attention economy

Hi Behind the Bastards Fans! Take a listen to the trailer of our newest show Sixteenth Minute (of Fame). 

About the show: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) is a weekly show from Jamie Loftus that takes a closer look at the internet’s main characters – one part reported, one part interviews, and one part Jamie collapsing her permanently internet-damaged brain. Whether it’s an enduring meme or a dreaded Character of the Day distinction, it’s the kind of notoriety that often results in little money, unwarranted attention, and a confusing blurred line of consent. What do you do when you get more attention and judgement than any one person is built to handle? The Sixteenth Minute of Fame is the place where we figure that out, putting people in the context of the moment they've been frozen inside of.

Listen here and subscribe to Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode I'm sharing a throwback keynote I gave to Booking.com employees back in 2017. We discuss the importance of consumer attention and its ever-changing nature, as well as brand relevance and how its built by leveraging social media. I also speak on humans' innate distaste for wasting their time and how a business can use that in their favor. Enjoy!

In this episode, we examine a series of Sam’s conversations centered around social media’s impact on the information landscape.

We begin with Sam’s second conversation with Tristan Harris, which was conducted shortly after the release of Tristan’s documentary, The Social Dilemma. The documentary lays out Tristan’s thesis on how social media is causing the deterioration of both individual and societal welfare. Author and technologist Jaron Lanier follows, echoing Tristan’s concerns and shifting the conversation to social media’s unique business model, addressing how perverse incentives reliably produce such detrimental outcomes.

We then hear from Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter. Sam and Dorsey’s conversation took place when Dorsey was still working at Twitter, and Sam still had an account. However, the questions they pose—relating to issues of content moderation and corporate transparency—are even more relevant today.

Next, psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents the alarming findings from his research on the psychological effects of social media, detailing how teenage girls are bearing the brunt of a mental health crisis. 

Shifting to a more political lens, Sam and Cass Sunstein discuss Sunstein’s book, #Republic, and Sunstein addresses one of Sam’s most pressing fears of the last seven years: how social media is warping our opinions on politics. We then narrow down on this issue, with Zeynep Tufekci explaining the real-life consequences of social media’s influence on protest movements.

Finally, Sam and technology analyst Nina Schick dive into one of the most urgent concerns of the AI boom: deepfakes and how they might be weaponized to further pollute and degrade our information landscape.

About the Series

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career.

Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

For most of us, seeing an advertisement pop up while we’re scrolling on Instagram or reading an article or watching a video is the most banal experience possible. But in the background of those experiences is a $500 billion marketplace where our attention is being bought, packaged and sold at split-second speeds virtually every minute of every day. Online advertising is the economic engine of the internet, and that engine is fueled by our attention.

Tim Hwang is the former global public policy lead for A.I. and machine learning at Google and the author of the book “Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet.” Hwang’s central argument is that everything about the internet — from the emphasis data collection to the use of the “like” button to the fact that services like Google Search and Facebook are free — flows from its core business model. But that business model is also in crisis. The internet is degrading the very resource — our collective attention — on which its financial survival depends. The resulting “subprime attention crisis” threatens upend the internet as we know it.

So this conversation is about the economic logic that undergirds our entire experience of the internet, and how that logic is constantly warping, manipulating and shaping the most important resource we have — our attention. But it’s also about whether a very different kind of internet — build on a very different economic logic — is possible.

Mentioned:

“Does Quora Really Have All the Answers?” by Gary Rivlin

Google report: “5 Factors of Viewability”

“Almost Impossible”

Book Recommendations:

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Jim Ravel’s Theatrical Pickpocketing

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Pat McCusker and Kristina Samulewski.

If Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter comes to fruition, the world’s richest person will own one of its most important communications platforms. Twitter might have a smaller user base than Facebook, Instagram and even Snapchat, but it shapes the dominant narratives in key industries like politics, media, finance and technology more than any other platform. Attention — particularly that of elite leaders in these industries — is a valuable resource, one that Twitter manages and trades in.

Musk understands Twitter’s attention economy better than anyone. On numerous occasions, his tweets have sent a company’s stock or a cryptocurrency’s value skyrocketing (or plummeting). So what would it mean for Musk to own Twitter? How would that change the platform? How might he use Twitter to change, well, everything else?

Felix Salmon is the chief economics correspondent at Axios, a co-host of the Slate Money podcast and someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the economics of attention, the way modern financial markets work and how money impacts the technologies we use. We discuss Musk’s possible motivations for owning Twitter, how Musk’s distinct brand of tweeting has reaped financial windfalls, what Musk understands about finance and attention that many others don’t, why Twitter is so powerful as a storytelling machine, why journalists are turning away from it, what a decentralized Twitter might look like, how Web3 resembles the 1960s “back to the land” movement, how Musk could break Twitter — but why that might end up saving Twitter — and more.

Mentioned:

“Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter” by Ezra Klein

"A Crypto Optimist Meets a Crypto Skeptic” on The Ezra Klein Show

“A Viral Case Against Crypto, Explored” on The Ezra Klein Show

“The Way the Senate Melted Down Over Crypto Is Very Revealing” by Ezra Klein

Book Recommendations:

The Bond King by Mary Childs

Typeset in the Future by Dave Addey

The Surprise of Cremona by Edith Templeton

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Jenny Casas, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Spring of 2021 was peak meme mania. GameStop was going nuts. AMC was going nuts. And in general, the big cohort of traders that entered the market in early 2020 was riding high. Since then, though, things have turned south. Volumes have dipped significantly. The memes came back to Earth, and a lot of the growth stocks that were riding high have gotten absolutely killed. So where do things stand now, and what happened to all the new traders? On this episode, we speak to Lily Francus, director of quantitative research at Moody's Analytics, as well as Kyla Scanlon, a popular financial commentator across social media (as well as the founder of a new financial education company) to understand what happened, what's changed, and how the last two years have permanently altered financial markets as we know them. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic magazine, Tristan Harris spent three years as a Google Design Ethicist developing a framework for how technology should “ethically” steer the thoughts and actions of billions of people from screens. He is now co-founder & president of the Center for Humane Technology, whose mission is to reverse ‘human downgrading’ and re-align technology with humanity. Additionally, he is co-host of the Center for Humane Technology’s Your Undivided Attention podcast with co-founder Aza Raskin.

"Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix." — Chuck Palahniuk

Tristan Harris (@tristanharris) was named by Rolling Stone as one of the "25 People Shaping the World." He was featured in Fortune's 2018 "40 under 40" list for his work on reforming technology, and the Atlantic has called him the "closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience."

Formerly Design Ethicist at Google, he is a world-renowned expert on how technology steers our decisions. Tristan has spent nearly his entire life studying subtle psychological forces, from early beginnings as a childhood magician, to working with the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, and to his role as CEO of Apture, which was acquired by Google.

Tristan has briefed heads of state, technology company CEOs, and members of the US Congress about the attention economy, and he's been featured in media worldwide, including 60 Minutes, PBS News Hour, and many more. He is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, which can be found at Humanetech.com, and cohost (with Aza Raskin) of Your Undivided Attention podcast, which exposes the hidden designs that have the power to hijack our attention, manipulate our choices, and destabilize our real world communities.

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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.

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What’s up podcast! On this episode of the GaryVee audio experience, you’ll hear a full keynote from my trip to Singapore back in 2017. Listening closely for facebook and google ad advice, attention arbitrage and the benefits of adversity.

Today’s episode is long, but important. If you make it to the end, tweet me @garyvee with your biggest takeaway. Enjoy!

If you’ve been to 4Ds and have any feedback for this community tweet me @garyvee and for more info on the program email nick@thesashagroup.com with the month you’d like to attend.

#QOTD: What's the biggest mistake that you made recently?

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