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your first custom shirt today. This

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is Masters in Business with Barry

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Ridholts on Boomberg Radio. This

0:28

week on the podcast, I have Derek

0:30

Thompson. He is a writer

0:32

for The Atlantic magazine. I've been a fan

0:35

of his work for a long time.

0:37

I think he does an outstanding job

0:39

of taking complex

0:42

issues of economics

0:44

and markets and making it really understandable

0:47

for the lay person. His new

0:50

book is called Hit Makers, The

0:52

Science of Popularity and the Age

0:54

of Distraction, and it's really a

0:57

fascinating discussion

1:00

about how we completely

1:02

misunderstand what makes

1:04

a hit and what doesn't make a hit.

1:07

Our concept of things going

1:09

viral is really wrong.

1:12

Most things don't go viral.

1:15

Even the things we think that

1:18

are going viral are really in

1:20

some way being broadcast,

1:22

being selected, being pushed. Uh,

1:25

the organic viral hit is

1:27

as much a myth as anything else. I

1:30

found the book to be quite fascinating. It

1:32

it is some ways a

1:35

more rigorous version of tipping

1:38

points, uh to some

1:40

degrees. It's a freakonomics

1:43

like type of book where there's actual

1:46

science and actual studies and

1:48

and really interesting history

1:51

that leads to an explanation

1:53

of something that we think we understand,

1:55

but in reality we really don't. And

1:58

that's what made both the book and our

2:00

conversation so interesting. So, with

2:02

no further ado, my conversation

2:05

with Derrick Thompson. This

2:09

is Masters in Business with Barry

2:11

Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My

2:15

special guest today is Derrick Thompson.

2:17

He is the senior editor at The Atlantic

2:20

Magazine and has appeared on Forbes

2:23

thirty Under thirty List. He is

2:25

the author, most recently of Hit

2:28

Makers, The Science of Popularity

2:30

in an Age of Distraction. The

2:32

book, which I enjoyed a great deal, has

2:35

been described as picking

2:37

up where the tipping point left off,

2:39

a sharply observed history of the

2:42

mega hit. Derrek Thompson, Welcome

2:44

to Bloomberg. It's great to be here. Thank you. So

2:47

you you tap into a lot of my favorite

2:49

subjects, everything from

2:51

cognition to networks to why

2:54

our beliefs about many

2:57

things are so wrong. So so

2:59

let's just jump right into this let's

3:01

discuss familiarity.

3:04

What is fluency and disfluency.

3:07

Fluency and disfluency are these two lovely

3:09

ideas that actually come from meta cognitive

3:12

psychology, which is a bit of a mouthful,

3:14

but meta cognitive above thinking,

3:17

thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking, feelings

3:20

that we have about our thoughts. And it's weird and a

3:22

bit hippie dippie maybe to think that our thoughts have

3:24

feelings. But imagine, for example, you're

3:26

traveling in a foreign country and you're looking

3:29

at all of these signs and you don't know what

3:31

they say, and you really have to get to your hotel,

3:33

and you're very anxious about this. That

3:35

is disfluency. That is anxiety about thinking,

3:38

difficult thinking. But let's say you turn

3:40

around in this busy street in this foreign country

3:42

and you see a close friend from high school

3:45

who looks completely at home in the

3:47

street, and you realize, ah, I

3:49

can ask you directions. That is

3:51

fluency. That is sudden ease of thinking.

3:53

And I think that we confront

3:56

products in the cultural landscape,

3:58

whether there are songs, movies, tele and shows,

4:00

along a spectrum of fluency to

4:02

disfluency, meaning things that were familiar with

4:05

the things that are just too far out

4:07

there, a little strange, and we're not comfortable

4:09

with right on the right the extreme on one

4:11

end, hearing our favorite Beatles song

4:13

for the fifteenth time, and at the extreme

4:15

on the other end, hearing some weirdly syncopated

4:18

Swedish music for the first time.

4:20

And so in dealing with fluency and disfluency,

4:23

what's interesting to me is that, yes, people

4:25

do have a bias toward the fluent. They have a bias

4:27

toward the familiar. We love things

4:29

that are familiar, but we particularly like things

4:31

that are familiar when they're sneakily familiar,

4:34

or when that familiarity emerges from

4:36

a state of disfluency. Think about

4:38

a podcast. I think one of the

4:41

things that people try to do on the best podcast,

4:43

one of the things that you try to do consistently is

4:45

to take a subject area that's a little

4:47

bit confusing and find a way to elucidate

4:50

it for listeners so that they can say, ah, ha I

4:52

suddenly understand it. And that switch from

4:55

disfluency to fluency has

4:57

a very specific term in psychology.

4:59

It's called old in a rather lovely way, the

5:02

aesthetic aha, and that is actually

5:04

my next question. By the way, I cheat

5:06

because I bring in folks like yourself

5:09

and Philip Tetlock and Scott

5:11

Galloway and go down the list who are

5:13

experts in a deep but

5:15

narrow area. And the

5:17

beauty of their work is they

5:20

provide that fluency in

5:22

an area you almost sort of kind

5:24

of understand, you know, there's something there, and

5:26

the aesthetic aha shows up. So

5:28

let's discuss what is the aesthetic?

5:32

The aesthetic aha, So let's

5:34

talk about it very clinically. This

5:36

was a study that was done by a few psychologist

5:38

about Cubist paintings, and they would

5:40

show a bunch of weird Cubist paintings to participants

5:43

and they would say, I'm not sure I like this, I don't get

5:45

this. And then in a second round they would

5:47

give them a little clue, so if

5:49

the painting kind of looked like a fish,

5:51

they would say pisces or they would

5:54

say did you know that Picasso loved

5:56

fishing in the Mediterranean, And suddenly,

5:58

in the second round people would like the paintings

6:00

much more. They would gain a sudden appreciation

6:03

for what the painting was. And this moment

6:05

of suddenly understanding that which was previously

6:07

confusing, was called by this psychologist,

6:10

Claudia Muth, the esthetic aha.

6:13

And so if you extend this to say,

6:15

the storytelling realm, you can imagine,

6:18

for example, how every single great

6:20

thriller, every episode of Law and Order,

6:22

every story of Sherlock Holmes, every

6:24

mystery is this beautiful dance

6:27

between disfluency, what's going on,

6:29

who's the killer, who's died? And

6:31

fluency. Ah. I think I got it, I think

6:33

I know who did it. I suddenly realized

6:35

the answer. And in many ways, I think the

6:38

best hit makers, the best cultural producers,

6:40

are those who are really gifted at engineering

6:42

these moments of both anxiety and

6:44

sudden understanding, meaning that it is

6:47

both accessible yet different

6:49

enough to present something. Hey,

6:51

I haven't quite heard that, and yet it sounds

6:54

somewhat familiar exactly if we were here

6:56

discussing you know, what is g d P.

6:58

What are the elements of g d P. A

7:01

lot of your listeners I think don't need another

7:03

you know, ninth grade class in the various

7:06

components of GDP that is too familiar

7:08

to offer any aesthetic. Ah.

7:11

But if you're talking about you know,

7:13

what's going to be, you know Tillerson's

7:16

plan for the Middle East, or

7:18

what's gonna be Minuchans plan for

7:21

uh, you know, the Federal reserve or interest rates

7:23

or tax policy questions that people

7:26

think dis fluently about don't know the answer

7:28

to. That's what yields an

7:30

aesthetic a HAA is providing an answer to those unknown

7:32

questions. So we've been talking about

7:35

content. There's a quote in the book

7:37

that that I love which um

7:40

is your quote. It's not you writing about someone else,

7:43

which is content maybe king,

7:45

But distribution is the kingdom.

7:48

Just discuss that content might

7:50

be king with distribution is the kingdom.

7:52

Content is king? Is the cliche It

7:55

says that if you make something that's great,

7:57

a great podcast, a great song, great

7:59

move v it is self distributing,

8:02

it will necessarily go viral. It has within

8:04

it the qualities of a virus.

8:06

It is typhus, it is pneumonia.

8:08

It'll just spread automatically. And yet,

8:10

and yet, what we see throughout the history

8:13

of culture is that that's just so obviously

8:15

not true. Some of the biggest hits in

8:17

music and movie history depended

8:19

overwhelmingly on distribution mechanisms

8:22

to get out to the public, and in fact, sometimes

8:24

they failed before they had this

8:26

powerful distribution mechanism um

8:29

in the music industry. For example, they have song

8:31

testing websites that will essentially test hundreds

8:34

of songs for in front of hundreds of people

8:36

and ask them before these songs hit the radio, how

8:38

much do you like this song? And what they'll say is

8:40

that if the song passes a certain threshold,

8:42

say an eighty between zero and a hundred,

8:44

that the song is a guaranteed hit. I'm

8:47

Barry Rehults. You're listening to Masters

8:49

in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My

8:51

special guest today is Derrick Thompson.

8:54

He is senior editor at the Atlantic

8:56

Magazine and author of Hit Makers,

8:59

The Science of Popularity in an Age

9:01

of Distraction. Let's talk about

9:03

music because this is really a fascinating

9:06

topic to me. Repetition

9:08

is the god particle of music. Explain,

9:12

there are many species of

9:14

animals where biologists say they sing,

9:17

and it always means that they repeat a certain

9:19

sound at a common interval. If you take even a

9:22

sliver of human speech, and you

9:24

take even a little bit of it, and you start repeating

9:26

it again, start repeating it

9:28

again, start repeating it again,

9:31

start repeating it again. Suddenly

9:34

the brain starts to hear that which was previously

9:36

sort of cacophonist speed stream as

9:38

music. No longer hearing the content,

9:41

but you're hearing the melody, and you're hearing the

9:43

exactly. Yes, you're hearing the tones and you're hearing

9:45

the rhythm. And so literally,

9:47

repetition is the thing that distinguishes

9:49

the cacophony of the world from that which the

9:51

brain recognizes as music.

9:54

So why is familiarity

9:56

such an important part of our

10:00

liking music, film,

10:02

everything else. There's two elements of this. There's

10:05

the biological element and then we'll talk about the economic

10:07

element. Biologically, why are we predisposed

10:10

to that which is familiar um. The evolutionary

10:12

psychology explanation would be that if you're

10:14

a hunter gatherer trawling the savannah

10:17

of Africa and you see a plant

10:19

or an animal that you recognize, that's

10:22

a really good sign that it hasn't killed you

10:24

yet, so you should probably trust it a

10:26

little bit more than that plant or animal that you don't

10:28

recognize and might kill you. Disfamiliar

10:31

potentially equals danger. Its equals danger,

10:34

right, so there should be a sort of alarm

10:36

bell that goes off in your head that says, I don't

10:38

trust this, and now I have to think a little

10:40

bit about whether I should trust it. That is

10:42

that the reason why you say to a

10:44

young child, here, try this. You've

10:47

never had it, No, I don't want to try it is literally

10:49

a biological component to that, that that

10:51

that child has learned quite well from

10:53

thousands and thousands of years of human evolution.

10:55

Absolutely, um But on the economic

10:58

side, I mean, familiarity is the back owe

11:00

of the advertising business. Right. Why do you want

11:02

to expose people to coca cola and pepsi

11:04

and uh Bloomberg over and over

11:06

and over again. You want them to trust it, You want

11:08

to them you want to build in the familiarity

11:11

that comes from multiple exposure.

11:13

Um. On. From music, it's unbelievably

11:15

powerful. On top forty radio, songs

11:17

that are unfamiliar are considered two notes

11:20

in a somewhat paradoxical way. We

11:22

tune in to top forty radio

11:25

to hear songs that we already know, but

11:27

in an order that surprises us.

11:29

And so with in music, in

11:31

film, and even across the economic landscape,

11:34

there is and there's a strong economic

11:36

imperative to build in familiarity

11:39

because with familiarity with familiarity comes

11:41

like, so, let's let's talk about the Spotify

11:43

Weekly Playlist, which I've been

11:46

getting for years and and I'm always feel like

11:48

it's homemark. I'm so far behind. However,

11:50

there's a fascinating story as to how that evolved.

11:53

One of my favorite stories from the book um Spotify

11:55

is discover weekly app. Uh.

11:58

It dumps thirty new songs into computer,

12:00

into your phone every single Monday. And

12:02

when they first built this technology,

12:04

they wanted all the songs to be new, all the artists

12:07

to be new, pure discovery, pure originality.

12:10

But a bug in the algorithm accidentally

12:12

let through some very familiar

12:14

songs and some very familiar artists. They

12:16

fixed the bug, and they kept testing it internally.

12:19

And what happened if they fixed the bug, engagement

12:21

with the app collapsed. It turned

12:24

out that having a little bit of familiarity,

12:26

a little bit of this app

12:28

won't kill you, it won't bite you. Made

12:30

it much much more popular. And

12:32

so that's why I say in the book, if you're trying

12:34

to sell something that is familiar, the

12:37

key is to make it a little bit surprising,

12:39

to make it a little bit This is not something

12:41

that you've experienced before. But the key

12:44

to selling something that is surprising

12:46

is to make it a little bit familiar. And

12:49

that applies to some degree to the pandora

12:53

Um playlists, or actually it's not even

12:55

a playlist, it's Pandora's collaborative

12:57

filtering. If I like this artist and this song

13:00

and this artist will I probably like

13:02

those and that works very well

13:04

for them, doesn't it? Yes, right, and you mentioned collaborative

13:07

filtering. Collaborative filtering also essentially

13:09

takes the taste of the masses

13:12

um and uses the decisions

13:14

that they've made to guide your next choice.

13:16

So that, for example, if you're shopping on

13:19

Amazon and somebody buys your

13:21

book and then buys my book and then buys Tyler

13:23

Cowen's book, if lots of people make that sort

13:25

of decision tree process, then the next

13:27

time my friend goes and buys your book on Amazon

13:30

and my book on Amazon, Amazon

13:32

will prompt them and say do you want to buy Tyler Cowen's

13:34

book, because thousands of people that bought those

13:36

first two books also bought the Latin the

13:39

third one. So this is how a lot of

13:41

these algorithms work is they essentially say a

13:43

lot of people after they listened to Beyonce and the

13:45

Weekend, then listen to Drake. So if

13:47

you're listening to Beyonce and you've listened to the Weekend,

13:49

we're going to suggest Drake. So let's

13:52

let's talk a little bit about um,

13:54

why so many songs seem to sound

13:57

so familiar. When I started reading

13:59

that part of the book, I immediately

14:01

thought of the Blues Travelers song Hook,

14:04

which is loosely based theoretically

14:07

chord for chord on Pacabell's

14:09

cannon and D. And then you start looking

14:12

at that chord progression, the

14:14

one five four six, and

14:16

it just shows up everywhere

14:18

in music, and there's an ongoing list and

14:21

a hilarious YouTube video of

14:23

somebody playing all the variations on pacabell

14:26

and they're all well known rock and roll

14:28

songs right or or pop songs and reggae

14:30

songs. This is if you're if you're listening at home and

14:32

you are an arms leanked away from a

14:34

piano, you can play a C chord

14:37

followed by a G chord followed by an

14:39

A minor followed by an F or

14:41

you can look that up in line and just you know, listening to you

14:43

listen for it to yourself. Um, but yes,

14:46

that's exactly right, you know you The number

14:48

of songs that play off of

14:50

the structure is just incredible. You have Bob

14:52

Marley is No Woman, No Cry. You have Lady

14:54

gagas Paparazzi, you have Journey, Don't

14:56

stop believing. I mean, there are so two

14:59

you with or without you. And

15:02

what's interesting about this is that I think

15:04

the common thing that said about

15:07

these these songs in this chord structure is

15:09

that the songs you're derivative, that they're all

15:11

just doing the same old thing. But

15:14

the reason I don't quite buy that is that No

15:16

Woman, No Cry doesn't sound anything like Lady

15:19

Gaga, and it doesn't sound anything like with

15:21

or Without You, or anything like you know, John

15:23

Denver. These are actually I prefer

15:26

to think of them as clever cartographers,

15:29

understanding that they all have to plot a

15:31

route home, but taking slightly

15:34

different routes to the same destination. And

15:37

if you buy the thesis of this book,

15:39

which is that familiarity beats

15:41

originality and distribution beats

15:44

content, then it makes an enormous

15:46

amount of sense that as a new artist, you would

15:48

try to write music that is optimally

15:51

new that is slightly familiar,

15:53

not only because people are predisposed to like that

15:55

thing, but also because the most powerful

15:58

distributors might be inclined to

16:01

more to better distribute a song that

16:03

is sneakily familiar and therefore more

16:05

likely to be a hit. Why has Sweden

16:08

become the capital of pop

16:10

songwriting? Three things. First,

16:13

Sweden writes music in major

16:15

chord melodies, which makes it really exportable. They

16:18

often write their songs with uh

16:21

English lyrics, which also makes them exportable. They

16:23

have a massive public education

16:26

investment in music education

16:28

at a young age, which is very helpful. And finally,

16:30

they've had a couple sort of like Michael Jordan's style

16:32

hits. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're listening

16:35

to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

16:37

My special guest today is Derrick Thompson.

16:40

He is the author of Hit Makers,

16:42

Science of Popularity in

16:45

the Age of Distraction. He

16:47

has appeared on Forbes thirty Under thirty

16:49

List. He is a senior editor at

16:51

The Atlantic. Let's talk about

16:53

TV movies and video images.

16:56

How did ESPM become the most

16:58

valuable cable channel in the world.

17:01

ESPN in the early two thousand's was really

17:03

struggling with Sports Center. Uh, they

17:05

were covering bass fishing, they were covering all

17:07

sorts of card games. And John Skipper,

17:10

the president, comes in and he says, you know, I feel like

17:12

we're turning into a Greek diner.

17:14

We're serving ten thousand things in a mediocre

17:16

way. We need to be more like a steakhouse.

17:19

We needed to do a few things really, really well.

17:21

And he be orients Sports Center in the mid two

17:23

thousands around a handful of

17:26

hero stories, Kobe Bryant, Tiger

17:28

Woods, Derek Jeter. Let's just make

17:30

sure to optimize the chance

17:32

that every time a marginal ESPN viewer

17:35

wants to click in, they'll expect

17:37

to see a continuation of

17:40

their heroes story. And after this,

17:42

you see ESPN stock just absolutely

17:45

sore the value of the

17:47

of the channel, actually sore on the cable bundle. Obviously,

17:49

they've had an enormous number of issues

17:51

in the last few years. It's using cord cutting, but

17:54

this is clearly how they established their dominance in

17:56

the two thousands. And so interesting about this

17:58

is that it's really similar to the way at Hollywood

18:00

has thought about heroes as well. That

18:03

audience has seen that just want to come back and back

18:05

and back to see the same franchises,

18:07

sequels, adaptations, and reboots

18:09

of the same heroes. So in a way,

18:11

you could say that ESPN took

18:13

a page out of the Hollywood playbook

18:16

to become a hit. So one of

18:18

the data points in the book I found fascinating

18:20

is since two thousand and twelve,

18:23

more people spent time interacting

18:25

with digital devices then

18:28

with television. And it seems the progression was

18:31

radio was eclipsed by movies.

18:33

Was eclipse by television? Was eclipse by

18:35

laptops? Was a clip by eclips by

18:38

phones? Is that more or less right? That is actually

18:40

correct? But what's so fascinating is the degree

18:42

to which these former technologies

18:45

were eclipsed without being totally

18:47

shut out. Uh. In a way,

18:49

yes, the television state,

18:51

the television box replaced

18:54

the radio set in the corner of tens

18:56

of millions of families living rooms.

18:58

But in a way that made radio better.

19:00

It made radio mobile. In the next few decades,

19:03

radio went from being an absolute rarity

19:05

in cars to being a standard feature in

19:07

cars. So TV sets

19:10

made radio mobile. And I'm sure a lot of

19:12

people are listening to us right now as they're walking

19:14

around or as they're driving. Radio is considered

19:16

a kind of mobile technology, and so people

19:18

still listen to the radio while they watch

19:21

TV, while they're on their laptops, while

19:23

they're looking at going to a movie maybe later that

19:25

weekend. The mountain of media

19:27

seems to keep growing. The quote

19:29

in the book I Really liked was television

19:32

ones freed moving images from the

19:34

clutches of the cinema cineplex.

19:36

The historical sequel is mobile

19:38

technology is emancipating video

19:41

from the living room. Yeah. I think sometimes people

19:43

say, you know, TV is dead. TV is

19:45

not dead. What's happened is that

19:47

I think as millennials have cut the cord,

19:50

so to speak, they've sort of

19:52

unleashed this, like all of these little

19:54

seedlings of television that are pollinating

19:56

our little tiny plates of glass. So,

19:59

yes, tradition no linear programming

20:01

is clearly instructural decline for

20:04

Americans under the age of sixty,

20:06

that is without debate. But

20:08

Americans under the age of sixty are still spending

20:10

hours and hours of their day watching

20:13

video. Maybe it's on Facebook or Snapchat

20:16

or YouTube or Hulu

20:18

and Netflix, but they're still spending a

20:20

lot of time consuming video

20:22

entertainment it's just that there's so much video

20:25

entertainment that it's eclipsing sort of the the o

20:27

G the original linear programming

20:29

content. The day we're recording this is there

20:32

was a Wall Street Journal article. YouTube

20:35

is now up to a billion hours

20:37

of video watched per day,

20:39

unbelievable, astonishing number.

20:42

Um. We keep coming back to repetition.

20:46

And there's a couple of things I wanted to go

20:48

over with you, not just Joseph

20:50

Campbell and George Lucas and that, but

20:52

you referenced um a movie

20:55

dumb and Dumber. There are movies we've

20:57

all seen a million times. For me,

21:00

when my wife had the chicken pox

21:02

a decade ago, we watched Gross point Blank

21:05

on HBO over and over and over again.

21:08

And the more we watched it, the more we liked

21:10

it. It just became every scene

21:12

became familiar. I could probably say

21:14

the same thing about Blade Runner, I've seen a

21:16

million times. And then there are the films

21:18

that have that repetition built into

21:21

a Groundhog Day or the Tom

21:23

Cruise, UM War. It's

21:26

the same movie internally, only with slight

21:28

variations. Is that actually

21:31

a genre that plays to our desire

21:33

for for familiar things in a weird

21:36

way. Those sort of movies groundhog

21:38

Day are microcosms of the experience

21:40

that you have. I think with a single piece of

21:43

fractical content, right, it's it is fractical.

21:45

It's a perfect word for it. So that, for example, in groundhog

21:47

Day, he is living the same day over

21:49

and over again, but he's also learning from it, and he's

21:51

noticing different things, and now he's mean to the homeless

21:54

guy, and then he helps the homeless guy, and

21:56

we have that relationship. I think with movies

21:58

and songs too. The fifteenth

22:00

time you've heard a Day in the Life by

22:03

the Beatles is not like the first time

22:05

you've heard it. You know how to pay attention to the

22:07

shape of the song, you know when to sort of tune

22:09

in and tune out. Um, even with movies

22:12

like Dumb and Dumber, which is not exactly Citizen

22:14

Kane, I probably seen it a hundred times, not

22:16

exactly, not exactly, but maybe who knows, you

22:18

know, everyone has their own taste. I'm Barry

22:20

rid Hilts. You're listening to Masters in

22:22

Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest

22:24

today is Derrick Thompson. He is

22:26

a senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine

22:29

and author of the new book hit

22:31

Makers. Let's talk a little bit about

22:34

art and why some things go viral

22:36

quote unquote, and why things don't.

22:39

I want to talk about a both

22:41

a patron of the arts and an artist

22:43

himself that you describe in the book,

22:46

Kai Bot, who left a bequest of

22:49

seven specific artists from

22:52

the impression Impressionist period

22:55

that weren't particularly highly regarded.

22:58

And it was to the

23:00

um remind me which museum,

23:02

muse de Luxembourg, Muse de Luxembourg,

23:05

tell us, tell us what happens with

23:07

those seven artists and how this affected

23:10

future history. So I came upon

23:12

this story as I was having this thought.

23:14

I was in the National Gallery

23:17

in Washington, d C. And having a thought

23:19

that I think is relatively familiar, which is,

23:21

why is this painting so much more famous

23:23

than this other painting, even though they seem to be of relatively

23:26

similar quality. And there's this remarkable

23:28

story with Gustav Kaibat. He's

23:30

one of the least famous French Impressionist painters

23:32

today, but he was a collector

23:35

of his friends worst paintings.

23:37

Actually he only collected or bought

23:39

the paintings that wouldn't sell to anybody

23:42

else. And when you say his friends just

23:44

a quick list, Monet, Pissarro,

23:46

Dega Siciley, man A Renoir

23:49

says, on, that's some crowd to run

23:51

with. It's some crowd to run with now, I

23:53

mean, if you his his walls are probably

23:55

valued at several billion dollars

23:57

sort of today's Christie sales, but at the time it

23:59

was relatively worthless. I mean, he literally

24:01

was buying that which couldn't sell. So he dies

24:03

in the early eighteen nineties at the age of forty

24:05

one, and he his estate

24:08

he bequeathed to the French government. The French government

24:10

says absolutely not, We're not going to hang these

24:12

terrible paintings. But after a bit of haggling,

24:14

they finally decide, yes, we'll hang a

24:17

handful of these Impressionist works

24:19

in a French state museum for

24:21

the first time ever. It was this enormous

24:23

scandal. And as you said, who just happened

24:25

to be the seven painters he collected Manna,

24:28

Mone, Degassan, Renoir,

24:31

uh Sicily and Piesarrow still

24:33

today these seven core

24:35

Impressionist painters. So what

24:37

does the story mean? Well, my

24:40

interpretation of it, and it's not just mine, it's several

24:42

psychologists as well. Is that his

24:45

bequest consecrated

24:47

the Impressionist canon, because

24:49

the next generation of artists looked at these seven

24:51

to say, all, right, which Impressionist matter,

24:54

And the next generation of art historians looked

24:56

to this seven to say which Impressionist

24:58

matter? Even in the night teen fifties. John

25:01

Rowald's very famous History of Impressionist

25:03

Art talks about these seven

25:06

Impressionist paintings exclusively

25:08

as the cannon. So it's this remarkable

25:11

reminder of a the power

25:14

of familiarity. When we see a famous

25:16

work of art, we're not just seeing the paint, We're

25:18

also seeing its accumulated

25:20

fame and be that Cannons

25:24

can be kind of bs sometimes, right,

25:26

that this cannon. I'm not saying money is bad,

25:28

but the cannon was consecrated by a

25:30

literal stroke, distribution being

25:33

the kingdom. Distribution is the kingdom. Yeah,

25:35

absolutely, not all that different

25:37

from the Mona Lisa story. Until it

25:39

was stolen, it was thought of as

25:42

a minor work, and it created a whole bunch of celebrity,

25:44

and all that attention became its distribution

25:47

network. Yet Mona Lisa now is literally

25:49

the most valuable painting in the world. The most expensive

25:51

insurance policy on any painting.

25:54

But in the nineteenth century it was worth

25:56

I think one sixth of several Raphael

25:58

and Titian paintings that were in the same museum.

26:01

It was a minor work. It wasn't considered especially.

26:03

It was considered a lovely a lovely work,

26:05

but not certainly not the most famous painting

26:07

in the world. It's then stolen by

26:09

an Italian painter to

26:12

bring it back, wants to bring it back home, right, it takes

26:14

it to Italy. It becomes this international man hunt

26:16

for the Mona Lisa. And it's only

26:18

then after it's recovered and it's become

26:20

broadcast on newspaper covers

26:22

all over the world, uh, that it

26:24

goes on a little international journey to

26:26

visit all these different countries so that the patrons

26:29

can come see the stolen

26:31

piece of work. So again, the Mona

26:33

Lisa, I don't think I could well, just

26:35

to remind listeners, looks the

26:37

exact same today as it did in the nineteenth

26:40

century when it was worth sixteen percent of

26:42

Titian and Raphael. I'm gonna tell you it doesn't

26:44

look the same it was the first time you see the Mona

26:46

Lisa, you go, that's it. It's tiny. You're

26:49

so used to seeing the image, you assume

26:51

it's a big portrait and you show up. I'm

26:53

like, Oh, that's how he stole it. He's stuck in this. It's

26:57

a tiny little thing, right, you can fit it in a

26:59

little back hack. Um, And which is why

27:01

it's now behind you know, basing is because

27:03

it's easy to steal. But once again,

27:06

um, the content is the same. What changed

27:09

massive media distribution of

27:11

a the story of its stealing

27:14

and be the painting itself. It goes on an

27:16

international tour like it's the Rolling Stones

27:18

after it's recovered and brought back the loop.

27:20

So why is it the most famous painting ever? Not

27:23

because the content, because of the distribution,

27:26

quite amazing. Let let me shift gears on you and

27:28

talk about industrial design. What

27:31

is maya? Maya is

27:33

how I pronounced it, But it might be most advanced

27:36

yet acceptable, m a y a,

27:38

most advanced yet acceptable.

27:40

This was the grand theory of everything

27:43

from Raymond Loewy, the father

27:45

industrial design. And that's what you tell.

27:47

A wonderful story as to how

27:50

he comes to understands

27:52

design and how he comes to think about New

27:55

York is this grimy,

27:57

greasy place he looks at from the

27:59

top of building right

28:02

and basically says, no, no, we have to change all

28:04

this exactly. Yeah, he's a French orphan, comes

28:06

over to the States in nineteen nineteen, struggles

28:09

in art in the nineteen twenties, and basically

28:11

between the nineteen thirties and nineteen

28:13

sixties, designs that which we now

28:16

recognize as mid American esthetic.

28:18

Like everything everything, the cars, the

28:20

trains, the tractors, the cold

28:23

spot refrigerators, the central acting cleaners,

28:25

the pencil sharp that looks like a like a little

28:27

egg that everyone listening I'm sure has seen

28:29

a thousand times bolted in your grade

28:32

school. That is him.

28:35

Uh, this guy is Steve

28:37

Jobs for the nineteen fifties. If Steve

28:39

Jobs was allowed to design for literally

28:41

every single company in America, it's

28:43

amazing. We don't he's not as famous

28:46

as as he is. But yes, his theory of everything

28:48

was maya uh most advanced

28:50

yet acceptable. He said that people like

28:53

discovering new things, new songs

28:55

and new consumer products and movies, but we

28:58

only truly love them if

29:00

they sneakily remind us of that which

29:02

we are really familiar with. So he was this

29:04

genius at understanding it, really being

29:06

an anthropologist, first understanding

29:08

how consumers lived in their kitchens

29:11

and on their farms, and then designing

29:13

something that was only so sneakily

29:15

new that they would confront

29:18

something clearly novel and immediately

29:21

understand how to use it. He he

29:23

was doing consumer product research and

29:25

market studies really before there was

29:27

a science of that. I don't know if he could

29:30

say he created it, but he certainly took

29:32

it to places that nobody else did. He

29:34

He was a genius in a in a way, and and and his

29:36

company what were We're total geniuses

29:38

in a way that today I think we would

29:41

revere to the end. I think

29:43

that if he were alive today, Uh, he

29:45

would be a Steve Job style figure. He would have

29:47

television shows named after him. Uh.

29:50

He really was in a way. If you take mad

29:52

Men, right, if he could don Draper character a

29:54

genius of human psychology,

29:56

and you marry this with a Steve

29:59

Jobs intell and a an instinct

30:01

for aesthetics, that's Raymond

30:03

Loewy, you know, I mean Draper plus Jobs.

30:05

He was just absolutely market And you describe

30:08

three rules that we learn from

30:10

his work and I'll let me quickly

30:12

go through them, and let's talk about it audiences

30:15

collectively no more than any individual

30:17

creator. To sell something familiar,

30:20

you must make it surprising, and people

30:22

may not know what they want until they love

30:24

it, which is very much a Steve Jobs

30:26

like very much believe. Yeah,

30:29

but he he really was a populist. He

30:31

believed that design began

30:33

with consumers. And so if you want to design

30:36

something that people love, the first challenge

30:38

is to understand them. How do they

30:40

live? And I think this applies to everything from

30:43

you're designing a new chair, figure

30:45

out how people, how people

30:47

sit and what parts of existing chairs sort

30:49

of don't fit their bodies, to

30:52

something like a mobile money app.

30:55

Figure out, you know how people send money,

30:57

where they meet to send money, what their pain points

30:59

are. He really believed that

31:01

the design began with anthropology.

31:04

And then the second lesson might be one of the most important

31:07

prescriptive lessons of

31:09

the book. To sell something surprising,

31:11

make it familiar. To sell something

31:13

familiar, make it surprising. So,

31:17

since you just did that inversion,

31:19

let's talk a little bit about rhetorical inversion.

31:22

I thought that was kind of fascinating

31:25

the language of anaphora

31:27

and apistrophe, and all

31:29

that is really quite asked,

31:32

not what your country can do for you, Ask what

31:34

you can do for your country. There are so

31:36

many examples in the book of this. Is

31:39

it just the rhyme and the and the

31:41

lure of the familiar that makes that

31:44

sort of rhetoric so attractive,

31:46

so soaring. There is a

31:48

psychological principle called the rhyme

31:51

as reason effect rhyme

31:53

as reason effect, which essentially says

31:55

that people, rather dispiritingly perhaps

31:58

are more likely to trust and idea

32:00

when it's phrased musically. And

32:03

that doesn't just have to be a rhyme. You know, it's

32:05

not just birds of a feather flock together. There's

32:07

all sorts of very clever and subtle

32:09

ways to turn language into music. Uh

32:12

JFK's first inaugural

32:14

used a ancient Greek rhetorical device

32:17

called antimetaboli, which

32:19

is way too difficult to spell it pronounced, so just

32:21

think of it. Is abba A B b

32:24

A. Ask, not what your country

32:26

can do for you, Ask what

32:29

you can do for your country.

32:31

It's not the size of the dog in the fight. It's

32:33

the size of the fight in the dog.

32:36

Human rights are women's rights and women's rights

32:38

are human rights a B B

32:41

A anti metaboli. And it is not a coincidence

32:44

that Abba and that A quinces

32:46

that Abba wrote a lot of hit songs. Right, So it's easy to remember

32:48

because you think, if I want to make this idea a hit,

32:50

just think you know Abba. We

32:52

have been speaking with Derrick Thompson. He

32:55

is the author of Hit Makers, The Science

32:57

of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.

32:59

If you want to find Derek's works,

33:02

you can go to The Atlantic Magazine

33:04

or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

33:07

Uh. You can follow me on Twitter or

33:09

at Dhults. Check out my daily column

33:11

on Bloomberg View dot com.

33:13

We love your comments, feedback

33:16

and suggestions right to us

33:18

at m IB podcast at Bloomberg

33:20

dot net. I'm Barry Hults. You're

33:23

listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg

33:25

Radio. Hey guys, let me ask you a question.

33:28

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proper cloth dot com Custom

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shirts made Smarter. Welcome

34:08

to the podcast, Derek, Thank you so much for

34:10

doing this. I was really looking forward to this. I'm

34:13

like three quarters of the way through the book.

34:16

I really have enjoyed it. I

34:18

really like the way you

34:20

take something. So first of all,

34:22

the books we like the best are the ones that are about

34:25

us in some way. So you see

34:27

a lot of your own psychological foibles

34:30

and cogniveras, and you start

34:32

to recognize some things. There

34:34

are so many questions we didn't get to before I

34:36

get to our standard questions. I

34:39

have some stuff I have to uh,

34:42

I have some stuff I have to go through with you

34:45

because it's just it's just

34:47

to me, is just so fascinating.

34:52

Most popular products

34:54

in history, or some of the most popular products

34:56

in history, were one bad breakaway

34:59

from her failure explain.

35:02

One of my favorite stories in the book is Rock

35:04

around the Clock. Rock around the Clock is

35:07

one of the most famous songs the twentieth century,

35:09

but it's best understood as just an unbelievable

35:13

fluke. It comes out,

35:15

it's a B side, not even an A side.

35:18

It charts on Billboard for about one week, and then it's

35:20

basically forgotten. The song did

35:22

not succeed. It was essentially

35:25

a middling flop. But

35:27

one of the few thousand people that bought the record

35:29

was a ten year old boy named

35:31

Peter Ford. And Peter Ford's dad

35:34

was the movie star Glenn Ford. And Glenn Ford

35:36

was in this movie, Blackboard Jungle, and

35:38

the director of Blackboard Jungle comes

35:40

over to the Ford's house and says, to

35:43

kick off this movie, I want to jump jive tune.

35:45

What have you got? And father

35:48

Glenn Ford says, look, I just listen to Hawaiian folk

35:50

music. It's not going to work out for me, but my

35:53

son, Pete, he might have some

35:55

records that you'd like. So young Peter

35:57

Ford, this ten year old boy in fifth grade. Hey

36:00

ends the director Blackboard Jungle a stack

36:02

of vinyl records, and one

36:05

of those vinyl records included Rock

36:07

around the Clock. The song ends

36:10

up playing at the beginning of Blackboard Jungle, in

36:12

the middle of Blackboard Jungle, and at the end

36:14

of Blackboard Jungle in May of nineteen

36:16

fifty five, and it's only then

36:19

two weeks after the movie comes out the song

36:21

hits number one on Billboard and becomes

36:23

the first rock and roll song to ever be a number

36:26

one hit. And this becomes the second best

36:28

selling record of all time

36:30

after Bing Crosby's White Christmas.

36:32

So again like on the one hand,

36:34

the song sounded the exact same when

36:37

it was a flop in a nine and it was a hit.

36:39

The difference was this bizarre flukey

36:42

lucky moment of distribution in Blackboard

36:45

Jungle. Um, But it suggests that it's

36:47

really difficult to predict, sort of before

36:49

the fact, whether a song is going

36:52

to be a massive hit or a

36:54

massive flop. Sometimes the same song

36:56

can be both within the same ten month

36:58

period. And we all know songs that

37:01

we know and love, And how come this album

37:04

never took off half them? No one's discovered

37:06

this band. It's not the quality

37:08

of the music, it's the distribution right above

37:10

a certain threshold of quality, above a

37:12

certain threshold of catchiness.

37:15

What matters to become a hit is not more

37:17

catchinus or more quality, but rather

37:19

superior distribution. And Blackboard

37:22

Jungle is Glenn Ford, Sydney

37:25

is Sydney Portier, and I think Sydney Party is in

37:27

this, Yes, and um and Francis.

37:29

I'm just trying to think of of the main

37:31

It was The Stars teen it was it was

37:34

not one of the great hits of nineteen five.

37:36

It was the thirteenth biggest movie of the year.

37:39

So, I mean, just imagine being in Nate Silver about

37:41

this, trying to predict that a discarded

37:43

and forgotten B side from nineteen

37:45

fifty four played over the credits of

37:48

the thirteenth biggest movie of nineteen fifty

37:50

five is going to be the biggest rock and

37:52

roll song in music history. It's

37:54

It's completely amazing and unpredictable.

37:57

So you you talk about a

38:00

a Yahoo research project

38:02

in where they're

38:04

looking at the spread of online messages

38:07

on Twitter, More than of

38:10

the messages didn't diffuse at all,

38:12

and the clicks came

38:15

directly from the original

38:17

source or one degree of separation.

38:20

So so what does that tell us? What does that mean?

38:22

Are we still in a broadcast one

38:25

too many sort of world? Yeah? I

38:27

think that today when people

38:29

say that went viral,

38:32

what they really often mean is that got

38:34

big really quickly, and I'm not sure how,

38:36

But there's two ways that information can spread

38:38

online, broadly speaking. Way

38:41

number one is pure virality, pure

38:43

one to one, one to two shares. So so

38:45

give us an example of that, because we all

38:48

know of things that we think are viral, but you're

38:50

telling us some of these things really aren't.

38:52

For sure. Let's say I publish an article

38:54

on the Atlantic. Um it

38:56

doesn't hit the Atlantic homepage, doesn't hit any

38:58

major a broadcast plot form. But I

39:00

share it with one friend on Facebook. He shares

39:03

it with two of his friends, he shares it

39:05

with a handful of his friends, and it grows

39:07

over many, many, many generations of

39:09

intimate shares. That's one way,

39:12

right, That's how a virus spreads. That is true

39:14

virility. But there's another way

39:16

that information spreads online that's

39:19

not a million one to one moments,

39:21

but a handful of one to one million

39:23

moments. So, for example, let's say an

39:25

article that I write he hits the front page of Drudge,

39:27

or hits the front page of Reddit, or

39:30

is shared by Oprah on Facebook.

39:32

There's nothing about that mechanism

39:35

that is viral. Millions of people

39:37

are going to see that article from the same

39:39

source. So It's very similar to

39:41

that which we are comfortable calling a broadcast,

39:43

like on television when twenty million people

39:46

are tuned into the same program

39:48

all at once. So the Super Bowl, the Oscars,

39:50

things like that. Super Bowl clearly

39:53

broad list. Let me challenge you on Reddit because

39:55

Reddit has this built in virility mechanism

39:58

where things are up voted, down voted. So

40:00

for something to make it to the

40:03

front page of Reddit, where it

40:05

may subsequently be broadcast, it

40:07

has to have some degree of I

40:09

don't want to say virility, but I guess virility

40:12

work appeal, Yes, right where it's getting

40:14

up voted and up voted and up voted, and

40:17

that's almost a one to one or one to

40:19

a few before it reaches the front

40:21

page where it then becomes broadcast to everybody.

40:23

And this is what's really interesting about the age that we're living

40:25

through right now, which is that you know, there was a

40:28

period where technology was either social

40:30

or broadcast. Telephones are clearly

40:33

just social, that is a one to one conversation.

40:36

Um Television is purely

40:38

broadcast. It is just one to tens

40:40

of millions. But most of the technologies

40:43

that we have today are an interesting combination of

40:45

social and broadcast. Facebook, for example,

40:47

allows family members to talk to each

40:49

other while seeing articles from

40:52

Time magazine in Bloomberg. Reddit

40:54

is a really is it really fascinating combination

40:57

because articles are up voted socially

40:59

by individual users, but once they

41:01

hit a large page like the Reddit dot com

41:04

home page, it suddenly is a broadcast.

41:06

My contention is that if you that

41:09

for every piece of content

41:11

that we think goes quote unquote viral

41:13

online, it almost always

41:15

needs at least one or hopefully a handful

41:18

of broadcast moments. But

41:20

because we sometimes don't see these broadcast

41:23

moments in the information cascade, because

41:25

for example, um, your friend reads

41:28

an article on reddit dot com and

41:30

then shares it with another one of your friends,

41:32

and then you see that friend's article on Facebook,

41:34

you can't see that it was broadcast

41:37

on Reddit dot com, and so I call it

41:39

a dark broadcast. But my contention

41:42

is that broadcast moments are still

41:44

responsible for popular for

41:46

driving popularity. So let's talk about

41:48

a couple of pop confections. You

41:51

mentioned some of these in the book Call

41:53

Me Maybe, or All about the That

41:55

Base. These things seemingly,

41:58

especially to someone like me over

42:00

thirty way over thirty, have

42:02

exploded out of nowhere, and then

42:04

they've just become in escaped, in escapable.

42:07

How how do hits like that? How

42:10

are they manufactured? So Call Me Maybe is a

42:12

really interesting example of a so called

42:14

viral hit. You could say, on the one hand, that

42:16

Call Me Maybe his popularity was

42:19

engendered online, which

42:21

suggests that maybe there was a purely viral

42:24

mechanism to its to its popularity,

42:27

But in fact the song was

42:29

sort of hovering in like the mid

42:31

level tiers of Canadian pop track

42:33

popularity. When a

42:36

little known star named Justin bieberi

42:39

Canadian star indeed, found it, tweets

42:41

it out, and makes a YouTube video

42:44

of him and his girlfriend's Lena Gomez dancing

42:46

to it. That video goes

42:48

absolutely wild. And it's only then

42:50

after he releases that video that Called

42:52

Me Maybe becomes a sensation that's on the broadcast.

42:55

So what's the broadcast? It is Justin

42:57

Bieber, a celebrity with

42:59

the fall lowing of any traditional broadcaster,

43:02

Time magazine, right, yeah, exactly, USA

43:04

Today, broadcasting this song

43:07

to his millions and millions

43:09

of followers. And it's only then that the song

43:11

becomes a hit. So you use

43:13

the phrase the audience of my audience.

43:16

That is truly how things go viral.

43:19

Unless you're Justin Bieber or Taylor

43:21

Swift or someone with tens of

43:23

millions of Twitter followers, you tweeted

43:25

out and even though half of them are bots, it doesn't

43:28

matter. You tweeted out and that goes out

43:30

to millions of people

43:32

and and an equivalent number of algorithms.

43:35

Right, yeah, I Right after my chapter

43:37

on virility and broadcast, I say, okay,

43:39

well, let's say that you're trying to build

43:42

a hit product or a hit company,

43:44

but you're starting from a really, really small base and

43:46

you don't have access to the Justin Bieber's

43:48

the world. What do you do to be

43:51

to make things that people want to talk

43:53

about? And a way that I think about

43:55

this is that when I

43:57

write an article, for that

43:59

article to go big, it can't

44:01

just be appealing to my

44:03

first audience, to my first level

44:06

of readers, and for them to simply say okay,

44:08

cool and then click out and never talk about it again.

44:11

I need a handful of them to

44:13

want to pass it along because they

44:16

think that passing along that article will make

44:18

them my readers look smart,

44:21

uh, morally in touch with

44:23

the world. Um surprisingly,

44:26

sort of counterintuitive about what is true

44:28

and not true about economics. So in

44:30

a way, the psychology I have to

44:32

employees to think. I can't just be

44:34

appealing to the my audience. I have

44:36

to make my audience think that they want

44:39

to share it with their audience, the

44:41

audience of my audience. And

44:43

so I think that it's sort of it. It provides

44:46

I think, a really nice frame to see.

44:48

You know, how do how do you create articles

44:51

or you know, essays or or podcasts that

44:53

appeal to a as broad a possible

44:56

as a listenership and viewership. And that's

44:58

too to cree ate

45:00

something that your listeners feel

45:02

like, well, it will make them look good if

45:05

they pass it along. So we

45:07

we have a situation and I'm

45:09

reminded of this from a quote

45:11

from the book where it's a winner

45:14

take all society to a large

45:16

degree. Another previous

45:18

guest on the show, um,

45:20

the top one percent of bands and solo

45:23

artists now earn eight

45:25

percent of all the revenues of

45:27

recorded music. That's an astonishing

45:30

Parado principle. That's just it's

45:33

not steroids. It's

45:35

eighty two one that it's

45:37

just the stuff. So what does this mean for the

45:40

non justin biebers who want to try and get

45:42

something out there, whether whether it's

45:44

an article, whether it's a small film or

45:46

television show, or a song. What

45:48

does this mean is is this a doomed

45:51

effort or do you need a million of these things

45:53

in order to find that that one percent?

45:56

This is? This is an awesome question. And I think about

45:58

this a lot. And there's lots of for an answers

46:00

that I provide in the book. But let me talk about one that I that

46:02

I think might be most interesting, um,

46:05

which is this concept from sociology of cults.

46:08

Um. What is a cult? Uh?

46:11

Accult is a measured

46:13

rebellion against a mainstream.

46:16

So it is people thinking that they are

46:18

special and the mainstream is wrong. And

46:21

there's lots of interishing research that suggests

46:23

that when people hear

46:26

a song or read an article, or experience

46:28

a product that they think gets them specifically

46:31

to the exclusion of the mainstream,

46:33

that they're more likely to share it with their

46:35

close friends in order to sort of draw

46:38

that tight circle of kinship and say,

46:40

see, there's someone who gets us. So

46:42

one way to employ the audience

46:44

of my audience principle somewhat paradoxically,

46:47

is that if you want to be really big, start

46:49

by making something that's small and specific,

46:52

because that small specific message

46:55

or small specific product is

46:57

more likely to get your audience, your

46:59

consumer base to say

47:01

this, this thing gets me, and

47:03

I'm going to share it with my close friends to show

47:06

that it gets me. And so I talked to this h

47:08

and an Etsy designer who ended up being one of the most

47:10

successful um Etsy

47:12

sellers in that company's history.

47:14

He makes little pinback buttons, and one

47:16

of the lessons that he gave me was, um,

47:18

you know, of course he's you know, as

47:21

mainstream as an Etsy person can be right now. I think

47:23

it's the top seller on one of its um

47:25

platforms for several years. But he said,

47:27

I don't want to make pinback buttons that express

47:29

purely banal thoughts, purely generic

47:31

thoughts. I want my pin back

47:34

buttons to express something that's weird, because

47:36

in a weird way, it's the weird message

47:38

that makes people want to spread it along, not the message

47:41

that says, hey, I'm just like everybody else. The market

47:44

related quote to that that I've always

47:46

loved is everybody wants to be

47:48

a contrarian. Yeah, right, But if

47:50

everybody is a contrarian. They're just part

47:52

of the crowd. And so you go through this whole

47:55

of mirrors where people want it to be different

47:58

enough so they could look down on the crowd,

48:01

yet they become part of a crowd. It's

48:03

it's there's a I don't know if you saw

48:06

the Money Python movie, The Life recording

48:08

to Brian, Life of Brian, Life

48:10

Recording um Life of Brian.

48:12

I love the scene where he's speaking to the

48:15

crowd, you're all individuals,

48:17

and they chant back in response, we are

48:19

all individuals. It's that exact

48:22

moment. Well, it is. I mean, this is one of the

48:24

really interesting paradoxical things about human

48:26

psychology, which is that in a weird

48:28

way, we feel more like individuals sometimes

48:30

when when we belong to a group, which doesn't

48:32

make any sense, right, I feel more like an individual

48:35

when I belong to a group. But this is

48:37

precisely what cults are all about. It's

48:40

all about individuals saying society doesn't

48:42

get me. But if I enter this different

48:44

group of people, then I can be my

48:46

true self. I can realize my true

48:49

individuality, but only if I find

48:51

the right group, right, And

48:53

so I think in many ways, this is one of the things

48:55

that that you know, marketers and advertisers

48:58

that think about culting in their own messages try

49:00

to do um. You think about one of the most famous

49:02

culting advertisements of all time, Apple Night

49:05

four. You are defined

49:07

by that which you are not. We're

49:10

not the talitarian big

49:13

blue IBM company, right. We

49:15

are the people who throw with it a hammer.

49:17

Yeah, it was a hammer at the screen, a

49:20

big brother like we are. We

49:22

are rebels. This is a rebellion,

49:25

and every cult is a rebellion

49:27

against a mainstream. In many ways, I

49:30

think identity is antagonistic.

49:32

Identity is that which we are not, and

49:34

so in many ways, I think that you see

49:37

lots of advertising right now which

49:39

is all about allowing consumers to

49:41

define themselves by that which they aren't.

49:43

That that's really fascinating. I'm a huge

49:45

um comedy nerd, and

49:47

I love Mill Brooks two thousand

49:50

year old man. And there's a line in it

49:52

that speaks exactly what you're

49:54

describing, and he says, he sings

49:57

the hell with everybody except

49:59

Cave seventy three. And that's

50:02

that's the cult of

50:04

of that it And it's hilarious

50:06

if you if you haven't, if you're not familiar

50:09

that it's UM if you listen

50:11

to the I didn't realize he was such a big fan of historical

50:14

comedy. Between life and Well, it was

50:16

I'm not quite contemporary. Well

50:18

Life of Brian is contemporary with me. But

50:21

all the mel Brooks stuff, especially going back

50:23

to the two thousand year old Man,

50:26

was talk about viral

50:28

hits. If you read the story,

50:30

he tells the story of

50:33

how that went viral

50:36

and I don't remember if it was

50:38

UM when he sat down with Seinfelder,

50:41

when he sat down with UM

50:43

David Steinberg, but he tells the story

50:45

of it was party stick that him and

50:48

Carl Reiner used to do and

50:50

no one ever thought and finally someone

50:52

says, you two have to record

50:55

it. Uh. Brooks was a genius

50:57

improviser, as was Rhiner,

50:59

and Einer would take the role of the interviewer

51:01

and they would just do this and people would fall

51:05

out of out of their chairs. Finally someone says

51:07

in them, you gotta record this. Might have been

51:09

carried grant. You have to record

51:11

this, and he when it's recorded, he takes

51:13

two hour. He goes, listen, I need two albums.

51:15

I'm leaving the country, and he goes to

51:18

England and he comes back and

51:20

he says, I have to tell you, the Queen loved

51:22

it, and if you listen

51:24

to it, it's just really the most Some

51:26

of the stuff is just beyond beyond

51:28

hilarious. So we're down

51:31

to our last half hour. There are a couple of things

51:33

I wanna get to before

51:35

we jump to our favorite questions.

51:38

Let me let me just reference this quote

51:41

of yours about books, which

51:43

I found quite fascinating.

51:45

A reader both performs the book,

51:48

attends the performance, and attends

51:50

the performance. She is conductor,

51:53

orchestra and audience. So

51:56

explain that a little bit, because I think that

51:58

is a fascinating take

52:00

on books. It's interesting because

52:03

we live in a world right now where

52:06

with movies and virtual reality,

52:08

there are all sorts of experiences that were essentially

52:10

just were given them, right, everyone

52:13

agrees w a movie looks like, everyone agrees,

52:15

and what the song sounds like. But

52:17

books are really interesting because it's

52:19

this weird arbitrage where I,

52:22

the writer, have an idea, a

52:25

mental image that I have to translate into

52:27

letters, and then you the reader,

52:30

read these letters and

52:32

create your own movie. And sometimes

52:34

it's the same movie, but it's rarely the exact same

52:37

movie. It's slightly different. You're imagining different pictures,

52:39

you're making different connections to to mel Brooks.

52:42

And So I think one thing that is still

52:45

so special about books, even in an

52:47

age of proliferating and ever more

52:49

developed media technology.

52:51

UM, books are special because they're ours.

52:54

They belong to us in a way that the movies

52:56

don't, because we are responsible

53:00

for creating a movie from them.

53:02

The seraph's themselves, the

53:04

print itself cannot

53:06

be revealing of anything. We have

53:09

to interpret it. We have to sinest, the

53:11

sinest, the size it into words

53:14

and images and connections and our

53:16

own ideas and our own self help. Um.

53:19

And so I still think that books are special

53:22

because they are more individual.

53:25

The individual has a larger role in

53:27

internalizing it, and they do for something like a

53:29

movie or a song. That that's that's

53:32

quite fascinating. Let's let's talk about film

53:35

and the quote from the producer

53:37

who said, the film producer said, you

53:40

could look at twenty things in

53:42

a success twenty five things in a successful

53:44

genre. Change one and you have

53:46

something new and interesting. Change them

53:48

all and you have parity. Right.

53:51

That's that's quite a fascinating meta

53:54

view of films. Yeah, it's it's

53:56

a fascinating meta view of films. And it clicks right

53:58

back into one of the first thesis of the book, which

54:00

is that we love that which is familiar

54:03

with a slight twist. And you

54:05

know, you can think about this for all sorts of hits that

54:07

you know, what is Star Wars. It is

54:10

a Western set in outer space.

54:12

It is in many ways an unbelievably

54:14

conventional story. An

54:17

orphan goes on a supernatural

54:19

quest to defeat a

54:21

villain who is involved in his origin

54:24

story and returns to the normal world as a

54:26

hero. That's Lord of the Rings, that

54:29

is Harry Potter to a t it's the hero's

54:31

journey. It's Joseph Campbell. But Joseph

54:33

Campbell basically says all these stories

54:35

are one and the same, with with interesting variation,

54:38

right. And what's so fascinating about Campbell's theory is

54:40

that the individual storytellers aren't trying

54:42

necessarily to copy each other. They're

54:44

just trying to tell a good story. But there

54:46

are certain elements of that which is a you know,

54:49

capital g good capital, a s story

54:51

that seemed to be relatively universal. We need

54:53

an element of relatability. We don't want

54:56

to um attach ourselves to a

54:58

hero who's already invincible. The hero has

55:00

to start off normal UM. He

55:02

has to go on a journey with its pock

55:04

marked with all sorts of defeats.

55:07

He there has to be you know, defeat

55:09

and recovery and defeat and recovery, and

55:11

then finally he has to accomplish

55:13

something that is not only powerful and gives

55:15

him a glory, but that he

55:17

learns from. And it makes me a better person because it tells

55:20

us that our own journeys are self improvements

55:22

as well. So as I'm reading this in the book, a

55:25

name pops into my head because it's

55:27

so counter to that, and it's

55:29

Kevin Spacey, and three movies

55:32

jump out in me. By the way these

55:34

are, you can see this isn't anything I was doing deep

55:36

research on. It was just notes I scribbled

55:38

in the margins. Usual

55:41

suspects, l A Confidential

55:43

and American Beauty, none

55:46

of the real Could you think he's

55:48

the main character in each but those

55:51

usual um art

55:53

types of of UM narrative

55:56

building to a climax than the anti

55:58

climax, and everybody learning their little lessons

56:00

along the way. They're not quite in

56:02

those movies. And it's a great point. I think

56:04

that those movies aren't necessarily I

56:07

mean, they are famous, and certainly

56:10

I think I think the usual suspects. My

56:12

guess that that's the biggest box office

56:14

box office performer was pretty

56:16

big also and an American, I mean, there's

56:19

won awards among my favorites. I

56:21

think that, you know, the

56:23

the awards circuit movies

56:26

follow slightly different rules. And I asked,

56:29

when I was talking to Vincent Bruces and talking

56:31

to the movie producer, what Bruces is

56:33

the person who came up with the algorithm for looking

56:35

at what makes the script more popular

56:38

us popular? Exactly exactly, So we're so

56:40

the first thing we're talking about, which is hero's journeys,

56:42

I think apply most specifically to

56:45

blockbusters, right, two movies that are not

56:47

trying to be Best Picture nominees but are just

56:49

trying to maximize their audience. So

56:51

I asked him, I said, okay, well, is

56:53

there a formula? Is there a rule

56:56

to Best Picture movies? What

56:58

would that rule be? And he had an interesting

57:01

answer. He said, look at Best

57:03

Actor and Best Actress nominations

57:06

every year and tie those

57:08

two best Picture. You almost always

57:10

have a very clear relationship between

57:12

the Best Leading Actor nominations

57:14

and the Best Picture nominations, which says to me,

57:17

him talking to me, which says to me that

57:21

the what we consider to be quality movies

57:23

are not heroes journeys, but complicated

57:26

investigations of individuals

57:29

into self into self, essentially

57:32

stages for uh,

57:34

complex acting. And what you see

57:36

American beauty. Both Kevin Spacey

57:39

and oh god, that Benning, we're both

57:41

nominated for Oscars, And I forgot who the

57:43

one she won? He didn't, although he's won

57:45

before. And I forgot the woman who played one

57:47

for age girl interest. Oh

57:49

yeah, who became like a hot television

57:51

actress for a while. Um uh,

57:54

but you know his his performance

57:56

in Usual Suspects and astonishing

57:59

is astonishing and l A Confidential is again

58:01

for Guy Pearson, for Russell Crowe.

58:03

It's it's ways for the characters to grow. So

58:06

great movies, quality movies,

58:09

Best Picture nominee movies are are

58:11

disproportionately character

58:13

studies. And so the formula is not

58:15

let's send this character on a hero's journey. No no no, no,

58:18

that is too conventional for a character

58:20

study. A character study is an

58:22

investigation of an individual's realization

58:25

of self in a way that doesn't necessarily

58:27

follow a Campbell's art journey. And the

58:29

book is just out recently. Have you gotten

58:32

any of the comic book nerds telling you how

58:34

wrong you are about Superman? Uh?

58:36

No, but maybe you can be the first to tell me

58:38

Superman wasn't born with superpowers.

58:41

It's only the people from his

58:43

planet in the light of the

58:45

yellow sun of our solar system that

58:47

gives him his power. And by the way, I am

58:50

not a comic book nerd, but I hang

58:52

out with enough comic book nerds that even I know

58:54

that, so you will get some I will get

58:56

some angry readers. I guess his

58:58

his his His story in

59:00

our universe, or at least in our solar

59:02

system, clearly begins with invincibility,

59:05

which in a in a way makes him I

59:07

think a a

59:10

interesting exception to the

59:12

rule, which is that most of our

59:14

superheroes begin without

59:17

any element of invincibility. Begins

59:20

Spider Man begin right exactly. I mean,

59:22

obviously there's uh, you know, there's kryptonite.

59:25

Um, but I wonder whether

59:27

that is one of the things that has made it more difficult

59:30

for Superman to catch on in

59:32

in this century is that there are so many

59:34

movies now that are made in the familiar heroes

59:37

journey formula where the character

59:39

always begins um with

59:41

obvious flaws that even the new Batman

59:44

movies that came out you

59:46

reference Iron Man in the book because they're the flaws

59:49

are so manifest even

59:51

after he achieves his quote unquote

59:53

superpowers, when this is true with Batman as well.

59:55

Um and even with Spider Man, there's this question

59:58

of, you know, either the media

1:00:00

hates him and he's always trying to, you know, realize

1:00:02

whether or not he wants to be Spider Man or be with Mary Jane.

1:00:05

That that the his heroism

1:00:07

is always you know, darkened in a way by

1:00:09

the fact that he can never truly sort

1:00:11

of you know, transcend humanity

1:00:13

in our problems. Really interesting,

1:00:15

and I didn't mean to go into a comic digression.

1:00:19

Last question before we get to our our standard

1:00:21

questions fake news.

1:00:24

How does fake news

1:00:27

go viral? Is it broadcast

1:00:29

by something or is it

1:00:31

a Because what what I've noticed

1:00:34

and I don't want to throw rocks at Fox

1:00:36

News or or bright Bord or other, but

1:00:38

what I've noticed this Fox News is this giant

1:00:40

broadcast entity, some not

1:00:44

quite credible, not quite legitimate

1:00:47

um fourth to your

1:00:49

blog will write something outrageous.

1:00:51

We just saw this happen with the Swedish

1:00:54

defense expert talking about the

1:00:56

terrorist attacks. Turns out there was no

1:00:58

terrorist attack, and sweet and this guy

1:01:01

Sweden has already disavowed. You don't know who the

1:01:03

hell this guy is, but some crazy

1:01:06

wing nut blog references him.

1:01:08

He gets picked up on Fox and now suddenly

1:01:10

there's this whole and then the president sees

1:01:12

it and starts talking about it. Do you think

1:01:14

I would say about this? First? As you've already acknowledged,

1:01:17

there are obvious broadcast mechanisms

1:01:19

by which that which seems to be quote unquote

1:01:22

viral fake news is not actually

1:01:24

viral at all. It is broadcast by

1:01:26

Bright part or by info Wars,

1:01:28

or by Macedonian teenagers with a

1:01:31

Russian propaganda backing UH

1:01:33

and a whole bunch of botan net computers and a

1:01:35

bunch of exactly The second

1:01:37

deeper point, though, is that familiarity,

1:01:42

the biased toward familiarity, is so powerful

1:01:45

that in many ways what readers have always wanted

1:01:47

from the news is to learn

1:01:50

that that which they had previously intuited

1:01:52

is in fact correct and backed by massive

1:01:55

evidence confirmed my existing beliefs.

1:01:57

Please, it's it is a confirmation

1:01:59

bias cascade. And what

1:02:03

fake news is, uh,

1:02:05

it's sometimes just propaganda and that is pure broadcast,

1:02:08

but lots of what is fake news, which by which

1:02:10

actually just means news that turns out to not be

1:02:12

true, which is something we've been living with a lot longer

1:02:14

than just six months. We

1:02:17

want to believe that the biases that we've just

1:02:19

arrived at are correct, and we want

1:02:21

to seek out places that will reliably

1:02:24

tell us that our biases are correct. Because what

1:02:26

was the first question of this entire segment, fluency.

1:02:29

We like ideas that are easy to think about,

1:02:31

and there is nothing easier to think about than

1:02:34

a beautiful essay that tells

1:02:36

us that everything we think is true. Moreover,

1:02:39

there's nothing more difficult to think about then

1:02:41

an articulate essay that says

1:02:43

that all these ideas we consider more ably abhorrent

1:02:46

are in fact moral. That's

1:02:48

a really tough thing to consume. So

1:02:51

naturally, attention markets like Facebook,

1:02:53

which is just you know, an attention clearing house, will

1:02:56

gravitate toward fluency,

1:02:58

even though that's not necessarily great for our

1:03:00

civic body. So your book did two

1:03:03

things for me that that

1:03:05

I find interesting and and within

1:03:07

now I'll get a little fractal and a little metap

1:03:09

depending if I look down or look

1:03:12

up first. One of the things within the book

1:03:14

tells us why

1:03:16

we like things that make us feel

1:03:19

smart, knowledgeable, A member

1:03:21

of occult that gets to look with some

1:03:23

disdain at at the non members.

1:03:26

My career long interest

1:03:28

in behavioral economics basically

1:03:32

is just a little bit of egotism, saying,

1:03:34

oh, look, I figured out that everybody's wet

1:03:36

wear is flawed. Are and I smart?

1:03:38

And it turns out no, you're just confirming

1:03:41

your own um issues.

1:03:43

But the more interesting one. A

1:03:46

previous guest uh is

1:03:48

Lawrence Juwber. We were talking about off

1:03:50

the air, and he's

1:03:52

this guitar prodigy and well known

1:03:55

in fact, before the led Zeppelin

1:03:57

Stairway to Heaven decision

1:03:59

came out, he explained how

1:04:01

both the stair with to Heaven and

1:04:04

the piece that it's supposedly stole

1:04:06

from are both based on this classic

1:04:08

prod chord progression from

1:04:11

the sixteen hundreds, and he plays

1:04:13

the original. He plays Zepp when he plays

1:04:15

the one that's supposedly stolen, and it's pretty clear they're

1:04:17

both derivative of the multi

1:04:19

century old one. But and

1:04:22

I really like his his classical

1:04:24

music, and I like his original recordings.

1:04:27

But he's done a couple of albums of of Beatles

1:04:30

covers, and you explain

1:04:32

why I am so totally in love

1:04:34

with his work. It's the Beatles

1:04:36

songs you know and love, but presented in

1:04:38

such a unique no

1:04:41

recording tricks, it's just him an acoustic guitar

1:04:43

with a um. I

1:04:46

think it's gad mad. Is the tuning, it's an

1:04:48

it's an open tuning approach.

1:04:50

And it's your book explained why

1:04:52

he has two Beatle albums. He has a Wings

1:04:54

album, and I used to think I didn't like Wings

1:04:57

because it was sappy, and and then you find out,

1:04:59

oh the beautiful songs when presented correctly.

1:05:02

And now coming next month he has coming

1:05:04

in March, he has another Beatles albums.

1:05:06

He's he's got about two dozen albums.

1:05:09

But your book helped me figure out why I

1:05:11

am just completely entranced by

1:05:14

his covers of Beatles. They're

1:05:16

familiar enough that you immediately recognize

1:05:19

the melody, but they're so different

1:05:22

and so well done. You can't help

1:05:24

but say, ah, that's a song I know really

1:05:26

well but with the twist, and

1:05:29

thank you for explaining that. Thank you. The last thing I would

1:05:31

say is that, well, first of

1:05:33

the time we're listening to music, we're listening to a song

1:05:36

we've already heard, according to musicologists,

1:05:38

makes sense. Yeah, powerful

1:05:40

bias for familiarity in song. But

1:05:43

more broadly, I think there is

1:05:45

obviously a commercial

1:05:47

economic interest in what I

1:05:49

call neophilia, making consumers

1:05:52

love new things. The way that GDP

1:05:54

grows, the way that profits are made

1:05:57

is by getting people to buy new stuff.

1:05:59

That is, the will get people to buy new stuff.

1:06:02

But this macro economic

1:06:05

instinct toward the aphilia is always

1:06:08

cross cut with consumers actual preference

1:06:10

with that which is familiar. We are very

1:06:13

happy wearing the same clothes over

1:06:15

and over. In fact, we did so for thousands of years

1:06:17

until the thirteen hundreds. We are very

1:06:19

happy naming our kids the same names

1:06:21

over and over throughout history. In fact, first

1:06:23

names only became a fashion in the

1:06:26

eighteen hundreds. We're happy to listen to watch

1:06:28

the same Netflix shows over and over, listen to

1:06:30

the same songs over and over. In many

1:06:32

ways, I think the cultural appetite

1:06:35

for new products is an economic

1:06:37

creation. It is something that had

1:06:40

to be created after the Industrial age in order

1:06:42

to allow the factories to sell

1:06:45

as much as they could make. You references

1:06:47

with cars in particular with

1:06:50

fashion today that if because

1:06:52

most clothes you buy, you could buy them and wear them forever,

1:06:55

But if you have to go out and buy the new color

1:06:57

this year or the new pattern, well that's

1:06:59

that's quite good for the manufact right. In short,

1:07:02

markets are neo philick, consumers

1:07:04

are neophobic, and hits are

1:07:06

that special place in the middle just

1:07:09

new enough, just surprising

1:07:11

enough, and yet perfectly familiar, most

1:07:13

advanced yet acceptable. MAYA All

1:07:16

right, so let's jump right into our

1:07:18

favorite questions. So you've been at

1:07:20

the Atlantic? What what were you doing

1:07:22

before you were at the Atlantic? I was a journalism

1:07:24

student at Northwestern University

1:07:26

and you were a triple major. If I read your background,

1:07:29

I was a triple major. I should take that record,

1:07:32

so it does not count. So first of all, every

1:07:34

journalism major is uh invited

1:07:37

to, if not practically demanded,

1:07:39

to major in something else. That was political

1:07:41

science for me, And then I realized there was

1:07:43

this special trick in Northwestern where if you

1:07:45

double counted a lot of classes and wrote a

1:07:48

five thousand word paper, you could get a legal studies

1:07:50

major. And I figured that, in sort of the long

1:07:52

tail possibility that I would want to become a lawyer,

1:07:54

I should do that. But I sit before

1:07:56

you today, having not taken a single

1:07:58

law class, sense I said, before you, having

1:08:01

gone to law school, and I'm so happy I don't,

1:08:04

as do the majority of law school

1:08:06

graduates. Um, let's talk about early

1:08:09

mentors. Who who were the people

1:08:11

who helped god your career along. I

1:08:13

had some great teachers in high

1:08:16

school and in college. A

1:08:18

lot of my mentors were actually theater

1:08:20

directors. I was an actor before I was a journalist,

1:08:23

and I think that acting is a

1:08:25

very useful education

1:08:28

in journalism because it

1:08:31

requires the individual to

1:08:33

develop a kind of internal

1:08:35

sense of authenticity and an external

1:08:37

sense of entertainment. And so much

1:08:40

of great journalism, I think is that which

1:08:42

is informative is true, but also

1:08:44

is informative truth expressed in entertaining

1:08:47

ways storytelling. Storytelling absolutely,

1:08:50

let's let's talk about authors before we

1:08:52

get to books. Who what authors,

1:08:55

journalists? Writers influenced your approach

1:08:57

to write? Uh, this is a great question

1:08:59

and of a question because you were, in fact one

1:09:01

of them. Well, I'll

1:09:04

tell you this. When I started off writing in two thousand

1:09:07

nine, there were a handful of blogs

1:09:09

that were absolute

1:09:12

must for me to develop an expertise

1:09:14

in economics, as re Klein was

1:09:16

one, Matti Glecias, Ryan A Event, Felix

1:09:19

Salmon, the Big Picture. Um,

1:09:21

so there were a handful of these blogs

1:09:23

that I absolutely needed to read

1:09:25

every single week to stay on top of the crap, the

1:09:27

financial crash and the recovery. And so

1:09:30

you were a huge up there. How about

1:09:32

someone else? Oh, I think

1:09:34

I named four others, but yeah, Ryan A. Van

1:09:36

matt Ezra. Occasionally

1:09:40

people will say stuff like that, and I still

1:09:42

have not learned how to

1:09:45

accept a compliment. It's just like, come on,

1:09:47

stop because because my wife will

1:09:49

tell you. My wife will tell you that

1:09:51

I'm still the same idiot I was twenty years

1:09:53

ago. But you know, well,

1:09:56

your your economic idiocy was absolutely

1:09:58

illuminating for me in two thousand nine. Weren't when we

1:10:00

were all idiots. And so to be the smartest man

1:10:02

in the room nearly to be the say

1:10:05

I frequently say, I am unburned by a

1:10:07

classical economics education. And that

1:10:09

was a huge extremely

1:10:11

unburned by that education. But sometimes

1:10:13

that's an advantage when you're looking at things and

1:10:16

you're not you know, talk about hit

1:10:18

makers and factories every

1:10:20

wolf Street. Economists them

1:10:23

come from the same schools, the same training, training

1:10:25

programs, so when something is a little outside

1:10:27

the box, they're oblivious to it. And it took

1:10:30

all The people who saw the crisis coming were

1:10:32

none, for the most part, non economists,

1:10:35

right as mathematicians,

1:10:37

some some unusual background. I

1:10:39

would say this. I think that when I didn't know anything

1:10:41

about economics, it was useful because if

1:10:43

I if at nine am I had a question

1:10:45

I needed the answer to, and I talked to a

1:10:47

couple of economists before one pm.

1:10:49

At two pm, I could write the story

1:10:53

remembering my ignorance at

1:10:55

eight thirty in the morning. And so in a way, I think

1:10:57

I was able to explain some of these

1:10:59

really amplicated issues in simpler ways

1:11:02

because I remembered what the first questions

1:11:04

were of the ignorant person.

1:11:06

I was so so I had so recently departed

1:11:08

from the land of ignorance. And you've done a really good job.

1:11:11

A lot of the things that you've written in

1:11:13

our mutual admiration

1:11:16

society. They're very, very

1:11:19

are well articulated to somebody

1:11:21

who may be a late person but wants to understand

1:11:24

a more complex or nuanced issue.

1:11:26

And you've always done a really nice job with that, which

1:11:29

is probably why the book is so

1:11:31

interesting and does such a nice job

1:11:34

explaining some really interesting concepts.

1:11:37

Speaking of books, tell us

1:11:39

about some of your favorite books. By the way, this

1:11:41

is the question I get more than any other from

1:11:43

readers. Are Hey, what books

1:11:45

do your your guests like? Yeah,

1:11:47

Um, there's a handful of books about cognitive

1:11:50

psychology that are just mainstays and

1:11:52

uninteresting, like Thinking Fast and Slow. I thought

1:11:54

was utterly fascinating. Uh.

1:11:56

I get a lot of my

1:11:59

insight about the world and particularly

1:12:01

about how to write from novels. Um. There's

1:12:04

a couple sort of hidden allusions

1:12:06

to the Corrections throughout this book.

1:12:08

Some of my favorite lines the corrections sort of um

1:12:11

slightly modulated to UH

1:12:13

to talk about new issues. There's a line

1:12:15

from from Frandsen's book where

1:12:17

he says, um, uh

1:12:20

afternoons are a cavity

1:12:22

in which infections breed um

1:12:25

uh lazy afternoons, or cavity

1:12:27

in which infections breed Um when he's talking

1:12:29

about the frustrations of a of an older character,

1:12:31

and I think I have a line where I I um,

1:12:34

I steal from him a bit, while

1:12:36

noting in the index where I say boredom

1:12:38

is a cavity in which creativity breeds, because

1:12:41

I do find that sometimes it's those moments when

1:12:43

you're bored when you come up with that aha

1:12:45

insight that answers the question you previously

1:12:47

couldn't when you were at work. UM. So that's

1:12:50

a that's a great book that I love. UM.

1:12:52

I love the work of Bill Bryson, A

1:12:54

Short History of nearly Everything was in the

1:12:56

Woods at Home one summer.

1:12:59

He is is a brilliant popular

1:13:02

historian and a genius at

1:13:05

using topic A to discuss

1:13:07

topics be through Z. He's

1:13:09

wonderful. It's sort of zooming in on a topic

1:13:11

and then broadening out. And I love writing

1:13:14

that understands that every

1:13:16

every question has historical context.

1:13:19

Here's a question, a new question.

1:13:21

You'll be the first the guinea pig for this one. UM,

1:13:24

tell us about failure. Tell us about

1:13:26

a time you failed and what you learned from it.

1:13:29

I think every article that I write is

1:13:32

a failure. Large or small, and

1:13:34

well, now that's a little bit of an exaggeration, is

1:13:37

no, no, but but of course it is every everything

1:13:39

that I've written this book, the last column that I

1:13:41

wrote. I'll look back on it after two weeks,

1:13:43

back on it after a month, and I'll think, I miss this, I

1:13:45

miss this. And I think that one of the more

1:13:48

important things for writers to do is to maintain

1:13:50

this awareness that everything

1:13:52

that they write, everything they will ever do, is

1:13:54

a failure in some way. And it's dispiriting

1:13:57

when I see some uh, some older journalists

1:13:59

who I will name and certainly don't sit in the room

1:14:01

where I'll see that they they

1:14:04

they've attained a level of fame at

1:14:06

which they no longer need that feedback

1:14:08

loop. They no longer feel like they have to read the comments

1:14:10

or read the mean tweets. They'll just

1:14:13

say, I'm above it. And

1:14:15

when you lose that feedback loop, and you lose

1:14:18

the the expected rush of criticism,

1:14:21

you lose touch with the thing that journalism

1:14:23

is supposed to be about, which is a journey out

1:14:25

of wrongness, not necessarily to

1:14:27

truth, but always out of wrongness.

1:14:30

And journey out of wrongness.

1:14:33

Yeah, and and and that's you know, this book

1:14:35

is a journey out of wrongness. There there are dozens

1:14:38

of things I can tell you right now that I wish i'd put in

1:14:40

it, But um, you know, that's why we

1:14:43

have an opportunity to write new articles, do new podcasts,

1:14:45

write new books. You describe

1:14:48

that lack of feedback loop. As

1:14:50

you were just putting words to

1:14:52

that, my mental

1:14:54

image was, oh, he's describing former

1:14:57

journalists who become TV pundits. Am

1:15:00

I today some degree?

1:15:03

That's I don't know if you were referencing anybody

1:15:05

specifically, but I immediately thought

1:15:07

of, well, this guy is basically hasn't

1:15:09

done anything new for twenty years, and

1:15:12

and that's why they're so out of touch because

1:15:14

their frame of reference is decades

1:15:16

removed from what's happening today. If that was

1:15:18

your implication, then I accurately communicated

1:15:21

my thought. So I know I

1:15:23

only have you for another eight minutes

1:15:25

or so. Let's let's jump to our

1:15:27

our last three questions,

1:15:30

and and these are my favorite questions.

1:15:32

Another yet another question, which was reader

1:15:35

or listener derived What

1:15:37

do you do to keep mentally and or

1:15:39

physically fit? What do you do to relax or

1:15:41

for enjoyment outside of work? Uh?

1:15:44

So let's start with physically fit. UM.

1:15:47

I hate working out. I working

1:15:49

out to me is like brushing my teeth. I

1:15:51

don't like the process, but I hate

1:15:53

having not done it. Um. And

1:15:56

so I have a very

1:15:58

nice physic. My only urge in life

1:16:00

is that I have a physical trainer. Um.

1:16:02

And I pay him to kick my butt, because

1:16:05

if I didn't pay him to kick my butt, I wouldn't go

1:16:07

to the gym, and I would just feel sad about myself.

1:16:10

I am a huge proponent of procrastination

1:16:13

and um, mindless,

1:16:15

pointless relaxation.

1:16:17

I will take some Saturday afternoons and

1:16:19

I will just lie down on a couch with a

1:16:21

coffee and a bagel and watch ten hours

1:16:24

of Law and Order. And I

1:16:26

think, if you don't strike me as that sort of

1:16:28

oh, if they book looks like it was written

1:16:30

by someone who reads deeply

1:16:32

and widely. I love reading deeply.

1:16:35

I love reading widely, and I like reading deeply

1:16:37

and widely so that I can reward myself with ten hours

1:16:39

of Law and Order on the couch. I

1:16:42

I think that you know, everyone, let's

1:16:45

put it this way. Meditation is a hot concept

1:16:47

right now. This idea of you know, reaching a

1:16:49

sort of a personal nirvana or allowing

1:16:51

a quietude to descend

1:16:54

upon one's self. Um, my meditation

1:16:57

is Law and Order SVU. That sounds

1:16:59

sick. You know exactly what

1:17:01

is happening on Leader SPU. But there's

1:17:03

something just so beautifully

1:17:06

predictable and satisfying

1:17:08

about every episode. A problem a solution,

1:17:10

a problem a solution, and it's

1:17:13

so tidy and so neat, and it allows for a

1:17:15

kind of, um a mental spring

1:17:17

cleaning every Saturday. That's great. I'm gonna

1:17:19

I'm gonna share something odd television

1:17:21

wise with you. About five years

1:17:23

ago, we're watching

1:17:26

some lure in Order and there's the scene where they're

1:17:28

doing the autopsy explaining what

1:17:31

happened, and I decide

1:17:33

I don't need to see yet another human body.

1:17:36

And by the way, I love these

1:17:38

cartoon war movies, and I love these superhero

1:17:40

movies, but it's cartoonish violence.

1:17:42

And the problem with C S I and Lawyer

1:17:45

it's real and it's visceral. And

1:17:47

I just decided to stop every

1:17:49

last one of those. And so when I see

1:17:51

somebody get killed or blown up, it's

1:17:54

purely cartoonish. It's not real.

1:17:57

Because and then when you see a movie like um,

1:18:00

saving Private Private Ryan. The impact

1:18:02

is so much greater than because

1:18:05

you do get I'm a little bit desensitized, so

1:18:08

much so much c s I that

1:18:10

I'm like, well, you know, like of course,

1:18:12

like say, the Private Ryan's opening scene is absolutely

1:18:15

start wrenching. Yeah. Um, but

1:18:18

there is a lot of ghoulish stuff

1:18:20

on broadcast television. Tons absolutely

1:18:22

tons. Um. Let's talk about advice.

1:18:25

So you're not that far removed from college,

1:18:27

and I kind of would say,

1:18:29

you're still a millennial, right I am. So

1:18:32

what advice do you give to a recent

1:18:34

college grad or a college student who

1:18:36

comes up to you and says, I'm interested

1:18:38

in journalism, becoming an author,

1:18:41

writing books. What do you say to a person like

1:18:43

that? The this is a lesson,

1:18:46

a piece of advice that comes out

1:18:48

of that chapter. The audience of my audience, which

1:18:50

is that there's a paradox to scale.

1:18:53

I think, Um, people who want to

1:18:55

be big sometimes think I have to immediately

1:18:57

reach the largest possible audience. But no, weird

1:19:00

way. Um. The best

1:19:02

way to produce things that take off is

1:19:05

to produce small things. To become

1:19:07

a small expert, to become

1:19:09

the you know, the best person

1:19:11

on the internet at understanding

1:19:14

the application of medicaid

1:19:17

uh to on minority children

1:19:19

or something like that. And the reason I think this is

1:19:21

true is I call it's like my Tokyo example.

1:19:24

If you go to Tokyo, you'll see there are all

1:19:26

sorts of really really strange shops. They'll

1:19:28

be like a shop that's like only nineteen seventies

1:19:30

vinyl and like nineteen eighties

1:19:32

whiskey or something, And that

1:19:34

doesn't make any sense if it's a shop in

1:19:36

like a Des Moines suburb,

1:19:39

right, de Moines suburbs to exist, you

1:19:41

have to be subway. You have to hit the mass market

1:19:43

immediately. But in Tokyo, where

1:19:45

there's thirty forty million people within a

1:19:48

train ride of the city, right

1:19:51

then your market

1:19:53

is forty million. And within that forty million, sure

1:19:55

there's a couple of thousand people who love nineteen seventies

1:19:57

music and nineteen ettie whiskey. The Internet

1:19:59

is Tokyo. The Internet allows

1:20:02

you to be niche at scale and

1:20:04

ironically, the best which at scale

1:20:07

Niche at scale uh And this is

1:20:09

a concept in the last chapter of the book um

1:20:11

and Uh. Niche at scale,

1:20:13

I think is something that young people should aspire

1:20:16

to. And our final question,

1:20:18

what is it that you know about journalism

1:20:20

today that you wish you knew when

1:20:23

you just got out of school. Um,

1:20:26

I wish coming out of school. You

1:20:28

know I was in I was a political

1:20:30

science major, and I do wish I had taken

1:20:32

more economic classes number

1:20:34

one, but also really history classes

1:20:36

that I've had to catch up on my

1:20:38

history education since they graduated from school.

1:20:41

I think that understanding academia,

1:20:44

understanding research papers, that

1:20:47

isn't the most important thing I think of being

1:20:49

a good journalist. I think the most important thing is

1:20:52

understanding where we've come from. I

1:20:54

wish I had taken more history in college,

1:20:56

and I and still in the process of catching

1:20:58

up. We have been speed king with Derek Thompson.

1:21:01

He is the author of hit Makers,

1:21:03

The Science of Popularity, and an

1:21:06

Age of Distraction. If

1:21:08

you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look

1:21:10

up an Inch or down an inch on Apple iTunes.

1:21:12

You can see any of the other hundred and forty

1:21:14

two or so such previous

1:21:17

conversations. We love your

1:21:19

comments, feedback, end suggestions

1:21:22

right to us at m

1:21:24

IB podcast at Bloomberg dot

1:21:26

net. I would be remiss if

1:21:28

I did not thank our crack staff who

1:21:30

helps us put together this podcast each

1:21:32

week. Medina Parwana is

1:21:34

my recording engineer. Taylor

1:21:37

Riggs is my booker. Producer. Mike

1:21:39

Battnick our head of research. I'm

1:21:41

Barry Reholts. You're listening to Masters

1:21:44

in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

1:21:49

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