No Mercy / No Malice: The Attention Economy and Young People

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1:28Best idea wins! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC.

1:38Economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance. Scarcity equals value. Today, information is abundant. Attention is scarce. 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. 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 Sidney Sweeney ad calibrated for the culture war's choose-your-own-narrative ecosystem. Sidney Sweeney has very keen. The stock popped another 20 % after President Trump praised the ad on his social media platform.

2:33Sidney Sweeney doesn't have great genes, 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? She's a frequent guest on Prop G Markets and the author of In This Economy, How Money and Markets Really Work. Kyla coined the term vibe session 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, as read by George Hahn.

3:23We're all living through a time of immense change. The news cycle is whiplash-inducing, 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 generation-shaping worry. 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 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, today's young people confront a massive reckoning between technology, economic opportunity, and personal identity Across the U.S., young people tell me the same thing They're worried about jobs, but more important, they question whether the concept of a career will even exist in five years 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.

4:53To understand what's 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. Late Friday night on January 17, 2025, Donald Trump launched a meme coin. 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 world's richest individuals, entirely through attention-based speculation. The coin, officially, has nothing to do with any political campaign or office, or so they say, but its success came precisely because it's associated with him.

5:55I believe this moment cemented our final step in the transition into the attention economy. 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. Historically, value creation followed a clear progression. One, capture attention with a quality product, Apple's iPhone, then convert that attention to business improvement, reinvestment, or share buybacks. And two, 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.

6:51Trump coin skipped the middle steps entirely One, capture attention And two, 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 self-reinforcing system. Attention became so dense that it warped reality itself.

7:43We're 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 don't 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 need to look at the broader ecosystem that made Trumpcoin possible in the first place, because this was the logical conclusion of the systems we've built.

8:33Four interconnected elements have reshaped our reality. 1. 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. That's how the big bucks are made. 2. The Algorithm Trap We've built our communication infrastructure around engagement metrics rather than knowledge Attention game winners excel at capturing eyeballs Mr. Beast, Sidney Sweeney, Joe Rogan, etc. But aggregated attention rarely equates to societal progress 3. Brain Rot Short-form video has totally changed how we process information Instead of reading or having deep conversations, we absorb fragments and regurgitate talking points.

9:37We've drastically lowered our standards for what constitutes being informed. And four, the generation gap. Among U.S. 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 that's 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, Trump coin. But young people aren't just passive victims of this system.

10:31They're responding to it, and their responses are reshaping politics. 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 zero-sum thinking, institutional distrust, and attention economy dynamics, young people are trying to find footing in a fundamentally new world. The conservative shift among young voters is about more than politics. When OpenAI's 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.

11:30The boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, had a somewhat clearish wealth-building formula, broad generalization, and a seemingly clearer sense of self. Career progression plus home appreciation plus 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 mega-high interest rates of the 1980s But many boomers who benefited from this system have participated in its dismantling through thousands of small decisions prioritizing short-term gains over systemic stability Today, boomers own 38 % of homes nationwide, despite comprising just over 20 % of the population.

12:40Millennials haven't caught up to boomer life markers and home ownership rates. Home ownership rates are even lower for Gen Z than millennials at the same ages, according to a UC Berkeley study. Meanwhile, 72.9 % 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 These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Taleb's barbell strategy We increasingly have a world split between young people One, foregoing college to pursue the trades Or two, gambling everything on digital moonshots 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.

13:50One, safety seekers. Those skipping college debt to pursue trades, finding identity instability amid chaos. The tool belt generation is choosing steady work over uncertain professional paths. And two, digital gamblers. Those embracing the creator economy, crypto speculation, and AI startup moonshots Finding identity and potential rather than stability To be clear, a middle path still exists and is evolving I'm generalizing to make a point Many people are still going down the traditional road And rightly so, albeit with more skepticism For some, it's working, especially for those entering health care and social services, the only sectors adding jobs currently.

14:44Others are trying to bridge the gap between the past and the present with mixed results. But as my former professor, Dr. Indudeep Chachi, says, quote, the opposite of rationality isn't irrationality, it's being normal, unquote. When the safe path might be eliminated by AI overnight, hyper-gambling becomes emotionally and economically sensible. Safety seekers are making calculated bets. Digital gamblers are responding to an economy that increasingly rewards exponential outcomes. 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.

15:39Create digital spaces that strengthen society rather than fragment it. Develop algorithms that reward depth and critical thinking instead of emotional manipulation. It's a lot. Is it possible? I'm 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 isn't just technical or policy-driven.

16:30It's about something more important, our collective capacity to understand one another across the attention economy's fault lines. Young people aren't broken. They're adapting to a world that's fundamentally different from the one their parents knew. But their parents aren't 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 isn't going anywhere. It's too powerful, too integrated into how value gets created now.

17:14It's a system, though, and systems can be changed. As historian Howard Zinn wrote, quote, 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 don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presence 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. Unquote.