The Attentional Investor
The Attentional Investor
In this story, we learn the difference between paying attention and investing attention. We also discuss content budgets, which protect us from total entertainment forever.
In the previous story, When Labor and Capital Are Free, we discussed what will happen to the global economy as millions of super genius robots join the workforce. These robots will:
🧠 be smarter than ChatGPT 5
🔎 search the Internet just by thinking
🗣️ speak every human language
🛜 speak every computer language
🩻 know more about healthcare than human doctors
👩⚖️ know more about laws than human lawyers
🍼 follow babysitting instructions better than human babysitters
🚙 drive safer than us
🧱 build houses faster than us
💵 invest money smarter than us
👩🍳 cook like a yacht chef
👀 never sleep, and
🔋 eat electricity
By 2030, the technology in the movies ex machina, Surrogates, and I, Robot will go from science fiction to science fact.
If you haven’t seen these movies lately, watch them again.
The risks are real.
Permanent Vacation
It’s difficult to imagine just how much free time everyone will have in the future as a result of these general intelligence robots. So let’s see what we can learn from the agricultural industry because their transition from human labor to machine labor began more than a century ago.
Back in 1850, 60% of all jobs in America were in agriculture. The average work week was 70+ hours for everyone, including women and children.
Today, only 0.2% of jobs in America are in agriculture despite the fact that they feed 5 times as many people. The average work week has fallen to 38.5 hours, but that only measures the people who want to work. The Labor Force Participation Rate for men has steadily dropped for almost a century.
During this time, prices fell 60-85% as cheap machine labor replaced expensive human labor—which is a process known as Technological Deflation.
General intelligence robots will quickly transform every industry in the global economy just like this. The highest performing 0.2% of people in each industry will produce 5 times the output of everyone working in that industry today, while simultaneously lowering prices by 85%. I’m not making these numbers up—this already happened in agriculture.
Robots are not the only technology creating more free time for us each day. Over the last century, advancements in biotechnology have created decades of more free time for everyone.
Today, our biotechnology is progressing so rapidly that this chart is about to go vertical. By 2050, biotechnologies like DNA Methylation, Senolytic Drugs, and CRISPR Gene Therapy will help us achieve Longevity Escape Velocity. That’s when the average life expectancy at birth increases by one year, every single year. So people in the future may have centuries of free time to spend.
Even the Bible agrees.
Revelation 9: 6 In those days, people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them.
If you want to learn more about “biotechnological immortality”, read The Fountain of Youth in the next chapter.
Total Entertainment Forever
When everyone has general intelligence robots to do all our work for us, what will we do with all those decades, or even centuries, of free time?
Probably more of what we already do today. The average American currently spends 13 hours and 11 minutes consuming digital media every day. And that’s before we have super genius robot butlers to do all our work for us.
Are people in the future just going to watch television all day?
Why not? There will be unlimited AI resources to make never ending episodes of every show you have ever loved. The episodes will continue to get better and better, forever, as the AI watches you watch each episode. 📺
Are people in the future just going to play video games all day?
Why not? Several e-Sports championships already have more viewers than the Super Bowl. The most popular kids streaming their game play on Twitch are millionaires long before the kids who play in the NBA. 🕹️
Are people in the future just going to doom-scroll Instagram and TikTok all day?
Why not? In the future, we all live like rock stars. Everyone will have an entourage of robot drivers, chefs, stylists, trainers, and financial mangers. Even our electric private jets will be flown, managed, and operated by artificial intelligence. So, yeah, we gotta see how e’rybody else is livin’. 🤩
Anyone who doesn’t intentionally limit the amount of content they consume each day is at risk of Entertainment Addiction. This addiction may sound benign, but that’s only because we don’t know that much about it. It’s so new, it doesn’t even have an entry on Wikipedia yet.
Entertainment addiction may actually be worse than drug addiction because it’s so much more accessible. Netflix is cheaper than heroin and video games are cheaper than cocaine. Plus, we give our children access to smartphones years before they hear their first “say no to drugs” speech.
@musicfans: My favorite warning about the dangers of entertainment addiction is a song called, Total Entertainment Forever, by Father John Misty. Tap the CC button to see the lyrics. (3 mins)
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More Warnings From Smart People
Scientists have been warning us about entertainment addiction for decades.
The first big warning came from Herbert Simon, who was a professor of psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon from 1949 to 2001. Simon won a Turing Award for “basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing”. He also won a Nobel Prize in Economics for “his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations”. Herbert Simon is the only person in history to win both awards—the guy’s academic range was prodigious. 🤩
Side note: In 1957, Herbert Simon predicted computer chess would surpass human chess abilities “within ten years”, but that transition actually took about forty. Then in 1965, he predicted, “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” If we assume he was equally too early about his second prediction (25% of actual), then we should see “machines doing any work a man can do” by 2045. 🦾
In 1971, Herbert Simon gave a speech at John Hopkins University called Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, which included the following quote:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
His statement, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”, means Attention Economics has a supply and demand curve just like financial economics.
Each of us has a fixed amount of attention that we can spend each day. That’s our Supply. When robots do all our jobs, we may have twice as much attention to spend each day.
The reason there is a poverty of attention is because the Demand on our supply is multiplying exponentially. For example, ChatGPT adds 4 billion words per day to the Internet, and that number grows every day. Another good example is YouTube:
In 2009, YouTube received 15 hours of new content every minute.
By 2013, YouTube received 100 hours of new content every minute.
Today, YouTube receives 500 hours of new content every minute.
@christians: The Bible predicted this too. In Daniel 10, Daniel gets a visit from an interdimensional extraterrestrial, who tells him very specific details about the end of this world. Here’s what the creature says before he heads back to some kind of supernatural war in the cosmos.
Daniel 12: 4 But you, Daniel, keep these words secret and seal the book until the time of the end. Many will roam about, and knowledge will increase.
The original Hebrew word translated as increase means “to sexually multiply”. So at the time of the end, many people will travel around the world, and knowledge will exponentially multiply. 😳
The next important warning about the dangers of entertainment addiction came from Neil Postman in 1985. Postman was a professor at NYU from 1959 to 2002, where he established a graduate program for Media Ecology to study the effects of media, technology, and communications on human society. He wrote extensively about the subject, including his very prescient book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
@ChatGPT: can you explain the dangers in the book amusing ourselves to death
ChatGPT: In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman argues that television and other forms of visual media are turning serious discourse into entertainment, leading to the trivialization of public discourse and the erosion of critical thinking. Here are some key dangers he highlights:
Decline of Public Discourse: Television prioritizes entertainment over informative, rational discussion. This shift undermines the quality of public discourse on important issues like politics, education, and religion.
Information Overload: The constant barrage of disconnected, context-free information leads to superficial understanding. Viewers are less likely to engage deeply with content, reducing the ability to form coherent, critical viewpoints.
Short Attention Spans: The rapid pace and visual nature of television content contribute to shorter attention spans. People become accustomed to quick, fragmented information rather than sustained, in-depth analysis.
Reduced Critical Thinking: Television's emphasis on imagery over words diminishes the role of critical thinking and reasoned debate. Viewers are more likely to be influenced by emotional appeals and superficial appearances than by logical arguments.
Cultural Shift: The dominance of entertainment in media affects societal values, prioritizing amusement and distraction over meaningful engagement with complex issues. This shift can lead to a more passive, less informed citizenry.
Postman warns that if these trends continue, society risks losing its capacity for rational public discourse and critical thought, essential for a functioning democracy.
Postman gave us the playbook for entertainment addiction forty years ago and we totally ignored him. Not only did we ignore him, social media is making our symptoms much, much worse. For example, attention spans have shortened by an order of magnitude since Postman published his book:
The average duration of a show on network television is 30 mins. That was the shortest video you could watch in 1985.
The average duration of a video on YouTube is 11 mins 47 secs.
The average duration of a video on TikTok is 35 secs. 😵💫
The quality of public discourse has deteriorated even further. Just check the comments section on any social media platform—especially the posts that discuss politics, education, and religion.
Critical thinking is at an all-time low because social media values imagery over words more than other forms of communication. A good example of this is the Meme, which uses emotional appeals and superficial appearances instead of logical arguments to influence viewers. Here is an example posted by Donald Trump Jr.
Amusement and distraction, aka “Netflix and chill”, has led to an American citizenry that is more passive and less informed than ever before. Our country is well on its way to becoming an “Idiocracy”, just like the one in the movie, Idiocracy. This farce, created by Mike Judge in 2006, is another blunt warning about the dangers of entertainment addiction that we totally ignored.
The last warning worth mentioning is the book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, published by Dr. Anna Lembke in 2021.
Dr. Lembke shows how excessive smartphone use and binge-watching television leads to dopamine overflow, which creates viscous cycles of pleasure and pain in our brains—just like drugs and alcohol. She recommends we all practice “self-binding”, which basically means we limit access to entertainment within our environments.
Dr. Lembke also discusses the broader impacts of entertainment addiction on society, including:
mental health issues
decreased productivity
weakened social connections
For example, suicide rates among “tweenage” girls have increased 200% since Instagram was invented.
Will our country survive our addiction to entertainment?
If 13 hours per day of digital media is too much, what’s the right amount?
What other books or movies should we recommend in this story?
If we are losing massive amounts of economic productivity to television, should we progressively tax people based on how much TV they watch?
Get (Attention) Rich or Die Tryin’
Our attention is the most valuable commodity in the world to corporations, yet we throw it away on mindless activities every day. At work, we multitask with music, water cooler conversation, and shopping on the Internet. At home, we evade our own attention with television, video games, food, drugs, porn, and alcohol. Sometimes, all at the same time. 🥴
That all changed for me around 2011. That’s when I made a decision that would transform my life in more ways than I could imagine at the time. I was 34 years old, Chief Technology Officer of a $100M company, and making more money than I ever dreamed. But I also had 5 young children at home that were very precious to me aged 7, 5, 3, 2, and 6 months. There were so many competing demands on my time that it led me to an inescapable question: Is it more important for me to be “time rich” or “money rich”?
So I faced this question like I face everything else in life—with data. Most adults in America only see their parents 1-2 days per month, usually around the holidays. That means they need 25 years of years to make 1 year of days together:
So there are only about 2 years of time to spend with our parents after college. That means 80% of all the quality time we will ever spend with our own kids is before they can drive. And if we break down the decade from when our kids start making memories (aged 5) to the time they can drive, almost 80% of all those “memory making hours” are in the summertime because of school.
Once I realized I only had ten years left to spend most of my life with my kids, I decided to reorganize everything. At the peak of my career, just a few months after winning a CTO of the Year award, I decided to quit my job to become the most “attention rich” person on Earth. I know that’s crazy, but isn’t that why you’re reading this book? I don’t think like other people. I even took my kids out of school for 2 years to create 12 additional summers of time together.
Becoming attention-rich is not that different than becoming money-rich. To protect our precious supply of human attention, we need to hoard it, which is why became an “Attention Scrooge” in every area of my life:
In Person — I don’t go to weddings, birthday parties, or charity galas anymore. I’d rather send money.
Email — In 2011, I decided that every inbound email that needed a decision from me was my own failure to delegate properly. So I hired better operators than me at work. I either re-trained an employee or fired them. The only emails I want to see in my inbox today are docusigns from startup investing or new subscribers for funfreq.com.
Smartphone — In 2013, I “dead bricked” my phone, which means my ringer doesn’t ring and the haptic vibration is disabled because I don’t want my phone telling me when I want to compute. My phone works for me, not the other way around.
Television — I canceled our cable and streaming services for years. Our children grew up in the technological equivalent of 1950. I still don’t watch the news because I can’t solve those problems. Today, I treat television the same way coping alcoholics treat alcohol—I wait until 5pm each day to start mindlessly sipping.
Each day, just before I relinquish the day to entertainment, I ask myself the same question, “If today was my last today, was it a good one?”
I have lived every day as if it were my last day since I was 16-years old. That’s when a high-school bully pressed a loaded gun to my head during an argument. The anticipation of that question each evening is what drives me to attempt difficult challenges each morning. So, ask yourself:
@parents: My wife and I were so diligent about denying television and personal computing devices to our kids when they were young because creativity is on the other side of boredom:
busy people don’t paint
busy people don’t code
busy people don’t play piano
busy people don’t play golf
busy people don’t bake
and devices make kids busy
Ten years later, our children still invest 10-20 hours each week into these hobbies because they love them. Produce or consume, there is no try.
Boredom requires practice, so don’t be so quick to entertain your kids. During the first 100,000 miles of road trips in our family adventure van, our kids only saw one movie, one time. At the end of a very long day of driving, we watched The Goonies on our first trip into Cannon Beach, Oregon. 🏴☠️
Remember how creativity is on the other side of boredom? Well, so is adventure. At low tide, we ride electric skateboards on the hard-packed sand to search for buried treasure in one-eyed Willie’s cave.
Returns on Attention
The only way I can have my best “last today” is if I spend my seconds of attention intentionally. Instead of paying attention to TikTok, Instagram, television, news, porn, and video games—I invest my attention into creative projects, education, friends, and family. The difference between paying attention and investing attention is the Return on Attention you get for your time.
Back in 2011, I only knew I wanted to invest my seconds of attention into my kids, but I didn’t really know where else to invest them. So like any good scientist, I spent 10 years and millions of my own dollars A/B testing every kind of way of living, learning, and retiring in 250 cities in 45 countries. Our family lived in downtown Hong Kong and a remote farm in western Norway. We lived on a catamaran in Greece, an RV in New Zealand, and without a car for months in Europe. We lived in old towns, new towns, suburbs, beaches, and mountains. We tried home schooling, world schooling, unschooling, peer schooling, and public schooling.
@retiredpeople: I have tried most of the popular retirements:
🪑 I built furniture in my woodshop 100+ days a year.
🏌️♂️ I golfed 100+ days a year, multiple years.
🦆 I hunted duck, dove, and quail 30+ days a year.
🏛️ I spent a year touring European capitals and museums. All of them.
🌹 I planted my own garden.
🎿 I lived in Epic Ski Pass towns just to see what 60+ days on the mountain feels like.
🎣 I fished 100+ days in a year, inshore and offshore, all over Florida and the Caribbean. I have tall tales of huge fish and moonlight revelry.
Which of these pastimes is your favorite?
Where are your favorites places to do them?
After all that experimentation, there are four main Returns on Attention that I want from each of my last days on Earth:
Make (3-6 hours)
Learn (2-4 hours)
Play (1-2 hours)
Commune (2-5 hours)
They roughly correlate to the four major eras of our lives: play, learn, work, retire. For example, most children born today are free to play and explore the world until they are about 5 years old. Then we walk them into school one day and demand that they learn 6-8 hours every day. Then one day, we escort them from the school room to the work room and demand they work for 8-10 hours every day. Finally, around 65 years old, we let them retire to hang out with their friends and family. I try to do all four of these things every single day.
I start each morning with work, which I call Make. Work at its best is making something new in the world, even if that means making a new customer. Work at its worst is tasks.
Make is the most mentally taxing of the four returns on my attention, so getting it done first means that I enjoy playing in the afternoon even more. Whenever I play first, I’m often distracted with what I’m going to make later in the day. Like Mark Twain said, “It’s always best to eat a live frog first thing in the morning.” 🐸
My advice for finding your best Make is to work for a company that has a mission statement that you believe in. If you don’t know your company’s mission statement, or they don’t practice and preach their mission statement, then you should find a new employer. For real. When you believe in your company’s purpose for existing and it matches your purpose for existing, work will feel like you are making the world a better place. 🫶
Whatever you Make today should create some artistic, scientific, or economic value for you in the future. If you drive a rideshare, that means getting paid within the next hour (IRS Form 1099-K). If you have a salaried job, that means getting paid within the next two weeks (IRS Form W-2). If you are an expert consultant, that means getting paid within the next few months (IRS Form 1099-MISC). If you are rich, getting paid by mailbox money, that means getting paid within the next few years (IRS Form K1). If you are a founder waiting on your IRS Section 83(b) election to pay off, then you are waiting for a decade.
Learn is next in my day. The easiest ways for me to learn are books on Audible and lectures on YouTube. I don’t allow myself to hear music until the afternoon each day because music is an opportunity cost.
I also Learn things each day that can’t be read in books. I invest heavily in experts, coaches, and guides because they provide the greatest Returns on my Attention. For example, I met with an executive coach every month for 5 years. I’ve hired fishing guides, city guides, and museum guides all around the world because there is more local knowledge not on the Internet, than there is total knowledge on the Internet. 🤔
I have coaches for Rolfing and Chinese medicine. I have a brain coach who hooks my brain up to her computers. I have a Bible coach. I get counsel from:
lawyers who make companies,
lawyers who make patents,
lawyers who make trusts, and
lawyers who make trademarks.
I frequently ask questions to my “textable network” of friends, which includes experts in: photography, medicine, finance, myofascial manipulation, startups, gardening, cryptocurrency, construction, charitable ministries, real estate, golf, quantum computing, music, data brokering, woodworking, education, software design, venture capital, and economics.
As an adult, the most challenging Return on Attention is Play. My goal is to play for one hour each day, but at 45-years-old there’s almost no one my age to play with. I vary my play by season, which currently includes golfing (from the ladies tees), skiing, hiking, paddle boarding, throwing lacrosse with my kids, Mario Kart, and Smash Brothers. Candidly, I’m terrible at the two video games, but my kids love them. If I want them to participate in my sports, then I have to participate in their sports.
When I Play for an hour each day, it prevents me from feeling “burnt out” from work. If we don’t play a little every day, we will get so tired of work that we have to go on vacation to escape our own lives. But after 3 straight days of sitting on the beach, we get so bored that we start checking our work emails. Playing correctly is like sipping a beer versus bonging a beer. Vacation is essentially “bonging play”.
I have tried retiring a few times in my career to Play even more, but I inevitably get this hollow feeling like I don’t have a purpose. Making and learning every day prevent that feeling, which is why I invest my attention in all three activities every day.
The last Return on Attention I want from each day is when I Commune with other people. Most longevity research indicates that we live longer and happier lives when we are connected to the people around us. So our family invests time in:
each other,
families from our neighborhood,
families from our kids’ schools, and
families from our kids’ sports.
When we travel, we chat up locals in parks, coffee shops, gelato shops, and along hiking trails. The likelihood that your day is awesome will dramatically increase if you:
🔥 sit around a fire with other people
🌊 get into water with other people
It doesn’t matter if the water is a swimming pool, lake, river, ocean, creek, or hot tub—if you get into water with other people, your day will be awesome.
@ChatGPT: what words are used the way Americans use awesome in the top 10 oecd countries?
ChatGPT: In the top 10 OECD countries, each with its own distinct language and cultural nuances, there isn't a specific word that directly corresponds to how Americans use “awesome.” However, here are a few words/phrases that are commonly used in those countries to express enthusiasm or approval:
Canada: Amazing or Fantastic
USA: Awesome or Amazing
Japan: Sugoi or Subarashii
Germany: Toll or Super
UK: Brilliant or Fantastic
France: Génial or Formidable
Italy: Fantastico or Incredibile
Australia: Bloody Ripper or Awesome
South Korea: Daebak or Meotjida
Spain: Increíble or Genial
I invested six weeks driving from Port Douglas to Byron Bay in Australia and those people are in the water or by the fire every day. So I guess every day is a bloody ripper for them. If you spend ten years in an adventure van driving to as many ends of the earth as you possibly can, do you know what you will find at the end of every dirt road that ends in a deserted beach?
It’s true.
They will have good beer, good coffee, and know where to find the cheapest taco within 50 kilometers. It works on every continent. I asked my friend from Brisbane about this during lunch one day in Antarctica and she wasn’t surprised. She said, “Stuart, how long did it take you to get to Antarctica?”
I told her it was about 20 hours of flying.
She replied, “That’s how long it takes for us to go anywhere. So once you are that far away from home, why would you stop?”
So I guess what I’m saying with this story is: do more with your friends than just hang out. Put in the work to make sure some of your “last todays” are bloody rippers.
You can see more of our adventures in Travel Advisories.
Your Time Here on Earth
Make. Learn. Play. Commune. If you can’t imagine finding that much time in your busy life each day, you’re wrong. If you are like everyone else in America, you are consuming digital media 13 HOURS and 11 MINUTES every day. That’s too much of your life to give away for free. If you cancel your streaming services you will have more time in your life than you know what to do with.
You have to actually block out space on your calendar to play and learn. Try this experiment:
Go to any day next week on your calendar and choose any open hour.
Make an appointment titled “Nothingness”.
When that hour comes, do whatever you want except for your normal life.
It only costs an hour.
Don’t let television, work, and family be the only things that colonize your calendar. Kids, employees, and bosses will delegate so many of their problems to you that they will consume all your time. Make sure you get some returns on your attention. Budgeting and managing our seconds of attention is the most important work we can do—it defines who we are and who we will become.
We close this story with a quote from one of my favorite movies. Movies have great Returns on Attention because they are the most expensive stories ever told. The quote is from Vengeance, which is a brilliant commentary on just about every facet of current American society: rich vs poor, country vs city, young vs old, republican vs democrat, fake vs authentic, and North vs South. It’s a masterpiece really.
@moviefans: In my opinion, other movie masterpieces include:
The Prestige (and most Christopher Nolan movies)
Ready Player One (and every Steven Spielberg movie)
Avatar (and most James Cameron movies)
1883 (I know this is a TV series, but the writing in this story is so fantastic that it deserves a 10 hour runtime)
Go ahead, judge away. ⚖️
The quote in Vengeance comes from a music producer who is trying to inspire a listless young girl singing in his studio. (3 mins)
He interrupts her and says,
Let’s take a step back. I want to share an idea with you. There is no argument more profound than how the universe came into existence. Are we here because of God or science? I mean it is by its very nature the most fundamental question. But there’s one thing that everyone agrees on. And that is, whether it was God declaring let there be light, or an infinite particle of energy bursting forth in the Big Bang, everyone, and I mean everyone, agrees the universe started with a sound.
He continues,
Why do I even call myself a record producer? Yeah, I mean, we don’t even make records anymore. What we're recording here isn’t your record, it’s your sound…on the record, that started with the very first moment in time. So when you sing this song, I want you to think about how what you’re making is the record of your time here on this Earth. It’s the sound that you scratch, with your life, on the record of the universe. Okay?
Continue reading…
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