Five monkeys (E)

0:00There are five monkeys. there's a pole or maybe a ladder, and at the top, a banana. And of course, there's a powerful spray of water. One of the monkeys starts climbing up the ladder, it gets hit by the water spray. Another monkey starts climbing up the ladder, it gets hit by the water spray. Pretty soon, the other monkeys, every time they see a monkey getting ready to climb up the ladder, We'll tackle him, keep him from climbing the ladder. And then, one by one, the monkeys are replaced. Now the new monkey, the naive monkey, starts trying to climb the ladder, and it gets tackled. One by one, the monkeys are replaced until none of the original wet monkeys, until not one monkey that was present in the face of the bizarre experiment with the water gun, is in the room.

1:00And yet, still, the monkeys will keep each other from climbing the ladder. Konnichiwa. It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo. Is Akimbo.

1:20That story's not true. Even scientists who work with primates aren't quite twisted enough to actually have performed that experiment, but it was in a bestseller called Competing for the Future, which came out in 1996 by Gary Hamill and C.K. Prahlad. The thing is, they sort of made it up. It was based on an earlier actual experiment that happened in the 1970s. The core takeaway that we're supposed to remember is this. That's the way we do things around here. That it turns out that the relationships between and among us, what we call culture, is way stickier and sometimes way more subtle than we'd like to admit.

2:07DNA is permanent. It doesn't really change. What that means is it doesn't matter how long a giraffe's neck is, it will not get longer if that giraffe keeps stretching for higher leaves. That's what Lamarck and others believed about evolution, but it's not true. That in fact, it's pretty permanent. If your eyes are blue, their eyes are going to stay blue no matter how much you want them to turn brown. But for us in our day-to-day lives. It turns out DNA isn't really the driver. It turns out that the driver is memetics, our culture, the relationships between and among us. That is way harder to shift.

2:59It's invisible and it's powerful. Remember Blockbuster? Before Blockbuster went bankrupt, they had a chance to completely demolish Netflix. Netflix had just launched a subscription version of their DVD rental business where there were no late fees. And it turned out consumers hate late fees. If Blockbuster had matched them and gone into the subscription business, it's entirely likely that House of Cards would never have happened. but at a board meeting where they had a vote as to whether they were going to go after it or not, the board voted no. And the reason is that year they made$800 million in late fees.

3:51Blockbuster defined themselves as a company that made money from late fees. So taking away late fees would have gotten right at the heart of what they stood for. Or consider the ongoing conversation, the debate about digital versus print books. Do any search you want and you will see book loyalists gloating at the fact that digital is no longer growing. That digital plus audio is only two-thirds of the nonfiction book business. Only two-thirds. Hooray, hooray. Why do they care? Why do people in the book business act like they are in the business of chopping down trees? That's not really the business they're in.

4:41Or consider what's going on in Pennsylvania with coal miners. Coal mining, of course, is dangerous, it's dirty, and it's destroying the earth. Coal mining is going to go away. The price of coal can't go down, and the price of other forms of fuel will go down. Coal mining is going away. So there are tons of retraining programs being offered to coal miners. And in one report, five out of six of the slots are going unused. Why aren't coal miners taking advantage of the opportunity they have to learn a new skill? It won't cost them anything. or consider the fact that Encyclopedia Britannica is no longer printed.

5:31Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it depends on what the point of Encyclopedia Britannica is. If the goal of it, 200 years after Encyclopedia showed up, is to have many, many volumes sitting in your living room, then it has failed. But if the goal of Encyclopedia Britannica as a cultural force is to create a template for more people to know more stuff it has succeeded beyond its founders' wildest dreams. What we do when we are in culture is we get hung up on how we do things around here. It goes far beyond the innovator's dilemma, far beyond a dollars and cents bit of math, and goes right to the cultural understanding of who we serve.

6:29Yahoo could have bought Google for just about nothing. But if they had, they would have had to acknowledge that their approach of building a directory wasn't as good as Google's. AOL could have bought Yahoo for almost nothing. But if they had, they would have had to acknowledge that their walled garden was falling down to a more open place. And Prodigy could have bought AOL for a dollar, but they didn't. Because if they had, they would have acknowledged that all of the infrastructure that they had bet so much on was becoming obsolete. The point of all of these stories is that organizations, large and small, forget to examine their cultural DNA.

7:22They forget to go back to first principles, and they think their job is to collect late fees. They think that their job is to cut down trees. They think that their job is to put entertainment into movie theaters. None of those things are true. So here are the four questions. The first one, who do we serve? Because every organization has its base. It's really hard to change it because the relationships between and among humans are really fragile and difficult to create. But you have one. You have a relationship. These people we serve, what do they need? What that means is if you're a book reader and you suddenly start reading on the Kindle, book publishers shouldn't be upset with that.

8:15They should simply accept that because the people they seek to serve want to be served in a different way. Then the third one, which applies mostly to organizations, is what do we own? What assets do we already have? So here's an interesting question. Random House had as its stated goal to get information to people who wanted information. Well, if that's what Random House did for all those years, why didn't they start Google? It only took two people to start Google. Why didn't they? Because Random House thought what they did for a living was make books that are sold in bookstores. They thought that the key asset they owned was the relationship with the bookstore because they had no relationship with the reader.

9:07They didn't own the printing plant. All they had was shelf space at the bookstore. So if you are going to defend what you own, then of course all of these new form factors, all these different kinds of media can be viewed as a threat. But if we go back to the first two questions, who do we serve and what do they need, then maybe you can get to the fourth question, which is what do we know? Because the thing we own that's the most useful isn't a machine, it's knowledge. What are we confident in? What do we know? Once you know something and you can solve somebody else's problem with it, then maybe you don't need to worry about the water jets so much if you're a monkey.

9:53That maybe what you get to do is take a deep breath and realize that once again the platform has shifted. And that what we need to do is walk away from what we used to believe we did and do something else. So let's look at Netflix where we started. Netflix did not fall in love with late fees. Netflix used to have warehouses filled with DVDs. They would put them in envelopes and mail them to people. When the internet came along, they realized they could be disrupted the same way they disrupted Blockbuster. So they started streaming movies, and they did it when it was difficult. But they understood who they served.

10:36They already had customers, and they understood what those people needed. And for the first 10 years that they were streaming, the mission was, let's stream everything. Now they hardly do that at all. Now they make movies and they make documentaries and specials. So all of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, 20 years, Netflix has gone from we're sort of like Blockbuster but without the late fees to we are the biggest movie studio in the history of the world. They did that because they understood what they knew. They understood that they could get more knowledge Obtaining more knowledge is usually easier than giving up what you're already good at.

11:22They understood what they owned, and they understood what the people they serve needed. So the challenge we have as individuals or organizations when the world changes is to begin by looking at our mimetic DNA. What is the relationship between and among? Is someone tackling us every time we go near the ladder? Because primate experts say that if you put bananas on the top of a pole, it's going to get eaten. Some monkey's going to go for it. And as the media landscape changes, that's what we keep confronting. Someone's going to figure it out. And it might as well be you. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

12:07Wait, before you go, one last metaphor to share with you. Isaac Shankler, a musician in L.A., recorded the Moonlight Sonata, one of the most famous pieces of classical music ever. You'll recognize it immediately. But what he did wasn't change the notes. All he did was change the timing. His left hand and his right hand are at a different synchronization than you've ever heard before. One is one bar ahead of the other. So what you will hear in the excerpt that follows is not different music, but a different relationship between the notes. It really made me think. Thanks.

13:17you

13:47Thank you.

14:11Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Thanks so much for all the great questions. We love to hear from you. Visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button. And a reminder, there are show notes posted for every past episode.

14:56Hey Seth, this is Joey from Virginia, and I have a two-part question. The first part is, with the ability to publish and create content so much more effectively, it seems like there's a bit of a supply issue. And it feels like with the overwhelming amount of content that is created, that it cheapens the art. Now, I know that is not true in my mind, but it feels cheaper. And I wondered if you had any advice on how to combat that feeling. The second part of the question is about curators and gatekeepers. do you think that they're the same thing? And maybe what is the role of curation as we move forward into an era of multitudes of content creators?

15:42Thanks for all your work. A great two-parter. Here's the deal. There has always been a surplus of cheap, in quotation marks, content. That the movies that were shown in the 20s or the 30s or the 40s, or the comic books that were in huge piles during the 50s. The radio stations we didn't want to listen to. The late night TV that was easy to make fun of. Making cheap content, not cheap because it's inexpensive, but cheap because it's worthless, is really easy. Because it's trite. Because it's a commodity because it's safe. And so going forward as the media changes, yes, more and more people will have a blog or a podcast.

16:31More and more people will put a show on YouTube or Netflix. But we will only think it's cheap when it's not about us, when it's not for us, when it's not part of an important conversation. So there'll be the important stuff and the rest of the stuff. and the rest of the stuff we'll ignore. Which leads to the second part of your question about curation and gatekeepers. And yes, there's a big difference. A gatekeeper might not have the best interests of the audience at heart. They may simply seek to maximize short-term profit by, for example, accepting payments. Curators, on the other hand, have a reputation at stake.

17:16Like curators are saying to their reader, their listener, their viewer, I am putting my stamp on this. You can trust that when our brand is on this, they'll be more like this one. So curation keeps going up in value even as gatekeepers go down in power. This is Rebecca from Wheaton, Illinois. I just finished listening to your episode, The Big Sort, and twice you mentioned Marcel Duchamp. Because the source does matter, I want to encourage you to look into Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Lornehaven. It is generally understood now that she was the first to hang the fountain as part of the Dada movement and that Duchamp took the credit for it.

18:09Thank you for giving me a chance to clarify about Marcel Duchamp. I've actually blogged about this, and you can find it in the show notes. He was one of my heroes, because when conceptual art showed up, what happened was he got the joke, he told the joke, the joke was over. But then I found out about the Baroness and his deliberate theft of her concept, of her concept, her great, extraordinary, game-changing concept, a concept that's only great once, the first time you tell it. And the thing is, when Duchamp first proposed it for the art show, he didn't say he made it. But over time, over the years, as he played more and more chess and got less and less feedback about his work as an artist, he increased his claims as to its creation.

19:03And I'm offended by this. And I hope I've just set the record straight. And I wish I could be as excited about Marcel Duchamp as I used to be. Hi, Seth. This is Erin from Toronto, Canada. I just finished listening to The Big Sort. And I think a thing we need to remember is that oftentimes the taxonomy is decided by the majority or those people with the most power and the meaning that they give the language of the labels. An example from the book world that I can think of is your category of miscellaneous. That actually does get subdivided and a majority of male writers who write in miscellaneous get labeled as leadership or business.

19:44Whereas a woman, I get labeled as self-help, a genre that isn't as valued. Any thoughts on how to level the playing field so that the taxonomy doesn't keep people with less power or status down. And from my point of view, this is a very first world problem. But if it's happening in this circumstance, it actually happens to underrepresented populations much more of the time and would like to figure out how we can start combating against that. Thanks, Seth. Yes, you got the point of the Big Sort episode. That's precisely why I made the episode. Because it turns out that the creator of something is either given the benefit of the doubt or punished by how they are sorted.

20:38So, no, I'm not a female writer, but my books have been missorted by the times put into a self-help section when that's not what they were. And there are plenty of examples, particularly for people of color and from other disadvantaged communities, where they are sorted into a pile onto themselves in an unfair way. Unfair to them and unfair to the reader or consumer of the content who won't find it because it has been put into some sort of special pile. One of the weirdest things that you'll see in a bookstore, particularly sometimes in airport bookstores, you'll see novels, you'll see nonfiction, you'll see business, and then there's a category called famous authors.

21:22Well, there's a nice benefit of the doubt that your book is okay simply because someone's decided that you've been heard about enough that you're safe. Well, what about the unfamous authors? What about the previously disrespected authors? What about the film directors or stars who have been previously overlooked? So it's not fair. Of course not. But it's also an opportunity. It's an opportunity to figure out who is the sorter? Who is the curator? How can you over-invest early in the process to get sorted into the pile where you will get the benefit of the doubt? That's hard work that each of us has to do with a resume, with testimonials, with the way we show up online.

22:11Who are you next to? Who should I compare you to? What's the look and the feel, the veneer on the outside of who you really are, of what your work really does? Because if it's in the right wrapper, then, wrapper with a W, then people will treat it differently than if it's in one that causes you to have an uphill battle going forward. Again, thank you for listening. Thank you for the work that you create. And I can't wait to see what you make next. See you soon.