Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World

Why is the most popular pencil the # 2 pencil? What’s wrong with #1? And why are most pencils yellow? If you took an average pencil and drew one continuous line until there was no more pencil left – how long would that line be? This episode begins with some interesting intel on one the world’s most popular writing instruments. https://www.straightdope.com/21343238/how-come-you-see-2-pencils-but-no-1-pencils Seth Godin is one of those rare people who gets you thinking about things differently. Today, he joins me to help explain the importance of having a strategy – and how strategy is not the same thing as a plan or a goal. He has wonderful examples to illustrate how a great strategy can propel your success - including strategies from AirBnB, the inventors of the telephone and more. Seth Godin is author of 21 international bestselling books, he has given 5 TED talks and his latest book is This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (https://amzn.to/4gbhZ14). Beer just may be the most important beverage in the history of the world – perhaps the universe! That’s what my guest Jonny Garrett believes and is going to explain. Beer has been made for thousands of years and by every civilization. It was the first alcoholic drink ever made and by all accounts it revolutionized the world in extraordinary ways. Yet beer is a delicate drink. Light, air and heat can ruin it in a matter of minutes. And many people store their beer all wrong. Jonny will help you correct all that. Jonny Garrett is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker and podcaster as well as the cofounder of the Craft Beer Channel on YouTube https://craftbeerchannel.com/. He is also author of the book The Meaning of Beer: One Man's Search for Purpose in His Pint (https://amzn.to/41cVtRg). Around the holidays, it can be very tempting to open new charge accounts because you can often get 10% off your first purchase. But there is a significant potential downside. Listen and I will tell you what it is. Source: Fred Rewey author of Winning The Cash Flow War https://amzn.to/49mH32Y PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. AURA: Save on the perfect gift by visiting https://AuraFrames.com to get $35-off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames by using promo code SOMETHING at checkout! SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: It's your last chance to snag Dell Technologies’ lowest prices of the year before the holidays! If you've been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Shop now at https://Dell.com/deals PROGRESSIVE: The Name Your Price tool from Progressive can help you save on car insurance! You just tell Progressive what you want to pay and get options within your budget. Try it today at https://Progressive.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

  If you listen to Something You Should Know regularly, you know we talk about sleep quite a bit here. And one of the things I've learned from those conversations is just how important a good night's sleep is. And I've always been someone who loves his sleep. So I was intrigued when I heard about Beam Dream. It's a delicious nighttime drink formulated to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. It contains ingredients like reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, epigenin, and melatonin. They have lots of great flavors. I tried the cinnamon cocoa flavor, and I love the idea of having something warm and delicious as part of winding down at night.

• 0:45Mike Carruthers?

  And it's less than 20 calories per serving. Dream has improved more than 30 million nights of sleep, and they back it up with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you don't sleep better, you get your money back. And right now, there's a terrific offer. Go to shopbeam.com/sysk. Use code S Y S K and get 50% off during Beam's cyber sale. Only available while flavors are in stock. With this incredible discount, that means you'll pay just 83 cents per night for the best sleep of your life. So seriously, think about it. I mean, how much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep? Beam is just 83 cents per night.

• 1:29Mike Carruthers?

  So go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk.

• 1:41Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, we all like the number-two pencil, but how come no one uses a number-one pencil? Then Seth Godin reveals why you need a strategy for your life.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Strategy is not tactics, and strategy is not a plan. Those things are based on a mindset that says, "If I do this, I'll get that." Strategy is our philosophy of becoming. It's seeing how the world actually is and then showing up to make it better.

• 2:10Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why you should be careful about opening up new credit card accounts around the holidays. And how beer has changed the world. And just how delicate beer is.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  At its absolute best, straight from the brewery. And from the moment it leaves, it's only getting worse. You know, 30 seconds in the light is enough to taint a very hoppy beer. So we need to treat beer like it's almost a fresh food.

• 2:35Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:40Mike Carruthers?

  I imagine most of us shop for clothes online, at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures. But when they arrived, eh, not so beautiful. Cheap looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice. The quality is consistently good. And the prices are surprisingly reasonable. I've bought their cashmere sweaters, which are gorgeous.

• 3:22Mike Carruthers?

  And they start at just $60 for cashmere. My wife buys tons of stuff from Quince and we keep coming back. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, offering prices 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And with the holidays coming, that's a pretty compelling combination. Beautiful clothes and gifts without spending a fortune or wondering what's really going to show up at the door. I really do recommend Quince. It's one of those companies that has earned our trust. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com.

• 4:05Mike Carruthers?

  Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support the show.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something you should know. With Mike Carruthers.

• 4:35Mike Carruthers?

  Hi. Yeah, I'm holding in my hand a pencil. And it has little Christmas trees on it. Because it's a holiday pencil. And the background of the pencil is white. Which makes it somewhat of a rare pencil. Because as it turns out, 75% of all pencils are yellow. Why is that? Well, during the 1800s, the best graphite came from China. Yellow is the color they associate with royalty and respect. A pencil painted yellow became known as the best pencil you could buy. And that's why today, there are still so many yellow pencils. The most popular pencil is the number 2 pencil.

• 5:17Mike Carruthers?

  But there is also number 1, 3, 4, and 5. There's a trade-off between the hardness and the darkness in pencils. And the number 2 is the best compromise for most purposes. The number 1 pencil is darker, but people find it smudges too easily. And has to be sharpened too often. One average pencil can write 45,000 words. Or draw a line 35 miles long. The lead, of course, is not lead. It is graphite. The wood is cedar. And pencils have been mass-produced in Europe since 1622. The first US pencils were made in 1812. And that is something you should know.

• 6:05Mike Carruthers?

  You probably have goals and plans. But do you have a strategy? Those three words, goals, plans, and strategy, and maybe tactics. Those words get used a lot, somewhat interchangeably, but they are all very different. And strategy is probably the most misunderstood. Strategy is not a list of steps to take. Strategy requires strategic thinking and is much more long-term. Perhaps there is no one better to discuss strategy and strategic thinking than Seth Godin. Seth is author of 21 international bestselling books such as Unleashing the Idea Virus, Permission Marketing, and Purple Cow.

• 6:49Mike Carruthers?

  He's given five TED Talks. He is the former Vice President of Direct Marketing at Yahoo and the founder of the pioneering online startup YoYoDine. His latest book is called This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Hey Seth, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mike. What a pleasure.

• 7:09Mike Carruthers?

  So we're talking about strategy and it's a word that, you know, people throw around a lot, but focus it in the way you're talking about it. What are you talking about when you mean strategy?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Strategy is not tactics and strategy is not a plan. Those things are important, but those things are based on a mindset that says, if I do this, I'll get that. Strategy is our philosophy of becoming. It's where we want to go and how we hope to get there. It's seeing how the world actually is and then showing up to make it better.

• 7:45Mike Carruthers?

  And how is that not a plan?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Well, a plan comes with a guarantee. So a plan could be, I need to lose 25 pounds. So my plan is stop eating dessert, run three miles a day. If I do that for X amount of time, I will lose 25 pounds. We like plans because they come with a prize at the end. But a strategy is about dealing with an unknown future. So you don't have a plan for getting into a famous college, but you might have a strategy for doing it that is based on some assertions and some understanding of the game you're playing and how you're going to be able to win that game.

• 8:26Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it seems, well, my experience anyway, but I think for many. Plan, strategies are great, but life has a way of doling out its own strategy, or disrupting yours if nothing else, that you can have the best of intentions and the best ideas and the best ways to get there, but life will always throw you a curveball.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Exactly, and that's the big insight here. The big insight is you don't get to decide. The system existed before you got there, and the system's gonna be there when you leave. Instead, what we say when we build a strategy is, there are certain things that are more consistent than others. I want those things to be at my back. So let me give you an example of an elegant strategy that changed the world. When potatoes were brought to Europe in the 1600s, they weren't viewed with respect, partly because of colonialism and racism, partly because they were new, and people were afraid of things that were new. So potatoes

• 9:32Speaker 01

  were banned in France. And the question this entrepreneur faced was, how am I gonna get potatoes to be adopted by people who don't want them? And the tactics that he came up with were brilliant, based on a simple strategy. So what he did was, he took some land near Versailles, the castle, a few acres, and he planted it with potatoes. And then, he put armed guards all around the farm during the day. But at night, he sent them home. So at night, hungry peasants who figured there must be something valuable there on the farm, stole the potatoes, discovered that they were delicious, probably with some butter,

• 10:14Speaker 01

  and Europe changed. The key to this is, that tactic might not have worked, but the strategy of betting on the fact that people will want what they can't have, that's an interesting strategy that's likely to get you where you're going.

• 10:31Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's pretty clever, but don't you think that's kind of manipulative? Like, you're tricking people into believing something.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Well, what's manipulation, Mike? Manipulation is when you use marketing to get someone to do something that if after the fact they did it, they'd regret it. That's manipulation. So when a drug dealer stands outside of a school and gives out free samples and people get addicted, they've manipulated people. On the other hand, when the coach of the high school football team gives an inspirational speech and the kids on the team go out and play better, they're not manipulated. That's what they signed up for. And so there's a fine line when we show up to contribute, to make a difference, right? That if we go ahead and rescue somebody who's drowning, they might thank us for it later,

• 11:22Speaker 01

  but in the moment, they're fighting us because in the moment, they're drowning.

• 11:27Mike Carruthers?

  You have written in your book, some things that I think are really interesting, but I would like to get you to tie this into what you just said about what strategy is. And one is the story about where's the meter? How is that a strategy?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  So this brilliant natural experiment occurred, and it involved a housing development in Amsterdam or somewhere in the Netherlands. And what happened was there was a bunch of houses. They were all identical, pretty much, except some of them had the electric meter in the basement, and some of them had the electric meter in the vestibule. So you had to look at it when you walked in. And what they found is that people who had the electric meter right in front of them used one-third less electricity than people who didn't have the meter in front of them. And when we hear that story, it seems sort of obvious. We could imagine that could happen to us. But we are intentionally putting meters all around us.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Do you know how many people follow you on Instagram? Do you know to the penny how much money you have in your checking account? Those are meters. Those are things that are right in front of us. But if they're keeping you from doing the work you want to do, from focusing on what you want to focus on, then... You're measuring the wrong thing. So we know, for example, that the people who do the best in the stock market only pay attention to what's happening every three months or year, not every five minutes. So if you're busy getting updates about how your stock portfolio is doing, if you have one, every few minutes, you're going to panic.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And in fact, there's some very successful investment funds that don't permit their analysts to even keep track on that kind of scale because they know it's going to cause them to make bad decisions.

• 13:25Mike Carruthers?

  You say that the hard work of developing a more resilient strategy begins with letting go of assumptions and goals, which seems like, well, why would you want to let go of those?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  When we have assumptions, what we're saying is we've already made statements about how the world is and the systems that are around us. But it's entirely possible that we are mistaken about that. So back to the idea of college, if I talk to a typical high school student and say, who gets into Yale? Or who gets into Princeton? They'll tell me the smartest kids or the kids who kissed up the most. But if I look, for example, at Harvard University, 50% of the people who get in, get in because of a recommendation of a sports coach. That if I take a hard look at what the system actually rewards,

• 14:20Speaker 01

  it might not be the thing you think it does. So part of what we have to do to bring change to a system is to see the system, to see where the leverage points are. And the goal that we had when we got there might not match the change we actually seek to make.

• 14:39Mike Carruthers?

  That's a hard way to think. I mean, it's not a normal, natural way to think. It's the other way of you make assumptions, you have goals, you make assumptions on how you get there and then you go.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly what the system wants you to do. The system is good at sticking around. The system invents culture. So, simple example, all the 12, 15, 20 years we spend in school, they never once, never once ask you a question they don't know the answer to. And then we graduate, and that's all that's required if you want to actually have a great life and succeed, is to answer questions no one knows the answer to, but no one trained you how to do that. Why? Because it's much easier to be a teacher or to run a school if everything's already in the notebook, if everything is a given, if it's a multiple choice test. And we can see in all these corners of our lives where systems have created

• 15:37Speaker 01

  a reality that doesn't actually match what works best for our lives.

• 15:43Mike Carruthers?

  I'm speaking with Seth Godin. He is author of the book, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans.

• 15:51Mike Carruthers?

  Well, here's something you should know about your bones. We all hear about calcium and vitamin D, and they're important, but there's another ingredient in healthy bones that hardly anybody talks about: collagen. Think of your bones like a building, right? Collagen provides the framework while minerals like calcium help give it strength. Here's the problem, though. As we get older, our bodies naturally produce less collagen. That's why I was interested in Native Path Bone Health Collagen. It's not just ordinary collagen. It contains a specialized form called Fortabone, and there's some interesting research behind it. In a

• 16:31Mike Carruthers?

  study of 131 post-menopausal women, researchers saw improvements in bone mineral density after 12 months, up to 7.7% in an important part of the hip. Native Path gives you the same five grams of Fortabone used in that research in an easy-to-mix daily formula. I just got mine, because bone health is something I'd rather pay attention to now than wish I had later. And here's a great reason to try Native Path Bone Health Collagen right now. You can save up to 48%, get free shipping, and it's backed by a 365-day money-back guarantee.

• 17:15Mike Carruthers?

  Now, that's a pretty compelling offer if you've been thinking about doing something to support your bone health. Go to getbetterbones.com/sysk. That's G-E-T betterbones.com/sysk.

• 17:32Mike Carruthers?

  This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are, the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years, and yet there they hang, taking up space. But here's the thing, you could turn those clothes into money. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer wear and make some extra money.

• 18:15Mike Carruthers?

  Listing on Vinted is so quick and simple. And when something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And here's what I really like. Vinted charges no seller fees. So whatever you earn from selling your clothes, you keep. Think about that. Clothes that you aren't wearing, taking up space, could be putting money back in your pocket. So here's my suggestion. Take five minutes, go look at the far ends of your closet and see what's hanging there. You might be surprised. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn. That's Vinted, V-I-N-T-E-D.

• 18:58Mike Carruthers?

  So Seth, as I listen to you, I think, you know, perhaps you see the world differently than most. In fact, you, Seth Godin, have a reputation as being this out-of-the-box thinker. And so what might be obvious to you might not be so obvious to me or somebody else.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  I'm not some special talent. I just decided to focus on this, to focus a lot of my life on seeing systems that would help me explain why things might be the way they are. If you see something in the world and you're not sure why it is that way, it's worth asking a few questions to get deeper into, well, who benefits from it? What's the history that made it this way? Because that history might not be relevant anymore, but the thing is still the way it used to be.

• 19:53Mike Carruthers?

  Well, sometimes it seems that although you can ask the question, it doesn't mean you know the answer. And you may, you may come up with a false answer that leads you down another wrong path.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is interesting, Mike. Most of the interactions I have with people, I'm not seeing that that is the problem. I'm seeing the problem is people aren't asking the question. So I wrote a book about school and there's only one question in the book, which is, what is school for? And if I talk to teachers, or to parents, or to administrators, school boards, they can't answer the question because they're not asking the question. We're going to spend a trillion dollars and we can't even ask the question, why? What is school for? And if you answer that question, you might not come up with the answer I come up with, but at least you'll be ahead of people who aren't even bothering to ask it.

• 20:52Mike Carruthers?

  Well, a great point. What is school for in the Seth Godin head? What is, what is school for?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Two things. It's to teach kids to solve interesting problems and to teach them how to lead. And we don't do either one of those things in almost any school setting, except for a few minutes a day.

• 21:13Mike Carruthers?

  What do you mean that games are in every strategy?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  A game is any situation where there are multiple players and boundaries and outcomes. And that's you get pulled over by a cop and you don't want to get a traffic ticket. That is a game. It's a game when you run for local city council. It's a game if your birthday's coming up and there's seven people who are trying to decide where to go for dinner. These are all games. And the reason they're worth calling them games, one, because we understand game theory. We've learned a lot about how games actually work. And two, because if you make a move that doesn't work, you realize you're not a bad person, you just made a move that didn't work.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And that's how you get good at chess, but it's also how you get good at life. Because you don't take it personally when a move doesn't work, you just make a better move next time.

• 22:10Mike Carruthers?

  So talk about Airbnb, because their story, you say, is a great strategy story. Explain, explain how that is.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so here's the deal. When you pick your audience, you pick your future. So here we are on this extraordinary podcast. And yet, nobody, not one person who listens to it, speaks only Greek. Because the podcast isn't in Greek, it's in English. You picked that first thing about your listeners. But there's lots of other things you picked about your listeners that help you decide if it's a good show or not. And so if someone's writing for the sports page of the local newspaper, they probably shouldn't be covering the city council election that took place in Botswana last week, because that's not who their audience is. So Airbnb, they think, oh, we've got this great idea.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  We're going to create a place where people who have an extra room, a spare living room, can trade it, sell it to somebody who's traveling. That's too many people. It's too many people because until you get everybody, you're going to have nobody. No one's going to be listing, and no one's going to be looking for listings because it's too amorphous, it's too unclear who it's for. And Airbnb almost went out of business. Interesting trivia, the way they stayed in business during an election, a bunch of elections ago, is they made boxes of cereal named after John McCain and Barack Obama, and sold them as collectibles to make enough money to stay in business. So they're about to fold, and then they said, oh, you know what we need?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  We need to pick the right audience. Well, there's a conference that takes place in Austin, Texas, every year, the South by Southwest Tech Conference. And the people who go are really nerdy, and they don't have a lot of money, and they use the internet a lot. And the other thing about that conference is there aren't enough hotel rooms. So they decided to focus all of their energy, this part's the plan, all of their energy on that week in that town.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  By that focus, they got enough listings. Those listings got them enough users. And then all of those users bragged about how cool it was. So the overall strategy was pick the right audience. Focus on them obsessively. Make it as small as you possibly can. The tactic they picked, the plan, was an example of that. But they could have picked 40 different ones that would have worked just as well.

• 24:44Mike Carruthers?

  Can you explain the idea of it barely works? I think is the phrase you use where you talk about, you know, things don't have to be perfect to launch.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Well, think about the telephone. At the beginning, there was no one to call. It took more than a decade for a million people to have a telephone. It was really expensive. You had to crank this thing up. The connections weren't very good. It barely worked. In fact, when the telephone came out, Thomas Edison took Alexander Graham Bell aside and he said, you, this, this idea that you should say ahoy when you answer the phone is stupid. And they invented the word hello as a way to answer the telephone because people didn't even know how to answer the phone. So you had this stumbling technology that barely worked. Move to the modern day.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  When Facebook started, it was on one college campus for lonely guys who couldn't get a date. And all it was about was looking at other people on this campus and figuring out who would go out with you. It barely worked. Big problems demand small solutions. It doesn't matter if you're trying to lose weight or get a job. Whatever you do isn't going to be perfect for a long time.

• 25:59Mike Carruthers?

  And yet people's sense, or my, I, my sense is, you know, if you're going to launch something, if you're going to do something, you do it right, or you don't do it at all.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  This is a great point. And it comes to the confusion about the word quality and the idea of perfectionism. People also don't understand what quality means. Quality doesn't mean luxury. Quality doesn't mean expensive. Quality just means it meets spec. You decided what the spec is. And once you meet the spec, you ship it. If it needed to be better, you should make a better spec. So perfectionism is an enemy because it's a way of hiding. Perfect is unobtainable. So with that said, what we have to do is say, well, what is the spec? That we need to launch this with that we can be proud of. So when Toyota started making quality cars in the late 60s, early 70s.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  It took a while, but by 1980, a Toyota Corolla was a better quality car than a Rolls Royce. Not because it was fancier, but because it met its specification better. It reliably did what it said it was going to do. And so we need a strategy to help us decide what the spec should be. But then, once we have the spec, we should define that as what good enough is. So we're seeking the minimum viable product for the smallest useful audience. Not shipping junk, shipping something with utility, but just enough utility to make it worth eagerly trying.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  And you can't name, not a single idea, scientific advancement, product of any kind that launched as good as it's ever going to be. Not one, not the Mac, not the iPhone, not Nike sneakers, not one.

• 27:52Mike Carruthers?

  Talk about feedback loops. What are they and why are they important to this discussion?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is another good one because people think feedback means criticism. I'm just going to give you some feedback. We should have a word for that, but that's not what feedback is. There's two kinds of feedback, positive and negative. They sort of mean the opposite of what you think. So negative feedback is the thermostat in your house. So when your house, when it gets warm out and your house gets too warm, the thermostat kicks in the air conditioning. When it gets too cold in the winter, the thermostat kicks in the heat. The purpose of negative feedback is to keep things stable.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Positive feedback is what happens if you go to a wedding and the amateur DJ holds the microphone too close to the speaker, you hear that horrible screeching sound. That's what happens when something gets amplified and amplified and amplified and goes out of control. So the feedback loop we have in our climate right now is a positive feedback loop because as the ice caps melt, they release methane, methane makes climate change worse and more ice caps melt. It's not a good thing. But in lots of areas of our lives, we have negative feedback that keep systems the way they are. So if there's a culture at your company of meetings, that meetings are a certain way, they always last a certain amount of time, certain people get to speak, other people

• 29:19Speaker 01

  don't. It sticks around, not because that's a good way to have a meeting, but because the negative feedback loop keeps it in place. Because if you try to change it too fast, the boss is going to come down on you and make it back to what it was, not because the boss likes it the old way, but because the boss's job is to protect the old way. So if we want to change a negative feedback loop, we have to do it incrementally, often apart from the crowd. And we have to change the way that the feedback is applied so that it doesn't extinguish our good ideas too early.

• 29:56Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I always enjoy talking to you. You're one of the people who we talk about sometimes about, I feel smarter having talked to you because you make me think in a way that I don't normally think. And I think that's true for a lot of people, which is why your books sell so well and you're so popular. I've been speaking with Seth Godin, author of 21 bestselling books. He has five TED Talks you can go watch. And the name of his latest book is called This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Always great to have you on. Thanks, Seth.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  All right, we'll see you.

• 30:33Mike Carruthers?

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• 31:59Mike Carruthers?

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• 33:17Mike Carruthers?

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• 33:30Mike Carruthers?

  Go to any party, bar, sporting event, backyard barbecue, you will usually find people drinking beer. It's a popular drink, so popular it has its own aisle at the grocery store. There are many types of beers, many brands of beers, and of course, it's not only popular in the U.S., but beer is popular all over the world. People like their beer. So what's the big deal here? Why is beer so popular? What are all these different kinds and colors of beer? Well, meet my guest, Johnny Garrett. He is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster, who is best known as the co-founder of The Craft Beer Channel,

• 34:12Mike Carruthers?

  a YouTube channel with over 140,000 subscribers and 10 million views. He is author of the book, "The Meaning of Beer: One Man's Search for Purpose in His Pint." Hey Johnny, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 34:29Mike Carruthers?

  So do we know who first said, "Hey, taste this, this is great, this is beer, I'm really liking this." Do we know when that was?

• 34:39Speaker 02

  It's a great question, and to be honest, no, we don't. What we know is the oldest record we have of that happening, which is about 13,000 years ago in a cave called Rakhafet Cave near Nazareth in Israel, where we found evidence of the Natufian people, who were a semi-sedentary, semi-nomadic kind of tribe, who we know they were brewing with barley and wheat in divots that they created, purpose-built in the cave. And we know this through digging right down and looking at these divots very carefully under microscopes and working out the processes and the ingredients.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  But were you fairly certain, given how, I guess, complicated the process was, how technologically advanced it was, that it must have been happening earlier? It's sort of, we're too far down the chain to think that this was the first example of brewing, they must have learned it earlier.

• 35:36Mike Carruthers?

  And it was when again?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Well, about 11,000 BCE.

• 35:40Mike Carruthers?

  And so is beer beer, like, is the beer that they made 11,000 years ago, if I took a sip of it, I'd go, yeah, that's beer? Or would I say, no, that's not what I think of as beer?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  I think in the Western world, you'd absolutely not recognise it. Beer has come an incredible distance since that first brew that we know of. But there are still lots of, I guess the word would probably be like indigenous style, still made in certain parts of Africa, certain parts of South America, where the technology hasn't been introduced, and so the methods are still very, very traditional.

• 36:14Mike Carruthers?

  So what makes beer beer? Like, in order to call this beer, it must have what?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  It must be a fermented cereal-based alcoholic drink. So it must use something like barley, or wheat, or fonio, or, which is sort of a new grain that we're getting very excited about now because of its sustainability properties, or even things like sorghum, spelt. All of these grains would have been used in different parts of the world, and indeed exported and imported to different parts of the world because of the unique flavours and characteristics that they had.

• 36:46Mike Carruthers?

  Today, people drink beer, well, I mean, today, people drink alcohol because they want to get buzzed. I mean, has that always been the purpose of beer? Has beer served any other purpose other than being an alcoholic beverage that people use to get buzzed and socialise and whatever?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Well, when it was first invented, as far as we know, in 11,000 BC, and probably for the next 10,000 years, it had a dual purpose, or even a three-pronged purpose. So the first one, the most important one, was actually that it was full of nutrition, it was full of calories, and it was a relatively safe thing to consume. You didn't always have access to clean water, our ancestors, so... We somehow knew that beer was much less likely to poison us. And the reason behind that is that alcohol is an antiseptic. So it kills many of the bacterias and viruses that might make us ill from drinking water that we didn't really know the source of. So it became very important for nutrition and as a safe source of liquid. And as a

• 37:48Speaker 02

  result of those two things, it then became a form of worship. So we've seen it in the ancient Egyptians, we've seen it in the ancient Sumerians, and countless, countless different civilizations all over the world were using beer as part of funeral traditions, part of worshiping of gods. You know, we don't necessarily associate beer with the ancient Egyptians, but actually, it was a daily inevitability in their lives in terms of, you know, the people that built the pyramids were paid in beer, in cloth, and in bread. Those were the three things that you needed to survive in ancient Egypt as a worker. And so it was inevitable to them, but equally, it's painted onto their sarcophagi, it's carved into the stones as a gift to God, because it was a life-giving drink. And

• 38:31Speaker 02

  that's only really faded in the last, you know, maybe thousand years, but really in the last 200, with all the industrial and technical revolutions, and of course, the spread of safe drinking water throughout the Western world.

• 38:42Mike Carruthers?

  And so what is it that makes, you know, some beers very expensive, some beers very cheap, some beers dark, some beers light? I mean, is it just, subjectively, we're going to do it this way? Or is there some rhyme or reason to it? Or can you untangle that? Or it just is what it is?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a super complicated question and would really vary depending on where you are. And I would say in the UK, where we're very sensitive to how much our beer costs, because it's so important to us, but equally, we have some of the highest taxation on alcohol in the world. The strength of the drink can make a big difference, because that's what the duty is levied against in many countries. So, you know, the important thing to point out, and I think the thing that a lot of people worry about when they're getting expensive beer, is that the beers that maybe we grew up drinking, the beers that are the best-selling in the world, you know, the Budweisers, the Coors, the Stella Artoise in the UK. These are mass-produced, commercialised products, so they have huge economies of scale.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  They have used the absolute pinnacle of human endeavour and technology to make these beers as quickly and as cheaply and as uniformly as possible. And that has resulted in beer becoming very cheap, but also I think its place in society, its place in the world being diminished as well, because it just sort of sits there next to the washing-up liquid on your shopping list, instead of being something that was celebrated the way that our ancestors did. And so there are a lot of people that are very cynical about the craft beer movement, about the bringing back of traditional methods, of small-batch brewing, of experimentation with different ingredients and different techniques, as sort of hipster fuel and this kind of stuff. But actually, I think that it's an incredibly important thing that's happened in the last sort of 30 or 40 years.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  And of course, that's going to come with additional costs because of the smaller batches that it's being made in, because of the increased ingredients. If you want to make a very strong beer, that takes significantly more malts, because you need more sugar to ferment, to get that higher ABV. But then also, you might need more hops to balance it, or you might want more hops to get more aroma and flavour, and to really push the boundaries of what a beer can taste and smell like. Or you might, you know, a Budweiser's made in a week, 10 days, a really great artisanal lager, like the way they've made in Germany for centuries, would typically take at least six weeks. In the Czech Republic, they'll lager beers for three months, six months, 12 months.

• 41:12Mike Carruthers?

  To look at your book, as I looked at your book, you attribute a lot of things to beer, from pasteurisation to railroads, to, I mean, that it's more important than, in your mind, than what most people think. So can you talk about some of that?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've made a career of writing about beer for about a decade now, and I've constantly come up against either people online sort of saying, "Come on, man, it's just beer", or friends sort of worrying about me and worrying about my career. And that's sort of what spurred me on to this journey, and just sort of going, "Well, is it just beer? Is the significance of beer purely, you know, a drink at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, or meeting up with friends? Or, in my brain, something so fundamental to the daily life of most people in the world...

• 42:03Speaker 02

  There has to be more significance to it. And so I started to think about all the possible ways that beer might have changed the world. And it started with the discovery in my previous book, A Year in Beer, that the fridge was actually invented in a brewery in Bavaria. Like, the first commercial compressed gas refrigeration unit was for a brewery, so that they could chill their cellars and get fewer infections and be able to brew year round, most importantly, because it was too warm for the lager yeasts of Bavaria to brew in summer. And it was literally outlawed by the government. So I started to think, what else could there be? And I started to discover all kinds of incredible things, such as the pH meter, the caldile test, which is what we use to test for protein in foods.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  If you've ever read the back of a cereal packet with the, you know, the protein listed, that would have probably used a process that was invented, actually, in the first case for beer. And then I started to go across some sort of the incredible industrial stuff and look at, you know, medicine and medical ties that the brewing industry had. So we only discovered, you know, the full role of bacteria and infections in humans as a result of us trying to work out why beers and wines were turning sour. And that was the work of Pasteur and a couple of other incredible scientists in the mid 1800s. And in fact, I managed to dig out a century old biography of Louis Pasteur, in which there's

• 43:27Speaker 02

  a letter that's sent by Joseph Lister, the surgeon who created the very notion of antiseptics and to save millions of lives as a result of basically saying to surgeons, wash your hands, please. That comes from him studying Etudes de la Beer and Etudes de la Sauvage, which were the two sort of huge pieces of research that Pasteur did in wine and beer. So, like many of the things, you know, our journey to the moon, you know, lots of people might say that was a huge waste of money, particularly given the way that the world is right now. But if you look at the technology we had to develop to get to the moon and the implications that has had, it's kind of the same with beer. There's so, there's very few, I think, industrial, commercial, or indeed cultural developments that have happened in the last 200 years that haven't had beer either inspiring it or directly

• 44:12Speaker 02

  influencing it. And this book was trying to make that case. And I'm sure there'll be critics out there that will say I've overplayed it in some ways. But beer, you know, literally and metaphorically has had an influence on our lives, whether we drink or not.

• 44:25Mike Carruthers?

  But do you think that it's bigger than anything else? In other words,

• 44:31Mike Carruthers?

  Somebody could be similar to you and take on vodka and say, look at all of these great things that we can associate with vodka and it would be just as compelling as beer. Or do you think beer just stands head and shoulders above every other alcoholic drink?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  I've had this argument many times online and I think my point always comes down to a couple of simple facts. The first thing is that beer was the first alcoholic beverage produced by humans. We know that for a fact. Wine was four or 5,000 years later. We didn't distill anything for seven or 8,000 years after that. And things like cider were also discovered thousands of years later. So we know that beer was the very first one and we know that beer had a huge influence on why we settled, where we settled, arable farming in its early days, the shape of pottery, our religions and how they were constructed and how they were enacted. So beer had 5,000, 6,000 years of influence over humanity before

• 45:32Speaker 02

  any other form of alcohol was manufactured by humans. The other thing I would say is that we are yet, anthropologists are yet to find a civilization, ancient or modern, that didn't brew beer. And that's not the case, say, for vodka or for sake or these very regional forms of beautiful and influential alcohols within their spaces. But beer is fundamental to every human that's ever existed and ever will will know what beer is and will probably have consumed it at some point. And so beer has the time and it has the spread that no other alcohol does. The only one where it entertained the idea that it might be as influential is wine. Pasteurization was an idea that Louis Pasteur first suggested

• 46:17Speaker 02

  to the wine industry before he did to beer. And there's a couple of other instances there because wine is so central to Europe where a lot of these certainly 19th century discoveries were being made. Obviously, there's so many more happening around the world now. But wine could come close, but it doesn't have that head start and it doesn't have that ubiquity.

• 46:38Mike Carruthers?

  And what's the connection between? Beer and railways?

• 46:43Speaker 02

  There was a time after prohibition where many of the breweries had to close due to the lack of business, the fact they weren't allowed to brew. The surviving breweries, five of them, became known as the shipping breweries. So these were breweries Budweiser, Coors, Miller, Pabst. And these were the breweries, they were called shipping breweries because they were the quickest out of the gate to recognize that railroads were the best way to grow their business, to get their beers out there. And so they were helping, they were funding railway projects. They were funding technologies such as ice-packed railway cars so that their beer could stay cold on the way. Budweiser invested in ice houses all over the country, next to railroads, where they

• 47:23Speaker 02

  could store their beer to keep it cold, but also then sell the ice to local people. So they had a huge impact on where the railways went, why they went, and when they were built, and indeed invested in many of them, because that's how they knew their breweries could grow quicker than, say, their competitors.

• 47:42Mike Carruthers?

  So could you do me a favor? And I'm not a big beer drinker. I drink a couple of beers a year. Go to a baseball game, I'll have a beer, but I'm not a big beer drinker. So I don't know a lot about it. But there is so much vocabulary in beer, from, you know, there's beer, and there's ale, and there's lagers, and there's pilsners in there, and all these words that I have, I don't really know what they mean. Could you give me like a little vocabulary tour through beer?

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, when I first got into beer, I was in the same position and didn't understand a lot of these phrases. And if I could have sort of craft beers time again, I would say, look, everybody, let's try and keep this a bit simpler. But we didn't really have names for styles or families of beer until a great beer writer called Michael Jackson came along, and he still venerated as sort of the original beer writer. And he came up with, you know, essentially, he made sort of the animal kingdom, these taxonomies of beer. By travelling the world and discovering all these styles that hadn't been made. So it all sort of comes from his work and really what we have at the top is beer. Beer, as I said earlier, refers to anything that is a, any drink that is a fermented cereal

• 48:54Speaker 02

  based alcoholic drink. Down from beer, you have ale and you have lager. And lager is often seen as sort of the poor, the poor man's version of ale. But really, the only difference between those two things is the yeast strain that's being used. And lagers, lager yeasts specifically, a slightly different breed of yeast like to ferment cold and ale yeasts like to ferment at room temperature. And that's literally the only difference. As a result of, you know, the laws of thermodynamics, they ferment, lagers ferment slower and produce fewer flavours, which is why they're used in all these, these clean crisp lagers. But that's the only difference. And then from that point onwards, between ale and lager, you break down into hundreds

• 49:37Speaker 02

  and hundreds of different styles of beer that all have their individual histories, their individual stories, and in particular, until quite recently, their own regionality. So it used to be that, you know, particularly in places like Belgium and the UK and Germany and the Czech Republic, these sort of old world brewing nations, every town would have its own style, its own breweries, its own customs when it came to consuming beer. But obviously that's now blurred as, as we've started to learn more about other people's cultures, been able to brew with different yeast, different ingredients and export them around the world. So I guess sort of the most famous styles would be the Pilsner, which was invented in 1842 in Pilsen in the Czech Republic, which is a beautiful, like quite hoppy, quite bitter, full-bodied lager beer, Pilsner O'Kell being the most famous in the original.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  And then you have the IPA, which in the UK used to be a slightly funky, really hoppy, very bitter, quite strong beer that got its name from being sent over to India when the UK occupied that. But now the Americans have sort of co-opted that beer and turned it into the American IPA, which I think.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Most people will know, some will love, some will hate. And those are sort of the two biggest styles in the world, IPA being sort of the flagship of craft beer. Don't ask me what craft beer means because that that meaning is lost to the wind, I think, at this point.

• 50:58Mike Carruthers?

  Although I don't know much about beer, well, I do now, I know a lot more than I did 20 minutes ago. But one thing I do know or that I've heard over and over again is that light is beer's enemy.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. So beer has a couple of enemies. Light is absolutely one of them, heat is the other one, and oxygen is the final one. So when it comes to brewing beer and when it comes to caring for the beers that you have, those are the three things you want to avoid. So light, UV light creates this process called light striking, which is essentially UV light breaking down some aroma compounds in the beer. And it makes the beer smell and taste a little bit kind of weedy, a little bit skunky. It's sometimes called skunking, but just kind of musty. And if you want to know what that tastes like, what I'd advise is getting a bottle of Corona, putting it in the window for an hour and then drinking it. Or well, crack it open and smell it and it will smell a little bit illicit.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  So that's why bottles are almost always in brown glass because that blocks the most amount of UV light that you can. But in terms of protecting beer's best, they're actually better off in the can. And there's a lot of cliches around cans not being as good for beer. And that was definitely true 40, 50 years ago. But technology, you know, we line these with certain plastics that are entirely inert. And now cans are absolutely the best preservative for beer because it blocks out the light. It also means they're quicker to chill down. And as I said, heat is the enemy as well. That also breaks down aromatic compounds. So you want to keep your beer cold, don't sort of keep it in a cupboard and then put it in the fridge. So it's cold when you want to consume it, always, always keep it in the fridge. Think of it as, you know, butter, it should always, always be in the fridge.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  And then the final one is oxygen, which, you know, we can't do a lot about other than drinking quickly. But breweries spend millions and millions of pounds on perfect canning and bottling lines to minimize how much oxygen ends up in the bottles and the cans. Because that can, what's, that's called staling of the beer. And again, oxygen breaks down these delicious aroma and flavour compounds in the beer to make it, you know, no longer the beer that the brewer sort of had in their heads.

• 53:06Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's really interesting to know because I think most people would imagine that beer sealed in a can or sealed in a bottle, you could store it forever in your cupboard and then just cool it off when you want to drink it. But you're saying that that no, that's bad idea.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Beer, beer is, they called it liquid bread for thousands of years, our ancestors, and it is like that, you know, it's not going to poison you if you drink it out of date or you haven't cared for it because it's got alcohol in it. It's a pretty safe, safe form of liquid, but it is at its absolute best straight from the brewery. And from the moment it leaves, it's only getting worse. So that's why, you know, craft breweries, they'll always be saying, you know, drink it fresh. And why a lot of the cans will also say, keep cold and store in a dark place because it really, you know, 30 seconds in the light is enough to taint a very hoppy beer. So you'll even see at beer festivals, and this is slightly ridiculous, sort of beer geeks putting paper over their beers

• 54:04Speaker 02

  to try and protect it from the light. That doesn't do much, but that's sort of the extent that it can affect the flavor of beer. So we need to treat beer, even mass produced, you know, macro lagers, we need to treat it like it's almost a fresh food.

• 54:17Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I had no idea there was that much to know about beer. I mean, you certainly are the quintessential beer expert. I appreciate you coming on. I've been speaking with Johnny Garrett. He is an author, journalist, filmmaker, podcaster. He has the Craft Beer channel on YouTube and he is author of a book called The Meaning of Beer: One Man's Search for Purpose in His Pint. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, Johnny.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me, Mike. It's been an absolute pleasure being on the show.

• 54:51Mike Carruthers?

  One very common marketing practice is for retail stores to get you to open a store charge account by giving you 10% off your first purchase. And if you're buying hundreds of dollars of holiday gifts or other merchandise, it might be a pretty good idea if you don't do it too often. You see, every time you open a new account, that store runs a credit check on you and you get an inquiry on your credit report. When you get too many inquiries, your credit score will start to drop. Those inquiries work against you. So just be careful about opening up a lot of new accounts during the holiday season because your credit could suffer for quite a while. And that is something you should know.

• 55:35Mike Carruthers?

  It's always fun to read reviews that people leave about this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, you can typically leave a review. We read them all, we take them to heart and, well, most of them. And appreciate you taking the time to write them. So if you have a moment, please leave us a rating and review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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