iPhone is nothing but a Star Trek communicator.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Godin: And — and — and so, the …

Ms. Tippett: And I'm still missing a lot of those characters.

Mr. Godin: Exactly, yeah. And so, you know, for someone in your shoes, the magic is this: that you're back to the weighing machine versus the voting machine. You will never have better ratings than the Jersey Shore. But that's not what the purpose is. It's not what the point is. It's not why we do our work. What works is does it matter? And is it possible to make a living doing something that matters? And the answer is, yes. Is it possible to make the maximum amount of money? Probably not. But that's playing by a different set of rules.

That what the Internet is saying to us is you don't need a building, and you don't need an FCC license, and you don't need 10,000 employees. So when I strip those away and I get to the nub of what I can be and what I can do, it turns out it's not that expensive for me to put my art in the world. So I can make more mistakes. I can take bigger risks. And I can make a bigger impact. Not to a lot of people. Like I'm thrilled that almost everyone I meet has no idea who I am and what I do. Because I don't want lots of people showing up and saying, I read this, I read this, I read this. Can I have your autograph? That's not the point. The point is will someone come up to me and say, based on what I learned from you I taught 1o other people to do this, and we made something that mattered.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Godin: And you don't — you can't accomplish that if you're trying for ratings on the scale of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Ms. Tippett: So is that true that you are not recognized? I mean, you're saying that personally? Do you …

Mr. Godin: Yes.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, right. So this is this funny phenomenon of, you know, you and — I don't know — somebody like Brené Brown, it's true as well. It's this phenomenon of amazing things that are just under the cultural radar. And yet the irony there is something you, for example, or Brené Brown with her how many millions of people have watched her TED Talks. It's the niche, maybe that would be called the niche. But these niches are huge, some of them — some of them — and they're powerful.

Mr. Godin: Yeah, I think it's — I need to interrupt you. Because you're falling into the same trap, which is there is not such thing as cultural radar anymore. There's cultural radars. Right?

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Godin: That the New York Times Bestseller List is stupid. And they should stop publishing it. Because it doesn't mean anything.

Ms. Tippett: OK. But there it is, right.

Mr. Godin: Because it's actually the collection of 100 best-seller lists all mushed together. Right. That if you look at the list of the most popular TED Talks, it's a silly list, because very few people have seen all of them. So what you're seeing is 20 best-seller lists all mushed together. And if we're going to say, I'm not a success unless I'm on that best-seller list or this best-seller list or I get that thing in advance, or I have these sorts of ratings — you're playing the game of the industrialist.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Godin: Whereas, the other way to think about it is, how few people can I influence and still be able to do this tomorrow? Because if we can influence just enough people to keep getting the privilege to do it, then tomorrow there'll be even more people. Because we're doing something genuine that connects, as opposed to doing something fake that's entertainment.

Ms. Tippett: So how do you — you must have people come to you who say, well you know, let's just say this. There are a lot of great things that happen which don't get recognition, don't sell. I mean, you have this idea — and I share this — that everyone, you know, that we all have something, right, we have that are all worthy and valuable and that there's something like a talent or a passion or a calling. But the truth is that these things get drummed out of many of us in different ways. And also that your passion might not be your talent. And also that every idea is not a good idea. So how do you advise people to be discerning on this? And that's another word you use that's really important to me, discernment. And I don't think it's a word we use that much in connection with something like the Internet. But you know, how do you help people who think about where to start and how to be wise?

Mr. Godin: Well, let me weave together two people in my answer. The first one is Robert Irwin, who is a little-known conceptual artist from the 1960s and '70s. And he talked a lot about learning how to see. That art is the act of making something where you forget the name of what you're seeing. And what we see among everybody who is managing to do this kind of work is that they've noticed things. They have learned how to see the difference between good and bad.

That Clive Davis understood how to listen to a record and say, my kind of listener is going to like this kind of record. And the only way you get that discernment is by practicing. Is by saying, when I pick this am I right? When I put this in the world, did it resonate with the people I was trying to reach? And then, so then we get to the 10,000 hours and the whole notion that if you practiced noticing enough, you'll get good at it.

Ms. Tippett: And that means you're not good at the beginning necessarily, and you'll fail?

Mr. Godin: Right. The only people who are good at the beginning are lucky.

Ms. Tippett: That's good.

Mr. Godin: You can't claim that it's a skill that you can see and other people can't see. That you got lucky in that you started with a set of assumptions that happen to resonate with the marketplace. But you're not smarter than the rest of us — you just, someone had to start in the right place and you did. But the second part that's so critical here is the Oprah Winfrey problem, which is that every writer who wanted to make an impact 15 years ago dreamed that Oprah would pick them.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Godin: And so in a media-saturated world, we want to get picked. So like you, every day people show up to me and say, pick me, put me on your blog. If you would just talk about me, then my art will reach everyone I want to reach. But if we distinguish that from Darwin, you know the first lizard that crawled out of the mud and started walking on legs didn't say to the media, please pick me so that more for walking lizards could come along. That's not the way it worked; it's bottom-up. So what I say to people is, I'm not in charge of what's good. I don't get to pick what's a purple cow, what's remarkable — anything. That the world is, the bottom is, everybody, I'm on the bottom too, everyone is. So tell 10 people — there are 10 people who trust you enough to listen. And if you tell your thing to 10 people — if you send your e-book to 10 people — if you do your sermon to 10 people or show your product to 10 people and none of them want to tell their friends, and none of them are changed — then you failed. That you didn't really understand what was good. But if some of them tell their friends, then they'll tell their friends, and that's how ideas spread. So it's this 10 at a time — 10 by 10 by 10. How do you put an idea in the world that resonates enough with people if they trust you enough to hear it. That then it can go to the next step and the next step.

Ms. Tippett: Let me ask you about this word discernment. And just in terms of you, how you use technology. Because I think and this and everything else, you know, you kind of march to the beat of your own drummer. Right? So you do, you've written over 4,000 blog posts. You feed your work to Twitter, but you're actually not really on Twitter. Right?

Mr. Godin: Right.

Ms. Tippett: I mean you haven't taken that leap. You're, you don't follow anyone. But your writing goes into this Twitter account. You write books that rise to the top of the Amazon best-seller lists without doing anything that the whole world thinks you have to do to sell a book. I mean, it's not just not getting picked by Oprah, but you don't do book tours. You don't do interviews. So how, you know, what have you learned as you've worked with this thing called technology these years? How have you learned how to figure out what to throw yourself at and what to resist?

Mr. Godin: Well, I'm glad you said the word resist. We've managed to make it a long time without bringing up Steve Pressfield and the resistance for the lizard brain and the desire to hide. That what every artists wrestles with all day long is that voice in the back of their head that says, uh-oh, you've gone too far. Better not show this to anyone. So what I've tried to do is strip away the things in my life that would give me a place to hide. So I don't write the sequel. I didn't write the Permission Marketing Handbook or Purple Cow Part 2.

I don't have employees, so that way I don't have meetings. I don't spend time on Facebook and Twitter because that would be a huge suck of my time, and I could deny that I was wasting time, because everyone does it. And so the challenge for me with technology is this leveraging me in a way that makes me uncomfortable — that puts me in a spot where I have to dig deeper to do the work that I'll be proud of. If that's what it does, that's what I want.

Ms. Tippett: So that's a good, that if your answer is yes. OK. So your answer, if it's harder, what did you say? If it's challenging, if it puts you in …

Mr. Godin: Right. If it puts me — if the leverage makes it harder for me to do that thing I'm defining as art, then I want to do it.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Godin: Right. And so that, you know, the Kickstarter project I did — I did it because it was interesting, not because it was a financially important thing.

Ms. Tippett: To raise the money for The Icarus Deception? Is that …

Mr. Godin: Right. But it wasn't to raise money; it was to raise a tribe, to get 4,500 people to say, we're not, we haven't read it yet, but we trust you, go write it. Now those are pretty high stakes. Right? But and it meant I didn't have any excuses left. I couldn't say, well my editor wouldn't let me do it, or my publisher wouldn't let me do it. Because they weren't a factor. It meant that these people trusted me and gave me a tool that could bring it straight to them. That raises the stakes.

Ms. Tippett: I mean, one of the points you make about this new world we inhabit and the need and also the opportunity for each of us to be artists is that it's precisely when you are doing something that no one has done before that you are not going to get the loudest applause. Right? That you will not get picked. And that then requires us to develop some different kinds of internal resources. Right? I mean, how do we internally have faith in what we care about?

Mr. Godin: Yeah. Exactly. And that's where the discernment comes. You know, so when I give a talk — at the end you'll say, are there any questions? And the only people who are raising their hand are raising their hand because they think they have a question the group wants to hear. They think that they have something to contribute. Now what's fascinating about it is five minutes after we're done, everyone has a question. Right?

Ms. Tippett: Right. Right. Right.

Mr. Godin: Because now it's safe to ask your question because you're not going to be judged on the question that you're going to ask. But the people who do ask a question have demonstrated to themselves that they have good enough judgment to be able to put something into the world that hasn't been said before. That's what makes it a good question. And that practice is something that we should learn and we should teach our kids, and we should teach our colleagues how to do it.

So if you and I had been sitting around just after the Dark Ages and heard the story of Icarus — what we would have heard is this: that Daedalus said to his son two things — one, put these wings on but don't fly too close to the sun because it's too hot up there and the wax will melt. But more important, Son, do not fly too low, do not fly too close to the sea, because the mist and the water will weigh down the wings and you will surely perish. And for me the most important message that I've come to after thinking about this for so many years is, we are flying too low. We built this universe, this technology, these connections, this society, and all we can do with it is make junk. All we can do with it is put on stupid entertainments. I'm not buying it.

So I go back to all the things that my late mom taught me. And we can have more faith in community and charity and innovation and dignity and education. And you know, I gave this talk a couple weeks ago to some educators. And a woman in her 50s raised her hand she said, "Well, I work at a community college. And that we don't, we have a different problem. Our problem is we have to let in everybody. And let me tell you something, mister," she said, "those people can't make art." And I started to cry because here is someone who is trusted to elevate and to teach and to inspire. And she had become so beaten down that in a public setting she turned to me and she said, "Those people can't make art." And I just don't believe it.

Ms. Tippett: It's hard to move past that. So you know, a final thing I just want to name is something that's wonderful — that you say again and again, that we are all weird. And again, you're pointing at something that manifests itself in so many ways. But we don't necessarily say, it's kind of the demise of normal, which is such a relief. And I wonder maybe in that regard, or maybe in other ways. You know, you're also raising children in this time. So how does that — how does parenting — how do your kids who are growing up in this post-industrial, post-geography world — you know how do they continue to feed and inform your sense of what this means and what's at stake and what's possible?

Mr. Godin: You know, if you spend time with technically connected 15-year-olds, you're going to discover a bunch of things. First of all, many of them don't watch any television whatsoever. But they consume more video than ever before.

Ms. Tippett: That's true, yeah.

Mr. Godin: Um, and — and most of them are not concerned whatsoever about Dunbar's number and this notion that they can only have 150 friends and family, or else their brain melts. They have 1,000 people that they're connected with or 5,000 people. And they are living a life out loud. And some people are responding to that by saying, I don't care. I'll put up pictures of me drinking out of a funnel. And I will, you know, act out, because it's in the world — I'm just going to do it and that's fine.

And others — and I'm very lucky to live with two of them — are saying, wow, what a chance for me to contribute to this circle, and to organize to this circle. That here's a stage and I'm not going to put on a play, but I am going to organize something, whether it's, you know, helping to build something with Habitat for Humanity or putting a technical innovation into the world. And so as parents, we're often pushed to make this choice.

And the choice is — keep your kids out of the connection world and isolate them and make sure they're "safe." Or put your kids into the world and, you know, all hell will break lose. Those are the things that they talk about at the PTA meeting. And I don't think that's the choice. I think the choice is everyone is in the world now. Everyone is connected. You cannot keep your 12-year-old from hearing profanity.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, right.

Mr. Godin: You know, get over it. But given that they're in the world, what trail are they going to leave? What mark are they leaving? Are they doing it just to get into college? Or are they doing it because they understand that their role as a contributor to society starts now when they're 10, not when they're 24. And that the trail they leave behind starts the minute someone snaps their picture.

And if we can teach children that there isn't this bright line between off duty and on duty, but that the life is life and you ought to live it like people are looking at you, because they are, then we trust them. And we trust them to be bigger than they could be because they choose to be bigger. And it's that teaching, I think, that is so difficult to do as a parent. Because what you really want to do is protect them and lock 'em up until it's time. But the bravest thing to do is have these free-range kids who are exploring the edges of their universe, but doing it in a way that they're proud of, not hiding from.