Name: There's a War Going on For Your Attention
Uploaded: 2023-10-30T19:36:41.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'There's a War Going on For Your Attention' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'There's a War Going on For Your Attention' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-30. Transcript available.

we've created such a perfect fog these days like really the fog has been it's
become such a bit the
fog is such a business every little thing that they can that can be created to
take away your
attention from uh or that can take away our attention from figuring out who we
are or like
kind of spelunking inside of ourselves and trying to get some answers um has
really been created
it's almost it's pretty masterful how much has been created out here on the
outside to keep our
attention um away from delving inside of ourselves well you know attention is
the basic currency right
everyone fights for it and it's incredibly valuable and it certainly is the
case that
it's also very tempting to turn your attention to things that grasp your short-term
interest
rather than say pursuing the causes of negative emotion that's a that's a good
example and
of course we have massive corporations working night and day to continually
attract our attention and
there's something sinister about that obviously but but you can't exactly lay
responsibility at their
feet because there isn't that there's a tremendous overlap between educating
people informing them and
and making them attend to you and and the lines between all of those things are
very
foggy let's say and difficult to lay out it's certainly the case that one of
the ways that you can keep
yourself in a fog about yourself is by distracting is through distraction with
external uh
with anything in the external world and obviously computer technology cell
phones games well not
negative in and of themselves perhaps
are there at any moment to distract you at any moment yeah those yeah the
little things that are
time consumers like it's yeah there's companies there are businesses where that
is their that's
their that's their business is to get your attention everything's trying to get
our attention
sometimes i worry that the forces that are out there that have like started to
you know really create
algorithms even on how to get our attention and how to keep it that those
forces are stronger than
our human abilities to to keep them away from us do you feel like that that's
true or do you feel
like that i think i really do believe that that's true i look as far as i can
tell we are teaching
computers to to read our minds as fast as we possibly can and they're way
better at it than they were
10 years ago and they're going to be so much better at it in five years that we
won't even be able to
imagine it and when i say read our minds i'm not talking about something
magical but oh yeah for
example talking about like guess what's happening it's not like like they're
going to guess what
we're thinking or guess what we want for dinner or anything like that probably
well they might but
they won't do it by directly reading our brain waves or anything like that um
they'll they're already
algorithms that target advertisements to send it you are pretty good at
deciding what it is that
you're motivated to pursue and now oh yeah i actually just got an ad on my
phone for your new book
actually so yeah oh well good so i'm involved in the same process the same nefarious
process
i'm just joking that that i think it's facebook but i might be wrong about this
that owns oculus
and the headset the vr headset company now you can you can track eye movements
with uh vr headset and
psychologists use the tracking of eye movements to map attention in high detail
now look if you look
at our eyes you see that there's a colored circle and a dark circle in the
middle and then that's surrounded
by white and that makes your eye very visible to other people animals too but
to other people
particularly human eyes are quite unique in that regard and it looks like we've
evolved to have highly
visible eyes and the reason for that is that other we communicate with other
people and they can read
our motivations by watching our eyes so if you stand on the corner and you look
up at nothing in the sky
and you stand there long enough someone else will join you and then if there's
two people then there'll
be 10 right away and the reason for that is that we and this is again something
uniquely human we attend
to where other people point their eyes assuming that if they're interested in
we might be interested in it
too and so that's and human beings are visual animals about half our brain is
is taken up with visual
processing we're much more visual than virtually any other animal and so
computers are soon going
to be able to track where we place our eyes which of course advertisers are
incredibly interested in
and that's going to speed up the ability of of high-powered computational
devices to understand
human beings as a group but also each of us individually to an immense degree
immense degree and so and
i i think we're probably 10 years away from computers that understand us better
than we understand
ourselves ai machines are going to get extremely good at this because it's so
lucrative to to be able
to gauge attention there's there's nothing that's more valuable than that and
so do you feel like
it's do you feel like there should be let it's hard to say there should be
legislation because i hate to
put anything on the uh you know that the gov it's the government's
responsibility but should there be
like rules or legislation between allowing computers and ai to get that
advanced or is it still just fall on the
feet of us as humans just to battle kind of the dark arts of of of of these
machines that can sort of
like take us into a trance and then monetize the trance at the same time
i think i think that legislation in some sense is it's going to be playing
catch up and it's going
to be farther and farther behind all the time because this is moving so fast
and with such power
and it's so distributed that no one is going to be able to even keep track of
it much less regulate it
i mean the the the the interconnected environment is changing so rapidly that
even if you're reasonably
tech savvy you can't keep up with all the major changes and there's there's no
evidence whatsoever
that that's going to do anything but accelerate and so i can't see how
legislators have the ghost of a
chance at keeping up with this even if they knew what to target or what to
legislate yeah and you know
more and more engineers are i think china now graduates more engineers every
year than the
united states has engineers oh yeah china you could be eight years old in china
and be a damn engineer
i've been over there and i've seen it bro i've seen a six-year-old build a damn
bridge in front of
me you know what i'm saying they they're highly capable yes well and lots of
other cultures are
coming online very rapidly and so we're at well and there's no shortage of
unbelievably proficient
amateurs online as well and and and programming and and so we ain't seen
nothing yet and i really do
believe computers are gonna your computer is going to understand you so well i
think it it won't be
long till it knows what you're going to do more accurately than you do i think
that's already true
to some degree but well then we're at a real loss because then if i've been
afraid to make a plan for
myself in my life and i've been afraid and i've been living in the fog and i've
been just you know kind
of sidestepping really putting my pants on as a human and taking some action if
i'm in that fog and
then the computer is able to figure out what i'm going to do before i've even
done it but i haven't even
made a plan then surely the computer is going to make a plan for me it feels
like i think the
computer is making a plan for you all the time already with by default look
that's exactly what
advertising is is advertising makes a plan for you it's there's no difference
between those two things
except maybe one of sophistication so you know i mean when you're watching
something and an ad pops up
that's a little world that you could visit and the advertiser obviously wants
you to visit that
and the the problem there because you might think well it would be really good
the computer can help
you make a plan but i think what's more likely to happen because at least to
begin with the computer
is going to be paid so to speak by the advertisers to capitalize on your short-term
impulsivity is that
ever more attractive distractions are going to be dangled in front of you and
that's and that that's
likely to keep you in the fog and what can i do like to kind of are we going to
start to see like
new parts of like new like small societies form of people that don't want to be
influenced by technology
or you know what do you what do you feel like some of the future looks like as
far as trying to retain
some sense of of holding on to my attention and using it for myself as opposed
to letting it be used by
outside influences does that make any sense or not yes yes well look there's
another rule i suppose a
dictum perhaps that if you don't have your own story then you're going to be a
bit player in someone
else's story okay so let's talk about that fog again so let's say because of
the reasons you
already laid out you don't want to make your conditions for failure conscious
because then you
know when you're failing and that hurts you don't want to um make your plans
for the future too clear
because then if you then if you don't attain what you're looking for it's very
clear that you've lost
it which is somewhat different than failure right um and then there's also the
problem problem that if
you make your motives clear to other people then they really have the
ammunition to hurt you because
like i can hurt you by depriving you of what you want but i can hurt you even
better if i really know
what you want and can deprive you of that so you have reasons to keep these
things unclear but then
and then you but the problem then is is that you don't have a a direction that's
powerful right because
you're not consulting yourself watching yourself learning about yourself
figuring out who you are
and figuring out what kind of route through life you would have to take to be
engaged okay so then you get
weak because you're not integrated you're all over the place you're scattered
um well then anybody who
is has power for one reason or another can compete with you for your own
attention and win and so if
you don't have your own plan painful as it is to develop one partly because you
have to take your own
inadequacies into account oh yes and you also mentioned you know you you posit
an ideal this is what i want or
this is who i could be the farther away that is from you the more inadequate
you feel in relationship to
it you know so that's another reason to avoid it but yes well that's why every
ideal is a judge
there's no getting away from that now if it's too much for you i might say well
make a lesser ideal
like try to pursue something that doesn't intimidate you into paralysis right
start with something closer
that's more manageable huh so you can even prove to yourself that you can do it
exactly well what you really
want to do is you want to lay out a plan that has a pretty high end aim but
that also consists of steps
that aren't too intimidating that that so you have to ask yourself um i would
like to do this um i should
do it but would i do it and the answer is likely to be no often because you
know what you're like you're
supposed to go to the gym but you don't it's like okay well maybe you won't go
to the gym but maybe you'd walk
half a block every second day something like that and you have to ask yourself
i write about this in
the first chapter about the advantage of being a fool you know if you notice
that you're not so good
at something then you can calibrate down the goal until a fool like you can
manage it and then you can attain it and then you're not quite so much of a
fool
and so okay so you have to build a plan i have a tool for that that i often
recommend for people called
self-authoring yeah yeah yeah i'm very familiar with it okay well it and it is
it it it was developed in
an attempt to help people write out well an account of themselves right past
present and future but
relevant to this discussion is to to make a plan it's like what is it that you
need to thrive in the world or at least not to
become bitter and if you don't have your own plan that you're committed to
right and honestly committed
to what that means is that you will be the pawn of other people's decisions
especially now more than
ever it feels like do you think that that's true well that's that that
certainly seems to be the
conclusion we're reaching in the course of this conversation it's like as the
powers around you become
more and more invasive but also also of more utility to you to some degree i
mean we don't want to be
completely negative about computational power right of course having this
discussion without it
but as the power as the forces around you have more and more capacity to grip
your attention it stands
to reason that you're going to have to be the captain of your own ship to a
greater and greater degree
otherwise you'll fall you'll fall prey to those who wish to monetize your
attention so it's time for it's
time to make a plan if you haven't made a plan it's time to have a plan it's a
really it's a really good
time to have a goal and to have a plan hope you enjoyed that video and you can
watch another and
you can watch this one you can watch this one different options different
choices some guy just
brings you one option not this guy two options watch one this one or this one

There's a War Going on For Your Attention

we've created such a perfect fog these days like really the fog has been it's
become such a bit the
fog is such a business every little thing that they can that can be created to
take away your
attention from uh or that can take away our attention from figuring out who we
are or like
kind of spelunking inside of ourselves and trying to get some answers um has
really been created
it's almost it's pretty masterful how much has been created out here on the
outside to keep our
attention um away from delving inside of ourselves well you know attention is
the basic currency right
everyone fights for it and it's incredibly valuable and it certainly is the
case that
it's also very tempting to turn your attention to things that grasp your short-term
interest
rather than say pursuing the causes of negative emotion that's a that's a good
example and
of course we have massive corporations working night and day to continually
attract our attention and
there's something sinister about that obviously but but you can't exactly lay
responsibility at their
feet because there isn't that there's a tremendous overlap between educating
people informing them and
and making them attend to you and and the lines between all of those things are
very
foggy let's say and difficult to lay out it's certainly the case that one of
the ways that you can keep
yourself in a fog about yourself is by distracting is through distraction with
external uh
with anything in the external world and obviously computer technology cell
phones games well not
negative in and of themselves perhaps
are there at any moment to distract you at any moment yeah those yeah the
little things that are
time consumers like it's yeah there's companies there are businesses where that
is their that's
their that's their business is to get your attention everything's trying to get
our attention
sometimes i worry that the forces that are out there that have like started to
you know really create
algorithms even on how to get our attention and how to keep it that those
forces are stronger than
our human abilities to to keep them away from us do you feel like that that's
true or do you feel
like that i think i really do believe that that's true i look as far as i can
tell we are teaching
computers to to read our minds as fast as we possibly can and they're way
better at it than they were
10 years ago and they're going to be so much better at it in five years that we
won't even be able to
imagine it and when i say read our minds i'm not talking about something
magical but oh yeah for
example talking about like guess what's happening it's not like like they're
going to guess what
we're thinking or guess what we want for dinner or anything like that probably
well they might but
they won't do it by directly reading our brain waves or anything like that um
they'll they're already
algorithms that target advertisements to send it you are pretty good at
deciding what it is that
you're motivated to pursue and now oh yeah i actually just got an ad on my
phone for your new book
actually so yeah oh well good so i'm involved in the same process the same nefarious
process
i'm just joking that that i think it's facebook but i might be wrong about this
that owns oculus
and the headset the vr headset company now you can you can track eye movements
with uh vr headset and
psychologists use the tracking of eye movements to map attention in high detail
now look if you look
at our eyes you see that there's a colored circle and a dark circle in the
middle and then that's surrounded
by white and that makes your eye very visible to other people animals too but
to other people
particularly human eyes are quite unique in that regard and it looks like we've
evolved to have highly
visible eyes and the reason for that is that other we communicate with other
people and they can read
our motivations by watching our eyes so if you stand on the corner and you look
up at nothing in the sky
and you stand there long enough someone else will join you and then if there's
two people then there'll
be 10 right away and the reason for that is that we and this is again something
uniquely human we attend
to where other people point their eyes assuming that if they're interested in
we might be interested in it
too and so that's and human beings are visual animals about half our brain is
is taken up with visual
processing we're much more visual than virtually any other animal and so
computers are soon going
to be able to track where we place our eyes which of course advertisers are
incredibly interested in
and that's going to speed up the ability of of high-powered computational
devices to understand
human beings as a group but also each of us individually to an immense degree
immense degree and so and
i i think we're probably 10 years away from computers that understand us better
than we understand
ourselves ai machines are going to get extremely good at this because it's so
lucrative to to be able
to gauge attention there's there's nothing that's more valuable than that and
so do you feel like
it's do you feel like there should be let it's hard to say there should be
legislation because i hate to
put anything on the uh you know that the gov it's the government's
responsibility but should there be
like rules or legislation between allowing computers and ai to get that
advanced or is it still just fall on the
feet of us as humans just to battle kind of the dark arts of of of of these
machines that can sort of
like take us into a trance and then monetize the trance at the same time
i think i think that legislation in some sense is it's going to be playing
catch up and it's going
to be farther and farther behind all the time because this is moving so fast
and with such power
and it's so distributed that no one is going to be able to even keep track of
it much less regulate it
i mean the the the the interconnected environment is changing so rapidly that
even if you're reasonably
tech savvy you can't keep up with all the major changes and there's there's no
evidence whatsoever
that that's going to do anything but accelerate and so i can't see how
legislators have the ghost of a
chance at keeping up with this even if they knew what to target or what to
legislate yeah and you know
more and more engineers are i think china now graduates more engineers every
year than the
united states has engineers oh yeah china you could be eight years old in china
and be a damn engineer
i've been over there and i've seen it bro i've seen a six-year-old build a damn
bridge in front of
me you know what i'm saying they they're highly capable yes well and lots of
other cultures are
coming online very rapidly and so we're at well and there's no shortage of
unbelievably proficient
amateurs online as well and and and programming and and so we ain't seen
nothing yet and i really do
believe computers are gonna your computer is going to understand you so well i
think it it won't be
long till it knows what you're going to do more accurately than you do i think
that's already true
to some degree but well then we're at a real loss because then if i've been
afraid to make a plan for
myself in my life and i've been afraid and i've been living in the fog and i've
been just you know kind
of sidestepping really putting my pants on as a human and taking some action if
i'm in that fog and
then the computer is able to figure out what i'm going to do before i've even
done it but i haven't even
made a plan then surely the computer is going to make a plan for me it feels
like i think the
computer is making a plan for you all the time already with by default look
that's exactly what
advertising is is advertising makes a plan for you it's there's no difference
between those two things
except maybe one of sophistication so you know i mean when you're watching
something and an ad pops up
that's a little world that you could visit and the advertiser obviously wants
you to visit that
and the the problem there because you might think well it would be really good
the computer can help
you make a plan but i think what's more likely to happen because at least to
begin with the computer
is going to be paid so to speak by the advertisers to capitalize on your short-term
impulsivity is that
ever more attractive distractions are going to be dangled in front of you and
that's and that that's
likely to keep you in the fog and what can i do like to kind of are we going to
start to see like
new parts of like new like small societies form of people that don't want to be
influenced by technology
or you know what do you what do you feel like some of the future looks like as
far as trying to retain
some sense of of holding on to my attention and using it for myself as opposed
to letting it be used by
outside influences does that make any sense or not yes yes well look there's
another rule i suppose a
dictum perhaps that if you don't have your own story then you're going to be a
bit player in someone
else's story okay so let's talk about that fog again so let's say because of
the reasons you
already laid out you don't want to make your conditions for failure conscious
because then you
know when you're failing and that hurts you don't want to um make your plans
for the future too clear
because then if you then if you don't attain what you're looking for it's very
clear that you've lost
it which is somewhat different than failure right um and then there's also the
problem problem that if
you make your motives clear to other people then they really have the
ammunition to hurt you because
like i can hurt you by depriving you of what you want but i can hurt you even
better if i really know
what you want and can deprive you of that so you have reasons to keep these
things unclear but then
and then you but the problem then is is that you don't have a a direction that's
powerful right because
you're not consulting yourself watching yourself learning about yourself
figuring out who you are
and figuring out what kind of route through life you would have to take to be
engaged okay so then you get
weak because you're not integrated you're all over the place you're scattered
um well then anybody who
is has power for one reason or another can compete with you for your own
attention and win and so if
you don't have your own plan painful as it is to develop one partly because you
have to take your own
inadequacies into account oh yes and you also mentioned you know you you posit
an ideal this is what i want or
this is who i could be the farther away that is from you the more inadequate
you feel in relationship to
it you know so that's another reason to avoid it but yes well that's why every
ideal is a judge
there's no getting away from that now if it's too much for you i might say well
make a lesser ideal
like try to pursue something that doesn't intimidate you into paralysis right
start with something closer
that's more manageable huh so you can even prove to yourself that you can do it
exactly well what you really
want to do is you want to lay out a plan that has a pretty high end aim but
that also consists of steps
that aren't too intimidating that that so you have to ask yourself um i would
like to do this um i should
do it but would i do it and the answer is likely to be no often because you
know what you're like you're
supposed to go to the gym but you don't it's like okay well maybe you won't go
to the gym but maybe you'd walk
half a block every second day something like that and you have to ask yourself
i write about this in
the first chapter about the advantage of being a fool you know if you notice
that you're not so good
at something then you can calibrate down the goal until a fool like you can
manage it and then you can attain it and then you're not quite so much of a
fool
and so okay so you have to build a plan i have a tool for that that i often
recommend for people called
self-authoring yeah yeah yeah i'm very familiar with it okay well it and it is
it 