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 their 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?

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