Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:02 Megan Rapinoe here.
0:00:08 This week on A Touch More, we are joined by my longtime U.S. Women’s National teammate, Allie Krieger.
0:00:15 We talk about her post-retirement plans, the current generation of soccer players, and of course, her boots.
0:00:23 Sue and I also get into big WNBA trades and share a new workout of the week, one you can do from your own home.
0:00:27 Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
0:00:39 Economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance.
0:00:41 Scarcity equals value.
0:00:44 Today, information is abundant.
0:00:47 Attention is scarce.
0:01:00 The scale of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention.
0:01:02 The most recent example.
0:01:20 American Eagle added $200 million in market cap overnight, not by increasing sales or lowering costs, but by hacking the attention economy with a Sidney Sweeney ad calibrated for the culture war’s choose-your-own-narrative ecosystem.
0:01:22 Sidney Sweeney has very keen.
0:01:30 The stock popped another 20% after President Trump praised the ad on his social media platform.
0:01:36 Sidney Sweeney doesn’t have great genes, or genes, but great memes.
0:01:42 Few people understand attention economy dynamics better than Kyla Scanlon.
0:01:47 She captured, monetized, and continues to hold my attention on TikTok.
0:01:48 Where else?
0:01:56 She’s a frequent guest on Prop G Markets and the author of In This Economy, How Money and Markets Really Work.
0:02:05 Kyla coined the term vibe session to explain the disconnect between the strong fundamentals and gloomy outlook of the Biden economy.
0:02:11 This week, I asked her to write about how the attention economy affects young people.
0:02:17 The Attention Economy and Young People by Kyla Scanlon.
0:02:19 As read by George Hahn.
0:02:24 We’re all living through a time of immense change.
0:02:26 The news cycle is whiplash-inducing.
0:02:31 Frameworks are being broken, and everything feels unmoored.
0:02:36 Last year on the road, talking about my book, In This Economy, I heard one common thread.
0:02:38 Worry.
0:02:40 A generation-shaping worry.
0:02:43 CEOs are worried about their businesses.
0:02:54 CEOs are worried about their businesses, manufacturers about tariffs, and young people about everything, from identity to employment to whether the world they’re inheriting even makes sense.
0:02:58 Young people today face a triple disruption.
0:03:09 Technological creative destruction through AI and algorithmic systems, plus political and economic upheaval through tariffs and increasing fiscal uncertainty.
0:03:20 While every generation has faced challenges, today’s young people confront a massive reckoning between technology, economic opportunity, and personal identity.
0:03:25 Across the U.S., young people tell me the same thing.
0:03:34 They’re worried about jobs, but more important, they question whether the concept of a career will even exist in five years.
0:03:50 They’re 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.
0:04:00 To understand what’s happening, we need to understand two things, the attention economy and the real economy.
0:04:05 But let me start with a very surreal moment that crystallized everything for me.
0:04:14 Late Friday night, on January 17, 2025, Donald Trump launched a meme coin.
0:04:27 By Sunday, a mere three days later, Trump and his team had generated $60 billion in paper wealth from pure narrative value.
0:04:38 By Monday, inauguration day, he was both president again and one of the world’s richest individuals, entirely through attention-based speculation.
0:04:47 The coin, officially, has nothing to do with any political campaign or office, or so they say.
0:04:53 But its success came precisely because it’s associated with him.
0:05:00 I believe this moment cemented our final step in the transition into the attention economy.
0:05:17 The president of the United States bypassed every traditional wealth creation mechanism and generated more money in 36 hours than most companies create in decades, all through attention and narrative.
0:05:22 Historically, value creation followed a clear progression.
0:05:32 One, capture attention with a quality product, Apple’s iPhone, then convert that attention to business improvement, reinvestment, or share buybacks.
0:05:40 And two, build better products, generating real cash flow and compounding value over time.
0:05:49 This was the Warren Buffett playbook, attention as a means to an end, with cash flow and tangible assets at its core.
0:05:53 Trump coin skipped the middle steps entirely.
0:05:58 One, capture attention, and two, convert directly into value.
0:06:04 Attention is truly all you need.
0:06:08 Attention became the product, the business improvement, the way to compound wealth.
0:06:21 It worked with immense speed because Trump controls political positioning, executive power, regulatory influence, platforms, narrative shaping via truth social, and now token wealth.
0:06:24 Instant value creation through pure narrative.
0:06:35 This was the birth of the attention singularity, where power, narrative, and wealth merged into one self-reinforcing system.
0:06:40 Attention became so dense that it warped reality itself.
0:06:53 We’re watching a system where attention directly creates wealth, wealth instantly empowers, power captures more attention, and each cycle gets faster and stronger.
0:06:58 Many young people watched this and thought, of course this is how the world works now.
0:07:01 Of course attention is the ultimate currency.
0:07:03 Of course the old rules don’t apply.
0:07:05 I have to change everything.
0:07:12 Watching this unfold made me question everything I thought I knew about value creation.
0:07:16 Cue the meme of someone throwing away a copy of The Intelligent Investor.
0:07:25 But it also made me realize we need to look at the broader ecosystem that made Trump coin possible in the first place.
0:07:29 Because this was the logical conclusion of the systems we’ve built.
0:07:35 Four interconnected elements have reshaped our reality.
0:07:39 One, digital infrastructure.
0:07:44 Our mass communication system is privatized and optimized for profit.
0:07:49 Billionaires own newspapers, platforms, and the very means of connection.
0:07:53 Communication has become an addiction because it has to be.
0:07:56 That’s how the big bucks are made.
0:07:59 Two, the algorithm trap.
0:08:05 We’ve built our communication infrastructure around engagement metrics rather than knowledge.
0:08:10 Attention game winners excel at capturing eyeballs.
0:08:13 Mr. Beast, Sidney Sweeney, Joe Rogan, etc.
0:08:19 But aggregated attention rarely equates to societal progress.
0:08:28 Short form video has totally changed how we process information.
0:08:34 Instead of reading or having deep conversations, we absorb fragments and regurgitate talking points.
0:08:40 We’ve drastically lowered our standards for what constitutes being informed.
0:08:44 And four, the generation gap.
0:08:50 Among U.S. adults younger than 30, 59% use TikTok.
0:08:56 To succeed in business, you must master digital media.
0:09:00 Many people now work in social media or marketing.
0:09:05 An extremely valuable skill set, but one that’s also frying our brains.
0:09:11 These four elements reinforce one another, forming a digital cage.
0:09:16 When narrative production becomes more valuable than actual production,
0:09:22 we risk creating a world where attention harvesting matters more than building things.
0:09:25 Hence, Trump coin.
0:09:29 But young people aren’t just passive victims of this system.
0:09:31 They’re responding to it.
0:09:35 And their responses are reshaping politics.
0:09:43 When things are uncertain, people retreat to extremes, but also vote for new normals.
0:09:56 Trump won in 2024 partly by capturing young voters who believed traditional professional paths promising stability might cease to exist soon.
0:10:04 coupled with increased zero-sum thinking, institutional distrust, and attention economy dynamics,
0:10:08 young people are trying to find footing in a fundamentally new world.
0:10:13 The conservative shift among young voters is about more than politics.
0:10:22 When OpenAI’s Sam Altman says AI will require the whole structure of society to be up for debate and reconfiguration,
0:10:26 The entire nature of the self is being questioned.
0:10:33 The boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964,
0:10:38 had a somewhat clearish wealth-building formula, broad generalization,
0:10:42 and a seemingly clearer sense of self.
0:10:48 Career progression, plus home appreciation, plus retirement savings,
0:10:51 supported by mostly predictable returns on education.
0:10:56 This shaped their worldview and understanding of success.
0:11:01 Boomers are the wealthiest generation to have ever lived,
0:11:04 thanks to affordable housing and strong equity markets.
0:11:07 The boomer formula worked for many,
0:11:11 despite disruptions like the stagflation of the 1970s
0:11:14 and the mega-high interest rates of the 1980s.
0:11:18 But many boomers, who benefited from this system,
0:11:23 have participated in its dismantling through thousands of small decisions
0:11:27 prioritizing short-term gains over systemic stability.
0:11:33 Today, boomers own 38% of homes nationwide,
0:11:37 despite comprising just over 20% of the population.
0:11:42 Millennials haven’t caught up to boomer life markers and home ownership rates.
0:11:48 Home ownership rates are even lower for Gen Z than millennials at the same ages,
0:11:50 according to a UC Berkeley study.
0:11:57 Meanwhile, 72.9% of wealth is held by people over 55.
0:12:04 Millennials and Gen Z own 71% less wealth
0:12:07 than their population representation would predict,
0:12:09 according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
0:12:17 These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Taleb’s barbell strategy.
0:12:21 We increasingly have a world split between young people,
0:12:24 one, foregoing college to pursue the trades,
0:12:28 or two, gambling everything on digital moonshots.
0:12:32 Taleb writes that the barbell strategy is
0:12:36 a method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude
0:12:39 and an excessively aggressive one at the same time.
0:12:44 Here, we see people doing maybe one or the other.
0:12:47 The barbell economy creates its own culture.
0:12:51 One, safety seekers.
0:12:55 Those skipping college debt to pursue trades,
0:12:58 finding identity instability amid chaos.
0:13:02 The tool belt generation is choosing steady work
0:13:04 over uncertain professional paths.
0:13:07 And two, digital gamblers.
0:13:10 Those embracing the creator economy,
0:13:12 crypto speculation,
0:13:14 and AI startup moonshots.
0:13:17 Finding identity and potential
0:13:19 rather than stability.
0:13:21 To be clear,
0:13:24 a middle path still exists
0:13:25 and is evolving.
0:13:27 I’m generalizing to make a point.
0:13:30 Many people are still going down
0:13:31 the traditional road,
0:13:32 and rightly so,
0:13:34 albeit with more skepticism.
0:13:36 For some, it’s working,
0:13:37 especially for those entering
0:13:39 healthcare and social services,
0:13:40 the only sectors
0:13:42 adding jobs currently.
0:13:44 Others are trying to bridge the gap
0:13:46 between the past and the present
0:13:47 with mixed results.
0:13:49 But as my former professor,
0:13:51 Dr. Indudeep Chachi says,
0:13:52 quote,
0:13:54 the opposite of rationality
0:13:55 isn’t irrationality,
0:13:57 it’s being normal,
0:13:58 unquote.
0:14:01 When the safe path
0:14:04 might be eliminated by AI overnight,
0:14:06 hyper-gambling becomes emotionally
0:14:08 and economically sensible.
0:14:12 Safety seekers are making calculated bets.
0:14:14 Digital gamblers
0:14:16 are responding to an economy
0:14:17 that increasingly rewards
0:14:19 exponential outcomes.
0:14:24 I see two possible paths,
0:14:25 both requiring us to acknowledge
0:14:27 how the game has changed.
0:14:29 Path one,
0:14:31 platform reboot.
0:14:34 Build platforms optimized
0:14:35 for understanding
0:14:36 rather than engagement.
0:14:38 Create digital spaces
0:14:40 that strengthen society
0:14:41 rather than fragment it.
0:14:42 Develop algorithms
0:14:44 that reward depth
0:14:45 and critical thinking
0:14:46 instead of emotional manipulation.
0:14:48 It’s a lot.
0:14:50 Is it possible?
0:14:51 I’m not sure.
0:14:54 But we certainly have to try something new.
0:14:56 Path two,
0:14:57 navigation.
0:15:00 Teach digital literacy
0:15:02 beyond privacy settings
0:15:04 to understand attention dynamics.
0:15:06 Create systems
0:15:08 to preserve digital culture
0:15:10 independent of any single platform.
0:15:13 There are policy choices here
0:15:15 around technology regulation,
0:15:17 wealth transfer mechanisms,
0:15:18 platform governance.
0:15:20 But spending this year
0:15:21 talking to young people
0:15:22 across America
0:15:23 has convinced me
0:15:25 that the deeper challenge
0:15:26 isn’t just technical
0:15:27 or policy-driven.
0:15:30 It’s about something more important.
0:15:32 Our collective capacity
0:15:34 to understand one another
0:15:35 across the attention economy’s
0:15:36 fault lines.
0:15:39 Young people aren’t broken.
0:15:41 They’re adapting to a world
0:15:43 that’s fundamentally different
0:15:44 from the one
0:15:45 their parents knew.
0:15:47 But their parents
0:15:48 aren’t wrong either
0:15:48 for feeling like
0:15:49 the ground has shifted
0:15:50 beneath their feet.
0:15:53 The attention economy
0:15:54 has created
0:15:55 new forms of value
0:15:56 and new pathways
0:15:57 to wealth.
0:15:59 The old ways
0:16:00 of understanding ourselves
0:16:01 and one another
0:16:02 are straining to keep up.
0:16:05 The attention economy
0:16:06 isn’t going anywhere.
0:16:08 It’s too powerful,
0:16:09 too integrated
0:16:10 into how value
0:16:12 gets created now.
0:16:14 It’s a system though
0:16:15 and systems
0:16:16 can be changed.
0:16:18 As historian
0:16:19 Howard Zinn wrote,
0:16:20 quote,
0:16:22 if we remember
0:16:23 those times
0:16:24 and places
0:16:25 and there are so many
0:16:27 where people
0:16:27 have behaved
0:16:29 magnificently,
0:16:31 this gives us
0:16:32 the energy to act
0:16:33 and at least
0:16:35 the possibility
0:16:36 of sending
0:16:37 this spinning top
0:16:37 of a world
0:16:39 in a different direction
0:16:41 and if we do act
0:16:43 in however small a way,
0:16:44 we don’t have to wait
0:16:45 for some grand
0:16:46 utopian future.
0:16:48 The future
0:16:49 is an infinite
0:16:51 succession of presents
0:16:53 and to live now
0:16:54 as we think
0:16:54 human beings
0:16:55 should live
0:16:57 in defiance
0:16:58 of all that is bad
0:16:59 around us
0:17:01 is itself
0:17:03 a marvelous victory.
0:17:05 Unquote.