118: Attention is All You Need: The World After Capital

“The amount of human attention in the world is finite. We have 24 hours in the day, some of which we need to spend paying attention to eating, sleeping and meeting our other needs. The attention during the remaining hours of most people in the world is taken up by having to earn an income and by consuming goods and services, leaving relatively little time for attention to be freely allocated. A hard limit on available attention also exists for humanity as a whole—as I argued earlier, we are headed for peak population, at which point we will no longer be increasing the total amount of potentially available attention by adding more people.”

Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, we're covering The World After Capital by Albert Wenger. We'll explore the transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age, the new scarcity of attention, and the potential for widespread societal change. Join us in this futuristic discussion as we ponder how digital technologies are reshaping our world and the future of human civilization.

We cover a wide range of topics including:

• The shift from capital to attention as a scarce resource
• How we're heading into a future that's non-linear
• Why "everyone needs to" is not a practical solution
• The role AI may play in replacing jobs and technological adaptation
• Do we agree with the author's proposed solutions?

And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode.

Links from the Episode:

Mentioned in the Show:

• Duolingo (4:47)
• The New York Times (5:25)
• Codementor (29:47)
• Cursor (29:55)
• Starlink (44:43)
• WWDC24 (45:06)
• Outside the System (53:15)
• Tucker Carlson and Bukele (53:25)
• Zeekr 001 (1:01:12)
• Outside the System: Crypto Confidential episode (1:05:56)
• DeepMind (1:08:25)
• Inflection AI (1:09:13)

Books Mentioned:

• The World After Capital (Adil's Book Notes)
• Homo Deus (0:14) (Book Episode) (Nat’s Book Notes) (Adil's Book Notes)
• Novacene (0:21) (Book Episode)
• The Beginning of Infinity (0:29) (Book Episode) (Nat’s Book Notes)