Austin Kleon

Yeah, and when you think about it, the way the world is structured right now, it's not really in the interests of corporations and people who want to make money off of you for you to have your own attention.

They want your attention.

I mean, there's all these books.

I think it's Tim Wu's books about attention merchants and that kind of stuff.

So it's like everyone wants your attention.

And so in some ways, it's the most valuable thing you have as a human being.

And you want to make sure that you're...

pointing your attention that you're in control of it that you're putting it kind of where you want to put it i think that's the real challenge in modern life is to make sure that you're the one paying the attention you know and not having your attention taken from you

Really?

We both went to Miami.

Yeah, there was a program at Miami that was really wonderful.

So if you think about campus, the east side of campus, like way over in the woods, there was this thing called the Western Program.

It was the School for Interdisciplinary Studies.

And it was this kind of like really magical place

just a really nice part of campus, like kind of tucked in the woods, like old stone buildings and stuff.

And yeah, you would go there and you just kind of like make up, it was the perfect place for someone like me.

And it was one of those things, I don't know how you feel about your education, but the further away I get from my formal education,

the more I realized like actually a lot of the bricks were kind of laid, like a lot of the foundation was laid there.

I was already that kind of person.

I was already that kind of person who wanted to be interested in a lot of different things and to kind of synthesize these multiple fields into my own like kind of course of study.