in the very fabric of the modern economy.

And to talk about that, I'm going to go back to the beginning,

because in the beginning were commodities.

Commodities are things that you grow in the ground, raise on the ground or pull out of the ground:

basically, animal, mineral, vegetable.

And then you extract them out of the ground,

and sell them on the open marketplace.

Commodities were the basis of the agrarian economy

that lasted for millennia.

But then along came the industrial revolution,

and then goods became the predominant economic offering,

where we used commodities as a raw material

to be able to make or manufacture goods.

So, we moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.

Well, what then happened over the last 50 or 60 years,

is that goods have become commoditized.

Commoditized: where they're treated like a commodity,

where people don't care who makes them.

They just care about three things and three things only:

price, price and price.

Now, there's an antidote to commoditization,

and that is customization.

My first book was called "Mass Customization" --

it came up a couple of times yesterday --

and how I discovered this progression of economic value

was realizing that customizing a good

automatically turned it into a service,

because it was done just for a particular person,

because it wasn't inventoried,

it was delivered on demand to that individual person.

So, we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy.

But over the past 10 or 20 years, what's happened is that

services are being commoditized as well.

Long-distance telephone service sold on price, price, price;

fast-food restaurants with all their value pricing;

and even the Internet is commoditizing not just goods,

but services as well.

What that means is that it's time

to move to a new level of economic value.

Time to go beyond the goods and the services,

and use, in that same heuristic, what happens when you customize a service?

What happens when you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person --

that's exactly what they need at this moment in time?

Then you can't help but make them go "wow";

you can't help but turn it into a memorable event --

you can't help but turn it into an experience.

So we're shifting to an experience economy,

where experiences are becoming the predominant economic offering.

Now most places that I talk to,

when I talk about experience, I talk about Disney --

the world's premier experience-stager.

I talk about theme restaurants, and experiential retail,

and boutique hotels, and Las Vegas --

the experience capital of the world.

But here, when you think about experiences,

think about Thomas Dolby and his group, playing music.

Think about meaningful places.

Think about drinking wine,

about a journey to the Clock of the Long Now.

Those are all experiences. Think about TED itself.

The experience capital in the world of conferences.

All of these are experiences.

Now, over the last several years I spent a lot of time in Europe,

and particularly in the Netherlands,

and whenever I talk about the experience economy there,

I'm always greeted at the end with one particular question,

almost invariably.

And the question isn't really so much a question

as an accusation.

And the Dutch, when they usually put it,

it always starts with the same two words.

You know the words I mean?

You Americans.

They say, you Americans.

You like your fantasy environments,

your fake, your Disneyland experiences.

They say, we Dutch, we like real,

natural, authentic experiences.

So much has that happened that I've developed a fairly praticed response,

which is: I point out that first of all,

you have to understand that there is no such thing

as an inauthentic experience.

Why? Because the experience happens inside of us.

It's our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us.

So, as long as we are in any sense authentic human beings,

then every experience we have is authentic.

Now, there may be more or less natural or artificial

stimuli for the experience,

but even that is a matter of degree, not kind.

And there's no such thing as a 100 percent natural experience.

Even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods,

there is a company that manufactured the car

that delivered you to the edge of the woods;

there's a company that manufactured the shoes that you have

to protect yourself from the ground of the woods.

There's a company that provides a cell phone service you have

in case you get lost in the woods.

Right? All of those are man-made,

artificiality brought into the woods by you,

and by the very nature of being there.

And then I always finish off

by talking about -- the thing that amazes me the most about this question,

particularly coming from the Dutch,

is that the Netherlands

is every bit as manufactured as Disneyland.

(Laughter)

And the Dutch, they always go ...

and they realize, I'm right!

There isn't a square meter of ground in the entire country

that hasn't been reclaimed from the sea,

or otherwise moved, modified and manicured

to look as if it had always been there.

It's the only place you ever go for a walk in the woods and all the trees are lined up in rows.

(Laughter)

But nonetheless, not just the Dutch,

but everyone has this desire for the authentic.

And authenticity is therefore

becoming the new consumer sensibility --

the buying criteria by which consumers

are choosing who are they going to buy from,

and what they're going to buy.

Becoming the basis of the economy.

In fact, you can look at how each of these economies developed,

that each one has their own business imperative,

matched with a consumer sensibility.

We're the agrarian economy, and we're supplying commodities.

It's about supply and availability.

Getting the commodities to market.

With the industrial economy, it is about controlling costs --

getting the costs down as low as possible

so we can offer them to the masses.

With the service economy, it is about

improving quality.

That has -- the whole quality movement has risen

with the service economy over the past 20 or 30 years.

And now, with the experience economy,

it's about rendering authenticity.

Rendering authenticity -- and the keyword is "rendering."

Right? Rendering, because you have to get your consumers --

as business people --

to percieve your offerings as authentic.

Because there is a basic paradox:

no one can have an inauthentic experience,

but no business can supply one.

Because all businesses are man-made objects; all business is involved with money;

all business is a matter of using machinery,

and all those things make something inauthentic.

So, how do you render authenticity,

is the question.

Are you rendering authenticity?

When you think about that, let me go back to

what Lionel Trilling, in his seminal book on authenticity,

"Sincerity and Authenticity" -- came out in 1960 --

points to as the seminal point

at which authenticity entered the lexicon,

if you will.

And that is, to no surprise, in Shakespeare,

and in his play, Hamlet.

And there is one part in this play, Hamlet,

where the most fake of all the characters in Hamlet, Polonius,

says something profoundly real.

At the end of a laundry list of advice

he's giving to his son, Laertes,

he says this:

And this above all: to thine own self be true.

And it doth follow, as night the day,

that thou canst not then be false to any man.

And those three verses are the core of authenticity.

There are two dimensions to authenticity:

one, being true to yourself, which is very self-directed.

Two, is other-directed:

being what you say you are to others.

And I don't know about you, but whenever I encounter two dimensions,

I immediately go, ahh, two-by-two!