Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…As we have thinking people in this room and I suspect most of your audience is thinking people, I think you’ll be happy to know that I really believe that there is a rubber band effect happening right now. We’ve been so bludgeoned with short form stuff. Vine or six second videos and Snapchat and Twitter’s 140 characters and this endless assault on thinking, because you can only have this tiny chunk to say anything. So I actually think in the last… I think it’s really started in the last year or so, there’s really a movement, people are willing to give you their time if you give them something good. So conversations like you have and like Serial and a bunch of other things, they’re allowing people to stop the noise. Because I think that’s what’s happening, people, even when I was on the flight here, I was watching the guy next to me on his iPad just go through his Facebook feed and it’s half political stuff and half babies and half cats, that’s three halves, but it was just a long feed. [laughter] People are just inundated and they don’t know where to put their attention, so I think a certain amount of people are finding long form now. And as I always say, it’s not rocket science what we’re doing but I think it’s actually, it’s rare these days. I think a lot of it is about going to the gym. So when I was young everyone played tennis or even, believe it or not, racquetball. And if you’re doing that you can’t really listen to much while you’re playing. But if you go to the gym, you go to the gym often for about an hour or a bit more than an hour, you’re typically doing something solo, you’re bored out of your mind and you want something to listen to. And you don’t wanna be changing podcasts every five minutes, you get into some kind of rhythm and you actually listen. It’s the closest thing we have to a captive audience. And then there are commutes which, because we don’t price the roads at rush hour, ’cause we don’t listen to economists, many of those are about an hour long, so you get your podcast listened to in your commute. Yeah.…

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