Tim Wu's interesting, unusual, fascinating life

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2016

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Columbia law professor Tim Wu makes me feel boring and underaccomplished. He’s been a Supreme Court clerk, a Silicon Valley startup employee, a bestselling author, and a star academic. He coined the term "network neutrality," wrote the superb book The Master Switch, and was dubbed "Genius Wu" by Richard Posner — a man many consider to be our smartest living judge. And this is to say nothing of Wu's award-winning side-gig as a — yes — travel writer.Anyway, screw that guy. Wu's new book is The Attention Merchants, and it's a history of how the advertising business has shaped the information we consume, the products we crave, and the way we think. We talk about that book, but we also talk about Wu's approach to life. He explains why his great strength is his ability to ignore inconsistency, how Larry Lessig shaped his career and his marriage, why working in Silicon Valley left him skeptical of markets, and Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary’s advertising jingle for acid (really).We also go deep into antitrust law, the inner workings of the Supreme Court, whether Google and Facebook are monopolies, and what a world without advertising in media might look like. So this conversation covers a lot of ground. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains explicit language.
0:14.0	Hello, welcome to another episode of The Ezra Client Show.
0:16.2	I am Ezra Client and my guest this week is Tim Wu, author of the awesome new book, The Attention Merchants.
0:22.0	He is also the father of the term net neutrality.
0:25.2	I don't want to buy too much on him because I talk a little bit about his biography in the beginning of the show.
0:30.9	So you'll hear who he is, but he is genuinely one of the most interesting human beings with one of the most varied careers.
0:36.2	I have ever met and just a really brilliant guy.
0:39.9	In this episode we talk a lot about his path, his time, clirking onto the Supreme Court,
0:44.8	his work as a lawyer, his work as a writer.
0:48.5	We also talk a lot about his ideas.
0:50.7	His previous book, The Master of Switch, is a favorite of mine.
0:54.1	And I wanted to talk with him about monopolies and antitrust in the modern American economy
0:59.1	because this is something that is becoming really central to a certain part of the left.
1:02.4	It is something that is objectively rising, at least in certain industries.
1:06.6	And he's a really good guide for thinking about these issues in a clear way.
1:10.9	So we talk about that.
1:11.8	We talk about the development of advertising as a medium.
1:15.3	We talk about the ways in which both advertising and modern attention and informational platforms
1:20.8	are making us more distracted, making it harder to think about things.
1:24.5	Talk about his best advice, which I found really interesting.
1:27.1	His favorite books, of course.
1:28.8	This was a great discussion, and he's a good person to listen to.
	...

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