Beau VO: Once upon a time, the internet was going to be awesome. 

Beau : Haven’t seen Seth for 22 years down downtown, uh, Hastings on Hudson.

Seth: that’s why spam took off. ’cause you don’t have to pay for stamps

Beau VO: That’s one of my heroes. Seth Godin. Bestselling author, entrepreneur, marketing, visionary teacher, person who knows a lot about chocolate.

Beau: Here I brought you so I remember you like dark chocolate. Dick Taylor’s. 

Seth Dick Taylor is one of the great, perfect, 

Beau: perfect. I bought two pounds of this and I thought you might enjoy it. And if you do, then you should always have this in the house.

Beau VO: Anyway, but I digress. This was before spam, before mass scammers before social media.

Seth: And the difference is stamps cost money. 

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: If it’s worth 50 cents for Land’s End to bother me, I will be willing to put up with that because they cared enough to spend 50 cents. But the thing that happened when you went to the internet is it went to zero.

Beau VO: And then at some point the internet went bad. It started to look at users, the way the machines and the matrix looked at humans like a commodity, specifically fuel or fodder for unimaginable growth.

Beau VO: Now that clip comes from Groundhog Day, the movie starting Bill Murray, who plays this arrogant, cynical, self-centered television weather reporter who is trapped, reliving the same day till he figures out how to stop being such a jerk. That Bill Murray character is the internet. The Internet’s attitude to our privacy and data has become that Bill Murray character. I wanted to talk to Seth about the problem, that problem that we’re stuck in this internet that kind of sucks and the way maybe up and out.

Beau VO: i’m Bo Friedlander and this is what the heck, the show that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online?

Start

Seth: you can have a normal chair or that chair. 

Seth and Beau: I don’t care. Oh, you wanna sit in this one? I said I don’t care. Whichever. Oh, I’ll sit here. Fine.

Beau VO:   Seth Godin has always been one of the good guys. Back in the nineties when the internet was still young and full of promise, Seth gave us a simple idea. Attention is precious. Attention’s got value, and if you wanted someone’s attention, you had to earn the right to it, not just grab it, but the internet didn’t exactly, uh, stick with that idea.

Somewhere along the way, something changed. Spam took over. Data brokers got rich and the rest of us, we got harvested. Still long before algorithms and ad trackers and doom scrolling, Seth had already kind of figured out a different path, one that would’ve changed everything. I think. He called it permission marketing, which is where we pick up.

Seth: Well, I, I coined it and I invented email marketing. Yeah, 

Beau: so permission marketing. Can you explain it just in nutshell? Well, it’s 

Seth: super simple. Is attention worth something or not? If attention is valuable, and I think it’s worth almost as much as trust, but attention and trust are all there is. If attention is valuable and marketers can steal it from people without asking permission, they will.

Seth: And that’s what spam is. Spam is when someone shows up on unwelcome and steals your attention, which you can’t get back, right? You only get 24 hours a day. They don’t make any more of it. So permission marketing is the idea that if you can earn the privilege. Of delivering anticipated personal and relevant messages to people who wanna get them.

Seth: That is an extraordinary asset. So if you think about a company, you know, the first 20 years of Amazon, anyone could have copied what they were doing. The thing they had wasn’t the database. It was permission that if Amazon wanted to talk to you, you wanted to hear from them. Were their competitors. That wasn’t true.

Seth: If you earn that and protect it, you’re gonna create an asset for the long haul. On the other hand, if you strip mine people’s attention and you scam and race to the bottom, then you’re a spammer. 

Beau: Mm-hmm. Okay. So on the way over here, I was thinking about the movie Groundhog Day. 

Seth: Mm-hmm. 

Beau: And Groundhog Day is about a narcissist, essentially.

Beau: Who has to live the same day over and over and over again until he figures out what’s wrong and what’s wrong. He’s what’s wrong. 

Seth: Yeah. 

Beau: Now I was thinking about it because the internet has become Bill Murray and Groundhog Today. 

Seth: The internet is a dumpster fire that amplifies the most selfish, short, uh, term.

Seth: Systemic thinking of anybody who engages in it. So let’s break this into pieces. Okay. Email works because it’s an open API. And what does that mean? It means anybody can put things into email and anyone can take things out of email.

Seth: There’s no gate and that’s why it worked. But that’s why spam took off. ’cause you don’t have to pay for stamps when social media comes along. If you are. Backed by, uh, investors. If you seek to go public, if you want your stock price to make to go up, you need to make certain metrics go up all the time.

Seth: Well, the easiest way to do that is to encourage people to be selfish and angry and noisy. And to have fights. ’cause fights attract crowds. Right, right. And so we’ve built this place where we amplify long-term human systems that are all about. Selfish, short-term thinking. It’s like turning the love canal, toxic waste dump into something in everybody’s front yard.

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: And a long time ago, I started talking about the fact that community action is the way we make life civil community action says this is a school so you can only go 15 miles an hour here. 

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: We know that you wanna go 60 miles an hour. We know that you might think it’s important to go 60 miles an hour.

Seth: You may not go 60 miles an hour. The community said no. And the problem with the open API mindset of the internet is that every time people think about taking community action, it squirrels away and runs away.

Beau: Mm-hmm.

Seth: So even though you and I say these interactions in social media are making our lives worse because everyone else is doing it, it sucks people back in and we need to wake up before it gets even more toxic and say no.

Seth: That’s not okay. You can’t do these sorts of things here. This isn’t about protesting things with free speech. This is about being manipulated by systems that are selfish. So it’s not that the internet is Bill Murray . It’s that, uh, there are companies that are rewarded for acting like Bill Murray.

Transition

Beau: You described this dumpster fire, social media where, things are privileged that cause, uh, rubbernecking.

Beau: Fights.

Seth: Sure.

Beau: Right. That’s attention, 

Seth: right? 

Beau: That’s, that’s the bedrock of marketing. 

Seth: Correct. 

Beau: But it’s not permission marketing. 

Seth: Right. Because what’s happening here is you are stealing people’s attention in an unsatisfying way over and over and over again, which is why it’s innervating and exhausting people.

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: The kind of permission I’m talking about is simple. Would they miss you if you were gone? Right. If that street fight that broke out, that distracted you for a couple minutes, if that street fight hadn’t happened, would you have missed it? No. No. Exactly. Whereas if, uh, Dick Taylor is launching a new flavor and they don’t tell me and I miss out, I’m annoyed at that.

Seth: ’cause I’ve given them my permission.

Beau: I was immediately going to Dick Taylor. Like, what do you mean Dick Taylor? Dick Taylor has a fig chocolate bar and 

Seth: right. 

Beau: I didn’t hear about it. 

Seth: Exactly. 

Beau: So permission marketing is alive and well, we all know about it ’cause we all buy stuff and then the minute we buy something online it says, can we send you an email?

Seth: There’s things that look like permission marketing, but they miss the point. Okay. 

Beau: Explain that 

Seth: there’s still real permission marketing. Mm-hmm. And as, because I don’t like being hypocrite, I would be an example of that. I can reach a million people every single day. Yeah. With my blog. And I have never once abused it.

Seth: Right. I don’t have popups and I don’t have pop unders, and I don’t have opt-outs, and I don’t do all the things that MBAs push companies to do to, to gradually turn it into spam. Right. And this is the problem. The problem is you bought something from this store and now all of a sudden, this happened to me last week, three emails a day until I unsubscribe.

Seth: Because in the mindset they have is, well, if we don’t sell him right now, he’s gonna go away anyway. Let’s just spam him into submission. That’s not permission. I wouldn’t have missed those three emails the next day if they hadn’t arrived.

Beau: Yeah.

Seth: So they forgot to take the long term view. Yeah. So my friend Paul runs a company called PS Audio.

Seth: They’re one of the giants of high-end stereo equipment, Paul. Does an email and a video every single day to people. There’s only probably 50,000 of us who are into high-end audio. Mm-hmm. If he misses a day, 50,000 people miss him. 

Beau: The guy who has like the turntable that’s that thick made outta plex across Yeah.

Beau: With the end, with the motor in the next room. Right. 

Seth: Yeah. He doesn’t make turntables, but he’s, that’s his customer. That kind of world. Yeah. His entire company, Paul and I talked about this how many years ago? 20 years ago? Yeah. And he got the joke immediately and he’s built the whole company. He runs a multi multimillion dollar company, and that is at least 80% of his sale.

Seth: Because he protects it. It’s all you’re gonna hear from him. You’re gonna get the newsletter, you’re gonna see the video. And it’s not about almost all the time, not about what he’s selling, it’s about what he knows about Transformers, what he knows about tubes, what he knows about power supplies. And every once in a while he has a new product and he says, and we just launched a new product, lemme tell you why.

Transition

Beau: Okay. So what happened? Here’s the question I have because like I.

Beau: Uh, there’s data broker sites out there right now, and this is pacs on their houses. Yeah. Pacs on their houses, but they but it’s not just them. The, the, the, the Groundhog Day situation Sure. That we’re in is very much dates back to the year after we first met when Facebook took off. And we’re like, well, what are they gonna do with all this data?

Beau: What are they gonna do with all this attention? And didn’t, isn’t that where the race downhill? I don’t want to rag on meta necessarily.

Seth: Well, it’s super fun to rag on meta, but No, it’s before that. Scraping goes back at least a hundred years. There’s a long history of people who sold mailing lists. Edith Roman was the one I grew up with as a marketer.

Seth: So you would call the Edith Roman Company, call the 800 number and say, I would like to buy a mailing label for every woman in New York City who has a handgun. I want her home address on sticky labels. And they would, they were 30 cents each. And there they are. They show up five days later and you can send a mail, a letter to all those people.

Seth: Okay. So Lillian Vernon lands at LL Bean. How did LL Bean become L Bean? LL Bean became LL Bean because a man named LL Bean made waterproof hunting boots, and he bought the list of every person in Maine who had a hunting license and he mailed them a letter. 

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: And he made enough money to do it again.

Seth: And to do it again, and it scales. And the post office has made a living from that for a very long time. But there’s a huge difference. And the difference is stamps cost money. 

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: So the socially acceptable thing is if it’s worth 50 cents for Land’s End to bother me, I will be willing to put up with that because they cared enough to spend 50 cents.

Seth: But the thing that happened when you went to the internet is it went to zero. Not 50 cents, but zero. So the data brokers started by being at the very beginning, online spammers. They just said, we’re gonna harvest every email we can. It doesn’t have to be specific. ’cause if you’re going to email somebody, it can cost 50 cents it since it costs zero.

Seth: Just email ’em all, 

Beau: email everybody. Oh, you don’t hunt Too bad. Yeah, 

Seth: we, it didn’t cost us anything to bother you. Yeah. And that’s what led to me inventing. Permission marketing was, oh, there’s all this spam and it will go to infinity unless, and then marketing online will just be completely broken unless somebody figures out a reason that people want to open the email.

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: Okay. So the problem is there’s a system and the system says, I’m just doing my job. My boss needs me to grow. I’m, we’re in a hurry. If I don’t do my job, I’m gonna lose my job. How are we gonna grow? And so all these cycles of bad behavior. Lousy content marketing, all this, um, you know, stuff to trick people, link bait, all of these things were around before meta.

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: What Zuckerberg figured out how to do was say to Harvard students, there’s someone talking about you behind your back. Someone at Harvard is talking about you. Do you want to hear what they’re saying? And people eagerly signed up for that ’cause that’s human nature. 

Beau: Yep. 

Seth: And it went from Harvard to Yale to every Ivy League school, and then it kept spreading.

Seth: Mm-hmm. But the entire dynamic was, I am going to give my permission to do this because the itch in the back of my head, the fear of being ostracized by my group without me knowing it is too great. 

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: So the very origins of the thing are negative cycle. It was a negative cycle of saying, yeah, there’s gossip going on here.

Seth: I better hear it. 

Beau: Self-centered attention. 

Seth: Yeah. And so then he says, well, how are we gonna make money? And in the movie, the social network. Yeah. Um, uh, you see the author of the movie pretending he’s the guy who wrote the screenplay pretending he is working at Facebook, going to talk to ad agencies and Aaron.

Seth: And I knew Aaron when he wrote a few Good Men on my laptop actually. And um, Aaron gets thrown outta the ad agencies ’cause the ad agencies don’t know how to buy that. And so what Facebook figured out how to do was go to people just like Google did, who were willing to pay a nickel for a click. It didn’t cost very much.

Seth: Let’s see what happens. And it then worked its way up to a hundred dollars a click, which is what Google gets for an ad from a law firm. And. Because it’s direct marketing, it’s measured marketing. And the thing about measured marketing, the magic of it is when it works, you do it more immediately, your budget goes to infinity.

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: So Facebook has all of these clients who have basically signed an open purchase order to say, if we can get more of these clicks, we will buy them all. 

Beau: And they’ve, and they’ve decided what their cost of acquisition is and they’re happy with it. 

Seth: Well, yeah, because if you, let’s say, you know, you run a skydiving facility.

Seth: Gosh, New York. Oh, I’ve been there and you know, you, you make a profit of $140 every time someone jumps out of a plate, let’s say. 

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: You’d happily pay $130 for a new customer because they might come back again and then you get all the money, but at least this time you got 10 bucks. Why wouldn’t you, you 

Beau: almost certainly get their friend.

Seth: Yeah. 

Beau: The whole, the 

Beau: whole nut. 

Seth: Right. But the magic that Google figured out is 

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: Once the guy in, in Goshen 

Beau: mm-hmm. 

Seth: Is willing to pay 130. He’s only paying like 10 because there’s no competition for that. Click. 

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: But then the other skydiving place, 10, 10 miles down the road, sees that the Goshen guy’s getting all the clicks.

Seth: So he bids 11, 12, 13, 40, and it goes up to the marginal cost, marginal benefit of one 30. Yeah. So all the money goes to the seller. Almost none of the profit goes to the buyer. So they’re working super hard to run a skydiving place. Google makes $130 from every customer they make. 10. 

Beau: Yeah. Nobody’s in anywhere near spending 50 cents on a, on a, on sending out a direct mail piece.

Seth: No, because you, you only pay if it works.

Beau VO:  Okay, so Seth nailed it. Spam is stolen attention, but the problem isn’t just our inboxes, It’s the entire MO of the internet. It’s not just data harvesting either. Big data collects everything they can about you without you reading the part of the privacy policy where you consent to that and they deploy that data not just to target ads.

They’re in the business of changing who you are, flying the kite of who you are on the changing winds of desired business outcomes. Hmm. Next up, how we got stuck in this loop.

C Break 1

Beau: Let’s talk about the wrong turn. I feel, I have a feeling you’re gonna correct me on this and that’s great. ’cause I can’t imagine I have the right answer, but I feel like there was a wrong turn and, uh, back around 2000. There was a wrong turn in the way that people who were had VC and were starting to start, companies were thinking about what the internet could do.

Seth: Mm-hmm.

Beau: And that’s when the internet became Bill Murray and Groundhog’s Day and, and it’s been having the same day over and over ever since, which is this internet, this great promise. You know, like with all marketing, like what’s the promise? This could be an, a connected world. This could be mm-hmm. You know, universal income because we don’t need to work because everything’s perfect in AI solving all our problems.

Beau: I’m so, where do we go there? But yeah, worry. But, but, so, but, but

Seth: there were at least three wrong turns that, that’s what I want to hear about. And it was before 2000, but the wrong turns are number one. Yeah. We needed to charge for stamps and we had the chance. I, I convened a meeting right after I got to Yahoo and I almost pulled it off and I failed.

Seth: Totally acknowledging I failed AOL Yahoo. One or two other companies. If the four of them have gotten together and said everyone gets a hundred emails for free and after that every day they’re in nickel each. Oh, it would’ve changed everything for email marketing.

Beau: How so?

Seth: Well, because no human I know sends more than a hundred emails a day.

Seth: The only people who are sending more than a hundred emails a day are businesses. So now instead of, uh, spammer sending a million, they’re gonna be picky ’cause they’re nickel leach. They’re only gonna email the people they wanna get it 

Beau: right. 

Seth: So email spam would go down dramatically. So that’d be the first thing.

Beau: Buy stamps 

Seth: by sell stamps. Buy stamps. So there’d be a business model. Yep. Because each Yahoo and AO would’ve made a fortune selling stamps. Right? Everyone would’ve been happy. It would’ve been a, a really cool outcome. Number two is, uh, many people, and I was not one of them. I made a lot of mistakes, but I was not one of them said anonymity is a good thing online.

Seth: And I think anonymity is a bad thing online. If you walk into a bank with a stocking over your head, they don’t say, would you like to make a deposit? They call the FBI. Yeah. Because anonymous people aren’t welcome to walk into banks. 

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: Why do we let anonymous people ruin our day? Why do we let anonymous people talk about us behind our back?

Seth: Why all this stuff online? 

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: At the beginning it was just fun and games, but now it’s been weaponized by bot farms and everything else. If there was a bias that said, nothing’s anonymous here. You’re not anonymous at the VFW Hall, you’re not anonymous at the volunteer fire department. Why are you anonymous here?

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: If you get rid of anonymity, another thing shifts, and then the third thing. Which comes from Corey. Ro is the idea of adversarial interoperability. I love that word. ’cause it’s two words, ’cause it’s seven syllables. Adversarial interoperability is a standard that says every social media site has to be open for data exchange partners, et cetera.

Seth: So Twitter can be Twitter, but I’ve gotta be able to plug my thing into Twitter and I’ve gotta be able to take my data outta Twitter. It belongs to me. It doesn’t belong to them. And when you start to do that, when we own our own words, when we own our own data, when we can move it around.

Beau: Mm-hmm.

Seth: Now the power shifts back to the people who deserve it.

Seth: The people who created the attention in the first place. Right. But instead the business model, the, the thing that got the VCs so excited and, and Google was really the breakthrough when they figured out how to do the ads that. Bill Gross pioneered was Infinity is what VCs want, and the Infinity comes from when you can harvest attention for free and sell it for a lot.

Beau: And that’s where the data brokers come in too. Yeah. That’s, that’s the, that’s the end of everything. That’s when the Wild West starts. 

Seth: Well, yeah, and I think that most of the people I know who do most of these jobs are not evil, horrible people. Mm-hmm. They’re just saying, I’m just doing my job. And if the boundaries were different, they would make different decisions.

Seth: And the problem is short-term thinking influences the regulators as well as the regulated, and you end up with the boundaries getting more and more porous. 

Beau: So on the anonymity thing, I’m curious, how would you enforce that? How would you That there was a decision. And then, and then, you know, trolls were possible people could walk up to you online with a mask on and say, boo.

Beau: Um, how would you, how would that be designed out of existence? 

Seth: Well, okay, so the, the other thing that is sad and interesting is that it’s one thing to hustle when you’re behind, but what would’ve happened if Cheryl and Mark had said, you know what? Facebook’s not gonna run political ads. We can afford it.

Seth: We’re just not gonna run political ads. 

Beau: A lot of problems would’ve been solved. 

Seth: I mean, like leadership matters, making hard choices matters, 

Beau: right? 

Seth: If the people who were influencing and regulating the internet had said to just a half a dozen companies the same way they did with the, you know, digital Millennial Copyright Act and other things, certain things aren’t gonna work for you if you permit.

Seth: Anonymous behavior. Mm-hmm. They wouldn’t have permitted anonymous behavior ’cause it wouldn’t have been in their interest. Right. But we made it in their interest to make it so that you can have 40 email addresses 

Beau: and legislated it so that, you know, the, the, the host was not, uh, responsible for what was being posted.

Beau: Yeah. And, and that’s been a huge part of the problem. 

Seth: Yeah. And on the other end, if we had made the host responsible, the internet wouldn’t have existed. 

Beau: Well, but here’s the thing is that the people who invented. The internet, not all of them, but the people who invented the internet that we’re using right now, they weren’t making, they weren’t in legislation because why would they be?

Beau: They weren’t, that’s not where the money was. 

Seth: Well, the people who 

Seth: invented the internet No, 

Beau: but you know what I’m saying, didn’t make money from it. No, I understood. Right. They wanted, they had, I’m not talking about the sixties and seventies Right. I’m talking about the, the right Yes. World. It, it wasn’t in Yahoo’s, 

Seth: it wasn’t in Yahoo’s interest to go create legislation.

Beau: No. And the people who are making Yahoo Giant and the people who were making Google Giant and face and meta and all the rest, they, they were not interested in, they, they had absolutely no interest in, in, in, they could have made the laws. But they were like, why, why would you No, I was in the room with them.

Beau: Stop this train. 

Seth: Yeah. No, I, I still have an email from my boss at Yahoo. Who, and it just said, cool. It cool, it, cool it. The stock was going up $3 every day. Yeah. $3 every day, which means there were people down the hall I knew who had a hundred thousand shares and we’re not selling stamps. Yeah. But right.

Seth: So, so they, there was this mindset of don’t touch anything. We’re not sure why it’s working. It’s working. Just, just stand there. 

Beau: And none of those guys were gonna run for Senate and say, Hey, this isn’t right. 

Seth: Yeah. Well, when I, when I testified to the Senate, um. They were, they were colleagues of mine kicking me, literally kicking me under the table.

Seth: Mm-hmm. When I was saying the single best thing you can do is regulate commercial email. Commercial email is not free. Speech regulate commercial email. Don’t let spam be allowed. The Can Spam Act hadn’t been passed yet, but do that times 10. Mm-hmm. Because it’s a pox on everybody else and the people from double clicking whatever, like don’t do sh Don’t do that.

Seth: Yeah. Yeah. And so now we have to suffer from it. I’m not saying I’ve been right about all this. I was wrong about so many things. What I’m saying is it’s not too late for us collectively to say. How do we want to spend our days? How do we want our kids to spend their days? What are the standards here?

Seth: ’cause the market isn’t gonna fix itself. 

Beau: No, and the, and it was a great example ’cause my cousin who’s couldn’t possibly be less interested in online culture mm-hmm. Um, he left this part of the world from a family and show business and became a Mormon. 

Seth: Okay. That’s a leap.

Beau: A hundred percent. Hi, Jonathan. but there was a serious event in America this year, 2025.

Beau: Um, and, uh, a, a public figure was killed in the process. And, the only thing my cousin had to say about it was before anyone could say anything, every, he had, he has 11 grandchildren. Every one of them had seen that video.

Seth: Yeah.

Beau: And that’s like, is that part of what needs to get fixed? 

Seth: This is not my area of expertise.

Beau: Okay. Well, 

Seth: but I, I will say you don’t have to. No, we, I just, we have to be very careful about the difference between. Looking at the incentives that systems have versus trying to draw really bright lines of yes and no. So I grew up near Love Canal in Buffalo, New York. Okay. The incentive for chemical companies was to dump their waste in the cheapest possible place.

Seth: Mm-hmm. Because to do anything else was to make your stock price go down. So when you change the incentives, you change the behavior. So as we see, for example, solar power getting cheaper, the incentive is to switch to that. No one has to tell you to do it. No. ’cause it’s just cheaper. So when we think about expression community, the way people engage with each other, I am really focused on how do we change little pieces of the system that will change incentives as opposed to saying, you can’t do that, but you can do that.

Beau: So legislation’s not the answer at this point? Well, 

Seth: certain kinds of legislation. Are very draconian. Right? If you’re gonna say, we’re gonna make a rule about which videos, like, I think as a community, we’ve probably made very good decisions about videos affecting children. Mm. Right? Mm-hmm. But there’s plenty of gray area.

Seth: Sure. And I’m not sure how I want to be in charge of the gray area. I don’t want 

Beau: anyone to be in charge of the gray 

Seth: area. So that’s, that’s the only process. 

Beau: Well, but, but then let’s talk about incentivizing, uh, getting the. Some of the worst elements. The worst elements that came out of Pandora’s Box. Yeah.

Beau: In this process. Well, that’s part of why, how do you get ’em back? In? 

Seth: Part of what I’m saying is anonymity matters. Yeah. Because you don’t know online. If you’re talking to a talking dog, if you’re talking to a bot, if you’re talking to an ai. Or if you’re talking to somebody sure, who’s in their basement.

Beau: But, but, and then how do you, but that’s the thing that I don’t understand and I’m, I’m looking at you and you can tell, I actually don’t understand, um, how that could be changed right now. And, and maybe you don’t either, but, 

Seth: well, I think that you could, 

Beau: or a social media com media company comes along that says, Hey, they’re whispering about you.

Seth: I, I think that. The internet keeps evolving, right? Yeah. And it evolves in response to two things, technology mm-hmm. And the community. Mm-hmm. So when the community says clubhouse is the coolest, fun thing, ’cause we can whisper and blah, blah, blah, and technology supports it, boom it goes.

Seth: Yeah. But then the, the community says. We’re not tech people. The masses aren’t interested in that. And so it goes away and the next thing comes the next thing. So when AI shows up, when another social network shows up, they’re responding to what they’ve seen come before. So I don’t live, work or deal with what happens in legislation around the world, but it is probable that you could come up with a way to make it so that.

Seth: Non-anonymous email accounts, non-anonymous social media accounts are elevated above ones that are anonymous. There you go. And then once you start that process, however you do it, 

Beau: mm-hmm. 

Seth: That process will continue because people, if the system can come out ahead using something, it always will. 

Beau: Mm-hmm. 

Seth: And that’s what we’re, what, what I’m trying to get at.

Seth: So like, we want, let me just switch gears to the climate. All right? 

Beau: Yeah. 

Seth: If you gave everybody a dividend every year. Based on charging a surcharge on people who use carbon when they have the option to not. So you would get a check in the mail if someone decided to, you know, go burn something when they had the option not to.

Seth: The price of burning things would go up. 

Beau: Oh yeah. Right. 

Seth: Yeah. And. Everything would shift because your incentives would shift and that one little change of you’re either sending money into the pot or you’re getting money outta the pot 

Beau: mm-hmm. 

Seth: Would dramatically transform all of our decisions. 

Beau: Right.

Beau VO:  So three big wrong turns, right? Money changing hands without user permission. The ease of scraping data that makes it profitable, right?

And the failure to distinguish between helpful and dangerous data brokers. That’s how we ended up here. Seth Godin has long advocated for change by changing incentives, right? Everything is marketing, and marketing is attention. Change happens because we change what we focus on.

You know, there’s a saying, you know, if we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. So we change the way we, you know, what we focus on as a group. That’s community action. We talk about that next.

C Break 2 

Beau: now let’s talk about money changing hands and how that can change things.

Beau: I’m curious to know if there’s any permission marketing. Like idea that can address and destroy the current ecosystem of data brokers, because I do that every day. That’s what I work on. And I think that data brokers are, there’s many kinds of data brokers, some are fine, some help helped me buy my house.

Beau: Um, and, and, and if I, they didn’t exist, my credit wouldn’t exist and mm-hmm. Fine. Others are absolutely unnecessary. Like, I don’t need somebody to snap my picture at Dwayne Reed or CVS, I’m not pri privileging one or the over the other and, and, and, and ask Pi eyes who I am, which they can do, and then use that name to find out where I live.

Beau: Because I was wearing a T-shirt they disagreed with. Mm-hmm. That scares me. Like we’re living in that economy. How do you de privilege that kind of information? I mean, how do you 

Seth: approach that? Yeah, no, it’s a very tricky thing. You know, Bruce Schneider has written brilliantly about it. Shoshana Zuboff has written brilliantly about it.

Seth: Yes. Way better than me. But again, you’re not gonna ban data brokers for the very reason you just talked about the mortgage market would fall apart. Right, right. You have to create these fundamental dynamics that cause the system to ingest them and act differently. And the method for doing that will require way more ground knowledge than I have.

Beau: And that’s incentivization though. But the, the, the, the, the, the basic rules are gonna probably be the same, correct? 

Seth: Yeah. The basic rule of the whole thing is. It’s not worth racing to the bottom to start putting together pieces of data that the user doesn’t want you to put together to make a nickel.

Seth: Because you won’t make a nickel. You’ll lose a nickel doing it, so they’ll stop. Right? Yeah. And so when we change the rewards of a system, 

Beau: yeah, 

Seth: the system. Does what it’s really good at, which is getting more rewards. 

Beau: Yeah. And those, and that’s scrape data that people are using. Like, uh, someone once said, you know, revenge, it doesn’t pay, you know, there’s no money in it.

Beau: So, so like, you know, but the same token, you know, like, it’s just like, what are you gonna use make a situation where that data is more annoying and expensive than it’s worth. 

Seth: Yeah, exactly. Because the all only other alternative is to have a monarchy. We trust a benevolent monarch to make all of our decisions, and we have no good experiences doing that.

Beau: Well, they’re never nice .

Transition

Beau: when we first met. You reached out to me because I was publishing books and we met at Citi Bakery and you told me about change this, um,

Beau: what, you know, what kid is gonna come and what’s the solution look like? What do we, what do, what is, what is the, the, now what is the big topic that you’re thinking about? 

Seth: Let me answer the question a little differently 

Seth: It’s Very easy to listen to the gloom and the dooms, much of which we’ve just gone over and say, I give up.

Seth: I’m a victim. This isn’t gonna get any better. It’s a disaster. 

Beau: Okay? 

Seth: That’s what the system wants you to do. It’s also tempting to say, I personally, all by myself will simply opt out of X, Y, or Z, and that’s tempting, but it’s not gonna change very much. The thing that. Always changes things ’cause it’s the only thing that changes things is community action.

Seth: When you find three other people who find three other people who find three other people, you know, if you haven’t been on the other side, when an organization gets 20 or 50 or a hundred notes about something, it’s an emergency. They do not want organized. Communities of people saying, we’ve had enough of this, if they can’t outlast them.

Seth: So all we need are groups of people coming together consistently and persistently, not for in the short run, but for a long arc. And that begins to change the system when you call it out, when you name it, and when you organize around it, the system responds that if you really care about this, that’s how you change it.

Beau: Thank you so much, Seth. 

Seth: A pleasure. 

Ending

Beau VO:   We willingly forfeit our most valuable non-renewable resource, our attention to a digital world that feeds on it.

Now, it wasn’t always a digital world that did that. First it was junk mail, then spam. Now it’s data brokers and the quiet scraping of everything we’ve ever posted. It starts with a privacy policy that no one reads and endlessly repeats in the daily blind opt-in breach of our privacy. This is why the internet has become a dumpster fire, a system that rewards short term selfish profit while treating our digital communities like a toxic waste dump. Essentially, companies are pursuing infinity growth and the cost is your attention because of an underlying structural problem. We can’t charge money for our attention, but we can ’cause we’re consumers. That’s money’s changing hands there.

Seth Godin offers the better idea, the solar power of online life, a sustainable way forward. Built on permission and earned trust. It’s slower. Sure. It’s more ethical though. It doesn’t scale as easily for the people who want to own the whole damn world yesterday, which is fine with me, but it scales great for us.

It sounds like marketing because that’s what it is, but with some digital self-respect. The internet is Groundhog Day Loop doesn’t break until we collectively decide it’s time to change the vibe as a community.

TFS

And now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. Let’s talk about a simple change.

Your primary email address is an attention taker. It’s become a passive source of endless distraction, operating as if the permission you granted once upon a time is irrevocable. But you can take that power back with email masking. If you use DeleteMe, you have email masking as a service so check it out. 

This is your act of digital resistance—the marketing version of the “one straw revolution.”

Email masking uses a unique, single-purpose digital alias for every company you do business with.

If that company is a good steward of the privilege you extended—access to your attention—the email works. But if they abuse it—if that unique address shows up in a breach or they start spamming—you don’t have to change your primary email address.

You simply go to your privacy tools and revoke permission for that single alias. You turn off the tap.

This destroys the value of the commodity. You make the data too fragmented and too expensive for brokers to maintain. You start to make it make more sense to spend 50 cents on postage.

You break the system: by making the gift of your attention finite, conditional, and worth something.

That’s our Tinfoil Swan for this week. Thank you so much for joining us.