712 Martin Reeves: Author of LIKE: The Button That Changed the World

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Kara Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:So excited for our next guest. Today's guest is someone who literally wrote the book on how one tiny, tiny button changed the whole world. And I'm talking about Martin Reeves, who was also chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute. But he is the co-author of an incredible book that I absolutely was not only really enjoyed, but also just made me keep thinking. And it's one of these that I kept going back a few pages and then going forward just to make sure that I understood exactly what he was saying about it. But the book is called Like, The Button That Changed the World. and he's tapped into it, he's chased it, you've chased it, and you've probably felt the dopamine hit that comes from hitting this like button and receiving likes, I should also say.

1:42Kara Goldin:But what is the story behind this like button? And that's exactly what he and his co-author, Bob Goodson, have jumped into. So we'll get into the psychology that makes it so addictive and the ripple effects it's had on mental health, business, and AI innovation, of course. So stay tuned. And Martin, without further ado, welcome to the show. Thanks very much, Gara. Glad to be here. Let's start with the title, Like the Button That Changed the World. What is the story behind this button in a few short sentences, I guess. And what made you so interested in writing this book? Well, I bumped into the story by bumping into Bob Goodson, who is the founder of Quid, a Silicon Valley analytics company.

2:35He was also employee number one at Yelp. And I discovered that he was one of the people who was involved in the design, the invention of the like button. And it's just such a fascinating story about something that so small that had such an enormous impact that we haven't thought about very much. I was really interested in how these, this dozen lines of JavaScript code with a thumbs up symbol attached, the like button, could have such a profound impact. And it took us into evolutionary biology. It took us into brain science. It took us into social psychology. It took us into Web 2.0 and coding and artificial intelligence and many other things, too.

3:20So I love the breadth of the story that this little like button showed to us.

3:25Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Range Rover Sport. You know that old saying, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. Well, I believe it's also how you show up. Because in business and in life, you have to lead with presence, power, and adaptability. That's exactly what the Range Rover Sport brings to the table. It's a force inside and out with a dynamic sporting personality, an assertive stance, and refined performance. This SUV doesn't just handle challenges. It owns them. Seven terrain modes let you tune the drive to whatever comes your way. The adaptive off-road cruise control and dynamic air suspension mean you're always in control.

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5:02Kara Goldin:It wasn't a thought that you had been thinking for years and years, but you were very intrigued after. This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey, everyone, Kara here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business. Not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day, the friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. And you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice-to-have, it's the lifeblood of your business.

5:45Kara Goldin:As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time. That's why AT &T Business matters. AT &T Business is the reliable provider for small business owners. And when you have that kind of reliability behind you, you can focus on what actually moves your business forward. Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. You had spoken with Bob about this topic. Well, I was primed to tune into this story by two things. I think one of them is I do a lot of work on innovation and my research and innovation suggests that innovation is rarely the neat hero's story that we often think of it as being, you know, one person, great foresight, solving a very clearly defined problem in a short space of time.

6:46It's usually much more messy than that. So when I stumbled across the messiness of the like button, that was attractive and I was tuned into that. The other thing is that for a book I wrote on the role of the imagination in innovation called The Imagination Machine. One of the things I did with that book was to create an online art gallery of the drawings of the inventions that changed the world, the first drawings of inventors. And when Bob showed me his sketch from 2005, I thought, that needs to go in the imagination gallery. And there the conversation started.

7:25Kara Goldin:So let's backtrack a bit. What is your day job, I guess, beyond writing this incredible book? So I lead something called the Henderson Institute, which is BCG's think tank on new ideas and strategy and management. So I look at everything from innovation theory through to AI strategies, new ways of organizing. But the particular theme here is one of great personal interest, which is how does innovation really work? Definitely. So what year was this that the like button actually came to be? Well, that sounds like a simple question. And that was indeed the first question that Bob and I attacked, which is who invented the like button.

8:12So Bob showed me a sketch, essentially, a dated sketch that he had made in 2005. And that date immediately struck me as being way in advance of what I thought the like button was all about, which is Facebook's propagation of the like button in 2009. So my first question to Bob was, are you telling me you invented the like button, Bob? And he said, well, of course not. Maybe, I'm not sure. And I thought that was such a strange response that our 30-minute first coffee conversation turned into a 12-hour conversation, at the end of which we had sort of the outline for a book. But the prime question was, who invented the like button.

8:51And, well, that's really the story of how innovation really works. It's social. Many people are facing the same things, the same problems at the same time. And if you look closely enough, most inventions don't have a single inventor, and that's certainly the case for the like button. So we could say that the, you know, the early mankind invented the like button in the sense that the thumbs up gesture is thousands of years old. And we could say that the early bulletin boards of the, do you remember digital bulletin boards of the early 1990s, they had a voting function. It wasn't a like button, but it was a first step towards the like button.

9:34We have in the late 90s, we have the little buttons on the TiVo handset. If you remember, it was impossible for even PhD engineers to program their video recorders. And TiVo's response to that was to have a little thumbs up, a little thumbs down physical button on the handset. But if you pressed it, it remembered what you liked, but it wasn't a fully digital button. Perhaps you'll remember in our youth, there was a site called Hot or Not, where you voted on the appearance of your friends. Were they hot or not? and this was quite an innovation because in the early 2000s, we didn't have broadband.

10:18Very few people had broadband networks. So the last thing you wanted to do if you were interacting with users was to trigger a page refresh because you might lose them for 20 or 30 seconds. So Hot or Not was a site which invented one-click digital voting without triggering a page refresh. or maybe it's Bob and employee number one at Yelp or 30 other sites that we list in the appendix to the book. So I think that all of these people had a role in the evolution of the like button. And in fact, we devote the book to the tinkerers and makers, many of whom will be certainly forgotten by history. It's a very, innovation is more social than we often tell the story.

11:09Kara Goldin:It's so true. I was early at America Online, and when I was reading through your book, I thought the you've got mail phenomenon, it was in many ways was just like like, right? It was this dopamine. It's like you opened up your computer and turned it on, and then all of a sudden you you know, you wanted to get mail, right? And you would hear that message come to you. That's the third question we tried to address in the book. So the first question was who invented the like button? The second one is, what does it tell us about how innovation really works? The third question is, really, why do we like to like?

11:48You know, what's the humanity behind the code? And we like surprise, we like social connection. And really, one of the things we discovered, I'm a former biologist, and so I wanted to go into the biology of this. And one of the things we discovered is that the superpower of mankind is social learning. In other words, we can learn things which are beneficial to our survival, not just by trying them, like most animals, but by looking at somebody else doing them, by learning from someone. And in order to learn from others, there are some behaviors that are hardwired into our chemistry. So one of them is homophily.

12:31Homophily means I choose to learn from people like me. So that's the deliciousness of the ambiguity of the word like. I like your content, I like you, but I am like you. We like to learn from others because those learnings are likely to be applicable to people like me. And then the second behavior is mild hierarchy. So the hierarchies of the animal kingdom are based upon violence or the threat of violence in in the human hierarchies are often based on respect or popularity. In other words, we want to learn from people who other people learn from and think of the counter on the like button and the word like.

13:10And so really this like button, the reason it's spread like wildfire and why we never needed a manual on the like button is that it plugged directly into our evolutionary psychology, which is hardwired in our brain chemistry. The dopamine hit we get from being liked is the same as the dopamine hit of liking. And that is exactly the same thing offline and online. And that's a highly evolved behavior. It plugs directly into that.

13:39Kara Goldin:Definitely. So in the book, you talk about how the like button created a new kind of economy. Can you chat with us about that a little bit? Right. So the like button solved a tactical problem, which is how do you get people to contribute content in the Web 2.0? Web 2.0 was the social network was all about getting user generated content. And but there was no reason why it should become a multibillion dollar business. I mean, it was just a, that's the technical problem. Why did it become a multi-billion dollar business? Because it's solved for the age old problem of advertising, which is the joke, the serious joke that 50 % of my advertising is wasted.

14:25I'll just never know which 50%. Well, that was true throughout the history of advertising. But by having a very granular feedback on who liked your content, who liked the advertisement, that problem was substantially solved. So that allowed for the possibility of the attention-based economy, which is essentially giving you free services like free email and social media access in exchange for you leaving a data trail, which told advertisers something about you. and that was mediated by the like button. This little signal when tapped off and off leads to an enormous amount of knowledge on who you are and what you like.

15:12And so that was the evidence-based value advertising proposition which Facebook innovated. So Facebook's innovation was not the like button per se. It was a business model based on the like button. and that became a multi-billion dollar industry. And in the process, it blew up another multi-billion dollar industry, the advertising and marketing industry, and created a zoo of new players. So the part of the research of the book where I felt like I was walking on the surface of Mars was when I went around interviewing teenage TikTok stars who had tens of millions of followers and made these short lip syncing and dancing videos and often generated multi-million dollars of annual income in the process.

16:04So that is a new ecosystem which didn't exist in the early days of the like button.

16:11Kara Goldin:What do you think has been the most surprising aspect of the like button? Well, I think in a way, every aspect of it in that innovation is serendipitous. Often we try and solve one problem and we accidentally solve another. So the tactical problems that the early pioneers were trying to solve were things like, how do you prioritize a feed? How do you vote without triggering a page refresh? but the problem they inadvertently solved was how do you monetize social media? And nobody at the time was trying to do that. That was an accidental outcome, a serendipitous outcome of trying to do something else.

17:00And then once we had solved that problem, we, of course, also had serendipitous side effects. We had unanticipated side effects. Nobody foresaw that this little light button would also become associated inadvertently with teenage mental health, internet addiction, depression, used to create misinformation that subverted democratic elections and so on. We couldn't foresee the full benefits. How could we foresee the side effects? So one of the later chapters is about another question, which is, how do you regulate without foresight? Innovation, we generally can't see the benefits or the disbenefits.

17:45So how can we regulate? And we had some thoughts on how to do that and the importance of that, giving how rapidly these very intrusive technologies spread nowadays. And all of that, of course, could be extremely useful with respect to the AI revolution, which is underway.

18:04Kara Goldin:Some of these companies that you mentioned definitely benefited, probably benefited before consumers actually knew what was going on. And if you look at more than anything, the research and kind of the harm that has been done by this dopamine effects, is it equal on both sides, equal harm to equal benefit? Or where do you think the economics of this all net out? Well, we didn't want to judge. There have been a number of books that sort of, you know, analyzed rather pessimistically social media for a couple of reasons. I mean, one, we wanted to understand, and we wanted to understand how innovation worked, how regulatory innovation worked.

18:58We also wanted to be pragmatic in the sense that we wanted to come up with some ideas on what you could do about it, not merely to judge it. And so I think that there are harms, but when we see the harms of a technology, and there are always side effects from any technology, it takes a while for society to figure out what they are because there are many putative things that could be wrong. and it takes time to sort out, well, what's attributable to social media? What's attributable to large companies? What's attributable to their particular business model? What's attributable to the like-band?

19:36It takes a while to figure out the science and the causality and then what to do about it. In this particular case, it's quite hard to separate the technology from the humans because we're dealing with this piece of evolutionary psychology. because so the problems of the like button are really problems that we've always had. So we're sensitive to how popular we are and we're delighted if we're popular and we can become a little depressed if we're not. And that is hardwired into our evolutionary psychology. So what exactly are we criticizing? So I think I came to the view that the difference between liking in real life and liking digitally is actually not one of quality.

20:20it's one of quantity because it's exactly the same brain mechanisms. The thing which is different is I can only meet, um, if I try really hard, maybe, you know, five people called Cara per day and maybe, um, uh, you know, maybe only two of them will dislike me. And so it's all within a, within a bound, uh, bound by the, it's, it's constrained by the physics of social interaction. But if I'm a teenager at a very formative stage of development, I can sit in my bedroom and I can, not only have hundreds of interactions, I like this, I am liked with respect to this or that, but also I can receive a comparative judgment.

20:58I can see how relatively liked or disliked I am by others. And that can be very impactful. So I think that many eventually will move to maybe restrict access to minors of social media. And Australia has done that. And Texas is close to doing that. And this is one of the, of all of the sort of putative harms, this is one of the ones that I think is clearest. It's at the stage of early teens when we are learning how to interact with others, we're developing social skills. That's when we're most sensitive. And for some reason, young girls are especially sensitive. Now that said, I wouldn't want to go backwards and rerun history without social media, it creates tremendous benefits.

21:51And we often take the benefits for granted and criticize the harms. But in a way, the harms are the call for the next wave of innovation.

22:03Kara Goldin:Definitely. What do you think, based on, you talked about individuals and how that button has affected them, but what is the one thing that brands, I guess, have misunderstood about how these likes actually are driving action? I think there are some subtleties about, you know, do we have a like button and a dislike button, and do we always show the counter, and how do we protect children, and so on, And do we do it with regulation or do we do it with family norms? So Jonathan Haidt has just written a book about proposing that essentially we should educate our children on how to use the Internet property using family norms, which are much more powerful.

22:51You know, what parents tell them about what you can and can't do than with sort of heavy handed regulation. So I think we've learned the subtleties. We've learned the science of this. you know, what exactly the harm is, how it works. Also, I think on the benefit side, I think initially the like button was specific to social media and things like encouraging user content, but it actually spilled over into shopping. You know, you can now like the thing you shopped and the person or the company you bought it from. It spilled over into entertainment. It's like Going back to the psychology of the TiVo controller, we can teach the algorithms on sites like Netflix what we like and what we don't like, which simplifies our navigation problem.

23:41And then actually even B2B businesses, things like logistical services have now become much better at receiving feedback on all of the things that they do for their customers and what their customers like and what they don't like. I was actually, I've just come back from a trip to Europe, and I even discovered that you have light buttons in toilets that I came across. Do you like your bathroom experience? So it really is quite pervasive. And essentially, it's a very simple idea that is permitted by internet technology, which is just creating the possibility of very granular feedback, which aggregated can do all sorts of jobs.

24:25prioritize content, tell people what you like, give feedback on the quality of a service. So I think the non-social media companies have also learned how to use this tool.

24:36Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. Well, it's fascinating. I've also thought that the word like has been almost homogenized in a way because it's not that you necessarily like those experiences, but it's about that you don't, it's not like you hate it, right? It didn't bother you so much. It was okay, right? So you end up saying, you know, if there's only two options and you don't completely dislike it, then you're more likely to either, I guess, not hit the button or just like it. One of the strangest reactions I've gotten to the book is, the book in itself actually also has a life of its own and, and, and it's somewhat serendipitous.

25:22So I, um, as the book has been, um, finding it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's market and, um, and resonating with people. Um, there are some surprises. So one thing I'm surprised by is that, um, uh, for, uh, for middle-aged people, it's very much connected with the word like. So when, when teenagers say it's kind of like great like you know that that sort of sloppy way of speaking from a from middle aged perspective it you know that that invokes a lot of emotion for uh for a certain type of person so a lot of people ask me is this connected with the misuse of the word like and then um related to that um um some people get a little upset that what is going on is not necessarily restricted to liking.

26:08So I can click the internet, I can click the button, the like button, meaning I like the content or I like you. Or I can also click it to mean I want to pretend that I like it because you're my boss. Or it can mean I prefer not to have a conversation about this. I'm just going to like it and have a smooth transaction. I'm going to avoid a troublesome conversation. It can mean I want to pretend to be a member of your tribe, or it can mean I want to curry favor with you in a way that's very cost-efficient for me, which is I'm going to give you 20 likes and then I'm going to ask you for a favor. And some people I've spoken to see this as sort of illegitimate and untruthful, but the truth is that human beings will always play every game with great subtlety, all of the games they can with any word or symbol in language.

27:02That's who we are. We do all of these things from, you know, deception to compliments and everything in between. And I think always, always will.