This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. As you listen right now to this podcast, you're probably surrounded by stuffed-angled earbuds, half-empty water bottle, legos, scatters, and a bite. Try to remember what made you buy all these things. Hello, Motoh.
It's time to reimagine the bird with a fridge, who listens. Sketch or shave us, step into your new bike. Get on Hollywood in Honorsons. Newspapers, radio, and TV have helped us learn about these products.
But in order to serve up billions of ads, these forms of mass media have had to first create a very special product of their own. The secret product, you can't buy it in a store, you can't see it. But you are in the process of supplying it at this very second. This new product, attention, attention, attention, is your attention.
We can lose our freedom and become entrapped, really, by doing what we think are voluntary choices. Corporations ranging from Google to Fox News have found ways to grab your attention, package it, and then make money from it. Their strategies are part of a long legacy of companies trying to capture and monetize our attention. Columbia University Law Professor Tim Wu calls these businesses, attention merchants.
Today we explore the rise of attention merchants, and why Tim says the techniques they've invented pose real risks to our autonomy. At Vodafone, you get more. Like more than more, get the brand new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra for 0 euro. Plus, get more peace of mind with an extra 12 month warranty when you switch to our unlimited bill pay mobile plan.
Now that's a whole lot more. Vodafone, together we can. Subject to availability eligibility and switching to our 24 month 65 euro per month on limited bill pay plan by 30th June, 2026. Each April the price we plan will increase by 350 per month for full-term C Vodafone.ie 4 slash terms.
The bank holiday is finally here. Enjoy summer savers, act centra with great offers. Black Centra Fresh-Arts, Triple-In's Day 2 pack on the 8 euro offer end Sunday. Selector Pringles 165 Grand 1 75 each.
Plus Dye Coke and Coke 0 12 Compact, only 6 euro each plus deposit. Bank Holiday value sorted. Centra. Live every day.
In the early 1800s, the newspaper business in New York City was bleak. The New York Times wasn't around yet, but they were a handful of other papers. The Journal of Commerce, the Morning Courier in New York Inquirer. They typically charged 6 cents a copy, which was a lot of money in those days.
Benjamin Day was working in newspaper printing and he thought the business model needed a reboot. 6 cents was way too much. He decided to start his own paper, The New York Sun, and sell it, for one cent. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he knew something that they didn't.
His strategy was one that Jeff Bezos from Amazon could appreciate. On August 25, 1835, The New York Sun ran a front page story titled- Readers learned that an astronomer in South Africa had built a telescope that could see minute details on the surface of the moon. Over the next few weeks, the sun released a stream of new findings. The moon contained canyons, oceans, forests.
The telescope also identified a new form of life, a creature with a scientific name, Vespa Tileo Homo. It looked like a human with bat wings. Here's how the newspaper described the creature. The average 4 feet in height were covered except on the face with short and glossy copper-colored hair and had wings composed of a thin membrane without hair, lying snugly upon their backs.
Obviously, the paper was peddling fake news. But that's only obvious to us in the 21st century. To the average person in 1835, the discovery of moon bats was incredible. And for The New York Sun, it carried the paper to unrivaled levels of circulation.
Columbia University law professor Tim Wu has written a book titled The Attention Merchants where he recounts the history of the many ways our attention has been hijacked. By selling the newspaper for a penny, Benjamin Day captured market share, and this turned out to produce something much more valuable than New Sprint. The New York Sun, which published these stories, was the first paper to run entirely on the harvesting of human attention, what we also call an advertising business model. And so its profits entirely depended on its credibility or anything else, but how many readers it had that it could resell.
So that was a crucial historic moment that began the commodification of attention as something very valuable that you could resell make a lot of money out of it. And that's why I think the paper was driven to stories such as Discovering Life on the Moon so it could build circulation. Benjamin Day's business model was a profound discovery. That model is alive and well today.
Attention is the fuel that allows everyone from candy makers to car dealers to sell their wares. In fact, attention is so powerful that once you have it, you can get people to buy things they didn't even know they needed. Like for example, Mount Wash. In the 1920s, Listerine came up with one of the first examples of something Tim calls demand engineering.
It was an advertising campaign built around an unfamiliar word, halitosis. This dreaded condition, the ad claimed, makes you want popular. Yeah, well, I don't think people thought much about whether they had bad breath or not before the 1910s or 1920s. In that era, a new form of advertising was essentially invented, which the goal of which was to engineer a demand that did not already necessarily exist.
It was seen as a scientific process done by professionals and necessary to support new products that might otherwise not sell. Mount Wash being one of them, toothpaste being another, people that necessarily want them. The key there is that you can take human attention, which you harvested to some extent, and then transform it or spin it into gold by engineering new demands. And that was the magic or the science of advertising in the 1920s to make people want things they didn't otherwise want.
So Tim, I understand that Listerine sales grew from $115,000 to over $8 million as a result of this advertising campaign. That's right, and there are abundant examples from the 1910s, particularly 1920s, of demand engineering working. That's what powered, frankly, the growth of something called an advertising industry, which before had really been a marginal industry. In Listerine, I'd take a sip example, had previously been used for unclear purposes, had been disinfectant, had been sold as something to clean floors with, but the invention of it as a melt wash to clear a cure-bad breath was the key to its success.
Light up the lucky. It's light up time. The attention merchants of the 1920s discovered that they could not only create new norms. All the cheese that you like, light up the lucky strike.
But they could undo old ones. One of the most effective campaigns was to undermine the taboo against women smoking. It was considered unseemlier taboo for a woman to smoke in public, or even to smoke at all. And the tobacco industry, particularly lucky, shook, took aim of that in two directions.
One was to try to brand cigarettes as a symbol of women's independence and co-branded with the suffragette movement. They invented this phrase, a tortures of freedom to refer the cigarette to show that women were in charge of their own destiny. And the second, which is a well-tried advertising technique, was to link cigarettes to weight loss. There's lucky strike advertising in the area that picture an enormous fat woman and says, this is you in five years, smoke lucky strikes, or reach for a lucky, not for a sweet.
So they certainly went right at it. And the statistics are dramatic. They went from very little sales to many millions of cartons being sold to women specifically. And so I think it's one of the most successful examples of men engineering.
For the taste that you like, light up the lucky strike. Relax. It's light up time. 90 years ago, you might have heard that lucky strike jingle through a new medium that was taken America by storm.
Really didn't just capture people's attention, it brought them together. Families gathered around the fireplace to listen to FDR. My most immediate concern is in carrying out the purposes of the great work program, just in the past. And while the New York Sun did in print, Orson Welles did on Vay.
Let's do a luxury theater and start a V broadcast. Orson Welles. We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this opened up new avenues for attention merchants. Advertisers began sponsoring programs and often slipped the names of companies and products into shows.
I know you'll join the vast army of women who whistle while they wash. And now, the news, Opie Ridge, Rins, O Presents, the new Amos and Andy Show. The communal aspect of radio harnessed attention in a way that newspaper publishers could only dream of. You know, there were some 19th century, early 20th century writing on psychology of the crowd.
There was the idea, not exactly contemporary psychology, that people listening to things en masse sort of shed their individual identity and became part of a group which behaved more like an animal. And in some ways was entirely wild. And that was the speculation that we sort of lost it. I think there's some support for that view.
I mean, if you've ever been at a sports event or a political rally and you feel you sort of have submerged yourself into a group. But you know, it was at that level of theorizing, nothing more scientific than that. If radio came along and essentially showed that, you know, you could put newspapers to shame, a new product emerged in the 1950s and it quickly proved that it became the dominant way to capture people's attention. You say that something extraordinary in the history of the attention merchants happened on Sunday, September 9th, 1956.
Yes, and that is what I label, peak attention, otherwise known as Elvis Presley appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, which registered an audience share, which has never been rivaled. They've been larger audiences, but the share of the audience has never been quite as large as on that day. This is probably the greatest honor that I've ever had in my life. And television, even beyond radio, has shown this incredible capacity to capture the entire nation at one time watching the same information.
In retrospect, it's remarkable. The thing about today, how divided people are, how they all listen to their own streams. The whole nation watching one thing at once is really a product of the mid-century and something that was never equal before and maybe in some ways never equal since. You know, it used to be that for a long time before radio and television that if you wanted people's attention, you actually had to capture it in something that looked like the public square.
And of course, with the advent of radio and television, what you have, as far as the attention merchants are concerned, is an ability to sell things to people even when they're inside their own home. So the home becomes an opportunity to capture this enormous mind space, if you will, there's this attention of the nation. Yes, I think that's a very significant development. One that people, 20, thought, you know, radio advertising is in the home, no one's going to stand for that.
The home is a sacred place for family, you know, it's impossible to imagine. You'll have acceptance of commercial banter in the home. Uh-oh, catch him. Oh!
I wish somebody would invent a catch a bottle at sports where you aim at. This is Porter. I've got the next best thing. A new invention from Procter & Gamble.
It absorbs like magic. It's called bounty, the new paper towel that actually attracts more people. You know, but it came with a lot of sweeteners. Elvis Presley, other radio shows, I love Lucy.
And so we reached a situation where everyone in the United States would, you know, face at least sit down after dinner, watch television. And in the course of that, absorb massive amount of commercial advertising in its most compelling form, namely full sound and full video. And it's remarkable transformation is almost remarkably allowed commerce to intrude in that way, but it fell, as I said, not with a stick but with a carrot. By the late 1950s, of course, people are recoiling from the amount of advertising they're seeing on television, and a new product emerges to cater to this concern, and this product is the remote control.
The idea is this device is going to allow you freedom to avoid the advertisements, to basically be in charge of your own television-watching experience. Did it do that? Well, what many people may not know is that the remote control, as you suggested, was born as an ad killer. It was invented by Zenith as a solution to the problem of advertising.
The early versions of the remote control looked like a revolver, a gun, that you would shoot at the ad, basically turning out down the volume of your switching channels. And it was marketed as serving the individual. In the long term, however, and I think most of us have experienced this, I didn't quite have those purposes. It instead began enabling a different kind of behavior, a channel surfing where you sort of sit there and push the button, push the button, push the button, sometimes for hours on end.
So there's this paradox that sometimes devices designed to liberate us or empower us, and enslaving us in completely different ways, mainly because of our weak powers of self-control. This lack of self-control lies at the very heart of nearly every new invention of the attention of the emergence. Even as people try to liberate themselves from one form of mind control, skilled merchants find new ways to undermine people's ability to look away. One of their biggest victories in this arms race was the discovery of televised sports.
The turning point for sports was the 1958 National Football League Championships. The greatest game ever played between the Colts and the Giants, and it was an incredibly exciting football game. There's a guy, a guy, a guy. But more to the point, football had not been watched on TV by large audiences, and no one quite understood that point just how captivating it was.
And it's proven to this day, there's been some weakening, but sports audiences are very loyal, they're exceptionally valuable, maybe the most valuable attention harvesting opportunity, and this is another of TV's inventions in the 1950's. I have to say, as a sports fan myself, I find myself sitting through two and a half minutes of ads at the two minute warning of a game asking myself, what in God's name am I doing, but of course I keep doing that every Sunday. It's one of the few times I think that the old model that 50 still has its way in an era of streaming and other competitors, sports is the Gibraltar of the traditional broadcast model. And as you said, I like sports too, and I will sit through ads where I would never do it for anything else, so I think you're right.
As the television networks captured an ever larger share of people's mindspace, new entrants found it difficult to compete, producing compelling television was expensive. In 1992, MTV was looking for a way to grab and hold people's attention without spending too much money. The solution they came up with, pure genius. This is the true story.
True story. Seven strangers picked to live in a lot. And have their lives taped. To find out what happens when people stop being polite.
Could you get the phone? I'm getting real. The real world. Talk about this idea that this was in some ways the discovery of what today we would call reality television.
Yeah, so absolutely. MTV90 started thinking, well, it could be that the era of Michael Jackson's videos are coming to an end. They're darandaran. People aren't going to watch videos anymore.
We need something else. They actually thought about broadcasting football. They did a game show for a little while. But then someone had the idea that what they really needed was a soap opera.
And as we already suggested, they looked at soap opera and realized that they were far too expensive. MTV was running the cheap. They had basically no cost other than the VJs who paid in parties and some minimal salary. So they had the idea of getting a bunch of amateurs or regular people together, putting them in the house and then just seeing what happened, the house was in so-how, the result was a show called The Real World.
And as you already suggested, it was a founding series of reality television and driven really at bottom by cascading, the idea that we needed to show it on the cheap. The participants in the real world were paid $1,400 for the entire set. So not very expensive. And the argument made to the participants was we are going to pay you not in dollars and cents, but we're going to pay you in attention and fame.
Yes, this was the genius discovery in a way. It's one way of putting it is that as opposed to shelling out for a big salary, especially for a famous actor, that you could instead get so-called normal, somewhat normal people to do it for the idea that they would themselves become celebrities at least for a little while. Thousands of people have taken this idea and run with it. You don't need to be a large corporation anymore to be an attention merchant.
The screens on our desks and in our hands have enabled a new breed of merchants who have found ever more powerful ways to keep us coming back. That's coming up after the break. But first, we need a moment to monetize your mind space with some messages from our sponsors. Yes, we're attention merchants too.
At Vodafone, you get more. Like more than more, get the brand new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra for zero euro. Plus, get more peace of mind with an extra 12 month warranty when you switch to our unlimited bill pay mobile plan. Now that's a whole lot more.
Vodafone. Together we can. Subject to availability, eligibility and switching to our 24 month 65 euro per month on limited bill pay plan by 30th June, 26th each April the price of your plan will increase by three or 50 per month for full-term C Vodafone.ie for slash terms. The bank holiday is finally here.
Enjoy summer savers at Central with great offers. Like Central Fresh Air Strip, or in State, two pack only eight euro offer ends Sunday. Selector Pringles 165 grand, 175 each. Plus Diet Coke and Coke Zero, 12th compact.
Only six euro each plus deposit. Bank holiday value sorted. Central. Live every day.
Sometimes your search for a new home can feel like it's going nowhere. But every month at AIB we help hundreds of house hunters become homeowners. Our specialist mortgage team are on hand to help you every step of the way. Moving mortgage applications to mortgage approvals.
Changing can we? Into we can. And turning hoping into owning. Because we don't just help.
We help make it happen. Apply for your mortgage today. Online, in branch or on the phone. AIB for the life you're after.
Aladarsh Banks PLC and AIB Mortgage Bank UC are regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Today we're talking with author Tim Wu about his book, The Attention Merchants. The epics crumble to get inside our heads. Attention merchants are television shows, newspaper articles and podcasts that draw you in and then sell your attention to advertisers.
The internet has redefined the notion of what and who an attention merchant can be. You don't need to be a Fortune 500 company or an advertising behemoth. You can be someone like Jonah Peretti. In 2001 the MIT grad student had an idea.
He decided to order some personalized Nike sneakers with a word, sweatshop printed on them. Nike didn't really take to that suggestion. They rejected it or some employee did as an inappropriate slang. He wrote back and pointed out that sweatshop wasn't slang, that it was in the dictionary.
They just canceled the order and he finally got a single picture of the 12 year old who's making my shoes. He also went on to write a blog post about his experience or shared this material. It described to me what happened and the turn of events that turned this relatively innocuous private interaction into something that was close to a global phenomenon. Well, Jonah Peretti was in the early 2000s and he touched a live wire that no one really understood well which was a tendency of certain stories.
I don't know if it was quite a blog post. I think he just sent an email out and the email got forward, got forward, got forward, got forward until millions of people had seen it or read it. We now call that going viral but that phrase didn't exist back then. Jonah told me he then ended up on the Today Show talking about sweatshops.
The thing blew up. That's something we're kind of more familiar with now but the time it was a new phenomenon, especially an unknown person having their email just go viral and it showed that there was something new and unusual about this medium, the web and the internet. Jonah of course was not a one shot wonder. He went on to do several other things.
In fact, he demonstrated that he had something of an act for finding things that went viral. Describe to us some of the websites that most of us have visited that are the brain shot of Jonah Peretti. Yeah, so Jonah in some ways a lot to invent our present. Something about virality fascinated him.
I think he just thought that experience with shoes was so strange and weird and unexpected that he went back almost like a scientist to see if he could bottle that lightning. He founded two websites. One was the Huffington Post which he co-founded with other people including Ariel Huffington which was designed to use these sort of web techniques to push a more left-leaning form of journalism. It was a tremendous success, transform journalism not all in good ways but did.
But he even went further and went to the pure distillation of attention with a site named Buzzfeed Laboratories, known as Buzzfeed. The only goal of which was the pure harvesting of attention by creating viral stories. That Buzzfeed has obviously transformed web content today as we know it. I remember some time ago when I was watching something that was forwarded to me by a friend and it showed a video that Buzzfeed had posted where they had a watermelon sitting on a table and these two people working at Buzzfeed essentially wrapped rubber bands around the watermelon and they kept doing so until they were probably hundreds of rubber bands.
And the idea was of course at some point the rubber bands would exert enough power in the watermelon to make the watermelon explode and you sort of knew this was going to happen but you didn't quite know when it was going to happen. And people like me sat and watched this video unfold for I don't know how long it was. It might have been even 10 or 12 minutes and all this was of people was people putting rubber bands on a watermelon and throughout that process I found myself asking why is it that I just simply are not able to look away and in some ways it is an act of genius to create content like that. Yeah, Buzzfeed Laboratories I think the laboratory is an important part of the original name.
They just kept experimenting until they found stuff that for whatever reason just grab people and when let it go watermelons with rubber bands maybe more obvious ones like cat photos they just people kept coming back and I guess we know more about the human mind as a result of Buzzfeed's experiment on us although I'm not really sure that we like what we found or at least we found that the things we're interested in aren't necessarily reading Tolstoy or something but are these strange things like the one you mentioned. Let's talk a moment about Silicon Valley and the work of companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook. They have in some ways become masters not just of capturing our attention but monitoring where our attention goes and building products that cater to the drift of our attention. Talk about these new attention merchants and in some ways they're enormous power over our lives.
Yeah sure a big turning point in the history of humanity came at the end of the last century the last millennia when Silicon Valley headed by Google first really started to get into advertising and turned all the resources all the know-how all the expertise of engineering and computer science to the art and science of capturing as much attention as possible getting as much data as possible other people and reselling it to advertisers. That has been a change of profound consequences. I think many of us are hooked on one or more online products which no more about us than anyone else and frankly are like this incredible super computer designed to get as much resellable attention out of us as possible. I think this is something that goes beyond even what television or radio is capable of doing because they know so much more about us they know so much more about you your vulnerabilities your desires and you know customized marketing can really work and it's something we really need to watch in this next decade.
Many celebrities have come to understand that attention online translates to money. I was reading a website the other day that was describing the Indian cricket star Virat Kohli who has nearly 17 million Instagram followers and the article said that Virat Kohli makes half a million dollars per Instagram post where he promotes a product. That is just mind-boggling. It does show the commercial value of attention which is really what my book is all about and it also speaks to the transformation of celebrity.
You know there was once a point where famous people you know say the Queen of England are famous scientists they sort of tried to stay out of public view you know they usually had jobs other than being celebrities say Einstein was trying to discover things and their mysteries seem to add to the sense of wonder or fame. That's not our model at all. Celebrities or aspiring celebrities seek to eat out any minute or second they can get of our attention and stay there never go away and as you suggested there's commercial reasons to do so that you can make a lot of money not only doing your job but just by being famous and I think maybe Paris Hilton gets some credit for the theory of just being famous or being famous sick. Famous or being famous is the phrase but certainly celebrity has transformed our time.
It isn't just mega stars who can monetize their celebrity. Increasingly micro celebrities often called influencers are finding there's real money to be made in harvesting the attention of their friends and followers. Hi I'm Sue Tran I'm currently an associate creative director at Refinery29 working in the Branding College Ant Space. I also have a micro large following on Instagram with my Instagram handle Sue Tran with three ends.
Sue Tran has about 23,000 followers on Instagram. She joined the site five years ago since then she's built up a following of people interested in food and art around New York City. Scattered among some 1,500 photos are pictures of Yankee candles, portable printers and most recently pictures of Sue posing with a Google Pixel smartphone. Google is actually through an influencer agency.
influencer marketing agencies has been growing in the last like one or two years just because people want to monetize influential Instagram and bloggers and all that stuff. So they kind of create platforms to make it easier for influencers to seek out sponsors or sponsors to seek out them. Sue says companies pay influencers based on the number of followers they have. I have a rate of 150.
There's a homemade quality to Sue's sponsored post. Some of them are obviously a little bit more staged but I don't think I would ever post anything that I didn't feel like was 100% me. Companies want these messages to feel like authentic recommendations from one friend to another rather than advertising messages directed by a multi-billion dollar company. In one picture Sue poses with her Google phone in front of a building in Brooklyn.
In another she's holding the phone while sitting in a Chinese restaurant. To a friend it might look like she loves her Google phone but don't tell anyone I'm still on my iPhone. It just indicates a sort of a new type of media environment where as you suggested many more people can be famous not in an older traditional sense of everyone in America knows your face or everyone in the world knows your face which was the old criteria for people magazine putting your face on the cover but that millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people know who you are and therefore in some smaller way you were micro or nano famous. When we think of celebrities we think of people most often in movies and on television.
When he's Donald Trump and I'm the largest real estate developer in New York. You have a particular interpretation to him of how the apprentice led to Donald Trump's election as president. Yes I think that Donald Trump through the apprentice and to some degree other parts of his life understood deeply the power of capturing and using human attention. Now on the apprentice I think he studied what it takes to capture an audience some of these things we talked about at BuzzFeed you know the sort of plot twist the unusual surprising behavior and I think he has in his presidency and during his campaign saw it as his primary directive to always win the battle for attention.
Sometimes even losing or appearing to lose it doesn't matter as long as there's a good show a big fight and everyone's paying attention to me and his mind he thinks he's won and to some degree it is truer than any of us would like to admit. At some level there's some genius to it understanding that the battle for attention is primary to a lot of other battles. You know the whole country and to some degree the world is reacting to his agenda his presence his tweets everything he does. It's also known as power you know even if people are resisting you they're still paying attention to you and so you know the mental resources of the entire nation much of the world haven't devoted to this one figure that Mr.
Donald Trump. You say that because Trump is an attention merchant his biggest vulnerability you know might not be the risk of impeachment but the risk that people will eventually get bored of him. Talk about that idea that one of the risks of being an attention merchant is that people will eventually start to tune you out. Yes I think this happens with all advertising almost all content and many celebrities with a few exceptions is we have some innate tendency to get bored get used to things develop some immunity you know even a show like I Love Lucy eventually lost its audience and so much as Donald Trump rose to power on an attentional move you know almost running his campaign and presidency as a reality show I think when people begin getting bored begin tuning out you can expect a loss of power he may fade less in the way of Richard Nixon and more in the way of Paris Hilton.
When you step back and look at this long arc of how attention merchants have captured our attention and monetized it and sold it and found ways to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Are there broad patterns that emerge about human nature and human psychology are there lessons to be drawn about how the mind works from the story of the attention merchants? I think there are so first of all there's lessons as to how we decide what to pay attention to it's a mixture of voluntary and involuntary mechanisms the science suggests and I think the history suggests it's true so we like to think we control what we pay attention to but in fact we can sort of be conditioned or involuntarily attracted to things if you ever found yourself you know clicking on Facebook and wondering why did I do that or if you ever find yourself you know startled by an ad and watching it not sure what got you there you'll know that it's not fully within our voluntary control. Part of this book is motivated by deep interest in human freedom and you know sense that we can lose our freedom and become entrapped really by doing what we think are voluntary choices I mean I don't have to read email I don't have to be writing tweets or something but you should nevertheless these voluntary choices in a certain environment can leave one trapped.
Another motivation for this book is the experience which I'm sure many listeners will have had where you you know go to your computer and you have the idea you're going to write just one email and you sit down and suddenly an hour goes by maybe two hours I don't know what happened you know this sort of surrender of control over our lives the loss of control to me speaks deeply to this challenge of freedom and what it means to be autonomous in our time and have a life where you've sort of to some degree chosen what you want to do these are values that seem to be under threat in our times. So there's been a war for our attention for a very long time at least a century probably much longer than that. Are we just helpless victims in this war where you know people are waging you know this battle for our attention is there a way that we can in some ways take back this battlefield and own our own minds again? Yeah this is as you said something only a century old you know advertising a hundred years ago was just getting started so we're a relatively new over the course of human civilization environment and I think we can adapt we still have our individuality and ultimately some choice now the challenges we face in industry which has spent a century inventing and developing techniques to get us hooked to harvest as much attention as possible and they're good at it but we do have choices and I think it begins with the idea that attention is a resource that you own it and that one should be very conscious about how it's being spent.
I was motivated writing this book by the work of William James the philosopher and he pointed out that something very straightforward which is you know at the end of your days your life will have been what you paid attention to and so deciding how that vital resource is spent in my view is the key to life frankly the key to meaning the key to doing and having a life which you think is meaningful. Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. He's the author of The Attention Merchants the epic scramble to get inside our heads. Tim thank you for joining me today on Hidden Bre.
Thank you so much. This week's show was produced by Paz Shah and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Maggie Penman, Jenny Schmidt, Raina Cohen and Renee Clark. Our unsung heroes this week are Enzo Dorian and Trey Warman.
You heard these two young gentlemen at the beginning of the episode. Extra, extra, read all about it. Great astronomical discoveries lately made. And we greatly appreciate their voice acting work.
Great astronomical discoveries lately made. Great astronomical discoveries lately made. Great astronomical lately made. Do it again but don't forget discoveries.
For more Hidden Brain you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. From all of us here at the show we wish you a Happy New Year. If you're looking for a New Year's resolution I have a suggestion for you. Recommend Hidden Brain to as many friends and family members as you can in 2018.
I'm Shankar Vittantan and this is NPR. At Vodafone you get more. Like more than more. Get the brand new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra for 0 Euro plus get more peace of mind with an extra 12 month warranty when you switch to our unlimited bill pay mobile plan.
Now that's a whole lot more. Vodafone. Together we can. Subject to availability eligibility and switching 24 month 65 Euro per month on limited bill pay plan by 30th June, 26th each April the price of your plan will increase by 3 or 50 per month for full-term C Vodafone.ie for slash terms.
Both brighter days are giving you that getaway feeling. Now's the perfect time to start planning a trip. Book your next break at Clayton Hotels. With style hotels across Ireland, the UK and Europe there's lots to enjoy.
And we promise every guest an experience to remember. Save on every room every night. Just click on ClaytonHotels.com. Clayton Hotels.
Where it's personal. Skoda electric cars are cleaner, greener, low attacks, lower running costs, smooth, quiet, effortless. It sounds great. But for some drivers this still sounds better.
For those who are not ready to make the switch to electric, it's OK. What are your new diesel Skoda Octavia, superb carock or Kodiak today? Skoda, let's explore.