Americans and a family’s life and it’s
not really getting married or having
their first child its owning a minivan
so a few years ago we owned our first
minivan and as I was driving my younger
son to his preschool I was taking him
without drinking my morning coffee which
I have been told is a crime in a few
countries and I drove to his preschool
dragging my feet closing my eyes and I
am signing him in I walked him out or I
walked out in myself I left the child
inside I walk out and I got inside the
minivan and I tried to turn it on but
the key wasn’t working so I took it out
I looked at the key again and I tried to
turn it in again and it still wasn’t
working so I looked at my surroundings
and I suddenly realized that the
interior of the vehicle wasn’t the same
one that I came in and when I looked
outside the actual owner of the vehicle
was crossing his hands crossing his arms
with a frown on his face wondering what
the heck I was doing inside his car so I
had to just apologize profusely and try
and convince him that I wasn’t trying to
steal his vehicle and that was the day I
realized the importance of paying
attention now you see I believe that we
are living through an economic crisis
today and it has nothing to do with the
crash of the stock market or the
devaluation of national currencies but
it has everything to do with an economic
crisis of attention you see I believe
that attention is today’s most valuable
currency and you might think that I’m
going a little bit too far by calling
attention a currency but think about it
for a minute the first characteristic of
a currency is that it is in limited
supply once you wake up in the morning
you only have enough attention to spend
on a certain number of things and are a
10
collectively as a society is limited by
the number of members in society and the
number of time that we each of one of us
has attention is also valuable it’s also
a desirable in the marketplace and there
are professions that are built such as
musicians and artists that are built
upon the notion of attracting attention
from others attention is also a a
commodity in the marketplace and there
are industries such as advertising and
public relations that depend on
generating human attention and finally
the last characteristic of a currency is
that attention can be used as payment
for value and in this context I want to
be very clear that I’m talking about
valuable ideas and experiences that can
be quote unquote purchased through the
investment of your attention now one of
the things that I want to just just
impress in your mind is that when you
wake up in the morning you it’s almost
like an attention wallet that you wake
up with you have a certain amount of
attention that you can invest in
different ideas and experiences and in
the best of cases ideas and experiences
that are valuable that help bring us
together that help move us forward and
this is our responsibility to invest
this attention wisely now in fact there
is a cryptocurrency project called the
BA tee or basic attention token that is
seeking to monetize or give it or give
monetary value to our attention and
creating a marketplace between users
advertisers and publishers so that they
may transact with one another with the
attention that primarily the users have
available so this notion of attention as
currency is gaining steam in today’s
fast-moving environment but what we’re
seeing is that the the our attention is
being exploited today
and their exploits that are causing
concern in people like us that are
paying attention to the situation there
are exploits that I’m gonna continue
explaining further but before I do you
might find it ironic that someone like I
who makes their living off of
advertising and advertising being a
commercialization of human attention is
the one standing here and warning you
about miss utilizing attention but I
want to believe that I’m part of a
movement of honest advertisers that is
seeing the problem for what it is and
seeing that some things definitely need
to be changed and needs to be fixed for
example if we look at recent stats we
can find that the average American per
day is watching 270 minutes of
television every single day now even in
an era of Netflix and YouTube and other
forms of video if we take that and by
the way for those mathematically
impaired like I am 270 minutes amounts
to four and a half hours of television
per day so if we count between 13 and 15
minutes per hour of television watched
that amounts to four years in the
average lifespan of a u.s. adult just
watching advertising messages and if you
agree with I that is not correct that’s
something that we need to look at
closely but is this enough to call this
situation of crisis just because there’s
an excess of advertising or the types of
messages well there are two phenomena
that I want to look at very quickly that
I believe are very concerning in today’s
environment and the first one is what I
like to call the spendthrift syndrome
now in personal finance a spendthrift is
a person who cannot have any money in
their pockets or in their hands because
as soon as they have it they spend it
it’s an addiction to spending and if
there’s anybody here in the audience
with that spendthrift syndrome please
don’t raise your hand we don’t want to
expose you
sorry little bit too late but in
personal finance that was that would be
a spendthrift but in the economics of
attention a spendthrift would be a
person that cannot hold their focus for
long they’re quickly distracted and
we’re seeing this phenomenon more and
more particularly in the younger
generations you’ve probably heard the
saying that today our attention is equal
to that of a goldfish and that’s what
some specialists have tried to just give
kind of a metaphor to the problem of
keeping focus and keeping attention and
in fact there are stats that seem to
support this for example the the level
of ADHD which psychologists call
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
the growth of cases in US children is
42% in the last eight years now this is
a concern particularly when nannies have
been replaced by iPads video games and
television screens and YouTube on
autoplay this is a concern and we’re
teaching our kids our kids the personal
finance equivalent of breaking their
piggy bank taking their coins and just
shoving it at anybody who passes by
that’s in the economics of attention
what we’re teaching them but the other
phenomena that I want to look at is the
plummeting quality of signals out there
the plummeting quality of content that
is competing for our attention right
there is a sociological phenomenon
called the Parkinson’s law of triviality
and this just spells out that we tend
our human tendency is to invest the
majority of our time on matters of very
low relevance and on the other hand we
invest very little time on matters that
are critical and they exempt of
exemplify this phenomena in a business
meeting setting where let’s say they
meet for two hours one and a half hours
are gonna be spent discussing the color
of the drapes which brands of coffee
should we buy and who is on vacation and
did you enjoy your holiday yet only
thirty minutes are gonna be spent
talking about the actual critical
matters that were on the
and for that business meeting and if
you’ve ever wondered why some business
meetings are so boring this is a hint to
that effect so it’s it’s irresistible
but one of the things that we want to
talk about is a way of example is the
2016 election period and I know it’s a
painful topic I know we all want to
leave it behind but stick with me for a
second the 2016 election might as well
been renamed 2016 fake news because this
was the keyword that were was heard even
to this day that was passed around again
and again and I want to be very clear
that when I talk about fake news here I
am NOT talking about pointing your
finger at a news entity that goes
against your political ideology and just
calling it fake news in this context I’m
talking about real fake news for example
Mark Zuckerberg this is a site site
called the shovel Mark Zuckerberg dead
at 32 denies Facebook has a problem with
face fake news so he’s dead and he’s
making a declaration from the grave take
that
another example Obama signs bill
forgiving all student loan debt any
students in the audience rejoice
this fake news says that you do not have
to pay and then the last example is one
of my favorites
fake news epic gamut epidemic turns out
to be fake news so fake news says that
there’s no fake news this is awesome
so this does not exist is not a problem
according to fake news sites however a
study by Stanford University says that
during the 2016 election period there
were a brought around 40 million shares
of fake fake news items on social media
40 million shares which led to about
seven hundred and sixty million click
throughs to fake news websites and this
impacted 70 million Americans that’s
about 21 percent of our US population
now I want you to let that settle in for
a little bit our last election period of
2016 election period was decided on
about 80,000 votes sprinkled across
three
in states and yet we have one fifth of
our population of our voting population
being impacted by fake news items that
are captivating their attention but it
only gets worse from here because more
stats show that the fake news items
actually reached a higher level of
engagement and in social media and
digital media we call engagement likes
shares comments etc etc by election day
the fake news items had more engagement
than items that were generated from
entities with journalistic integrity so
not only were the culpable party here
the fake news sites but people like you
and I were responsible for sharing this
information along and making the
situation worse
so in this attention economy we’re
seeing fraud we’re seeing counterfeit
we’re seeing the same situations that
we’ve seen any other type of economy and
this you’ll agree by now that is a
matter of concern now I believe in much
more than just complaining about the
issue I believe in much more than just
pointing our finger about at the problem
and I believe in doing something about
it but what do we do now if we had a
personal finance crisis we would boil it
down we can talk about many many
different tips on how to improve this
situation but we would boil it down to
two actions to look into and these are
the same actions that I want to propose
that we look into in the personal in the
nd crisis of human attention and it’s
simply looking at our income and our
expenses and I’m gonna talk about each
one individually in the context of the
economics of attention but first let’s
talk about expenses and by expenses what
I mean is the collection of ideas and
experiences that we are investing our
daily attention wallet into so what are
we investing what are we spending our
attention on right now I agree that we
have to keep news entities social media
digital media we should keep them
accountable
or containing in some manner the barrage
of fake news and misinformation that is
out there but I also believe that we
need to elevate our standards because
these news entities and and media
entities being for-profit organizations
they are driven by increasing
shareholder value and the way the
increased shareholder value is by
attracting more attention so if we as a
community we tell these entities that
we’ve had enough and that we expect
something higher we expect more pure
information than they’d sooner or later
will have to comply but the other aspect
that I want to look at is our income now
by income in this context what I’m
thinking about is the ideas that we
expose the idea that we share forward
the ideas that we pass along in exchange
for our social circles attention or
whichever circle that we have influence
over so what ideas are we selling
quote-unquote to others so that others
may invest their attention in us now in
this era in which we with a
supercomputer in our pocket which over a
double macchiato we can spend you can
spread ideas around the world in a
matter of seconds we have the power of
being many media entities and think
about the responsibilities that you and
I have in the moment of sharing an idea
so my question to you is
wouldn’t it be hypocritical if we demand
of social media of digital media of news
entities we demand a level of standard
that we as individuals don’t comply with
I think it would be hypocritical and I
think that the same standards that we
applied to them must be applied to us in
such a manner in which we think before
sharing before forwarding that
information we think about it one or two
times you think we could do that
so accountability certain certainly goes
both ways both in the media entities the
people the entities that have reached
wide reach to all huge population but
also we even on an individual one-to-one
basis we can all do better so to wrap
things up really quickly there are just
a few things that I want to say there is
a Japanese proverb an ancient Japanese
proverb that goes ino Nagano kawazu Tai
Chi Yoshida zu and what it means is the
Frog inside the well cannot see the
great ocean and in Spanish we have a
saying that goes
camarón Casa de where may say la joya la
corriente and that means the shrimp that
falls asleep is swept away by the
current and from very disparate cultures
for centuries and centuries it seems
like we have embedded this idea that our
attention and our focus is a matter of
prime importance and my hope is that we
invest our attention wisely so that we
do not get swept by the currents of
misinformation and bad ideas and we can
stand and look at the expansive ocean of
ideas that matter ideas that help bring
us together and help us move forward and
at the very least so that we don’t wind
up in somebody else’s vehicle so today
you’ve invested a little bit of your
attention wallet in my talk and for that reason thank you