Live at the United Nations (E)

0:00A TV show from my youth that doesn't hold up very well on reviewing is The Man From U.

0:11but one thing that does hold up was the logo that they had it looked a lot like the logo for their parent organization which i assumed was the united nations hey it's ajay and this is a special archived episode of akimbo

0:36The United Nations quietly, persistently saves the world. Saves the world in a lot of ways, ways that we can't go into right now. But I need to say that when they reached out to me and asked if I would come address one of their larger gatherings in New York, I instantly jumped at the chance. So here is a presentation I gave in September 2019, the first half of it, to a group of women's rights activists at the United Nations. Thanks, as always, for listening. I am, I'm really privileged to be here, but I have to start by talking about a hotel that was just a few blocks from here. 15 or 20 years ago, a woman named Leona Helmsley owned a bunch of hotels in New York City and she was referred to as the Queen of Meme.

1:30She had a dog named Trouble and she was indicted for tax fraud. While she was sitting with her lawyer, the fabled Alan Dershowitz, her servant, and she called him her servant, brought her and Alan a cup of tea. When she got the cup of tea she noticed that there was a drop of water on the saucer. Looking the servant in the eye, she dropped the cup and saucer on the tile floor, smashing it into thousands of pieces, and then instructed the servant to get down on his knees and clean it up. Because Leona Helmsley lived on stripping people of their dignity. That was her fuel. and that story got me thinking a lot about the idea of dignity is an idea that came after the word dignitary so I thought coming to the United Nations and talking to dignitaries it would be a good idea to start with this idea of the difference between dignitaries and dignity and where dignity lives because if your work is about anything I think that's what it's about how can we help institutions and humans create opportunities for other people to find their dignity.

2:52Because the thing about dignity is it's very hard to take, but it's very easy to give. And we have to figure out how to give people this dignity. But it doesn't matter that that's obvious and it doesn't matter that we're right, nor does it matter that your plan, which you have worked so hard on that you have laid out in one series of slides after another with charts and graphs and analyses and budgets it doesn't matter that it's right because if all we needed were things to be right for them to be accepted almost all the problems that we face that don't bump into the laws of physics would already be solved the reason that there are problems left human problems is because what we have to do as humans is not simply figure out what's right, but get other humans to see what we see, to believe what we believe, to want what we want, or else at some level, no forward motion is going to happen.

3:55So what I want to do is tell you about five or six of the social entrepreneurs that I've worked with over the last bunch of years and sort of weave together how storytelling can change the game. The first one is something that's going on in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is one of the youngest countries in the world, and we know that people under 20 in Ethiopia are severely protein deficient. 15 to 30 percent of the country is protein deficient. One of the reasons is that it's a smallholder farm country, that most of the people in Ethiopia live on a smallholder farm, which means that what you grow is what you grow, and what you eat is what you grow.

4:39And if you can't grow it, then you're not going to be able to eat it. And the typical Ethiopian chicken lays one egg a week. And there are a lot of reasons for that. But a guy named David Elias saw that this was happening and figured that there might be a harder working chicken available. He found a chicken in France, brought it to Ethiopia. I think he brought more than one. I'm not exactly sure. And the Ethiopian government gave him an abandoned, dilapidated, run-down chicken hatchery. Well, he started a network engaging with local entrepreneurs near local farmers to take his three-day-old chicks, grow them to the point where a local farmer can work with them, and these chickens lay six eggs a week.

5:32I don't know what they do the seventh day, but they lay six eggs a week. The end result is that if you have switched to the chickens from Ethio Chicken, your farm is six times more productive than it used to be with no other changes. Yesterday, Ethio Chicken sold one million baby chicks. Today they will sell one million baby chicks and tomorrow they will sell one million baby chicks day after day after day because one person showed up and said follow me. He did not invent the chicken. He didn't even invent the idea of bringing a French chicken to Ethiopia. What he did was something that is in short supply which is he showed up and he said follow me.

6:16So that's the first piece that I wanted to pin down, the idea of follow me. The second one, 20 blocks from here, is a charity called Charity Water. Last year, Charity Water raised its 250 millionth dollar in fundraising, quarter of a billion dollars raised in less than 15 years. How did this tiny charity do it? They didn't do it by having people realize that there are folks around the world who do not have access to clean water. Everyone already knew that. What Scott and his team did was create a dynamic where your personal status, your personal satisfaction, the way you looked at yourself in the mirror would go up greater than it costs you to donate.

7:12That if you're going to send$50 to Charity Water, the only reason you're going to do it is because you get$100 worth of satisfaction out of doing it. No one gives money to a cause, whether it's a bureaucrat with a budget or a person with their own money, unless it's worth more than it costs because they have choices. The third idea is what they built at the Aravind Eye Hospital. India. If you take up the total population of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Cleveland and add them together, there are more people on earth who can see today because of Aravind than there would have been. Add up all those people, that's how many people Aravind has given sight to with cataract surgery.

8:00How does the cataract surgery work at Aravind? Well it costs about$120 or it costs nothing, your choice. And a lot of people choose to pay, but plenty of people choose not to pay. And what Dr. V did in building Aravind was questioned conventional wisdom. In the United States and the UK, the conventional wisdom is you can only have one patient in the operating room at a time because of the problem of cross-contamination. And so a good eye surgeon can do eight or ten surgeries a day. At Aravind, they prep two patients ahead of time. And so when the surgeon is done, all she has to do is turn around and work on the next patient right behind her.

8:42And a typical surgeon will do 20 or 30 or 40 operations a day. Doctors from the US and the UK travel to India now to train because they can do more surgeries per day than they could ever do here. You say, well wait the quality must be worse well in fact the quality is better that the cross infection rate is actually lower at Aravind's Hospital in southern India than it is in a typical hospital in London and that's because there is wisdom that is worth questioning there are things that we don't know that we could find out but we're only going to be able to find them out by doing them not by studying them.

9:24And that was the key leap that he made. Two or three more. Jehudi Kolimo is a bank, a lender in Kenya. And here's the deal. They will loan you enough money to buy a cow. You can milk that cow and make enough money from milking that cow to pay back the interest on the loan. And a year from now, the cow is yours. The repayment rate on loans that Jehudi Kalimo makes is over 97%. How can they do that? They're loaning money to some of the poorest people on earth. The way they do that is that in order to get the loan, your neighbors who are members of Jehudi Kalimo have to back you. And so the loan is not the divisive loan between the bank and the person who's getting the loan.

10:13The loan is the community supporting the community. And when I went house to house with the chairman, that's what he called himself, the chairman, an unpaid honorary job leading his community for Jehudi Kalimo. Every single person knew him. And it was such a proud moment in this 65-year-old man's life to be able to look his neighbors in the eye, introduce somebody from out of town, and talk about the change we will make together. And so in a couple minutes, we're going to talk about tribes, but this idea that people want to do what other people are doing is the very essence of what it means to be a human.

10:56People like us do things like this. And the last story I'll tell you is the story about the day that I finally figured out how to be a marketer, and that's where we're going to get to the heart of all of this. If you weave silk for a living, if you work with your hands for a living and you turn 50 years old, no matter where in the world you live, you're going to need reading glasses. It just happens. There's just something in the air that after a while, it happens to us. And if you need reading glasses and you can't get reading glasses, you are now unemployed. And in the old days, it didn't matter because you're going to die at 40.

11:35But now it matters because you're going to die at 70, which means that for 20 years, your family's going to have to support you. So VisionSpring shows up and they say the following. We bought these glasses at a cheap factory for$2 each. We'll sell them to you for$3 each. We'll make enough money that we can do it again and scale and scale and scale. In the United States, there is no coffee shortage because Starbucks makes enough money per cup to sell more. Well, if we can figure out how to make enough money per glasses to sell more, we'll solve the problem that there's 100 million people in India alone that need reading glasses.

12:09So I go with VisionSpring to Borelli, India. not even Borelli, outside of Borelli, India. To get to Borelli, India, you have to drive for eight hours. And this village has no electricity. And I don't know why, no one here told me, but I went in July. So it's 120 degrees, and I'm standing there, and there's 100 people in the village. There's nothing to do at noon. Everyone's waiting in line. What's this all about? And at the front table, over here, 10 different styles of glasses, each nicer than the others. each individually wrapped. And over here, an eye chart that you can use without being literate, but you can use it if you are literate too, to see if glasses work.

12:52Now, you already know people who wear glasses. It's not some fancy, weird technology, no matter where you are on Earth. So I look at the people who are in line. They are qualified. First, they're as old as me. Two, they're wearing Indian dress shirts, and I can see in the front pocket money. They all have enough money to buy the glasses. So they're qualified. They need glasses. They have money. They're waiting in line. They get to the front of the line. They look at the eye chart. They can't read the eye chart. They put on the sample pair of glasses. They can read the eye chart. There is no doubt that these work.

13:27Then they say, all right, put down the glasses. Come over here. Look at this lovely table. Which of these 10 pairs of glasses do you want? They're$3 each. two-thirds of the people who needed a pair of glasses did not buy one. Two-thirds. And I'm standing there. I don't understand. It works. It's true. It's real. You tried it. You need them. What are you doing? It's hot. And I stood there. I don't think I'm exaggerating for half an hour. And I said, I'm going to need to move to India. Because if I can't figure this out, I can't go back home. Because I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. I'm in the marketing hall of fame, for God's sake.

14:12And I don't understand. And then, I don't know what happened. I changed one thing. And I doubled the percentage of people who took a pair of glasses. The one thing I changed was I got rid of all 10 pairs of glasses. And instead, we said to the person, how do you like these sample glasses? And they said, they're good. And we said, all right, now you have a choice. Either give us back the glasses or give us$3. That changes everything. Not for me. It wouldn't work on me. It wouldn't work on you. But if you grew up in a culture with parents and grandparents and great-grandparents where shopping was an alien idea, shopping isn't something you look forward to.

14:58Shopping is a risk. Don't buy something that might not work because it might not work. You don't get to go shopping again tomorrow if you buy something with tonight's dinner money and it doesn't work. Only replenish the things you have because you have so few, so little. So in that moment, avoidance of loss was so much more important than desire for gain. That it was not disrespectful to take away people's choice. It was actually respectful to see the other person for who they were. and here's the home run, here's the big idea. The people you are seeking to persuade, whatever they are currently doing, they're right.

15:43They are right to deny certain people dignity. They are right to deny certain ideas of science. They are right to defend the status quo because of who they are and where they are and what they believe in this moment. That we have to develop the empathy to say, as the Yemeni expression goes, you are right in front of my face. Saobana, I see you. And I see your grandparents before you and your great-grandparents before them. I see you. And I see your fear. And I see the tension. And I see the pressure. And I see how you were raised. And I see what you don't have enough of and the surplus and the scarcity.

16:25I see you. So it doesn't matter that I'm right. because based on the glasses you're wearing, you're right too. So the only chance we have to tell a story to people is to begin by saying, I don't believe what you believe, and that's okay. Because if we can't add, and that's okay, then we don't have any chance at all to go beyond the facts of where we are in this moment. And where we are in this moment is, you've seen the facts, I've seen the facts, you're wrong. Okay, we get that part, but you're not doing anything and you have the power to stay where we are. So this gets back to people like us do things like this.

17:09And this is why this institution is so important. So the next story I want to tell you happened in my little town. So in New York State, where we are right now, the school board rules are fairly clear. the budget goes up and everyone in town gets to vote on whether the school will get the money they asked for if the budget fails they get one more try and if it fails the second time then draconian cuts are put into place no one gets a say over them so my town has great public schools that's why we live there and year after year the taxes went up year after year that neighborhood it started to shift.

17:51And at the key year, 20 to 25 percent of the households in my town had a household income of under$25 ,000. It's not a lot of money. They were either senior citizens, they were people who had inherited their homes from their parents, they were people who had been in town for a long time. And they organized and defeated the budget. And so it was time for it to come up again. Well I have to put it a little aside in which is that the schools in the town are great in fact they won a national award called the Blue Ribbon School Award where you get a little seal in front of your school for excellence.

18:30So there's only a week to go before the second election and everybody's right and everyone's calling each other names and everyone is wondering about their value well three people went to a stationery store and bought a hundred yards of blue ribbon and on the big tree in front of the big school that everyone drives by every day they hung 50 blue ribbons from that tree and over the next six days without those three people doing anything else blue ribbons started showing up everywhere. And the day before the election, you couldn't drive down a block in my town without seeing people celebrating what they were proud of, celebrating their kids, celebrating excellence.

19:22And it wasn't about us and them. It was about what we could become. And so when the vote happened, the budget won two to one. And it has never lost since. Because people like us do things like this. What does it mean to be part of a tribe, to be part of a group, to be part of a community that sees each other? Because even in this fractious time, with the fractiousness multiplied by the media, because that's what they make a living doing. We're still 98 % the same. We're still 98 % in agreement. And yet, it's so much easier to say, I am not part of you. When the opportunity we have when we tell our story is to figure out how to do the hard work of people like us do things like this.

20:17And to figure out how to tell our story, our narrative, in a way that doesn't get to the point of, oh, well, McKinsey did a study and I can prove we're right, but instead gets to the words and the visions and the pictures that others have in their head so that without losing, they can help all of us win. So I've made it sound super simple, and it's not simple. It's the hardest work you can do, and you are doing it, and I'm not minimizing how hard it is. What I am trying to challenge, and now we're going to have a conversation about it, is when we get pushed into a corner, what we often do is bring out our spreadsheet.

21:00What we often do is bring out our proof. What we often do is try to argue to higher ideals, but mostly what we're trying to say is we're right and you're wrong. Can't you see it? And the people who are wrong, the people who are wrong know that they are wrong, but they are holding attention. and that tension is not making them happy. It is the tension that keeps them with the status quo. It is the fear of change. It is the fear of losing what they have. It is the fear of what will I tell the others. That we need to learn to see the tension if we hope to find a path forward. And at the same time, we need to be able to give up our satisfaction in what it is to be right.

21:49I like being right. I like the fact that Newtonian mechanics make sense. And I'm not here imagining that gravity could go away just because I will it to. But if it helps us all move forward for me to be temporarily not right in the service of telling a story that resonates with people so that we can figure out how together to get in sync, that is effective storytelling. And I will finish with a couple things before we get into the Q &A and the discussion. The first one is how do we get people to know our idea? How do we get the word out? And what marketers have done in the last 50 years is persuade us that that's the hard part.

22:41If everyone knew that I have a Kickstarter, it would do great. If everyone knew that I was running for parliament, I would win. That we want awareness, but awareness is only one third of what we need. The second thing we need, which is so much harder than awareness, which awareness undermines and belies, is trust. Because you can run down the street naked and get awareness, but you're not going to get anyone to sign up to be getting heart surgery from you. Because awareness doesn't always lead to trust. Trust is in short supply. Trust is even more scarce than attention. Trust is what happens when we show up and we show up and we show up.

23:29When we make promises and we keep them. When we present ourselves in a way that reminds people of someone they've trusted before. But those two alone are not sufficient. The third one is tension. What will happen if I don't say yes? Fear of missing out. Fear of being left behind. Fear of being ostracized. That without tension, it's easier to just stay where we are. And so if you walk down the street, seven blocks that way to the hospital, you will see people doing ridiculous things to their bodies at the end of their lives because they are filled with tension about what's going to happen next.

24:13And if you go seven blocks that way, you will see healthy people slowly killing themselves with one bad habit or another because they feel no tension at all to stop doing it. So what we do if we are marketers, if we are storytellers, is yes, we have to occasionally get attention. Mostly we have to earn trust. but then the thing that scares us that we don't want to have to do, we must willingly inflict tension. Then when you show up and say, I have a new idea, when you show up and say, we have to change, you don't have to like the fact that you created tension, but you just did. And it could be the tension that bus driver inflicts when he makes that noise with the air brakes.

24:52Oh, the bus is about to pull out. I better hurry. That causes tension. When you hear the voice coming out of the speaker at JFK, that person who's calling the last gate, she is creating tension. And that is what each of you has to figure out how to do, because your story is not going to work just because you told it. It's going to work because you told it in a way that resonated with people. Thanks for your attention today. Go make a rocket. Thank you. Thank you. I'd love to hear from you. If you've got a question, just visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button.

26:02This question sounds specific, but it's fairly universal. Hey Seth, my name is Bruce from Planet Earth. Recently, one of my favorite podcasts, Making Sense with Sam Harris, went behind a paywall. He did this to avoid the perception that he is being influenced by his sponsors. I respect that, but I can't see myself paying the monthly subscription to have access to his work. My question is, how can Sam continue to provide his podcasts free to me, but still make a profit? Thanks for all you do. Bye. Thank you, Bruce. Here's the deal. For 20 or 30 years, people have been talking about the idea that some kind of information wants to be free.

26:42That information that spreads changes the culture. How is it then that once we eliminate the scarcity of the container that used to hold the information? For example, books are scarce because you have to chop down trees, you have to store them, you have to ship them. For example, music was scarce because you had to put it on vinyl or a CD. For example, wine is scarce because it needs to come from a grape and go in a bottle. So leaving wine aside for a minute, what are we going to do about the industries built around information? Because the very thing that they depend on, the ideas spreading, are somehow related to the container that they come in.

27:28And so when we take words, take them out of a book, put them into an e-book, or put them into a podcast, we are starting to eliminate scarcity. Radio had scarcity built right in because there were only a few stations in every town. Spectrum creates scarcity, so there's only a few stations. Since there's only a few stations, more people listen to each one. since more people listen to each one, attention, also scarce, becomes valuable because you're heaping it in huge piles and you can sell some of that attention to a sponsor. But what happens when there's a million podcasts? When there's a million podcasts, the average podcast only has 20 listeners.

28:1220 listeners is not enough to interrupt them and turn around and make a profit. So you've outlined the problem. You don't want to pay Sam. Sam is worried about the perception that his opinion will be changed by sponsors. I'm not totally sure that that's true. I don't think my opinion about how to brush your teeth is changed by the fact that, without my knowledge, toothbrush ads appeared on this podcast. But leaving that aside for a second, we have a more universal problem here, which is you used to be able to get paid for making content because content was scarce. But more and more, you're not going to get paid for making content, particularly for making generic content.

28:59If there's content associated only with you, as we've seen on Patreon, you can hold your content hostage. You can go to your fans and say, unless enough of you pony up, unlike Bruce, I won't make it. But you have to mean it. And over time, you may run into a problem. Because as Tim O 'Reilly coined, the problem isn't piracy. The problem isn't that your ideas are spreading without you getting paid. The problem is obscurity. Your ideas aren't getting heard. If your ideas aren't getting heard, then you're not known. And if you're not known, then you're not trusted. And if you're not trusted, you can't change the culture.

29:39And if you can't change the culture, you can't create value. And so if you're a creator of ideas, you need your ideas to spread. So how do you get paid? Because we live in a society and a culture built on free market and industrial capitalism, two different things. And in both cases, we sort of expect people are going to get paid for their work. It's worth noting that for more than 100 ,000 years, humans did not get paid for their ideas, did not get paid for their songs, did not get paid for their words. That was your hobby. You got paid for hunting or gathering or farming. You got paid for doctoring.

30:18But you didn't get paid because you said something funny. You didn't get paid because you wrote Amazing Grace. Just imagine what the royalties would be like on that one.

30:30Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. No, that was your hobby. And it's only in the last 100 or 200 years that we turned this into a profession, something you could expect to get paid for. But going forward, people with ideas are going to get paid and are getting paid for something else, something scarce. They're getting paid for organizing the others. They're getting paid for creating places and opportunities for connection. They're getting paid for souvenirs of their ideas, not the ideas themselves. And Schumpeter's cycle of creative destruction is going faster and faster and faster. Because now that we can fake someone's voice, now that we can fake someone's video, you're not even sure who the source of the idea is.

31:29And so chaos will ensue. We are on the cusp of a lot of chaos. And so people who create ideas, people who create ideas that want to reach people like Bruce who don't want to pay for them. It's not clear to me we can get paid for our ideas. It's not clear to me that we can create sufficient scarcity to at large scale repeatedly make a living. So I am doing this podcast not because I am getting paid to do it. I am doing this podcast because I can, because it's a privilege. This is the end of the fifth season of Akimbo. And to those of you who have listened to more than 100 episodes or just this one.

32:13Thank you. Because you are offering me something really valuable. You're offering me your attention. And that attention implies a level of trust. That attention gives us a chance to share ideas and make things better. If you share this podcast, I would really appreciate it. It might be good for you as well. Because if you share this podcast, the people around you might be willing to have an interesting conversation with you. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.