AI transcript
0:00:06 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Zee podcast. I’m Sonal. Today’s episode was recorded at
0:00:10 our most recent annual Innovation Summit in our pop-up podcast booth with me and Kevin
0:00:15 Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and author of several books.
0:00:19 In this quick, literally hallway-style chat, I ask him about two of his big ideas, the
0:00:24 notion of 1,000 true fans, which sometimes people misinterpret or miss the nuances of,
0:00:29 and two, the idea of being able to sell our own attention versus our attention being sold
0:00:33 for very little. And we try to connect the dots between these and other ideas, including
0:00:38 some new, never-been-heard-before ones in between. The second idea was also covered in his most
0:00:42 recent book, The Inevitable, which we did a podcast on with Chris Dixon, and his conversation
0:00:46 with Mark at this summit is also available in this feed as well.
0:00:47 Welcome, Kevin.
0:00:50 It’s a real delight to be here. Thanks for having me.
0:00:54 I think of you as one of the original thinkers of the future. We’re just coming off of summit.
0:00:59 One of the big themes was about the future of business models after advertising. This
0:01:02 is a talk Connie gave last year, and then today she went further on that, like what
0:01:07 happens when things become a super app. We had Kevin Chu from Forte talking about business
0:01:12 models for crypto-economics and gaming. And then we had Jonah Peretti and Chris Dixon talking
0:01:17 about the evolution of the web and how so much of the promise of the web in some ways
0:01:21 came about, but in other ways didn’t because of the sort of albatross around our neck of
0:01:27 advertising as a business model. So one idea I remember you talking about in your book
0:01:30 that just blew me out of the water. It was so interesting, like it was a Kevin Kelly
0:01:36 signature idea. Is this idea that you can actually, in the future, we may be able to
0:01:42 quote, reverse our attention economy? You should actually explain this idea.
0:01:51 So the idea is, in some ways, disimmediating attention. So advertising model is, let’s
0:01:58 say I am a company that I’m selling a widget. And I want people to know about the widget.
0:02:05 I want attention to the widget. So the normal way is I will hire advertising agencies. I
0:02:13 will make ads that will go out and people will see the ad. So I’m paying an advertising
0:02:18 company and they’re going to make an ad that will then take that attention from the consumer.
0:02:26 But you could actually short-circuit that rather than having a two-step. What if I paid
0:02:33 the audience directly for their attention? Exactly. And so let’s say I send a call out
0:02:40 and say I will pay you 25 cents to watch this ad. So you’re getting paid for your attention,
0:02:45 to give your attention to an ad. And it’s not just ad, it could even be something like
0:02:54 email. And so you could set up something saying I’ll charge 25 cents to read your email.
0:03:02 So you have to pay me for my attention. And so if it’s true that attention is the only
0:03:09 scarcity that we have in this world of abundance, how come you and I are giving our attention
0:03:13 away for free? I completely agree, which is why I’m so glad we’re finally talking about
0:03:17 this. So a couple of quick things. On the example you just gave about email, that’s
0:03:22 a great example that’s commonly cited for a way that we can fight the spam problem,
0:03:27 especially when you think about combining with crypto and blockchain economies where
0:03:31 you can actually do micro payments in a scalable way because right now it’s actually very cost-prohibitive
0:03:38 to charge someone 25 cents to read their email. And then if someone is a spammer, it’s pretty
0:03:41 unlikely that they’re going to do a spray and pray method to try to get your attention
0:03:46 or even a spearfisher, whoever, all the bad economic models of the web get broken to your
0:03:51 point with this perfect example of email because the bad actors are not incented to pay for
0:03:54 your attention. But I want to really dig a little deeper because your idea is a lot
0:03:59 more nuanced and I really want to pause the profound implications of what you’re saying.
0:04:05 So you’re putting the power back into the consumer. The power of the attention is with us who
0:04:10 have it. We’re surrendering it. We’re giving away for free when we should really be charging.
0:04:14 We want to have a technology that reverses that. So the power is back with us. And there’s
0:04:18 a second aspect of that. Oh, good. This is what I want to hear.
0:04:25 Which is that in media and publications, in that world, the publication, the magazine,
0:04:33 the newspaper, whatever that portal is, they don’t really have choice about what advertisements
0:04:43 they run. That is something that’s decided by the advertiser. But what if anybody could
0:04:49 run an ad and you would get the benefits of that ad if people clicked on it, if people
0:04:55 watched it. So what you have is you have an outsourced, crowd, decentralized version of
0:05:03 an ad network where anybody is making an ad and anybody can run the ad. And you have
0:05:07 the money flowing through the system, again, using crypto to kind of keep or blockchain
0:05:13 and keep track of things. But what that would mean is that you would have very, very creative
0:05:20 people making ads that worked and the sponsors have to pay up when people actually watch
0:05:28 them. And so what I’m trying to do is to imagine a decentralized advertising system that put
0:05:38 power back into the audience, but would require something like crypto or blockchain to maintain
0:05:42 the integrity and to have that financing. The provenance, economics, the alignment of
0:05:46 incentives, all the things, all the features. Sending the credit money through as it follows
0:05:51 these different things. So that’s a possibility that we haven’t really thought about before.
0:05:55 I love it. But less people think this is so far off because you repost this idea in your
0:05:59 book The Inevitable, which is about the future. And who knows if that’s five years, 10 years,
0:06:03 20 years, 100 years. Less people think that’s so far off. Let me give a concrete example
0:06:10 today. So TikTok, basically what people are already doing in a not necessarily decentralized,
0:06:15 but certainly a bottom up manner. The centralized platform is TikTok. They are essentially making
0:06:20 ads. And these are short viral clips where they are promoting some idea, a product. Because
0:06:23 if you think about an ad, it’s simply an ad for anything, whether it’s a product, an
0:06:28 idea, whatever. They’re short, they go viral. And the reason they go viral is unlike on
0:06:33 YouTube where the algorithm is very optimized for people who are mature creators, have an
0:06:38 established track record, et cetera. Because it’s all purely AI based, it’s not basing
0:06:44 things on specified intent, but learned intent. It can let anybody, any creator have a clip
0:06:48 go viral, even if they don’t have a huge following. And that’s hugely powerful. So it’s really
0:06:52 fascinating is what you’re basically describing is kind of already happening with TikTok.
0:06:56 And now I just need to put the economic of getting those creators paid. Because the other
0:07:00 thing that I think is super interesting about this is that when you have new models, business
0:07:05 models, it then in turn, this is when you and I both care about changes of creator economy
0:07:10 that feeds it. Not only unlocking creators who maybe didn’t come out before in the current
0:07:14 model, but more importantly, you don’t even have to get that big of a scale in order to
0:07:20 be successful. It actually ties to your original true idea of 1000 true fans. But that part
0:07:24 of your idea that people don’t talk about as much, they don’t get past 1000 true fans
0:07:29 is that not only do you get the 1000 true fans, but you get the nodes next to them. So I’d
0:07:33 love for you to explain that. And then maybe we can connect the dots between this attention
0:07:36 economy back to 1000 true fans.
0:07:42 Just to summarize the 1000 true fans theory very, very quickly, which is that in the world
0:07:46 in which you have direct contact with your audience, you’re and when you’re not going
0:07:52 through the intermediate of a publisher, the studio, a record label, but you actually
0:08:00 have your truth, you have your fans, you’re getting the money directly from that if you
0:08:04 could get a certain amount of money from them directly every year, that the number that you
0:08:10 would need to make a living is in the neighborhood of 1000s. So 1000 true fans, if you could
0:08:16 get $100 each from one of you for each of your fans for a year, then that’s $100,000.
0:08:22 So then that’s what I would call a true fan, someone who’s going to buy whatever you make,
0:08:26 you know, the hardcover, the softcover, the singles, the box set, they’re going to travel
0:08:32 200 miles to see you. That’s your true fan. But that’s just your true fans. And your true
0:08:38 fans become basically marketers for this other concentric circle around them, which is kind
0:08:42 of the casual fan. And so it’s your true fans who actually are doing the hard work
0:08:50 of publicizing and promoting you to this other larger, even larger one. So you get the income,
0:08:55 not just of your true fans, but you get the larger income of that concentric circle that’s
0:08:56 right next to it.
0:09:00 Central fans around you. And the other aspect of 1000 true fans is that in a world of a
0:09:05 billion, now that we are global and we have a global system, even if there’s only one
0:09:10 in a million people who are interested in your idea, you still have a thousand potential
0:09:16 people, you just have to find them. So there’s almost any idea you can come up with, anything
0:09:22 that you can imagine can probably find a thousand people on the planet to be true fans
0:09:29 of it. And so that process of finding your true fans is really the process that we want
0:09:33 to use and we want to have tools that enable us to do that easier and easier.
0:09:36 You wrote about 1000 true fans in what year was it again?
0:09:41 Gee, it was right before Kickstarter, it was probably like, I don’t know, 2007 or something.
0:09:45 It was very prescient as always. So it was very early. Then Chris Anderson, our mutual
0:09:50 friend wrote the long tail around either before or after them, forgetting when he wrote that,
0:09:51 2006.
0:09:53 I think he wrote before.
0:09:56 And the idea of the long tail is that the internet lets you find these niche communities.
0:09:59 So that goes to the discovery aspect and you can actually create communities around niches.
0:10:04 Then you wrote 1000 true fans and now today we’re talking about this idea of monetizing
0:10:08 and reversing the attention economy. What I’m hearing you say when we connect all those
0:10:14 dots is that we now finally have a business model for those 1000 true fans to monetize
0:10:18 because what readers are essentially doing, if you imagine a world where the reader is
0:10:24 at the center of a future media web, where there’s a million publications like this and
0:10:30 whatever form, podcast, newsletter, blog posts, doesn’t matter, you know, decks, whatever.
0:10:37 We now have a way and add crypto in for an economic internet that empowers creators of
0:10:43 all kinds to now empower readers to monetize their attention and essentially curate their
0:10:49 custom personalized, perfectly curated dream holy grail paper of their choice, but I’d
0:10:52 be printed on demand by selling their attention.
0:10:57 I even have another idea that I think was patentable. Patents don’t give you much. So I decided
0:11:02 to publish it instead of patenting it and it was called, I’ll pay you to read my book.
0:11:04 Tell me more about this. I’ve never heard this.
0:11:09 So the problem with books these days is I don’t care about selling books. I want people
0:11:15 to read my books and it’s so, attention is so, so scarce that I said, oh, look, I’ll
0:11:19 pay you to read my book and I’m going to make money doing it.
0:11:20 How?
0:11:29 So it’s an ebook and what it is, is I’ll sell the book for let’s say $4 and then I will
0:11:35 pay you $5 if you finish reading the book and we can tell, Amazon can tell whether you’ve
0:11:36 read the whole book or not.
0:11:38 Right, they already have that data.
0:11:42 And so most people probably won’t finish it. And so I think the total amount that they
0:11:46 would make would exceed the amount that I have to pay out. So there’d probably be fewer
0:11:49 people who are going to finish it.
0:11:50 Interesting.
0:11:53 I could, I could adjust those numbers. But I would sell it for very little and I would
0:11:57 pay you to actually finish reading it. So the idea is I’m paying for your attention.
0:12:01 Yes, you are. The completeness of the attention is what I love is that you’re not saying it’s
0:12:07 an either or a binary yes, no, it’s actually a degree. What I love about this is a very
0:12:13 much fits into a world we’re entering now where there is no discreet beginning and end.
0:12:16 Like Doug Roushkoff and I talked about narrative collapse, you know, like in one of Op-Ed’s
0:12:20 I did it for me at Wired in this world of Game of Thrones binge watching the everlasting
0:12:27 story gaming economies, gaming narratives. We just talked today about how gaming is bigger
0:12:32 than music and entertainment combined huge economies. And those narratives are endless
0:12:33 narratives.
0:12:38 So what I love about what you’re saying is essentially it’s a way to optimize for the
0:12:44 few rare completers while also making money off the people who are dipping in and out
0:12:47 and not going to complete the thing. So it puts it on a degree and kind of a continuum.
0:12:52 But the second thing that I love about it is that if you, this is a crazy counterintuitive
0:12:56 part of this, if your idea and your book is so damn good that people are going to read
0:13:00 the entire thing, you’re actually going to pay them a lot more because you’re putting
0:13:04 them a dollar extra to make this happen. And so tell me about that the flip side of it.
0:13:07 Does it actually make creators not want to, because one thing that Connie’s talked about
0:13:12 in China is that there’s actually apps that let people readers weigh in on books as they’re
0:13:16 being created. And that then in turn changes a narrative or how many chapters. This reminds
0:13:19 me the Charles Dickinson day of like paying my word.
0:13:24 So the reality is that very few people make real money from books. I don’t make my living
0:13:28 from books. I make my living from giving talks about the book.
0:13:33 So the book is like a vehicle for that and that’s true for more and more people. The
0:13:38 actual book itself is just a part of this network. And so you can still lose money on
0:13:43 a book and many authors do and still make overall. It’s particularly important when
0:13:48 you are talking about ideas. Maybe this doesn’t work if you’re just writing novels, but if
0:13:49 you’re trying to get ideas out.
0:13:51 This is what we both care about more than anything.
0:13:57 Then again, the battle for attention is so great that I am willing to pay you for your
0:13:58 attention.
0:13:59 Yes.
0:14:03 And by the way, one thing I also bet attention is I did these calculations of the total amount
0:14:10 of attention that are given to different media and I found out that on average, we surrender
0:14:13 our attention for about $3 an hour.
0:14:15 Wow. That’s so cheap.
0:14:16 That’s ridiculous.
0:14:20 So look at the total amount of time that you spend reading a book and how much you can
0:14:25 charge. How much you pay for the book, for a movie, for whatever it is. And it comes out
0:14:31 to very, very low pay that we are accepting for our attention.
0:14:32 It’s insane.
0:14:39 It’s just that we value our attention at. And so, and when TV, TV is, if you take all
0:14:43 the amount of hours that people watch TV and the total amount of revenue TV, that’s what
0:14:44 it’s come out to be.
0:14:45 Yeah.
0:14:49 It’s like we’re giving up our attention for such small wages. So we really want to be
0:14:50 charging more.
0:14:55 Well, what I love about this is it puts again people at the center. And what I love about
0:14:59 what you’re saying is this is a way to be optimistic about the future that readers and
0:15:05 creators can be empowered by putting better models in place that align incentives that
0:15:10 remove adverse selection and bad alignment of incentives that we can actually embrace
0:15:11 a better future.
0:15:12 Right, right.
0:15:14 So thank you for joining this episode of the A-60 podcast.
0:15:18 Well, yeah. And if we were really doing things, we would be paying you listener right now.
0:15:19 The listener.
0:15:20 Yes.
0:15:22 That’s fantastic listeners. We need to be paying you. Thank you so much for listening.
0:15:26 Kevin, thank you so much for joining the A-60 podcast live from the Andreessen Horowitz
0:15:29 annual innovation summit. The future is inevitable.
0:15:30 Great.
0:15:30 Good.
0:15:33 (audience laughing)
0:00:10 our most recent annual Innovation Summit in our pop-up podcast booth with me and Kevin
0:00:15 Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and author of several books.
0:00:19 In this quick, literally hallway-style chat, I ask him about two of his big ideas, the
0:00:24 notion of 1,000 true fans, which sometimes people misinterpret or miss the nuances of,
0:00:29 and two, the idea of being able to sell our own attention versus our attention being sold
0:00:33 for very little. And we try to connect the dots between these and other ideas, including
0:00:38 some new, never-been-heard-before ones in between. The second idea was also covered in his most
0:00:42 recent book, The Inevitable, which we did a podcast on with Chris Dixon, and his conversation
0:00:46 with Mark at this summit is also available in this feed as well.
0:00:47 Welcome, Kevin.
0:00:50 It’s a real delight to be here. Thanks for having me.
0:00:54 I think of you as one of the original thinkers of the future. We’re just coming off of summit.
0:00:59 One of the big themes was about the future of business models after advertising. This
0:01:02 is a talk Connie gave last year, and then today she went further on that, like what
0:01:07 happens when things become a super app. We had Kevin Chu from Forte talking about business
0:01:12 models for crypto-economics and gaming. And then we had Jonah Peretti and Chris Dixon talking
0:01:17 about the evolution of the web and how so much of the promise of the web in some ways
0:01:21 came about, but in other ways didn’t because of the sort of albatross around our neck of
0:01:27 advertising as a business model. So one idea I remember you talking about in your book
0:01:30 that just blew me out of the water. It was so interesting, like it was a Kevin Kelly
0:01:36 signature idea. Is this idea that you can actually, in the future, we may be able to
0:01:42 quote, reverse our attention economy? You should actually explain this idea.
0:01:51 So the idea is, in some ways, disimmediating attention. So advertising model is, let’s
0:01:58 say I am a company that I’m selling a widget. And I want people to know about the widget.
0:02:05 I want attention to the widget. So the normal way is I will hire advertising agencies. I
0:02:13 will make ads that will go out and people will see the ad. So I’m paying an advertising
0:02:18 company and they’re going to make an ad that will then take that attention from the consumer.
0:02:26 But you could actually short-circuit that rather than having a two-step. What if I paid
0:02:33 the audience directly for their attention? Exactly. And so let’s say I send a call out
0:02:40 and say I will pay you 25 cents to watch this ad. So you’re getting paid for your attention,
0:02:45 to give your attention to an ad. And it’s not just ad, it could even be something like
0:02:54 email. And so you could set up something saying I’ll charge 25 cents to read your email.
0:03:02 So you have to pay me for my attention. And so if it’s true that attention is the only
0:03:09 scarcity that we have in this world of abundance, how come you and I are giving our attention
0:03:13 away for free? I completely agree, which is why I’m so glad we’re finally talking about
0:03:17 this. So a couple of quick things. On the example you just gave about email, that’s
0:03:22 a great example that’s commonly cited for a way that we can fight the spam problem,
0:03:27 especially when you think about combining with crypto and blockchain economies where
0:03:31 you can actually do micro payments in a scalable way because right now it’s actually very cost-prohibitive
0:03:38 to charge someone 25 cents to read their email. And then if someone is a spammer, it’s pretty
0:03:41 unlikely that they’re going to do a spray and pray method to try to get your attention
0:03:46 or even a spearfisher, whoever, all the bad economic models of the web get broken to your
0:03:51 point with this perfect example of email because the bad actors are not incented to pay for
0:03:54 your attention. But I want to really dig a little deeper because your idea is a lot
0:03:59 more nuanced and I really want to pause the profound implications of what you’re saying.
0:04:05 So you’re putting the power back into the consumer. The power of the attention is with us who
0:04:10 have it. We’re surrendering it. We’re giving away for free when we should really be charging.
0:04:14 We want to have a technology that reverses that. So the power is back with us. And there’s
0:04:18 a second aspect of that. Oh, good. This is what I want to hear.
0:04:25 Which is that in media and publications, in that world, the publication, the magazine,
0:04:33 the newspaper, whatever that portal is, they don’t really have choice about what advertisements
0:04:43 they run. That is something that’s decided by the advertiser. But what if anybody could
0:04:49 run an ad and you would get the benefits of that ad if people clicked on it, if people
0:04:55 watched it. So what you have is you have an outsourced, crowd, decentralized version of
0:05:03 an ad network where anybody is making an ad and anybody can run the ad. And you have
0:05:07 the money flowing through the system, again, using crypto to kind of keep or blockchain
0:05:13 and keep track of things. But what that would mean is that you would have very, very creative
0:05:20 people making ads that worked and the sponsors have to pay up when people actually watch
0:05:28 them. And so what I’m trying to do is to imagine a decentralized advertising system that put
0:05:38 power back into the audience, but would require something like crypto or blockchain to maintain
0:05:42 the integrity and to have that financing. The provenance, economics, the alignment of
0:05:46 incentives, all the things, all the features. Sending the credit money through as it follows
0:05:51 these different things. So that’s a possibility that we haven’t really thought about before.
0:05:55 I love it. But less people think this is so far off because you repost this idea in your
0:05:59 book The Inevitable, which is about the future. And who knows if that’s five years, 10 years,
0:06:03 20 years, 100 years. Less people think that’s so far off. Let me give a concrete example
0:06:10 today. So TikTok, basically what people are already doing in a not necessarily decentralized,
0:06:15 but certainly a bottom up manner. The centralized platform is TikTok. They are essentially making
0:06:20 ads. And these are short viral clips where they are promoting some idea, a product. Because
0:06:23 if you think about an ad, it’s simply an ad for anything, whether it’s a product, an
0:06:28 idea, whatever. They’re short, they go viral. And the reason they go viral is unlike on
0:06:33 YouTube where the algorithm is very optimized for people who are mature creators, have an
0:06:38 established track record, et cetera. Because it’s all purely AI based, it’s not basing
0:06:44 things on specified intent, but learned intent. It can let anybody, any creator have a clip
0:06:48 go viral, even if they don’t have a huge following. And that’s hugely powerful. So it’s really
0:06:52 fascinating is what you’re basically describing is kind of already happening with TikTok.
0:06:56 And now I just need to put the economic of getting those creators paid. Because the other
0:07:00 thing that I think is super interesting about this is that when you have new models, business
0:07:05 models, it then in turn, this is when you and I both care about changes of creator economy
0:07:10 that feeds it. Not only unlocking creators who maybe didn’t come out before in the current
0:07:14 model, but more importantly, you don’t even have to get that big of a scale in order to
0:07:20 be successful. It actually ties to your original true idea of 1000 true fans. But that part
0:07:24 of your idea that people don’t talk about as much, they don’t get past 1000 true fans
0:07:29 is that not only do you get the 1000 true fans, but you get the nodes next to them. So I’d
0:07:33 love for you to explain that. And then maybe we can connect the dots between this attention
0:07:36 economy back to 1000 true fans.
0:07:42 Just to summarize the 1000 true fans theory very, very quickly, which is that in the world
0:07:46 in which you have direct contact with your audience, you’re and when you’re not going
0:07:52 through the intermediate of a publisher, the studio, a record label, but you actually
0:08:00 have your truth, you have your fans, you’re getting the money directly from that if you
0:08:04 could get a certain amount of money from them directly every year, that the number that you
0:08:10 would need to make a living is in the neighborhood of 1000s. So 1000 true fans, if you could
0:08:16 get $100 each from one of you for each of your fans for a year, then that’s $100,000.
0:08:22 So then that’s what I would call a true fan, someone who’s going to buy whatever you make,
0:08:26 you know, the hardcover, the softcover, the singles, the box set, they’re going to travel
0:08:32 200 miles to see you. That’s your true fan. But that’s just your true fans. And your true
0:08:38 fans become basically marketers for this other concentric circle around them, which is kind
0:08:42 of the casual fan. And so it’s your true fans who actually are doing the hard work
0:08:50 of publicizing and promoting you to this other larger, even larger one. So you get the income,
0:08:55 not just of your true fans, but you get the larger income of that concentric circle that’s
0:08:56 right next to it.
0:09:00 Central fans around you. And the other aspect of 1000 true fans is that in a world of a
0:09:05 billion, now that we are global and we have a global system, even if there’s only one
0:09:10 in a million people who are interested in your idea, you still have a thousand potential
0:09:16 people, you just have to find them. So there’s almost any idea you can come up with, anything
0:09:22 that you can imagine can probably find a thousand people on the planet to be true fans
0:09:29 of it. And so that process of finding your true fans is really the process that we want
0:09:33 to use and we want to have tools that enable us to do that easier and easier.
0:09:36 You wrote about 1000 true fans in what year was it again?
0:09:41 Gee, it was right before Kickstarter, it was probably like, I don’t know, 2007 or something.
0:09:45 It was very prescient as always. So it was very early. Then Chris Anderson, our mutual
0:09:50 friend wrote the long tail around either before or after them, forgetting when he wrote that,
0:09:51 2006.
0:09:53 I think he wrote before.
0:09:56 And the idea of the long tail is that the internet lets you find these niche communities.
0:09:59 So that goes to the discovery aspect and you can actually create communities around niches.
0:10:04 Then you wrote 1000 true fans and now today we’re talking about this idea of monetizing
0:10:08 and reversing the attention economy. What I’m hearing you say when we connect all those
0:10:14 dots is that we now finally have a business model for those 1000 true fans to monetize
0:10:18 because what readers are essentially doing, if you imagine a world where the reader is
0:10:24 at the center of a future media web, where there’s a million publications like this and
0:10:30 whatever form, podcast, newsletter, blog posts, doesn’t matter, you know, decks, whatever.
0:10:37 We now have a way and add crypto in for an economic internet that empowers creators of
0:10:43 all kinds to now empower readers to monetize their attention and essentially curate their
0:10:49 custom personalized, perfectly curated dream holy grail paper of their choice, but I’d
0:10:52 be printed on demand by selling their attention.
0:10:57 I even have another idea that I think was patentable. Patents don’t give you much. So I decided
0:11:02 to publish it instead of patenting it and it was called, I’ll pay you to read my book.
0:11:04 Tell me more about this. I’ve never heard this.
0:11:09 So the problem with books these days is I don’t care about selling books. I want people
0:11:15 to read my books and it’s so, attention is so, so scarce that I said, oh, look, I’ll
0:11:19 pay you to read my book and I’m going to make money doing it.
0:11:20 How?
0:11:29 So it’s an ebook and what it is, is I’ll sell the book for let’s say $4 and then I will
0:11:35 pay you $5 if you finish reading the book and we can tell, Amazon can tell whether you’ve
0:11:36 read the whole book or not.
0:11:38 Right, they already have that data.
0:11:42 And so most people probably won’t finish it. And so I think the total amount that they
0:11:46 would make would exceed the amount that I have to pay out. So there’d probably be fewer
0:11:49 people who are going to finish it.
0:11:50 Interesting.
0:11:53 I could, I could adjust those numbers. But I would sell it for very little and I would
0:11:57 pay you to actually finish reading it. So the idea is I’m paying for your attention.
0:12:01 Yes, you are. The completeness of the attention is what I love is that you’re not saying it’s
0:12:07 an either or a binary yes, no, it’s actually a degree. What I love about this is a very
0:12:13 much fits into a world we’re entering now where there is no discreet beginning and end.
0:12:16 Like Doug Roushkoff and I talked about narrative collapse, you know, like in one of Op-Ed’s
0:12:20 I did it for me at Wired in this world of Game of Thrones binge watching the everlasting
0:12:27 story gaming economies, gaming narratives. We just talked today about how gaming is bigger
0:12:32 than music and entertainment combined huge economies. And those narratives are endless
0:12:33 narratives.
0:12:38 So what I love about what you’re saying is essentially it’s a way to optimize for the
0:12:44 few rare completers while also making money off the people who are dipping in and out
0:12:47 and not going to complete the thing. So it puts it on a degree and kind of a continuum.
0:12:52 But the second thing that I love about it is that if you, this is a crazy counterintuitive
0:12:56 part of this, if your idea and your book is so damn good that people are going to read
0:13:00 the entire thing, you’re actually going to pay them a lot more because you’re putting
0:13:04 them a dollar extra to make this happen. And so tell me about that the flip side of it.
0:13:07 Does it actually make creators not want to, because one thing that Connie’s talked about
0:13:12 in China is that there’s actually apps that let people readers weigh in on books as they’re
0:13:16 being created. And that then in turn changes a narrative or how many chapters. This reminds
0:13:19 me the Charles Dickinson day of like paying my word.
0:13:24 So the reality is that very few people make real money from books. I don’t make my living
0:13:28 from books. I make my living from giving talks about the book.
0:13:33 So the book is like a vehicle for that and that’s true for more and more people. The
0:13:38 actual book itself is just a part of this network. And so you can still lose money on
0:13:43 a book and many authors do and still make overall. It’s particularly important when
0:13:48 you are talking about ideas. Maybe this doesn’t work if you’re just writing novels, but if
0:13:49 you’re trying to get ideas out.
0:13:51 This is what we both care about more than anything.
0:13:57 Then again, the battle for attention is so great that I am willing to pay you for your
0:13:58 attention.
0:13:59 Yes.
0:14:03 And by the way, one thing I also bet attention is I did these calculations of the total amount
0:14:10 of attention that are given to different media and I found out that on average, we surrender
0:14:13 our attention for about $3 an hour.
0:14:15 Wow. That’s so cheap.
0:14:16 That’s ridiculous.
0:14:20 So look at the total amount of time that you spend reading a book and how much you can
0:14:25 charge. How much you pay for the book, for a movie, for whatever it is. And it comes out
0:14:31 to very, very low pay that we are accepting for our attention.
0:14:32 It’s insane.
0:14:39 It’s just that we value our attention at. And so, and when TV, TV is, if you take all
0:14:43 the amount of hours that people watch TV and the total amount of revenue TV, that’s what
0:14:44 it’s come out to be.
0:14:45 Yeah.
0:14:49 It’s like we’re giving up our attention for such small wages. So we really want to be
0:14:50 charging more.
0:14:55 Well, what I love about this is it puts again people at the center. And what I love about
0:14:59 what you’re saying is this is a way to be optimistic about the future that readers and
0:15:05 creators can be empowered by putting better models in place that align incentives that
0:15:10 remove adverse selection and bad alignment of incentives that we can actually embrace
0:15:11 a better future.
0:15:12 Right, right.
0:15:14 So thank you for joining this episode of the A-60 podcast.
0:15:18 Well, yeah. And if we were really doing things, we would be paying you listener right now.
0:15:19 The listener.
0:15:20 Yes.
0:15:22 That’s fantastic listeners. We need to be paying you. Thank you so much for listening.
0:15:26 Kevin, thank you so much for joining the A-60 podcast live from the Andreessen Horowitz
0:15:29 annual innovation summit. The future is inevitable.
0:15:30 Great.
0:15:30 Good.
0:15:33 (audience laughing)
The idea of “1000 true fans” — first proposed by Kevin Kelly in 2008 and later updated for Tools of Titans — argued that to be a successful creator, you don’t need millions of customers or clients, but need only thousands of true fans. Such a true, diehard fan “will buy anything you produce”, and as such, creators can make a living from them as long as they: (1) create enough each year to earn profit from each fan, plus it’s easier and better to give existing fans more; (2) have a direct relationship with those fans, which the internet (and long tail) now make possible.
But patronage models have been around forever; what’s new there? How has the web evolved; and how are media, and audiences/voices finding and subscribing to each other changing as a result? If the 1000-true-fans concept is also more broadly “useful to anyone making things, or making things happen” — then what nuances do people often miss about it? For instance: That there are also regular fans in the next concentric circle around true fans, and that the most obscure node is only one click away from the most popular node.
Finally — when you combine this big idea with another idea Kelly proposed in his most recent book The Inevitable (covered previously on this episode) on inverting attention economies so audiences monetize their attention vs. the other way around, how do we connect the dots between them and some novel thought experiments? In this hallway-style episode of the a16z Podcast, which Sonal Chokshi recorded with Kevin in our pop-up podcast booth at our most recent a16z Summit, we discuss all this and more. Because on average, we all currently surrender our attention (whether to TV, books, or whatever) for about $3 an hour. Whoa?!
image: whatleydude/Flickr