687. The Path Forward: Leading With Purpose in 2026 - Seth Godin

Summary

We Are For Good Podcast – Episode 687
The Path Forward: Leading With Purpose in 2026
Guest: Seth Godin
Release Date: March 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This special episode delivers a candid, thought-provoking conversation between the We Are For Good hosts (Jon McCoy and Becky Endicott) and Seth Godin, renowned author and social impact thought leader. Recorded as the closing session of the recent We Are For Good Summit, this discussion explores uncertainty as the new normal, the enduring importance of community, innovating amidst instability, harnessing AI without losing humanity, the true cost of caring, and practical courage for nonprofit leadership. Seth offers both philosophical wisdom and grounded advice to nonprofit professionals wrestling with burnout, risk, and the drive to make a positive impact.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Embracing Uncertainty as the New Normal

• Uncertainty as Environment, Not Season
  • Seth reminds listeners that "this is as normal as it's ever going to get again" ([02:15]). The expectation of certainty is now obsolete; instead, resilience and adaptability must become core skills.
• On Doing Good Despite Imperfection
  • “We are for good…Notice it doesn’t include…perfect, guaranteed, calm and easy, or straightforward. What creates the good shortage is it comes with things. It comes with imperfect, it comes with uncertain, it comes with things that don’t work. It comes with promises that you can’t always keep. That’s the deal.” (Seth, [02:39])
• Leadership in Uncertainty
  • You can curse the uncertainty, or accept it as the context for all positive change. “You can't run a marathon without getting tired. And you can't do good work without dancing with all the other parts.” (Seth, [03:20])

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2. The Power and Practice of Belonging & Building Tribes

• Fear and High School – The Roots of Belonging
  • “Everyone wants to be included…But all of at the same time, no one wants to organize. We want to get invited to the party, but we don't want to throw the party.” (Seth, [04:54])
  • Leadership is the act of inviting others into belonging: “We’re going to organize a cool kids table. We're going to create this environment where maybe the fear will go down just a little bit…and it reflects back.” (Seth, [05:28])
• Organizing Not for Ego, but for Others
  • “I'm not going to help organize a tribe as a fundraising hack or tactic. I'm going to organize a tribe because I can…They want to be in a tribe with each other.” (Seth, [06:20])
• Virtual Community as New Frontier
  • “We can do that in the most local place. We can also do it really virtually. That was never possible before.” (Host, [06:52])

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3. The Cost of Caring: Burnout, Attachment, & Boundaries

• Attachment and Professionalism
  • Seth explores why deeply caring creates suffering: “When the work becomes important, we get attached to it…it’s our fuel…then when it doesn’t happen…attachment is what causes us pain, not what happened, our attachment to it.” ([07:27])
  • Analogy: “If two people want to swim across a lake safely…tie them together and they’ll drown. Swim together, but don’t be attached.” ([07:27])
  • “When that patient leaves the room, you leave the room too, that you are no longer attached to the outcome. You did what you could do…” ([09:18])
• Burnout Is a Symptom of Stress
  • “All burnout is a symptom of stress. Stress is wanting two things at the same time: to flee and to stay. And if you're getting burned out, it's probably because you're attached.” ([10:14])

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4. Trust is Built on Consistency, Not Authenticity

• Consistency Over Sacrifice
  • “None of this has to do with authenticity…it's based on consistency. The same way your brakes, you trust them because they always work. If your brakes only worked, failed one out of a hundred times, you wouldn’t drive.” (Seth, [12:18])
  • He criticizes shortcuts: “You burned trust to get attention…The way we rebuild trust is by reliably making promises and keeping them.” ([13:58])
• On Nonprofit Communication
  • “If you make a promise…and you don't keep it, that action is a burning of trust.” ([13:50])

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5. Rethinking Risk: Feeling vs. Reality

• The Feeling, Not the Fact, of Risk
  • “We don't have trouble with risk. We have a trouble with the feeling of risk. Those are different things.” (Seth, [14:43])
  • “If it feels risky to go forward with a new program, but in fact, if you don't, you're taking a much bigger risk because…you didn't do anything important.” ([15:00])
  • “We're getting paid to experience the feeling of doing something risky when it's in service of the mission we signed up for.” ([15:46])

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6. Courage Over Reassurance – The Nonprofit Calling

• Art, Museums, and the Danger of Proxies
  • Seth uses the evolution of museums to illustrate nonprofit mission drift—clinging to “proxies” (like visitor numbers) instead of true impact ([17:31] – [22:38]).
  • “Lots of nonprofits need to reconfigure themselves and say what problem are we actually trying to solve? Because problems are solvable and if we can agree on our mission and walk away from our entanglements, we can go solve that problem.” ([22:54])
• Entanglement & Stress
  • “When we want two things at the same time, that's called an entanglement. And the entanglements are where almost all the stress you're talking about are coming from.” ([21:08])

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7. Navigating AI and Preserving Humanity

• Harnessing AI as a Tool, Not a Master
  • “Either AI works for you, or you work for AI and you do not want to work for AI. It's a lousy boss…it makes sense to automate every task, but greatness comes from being generative and creating community.” ([23:43] – [25:51])
  • “Everyone who works for you, everyone who's on the payroll, has to justify, why are they worth being here if they're not outsourcing all their tasks and making human decisions? Because that's really what we need from nonprofits is decisions, not tasks.” ([25:51])

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8. On Courage and Imposter Syndrome

• The Lifeguard Analogy: Imperfect Action
  • “She [the 19-year-old lifeguard] wasn't even the best lifeguard…but she was right there and she jumped in the water and she saved Robin, and he's alive because she did that.” (Seth, [28:00])
  • “It's okay to feel like an imposter. That's a symptom that you're healthy. It's a symptom that you care about quality and we feel the fear and we do it anyway.” ([29:31])

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9. Building Trust at Scale: “On the Hook”

• Accountability and Repeated Promises
  • “When you build trust, you give up freedom—the freedom to do whatever the hell you want. In exchange, you keep your promise.” ([30:42])
  • Using consistency as a lever for institutional trust, Seth describes being “on the hook” to publish, communicate, and maintain standards, day in and day out ([30:42]).

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10. Agency in the Age of AI & Undoing Systemic Compliance

• Undoing Indoctrination
  • “From the time you were three, the system has been indoctrinating you to give up agency…And then we built this trillion dollar institution of AI that's going to give agency to anyone who wants it…You have agency.” ([37:34])
  • “I've chosen a path of undoing the indoctrination of taking responsibility and making choices. That's what we make for a living. We make decisions. We don't make stuff.” ([39:14])

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Notable Quotes & Highlights

• “We don’t have trouble with risk. We have trouble with the feeling of risk. Feel it.” (Seth, [01:12])
• “You can’t do good work without dancing with all the other parts.” (Seth, [03:20])
• “No one wants to be in your tribe. They want to be in a tribe with each other.” (Seth, [06:20])
• “All burnout is a symptom of stress. Stress is wanting two things at the same time: to flee and to stay. And if you’re getting burned out, it’s probably because you’re attached.” (Seth, [10:14])
• “Consistency is what builds trust—not authenticity, not sacrifice.” (Seth, [12:18])
• “If you make a promise…and you don’t keep it, that action is a burning of trust.” (Seth, [13:50])
• “It's okay to feel like an imposter. That's a symptom that you're healthy.” (Seth, [29:31])
• “Either AI works for you, or you work for AI…what we need from nonprofits is decisions, not tasks.” (Seth, [25:51])
• “When you build trust, you give up freedom—the freedom to do whatever the hell you want. In exchange, you keep your promise.” (Seth, [30:42])
• “From the time you were three, the system has been indoctrinating you to give up agency...” (Seth, [37:34])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:15] — Uncertainty as the “new normal” and redefining nonprofit leadership.
• [04:43] — Misunderstandings about tribes, belonging, and the reluctance to lead.
• [07:27] — The emotional cost of caring; burnout, attachment, and letting go.
• [11:11] — Rebuilding trust: behavioral consistency as the foundation.
• [14:43] — Risk aversion vs. embracing calculated risk; what real risk looks like.
• [17:13] — Personal legacy stories—Seth’s nonprofit roots and museum analogy.
• [23:43] — AI’s impact on nonprofit work—automation vs. community.
• [28:00] — Lifeguard story: courage in nonprofit leadership.
• [30:42] — Building trust at scale and being “on the hook.”
• [37:34] — Agency in an AI world; undoing systemic compliance.
• [39:31] — Seth’s closing advice: Find the others, connect, and make it contagious.

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Memorable Closing

“Of course, you’re exhausted, and it’s going to get even more exhausting. So find the others. Organize the others. Connect with the others. Spread the word. Make it contagious. Because this is the point. What we are doing is the point.”
— Seth Godin ([39:31])

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Summary Takeaway

Seth Godin calls nonprofit leaders to embrace an era of perpetual uncertainty, lead with generosity, and build resilient communities rooted in trust and shared purpose. He emphasizes the need to let go of perfectionism, reframe risk, and courageously create spaces for belonging and agency, all while adapting to the new realities of technology and societal change.

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For further inspiration, check out weareforgood.com and join the community of change makers.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, friends. Welcome to a really special episode of the We Are For Good podcast. We just wrapped our We Are for Good summit a couple weeks back, and the day was met with a lot of leaders joining together, change makers who are showing up despite so much uncertainty, so much stress and strain, and just a desire, though, to still show up for the missions and impact that we want to create in the world. And so we closed the day of powerful combos with a really grounding conversation with our friend Seth Godin. And today on the podcast, we wanted to bring that conversation directly to you. So if you feel yourself sitting under the weight of all the pressure and uncertainty that is just so present in our work right now, I hope that you pull up a chair and that you really enjoy this time that we had with Seth. We're talking everything from the power of community. We're talking about innovating when nothing feels stable around us. We're talking about AI, but we're also talking about how do we not tap out of this work, the work that we feel so called to do and that we love. But at the end of the day, how do we stay engaged and not tap out? So this conversation's for you. I'm so excited that you're here with us, and I hope you enjoy.

[B]

We don't have trouble with risk. We have trouble with the feeling of risk. Feel it. Oh, my God. So if it feels risky to fly somewhere on an airplane, it's not actually. It's safer than getting to the airport in a car. It just feels risky. It might feel risky to go forward with a new program, but in fact, if you don't, you're taking a much bigger risk because you're probably going to have to shut down over time because you didn't do anything important. We sign up to say, I'm here to feel the feeling of risk, but to make good decisions. And good decisions are based on probabilities and our mission. Let's go do that. And when it feels risky. Yeah, that's part of what we're getting paid for. We're getting paid to experience the feeling of doing something risky when it's in service of the mission we signed up for.

[A]

Hey, I'm John.

[C]

And I'm Becky.

[D]

And this is the We Here for Good podcast.

[C]

Let's get started.

[D]

Seth, what an honor to be in this space with you. Thanks for being here.

[B]

It's good to see you. Good to see you, too. Thanks for coming to my hometown.

[C]

It's good to be here.

[D]

It's good to be Here, I mean, we gotta talk about uncertainty. I love how you've led us into this on a past episode. I'm gonna get this quote right. Seth, you said this is as normal as it's ever going to get again.

[C]

I remember that moment.

[B]

That one was true.

[D]

It's held up well. But if uncertainty is no longer the season, but the environment, what does evolve leadership look like right now?

[B]

Well, as you know, we spent a few hours yesterday talking about changing the name of the organization to we are for perfect or we are for guaranteed or we are for calm and easy or we are for straightforward. None of those things would be good names for the organization. Yeah, right. We are for good. Yeah. Notice it doesn't include any of the other parts because if the other parts came with it, there wouldn't be a good shortage. That what creates the good shortage is it comes with things. It comes with imperfect, it comes with uncertain. It comes with things that don't work. It comes with promises that you can't always keep. That's the deal.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And so you can hope it will go away. You can curse it or you can say, yeah, that's the deal. You can't run a marathon with getting tired. And you can't do good work without dancing with all the other parts.

[C]

So good. And I. I think about this word that is so precious to both to we are for good and to you. We use it a lot. It's in. I feel like it's the headline of tribes, which is belonging. And John is probably the biggest amboy of tribes ever. I feel like he quotes it a lot in Elvin, but it's really tribes is about building an audience. And when I revisit it now, I just think about how it's really about a deeper invitation. So I want to talk about belonging just a little bit because that's what I feel like you're saying in naming in the moment that people are wanting to be a part of something bigger that helps them become more themselves. And so in this moment, when connection feels distorted, lost, but it's also everywhere, all the time. And this is as normal as it's going to be ever. I want to know what you think we misunderstood about tribes and what matters most about it right now.

[B]

So when we're trying to analyze people, there are two things that are worth considering. Fear and high school. Okay.

[C]

More.

[B]

Because sooner or later it all comes down to those things. Starting in high school, everyone wants to be included. Everyone wants to be belong. Everyone wants to belong. But all of at the same Time. No one wants to organize. No one wants to be the person who offers belonging. No one wants to be the person who offers, including. We want to get invited to the party, but we don't want to throw the party. And so, you know, in dozens or hundreds of cities, here's a meetup, Right. Well, I want someone to invite me to the meetup. I want to make sure all the right people will be at the meetup. I would be heartbroken if I wasn't invited to the meetup. I'll feel like I'm wasting my time if the wrong people are going to meet. But I'm not sure I want to do the work to organize it, even though if I want this, I bet a lot of other people do, too. So when we think about this idea of leadership, it's an invitation to other people to give them the thing we desperately want. Right. We're going to organize a cool kids table. We're going to create this environment where maybe the fear will go down just a little bit. And we're not going to hope that someone will do that for us. We're going to do that for other people because it becomes generative and it reflects back. So I was at the uncoolest table in high school by myself.

[C]

You so would have been at the same table. Quirky kids unite.

[B]

But the quirky kids didn't.

[C]

Yeah. Because we couldn't organize and that's the

[B]

opportunity is to say, I'm not going to help organize a tribe as a fundraising hack or tactic. I'm going to organize a tribe because I can. And the people who are joining it aren't doing it to be in my tribe because no one wants to be in your tribe. They want to be in a tribe with each other. And maybe you get to narrate for them. Maybe you get to lead them. But that posture that now we're not in high school anymore, so what could I do to create a cool kids table? Because that's where I'd like to sit.

[D]

I mean, is this resonating as we're. We have so many hosts around the world. I love that messaging that kind of gets us back to the core, that everyone's looking for a space to belong. And I think we can do that in the most local place. We can also do it really virtually. That was never possible before. So I want to talk about the cost of caring for a second, Seth, because people here are not burnt out because they're doing meaningless work. They're doing a lot of meaningful work. But the emotional toll of that, like, continues to grow. Like, how do you keep choosing work that matters when that toll keeps growing?

[B]

So I, I guess there's two parts that I'd like to talk about. The first one is the idea of attachment, which we may have mentioned earlier in other conversations. It's a Buddhist term, but it applies to everybody. And what attachment means is, you know, you're rooting for your team in the sporting event and if they lose, it hurts your feelings. But the team doesn't even know you exist. You become, you're attached to the outcome. That when we hand somebody, show someone our PowerPoint deck or hand someone our proposal, we're now using all of our mental powers to try to control their behavior. We're attached. And the thing about attachment, if we think about swimming across Buck Lake or something, if two people want to swim across the lake safely, here's a really bad way to do it. Get four, eight foot lengths of rope, hand to hand, hand to hand, leg to leg, leg to leg. And now we're connected, attached, but we're both going to drown, right? Right. The alternative is swim reasonably close to each other and if one person gets in trouble, the other one can help them. But we're not attached. And so when the work becomes important, we get attached to it because it's our fuel. It's our fuel that says, yeah, I took this job, I get paid less than other people, I'm getting up early, I'm working super hard because someone might die or someone might relapse or someone might whatever. And that pushes us forward. And then when it doesn't happen because it can't get fixed every time, the attachment is what causes us pain, not what happened, our attachment to it. Because guess what? On all the projects you're not working on, someone went blind, someone died, someone didn't get through surgery, someone relapsed and isn't in remission anymore. You don't even think about those people because you're not attached to those outcomes. So how do you make it as an emergency room doctor? How can you possibly do it? The answer is when you're present and you have leverage, you are present and you are doing everything you can. But to be of service, when that patient leaves the room, you leave the room too, that you are no longer attached to the outcome. You did what you could do, and now whatever is going to happen is going to happen. That's not easy, but that's what a professional always does, is to say, my work is done here. When you say Here, I made this. It feels like the key word is I, I made this. No, the keyword is this. Here, I made this. And now if this works, if it gets a good review, if it changes the world, terrific. And if it doesn't, it didn't work. But it's not me. It's the work didn't work. So what can I learn from that so I can do it next time? So all burnout is. Is a symptom of stress. Stress is intention. Stress is wanting two things at the same time. To flee and to stay. And if you're getting burned out, it's probably because you're attached.

[D]

Okay, Chat, I know you're going to want to respond to this.

[B]

Put up some gifts, too. We need a gift chaser after all those.

[C]

I think Vanessa's question is really good. I want to pause and integrate that in. How do we apply that in policy work? She wants to know.

[B]

Well, fill me in. Cause you know what she's talking about.

[C]

Come in deeper, Vanessa. I think. Are you talking about attachment? Go deeper, Vanessa, and we'll come back to your question. But I'm gonna move into trust because, I mean, that's really been the hallmark of today. And we're talking about it as the theme for We Are for Good for this year. It is our number one trend, that trust is the work now. And I would wager that every single one of us have been let down by an institution that we believed in.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

So my question to you, Seth, is how do leaders rebuild trust through behavior? Especially when people are understandably skeptical right now.

[B]

The only way to rebuild trust through behavior. All right, so first question. Do you trust your bank? No, you don't. Because your bank is an industrial institution designed to increase its profits by basis points and will manipulate anything they can to make that number go up. They don't promise that you should trust them outside the boundaries of the law. Right. Do you trust that when you get in your car and hit on the brakes, it will stop? Probably, yes, because it made a promise and it's always kept that promise. What critical to understand is that none of this has to do with authenticity. None of this has to do with sacrificing yourself on the altar of I have to go bleed in front of this person. That's not what trust is based on. It's based on consistency. The same way your brakes, you trust them because they always work. If your brakes only worked, failed one out of a hundred times, you wouldn't drive because that's enough to break it. So what happens? A big city library says to someone, who says to their employee, who says to their employee, we need to raise a bunch of money. Go use your email list. So they send an email blast to 10,000 people disguised as a personal note, disguised as it looks like their library card's about to be canceled, all so that the person will click. Also, the person will give $10 because it's an emergency. Well, what they just did was burn down 100 years worth of trust because they weren't consistent. Right. They authentically needed to raise the money, but they weren't consistent because when you get an email from them, you want it to be like all the other emails that came, that you could trust it. So when we think about this critical work lives are in the balance, careers are in the balance. So we're going to just shave a little bit from our consistency because we got to make some number go up. Well, then you got exactly what you set out to do, which is you burned trust to get attention. You burned trust to get action. And the way we rebuild trust is by reliably making promises and keeping them. And that can include, I am promising to do my best, and it might not work. That's still a promise. And that means it doesn't have to work. But you promise to do your best. But if you make a promise of any kind in the way you communicate with people or how you show up and you don't keep it, that action is a burning of trust.

[D]

I mean, Seth. Okay, I think that where you're leading this always gets me really riled up when you talk about, is this what

[B]

you look like when you're riled up?

[C]

Yes. This is John at a nine right now. So everybody knows.

[B]

Yes.

[D]

Because I was chatting about this outside. I think that the nonprofit experience, we're averse to risk. We're averse from taking chances on things. But you've come in our house before and said, we're in service of problems that we haven't solved. Like it's incumbent on us to take the risk. And so how you just position that is really important. That how are we communicating that out? How do we balance feeling like we got to go to the table with certainty, when actually we just need to be honest about that.

[B]

We got to begin with getting the words right, which is, we don't have a trouble. We don't have trouble with risk. We have a trouble with the feeling of risk. Those are different things.

[D]

I'm a feeler, so I feel the risk.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I feel it in My gut. So if it feels risky to fly somewhere on an airplane, it's not actually. It's safer than getting to the airport in a car. It just feels risky. It might feel risky to go forward with a new program, but in fact, if you don't, you're taking a much bigger risk because you're probably going to have to shut down over time because you didn't do anything important. Right. So, you know who did really risky things? AOL did really risky things. Yahoo did really risky things. GeoCities did really risky things. They're all gone because they were avoiding the feeling of risk, and so they avoided doing things that could make a difference. So we sign up to say, I'm here to feel the feeling of risk, but to make good decisions. And good decisions are based on the probabilities and our mission. Let's go do that. And when it feels risky. Yeah, that's part of what we're getting paid for, because we're not getting paid for to pay to dig ditches or lift heavy objects. We're getting paid to experience the feeling of doing something risky when it's in service of the mission we signed up for.

[C]

And it just reminds me, you came on the podcast and you gave this such a reassuring love letter. I don't even know if you know you did that, but you said something in the same vein that I want to make sure everybody hears here. And it was. We were not designed to solve these problems. We were not straight up. We were meant to test. We were meant to pilot. We were meant to evolve. And so even you said the we are for perfect. Oh, my. That's like the opposite of anything anybody could ever do. And I like this idea of embracing this courage. And I just feel like you. You are uniquely gifted to help us unlock that courage just with your kindness, with what you know. And you are such a nonprofit lifer. I mean, I don't know if people know this about you, but your mom, El, was such a beautiful volunteer at the Buffalo. It's renamed now. Tell the audience who it is.

[B]

I'm call it the Albright Knox for the rest of my life.

[C]

It doesn't.

[B]

My mom, Lenore, was the first woman on their board, and she helped invent the museum store as we know it. And my dad was the volunteer head of the United Way. And to grow up in a small town like Buffalo and think that that was normal.

[C]

Yeah. Wild.

[B]

From the age of 10. Help me think about how important this work is. Why is this work less important than going to Wall street making $10 million and going to the Hamptons and being angry at people. I don't know why. This seems way more important to me. Right. And what we signed up for is one of two things. Either we signed up for a sinecure surrounded by other people like us who are just going to have safe jobs where we can brag at cocktail parties that we're doing this thing, or we signed up to be spiritual warriors in service of better doing. A combination of science and art to figure out solutions to problems that haven't been solved yet. So last month I gave a talk to the museum directors, the people who run all the museums in America. And I explained to them, many of them didn't know. Where did the museum even come from? Well, we know this. We know where the first art museum was, and we know whose idea it was, and we know how it became what it became. And it says right on the front door of the Louvre, Dinant Dinan was the first director. He was appointed by Napoleon. And the purpose of the Louvre was to codify French style and culture and spread it throughout the world so that when Napoleon went and conquered a country like Egypt, he would bring Danone with him, figure out which artifacts he was going to steal, bring them back, put them inside the Louvre, and then use that to make France the center of the world. And so other countries, imperial countries, colonial countries, started stealing that idea. And the key to the museum for that 200 year run is the frame. Pictures have frames around them and a frame is supposed to show us like a window frame. We're looking through that frame and we can see what's on the other side, which is what the artist saw. And most people in the museum world would be very happy if none of that had ever changed. But in the middle of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock showed up and they blew up a frame, right? Because Jackson Pollock says there's no frame. This is just a piece of canvas with stuff I put on it. And the world starts to change. And the museum has to shift now because it's not a repository for dead art by dead artists. It's a different sort of thing. And there are a couple really useful stories to take away here. Here's the first one. Jackson Pollock has a brilliant three year run. It's on the COVID of Life magazine. It's the most famous artist in the United States. And his wife reports after his death that he decided he couldn't go any further with. He didn't want to do cover paintings. He didn't want to do versions of Jackson Pollock doing Jackson Pollock paintings. So after three years, he took a break. And then he started doing paintings that were different scale and that don't look like Jackson Pollock paintings. And he did a big exhibit, and not one painting sold, and the critics hated it. And that led to an amplification of his substance abuse and eventually his tragic death with someone else in the car. Because Jackson Pollock wanted two things at the same time. He wanted to be on the cutting edge, to be a, quote, artist. But he also wanted to be beloved the way he had been, even though he had forgotten how many years it took for that. And two things that can't coexist, that'll eat you up. And so the first lesson is, if you want to be an artist, be an artist. And that means people don't get the joke. Don't get the joke. If you're going to be on the frontier, you chose to be on the frontier. So if a foundation turns you down, that's part of the deal. You said you wanted to be on the frontier. Can't have both at the same time. When we want two things at the same time, that's called an entanglement. And the entanglements are where almost all the stress you're talking about are coming from. The entanglements are why when we go to our board of trustees and three people want this and six people want that. Well, we don't even have a mission anymore. And if we can't agree where we're going, it's unlikely we're ever going to get there. So that's the first lesson. The second lesson is the museum curators look at this and say, okay, it's all right. We can make celebrity art. We can get Andy Warhol. We can get Helen Frankenthaler. We can create enough celebrity art that people are going to come to the museum, and we're going to measure how many people come. That's a false proxy, right? It's easy to measure, but it's not why you built the museum. And now the world is changing again. Because now in my pocket right here, I have every single famous painting ever painted, right? Celebrity art is a whole new idea. I don't have to go to the Art Institute of Chicago to see that painting. It's in my pocket. And the people who organize museums, like, oh, we don't like this. And the libraries, if we're going to go to another nonprofit segment. Fifteen years ago, as much as 40% of all the transactions at libraries in the United States 40% were DVDs really what they were basically free blockbusters. 40%, 40%. And now all of a sudden we don't need DVDs anymore, the DVD player anymore. So, so first they, they, they grab for something because match their false proxy. How many people can we get to come to the library? And now that goes. So is it you have a building for dead books? Like what are we here to do? Well, lots of nonprofits need to reconfigure themselves and say what problem are we actually trying to solve? Because problems are solvable and if we can agree on our mission and walk away from our entanglements, we can go solve that problem.

[D]

Dang. It's all starting to stack for me. And I think where you're leading us makes me think of AI and just like what's available right now, the automations and the learning and the kind of evolution pace is happening so much faster. But I mean I can't see the chat right this second. But I know that this is such a pain point for us with nonprofit because at the same time we don't want to lose our humanity and we kind of see it slipping away. How do you navigate that tension? How do you leverage AI without losing our humanness in this moment?

[B]

You know, when they came for the ditch diggers, none of us spoke up and said what are steam shuffles doing? They're going to make ditch diggers irrelevant and we gotta be really clear about what we mean by humanity. So I was reading a book the other day and I promise you it wasn't handwritten by the author and it wasn't even a Xerox copy of a scribes version of it. It was typeset because books are supposed to be typeset. That sort of automation seems to make perfect sense to just about everyone today. It was actually very controversial to typeset a Bible just 400 years ago. So this keeps happening, this cycle keeps happening. So here's this magical tool and it can imitate my voice and it can create photos that you probably can't tell aren't real. There's all of these things that it's going to be able to do that could cost reduce for us. But you can't cost reduce your way to greatness. Greatness is going to come from being generative and creating community. It's not going to come from lowering your costs. So what does this mean? It means if you have tasks anywhere in your institution, every single task should be outsourced. Every single task should be automated as fast as you can because It's a task. If it can match what needs to be done, it's done. Right. You don't have a plumber on staff. You hire a plumber when you need a plumber because your institution doesn't do plumbing, it just needs plumbing. Yeah, right. Well, we can stack up how high we can go. So a product manager that I know has built an AI engine that, instead of sending one email to 500 people, sends 500 emails to 500 people based on lots of data and lots of other things. Does that take away the humanity or increase humanity? Because most people who support the nonprofit aren't doing it so they can hire someone to hand write fundraising emails. They're doing it because they want to help the mission. It's true. So the short version is either AI works for you, or you work for AI and you do not want to work for AI. It's a lousy boss. It's going to make you very miserable. But putting AI to work in any task orientation makes sense. So now everyone who works for you, everyone who's on the payroll, has to justify, why are they worth being here if they're not outsourcing all their tasks and making human decisions? Because that's really what we need from nonprofits is decisions, not tasks. And if you're busy doing tasks, and that's your excuse for not making decisions, I think you've missed the point.

[C]

I remember a quote from someone I really admire that says, you don't need more time, you just need to decide. Right. I thought that was one of the funniest and most on point comments that you have made, because I. Shortest blog post ever. The shortest blog post ever. It almost rivals the. Just. Just start. Just do something. And so I. I want to end this conversation talking a little bit about courage.

[B]

What do you mean?

[C]

You want to keep going? Yeah, y'. All. You want to go a couple hours. We love Seth. We have endless questions for him. But I think courage is hard to come by sometimes in nonprofit work. And we are in the middle of a reckoning right now, and we are battling with what's true and what's not and who's real and who's not. And I love this notion of, like, what is the true story of your nonprofit right now? What are those values? Do you still honor them? Are they still true? Are you testing that with your audience? Are you speaking with one voice? And I just think it's. You have helped people embrace courage over reassurance. And there are a lot of people who are here today. These Are your insurgents for good right here. And they are the bold change makers. What would you say to them to unlock that courage and really start to get in to stepping out and taking the risks that are missions deserve?

[B]

So 40 years ago on Lake Michigan, family took a picnic and their six year old, when no one was watching, wandered out into the water and Robin started to drown. And the woman who was on lifeguard duty, there's a lifeguard every 50ft, was 19 years old. She had her water safety certification, but she was 19 years old. She wasn't the best lifeguard in the world. She wasn't even the best lifeguard on Lake Michigan. And but she was right there and she jumped in the water and she saved Robin and he's alive because she did that. And I think most of us would say that she did exactly the right thing. Even though she was an imposter and a fraud, even though there were better lifeguards somewhere, even though it would have been better if someone had been cheering her on or giving her enthusiasm or a permit or whatever it was. And so when we see the lifeguard story, we say, well, yeah, that's what lifeguards do. And we're really glad that happened. But you signed up to work in a non profit because you want to cure tuberculosis or because you want to help people get access to the arts or because you want to help people survive cancer. And no, that person's not drowning 10ft in front of you, but it's the same thing. And the question is, what are we willing to do to the story in our head and the entanglements we have? Because that's the only place the courage is required. Right. That you rarely hear about a mid level non profit executive fired because they cared enough to do something important. Exactly. It's almost certainly not going to get you fired. What it's going to do is cause some noise in your head. It's not asking very much. There's someone drowning 10ft in front of you and so it's okay to feel like an imposter. That's a symptom that you're healthy. It's a symptom that you care about quality and we feel the fear and we do it anyway. There you have it.

[D]

I'm going to invite everyone watching to drop some Q and A. It looks like we may have a little bit of time for some Q and A with Seth, so please drop it in the chat. One of the trends, or not trends. One of the themes from today was trust is the work now and I think of how you built trust with us, with me as, like, a reader and a consistent publisher and a thinker, and how that was built in, like, small deposits over a long period of time. I wonder what. How you think about trust building at scale, because everyone here knows that's an unlock for our mission. What do you think are the takeaways for that? It's gotta be consistency. But what else?

[B]

It's just frightening. Name. It's frightening if I see somebody in the green room or on the street who knows anything about my work, I can't blow that. If I say to somebody, I made these AI cards last year, and then anthropic changes, the algorithm, the support for the thing, and all of them break. I don't get to say, oh, whatever it was, 50 bucks. Live with it. I'm on the hook. On the hook, on the hook, on the hook. There's gonna be a blog post for me tomorrow. Not because it's the best blog post I ever wrote, but because it's Friday. And so I'm on the hook. I'm on the hook. That's what I signed up for. And I'm never gonna complain about being on the hook because it's what I signed up for. That's the work. And so you give up freedom when you build trust, the freedom to do whatever the hell you want. In exchange, you keep your promise.

[C]

I mean, this is the good work. This is the good stuff, right? Now. I know we got Naomi's question in here. What is today's version?

[B]

She's a fan. Ask her.

[C]

Yeah, she is. Oh, my gosh. Okay. And our accountability, responsibility to be on or off the hook.

[B]

Okay, so asketa ekmek is a Turkish term for, in a traditional bakery, if you had a little bit extra money, you'd buy a second loaf of bread. And there's a nail on the wall. Put it on the nail. So if someone was hungry, they could come in and no shame, no blame, they could have a loaf of bread. And we have so much privilege, so many advantages, and it's easy to look at, to find someone who has more than you. Of course there are, but there's also so many people who have less than you. Less trust, less benefit, less health, less of a system supporting them. So part of the idea is, how do we create the conditions, the system, so that somebody can lever their way up without all of the advantages that we had. But the second half of it, of being on the hook, is if you have more than one person in your organization, you Have a challenge. And your challenge is you all have noise in your head, and you're not sharing the noise with everybody else. So the key three words are tell the truth, go in a room one at a time, two at a time, but not seven, and tell the truth. What are you actually afraid of? Where is the thing that's going to make you feel like a fraud? Where is the thing that's keeping you up at night? Where is the thing that if you could just say it, then you wouldn't have to worry about it anymore? Because if the work is important enough for you to devote so much of your life to it, it's probably important enough for you to tell the truth.

[D]

This may be the answer to Levy's question here. People generally expect nonprofits to solve problems. I think donors could have the same thinking. How do we communicate risks, courage, and experimenting to the community and donors so they don't come across like we're unsure?

[C]

That is a really good question.

[D]

I love the humanity here.

[B]

Thank you. Okay, so it's easy to imagine that donors are aware of every single nonprofit and its yield. And this is completely untrue. We know the yield of medicine to cure and prevent river blindness is enormous. For $2, you can keep someone from going blind for 30 years. Is your charity doing better than that? I don't think so. So if somebody's looking for the most effective charity, please send your money to river blindness. That's not what people are doing. What they're looking for is the story they tell themselves. People like us do things like this. Would this make my mom proud of me? What am. Who am I, and how do I think about all of these things? Leverage and systems and et cetera. So if you're getting hung up on proving the math, you're probably not even having an honest conversation with your donor, right? Let's get real or let's Not Play. And I encourage everyone to go get that book. It's called let's Get Real or let's Not Play. What was it like at your house growing up around the dinner table? Tell me what it was like when you were 10 years old, because now we're going to start getting real, Right? What was it like for you to have an argument with your spouse about whether you're going to give 1% of your income to charity or 5%? What does that feel like? Let me help you solve that problem. If you don't want me to help you solve that problem, let's not play. Right? Send some money to Save the Children you can just do it by mail. I don't need to go talk to you. Right. So we then can say to somebody who says, I made all my profit on a frontier. I started a startup. I invested boldly. Oh, so you like that feeling of going first, of finding out what works and what doesn't. Would you like to journey with us? Because we know every time we build a school at Build on, it's going to work. It costs us 24,000 to $30,000. It's going to work. Would you like to build some schools with us? Because you can have as many schools as you want, and they're going to work. But over here, we have this experimental thing we're doing where we're not sure how to fix a Chicago high school, but we have this idea. Would you like to subsidize one teacher for one year? And then we'll let you know, as our co experimenter, what's going to happen. So now I can be consistent and thoughtful and trustworthy in both things. And I'm allowed to go back and say, yeah, that one didn't work. But we got another one that's even more interesting because that's what scientists do. Scientists don't repeat experiments that work. Right. They're figuring out what doesn't work on their way to figure out what does. That doesn't mean you're going to get all your donors to want that. And so a portfolio of things, they say, no. What I like is that the museum is fantastic. I want to support being open two more hours on Tuesday. Terrific. There's no risk here. We know exactly what's going to happen if we're open two more hours on Tuesday, thank you very much. But if you want us to host Devoid, which they're actually doing at the Albright Knox in June, get your tickets before they're all gone. We have no idea what's going to happen if Devo shows up at the Albright Knox. The paintings might fall off the wall. We need a donor for that one. So pick.

[C]

Incredible.

[B]

Beautiful.

[C]

All right, last one. We've got one from Corey that says, I've been discussing the development of AI with a colleague lately, and we have come to the conclusion that agency is going to be in demand as the world changes. How do you think organizations can start offering agency to people? Ooh, that's a good one, too, Corey.

[B]

It's a great one. I've been blogging about this for four months, and I haven't heard back that it's landing the way that I Want it to, but I'm not going to stop.

[C]

Keep going. There's a demand.

[D]

Safe space.

[B]

From the time you were three, the system has been indoctrinating you to give up agency. Write all the fractions in the right order, get an A on the spelling test. Do exactly what you're supposed to do in high school. Go to the placement office with a resume that matches everyone else. Get a job. When you have a job, do what your boss tells you to. This is our system compliance. We know exactly where this started and we know the people who optimized the system. And it worked great for a very long time. And I hope we now understand. Just look at a video from an Amazon warehouse. This is not a system that is yielding what we want anymore. And then we built this trillion dollar institution of AI that's going to give agency to anyone who wants it. You want to be a movie director, Be a movie director. You want to be a writer, Be a writer. You have 10,000 interns working for you for free for $20 a month. They're tireless. They never complain. They do whatever and they do mediocre work. They're interns.

[C]

Sometimes they compliment you. What a great question.

[B]

Exactly.

[D]

You know, makes it patronizing.

[B]

So you have agency. So, like, I made some really cool art that I'm very proud of. And the thing that amazes me about it is that no one else did. Right? Like people who had artists in their title didn't go do that. I had as much agency as they did and they're smarter than me. But how did that happen? Right? And because I have chosen a path of undoing the indoctrination of taking responsibility and making choices. That's what we make for a living. We make decisions. We don't make stuff

[D]

always recentering, Seth. I mean, we can't close a conversation without asking for a one. Good thing can be something that's bubbled up in your mind. Just a piece of advice or a piece of hope or whatever is coming that you want to share with the change makers in this room today. Where would you leave it?

[B]

You know, I don't know if there's a mirror where you're sitting, but you could look over here if you want. Because there are people who have options and they're showing up to do this work like you and like you. So I trust the two of you so much and I have so much faith in the people who are on this call. What could be more optimistic than that is that people who are not just talking about it but who are doing it. And of course, you're exhausted, and it's going to get even more exhausting. So find the others. Organize the others. Connect with the others. Spread the word. Make it contagious. Because this is the point. What we are doing is the point.

[C]

Thank you for coming today.

[B]

It's such a privilege.

[C]

We made a donation to your mom's museum in honor of you and her, and we put it under her name. And so we're paying it forward. And we very much appreciate everything that you do for us and the way that you love this beautiful Impact community.

[B]

Thank you, everybody. Go make your ruckus.