telling themselves a story about that person as Well, so they are all competing to move up on the list because the difference between five billion dollars. And fifty billion dollars is no difference at all.

There is nothing a person with five billion dollars. Once that they can’t get but could get if they had 50 billion dollars except for one thing the feeling of being up on the list when people are pursuing suing a treadmill that hurts no one or even themselves. It’s really hard to criticize that that if you’re spending half an hour or a day playing Scrabble or chess against the computer trying to beat your personal best that’s called a hobby a Pastime. It’s something that gives us pleasure and hurts. No one other times there are things we call addictions whether it’s something like going for too much plastic surgery. or finding comfort in a bag of chips that leads to problems associated with your weight what we see in those situations is someone hurting themselves but no one else and the third situation is what happens when the treadmill leads to hurting the culture itself in the 1970s some very rich industrialists got together and decided to start lobbying against taxation to start lobbying against regulation these Healthy families did not need freedom from Taxation and regulation in order to pay their bills in order to find happiness of any kind other than winning a game and then winning the game became a game that a lot of people in that Circle wanted to play and what we ended up with was a shift to the culture so that in order for some people to win a game that they decided would be there treadmill they chose to change. The entire culture and so we see that culture is often the side effect of what happens when Youmans choose to pursue their goals. I’m not just picking on billionaires here consider somebody whose treadmill is all about being the class clown when you’re the class clown in third grade or fifth grade or ninth grade you get satisfaction from making the class laughs from showing that you have power over the teacher and the system, but then some people choose to go to 11 and then More and then more if you end up with a career as a stand-up comic is one thing to say, I want to practice my craft. I like being in front of people and doing my work.

It’s another to say I can’t find satisfaction unless there’s more people in the crowd than there were last week. I can’t find satisfaction unless they’re laughing harder than they were last week because the problem with treadmills like this is you will hit the wall. You will hit the wall because you have stopped keeping track of the thing that got you. In the game in the first place and now are obsessed simply with winning and with personal best. This gets particularly poignant, when we think about people whose treadmill is about dominance is about bullying is about lying is about getting away with things and about beating other people because as you can imagine when you turn this up to 11, you need to victimize more people you need to play on an Ever bigger stage. You need bigger Stakes you need to do more damage.

Every James Bond villain in history is the victim of a poorly chosen hedonic treadmill.

This is gold Mr. Bond.

All my life. I’ve been in love with its color its Brilliance. It’s divine heaviness.

I welcome any Enterprise that will increase my stock working their way up from petty crime to World Domination.

Now, of course, that’s fiction, but it happens in the real world as well. And so when we see people who finally hit the wall who get arrested or shamed or fail because they Gone too far we shake our head and say why did they keep going? Why did they need to keep hurting people and the answer is because they were trying to turn it up to 11.

So what’s our opportunity? Our opportunity is to choose our treadmill wisely. We can choose a treadmill that hurts. No one that no one even knows about that’s our personal hobby our craft the thing we find satisfaction in the thing where it’s sort of harmless to turn it up. 211 if it leads to an attic crammed with stuff dangerous living conditions too much debt. Well, then then we haven’t chosen as wisely as we could often industry. Sometimes even marketers are pushing us to pick the wrong treadmill or once we pick a treadmill to race down it ever harder.

The merchants of debt do this all the time. There is a significant portion of the population that believes that a high interest rate on in. Just better than the low one when they’re in debt because more must be better. There are a huge number of people who no matter what their credit limit is on their credit card will go right to that credit limit their on a bizarre painful hedonic treadmill seeking to go to XI 1 XI is impossible and in return they’re ending up with a lifetime of debt.

Instead we can say wait a minute. I can get that same satisfaction, press those same buttons by becoming a community activist by becoming a teacher or a mentor or a coach. I can figure out how to do increasingly difficult challenges that have nothing to do with risking my life climbing a mountain face and everything to do with playing in an arena where my contribution to the culture makes the culture better and then I get to do it. Again, so the choice of our treadmill and its impact on the culture around us is profoundly important and as a community we’ve got to figure out what to say to people who have picked the wrong treadmill because it’s entirely possible. They are treadmills fun to watch it’s entirely possible their treadmill creates positive side effects.

It’s also possible that their treadmill is hurting other people and that they could get the same satisfaction. Faction with far fewer side effects once we can understand what game people on a treadmill are choosing to play then we have a chance to help guide them in a way that helps all of us because no each of us is not entitled to our own treadmill not if it’s going to affect anybody else.

This is part of our responsibility of being in the culture acknowledging that it never goes up to 11, but that part of being human is trying To get it up to 11 is a first step in US understanding that we are always playing this game with ourselves and that we have a chance to put ourselves on a track where our subconscious is working overtime to create outputs that we can be proud of.

Thanks for listening to my rant. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with questions from last time, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the akimbo workshops. These are interactive real-time online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2022 finding one that matches where you need to go if you’re ready to level up. I hope you’ll check out a Kimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

A small aside about Marketing in the upcoming marketing seminar marketing is not advertising marketing is what we do when we choose to change the culture if you are seeking to make things better, if you are seeking to engage with other people and help them get to where you and they want to go. I would argue you are a marketer if we are looking for connection and Justice and change if we are looking to grow our project our nonprofit or our business. We are marketers and I take this marketing thing really seriously and I don’t believe it has anything to do with advertising or hype or hustle or SEO or tactics or tricks.

I think it’s about understanding that we each have a chance to lean into this work and make things better by making better things. I hope to see you there.

My name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here. – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin Tire sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question.

Thanks, as always for listening. I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, please visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo link2006. Click the appropriate button. We’ve gotten some really strong questions recently. I hope you’ll keep them coming. The first one was from Andre. I’ll summarize it a little bit. Basically. Here’s Apple with its elegant polished semi closed system where everything is approved where? We think must be sandboxed where they are clearly in charge versus something like Android which is open. And in many ways more of the Wild West for years Microsoft was plagued with viruses. Whereas the Mac had almost none people ascribe that to the fact that Apple was less open.

I think it’s important to understand there is a spectrum. The iPhone would have clearly disappeared. It would have been a failure. If it weren’t for the App Store, it’s the App Store the interoperability of it that permitted the iPhone to beat Nokia and all the other phones that were on the market at the time.

So the question is where on the Spectrum does an organization choose to live the laissez-faire attitude of Google which in some ways is a technological hubris of saying we are really good at Tech. We don’t have to care about user experience. It’ll all sort itself out. Versus the design you bursts of Apple in which they say we know everything we are right and we will not let others interoperate with us in a way that undermines our rightness.

There are clearly places in between there clearly places in between where we can create regimes of openness where people are interacting with each other according to certain rules and where the end result is something that we are proud to point to and so we often end up in the middle. The extremes are rare. There are very few things that are completely unregulated in open and there are very few successful things that are completely closed.

We have to pick where we’re going to be on the Spectrum and then do that work in a way that we can be proud of it.

I said, it’s John from Boston. I have a question pertaining to a few things from across your work and sure what’s your take on the value of a PhD moving forward in the 21st century if I’m interested in becoming a public policy thought leader, which I am. What a doctor would be a good way to stand. Doubt since there are relatively few phds or is the value of doctorate declining much like the traditional MBA.

Thanks John quick answer for you a PhD like many things is not about what you learn. It’s about the signal that you earned by putting in the effort. Someone could spend twice as long and go twice as deep and learn a lot more but not get the piece of paper which means they don’t get the signal. So the challenge is to buy Right signal if you want to go to work at Goldman Sachs or Bane or McKinsey don’t go to a top 50 business school. It won’t help you got to go to a top for business school. Cuz that signal is the one you’re seeking.

If you’re looking to get ahead in your chosen field of public policy figure out which signal you can send that’s well-earned and that pays off for the Long Haul. I don’t think we can generalize or than that haisa that Silas here from Auckland New Zealand.

My question is based on the idea of saying no when I started this freelance journey, I had to say yes to a lot of things just to kind of get my foot in the door to get people aware of the fact that I was doing great work and that I could benefit their companies or their organizations and I was lucky enough over time to be able to turn down jobs that didn’t necessarily sit right with me, but I’m finding myself now coming out of lockdown in New Zealand and lat On continuing around the world in a state of having to say yes to more things just to tide myself over and be able to pay the bills.

There’s one that comes to mind recently where my models really don’t sit with the project and I said no to it because my gut feeling was so strong on that. But I’m also really feeling the financial pressure of saying that no and I’m struggling with whether it was the right idea to say no or whether I should have just swallowed my pride.

And worked on something that I didn’t really believe in. My question for you is really do you have any advice or perspective on how you decide when you’re going to turn down opportunities or jobs or yeah how you shape your perspective and you stay confident and those times where you feel like it’s more important in the long term to stick with your gut feeling and stand behind the things you believe in versus making sure there’s money in the bank and paying the bills.

Thank you so much for all that you You’ve really helped shape my perspective into a flexible tenacious and patient experience and I haven’t found that anywhere else. So I’m very very grateful. Keep doing what you’re doing much love.

Thank you Silas for this question. We could talk about this all day long. We may talk about it in a future episode. I think we can differentiate between several kinds of know the first one is this and it’s one we cover a lot in the Freelancers Workshop the know of building your career. Career that when you are busy saying yes to things you may not realize it but you’re saying no to other things because you’re too busy to do them. Anyway that what we choose to do when we build a career is invest in what we’re working on and not invest in others.

So when you start working with a certain kind of client helping a certain kind of industry showing up in a certain way you are defining to the public who you are you are sending a Ignore the second kind of know is the no of morality. I don’t want to contribute to this here. We need to be really clear about whether we’re doing slacktivism or whether we’re actually being thoughtful about where our nose appear and so we have the opportunity to be consistent to figure out the priority list to figure out where we are going to have leverage to make things better, and there’s lots of discussions about you. utilitarianism about where our dollars and our time or best spent people like Peter Singer have argued that it probably makes sense for someone who’s getting paid $500,000 a year to be an investment banker not to quit their job and go work for the Peace Corps, but instead to send four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Charities that are make things better because their comparative advantage enables them to contribute more and then the Third Kind of know is the know where One else is going to do that job. No matter what if it’s really true that someone else is going to do that job. No matter what then it’s easier to say yes to it.

But often we fool ourselves because if every single talented marketer walked away from the cigarette industry. I don’t think they would do as well as they do now sooner or later. They’re going to run out of people and they can start by running out of you. Hi Seth.

This is Spencer from Amsterdam.

No, I was just listening to the industry and its discontents episode and I have a question.

But first I just wanted to say a huge thank you for this connected journey of musings insights. And yes, even the rants over the past few weeks about where we go as a culture like you said, we’re at a Crossroads and it’s an important conversation. So if we want to build an industry that enables our culture and not the other way around then I That by changing by whom and how startups are funded is a critical part.

Ultimately. It feels like the investors are the ones that are geared to enrich Wall Street. So to speak living in Amsterdam, I discovered the work of Kate raworth author of The Donut economies, which is all about how we can reimagine our Industries and economies to meet the needs of all people within the boundaries of the planet’s resources and Amsterdam is one of the first cities to to adopt this model What if we could build a venture capital ecosystem around this doughnut economy idea that would still reward the entrepreneurs for the work that they do but is more accountable to government or social policies than Wall Street.

So to speak curious to know your thoughts.

Thanks for your work and consistency.

Thank you Spencer for this question. It gives us a chance to highlight some of the things we’ve been talking about. Here we go. If someone is going to invest money to take a risk, they need a return on that investment and the current understanding the understanding for the last hundred plus years is that the purpose of the investment is to maximize the return on the investment people who are investing in getting bigger returns have more money to invest it crowds out investment. that isn’t seeking bigger returns built into the very Dynamic of scarcity and money and investment is this idea of racing for return what Milton Friedman and others injected into the culture was the idea that the only purpose of a company is to maximize the return for investors and by accepting that myth that unfounded myth our culture gave up something really important, which is Personal responsibility which is the idea that companies exist to do things other than maximize return but then other voices show up like the ones you’re talking about like Jacqueline novogratz and the idea of patient capital of investing to make things better. Not just to make a return but the chain continues because sooner or later the chain connects to the ultimate owner of the assets and that someone who’s trying to maximize return So I applaud these efforts to bring back to culture what culture used to have which is our shared responsibility for how we invest for what a return even means. But until we get there and one thing that will help us get there are the boundaries around what happens for people who play with money for people who are on the hedonic treadmill of seeking to win in the game of money and the answer of course is that you don’t get to keep keep all of your winnings that if some of the winnings from investment go to improve the culture to improve schools to improve Health and Welfare and Community while the game will still be the same people will still seek to invest but the byproduct of that investment are all sorts of magical side effects, like training the next generation of entrepreneurs like creating an understanding of what Is to do things around here like insiders and Outsiders where the Insiders are the ones who are investing to make things better.

So it’s all part of an ecosystem. There isn’t one simple solution, but it’s obvious to me at least that boundaries have to be part of it boundaries on what happens to the winnings boundaries on what’s an okay thing to invest in and what’s not we already have these boundaries. We already have made it so you can’t make money doing I’m certain things. We already tax the winnings.

The only question is the degree and what I’m trying to encourage the culture to realize is that it is up to each of us not to accept the rules as is but instead to move the dial in the direction that benefits the world we seek to live in thanks to everyone for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world. To distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t Ask that question it’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me.

Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8861-go-invent-something- <==

On a cold winter night in January 2020. I was walking through a supermarket parking lot and I saw there on the ground next to a puddle a beautiful picture of a tropical fish I bent down to pick it up. It turned out to be the label from a DVD the DVD was a home aquarium in HD. No less from 2010. You would put the DVD into your DVD player and watch. Fish swim back and forth and back and forth and standing there in the cold wondering how a 10 year old DVD label was sitting in a parking lot.

I remembered that in 1987. I launched the first aquarium on VHS. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about tropical fish but mostly invention but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Yes, we all know that the digital aquarium changed the world that around the world millions and millions of people right now are trying to tear themselves away from their TV sets their flat screen. 4K expensive TV sets where they are watching tropical fish swim back and forth in a coral reef, and they have me to thank for it sort of on to another invention in 1989. There was a problem in the marketplace. The problem was this tons of kids were playing Nintendo games and lots of kids didn’t want to spend the time to read a manual or a hint book to figure out how to win the game. Mmmmm, so I came up with a great idea of filming video tapes is taking the output from a Nintendo going straight into a super VHS recorder and recording people winning the video game.

We then created the score more points series of Home Videos. It featured of course. Skip Rogers World video game champion who I invented and the tapes went on to sell just a few copies.

This is the hottest game of the year as far as skip Rogers is concerned you get to be any wrestler you want. I’m Hulk in this round.

Here’s a flying dropkick.

Well, we all know what happened fifteen years later Amazon bought twitch for more than a billion dollars. Yes, in addition to inventing the home aquarium that runs on a TV set. I also invented what became twitch. Yep. We’re on a roll soon after Apple launched the iPod it occurred to me that there was a chance to build a device that would use radio waves to Just the music from your iPod across your room to your speakers as we all know this idea eventually got picked up and turned into the Mac sense home pod.

I have one in my office. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes and then years later became Sonos a billion dollar company with more than a thousand employees that is now having its intellectual property stolen relentlessly by Google Another Innovation that I started perhaps but had little to do with one more Tech Innovation from the 1980s.

The Mac could be hooked up to a dot matrix printer the cheap precursor to a laser printer. And then if you wanted to you could send something across the country using a fax machine for those of you haven’t touched one in a while a fax machine works like a scanner and a printer connected by a row. Really long phone wire in between and my idea was to write some software and some hardware for the Mac so that instead of printing to your printer.

You could print to any fax machine in the world straight from your screen. Apple didn’t have something like that. So my plan was to build one a prototype to prove that it could work and then go get meetings with fancy companies software and Hardware that wanted to support the Mac license them are brilliant idea and just sit back. Let them do the hard work and watch the royalties role in so my partner Dan and I built one it fit inside a very small suitcase bigger than a briefcase and I would take it to these meetings. I was really good at getting the meetings and we go to the meetings and I’d open the thing up and I’d wire it up and I’d go to send a fax but the thing is fax machines are Not so much digital at least they were then so almost every single time this device which worked great in our lab didn’t work after I got off the plane in San Francisco or Dallas One Last Shot. We bought a booth at the famous macworld Expo.

We set up our prototype working this time and waited for the hordes of buyers to come by well on the very first day to analysts from Apple computer came by they spent a half an hour looking at our device they confessed to us that they had certainly been talking about this idea at HQ. But it was just an idea that afternoon Apple had a press conference. They announced that even though we had something called a Max fax their new thing a Mac facts would be shipping in just three months for half the price.

We were claiming ours who’s going to ship for. Well, I’m sure you guessed it. It was more than a year later before Apple finally came out with there’s but by that point we were long gone exhausted by the journey.

It could be that you’re sensing a pattern here and the pattern is pretty straightforward inventing stuff isn’t particularly difficult if you are willing to invent a lot of things that don’t work. Work and you’re working at a time of structural shift in this case the media landscape along with technology and third and most of all you don’t then commit to spending the time to actually building the thing and sticking with it all the way to the point where it’s quite valuable years ago. When I worked at Spinnaker software, I helped develop a line of computer games based on science fiction novels. I got to work with real. Bradbury and Arthur C Clarke and going on the list of authors. I really admired Michael Crichton was next and then I called up Harry Harrison Harry Harrison wrote the stainless steel rat, but he’s most famous for writing the book that inspired the movie Soylent Green.

Charlton Heston, Edward G Robinson Chuck Connors Lee Taylor young Brock Peters Paula Kelly and Joseph Cotten fight for survival and try to solve the most bizarre. It’ll ever to face mankind the search for the secret of Soylent Green.

We’ll find out why Soylent Green means life. You will find out why Soylent Green means death. We gotta stop them.

So I call up Harry and like all science fiction authors of the day except for perhaps Michael Crichton. He was hard up for cash and was eager to license us the rights to one or more of his titles. So we got together and formed Some reason he picked a rotating restaurant rotating restaurants don’t have very much to recommend them particularly. If the person you’re with is drinking shots of tequila.

So Harry on his fifth shot turns to me and quite seriously says, you know, I’m not speaking to Michael Crichton and I said, oh really? Well, he’s a pretty nice guy. What’s the problem? He said? Well, here’s what happened. I wrote an entire science fiction novel about a virus that comes from out. Outer space and takes over the Earth and as I finished the last page and was about to mail it to my publisher.

I read a book called The Andromeda Strain which had just become a best-seller and Harry turned beet red and he said the guy pre stole my idea. Thus making his book worthless. He was punishing Crichton by not speaking to him Crichton, of course had no idea any of this had occurred the point. Is that writing that book getting all the way to the end having your agent Lin Nesbitt sell it to a big-time publisher and then promoting it and getting all the way over the finish line that is just as hard as thinking of an idea for a virus that comes from outer space and takes over the Earth.

There are priests eel. Everywhere, we look and people who have successfully taken an idea and actually done something with it. So back to the aquarium in 1986. They were Airline magazines. They were thicker than they are now, they did not have enough ads and if you had some gumption you could call one of them up and offer to trade for an ad in the magazine in my case.

The aquarium tape. There was also a fireplace tape cost $49. I call up the sales rep at American Airlines magazine and I say here’s the deal. I’ll pay you 20 bucks for every one of the tapes. I sell I’ll give you a full page ad run it if you have space and you’ll make maybe a lot of money so I run the ad and I don’t get any orders. I don’t get any orders and I’d made myself a commitment that if I got more than Twelve orders, I would go ahead and actually make the product.

Well, I got eight orders after getting a tour director. I looked at my commitment that I needed 12 to get out the hi-def camera and start filming fish and I sent all eight of the people their money back along with a nice little gift. Well you guessed what happened the next time I went to the mailbox to check there were seven more orders, and so it went I didn’t have the guts to follow through it was enough for me to say that I invented the aquarium on videotape, but it wasn’t enough to change the culture.

It wasn’t enough to go down the rocky road between here and there the people who sold twitch for all of those zeros deserve what they got because the hard part wasn’t saying let’s put a video game on videotape the hard part was showing up. Showing up and showing up of solving 10,000 little problems. Some of them really big problems as opposed to Simply say I came up with an idea and now we’re done.

This is why it’s ludicrous when we see lawsuits where people who had an idea in their basement claim that some bigshot organization stole their idea. That’s not likely I truly believe that Google stole the ideas and patents behind Sonos because Sonos had done the work for decades of figuring out the best way to make the thing work, but know if you send a five-page proposal to someone, you know, who’s brother-in-law’s cousin is a screenwriter.

They’re not going to steal your idea and make it into a movie. They have more ideas than they know what to do with that’s not the hard part. The hard part is going to the meetings and staring down the Optics the hard part is figuring out how to violate the laws of physics that are laws until you figure out how to bend them enough that you can make the thing you’re building actually work.

So yes, I still love to invent stuff and for fun. I pretend that people have pre stolen my ideas but deep down what I know is this ideas that spread win if you’re really really good and really fortunate one of your ideas. We’ll get pre stolen by somebody and go into the world and change things without you having to break a sweat.

So if you’ve got an idea fantastic write it down, but even better decide to commit years of your life Drip by drip day by day to actually changing the culture.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back in a second with a question from last time, but first here’s a message from our sponsor If you want to learn to ride a bicycle don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the akimbo workshops. These are interactive real-time online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2022 finding one that matches where you need to go if you’re ready to level up. I hope you’ll check out akimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

It’s Maria.

If my name is Kyle reading Seth, this is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new product.

Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao.

Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex.

Whoosah. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question.

As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode or anything else drop me a note by visiting akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki and Bo dot link2006 is the appropriate button. Hi Seth. This is Chow from the Philippines.

I just wanted to ask about being a Jack or Gene of all trains.

It seems to be that audiences people prefer and notice. And listen to people who are focused with one particular thing for example Sports fashion Arts. So on and so forth as opposed to people who do all sorts of things. So where do people who are Jack and Jane of all trades? Go or what should they do to reconcile this Joy of learning all sorts of different things without actually excelling in them or being great and heard and known for it. Thank you so much for all the work that you do. You’ve been such an inspiration especially during these times. Thank you.

You’re highlighting a real pressure in our culture on one hand the professionals. We choose the people we talk about the folks that we follow orders. Listen to are often at the extreme. They are seen as the best as singular as idiosyncratic as peculiar as doing something extraordinary at the edges because after all if you needed a lawyer or a surgeon or a coach or an advisor or an investor or even a PTO low to make you dinner, why wouldn’t you pick the best one on the other hand years and years of schooling and cultural? Dr. Nation pushes us to fit in to do what we’re told to sand off the edges and to be well-rounded.

We often prefer to have straight B pluses then one a and a bunch of Dee’s we push kids to work on their deeds and we ignore the fact that they had won a and so your point about Jack or Jane of all trades. This is somebody who’s pretty good at a lot of things how then to show up in the marketplace of ideas how then to show up in the queue. Economy, if you’re pretty good at a bunch of things.

Well, there are a few choices. The first one is to realize that being pretty good at a bunch of things is in itself an extraordinary Edge case of a skill the Swiss army knife is worth talking about precisely because most knives don’t also come with a can opener the Swiss army knife should not go head-to-head against the chef’s knife to work in a fancy restaurant kitchen.

But if you can only carry one thing in your pocket carrying a chef’s knife is probably not the right answer. So what that means is you have to get very good at being pretty good at a lot of things. You have to get very good at context switching without a hassle that what it means to be a handy person.

Is that your answer to almost every question is no problem. It means that you carry with you the tools of your trade. That you have figured out how to have what you need to do pretty good work on a moment’s notice because an expert is more brittle than you you by being expert at a lot of things are flexible.

And the second alternative is to seek out gigs where it’s not necessary to be an expert. It’s necessary to Be steady to be resilient to be the flexible enthusiastic positive easy to work with Because you can become the best in the world at that what’s not available is to say I’m three and a half stars at 40 things. I come in fourth place in every ranking. Please pick me because I really need the gig because no one’s going to pick you for that reason, but we can do is lean into the fact that we’re good at a lot of things and also a correction free climbing and free soloing are apparently different things free climbing means climbing without Using any aids to move up but you’ve got ropes to avoid falling down. Whereas free soloing is just plain nuts.

Thanks for the correction. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great. But a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities. Within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical.

But it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel Like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories.

I see out there but I can show up consider the alt MBA more than three thousand alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 8996-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list- <==

Every week the New York Times publishes one or two pages of information that it knows to be untrue. Now, I’m not talking about the made-up claims of the fake news crowd. I’m talking about the New York Times bestseller list. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo. We’ll be back in a second to talk about why the list matters and why it’s wrong, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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I’m an author so I understandably care a little bit about the New York Times bestseller list, but why does it even matter? Well, we’ll begin with this for 500 years books have mattered books have never reached the preponderance of people because there are just so many different titles. It’s possible for a man. Movie to be seen by 20 or 30 million people.

It’s likely that a national TV show could be seen by almost as many on a regular basis but a book if a book sells two million copies, it’s a gasp inducing home run five million is virtually unheard of these days. So books books don’t have Mass Appeal / title, but who reads books who buys books who talks about?

Well, the answer to that question is largely people who influence the culture people who start and maintain conversations. You might not have read the Atkins diet. But if you’ve ever touched anything that’s labeled Quito it’s because someone wrote a book books can influence which movies get made which TV shows get made but mostly what they’re able to do particularly non-fiction books.

Is change the conversation but books have a torturous route from the author to you. And one of the stops on that route for a long time was Barnes & Noble The Big Box book stores before Amazon. Where are you in Barnes & Noble? Because if you are near the cash register, if you’re in a big stack near the door, then someone is going to find your book. It’s a little bit like SEO search. Engine optimization except for books but how do you end up in a big pile near the door?

Well, there are a couple ways that that happened one way was that your publisher would flat-out pay the bookstores to be in the front of the store. But Publishers aren’t very good at that. Another way is that the sales force for the publisher would agitate and push because this is going to be a big book. Now. The thing about Book Sales is they are guaranteed. He’d meaning that if the bookstore doesn’t sell it they can ship it back for a full credit. They’re not taking any risk at all.

So they’re saying to Random House any other Publishers? Well, you’re taking all the risk. Which one do you think is big and how does a publisher decide what’s big? Well, ironically they often decide based on how big an advanced they paid. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy how to decide how big an advance to pay well The author is had bestsellers before it makes it a lot easier to persuade your boss that this one’s going to be a best-seller to which leads to this challenge. What makes something a best-seller how to count them today in 2020. It’s very straightforward Nielsen bookscan count them all cash registers scan things. It’s not that hard to tell how many copies of something sells but for the longest time as you could imagine it was not that automatic and so in the 1930s and 40s the New York Times steps into the breach first by surveying New York City stores then adding one city at a time until they were up to 22 cities and turning it into a national list of best seller list back to Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble wants to strike a blow against the independent bookstores in the 1970s and 80s how to do that. Well, here’s what they decided to do.

If it’s a New York Times bestseller, they said we will have tons of them in a big pile near the front of the store and we will sell them basically at cost. It’s a loss leader. Let the New York Times decide what’s hot and then promote it like crazy people who were looking for the big books the hit books. Meaning the masses are the ones who are also price-sensitive are the ones who are going to stumble into the Big Box store asking Should I read now?

I want to read what everybody else is reading people like us do things like this. What does everybody else reading there reading the book that’s on the New York Times bestseller list and in big Stacks, which means it’s going to keep selling which means it’s going to stay on the list even longer which means that more people are going to read it which means that more people are going to talk about it. And so the cycle continues.

Well, this is a common cycle in many forms of media. What’s the problem? Well, there are a few problems in 1983 Peter blatty who wrote The Exorcist.

Well another book it turned into a movie called The Exorcist 3. That book didn’t make the New York Times bestseller list. So Peter blatty did what many authors wish they could do. He sued. The New York Times the case went almost all the way to the Supreme Court and the decision while the New York Times said, what do you mean you’re suing us? The New York Times bestseller list isn’t actually a list of best-selling books. It’s just a list we made up.

It is editorial judgment. They said it’s a list of books. We want to put on the New York Times bestseller list. It is not something you can sue us for because we’re not pretending it’s true. I can’t believe I just said that I can’t believe the New York Times said that but they did. Ever since then the New York Times has done whatever they needed to to make the list reflect the books. They want us talking about the books. They want us to buy their books. They want to get written as opposed to what’s actually selling a couple examples in York Times has a list called device how to and miscellaneous as a book packager. I guess I was in the miscellaneous business and getting on that list was important to me and the people that I was working with well that list like the other lists in the times had I don’t remember Ten books on it and one week. I hope in the book review on a Sunday and I discover that they have made the how-to advice and miscellaneous list half as long now. This is a big deal because it’s the hardest list to get on because books like that tend to sell a lot of copies and they made the list half as long which made it much harder to get on the list.

So I wrote a letter to the editor of the book review and I said what’s going on here? Why did you make this list? The list of books that a lot of people are interested in half as long and she wrote back because we don’t want people to read those books. I wish I’d kept that letter but yes she wrote because we don’t want people to read those books.

There was a period of time when Harry Potter books were selling and selling and selling as a result.

The top of the fiction list was crowded.

With Harry Potter titles. So what did the times do they invented a new list children’s fiction so they could take Harry Potter off the list and go back to focusing on the books. They wanted people to read. I am totally fine with the times having a list of books people should be reading or popular books people should be reading the problem is the entire ecosystem Embraces the fiction of what it means to be a New York Times bestseller as a result entrepreneurial authors have decided to take matters into their own hands Jacqueline. Susann famously tried to butter up the staff of the times so that they would look at her books. A little bit more favorably and one of the earliest practitioners of the now obvious strategy of buying your own book was a relatively unknown author with a ghost writer named Donald Trump and the idea was if you send a bunch of old ladies to a bunch of bookstores around the country, if you know which book stores and they buy your book and buy your book and buy your book. You can send a false signal to the person whose purveying this manipulated list and suddenly Lee you have earned in quotation marks a certain sort of credibility now Barnes & Noble doesn’t have nearly as much power the Stacks and stacks of books have disappeared and yet we still treat a New York Times bestselling author like a Nobel prize-winning physicist.

And here’s where the process really gets corrupting. If you are an author you are under pressure to turn. Your book into a New York Times bestseller. And so you start to make decisions decisions about the subtitle because if it’s not a how-to book, then it might end up on a different list decisions about how you’re going to deal with groups organizations and others that really want to read your book. Most people don’t know but a hardcover book costs about a dollar fifty to print and yet it sells for $20 or more now if you’re trying to get It yourself on the New York Times bestseller list. What you’ll do is if a group of people maybe a hundred students wants to read your book you say okay, here’s what I need you to do.

Here’s the link go pay $22 for this book by a hundred at a time and then and then and then and then that’s 2,200 bucks. The alternative is you could spend I don’t know a hundred and fifty dollars to just hand them all a copy of your book spreading the Idea teaching them what they need to know that there’s a fork in the road. That’s so many authors who are trying to change the culture have to face and one side of that fork is will I spend my time ethically or unethically seeking to manipulate the X which is a list that’s not based on anything rational or will I spend my time trying to spread my idea because it turns out that ideas that spread win it turns. Out that this choking point of being on the times list is distracting the people who want to change the culture into a detour that takes them away from their goal in the first place because if the goal in the first place is to change the culture maybe a book isn’t even the way to do it.

Maybe a podcast is the way to do it or a blog post has the way to do it or conference is the way to do it may be the way to do it is to run a workshop for a small number of people who will teach Other people so what we’re left with is this cultural overhang 500 years of patina and Authority that come with having a book and at the top of the book food chain that little sticker that says, this is a New York Times bestseller the whole notion that handing someone a document that codifies your idea. Somehow gives it more Authority.

It’s under threat. It’s under threat for a whole bunch of reasons. And one of the biggest ones is this the people who are changing our culture who are leading the conversation who are open to new ideas. They’re not hanging out at the bookstore the way that they used to that ideas that spread win but ideas that spread fast often have more of an impact than ideas that sit on a shelf. And so what we end up with is a coarsening of our conversation what we end up with is clever.

Fate clever listicles ending up taking up the time of people who used to be able to sit still and actually read a book books are precious the time that the author spends putting it together the time that the reader spends digesting it. This is time. Well spent it takes 64 hours to listen to Robert Caro’s the power broker a massive book about Robert Moses.

It could have been a blog post if it had been a blog post it wouldn’t have worked. And so what we’re left with is this need to curate to figure out a way how to sort the important stuff from the high P stuff and the New York Times could be taking that role. They could figure out how to actually do what they said. They were doing in 1983, which is curating the list that people like us are Eating because people like us do things like this, but instead they are maintaining an antediluvian approach to reporting something to us that is easy to look up accurately.

And what we really need is for authors to not spend any time and Publishers to not spend any time trying to game The New York Times and instead what we need are authors and Publishers spending. In all their time trying to make something worth reading trying to make something that once someone reads it they will tell someone else so famously about 10 years ago. I wrote a blog post and on the Domino Project Blog firing the New York Times announcing that I wasn’t going to pay any attention to it that I wasn’t going to do a thing to try to get myself on the New York Times bestseller list and it has been very liberating because if you write books for your readers, And if you write books so that your readers will tell the others you are way more likely to impact the culture and that is the reason we write a book in the first place.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second to answer your questions from last time, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Except my name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump. This is Caitlin.

Hi, sir.

Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question.

I said, it’s on Dragon. Thank you so much for answering my question last time. this time I would love to hear your take on the weight of responsibility and the emotional toll of Off trying to change culture trying to lead. I have a business as a new business owner something that I’ve been really struggling struggling with over the past couple years and I am wondering where everybody could or should bear this much responsibility and this much emotional distress, or is it something that is that the is or should be reserved for a Chosen Few namely the leaders. I know that you are always about the fact that everybody should lead and I believe in that very strongly.

I’m just wondering what your take is on on that whole aspect of things. Thank you so much for everything you do and he reason Thank you Andre.

I think that we have to begin by differentiating Between the physical labor and the Quest for efficiency that the factory demands and the emotional labor that leadership craft art and the connection economy demand that we still live in an industrial economy. One where productivity is measured where people burn the candles at both ends where people Are pushed ever harder to do that thing against constraints?

But it’s important to distinguish that from the emotionally difficult work of Leaning out of the boat of choosing to lead of doing something that might not work. And when I say that everyone can lead what I’m saying is that everyone already has at least once in your life. You have said something done something contributed something that was useful.

That was important that had never been done before. So the challenge that we face is how do we do that again? And we don’t have to do it as the victim of the system we can do it as the maker of the system which leads to the question from Jesus.

This is case was from Mexico. I was jogging while listening to the treadmill episode about turning it to 11.

I had to stop and see it because this one hits home in a sad way.

Way, I work in mid-level management in a manufacturing environment.

We were already at 11:00 before the pandemic and we are starting to hit 12.

I have seen how these corporate culture of turning it to 11 cents people to the hospital because of stress insomnia digestive issues. It creates addictions and even dysfunctional families because of the long shifts at work. I’ve experienced some of those issues myself at as the bar get set higher and higher every time.

A decision to live this kind of job is hard because the pay is good and I want to provide to my family but on the flip side, I think that if people like Elon Musk didn’t turn it to 11, we wouldn’t have breakthroughs in engineering science or medicine. So if we so if there weren’t people pushing beyond the limits, how do we break the status quo, how do we hit Higher Goals without the negative side effects.

Thanks Ed.

So clearly there’s an industrial Dynamic going on here. Yes. We do want to provide for our family. We do seek affiliation and Status. We do want to be able to provide stability and health and well-being to ourselves and the people around us and the bargain the industrialist brought to us is one that says the only way to get there is again burning the candle at both ends exerting ourselves more than other people do But I think it’s a mistake to then conflate that with the youthful contributions of someone like Elon Musk or Spike Lee because in those cases if we add up their useful contributions, they worked Less in terms of hours or sweat on those things. Then you do in your factory job that what we end up doing is running around crazed because we think that that extra productivity and the drama and the urgency is required.

To actually lean into the hard work of connection Innovation and Leadership. They don’t have to be that way Thomas Edison famously kept up a really rigorous Pace. He ran a shop of fellow inventors that was known for being quite rigorous. However, by today’s standards they were coasting because we measure ourselves not against what needs to be done but against what Other people are doing and social media makes it worse. Social media says here are snapshots of people who are ahead of you here is a feeling of being behind you better hurry up because you’re losing and Silicon Valley and the bank’s they do the same thing because money wants to flow to the quote Best use of money.

And so we measure basis points. We’re racing to Edge out the competition to get there are heart beat faster or to yield a few more Pennies on the dollar and unfortunately the highly leveraged capitalist system. We work in often does reward people who are willing to shortcut people who are willing to burn out and yes the rest of us benefit because someone gave up so much to do that, but there’s also plenty of evidence that shows that people who persistently and consistently contribute at a pace they Sustained make an even bigger difference over time.

It’s about chronic contribution showing up and showing up learning evolving and doing it again, but we don’t have to do it again at 11:00 at night or one in the morning or three in the morning because it’s not that kind of race. It’s not a Sprint. It’s a marathon and it’s a marathon we can do with joy and with lightness to our step if we are fortunate enough to get the benefit of the doubt. If we are fortunate enough to not be brainwashed indoctrinated into believing we’re simply a cog in the system.

If we are fortunate enough to have choices if those things are true than those choices we make matter a lot. How do we spend that time we call free time. What are we measuring? What does success look like what would happen if you worked a little bit less built aside hustle, and we’re able to grow that into something that could sustain you and your He may be more isn’t the answer maybe better is the answer.

We’ve got to improve the way we ask the questions before we can figure out the best path forward.

I said, my name is Doug Schmidt. I’m a teacher from Rochester New York. I recently watched the documentary the social dilemma where leaders in the tech industry talk about their regrets or issues with media today and how it needs to change listening to to your podcast.

It seems that you are trying to change the system to not from the top down but from the bottom up person by person. I was wondering do you have any regrets or feelings of responsibility for things you created and didn’t see the possible negative impact at the time that they might have on society. Thank you for your insights and all you do thank you for this I think about it a lot.

I think about the fact that pioneering email marketing a long time ago. Opened the door for a lot of good to happen communication between willing consenting parties things that could scale and create positive side effects, but I also know that when I started and it was a zero billion dollar industry, and now that it’s a multi multi-billion dollar industry. A lot of those billions are about people who are manipulating or spamming or skirting the edges.

I know having written books like tribes that they enabled and a lot of causes that I believe in to do really well, but I also know that some of those ideas have been adopted by people who would divide us who would make the world worse and I do feel responsibility for that. I’m not sure how I could avoid it then I think about that time machine the one I hardly use what would happen if I had gone back in time and invested in social media companies found myself on their board and been able to speak up.

How do we end up changing a system from the top? That indoctrinates us into a set of beliefs that most of us don’t want to live with ones that are based on judging people on their appearance ones that are about creating hierarchies. And yes, lots of Cycles making people feel badly about themselves so that they will do more that helps the dominant power system.

This is all a shame. It’s all a tragedy. It’s all immoral.

What should we do about it? So I don’t have any regrets about playing on the frontier of media and it being in the internet from the beginning. I do know that each of us has to stand up more proudly. I do know that each of us has to stand up and take more responsibility because doing things simply because they’re being done is a really good excuse but doing things simply because they’re being done minimizes our value as contributors as our value as human.

We can do better. We must do better and we start by saying not on my watch. We’ve got to figure out how to leverage our voices not so that we simply walk away from systems. We don’t approve of but where we can help create coordinated action. So those systems pay attention to the fact that they are here to serve us.

We are not here to serve them. Thanks to everyone for your questions. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it? Puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the Were one reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question.

It’s not because we don’t know or we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 9152-the-game-theory-of-carbon- <==

If it’s a beautiful sunny day a bluebird day and you look up in the sky just about anywhere in the world Criss crossing the sky. You will see white plumes of smoke hanging their long Trails, they call them contrails. And if you talk to somebody who is uninformed or deliberately manipulative, they will tell you some sort of conspiracy story about those Trails. It turns out there are just Dice hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about contrails the government coordination and our future but first, here’s a message from our sponsor get better clients. They are in three words is the strategy of any freelancer who wants to do better work. Get better clients. You can’t work more hours, but you can work for people who appreciate the work you want to do. They will push you harder. You will do better work. They will talk about you. You will get paid more. You will be more proud of what you produce how to get better clients.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and we have built a workshop just for you if you work for yourself. I really think you need to check it out. It’s a The Freelancers Workshop.com. It’s not a bunch of videos It’s a workshop. You will work with other Freelancers working your way forward to figure out how to do this work that matters.

I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out. The Freelancers Workshop.com. We would love to have you join us.

Yes those contrails you see up in the sky left behind by jets are almost entirely ice. And it turns out that when you burn a gallon of jet fuel high in the atmosphere, it releases almost a gallon of water. There’s no water in the jet fuel, but jet fuel is a hydrocarbon and the act of combusting it frees up some hydrogen which then engages with the oxygen in the air turns itself into water it adheres to tiny little bits of sulfur that are in the fuel and those droplets of water are in air that is A below zero and so it freezes takes a long time for that ice to melt which is why the contrails might last for a few minutes or even longer but I don’t really want to talk about conspiracy theories. I do want to talk about a conspiracy.

How is it that you can get on a plane anywhere in the world and fly anywhere in the world that every airport code aligns with every other one in structure that the Audio on every single airplane can talk to the radio at every single control tower that air traffic control works around the world that if you land in your Airbus or your Boeing plane the airport where you land will have a Jet Bridge. That’s exactly the right size to let you get off the plane.

It turns out that since 1906 the countries around the world have been working together. To coordinate what it means to travel now. It’s called the international civil aviation organization to UN agency. Every single country in the world is a member except for Liechtenstein because Liechtenstein doesn’t have an airport, but all the rest of them are members and as members there is a reason that they obey the rules they obey the rules because if you don’t you can’t fly to another country the cost of defecting is very high. So what we end up with is a coordination ratchet that opting out is really expensive coordinating is very beneficial the system keeps getting more and more refined all the countries working together to make it more and more likely that planes work the way they’re supposed to Sometimes countries are good at this what they’re not particularly good at is Big independent projects from scratch.

They’re not very good at doing things like putting a man on the moon every once in a while. They’ll fight a war. That’s an existential crisis every once in a while. They’ll do something like pave huge sections of the Earth because there is not just economic incentives. There are huge pressures on governments to make industry happy but in General governments are reactive and in general governments aren’t particularly good at coordinating with one another.

The main reason for this is that there isn’t a ratchet toward cooperation. There’s a ratchet toward dropping out which brings us to the topic of the warming of the Earth the cancer of the atmosphere the fact Beyond any measure of any doubt that the Earth is getting warmer. Warmer year after year and countries countries are having a real problem figuring out how to coordinate to solve the problem.

And the reason that they need to coordinate is that there is only one planet just as we saw with aircraft needing to engage with each other and with airports around the world. It doesn’t do the planet a lot of good if one country is doing one thing and another country’s doing something that cancels that thing out.

But the benefits of defecting are high indeed consider the world’s Taxation and banking system. How is it that people with billions of dollars are able to move their money around and manipulate the system so that they don’t have to pay taxes anywhere. Well, the answer is there’s always a country that’s willing to break the system to benefit. Itself even a little because their rationale is well, it’s better to make a little tiny bit on this billionaire then to make nothing and have them stay in their home country. So there is no worldwide regime to ensure that everyone every company or every person is paying taxes.

There is defectors. So what happens when we start to develop cheaper alternatives to burning carbon fuels? Well, when that happens demand for carbon will go down for two reasons one because carbon is hurting all of us and two because there are cheaper alternatives. So the price of oil will go down when the price of oil goes down some people some countries instead of walking away from it will defect and take advantage of the Surplus.

All of which leads to this challenging problem the problem that is highlighted by the difficulty of the Paris Accords the Paris Accord hardly strict enough also don’t have Universal worldwide adoption. Unlike the international civil aviation agreement. There is very little reason to not defect and so the United States has defected opting out of the agreements. They said they would honor So we have a problem.

The problem is we have a Worldwide Challenge but we don’t have the game theory in place to solve the Worldwide Challenge because if we don’t all work in unison, it’s significantly less effective than if we do so in the face of this many of the technocrats I know have shifted in just the last year from we can figure our way out of this together, too.

There’s a technical solution geoengineering and if the countries won’t do it, we’ll find someone who will so a simple version of geoengineering one. That is I think Beyond controversy is building machines that take carbon out of the air and either turn it back into fuel which becomes a circle or pump it deep into Caverns or mines underground backward. It came from the problem with carbon sequestration is that it is expensive and it is slow technology tends to make things that are expensive cheaper and things that are slow faster and over time. It’s entirely possible that it will get faster.

The problem is it’s hard to come up with an economic justification Because unless there’s a worldwide regime in place to create carbon cap and trade A way that you can get paid to take carbon out of the air. It’s hard to see how to make a business out of taking carbon out of the air. And so people are pursuing more dramatic approaches. For example, if you take huge amounts of wasted bent iron bars and bring them to the ocean and dump them in the iron will Rust as the iron rusts. It will release oxygen as the ah, Oxygen is released under water. It will cause all sorts of things to grow those things that grow.

You got it. They will sequester carbon changing the entire chemistry of the ocean. It sounds like a government sized problem. However, we’ve gotten to the point where industry were loan crazy entrepreneurs have enough leverage to start doing this.

Okay back to the contrails back. To where we started they did some research around 2001 some before that some after and they found that contrails actually change the weather for the three days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. There was no air traffic all planes were grounded in just that period of time they were able to determine that the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures got dramatically bigger around the country with more than four thousand places monitoring this it is entirely possible since it was just a three-day window that it was an anomaly but it’s much more likely that it has to do with the contrails with reflecting heat back to the Earth that the warm heat for the day gets reflected back at night. And so the difference the diurnal shift between day and night. It smaller.

So there’s one theory that says contrails as they currently exist actually create more warming of the Earth. But what happens some engineers and technologists say if we could get the stuff higher into the air and what happens if we add just a little bit more sulfur to the fuel that leads us to scope X scope X and experiment done at Harvard. About to be released into the upper upper atmosphere in which the stuff that’s in Alka-Seltzer just powdered not a lot of it released into the atmosphere to determine if it reflects enough sunlight to lower the temperature of the earth.

Let’s just say for a second that for not a lot of money maybe a billion dollars. We could release enough stuff whether it’s calcium carbonate or sulfur or something else into the Upper Stratosphere that it would reflect enough sunlight to cool. The Earth here is the question is there are enough coordination enough opt-in Game Theory a ratchet toward cooperation that the nations of the earth could get their act together and go ahead and do something like that or is it more likely that someone some crazy mad scientist is just going to do it or perhaps Soooo, someone who figures out that they can make a profit doing it because corporations have been doing this since there have been corporations going on missions to colonize the Earth creating trade in goods and services that other people don’t think they should building things putting effluent into the river pumping stuff into the sky.

This has been going on for a really long time independent commercial entities in the name of the free market. Changing our environment. There’s another un body called the Council on biological diversity and they also have a hundred and ninety three countries as members and they are regularly entering into agreement to work to save the biodiversity of the earth. It’s really hard to argue against their cause and one of the things that its members have signed on to is that no government will engage age in geoengineering to radically change the environment of the earth if it will decrease the biodiversity of the Earth.

This is a loop hole big enough to fly a jet through because the argument can be made that radical shifts in our climate are the single best way to save the biodiversity of the Earth. All of this is a way of highlighting how important it is as we think about culture to realize the difference between defectors and coordinators and Co-operators that when cooperation makes sense in the short run. It is much more likely to happen in the long run and as we face more and more crises with billions of people losing their homes with Food Supplies being shifted, I think it’s A veritable that independent actors are going to show up with technology that works on the entire planet. Of course, if this movie had a happy ending two things would be true. The crazy entrepreneur would be right and the crazy entrepreneur would be alone.

There wouldn’t be two or three or four or five people or organizations doing this in an uncoordinated fashion that duplicated their efforts plunging Us in the wrong direction. There’s a reason that they lock the thermostats at a conference because if one person after another goes up and changes the thermostat pretty soon chaos ensues, and I’m not saying this to scare anybody, but we can feel it already beginning to happen around the edges.

So the questions we need to ask ourselves are not is the world getting warmer our sea levels Rising our people and animals going to be severely disrupted the answer to All of those questions is yes, what we have to figure out is in our culture the culture that we built the thing that is ours not done to us, but by us how will we put in place game theory that leads to cooperation?

Because when our backs are to the wall human beings have figured out how to do it before we figured out how to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. We figured out how to get planes to be able to land at one. Sort or another and so the Urgent cause in front of us is to figure out how with only one planet to share.

We’re going to coordinate our way to fixing the problem. We made in the first place. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. We’ll be back in a second with an answer to a question from last time. But first here’s a message from our sponsor.

If you want to learn to ride a bicycle don’t watch a video don’t read a book. Hey, it’s Seth and I’m here to talk about the akimbo workshops. These are interactive real-time online workshops that work and we’re devoting 2022 finding one that matches where you need to go if you’re ready to level up. I hope you’ll check out a Kimbo.com to find out about our proven effective workshops.

Seth my name is Kyle reading sound. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth Alicia from Charleston here – this is an apology – Caitlin.

Hi, sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth.

My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that completes my question. As you know, I love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode. I hope you’ll visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd. Click the appropriate button. Here’s a question from Mike about a topic we’ve covered before but it’s worth going through again.

Hey Seth, Mike here from Sydney Australia when I was a kid, I played in a Buddy Holly tribute show that used to play around the Yeah, we played different different pubs and clubs and at some venues people have to pay $40 per ticket to come and see the show and in some clubs. It was a different deal and the gig was free and anyone could wander in and wander out and it was very noticeable that at the shows where people had to pay 40 $50 to come and see the show they sat there. They watched it they cheered. And clapped and they just seem to get into the show more than the people where the show was free and they could wander in and wander out and they didn’t really care.

So my question is giving away ideas and giving away things that can that are going to help change culture. How do we balance this? How do we balance, you know giving an idea away for free, but then also expecting people to value that even though you just gave it away. Because often times when something is free or very low price people don’t value it. So what do we do?

Thank you. Thank you for taking this one up. Yes. There is a huge Gulf between the enrollment that people feel when they pay and when it just shows up for free and what the internet has done for everything that involves digits is turned so much of it upside down things that used to be really expensive my Free things that used to be free might end up being expensive and it turns out when people pay they take it more seriously cognitive dissonance kicks in sunk costs. There’s more commitment. Also when people pay we’re much more likely to have quote the right people unquote in the room because there’s nobody who’s just drifting in for a beer.

They made a commitment to be there when the right people are in the room virtual or of what we discover is that the atmosphere in the room changes, peer pressure changes expectations change even the performance in your case changes because you’re saying to yourself This is an audience that cares so we have to care more as well. I could go into great detail with plenty of examples that poor piano player at the Ramada Lobby sitting there. Maybe there are really good piano player, but surrounded by people who listening to the piano is their 40th highest priority. The piano player starts the phone it in they become embittered and then a career ends all because of free and the other hand when we charge a lot of people who might show up if it was free who might get involved don’t because they’re afraid because there’s friction charging creates this sort of friction. So what’s the advantage of free the advantage of free as Chris Anderson has pointed out in his book. Of the same name is it creates a sampling and a sharing mindset Tim O’Reilly famously said foremost creators. The enemy is not piracy.

The enemy is obscurity not being known if you have a factory that makes widgets and everyone in town comes and takes one for free you’re bankrupt. But if you have a factory that makes ideas and everyone in town comes and gets one. You’re rich because an idea isn’t taken its And as ideas spread they become more valuable.

And so we have this challenge which is how do we spread an idea for free and then create a motional enrollment? Because if you have emotional enrollment, the money will take care of itself. Someone could listen to every song John Legend has ever put on the radio for free, but they have to pay for the souvenir Edition for the autograph. Raff for the concert if enough people know your idea and there’s emotional enrollment the money will take care of itself.

So where does the emotional enrollment come from? Well one model as you pointed out with your buddy Holly band is if someone pays paying creates emotional enrollment emotional enrollment selects people who are willing to pay that’s the way it’s been for a really long time, but the If is what happens when the culture creates peer pressure when the culture announces that this is important. It’s important because we’ve all sampled it.

It’s important because people like us do things like this. It’s important because we’re all in the room together. It’s important because even though it’s free. We’re giving you a dirty look because you’re talking during the concert. And so what is ending up happening here is a division between getting paid to make a living and getting paid as a a signal and there are other versions of that signal and that signal have to do with is this what people like me do is this what my group does is this a thing I need to do to improve my status the way I fit in with my community in a few weeks here in the United States people are going to be voting voting is free but voting involves a lot of emotional commitment and unbelievably To me disappointingly about half the people in this country don’t vote.

They don’t vote not could they can’t afford it. But because they don’t want the emotional commitment to the process and to the outcome that Gulf between how much does it cost an MI committed is what people who create culture for a living as you do have to lean into what does it mean to be in the room.

Maybe you have to apply to be in the room. Maybe there’s a scarce number of seats. Seats in the room, maybe something magical happens in the room and you need to bring a friend or you can’t come in or maybe you can’t come in unless a friend brings you all of these are ways to ensure that the people who are engaging in what you do are engaging for the right reasons.

The right reasons have nothing to do with the fact that you play in tune. The right reasons have nothing to do with Buddy. Holly. The right reasons have to do with am I emotionally committed to this journey to this process? Us to this group of people am I here because I want to be here or did I just wander in so there’s no simple answer but it really helps to see the questions.

We hope you come back.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right is it? Puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number.

Reason why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 9321-the-zoom-revolution- <==

More than a hundred years ago in one of the earliest episodes of the akimbo podcast. I jumped on the bandwagon about the telephone. The telephone was still in its infancy. Most people were using it but I went on and on about how it was going to transform the world as we know it changing real estate the way business has worked international relations politics media and eventually leading us to bulletin boards and The internet I’m back. I’m back to talk about another sea change one that is also easily minimized, but it’s going to rework the fabric of our culture.

Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a second to talk about video conferencing zoom and the future of everything, but first here’s a message from Sponsor get better clients there in three words is the strategy of any freelancer who wants to do better work get better clients. You can’t work more hours, but you can work for people who appreciate the work you want to do.

They will push you harder. You will do better work. They will talk about you. You will get paid more you will be more proud of what you produce how to get better clients. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and we have built a workshop just for you if you work for yourself. I really think you need to check it out. It’s a w-w-w DOT the Freelancers Workshop.com.

It’s not a bunch of videos It’s a workshop. You will work with other Freelancers working your way forward to figure out how to do this work that matters. I hope you’ll take a minute to check it out. The Freelancers Workshop.com. We Love to have you join us.

Yes, I’m talking about Zoom. You’ve spent too much time on zoom. And the reason it feels like too much time is because it’s enforced and it’s not used properly. It’s not used in the way. The technology wants to be used but more about that in a minute and throughout this riff. I’m going to use the word Zoom when I’m talking about any sophisticated low-latency video conferencing. system that is widely adopted it’s entirely possible that Zoom will win but it’s also possible that they will listen to people who want it to Simply Be A Place for traditional meetings and occasional emojis and video filters that someone else will figure out how software that combines the best of the telephone and television two of the three biggest Changers of our culture over the last hundred years will transform how We live and how we work. I’ve come up with a list of 18 things some small some big. I want to take you through them because some of them will resonate and maybe you’ll run with these ideas.

Number one timing. It used to be that a meeting how to take more than 3 minutes because going to a meeting and getting back from a meeting was a commitment you might drive across town to meet with your agent. You might fly across the country to make a sales pitch or or you might get invited to a wedding all of these things involved a lot of schlepping both context switching and physical location as a result. We decided to honor the people who were coming first by not starting the meeting on time because what will happen if people are late and missed the beginning and second by having the meeting last more than three or four minutes when we brought the telephone along we didn’t do that. We didn’t schedule Minute phone calls just to check in on a relative because starting and finishing phone call was a pretty straightforward task.

I went to a wedding on Zoom last week and like Real Weddings the first half-hour consisted of people sitting quietly listening to background music, but in a real wedding that half hour of buffer time because people don’t want to miss the beginning because people feel socially shamed for showing up late that Half hour in a real wedding involves people chatting with other people that they know in a zoom wedding in which a traditional wedding is forced into Zoom everyone sat there silently because they were all on mute.

Well timing rears its head because the fact is if you call a wedding for nine o’clock at night, you can start the wedding at nine o’clock because everyone knows how to get there on time which leads to the second part, which is commuting. Muting goes away. It might go away when it comes to going to one meeting or it could go away when it comes to going to the office in general.

Some people have a job where they have to go to the office maybe a surgeon for example, but for a lot of people the purpose of the office is to be with the other people who are exchanging ideas, and if we use video conferencing properly we can dramatically accelerate 8 the efficiency and yes, the joy associated with connecting with other people professionally if we use it properly as opposed to just jamming another 30-minute meeting into another Zoom room that what we’ve built is the system that transforms space just like the telephone did bringing us right next to somebody who we need to be right next to and then away from them when we’re done.

Number three the size of the group there was a natural limit to how many people could be on a phone call. Pretty much to conference calls have always been a problem because we can’t see other people and thus get signals about who’s going to talk next or how people are reacting or responding, but the flexibility of a video call if used properly means three people 30 people if you do it, right? Right, you can dramatically shift the size of the group.

Now a lot of people who are misusing Zoom are viewing it as a way of exposing status and power. They are commanding 20 people to be in the meeting. The should have three they’re not using recordings or a shared Google Docs as a way of actually getting participation there simply lecturing to people who are victims of their power again. We’re going to see a dramatic shift happen as flexibility and Whoa show up people adding folks to meetings people leaving meetings working its way through the day as we discover how to connect when we don’t have the barriers of space involved.

The next idea has some sub ideas. I’m calling it multi-modal when we’re on a phone conference call. The only thing you can do is talk, but on a video conference, you can talk you can see other people you can text and you can work on a sharedoc all at the same time multimodal is a game changer because side conversations don’t have to detract from what the meeting was for.

What were able to do is to create environments of intensive creativity where lots of things happen in a very short period of time almost like a Harlem Globetrotters game almost like a charette at an architect’s office. No-look passes people working things behind the scenes things weaving left and right and then coming together almost in real time to create something that could never be created Anywhere But Here and this is one reason why number 6 breakout rooms are So important because breakout rooms change the rhythm of what is happening instead of it being this enforced synchronized March in which most people are bored most of the time videoconferencing creates this environment where we can take a group of eight breaking it into twos break it into fours break it into a 5 and a 3 go off Sprint come back back and forth and back and forth working together inside the medium.

To create something of real value number seven video video as we learned from television is incredibly powerful at weaving the culture. If you think that people can’t see you when you’re on mute you are mistaken showing up in the office has one other important function, which is people see you they see your energy. They smell your pheromones. They are able to engage with you your Energy Etc.

Well Zoom is a poor substitute for that. But because we’re forced to use it right this minute. It is a substitute for it and people who choose to bring energy to that interaction are adding more value than those that don’t this is more than just putting on the touch of filter. This is choosing to exert energy on a platform that rewards you for doing. So again, It’s on the organizer for organizing bad Zoom meetings. Don’t do that organize them with intent for the right reason if you can send a memo send a memo, but if you can’t send a memo if we’re trying to create this future of interaction where level one and there’s at least 12 levels left to go.

The next thing that video conferencing does that the telephone couldn’t do is it can be a synchronous what I mean by this is That synchronized conversations require everyone to be on the conversation in real-time at the same time. This is really expensive. It’s expensive because what it means is that you have to stop what you’re doing and do this with everyone else at the same time. This is one reason why so many organizations that are finding people at home are demanding synchronized Zoom calls because in the back of their head, they want to make sure people are working because in the back of their head, they’re worried that somebody’s out walking the dog when they should quote be at work. And so we demand butts and chairs. We want to look people in the eye even if they’re sort of snoozing on us because again, it’s about demonstrating power and Status the alternative asynchronous says, wait a minute.

I can make a six minute video. I can send it to everyone who needs to watch it. People can watch it build up speed. They can go back and re-watch it they can take notes. And then we can have the short meeting where we discuss what needs to be discussed. But the asynchronous part do it at your own pace when it fits into your schedule changes the economic Dynamic of what’s on offer.

Number nine. We recording Richard Nixon taught us that recording your meetings and phone calls might not be such a good idea.

But we need to assume that lots of Zoom calls are going to be recorded whether you know it or not what happens when it’s on the record what happens when we can actually create recordings and then apply insight and data collection to what was said to actually figure out what’s working in the meetings. What’s not where are we headed? And why at the same time we now have real-time translation.

This is already built in to Google meetings. What it means is that you can subtitle your conversations in real time in Just about any language in the world. If this was on a Star Trek episode in 1964. No one would believe it. And here it is. It’s a commonplace anyone can have it. It’s free what this means is that while there will still be misunderstandings International cooperation is significantly easier than it used to be and if we combine number nine recording a number 10 translation, we get transcription and what transcription means Is that we can end up with a written record of everything that was set. Once there’s a written record of everything that was said, it’s searchable.

We can go back through the archive who said what about what suddenly the interactions we are having at work can become computer-assisted all that stuff. They used to just disappear into the ether is now they’re on the record easy to understand to go back over to figure out the intent and to make sure we’re doing it, right.

Number 12. This is a big Frontier which is computer aware because we have a transcription because we have a recording because AI is now really good at listening. Imagine what happens when we point a computer to what’s going on inside one of these meetings. Imagine what happens when we invite a computer to these meetings when we can ask it a question when it can teach us something we don’t know when it can chime in.

With data, we didn’t even know it had suddenly the AI which knows a lot about our history can stay back to us. The thing that we merely asserted in a previous era which leads to number 13 triggers what happens when the computer that’s listening to everything we’re saying here is certain phrases and knows that it can then play a video for everybody knows that it can then send a text to everybody who’s in the meeting now.

This catch up because we’re not even finished with the list we’re talking about a world where real estate is valued totally differently where commutes are a choice where there’s a transcription where there is computer-assisted insight into what’s going on. We’re meetings might last 6 minutes where people get called into meetings for the right reasons and asked to leave for the right reasons where we have breakout rooms where people are really heard when it is time for them to be heard where the power Amex are shifted from an organizer using an hour of our time because that’s what Outlook says the meeting should last for too many organizers working together to actually create lots of positive energy as the result of what just happened on the screen.

Okay. You still with me number 14. One of my favorites is gamification what happens when there are points in scores and badges and wins for people as they work their way through their day at work. Because the fact is we get them everywhere else. It’s one thing to get frequent flyer miles. It’s quite another to score a lot of points in the video game. We’re entertaining ourselves with that night if we can figure out what the proper metrics are. Why isn’t there a game associated with so much of this work? We do every marketer is playing a game. What’s the click rate? What’s the open rate? What’s the conversion rate?

They’re constantly cycling things to figure out what works well. Why isn’t that happening in meetings? Why isn’t there a real-time way for people to say? You’re talking too much? Why can’t the zoom report back? Hey, there are eight people in this meeting. And when you started talking five of them defocus the screen and started browsing the internet.

Why wouldn’t you want to know that this is going to change the way we talk to each other professionally because new data is coming to us in new ways. All right, I got three more number 16. It’s always on. What does it mean for to be always on what your office is always on from the time you get there till the time you leave your in the office?

Well, look for Zoom Booms to be always on drop in when you need to talk to certain people drop out when you’re done this idea of checking in with one another not on a regular scheduled basis, but at the water cooler, there’s nothing about computer video conferencing that makes that difficult at all number 17 like most things associated with The internet it scales to free and once it’s free, it’s widely adopted and once it’s widely adopted the network effect becomes ever more powerful.

It’s inconceivable in 1985 to say to somebody what’s your phone number? And they say I don’t have a phone just as it’s becoming clear that everybody is going to be engaging in this video format because going to work spending an hour parking. Sitting in an office only interacting with two or three people who happen to have physical proximity to you and then getting back in the car and driving all the way home.

People are going to look at that like it was crazy because at some level it was and what this means is that first organizations that deal just in information will go virtual and then bit by bit as fast as they can all organizations will the idea that Banks investment Banks need to call people back to work in, New York. And that is nothing but a power grab because if they devoted any percentage of their rent to actually building video conferencing that worked as opposed to being an analog of what they’re used to at work. They would discover a a huge impact in the way people are given a voice and the way information flows and then number 18 Chris Anderson’s the long tail right now. You only get to interact with a small group of people who are In your circle and you have little in common with most of them.

But with the long tail does is it creates pockets of people who share something. So, where are the nine people who are launching a Kickstarter for their new novel today those nine people might benefit by connecting with each other in a zoom call. Somebody is going to figure out how to create this ongoing circle of focused ad hoc.

All groups, maybe not even ad hoc may be long-term of people with a lot in common. These people are not connected by geography. They don’t even get a paycheck from the same company, but they desperately need to be connected. This pandemic has wrought a lot of damage but one thing it is done is accelerated the arrival of the future it moved videoconferencing three to five years ahead.

Boom all at once. It’s no longer a discussion about whether or not Not you’ve been on a zoom call. Of course, you have the discussion now going forward is whether we’re going to get stuck with skew morphs whether we’re going to get stuck putting all of the worst parts of meetings into video conferencing and leave out all of the magic potential that it has it’s going to cause massive disruption real estate alone transport commuting fashion. All of it is going to be changed by the fact that Youmans desperately.

To connect with one another and this machine this machine is no substitute for high-fiving someone in the hall for being able to judge their body language in a way that we’ve been studying for hundreds of thousands of years, but at the same time used properly it creates so many opportunities for people to speak up to go outside their comfort zone to be heard to be connected with the people. They need to be connected to it is the dynamic of our future certainly For the next five years figuring out how to be great at it and figuring out how to create a platform for others to be great at it is a new frontier. Thanks for listening to my rant.

We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with some really juicy questions from earlier episodes plus an announcement, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

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My question is and that completes my question.

I truly love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question about this episode or anything previous please visit akimbo dot link. That’s Aki MBO link2006. Click the appropriate button before we get to Sue’s question. I wanted to give you an update about akimbo the home of the alt NBA and the other workshops that are run often with me as the lead voice as of last week. Akimbo is a b Corp which means that it is legally obligated. Get to work in addition as a company to be in the public interest and I’m thrilled that my colleagues Alex pack and Marie shot will be owning and running the organization. So I’m going to be focused on new workshops. I’m working with Ramon Ray TK Coleman and the Duke and the one and only Margo Aaron on some that will be announcing upcoming and I am thrilled that akimbo is now structured and organized to become the tushin that it can be helping people learn not just get educated helping people lean in and connect in a time when there isn’t nearly enough connection going on.

Congratulations to the team. I can’t wait to see what they build.

Hello Seth. It’s to Hetherington here greetings from a little value in Southwest Wales recently. I’ve returned to my most favorite book of yours graceful a small but perfectly formed a book published. 2010 and I’ve been wondering two things firstly 10 years on what are the themes of graceful that need to be heard and perhaps reinterpreted for today.

Secondly. I’m especially interested in Innovation and I wonder what graceful Innovation looks like and how we can Inspire and encourage each other to pursue this perhaps contrasting with the growth at all costs Mantra we so often Here do your current very own. That’s thanks in Welsh.

Thank you for this question to I’ve been thinking about that. You book a lot in the last six months or so. I’ve posted it in the show notes if anyone wants to take a look it’s free. It’s based on my book linchpin and the idea in graceful is resilience that there are two ways to change the culture the old model. The capitalist industrial model is about scarcity and power that If I have it, you don’t have it.

And if you have it, I don’t have it and the idea of scarcity and power is that we can force change to happen by leveraging our access to Capital by becoming a monopoly by forcing people to do things. They might not want to do the alternative which I think is more modern and more hopeful and what we need right now.

It’s also more resilient is the idea that culture reflects what we put into it the more we Cute the more we get back the more we contribute the better the culture gets the better the culture gets the better it is for everyone. And so we can argue that it makes no sense to pay taxes for park because other people who didn’t pay the taxes will benefit from the park, but that sort of argument means that there are no parks and I hope we can agree that life is better if there are parks and we can multiply this Times Public School.

We can multiply this Times Public Health the idea of graceful and Resilience is that each of us can take responsibility to show up and say I’m turning on a light to show up and lead to show up and make things better that opportunity works. Even when the world is upside down. In fact, it works especially when the world is upside down.

Thanks for teeing up that question Sue.

Poff this is Peter and London. I have a couple of Reflections and questions about your episode on interoperability. I’m currently completing a PhD in design engineering where my focus is designing for improved human connectivity. So you got me thinking about the social side of interoperability. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on language currency and capitalism through the lens of interoperability language in some instances seems a brilliant example of a cooperatively interoperable system.

It allows people who have no prior experience of each other to communicate yet. It can also create adversarial conflict and how about currency and capitalism currency seems a great example of a tool that facilitates Cooperative interoperability, but many aspects of capitalism seem to stimulate adversarial interoperability. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any or all of the above and thanks again for the great work that you do cheers.

This one can go really deep and I’m looking forward to reading your PhD. Thisis interoperability is different than adversarial interoperability. So let’s talk about both language is a beautiful example of each of them interoperable because a language that only you speak is worthless that the idea of a language is here’s the dictionary. Here’s the thesaurus anyone who wants to can speak it. We can’t stop you and this is why grouchy grammarians are such a ridiculous sideshow.

Because the language doesn’t belong to you the Oxford comma doesn’t belong to you. It is a way all of us communicate with each other. And so language is plastic. It changes someone can show up with new words new phrases new ways of engaging and if others choose to engage in that way, it becomes part of the language if they don’t the person feels like a babbling fool because no one understands what they were getting at and a lot of what we do as we work in. Culture is change the culture based on the words that we use. So it is interoperable and it’s also adversarial and that you can’t keep someone from speaking your language.

If you try you will defeat the entire purpose of the language itself. And so currency began as the way for the king to give his soldiers a method for buying stuff when they were out on patrol when they were on their way to For the delete David graeber wrote about this in his fabulous book Debt. Here’s how you do it. If you’re the king you print up some currency you give it to your soldiers and you make two rules one. Everyone in the Kingdom has to accept the money in exchange for supplies for the soldiers and two taxes have to be paid in the money. The soldiers have boom you have an economy and that economy is based on an interoperable currency that anybody can An trade for now, of course, it’s not adversarial in that. You can’t print up your own currency. As soon as you try to print up your own currency. It’s no longer scarce and currency is based on scarcity.

So what is bitcoin Bitcoin was the idea of using a math formula and a clever social network hack to create scarcity and value in something that is interoperable. I’m not sure if Corey. I would say it’s adversarial. It’s open its open in that built into the nature of Bitcoin is it’s all inspectable. The blockchain is public but then we throw into the mix capitalism industrialism Monopoly because these things work really hard to create new forms of scarcity. There’s only one hardware store in town Walmart puts everyone else out of business in the neighborhood. So you have to Shop there that is not open in the way. The Bitcoin is open.

But is there adversarial interoperability? Well at some level one of the ideas Surface by people like Tim Wu in the modern anti antitrust movement is the idea that one way we undermine the inexorable rise of Monopoly is by ensuring adversarial interoperability that you ought to be able to see your files on Google you ought to be able to extract your social graph. Facebook because if you could you could go to another network with just a few clicks if that was possible then all the people who are seeking to win by being the only one would have to up their game so that they could actually be seen as the best one so we can rant about this all day long, but I hope that that’s a good start.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up when you’re going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why Why we don’t write that book.

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==> 9505-a-quantum-theory-of-customers- <==

A clarinet can make a virtually infinite number of sounds there are practically an infinite number of stars. We could never list all the combinations of ice cream that are available and yet there are fewer than 100 basic elements on the earth. Hey, it’s Seth and this is akimbo will be back in a sec. And to talk about digital analog and Quantum States, but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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I actually really want to talk about customer service but first Quantum States, why are there fewer than 100 elements? Everything from uranium to hydrogen and in between but you will recognize the names of most of them and there aren’t that many to choose from on the other hand analog things like the sounds and instrument can make are numberless.

So why the distinction the distinction is that electrons which determine which element we’re dealing with need to be here or there? They are never in between or at least not for very long here or there. They have different Quantum States and when they go from one state to another they either take an energy or give off energy, but they are sticky one state or another which is what we need to understand so we can talk about my oven if all you want to do is heat up frozen pizza. You can go online and buy a toaster oven for $69. Is everyone who has spent more than $69 on a toaster oven has made a decision about how to spend their time and their money that the oven in their home might be for entertaining large groups, but it’s also possibly a story they tell themselves about what a kitchen is supposed to look like about luxury about status or just good engineering.

Maybe it’s about making sure you can produce what you want to produce when you need to produce. Sit you’ve probably guessed from listening to this podcast that I have a pretty nice oven. Not one of those crazy expensive ovens from France that you can’t turn off but a nice enough oven. Well 13 months after we got our new oven.

It stopped being an oven in the sense that to be an oven when you turn it on it is supposed to get hot so I called the company that made it and I’m going to tell you it was GE not because this is a screed about General Electric, but because if I didn’t you’d wonder the whole time. Who it was so I called up GE and I said my oven is broken now in this moment.

I am not like I was five minutes before that because my Quantum State as a customer is not on an analog scale. So let me break that down to show you what I mean. When we listen to a vinyl record or a live concert music gets quiet or it gets loud and it does that Gradually moving from one tiny step to another if I look at a population of people say a million people and I look at their height. I can plot a curve of how tall each one of those people are and that curve looked at from a suitable distance will be a curve. It won’t be very bumpy because with the million people I’ll see a normal distribution.

Most people are in the center. Some people are At one Edge, some people are at the other it’s smooth even though looked at closely enough. It’s not for our purposes of understanding the statistics of that population. It’s as smooth as we need it to be the problem comes when we zoom in close because when we zoom in close consumer states are not the same as height height changed gradually when we were growing even We had a growth spurt.

We weren’t growing so fast that someone could see us grow but consumers consumers flip and flop if you look at the distribution of reviews on Yelp or Amazon, you will not see the same curve that you see for the distribution of height in any population. It is not a normal distribution. It is in fact a bimodal distribution with one big hump at one star reviews and one big hump at five star reviews.

There’s a reason for this that’s caused by two factors one. It’s quite possible that for most Mass market products. Most people are actually in the middle. So yeah, it’s fine. But and it’s a huge but the only people who are energized enough to post your review are either the trolls in the critics or Raving fans in the middle.

You don’t bother who bothers to spend the time to post a three-star review. It was pretty good. They did what they said they were going to do. I might come back that’s not much of a review. I don’t want to write that review and I sure don’t want to read that review. And so when we deal with individual consumers who are going to talk about their interaction with you and your work, we have to understand that the only ones Who are going to take most actions are at one end of the curve or the other?

My thesis is this for most of the time customer service that is worth investing in is either about moving somebody from at fine too. I am a raving fan or it’s about mollifying and saving the day for someone who is about to flip to the quantum state of I hate you. I hate you because you lied to me. I hate you because you tricked me. I hate you because you made me look stupid.

And now now that the internet has connected us not just to each other but to the brands in our lives, it’s imperative that organizations that do customer service think very hard about the state a customer is in because if you treat all customers like they are on a smooth continuous curve you are going to be wrong almost all the time. You’re going to spend money on the wrong things and you’re going to end up. Disappointing the people you are hoping to turn into raving fans.

So back to my oven in the moment that I am calling General Electric. I feel really fragile. I feel fragile because I made a significant commitment to putting this thing into my house. It’s a daily reminder of the choice I made so the first thing that happens when you call the Oven company to get service is they ask you for the serial number?

That’s not an unreasonable thing to ask for because how else to know if it’s under warranty well to get the serial number out of my oven. I needed to lie on my back elevated just above the oven door sticking my head into the oven so that I could see written upside down and backwards on the roof of the oven in small 14-point type a complicated serial number long enough to have included every Human on earth having a hundred ovens.

Fortunately. I have a camera on my phone. So I stuck my hand in the oven and took a picture of it. But even that was in high res enough to figure out if that was an s or a 5 so in my elevated Quantum State, we began our interaction by me doing an errand for the company around a poorly designed label that should have been easy to read and easy to find if General Electric answers the phone.

And a helpful person sees me understands me and deals with the problem. They have validated my initial decision. They have made it much more likely that I’m going to move into raving fan territory. The investment of $5 of General Electric’s money into this interaction is worth $5,000 in marketing instead General Electric’s independent Appliance division had done the A CFO or an accountant had looked hard at this and said wait a minute.

If we can put people in a phone tree, maybe some of them will lose interest before we have to deal with them. Oh if it’s a warranty call, let’s figure out how to spread out our costs associated with excessive. It takes a little bit longer. We’ll save some more money that money we save goes straight to the bottom line.

My hunch. Is that a marketer wasn’t in those meetings? So as you can imagine I was put in the phone tree, and then finally I talked to someone who said I would have to wait eight days before someone came to fix my oven. Yes. I have a toaster oven and we have an oven at work. So no one’s going to starve here.

Maybe there are good logistical reasons to spread it out and have someone wait eight days. All you need to do when you’re spending the five dollars on an alert caring person who you have. In the freedom to be him or herself is say wow. Really? Sorry. This happened. We’re going to do everything we can to fix it. Here’s how you contact me. Here’s how we’re going to keep you up to date about what’s coming along and here’s some data a website and easy way for you to track what’s upcoming. We’re going to make it so that we can do it all in one visit. We hear you we see you.

This is not what the CFO wants the CFO wants you to Say there’s an eight-hour window. Please be home the whole time. Well, you’ve already guessed the fact that they didn’t show up that I waited from eight until noon and they didn’t show up and they didn’t tell me until 11:45 in the morning that they weren’t going to show up between 8 a.m. And noon now in a world where they are tracking dogs cats and people in everything that we do all the time.

It’s really hard to imagine that they didn’t know until 11:45. Wasn’t going to show up but that’s not the point of the rant point to the rant is to understand that again. You have a Quantum moment here a moment. We’re spending the time and the effort to see somebody when they are about to be excited to a new Quantum State really pays off the first 13 months. I had this oven they didn’t have to spend a penny to engage with me because it wouldn’t have made a difference. I was already be happy but in these key moments of breakage, they can intervene. They can intervene at reasonably low costs by Being Human by saying, oh wait a minute. Here’s a high value customer who doesn’t just have a toaster oven. We made a promise to this person and we are about to break it. What should we do now, but if you view the world as a continuous analog system a bell curve. Well, everyone’s pretty much the same. Name, but everyone pretty much isn’t the same regardless of their income where they’re coming from what they look like what they do.

Everyone is at a different Quantum state. So here’s one of the challenges of customer service triage triage. What’s triage triage is a medical term that they use at the emergency room putting people into three groups. That’s the T RI in triage triage means this person is going to get well no matter what we do this person is going to Die no matter what we do and this person the third group they will respond to immediate intervention in a busy emergency room. Which group do you think they spend time on the problem is this the problem is the old model based on a lack of information meant that the only way to indicate that you were in the third group that your Quantum state was at risk was to have a fit to write a letter to CEO to figure out how to raise your hand higher than everyone else to stomp your foot.

It’s a great old cartoon. One of those fat suited Rich guys with a cigar is standing at the airplane counter while the long-suffering gate agent is making an announcement that there’s no room on the plane and the big fat cat says, do you know who I am? Well, the unflappable gate agent takes out her microphone and says to the terminal attention ladies and gentlemen. And there’s someone at the ticket counter who has Amnesia if anyone can come help, we would appreciate it.

But levity aside having a fit at the counter doesn’t help anyone. It certainly doesn’t help those poor folks on the front lines who have had all of their agency Stripped Away by giant systems designed by people trying to save a nickel and it doesn’t help the customer who shouldn’t have to put on public displays of emotion to get I think that they need particularly when they are in a risky Quantum state. So what we’re left with is this we’re left with organizations that now need to figure out based on Behavior Clues analysis of the life cycle who is in a Quantum state that can be adjusted because neglecting your best customers figuring out how to give a bonus to people who switch to your phone service, but not take care of the people who are already on it.

That’s a long-term way to Brand death on the other hand. I get that you probably can’t afford to spend an unlimited amount of money on every single customer. What’s the opportunity the opportunity is to treat different people differently and to get really smart about what it means for someone to be different.

How many days after someone buys a new car should a Men with authority call that person on the phone and say how do you like your car? Because if you never call them well, then you’re leaving them to seethe to marinate in their own juices and to probably vent at some point. But if you call them too often, well then maybe your CFO is going to say you’re spending too much money.

So the art of this is to realize that what makes something a purple cow. It makes it remarkable is that you designed it right in the the first place that you created something worth talking about and then on top of it that when something stumbles and yes now, you know something stumbled because of the internet of things because there is a chip in the device when something stumbles what proactive effort can you take so that you turn the stumble into such a plus that people insist on talking about it, and yes, it keeps Harder and harder to do that your Amazon package arrived an hour late. Oh boy. Boohoo in the old days. It took two weeks to get something by mail and now we’re complaining because it got there an hour late. Everything is getting faster.

Everything that is measured keeps getting improved, but it’s a huge but there’s a role here for uman intervention and it needs to be human intervention based on an understanding that different people want different things in different. Moments and that if you are putting your customer service people through a grinder giving them nothing but rules that they are not allowed to break.

It’s extremely unlikely that you will develop a brand for the ages.

I like telling the story of Tony hsieh and Zappos because I tell it a little differently than most people. Let’s say you are a mission was to build an online shoe store now an online shoe store sort of by definition. Is a ridiculous idea. What do we care more about trying on then shoes shoes need to fit you can’t walk around with shoes that don’t fit just because they’re pretty online shoes. That doesn’t make any sense.

And when Zappos launched it was the most crowded time ever to launch an internet company the cost of All Those ads all that promo prohibitive. So what did Tony do Tony understood that anybody who calls in to Zappos is in a moment where their Quantum state is about to shift where they’re either going to go down a state and become a different sort of element Untouchable or go up a state releasing energy and making things better spreading the word and so they did a few things. The first thing they did was they trained the people they hired and after their weeks of training They set them down and they said you know, we like you and we’d like you to work here but here’s three thousand dollars. If you will quit today, they bribed their employees to quit before they started work.

Why would you do that? Well, you did it because if someone turned down that money you knew they were in it for the long haul for the right reasons. The second thing they did was instead of rewarding people to get off the phone. They rewarded people to stay on the phone. And that meant that people in their most fraught moment in the moment when their Quantum State could go up or down we’re eagerly engaged with on the phone. What did that lead to it led to conversation it led to remarkability. It was probably the cheapest marketing campaign of its kind and yes Zappos sold for almost a billion dollars because it customer service rep was willing to sit for two hours. Three hours four hours on the phone talking about shoes because they weren’t talking about shoes.

They were talking about their customers. So I think it’s naive to say all customer service should be instant and perfect that any customer at any time should get the CEO on the phone and that she should help that customer no matter what her request is. I think it’s totally legitimate to say to a customer. You know, what your expectations don’t match our promises.

And we’re not going to be able to serve you here’s a phone number for our competition. Good luck to you we can say that with dignity and respect and wish them well because our job is not to be perfect all the time, but our job might be to make promises and keep them and one of the promises that a successful brand makes is this we accept that you will have Quantum moments when it’s all on the table when the chips are down and in that moment.

We will respect where you came from see who you are make a judgment about what you are worth to us in the future and us to you and act accordingly because the way to justify all this internet snooping is not to some marketer can figure out how behind our back they can Target us for something that they think we want, but maybe it could be mutual that we like the fact that the companies we do business with have thought about who we are have thought about what we need. Need an offer to us.

It doesn’t always take a lot. Mostly it takes understanding that the person in front of you is in this moment about to make a decision. And once they make a decision, it’s not going to be that easy to fix it in the future knowing that and acting on it is a chance to make things better right at the key moment.

Thanks for listening in a second. We’ll be back with two good questions. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Maria hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth. This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new pump pricer warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey Sun. Hi, this is Russell is from Grace. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is and that completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you if you’ve got a question about this or any previous episode.

Hope you’ll drop me a note just visit a Kimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2sd click. The appropriate button to questions came in from opposite sides of the globe. Both of them poignant. Both of them important.

Here we go. Hey Seth, my name is Aguilar from Vilnius Lithuania.

I am now finishing the second year of teaching at the faculty of architecture. Comparatively to other university courses in this country this faculty receives very good students. However, teaching kind of a secondary subject such as history of architecture while design project is considered as the main I faced difficulties of opening minds and hearts of majority of students to embrace history of architecture as complementary, but also very important I uh, Opening and mind tickling subject necessary for conscious and erudite practitioners responsible for our present and future environment.

My main goal is to encourage critical thinking curiosity and instead of stuffing dry data such as names and years to help them look at architecture and history as Dynamic multi-layered field of Interest. Rest, but I have received very little and luckily very warm reception for my teaching from the students.

I noticed that a majority prefers a recipe kind of tasks the fearful thing gauge into discussion and through the times of pandemics having to teach online. I’ve been facing Zoom with some 40 faceless Windows majority finds excuses for showing their faces even been asked and I see no point in employing autocratic methods of teaching With that, I mean to oblige them to turn cameras on.

Listening to your podcast for more than two years. I kept raising a question. What a good teacher should be like today and what matters for successful teaching of such subject can be And while finding my own answers, I would love to hear yours. Thank you Seth. Take care best from illness.

Thank you for the work. You’re doing those students the ones who appreciate the work are so lucky to have you and you are right there at the chasm the chasm between learning and education you’re showing up as a teacher seeking enrollment ready to turn on lights help people get to a new level and your students your students are daring you begging you to offer them education instead. Will this be on the test?

What’s the minimal amount of work? I’m going to turn off my camera so I can surf the net And not be distracted by you or embarrassed that I’m not looking at you and so because we have brainwashed kids for so long indoctrinated them into a system that wants nothing for them from them, but there are compliance you are paying the price because you’re one of the good ones you are teacher who’s there for the right reasons teaching the right thing.

So how to move forward. Well, I’ve two things in mind the first one is enrollment has to Voluntary that there are some people in your class who want to be there giving them a chance to raise their hand creating a circle for them status for them away to say this is for people who want to be here. You won’t get many but the ones you get will be there for the right reason and you won’t need to wrap their knuckles with a ruler and you won’t need to ask them to turn on their video and that offering this enrichment to the ones who want it and Eating them helping them level up in the eyes of their peers that starts to undo the indoctrination which leads to the second half. What do we do with the masses of kids? It’s not their fault since they were five people have been pushing them to act this way in education.

It seems to me what we need is Project centered student-driven education basically saying to kids. All right fine. I’ll give you your a here’s what you have to do to get your a you have to pick what you’re going to do and you have to do it beautifully that this choice of yours to pick it to pick from one of a list serves as a form of enrollment.

If it’s Project based, it means that you can finish the project the sooner you finish the project the faster you can get back to surfing the web fine with me, but then there’s going to be another project that what you can help students understand is that Based student-driven student-centered education turns into learning and that as long as they’re brainwashed into believing that they’ll do anything to get that great. Let them know that this is what they have to do to get that grade and as someone who teaches I gotta tell you it must be completely enervating and undermining to be in that Zoom room with people who have their cameras off.

I would say to those kids either come or don’t come if you don’t come you don’t pass. And if you come you have to come you have to be present just because we’re not in a room doesn’t mean we can’t be together in this room.

Hi Seth, this is Tony from Australia. I own a company where we have about 50% about Workforce in a warehouse situation where they really need to be physically present sort of building the product assembling it and then shipping it and then about 50% of our team are kind of Administrative marketing kind of sales related stuff and I mean this interesting dilemma where I can be really flexible with my upstairs team as we call them because they’re able to work from home to utilize, you know, these tools that you speak about it.

Just listen to your Zoom podcast. Hence the question and I feel like I can create this really flexible and kind of you know, human-centric work environment for these people, but then I have this team that’s sort of Physically present and it’s really hard to build flexibility and kind of you know space into their workflow and we do nice things like of group meditations and you know group launches and all those kinds of things, but I just wondered if you had any thoughts as to how people who run businesses that require a bit of physical showing up.

Can I guess think a little bit more flexibly or a little bit more laterally around how we have E8 interesting and novel workspaces for our staff to be really interested to hear your thoughts. I’m in Australia where the pain to make hasn’t really been as in a part of Australia. I should say well depends on Mike hasn’t been as damaging. So we still have a lot of face-to-face work. So yeah, really curious to hear your thoughts and thank you so much for your podcast. It’s one of the highlights of my week when I see anyone come through.

Thanks.

I grew up in a family that had a factory my dad’s factory-made Hospital Clips 90% of the mental hospital cribs around the world made in Buffalo New York by UAW organized Workforce. And yes, there’s a difference between the place where they’re bending the steel where there’s grease on just about every surface and the office which has carpet on the floor.

And even in a factory as egalitarian is the one my sister now runs the truth is still there the truth is that How’s jobs office jobs feel cushier then factory jobs, and because the people in the office have found some power some status and some leverage. They’ve given themselves the snacks. They’ve given themselves an easier job easier physically for sure and they say to the people in the factory. Well, you can come up front. As soon as you’re willing to do the work that we do up front and that work might mean closing sales that work might. I mean designing a brochure that changes someone’s mind too often.

The people who have the cushy jobs forget about the part that earned them the cushy job and just like the cushy part. It’s interesting. You might hear some tapping in the background as I record this in a few other podcasts. They’re rebuilding an entire brick wall. Just outside the window here people who lay brick for a living work really hard way harder physically than I ever have.

And they are not paid particularly. Well that the Delta the gap between how much they’re paid and how much value they create is easy to measure but because lots of people say they can lay brick the people who hire brick masons end up racing to the bottom anyone who’s good enough can have that slot and then a couple blocks from here is a place that does design and they’re hard up to find people skilled enough and passionate. Enough to do what they need done.

And so they pay more and they pay more and they pay more and the Gap the amount of value taken off the table by the worker is far greater. And so people who manage who lead White Collar idea workers have discovered that many of those jobs go under filled because they can’t find enough people to do them.

Whereas with a hundred and fifty year Head Start industrial factory work. There’s a long line. people who want to do that so I haven’t answered your question, but I sort of set the stage for the answer which is you are trying to create an egalitarian and open workplace, but I’m not sure you’re being as clear as you could be to everyone involved about what the jobs are and what it takes to have one of the jobs that there’s no reason that someone who works on the factory side can’t aspire to work a different job and that you could probably create an environment where people who choose to rotate one way or the other and the people who choose to rotate toward factory jobs would do that knowing what the deal is how many hours they have to be at the machine how much they get paid for it.

There’s examples of for example car dealerships that have rotated the people who work in the service department with the people who work on the sales side. And usually what happens is that the service people want to go back to doing service and the sales people want to go back to In sales, so neither job is better than the other but the jobs are different and we shouldn’t pretend that they’re not at the very same time.

We really do owe it to ourselves to our organizations to clean out the cruft to give the people who aren’t liking their job who are simply showing up a chance to do that work somewhere else because if someone’s enjoying all the perks, but not producing the value on the office side. Well, then they’re taking from Buddy else and the same thing is true for work on the factory side.

That work is still work work is difficult in a competitive environment in a world has been turned upside down by a pandemic and so many other things work is hard and it helps if we can be clear about why we’re here who does the work and what work they’re doing as in the previous answer project-based worker Centric work.

Almost always produces better output than someone who’s just saying, what’s the minimum I can do to get a paycheck around here. Thanks for listening.

We’ll see you next time.

I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution, or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution. I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right?

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data. What all-nba gets right is it puts you in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you’re going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you’re going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple it sounds very He commonsensical but it’s the number one reason why we don’t write that book.

==> 9822-the-pursuit-of-perfection- <==

Around 1969 a manager named Frank pip came up with an idea. He ran a assembly at a Ford Motor Company Plant and he said to some people on his team go out and buy some Japanese cars brand-new. Let’s see how they’re put together at the time at Ford and at every other American Car Company the standard way to assemble a car was to use a rubber mallet that each part they came in was Whacked with a mallet to fit into the other part if there was a rare occasion when you didn’t need a mallet, it was called Snap fit snap fit was the exception well pip discovered something extraordinary the Toyotas were 100% snap fit.

They could take the car apart and put it back together without using a mallet once hey. It’s Seth and this is akimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about perfect and also my new book, but first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, Ramon it Seth.

Hey Seth, this is Ramon. Good to be here with you. Thanks for having me. My friend.

Ramon. Ray is launching a new workshop on the akimbo platform. It’s Ali special it’s really important.

What’s it about Ramon? Yeah, this is small businessí Central not only do you have the videos and the contents of the modules, but you’re learning with others and for me that is most special because many of us are alone. We think we’re alone in this journey. So that’s one regarding Small Business Essentials Seth is, you know, I’ve started for small companies and I think what’s always there for me is that it is hard work to its highly rewarding and the three often times and I’ve learned this from you and doing this Workshop. We get so much into the weeds and That we forget the high-level thought that goes behind why are we doing it?

So inside this Workshop people I think are going to open their eyes to things that a they didn’t know or things they knew but didn’t know why they were doing it. That’s why I’m excited about it.

Fantastic. How do we find out more? Where do we go?

Yeah, akimbo.com small business essential.

Thanks for watching. We’ll see you there. Thank Seth sign up anytime until October 28th 2020 at akimbo.com / Small Business Essentials.

Well, you may have guessed what happened when Pip shared this news with the senior Executives. They stared at him silent for a while. And then one of them said the customer will never notice. We’re really confused about what perfect means we’re really confused about what good enough means and the pursuit of perfection. Oh, let me send it again. I was little closer the pursuit of perfection.

My timing was a little bit off the pursuit of perfection gets in the way of doing the work that we need to do. This is episode hundred and twenty give or take of the akimbo podcast and I can confidently say that every single episode has been imperfect. There’s no doubt about it. The timing the levels the phrasing the fact checking the word choice never once not one episode has been perfect. T’ even my favorite podcast things like 99% invisible or episode 3 of Mystery Show, not perfect. So what makes it a great podcast? What does it mean to see a live Broadway show when we know that it is not exactly the same as it was yesterday. If it’s not exactly the same which one was perfect. What does the pursuit of perfect? Let’s call it perfectionism actually mean are we doing it? Serve the customer.

I don’t think so back to this idea of the customer will never notice. Well in this case clearly the Ford executive was wrong because he didn’t understand the Japanese outlook on quality Japanese weren’t making Quality Parts because they were hiding from something because they were perfectionists. They were making Quality Parts because sticking to spec going within tolerance of spec actually made.

NG in the production of the car more profitable quality is free and in addition the customer does notice because with mechanical things when it’s a little out of whack it gets a little more out of whack when Parts don’t fit precisely correctly. They get worse over time and it tighter tolerances lead to better cars which the customers noticed.

And it’s a huge but if you go into your driveway to your brand-new Lexus and take any part from that brand new car and look at it with an electron microscope. You will see that it’s not perfect at all. There are giant pits and Peaks and valleys it is out of whack to some decimal point.

Maybe .001 inches, who knows?

It’s a really small number, but it’s not perfect. T’ it’s good enough. It meets spec now. It is entirely possible that as a marketing effort. Your definition of good enough is much better than people expect if you define good enough as remarkable in the way the customer experiences it you’ve still defined what good enough is.

So if I shipped something Federal Express back in the old days when a letter took 4 days and FedEx got there by 10:00. 30 that was worth talking about because it arrived the next day if it got there at 10:15. It’s not better than getting there at 10:30. Certainly not dramatically better. If I need to make copies of a legal document 300 DPI looked at through a magnifying glass is not perfect at all 1200 DPI approaches retina level and it’s hard for me to tell the difference unaided but with enough magnification even 2400 DPI. II which is really difficult and expensive to do in an office printer is hardly perfect at all how perfect does a legal document need to be if I’m making a copy of it.

I think we can all agree that if I can accurately read everything that’s on the document without being distracted by its resolution. It is good enough and that’s its job. There are lots of other things that I want that copier to do. I want that printer to never Jam. I wanted to Cost Less to use Etc.

But I’m going to pay an extra Penny to go from 300 to 600 DPI on the laser print out used for internal documents. Good enough is something to be proud of better than good enough means somewhere along the way you’ve made the spec probably incorrectly but back to perfectionism. The reason we Embrace perfectionism is a little complicated on one hand. We’ve got Frank. I’m pip who correctly said this place is making shoddy stuff. Ford can do better. Look what our competitors are doing. We are going to get killed that meant he wanted the spec to be better.

He didn’t think you needed to make a perfect Mustang or a perfect Pinto but it would be good to make one that didn’t explode when it was in a rear end collision. It would be good to make one that lasted an extra five or ten thousand miles, but you need to make one and you need to ship it. To ship creative work bringing our creative work to the world is our job if it doesn’t ship it doesn’t count and this is important.

It’s not just ship it which implies what the hell ship some junk get it out. There. It is instead about setting spec appropriately and then merely shipping it merely shipping it without commentary without a lot of drama and without perfectionism. Day after day hour after hour week after week. We ship the work.

I call this the practice. The practice is a process. It’s an approach. It’s a belief that the only way to make things better is to make things and then to learn what the customer wants to learn how to engage with the market to make them better still it is a process album after album after album The Working musician makes Her work page after page after page the working author makes their work.

This new books got 200 little chapters in it. And as far as I can tell there are no typos, so it meets spec. But if I rewrote the book, I wouldn’t be right it word for word the same way because there’s a difference between it being perfect and it meaning spec it being something that changes people that what we need to do when we ship creative work is to understand what all three words mean ship because as I said, if it doesn’t ship it doesn’t count ship because ship gives us the chance to engage with the person we made it for if it’s not good enough for them. We’re doing shoddy work. We need to make it better creative creative means you’re doing something that might not work you’re doing something where perfect is unknown.

You’re doing something human something generous something that might make things better. Think to make it change and work work cuz we do it even when we don’t feel like it work because we do it before we’re in the mood that we get into flow because we’re doing the work not the other way around and built into all of this is that while perfectionism is about us our belief our perception of what we’re doing a place to hide by saying it’s not perfect yet.

Good enough. Peck great work remarkable work is not about us. It is about the person we are making it for which means we have to figure out who were making it for we have to be able to find our smallest viable audience and bring them the smallest viable breakthrough. We have to figure out how to show up for the people we seek to serve and ignore everyone else reading the reviews from people you didn’t make the work for is a trap. It pushes you toward perfectionism.

In this case when you’re trying to reach lots of people with something that everyone is going to interpret differently. You can’t sand off enough edges. You can’t make it beige enough for everyone average enough for everyone indistinguishable enough for everyone. So no a Toyota Corolla isn’t even for everyone even though they sell millions and millions of them.

It’s not for someone who wants to Hot Rod. It’s not for someone who wants to Hall a big family and it’s not for someone who enjoys tinkering with a car that’s a little fussy it has no Italian racing Heritage. It doesn’t make a noise like a Lamborghini or an Aston Martin.

And so for all those things it doesn’t do it makes a very specific promise about what it does do and that’s what we need to do with our work. We need to develop a practice of shipping regularly for the people we seek to serve to make the change we seek to make to do it without drama without a lot of internal commentary. We must never accept shoddy work. It doesn’t make any sense to make something not as good as it should. Should be but we will always be making things that are not as good as they could be faced if we have unlimited time and unlimited money, of course, we would make something differently, but we don’t have unlimited time.

We don’t have unlimited money and we must interact with the market. We must bring our work to other people so we can learn what they want how they’re interacting with it what’s important to them? Them. So yes, we need a point of view. We need to make assertions. We need to lead we are not running a focus group to ask people what they want because they don’t know but what we are doing today more easily than ever before is shipping the work here. I made this here.

I made this. No, it’s not perfect. But maybe it met spec and maybe my spec is exactly what you needed. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

I’ll be back in a second with a question from last time but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

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Hi Seth. This is unimportant calling in from Berlin episode on hedonic.

Treadmill. Got me thinking about how billionaires change our culture like you mentioned in the episode how when we and as play the game of rising on or going faster on the hedonic treadmill, they tend to accumulate a lot of wealth and in the episode you implied that this wealth comes at a cost to society, but what if a billionaires impulse to gather more wealth can also bring something to society because assuming that they are always accumulating wealth assumes that whatever they are doing through business or through Innovation is a zero-sum game which it often isn’t so so my question to you is what if billionaires playing on the hedonic treadmill actually ends up being beneficial to society in so many ways and we see that happening with so many of the billionaires and the innovations that you’re bringing about. Thank you.

Thank you Anna pom. I love hearing your questions all the way from Berlin. This one is complicated. I am not arguing that money gets hoarded hurting other people because money is a fiction governments can print more money. If everyone puts a bunch of money in their mattress, it’s out of circulation. The government can print more now. I’m talking about several other things when we talk about people who are billionaires.

The first one comes from measuring value is a great teacher worth less than a really effective Bond Trader because the bond Trader somebody works in the stock market might make millions of millions of dollars a year and a hard-working teacher who’s putting themselves on the line every day to do the Orton work of helping us raise our kids might make one percent of what that Bond Trader is making are they creating one percent as much value. Well, I guess it depends on how you measure it lin-manuel Miranda created the most successful Broadway show of his generation. He’s not a billionaire Isabel Wilkerson wrote a book that changed my life and the life of a lot of other people.

She’s not a billionaire we can go down the list Jimmy Wales. Developed Wikipedia. He’s not a billionaire Vint Cerf invented much of the underlying technology of the internet. He’s not a billionaire. There’s no connection between value created and whether or not you’re a billionaire unless we only measure value created in terms of easily measured dollars and in order to get from a million dollars, which most people would consider a lot of money 10 million more than you’ll need for the rest of your life to a billion or 50 billion dollars. We have to multiply it by a thousand and so the question we’d start with from a public policy point of view is do we need a thousand time bigger incentive to get people to do the hard work of making billions and billions of dollars.

I’m not sure we do because there are plenty of people who are teachers who are putting in hard work and even more people who aspire to make five million dollars. Who are we? Going super hard as well. Number two billionaires sometimes achieve their goal as the result of market failure. Now what I mean by market failure is this in an efficient free market as soon as a company starts making a significant profit competitors will arise and those competitors will offer something better cheaper faster to the people that the profitable company is. Saying now it’s in the momentary exceptions to this over time that companies are able to create significant profits. But yeah, the companies in the 1920s 30s and 40s are mostly gone now because their profit was taken by a new company in a free market. Now, let’s consider Google which is under antitrust investigation because they are a monopoly there are Monopoly who in just two weeks can shut down many many companies. The Internet by starving them of traffic and there are Monopoly in the sense that a majority of search ads go to Google Search ads.

Who are they benefiting while we know who they’re costing? They’re costing the consumer because if a company is paying Google 20 or 30 or 40 dollars a click to get traffic because they have to pay that much to win the auction because Google’s the Monopoly then the question is who’s paying the 20 30 or 40 dollars?

Well, the answer ultimately is the consumer that because there’s only one search engine Google’s whims have a significant impact on the market and the value that is created is moved from the checkbook of the consumer and the balance sheet of the other companies their customers to Google all of those billions and billions of dollars are not part of Most people think of as the free market or if we think about wages a long time ago Henry Ford raised the wages of people at the plant, you know, the one where Frank pip worked in the 1960s, he went from paying machinists 50 cents a day to $5 a day.

He was selfishly motivated to do that because he figured a he get plenty of workers and he needed them be it would create a middle class. That could afford the product he was making because other companies would have to follow suit. So if I look at a company like Amazon, what would happen if Amazon took a stock price hit in the short run and paid their 100,000 lowest paid people more money or gave them better easier working conditions. If they did that Jeff Bezos might end up being a little bit less of a billionaire, but then what would happen?

Where would value flow in which direction so what I’m arguing is that a talented or lucky person who becomes a billionaire? What do they do after that? Do they turn the dial toward more Monopoly toward expanding market failure toward building moats fighting adversarial interoperability buying the outcome of Elections fighting regulation working. In opposition to what helps plenty of other people or do they seek to create new kinds of value that payoff in terms of respect from the community that pay off in terms of a planet a place where they’re happy to live Oxfam reports that last year 2019 one percent of the population of the Earth the richest 1% I’m super privileged. I am part of that group in the Western World put in twice as much. I’ve been to the atmosphere as 50% of the population.

That’s another example of market failure in this case externalities because if externalities aren’t taking care of it is possible to turn the dial and pump more stuff into the air that you don’t have to pay for. So I am not arguing that we come in level everything and give everybody an equal amount of money.

The purpose of the hedonic treadmill episode was to help people see that just because you’re good at one thing. Does it mean a you’re creating the maximum amount of value for the maximum amount of people and be that you have to do that all the time forever. There are lots of things to measure life is short. Our potential is high. There is plenty of possibility.

What will we do with it? Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. I just don’t think it’s possible or probable and in today’s world to distinguish yourself as an educational institution or as a success Seeker at the level of of information gathering or information distribution.

I mean, this is the information age and you can get a great book a great essay a great idea anywhere, you know, and none of us can do that better than the internet right? There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. You in a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you got to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason.

Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question. It’s not because we don’t know where we don’t have the information. We don’t have an environment and we don’t have a support network that makes it feel like showing up as possible for me. Not just possible for the success stories. I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

More than 3,000 alumni in 74 countries around the world find out more at alt mba.com.

==> 9976-a-vote-for-books- <==

Next week on Tuesday, November 3rd 2020 something truly important is going to happen people around the world are holding their breath and perhaps the biggest turnout in American history will occur because there’s a presidential election. It’s also the day my new book comes out. Hey, it’s Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We’ll be back in a second to talk about books. X and why they still matter but first here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, Ramon it Seth.

Hey Seth isn’t Ramon good to be here with you? Thanks for having me. My friend.

Ramon. Ray is launching a new workshop on the akimbo platform. It’s really special. It’s really important. What’s it about Ramon?

Yeah, this is small businessí Central. Not only do you have the videos and the contents the modules which are learning with others. And for me that is most special because many of us are alone. We think we’re low on this journey. So that’s one regarding Small Business Essentials Seth is, you know, I’ve started for small companies and I think what’s always there for me is that it is hard work to its highly rewarding and the three often times and I’ve learned this from you and doing this Workshop. We get so much into the weeds and tactics that we forget the high-level thought that goes behind why are we doing it? So inside this Workshop people I think are going to open their eyes to things that a they didn’t know or things they knew but didn’t know why they were doing it.

That’s why I’m excited about it. Fantastic. How do we find out more?

Where do we go? Yeah akimbo.com / small business essential thanks for watching.

We’ll see you there. Thank Seth sign up anytime until October 28th 2020 at akimbo.com / Small Business Essentials.

I’m hoping that if you’re able to vote you will vote it matters a great deal speak up go to the polls, but let’s talk about my new book. In fact, let’s just talk about books in general. I want to help us understand why books matter as a cultural Touchstone. More than 500 years later since the book became one of the first mass forms of culture.

It has been followed by magazines and radio and television and newsletters and YouTube and social media and podcasts and I could go on for a long time and yet books persist. Let’s go through a list of some of the reasons why one of them is that they transcend time. There’s a new Dune movie coming out and as a result of the movie coming out hundreds of thousands of people are going to reread Frank Herbert’s original book almost nobody is going to re-watch the movie that featured sting try looking into that place where you dare not look you’ll find me there staring back at you.

You mustn’t speak.

I remember you’re going to bar now. You’ll remember mine. I can kill with a word.

Why because there’s something Timeless about a book you can pick up the Odyssey more than a thousand years after it was written and it is in and of itself. You definitely need some cultural context to explain when it was written. But the technology itself holds up the words are still the words number two books transcend space Alexander solzhenitsyn. Ethan wrote the gulag archipelago, he wrote it ten thousand miles from where I’m sitting right now it changed his world and our world as well that it turns out that a book can be written just about anywhere and it can be read just about anywhere number three books are focused a best-selling book to a rounding error cells to zero. Percent of the mass audience for book to sell a million copies in the United States is considered a very significant home run a million copies means that one out of three hundred people bought it which means fewer than half a percent which means 0 that the goal of a book is not to sell to everyone it’s to sell to someone number four.

Is leverage while it may sell to No One the ones it does sell to talk about it. It influences how they teach how they live how they act and it does it over a longer period of time than almost any other form of media. And so we have a breakthrough like Hamilton on Broadway, which was also seen by approximately zero percent of the population and it too has a longer-term impact. IT industry and on the people who interacted with it, but for every Hamilton there’s a thousand books that have an impact like that.

One of the reasons that books have this sort of impact is that they are curated until recently you couldn’t get a book into the hands of a bunch of people unless an editor and a publisher gave you the Boost to do. So, this is really important because curation We limited the supply of books because the supply of books was lower than the demand they were scarce, which meant that yes, you could in fact read all of the important cookbooks or all of the important business books. You could have wide domain knowledge because somebody a few somebody’s were limiting the supply which goes hand-in-hand with books were carefully hand sold.

You want to understand what actually killed the book industry in the long run and what killed the bookstore’s it was waldenbooks waldenbooks before Barnes & Noble before Amazon waldenbooks was eight chain of bookstores in malls and the thing about it two things about it one. Each individual Walden was run by someone who didn’t care very much about books. They weren’t rewarded for caring about books because their job was to follow the planogram they came from Central. Command, which is the second half of it.

There was one person or a small team of people in their central office in Massachusetts. That was picking. What would be on the Shelf? They weren’t picking what would be on the Shelf because it was a book they cared about that. They liked that they wanted to contribute to the culture they did it because they had shareholders and their job was to maximize Revenue perhaps for the first time throughout an entire nation magazine. Maximizing Revenue became the point of many of the activities in the book business. It became a business Barnes & Noble multiplied this dramatically Barnes & Noble didn’t care about what they sold. They just wanted to sell something and then Amazon comes along and the thing about Amazon is they are organized from the top down from the bottom up to sell everything.

But they don’t know how to sell anything more than 20 years ago. When I first met Jeff Bezos, I talked to him about the fact that Amazon was doing the actual hard part of book publishing. They were organizing and understanding the readers book publishers have never done that that’s why you don’t know the 800 number for Random House. In fact, it’s not even in the book random house does not want to hear from readers Amazon on the other hand new everything. About readers not only that they had access to their shelf space.

And so I pitched Jeff on having a book publishing division because printing isn’t hard selecting. The next book is an art, but you can hire for that. The really hard part was understanding readers and what they want earning permission to talk to them about what they might want to read next differentiating people treating different people differently.

Well year after year, there’d be a back. Back and forth about was Amazon ready to be a book publisher when they were finally ready. I started an imprint called the Domino project. We did 10 best sellers in row. I’m really proud of those books. But Amazon had a contractual obligation with us and their obligation was to promote those ten books and they didn’t they said we don’t want to they walked away from that.

And so we ended the partnership. I had to promote the books the authors and I had to work together to make Bestsellers Amazon could have done it with one click but they’re not organized to do that. They don’t want to hand sell things. They don’t want to give their Merchants the power that Merchants want instead. It’s just a giant engine that turns and turns okay, but that part of the rent isn’t as important as the part that says, we now have this medium 500 years old that transcends time and space that’s focused that gives leverage in the culture that serrated and is mostly and sold that hand selling has now been replaced by peer-to-peer and selling.

So let’s compare the impact of a book to something say like a YouTube video a Hit YouTube video is seen by more than a thousand times as many people as read a hit book a thousand to one. There are at least a hundred YouTube videos that reach hundreds of Millions. Viewers for every book that sells a million or two million copies clearly a video gives you a broad reach or podcast the podcast has no curation a podcast is way more timely than a book but a podcast like a YouTube video doesn’t really persist over time almost nobody is listening to podcasts that are five years old almost nobody watched the Gangnam Style.

YouTube video last week on the other hand. There are books that sell better now than when they were published 15 or 20 years ago. And then here comes the Kindle the Kindle non curated anyone can publish for it transcends space and maybe time however, it pushes the old titles down and you only see the book you’re currently reading on top of that. There is no Shelf.

Can’t look across the room and see a Kindle book that you remember fondly or one that you haven’t finished and decide to pick it up and read it again. No the book and its form factor persist and so books are in danger. They’re in danger because curation and hand selling are fading. They’re in danger because in a world that’s ever more commercial ever more focused on the bottom line most books can’t possibly turn a profit and as the long tail gets it’s longer the average sales per book have to go down Amazon stopped separating out numbers for how many books they sold. But the last numbers I see five or six years old are six billion dollars worth. So figure that number has tripled. Let’s call it twenty billion dollars that sounds like a lot of books, but they sell more than a million. So do the math that means on average they sell 20,000 dollars worth of a book.

And dollars at $10 a copy that’s only 2,000 copies the biggest Bookseller in the world. I’m guessing cells on the order of two thousand copies of Any Given book title. So sure there’s a short head their hits. There are the best sellers but there are so many bestsellers. None of them are selling a million or two million copies.

So why am I crazy enough to launch the practice while you can read the details that says stop blog / the practice? But writing a book is inactive hubris it saying I want something that will transcend space yet, but I could do that with blog post and transcend time. I’m hoping that people will read it 10 or 20 years from now the way they’re reading linchpin and permission marketing to this day.

And so why make a book the book gives us a handy magical container and we can hand it to someone else and say let’s read this together. We can form a group we can establish a Standard among our peers. We’re going to together try to understand each other and this work. It can be a guidepost for how tomorrow could be a little bit different from today.

The practice is a book about shipping creative work, but mostly it’s a book about changing the culture and all of us are obsessed with the culture for good reason, the culture feels fraught there’s way too much Injustice and separation. There’s way too much dislocation and unfair – we need more optimism and possibility. We need to figure out how to weave together communities that help us go forward.

So definitely one thing we need to do is vote. And if I only could pick one thing I would have you vote but I get to pick two things. So I’m hoping that you will vote if you’re allowed and number two check out this work and talk about it because what changes culture is each of us what we expect. And how we expect things to go.

So it’s true. There’s no such thing as writer’s block. It’s true. Each one of us has a voice and a keyboard and leverage. It’s true that you might feel like an impostor but leadership is an act of going somewhere. We haven’t gone before all of it rolls together to help us realize that we could adopt a practice one that relentlessly turns a wheel forward to make things better by making better things.

It’s a privilege to make this podcast. A privilege to be able to talk about my book. Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next time.

We’ll be back in a second with two fascinating and juicy questions from previous episodes. But first, here’s a message from our sponsor.

Hey, it’s Seth. I wrote a new book. It was originally called trust yourself, but my editor persuaded me correctly to change the title to the practice if you’d like to see a free excerpt in a Marie visit trust yourself.com got to do something with that domain. Check it out.

It’s Maria. Hey Seth, my name is Kyle reading Seth.

This is Steven out in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here – this is our new power Katelyn Tire sir. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Sam, this is Rex. Hey, son. Hi. This is Russell is from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry.

My question is and that Completes my question as you know, I love to hear from you. Thank you for chiming in with your questions about this or any other episode or anything else that’s on your mind. If you’ve got a question visit akimbo dot link. That’s a Ki M Bo dot link2006. Click the appropriate button.

Hi Seth.

I hope this voice message finds you well, and it’s this pandemic and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to specialize in my career and I thought about coaching and teaching about Creativity and now unfortunately, I am near the start of my career and haven’t produced anything particularly creative. I have no books published. I haven’t produced any blockbuster movies. I haven’t written a play.

So my question is do you think someone can teach a subject without having achieved in that field first does someone have to write a best-seller before they can’t eat about writing and love to hear your thoughts and thanks for all the work you do.

You knew that I would love this question and I do because it touches on pedagogy pedagogy is the craft of teaching understanding how to put something in front of someone who wants to learn it. So they are likely to learn it and there is no evidence none that being really good at a skill at a thing at cooking or cross-country skiing makes you likely to be good at pedagogy.

Along the way we got confused. We tend to believe that there’s some sort of hidden wisdom the people who are really good at something the Michael Jordan of whatever their craft is have a secret and if we could just get them to tell us the secret then we’d be fine. And this is the conceit behind master class, which is basically entertainment masquerading as education the people who teach a master class don’t know more than people who know how to teach in They know less they have simply figured out how to succeed but it’s not a secret.

It is a combination of persistence and luck and hard-earned skill teaching pedagogy figuring out how to structure lessons to learn how to see people the way they need to be seen to help them. That’s totally different the kind of therapy that someone needs to become creative has nothing to do with you being creative at all. All it has to do with helping them find their footing and develop a practice.

So no, I don’t think that you should let the fact that you haven’t written a best-selling book about creativity or even written a creative opera on your own keep you from doing the generous difficult and important work of helping other people get their the hard part is breaking the false connection between what people think a successful teacher has Which is best sellers and what they need a successful teacher to have which is student who have created bestsellers.

That is what we seek pedagogy is a skill. It is a craft we can learn it. But most people who are busy succeeding at other things don’t have the time or inclination to learn how to do. So, thanks for this one.

Hi Seth, this is Barack from Israel. Now in San Diego California my question refers to one of the points. You mentioned in the podcast life at Catalyst 2010. My question is about failing while selling in cupcake baking is not fatal when a doctor fails in a surgery. It definitely is or if a BMW engineer will try a design that might fail it can cost in the drivers life or another example if asked Counselor will try to help a kid with an approach that might not work. If this approach doesn’t work it can end with unfortunate results.

The sad outcome is that these possible fatal results leads to a culture especially in these jobs of deniability fear of liability and eventually cripples growth and the Thrive for being better. Can you please explain how to allow failing in these kinds of jobs without having the risk of fatal? That’s thank you for being consistent and teach us your ideas set.

There’s all sorts of layers here and they have to do with what kind of harm are we doing? When we do our work. So Elon Musk has famously pointed out that self-driving cars are going to kill people on their way to working but not developing self driving cars is going to kill even more people far more people because once we have good self driving cars, they are not going to run over pedestrians.

People do today. So the first question is getting deep into what’s the trade-off. What is the trade-off of making something that in the short run as it transitions might not be as safe as the thing it replaces but in the long run leads to a lot of positive outcome in my case, when I am talking about the work that most of us are doing if we are honest with ourselves, even though it feels like a matter of life or death it hardly is it is hardly a matter of life or death about whether your book sells another copy or whether that kid in the third row of the kindergarten class learns something today or not. But leaping diving in committing is fraught and so we act like it’s a matter of life or death. I’m trying to undermine that thinking because the minute we realize we’re doing a generous Act is the moment we can lean in to the contribution we seek to make there’s a bigger point to your Chicken which is how we do the public policy issues and decisions about is it okay for an engineer to even work out a car at all, or should we just stop the development of everything unless it’s a net positive.

I’m going to leave that one for a future of and thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

There is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet like we have data what all-nba gets right. Is it puts you. In a context where you’re part of a community that says yeah. Yeah, that’s good. You got access to ideas you’ve got access to information. That’s awesome. But when you going to show up, when you going to face that blank page when you going to face the possibilities within you when you going to face those fears, I’m not gonna let you hide you gotta show up and that’s the hardest part and it sounds simple. It sounds very commonsensical, but it’s the number one reason why Why we don’t write that book. It’s the number one reason why we don’t ask that question.

I see out there, but I can show up consider the alt MBA.

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