Principles behind Engineering a Viral Idea with Dr Brendan Markey-Towler

What makes an idea stick? What is it about an idea that causes it to plant itself in the mind and spread? In this episode, I talk to Dr Brendan Markey-Towler, an economist from the University of Queensland, about a paper he wrote called 'Competition of Ideas in the Public Sphere'. Basically, what Brendan does in this paper is break dow what form an idea should take, to make an idea the fittest it can be in the marketplace of ideas. He does this using behavioural economics, psychology and graph theory, and comes up with a number of principles that make a lot of intuitive sense, and that can be implemented in your communication efforts immediately. In this episode, we cover Aristotle and his treatise Rhetoric, which is the original guidebook on how to communicate effectively. Brendan then builds on this with his principles behind a viral idea, and gives contemporary examples of the in action in the form of the caricature of American capitalism, Donald Trump, Most importantly, he stresses why that, in the battlefield of ideas, we must become soldiers of truth. www.talkoftoday.com Link to the Paper: 'Competition of Ideas in the Public Sphere' https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2907892 Brendan's Academic Profile: https://economics.uq.edu.au/profile/2529/dr-brendan-markey-towler Twitter: @B_MarkeyTowler Medium: https://medium.com/@brendanmarkeytowler