a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Addiction vs Popularity in the Age of Virality

Episode Date: July 15, 2017

In the age of virality, what does it actually mean to be popular? When does popularity -- or good product design, for that matter -- cross over from desire and engagement... to addiction? Journalist and editor Derek Thompson, author of Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction -- and NYU professor Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked -- share their thoughts on these topics with Hanne Tidnam in this episode of the a16z Podcast. The discussion covers everything from the relationship between novelty and familiarity (we like what we know we like! and want more of it!) to what makes a hit. And what's going on when we suddenly fall in love with something "new" and can't get enough of it -- like playing a new video game or binge-watching a TV show.

Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah, and today we're talking with the authors of two new books about popularity and addiction, and really why it is that we like the things we like, with Derek Thompson, author of Hitmakers, The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, and Adam Alter, author of Irresistible, The Rise of Addictive Technology, and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. So what does it really mean to be popular? What is the nature of popularity? As I was going around the country to talk about this book, one of the questions that I got all the time was, is Donald Trump popular? On the one hand, he seems to have legally won this popularity contest, national popularity contest, despite technically losing the popular vote. But he's also one of the least popular presidents at this point in history. So is he popular? And if the definition of popular is the quality of being well liked by the most people, then that definition of popularity almost never applies to the biggest hits. A book that sells one million copies in a year is a runaway bestseller. But one million sales means that 99% of the country didn't buy it. Or if 10 million

U.S. households watch a new show, it's a smash hit that 90% of households never saw. Right. It never has to be about majority. The point is Trump is a cult hit. And perhaps every single hit in an age of abundance is a cult hit. adored by a minority, but from a majoritarian perspective, broadly unpopular. If the threshold of a hit is to get a commercially viable minority to adore you, and if the understanding is that popularity is cultish, then culture is cults all the way down. People are most reliably drawn to new ideas that remind them of old ideas. What they like is sneaky familiarity in their songs and products the heart of popularity, this familiarity and surprise. Do you mean familiarity that we don't

think is familiar? Is that what you mean by sneaky? How present is that familiarity? Do we need to actually recognize it? Sometimes we just like doing the same thing over and over again, right? I mean, 90% of the time that we're listening to music, we're listening to a piece of a song that we've already heard before. We love watching old movies again. We love nostalgia. But when it comes to hits, which are by definition new products. The key is to design for both of these capacities. You have to have this quality of newness. But understanding that what people like most deeply and most fulfillingly is actually just pure old familiarity. One of the first findings in the history of psychology is this idea called the mere exposure effect, which essentially says just this,

that the mere exposure of any stimulus to us sneakily biases us toward that stimulus. So once we've had it, we wanted again? Right, exactly. Consuming something new is a little bit scary, and we tend not to like new novel, scary things. So once we've been exposed to them, once we've learned how to think about them, then it feels nicer to think about them and reconsume them again. It's easier to process them. But how does that first exposure happen? Is it just chance then that we go for these first exposures to something new that we then want the next time? When people tend to think about sort of their favorite songs, the best songs, the best movies. They think about the qualities of those songs, the qualities of those movies. They rarely think about the cultural marketplace

underlying them. But the history of culture, the history of entertainment is essentially a war, a battle over distribution in music and movies, in publishing, for example. If you own the channels of distribution, then you own the means of exposure. You get to determine what people see, what people listen to, what people watch. Adam, you talk a lot about addiction and the irresistible drive urge the current technology has for us of keeping us hooked. What role does familiarity play in that addiction? I think most popular products are basically fairly innocuous. So that's, I would say, you know, the fact that a song becomes an earworm and you want to listen to it a hundred times, the impact of that is minimal. The other thing that's interesting about addiction is that things that are

familiar to you actually are less likely to be addictive. You develop a tolerance really fast. So it's the opposite, in fact. Well, I think there's a sort of popular version of addiction, which is this idea that you just can't get enough of something. But there's nothing inherently bad about that. You can enjoy it. It can be something that you return to over and over again. It can bring you great pleasure. It doesn't need to bring you harm or ruin or any negative consequences. But when it does, that's when it becomes addiction. And that's less likely to happen with things that are experienced frequently because you start to develop a tolerance to them and then you tend not to feel that same buzz that you get from an addictive experience.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the hit then specifically because actually it has two very different meanings that are perhaps not unrelated for both of you. But what is happening to the hit now in the age of virality? How is the narrative changing around what it means to have a hit and how we respond to that? What you clearly see is that we live in an age of abundance when it comes to basically every single art form. Since the 1980s, the number of books published worldwide has grown by a factor of seven. Since the 1990s, the number of movies made in the North American market has grown by a

factor of seven. And since the early 2000s, the number of original scripted shows on television has grown by a factor of seven. So there is just so much more out there. And one thing that it clearly does, I think, is changes what it means to be a hit. The threshold for hit is changing. That, for example, in the 1950s,

if you had a song that sold 100,000 copies, it was considered kind of a flop. But today, you know, you sell 100,000 physical copy, physical vinyl copies of any song, and it's massively successful. That television, for example, the threshold for a hit in the 1980s and 1990s was really, really high. There were only a handful of original scripted shows, and as a result, they expected those shows to get massive audiences as you had a lot of people arrayed around TV and not so many channels to sort of spread them out on. Higher than it is now?

Yeah, but as a number of channels that proliferated, all these cable networks have essentially said that their definition of a hit on television is getting lower and lower. You can literally see the threshold for a guaranteed hit on television fall as basically no shows cross certain thresholds, you know, 20 million viewers, 30 million viewers. A hit is anything that's not only popular, but also commercially significant. And how do you both see the role of, you know, compulsive behavior in terms of sort of binge watching and, well, maybe I shouldn't use the word addiction or should I? How does that factor into hit making and now versus in the 80s? and 90s or versus in the 50s, you know, with pop music. How is that kind of behavior changing on our part? I think a big part of what makes something a hit or what makes something popular or successful is continued engagement. It's not that initial engagement. It's the fact that you don't

stop being interested. And one of the big trends, I think, in media today is the eradication of stopping rules. So if you think about the way we consume media in the whole of the 20th century, everything had a natural endpoint, or at least the suggestion of an endpoint. Books have chapters. A song ends, a newspaper ends, a show ends, and you have to wait a week for the next episode to arrive. And that's just not true anymore. One of the things that companies do when they're distributing these potential hits, but also when you're making them by, say, building in cliffhangers in just the right way, is to try to eliminate those stopping rules in the same way as a casino might make it impossible to tell what time it is, because they basically want you

to engage, but then never to disengage. And that's, I think, a big part of compulsive behavior. which then feeds into definitions of popularity. Right. I think towards the end of the book, you talk about short-circuiting that desire, right, by stopping before the narrative thrust into the next episode. Yeah, you want to basically short-circuit these attempts

to eradicate stopping cues. You stop watching five minutes before the end of the episode, before the cliffhanger arrives. And then every time you watch, you watch from the last five minutes of one episode to the last five minutes of the next one. So you're always consuming the cliffhanger and its solution in the same episode.

It's sort of getting rid of endings, right? On the one hand, it's getting rid of endings because we want you to be pulled through them to the next thing. And on the other hand, it's getting rid of the ending so that you aren't pulled through to the next thing, right? To prevent that addiction. Exactly.

I love this idea. This is so interesting. I mean, you can think of this as sort of like the end of the ending. The end of the ending. Exactly. But you see this literally across the entire cultural landscape in movies.

You see it in sequels, right? I mean, Hollywood is infected with sequelitis. In the 1990s, you had all top 10 movies of the year 1996 were original. 20 years later, half of the top 10 movies in America every single year this century are sequels, adaptations, and reboots. What's a television show? It's just one hour of entertainment plus a lot of sequels. But you even see this, I think, from an economic standpoint, from really successful media companies, say the Walt Disney company, this end of an ending. So you watch Frozen, right? The movie is

over. But what Disney says is if you like it, it's a little bit more. You'll buy bed sheets that have the characters on them. And if you like us a lot, a lot more, you'll spend $200 per person at Disney World to walk around and buy more frozen merchandise. So again, they're sort of moving their consumers up the value chain and not allowing the experience to end. I mean, it really is an incredibly powerful concept. And to me, it goes right back to this issue of how to merchandise or monetize familiarity. Once you understand what people like you have to keep giving it to them. Yeah, but it is, it's also sort of a move away from linear narrative into just immersing you in all aspects, right? I feel like that's kind of what you're saying about

continual engagement and the eradication of stopping rules. On the one hand, it seems like an interesting tension to me, right, where you want this continual drive onwards, but both of you, well, Adam in particular talks a lot about the shortening of the attention span. I think you said in some interview that we now have a shorter attention span than goldfish? Is that true? It's a sort of juicy factoid. I don't know that the evidence really would hold up to scientific scrutiny, but this repeated test showing that goldfish, apparently, if you hold something up in front of them, on average, the average goldfish will look at it for nine seconds. But if you look at the average teenager today, you do the same thing, and they'll only look at that interesting thing for eight seconds.

So we're now being dominated by goldfish in the attention wars. But how does that work then? This tension between sort of continual onwards narrative or maybe immersion, you know, it's saturating your full, your entire life in different ways with the much shorter attention span. Well, I mean, the attention span is a lot like a muscle that you have to exercise to improve. And what happens is if the whole world is trying to visit itself on you with great ideas and it's trying to capture your attention and, you know, you're constantly being torn in different directions, you never actually have to exert your own attention. You just don't have to because you're given everything that you could possibly need to enjoy every moment.

And as a result, your attention withers. Once you sit down to binge, if you binge for 12 hours, it doesn't take deep attention and care to do that. What takes attention is to actually remove yourself from that experience. You also see engagement times lengthening because that ends up becoming the default. And there's great inertia in that experience. Yeah. Well, and not to sound like a total dits, but sometimes that's the pleasure in it.

You know what I mean? Totally. Totally. I agree. Yeah. Is that a function of things being presented to us and our time being filled up? Or is it a function of the choices being made for us? Because of all sorts of smart browsing and learning algorithms, other things that are familiar that we know will like. The choices have been made. There's no searching. Yeah, I think both are in operation. We don't have a lot of decision points, basically. If I think back to my childhood, there were a lot of moments where I had to think about what was the next thing I wanted to spend my time on. Well, that's when you're bored, basically. That's when you're bored. And that's so important. Creativity comes from moments of boredom. Otherwise, you just keep going down that same little channel that you've been going down, you know, a hundred times before. But kids today, I don't have to be. There are so many things that are constantly drawing their attention away or consuming their attention. I love when my kids are bored. They come up to me and they're like, what should I do? I'm so bored.

I'm like, this is, you're supposed to be bored. Go solve it yourself. Exactly. Live in it. Enjoy it. Live in the boredom. To come back around to popularity, What's the difference, Derek, between popularity and celebrity? Is there one, or is celebrity by definition a kind of cult popularity with a heated following? Are they the same? Yeah, absolutely. Popularity applies mostly to products and ideas, and celebrity almost exclusively applies to individuals. There are lots of celebrities that are widely known to people who are exiting grocery stores and supermarkets, right, on the cover of magazines, former Bachelor stars and former reality show stars, completely adored and consider the center of the universe. and Snapchat celebrities and Instagram influencers and all of this. But it's very likely that the majority of the country has no idea who these people are. I'm reminded of Major League Baseball's marketing problems

and how you could have the best baseball player of the last five years, Mike Trout, walk into a typical bar, and very likely half the people in that bar would not know who he was, even though he might be the best baseball player ever. I wouldn't know. I'm not ashamed to say. Right. But is the best baseball. player in the world, the celebrity? Yeah, he probably is. In a world of abundance, in a world of distraction, we have to be comfortable with the likelihood that popularity is going to be cultish.

But there is a way in which our new kind of media behavior is, I think, exaggerating those cult followings. We see the cult following, right? And it's very active and immediately access. We have immediate access to it. It sort of is in the fabric of our lives in a way that cult popular hits, you know, weren't, they were in their own little wheelhouse. before. We had less, I think, general access visually to them in our lives. Yeah, there's a huge point that I think about all the time when I'm on Twitter or on Facebook and feeling like the entire world is talking about X topic. It's this great term called the majority illusion. It's the illusion that your social network is accurately reflective of the world. And we should just

try to build the instinct to think that it never is. That just because something seems ubiquitous to our local communities, almost never means that it's necessarily a sort of universally held idea or a universally attentive issue. So we have to get used to this being, in fact, totally the wrong instinct at this point in time. Right. Lots of times, when people point to a popular song or a popular movie, whatever, Pirates the Caribbean, and they think to themselves, God, this is terrible. Like, why is this broadly known? I hate this. Just remember that in a world where popularity is cultish, most products are not for you. But except, for that these products are all being, I mean, Adam, wouldn't you say they're all being designed

specifically to seem like they are? You basically make the argument that we are currently designing for addiction, right? Oh, absolutely. The middle part of the book is really a backward engineering of what makes an experience addictive. If you're creating a game, for example, and you want that video game to be played by people, not just the day they buy it, but for months afterwards as well, which is obviously very important for ad revenue and for their continued engagement. There are six or seven tools and you can draw from the toolbox and it doesn't guarantee that you're going to have a hit game on your hands. I spoke to a number of game developers who said that you can have two games, both of which use a lot of these tools and one game happens

to be successful, the other doesn't. But you do need to draw some of these tools, draw on some of these tools for your game to stand a chance of being a huge success. So there are certainly consistent features in the products and their ideas that do become addictive or very hard for people to resist. That reminds me, Derek, of what you say about engineering hits. You also talk a lot about the importance of luck, right? I think that there are clear ingredients for popularity. I actually don't think that there is a formula. There's a very like simple like syllogism for why there could never ever be a formula for success. That means that someone's discovered it, right? And if one person's discovered it, then probably several people have discovered this formula for success. Then the formula is

a norm. Except for we want the familiar, right? We want what we already have. There's no way for a formula for success to become a norm because then it can't make anything that's abnormally successful. Right. Nothing will break out. Right. Yeah. So what you tend to have is lots of imitation. When dark male antiheroes seem to be what people like in cable dramas, you have lots of dark male antiheroes between the early 2000s and in 2015. There is no formula. And because there's no formula, you do have a lot of imitation. That said, though, I do think that there are certain ingredients, certain rules that broadly applied or broadly listened to improve anybody's chance of making something that is appealing to the demographic that they're aiming for.

But when it comes to luck, I mean, one of my favorite stories is about Rock Around the Clock, which is one of these songs that everyone has heard, everyone adores. When it came out in 1954 as a B-side, it was a total failure. And it was only in the following year in 1955 when it came. came out again at the beginning of this movie called Blackboard Jungle, that it soared to the top of the billboard charts, became the first rock and roll song to ever hit number one and the second best-selling song of all time. The song itself sounded the exact same when it was a flop in 54 and this world-conquering hit in 55. The difference was essentially a matter of distribution

and luck. Of exposure. And exposure, right, exactly, that the artist himself could not possibly have controlled. What's the story of this product's distribution? How did it find its market? Because that story is ultimately, or at least often, more descriptive of its ultimate success. I keep going back to circling around these ideas of sort of imitation versus familiarity, sneakily familiar, right? What you said at the very beginning. So you do need an element of something new and then adding exposure into the mix. I was really fascinated by the description you had in the book of Cutting's Experiment with the seven famous Impressionist painters. Can you talk a little bit about that specific example where it was really all about exposure? Oh, sure. Yeah. This is one of my favorite studies from the book.

And might I add seven again? What's up with it? It's like seven. Seven. What's going on with this number? Right. Exactly. It's like this magical number. Maybe that's the formula. I should have just rewritten the book. It's just one page that has the letter. There's seven on it. So James Cutting a psychologist did this fascinating experiment where he had this inkling that the most famous impressionist artworks became famous because they all hung in the same gallery in the 1890s, this very, very well-publicized, extremely controversial gallery exhibition at the Mousa Luxembourg. And he thinks that this one moment of exposure essentially consecrated the Impressionist canon. So he goes back to Cornell University and he says, how can I test this?

And he has a class, it's a psychology class where he exposes his students to a bunch of lesser-known impressionist paintings over and over again to make certain points about perception and psychology. And at the end of this class, he asks all of his students to rank the paintings that they think are the best. He gives them several dozen pairs of paintings. One is a famous painting and then one is a less famous painting and says, name your favorite. And what we found is that merely through exposing his students to less famous impressionist paintings over and over and over and over again, he could make them think that those paintings were actually better. And what this suggests is that when you're dealing with a consumer demographic that doesn't know a whole lot about a

certain subject, that at that point, lots of repetition and lots of familiarity can really bake in liking. An example of this in politics would be that political advertisements don't work at all when people have decided that they like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. But local elections where the viewers don't know either of the candidates involved, right? That lots of advertising works really, really well when you're a low information consumer. Right. It reminds me a little bit of deja vu, right?

Like, isn't that one of the explanations I've read? Maybe this is a total urban legend. Is that deja vu is when your brain misfiles something from short-term into long-term memory? It's like short-circuiting with exposure to like, oh, actually, this is a canonical painting, or this is my candidate that I believe in on a deeper level. Absolutely. Certainly one thing that's happening when people consider a famous artwork to be good without, you know, deeply thinking about it, is that they're conflating familiarity and reputation with liking. I like this painting because it looks familiar. I like this genre of music because it's really similar to the genre of music that I grew up with. It's very, very easy for familiarity and liking to be conflated.

This drive towards popularity with familiarity. We like what we know. I mean, Adam, you talk a lot about loneliness in your book. Is it possibly that a drive towards the familiar makes us on some level even more lonely? Yeah, in the sense that we're driving towards these experiences that are isolated, that they happen to be the familiar ones. Yeah. I mean, certainly, I don't know if people describe themselves as feeling lonely in these moments. I think they often feel pretty good. And they also feel relaxed. It feels like the easiest part of their lives. If there are difficult moments in life, these moments when we're spending our time engaged with some sort of cultural experience usually feel easier than the rest. But generally speaking, this tendency to engage obsessively over and over again with a certain experience is designed to treat some psychological need that isn't being met another way. And that does drive us tend to drive towards loneliness? I think it can. Yeah. There's this amazing study showing that if you sit across from someone else and there's a smartphone on the table, even if it's inert, it's not actually being used, the conversation that you have with that person, if that person

is a stranger, will be diminished in quality. You will feel less connected to that person than you would if there were a book on the table instead of the phone. So the mere presence of a phone that isn't active basically suggests that there's a whole outside world that's fascinating, that should be taking your attention away from the present moment. It's like a closed door you want to open, essentially. Basically, basically. Yeah, it suggests that there's something else out there. And that degrades the quality of the relationship that you form, the connection that you form with this other person. So if we want to have healthier relationships, we should hide our phones while we're talking to it. Well, yeah, this is what I suggest to people. So when I... My phone is sitting here right now. I'm feeling horribly guilty.

Well, I'm sitting here as well. On the other hand, and I'd love Adam to respond to this, I feel like great products should drive us to match. I can't stop listening to this song. I can't stop watching this show. I can't stop checking this site. That is obsession in a way. It's certainly along the spectrum toward addiction, yes. But it's also a sign of thrilling success. And if a product is designed such that the consumer has to employ meticulous, complicated strategies to stop using it, that's an extraordinary sign that something was done right to a certain extent. And it doesn't mean that addictive products are benign or that we shouldn't employ those strategies to avoid them. If you can't talk to your wife because the cell phone's on the table, like that is definitionally bad. But something successful

has been done to at least move us along the spectrum toward addictiveness. And I'm just curious to know what Adam thinks about the difference between benign obsession and malign addiction. And also how companies should think about balancing those. things, right, when they're designing products for it? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. There is an important definition or difference between benign obsession and malign addiction or dangerous addictions. And I think most products, as we've said already, are benign. So even though they may drive you to a sort of madness, that madness is temporary and ultimately it'll pass and it shouldn't have much of an effect on other areas of

your life. But if the product keeps influencing your life, keeps infringing on other aspects, obviously then that's a problem and that's where I think you can start using terms like addiction. But absolutely. I mean, the only reason we're having this discussion was because there are people out there today who are so good at designing products who have such great teams of behavioral experts that they've put together that we need to discuss how to react against those products, how to deal with them as consumers. That's a really new idea, I think. That's not something we had to discuss before. To sell something familiar, the key is to make it surprising, but to sell something surprising, the key is to make it familiar. And this is an incredibly

powerful concept for technologists. Spotify, when they were initially designing their incredible program Discover Weekly, they initially wanted it to be entirely new songs. But a bug in the algorithm accidentally let through some familiar songs as they were testing internally. So they fixed the bug, and after they fixed the bug, engagement with the app plummeted. It turned out that having a few familiar songs made the app much, much more popular, even though it's a discovery. Even though it's a discovery tool. And I think about this also with like the movie Steve Jobs. There's that famous scene where Michael Fasbender is pointing at the Mac 2 and he goes, this has to look like a face. This has to say hello, right? To sell something truly novel, it had to look like a friend.

And so throughout this sort of technology landscape, you see this challenge of if we're designing a, if we're creating a truly novel product, the key challenge is how do we make it familiar to our first consumer demographic. Thank you so much for joining the A16Z podcast. It's been a pleasure talking to you both today. Thank you so much.