SPI 831: How to Find a Winning Strategy with Seth Godin

SPI 831: How to Find a Winning Strategy with Seth Godin

Seth Godin: You’re not the one who’s supposed to get the word out. If you write a book and give it for free to 10 people who trust you and no one asks you for another copy, you didn’t write a good enough book. The idea is not, “How do I get on Oprah and yell about my book?” It’s, “How do I make it so that the ten or the hundred or the thousand true fans tell the others?”

All the stuff that matters to us. We didn’t hear about it because the creator bought an ad or showed up on our feed. We heard about it because someone we trusted told us about it.

Pat Flynn: I lost sleep over this podcast interview and I was so nervous about it because it was somebody who I’ve been wanting to have on the show for such a long time, but even more than that, I just wanted to thank this person, and today I couldn’t be more excited to invite Seth Godin on the SPI podcast.

After 830 episodes, I’ve finally been able to have him on the show. He has a brand new book that’s coming out called This Is Strategy, and I definitely recommend you check it out. But we talk a little bit more than strategy today. We talk about the new version of what a purple cow might be and we just get pretty deep and I love Seth’s answers to every question that I’ve ever seen him answer on a podcast or in a video and so I knew this was gonna be really special.

So this was definitely a treat and an honor and Seth was so nice like, he’s just such a nice guy. So, here he is, Seth Godin.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he’s worn the same Darth Vader Halloween costume to greet trick or treaters five years in a row, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Seth Godin, welcome to SPI. Thank you so much for being here today.

Seth Godin: Well, thank you for having me, for showing up the way you do. It’s been a long time.

Pat Flynn: And in full uniform too, with the yellow glasses, for those who aren’t able to watch right now, I’m curious, how many pairs of those glasses do you actually own?

Seth Godin: Well, when my eyesight started to fail, I said, my brand is my face. So I bought clear frames and I’m like, that doesn’t work either all in or all out. So I buy cheap glasses. None of this Luxotica nonsense, but I lost my favorite pair on the bike path. I don’t know how that’s possible. So now I have two pair, but I’m not ready to invest in like an Elton John collection.

Pat Flynn: Okay. I was wondering if you woke up in the morning, you opened a drawer and there were like a hundred pairs there and you just happened to choose, you know, row two number five for for some odd reason.

Seth Godin: I’m too cheap for that. ,

Pat Flynn: you have a new book that is just about to come out, if not already, and it’s called, This Is Strategy.

And I’m excited to chat about this with you because I think it’s something we all need. A lot of us kind of jump into, especially with the barrier to entry being a lot lower. Now we see the results that other people have. We get encouraged by that. And to quote you, actually, and something that helped me early on, just ship it.

That was something that was huge for me because I was always in my own head. But how do you balance the idea of just shipping and going out there and putting yourself out there with the strategy that’s actually required to see some success?

Seth Godin: This is a great place to start, and I have to begin with the semantics of it, because the word just gets us into trouble.

Nike and the just do it thing, just, it was the word I used to use way too much, could be implied to mean what the hell, do it, whatever. And what I actually say is merely ship it. And by merely ship it, I mean, drop the drama, drop the narrative, simply ship the work, the best work, the work that you are proud of, But, We need to get out of our own way.

And this is Steve Pressfield’s gift to me and a lot of what I wrote about in the practice. But the reason I’m so excited to talk to you is because your listeners are doing something brave and important. They’ve stripped away all the insulation. They don’t have 40 layers around them. They haven’t raised 25 million.

They don’t have a giant ad budget. They’re exposed to the market. And that means they have to deal with their mindset. The mindset of merely shipping it and it mostly means they got to get their strategy right because it doesn’t matter how hard you’re running if you’re running in the wrong direction.

And in the book, I basically say one of the ways you can tell if someone’s good surfer is if they find good waves. And strategy is the art of finding a good way.

Pat Flynn: Reminds me. I used to play soccer when I was a kid and I was a small kid. I didn’t even hit five feet tall until my junior year of high school.

Seth Godin: So you and Michael Jordan.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, he got the growth spurt later. I did not. So I don’t know what, what happened there, but my advantage was the strategy. I was the number one assist person on the team because I could read the field. That, that was the only thing I could really provide. Cause I couldn’t provide strength and power, but I could provide that forward thinking this in the game and you know the chess match of soccer and thinking two steps ahead. This is what I feel would be the differentiator for a business owner like those who are listening and those who have millions of dollars to spend on whatever they have to go into the strategy. How do you start with strategy when you have never gone down this path before there are so many avenues it seems that you could go down that it almost becomes overwhelming.

How do you determine what that first step actually is?

Seth Godin: Well, the zeroth step, I think, is where we begin, which is, who are you and what are you seeking to do? A lot of people who say they are entrepreneurs are freelancers. I, for example, I’m a freelancer. I’m proud of it. I get paid when I work. I can’t have someone who isn’t me show up and be me.

And being a freelancer is sort of a job without a boss. Being a freelancer is your craft, your work, that other people value. If you can acknowledge and embrace that, a whole bunch of different choices will present themselves. If you’re an entrepreneur, your job is to build something bigger than yourself.

To use other people’s money and effort to create leverage so that you create value when you’re not in the room. If you can get that straight, then you start by saying, what’s the change I seek to make? And why would someone who has the option pick me? And it’s a very challenging question because you’re working so hard.

You know how good your work is. But people aren’t picking you and you end up resenting those people. And what we have to do is have the empathy to celebrate those people. Someone who doesn’t choose you made the right choice. You have to figure out why they made the right choice. What is it that they want and they see that you don’t?

But once we can have the empathy for people, you know, if, if, if you’re a standup comic and someone isn’t laughing at your jokes and you find out they only speak Italian, you can forgive them. It’s your fault. You’re telling the jokes in the wrong language, right? So that’s where I begin with empathy.

Pat Flynn: How do you lean into empathy and begin to ask those questions?

Why to whom do you ask and what are the questions?

Seth Godin: Well, one of the reasons it’s worth the enormous amount of trouble to publish a book as opposed to just writing a blog post which would be way easier and reach more people is books demand conversations. So you hand two copies of the book to two people who trust you and you trust them and say I want to talk about number 136 and number 149 Let’s have a conversation about that. Because if you can’t talk about your strategy, if it’s intuitive, then it’s not really a strategy, right?

That strategy is something that we don’t have to hide. Tactics could be a surprise. Tactics could be secret, but strategy, Starbucks doesn’t hide their strategy. Football coaches don’t hide their strategy. Your strategy is something you can stick with and you don’t want to change, but you better say what it is out loud if you want it to get better.

Pat Flynn: I think the audience may be confused on what the difference between a tactic and a strategy is. I think a lot of us default, especially us newbies, default to a tactic as a strategy. My strategy will be TikTok, for example. That’s not what I’m hearing from you. What is a strategy versus a tactic?

Seth Godin: So a strategy is something that we can stick with for a very long time and our tactics are going to change. Apple decided, when Steve finally got his act together, that they were going to make functional luxury goods for people who want to develop good taste and status around digital items. And the iPhone isn’t better at being a phone than an Android phone.

It is better at serving that desire, giving you connection and status and good taste around digital interaction. So anything that Johnny Ive or anybody else brings into the office, they can look at through that lens. So once you start down that road with an iMac, it’s not that conceptually difficult to end up with an iPad or an iPhone.

Starbucks says, our strategy is twofold. One, to help uncaffeinated people become caffeinated. And two, to give those people a place where they feel, at least for a moment, something of substantial status and luxury. Those are the two things they do. And when they work to forward that, they do great when they do something like inventing a decaf coffee that’s in a powder you can buy at the supermarket, they fail because that’s not what their strategy is.

So a key part of it is who exactly are you trying to serve and what change are you trying to make for them? And then you will find tactics that help you serve that strategy. And what you want as the person who’s running the enterprise is not to come up with some fancy complicated mission statement that could mean anything, but to actually come up with a strategy that tells you what you do and what you don’t do.

So it was not hard for me to not be on TikTok, to not be on Twitter, to not be on LinkedIn, to not be on Facebook, because none of them matched what I am trying to do. And so because I already knew what I was trying to do and who I was trying to do it for, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time debating the tactics.

Pat Flynn: That’s so key for everybody listening to understand what your filters are and to understand what your North Star is. It makes the decision to not do TikTok, to not do Instagram or those kinds of things much, much easier. Although it is getting harder. There’s a lot of noise out there. We see a lot of, especially in the media, you know, so and so blew up overnight and it’s because of this.

And so we get pulled mentally this way and that way. What do you do to make sure that. Even though you know which direction you want to go, you’re not being pulled by those other levers that other people are pulling. It’s a seemingly very hard thing to do. It took a while for me to know how to stay in my lane, but the world’s getting noisier.

It’s getting harder and harder to do that.

Seth Godin: Yeah, it’s a great question. Do you remember, well, we’re too old to remember, but have you ever heard of phrenology, which was bigger than astrology a hundred years ago?

Pat Flynn: No.

Seth Godin: So if you do a Google image search on phrenology, you’ll see a picture that you will recognize.

It’s a human skull with dotted lines on it. And phrenology was the pseudoscience of feeling the bumps on someone’s head and using them to figure out if they were creative or if they were evil, if they were trustworthy. It had racism associated with it and lots of other things. And it’s obviously false, but phrenology was a very big deal.

When we read the bumps on someone’s head to try to determine their personality, we’re using a false proxy. We’re doing a easily measured thing that is not related to the thing we care about. So the number of people who saw your TikTok video is a false proxy. It has nothing to do with how much money you made, what a difference you made.

I mean, I saw a TikToker guy did, he got 39 million views. He was picking up something with his bare feet. I don’t know, but that’s what people wanted to watch. But that didn’t match the change he wanted to make. It was just a number. So, if you are chasing a false proxy, you’re going to be busy all the time and disappointed often.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. One of the books that you wrote, I mean, you’ve written several. What number is now this one? This Is Strategy, is it 20 or 21 or?

Seth Godin: So I used to be a book packager, which is a profession I would recommend to anybody if it was 1987. Book packagers invent ideas and sell them to book publishers.

And I did 120 books when I was doing that. Oh wow. So I don’t really count those. Okay. After that, 21 bestsellers.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Twenty one. Twenty two on the way. This is, this is going to be a good one. And I’m taking a lot of inspiration. I have my first traditionally published book coming out very, very soon. So Wow!

Seth Godin: Tell me about it. What’s it called?

Pat Flynn: It’s called Lean Learning, how to achieve more by learning less.

Seth Godin: Brilliant, brilliant idea.

Pat Flynn: Thank you. Thank you. A lot of people have seen a lot of the things that I’ve been involved with. I’ve invented something. I have a new YouTube channel in the Pokemon space. It seems like people call me like Midas because everything I touch turns to gold, it seems, but I know that’s not true.

It’s just the way that I learn myself into those things is non traditional. I don’t read the textbook and then go do the thing. I live the textbook as it’s happening. So this book kind of distills a lot of that into a frameworks in a step by step process. And I found the, I was going to save these questions to the end, but since we’re here, I’ve self published three books.

Great experience. I have a lot of control. I could say yes to everything. Working with a publisher has been challenging in different kinds of ways and also very enlightening, but now that I’m not 100 percent in control of all the creative efforts, it’s, I’m, I am finding a little bit difficult. I know you’ve had experience in both self publishing and traditional publishing.

I’d love to hear your perspective on perhaps the pros and cons of each or your experience. And I know that the Kickstarter campaigns that you’ve run Icarus and, and those which I supported, which were making noise in the industry, which was amazing, but here we are several years later. I just love your, maybe even just coach me for a minute on what I can do to best see myself toward a result that I hopefully can achieve.

Seth Godin: Well, I would love to hop on a call anytime you want to coach you directly, but let me tell you, let’s talk about systems for a minute because it’s relevant here. Book publishing around the world, they have a fall list and a spring list when they launch most of the books in the upcoming season.

Why don’t they have a winter list? They don’t have a winter list even though it’s when most people in North America buy and read books because in 1910 and so the Erie Canal used to freeze in the winter and it was very hard to get books from New York to Chicago so they didn’t try to promote books for December or January.

We still don’t do that. It’s absurd, but systems stick around. So there are all these systems in traditional book publishing that stick around. So here’s one. Barnes Noble used to be the dominant seller of books in the U. S. And if a book was a New York Times bestseller, they discounted it 40 percent and sold it at >cost><, and they put it in the front of the store, which made it sell even more. So book publishers who seek status because they're not measuring dollars and cents because they don't have any, decided that getting a New York Times bestseller was the single best way to get a book to sell a lot of copies. So there's all this pressure on authors to promote a lot of books in the first week, so you get on the New York Times bestseller list. But wait, Barnes Noble doesn't matter anymore. And yet we're still running around playing this ridiculous game around status and false proxies. as opposed to doing the work related to why we wrote the book in the first place. So what authors need to begin with is, why did I write this book? And what would a good outcome look like? And if the answer is, I was a New York Times bestseller, then go pay some guy and buy your way onto the list, because it's not worth, it's not worth bending everything in your life to earn this false proxy gold star. So it's interesting because I have more than 175, 000 emails in my email box, not counting spam. And when I look for someone like you in my email box, you're the fact that you backed my Kickstarter shows up. And that was 12 years ago, but your name is in the file, right? So thank you for that. The thing is that I think authors of nonfiction books, two things. One, We write books to be shared. You cannot possibly reach enough people directly for your book to work. James Clear hardly knew anybody and now his book has sold tens of millions of copies because people who read it gave it to someone else. So what we're looking to do is create books that sell by the box, not by the copy because we want people to hand them out to cause a conversation to happen. And the second thing, which is relevant to everybody who's listening to this, stop thinking about the biggest possible audience. The biggest possible audience is a trap when you want is the smallest viable audience. And I've had 21 bestsellers in a row and not one of them has reached more than 1 percent of the US population. So to a rounding error, I have 0 percent market share. If I kept chasing people who watched the view or I said yes, to go on some AM radio show, I'd just be broken. Instead, it's like, no, this book is in for you and that channel is in for me. I am here to serve these people. And if they talk about it, that's great. But that's a very clear mission. The people listening to this, if you get 100,000 customers, you win. That's an enormous number. So, forgive the other 299 million people. Just forgive them and go back to focusing on the people who are enrolled in the journey you're on. Pat Flynn: That’s so brilliant. When I self published my first business book, Will It Fly?, it actually went on to become a Wall Street Journal bestseller as a self published book, which I didn’t even know was possible.

And the only reason that happened was, like you said, people started to share it. Nobody ever talked about business and starting one in that way tells a lot of stories from me and being a parent, and it’s just different than other business books. And this new one has a lot of the similar kind of tone to it.

But I’d imagined people reading it at the beach or at the pool that summer. And then I started to see on twitter those images of people laying on the lounge chair with the book in between their legs and it’s just like this vision actually happened and I have vision similar for this book but it’s more in the sense of educators achieving things with their students and entrepreneurs doing things that they never thought possible before and I’m excited and this is why I want to make sure you understand that at least for me your book has changed my life your books have changed my life one of them being purple cow this idea And most people listening to this probably know, but you know, in the field of brown cows, you want to be the purple cow, the one that stands out, the one that people stop for.

My question today for you, Seth, is with everybody trying to make a purple cow, now all the cows are purple, or at least they’re all different colors now. It’s feeling like it’s harder to stand out. What is the 2024 version of a purple cow?

Seth Godin: So a purple cow is not a gimmick. A purple cow is a generous tool to help the people you are seeking to help.

So, for those who are watching a video. I’ll keep this on my desk. The original copy of Purple Cow came in a milk carton. So I only sold 5,000 copies, because I had no publisher. And this was the envelope. I mailed it to people in the milk carton. And some people got the wrong idea about gimmicks. The milk carton ended up on people’s desk at work, whereas books end up on their bookshelf.

Why would someone put it on their desk? Because they wanted to help me? No. Because they wanted their boss to change the culture of the company so they could make the kind of stuff they were excited about. I gave them a tool to say something they always wanted to say. That’s what the word remarkable means, worth making a remark about.

So if you go ahead and do a Twitter live stream naked, standing on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, That was a gimmick. People will look at that, but that will not achieve your goal. That if you give people something, right, if someone says to their spouse, you need to read Pat’s book because it’s going to help both of us raise our kid, or it’s going to help both of us build our organization, you did them a service.

They didn’t do it because they like you or because you made a ruckus. They did it because they needed to talk about it. And so we’re never going to run out of things worth talking about. Most people are too scared or too lazy to do that. They’re going to just build hype or hustle. And it’s going to get noisier and noisier, but that’s not your problem.

Pat Flynn: When you have something to say that is remarkable. And I know a lot of the audience is remarkable and has remarkable things to share and to say and to sell. It almost feels like it’s so noisy out there that whatever I say, no matter how loud I yell, it’s never going to be heard. And this is how a lot of the audience is feeling.

They have something amazing to share.

Seth Godin: You nailed it, but they’re fibbing to themselves a little bit. Because you’re not the one who’s supposed to get the word out. If you write a book and give it for free to 10 people who trust you and no one asks you for another copy, you didn’t write a good enough book.

The idea is not, how do I get an Oprah and yell about my book? It’s how do I make it so that the 10 or the hundred or the thousand true fans tell the others? So an example is if you’re a woodworker, dovetailing is this fascinating and difficult thing. This guy made a dovetail device for 29, it uses a magnet, it’s a miracle.

How do I know about it? Did he tell me? Of course not. I heard about it from a woodworker who couldn’t wait to tell me about it. And I can go down a long list of things in my life. The bean to bar chocolate, where I got these glasses, all the stuff that matters to us. We didn’t hear about it because the creator bought an ad or showed up on our feed.

We heard about it because someone we trusted told us about it, and if people aren’t talking about what you’re doing, you might want to think about how you are telling the story and whether the thing you’re making is actually as remarkable as you think it is.

Pat Flynn: All right, we’ll clip that and have that replayed over and over just so people get that into their head.

I love that so much. Seth, you went to engineering school back in the day at Stanford. I’m curious, your time at Stanford, how much or how little did you care about the Cal versus Stanford rivalry when you were at Stanford?

Seth Godin: Okay. So to be fair. I went to engineering school at Tufts, where I found a loophole in the catalog that allowed me to get a degree without taking any advanced engineering classes, not one.

So I took every class I cared about, but skipped all the ones I didn’t care about. It was great. That sounds like a perfect education. They took it out of the catalog. You can’t do that anymore. And then I got to Stanford. The year of the big game. I was at the business school and the big game is famous because the marching band went on the field and ruined a touchdown or something.

Anyway, I had zero interest in that. I did go to see the Grateful Dead on Frost Amphitheater and That was a magical California experience, but I have to tell you that at 22 years old, I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have.

Pat Flynn: So the big game I have seen at least a hundred times in my life because I was in the Cal band and they play that every single year to hype us up before the big game during that week.

So I was curious cause I knew it was around that time and the fact that you mentioned it unprompted, it makes me so happy. That is really cool. You have written blog posts about your engineering education. Obviously you’re not an engineer in perhaps what you thought you were going to be doing back then, but you are engineering in kind of different kinds of ways, but you do give credit to that learning and that education in many different ways.

What were the one or two things you learned from engineering school that you then were able to apply or that you appreciated and happened even though you didn’t go down that route?

Seth Godin: So the first thing is there’s a difference between a problem and a situation. Situation sucks. There’s no way out. You got to live with situations, right?

If you’re 85 years old and you break your hip, that’s the situation. A problem has a solution. You might not like the solution. The solution might not be easy, but there’s a solution. So first decide if you have a problem or a situation, and if it’s a problem, decide if you care enough to solve it. And if you don’t let it go, and if you do solve it, the second thing is engineers discover that there is actually a best answer. And in a world that is increasingly qualitative with people bending the truth in lots of different ways, it’s worth saying, is this actually a problem that has a right answer? If it isn’t one with a right answer, then go ahead and pick the best available answer and just go and move on to the next thing.

If it is one with a possible best answer, put in the effort to find it. So, I’ve been shipping projects my whole career, most of which have failed, but that’s what I do. I look for a problem, I come up with a theory about how I can solve it, and then I merely ship the work to see, and if it resonates, then I make it better.

And I guess the third thing I would say is people don’t really know what the word quality means. Quality doesn’t mean luxury, quality doesn’t mean expensive. A Toyota is a higher quality car than a Rolls Royce. Because quality means meets spec quality says, did this match what you asked for and does it do exactly what it says it does.

And if you don’t like the spec, make a better spec. But if this, you know, is this milk carton good quality? Well, I can’t tell if it’s going to hold 30 pounds or not leak, but that’s not in the spec. Right? The spec is, could I make a milk carton without buying a dairy and ship it in six weeks and have it look like a milk carton?

The answer is yes. So this is a high quality milk carton.

Pat Flynn: And a lot of the quality is because of who you know you are building it for. Yeah. Right? A Toyota is being built for a family and they have specific needs. Yeah. You know, somebody who would buy Rolls Royce, who cares so much about status, quality means something different to them.

So this goes back to what we talked about earlier, which is know who you’re doing this for, which I think is key. Another phrase that I quote you on many, many times is, and this was, you know, I got my start in 2008 and then soon started a podcast and the podcast is what really it was my launchpad for a lot of things that people know me for.

And you had quoted, I don’t know when you said this, but you had said that podcasting is the new blogging. And I quoted you so much on that. And I even extended it at one point. I said, if Seth Godin says that podcasting is just the new blogging, therefore guest podcasting is the new guest blogging. And people took to that and it’s, it’s been great.

I’m curious your thoughts on 2024 and beyond. What is the new podcasting these days? Where are people having a platform that is an opportune time to amplify their message and reach people that matter?

Seth Godin: Okay. So the thesis of Permission Marketing, which was my real breakthrough first book was that’s not going to go away.

The value of talking to people who want to hear from you in a disintermediated conversation. is priceless. So Google shows up with Gmail and tries to get in between me and my readers by moving me to the spam folder or the promo folder where I don’t belong. Eventually it comes back. Then podcasting comes along and it is also disintermediated.

You don’t need anyone’s permission. Once someone puts your podcast in their podcast thing, you can talk directly to them and they are only going to listen to people they want to listen to. And podcasting worked so well, it wrecked itself, because there are too many podcasts. So it’s very difficult for somebody to get enough listenership to make it worth doing again next week.

And so, the fact that you’ve been doing this for 15 years is extraordinary. It means you made it with hard work and persistence and commitment to the other side, right? And then when you add advertising to it as the way to pay for it, it starts to be a mess again, because the advertiser wants something you don’t want.

The advertiser wants you to pander, they want you to interrupt yourself all the time, they want you to pretend to endorse things you don’t believe in, on and on and on and on. Because if podcasts are a commodity, the advertiser is going to buy the cheapest one they can afford, right? So the best podcasts don’t do that.

The best podcasts don’t do that. are able to say, I want a sponsor, not an advertiser. Don’t argue with me about the CPM. My listeners are special. And you’re going to pay extra for that and followed by rules, or you can’t advertise here. So now to answer your question, when you are on YouTube and have an actual subscriber, that’s a form of permission that you can make a video and send it right to people who want to get it.

On the other hand, As we’ve seen, if a billionaire takes over a platform and starts changing the algorithm and you can no longer talk to the people who are, quote, following you, you’ve been intermediated out of the game. You are unpaid labor for somebody who doesn’t treat you with respect. So my expectation is that going forward with AI, we’re going to see a whole bunch of gatekeepers lose their power.

Google is already losing an enormous amount of power to things like perplexity. And that leaves. huge opportunities for new direct communication. But the thing about direct communication is it doesn’t scale forever. So you got to be worth it, right? There are podcasts I used to listen to that are now stacking up in my reader because I just don’t have time to keep listening to them.

They didn’t make it to the top of my attention pile. Attention doesn’t get any bigger. So you’re going to have to take what you earn and that’s probably going to be under pressure. So you have to re earn it all the time.

Pat Flynn: Thank you. As we finish up here, I wanted to call out a project that you worked on with a good friend of mine, Barrett Brooks.

I know that he had worked under you for a little bit, which was amazing. And he’s spoken with high regards to, to that time. And he was the one who told me about the Carbon Almanac, a book that you had helped write. And publish related to the fact that it’s not too late to reverse what’s going on in the environment and with global warming and such.

What other projects are you working on that are more beyond the sort of marketing tone that you normally have? I was very surprised and very grateful to see that book and your voice behind that and the work that it’s doing. Are there any other projects that we could get excited about that you’re working on perhaps under wraps or that you’re willing to share about other things that you believe in and want to support?

Seth Godin: You know, the Carbon Almanac changed my life. It was my full time job for more than a year and a half as a volunteer. I worked with 1900 people in 90 countries, and it’s been an extraordinary sense of solace and connection and possibility. It demonstrated to me and to other people that you can do something really cool with other people who want to do it with you, and you don’t have to have money to do that.

And I would love to do another one that big, that deep, that exciting, they don’t come along every day. With the new book, I partnered with Askinosie Chocolate and made a collectible chocolate bar. The thing about chocolate, chocolate, and it’s almost Halloween, so it’s worth saying this out loud. The people who collect cacao from trees are slave labor in many places.

There are more than a million children who do it. The wages are ridiculous, $2 an hour. And if you’re buying cheap chocolate, you are furthering the problem. Don’t buy cheap chocolate. What Askinosie does, their motto is, it’s not about the chocolate, it’s about the chocolate. Sean goes to Tanzania, goes to the Philippines, meets the farmers, pays them five or 10 times the usual rate, sends their kids to private school and on and on and on because we can afford it.

And the things I am focused on as I enter this next stage of my life are about teaching people and being aware of unearned privilege and focusing on what are we going to do now that we’ve earned all this leverage? How are we going to use the communities around us not to get more, but to make things better.

And so I’m not done with the climate thing. It’s going to be something we live with for the rest of our lives. And I’m trying to find interesting new ways to be of use.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. Tell me a little bit about the collectible component of the chocolate. Is there a certain limited quantity of them?

I’d love to know a little bit more about that since I’m in the collectible space on the Pokemon side of the world, but.

Seth Godin: You’re the OG. So plenty of people have no trouble paying 50 bucks for a bottle of wine. And a great chocolate bar should cost 50 bucks too. They tend to cost 10. What I did was, I hand designed the packaging.

It’s really cool. I don’t have one here to show you. And it comes with a collectible trading card inside. There are 54 different cards. One of them is a golden ticket. There’s only 100 golden tickets. If you find a golden ticket, there’s a secret URL on it. You go to the URL, it explains what to do with the golden ticket.

You mail it to a secret post office box and you can win some really cool stuff. The other collectible cards, there’s going to be a prize for someone who can identify at least 50 of the people who are on the cards. And it’s a huge range of People who I share a lesson about strategy through each one of them and the chocolate is the first time Askinosie’s made a blend It’s Philippines Tanzania and Ghana and I haven’t tasted it yet.

But my hunch is it’s gonna be pretty amazing.

Pat Flynn: Oh my gosh I, when I was in Ghana, we were building schools over there through Pencils of Promise. We had been able to sample some stuff over there. It was, it was incredible. And I’ve actually been getting in a little bit into the chocolate game. How are you involved with, or how much do you know about the sort of like health related aspects of really good chocolate with not a lot of heavy metals and the, you know, I don’t even remember the scientific term of the, the things in there that can help you with brain and energy.

Like, are you getting involved in the sort of health aspect of that as well.

Seth Godin: Okay, so we have a couple minutes. I’ll get nerdy on you.

Pat Flynn: Okay, let’s get nerdy

Seth Godin: John Scharffenberger was a winemaker and he figured out that chocolate was either coming from the giant evil companies like Nestle’s or Hershey’s or made in Switzerland and He found an old machine in France brought it to California and built the first bean to bar chocolate maker in the US. He was importing beans You And making chocolate bars.

And I had to meet John. And when I was a VP at Yahoo, we did a a pilot of a promotion together. So I got to understand bean to bar chocolate. The way he launched it is really interesting. He was sure the answer would be chefs. He was going to sell three to 10 pound blocks of high quality chocolate to pastry chefs. But pastry chefs like the status quo, they’re using old recipes and they do it exactly the same way. Couldn’t make any sales. So he had this leftover chocolate, he took it to the Berkeley Farmer’s Market, and he sold it all in 20 minutes. And he’s like, you don’t have to tell me twice. I know who this is for. And that’s when bean to bar chocolate came along.

Sean was probably the third or fourth guy to do it at Askinosie Chocolate. He used to be a criminal defense attorney working with rapists and organized crime figures. No one ever went to jail who he represented. He burned out. Good for him. And he decided to do this. So anyway, I got more and more into this cause I don’t drink.

And this would become my vice. I have a basket here of more than 40 different kinds of dark chocolate. And I was four days away from starting a chocolate bar company. I took courses. I have a chocolate making facility in my house where I can make chocolate from scratch. I was going to scale it up. And then I thought, you know what, I’m probably better at marketing than Sean Askinosie, but I’m not a better person than him.

So I’m going to start stealing market share from him. Why don’t I just sell his chocolate instead? So I’ve been aligned with many, I know many of these people. I love them. The answer to your question, the amount of heavy metal that you eat, if you eat as much chocolate as I eat, Is vanishingly small. You don’t need to worry about the heavy metal and chocolate.

And I eat a lot of chocolate. Because a lot of chocolate is a couple of squares. It’s not like you’re drinking bottles of wine, right?

It’s not something that you need to worry about. As for the beneficial side effects, they’re bigger in Harry Potter than they are in real life, because you may recall in the second or third book, dark chocolate gets you saved if you get attacked by one of those evil creatures.

But I can attest that my best ideas come when I have a chocolate buzz. I haven’t done double blind studies, but that’s the way it is. I’m sticking with it.

Pat Flynn: If it works, it works. And you’re not the first person I’ve heard who’ve said that chocolate during the creative phase of their work actually is really, really helpful.

And I’ve been feeling the effects as well. I buy some really expensive chocolate for this exact purpose. Fun fact, I took a chocolate factory tour at the Scharfenberger factory in Berkeley, California while I was there. And it was such a fun experience. Seth, thank you so much for this. In a minute, can you tell people why they should check out This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans.

Seth Godin: Well, first, thank you for letting me rant. I realize I’ve been ranting, but you are such a good interviewer that you can just keep setting me up to rant and rant and rant.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, Seth. It means a lot.

Seth Godin: If you go to Seths.blog/TIS, you can read about the book. I don’t care if you buy my book. I really don’t.

I just need you to talk about it. I need you to sit down with someone you care about and have a conversation about how are you making things better and what strategy would help you do that more. That’s why I wrote a book. Not because I want to chop down trees or get a check from my publisher, but because I want people to have a conversation.

If your strategy is working, you don’t need my help. But if it It could be better. You need to talk to somebody about it and this book is a good way to start.

Pat Flynn: In your vision, a person reads this book, sits at a dinner table and says, gosh, you got to read Seth’s book because blank. What are they filling in that blank with?

Seth Godin: Because then you’ll understand what I am wrestling with. I’m not here to just do my job. That’s what our grandparents did. I’m here to figure out what my job is and to be of service. To do work that matters for people who care. Will you help me do that? As opposed to asking, when am I going to get a nine to five job?

Cause that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Pat Flynn: Seth, this was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me let you rant. And I look forward to the next conversation.

Seth Godin: Let’s not wait so long. I’m looking forward to it. Thank you, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

All right. I hope you enjoy that interview with Seth Godin. What an absolute pleasure that was. I’ve been reading his blog forever. Even back before I became an entrepreneur, his blog was around and like just the amount of people that he has helped myself included is just staggering and he continues to do so. And I very much admire that and to get inspired by that. So I’m hoping that you definitely check out his new book.

This Is Strategy make better plans and you can check that out on Amazon or on his website and definitely check out his blog. Let me know what you think. Hit me up on Instagram or X at Pat Flynn and let me know that you listen to this and what you thought about it. I’d love to have him back on the show at some point and we’d love to just continue to deepen that relationship with Mr. Seth Godin. Thank you, Seth. I appreciate you. And thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you as well. Please hit up the show notes for all the links and resources mentioned. And just to visit the website if you haven’t visited it in a while, it may look a little different to you.

SmartPassiveIncome.com/session831. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session831. Look forward to serving you more in the next and upcoming episodes. And we’ll chat soon. Take care, everybody. Thanks.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!