This episode of The Eric Ries Show is all about the relationship between trust and success. I can’t think of anyone better to talk about it with than Seth Godin, author of the classic Permission Marketing, the best-seller This Is Marketing, and many other books, as well as a fantastic daily blog that has been going strong since the early days.

He also co-founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne. While the world tends to view Seth as an expert on marketing, he sees what he does in slightly different terms. “What I write about is how do humans interact? What stories do we tell ourselves? What do we want? What's worth doing?” 

We talked about the roots of “the epidemic of unicorns,” the two approaches to gaining customer loyalty, how AI has permanently changed the means of production, how to build systems that create the conditions for great work to occur more easily, plus: 

• False proxies

• The permissions hierarchy

• The power of stories

• The problem with business school

• Continuous effort

• Why Amazon lost customer trust

• Seth’s definition of marketing

• Chocolate cookies

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Where to find Seth Godin:

• Seth’s Blog: https://seths.blog/

• Seth’s site: https://www.sethgodin.com/

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sethgodin/

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sethgodin

Where to find Eric:

• Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠https://ericries.carrd.co/⁠⁠⁠ 

• Podcast: ⁠⁠⁠https://ericriesshow.com/⁠⁠⁠ 

• X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/ericries⁠⁠⁠ 

• LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/⁠⁠⁠ 

• YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@theericriesshow⁠⁠⁠ 

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In This Episode We Cover:

(00:33) Meet Seth Godin

(05:06) Seth’s book, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers

(06:31 The relationship between attention and trust

(07:29) The hierarchy of permission

(09:18) Seth’s essay Trading Trust

(10:44) Amazon’s trust for profit trade-off

(14:54) How fear of change erodes organizations

(18:16) How new paradigms spread

(20:34) Getting customers to love you

(23:20) Why business schools don’t produce leaders

(26:02) The need for internal systems to process feedback

(26:40) The two choices a brand makes in order to earn trust

(28:55) Continuous versus sporadic value creation

(33:13) How taking shortcuts leads to a brittle company

(35:35) The “holy trinity” of engineering, product, and marketing

(36:35) Seth’s definition of marketing

(39:27) The AI hype and future

(42:33) AI, ethics and trust

(44:40) How political money and ads changed Facebook’s culture

(46:48) Money and the race to the bottom

(49:30) Status, affiliation, and warm chocolate cookies

(51:13) Aphorism lightning round

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Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email ⁠⁠⁠jordan@penname.co⁠⁠⁠ 

Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.