Unfortunately, there’s also a race to the bottom, and you get a lot of junk. It’s the junk that people don’t like. Marketing that they like, people don’t call junk.

A lot of car heads will say, “No, no, no, I just buy the best car.” And I would say to them, “No, you buy the car that tells your story the best way possible.”

Anybody who has actually done marketing — not worked in a marketing department and gone to meetings, but actually done marketing — has found that the only thing that matters is empathy.

COWEN: Jeff Koons — how does his work strike you? Genius, fraud, something else?

GODIN: Anyone who’s willing to go that close to bankruptcy that many times cannot be a fraud.

You don’t teach them the history of baseball, give them the baseball encyclopedia, quiz them about Abner Doubleday, and if they do well on the test, let them go to a game. What you do is get them enrolled in the journey of being a baseball fan because five minutes of it was fun, and they want it again. The next thing you know, they’re learning statistics because they want to. They’re learning facts because they want to, not because there’s going to be a test.