What Convenience and Your Phone Are Costing You | Tim Wu

William James, the father of American psychology, said, "At the end of our life, our experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or by default." The average person now spends more than 10 hours a day with digital media. That is from phones, TVs, computers, and yes, podcasts. Now for nearly all of humanity's 300,000 year history, we had nothing digital in our lives. Now this stuff, it has become our lives. It impacts everything, our relationships, decision making, physical and mental health, and most importantly, how we spend our time and attention. Our guest today is Tim Wu, he's a law professor at Columbia University who's helped shape media law at the FTC and in two presidential administrations. His new book is The Age of Extraction. We talked about how the world became soaked in media and advertising, who and what pulls the strings that grab our attention and shape our thinking, what that's done to individuals in society, why humans do the easy thing, even when it hurts us, and a lot more. Let's bring on Tim. Alright Tim Wu, you are a professor at Columbia Law School. You cover law related to media and the internet, you worked at the FTC and you were the special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. So I feel pretty safe saying that you are one of the deepest thinkers in media alive right now. We're going to get into a lot of your books, a lot of your work, but I want to start at this sort of very beginning, I think, of modern media as it is right now. So 1833, you read about this in the attention merchants, guy named Benjamin Day, starts a newspaper, but it's not like other newspapers at the time. So what did he do that made this newspaper different and what happened afterwards? Yeah, this is a big moment in basically history of human civilization. He decided to sell a newspaper for less than his costs of producing it. So that may smile like a small thing, but he decided effectively to count on advertising to make up for the fact that he was losing money on sales. And so therefore in 1833, we have the birth of advertising supported media, which sounds kind of like a small thing, but is a huge thing. And so how did he, so now the thing is, is that if you're going to sell ads, you need to have a lot of readers. Right. If you're making your money off of ads, the more readers you have, the more subscribers you have, the more you can charge those advertisers. So what does he do to ensure, hey, I've got to get this big population of people reading this paper? I mean, I think there's two things. So the first is he sold it for cheap, sold it for a penny. That's the phrase, where the phrase the penny press comes from. Second, unlike most newspapers at the time, he decided not to be boring. Now, maybe I should put this a little more differently. I think if you were looking at newspapers in the 1820s, they tend to be specialized publications. They had things like speeches in full by politicians or trade news. They sold to select audiences. They were expensive. They were a little bit more like trade magazines or magazines, I guess. So what he did instead was fill it with stories that are interesting to people like a story of, you know, a couple getting a divorce and fighting at the courthouse. I think the opening, I read the entire first issue and, you know, it opened with this morbid suicide, actually, of a man who was being sent by his family overseas because he was being forced to marry a woman, he, sorry. He was being, he was being sent overseas because he wouldn't marry a woman that his family wanted to marry. And so instead, he killed himself. I mean, you're already kind of interested in the story, right? So yeah, he decided to cover what we now call human interest or even tabloid stories. And so it's this sort of idea that what grabs human attention is not a long stump speech or sort of boring business news. It's stuff that can be salacious that has kind of an element of randomness, and I guess in the case of the suicide, it's like murder, crime, things like that. And that sort of sets us off on the course we're on now, in a way. Yeah, I mean, let's get deeper about it is in a sense he realized he was in the market for attention as opposed to information. So if you think about the older, earlier newspapers, they were giving people important information, you know, for example, commodity prices or diplomatic news for people who needed it, he was trying to grab and resale human attention. And honestly, it's hard to overstate the importance of that realization. You know, that there was both a market for human attention and that you could make a lot of money out of it. Because ultimately he did make a ton of cash. So that's sort of really what the book attention merchants is about. Now when I was, I used to be a professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at UNLV, and I would assign that book to students. And first of all, they all loved it, which is very rare for an assigned book in college. So nice job on that. But from there, the book really walks through. Once we shift from selling, shift to selling attention, that like changes the game and puts us where we're at now. So where do you see us as where we're at now in terms of this battle for attention? I mean, I think we're deep, deep down the line in this story, you know, the 1830s and the beginnings captured in some way the realization that attention was a resource, almost like oil. I mean, one of the models for that book, the attention merchant was the book oil, which was really about the discovery that oil could be a valuable commodity, you know, for most of human history oil was useless or, you know, used as a beauty product, or maybe for a little bit of lighting, but when people realized, "Hold these smokes, this thing could become valuable," it transformed civilization society. In fact, as far as I can tell, we're still in the war over it. Even attention similarly, over, you know, I guess more than 100 years, we really started to understand all the ways you could harvest or mine human attention. And I'd say we're at, you know, the end point, not unlike oil, where every obvious attentional resource has been mined and, you know, people do things like, you know, trying basically to have people on a screen at any possible second of the day. So there are very few, it's almost like fracking, you know, fracking's big insight was to figure out these little tiny channels of oil that no one had got. In some ways, you know, there's this phrase attentional fracking. It's been the story of our last 20 years, and an extraordinary sophistication in the efforts to try to get every single little second of our attention. So as sort of attention harvesting has ramped up, why do you think we're so good at harvesting people's attention now? So if you look at the stats, people are spending something like 10 hours a day engaged with digital media. Now, of course, some of that is work on behind the Excel sheet, but a lot of it is Instagram Netflix, whatever it might be, like, why is it, why does our attention default to media? You know, in the grand scheme of humanity, we didn't have any of this stuff in our lives for all of time. And now within the last 100 years, it's like, this is what we do. Yes. The attention merchants is also a story about the erosion of the idea of private spaces. And you know, if we went back to the 2010s or something like that, when the poster was a dominant form, this is pre-radio, there was a clear line between the home and the outside. And so you saw advertising or content affiliated content either by walking around or maybe going to a movie, they had movies. So you know, the radio breaks us down first, and when the radio starts coming into people's houses with advertising, there is kind of like this reaction and shock like, how could you have advertisements in your home? So that eventually that barrier is broken. And I think they break one after another. The bedroom being kind of a sacred space or different or family, you know, those slowly break down. But I think the innovation of the last, I guess, now 15 years, is the person. You know, the idea that you have, frankly, is a part of your body almost, a device that is for most people, almost always with them. I think a lot of people sleep with or near their phones when they walk around, they don't leave them behind. So without being too dramatic, the sort of side-mortization, we're not physically implanted with technology, but what is really the difference? if it's always on you. It's pretty close. And I think that was kind of the last barrier such that that tiny fraction of time where you're waiting for the bus or even people stopped at a red light, you know, pulling out. Right. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. Somehow the time where people are stopped at red lights got harvested. At least, you know, if my life is any guide and the person in front of me is not moving for 15 minutes. Yeah. So with with most new forms of media, you get some sort of a panic. And it's almost like you said with radio coming into the home, people go, this is absurd that we're having ads in our home. And then we kind of adapt to it. Do you think that there's something fundamentally different to be worried about with phones on us all the time? And then I think maybe the next phase is AI. That's a good, let me talk about the reaction. So the attention merchants does show this pattern of reaction resistance. It may sound crazy now, but the poster was a source of the outdoor poster being placed on walls produced this enormous reaction in Paris where the technology was the most advanced in the earliest. And the French, there was some society for like the preservation of the beauty of Paris or something. And you know, they in fact Paris still has bands on posters in many spots, maybe what's good looking city. The radio provoked its reaction, advertising on radio in particular, television, obviously. The counterculture just to this might be a long sidebar. In many ways was centered on this like, you know, drop out tune in, although tune out to, you know, this idea from the 60s and 70s, this idea that, you know, you need to get away from conventional information sources and like, you know, go listen to a dude with his guitar, whatever. Although counter people in 60s and 70s did watch a lot of TV, so they were, you know, they just watched countercultural TV like, you know, masher, something like that. So is it different in this period? I mean, one thing about these sort of countercultural moments or these reactions is they, you know, haven't exactly succeeded in creating barriers, you know, like that, the reaction against advertising on radio didn't exactly end advertising in any kind of meaningful sense. So they're limited. And I do think, I wonder, I do think there's something different about the proximity to the body and the sense that it's a part of you, of the telephone, what we call the telephone, but it's almost more like a cyborg extension. I know it sounds kind of weird, but it gets true. And then if you add to it the idea, the reason is because if you always have it with you, you start to depend on it and think of it as part of yourself. And if you get artificial intelligence, you're a heavy user of artificial intelligence, then you're starting to adapt to the idea of having another brain that does some of your thinking for you as well, or, you know, mainly the annoying part of thinking, like math, I guess. So I do think it is different because it is starting to influence human evolution, and not just this sort of internal external thing. Okay. You mentioned that it's going to influence human evolution. What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is that who we are is changing as we become more embedded with various technologies and start to take them as part of ourselves. Now, it doesn't make me to sound weird here or something, but it's clear that the technological evolution of what a person is is proceeding more quickly than the biological version. And so in some ways is more relevant. And I think a person with a phone always on them, device always on them, that they rely on, you know, for their mathematics to remember obscure details and to take pictures of things is kind of like a different person than we were a hundred years ago. In some ways, we're kind of like superhuman. I wrote the story once about, like, imagine there was a curtain and a time travel that came from the future and was like asking questions to, you know, contemporary human who has their device. They'd be like, holy cow, this person can recite every line of Shakespeare. They, you know, can do complex mathematical problems. They must be have become something kind of evolved or super. Now, and when you add to it, AI's capacities really does change it. Now, okay, you know, there's a debate as to what is you and are you you is, you know, a very integrated AI with you, also part of you, that's an interesting philosophical debate. But I think this is really the discussion of human evolution that is the real discussion and the real course. Most nutrition apps are like your mother-in-law. They shame you if you overeat, they give you big red warnings, they jot you, you're going to feel like a failure and that actually hurts your progress. Turns out those big red shaming warnings, they can lead to what's called the absence violation effect. That is where we say screw it and we completely break our diet. But the app macro factor, it's a nutrition app that was built by scientists who understand both nutrition science and behavior science. 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And so now, within the last couple of weeks, you're having AI companies go, hey, we're going to kind of slow this down. I think we need to think about this. Is this just sort of like part of that trend or what are your thoughts there? Yeah, well, let me first comment on the trend you mentioned. Can I also say how much of enjoying this conversation? I mean, I guess you've gotten into some of the deeper parts of this work, which I really appreciate. There is this sort of mutability to, I guess you could say capitalism or the advertising business, I'm not sure which you want to say, which is this ability to chameleon like craft itself into whatever demand is. So the counterculture says, we need to turn away, we need to change. Capitalism says, well, they want something we can cater to that. It is captured very well by Madman. It's not that they don't want things, they want peace, love, and a sense of community and a return to early values. All right, well, let's be that. The new book is Age of Extraction. How do you think about the difference between an attention merchant versus extraction? It's a great question. Let me put this book in context. So the Age of Extraction is actually the third in a trilogy in my thinking. The third book, The Age of Extraction, is about something more contemporary. It has its origins in the 70s and 80s, but it's full manifestation in this century, which is the rise of the platform and the platform model. So what's the difference? There are platform companies that are attention merchants that have made their money that way. In fact, Facebook and Google are some of the most important. But the difference and the important development in the platform book, The Age of Extraction, is the invention and domination of a business model that relies on being the middleman or the intermediary for an entire ecosystem. I think that is consistent with some kind of attention merchant models, but it's another fundamentally different kind of trend that has defined our centuries so far. You have this line, quote, you own a population first, then harvest it later, end quote, and in the book, you use Amazon as the perfect case study of how this works. So walk us through how Amazon sort of stands for this idea you're talking about here. Yeah, I think Amazon is, you know, the rise of platform power illustrated in both its inspiring and also extractive phases. So Amazon, as some people may remember, was once on time of the bookstore and that its stick was, we have more books than anybody else, and that was, you know, kind of a cool thing and impressive, then they moved into other products, and then there's this key moment. In a lot of my books, I'm really interested in innovation, not just in like inventing light bulbs, but in business models. In Amazon realized there was a lot more money to be made as a platform, which is to say by selling other people's stuff. By having people on its site, and it being the middle man, the intermediary. So it moved past books, started making money, and at the beginning was kind of extraordinary and very catalytic in some ways inspiring model. It was very cheap to sell in Amazon. It was less than 20 percent. Like the number is really mad, it was less than 20 percent of your price they wanted, which is much better than normal retail, which is usually about 50 percent. And they did all this amazing stuff. They, you know, handled a fulfillment, which eBay had never managed to figure out. They had a good search engine. They developed, they used to compete with Google, people probably forget this, but A9 was Amazon search engine. So I had all these amazing innovations. And so for a moment there, it was kind of like the promise of the 90s internet made flesh, wishes to say that she placed for anyone with a cool new product to sell to the world and make money. So it had kind of a class leveling promise that it would make like a lot of normal or entrepreneurial Americans rich. You know, I have a story in the book about this barber. I forget it was in the Midwest who, you know, start selling pomade and then, you know, makes millions of dollars. It catches on some pant pomade project. You know, there's a lot of stories like that, which I think it's, we're very inspiring and certainly inspired a generation of internet idealists. The problem is once Amazon captured its audience, that is to say, had the sellers basically tied up, defeated eBay and also had enough buyers so that it owned both sides of its market. Well, then it entered the extractive phrase phase and, you know, one way after another figured out ways to just take more from everyone as much as they could. The seller side is actually more traumatic, that the buyer side, the prices have frankly gotten about the same as retail used to be and Amazon prime gets more expensive and so forth. But it's the seller side where it's much starker. Amazon, you know, one way or another began ratcheting up the fees. It introduced this one thing, one little trick, which are those sponsored links you see if you ever search for stuff. Always. Which might seem like not a big deal or a small thing, but are a huge, huge revenue source. In fact, they represent Amazon becoming an attention merchant because they put sellers in a position where they're beginning against each other, basically bidding against their own profit margins to be the sponsored, you know, result. It's a paid for search. And that thing became actually Amazon's biggest cash cow. Amazon cloud has made a lot of money, but the kind of hidden story is just the incredible amount of money that's made on those weird sponsored results. It was $10 billion, $20 billion. When I wrote the book, it was over $50 billion in pure profit just for that link. I think last year was over $70 billion which is more than double every single newspaper in the world combined in terms of advertising revenue. So you have to show you could have tripled the number of newspapers in the world or you could have sponsored links. And it's pure profit. Like there's, it's pure extraction because there's no value in it. I actually make search worse. You can't find the best product. You have to go down like 10. See, we're paying collectively $70 billion for this inhibition. Anyway, that is the extractive cycle. And Amazon is a very good example of it. Yeah. And then they move into a lot of different industries like Amazon now, books to pomade and all these other kind of random items to now we own Whole Foods. Now we're doing media with Amazon Prime. Now we're doing Amazon music. Now it's just like keep kind of creeping into different spaces in life. One thing that I say word why it matters. Yeah. I say word about why it matters. I mean, I mean, it might be like, oh, poor guy in the Midwest, like pomade business when bankrupt. Oh, well, too bad. But there's something more important about it, which is the potential for Amazon potential for the internet to be this kind of class leveling innovation, something that makes a lot of people rich, not just a small number of people rich. Some work got lost somewhere in the 2010s. I mean, I people really believed in the early 2000s. Some of our younger listeners might be, of course, it was going to be that way. But there was a real hope or dream in the 90s, thousands that like some other technologies, the internet might be this incredible leveler and leave us like with this happy, class free society. I mean, sounds crazy to say it like, you know, we'd be more like Denmark or something. So went with all these, frankly, it's only Chinese sellers who really been that successful. So with the end of this, ended a dream and a dream, that dream was one of the internet is this kind of leveler and a maker of widespread wealth. One thing that you point out in Age of Extraction, you have this chapter called "A Long Slow Bat on Laziness." Wonderful chapter title. And the idea is in that it really kind of overlaps with my book, The Comfort Crisis. And it basically argues that humans are going to do sort of the next easiest thing. And these platforms have really made it easy to do whatever you need to do. It's like, once you're on Amazon and you start buying stuff, you're never going to go to the guy's pomade.joespomade.com store because oh, he doesn't have the prime shipping. And so like, we just kind of do these easy things without realizing some of the downsides. We get trapped in them almost. Yeah. I am a strong believer that the most powerful force among the most powerful force in our times is convenience. You know, convenience is not as exciting as like Freud's theory of death wishes and sexual desires or Nietzsche's like will the power. But I think as a driver, at least for most people I know, they're more driven by will-to-ease or like, couch lock than they are driven by, you know, Nietzsche and ambition to conquer an empire. There are a few people like that, but I'm saying, convenience is in the mass population, the great driver. And I, as you already alluded to in your book, have recognized the platforms really began to understand loyalty, frankly, dependence, sort of getting their customers in a couch lock position where going to another website or, you know, or going to a store, it would feel like, oh my god, are you kidding? I can't do this. That is the key to a fortune right there. When people are like, I kind of should do this, but I can't. And yeah, the more honest business writers call it consumer captivity, but that is the formula of our time. And it's more important, you know, if you take a basic economics class, it would be like the cost, the product that's cheaper or better wins, that's not our times anymore. Easiest wins. Yeah. If something is saving you a step, how do you get the sense of whether you're getting time back or whether you're just sort of like doing the easy thing that might actually be harmful for either you or society in the long run? That is the profound question of our time. I almost, I mean, who hasn't had the experience where they introduce something, take email, design to make life, email being the champion example, design to make life easier and make our professional lives like labor free. And then suddenly I spend, seem to spend half my time searching for some attachment that I put on something three years ago or something, not to mention answering for, you know, whatever thousands of emails a day. There's also something about raising the bar. Maybe it's getting, you know, natural, there's a lot in here because there's this natural tendency to raise the bar, you know, if you think about anything where, you know, maybe we're a freelance journalist and now you're starting to write stories with AI. And in the old days, you were supposed to write, you know, say a story a day and now you're having to write 10 stories a day. Well, that's not actually saving you any time. In fact, you're having to make sure the AI isn't making stuff up. So, you know, yeah. Do you have an answer to this question? Well, I think it's this, you know, you can argue, maybe in the grand scheme of things, it's a good thing that, you know, if we do want to be warm, we don't have to chop the firewood. We don't have to go walk to get the food. It can all get delivered. But I think the problem is to your point is that we do default to the convenient thing. And I think we just completely overlook what we, what we remove when we take out whatever the friction was. An example that comes to mind is everyone uses Google Maps now. if you want to get from point A to point B, you just pull out your phone, you use Google Maps, you follow the blue dot. Well, it turns out that like humans evolved to navigate, right? Navigation is a form of paying attention and figuring out where you are in time and space, and our brains evolved, and this is in all animals, evolved specifically to navigate. And like some important things happen when you are figuring out where you are because you're paying attention to the outside world. You're going, okay, am I here? Am I here? You're moving your body across the landscape, and still today there's evidence that shows people who still have to navigate, don't just automatically pull out their phones. They tend to have lower rates of Alzheimer's and dementia, because that area of the brain that gets work turns out just really important. Well, now you can apply that to like all these different things in life. And so I think, you know, for me the answer for most people is not, you got to get rid of all this stuff, but I think it is to ask yourself, okay, when I use this super easy convenient thing, what am I getting and what am I giving up, and it's like a, it's a hard thing to do, because I think you're right at the end of the day, it's like, well, I'm cold. I don't want to make the fire. I just want to turn that dial, but that's like a battle we have to wage every single day. I mean, I happen to like fire, so you got the wrong guy, but I think that you're, well, but I don't like to fire every day. I think you're on to something by focusing on frictions, and what's in the friction, because the word friction, you know, inherently seems like, well, you got to get rid of that. I was very interested. There was this tribe and a native Canadian, a native, I want to make sure I have the right word, the indigenous tribe in Canada, Northern Ontario, that until the 60s had very little modern technology, and all of a sudden, you know, finally, they, and they reached later than other parts of North America, sort of an isolated North American tribe. And so they had previously been understood for their, like, fitness and longevity, and, you know, they had to do everything by hunting and running around, building for everything you're talking about. And so, you know, within a very quick period of time, they had the snowmobile, the car, you know, the television, they had reliable, sort of reliable food sources. And I got to say, as opposed to the health indicators getting better, they got worse, because inside of a lot of that friction was something we call exercise. And, you know, suddenly, with no need to exercise, the obesity levels went through the roof. Diabetes problems showed up in various forms. I mean, it's sort of a sad story when it has actually gotten worse, instead of better, over the last 10 years. So, you know, in those frictions are some of the things that make us healthy, and maybe that's another way of looking at it, you know, just that really hard question of what is in this friction that I'm eliminating. Is it more than a nuisance, or is it like something else called exercise, or training, or something like that? One of my army, Grame-Bare friends once gave me a great set of rules for life. One, never get lost. Two, always look cool. Three, if you get lost, look cool. Which is why I wear Viori. Viori makes performance apparel that keeps up with all of my outdoor adventures and looks great while doing it. Their Sunday performance jogger, that is a staple on my fall trail runs and my hikes. It's soft. It's four-way stretch moves with me. It's got a small zipper pocket for my car keys. You know, here's the thing, I may not know exactly where I'm going when I'm outdoors, but I do know that with Viori, I'm going to look cool and I'm going to be comfortable finding my way. You can get 20% off your first order of Viori at Viori.com/TWOPCT. That is V-U-O-R-I.com/T-W-O-P-C-T. Of course, exclusion's apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. And you had a quote from Edgar R. Murrow in Attention Merchants. He said, quote, he's talking about the television. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, it can even inspire, but it really depends on what are people watching on it. So Sesame Street is a good example where TV producers are like, hey, what if we came up with a show that got kids hooked, but it actually taught them something in the process? How much of this do you think it just comes down to like, we have to make a choice to use things in a way that helps us versus what's the role of policy in the government and these sort of questions? You know, it's good to bring up Sesame Street because one thing that has not really happened with the internet technologies and we're in danger of running away quickly in AI is this sense that something else matters other than making money with this thing. You know, I think partially people were a little deluded because the, and I count myself as one of these people, it's like a 90s internet idealist, is that we thought, okay, we can have all these great things and they can be for profit companies, but it'll all work out in the end because there's really good vibes going on here and like, you know, it's California and people go to Burning Man and like, they're awesome. So it's not going to be a problem. Like, you know, in the 60s, the 50s with television, the period you're talking about, people are like, man, commercial television is never going to be everything we want to be. So we need to have rules to, you know, try to drive them. We have to have rules to force them to serve the public interest and we also need public networks like PBS and NPR that are just built differently from the outset. There is none of that in the internet platforms. Where is like the public spirited version of Facebook? Sometimes I wonder what if Facebook had like Wikipedia, you know, God non-profit and not been run by kind of crazy people, very super ambitious, like have to milk everyone for everything possible kind of people. You know, what if they'd been run more like Wikipedia? Wikipedia also could have been a multi-billion dollar company. To give Jimmy Wales credit, he never pushed that billionaire button. You know, he could have been a billionaire in his studies like, you know, yes, but Wikipedia will suck, which is not to sacrifice anyone else's willing to make. It was obvious. Even, you know, the Google guys foretold that advertising-based search was going to suck and get corrupted. And it did. And, you know, but they have their money. So it's amazing that we don't really have, I mean, I don't think there's a single non-profit. There are some non-profit AIs, but among the major AIs that, you know, or in the conversation, is there a major serious non-profit? We have like anthropic or some sort of well-meaning guys. We have some somewhat open source guys, but something that's dedicated to somehow doesn't have to have, oh, and everyone has to make a billion dollars out of this as part of its framework. Why did I say a billion? I should say a trillion. And I'm not saying like, you'll always have commercial money making media, but you know, some balance. We've lost the balance. Yeah. And it almost feels like in the case of Jimmy Wells, it was just a hard, nope, this is a non-profit. Whereas I think when you open the door, a lot of times people, okay, well, we'll kind of do this to start making some money. And then someone in the room goes, well, if we did the next thing, you're going to have five million dollars instead of two million dollars. And you go, well, that next thing actually doesn't sound so bad if you put it that way. And then that just sort of gets repeated. And then we end up with Facebook.com as it is right now and all the meta things. Let me say as a good chapter in my book, Age of Extraction, about the profound self-delusion of the Google Founders and Management in their thinking they could, you know, serve two masters, despite what's been written in scripture, that they could be this incredible thing for advertisers and have that not at all compromised user experience, unlike every other form of media and human history, that they sort of thought they could do it. And OpenAI is doing the same thing. They're starting to mess with advertising. I had a guy in advertising executive actually say, we need to ban, open any AI from doing advertising because it's going to go in a bad direction pretty soon. Like it's going to start very light, but then sooner or later it's going to be like, you know, hey, a GPT, you need to think a little bit more about your advertisers interest when you answer these questions. And once you're in that game, history suggests it tends to be a highly corrupting direction. Yeah, you go, hey, what's the most reliable pickup truck and turns out that it's sponsored by Chevy now. So, oh, it's, of course, it's the Chevy Silverado, my friend. Go buy yourself a Silverado. At, put that to any question that has any sort of product. Fargo's deeper than that. It goes deeper than that than bias into more like, yes, you have to buy things as opposed to, you know, maybe you're fine with what you got. You know, I mean, like the most, or something like that, or have you thought about repairing your car and not like buying a new one? Like some of this stuff is, is deeper is like, it adapts the ideology of even if it's not a specific product. The civic product is the most obvious form of bias, but it's more also just like, you know, you need to be buying things all the time. Yeah, we had Tyler Cowan on and we asked him kind of what he's learned and what that tells him about living a good life. And, you know, he's a super into messing with AI. And he's like, you know, I've put that question into the AI. It'll give you a decent answer. And now I I'm envisioning a future where Tyler asked that question of AI and it says, "A good life is one where you've accumulated enough stuff to fill a $5,000 house made by PULTY HOMES and on and on and on." So I have a question. What did Tyler Colet say? What did Tyler Colet say is the key to a good life? Or maybe that's another episode. He said that if you can perfectly answer that question, you probably haven't lived a good life because it's so complex, I'll send you a link to that. I think the answer is, "Can I take this side by?" I kind of think over the long run that a real key to human, I mean, there's the usual things like having a connection and a family, things like that, human connection, but also developing some kind of profession or skill or something and spending your entire, that really keeps you interested and spending your life trying to master it. Now that could be your actual occupation, like maybe you're a podcaster and you hone your craft of having the right kind of questions or you're an author or maybe you're like a really great carpenter or something like that, but it could also be your hobby. You're just like something about bowling really grabs you or whatever, I don't know whatever it is. Like that, you kind of spend your life with that endlessly interesting thing to you. I think that and manage to construct your life so you have time and space for whatever it is that is endlessly interesting and where you continue always want to get better. If you manage to find that in your life, that's a pretty good key to a good life. And one that a lot of people can aspire to, I mean, not everyone can be like a billionaire. Yeah. Yeah. What is that thing for you? Well I've got a bunch. I think actually authoring and writing is endlessly challenging, trying to craft sentences is endlessly difficult. I also am a little bit of a dilatant, but I have a lot, a lot of hobbies. I like to surf. I like to say race sailboats, I like to until recently play hockey, so in all those areas, this is getting a little beyond the book, but all those things are things where I actually find endlessly interesting, like racing sailboats is endlessly or surfing, but I'm actually not very good at any of those things. Writing is the only thing where I think I'm maybe can, you know, and I'm not say I'm some master, but I can at least, you know, rise to the level of being professional at it. But all these other hobbies is too. I just can't ever get enough of like trying to catch another wave or whatever it is. Yeah. So I look for those things and I try to make sure I spend time on them. Well, you also use the word difficult, that goes back to your convenience thing, is that when you look at what people value, it tends to not be things that are super easy, where you can just hit the easy button because that's not rewarding. It's like we get some fundamentally meaningful reward from things that took more effort and that we did have to struggle with. Yes. You know, I honestly, at the risk of selling, starting to get, I honestly think it's where the difficulty for me is posed by nature itself, where you're sort of face to face with something like, you know, the changing nature of the wind or waves or, you know, if you're hiking and trying to get up a mountain, like the sheer challenge of gravity and friction, literal friction, not like, damn, this website sucks fiction, but actual friction between your fingers and the rock. I find the closer you are to sort of nature's challenges, maybe it's close to our biological selves, that to me is where I find the kind of endlessly interesting challenges tend to come from. I could not agree with you more. To me, nature is always the greatest teacher because it's embedded with uncertainty. You can't predict what's going to happen next and you have to figure things out. And there's also a short time scale to when you learn if you figured that thing out. Like for example, in a normal corporate job, you might have some project you're working on. It might take months. You don't know how it's going to, you know, there's an end date, but sometimes it's very vague. It's just a stocko, upper to the stocko down, whereas when you get on a wave, you can't predict how big the wave will be, you don't know how it's going to break, and you're going to know, did I do this pretty decently in about five seconds, and then you get back up and you do it again. And so it's like this satisfying, just conclusion to this challenge. Question about ad, we'll pivot a little bit to ad, so this podcast that runs on ads. Now I'll give us credit, we were with iHeart for a while and we left specifically because we thought the ad load was just excessive and aggressive. So we know how fewer ads with brands that I like and I use, we still got to pay the bills. What in your mind is like an ethical way to approach funding media? Is it paywalls? Is it ads that serve the listener or reader whoever it is? Like how do you think of that? Yeah, it's a great question and I actually appreciate that you're struggling with it. So I am not the advocate for that purely monastic life. Well, I mean, it's cool to live that way, but most of institutional reality involves some need to pay the bills one way or another. And I've usually thought, so I have a lot of thoughts about this, I've often thought that if you can have a paid for service, that there's something good about that because people are paying you and you get to be loyal to them in some sense. If you can pull that off. But I've started over the years, so there's a fidelity between what they want and what you are giving them. You can be a loyal agent. I've started to think, however, the last 10 years, you know, inspired by some of the good advertising sponsor media of the last 20 years and there's been a lot of independent media, a lot of podcasters as well who are good, independent, but you know, it's not really realistic because we don't have any kind of way to easily get paid for some people of donation models, but I don't know if it always works, to have advertising-sported models. And it certainly makes it possible to have a broader adoption level. I just think you have to watch it and, you know, I think what you're doing sounds right is, you know, not just assuming that an ad or dependence on advertising is going to be harmless, you know, free money, that kind of thing. I think it has this long-term kind of corrupting influence, if you aren't careful with it. I don't know. That's what I got for you. Yeah. So I guess my bottom is paid, paid if you can pull it off. But I wouldn't want to extinguish all the incredible and impressive things that have succeeded without being, you know, without advertising, without advertising revenue. And I, yeah, I could go on with that. Yeah. And it's a sub-stack too, and that's paid. And so which, the upside is that we're not beholden to any advertisers like right whatever I want, as long as it serves the reader. Now the downside is I got to put a paywall on it, which means that not everyone can see it. So with the podcast, anyone can listen to this, but there is going to be an ad. So it's like this really tough balance of paying the bills versus trying to get people as much good information as you can. It's definitely a tricky tight-rope to walk. Can I bring the 1830s back into here? Can I bring the 1830s back? Always. I mean, I mean, the most, the amazing thing about the penny press, even though it was kind of tabloid and sometimes they made up stories, is it in a sense was the beginning of something we now call public opinion, or, you know, the idea of the entire population knowing something is happening through the media, like a media, media, media, the internet connects everyone. And that was really only possible when the newspaper became a penny, as opposed to being something that's expensive and more like this operation. So it is this trade-off between, you know, having some ways of society enforce and just reaching some people with information that they particularly want. Yeah. With social media, you have kids, right? Yeah. How do you approach social media with kids? Because that's one of those where, oh, they'll get entertainment. It's like, when we go out to dinner with my niece, you hand her the iPad and she's not going to go crazy. But what's your take on that? How do you, do you have boundaries for your kids or what are your thoughts? Strong boundaries. No social media. I know, I, no social media at all for them. Now they're pretty young, 10 and 13, youngish, but no social media, very limited devices. I think kind of importantly, I'm big into zoning, so, you know, not in your bedroom basically. Like, you know, I remember, I, the attention was, as I said, was the breakdown of spaces. Yeah. And, you know, family room, maybe we're all together, but not like you're gone in your own little world. If we're on devices, we're like together on devices. So I kind of zone our world, you know, on what, watch TV, but yeah, no social media. I think we'll look back. at this period of social media and be a little bit like we look back at the point where cocaine was given freely to everybody or opioids and be like, yeah, that was kind of a crazy thing, especially for teenagers. Now, you know, maybe, or for anyone, you know, or tobacco and other errors, we just thought, okay, it's fine to be, you know, 12-year-olds smoke a cigarette. Yeah, I think that social media and children, that error, look, it could be wrong, but I think it's the trend is it's it's going to be banned for most people. You think we'll put age restrictions on it or what if you had to think about what regulations around social would be, what would you be thinking about? I think age restrictions. Yeah, I mean, I think the kind of trying to finesse it and we'll have information. We'll force them to disclose what they are and let parents choose and all this kind of stuff. I mean, parents need me to help need help here. It wasn't like parents were going to really stop their kids from smoking or or eating or or holistic with smoking or in earlier days. It wasn't as if parents were able to control opioid use in 19th century. So, yeah, I think the police state, I think that's what's happening, frankly, with the states and all these lawsuits is it's the it's been less about this whole innovation, free speech, or more about public health. And I think the public health stuff is becoming clear and clear. Look, I could be wrong. Maybe we'll be the one country. I think most countries will ban it. Maybe the US will be an exception because the US sometimes holds out for a long time on things like this. But I think like smoking indoors, now you'll be like, wow, I can't believe we had restaurants full of cigarettes smoke and I thought that was cool. Yeah, so we had on a writer named Taylor Lorenz who covers a lot of internet culture and she was worried about privacy issues. If you had, you know, say you had to upload a photo of your face to improve that you were a certain age, she was worried that that data could link out. It could be some privacy issues. She thought it could lead to surveillance. What's your take on that? I have very little patience for those arguments. I worked in the White House in those trying to pass child protection bills. And I was one of the arguments like, oh, no, what about, I mean, do you think we're in a high point of privacy right now? What are you exactly trying to protect here? I know she's not here, but like, are you imagining that there's this extraordinary people are already on Facebook, Instagram, all these things have surrendered their privacy a thousand times over. And your thing is going to make worse for privacy if we ban, I mean, it's the other way around. If you ban social media for children, it would be a massive increase in privacy, because they're the worst invaders of privacy. I find that argument to be, so I am getting a little heated now, but we ran into it a lot when I was working on this legislation. And I think it was just very opportunistic. I'm sure it's meant to good face. It comes from the idea of, well, okay, it ought to be a gay kid who doesn't want to reveal their gay or something like that. And I also think children should have privacy protection. So it's not, like, I don't believe that. And in fact, I think we need strong privacy protection rules. But the idea of like banning social media is going to ruin what privacy doesn't exist right now, I think, is wrong. Well, it is interesting because when I was a professor of teaching, you know, journalism media studies classes, I would ask my students, how many of you care about your privacy? This would be a class if you have 200 kids. Every single hand goes up. How many of you spent a lot of time on social media? Every hand goes up. So there's this disconnect between, you know, what we say we care about and what we actually care about. This is going to be totally off topic, but I really just enjoyed this portion of your book about reality TV and what made it work. And the reason I'm asking you about it now is because we just had Heather Gaye, who is a real housewife of Salt Lake City, a very smart, interesting one. We had her on the show. So she's a big reality star, but in attention merchants, you have this anecdote about how season run, one of the real world sucks. No one watches it. So it leads the producers to go, well, why didn't people watch it? And so what was the answer to that? And then how did it lead us into this world of reality TV we're in now? Can I embarrassly pause and tell you I can't remember? Can you, can you prompt me for my own answer? Because I actually forget I haven't written that book and I feel comfortable that part 12 years ago. Yeah, I feel comfortable too because I would actually teach this because I knew so many of my students loved reality TV. And I actually had a graduate assistant that used to edit reality TV too. So I would have her sit in on that day and tell story. I think I remember the answer. You want to give it a go? I think I remember. So first thing I remember is the reality TV was primarily a cost-cutting measure. You know, we don't want to pay actors. And MTV already had a brilliant idea of having music videos, which were free. And frankly, we're advertising also. It's like advertising support by more advertising and fees. But it was primarily conceived that it's like we don't want to pay actors. Let's just see if a bunch of kids will do it. And I think if I'm not mistaken, the answer was to hire really difficult people. Is that wrong? Or just answer? And set them in contact with each other. Season one of the real world. They hire normal people, right? It's like, oh yeah, that guy, he seems like a nice guy. I hate that lady's cool. It's put him in a house together. See what happens. And of course, they're just they're hanging out. They're being nice. And then they go, well, this is boring as hell. So then it became this pivot too. We got to get crazy people. And we got to feed him alcohol. And it's this wildly successful thing. But I think it also from the context of the viewer, it just totally skews your perception of what human beings are like, because we just rigged the game in advance. So I just love that. And to Heather's credit, the real housewife we have on, she knows that's what it, I mean, she was like, my job is to get behind the camera, create a little drama, have a good time. And I just move on. Yeah. She was she was great about it. All right. We'll start to land the plane here. And I have one thing. It shows something about, you know, the human interest and that they basically paid people in attention. Another way of understanding it. And frankly, like TikTok too, is the understanding you could pay people in attention instead of dollars. So, you know, I mean, they paid those, and maybe some of them ended up making some money sort of, but most people from real world just went back to life at some point. And, you know, they were just paid in attention units, whatever those are like fleeting, fleeting pieces of fame. Now, there's some big stars. I don't know why the word snooki comes to mind. When they found snooki, they must have been of Jersey Shore. They must have been, this is going to our show right here. And they found her right there. And she wasn't. She wasn't. Yeah. What do you, what does your immediate diet look like? Given your position in question, stuff you write about? What can I tell us? I mean, I believe you need to live what you write. It's kind of like a book about digitalism. You don't want to book on, you know, vegetarianism written by a carnivore. And obviously, I think it's more obvious. So, I'm not a hermit. But I do try to read physical books. I don't always do that, but I try to read physical books. I try to limit the time. Now, I think I'm on very limited social media. I feel like as a job, you kind of have posts on Twitter. But mainly I zone my life. Like I try the most important thing is I try to have periods. As opposed to saying, okay, I can resist in the moment. I try to say like this day is not a device day. Or like this time, basically our family time between six children and 10 or something. It's just like maybe watch TV together, but it's not a time where we're going to be on media. And like when we dinner, we're not going to, hey, look what I saw on my phone. It's actually a very small but important thing. It's like, you're not allowed to say, okay, look at this thing and bring the phone up into the dinner conversation and say, look at this thing. So I'm really proponent of a zoning system. Doesn't work perfectly. Obviously not. And also on the slip side, do I often forget to respond emails? Yes. And probably drive people crazy. But that's my basic approach. That's interesting. Can I say one more thing? I try to patronize all the independent, you know, independence for things like email, even word processors. The degree I can, I try to patronize independence. And you know, probably fighting a losing battle. But that's where I met. No, but at least you're given a memo to find it. That's good. All right, so books are the master switch, Age of Extraction, Attention Merchants. It's a trio. Would you have people start at the master switch and then go Attention Merchants, then Age of Extraction? It'll be cover. The first two books cover this time, same time period. So you can start with either first two books first. And then ideally read one of those two and then the third. And you know, yeah, it's my own little ring cycle, I guess. Because there's a lot of cycles. All those books have a cycle in them. A little less extraction. But the first two are heavily focused on trying to understand the long cycles of median tech. I love it. We appreciate you coming on. This was a really fun conversation. I really enjoyed it. I relish opportunity to get into some of the depths here and have this encounter with the very forced of nature of being a part of my day. Put it that way.