Fooled by spectrum (E)

0:00Something extraordinary happened between 1950 and 1962. Television changed the world. 9 % of the households in the United States had a television set in 1950. By 1962, it was 90%. Hey, it's Arav, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:30This isn't a podcast, actually, about how television changed the world. It's about how we've been fooled by the magic moment that television created, because that moment is over. The magic moment of television is actually a byproduct of the electromagnetic spectrum. And to talk about that, we have to talk about the Hertz family. Matilda Hertz, the youngest, who did pioneering work in The Raven and its behavior and eyesight. Her uncle, Gustav Hertz, won a Nobel Prize. Her cousin, Carl Hertz, not to be confused with Carl Hertz, the stage magician, helped invent the inkjet printer and the sonogram.

1:17But we're really talking about Matilda's dad, Heinrich Hertz, for whom the Hertz is named. What Hertz demonstrated, What Maxwell theorized is that light isn't just Roy G. Biff, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. There are the gamma rays that turn Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk.

1:50The gamma's too high! Bruce, I can't stop it! There are the x-rays. There are the high-frequency rays that lead us to radio and then television. Spectrum, it's all the same stuff. Light at different frequencies enables us to communicate analog signals at long distances. It enables us to use x-rays to see through your skin and scan a bone, and it enabled television. The thing is, spectrum is scarce. That in any given band of the spectrum, there's only a little bit available for each use. CB radio gets two dozen channels. You could try to put more channels in the CB radio section of the spectrum, but because analog is imprecise, we have to leave enough spacing between the channels.

2:51So I grew up in Buffalo, New York, channel 2, channel 4, channel 7, and then on channel 17 was public TV and channel 29 had Ultraman. And that was it. There weren't a hundred channels or a thousand channels. So there are technical reasons for this spacing and there are economic reasons. The invention of radio and then television wouldn't have had that big an impact on the culture of the world, except for the fact that first radio and then television quickly moved to a network model, meaning that all over the world, people saw the same thing. Before television's precursor radio came around, It's true that everything was local.

3:44If you were a sensation in Vienna, people in Paris had probably never heard of you. If news was happening in Madrid, they really had no clue about what was going on in Krakow. It was local. So you could win in the local market because the local market had a finite number of butcher shops, of theaters, of newsstands. Again, scarcity. There weren't that many slots to support the creators, the people who made the news, the people who reported the news. The media had to win locally in order for it to pay. That if you wanted to get elected or change the culture, you had to be a big shot in your little town.

4:33That's how news spread. That's how the culture was built. But when radio came along, suddenly local became a much bigger circle. And then the big insight was this. Once I'm making radio for New York, the cost of beaming my radio through a cable to Los Angeles is really low. This is NBC, the national broadcasting company.

5:06That sound is heard more often by more people than any other sound in America. Pulsing out from the transmitter tower into the tubes and coils behind your radio dial, whoever, wherever you may be, is like a welcome knock on the door and the sound of the familiar voice of an old friend. So now local begins to disappear. One voice could be heard in a hundred places, a thousand places in every country in the world. Because the economics dictated that we wanted to invest in making something really shiny. That people wanted to hear what other people were hearing. So culture, culture as we understand it today, shifted from hyper-local, from the shtetl, from the ghetto, from the little village, to nationwide or even worldwide because of the economics of scarcity.

6:08Still just a few newsstands, still just a few channels to tune into. There are two reasons then that networks arose. One, because the economics of it made it so that it was cheaper to take one thing and put it in lots of places. And two, because people wanted to hear what other people were hearing. This regime lasted from 1940 until the year 2000. For 60 years, it was a magical engine, a magical engine of commerce and culture. It turned out, if you were smart enough to buy TV ads in 1964, you made enough money to buy more TV ads in 1965. It turns out that the brands that we grew up with, Goodrich, Goodyear, Heinz, Ford, Chrysler, go down the list.

7:04Average stuff for average people advertised widely. And our definition of success shifted from, I'm a big deal on my block, or I'm a big deal in my town to everybody knows my name. And so we get to the part about being fooled by spectrum. Because once digital showed up, the rules changed. First, channel spacing is way easier to deal with when it's a digital signal. But soon thereafter, we realized we didn't need to use the expensive, hard-to-share part of the spectrum, that we could multiplex signals and send them over things like Wi-Fi, or we could send them over cables. What it meant was we don't need there to be three TV networks.

7:53There's room for three billion TV networks. This has to change everything. At the same time, it got cheaper than ever to make TV-quality content. At the same time, people responded to this freedom by realizing they don't want to hear what everybody else is hearing. They don't want to get email. They want to get me-mail. That the filter bubble shows up. And what the filter bubble says is that people want to hear what people want to hear. People want to listen to what people want to listen to. So, movies. Movies have a scarcity component, and that scarcity component is theaters. If there's a finite number of theaters, then the movies that get into the theaters will get seen.

8:46Which movies get into the theaters? Fifty years ago, a movie might play in a theater for months. Now, the typical movie plays in a theater for a week. What happened? What happened was the culture of television. Because if you could advertise your movie heavily, particularly on Thursday night TV, you could have a big weekend. That made the theater owner happy and made it more likely that your blockbuster would get booked into the theater. This started with Jaws and has moved throughout the film business. That's why so many movies seem like superhero movies, because superhero movies are easy to promote using limited spectrum.

9:31So what does this have to do with you? Well, number one, when we have a choice, we take a choice. You, my alert listeners, have no doubt heard this before many times. We went from the three-channel universe of television or the 18-station universe of radio to the nearly infinite universe of modern media. But that's not what's really important here. What's important is that the magic of television and its alignment with scarcity in the physical world changed our culture. It changed it deeply, right to the core. The reason that we have nationwide chain stores is that we had nationwide television.

10:20The reason that there are nationally advertised brands is that we had national advertising. Scarcity of shelf space lined up with scarcity of spectrum. And it created this dynamic fueled by capitalism, fueled by the public markets that went like this. Not everything is going to get distributed. The things that get distributed will sell enough that they can buy more ads. Buying more ads will get you more distribution. Distribution and ads will lead to sales, which will change the culture. Change what we want. In 1910, radio pioneer Lee DeForest broadcast the first commercial radio broadcast in New York City.

11:10It was Enrique Caruso singing the opera.

11:21Why isn't there a lot of opera in our culture now? Well, with a limited number of stations, programmers wanted to program what people wanted to listen to. People in quotation marks, meaning most people. And most people wanted to hear jazz and dance music. For a hundred years, there weren't a lot of places to listen to opera on the radio. Fast forward to a day when there are a million radio stations. we've been taught that opera isn't as cool as pop music. And so there's less of it. Number two, and this one is the most important. It is no longer possible to build a nationwide brand using scarce spectrum.

12:13Think about that. In 1965, it was required. now it is no longer possible, that the idea of a nationwide brand is fading really fast, and it's being replaced with something specific. And what it's being replaced with is the minimum viable audience. Not the largest possible audience, but the smallest audience you can live with. Because if you can find those people, and those people can find you, The specific ones. Not the masses, but people who care. If you know who they are, you can delight them. You can make something just for them. Something exclusive. Something focused. Something meaningful.

12:58So now we're in this world of infinite shelf space and infinite spectrum. A world where any message can get to the people who want to hear it. and any product can be purchased by the people who seek it out. This changes everything about how our culture will evolve. It means that if you love opera, you can find opera, you can listen to opera, you can buy opera, and it doesn't matter if CBS and Walmart don't want to play along because infinity has arrived. But there's this huge cultural overhang, and the huge cultural overhang is that we grew up thinking in mass and thinking about scarcity. The opportunity of our time is to realize that the dinosaurs from that world are struggling.

13:53Procter & Gamble is not happy. Working today in Cincinnati is not fun because everything they built their company on doesn't work anymore. Heinz just reported huge earnings losses. Why? Because the thing that makes Heinz work isn't working anymore. What is working is passionate people seeking out the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people that they can live with, who can support them. As Kevin Kelly would say, 1 ,000 true fans. If there are 1 ,000 people who will cross the country to see you perform, 1 ,000 people who will support your Kickstarter, 1 ,000 people who will subscribe, it's enough.

14:4010 ,000 is a home run. 100 ,000 changes things. We don't need 10 million or 100 million. Those were based on the idea of scarce shelf space, which meant that we needed plenty of money to buy scarce spectrum. The internet is not a mass medium. It is a micro medium. It reaches 3 billion people, yes, but there is no homepage. There is no Super Bowl. That's not how the internet works. The internet is a collection of tiny markets. I find it ironic and a little pathetic that smart marketers buy Super Bowl ads. They are paying a premium to reach an undifferentiated audience of average. Doesn't it make more sense to pay a premium to reach the people you want to reach and not interact with the other ones?

15:39That this idea of a filter bubble has two sides. There's the negative side, which is that we are now dividing, that the media companies have discovered that they can make a profit by pushing us away from each other. The media companies create false crises. They live in the situation room. They're trying to keep everyone on high alert. And the filter bubble makes that worse because people only read what they agree with. But the flip side of it is that when it comes to our culture, 100, 1 ,000, 10 ,000 pockets are growing. Pockets of real passion. Pockets of connection. That what we get to do as creators of culture is make something worth talking about.

16:27Not by everyone, but by some people. By people who want to be connected around our idea. So we are no longer in the business of bringing molecules from one facility to a home. We are in the business of creating connection, interacting with people who want to be interacted with, connecting people who want to be connected, to weave together pockets of culture that we're proud of. That's what we each get to do. This is a moment in time when you don't need a big budget to make a big difference. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin.

17:10Hi 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. As always, we love hearing from you. If you visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button, you can submit your question as well. While you're there, you can see show notes for the last 55 episodes. Hi Seth, this is Priyel from Italy. Your latest episode on being supple was right on the spot with me.

18:00I'm walking right now thinking about exactly that for my own gig. I'm curious about your take on focus because I find it as someone that likes opening so many things and likes starting new things, I tend personally to start one too many or five too many projects and then I find myself myself overwhelmed. What advice can you give on that and thank you so much for your work. Thanks for this question. It comes up a lot and it's based on a little bit of a confusion about what our work is. Too often people struggle to find ideas to find creative solutions to existing problems. And so if we are in a position where we've done the work to find one of those solutions, it feels like we've done the work.

18:54And so we can collect them, a lot of them, over and over and over again, bouncing from one to another. Happens to me all the time. One of the reasons I have a blog is so that I can take an idea and get rid of it, as opposed to carrying it around with a briefcase full of other ideas. But here's the thing. The work isn't coming up with the idea. The work is shipping the idea. What we have to measure is not what we are working on. We have to measure what we have shipped, what doors have we opened, what generous solutions have we brought to the world. So it's work because it takes discipline, the emotional labor of sticking with something when another idea is more attractive, when another idea is shinier, hasn't been besmirched yet by reality.

19:51So I am regularly reminding myself of this. Real artists ship. Real artists show up and make things better. And it will not work the first time or the fifth time or the 10th time, that this idea of generous persistence, not on your behalf, but on behalf of those you seek to serve, that's at the core of the best work we're able to do. Hi, Seth. This is Nick from Campbell, California. And I'm really intrigued by this concept of suppleness, I was wondering if you have any ideas or thoughts on how you could maybe test yourself for suppleness or with a thought experiment or with a real experiment. When I hear the concept of being supple with what you're trying to do in the world, I think, yeah, I got that.

20:50But I don't know if I'm just being too easy on myself and moving on to the next thing or whether there's a good way of knowing. Thanks. This is a great question, and I confess I have not spent a lot of time thinking about it. But of course, we spend a lot of time testing ourselves in other ways. We get on the scale. We see how long it takes us to swim a mile. So how to go about understanding our personal approach to being supple? Well, Well, I'll divide it into two categories. The first category is strategically, organizationally. Are you ready to be supple? So for example, if you have planned a trip somewhere and you have seven bags that you have checked all the way to Cincinnati and something comes up, you're not that supple because your stuff's already in the hold of the plane.

21:47You can't switch gears. It's not even easy to accept being overbooked, taking the credit and going on a later flight because your bags are already stuck. So the supple flyer is walking around with one bag ready to shift gears at any moment. We can take that model and apply it to lots of ways as we work our way through the world. For example, if you're up to your eyeballs in debt, it's a lot harder to take a leap to a new job than it is if you are more nimble and thus supple. But the second half, and the part I think you're actually getting at, is how do we deal with sunk costs? I was talking with my friend Brian the other day, and he pointed out that one of his superpowers is that he's really good at ignoring sunk costs.

22:38And there's an entire akimbo episode about this. You can listen to it. But basically the question is this. Emotionally, how do you react or respond when sunk costs need to be ignored and a new decision needs to be made? So, for example, back to the idea of that flight to Cincinnati that's overbooked. You're sitting in row seven and the flight attendant comes on and says, we're offering$400 to somebody who's willing to take the flight in an hour and a half, all you have to do is get off the plane and cross the tarmac to the other gate. Do you say great news and go because it's very rare that you get paid$400 for an hour and a half's worth of work?

23:24Or do you get a discomfort in the pit of your stomach because ignoring those sunk costs, that commitment to the decision you already made is a little bit painful for you. So that would be the homework. The work we do is how do we experience sunk costs to make new decisions based on new data and to refuse the gifts from our past self when they are worth refusing. So thanks for the thought experiment. I hope that helps. Hey Seth, this is Brownrigg from Niceville, Florida. So I just finished your book, linchpin for the second time on audio version and it's always been an inspiration about seven months ago i started a new position and i've been actively working at becoming a linchpin for my my peers and my co-workers to add value where there wasn't value before that being said i've gone outside of the scope of my typical job description in order to create connections where there weren't connections before and we got our course i mean not of course our job evaluations back today and everything was very average.

24:36And apparently that's what you do at a big company. Everyone is always very average. And even though I knew that the results shouldn't discourage me, they really did discourage me. Maybe because I felt like I wasn't getting the recognition that I was hoping for or that people weren't seeing the change that I was seeking to make, even though that change is apparent to the people that I'm connecting and the ideas that I am spreading. So any advice on how to deal with that would be wonderful. Thank you. Oh yeah, I feel your pain and I'm sorry that the people you are working with aren't getting the point of what you are trying to do.

25:13It's easy to see being a linchpin, which is the opposite of being a cog, being a linchpin, someone who eagerly takes responsibility, someone who puts in the extra effort to make things better as the sort of person that any organization will embrace. But the fact is many, many organizations and a lot of managers want cogs. Cogs are less threatening. Cogs in some level are more dependable. They do exactly what you expect every single time. So the argument I've been making for 15 or 20 years is that the future belongs to organizations that are resilient, that can deal with change, that do things that are magical, that can't easily be outsourced, that can't easily be turned into AI.

26:03That is the job of a linchpin, a group of people who care enough to write the manual instead of following the manual. But, and it's a very big but, we're in the middle of a generations-long transition away from the industrial era. And if you work at an institution where people are rewarded for being compliant cogs, don't be surprised that they're not happy when you act like a linchpin. One thing I can share with you is early in my career, after a year of some of the best work of my life, one of my managers tried to get me fired. He didn't try to get me fired because he disliked me as a person.

26:47He tried to get me fired because it was too difficult for him to manage seven people where one of them was intent on breaking rules, making rules, figuring out how things worked, and six of them wanted to follow the manual. What I figured out in that moment was that I could stay in the organization by working with and for other people who got the joke, who needed what I could provide. But if those people aren't around, that's a signal that maybe you need to look somewhere else. Because the worst thing you could do is pretend to be a cog. The worst thing you could do is give up and just become compliant and ask what to do next and simply follow the manual.

27:32Because if you do that, then you will be just like everyone else. And then you will be easily replaceable. and the goal when we do our work is to make things better by making better things. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.