Show Notes
Three years after The Song of Significance, Seth Godin returns to Invisible Machines on the day his new book arrives, The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. The compression of his body of work is now a sorting tool. Most stuckness is not a lack of information, it's an entanglement—two incompatible wants held at once. Effort doesn’t help. You stay stuck until you name the pin, pull it out, and loosen the knot.
Josh and Robb press him on what that means when the change agent is AI. Seth’s first move is not “purpose” as a poster. It is a sharper pair of questions: what’s this work for, and who is it for? Fake mission statements are easy. Johnson & Johnson can engrave patients in granite ten feet tall and still get caught serving the bonus pool. A person will wink. A model will not. Lie to AI and it will believe you.
Also in this episode: why Seth believes AI is the biggest change since electricity—and why the washing-machine demo was perfect while the real machines were killing people; why a CEO who demands perfection or ignores the tool is making the same mistake; proximal empathy (you cannot be a tourist); San Francisco vs Topeka as scaffolding, not IQ; individuals using AI at the micro level while companies keep the wrong business model; furniture makers who should have become designers; you are the circumstances; toolmakers selling screwdrivers vs FedEx selling a whole solution; constraints as a gift (“you can’t think outside the box—it’s very dark out there”); false proxies like counting tokens (IBM already learned this with lines of code); empathy-based compromise vs the compromise of average; and a future of AI that is networked, not solo.
Guest: Seth Godin—The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved Hosts: Josh Tyson, Robb Wilson—Invisible Machines
The Knot is available now!
Prior visit: S1E14 — Seth Godin on The Song of Significance
#SethGodin #TheKnot #InvisibleMachines #AI #AgenticAI #Leadership #FutureOfWork #Marketing
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