Seth Godin On Creativity, Embracing Failure & Spreading Big Ideas

Today’s guest wants to give you the tools to get started, overcome creative blocks, and get your work into the hands of the people you most want to help. His name is Seth Godin. He's the author of more than 19 international bestsellers, an entrepreneur, a speaker, and a climate activist. Through his work, Seth seeks to turn people’s lights on, inspire them to action, and teach them how to level up. And in today’s conversation we discuss creativity, writing, understanding the distinction between marketing and advertising, the pitfalls of modern education, and his most recent book, The Carbon Almanac, a one-stop-shop on everything we know about global climate change. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Everybody has a brand, or they are invisible. Your brand is the story people tell themselves about you and the expectations they have of what you're going to be like when you walk in the room.

• 1:30Rich Roll?

  When it comes to creativity, marketing, business, speaking, writing, and how to interpret the world, few names are as influential as that of today's guest, Seth Godin.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  If you are a pizza lover and you think about the great pizza places in the United States, none of them are full-service restaurants with big menus. You have to say, "This is what I do." You can't say "and, and, and, and, and," because then you have an excuse for everything being sort of average.

• 2:01Rich Roll?

  An absolute giant in the book publishing and marketing worlds. He is quite literally in the marketing Hall of Fame. Seth is the author of more than 19 international bestsellers. He's an entrepreneur, a speaker, a climate activist, and the solo contributor to his incredibly popular daily blog, which he's been writing every single day since 2005. But when asked, Seth considers himself primarily a teacher. Through his work, including books like Tribes, Purple Cow, Linchpin, The Dip, and This Is Marketing, Seth seeks to turn people's lights on, inspire them into action, and teach them how to level up.

• 2:46Rich Roll?

  And in this conversation, he certainly delivers on that endeavor.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  So I had 20 bestsellers in a row, and not one of them has sold to more than 1% of the US population, which means that 99% of the US population said, "Not interested, no idea who you are, see ya." That's not failure, that's success.

• 3:05Rich Roll?

  We discuss navigating creative blocks, the distinction between marketing and advertising. We talk about the pitfalls of modern education and his most recent book, The Carbon Almanac, which is designed to be a one-stop-shop on everything we know, have known, and potentially will know about global climate change. The book uses cartoons, quotes, tables, illustrations, and articles to gather, display, and explain all the relevant facts on carbon's impact on our world as simply and as comprehensively as possible, all with an optimistic lens on the plausibility of positive change.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  And what we've been doing for 110 years is selling carbon-based energy way cheaper than we should. We forgot to count how much it really costs.

• 3:56Rich Roll?

  I've got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

• 4:12Rich Roll?

  Okay, it was an absolute dream to have Seth in the studio. I've looked up to this man for a very long time and I think you're going to be really inspired by our exchange. So, this is me and the great Seth Godin.

• 4:31Rich Roll?

  It's such an honor and a pleasure to have you here today. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. And on the subject of too many things to talk about, this is the challenge with you, Mr. Seth Godin, because you are truly such a polymath and wise on so many topics with this breadth of expertise that spans a myriad of disciplines that it's very difficult to choose which thread to pull. And I have deemed this condition, this disease, polymath-induced podcast host paralysis.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Uh oh.

• 5:05Rich Roll?

  Soon to be in the DSM-IV.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  To be clear, I don't have that much expertise, but I'm good at asking questions about the way things work.

• 5:13Rich Roll?

  I think that's a very humble answer, because I do think that you are very wise across so many disciplines. And I was reflecting on the drive over here today about the fact that, and I think this is a good way to launch in, that our email, I don't know if you remember this, but our email correspondence about trying to make this happen dates back many years through a mutual friend, Matt Fraser, who introduced us many years ago. And you said, "Listen, when you're in New York, I'm happy to do the podcast. Come up to my home in Hastings on Hudson." And I did not take you up on that offer. This is like a heuristic or a rule, like if you really want to have me on, you will

• 5:56Rich Roll?

  get on the train from Manhattan and come up. And I did not do that. And the story that I've told myself about that, because I've reflected back on that many times, is that I was too busy, I had a packed schedule, I just couldn't afford the time. So I was rooted out in your rule. But that's not really the truth. I think the truth is that I was frightened by the prospect of meeting you. I was intimidated. You're somebody I hold in such high regard and I did not feel up to the task. I was succumbing to insecurity and perhaps a sense of...

• 6:37Rich Roll?

  Perfectionism paralysis that prevented me from rising to that challenge.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. That certainly wasn't my intent.

• 6:45Rich Roll?

  It's all in my head.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Well, but it's all in all of our heads and it's my loss because we could have had two podcasts instead of one.

• 6:53Rich Roll?

  This is true, but I also believe that these things happen when they're meant to happen and I now feel armed and ready in a way that maybe I didn't back then. But I think that that subject of of feeling paralyzed or not feeling up to the task with respect to a creative expression very much falls in the focus of many of the things that that you pontificate on so eloquently. So I don't know that that's a question, but perhaps a launching point.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  It's an epidemic. So I wanted the story I wanted to start by telling you happened to me a couple of days ago. I was in San Clemente seeing a friend and got up at six o'clock in the morning to go for a swim and I almost drowned. I am a good swimmer, but I have never experienced the current the way that I did. And it was this moment of it doesn't matter whether I'm swimming with 10 people or no people, there's not, there's nobody who's going to help me above me. And this moment of this might be my last thing, what do I want to do right now? And it's, there's a lot of things left to be done.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  There's a lot of work left to be done, people to connect with, ideas to share. And I just took a deep breath and motored in barely. And I think it's worth talking about that because there's a huge difference between drowning off the coast of San Clemente and putting up a blog post that isn't perfect or connecting with a customer or a friend in a way that you wish you could do it differently the next time. And yet we've been pushed to make everything a matter of life or death, when there aren't that many things that are actually matters of life or death.

• 8:42Rich Roll?

  So in that moment of clarity, when you felt death being visited upon you, you had this, you know, sense that there was much left to do and to kind of get out of your own, your own way as somebody who's very good at getting out of their own way.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  It was. Extraordinary how quickly all the imposter syndrome stuff goes away. Because I'm sitting there saying, "Well, I can't swim nearly as well as Rich." But it didn't matter, because I wasn't in a race with you. I was just trying to get back to shore. And in that moment, you become the best version of yourself, which is usually good enough.

• 9:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. On the topic of creative expression, the titans that come to mind are people like Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way, Steven Pressfield, Robert McKee, who I just had in here, who is a hoot. Now Rick Rubin, have you read his new?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  I was the first person to read his book.

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, you were? I got an early copy of it, because I was doing an event with him, a Google event with him, a fireside, and read that book and was just deeply moved by that. I think it's, you know, soon to be, as it is released into the world, among the great books on creative expression. And I would consider your work very much in that regard as well. And I would be remiss, on a very selfish level, to not, you know, run a little bit of an experiment on my own creative blocks. As somebody who is in the business of creative expression, really, the last real book that I wrote was in 2012. And there is an argument to be made that all of this, The Beautiful Studio, and the podcast, and all of it,

• 10:20Rich Roll?

  is a massive elaborate distraction and justification or rationalization for not getting up and writing every day. And this is my Mount Everest that I'm determined to conquer in the upcoming year. And I think what's interesting about it is that, you know, reflecting on my own boundaries as being somewhat porous and very much negotiable, I have a self-awareness around it. And I'm aware that these habits will not change without a system change. And yet, despite that self-awareness and the parlance of recovery, like self-awareness will avail you nothing. It's the action that moves the needle.

• 11:04Rich Roll?

  And in my experience, as somebody who's undergone, you know, dramatic changes over the course of my life, those changes are generally motivated by pain when I feel backed into a corner. And the pain of my current situation finally tips over and exceeds the fear of that change.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Well, that last part's good. I want to throw a monkey wrench in just a little bit, maybe for our listeners and not for you. I think Steve and I would agree on this. Just because there's resistance doesn't mean the thing you are feeling resistance about is important. And what you have been doing for the last 10 years is narrating a journey for millions of people. You haven't been hiding, working at a barbeque shop. You have been showing up with a unique voice for people who need to hear it in a medium that didn't exist 25 years ago. And just because books have been around for 500 years and there's a particular pain that comes from writing one because of the Proustian overhead that goes with it,

• 12:07Speaker 01

  doesn't mean that you will serve the people you seek to serve better by writing a book. Now, if it turns out that the conditions that you need to write a book will actually escalate your thinking in ways that can lead you to where you want to go, then I'm all in and I would love to help you. But it could be that this is resistance bothering you, pretending to be resistant, saying, "You're a failure because you haven't written a book. Go write a book." But that's actually keeping you from pioneering a new kind of Netflix talk show or whatever it is that's going to let you do your unique work. So I don't know the answer to that.

• 12:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's a valid observation. I think that perhaps I hang my hat on this idea of where being a published author sits in the hierarchy of influence. And there is something about that that I think is real. I think it's being challenged and fractured a little bit.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  It's eroding really fast.

• 13:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not what it used to be. But I do think that fundamentally, I feel like I am a writer and I haven't served that muse inside of me.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Get writing.

• 13:14Rich Roll?

  So it's a function of like getting honest with myself and trying to dissect what are the externalities, those external kind of social pressures that I feel to live up to a certain standard versus what is the best use of my time and energy. And it is true that this podcast reaches more people than any book that I'm going to write on a weekly basis. So from that perspective, there's no reason to write a book because I'm already communicating with more people if that is an important... Like variable in that equation. But books, as you know, with your love of books, stand the test of time. And there is something about that three dimensional thing that exists in the world

• 13:58Rich Roll?

  that I think is important and timeless and hopefully will remain so.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, thank you for teeing up first the discussion about the marathon, which is the difference between people who run 20 and 26 miles isn't physical condition. It is simply figuring out where to put the tired. That the people who finish figure out where to put the tired and the people who don't, don't. Because if you made it to 20, you could make it to 26. And you can't go to a trainer and say, please train me to run a marathon without getting tired. It's not an option. So if you're going to do important work as a writer, you can't say, I want to do important work as a writer, but not feel any of the feelings that come from doing important work. Because that's the deal. That's why writing is worth doing.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  But that doesn't mean you have to do it the way Ernest Hemingway would do it. And there are lots of ways to create the conditions for you to have a place where the best work is evoked. And so I've coached a lot of friends to writing books, some of which I've done very well. And the first rule is you can't become attached to the outcome. That publishing is a weird business. It's more of a hobby and it has all these signals in it that don't make sense. Great books don't sell that well. Lousy books sell a lot of copies. Good people spend their lives promoting books. That's not what you need to do. So we're not going to get attached to whether it's a bestseller.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  We're going to get focused on, did this book be what I want it to be? But then the second part of it is getting really clear about who's it for and what's it for. Who exactly are we seeking to change? And if you're not clear about that, you're going to write a mediocre book, no matter what it is. But if you can visualize the emotional state, the fears, the dreams, the desires, the person you're seeking to serve in the book, it becomes much more practical for you to be able to say, this works and this doesn't. And then the last thing comes from Isaac Asimov, who I used to work with when I was a kid and he was old. He invented the idea of robots. He was one of the most successful science fiction authors ever. And Isaac published 400 books in his lifetime.

• 16:14Rich Roll?

  Unbelievable.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. And I'm sitting in his apartment near Lincoln Center in New York. And I said, so Isaac, he had a pretty big ego. He liked when I said things like, you've written some of the most important books of all time, and you've done 400 books. How did you do that? And he walks me over to this little tiny table with a manual typewriter on it. And he says, what I do is I wake up in the morning and I walk over to this typewriter and I type from 6:30 to noon every day. And it doesn't matter if it's good, I just have to type. And that thinking tricked his subconscious into typing good stuff because it feels really stupid to sit there and type bad stuff. And so what I say to people in the 2020s is, you don't need a manual typewriter, you need a recorder.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  And then you need to find a human being you want to teach something to and go for a walk with them and record you for an hour telling them what they need to know. Then get it transcribed and start with that. Because you can make that better, but that just did the hard part, which is you got over.

• 17:15Rich Roll?

  Blank page is now off the table.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 17:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the idea of creating that non-negotiable and then lowering the stakes seems to be the path forward. But taking a step back from that, it's really all about boundaries and knowing how to say no to protect your yes, right?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  And this is something I know that you've thought about deeply, that you practice and you teach to so many people. So talk a little bit about, you know, how you create those rules around the things that are important in your life. And then maybe as background to that, how did you figure out what was important to you?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  So if you are a pizza lover and you think about the great pizza places in the United States, none of them are full-service restaurants with big menus. They make a thing and they make it the best they can make it because it must be done with care or it becomes mediocre. And we have created an entire generation of wandering generalities, as Zig would say, instead of meaningful specifics. And to be a meaningful specific, you have to say, "This is what I do." You can't say "and, and, and, and, and," because then you have an excuse for everything being sort of average. And if your slogan is, "You can pick anyone and wear anyone," then someone else is gonna win. You wanna be in and of yourself, the one and only version of that.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  So I think that's a universal law. I think that if somebody is more focused than you, they're gonna put in more cycles than you, and they're gonna learn more than you, and inevitably, they're gonna become better than you when you have enough competitors. So with that said, you gotta say, "Well, the only way that's gonna happen is if I say no to all sorts of attractive things." So in my case, as somebody who has a certain kind of willpower, it means no Twitter, no Instagram, no Facebook, no LinkedIn, almost no travel. There are all these things I don't do. Because I don't wanna reconsider every time, because it would be a huge number of cycles to say, "Oh, but this one's really special. I should open the door and think about that one again."

• 19:23Rich Roll?

  But is this a function of not wanting to fall into the kind of pleasure trap of scrolling? Or is it because you don't wanna be influenced by what other people are saying?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I'm not, not only, I'm not reading them, but I'm also not writing on those platforms. So when Twitter came along, it was early days, I saw it. I said, "I could probably have a lot of people following me on Twitter." But if I got good at Twitter, I would have to become mediocre at blogging. So I don't wanna do that. I wanna be really good at the thing I do and not do the other thing. So that's part A. And yes, as you pointed out, listening to anonymous trolls makes nobody better. I've never met an author who said, "I read all my one-star reviews on Amazon, and now I'm a better writer." So 11 years ago, I stopped reading my reviews on Amazon. I haven't read a review once since that day, because I'm not gonna learn anything from a one-star review, other than, "It wasn't for me." Well, you just told me about you, but you didn't tell me about my work.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  So I get it, it wasn't for you. But that's not what I need to learn to get better.

• 20:25Rich Roll?

  Many people fall into this illusion that whatever they're creating is for everybody, and they don't have that clarity around who specifically they're writing for, creating for, and as a result, the work suffers, right? And this is something, this is a drum you've been beating, you know, from the beginning about, you know, all the way back to tribes, et cetera, about like having that definitive sense of who you're serving. And I think we're in an interesting time now because the internet has fractured the monoculture and everything is about tribes now. There is, it's very unlikely that we're gonna see, you know, only rarely now do we see gigantic

• 21:09Rich Roll?

  creative offerings that move the entire culture.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:13Rich Roll?

  And because of that, it's created opportunity for many people, but I feel like people still fall under the delusion that they need to be like Taylor Swift, or George Lucas, or somebody like that.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Taylor Swift isn't like Taylor Swift.

• 21:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  This is, I got to interrupt you.

• 21:29Rich Roll?

  So just abuse us of the fact that like, yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  I got to interrupt you. This is such an easy thing to describe and a hard thing to embrace. So about seven miles from here is a four-mile trail where you can go in a state park into the woods and find out where they filmed MASH. Like, you're in the DMZ.

• 21:48Rich Roll?

  It's my backyard trail.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  It's a real, I was there yesterday, and I took pictures and sent them back to the family, and my wife's like, "That's really cool." And the kid's like, "What's this?" So MASH was the most popular TV show ever broadcast when it went off the air. The last episode, 70 million-plus people saw. So to compare 70 million people to a show like The Sopranos, or Mad Men, or whatever, which got seen by 3 million people when they were broadcast, right? One-twentieth the number. Or if you think about anything that your friends, people, in quotation marks, are talking about on Netflix, a million, two million people are seeing it when it's first coming out.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Taylor Swift would not make the Billboard Top 500 if her music was compared to sales from the 1970s. Not even close. That what it means to win on the long tail is you're just a tiny drip in a giant bucket, and that's enough. So I had 20 bestsellers in a row, and not one of them has sold to more than 1% of the US population. Which means that 99% of the US population said, "Not interested, no idea who you are, see ya." That's not failure, that's success. So, writing for all these people who are never gonna engage with you, making a TV show or a podcast for everyone, no, don't make cereal.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Because cereal ends up being popular because something had to win that day's lottery, but it's probably not gonna be you.

• 23:19Rich Roll?

  No, and it's very specific in what it is. I don't think anybody involved in that program anticipated the success, nor were they making it for the purpose of impacting culture on a mass level.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Right, but if you copy them and say, "Well, this is gonna be the next blank," you've lost why you're doing it. The thread, you're saying, "Someone's gonna win the lottery, it's gonna be me." And we see struggling people, struggling with income, tricked into buying lottery tickets for that very reason. And it's a dumb investment. And instead, put ourselves on the hook and say, "No, I'm making this for the vegan community of Agora Hills, California, and if they don't like it, I have failed." Because it's for them, and that's who it's for. So I put myself on the hook when I say that. Whereas if I say, "I'm making the best thing I can, and hopefully lots of people will like it," well then, when a few people don't like it, you can just say, "Well, I'm waiting for the next people, I'm waiting for a lucky break, how do I hype this?"

• 24:17Speaker 01

  And so putting yourself on the hook, that's how you get funding for your project. That's how you hire people. That's how you get a job. Be specific, not this average mediocre generalist.

• 24:28Rich Roll?

  Right. And backing into that, talk a little bit about how you made these decisions for yourself about how you wanted to invest your time and kind of defining for yourself what was important to you.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  So I failed a lot when I was getting started, 10 years in a row, pretty much. I got 800 rejection letters in a row from the book publishing community after I sold my first book. Chip Conley was co-author in 1986.

• 24:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I want to get into the Chip Conley, Seth Godin, Algonquin table back in the anthropology department.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And so Chip and I sold the first one, the first day I was like, oh, I get it. I'll just make books that everyone wants to buy and publishers will publish them. And what I discovered was that the market was smarter than me and it was saying to me, we get that you have ideas about what book would sell if it was at the cash register at Barnes and Noble, but we can't make a book get to the cash register at Barnes and Noble through will. It's luck. So why don't you make something specific? And that pushed me on this path of realizing that every time I got deep with things, and it wasn't always the same thing from my team. There were 10 of us, but you know, we did the Stanley Kaplan SAT prep books, not sort of average SAT prep books. We did novels based

• 25:48Speaker 01

  on Nintendo games, the best Nintendo games, not something we could do easily or conveniently. And that cycle got it started. And then I started one of the very first internet companies. And what was going on in the internet in the 90s was, think about how we spend our time today and imagine that none of those companies existed. So there was this huge race because it was a buffet for a few of us who understood what was happening. And if you put too much on your plate, it all fell off. And the people who figured it out put one thing on their plate and won that thing. So I understood strategically what was going on, but then the personal challenge was, I don't, as an entrepreneur, like getting

• 26:30Speaker 01

  too close to, I'm going to have to give this up and go get a job as a bank teller. So conservative about the size of the risks I was taking. But also, I have mild ADD and I, oh, look, a puppy. I'm mildly distracted by shiny objects. And I realized if I didn't put up blinders, I would be racing from one thing to the other. So those were the two reasons that got me disciplined.

• 26:55Rich Roll?

  But within that, there's this journey. I mean, you're at Stanford Business School. You're iterating on all these business ideas. You, from there, become a serial entrepreneur. You have an exit and you get into book publishing, et cetera. But at some point, you decide, I'm going to be a writer. Along the way, you learn all these skills, these, you know, relevant principles around business and culture. And there must have been an impulse to share them. Was that a function of being in the book publishing industry and saying, actually, I could write better books than this? Or where did the writer impulse, you know, come up and make its voice heard for you?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  All right, so when I was a book packager, I did 120 books. Some of them I-

• 27:37Rich Roll?

  What is a book packager? I don't even know that if I know what that is.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Good question. It's like being a movie producer. You create the conditions for a book to exist. Most books don't need one. Almanacs need one, encyclopedias need one, photo books need one because it's a production. And sometimes I wrote them, sometimes I didn't. Usually I hired other people to write them. But I wasn't a writer with a capital W. I would go to meetings and the editors would treat me with much less respect because they like writers. They didn't like people who did what I did. And when I was building the internet company, Yo-Yo Dine, it was taking us six to nine months to close a sale because it was complicated in those days to explain what permission marketing was, what email marketing was. It's like, hey, I know how to make books. So I'll write a book about this and we could just give the book to people, which would

• 28:25Speaker 01

  give credibility. And if they read the book, the sales cycle would- So it was totally a mercenary thing to say, this would pay off for our company. But between the time I wrote it and the time it came out, we sold the company to Yahoo. And yet this book came out and it became a New York Times bestseller. And around that time, some things happened in my personal life. My mom got really sick. I left Yahoo, I moved back to New York. And I sat in a dark room by myself for nine months. Not with no job with why bother writing another book? My real book worked. I can't sell more copies than that. And then this guy who almost no one had heard of named Malcolm Gladwell, sent me the galleys of a book called The Tipping Point. And he asked me to blurb the back of it.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And I read it in an hour.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  And I sent him a blurb right away. And in the next two weeks, I wrote an entire book. Because clearly, I had been thinking about it, but had been denying, resisting, doing it. Because I didn't want to be an author, I thought. But Malcolm's book opened that spigot for me. Because I saw that he was committing a generous act in the way he was describing what he was seeing.

• 29:39Rich Roll?

  That's so interesting. Because I do think of you in similar terms as people who have a keen observational ability when it comes to seeing trends from a macro perspective, culturally, business, et cetera. And have kind of, you know, not necessarily contrarian, but kind of orthogonal perspectives. We were talking before the podcast about your ideas about how to, you know, reframe the Olympics, et cetera. I mean, these are, you know, these are, there is a shared kind of kindred sensibility there.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there is. And I'm always flattered if someone compares me to Malcolm, except when it comes to hairstyles. Because I used to have hair like-

• 30:21Rich Roll?

  Well, he's the champion.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  I used to have hair just like him. But it all fell out. Anyway, so I was nervous because my book was going to come out before his. And it had been inspired by the idea of the tipping. So I sent it to him. And I said, if you don't think I should publish this, I won't. But if you like it, I appreciate any kind. And he actually volunteered to devote the foreword for it, which he doesn't do anymore. But that was back in the day. And the book was about how ideas spread. So I put the book online for free. And I just needed to get it off my desk. I didn't, I'd been using books as a tool my whole career. I love books, but I didn't, wasn't an author in the sense of I'm willing to slave in obscurity to put my stuff down.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  They were a tool, they were what I did for a living. And this book, I wasn't gonna make a penny from. I just wanted to share this idea because it was so timely. And it took off. It got downloaded millions of times, the most popular book of all time at the time. And I was like, oh, well, we should make a hard copy because people hate reading it on the screens in, you know, 1990, whatever, 2000. So we quickly made a hardcover and it became a really big bestseller. I was like, now I'm an author because now I've done it twice in a row. And not only that, I'm not sitting in a dark room by myself anymore. This, this cycle of think hard, write hard, and a year later, your event, publishing event will happen and then you can do it again. I can do that.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And I can do that with a sense of confidence and generosity.

• 31:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  That is partly because I understand the industry, partly because I know how to write, even though I didn't used to know how to write, I taught myself. And partly because I think I can see systems in a way that people would appreciate.

• 32:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And so that's what made me a writer.

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  So today, when somebody says to you, oh, they don't know you, they've just met you, and they say, what do you do? Do you answer that you're a writer? Or how do you, like, what do you write on forms where they say occupation?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  So full credit to my friend Clay Haber. He has a great 10-minute talk about the elevator pitch. But my rejoinder is no one ever bought anything on an elevator. And if you're busy doing an elevator pitch, it's probably a way of hiding. I think elevator questions are better because what you want is people to follow you out of the elevator and keep talking to you. And so when people ask me what I do, I now say I'm a teacher because I do it in enough media that I don't think of myself as just an author. But the...

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I've always had a lot of insecurity about picking that genre because imposter syndrome instantly follows.

• 33:13Rich Roll?

  So as somebody who is known as a genius of marketing, you're in the marketing hall of fame, how does marketing play into how you think about what you do and how you ship your creative work, to use your vernacular? Do you think about the brand of Seth Godin and the promise and the trust that you're building with the community of people that care about what you do?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Okay, so a small sidebar for people who haven't listened to me for 400 hours before. Marketing isn't advertising, marketing isn't hype, marketing isn't hustling people. No one wants to be hustled. It used to be all of those things. In 1965, advertising and marketing were the same thing.

• 33:52Rich Roll?

  I'm not sure I understand the difference.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Well, advertising is using money to interrupt people, so you make enough money so you can do it again. And in the age of mass marketing, average stuff promoted a lot will always outsell average stuff that's not promoted a lot. So Skippy peanut butter and Heinz ketchup and go down the list. Those are intentionally built to be average. They respond well to advertising. But the internet, like all things, it blows it up and it says, "Name any brand you care about and trust these days, their ad budget's either nonexistent or tiny." Right? When was the last time you saw an ad with a jingle for Google? Google doesn't have a jingle, they don't need a jingle.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  So it has been replaced by the story we tell to the people we seek to serve, so that the story is resonant and they will tell the others. If you can do that, then you have done a good job of marketing. And so if we think about, how do you go about marketing a Toyota Prius? Well, first thing is make sure it doesn't look like a Toyota Corolla. Because if it looked just like a Corolla as they were driving around the neighborhood, no one would notice them. But if you have a car 10 years ago that looks a little bit like a weird spaceship, your neighbor is, you know, and so you start to understand status roles and affiliation

• 35:18Speaker 01

  and dominance and subcultures and tribes and all of these things are what marketing actually is, the story we tell that creates tension so that people will move forward. That's great marketing.

• 35:31Rich Roll?

  Or a story that's being told that invites and attracts people who like that story and would like part of that story to be their own story.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Correct. It starts to create identity, which is about affiliation, or either you're an insider or you're an outsider. Culture is right next to marketing. So I've been a marketer my whole life and everybody who has been successful at making any sort of change has likely been a marketer if they're dealing with voluntary interaction, right? So if you want soccer to be more popular than basketball in a country, you need to make marketing decisions that have nothing to do with whether you're putting up billboards. And a lot of people don't understand this. They think they just need to get some more money together to put up some more billboards, which used to be true, but it's not true anymore. And so when we, if you, you know, if you drive down through Hollywood, you see all

• 36:24Speaker 01

  these billboards for not very good TV shows that aren't going to resonate with people. That's because someone at Netflix or Hulu is making bad marketing choices about what shows to make and who to put in them, not bad marketing decisions about billboard placement. So with all that said, everybody has a brand or they are invisible. Your brand is not your logo, though your logo is very cool. Your brand is the story people tell themselves about you and the expectations they have of what you're going to be like when you walk in the room. That's your brand. And if you start becoming inconsistent, your brand will inevitably become inconsistent and fade away. So General Motors doesn't have much of a brand

• 37:09Speaker 01

  because we don't know what to expect the next time General Motors tells us they're going to make a car. Whereas McLaren has a brand. No ads, but they're a brand. Because if I said I got a new car from McLaren, you would have a hunch

• 37:21Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  as to what I spent on it and what it would mean about me, identity wise. Which is why I have to take great paints and say I don't have a McLaren. Right? So.

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  I would be very surprised.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. Because that's what a brand is. So in my case, there are definitely times when I would like to act authentically in the moment. And I don't because authenticity is overrated. Your customers don't want you to be authentic. Your podcast listeners don't want you to be authentic. They want you to be the best version of you that you promised them. That there are certain professions like rock star where you get points for having a meltdown on stage and dying of an overdose because that's authentic. But in most other fields, if you go to see a doctor for a checkup, you don't care that the doctor's having a bad day. You just want her to be the best version of that doctor that she is capable of being today. Because that's what you bought.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  And so, you know, when you see somebody having a tantrum dealing with a customer service person, that's, you know, unacceptable. It is a version of status roles that I don't approve of. But also, if that person who was having the tantrum was someone you knew, their brand would change in your mind.

• 38:35Rich Roll?

  Sure. All right, well, a couple of observations on that. First of all, you know, I do feel like this innate allergy to the idea that like I'm a brand. Like I really struggle with that. I understand intellectually the importance of thinking about this in a professional context and the role that brand plays in that. But it's, it just strikes me as distasteful. And perhaps that's because

• 39:03Speaker 01

  You don't have to like it.

• 39:04Rich Roll?

  The whole economy of. You know, what's going on on the Internet right now? And then, and then second to that, I would push back a little bit on, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, on the authenticity piece, because I do feel like authenticity is an aspect of what I am communicating and advocating through the work that I do. Because I feel like most people are so far shy of being authentic to who they are, and I have to model that. I don't have to. I choose to model that in a, in a way that's perhaps a little bit more vulnerable than somebody else who does what I do, to create that permissiveness for the audience. Now, I calibrate that.

• 39:46Rich Roll?

  I'm not going to come in and, you know, like, I'm choosing those moments, not, not in a negative context of strategy, but, you know, there's, there's, there is too much vulnerability and too much authenticity, I would grant you that.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  So it's a spectrum. We're not disagreeing. That we have no problem with the fact that Alana Glazer plays a role when she's on television. We're not looking for the authentic Alana Glazer. We're looking for Broad City Alana Glazer, Jerry Seinfeld, or George Costanza, or whatever you want, right? And all the way at the other extreme, we want our spouse to talk to us like the authentic human being that they are. So everywhere in between is a spectrum. If we get pulled over for a traffic ticket, we don't want the cop to punch us in the nose just because they can and they're having a bad day. Not okay. It would be authentic, but not okay. The last time we were fully authentic, we were a year old and we had poop in our diapers. Ever since then, we've been calculating. We've been trading.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  We've been saying, I know I could blurt something out right now, but I'm going to hold back for just 10 seconds, because it's worth it. And what I'm just trying to say to people is, I don't want to let you off the hook for your bad behavior.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Just because you say, "Well, I'm being authentic." Because I don't think it's a legitimate excuse.

• 41:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  If you want to stand for something, stand for something. That's all I'm saying.

• 41:07Rich Roll?

  Right, I got you. So, for the average person who's listening to this or watching this, like, why should they care about brand? Should they think about brand in the context of their own lives? Or how can understanding, uh, brand or marketing be, you know, something that, you know, should garner their attention?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  So, how do you get into college, right? College is a sweepstakes. College isn't fair. Only 20% of the qualified people get into any famous college. If you just say, "Here's everything there is about me. Now you know me as well as I do. Please pick me." A, they're not going to spend the time it's going to take to learn everything about you. And B, it's probably not going to work. On the other hand, you can choose by which activities you narrate, by which behaviors you highlight, what you will be seeing in the four minutes they're choosing to pick you or not. Same thing's when you're applying for a job. Resume isn't you. Resume is the things you selected to show somebody that you can honestly persist in doing consistently so that you can get to the next step.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  And the same thing is true in all the people we connect with online and all the people we work with. We get to pick what story people tell about us when we show up. My blog post today is about writing your own autobiography. So, the autobiography, the biography of Robert Moses is a 66-hour-long audiobook. I strongly recommend it because you can listen to it at a fast speed. So, here's this guy who lived for 90 years and it took only 66 hours to tell us about his life, which means you have to leave out all of it except a little tiny bit. Which part are you going to talk about, right? You're going to talk about that evening he, his daughter had a fever and he went to the drugstore for her? No, because it doesn't add to the narrative.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  So, what I'm saying is, you probably will benefit from writing your own narrative and living it because people are going to judge you one way or the other. You should be judged the way you want to be judged.

• 43:03Rich Roll?

  There's this story that we want to tell others about who we are and how we show up in the world and present ourselves, so that we can succeed or make our way in the world in the manner of our aspirations. And then there's the stories we quietly tell ourselves about who we are and what we're capable of. And those are really, that really dictates outcomes, in the largest way. And this is the ultimate hamstring for most people, myself included.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  And this is what your next book is about.

• 43:37Rich Roll?

  Tell me more.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  This is what we need you to teach us. What do we say when we talk to ourselves? Who is more qualified to talk about that than you?

• 43:46Rich Roll?

  Well, maybe you. Maybe you.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  No, because I don't know how to talk to myself in a way that would increase my performance in ways that are outside of my comfort zone, the way that you do. And I think that you can start with physical performance because it's easier to measure, but it's all of the same thing, which is you don't need more time, you don't need more information, you need to tell yourself a different story. And rebooting the story we tell ourselves is really challenging. There are lots of hacks for it, but conceptually, just acknowledging it's possible is super important. And Pressfield's work goes into this without naming it, but

• 44:34Speaker 01

  War of Art and the new book are just all about, by acting differently, you will start to tell yourself a different story.

• 44:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So it's the action that changes the story, but the action is the result of a decision that has to be made.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  And that decision is a stumbling block, because on some level, whatever story it is that we're telling ourselves about who we are and our capacity, even if it's incredibly negative, and most people's stories are...

• 45:05Rich Roll?

  First, it's acknowledging that it's an illusion. But even more primary to that is understanding that even though it's not serving you, it is serving you. There's a reason why you're holding on to it. There's a comfort with it.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 45:19Rich Roll?

  It's a way of staying safe and small, so you're not putting yourself on the line. And even if it's obvious to everyone else and to the person themselves, it still is a Herculean task to grapple with that and ultimately transcend it.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Correct. And we've been indoctrinated intentionally by cultural forces since the day we were born to have this story be told to ourselves.

• 45:45Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  That industrialists invented it so that we would show up at work.

• 45:48Rich Roll?

  Right. And this opens up the whole conversation around education, which was constructed from an industrialist perspective to create compliant workers and to lure us into a web of easy coercion.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:07Rich Roll?

  Right? And you have a lot of ideas about what's wrong with education and how it should be changed.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  And when you name it, it's already making people uncomfortable.

• 46:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  They don't want to believe that. It feels like something that your loving parents put you into at the beginning and that you've been doing your whole life must be a natural law. It must be correct. And if it is working for you, no problem. No harm, no foul. But what we are seeing with a new generation coming up, with the climate, with everything else, is it's not working for us. And we are not going to be able to standardize, test our way out of this. And understanding that well-meaning people were part of a system of indoctrination helps you realize what clothes the emperor is wearing and what to do about it for yourself and for your kids.

• 46:55Rich Roll?

  So what is the path forward if you woke up tomorrow and you had been, you found yourself as the Secretary of Education or some other, you're in the seat of power to make these changes, or you were the provost of Harvard or whatnot, like what would you do?

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Well, neither of those people has any power. We have a systems problem. There are people who are opening schools that address it, but most parents don't want to send their kids there because it's systemic. And I think we should be teaching kids two or three things. How to lead, how to solve interesting problems, and probably how to be a good citizen. How to lead is different than how to manage. How to lead is wayfinding, pathfinding, and encouraging people to follow you, even though they don't have to. And solving interesting problems is the opposite of looking them up in Wikipedia. We don't need anyone to know what 4x7 is, because we can just look it up. What we need is for people to say, "Oh, this is a thorny intersection

• 47:58Speaker 01

  of human problems, technical problems, and a situation. I wonder if there's a way I can decode this." We spend one minute a year helping eight-year-olds and 12-year-olds with stuff like that. And it extends really dramatically into sports and school, which seems to be about solving a trophy shortage, not about helping kids lead and solve interesting problems.

• 48:21Rich Roll?

  Right, that was part of the Malcolm discussion that I had.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so when we add it all up, what we're doing is creating people who are willing to be compliant cogs in an industrial system. And guess what? The industrial system is falling apart. So now we have all these people who say, "I did what I was supposed to do. Where is my American dream?" And we have to say to them, "Well, actually, what we need you to do is be more insightful than an artificial intelligence system and be more flexible than somebody I could hire for half the price, who's remote. If you can't do those two things, I don't need you." But we never taught them how to do either.

• 48:57Rich Roll?

  Right, after 20 years of indoctrination in following the rules and being a good, studious individual, you become inured to following rules. And what we need now are people who look at the rules and deconstruct them. And that's just not part of the curriculum.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Right, and they're not even looking... Like, if you have a fever, you realize you have a fever. You try to find some Tylenol. In this case, people don't even know that this system exists and that it's the problem. And so part of my work on education has been just highlighting it, just saying, "Look what just happened in this classroom right here. Is that what we want to do tomorrow? And if not, how are we gonna start undoing it?" And there's a lot of interesting work getting done in unschooling, in peer-to-peer schooling, where if you say to a seven-year-old, "Teach this five-year-old five things," they probably can. And the seven-year-old grows, the five-year-old grows, and a cycle is created that's different.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Lenny Levine, the great kindergarten teacher, who had such an impact on my family, he said to the parents, the only purpose of his kindergarten class for nine months is you can't say you can't play. He said, "Your kids are all going to learn how to read, but if I can teach them the expression, 'you can't say you can't play,' meaning if someone wants to join the circle, they can join the circle. If someone needs your help, they get your help. If someone needs leadership, you lead. If I can teach them that, everything else will take care of itself."

• 50:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but it's scary from a parental perspective because the system and all the external pressures that are built into complying and adhering to that system make it very threatening and scary for any parent to say, "We're going to opt out of that and do this" when everyone else is doing it in the traditional way. Because nobody wants to lead their child astray. Everybody wants the best for their kid and it's very easy to say, "Well, everyone else is doing this. It must be fine. We're going to take this risk and do this. What if it doesn't work out?"

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Right, back to being on the hook, right? That most suburban parents would like to be on the hook for a sticker on the back of their car 10 years from now, not on the hook to answer for why their kid didn't do well on the SATs.

• 51:15Rich Roll?

  Right, and the sticker is about the parents.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Correct, the sticker is about the parents and then we say to a 17-year-old, "Please make a decision about going a quarter of a million dollars in debt and base it on whether or not their stadium makes you happy."

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  Sure, and not for nothing, when you're 17, you need to know what you're going to spend the rest of your life doing, which is total insanity.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Right, but all of these things have evolved in our lifetime because the system rewards them. And the more I think about systems change, the more clear it becomes to me that the system and the status quo remain because they're good at remaining. That there's a self fulfilling thing going on, that systems that didn't work disappear, and that systems that are good at hanging on, hang on. And so we built all of this insulation around the industrial system, the education system, the carbon system, so that they would stick around. And the only way to get rid of them is not for the emperor or the person at the top to slice them open, because that never happens. It's when the grassroots says, we're not going to deal with this anymore.

• 52:18Rich Roll?

  Right, you need that grassroots, but at the same time, part of the intractability of that problem is that the architecture of system stability, like the engine behind it, are the incentives, right? And you can't change the system without changing the incentives.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 52:36Rich Roll?

  And most of the incentives in our society are not only holding broken systems in place, they're incredibly difficult to change. And those can't necessarily change at a grassroots level. It has to be from the top down as well.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Well, so let's think of a couple of-

• 52:51Rich Roll?

  Like if you look at farm subsidies, or, you know, any, you know, pick your poison-

• 52:55Speaker 01

  But those might be the last domino. So let's just pick a couple trivial examples.

• 52:59Rich Roll?

  Campaign finance.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  One trivial example is, no one wears a suit to work anymore. Like, no one, meaning 95% of the people. When I was born, every person who worked in an office wore a suit. That didn't take that long. What happened? Well, it started because Levi's and the Gap figured out they could make a profit by flipping one day of the week. And then it shifted because certain kinds of knowledge workers used software in a way that created so much value, they got to announce what they were doing. And a different class of knowledge worker came along, who wasn't an investment, and on and on. And so, bit by bit, it starts to fall apart. Or, a pandemic shows up, which is a crisis, and Zoom is ready for it.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  The technology is present. And all of a sudden, we're dismantling one of the biggest systems in the history of the world, right? Commercial real estate. You don't have to go to work, so you don't want to go to work, so you can work from home. Well, that means that there are giant skyscrapers in New York City that used to be worth a billion dollars, that are empty right now. And maybe they'll never have people in them again. That there are forces that want people to come back, but people have enough power. So, bit by bit, systems start to change. So there's usually a disruption, a crisis, a technological innovation, some sort of cultural shift that causes these things to happen, right? In the case of music, we got rock music because the transistor radio came with headphones.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  And before that, everyone in the family listened to music together. And it's headphones that permitted teenagers to listen to music their parents hated. And so we had to invent music that parents would hate so that teenagers could act out. And the headphones were the tool that changed the entire music industry. And then go fast forward 30 years, MTV is doing its thing, but then rap music shows up. And there's another way forward. And our friend Rick Rubin walks right into that and begins to change just a little tiny corner, which gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And then radio falls apart, so then the billboard charts don't matter anymore. And so, yeah, systems change in surprising ways,

• 55:12Speaker 01

  but usually because a bunch of people can outline how and why it should change.

• 55:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's something placating about that also, though, because it's reliant upon some kind of technological innovation or it's about some outlier creative who expresses themselves in a certain way that shifts culture, which can create paralysis for that grassroots movement.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  It could, but I think there's plenty of, if we talk about technology, the thing that's going to change education is, for example, every course at MIT is online for free.

• 55:49Rich Roll?

  Right, but here's the thing. The pandemic presented an unbelievable opportunity for that seismic shift. We saw it in the workplace. We really didn't see it in education. It snapped back to where it was. Scott Galloway talks about this quite a bit. Here was this massive opportunity where these...

• 56:10Rich Roll?

  Institutions of higher learning could have broadened their enrollment and created tiers of education experience for people as public servants. But these brands are so powerful, it's back to brand, right?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Except they're not.

• 56:23Rich Roll?

  Like Harvard, Stanford, whatever, they have to protect their brand and that brand is built upon exclusivity.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:30Rich Roll?

  And limiting enrollment. Even though they're sitting on ridiculous endowments and...

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Scott and I agree about a lot of this, but I don't agree that it is ever going to be led by Harvard or Yale. What's already happening is a self-taught computer programmer who uses Stack Overflow for two hours a day for two years can go get a six-figure job.

• 56:52Rich Roll?

  Sure, and this is happening right now.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  It's all gonna unravel.

• 56:56Rich Roll?

  It's the re-immersion and the respect for trade.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Correct. And the other thing that's gonna happen, which is already happening, is third-tier colleges are gonna go bankrupt. They're gonna go bankrupt all of a sudden and widespread because they don't have big endowments and people aren't gonna be willing to go in debt for the rest of their life to get a second or third-rate degree that isn't worth anything. So, once that happens, then you have this cratering underneath and all of a sudden, people are gonna start, like, I just got a note today, applications at the top five business schools of all the famous ones are down between 15 and 25% this year. In one year!

• 57:38Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  But not surprising because a whole bunch of people are saying, "I don't want to become an industrial middle manager. I don't need to go to Wharton. I'm gonna go do a thing with the $100,000 I saved." And the status of that degree can drop really fast as soon as the people who are gauging the status don't care about it anymore.

• 58:04Rich Roll?

  I wonder if there is a downside to that in that what we need is, you know, people who are excited about things like STEM. And instead, we have a generation of young people who would rather try to be a Kardashian or a TikTok influencer.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  There's so many downsides.

• 58:23Rich Roll?

  And feeling like they could, you know, make a ton of money overnight, the easy way.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  No, thank you for highlighting that.

• 58:29Rich Roll?

  Without the toil and creativity and the hard work that is part and parcel of becoming good at anything.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Oh, the downsides of this shift are huge. I'm not a Pollyanna about it, they're huge. And anti-intellectualism is a problem, as well as anti-smart is a problem. And Harvard is going to have to respond or react, and they have enough money to do it, they're just never going to go first. And, you know, the idea that you're going to make it as an influencer is fundamentally absurd. You're not, just do the math. And having a skill that creates value is a no-brainer. The thing is, can you get the skill without the piece of paper? And the online workshops that I built, I don't run them anymore. That's what we set out to do.

• 59:15Rich Roll?

  Certainly, you can do that.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  We can prove it.

• 59:17Rich Roll?

  Now more than ever.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, as soon as the value of the paper goes down, but the skill goes up, someone's going to step into that gap and say, here's how we're going to accredit skills, as opposed to accredit scarcity. So this is all happening, not fast enough, but you just need to see it first.

• 59:34Rich Roll?

  As somebody who has such keen observational skills and has your finger on the pulse of the macro and can kind of see the forest for the trees, and your understanding around like how ideas spread, I'm interested in your perspective around what has transpired culturally over the last few years with respect to the nature of public discourse, the increase of siloization, the death of nuance, the obfuscation of truth, the ascent of the conspiracy, all of that. Like, it's very trepidatious terrain right now.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 1:00:13Rich Roll?

  So how are you making sense of this?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so there are a couple of things that are worth noting. The first one is, back at the dawn of the internet, I was a techno-optimist. Give everybody a microphone, things get better when you get rid of gatekeepers, and we will see a flourishing like we've never seen before.

• 1:00:34Rich Roll?

  And let me just put a pin in that for a moment. When you say "the birth of the internet," you're talking about like 1976, right? You're talking about ARPANET.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Seventy-six is when I got my... I got my first email in seventy-six. No, I'm talking about the dawn of Prodigy. I had Prodigy's most popular product in 1989, right? So we were sitting in rooms saying, "This is clearly going to get bigger, and what will happen when it gets bigger?" What we fail to take into account is, some people want to be a troll. There is satisfaction for some people in being a contrarian. That's number one. And number two is, fights sell tickets. And that's always been true. When you combine those two things, what we see is that media channels, which also have influence over technology, because Facebook is a media channel and a

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  technology, have an incentive to amplify trolls. And so what you end up with is people who make money from division, and then you have people who would like to seek political power who make money from division, and a cycle, a non-virtuous cycle that just keeps going in that direction over and over and over again, making it feel like things are far more divided and atomized than they ever were before. When in fact, what we've really done is just put microphones in front of people who already were angry and felt left out, but we couldn't hear them. And what happens is, if you turn down the volume of these people who would seek to

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  make us feel uncomfortable so that we will go back just to make sure everything's okay... You realize that an enormous amount of progress has been made in enormous amount of areas, that the percentage of the truly poor on earth, percentage wise, smallest it's ever been, there's still way too many people, that the ability that we have to know things, to connect to things, to learn things, never before have we seen this. So what we've got to figure out now, how to do, is change the incentives for media and politicians, so that they don't make a living by making things worse. And we've been through this before.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  In the early 1960s, when I was born, the single best way to gain power in Soviet Union or the United States was to threaten to blow up the planet. And we were 10 minutes away from the entire planet being blown up in one hour. We figured out how to calm that down, because we know how much is at stake.

• 1:03:05Rich Roll?

  Until like last week, but go ahead.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  So many things, right? And so, I think we got to figure out what to do about breaking news, because no one needs breaking news. We got to figure out what to do about people who are day trading their emotions, trying to figure out if everything's going to be okay. And the last part of my rant is, the baby boomers have always made it about the baby boomers. In the 70s, when they were getting drafted, it was all about the draft. In the 80s, when it was about, you know, dad rock and music, it was all about that. Well, the baby boomers are all dying now. And, you know, I'm one of the youngest ones, and I'm in my 60s. So all of a sudden, it's all about the end times. It's all about, this is all over. And guess what? 90% of the world is in a baby boomer.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  So interesting, this idea of boomers making it all about themselves.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  We've controlled the media since 1972.

• 1:04:00Rich Roll?

  Right. Not so much anymore.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  It's shifting.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Rich Roll?

  There is this situation in which we have the denigration of trust in institutions, right, media, politicians, corporations, etc. And also, we don't agree upon a shared set of facts about what's real and what isn't, which is an even larger, kind of more macro problem. And the siloization is separating ourselves and gamifying the discourse such that it's about being right, or it's about signaling to your in-group that you are a member in good standing, as opposed to grappling with the nuance of reality and trying to make sense of it.

• 1:04:55Rich Roll?

  And this I see as, you know, the great existential crisis of our time is the climate, and I promise we're going to get to this, but, you know, this is another great threat to our ability to problem solve. How can we solve the climate problem if we can't agree on reality?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so, again, part of this is amplified by people who make a living amplifying it. But we've never agreed about reality. Ten years ago, 80% of the people in the United States said they believed in angels, that angels were real. And what's always been true is that human beings have emotions and feelings and stories. And science, which is only a couple hundred years old, has come along and shown us replicatable, falsifiable theories that we can say, "This is reality. Your emotions are your emotions," and there's a gap between them. And that gap widens and narrows over time.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  But people, including me, believe lots of things that aren't true. What you're highlighting, I think, is that you can sell a lot of papers and raise a lot of money by pointing out that the other team refuses to acknowledge reality and that our reality is right. What really is being said is we have feelings. We have feelings about winning and losing, feelings about status, feelings about affiliation, feelings about being in something. And we will find facts, in quotation marks, to prove that our feelings are correct. Because people don't like to acknowledge that their feelings are not correct. So, small aside, I used to get upper respiratory colds because I traveled so much. And I walk into a... Health food store in a strange town and I say to the person behind the counter,

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  "I got a bad cold, do you have any placebos?" And she says, "I don't know if they've come in yet." And she calls to the back to the manager, "Do we have any placebos?" And they did not want to admit that they sold placebos. That if you want to have a fight with an acupuncturist or a chiropractor, just point out that they have a very effective, low-side effect placebo. Thank you for making that. They will insist that what they do is real and factually based. So, our stories are our stories. We just have to make sure they don't hurt other people.

• 1:07:17Rich Roll?

  Our stories are our stories and we have to make sure they don't hurt other people. I'm not convinced that people care about whether their stories hurt other people or not.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Not enough. They don't care enough. That's our work. Not to prove that they are wrong, but to create a civil society where you can have your feelings, but we have to have a civil society that works for all of us. And there are certain things that you just don't do, can't do, because if we do them, regardless of our story or our feelings, the civil society itself doesn't work. That's what scares me.

• 1:07:52Rich Roll?

  Right. And I would argue that it's already not working on some level.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Of course not. It has never worked perfectly. But yes, in recent times, it's very troubling about things that will happen in our civil society that are based on the amplification of stories and division by people who make a profit doing it.

• 1:08:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  We need to see that, we need to name it. And I don't think it matters which side of any given story you're on. You should be able to say that sentence in a clear way. And acknowledge that it's concrete.

• 1:08:31Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. That's sort of a segue into the climate issues that I want to talk to you about. Solving these problems does require consensus. And this book, The Carbon Almanac, is an effort to create consensus based upon scientific research and evidence-based reality, right? This is your 20th book. 20th?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  There are 20 bestsellers. This is 21, but this is not my book. It's our book.

• 1:09:00Rich Roll?

  And what's interesting about it is that on some level, you can make the argument that it is very much a departure from your other books, which are about marketing and business and creativity and expression, et cetera. But there's another argument that it is very much a piece with your other work, certainly in the kind of beautiful artistic presentation of it. But talk a little bit about how it fits in thematically with, as a kind of extension of the work that you've always been doing.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  So the earth is going to be fine. That's not the question. The question is whether people living on the earth will be fine. And whenever we talk about the future, what we're doing is telling a story. And the problem with the last 40 years of talking about the climate is the people who've been telling a story haven't been doing a very good job of it. And they've been waylaid and manipulated by the people who dig things out of the ground or want certain political structures to stay the way they are. But the fact is, the first thing most people say who know what they're talking about, when you talk about the climate, is they say it's complicated and it's inconvenient. That was even the name of the movie.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  And when you say to people, "It's complicated," their eyes begin to glaze over. And when you say, "And it's inconvenient," they walk away. On top of that, it's easy to feel stupid because no matter how much you know, somebody knows more than you. So it became hard to talk about. If you can't talk about it, you can't make it better. So the purpose of this project is, I wrote my first blog post about the climate 16 years ago, didn't solve the problem. And I haven't written too many other posts in the 15 years in between because I didn't feel smart. I felt stupid. I felt like whatever I was gonna write, people were gonna say, "You don't know enough." And I said, "Well, if that's true for me, it's probably true for other people, too." And I used to make almanacs when I was a book packager. I knew how to make an almanac.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  I could have made the whole thing myself if I had spent five years on it. But I wanted to model systems change. How do we do something together? And so, 300 people, 40 countries, every single page is footnoted with live links on our website. We correct errors in real time. We haven't corrected any that matter. And we're all volunteers, including me. And it became a bestseller in the US, in the Netherlands, in Italy, and just came out in China. But here's the thing that people should take away. Let's say it's 1642, and you're a James Bond villain, and you wanna kill all the whales. The way you would do it is by putting space lasers on satellites and shooting the whales from space.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  The problem is there are no satellites and there are no space lasers. So you know what you could do instead? You could teach five people that whale oil is a really good way to light your house. And if you did that, the idea would spread. And then there would be whale oil refineries, and people who made the lanterns, and people who built the boats, and people who hunted the whales, and people who made a living building a system in which the input was whales. And the only reason there are whales left is not because people said, "Please, please, please, stop hunting whales." The only reason there are whales left is because someone invented kerosene. And then the system changed. And we have a systems problem. And this is what I learned in working on this project. I learned a lot about human nature,

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  about the amazing people I did this with around the world. But the systems problem is simple. 110 years ago, there was a gusher called Spindletop.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  And a couple of years before that, they found oil in Pennsylvania. And those two things created the modern world. Cheap energy from the ground for anybody who wants to dig it up. And what we've been doing for 110 years is selling carbon-based energy way cheaper than we should. We forgot to count how much it really costs. And so, everything in the system around us is based on cheap energy that's underpriced. And as long as the system is based on convenience and price and all the other things we built around it, we can't solve this problem by just saying, "I'm composting in my backyard." We need to change the system.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  A couple of observations. It really does model the addiction paradigm on some level. You know, it's sort of flipped to say we're addicted to cheap energy, but truly we are. And what's interesting about that is the notion that we become addicted to something because it works, whether it's alcohol, or cocaine, or gambling, or bad relationships, or scrolling on our phone. It's serving a need and a purpose. And cheap energy did that. It allowed us to modernize the world, right? But it works until it doesn't, and it's not working anymore, right? And it becomes a function to kind of extend the addiction metaphor. Like, the elevator is going down. Is it gonna hit the bottom? Or are we gonna step off before it hits the bottom?

• 1:13:58Rich Roll?

  And this is the story that every person who struggles with addiction has to answer for themselves. And now, we're having to answer that as a global society. And it's hard, as somebody who loves, somebody who is struggling with addiction, to see them destroying themselves, to know that there is a solution to offer your hand to help, and to see them refuse to take your hand.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Beautifully said.

• 1:14:24Rich Roll?

  And this is the scenario that we are in right now. And the solution, as you so eloquently put, cannot rest on necessarily, or only, the shoulders of the individuals to martyr themselves or to make sacrifices that seemingly are just a drop in the ocean, but to create the system change wherein the right choice is the convenient choice, the cost-affordable choice, the accessible choice for everybody.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Correct. Well said.

• 1:14:55Rich Roll?

  So how do we bridge that gap and get there?

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  So, the purpose of the Almanac is to begin to have the conversation to answer that question, because we weren't having it. And so, I have personal theories, but I'm not speaking for the Almanac team. The reason is because what we did in the Almanac, 97,000 words, built by 300 people, fact-checked completely, is say, "You can look up every single thing in this book, every single thing. There is no argument about any fact or table." You have these three-digit codes for every topic heading. Correct. Right, so you go to thecarbonalmanac.org, and then the three numbers, and it will show you everything we used to write it. If you find a mistake, we will fix it, no problem. But what do I think?

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  I think there are just a few very simple, dramatic shifts that will change the system and put the market to work. That the reason markets have transformed the world is markets are good at finding and solving problems. They see a need. If there's a team that doesn't have a baseball bat, and they need a baseball bat, someone will figure out how to sell them a baseball bat. And now, the baseball bat problem goes away, because the market did it, not some central government authority or some wizard. Someone says, "I need something," someone sells it to them. That only works if the inputs and outputs are measured properly. So, the first thing, hardest to implement in the short run, but it's already happening

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  in countries around the world, is you give every single person a check for $3,000, $4,000, and you get the money for that check by pricing carbon fairly. So, if you buy exactly the same amount of carbon as you used to buy, you'll probably break even. If, on the other hand, you want to take a private jet from here to London, it doesn't cost $80,000, it costs $400,000. If you really want to go, you can still go, but now, we've charged you the correct price. And if you do that, all of your fellow citizens are going to get a bigger check, because you decided to do that, right? So, as soon as you do that, it's called a carbon dividend and border adjustment. All these different decisions get made. You know those yoga mats you bought?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  The yoga mats aren't going to come wrapped in a plastic bag anymore because plastic bags are cheap in the old days. Now, plastic bags are expensive as they should be, and they come wrapped in paper. But if you want to buy the plastic bag, you can, but why would you? Because it's not convenient. And so it starts to ripple through the economy really fast. The government doesn't touch any of the money. And what you end up with is corporations, which run so much of our economy, making smart decisions, and consumers, which run the rest of our economy, making smart decisions. That's the first part. And the second part, which surprises a lot of people, is way more than 20% of our problem, maybe 35% of our problem, is cows. There are a billion cows on this planet.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  And it is very hard for me, other than the cost of change, to understand why anybody would say we should have any cows on this planet. Most people on Earth don't eat things that come from cows. And if everyone did eat the way we eat in the United States, just the physics of it, we would need a whole other planet just to hold the cows. So clearly, that's not going to happen because we don't have another planet. So with that said, the path forward is pretty clear. The systems that built this, now that I just described, would get rid of 70 to 80% of the problem. If someone can figure out how to make fusion power work, that would help an enormous amount.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  And what's not helping is greenwashing. What's not helping is people doing performative stuff that makes them feel like they're making a difference, like recycling their plastic water bottles, which doesn't work, which was invented by the plastics industry, and they know it doesn't work. When you start doing those things, you're giving yourself solace for one day. But you're spitting on your grandchildren's

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, those are lullabies.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:18:54Rich Roll?

  Designed by vested corporate interests to make us feel like this is all moving in the right direction, when in fact, it's a barrier to the solution that we need. The cows thing, people are very dismissive of that. They like to make fun of it. And there's a lot of sort of intellectual gymnastics going on right now to suggest that, you know, that's really not part of the problem. In fact, we need the cows for the soil that has been so denigrated. And, you know, there's a lot of, I think, moral and intellectual confusion around that.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yes, and I really don't want to have an argument with anybody who cares about keeping beef around. I get it, that's your story, those are your feelings. You can have them. You're just asked, when you look at the math, where it's coming from? There's a great book that people who want to approach this problem with an open mind should read called The Wizard and the Prophet. And what he describes in his history book, it's about two men who only met once in their life, who changed the world. The wizard won the Nobel Prize for feeding people in Mexico, India, and other places by hybridizing seed and killing the soil by creating the fertilizer industry. Because if you put enough fertilizer down and till, you can grow a lot more crops in

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  the short run. He fed a billion people doing that. It's hard to be against feeding a billion people. The prophet invented the modern environmental movement and said, "We have exceeded the earth's carrying capacity, we need less people, and we need less of a footprint." So their whole lives were woven back and forth. They just kept missing each other. And the wizard was right, and the prophet was right. They're both right, and they're both wrong. That the way forward is to understand, how are we going to use technology to create the conditions for carbon to get back in the topsoil? How are we also going to tread lightly and put in, you know, whether it's LED lights

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  or family planting, so that we don't have 20 billion people on the planet? Because we can't have 20 billion people on the planet, no matter how you do the math. So It's complicated. And the people who don't want us to change will make it more complicated. And this is the thing I really want to focus on because a lot of people listen to you and some of them will be swayed by people who want the status quo to stay where it is. So the easiest way to do it is, I need to persuade you not to get in your beef because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's just like a lot of math and stuff. And it's easy to say, okay, fine. And then this person says, well, how will we live a life without plastic? So we just need to be alert to the fact that we can argue about this all day,

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  but the earth is getting warmer every single day and a melted ice cap never gets unmelted.

• 1:21:44Rich Roll?

  Sure. And the wait and see approach, let's just sit on the sidelines and don't worry about recycling because we know that doesn't work anyway and somebody's going to innovate our way out of this is another form of lullaby, right? Like, we do have to shoulder our own personal responsibility for this and make the conscious choices that we can. It's incumbent upon us. It's part of our responsibility towards, you know, living in this society and borrowing, you know, the planet from our grandchildren and the generations to come. And I think what is incredibly frustrating about all of this is that we already have the solutions. Like, yes, we need innovation, but actually, we already have enough innovation to solve all of this.

• 1:22:27Rich Roll?

  And more than half of this book is solutions. Like, I think, you know, maybe 30% into the book, it turns to solutions and it's all about solutions. Just like, I mean, this book in many ways is similar to Paul Hawken's book, Regeneration. It's like, here are the problems and look at all these people who are already doing all these amazing things that can solve this problem. How do we onboard these people so that their technologies can get traction? How do we reconfigure the incentives such that these solution-oriented innovations can get integrated? Like, whether it's solar, wind, and nuclear, I know there's a lot of, you know, controversy and conversation around that, but like, we have everything that we need now.

• 1:23:12Rich Roll?

  The only thing we do need is political will, frankly, and we need grassroots will and we need business incentives that are in line and see the short and long-term benefits for investing in these things.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Correct. What you just described is a marketing problem. That's why it fits in with my work. We have a marketing problem. If you tell an investor, you tell a CEO, you tell a congressperson a story that's true, that resonates, that's to their advantage, they will use it. They will move in that direction. We have done a bad job because of the wizard profit confusion of letting the status quo persist because their stories are better, because they got really good at it. So Ogilvy, the famous ad agency, invented the term carbon footprint, and their client was British Petroleum. It's one of the great marketing campaigns of all time. Because if you are worried about your carbon footprint, you feel like a hypocrite. If you feel like a hypocrite, you're not going to talk about it.

• 1:24:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's super interesting. The Exxon memo, like I flagged it in here, it's like on page 46.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  I can't wait till they sue us. It would be great.

• 1:24:22Rich Roll?

  I mean, first of all, so, all right, there's, in the book, you have a photocopy of a memo from Exxon dated November 12, 1982, in which Exxon proceeds to basically describe the very problem that we're experiencing right now in 1982.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  And they got to a degree.

• 1:24:44Rich Roll?

  How did you even get this memo?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  They predicted exactly what the climate would be like today in that memo. And the great cartoonist Randall Monroe linked to it in one of his Ex K C D cartoons. So that's how I found it. I don't know how it leaked onto the internet. But it is a genuine thing Exxon has not denied, that these are their words from one of their engineers.

• 1:25:06Rich Roll?

  I was wondering why it didn't, you didn't just put it like right on the page one insert to the book at the very beginning, because it's so damning and extraordinary to read this.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had a lot of decisions to make in five months about the book. It's easy to make a book that's filled with shame and blame and villains.

• 1:25:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  And it's also easy to make a book that's completely positive all the... I mean, what do you want to do? And so the team was terrific in figuring out how to not use balance as an excuse to not mean anything, but to use it as a way to say, there is nobody you can give this to who can say, I reject this out of hand. Because we're not showing up to punch somebody in the face. We're showing up to say, the weather in Central Park is not up for debate. This is what the weather is in Central Park right now. What should we do about it is up for debate. So let's have conversations about what to do about it, because the time is long gone to deny it.

• 1:26:06Rich Roll?

  Explain why you felt compelled to create this book in an almanac format? And like, what is an almanac, actually? It just feels like, you know, when I think of almanac, I think of like Benjamin Franklin.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he was first. Almanacs changed my life when I was a book packager, because I invented the business almanac, and it sold a lot of copies. It was the internet before the internet. And then we did the celebrity almanac with People Magazine, and I did the women's almanac. And I loved them, because they matched the way my brain works even before the internet. But once the internet shows up, all anyone can deal with is an almanac. Half a page at a time. Oh, look, here's a cartoon. Wait, there's a puppy. And so people way better at writing than me have written articulate books about the climate. What I could add value is by organizing a bunch of people to say, yeah, but look it up. Here it is.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  It's not the encyclopedia, it's not school, it's an almanac. And it's got stats and graphs and charts, and it's cheap, and you should buy five and share them. Because if you hand this around the office, then tomorrow you can say, which page do you think we should discuss? Because we got to discuss something.

• 1:27:20Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Part of the kind of cultural battle that we're waging right now is one between liberty and responsibility. And liberty is winning. There is something very American ingrained in our DNA as citizens of this country that...

• 1:27:39Rich Roll?

  Over indexes on liberty and we've seen the flare ups politically and culturally around that right now. And what we're not valuing to the extent that is necessary right now is the counterbalance to liberty, which is responsibility. This is something that was kind of understood in prior generations when World War II happened, etc. And I feel like that is lost right now in the conversation and in the kind of approach that we have towards how we feel about this country that we live in, in this planet that we're sharing.

• 1:28:17Rich Roll?

  So how do we restore a return or at least a call back to feeling a shared sense of communal responsibility? Because ultimately, this is what the Almanac is saying. It's like, yes, we need system change, but we also need individual responsibility and change.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is, I wish I had a glib answer. I will tell you a couple of interesting things about going to some of the poorest places on earth. I've worked with Acumen for more than 20 years. Jaclyn is one of my heroes.

• 1:28:47Rich Roll?

  She's unbelievable.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  She's a very special person. They have now helped 200 million people around the world who are the poorest people in the world to make $3 a day, start to move their way out of poverty. But one of the things you notice when you're in one of those places is no one's on a weird diet. Because you don't have that much food anyway. You have to have a lot of food available. You have to have a Whole Foods down the street before you can say, no, I only eat collagen from left-handed animals or whatever it is, right? And the other thing that goes on is there's an enormous amount of freedom from government intervention in places like this. You don't have to pay any taxes and there's nobody from the government who's going to come tell you what to do. And yet, most people wouldn't want to live there, given the choice.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Because the creature comforts, the civilization that we have come to expect is important. And it's so easy to take for granted. So liberty is a fascinating term because liberty requires civil society for it to be worth anything whatsoever. So I think we have to be careful making sure that the dichotomy is in between liberty and responsibility because I think you can't have liberty unless you have responsibility. That's sort of its definition. With that said, there are long histories of shocks to the system that lead to changes in the culture. And, you know, the Beatles were a shock to the system that aided by technology changed the culture. And I think we are facing now a massive shock to the system.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  That, the fact is that, you know, I don't know what the expression is, there's no atheist in a foxhole. That when your house is flooded, you start to think a little bit differently about whether we should be doing something about whether it's gonna get flooded again. And like I learned in the current, you can't really easily fight the current of the Pacific Ocean, and you can't really easily fight the weather. Fighting the weather is really expensive, and I think it's gonna cause a shift in our culture.

• 1:30:49Rich Roll?

  But those problems are academic and obscure until you find yourself mired in them, right?

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:30:57Rich Roll?

  And the human animal is not wired very well to contend with future problems that are not experiential in the moment.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Right. So, it's happening, and it's gonna, the next year's gonna be so much worse than last year. We still have 10 years to take dramatic action, and my hunch is that we're gonna soon hit a point where it's obvious and where it's enough. Enough for people to say, "Oh, not that I was wrong, based on what I knew then, I was right, but now I'm gonna make a new decision based on new information, and this is what we should do."

• 1:31:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a quote in the book, "Convenience is all destination and no journey." And a lot of these problems, at least from our experiential perspective, are the result of overabundance and convenience, where we're not contending with real problems that are being visited upon us now, and as such, we have to focus on trivialities, right? And the threat of our conveniences being taken away from us is really, you know, monopolizing our focus, instead of allowing us to focus on the real problems.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think the grownups who are listening to us today... Are aware enough that they ought to be able to say, "There's a difference between your feelings and the way things are." Almost always. Where we get into trouble is when we insist that the way things are has to match our feelings. Because we always start with our feelings. You're entitled to your own feelings, you're not entitled to your own science.

• 1:32:29Rich Roll?

  And as somebody who understands deeply how ideas spread, what is your sense of, you know, beyond the almanac and the resources, et cetera, and for this movement as a whole, what is something we could all think about and practice that could help these ideas spread?

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  So I've been studying how ideas spread longer than most people, and I still don't understand. I'm pretty good at being able to point to something and say, "Yeah, that one's gonna work." And sometimes I'm right. But then things come out of the blue and totally don't make any sense until after the fact.

• 1:33:06Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Right? And I don't know what the dynamic is gonna be that causes this one to give people the status rolls, the affiliation, the energy to make it easy to spread. It will, because the same way the internet did, right? That people didn't know that email was gonna be the killer app. They didn't know that chat was gonna be the killer app. They didn't know that Facebook was gonna work when Friendster didn't. But then something happens. And it's a very complicated formula, but there is, something happens.

• 1:33:39Rich Roll?

  And it happens quickly.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes longer. But this is happening now. A year ago, when I started this, people gave me a funny look. And now, like, "Oh, of course." And that happened, not just in New York. That happened with people who I know in Perth, and people I know in Johannesburg, and people I know in Bangalore. It's on the radar, and it's not a fad.

• 1:34:06Rich Roll?

  Why don't we have some kind of Manhattan Project? Under, maybe we do, I don't, that I don't know about. But how come we don't have the brightest people in the world convening regularly to solve this problem at the highest level?

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  Well...

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Because we get confused about what the highest level means. The highest level for war has always been Dr. Strangelove and the Pentagon. But the highest level for the kind of technological, cultural change we're talking about has always been privately funded entities. And the internet took off when 20 people on Sand Hill Road decided it was the best investment they ever saw. And I was there. And if you had a notion, it became an idea, and then the next day it was a business, and then you had the resources to share it. And what I am seeing, one of the reasons I'm out here, is I spoke at a Regen conference, a VC fund that only funds companies that are working on this problem.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  That the first trillionaire is going to be somebody who comes up with a really substantial impact on this problem. So that's not enough, because we need the carbon border adjustment and dividend. We need all the stuff that the people we elect can do, but they always follow. They never lead. And so they're going to follow us if we show up enough times, if the first, second, and third question anyone running for any office gets asked is about the climate. Not true yet, but it's starting to happen. And they ultimately need to be responsive to the people who are going to send them money or send them votes, and that's going to happen when we speak up. So yeah, the number of brilliant people who are working on, say, fusion, is 10 times

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  what it was 10 years ago.

• 1:35:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the money should get funneled into the innovators who are making that correct, conscious choice be not just the easy choice and the affordable choice, but also the sexy choice, right? Like, I love how on the website for this, the first thing in terms of like a call to action for anybody who's visiting is, "Switch your browser to this Ekosha." And for every 45 searches, they plant a tree. And they've planted, I don't know, like, a lot of trees, right?

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Millions and millions and millions.

• 1:36:25Rich Roll?

  Which is like, I'd never had heard of that. What a great idea. It's so cool. There's no friction to making that switch. It's very easy and you can be part of the solution. And it's cool and you feel better about doing your searches online.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. Your status goes up. There are no ads. It's more convenient. And if everybody switched, it would be the equivalent of taking, I don't remember the number, a lot of cars off the road. It's a very significant thing. It's not the answer to the problem. But what's really interesting is the resistance some people have to switching. And I got one email talking about placebos. This person said, "I used to use Bing. I switched to Akosia because I like your blog. But I'm switching back because Bing has different, better results." And I wrote to them and I said, "Did you know that Akosia is powered by Bing? And the results are exactly the same?" And you know, you never hear back from people like that. But the point is, we tell ourselves a story.

• 1:37:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  And what's happening is, once you start telling yourself the story of, "I am going to make these shifts," you can't start untelling yourself that story. Because there's so much momentum. The same way, in 1995, a whole bunch of people said, "This internet thing's never going to amount to anything." But some people got an email address and then some people got a GeoCities page. And it unravels or ravels forward. And so I'm guardedly optimistic. Human beings can screw up just about anything. Human beings are capable of being really cruel and short-term thinkers. But a lot of people of privilege don't want to have privilege in a world that's not worth living in. And they're starting to show up either because they're going to make more money

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  or because they want to undo some of the damage that their privilege caused.

• 1:38:09Rich Roll?

  In the journey of compiling all of this and working with all of these experts and researchers, what was the most surprising fact or truth that was uncovered? As somebody who already was steeped in this science?

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  I would say the most stunning is that plastic recycling is a fraud, intentionally invented to trick us. It is chemically impossible to have blue bins filled with plastic be recycled. And almost everywhere, they're just put in the incinerator and all you've done is make the incineration more efficient. And said that baldly, people are sort of amazed. And then the next day, they will still put plastic in the blue bin.

• 1:38:53Rich Roll?

  So no, no blue bins at the, at the Godin household?

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Well, in half the Godin household, there are blue bins. And then the other one, that's just a surprising trivial fact. Concrete is 8% of the problem.

• 1:39:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  Blew me away.

• 1:39:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have those like four Cs at the beginning of the book.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I had no idea. I thought that was a fairly benign thing. Concrete is cement heated to more than 2,000 degrees by coal, usually, to make concrete. And so we've got all these coal plants that are belching carbon into the air. It's like crack cocaine for the atmosphere so that we can make more concrete. And the good news is

• 1:39:28Rich Roll?

  There's incredible innovation in that space. Yeah, like there's all these new building materials that are actually better, lighter, more structurally sound.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:38Rich Roll?

  That obviate the concrete problem.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  And as soon as we start charging the right price for coal, it will just happen instantly. But right now, there are still entities say, yeah, but it's cheaper to do it the old way.

• 1:39:49Rich Roll?

  Robert Downey Jr. just built this new house and it made the newspaper out here. It made the news and it's like, I don't know what the name of the, the building materials are, but it's, it's kind of like this curved structure. It's very kind of Flintstone-y meets the modern age kind of thing. But apparently there's something about it. I should know more if I'm going to talk about it. I don't know that much about it. But my friend Darren is also using the same materials to build a home right now as well. And it, it's completely carbon neutral.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:20Rich Roll?

  And we don't think of our building, we know about lead and green buildings and all of that, but it's not immediately obvious like why building a building would be a problem.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so here's a great systems example. In my little town, leaf blowers are against the law six months of the year. And the reason is one hour of using a leaf blower puts out as much carbon as driving a Toyota Camry from LA to New York.

• 1:40:44Rich Roll?

  That's nuts.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  But true. And they're noisy, and they're not good for the people who are using them. So, systems idea number one, it only took 20 people in my town to get them banned. Pretty easy to get a ban like that passed, because people can get an electric leaf blower. It's no big deal. Number two, the lawn contractors in my town persist in forcing their underpaid, under-respected workers to use gas leaf blowers. They just like, either don't pay the tickets, or they pay the tickets. It's more convenient to keep doing it the old way.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  And if it's this hard to change leaf blowers, when it's so obvious about their problems, and so easy to replace it with something that's quieter, better, and more efficient, you can see the scale of our systems problem. And the way we solve it is by saying, guess what? If you're a contractor in town, and you get three tickets, you don't have a permit anymore. And then in one day, all the gas leaf blowers will be gone.

• 1:41:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Well, if we care, if you're listening to this and you care, figure out how to get that law passed in your little town. Once enough little towns pass the law, they'll stop making gas leaf blowers. And we will move on to the next thing.

• 1:41:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, it's back to incentives.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:42:00Rich Roll?

  Right? Same with like, solar on our homes. If we had better incentives, more people would grapple with that and figure it out.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And no one wants to go back. Right? Nobody says, "Oh, my house is filled with beautiful LED light, I'm ripping it out and putting in incandescence." And nobody says, "Oh, I'm getting reliable solar power off the grid. I wish I could plug back into the coal plant down the street." It's pretty clear that we have figured out a path. They're gonna have test tube meat soon, so if that's your thing, you can eat real hamburger, all you want. Right? But first, we gotta have forward motion and systemic change, which comes from talking about it.

• 1:42:41Rich Roll?

  And it's a, it's, there's a ticking clock. That's the other thing.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  There is, indeed.

• 1:42:45Rich Roll?

  You know, so, in the, you know, Robert McKee screenplay, like, where are we, are we nearing like, the bottom of the second act right now? Like, where do we find ourselves on the doomsday timeline?

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, we've, the inciting incident has already come and gone.

• 1:43:00Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, that's page 10.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:02Rich Roll?

  So, we're well past that.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that we're all gonna die. Americans don't like to acknowledge this, but we're all gonna die. So... You're either gonna die in 10 years, or 50 years, or 100 years, but we're all gonna die. So how do we live a life that we're proud of along the way? And rather than handicapping, how bad is the earth gonna be in 10 years or 15 years? I think what we have is the chance to shift our timeframe. And to say, if we're lucky enough to have all of the bountiful benefits that technology has given us, and we've got food on the table and a roof over our head, isn't our obligation to just respond to that by making our time horizon at least a couple of weeks longer?

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  As opposed to just what's on TV tonight?

• 1:43:50Rich Roll?

  Hundred percent. Hundred percent. Enrollment is a big theme for you, right? And it seems like enrollment is germane and pertinent to this issue. So maybe we can kind of end this with some thoughts about enrollment and how to get people more actively engaged.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  So enrollment is another word that's easily confused because you enroll your kid in school because you have to. That's not what I'm talking about. If you're a bus driver and your bus goes from here to Santa Fe, it doesn't pay for you to go up and down the streets trying to persuade people that they should go to Santa Fe. Right? That if somebody really wants to go to Bakersfield, they should get on a different bus. Your bus goes to Santa Fe. And we don't need a unanimous vote here on almost any marketing plan, but including the one about our planet. All we need to do is be able to find the people who want to go to Santa Fe, who are enrolled in the journey, organize them, connect them, and amplify them. There's already enough.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  That you can change the Constitution of the United States without a vote if you build a nonprofit that sticks with their idea for 40 years. Forty years of sticking with it and sticking with it, then you get your justices and you win. It's not, what's the crisis of today? It's not about being a slacktivist. It's, this is the bus we're on. And so it's not going to take 40 years. What we need to do is shun the nonbelievers and say to people, oh, okay, not for you. But it is for these people, these people you respect, these people you want to be friends with, these people who are leading, they're all getting on this bus and the bus is going this way. Here we go. And if someone wants to get off the bus, they can get off the bus because we can't force them. But what marketing is in this day and age is not that you have one-third of the channels, viewers tuned to your channel.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  What it is, is that you incrementally build how many people are on the bus and you connect them to each other and then you amplify their work.

• 1:45:50Rich Roll?

  And you empower the leaders.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:45:52Rich Roll?

  And the leaders need to carry themselves with a certain level of responsibility mixed with charisma and something about them that is aspirational, that makes people want to get on board.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  That's right. And the good news is you don't need one leader because it's not an election.

• 1:46:10Rich Roll?

  All shapes and forms.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:46:12Rich Roll?

  You don't like Greta? We got Seth right over here.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  Well, I do not belong in the same sentence as her.

• 1:46:18Rich Roll?

  Well, I commend you for this really important work. It's really a beautiful act of service.

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:46:24Rich Roll?

  You are a genius teacher. I aspire to your level of clarity in thought and your precision with language. It is the high watermark for me and I have so much respect for everything that you're about, the extent to which you make yourself available as a teacher, as a mentor, as somebody who is a creator, who thinks deeply about what the right thing to do is and tries to make the world a little bit of a better place. That is your promise to the people that care about what you do and I think you're fulfilling in that promise. And I'm staring at this outline that's like 20 pages long and we got to about 10% of that. So I hope that we can continue this conversation.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  This was such a joy. I can't wait to do it again. Maybe we'll have to do it by Zoom if that's okay. But a pleasure.

• 1:47:14Rich Roll?

  No, I think I just have to go up to HOH.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  Okay. We'll go out in the canoe.

• 1:47:19Rich Roll?

  In the meantime, I would also encourage people to check out the series of podcasts that you have done with both Tim Ferriss and Brian Koppelman. Those are all wonderful and will provide you with a background until we reconvene.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  And there's 100 and

• 1:47:36Rich Roll?

  You've done

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  200 episodes of Akimbo with no guests.

• 1:47:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  It's just me prattling on.

• 1:47:40Rich Roll?

  And it's really, yeah, we didn't even talk about your podcast. That was in the outline, but I've been enjoying that. It's very different from most podcasts out there. They're sort of little, like, sort of mini blog rants and thoughts and truths mixed in, and it's very entertaining.

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:47:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I really enjoy it.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  This was such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 1:48:01Rich Roll?

  Appreciate it. Thanks, Seth. Cheers.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 1:48:04Rich Roll?

  Thanks.

• 1:48:16Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a

• 1:48:58Rich Roll?

  review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic

• 1:49:41Rich Roll?

  and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate.

• 1:49:48Rich Roll?

  Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Namaste.