This is Hidden Grain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There are so many universals in the human experience. Hunger, thirst, lust, fear.
They drive us as much as they did humans a hundred, a thousand, or even a hundred thousand years ago. But there are also experiences that feel unique to our current moment that only modern humans have encountered. Among them, the many competing forces desperately seeking our attention. The social media and news apps pushing alerts to our phones.
The streaming TV services and yes, podcasts offering us endless opportunities to binge our favorite shows. All this clamoring for our attention can be exhausting. It reminded us of an episode we did a little while back about how our attention is being constantly harvested and hijacked. Esther Bly grew up with a mom who kept her kitchen free from food coloring and high-fructose corn syrup.
Esther's lunchbox was subject to the same rules. So I would have snap peas, I would have orange. Sometimes it would be leftovers, and one may be like yummy snack, but it would only be like health gummy. Of course, Esther craved the processed snacks and cereals that her classmates were eating.
Television commercials fueled her desire. One of her favorites was for Trix yogurt. It's black and white. Hey, a package from home.
Trix rabbit is inside this costume. And he starts describing all the wonderful fruits that aren't real, but they actually are real. It's a rabbit. As the kids take a bite, they start to turn the color.
And at the very end, everything's like tech coloring. Now, Trix yogurt, of course, was banned from the Bly family fridge because it had artificial flavors and food colorings. But at breakfast time, Esther says her mom allowed her one solitary, sugary exception. So I wasn't encouraged to have sugary cereals unless possibly her or my father had them growing up.
So it was kind of that nostalgic allowance. Today on Hidden Brain, how advertisers, tech companies, and influencers exploit this nostalgia allowance and other aspects of human behavior to capture our attention. At D.I.D. Electrical, we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting.
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Plus Diet Coke and Coke Zero 12 pound packs only 6 euro each plus deposit. Bank holiday values sorted. Centra, live every day. Esther's parents don't have Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms for breakfast because they ate Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms for breakfast when they were kids.
If you think about it, parents love to have their kids experience the same wonderful things that they did. This is Professor Mary Brooks. I work at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. And I'm interested in the psychology of advertising effects.
Mary says it isn't just the taste and smell of sugary cereals that cement memories in our minds. It's the advertising that sells those products. For a 6 or 7 year old, commercials with fun mascots like Lucky the Leprechaun and Tony the Tiger can be really powerful. Children are vulnerable to messages that are fun and sound good and you can sing and they have fun characters because their minds are just so open to all of that.
They're open to everything. Small children are not skeptical. They don't listen to commercials with cute rabbits and think a multi-billion dollar company is trying to influence me. Of course, at a certain point, this changes and kids start to think of commercials as commercials.
Presumably you have some ideas of when the window opens and closes in terms of our vulnerability or impressionability. What does that window look like? The research says and I'm not sure I believe it that the vulnerability ends around 13 in terms of your cognitive ability meaning children's understanding of what advertising is and how it works and that they should not be open to it. You should be thinking critically and they're able to at the same time they're hearing it, question it.
Here's the interesting question. What happens to those messages that we heard when we were small? Do our grown-up minds question them? To answer that question, Mary teamed up with two colleagues.
Paul Connell at Stony Brook University and one of my professor colleagues here. His name is Jesper Nielsen. And the trio arranged a series of studies to look at how adults build cereal products. First thing we wanted to do is to establish that we can tie people's beliefs about the nutritiousness of a product with their exposure to that product when they were children.
They gathered a sample of people in the United Kingdom and asked them to rate the helpfulness of a chocolate-puffed rice cereal called Cocoa Pops. The cereal contesters, Cocoa Pops, are not to be confused with the Cocoa Pops that American listeners may have grown up eating. The Cocoa Pops mascot is a smiling monkey wearing a blue baseball cap. Some people in the study only learned about Cocoa Pops when they were adults.
Others grew up eating the cereal and had seen commercials for it when they were small kids. Those people rated as much more nutritious. So everyone else has a more accurate rating of how nutritious this is except for the people who saw it as a child and who have feelings of liking and warmth towards the Cocoa Monkey. Did you catch that line?
Part of a nutritious breakfast. Cereal commercials often use language like this. Now, if you're a skeptical adult, you might guess that a cereal with cocoa or marshmallows and the ingredients is not your healthiest option. But if you're a kid, a nutritious breakfast sounds pretty good.
So shouldn't your grown-up brain correct for the mistakes of your impressionable brain when you were a kid? Well, to me, one of the scary things is adults don't correct for it. They don't later on say, you know, I have these memories from when I was a child and, you know, they're wrong. I really should rethink that.
So in our later studies, that's what we actually checked is would people, if we help them by reminding them of health, for example, or reminding them of children's vulnerability to advertising, that if we were to do that, would they then correct these biases? And what we found, again, is that the people who felt that emotion towards these characters did not correct for it. So shouldn't the average adult be able to say, look, I liked the mascot when I was a child, but I'm not a child anymore. I'm too old now to believe in childish things, so I should just set it aside.
I think if you ask most adults, do you want to behave childishly, they will say no. Why is this effect still persisting? Why does the effect of what we hear in childhood stay in our minds if we want to leave those behind, in a way? Well, you'd have to really want to leave those behind.
So I think that's an individual difference, that some people do move away from the love of the things they had as kids. But if you think about it, parents love to have their kids experience the same wonderful things that they did, which is why parents love to take their kids to Disney, and they love to share with them the toys that they had, and I think that they still love these things. Remember Esther? Her health-conscious parents made an exception for Frosted Flakes because they grew up with Tony the Tiger, and not just on the cereal box.
Tony the Tiger, my grandma still kept the trash can, so we had this very old Kellogg trash can with Tony the Tiger, one of his very first designs from the 60s, 70s. Cereal mascots appear to have incredible power. Esther told us about the Trix yogurt ad that stuck with her, but she also remembers specific ads for Fruit Loops, Yeah, I really like Santa Toucan because he would go and explore And Oreo cereal. There's these dancing Oreo figures and it reminded me of the Flubber ad.
She's never even tried the Oreo one, but she still feels a kind of strange fondness for it. For kids, telling a story is very easy to do, especially when you have mascot involvement. In 2016, based in part on research studies that the one Mary Brooks conducted, the country of Chile banned mascots from all product packaging and launched a media campaign to educate people about healthier foods. Mascots have been removed from all sorts of products, from chips to cereals.
Some foods also have a black sticker slapped on them with labels like alto and calorías, high in calories, or alto and azucarés, high in sugar. I asked Mary if she thinks it'll work. Based on my research, I would be fully supportive of that effort. If they do it for 10 years and it doesn't work, well, then we should go back to the way it is.
But I think it will work. I just don't think you're going to see the result for a long time because these effects build up over a long time. Mary herself remembers commercials from her childhood that have stopped with her for several decades. I have a memory of walking to elementary school with my friends singing the Winston jingle.
That's why more people smoke Winston than any other filter cigarette. When I change to Winston, that tastes more good because I got good taste like I knew I was. Winston tastes good like it should. Change to Winston that tastes more good because I'm good.
It's a disturbing image. Elementary schoolers singing a song about the virtues of smoking. You might think that as a society, we would decide to expose our children to fewer advertisements. But in fact, as the school district in California shows, we might be going in exactly the opposite direction.
Back in 2012, the Twin Rivers Unified School District was trapped for cash. Benefactors stepped in and offered to help. But there was one small catch. The benefactors wanted something in exchange.
Here's Columbia University researcher Tim Wu. They wanted nothing less than the attention of the students. So they proposed that the school could have not all the money it wants but great riches if it only agreed to subject its students to advertising. Covering lockers with ads, some in-class advertisements, ads in the cafeteria.
And it's part of the big trend where schools that are strapped for cash have occasionally turned to their captive audiences, namely their students. After the break, Tim Wu pulls back the curtain on today's multi-million dollar advertising industry. You know, the advertisers in the 1910s were not shy to boast of their powers. I can remember a man in Cloud Hopkins bragging, you know, we are not known but we control what people all across America want and do.
I'm Shankar Pitantham and you're listening to Hidden Brain. The Bank Holiday is finally here. Enjoy summer savers at Centra with great offers like Centra Fresh Air Strip Loin State 2-pack only 8-0 offer ends Sunday. Selected Pringles 165-gram, 175 each, plus Diet Coke and Coke 0-12-gram packs, only 6-0 each, plus deposit.
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Most people don't like ads. We install ad blockers on our browsers and pay for streaming services so we can skip the commercials. But despite our valiant efforts, companies have discovered remarkably effective ways to capture our attention, especially when we don't realize it. The button to skip YouTube ads sometimes vanishes.
That athlete with a million followers on Instagram starts posting discount codes for whey protein powder. We can lose our freedom and become entrapped really by doing what we think are voluntary choices. We've explored how advertisements influence our minds. In the next segment of our show, we explore how celebrities, entrepreneurs, and media companies hijack our attention in order to present us with ads.
We begin with a story from the early 1800s when the newspaper business in New York City was bleak. The New York Times wasn't around yet, but there were a handful of other papers, the Journal of Commerce, the Morning Courier and New York Inquirer. They typically charged six 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.
Six 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, Extra, extra, read all about it. The New York Sun ran a front page story titled Free Astronomical Discovery's Lake. LeMade. Readers learned that an astronomer in South Africa had built a telescope that could see minute details on the surface of the moon.
Read all about it. 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 Vespertilio homo.
It looked like a human with bat wings. Here's how the newspaper described the creature. The average four 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. And apparently a ferocious sexual appetite.
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 a 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 newsprint. The New York Sun its profits entirely depended not 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 and make a lot of money out of.
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 ad-passing campaign built around an unfamiliar word, halitosis.
This dreaded condition, the ad claimed, makes you unpopular. Yeah, well, I don't think people thought much about whether they had bad breath or not before the 1910s, 1920s. In that era, new form of advertising was essentially invented which the goal of which was to engineer 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.
Mouthwash being one of them, a toothbrush, a toothpaste being another, people didn't necessarily want them. The key there is that you can take human attention, which you've 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 the 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. And Listerine, to take a specific example, had previously been used for unclear purposes, it had been disinfected, it had been sold as something to clean floors with, but the invention of it as a mouthwash to cure bad breath was a key to its success. The attention merchants of the 1920s discovered that they could not only create new norms, but they could undo old ones.
One of the most effective campaigns was to undermine the taboo against women smoking. It was considered unseemly taboo for a woman to smoke in public, or even to smoke at all, and the back-winded industry, particularly Lucky Strike, took aim at that in two directions. One was to try to brand cigarettes as a symbol of women's independence and co-brand it with the suffragette movement. They invented this phrase, torches of freedom, to further 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 advertisements in the era that picture enormous fat women and say, is this you in five years? Smoke Lucky Strike, so it reached 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 an engineer. For the taste that you like, light up the Lucky Strike. Relax. It's light of time.
Ninety years ago, you might have heard that Lucky Strike jingle through a new medium that was taking America by storm. Radio 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.
And what the New York Sun did in print, Orson Welles did on radio. 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. Hi, Rinseau. I know you'll join the vast army of women who whistle while they watch. And now, the new Soapie Rinseau 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, you know, in some ways it was entirely wild, and that was the speculation that we sort of lost it.
You know, I think there's some support for that review. I mean, if you've ever been at a sports event or a political rally, 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, it 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. You know, there have been larger audiences, but the share of the audience has never been quite as large as on that day. And television, even beyond radio, has shown this incredible capacity to capture the entire nation at one time, watching the same information. You know, in retrospect, it's remarkable.
Think 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, this attention of the nation. Yes, I think that's a very significant development. One that people in the 20s thought, you know, radio advertising is in the home, no one's going to stand for that. The home is a sacred place, a place for family.
You know, it's impossible to imagine, you know, acceptance of commercial banter in the home. Uh-oh, ketchup. Oh! I wish somebody would invent a ketchup bottle at Sportswear, you ain't it.
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...
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 faithfully 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, it's 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 recording 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 out the ad, because basically turning down the volume or switching channels. And it was marketed as serving the individual. In the long term, however, I think most of us experienced this. It didn't quite have those purposes instead of enabling a different kind of behavior, 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 device is 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 merchants. 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.
And 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. But more to the point, football had not been watched on TV by large audiences and no one quite understood to that point just how captivating it was. And it's proven to this day that there's been some weakening, but sports audiences are very loyal.
They're an exceptionally valuable, maybe the most valuable attention harvesting opportunity. And this is another of TV's inventions in the 1950s. And 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 of 50 still has its sway 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 who never do it for anything else. So I think you're right.
As the television networks captured an ever larger share of people's mind space, 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?
This is a 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 ball?
Start 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.
MTV 90s started to think, well, you know, it could be that the era of Michael Jackson's videos are coming to an end or Duran Duran. You know, 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 some of 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 run on the cheap.
You know, they had basically no cost other than the VJs who they paid in parties and, you know, some minimal salary. So they had the idea of getting a bunch of amateurs or regular people together, putting them in a house and then just seeing what happened. in the house was in Soho. 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 cast cutting. You know, the idea that we needed a show on the cheap. The participants in the original Real World were paid $1,400 for the entire set. So, you know, 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 a genius discovery in a way. That's one way of putting it is that, you know, as opposed to shelling out for a big salary, especially for a famous actor, 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. I'm Shankar Pithamton and you're listening to Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Pithamton.
Today we're talking with author Tim Wu about his book The Attention Merchants, the epic scramble 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 the word Sweatshop printed on them. Nike didn't really take to that suggestion.
They rejected it or something called he did as inappropriate slang. He wrote back and pointed out that Sweatshop wasn't slang, that it was in the dictionary. And they just canceled the order and he wrote a final email saying, well, could you please send me a 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.
Describe to me what happened and the tone of events that turned this relatively innocuous private interaction into something that was close to a global phenomenon. Well, Jonah Peretti was, 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 forwarded, got forwarded, got forwarded, got forwarded 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. And that's something we're kind of more familiar with now.
At 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. Now, 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 a knack for finding things that went viral.
Describe to us some of the websites that most of us have visited that are the brainchild of Jonah Parade. Yeah, so Jonah, in some ways, the lots of inventors are present. Something about virality fascinated him. I think he just thought that experience with the shoes was so strange and weird and unexpected.
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 Ariane Huffington, which was designed to use these web techniques to push a more left-leaning form of journalism and it was a tremendous success-transform journalism, not all in good ways, but did. But he even went further and went to a pure distillation of attention with a site named BuzzFeed Laboratories, now known as BuzzFeed, the only goal of which was the pure harvesting of attention by creating viral stories.
And BuzzFeed has obviously transformed web content today as we know it. I remember some time ago, Tim, 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 there were probably hundreds of rubber bands. And the idea was, of course, at some point, the rubber bands would exert enough power on 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 with people was people putting rubber bands on a watermelon. And throughout that process I found myself asking why is it that I just simply am 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 Laboratories, it's an important part of the original name, is they just kept experimenting until they found stuff that for whatever reason just grabbed people and wouldn't let it go.
Watermelons with rubber bands, maybe more obvious ones like cat photos, these 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 for 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 their 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 out of people and reselling it to advertisers. That has been a change with profound consequences.
I think many or most of us are hooked on one or more online products which know more about us than anyone else and frankly are like this incredible supercomputer 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 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 may be a great makes half a million dollars per Instagram post when he promotes a product.
That's 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. There was once a point where famous people, say the Queen of England are famous scientists, they just tried to stay out of public view.
They used to have jobs other than being celebrities, say Einstein was trying to discover things. And their mystery seemed to add to the sense of wonder or fame. That's not our model at all. Celebrities or aspiring celebrities seek to eek 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. You can frankly make a lot of money not only doing your job, but just by being famous. Nothing maybe Paris Hilton gets some credit for the theory of just being famous or being famous for the sake. Famous or being famous is the phrase.
But certainly a celebrity has transformed their times. It isn't just megastars 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 RefundMe29, working in the brand content space. I also have a micro-large following on Instagram with my Instagram handle SueTranWithBriYans. 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's actually through an influencer agency. Influencer marketing agencies have 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 posts.
Some of them are obviously a little bit more staged, but I don't think I could 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 her 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 new type of media environment where, as you suggested, many more people can be famous, not in the 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 are micro or nano famous. When we think of celebrities, we think of people most often in movies and on television.
My name is 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, the plot twists, 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 I'm not paying attention to me. In his mind, he thinks he's won.
And to some degree, it is truer than any of us would like to admit. At some people, there's some genius to it, understanding that the battle for attention is primary to a lot of other battles. The whole country, in this degree of the world, is reacting to his agenda, his presence, everything he does. That's also known as power.
Even if people are resisting you, they're still paying attention to you. And so the mental resources of the entire nation, much of the world, have been devoted to this one finger, Mr. Donald Trump. 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 find yourself, you know, clicking on Facebook and wondering, why did I do that? Or if you ever find yourself 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, a 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. Nonetheless, 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. You sit down and suddenly an hour goes by, maybe two hours, and you don't know what happened. You know, this sort of surrender of control over our lives, the loss of control, that to me speaks deeply to this challenge of freedom and what it means to be eponymous 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 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 in 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 challenge is we face an 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 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 Brain. Yeah, thank you so much. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Ryan Katz, Kristen Wong, Autumn Barnes, Laura Querell, and Andrew Chadwick.
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