Welf von Hören; Attention Hijacking and Technology as a Vice

About this episode

Welf von Hören, founder of the habit-and-intentionality app "Potential," joins Vance to unpack how attention-economy technology is engineered — deliberately and at massive scale — to hijack human limbic systems for profit, and what an alternative "humane technology" could look like. Von Hören draws the Las Vegas-casino analogy explicitly: social media companies employ psychologists and behavioral scientists to A/B test features across hundreds of millions of users, extracting attention the same way a casino extracts cash, with a profound information/power asymmetry between platform and user ("it's not a fair game"). He goes further, suggesting future generations may view this manipulation as "crimes against humanity" given its scale and deliberateness. Vance parallels this to alcohol and sugar — vices that predate our regulatory instincts versus a novel one (social media) that crept in unregulated. The conversation moves into practical territory: von Hören's Potential app builds "fallback intentions" (e.g., substitute 10 pushups for a skipped workout) using James Clear's Atomic Habits framework, and both host and guest share personal experiments — Vance's 30-40 day caffeine elimination revealing how invisible ingrained habits are; von Hören's own coffee-quitting and hypersensitivity to sensory inputs. The most substantive disagreement is over solutions: von Hören proposes "attention settings" (opt-out toggles for manipulative features like infinite scroll), platform-level accountability from Apple/Google, and even potential legislative "food labels" for addictive app design. Vance, drawing on his Monsanto background, pushes back hard on any government or labeling-based solution, arguing labeling politicizes into an unwinnable power struggle between only the most extreme stakeholders (using the GMO-labeling fight as his direct analogy), and that market-based apps like Potential are the only stable path forward, warning that government involvement would turn social media into "the DMV."

“So if you use the promo code Vance V-A-N-C-E, you'll get 20% off of the interview until we've sold out all the slots before our spot opens up.”

“Just as the people that built the casinos in Las Vegas hired... the smartest people that they could find psychologists and neuroscientists and behave with psychologists... to figure out how do we make this as addictive as possible? The same thing is true here. And the difference is it's at a much, much greater scale.”

“If you cross compare or if you have algorithms that cross compare what you clicked on and what gets your attention with... what 10,000 people like you clicked on, it just gets you deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole.”

Key moments

• ~2%: Legacy Interviews studio-build ad — money theme, standard promo.
• ~15%: Von Hören names the "voice of resistance" concept (a recurring Vance framework) and connects it to his own high-openness/high-creativity personality profile that made building the app personally necessary.
• ~31%: MOB peak — the Las Vegas casino analogy for how attention-extraction is professionally engineered at scale against an asymmetric, uninformed user.
• ~35%: WINDOWS peak — cross-user AB testing and collaborative filtering ("10,000 people like you") described as a mechanism that systematically drags behavior toward "the worst parts of our nature."
• ~40%: Von Hören predicts future generations may judge mass attention-extraction as "crimes against humanity" — strong, quotable overreach worth flagging as a prediction candidate.
• ~54%: Vance's personal caffeine-elimination story (40 then 30 more days) as concrete evidence for how invisible deeply-ingrained habits are — a strong SOC/authenticity beat.
• ~76%: INSTITUTIONS peak — Vance's sharp rebuttal against government regulation of tech, invoking "the DMV" as his shorthand for regulatory capture/bureaucratic degradation.
• ~77%: TRUST — Vance draws directly on his Monsanto/GMO-labeling experience to argue labeling debates get captured by only the most extreme, motivated stakeholders, never the disengaged middle.
• ~86%: Von Hören outlines a genuine business case for Apple to build in "humane" features (higher customer lifetime value if users are intentional/productive rather than distracted) — money/institutions overlap.

Notable quotes

“Just as the people that built the casinos in Las Vegas hired the smartest people that they could find... to figure out how do we make this as addictive as possible? The same thing is true here. And the difference is it's at a much, much greater scale.”

“I think there's a fair chance that future generations will look back on that as basically crimes against humanity.”

“The very first time I ever did a digital sunset, I remember I was eating like a beautiful prime rib, and it tasted like sand to me because I was like, this is so boring.”