But when summer rolled around, I made more money on weekends lifeguarding. So, when I wouldn’t change my schedule, a company whose whole brand identity was a grinning, wise-cracking, anthropomorphic mouse parted ways with me, and not for the last time, it would turn out.

Chuck E. Cheese (Charles Entertainment Cheese, if you’re feeling formal) really brought together all the things I would later come to love: hospitality, iconic IP, entertainment, and games. The term “experiential” hadn’t yet entered my lexicon, but that’s exactly what I loved—live, immersive entertainment that engages people in a way technology has yet to replicate. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the manic energy of Chuck E. Cheese—the unlimited soft drinks and pizza and loud music and video games—was a perfect metaphor for today’s entertainment-centric world of infinite distractions.

The difference is that, at Chuck E. Cheese, the chaos was shared and physical. You were elbow-to-elbow with other people, feeding sticky tokens into machines, celebrating wins together. Today we experience that same sensory overload virtually and alone, our attention splintered by endless notifications and algorithmically generated content, isolated behind screens that promise connection but deliver only the simulation of it.

Attention is the world’s, and every individual’s, most valuable resource, influencing our lives and the planet in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Attention may be finite, but what it can be converted into is not. It shapes everything—not just what we watch and the products we buy—but who we date, whether we marry, the movements we join, the causes we fight for, and even where we worship and how we die.

This idea has shaped my career in media and advertising (theoretically the market for buying and selling attention), giving me a front-row seat to the modern attention wars—how they’ve been won and lost and how they’ve transformed our world over the last twenty-five years.

Today, an astonishing percentage of the global economy—trillions upon trillions of dollars in market valuation—is built on top of algorithms competing to attract, harvest, and monetize attention. Once viewed as the business of brand awareness, a marketing expense, advertising is now the invisible infrastructure of the entire global economy.