Discussion on communication strategies, messaging, and marketing approaches for promoting Ethereum and decentralized technology concepts to broader audiences.

Transcript

[00:14] SPEAKER_00: 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 route path. And for something like Ethereum, any lie that is communicated to people will turn into 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 clash 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 that make sense? This notion that you want to join a system which is true at every level is just vastly easier to build than 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. This fundamental rule that if you're not paying for it, you're actually the product no longer applies when you begin to deal with FOSS.

So 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 1.2 by 2.4 meter material. Just as it comes off the truck. The roof pieces are half a sheet. So as a result 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.

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 per refugee per year. It's somewhere between 1/10 and 1/5 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 dollars 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 completely bound up into the capitalist discourse 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 would do.

This is an intense problem around NGOs. They call it donor driven aid. So you raise a bunch of money 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.

Once you start trying to achieve social change through kind of technological means or techno social 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. If you're in the business of trying to change the world, everything you do is on the end of this kind of like 10 kilometer long lever, or even a 10,000 kilometer 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 defined syntax or semantics for the markup language in Wikipedia makes it almost impossible to port content out of it into anything else. MediaWiki is basically a rat hole for data 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 in PHP.

So 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 get a 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 interface design, all of these kind of micro decisions have this consistency of purpose all the way through. We're steering people towards making a better world by changing their behavior.

That is the very first hexayurt built in 2003. It does resemble a dog shed, but it's actually quite big inside. As the design went viral, as it spread from mouth to mouth and ear 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 have no idea what that is. Never heard of the people that built it. People started building big deployments. All this is at Burning Man, by the way. You can see this enormous dome. Every triangle on that dome is half a sheet of 4 by 8. So 30 sheets of 4 by 8 and a saw. Real housing, 45 square meters, 450 square feet. People love these things. Shiny, happy people love that picture.

So one of the core lessons about how to sell ideas is that ideas are bigger than products. 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 and space. Ideas, on the other hand, ripple through reality. The idea of hypertext, it sure took a long time before it became a real thing. But at this point, there's probably never going to be an 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 Metcalfe's Law, because we're spreading an idea first and foremost. Append only ledger. Something that gives you this 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? But the idea is free. The instantiations each come with their own prices.

So I want to talk about a little bit about how ideas go into culture. Years and years and years and years ago, a bunch of my friends got very serious about the idea that we might see failed states in Europe. 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 far right swing that would potentially bring down the Greek government. This is in 2009. So a decent amount of headroom.

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 rampage and destroys everything. And once that happens, everybody will say, oh, that was a black swan. We could never have seen it coming.

Could anybody think of some black elephants? Global warming. Global warming, right. The biggest treasuries. Yes, treasuries, potentially. Right.

So 2009, 2010, the black elephant thing was in fringe culture. It was in the Dark Mountain movement in the UK. 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 op ed about black elephants in the New York Times. So from inception to that term is now locked into global use, five years.

The idea slowly crept into culture because it was a good idea, because it was a strong explanatory model for what we saw around 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 Friedman. Oh, yeah, black elephant. You know, you read about that, right? And I don't think it's going to become quite the same kind of a 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. But once the idea is locked into culture, it's there for keeps.

Another example, resilience maps. So this is a thing that you use for designing a hexayurt refugee camp. And it's a simple, simple, simple map of what keeps you alive. 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 a group. Electrical grid, shared at the nation state level. The further you go out from the center, the bigger the size of the entity that's doing the sharing and the supporting. Very simple idea creeps out. That's where it was first presented. That's the audience. Look at these people.

Now a movement called Stacktivism has taken up this idea and a whole bunch of associated stuff, mainstream in the art world, things like the Goethe Institute supporting it. It's a real thing. Government of Spain uses it in their pandemic flu planning. So it's become semi official. It's used in the US as well.

So that notion that these ideas kind of start small, they start in little places and then get pushed out, 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. Bitcoin's market cap is on the order of what, $4 billion right now? Something like that, which is tiny. I mean, if you actually look at what a $4 billion company looks like, they're not actually all that remarkable. There are a lot of them around.

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. That is a series of multipliers. Factor 10 growth 4, 5, 6, 8 times, right? Over and over and over again. It has to not just double, it has to go up by factors of 10.

So could I have a quick show of hands who's seen this 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 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.

This is a couple of years old, so it's got Twitter as being an early adopter thing. Twitter is now early majority. Facebook is now late majority. Everything's actually kind of moved left a little bit. Sorry, moved. 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 50,000 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.

And we can talk about how, for example, TCP/IP 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 WiFi, but if the WiFi 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, I have no idea what you're talking about. It's not bad.

So out here you have a very different set of problems to the problems of ordinary marketing. 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. Tenth of a percent of the population globally is 17 million users. 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 a predator. It's the same kind of behavior.

So for us, lowering the background level of fear, uncertainty and doubt about everything cryptocurrency related, everything blockchain related, everything about this kind of paradigmatic shift in the way that computers work, all of those kind of processes 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. 2000, 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. I deleted 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. 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. Does it make sense? 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 investors who we want to get funding dapps, every single person in the institution has contact with people who are outside of the institution. All of that, God help us, is sales.

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 ten. And those people to increase it by another factor of 10 five or six times. Before we even get started, 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 people. If you're inviting somebody to come and actually write code with you, make sure you understand what it is you need them to do. Not just at a technical sense, but why it is they should 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. 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 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 sell. So practice on your friends. This is not just kind of cult leadership tactics, although it might be. Practice on your friends because it minimizes the incidental complexity of the communication process. 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'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 conversations, 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 is 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 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.

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.

I know a friend of mine who describes himself as a strategic listener 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 it 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. 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. And with gulfs of understanding on that scale, the behavior that will occur is completely undetermined. 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. 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 of 10 to the user base. That adds another factor of 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 is it. Just do it. To infinity and beyond. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Be the change you want to see in the world. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. 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. Others 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. 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 gonna 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 your 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, the whole social structure that gave rise to the innovation. All of this stuff gets enmeshed in these phrases, enmeshed in the logos.

Think of the Olympic rings. 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 like to live in.

How do we teach more people that that's what that logo means? Strategic communications. 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 Pritikin. And Bob Pritikin 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 Pritikin sold things based on telling the truth.

And because the book was written on a bet, he had a bet that he could sell a 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 Pritikin's Testament, but if you're looking for it, it's usually easier to find as Christ was an ad man. 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 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. The free software movement is essentially a strategic communications project. It's just that one of the communications 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 pub. Fully generalized 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 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 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 was a bridge where Twitter went from being, you know, the darling of the dot com 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.

Now, Ethereum, right, Ethereum is an agnostic technology at a pretty fundamental level. But what if we discovered that it became enormously popular for people who do things like play chess because you want 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 in or 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 that we can actually get the growth that we're looking for. Does this sort of make sense as a model? 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 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 as 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.

Oh, final piece. So, to get effective collaboration, people need to have either shared experiences or shared expectations. Shared experience is history. Shared expectations, projected future. Either one will work. It's easiest to spread this stuff in the places where there's 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, that's it. Thank you very much.