WEBVTT - Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) 0:00:00.120 --> 0:00:02.920 Masters in Business is brought to you by proper Cloth, 0:00:03.440 --> 0:00:08.039 the leader in men's custom shirts, with proprietary smart sized 0:00:08.080 --> 0:00:12.479 technology and top rated customer service. Ordering a custom shirt 0:00:12.560 --> 0:00:16.279 has never been easier. Visit proper cloth dot com to 0:00:16.440 --> 0:00:22.360 order your first custom shirt today. This is Masters in 0:00:22.440 --> 0:00:28.639 Business with Barry Ridholts on Boomberg Radio. This week on 0:00:28.680 --> 0:00:32.640 the podcast, I have Derek Thompson. He is a writer 0:00:32.840 --> 0:00:35.440 for The Atlantic magazine. I've been a fan of his 0:00:35.560 --> 0:00:38.239 work for a long time. I think he does an 0:00:38.240 --> 0:00:45.159 outstanding job of taking complex issues of economics and markets 0:00:45.159 --> 0:00:49.640 and making it really understandable for the lay person. His 0:00:50.200 --> 0:00:53.880 new book is called Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity 0:00:53.920 --> 0:00:58.320 and the Age of Distraction, and it's really a fascinating 0:00:59.040 --> 0:01:04.560 discussion about how we completely misunderstand what makes a hit 0:01:04.800 --> 0:01:09.280 and what doesn't make a hit. Our concept of things 0:01:09.319 --> 0:01:14.840 going viral is really wrong. Most things don't go viral. 0:01:15.600 --> 0:01:19.759 Even the things we think that are going viral are 0:01:19.800 --> 0:01:25.199 really in some way being broadcast, being selected, being pushed. Uh, 0:01:25.240 --> 0:01:28.840 the organic viral hit is as much a myth as 0:01:28.880 --> 0:01:32.399 anything else. I found the book to be quite fascinating. 0:01:32.440 --> 0:01:37.480 It it is some ways a more rigorous version of 0:01:37.680 --> 0:01:43.240 tipping points, uh to some degrees. It's a freakonomics like 0:01:43.440 --> 0:01:48.360 type of book where there's actual science and actual studies 0:01:48.440 --> 0:01:53.640 and and really interesting history that leads to an explanation 0:01:53.680 --> 0:01:56.880 of something that we think we understand, but in reality 0:01:57.160 --> 0:01:59.640 we really don't. And that's what made both the book 0:02:00.200 --> 0:02:03.400 and our conversation so interesting. So, with no further ado, 0:02:04.000 --> 0:02:10.440 my conversation with Derrick Thompson. This is Masters in Business 0:02:10.639 --> 0:02:16.400 with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today 0:02:16.680 --> 0:02:19.640 is Derrick Thompson. He is the senior editor at The 0:02:19.680 --> 0:02:24.880 Atlantic Magazine and has appeared on Forbes thirty Under thirty List. 0:02:25.240 --> 0:02:29.040 He is the author, most recently of Hit Makers, The 0:02:29.160 --> 0:02:33.160 Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. The book, 0:02:33.200 --> 0:02:36.240 which I enjoyed a great deal, has been described as 0:02:36.680 --> 0:02:40.639 picking up where the tipping point left off, a sharply 0:02:40.720 --> 0:02:44.720 observed history of the mega hit. Derrek Thompson, Welcome to Bloomberg. 0:02:44.760 --> 0:02:47.600 It's great to be here. Thank you. So you you 0:02:47.680 --> 0:02:51.680 tap into a lot of my favorite subjects, everything from 0:02:51.880 --> 0:02:57.200 cognition to networks to why our beliefs about many things 0:02:57.400 --> 0:03:00.679 are so wrong. So so let's just jump right into 0:03:00.760 --> 0:03:08.040 this let's discuss familiarity. What is fluency and disfluency. Fluency 0:03:08.040 --> 0:03:10.919 and disfluency are these two lovely ideas that actually come 0:03:11.000 --> 0:03:14.600 from meta cognitive psychology, which is a bit of a mouthful, 0:03:14.720 --> 0:03:19.840 but meta cognitive above thinking, thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking, 0:03:19.919 --> 0:03:22.200 feelings that we have about our thoughts. And it's weird 0:03:22.280 --> 0:03:24.200 and a bit hippie dippie maybe to think that our 0:03:24.240 --> 0:03:27.239 thoughts have feelings. But imagine, for example, you're traveling in 0:03:27.280 --> 0:03:29.760 a foreign country and you're looking at all of these 0:03:29.760 --> 0:03:32.120 signs and you don't know what they say, and you 0:03:32.160 --> 0:03:33.760 really have to get to your hotel, and you're very 0:03:33.800 --> 0:03:38.000 anxious about this. That is disfluency. That is anxiety about thinking, 0:03:38.040 --> 0:03:40.960 difficult thinking. But let's say you turn around in this 0:03:41.040 --> 0:03:43.240 busy street in this foreign country and you see a 0:03:43.280 --> 0:03:46.680 close friend from high school who looks completely at home 0:03:46.800 --> 0:03:49.800 in the street, and you realize, ah, I can ask 0:03:49.880 --> 0:03:53.440 you directions. That is fluency. That is sudden ease of thinking. 0:03:53.920 --> 0:03:58.520 And I think that we confront products in the cultural landscape, 0:03:58.560 --> 0:04:01.360 whether there are songs, movies, tele and shows, along a 0:04:01.440 --> 0:04:04.920 spectrum of fluency to disfluency, meaning things that were familiar 0:04:04.960 --> 0:04:07.400 with the things that are just too far out there, 0:04:07.440 --> 0:04:09.920 a little strange, and we're not comfortable with right on 0:04:09.960 --> 0:04:13.080 the right the extreme on one end, hearing our favorite 0:04:13.080 --> 0:04:15.880 Beatles song for the fifteenth time, and at the extreme 0:04:15.920 --> 0:04:19.200 on the other end, hearing some weirdly syncopated Swedish music 0:04:19.320 --> 0:04:22.520 for the first time. And so in dealing with fluency 0:04:22.520 --> 0:04:25.159 and disfluency, what's interesting to me is that, yes, people 0:04:25.200 --> 0:04:27.039 do have a bias toward the fluent. They have a 0:04:27.040 --> 0:04:30.400 bias toward the familiar. We love things that are familiar, 0:04:30.680 --> 0:04:32.960 but we particularly like things that are familiar when they're 0:04:33.000 --> 0:04:36.919 sneakily familiar, or when that familiarity emerges from a state 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:40.880 of disfluency. Think about a podcast. I think one of 0:04:40.920 --> 0:04:43.320 the things that people try to do on the best podcast, 0:04:43.400 --> 0:04:45.080 one of the things that you try to do consistently 0:04:45.560 --> 0:04:47.840 is to take a subject area that's a little bit 0:04:47.880 --> 0:04:51.360 confusing and find a way to elucidate it for listeners 0:04:51.400 --> 0:04:53.960 so that they can say, ah, ha I suddenly understand it. 0:04:54.240 --> 0:04:57.560 And that switch from disfluency to fluency has a very 0:04:57.600 --> 0:05:00.880 specific term in psychology. It's called old in a rather 0:05:00.960 --> 0:05:04.440 lovely way, the aesthetic aha, and that is actually my 0:05:04.520 --> 0:05:07.440 next question. By the way, I cheat because I bring 0:05:07.480 --> 0:05:11.640 in folks like yourself and Philip Tetlock and Scott Galloway 0:05:11.640 --> 0:05:14.560 and go down the list who are experts in a 0:05:14.640 --> 0:05:19.080 deep but narrow area. And the beauty of their work 0:05:19.240 --> 0:05:23.839 is they provide that fluency in an area you almost 0:05:23.880 --> 0:05:26.159 sort of kind of understand, you know, there's something there, 0:05:26.520 --> 0:05:30.279 and the aesthetic aha shows up. So let's discuss what 0:05:30.640 --> 0:05:34.800 is the aesthetic? The aesthetic aha, So let's talk about 0:05:34.800 --> 0:05:37.440 it very clinically. This was a study that was done 0:05:37.440 --> 0:05:40.640 by a few psychologist about Cubist paintings, and they would 0:05:40.640 --> 0:05:43.520 show a bunch of weird Cubist paintings to participants and 0:05:43.520 --> 0:05:44.960 they would say, I'm not sure I like this, I 0:05:45.000 --> 0:05:47.240 don't get this. And then in a second round they 0:05:47.240 --> 0:05:50.120 would give them a little clue, so if the painting 0:05:50.279 --> 0:05:53.520 kind of looked like a fish, they would say pisces 0:05:53.600 --> 0:05:56.159 or they would say did you know that Picasso loved 0:05:56.160 --> 0:05:59.239 fishing in the Mediterranean, And suddenly, in the second round 0:05:59.240 --> 0:06:01.720 people would like the paintings much more. They would gain 0:06:01.760 --> 0:06:05.000 a sudden appreciation for what the painting was. And this 0:06:05.080 --> 0:06:08.960 moment of suddenly understanding that which was previously confusing, was 0:06:09.080 --> 0:06:13.360 called by this psychologist, Claudia Muth, the esthetic aha. And 0:06:13.400 --> 0:06:17.040 so if you extend this to say, the storytelling realm, 0:06:17.279 --> 0:06:20.679 you can imagine, for example, how every single great thriller, 0:06:20.880 --> 0:06:24.320 every episode of Law and Order, every story of Sherlock Holmes, 0:06:24.400 --> 0:06:29.200 every mystery is this beautiful dance between disfluency, what's going on, 0:06:29.440 --> 0:06:33.040 who's the killer, who's died? And fluency. Ah. I think 0:06:33.080 --> 0:06:34.680 I got it, I think I know who did it. 0:06:34.839 --> 0:06:37.719 I suddenly realized the answer. And in many ways, I 0:06:37.720 --> 0:06:40.560 think the best hit makers, the best cultural producers, are 0:06:40.600 --> 0:06:43.400 those who are really gifted at engineering these moments of 0:06:43.440 --> 0:06:47.440 both anxiety and sudden understanding, meaning that it is both 0:06:47.480 --> 0:06:52.040 accessible yet different enough to present something. Hey, I haven't 0:06:52.120 --> 0:06:55.400 quite heard that, and yet it sounds somewhat familiar exactly 0:06:55.440 --> 0:06:58.040 if we were here discussing you know, what is g 0:06:58.160 --> 0:07:00.080 d P. What are the elements of g d P. 0:07:01.000 --> 0:07:03.440 A lot of your listeners I think don't need another 0:07:03.800 --> 0:07:06.599 you know, ninth grade class in the various components of 0:07:06.600 --> 0:07:10.760 GDP that is too familiar to offer any aesthetic. Ah. 0:07:11.320 --> 0:07:14.960 But if you're talking about you know, what's going to be, 0:07:15.160 --> 0:07:18.720 you know Tillerson's plan for the Middle East, or what's 0:07:18.720 --> 0:07:22.080 gonna be Minuchans plan for uh, you know, the Federal 0:07:22.120 --> 0:07:25.720 reserve or interest rates or tax policy questions that people 0:07:26.000 --> 0:07:29.360 think dis fluently about don't know the answer to. That's 0:07:29.400 --> 0:07:32.080 what yields an aesthetic a HAA is providing an answer 0:07:32.160 --> 0:07:35.960 to those unknown questions. So we've been talking about content. 0:07:36.280 --> 0:07:38.840 There's a quote in the book that that I love 0:07:39.240 --> 0:07:42.560 which um is your quote. It's not you writing about 0:07:42.560 --> 0:07:47.040 someone else, which is content maybe king, But distribution is 0:07:47.080 --> 0:07:50.840 the kingdom. Just discuss that content might be king with 0:07:50.920 --> 0:07:54.640 distribution is the kingdom. Content is king? Is the cliche 0:07:55.200 --> 0:07:57.800 It says that if you make something that's great, a 0:07:57.800 --> 0:08:00.880 great podcast, a great song, great move v it is 0:08:00.880 --> 0:08:04.280 self distributing, it will necessarily go viral. It has within 0:08:04.320 --> 0:08:07.440 it the qualities of a virus. It is typhus, it 0:08:07.600 --> 0:08:11.320 is pneumonia. It'll just spread automatically. And yet, and yet, 0:08:11.520 --> 0:08:14.000 what we see throughout the history of culture is that 0:08:14.000 --> 0:08:16.640 that's just so obviously not true. Some of the biggest 0:08:16.720 --> 0:08:21.640 hits in music and movie history depended overwhelmingly on distribution 0:08:21.680 --> 0:08:23.960 mechanisms to get out to the public, and in fact, 0:08:24.160 --> 0:08:28.400 sometimes they failed before they had this powerful distribution mechanism 0:08:28.760 --> 0:08:31.200 um in the music industry. For example, they have song 0:08:31.280 --> 0:08:34.800 testing websites that will essentially test hundreds of songs for 0:08:35.000 --> 0:08:36.959 in front of hundreds of people and ask them before 0:08:36.960 --> 0:08:38.840 these songs hit the radio, how much do you like 0:08:38.920 --> 0:08:40.800 this song? And what they'll say is that if the 0:08:40.840 --> 0:08:44.160 song passes a certain threshold, say an eighty between zero 0:08:44.160 --> 0:08:46.640 and a hundred, that the song is a guaranteed hit. 0:08:47.040 --> 0:08:50.200 I'm Barry Rehults. You're listening to Masters in Business on 0:08:50.240 --> 0:08:54.440 Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Derrick Thompson. He 0:08:54.640 --> 0:08:58.040 is senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine and author of 0:08:58.200 --> 0:09:02.079 Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. 0:09:02.679 --> 0:09:05.839 Let's talk about music because this is really a fascinating 0:09:06.360 --> 0:09:11.240 topic to me. Repetition is the god particle of music. Explain, 0:09:12.679 --> 0:09:17.200 there are many species of animals where biologists say they sing, 0:09:17.559 --> 0:09:20.160 and it always means that they repeat a certain sound 0:09:20.200 --> 0:09:22.320 at a common interval. If you take even a sliver 0:09:22.440 --> 0:09:25.559 of human speech, and you take even a little bit 0:09:25.559 --> 0:09:28.800 of it, and you start repeating it again, start repeating 0:09:28.800 --> 0:09:32.800 it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again. 0:09:33.240 --> 0:09:36.240 Suddenly the brain starts to hear that which was previously 0:09:36.280 --> 0:09:40.400 sort of cacophonist speed stream as music. No longer hearing 0:09:40.440 --> 0:09:43.000 the content, but you're hearing the melody, and you're hearing 0:09:43.000 --> 0:09:45.280 the exactly. Yes, you're hearing the tones and you're hearing 0:09:45.280 --> 0:09:48.880 the rhythm. And so literally, repetition is the thing that 0:09:48.960 --> 0:09:51.680 distinguishes the cacophony of the world from that which the 0:09:51.720 --> 0:09:57.320 brain recognizes as music. So why is familiarity such an 0:09:57.360 --> 0:10:03.800 important part of our liking music, film, everything else. There's 0:10:03.840 --> 0:10:06.640 two elements of this. There's the biological element and then 0:10:06.679 --> 0:10:09.640 we'll talk about the economic element. Biologically, why are we 0:10:09.679 --> 0:10:13.200 predisposed to that which is familiar um. The evolutionary psychology 0:10:13.200 --> 0:10:16.760 explanation would be that if you're a hunter gatherer trawling 0:10:16.760 --> 0:10:19.800 the savannah of Africa and you see a plant or 0:10:19.840 --> 0:10:23.040 an animal that you recognize, that's a really good sign 0:10:23.080 --> 0:10:25.640 that it hasn't killed you yet, so you should probably 0:10:25.720 --> 0:10:27.640 trust it a little bit more than that plant or 0:10:27.640 --> 0:10:31.520 animal that you don't recognize and might kill you. Disfamiliar 0:10:31.679 --> 0:10:34.679 potentially equals danger. Its equals danger, right, so there should 0:10:34.720 --> 0:10:37.000 be a sort of alarm bell that goes off in 0:10:37.000 --> 0:10:39.360 your head that says, I don't trust this, and now 0:10:39.440 --> 0:10:41.200 I have to think a little bit about whether I 0:10:41.200 --> 0:10:43.880 should trust it. That is that the reason why you 0:10:43.920 --> 0:10:47.160 say to a young child, here, try this. You've never 0:10:47.200 --> 0:10:48.800 had it, No, I don't want to try it is 0:10:49.000 --> 0:10:51.920 literally a biological component to that, that that that child 0:10:51.960 --> 0:10:54.840 has learned quite well from thousands and thousands of years 0:10:54.880 --> 0:10:58.400 of human evolution. Absolutely, um But on the economic side, 0:10:58.440 --> 0:11:01.480 I mean, familiarity is the back owe of the advertising business. Right. 0:11:01.679 --> 0:11:03.880 Why do you want to expose people to coca cola 0:11:03.920 --> 0:11:07.160 and pepsi and uh Bloomberg over and over and over again. 0:11:07.320 --> 0:11:09.160 You want them to trust it, You want to them 0:11:09.240 --> 0:11:11.760 you want to build in the familiarity that comes from 0:11:12.000 --> 0:11:16.240 multiple exposure. Um. On. From music, it's unbelievably powerful. On 0:11:16.320 --> 0:11:19.760 top forty radio, songs that are unfamiliar are considered two 0:11:19.880 --> 0:11:23.959 notes in a somewhat paradoxical way. We tune in to 0:11:23.960 --> 0:11:27.080 top forty radio to hear songs that we already know, 0:11:27.280 --> 0:11:30.600 but in an order that surprises us. And so with 0:11:30.840 --> 0:11:34.319 in music, in film, and even across the economic landscape, 0:11:34.600 --> 0:11:38.200 there is and there's a strong economic imperative to build 0:11:38.200 --> 0:11:41.600 in familiarity because with familiarity with familiarity comes like, so, 0:11:41.720 --> 0:11:45.800 let's let's talk about the Spotify Weekly Playlist, which I've 0:11:45.840 --> 0:11:48.040 been getting for years and and I'm always feel like 0:11:48.080 --> 0:11:51.839 it's homemark. I'm so far behind. However, there's a fascinating 0:11:51.880 --> 0:11:53.760 story as to how that evolved. One of my favorite 0:11:53.760 --> 0:11:57.920 stories from the book um Spotify is discover weekly app. Uh. 0:11:58.080 --> 0:12:01.120 It dumps thirty new songs into computer, into your phone 0:12:01.160 --> 0:12:04.960 every single Monday. And when they first built this technology, 0:12:04.960 --> 0:12:06.800 they wanted all the songs to be new, all the 0:12:06.880 --> 0:12:10.360 artists to be new, pure discovery, pure originality. But a 0:12:10.400 --> 0:12:14.200 bug in the algorithm accidentally let through some very familiar 0:12:14.240 --> 0:12:17.040 songs and some very familiar artists. They fixed the bug, 0:12:17.080 --> 0:12:19.840 and they kept testing it internally. And what happened if 0:12:19.920 --> 0:12:23.720 they fixed the bug, engagement with the app collapsed. It 0:12:23.760 --> 0:12:26.280 turned out that having a little bit of familiarity, a 0:12:26.320 --> 0:12:29.480 little bit of this app won't kill you, it won't 0:12:29.520 --> 0:12:32.800 bite you. Made it much much more popular. And so 0:12:32.880 --> 0:12:34.920 that's why I say in the book, if you're trying 0:12:34.920 --> 0:12:37.680 to sell something that is familiar, the key is to 0:12:37.760 --> 0:12:40.280 make it a little bit surprising, to make it a 0:12:40.320 --> 0:12:43.040 little bit This is not something that you've experienced before. 0:12:43.400 --> 0:12:46.920 But the key to selling something that is surprising is 0:12:46.960 --> 0:12:50.439 to make it a little bit familiar. And that applies 0:12:50.480 --> 0:12:54.679 to some degree to the pandora Um playlists, or actually 0:12:54.679 --> 0:12:58.319 it's not even a playlist, it's Pandora's collaborative filtering. If 0:12:58.360 --> 0:13:00.920 I like this artist and this song and this artist 0:13:00.960 --> 0:13:04.800 will I probably like those and that works very well 0:13:04.840 --> 0:13:07.400 for them, doesn't it? Yes, right, and you mentioned collaborative filtering. 0:13:07.400 --> 0:13:11.520 Collaborative filtering also essentially takes the taste of the masses 0:13:12.080 --> 0:13:15.680 um and uses the decisions that they've made to guide 0:13:15.840 --> 0:13:18.679 your next choice. So that, for example, if you're shopping 0:13:18.760 --> 0:13:21.760 on Amazon and somebody buys your book and then buys 0:13:21.800 --> 0:13:24.480 my book and then buys Tyler Cowen's book, if lots 0:13:24.480 --> 0:13:27.160 of people make that sort of decision tree process, then 0:13:27.200 --> 0:13:29.440 the next time my friend goes and buys your book 0:13:29.440 --> 0:13:32.640 on Amazon and my book on Amazon, Amazon will prompt 0:13:32.640 --> 0:13:34.640 them and say do you want to buy Tyler Cowen's book, 0:13:34.679 --> 0:13:37.120 because thousands of people that bought those first two books 0:13:37.160 --> 0:13:40.640 also bought the Latin the third one. So this is 0:13:40.640 --> 0:13:42.480 how a lot of these algorithms work is they essentially 0:13:42.559 --> 0:13:44.920 say a lot of people after they listened to Beyonce 0:13:45.080 --> 0:13:47.640 and the Weekend, then listen to Drake. So if you're 0:13:47.640 --> 0:13:50.000 listening to Beyonce and you've listened to the Weekend, we're 0:13:50.040 --> 0:13:52.960 going to suggest Drake. So let's let's talk a little 0:13:52.960 --> 0:13:56.760 bit about um, why so many songs seem to sound 0:13:57.240 --> 0:14:00.280 so familiar. When I started reading that part of the book, 0:14:00.679 --> 0:14:04.720 I immediately thought of the Blues Travelers song Hook, which 0:14:04.800 --> 0:14:09.960 is loosely based theoretically chord for chord on Pacabell's cannon 0:14:10.080 --> 0:14:13.400 and D. And then you start looking at that chord progression, 0:14:13.520 --> 0:14:17.360 the one five four six, and it just shows up 0:14:18.080 --> 0:14:21.160 everywhere in music, and there's an ongoing list and a 0:14:21.240 --> 0:14:25.080 hilarious YouTube video of somebody playing all the variations on 0:14:25.120 --> 0:14:28.440 pacabell and they're all well known rock and roll songs 0:14:28.680 --> 0:14:31.120 right or or pop songs and reggae songs. This is 0:14:31.160 --> 0:14:32.960 if you're if you're listening at home and you are 0:14:32.960 --> 0:14:36.080 an arms leanked away from a piano, you can play 0:14:36.120 --> 0:14:39.000 a C chord followed by a G chord followed by 0:14:39.000 --> 0:14:41.720 an A minor followed by an F or you can 0:14:41.720 --> 0:14:43.440 look that up in line and just you know, listening 0:14:43.440 --> 0:14:46.080 to you listen for it to yourself. Um, but yes, 0:14:46.120 --> 0:14:48.600 that's exactly right, you know you The number of songs 0:14:48.680 --> 0:14:51.600 that play off of the structure is just incredible. You 0:14:51.680 --> 0:14:54.400 have Bob Marley is No Woman, No Cry. You have 0:14:54.480 --> 0:14:58.160 Lady gagas Paparazzi, you have Journey, Don't stop believing. I mean, 0:14:58.200 --> 0:15:02.280 there are so two you with or without you. And 0:15:02.440 --> 0:15:05.080 what's interesting about this is that I think the common 0:15:05.080 --> 0:15:08.600 thing that said about these these songs in this chord 0:15:08.640 --> 0:15:11.720 structure is that the songs you're derivative, that they're all 0:15:11.760 --> 0:15:14.960 just doing the same old thing. But the reason I 0:15:15.000 --> 0:15:17.600 don't quite buy that is that No Woman, No Cry 0:15:17.680 --> 0:15:20.160 doesn't sound anything like Lady Gaga, and it doesn't sound 0:15:20.280 --> 0:15:23.040 anything like with or Without You, or anything like you know, 0:15:23.600 --> 0:15:26.760 John Denver. These are actually I prefer to think of 0:15:26.800 --> 0:15:30.720 them as clever cartographers, understanding that they all have to 0:15:30.840 --> 0:15:35.240 plot a route home, but taking slightly different routes to 0:15:35.280 --> 0:15:39.000 the same destination. And if you buy the thesis of 0:15:39.080 --> 0:15:43.600 this book, which is that familiarity beats originality and distribution 0:15:43.760 --> 0:15:46.880 beats content, then it makes an enormous amount of sense 0:15:46.920 --> 0:15:49.200 that as a new artist, you would try to write 0:15:49.520 --> 0:15:53.640 music that is optimally new that is slightly familiar, not 0:15:53.760 --> 0:15:56.120 only because people are predisposed to like that thing, but 0:15:56.240 --> 0:16:00.400 also because the most powerful distributors might be inclined to 0:16:01.120 --> 0:16:04.640 more to better distribute a song that is sneakily familiar 0:16:04.680 --> 0:16:07.440 and therefore more likely to be a hit. Why has 0:16:07.480 --> 0:16:12.800 Sweden become the capital of pop songwriting? Three things. First, 0:16:13.120 --> 0:16:16.400 Sweden writes music in major chord melodies, which makes it 0:16:16.440 --> 0:16:21.800 really exportable. They often write their songs with uh English lyrics, 0:16:21.840 --> 0:16:25.280 which also makes them exportable. They have a massive public 0:16:25.640 --> 0:16:29.200 education investment in music education at a young age, which 0:16:29.240 --> 0:16:31.560 is very helpful. And finally, they've had a couple sort 0:16:31.600 --> 0:16:34.640 of like Michael Jordan's style hits. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're 0:16:34.680 --> 0:16:38.080 listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special 0:16:38.120 --> 0:16:41.560 guest today is Derrick Thompson. He is the author of 0:16:41.640 --> 0:16:46.440 Hit Makers, Science of Popularity in the Age of Distraction. 0:16:46.920 --> 0:16:49.640 He has appeared on Forbes thirty Under thirty List. He 0:16:49.800 --> 0:16:53.800 is a senior editor at The Atlantic. Let's talk about 0:16:53.920 --> 0:16:58.440 TV movies and video images. How did ESPM become the 0:16:58.440 --> 0:17:02.040 most valuable cable channel in the world. ESPN in the 0:17:02.040 --> 0:17:05.160 early two thousand's was really struggling with Sports Center. Uh, 0:17:05.280 --> 0:17:08.000 they were covering bass fishing, they were covering all sorts 0:17:08.040 --> 0:17:10.800 of card games. And John Skipper, the president, comes in 0:17:10.880 --> 0:17:12.640 and he says, you know, I feel like we're turning 0:17:12.640 --> 0:17:16.080 into a Greek diner. We're serving ten thousand things in 0:17:16.119 --> 0:17:19.040 a mediocre way. We need to be more like a steakhouse. 0:17:19.240 --> 0:17:21.320 We needed to do a few things really, really well. 0:17:21.800 --> 0:17:23.800 And he be orients Sports Center in the mid two 0:17:23.800 --> 0:17:28.800 thousands around a handful of hero stories, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, 0:17:28.960 --> 0:17:32.920 Derek Jeter. Let's just make sure to optimize the chance 0:17:32.960 --> 0:17:36.640 that every time a marginal ESPN viewer wants to click in, 0:17:37.000 --> 0:17:41.720 they'll expect to see a continuation of their heroes story. 0:17:42.119 --> 0:17:45.359 And after this, you see ESPN stock just absolutely sore 0:17:46.040 --> 0:17:48.440 the value of the of the channel, actually sore on 0:17:48.480 --> 0:17:51.399 the cable bundle. Obviously, they've had an enormous number of 0:17:51.520 --> 0:17:53.720 issues in the last few years. It's using cord cutting, 0:17:53.920 --> 0:17:56.040 but this is clearly how they established their dominance in 0:17:56.080 --> 0:17:58.359 the two thousands. And so interesting about this is that 0:17:58.440 --> 0:18:01.040 it's really similar to the way at Hollywood has thought 0:18:01.280 --> 0:18:04.040 about heroes as well. That audience has seen that just 0:18:04.080 --> 0:18:05.920 want to come back and back and back to see 0:18:05.920 --> 0:18:10.720 the same franchises, sequels, adaptations, and reboots of the same heroes. 0:18:10.760 --> 0:18:13.800 So in a way, you could say that ESPN took 0:18:13.960 --> 0:18:16.760 a page out of the Hollywood playbook to become a hit. 0:18:17.240 --> 0:18:19.520 So one of the data points in the book I 0:18:19.560 --> 0:18:24.359 found fascinating is since two thousand and twelve, more people 0:18:24.520 --> 0:18:28.879 spent time interacting with digital devices then with television. And 0:18:28.920 --> 0:18:33.280 it seems the progression was radio was eclipsed by movies. 0:18:33.680 --> 0:18:36.879 Was eclipse by television? Was eclipse by laptops? Was a 0:18:36.920 --> 0:18:39.600 clip by eclips by phones? Is that more or less right? 0:18:39.640 --> 0:18:42.439 That is actually correct? But what's so fascinating is the 0:18:42.440 --> 0:18:46.960 degree to which these former technologies were eclipsed without being 0:18:47.000 --> 0:18:51.720 totally shut out. Uh. In a way, yes, the television state, 0:18:51.800 --> 0:18:55.520 the television box replaced the radio set in the corner 0:18:55.680 --> 0:18:58.520 of tens of millions of families living rooms. But in 0:18:58.560 --> 0:19:01.800 a way that made radio better. It made radio mobile. 0:19:01.840 --> 0:19:04.480 In the next few decades, radio went from being an 0:19:04.480 --> 0:19:08.320 absolute rarity in cars to being a standard feature in cars. 0:19:08.520 --> 0:19:11.879 So TV sets made radio mobile. And I'm sure a 0:19:11.880 --> 0:19:13.679 lot of people are listening to us right now as 0:19:13.720 --> 0:19:16.600 they're walking around or as they're driving. Radio is considered 0:19:16.600 --> 0:19:19.400 a kind of mobile technology, and so people still listen 0:19:19.400 --> 0:19:22.200 to the radio while they watch TV, while they're on 0:19:22.240 --> 0:19:24.560 their laptops, while they're looking at going to a movie 0:19:24.600 --> 0:19:28.040 maybe later that weekend. The mountain of media seems to 0:19:28.200 --> 0:19:30.840 keep growing. The quote in the book I Really liked 0:19:31.160 --> 0:19:34.760 was television ones freed moving images from the clutches of 0:19:34.800 --> 0:19:39.639 the cinema cineplex. The historical sequel is mobile technology is 0:19:39.680 --> 0:19:43.119 emancipating video from the living room. Yeah. I think sometimes 0:19:43.160 --> 0:19:46.080 people say, you know, TV is dead. TV is not dead. 0:19:46.760 --> 0:19:49.560 What's happened is that I think as millennials have cut 0:19:49.600 --> 0:19:53.160 the cord, so to speak, they've sort of unleashed this, 0:19:53.400 --> 0:19:56.280 like all of these little seedlings of television that are 0:19:56.320 --> 0:19:59.960 pollinating our little tiny plates of glass. So, yes, tradition 0:20:00.080 --> 0:20:05.120 no linear programming is clearly instructural decline for Americans under 0:20:05.119 --> 0:20:09.040 the age of sixty, that is without debate. But Americans 0:20:09.119 --> 0:20:11.520 under the age of sixty are still spending hours and 0:20:11.640 --> 0:20:15.320 hours of their day watching video. Maybe it's on Facebook 0:20:15.400 --> 0:20:19.880 or Snapchat or YouTube or Hulu and Netflix, but they're 0:20:19.920 --> 0:20:23.840 still spending a lot of time consuming video entertainment it's 0:20:23.880 --> 0:20:26.200 just that there's so much video entertainment that it's eclipsing 0:20:26.240 --> 0:20:30.000 sort of the the o G the original linear programming content. 0:20:30.080 --> 0:20:32.400 The day we're recording this is there was a Wall 0:20:32.440 --> 0:20:36.920 Street Journal article. YouTube is now up to a billion 0:20:37.119 --> 0:20:43.040 hours of video watched per day, unbelievable, astonishing number. Um. 0:20:43.080 --> 0:20:46.920 We keep coming back to repetition. And there's a couple 0:20:46.920 --> 0:20:49.760 of things I wanted to go over with you, not 0:20:49.840 --> 0:20:52.960 just Joseph Campbell and George Lucas and that, but you 0:20:53.040 --> 0:20:57.000 referenced um a movie dumb and Dumber. There are movies 0:20:57.040 --> 0:21:00.520 we've all seen a million times. For me, when my 0:21:00.560 --> 0:21:04.160 wife had the chicken pox a decade ago, we watched 0:21:04.160 --> 0:21:07.680 Gross point Blank on HBO over and over and over again. 0:21:08.040 --> 0:21:10.280 And the more we watched it, the more we liked it. 0:21:10.280 --> 0:21:14.119 It just became every scene became familiar. I could probably 0:21:14.119 --> 0:21:16.439 say the same thing about Blade Runner, I've seen a 0:21:16.480 --> 0:21:19.119 million times. And then there are the films that have 0:21:19.280 --> 0:21:23.920 that repetition built into a Groundhog Day or the Tom Cruise, 0:21:24.040 --> 0:21:29.640 UM War. It's the same movie internally, only with slight variations. 0:21:30.440 --> 0:21:33.720 Is that actually a genre that plays to our desire 0:21:33.880 --> 0:21:37.040 for for familiar things in a weird way. Those sort 0:21:37.040 --> 0:21:40.639 of movies groundhog Day are microcosms of the experience that 0:21:40.680 --> 0:21:44.320 you have. I think with a single piece of fractical content, right, 0:21:44.359 --> 0:21:46.119 it's it is fractical. It's a perfect word for it. 0:21:46.280 --> 0:21:48.920 So that, for example, in groundhog Day, he is living 0:21:48.920 --> 0:21:50.840 the same day over and over again, but he's also 0:21:50.960 --> 0:21:53.120 learning from it, and he's noticing different things, and now 0:21:53.160 --> 0:21:55.120 he's mean to the homeless guy, and then he helps 0:21:55.160 --> 0:21:57.840 the homeless guy, and we have that relationship. I think 0:21:57.960 --> 0:22:01.879 with movies and songs too. The fifteenth time you've heard 0:22:02.000 --> 0:22:04.200 a Day in the Life by the Beatles is not 0:22:04.280 --> 0:22:06.040 like the first time you've heard it. You know how 0:22:06.080 --> 0:22:08.560 to pay attention to the shape of the song, you 0:22:08.600 --> 0:22:11.119 know when to sort of tune in and tune out. Um, 0:22:11.240 --> 0:22:13.280 even with movies like Dumb and Dumber, which is not 0:22:13.280 --> 0:22:16.119 exactly Citizen Kane, I probably seen it a hundred times, 0:22:16.119 --> 0:22:18.479 not exactly, not exactly, but maybe who knows, you know, 0:22:18.560 --> 0:22:21.360 everyone has their own taste. I'm Barry rid Hilts. You're 0:22:21.400 --> 0:22:24.640 listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest 0:22:24.680 --> 0:22:28.080 today is Derrick Thompson. He is a senior editor at 0:22:28.119 --> 0:22:32.240 the Atlantic Magazine and author of the new book hit Makers. 0:22:32.720 --> 0:22:35.120 Let's talk a little bit about art and why some 0:22:35.200 --> 0:22:39.439 things go viral quote unquote, and why things don't. I 0:22:39.520 --> 0:22:42.879 want to talk about a both a patron of the 0:22:42.960 --> 0:22:45.920 arts and an artist himself that you describe in the book, 0:22:46.440 --> 0:22:51.640 Kai Bot, who left a bequest of seven specific artists 0:22:52.480 --> 0:22:57.920