📊 How Ideas Spread: 5 Graphs That Reveal the Hidden Wisdom of Viral Trends!

Hi, it's Seth Godin. I've been a teacher for a long time, and something has come up a whole bunch of times that confuses people. So I thought I would make a short Udemy class about it. Here we go. In the next 15 or 20 minutes, what I hope to be able to do is change the way you see charts and graphs, and charts and graphs can change the way you see the world. In this short course, I'm going to go through some big ideas that will help you understand how ideas spread, how people engage with ideas and each other, and how you can show up either at a big organization or a small one to find clients, to make a difference, to decide what you stand for, to bring these ideas to the world. And it all revolves around five basic, simple charts and graphs that so many people don't really see. So what do I mean by being able to see? Well, we learn to process images long before we process words. And just about every other creature on earth processes just images. Images are really powerful. A huge portion of our brain is devoted to paying attention to images. And the thing is, an image can get under our skin. Once we see it, we cannot unsee it. So here's a picture of a duck, and the duck is looking at me. There's a duck. But once someone helps you see that it's also a rabbit, a rabbit that is now looking at me, it's hard to see the duck and the rabbit at the same time, but you can eventually flip back and forth. And once you see that, you can't really unsee it. Now, I could have written 400 words to explain what you just saw, but it was easier to show you. So what I want to do is take you through where we get stuck looking at some of these graphs and decode them. The first one is this idea of the map and the territory. So here's a map of Algonquin Park. And if you wanted to know how to get from Canoe Lake to Joe Lake, to Teepee Lake, all the way to Burnt, this map would help you understand that. First, you have to understand what maps are, how to read a map. But once you know how to do that, it's pretty clear that the way maps work is there's north and south, there's east and west. When you're going in one direction, it's a pretty similar thing to what would happen if someone above in a drone was watching you move through those axes. It is natural for us, if you're an adult or even an older kid, to understand that while a map is not actually the territory, the territory is in three dimensions, the map smushes it into two. Left is left, up is up, right is right, down is down. We can move our way through the world once we see a map. So when you are trying to understand something new, it helps to have a map. But the thing is, most charts and graphs aren't based on the axes of the world we live in. The one that is very common and so many people have trouble with are maps that make time visible, that help us understand yesterday and tomorrow. So here's a stock photo video of a map. Up and to the right is what every business is trying to do. Make your profits go up over time. What does that mean, over time? Because time itself is invisible. It's invisible in the sense that you can't see it. You don't know what color it is, you don't know where it lives. But if you go back to the street where you grew up, it's different than it was last time. We can array snapshots one after the other. We can see the symptoms, that time has been here, but we can't see time itself. Now, when someone shows you a graph or a chart that is highlighting changes over time, there's that keyword over, that's the x-axis, over. Over time, some of what they're showing you is what happened yesterday. Some of what they're showing you is what the GDP of China was in 1990, or the fact that Korea in 1961 had the same per capita income as Haiti. That's history, that's true, we can look it up. But often, the reason we bothered to make a chart or a graph about it is we're going to make an assertion about the future. It was like this, it was like this, and if I keep time going, it's going to be like that. So, when we see a graph that is over time, we have to put on our skeptics hat for a minute and say, wait a second, how did you go from the part that we know is true to the part that you're asserting is going to be true? But the next one, the next one has very little to do with time, and it's called the standard distribution, otherwise known as a bell curve. So, there's a lot here, and we're gonna slow down and break it into pieces. What this says is that if I look at any population that is divided into a standard deviation bell curve, amazingly, I see that about 68% of the people are in that center section. That a tiny percentage of the people are in the first section, you can see the numbers as they grow or get smaller. So, what falls into a standard distribution? Because again, it has nothing to do with time. It's not over time, it's over a population. Well, there's a really cool device that lets me show you what's going on here. It's called a quincunx, and I'm only putting it here because I get to write the word quincunx. A quincunx is a box filled with rice or a little ball, and as you can see, when I turn it right side up, the balls or the rice start distributing themselves based on random motion, and look how they end up. They end up in a standard distribution. It's a magical arrangement. So, what's in a standard distribution? Things like the height among a certain population of people. A few people are very not tall, a few people are very not short, and most people are in the middle, in the average section. I can do the same thing if I look in a typical population of students of their reading scores. A few kids have a lot of trouble reading, a few kids read extraordinarily well, and the masses of people are in the center. This phenomena, this bell curve, shows up over and over again when we seek to bring an idea to the public, and as you'll see as we work through the curves that we're here to talk about, the combination of the bell curve and the curve over time start to help us see what is actually happening in the world. A guy named Rogers wrote a book more than 50 years ago in which he described the fact that there's an adoption life cycle and it happens to match the normal distribution. What it says is this, that in almost every population, just a few percentage of the people are innovators. They like to go first. They're not buying new ideas, wireless headphones, interesting stocks. They're not doing it because they're sure it's going to work. They're doing it because it's new. That's what motivates them. So I know people who are innovators when it comes to fashion. They want to buy an article of clothing that no one else is wearing. And then there are other people who don't care about fashion whatsoever, and they want to be innovators when it comes to new sports that they can do on a body of water and everywhere in between. The next group are early adopters. They're not adapters. They're not adapting something because they have no choice. They're adopting it because they want to. These are people who look for innovators who are happy. And when a happy innovator has tried something just because it's new and it made them happy, the early adopters get double pleasure. They get pleasure because they got to go before almost all their friends, and they got pleasure because they got to explore something that's new, that's hip. These are the people who go to a hot restaurant while it's still hot. They weren't the first people to go in when it had no reputation, and they're definitely not gonna be the last people. They like things that are hot. And then there's that center again, that average group, the one I just told you about, the early majority and the late majority. That's almost everybody. This group of people chooses things that work. These are the people who wear a hoodie to work because it saves them money on dry cleaning. They weren't gonna be the first people to wear a hoodie, and they're not gonna be the last one. But they're in the middle, they're normal. That's why it's called the normal distribution. The next one are the laggards. The laggards are the people who still have a 12 flashing on their VCR. They're not changing for nobody. They like being behind the group. So this curve, Roger's adoption life cycle, is critical if we're going to make anything, anything new, anything interesting, anything that changes. Because if you make something new and try to get the normal people to adopt it, to pick you, to applaud you, to talk about you, it's not going to work. So let's take a second. You can rewind this if you want to think about the fact that everywhere around us, people are choosing. They're choosing who to let into their PhD programs. They're choosing who to pick to work with. They're choosing what kind of glasses to wear. Everyone makes a choice. And it turns out those choices are pretty amazingly allocated on the normal distribution. So here's what is now happening to our culture. In 1970, when I was 10 years old, it looked a lot like this. This was a normal distribution where most people were normal. That they dressed normal, they talked normal, they were interested in normal things. That there was a mass market. There were only three TV networks. Most places only had one or two newspapers that were going to be your source for news. There was a center lane. But then, thanks to changes in our media, things like cable TV, et cetera, it started to melt. More people were able to make more choices. You went from having a corner store that sold what they sold and that's all you could have, to having giant stores, the beginning of big box stores, where you had lots of choices about what you were gonna pick and why you were going to pick it. And now, you've probably guessed where we are in the chaos of our modern world. There are so many choices that you can go on a website that will sell you anything, anytime, and deliver it to you in a day or two. If you are into left-handed can openers, you can get three different kinds of left-handed can openers that the number of people who are normal keeps going down and the amount of people who are weird keeps going up. Weird used in the best possible sense. Weird in the sense that you got to pick what you were interested in. That it is now a moment in time where what we're seeing is people can make a choice and so they are making a choice. That the center, the early adopters, the early majority and the late majority, sorry, it's hollowing out. Okay, so Rogers Diffusion from 1962. This is where the idea of the bell curve and time come together. So I'm gonna give you two examples. One you probably thought of before, one you might not. The first one is smartphones. The second one is sushi. When was the very first time you had sushi? A lot of people remember that, particularly if you're my age. The way it works is this. The curve, you've seen it before. Innovators, early adopters, early majority. But it has a time component to it. At the beginning, only the innovators are interested. So in the case of sushi, it was 1980, Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's the first time I ever had it. There was only one restaurant you could get it. We went because it was weird, not because we liked sushi, because we'd never had it before. Then other people start to show up. They show up because they've heard from the people who had it because it was weird, that it was delightful. This group of people, the same group of people that got in line that first year to get a smartphone, not the same humans. Some humans like to go first when it comes to something like sushi. Some humans want to go first when it comes to something like tech or politics or social justice or whatever you want. Only then did it become sort of a normal thing for a sort of urban person of a different income group to say, yes, well, sushi is what we eat around here. And it's only 20 years later where you could go to a wedding in Cleveland and they would be serving sushi. It moves through the curve over time. There were all of these people who said, there's no way I'm going to use a personal computer. There's no way I'm going to use email. There's no way I'm going to vote for this issue. And then they do because as it moves through the curve, what the idea does is it reaches people who have a different goal. The people who have chosen to go first in a given segment, whether it's shoes or sushi, have chosen to go first. It doesn't pay to try to persuade that other person, the laggard, to go first. They don't want to. It doesn't matter how good it is. They're going to wait until they are surrounded. Watching it spread through time, that is the essence of understanding the diffusion of innovation, which is why the word diffusion is even in the title of the chart. And this leads, connected directly to it, to Jeff Moore's idea of crossing the chasm. Crossing the chasm. Oh, look, a curve we've seen before. Look, in the center, the early majority, the late majority. We have seen this curve before. This curve was used by lots of tech companies where they thought, all right, all we have to do is please the innovators, then the early adopters, and ride our way all the way through the curve. You want an example? The iPhone. You did not buy an iPhone the first week it was on sale. I am sure of that. You might have bought one the first year it was on sale, but even that is unlikely. And now, lots of people around the world, perhaps a billion of them, have touched an iPhone. And between the iPhone and the Android phone, two smartphones, it's made it all the way to the laggards. It is possible for an idea to work all the way through the curve over time. Interesting, because that's where we began, talking about the fact that sometimes these curves are over time. So the original Rogers adoption curve that I showed you, I'll go back here, this one isn't over time. This is in any given moment. This is who wants what. But what Moore explained is, no, it actually shifts over time as a product comes into the marketplace. And what does this mean for you? It means that the early adopters and the innovators, they don't care that much if it works. They care that it's new. And so lots of products come into the world. They are new. They seem like they're doing well. Apple had a product called the Newton. You might not even remember it. It is widely regarded as a failure. That is a mistake. In the first month, Apple sold 100,000 Newtons at nearly $1,000 each. And that was a long time ago when money was worth something. Wasn't a failure at the beginning, but it couldn't cross the chasm. The chasm is the gap, the hole, the space between what the early people want and what everybody else wants. That is the idea of the Gartner Hype Cycle. That there is a gap between a new technology, whether it's a silicon technology or a fashion, between that thing that is new and giving people buzz and that thing that actually sticks with the market for a long time. So on to the Gartner Hype Cycle. Here's where it begins. Again, notice at the bottom, it's over time. At the beginning, there is a technology trigger. Something gets invented. It might be NFTs. It might be the sleeveless sweater. It might be really spicy curry introduced to New York City. Something comes along and the people who like new things go nuts for it. That's called the peak of inflated expectations. Because when the early adopters, when the innovators go nuts for something, they think everyone else is going to as well. So there's all this hype around it. You can watch this in the price of Bitcoin. You can watch this in all the articles that were written about NFTs, and then there weren't any articles written about NFTs. The media loves the peak of inflated expectations, and so does the stock market. So artificial intelligence, right this moment, as I record this at the end of 2023, is in this moment of the peak of inflated expectations. But then, then comes the trough of disillusionment, which is it doesn't instantly happen. And this is where we are right now with electric cars. So you hear companies like GM blinking, wondering if it's even going to work, because not everyone bought an electric car on the same day. The people start to highlight all the little challenges a new technology's going to have. They haven't figured out the charging technology, the batteries have this issue, et cetera. But some people, some people quietly persist. They work through the slope of enlightenment, where one by one, they solve the pesky problems until they reach the plateau of productivity. And the plateau of productivity is when everyone says, well, of course. Of course we all use email now. But there was a hype cycle before that happened. So what we're looking for when we think about bringing an idea to the world, or buying a stock, or engaging in any cultural shift, whether you're trying to get someone elected or change a rule, what we're dealing with here is something happening over time that also happens to involve a normal distribution. That involves media amplifying it, people talking to other people to spread the idea. We can see all of these pieces fitting together once we realize that, no, the map is not the territory, but we do have a map. But the axes keep changing, the assertions keep changing. But in my lifetime, 60 plus years, it has never failed that an idea will spread along these axes. Every single time an idea goes through our culture, this is how it does it. It does it because a small group of people voluntarily engage with it. Then there's the hype. Then there's the chasm. Sometimes it crosses the chasm. Then it reaches the people in the middle. So a couple more to share. This one is from me, your host. The dip, I wrote a book about it. And what the dip is, is very simple. Easy to explain, sometimes it's hard to live with. And what it says is this. When we start something new, the results at the beginning tend to be pretty exciting. The first time you make a loaf of bread, it's a miracle. It worked pretty well. It's not a loaf you would've been happy to buy at a bakery, but compared to what you used to do, it's a home run. So at the beginning, right? Oh, I'm signing up for medical school and everyone's cheering for you. At the beginning, it's January, you join the gym. You're cheering for you. Lots of good things happen at the beginning. But then, the dip. What the dip is, is simple. It's what happens when the hard part shows up. Because the reason that there aren't that many people on the other side, that there aren't that many doctors, that there aren't that many expert programmers, that there aren't that many people with six-pack abs, is because sooner or later, it gets hard. And when it gets hard, is when almost everybody quits. Almost everybody stops going to the gym at the end of February and the beginning of March, because that's when it gets hard. And so the argument of the dip, is to see it before it comes. To be prepared for it. To say, oh, I'm in the dip. I wonder what I'm gonna do now. If you know that before the dip arises, if you have enough resources before you get there, you're more likely to get through it. My friend Brian put it into an episode of Billions. That sensation you're feeling, it's known as the dip. Seth Godin coined it, feels like the moment before defeat. It's actually the moment before success. Feels more like Death Valley. And so now you've been forewarned, right? Now you understand that if I'm gonna do something hard, I don't know, start a TikTok account. You don't make a TikTok account and then get 40 million views. Every once in a while, someone wins the lottery and does. But you won't, and I won't. So when I sat down to start blogging, I signed up for 9,000 blog posts in a row because it's the people who quit after blog post 140 that are a little bitter because they put all that effort in and they never got any of the reward. That as social media has given us more and more tools, we are tempted to start stuff because it's fun and then stop right into the dip. Okay, two left. The next one, one of the ones I wish I had written about, I mentioned it in my book, Unleashing the Idea Virus, but I failed to work it out the way Chris Anderson did, is the long tail. A lot of people don't understand the long tail. It's not Chris's fault. Here we go. If you look at this graph, you will see that part of it is greenish and part of it is yellow. The axis on the bottom is not time. The axis on the bottom is how many different varieties of stuff there is to choose from. And the y-axis, the up and down axis, is how much does it sell. So what it says is this. If I look at the area of the green spot, the top 40 sell just as much as the bottom four million. What it says is that it would be nice to have a hit. And if you have a hit, you will sell a lot of copies. But the long tail creates the condition for there to be way more choice than there used to be. So let's think about books. If we think about books, they used to publish 30 to 40,000 books a year in the United States. And of those books, some of them were big hits and sold lots of copies. But then the Kindle came along and self-publishing came along and print-on-demand came along. They don't publish 40,000 books a year anymore. They publish a million. I should say we publish books a year. 25 times as many. A lot of those books sell one or two or three copies a year, but no one knows what they're gonna be in advance. And the fascinating thing about the division in this chart is this. In the old days, Barnes & Noble could carry the green area. They didn't have one of the books from the yellow area. They didn't have room. The store is not infinite. Amazon comes along, the Kindle comes along. It turns out the sum total of sales from the books that Barnes & Noble never carried is equal to the sales of the books that Barnes & Noble did. If you add up all the titles that are way out on the long tail, it adds up to exactly as many as used to sell in a bookstore. If we think about Blockbuster versus Netflix in the old days, Blockbuster had a limited amount of shelf space to carry movies. If we add up the number of hours spent watching the movies carried by Blockbuster, it was exactly equal to all the little movies that Netflix was now able to carry. And that's why Blockbuster is gone because Netflix could not carry all of them, including the hits. So the reason we need to know about the long tail is this. The long tail opens the door for you to start your own gig, whatever that gig is. But living way out on the edge of the long tail is a lonely place to be. Just because you can publish something doesn't mean you will be successful. So all the people who are racing around looking for a record deal, you don't need a record deal if you want to get your music into the world. But the record companies, the book publishing companies, the venture capitalists, they are making an assertion. They're saying with our money and our attention, we're going to get you into the short head. The short head where you get more than your fair share of sales. But what we're seeing in one industry after another is that doesn't work the way that it used to. That a $200 million movie might sell just as many tickets as a $1 million movie. That if we look on YouTube, YouTube is all long tail. That the stuff that's been seen a billion times on YouTube was made by somebody who's right next to you on the long tail. So long tail can feel like a lottery and we have to go into it knowing that we're not guaranteed that just because we put in the effort, we're going to be in that short head, the one that people are talking about. And I'll go back in these lessons and take a look at this thing about over time. Take a look at this thing about early adopters and innovators. And what we learn is that the secret is the smallest viable audience. Not to try to be on the short head for everyone, but for someone. To pick the smallest number of people that you can thrive with. Delight them, overwhelm them, be the one and only for them. And they will begin to tell their friends. So if you deliver a product or a service or an idea or a movement that crosses the chasm, it will cross the chasm because you designed it to be good enough for the masses. But it will not reach the masses because you made it reach the masses. It will reach the masses because that tiny group of people that you decided this was for, those people will not be able to go to bed tonight without telling somebody else. And that's where we get to the last one from Trout and Reese. This one is super important because this is the graph you are going to draw. And this one is also misunderstood. So I'm gonna give you a specific example and then we'll figure out how it works for you. The way we position a brand is by drawing a two by two quadrant XY grid that shows us on its axis things people want. What you're not allowed to do is make any of them a bad thing. So here we have luxury versus value. Do some people want value? Yes. Do some people want luxury? Yes. What would not be allowed is one axis of good and another axis being crap because no one wants crap. Luxury versus value, or in this case, power versus agility. And so what I was able to do here is draw four brands that don't compete with each other at all. Hummer says, look, if you want a high value car that's agile and it's gonna be your daily driver, please don't buy a Hummer. Here's the phone number of the Hyundai deal. Porsche and Hummer do not compete. Hyundai and the Ford 150 pickup truck do not compete. Now what we learn from this graph is that positioning is a service. It is not about defeating your competition by saying, oh, all the stuff I make is up here and all our competitor stuff, which you don't want, is down here. If we're doing a good job of positioning, what we are doing is showing up as a service and saying to people, if you're an early adopter and you're looking for something new, that's me. On the other hand, if you want the proven thing, Campbell's Soup, that's over there. Being very clear, who's it for, what's it for? We are seeking to help people who are looking for us to find us, but we are not trying to persuade anybody who is not looking for us to find us. So once you see this graph, I'll put it back up again, I hope you can understand that your opportunity, whether you're a freelance copywriter or somebody who has 500 employees, your opportunity is to say, how do I draw these axes so that there's three quadrants where people have plenty of choices and there's one quadrant where there's nothing available? If I can find a quadrant where I am making something that people need and want and desire and will talk about, then they will. And so that is our opportunity. Our opportunity, once you see the maps, the charts, the graphs that I've just shown you, is to decode how these ideas spread and what to do with them. I hope this half hour has opened your eyes. Go ahead and share the ideas with people who you are working with, because it's really hard to get around without a map, and now you have one. Thanks for being part of this. Go make a ruckus, we'll see ya. A few years ago, I wrote a book called Unleashing the Idea Virus. Actually, it was more than a few years ago, it was almost 20 years ago, and it ended up transforming the arc of my career because I took my own advice. The book is about viral marketing, specifically about an idea from epidemiology called R0. R0, capital R, little zero, is a variable that tells us once someone gets infected with a virus, how many people will also be infected. So the Spanish flu, which ripped through Europe and the United States and killed more people than any world war, did it because it had an R0 of over one, which meant that if you got it, the chances are at least one other person was going to get it from you. Do the math, that leads to infinity. The reason everyone didn't die is because sooner or later, in this case, it went below one. Or consider the music video from Psy, Gangnam Style, that's been seen by two billion people around the world. Did he do that by running a lot of ads? Of course not. It happened because at the beginning, some people sent it to 100 people each, who then sent it to maybe 80, maybe 200, but it had an R0 that was a very high number, and then over time, it decreases. So when we think about your project, we begin by understanding that your R0 is considerably less than one, that when 10 people are exposed to your idea, fewer than 10 new people hear about it from those 10 people. It might even be one, it might even be zero. And that number drives the way we think about our idea spreading. Now, unleashing the idea virus has some complicated concepts here because the digital world changes everything. That as soon as ideas entered the internet, or as soon as the internet entered ideas, something changed, and what changed was the R0 went up. What changed is we went from a book being a word-of-mouth hit to a video being a idea virus, and that's an order of magnitude or more in impact because it turns out that ideas that can spread at the speed of light for free will go further faster than something that's bound into a medium. So I wanted to share a couple of the words that I used in describing the math of the idea virus because once you understand the vocabulary, you can figure out which ones you wanna play with. Before I do that, though, a small aside. If you make an app, please understand that the only chance you have for your app to succeed is for it to be viral, meaning that the app stores are so crowded, that smartphones are so crowded, that the money on the table is so low at the beginning, you cannot possibly promote it, hype it, market it in the advertising sense enough to make it popular that unless you build virality into your app itself, it will not work. And when we think about the ones that spread, Twitter or Tinder or pick any other one that starts with a T, what you find is they work better when other people have them. If we think about the fax machine, the fax machine works because the fax machine works better if other people know you have a fax machine. So you tell other people to go get a fax machine. So for a long time, the R0 for a fax machine was over one because there's something built into the technology that gives us a reason to spread it. So we can dive way into that, but I want you to think deeply about what is it about what you do that incents people to tell other people? So the first word I mentioned was medium. Medium means for the idea to travel, does it need a container to hold it? A book uses paper as its medium, right? The medium of architecture is a building. You can have a picture of the building, that's a different medium. Once you pick a medium, it can change how this thing is going to be able to move from place to place. The next idea is velocity. How fast, how long does this have to sit with somebody before they're eager to tell someone else? So the thing about pop stuff is it has very high velocity because the sooner you tell somebody you saw a new music video, the better. But there are other things in our lives where it might take months or years for the idea to start moving. Then I coined this term sneezer because I was playing on the idea of a virus. Some people, not necessarily the people who like you the most, some people will tell more other people because they like doing it. Malcolm Gladwell calls these people, at some level, we're slightly different on this, connectors, that there are some people who are eager to talk about cool new stuff. So if you check out Boing Boing, which is one of the oldest, most popular blogs in the world, all Mark and Corey and the rest of the team do is tell other people about cool stuff they just found. And when they tell someone else, 100,000 people hear them, they are sneezers. There are people who sneeze for a living, and I would argue that Mark at Boing Boing does that. And then there are people who sneeze as a hobby, who are just eager to tell other folks. Now, sneezers don't tell everyone. They work in a hive, a group of people around them, an idea that I then developed into the term tribes. A tribe of people, a hive of people are the ones who are listening to somebody. So let's think about Napster. Napster was the fastest growing software in the history of mankind. How did Napster spread? Well, first of all, the medium, it's electronic. So all you had to do was be connected on the internet to know about it and to use it. Number two, the velocity was super high because the minute you got the joke, which took about two minutes, unlimited free music, you could tell other people. It had people who wanted to sneeze about it because it would gain status for you. If you were the person that told somebody else about Napster, you ended up looking good. And it had a hive. Worth noting, Napster did not spread at old folks' homes. Napster did not spread among senior citizens who have plenty of spare time and are trying to save money. But senior citizens don't pride themselves on having lots of new friends. And senior citizens are not interested in new music and new experiences as a general rule. College students, on the other hand, have an unlimited number of new friends and they're always looking for new ones. And they're obsessed with new music. So that was the hotbed, the place where Napster could land and spread. Two more, persistence, which means once someone gets your idea, how long does it last on them? So if I think about a tattoo, a tattoo has very high persistence. And a tattoo is seen by everybody else you run into. That's why tattoos have been on a ratcheting up cycle for so many years, because one hipster gets a tattoo and all day long, every day, whether they want to or not, they're sneezing that idea. Other things have a persistence of just a few days that my guess is, other than the video below, you haven't seen the Psy Gangnam Style video in a really long time, because it doesn't need to stick around for you to get that mindset. Okay, a couple more, amplifier, which is where can you put your idea, whether it's into a media place or some architected place, where it's more likely to be amplified to reach new people. So it's sort of a hypersneezer. And the last one I'll throw out is vector, which is that once an idea starts spreading, it tends to spread in a given direction because of the way you constructed it, because of the kind of person that wants to engage with it. So what we've seen since the days of Hotmail, which is often held up as the original granddaddy of viral marketing, is that it's not easy to do. It's lightning in a bottle. It's hard to predict. That when Chris Anderson started the TED Talks online, there were 10 or 15 years of TED Talks in the vault. He posted those videos online. So we can go down the list. Where's the hive? Who's the sneezers? How persistent is it? What's the medium? In which direction is it gonna go? And you can look after the fact and see that his timing was perfect and that the idea was brilliant. And as a result, more than a billion TED Talks have been viewed because they have some of the key elements of spreading virally. And what almost is always true is that it's generous, that the ideas that we spread, we tend to spread because they help us, not because they help the creator of the idea. That when we go on Patreon or some other site and ask people to support us, that tends not to be viral marketing. That when you see a Kickstarter go, quote, viral, it's almost always going viral way beyond the needs of the creator. In fact, in ways that hurts the creator, it goes viral because there's something in it for the spreader. So we think about Groupon or Kickstarter, the original spreaders spread it because they want the project to succeed so they can get the prize. If not enough people sign up, it doesn't succeed, they don't get the prize. The next level though, after it's reached the level of it's gonna work is, well, I want a Pebble watch. Well, I want a little fidget toy because it's cool for me. And then the next level after that is, look how popular this thing is. I can't believe I'm the last one to hear about it. And you can see how these cycles develop. So the book is below, it's free, you can have a copy. And I want you to think hard about why it is that people don't talk about you, how you could change the architecture of what you offer, the medium in which your ideas spread, who your sneezers are and what's in it for them, how to increase the velocity and the persistence of your idea and how to amplify it in appropriate ways so that the cycle repeats. There's a lot to chew on here. Tell the others.