It was a job. Hank liked his job, most of the time. He did research into the reactions of people to words and language. He met different people most every day, which was good, but he generally didn't see them for any length of time.
He had a list of words and phrases that were given to him by his bosses that he would read to the subjects and then measure their responses. It was interesting to get a feeling for what people reacted to which phrases or short sentences. The turning point came when the tuner on his car radio got stuck on one pop music station. This station played the most recent hit songs. What got his attention was that some of the phrases he was testing his subjects with were the catch-phrases in many of the songs - the hook. He had wondered where those phrases he used came from.
After a few months of this, he noticed the timing was...odd. And then, when keeping an independent log of the timing of his testing, he realized that his testing came before the songs. He asked questions around his office and discovered that, because of the results of his research, the hook phrases were identified, then sold to music labels, then given or sold to individual artists to write a song around.
The hook. Shit. He was selling The Hook to pull people in.
He quit his job when he started hearing his highest rated Hooks in political ads. "Make America Great Again" was his best scored Hook, ever. Shit.
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