Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio)

work for a long time. I think he does an outstanding job of taking complex issues of economics and markets and making it really understandable for the lay person. His new book is called Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity and the Age of Distraction, and it's really a fascinating discussion about how we completely misunderstand what makes a hit and what doesn't make a hit. Our concept of things going viral is really wrong. Most things don't go viral.

Even the things we think that are going viral are really in some way being broadcast, being selected, being pushed. Uh, the organic viral hit is as much a myth as anything else. I found the book to be quite fascinating. It it is some ways a more rigorous version of

tipping points, uh to some degrees. It's a freakonomics like type of book where there's actual science and actual studies and and really interesting history that leads to an explanation of something that we think we understand, but in reality we really don't. And that's what made both the book and our conversation so interesting. So, with no further ado, my conversation with Derrick Thompson. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today

is Derrick Thompson. He is the senior editor at The Atlantic Magazine and has appeared on Forbes thirty Under thirty List. He is the author, most recently of Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. The book, which I enjoyed a great deal, has been described as picking up where the tipping point left off, a sharply observed history of the mega hit. Derrek Thompson, Welcome to Bloomberg.

It's great to be here. Thank you. So you you tap into a lot of my favorite subjects, everything from cognition to networks to why our beliefs about many things are so wrong. So so let's just jump right into this let's discuss familiarity. What is fluency and disfluency. Fluency and disfluency are these two lovely ideas that actually come from meta cognitive psychology, which is a bit of a mouthful, but meta cognitive above thinking, thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking,

feelings that we have about our thoughts. And it's weird and a bit hippie dippie maybe to think that our thoughts have feelings. But imagine, for example, you're traveling in a foreign country and you're looking at all of these signs and you don't know what they say, and you really have to get to your hotel, and you're very anxious about this. That is disfluency. That is anxiety about thinking,

difficult thinking. But let's say you turn around in this busy street in this foreign country and you see a close friend from high school who looks completely at home in the street, and you realize, ah, I can ask you directions. That is fluency. That is sudden ease of thinking.

And I think that we confront products in the cultural landscape, whether there are songs, movies, tele and shows, along a spectrum of fluency to disfluency, meaning things that were familiar with the things that are just too far out there, a little strange, and we're not comfortable with right on the right the extreme on one end, hearing our favorite Beatles song for the fifteenth time, and at the extreme on the other end, hearing some weirdly syncopated Swedish music

for the first time. And so in dealing with fluency and disfluency, what's interesting to me is that, yes, people do have a bias toward the fluent. They have a bias toward the familiar. We love things that are familiar, but we particularly like things that are familiar when they're sneakily familiar, or when that familiarity emerges from a state

of disfluency. Think about a podcast. I think one of the things that people try to do on the best podcast, one of the things that you try to do consistently is to take a subject area that's a little bit confusing and find a way to elucidate it for listeners so that they can say, ah, ha I suddenly understand it. And that switch from disfluency to fluency has a very specific term in psychology. It's called old in a rather lovely way, the aesthetic aha, and that is actually my

next question. By the way, I cheat because I bring in folks like yourself and Philip Tetlock and Scott Galloway and go down the list who are experts in a deep but narrow area. And the beauty of their work is they provide that fluency in an area you almost sort of kind of understand, you know, there's something there, and the aesthetic aha shows up. So let's discuss what is the aesthetic? The aesthetic aha, So let's talk about

it very clinically. This was a study that was done by a few psychologist about Cubist paintings, and they would show a bunch of weird Cubist paintings to participants and they would say, I'm not sure I like this, I don't get this. And then in a second round they would give them a little clue, so if the painting kind of looked like a fish, they would say pisces or they would say did you know that Picasso loved fishing in the Mediterranean, And suddenly, in the second round

people would like the paintings much more. They would gain a sudden appreciation for what the painting was. And this moment of suddenly understanding that which was previously confusing, was

called by this psychologist, Claudia Muth, the esthetic aha. And so if you extend this to say, the storytelling realm, you can imagine, for example, how every single great thriller, every episode of Law and Order, every story of Sherlock Holmes, every mystery is this beautiful dance between disfluency, what's going on, who's the killer, who's died? And fluency. Ah. I think I got it, I think I know who did it.

I suddenly realized the answer. And in many ways, I think the best hit makers, the best cultural producers, are those who are really gifted at engineering these moments of both anxiety and sudden understanding, meaning that it is both

accessible yet different enough to present something. Hey, I haven't quite heard that, and yet it sounds somewhat familiar exactly if we were here discussing you know, what is g d P. What are the elements of g d P. A lot of your listeners I think don't need another you know, ninth grade class in the various components of

GDP that is too familiar to offer any aesthetic. Ah. But if you're talking about you know, what's going to be, you know Tillerson's plan for the Middle East, or what's gonna be Minuchans plan for uh, you know, the Federal reserve or interest rates or tax policy questions that people think dis fluently about don't know the answer to. That's what yields an aesthetic a HAA is providing an answer to those unknown questions. So we've been talking about content.

There's a quote in the book that that I love which um is your quote. It's not you writing about someone else, which is content maybe king, But distribution is the kingdom. Just discuss that content might be king with distribution is the kingdom. Content is king? Is the cliche It says that if you make something that's great, a great podcast, a great song, great move v it is self distributing, it will necessarily go viral. It has within it the qualities of a virus. It is typhus, it

is pneumonia. It'll just spread automatically. And yet, and yet, what we see throughout the history of culture is that that's just so obviously not true. Some of the biggest hits in music and movie history depended overwhelmingly on distribution mechanisms to get out to the public, and in fact, sometimes they failed before they had this powerful distribution mechanism

um in the music industry. For example, they have song testing websites that will essentially test hundreds of songs for in front of hundreds of people and ask them before these songs hit the radio, how much do you like this song? And what they'll say is that if the song passes a certain threshold, say an eighty between zero and a hundred, that the song is a guaranteed hit. I'm Barry Rehults. You're listening to Masters in Business on

Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Derrick Thompson. He is senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine and author of Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. Let's talk about music because this is really a fascinating topic to me. Repetition is the god particle of music. Explain, there are many species of animals where biologists say they sing, and it always means that they repeat a certain sound

at a common interval. If you take even a sliver of human speech, and you take even a little bit of it, and you start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again, start repeating it again. Suddenly the brain starts to hear that which was previously sort of cacophonist speed stream as music. No longer hearing the content, but you're hearing the melody, and you're hearing the exactly. Yes, you're hearing the tones and you're hearing

the rhythm. And so literally, repetition is the thing that distinguishes the cacophony of the world from that which the brain recognizes as music. So why is familiarity such an important part of our liking music, film, everything else. There's two elements of this. There's the biological element and then we'll talk about the economic element. Biologically, why are we

predisposed to that which is familiar um. The evolutionary psychology explanation would be that if you're a hunter gatherer trawling the savannah of Africa and you see a plant or an animal that you recognize, that's a really good sign that it hasn't killed you yet, so you should probably trust it a little bit more than that plant or animal that you don't recognize and might kill you. Disfamiliar

potentially equals danger. Its equals danger, right, so there should be a sort of alarm bell that goes off in your head that says, I don't trust this, and now I have to think a little bit about whether I should trust it. That is that the reason why you say to a young child, here, try this. You've never had it, No, I don't want to try it is literally a biological component to that, that that that child has learned quite well from thousands and thousands of years

of human evolution. Absolutely, um But on the economic side, I mean, familiarity is the back owe of the advertising business. Right. Why do you want to expose people to coca cola and pepsi and uh Bloomberg over and over and over again. You want them to trust it, You want to them you want to build in the familiarity that comes from multiple exposure. Um. On. From music, it's unbelievably powerful. On top forty radio, songs that are unfamiliar are considered two

notes in a somewhat paradoxical way. We tune in to top forty radio to hear songs that we already know, but in an order that surprises us. And so with in music, in film, and even across the economic landscape, there is and there's a strong economic imperative to build in familiarity because with familiarity with familiarity comes like, so, let's let's talk about the Spotify Weekly Playlist, which I've been getting for years and and I'm always feel like

it's homemark. I'm so far behind. However, there's a fascinating story as to how that evolved. One of my favorite stories from the book um Spotify is discover weekly app. Uh. It dumps thirty new songs into computer, into your phone every single Monday. And when they first built this technology, they wanted all the songs to be new, all the artists to be new, pure discovery, pure originality. But a bug in the algorithm accidentally let through some very familiar

songs and some very familiar artists. They fixed the bug, and they kept testing it internally. And what happened if they fixed the bug, engagement with the app collapsed. It turned out that having a little bit of familiarity, a little bit of this app won't kill you, it won't

bite you. Made it much much more popular. And so that's why I say in the book, if you're trying to sell something that is familiar, the key is to make it a little bit surprising, to make it a little bit This is not something that you've experienced before. But the key to selling something that is surprising is to make it a little bit familiar. And that applies to some degree to the pandora Um playlists, or actually

it's not even a playlist, it's Pandora's collaborative filtering. If I like this artist and this song and this artist will I probably like those and that works very well for them, doesn't it? Yes, right, and you mentioned collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering also essentially takes the taste of the masses um and uses the decisions that they've made to guide

your next choice. So that, for example, if you're shopping on Amazon and somebody buys your book and then buys my book and then buys Tyler Cowen's book, if lots of people make that sort of decision tree process, then the next time my friend goes and buys your book on Amazon and my book on Amazon, Amazon will prompt them and say do you want to buy Tyler Cowen's book, because thousands of people that bought those first two books

also bought the Latin the third one. So this is how a lot of these algorithms work is they essentially say a lot of people after they listened to Beyonce and the Weekend, then listen to Drake. So if you're listening to Beyonce and you've listened to the Weekend, we're going to suggest Drake. So let's let's talk a little bit about um, why so many songs seem to sound

so familiar. When I started reading that part of the book, I immediately thought of the Blues Travelers song Hook, which is loosely based theoretically chord for chord on Pacabell's cannon and D. And then you start looking at that chord progression, the one five four six, and it just shows up everywhere in music, and there's an ongoing list and a hilarious YouTube video of somebody playing all the variations on pacabell and they're all well known rock and roll songs

right or or pop songs and reggae songs. This is if you're if you're listening at home and you are an arms leanked away from a piano, you can play a C chord followed by a G chord followed by an A minor followed by an F or you can look that up in line and just you know, listening to you listen for it to yourself. Um, but yes, that's exactly right, you know you The number of songs that play off of the structure is just incredible. You have Bob Marley is No Woman, No Cry. You have

Lady gagas Paparazzi, you have Journey, Don't stop believing. I mean, there are so two you with or without you. And what's interesting about this is that I think the common thing that said about these these songs in this chord structure is that the songs you're derivative, that they're all

just doing the same old thing. But the reason I don't quite buy that is that No Woman, No Cry doesn't sound anything like Lady Gaga, and it doesn't sound anything like with or Without You, or anything like you know, John Denver. These are actually I prefer to think of them as clever cartographers, understanding that they all have to plot a route home, but taking slightly different routes to

the same destination. And if you buy the thesis of this book, which is that familiarity beats originality and distribution beats content, then it makes an enormous amount of sense that as a new artist, you would try to write music that is optimally new that is slightly familiar, not only because people are predisposed to like that thing, but also because the most powerful distributors might be inclined to more to better distribute a song that is sneakily familiar

and therefore more likely to be a hit. Why has Sweden become the capital of pop songwriting? Three things. First, Sweden writes music in major chord melodies, which makes it really exportable. They often write their songs with uh English lyrics, which also makes them exportable. They have a massive public education investment in music education at a young age, which is very helpful. And finally, they've had a couple sort of like Michael Jordan's style hits. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're

listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Derrick Thompson. He is the author of Hit Makers, Science of Popularity in the Age of Distraction. He has appeared on Forbes thirty Under thirty List. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic. Let's talk about TV movies and video images. How did ESPM become the most valuable cable channel in the world. ESPN in the

early two thousand's was really struggling with Sports Center. Uh, they were covering bass fishing, they were covering all sorts of card games. And John Skipper, the president, comes in and he says, you know, I feel like we're turning into a Greek diner. We're serving ten thousand things in a mediocre way. We need to be more like a steakhouse. We needed to do a few things really, really well.

And he be orients Sports Center in the mid two thousands around a handful of hero stories, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter. Let's just make sure to optimize the chance that every time a marginal ESPN viewer wants to click in, they'll expect to see a continuation of their heroes story. And after this, you see ESPN stock just absolutely sore the value of the of the channel, actually sore on the cable bundle. Obviously, they've had an enormous number of

issues in the last few years. It's using cord cutting, but this is clearly how they established their dominance in the two thousands. And so interesting about this is that it's really similar to the way at Hollywood has thought about heroes as well. That audience has seen that just want to come back and back and back to see the same franchises, sequels, adaptations, and reboots of the same heroes. So in a way, you could say that ESPN took a page out of the Hollywood playbook to become a hit.

So one of the data points in the book I found fascinating is since two thousand and twelve, more people spent time interacting with digital devices then with television. And it seems the progression was radio was eclipsed by movies. Was eclipse by television? Was eclipse by laptops? Was a clip by eclips by phones? Is that more or less right? That is actually correct? But what's so fascinating is the degree to which these former technologies were eclipsed without being

totally shut out. Uh. In a way, yes, the television state, the television box replaced the radio set in the corner of tens of millions of families living rooms. But in a way that made radio better. It made radio mobile. In the next few decades, radio went from being an absolute rarity in cars to being a standard feature in cars. So TV sets made radio mobile. And I'm sure a lot of people are listening to us right now as

they're walking around or as they're driving. Radio is considered a kind of mobile technology, and so people still listen to the radio while they watch TV, while they're on their laptops, while they're looking at going to a movie maybe later that weekend. The mountain of media seems to keep growing. The quote in the book I Really liked was television ones freed moving images from the clutches of the cinema cineplex. The historical sequel is mobile technology is

emancipating video from the living room. Yeah. I think sometimes people say, you know, TV is dead. TV is not dead. What's happened is that I think as millennials have cut the cord, so to speak, they've sort of unleashed this, like all of these little seedlings of television that are pollinating our little tiny plates of glass. So, yes, tradition no linear programming is clearly instructural decline for Americans under

the age of sixty, that is without debate. But Americans under the age of sixty are still spending hours and hours of their day watching video. Maybe it's on Facebook or Snapchat or YouTube or Hulu and Netflix, but they're still spending a lot of time consuming video entertainment it's just that there's so much video entertainment that it's eclipsing sort of the the o G the original linear programming content. The day we're recording this is there was a Wall

Street Journal article. YouTube is now up to a billion hours of video watched per day, unbelievable, astonishing number. Um. We keep coming back to repetition. And there's a couple of things I wanted to go over with you, not just Joseph Campbell and George Lucas and that, but you referenced um a movie dumb and Dumber. There are movies we've all seen a million times. For me, when my wife had the chicken pox a decade ago, we watched Gross point Blank on HBO over and over and over again.

And the more we watched it, the more we liked it. It just became every scene became familiar. I could probably say the same thing about Blade Runner, I've seen a million times. And then there are the films that have that repetition built into a Groundhog Day or the Tom Cruise, UM War. It's the same movie internally, only with slight variations. Is that actually a genre that plays to our desire

for for familiar things in a weird way. Those sort of movies groundhog Day are microcosms of the experience that you have. I think with a single piece of fractical content, right, it's it is fractical. It's a perfect word for it. So that, for example, in groundhog Day, he is living the same day over and over again, but he's also learning from it, and he's noticing different things, and now he's mean to the homeless guy, and then he helps the homeless guy, and we have that relationship. I think

with movies and songs too. The fifteenth time you've heard a Day in the Life by the Beatles is not like the first time you've heard it. You know how to pay attention to the shape of the song, you know when to sort of tune in and tune out. Um, even with movies like Dumb and Dumber, which is not exactly Citizen Kane, I probably seen it a hundred times, not exactly, not exactly, but maybe who knows, you know, everyone has their own taste. I'm Barry rid Hilts. You're

listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Derrick Thompson. He is a senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine and author of the new book hit Makers. Let's talk a little bit about art and why some

things go viral quote unquote, and why things don't. I want to talk about a both a patron of the arts and an artist himself that you describe in the book, Kai Bot, who left a bequest of seven specific artists from the impression Impressionist period that weren't particularly highly regarded. And it was to the um remind me which museum, muse de Luxembourg, Muse de Luxembourg, tell us, tell us what happens with those seven artists and how this affected

future history. So I came upon this story as I was having this thought. I was in the National Gallery in Washington, d C. And having a thought that I think is relatively familiar, which is, why is this painting so much more famous than this other painting, even though they seem to be of relatively similar quality. And there's this remarkable story with Gustav Kaibat. He's one of the least famous French Impressionist painters today, but he was a

collector of his friends worst paintings. Actually he only collected or bought the paintings that wouldn't sell to anybody else. And when you say his friends just a quick list, Monet, Pissarro, Dega Siciley, man A Renoir says, on, that's some crowd to run with. It's some crowd to run with now, I mean, if you his his walls are probably valued at several billion dollars sort of today's Christie sales, but at the time it was relatively worthless. I mean, he

literally was buying that which couldn't sell. So he dies in the early eighteen nineties at the age of forty one, and he his estate he bequeathed to the French government. The French government says absolutely not, We're not going to hang these terrible paintings. But after a bit of haggling, they finally decide, yes, we'll hang a handful of these Impressionist works in a French state museum for the first

time ever. It was this enormous scandal. And as you said, who just happened to be the seven painters he collected Manna, Mone, Degassan, Renoir, uh Sicily and Piesarrow still today these seven core Impressionist painters. So what does the story mean? Well, my interpretation of it, and it's not just mine, it's several psychologists as well.

Is that his bequest consecrated the Impressionist canon, because the next generation of artists looked at these seven to say, all, right, which Impressionist matter, And the next generation of art historians looked to this seven to say which Impressionist matter? Even in the night teen fifties. John Rowald's very famous History of Impressionist Art talks about these seven Impressionist paintings exclusively as the cannon. So it's this remarkable reminder of a

the power of familiarity. When we see a famous work of art, we're not just seeing the paint, We're also seeing its accumulated fame and be that Cannons can be kind of bs sometimes, right, that this cannon. I'm not saying money is bad, but the cannon was consecrated by a literal stroke, distribution being the kingdom. Distribution is the kingdom. Yeah, absolutely,

not all that different from the Mona Lisa story. Until it was stolen, it was thought of as a minor work, and it created a whole bunch of celebrity, and all that attention became its distribution network. Yet Mona Lisa now is literally the most valuable painting in the world. The most expensive insurance policy on any painting. But in the nineteenth century it was worth I think one sixth of several Raphael and Titian paintings that were in the same museum.

It was a minor work. It wasn't considered especially. It was considered a lovely a lovely work, but not certainly not the most famous painting in the world. It's then stolen by an Italian painter to bring it back, wants to bring it back home, right, it takes it to Italy. It becomes this international man hunt for the Mona Lisa.

And it's only then after it's recovered and it's become broadcast on newspaper covers all over the world, uh, that it goes on a little international journey to visit all these different countries so that the patrons can come see the stolen piece of work. So again, the Mona Lisa, I don't think I could well, just to remind listeners, looks the exact same today as it did in the nineteenth century when it was worth sixteen percent of Titian

and Raphael. I'm gonna tell you it doesn't look the same it was the first time you see the Mona Lisa, you go, that's it. It's tiny. You're so used to seeing the image, you assume it's a big portrait and you show up. I'm like, Oh, that's how he stole it. He's stuck in this. It's a tiny little thing, right, you can fit it in a little back hack. Um, And which is why it's now behind you know, basing is because it's easy to steal. But once again, um,

the content is the same. What changed massive media distribution of a the story of its stealing and be the painting itself. It goes on an international tour like it's the Rolling Stones after it's recovered and brought back the loop. So why is it the most famous painting ever? Not because the content, because of the distribution, quite amazing. Let let me shift gears on you and talk about industrial design.

What is maya? Maya is how I pronounced it, But it might be most advanced yet acceptable, m a y a, most advanced yet acceptable. This was the grand theory of everything from Raymond Loewy, the father industrial design. And that's what you tell. A wonderful story as to how he comes to understands design and how he comes to think about New York is this grimy, greasy place he looks at from the top of building right and basically says, no, no,

we have to change all this exactly. Yeah, he's a French orphan, comes over to the States in nineteen nineteen, struggles in art in the nineteen twenties, and basically between the nineteen thirties and nineteen sixties, designs that which we now recognize as mid American esthetic. Like everything everything, the cars, the trains, the tractors, the cold spot refrigerators, the central acting cleaners, the pencil sharp that looks like a like a little egg that everyone listening I'm sure has seen

a thousand times bolted in your grade school. That is him. Uh, this guy is Steve Jobs for the nineteen fifties. If Steve Jobs was allowed to design for literally every single company in America, it's amazing. We don't he's not as famous as as he is. But yes, his theory of everything was maya uh most advanced yet acceptable. He said that people like discovering new things, new songs and new consumer products and movies, but we only truly love them if they sneakily remind us of that which we are

really familiar with. So he was this genius at understanding it, really being an anthropologist, first understanding how consumers lived in their kitchens and on their farms, and then designing something that was only so sneakily new that they would confront something clearly novel and immediately understand how to use it. He he was doing consumer product research and market studies really before there was a science of that. I don't know if he could say he created it, but he

certainly took it to places that nobody else did. He He was a genius in a in a way, and and and his company what were We're total geniuses in a way that today I think we would revere to the end. I think that if he were alive today, Uh, he would be a Steve Job style figure. He would have television shows named after him. Uh. He really was

in a way. If you take mad Men, right, if he could don Draper character a genius of human psychology, and you marry this with a Steve Jobs intell and a an instinct for aesthetics, that's Raymond Loewy, you know, I mean Draper plus Jobs. He was just absolutely market And you describe three rules that we learn from his work and I'll let me quickly go through them, and let's talk about it audiences collectively no more than any

individual creator. To sell something familiar, you must make it surprising, and people may not know what they want until they love it, which is very much a Steve Jobs like very much believe. Yeah, but he he really was a populist. He believed that design began with consumers. And so if you want to design something that people love, the first

challenge is to understand them. How do they live? And I think this applies to everything from you're designing a new chair, figure out how people, how people sit and what parts of existing chairs sort of don't fit their bodies, to something like a mobile money app. Figure out, you know how people send money, where they meet to send money, what their pain points are. He really believed that the

design began with anthropology. And then the second lesson might be one of the most important prescriptive lessons of the book. To sell something surprising, make it familiar. To sell something familiar, make it surprising. So, since you just did that inversion, let's talk a little bit about rhetorical inversion. I thought that was kind of fascinating the language of anaphora and apistrophe, and all that is really quite asked, not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do

for your country. There are so many examples in the book of this. Is it just the rhyme and the and the lure of the familiar that makes that sort of rhetoric so attractive, so soaring. There is a psychological principle called the rhyme as reason effect rhyme as reason effect, which essentially says that people, rather dispiritingly perhaps are more likely to trust and idea when it's phrased musically. And that doesn't just have to be a rhyme. You know,

it's not just birds of a feather flock together. There's all sorts of very clever and subtle ways to turn language into music. Uh JFK's first inaugural used a ancient Greek rhetorical device called antimetaboli, which is way too difficult to spell it pronounced, so just think of it. Is abba A B b A. Ask, not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country. It's not the size of the dog in the fight. It's the size of the fight in the dog.

Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights a B B A anti metaboli. And it is not a coincidence that Abba and that A quinces that Abba wrote a lot of hit songs. Right, So it's easy to remember because you think, if I want to make this idea a hit, just think you know Abba. We have been speaking with Derrick Thompson. He is the author of Hit Makers, The Science of Popularity in an

Age of Distraction. If you want to find Derek's works, you can go to The Atlantic Magazine or Barnes and Noble or Amazon. Uh. You can follow me on Twitter or at Dhults. Check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Hey guys, let me ask you a question. Do you have trouble finding dress shirts that fit well?

Thanks to proper Cloth, ordering custom shirts has never been easier. At proper cloth dot com, you can literally order a high quality, perfect fitting custom shirt in less than five minutes. Create your custom size by answering just ten simple questions. No need for measuring tape or trips to the tailor. Perfect fit is guaranteed, remakes are completely free, and expert

staff are standing by the hell. For premium quality, perfect fitting shirts, visit proper cloth dot com Custom shirts made Smarter. Welcome to the podcast, Derek, Thank you so much for doing this. I was really looking forward to this. I'm like three quarters of the way through the book. I really have enjoyed it. I really like the way you take something. So first of all, the books we like the best are the ones that are about us in

some way. So you see a lot of your own psychological foibles and cogniveras, and you start to recognize some things. There are so many questions we didn't get to before I get to our standard questions. I have some stuff I have to uh, I have some stuff I have to go through with you because it's just it's just to me, is just so fascinating. Most popular products in history, or some of the most popular products in history, were

one bad breakaway from her failure explain. One of my favorite stories in the book is Rock around the Clock. Rock around the Clock is one of the most famous songs the twentieth century, but it's best understood as just an unbelievable fluke. It comes out, it's a B side, not even an A side. It charts on Billboard for about one week, and then it's basically forgotten. The song did not succeed. It was essentially a middling flop. But one of the few thousand people that bought the record

was a ten year old boy named Peter Ford. And Peter Ford's dad was the movie star Glenn Ford. And Glenn Ford was in this movie, Blackboard Jungle, and the director of Blackboard Jungle comes over to the Ford's house and says, to kick off this movie, I want to jump jive tune. What have you got? And father Glenn Ford says, look, I just listen to Hawaiian folk music. It's not going to work out for me, but my son, Pete,

he might have some records that you'd like. So young Peter Ford, this ten year old boy in fifth grade. Hey ends the director Blackboard Jungle a stack of vinyl records, and one of those vinyl records included Rock around the Clock.

The song ends up playing at the beginning of Blackboard Jungle, in the middle of Blackboard Jungle, and at the end of Blackboard Jungle in May of nineteen fifty five, and it's only then two weeks after the movie comes out the song hits number one on Billboard and becomes the first rock and roll song to ever be a number one hit. And this becomes the second best selling record

of all time after Bing Crosby's White Christmas. So again like on the one hand, the song sounded the exact same when it was a flop in a nine and it was a hit. The difference was this bizarre flukey lucky moment of distribution in Blackboard Jungle. Um, But it suggests that it's really difficult to predict, sort of before the fact, whether a song is going to be a massive hit or a massive flop. Sometimes the same song

can be both within the same ten month period. And we all know songs that we know and love, And how come this album never took off half them? No one's discovered this band. It's not the quality of the music, it's the distribution right above a certain threshold of quality, above a certain threshold of catchiness. What matters to become a hit is not more catchinus or more quality, but

rather superior distribution. And Blackboard Jungle is Glenn Ford, Sydney is Sydney Portier, and I think Sydney Party is in this, Yes, and um and Francis. I'm just trying to think of of the main It was The Stars teen it was it was not one of the great hits of nineteen five.

It was the thirteenth biggest movie of the year. So, I mean, just imagine being in Nate Silver about this, trying to predict that a discarded and forgotten B side from nineteen fifty four played over the credits of the thirteenth biggest movie of nineteen fifty five is going to be the biggest rock and roll song in music history.

It's It's completely amazing and unpredictable. So you you talk about a a Yahoo research project in where they're looking at the spread of online messages on Twitter, More than of the messages didn't diffuse at all, and the clicks came directly from the original source or one degree of separation. So so what does that tell us? What does that mean? Are we still in a broadcast one too many sort

of world? Yeah? I think that today when people say that went viral, what they really often mean is that got big really quickly, and I'm not sure how, But there's two ways that information can spread online, broadly speaking. Way number one is pure virality, pure one to one, one to two shares. So so give us an example of that, because we all know of things that we think are viral, but you're telling us some of these things really aren't. For sure. Let's say I publish an

article on the Atlantic. Um it doesn't hit the Atlantic homepage, doesn't hit any major a broadcast plot form. But I share it with one friend on Facebook. He shares it with two of his friends, he shares it with a handful of his friends, and it grows over many, many, many generations of intimate shares. That's one way, right, That's how a virus spreads. That is true virility. But there's another way that information spreads online that's not a million one to one moments, but a handful of one to

one million moments. So, for example, let's say an article that I write he hits the front page of Drudge, or hits the front page of Reddit, or is shared by Oprah on Facebook. There's nothing about that mechanism that is viral. Millions of people are going to see that article from the same source. So It's very similar to that which we are comfortable calling a broadcast, like on television when twenty million people are tuned into the same program all at once. So the Super Bowl, the Oscars,

things like that. Super Bowl clearly broad list. Let me challenge you on Reddit because Reddit has this built in

virility mechanism where things are up voted, down voted. So for something to make it to the front page of Reddit, where it may subsequently be broadcast, it has to have some degree of I don't want to say virility, but I guess virility work appeal, Yes, right where it's getting up voted and up voted and up voted, and that's almost a one to one or one to a few before it reaches the front page where it then becomes

broadcast to everybody. And this is what's really interesting about the age that we're living through right now, which is that you know, there was a period where technology was either social or broadcast. Telephones are clearly just social, that is a one to one conversation. Um Television is purely broadcast. It is just one to tens of millions. But most of the technologies that we have today are an interesting

combination of social and broadcast. Facebook, for example, allows family members to talk to each other while seeing articles from Time magazine in Bloomberg. Reddit is a really is it really fascinating combination because articles are up voted socially by individual users, but once they hit a large page like the Reddit dot com home page, it suddenly is a broadcast.

My contention is that if you that for every piece of content that we think goes quote unquote viral online, it almost always needs at least one or hopefully a

handful of broadcast moments. But because we sometimes don't see these broadcast moments in the information cascade, because for example, um, your friend reads an article on reddit dot com and then shares it with another one of your friends, and then you see that friend's article on Facebook, you can't see that it was broadcast on Reddit dot com, and so I call it a dark broadcast. But my contention is that broadcast moments are still responsible for popular for

driving popularity. So let's talk about a couple of pop confections. You mentioned some of these in the book Call Me Maybe, or All about the That Base. These things seemingly, especially to someone like me over thirty way over thirty, have exploded out of nowhere, and then they've just become in escaped, in escapable. How how do hits like that? How are they manufactured? So Call Me Maybe is a really interesting

example of a so called viral hit. You could say, on the one hand, that Call Me Maybe his popularity was engendered online, which suggests that maybe there was a purely viral mechanism to its to its popularity, But in fact the song was sort of hovering in like the mid level tiers of Canadian pop track popularity. When a little known star named Justin bieberi Canadian star indeed, found it, tweets it out, and makes a YouTube video of him and his girlfriend's Lena Gomez dancing to it. That video

goes absolutely wild. And it's only then after he releases that video that Called Me Maybe becomes a sensation that's on the broadcast. So what's the broadcast? It is Justin Bieber, a celebrity with the fall lowing of any traditional broadcaster, Time magazine, right, yeah, exactly, USA Today, broadcasting this song to his millions and millions of followers. And it's only then that the song becomes a hit. So you use the phrase the audience of my audience. That is truly

how things go viral. Unless you're Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift or someone with tens of millions of Twitter followers, you tweeted out and even though half of them are bots, it doesn't matter. You tweeted out and that goes out

to millions of people and and an equivalent number of algorithms. Right, yeah, I Right after my chapter on virility and broadcast, I say, okay, well, let's say that you're trying to build a hit product or a hit company, but you're starting from a really, really small base and you don't have access to the Justin Bieber's the world. What do you do to be

to make things that people want to talk about? And a way that I think about this is that when I write an article, for that article to go big, it can't just be appealing to my first audience, to my first level of readers, and for them to simply say okay, cool and then click out and never talk about it again. I need a handful of them to want to pass it along because they think that passing along that article will make them my readers look smart, uh,

morally in touch with the world. Um surprisingly, sort of counterintuitive about what is true and not true about economics. So in a way, the psychology I have to employees to think. I can't just be appealing to the my audience. I have to make my audience think that they want to share it with their audience, the audience of my audience. And so I think that it's sort of it. It

provides I think, a really nice frame to see. You know, how do how do you create articles or you know, essays or or podcasts that appeal to a as broad a possible as a listenership and viewership. And that's too to cree ate something that your listeners feel like, well, it will make them look good if they pass it along. So we we have a situation and I'm reminded of this from a quote from the book where it's a

winner take all society to a large degree. Another previous guest on the show, um, the top one percent of bands and solo artists now earn eight percent of all the revenues of recorded music. That's an astonishing Parado principle. That's just it's not steroids. It's eighty two one that it's just the stuff. So what does this mean for the non justin biebers who want to try and get something out there, whether whether it's an article, whether it's

a small film or television show, or a song. What does this mean is is this a doomed effort or do you need a million of these things in order to find that that one percent? This is? This is an awesome question. And I think about this a lot. And there's lots of for an answers that I provide in the book. But let me talk about one that I that I think might be most interesting, um, which is this concept from sociology of cults. Um. What is

a cult? Uh? Accult is a measured rebellion against a mainstream. So it is people thinking that they are special and the mainstream is wrong. And there's lots of interishing research that suggests that when people hear a song or read an article, or experience a product that they think gets them specifically to the exclusion of the mainstream, that they're more likely to share it with their close friends in order to sort of draw that tight circle of kinship

and say, see, there's someone who gets us. So one way to employ the audience of my audience principle somewhat paradoxically, is that if you want to be really big, start by making something that's small and specific, because that small specific message or small specific product is more likely to get your audience, your consumer base to say this, this thing gets me, and I'm going to share it with

my close friends to show that it gets me. And so I talked to this h and an Etsy designer who ended up being one of the most successful um Etsy sellers in that company's history. He makes little pinback buttons, and one of the lessons that he gave me was, um, you know, of course he's you know, as mainstream as an Etsy person can be right now. I think it's the top seller on one of its um platforms for

several years. But he said, I don't want to make pinback buttons that express purely banal thoughts, purely generic thoughts. I want my pin back buttons to express something that's weird, because in a weird way, it's the weird message that makes people want to spread it along, not the message that says, hey, I'm just like everybody else. The market related quote to that that I've always loved is everybody wants to be a contrarian. Yeah, right, But if everybody

is a contrarian. They're just part of the crowd. And so you go through this whole of mirrors where people want it to be different enough so they could look down on the crowd, yet they become part of a crowd. It's it's there's a I don't know if you saw the Money Python movie, The Life recording to Brian, Life of Brian, Life Recording um Life of Brian. I love the scene where he's speaking to the crowd, you're all individuals, and they chant back in response, we are all individuals.

It's that exact moment. Well, it is. I mean, this is one of the really interesting paradoxical things about human psychology, which is that in a weird way, we feel more like individuals sometimes when when we belong to a group, which doesn't make any sense, right, I feel more like an individual when I belong to a group. But this is precisely what cults are all about. It's all about individuals saying society doesn't get me. But if I enter this different group of people, then I can be my

true self. I can realize my true individuality, but only if I find the right group, right, And so I think in many ways, this is one of the things that that you know, marketers and advertisers that think about culting in their own messages try to do um. You think about one of the most famous culting advertisements of all time, Apple Night four. You are defined by that which you are not. We're not the talitarian big blue IBM company, right. We are the people who throw with

it a hammer. Yeah, it was a hammer at the screen, a big brother like we are. We are rebels. This is a rebellion, and every cult is a rebellion against a mainstream. In many ways, I think identity is antagonistic. Identity is that which we are not, and so in many ways, I think that you see lots of advertising right now which is all about allowing consumers to define themselves by that which they aren't. That that's really fascinating. I'm a huge um comedy nerd, and I love Mill

Brooks two thousand year old man. And there's a line in it that speaks exactly what you're describing, and he says, he sings the hell with everybody except Cave seventy three. And that's that's the cult of of that it And it's hilarious if you if you haven't, if you're not familiar that it's UM if you listen to the I didn't realize he was such a big fan of historical comedy. Between life and Well, it was I'm not quite contemporary.

Well Life of Brian is contemporary with me. But all the mel Brooks stuff, especially going back to the two thousand year old Man, was talk about viral hits. If you read the story, he tells the story of how that went viral and I don't remember if it was UM when he sat down with Seinfelder, when he sat down with UM David Steinberg, but he tells the story of it was party stick that him and Carl Reiner used to do and no one ever thought and finally

someone says, you two have to record it. Uh. Brooks was a genius improviser, as was Rhiner, and Einer would take the role of the interviewer and they would just do this and people would fall out of out of their chairs. Finally someone says in them, you gotta record this. Might have been carried grant. You have to record this, and he when it's recorded, he takes two hour. He goes, listen,

I need two albums. I'm leaving the country, and he goes to England and he comes back and he says, I have to tell you, the Queen loved it, and if you listen to it, it's just really the most Some of the stuff is just beyond beyond hilarious. So we're down to our last half hour. There are a couple of things I wanna get to before we jump to our favorite questions. Let me let me just reference this quote of yours about books, which I found quite fascinating.

A reader both performs the book, attends the performance, and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra and audience. So explain that a little bit, because I think that is a fascinating take on books. It's interesting because we live in a world right now where with movies and virtual reality, there are all sorts of experiences that were essentially just were given them, right, everyone agrees w a movie looks like,

everyone agrees, and what the song sounds like. But books are really interesting because it's this weird arbitrage where I, the writer, have an idea, a mental image that I have to translate into letters, and then you the reader, read these letters and create your own movie. And sometimes it's the same movie, but it's rarely the exact same movie. It's slightly different. You're imagining different pictures, you're making different

connections to to mel Brooks. And So I think one thing that is still so special about books, even in an age of proliferating and ever more developed media technology. UM, books are special because they're ours. They belong to us in a way that the movies don't, because we are responsible for creating a movie from them. The seraph's themselves, the print itself cannot be revealing of anything. We have

to interpret it. We have to sinest, the sinest, the size it into words and images and connections and our own ideas and our own self help. Um. And so I still think that books are special because they are more individual. The individual has a larger role in internalizing it, and they do for something like a movie or a song. That that's that's quite fascinating. Let's let's talk about film and the quote from the producer who said, the film producer said, you could look at twenty things in a

success twenty five things in a successful genre. Change one and you have something new and interesting. Change them all and you have parity. Right. That's that's quite a fascinating meta view of films. Yeah, it's it's a fascinating meta view of films. And it clicks right back into one of the first thesis of the book, which is that we love that which is familiar with a slight twist. And you know, you can think about this for all sorts of hits that you know, what is Star Wars.

It is a Western set in outer space. It is in many ways an unbelievably conventional story. An orphan goes on a supernatural quest to defeat a villain who is involved in his origin story and returns to the normal world as a hero. That's Lord of the Rings, that is Harry Potter to a t it's the hero's journey. It's Joseph Campbell. But Joseph Campbell basically says all these stories are one and the same, with with interesting variation, right.

And what's so fascinating about Campbell's theory is that the individual storytellers aren't trying necessarily to copy each other. They're just trying to tell a good story. But there are certain elements of that which is a you know, capital g good capital, a s story that seemed to be relatively universal. We need an element of relatability. We don't want to um attach ourselves to a hero who's already invincible.

The hero has to start off normal UM. He has to go on a journey with its pock marked with all sorts of defeats. He there has to be you know, defeat and recovery and defeat and recovery, and then finally he has to accomplish something that is not only powerful and gives him a glory, but that he learns from. And it makes me a better person because it tells us that our own journeys are self improvements as well.

So as I'm reading this in the book, a name pops into my head because it's so counter to that, and it's Kevin Spacey, and three movies jump out in me. By the way these are, you can see this isn't anything I was doing deep research on. It was just

notes I scribbled in the margins. Usual suspects, l A Confidential and American Beauty, none of the real Could you think he's the main character in each but those usual um art types of of UM narrative building to a climax than the anti climax, and everybody learning their little lessons along the way. They're not quite in those movies. And it's a great point. I think that those movies aren't necessarily I mean, they are famous, and certainly I

think I think the usual suspects. My guess that that's the biggest box office box office performer was pretty big also and an American, I mean, there's won awards among my favorites. I think that, you know, the the awards circuit movies follow slightly different rules. And I asked, when I was talking to Vincent Bruces and talking to the movie producer, what Bruces is the person who came up with the algorithm for looking at what makes the script

more popular us popular? Exactly exactly, So we're so the first thing we're talking about, which is hero's journeys, I think apply most specifically to blockbusters, right, two movies that are not trying to be Best Picture nominees but are just trying to maximize their audience. So I asked him, I said, okay, well, is there a formula? Is there a rule to Best Picture movies? What would that rule be?

And he had an interesting answer. He said, look at Best Actor and Best Actress nominations every year and tie those two best Picture. You almost always have a very clear relationship between the Best Leading Actor nominations and the Best Picture nominations, which says to me, him talking to me, which says to me that the what we consider to be quality movies are not heroes journeys, but complicated investigations of individuals into self into self, essentially stages for uh,

complex acting. And what you see American beauty. Both Kevin Spacey and oh god, that Benning, we're both nominated for Oscars, And I forgot who the one she won? He didn't, although he's won before. And I forgot the woman who played one for age girl interest. Oh yeah, who became like a hot television actress for a while. Um uh, but you know his his performance in Usual Suspects and astonishing is astonishing and l A Confidential is again for Guy Pearson, for Russell Crowe. It's it's ways for the

characters to grow. So great movies, quality movies, Best Picture nominee movies are are disproportionately character studies. And so the formula is not let's send this character on a hero's journey. No no no, no, that is too conventional for a character study. A character study is an investigation of an individual's realization of self in a way that doesn't necessarily follow a Campbell's art journey. And the book is just out recently. Have you gotten any of the comic book nerds telling

you how wrong you are about Superman? Uh? No, but maybe you can be the first to tell me Superman wasn't born with superpowers. It's only the people from his planet in the light of the yellow sun of our solar system that gives him his power. And by the way, I am not a comic book nerd, but I hang out with enough comic book nerds that even I know that, so you will get some I will get some angry readers.

I guess his his his His story in our universe, or at least in our solar system, clearly begins with invincibility, which in a in a way makes him I think a a interesting exception to the rule, which is that most of our superheroes begin without any element of invincibility. Begins Spider Man begin right exactly. I mean, obviously there's uh,

you know, there's kryptonite. Um, but I wonder whether that is one of the things that has made it more difficult for Superman to catch on in in this century is that there are so many movies now that are made in the familiar heroes journey formula where the character always begins um with obvious flaws that even the new Batman movies that came out you reference Iron Man in the book because they're the flaws are so manifest even after he achieves his quote unquote superpowers, when this is

true with Batman as well. Um and even with Spider Man, there's this question of, you know, either the media hates him and he's always trying to, you know, realize whether or not he wants to be Spider Man or be with Mary Jane. That that the his heroism is always you know, darkened in a way by the fact that he can never truly sort of you know, transcend humanity in our problems. Really interesting, and I didn't mean to go into a comic digression. Last question before we get

to our our standard questions fake news. How does fake news go viral? Is it broadcast by something or is it a Because what what I've noticed and I don't want to throw rocks at Fox News or or bright Bord or other, but what I've noticed this Fox News is this giant broadcast entity, some not quite credible, not quite legitimate um fourth to your blog will write something outrageous. We just saw this happen with the Swedish defense expert

talking about the terrorist attacks. Turns out there was no terrorist attack, and sweet and this guy Sweden has already disavowed. You don't know who the hell this guy is, but some crazy wing nut blog references him. He gets picked up on Fox and now suddenly there's this whole and then the president sees it and starts talking about it.

Do you think I would say about this? First? As you've already acknowledged, there are obvious broadcast mechanisms by which that which seems to be quote unquote viral fake news

is not actually viral at all. It is broadcast by Bright part or by info Wars, or by Macedonian teenagers with a Russian propaganda backing UH and a whole bunch of botan net computers and a bunch of exactly The second deeper point, though, is that familiarity, the biased toward familiarity, is so powerful that in many ways what readers have always wanted from the news is to learn that that which they had previously intuited is in fact correct and

backed by massive evidence confirmed my existing beliefs. Please, it's it is a confirmation bias cascade. And what fake news is, uh, it's sometimes just propaganda and that is pure broadcast, but lots of what is fake news, which by which actually just means news that turns out to not be true, which is something we've been living with a lot longer

than just six months. We want to believe that the biases that we've just arrived at are correct, and we want to seek out places that will reliably tell us that our biases are correct. Because what was the first question of this entire segment, fluency. We like ideas that are easy to think about, and there is nothing easier to think about than a beautiful essay that tells us

that everything we think is true. Moreover, there's nothing more difficult to think about then an articulate essay that says that all these ideas we consider more ably abhorrent are in fact moral. That's a really tough thing to consume. So naturally, attention markets like Facebook, which is just you know, an attention clearing house, will gravitate toward fluency, even though

that's not necessarily great for our civic body. So your book did two things for me that that I find interesting and and within now I'll get a little fractal and a little metap depending if I look down or look up first. One of the things within the book tells us why we like things that make us feel smart, knowledgeable, A member of occult that gets to look with some

disdain at at the non members. My career long interest in behavioral economics basically is just a little bit of egotism, saying, oh, look, I figured out that everybody's wet wear is flawed. Are and I smart? And it turns out no, you're just confirming your own um issues. But the more interesting one.

A previous guest uh is Lawrence Juwber. We were talking about off the air, and he's this guitar prodigy and well known in fact, before the led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven decision came out, he explained how both the stair with to Heaven and the piece that it's supposedly stole from are both based on this classic prod chord progression

from the sixteen hundreds, and he plays the original. He plays Zepp when he plays the one that's supposedly stolen, and it's pretty clear they're both derivative of the multi century old one. But and I really like his his classical music, and I like his original recordings. But he's done a couple of albums of of Beatles covers, and you explain why I am so totally in love with his work. It's the Beatles songs you know and love, but presented in such a unique no recording tricks, it's

just him an acoustic guitar with a um. I think it's gad mad. Is the tuning, it's an it's an open tuning approach. And it's your book explained why he has two Beatle albums. He has a Wings album, and I used to think I didn't like Wings because it was sappy, and and then you find out, oh the beautiful songs when presented correctly. And now coming next month he has coming in March, he has another Beatles albums.

He's he's got about two dozen albums. But your book helped me figure out why I am just completely entranced by his covers of Beatles. They're familiar enough that you immediately recognize the melody, but they're so different and so well done. You can't help but say, ah, that's a song I know really well but with the twist, and thank you for explaining that. Thank you. The last thing I would say is that, well, first of the time we're listening to music, we're listening to a song we've

already heard, according to musicologists, makes sense. Yeah, powerful bias for familiarity in song. But more broadly, I think there is obviously a commercial economic interest in what I call neophilia, making consumers love new things. The way that GDP grows, the way that profits are made is by getting people to buy new stuff. That is, the will get people to buy new stuff. But this macro economic instinct toward the aphilia is always cross cut with consumers actual preference

with that which is familiar. We are very happy wearing the same clothes over and over. In fact, we did so for thousands of years until the thirteen hundreds. We are very happy naming our kids the same names over and over throughout history. In fact, first names only became a fashion in the eighteen hundreds. We're happy to listen to watch the same Netflix shows over and over, listen to the same songs over and over. In many ways, I think the cultural appetite for new products is an

economic creation. It is something that had to be created after the Industrial age in order to allow the factories to sell as much as they could make. You references with cars in particular with fashion today that if because most clothes you buy, you could buy them and wear them forever, But if you have to go out and buy the new color this year or the new pattern,

well that's that's quite good for the manufact right. In short, markets are neo philick, consumers are neophobic, and hits are that special place in the middle just new enough, just surprising enough, and yet perfectly familiar, most advanced yet acceptable. MAYA All right, so let's jump right into our favorite questions. So you've been at the Atlantic? What what were you doing before you were at the Atlantic? I was a journalism student at Northwestern University and you were a triple major.

If I read your background, I was a triple major. I should take that record, so it does not count. So first of all, every journalism major is uh invited to, if not practically demanded, to major in something else. That was political science for me, And then I realized there was this special trick in Northwestern where if you double counted a lot of classes and wrote a five thousand

word paper, you could get a legal studies major. And I figured that, in sort of the long tail possibility that I would want to become a lawyer, I should do that. But I sit before you today, having not taken a single law class, sense I said, before you, having gone to law school, and I'm so happy I don't, as do the majority of law school graduates. Um, let's talk about early mentors. Who who were the people who helped god your career along. I had some great teachers

in high school and in college. A lot of my mentors were actually theater directors. I was an actor before I was a journalist, and I think that acting is a very useful education in journalism because it requires the individual to develop a kind of internal sense of authenticity and an external sense of entertainment. And so much of great journalism, I think is that which is informative is true, but also is informative truth expressed in entertaining ways storytelling.

Storytelling absolutely, let's let's talk about authors before we get to books. Who what authors, journalists? Writers influenced your approach to write? Uh, this is a great question and of a question because you were, in fact one of them. Well, I'll tell you this. When I started off writing in two thousand nine, there were a handful of blogs that were absolute must for me to develop an expertise in economics, as re Klein was one, Matti Glecias, Ryan A Event,

Felix Salmon, the Big Picture. Um, so there were a handful of these blogs that I absolutely needed to read every single week to stay on top of the crap, the financial crash and the recovery. And so you were a huge up there. How about someone else? Oh, I think I named four others, but yeah, Ryan A. Van matt Ezra. Occasionally people will say stuff like that, and I still have not learned how to accept a compliment. It's just like, come on, stop because because my wife

will tell you. My wife will tell you that I'm still the same idiot I was twenty years ago. But you know, well, your your economic idiocy was absolutely illuminating for me in two thousand nine. Weren't when we were all idiots. And so to be the smartest man in the room nearly to be the say I frequently say, I am unburned by a classical economics education. And that

was a huge extremely unburned by that education. But sometimes that's an advantage when you're looking at things and you're not you know, talk about hit makers and factories every wolf Street. Economists them come from the same schools, the same training, training programs, so when something is a little outside the box, they're oblivious to it. And it took all The people who saw the crisis coming were none, for the most part, non economists, right as mathematicians, some

some unusual background. I would say this. I think that when I didn't know anything about economics, it was useful because if I if at nine am I had a question I needed the answer to, and I talked to a couple of economists before one pm. At two pm, I could write the story remembering my ignorance at eight thirty in the morning. And so in a way, I think I was able to explain some of these really amplicated issues in simpler ways because I remembered what the

first questions were of the ignorant person. I was so so I had so recently departed from the land of ignorance. And you've done a really good job. A lot of the things that you've written in our mutual admiration society. They're very, very are well articulated to somebody who may be a late person but wants to understand a more complex or nuanced issue. And you've always done a really nice job with that, which is probably why the book is so interesting and does such a nice job explaining

some really interesting concepts. Speaking of books, tell us about some of your favorite books. By the way, this is the question I get more than any other from readers. Are Hey, what books do your your guests like? Yeah, Um, there's a handful of books about cognitive psychology that are just mainstays and uninteresting, like Thinking Fast and Slow. I thought was utterly fascinating. Uh. I get a lot of my insight about the world and particularly about how to

write from novels. Um. There's a couple sort of hidden allusions to the Corrections throughout this book. Some of my favorite lines the corrections sort of um slightly modulated to

UH to talk about new issues. There's a line from from Frandsen's book where he says, um, uh afternoons are a cavity in which infections breed um uh lazy afternoons, or cavity in which infections breed Um when he's talking about the frustrations of a of an older character, and I think I have a line where I I um, I steal from him a bit, while noting in the index where I say boredom is a cavity in which creativity breeds, because I do find that sometimes it's those

moments when you're bored when you come up with that aha insight that answers the question you previously couldn't when you were at work. UM. So that's a that's a great book that I love. UM. I love the work of Bill Bryson, A Short History of nearly Everything was in the Woods at Home one summer. He is is a brilliant popular historian and a genius at using topic A to discuss topics be through Z. He's wonderful. It's sort of zooming in on a topic and then broadening out.

And I love writing that understands that every every question has historical context. Here's a question, a new question. You'll be the first the guinea pig for this one. UM, tell us about failure. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from it. I think every article that I write is a failure. Large or small, and well, now that's a little bit of an exaggeration, is no, no, but but of course it is every everything that I've written this book, the last column that

I wrote. I'll look back on it after two weeks, back on it after a month, and I'll think, I miss this, I miss this. And I think that one of the more important things for writers to do is to maintain this awareness that everything that they write, everything they will ever do, is a failure in some way.

And it's dispiriting when I see some uh, some older journalists who I will name and certainly don't sit in the room where I'll see that they they they've attained a level of fame at which they no longer need that feedback loop. They no longer feel like they have to read the comments or read the mean tweets. They'll

just say, I'm above it. And when you lose that feedback loop, and you lose the the expected rush of criticism, you lose touch with the thing that journalism is supposed to be about, which is a journey out of wrongness, not necessarily to truth, but always out of wrongness. And journey out of wrongness. Yeah, and and and that's you know,

this book is a journey out of wrongness. There there are dozens of things I can tell you right now that I wish i'd put in it, But um, you know, that's why we have an opportunity to write new articles, do new podcasts, write new books. You describe that lack of feedback loop. As you were just putting words to that, my mental image was, oh, he's describing former journalists who

become TV pundits. Am I today some degree? That's I don't know if you were referencing anybody specifically, but I immediately thought of, well, this guy is basically hasn't done anything new for twenty years, and and that's why they're so out of touch because their frame of reference is decades removed from what's happening today. If that was your implication, then I accurately communicated my thought. So I know I

only have you for another eight minutes or so. Let's let's jump to our our last three questions, and and these are my favorite questions. Another yet another question, which was reader or listener derived What do you do to keep mentally and or physically fit? What do you do to relax or for enjoyment outside of work? Uh? So let's start with physically fit. UM. I hate working out. I working out to me is like brushing my teeth. I don't like the process, but I hate having not

done it. Um. And so I have a very nice physic. My only urge in life is that I have a physical trainer. Um. And I pay him to kick my butt, because if I didn't pay him to kick my butt, I wouldn't go to the gym, and I would just feel sad about myself. I am a huge proponent of procrastination and um, mindless, pointless relaxation. I will take some Saturday afternoons and I will just lie down on a couch with a coffee and a bagel and watch ten

hours of Law and Order. And I think, if you don't strike me as that sort of oh, if they book looks like it was written by someone who reads deeply and widely. I love reading deeply. I love reading widely, and I like reading deeply and widely so that I can reward myself with ten hours of Law and Order on the couch. I I think that you know, everyone, let's put it this way. Meditation is a hot concept

right now. This idea of you know, reaching a sort of a personal nirvana or allowing a quietude to descend upon one's self. Um, my meditation is Law and Order SVU. That sounds sick. You know exactly what is happening on Leader SPU. But there's something just so beautifully predictable and satisfying about every episode. A problem a solution, a problem a solution, and it's so tidy and so neat, and it allows for a kind of, um a mental spring

cleaning every Saturday. That's great. I'm gonna I'm gonna share something odd television wise with you. About five years ago, we're watching some lure in Order and there's the scene where they're doing the autopsy explaining what happened, and I decide I don't need to see yet another human body. And by the way, I love these cartoon war movies, and I love these superhero movies, but it's cartoonish violence. And the problem with C S I and Lawyer it's

real and it's visceral. And I just decided to stop every last one of those. And so when I see somebody get killed or blown up, it's purely cartoonish. It's not real. Because and then when you see a movie like um, saving Private Private Ryan. The impact is so much greater than because you do get I'm a little bit desensitized, so much so much c s I that I'm like, well, you know, like of course, like say,

the Private Ryan's opening scene is absolutely start wrenching. Yeah. Um, but there is a lot of ghoulish stuff on broadcast television. Tons absolutely tons. Um. Let's talk about advice. So you're not that far removed from college, and I kind of would say, you're still a millennial, right I am. So what advice do you give to a recent college grad or a college student who comes up to you and says, I'm interested in journalism, becoming an author, writing books. What

do you say to a person like that? The this is a lesson, a piece of advice that comes out of that chapter. The audience of my audience, which is that there's a paradox to scale. I think, Um, people who want to be big sometimes think I have to immediately reach the largest possible audience. But no, weird way. Um. The best way to produce things that take off is

to produce small things. To become a small expert, to become the you know, the best person on the internet at understanding the application of medicaid uh to on minority children or something like that. And the reason I think this is true is I call it's like my Tokyo example. If you go to Tokyo, you'll see there are all

sorts of really really strange shops. They'll be like a shop that's like only nineteen seventies vinyl and like nineteen eighties whiskey or something, And that doesn't make any sense if it's a shop in like a Des Moines suburb, right, de Moines suburbs to exist, you have to be subway. You have to hit the mass market immediately. But in Tokyo, where there's thirty forty million people within a train ride of the city, right then your market is forty million.

And within that forty million, sure there's a couple of thousand people who love nineteen seventies music and nineteen ettie whiskey. The Internet is Tokyo. The Internet allows you to be niche at scale and ironically, the best which at scale Niche at scale uh And this is a concept in the last chapter of the book um and Uh. Niche at scale, I think is something that young people should aspire to. And our final question, what is it that you know about journalism today that you wish you knew

when you just got out of school. Um, I wish coming out of school. You know I was in I was a political science major, and I do wish I had taken more economic classes number one, but also really history classes that I've had to catch up on my history education since they graduated from school. I think that understanding academia, understanding research papers, that isn't the most important

thing I think of being a good journalist. I think the most important thing is understanding where we've come from. I wish I had taken more history in college, and I and still in the process of catching up. We have been speed king with Derek Thompson. He is the author of hit Makers, The Science of Popularity, and an Age of Distraction. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look up an Inch or down an inch on Apple iTunes. You can see any of the other hundred

and forty two or so such previous conversations. We love your comments, feedback, end suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss if I did not thank our crack staff who helps us put together this podcast each week. Medina Parwana is my recording engineer. Taylor Riggs is my booker. Producer. Mike Battnick our head of research. I'm Barry Reholts. You're listening

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