Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why Did Stanley Water Bottles Suddenly Become a Cultural Phenomenon?

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

It's just a steel tumbler with a straw and side handle. But the Stanley cup is a social media phenomenon and an incredible business success story. How did this thing come out of nowhere? What lessons can we learn about its success? And, more broadly, what do cultural phenomena like this say about marketing trends, social media tastes, and the role of randomness in our life and economy? Joining the show are Amanda Mull, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Brian Klaas, author of the new book ‘Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.’ If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Amanda Mull & Brian Klaas Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

On plain English the last few weeks, we've been. We've delved into several difficult and often dark subjects. We've talked about the war in the Middle East, conflict around the world, the border crisis, and the disaster that is news media economics. Today is a lighter piece of cultural curiosity. The question at the heart of today's episode is, why is the Stanley Cup so popular? Perhaps you know exactly what I'm talking about, because you, your spouse, your friend, your coworker,

or all of the above, own a Stanley Cup, or perhaps own 17 Stanley Cups, and walk around with these trendy water bottles like they're surgically attached to the palm. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, I'm not talking about the Stanley Cup, as in the trophy awarded to the NHL champion. I'm talking about Stanley water bottles, which went from obscurity to ubiquity in the last three years. Stanley, revenue, according to its president, has gone up by a thousand percent in the last three years on social media, there are tens of millions of views of influencers and random people displaying their dozens of Stanley Cups.

This Stanley Tumblr has now 3 billion views on TikTok. An ordinary-looking thing, a water tumbler with a fat top and skinny bottom, has become a total cultural sensation and a cultural mystery. The whole thing is equal parts dumbfounding and fascinating to me. The science and sociology of cultural hits is fascinating to me. Several years ago, I published a book called Hitmakers, which used stories from pop culture and academic theories in psychology and sociology to explain why we like what we like,

and why some cultural phenomena seem to go viral, while others do not. The book was narrowly about the science of preferences and the economics of distribution in movies and television and music, but more broadly, it was about human nature. Sensations like 50 Shades of Grey or Pokemon Go or Stanley Cups, have a lot in common with the mechanics of revolutions, the rise of religion, political party, ideology.

The question of why do some things take off cuts very close to the bone of who we are, why we behave the way we do. And so if you're clicking into this episode thinking that Stanley Water Cups don't quite match the import of Israel Gaza or the demise of local journalism, I cannot disagree with you narrowly. But in the bigger picture,

this is a welcome return home to a question that I used to wrestle with more than any other question, is there a formula that explains success in economic and cultural markets? Or are these things best understood as chaos? Today is a bit of a special episode in terms of its construction.

You're going to hear a bit more of me than usual, but we're going to weave in two interviews. Amanda Mull is a staff writer at the Atlantic and one of the most delightful chroniclers of American trends that I know. and Brian Claus is an associate professor at University College London and the author of a new book, Fluke, on the Science and Stories of Randomness. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Amanda Mull, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So to ground our investigation, Amanda, tell me about when you first realized that the Stanley Cup was a cultural phenomenon to be reckoned with. You know, it's kind of hard to put an exact, date to it because I remember all of a sudden, on Instagram specifically, I began to see a couple of people who are particularly, well, a couple of people who I think of is spending a lot of time on

Instagram friends of mine who suddenly had these Stanley water bottles. And, you know, this is, this was probably 2019, I want to say, maybe beginning of 2020. I remember thinking, like, oh, we've already got Yeties, we've already got hydroflasks, we had swell bottles. Like, we have all of these products so far. Like, why a new one? Why another one? And I didn't think much of it because, you know, people are always buying stuff on Instagram.

And then it just, like, never stopped. And then it just continued to grow and grow and grow. And over the past few years, there have been times where in my head, I'm like, all right, the Stanley thing is probably telling us. topped out. And then it just continues to get larger and larger and larger. I reached out to Amanda first because she's such a good explainer of cultural trends. And the truth is, full disclosure, I do not use water bottles. I do not purposefully or knowingly own a single water bottle. I say purposefully or knowingly because my wife owns about 19,000

water bottles, including a Stanley Cup, maybe several Stanley Cups. Most of the water that I consume comes in the form of coffee. I am chronically under hydrated. So the first question that I had for Amanda about this basic phenomenon was a very simple one. Why are high-end water bottles a thing at all? Well, the first time I wrote about water bottles as a status symbol was back in 2019. This has been going on for a while. Dare I say, this actually goes back to the 1990s when bottled water itself became a trend. And then the Evian and later the Fiji bottles became super, super popular to carry around to sort of have as a fashion accessory. Then, you know, over time, the concept of using single-use plastics became sort of outdated and untrendy unto itself.

So naturally, there had to be something to replace that because the concept of being hydrated and, like, taking good care of your health is still a status symbol and people still need ways to signal that. And also, people do just want to be able to drink some water when they're out. and about traversing the world without having to buy some. So, you know, you get this, like, twin need of status signaling and of just, like, basic human biology. And then you get, like, a really powerful, durable, you know, quest for products out of that. So you get a lot of people who buy up these bottles pretty quickly,

and then people who are sort of, like, on the leading edge of this type of sort of wellness consumption trend, start looking for something else. So you have this really, really quick cycling of It brands in this space, which is why you find a lot of people who have a hydrophlask and have a Yeti and have a Stanley. This is a good place to give some history. The Stanley of Stanley Water Bottles was William Stanley Jr. Born in Brooklyn in 1858, he was a physicist and an inventor. Most of his patents concern the transmission of electricity. William Stanley's son, by the way, was Harold Stanley.

Any finance heads listening might feel their ears perk up here because Harold Stanley worked with J.P. Morgan in the 1920s to found Morgan Stanley. Yes, the Stanley of Morgan Stanley is the son of the Stanley of Stanley water bottles. Anyway, Father William, in addition to mainstreaming alternative current technology and siring the Stanley of Morgan Stanley, also patented an all-steel vacuum bottle in the early 1900s, and he formed the Stanley Bottle Company. They, for much of their history, were a company that marketed mostly toward men, construction workers, outdoorsmen, people who work in physical labor jobs. These were really, really common sort of physical accessories of those jobs where, you know, it's important to be hydrated.

You need to bring water with you. You're working in all kinds of weather. So it makes a lot of sense to have something that is insulated, that is vacuum sealed, and that is portable for your water. And until, like, extremely recently, that is what they did, almost exclusively. So I asked Amanda, how does a company that makes bulky green thermases for construction workers, for most of the 20th century, become a company that now makes water bottles largely for women? Well, I think the legend of Stanley starts in 2017, and that is the year that a product recommendation website and Instagram account called The Buy Guide had just started up, and it

chose the Stanley Tumblr as one of its first recommendations. The Buy Guide is run by three family members, and the website serves a disproportionately female and disproportionately Mormon audience. And something that a lot of people who consume lifestyle content online might not realize is that Mormon moms are a huge, huge influential group in how lifestyle and domestic trends move online. Over the next few years, the buy guide found that these tumblers were harder and harder for their readers to come by. So they asked to sell the watercups directly to their audience. The buy guide said, sell us 5,000 of them, we'll sell them directly to our readers. And that worked great. They sold them directly to their readers. The readers ate it up. And then eventually,

Stanley, they try to encourage Stanley to market directly to women, to consider this new audience. And they don't really get anywhere until a new executive comes in in their marketing department. And the marketing executive comes from Crocs and says, oh, yeah, this is probably like a good idea. you know, if women want to buy our products, we should probably market them to women. That marketing executive would be Terence Riley. After seven years making Crocs a thing, he moved to Stanley. After one day hearing from his daughters that all the kids and teachers in the class were buying scores and scores of Stanley quenchers, a 40-ounce colored stainless steel tumbler

with a straw and side handle. As ink reported, Stanley was transformed by Terrence Riley into a rocket ship. by deftly using exclusivity, online influencers, and social media. They started putting money back into developing the product, into making new colors, new options. And now they come in sort of a rainbow of colors. And there's new colors dropping all the time. And I think that it was sort of off to the races after that.

Because the form factor is particularly good. You had a particularly online and connected subset of women, Mormon moms, who took to it initially. And then you had a company that said, oh, yeah, we're interested in this new market. We're interested in learning about them. And then we'll do what it takes to market to them, basically. It also helped that the Stanley water bottle

had the right shape for moms on the go. Stanley bottles are wider up top and narrower at the bottom, making them easier to put in cup holders. You can put them in a car. They have a handle so that if you have smaller hands, they're easy to grip. I have tiny baby hands, and a 40-ounce water bottle is normally going to be really hard for me to get it like a solid grip on. And a lot of vacuum water bottles up to this point have required you to unscrew a lid in order to take a sip, which requires two hands.

So if you're a mom, which means you're probably, you know, population-wide, your hands are probably on the smaller side because you're probably female. And so you have kids, you're taking them around, you want to stay hydrated. It's very, very difficult to maneuver a like 40-ounce screw-top water bottle. If you can't put it in your car holder, if you have to have your hands entirely free in order to use it, it's just difficult. And like, car water bottles and water bottles with handles and water bottles with straws were all available at the same time as the Stanley back in 2017. But the combination of those three. aspects in one product was like much less common. Stanley wasn't the only one by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes total sense to me why a group of Mormon moms who are interested in

aesthetics and interested in products that might be helpful to them latched onto this one in particular. So if someone's listening and they're thinking, how do I recreate the magic that created the Stanley Water Cup craze, they might say, well, first, you have to find an affinity group, find your 1,000 true fans. Number two, partner with them, partner with people who are most passionate about your product, and three, find influencers

to broaden the appeal beyond the core early adopter group by using social media. In fact, that is exactly the narrative, the playbook, the formula that I keep seeing around the Stanley Cup. In business magazines, in newspapers, on business YouTube,

on podcasts I listen to, I've seen countless efforts to deliver a kind of Stanley Cup playbook that people can learn from and operationalize. But according to Amanda Mall, these explanations all have their limits. They tell us how the Stanley Cup became popular, but they don't answer the why.

I don't doubt that Stanley intended to sell Stanley cups to as many people as possible, but I also don't think that they went about it in a way that is as sort of masterful as perhaps they're getting credit for. They made a good water bottle in a bunch of colors. And that definitely helped, but, like, there's a lot of good water bottles in a bunch of colors out there.

Like, most brands make their water bottles in a rainbow of colors, and most of them do seasonal colors or special editions or limited editions or influencer collabs. Like, it's good marketing. This executive did a good job. But I think that there is, are just like so many other things happening here that then when you try to go back and like reverse engineer the explanation for why this happened, it tends to get like a little

bit overdetermined into this like mastermind who, who saw the writing on the wall and like is playing everybody like a fiddle. Like no, I think he just knows his customer. Overdetermined. I love that word. One of my biggest gripes with productivity podcasts and business books, like, you know, airport books and the like, is when they take a success story from the past and say, we can explain this success story in five easy steps. And if you follow these five easy steps, you can achieve success too. Well, that's not how life works. That's not how the world works. Just because you can tell any story about something doesn't mean you have an explanation. And it certainly doesn't mean you have a blueprint. I think that

especially in like the business press, it is a little bit difficult to talk about the fact that, like, you can have a good product and good marketing and a good plan and a good idea of who you want your customer to be and budget in order to market to them. And like, all of that can, like, still not work. You can still, like, fail to build a sustainable business. You can fail to catch on. Like, so much of how this.

happens is just timing and luck to a certain extent. I think that the Stanley water bottles were to a certain extent in the right place at the right time. A lot of people were stuck at home. A lot of people were concerned about their health. A lot of people were just sort of buying random things online because they couldn't do much else with their resources and they were bored and agitated and anxious and what's a better head of dopamine than ordering something online. So I think that they were just sort of in the right place at the right time, like the right people took notice of them early on. You really can't underestimate the influence of Mormon moms on the internet. What Amanda's saying here is going to strike some people as very unsatisfying. She's saying,

Stanley kind of got lucky. We hate to hear that. We hate to hear that things that succeeded just kind of got lucky. It's strange to think that some of the biggest cultural successes are just flukes. But the truth is, fluke might often be the best way to think about them. Quick example. In 1954, Bill Haley and his comments released a record whose B-side was a cover called Rock Around the Clock. Rock Around the Clock pretty much flopped in 1954. But one of the few people who bought that record was a 10-year-old boy named Peter Ford. And Peter Ford was the son of a Hollywood actor named Glenn Ford. Glenn Ford was starring in a movie called Blackboard Jungle, one of those movies the 1950s

about teenage delinquency, like Rebel Without a Cause. One day, the director of the movie, Blackboard Jungle, asked Glenn if he knew of any dangerous songs that would capture the vibe of teens behaving badly, that they could put in the movie. Glenn asked his son, Peter, to give the director some of his records. included in that stack was a dud by Bill Haley and his comets called Rock Around the Clock. Rock Run the Clock played in the middle

of Blackboard Jungle at the beginning of Blackboard Jungle and at the end of Blackboard Jungle. And only then, in 1955, did the song become a sensation. The first rock and roll hit in American history, the sixth best-selling single in music history. Rock Around the Clock was the same song

when it failed in 1954 and when it succeeded beyond anybody's wildest dream in 195. The difference wasn't quality, the difference was chance. The music preferences of one boy shaped the course of music history. I think that's Amanda's point. Success in culture isn't predetermined. It's contingent. It's fluky.

To learn more about the science of flukes, I called up Brian Klaus, a political scientist and the author of a new book. Fluke. Well, the argument is basically that the world is diverted a lot more by random or apparently random things than we think it is. And the arbitrary and the accidental play a big role in our lives, even though we're often unaware of it. And, you know, I think there's this sort of trope that exists in, like, all the smart thinking world, which is you have to separate the signal from the noise. I reject that.

I think that the noise is actually one of the most important parts of our world. and I think that's where a lot of the unexpected and seemingly arbitrary things that change our trajectories come from. So the argument is that the world could be profoundly different but for a few small changes. According to Brian,

flukes don't just shape the water bottles you buy. They shape history, wars, catastrophes. Here's one example. Henry Simpson goes on vacation to Kyoto, Japan, in 1926 with his wife, and they fall in love with the city. It just gets their sort of soft spot in their heart for them.

Now, this doesn't seem to matter until 19 years later, Stimson is in charge of, well, he's the American Secretary of War, and the target committee submits to him their plans to drop the first atomic bomb on Kyoto. Now, Stimson doesn't want this to happen. It's his so-called Pet City, so he twice meets with President Truman and convinces him to take Kyoto off the targeting list. And so the first bomb gets dropped on Hiroshima instead. And the second bomb is supposed to go to a place called Kokura, but there's briefly cloud cover over Kokura. So the bomber goes to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki. So when you look at the story of the atomic bombings, it's quite literally true that hundreds of thousands of people died in different cities because of a 19-year-old vacation

and a cloud. So let's bring this back to water bottles in the 21st century. I asked Claus, how might randomness play a role in the shaping of cultural preferences today, the songs that we like, the movies we watch, the water bottles we buy? I asked them to give me a scientific frame to understand how individual people, individual consumers, can chaotically, yet sometimes predictably, cluster around certain products. To my surprise, we ended up talking about locusts. Whenever we think of locust, we always imagine them in their sort of gregarious state where there's devouring and everything.

But actually solitary locusts are pretty harmless. They're basically just grasshoppers. And locusts behave in different ways depending on the densest. of how many are put together. And this is a really mind-bending finding that's very experimentally verified by some scientists in Australia. I reached out to them

when I was researching the book. And basically what they say is that for whatever reason, and they don't know why, when you put 73.7 locusts together in a square meter, they instantly start to swarm. And as soon as they start to swarm,

their behavior is radically different. And what's really striking and where it's, I think, relevant for this story is that when they're in that swarm pattern, a single locust jostling another locust, even a tiny bit, can redirect the entire swarm in an instant. And so what's really extraordinary is you can have these like billions of locusts, and one individual locust will move, you know, the size of a human hand,

and billions will all of a sudden switch direction. And I think this is the kind of stuff where there's sort of what I call the paradox of the swarm, which is to say that, you know, in modern life, we tend to think, think there's all sorts of regularities and reasons behind everything that happens, right? It's like, and we have this. I mean, there's like loads of stuff that is like this in our lives, like you have Starbucks and Starbucks is always the same and so on. But like the flip side of this is that every so often, you know, somebody buys a Stanley Cup and says it's amazing or somebody tweaks the design slightly and it takes off. And, you know, it can be something that's really small

and arbitrary and it can redirect the human swarm. And so I use the analogy for us to say, you know, we can be like this. We've built social systems where we have extreme. extremely high densities, our social crazes can be redirected by small numbers of people, and they can create ripple effects through, in this case, potentially millions of people buying the same cup. So, are Brian and I saying, or suggesting, that human beings are just like Locus? No. I'd like to think we have more self-control than a mindless swarm of bugs.

But I'm not sure that we have as much self-control as we'd like to think. In psychology, what Brian is calling the paradox of the swarm sometimes goes by a different name. Social influence. Our tastes are not our own. We are influenced by our social environment. And social media expands the environment that influences us. Sometimes, I think we can all admit, the tastes of the masses swarm our own tastes. We buy something because everyone else is buying it.

We listen to something because it seems like everyone else is listening to it. We share a political opinion because, well, it seems like the political opinion that is safe to share among everyone we're exposed to. No, we are not locusts. But sometimes we do behave like a gregarious grasshopper. And I think this is where social media has embedded increased arbitrariness and contingency into the world because, you know, somebody with no followers who writes about something or tweets about something or, you know, posts a video on TikTok about something.

they may not have the same reach. But some of the different mechanisms by which the locus sort of style thing can spread now are different. So TikTok spreads differently than Instagram, which spreads differently from Twitter and so on. And so I think we have, you know, more sophisticated and differential patterns of the locust swarm, but we're not completely interchangeable. And the networks that we are in, are we, the networks that we live within will affect how quickly a sort of paradox of the swarm moment might develop. The Atlantic's Amanda Moll agrees. A huge part of why the Stanley Tumblr took off wasn't about marketing genius alone.

It was about the power of TikTok, the social influence of TikTok, in the late pandemic years. That is also a time that TikTok was gaining a lot of users in the U.S. And a lot of people were trying to figure out what was going on on TikTok. And these sort of norms and expectations of like product recommendations on TikTok were being. formed and being worked out in real time over the past couple of years. And TikTok has become a place where people go for a lot of shopping recommendations and to get, like, you know, hot tips on products. So the sort of like big, colorful, silly look of some of these Stanley Tumblers works

well visually, works well on TikTok. And it gave people like an opportunity to sort of like make fun of themselves and make fun of like their demographic a little bit in a way. but also signal status at the same time, which is like a really powerful combination of things to get to do at once. And I think that you just had all of these things sort of coming together at once,

and the Stanley Cups were there, and they offered something that was like just slightly different enough that a lot of people were like, I don't know, I guess I'm going to order one. Now there's one more dynamic that's worth talking about here. Water bottles are of fashion.

kind of like blue jeans, certain styles seem to go in and out and in and out. When I think about my favorite fashion, it's first names. Think about a name like Jennifer. In 1920, practically nobody in America was named Jennifer. By the 1960s, Jennifer was a familiar but not particularly popular name.

But so many parents decided that Jennifer was optimally novel in the 1970s, the 1980s, that it became the top name for the country in that decade and a half, only for it to fall back down the curve. What's interesting about the fashion of first names is that no marketing executive made Jennifer popular. No company made Jennifer popular. No executive mastermind at its rise and fall. It just happened. When most people are looking for something surprising, but also familiar, It tends to create fashion cycles. Once something reaches a certain level of popularity,

if it is the right type of product, everybody else, well, not everybody else, but lots and lots of other people just get curious about it and get curious about what they might benefit from, you know, acquiring that product or using that product or like how it might feel different from what they already have or like maybe they're just bored. Like that is how I got mine.

I was just a little bit bored. And like, and it was just different enough. in that I had bought a straw top for my hydroflask that I still use when I go to the gym. Like, I still use that water bottle for a different purpose than I used my Stanley. Because I didn't want to unscrew the cap and, like, tip back the entire bottle and have, like, a rush of ice hit me in the face. And, like, this is, like, an existing problem with water bottles. And this one just came with a straw top that I didn't have to spend an extra $15 on.

And it came with a handle. like I have little hands. And so it was like, well, this is a product that I know I will like in like general practical terms because I use my existing water bottle all the time. And it has like a couple of things that I think I might like better, or that at least I would like to try out. Let's summarize what we've learned so far. The mainstream explanation for the Stanley Cup's success is a really good story.

The by-guide, the Mormon women, the brilliant chief executive. This is the stuff of great narratives. But that clear narrative misses something significant, which is that history, culture, and life is fluky. We like to believe in Pat's stories, but if we want to understand the world, we need an awareness of, and maybe even a theory of flukes.

I asked Amanda, what does she find so interesting about seeing culture as chaos? Our brains want to build narratives out of events that we find confusing or novel, we want to connect our perception of what is happening with our beliefs about the world and our understanding of the rest of the world.

So you go looking for explanations that sort of fit this rational, cause and effect, way of understanding how life happens. And you see this all over the news. You see this is the reason that conspiracy theories are powerful in one sense because people just want to understand why inexplicable things are happening.

They want to feel a sense of a sense of rationality about the world. They want to understand who are the relevant actors in any particular phenomenon they notice. And it is like a little bit unsettling to really sit with the idea that maybe there's not like a super rational way to understand this.

Maybe things sort of, maybe happenstance really accounts for a lot of what we experience. And maybe there is no single agent of action that is like enacting a grand plan to sell you a particular water bottle. Or if there is one agent of action doing that, like he is not like entirely in control of whether you do that or not. There is a lot of other circumstances that determine whether or not you even encounter that product anywhere in the world. So it is unsettling. It is uncomfortable to sit with the idea that a lot of stuff is just random, and there is not any particular reason why one thing does better than another, why one thing is successful and one thing is not. There are probably a lot of little explanations that amount to the difference, but none of them are going to be satisfying in a lot of situations. I don't think that there's any particularly satisfying explanation for why state.

Stanley and not hydroflask, reaching this sort of like cultural escape velocity. For Brian Klaus, the biggest takeaway is different. It's that when business books and podcasts look to the past to create the determinants of hits, the risk is that you squash creativity by merely duplicating what's already been done. The really big problem with people trying to infer

through swarm dynamics, some sort of linear cause and effect, is they always chase the last success. So like, oh, well, the reason this happened was because this figure did X. So let's do X. But you're like, no, the reason that worked was because it was different. So if you do the same thing, you're just replicating something that is old hat to people and it doesn't actually break out, right? I call this, I've written an essay about this called like The Rise of the Surefire Mediocre, where lots of people chase success in exactly the same way because like they get told this story, oh, yes, this is how this product broke out.

And, you know, it creates a whole bunch of stuff that's okay, but it's boring. And the stuff that actually spreads is actually, you know, it's new. It's interesting. It's different. And so, you know, when you overlearn the lesson of the past, you actually stifle creativity. And I think, you know, someone who looks at the Stanley Cup and is like, let's try to find the perfect marketing strategy based on this case study is actually going to make it less likely that will break out.

They might make a decent product because obviously it has features that are going to work, but they're not going to have the breakout product because that is going to be something that's often unexpected because if you already know. it's going to be popular, then you haven't actually captured a cultural zeitgeist that is new. That's the paradox, right? So, like, the things that truly break out are different from what everyone thought would already exist. Brian left me with one more great story. It's about the famous jazz musician and pianist, Keith Jared.

So he goes to this opera house in Cologne and is, you know, expecting for his specified grand piano to arrive just in time for the show. and somebody has screwed up so there's no piano, right? So the only thing he's got, and there's like no time to fix this, the only thing he's got is this like rickety crappy practice piano that like no one uses.

It's like, you know, like let's imagine it's like covered in dust and all this, right? But like, there's no choice. It's either cancel the show or play on the bad piano. And the thing is, through the forced experimentation,

he adapts his music. He has to change things. He has to improvise more and so on. The result was the Kohlm concert, released to 1975. It is still today, the best-selling piano recording in music history. It's because it was a situation where if he had controlled everything exactly as he thought

it would be, it wouldn't have been new. It wouldn't have been interesting, right? So it's this novelty of being forced to experiment that I think creates these breakout moments. And I think so much of our life is about chasing control where we have certainty. We think, just do this and you'll be fine. You know, that story to me really sticks with me because it's like the moments of creativity and sometimes artistic beauty are derived from accidents. If you take nothing else from this show, take this. When we try to glean lessons from viral sensations and cultural phenomena to build new things, it's the lesson of Keith Jarrett that we often miss.

There is no finally tuned formula for success. The biggest hits are often the opposite of a tuned instrument. Brian Claus, thank you. Thanks for having me on the show. Amanda Mull. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening.

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