How to Sell Ideas

Transcript

[Music] right so how to sell ideas is fundamentally about why to sell ideas right it's very easy to talk about the how but if you don't know why you're doing it there are a whole bunch of different ways of selling ideas some of which are completely evil like lying to people and telling them it's going to be great and some of which are extremely ethical like the scientific method which is almost entirely about selling discoveries right getting other people invested enough in your experiment to repeat it is the hard problem in science

right doing the experiment that's a hard problem but once you've done it getting people to replicate getting people to accept it getting people to publish very difficult so the why totally changes the available how the more ethical the how is the more you could take a kind of High root path and for something like ethereum H any um lie that is communicated to people will turn in huge distortions of the specification because the desire for the users to have certain features they've been led to believe will exist will completely clashed with technical possibility the closer you are to truth in marketing the more deliverable the product becomes so what I'm basically suggesting is that we have

a deep integration between the ends and the means does does that make sense this notion that you want to join uh a system which is true at every level um is just vastly easier to build in a system that has to lie about what it is at some level and this is actually a core competitive advantage of free software projects and projects that bring Liberty and Liberation to people over projects which are proprietary closed and have a whole bunch of ulterior motives like for example Twitter right the F this fundamental rule that if you're not paying for it you're the you're actually the product no longer applies when you begin to deal with Foss so um now I'm going to tell you how open source ruined my

life I invented this which is in fact a shed right but it's the world's cheapest and easiest build shed because the walls are a whole sheet of 4x8 or 1.2x 2.4 M material just as it comes off the truck the roof pieces are half a sheet so as a result you you could take pallets of this material which is just plywood hundreds of tons of the stuff cut half of it in half screw the thing together with deck screws and you have emergency housing this one is in Haiti just a prototype um so after I invented this thing I had to go off and tell people that we could do something we hadn't

done before which was for less than the price of a refugee tent we could provide reasonably solid semi-permanent housing and it's a lot less like per Refugee per year it's somewhere between 1110th and 1/5th of the price of a tent and they last a long time if you're in a dry climate and you keep the thing painted it could be 20 years for a few hundred of plywood so once you've got a piece of news like that you're now in the marketing business whether you like it or not I fortunately figured this out pretty early 2003 like wow my next 10 years is going to be about learning how to sell ideas because if I turn this into a product I'm going to get completely bound up into the capitalist disc SCE around product which is

entirely about lying to people so that you can get enough money to get something done but the thing that you get done is never quite what you said you do this is an intense problem around NOS they call it donor driven Aid so you raise a bunch of money uh telling people that you're going to go and fix AIDS in Africa and then you turn up and you do 2% of what you said you would do and because nobody really wants to think about AIDS in Africa nobody pays attention and this is how you get the kind of monstrous long running stable corruption which is so much a part of what we're trying to fix right the transparency is eaten away at every level and then the delivery becomes corrupt as a result um once you start trying to achieve social change through kind of

technological means or technosocial means everything that you do becomes exponentially more difficult people hold you to an extremely high ethical standard every decision you make has to be considered against long-term ramifications um if you're in the business of trying to change the world everything you do is on the end of this kind of you're like 10 km long lever or even a 10,000 km long lever and as you pull the future changes tiny little early decisions that were made for example in the design of Wikipedia have turned out to completely dominate the long-term technical evolution of the platform the fact that there is no proper uh defined syntax or semantics for the markup language in Wikipedia makes it almost impossible to P content

out of it into anything else media Wiki is basically a rat hole for because they never cleaned up the parsers amazing long-term implications from a trivial technical decision that was made over one Summer by somebody writing a PHP so um changing behavior is the name of the game right we talk about user adoption we talk about getting developers but what we're talking about is getting individual human beings to change their mind about what they'll do I'm going to do this rather than that and that decision point is really the function of all of our work you got single individual that you've never met and probably never will to go click rather than click and that decision then ramifies through everything they do

after that trivial examples Firefox or Chrome the button you pick supports either an ecosystem which is entirely about monitoring you to sell your data or an ecosystem which is struggling extremely hard to provide a better alternative and those tiny decisions all the stuff we were hearing about in terms of uh interface design all of these kind of micro decisions you know have this consistency of purpose right all the way through we're steering people towards making a better world by changing their behavior uh that is the very first hexar built in 2003 uh it does resemble a dog shed but it's actually quite big inside um as the design went uh viral as it spread from mouth to mouth and ear to

to ear lots of variations occurred these huge ones over here I don't even know what this big one over there is like I no what that is I've never heard of the people that built it people started building big deployments oh this is a Burning Man by the way um you can see this enormous Dome every triangle on that Dome is half a sheet of 4x8 so 30 sheets of 4x8 and a saw real housing 45 sare M 450 ft people love these things right Shiny Happy People love that picture so one of the core of lessons about how to sell ideas is that ideas are bigger than products right a product is kind of a transactional exchange

between two people you give me some resources I'll give you a thing and the thing is a relatively confined thing things don't have a future they don't tell stories they're fixed in time in space ideas on the other hand Ripple through reality right you know the idea of hypertext it sure took a long time before it became a real thing right but at this point there's probably never going to be an ident identifiable human culture without hypertext in the same way that there's probably never going to be a human culture without the knot or without shoes the idea gets bound into the culture and I think that the blockchain is kind of like that right it's a thing which has locked itself into the culture as an idea and then

every round of activity around that is basically another evolution of the ideas it kind of rolls forward into the culture one of the critical differences between ideas and products is that ideas are not monopolies so once you have an idea that's in general currency even if there's a temporary Monopoly or a temporary cartel it will always break down and new forms of the idea will come up somewhere else with other things attached or other things removed so at no point are we binding people into some kind of monopolistic ecosystem even given things like meta's law because we're spreading an idea first and foremost right a pendon ledger something that gives you this you know complete certainty about the past turns out to be something

that's widely applicable I don't think anybody believes that we are never going to see another blockchain after ethereum right right yeah I it's lovely but the idea is free the instantiations you know each come with their own uh prices so I want to talk about a little bit about how ideas go go into culture um years and years and years and years ago a bunch of my friends got very serious about the IDE idea that we might see failed States in Europe um the number one predictor that we made of collapsing institutions would be that the Greek medical system would be the first thing in Europe to collapse which turns out to be pretty close to what happened we also predicted a farri swing that would

potentially bring down the Greek government this is in 2009 so a decent amount of head and one of the terms that we came up with was this thing called the black elephant and the black elephant was the elephant in the room that everybody will ignore right up until the point where the thing goes on the r page and destroys everything and once that happens everybody will say oh that was a Black Swan we could never have seen it coming right can anybody think of some black elephants name GL Waring global warming right the biggest treasuries yes treasuries potentially right so 2009 2010 the black rhetoric thing was it was INF Fringe culture it was in the dark Mountain movement in the UK H it was online there was a hashtag on Twitter

that was kind of a big deal nothing happened slowly slowly slowly just a couple of days ago Thomas bloody Friedman does a bloody uphead about black elephants in the New York Times so from inception to that term is now locked into Global use 5 years right the idea slowly crapped into culture because it was a good idea because it was a strong explanatory model for what what we saw around us us it spread and it spread and it spread and it spread and this is that term jumping the chasm right it's gone from being small communities early adopters underground

discourse to you can say the word black elephant in pretty much any context in the general discourse now and you could point to Freedman oh yeah black elephant you know you you read about that right and I don't think it's going to become quite the same kind of deal as Black Swan because it's much less kind of psychologically comfortable but that is an example of an idea being sold right it's gone out at this point nobody even remembers who came up with the term right whether or not anybody will ever remember the group in London that came up with it is an open question maybe they will maybe they won't um but once the idea is locked into culture it's there for Keeps and another example resilience Maps so this is a thing that you use for

Designing in HEX here at refugee camp and it's a simple simple simple map of what keeps you alive um why are we not dying of cold in here well there's a building there are clothes there's an electrical grid so clothes individual building shared in group electrical grid shared at the nation state level the further you go out from the center the bigger the uh size of the entity that's doing the sharing and the supporting very simple right idea creeps out that's where it was first presented right that's the audience look at these people right now uh a movement called St activism has taken up this idea and a whole bunch of

associated stuff uh mainstream in the art World um things like the goth Institute supporting it it's a real thing uh government of Spain uses it in their pandemic flu Planet so it's become semi-official it's used in the US as well go back on so that notion that these ideas kind of start small they start in little places and then get pushed out and pushed out and pushed out that process is a process that we're kind of in the middle of now right much as this is a very impressive room of people much as a ton of Bitcoin was raised to finance this whole thing we are still a very very small Edge culture right I mean bitcoin's market cap is on

the order of what $4 billion right now something like that which is Tiny right I mean if you actually look at what $4 billion company looks like they're not actually all that remarkable there are a lot of them around so so getting from where we are now into a position where we have real impact not just a ton of people are using it but a ton of people are using it in ways which achieve the long-term goals of the organization right that is a series of multipliers Factor 10 growth four five 6 eight times right over and over and over again it has to not just double it has to go up to 5 of 10 so could I have a quick show of hands who's seen this thing

thing terrifying right so this is a model from the States called the Rogers diffusion of innovation curve and it's basically measuring the number of people that have taken up an idea over time so as you go right on the graph more and more and more people adopt the idea you get to a kind of peak adoption rate as you go from early adopter to early majority and then once you're at late majority the adoption slows up again until you get right down to this long tail which is largely made of old people that will never adopt your new technology um this is a couple of years old so it's got Twitter as being an early adopter thing Twitter is now early majority um Facebook is now late majority everything's actually kind of moved left a little bit uh sorry moved

um anyway you know what I'm saying so right now this is where we are right we are so far out that way right that there are on the order of 50, people that if you sat them down could give you a semi decent explanation of what Bitcoin or ethereum is right here's a whiteboard tell me what a blockchain is that number is minute right and we can talk about how for example tcpip is equally hard to explain still relatively small numbers of people vast numbers of people are able to use it but actually most of those people understand Concepts like connected to the

internet right they have this kind of notion that you could be connected to the Wi-Fi but if the Wi-Fi isn't connected to the internet it's not going to work they've got some basic notion about things like packet loss maybe there are terms that they've heard there's a sort of gradual creeping out right that gradual creeping out hasn't even begun to start for the stuff that we're talking about right there is no gradual creeping out of things like blockchain forking that is not the kind of thing that people are able to discuss at a casual level blockchain for no idea what you talking about is that bad right so out here right you have a very different set of problems to the problems of ordinary

marketing right ordinary sales ordinary marketing you've got a few people who are doing it in this kind of Innovator category or maybe one step out from the innovators it's a tenth of a percent of the population 10% of the population globally is 70 million users right so we are so far out along that bell curve what we're really looking at doing is spreading right the way down this blue line as quickly as we can until you've got a few tens of millions of people that are familiar enough with the basic concepts to be able to tell whether something is good for them or bad for them to get them into a position where they can reason about the proposition well enough to understand

whether they want it and that's a very important step a lot of times we put technology in front of people and we ask whether they like it or not but they actually don't feel empowered to make the decision because they don't understand the impact well enough to decide whether they want it and when that happens some people say hey let's do it and that's your kind of early adopters or your innovators the rest of the population it's like let's wait and see what happens to those guys you know kind of like penguins in the Arctic where they kind of let somebody go swimming to see whether there's problem right it's the same kind of behavior so for us lowering the background level of fear on un certainty and doubt about everything cryptocurrency related everything blockchain related everything

about this kind of paradigmatic shift in the way the computers work all of those kind of processes um are about making people more and more comfortable to make decisions because until they feel comfortable to make a decision they can't say yes they won't click on the button to download until they know what it is they're getting into so processes for doing this firstly like it or not we are all in sales right I was an engineer I was working on cryptocurrency stuff 2 2001 I was designing a stock market that ran using an append only general ledger but it was centralized tons and tons and tons of digital signatures lots of round Robins um I deleted for my prototypes for

reasons I don't discuss very much once I was out of crypto I began to understand the world in a different way right crypto trains you to think about things in a way which is very much about narrowing of access to information and it's in many ways the opposite mindset to sales so there's quite a substantial kind of psychological jump from saying right these are the things we want everyone to know these are the things we want nobody except authorized people to know and training The Reflex of getting out of secrecy culture and saying yeah come on have one look it's amazing see this it's quite a substantial step all of us are in a position where we're Gathering and raising support for the project whether it's hiring whether it's recruiting people to work on the open

source code base in the areas which are not currently being covered by the team whether it's journalists whether it's uh investors who we want to get funding daps every single person in the institution has contact with people who are outside of the institution all of that God help us is sales right that step of realizing that we're all attempting to increase the number of people thinking about this stuff and using it by a factor of 10 and we want those people to increase it by another factor of 10 and those people to increase it by another factor of 10 five or six times before we even get started right we all have to be in a position where we are constantly communicating

the vision to people in a language that gets us the next factor of 10 jump does this sort of make sense as a model right quite aggressive quite ambitious but not at all unreasonable so first thing make sure you understand what it is that you're proposing to to people if you're inviting somebody to come and actually write code with you make sure you understand what it is that you need them to do not just at a technical sense but why it is they should be feel motivated to do this right why is it you know for you to sit down and do this with me well because all the way back up the chain we've got a bunch of Big Ideas that we want to implement and you're building a brick in that road right but you have to understand what the offer is before

anybody can accept it and that's quite tricky because until you can repeat it to yourself it's quite difficult to really understand what the offer is practice explaining it to people like you so if I'm explaining this stuff to another you know mid 40s former programmer that's really pretty easy oh you remember back in the day I remember back in the day very simple if I'm communicating that to somebody that's unlike me it's a much more difficult cell so practice on your friends this is not just kind of cult leaders ship tactics although it might be um practice on your friends because it minimizes the incidental complexity of the communication process right if

you're communicating with somebody same culture same age same technical skills and you're having the conversation for the first time there are no extra barriers to the communication there there's just you and them having a conversation about a thing in a space that you both well understand and can see and Define practice it until it's easy might take four or five conv ation but without that practice it's very difficult to start talking to people that are not like you and as you get to this kind of third step you begin to say right I'm going to try telling this story to somebody who's older to somebody who's younger to somebody who is non-technical to people who have a completely different political understanding of the world to people from a different culture

different country try and go across one barrier at a time this time I'm going to try and communicate across an age barrier this time I'm going to try and communicate across a professional barrier and as you do that what you're going to notice is that people have different questions they have different understandings of the world they have their own story about your story and getting a sense of how radically different different people's understanding of the world is is one of the hardest parts about doing this kind of strategic Communications because getting everybody that is like us on board is relatively easy and relatively useless it will get us a a fair bit down that blue line but it will leave us so attached to that

story that we won't be able to jump across and get into the early majority right even making it to the first 2% of the innovators requires a story that generalizes to the point where one person in 50 understands exactly what you're on about it's a big jump and what hits us hardest is that everybody has their own world model this is the hardest thing about Communications uh I know uh friend of mine who describes himself as a strategic listener right and strategic listening you just sit and you try and understand exactly how somebody sees the world when they're not like you and it's not a quick process you know think of how long it would take to understand the position

of let's say radical Muslims fighting in Iraq how many years work is going to take somebody to get into a position where they fully understand the other person's World model to the point where they can have a straight conversation with them right to understand even your enemies perfectly is a really hard job and we have to do that because for example Regulators look at us and wonder what in God's name is that any idea no idea do we need to do anything about this I have no idea how we would tell Mr George is there anyone we could ask no I don't think we know anybody who knows anything about this right and with Gulfs of understanding on that scale

the behavior that will occur is completely undetermined right they could ignore it for 50 years they could freak the hell out no way to know no consistency so strategic listening to really understand the world model of everybody around you is a huge part of learning how to do strategic Communications and all of our Communications are strategic because we are tiny the world is big and we want them all to move it's all strategy right the people that you hire the people that you communicate with on forums the people who are building it and hitting bugs any single one of those could unlock the correct version of the story or the correct Insight that adds another Factor 10 to the user base that adds another Factor 10 to the

size of the open source Community doing the development work you know if we had another 900 programmers involved in this thing in a year that would be really useful wouldn't it right be like raising another $200 million amazing right so examples of great communication of this type Caz it just do it to infinity and beyond do what th Wilt should be the whole of the wall be the change you want to see in the world from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs right each one of these is a phrase which has become to a greater or lesser degree Universal some of these phrases indicate World models that we think are acceptable other indicate

World models that are unacceptable is Coke actually it no actually I don't think it's even a very good symbol for it it's a corrosive sugary beverage um be the change you want to see in the world that really is a good one right it is a good one you have to think really hard if you're going to argue with that and by the time you are thinking that hard you're probably taking a moral position rather than a self-interested one maybe that's a good one maybe it's not right so at some point you get into a position where if you're messaging is sufficiently Universal it becomes kind of like this it doesn't necessarily have a simple meaning anymore because the phrase is

completely embedded in a matrix of beliefs history experience uh the whole social structure that gave rise to the Innovation all of this stuff gets in mesed in these phrases in meshed in the logos think of the Olympic rings right it triggers a whole bunch of semantic associations competition Global Community enormously powerful athletes you know the history of the Olympics something about Greece maybe it's all embedded in that right what does that ethereum logo actually mean right now not very much to most people but to a small community of people it means this extremely high ideal about

the kind of world that we'd like to live in how do we teach more people that that's what that logo means right strategic communication every single bug report has to be handled in a way that eventually teaches people yeah when you see that symbol it's a square deal it's the real deal they're not going to mess you around it's the right thing to do and that is something that has to percolate right through not just the organization but also the user Community it's about values now this is the best book in the world on strategic Communications right I apologize for its name I apologize even more for its content it is hilariously offensive it's a product of the 1970s 1960s When It Was Written it's

a bunch of folk tales by an advertising executive in America called Bob PRK and Bob pran was an honest advertising executive who hated lying to the people that were buying things so it's a whole bunch of stories about how Bob prakan sold Things based on telling the truth and because the book was written on a bet he had a bet that he could tell Christian themed advertising book so he wrote a Christian themed advertising book and turned it into a best seller which is kind of an example of the master of advertising demonstrating his capability even with a handicap like that he could produce an amazing advertising book it's normally sold under the name prian Testament but if you're looking for it it's usually

easier to find as Christ was an adman you can only find it used it's very scarce get hold of a copy read it pass it around somebody scan it and make a PDF I think I think he's dead so right strategic Communications in this kind of mode yes it has been used for advertising but it's also the core DNA of social change movements right the free software movement is essentially a strategic communications project it's just that one of the communications that we want from people is that they emit free code as a communication right I attach the GPL to my work that's my communication with the world so let's wrap this up and go to the pop fully General eniz communication

Coke is It Be the Change you want to see in the world rare this is not our goal if we happen to get one of those that would be amazing don't count on it don't necessarily strive for it those things are literally you know there are four or five dozen of them in the culture at any given time they're they're not common All You Need Is Love who's going to say something is perfect getting into a position where you've got 10 people to understand what it is that you mean when you say ethereum is not an intractable problem because you can start with the people who are like you and you can learn how to communicate with them and if you do it right they can learn how to communicate with their friends and gradually gradually gradually gradually the stuff will begin to move as time

passes the message changes and becomes more adaptive you hit a new community of users for them it's about convenience rather than privacy for these guys over here it's about security rather than convenience everybody retells the story in a slightly different way the story becomes kind of fractal every time you get a new version of the message that pushes you further down into uh wider groups you get into a position where a new kind of people become engaged for example Twitter in America divides into two camps there's white Twitter and there's black Twitter exactly the same technology black teenagers have a completely different set of social protocols that they express through Twitter and it's a huge

part of the Twitter user base at some point there there was a bridge where Twitter went from being you know the darling of the do world to some black kid sitting there on a feature phone going like oh I see what you do with this and off it goes in a whole new Direction and if you do the social network analysis you can see it's two completely different sets of people following each other right now ethereum right ethereum is an agnostic technology at pretty fundamental level but what if we discovered that it became enormously popular for people who do things like play chess because you to put every move into a blockchain to make sure that people aren't screwing each other on the forums you could get I don't know 10 15 20 million users that way and they might not be particularly useful politically

for the long-term agenda but what would we do if we suddenly discovered that ethereum became that chess thing because chess people turned out to be the main users you have to say that's amazing and then continue to build and we don't know the environment that we're operating and where that jump might be we kind of think Finance I wonder if it's not going to turn out to be web hosting you know the first big win could turn out to be almost anything so we have to stay alert to this notion that it's people that aren't like us that represent the next jump because we've already gotten a pretty good job of the immediate set of people that are similar and it's all about adding more and more and more difference and diversity to the project particularly in the user base but you can't reach the

users without the developers and the whole thing becomes this quest for a broader and broader and broader inclusivity so so that we can actually get the growth that we're looking for does this sort of make sense as a model right little ambitious little strange this is the notion so two final points because we're doing something that we actually believe in as we actually uh have these conversations with people what's happening is we're showing them a piece of our world model This is How I Live this is what I actually believe this is what we want to do about the world and its condition and that directness of communication is what makes this an honest project you're not selling something

because typically we think of selling is being associated with lying you're not selling something by telling people something which is not true you're showing them an idea or a perspective or a world model which is useful to them in a way that their current world model doesn't let them Reach they adopt a little piece of your perspective because your perspective shows them something they didn't have before and that is a very very simple approach to two people talking and one person allowing the other person to see something they hadn't seen before yeah yeah there's a shortcut over here you're just going to go over the humpback bridge and then take a left takes you right down to the station that's great you never go the old way again oh you're transferring money to India oh there's a better way of doing that let me tell you

and after that jump happens different game right have you tried doing it on a blockchain different game all of this stuff is how we build the strength that comes with having a genuinely diverse community and that is how we're going to get the growth it's an entire section of people at a time it's not that we spread all the way down through one horizontal and then jump to another horizontal it's that we spread to a whole bunch of different verticals and race off in different directions and we can only do that by building this enormously broad base um oh final pie so to get effective collaboration people need to either shared experiences or shared expectations shared experiences history shared expectations project future

either one will work it's easiest to spread this stuff in the places where there's shared uh shared experience which is the Bitcoin Community shared expectation who are the people that expect the world to work in the way that ethereum makes it work and if we can identify who those people are that's a community of people for whom ethereum looks like their future Ah that's exactly what I always wanted give that to me so um that's it thank you very much oh