RHS 036 - Rand Fishkin on the Opportunity That Exists Where Capitalism Meets Humanity

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Speaker 4 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today, I am joined by someone who's hard for me to express the gravity of the impact this individual has had on the course of my career.

Speaker 4 As many of you who've listened to the show, or if you've followed along with my work for any period of time, you know that very early on in my career, 2010, 2011,

Speaker 4 even as back as far as 2009, content marketing and

Speaker 4 a focus on storytelling and delivering value, and then a lot of the technical aspects of that that come with SEO and building out websites.

Speaker 4 That was what changed the course of my career. The reason that I'm sitting here in this chair, the reason that Rogue Risk, my agency exists, all the parts in between this moment and 2009,

Speaker 4 if it wasn't for my adoption of what was then just called blogging, but essentially is content marketing

Speaker 4 in our current vernacular,

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 Rand Fishkin played a large part, a large part in the development of my expertise and skills in that space.

Speaker 4 And I didn't know Rand personally, frankly, the conversation that we just had is the first time that we've ever spoke in person, 10, 11 years from when I first started engaging with his content.

Speaker 4 But the work that he did originally at SEO Moz, which then became Moz, and now he's transitioned, published a best-selling book,

Speaker 4 Lost and Founder, and is now a co-founder of a company called Spark Toro.

Speaker 4 His work has just always been there.

Speaker 4 From his Whiteboard Friday videos to the in-depth articles, and then and even

Speaker 4 in the episode, in the interview, I mention it's not just his work, but then the people that he brought into the space that he kind of

Speaker 4 put on blast, you know what I mean? That

Speaker 4 his platform that he originally built then allowed others to come behind him and build upon and do even more.

Speaker 4 It really,

Speaker 4 he is a cornerstone figure in my own career. And

Speaker 4 we have a dynamic conversation. We go a lot of of different places, business,

Speaker 4 we go a lot of different places in this interview, and it is an absolute treasure.

Speaker 4 By far, one of my favorite interviews that I've probably ever done because

Speaker 4 I had no idea where this was going to go.

Speaker 4 And I think what you get out of this interview is that

Speaker 4 the cross-section of humanity and capitalism and the opportunity that exists in that space.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I will treasure the conversation because I think it was important

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 I just enjoyed the shit out of it. So

Speaker 4 with that, I want to get on directly. No sponsor, no sponsor.
The only thing I'm going to ask you is if you like this episode, just subscribe, tell a friend, whatever,

Speaker 4 listen to more episodes because there's lots of good stuff in here. So with that, let's get to Rand and this absolutely tremendous conversation.
I really enjoy it.

Speaker 4 So I do a lot of interviews with people inside the space,

Speaker 4 but when I get to bring someone like yourself who is,

Speaker 4 you know, infinitely talented in something that isn't insurance and share your expertise, that cross-pollination, I think, yields enormous dividends for them because they kind of hear the same voices over and over.

Speaker 4 It's not a huge community. There's only about 500,000 people in the industry.
So when you, anyway, and then take that cross-cut and think of how many actually share what they're doing.

Speaker 4 This is

Speaker 4 very, very valuable to them.

Speaker 4 Like I had Ann Hanley on in September or October, and people just just went bananas.

Speaker 4 I mean, rightly so. I mean, she's tremendous, but

Speaker 4 you know, just to hear this voice and all that from outside the space. So I think

Speaker 4 I wouldn't overthink that side of it. Not that you would, but I just want you to know that.

Speaker 5 Okay, great. Well, I was

Speaker 5 glad to hear it for sure.

Speaker 4 Cool. So we'll get right into it.
And, you know, man, I just.

Speaker 4 I'm really excited to have you on. I, you know, we did the little intro talk before we started recording here, but

Speaker 4 I'm trying,

Speaker 4 I walk downstairs to my office where I record these, and I'm sure you get this a lot, but I just have to say it so that I can release the stress of our conversation.

Speaker 4 I'm trying very hard not to like just pepper you with like super nerdy content marketing questions because I've followed you for so long.

Speaker 5 Oh, my God.

Speaker 4 But like, I was Moz subscriber from way, way long ago. I fell in love first with your voice, and I want to ask you a ton of questions about that.

Speaker 4 But I do think, and I know you've heard this many times, but I think it's very deserving.

Speaker 4 You are one of the jewels of the marketing leadership, entrepreneur, whatever you're talking in, you really are. And I just wanted to say thank you for all the work that you've done.

Speaker 5 Oh my gosh, that is so kind, Ryan.

Speaker 5 Honestly, it's

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 not all of that that has been intentional. A lot of it's kind of stumbling through and just trying to be helpful to other people, but it's it's always great to hear that that's resonated.

Speaker 4 For those of you who've ever followed my career, I can actually pin a lot of the content marketing work and success that I had back in my early days as an agent to

Speaker 4 literally mimicking and listening and putting into practice many of the things that Rand and then the people who he brought to us, to the audience the other people who who he um

Speaker 4 not just you but your team and i'm just using you as maybe the the the the um focal point but um what seo moz and the work that you did and the people that you highlighted brought to you know small business owners small business professionals like myself who were trying to get our message out into the world um it really has had an impact man and and and i'm sure you are aware of that but uh i would be doing your work a disservice if i didn't let you know that

Speaker 4 you know, a large part content marketing is what changed the course of my career and you played a significant role in that.

Speaker 5 Oh, well, thank you. Yeah.
I'm thrilled to hear it. Okay.

Speaker 4 So now that the ego stroking is over and I released that pent up stress that I had feeling the need to say those things to you, we can actually get into some content and talk through some of this stuff.

Speaker 4 So the very first place that I want to go is what I think is your superpower just watching from the outside. And it is the ability to

Speaker 4 mix a very technical topic, whatever that topic may be, whether it's SEO, content marketing, evaluating something that's happening in the industry in that industry or another, or even

Speaker 4 your book, Lost and Founder, which I have a couple of questions I want to ask you about, where you're talking very much about being an entrepreneur and growing company.

Speaker 4 You mash up the ability to deliver

Speaker 4 technical value with

Speaker 4 personal transparency in a way that really draws someone in.

Speaker 4 And my question for you is,

Speaker 4 is that a skill? Do you think there is an innate sense to you that that's just something that came out and is part of who you are?

Speaker 4 Or was it also kind of developed through the work?

Speaker 4 like how did you get to that point if you even think that's a fair critique No, no,

Speaker 5 I think that's a good assessment, right? One of the things that I've always seen over the course of my career is that,

Speaker 5 and it's certainly something I got better at, right? But it's a skill I've invested in and an effort, a conscious effort that I've made, and that is to teach people and

Speaker 5 share my experiences in a way that's compelling. and that earns attention.
And part of that, you know, part of that in my early 20s, to be totally frank, Ryan, Ryan, was just about

Speaker 5 filling that kind of personal need to be paid attention to.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 when you're just getting started in work and in life as an adult and you're like, look at me, look at me, look at me.

Speaker 5 I had that, right? I had that big.

Speaker 5 I describe it sometimes as like a hole in my chest that could only be filled by the praise of other people on the internet.

Speaker 5 And in the early days of the internet, that was blogging and getting people to comment on my posts and getting nice emails about the stuff that I'd write.

Speaker 5 And if I got one or two of those, you know, it fueled my ego for the next day. And then I'd try and get more and more and more.

Speaker 5 And over the course of, you know, frankly, a decade, right, 2001, maybe even 1999, when I started writing on the web,

Speaker 5 into

Speaker 5 you know, the early days of Moz as a software company, 2007, 8, 9,

Speaker 5 that worked, right it eventually turned into a great content marketing practice we didn't I didn't even call it content marketing back in the day it was just me looking for attention and

Speaker 5 what can I say I think that I think that storytelling is a super powerful skill it is absolutely something that marketers who want to reach other people should invest in And the more compelling you can make your stories, the more attention you can attract.

Speaker 4 Do you think that that feeling ever goes away? Because I completely

Speaker 4 share that sense with you, especially early on. And one question that I've asked myself

Speaker 4 is:

Speaker 4 does that feeling go away, or do we just get better at managing it?

Speaker 5 Hmm, that's a great question. Certainly, I would say that with age and experience comes a maturity that recognizes

Speaker 5 that it's not everything.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Right? So I don't know whether I'd call that you get better at managing it or you just start to

Speaker 5 internalize the idea that

Speaker 5 what other people think about you and how much other people think about you is not the most important thing in the world.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And that, you know, that, I think that is often why

Speaker 5 folks who are further on in their careers of all kinds

Speaker 5 have a little bit less of that kind of desperate energy that

Speaker 5 you see in

Speaker 5 young celebrities, young politicians, young

Speaker 5 stars in their field.

Speaker 5 And it just seems to be a reality of humanity, right? I think it's why you know, when you look at cohorts of social media behavior from young folks, right?

Speaker 5 I remember, you know, 10, 15 years ago, everyone was looking at Facebook and saying, oh, well, young people are never going to use email. They're just going to be on Facebook.

Speaker 5 Now everyone says that about WhatsApp or TikTok, right? And as you watch those cohorts move through, as they get into their later years, oh, it turns out, what do you know?

Speaker 5 Once people hit 25, no matter which generation they're part of, they start getting on email more. They stop using

Speaker 5 certain forms of social media as much.

Speaker 5 Look at that. Curious indeed.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I find it very interesting that,

Speaker 4 you know, we've stopped using the word millennials.

Speaker 5 Thank God. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 It's so nice, isn't it?

Speaker 4 I just,

Speaker 4 in the insurance industry, it was like, you couldn't get away from it. It was almost like

Speaker 4 you couldn't hit publish on the interweb would not allow an insurance professional to publish something without injecting the word someplace in that piece of content.

Speaker 5 Yeah, Microsoft Clippy would pop in. Did you mean to use millennial more often in your copy?

Speaker 4 Exactly. Oh my gosh, I'm so glad.
I was like, I just remember standing on stage and going, It's not millennials. They're 24.
They don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 4 Do you you remember what you were like at 24? I could barely keep myself alive at 24.

Speaker 5 Oh, geez.

Speaker 5 Young men are just the worst.

Speaker 5 I don't know what we were thinking.

Speaker 5 But I will say, you know, one of the problems I have with the generational divide lines and the markers is I think that while there are statistical correlations, with behavior across decades and trends, the sharp dividing lines that we concocted in the media,

Speaker 5 sort of starting with the baby boomer generation and then going to others, just simply makes no sense.

Speaker 5 I've never seen an analysis of people born in 1980 versus 1981 and how they are remarkably different from one another.

Speaker 5 And yet, there's this huge dividing line that the media has concocted and that we all use around it. And I find that

Speaker 5 misleading at best, right?

Speaker 5 And so I think that's really unwise to use that. I think it's also very unwise to

Speaker 5 attribute to generations or age what can be better explained by other phenomena.

Speaker 5 So for example, you know, obviously you and your listeners operate in the insurance industry, so you have a really good sense for the financial capabilities and financial

Speaker 5 biases of groups of people. And one of the biases that you see in folks who

Speaker 5 were born sort of

Speaker 5 in the 1980s into the 1990s is that as their generation

Speaker 5 graduated high school or graduated college,

Speaker 5 the work opportunities while still available were at a far lower number compared to the cost of living in most of the United States.

Speaker 5 And so they simply don't have as much disposable income as their parents' generation did.

Speaker 5 Right. And so, and this, you know, this gets

Speaker 5 sort of media attention for like, oh, those millennials don't like home ownership or buying cars or having children. And in fact, their behavior when they have the same finances

Speaker 5 as their parents' generation had compared to cost of living is remarkably similar. It's just the fact that that's not, you know, that's not how the U.S.
economy worked. The U.S.

Speaker 5 economy basically rewarded a very small number of people with a huge amount of wealth, and nearly everyone else kind of suffered and did not do as well as a generation 20, 30 years before.

Speaker 5 So that behavior is explainable with data, but instead we rely on these lazy media tropes. I really hate that.
I think it's bad for business.

Speaker 4 I hope everyone listening takes to heart. I'm going to give

Speaker 4 one, absolutely,

Speaker 4 as

Speaker 4 a supplemental factor, who expected the baby boomers to continue on for another 20 years in the leadership positions and retaining wealth that had normally been generationally transitioned down at this point, right?

Speaker 4 So, you know, there's, I couldn't agree with you more

Speaker 4 in that aspect. And one that's often pushed around the the insurance industry is loyalty, right?

Speaker 4 Where, you know, they jump from carrier to carrier, from provider to provider, agent to agent, and there's a distrust and big business.

Speaker 4 And, you know, to the same kind of idea that you said, you know, if you had to live through the 2000 stock market crash as a child and watch your parents, you know, either their careers or their fortunes be obliterated,

Speaker 4 then go through 2007, 2008, then live through hyperinflation and everything that's going on in our economy today

Speaker 4 and the massive move of jobs overseas,

Speaker 4 how would you be loyal to large enterprises? Like, would you naturally just say, oh, yeah, they have my back, right?

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 4 it makes no sense. And then we're saying, oh, well, you know, it's the internet.
And

Speaker 4 it has nothing to do with internet and everything to do with the

Speaker 5 cultural ramifications of the last 20 years of our economy and yeah yeah and I think that's I think what you know I think that has interesting political implications interesting cultural implications but also really interesting business implications right because if you successfully identify these trends right and if you can kind of mentally remove yourself from the

Speaker 5 well i don't believe it because it doesn't fit with the whatever political reality that i want to believe in or how i want to think about things, like, just take that away for a while and

Speaker 5 instead focus on the reality of how financial success has been distributed across the spectrum of,

Speaker 5 we'll use just the United States because I think it's a little tougher worldwide.

Speaker 5 But if we look at the distribution of where wealth is going and where it has been historically, right, essentially post-World War II, you have this very large middle class and for several generations that wealth keeps growing and getting distributed more and more up until, you know, essentially the 1980s

Speaker 5 when,

Speaker 5 again, people can argue the politics of what happened or why it happened exactly, but essentially that distribution stops going to the broad middle class,

Speaker 5 folks who are low wage earners,

Speaker 5 that group starts to grow, the middle class starts to stagnate, and it is the upper, and even the upper echelon, right? The sort of top nine of the top 10%

Speaker 5 stagnates in terms of their wealth growth. And it's essentially the 1%

Speaker 5 and really the 0.1% and the 0.01%

Speaker 5 where almost all of the economic gains from the last really 35, 40 years have gone.

Speaker 5 And so if you're recognizing that as a business, I think you can be very wise about how to play your products, right? And how to do your marketing, because you can essentially

Speaker 5 target your products to, hey, we need to pay attention to how much people can afford, what they worry about and don't, what they care about and don't.

Speaker 5 who has wealth and doesn't, who can afford our products and doesn't, where to reach those people, how to market to them.

Speaker 5 And that, you know, that tends to have a lot more success than sort of burying your head in the sand and hoping that everyone's going to behave the same way that their parents did.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I, you know, how I usually attack these type of issues, because I don't know that

Speaker 4 I don't know that I'm smart enough to understand the,

Speaker 4 you know, even, even just cultural ramifications of all the factors that go into decision making, but I know that mass market

Speaker 4 marketing, mass media marketing,

Speaker 4 tends to do silly things. So I watch what they do and then do the opposite.

Speaker 4 So when I see everyone going, millennials are unloyal and all they care about is price and the product means nothing to them.

Speaker 4 What I say to myself is, that sounds like someone who really wants a good product at a competitive price and wants to work with someone who's going to take care of them. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like it sounds like someone who just wants to be petted on the head and say, everything's going to be okay. Like you're not going to get hosed

Speaker 4 and not placated to. And that's where how I tend to engage people is to say, you know, to me,

Speaker 4 that action is not a... does not necessarily mean that that that's what they want just because someone may jump around from provider to brider or carrier to carrier,

Speaker 4 it doesn't necessarily signal that that is exactly the experience that they want.

Speaker 5 Right. I think there's two ways to play that.

Speaker 5 I think you can lean very heavily against the trend to say, hey, we are going to provide a premium product that has relationships at the core of it, that looks for the most relationship-driven customers, identifies those based on their behavior, based on where we reach them, all that kind of stuff, and then

Speaker 5 gets that share of the market, even if that share of the market is smaller than it used to be.

Speaker 5 But we're going to appeal to them. Or we can go the other direction and basically say, hey, let's remove the hands-on touch, the

Speaker 5 heavy relationship aspect. Let's have a much less, much more cost-efficient product by

Speaker 5 digitizing almost everything that we do, by removing a lot of need for customer service, for salespeople, for

Speaker 5 people costs, essentially, and then make that product really compelling for folks who are not relationship driven, but instead are price driven and are looking for the best value that they can get.

Speaker 5 And then we make that available in a self-service kind of way. And you can see, you know, you can really see the U.S.
economy bifurcating in sector after sector on on these two vectors, right?

Speaker 5 Essentially, you get more high touch, more relationship driven at the higher end and more mass market self-service at the lower end. And companies that have done this well have done

Speaker 5 extraordinarily well over the last 20 years.

Speaker 4 And there's not really, and what I hear you saying and would agree with is

Speaker 4 either option is not necessarily right or wrong. Where you could get yourself in trouble is if you try to have one foot in one bucket and one foot in the other bucket.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 5 this is like the core of product and marketing strategy, right?

Speaker 5 Is that you want a strategy that makes sense all the way through the path of how the product is designed, how the product is sold and marketed, how the product is served and serviced, how the customer is targeted.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 if that strategy doesn't make sense all the way through right if it oh well we're gonna we're gonna serve it in a self-service way but it's gonna be a premium product

Speaker 5 what

Speaker 5 right that that's not the expectation that the premium customer has right premium customer expects relationships they expect sales they expect you know potentially high touch they expect extreme customer service right very very high levels of customer service so you've got to play that a good way to look at it is is like the credit card and banking industry, right?

Speaker 5 There is your American Express platinum customers, right?

Speaker 5 And then there's your,

Speaker 5 I have a visa from my local credit union.

Speaker 5 And both of those are doing well, but

Speaker 5 right, it's the in-between stuff that gets really messy.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 4 I think that, so for you guys listening,

Speaker 4 where I see insurance, insurance, both carriers, large and small, and agents getting in trouble here is that right now we're stuck

Speaker 4 in a transition period where our business, and Rand, you probably are tangentially aware of this, but

Speaker 4 it is an incredibly traditional business.

Speaker 4 I mean, we still have highly the issue with independent, I shouldn't say the issue, an interesting business slash marketing problem in the independent insurance industry space in general is that you can still be 90% paper and be highly successful, highly successful.

Speaker 4 Now, you could not start a business that way today and be successful, but you can maintain and even grow an agency.

Speaker 4 using very, very old school tools. The problem is the next wave, right? Like we talked about, the millennial agent who is trying to find their place

Speaker 4 is struggling because the industry is set up for these

Speaker 4 larger,

Speaker 4 well-established, in some cases, 100, 120-year-old agencies that are paper and they're completely okay with telling their clients it's going to take them a month to turn around a proposal.

Speaker 4 And I don't want to necessarily say there's anything wrong with that because they're doing business. I mean, you can't necessarily fault them for that.
But if

Speaker 4 the up-and-comer, the upstart were to make that same

Speaker 4 value pitch to a customer, they would have no shot. It would, you know, they would go out of business.

Speaker 4 So they're pushing, they're trying to make their value proposition digital, but the industry's not ready, right? And we're talking, like, we still have conversations about

Speaker 4 basic API connections, like literally, we have conferences about basic API connections and whether or not we should have them. It's a whole different world.

Speaker 5 But,

Speaker 4 and I feel like that's where a lot of people are stuck.

Speaker 4 That's what I'm trying to get to is I feel like a lot of people are stuck in the middle between being taught traditional, but trying to go digital and they get caught in the middle there and their value proposition really gets lost.

Speaker 4 If you just not living in our space, but hearing what I just said, what kind of advice or what are your first thoughts?

Speaker 5 I mean, it does not surprise me. I think there's huge swaths of the economy and tons of industries

Speaker 5 that are similar. I think that

Speaker 5 my advice would generally be if you are one of the folks who embraces change early and can provide the product that your customers, whether that be at the top end of the market, the bottom end of the market,

Speaker 5 if you can serve your customers better than your competition and you can market it in the right way to those right folks you're going to have a competitive advantage and that

Speaker 5 that is what you should be seeking

Speaker 4 so i want to shift our conversation a little bit um and uh i i really i really just have one

Speaker 4 question on this particular topic and then i want to talk about spark toro but so i saw you you sent out a tweet um

Speaker 4 a couple

Speaker 4 to be honest with you i have no idea when it was a couple weeks ago at some point in the last few weeks And it was basically

Speaker 4 your tweet was, and I'll give you just the context here before you respond, but

Speaker 4 it was basically, if you hire me to speak, you know, I'm going to come with my opinion/slash politics or whatever, right?

Speaker 4 And I don't necessarily know if you meant politics, like actual politics or just your general perception on the world.

Speaker 4 That's not really the point.

Speaker 4 What I was so interested in, and this is kind of my impetus for this question is coming off of

Speaker 4 yesterday or the day before.

Speaker 4 A very good friend of mine, Marcus Sheridan, gave the closing keynote at Social Media Marketing World. And he was crying on stage and was very

Speaker 4 vulnerable and was 100% him.

Speaker 5 That's who he is, right?

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 and my perception of you is that you're very much who you are.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I'm just interested in

Speaker 4 your development of that, because

Speaker 4 I

Speaker 4 effort to be the same way as often as I can. I think it's a struggle for all of us to always be maybe exactly who we are.

Speaker 4 And I'm just interested in the pushback that you get on that, like your experience, because to me, I

Speaker 4 you know, I think in some ways our politics are different, but in certain aspects, and in particular, your

Speaker 4 openness with exactly who you are is something that I want to encourage in everybody, whether it's working in your local communities.

Speaker 4 I think my industry in particular, we get caught in feeling like we have to be a certain way because of a perception of us. And

Speaker 4 I'm constantly trying to encourage people to

Speaker 4 be exactly who they want to be and allow others to come to them who are either interested in that, agree or disagree, or relate.

Speaker 4 Does that make sense?

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So I'll talk about this first from the strategy side, right? Which is essentially

Speaker 5 I was not strategic about this in the early part of my career, right? I was very transparent about who I was and

Speaker 5 how things were going and those sorts of things. But I think I was,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 what you might term asleep. in terms of awareness about the broader world, how

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 government policy and law and

Speaker 5 power impacted

Speaker 5 all of the world around me.

Speaker 5 Why was it that

Speaker 5 when I went to college, I could work a $4.85 an hour job and pay for my tuition and my rent.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 Only three years later, that was totally impossible. And five years later, it it was impossible to the tune of

Speaker 5 five times as much to go to the same state college. And

Speaker 5 it's not that I didn't care. I just didn't pay attention.

Speaker 5 It wasn't on my radar.

Speaker 5 I didn't think about how

Speaker 5 when I went to go pitch venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, right, and

Speaker 5 would drive all around,

Speaker 5 go into these offices and try and raise millions of dollars for my company. I didn't think about how horrible it would have been if I were a woman, right?

Speaker 5 Because a lot of these meetings, frankly, were, hey, let's go to this bar and I'll meet you this night or like, come over to my house and let's chat about it.

Speaker 5 You know, Ryan, if you or I are invited to some 40, 50 year old dude's house

Speaker 5 to have a glass of wine with him and chat about our business, we don't have to think twice about that. We're like, yeah, hell yeah, put me in, coach.
Yeah. Right?

Speaker 5 Let me go wine and dine this guy and like get him to invest.

Speaker 5 And, but if I were a 29-year-old woman,

Speaker 5 who knows, like, what is that like? Yeah. Right?

Speaker 5 Do I even get that invitation?

Speaker 5 Is that dude like, well, I don't, you know, I don't know. I don't want to be, I don't want to have any impropriety.
So,

Speaker 5 better if I don't invite her. You know, it's not going to work for me this week.
Hey, let me know if you're back in Silicon Valley some other time.

Speaker 5 Or, do you get that invitation, but it means something else?

Speaker 5 Or do you get that invitation and it means the same thing,

Speaker 5 but you have to spend tons of cognitive processing to try and figure that out, right? So, I just didn't, none of this stuff.

Speaker 5 I didn't think about the unfairness or the changes in the world or how who I was and who I wasn't affected me. Just wasn't part of me, right? And so, I didn't, I didn't talk about that stuff.

Speaker 5 And, and

Speaker 5 even though it affected me and affected the world around me, I just wasn't aware. And then, you know, over the course of, I don't know, the last decade or so,

Speaker 5 I've become aware of that, right? I have more

Speaker 5 of a diverse friend group, right? Lots of

Speaker 5 folks in my personal and professional networks who have been through all sorts of experiences of all different kinds in whatever, in the political field, in the financial services field in the venture capital world and startups and raising raising money as entrepreneurs

Speaker 5 and I can see right I can see how that stuff changes and so I

Speaker 5 like I was in my early days at Moz right where I refused to be quiet about how search engines worked right despite the fact that Google and Microsoft and whatever didn't like what I was publishing I was like no screw you guys I'm gonna tell it how it is I'm gonna show people what works in SEO And that's how I built the Moz brand.

Speaker 5 Nowadays, right, when I see

Speaker 5 injustice or unfairness or how things work in a field, I want to share that too. I'm just unwilling to be quiet about it, right? So I think I've always had this predilection for transparency.

Speaker 5 It's just that now

Speaker 5 I'm not asleep on this other stuff, right?

Speaker 5 I'm awake and I can, you know, my eyes are open. And so I share what I see.

Speaker 4 I like the idea of not being asleep.

Speaker 4 You know, one of the major issues inside the insurance industry is diversity. It's a, it's an, I mean, it's, we live in a whitebred world

Speaker 5 here.

Speaker 4 And when I used to put on, I, I, I used to put on a conference

Speaker 4 called Elevate. And I, you know, one of my, one of my, one of the things I used to say to my team is like, I can't have any more white guys on stage.
Like, I need a different voice. Like,

Speaker 4 if they're a white guy, they need to come from a place that, like, we haven't heard that story 20 times. You know what I mean? Like, it's got to be, I need something different.

Speaker 4 Not because, you know, I always fight the idea of diversity for diversity's sake, but

Speaker 5 I think that Ryan, can I ask why is that? Yeah.

Speaker 5 I always fight the idea of diversity for diversity.

Speaker 4 No, no. And here I have, I have a, and I would super interested in your thing, but this is, I don't want to diminish the,

Speaker 4 I don't want to diminish the person who I put on stage because anyone could ever say the only reason they're on that stage is because they're not a white, white guy.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So, but I have found two things to be true, right? So we did, I did the same thing at MozCon.

Speaker 5 It wasn't, it wasn't early in MozCon was, so for folks who are listening who might not know, right, Moz is this company that I started.

Speaker 5 It used to be called SEO Moz, started a consultancy, became an SEO software company. Now it's a $55 million a year revenue business with a couple hundred employees in Seattle and Vancouver.

Speaker 5 You know, it's made a few acquisitions along the way. I stepped down as CEO and left the company a couple years ago, but

Speaker 5 during the course of that company's history, we built up this conference called MozCon. It happened in Seattle every year, grew to about 1,600, 1,700 attendees, right?

Speaker 5 So not dissimilar from your Elevate event.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it was over the course of

Speaker 5 three days sometimes two you know we had somewhere between 20 and 35 speakers depending on the year and early on

Speaker 5 it was yeah it was all well almost all white dudes right speaking and then

Speaker 5 you know I started paying attention to to these other

Speaker 5 voices, right? Reading stuff online, making friends in other communities and hearing from folks like, yeah,

Speaker 5 there's no representation.

Speaker 5 I remember so distinctly hanging out with a friend of mine. I won't say who it was, but

Speaker 5 black guy. And he's like, yeah, man, you know,

Speaker 5 when I got into this field,

Speaker 5 I was like, oh, you know, these conferences are pretty cool. I learn a lot, but I guess speaking is not for me.
Because I don't see anybody like me up on stage, right?

Speaker 5 It's all you guys.

Speaker 5 It's all you white guys.

Speaker 5 He's like, so there's no, there's no room for me. And then, and then I saw Will Reynolds, who's, who's a black guy and a

Speaker 4 tremendous.

Speaker 5 Yeah, awesome, awesome guy, right? He's been speaking for a long time. He spoke at Moz County.
He's like, I saw him and I was like, oh, shit.

Speaker 5 That could be me. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I could do this too.

Speaker 5 Right. And that

Speaker 5 had a powerful impact on me, right? That was like, oh, my God.

Speaker 5 If

Speaker 5 I don't, as the organizer, put diverse people on this stage,

Speaker 5 this will never get better. This problem will never fix itself until I fix it.
This is my obligation now,

Speaker 5 right? I have the power. I get to choose who goes on the MozCon stage.

Speaker 5 That means I have the responsibility to make sure that the next generation has fair opportunity because the fundamental core truth is talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not

Speaker 4 we are wholeheartedly agreed on that I guess when I said so so I agree you have responsibility as the organizer and I

Speaker 4 maybe maybe the way that I positioned it wasn't the way what I actually meant

Speaker 5 but I get where you come from right like so I have heard I have heard many times right exactly what you heard right which is the only reason that person is on stage is because

Speaker 5 you know whatever you needed more women speakers

Speaker 5 right

Speaker 5 like well that you know that talk whatever it didn't resonate with me and so

Speaker 5 rather than saying oh that was a shitty talk you say oh well what woman speaker right

Speaker 5 I have heard that before

Speaker 5 what I what I can tell you from my experience is those people who think in that way

Speaker 5 are not going to

Speaker 5 change their minds because of an awesome talk.

Speaker 5 Right?

Speaker 5 Not quickly anyway, maybe slowly over time, right? Over years and decades and generations, those attitudes change. But those voices, to me, they just

Speaker 5 kind of don't get... don't get to have an impact.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So I have a different opinion on that part of what you're saying because I think

Speaker 4 and not that not the part where the person shouldn't be up there, but the part where I think that the steadfastness of positions that people are currently in is an ex is as much

Speaker 4 an exposure and a and a construct of the of the the the social their social circles, right?

Speaker 4 And when you can break someone out of their social circles and show them a world of of people where exactly what you're describing exists, I think those minds can change a heck of a lot faster.

Speaker 4 I think the problem is

Speaker 4 not putting them, not finding situations to inject them into those places, right? Because oftentimes that person feels like just as much of an outsider. And look,

Speaker 4 I'm not going to try to play in any way like some like,

Speaker 4 you know, fat old white guys with tons of money have been um discriminated against in any way that is certainly not my position but but the understanding is like

Speaker 4 as much as uh you know to get people to the middle we have everyone feels like an outsider right and inside all of us individually we all feel like tiny little people right like just

Speaker 5 imposter syndrome is universal yes um which is a wonderful thing right because i think i think it can help give you empathy depending on how you process it it can help give you empathy for everyone else right you can have empathy for you know my uh my friend right um who's black and was like gosh i don't see anyone like me up on stage yep right and you can have empathy to being like oh my god

Speaker 5 that that could be me right like i can imagine myself not you know seeing only whatever right going to an event and it is all black women speakers and you know i'm one of the few white people in the room and it just feels weird it feels so awkward right and gosh i'm uncomfortable i don't know why I'm uncomfortable.

Speaker 5 It's just like I don't fit in here. It doesn't, it's not me, right? And how do I become part of this world? Because this world clearly has lots of opportunity for me.

Speaker 5 And if you, if you reflect on that awkwardness, you can then realize how important it is to have, you know, faces like yours, representation like yours

Speaker 5 up on stage, right? And that. that that might not be purely tied to identity.
It might be tied to you're someone in a wheelchair. And you're like,

Speaker 5 conferences, what do you talk?

Speaker 5 How am I going to get up the freaking stairs?

Speaker 5 What are you talking about?

Speaker 5 How can I participate in that?

Speaker 5 And if conferences don't

Speaker 5 use accessible spaces and if they don't invite folks like that up on stage,

Speaker 5 who are also in those conditions, you can't see yourself there. So I think that can be.

Speaker 4 The other part of it is you're missing the best of the best if you do that.

Speaker 4 I guess

Speaker 4 that was always my point when I was putting on elevate was I literally could do this blindfolded because to me, all I want is the max value.

Speaker 4 And if you're telling me that, you know, whatever we have to do to re-rig a stage to get a person or whatever they look like or their background or their sexuality, who gives a shit?

Speaker 4 Like, if you are, this is the thing I never, I've never understood about an exclusionary mentality is you are purposefully choosing a a

Speaker 4 lower value, like providing less value in exchange for being exclusionary. I've never understood that mentality.

Speaker 5 It makes no sense. Well, I mean, I think that's the core of racism and sexism and bias, right? It's that,

Speaker 5 you know, you want an in-group who is like you to be the ones in power so that even if you as part of that in-group are not as good, you still get opportunity. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 4 And And you're artificially inflating your market value.

Speaker 5 Exactly, right? I mean, what else is

Speaker 5 institutionalized, you know, racism, sexism, stereotyping, bias, if not those things? But

Speaker 5 I will say this: one of the things that we had to realize when we were building MozCon, I remember having conversations about this with other organizers of other events in technology and entrepreneurship and marketing,

Speaker 5 was that

Speaker 5 your scores, right? So we did what most conferences do, which is we had the audience score speakers, right? They could go online to do that or they'd get a survey at the end or whatever it was.

Speaker 5 And your speaker scores will technically suffer, right? So you have to be aware, and we saw this somewhere in the 20 to 30% range that women were

Speaker 5 almost always lower, right? A woman could deliver the same talk that a man delivered, right, with the same quality, the same content, and it would be scored on average 20 to 30% lower by the audience.

Speaker 4 That's why I always put those speaker score things in my

Speaker 4 round filing cabinet that goes out the back door.

Speaker 4 I put them out because I know the audience wants to be placated. And anyone who came to elevate, this is exactly what would happen because I don't trust you guys.
I would watch all the presentations.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I didn't care what anyone thought because I knew it, whoever the person was,

Speaker 4 I knew, you know, I knew if they were bringing it, and that's all I really cared about.

Speaker 4 Everyone's going to miss, or a point's not going to hit, or a joke's going to flop, or a story isn't going to be exactly what they wanted. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like, I knew whether they were bringing it or not. So I would send out the surveys, the surveys would come back, and I would slide them right across the desk and put them right into the trash can.

Speaker 5 Well, so here's what we found, though. Here's what we found.
That was true in 2008, 2009, 2010. But fast forward six, seven years later,

Speaker 5 those numbers got to be more like two, three, five percent.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 4 that's why that happens though. Oh, well, maybe this doesn't happen in the marketing industry.

Speaker 4 I'm super glad that those are the numbers because that makes me feel happy as a human and as a citizen of the United States.

Speaker 4 But what I found was you, there's just so many, like not even white guy on white guy bias baked in because he's from Montana. And what do people from Montana know? You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Or like, oh, I couldn't understand his Alabama accent or people from the North are pricks. You know what I mean? Like, it's stupid stuff.

Speaker 5 I just was like, you know, we did find, I will say this, the English accent, those, those crush. Oh, yeah.
Well, they're just Americans just love it, right? They're like, oh, he's so smart.

Speaker 5 Listen to that accent.

Speaker 5 But no, so the more diversity that we put on stage year after year, the more diversity was expected, the more

Speaker 5 this is also awesome, right?

Speaker 5 And for those of you who are thinking about like, how does this have a positive impact, business impact for me, we sold more tickets and over time, our average speaker scores rose.

Speaker 5 Right, so the average collective score that everyone was given,

Speaker 5 regardless of the fact that you know, in the early days, right, there was this scoring deficit. I was never able to look at it across

Speaker 5 racial

Speaker 5 or other kinds of diversity, but I could look at it on gender diversity because we had a 50-50

Speaker 5 policy, basically. We joined this 50-50 project early in MozCon's.

Speaker 4 I remember when you did that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, sort of a commitment to like, hey, we'll always have,

Speaker 5 you know, 50-50 split between men and women on stage. And that led to more ticket sales.
And we found that, in fact, it led to more women buying tickets, right? Because

Speaker 5 no surprise, right? If you see people like you on stage and who are going to be headlining, you are more likely to want to go to the event. I know that HubSpot had the same thing with Inbound.

Speaker 5 It's one of the ways that they grew that event to, what is it now, 30,000 attendees or something that go to Boston in the fall? Just incredible.

Speaker 4 As an event planner, that just like gives me, that just like makes me want to curl up into a ball.

Speaker 5 They have a whole team who works on it all year round, right?

Speaker 5 But yeah, that,

Speaker 5 you know, I think you have to be willing to make that sacrifice early on.

Speaker 5 Recognize that, you know, hey, I don't, I think there's a mentality in the United States that like, I don't want to have to put my finger on the scale to tip it unfairly in one way or another.

Speaker 5 But when there's historical injustice and historical bias, that's what you have to do in order to get to a fair place. And then over time, the scales balance themselves out.

Speaker 5 I had this amazing experience recently where

Speaker 5 I did an event for entrepreneurs,

Speaker 5 invited a bunch of folks and

Speaker 5 did not, failed to, forgot to pay attention to diversity. And then when I looked at it, I was like, oh my God, we have 14 women and 15 men.
Oh,

Speaker 5 look at that, right? And like.

Speaker 5 And multiple black women and multiple

Speaker 5 women of color from other groups and multiple men from

Speaker 5 diverse backgrounds. And, like, oh my gosh, this is so cool.
I didn't even have to think about it. It just happened.

Speaker 5 How cool is that? Yeah. Like, that is where you eventually get to, and that's where you,

Speaker 5 you know, that's where we all ideally want to be, where we're not selecting based on these other traits. But you got, sometimes you got to tilt the scales.

Speaker 5 So I don't want to monopolize the conversation with just this. I know there's other stuff.

Speaker 4 No, I find it that, dude, life to me is fascinating.

Speaker 5 And in every aspect of our lives, we can pull out um pieces and frankly i'm i'm just glad that we found a topic that you're incredibly passionate about um guy i love it that's my job of the things that you know going back to your early question about like transparency and and authenticity and all that like one of the things that i have found is by having conversations like this which i think frankly for many

Speaker 5 for many americans for many like white dudes it's uncomfortable. This shit is uncomfortable to talk about, right? It might even be uncomfortable to listen to.

Speaker 5 I don't know if some of your listeners are like, oh, Maravo. Yeah, probably some of them.

Speaker 5 This is a little tough, right? It's a little tough to process. I have found that when you dig deep into those uncomfortable conversations,

Speaker 5 there is incredible value.

Speaker 5 When other people are not talking about something, when other people are thinking about something, but not talking about it, there is huge amounts of marketing value, content marketing value, because people pay attention, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah. It gets, it busts through the sort of noise of our usual day-to-day lives and how many, you know, Mike Bloomberg ads were bombarded with.

Speaker 5 That's all I see now.

Speaker 5 My mailbox is just filled with Bloomberg ads.

Speaker 4 Not for long.

Speaker 5 No, not for long, probably. My YouTube ads.

Speaker 5 But like, it breaks through that

Speaker 5 barrier. And so that, you know, that's another piece of advice.
If you know that there are subjects, topics,

Speaker 5 you know, areas, people that are not being covered in your space.

Speaker 5 That is a pretty killer way to get an audience.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 I agree.

Speaker 4 I think I also, you know, and I want you to feel, and not that you wouldn't, but incredibly comfortable with the fact that what you've shared so far, because this is a major issue in our industry.

Speaker 4 I mean, this has been

Speaker 4 a bugaboo of mine, you know, and I've, you know, I've tried to use this platform in particular to put as many,

Speaker 4 we'll just call them non-white guys on as possible, you know what I mean. Like, we got enough white guys, I love white guys, but we got enough.

Speaker 4 I want more, I want more different people because you find interesting shit out. Like, I know what most white guys know.

Speaker 5 I'm in, you know, yeah, yeah, right. You know what I mean? I want to know what other people know.
You know what I mean? Diversity of background often dictates diversity of experience. Yes.

Speaker 5 And when you get diversity of experience, you get diversity of perspective,

Speaker 5 right? Which is what's so valuable in

Speaker 5 learning.

Speaker 5 So valuable in a room.

Speaker 4 dude and and and i know we're running short of time but this is the thing that drives me nuts take a pure capitalistic standpoint on this right purely capitalistic if you're racist sexist um if you're a a homophobe if you if you're biased against anybody all you've done is decided to take a market segment out cut that out completely you've now you now can't talk to that group you've insulated yourself into a group of people who maybe they're repeat purchasers maybe they're they're not.

Speaker 4 And frankly, you've created negative energy in your space and you've created a whole structure of value creators that could potentially be part of your organization who now won't work for you. So

Speaker 4 I mean, if you just want to take all the actual humanity out of the topic from a capitalistic perspective,

Speaker 4 to live on in 2020 with this type of mentality is bananas to me. It's absolutely bananas.

Speaker 5 It's definitely giving your competition an advantage over.

Speaker 4 Yes. Then layer in actual humanity and,

Speaker 5 you know, now we're talking a whole different world, everything you've talked about before.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 we have just a tiny few minutes together.

Speaker 4 I actually pitched you on coming on the show because you have a tremendous new tool out that I'm, and I want to give you the 30 seconds on how I'm using it to put it in context.

Speaker 4 And I'd love you to just talk a little bit about it before we sign off here. And that is

Speaker 4 Spark Toro. Everyone who's listening to the show, go to SparkToro, S-P-A, S-P-A-R-K-T-O-R-O dot com.

Speaker 4 And what this, I'll share with all the agents how I'm using this tool. So as I launch my insurance agency, Rogue Risk,

Speaker 4 one of the market segments that I'm going after is fitness professionals.

Speaker 4 And what SparkToro has allowed me to do, and then Randy, you can fill in the blanks, but what I'm using in particular for is I can target

Speaker 4 people who have, and just as some of the one microcosm, but I put the word fitness in, and then I can target people with fitness in their profile. And then what it's giving me is

Speaker 4 what YouTube channels are there following? What podcasts are they listening to?

Speaker 4 What other channels are they following? So now I can start to use those both from a research perspective and from a,

Speaker 4 you know, I'm actually going to do some targeted YouTube ads and stuff to some of these channels that I know a lot of people who I want to go after are are watching and I can I can find ways to add you know what I'm trying to do for their business into that marketing mix but otherwise I I there's no other single point that I could derive all that information from

Speaker 4 and and I've found spark tour to be an incredibly valuable tool especially in the research phase of of launching uh this business so um i just wanted to give that caveat so people knew what I was talking about and then ran any any additionals that you want to add?

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah. So I mean the you know the idea behind this was my sense is the duopoly of Facebook and Google are really expensive, right? They're really expensive.
It's hard to show ROI.

Speaker 5 You know, you spend a ton of money with Facebook advertising, a ton of money with Google search ads.

Speaker 5 And frankly, where I was seeing a ton of marketers have success was when they looked at alternative channels, right?

Speaker 5 Hey, let me go pitch this podcast to see if I can be a guest on it, or go pitch this event to see if I can be a speaker, or

Speaker 5 go get a booth at this event, or sponsor this website, pitch a guest post,

Speaker 5 right? All these different kinds of tactics, right? Let me try and sponsor that podcast or advertise on this, you know, maybe I can do some influencer marketing, whatever it is.

Speaker 5 But that is so, so hard if you don't already know what your audience pays attention to. And anytime you're going after a new market segment, right,

Speaker 5 what you should be able to do is say, all right,

Speaker 5 you know, go give me all the

Speaker 5 profiles of people who have public social and web accounts who say that they're an architect, right, in their bio.

Speaker 5 And then give me a bunch of information about them. And there was just no tool to do that.
Like it didn't exist, right? that's like impossible. So what would you have to do?

Speaker 5 You'd have to like go survey a thousand architects and try and get them to tell you which podcasts they listen to and which YouTube channels they subscribe to and which social accounts they follow, what websites they visit and share.

Speaker 5 That takes months of work and it's crazy expensive.

Speaker 5 And so Casey and I, my co-founder and I, basically decided to build this thing, right? So we crawl.

Speaker 5 tens of millions of web and social profiles, well, billions actually, and then we aggregate them up to, I think we have around 70, 80 million profiles in our database.

Speaker 5 And so you can search those right you can search for architect in

Speaker 5 New York right and we have I don't know you know 1700 architects who are in New York in our in our profile database and we can tell you that 22% of them listen share follow this particular podcast right 21% follow this other one 19% follow this next one 16% follow that one and on down the list and and that

Speaker 5 yeah for a lot of our early customers and beta users and Ryan, I know you're one of our, you know, one of our early customers, first hundred customers, which is awesome.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's been super useful for them, right? To be able to do that market research at the snap of a finger.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, man,

Speaker 4 I want to be respectful of your time, and we're over.

Speaker 4 We just got into so many other topics, but I would highly encourage everyone who's listening.

Speaker 4 SparkTorre is a tool that is going to separate many, especially my friends in in the industry.

Speaker 4 If you're doing program business, if you're writing super regionally or nationally on a particular program, a particular industry or a line of business, finding, I think, some of the podcasts, some of the YouTube channels that you could partner with and do some targeted

Speaker 4 legit advertising into those spaces, that is where I'm extracting incredible value. Being able to find real thought leaders in that space, partner with them, crafting a message.

Speaker 4 And when I said, there does not exist another platform which pools all this stuff, pools all this data into one place. It's well worth the look.
And,

Speaker 4 Rand, man,

Speaker 4 I appreciate you as a person. I appreciate the work you do.
And I very much appreciate you taking so much time out of your day to share with my audience.

Speaker 5 It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Rand.
Really appreciate it. Thank you.

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