 You know, I've been doing the show for ten years and I figured, you ain't seen nothing yet. Thirty spokes show the hub of a wheel, yet it is its center that makes it useful. You can mold clay into a vessel, yet it is its emptiness that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house, but the ultimate use of the house will depend on that part where nothing exists. Therefore, something is shaped into what is, but its usefulness comes from what is not. Part one, advertising. It's hard to count how many advertisements were exposed to every day. Estimates range from low double digits to tens of thousands, primarily due to disagreements about what counts as being exposed to an ad in a world almost entirely composed of products. Companies will enthusiastically command a few degrees of every passerby's visual field with billboards on buildings, cars, trucks, just about anything. That definitely counts. Google is increasingly populated with ads instead of search results, and you might click on a promising link to a page of garbage written by an article spinning algorithm, designed to bait unlucky marks and show them a few dozen ads before they leave in disgust. Those probably count. But if you think about it, the screen you view those ads on also has a logo on it. When you open your fridge to make yourself lunch, every jar, can, and bottle is plastered with a colorful brand label designed to attract your eye on the store shelf. Even the clothes you're wearing right now are emblazoned with a little reminder of what companies sold them to you, just in case you'd like to give them some more cash in the future. There's probably at least a handful of advertisements touching you right now. Advertisers usually claim that it's essential for consumers to be well informed about products and services they might want or need, judging by the expanding use of ad blockers in the premium that streaming services can charge for an ad-free experience, those consumers feel differently. That's fun as a really good commercial can be, where force fed some number between 20 and 10,000 of them every day, depending on how you count. Our artificial world increasingly wall-papered by pleas for your attention and your money that we generally don't want to look at. Still, it's hard to quantify the cost of increasingly intrusive ads. If the inside of a subway car wasn't plastered with enticements to try this therapy app or that sandwich, the people who control that space might well think of it as a missed opportunity to make a couple bucks. Why shouldn't there be an ad there instead of nothing? Part 2 Michelangelo In 2018, I saw an exhibition of Michelangelo's sketches, a surprisingly sparse collection for such a prolific artist. He was a non-stop workaholic until the week before he died at 88, surviving almost two decades longer than his fellow artist Da Vinci. But while we have tens of thousands of pages of Leonardo's notes and preliminary drawings, we only have a few hundred sheets illustrating Michelangelo's creative process. According to one of his nephews, in 1546 Michelangelo built two giant bonfires in front of his studio in Rome and proceeded to commit every one of his sketches, pencil drawings, charcoal studies, cartoons, every bit of preparatory material he produced to the flames. Many historians and artists have speculated about why, considering his history of incredible narcissism and violent tantrums, you can probably come up with a few theories yourself. But there's one explanation that's undeniable. He didn't want anyone to look at it. He clearly thought it would be better if all the meticulous planning and iteration he toiled over for David, Moses, The Last Judgment, or hundreds of other sculptures and paintings was never seen by anyone but him. Many technologies make it easier to make things. I can 3D print an object in a fraction of the time it would take me to carve it by hand. I can type around 120 words per minute and distribute that text instantly to thousands of people. I can feed a prompt into an LLM and blast out an entire book between sips of coffee. But distilling everything you might say into the most resonant and authentic version of what you really want to say, figuring out where to hold back or leave something out, remains a thankless gauntlet of hard choices for the creator. Software license agreements, reply all wind bags, and 100-page instruction booklets use a similar maximalist strategy to avoid making those hard editorial choices. If you're overwhelmed by an encyclopedic response to every question, that's a you problem. In contrast, Michelangelo was clearly willing to make the call about which of his works were deserving of our attention, albeit with his signature theatrics. To be honest, I feel guilty for having ogled some of the things that escaped his bonfires. He'll never find out, I'm not hurting anyone by sneaking a peek, but it does seem like I've violated the sanctity of his editorial resolve. Part 3. Content. Tom Scott recently announced that he's taking an indefinite hiatus from the incredibly consistent YouTube show he's been making every single week for more than a decade, explaining how exhausting it's been to travel around the world and improve his content while keeping to his schedule. I'm obviously doing a much smaller scale thing on thunk, but I get it. I used to hold myself to a fairly rigid timetable, but I've recently embraced the luxury of putting out videos when I feel like it. The subjective experience is much different. Rather than watching a timer tick down and scrambling to scrape together something, anything that might be interesting enough to write about a record, I can think and research my topics to my heart's content until they feel ready. There's an old adage that without some sort of deadline creators will just spin their wheels fruitlessly, but it feels so much better to say something because I have something that I want to say instead of firing off some half-baked idea because I've used up my quota of silence. The world is not friendly to irregular creators, at least not new ones. We celebrate when an established band like Tool drops an album out of nowhere after 13 years, but it's almost impossible to start a creative career if you don't pair your creativity to a predictable release schedule, the way record labels, book publishers, and content-serving algorithms prefer. As a result, an increasing amount of art is being squeezed out of artists. A hydraulic press of demand and metrics-driven clockwork stamping them repeatedly to ensure a regimented two-stroke cycle of anticipation and release, never allowing things to get too quiet. After all, they're all competing for the same pool of attention. Part 4. Information Overload. Turning away inside that engine, artists produce more media every single day than I could absorb in a whole lifetime. The document I use to record all the enthusiastic recommendations for books, music, essays, video games, podcasts, TV shows, and everything else has more than 500 entries and it keeps getting bigger. I blast through it whenever I can find time. I shower while listening to new albums, read a few articles over coffee, blitz through podcasts, audiobooks, and video essays at double speed or more while I'm doing chores or walking the dog, but even without a full-time job, dedicating almost every waking hour to learning and absorbing and growing, it always feels like I'm falling behind the inexorable engine of content. In information cultures in the digital age, information science theorists and philosopher Shakhid Shbir closely examines the concept of information overload. He starts off noting that the very idea is a sort of contradiction. The term information describes a subset of facts that are useful for our goals. If you took a moment to pay slightly more attention to your surroundings, you would easily find more facts about the world than you could possibly register, remember, or process. But unless you want to use them for something, none of that is really information. We don't feel overloaded knowing that there is a specific number of hairs on our heads or a molecular composition of our shoelaces. If we don't know something, we can't use it. So why would we ever complain about there being too much information? Another claims that what we're really wrestling with is confusion between information as a tool and information as a product. To be genuinely useful, information has to be incorporated into our picture of the world. Processed, interpreted, linked to other ideas, that sort of thing. But any time we spend processing data to make it useful is time we're not spending consuming information products. If you take 20 minutes to think critically about a video essay you just watched to interrogate its claims and place it somewhere in a broader understanding of the world, you can't also be listening to an abridged newscast or speed reading a biography of Robert Moses. You certainly can't be relaxing while you do those things, letting your mind recover from any efforts to absorb the ever-expanding volume of facts. But there's still an incredible social pressure to be well-read and well-informed. You don't want to be the only one at the party who never got around to watching the Godfather. This leads to a situation where an audience becomes trapped in a frantic cycle of consuming more information products than they could possibly internalize, binging on content that never seems to add up to a clear picture of the world or how to change it. That confusion drives them to consume even more. Maybe the next podcast or the next article or the next book will bring clarity and satisfaction. The industry is mass-manufacturing those products, responding only to visible metrics like engagement and time-watched, tailor their output to be easily binged by the overworked brains of their audience, simpler narratives, fewer challenging ideas, less ambiguity. You might not be able to do anything useful with it, besides maybe bragging that you've consumed it to improve your social status, but at least all that stuff sold to you as information goes down easy. Conclusion Miyazaki Hayao Miyazaki's animated films are widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces. My neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, spirit it away, his movies are equal parts entertaining and profound, seamlessly welding a fanciful art style and colorful childlike characters to deep questions of ecology, violence, identity, capitalism, ethics, all sorts of stuff. Many who watch Miyazaki movies are most struck by specific scenes that are a signature of his work, fiercely beautiful, mostly static shots that genuinely interrupt the rhythm of the story to linger a while. Miyazaki says these scenes are inspired by the Japanese artistic tradition of Ma, a focus on the negative space between elements, what he analogizes to the silence between hand claps. Ma is easy to spot in traditional Japanese landscape paintings in Zen gardens, but once the flavor is familiar to you, you'll likely find it in all sorts of places and situations where you recognize it, or something like it, the tension before the conductor cues the first note of a concert, an unexpected snow day. Many experiences feel like echoes of that pregnant silence between hand claps. I wonder how many people appreciate them the way Miyazaki does.