THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Perry Marshall: Okay, 80%—maybe AI could do it, or computers could do it, and it’s patterns and all that. But 20% comes from your connection to God. And I think one of the things that people in the modern world, many people, need to go on a journey of reclaiming is their original spiritual self. Who does God say you are?
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world insider podcast for artists by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Well hey there, it’s Miriam Schulman here, your curator of inspiration, and welcome to The Inspiration Place. You’re listening to episode number 325, and I’m so grateful that you’re here. Our next guest is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world. He is endorsed in Forbes and Inc. magazine and is the author of ten books, including this one: The 80/20 of Marketing. Please welcome Perry Marshall. Well hey there, Perry, welcome to the show.
Perry Marshall: Thanks for having me, Miriam. It’s great to be here. And I like your book. It’s great.
Miriam Schulman: Thank you. Um, so we have at least one thing in common. I have an engineering degree too.
Perry Marshall: Mhm.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah.
Perry Marshall: What kind of engineering?
Miriam Schulman: Well, since I never practiced engineering, does that count?
Perry Marshall: Does it? Well, I’m curious.
Miriam Schulman: I actually was in an AI lab at MIT, but this is way back in the infancy of AI. Oh my gosh, it was over 30 years ago, which makes me feel very old. But yes.
Perry Marshall: Well, there’s a lot of things in engineering that haven’t changed one bit since then, and there’s a lot of things that engineers know that not everybody else does. So… and you’re an artist. I think engineering is much more of an artistic discipline than a lot of people appreciate. That’s… it’s the fun part. It’s not the analysis. It’s all the stuff you can do and all of the creative ways of creating an affordance to solve some problem that nobody ever thought of before. I love engineering. To me, business is engineering and engineering is art. It all flows together.
Miriam Schulman: What was your degree in, Perry? Your engineering degree?
Perry Marshall: Electrical engineering.
Miriam Schulman: Okay.
Perry Marshall: And I was… I was endlessly fascinated with audio systems, and I built stereo equipment. And I felt like if I didn’t learn how it really worked, my life would not be complete, so…
Miriam Schulman: Very cool. So, the reason I invited you today is because I heard you speak with Brian Kurtz’s group about AI. And there were some concepts that you said that really got me thinking. So, you talk in this book about The 80/20 of Marketing, and I think we will talk a little bit about this book today. But one of the things that you talked about when you were talking about AI was how, you know, all these generative AI models are only really getting you 80% of the way there, and it’s really that last piece that makes all the difference. Which got me thinking that, like you were saying, us as engineers… but I serve artists in general, and I think, based on what you said, you would agree with this. What’s going to make that difference is really two things: creativity and our soulfulness. Was I hearing you right when you were speaking? Because you were mostly talking about AI, but there were a couple of little things you threw in there, and I was like, “I want to talk to Perry about this.”
Perry Marshall: You absolutely heard me correctly. I think there is a giant qualitative difference between anything humans or even animals do and anything that AI does. I think they are really two completely different things. There are a lot of futurists and a lot of people who… well, I’ll give you an example. I had a conversation about a year ago with Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning guy who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow. He’s an economist. And I ran into him at a party, and I got to talking to him about AI. And I said, “So, when you go give lectures, what do students ask you?” And he says, “They say, ‘Is there anything humans can do that AI can’t?'” And I say, “Of course not.” And I said, “Mr. Kahneman, I beg to differ.” And we got into this technical…
Miriam Schulman: I love this. You’re arguing with, like, what did he win? Like a Nobel Prize or something?
Perry Marshall: Yes, yes.
Miriam Schulman: Right, right.
Perry Marshall: So yes, I got into a very polite argument with a Nobel Prize winner about the nature of AI. I wrote a scientific paper three years ago called Biology Transcends the Limits of Computation, and it is a mathematical proof that what cells and tissues and animals and humans do is fundamentally different than what computers do. And humans are not computational machines. They are willful beings who have a soul and who do things that machines cannot do. Now, I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of technical stuff. I’ll just say that as an engineer, as a scientist, as a person who’s published peer-reviewed scientific literature, I take a very strong position that there’s something very fundamentally different between a human and a machine. And it’s artistic. It’s also religious. We don’t have to get into that if you don’t want.
Miriam Schulman: No, I want to. Let’s bring it all on. That’s why I invited you. I was like, “There’s more to say here.”
Perry Marshall: Yes, there is. Yes, there is. Well, the technical difference is that humans have a conscious experience. And I do not believe that rocks or computers or transistors do. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that if you break a rock in half, the rock hurts. The rock doesn’t cry. The rock doesn’t talk to you. Like, how do we know dead people are really dead and they can’t feel pain? Because when you cut them, they don’t move. They don’t grunt. They don’t cry. But, you know, you poke a living person, like, you know, if I… if I take my mechanical pencil and I stick you in the arm, it hurts. And you go, “Oh, why did you do that?” We have an embodied, conscious experience, which we don’t have any good reason to think that computers do. Or if I even allowed that they do, it’s… it’s such a .00001 percent. It’s not even in the same ballpark. And I don’t believe that you can understand what it is to be human unless you are involved in art and creativity and religion and poetry and music and dance and all of the expressive forms. There’s no such thing as a molecular biologist that can tell you what a human is. They can tell you what we’re made of. They can tell you how the molecules string together, but they can completely miss the point. In fact, I know a lot of scientists who believe that humans aren’t really alive, that we just appear to be alive, that being alive is an illusion. That being alive, consciousness, and our, you know, our sense of self is just an illusion bequeathed to us by Darwinian evolution. I think that’s bullshit. I think it’s a complete denial of who and what we really are.
MiMiriam Schulman: Yeah. And just to extend on that, these AI models, they want to replicate how humans—I’m gonna put this in air quotes for people who can’t see me—think. And the thing is, even neuroscientists don’t fully understand how humans think. They can only observe things, but they really can’t explain it yet. Like, they don’t understand how our biology interacts with our thoughts and interacts with all this quantum entanglement and all this stuff.
Perry Marshall: I don’t think that science even understands 5% of what is actually going on. And I’ve been deeply involved in biology and evolution for years. I wrote a book called Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design. It’s written at a high school level, but it has hundreds of scholarly references. It’s a rigorous approach to the subject. I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of even one bacterium actually is and does, let alone a human being. And with AI, everybody needs to remember. If you’ve taken huge server farms of thousands of computers and trained them on exabytes of conversations that humans created and put on the internet, of course, they should be able to recognize the patterns of human language. But I want to remind you that your two-year-old has none of that. Your two-year-old just bumbles around, plays with toys in his crib, crawls around, listens to people, and develops an entire sense of the world. He can tell the difference between a cat and a dog and a living thing and a non-living thing, without exabytes of data downloaded from the internet.
I watched a fascinating presentation live just a few nights ago. ASU did a live stream in their Beyond program, and they had a guy from Australia who trained bees to recognize paintings. This is so interesting—he took like 6 or 8 paintings; three of them were Monets, and three of them were somebody else. And all the Monets, he put a drop of sugar water on a yellow piece of paper next to the painting, and then the other ones, he put some other chemical that they don’t like. In 20 trials, he could train bees to recognize Monet, including paintings they’d never seen before. They would recognize a Monet painting instead of someone else’s. These are bees. Their brain is two millimeters in diameter.
Miriam Schulman: That’s amazing.
Perry Marshall: And somebody asked him, “Well, how does that compare to AI?” And he said AI requires thousands more trials to recognize a Monet painting than a bee.
Miriam Schulman: Wow.
Perry Marshall: And then he went on to explain, he showed a picture of a field. He said, “Do you realize how complex it is for a bee to figure out where the pollen it actually wants is in this field, with predators and all the other stuff? And its life as a forager is only 1 to 2 weeks long—it has to hit the ground running and go get pollen for the rest of the beehive now.” Yeah, they learn incredibly fast, so I don’t even—
Miriam Schulman: Or it’s epigenetic, like, which is something that we humans have too. It’s like we have this memory that goes back generations.
Perry Marshall: Yes, yes. The epigenetic stuff is the only reason why evolution works. Evolution is not a blind walk through random space. It is a 24/7, 365 optimization that is going on all the time in every creature in the entire world, and a surprising amount of it gets passed on to the next generation immediately—immediately. You can’t imagine how much. So, when you talk about exabytes of data, well, when we’re talking about the toddler, I didn’t mention the exabytes of data that come through its own body, from its mother and its father, and from the breast milk and everything else. Reality is so much more complex than our fictitious models, or even our very best models. I mean, I respect the models that people make. I respect scientists; I love scientists, and I’m not putting them down. But it really irks me when people degrade and dehumanize by reducing reality to these very simplistic models that we think we understand. We don’t. Like, we don’t even understand how the AIs work.
Miriam Schulman: I wanted to share a quick story with you. So, I just came back from Israel—my son got married. He’s fluent now in Hebrew because he’s been living there, but I speak very little of it. And at the wedding, somebody came up to me who also really didn’t speak much Hebrew. She asked, “Should I struggle through English or speak in Hebrew?” And usually I try to tell them, “Just speak in Hebrew. I’ll understand more if you’re speaking in your language.” But anyway, she said to me, “It will be very easy for you to learn Hebrew because you learned it in the womb.” Now, my mother didn’t speak Hebrew—we’re going back at least five generations that came from Russia. But the other thing that did happen during this last week when I was in Israel was somebody was giving a speech, and I did not like the speech at all. It was all in Hebrew. And my son’s wife said to him, “You know, I think your mother is starting to understand. There’s no more secret language anymore.” And it’s not that I can translate what was said, but so much of communication is non-verbal. It’s not about the words. It’s like… I can look at somebody—it’s kind of like watching TV with the sound off. It’s not about reading lips even. It’s like you see the gestures, you see the face, you hear the tone of the voice, and all this non-verbal communication—that’s like we’re talking about the 80/20. That’s like 80% of it. The words that are being said, that’s like the 20%. That’s not the main story.
Perry Marshall: That’s right, that’s right. I remember in 2008, they were still running up to the primaries of the election. I was sitting in an airport, and I could see, way across the room, there was a TV screen. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. They had a picture of the three candidates that were on offer at the time: John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. I remember, I hadn’t been paying any attention to the election at all. Again, I’m in an airport, looking at a screen across the room. I saw the three pictures, and I had an instantaneous gut reaction. It was, “McCain looks like a guy on a TV show who plays a president but doesn’t really look like a president. Hillary looks not likable, and Barack Obama looks like a real president. I think Barack Obama will win.” I had this thought in about three seconds watching that TV across the room, and I turned out to be right. Six or eight months later, that’s exactly what happened.
Miriam Schulman: Or that’s the three-second impression that most people are getting and therefore making decisions based on that three-second analysis.
Perry Marshall: I think people make those decisions… Well, I’m a professional marketer, so I’m even saying this with some authority. People make three-second gut-level decisions or 0.3-second gut-level decisions, and then back them up with paragraphs or hours of YouTube videos and whatever other language we want to attach to it. Yeah, you’re exactly right. And if I go to Ghana and I listen to a song on the radio in some language I’ve never heard before, I can make a very educated guess as to what kind of song that is, and I’d probably be right. It’s a love song, it’s a “I love you” song, it’s a “you broke my heart” song—you can tell.
Miriam Schulman: That’s right. It’s like the speech I didn’t like that somebody was talking about. I was like, “I kind of know what he’s saying, and I know this is not something I like.” Okay, so let’s back up a little bit because we’ve been kind of throwing out the term 80/20. And let’s assume most of the people listening do not know what the Pareto Principle is. Can you give us, like, a quick version of that and maybe an analogy in nature or something non-sports-related?
Perry Marshall: I think 80/20 is the most important thing you can learn in business. And so, let me explain it, and then we’ll apply it to artists and collectors as much as you like. So, 100 years ago, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto found out that no matter what country he studied, 80% of the money and the real estate seemed to be owned by 20% of the people, and the other 20% of the real estate was owned by 80% of the people. Which meant that the haves versus the have-nots ratio was always 16 to 1, and it didn’t really seem to matter what kind of government they had. Like, is it a king? Is it a democracy? Is it a whatever? It didn’t really make that much difference. And, um, when I first heard of it, I thought it was just like this business rule of thumb.
Perry Marshall: And I had an epiphany one day, reading a book where I suddenly realized, wait, no, this is a fundamental law of cause and effect. And it’s a pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern. So there’s also an 80/20 inside the 80/20 inside the 80/20. And so what that means is that I could look at almost anything. Like, I could look at the size of craters on the moon—it’s 80/20. So, 20% of the craters have 80% of the size, and 80% of the craters only have 20% of the size. And it’s true of rabbit populations, and it’s true of… like, if you go find any YouTube channel, the views on the YouTube channel from the most popular video to the least popular video—that’s 80/20. And the number of plays on Spotify for an artist—that’s 80/20. And it means that a very small number of things that you do have huge effects and huge outcomes, and most things that you do have very small effects and very small outcomes. And instead of just bumbling around and not knowing what might work, there are actually ways to predict what the most important 20% is probably going to be—and to be right at least enough of the time that you can be much, much, much more effective with less effort. It means a lot of people are wasting time doing things that are really unnecessary, and the implications just go in every direction. I mean, we could talk about this for hours, and it’s literally the biggest business epiphany that I ever had in my business life, and it completely changed the way I do everything.
Miriam Schulman: So, when you talk about this 80/20, you had this curve. And I don’t want to lose people who aren’t as scientific who are listening, but the idea is that you’re always moving towards what that 20% is and away from the things that are really wasting your time. And then once you get to the 20%, what is the 20% of the 20%? And what is the 20% of that 20%? So, there was a few things that I… there’s one thing I always drill into my audience, which is that they’re wasting way too much time making TikTok videos and reels and things like that. And I was very happy to see that. And this book was written when?
Perry Marshall: 11 years ago.
Miriam Schulman: Like even 11 years ago. Okay. So even 11 years ago, this was true. It’s even more true now. But you were saying that the most targeted thing that you can do would be either social media, Facebook ads (which is no surprise to my audience—they should, since most of them have found me that way. I spend a lot of money there), and you said also AdWords. And where did you put social media? Lower down, right? I’m assuming it’s much lower.
Perry Marshall: I put it a little lower. And we made a little quiz so people could judge essentially whether they’re more of an artistic discipline or whether there’s something that people search for. We have a quiz called isfbforme.com.
Miriam Schulman: I love this because this is something that I tell my audience—if you have the kind of art that somebody is searching for, then you could use Google AdWords. But if you don’t, you can’t really use it. And then even, I feel, for… so, if you’re selling something where you can identify who wants it, you can use Facebook ads. So, those would be people who sell information products, right? For a lot of the art, you can’t really use it because… I’m waiting to see if you’re going to agree or disagree.
Perry Marshall: So let’s… let’s divide the world into a few categories. There are things that people go looking for. And with the internet now, we know people are looking for it. We know 3 million people a day search for a plumber, and so you can bid on that word and you can get in front of it. So many people a day search for Impressionist paintings and so on. So there are things that people search for, and then there are other things where you have to interrupt them. They would never go looking for that, but you can pop up in their newsfeed and you can say, “Hey,” and you can get some percentage. And then let’s take it another step and say, there’s also… when you want to interrupt people, you can at least make sure that you’re interrupting the right people, or interrupting people with money, or people who would ever buy anything like this. Because these patterns are extremely predictable. So, when I do live seminars with an audience in the room, one of my favorite things to do is I’ll say, “Stand up if you own a pair of shoes,” and everybody stands up. Of course. “If you own less than five shoes, sit down,” and then a whole bunch of people will sit down, and then I’ll double the number.
I’ll go, “Less than 10? Less than 20? 40? 80? 160? 320? 640?” This is so fascinating when you actually do it. Every time I double the number, half the people sit down. Half. It’s really consistent. And so, what always happens, if I have more than 200 people in a room, I can guarantee you somebody in the room owns more than 500 pairs of shoes. Always true. I’ve done it with domain names. I’ve done it with rental properties, all kinds of stuff. Well, if you’re selling shoes and you don’t understand that in a room full of 200 people, ten of them own half the shoes, that is as 80/20 as I know how to get. Well, first of all, almost everything is that way. It’s true of plants, gardens, gazebos, rental properties, watches. Like, some people… I have about 10 or 12 watches. Some people have 120 watches. Some people don’t have any.
Miriam Schulman: So, to bring this back to art… I have a lot of artist friends and also artist clients, and they’ll say things to me like, “You know, I did really well because this collector came who bought so much art. But if it wasn’t for that one person or that one…” I say, “Yes, but that’s what it is.” Yes, that’s what it is. But not just for us, like these, you know, emerging artists. That’s also true. Like, if you go to the museum, you’ll see the same names on the little plaques. You know, like, yeah. Okay, so it’s the Cone sisters who collected all these Matisses, and it’s this other collector from Russia who collected all this other stuff. So that’s what it is. It’s these, like, uber passionate collectors that are supporting certain niches.
Perry Marshall: Every business works that way. And 50% of the money comes from 1% of the customers. That’s 80/20 cubed. 80% of the money comes from 20% of the people. 80% of the 80% comes from 20% of the 20%, and 80% of the 80/80 comes from 20% of the 20/20. That’s 1% of the collectors spend 50% of the money. This is the way the world works. And so, probably most artists, the way that you’re going to have a career and the way that you’re going to think is… you say, “Okay, I’m going to spend 50% of my effort in my career making sure that the needs and the wants and the whims of my collectors get met, and then I can spend the other 50% of my time doing what I want to do—being in artistic integrity, pursuing things that I find interesting—and the collectors pay the bills so that I can sit in my garden on a Tuesday afternoon and do watercolors, or whatever your art or jewelry or whatever you’re into.” And that’s… that’s how it works. And it means you don’t really have to worry or think too hard or give a lot of energy to the person that’s going to buy your $75 thing every now and then.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, and for the one naysayer who hasn’t heard me before, who’s thinking to themselves, “Well, that’s not real art,” Michelangelo knew quite well that his 1% of his 1% of his 1% was the Medici family and the popes.
Perry Marshall: Yes.
Miriam Schulman: Right. Like, that’s what it is. Most of the art went to that family.
Perry Marshall: Yes. And so, my son is 20, and he’s a classical music fanatic. And we go to concerts every few months, and so I’ve learned lots about classical music, and I’m really glad he did this because I’ve always sort of liked it. But you don’t just stick a pencil behind your ear and understand classical music—it’s kind of a complex art form. And so, Bach has his own numerical classification system called BWV. Like if you listen to the classical station and they say, you know, that was such and such sonata, BWV number 695. Well, if you really look at artists closely. So Bach has a little over a thousand works that are classified. They believe that there’s probably 500 more that have gotten lost or disappeared. And if you look closely at any artist, well, first of all, there’s the top 1%. And for Bach it would be the Brandenburg Concertos or Saint Matthew’s Passion, or some of these really famous symphonies. And that’s like, that’s the 1% that generates almost all of the attention. And if you look very carefully, there’s a lot of stuff he turned out that’s it’s not particularly great. It’s not better than Vivaldi or better than the other guy.
Almost all artists have lots of stuff that’s fairly average, and the production of an artist is like—you don’t get to decide when you get out of bed in the morning, like, “Today is going to be a top 1% day.” I know we want it to be, but I’m an artist and creator too. In fact, I consider myself more of an artist than a business consultant or an author or a marketing guru. I consider what I put out to be a body of work, and I have a very clear sense that there is a difference between what’s in my heart to do on a particular day, as opposed to what my audience might demand of me on a particular day, or what might get me a whole bunch of likes on Facebook or YouTube. I am very conscious of the difference. There are days when I’m like, “I gotta serve the audience, I gotta pay the bills,” and there are other days when I’m going to do what’s in my heart to do because this is sincerely me.
Miriam Schulman: Well, it’s like eight for them, two for me type of rule, but 80/20. So does your son play any instruments as well?
Perry Marshall: He plays piano and violin, and he teaches both. And he works in a recording studio.
Miriam Schulman: Awesome. My daughter is a classical musician. She’s a cellist, so she’s gotten me into it as well. And then my son—the one who’s in Israel—he used to nerd out on how Bach could play it forward and backward, and it’s a Möbius loop and all this stuff. He’s like, “Look at this, Mom.” You know, this was back when he used to live at home. Yeah, so it’s really fun. Okay, so I want to bring this a little bit back now to, oh, the seven cardinal rules. So, I wrote this… like, I always—when I read books—I like a physical copy, and I make myself a little index. And I wrote down page 25 of your book. So, this is not a quiz that way. Um, yeah, we can go through a few of these. Do you have a favorite that you want to talk about?
Perry Marshall: Well, the first one says…
Miriam Schulman: Let’s talk about the first one because I get a lot of questions about the first one, which, by the way, they don’t know what the first one is yet, so we might as well tell them.
Perry Marshall: The first one says, “No cold calling ever. You should attempt to sell only to warm leads.”
Miriam Schulman: So this is like when I get artists who ask, “Should I just send postcards to certain addresses?” I’m like, “Never, never, ever. No, that’s not a strategy.”
Perry Marshall: So this is about positioning. And I’m an engineer by training—an engineer. If you get past the stereotypes, because I know there’s the pocket protector and all of that, but if you get down past that, an engineer is a person who pursues an aesthetic. Like, if you said the hacker ethic in computer programming, that doesn’t mean people who break into servers—that means people who really appreciate an elegant approach to solving a problem. And a person who tries a bunch of different things and comes up with a really clever way of doing something—that is artistic. It’s the aesthetic. And people who focus on aesthetics intensely dislike being the salesman in the plaid suit who’s just hawking something for purely commercial purposes. They can barely even make themselves do it. And I got laid off from my engineering job when I was 26, and my wife was pregnant with our first child, and she was going to come home and be a stay-at-home mom. So, I had a huge amount of pressure to go solve this.
And so I went and I got a sales job, and the sales job pushed me really hard to be the guy in the plaid suit really often. And after two years of bologna sandwiches and ramen soup, I got fired from that job. So, I’ve been drugged through the wringer in this way. What I found was that I had to create a set of conditions that would work for me in order to sell, and I had to be positioned as somebody that people would listen to before they met me. And so, I started writing magazine articles, and I would write articles in really boring trade journals for industrial engineers. So that, you know, an industrial engineer would read my article about how to install your network, and they’d think, “Oh, this guy seems to know something.” There are always ways to get your point of view, your way of doing things, your way of thinking, your art, your aesthetic, your philosophy in front of people before you have to try to convince them to give you money. And that’s what I call positioning. And there are way more opportunities to do that now than there were 20 or 30 years ago. You can take advantage of them. And then you need to use 80/20 to figure out who—with my limited time, my limited budget, my limited ability to write, or whatever it is that I do to get in front of people—how do I get in front of the right people, the top 20%, as consistently as I possibly can? And what I found was, if somebody already knew me, liked me, and trusted me before I came into the room, I didn’t have to use a bunch of sales techniques. I could show up with my knowledge and my expertise, and I could help them decide what to do.
So, you talked about the Medicis and Michelangelo. Somehow—I mean, I don’t know the history—but I would bet any amount of money that a process took place where they figured out, “He thinks kind of like us,” and he figured out, “They think kind of like me, and we are in alignment.” So, we’re a good match. Yes, I would like to make buildings or paintings or ceilings for them because we’re on the same wavelength. This is so important. And I have learned from consulting, fundraising, and all kinds of endeavors—there are people out there with money to spend whose frustration is, “I can’t find somebody who sees things the way I do. Where are they?” They don’t align with every artist. They can’t get enough of what they want. And they’re looking.
Miriam Schulman: I’m not sure if this is too much of an abrupt change, but before we wrap up, we promised we would talk about religion. So let’s bring it, mention it all.
Perry Marshall: I think—and I’m speaking partly as a marketer because I think this is an empirical statement, but also speaking as a pastor’s kid—I think humans are irrevocably religious creatures. There is a fascinating book that I read called A Sacred Space Is Never Empty. It is by a historian at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and it is a history of atheism in the Soviet Union. And what that book explains is that when the Bolshevik Revolution happened and Lenin took over, they had to figure out how to get people to perform the acts of cruelty necessary to enforce the will of the state. In order to get people to do those things—which were horrific; we won’t name them here—they had to eradicate every notion that people had of the human spirit being created in the divine image. So they enforced atheism: there’s just matter, it’s just matter and energy, you know? There’s nothing special about anybody. Effectively, the state is God, and kill all the people that don’t do this. They burned churches down, and they had all kinds of ethnic cleansing and religious cleansing, and they had gulags and everything else. She said that at the very, very peak, only 52% of people surveyed said they were atheists. I mean, this is with Stalin and everything else, and it was not sustainable. And they were never able to replace the religious structures with a secular equivalent that would provide people with meaning. I mean, they would tell people, you know, “After you die, the molecules of your body will still be around.”
And people just did not find that to be satisfying. And she said that finally, in the 80s, the government sort of made its peace with the Orthodox Church because they recognized that they couldn’t fight this ingrained religious impulse in people. And a few years later, the whole thing just collapsed, and the Iron Curtain fell. The title of the book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty, refers to several things. It refers to the saying where Jesus says, “When a person gets the demons cast out, and then they don’t keep the place clean, it gets inhabited by seven more.” She explained that the Museum of the Evils of Religion in Moscow—like, Moscow has one of those, or maybe it’s Saint Petersburg—the museum is in a church. Like, they couldn’t build their own museum. The government had to go steal a church building that had been built by religious people in order to have a museum of the abuses of religion. And the title of the book refers to the idea that there’s always a vacuum, and it has to be filled by something. So her conclusion was that it was a 75-year experiment in enforced atheism that failed. And Russia’s back to being a religious country again.
Miriam Schulman: That’s really powerful. I’m going to have to check out that book. So one thing I believe that I actually have never said before on the podcast—which is amazing, since the podcast is called The Inspiration Place—is that where you find inspiration is wherever you let God in, or the divine in, or whatever it is that you are worshiping. And to just make this podcast go full circle, we talked… I told you I invited you because I really liked what you had to say, that AI is only going to get you 80% of the way there. That other 20% is your sacred creativity. It’s your divine spark. By the way, he is nodding furiously for my podcast listeners who cannot see the bobblehead going on next to me.
Perry Marshall: Preach it, sister. Preach it, sister.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so a good way to get into Perry’s world is The 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall. We will link that inside the show notes. There’s lots of great insights in here that I’m sure you’re going to love. Is there another resource that you wanted to share with my audience?
Perry Marshall: Well, um, if you want to go down the spiritual route, I have another book called Memos from the Head Office.
Miriam Schulman: Oh, that sounds like it’s for me. Okay.
Perry Marshall: It is a book of business miracles, really. And I’ll tell you one of the stories that’s in both the 80/20 book and the Memos book. So, about 20 years ago, I read a book by Richard Koch called The 80/20 Principle, which is a great book, and I suddenly understood, “Oh my goodness, no, 80/20 isn’t this little business rule of thumb—it’s like a central law of the universe.” I never understood that before. And he made this comment, which he never returned to—he just remarked, “80/20 has a lot to do with chaos theory.” Well, I had studied chaos theory, and it’s the science of avalanches, sand dunes, rivers, earthquakes, and natural markets. Stock market? Yes.
Miriam Schulman: Sarcastic calculus. That was the flux.
Perry Marshall: Yes.
Miriam Schulman: And nobody understood it but you and me, probably. Okay, go ahead.
Perry Marshall: And I thought, Whoa, like my brain exploded when he said that. I go, “Wait a minute. If that’s true, that means there’s a pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern. There’s an 80/20 inside the 80/20 inside the 80/20,” which very few people had ever talked or written about up to that time. Like, if you knew where to look, you’d find obscure papers on the internet, but nobody was talking about this. I’m like, “Wait a minute, this is a calculus formula—what is it?” And so, this one day—it was a Friday—I was trying to figure out the calculus formula because, again, I’m like you, I’m a geek, I’m an engineer, and I wanted to know. And I was stuck. I was not getting anywhere. I was obsessing about this all day. And the other thing I was obsessing about that day was just a few days before, I had had a caveman-discovers-fire moment in my business. I had made $11,000 in one hour, which at the time was mind-blowing. And I was thinking, How can I use my business to help a project in Mozambique that my brother-in-law is doing? Mozambique was one of the poorest countries in the world, and I was obsessing about the calculus formula and about Mozambique all day long.
And that night, I went to a music service at church, and they were playing this kind of Pink Floyd kind of music. I was swaying, and I was a million miles away. I was thinking about calculus and Mozambique, and I looked up, and this Black woman made a beeline for me. She walked right up to me, shook my hand—I had no idea who this was. She goes, “Hi, my name is Vivian, and the Lord gave me a word for you.” This had never happened to me before, and I looked at her like, “Well, this should be interesting.” She goes, “The Lord told me that you’re very good at math and you’re working on some kind of equation, some kind of formula, some kind of invention, and you are going to figure it out. You just keep working on it. You’re going to figure it out.” And I looked around, and I thought, What is the percentage of people in this room that are working on a math problem right now on a Friday night at a church service where they’re playing music? Like, okay, there is one person in this room, and she nailed you.
Miriam Schulman: You were thinking very loudly, apparently.
Perry Marshall: Apparently. And she turned to walk away, and then she spun around and she goes, “Oh, and He told me something else too. You want to support missions, and God is going to bless your business so you can support missions.” Now she really had me, and I stared at her with my mouth open, and I said, “If only you knew.” And she pointed up in the air and she goes, “He knows.” And she just walked away. Just like that.
Miriam Schulman: You know, that sounds like a totally made-up story, but I believe you.
Perry Marshall: It is exactly what happened in 2003, on a Friday night. And I stood there, and I thought, “Oh, my word.” Like, I just got a memo from the head office. That was unmistakable. I’ve never had that happen to me before. Well, I figured out the calculus formula three years later, and it’s all over my 80/20 book—you can read about it. And later that summer, my business started growing like crazy. And the reason it started growing like crazy was I had just written a book on Google advertising, and Google hit the hockey stick. And it turns out the reason I did that was three days before I met Vivian, I got an email from Ken McCarthy, who was a friend of mine who ran an internet marketing seminar back then. And he said:
“I need somebody to speak on Google AdWords at my seminar, and I think it should be you.” And that’s how I got into the Google Ads business. It was like a magic carpet ride. My business went supernova, and I’ve now written the world’s best-selling book on internet advertising. And it all came from this one-minute conversation with an African-American lady that I didn’t even know, who walked up to me and just started reading me my mail. And so, you said, “Okay, 80%—maybe AI could do it, or computers could do it, and it’s patterns and all that—but 20% comes from your connection to God.” I think that is absolutely right. And I think one of the things that people in the modern world—many people—need to go on a journey of is reclaiming their original spiritual self. You know, from the system, from the iPhone, from the microwave oven, from the hustle and bustle, and everybody telling you who you’re supposed to be or who they think you are, or the comment from the schoolteacher. Like, who does God say you are? And when you’re in that space, what flows? Because what you hear from the muse and what anybody else is going to hear from the muse are two totally different things.
Miriam Schulman: Mic drop. Do you have any last words for our listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Perry Marshall: Yeah, I do. My friend Megan Macedo has a brilliant way of breaking things down. She says there is a business paradigm and an art paradigm. In the business paradigm, the market comes first, the customer comes first, and your work is serving the market. And it’s about doing the work that the customer puts in front of you. That’s the business paradigm. In the art paradigm, it’s about building a body of work and doing what is meaningful to you. And it’s not about the market, it’s about the muse. She says, in the business paradigm, you ask, “What would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?” In the art paradigm, you ask, “What would be worth doing even if it did fail?” The challenge of being an artist in the real world is, honestly, you have to do both. And I have a very good friend who’s a brilliant scientist, and last week, I was on a Zoom with him and a young, early-career scientist who’s trying to make his way. A scientist is also an artist because a scientist does what they do for the pursuit of knowledge and beauty and truth, not for profit per se. And the young scientist was talking about how hard it is to not get shoehorned into, you know, whatever they’re writing grant approvals for lately, as opposed to whatever’s in his heart to do. And the older guy said to him, “There are two parts to your science life. There is the work that you do that’s in front of you that needs to be done because you work in a lab and whatever.”
And there’s what you present to your colleagues, what you publish, and what you say. He goes, “There’s another part, and that’s your imagination.” So, one of the complaints that the young scientist had was, he said, “I wrote a scientific paper where I said I got this really clever hypothesis from a science fiction story.” And a peer reviewer said, “You can’t use science fiction stories as inspiration for science,” which I think has to be one of the most boneheaded statements I’ve ever heard in my entire life. But such is the Academy. And the older scientist said, “There’s this other part, and you have to wall off what all those other people think, and you have to protect that space, and you have to cultivate your imagination. You have to be very careful what you say to all those other people.” Well, that was his way of expressing that there’s a business paradigm that you may need to respect in order to make a living, but there’s an art paradigm that’s ultimately more important and ultimately more meaningful. And what the older scientist said is, “As you advance in your career, you will get more and more freedom of speech to say what you really think as you gain credibility. And you just need to make sure that in the early part of your career, you don’t allow other people to kill that off because when it’s dead, it’s dead.” Boom.
Miriam Schulman: All right, Perry, this was such a great conversation, as I knew it would be. We’ve linked everything about you in the show notes. And this is episode number 325. So you can find that at SchulmanArt.com/325. And my friends out there listening, thank you for being here. I’ll see you same place, same time next week. Until then, stay inspired. That’s it.
Perry Marshall: That was fun. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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