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Speaker 1: order your first custom shirt today. This is Masters in
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ridholts on Boomberg Radio. This week on
Speaker 1: the podcast, I have Derek Thompson. He is a writer
Speaker 1: for The Atlantic magazine. I've been a fan of his
Speaker 1: work for a long time. I think he does an
Speaker 1: outstanding job of taking complex issues of economics and markets
Speaker 1: and making it really understandable for the lay person. His
Speaker 1: new book is called Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity
Speaker 1: and the Age of Distraction, and it's really a fascinating
Speaker 1: discussion about how we completely misunderstand what makes a hit
Speaker 1: and what doesn't make a hit. Our concept of things
Speaker 1: going viral is really wrong. Most things don't go viral.
Speaker 1: Even the things we think that are going viral are
Speaker 1: really in some way being broadcast, being selected, being pushed. Uh,
Speaker 1: the organic viral hit is as much a myth as
Speaker 1: anything else. I found the book to be quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: It it is some ways a more rigorous version of
Speaker 1: tipping points, uh to some degrees. It's a freakonomics like
Speaker 1: type of book where there's actual science and actual studies
Speaker 1: and and really interesting history that leads to an explanation
Speaker 1: of something that we think we understand, but in reality
Speaker 1: we really don't. And that's what made both the book
Speaker 1: and our conversation so interesting. So, with no further ado,
Speaker 1: my conversation with Derrick Thompson. This is Masters in Business
Speaker 1: with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today
Speaker 1: is Derrick Thompson. He is the senior editor at The
Speaker 1: Atlantic Magazine and has appeared on Forbes thirty Under thirty List.
Speaker 1: He is the author, most recently of Hit Makers, The
Speaker 1: Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. The book,
Speaker 1: which I enjoyed a great deal, has been described as
Speaker 1: picking up where the tipping point left off, a sharply
Speaker 1: observed history of the mega hit. Derrek Thompson, Welcome to Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: It's great to be here. Thank you. So you you
Speaker 1: tap into a lot of my favorite subjects, everything from
Speaker 1: cognition to networks to why our beliefs about many things
Speaker 1: are so wrong. So so let's just jump right into
Speaker 1: this let's discuss familiarity. What is fluency and disfluency. Fluency
Speaker 1: and disfluency are these two lovely ideas that actually come
Speaker 1: from meta cognitive psychology, which is a bit of a mouthful,
Speaker 1: but meta cognitive above thinking, thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking,
Speaker 1: feelings that we have about our thoughts. And it's weird
Speaker 1: and a bit hippie dippie maybe to think that our
Speaker 1: thoughts have feelings. But imagine, for example, you're traveling in
Speaker 1: a foreign country and you're looking at all of these
Speaker 1: signs and you don't know what they say, and you
Speaker 1: really have to get to your hotel, and you're very
Speaker 1: anxious about this. That is disfluency. That is anxiety about thinking,
Speaker 1: difficult thinking. But let's say you turn around in this
Speaker 1: busy street in this foreign country and you see a
Speaker 1: close friend from high school who looks completely at home
Speaker 1: in the street, and you realize, ah, I can ask
Speaker 1: you directions. That is fluency. That is sudden ease of thinking.
Speaker 1: And I think that we confront products in the cultural landscape,
Speaker 1: whether there are songs, movies, tele and shows, along a
Speaker 1: spectrum of fluency to disfluency, meaning things that were familiar
Speaker 1: with the things that are just too far out there,
Speaker 1: a little strange, and we're not comfortable with right on
Speaker 1: the right the extreme on one end, hearing our favorite
Speaker 1: Beatles song for the fifteenth time, and at the extreme
Speaker 1: on the other end, hearing some weirdly syncopated Swedish music
Speaker 1: for the first time. And so in dealing with fluency
Speaker 1: and disfluency, what's interesting to me is that, yes, people
Speaker 1: do have a bias toward the fluent. They have a
Speaker 1: bias toward the familiar. We love things that are familiar,
Speaker 1: but we particularly like things that are familiar when they're
Speaker 1: sneakily familiar, or when that familiarity emerges from a state
Speaker 1: of disfluency. Think about a podcast. I think one of
Speaker 1: the things that people try to do on the best podcast,
Speaker 1: one of the things that you try to do consistently
Speaker 1: is to take a subject area that's a little bit
Speaker 1: confusing and find a way to elucidate it for listeners
Speaker 1: so that they can say, ah, ha I suddenly understand it.
Speaker 1: And that switch from disfluency to fluency has a very
Speaker 1: specific term in psychology. It's called old in a rather
Speaker 1: lovely way, the aesthetic aha, and that is actually my
Speaker 1: next question. By the way, I cheat because I bring
Speaker 1: in folks like yourself and Philip Tetlock and Scott Galloway
Speaker 1: and go down the list who are experts in a
Speaker 1: deep but narrow area. And the beauty of their work
Speaker 1: is they provide that fluency in an area you almost
Speaker 1: sort of kind of understand, you know, there's something there,
Speaker 1: and the aesthetic aha shows up. So let's discuss what
Speaker 1: is the aesthetic? The aesthetic aha, So let's talk about
Speaker 1: it very clinically. This was a study that was done
Speaker 1: by a few psychologist about Cubist paintings, and they would
Speaker 1: show a bunch of weird Cubist paintings to participants and
Speaker 1: they would say, I'm not sure I like this, I
Speaker 1: don't get this. And then in a second round they
Speaker 1: would give them a little clue, so if the painting
Speaker 1: kind of looked like a fish, they would say pisces
Speaker 1: or they would say did you know that Picasso loved
Speaker 1: fishing in the Mediterranean, And suddenly, in the second round
Speaker 1: people would like the paintings much more. They would gain
Speaker 1: a sudden appreciation for what the painting was. And this
Speaker 1: moment of suddenly understanding that which was previously confusing, was
Speaker 1: called by this psychologist, Claudia Muth, the esthetic aha. And
Speaker 1: so if you extend this to say, the storytelling realm,
Speaker 1: you can imagine, for example, how every single great thriller,
Speaker 1: every episode of Law and Order, every story of Sherlock Holmes,
Speaker 1: every mystery is this beautiful dance between disfluency, what's going on,
Speaker 1: who's the killer, who's died? And fluency. Ah. I think
Speaker 1: I got it, I think I know who did it.
Speaker 1: I suddenly realized the answer. And in many ways, I
Speaker 1: think the best hit makers, the best cultural producers, are
Speaker 1: those who are really gifted at engineering these moments of
Speaker 1: both anxiety and sudden understanding, meaning that it is both
Speaker 1: accessible yet different enough to present something. Hey, I haven't
Speaker 1: quite heard that, and yet it sounds somewhat familiar exactly
Speaker 1: if we were here discussing you know, what is g
Speaker 1: d P. What are the elements of g d P.
Speaker 1: A lot of your listeners I think don't need another
Speaker 1: you know, ninth grade class in the various components of
Speaker 1: GDP that is too familiar to offer any aesthetic. Ah.
Speaker 1: But if you're talking about you know, what's going to be,
Speaker 1: you know Tillerson's plan for the Middle East, or what's
Speaker 1: gonna be Minuchans plan for uh, you know, the Federal
Speaker 1: reserve or interest rates or tax policy questions that people
Speaker 1: think dis fluently about don't know the answer to. That's
Speaker 1: what yields an aesthetic a HAA is providing an answer
Speaker 1: to those unknown questions. So we've been talking about content.
Speaker 1: There's a quote in the book that that I love
Speaker 1: which um is your quote. It's not you writing about
Speaker 1: someone else, which is content maybe king, But distribution is
Speaker 1: the kingdom. Just discuss that content might be king with
Speaker 1: distribution is the kingdom. Content is king? Is the cliche
Speaker 1: It says that if you make something that's great, a
Speaker 1: great podcast, a great song, great move v it is
Speaker 1: self distributing, it will necessarily go viral. It has within
Speaker 1: it the qualities of a virus. It is typhus, it
Speaker 1: is pneumonia. It'll just spread automatically. And yet, and yet,
Speaker 1: what we see throughout the history of culture is that
Speaker 1: that's just so obviously not true. Some of the biggest
Speaker 1: hits in music and movie history depended overwhelmingly on distribution
Speaker 1: mechanisms to get out to the public, and in fact,
Speaker 1: sometimes they failed before they had this powerful distribution mechanism
Speaker 1: um in the music industry. For example, they have song
Speaker 1: testing websites that will essentially test hundreds of songs for
Speaker 1: in front of hundreds of people and ask them before
Speaker 1: these songs hit the radio, how much do you like
Speaker 1: this song? And what they'll say is that if the
Speaker 1: song passes a certain threshold, say an eighty between zero
Speaker 1: and a hundred, that the song is a guaranteed hit.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Rehults. You're listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Derrick Thompson. He
Speaker 1: is senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine and author of
Speaker 1: Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about music because this is really a fascinating
Speaker 1: topic to me. Repetition is the god particle of music. Explain,
Speaker 1: there are many species of animals where biologists say they sing,
Speaker 1: and it always means that they repeat a certain sound
Speaker 1: at a common interval. If you take even a sliver
Speaker 1: of human speech, and you take even a little bit
Speaker 1: of it, and you start repeating it again, start repeating
Speaker 1: it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again.
Speaker 1: Suddenly the brain starts to hear that which was previously
Speaker 1: sort of cacophonist speed stream as music. No longer hearing
Speaker 1: the content, but you're hearing the melody, and you're hearing
Speaker 1: the exactly. Yes, you're hearing the tones and you're hearing
Speaker 1: the rhythm. And so literally, repetition is the thing that
Speaker 1: distinguishes the cacophony of the world from that which the
Speaker 1: brain recognizes as music. So why is familiarity such an
Speaker 1: important part of our liking music, film, everything else. There's
Speaker 1: two elements of this. There's the biological element and then
Speaker 1: we'll talk about the economic element. Biologically, why are we
Speaker 1: predisposed to that which is familiar um. The evolutionary psychology
Speaker 1: explanation would be that if you're a hunter gatherer trawling
Speaker 1: the savannah of Africa and you see a plant or
Speaker 1: an animal that you recognize, that's a really good sign
Speaker 1: that it hasn't killed you yet, so you should probably
Speaker 1: trust it a little bit more than that plant or
Speaker 1: animal that you don't recognize and might kill you. Disfamiliar
Speaker 1: potentially equals danger. Its equals danger, right, so there should
Speaker 1: be a sort of alarm bell that goes off in
Speaker 1: your head that says, I don't trust this, and now
Speaker 1: I have to think a little bit about whether I
Speaker 1: should trust it. That is that the reason why you
Speaker 1: say to a young child, here, try this. You've never
Speaker 1: had it, No, I don't want to try it is
Speaker 1: literally a biological component to that, that that that child
Speaker 1: has learned quite well from thousands and thousands of years
Speaker 1: of human evolution. Absolutely, um But on the economic side,
Speaker 1: I mean, familiarity is the back owe of the advertising business. Right.
Speaker 1: Why do you want to expose people to coca cola
Speaker 1: and pepsi and uh Bloomberg over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: You want them to trust it, You want to them
Speaker 1: you want to build in the familiarity that comes from
Speaker 1: multiple exposure. Um. On. From music, it's unbelievably powerful. On
Speaker 1: top forty radio, songs that are unfamiliar are considered two
Speaker 1: notes in a somewhat paradoxical way. We tune in to
Speaker 1: top forty radio to hear songs that we already know,
Speaker 1: but in an order that surprises us. And so with
Speaker 1: in music, in film, and even across the economic landscape,
Speaker 1: there is and there's a strong economic imperative to build
Speaker 1: in familiarity because with familiarity with familiarity comes like, so,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk about the Spotify Weekly Playlist, which I've
Speaker 1: been getting for years and and I'm always feel like
Speaker 1: it's homemark. I'm so far behind. However, there's a fascinating
Speaker 1: story as to how that evolved. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: stories from the book um Spotify is discover weekly app. Uh.
Speaker 1: It dumps thirty new songs into computer, into your phone
Speaker 1: every single Monday. And when they first built this technology,
Speaker 1: they wanted all the songs to be new, all the
Speaker 1: artists to be new, pure discovery, pure originality. But a
Speaker 1: bug in the algorithm accidentally let through some very familiar
Speaker 1: songs and some very familiar artists. They fixed the bug,
Speaker 1: and they kept testing it internally. And what happened if
Speaker 1: they fixed the bug, engagement with the app collapsed. It
Speaker 1: turned out that having a little bit of familiarity, a
Speaker 1: little bit of this app won't kill you, it won't
Speaker 1: bite you. Made it much much more popular. And so
Speaker 1: that's why I say in the book, if you're trying
Speaker 1: to sell something that is familiar, the key is to
Speaker 1: make it a little bit surprising, to make it a
Speaker 1: little bit This is not something that you've experienced before.
Speaker 1: But the key to selling something that is surprising is
Speaker 1: to make it a little bit familiar. And that applies
Speaker 1: to some degree to the pandora Um playlists, or actually
Speaker 1: it's not even a playlist, it's Pandora's collaborative filtering. If
Speaker 1: I like this artist and this song and this artist
Speaker 1: will I probably like those and that works very well
Speaker 1: for them, doesn't it? Yes, right, and you mentioned collaborative filtering.
Speaker 1: Collaborative filtering also essentially takes the taste of the masses
Speaker 1: um and uses the decisions that they've made to guide
Speaker 1: your next choice. So that, for example, if you're shopping
Speaker 1: on Amazon and somebody buys your book and then buys
Speaker 1: my book and then buys Tyler Cowen's book, if lots
Speaker 1: of people make that sort of decision tree process, then
Speaker 1: the next time my friend goes and buys your book
Speaker 1: on Amazon and my book on Amazon, Amazon will prompt
Speaker 1: them and say do you want to buy Tyler Cowen's book,
Speaker 1: because thousands of people that bought those first two books
Speaker 1: also bought the Latin the third one. So this is
Speaker 1: how a lot of these algorithms work is they essentially
Speaker 1: say a lot of people after they listened to Beyonce
Speaker 1: and the Weekend, then listen to Drake. So if you're
Speaker 1: listening to Beyonce and you've listened to the Weekend, we're
Speaker 1: going to suggest Drake. So let's let's talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about um, why so many songs seem to sound
Speaker 1: so familiar. When I started reading that part of the book,
Speaker 1: I immediately thought of the Blues Travelers song Hook, which
Speaker 1: is loosely based theoretically chord for chord on Pacabell's cannon
Speaker 1: and D. And then you start looking at that chord progression,
Speaker 1: the one five four six, and it just shows up
Speaker 1: everywhere in music, and there's an ongoing list and a
Speaker 1: hilarious YouTube video of somebody playing all the variations on
Speaker 1: pacabell and they're all well known rock and roll songs
Speaker 1: right or or pop songs and reggae songs. This is
Speaker 1: if you're if you're listening at home and you are
Speaker 1: an arms leanked away from a piano, you can play
Speaker 1: a C chord followed by a G chord followed by
Speaker 1: an A minor followed by an F or you can
Speaker 1: look that up in line and just you know, listening
Speaker 1: to you listen for it to yourself. Um, but yes,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right, you know you The number of songs
Speaker 1: that play off of the structure is just incredible. You
Speaker 1: have Bob Marley is No Woman, No Cry. You have
Speaker 1: Lady gagas Paparazzi, you have Journey, Don't stop believing. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are so two you with or without you. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this is that I think the common
Speaker 1: thing that said about these these songs in this chord
Speaker 1: structure is that the songs you're derivative, that they're all
Speaker 1: just doing the same old thing. But the reason I
Speaker 1: don't quite buy that is that No Woman, No Cry
Speaker 1: doesn't sound anything like Lady Gaga, and it doesn't sound
Speaker 1: anything like with or Without You, or anything like you know,
Speaker 1: John Denver. These are actually I prefer to think of
Speaker 1: them as clever cartographers, understanding that they all have to
Speaker 1: plot a route home, but taking slightly different routes to
Speaker 1: the same destination. And if you buy the thesis of
Speaker 1: this book, which is that familiarity beats originality and distribution
Speaker 1: beats content, then it makes an enormous amount of sense
Speaker 1: that as a new artist, you would try to write
Speaker 1: music that is optimally new that is slightly familiar, not
Speaker 1: only because people are predisposed to like that thing, but
Speaker 1: also because the most powerful distributors might be inclined to
Speaker 1: more to better distribute a song that is sneakily familiar
Speaker 1: and therefore more likely to be a hit. Why has
Speaker 1: Sweden become the capital of pop songwriting? Three things. First,
Speaker 1: Sweden writes music in major chord melodies, which makes it
Speaker 1: really exportable. They often write their songs with uh English lyrics,
Speaker 1: which also makes them exportable. They have a massive public
Speaker 1: education investment in music education at a young age, which
Speaker 1: is very helpful. And finally, they've had a couple sort
Speaker 1: of like Michael Jordan's style hits. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special
Speaker 1: guest today is Derrick Thompson. He is the author of
Speaker 1: Hit Makers, Science of Popularity in the Age of Distraction.
Speaker 1: He has appeared on Forbes thirty Under thirty List. He
Speaker 1: is a senior editor at The Atlantic. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: TV movies and video images. How did ESPM become the
Speaker 1: most valuable cable channel in the world. ESPN in the
Speaker 1: early two thousand's was really struggling with Sports Center. Uh,
Speaker 1: they were covering bass fishing, they were covering all sorts
Speaker 1: of card games. And John Skipper, the president, comes in
Speaker 1: and he says, you know, I feel like we're turning
Speaker 1: into a Greek diner. We're serving ten thousand things in
Speaker 1: a mediocre way. We need to be more like a steakhouse.
Speaker 1: We needed to do a few things really, really well.
Speaker 1: And he be orients Sports Center in the mid two
Speaker 1: thousands around a handful of hero stories, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods,
Speaker 1: Derek Jeter. Let's just make sure to optimize the chance
Speaker 1: that every time a marginal ESPN viewer wants to click in,
Speaker 1: they'll expect to see a continuation of their heroes story.
Speaker 1: And after this, you see ESPN stock just absolutely sore
Speaker 1: the value of the of the channel, actually sore on
Speaker 1: the cable bundle. Obviously, they've had an enormous number of
Speaker 1: issues in the last few years. It's using cord cutting,
Speaker 1: but this is clearly how they established their dominance in
Speaker 1: the two thousands. And so interesting about this is that
Speaker 1: it's really similar to the way at Hollywood has thought
Speaker 1: about heroes as well. That audience has seen that just
Speaker 1: want to come back and back and back to see
Speaker 1: the same franchises, sequels, adaptations, and reboots of the same heroes.
Speaker 1: So in a way, you could say that ESPN took
Speaker 1: a page out of the Hollywood playbook to become a hit.
Speaker 1: So one of the data points in the book I
Speaker 1: found fascinating is since two thousand and twelve, more people
Speaker 1: spent time interacting with digital devices then with television. And
Speaker 1: it seems the progression was radio was eclipsed by movies.
Speaker 1: Was eclipse by television? Was eclipse by laptops? Was a
Speaker 1: clip by eclips by phones? Is that more or less right?
Speaker 1: That is actually correct? But what's so fascinating is the
Speaker 1: degree to which these former technologies were eclipsed without being
Speaker 1: totally shut out. Uh. In a way, yes, the television state,
Speaker 1: the television box replaced the radio set in the corner
Speaker 1: of tens of millions of families living rooms. But in
Speaker 1: a way that made radio better. It made radio mobile.
Speaker 1: In the next few decades, radio went from being an
Speaker 1: absolute rarity in cars to being a standard feature in cars.
Speaker 1: So TV sets made radio mobile. And I'm sure a
Speaker 1: lot of people are listening to us right now as
Speaker 1: they're walking around or as they're driving. Radio is considered
Speaker 1: a kind of mobile technology, and so people still listen
Speaker 1: to the radio while they watch TV, while they're on
Speaker 1: their laptops, while they're looking at going to a movie
Speaker 1: maybe later that weekend. The mountain of media seems to
Speaker 1: keep growing. The quote in the book I Really liked
Speaker 1: was television ones freed moving images from the clutches of
Speaker 1: the cinema cineplex. The historical sequel is mobile technology is
Speaker 1: emancipating video from the living room. Yeah. I think sometimes
Speaker 1: people say, you know, TV is dead. TV is not dead.
Speaker 1: What's happened is that I think as millennials have cut
Speaker 1: the cord, so to speak, they've sort of unleashed this,
Speaker 1: like all of these little seedlings of television that are
Speaker 1: pollinating our little tiny plates of glass. So, yes, tradition
Speaker 1: no linear programming is clearly instructural decline for Americans under
Speaker 1: the age of sixty, that is without debate. But Americans
Speaker 1: under the age of sixty are still spending hours and
Speaker 1: hours of their day watching video. Maybe it's on Facebook
Speaker 1: or Snapchat or YouTube or Hulu and Netflix, but they're
Speaker 1: still spending a lot of time consuming video entertainment it's
Speaker 1: just that there's so much video entertainment that it's eclipsing
Speaker 1: sort of the the o G the original linear programming content.
Speaker 1: The day we're recording this is there was a Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal article. YouTube is now up to a billion
Speaker 1: hours of video watched per day, unbelievable, astonishing number. Um.
Speaker 1: We keep coming back to repetition. And there's a couple
Speaker 1: of things I wanted to go over with you, not
Speaker 1: just Joseph Campbell and George Lucas and that, but you
Speaker 1: referenced um a movie dumb and Dumber. There are movies
Speaker 1: we've all seen a million times. For me, when my
Speaker 1: wife had the chicken pox a decade ago, we watched
Speaker 1: Gross point Blank on HBO over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: And the more we watched it, the more we liked it.
Speaker 1: It just became every scene became familiar. I could probably
Speaker 1: say the same thing about Blade Runner, I've seen a
Speaker 1: million times. And then there are the films that have
Speaker 1: that repetition built into a Groundhog Day or the Tom Cruise,
Speaker 1: UM War. It's the same movie internally, only with slight variations.
Speaker 1: Is that actually a genre that plays to our desire
Speaker 1: for for familiar things in a weird way. Those sort
Speaker 1: of movies groundhog Day are microcosms of the experience that
Speaker 1: you have. I think with a single piece of fractical content, right,
Speaker 1: it's it is fractical. It's a perfect word for it.
Speaker 1: So that, for example, in groundhog Day, he is living
Speaker 1: the same day over and over again, but he's also
Speaker 1: learning from it, and he's noticing different things, and now
Speaker 1: he's mean to the homeless guy, and then he helps
Speaker 1: the homeless guy, and we have that relationship. I think
Speaker 1: with movies and songs too. The fifteenth time you've heard
Speaker 1: a Day in the Life by the Beatles is not
Speaker 1: like the first time you've heard it. You know how
Speaker 1: to pay attention to the shape of the song, you
Speaker 1: know when to sort of tune in and tune out. Um,
Speaker 1: even with movies like Dumb and Dumber, which is not
Speaker 1: exactly Citizen Kane, I probably seen it a hundred times,
Speaker 1: not exactly, not exactly, but maybe who knows, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone has their own taste. I'm Barry rid Hilts. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest
Speaker 1: today is Derrick Thompson. He is a senior editor at
Speaker 1: the Atlantic Magazine and author of the new book hit Makers.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about art and why some
Speaker 1: things go viral quote unquote, and why things don't. I
Speaker 1: want to talk about a both a patron of the
Speaker 1: arts and an artist himself that you describe in the book,
Speaker 1: Kai Bot, who left a bequest of seven specific artists
Speaker 1: from the impression Impressionist period that weren't particularly highly regarded.
Speaker 1: And it was to the um remind me which museum,
Speaker 1: muse de Luxembourg, Muse de Luxembourg, tell us, tell us
Speaker 1: what happens with those seven artists and how this affected
Speaker 1: future history. So I came upon this story as I
Speaker 1: was having this thought. I was in the National Gallery
Speaker 1: in Washington, d C. And having a thought that I
Speaker 1: think is relatively familiar, which is, why is this painting
Speaker 1: so much more famous than this other painting, even though
Speaker 1: they seem to be of relatively similar quality. And there's
Speaker 1: this remarkable story with Gustav Kaibat. He's one of the
Speaker 1: least famous French Impressionist painters today, but he was a
Speaker 1: collector of his friends worst paintings. Actually he only collected
Speaker 1: or bought the paintings that wouldn't sell to anybody else.
Speaker 1: And when you say his friends just a quick list, Monet, Pissarro,
Speaker 1: Dega Siciley, man A Renoir says, on, that's some crowd
Speaker 1: to run with. It's some crowd to run with now,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you his his walls are probably valued
Speaker 1: at several billion dollars sort of today's Christie sales, but
Speaker 1: at the time it was relatively worthless. I mean, he
Speaker 1: literally was buying that which couldn't sell. So he dies
Speaker 1: in the early eighteen nineties at the age of forty one,
Speaker 1: and he his estate he bequeathed to the French government.
Speaker 1: The French government says absolutely not, We're not going to
Speaker 1: hang these terrible paintings. But after a bit of haggling,
Speaker 1: they finally decide, yes, we'll hang a handful of these
Speaker 1: Impressionist works in a French state museum for the first
Speaker 1: time ever. It was this enormous scandal. And as you said,
Speaker 1: who just happened to be the seven painters he collected Manna, Mone, Degassan, Renoir,
Speaker 1: uh Sicily and Piesarrow still today these seven core Impressionist painters.
Speaker 1: So what does the story mean? Well, my interpretation of it,
Speaker 1: and it's not just mine, it's several psychologists as well.
Speaker 1: Is that his bequest consecrated the Impressionist canon, because the
Speaker 1: next generation of artists looked at these seven to say, all, right,
Speaker 1: which Impressionist matter, And the next generation of art historians
Speaker 1: looked to this seven to say which Impressionist matter? Even
Speaker 1: in the night teen fifties. John Rowald's very famous History
Speaker 1: of Impressionist Art talks about these seven Impressionist paintings exclusively
Speaker 1: as the cannon. So it's this remarkable reminder of a
Speaker 1: the power of familiarity. When we see a famous work
Speaker 1: of art, we're not just seeing the paint, We're also
Speaker 1: seeing its accumulated fame and be that Cannons can be
Speaker 1: kind of bs sometimes, right, that this cannon. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying money is bad, but the cannon was consecrated by
Speaker 1: a literal stroke, distribution being the kingdom. Distribution is the kingdom. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: not all that different from the Mona Lisa story. Until
Speaker 1: it was stolen, it was thought of as a minor work,
Speaker 1: and it created a whole bunch of celebrity, and all
Speaker 1: that attention became its distribution network. Yet Mona Lisa now
Speaker 1: is literally the most valuable painting in the world. The
Speaker 1: most expensive insurance policy on any painting. But in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century it was worth I think one sixth of
Speaker 1: several Raphael and Titian paintings that were in the same museum.
Speaker 1: It was a minor work. It wasn't considered especially. It
Speaker 1: was considered a lovely a lovely work, but not certainly
Speaker 1: not the most famous painting in the world. It's then
Speaker 1: stolen by an Italian painter to bring it back, wants
Speaker 1: to bring it back home, right, it takes it to Italy.
Speaker 1: It becomes this international man hunt for the Mona Lisa.
Speaker 1: And it's only then after it's recovered and it's become
Speaker 1: broadcast on newspaper covers all over the world, uh, that
Speaker 1: it goes on a little international journey to visit all
Speaker 1: these different countries so that the patrons can come see
Speaker 1: the stolen piece of work. So again, the Mona Lisa,
Speaker 1: I don't think I could well, just to remind listeners,
Speaker 1: looks the exact same today as it did in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century when it was worth sixteen percent of Titian
Speaker 1: and Raphael. I'm gonna tell you it doesn't look the
Speaker 1: same it was the first time you see the Mona Lisa,
Speaker 1: you go, that's it. It's tiny. You're so used to
Speaker 1: seeing the image, you assume it's a big portrait and
Speaker 1: you show up. I'm like, Oh, that's how he stole it.
Speaker 1: He's stuck in this. It's a tiny little thing, right,
Speaker 1: you can fit it in a little back hack. Um,
Speaker 1: And which is why it's now behind you know, basing
Speaker 1: is because it's easy to steal. But once again, um,
Speaker 1: the content is the same. What changed massive media distribution
Speaker 1: of a the story of its stealing and be the
Speaker 1: painting itself. It goes on an international tour like it's
Speaker 1: the Rolling Stones after it's recovered and brought back the loop.
Speaker 1: So why is it the most famous painting ever? Not
Speaker 1: because the content, because of the distribution, quite amazing. Let
Speaker 1: let me shift gears on you and talk about industrial design.
Speaker 1: What is maya? Maya is how I pronounced it, But
Speaker 1: it might be most advanced yet acceptable, m a y a,
Speaker 1: most advanced yet acceptable. This was the grand theory of
Speaker 1: everything from Raymond Loewy, the father industrial design. And that's
Speaker 1: what you tell. A wonderful story as to how he
Speaker 1: comes to understands design and how he comes to think
Speaker 1: about New York is this grimy, greasy place he looks
Speaker 1: at from the top of building right and basically says, no, no,
Speaker 1: we have to change all this exactly. Yeah, he's a
Speaker 1: French orphan, comes over to the States in nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: struggles in art in the nineteen twenties, and basically between
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties and nineteen sixties, designs that which we
Speaker 1: now recognize as mid American esthetic. Like everything everything, the cars,
Speaker 1: the trains, the tractors, the cold spot refrigerators, the central
Speaker 1: acting cleaners, the pencil sharp that looks like a like
Speaker 1: a little egg that everyone listening I'm sure has seen
Speaker 1: a thousand times bolted in your grade school. That is him. Uh,
Speaker 1: this guy is Steve Jobs for the nineteen fifties. If
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs was allowed to design for literally every single
Speaker 1: company in America, it's amazing. We don't he's not as
Speaker 1: famous as as he is. But yes, his theory of
Speaker 1: everything was maya uh most advanced yet acceptable. He said
Speaker 1: that people like discovering new things, new songs and new
Speaker 1: consumer products and movies, but we only truly love them
Speaker 1: if they sneakily remind us of that which we are
Speaker 1: really familiar with. So he was this genius at understanding it,
Speaker 1: really being an anthropologist, first understanding how consumers lived in
Speaker 1: their kitchens and on their farms, and then designing something
Speaker 1: that was only so sneakily new that they would confront
Speaker 1: something clearly novel and immediately understand how to use it.
Speaker 1: He he was doing consumer product research and market studies
Speaker 1: really before there was a science of that. I don't
Speaker 1: know if he could say he created it, but he
Speaker 1: certainly took it to places that nobody else did. He
Speaker 1: He was a genius in a in a way, and
Speaker 1: and and his company what were We're total geniuses in
Speaker 1: a way that today I think we would revere to
Speaker 1: the end. I think that if he were alive today, Uh,
Speaker 1: he would be a Steve Job style figure. He would
Speaker 1: have television shows named after him. Uh. He really was
Speaker 1: in a way. If you take mad Men, right, if
Speaker 1: he could don Draper character a genius of human psychology,
Speaker 1: and you marry this with a Steve Jobs intell and
Speaker 1: a an instinct for aesthetics, that's Raymond Loewy, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean Draper plus Jobs. He was just absolutely market
Speaker 1: And you describe three rules that we learn from his
Speaker 1: work and I'll let me quickly go through them, and
Speaker 1: let's talk about it audiences collectively no more than any
Speaker 1: individual creator. To sell something familiar, you must make it surprising,
Speaker 1: and people may not know what they want until they
Speaker 1: love it, which is very much a Steve Jobs like
Speaker 1: very much believe. Yeah, but he he really was a populist.
Speaker 1: He believed that design began with consumers. And so if
Speaker 1: you want to design something that people love, the first
Speaker 1: challenge is to understand them. How do they live? And
Speaker 1: I think this applies to everything from you're designing a
Speaker 1: new chair, figure out how people, how people sit and
Speaker 1: what parts of existing chairs sort of don't fit their bodies,
Speaker 1: to something like a mobile money app. Figure out, you
Speaker 1: know how people send money, where they meet to send money,
Speaker 1: what their pain points are. He really believed that the
Speaker 1: design began with anthropology. And then the second lesson might
Speaker 1: be one of the most important prescriptive lessons of the book.
Speaker 1: To sell something surprising, make it familiar. To sell something familiar,
Speaker 1: make it surprising. So, since you just did that inversion,
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about rhetorical inversion. I thought
Speaker 1: that was kind of fascinating the language of anaphora and apistrophe,
Speaker 1: and all that is really quite asked, not what your
Speaker 1: country can do for you, Ask what you can do
Speaker 1: for your country. There are so many examples in the
Speaker 1: book of this. Is it just the rhyme and the
Speaker 1: and the lure of the familiar that makes that sort
Speaker 1: of rhetoric so attractive, so soaring. There is a psychological
Speaker 1: principle called the rhyme as reason effect rhyme as reason effect,
Speaker 1: which essentially says that people, rather dispiritingly perhaps are more
Speaker 1: likely to trust and idea when it's phrased musically. And
Speaker 1: that doesn't just have to be a rhyme. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not just birds of a feather flock together. There's
Speaker 1: all sorts of very clever and subtle ways to turn
Speaker 1: language into music. Uh JFK's first inaugural used a ancient
Speaker 1: Greek rhetorical device called antimetaboli, which is way too difficult
Speaker 1: to spell it pronounced, so just think of it. Is
Speaker 1: abba A B b A. Ask, not what your country
Speaker 1: can do for you, Ask what you can do for
Speaker 1: your country. It's not the size of the dog in
Speaker 1: the fight. It's the size of the fight in the dog.
Speaker 1: Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human
Speaker 1: rights a B B A anti metaboli. And it is
Speaker 1: not a coincidence that Abba and that A quinces that
Speaker 1: Abba wrote a lot of hit songs. Right, So it's
Speaker 1: easy to remember because you think, if I want to
Speaker 1: make this idea a hit, just think you know Abba.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with Derrick Thompson. He is the
Speaker 1: author of Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an
Speaker 1: Age of Distraction. If you want to find Derek's works,
Speaker 1: you can go to The Atlantic Magazine or Barnes and
Speaker 1: Noble or Amazon. Uh. You can follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: or at Dhults. Check out my daily column on Bloomberg
Speaker 1: View dot com. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions
Speaker 1: right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. Hey guys, let me ask you a question.
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Speaker 1: Welcome to the podcast, Derek, Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: doing this. I was really looking forward to this. I'm
Speaker 1: like three quarters of the way through the book. I
Speaker 1: really have enjoyed it. I really like the way you
Speaker 1: take something. So first of all, the books we like
Speaker 1: the best are the ones that are about us in
Speaker 1: some way. So you see a lot of your own
Speaker 1: psychological foibles and cogniveras, and you start to recognize some things.
Speaker 1: There are so many questions we didn't get to before
Speaker 1: I get to our standard questions. I have some stuff
Speaker 1: I have to uh, I have some stuff I have
Speaker 1: to go through with you because it's just it's just
Speaker 1: to me, is just so fascinating. Most popular products in history,
Speaker 1: or some of the most popular products in history, were
Speaker 1: one bad breakaway from her failure explain. One of my
Speaker 1: favorite stories in the book is Rock around the Clock.
Speaker 1: Rock around the Clock is one of the most famous
Speaker 1: songs the twentieth century, but it's best understood as just
Speaker 1: an unbelievable fluke. It comes out, it's a B side,
Speaker 1: not even an A side. It charts on Billboard for
Speaker 1: about one week, and then it's basically forgotten. The song
Speaker 1: did not succeed. It was essentially a middling flop. But
Speaker 1: one of the few thousand people that bought the record
Speaker 1: was a ten year old boy named Peter Ford. And
Speaker 1: Peter Ford's dad was the movie star Glenn Ford. And
Speaker 1: Glenn Ford was in this movie, Blackboard Jungle, and the
Speaker 1: director of Blackboard Jungle comes over to the Ford's house
Speaker 1: and says, to kick off this movie, I want to
Speaker 1: jump jive tune. What have you got? And father Glenn
Speaker 1: Ford says, look, I just listen to Hawaiian folk music.
Speaker 1: It's not going to work out for me, but my son, Pete,
Speaker 1: he might have some records that you'd like. So young
Speaker 1: Peter Ford, this ten year old boy in fifth grade.
Speaker 1: Hey ends the director Blackboard Jungle a stack of vinyl records,
Speaker 1: and one of those vinyl records included Rock around the Clock.
Speaker 1: The song ends up playing at the beginning of Blackboard Jungle,
Speaker 1: in the middle of Blackboard Jungle, and at the end
Speaker 1: of Blackboard Jungle in May of nineteen fifty five, and
Speaker 1: it's only then two weeks after the movie comes out
Speaker 1: the song hits number one on Billboard and becomes the
Speaker 1: first rock and roll song to ever be a number
Speaker 1: one hit. And this becomes the second best selling record
Speaker 1: of all time after Bing Crosby's White Christmas. So again
Speaker 1: like on the one hand, the song sounded the exact
Speaker 1: same when it was a flop in a nine and
Speaker 1: it was a hit. The difference was this bizarre flukey
Speaker 1: lucky moment of distribution in Blackboard Jungle. Um, But it
Speaker 1: suggests that it's really difficult to predict, sort of before
Speaker 1: the fact, whether a song is going to be a
Speaker 1: massive hit or a massive flop. Sometimes the same song
Speaker 1: can be both within the same ten month period. And
Speaker 1: we all know songs that we know and love, And
Speaker 1: how come this album never took off half them? No
Speaker 1: one's discovered this band. It's not the quality of the music,
Speaker 1: it's the distribution right above a certain threshold of quality,
Speaker 1: above a certain threshold of catchiness. What matters to become
Speaker 1: a hit is not more catchinus or more quality, but
Speaker 1: rather superior distribution. And Blackboard Jungle is Glenn Ford, Sydney
Speaker 1: is Sydney Portier, and I think Sydney Party is in this, Yes,
Speaker 1: and um and Francis. I'm just trying to think of
Speaker 1: of the main It was The Stars teen it was
Speaker 1: it was not one of the great hits of nineteen five.
Speaker 1: It was the thirteenth biggest movie of the year. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, just imagine being in Nate Silver about this,
Speaker 1: trying to predict that a discarded and forgotten B side
Speaker 1: from nineteen fifty four played over the credits of the
Speaker 1: thirteenth biggest movie of nineteen fifty five is going to
Speaker 1: be the biggest rock and roll song in music history.
Speaker 1: It's It's completely amazing and unpredictable. So you you talk
Speaker 1: about a a Yahoo research project in where they're looking
Speaker 1: at the spread of online messages on Twitter, More than
Speaker 1: of the messages didn't diffuse at all, and the clicks
Speaker 1: came directly from the original source or one degree of separation.
Speaker 1: So so what does that tell us? What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Are we still in a broadcast one too many sort
Speaker 1: of world? Yeah? I think that today when people say
Speaker 1: that went viral, what they really often mean is that
Speaker 1: got big really quickly, and I'm not sure how, But
Speaker 1: there's two ways that information can spread online, broadly speaking.
Speaker 1: Way number one is pure virality, pure one to one,
Speaker 1: one to two shares. So so give us an example
Speaker 1: of that, because we all know of things that we
Speaker 1: think are viral, but you're telling us some of these
Speaker 1: things really aren't. For sure. Let's say I publish an
Speaker 1: article on the Atlantic. Um it doesn't hit the Atlantic homepage,
Speaker 1: doesn't hit any major a broadcast plot form. But I
Speaker 1: share it with one friend on Facebook. He shares it
Speaker 1: with two of his friends, he shares it with a
Speaker 1: handful of his friends, and it grows over many, many,
Speaker 1: many generations of intimate shares. That's one way, right, That's
Speaker 1: how a virus spreads. That is true virility. But there's
Speaker 1: another way that information spreads online that's not a million
Speaker 1: one to one moments, but a handful of one to
Speaker 1: one million moments. So, for example, let's say an article
Speaker 1: that I write he hits the front page of Drudge,
Speaker 1: or hits the front page of Reddit, or is shared
Speaker 1: by Oprah on Facebook. There's nothing about that mechanism that
Speaker 1: is viral. Millions of people are going to see that
Speaker 1: article from the same source. So It's very similar to
Speaker 1: that which we are comfortable calling a broadcast, like on
Speaker 1: television when twenty million people are tuned into the same
Speaker 1: program all at once. So the Super Bowl, the Oscars,
Speaker 1: things like that. Super Bowl clearly broad list. Let me
Speaker 1: challenge you on Reddit because Reddit has this built in
Speaker 1: virility mechanism where things are up voted, down voted. So
Speaker 1: for something to make it to the front page of Reddit,
Speaker 1: where it may subsequently be broadcast, it has to have
Speaker 1: some degree of I don't want to say virility, but
Speaker 1: I guess virility work appeal, Yes, right where it's getting
Speaker 1: up voted and up voted and up voted, and that's
Speaker 1: almost a one to one or one to a few
Speaker 1: before it reaches the front page where it then becomes
Speaker 1: broadcast to everybody. And this is what's really interesting about
Speaker 1: the age that we're living through right now, which is
Speaker 1: that you know, there was a period where technology was
Speaker 1: either social or broadcast. Telephones are clearly just social, that
Speaker 1: is a one to one conversation. Um Television is purely broadcast.
Speaker 1: It is just one to tens of millions. But most
Speaker 1: of the technologies that we have today are an interesting
Speaker 1: combination of social and broadcast. Facebook, for example, allows family
Speaker 1: members to talk to each other while seeing articles from
Speaker 1: Time magazine in Bloomberg. Reddit is a really is it
Speaker 1: really fascinating combination because articles are up voted socially by
Speaker 1: individual users, but once they hit a large page like
Speaker 1: the Reddit dot com home page, it suddenly is a broadcast.
Speaker 1: My contention is that if you that for every piece
Speaker 1: of content that we think goes quote unquote viral online,
Speaker 1: it almost always needs at least one or hopefully a
Speaker 1: handful of broadcast moments. But because we sometimes don't see
Speaker 1: these broadcast moments in the information cascade, because for example, um,
Speaker 1: your friend reads an article on reddit dot com and
Speaker 1: then shares it with another one of your friends, and
Speaker 1: then you see that friend's article on Facebook, you can't
Speaker 1: see that it was broadcast on Reddit dot com, and
Speaker 1: so I call it a dark broadcast. But my contention
Speaker 1: is that broadcast moments are still responsible for popular for
Speaker 1: driving popularity. So let's talk about a couple of pop confections.
Speaker 1: You mentioned some of these in the book Call Me Maybe,
Speaker 1: or All about the That Base. These things seemingly, especially
Speaker 1: to someone like me over thirty way over thirty, have
Speaker 1: exploded out of nowhere, and then they've just become in escaped,
Speaker 1: in escapable. How how do hits like that? How are
Speaker 1: they manufactured? So Call Me Maybe is a really interesting
Speaker 1: example of a so called viral hit. You could say,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, that Call Me Maybe his popularity
Speaker 1: was engendered online, which suggests that maybe there was a
Speaker 1: purely viral mechanism to its to its popularity, But in
Speaker 1: fact the song was sort of hovering in like the
Speaker 1: mid level tiers of Canadian pop track popularity. When a
Speaker 1: little known star named Justin bieberi Canadian star indeed, found it,
Speaker 1: tweets it out, and makes a YouTube video of him
Speaker 1: and his girlfriend's Lena Gomez dancing to it. That video
Speaker 1: goes absolutely wild. And it's only then after he releases
Speaker 1: that video that Called Me Maybe becomes a sensation that's
Speaker 1: on the broadcast. So what's the broadcast? It is Justin Bieber,
Speaker 1: a celebrity with the fall lowing of any traditional broadcaster,
Speaker 1: Time magazine, right, yeah, exactly, USA Today, broadcasting this song
Speaker 1: to his millions and millions of followers. And it's only
Speaker 1: then that the song becomes a hit. So you use
Speaker 1: the phrase the audience of my audience. That is truly
Speaker 1: how things go viral. Unless you're Justin Bieber or Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift or someone with tens of millions of Twitter followers,
Speaker 1: you tweeted out and even though half of them are bots,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. You tweeted out and that goes out
Speaker 1: to millions of people and and an equivalent number of algorithms. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I Right after my chapter on virility and broadcast, I say, okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's say that you're trying to build a hit product
Speaker 1: or a hit company, but you're starting from a really,
Speaker 1: really small base and you don't have access to the
Speaker 1: Justin Bieber's the world. What do you do to be
Speaker 1: to make things that people want to talk about? And
Speaker 1: a way that I think about this is that when
Speaker 1: I write an article, for that article to go big,
Speaker 1: it can't just be appealing to my first audience, to
Speaker 1: my first level of readers, and for them to simply
Speaker 1: say okay, cool and then click out and never talk
Speaker 1: about it again. I need a handful of them to
Speaker 1: want to pass it along because they think that passing
Speaker 1: along that article will make them my readers look smart, uh,
Speaker 1: morally in touch with the world. Um surprisingly, sort of
Speaker 1: counterintuitive about what is true and not true about economics.
Speaker 1: So in a way, the psychology I have to employees
Speaker 1: to think. I can't just be appealing to the my audience.
Speaker 1: I have to make my audience think that they want
Speaker 1: to share it with their audience, the audience of my audience.
Speaker 1: And so I think that it's sort of it. It
Speaker 1: provides I think, a really nice frame to see. You know,
Speaker 1: how do how do you create articles or you know,
Speaker 1: essays or or podcasts that appeal to a as broad
Speaker 1: a possible as a listenership and viewership. And that's too
Speaker 1: to cree ate something that your listeners feel like, well,
Speaker 1: it will make them look good if they pass it along.
Speaker 1: So we we have a situation and I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: this from a quote from the book where it's a
Speaker 1: winner take all society to a large degree. Another previous
Speaker 1: guest on the show, um, the top one percent of
Speaker 1: bands and solo artists now earn eight percent of all
Speaker 1: the revenues of recorded music. That's an astonishing Parado principle.
Speaker 1: That's just it's not steroids. It's eighty two one that
Speaker 1: it's just the stuff. So what does this mean for
Speaker 1: the non justin biebers who want to try and get
Speaker 1: something out there, whether whether it's an article, whether it's
Speaker 1: a small film or television show, or a song. What
Speaker 1: does this mean is is this a doomed effort or
Speaker 1: do you need a million of these things in order
Speaker 1: to find that that one percent? This is? This is
Speaker 1: an awesome question. And I think about this a lot.
Speaker 1: And there's lots of for an answers that I provide
Speaker 1: in the book. But let me talk about one that
Speaker 1: I that I think might be most interesting, um, which
Speaker 1: is this concept from sociology of cults. Um. What is
Speaker 1: a cult? Uh? Accult is a measured rebellion against a mainstream.
Speaker 1: So it is people thinking that they are special and
Speaker 1: the mainstream is wrong. And there's lots of interishing research
Speaker 1: that suggests that when people hear a song or read
Speaker 1: an article, or experience a product that they think gets
Speaker 1: them specifically to the exclusion of the mainstream, that they're
Speaker 1: more likely to share it with their close friends in
Speaker 1: order to sort of draw that tight circle of kinship
Speaker 1: and say, see, there's someone who gets us. So one
Speaker 1: way to employ the audience of my audience principle somewhat paradoxically,
Speaker 1: is that if you want to be really big, start
Speaker 1: by making something that's small and specific, because that small
Speaker 1: specific message or small specific product is more likely to
Speaker 1: get your audience, your consumer base to say this, this
Speaker 1: thing gets me, and I'm going to share it with
Speaker 1: my close friends to show that it gets me. And
Speaker 1: so I talked to this h and an Etsy designer
Speaker 1: who ended up being one of the most successful um
Speaker 1: Etsy sellers in that company's history. He makes little pinback buttons,
Speaker 1: and one of the lessons that he gave me was, um,
Speaker 1: you know, of course he's you know, as mainstream as
Speaker 1: an Etsy person can be right now. I think it's
Speaker 1: the top seller on one of its um platforms for
Speaker 1: several years. But he said, I don't want to make
Speaker 1: pinback buttons that express purely banal thoughts, purely generic thoughts.
Speaker 1: I want my pin back buttons to express something that's weird,
Speaker 1: because in a weird way, it's the weird message that
Speaker 1: makes people want to spread it along, not the message
Speaker 1: that says, hey, I'm just like everybody else. The market
Speaker 1: related quote to that that I've always loved is everybody
Speaker 1: wants to be a contrarian. Yeah, right, But if everybody
Speaker 1: is a contrarian. They're just part of the crowd. And
Speaker 1: so you go through this whole of mirrors where people
Speaker 1: want it to be different enough so they could look
Speaker 1: down on the crowd, yet they become part of a crowd.
Speaker 1: It's it's there's a I don't know if you saw
Speaker 1: the Money Python movie, The Life recording to Brian, Life
Speaker 1: of Brian, Life Recording um Life of Brian. I love
Speaker 1: the scene where he's speaking to the crowd, you're all individuals,
Speaker 1: and they chant back in response, we are all individuals.
Speaker 1: It's that exact moment. Well, it is. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is one of the really interesting paradoxical things about human psychology,
Speaker 1: which is that in a weird way, we feel more
Speaker 1: like individuals sometimes when when we belong to a group,
Speaker 1: which doesn't make any sense, right, I feel more like
Speaker 1: an individual when I belong to a group. But this
Speaker 1: is precisely what cults are all about. It's all about
Speaker 1: individuals saying society doesn't get me. But if I enter
Speaker 1: this different group of people, then I can be my
Speaker 1: true self. I can realize my true individuality, but only
Speaker 1: if I find the right group, right, And so I
Speaker 1: think in many ways, this is one of the things
Speaker 1: that that you know, marketers and advertisers that think about
Speaker 1: culting in their own messages try to do um. You
Speaker 1: think about one of the most famous culting advertisements of
Speaker 1: all time, Apple Night four. You are defined by that
Speaker 1: which you are not. We're not the talitarian big blue
Speaker 1: IBM company, right. We are the people who throw with
Speaker 1: it a hammer. Yeah, it was a hammer at the screen,
Speaker 1: a big brother like we are. We are rebels. This
Speaker 1: is a rebellion, and every cult is a rebellion against
Speaker 1: a mainstream. In many ways, I think identity is antagonistic.
Speaker 1: Identity is that which we are not, and so in
Speaker 1: many ways, I think that you see lots of advertising
Speaker 1: right now which is all about allowing consumers to define
Speaker 1: themselves by that which they aren't. That that's really fascinating.
Speaker 1: I'm a huge um comedy nerd, and I love Mill
Speaker 1: Brooks two thousand year old man. And there's a line
Speaker 1: in it that speaks exactly what you're describing, and he says,
Speaker 1: he sings the hell with everybody except Cave seventy three.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the cult of of that it And
Speaker 1: it's hilarious if you if you haven't, if you're not
Speaker 1: familiar that it's UM if you listen to the I
Speaker 1: didn't realize he was such a big fan of historical comedy.
Speaker 1: Between life and Well, it was I'm not quite contemporary.
Speaker 1: Well Life of Brian is contemporary with me. But all
Speaker 1: the mel Brooks stuff, especially going back to the two
Speaker 1: thousand year old Man, was talk about viral hits. If
Speaker 1: you read the story, he tells the story of how
Speaker 1: that went viral and I don't remember if it was
Speaker 1: UM when he sat down with Seinfelder, when he sat
Speaker 1: down with UM David Steinberg, but he tells the story
Speaker 1: of it was party stick that him and Carl Reiner
Speaker 1: used to do and no one ever thought and finally
Speaker 1: someone says, you two have to record it. Uh. Brooks
Speaker 1: was a genius improviser, as was Rhiner, and Einer would
Speaker 1: take the role of the interviewer and they would just
Speaker 1: do this and people would fall out of out of
Speaker 1: their chairs. Finally someone says in them, you gotta record this.
Speaker 1: Might have been carried grant. You have to record this,
Speaker 1: and he when it's recorded, he takes two hour. He goes, listen,
Speaker 1: I need two albums. I'm leaving the country, and he
Speaker 1: goes to England and he comes back and he says,
Speaker 1: I have to tell you, the Queen loved it, and
Speaker 1: if you listen to it, it's just really the most
Speaker 1: Some of the stuff is just beyond beyond hilarious. So
Speaker 1: we're down to our last half hour. There are a
Speaker 1: couple of things I wanna get to before we jump
Speaker 1: to our favorite questions. Let me let me just reference
Speaker 1: this quote of yours about books, which I found quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: A reader both performs the book, attends the performance, and
Speaker 1: attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra and audience. So
Speaker 1: explain that a little bit, because I think that is
Speaker 1: a fascinating take on books. It's interesting because we live
Speaker 1: in a world right now where with movies and virtual reality,
Speaker 1: there are all sorts of experiences that were essentially just
Speaker 1: were given them, right, everyone agrees w a movie looks like,
Speaker 1: everyone agrees, and what the song sounds like. But books
Speaker 1: are really interesting because it's this weird arbitrage where I,
Speaker 1: the writer, have an idea, a mental image that I
Speaker 1: have to translate into letters, and then you the reader,
Speaker 1: read these letters and create your own movie. And sometimes
Speaker 1: it's the same movie, but it's rarely the exact same movie.
Speaker 1: It's slightly different. You're imagining different pictures, you're making different
Speaker 1: connections to to mel Brooks. And So I think one
Speaker 1: thing that is still so special about books, even in
Speaker 1: an age of proliferating and ever more developed media technology. UM,
Speaker 1: books are special because they're ours. They belong to us
Speaker 1: in a way that the movies don't, because we are
Speaker 1: responsible for creating a movie from them. The seraph's themselves,
Speaker 1: the print itself cannot be revealing of anything. We have
Speaker 1: to interpret it. We have to sinest, the sinest, the
Speaker 1: size it into words and images and connections and our
Speaker 1: own ideas and our own self help. Um. And so
Speaker 1: I still think that books are special because they are
Speaker 1: more individual. The individual has a larger role in internalizing it,
Speaker 1: and they do for something like a movie or a song.
Speaker 1: That that's that's quite fascinating. Let's let's talk about film
Speaker 1: and the quote from the producer who said, the film
Speaker 1: producer said, you could look at twenty things in a
Speaker 1: success twenty five things in a successful genre. Change one
Speaker 1: and you have something new and interesting. Change them all
Speaker 1: and you have parity. Right. That's that's quite a fascinating
Speaker 1: meta view of films. Yeah, it's it's a fascinating meta
Speaker 1: view of films. And it clicks right back into one
Speaker 1: of the first thesis of the book, which is that
Speaker 1: we love that which is familiar with a slight twist.
Speaker 1: And you know, you can think about this for all
Speaker 1: sorts of hits that you know, what is Star Wars.
Speaker 1: It is a Western set in outer space. It is
Speaker 1: in many ways an unbelievably conventional story. An orphan goes
Speaker 1: on a supernatural quest to defeat a villain who is
Speaker 1: involved in his origin story and returns to the normal
Speaker 1: world as a hero. That's Lord of the Rings, that
Speaker 1: is Harry Potter to a t it's the hero's journey.
Speaker 1: It's Joseph Campbell. But Joseph Campbell basically says all these
Speaker 1: stories are one and the same, with with interesting variation, right.
Speaker 1: And what's so fascinating about Campbell's theory is that the
Speaker 1: individual storytellers aren't trying necessarily to copy each other. They're
Speaker 1: just trying to tell a good story. But there are
Speaker 1: certain elements of that which is a you know, capital
Speaker 1: g good capital, a s story that seemed to be
Speaker 1: relatively universal. We need an element of relatability. We don't
Speaker 1: want to um attach ourselves to a hero who's already invincible.
Speaker 1: The hero has to start off normal UM. He has
Speaker 1: to go on a journey with its pock marked with
Speaker 1: all sorts of defeats. He there has to be you know,
Speaker 1: defeat and recovery and defeat and recovery, and then finally
Speaker 1: he has to accomplish something that is not only powerful
Speaker 1: and gives him a glory, but that he learns from.
Speaker 1: And it makes me a better person because it tells
Speaker 1: us that our own journeys are self improvements as well.
Speaker 1: So as I'm reading this in the book, a name
Speaker 1: pops into my head because it's so counter to that,
Speaker 1: and it's Kevin Spacey, and three movies jump out in me.
Speaker 1: By the way these are, you can see this isn't
Speaker 1: anything I was doing deep research on. It was just
Speaker 1: notes I scribbled in the margins. Usual suspects, l A
Speaker 1: Confidential and American Beauty, none of the real Could you
Speaker 1: think he's the main character in each but those usual
Speaker 1: um art types of of UM narrative building to a
Speaker 1: climax than the anti climax, and everybody learning their little
Speaker 1: lessons along the way. They're not quite in those movies.
Speaker 1: And it's a great point. I think that those movies
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily I mean, they are famous, and certainly I
Speaker 1: think I think the usual suspects. My guess that that's
Speaker 1: the biggest box office box office performer was pretty big
Speaker 1: also and an American, I mean, there's won awards among
Speaker 1: my favorites. I think that, you know, the the awards
Speaker 1: circuit movies follow slightly different rules. And I asked, when
Speaker 1: I was talking to Vincent Bruces and talking to the
Speaker 1: movie producer, what Bruces is the person who came up
Speaker 1: with the algorithm for looking at what makes the script
Speaker 1: more popular us popular? Exactly exactly, So we're so the
Speaker 1: first thing we're talking about, which is hero's journeys, I
Speaker 1: think apply most specifically to blockbusters, right, two movies that
Speaker 1: are not trying to be Best Picture nominees but are
Speaker 1: just trying to maximize their audience. So I asked him,
Speaker 1: I said, okay, well, is there a formula? Is there
Speaker 1: a rule to Best Picture movies? What would that rule be?
Speaker 1: And he had an interesting answer. He said, look at
Speaker 1: Best Actor and Best Actress nominations every year and tie
Speaker 1: those two best Picture. You almost always have a very
Speaker 1: clear relationship between the Best Leading Actor nominations and the
Speaker 1: Best Picture nominations, which says to me, him talking to me,
Speaker 1: which says to me that the what we consider to
Speaker 1: be quality movies are not heroes journeys, but complicated investigations
Speaker 1: of individuals into self into self, essentially stages for uh,
Speaker 1: complex acting. And what you see American beauty. Both Kevin
Speaker 1: Spacey and oh god, that Benning, we're both nominated for Oscars,
Speaker 1: And I forgot who the one she won? He didn't,
Speaker 1: although he's won before. And I forgot the woman who
Speaker 1: played one for age girl interest. Oh yeah, who became
Speaker 1: like a hot television actress for a while. Um uh,
Speaker 1: but you know his his performance in Usual Suspects and
Speaker 1: astonishing is astonishing and l A Confidential is again for
Speaker 1: Guy Pearson, for Russell Crowe. It's it's ways for the
Speaker 1: characters to grow. So great movies, quality movies, Best Picture
Speaker 1: nominee movies are are disproportionately character studies. And so the
Speaker 1: formula is not let's send this character on a hero's journey.
Speaker 1: No no no, no, that is too conventional for a character study.
Speaker 1: A character study is an investigation of an individual's realization
Speaker 1: of self in a way that doesn't necessarily follow a
Speaker 1: Campbell's art journey. And the book is just out recently.
Speaker 1: Have you gotten any of the comic book nerds telling
Speaker 1: you how wrong you are about Superman? Uh? No, but
Speaker 1: maybe you can be the first to tell me Superman
Speaker 1: wasn't born with superpowers. It's only the people from his
Speaker 1: planet in the light of the yellow sun of our
Speaker 1: solar system that gives him his power. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I am not a comic book nerd, but I hang
Speaker 1: out with enough comic book nerds that even I know that,
Speaker 1: so you will get some I will get some angry readers.
Speaker 1: I guess his his his His story in our universe,
Speaker 1: or at least in our solar system, clearly begins with invincibility,
Speaker 1: which in a in a way makes him I think
Speaker 1: a a interesting exception to the rule, which is that
Speaker 1: most of our superheroes begin without any element of invincibility.
Speaker 1: Begins Spider Man begin right exactly. I mean, obviously there's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there's kryptonite. Um, but I wonder whether that
Speaker 1: is one of the things that has made it more
Speaker 1: difficult for Superman to catch on in in this century
Speaker 1: is that there are so many movies now that are
Speaker 1: made in the familiar heroes journey formula where the character
Speaker 1: always begins um with obvious flaws that even the new
Speaker 1: Batman movies that came out you reference Iron Man in
Speaker 1: the book because they're the flaws are so manifest even
Speaker 1: after he achieves his quote unquote superpowers, when this is
Speaker 1: true with Batman as well. Um and even with Spider Man,
Speaker 1: there's this question of, you know, either the media hates
Speaker 1: him and he's always trying to, you know, realize whether
Speaker 1: or not he wants to be Spider Man or be
Speaker 1: with Mary Jane. That that the his heroism is always
Speaker 1: you know, darkened in a way by the fact that
Speaker 1: he can never truly sort of you know, transcend humanity
Speaker 1: in our problems. Really interesting, and I didn't mean to
Speaker 1: go into a comic digression. Last question before we get
Speaker 1: to our our standard questions fake news. How does fake
Speaker 1: news go viral? Is it broadcast by something or is
Speaker 1: it a Because what what I've noticed and I don't
Speaker 1: want to throw rocks at Fox News or or bright
Speaker 1: Bord or other, but what I've noticed this Fox News
Speaker 1: is this giant broadcast entity, some not quite credible, not
Speaker 1: quite legitimate um fourth to your blog will write something outrageous.
Speaker 1: We just saw this happen with the Swedish defense expert
Speaker 1: talking about the terrorist attacks. Turns out there was no
Speaker 1: terrorist attack, and sweet and this guy Sweden has already disavowed.
Speaker 1: You don't know who the hell this guy is, but
Speaker 1: some crazy wing nut blog references him. He gets picked
Speaker 1: up on Fox and now suddenly there's this whole and
Speaker 1: then the president sees it and starts talking about it.
Speaker 1: Do you think I would say about this? First? As
Speaker 1: you've already acknowledged, there are obvious broadcast mechanisms by which
Speaker 1: that which seems to be quote unquote viral fake news
Speaker 1: is not actually viral at all. It is broadcast by
Speaker 1: Bright part or by info Wars, or by Macedonian teenagers
Speaker 1: with a Russian propaganda backing UH and a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of botan net computers and a bunch of exactly The
Speaker 1: second deeper point, though, is that familiarity, the biased toward familiarity,
Speaker 1: is so powerful that in many ways what readers have
Speaker 1: always wanted from the news is to learn that that
Speaker 1: which they had previously intuited is in fact correct and
Speaker 1: backed by massive evidence confirmed my existing beliefs. Please, it's
Speaker 1: it is a confirmation bias cascade. And what fake news is, uh,
Speaker 1: it's sometimes just propaganda and that is pure broadcast, but
Speaker 1: lots of what is fake news, which by which actually
Speaker 1: just means news that turns out to not be true,
Speaker 1: which is something we've been living with a lot longer
Speaker 1: than just six months. We want to believe that the
Speaker 1: biases that we've just arrived at are correct, and we
Speaker 1: want to seek out places that will reliably tell us
Speaker 1: that our biases are correct. Because what was the first
Speaker 1: question of this entire segment, fluency. We like ideas that
Speaker 1: are easy to think about, and there is nothing easier
Speaker 1: to think about than a beautiful essay that tells us
Speaker 1: that everything we think is true. Moreover, there's nothing more
Speaker 1: difficult to think about then an articulate essay that says
Speaker 1: that all these ideas we consider more ably abhorrent are
Speaker 1: in fact moral. That's a really tough thing to consume.
Speaker 1: So naturally, attention markets like Facebook, which is just you know,
Speaker 1: an attention clearing house, will gravitate toward fluency, even though
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily great for our civic body. So your
Speaker 1: book did two things for me that that I find
Speaker 1: interesting and and within now I'll get a little fractal
Speaker 1: and a little metap depending if I look down or
Speaker 1: look up first. One of the things within the book
Speaker 1: tells us why we like things that make us feel smart, knowledgeable,
Speaker 1: A member of occult that gets to look with some
Speaker 1: disdain at at the non members. My career long interest
Speaker 1: in behavioral economics basically is just a little bit of egotism, saying, oh, look,
Speaker 1: I figured out that everybody's wet wear is flawed. Are
Speaker 1: and I smart? And it turns out no, you're just
Speaker 1: confirming your own um issues. But the more interesting one.
Speaker 1: A previous guest uh is Lawrence Juwber. We were talking
Speaker 1: about off the air, and he's this guitar prodigy and
Speaker 1: well known in fact, before the led Zeppelin Stairway to
Speaker 1: Heaven decision came out, he explained how both the stair
Speaker 1: with to Heaven and the piece that it's supposedly stole
Speaker 1: from are both based on this classic prod chord progression
Speaker 1: from the sixteen hundreds, and he plays the original. He
Speaker 1: plays Zepp when he plays the one that's supposedly stolen,
Speaker 1: and it's pretty clear they're both derivative of the multi
Speaker 1: century old one. But and I really like his his
Speaker 1: classical music, and I like his original recordings. But he's
Speaker 1: done a couple of albums of of Beatles covers, and
Speaker 1: you explain why I am so totally in love with
Speaker 1: his work. It's the Beatles songs you know and love,
Speaker 1: but presented in such a unique no recording tricks, it's
Speaker 1: just him an acoustic guitar with a um. I think
Speaker 1: it's gad mad. Is the tuning, it's an it's an
Speaker 1: open tuning approach. And it's your book explained why he
Speaker 1: has two Beatle albums. He has a Wings album, and
Speaker 1: I used to think I didn't like Wings because it
Speaker 1: was sappy, and and then you find out, oh the
Speaker 1: beautiful songs when presented correctly. And now coming next month
Speaker 1: he has coming in March, he has another Beatles albums.
Speaker 1: He's he's got about two dozen albums. But your book
Speaker 1: helped me figure out why I am just completely entranced
Speaker 1: by his covers of Beatles. They're familiar enough that you
Speaker 1: immediately recognize the melody, but they're so different and so
Speaker 1: well done. You can't help but say, ah, that's a
Speaker 1: song I know really well but with the twist, and
Speaker 1: thank you for explaining that. Thank you. The last thing
Speaker 1: I would say is that, well, first of the time
Speaker 1: we're listening to music, we're listening to a song we've
Speaker 1: already heard, according to musicologists, makes sense. Yeah, powerful bias
Speaker 1: for familiarity in song. But more broadly, I think there
Speaker 1: is obviously a commercial economic interest in what I call neophilia,
Speaker 1: making consumers love new things. The way that GDP grows,
Speaker 1: the way that profits are made is by getting people
Speaker 1: to buy new stuff. That is, the will get people
Speaker 1: to buy new stuff. But this macro economic instinct toward
Speaker 1: the aphilia is always cross cut with consumers actual preference
Speaker 1: with that which is familiar. We are very happy wearing
Speaker 1: the same clothes over and over. In fact, we did
Speaker 1: so for thousands of years until the thirteen hundreds. We
Speaker 1: are very happy naming our kids the same names over
Speaker 1: and over throughout history. In fact, first names only became
Speaker 1: a fashion in the eighteen hundreds. We're happy to listen
Speaker 1: to watch the same Netflix shows over and over, listen
Speaker 1: to the same songs over and over. In many ways,
Speaker 1: I think the cultural appetite for new products is an
Speaker 1: economic creation. It is something that had to be created
Speaker 1: after the Industrial age in order to allow the factories
Speaker 1: to sell as much as they could make. You references
Speaker 1: with cars in particular with fashion today that if because
Speaker 1: most clothes you buy, you could buy them and wear
Speaker 1: them forever, But if you have to go out and
Speaker 1: buy the new color this year or the new pattern,
Speaker 1: well that's that's quite good for the manufact right. In short,
Speaker 1: markets are neo philick, consumers are neophobic, and hits are
Speaker 1: that special place in the middle just new enough, just
Speaker 1: surprising enough, and yet perfectly familiar, most advanced yet acceptable.
Speaker 1: MAYA All right, so let's jump right into our favorite questions.
Speaker 1: So you've been at the Atlantic? What what were you
Speaker 1: doing before you were at the Atlantic? I was a
Speaker 1: journalism student at Northwestern University and you were a triple major.
Speaker 1: If I read your background, I was a triple major.
Speaker 1: I should take that record, so it does not count.
Speaker 1: So first of all, every journalism major is uh invited to,
Speaker 1: if not practically demanded, to major in something else. That
Speaker 1: was political science for me, And then I realized there
Speaker 1: was this special trick in Northwestern where if you double
Speaker 1: counted a lot of classes and wrote a five thousand
Speaker 1: word paper, you could get a legal studies major. And
Speaker 1: I figured that, in sort of the long tail possibility
Speaker 1: that I would want to become a lawyer, I should
Speaker 1: do that. But I sit before you today, having not
Speaker 1: taken a single law class, sense I said, before you,
Speaker 1: having gone to law school, and I'm so happy I don't,
Speaker 1: as do the majority of law school graduates. Um, let's
Speaker 1: talk about early mentors. Who who were the people who
Speaker 1: helped god your career along. I had some great teachers
Speaker 1: in high school and in college. A lot of my
Speaker 1: mentors were actually theater directors. I was an actor before
Speaker 1: I was a journalist, and I think that acting is
Speaker 1: a very useful education in journalism because it requires the
Speaker 1: individual to develop a kind of internal sense of authenticity
Speaker 1: and an external sense of entertainment. And so much of
Speaker 1: great journalism, I think is that which is informative is true,
Speaker 1: but also is informative truth expressed in entertaining ways storytelling.
Speaker 1: Storytelling absolutely, let's let's talk about authors before we get
Speaker 1: to books. Who what authors, journalists? Writers influenced your approach
Speaker 1: to write? Uh, this is a great question and of
Speaker 1: a question because you were, in fact one of them. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you this. When I started off writing in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, there were a handful of blogs that
Speaker 1: were absolute must for me to develop an expertise in economics,
Speaker 1: as re Klein was one, Matti Glecias, Ryan A Event,
Speaker 1: Felix Salmon, the Big Picture. Um, so there were a
Speaker 1: handful of these blogs that I absolutely needed to read
Speaker 1: every single week to stay on top of the crap,
Speaker 1: the financial crash and the recovery. And so you were
Speaker 1: a huge up there. How about someone else? Oh, I
Speaker 1: think I named four others, but yeah, Ryan A. Van
Speaker 1: matt Ezra. Occasionally people will say stuff like that, and
Speaker 1: I still have not learned how to accept a compliment.
Speaker 1: It's just like, come on, stop because because my wife
Speaker 1: will tell you. My wife will tell you that I'm
Speaker 1: still the same idiot I was twenty years ago. But
Speaker 1: you know, well, your your economic idiocy was absolutely illuminating
Speaker 1: for me in two thousand nine. Weren't when we were
Speaker 1: all idiots. And so to be the smartest man in
Speaker 1: the room nearly to be the say I frequently say,
Speaker 1: I am unburned by a classical economics education. And that
Speaker 1: was a huge extremely unburned by that education. But sometimes
Speaker 1: that's an advantage when you're looking at things and you're
Speaker 1: not you know, talk about hit makers and factories every
Speaker 1: wolf Street. Economists them come from the same schools, the
Speaker 1: same training, training programs, so when something is a little
Speaker 1: outside the box, they're oblivious to it. And it took
Speaker 1: all The people who saw the crisis coming were none,
Speaker 1: for the most part, non economists, right as mathematicians, some
Speaker 1: some unusual background. I would say this. I think that
Speaker 1: when I didn't know anything about economics, it was useful
Speaker 1: because if I if at nine am I had a
Speaker 1: question I needed the answer to, and I talked to
Speaker 1: a couple of economists before one pm. At two pm,
Speaker 1: I could write the story remembering my ignorance at eight
Speaker 1: thirty in the morning. And so in a way, I
Speaker 1: think I was able to explain some of these really
Speaker 1: amplicated issues in simpler ways because I remembered what the
Speaker 1: first questions were of the ignorant person. I was so
Speaker 1: so I had so recently departed from the land of ignorance.
Speaker 1: And you've done a really good job. A lot of
Speaker 1: the things that you've written in our mutual admiration society.
Speaker 1: They're very, very are well articulated to somebody who may
Speaker 1: be a late person but wants to understand a more
Speaker 1: complex or nuanced issue. And you've always done a really
Speaker 1: nice job with that, which is probably why the book
Speaker 1: is so interesting and does such a nice job explaining
Speaker 1: some really interesting concepts. Speaking of books, tell us about
Speaker 1: some of your favorite books. By the way, this is
Speaker 1: the question I get more than any other from readers.
Speaker 1: Are Hey, what books do your your guests like? Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: there's a handful of books about cognitive psychology that are
Speaker 1: just mainstays and uninteresting, like Thinking Fast and Slow. I
Speaker 1: thought was utterly fascinating. Uh. I get a lot of
Speaker 1: my insight about the world and particularly about how to
Speaker 1: write from novels. Um. There's a couple sort of hidden
Speaker 1: allusions to the Corrections throughout this book. Some of my
Speaker 1: favorite lines the corrections sort of um slightly modulated to
Speaker 1: UH to talk about new issues. There's a line from
Speaker 1: from Frandsen's book where he says, um, uh afternoons are
Speaker 1: a cavity in which infections breed um uh lazy afternoons,
Speaker 1: or cavity in which infections breed Um when he's talking
Speaker 1: about the frustrations of a of an older character, and
Speaker 1: I think I have a line where I I um,
Speaker 1: I steal from him a bit, while noting in the
Speaker 1: index where I say boredom is a cavity in which
Speaker 1: creativity breeds, because I do find that sometimes it's those
Speaker 1: moments when you're bored when you come up with that
Speaker 1: aha insight that answers the question you previously couldn't when
Speaker 1: you were at work. UM. So that's a that's a
Speaker 1: great book that I love. UM. I love the work
Speaker 1: of Bill Bryson, A Short History of nearly Everything was
Speaker 1: in the Woods at Home one summer. He is is
Speaker 1: a brilliant popular historian and a genius at using topic
Speaker 1: A to discuss topics be through Z. He's wonderful. It's
Speaker 1: sort of zooming in on a topic and then broadening out.
Speaker 1: And I love writing that understands that every every question
Speaker 1: has historical context. Here's a question, a new question. You'll
Speaker 1: be the first the guinea pig for this one. UM,
Speaker 1: tell us about failure. Tell us about a time you
Speaker 1: failed and what you learned from it. I think every
Speaker 1: article that I write is a failure. Large or small,
Speaker 1: and well, now that's a little bit of an exaggeration,
Speaker 1: is no, no, but but of course it is every
Speaker 1: everything that I've written this book, the last column that
Speaker 1: I wrote. I'll look back on it after two weeks,
Speaker 1: back on it after a month, and I'll think, I
Speaker 1: miss this, I miss this. And I think that one
Speaker 1: of the more important things for writers to do is
Speaker 1: to maintain this awareness that everything that they write, everything
Speaker 1: they will ever do, is a failure in some way.
Speaker 1: And it's dispiriting when I see some uh, some older
Speaker 1: journalists who I will name and certainly don't sit in
Speaker 1: the room where I'll see that they they they've attained
Speaker 1: a level of fame at which they no longer need
Speaker 1: that feedback loop. They no longer feel like they have
Speaker 1: to read the comments or read the mean tweets. They'll
Speaker 1: just say, I'm above it. And when you lose that
Speaker 1: feedback loop, and you lose the the expected rush of criticism,
Speaker 1: you lose touch with the thing that journalism is supposed
Speaker 1: to be about, which is a journey out of wrongness,
Speaker 1: not necessarily to truth, but always out of wrongness. And
Speaker 1: journey out of wrongness. Yeah, and and and that's you know,
Speaker 1: this book is a journey out of wrongness. There there
Speaker 1: are dozens of things I can tell you right now
Speaker 1: that I wish i'd put in it, But um, you know,
Speaker 1: that's why we have an opportunity to write new articles,
Speaker 1: do new podcasts, write new books. You describe that lack
Speaker 1: of feedback loop. As you were just putting words to that,
Speaker 1: my mental image was, oh, he's describing former journalists who
Speaker 1: become TV pundits. Am I today some degree? That's I
Speaker 1: don't know if you were referencing anybody specifically, but I
Speaker 1: immediately thought of, well, this guy is basically hasn't done
Speaker 1: anything new for twenty years, and and that's why they're
Speaker 1: so out of touch because their frame of reference is
Speaker 1: decades removed from what's happening today. If that was your implication,
Speaker 1: then I accurately communicated my thought. So I know I
Speaker 1: only have you for another eight minutes or so. Let's
Speaker 1: let's jump to our our last three questions, and and
Speaker 1: these are my favorite questions. Another yet another question, which
Speaker 1: was reader or listener derived What do you do to
Speaker 1: keep mentally and or physically fit? What do you do
Speaker 1: to relax or for enjoyment outside of work? Uh? So
Speaker 1: let's start with physically fit. UM. I hate working out.
Speaker 1: I working out to me is like brushing my teeth.
Speaker 1: I don't like the process, but I hate having not
Speaker 1: done it. Um. And so I have a very nice physic.
Speaker 1: My only urge in life is that I have a
Speaker 1: physical trainer. Um. And I pay him to kick my butt,
Speaker 1: because if I didn't pay him to kick my butt,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't go to the gym, and I would just
Speaker 1: feel sad about myself. I am a huge proponent of
Speaker 1: procrastination and um, mindless, pointless relaxation. I will take some
Speaker 1: Saturday afternoons and I will just lie down on a
Speaker 1: couch with a coffee and a bagel and watch ten
Speaker 1: hours of Law and Order. And I think, if you
Speaker 1: don't strike me as that sort of oh, if they
Speaker 1: book looks like it was written by someone who reads
Speaker 1: deeply and widely. I love reading deeply. I love reading widely,
Speaker 1: and I like reading deeply and widely so that I
Speaker 1: can reward myself with ten hours of Law and Order
Speaker 1: on the couch. I I think that you know, everyone,
Speaker 1: let's put it this way. Meditation is a hot concept
Speaker 1: right now. This idea of you know, reaching a sort
Speaker 1: of a personal nirvana or allowing a quietude to descend
Speaker 1: upon one's self. Um, my meditation is Law and Order SVU.
Speaker 1: That sounds sick. You know exactly what is happening on
Speaker 1: Leader SPU. But there's something just so beautifully predictable and
Speaker 1: satisfying about every episode. A problem a solution, a problem
Speaker 1: a solution, and it's so tidy and so neat, and
Speaker 1: it allows for a kind of, um a mental spring
Speaker 1: cleaning every Saturday. That's great. I'm gonna I'm gonna share
Speaker 1: something odd television wise with you. About five years ago,
Speaker 1: we're watching some lure in Order and there's the scene
Speaker 1: where they're doing the autopsy explaining what happened, and I
Speaker 1: decide I don't need to see yet another human body.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I love these cartoon war movies,
Speaker 1: and I love these superhero movies, but it's cartoonish violence.
Speaker 1: And the problem with C S I and Lawyer it's
Speaker 1: real and it's visceral. And I just decided to stop
Speaker 1: every last one of those. And so when I see
Speaker 1: somebody get killed or blown up, it's purely cartoonish. It's
Speaker 1: not real. Because and then when you see a movie
Speaker 1: like um, saving Private Private Ryan. The impact is so
Speaker 1: much greater than because you do get I'm a little
Speaker 1: bit desensitized, so much so much c s I that
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, you know, like of course, like say,
Speaker 1: the Private Ryan's opening scene is absolutely start wrenching. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: but there is a lot of ghoulish stuff on broadcast television.
Speaker 1: Tons absolutely tons. Um. Let's talk about advice. So you're
Speaker 1: not that far removed from college, and I kind of
Speaker 1: would say, you're still a millennial, right I am. So
Speaker 1: what advice do you give to a recent college grad
Speaker 1: or a college student who comes up to you and says,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in journalism, becoming an author, writing books. What
Speaker 1: do you say to a person like that? The this
Speaker 1: is a lesson, a piece of advice that comes out
Speaker 1: of that chapter. The audience of my audience, which is
Speaker 1: that there's a paradox to scale. I think, Um, people
Speaker 1: who want to be big sometimes think I have to
Speaker 1: immediately reach the largest possible audience. But no, weird way. Um.
Speaker 1: The best way to produce things that take off is
Speaker 1: to produce small things. To become a small expert, to
Speaker 1: become the you know, the best person on the internet
Speaker 1: at understanding the application of medicaid uh to on minority
Speaker 1: children or something like that. And the reason I think
Speaker 1: this is true is I call it's like my Tokyo example.
Speaker 1: If you go to Tokyo, you'll see there are all
Speaker 1: sorts of really really strange shops. They'll be like a
Speaker 1: shop that's like only nineteen seventies vinyl and like nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties whiskey or something, And that doesn't make any sense
Speaker 1: if it's a shop in like a Des Moines suburb, right,
Speaker 1: de Moines suburbs to exist, you have to be subway.
Speaker 1: You have to hit the mass market immediately. But in Tokyo,
Speaker 1: where there's thirty forty million people within a train ride
Speaker 1: of the city, right then your market is forty million.
Speaker 1: And within that forty million, sure there's a couple of
Speaker 1: thousand people who love nineteen seventies music and nineteen ettie whiskey.
Speaker 1: The Internet is Tokyo. The Internet allows you to be
Speaker 1: niche at scale and ironically, the best which at scale
Speaker 1: Niche at scale uh And this is a concept in
Speaker 1: the last chapter of the book um and Uh. Niche
Speaker 1: at scale, I think is something that young people should
Speaker 1: aspire to. And our final question, what is it that
Speaker 1: you know about journalism today that you wish you knew
Speaker 1: when you just got out of school. Um, I wish
Speaker 1: coming out of school. You know I was in I
Speaker 1: was a political science major, and I do wish I
Speaker 1: had taken more economic classes number one, but also really
Speaker 1: history classes that I've had to catch up on my
Speaker 1: history education since they graduated from school. I think that
Speaker 1: understanding academia, understanding research papers, that isn't the most important
Speaker 1: thing I think of being a good journalist. I think
Speaker 1: the most important thing is understanding where we've come from.
Speaker 1: I wish I had taken more history in college, and
Speaker 1: I and still in the process of catching up. We
Speaker 1: have been speed king with Derek Thompson. He is the
Speaker 1: author of hit Makers, The Science of Popularity, and an
Speaker 1: Age of Distraction. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure
Speaker 1: and look up an Inch or down an inch on
Speaker 1: Apple iTunes. You can see any of the other hundred
Speaker 1: and forty two or so such previous conversations. We love
Speaker 1: your comments, feedback, end suggestions right to us at m
Speaker 1: IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss
Speaker 1: if I did not thank our crack staff who helps
Speaker 1: us put together this podcast each week. Medina Parwana is
Speaker 1: my recording engineer. Taylor Riggs is my booker. Producer. Mike
Speaker 1: Battnick our head of research. I'm Barry Reholts. You're listening
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