Derek Thompson

Sure, that's a great question.

How can I say that there's a science if I also say that it's unpredictable?

Well, the easiest metaphor here would be the weather.

We understand all sorts of about the weather.

We understand how clouds form and how rain forms and at what temperature rain freezes and becomes snow or freezing rain.

There's all sorts of things that we know about the weather that make us a lot smarter than, say, ancient Egyptians when they said that gods controlled the moon and

the sun.

But at the same time, ask the smartest meteorologist in the world to predict the temperature in your zip code in two weeks.

And if he's honest, he'll tell you or she'll tell you it's absolutely impossible that predicting a chaotic system too far in advance is not possible.

So what I do is I tie together all sorts of things that anthropologists and economists and psychologists and network scientists have told us about cultural markets, why people like what they like, the power of familiarity, the power of repetition in music,

Whether ideas go viral or whether virality is a myth, which is one of the theses in the book, which is that virality doesn't really exist.

These are all true things, I think, about the world and our cultural markets, but it doesn't guarantee us that we can predict the temperature in two weeks.

Yes, I just finished Homo Deus by Yuval Harari.

It's completely brilliant.

Sapiens is one of my favorite books ever.

It's completely thought-provoking and everybody should read it.

I don't think I don't know how you can't study and follow Mark Zuckerberg.

He's a fascinating person.

The company that he's built has no historical precedent, really.

But I also think he's an incredibly surprisingly clear and empathetic thinker about world events.