Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20161106

Merchants you take is on quite a journey in this book. Historical perspective going way back to the early days of newspapers. What inspired you to die in this way and go so far back to track how high potential is getting captured . Guest on one of these people who believes our presence is formed by history. It just came to me, writing this book with a reason for writing this book as i started noticing how much of our life is driven by ad model to reduce to be just the media, newspapers, things like that but google, facebook, all of the internet sites. I think i have this experience which may be other people have that as well where i increase we found i would sit down at my computer and maybe try and write one email and then four hours would go by and im like, call it casino effect. I thought our presence have gotten a strange, this ad model where the ideas to resell your audience to other people as opposed to have been by the product itself. It always seem to be counterintuitive. I started thinking like when this is wer went to this reay start . Who invented this . That led me on a search, and i had kind of thought and maybe was roman times or something but it turned out it started more or less in the early, the 19th century in new york so thats what made me go back to it was like the search for the beginning of the river nile. Worded advertising come from . Thats what i wanted to know. Host why was it being in new york . Guest thats a great question. I think it was a number of factors. You started having cities that were really large and enough population that they could address to a newspaper advertisement and get some results. I think it has also allowed to do obviously with the Printing Press and the spread of our newspapers. Newspapers, advertising supported newspapers more expensive, sixth sense at the time. And becaus it isnt just sort od when real spirit in this country that drove it. These things all added up about the same time to create what we call Public Opinion of mass media advertisingbased media. House of representatives early on in the book you introduce this idea that there are occasional revolts against the advertising culture, the methods that advertisers are using to capture our attention. Times when perhaps they go too far. How many of these revolts would you say there have been, and do you think were close to another one now . Guest i think theres been, depends on how you count at least five or six results. Sometimes they are in individual areas were cities so its hard enough each other but theres really big ones nationwide in the depression, really big ones in the 60s. Depends on how you count the whole begins of the unit whether that was her fault or not, and i think were in one now. Host you see in the 60s. Many of our viewers will remember the 60s. What do you term as the advertising revolt that happened in . Guest i would put in Timothy Learys phrase, to name, turn on daschle and point to forget his link go. There was a sense in the 60s, which many of our listeners or viewers may remember, that advertising was the devil. Commercialism had ruined a television, ruined radio. It was time to get away from the big corporate speakers and spend more time with family, sitting in circles with guitars and with each other. The basic tenets of hippie dumb made a big turning away. Some people were history. Timothy leary, i spoke about him at the beginning. Advertising has never been that tough, it hasnt always been there. It was invented and one of the reasons is it is an industry that is harvesting your own mind, your own attention it is by nature always intrusive, always a little distracting, always trying to do something you wouldnt necessarily want to do otherwise. If you were going to buy something otherwise, you wouldnt need advertising. It is always at the edge and it does provoke these results but as an early example in france, very interesting, we now think of the poster as not a big deal to have a poster but in france, we said we had enough of these posters everywhere, there are too many and because people said these are ugly, they should be banned. France has a very expensive regulation still in place, not france, paris still in place, extensive regulations of where posters can be in the city. Which may be one reason when you go to paris it still is a very beautiful place. Its severely limited in where you can advertise so you start with newspapers in the 19th century and then radio. And at first, people think radio, not going to be a great medium for advertising. But they were wrong yes. Amos and andy. Yes. What happened there . People but theres no way radio as you said can be an advertising medium. First of all, it is too precious in Scientific Achievement for us to waste on advertising, no one will ever listen to it. People also thought based on the failure of ad supported theaters, there was a period in the 1910s where a chain of theaters try this idea that the movie would be free but you would watch ads during the break at the beginning and thats how they pay for it, those male. They saidthis is not going to make any money either. But radio , i guess 89 years or something was more or less commercial free but noncommercial. The very first big hit that radio put together was the amos and andy show which originally was a chicago show but eventually came to nbc. The idea of the show was the two white guys taking in what they considered to be negro accents, one of them had grown up in the south area and they had this ongoing plot, 15 minutes every day at 7 pm so that would be to black men who were new to harlem that you know, exploring life and they were kind of rough stereotypes nowadays but for whatever reason, amos and andy caught on like nothing ever before and became the first must listen radio. In some ways they invented prime time by themselves. Everybody, even schedules were rearranged. People started playing the show in the Movie Theater before the movie because they said people would go to the Movie Theater. Based on the idea that these guys were hilarious, established this ritual of prime time which now is such a thing in our lives for the past century. Is that the time, the same time of day we now think of as being Primetime Television . Is not the same but after dinner, 7 00 i guess and slightly earlier. But i think more it was this ritualistic coaxing us into this idea that your evening would be spent with the radio , and later the television. That idea went a lot further in the 1950s when television actually appeared and you had i love lucy shows, insulin shows and you had a big show every evening butamos and andy which at thetime , the ratings were weird. It had 40 to 50 Million Viewers every single day. They had really established something and its amazing, imagine one show with 50 million every day. Thats life after the super bowl or at the time a super bowl every day. It wasincredible. I would have called you out for it saying viewers when you met listeners but you could very well have meant viewers because one of the things researchers noted at the time was that people would stop what they were doing and look at the radio while this was on, on like how they behaved when music was on. Why was that and what did that indicate about the potential of radio to capture attention . This is a great point. With amos and andy, people were gathered around the radio listening, absolutely wrapped. It was able to outcompete dinner conversation or even people playing music at home. Before that radio had been a background thing, music in the background, jazz or Classical Music playing. This was Something Different. And this suggestion that nbc and later cvs said, we have the audience in their home listening and utterly opening the portal of judgment to you. This is a perfect way to reach your customers. And in fact it was. The key word there was in their home. Right. So before amos and andy, before radio, the idea of advertising with people so blatantly within their home was something that just came in, seemed to occur to a lot of people that no ones going to tolerate that. But this is different, inside and outside private and public, but no, somehow unbidden or kind of been but somehow brought in voluntarily and thats how it always must have happened, even in our time, advertisers had penetrated the inner sanctum which basically was the idea that black people are funny. Later on, after they did amos and andy, since his successor which was interesting was the goldbergs which was a show premised on the idea that jewish people are funny. And another comedy so then there was an irish show. The early capture of attention in the United States with the protestant majority was based on the idea that iron the irish, black or jewish people were funny. Thats how the west was one or the home was conquered. Host clearly weve moved far beyond those ideas of whats funny, perhaps area hit the rewind button for me. Tim wu, tell me what was your First Experience that you recall with mass media . What captured your attention as a kid . Guest that is a great question. The other day i was sitting there and irealized somehow i had memorized every single one of the sugar cereal. I was lucky charms, magically delicious. The honeycomb kid. Snap crackle pop,. Host i was fascinated as a child, thisthing with Marshall Mcluhan was that when you watch tv, you realize theres much more effort to the advertisement than there is in the programs and as a child, i had a particularly , for somereason that that and , thats it, which was popular at the time, threes company, i guess that was a little more of an adolescent thing. Host after school, right. Whatever it was, i would watch it. And it was interesting because today, we are talking about revolt. I would do anything i could to avoid advertising. But when i was a kid and a lot of audiences have the same feeling, we sit through the advertisements and that was the way it was. In the 1950s, during my Research People would talk about how they watched television and they would turn off all the lights, not everybody but many people, turn off the lights and patiently sit there, all the ads and consume it absolutely. This was before remote control. Every day, if theres an ad i turn it off. So it was a difference that i think has led to our current lifestyle. Host so you remember the jingles. I assume you are probably watching some cartoons in there somewhere to because thats where they would put the commercials. How did your parents respond to the demands that came as a result of the washing of commercials . My mother, she held for in sugar cereal and i remember being intensely disappointed. I also remember, as a youngster there was this character, like a red bird like character known as woody woodstock that all the other kids were talking about. I had no idea who it was. I told my mother i would basically be illiterate that everyone knew this red woody woodpecker. We didnt have cable. We were broadcast people. And so all the good cartoons were on, there was no question. So yes, i basically fell for whatever it was, what passed for childrens programming at the time which was you know, cartoons and sugar cereal. I also did watch sesame street. I love sesame street, which itself itself had marks of advertising. I remember the letter a and the number five or something. But we had the idea of using advertising content to get children interested in learning to read and that worked. At least to my memory, it was in fact better than the other shows. But that was my childhood. I was raised on that just like everyone else. The last thing about that is i didnt realize this at the time but there were shows like thetransformers, i dont know if you remember the robots , and i didnt think of them at the time is advertising. But if you look at any minute, you say of course they are advertising for the toys. Course people by the toys and the fact that we are watching advertisers , of course with mdd, which was the video, one day it dawned on me that those videos were actually trying to get you to buy the album. So i guess it was just a study in advertising, maybe thats why i wrote the book. Theres this idea that advertising to children, this idea is still around thats fundamentally different from advertising adults. Theres certain lines that are not supposed to be crossed. There are certain rules about the sort of images and the sesame street mention brings that the mind because it was this idea that wasprotected speech , kind of like the home was a protected space before radio got mature. Is that still the case with children . Are there new rules of the road whats happening there . I think things have gotten better than they used to be in the 1980s. This continually goes up and down, it depends on the administration speaking legally. I think there is a broad sense among scientists and pediatricians that not only are children more susceptible to advertising but its that green time is not necessarily good for children. I think it was the last couple of days the American Association of pediatricians say let your children to no more than one hour a day of television and by that, myself and other children were completely having our minds blown already so its amazing we could function anymore but i think children are genuinely understood to be more credulous. Certainly if you absorb a brand of the child, this is one of the reasons in particular its always been a brand particularly for children is because Brand Association from a young age, im not a neuroscientist, straightforward logic tells you that buying a giant cadillac, bmw, once you have that in their head as something of quality or value, my daughter is three recognizes delta airlines, she recognizes all these logos, she uses the word facetime so i think this is always been a concern. The extent to which is regulated or overseen depends on the administration. I think things were in the 50s, the 80s were an alltime low in terms of, it was sort of everything goes and i think more attention is being paid to how much advertising is going on today. On the other hand, i could go on, there has been an increase in the last decade of advertising tools. And maybe thats something you want to talk about is that because there has been such increased public funding, some Public Schools in poor areas have become so desperate they started selling out the inside of school for advertising purposes you cansee pictures of schools in minnesota , some in california where the very halls, the lockers are totally covered in ads. You walk through the school and its a constant advertisingexperience. Host how long does that work . I dont think they make much money. These schools make millions of dollars, how well does it work . The companies are happy with it. The advertising seems happy with it. How well does it work for schools . I dont think they make that much money. They dont make millions and they are getting hundreds of thousands advertising revenue , maybe at the margins so it goes back to this idea of there being certain spaces that were once sort of inviolate or sacred. I think they are being increasingly commercializedon the ends. One of the things i read about , that i did research for the book was another space of advertisement is churches. There are, not all the time but there are efforts certainly by hollywood filmmakers to try to put product placements there so for example the man of steel, that superman movie, they have a lot of screenings for passengers, they had this sermon provided, jesus was the first superhero. Sometimes they had contests, mailing that you use for name of the movie and your sermon and withdraw for money or something. There was an effort to get the church audience in. What im saying is a lot of sacred things are being challenged in our time. Host right and its interesting you mention in the book that some of the early language around advertising and the idea of capturing attention was something that churches really used. Its interesting to that theres this move with and even religious organizations in some cases to adopt the same sorts of attention grabbing methods that have now been pioneered in the broader society. If you want to talk about history , advertising history, many of the modern attentiongetting techniques around religion and the work propaganda itself was invented, i believe the jesuits and it was the sense of propagating the faith, part of the calendar of reformation though when we talk wrongly about the game trying to fight for attention, trying to make audiences on a regular basis pay some attention to a message, certainly organized religion got there before. One of the themes of my book and i think the theme for the last 200 years is the sense that our consciousness or our mind space about it was something that organized religion was the most, for most of Human History and the last 200 years or so, government propaganda. And then commerce or industry through advertising got in on the game. And so another way of describing what im trying to say in this book is a longterm, lets say, context or competition between organized religion and government and industry, all of whom want to get all our time, attention or consciousness and the bottom line is that churches and other religions have been losing. That one of the reasons they are adopting these techniques, modern advertising techniques, is they have to compete. They cant expect people to show up just because they feel bound to. They are intense competition with sunday football, for one example. Theres a lot of stuff on the weekend and they are in a desperate competition. Thats the one reason church has become, heres whats in it for you. Come to church and feel good, you will feel prosperous. Im not an expert on religion but my sense is that the older i get, you come to church or you are in a faith or have eternal damnation, its more the temporary idea that if you come to church , its basically to relax, so you can maybe become rich for prosperity. Heres whats in it for you. And. Host have you found a similar trajectory to how you talk about advertising developing from your what ails you and save you from death to you know, help you deliver better life. But i want to turn to, you mentioned government and you bring up in the book that government was an early innovator in marketing and capturing attention. The uk in particular, britain versus germany. It was able to capture mass attention and get people to do something that had not been done before on a massive scale. What exactly was that achieving and how did it come about . That achievement is otherwise described as world war i propaganda. Which Great Britain was the inventor of masks, systemized propaganda and the master of it in the first world war. Britain had this particular problem because of they invested so deeply in propaganda. Unlike other countries, they didnt use descriptions read at least the first in world war i so there it is, august 1914, Great Britain has declared war on the german empire. Had an army, depends on how you estimated, 100,000 or a couple hundred thousand, the German Imperial army was 4 million people, then overruns i dont know how many countries already so heres britain with no arm. Britain is ready to overthrow them anyway and they need to do something so they come up with the first systematic mass Improvement Campaign through posters, leaflets, marches and other tactics with all the resources of government. Its incredibly successful. You are asking people to volunteer for an arm. Within a short time, it became fairly clear that you had a pretty good chance of being killed or dismembered or permanently injured if you went to the front. On the left, they manage to recruit almost within months million people. Ultimately, i cant remember the statistics but Something Like a quarter or half of the british population, the british male population was in the armed forces during world war i so the industry, part of this book is theres a conversation between religion, industry and government. So industry, before world war i was typical of advertising. You see it as something used to sell medicine, kind of lowgrade products, brushes, kind of like that. Host patent medicine, snake oil. Guest but literal, actual snake oil. There was more than one type, there were competing snake oils. Snake oil, longevity potions, that was the extent of advertising. Essentially, as of one kind or another. So it was something no respectable company was going to invest in but when britain and the United States hold on with their advertising, then it was so incredibly successful that industry took notice and said you know what . This stuff seems to work and on top of that, its been legitimized by the government and using it so the real birth of advertising is in the 1920s with the birth of the baby had agencies, the growth of madison avenue and other places as the center of an industry which is dedicated to the Systematic Development of advertisements over and over that will keep you buying stuff. Thats how that works is it a coincidence that my 20s are the age of the rise of mainstream advertising and also womens suffrage . Thats an interesting question. I dont know completely its a coincidence but we do know that the advertisers in this. Decide that the real key to the success of their enterprise is the woman consumer. The lady buyer, as they call them. And there is an effort to target, before the 20s and 1910s, women are, advertising is just general. In the 1920s theres a very focused effort, the first targeted advertisements which im sure were designed to make women into consumers and have them buy so whether or not, how that plays with women is hard to say. A lot of the woman were advertisers were former suffragists. Lady waiters, they call themselves and in particular, some of the departments, there was advertising departments that were just for women only. Mainly order suffragists and they emphasize the themes of individual, self actualization which of course meant making decisions so for example, this cleaning solution will liberate you from drudgery. The idea that, im trying to remember some of the other copy but some of it. Host of soap that will make you desirable toyour husband. Guest talking about some of the advertisements were, freedom from the enslavement of having to cook for your husband every day, heres this instant food read Something Like that. These are the womens liberation that they are advertising. Theres also a lot of advertising women which you wouldnt call feminist in its style, a lot of shame advertising. I was looking yesterday at the old listerine advertisement which had the headline, often a bridesmaid, never a bride. The idea was that bad breath would make no one want to marry and you dont know it and you cant figure out why you cant keep being passed over by men but ultimately its because you have halitosis, a new word invented in the 20s which made people undesirable so therefore with listerine, which previously had been i think a floor cleaning substance in the battlefield disinfectant, the brown stuff but they repurposed it to a way of getting people married, basically so there was this whole movement and one of the most extreme, i can talk about here is the cigarette smoking women as part of womens liberation. Host thats an interesting thread that you have there in the book, the idea that women couldnt smoke in public and so there was a campaign embarked upon to more than double the cigarettes by making it socially acceptable. How did that come about . Guest for women to smoke in public , women were smoking at a restaurant for example. And so like lucky strikes in particular, they had the idea that if they could just get women to smoke whenever they wanted that they could increase their market share dramatically and this was the age when as i said, targeting women was all the rage area course, targeted marketing so they did various things to break this habit and one of them were well known, one of their efforts is they staged a fake protest. Lucky strikes stage secretly a protest during the easter parade. Host a real protest guest a real protest but it was put on by lucky strikes where they paid people to protest. People marching in the parade with cigarettes which they called torches of freedom. And when they asked women why they were doing this they said, we are addressing our freedoms. This was a form of liberation. So the cigarette industry was not above using fake protests. This was a forerunner of astroturf which we talk about here i am in washington, we have some cause here that this was one of the first. Host the so television and the internet dramatically raised the stakes in the attention economy. Looking at today, looking at even this proposed acquisition of time warner by a tnt, how does that fit into your thesis and to this idea that capturing attention and monetizing it, turning it into dollars is a business of the time . So you know, theres a tnt, obviously its an incredibly wealthy company. It has more revenue than many other companies combined but it, too, has come to think that maybe the real resource here that matters is your hold on attention. That is, this raw time , raw hours spent sitting in front. Thats what theyve seen as the only route forward for them to make more money. And thats Something Like 85 billion for time warners property, it gives them a sense of just how important this is. I think its odd just how far this model has gone. A historic perspective. We started this conversation talking about the pending press, the tabloid newspapers in new york in the 1830s selling for a penny area tiny sector of the economy. Nobody really cared about it necessarily and then you have a spread through this Business Model, the attention merchant is in a small. It spreads, first to radio and then to television and now we are watching every night and the last 15 years, it comes dramatically to the internet so now its every activity, not every but so many of our activities are going to see what your friends are up to on facebook. Even emailing, google maps. All these things we do from the daytoday are supported by a model and thats kind of weird. I think 40 years ago, its all advertising base . Whats going on. One of the reasons i wrote this book was theres this idea that how much of this can this reallysupport . Everything in the economy is riding on this advertising model but theresno question in my mind , particularly when Everything Else in our world , our economy is more abundant, we have more food, we had shelter, we have clothing so the old things are scarce anymore. The one thing that is scarcest time and attention. The one thing no one has enough of and the one thing you can expand his time and attention. So i think the kind of contest to control the 168 hours, we each have 168 hours a week is becoming more intense. Host your previous book, the master switch is about the idea and forgive me where i get this wrong, that previous modes of communication have eventually been dominated by one or two big players and kind of at a detriment perhaps to the society as a whole and the internet good perhaps head down that similar path. Interesting that a tnt which was one of those companies in a previous era is now making moves to cut a better position itself in the internet age but you wrote that book before the real rise of facebook. What do you think are the chances that the internet will be dominated by your thesis in masters warns is a possibility . Guest when i wrote master switch, a lot of that i wrote years ago and at that point the internet was understood by everyone to be so incredibly competitive, there was no chance that one company main dominant for any length of time. People said google is here but they are going to be gone in a year or two, theres no way they will hold on. Facebook had just gotten started, they were a flashing pan, there was no Holding Power to them, they were going to be gone but my book had suggested these patterns, long cycles and you know, ill briefly describe it. You have a newinvention. Theres sort of a wild west. , a wild west era where everyones trying to fit this model, see what works and each buys a lot and that consolidation to either and all of our pulley or a monopoly, like a tnt players. Like the telephone industry once had 1000 Different Companies and now it has for depending on how you are counting. And for a long time, there was just one. So that cycle which everyone thought the internet was immune to has clearly i think, to the internet. When you look at it now, it is a handful of companies. Google, facebook, apple when they are being an internet company, microsoft and then amazon and the list starts to trail off and we were talking about the companies, it really is google and facebook for the big players so that consolidation, everyone thought would never happen has happened. And it obviously has implications for our future. And. Host isnt necessarily bad . Guest i dont think its necessarily bad, we just need to be aware of it and not pretend. One thing we shouldnt pretend is that old, this will ultimately be solved by competition, we dont have to worry. Someone new will come along. At t lasted in monopoly form for 70 years. I think what i need from master switch to facebook is that monopolies themselves are problematic because they go through a series of lifestages. They often write when they achieve their monopoly or their power are in kind of a golden era. They have idealistic founders they had product. Mainly they got there for a reason. And as google became what it is not because of good advertising, even have advertising. It got there because it had a great product. They spoke , its harder to say how they got there but people like it, it hit on something. I was asking about this because your book expounds a very cynical note on facebook. Pointing out the idea that they are really not giving the world anything but its own relationships, sort of reprocessed and rehashed. The basic you know, quid pro quo weve always had looks like this. You watch i love lucy, you watch the ad and you trade something for something. You get the ads but you you, you have to watch the ads but you get a good content. How many ads can they put there . But they got to pay their salaries so there you go facebook is like , what are you getting exactly . Youre getting stuff you like, pictures of your friends kids but thats your friends kids, theyre not facebook so its this weird thing where they sell your own life back to you. And. Is it any different than the telephone . Guest the telephone, before there was a telephone you couldnt talk 100 miles away. Host before there was facebook, you can immediately sell pictures. Guest there was a thing called the email i guess. I meant they organized people a little bit. All right, how do you find that. It doesnt fully commute to me like this service. Its the telephone and maybe, i dont know. I like seeing my friends kids, i just find it a little weird. We didnt really think through it cause we also gave up all our personal information. Its like, i knew when i signed up for facebook it was like, who is your favorite band . This and that. We were more nacve than and thought i will tell them more and everything will be better and didnt have the idea that i was holding all the giant Marketing Survey at times. I was as nacve as everyone else but to get back to the message a little bit, we have had a big consolidation and as i said, they go through life cycles. The real danger i think is that if companies are powerful enough, that they can set off our competitors and therefore stagnate the economy. So that sounds absurd for google or facebook but at t was this incredibly dynamic Young Company in the 20s and by the 50s it had shut down all its competitors, shut down innovation so this is master switch territory, not attention merchants but if you let a giant company have too much control over a part of the economy, it tends to be bad for the countryoverall. Im a very strong believer in that. Host thats the thing with the unifying idea is that if you let Big Companies have too much control, too much influence through the people being aware of exactly what they are doing, why it could be bad for society, that that to me, correct me if im wrong is the threat running through both of these books because it seems like increasingly where you go in the attention merchants is this idea that the facebooks, the googles of the world are capturing our attention in subtle ways at first but person pervasive ways that we are not thinking about. We are not conscious of the bargain. Guest im concerned about the future where we live in a state of all being constantly manipulated in subtle ways. It reminds me a little bit of casino again. I dont know if you spent time in a casino and it can be fun but there are all these subtle efforts to make you lose control of yourself and stay there for hours. I dont know if i feel like, i dont like my everyday life to be like that. I dont think our homes should be set up like that where we are just in subtle ways always being a little bit manipulated. If you read a newspaper you are a little bit manipulated but thats not what im concerned about is that these Business Models and when we look forward to the future life the internet of everything and self driving cars and increasingly sophisticated wearable technology, is the fact that were going to create an environment where these devices and everything around us are kind of trying to remove us from certain directions, maybe commercial, maybe political without us knowing whats going on and what does that mean about the country where we are meant to be free . Thats what im concerned about. Host you got our attention now. Ideally, what do we do about it . Guest i think its really important to do your own attention accounting and figure out how you defend your time and to some degree, take control of it and decide distinctly this is i want to spend my time. People do this all the time. They decided they will have dinner with their families or something and they will have that time they can spend for the weekend, you spend your weekend with other people or with friends. I think being aware of how you are spending this incredibly valuable resource is kind of a theft. I also, this is going to make me sound oldfashioned but i think we often make these lines by ourselves. In the older days, maybe religion would make people take a day off of work and have them go to church or things like that for tradition and now its, because of the lack of power of organized religion and things like that, we have to kind of do this for ourselves and say im going to decide whats going to be in some sense a sacred space or a space of offlimits, what is going to be the rest of my life . Im not saying people shouldnt watch tv or play on your phone or whatever because that is life area if it happens all your life, it can impose a serious risk. The last thing i will say is that we need to think about advertising in our revolt against advertising. I believe we are in some ways in revolt against advertising can be a little smart about it. We are in a situation where lots of people are doing everything they can to get away from that. Ads are annoying. On the other hand, that makes advertising more desperate to get us and so we earn this terrible equilibrium where we are constantly, and i dont know what the new deal is but i think we need to somehow create as a society a better deal with advertisers but at the same time, number two, also support content if you really believe you dont want advertising, suck it up and pay for more content. Go ahead. Host so netflix. Guest netflix is themost successful easy example. But subscribe to newspapers believe in. All those annoying options, just basically paying for stuff is really important. Sports broadcasting, whatever it is. If you wanted to be more and more added free, you have to patronize the ad freemodel. We have a bad habit. Host do you intentionally stop short of recommending any kind of legal or regulatory action here . Because the problem you present, you present on kind of a global scale on a pervasive multibilliondollar corporate conspiracy that sucks the life out of us. On an individual basis, spend a little less time on your phone we seem like a scalable solution to such a big problem. Is the reason you stop short of saying what needs to be either utilize or read the definition of power in this era where people peoples data, peoples attention has become such a commodity . Its a great question and a challenging question. I think it comes maybe from experience with government and really wondering if this problem which is subtle and very moment to moment is something that is easy to regulate in a way that is not dangerous or counterproductive so thats the challenge in this area. Writing this book, ive also watched people be involved in a bunch of governments involved in the world and it is mainly in the form of propaganda. So i think its a very challenging thing, especially for say a federal government to step in and say we are going to do regulating on how the market of these companies work. Theres a couple things that can and should do. Truth in advertising, banning fraudulent advertising which is supposed to be done already, that kind of thing but to say we dont want to do much more than our city is hard in a free society. I do support more than these largescalesolutions locally. Bands on billboards, bands on flashing signs but i am not, i was a little disappointed, this particular case i think its a problem of our own consciousness that its very challenging to solve through federal legislation, i will put it that way. Even because its such a micro, moment to moment came that i cant imagine, and when i think about congress, how is that going to work . Or even wellintentioned agencies. There are exceptions, like kids for example, these ads for kids and trying to limit kids programmings make a lot of sense but more broadly, especially in a free society, it gets very sticky very quickly. It was okayed though in the earlier era to ban certain kinds of misleading advertisements and, im not sure if you feel it was fine to have limits on advertising for things like cigarettes and alcohol in certain cases. These are rules that evolved over time. Is there no need for any type of different thinking around the way information is collected . Guest ill take that. First of all, you are right. First of all there was for some point in the century we realized we had to ban advertisements that are flat out lies. Truth in advertising, you think it will make you lose 30 pounds and actually it makes you sick. For the period, this was offcolor but there was a period when there was an implementation of gonads into men to make them more sexually virulent in the 1920s so that kind of stuff. You want to make money appealing to mens sense of a fading libido, anyway, this is a bit of an aside but there are certain categories. I. Host i see lots of those commercials now, the little blue pill. We definitely have not given up on that, we havent given up on magic potions at all. Every day theres some new wonder thing which is going to cure all your things. That line should be, where would i be given Carte Blanche . I think in terms of regulatory areas, i think it is important to think about the ads that are just going for me with nothing in return. I dont know if youve ever been to the back of the taxi cab and ill start blowing ads that you and theres no way to get out, you are a captive audience. How is this in a way stealing from us . Its your mind, your time. I would be very situational in certain environments like need to be more peaceful. And i actually, one reason in the book i held back a little bit is i didnt want to try to cram into one chapter at the end, like, heres all the solutions to all the problems because then people get distracted by that. I wanted to say here is our problem. We have a problem with our attention being taken from us and we really need to think about this in this kind of way, as a kind of stealing almost before we get to what can work as a solution because i didnt really think i had the answer area its very hard to do that in the last chapter of the book and thats one of the reasons i held back. Host and one thing that i wondered about though when it comes to the collection of information and the tracking of individuals across areas, sites and services is why isnt it possible for consumers to see the dossier on them . Is my email address is being used by facebook and amazon to retarded ads when im on amazon, facebook and being used by others to track across, why dont i have access to a master math to be able to see that . And then make the decision that do i like this and if i dont like it, shut certain doors and stop Certain Services from following me so easily . Guest you can stop them right now, the problem is most people dont bother. Theres these do not track features built into the browser. Any viewer can do this and probably should. One of the things that because theres no regulation area or limited regulation, our browsers like the brave browsers, they panel ads and renegotiate what types of ads are allowed. On this tracking, we should never forget that this is our country. We, our citizens are sovereign. If we dont like something we should be able to ban it. Who really loves being tracked . Who loves going to a website and having all the information collected from you and sent over to a mothership somewhere to be processed . If we dont like it, we should ban it. Im not calling for it now that we have the right as citizens to say that some of these practices are just so intrusive, we know supposedly they will bring us better ads but the better at delivering bytracking, they know everything. Theres a good example in the uk, this poor fellow has liver cancer and all of a sudden he starts hearing all these ads for Funeral Homes because they figured out youre going to die soon. Though obviously thats a different era but nobody loves these trackpads and i would never see that we the citizens of the country or city or the state shouldnt have the right to say dont like us, stop that. Host what do you think the odds are that we are indeed in one of those moments where you close the book with the anecdote about apple introducing ad blocking . In the latest version of the operating system with the uproar that caused, perhaps a version of go. Is that the early sign available westmark. We could be in the beginning stages of a revolt thats fundamentally tapered to the Business Model of media forever. Its hard to say right now but it is possible that 20 years from now we will be like, remember advertising . I think its lasted for 120 years but died off, people work into it. Or people had all the information they need. One thing you have to realize is that 100 years ago people didnt know what toothpaste is. I know what budweiser is, i dont need to see another ad, i know what it tastes like. It could be that advertising becomes something that retreats to a very limited kind of product, maybe new movies you need to hear about but otherwise starts to fade away. It is possible that it just declines, especially for major media. We are not there yet, its very early but it could be the early stages of something that in retrospect seems so obvious, that this Business Model, this 20th century, like a lot of 20 century things, processed food, tanningsalons, they seemed like a good idea at the time but now we do things differently. Host a major realigning in a lot of different businesses, not police in which these googles and facebooks, they still have power to influence society and its not going to be a hindrance you think for that to happen . Guest Television Advertising was still the main revenue model although half of Television Services have become nonadvertising which is interesting. It would be a really interesting, i sell upon us to see what would happen if facebook and google switched to the same model and if people would say, 12 a year for facebook. If people would say i would probably pay for google i think the dollar or whatever. And if they wean themselves off that diet, would that ultimately lead to a completely different place for how the economy goes forward . Im not sure. Its hard to get people to part with money. Americans, we like to kind of parting with money in less obvious ways, thats the nature of our culture, we were addicted to free stuff. The other side of this was a free advertising so the natural idea of selling this thing thats so natural that we will never fully get rid of it. Host i cant think of a better note to end on a somewhat hopeful note about what could happen in the future. Tim wu, the book is the attention merchants the epic scramble to get inside our heads. Fascinating read and it should make many of us perhaps at least question the bargain that weve made for some of this supposedly Free Services and free media that we. Guest its been a great pleasure, thanks. C make your watching tv on cspan2 and since the election is tuesday we thought we would do Something Different for this months indepth program. Instead of focusing on one author we are now live with three offer authors and president ial historians and for the next three hours its your opportunity to talk to Kate Albertson brouwer about president s, first lady, elections and the white house. Bill, every four years we are told this is the most important election in our lifetime. Is that true . Every time its ever been held, yes. Why is that true . Its a change with a new figure in the white house, a new figure of state