June 18, 2025 • 52 mins
What if midlife isn’t a crisis, but your most creative chapter yet?
In this inspiring and deeply personal episode, bestselling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin shares how he’s reinvented his life through purpose-driven work, disciplined freedom, and the belief that life itself is a series of art projects.
We explore why the “dip” is a crucial part of growth, how to walk away from success when it no longer serves you, and what it really means to build a legacy. Seth also opens up about aging, identity, and choosing meaning over momentum.
It’s a conversation full of wisdom, honesty, and practical insight for anyone navigating change. Subscribe for more episodes that help you reimagine your next chapter!
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:16 How Seth and Chip first met at Stanford
02:49 Writing their first book together
03:53 Jay Conrad Levinson as a modern elder
07:01 Writing over 150 books
08:31 Understanding The Dip and its midlife parallels
12:28 Seth’s two “Dip” examples
14:13 Chip’s hotel dip and decision making
17:27 Creativity, resilience, and entrepreneurship after 50
19:36 Not being in high school anymore & insulating yourself
22:49 Midlife crisis or chrysalis?
27:25 Alt MBA, The Carbon Almanac, and collaborative creation
32:03 Rebranding midlife and self-image as we age
35:28 Things that got better with aging
37:54 Seth’s perspective on retirement & legacy
41:16 Seth’s next project
42:42 The future of the U.S. and generational change
46:28 A bumper sticker of wisdom
48:14 The importance of the origin story
Learn more about MEA at https://www.meawisdom.com/
#SethGodinInterview #MidlifeChrysalis #StanfordStories #TheDipBook #PortfolioLife #ModernElderAcademy #CarbonAlmanacProject #AltMBAJourney #RebrandingMidlife #CreativeAging #WisdomInMidlife #OpportunityCostLesson #EntrepreneurAfter50 #LifeAsArtProject #TeachingLegacy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
How should we rebrand? Midlife or getting older?
Who do we see when we look in the mirror?
The answer isn't useful if it's I'm a shell of my former self.
Instead, the answer could be I have a chance to be the best
version of me for someone else today.
What an opportunity. And that's a choice.
That's the branding that I thinkwe have to bring.
(00:22):
And I think you've done enormously positive work by
helping people realize that you don't have to apologize for the
fact that you're doing a new thing at 50.
In fact, you probably should. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
podcast with Chip Conley. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
and my episode with Seth Godin. Seth has been a friend of mine
(00:44):
for 43 years. We were in Business School
together as the two youngest people in our Stanford Business
School class. We wrote a book together, both
of our first books in our secondyear of Business School.
He's he's, he's a smartest can be kind of marketing guru.
And so I asked him about branding around midlife and
aging and getting older. And he had some interesting
(01:05):
comments there. But most importantly, that Seth
got personal in this episode andalso helped us to understand at
the end of this the episode, hisorigin story.
I think you're going to enjoy this one.
We have 43 years of history together.
The feeling is mutual, but it doesn't feel like it doesn't
even feel like 43 months. So just to give some background,
Seth and I were the two youngestpeople in our Stanford Business
(01:27):
School class. He was 22 when he joined.
I was 21 for about a month or somonth and 1/2, which is very
young, you know, you know, todayit's rare to see that.
But even back then in 1982 when we went to to Business School,
it was really unusual and, and we joined and we both had a chip
on our shoulder, excuse the pun,that, you know, just we're a
(01:50):
year or two younger than a lot of the people and they treated
us as if we were juveniles, Although they sort of liked me
because I had gone to Stanford undergrad and I could get dates
for a lot of the guys from with undergrads.
But Seth, I mean, what does it feel like to you when we were
the youngest people in our class?
This is worth decoding because there's some universal lessons.
(02:11):
First of all, I think Stanford makes an error when they don't
let people in when they're stillimpressionable.
The reason I had a chip on my shoulder was because everyone I
encountered needed to justify the way that they had wasted two
years of their life doing clerk work at an investment bank.
(02:31):
If the only reason they had doneit was to get into Business
School, and I hadn't had to do that, then there must be
something wrong with me. And I don't blame them for this.
But it was a huge growth opportunity for me to realize
that being judged by other people might not be based on
reality. Yeah.
I also think both of us learned during our two years there that
(02:53):
we're entrepreneurs and we don'tlove being in the classroom.
And so I, I think it was you whorecommended that in our second
year, we write a book together and get credit for writing a
book. And I think as if I recall it
properly, you, you said, listen,this is the only time we can go
out and, and talk to what I would now call modern elders
(03:13):
because we're not competition. They want to probably hire us
and we can ask them about their business rules of thumb.
And that was the name of that book that we wrote together,
which is wasn't didn't have a lot of writing and it just has a
bunch of rules of thumb from people out there in the business
world. And it was our first book, and
you've gone on to write many bestsellers, as have I.
(03:36):
But the poignant irony of the book is that it came out the
same day as Vanna White's autobiography and and Jim Frost
was our editor and Jim had a crush on Vana, and so he spent
all his time on Vana's book and none on ours.
That is true. Our our, our book didn't go very
far that but it it did capture, you know, our first of all, it
(04:00):
allowed us to get talked to a lot of interesting people.
I don't remember if we actually talked to J Conrad Levinson, but
I want to explore for a moment this idea of intergenerational
collaboration and wisdom transfer.
And I do remember back then thatyou were, you were sort of
enthralled with Mr. Levinson, Jay Connor with Levinson.
(04:20):
Tell us a little bit about why he was a bit of a modern elder
for you. What?
What was it that you liked abouthim as a role model?
Well, may he rest in peace. He became a good friend over the
years. Yes, I did get to speak to him.
And then I persuaded him to turnhis guerrilla marketing book
into a series, and I wrote threeor four of them.
So Jay was 30 years older. I got him his first computer,
(04:42):
got him on AOL where he became atexting sex addict, which is a
weird. Really.
Oh, OK. Yes, it took him, took him three
years to get out of that hole. We taught each other things.
I taught him a little bit about broadening his message and
understanding the power of a brand, and he taught me a lot
(05:05):
about walking through the world on lighter feet.
He found joy in every single thing we did.
His ideas, some of them really stand the test of time.
But his attitude more than anything does that.
We only get to do this once, so why the hell not enjoy it?
My impression, and this is again, you know, faulty memory
from 40 years ago, was that one of the things you liked about
(05:28):
him is he had he had a bunch of side things always happening.
He had this thing and he had that thing and he had that book
thing. And there was a sort of, it was
sort of a what we now call a portfolio life.
But tell me, tell me a little bit more about that.
You know why you admired that, especially as you started
looking at your career. It's hard to remember, but the
standard of the day was you got a job at the placement office
(05:51):
and you stayed at that job untilyou were dead.
And we felt like the most important choice we were going
to make is should we go to Bain or McKinsey.
We felt like this single moment was going to define us.
And there are some people from our class who are still in their
first job, but almost none. When you talk to someone today
(06:11):
as a modern elder who's 20, it'sthey would think you were insane
if you suggested to them that they were going to stick with
one job. I just read yesterday,
Creativity. The word creativity only was put
in the dictionary 100 years ago and it wasn't used by people to
say I'm creative or I do creative work that's brand new.
(06:32):
It was invented by the Department of Defense as a way
to persuade a wide swath of elites to go to post factory
work and do what they were told,but to have self esteem because
they could see themselves as creative.
And it's sowed the seeds for people realizing they have
agency and realizing that that means you are not your
(06:56):
organization, you are not your job, and if a better wave comes
along, you should switch waves. You have had a portfolio life.
You have, in fact, I have a couple of your books back here.
Let's angle over there. These are these big books.
These are these big, they're like barbells.
And yes, one of them is one of them is called This Might work.
(07:17):
The other one is called What does it?
What does it sound like when youchange your mind?
How many books have you had yourfingerprints on, whether you
wrote them or you published them?
I mean, we're over 100 books at this point, aren't we?
Over 150 And yeah, I was talkingto my friend Toby Haas, who's a
character actor, and he likes tosay he's been fired 178 times
(07:39):
because there's 178 shows he's not on anymore and proud of it.
You know, I've launched 150 plusbooks and not one of them has
been the best selling book of all time, but successful enough
that I get to play again. And that is my whole mantra.
Is it generous? Is it generative?
(08:00):
And will I get to play again, win or lose?
In your 40s, many of your books are.
Some of my favorites of yours came from your 40s, some of them
including Purple Cow, which I was lucky enough to be in.
Free prize inside all marketers are liars, the dip tribes and
linchpin in your 50s. Some of the books you came out
(08:21):
with were they showed the evidence of maturity and wisdom
and maybe giving back, especially the carbon Almanac,
which we'll we'll come back to. So I want to start just by
talking about the dip as a as a book and as a concept, because
this podcast is, you know, the midlife chrysalis.
It's generally seen in in the the popular lexicon as the
(08:45):
alternative to the midlife crisis, which is the number one.
Whoever the branding agency who came up with midlife crisis got
it right because nobody in the world has not heard of that
phrase. And yet what we have seen at
MEA, at the Modern Elder Academy, is that there's so many
people who hit that downslide where whether it's in the 40s or
early 50s and then things get better.
(09:08):
EU curve of happiness research in fact, shows that.
So tell us a little bit about the philosophy of the dip and
then I want to just then explorea little bit more with Seth
Godin about dips that you've gone through and how you have
eaten your own dog food to understand how how to go
through, get through the other side of this dip.
OK, I don't want to be true doctrinaire.
(09:29):
I don't want to get let my definition get in the way of the
excellent point you're trying tomake.
But the dip, which is only a 96 page book is about one and only
one thing which is that, and I wrote this a really long time
ago, so try to remember it in a world before Facebook and
YouTube. This is it came out when you
(09:49):
were 42 or 43 years old something.
Like that it's 20 years ago. There's a huge prize for being
the best in the world that the number one match on Google gets
100 times more clicks than the 8th, 1:00.
If you're in the short head, if you're seen as the winner in
whatever category you pick, the benefits are enormous.
And we are raised from a young age not to quit.
(10:12):
We are raised from a young age to believe we're supposed to
stick it out. And yet most people don't wear
tutus to work and they're not still taking karate lessons.
So something happened when we were a kid that we did, and then
we quit it. And my argument is that there is
a place in between the excitement and joy of starting a
project and coming out on the other side as somebody who wins
(10:36):
in your category. And that spot that through, it's
called the dip. It's difficult.
It's there on purpose to make you quit because if everyone
kept going, there wouldn't be someone in who's left in the
small little category. So lots and lots of people start
a startup, but almost nobody gets the other side.
(10:58):
Lots and lots of people go to the gym in January, but almost
nobody has 6 pack apps. My argument is don't quit in the
dip. Either quit before you start,
see the dip and say I'm not up for that and I've done that
many, many times. Or when you're in the dip,
congratulate yourself for realizing you're in the dip and
stick it out because it's on theother side.
(11:21):
So don't go to medical school and then quit during organic
chemistry. Organic chemistry exists.
Get you to quit. Know that.
That's why it's there. It's not exactly the same as the
midlife thing you're talking about, but it rhymes.
And the reason that it rhymes isbecause we evolved to die right
(11:41):
when the midlife crisis starts. That there's no evolutionary
benefit to being a great grandfather.
That when you hit 45, your work here is done, we don't need you
anymore. And it's only very recently that
the second act has even been possible.
And you are absolutely correct that if we can change our
thinking upstairs, it can becomethis extraordinary opportunity.
(12:04):
But if we buy in to the fact that the only people who are
happy are 30 years old and on their key ascendancy, then we're
going to be sad because we're not 30 years old anymore.
And I think you've done enormously positive work by
helping people realize that you don't have to apologize for the
fact that you're doing a new thing at 50.
(12:26):
In fact, you probably should. How has this helped you?
How's the DIP philosophy helped you in looking at the various
commitments you've made or commitments you're considering
making over the course of the last 30 years or so?
I mean, you've had a number of businesses.
So give us, give us a personal example of one that has, that
(12:48):
has that fits this philosophy. Well, I'll give you 2 that sit
right next to each other. They're very similar with
different outcomes. The first one is I invented
e-mail marketing and built one of the first Internet companies
and there was a two year period when we were within a week of
bankruptcy. There was a two year period
where every single day was impossibly difficult.
(13:09):
But I saw a path and I believed enough in my understanding of
the system that I could push through that dip.
And then ten years later, I invented one of the first social
networks called Squidoo, and there are only nine of us, and
we were the fourtieth biggest website in the US.
One day, without warning or explanation, Google turned us
(13:29):
off and we went from #40 to #2 million.
And I knew that it might be possible if I put five years of
my life into it and raise some money to get through that dip.
And I thought about what that would cost me.
And I said, I don't even want tostart.
So when we still had money in the bank, when no one was
(13:49):
stressed out of their mind, whenwe hadn't broken promises to the
world, we just said, OK, we're done.
And many of my peers have lookedat that and I've done things
like that three times, have looked at me and said, well,
you're not much of A player. That was pretty weak.
And I said, no, it wasn't. I got five years of my life back
and I got to go do the next thing.
That never would have happened if I had been slogging and
(14:11):
slogging through a dip that I didn't care that much about.
I went through that dip in my late 40s with with Joada Joada
view of my boutique hotel company.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and we were going
through the Great Recession and I thought I'd be running that
company. When I was 80 years old.
I sort of started it and grew itwith no, no intention of having
(14:32):
a liquidity event. But I really felt at that point,
you know, I had a, an NDE and near death experience and went
to the other side due to an allergic reaction to an
antibiotic. And that was my opportunity to
look at my life and say, wow, I have never thought of
opportunity cost in the context of my life.
You know, when you're an entrepreneur, you don't know
(14:54):
your limits until you've surpassed them.
And you go out and try these things and you don't realize
what you're missing along the way until people tell you.
And then you sort of feel like, well, they don't understand.
They don't. I'm living my calling.
Yeah. I'm not a workaholic.
I'm living my calling. This is the thing I'm supposed
to be doing. And, you know, like, get on, get
on, get on, get on the bandwagon.
(15:15):
But then you that opportunity cost I I really appreciate.
I think that's not, that's the thing that we maybe even get
smarter about as we get older. This idea of the opportunity
cost, your choice was Squidoo 20years ago or so to say, OK, I'm
not, I'm not going to actually put five years of my life into
that because I know what I'll bemissing if I do that.
(15:36):
Similarly, for me, I ultimately sold Joie Deive at the bottom of
the market was not the best decision from a financial
perspective, but from a lifestyle perspective was
absolutely the best decision. And frankly, if I hadn't done
that, the Airbnb, you know, founders would never have come
to me and said, Chip, you know, you sold your company.
What the hell you doing? You you're here in San
(15:57):
Francisco. We don't we don't know what
we're doing and we need a modernelder here to help us.
So that would not that opportunity would not have
arisen. And you just touched on
something and your honesty and telling this story is really
generous because I think it helps people understand that
decisions aren't based on returnon equity for the investors.
They're based on our personal sole our our investment in self
(16:23):
and what's possible. But you're talking about making
a decision. Annie Duke taught me something
really important. Annie Duke used to be a world
champion of poker. She asks groups of people, have
you made a really good decision in the last year?
And everyone says, oh, yeah, I made a good decision.
And then she says, did it turn out well?
(16:44):
And everyone says, yeah, it was great, blah blah blah.
These are unrelated. If you buy a lottery ticket and
you win the lottery, you made a bad decision and got lucky
because buying a lottery ticket is stupid.
And what happens after you make a good decision is out of your
control. A good decision simply means
(17:04):
based on who I am now, what I see now, what is important to me
now, what are the best paths available to me now?
And if it works out, great. If it doesn't work out, great,
but you still made a good decision, so the fact that you
didn't make 10X on what you madeon your hotel is irrelevant.
Based on who you were and what you saw, you made exactly the
(17:26):
right decision. Yeah, I think a lot of people,
especially in midlife, around 50, get really nervous that
based upon the ages and we have in our culture, depending upon
the industry that they're in, ifthey're in the marketing or
advertising industry, like, whoa, it's like that's a young
person's sport. Same with technology.
And there's a sense like, jeez, if if I make myself available
(17:47):
out there in the world at that time, nobody will want me.
But, you know, This is why the most flourishing entrepreneurs
and the greatest number of entrepreneurs tend to be after
age 50, partly because they're going to say, you know what, to
hell with the marketplace, to hell with ageism.
I have built some wisdom along the way and I'm going to go
(18:08):
start a business. And a lot of those people are
attracted to you, Seth, just because of your message and and
how you've constantly remade yourself and shown that at any
age you can start a business. So thank you.
Thank you for being that person.You're you're, you're kind.
You know the thing about most ofthe people who are not
youngsters who started business have a sense of reality about
(18:31):
market scale. A good business is not a
business that everyone is a customer of.
That's not where the prizes the prizes are.
You serving people who want to be served in a way that's
resilient enough that you get todo it again tomorrow.
And there has never been a better moment than right this
minute. Given the tools that are
available to find the people, you don't need a lot of them to
(18:54):
find the people who need you andwant you.
I wrote about a woman who started a cruise line for
lesbians and she didn't have to buy a boat.
Olivia Yep. Olivia.
Yeah. And so she don't have to buy a
boat. She's had to organize enough
people that she could charter a boat whenever she wanted to.
Is that going to ever have 5 million customers?
(19:15):
Of course not. It doesn't matter.
She's serving the people she wants to serve in a way she
wants to serve them and delivering enormous value to
them. And that's so much better than
compromising all your morals to become, you know, a billionaire
running some social network thatyou're not proud of.
Why would you want to do that? Just because you can do it
doesn't mean you should. So you, you were talking about
(19:38):
Annie a moment ago and, and the question about decision making,
one of the questions I like to ask people is do you make better
decisions now than you did 10 or20 years ago?
And you know, in, in a, in a bigballroom of people, 95% of the
people raise their hands. And, and so then I say, why?
And they say, I don't know. It's like, well, OK, maybe
(19:58):
you've built some wisdom. Your painful life lessons are
the raw material for your futurewisdom.
What is it that would you say for you, Seth, is common sense
for you today? That would was not common sense
for you 25 or 30 years ago. The biggest hard one thing is
not being in high school anymore.
(20:18):
I know what you're saying, but explain.
Well, high school had leaves scars.
No one really loved high school,but I particularly didn't have
did not like high school. So I don't read my Amazon
reviews because I'm never going to write that book again anyway.
And hearing that someone hated it just tells me something about
them. It doesn't tell me something
about me. I was at an event a couple weeks
ago and there were like 15 fancypeople like you and me
(20:40):
backstage, each about to go on stage and the the amount of
nervousness in the room was extreme, but there were only 600
people in the audience. It wasn't being recorded.
It was fun. It was just delightful.
And people wanted to grab you with that negative energy
because it loves company. And instead I was like, oh,
here's there was one other person who wasn't feeling the
(21:02):
the high school thing, and she and I just chatted.
It was great. But in the old days, I would
have been sucked into it like, like, nothing.
And so making a decision based on what masked anonymous people
over there are going to think that's a bad idea.
Well, also, I think getting to aplace where you don't really
give a give an F, you don't givea fuck about what other people
(21:24):
think about you, nor do you wantto get into the nor do you want
to be reactive. You know, that is Viktor Frankel
wrote Man's Search for Meaning and famously said between
stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is your power to choose your response.
And in your response lies your growth and your freedom.
When we're younger, we're a pinball in the pinball machine.
(21:44):
There's no space between stimulus and response.
Someone's the big man on campus or the bully, and he treats me
that way and I'm going to react.And I think this is part of the
reason why people don't like going to reunions all that much
until they get to a certain an age later in their life where
they don't give an F what anybody thinks of them.
Right? I don't listen.
I don't see you. I don't see you in our Business
(22:06):
School reunion, Seth. Well, I didn't even go to their
Business School graduation, but I have work to do because I
still really care. I just do the work to insulate
myself. I was walking down Broadway in
the 70s in New York City and there's a little tiny playground
and as I'm walking by I hear this 7 year old jeering some
(22:27):
kid, calling him names, making fun of him.
And as I walked past the playground I realized it's me.
He's making fun of me. I got to tell you, I still felt
bad. I felt bad that a 7 year old
strange kid is making fun of me as I'm walking down the street
because I don't know how to not care but I do know how to
insulate myself. Along the way, would you say
(22:50):
that you had a midlife crisis orchrysalis?
Yeah, I had more than one. Well, I think that the the
growth was not making the feelings go away over the the
times. It's just acknowledging the
feelings and not turning it intosomething that lasts and lasts.
(23:10):
So when I sold my company it was2000.
You saw you saw the Yahoo. Sold Yahoo.
I lost the 80 plus people who I have been spending all my days
with, many of whom were upset that I'd broken up the family I
had to move, which should have been exciting and really wasn't,
(23:30):
and my mom was sick all at the same time.
And I went from the thrill of keeping this very fragile thing
going for a decade to smashing into the wall.
And that crisis lasted nine months and it ended with me
sitting in a 3000 square foot empty office with my dog trying
(23:52):
to figure out what I was going to do next.
And it was. I will never forget Malcolm
Gladwell. I'm very grateful he mailed me
the galley of a Tipping point. No one knew who Malcolm was.
I don't know how he knew to mailit to me.
And he asked if I would blurb it.
And I read his book and realizedit in my head.
(24:17):
I had been thinking, even thoughI had just been sitting in a
funk. And I sent him a blurb.
And then I'm not exaggerating. 20 days later, unleashing the
idea virus was finished. I wrote the entire book in 20
days. And it wasn't based on his book,
but it rhymed. And my book was going to come
out six months before the tipping point.
(24:38):
So I felt bad about that. So I sent it to Malcolm and I
said, if you think this is stealing from your book, I'm not
going to publish it. And PS would you write the
foreword? And he wrote go for it.
And he wrote a foreword for me. And that got me back onto the
cycle that I wanted to be on of.I'm an author.
I don't have a giant team. And I can go with this new pace,
(24:58):
but that feeling of it's over and I don't know where I'm
going. It's easy to marinate in that.
And it's easy to imagine your greatest hits album and realized
there's never going to be another song on it.
Well, and also, you were about 40 years old then.
And so you had kids. You had two kids.
Is that right? You had two kids and you're
thinking about college and you're thinking about, you know,
(25:20):
and also probably feeling a little bit like a little scarred
from being the guy piercing together the, you know, cash
flow to keep the business alive and awake with all these
employees who you loved. There was probably some part of
you that just said, oh, I can't do that anymore, although you
did a few years later, but although that was not a that was
(25:43):
not nearly as large of a group. So you'd learn some lessons
along the way. And, and my sense is that since
that time you have appreciated the freedom of being, you know,
a, a free range person who can just write books and give
speeches and, and you don't havethe full armor of a big company.
You have to, you know, take careof.
(26:05):
Yeah, I, I don't think it is completely true that I
appreciate the freedom, but it doesn't come for free.
And this is the discipline. I'm a pretty disciplined, OK.
I'm an insanely disciplined person.
I try not to be rigid, but there's certainly so many things
in my life where I am disciplined and the discipline.
(26:26):
So five years ago, I said I'm not flying for work anymore and
I haven't been on a plane once in five years for work because
once I start compromising and have to reconsider, then I got
to reconsider it. So what I try to do is not focus
on what these rules cost me. I try to focus on what these
rules get me. So Murray, the pup, and I walked
for 10 miles today. What a treat, what a privilege.
(26:50):
I wouldn't get to do that if I was also doing this and doing
this and doing another thing. But I don't feel like I'm going
slow. I just feel like I pushed myself
to go deeper instead of cycling faster.
Yeah, no, I, I think as we get older, the idea of moving from
accumulation to editing and getting very clear on what are
(27:11):
the filters in your life in terms of people, places, things
and the way you, you know, the way you curate your lifestyle.
If you're, if you're fortunate enough and privileged enough to
be able to do that, you know, inyour 50s, Seth, you created, if
I'm not mistaken yet, it was your fifties, 55 years old, I
think alt MBA, the Akimbo organization or podcast.
(27:38):
And, and you then also created the Carbon Almanac.
And so it felt like in some waysas you move from in your 40s
into your 50s and you did a lot of other things too, but there
was a, there was a little bit ofa shift into what Eric Erickson,
the developmental psychologist would, would call generativity,
the idea of generating things for the sake of future
(27:59):
generations. Does that sound accurate to you?
Part of it is the I've been teaching and coaching my whole
life and my rule was don't get paid for it and don't do it in
public because I wanted a purityto it.
I didn't want there to be any ulterior motive.
And when the chance to do all the NBA came along and then the
(28:24):
chance to do the carbon Almanac,I realized I had built an asset.
And if I'm going to continue to hide from the public these sorts
of things, I would be depriving people of something that I
thought they could benefit from.So the Carbon Almanac was two
years of full time work as a volunteer, 1900 co-authors.
(28:46):
We built something really important.
And if I gotten paid for it or if I claimed I did the whole
thing myself, it wouldn't have worked.
It was, oh, Seth Godin is inviting me to be part of
something. You've heard of me.
So therefore, you might be more likely to say yes than if I was
just anonymous. And so I was trying to use the
leverage in a way that could still preserve the freedom that
(29:09):
I value so much, but could lead,could leave behind something
useful. Another one of my principles,
though, is public is a very big #6 billion, four billion people
with an Internet connection. You're never going to reach all
those people. So don't compromise what you
stand for for another 0 worth ofattention.
(29:32):
I've tried to maintain that I don't seek new readers.
I tried to do better work for the readers I already have.
And what was it about the CarbonAlmanac, beyond the the obvious
climate change, that gave you the motivation to devote 2 years
of your life to that? Was it?
Obviously it was the essential nature of getting the message
out, but to do it in in the formyou did, which was in an
(29:55):
exceptionally collaborative formthat was, you know, like
crowdsourcing. It was really crowdsourcing and
and explain a little bit more about how how that worked.
OK, so I some people might be onaudio, but if you have a video,
it looks like this. 97,000 words, footnoted, indexed,
illustrated, not one error and we did the whole thing in five
(30:19):
months. Everyone involved didn't get
paid. The idea was, I realized I
blogged 25 years ago about climate, and then I had stopped
because obviously my blog post didn't solve the problem.
So what's the problem? You know, what am I supposed to
do? The reason I stopped is I felt
stupid. I felt underinformed.
(30:41):
I was worried that if I talked about it, I would say something
that completely undermined anything I was trying to
accomplish. So I wanted there to be
something like this. I've made almanacs in the past,
so I know how to make an Almanac.
But I thought if I just do this on my own, I will be modeling
precisely the wrong behavior. Because my thesis is Community
(31:03):
Action is the only solution to the problem.
Community Action is what happenswhen people come together with
structure to produce value. So let me model that.
And that whole decision took 36 hours.
But then once I decided the discipline thing shifted, I
wasn't going to walk away from it.
In those 36 hours, I decided howI was going to spend the next
(31:25):
two years of my life. What skills did you have in your
late 50s that you might not havehad in your late 30s to be able
to pull off that kind of collaboration effort?
The biggest skill is super simple, which is I knew that if
I was just looking for assistance, who would do what I
told him to do. The project might happen, but it
(31:46):
wouldn't be very good. And instead I made the
commitment to witness, to structure, to support, but not
to tell anybody what to do. What I learned is how to leave
space for other people, not for me to tell them what to do.
So Seth, there are a lot of words associated with getting
older, midlife, senior old elder, modern elder, aging.
(32:14):
You're amazing at at being creative and branding.
How should we rebrand midlife orgetting older?
Because we have really awful language to describe this era of
life. And, and it's I think because we
have awful language, we also have an awful perspective as we
(32:35):
get older around this, this era of life.
What is? What are your thoughts on that?
I was lucky enough to know both of my grandfathers, and when
they were my age, they were old.They were just old.
All we've done is inserted 20 years into people's lives, and
those 20 years are the thing you're trying to give a name to,
(32:57):
right? That they didn't.
Those are 20 years. They just did not exist 40 years
ago. And I don't think the answer is
branding it in a way that young people will wake up and say, oh,
that's a whole new thing. I think it's more about how do
we help people find the mindfulness in the patience to
(33:21):
acknowledge that there aren't 2 1/2 things, you know, kid, young
adult, old, but there's this other thing now and how, how do
we talk to ourselves about it? Not how do we talk to other
people about it? Who do we see when we look in
the mirror? For me, it's was particularly
poignant. My dad got sick shortly after we
(33:42):
were in Business School together.
In solidarity, I shaved my head and he and I looked really
similar. And we were once traveling
together and a woman in an airport, a stranger walks up to
us and says, are you guys in some sort of a cult?
The last few years of his life, he had dementia.
And when I look in the mirror, Isee him because I looked like
(34:04):
him. And there's no question that I.
There are words I can't find anymore.
There are attention cycles I can't do anymore.
And if I'm not careful, I'll just decide I'm old.
I know I'm never going to downhill ski again.
I know that I am not somebody you can take to a disco who's
going to have fun. I.
Don't know if you're ever a person I could take to a disco
(34:26):
to have fun. I could take you to a.
There was. One night, there was one night
we went to a gay bar in San Francisco.
I don't know if you came or not.And it was super fun.
When we were in Business School,it was super fun.
But that was like the last time anyway, So it's just what do you
say to yourself when you look inthe mirror?
(34:46):
And the answer isn't useful if it's I'm a shell of my former
self. Instead, the answer could be I
have a chance to be the best version of me for someone else
today. What an opportunity and that's a
choice. That's the branding that I think
(35:07):
we have to bring. Becca Levy at Yale has shown
that when we shift our mindset in midlife on aging from a
negative to a positive, it givesus 7 1/2 years of additional
life. So it is about, you know, that
glass is half full. You know what, What gets better
as we get older because there are a lot of things that get
better with age. What?
(35:28):
What's something that you think is that's gotten better in your
life as you've gotten older? I am able to do things that
require patience dramatically better.
I can't do things that require attention dramatically better,
but I can be patient with everything from having to sit
(35:49):
for five hours in a waiting roomto doing a project that doesn't
work right away. And my impatience used to be a
superpower because I could sparksomething and make it go
forward. Like in Business School, the
professor knew if he called on me, I was going to say something
that was going to change what was going to happen next in the
class. So shifting that has been
(36:11):
interesting, but eagerly walkingaway from physical or mental
things I can't do with joy has been a fine choice for me.
I used to be able to drink a whole bottle of Matuk's hot
sauce. I don't eat hot sauce anymore.
It's just fine. It's fine, but if I have to just
(36:31):
keep pretending that I'm reminding myself all the time
that my instrument isn't what itcould have been.
And with time being a scarcer commodity as we get older, 10
years from now, what would you regret if you didn't learn it or
do it now, since anticipated regret is a form of wisdom?
OK, this is interesting because I started the year because I had
(36:53):
three projects last year and there was a lot of Sprint or the
end. So I decided to start the year
with a blank slate to see what would arise.
And a five year project is a commitment when you only have
one or two five year projects inyou, right?
And I started the whole year with this mindset that time is
scarce. And what I discovered is the
(37:15):
opposite is true. I got more time than ever
before. When I treat time as scarce, I
wreck it. And if I treat time as precious,
but I got a lot of it, then I can be patient and I can be
present. When you talk to people who are
nearly retired or retired, they'll tell you they got
(37:36):
nothing but time. Time's not scarce.
They got nothing to do. So if I'm in this liminal space
between busier than anyone I know, or, you know, sitting on a
rocking chair facing the wall, Imight as well relish the fact
that time isn't that scarce. What am I going to do with it?
So this beautiful segue into talking about retirement, do you
(37:57):
think you'll ever retire? And what does that mean to you?
Is, is retirement? Is retirement a dirty word?
I, I, my point of view on this is basically that retirement was
that were the golden years, because if you were doing mind
numbing, back breaking work for 40 years and you're 62 or 65
years old, you don't want to do that anymore.
(38:19):
And you, you deserve to play golf and watch TV and start
drinking martinis at at noon. That's not our era.
Our era of knowledge workers have crystallized intelligence
and wisdom that goes off into their 70s.
And, and therefore, for a lot ofus, the idea of retiring means
(38:40):
putting your brain on hold because that's, that has been
your that's been your valuable asset to offer the world.
And that doesn't make any sense.So what's your perspective
personally on retirement, Seth? And and if you, if you expect
that you'll never retire, does that mean you might curate your
(39:01):
light life differently, including the fact that you've
said I'm not, I'm not going to be jumping on any planes?
If retirement means lonely and bored, I'm not interested.
If retirement means that my day job isn't a job, then I've been
angling toward that for a very long time.
(39:23):
That I view my life as a series of art projects, and every once
in a while, one of those art projects enables me to pay for
the next art project. But if it doesn't, that's OK
because we live in this jackpot world where if some of your art
projects work, you're OK. I know people who came up in the
Internet side with me who don't have to work again for the next
(39:46):
7 lifetimes and they still show up at work with this grimace
like they have to go to work because that's their fuel.
And so pick your fuel and pick your future.
And my fuel through discipline is I'm not going to pick it
because it has a price tag. I'm going to pick it because
it's generative and thrilling and I'm going to learn something
(40:07):
and I like to think of this as an art project.
And if it doesn't succeed at what I set out to do, it's still
art. And that's what I'm trying to
seek out and create. And there's, you're not all
worked up about legacy, you know, in the capital L legacy
kind of way. Like I want to be remembered
for. If there's anything to be
(40:30):
remembered for, it's how you've curated your life to have it be
an art project and to be very generative.
But would that be accurate? Because I've been a teacher for
so long, started when I was 17, the biggest wins for me are when
someone I taught teaches somebody else something.
That's my legacy and that's why I don't keep track of how many
(40:52):
books I sell, but I do keep track of who bought the book and
what they did with them. So if I bump into someone like I
did yesterday and they walk oververy respectfully and say
someone gave me this and it really made a difference, I'm
like, yeah, that's the point. I don't want to be recognized
walking down the street. But I do want people to be in a
(41:13):
culture where they learn something or taught something
because I open the door for them.
And what's exciting for you these days, I mean, is there is
there something popping up in the Seth Godin world that is, is
the next juicy art project? I used to panic when I was
between projects. I'm not panicking right now.
One project that completely succeeded, but it's closed now
(41:34):
because it ultimately didn't work.
And then I did a book and I did a game.
The game made me so happy. It competes with Wordle.
It's called Bongo and Bongo. I play it every day.
It's being played by millions ofpeople around the world.
I loved making Bongo. I loved the way I was able to
work with Hearst and not have tohigher people.
(41:55):
The book I did with Authors Equity, I was their first
author. It was thrilling to work with
that team and teach them what I know.
And then the project that didn'twork was a classic Seth Godin
weird software game thing calledGood Bids, where we invented a
new way to raise money for charity.
And the people I worked with we're all delightful, and we
(42:17):
knew going into it that there was an excellent chance it
wasn't going to keep going because it was a heavy lift.
So when I think about these art projects, I'm trying to come up
with a blend of those things. A blend of good people doing
interesting stuff that has a component of community, a
component of learning, and a component of game, sort of all
(42:41):
integrated together. If you were to take those
component parts that Venn diagram you just described and
applied it to polarization in America as an art project, what
might you do to address this incredibly fragile and painful
time in the history of our country?
(43:02):
I think that many people in politics believe that the
populace cares about policies and even basic principles.
In fact, most people who are caught in this oppositional loop
have just bought into oppositionthat I want their half whatever
(43:25):
they're in favor of, I'm in favor of the opposite.
And guess why that happened? It happened because very well
funded forces in this country and other countries combined
with a new form of social media did it on purpose.
In the small around the table, people are not nearly as divided
as others would like us to believe.
(43:47):
And this too shall pass. While it's going on.
We have to figure out how to minimize the trauma and minimize
the real hurt and the the breakage of things that are
going to be very hard to fix. But it is incorrect to believe
that 300 million people have hada thoughtful, focused sit down
(44:11):
with all the issues and come to the conclusion that they are
unalterably in favor of one thing or another, because I
don't think that's the case. So do you think smaller
discussions with diverse groups of people make a difference
then? Oh, we know they make a
difference. And the well meaning people,
regardless of what color hat they're wearing, well meaning
(44:34):
people are trying to do this at scale.
The thing is, as soon as you sayat scale, you've mostly
undermined what you were trying to do.
And you know, I was one of the early Internet optimists and I
regret not raising a flag for all the pitfalls that I've since
seen. Not that it would have made a
difference, but it's not all happiness when you give everyone
(44:59):
a microphone and you give peoplebonuses if they cause division
to happen. But our, we're already seeing
new generations coming along whogrew up with this medium, who
understand it differently and who are connecting differently
and who are talking about thingsdifferently.
And so the generational crisis we're in, and I just, I know
we're running out of time, but there's a book called The 4th
(45:21):
Turning that gave me great insight and also a little bit of
optimism. There were only 15 years of the
baby boom. You and I are the youngest baby
boomers, but they're only 15 years of it.
And we've had baby boomer presidents 30 years already.
So we have taken over the culture, taken over music,
taking over industry, taking over politics, and now we're
(45:41):
dying. That vacuum is going to get
filled and it's not going to getfilled by 54 year olds.
It's going to get filled by 40 year olds.
And that turning happens every 80 years, particularly every 20
years, but this big one every 80years.
And it's happening right before us.
And again, I think what we need to do is hold each other's hands
(46:01):
and get through the trauma and stay resilient, optimistic and
demand better. But the cycle is going to take
us where it takes us. Beautiful, thank you.
I, I do know that book. It's, it's also, it's a, it's a
book that Steve Bannon, you know, is a big proponent of,
(46:21):
which means that anybody, you know, I don't necessarily have
the same politics as Steve Bannon, but I I agree that it is
a it's a Seminole book. Last question for you, Seth.
Let's say someone 20 years younger than you're, 30 years
younger than you comes up to youtoday and says, I'd love to tap
into your wisdom. Seth Godin, I'd love to have
lunch or coffee with you next week.
(46:43):
Are you open to that? And when you come to our lunch
or coffee, did you come with a bumper sticker of wisdom that
has your your wisdom fingerprints all over it?
And what's the origin story? Because if our painful life
lessons are the raw material forour future wisdom, often our
wisdom came from through the school of Hard Knocks.
(47:05):
What might be that bumper sticker of wisdom and.
OK, so that's a three-part question.
Part number one, buying AT shirtat Disney World doesn't give you
any future happiness. Having lunch with a hero is a
dangerous and risky affair that I do not recommend.
And so that's why I don't do it with people, because I can't
(47:27):
possibly offer them a souvenir that's better than the
thoughtful 30 year track record of stuff I built for them.
Better to imagine you're having lunch with me because then I'll
probably meet your expectations #2 sometimes there's wisdom on a
bumper sticker. But if there is, it's not
because it's a because of the bumper sticker, it's because of
the way you treat the bumper sticker.
(47:48):
So you don't need more information, you just need to
decide. You just need to choose who to
be and to do that and to do thatand to do that.
And there's no magic single sentence I can tell you that's
going to change anything. All learning is selflearning,
autodidactic, and my job, your job, is to create the conditions
(48:09):
for people to teach themselves, not for us to teach them.
There was a third part of the question, but I don't remember
what. It was the the origin.
The origin story. Oh, the origin.
Story OK, So what makes somebodylike, do I have a minute because
I love my origin. Story.
Yeah, please. Spider Man's origin story is the
radioactive Spider Superman's origin story is Carl L saw the
(48:30):
planet was going to explode. You get the idea.
The reason that superheroes haveorigin stories is not because
other things didn't happen to them.
Lots of things happened to them.They went to middle school, they
did this, they did this, they did this.
The origin story is the origin story because we remind
ourselves of it all the time. When you pick an origin story
(48:50):
that you can remind yourself of,and it's useful and generative,
good for you. If you pick an origin story that
diminishes you, undermines you, demeans you, you made a mistake,
pick a different origin story. So the short version of my
origin story is when I was 14, my dad worked at a very big
(49:10):
company. A guy on the board of the
companies in Buffalo said, will you come with me?
I'm taking my new 30 foot motorboat from Buffalo to
Detroit. And my dad hated big boats,
boats that were, that were bigger than a rowboat.
And he said I can't go, but my son would be delighted.
I was 14 years old, so they gaveme 40 bucks and I had a little
(49:32):
sailor's cap. And we get on this boat is me
and this guy. And Lake Erie is so big that
when you're out there, you can'tsee the shore.
It's like the ocean, like Gilligan's Island.
It's so rocky, it's so WAVY. I'm throwing up all over this
guy's boat. He's furious at me for vomiting
on the teak. And finally that night we made
(49:52):
it to Port Carling ON and I swear I'm never eating again
until I get to to dry land. OK, fine, We sleep.
The next day we head out and it's like glass.
Lake Erie is perfect and we're doing great.
And dusk comes and we see the lights of Detroit in the
distance and he runs out of gas.I got a plane ticket for 8:00 PM
(50:14):
that night back to Buffalo. So 6:00 PM, the Coast Guard
comes give us some gasoline. He gets the thing running and we
head toward Detroit. And we get there and it's not
Detroit, it's Cleveland. He was lost and we were in the
wrong sea. So now we're in Cleveland and
it's 9:00 at night. I've missed my plane.
My parents have gone to the airport.
(50:34):
I don't get off the plane. There are no cell phones.
This guy takes me to a stranger at the local Boat Club and says
and he comes back and says this guy's going to take you to the
rapid, you'll be fine. So it turns out the Rapid is the
name of the subway in Cleveland.So they dropped this 14 year old
kid at this inner city train stop at 10:00 on Sunday night
(50:58):
covered in vomit and they dropped me there.
So I get in the thing and it turns out the subway goes to the
airport. So I go to the airport.
The only hotel that's got a van is the Hilton.
I get in the van, I get to the hotel, it's 11:00 at night.
I walk and I say to the guy I'd like a room for the night. 14
year old kid by himself covered in vomit.
(51:18):
He says that'll be $38 in advance.
That's all the money I got, slapit on the table.
I go to the room. I call home.
I say to my mom, don't worry, I'm fine, I'm at the Hilton,
I'll find out a way to get home tomorrow.
Next morning, 6:00 AM, the phonerings.
Is my mother. She says you're in Cleveland.
I was like, yeah, I know I'm in Cleveland.
Well, I hadn't told her I was inCleveland.
(51:40):
I just said I was in Hilton. So she called every Hilton Hotel
in concentric circles around Detroit until she found me.
My dad calls up the US Air Club.They've got a ticket waiting for
me. At 10:00 in the morning.
I fly home to Buffalo 11:00 in the morning.
My mom picks me up at the airport.
She gives me a warm welcome. She hands me a clean shirt.
I said, what's this about? She says you're not sick, you're
(52:03):
going to school. That's my origin story.
Wow, just I love you Seth Godin.Thank you chef, you're the best.
You are too such a such a such ajoy being with you.
Thanks everybody. Go make a ruckus.
(52:24):
Thank you for watching the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast.
How should we rebrand? Midlife or getting older?
Who do we see when we look in the mirror?
The answer isn't useful if it's I'm a shell of my former self.
Instead, the answer could be I have a chance to be the best
version of me for someone else today.
What an opportunity. And that's a choice.
That's the branding that I thinkwe have to bring.
(00:22):
And I think you've done enormously positive work by
helping people realize that you don't have to apologize for the
fact that you're doing a new thing at 50.
In fact, you probably should. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
podcast with Chip Conley. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
and my episode with Seth Godin. Seth has been a friend of mine
(00:44):
for 43 years. We were in Business School
together as the two youngest people in our Stanford Business
School class. We wrote a book together, both
of our first books in our secondyear of Business School.
He's he's, he's a smartest can be kind of marketing guru.
And so I asked him about branding around midlife and
aging and getting older. And he had some interesting
(01:05):
comments there. But most importantly, that Seth
got personal in this episode andalso helped us to understand at
the end of this the episode, hisorigin story.
I think you're going to enjoy this one.
We have 43 years of history together.
The feeling is mutual, but it doesn't feel like it doesn't
even feel like 43 months. So just to give some background,
Seth and I were the two youngestpeople in our Stanford Business
(01:27):
School class. He was 22 when he joined.
I was 21 for about a month or somonth and 1/2, which is very
young, you know, you know, todayit's rare to see that.
But even back then in 1982 when we went to to Business School,
it was really unusual and, and we joined and we both had a chip
on our shoulder, excuse the pun,that, you know, just we're a
(01:50):
year or two younger than a lot of the people and they treated
us as if we were juveniles, Although they sort of liked me
because I had gone to Stanford undergrad and I could get dates
for a lot of the guys from with undergrads.
But Seth, I mean, what does it feel like to you when we were
the youngest people in our class?
This is worth decoding because there's some universal lessons.
(02:11):
First of all, I think Stanford makes an error when they don't
let people in when they're stillimpressionable.
The reason I had a chip on my shoulder was because everyone I
encountered needed to justify the way that they had wasted two
years of their life doing clerk work at an investment bank.
(02:31):
If the only reason they had doneit was to get into Business
School, and I hadn't had to do that, then there must be
something wrong with me. And I don't blame them for this.
But it was a huge growth opportunity for me to realize
that being judged by other people might not be based on
reality. Yeah.
I also think both of us learned during our two years there that
(02:53):
we're entrepreneurs and we don'tlove being in the classroom.
And so I, I think it was you whorecommended that in our second
year, we write a book together and get credit for writing a
book. And I think as if I recall it
properly, you, you said, listen,this is the only time we can go
out and, and talk to what I would now call modern elders
(03:13):
because we're not competition. They want to probably hire us
and we can ask them about their business rules of thumb.
And that was the name of that book that we wrote together,
which is wasn't didn't have a lot of writing and it just has a
bunch of rules of thumb from people out there in the business
world. And it was our first book, and
you've gone on to write many bestsellers, as have I.
(03:36):
But the poignant irony of the book is that it came out the
same day as Vanna White's autobiography and and Jim Frost
was our editor and Jim had a crush on Vana, and so he spent
all his time on Vana's book and none on ours.
That is true. Our our, our book didn't go very
far that but it it did capture, you know, our first of all, it
(04:00):
allowed us to get talked to a lot of interesting people.
I don't remember if we actually talked to J Conrad Levinson, but
I want to explore for a moment this idea of intergenerational
collaboration and wisdom transfer.
And I do remember back then thatyou were, you were sort of
enthralled with Mr. Levinson, Jay Connor with Levinson.
(04:20):
Tell us a little bit about why he was a bit of a modern elder
for you. What?
What was it that you liked abouthim as a role model?
Well, may he rest in peace. He became a good friend over the
years. Yes, I did get to speak to him.
And then I persuaded him to turnhis guerrilla marketing book
into a series, and I wrote threeor four of them.
So Jay was 30 years older. I got him his first computer,
(04:42):
got him on AOL where he became atexting sex addict, which is a
weird. Really.
Oh, OK. Yes, it took him, took him three
years to get out of that hole. We taught each other things.
I taught him a little bit about broadening his message and
understanding the power of a brand, and he taught me a lot
(05:05):
about walking through the world on lighter feet.
He found joy in every single thing we did.
His ideas, some of them really stand the test of time.
But his attitude more than anything does that.
We only get to do this once, so why the hell not enjoy it?
My impression, and this is again, you know, faulty memory
from 40 years ago, was that one of the things you liked about
(05:28):
him is he had he had a bunch of side things always happening.
He had this thing and he had that thing and he had that book
thing. And there was a sort of, it was
sort of a what we now call a portfolio life.
But tell me, tell me a little bit more about that.
You know why you admired that, especially as you started
looking at your career. It's hard to remember, but the
standard of the day was you got a job at the placement office
(05:51):
and you stayed at that job untilyou were dead.
And we felt like the most important choice we were going
to make is should we go to Bain or McKinsey.
We felt like this single moment was going to define us.
And there are some people from our class who are still in their
first job, but almost none. When you talk to someone today
(06:11):
as a modern elder who's 20, it'sthey would think you were insane
if you suggested to them that they were going to stick with
one job. I just read yesterday,
Creativity. The word creativity only was put
in the dictionary 100 years ago and it wasn't used by people to
say I'm creative or I do creative work that's brand new.
(06:32):
It was invented by the Department of Defense as a way
to persuade a wide swath of elites to go to post factory
work and do what they were told,but to have self esteem because
they could see themselves as creative.
And it's sowed the seeds for people realizing they have
agency and realizing that that means you are not your
(06:56):
organization, you are not your job, and if a better wave comes
along, you should switch waves. You have had a portfolio life.
You have, in fact, I have a couple of your books back here.
Let's angle over there. These are these big books.
These are these big, they're like barbells.
And yes, one of them is one of them is called This Might work.
(07:17):
The other one is called What does it?
What does it sound like when youchange your mind?
How many books have you had yourfingerprints on, whether you
wrote them or you published them?
I mean, we're over 100 books at this point, aren't we?
Over 150 And yeah, I was talkingto my friend Toby Haas, who's a
character actor, and he likes tosay he's been fired 178 times
(07:39):
because there's 178 shows he's not on anymore and proud of it.
You know, I've launched 150 plusbooks and not one of them has
been the best selling book of all time, but successful enough
that I get to play again. And that is my whole mantra.
Is it generous? Is it generative?
(08:00):
And will I get to play again, win or lose?
In your 40s, many of your books are.
Some of my favorites of yours came from your 40s, some of them
including Purple Cow, which I was lucky enough to be in.
Free prize inside all marketers are liars, the dip tribes and
linchpin in your 50s. Some of the books you came out
(08:21):
with were they showed the evidence of maturity and wisdom
and maybe giving back, especially the carbon Almanac,
which we'll we'll come back to. So I want to start just by
talking about the dip as a as a book and as a concept, because
this podcast is, you know, the midlife chrysalis.
It's generally seen in in the the popular lexicon as the
(08:45):
alternative to the midlife crisis, which is the number one.
Whoever the branding agency who came up with midlife crisis got
it right because nobody in the world has not heard of that
phrase. And yet what we have seen at
MEA, at the Modern Elder Academy, is that there's so many
people who hit that downslide where whether it's in the 40s or
early 50s and then things get better.
(09:08):
EU curve of happiness research in fact, shows that.
So tell us a little bit about the philosophy of the dip and
then I want to just then explorea little bit more with Seth
Godin about dips that you've gone through and how you have
eaten your own dog food to understand how how to go
through, get through the other side of this dip.
OK, I don't want to be true doctrinaire.
(09:29):
I don't want to get let my definition get in the way of the
excellent point you're trying tomake.
But the dip, which is only a 96 page book is about one and only
one thing which is that, and I wrote this a really long time
ago, so try to remember it in a world before Facebook and
YouTube. This is it came out when you
(09:49):
were 42 or 43 years old something.
Like that it's 20 years ago. There's a huge prize for being
the best in the world that the number one match on Google gets
100 times more clicks than the 8th, 1:00.
If you're in the short head, if you're seen as the winner in
whatever category you pick, the benefits are enormous.
And we are raised from a young age not to quit.
(10:12):
We are raised from a young age to believe we're supposed to
stick it out. And yet most people don't wear
tutus to work and they're not still taking karate lessons.
So something happened when we were a kid that we did, and then
we quit it. And my argument is that there is
a place in between the excitement and joy of starting a
project and coming out on the other side as somebody who wins
(10:36):
in your category. And that spot that through, it's
called the dip. It's difficult.
It's there on purpose to make you quit because if everyone
kept going, there wouldn't be someone in who's left in the
small little category. So lots and lots of people start
a startup, but almost nobody gets the other side.
(10:58):
Lots and lots of people go to the gym in January, but almost
nobody has 6 pack apps. My argument is don't quit in the
dip. Either quit before you start,
see the dip and say I'm not up for that and I've done that
many, many times. Or when you're in the dip,
congratulate yourself for realizing you're in the dip and
stick it out because it's on theother side.
(11:21):
So don't go to medical school and then quit during organic
chemistry. Organic chemistry exists.
Get you to quit. Know that.
That's why it's there. It's not exactly the same as the
midlife thing you're talking about, but it rhymes.
And the reason that it rhymes isbecause we evolved to die right
(11:41):
when the midlife crisis starts. That there's no evolutionary
benefit to being a great grandfather.
That when you hit 45, your work here is done, we don't need you
anymore. And it's only very recently that
the second act has even been possible.
And you are absolutely correct that if we can change our
thinking upstairs, it can becomethis extraordinary opportunity.
(12:04):
But if we buy in to the fact that the only people who are
happy are 30 years old and on their key ascendancy, then we're
going to be sad because we're not 30 years old anymore.
And I think you've done enormously positive work by
helping people realize that you don't have to apologize for the
fact that you're doing a new thing at 50.
(12:26):
In fact, you probably should. How has this helped you?
How's the DIP philosophy helped you in looking at the various
commitments you've made or commitments you're considering
making over the course of the last 30 years or so?
I mean, you've had a number of businesses.
So give us, give us a personal example of one that has, that
(12:48):
has that fits this philosophy. Well, I'll give you 2 that sit
right next to each other. They're very similar with
different outcomes. The first one is I invented
e-mail marketing and built one of the first Internet companies
and there was a two year period when we were within a week of
bankruptcy. There was a two year period
where every single day was impossibly difficult.
(13:09):
But I saw a path and I believed enough in my understanding of
the system that I could push through that dip.
And then ten years later, I invented one of the first social
networks called Squidoo, and there are only nine of us, and
we were the fourtieth biggest website in the US.
One day, without warning or explanation, Google turned us
(13:29):
off and we went from #40 to #2 million.
And I knew that it might be possible if I put five years of
my life into it and raise some money to get through that dip.
And I thought about what that would cost me.
And I said, I don't even want tostart.
So when we still had money in the bank, when no one was
(13:49):
stressed out of their mind, whenwe hadn't broken promises to the
world, we just said, OK, we're done.
And many of my peers have lookedat that and I've done things
like that three times, have looked at me and said, well,
you're not much of A player. That was pretty weak.
And I said, no, it wasn't. I got five years of my life back
and I got to go do the next thing.
That never would have happened if I had been slogging and
(14:11):
slogging through a dip that I didn't care that much about.
I went through that dip in my late 40s with with Joada Joada
view of my boutique hotel company.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and we were going
through the Great Recession and I thought I'd be running that
company. When I was 80 years old.
I sort of started it and grew itwith no, no intention of having
(14:32):
a liquidity event. But I really felt at that point,
you know, I had a, an NDE and near death experience and went
to the other side due to an allergic reaction to an
antibiotic. And that was my opportunity to
look at my life and say, wow, I have never thought of
opportunity cost in the context of my life.
You know, when you're an entrepreneur, you don't know
(14:54):
your limits until you've surpassed them.
And you go out and try these things and you don't realize
what you're missing along the way until people tell you.
And then you sort of feel like, well, they don't understand.
They don't. I'm living my calling.
Yeah. I'm not a workaholic.
I'm living my calling. This is the thing I'm supposed
to be doing. And, you know, like, get on, get
on, get on, get on the bandwagon.
(15:15):
But then you that opportunity cost I I really appreciate.
I think that's not, that's the thing that we maybe even get
smarter about as we get older. This idea of the opportunity
cost, your choice was Squidoo 20years ago or so to say, OK, I'm
not, I'm not going to actually put five years of my life into
that because I know what I'll bemissing if I do that.
(15:36):
Similarly, for me, I ultimately sold Joie Deive at the bottom of
the market was not the best decision from a financial
perspective, but from a lifestyle perspective was
absolutely the best decision. And frankly, if I hadn't done
that, the Airbnb, you know, founders would never have come
to me and said, Chip, you know, you sold your company.
What the hell you doing? You you're here in San
(15:57):
Francisco. We don't we don't know what
we're doing and we need a modernelder here to help us.
So that would not that opportunity would not have
arisen. And you just touched on
something and your honesty and telling this story is really
generous because I think it helps people understand that
decisions aren't based on returnon equity for the investors.
They're based on our personal sole our our investment in self
(16:23):
and what's possible. But you're talking about making
a decision. Annie Duke taught me something
really important. Annie Duke used to be a world
champion of poker. She asks groups of people, have
you made a really good decision in the last year?
And everyone says, oh, yeah, I made a good decision.
And then she says, did it turn out well?
(16:44):
And everyone says, yeah, it was great, blah blah blah.
These are unrelated. If you buy a lottery ticket and
you win the lottery, you made a bad decision and got lucky
because buying a lottery ticket is stupid.
And what happens after you make a good decision is out of your
control. A good decision simply means
(17:04):
based on who I am now, what I see now, what is important to me
now, what are the best paths available to me now?
And if it works out, great. If it doesn't work out, great,
but you still made a good decision, so the fact that you
didn't make 10X on what you madeon your hotel is irrelevant.
Based on who you were and what you saw, you made exactly the
(17:26):
right decision. Yeah, I think a lot of people,
especially in midlife, around 50, get really nervous that
based upon the ages and we have in our culture, depending upon
the industry that they're in, ifthey're in the marketing or
advertising industry, like, whoa, it's like that's a young
person's sport. Same with technology.
And there's a sense like, jeez, if if I make myself available
(17:47):
out there in the world at that time, nobody will want me.
But, you know, This is why the most flourishing entrepreneurs
and the greatest number of entrepreneurs tend to be after
age 50, partly because they're going to say, you know what, to
hell with the marketplace, to hell with ageism.
I have built some wisdom along the way and I'm going to go
(18:08):
start a business. And a lot of those people are
attracted to you, Seth, just because of your message and and
how you've constantly remade yourself and shown that at any
age you can start a business. So thank you.
Thank you for being that person.You're you're, you're kind.
You know the thing about most ofthe people who are not
youngsters who started business have a sense of reality about
(18:31):
market scale. A good business is not a
business that everyone is a customer of.
That's not where the prizes the prizes are.
You serving people who want to be served in a way that's
resilient enough that you get todo it again tomorrow.
And there has never been a better moment than right this
minute. Given the tools that are
available to find the people, you don't need a lot of them to
(18:54):
find the people who need you andwant you.
I wrote about a woman who started a cruise line for
lesbians and she didn't have to buy a boat.
Olivia Yep. Olivia.
Yeah. And so she don't have to buy a
boat. She's had to organize enough
people that she could charter a boat whenever she wanted to.
Is that going to ever have 5 million customers?
(19:15):
Of course not. It doesn't matter.
She's serving the people she wants to serve in a way she
wants to serve them and delivering enormous value to
them. And that's so much better than
compromising all your morals to become, you know, a billionaire
running some social network thatyou're not proud of.
Why would you want to do that? Just because you can do it
doesn't mean you should. So you, you were talking about
(19:38):
Annie a moment ago and, and the question about decision making,
one of the questions I like to ask people is do you make better
decisions now than you did 10 or20 years ago?
And you know, in, in a, in a bigballroom of people, 95% of the
people raise their hands. And, and so then I say, why?
And they say, I don't know. It's like, well, OK, maybe
(19:58):
you've built some wisdom. Your painful life lessons are
the raw material for your futurewisdom.
What is it that would you say for you, Seth, is common sense
for you today? That would was not common sense
for you 25 or 30 years ago. The biggest hard one thing is
not being in high school anymore.
(20:18):
I know what you're saying, but explain.
Well, high school had leaves scars.
No one really loved high school,but I particularly didn't have
did not like high school. So I don't read my Amazon
reviews because I'm never going to write that book again anyway.
And hearing that someone hated it just tells me something about
them. It doesn't tell me something
about me. I was at an event a couple weeks
ago and there were like 15 fancypeople like you and me
(20:40):
backstage, each about to go on stage and the the amount of
nervousness in the room was extreme, but there were only 600
people in the audience. It wasn't being recorded.
It was fun. It was just delightful.
And people wanted to grab you with that negative energy
because it loves company. And instead I was like, oh,
here's there was one other person who wasn't feeling the
(21:02):
the high school thing, and she and I just chatted.
It was great. But in the old days, I would
have been sucked into it like, like, nothing.
And so making a decision based on what masked anonymous people
over there are going to think that's a bad idea.
Well, also, I think getting to aplace where you don't really
give a give an F, you don't givea fuck about what other people
(21:24):
think about you, nor do you wantto get into the nor do you want
to be reactive. You know, that is Viktor Frankel
wrote Man's Search for Meaning and famously said between
stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is your power to choose your response.
And in your response lies your growth and your freedom.
When we're younger, we're a pinball in the pinball machine.
(21:44):
There's no space between stimulus and response.
Someone's the big man on campus or the bully, and he treats me
that way and I'm going to react.And I think this is part of the
reason why people don't like going to reunions all that much
until they get to a certain an age later in their life where
they don't give an F what anybody thinks of them.
Right? I don't listen.
I don't see you. I don't see you in our Business
(22:06):
School reunion, Seth. Well, I didn't even go to their
Business School graduation, but I have work to do because I
still really care. I just do the work to insulate
myself. I was walking down Broadway in
the 70s in New York City and there's a little tiny playground
and as I'm walking by I hear this 7 year old jeering some
(22:27):
kid, calling him names, making fun of him.
And as I walked past the playground I realized it's me.
He's making fun of me. I got to tell you, I still felt
bad. I felt bad that a 7 year old
strange kid is making fun of me as I'm walking down the street
because I don't know how to not care but I do know how to
insulate myself. Along the way, would you say
(22:50):
that you had a midlife crisis orchrysalis?
Yeah, I had more than one. Well, I think that the the
growth was not making the feelings go away over the the
times. It's just acknowledging the
feelings and not turning it intosomething that lasts and lasts.
(23:10):
So when I sold my company it was2000.
You saw you saw the Yahoo. Sold Yahoo.
I lost the 80 plus people who I have been spending all my days
with, many of whom were upset that I'd broken up the family I
had to move, which should have been exciting and really wasn't,
(23:30):
and my mom was sick all at the same time.
And I went from the thrill of keeping this very fragile thing
going for a decade to smashing into the wall.
And that crisis lasted nine months and it ended with me
sitting in a 3000 square foot empty office with my dog trying
(23:52):
to figure out what I was going to do next.
And it was. I will never forget Malcolm
Gladwell. I'm very grateful he mailed me
the galley of a Tipping point. No one knew who Malcolm was.
I don't know how he knew to mailit to me.
And he asked if I would blurb it.
And I read his book and realizedit in my head.
(24:17):
I had been thinking, even thoughI had just been sitting in a
funk. And I sent him a blurb.
And then I'm not exaggerating. 20 days later, unleashing the
idea virus was finished. I wrote the entire book in 20
days. And it wasn't based on his book,
but it rhymed. And my book was going to come
out six months before the tipping point.
(24:38):
So I felt bad about that. So I sent it to Malcolm and I
said, if you think this is stealing from your book, I'm not
going to publish it. And PS would you write the
foreword? And he wrote go for it.
And he wrote a foreword for me. And that got me back onto the
cycle that I wanted to be on of.I'm an author.
I don't have a giant team. And I can go with this new pace,
(24:58):
but that feeling of it's over and I don't know where I'm
going. It's easy to marinate in that.
And it's easy to imagine your greatest hits album and realized
there's never going to be another song on it.
Well, and also, you were about 40 years old then.
And so you had kids. You had two kids.
Is that right? You had two kids and you're
thinking about college and you're thinking about, you know,
(25:20):
and also probably feeling a little bit like a little scarred
from being the guy piercing together the, you know, cash
flow to keep the business alive and awake with all these
employees who you loved. There was probably some part of
you that just said, oh, I can't do that anymore, although you
did a few years later, but although that was not a that was
(25:43):
not nearly as large of a group. So you'd learn some lessons
along the way. And, and my sense is that since
that time you have appreciated the freedom of being, you know,
a, a free range person who can just write books and give
speeches and, and you don't havethe full armor of a big company.
You have to, you know, take careof.
(26:05):
Yeah, I, I don't think it is completely true that I
appreciate the freedom, but it doesn't come for free.
And this is the discipline. I'm a pretty disciplined, OK.
I'm an insanely disciplined person.
I try not to be rigid, but there's certainly so many things
in my life where I am disciplined and the discipline.
(26:26):
So five years ago, I said I'm not flying for work anymore and
I haven't been on a plane once in five years for work because
once I start compromising and have to reconsider, then I got
to reconsider it. So what I try to do is not focus
on what these rules cost me. I try to focus on what these
rules get me. So Murray, the pup, and I walked
for 10 miles today. What a treat, what a privilege.
(26:50):
I wouldn't get to do that if I was also doing this and doing
this and doing another thing. But I don't feel like I'm going
slow. I just feel like I pushed myself
to go deeper instead of cycling faster.
Yeah, no, I, I think as we get older, the idea of moving from
accumulation to editing and getting very clear on what are
(27:11):
the filters in your life in terms of people, places, things
and the way you, you know, the way you curate your lifestyle.
If you're, if you're fortunate enough and privileged enough to
be able to do that, you know, inyour 50s, Seth, you created, if
I'm not mistaken yet, it was your fifties, 55 years old, I
think alt MBA, the Akimbo organization or podcast.
(27:38):
And, and you then also created the Carbon Almanac.
And so it felt like in some waysas you move from in your 40s
into your 50s and you did a lot of other things too, but there
was a, there was a little bit ofa shift into what Eric Erickson,
the developmental psychologist would, would call generativity,
the idea of generating things for the sake of future
(27:59):
generations. Does that sound accurate to you?
Part of it is the I've been teaching and coaching my whole
life and my rule was don't get paid for it and don't do it in
public because I wanted a purityto it.
I didn't want there to be any ulterior motive.
And when the chance to do all the NBA came along and then the
(28:24):
chance to do the carbon Almanac,I realized I had built an asset.
And if I'm going to continue to hide from the public these sorts
of things, I would be depriving people of something that I
thought they could benefit from.So the Carbon Almanac was two
years of full time work as a volunteer, 1900 co-authors.
(28:46):
We built something really important.
And if I gotten paid for it or if I claimed I did the whole
thing myself, it wouldn't have worked.
It was, oh, Seth Godin is inviting me to be part of
something. You've heard of me.
So therefore, you might be more likely to say yes than if I was
just anonymous. And so I was trying to use the
leverage in a way that could still preserve the freedom that
(29:09):
I value so much, but could lead,could leave behind something
useful. Another one of my principles,
though, is public is a very big #6 billion, four billion people
with an Internet connection. You're never going to reach all
those people. So don't compromise what you
stand for for another 0 worth ofattention.
(29:32):
I've tried to maintain that I don't seek new readers.
I tried to do better work for the readers I already have.
And what was it about the CarbonAlmanac, beyond the the obvious
climate change, that gave you the motivation to devote 2 years
of your life to that? Was it?
Obviously it was the essential nature of getting the message
out, but to do it in in the formyou did, which was in an
(29:55):
exceptionally collaborative formthat was, you know, like
crowdsourcing. It was really crowdsourcing and
and explain a little bit more about how how that worked.
OK, so I some people might be onaudio, but if you have a video,
it looks like this. 97,000 words, footnoted, indexed,
illustrated, not one error and we did the whole thing in five
(30:19):
months. Everyone involved didn't get
paid. The idea was, I realized I
blogged 25 years ago about climate, and then I had stopped
because obviously my blog post didn't solve the problem.
So what's the problem? You know, what am I supposed to
do? The reason I stopped is I felt
stupid. I felt underinformed.
(30:41):
I was worried that if I talked about it, I would say something
that completely undermined anything I was trying to
accomplish. So I wanted there to be
something like this. I've made almanacs in the past,
so I know how to make an Almanac.
But I thought if I just do this on my own, I will be modeling
precisely the wrong behavior. Because my thesis is Community
(31:03):
Action is the only solution to the problem.
Community Action is what happenswhen people come together with
structure to produce value. So let me model that.
And that whole decision took 36 hours.
But then once I decided the discipline thing shifted, I
wasn't going to walk away from it.
In those 36 hours, I decided howI was going to spend the next
(31:25):
two years of my life. What skills did you have in your
late 50s that you might not havehad in your late 30s to be able
to pull off that kind of collaboration effort?
The biggest skill is super simple, which is I knew that if
I was just looking for assistance, who would do what I
told him to do. The project might happen, but it
(31:46):
wouldn't be very good. And instead I made the
commitment to witness, to structure, to support, but not
to tell anybody what to do. What I learned is how to leave
space for other people, not for me to tell them what to do.
So Seth, there are a lot of words associated with getting
older, midlife, senior old elder, modern elder, aging.
(32:14):
You're amazing at at being creative and branding.
How should we rebrand midlife orgetting older?
Because we have really awful language to describe this era of
life. And, and it's I think because we
have awful language, we also have an awful perspective as we
(32:35):
get older around this, this era of life.
What is? What are your thoughts on that?
I was lucky enough to know both of my grandfathers, and when
they were my age, they were old.They were just old.
All we've done is inserted 20 years into people's lives, and
those 20 years are the thing you're trying to give a name to,
(32:57):
right? That they didn't.
Those are 20 years. They just did not exist 40 years
ago. And I don't think the answer is
branding it in a way that young people will wake up and say, oh,
that's a whole new thing. I think it's more about how do
we help people find the mindfulness in the patience to
(33:21):
acknowledge that there aren't 2 1/2 things, you know, kid, young
adult, old, but there's this other thing now and how, how do
we talk to ourselves about it? Not how do we talk to other
people about it? Who do we see when we look in
the mirror? For me, it's was particularly
poignant. My dad got sick shortly after we
(33:42):
were in Business School together.
In solidarity, I shaved my head and he and I looked really
similar. And we were once traveling
together and a woman in an airport, a stranger walks up to
us and says, are you guys in some sort of a cult?
The last few years of his life, he had dementia.
And when I look in the mirror, Isee him because I looked like
(34:04):
him. And there's no question that I.
There are words I can't find anymore.
There are attention cycles I can't do anymore.
And if I'm not careful, I'll just decide I'm old.
I know I'm never going to downhill ski again.
I know that I am not somebody you can take to a disco who's
going to have fun. I.
Don't know if you're ever a person I could take to a disco
(34:26):
to have fun. I could take you to a.
There was. One night, there was one night
we went to a gay bar in San Francisco.
I don't know if you came or not.And it was super fun.
When we were in Business School,it was super fun.
But that was like the last time anyway, So it's just what do you
say to yourself when you look inthe mirror?
(34:46):
And the answer isn't useful if it's I'm a shell of my former
self. Instead, the answer could be I
have a chance to be the best version of me for someone else
today. What an opportunity and that's a
choice. That's the branding that I think
(35:07):
we have to bring. Becca Levy at Yale has shown
that when we shift our mindset in midlife on aging from a
negative to a positive, it givesus 7 1/2 years of additional
life. So it is about, you know, that
glass is half full. You know what, What gets better
as we get older because there are a lot of things that get
better with age. What?
(35:28):
What's something that you think is that's gotten better in your
life as you've gotten older? I am able to do things that
require patience dramatically better.
I can't do things that require attention dramatically better,
but I can be patient with everything from having to sit
(35:49):
for five hours in a waiting roomto doing a project that doesn't
work right away. And my impatience used to be a
superpower because I could sparksomething and make it go
forward. Like in Business School, the
professor knew if he called on me, I was going to say something
that was going to change what was going to happen next in the
class. So shifting that has been
(36:11):
interesting, but eagerly walkingaway from physical or mental
things I can't do with joy has been a fine choice for me.
I used to be able to drink a whole bottle of Matuk's hot
sauce. I don't eat hot sauce anymore.
It's just fine. It's fine, but if I have to just
(36:31):
keep pretending that I'm reminding myself all the time
that my instrument isn't what itcould have been.
And with time being a scarcer commodity as we get older, 10
years from now, what would you regret if you didn't learn it or
do it now, since anticipated regret is a form of wisdom?
OK, this is interesting because I started the year because I had
(36:53):
three projects last year and there was a lot of Sprint or the
end. So I decided to start the year
with a blank slate to see what would arise.
And a five year project is a commitment when you only have
one or two five year projects inyou, right?
And I started the whole year with this mindset that time is
scarce. And what I discovered is the
(37:15):
opposite is true. I got more time than ever
before. When I treat time as scarce, I
wreck it. And if I treat time as precious,
but I got a lot of it, then I can be patient and I can be
present. When you talk to people who are
nearly retired or retired, they'll tell you they got
(37:36):
nothing but time. Time's not scarce.
They got nothing to do. So if I'm in this liminal space
between busier than anyone I know, or, you know, sitting on a
rocking chair facing the wall, Imight as well relish the fact
that time isn't that scarce. What am I going to do with it?
So this beautiful segue into talking about retirement, do you
(37:57):
think you'll ever retire? And what does that mean to you?
Is, is retirement? Is retirement a dirty word?
I, I, my point of view on this is basically that retirement was
that were the golden years, because if you were doing mind
numbing, back breaking work for 40 years and you're 62 or 65
years old, you don't want to do that anymore.
(38:19):
And you, you deserve to play golf and watch TV and start
drinking martinis at at noon. That's not our era.
Our era of knowledge workers have crystallized intelligence
and wisdom that goes off into their 70s.
And, and therefore, for a lot ofus, the idea of retiring means
(38:40):
putting your brain on hold because that's, that has been
your that's been your valuable asset to offer the world.
And that doesn't make any sense.So what's your perspective
personally on retirement, Seth? And and if you, if you expect
that you'll never retire, does that mean you might curate your
(39:01):
light life differently, including the fact that you've
said I'm not, I'm not going to be jumping on any planes?
If retirement means lonely and bored, I'm not interested.
If retirement means that my day job isn't a job, then I've been
angling toward that for a very long time.
(39:23):
That I view my life as a series of art projects, and every once
in a while, one of those art projects enables me to pay for
the next art project. But if it doesn't, that's OK
because we live in this jackpot world where if some of your art
projects work, you're OK. I know people who came up in the
Internet side with me who don't have to work again for the next
(39:46):
7 lifetimes and they still show up at work with this grimace
like they have to go to work because that's their fuel.
And so pick your fuel and pick your future.
And my fuel through discipline is I'm not going to pick it
because it has a price tag. I'm going to pick it because
it's generative and thrilling and I'm going to learn something
(40:07):
and I like to think of this as an art project.
And if it doesn't succeed at what I set out to do, it's still
art. And that's what I'm trying to
seek out and create. And there's, you're not all
worked up about legacy, you know, in the capital L legacy
kind of way. Like I want to be remembered
for. If there's anything to be
(40:30):
remembered for, it's how you've curated your life to have it be
an art project and to be very generative.
But would that be accurate? Because I've been a teacher for
so long, started when I was 17, the biggest wins for me are when
someone I taught teaches somebody else something.
That's my legacy and that's why I don't keep track of how many
(40:52):
books I sell, but I do keep track of who bought the book and
what they did with them. So if I bump into someone like I
did yesterday and they walk oververy respectfully and say
someone gave me this and it really made a difference, I'm
like, yeah, that's the point. I don't want to be recognized
walking down the street. But I do want people to be in a
(41:13):
culture where they learn something or taught something
because I open the door for them.
And what's exciting for you these days, I mean, is there is
there something popping up in the Seth Godin world that is, is
the next juicy art project? I used to panic when I was
between projects. I'm not panicking right now.
One project that completely succeeded, but it's closed now
(41:34):
because it ultimately didn't work.
And then I did a book and I did a game.
The game made me so happy. It competes with Wordle.
It's called Bongo and Bongo. I play it every day.
It's being played by millions ofpeople around the world.
I loved making Bongo. I loved the way I was able to
work with Hearst and not have tohigher people.
(41:55):
The book I did with Authors Equity, I was their first
author. It was thrilling to work with
that team and teach them what I know.
And then the project that didn'twork was a classic Seth Godin
weird software game thing calledGood Bids, where we invented a
new way to raise money for charity.
And the people I worked with we're all delightful, and we
(42:17):
knew going into it that there was an excellent chance it
wasn't going to keep going because it was a heavy lift.
So when I think about these art projects, I'm trying to come up
with a blend of those things. A blend of good people doing
interesting stuff that has a component of community, a
component of learning, and a component of game, sort of all
(42:41):
integrated together. If you were to take those
component parts that Venn diagram you just described and
applied it to polarization in America as an art project, what
might you do to address this incredibly fragile and painful
time in the history of our country?
(43:02):
I think that many people in politics believe that the
populace cares about policies and even basic principles.
In fact, most people who are caught in this oppositional loop
have just bought into oppositionthat I want their half whatever
(43:25):
they're in favor of, I'm in favor of the opposite.
And guess why that happened? It happened because very well
funded forces in this country and other countries combined
with a new form of social media did it on purpose.
In the small around the table, people are not nearly as divided
as others would like us to believe.
(43:47):
And this too shall pass. While it's going on.
We have to figure out how to minimize the trauma and minimize
the real hurt and the the breakage of things that are
going to be very hard to fix. But it is incorrect to believe
that 300 million people have hada thoughtful, focused sit down
(44:11):
with all the issues and come to the conclusion that they are
unalterably in favor of one thing or another, because I
don't think that's the case. So do you think smaller
discussions with diverse groups of people make a difference
then? Oh, we know they make a
difference. And the well meaning people,
regardless of what color hat they're wearing, well meaning
(44:34):
people are trying to do this at scale.
The thing is, as soon as you sayat scale, you've mostly
undermined what you were trying to do.
And you know, I was one of the early Internet optimists and I
regret not raising a flag for all the pitfalls that I've since
seen. Not that it would have made a
difference, but it's not all happiness when you give everyone
(44:59):
a microphone and you give peoplebonuses if they cause division
to happen. But our, we're already seeing
new generations coming along whogrew up with this medium, who
understand it differently and who are connecting differently
and who are talking about thingsdifferently.
And so the generational crisis we're in, and I just, I know
we're running out of time, but there's a book called The 4th
(45:21):
Turning that gave me great insight and also a little bit of
optimism. There were only 15 years of the
baby boom. You and I are the youngest baby
boomers, but they're only 15 years of it.
And we've had baby boomer presidents 30 years already.
So we have taken over the culture, taken over music,
taking over industry, taking over politics, and now we're
(45:41):
dying. That vacuum is going to get
filled and it's not going to getfilled by 54 year olds.
It's going to get filled by 40 year olds.
And that turning happens every 80 years, particularly every 20
years, but this big one every 80years.
And it's happening right before us.
And again, I think what we need to do is hold each other's hands
(46:01):
and get through the trauma and stay resilient, optimistic and
demand better. But the cycle is going to take
us where it takes us. Beautiful, thank you.
I, I do know that book. It's, it's also, it's a, it's a
book that Steve Bannon, you know, is a big proponent of,
(46:21):
which means that anybody, you know, I don't necessarily have
the same politics as Steve Bannon, but I I agree that it is
a it's a Seminole book. Last question for you, Seth.
Let's say someone 20 years younger than you're, 30 years
younger than you comes up to youtoday and says, I'd love to tap
into your wisdom. Seth Godin, I'd love to have
lunch or coffee with you next week.
(46:43):
Are you open to that? And when you come to our lunch
or coffee, did you come with a bumper sticker of wisdom that
has your your wisdom fingerprints all over it?
And what's the origin story? Because if our painful life
lessons are the raw material forour future wisdom, often our
wisdom came from through the school of Hard Knocks.
(47:05):
What might be that bumper sticker of wisdom and.
OK, so that's a three-part question.
Part number one, buying AT shirtat Disney World doesn't give you
any future happiness. Having lunch with a hero is a
dangerous and risky affair that I do not recommend.
And so that's why I don't do it with people, because I can't
(47:27):
possibly offer them a souvenir that's better than the
thoughtful 30 year track record of stuff I built for them.
Better to imagine you're having lunch with me because then I'll
probably meet your expectations #2 sometimes there's wisdom on a
bumper sticker. But if there is, it's not
because it's a because of the bumper sticker, it's because of
the way you treat the bumper sticker.
(47:48):
So you don't need more information, you just need to
decide. You just need to choose who to
be and to do that and to do thatand to do that.
And there's no magic single sentence I can tell you that's
going to change anything. All learning is selflearning,
autodidactic, and my job, your job, is to create the conditions
(48:09):
for people to teach themselves, not for us to teach them.
There was a third part of the question, but I don't remember
what. It was the the origin.
The origin story. Oh, the origin.
Story OK, So what makes somebodylike, do I have a minute because
I love my origin. Story.
Yeah, please. Spider Man's origin story is the
radioactive Spider Superman's origin story is Carl L saw the
(48:30):
planet was going to explode. You get the idea.
The reason that superheroes haveorigin stories is not because
other things didn't happen to them.
Lots of things happened to them.They went to middle school, they
did this, they did this, they did this.
The origin story is the origin story because we remind
ourselves of it all the time. When you pick an origin story
(48:50):
that you can remind yourself of,and it's useful and generative,
good for you. If you pick an origin story that
diminishes you, undermines you, demeans you, you made a mistake,
pick a different origin story. So the short version of my
origin story is when I was 14, my dad worked at a very big
(49:10):
company. A guy on the board of the
companies in Buffalo said, will you come with me?
I'm taking my new 30 foot motorboat from Buffalo to
Detroit. And my dad hated big boats,
boats that were, that were bigger than a rowboat.
And he said I can't go, but my son would be delighted.
I was 14 years old, so they gaveme 40 bucks and I had a little
(49:32):
sailor's cap. And we get on this boat is me
and this guy. And Lake Erie is so big that
when you're out there, you can'tsee the shore.
It's like the ocean, like Gilligan's Island.
It's so rocky, it's so WAVY. I'm throwing up all over this
guy's boat. He's furious at me for vomiting
on the teak. And finally that night we made
(49:52):
it to Port Carling ON and I swear I'm never eating again
until I get to to dry land. OK, fine, We sleep.
The next day we head out and it's like glass.
Lake Erie is perfect and we're doing great.
And dusk comes and we see the lights of Detroit in the
distance and he runs out of gas.I got a plane ticket for 8:00 PM
(50:14):
that night back to Buffalo. So 6:00 PM, the Coast Guard
comes give us some gasoline. He gets the thing running and we
head toward Detroit. And we get there and it's not
Detroit, it's Cleveland. He was lost and we were in the
wrong sea. So now we're in Cleveland and
it's 9:00 at night. I've missed my plane.
My parents have gone to the airport.
(50:34):
I don't get off the plane. There are no cell phones.
This guy takes me to a stranger at the local Boat Club and says
and he comes back and says this guy's going to take you to the
rapid, you'll be fine. So it turns out the Rapid is the
name of the subway in Cleveland.So they dropped this 14 year old
kid at this inner city train stop at 10:00 on Sunday night
(50:58):
covered in vomit and they dropped me there.
So I get in the thing and it turns out the subway goes to the
airport. So I go to the airport.
The only hotel that's got a van is the Hilton.
I get in the van, I get to the hotel, it's 11:00 at night.
I walk and I say to the guy I'd like a room for the night. 14
year old kid by himself covered in vomit.
(51:18):
He says that'll be $38 in advance.
That's all the money I got, slapit on the table.
I go to the room. I call home.
I say to my mom, don't worry, I'm fine, I'm at the Hilton,
I'll find out a way to get home tomorrow.
Next morning, 6:00 AM, the phonerings.
Is my mother. She says you're in Cleveland.
I was like, yeah, I know I'm in Cleveland.
Well, I hadn't told her I was inCleveland.
(51:40):
I just said I was in Hilton. So she called every Hilton Hotel
in concentric circles around Detroit until she found me.
My dad calls up the US Air Club.They've got a ticket waiting for
me. At 10:00 in the morning.
I fly home to Buffalo 11:00 in the morning.
My mom picks me up at the airport.
She gives me a warm welcome. She hands me a clean shirt.
I said, what's this about? She says you're not sick, you're
(52:03):
going to school. That's my origin story.
Wow, just I love you Seth Godin.Thank you chef, you're the best.
You are too such a such a such ajoy being with you.
Thanks everybody. Go make a ruckus.
(52:24):
Thank you for watching the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast.
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