[MUSIC PLAYING]
MICHAEL: It's a great pleasure.
And really, I'm extremely
personally excited today
to welcome Derek to Google.
He's both a lifelong
friend of mine,
as well as being a senior editor
at "The Atlantic" magazine
where he writes about economics,
labor markets, and the media.
Derek is a regular contributor
on NPR'S "Here and Now."
And you may have
also seen him on TV
where he is currently a regular
contributor to CNBC and MSNBC.
He's appeared on
numerous lists, including
Forbes and "Ink Magazine's"
30 under 30, as well
as being one of the top
Twitter feeds to follow,
as he's received praise from
"Time Magazine" in that regard.
His new book, "Hit Makers--
the Science of Popularity
in an Age of Distraction," hit
bookshelves and audio books
in February.
And Derek is now in the midst
of a nationwide book tour.
So without further ado, it is
my great pleasure and honor
to welcome Derek Thompson.
[APPLAUSE]
DEREK THOMPSON:
Thank you, Michael.
I also want to thank my friend
Robbie Depicciotto sitting here
in the front row,
also a lifelong friend
since kindergarten.
I also want to
thank this, which is
going to type every single
word that I said as I say it,
which is such an awesome thing
to have right in front of me.
I know the technology exists
and I know that screens exist,
but I've never quite had the
experience of having a screen
read back to me
exactly my words.
So if I say something
extremely stupid,
I'll know just to
look right up there,
in order to edit it, which
would be helpful for my day job,
actually.
So day job-- I'm a senior
editor at "The Atlantic."
I write about economics
in the media mostly.
And this is my first book.
I wanted to write what I
called an unsentimental book
about a sentimental subject.
People feel very
emotionally about hits,
their favorite movies,
their favorite songs.
Even the favorite
means can sometimes
draw, elicit an emotional
response, I suppose.
And I wanted to write an
unsentimental book about this.
Why do we like some
things and not others?
Why do things go,
quote unquote, "viral"
or, as I"ll soon explain, not.
So the seven-word thesis of
the book, to kick us off,
is familiarity over novelty
and distribution over content.
And I'll say it one more time.
Familiarity over novelty and
distribution over content.
And that means that I
think we live in a world
that I call a cult of the new.
We are told that we need
to listen to new music
and watch new movies
and consume new articles
and buy new clothes and stay
up with the new fashion cycle.
But in fact, if you
go to human psychology
and you talk to
psychologists, particularly
evolutionary psychologists,
what you'll discover
is that people actually
don't like new things at all.
They hate new things.
They particularly hate things
that are extremely new.
If anything, what we
like in particular
are familiar surprises.
We love new products
that secretly remind us
of old products.
We love new songs with
old chord structures,
new movies that are sequels
and adaptations and reboots.
And even in my line
of work, people
love to read and
pass along articles
that provide a new joke, a new
frame, a new simile or metaphor
to explain that which the
reader has already intuited
and sort of serve their
biases back to them.
In many ways, journalism is
essentially a business of--
or opinion journalism,
going by popularity,
is a confirmation bias industry.
Distribution over content
is also really important.
And that's where I'm going
to start to dive right in.
One of the most controversial
ideas from the book
is something that I
call the viral myth.
I think that when something
becomes popular out of nowhere
now, it's become casual and it's
become the patois to say, oh,
that thing went viral.
In epidemiology, viral means
something very specific.
It means an idea that is sort
of passed along organically
between people,
and it grows over
many, many, many generations
to become a pandemic.
And there, I think, has grown
up in the world in the last 15
years, particularly
since the tipping point,
a sense that ideas do the same
and that the way that ideas
go big is that they go viral.
They have a million
one-to-one moments.
For a long period of
time, it was practically
impossible to analyze
whether or not ideas actually
spread in this way.
There was no way to
scientifically study,
for example, the spread of
bell-bottoms in the 1970s--
very, very difficult to do.
Online, however, information
leaves a data trail,
as people in this audience
are probably extremely aware.
You can trace the
flow of information
from the original
sender to the sendee,
watch how something like
a Tweet or a YouTube video
spreads over generations
and becomes a hit.
And when data scientists look
at the information cascade--
the map of that idea or video or
article sort of coming alive--
it doesn't, in fact, look like
the map of a disease spreading.
It looks much more like
diffuse broadcasts.
So if you sort of imagine a
spectrum of how information
spreads, on the one hand,
you have typhus, which
only spreads between people.
And on the other hand,
you have the Super Bowl--
a single broadcast to 150
million people all at once.
And nobody says that an
advertisement in the Super Bowl
goes viral.
That's sort of
on-its-face absurd to say.
It clearly infected 115
million people all at once.
But online, what
seems to be happening
is that there are many, many
broadcast moments, which
are obfuscated to
the ultimate reader
or consumer of that information
so that the end consumer thinks
that something has gone
viral when, in fact, the most
important reason
why it was spread
is through a
broadcast mechanism.
So let me take a
very easy example.
Let's take an article that
I write for "The Atlantic"
magazine, for the Atlantic.com.
I post it online.
And Drudge picks it up.
Drudge is read by millions
and millions of people
all over the world.
Let's say two of them read
that article on Drudge,
and then they Gchat me about it.
Well, it might be
sort of seductive
for me to say, this article
is clearly going viral,
because two people
Gchatted it to me.
That's a social mechanism.
But the most important
way that this idea spread
is through the broadcast
mechanism that was Drudge.
And it turns out that across in
Twitter and YouTube studies--
that's where these data
scientists at Microsoft
and Yahoo, particularly
Duncan Watts, who I think
might have spoken
here a few years ago.
He's a data scientist.
When they study the spread of
these pieces of information,
what they've said is that they
most likely spread through
broadcast mechanisms, rather
than social mechanisms,
that it's not, in other words,
about a million one-to-one
moments, but rather about a
handful of one-to-one-million
moments.
Some people say, OK, I
guess that's interesting,
but it just sounds like
an academic discussion
of information cascades.
Why could it possibly be
relevant to my purposes?
And I think it's relevant
for both producers
and consumers of information.
For producers of information,
I think sometimes we
get caught up in a cult
of virality where we say,
there are certain
ingredients to content
that can make something
automatically go viral.
And if I make content that
includes those ingredients,
I can just dump it
anywhere on the internet,
and it will spread organically
and automatically, the same way
that if you have
typhus in a population,
it will just
automatically spread,
because it is inherently viral.
And what we've
essentially discovered
in a lot of these studies is
that that's just not the case.
Of course, there
are some things that
are more likely to be
shared than other things.
An incredibly emotional video of
a tiger reuniting with someone
who used to raise him
when he was six months old
is going to spread further than
some article about the Canadian
Parliament.
High arousal emotions clearly
get people to click and then
share more than something that's
an article about a topic they
know nothing about.
Emotionality and
familiarity are incredibly
potent when it comes
to popularizing
a piece of content.
But they're not enough.
The distribution strategy,
the distribution mechanism,
the sources that
these places hit
is more important
than the qualities
of the content itself.
The second reason that
the viral myth, I think,
is really important to know
about is on the consumer side.
I think at a time of declining
trust in establishment media,
a lot of readers equate
volume with veracity.
That is, they say, well,
I saw this article shared
by five people on Facebook.
Therefore, it must be true,
even though I distrust
all of these right wing
and maybe even left wing
sources of news.
But in fact, if
that reader searched
for the provenance of that
piece of information--
searched for the
broadcast moment
when it spread to millions
and millions of people,
five of whom shared it
with them on Facebook,
they might realize that it was
coming from propaganda, that it
was coming from Macedonian
teenagers or some far
left or far right web blog.
And so it's really
important, I think,
for consumers to seek out
the provenance of information
and, again, not
trust the viral myth.
As I've gone around the country
and talked about this issue,
I've confronted what I call
two degrees of Trump, which
is to say that I tell
one story and then
I open it up to questions.
And the first question is
always about Donald Trump
and how does your book
explain Donald Trump.
And the short answer
is that my book
was finished in September 2016.
So like everyone in
this room, I would
guess I did not think that
what happened would happen.
But there really is
an interesting story.
Well, Donald Trump
is in the book
in chapters one, two, and
three, because he's just
such an unbelievably
fascinating character.
And there is, I
think, a story that
goes really deeply at explaining
how a creature like Donald
Trump could at least
get to where he
did in the presidential race.
And the best way to
tell the story actually
starts in the pop
music industry.
The Billboard Hot 100 is
the most famous register
of popular music in America.
It's been registering the 100
most popular songs in the US
every week since 1958.
But for a long time--
most people don't know this--
the Billboard Hot 100 was
essentially lying to you.
It was a register of lies.
And the reason why
is that it relied
on two sources of information.
First, they would
survey radio deejays.
And second, they would
ask record store owners,
what's selling?
The problem with
this strategy is
that the deejays were
often being paid directly
by the labels.
So what you were
hearing was essentially
a game of telephone
from the labels
when you asked the
deejays what was popular.
And when you talked to
the record store owners,
they had reason to lie, too,
because when music was a scarce
resource-- when it wasn't
digitized and it was just vinyl
records that you had to store--
if you had sold
out of ACDC, there
was no incentive for
the record store owner
to say that ACDC was selling
well, because they had nothing
left to sell.
So instead, they would
say that something
that they still had some
records of was popular-- say,
Def Leppard or
Bruce Springsteen.
So not only was
the Billboard Hot
100 biased toward
the labels tastes,
it was also biased toward churn.
So the song would
hit number one,
and it would fall right off.
In 1991, Billboard
ditched this honor system.
And they changed the way that
they measured the charts.
First, they measured
airplay using SoundScan.
And second, they registered
point of sales data
at record stores that
the record store owners
couldn't lie to Billboard.
And almost immediately--
almost overnight--
literally within the next month,
two incredibly important things
changed in American music taste.
First, music taste became
a lot more repetitive.
When you looked at what
people were actually buying,
rather than what record stores
were telling people to buy,
it turned out that
people just wanted
to hear the same songs over
and over and over again.
The 20 songs that have been
on the Billboard Hot 100
for the longest period of
time all came out after 1991.
It's not because the
music got better.
It's because the
methodology changed.
Second, rock collapsed on the
charts in the early 1990s.
And two other genres
soared up the charts.
You can probably guess what
at least one of them are,
maybe both.
They are hip hop and country--
both genres preferred by lower
class, lower income citizens
whose tastes might not
have been reflected
by the white men in
the suits on the coast.
Their favorite kind
of music, rock, faded.
The people's favorite kind of
music, country and hip hop,
soared.
And hip hop remains today
the dominant genre of music.
In sum, taste in music
used to be dictated
top to bottom from
the taste makers
through scarce distribution
channels to the public.
And now tastes are much more
likely to bubble up, bottom up.
And what does this have
to do with Donald Trump?
Well, in the early
2000s, there was
a theory about how information
got passed on to voters.
It was called the party decides.
Maybe some of you are
familiar with this theory.
It got a lot of play early in
the primaries this past cycle.
The party decides theory will
sound very familiar to you
since I just told you
the Billboard story.
A handful of taste
makers or influencers,
who are party elites settled
on their favorite candidate--
let's call him Jeb Bush--
decided to distribute their
favoritism of Jeb Bush
through scarce media channels,
like FM stations and television
stations, and the public would
necessarily and obediently
come to believe them and vote
for the preferred candidate.
Again, the familiarity--
familiarity breeds popularity.
The more they heard
that Jeb Bush was
wonderful from the taste
makers on TV and on the radio,
the more likely they were
to hold that position
as their own.
But what did we just see?
Jeb Bush had $100
million to spend,
and he topped out at about
five percentage points.
Marco Rubio got the second
most amount of money
from the establishment from the
elites, and he also flamed out.
It was Donald Trump-- someone
who spent basically nothing
on paid media-- got a
lot of earned media,
spent very little
on paid media--
who absolutely trumped
through the Republican primary
on his way to
winning the election.
So in many ways,
what we saw in music,
I think is happening in
lots of other markets.
We are used to, in all
of these industries,
taste being dictated
by a handful of elites
to scarce distribution
channels to the public.
And now tastes in markets
are much more chaotic, much
harder to predict, because
they are bubbling up
and they are harder to control.
Throughout this book, I
talk a lot about music.
I'm fascinated by the concept
of popularity in music
and why we like what we like
from genres to earworms.
And I began my
investigation of music
at the very most elemental
question of, what is music?
Why does the brain
hear some sounds
as cacophony and other
sounds as musical?
And there is a musicologist--
a detective of musical
illusions--
at the University of California
San Diego named Diana Deutsch.
And Diana Deutsch, she
is famous for discovering
that particular illusion called
the speech to song illusion.
And speech to song
illusion works like this.
You take about any
sliver of human speaking,
and you start
repeating it again,
start repeating it again,
start repeating it again,
start repeating it again.
And the brain just starts
to process it as a rhythm
and starts to hear a melody in
what was previously just speech
stream.
So what Diana would
say is that repetition
is the god particle of music.
It is the thing
that distinguishes
the cacophony of
the ordinary world
from that which the
brain processes as song.
This is true for speech stream.
It's true for me
drumming on this podium.
It's true for
animals in the wild.
Biologists reserve the
term song for any animal
that repeats a certain trill or
sound over a common interval.
Repetition is the god
particle of music.
So that's interesting,
I thought,
but it doesn't quite
give you the formula
for a hit, because if I go to a
music label just up the street
and I say, I have this
great idea for a song,
it goes, start
repeating it again,
start repeating it again,
they'll laugh me out
of that office.
So obviously, you
need a bit of both.
You need repetition, but
you also need variety.
So what is the right way to
layer repetition and variety?
And to answer this
question, you have
to travel to Columbus, Ohio
at Ohio State University
where a musicologist named David
Huron has another amazing study
where he'll play a note--
say it's a B note-- for
a mouse and the mouse
will turn its head like that.
And he'll play the note
again for the mouse,
and the mouse will
turn its head.
And he'll play B,
B, B, and the mouse
will just turn, turn, turn.
But eventually, the
mouse will habituate.
It will learn to
ignore the stimulus.
But if at that very
moment, the mouse
was about to habituate,
instead of playing a B note,
you play a C note.
The mouse will not only
turn its head at the C,
it'll also dishabituate
the mouse from the B note.
So now you can go
back to playing
the B note to scare the mouse.
And it turns out
that if you want
to scare a mouse for the
longest period of time
with the fewest number
of notes, there's
a very specific pattern in
which you play those notes.
And it goes, BBBC, BBC,
BC, and then a D note
to dishabituate from both
the B and the C notes.
And if you take a sliver
of that rondo sequence,
it goes BBC, BC, D. And
if you replace the letter
B with the word verse and
you replace the letter
C with the word chorus
and you place the letter
D with the word bridge, then
you get the following song
structure.
Verse, verse, chorus,
verse, chorus, bridge,
which is essentially the
structure of every pop
song for the last 50 years.
So Huron's conclusion
is not so much
that we are all living in this
weird mouse dishabituation
study or that music
is so unbelievably
formulaic and derivative,
but that actually the best
kinds of music play on the part
of the mammalian brain which
is so ready to hear
repetition and variety
in a certain sequence
that the same thing that
works for us in a Weekend
or Maroon 5 or Drake song
also seems to work in the
same way for a mouse--
that repetition and
variety play ideally
within certain patterns.
So I love this idea.
It was one of my
favorite studies
to have discovered in
the process of reporting.
But I wanted to take
it one level deeper.
I said I always wanted
throughout the book
to highlight what the
most important lessons
of these ideas would be.
And so thinking back
to the first job
that I ever wanted, which
was to be a speech writer,
I thought to myself,
it's kind of funny
how repetitive human
speech can be as well,
even when it's not
trying to be musical.
We still repeat
ourselves all the time
in public speaking settings.
And if you go back to
Greek rhetorical history,
it turns out that almost
every Greek rhetorical device
is essentially a
form of repetition.
There's anaphora,
which is repetition
at the beginning of a sentence.
Winston Churchill-- "We
shall fight them in the air,
we shall fight them on
the landing fields."
There's tricolon, which is
repetition in short triplicate.
Abraham Lincoln-- "government
of the people, by the people,
for the people."
There's something
called epizeuxis,
which is the same word repeated
over and over and over again.
Donald Trump does
this all the time,
but the example in the
book is from Nancy Pelosi.
"Just remember what this
legislation is for--
jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs."
And most catchily,
there is something
called antimetabole, which is
an impossible word to spell
and very difficult to say.
So instead, just think
of it as 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."
Hillary Clinton-- "Human
rights are women's rights,
and women's rights
are human rights."
ABBA, antimetabole.
In fact, antimetabole
is so endemic
to modern American
political rhetoric
that if you go through
JFK's first inaugural
and you take out all
the antimetabole,
you are basically left with
a series of conjunctions.
The entirety of the most
famous inaugural address
of the 20th century is
the same rhetorical device
over and over and over.
So why does it work?
Well, I think it works
because of something called
rhyme to reason effect, which
is sort of like a cousin
of a speech to song effect.
Rhyme to reason effect says
that we are weirdly more
likely to believe ideas
and slogans if they
contain an element of rhyme,
an element of musicality.
People are more likely,
in some studies,
to believe that birds of
a feather flock together,
for example, than
if you rephrase
that in a non-rhyming way.
But this works very, very
clearly in political rhetoric,
I think, because
it takes ideas that
might be complicated
and difficult to express
and it delivers
them to people not
through the capsule of
a public policy plan,
but rather through
the capsule of music.
So you think about
something like "Ask not
what your country
can do for you.
Ask what you can do
for your country."
It was JFK's attempt
to popularize
the idea of the Peace Corps.
But if you take the first
half of that, "Ask not
what your country
can do for you,"
that's a really weird
summary of modern liberalism.
In fact, it's an
incredibly strange thing
for someone to say
whose vice president is
about to pass the Great Society
Program, Medicaid, Medicare,
expansion of immigration rights,
expansion of Social Security.
"Ask not what your
country can do for you"
is the opposite of
the sort of liberalism
that JFK ended up
presenting to the world
through his administration.
But we repeat the idea
over and over again,
because we don't
hear the policy.
We hear the music.
And so I think it's very
important throughout the book,
as I'm trying to
give people ways
of using some of this science
to popularize their own ideas,
that I also give them
as audience members,
as consumers, ways to resist
some of the popularity
and some of the tricks
that can be played on them.
And in many ways, I
think that antimetabole
is one of the most
efficient tricks,
precisely because the
brain hears the music
and then wants to believe
the underlying policy.
The last story
that I have to tell
before we do a little bit of Q&A
and then I take your questions
may be one of my favorite
stories in the book.
I was very interested in
understanding fashions,
understanding what some
people call hype cycles--
why something comes
out of nowhere
and then becomes this
enormous hit and then fades.
And typically, there are
sort of three categories
of explanation for what
might drive these trends.
The first could be prices.
You could say that Abercrombie
was incredibly popular in 2005
among teenagers.
And then the great
recession strikes,
and the embroidered A logo
becomes way too expensive
for a lot of these families.
And so Abercrombie becomes,
as "Time Magazine" called them
in 2009, the worst
recession brand in America.
The look of the zippy
hoodies didn't change.
Prices changed.
And prices changed fashion.
So you could say it's prices.
You could say it's economics.
You could say it's marketing.
Maybe some color of skirt
is popular, you could say,
because J. Crew wanted
it to be popular.
So they blasted out a
bunch of advertising
to force people to like a very
specific shade of sapphire.
But there is one market
in the world that
is a cultural market that
has no prices and no scarcity
and no market.
And that market is first names.
First names are a
cultural market.
They have hype cycles.
Ethel is an unpopular name in
the middle of the 19th century,
a very popular name toward
the turn of the 20th century,
and is now a very unpopular
name for baby girls.
It followed the
precise same hype cycle
as any other fashion.
But names all exist.
They're infinite.
They are all free,
all the same price,
and there is no marketing.
Nike is not trying to get
you to name your kid Nike.
Of course, there are
sometimes exogenous events.
Like in the 1930s,
Adolf Hitler obviously
became this terrible figure.
And the name Adolf mysteriously
dropped in popularity
while the named Franklin
soared in popularity, again,
unmysteriously.
But for the most part, there
is no direct marketing.
So the really interesting
question for me was,
why are there hype
cycles in first names
if first names are unlike
any other marketplace
in which culture applies?
And there are two answers here.
And they both come
from a wonderful book
by Stanley Lieberson,
a famous sociologist,
called "A Matter of Taste."
So if you want to dig
deeper into that story,
you should check out that
book, "A Matter of Taste."
And he makes two very
important points.
The first point is that for the
vast majority of human history,
first names were not a fashion.
They were a custom.
Between 1550 and 1800,
half of all English men
were named William,
John, or Thomas.
Half of all English women were
named Elizabeth, Mary, or Anne.
This is for 500 years.
And the trend wasn't
just in England.
Sao Paolo baptismal
records from the 1700s show
that half of all the women were
named Maria, Anna, or Gertrude.
So for the vast majority
of human history,
you have a scenario where the
turnover rate of first names
sort of resembles a flat plane.
And then suddenly, in the
middle of the 19th century,
it takes off all over the
world-- in Hungary and Denmark,
in Canada and the US,
in France and England.
All over the Western world, the
turnover rate of first names
takes off.
And the only thing that
clearly affected all of them
at the same time is the
Industrial Revolution.
And the theory is that you
have an agrarian family-based
economy, formerly in the
1500s and 1600s, where
families were living essentially
with extended family.
So the name Thomas was a way
to highlight your lineage.
The grandfather's
name was Thomas,
so the son's name was Thomas,
so the baby's name was Thomas.
But suddenly, in the
1800s, 100,000 Thomases
move into the London
metropolitan area
at the same time.
And it's unbelievably
confusing, not only
because when someone wants to
hand out the coffee and says,
Thomas, 1,000 people
turn their head,
but also because
people need identities.
And identity is antagonistic.
Identity is how I am not like
everybody else around me,
but how I and my
group are different.
And so if you are one of 100,000
Thomases moving to London
at the same time and some of
you are Catholic and some of you
are Protestant and some of you
are attractive and some of you
are terribly hideous and some
of you are rich and some of you
are poor, Thomas
doesn't do it for you.
Thomas doesn't accomplish what
you need to have accomplished.
And so first, so economics--
the Industrial Revolution--
turns first names into
identity markers, which means
there has to be a hype cycle.
In the 1300s-- well, before
the 1300s, fashion was similar.
Fashion was not a hype cycle.
Clothing fashion was not
essentially a fashion.
The Romans wore the same
tunics for thousands of years,
very similar to the tunics
that the Greeks wore.
And it never occurred to anybody
living in 100 AD or 100 BC
that their tunic looked weird
because their grandfather wore
the exact same one with
a knot in the same place,
so maybe I should move the
knot a little bit to be cool.
It just never occurred to them.
It took until the 1300s
when you had global trading
patterns for the merchants
to be able to dress
like the aristocrats.
But the aristocrats, looking
at the merchants, said, wait,
now we just look like
poor, old merchants.
We can't do that.
We have to change the
way that we dress.
So aristocrats
changed their fashion,
which meant the
merchants had to change
the way they dressed as well.
And so once again, we
think in clothing history
that global trading patterns
created the concept of fashion.
But the second really
interesting idea
about why we change our names
comes down to this theory
called popularity as a taste.
And popularity as a taste
says that in addition to all
the qualities that we know exist
in a cultural product-- say,
in a song--
who sings it, what it
sounds like, how loud it is,
what the chord structure is--
there is a signal that
hovers above those qualities.
And that signal is
the song's popularity.
And some people interpret
that signal positively.
They like Taylor Swift,
because she's popular.
And some people
look at that signal,
and they interpret it in
the entirely opposite way.
I hate Taylor Swift,
because she's popular.
So the signal of
popularity is the same.
But it creates a range
of different responses.
Essentially, you can think of
this as mainstream to hipster.
I like it, because it's popular.
I hate it, because it's popular.
So what does this have
to do with first names?
Well, most people have
a taste for popularity
that exists in the middle.
They like, what I call in
the book, familiar surprises.
They like ideas that are
new, but not too new--
the song that sounds like
the song you liked before,
the sequel of your
favorite movie franchise,
that political
essay that expresses
in a new and profound way
that which you've already
intuited-- familiar surprises.
So if most parents
like names that
have sort of a
little bit of newness
but aren't that
familiar, that it
would predict that a lot of
parents in the late 1980s
would settle on a
name like Samantha,
which is the 50th or 60th most
popular name in the 1980s.
But the problem is
that so many of them
will have a similar taste
for the familiar surprise--
so many of them will
have a similar taste
for that name which is
popular but not too popular--
in the early 1900s, 224,000
parents in the same year
will name their
baby girl Samantha,
which means it's inevitable
that they will introduce
their child into
pre-K, kindergarten,
and that Samantha
will be surrounded
by 17 other Samanthas.
And it will be
very embarrassing.
And you'll the exact same
Thomas problem all over again,
which means that those
parents' friends who
are about to have their new
kid looks at the name Samantha,
decides it's way too ubiquitous,
and decide to not name
their daughter Samantha.
And so again, this
market without prices,
with sheer abundance and without
marketing, individual families
collectively making
individual decisions
drive a hype cycle
for baby girl names.
And one way that we know
for sure that this is true
that parents do have a
sturdy taste for popularity
is that siblings tend to
have similarly popular names
in the decade of their birth.
So for example, this
is sort of intuitive.
If you meet the siblings
Robert, Sarah, and Samantha,
it's very strange if the fourth
child's name is Zanthopy.
But if you meet the children
Zanthopy and Prairie
Rose and Esmerelda,
it's very weird
to have the fourth
child named Gary.
There's just intuitively--
siblings have equally weird
names, mostly, obviously.
For every single time
I tell the story,
there's always someone who's
like, well, my name is Thor,
and my sister's name is Sarah.
And it's like, well, I don't
know why your parents like
Thor, but obviously, they do.
And that's great.
And this is not
going to disprove it.
Anyway, so to conclude,
one of the lessons
throughout the book,
which really tries to
range widely from music
to movies to digital media
and the future of
entertainment--
these two lessons
that keep cropping up
are the power of
familiar surprises--
the power of ideas that
are new but not too new--
and the underrated
power of distribution--
that people like me
who are journalists
want to think that
cultural products either
have the inherent qualities
of being good or bad,
but the story of that
product's ultimate success
often has much more to do with
the distribution behind it
than its inherent qualities.
Thank you, guys, very much.
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL: We're going
to transition now
into just opening up the
Q&A with a couple thoughts
that I have, having
watched this book
come together over the
past three to five years
and watched Derek's
career progress.
So I'll kick things off.
And then in the
interest of time,
we'll open things up
to any of you guys
that would like
to ask a question.
And if you would, go to the mics
for that, that would be great.
So I had a bunch of things
I wanted to ask you.
But one of the central
figures of the book
that you talk about
that I learned about
for the first time--
is fascinating--
was Raymond Loewy
and would love to hear
how you discovered him
and how his theories of design
relate to some of the topics
that you bring up.
DEREK THOMPSON: Yeah.
I discovered Raymond
Loewy on just one
of those weird Wikipedia rabbit
holes, just opening new tab,
new tab, new tab, new tab.
And this is someone who you
either have heard of him
and you revere him more
than almost anyone you know,
or you haven't heard of him.
And the vast majority of
people that I have encountered
have not.
Raymond Loewy is the father
of industrial design.
He is a French orphan who came
over to the US the 19-teens.
In the 1940s and
1950s, designed what
we've come to think of
as mid-century America.
Imagine Don Draper, a
genius of human psychology,
meeting Steve Jobs,
a genius of design,
coming together, having a baby.
That baby is Raymond Loewy.
This guy designed the
1950s Studebaker coupe,
one of the famous automotive
designs of the 20th century.
He designed the modern train
for Pennsylvania Railroad.
He designed the modern tractor.
He designed the
pencil sharpener that
looks like an egg with a spindle
that you guys have surely seen.
He designed the logos
for Exxon, Shell, and BP.
He designed the
Lucky Strike package,
made famously ironic
by Madmen itself.
When NASA was making
its first spaceship,
they asked Raymond Loewy to
design its interior habitat,
because he was this
genius in understanding
what people wanted.
And it was his idea to
install the viewing portal.
So every time in a movie,
when you're in outer space
and you can look
through that window
back at the pale
blue Earth, that
is Raymond Loewy that
you're looking at.
It was his idea to put
a window in a spaceship.
So the great question
for anybody, I think,
who understands
Raymond Loewy's career
is, how the heck did this
guy know what people liked,
from pencil sharpeners
to spaceships?
And his theory was
called MAYA, M-A-Y-A--
Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
And it was his thesis
that every consumer is
torn between opposing forces.
Neophilia, a love of new things,
a need to discover new things--
sorry, neophilia,
love of new things,
and neophobia, a deep fear
of anything that is too new.
And he was just
absolutely brilliant
at using anthropology to
study consumers and understand
their habits and understand
exactly how they live
and then build new products
that essentially piggybacked off
of them.
And so again, this
concept of MAYA
and familiar surprises
just so beautifully
clicks into Hollywood's
franchise strategy,
ESPN SportsCenter strategy,
the strategy of Buzzfeed
for creating shareable
videos, and just
across the entertainment
and media landscape--
this power of familiar
surprises and MAYA,
for giving people
what they want.
MICHAEL: That's
interesting to think
about how that relates to
some of the big tech companies
and how we release products
all the time as well.
DEREK THOMPSON: Right.
And so one of the
ways I summarize
MAYA is I say, to sell something
surprising, make it familiar.
But to sell something
familiar, make it surprising.
And so in technology,
the challenge
is often how to make something
that is surprising familiar.
But the best technologists
do this all the time.
When Steve Jobs was designing
one of the first Macs,
there's that famous
line that you
see Michael Fassbender say
in the movie "Steve Jobs"
where he's looking at the
computer and he says--
at the monitor and he says,
it has to look like a face.
It has to literally say hello.
To sell a new
consumer product, he
had to make it
seem like a friend.
The modern incarnation
of that is clearly Alexa.
It is the hottest
new technology, AI.
How do how do we use it?
How do we interact with it?
It's incredibly new
and potentially scary.
But Alexis sounds
like a lilting woman.
It sounds like an
ordinary assistant.
It sounds like a kind friend.
And so again, to
sell something that
is inherently surprising
and confusing,
the challenge and
ultimate success
is often in those who can
make it really familiar.
MICHAEL: Thanks for that.
I think with the
Google audience,
I think we're constantly
aware of the rise of big data
and machine learning
and algorithms,
helping us predict things.
How do you think that big
data and machine learning play
in with the ability to
predict hits potentially?
DEREK THOMPSON: So I think that
every media and entertainment
company is trying to
get into big data.
And I think that the results
have been disappointing
for the following reason.
I think that when
a company, trying
to discover human
tastes, uses or begins
to use a new technology
to uncover them,
they want to learn
something new.
They want to learn something
that's counterintuitive.
And I think that
what seems to me
to have happened in the music
and movie industry specifically
is that the smarter these
industries have gotten
at discerning audience
tastes, the more it
turns out that audience tastes
are incredibly derivative.
Pop music now is more
repetitive than it used to be.
Hollywood sequels
are a bigger part
of the business than
they used to be.
In 1996, none of
the top 10 films--
"Independence Day," "Twister,"
"First Wives Club"--
none of the top 10 films
were adaptations, sequels,
or reboots.
None of them were
comic book movies.
20 years later, by 2016,
every year this century,
a majority of the top
10 films in the US
have been sequels,
adaptations, and reboots.
As the industry
has gotten smarter,
the product has become
more derivative.
And so the irony here is that
the use of big data seems
to me-- this is my read, and
other people might definitely
disagree-- but my read of it is
that the employment of this new
technology has ironically
taught hit makers and cultural
producers the first lesson--
literally, the first lesson--
of human psychology, which
was probably the mere exposure
effect--
the idea that the mere
exposure of a stimulus
to us over and over and
over again biases us
toward that stimulus--
that we have a strong
preference for the familiar,
specifically when
we can't see where
that stimulus is coming from,
when it's sort of furtive.
So first discovery in
psychology history--
familiarity breeds liking.
Last discovery of this
whip-smart new technology--
familiarity breeds liking.
And I think that for a
lot of culture producers,
that's been a
disappointing finding.
MICHAEL: Well, thank you, Derek.
I want to open it up to
questions from the audience.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Derek.
Thank you very much.
I have a question about the
very first-- sorry, I'm cold.
So that's why I
have my big jacket.
I have a question about
the very first iPhone.
I'd like to know your point of
view on how it fits in this not
too new-- like people prefer
familiarity over novelty--
because to me, and I might be
wrong, it was very, very new,
this first concept with
application, smartphone,
and everything.
And yet, it was a big success.
So did they compensate
with distribution?
How would you
position the iPhone?
DEREK THOMPSON: So if
you turn to page 231--
AUDIENCE: I didn't
read the book.
DEREK THOMPSON: It's OK.
There are books
right behind you.
I actually tell the story
of the first iPhone.
So just to briefly summarize
that which all of you
can read, first of all,
I don't think the iPhone
was all that new in look.
In many ways, it was promised
as a wide-screen iPod--
that essentially you could
think of the iPhone as sort
of evolving almost
Darwinistically-- not a word,
but we'll use it here--
from the earliest
models of the iPod--
that you had developed
a square with a screen.
Then the screen got
bigger and bigger.
And the dial got
smaller and smaller
until it was ultimately all
touch with a single button.
Here's the interesting thing
about the iPhone as a hit is
that when Universal McCann,
the marketing company,
did a 10,000-person poll all
over the world to ask people
if they wanted the iPhone, not
only did most people in the US
say they did not, because it
was an all-in-one device--
it was a jack-of-all-trades,
master of none--
that was the idea of
the first iPhone--
all those jokes about how
the call quality is terrible,
the internet's terrible.
It's a cool new phone, but
it doesn't do anything well.
They said, this
is actually going
to be most popular in
developing countries
where they don't already
have expensive cameras
and expensive iPods and
expensive computers.
And in many ways, what's
fascinating is how unbelievably
wrong that prediction was--
that the iPhone was only
supposed to work in Malaysia
and was supposed to be uniquely
unpopular in Germany, Japan,
and the US.
And then Germany,
Japan, and the US
ultimately served to
be its singular market.
But as a matter
familiar surprises,
I think that Jobs
introduced the iPhone--
if it was his ultimate
goal to make the iPhones--
a lot of people say it was--
he introduced it brilliantly--
that you don't go from 0 to 60.
You introduce an iPod.
And the screen gets bigger
and bigger and bigger.
And you lead people
into the new product.
So for many people, I think
they looked at the iPod itself
and they said, oh, this is
the obvious next iteration
of the iPod.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: You had mentioned
earlier an increase in mistrust
in the big established media.
And assuming that we can
measure that and that it's true,
what do you attribute that to?
Big media still have
big distribution power.
So what do you think
are the causes of that?
DEREK THOMPSON: This is a really
good and complicated question.
And in one way--
so several things--
first, there's
been macro, across
the board, collapse
in trust since the
1960s, 1970s, not just
for politics or Congress
or the White House,
but basically across
all institutions.
And the media, I think,
has been sort of brought
into that undertow of distrust.
But specifically,
what's happened
to the press is that, as you've
had this sort of Cambrian
explosion of media sources--
first with the rise
of cable news and then
with the rise of the internet--
there are so many
news sources now
that can appeal to
a specific niche
that there is always a news
source that A, can tell you
that that which you think
is already true, and B,
can tell you that the
mainstream is wrong.
And in sociology, this
is very, very similar
to the technical
definition of culting.
The sociological
definition of a cult
is a positive rebellion
against the mainstream, which
is ironically the same as
the cultural sociological
definition of coolness,
which tells you something
about the blurring of the lines
between coolness and culting--
that cults are
essentially cool kids that
are too far outside
the mainstream for us
to accept them.
But what's clearly
happened, I think,
is that the abundance
of media sources
have given rise to a kind of
media culting, in which case,
you can always find
a media source that
says that you're right and
the mainstream is wrong.
This is clearly a
destroyed trust.
But I think the last
thing to point out
is that as you've had this
Cambrian explosion of media
options, the media,
as a collective noun,
no longer makes sense
to apply adjectives to.
When people say, the
media is liberal,
or the media is
too conservative,
or the media's too
corporatist, it's like saying,
food is too spicy, or
shirts are too blue.
It's like, what?
I don't know.
Buy a non-blue shirt or don't
go to the Mexican place.
There's so many options
on media right now
that are diametrically
opposed to one another
that I tend to resist any-- and
this wasn't your description.
I'm just saying, I
tend to resist and sort
of bristle at any suggestion
that the media is too blank.
The real problem, I
think, is the opposite.
The media is too big, maybe.
There are so many sources
that it is inherently
that we distrust
the mainstream Borg
and just like our little cut.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Derek.
DEREK THOMPSON: Hi.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious how
universal these principles are
over the course
of one's lifetime.
Like I love Selena Gomez
maybe, but my grandmother
may hate Selena Gomez.
She doesn't like country.
She doesn't like rock.
She doesn't like pop,
doesn't like hip hop.
Why is that?
DEREK THOMPSON: So
first of all, hello.
I didn't see you at first.
This comes back to an idea in
developmental psychology called
sensitive periods.
There are sensitive periods, I
think, for all sorts of tastes.
For food taste, the
sensitive period
seems to be between birth
and two, three years old
that, for example,
broccoli evolved
to taste bitter and bad.
But if you feed lots of
broccoli to a newborn,
you'll have to sort of mix it in
with the applesauce and sugar.
But they'll grow up
liking broccoli--
that babies are very neophiliac,
accepting of new things
when they're very young.
The sensitive taste for music
seems to be between the teens
and early to mid 20s.
By the age of 33,
Spotify suggested,
people stopped listening
to new songs entirely.
So by definition, your tastes
have crystallized by your 30s.
This is one reason why--
right, the cliche
of my grandmother
loves Frank Sinatra and
Oscar and Hammerstein.
It was too late for
her with the Beatles,
whereas my parents adored Simon
and Garfunkel and Elton John.
In fact, what you've
seen is that taste
in people's favorite
music in their 20s
is so strong that
artists enjoy what
are called nostalgia bumps--
that as parents will
get to a certain age
and be able to teach their
children the kind of music
from a certain decade,
that band's popularity will
rise a bit on
streaming networks,
because kids who grow up under
parents who naturally like
Simon and Garfunkel
grow up listening
to a lot of Simon and Garfunkel
and therefore like them.
The last interesting implication
of this is in politics.
The political sensitive period
seems to be from mid-20s to--
I'm sorry, from
mid-teens to late 20s
as well, really
similar to music.
So it's kind of
interesting and, I think,
intuitive that music
taste and political tastes
are sort of crystallizing
around the same time.
And this explains a phenomenon
that the right bemoans,
which is, why do so many
children of conservatives
grow up becoming liberals?
And one theory is
that you have children
who develop a taste
for politics in general
in their teenage
years, but then go
to college at, say, University
of Michigan or Northwestern
or Middlebury.
And they will be surrounded
by more liberal students.
And as their ideologies within
politics are crystallizing,
they'll become liberal.
So the parents' interest
in politics has screwed,
you might say, them out of
sharing an ideological bond
with their child.
They've developed a
taste for politics
in a kid who then goes
off to crystallize
the taste on a liberal campus.
Basically, the short answer to
your question-- and I'm sorry,
I just love the topic
of sensitive periods--
is that we seem to
peak-- our neophilia--
our interest in
discovering new ideas
seems to peak at a
certain part of our life.
And we, somewhat depressingly,
spend the rest of our lives
playing around with tastes
that have already formed.
AUDIENCE: Except
for journalists.
DEREK THOMPSON: Except
for journalists.
We are indefatigable seekers
of the truth, no matter what
our biases are, yes.
MICHAEL: OK.
So unfortunately,
we are out of time.
So I just want to thank
all of you for coming
and also, a big round
of applause for Derek.
Thank you so much
for coming today.
[APPLAUSE]
