Seth Godin: "What They Don't Teach You About Strategy"

Seth Godin is on the Nick Stanley Show today. Fought leader, entrepreneur, best-selling author. We're going to discuss his new book. This is strategy. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is the work we do today to have something important happen tomorrow. But we didn't get taught that in elementary school. We didn't get taught that in most of the jobs we got. Seth shares groundbreaking insights into strategy and why success is often about stepping back and asking the right questions in the first place. We've been indoctrinated into the cycle of being competitive, trying really hard, but not questioning the boundaries that are in front of us.

Strategy is this hard work of saying, why am I even doing this particular interaction? What game did I set out to play? Who's it for? What's it for? To dig into the future of education, the power of intentional choices, and the importance of showing up with purpose. Each one of us has the chance to do nothing, or to show up and make a difference. In light of all your work, instead of just rattling off all your accomplishments, like I normally do with a guest, I would tell a little story. And that's my experience with your work. So this had to be about 15 years ago. I had a fledgling business and things were going well, but we wanted to improve our marketing.

And I knew I needed to do something different. I knew interrupting people wasn't it, but I didn't know what the alternative was. And a very smart gentleman turned me on to your blog, and that's when I discovered the permission-based marketing. And it took about a year for us to really get it down and figure it out. And then crazy things started happening. We had people thanking us for sending them messages about what we were doing. And I knew we were on to something special then. I think in the year after that, I attribute really that shift to tripling the size of the company. And so I became a devoted follower after that.

You've written 21 bestsellers. I went in this last week and checked. I've read 17 of them. And I'm in the middle of the carbon all-manack right now. And then you've got this strategy coming out soon, which is very exciting as well. And then the second half of this story is about a year ago, I had a few people suggesting I should start a podcast. I was a little late to your podcast, but I started at the beginning and went all the way to the present. And I remember the moment when I decided to start the show, I listened to the episode, pick yourself. And I was in the car, I was driving. And I got to the end of the episode, I pulled over to the side of the road, I called my wife and I said, you know what, I'm gonna commit to doing this for a year and we're gonna see what happens.

And so all this to say, thank you for the generosity in your work and that you keep doing it because I'm sure you don't have to anymore. And it's meant so much to me and my family because your work helped me achieve financial freedom. And now that I have some financial freedom, finding this project has been so meaningful and just a wonderful addition to my life. And so it's really a pleasure to get to talk to you today. Well, that's just so over the top and very kind. So we can stop now and I'll go do something. Thank you very much. Seth, to talk about your latest book, the line that keeps bouncing around in my head is this one.

We mistakenly spend more time figuring out how to win the game we're in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place. Can you tell me more about what you were thinking when you wrote that? There aren't very many books about strategy. There are many books that say they're about strategy but they're not really about strategy. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is the work we do today to have something important happen tomorrow. But we didn't get taught that in elementary school. We didn't get taught that in most of the jobs we've had. The industrial economy wants us to do what we're doing to be compliant.

We've been indoctrinated into the cycle of, sure, being competitive, trying really hard but not questioning the boundaries that are in front of us. And what strategy is, strategy is this hard work of saying, why am I even doing this particular interaction? What game did I set out to play? Who's it for, what's it for? And high performers that you and I know, just keep showing up to when the game we're playing as opposed to taking a deep breath and saying, you know, maybe today, the only day I've got today could be invested in something else instead. You mentioned school there and I've spent many years working in education.

And so I'm really interested if you were, if you had the ability to transform education, let's just imagine you could just do it the wave of a wand. Transform education from elementary school all the way up through graduate school. How would you do that? What changes would you make? Well, the most important thing I would do is change it from education to learning. And they're not the same thing. Education is compliance, it's perseverance, it's proving you got a badge. We do that to train people to do jobs. Education and jobs came about at about the same time. That it's based on the Prussian paramilitary system of the 1800s, that's when factories came along.

And what they found is that when they recruited farmers to come work in a factory, they were terrible at it because farmers were used to freedom and agency and factories are about willess beyond the test and what am I supposed to do. So when we have a learning institution, we are actually giving people the tools they need to find a strategy, the tools they need to make choices. When we have an education institution, we have people who are seeking to exchange as little effort as they can to get an A. And so I think school should be about only two things, which is solving interesting problems and learning to lead.

And we don't teach either of those things right now. What could we do to tweak the system to make it more oriented towards those things? Because I hear from a lot of people, it's people want it. I have been throwing this idea around for a while. My kids, when they were younger, attended a free form preschool that I thought was a wonderful education model. I mean, most of the day was spent, they threw out some clay, threw out some paint, threw out some books, threw out some costumes. And there were adults there that could guide them in whatever they gravitated towards. And one kid might go play with the clay every single day and other kids tried different things each time.

And the adults were just there to help facilitate what it was the kid wanted to create and was interested in. And I wonder if there's, if there are ways to make education more like that as kids get older, that we don't need to be stuck in the industrial education complex. Well, so this is a good chance to talk about systems. The educational system is a system and every single person who's working in it may very well mean well. They may be doing their best, but the system produces what the system produces. So principles principle and assistant principles assistant principle and teachers show up to do the job that's been described as teachers.

And everyone's got this role that is their role because all the other pieces under tension provide that spot. And so when you show up at a school, let's say you're the new principal and you announce to the parents, we're not gonna prep for the SAT anymore. They freak out. They don't freak out because they've done an analysis of whether the SAT is sensible or not. They freak out because the system, the one that fuels their self-esteem, the one that's about their status and affiliation with their neighbors, the one that's about future for the kids, is built on this hierarchy and this idea of dominance and who's ranking up and down, all of which pushes back to ninth grade and are we prepping for the SAT today?

So you rarely get a magic wand. You rarely get a chance to pretend the system isn't there. What you do have is the chance to see what the system is doing, what it's good at and decide where you will use that system to help you and where you will go somewhere else. So most really successful people are homeschooled, they go to school all day until three o'clock and then they're spending time with each other and with parents and a different sort of learning is going on and what each parent has the chance to do and it's easier for parents with privilege, it's easier for parents who aren't working three jobs, it's easier for parents where there's two or more in the home, where parents show up to create the conditions for kids to learn how to lead and to solve interesting problems.

And some of those parents have actually started schools like the Acton Academy to do this, but I don't think we can rely on existing institutions to solve this problem on their own because they were built to solve a different problem. Let me just stay on this topic of education for a moment. Is it more possible to change the existing institutions or to invent new systems to achieve the types of outcomes you're talking about? We tend to get what we measure, we tend to get what we pay attention to. Systems change over time, they always do, but they often change in the direction that keeps them in power.

And so when parents start showing up asking interesting questions, when we create new dynamics, new ways forward, systems will respond to those. So the system of higher education in this country is really struggling right now because for 30 years, the most famous colleges succeeded when they spent more money and when they raised their prices. And because they were selling the luxury good, the system responded to what people were buying. And so their cost of going to a place like Princeton is huge for no reason whatsoever, except that the system got into a feedback loop which pushed it forward. So what changes that?

What changes that is when we find people going off on their own and doing something that is outside of the walls of academia, when that starts succeeding, they notice it. When US news shows up and starts measuring things, competitive organizations start changing what they do to make their measurements go up. So systems tend to change over time and what we need to do if we're going to change them is see them first. Well, speaking of change, there was a note in the carbon almanac where you're definitely talking about changing big existing systems. And it was the seventh paragraph. And for those who haven't read CES books, they're in tight pithy little paragraphs.

And so the seventh one, I mean, it's the top of the second page comes in quick. And I thought it was interesting because you said this book is also about the power nearly unlimited that comes from coordinated action and community reinforcement connected. We are far more effective than each of us acting individually. You expand on that, IDEX. I think that's at the heart of a lot of your work. Yeah. So it's important that I say, I didn't write the carbon almanac. I organized the carbon almanac. It was written by 400 people. I was the founding editor. We were all volunteers, including me. That's part of what I'm talking about.

That no one of us could have made and published this book, but 400 of us did it in just five months, right? That when small coordinated groups of people persistently show up, you can change any enormous number of things because the system doesn't know what to do with an organized group of persistent people. The system, you know, I remember when I was in college, any college activist where I went to school could get a meeting with some dean because they know in the back of their head they can outlast you. You're only gonna be there for four years. They are gonna be there their whole career. You're gonna lose interest in two weeks.

They're not. So they'll let anybody spout off and then the attention goes away. But when a small group of people sees something and says something over and over and over again, over time, the system has no choice but to respond. What's something today that you see and believe that you would say most people disagree with? There's a lot of things, but I would say the first one is the world is healthier and safer than it has ever been in human history. We have more tools and more leverage and more freedom than any generation ever. And that each one of us has more power than the King of France did the last time there was a King of France.

That the media makes a living persuading us that we need to be short-term thinkers that the world is filled with doom and gloom. And then we have to come back for more breaking news tomorrow. And it has persuaded people they have no agency and that they are victims. And yes, many people have the short end of this draw. Many people are in fact victims, but, and better is possible. And so I'm not diminishing the trauma or pain that someone might be feeling today. What I am highlighting is, you know, when I was born, it was a few weeks after the Berlin blockade and a few years before the Cuban Missile Crisis that the world was minutes away from being completely blown up.

Where I grew up in Buffalo, New York, there was a toxic waste dump called Love Canal just down the street that was leading to birth defects in people dying. That there's always something that we can make better. And yet we don't see it because we're persuaded by people who have a microphone that we're better after just doing what they say. And I think that our freedom is based on our willingness to take responsibility. And that's something that most people are afraid to do. If we come back to the picking the right games to play and tie it into that, right, to have, give people the feeling of having agency, and I'm in agreement with you.

I mean, we do today more than ever if we'll stand up and try things and be willing to fail. If you were advising someone on the process of picking the right games to play, how would you advise them? Well, I have a whole bunch of ideas about this in the book, but one of them is I find it doesn't pay to play games where the other person only comes out ahead if you lose. That it is better to find places to play a game where there's mutual interests aligned, right? So it doesn't pay for a teacher to get into an argument with a class clown who can only win if the teacher loses. It makes way more sense for the teacher to engage with the students who wants to learn something because that game is much easier to play and to win.

That when we think about how many billionaires get unhappy when Forbes announces it's ranking of billionaires, how absurd is that? You have more money than 1,000 people could spend in a lifetime, but you're sad now because you move down the ranking of billionaires. That's a dumb game to play. Don't do that, right? Don't buy lottery tickets. That's a dumb game to play unless the feeling of buying the ticket is worth more than it costs. That all around us, we engage with teaching people a lesson who aren't going to learn the lesson. So why teach to them, right? That person who cut you off in traffic and you're screaming at them and racing up to cut them off again, that's a game.

And you don't have to play that game. You could decide that your game is getting a job that is super easy to get in the first place and then working your way up. Well, someone's going to become a vice president at Walmart by taking that route, starting as a clerk and working their way up, but it's probably not going to be you. And there might be a better game available for you to play. And so when I'm talking about games, I'm just talking about situations where there are boundaries, where there are rules, where there's scarcity, where there's a chance to make a difference, and there's also a chance that you won't.

And it costs money to play games or it costs time to play games. And anyone who's engaging in the world today is spending their time doing this instead of doing that. And one last example, if you learn how to do prompt engineering and artificial intelligence starting today, you're this huge advantage because no one knows how to do it already. It's fresh powder. So your 40 hours spent getting started there will is a much better game strategy than spending 40 hours learning how to program in Fortran because there's too much scarcity there. You want to go to places that have abundance. I had a moment the other day with my daughter in thinking about this game framework.

She was applying, I don't want to give too many specifics about my kids. This is a public forum, but she was applying for an internship at a very, very cool organization. There was a pre-event before the interview. She goes to the pre-event and there are a hundred, as she discovers there are hundreds of applicants interested in this. They're only taking a handful of kids. So it's super, super competitive, much more than she thought it would be. She comes home and tells me now how nervous she is because she really wanted to do this thing. And we came to this conclusion. So well, there are a couple of games you could play here.

One, we could play the game of get the internship, you win, don't get the internship, you lose. It's probably pretty stressful leading up to that moment. And percentage-wise, probably going to lose that game. And she said, well, what, what other game is there? I said, well, okay, here's here's an idea. We make a list of all the things you could do to prepare yourself for the interview, right? Anything you come up with, we're going to study the organization, think about what it might be like, what you're going to wear, all that stuff. And then the day before the interview, we're going to say, did you win the preparation game?

Did you position yourself for success? And if that's a yes, then great. And even if you don't get the internship, well, are you going to work at this place for your entire life? Is this the only project you're ever going to do? This is playing a game that will help with future endeavors. And it was really interesting because then we, she opted into that, felt great about it, was super prepared. And I dropped her off to go walk into the place for the interview. And the discussion over there, she said, she was really like, yeah, I could take her leave, getting this internship now. And it was such a great moment as a parent, because it was like, oh, we're, she's playing the right game.

And as a result, I, she did end up getting the internship, but I think she only got it because it didn't matter to her anymore. And so the nervousness was gone. Yeah, I think it's a really powerful idea. Thank you for sharing that. And, you know, I wish the punchline had been, sorry, daughter, that she hadn't gotten the internship because we often conflate good decisions with good outcomes. And they're actually completely unrelated. And she made good decisions going into the internship, whether or not there's a good outcome is irrelevant. She made good decisions. I'll tell you a couple college game stories because most people can resonate with them.

First one is a 30 years ago, a friend's kid came to me and said, I want to get into Yale. And my dad said, you would tell me how. And I said, look, this is the game that everyone's going to play. The game that everyone's going to play is they're going to join the soccer team, join the student council, try to get really good grades, try to get a good SAT score. That line is very long. I said, the other thing you could do is you could borrow 500 bucks and fly to India and then spend as long as it takes to earn enough money to get home. And that experience will put you in a totally different line for getting into Yale.

And I gave him like six other crazy ideas like that. Well, he ended up writing a book called How to Get into Yale, where it's actually technically getting into Yale. And I packaged it and we sold it to a book publisher and MTV bought the movie rights. And it never got made into a movie, but the point is the book got him into Yale. And the idea that you could find a different line is part of the game. And the other line is you don't need to go to Yale. You don't need to. You could spend the same amount of money and the same amount of time to get dramatically better results doing something else. And it comes down to what do you want?

Cause what's interesting is your daughter didn't say anything about the fact that this very cool organization was going to have an internship that would actually help her get what she wanted. Other than the bragging rights that she was at a very cool organization. They're using that to their advantage, not to her advantage. And so when we take what's on offer, when we look at the list of what's on the menu or what jobs are offered, and we don't think about what place we could be sitting instead, we've sacrificed our strategy. Now you've got me thinking when I, if I tell this story in a speaking engagement, I'm just going to leave out the outcome.

And I'm sure someone in the audience will say, they'll want to know. And then it doesn't matter. That's not the point of the story to create that learning moment. I'm also reminded you're bringing up a lot of different memories. I had the pleasure when I was young to on numerous occasions to drive, to be the chauffeur for Peter Drucker. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it was a pretty cool gig. And I remember one time I asked him why he did what he did. Clearly he could have made all kinds of crazy money just consulting all the time. But he started, he was writing books and started a school. And at this point in his life, this was in the last 10 years of his life, he was just lecturing all the time.

And I said, what keeps you going? And he said, I can't do an Austrian accent, but I can still hear that heavy Austrian accent. He said, I had this epiphany one day that I could be one of the richest guys in the graveyard. Said, I saw the path all the way to the end. And I didn't really see the point of that at the end. And I thought that one still really resonates for me on the wealth accumulation to a certain point where you can provide for the family is great, but there is certainly a point of diminishing returns. And it really ties into this picking the right games to play. Yeah, that's a great story.

And I'm only going to take 30 seconds to tell it, but how could I not? So one time you're driving Peter to one of these gigs and he's really hoarse and he's having a hard day and say, don't worry, I've seen you give these talks so many times I'll give the talk for you instead. And so you switch clothes, he sits in the back, you come up, you do your talk, and you nail the Austrian accent. And someone in the audience raises their hand and asks your question. And it's such a hard question, you have no clue. And you turn and in your accent, you say, that's such an obvious simple question. I'm going to let my chauffeur answer it.

I like that, I like that. Sorry, I got you off track. You didn't know it's okay. It's all right, that was a good bird walk. I love chauffeur jokes, yeah. If only I thought of that one back in the day. Who in this moment is Seth Codden? Who are some of the people that you admire and look up to and that inspire you? Well, why do you think I'm on the podcast with you, Nick? Yeah, I'm not kidding you. I was making a joke before, this is not a joke. Who do I look up to? It's not people who are famous or who won the birthday lottery. It's people who showed up and did a podcast week after week after week or wrote a book that wasn't going to sell a lot of copies or took the time to volunteer and build a nonprofit that changes people's lives.

I mean, the long list of people who inspire me is almost endless because each one of us has the chance to do nothing or to show up and make a difference. And that difference requires emotional labor. It's not I did this because it's my job or I did this because I'm hustling. The emotional labor of this might not work. The emotional labor of I had the chance to do this and I'm willing to take responsibility. And the thing we know about organizations is they're bad at giving out authority but they are eager to give people responsibility. So when someone shows up and says, I'll handle this, I got this, I'll make this better, that person inspires.

It's a great answer. It's a great answer. What thoughts do you have on people that are working in a, let's say they're working in a big organization and maybe they like their job but don't love it? What are some of those things they can do to take more responsibility, to drive more meaning into their work? Yeah, this is a fabulous question. And there are peers of mine who have promoted the idea that you should find what you're passionate about and do that, that when you do what you love every day is a gift. And I have a problem with that because the number of people who get to have a job like that that changes every time their passions change is close to zero.

On the other hand, if you make the commitment to love what you do, then you're always set. You get, if you choose to work indoors, you get, if you choose to work with your mind, you get, if you choose to solve interesting problems, you can learn to love that. And so, the difference between art and work is artists rarely say, do I have to paint another painting? Artists get to paint another painting. Artists get to lean into the next interesting problem. They don't measure it on a clock. Well, all of the work is art. I know customer service people who view it as an art. I know people who make hospital cribs who view it as an art because it's a chance to find the thing that lights us up.

And if we think about the world we live in today and use the time machine to bring someone from just 40 years ago to today's world, they wouldn't say where are the flying cars I was promised. They would be speechless, speechless for hours, not just at AI, but at the miracle that you and I are having this conversation, now I don't even know where you are, right? That there's magic everywhere we look, more connection than ever before. And if you're not passionate about that, that's your decision. It's nothing that the outside world is forcing you to do. Now that reminds me of another story that I think you'll like.

This was part of a project that Mike Chexett-Mehai was doing the author of Flow. And he did a huge project on meaning and work. It was called the Good Work Project. And then he also wrote a book on creativity and these things kind of dovetailed where he did interviews with all these high performers to find through lines in how they found meaning in their work. And there was a blanking on this woman's name. I'll put it in the show notes later, she was a very successful sculptor. And she said, said, you know, everybody imagines that I just get to play all day, right? And I'm just sitting around and coming up with cool ideas and then I bring it into reality and then people buy it and it's just every day is a celebration.

She said, you know, 99% of my day, I feel like a carpenter, it is grinding away at whatever this project is I'm working on. She said, I actually don't think it's that different than most other jobs. So there are these great little moments of inspiration. And that, I think that really jives with what you just said about the idea of not following your passion, which is often bad advice in my experience, but finding your passion in what it is you're doing, bringing your passion to work. Exactly. Like the people I know in the music business, they're not really in the music business. They're in a business that happens to sell music.

And if that is fueling you, that's great. But if it's not, the fact that you can brag about at a cocktail parties is not a good reason to do it. Yeah. Okay, I'm dying to ask you about placebo. I know this is in a new direction, but you've written a lot of, it's one of my favorite topics. And I find a lot of people don't love to discuss it because sometimes they feel like it exposes, they've been fooled by something. I don't see it in that way at all. That's one of the latest exciting thoughts on placebos. Cause I think it is one of the great mysteries of being a person. Okay. So for those of you who are just catching up at home, a placebo is one of the most powerful medical interventions ever created.

It is depending on the element you have, even more effective than traditional medicine, but even for ailments where we have no cure, it is a spectacular intervention. It has no side effects. It's not very expensive and it works. A placebo is a story we tell ourselves that makes us better. And it's not just for sniffles. It's also wine. What they did it tested the journal of wine economists and they found among the top tier owner files and sommeliers that $100 bottle of wine tastes better than a $10 bottle of wine unless you switch the bottles. And then when you switch the bottles, almost all of the almost all drinkers prefer $10 bottles of wine.

Because the story of the bottle is what people are tasting, not the wine itself. A no-cebo is the opposite of this. A no-cebo is something a story we tell ourselves that makes us worse. And a lot of people have a no-cebo associated with their office. When they walk into the office on Monday, their affect goes down just because they're telling themselves a story, not because a bad thing happened. So I love placebos. I take them for my ailments. I go to the acupuncturist quite happily, et cetera, et cetera. It's not offensive or an insult to tell somebody that's a placebo. In fact, it's a celebration.

It says this story is well crafted enough that it works. And so our job when we engage with these things is maximize the chances that the placebo is in your life, the rituals in your life, get you what you are looking for. And when we tell ourselves a better story, we usually get a better outcome. Ambien, I thought, was an interesting example of that. But gosh, if you discuss that with an ambient user, it's not always well received. So let's explain. So a friend of mine, I was with a friend three days ago. He was an ambient addict for 10 years. And ambient is non-addictive, except it's psychologically addictive.

Because if you believe you can't get a good night's sleep without it, you can get hooked on it. They've done studies. And what they found, it's very easy to do this study, that the typical ambient user sleeps 18 minutes more per night than someone who doesn't take ambient, 18 minutes. So why take it? Well, it turns out ambient is an amnesiac. It causes you to forget that you didn't sleep. That's why it works. You wake up in the morning with no memory of being up. So therefore, you think you slept better. So therefore, you have a better day. That's a placebo, in this case, a no-cebo, right? And why do people get upset when they discover that a placebo has an impact on them?

Well, they didn't used to get upset 100 years ago, because we understood that human beings and stories and spirits and spirituality are all of a thing. But in an industrial scientific culture, it feels like we're buying snake oil. It feels like we're weak if a placebo works on us. But my point is, if it's working and it has no side effects and it's cheap, well, then what's the problem? Absolutely. I mean, there are plenty of professional athletes that fully understand when they step into the batter's box and kiss the cross, actually putting your lips on the cross doesn't change anything. But it is part of the ritual and it does improve their performance by having a ritual and believing in the ritual.

And it's a fascinating, I think it's just super insightful into how our minds work and really hits at your, the bigger topic at hand here, which is the power of storytelling for all human beings. So when we want to go make a change in the world, telling powerful stories is such a driver of that change. Yeah, but you have to, and people are telling stories to you to take advantage of you every single day. And you have to be clear about what that's helping you or not. And so back to the internship, the internship is a story. And some people will go through an internship like that and it will never have another effect on their life.

And other people will go through an internship like that. And for 40 years, we'll say that internship changed my life. I promise you there was no difference in the internship. It was in the story someone tells themselves about the internship. And so if we are stuck in a negative cycle of self-talk, the only way out of it is to see that there is a negative cycle of self-talk and to do some of that makes us feel foolish, which is to create a new cycle that obviously stilted awkward self-talk until it becomes normal. And this has gotten a bad name because some people have taken advantage of it and made a bunch of money as motivational speakers, but the fact is it works.

And would life be better if we had a just and equitable society where people didn't get the short end of the stick? Yes, but we don't. And in the meantime, what are we gonna do about that so that people can be clear about what they want and why they want it and then develop a strategy that works with systems to help them get to where they seek to go? If we could brainstorm an example for a second. Story that I would like to help tell. I should say let's brainstorm the story because the change I would like to see is reorienting a lot of social media, especially for young people away from what it currently is towards, I do think it is transformative technology.

I love podcasts. I think they are a great example of the good that can come from all this transformative technology, but I would really like to see the stuff that gets used the most, the Instagram, the X, the TikTok, shift in a similar direction. What, do you have any ideas? We were just spitballing on the right way to tell that story to engage more people in that idea. Okay, so we don't have enough time for me to spend the time we take to completely deconstruct this, but it always begins with what's the smallest group of people we can possibly begin with? That the place in Canada where I work every summer teaching canoeing, there's 500 people and not one of them has a cell phone device with them during the summer.

And that's the price of being in that place, the forced detox, that if we imagine a family unit where there are prizes and benefits to living a life without it most of the time, if we imagine on a bigger scale community action where the reason they don't hook or chemical doesn't dump toxic waste into the left canal anymore is not because they're good people, it's because it's against the law. And so we are capable of creating boundaries and organizations actually want us to create boundaries because otherwise they have to race to the bottom. And so when persistent and consistent action comes along to just create things that keep people, I haven't thought this through at all.

But what would happen if by law, no one could use any piece of social media for more than an hour a day? How would the algorithms change in response to that? That's not the answer. My point is we have community action all around us. We regularly build boundaries for organizations that do things that aren't in our interests. And all that Mark is doing is making the shareholders happy and making the shareholders happy is in our job. It might be his job, but it's not our job. And we've got to be very clear, which group are we starting with? Where are the systems? The systems will respond to our persistent and consistent effort, but if it's not consistent and persistent, they'll outlast us.

And I know we're tight on time here, but I think it's really interesting that the way you've thought through that, which was what solution could we come up with and then how would the system respond? And I think I'm aware of that after having read the beginning of this strategy because that's one of the major themes in the book is understanding the systems at play and then how to affect those systems. The slice of the book that I was able to read was excellent. I strongly recommend it to anybody who's listening. As I would certainly be library of Seth Codden books, thank you for coming in today and taking the time and being generous and sharing your most precious assets, right?

Your attention and your time with me and with everybody that gets to watch this show. Well, thank you, Nick. Thank you for leading, for making this ruckus. It matters. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Okay, everybody, until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious.