Olivia: What makes something popular? Is it pure genius? Unmatched quality? Or is it just dumb luck? Consider the Mona Lisa. For centuries, it was just another beautiful painting in the Louvre, respected, but not even the most valuable. Then, on a summer morning in 1911, a handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia tucked it under his coat and walked out. Jackson: He just… walked out with it? Olivia: He just walked out. The theft became a global media sensation. Newspapers printed its image everywhere. People flocked to the Louvre just to stare at the empty space on the wall. When it was finally recovered two years later, it wasn't just a painting anymore. It was a celebrity. Its fame wasn't born from its artistic merit alone, but from exposure. Jackson: It became famous for being famous. This is the kind of counter-intuitive, almost unsettling idea we're exploring today from Derek Thompson's book, Hit Makers. The book’s core argument is that popularity isn't magic; it's a science, with hidden rules that govern what we love and why. Olivia: And today we'll dive deep into this from two perspectives. First, we'll explore the secret psychological formula behind what we like—this delicate dance between the familiar and the surprising. Jackson: Then, we'll shatter a modern myth and reveal why the concept of 'going viral' is mostly an illusion, and how hits really spread in the digital age.

Jackson: So, Olivia, that Mona Lisa story is fascinating because it completely upends our romantic notion of the lone genius creating a masterpiece that the world instantly recognizes. If it's not just about being the "best," what is it? The book argues it starts with a simple psychological quirk. Olivia: It’s called the "mere-exposure effect." And it’s the idea that we tend to like things simply because we're familiar with them. There's a fantastic story about this from the world of art. We all know the big names of Impressionism: Monet, Renoir, Degas. We see their work on posters, mugs, calendars. But there was another painter at the time, Gustave Caillebotte, who critics like Émile Zola said was just as talented, if not more so. Jackson: I’ve heard of Monet and Renoir. I have not heard of Caillebotte. Olivia: Exactly! And the book argues that’s not an accident of talent, but an accident of history. Caillebotte was wealthy, and he bought up his friends' paintings—Monet, Renoir, the whole crew. When he died young, he bequeathed his entire collection to the French state, demanding they be hung in a national museum. The government hated Impressionism—one critic called it "filth"—but they eventually caved and hung about half the collection. Jackson: So Caillebotte’s collection basically became the collection. It was the official playlist of Impressionism. Olivia: Precisely. And because those specific paintings were on display for decades, they were the ones printed in textbooks, the ones tourists saw, the ones that became… familiar. A psychologist named James Cutting actually tested this. He took his students and, for a whole semester, showed them obscure Impressionist paintings four times more often than famous ones. By the end, the students' preference for the "greats" like Monet had vanished. They preferred the paintings they'd simply seen the most. Jackson: So our brain has this built-in bias for the familiar. The book calls it "fluency"—we like things that are easy for our minds to process. It feels good, it feels right. But that can't be the whole story. If it were, we’d just listen to the same song on repeat forever and never want anything new. There has to be another half to the equation. Olivia: There is. And the master of that other half was a man named Raymond Loewy, arguably the most influential designer of the 20th century. He designed everything from the Coca-Cola bottle to the Shell logo to the interior of Air Force One. His guiding philosophy was a principle he called MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. Jackson: Most Advanced… Yet Acceptable. I love that. It’s the whole formula in one phrase. It’s not just ‘Most Advanced,’ because that would be too weird. And it’s not just ‘Acceptable,’ because that would be boring. Olivia: Exactly. Loewy understood that humans are caught in a constant tug-of-war. We are neophilic—we crave the new—but we are also deeply neophobic—we fear things that are too new. His genius was in finding the perfect middle ground. Take his first big job in 1929. He was asked to improve a Gestetner mimeograph machine. Jackson: A what now? Olivia: An early copy machine. And it was hideous. Loewy described it as having spindly legs and a "dirty black" color. He said it looked like a cast-iron monster. He didn't just make it a little prettier. He encased the entire mechanical mess in a sleek, smooth, futuristic shell. It was advanced. But he kept the crank and the tray, the parts people already knew how to use. It was acceptable. The design was a sensation. Jackson: He gave them a spaceship, but left the familiar steering wheel. Olivia: A perfect analogy. He did the same thing with the Lucky Strike cigarette pack. The original was a garish green. He made it a clean, crisp white, which was a radical change. But he kept the iconic red target logo. Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. He understood you have to anchor the surprise in a sea of familiarity. Jackson: So the formula for a hit, whether it's a painting or a product, is this perfect blend. It’s like a great movie trailer. It shows you the exciting new parts but reassures you with familiar actors or a familiar story structure. It’s that "aesthetic aha" moment the book describes—the thrill of the new, safely cushioned by the comfort of the old. It’s not just random. It’s a recipe. Olivia: And it’s a recipe that explains so much, from why pop songs have repetitive choruses with a surprising bridge, to why Star Wars felt so revolutionary. It was a space opera, a western, and a samurai film all rolled into one—a bundle of familiar things presented in a completely new way.

Olivia: So we have the psychological recipe for a hit. But a brilliant product that follows the MAYA rule perfectly and yet sits on a shelf unseen is just a very well-designed hobby. The book argues that how things spread is the most misunderstood part of popularity. We all love to use that phrase: "it went viral." Jackson: Right, and when we say that, we picture this neat little biological process. A virus. I get sick, I sneeze on you, you get sick. You sneeze on two of your friends, they get sick. It’s a chain reaction, an exponential cascade of one-to-one transmissions. Olivia: But the book argues, with a ton of evidence, that this is almost never how ideas or products actually spread. A massive study by researchers at Yahoo looked at the diffusion of millions of messages on Twitter. They found that over 90 percent of messages didn't diffuse at all. They were dead on arrival. And of the ones that did spread, the vast majority of people saw them from the original source or from just one degree of separation. Jackson: So it’s not a sprawling, multi-generational family tree of sharing. It’s more like a starburst. One big source, and a bunch of people seeing it directly from that source. The book calls this "broadcast diffusion," and it has a perfect, if slightly morbid, analogy to explain it. Olivia: It does. Picture London, 1854. The Soho district is in the grip of a terrifying cholera outbreak. People are dying within hours. The dominant theory at the time was "miasma"—that disease was spread by bad air, a foul-smelling fog. Jackson: Which sounds ridiculous to us now, but it’s a very "viral" way of thinking about it. The disease is everywhere, in the air, spreading from person to person indiscriminately. Olivia: But a skeptical doctor named John Snow didn't buy it. He went door to door, talking to families, and he started mapping the deaths. And he noticed a terrifying pattern. The deaths weren't random; they were clustered around a single public water pump on Broad Street. He also noticed that workers at a nearby brewery were mysteriously spared. Why? They got a daily allowance of beer and never drank the water. Jackson: The pump was the source. Olivia: The pump was the source. The cholera wasn't spreading like a cold, from person to person through the air. It was a broadcast. One contaminated source was infecting hundreds of people at once. Snow convinced the local authorities to remove the pump handle, and the epidemic stopped almost overnight. Jackson: And that is such a powerful metaphor for how hits spread. It’s not a million tiny sneezes. It’s one big, powerful pump. In the modern world, those pumps are what the book calls "dark broadcasters." Olivia: What a great term. "Dark broadcasters." Jackson: It refers to people, or companies, or media outlets that distribute information to a huge audience all at once, but whose influence isn't always visible. Think about the Kony 2012 video. It was called the "most viral video in history." But it didn't spread because a million regular people shared it with their friends. It spread because a handful of celebrities—Rihanna, Oprah, Justin Bieber—with a combined audience of tens of millions, all tweeted it at roughly the same time. They were the Broad Street pump. Olivia: It’s the same with the book Fifty Shades of Grey. It didn't become a 150-million-copy bestseller through a slow, organic, person-to-person chain. It had three massive broadcasts. First, it built a huge, concentrated audience in the fan fiction community. That was its first pump. Second, it got nominated for a Goodreads award, broadcasting it to millions of avid readers. And the third and biggest pump was when Random House acquired it and put their global marketing and distribution machine behind it. Jackson: So the myth of virality is that you just need to make something contagious and release it into the wild. The reality of hits is that you need to make a great product, sure, but then you need to find a pump. You need a broadcast. Content might be king, as the saying goes, but the book makes it clear: distribution is the kingdom.

Olivia: So, when you put it all together, the book paints a really clear picture. The secret to a hit isn't one single thing. It's a product that feels daringly familiar, hitting that perfect MAYA sweet spot between advanced and acceptable. Jackson: And, crucially, that product needs to find its 'Broad Street pump.' It needs a distribution network, a broadcast to a wide audience, not just a vague hope that it will magically 'go viral' through word of mouth. It’s about understanding both the psychology of the individual and the structure of the network. Olivia: It really changes how you see the world. You start to see the MAYA principle everywhere, from movie sequels to new iPhone designs. And you start to question the narrative of how things become popular. Jackson: Which leaves us with a great question to think about. The next time you find yourself loving a new song, or see a product explode out of nowhere, ask yourself two things. First: Is this truly, radically original, or is it a clever and comforting remix of something I already know? Olivia: And second, and maybe more importantly: How did it find me? Did it spread like a virus, passed from friend to friend? Or did I just drink from the same well as a million other people?