#3 – Building a community with Seth Godin’s tribalism-based marketing: People Like Us Do Things Like This

Seth Godin is, to say the least, a global thought leader in every respect when it comes to marketing and storytelling. He’s written books that have connected and impacted people around the world. He has a weekly podcast, Akimbo and he writes his blog and ships it every single day. But really, his goal in distributing information isn’t to just share ideas to change the culture, as he would call it, it’s to be a teacher, it’s to spread information to different pockets of community. In his words, “People like us do things like this” it’s one of the most important concepts because it’s what glues us together as a community. We talked about:

People like us do things like this

Seth Godin’s famous statement describes the crux of culture and community.

“People like us that do things like this” has two classes. “People like us” has nothing to do with what you look like, zero. It is not about racism. It is not about the indoctrination of birth. “People like us” means you picked who the people like us are. Among that group that you picked, you are suggesting that what we do are these sorts of sacraments, ceremonies, and identities. “People like us do things like this”, it’s a blindingly obvious statement that is at the heart of every culture all the time.

There isn’t one Buffalo

Growing up in Buffalo influenced Seth’s view on micro-communities and the micro chasms in culture.

First of all, there isn’t one Buffalo, just like there isn’t one Chicago or one Winnipeg. I grew up in several Buffalo’s. I grew up in a suburb of Buffalo that compared to the rest of Buffalo is pretty affluent… compared to a place like New York City, not so much. The house I grew up in cost $80,000. That suburb was a place where I could walk to the hockey rink, read every book in the Clearfield Public Library, see the teachers. If we went out for pizza, they would be at the next table. It was a small town inside of a big one. My parents were both really active in big city, Buffalo. My dad volunteered to run United Way one year. My mom was on the Board of the art museum. I got to see what was possible when a community came together. Then, my dad had worked at a company that was on a different side of Buffalo, that was right next to the football stadium. That was corporate, industrialized, factory kind of work. When you put the three together, I guess part of the influence is being able to see these micro-communities.

The rise of the interview podcast

Podcasts have exploded as a medium without requiring the same level of skill as mediums like blogs and novels.

Isn’t it interesting that the interview podcast has taken off? There’s no interview blog, there’s no interview novel, there’s no interview book, really. But the interview podcast has taken off because it gives the podcaster a way to somehow… not someone like you, but someone who’s just mediocre at it, get off the hook because you’re just as good as your guests. You just book people and let them talk. That is how radio evolved, and radio evolved that way because it’s cheap. I don’t have any problem with interview podcasts, I listen to them all the time, but the best podcasts are either from gifted interviewers like you or my friend, Brian Cooperman, or they’re from people like Roman Mars who have a thing to say. I just don’t want to turn on a podcast and hear two people talking to each other about something that I’m not interested in.

Professionals are expected to embrace consistency over authenticity

Customers of a business only want the best version of what they are paying for which doesn’t leave room for human authenticity.

Every day two of the people on the team are having a bad day, just do the math. If I’m a customer or a vendor or a supplier and I’m interacting with one of those two people, I don’t want them to be authentic. I don’t want them to act like they’re having a bad day. I want the best version of them. If I go to see Keller Williams perform in concert, I don’t want to see the true daily version of Keller. I want to see the best version of him, that’s what I paid for. If I’m flying, which will never happen I don’t think, a Delta and the pilot’s cranky because their spouse got in a fight with them, I don’t want them to be authentic. Go down the list. We don’t want authenticity in anything except a certain sort of Twitter diva. That’s the only place that we have room for it. Actors are actors. They are not there to tell us how they truly feel, they’re there to perform. As soon as you show up as a professional, you’ve given up the mantle of authenticity and instead you must embrace consistency.

New media is exciting because it’s always changing

As each new wave of media evolves new patterns emerge that provide exciting new opportunites.

I loved being in a new form of media. We were making software for the Commodore 64, the PC Junior. I was just thrilled that the landscape would change every six weeks. I think the reason goes back to football and hockey, which is the problem with hockey, besides the fact that I broke my nose and broke my arm and broke my spirit, was because the game of hockey hasn’t changed in 100 years, people who are good at it, stay good at it and the advantages compound. I viewed myself as an outsider. I liked the fact that we were the first people on the PC Junior. Then, when the PC Junior crashed and burned, I was like, “All right, well, we have enough resources. We’ll be the first company on the Apple II, whatever it is. You could just read InfoWorld Magazine, because there was no web, and be six months ahead of the people who were slow because the foundation kept shifting. That’s when I committed to discovering new forms of media. When online services like AOL and CompuServe came along, I saw it happening again.

Following the path to find the dynamics of the medium

Media is always changing but by understanding the way people interact you can understand why specific tactics are effective.

If the money from users disappears, again, you get to look at a media landscape and you say, “Well, the equation has to be attention. It’s the only option. What will people pay for attention?” It’s a two-sided thing. Either, how do you get a lot of attention or how do you sell attention you get for a lot of money? I didn’t predict all of what happened on the worldwide web, but I predicted a lot of it. I helped invent email marketing because I understood that email was a very special sort of attention, hooked into an open API. I wrote books about it and I built the first email marketing company. But, I also saw where banner ads were going to go. I was famously castigated by the people at Yahoo for predicting that the banner ad price would go… I remember it was $70 a thousand and I said it would go to a penny, and it did. Once you start seeing the dynamics of a medium, and now it’s podcasting or Clubhouse, which has stupid dynamics, you can say, “Well, let’s follow the path” because if you follow the path, you’ll understand. You’ll understand why Netflix likes Dave Chappelle, just follow the path.

How do ads create value?

Advertising can create cultural value by allowing people to see themselves in the brands and tell their own story.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that advertising creates cultural value, that people tell themselves a story about Gucci or Prada or Nike or Chevrolet, partly because of the advertising, and that if you read a fashion magazine with no ads in it, it feels very sad. The advertising in certain spaces is a spice that adds energy to culture, given that we are used to it. When they start putting up billboards in National Parks, we hate that because we’re not used to being interrupted in that place. The fascinating thing that happened when the web came along is the web wasn’t invented for marketers, and every other medium was. Advertising was in its accepted boxes for 100 years. Then, the web came along and there were no accepted boxes so we got spam and popovers and pop-unders and spying and cookie reading and things. People don’t like to be surprised. On the other hand, when they started putting ads into the movies, which until last year was a bigger market than podcasting in total, people didn’t like it at first because they said, “Hey, I paid 12 bucks for this ticket”, but the ads were pretty good. They were culturally appropriate, and so people got used to it.

Defining the culture to drive action

Building a community starts with setting clear expectations around what people in that community do.

It wasn’t until the year ’50 when they realized how hard it was to get an adult to want to circumcise themselves, that they got rid of the Orthodox Jew part of it and they could say, “Anybody who wants to do things like this can be people like us”. That’s how they grew into one of the fastest religions ever. Go all the way forward to any Apple store. Well, there’s a certain way you’re supposed to act when you walk in there. There’s a certain set of products you’re supposed to own. You’re supposed to have a certain attitude about how technology works. As Steve has said, in the words of Michael Schrage, he was trying to give people better tastes when it came to digital interactions. That’s “people like us do things like this”, but there is a key component of it, which is, and you have to forgive the people who don’t want to be people like us. If you can’t do that, then you’re a megalomaniac and you’re trying to just insist that everybody do what you want, and that doesn’t work. You don’t have the power to do that. Instead, what we say is, “If you want to be in this circle, this is what people in this circle do. We are definers of culture around here, that’s our job. This is what our culture is like around here.

Respecting people who like loud music

The division in North America especially could be attributed to people in different communities with no overlap in their interests and beliefs.

one of the reasons why, particularly in North America, we’re in so much cultural disarray is we have shifted in the last 10 years, partly due to the web, partly due to selfish demagogues. We have shifted from, there is one people like us that people aspire to be doing things like this with to there are many. When those groups brush up against each other, tolerance is the only valid response because everyone is right. Everyone has their own noise in their head. If you’re not bothering anybody else and you are not being manipulated, then your taste is your taste. The fact that my cousin likes to hear live music that is so loud you must wear headphones in the theater… it’s true. I can happily tell you I think he’s an idiot, but he doesn’t think he’s an idiot. He is being his best self when he goes to these events and he’s entitled. People are made up of a whole bunch of micro-communities that they’re a part of. There’s always going to be some overlap in the Venn diagram, but where you get the friction is when there are sometimes people from two different communities that don’t have any overlap in the Venn diagram, that being interest or community or shared values, that’s where the friction comes from. That’s where I think we, as a society, have to respect other people’s outlooks, say “It’s entirely okay to listen to loud music. I choose not to do it.” It’s that we decide that we’re going to make that our own issues.

How do you build community?

Building a community does not start with a tribe but instead Seth says it starts with finding people already on the journey.

when you create evangelical voices with a remarkable product and service and a network effect that rewards people for spreading an idea, they will. I do not believe that the best way to have a movement is to start a tribe. I believe the best way to have a movement is to find a tribe that is looking for a leader and a connector, so that’s different. When I think about what your organization is doing, you’re not going to invent a nascent tribe of people who care about this thing. There’s already people who care about the journey that you are hoping they will go on. Your job is to go to them and say, “Over here”, and they will come.

Building a new path for learning

Seth’s teaching journey has seen a transition across learning styles while always focusing on what could be.

I don’t own or run Akimbo anymore on purpose. It’s a B-Corp in the public interest run by really talented people. My workshops are still there. My point six years ago was, “The medium is changing again”. I was the number one instructor on Skillshare. I was number one in my category in Udemy. I knew how to make video courses. I also knew that the typical video course had a 95% dropout rate, and the reason is because learning requires tension to get you from “I don’t know” to “I know”. When tension hits, people quit. I said, “If I was going to play with this medium the way I played with email and the way I played with the web, what would I do?” That, over the course of a week, led to me creating the altMBA…As a creator of media, after the 10th one I was like, “I’m not changing this too much, so what am I going to focus on now?” My job is not to be an educational bureaucrat, though those are really important people. I said, “Well, what new rules could I build about other kinds of workshops that maybe would cost a lot less and take less time?” That led to the creation of cohort-based learning. I don’t think anyone was doing it before me, the way I did it anyway. Once it was working so well, I said, “Well, now I need to get lots of people doing cohort-based learning. It’s a bigger thing than Seth as a teacher.” Part of it is… Wes went on to start Maven and Candace has Disco, and it looks like Teachable and Udemy are going to start doing cohort-based learning. That’s what I wanted. That’s great. I don’t have to run anything, that’s great too.

Seth Godin: “People like us that do things like this” has two classes. “People like us” has nothing to do with what you look like, zero. It is not about racism. It is not about the indoctrination of birth. “People like us” means you picked who the people like us are. Among that group that you picked, you are suggesting that what we do are these sorts of sacraments, ceremonies, and identities. “People like us do things like this”, it’s a blindingly obvious statement that is at the heart of every culture all the time.

Ben Grynol: I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at LEVELS. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. This is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level

Ben Grynol: Growing up in Buffalo, New York, Seth Godin realized that he thought differently at a pretty young age. He was around seven years old. He was exposed to different sports. He was exposed to people in the community. He was exposed to the library. All these different facets of the community and the city that he lived in created the conditions and the glue, the nodes and the network, the connection points for him to start to develop his own way of thinking. Fast forward till today, that being October 21st, 2021, well, Seth Godin is, to say the least, a global thought leader in every respect when it comes to marketing and storytelling. He’s written books that have connected and impacted people around the world. He has a weekly podcast that he drops, Akimbo. It’s a great podcast if you haven’t had a chance to check it out. He writes his blog and ships it every single day.

Ben Grynol: But really, his goal in distributing information isn’t to just share ideas to change the culture, as he would call it, it’s to be a teacher, it’s to spread information to these different pockets of community, to these different areas of the world. In his words, “People like us do things like this”, well, it’s one of the most important concepts that he’s done to this day. It is what glues us together as a community. Seth and I had a chance to sit down and have a very meaningful conversation around all these different ideas, this different way of thinking. Here’s the conversation with Seth. There’s so many interesting things to discuss because you’re… full disclosure, you come up in conversation probably more than once a week within our team. Across different memos, across different meetings we have, one of our goals is that we’re trying to build a movement.

Ben Grynol: Everyone’s on the same page as far as not competing for three seconds of attention and doing all the things that companies typically think that they should do. We’re focused on how do we truly… A, our main goal is to educate the world about metabolic health, not to try to convince them to buy some product. As soon as we set that as the expectation, it changes the heuristic of the way we approach everything we do. But we refer to the movement we’re building, we refer to the micro-communities, the sense of tribalism, and the sense of people like us do things like this. I was like, “Okay, I think we should dig in and explore everything further.” That’s sort of the… I guess, to set things up, why don’t we go way back? Let’s go all the way back to Buffalo. We know you grew up in Buffalo. We know that Buffalo is, in a similar sense to Winnipeg, it’s very much this smaller community of a city. But, what was it about growing up in Buffalo that influenced your thinking so much?

Seth Godin: There’s so many juicy things to go into there. First of all, there isn’t one Buffalo, just like there isn’t one Chicago or one Winnipeg. I grew up in several Buffalo’s. I grew up in a suburb of Buffalo that compared to the rest of Buffalo is pretty affluent… compared to a place like New York City, not so much. The house I grew up in cost $80,000. That suburb was a place where I could walk to the hockey rink, read every book in the Clearfield Public Library, see the teachers. If we went out for pizza, they would be at the next table. It was a small town inside of a big one. My parents were both really active in big city, Buffalo. My dad volunteered to run United Way one year. My mom was on the Board of the art museum. I got to see what was possible when a community came together. Then, my dad had worked at a company that was on a different side of Buffalo, that was right next to the football stadium. That was corporate, industrialized, factory kind of work.

Seth Godin: When you put the three together, I guess part of the influence is being able to see these micro-communities. Then, for me personally, it was just winning the parent lottery and having parents who challenged me regularly to be part of community and to lead, even if I wasn’t popular… because I wasn’t, even if I didn’t do the sorts of things that community looked to for a leader, like play football and stuff. But, we always had strangers at our house for dinner. If somebody didn’t have a place to sleep, people would stay with us for months at a time. I thought that was normal, and I don’t understand why it can’t be normal.

Ben Grynol: I know you’ve talked a little bit before about hockey and football and all these sports that you would try, and summer camp, and all these cool things. You sort of said, “I felt more connected to the library.” In your words, you’ll say, “I was a bit of a nerd.” You felt that you would try these things, but they didn’t resonate as much as all these other long tail things. Was there sort of an introspective period where you recognized, “Hey, I think a little bit differently than other people”? Then, what was it that made you think to yourself, “I want to communicate these ideas to the world. I want to influence the culture.” What was it that was sort of the catalyst for change? The reason that I ask is that Dan Ariely talks often about his experience in the hospital that is what made him have a switch just flip in his brain where he’s like, “Oh my goodness, I don’t think the same as other people. I have to tell other people about this.” Did you have any moments where you recognized that in yourself?

Seth Godin: Dan’s trauma is heartbreaking and I’m so glad that it led to something positive. Mine was nowhere near that, but I was an outsider all along and knew it from the time I was seven. I think that the big shift that you’re getting at though is I just decided to be a teacher when I was 17. I knew I couldn’t teach in a bureaucratic structure because it would kill me. I’ve just constantly been on the search for platforms to teach. The people I’m most interested in teaching are the people who are the least privileged and least popular.

Ben Grynol: I think that’s what your underlying message with Akimbo… not just the idea of the community behind Akimbo and all the workshops, which we can get into later, but the podcast is everything that you do seems to be the sense of A being a leader, B trying to build other leaders, and C being the teacher that teaches. That’s the byproduct of having a solo cast where you’re like, I do this… in the same way that you blog. You don’t do it to interview people, you do it to express ideas and hopefully influence one person who influences one person who influences more and more. It’s such an interesting lens to think about communicating ideas from the perspective of teaching as opposed to pontification, if that makes sense.

Seth Godin: It does. Isn’t it interesting that the interview podcast has taken off? There’s no interview blog, there’s no interview novel, there’s no interview book, really. But the interview podcast has taken off because it gives the podcaster a way to somehow… not someone like you, but someone who’s just mediocre at it, get off the hook because you’re just as good as your guests. You just book people and let them talk. That is how radio evolved, and radio evolved that way because it’s cheap. I don’t have any problem with interview podcasts, I listen to them all the time, but the best podcasts are either from gifted interviewers like you or my friend, Brian Cooperman, or they’re from people like Roman Mars who have a thing to say. I just don’t want to turn on a podcast and hear two people talking to each other about something that I’m not interested in.

Ben Grynol: Or, I think maybe when conversations feel linear. The intimate part of being a fly on the wall to a conversation is that you feel like you’re part of a conversation, you’re listening to two people converse. But, when it feels like there is some agenda or some linear process… well, and my next question is this. It’s all of a sudden, it just loses that sense of being conversational because you go… if Seth and I were having tea right now. I’m having coffee, you’re having tea, if we are both in New York and we are sitting there, we wouldn’t be having this linear conversation of like, “My next question for you, Seth, is how is your wife’s bakery doing?” It would just be so absurd to communicate like that. But I think when we give ourselves a medium or a platform, we think that we have to act differently, and that gets away from, we’re not going to use the word authenticity because I know that there are certain gripes with that word, but that gets away from… we’ll finish this thought when you go to digress into that rant for a sec.

Ben Grynol: But, it loses the element of being genuine and a personal conversation. Now, we got to digress into authenticity for a second because why not?

Seth Godin: How many people on the team now where you work?

Ben Grynol: 33.

Seth Godin: That means that every day two of the people on the team are having a bad day, just do the math. If I’m a customer or a vendor or a supplier and I’m interacting with one of those two people, I don’t want them to be authentic. I don’t want them to act like they’re having a bad day. I want the best version of them. If I go to see Keller Williams perform in concert, I don’t want to see the true daily version of Keller. I want to see the best version of him, that’s what I paid for. If I’m flying, which will never happen I don’t think, a Delta and the pilot’s cranky because their spouse got in a fight with them, I don’t want them to be authentic. Go down the list. We don’t want authenticity in anything except a certain sort of Twitter diva. That’s the only place that we have room for it.

Seth Godin: Actors are actors. They are not there to tell us how they truly feel, they’re there to perform. As soon as you show up as a professional, you’ve given up the mantle of authenticity and instead you must embrace consistency.

Ben Grynol: That’s exactly it. I know you’ve talked before about… babies are authentic. They’re their most authentic version of themselves, but the parents can’t be authentic because their job is to actually act. It’s not that hard to the kids. You have to be patient and being patient is not necessarily authentic when you might be a little upset if children are not listening, something that is near and dear my heart at this point in life. Well, let’s go into Yoyodyne and Yahoo. Interesting period. A lot was happening in marketing, advertising, everything with email communication, and it was something that you saw firsthand. You were very much a part of this… I don’t want to use the word movement, but we’ll call it a… because it’s different than a tribal movement, but this forward movement in society towards, “Hey, we are now online”. Where was it that you started to think differently about advertising versus marketing and how marketing is a sense of storytelling versus advertising being hacking attention.

Seth Godin: Those are two different questions. I’ll answer the second question. I read the work of Jay Levinson in 1985 and he wrote a book called Guerilla Marketing. Guerilla Marketing, he thought was a book of tactics for how companies with no money could do things that felt like advertising. I really internalized a lot of those messages. I had millions and millions of dollars to spend. I was a 24 year old Brand Manager at Spinnaker launching books based on science fiction novels. I just knew in my bones that the magazine ads and People Magazine weren’t going to work, they just weren’t going to work. We didn’t have enough money. We were the 240th biggest advertiser in America that year and you have to be in the top 20 or it’s not going to work. Even then I was saying, “Our marketing is what we do. Our marketing is who we serve. Our marketing is how we engage with people. Our marketing is the package, the way it makes people feel. All of those things are marketing. If you make me buy some ads, I will, but that’s not why we’re here.”

Seth Godin: I loved being in a new form of media. We were making software for the Commodore 64, the PC Junior. I was just thrilled that the landscape would change every six weeks. I think the reason goes back to football and hockey, which is the problem with hockey, besides the fact that I broke my nose and broke my arm and broke my spirit, was because the game of hockey hasn’t changed in 100 years, people who are good at it, stay good at it and the advantages compound. I viewed myself as an outsider. I liked the fact that we were the first people on the PC Junior. Then, when the PC Junior crashed and burned, I was like, “All right, well, we have enough resources. We’ll be the first company on the Apple II, whatever it is. You could just read InfoWorld Magazine, because there was no web, and be six months ahead of the people who were slow because the foundation kept shifting. That’s when I committed to discovering new forms of media. When online services like AOL and CompuServe came along, I saw it happening again.

Seth Godin: I realized that I was quick enough and knew enough about media to go into those spaces better than other people could. I still remember there was a guy at [inaudible 00:15:27] which was one of the five biggest book publishers. His last name was Gutenberg, which I thought was hysterical because it was just such a flash from the past. He was in charge of their CD-ROM division. I finally got him to confess that his job was to go to meetings and not spend any money, that they had decided that they would deal with this revolution by pretending to be in it. I knew I could be in it, whichever one it was. When online services came along, I had to do the math, like who’s paying? Where’s the money? A couple things occurred to me. The first one was that AOL at the time was charging $3 an hour and paying a royalty on hours spent, so that’s where the money is. If you could make a product that people would use for a lot of hours, you could get paid to do it.

Seth Godin: All right, so now we know what the game is. Let’s figure out a structure on that foundation where we can serve people. Then, when AOL went to flat rate and I realized I had been wrong about worldwide web, all the money from users disappears. If the money from users disappears, again, you get to look at a media landscape and you say, “Well, the equation has to be attention. It’s the only option. What will people pay for attention?” It’s a two-sided thing. Either, how do you get a lot of attention or how do you sell attention you get for a lot of money? I didn’t predict all of what happened on the worldwide web, but I predicted a lot of it. I helped invent email marketing because I understood that email was a very special sort of attention, hooked into an open API. I wrote books about it and I built the first email marketing company. But, I also saw where banner ads were going to go.

Seth Godin: I was famously castigated by the people at Yahoo for predicting that the banner ad price would go… I remember it was $70 a thousand and I said it would go to a penny, and it did. Once you start seeing the dynamics of a medium, and now it’s podcasting or Clubhouse, which has stupid dynamics, you can say, “Well, let’s follow the path” because if you follow the path, you’ll understand. You’ll understand why Netflix likes Dave Chappelle, just follow the path.

Ben Grynol: With marketing, there’s a sense of value. Let’s say marketing is synonymous with storytelling, which is something you talk about often… and advertising being hacking attention, to be colloquial about it. One creates a lot of value, right? If you are storytelling and you are teaching, that being through marketing, and you do it effectively, that’s very different than hacking attention. What’s your outlook as far as… does advertising create value? Not economic value, that’s clear as day, but does it create intrinsic value for people? Or, is that sort of the dichotomy between the two, advertising and marketing?

Seth Godin: I don’t think there’s any doubt that advertising creates cultural value, that people tell themselves a story about Gucci or Prada or Nike or Chevrolet, partly because of the advertising, and that if you read a fashion magazine with no ads in it, it feels very sad. The advertising in certain spaces is a spice that adds energy to culture, given that we are used to it. When they start putting up billboards in National Parks, we hate that because we’re not used to being interrupted in that place. The fascinating thing that happened when the web came along is the web wasn’t invented for marketers, and every other medium was. Advertising was in its accepted boxes for 100 years. Then, the web came along and there were no accepted boxes so we got spam and popovers and pop-unders and spying and cookie reading and things. People don’t like to be surprised.

Seth Godin: On the other hand, when they started putting ads into the movies, which until last year was a bigger market than podcasting in total, people didn’t like it at first because they said, “Hey, I paid 12 bucks for this ticket”, but the ads were pretty good. They were culturally appropriate, and so people got used to it. I don’t think there are many successful cultures that have banned advertising, but I know that advertisers should want there to be limits on advertising because if there aren’t, then all the ads become worthless.

Ben Grynol: That’s the point where things get to be uncomfortable where people opt in, they put up their hand, they say, “I’m willing to have my attention hacked.” Then the second that they get it hacked too much, when it is not when they want, then they go, “I don’t like this advertising thing”. Advertising… again, everyone’s going to have a different outlook. My outlook is, advertising can be cool if you have opted in and you put up your hand and you say, “I would like to discover”, it has a sense of discovery, “I’d like to discover new things”. Let’s say, hypothetically, it is pre-roll ads on a podcast. A great sense of discovery… a company that somebody didn’t know before, your favorite podcaster reads that out. There you go, it’s sense of discovery, but you’ve opted into that. Where you don’t like it is exactly what you said, it’s popups and it’s all these things, spam email, and the list goes on and on. That gets back into this whole different rant about data and privacy, which you have talked very deeply about.

Ben Grynol: I think that’s where people have somewhat of attention between advertising that they opt into and they want versus feeling like they are being overly targeted, and it gets to be a much deeper conversation. What’s really interesting though, something that I think about often and I, again, totally subjective. I think the most important thing that you have done from a concept standpoint is this, “People like us do things like this”. It’s something that initially was harder to wrap my head around, like sure, I could read it, but to truly grasp it… when I understood it, it was like a light bulb clicked. I was like, “Oh my goodness. I actually think this is one of the most important marketing concepts of the past 50 years.” It’s something that, when digging into it deeper, it seems like it started sort of with Tribes. That is the foundation of when you wrote Tribes. When you had the TED Talk, you talked about the tribes we lead. Then, you actually wrote the blog post. It was like 2013, called “People like us do things like this”.

Ben Grynol: I think there was the PDF along with it. That was still sort of this underserved concept. Fast forward to 2018, This Is Marketing drops, and that was the foundation of that book. What’s the outlook on that? Maybe we should frame exactly what “People like us do things like this” is, but what’s your outlook on that as it pertains to tribalism and community?

Seth Godin: I fear I don’t have enough time to decode all of the things you just brought up, but thank you for such attention to detail. “People like us do things like this” has two clauses. “People like us” has nothing to do with what you look like, zero. It is not about racism. It is not about the indoctrination of birth. “People like us” means you picked who the people like us are, and among that group that you picked, you are suggesting that what we do are these sorts of sacraments, ceremonies, and identities. People like us do things like this. It’s a blindingly obvious statement that is at the heart of every culture all the time. If we think back to the original first 40 years of the Christian Church, you had to be an Orthodox Jew. That’s one group of people who do a set of things. Then, you had to do a whole second set of things. You were one of a group of just a few thousand people, people like us do things like this. You didn’t try to get other people to do it, that wasn’t built in.

Seth Godin: It wasn’t until the year ’50 when they realized how hard it was to get an adult to want to circumcise themselves, that they got rid of the Orthodox Jew part of it and they could say, “Anybody who wants to do things like this can be people like us”. That’s how they grew into one of the fastest religions ever. Go all the way forward to any Apple store. Well, there’s a certain way you’re supposed to act when you walk in there. There’s a certain set of products you’re supposed to own. You’re supposed to have a certain attitude about how technology works. As Steve has said, in the words of Michael Schrage, he was trying to give people better tastes when it came to digital interactions. That’s “people like us do things like this”, but there is a key component of it, which is, and you have to forgive the people who don’t want to be people like us. If you can’t do that, then you’re a megalomaniac and you’re trying to just insist that everybody do what you want, and that doesn’t work.

Seth Godin: You don’t have the power to do that. Instead, what we say is, “If you want to be in this circle, this is what people in this circle do. We are definers of culture around here, that’s our job. This is what our culture is like around here.”

Ben Grynol: It gets into the sense of signaling too, signaling and perception. I can’t remember exactly which podcast it was. It might have been two years ago that you had brought something up around signaling, it might have been, call it, two or three years ago. It might have been when This Is Marketing dropped. But, the insight or the takeaway was if you wear ripped jeans and they happen to be… to somebody who is not part of the people like us. They go, “Look at Seth in his ripped jeans. Why doesn’t he get new jeans?” To other people, they go, “Look at Seth’s ripped Japanese denim or Levi’s from 1962. Oh my goodness, can you believe he’s wearing that?” People like us do things like this, very different pockets and perceptions. Then the takeaway is there actually isn’t a right answer because there are these long tail pockets where each community can serve itself. It’s completely okay to not understand Seth’s ripped jeans and to completely understand Seth’s ripped jeans, and you find the others. It’s such a neat concept to start thinking about groups this way.

Seth Godin: There are so many, but one of the reasons why, particularly in North America, we’re in so much cultural disarray is we have shifted in the last 10 years, partly due to the web, partly due to selfish demagogues. We have shifted from, there is one people like us that people aspire to be doing things like this with to there are many. When those groups brush up against each other, tolerance is the only valid response because everyone is right. Everyone has their own noise in their head. If you’re not bothering anybody else and you are not being manipulated, then your taste is your taste. The fact that my cousin likes to hear live music that is so loud you must wear headphones in the theater… it’s true. I can happily tell you I think he’s an idiot, but he doesn’t think he’s an idiot. He is being his best self when he goes to these events and he’s entitled.

Ben Grynol: People are made up of a whole bunch of micro-communities that they’re a part of. There’s always going to be some overlap in the Venn diagram, but where you get the friction is when there are sometimes people from two different communities that don’t have any overlap in the Venn diagram, that being interest or community or shared values, that’s where the friction comes from. That’s where I think we, as a society, have to respect other people’s outlooks, say “It’s entirely okay to listen to loud music. I choose not to do it.” It’s that we decide that we’re going to make that our own issues.

Seth Godin: I think that there’s a second source of the friction. This is, there are people who define their status and define their affiliation by embracing a status quo that is under threat. They have just decided that people who do not adhere to their indoctrinated vision of what it’s supposed to be like around here, they’ve decided that’s not okay. Traditionally, those have been people of privilege who are casting that blame on people who aren’t. But there will be a backlash and it will go in the other direction, where there will be people who newly have found a voice who will say, “I cannot tolerate someone who doesn’t have my voice not having my voice”. That’s not as bad, but it’s not good either.

Ben Grynol: It gets into the idea of influencing the culture. The culture is influenced by all these micro-communities. I think you said it firsthand, the way to create a movement, aside from making something that’s remarkable and that is a great experience… the way to create a movement is to create a tribe that creates tribes that creates tribes that creates tribes. It’s back to the start of the conversation of you being a teacher. You are teaching other people who have the shared interest in ideas to teach other people who can teach other people. That’s what Akimbo has really done from a platform standpoint.

Seth Godin: I just want to… before you move forward, thank you though. You said two things, I agree with one and I disagree with the other.

Ben Grynol: Let’s do it.

Seth Godin: I agree with the second one, which is 10 by 10 by 10, that when you create evangelical voices with a remarkable product and service and a network effect that rewards people for spreading an idea, they will. I do not believe that the best way to have a movement is to start a tribe. I believe the best way to have a movement is to find a tribe that is looking for a leader and a connector, so that’s different. When I think about what your organization is doing, you’re not going to invent a nascent tribe of people who care about this thing. There’s already people who care about the journey that you are hoping they will go on. Your job is to go to them and say, “Over here”, and they will come.

Ben Grynol: Interesting. It’s creating the conditions to attract like-minded people, knowing that within the like-minded people, the people like us, there are people like us within… this is getting a bit meta. But, there are people like us within the people like us, within the community. That’s what gets really interesting when you start to say, “You can be interested in ripped jeans, the Grateful Dead, and plant-based diet. That’s entirely okay. These are your people.” There are other people that you interact with that are only the ripped jeans crowd, and only the plant-based diet crowd, and only the Grateful Dead crowd. But, that’s sort of what makes us all these individuals and brings together the glue of these larger communities.

Seth Godin: Or, if I think about my friends, Alan and Bill… Alan, the mayor of Santa Fe now who started Fast Company, they didn’t invent the Fast Company tribe. When they finally succumbed and allowed me to be a columnist, I wrote more words for Fast Company than almost anybody. They weren’t my tribe either. I was narrating for a group of people that Alan and Bill was able to assemble that would’ve been there even if Alan and Bill hadn’t started the magazine. That was a huge insight for me. When I did this book in the Milk Carton, there were only 5,000 copies originally sold. The Milk Carton wasn’t because I wanted people to talk about Seth. It was because it would help you find the others who were going where you were going anyway, if you had a badge. I’m a badge maker. I’m writing my blog posts so that people who already agree with me have something cogent to share with people right next to them to join in.

Seth Godin: But, there’s no Seth Godin tribe, I really believe that. I believe that if I stop working tomorrow, that group of people would still be making the changes and leading the way they are. I’m just narrating for them now.

Ben Grynol: You’ve shipped so much work though that you’ve created a foundation for people to share these ideas and to find commonality around them. One of the things that’s interesting though, let’s get into shipping, you are a huge proponent of ship fast and often. There is a reason you write every day. You don’t write every day for everybody else, you write every day, you ship your blog every single day for yourself, right? That is why… plus you’re teaching.

Seth Godin: I don’t think I’m doing it for myself.

Ben Grynol: I guess maybe reframe it, from an accountability standpoint, right? Where you said, “I am shipping every day”.

Seth Godin: If I’m going to do this work, I don’t want to have to renegotiate with myself every day about whether I want to do this work. I made one strategic decision 25 years ago about the change I seek to make. Now, I have lots of tactical opportunities. Should I, like my friend Simon, come out with a line of T-shirts and a candle? That’s a tactic. I love tactics. I could spend all day, as you’ve heard me, going on and on about tactics. But if I spend all day going on about tactics, I’m not fulfilling my strategy. I just decided one of my tactics is there’s going to be a blog post every day. There’ll be one tomorrow, not because it’s the best one I ever wrote, but because it’s tomorrow. That practice is mine, but I do it because it serves my goal, my strategy, my long term thing of, how do I become a teacher?

Ben Grynol: Then, what is it about being comfortable shipping over and over and over again when work is never perfect? You can never perfect a painting, an artist just cannot perfect a painting. You can’t perfect a blog post. You can rewrite it 20 times over, but it’s not going to ship itself. What is the hesitation that people have when it comes to shipping work, whether it is creative, like whether it is art or whether it is tactical work like actually shipping a product update? Why can’t people wrap their heads around that?

Seth Godin: Well, the first rule of indoctrination is you’re not supposed to know you’ve been indoctrinated. We have been indoctrinated from a very young age to be cogs in the industrial system, to do what the teacher says, to do the minimum because if we don’t, the boss will take more, to try to avoid responsibility, and to look for authority so we can tell other people what to do. All of those things are baked in the culture from the time our kids are really little. When you say to people, “Anyone who wants, you can have a blog, they’re free” almost no one builds one. When you say to people, “Anyone can have a podcast, but they’re free” almost no one does because it’s not an assignment and because you’re responsible. The thing about this voluntary sort of leadership of publishing and creation is it flies in the face of all the things we were taught to do and not do.

Ben Grynol: Do you think there’s a sense of vulnerability with shipping work that isn’t polished? You’re putting yourself out there.

Seth Godin: Well, the polished thing is so important to talk about. If you have a phone, it’s defective. If you have a car, it’s definitely defective. If you have software, there are bugs in it, guaranteed. If you eat a food product, there are bugs in it, guaranteed. Is it possible to make one that is truly polished to the level that no one could notice a flaw? Possibly. But all of us regularly buy stuff that’s good enough because the definition of good enough is it’s good enough. That’s a good thing, that’s not an excuse. If you don’t think it’s good enough, change the spec to the point where good enough means what it’s supposed to mean, which is it’s good enough. That’s the spec. Half my blog posts are below average. Every once in a while, I write one that really resonates with people, and I never, ever know in advance the difference between the two, no clue. If I was waiting for one that was without defects, there’d be no blog.

Ben Grynol: You can’t really get evolution without iteration, it’s impossible. There’s also a fine line though, too, between shipping things that are functionally sound and shipping things that are good enough. Great case study, was it the Pinto of the 70s that was a little bit, and by little bit, I should say very unethical to ship, when people knew that there were mechanical issues with a car that would blow up if it was rear-ended because…

Seth Godin: It didn’t meet spec, it wasn’t good enough.

Ben Grynol: That’s where you can’t ship. But, when you’re talking about things that don’t have a functional harm to other people, there is no harm in a period being missing in a blog post or…?

Seth Godin: Be very careful here, all right? First of all, more and more, all of us have to be experts in public health. One of the reasons that I could never be a professional in public health is this, if you approve, I don’t know, a skin cream for athlete’s foot, one out of 100,000 people who use it are going to be in the hospital with a horrible side effect. Is that good enough? What’s the standard? Well, fortunately, we do have a standard. Once we understand the standard, if it’s good enough, we have to do it. Self-driving cars… at some point we are going to switch to self-driving cars, and some people are going to die. But, far fewer people are going to die than die from human driven cars. I just don’t want to be the person who has to say, “Today is the day we’re switching” because then I feel like it’s my fault. What I’m getting at is you are giving voice to the noise of perfection, and you can say, “Well, a period missing doesn’t really count, blah, blah, blah.”

Seth Godin: I can say, “Well, what about an Oxford comma? What about a capital letter? What about putting the right conjunction in there? But even better, what about the fact that I could rewrite most blog posts, make them a little bit better.” When are we done with this? The purpose of perfectionism has nothing to do with meeting spec. Perfectionism means I will look for a reason to not ship this because then I will be off the hook. That is not the conversation that someone who’s trying to meet spec has. The person who’s trying to meet spec says, “There are people who need my help. Am I willing to drive the ambulance to the scene of the accident even though all four tires don’t have perfect air pressure? I know I can drive there successfully. I know I can rescue that person’s life, but all four tires don’t have perfect air pressure so what should I do?” Well, that’s an obvious choice, but everything is on its curve.

Seth Godin: I guess what I’m getting at is, how many people can you help? Will they miss you if you are gone? I’m not saying do anything that doesn’t meet spec, I’m not saying do anything that’s not “good enough”. I’m saying be really thoughtful about what good enough means.

Ben Grynol: It’s an interesting perspective to have because if you start to think about reach and you start to think about impact, that’s where this discussion comes in. Are you impacting fewer people by reserving to ship? If the answer is yes, assume that something meets spec, then you’re not meeting your mission, you’re not meeting your goal. Whatever it is that you choose to reach the “people like us who do things like this”, whatever it is that you’re choosing to reach those people… and if you are a leader and a teacher, if you are hesitating to ship when something meets spec, then you’re not actually achieving your goal.

Seth Godin: Right. Let’s have a conversation about the spec, for sure, but don’t talk to me about perfectionism. I’m not interested.

Ben Grynol: You did this thing with Akimbo. Akimbo is the community. Akimbo is a podcast. Akimbo is many different things, a series of workshops. You’ve got the altMBA. What was it about building that, that allowed you to say, “I’m building something so I can teach other people to teach”? Maybe go a little bit into the Akimbo community and this idea of putting growth into the hands of the community.

Seth Godin: Okay, well, I’ll start with the punchline, which is I don’t own or run Akimbo anymore on purpose. It’s a B-Corp in the public interest run by really talented people. My workshops are still there. My point six years ago was, “The medium is changing again”. I was the number one instructor on Skillshare. I was number one in my category in Udemy. I knew how to make video courses. I also knew that the typical video course had a 95% dropout rate, and the reason is because learning requires tension to get you from “I don’t know” to “I know”. When tension hits, people quit. I said, “If I was going to play with this medium the way I played with email and the way I played with the web, what would I do?” That, over the course of a week, led to me creating the altMBA.

Seth Godin: Then I worked with this woman, Wes, and the two of us brought it to the world. It’s now in its 50th or so session, it worked, it worked great. As a creator of media, after the 10th one I was like, “I’m not changing this too much, so what am I going to focus on now?” My job is not to be an educational bureaucrat, though those are really important people. I said, “Well, what new rules could I build about other kinds of workshops that maybe would cost a lot less and take less time?” That led to the creation of cohort-based learning. I don’t think anyone was doing it before me, the way I did it anyway. Once it was working so well, I said, “Well, now I need to get lots of people doing cohort-based learning. It’s a bigger thing than Seth as a teacher.” Part of it is… Wes went on to start Maven and Candace has Disco, and it looks like Teachable and Udemy are going to start doing cohort-based learning. That’s what I wanted. That’s great. I don’t have to run anything, that’s great too.

Ben Grynol: Probably a good place to end it there. We’ll get one closer. We’ve got to get a closer, we have to go make a ruckus for sure. Here we go. If you can only have one type of chocolate, which one are you going for?

Seth Godin: Do you mean brand or flavor?

Ben Grynol: I’m going flavor because…

Seth Godin: Let’s go with flavor.

Ben Grynol: Brand is too hard because they’re… for anybody who isn’t aware, you’re a huge proponent of bean-to-bar chocolate and all types of chocolate, so going brand is just way too difficult. That’s like anchoring on your favorite musician, it’s impossible.

Seth Godin: I hear you. Halloween is around the corner. Don’t eat cheap chocolate. Cheap chocolate is made by some of the poorest people on earth who are poorly treated. Cheap chocolate doesn’t taste as good as you think it does. Cheap chocolate persists in maintaining really bad structures of colonial inequity. On the other hand, bean-to-bar chocolate made by craftspeople, whether they’re in Ghana or Panama or Missouri works directly with farmers, dramatically increasing their quality of their life, and will completely change your taste buds if you give it time. It is a hobby that deserves at least as much attention as some people spend on wine. With that said, cocoa beans aren’t beans, they’re seeds of a fruit. The fruit grows in a pod that’s about this big, and the pod is usually brown. It is not brown because chocolate is brown, it’s unrelated to that.

Seth Godin: But 50 years ago, two people were walking through the jungle somewhere near Peru, Colombia in South America and they saw two trees that were extinct. These trees had white cacao pods growing on them, and they’re called Porcelana trees. They were gone because Nestle and Hershey wasn’t paying anyone to grow good chocolate, and so bit by bit they disappeared. These two trees were found. The magic of a cacao tree is you can graft it so you don’t have to start over. You can just take an existing tree and glue a branch onto it and it starts growing a second kind of chocolate. You can just do all sorts of cool things. Anyway, Porcelana is back. Porcelana chocolate… look for 70, 75, 80%. Find it from someone who does it ethically, the people at Original Beans, the people at Soma, you can find it, just look for Porcelana chocolate. Don’t start with that because you got to train your palette, but once you do, you’ll be hooked.

Ben Grynol: Amazing. Well, truly thank you so much, Seth. Truly, always fun to chat, always appreciate your perspective on everything.

Seth Godin: Well, I want to… I’m not going to let you off that easy. You, my friend, quietly, behind-the-scenes make things better for a lot of people. You show up in ways that you don’t have to. You show up with consistency and passion and openness to possibility. That is a model for me and for a lot of other people. That’s why I said yes to this podcast. That’s why I say yes whenever you ask me something. Thank you for the ruckus you make because it matters a lot.

Ben Grynol: Thank you so much, Seth. Truly, thank you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. That really means a lot.

Ben Grynol: It looks like you got a new camera.

Seth Godin: I try.

Ben Grynol: What’s the…?

Seth Godin: Not since yesterday, it’s the same one I had yesterday.

Ben Grynol: Which one is it?

Seth Godin: It’s a Sony Alpha something.

Ben Grynol: But, it looks new from before, like from, I don’t know, other times we’ve talked?

Seth Godin: I tweak it all the time.