← ReThinking
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:37]
B
Quality of the attention, you might not like the object of the attention. But now we're arguing about something different than like, do people have the cognitive capacity to pay attention? It just seems fairly obvious that we are living through an age of shortened attention spans when it comes to some things, but clearly lengthened ones when it comes to others.
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C
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking my Podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Daniel Immerwar. He's a history professor at Northwestern University, where he's won their highest teaching award. He takes his craft of studying the past very seriously.
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B
First of all, I should say that I currently live in an apartment without.
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C
Wi fi because wait, you have no WI fi.
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B
I have no WI fi.
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C
Wow. So you're basically living in the 90s?
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B
Oh God, I wish. Yeah. I'm a historian, so my partner calls me a method historian, like a Methodist. I want to know how they lived.
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C
Daniel is the award winning author of the books Thinking Small and How to Hide an Empire. He writes for the New Yorker, where his piece what if the Attention Crisis is a Distraction? Is the best article I've read this year. He did a masterful job challenging us to rethink the widespread narrative about our inability to focus, which is what I want to talk to him about. Well, let me ask you this. What is your thesis about? What's going on with our attention?
- [03:17]
B
I'm coming to this as a skeptic. So it's a kind of anti thesis, right? The thesis that everyone sort of intuitively thinks and that I intuitively thought as well, which is our attention spans are getting shorter. Can't be right. And I guess one thing that struck me as I was working through this was that we actually say two things about our unhealthy relationship with technology. One is that it's doing cognitive damage and it's making it impossible for us to focus on anything. And then we also say that it's polarizing us and that we're kind of sorted into separate worlds and now we almost inhabit separate epistemological spaces. And I don't think people have noticed that those are contradictory stories. Because the more that people get polarized, this is true politically, this is true culturally, the more they are in niches like small fandoms for like a K pop band or, you know, the more they're in like political niches like QAnon. Those people are deeply obsessive. And so the more that we're like sorted out into micro tribes, the more we become obsessive and avid rather than sort of checked out and unable to focus on anything. So weirdly, the age of distraction is also the age of obsession.
- [04:30]
C
Oh, that's such an interesting juxtaposition. I want to talk about this potential moral panic that we're facing around attention. And before we dive into it, I'm just curious about what piqued your interest in the topic of our attention and what claims it. It's such an unusual topic for a historian to take on.
- [04:53]
B
The attention discussion is really loud. And as a historian, it's hard not to immediately think. We've had this discussion rather a lot before. I mean, I know it always feels new and fresh and urgent and it certainly feels that way, including to me. But, you know, I know that there's been round after round after round of the attention crisis with people saying things that sound shockingly modern, but saying them in the 18th century. And it's not obvious what to take from that doesn't mean that the attention crisis isn't real. But I found that it was resonating with things that people have been worried about kind of throughout informational modernity. That's what made me want to think through this.
- [05:33]
C
Well, take us back to the past a little bit. What were the attention suckers of prior eras? I'm like, did people think books were a problem?
- [05:45]
B
Yeah, they thought novels were a problem. So what's really funny is that the measure of our attentional failures today, which is canonically expressed as our inability to read long novels, especially War and Peace, those were the objects of attention panic back then. Priests worried that, you know, women reading these long novels were, you know, just engrossed by them and their minds were taken away from prayerful obedience. So, I mean, that kind of does something to you when you realize that the thing that we are wistful about and wishing that we could do again used to be the problem, used to be the junk food of a past era.
- [06:23]
C
This is making me think about John Stuart Mill's distinction between higher quality and lower quality pleasures.
- [06:27]
B
Go on.
- [06:28]
C
Now, we would say that a novel like War and Peace is a fairly high quality. It's, you know, it's complex, it's rich, it forces you to think cat videos less so.
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B
Yeah, so it seems like there's a kind of like. I don't know if this is wrong to posit, but I wonder if there's a sort of treadmill by which junky past culture then kind of seems more elevated to us now. Because it's not just novels that people in the past were worried about. There was a whole crisis of the pianoforte. So, you know, pianos were entering people's homes. And this would also drive people to distraction and madness. So, I mean, yeah, it's just crazy when you think about like all the past informational or entertainment genres that were disturbing to people. Because when we look at virtually anything that someone is doing in the 18th century for entertainment, we think, well, that's going to class up the joint. And there's two possibilities. One is that we've just become so degraded and debased in our forms of entertainment that anything from the past, even tv, looks amazing to us now. Or it's just there's something perceptual about that, that we perceive the media of our time to be, you know, a lower order. But in the past, it all just kind of, you know, through the kind of rose colored glasses, it all looks great.
- [07:44]
C
So as I hear you describe the two possible theories, it seems like you can make a case for both of them, but we're underappreciating the second.
- [07:51]
B
Yeah, my favorite example is I found a 1843 complaint by the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne where he's just like going on about some technology that is. It sounds like he's describing an iPhone. He's like, the generation that is born after this, they're never going to have real conversations. They're just going to be like, in their separate corners and they're never going to know how to talk to anyone because basic possibility for people existing in community has been eroded by this new technology. And he's talking about the stove replacing the open hearth. That's nuts, right?
- [08:28]
C
Wait, so because we can't gather around.
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B
Yeah, because we're not forced to gather for warmth, we're not going to talk. A single heat source. And he's just like, all mortal intercourse will become frosty and people will just yell at each other. It sounds just like us talking about our cell phones.
- [08:43]
C
Wow.
- [08:43]
B
Okay. So it's fun to think about how much those complaints resemble ours. But it wasn't just people complaining. There were also people talking back. So there's a lot of novelists in the 18th century who have to defend this new popular commercial genre that they're working in, the novel. And, you know, they're hearing from, you know, tutting priests that, you know, this is going to wreck everyone's brain. And they're asking themselves, is that true? And so you start to get like a lot of people saying, you know, actually maybe it's good to be distracted. You know, maybe, maybe like, too much attention is, is bad for the brain and maybe your brain has to hop around a little bit. The novel Tristram Shandy is, is all about the pleasures of, like, losing your train of thought. And like, you know, you're thinking about one thing and then something else pops up and somehow that creates a connection. So there's a lot of, like, real serious philosophical questions about is it a good idea to pay attention, like, should, like, how attentive should we be? And some worries that if we pay too much attention, A, we're intellectually missing things, or B, we just become overly attentive and, you know, we become like schoolchildren or servants rather than, you know, free intellectuals. With, you know, our own kind of autonomy over our minds.
- [10:00]
C
This is a hot topic in my world in the present, where on the one hand, there's a paper I really loved by Kim Elsbach and Andrew Harganon about workday design and the importance in cognitively demanding jobs of having mindless tasks.
- [10:12]
B
Yeah.
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C
That allow for attentional resets and mind wandering and creativity. And on the other hand, we have researchers like Sophie Leroy who study attention residue, where if I'm working on task A and then I shift to task B, my performance on task B suffers because task A is still partially active in my mind.
- [10:34]
B
Yeah.
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C
And maybe that's good for task A, but it impairs task B. And so I think, I guess at some level this controversy speaks to the fact that just concentrating on one thing is a double edged sword.
- [10:48]
B
Yeah. And there's two ways to think about that. Right. One, you can say like, okay, how good is that for you as someone who's setting out to work? And you might think the attentional residue might be really helpful. And often we have these accounts of mathematicians who working really hard on a proof and they can't solve it and they step on a bus and they're just like, oh, I got it now. Somehow pushing you into a different intellectual space works. But you could also ask, independent of how good of a thinker hopping from one thing to another makes you, is it good to be a really attentive thinker or might you just, as a subject, for other reasons other than your intellectual success, need some kind of protection? And there's a lot of people by the 19th century get really worried that capitalism is demanding a just sort of machine like focus of people. And that's not fair. Right. That employers shouldn't get to fix your mind on one thing. And weirdly, we have this concern about, I mean, huge concern about ADHD now. But the hot diagnosis of the 19th century was something called monomania. You have been deformed by industrial capitalism. This is what Moby Dick is about. And so you can just only think of one thing and you're thinking too much of one thing and that's going to drive you nuts.
- [12:08]
C
Oh, I mean, what a great problem to have in the 21st century.
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B
Yeah. It's interesting, right? And the concern there is like, yeah, maybe that's good for your employer, like, maybe that makes you a good worker, but it makes you screwed up in the head, like it's not good for your life.
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C
It strikes me that another, I guess another variation on that theme is that at Some level, if your employer gets the best of your attention, what's left for your family?
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B
Yeah. The model there is like you have a certain amount of attentional resources, those are extracted in the workday, and then you come home and all you've got left is drinking a beer and going to sleep.
- [12:43]
C
I think there's some good news on that front, which is for a number of years in psychology, the ego depletion model of willpower was popular. And the idea was that self control and focused attention were limited resources that were drained and had to be replenished. And my read of the evidence is that effect has consistently failed to replicate. And it's considered debunked at this point that it's not ability, it's actually motivation, that over long periods of time of having to concentrate, especially if you're doing something tedious or painful, at some point you lose interest in sustaining your effort, and at that point you disengage. But if there's enough desire, then you can basically reboot your focus.
- [13:27]
B
That seems intuitively right to me. I can think of times when I've had a sustained interest in something and I don't burn out on it, and I can think of things where I have zero interest and I burn out within two hours.
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C
That sounds oddly familiar.
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B
Yeah.
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C
So this goes to the one thing in your article that I had to challenge.
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B
Yeah.
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C
You wrote that psychologists can't measure attention spans.
- [13:53]
B
Yeah.
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C
And I beg to differ because.
- [13:56]
B
Tell me about that.
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C
In 2024, there was a meta analysis, a study of studies of attention spans over time.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And I want to get your reaction to what the research found. But first I wanted to hear why, as a historian, you thought that psychologists couldn't do this task. Because I think we are up to the challenge.
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B
Yeah. So my understanding, and I'm happy to be corrected or educated on this, is that there just isn't the kind of thing, attention span that can be met. This is not a failure of psychologists. It's a conceptual failure. We can measure people doing tasks and we can see how attentive they are to those tasks. And we could even measure over time, are they growing less attentive? And so there's a lot of studies where you have someone do a task and then you put the smartphone near them and does that make it harder for them to. To keep up with that? But that's not an innate capacity called attention span. That's a task specific thing. And weirdly, a lot of the tasks that we measure are people doing things like playing video Games as some kind of psychological test that resembles a video game. And I think we can't. My understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that it would not be proper to say if someone, this guy's got an attention span of 3 minutes, whereas she has an attention span of 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Because all attention spans are task dependent, which means there's no kind of central, just like concept of an attention span in the way there would be a concept of someone's height or weight or something like that. Is that different from your understanding?
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C
Fascinating. We don't disagree.
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B
Great. Yeah.
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C
Disappointing. No, I think you're right. I think that this actually, this underscores the point about motivation versus ability.
- [15:42]
B
Yeah.
- [15:43]
C
There's no such thing as a fixed capacity for attention in a human brain. Because how long you can sustain your attention depends entirely on the task you're doing and what you feel about it.
- [15:55]
B
Sometimes when you read these studies and you're like, well, we had people track a ball moving back and forth on a screen and then we saw how long before they gave up. And I was like, give up earlier? That's a stupid thing to spend time on. Like, I wanted to go.
- [16:09]
C
Although that makes it really hard then to track what raises and lowers attention. But I'm with you there. Okay. So Andrew Juski and colleagues did this meta analysis where they had data across 32 countries, three decades, over 20,000 people that are given the same tests of concentration. And they ask you to pay attention to various kinds of tasks and then measure basically how long you can sustain your attention in that task. And then what's your processing speed and how many errors do you make? According to the theory that the digital world is destroying our capacity to pay attention, we should see a drop over time.
- [16:50]
B
Yeah.
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C
And their data span 1990 to 2021. And what they show is that performance has not gone down over those three decades among children and it's gone up among adults.
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B
Ooh.
- [17:06]
C
And I just, I read this evidence and I thought, okay, here are psychologists landing at the same conclusion that you reached as a historian.
- [17:12]
B
Yeah. I mean, are we having a weird moment with our attentions? Absolutely. We all feel it. Everyone knows this. But the way that we normally say it, which is our attention spans are becoming shredded. We can focus for shorter and shorter amounts of time. We've lost the capacity to do, you know, things that would take long amounts of concentration that I find completely uncompelling. And the reason I find it uncompelling is that usually when we phrase that it's like no one's reading War and Peace anymore. I'm like, okay, maybe that's true. I mean, I'm actually unsure how true that is. War and Peace made it onto the bestsellers list in the 21st century after a TV adaptation came out. But okay, let's just imagine that it's probably true that people are reading fewer 19th century novels, I guess. Have you watched anyone play a video game? Like, that's attention. That is a deep, profound attention. And we might not be excited about what we're paying attention to, but like the thing that people usually interpret as a lack of attention, which is a teenager on their cell phone, you could just as easily interpret as someone intensively reading.
- [18:14]
C
Yeah. And to your point about video games, the parents who are complaining about their kids usually can't wrestle their attention away from the screen.
- [18:23]
B
The parents are having the attention crisis. They're the ones who are upset about where their attention is going. And kids might have fewer issues.
- [18:31]
C
Exactly. Yeah. You're complaining that maybe that your kid is paying attention to the wrong thing, but not that they lack the capacity to pay attention.
- [18:38]
B
Yeah. And that's a different complaint. And if that's the complaint we want to make, let's make it an interesting reaction to the article. When I wrote it was a lot of older people wrote in and said, how dare you suggest that a video game is at all inappropriate object of attention, especially compared to an opera. And I was like, okay, I mean we can have that conversation if you want. But my point is one of the most popular video games, it's called Baldur's Gate 3. And this is not unusual in video games. It takes 75 hours to play through quickly and easily, twice that to play through the kind of take your time way. We used to say that getting through Wagner's Ring cycle, which is 15 hours, was amazing. We were really impressed when people I've listen to the entire Ring cycle. We're talking here like five to ten ring cycles and we're talking way more people doing it than ever. Listen to those Wagner operas.
- [19:34]
C
Yeah, we did a whole podcast with Ash Brandon about the science on video games. And I don't know that there's any other activity that as reliably builds self control, focused grit than a video game where you lose and you immediately then have to regroup and figure out how to improve and try again after you've failed and manage the emotions of frustration when you don't hit your goal. There are a series of cognitive benefits too. And I think I Guess it makes me wonder, what are people attributing to the opera that a video game lacks? There's the sort of the sense of class and refined taste that you're describing, but you're also sitting there a little bit less interactively when you're listening to music than you are playing a video game. And to me, that's a point against the opera, not a point in favor.
- [20:30]
B
It's genuinely unclear how interactive our art should be. Right. Because you can make the argument I want art that gives very little, like a poem. Right. So you have to put in a lot to make that work in your mind. And there's a great joy in that. But also you get bored, your mind wanders. A lot of people don't really like poetry that much. And you can make a gesso story about why the opera is cognitively or spiritually better. It's just not obvious to me that you can't make a similarly compelling case about a video game.
- [21:08]
C
So I think that underscores your point then that if we're going to panic about something attentional, it should be that we're paying attention to the wrong things, not that we can't pay attention anymore.
- [21:17]
B
That's right, that's right. Yeah. And then the case becomes a little harder to make right because you have to say things like opera is better than a video game. And then you have to explain why. And maybe that's a little hard to do. Weirdly, you also have to explain why it's bad. One of the things that the Internet does is create these sort of participatory feedback loops. So it's not just that you're watching something on the idiot box or that you're like participating in a TikTok trend. You know, there's all kinds of ways that like technology not just elicits but like has profit models that run on our participation. And so you also have to explain why this kind of upsurge of certain forms of democratic participation is a bad thing. That's a harder choice to make.
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C
Yeah, you can call it, you know, creative self expression and opportunities to gain status and influence. You can also say you now get to become the idiot box.
- [22:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. But all the complaints about TV was that it turned you into a passive zombie. I think we just have to acknowledge that is not what the Internet has done to us. I mean, yes, there are moments we've all had like, you know, the like, you know, doom scrolling, like a little thin thing of drool coming down from your mouth, but like we've also had moments or seen others have moments where the Internet like riles you up into this like, weird frenzy of like do your own research and like having all kinds of heterodox opinions, which is exactly what the idiot box was supposed to prevent.
- [22:41]
C
That's such an intriguing way to reframe and rethink the conversation we're having about attention. This episode is sponsored by Cozy Furniture Shopping shouldn't feel like a chore. That's why Cozy is reimagining the entire experience, making it simple to create a home that reflects who you are. Their furniture is designed for the way you actually live, with frustration, free assembly, lifeproof fabrics, and adaptable configurations that grow with your changing needs. Whether you're setting up your first studio or refreshing your family home, Cozy transforms the process from overwhelming to enjoyable. And because Cozy understands life's unpredictability, their modular designs let you expand your sofa, swap covers for a fresh look, or convert pieces to accommodate overnight guests, all without replacing what you already love with comfort. This inviting your home might just become your favorite destination. Transform your living space with Cozy Visit Cozy CA spelled C O Z E Y the home of possibilities made easy. This episode is brought to you by Ambetter Health Group Health insurance can put businesses in a tough position if you're a business owner, a CFO or an HR leader, this is probably going to sound familiar. It's fall and you find out your group health insurance premium will be more expensive next year, maybe by a lot. And as usual, you have to pick one carrier in a few plans for all the employees. But they each have different medical needs, different budgets and different preferences for doctors. Plus, the carrier's network might not be strong where all employees live. Fortunately, there's a new approach. It's called an Ichra or Ichra. And it's a game changer. Ichras make costs predictable with stable pre tax contributions and a larger risk pool. And they make health plans personal because employees can buy any plan that fits their needs from any carrier. You choose how much to contribute. They choose what works for them. It's about time, right? For coverage you control plan on an Ichra. Learn more@ambetterhealth.com Ichra ready to order?
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C
And entertainment with the Capital One saver card. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com for details. We talked about novels earlier.
- [25:21]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [25:23]
C
And my read of the data is that novels do have benefits that other forms of reading don't.
- [25:29]
B
Yeah, let's talk about that.
- [25:31]
C
So I think the clearest findings have to do with empathy. Reading a novel versus more traditional nonfiction or watching TV or a movie, it puts you in the protagonist's mind.
- [25:44]
B
It's an empathy machine.
- [25:45]
C
It is in a way that, you know, watching as an observer on a screen, it's hard to imagine yourself in somebody else's shoes. And that perspective taking, the theory of mind that comes from that, it's not a large effect, but it is a robust one. I don't want to lose that. And I hear all these teachers saying our students won't finish a novel anymore. How do you think about that problem?
- [26:09]
B
First of all, I am one of those teachers, so I know that feeling. What my students will permit for assignment length is about half of what I read when I was an undergraduate. We can talk about why that is permit.
- [26:22]
C
As if the students are in charge.
- [26:24]
B
Yeah, because, you know, in some way they are. Like, it is an actual democratic feedback process. You can give students longer assignments than they will allow, but pedagogically, it's going to be a mess. They won't do it. They'll randomly read half the stuff you assigned, but not the half you wanted, and you lose a lot of control and they learn less. So you can push, but there's some negative consequences for the thing you're trying to do, which is teach them stuff. But it seems like people are paying less attention or less appreciative of long texts and more interested in long audio and video. And you could argue that audio and video podcasts, they give you an affective dimension. You get to hear someone's voice, you get to see what someone looks like, you get to see the visual presentation, and that that might be meaningful. You might argue that text in the novel is actually a fairly lossy medium and that just someone talking to you on TikTok, you're getting a sort of real hit of someone else's point of view in a way that it's harder to access through a novel. Is that too much? Would you agree with that? I don't know.
- [27:33]
C
No, to your point, I think you're illustrating a trade off that has some data behind it. Listening is better for immersion and engagement, or watching for that matter. But reading is actually better for critical thinking for the very reasons you describe. There have been a whole series of experiments that show that you're better at retaining information when you read it than when you listen to it because you have to work harder to process it. And also you're more likely to stop and reread or to pause. It's a little bit less natural to do that in an audio or a visual medium. And so. So there is a risk to the quality of our thought if we lose words on a page.
- [28:14]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:15]
C
Now let me get your reaction to something that I found puzzling from an attention perspective, which is lots of members of Gen Z not wanting to read a novel.
- [28:25]
B
Yeah.
- [28:27]
C
On the other hand, there's also seemingly a generational trend to have subtitles on when watching TV and movies. Oh yeah, what is that? What's going on here?
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B
Yeah, that's really good.
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C
They're choosing to read when they don't even have to.
- [28:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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C
I want to know why. How do you make sense of that?
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B
It is really true in ways that I think a lot of the reading crisis people haven't acknowledged that we are seeing a recursion to text and that videos are more likely to have text as part of them and maybe as subtitles, but maybe just like as an inbuilt part of it. And it seems like the idea that all we just want to do is watch the Honeymooners like the dumbest form of tv. No, it turns out that we're interested in all kinds of complex relationships between text and videos and we haven't descended to the point where all we're doing is watching three second clips of the most sensationally in your face things that you can imagine. That's not where this is going. And it doesn't seem like it's headed in that direction. I mean, I guess I want to ask what are your worries?
- [29:30]
C
Mine?
- [29:30]
B
Yeah.
- [29:31]
C
I think I have two worries. One is that people will regret where they place their attention, that there are better uses of my scarce focus. I didn't keep them in view. And the other is that the perception of an attention crisis becomes a self fulfilling prophecy people just take for granted. Well, attention spans are shortening. There's not a lot we can do about that. And so we should give up on, you know, on encouraging kids to read novels as opposed to being creative about how we engage with them.
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B
Do you, do you have like individual practices that are about Attention and, like, sculpting your attention.
- [30:10]
C
Yeah. Many. My. My favorite one is just a simple to don't list. So my. My to don't list includes, don't turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch.
- [30:19]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [30:20]
C
More recently, don't scroll on social media unless there's nothing else I could be doing. Like, if I'm sitting on a plane waiting for takeoff.
- [30:27]
B
Yeah, yeah.
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C
And those practices are really simple, but they're set up in advance, and they give me freedom to control my attention in ways that I didn't have before I created them, and they seem like micro versions of your macro. No wifi at home.
- [30:46]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I took a theater class a while back with someone about, like, storytelling and that kind of stuff. And he told this story. He was like, I went to a doctor's office, and I sat down, and I turned the television off, and I sat down, and I didn't take out a phone, and I didn't do anything. I just sat down. And he's like, at the desk, they freaked out. They were like, do you need a magazine? He was like, no. And just the idea that he was like, no, I just want to sit here. I just want to sit here and think thoughts was, like, very upsetting. Enough that other people felt like they had to mobilize around it.
- [31:26]
C
Wow.
- [31:26]
B
And I've thought about that a lot. I'm like, oh, is this a moment? Like, I'm waiting for someone? Is this a moment I should just sit down? Like, maybe that would be okay. Yeah.
- [31:36]
C
It's fascinating to think about people being troubled by the fact that you might just be willing to sit there and let your mind wander or let your attention go wherever it goes. Okay, so, Daniel, just zooming out a little bit. We were talking about what may be a moral panic. I think more likely than not, overblown attention is not a crisis, at least in the way we're talking about it. I feel fairly confident in that thesis, like, 68%. So it's gonna get really.
- [32:12]
B
You got more than two thirds. Keep going.
- [32:13]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's real conviction for me. I think it raises kind of a broader question of. I've been told by historians who study the American presidency that they don't evaluate presidential effectiveness or greatness until at least 30 years have gone by because there's so much context they're missing and so much information to be released that it would just be premature to judge. It seems like evaluating crises and panics is subject to a similar constraint, which is it's almost impossible to know whether you're in one in the middle of it.
- [32:49]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:50]
C
And yet I think you are remarkably good at addressing that question, or at least challenging us all to think harder and more carefully about how to answer that question. So can you explain to me how you think about evaluating a current event through a historical lens that allows for the perspective that you bring so, so skillfully?
- [33:12]
B
Yeah. So, first of all, you know, let's talk about why historians have a kind of 30 year rule before they are often willing to weigh in on something. It's partly because it takes a while for all the documents to shake out and the things to get declassified. Although, you know, at the rate things are getting declassified now, we shouldn't be able to do anything before the 60s. It is more for the deeper reason, which is that the present always feels so emotionally gripping that it's just really hard to separate the deep feelings of urgency that you have from any kind of analysis. So are we in a panic? I mean, there's a lot of things that we're really concerned about, and the question is, are they panics? Panic is usually the term we use for like, well, we got a little overexcited about that one, didn't we? Or are we in an emergency, in which case freaking out is exactly correct. I mean, if you were asking me, I would say, okay, climate change, that's an emergency. Short attention spans, that's a panic. But other people clearly feel differently. So I think the question that you have to ask, which is hard to do, is to be like, all right, what are the things that I'm worried about? Let me just take each of them one by one. If I were paid to argue the other side of it, what would I come up with? And could I come up with something that actually, now that I've done it, said it out loud, sounds compelling to me because I started with this attention crisis thing feeling exactly the same feelings that the people I'm arguing against still continue to feel. Wow, I have all those instincts. I would have said every single one of those things, because that's how it feels. And that's part of what it is to live through a panic is to just have a kind of intuitive and urgent sense of rightness about a set of propositions which retrospectively you're like, ooh, maybe this weren't so correct.
- [34:58]
C
So you really just, you just took the null hypothesis seriously instead of straw manning it. You really went with the steel man and changed your mind along the way.
- [35:08]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. One thing the past is really good at, one thing that is cool about being historian, is that it allows you to look at a maybe similar situation without the same overriding sense of what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. And so that sometimes can give you a helpful perspective.
- [35:29]
C
Okay, so let's take an example. This is not my view. Disclaimer.
- [35:33]
B
Great.
- [35:33]
C
Okay. I think I know people in Hollywood who would subscribe to this view. So comic books were on your list of things that people freaked out about once upon a time?
- [35:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:43]
C
And then we decided, eh, probably not that big of a deal.
- [35:47]
B
Yeah.
- [35:48]
C
And yet some of my Hollywood friends would say no. The second order consequence of comic books is that they gave us Marvel movies and ruined cinema.
- [35:56]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:57]
C
And we underreacted.
- [35:58]
B
Yeah. I mean, the comic book. What is, by the way, interesting about the comic book thing is that there was a guy called Frederick Wertham who wrote a book called the Seduction of the innocents in 1954 that was like the anti comic book book. We've now had, you know, decades with comic books. And of all the things that make us dumb and awful, like, comic books seem pretty low on the list. And so it seems silly if you go back and look at what Frederick Wertham was complaining about. He was complaining about the racism in comic books. He was like, these things are crazy. And he was not wrong about that. And so looking back on that, you're like, okay, the medium itself wasn't really the problem, but there is something, to our eyes, objectionable about rendering really gross racial stereotypes in visual form and then feeding them to children without any parental supervision. Yeah, I get it.
- [36:49]
C
Agreed. Okay. And then what about Marvel movies?
- [36:52]
B
Yeah, I mean, they're not amazing. Right. But let's talk about how they're bad. Right? Like, they're not dumb. They're actually like, overly complicated, you know, and they like, go on for a long time and you have to like, watch all of them to get it. So by a lot of the measures that we invoke when we're talking about like good art and like, can't we get back to a time when we were reading long novels? I was like, well, I got some really good news for you about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is long and complicated and takes an enormous amount of patience and has all kinds of complex illusions. Because then you have to be like, okay, well, the comic book version says this, and then the filmic version says that, and then Sony Pictures did it like this and all the Spider man movies are jammed together because of Multiverse and now they're making knowing jokes about intellectual property when they're combining the different spider mans. Yeah, I mean are those great movies? Probably not. But also most movies are not great movies.
- [37:45]
C
Well put.
- [37:51]
A
This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Imagine a world of extraordinary comfort where Bowland Branch bedding wraps you in the softest. Embrace the coziest experience made from the world's finest 100% organic cotton, all so you can sleep better. Start building your fall sanctuary with Bolin Branch's iconic signature sheets made with a buttery, breathable weave that gets softer with every wash. Enjoy 15% off your first set of sheets with free shipping and returns at b o l l and branch.com with code buttery. See site for details and exclusions. If you're a custodial supervisor at a local high school, you know that cleanliness is key and that the best place to get cleaning supplies is from Grainger. Grainger helps you stay fully stocked on the products you trust, from paper towels and disinfectants to floor scrubbers. Plus, you can rely on Grainger for easy reordering so you never run out of what you need. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [39:33]
C
What do you think is the worst advice people give about attention?
- [39:37]
B
That everyone should pay attention harder. That if we just try harder, it'll work.
- [39:41]
C
Good riddance. What's the best advice?
- [39:44]
B
Take seriously people's hesitation about attention. Like when people are inattentive to something, don't just berate them for it.
- [39:52]
C
Yeah, there's a reason why they're not paying attention to what you want them to pay attention to.
- [39:58]
B
What a pleasure having this conversation.
- [40:00]
C
Oh this was a joy for me. Daniel, I can't thank you enough for joining. Your mind is every bit as riveting as I thought it would be, and maybe even more so.
- [40:08]
B
You are being totally flattering, but it's really good to talk about this stuff.
- [40:16]
C
My biggest takeaway from Daniel is that we have not lost the capacity to pay attention. What shifted is our motivation. It's not that we can't focus, it's that we're interested in focusing on different things than we were in the past. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser, our editor is Alejandra Salazar, our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson, our technical director is Jacob Winick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hylash Van Vancheng, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale sue and Alison Layton Brown. Do you have a hot take? An unpopular opinion you're keen to defend?
- [41:10]
B
Oh God, you're not going to get me that easily. Yeah, what's your terrible idea that you'd like to say out loud.
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C
Only Boost.
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B
Mobile Boost Mobile will give you a.
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C
Free year of service.
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B
Free year when you buy a new 5G phone.
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C
New 5G phone?
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B
Enough. But I'm your hype man.
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C
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A
Imagine a world of extraordinary comfort where bowl and branch bedding wraps you in the softest. Embrace the coziest experience made from the world's finest 100% organic cotton, all so you can sleep better. Start building your fall sanctuary with Bolen Branch's iconic signature sheets made with a buttery, breathable weave that gets softer with every wash. Enjoy 15% off your first set of sheets with free shipping and returns@b o l lbranch.com with code buttery. See site for details and exclusions. If you're a custodial supervisor at a local high school, you know that cleanliness is key and that the best place to get cleaning supplies is from Grainger. Grainger helps you stay fully stocked on the products you trust, from paper towels and disinfectants to floor scrubbers. Plus, you can rely on Grainger for easy reordering so you never run out of what you need. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.