When you decide to like something, I mean, you may feel you're sort of innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that, you know, you'd essentially like to be advertised to by this company.

Now, he doesn't control the media, but Donald Trump has been incredibly successful in having his face appear everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing that face somewhere maybe 10 times.

Wikipedia, a nonprofit, is an enormously popular website but has managed to operate without advertising. And, you know, maybe it's a little simpler than Google and YouTube, but it does show there's another way.

There's always people - it doesn't take many - who have a different psychological makeup than most of us who really get joy out of provoking. They don't always believe the things they say, they just like to watch people go crazy. You know, I knew people like that in elementary school - bullies of one kind or another.

If you really care about content, you should pay for it.

In fact, the big steps forward for advertising, especially after World War I were when government just began employing the tools of advertising for its own purposes to get people to join the army and other things.

When you think about normal advertising, it's just like, hey, here's a car and, you know, we don't know if you're looking for a car or not. So Google promised that mental state, and then were able to prove that delivering the message at the exact right moment would make someone click on something. So they pioneered the idea that advertising could be profitable on the internet, that a specific, very micromental state could be targeted. And they established the primacy of the click, which has haunted us ever since.