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00:00:01
Seth Godin AKA F.X. Nine Interview
28 Plays4 years ago
Seth Godin, creator of Nintendo World's of Power stopped by the pod to talk about how the World's of Power book series was concieved of, as well as is past, present, and future in the gaming and book publishing industry. You won't want to miss this one!
Seth's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThisIsSethsBlog
Website: https://seths.blog/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pixellitpod
Our website: https://www.pixellitpod.com
Our discord: https://discord.gg/NdwmVEwFbQ
PixelLit is the video game-literary nerd’s dream come true. It’s a podcast where we read and discuss video game novelizations, and the games they’re based on. This is a podcast for the former kid who read their instruction booklets cover to cover. For the gamer who listens to every audio log in Bioshock.
The PixelLit Podcast! Because the only thing better than playing a video game is reading about it.
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
You know who else is ready, Phil?
00:00:02
Speaker
Who?
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey there, everybody!
00:00:05
Speaker
Oh, God!
00:00:06
Speaker
Us!
00:00:07
Speaker
Us!
00:00:07
Speaker
We're ready!
00:00:08
Speaker
It was?
00:00:09
Speaker
It's
Seth Godin Interview Recap
00:00:10
Speaker
us?
00:00:10
Speaker
It's us!
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome back to Pixel It!
00:00:12
Speaker
My name is Kevin.
00:00:14
Speaker
With me, as always, is Phil.
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:15
Speaker
How you doing today, Phil?
00:00:18
Speaker
Man, I'm having a good day.
00:00:19
Speaker
How about you?
00:00:20
Speaker
Having a great day.
00:00:21
Speaker
We just finished talking to FX9 himself, Seth Godin.
00:00:27
Speaker
And I got to tell you, that was probably one of the most unexpectedly uplifting phone calls we've ever had.
00:00:38
Speaker
We've only had two of them with authors and they've both been wonderful.
00:00:43
Speaker
But Seth is such a sweetheart.
Origins of FX9 and Worlds of Power
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:47
Speaker
Along with a really kick ass, you know, history lesson on the 80s and the, you know, it turns out he is literally the first person to adapt a video game to a book.
00:01:01
Speaker
He himself wrote the first video game adaptation.
00:01:07
Speaker
That's crazy.
00:01:09
Speaker
That's literally what we're basing this entire podcast around where we had the originator on the show.
00:01:14
Speaker
So it's all downhill from here, ladies and gentlemen.
00:01:17
Speaker
It's all downhill from here.
00:01:18
Speaker
Kiss your friends and family goodbye.
00:01:20
Speaker
This is it.
00:01:22
Speaker
So we we spoke to Seth a little bit about the FX9 and Nintendo Worlds of Power, how that got started.
00:01:30
Speaker
He gave us literally the beat for beat of how that happened between himself, Nintendo, the third party companies, Scholastic and all that stuff.
00:01:41
Speaker
It was a great conversation.
00:01:43
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:45
Speaker
Anything you want to add before before we throw it over to to our past selves?
00:01:50
Speaker
No, let's let's I want I want to know what our past selves are up to.
00:01:53
Speaker
Let's let's
Book Packaging and 1980s Gaming Industry
00:01:54
Speaker
hit them.
00:01:54
Speaker
All right.
00:01:54
Speaker
Let's let's go take a listen.
00:01:57
Speaker
Thank you so much for taking us up on this, by the way.
00:02:00
Speaker
What a blast.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, we're excited.
00:02:03
Speaker
We I told Kevin, I was like, this might be a long shot.
00:02:07
Speaker
But I went ahead and reached out to Seth Godin.
00:02:10
Speaker
And I think it was I think, Kevin, I think you actually were like, he's already replied and said yes.
00:02:16
Speaker
What?
00:02:19
Speaker
I got the push notification on my phone and it was like a few minutes later said, yes, sure.
00:02:23
Speaker
And I was like, oh, okay, why not?
00:02:26
Speaker
I'm actually saying no to almost all podcasts because I did a whole bunch last year, but I mean, how could I resist?
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:02:34
Speaker
That's so great to hear.
00:02:36
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining us.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, do we want to just jump right into it?
00:02:40
Speaker
Let's jump right into it.
00:02:41
Speaker
Tell me what you want to know.
00:02:42
Speaker
I will reveal all.
00:02:43
Speaker
I mean, the obvious first start is what's how did this begin?
00:02:47
Speaker
How did you start with worlds of power with this this project?
00:02:51
Speaker
So I used to be a book packager for a living, and it's a really cool profession that almost no one knows about.
00:02:57
Speaker
It has nothing to do with making book covers.
00:02:59
Speaker
It has to do with being a movie producer, but for books.
00:03:03
Speaker
So I did 120 books, a book a month for 10 years.
00:03:06
Speaker
I did books on the first book about emojis and smileys.
00:03:09
Speaker
I did the first book on digital cash.
00:03:11
Speaker
I did almanacs.
00:03:12
Speaker
I did stain removal books.
00:03:14
Speaker
I spent seven years getting Stanley Kaplan, the person to let me do the Stanley Kaplan test prep books.
00:03:20
Speaker
It was just what can
Video Tape Setbacks and Transition to Books
00:03:22
Speaker
we bring to the world that the world needs?
00:03:25
Speaker
And so I was always...
00:03:28
Speaker
waking up in the morning, having a book problem, which is I needed enough to keep proposing so that I could keep my team of eight people busy.
00:03:35
Speaker
Right.
00:03:36
Speaker
And along the way, I had also been spending time in the computer game business in 1983.
00:03:42
Speaker
I was brand manager for a line of computer games at Spinnaker.
00:03:46
Speaker
I worked with Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton.
00:03:50
Speaker
I was 23 years old.
00:03:51
Speaker
It was amazing.
00:03:52
Speaker
That's wild.
00:03:53
Speaker
That sounds amazing.
00:03:54
Speaker
I could talk about that all day.
00:03:55
Speaker
Then I went to Prodigy as their first outside provider, and I built the most successful online game of all time at the time called Guts.
00:04:05
Speaker
But when video games showed up, I had a real problem.
00:04:08
Speaker
And the problem was they make me really dizzy.
00:04:13
Speaker
It's part of my ADD, but I can't easily recover from playing a typical video game.
00:04:21
Speaker
Well, along the way, I discovered that the first project that I worked on was kids were buying these magazines filled with step-by-step cheats about how to win at video games.
00:04:35
Speaker
They were buying millions of them.
00:04:37
Speaker
And it occurred to me that kids who don't want to read, don't want to read a magazine either.
00:04:44
Speaker
So why not make a videotape showing them how to win at video games?
00:04:49
Speaker
So what I did was I hired my 12 year old cousin and hooked up a super VHS recorder to his, the output of his Nintendo and had him win all these games.
00:05:02
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:05:03
Speaker
And then I hired a professional voiceover actor named, I named Skip Rogers, not his real name, world video game champion.
00:05:12
Speaker
And he would read the script while the video was playing of how he was winning each level.
00:05:18
Speaker
Oh my God, that explains so
Negotiating Video Game Book Rights
00:05:20
Speaker
much.
00:05:20
Speaker
We were literally speculating as we- I didn't even get into the books yet.
00:05:29
Speaker
So-
00:05:31
Speaker
I had done a video with Isaac Asimov of a murder mystery game called Robots that Siskel and Ebert gave two thumbs up, which was pretty exciting.
00:05:42
Speaker
And so I had a relationship with Kodak and I sold Kodak at the time sold a lot of videotapes and sold Kodak these two videos of how to win at video games.
00:05:53
Speaker
And it was still to this day, one of my five best ideas.
00:05:58
Speaker
And unfortunately, there was a lot of politics at Kodak and a guy who didn't like me and he intentionally spiked the project.
00:06:06
Speaker
And at the same time, another company two months later came out with the same thing and sold millions and millions of them.
00:06:13
Speaker
And I was a really struggling book packager at the time, and it would have made a big difference in
00:06:18
Speaker
If it worked.
00:06:19
Speaker
All right.
00:06:20
Speaker
So I'm reeling from this and I think, well, but clearly I'm onto something.
00:06:24
Speaker
So I went back to my cousin's house and at the time he lived, I didn't live here, but he lived three blocks from where I am right now.
00:06:32
Speaker
And I went to his house and I realized that Eric had never read a book for fun in his whole life.
00:06:39
Speaker
He was now 13 years old and he and his friends, all of whom came from privileged, literate households, were spending their whole day playing video games.
00:06:49
Speaker
And I realized that the same way I had seen people like Alan Dean Foster who novelized
00:06:56
Speaker
movies, it's possible to novelize a game.
00:06:59
Speaker
And when I was back in the days of doing my computer games, I had actually done the first novelization of a computer game, a game called Shadowkeep, which we worked with Alan Dean Foster on.
00:07:09
Speaker
So I knew it could be done.
00:07:11
Speaker
And so the plan was let Eric play the games because I didn't want to get dizzy.
00:07:16
Speaker
I would come up with a three page summary of ostensibly what was happening.
00:07:21
Speaker
I would turn it into a 15 page.
00:07:24
Speaker
We called it a Bible that had who the characters were, what their personalities were, et cetera.
00:07:30
Speaker
And then I would hire movie novelizers who knew, or people who wrote Sweet Valley High and Babysitter's Club books, who knew how to turn a 15-page Bible into a 125-page book.
00:07:43
Speaker
But before I did that, I had to get the rights from these companies.
00:07:48
Speaker
And it was different in the videotape thing, because I could argue fair use in the videotape thing, because I wasn't actually impacting their intellectual property rights.
00:07:57
Speaker
But here, I had to go and get the exclusive rights.
00:08:01
Speaker
And it was really very straightforward.
00:08:04
Speaker
Mr. A, who was a key player at Nintendo, didn't want to do business with me, but all the other ones did.
00:08:11
Speaker
Once I had this guy on my side who was their distributor, I could call up, I can't remember the guy's name, Konami, but he was like the first guy who said yes.
00:08:21
Speaker
And I was like, you're going to get money and I'm going to sell a
Partnership with Scholastic and Literary Challenges
00:08:25
Speaker
lot of games.
00:08:26
Speaker
If someone buys the book, they're going to make, and that's what you do for a living.
00:08:29
Speaker
Right.
00:08:31
Speaker
So I went down the street to Scholastic and I said, here's the deal.
00:08:36
Speaker
Now, at the time, I know I'm talking too much, but I had never been able to.
00:08:40
Speaker
This is literally why we have you on here.
00:08:45
Speaker
At the time, Scholastic hadn't published Harry Potter yet.
00:08:48
Speaker
It was a couple of years before Harry Potter.
00:08:50
Speaker
And I went to the woman, Jean Fywell, who actually brought Harry to the US.
00:08:55
Speaker
And I said, Jean, here's what I want to do.
00:08:57
Speaker
I know how to do this part, this part, this part.
00:08:59
Speaker
I have all the rights.
00:09:00
Speaker
This is really straightforward.
00:09:01
Speaker
And we're going to spread a lot of literacy.
00:09:05
Speaker
And Jean was fantastic.
00:09:06
Speaker
She said yes immediately.
00:09:08
Speaker
And then I just had to do all the pieces.
00:09:11
Speaker
Right.
00:09:11
Speaker
And yeah.
00:09:14
Speaker
My editor, on the other hand, Greg, nice guy, had all these rules that Scholastic was enforcing.
00:09:20
Speaker
Rules like characters aren't allowed to die because we're Scholastic.
00:09:25
Speaker
There's no devils, vampires, or cult allowed.
00:09:29
Speaker
Now, remember, three years later, Harry Potter showed up.
00:09:32
Speaker
They're like, joke every single one of these rules.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:36
Speaker
Right around these rules.
00:09:38
Speaker
And if you read Castlevania again now, you will see how like the gloom and doom of the game isn't quite in the book.
00:09:47
Speaker
Right.
00:09:48
Speaker
So anyway, I found like three or four people who could write these books.
00:09:52
Speaker
It took less than five days for one of them to write a book because once they're good at it.
00:09:57
Speaker
You're just cranking out.
00:09:59
Speaker
Right.
00:09:59
Speaker
And I think I paid $3,000, $4,000 for a straight buyout.
00:10:03
Speaker
And they're sort of making $1,000 a day.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:06
Speaker
And we sold more than a million books.
00:10:10
Speaker
Wow.
00:10:11
Speaker
And so now I will tell you the question you should ask me next, and then I'll stop talking while you can do that.
00:10:16
Speaker
Please, by all means.
00:10:17
Speaker
We should say, why are the books written by FX9?
00:10:22
Speaker
We did, you know, it's because on the cover, it says FX9.
00:10:25
Speaker
And then when you open it up, it's FX9 Seth Godin production.
00:10:29
Speaker
And then you actually do get the author's name.
00:10:32
Speaker
So I think everyone assumes that FX9 wrote these.
00:10:35
Speaker
Correct.
00:10:36
Speaker
So the way bookstores are organized in the fiction section is not so much by genre and subgenre.
00:10:45
Speaker
They're organized by author.
00:10:47
Speaker
And if you want to go look for the Nintendo books,
00:10:51
Speaker
You might look on N I N. So I needed a name that started with N I N and that's work.
00:10:58
Speaker
That is amazing.
00:11:00
Speaker
That's that was literally, that's one of the questions.
00:11:03
Speaker
Now, where does the FX just kind of pop in your head?
00:11:06
Speaker
Cause what you're doing is the kind of futuristic sort of thing.
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:10
Speaker
Also, I didn't want it to be gender specific.
00:11:15
Speaker
Sure.
00:11:15
Speaker
Fair enough.
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:17
Speaker
That makes sense.
00:11:17
Speaker
I mean, that's pretty forward thinking of you considering that in those days, the stereotype that video games for boys was very prevalent, much more than nowadays.
00:11:27
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:11:27
Speaker
I mean, we were pushing a lot of envelopes about if you look in the books, I'm still proud of how every we did not fall into any of the misogynistic traps that are so easy to do.
Breaking Stereotypes and Industry Success
00:11:42
Speaker
I'm like,
00:11:43
Speaker
I don't do this just for the money.
00:11:45
Speaker
If I want to make money, I would have done something else for a living.
00:11:47
Speaker
Sure.
00:11:47
Speaker
And I like, I don't know that they're going to sell a million copies.
00:11:51
Speaker
And I only made 10 cents a copy.
00:11:52
Speaker
So it's not like this was winning the lottery, but it was a lot of work.
00:11:57
Speaker
And one of the authors I hired, some of the people who do this for a living are not the sort of people you would imagine coming over to your house for a barbecue.
00:12:06
Speaker
And writers go on.
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:10
Speaker
There was one person who just had an enormous amount of trouble letting go.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:14
Speaker
And there was no email or anything.
00:12:16
Speaker
I mean, I had email, but I didn't have file transfer or anything.
00:12:18
Speaker
Sure.
00:12:20
Speaker
So I ended up driving to this person's house and I had to like practically break into the house to take the print out from their hands.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:30
Speaker
Other people, like Peter, who did three of them, was amazing.
00:12:34
Speaker
He beat every deadline.
00:12:36
Speaker
Everything was formatted.
00:12:37
Speaker
It was clean copy.
00:12:39
Speaker
It was delightful.
00:12:40
Speaker
And then we also, I typeset the books myself on my Mac.
00:12:45
Speaker
And those were the first, one of the early examples of desktop publishing.
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:50
Speaker
getting the end spaces right on the ellipse, stuff like that.
00:12:54
Speaker
So you basically, you basically did, you did all of this, all the work and just took it to Scholastic and said, here you go.
00:13:02
Speaker
Here's, here is a finished product.
00:13:05
Speaker
Go, we'll make a bunch of money with this.
00:13:10
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:13:11
Speaker
Now we do.
00:13:12
Speaker
It does say in a couple of books that it's it's how did they put it?
00:13:17
Speaker
That it's not an official adaptation or it's not officially recognized by.
00:13:21
Speaker
Yeah, there's some very strong, strong legalese in the front saying, but Nintendo had nothing to do with this.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:28
Speaker
Because remember, so the deal, I don't know if you know how much you know about how the industry was working in those days.
00:13:34
Speaker
So if you were the guys who made the Commodore 64 and Spinnaker was making a game and selling millions and millions of copies, Commodore got nothing.
00:13:44
Speaker
Right.
00:13:46
Speaker
And so the lesson that they learned in Japan when they decided to make the Nintendo cartridges was come up with a patent so that nobody can make a game without your permission.
00:13:58
Speaker
Right.
00:13:59
Speaker
And they used really strict monopoly power to control how many units they would ship of your thing.
00:14:07
Speaker
They could control how many Konami would make.
00:14:10
Speaker
And so all of the people I was dealing with were really afraid of offending Nintendo because Nintendo could shut them down in a minute.
00:14:18
Speaker
So I had to say, Mr. A doesn't want you to say no.
00:14:24
Speaker
He just doesn't want to have Nintendo do it, but nothing bad will happen to you.
00:14:28
Speaker
You can call his office and they will confirm this.
00:14:30
Speaker
And they all checked before they did that.
00:14:33
Speaker
But because I wasn't a party to any of the transactions, I had to say, Nintendo, the corporation is hands off about this.
00:14:41
Speaker
Did that leave you feeling a little shaky?
00:14:43
Speaker
Like you were worried that maybe they changed their mind and like they did with TenGen, for example, and some other gaming companies in those days?
00:14:51
Speaker
Well, having just had the videotape thing completely blow up on me, the magic of being a book packager in those days was I didn't have any assets.
00:15:03
Speaker
So what are they going to take?
00:15:05
Speaker
If it blew up, that would be a shame.
00:15:08
Speaker
But the advance from Scholastic was big enough that we were even before we started.
00:15:12
Speaker
So there were lots of, there still are lots of very risk averse people in book publishing.
00:15:19
Speaker
But I took the position that ideas that spread win.
00:15:22
Speaker
If you're doing good work that helps people, you will probably be fine.
00:15:27
Speaker
And if someone has a real problem, we'll just move on.
00:15:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:34
Speaker
So Mr. A, that's Minoru Arakawa that you're referring to, right?
00:15:38
Speaker
Yep.
00:15:38
Speaker
OK.
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:40
Speaker
The president's then president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa.
00:15:46
Speaker
He was incredibly powerful in order to get to him.
00:15:51
Speaker
I did a partnership with
Nintendo Monopoly and Industry Insights
00:15:53
Speaker
the distributor, the sales rep, sorry, the sales rep for almost all the Nintendo games in America from Nintendo and the third parties.
00:16:01
Speaker
So what he used to do
00:16:03
Speaker
is he would go to Toys R Us' headquarters in New Jersey for three days.
00:16:09
Speaker
That's how long the sales call lasted.
00:16:12
Speaker
And for three days, he would tell Toys R Us how many they were going to get of every item.
00:16:18
Speaker
It wasn't a sales call.
00:16:20
Speaker
It was sort of a, I'm going to give you your allocation today.
00:16:23
Speaker
And he made a commission on every single one.
00:16:26
Speaker
His house, I went to his house in Long Island.
00:16:29
Speaker
It had...
00:16:30
Speaker
11 bedrooms and it was his home office.
00:16:33
Speaker
So like before anyone had a home office, so like 14 people came to work there.
00:16:37
Speaker
They were, I don't think he had a roles, but it was something that looked like a roles parking front.
00:16:41
Speaker
Really nice guy.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:43
Speaker
So he was my, my Nintendo whisperer.
00:16:47
Speaker
And he owned a tiny piece of all the things that we did.
00:16:50
Speaker
But mostly we just got along and he understood that if Nintendo was going to become a permanent cultural force, it had to get outside of that aisle at Toys R Us.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:04
Speaker
It actually worked.
00:17:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:08
Speaker
I mean, that level of monopolization, the control, all of that is still, I mean, in play with Nintendo to this day.
00:17:16
Speaker
So, yeah, makes sense.
00:17:18
Speaker
Now, how did you choose the books you went with?
00:17:21
Speaker
Because when you look at the dates of when the books came out versus when the games came out, sometimes I think Mega Man 3 had come out by the time Mega Man 2 as a book came out, that sort of thing.
00:17:32
Speaker
How did you make those decisions?
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:35
Speaker
So the first lens is three circles.
00:17:39
Speaker
Can it be turned into a story?
00:17:44
Speaker
Is it controlled by Nintendo?
00:17:45
Speaker
And can we get the rights from the person who does control?
00:17:49
Speaker
Right?
00:17:49
Speaker
So if it's all three of those things, it gets on the short list.
00:17:52
Speaker
And then it takes a year after you start for a book to come out.
00:17:58
Speaker
So that's some of your timing issue.
00:18:00
Speaker
But the other thing is, if I'm talking to Heitkamp at Konami and he's nervous about his new title, give me an old title.
00:18:08
Speaker
It's backlist.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:10
Speaker
And so it's much easier to do those sorts of transactions.
00:18:14
Speaker
And given how well movie novelizations have done, it wasn't that hard to persuade.
00:18:22
Speaker
They could see that movie novelizations were a thing.
00:18:25
Speaker
I had already shown that a computer game could be novelized.
00:18:28
Speaker
I was giving them a chance to read the book to make sure they weren't embarrassed.
00:18:32
Speaker
I got to tell you, none of them read the books, or if they did, they never once gave me a comment.
00:18:37
Speaker
It's not what was on their agenda.
Producing and Marketing Book Adaptations
00:18:40
Speaker
Maybe they were just kind of like if he if he didn't, he wouldn't send us a piece of garbage or something like that.
00:18:44
Speaker
So that's like, I'm sure it's fine.
00:18:46
Speaker
It's actually that's actually a funny point, because we we we just talked to William C. Deetz a few days ago, and he wrote the second novelization for the Halo series.
00:19:00
Speaker
And he was talking about how Bungie was very, very particular and hands on with everything that he was allowed to put in the book.
00:19:11
Speaker
I just think it's a funny parallel because you were so ahead of the curve.
00:19:16
Speaker
This was so early days in the concept of adapting games to books that they're like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's fine.
00:19:25
Speaker
I mean, I think it's part of the personality.
00:19:27
Speaker
So yeah, true.
00:19:28
Speaker
Having, you know, I helped build computer games at the beginning.
00:19:33
Speaker
And if you had wanted to novelize something that I had helped build, I was going to be all over it because I was emotionally invested.
00:19:40
Speaker
Sure.
00:19:40
Speaker
But if you're in, you know, some suburb of Chicago and Konami is sitting there turning this crank, that's making money.
00:19:48
Speaker
You're not in it because you deeply believe in Mega Man or whatever.
00:19:55
Speaker
You're in it because there's this spectacular market opportunity where there was a shortage for years.
00:20:01
Speaker
And if you could just get through all the hoops, the cash register was going to, you know, a lot of these people came from the pinball machine industry or the, there was a company, do you know about Handelman?
00:20:14
Speaker
No.
00:20:15
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:15
Speaker
So Handelman, this goes all the way back to when I was at Spinnaker.
00:20:19
Speaker
Handelman, I'm not going to make any statements at all about whether or not organized crime was above.
00:20:25
Speaker
All I'm going to say is that there are companies like Handelman that would go to companies like Kmart and say, these 18 feet of Kmart, we own them now.
00:20:36
Speaker
And we will pay you for these 18 feet, but you don't get a lot of say about what happens there.
00:20:43
Speaker
So almost all the records that were sold at discounters like Kmart and mass marketers went through a company like Handelman.
00:20:51
Speaker
So you would go, if you work for CBS Records or Spinnaker and say, we want to get this there.
00:20:57
Speaker
And they, because they had so many shelves, they could get the best possible price.
00:21:02
Speaker
They would then give some of the savings back to Kmart and they would keep the rest.
Cultural Insights and Online Gaming
00:21:06
Speaker
Right.
00:21:07
Speaker
And there was a long history at Toys R Us and at Kmart and places like that, that there was this middleman thing going on.
00:21:15
Speaker
And so the conversations that you would have with these people weren't, this is a really good song on a really good record.
00:21:24
Speaker
They were, it's going to be on this many radio stations.
00:21:27
Speaker
And if it's going to be on that many radio stations, you would get the distribution.
00:21:31
Speaker
And then you'd have to go take some money and give it to disc jockeys to get it on all those radio stations.
00:21:36
Speaker
So you would have credibility the next time.
00:21:38
Speaker
That's where Payola came from.
00:21:39
Speaker
Payola.
00:21:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:41
Speaker
So the, I have always come at this as a creator, not as somebody who wants to play those games, but the people who play,
00:21:51
Speaker
are in these industries, the music business, anything that touches the big mass merchants or the National Enquirer type cash register stuff, you just got to deal with that.
00:22:01
Speaker
And that's what they do for a living.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah, even even even early days in in the arcade industry over in Japan, there is rumors of of Yakuza involvement with with companies like Taito or what have you.
00:22:18
Speaker
There's always and and and back when pinball was banned in New York City in the 1940s, there was there was kind of like that was LaGuardia doing it because of of the
00:22:30
Speaker
you know, mob involvement or what have you.
00:22:32
Speaker
So there's always something there in these types of industries.
00:22:39
Speaker
Not, it's not visible.
00:22:41
Speaker
It's always kind of looming in the shadow of, of that kind of thing.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:22:49
Speaker
Exactly.
00:22:49
Speaker
And, you know, I, I keep,
00:22:53
Speaker
hovering around the edges of the game business, because that's where I started.
00:22:56
Speaker
And I still believe human beings changed by what they do, not what they read.
00:23:02
Speaker
And it is possible to create all sorts of really fascinating interactions on the internet now that aren't about, you know, I mean, if you just look at something like Wordle, you know, you can get a lot of really smart people to spend a lot of time interacting in that sort of way.
00:23:18
Speaker
And, but ever since, you know,
00:23:21
Speaker
When I started Yo-Yo Dine, which was one of the first internet companies, we did email games online.
00:23:26
Speaker
And that was thrilling.
00:23:28
Speaker
But after I sold it to Yahoo in 1999, that was sort of the end of the gaming world for me.
00:23:36
Speaker
But I still wanted to get back into it.
00:23:38
Speaker
That was actually one of my questions.
00:23:40
Speaker
Do you ever think about how you could get back involved in it, that sort of thing?
00:23:45
Speaker
Yeah, I just, it would not be this sort of fictional world thing, just because the overhead, it's easier now to make a blockbuster movie than it is to make an AR, you know, multiplayer game.
00:23:59
Speaker
And that
00:24:01
Speaker
overhead makes it harder to have the kind of game design leverage that I've always been into.
Blockchain Auction Game Idea
00:24:07
Speaker
The one I was playing with last year would be a blockchain-enabled auction that could be run by nonprofits.
00:24:17
Speaker
And the idea is put something up for auction that's almost priceless.
00:24:23
Speaker
And here we have a signed script from the first episode of Star Trek or whatever.
00:24:30
Speaker
And it's up for bids.
00:24:32
Speaker
And the starting bid is $10.
00:24:34
Speaker
It's a standard auction with one twist, which is the top five bidders all have to pay whatever they bid last, but only the top bidder gets it.
00:24:43
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:24:44
Speaker
Okay.
00:24:47
Speaker
You think about it, you bid $30.
00:24:49
Speaker
Should you stop?
00:24:50
Speaker
Now you're going to lose $30, so you might as well bid $40 and people to keep going because it's for charity, blah, blah, blah.
00:24:56
Speaker
I just love the game theory of that and figure their way through it.
00:25:02
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:25:03
Speaker
That's interesting.
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah, because the strategy changes completely at that point.
00:25:07
Speaker
You can't come at it from the usual auction style way.
00:25:12
Speaker
And people would start, you would get a Ferrari for $10,000 because no one was willing to outbid you.
00:25:18
Speaker
The charity would still do fine, but the word would spread that someone got a Ferrari for $10,000.
00:25:22
Speaker
So the next auction would do even better.
00:25:25
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:25:26
Speaker
You could almost make that a spectator sport.
00:25:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:31
Speaker
I would tune in to see that.
00:25:34
Speaker
That's some high stakes stuff there.
00:25:36
Speaker
That is high stakes bidding right there.
00:25:41
Speaker
Now, you mentioned finding your writers from, you know, you have a collection of, you know, YA authors, that sort of thing.
00:25:50
Speaker
How did you choose them beyond just like they were part of a team that you knew?
00:25:54
Speaker
Like, did you try to pick someone who had maybe some science fiction background for like Mega Man, for example, that sort of thing?
00:26:01
Speaker
So I had done two other series.
00:26:06
Speaker
One of them I'm really proud of, which was Walter Dean Myers, who was the most honored black children's book writer of his generation, won the Coretta Scott King Award two or three times.
00:26:18
Speaker
I said to Walter, I'm
00:26:20
Speaker
I lived in a really successfully integrated neighborhood outside of New York City.
00:26:24
Speaker
I said, Walter, my neighbors are all busy reading Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley High.
00:26:29
Speaker
There are no black kids in those stories.
00:26:32
Speaker
And I said, can I just use your name?
00:26:33
Speaker
You'll approve everything.
00:26:34
Speaker
And I'm going to make Babysitter's Club for black kids and kids who aren't black, but anybody who wants to read about real community.
00:26:42
Speaker
And he was great.
00:26:44
Speaker
And so we did 10 of those.
00:26:47
Speaker
And I'm really proud of how they came out.
00:26:51
Speaker
same kind of authors, right?
00:26:52
Speaker
The, the, the goal, the, the science fiction parts were, came from me.
00:26:57
Speaker
I had to write a Bible that was worth turning into a book and I loved it because I didn't have to be on the hook for, for serial commas or semicolons and stuff like that.
00:27:05
Speaker
Right.
00:27:06
Speaker
And somebody like Peter could switch from writing sort of sisters, which was one of those to writing a babysitter's club to writing one of these because the,
00:27:16
Speaker
What you were just good at is directly telling a story in words that were exciting for 12 year olds.
00:27:24
Speaker
And it's a skill.
00:27:26
Speaker
So I mostly the hard part was winnowing down the people who I could know, who I knew I could reliably count on to get this part of the work done.
Personal Inspirations and Hobbies
00:27:38
Speaker
Because when you pick one that's no good, you don't discover it until too late and you have to start over and it's a mess.
00:27:44
Speaker
Right.
00:27:45
Speaker
Did you choose what books were on the, if you liked this book, you might enjoy these books list?
00:27:54
Speaker
I think so.
00:27:55
Speaker
I think if you quizzed me, I could not remember, but yeah.
00:27:59
Speaker
They were a good collection, Seth.
00:28:02
Speaker
I only had two employees.
00:28:04
Speaker
So if it wasn't me, I don't know who it was done.
00:28:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:07
Speaker
I think at the end of Mega Man 2, I think it was the other suggestions included Isaac Asimov for iRobot and Robert Heinlein, which threw me for, I was like, Robert Heinlein.
00:28:19
Speaker
And then, and, and how to eat fried worms was also in the, and I was like, I've read all of these books at very different points in my life.
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:30
Speaker
That sounds like my handwriting to me.
00:28:35
Speaker
It actually did inspire us, though, with with our social media.
00:28:40
Speaker
We like when we finish up a book, we like throwing out a suggestion box of four or five books that they might enjoy if they like the one we just finished.
00:28:47
Speaker
So we have you to thank for that at the very least.
00:28:50
Speaker
That's fantastic.
00:28:51
Speaker
So my tip for people who like the kinds of stuff you like is an author named Elliot Pepper, P-E-P-E-R.
00:29:00
Speaker
And his bandwidth series will suck you in and you will never let go.
00:29:04
Speaker
It's you're going to be so grateful that I highlighted Elliot Pepper for you.
00:29:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:11
Speaker
All right, everyone, write that down.
00:29:12
Speaker
Elliot Pepper.
00:29:13
Speaker
Oh, this does look good.
00:29:15
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:17
Speaker
Now you mentioned, I also literally officially was diagnosed with ADHD today.
00:29:23
Speaker
And you mentioned that earlier.
00:29:25
Speaker
He was just on the phone with the psychiatrist.
00:29:29
Speaker
And it's one of those things that we were like, oh no, we had no idea.
00:29:37
Speaker
But I know what you mean when it comes to how certain kinds of games, certain kind of books, media in general, can really throw you for a loop.
00:29:45
Speaker
Do you play games still these days?
00:29:48
Speaker
Do any of them?
00:29:50
Speaker
On my phone, I have Wordmaster, which is a Scrabble analog.
00:29:58
Speaker
I have trouble watching thrilling television.
00:30:01
Speaker
I can't.
00:30:03
Speaker
The internet was built for people like you and me because, oh, look, a puppy kind of thing.
00:30:08
Speaker
But I also need an enormous amount of discipline to be able to produce what I produce.
00:30:18
Speaker
And so I went 20 years without turning on a television.
00:30:22
Speaker
And I don't go to meetings because it was enervating.
00:30:28
Speaker
And, you know, now thanks to streaming, I can find just like a little thing that can, you know, soothe part of my brain.
00:30:35
Speaker
But even like I love the Matrix movies so dearly, but I'll feel it for hours afterwards.
00:30:42
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:30:43
Speaker
So what do you what do you do to relax then?
00:30:45
Speaker
If it's not too personal a question, like what's what do you find works for you?
00:30:50
Speaker
I paddle my canoe on the Hudson River every day where the weather is good enough.
00:30:53
Speaker
So it's been a few months without that.
00:30:55
Speaker
And I listen to a lot of jazz.
00:30:58
Speaker
Oh, that's great.
00:30:59
Speaker
That sounds good.
00:31:00
Speaker
Jazz is wonderful.
00:31:02
Speaker
I was, I was in the jazz bands when I was younger and yeah, it is, it's a wonderful musical hobby for anyone who can, who can really get into it because it's, it's complex in a way that really suits, it takes your brain places, but without too much work needed because of, of the, the way that the motifs kind of move around.
00:31:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:29
Speaker
And it can absorb as much of your nerdiness as you can handle.
00:31:33
Speaker
Exactly.
Career Reflections and Advice
00:31:34
Speaker
It's an infinitely deep musical genre.
00:31:38
Speaker
Exactly.
00:31:41
Speaker
We've got one more big one.
00:31:43
Speaker
And then I think unless, Kevin, you've got anything.
00:31:45
Speaker
No, no.
00:31:46
Speaker
Go ahead, Phil.
00:31:47
Speaker
Now, this kind of ties into what we've been talking about, the concentration required to do what you do in research and finding you, frankly.
00:31:58
Speaker
You have had a stellar career in marketing in particular and that sort of thing.
00:32:03
Speaker
But why don't you tell our audience a little bit about what it is that you do?
00:32:09
Speaker
These days, my full-time gig right now is I'm a volunteer leading a group that's building an almanac about carbon and climate.
00:32:19
Speaker
And it's coming out in June.
00:32:21
Speaker
There's 1800 of us in 91 countries and it fits so many of the things that are important to me, but also my skillset.
00:32:28
Speaker
I'm in it for 11 hours a day answering and building.
00:32:32
Speaker
And we just shipped it to the publisher last week.
00:32:35
Speaker
It's 97,000 words written by 200 different people, edited, designed, laid out.
00:32:41
Speaker
I think it's the most important thing I've ever done.
00:32:45
Speaker
But I also write a blog post every day.
00:32:47
Speaker
I do a podcast every week.
00:32:49
Speaker
I've started a bunch of companies, written 20 bestsellers.
00:32:53
Speaker
But mostly, I just am so lucky that I get to share the noise in my head on a regular basis and people seem to appreciate it.
00:33:01
Speaker
It's all we can hope for, isn't it?
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:03
Speaker
I mean, there's nothing to complain about.
00:33:06
Speaker
A lot of my peers from the internet age have a B next to their name.
00:33:11
Speaker
I don't want to be a billionaire.
00:33:13
Speaker
I don't think they're happy.
00:33:14
Speaker
They just decided to become evil monopolists.
00:33:17
Speaker
And that's not interesting to me.
00:33:19
Speaker
We have a very strong anti-billionaire stance on our podcast.
00:33:25
Speaker
Yes.
00:33:26
Speaker
Yeah, it is part of what we do.
00:33:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's about accumulation after a while, isn't it?
00:33:32
Speaker
It's not about being happy.
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:33:35
Speaker
Well, Mr. Godin, thank you so much for coming on.
00:33:37
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:33:38
Speaker
Is there anything, I mean, you did it just then.
00:33:40
Speaker
Is there anything you want to plug?
00:33:41
Speaker
Anything our listeners should know?
00:33:43
Speaker
The thing I want to say is,
00:33:45
Speaker
People don't understand what it means for the two of you to show up the way you do over and over again, not because it's your job, but because you just have something to share.
00:33:56
Speaker
And the reason that I said yes is not because I like talking about my past because I almost never do.
00:34:01
Speaker
It's because I want to honor the kind of passion that you're bringing, because this is what the internet is really actually for, is to allow people who care to make things better.
00:34:12
Speaker
So I want to thank both of you.
00:34:13
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:34:15
Speaker
What a privilege to talk with you, sir.
00:34:16
Speaker
This has been fantastic.
00:34:18
Speaker
Thank you both.
Closing and Future Plans
00:34:19
Speaker
Go make a ruckus.
00:34:20
Speaker
Well, that was a heck of an interview.
00:34:25
Speaker
And Seth just basically warmed our hearts with...
00:34:30
Speaker
I'm going to, I'm going to, that is going to get me through the rest of the month, Kevin, like that.
00:34:36
Speaker
It's not only, it's nice to find someone of your own tribe, but a kindred spirit in the geek realm is especially good.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's wonderful.
00:34:48
Speaker
And we're going to be continuing with our Nintendo Worlds of Power coverage for the foreseeable future.
00:34:55
Speaker
But with, I guess, a new perspective on how they came to be,
00:35:01
Speaker
It'll be a little bit refreshing to take another look at these.
00:35:06
Speaker
But that's pretty much all we got for you today, folks.
00:35:09
Speaker
Phil, you had some plugins that you want to... Yeah.
00:35:13
Speaker
For those of you who want to get to know Mr. Seth Godin, the FX9 himself, you can check him out at Seths.blog.
00:35:22
Speaker
S-E-T-H-S.blog.
00:35:24
Speaker
That's easy enough to remember.
00:35:26
Speaker
And follow him on Twitter at ThisIsSethsBlog.
00:35:30
Speaker
where he is just he's throwing down all kinds of really interesting news and information and tidbits.
00:35:38
Speaker
Definitely, definitely worth taking a look at.
00:35:40
Speaker
Yep.
00:35:40
Speaker
And as always, if you can share, share this, this episode around to your friends and family, I'd say this episode and the episode with Bill Dietz are pretty good intro episodes for us for just finding out or people who are just interested in the process of writing.
00:35:57
Speaker
Share this with the writers in your life just so they can get a little behind the scenes look.
00:36:03
Speaker
Otherwise, follow us on Twitter at PixLitPod.
00:36:05
Speaker
Go to our website, www.pixlitpod.com.
00:36:09
Speaker
and rate us five stars on iTunes and Spotify.
00:36:13
Speaker
If you have the means, we would greatly appreciate it.
00:36:18
Speaker
But that is all for today's episode.
00:36:20
Speaker
Thank you and have a good night, everybody.
00:36:21
Speaker
Bye.