Before I can do that / I've got to tell you about sliced bread, / and a guy named Otto Rohwedder. // Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s / I wonder what they said? / Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. // But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread, / and he focused, / like most inventors did, / on the patent part / and the making part. // And the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this -- / that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available / no one bought it; / no one knew about it; / it was a complete and total failure. // And the reason is that until Wonder came along / and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, / no one wanted it. // That the success of sliced bread, / like the success of almost everything we've talked about at this conference, / is not always about what the patent is like, / or what the factory is like -- / it's about / can you get your idea to spread, / or not. // And I think that the way you're going to get what you want, / or cause the change that you want to change, / to happen, / is to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread. // And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop / or you're an intellectual, / or you're in business, / or you're flying hot air balloons. // I think that all this stuff applies to everybody / regardless of what we do. // That what we are living in / is a century of idea diffusion. // That people who can spread ideas, / regardless of what those ideas are, / win. // When I talk about it / I usually pick business, / because they make the best pictures / that you can put in your presentation, / and because it's the easiest sort of way to keep score. // But I want you to forgive me / when I use these examples / because I'm talking about anything / that you decide to spend your time to do. // At the heart of spreading ideas / is TV and stuff like TV. // TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas / in a certain way. // I call it the "TV-industrial complex." // The way the TV-industrial complex works, / is you buy some ads, / interrupt some people, / that gets you distribution. // You use the distribution you get / to sell more products. // You take the profit from that / to buy more ads. // And it goes around and around and around, / the same way that the military-industrial complex worked a long time ago. // That model of, / and we heard it yesterday -- / if we could only get onto the homepage of Google, / if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, / or grab that person by the throat, / and tell them about what we want to do. // If we did that / then everyone would pay attention, / and we would win. // Well, this TV-industrial complex informed my entire childhood / and probably yours. // I mean, all of these products succeeded / because someone figured out how to touch people / in a way they weren't expecting, / in a way they didn't necessarily want, / with an ad, / over and over again / until they bought it. // And the thing that's happened is, / they canceled the TV-industrial complex. // That just over the last few years, / anybody who markets anything has discovered / is that it's not working the way that it used to.