DOUGLAS VAN PRAET

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[[00:00:00] R.J.: What is your name and your background?

[00:00:03] Douglas: Doug Van Praet, and my background is really working for many years in New York and Los Angeles. I worked for big eight ad agencies on large accounts. My role was really the strategist, so the guy who writes the creative brief. That's something I did for a long, long time. I'm a market researcher by trade because that's the tools of the trade when you're a strategist. You look at research and you bridge the gap between data and elimination and creativity. I was finding a lot of pitfalls and shortcomings with market research so I started to look at behavioral science research. That sort of transformed me and led me to form my own consultancy, applying neuroscience and behavioral science to marketing and creative challenges and business challenges. That's a brief summary of a long career.

[00:01:12] R.J.: What about that work? I think people can figure it out, but what about that makes you qualified to speak to things, how things go viral out on the internet? I think that that's a question that a lot of people in marketing are always trying to figure out and you seem to have a kind of interesting and scientific breakdown of why you believe things go viral.

[00:01:47] Douglas: I think in terms of qualifications, I started on a practical level. I work with budgets and media budgets and creativity. My job as a market researcher and a strategist is to measure what does well and what doesn't well, so I've been seeing patterns for decades now in terms of what works and what doesn't work. I started with practical application and I backfilled it with scientific information. I understand both sides, the theory as well as the practice. I write for Psychology Today, I have a industry best-selling book out in marketing and market research called Unconscious Branding.

Really, it's about understanding what works because in advertising and marketing, you actually get to see sales figures after you launch campaigns. More importantly, as we've moved towards digital media environments, you have direct response feedback in terms of what works and what doesn't work. These are patterns that occur in nature, not just in markets, and that's the observation that I had was really this isn't something that's specific to a demographic. It's pan-cultural and it's human, so there's a matrix below this that is really driven by human needs, not necessarily consumer needs.

[00:03:24] R.J.: Overall, why do things go viral? I know it's a very simple question for a broad topic, but if you could distill it down, why do things go viral?

[00:03:40] Douglas: Things go viral because they trigger powerful human emotions that are reflective of fundamental human needs. Most of our behavior is unconscious, the things that we do in life happen automatically. If you had to think about every little action you did, we couldn't survive because we'd be overwhelmed. Things that go viral really tap into these fundamental human needs that you don't have to think about like food or survival or, sex or sustenance. I broke it down into six fundamental elements, which we can dig deeper into, but it really is reflective of basic human needs that are articulated, oftentimes implicitly and not directly.

[00:04:36] R.J.: For that, can you force anything to go viral or is it or an organic process?

[00:04:45] Douglas: It's absolutely an organic process that can be lifted by paid media. You can't force something to go viral, but you can force something not to go viral. What I mean by that is if you're not playing in one of these sandboxes of what I call the Six S's to Success, six human needs, it's not going to go viral. You have to still tap into these fundamental human needs. It has to trigger powerful emotions and also these need states that are much deeper.

[00:05:23] R.J.: I know in your article, I believe in Psychology Today, you actually said that there's a major difference between simply communicating a message and causing an emotional response. That's the big difference in making things go viral and break out. What is that difference between communicating a message and causing an emotional response?

[00:05:49] Douglas: I guess the simplest way to describe this is really, we all know intuitively that communication happening at a couple of levels, conscious and unconscious. We don't necessarily think of the distinction, but the simplest distinction is to understand there's the words that come out of your mouth and there's the emotions that your body is communicating through your facial expressions, through your intonation, through your body language intonation, other things that represent these reflexive reactive unconscious responses.

When you tap into the reactive unconscious responses, that's where you tap into viral content. Very rationally focused messages are not necessarily going to go viral. Ones that tap into powerful needs states are the ones that will like, Black Lives Matter, the Me Too Movement, Build the Wall. These are things that are, oftentimes, cultural, metaphorical, implicit, and powerfully relate to issues of survival and status and things like that.

[00:07:11] R.J.: What you just said, those three messages, I don't think that there's a single person out there, at least in America, that doesn't have some kind of emotional response to those phrases. One thing is that they're also very short. Does length of what you're trying to convey have anything to do with how quickly an idea can spread?

[00:07:36] Douglas: They don't have to be. Oftentimes, they're very brief. They're probably sometimes symbolic and metaphorical so simple messages absolutely will work well. We're interested in the simple story, not the tedious tale, right? If you're going to have a story that's going to be repeated, it must be very simple, must be easy to articulate and pass along. Brevity is certainly a component of that.

[00:08:08] R.J.: Yes, definitely. I think that actually brings us- now you've mentioned it a couple of times- to the Six S's to Success. What are the Six S's?

[00:08:19] Douglas: Well, again, these are simply patterns in nature. This is a reverse engineering process that I discovered in my research, but if you look at all viral content out there, there really are six functional components that were 'designed' by natural selection. I say designed in quotes because, by definition, natural selection is not by design, but these are the things that evolved naturally in our environments. The first of which is Surprise, second is Survival. The third is Sustenance, fourth is Sex. The fifth is Small Fry, so babies, cute puppies, kittens, and sixth is Status.

All of these needs, they overlap and they do stack upon each other, because you'll often find several S's within a piece of viral content, but they all are aimed at who we are as humans, which at a fundamental evolutionary level is about survival and replication of the species. These are the areas that go viral and these are the sandboxes creatively you should play in if you want viral content to emerge. There's no paint-by-numbers method to virtality, but understanding that you want to touch upon these things, either directly or perhaps more importantly, implicitly or an obliquely to get it virality.

[00:10:02] R.J.: Yes, definitely. I'd like to drill into those a little bit more. Could we go through each of the Six S's and you explain to us what they are and how they affect virality?

[00:10:20] Douglas: Sure.

[00:10:22] R.J.: Starting with survival, how would you define survival when it specifically comes to viral content?

[00:10:33] Douglas: It's the big category for all of them. We are, in essence, survival machines. That's what our brains and our bodies are designed to do. We are designed to avoid harm and survive and put our genes into the next generation. Things that reflect survival are-- It's not just internet content. These are human experiences that existed far before the internet. If you've ever driven down a highway and you saw a car crash, despite your own rational protest, you turned your head and looked even though you didn't want to witness the horrors that you might see. You just have to look.

We are galvanized and focused at things that threaten our survival because that's why we're here. We're here to survive. Anything that you see right now, as I mentioned, like Black Lives Matter, the Me Too Movement, these are issues of survival. Most viral content, in some way, touches upon this but oftentimes, it's oblique, it's not direct. It doesn't always have to be mayhem and fear and that, but there is that.

If you watch the news, there's a reason why there's a focus on the negative. The reason why is we, as humans, are focused on the negative. If you look at our basic human emotions, most of them are negative because we evolved to avoid harm. You have things like fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and then you have surprise and happiness. Surprise can go either way. That can be positive, as in a joke with a punchline you didn't see coming, or it could be negative, something threatening in here.

We've evolved to avoid harm and it shouldn't be any surprise that if emotions drive our behaviors, if emotions create motion, if emotions represent our motivation, then most of that is going to be to avoid harm, which is survival.

[00:12:48] R.J.: You were just talking about it but surprise is one of the S's as well. Beyond just a joke or something that takes you, what about surprise makes people keep coming back?

[00:13:04] Douglas: Surprise is really more fundamental than I think any other human emotion. The reason for that is really simple. Our brain is designed to predict. That's what our brain does, it predicts. It predicts because it wants to know what's going to happen next so I can literally move my body through the environment to stay safe. That's at a fundamental level.

Our brain is trying to make predictions so when something defies our prediction, we pay attention because that's how we learn. It's important. If there's some sort of pattern that doesn't make sense, we're literally, neurobiologically rewarded with a hit of dopamine, the wanting behavior of learning and addiction, and things like that. It literally is a hit of dopamine. The way I try to break down surprise is through the words pattern interruption. That's a tool that you could use and actually create things that can go viral.

If something is interrupted, your brain automatically, unconsciously, through the emotion of surprise, will pay attention to it. Emotions are not something you choose. They're like the weather, they just happen. They happen at an unconscious level. You become aware of them in consciousness when they're triggered but if you interrupt someone's pattern, if you surprise them, you will be forced to pay attention to, regardless of your conscious choice.

[00:14:50] R.J.: Interesting. In a very different world than that, you have sustenance as one of the Six S's. Food, basically. Right?

[00:15:05] Douglas: Exactly. What's more unconscious than your desire for food? You don't choose to be hungry. It just happens. It's your body saying, "You need energy, you must eat food." It's an unconscious drive. It's coming from inside of you and it's not something you have to think about. If you look down your Facebook feed right now, you're going to find plates of food. It's odd. It's odd behavior but it's incredibly viral. Why? Because food is really important to us. It's so important that those needs operate below the surface. Unconsciously, you gravitate to any messages that have to do with sustenance. It's really that simple.

[00:15:50] R.J.: Yes, Doug. I was actually working at Buzzfeed as a producer when they invented Tasty, when the Tasty videos first started coming out. I remember everybody was very shocked because it's a very simple thing that there's whole companies that have dedicated themselves to ripping it off at this point. It was just top-down videos of people making food and it was performing so much more than-- This was during the time when they were spending a lot of money on internet videos. We were making branded videos for very high budgets and this video just destroyed it, just the food. [chuckles] I spend every day watching pizza videos, pizza reviews so I get it. I get that sustenance.

[00:16:46] Douglas: You see, that's a great example. You mentioned, can you force something to go viral. You can force something not to go viral by focusing-- I think Buzzfeed will figure this out before anyone because, again, they have the pattern recognition of having done this so many times that they know what hits. Clearly, it is incredibly powerful and viral. Obviously, you can't fight the forces of nature so why go against the grain once you know that these are the patterns?

[00:17:22] R.J.: Definitely. Speaking of forces of nature, next is sex in the Six S's. I think we all know why this gets people going viral but I'd love to hear you explain it.

[00:17:34] Douglas: At our essence and I think evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, probably explains it the best. We are survival and replication machines in service of our genes. Our genes literally evolved to create these bodies to propagate the genes and spread amongst the population and create our species and create cultures. He points to the rabbit hole and you want to go.

We all know that sex sells. It's the one thing in advertising we know for so much. It's basically down to the same thing. You don't have to decide attraction. Attraction is deep. It happens at a deeper level. You don't have to consciously choose the desire to mate. It's as deeply rooted as behavior gets. All over, we are going to see reflections of that in our marketplace. Oftentimes, it's implicit and not necessarily as direct.

It's interesting, as I was talking to you about virality, a couple of years back it was so much easier to think about viral content because it really was an earlier process in internet development. Now, it's harder to pick them out like we used to because it's so, so blurred because there's so much of it. Sex runs deep for obvious reasons.

[00:19:28] R.J.: Definitely. Sex leads to the next one which is small fry. Can you explain it? It's my favorite name out of all of them. I love it and it makes a ton of sense. Can you explain to us what small fry is?

[00:19:47] Douglas: Yes. I love the name small fry, too, because I had to come up with an S, right? If it's small fry and in my in my view like, for example, I have a good friend and she has a little six-pound maltipoo. Her name is Sammy and I light up like a light bulb when I see her. It never gets old. There's a reason why we have this response. It's really a cuteness code. The fact that I overlap that code onto a dog is just an evolutionary by-product. The reason it exists is that we have this reflective unconscious positive response to babies. If we didn't care for these adorable little creatures, they would die without our help and so would our species.

If we are survival machines, these little adorable children are our gateway into the success of our species. Unlike other animals, humans are really helpless without their caregivers, without their parents for a much longer period, in part because we have these large brains. We're born prematurely so human babies can fit through the birth canal. Evolution has simply designed an emotional motivational response to love and care for these children that is embedded in our DNA and our unconscious mind.

[00:21:31] R.J.: Very interesting. It is very interesting that all of these does eventually go back to survival and what our base needs are. Which I guess this last one, I would love to know how that fits into it, which is status.

[00:21:48] Douglas: Yes, exactly. You just touched upon it. I think survival-- In market research, we call it the grand net. All mentions fit under this grand category. I think survival is the grand net of all of these. Status is really a means towards survival. With status, it confers an evolutionary advantage in terms of access to resources, which means the ability to survive, and track mates, and replicate, et cetera.

We are profoundly social creatures. We've not only evolved to avoid harm but we've evolved to bond with other humans. This happens at a very powerful, innate, unconscious hard-wired level. We are hard-wired for groupism. We have an inclination to find our tribe because 99% of human evolution, we lived in hunter-gatherer societies. Status is really important because unconsciously, we're always looking for our place in the pecking order. Where do we stand?

When we're not at a point of advantage or a point of disadvantage that makes our survival in question, we have powerful emotional responses. That's what you're seeing in using those same three examples, but Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Build the Wall. These are things that are about status. Which group do you fit into and how does that affect your survival?

[00:23:40] R.J.: It does seem that a lot of content that does go viral contains multitudes of these Six S's. It would be crazy to find one that has all of it, I'm sure that does. Most things that I could think of have two, three, four.

[00:24:03] Douglas: Yes, absolutely. It's what I say stacking S's, right? You'll find that because there is overlap and they all relate and they're all aimed at survival that it's not unusual that you would find at least two or more S's in each piece of viral content.

[00:24:25] R.J.: Definitely. You were alluding to this a little earlier, that it's a little more difficult to measure what is viral and what isn't nowadays. How have things changed in just the past year? We're talking at almost the one-year anniversary of LA going into lockdown. Has there been any shift in how things spread, how information spreads? Why or why not has there been?

[00:25:06] Douglas: It's a good question. We talked so much about the power of survival but if you're really talking about viral content, I think even more so, surprise is what's most important. As I mentioned, there's a saturation that's occurring and there's a lack of conscious attention that we simply have to expand upon receiving these messages. As I mentioned before, if our attention is determined by an emotion, not a thought and that emotion is surprise and it's something that we don't control, then the first step to any kind of virality is really about pattern interruption and surprise, especially in a saturated marketplace.

In terms of COVID and how these messages affect virality, but it's tougher these days, as I mentioned it, to see examples of virality because there're so many. In terms of my work, I work with marketers and I give them consultation and this happens all the time, is what you're seeing with COVID has been an absolute sea of sameness with the same message. We've done montages and videos of different ads to make this point when we sell it to our clients. It's gotten better as we're moving towards the back end. In the beginning, it's like, "We're there for you," or "in times like this, in uncertain times."

All the language was just a montage of sea of sameness. The brain is designed to predict and ignore stimuli that's predictable. We're a pattern recognition machine and we learn through pattern interruption. If I predict what you're going to say, I will ignore it because my brain is going to say, "This is not important. I know this pattern, move on." What I would say during COVID is that we had become numb to a lot of these messages of survival.

Not entirely, because it's absolutely fundamental to who we are as humans but I think that what you're seeing is clearly marketing messages. You've got to start interrupting a pattern. You have to go back to normal. You have to do things that will defy that prediction and you have to get out of the sea of sameness.

[00:27:30] R.J.: One thing that has always been around but really seems to be breaking out into the mainstream in real way is conspiracy theories seem to be spreading a lot in the last couple of years. Why do you think that is?

[00:27:51] Douglas: Well, it's twofold, basically. Number one is the word conspiracy sounds evil and sinister, right? There you go, right? It's survival. It really is that simple sometimes. The second point is that we have to remember that a rational mind, it's almost a misnomer because emotion is data by other word. A rational mind is running the show.

If 90% of our cognition is our emotions and 10% is our rationality and our conscious thinking, we are being driven by irrational reactions, emotional reactions. Emotional reactions are correlations. They're not causality-related. They're just simply-- When you are a child, you learn early, "Touch the stove, hot, pull your hand out." Then it starts to generalize. "Don't touch anything that might be hot because you'll get hurt." Sometimes, these correlations, they work really well.

Other times, they don't work well. We can fall prey to irrational messages because that's how our body and our brain work. We're not driven by facts, we're driven by feelings. Those feelings often come from things that can be easily manipulated. That's what we're seeing with conspiracy theories. The other thing is conspiracy theories do very good jobs of polarizing the population. There's a group of people who think differently. You want to create some sort of polarity in conversations. It's always when you come up with something that goes against the grain of other folks, it creates this kind of back and forth dialogue that you see on social media.

[00:30:07] R.J.: Do you think that it also has anything to do, thinking through the emotional response and how that leads people to find the content? In the last 5 to 10 years, social media sites have really gone all-in on their algorithms. It has destroyed the monoculture that we once had where we had, maybe not everybody agreed, but new sources we agreed on, there were a certain amount of shows you could watch.

Nowadays, you could go on Netflix, Netflix knows all your shows. You find whatever you want there, you could find whatever news source you want. Do you think that that emotion is leading to the destruction of the monoculture, or do you think that how splintered the information is, is feeding the conspiracy theories?

[00:31:21] Douglas: I'm not exactly sure I understand your question, but I will say the splintering of media means you don't have-- Back when there was what you're calling a monoculture, you could force- provided you're focusing on a message that could go viral- you could force a cultural conversation. Now you can't, the choice has to happen organically. If it's going to happen organically, it has to be reflective of the natural patterns of emotional reactions to messages.

With more competition, you have to be even more cognizant of how to create this message that will naturally pop up, because otherwise, you just simply don't have enough conscious attention to get the kind of viewership and engagement that you want to see.

[00:32:26] R.J.: That leads us into what is going to be the overarching story of the episode, which is the Utah monolith. Do you have any idea of what the Utah monolith is?

[00:32:43] Douglas: Yes, I remember. Was it last fall or-

[00:32:50] R.J.: Yes, last November-ish, yes.

[00:32:52] Douglas: It was last November and it was originally in Utah, and then there was one in California and Romania, I believe. There were-

[00:33:07] R.J.: Yes, they started popping up all over the world, definitely.

[00:33:10] Douglas: There was an installation about a large monolith in natural settings.

[00:33:19] R.J.: Yes. Is that your base understanding of what the monolith is?

[00:33:27] Douglas: Well, no. You could refresh my memory, but clearly, it was something that went very viral, and for me, for very obvious reasons, that are reflective of the successes that we just spoke of. As I mentioned, the first of which is survival and surprise. Surprise, to me, is even a bigger one because survival is just so general that it doesn't have the specificity of surprise. Your brain is designed to pay attention to pattern interruption and contrast, so you notice differences. Having something appear out of nowhere in a natural setting, which is clearly something that doesn't belong, something manufactured by a man. The absolute randomness of it is the first thing that will grab your attention.

You would be remiss not to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is a massive part of our culture, and there's a reason for it because they use these same principles intuitively. They didn't listen to this podcast and create something. They knew intuitively that if you're going to create a great piece of cinema and a great screenplay, that pattern interruption and survival was a big part of the movie in a very ambiguous and vague manner. It's been a long time since I've seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. The monolith scene appears-- There was two rival ape tribes that were competing for a waterhole for survival, in the movie, correct me if I'm wrong.

[00:35:39] R.J.: Yes, definitely.

[00:35:40] Douglas: There's two rival tribes of apes and they're competing for a waterhole for survival. All of a sudden, mysteriously, this monolith appears out of nowhere, and there's implicit suggestions of what that means. Does it stand for intelligence? Does it stand for alien life forces? Coinciding with that occurrence, one of the tribes learns how to make tools out of bones and they create weapons and they destroy the other tribe. I was just remembering what I can remember. The details might be not accurate.

They turned it into weapons and they basically survived, if I'm right. Then you fast forward to the very end of the movie, and the astronaut is on his deathbed and then all of a sudden, the monolith appears again at the foot of the bed, right? It cuts to a scene after the guy dies. All of a sudden, he's a fetus in an orb on the bed and he sort of survived and replicated, and the species is continued. There's an implicit message that was part of the backstory of our culture that was about survival that I think was really a big part of it.

If you look, I would have to say that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a huge cultural poll, 1968, I think. It's probably a top 10 movie of all time. Clarke and Kubrick knew intuitively the power of survival pattern interruption, vagueness, ambiguity, the mind wants to seek patterns and figure stuff out. The movie itself was very vague and implicit and it tapped into these fundamental, powerful emotional human needs. I don't know if they did this with conscious intent, but obviously, it worked really well. It caught a lot of attention and became viral.

[00:38:13] R.J.: Do you think the Utah monolith would have gone viral if there was a clear-cut answer right at the beginning? I think for a lot of people, it was a fun guessing game. It was like, "Is it aliens? Is it an art piece?" People were really going crazy. On our end, we posted a picture of it in between seasons on our Instagram and it blew up. It became one of the single most popular piece on our Instagram. We were shocked because we didn't really think much about it. People were debating its origins in the comments. Do you think that it would've had the same appeal if there were clear answers?

[00:39:12] Douglas: Absolutely not. Absolutely not, because, again, it's going back to why, how our brain is designed. Our brain wants to know what's going to happen next. It's a deep ingrained curiosity that's rewarded with the hit of dopamine. Every time something defies our prediction, we get a buzz. People want to know how to create a buzz. Well, there's a structure and that's the structure.

It's not knowing, it's also the ambiguity and the vagueness because I want to know what's going to happen next, and I'm on the hook. There's a reason why in great literature there's page-turners. You want to know what's going to happen that you're always keeping that person trying to figure out what's going to happen next. There's a reason why you have cliffhangers in screenplays. It's that not knowing is what creates the virality and the wanting behavior.

[00:40:15] R.J.: Definitely. Sorry, my dog just invaded me real fast. It threw me off my little small fry but, to that, and, what do you think, just on a personal level, what do you think that the best answer for what the Utah monolith is? Some people claim it's the work of this artist, McCracken, who did installations and had talked to his son, actually, specifically, about being inspired by 2001.

There's also this other artist who is very millennial and goes by the name, Most Famous Artist, who claims he did it. There's still people that want to believe it was aliens. What do you think, just personally, is the answer to the question?

[00:41:22] Douglas: I definitely don't think it was aliens. That's not dismissive of the whole alien argument and we're talking about this particular incident. Well, to me, it looks like an art installation. To me, that seems like a viable answer to it. Perhaps you mentioned a couple of artists, I don't know the actual specific details of it, but it reminds me-- Have you seen the documentary Banksy Does New York?

[00:42:01] R.J.: I actually haven't seen that one. I've watched Exit Through the Gift Shop about 20 times, but I haven't seen Banksy Does New York.

[00:42:07] Douglas: I think that's the name of the documentary, but he's great at creating value. How do you create the value? You do it through emotions and you do it through the element of surprise and scarcity or what's going to happen next. There was just these random pop-up art-x, things that were happening around town. Everyone's trying to search out and find the next one, and all actually try to steal it because they know it's going to be worth a lot of money in some instances. To me, that seems would be something that an artist would think about. I actually think there was- didn't one of the artists' commissioned try to sell the actual installation on the Web for $50-

[00:42:58] R.J.: Like, $45,000, cash.

[00:42:58] Douglas: Yes, $45,000. If that was the goal, to create this attention, the scarcity, and this randomness and start a cultural pull that became very significant, then all of a sudden, now the object confers some social status. If you're in this house and, "Hey, remember that meme that took over in 2020 on the monolith?" This is it, and everyone's like, "Wow, that's cool."

That, to me, seems like what is most likely going on with that. If so, obviously, it just shows you how people can-- I mean, if the end game was to sell a $45,000 piece of art- I don't know if he sold it or not- but it just shows you that can consciously construct things to create this frenzy. Banksy has been really good at that and he had an art piece that he sold that self-destructed in the middle of the presentation where it was shredded automatically. It became more valuable after it became shredded. It just shows you how irrational our reactions are to art, for that matter, and the price points that we ascribe to them.

[00:44:31] R.J.: Definitely. This isn't something, yet you had spoken about, or one of the S's. Maybe it falls into survival a bit, but do you think that it could have possibly gone viral because it was a breath of fresh air at the time, too? It didn't have anything to do with politics, especially in November 2020. I think that was a valuable thing. It didn't have anything to do with COVID, and it did weirdly become part of a bit of the monoculture. There was multiple articles in New York Times, CNN. It was over local news. Do you think that that could have had something to do with why it went viral?

[00:45:23] Douglas: Yes, I think that's a good point. If you think about the specifics of what going viral means, it means I'm sharing it with a friend, right? Do you want to be the guy that throws a wet blanket on the party, or do you want to be the one who makes people laugh or smile? In the interactions with social media that create virality, people- and that's where you can make conscious choices to say, "You know what, I'm moved by this one of fear, but I'm also moved by this one of randomness and trying and-" Which person do you want to be right now when you drop it on the feed?

That's where it could be encouraging where virality could be something we want to actually share that's positive. That's actually a result of pattern interruption, too, because if all of social media becomes more negative than the guy who shows something positive, it's going to stand out more. That's also an effect as well.

[00:46:34] R.J.: That's true. Well, Doug, that's my last question for you. Do you have any last thoughts that you'd like to share?

[00:46:43] Douglas: I think you pretty much covered it. Did they actually resolve the whole monolith thing or is that still an open question?

[00:46:54] R.J.: It's a bit of an open question. Mainly, that it's between this artist McCracken or if it really is this artist, The Most Famous Artist, Matty Mo, who has claimed it is. Some people think that the original was a McCracken, and then Matty Mo saw how it was blowing up and built a bunch of copycats because McCracken had actually previously expressed an interest of leaving these pieces around.

It's very similar to other pieces that he has done, and leaving them around is a hint that maybe there were aliens out there. He had told that to his son and interdimensional realism was a huge part of his work, and it's been there since 2016. My personal theory is that the original was probably him and then it was found. Then this Matty Mo copied it and built it, built others throughout the world to make it a more viral sensation. It is weird that they all started popping up and being found at the same time. There is an open debate over exactly who created the original.

[00:48:37] Douglas: That's interesting because the essence of virality is imitation. It's very conceivable that what's happening is imitation. It reminds me of- I think it was in the early '90s- the crop circles. The crop circles because it had an alien, and again, why alien? It's like, "Oh no, we're being invaded by alien civilization." The earth is under attack by aliens, all the implicit suggestions that run in your mind, but there was crop circles that came out of nowhere.

I think that Led Zeppelin had it on the cover of one of their albums. It seems there was imitation involved, too. Somebody had this idea and they went out in the middle of the night and they said, "This is going to look some crazy spaceship landed in this wheat field or whatever." Perhaps, others were like, "That's kind of cool. Let's try it here." It spread for reasons of imitation. I don't remember the backstory and if there was, in fact, imitation, but it sounds like it's very plausible.

[00:49:53] R.J.: I don't remember the full details of that crop circle spread, but I do remember it from the '90s. I think that the originals, they actually have a very good idea of who did them and how they did them. I've seen examples of how they were actually pulled off overnight,, and I do think you're right. I think a lot of people copied it. That's very interesting you bring that up because that's viral before viral. Even in the '70s, keeping the theme of the podcast, there was this huge boom of Bigfoot sightings and content.

It started in the Northwest, but then there were Bigfoot sightings all over the country, in Maryland, and Florida has the Skunk Ape. They all blew up at the same time or aliens in the '50s, like UFOs in the '50s. That was a big thing, '50s to '60s, a lot of sightings. Do you have any idea of why something would be in the air and would potentially inspire a spawn of phenomenon like that?

[00:51:30] Douglas: Say that again?

[00:51:33] R.J.: Do you have any explanation of how a phenomenon like that would get started or does it just go back to these Six S's? Even thinking pre-internet times.

[00:51:47] Douglas: Yes. Go back to Richard Dawkins and his book, The Selfish Gene. He created the word meme. The meme is a unit of cultural- unit of information that is transmitted in a way analogous to the spread genes or viruses. They're imitations that other people do so the genes replicate, but also cultural units replicate because others just simply imitate and share them.

That's probably what's going on on both levels and there's people who are maybe searching for they're whatever- the Loch Ness Monster is here or Bigfoot is there. Maybe they'll go out and they'll start looking for them. Every little noise they hear in the forest or every little ripple they see in the water is proof that-- You see what you look for, but more, I think there's other people that will go out there and create disturbances.

That's where fake news comes in and that's why fake news is so viral. If everyone's looking for this thing, what if I created something by starting a fake event. I think that's what happens is there's so much imitation and then there's people creating events to believe that these things are real. They turn out to be frauds and they do it just to get attention. It's really this random process of imitation of these cultural messages.

Messages can be anything. They could be a pair of shoes, you're wearing it out. That could go viral. It could be a hobby you take on, like looking for Bigfoot. That's a good question. It is really all related, again, back to biology.

[00:53:53] R.J.: It's interesting and I think it goes back to your Six S's. Almost everything that you just spoke about also has their own little communities, and creates their own communities that can connect people. Sneakers, there's a huge sneaker community. Of course, there's the whole crypto and alien. How much does building a community go into having people share information with each other?

[00:54:33] Douglas: It's essential because it's who we are as humans. That, really, is the most important thing, that we're profoundly social creatures. That's why social media is so powerful because we will naturally organize in groups and that's how it happens. It should be no surprise that community is a part of it because it has to be spread within the community.

Oftentimes. it doesn't have to be super mainstream and broad. It can be very specific to a certain community. As a matter of fact, most viral content is very polarizing. The best viral content is the one where you divide a country in two and get them to fight it out amongst each other, because then you have both sides throwing out in messages into the environment. If it wasn't for community, nothing would be shared, so yes, absolutely.

[00:55:43] R.J.: Well, that's great. That's a great thought to leave it on, Doug. Thank you so much for speaking to me. This was a lot of great information and I had a lot of fun.

[00:55:54] Douglas: I did too. Thank you. I appreciate you having me on the show.

[00:55:59] [END OF AUDIO]