Radical Authenticity Over Marketing Tricks

`0:58:18`

And that's kind of what I'm striving for with this stuff, is not to take things so damn seriously, and build a company that's afraid of itself, and afraid to do anything wrong and afraid to have an opinion. All these companies, not all, that's a very broad statement, all these companies. — Yeah. — You know what? Everyone's afraid. Companies are afraid, the PR people, and they've got to talk to lawyers before they publish anything. Everyone's afraid of everything, of saying something wrong, doing something wrong, being wrong in some way. That is not endearing. I think people want to do business with people. And they have to do business with companies because companies provide a lot of product. But I think they really want to do business with people. And maybe this is why I like the dry cleaner. Maybe this is why I like the grocery store. Maybe this is why I like running my business my way. I feel like people are dealing with people.

`0:59:06`

We don't have a big corporate structure. We're just 62 people currently doing the things that we're doing. We're all accessible, all reachable. No one's hiding from anybody. This is what we do. And there's, again, a thinness, a directness to that which just has an aesthetic value to me that I can't quite explain. It's like the quality that cannot be explained. I think it might have been Christopher Alexander or something, who was an architect, who talked about this. I might be totally off on this, but I think conceptually, the idea was, you can go see buildings in native villages, and there's no architect that made any of this stuff. They didn't have any architects. They had people making places for them to live and work and worship. And there's a certain quality to that,

`0:59:53`

which is not textbook high quality. But it's beyond high quality because it's a perfect fit for what they wanted for themselves. That's the kind of stuff I like to build. — It's kind of how you're designing your company. — Yeah. Perfect fit for us, for what we want and what we need, and again, getting back to the original thing, how many other people are there out there like us? Enough. That's the business model. — This is exactly how I started doing the podcast. I think I'm drawn to that, too. I think in people, not companies, right? — Yeah — And this is why I was drawn to podcasts to begin with, because it's impossible. Some of these podcasters that I was fans of before I had a podcast, I've heard them speak for hundreds of hours.

`1:00:38`

You can't hide who you are at that point. — Right. — You're going to like the good, you're going to hear the mistakes, and you used the word endearing, and that's exactly how I feel — Mm-hmm. — for some of the people that I admire. — Mm. — There's something about them that is endearing. In fact, a friend of mine just texted me this morning, my friend Lulu, she was listening to one of my old podcasts on Napoleon's maxims on Founders, — Uh-huh. — Episode 337, if I remember correctly. — Yeah. — And she thought it was hilarious that I didn't edit out the fact that I was mispronouncing all these French names. And I'm just like, I don't know. — Right. -I'm reading from the book. I'm like, "I don't know what this is. — Yeah. — I don't speak French, — Yeah. — so I'm just going to do this phonetically." — Yeah, just do it your way. — But it was endearing to her, — Of course. — that I didn't act like I speak French or anything. I was like, "I read books, — Yeah. — and I'm just guessing at how this is pronounced." — You're not putting on airs.

`1:01:27`

I admire anyone who is truly themselves, and that's what that was for you. You're like, "I could have probably faked the accent." You watch TV news, and the guy uses the Hispanic accent for some Spanish word, and you're like, "That's weird." — I know. — You're trying too hard. If you don't speak Spanish, you don't need to fake the accent to try to speak Spanish, is what I was trying to get at. But you see it all the time. I don't know how to pronounce French words either. I'm not even going to try. I'll just say what I say and read it phonetically, and you could even say, "I don't know how to say this." — I do say it. Exactly. — Yeah. I don't know what this is. You're going to laugh at me, but this is what it... And then you move on, and no one gives a damn because you're you, and that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is not perfect French pronunciation,