YouSaid · the spoken record

Derek Thompson

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87

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2017-03-24

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2017-03-24

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1

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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “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-one shares.”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “It was the stars. It was not one of the great hits of 1955. It was the 13th 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 1954 played over the credits of the 13th biggest movie of 1955 is going to be the biggest rock and roll song in music history. It's completely amazing and unpredictable.”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Above a certain threshold of quality, above a certain threshold of catchiness, what matters to become a hit is not more catchiness or more quality, but rather superior distribution.”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Hands the director of 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 1955. 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 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 in 1954 when it was a flop and a 1955 when it was a hit, the difference was this bizarre fluky, lucky moment of distribution in Blackboard Jungle, 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 flood.”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “To kick off this movie, I want to jump jive tune. What have you got? And Father Glen Ford says, look, I just listen to Hawaiian folk music. It's not going to work out for me. But my son, Petey, he might have some records that you'd like. So young Peter Ford, this 10-year-old boy in fifth grade.”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “One of my favorite stories from the book is Rock Around the Clock. Rock around the clock is one of the most famous songs of the 20th century, but it's best understood as just an unbelievable fluke. It comes out in 1954. 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 10-year-old boy named Peter Ford. And Peter Ford's dad was the movie star Glen Ford, and Glenford was in this movie Blackboard Jungle, and the director of Blackboard Jungle comes over to the Ford's house and says”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “And that coincides 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.”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “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 an idea when it's phrased musically. And that doesn't just have to be a rhyme. 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. JFK's first inaugural used ancient Greek rhetorical device called antimetaboli, which is way too difficult to spell or pronounce. So just think of it as ABBA. 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 or women's rights and women's rights are human rights A, B, B, A, antabola.”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Very much Steve Jobs, like belief. Yeah, but 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 sit and what parts of existing chairs sort of don't fit their bodies to something like a mobile money app. figure out 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”

   2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “He was a genius in a way, and his company were total geniuses in a way that today I think we would revere to the nth. I think that if he were alive today, he would be a Steve Jobstyle figure. He would have television shows named after him. He really was, in a way, if you take Madmen, right? If you take a Dandre,”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “That is him. This guy is Steve Jobs for the 1950s. If Steve Jobs was allowed to design for literally every single company in America, it's amazing. He's not as famous as he is. But yes, his theory of everything was Maya, 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, at really being an anthropologist first, understanding how consumers lived in their kitchens and on their farms, and then deciding something that was only so sneakily new that they would confront something clearly novel and immediately understand how to use it.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Everything, the cars, the trains, the tractors, the cold spot refrigerators, the singer vacuum cleaners, the pencil sharpener that looks like a little egg that everyone listening, I'm sure, has seen a thousand times in bolted.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “The building. Yep. Exactly. Yeah, he's a French orphan, comes over to the States in 1919, struggles in art in the 1920s. And basically between the 1930s and 1960s, designs that we now recognize as Mid-American aesthetics.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Most advanced yet acceptable. This was the grand theory of everything from Raymond Lowey, the father of industrial design.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “You're so used to seeing the image, you ass I know And walked out of the music. Exactly, right? It's a tiny little thing. Right. You can fit it in a little backpack, which is why it's now behind bulletproof casing is because it's so easy to steal. But once again, the content is the same. What changed massive media distribution of A, the story of its stealing, and B, the painting itself. It goes on an international tour like it's the Rolling Stones after it's recovered and brought back to the Louvre. So why is it the most famous painting ever? Not because the content because of the distribution.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Who wants to bring it back home, right? He takes it to Italy. It becomes this international manhunt 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, 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 have to, well, I'll just to remind listeners, looks the exact same today as it did in the 19th century when it was worth 16% of Titian and Raphael.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “It was considered a lovely work, but not certainly not the most famous painting in the world. It's then stolen by an Italian painter.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Yep, Mona Lisa now is literally the most valuable painting in the world, the most expensive insurance policy on any painting. But in the 19th century, it was worth, I think, one sixth of several Raphael and Titian paintings that were hanging in the same museum.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Consecrated the Impressionist canon. Because the next generation of artists looked at these seven to say, all right, which impressionists matter? And the next generation of art historians look to the seven to say which impressions matter. Even in the 1950s, John Rewald's very famous history of impressionist art talks about these seven impressionist paintings exclusively as the canon. 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 B, that cannons can be kind of BS sometimes, right? That this canon, I'm not saying Monet is bad, but the canon was consecrated by a literal stroke.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “It's some crowd to run with now. I mean, his walls are probably valued at several billion dollars in 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 1890s at the age of 41. And 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, Manet, Monet, Dagas, Cezanne, Renoir, Sicily, and Pissarro, 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”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “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 Gustave Kaibat. He's one of the least famous French Impressionist painters today, but he was a collector of his worst paintings, actually. He only collected or bought the paintings that wouldn't sell to anybody else.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Edge it tomorrow 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 cultural content. Right, it is fractal. 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 15th 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. Even with movies like Dum and Dumber, which is not exactly Citizen Kane, I've probably seen it a hundred times. Not exactly. Not exactly. But maybe, who knows? You know, everyone has their own taste.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “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, traditional linear programming is clearly in structural decline for Americans under the age of 60. That is without debate. But Americans under the age of 60 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 OG, the original linear programming content.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “That is absolutely correct. But what's so fascinating is the degree to which these former technologies were eclipsed without being totally shut out. In a way, yes, 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. 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.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “The 2000s. And what's so interesting about this is that it's really similar to the way that Hollywood has thought about heroes as well, that audiences 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.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “ESPN in the early 2000s was really struggling with Sports Center. 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 10,000 things in a mediocre way. We need to be more like a steakhouse. We need to do a few things really, really well. And hey, Yori and Sports Center in the mid-2000s 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 hero's story. And after this, you see ESPN stock just absolutely sore, the value of the channel absolutely sore on the cable bundle. Obviously they've had an enormous number of issues in the last few years as you've seen cording, but this is clearly how they establish their dominance.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Three things first, Sweden writes music in major chord melodies, which makes it really exportable. They often write their songs with 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 style hits.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Right, or pop songs or reggae songs. If you're listening at home and you are an arm's length 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 online and just, you know, listen for it to yourself. But yes, this is exactly right. The number of songs that play off of this structure is just incredible. You have Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cross.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Yes, right. And you mentioned collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering also essentially takes the taste of the masses 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 Cowan'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 third one. So this is how a lot of these algorithms work is they essentially say a lot of people after they listen to Beyonce in 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.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “One of my favorite stories from the book Spotify's Discover Weekly app. It dumps 30 new songs into your 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 after 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.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Exactly. Yeah, that child has learned quite well from thousands and thousands of years of human evolution, absolutely. But on the economic side, I mean, familiarity is the backbone of the advertising business, right? Why do you want to expose people to Coca-Cola and Pepsi and Bloomberg over and over and over again? You want them to trust it. You want to build in the familiarity that comes from multiple exposure. For music, it's unbelievably powerful. On top 40 radio, songs that are unfamiliar are considered tune outs. In a somewhat paradoxical way, we tune in to top 40 radio to hear songs that we already know, but in an order that surprises us. And so in music, in film, and even across the economic landscape, there is a strong economic imperative to build in familiarity because with familiarity comes like you.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “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.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “There's two elements of this biological element, and then we'll talk about the economic element biologically. Why are we predisposed to that which is familiar? 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.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Melody and you're hearing the rhythm. 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.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “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 cacophonous speed stream as music. You're no longer hearing the song.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “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. In the music industry, for example, they have song testing websites that will essentially test hundreds of songs 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 80 between zero and 100, that the song is a guaranteed hit.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Content might be king, but 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, a great movie, it is self-distributing. It will necessarily go viral. It has within it the qualities of virus. It is typhus. It is pneumonia. It'll just spread automatically.”

    2017-03-24 · Masters in Business · Interview With Derek Thompson: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source