The Daily Stoic - Ryan Holiday on The Art and Stoicism of Digital Marketing

Episode Date: April 2, 2023

Today, Ryan presents a live talk that he gave in September 2022 to a group of business leaders about the art and business of modern marketing. He covers why competition is for losers, how to create clarity around what you are making and who you are making it for, the importance of doing work that addresses actual problems, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that we like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening. of life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. I had a very, very crazy week in September of 2022. We have a whole YouTube video about it, one crazy

week in the life of a stoke. Basically, I did a talk in Denver that I came home, I did a talk in Austin. I saw Iron Maiden play at the Moody Center. Then I did a talk in Las Vegas. I flew out at like 5 a.m. so I'd get up at like four or no, three, 30. I think it's insanely early. Flute in Las Vegas. I got to take a nap in my hotel room

for like 20 minutes, order room service. Go downstairs, give a talk. And then I went up to Saragordo where I ran from the bottom of Saragordo to the top, basically the town of Keeler to the top of Saragordo, which is this ghost town in the mountains of Inyo County. I basically did about 5,000 feet of elevation climb over eight miles in a little under two hours. It was grueling, but part of the reason I was so grueling

is one, it took me forever to drive from Vegas to Cerro Gordo, it's been on this crazy flooding and blah, blah, blah. But the talk I gave in Las Vegas this morning had been, I really felt it. I was like locked in, went great, and then I did like, there was a Q&A after it. Anyways, it was just,

like sometimes you dialed in at a level that you're not normally dialed in. It doesn't mean you're not normally dialed in. You're just really dialed in, and I was really dialed in. And I forgot to say, all of this was for the launch of discipline is destiny. So it was certainly a test of my discipline and stamina and endurance in many ways.

But normally on these Saturday episodes, we bring you excerpts like from the classics or excerpts from some of my favorite books. And in this one, I wanted to bring you one of my talks. That's tangentially connected to stoicism, but not fully connected to stoicism, but not fully connected to stoicism. This is where I get to talk about what I think about as a professional, right? Like, obviously I write and talk about so philosophy. It's what I apply in my life, but I have

to be a professional in that thing. I have to figure out how to make that message compelling. I have to make it sustainable. I have to make it shareable. I have to make it something that connects with people, not just of the moment, but hopefully over a long period of time. I have to make something, I have to do my work at an high and elite level. How does one do that? How does one build an audience? How does one connect with the audience? How does one cultivate the audience? How does one serve the audience? That being owned by the audience? These are all questions that I have to think about,

like when I have my technician hat on, right, my strategy hat on. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. I was in Las Vegas for this talk, it was to a digital mortgage group. And it was nice, a very nice of them to have me. And I'll let you listen in on that. We're gonna talk about how you make stuff that lasts, how you create work that dresses actual problems

that real people are going through and how I work to make stoicism relatable, practical, both timeless and timely, as Robert Green taught me to do. And without further ado, I'll give you that talk. If you haven't read Discipline as Destiny, please do check it out. And speaking of which, the Daily Dad is available for preorder at DailyDadBook.com. That is the release cycle that I am in the middle of now. Slightly less crazy, slightly less travel.

But it was a week, I hope not to repeat, but in the meantime, I'll let you listen in to my talk on how you make work that lasts. The Dell Technologies Black Friday in July event is on with limited quantity deals on top business PCs with Windows 11 Pro. Save on select Vostro laptops with built-in OS recovery, fingerprint readers and antivirus protections. Plus, you can save on select Vostro laptops with built-in OS recovery, fingerprint readers and antivirus protections. Plus, you can save on select latitude laptops

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by calling a Dell Technologies Advisor at 11 Pro for business. Find the right tech for your needs by calling a Dell Technologies advisor at 877-Ask-Dell. That's 877-Ask-Dell offered to business customers by Web Bank, who determines qualifications for in terms of credit. Well, it's good to be here. I don't know what your pandemic story was like, but I started March of 2020 with two kids under the age of four. And then I happened to have just begun the process in February of 2020 of opening a small town bookstore

in rural Texas. So it would have been hard under ordinary circumstances. It took longer than we thought. It cost a lot more than we thought. Everything that could go wrong inevitably did go wrong on top of the fact that when we were done, it was illegal to open. And it was a little bit like,

Elon Musk once described starting and running a business as like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. It was a little bit like Elon Musk once described starting and running a business as like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. It was a little bit like that. It was also like an arrestive development. I think I've made a huge mistake. We repeated that to ourselves many, many times. But I had to apply the stuff that I write about.

I write about Stoke Floss. And namely, this idea from the Stokes that the obstacle is the way. That we don't control what happens, but we do control how we respond to what happens. And I feel like we did a pretty good job. Ultimately, the bookstore opened.

My wife and I are still married. We didn't get divorced, so that was a success. And then I wrote myself this little note card at the early days as we had this whole thing open or whole thing done unable to open a monument to my arrogance it felt like at times I wrote this note I said look this is a test will it make you a better person or a worse person right why be a better entrepreneur a better leader a better writer a better citizen a better neighbor right if I can if I can

emerge from this better, that's great. If I can't, then I've screwed up even if the bookstore ends up succeeding. So, all of which is to say, starting, running, operating any kind of business is extraordinarily difficult. It's always difficult, it always has been difficult. And in fact, art and work and life, they're really hard, right?

And my point, what I want to talk about today is why, since it is hard, we might as well do it right, and we might as well do it in a way that lasts. So one of the things I discovered running this bookstore, obviously, I suspected and thought about it as an author, as a person in publishing industry, but I noticed something in publishing that happens to be true in almost every industry, which is that the priorities of the industry are totally screwed up and fundamentally irrational. So I'll give you a hint. This is from Seth Goedan, one of the great marketers over time. He said that book publishers make 90% of their profit from books that are published more than

six months ago. And yet, like 2% of the effort is focused on those books. Everything is focused on what's new, right? The catalog, the library, just as it's true for movies and music, for most classic products in every industry. It's the old stuff that's profitable, that's efficient that lasts. And yet, all of the attention is on what's trendy and what's new, what everyone else is doing. And in fact, the New York Times bestseller list is fundamentally built around this bias. This is the fine print on the bestseller list, which you can look at at any time. It explicitly excludes what they call perennial sellers, books that sell week in and week out,

right, as opposed to books that come in really high out of nowhere and pop up. So for Quirk and Mike, I sold over a million books worldwide before I appeared on the New York Times best seller list. And that wasn't because, cumulatively, I'd sold a lot of books, but because in one concentrated week, I sold more than expected. So there is this fundamental bias in tech, in business, in publishing, in entertainment around what's new,

because that's exciting, and what we ignore the opportunity we leave on the table is the classic stuff that really works. If you think about most businesses, most businesses take a while to become profitable. Most businesses lose money, they're first several years in business. So if we thought of the economy as a whole, it's not controversial. I don't think to argue that

the vast majority of profits in the economy are not coming from the hot new company. They're coming from established perennial companies that have figured out how to do what they do in a sustainable way aimed at longevity, which is what I want to talk about today. This idea of perennial sellers, this is my longhorn, her name is Domino. But businesses, even a lot of the classic brands that we take for granted have been around a lot longer than we think, right? Kikum in soy sauce over a hundred years old. Pretty cool. Fiskar's scissors dates back to

the 17th century zildogen symbols. They made symbols for Napoleon's army, his marching vans, and when they did that, they were already two centuries old. Right? My point is we've got to radically expand our timeline when we think about the success of businesses. One of my favorite restaurants in LA, it's a greasy spoon called the original pantry cafe right across the street from the Staples Center. Pandemic messed with their hours a little bit, but until 2020, they had been open 365 days a year, 24-7 since 1924. They did not have locks on the door of the restaurant because they'd

literally never closed. Right? And it's an all-cash business. So there's some advantages to this too. The point is they've lasted a very long time. The oldest continually operating business here in Nevada is the Santa Fe Club, which has been in business since 1905. Pretty cool. This hotel, 1969. Pretty good run for a place that's always based on what's trendy and new. The bank I use in Texas, 1868, not bad, but nothing even close compared to the oldest bank in Italy, which dates to the 1400s. My bookstore in Texas is in a building that was built and opened in the late 1800s, 1880s, early 1890s. The building next door to it, the owner just passed away.

His name was John. He ran John's hair design. I remember I walked into a couple years ago and I said, wow, this is really cool. It looked very almost trendy. It was so retro. I said, this is really cool it looked very sort of almost trendy it is so retro and I said this is really cool I like this and he said yeah you know I did all these designs myself and I said when was that and he said oh when I opened and I said when was that and he said in 1969 he just closed after 52 years in business which is a pretty good run but it's even more incredible run if you consider the fact that this building, which also opened in the 1880s, has always been a barber shop.

It has been one continual barber shop for more than a century. And all of this proves what they call an economics the Lindy effect. It's named after a diner in New York City called Lindy's, which had a pretty good run, I believe it did close during the pandemic. But Lindy effect is basically that things which last tend to continue to last. They have a long shelf life. The longer you last, the longer you'll continue to last. Basically that classics stay classic, right? So if you're trying to build a successful business, you should think about how do you make a classic? What goes in to making something that can stand the test of time? This is my donkey, his name is buddy. I got him on Craigslist for $100. Craigslist could legally drink if it was a person, right? Almost entirely owned by one person. It makes about $900

million a year in profits. So it's not the trendiest, newest, fanciest tech startup that's breaking fundraising records, right? You won't see the owners of the founders on magazine covers or on social media, but they are cleaning up. Now let's contrast this a little bit with your industry. This is an article from October, 2012, 75% of the biggest home lenders in 2006 no longer exist. From 2006 no longer exists.

I bet if we were to update this story, it'd be like 90, 95%. People don't think about making things that last, even though you're in a business that fundamentally is treating a very perennial need. So I want to poke around at this and I want to sort of challenge you as you build your businesses, as you manage your careers to think about how do you create something that injures and lasts as Drake famously

said. It's not who's popular now, it's who's still around a decade from now. That's the test. Can you run that gauntlet? And I think we begin there for looking at some first principles for last. And I think we start with uniqueness, right? You could argue that every single human being, every person, has totally unique DNA, totally unique set of circumstances that brought them into the world. Totally unique set of experiences that they will have in their life. Totally unique moment in time. And what do we do with this fundamental uniqueness

is that we pretty much do whatever one else is doing, right? Peter Tiel, the economist, the tech entrepreneur would say that competition is for losers, right? That you wanna have a monopoly, that all great, truly successful business people own their space, they're the only one in it. And we have that at birth, and yet we sort of fritter it away

by doing what we think we're supposed to. The other word for this is the blue ocean strategy. The blue ocean strategy means instead of competing in a red ocean where you have lots of competition, where people are just like you, you seek out the blue ocean where you're the only one where you have no competition, right? If you're in a competition you can lose. If you have no competition, you win by default. So where is the least competition where can you have a monopoly? This is the question, where can you be fundamentally unique? Even this hotel, when it opened in 1969,

was the largest hotel in the world, right? It's an interesting claim to family, fundamentally makes it unique. Even when I was thinking about writing my book, perennial seller, my publisher said, look, we think there's a really good market for a book that teaches people who write books how to market books.

And I thought about that, and then I sold the proposal, they bought it, it was great, it was exciting, but then I looked at the market and I saw a ton of other books about marketing. And it's not that these books are bad per se, but it's that they exist. And because they exist, I would have to compete by being better than them. I would have to compete by stealing attention or potential market share away from them. I would have to beat them even in an advertising match. I would have to outb even in an advertising match,

I would have to outbid them for say a certain keyword. But by carving out my own niche by writing about what we're talking about today, how you make things that last, the only one in that category. You want to be the only one you want to have the monopoly. This is actually one of the laws of marketing and the book, the 22 immutable laws of marketing,

which I very much recommend. Say, it's better to be first than it is to be better. Marketing is a battle of perception, not products. Great. But what if you're in an industry where it's pretty established? It's pretty clear what it is. You're not inventing something wholly new. Well, they say, invent a way to describe yourself as a new, right?

Invent a new category inside that niche, right? Lots of hotels, where the world's biggest hotel. How do you target what you do? So you have less competition, and thus you can be more dominant over a long period of time. So the question is, as you're designing something, as you're marketing something, as you're coming up with a pitch, you got to ask yourself, like,

has anyone done this before? Or am I at least doing it in a new way? So you think about a bookstore, right? A bookstore is like the oldest business there is. It's not quite the oldest profession, but it's pretty old. Stoicism, the philosophy that I write about, was founded in a bookstore in Athens, not long after Alexander the Great died, right? So it goes back a lot of years, like 2300 centuries,

sorry 23 centuries, give or take, right? That's a long time. So how do I expect to have a monopoly be niche? Well first off, I went to a place that doesn't have any bookstores, but when we looked at the sort of basic practices of running a bookstore, you end up contacting a wholesaler. In this case, it's called Ingram. You talk to the publishers and they recommend that a bookstore of our size carries something about like 10,000 books. That's what a bookstore,

your average independent bookstore would carry between 10 and 15,000 titles. Well, that seemed very expensive and that seemed like a very high number, a lot to manage. And so what my wife and I did was settle on a fundamentally different way of running the bookstore, which is that we carry about 700 titles, right? And they all sit face out on the shelf. We don't carry every book. We don't carry the books that people think are trendy or new, we don't carry the books that publishers are pushing, we carry the books that sell consistently and have sold consistently over a very long time. Some of our most popular books are 500 years old or a thousand years old, some of them are 50 years old. Some of the times the publisher doesn't think they continue to sell,

but they fly off our shelves because we've read them and we actually love them. So we came up with a way of doing the bookstore that makes it unlike all other bookstores. And I was talking to someone at the story yesterday who drove from Los Angeles to come to the bookstore, right? And so when you make something that's new and different, when you own a category, when you're the only one in that category, you stand out, you're marketing is easier. And thus, you also have a chance to last and endure. You of course do have to do the job, right? It can't be trendy in New York, this sort of made up category that someone doesn't actually want or need, you have to do the job. These are my red wing

boots, I bought them 13 or so years ago for $300, which seemed like an insane amount of money at the time, but they still work. I wore them yesterday. The only reason I'm not wearing them right now is I got the money when I was walking around on my farm. When you make something that does the job, people are willing to pay a premium for it, because they know they'll continue to get value out of it, right? These shoes I've had them resold by Redwing, they just mailed them back to the manufacturer, they put new soles on them, they cleaned them up. I saw a video of somebody discovering their grandfather's shoes, getting them out of

the closet and looking like brand new again, but that's what happens when you make something great and you make something timeless. So the question that I see so many people with their businesses struggling with is, I go like, what do you do? Or what is this thing they're working on? And they're like, well, it's a, and then they launch into some like, 20 minute explanation of the thing.

And you're like, I'm actually interested in what you're talking about. Why would a total stranger sit down and listen to this, right? You can't quickly and emphatically articulate what you do, and then you wonder why it doesn't resonate. You wonder why your marketing doesn't work.

This is a blank that does blank for blank. Where are you creating value? What are you actually doing? You have to have clarity about this. The ultimate question in business and in marketing is, who are our customers? Like, who are they? I talk to authors, I go, who's this book for?

And they go, I don't know, smart people? That's not a category, okay? First off, there's not that many of them, not as many as we'd like them to be. But those people don't like get together. There's not like a smart person conference, right? You have to know who your people are, what they do, how to reach them.

They have to actually exist, not in some made up spreadsheet, but in real life, how are you gonna reach these people? Who are they, and what do you do for them? What do you do for them? How do you create value for them? My editor once said to me, it's not what a book is, it's what a book does.

It's not what I think it is, it's not what a book is, it's what a book does, right? It's not what I think it is, it's not my personal expression, it's why is someone paying me money for this? And why are they getting a greater return on that investment than they expected? Max Martin, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, written for every boy band you can imagine,

every big rock band you can imagine, every big pop star of the moment. He subjects all the music that he writes to this thing that he calls the PCH test, right? So basically, he writes a song and doesn't go, oh, it's beautiful, I think it will work. He doesn't trust his gut, even though he has a great gut, clearly, he takes the song, puts it on something, gets in his car, and

he drives up and down PCH, drives up and down the Pacifico's highway, ideally like in a convertible with a top down. And he goes, is this working? Is it enhancing this experience? Even thinking that music does a job for people, right? Even though it is artistic, even though it is a creative feel, and a creative bit of expression, does it do a job for people, right? Even though it is artistic, even though it is a creative feel, then a creative bit of expression, does it do a job for people? Is it up to the environment that it's going to be consumed in? And one of the ways you have to do this is by mirroring

the customer's experience. And then of course, also by, you know, like actually talking to the customers. I love this comic. Talk to customers. What do customers have to do with the products we want them to buy? So often the marketing team or the sales team exist in this silo over here. Somebody is making this stuff and then they go, here you sell this, right? As if the marketing team doesn't understand what the media wants, what the customers want, what's working in advertising and promotional channels. These things have to be integrated. There has to be a line of communication

from the people on the ground interacting with the customers up through the development phase. So what gets made is marketable, most importantly, viable. Amazon does this. When you want to launch a service or a product inside Amazon, you have to rate the press release first. How are you going to announce it and explain it? Going back to that question. This is a blank that does blank for blank. Why does anyone give a shit? If you can't make it in a press release that's exciting or interesting, you've got to go back to the drawing board before you're going to get clearance. So instead of seeing the marketing and the sales as this afterthought,

it has to be integrated into the process itself. Because ultimately, the only marketing that works is word of mouth, right? Do the people who like who have tried and used your product, do they tell other people about it, right? Does it do the job? And then can they explain it to other people? This is the bank that I use, I was telling you it frost. If I didn't like frost, if they were not a good do the job and then can they explain it to other people. This is the bank that I use. I was telling you it frost. If I didn't like frost, if they were not a good bank, I wouldn't have included them in this slideshow, right?

I wouldn't have recommended that my friends also bank there. This is my mortgage broker, Hygin Kim and her husband, Jay. They founded JVM Lending. I've used her three or four different times. And the reason I've used her three or four different times is because on the first one we were doing, I got a referral. Then the whole thing went sideways. There was a bad appraisal. It was not going well. She stepped in. She just solved all the problems.

She made it so seamless and easy for me that when my friends have needed a mortgage broker, I said, I have exactly the person that you should talk to. Your customers are your advertisements, right? Of course, you can incentivize this, you can make it easier, but first off, it has to actually work, right? No amount of incentive is going to get someone to recommend something that doesn't work, that nobody cares about, but I like Wellfront, Wellfront's great, and wealthfront pays me in free managed money if I refer other people. But over the years, I've collected, you see these all the time,

and the emails I've collected some of the referral programs that I love, because they're so terrible. This is one from Scott Trade, which is now TD Ameritrade. It's like, okay, if I add some money into my account, you'll give me a little bonus. Look, look, there's one here in the end. If I drop in a cool million dollars,

they'll give me $2,000 cash back. And 50 free trades, which were at that point, worth $7 each. So people often think about incentives, like we should reward people, but they don't actually think, because they don't know the customers, they don't live in the real world, where the customer would actually be prodded by this or be able

to use it in any way. This is a mortgage statement that I got many years ago and said, hey, we appreciate your referrals. If one of your friends, family members, or acquaintances mentions it, I'm sure you do appreciate referrals, right? But you haven't made it easier for me in any way. You haven't made it clear for me in any way. And this is about the most boring pitch I've ever seen in my life.

This is one from Quickin, now Rocket Mortgage. Look, there's so much going on. I don't even know what's happening. There's all these confusing codes. Then if I refer someone to buy a multi-million dollar property, I get a Visa card with $700 on it. I mean, this is not what's going to get anyone excited. This is not going to work, right?

Pitches have to be clear. They have to be simple, but most of all, they have to be time. To the fact that your product actually works for someone and has improved their life. It has to solve a problem. When I think about books, I try to write books that people that address a problem. So when someone sees one of their friends going through a problem, they go, I have just the book for you. Influencers are the same thing. People talk a lot about influencer marketing these days, but influencer marketing is just word of mouth like on steroids. People spend a lot of money on influencer marketing because they have foreign products that people don't actually like and they have to pay celebrities or people social media followings to talk about. Influents are marketing on my end. It's happened because

the people like what I do, right? This is an Olympic medalist just posting about the books. These are a radio show. This is Joe Rogan. This is Lauren Bostwick, a makeup influencer. They liked the stuff. It works for them. Their job is to tell people about stuff that works for them. That's what an influencer is. So yes, there's sometimes a financial transaction, but when you've made something that really works that solves a real problem that's interesting or exciting, right? The influencer marketing follows. There's Aaron Rogers, he put it in a book club earlier this year, the New England Patriots,

credit it with winning the Super Bowl. Then people wrote about it, right? When you have something that solves a problem, the influencer stuff follows. When you have something that's boring or scammy or weird, you end up having to pay for it. And so what I try to do, as I was saying, is root what I do in perennial timeless things.

If you saw the movie Lady Bird, it's not really about a high school girl in 2004. It's a timeless coming of age story, right? The reason it wins best picture is because it speaks to something of that generation, as well as previous generations, as well as future generations, right? It's rooted in understanding what people have gone through and always will go through. Star Wars is not like the most successful franchise in the history of cinema because of its fancy space lasers,

right? Those effects in the old movies look comically bad now in many ways. Star Wars has lasted and created all its various spin-offs as now worth billions of dollars because George Lucas roots Star Wars in the Hero's Journey, the same journey of Gilgamesh and Odysseus. All the great stories of history are mirrored and played out in Star Wars. It's based on the hero's journey, what Joseph Campbell calls the hero of a thousand faces.

That's what Luke Skywalker is. He roots it in something timeless and real. Life can get you down. I'm no stranger to that. When I find things are piling up, I'm struggling to deal with something. Obviously I find things are piling up, I'm struggling to deal with something. Obviously, I use my journal, obviously, I turn to stochism, but I also turn to my therapist, which I've had for a long time and has helped me through

a bunch of stuff. And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country, I do therapy remote, so I don't have to drive somewhere. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Toxbase makes it easy to find a therapist that you like. It's convenient, it's affordable. By doing everything online, Toxbase makes getting the help you want easy and affordable, so why wait? Toxbase can help with any specific challenge you might be facing. That's why it's the number one online therapy platform with license therapists and over 40 specialties.

It's secure and private and in network with most major insurers. As a listener of this podcast, you can get 80 bucks off your first month with Talkspace when you go to Talkspace.com slash stoic to match with a license therapist today, go to Talkspace.com slash stoic to get 80 bucks off your first month and show your support for the day with stoic. That's Talkspace.com slash stoic. It's funny, I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it. And I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading. They're reading more than ever and I go, let me guess, you listen audio books don't you? And it's true. And almost invariably, they listen to them on Audible. And that's because Audible

offers an incredible selection of audio books across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs. And of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on audio, read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app. You'll always find the best of what you love, or something new to discover, and as an Audible member, you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest bestsellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, and exciting new voices in audio. You can check out Stillness is the key, the daily dad. I just recorded so that's up on Audible now. Coming up on the 10-year anniversary

of the obstacle is the way audio books. So all those are available and new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500 that's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500 It's a great book by Guy Kawasaki called Enchantment about creating like a wonderful sort of product experience I very much recommend it This is a book that's sold well when it came out has continued to sell it's still relevant even though it's 10 plus years old I would venture to guess though that this book has sold much better than a book he wrote when it came out has continued to sell. It's still relevant, even though it's 10 plus years old. I would venture to guess, though, that this book has sold much better

than a book he wrote after called What the Plus, Google Plus for the rest of us. When you try to capture a trend or a moment in time, it often doesn't work, but when you root it in something that isn't going anywhere, you might not get off to as fast of a start, but you have a chance of sticking around. Like this would be a great book to have written, right? Because people are always getting pregnant and they have no idea what to do, right? Because it's something that people

want to help them with. And they go, oh, read this book, right? Even my work is based on Stoicism, Stoic Philosophy dates back 23 odd centuries, right? I'm not having to make this up from scratch. If it did, I'd have to be a lot smarter, right? I'd have to be a genius and I am not a genius, but I am able to articulate and identify, be able to identify and articulate things that have worked over time.

So it's about finding the timelessness in the timely, right? As Jeff Bezos would say, focus on the things that don't change, that aren't going anywhere, right? Not the fidget spinners, not cryptocurrencies, or whatever is trendy at the moment. I imagine his cycle of regret and excitement about this tattoo has changed a lot over the last few years. But the point is, like, rooted in something that's going to be around, that's going to stick around. And so I think about what you guys do, what you guys sell.

And obviously, it changes. The market goes up and down. There's new products, new ways of doing things, new regulations, changes all the time. But at the core, what you do is the most important, you sell the most important thing that there is, which is home, right, which is where people live, which is what they build their life around, what they work so hard for. And when the marketing and when the products and the brand and the customer relationships

are rooted in that, you'll find success. I mean, it's about what's trendy and new, I think you struggle with. So we're talking about thinking about long-term, not just with products, but in how we brand ourselves. It's kind of crazy to think that BMW's ultimate driving machine campaign, the campaign itself is 50 years old, right? Because it speaks to something timeless. It doesn't say, oh, we have the fanciest X or this or that, right?

It's the ultimate driving machine. It describes what a BMW was in 1976, describes what a BMW was in 1996, and hopefully it will describe what a BMW is in 2026, right? It's the ultimate driving machine. And when you find something that works and you continue to invest in it over time, yes, it might feel like it goes out of flavor temporarily, but you also have nostalgia working for you. You have consistency going for you.

You have momentum going for you. This is the Laws and Grata Familia. It's set to be finished actually in 2026, which will be the hundredth year anniversary of the Architects Death. So it's a little over budget and a little behind schedule. But it takes what it takes, right? And when you think of these things in a long time,

and you're trying to build something that lasts for all time, it finishes a few years over schedule, or a few decades over schedule, it doesn't really matter. Right, they're thinking long-term. And it's worth it. I think it's worth it. I love this. This is an LLB in tag that's actually designed to assume you will pass this on to someone else, right? That one of your kids will wear it, then your younger kid will wear it, and then you'll give it to your sister's kids, and then

they'll give it to Goodwill. The idea is that over time, this will be used multiple times. I just bought a backpack from Patagonia. They actually have a used gear section of their website. Right, I love the marketing of it, right? It's implying that their things stand the test of time. It's assuming that they're sustainable, that they're not just making disposable stuff.

But also that what they're really investing in is developing customers of Patagonia products. They don't necessarily care if they profit off each one of those transactions. They're trying to create people who like their products and understand that they work, and know from experience that it's not some piece of junk that it can be used hard by multiple people over a long period of time. I think this is really cool. And you've got to remember to all the people who aren't your customers, you are new. Your thing is new.

Sometimes I'll go, I'll do an interview in the garden. Are you okay talking about one of your older books? And I go, yeah, of course, to the people who haven't heard about it, it's not old, right? To the people who are reading it for the first time, it's brand new. This newness bias is in our heads, right? Customers just want stuff that works. They just want their problem solved. Now, of course, you do have to be a creative marketer. You can have the most unique, coolest, effective, durable product in the world. But if people don't know that it exists, right, your S-O-L.

So I like to do controversial stuff. I do controversial stuff all the time. I once held an atheist church service for an author. I once sent a book to space with my bookstore. They started banning a bunch of books in the state of Texas, so we just gave them away for free in front of the bookstore. You might think that this is not great business for a bookstore, right, or drops to sell books, and here we are giving them away for free. But the attention we get, the crowds that we draw from it, we're awesome. There's a bunch of homophobic stuff happening

in the little town we're in, so we held a drag reading, which is really cool. I donated $10,000 to get a Confederate monument moved from the courthouse down the street from the bookstore. You can get negative attention for things that you were just following the law, right? People get upset about things, but those people aren't your customers, and so I don't really care if I piss them off. Cards of humanity did this awesome thing on Black Friday a couple of years ago, where they just sold nothing, right?

They were counter programming what everyone else was doing. They once raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to just dig a giant hole in the ground, which they live streamed, which of course got a ton of attention. They ran a Super Bowl ad that was just a potato. Again, counter programming, right? PETA every year designs a Super Bowl ad that was just a potato. Again, counter programming.

Right? PETA every year designs a Super Bowl ad that they know will get banned from the Super Bowl. Right? So then they don't have to pay to run it on the Super Bowl. And then the media talks about PETA's banned Super Bowl ad. Right? I once sold the book via Bitcoin. We sold three copies via Bitcoin, but then the author got made the front

page of Yahoo, and then was on CNBC about it, and we sold real copies to people with real money. That was the whole point. This is, you know, I think more interesting than the free pens, or the buying naming rights to local softball team or whatever, right? When I was looking for this picture of boring bank pens, I found this awesome McSweeney's article. We're stepping away from banking to focus on pens. The only thing I hate more than the pens is the pen on the string, right? You're not even taking the free advertisement, you're... So the point is you can't be cheap and you can't be boring, right?

When you're boring, you have to pay extra. And I would argue, you don't have to pay anything at all if you have a platform, right? When Winston Churchill is driven out of power in the 1930s, this should be the end of a politician's career. Instead, he focuses on building what is basically a modern media empire. Between 1931 and 1939, Winston Churchill publishes 11 books, 400 articles all over the world and what were sort of then the blogosphere he writes in these magazines and newspapers. And he delivers 350 speeches, most of them via this newfangled thing called the radio.

He becomes one of those famous people in the world, one of the most influential people in the world, and although he has no political power, he's directly speaking to people all over the world, not just his small constituency inside England, and he's able to get his message out when the moment does come, he's primed the world for what it needs to hear, right?

This platform is power. And as a business, we have to cultivate this. So many people, their business is cultivated on platforms that they don't control or has intermediaries between them and their customer. We think about the famous sales funnel, right? At the top is awareness. How are you developing awareness? What is your platform?

How are you capturing that interest so you can drive it towards customers over a long time? So about two, two and a half years ago, my business made the decision that we were gonna stop spending money on advertising entirely. We were just gonna focus on, we're gonna take, you know, the 10, 15, $20,000 a month we were spending, and we're going to spend it instead on making cool stuff.

It just struck me that, you know, the ads were converting sure, but they weren't like a positive good in the world. No one is like, thank you for making this Facebook ad. And were I to stop the advertising, the ROI would immediately cease, right? Because as soon as the ad isn't being served, it doesn't exist to people. So I decided instead to focus all that energy on making content, we made videos.

All right, back there. Make lots of videos. Make videos. We make Instagram posts, TikToks. And these things have blown up. They do millions and millions of views on all the different platforms, and they've created a huge, huge audience for the work. So I don't have to market the work.

I just have to tell my fans that new work exists. And as much as I love TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and all the Twitter and all the places that we make content on social media, the most powerful thing has been the email list because I own the email list. There's no one in between me and those customers. And I started an email list almost 15 years ago. I wanted to be a writer. I thought, why would anyone want to hear from me?

They don't know who I am. But why would they sign up for a list for me me? They don't know who I am, but why would they sign up for a list for me? Also, they don't know who I am. And what I offer, so I decided that one day, if I wanted to write my own book, I needed to create a list of people who bought books. So I started an email list that just recommended books. And for more than 10 years, I just recommended other people's books that I really liked. This started as 50 people in the BCC field of Gmail that I would just copy and paste each month, and it grew to 10,000 people by the time my first book came out and then 20,000

and 30,000. Now hundreds of thousands of people, the daily stoic email is about 500,000 people every day. The daily dad email that I do every day is about 100,000 people. So 600,000 people every day I send a note to. That's the power that I have. That's the relationship I have with the audience that no one else can get between. And at the back of each one of the books that I publish is a prompt for the email list. It's where I put my energy, and then I don't have to do as much marketing. I don't have to spend money on advertising because I can just tell the people who have liked

my stuff in the past that I have something new. And I even now sell most of my books directly, right? And so I have not just email contact information, but I have physical addresses. I can send postcards. I can send follow-ups, right? I could just send them the book if I wanted to. I have direct access to the audience. Stefan Zwoag, a great, in an early 20th century writer, he would say, the most valuable success you can have is a faithful following, a reliable group of readers or fans or customers who look forward to what you do,

who trust you and who's trust you do not want to disappoint. I flew in this morning very early, I was very tired because I saw Iron Maiden play at the Moody Center in Austin yesterday. These are my pictures from seeing them in San Antonio before the pandemic. I didn't have time to put the new ones, but Iron Maiden, which is a band that's never really been popular, never been on the radio, is kind of absurd on their face. They have three lead guitarists.

They write, you know, 12-minute songs about Alexander the Great. They have these giant scary things that come out on stage. They've never had any huge hits. They sold out the same arena that Harry Styles is playing in next week, right? This is 40 odd years into the band existing. It was crazy to see all these different people

of all these different ages. I will say it was dudes, it was a lot of dudes. The band flies themselves to each show in their own jet, which the lead singer flies. This is just some iron maiden facts as they'll end up with marketing. But I love this quote. This is from Bruce Dickens in the lead singer. He says, we have our field and we plow it.

That's it. What's going on in the field next to us is that no interest can only plow one field at a time. So this is a band that, sure, Heavy metal was popular in the 80s, then grunge came along and it stopped being popular and then Indira came along and it was even less popular and then rap came along and it was less popular. Right. They have just been focusing on what they do for who their customers are. Their manager was once approached by a fan in the industry said, hey, you hey, I love what you do.

You're one of my favorite people in the music business. And they said, I'm not in the music business. He said, I'm in the iron fucking maiden business. Right? He's in it for his fans for what they do. That's what you want. I'm not in the publishing industry. I'm in my industry.

Me, Inc. I have my fans, my customers. I don't care what's popular. I don't care what's selling. When I walk by an airport, I don't go, Oh, I wish I was there. I know who I'm speaking to and I speak to them every single day. Right? Lady Gaga said, I'm not the next Madonna. I'm the next Iron Maiden. And you can see why she would say this. This is their 17th album. They've done multiple live albums, like 25 world tours. They've sold almost 100 million records. They more streamed than some of the biggest acts in the world. And I didn't get to do it this time,

but last time I saw them, they had this VIP package. And it was $220. And basically, they just gave you all these chachkis. That was probably $12 worth of stuff. And then a bunch of the fans could get together and talk. And everyone was excited to pay it, right? Tickets were already insane. But people wanted the upgraded experience.

They wanted more because there was this cultivated relationship. The trust that we were talking about, the thing that you don't want to disappoint, the meaningful connection. The joke about Iron Maiden from sort of snooty or people in the music industry was that this was a band that sold more t-shirts than albums, right? Which it may be true. Except for the margins on t-shirts are way better than the margins on albums. And as I watched them sell thousands of $50 t-shirts last night, you get the point, right?

When you have that relationship, when you lock in with who your customers are, you're not worried about finding more and more and more new people who are only kind of half bought in. You sell high-end stuff, the stuff that your people want, at whatever prices they think is fair, right? So you want this, the community is ultimately worth way more, and it sustains you, you evolve with them, they evolve with you, and you're immune

to what's happening in the world outside. So as I wrap up here, I guess what I would say is that, look, life is very brief. You don't know how long we're here. No, no, how long we get to do this. This is why the Stokes remind themselves, Memento Mori, right? Remember that you could die. Marks really says, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. This is important part of the creativity process for me, the mindset that I want to have. I go, look, am I giving this moment all that I have? Am I doing my absolute best?

Am I making a positive difference in my industry, in my space, in my thinking long-term? Am I building something that matters that I'm proud of? Is this the legacy that I want to leave? Memento Mori puts that in perspective because we only get to do this once. Don't know how long we get to do it. So to try to make something up that moral,

to try to make something that cash is in, to try to make, to spend our precious time, our most precious resource on something we don't like, on something that we wouldn't use, on something that we know't use, on something that we know isn't decent or fair or honest, right? Life is too short. Life is too short. So as you leave today, I want to leave you with this idea that none of us know how long we're here, how long we have, and that what we spend our time on is ultimately who we are.

That's the legacy that we leave. Hopefully, it's a really long legacy. Hopefully, it endures not just for 40 years, like a man like Iron Man, not just for 100 years, like some of the businesses we've talked about, but for 500 years, like some of the businesses we talked about. But we don't know that. All that matters, all that we control the stokes and say,

is what we show up and do today, the attitude we bring to it, the ethics we bring to it, focus we bring to it, effort we bring to it, and that has to be enough. Thank you all very much. Thanks for listening to The Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in The Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend.

The app goes away. You go as the enemy, still in this is the key. The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke, we have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two.

Hey, y'all. I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kiki Pabag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bad love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do.

So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby this is Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms?

It's only fans, only bad. I want to know, so I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey Prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.