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Audio Recording by Written by Kyla Scanlon As read by George Hahn PS Kyla Scanlon is the author of In This Economy How Money Markets Really Work After you buy her book you should subscribe to her newsletter httpswwwprofgallowaycomtheattentioneconomyandyoungpeople Learn more about your ad choices Visit podcastchoicescomadchoices
Economies are defined by scarcity not abundance scarcity value Today information is abundant attention is scarce The scale of the worlds largest companies the wealth of its richest people and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction monetization and custody of attention The most recent example American Eagle added 200 million in market cap overnight not by increasing sales or lowering costs but by hacking the attention economy with a Sydney Sweeney ad calibrated for the culture wars chooseyourownnarrative ecosystem The stock popped another 20 after President Trump praised the ad on his social media platform Sydney Sweeney doesnt have great jeans or genes but great memes
Few people understand attention economy dynamics better than Kyla Scanlon She captured monetized and continues to hold my attention on TikTok Where else Shes a frequent guest on Prof G Markets listen here for Kylas American Eagle take and the author of In This Economy How Money Markets Really Work Kyla coined the term vibecession to explain the disconnect between the strong fundamentals and gloomy outlook of the Biden economy This week I asked her to write about how the attention economy affects young people
The Attention Economy and Young People
by Kyla Scanlon
Were all living through a time of immense change The news cycle is whiplashinducing frameworks are being broken and everything feels unmoored
Last year on the road talking about my book In This Economy I heard one common thread worry A generationshaping worry CEOs are worried about their businesses manufacturers about tariffs and young people about everything from identity to employment to whether the world theyre inheriting even makes sense
Young people today face a triple disruption technological creative destruction through AI and algorithmic systems plus political and economic upheaval through tariffs and increasing fiscal uncertainty While every generation has faced challenges todays young people confront a massive reckoning between technology economic opportunity and personal identity
Across the US young people tell me the same thing Theyre worried about jobs but more important they question whether the concept of a career will even exist in five years Theyre graduating into a Great Uncertainty where traditional pathways to security are disappearing affecting how they think about their entire economic future from employment to homeownership to marriage to having kids
To understand whats happening we need to understand two things the attention economy and the real economy But let me start with a very surreal moment that crystallized everything for me
Trumpcoin The Defining Moment of 2025
Late Friday night on January 17 2025 Donald Trump launched a memecoin By Sunday a mere three days later Trump and his team had generated 60 billion in paper wealth from pure narrative value By Monday Inauguration Day he was both president again and one of the worlds richest individuals entirely through attentionbased speculation The coin officially has nothing to do with any political campaign or office or so they say but its success came precisely because its associated with him
I believe this moment cemented our final step in the transition into the attention economy The president of the United States bypassed every traditional wealthcreation mechanism and generated more money in 36 hours than most companies create in decades All through attention and narrative
Historically value creation followed a clear progression
Capture attention with a quality product Apples iPhone then convert that attention to business improvement reinvestment or share buybacks
Build better products generating real cash flow and compounding value over time This was the Warren Buffett playbook attention as a means to an end with cash flow and tangible assets at its core
Trumpcoin skipped the middle steps entirely
Capture attention
Convert directly into value
Attention is truly all you need Attention became the product the business improvement the way to compound wealth It worked with immense speed because Trump controls political positioning executive power regulatory influence platforms narrative shaping via Truth Social and now token wealth instant value creation through pure narrative
This was the birth of the Attention Singularity where power narrative and wealth merged into one selfreinforcing system Attention became so dense that it warped reality itself Were watching a system where attention directly creates wealth wealth instantly empowers power captures more attention and each cycle gets faster and stronger
Many young people watched this and thought Of course this is how the world works now Of course attention is the ultimate currency Of course the old rules dont apply I have to change everything
Watching this unfold made me question everything I thought I knew about value creation Cue the meme of someone throwing away a copy of the Intelligent Investor But it also made me realize we needed to look at the broader ecosystem that made Trumpcoin possible in the first place because this was the logical conclusion of the system weve built
The New Rules
Four interconnected elements have reshaped our reality
Digital Infrastructure Our mass communication system is privatized and optimized for profit Billionaires own newspapers platforms and the very means of connection Communication has become an addiction because it has to be Thats how the big bucks are made
The Algorithm Trap Weve built our communication infrastructure around engagement metrics rather than knowledge Attention game winners excel at capturing eyeballs Mr Beast Sydney Sweeney Joe Rogan etc but aggregated attention rarely equates to societal progress
Brainrot Shortform video has totally changed how we process information Instead of reading or having deep conversations we absorb fragments and regurgitate talking points Weve drastically lowered our standards for what constitutes being informed
The Generation Gap Among US adults younger than 30 59 use TikTok To succeed in business you must master digital media Many people now work in social media or marketing an extremely valuable skill set but one thats also frying our brains
These four elements reinforce one another forming a digital cage When narrative production becomes more valuable than actual production we risk creating a world where attention harvesting matters more than building things Hence Trumpcoin
But young people arent just passive victims of this system Theyre responding to it and their responses are reshaping politics
The Politics of Disruption
When things are uncertain people retreat to extremes but also vote for new normals Trump won in 2024 partly by capturing young voters who believed traditional professional paths promising stability might cease to exist soon Coupled with increased zerosum thinking institutional distrust and attention economy dynamics young people are trying to find footing in a fundamentally new worldThe conservative shift among young voters is about more than politics When OpenAIs Sam Altman says AI will require the whole structure of society to be up for debate and reconfiguration the entire nature of the self is being questioned
Economic Headwinds
The boomer generation born between 1946 and 1964 had a somewhat clearish wealthbuilding formula broad generalization and a seemingly clearer sense of self
Career progression home appreciation retirement savings supported by mostly predictable returns on education
This shaped their worldview and understanding of success Boomers are the wealthiest generation to have ever lived thanks to affordable housing and strong equity markets
The boomer formula worked for many despite disruptions like the stagflation of the 1970s and the megahigh interest rates of the 1980s But many boomers who benefited from this system have participated in its dismantling through thousands of small decisions prioritizing shortterm gains over systemic stability
Today boomers own 38 of homes nationwide despite comprising just over 20 of the population Millennials havent caught up to boomer life markers and homeownership rates Homeownership rates are even lower for Gen Z than Millennials at the same ages according to a UC Berkeley study Meanwhile 729 of wealth is held by people over 55 Millennials and Gen Z own 71 less wealth than their population representation would predict according to the St Louis Federal Reserve
Young Peoples Response The Barbell Strategy
These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Talebs Barbell Strategy We increasingly have a world split between young people 1 forgoing college to pursue the trades or 2 gambling everything on digital moon shots
Taleb writes that the barbell strategy is a method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude and an excessively aggressive one at the same time Here we see people doing maybe one or the other The barbell economy creates its own culture
Safety seekers Those skipping college debt to pursue trades finding identity in stability amid chaos The toolbelt generation is choosing steady work over uncertain professional paths
Digital gamblers Those embracing the creator economy crypto speculation and AI startup moon shots Finding identity in potential rather than stability
To be clear a middle path still exists and is evolving Im generalizing to make a point Many people are still going down the traditional road and rightly so albeit with more skepticism For some its working especially for those entering healthcare and social services the only sectors adding jobs currently Others are trying to bridge the gap between the past and the present with mixed results
But as my former professor Dr Indudeep Chhachhi says The opposite of rationality isnt irrationality its being normal When the safe path might be eliminated by AI overnight hypergambling becomes emotionally and economically sensible Safety seekers are making calculated bets Digital gamblers are responding to an economy that increasingly rewards exponential outcomes
Two Paths Forward
I see two possible paths both requiring us to acknowledge how the game has changed
Path One Platform Reboot Build platforms optimized for understanding rather than engagement Create digital spaces that strengthen society rather than fragment it Develop algorithms that reward depth and critical thinking instead of emotional manipulation Its a lot Is it possible Im not sure But we certainly have to try something new
Path Two Navigation Teach digital literacy beyond privacy settings to understand attention dynamics Create systems to preserve digital culture independent of any single platform
There are policy choices here around technology regulation wealth transfer mechanisms platform governance But spending this year talking to young people across America has convinced me that the deeper challenge isnt just technical or policydriven Its about something more important our collective capacity to understand one another across the attention economys fault lines
Young people arent broken Theyre adapting to a world thats fundamentally different from the one their parents knew But their parents arent wrong either for feeling like the ground has shifted beneath their feet The attention economy has created new forms of value and new pathways to wealth The old ways of understanding ourselves and one another are straining to keep up
The attention economy isnt going anywhere Its too powerful too integrated into how value gets created now Its a system though and systems can be changed As historian Howard Zinn wrote If we remember those times and places and there are so many where people have behaved magnificently this gives us the energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction And if we do act in however small a way we dont have to wait for some grand utopian future The future is an infinite succession of presents and to live now as we think human beings should live in defiance of all that is bad around us is itself a marvelous victory
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PS Kyla Scanlon is the author of In This Economy How Money Markets Really Work After you buy her book you should subscribe to her newsletter