Factually! with Adam Conover - How To Do Nothing with Jenny Odell

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Artist, writer and author of the book "How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy" Jenny Odell, joins Adam this week to discuss different types of attention, art and contemplation being challenged, how doing nothing is doing something, and the mysterious bowerbird! This episode is brought to you by Blinkist (www.blinkist.com/FACTUALLY), The Great Courses Plus (www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/FACTUALLY), Hawthorne (www.hawthorne.co code: FACTUALLY), and Kiwi Co (www.kiwico.com/FACTUALLY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And recently I found myself with the rarest of gifts, free time. We finished shooting our TV show, so I was released from the grind of, you know, 12-hour days on set, 12-hour days in an edit bay, 12-hour days with the most elite hair care team and basic cable perfecting my coiffure, all right? I had fantasized about this free time. Finally, I was going to get to do more than just respond to the demands of the moment on our TV set. I was going to be able to work on my new live show, develop my new projects, think big thoughts, dream big dreams, read big fat books. I had no deadlines, no office. I was liberated, able to do whatever I wanted. Right. And what did I do with these long, wonderful days stretching out before me? Well, I'll tell you. Every morning, I'd brew up a cup of PG Tips tea, fire up my laptop, and proceed to get nothing done.

Instead, I'd ping pong from tab to tab, refreshing my emails, checking my Twitter DMs, then over to my RSS reader where I'd load up a few dozen more tabs of interesting articles and then move on from those without reading them because I thought, ah, no, I'm too busy to read those right now. One of those tabs, I literally kept open for a month. I still get guilty thinking about it. I am so sorry, New Yorker article about the Syrian Civil War. I swear I will read you one day. My goal during this time was to develop the concepts that would guide my next year of creative work. And instead, I just ended up refreshing my inbox over and over again.

You know, the underlying architecture of the internet, the clicks, the tabs, the refreshing, the links, it rested my attention away from my intent and I felt powerless to stop it. Well, towards the end of the month, I actually got a break from my break. My family had booked a week's vacation on a boat in Southeast Alaska.

And that meant we had a week with vacation on a boat in southeast Alaska, and that meant we had a week with little to no internet access at all. So instead of loading up those tabs, I spent that week bushwhacking through the woods, watching wildlife through binoculars, and doing crossword puzzles in the cabin. It was idyllic, but even as I was watching the tail of a humpback whale arc gracefully out of the water, you know, sometimes my thoughts would drift back home and I'd think, I hope I haven't missed any important emails. Surely, I thought, you know, there were crucial life-changing missives

coming at me every day. I lacked that access, right? Well, halfway through the trip, the boat passed by a little village with a cell phone tower in it. And finally, I had just a single bar of internet access. And so with a compulsive mixture of fear and excitement, I tapped into my inbox, and what did I find?

Well, sure, I had dozens of emails, but none of them were important. That same Pandora's box that I had been spending my days obsessively refreshing and refreshing when I was back home, when left alone for a full week, nothing important had popped into it at all. Well, after that, my head cleared, I was able to dive back into my vacation. And it was in that blissful state that I read a book called How to Do Nothing by our guest today, Jenny O'Dell.

You know, this book is kind of hard to describe. It's a beautiful and thought-provoking read, and it covers a huge range of subjects and sources. But the piece of the book that resonated with me the most was this passage about attention and distraction. I want to read it to you. If we think about what it means to concentrate or to pay attention at an individual level, it implies alignment. Different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented towards the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things. It means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. And we contrast this with distraction in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different

directions at once and preventing meaningful action. See, and this is Adam again. I'm not reading the book anymore. The truth is that the Internet today is an attention economy that is designed to distract us in exactly this way, to keep us staring at its ads and its bullshit content by preventing us from doing everything else that really matters to us. It's designed to keep us weak, keep us passive, and keep us from making the changes in the world that are truly important to us. And we all know this deep down. We know we need to fight it. But how, right? It's obviously not possible for every one of us to take to the sea year round

just in order to have the mental space to read a book, right? Hell, I'm not probably going to go back to Alaska again anytime soon at all. So what can we do? What are the strategies we can employ to refocus and escape an online world that's designed to rewire the circuitry of our attention? Well, to help answer this some more, we have on the show today Jenny O'Dell, the author of How to Do Nothing. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. She is a writer, an artist, and a professor at Stanford.

Please welcome Jenny O'Dell. Jenny, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I loved the book. I read it, as I said in our intro, over a week in Alaska when I was on a boat with no internet, which was the perfect place to read it. I love the title, How to Do Nothing. Can you explain quickly how doing nothing can be an active resistance in the attention economy? Yeah, it's a little bit paradoxical, right? Like

the title is inherently a bit weird sounding. And the idea that doing nothing is somehow doing something can be a little confusing. But I think, you know, like, if you are in a situation in which you are expected to be producing something all the time, and when I say producing, you know, I mean, work, but also things like expressions and representations of your life, and representations of your identity. you know, if you're expected to do that all the time, then just not doing that not only is an act of resistance, but is surprisingly difficult. It's difficult enough that it does feel like you're doing something.

So really, you know, I think it's, you know, it's nothing within the context of kind of like something all the time, all day, every day. Right. Let's just expand on that idea because the book made me aware of this trend in our society that I had realized in reading it I've been subject to but have never really thought distinctly about, which is the sort of productivity culture, both in the overt ways, which are very noticeable, rise and grind, you know, kind of culture, go, go, go, that sort of ethos, but also the way in which you talk about how our, you know, social media, our, you know, the rest of our economy is sort of structured so that we are incentivized to constantly be producing something of value for someone else. That productivity culture isn't just that rise and grind. It's also turning every aspect of your life into content or into some sort

of economic unit. Right. Yeah. It's sort of like, you know, ultimately you become the product or like every utterance you make is a product. And the thing about products is that they are kind of static and optimizable and can be evaluated. I mean, I find something really troubling about like this uh phenomenon of like spending a really long time like crafting some kind of like phrase and then just like throwing it out there and then just constantly checking back and seeing how it's doing right right i mean i say that i really love seeing things that other people write on twitter so you know but i think like the overall kind of like

structure of it um feels kind of gross sometimes. Yeah, there's this thing that we do now. I mean, as a comedian, I am used to having funny thoughts. And I used to, you know, before Twitter, I would put those out on stage or I would, you know, find some sort of creative outlet for them. And then Twitter became a place that I put those thoughts. But now those thoughts are sort of turned into this sort of unit that I'm constantly, oh, how did it do? How did it do? Oh, that thought wasn't as good as that thought because it didn't get as many little icon. There aren't as many numbers next to the little icons

on it. And so it's somehow been like quantified and monetized in this odd way. Yeah, totally. I think that's a really good example. I mean, I think one of the times I was probably the least active on social media was when I was writing the book. Because I'm not, you know, I guess sometimes I see people like sharing, you know, like a sentence here and there from what they're working on. But it's just, I just felt like I needed this sort of incubation time. And I think that there's something very different about spending the time and, and kind of collecting those thoughts, like, you know, kind of what you're describing. And then having the time to work those into something larger, like a performance or a book, and have that be the thing that's evaluated, not these kind of, like, small kind of atomistic little, you know, pieces of it. Like, imagine if someone were a musician and they were like, I'm going to write an album and they put out one song at a time and wait to see how it does and then like made the next song based on the last one. Like, I bet the last song would be terrible. Like it would just devolve into like total mush. So, you know, again, I recognize that, you know, different artists and writers processes are different, but I do think that there is some kind of like removal from that sphere of constant evaluation that's like really important for incubating something. on the internet instead, you know, have them and work with them in a deeper way, seems really connected to the book itself, because the book is so much a connection of looking at these issues

through different lenses, through different ways that collide in surprising senses. Like, so we're talking about, I think, the sort of clearest takeaway from the book about doing nothing in the social media context, but how does that apply to, you know, completely different parts of the economy or our lives on earth, that concept of doing nothing? Yeah, I think it's, you know, something I was surprised by in writing the book was the ways in which these things, these arguments that I'm making that seem specific to social media have a really long history culturally. So, you know, that's why in the book I talk about, you know, the general strike in San Francisco is this kind of moment of,

you know, putting one's foot down, you know, in the context of like inhumane working conditions in which there is, you know, it's every man for himself and people are sort of pitted against each other. And in my research into that, I was like, wow, this sounds really familiar. This sounds like, you know, a bunch of abused freelance workers or something, right? Like, it's like really familiar. And just kind of like tracing this longer, this longer history of these these kind of depressingly almost like small islands in which people were pursuing something like that in a longer story of this like continued crush of just like total determinism and like productivity at all costs and like extreme bottom line mentality at the expense of like human health and just like survival,

like psychological survival. And then I also talk a lot about art in the book because I teach art and I make art. But that's another thing where if you kind of look back through history, you see that things like art and contemplation and anything that's not sort of productive in a really super obvious, narrow way has always been threatened in culture in different ways. And so I think it's just really helpful to get that historical context because it makes this current moment not necessarily less dystopian, but like an unprecedented dystopia is way scarier than one that has precedent that you can kind of like look back and see a little bit

more about like how we got here. Right. And that's one of my favorite lenses to look at any kind of issue through as well, because everyone is always saying about every issue facing us that this is the first time we've ever faced this, that, you know, we've we've never seen an election like this one before. We've never faced a problem of this magnitude. And the fact is, we usually have, and it makes them seem less frightening, but it also gives you a different approach to facing those issues when you are looking at them through the lens of how other folks have faced them through history. And one of the things I'm really interested in is that broader view that

you take means that you make a much larger critique of social media or the productivity ethos in our economy than most commentators do. You don't just say, hey, we should all be quitting these sites or even that these sites should be reforming their algorithms or et cetera. You're saying something a lot more complex than that. I just pulled a line from the book where you say, I'm less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention. What happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again together? I'm really fascinated by that thesis statement. Can you expand on that at all? Yeah. And I should say, you know, in terms of like the writing that's been done and the work that's been done on things like persuasive design and social media and trying to, you know, perhaps

regulate that, I am kind of all for that. I feel like my argument isn't necessarily like contrary to that, but it's kind of maybe just from a different perspective or it's like zoomed out a little bit or something. Because like my problem is really with the idea of productivity overall. One of the things that I ask in the very beginning of the book is like, when you say productivity, it's like productive of what and for whom and why. I mean,

I think we can all think of examples, right? Like individually or culturally where like, you know, something was supposedly made more efficient in the service of some larger structure that was totally inefficient. And so I think there are just oftentimes when you kind of like zoom out and you're like, okay, yeah, like you're being, you're producing something, but like, is that even worth producing? Or like, is that actually like horribly destructive? Right. You can do the TPS reports faster, but why not ask, do the TPS reports need to be done? Why are we spending our lives doing these reports? Right. Or it's like building a really efficient coal plant. It's like, that's the least efficient, you know, possible thing to do, but it's like, oh, but it's like really high tech inside. So that's kind of how I feel about the

whole thing. So I think that's why my, my argument sounds a little bit different where it's not like, you know, quit social media, but like get control of your time. Cause usually that rhetoric is still taking for granted this kind of take, take control of your time so you can produce more. Like that's left kind of unquestioned. And the other thing that it really leaves unquestioned is the idea that time and attention are currency. And like any other currency, like that it's sort of just interchangeable and distinguishable units of value. Whereas I think, you know, in everyday life, we all know that different time feels differently, and that there are many different forms of attention. Even though one

very shallow type is encouraged by, you know, social media, there are other forms of attention. So, you know, those are assumptions that like, I'm kind of interested in pushing on. And that's why the sort of like, just quit Facebook once and for all. It's just, I think I described it in the book as fighting the battle on the wrong plane. Yeah, let's keep talking about that in terms of attention, because you discuss in the book how social media sites or even the way advertisers divide up our, you know, they're trying to grab our attention and, you know, television networks sell our attention to advertisers, right, for them to put commercials in front of, right? But that's all taking our attention as one, you know, sort of infinitely

divisible unit, right? It's just people have attention and we are gathering it, we're selling it. In the case of something like Facebook or Twitter, they even resurface that to the users in terms of seeing how many times your video was viewed or your post was liked to see how much attention it got. But you point out that, yeah, there's different types of attention. You can be half paying attention to something. You can be thinking about something thoughtfully.

You can be engaging with something critically. And you talk a lot about deepening attention. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Yeah, I think a lot of it just comes down to kind of like pacing and patience, right? Like really shallow attention is, which is like the type of attention that advertisers would like to think that they are getting from you is like uncritical and shallow. Like I saw it, therefore I consumed the message, like end of story. Like there were, there were no obstacles in that. Right. And there were no, maybe like questions about the circumstances around that

ad and, you know, maybe like who, who owns this company or like, why is this ad being served to me? Like, these are not questions that are a part of that really shallow attention. And so I think, you know, the kind of deeper attention that I'm talking about is really just a form of seeking or even like inviting the possibility of context, as well as kind of like looking at something from a slightly different perspective. So like, this is kind of a depressing example, but yesterday, um, my boyfriend, Joe Vikes, who's also a writer, um, and comedian, um, he and I were talking about, um, Instagram ads and how, you know, it's possible that maybe we were talking about how, we don't feel good when we look at Instagram, you know, even though I like all these people, they're my friends. Um, but, but it's just kind of, you know, you don't feel good.

And then in that moment of feeling not good, you're served an ad, which is when you're pretty, you're vulnerable. Right. Yeah. And so we just kind of got curious about these ads. And so we were like one at a time. We like each went through our Instagram stories and just like flipped through that. Like we weren't actually looking at them. We just wanted to see which ads we were being served because I had never seen which ads he gets and he had never seen which ones I got.

And it was super interesting. Like his were all snack foods. And mine were, mine was, I felt very insulting. It was like very like yoga, like goop. I was like, excuse me? Like, and like. There's nothing wrong with yoga particularly, but you didn't feel that that actually was a correct reduction of your personality, I suppose.

Well, I mean, okay, I like yoga, but I guess I mean it was the more sort of like the whole, the overall image I was getting of like, you know, yoga amidst like all of the other sort of like organic, whatever, facial products, I don't know. I was just like, oh, like, it's so gross. But, you know, I realized that it's, that's a very different way of looking at ads, right? Like, I realized that I'd never actually looked at the ads, like I'd'd looked through them maybe, or like, and I think that's what you're, that's what's supposed to happen, right?

Like you're in the middle of doing something and then you see an ad and it just sort of like goes into your head and you're like, okay, next, right? But like, you know, actually like holding your finger down and being like, what is in this ad? Right. And why am I getting this ad? And like, what is the overall picture when I look at all of these ads? And like, don't get me wrong, I don't like looking at ads either way,

but if you have to look at ads, like there is, you know, there are different ways to look at it. And I think that extends to a lot of other things where, you know, you can take like a slightly, a weird perspective on a lot of media and social media and ads and, and see, you know,

some get some information that's kind of like interesting and maybe useful. Well, it's really interesting. It connects to something I'm doing in my, in my own work in the live show and touring right now. I talk about how ads it's been shown work better on you, the less attention you pay to them because the images, the connection with the image and the brand just sort of leech into your mind

without you fighting back. But if you're actually, if you actually watch the ad very closely, like I feel like I used to more often when I was younger, when I would see an ad come on, I'd be like, what's the fucking deal with this ad? That's like a way to, I mean, you know, you're maybe not going to escape, you know, say Apple's luxury halo, right? Or something like that. Like those, those deep image associations might still work on you,

but at least you're thinking critically about it, which is better than not in terms of erecting your own defenses, I suppose. Right. And it feels different, right? Like I think, like I find myself using this phrase a lot of like, it matters where like the center of gravity is.

And I think like in that passive moment in which like, yeah, phrase a lot of like it like this it it matters where like the center of gravity is and i think like in that passive moment in which like that yeah the ad is just sort of like leeching this brand into your mind like the center of gravity is not really in you um it's like you're just this sort of like empty vessel and you're like all of these things are scrolling past you and and some of them are making it in and some of them aren't versus like if you sit down and make a decision to like look at ads like study these ads you know um then that's coming from some it's it's an intentionality that's coming from like a decision that you individually made and i think that's that's one of the things that i just worry about in general with the attention economy is this like faculty for intentional decision-making about information.

As someone who really loves to spend time researching weird things and like my favorite place to be other than outside is the library. And I like to just, you know, pick like some, you know, choose a topic on purpose and then physically go to that place and see not only, you know, the book I was looking for, but all of the related books about that, regardless of what time in which they were written, you know, they could be really old or really new. And just decide to kind of spend the time getting that information. It's so different. Like I was just telling someone the other day, like imagine if you, when you went into the library and someone threw a bunch of books at you. Yeah, that's the experience of going on the internet is being confronted by that chaos.

I mean, you know, I described in the intro the feeling of, you know, being confronted with all of these articles from my Twitter feed or my RSS feed. You know, I try to use an RSS reader as a healthier choice on the internet. And even that results in me queuing up tab after tab of unrelated decontextualized pieces that I am maybe interested in, but, you know, I'm maybe not prepared to take in right at that particular moment. I find this interesting,

but I don't want to read it right now. But if I close the tab, I'll never find it again. So what do I do? And yeah, that's exactly what that would feel like if you went to the library and they were like, ah, here's a bunch of books, right? want to read it right now but if I close the tab I'll never find it again so what do I do uh and yeah that's exactly what that would feel like if you went to the library and they were like ah here's a bunch of books right uh and you're I don't know should I read this now it's good okay all right maybe but there's no time I don't know what do I do um yeah and it wouldn't even be like subjects that you wanted to know about and a lot of kids I mean you know like that you feel it seems like

you're being very like sort of comparatively responsible about it. And like I just started using Twitter lists more to like try to kind of combat this. But that's just like changing like which books are thrown at you in the library, not the fact that they're being thrown at you. Yeah. Well, I want to get back to that point about you said about the way that Instagram had, you know, boxed you in with the yoga and goopy stuff because you write about how that sort of compartmentalization of our identities into these little boxes is really almost a violence done against ourselves, that ourselves are so much more,

our identities are so much more fluid and dynamic and, you know, nuanced than that. Can you talk about that at all? Yeah. I think I call it like an algorithmic honing in, which is like, if you imagine accepting or following all of the recommendations given to you algorithmically. So, you know, there could be like things that you should listen to or watch or read or whatever. And you did that very diligently.

You would almost kind of start to reach this like very stable state of like a, like a hyper, I, like a person with like very identifiable characteristics that like incidentally would be very easy to advertise to. Right. And so you kind of become like a really easy target, right? Like an easier and easier target, the more you participate in that targeting. And that's the person that they want you to become if that's their ideal is that you become that person so that you'll be so easily marketed to. Right. And I mean, I think you can see it like, you know, just culturally, right? Like, I feel like I see aesthetically a lot of people congealing into the same thing. I'm sure that's all, you know, happened to some degree, like even, you know, in the past. But, but, you know, the counter example that I give in the book is like, when you hear something,

I listen to the radio a lot, because I don't have an aux input in my car. And so when I hear something on the radio that is a song, it's like not an unfamiliar genre. It's just it's in a genre that I wouldn't think that I like. And I really like the song. And not only do I not like it, I can't explain why. And like, that's a really interesting kind of feeling to dwell on where you're like, OK, well, if I don't know why I like something, then who is doing the liking? You know, like on top of like, why do I like it? Who likes it?

And why is that surprising to me? And like, who's the me that's being surprised? Like, it gets really complicated very quickly. And I think there are many other actually, you know, instances in which if you try to draw a hard line around yourself as an identity, you just can't do it. Even though all of these forces are kind of joining together to try to make you feel more like an identifiable thing, like a personal brand, that will ultimately be unsuccessful because that is just, I don't think that's how identity works. It's certainly not how I feel my own identity. And I think that's something to be celebrated

because if you were to become this sort of reverse engineered thing by your recommendations, I would argue that you're sort of like, you're kind of like done, right? Like you're done changing. And there isn't like, for me, there wouldn't really be a reason to like keep like living another day to like see if something different happens you know it's kind of like this fantasy of like seeing all of time and experience stretched out in front of you and you kind of like think that you know

in this moment like everything that you'll ever be interested in yeah but that's so that's so reductive and and limiting it's like shaving off all the interesting edges of ourselves and turning everything into straight lines. And I mean, this, yeah, this connects to, man, this book touches on so many issues, but like a passage I underlined, you, you wrote, as physical beings were literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else. I think that's so beautiful. And then as social, sorry, that was my editorializing in the middle there. And as you didn't write that about your own sentence. And you read, as social beings,

we're equally determined by our context. And I thought that was very wonderfully put that ourselves are permeable in the actual world. We are influenced by each other and by the world around us as with every breath that we take, but also in the context that we're in. And yeah, what you're describing there that social media and that the attention economy does to us is really, and the idea of personal branding and the idea of individualism, right, is sort of shaving off that context and trying to divorce us from the context that we naturally share with other people. But then that's a betrayal of what our actual self is made of, in a way. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And I think, you know, beyond that, it also makes it a lot harder to change your mind. You know, if I

mentioned in the book that I worked at a really big clothing brand for a while, so I know all about, you know, just kind of like branding 101 or whatever, you know, the brand is supposed to be timeless. It's not supposed to change. It's supposed to be highly identifiable. People are supposed to be able to kind of count on this brand, right? To not have changed. And so there's obvious problems for something like a personal brand where, you know, it's you're heavily scrutinized and all of your kind of past expressions are available to everyone.

And so it makes it a lot scarier, I think, to admit that you're wrong. That's something you almost, I feel like you almost never see online. to admit that you're wrong. That's something you almost, I feel like you almost never see online. Admit that you're wrong and be forgiven and change your mind and learn something. Like these are all things like that, you know, happen very frequently within,

you know, groups of friends or families or just normal human context. But, you know, something like Twitter is pretty hostile to something like that. Yeah. But I mean, if we like, you're, something like Twitter is pretty hostile to something like that. Yeah. But I mean, if we like, you're right about brands. Like I got so mad when the Slack logo changed. The, for those who don't know, the work instant messaging app.

This is how sucked in I am to productivity cultures that my favorite social media app is the work chat app I use, but they changed the logo and I was so angry. I was like, this logo is so, the new logo is so bad. I will defend that it is bad, but still I was, I'm still waiting around for them to change it. I'm still, oh, this is bad. And imagine if I treated my friends that way, right? If that was the way we treated each other, like, ah, I can't believe you changed your clothes. What are you doing? Ah, why'd you take off the hat?

Ah, you ruined your brand, you know? It's not, it's not, that's not how humans are or should be. Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, you know, you can see this happen a lot in like relationships, right? Like where, you know, you start dating someone, right?

And it's like, I think for some people, they're like, like the person they're dating changes and they're like, I didn't sign on for this, you know? Or like when you started dating someone, it's like, I expected you to just like stay like the same version of the person that I liked forever.

And then you're also imagining that like you would also say the same. Therefore, you would always like this like same person. Yeah. And I find it just like so lovely and endearing when you see like one partner in a relationship like suddenly take up some like weird hobby. And like the other person is just like, that's great. I support that. Yes. You know, like, like acknowledging that like this person is going to like change and like learn different things and just become a different person and that you're like on board for that. Yeah. I want to talk about, there's so much nature in the book.

You talk about how to resist the attention economy. One of your answers to that is that you started learning to recognize bird songs, which I thought is the most interesting right turn of an answer to that question. Can you talk about how those things go together? Why paying attention to the natural world around you is a way of resisting the attention economy? Yeah, I think that there's kind of maybe two different ways. And one, like more generally, is just that if you, you know, if you've lived in the same place for a long time, which I have, and you have heard bird song, like, you know, generally for your entire life. It's very humbling to learn that, you know, you're not just hearing like three different songs or five different songs. You're hearing like 20 different songs.

And that those are all from individual birds that you sort of learn to recognize. birds that you sort of learn to recognize. And, and it's just, you know, not too hard to extrapolate outward from that to like, you know, what are all of the other things that I'm lumping into one thing that are actually 10 things. And I think that, again, that's something that like, is so different from, you know, being online and needing to look like you know everything already, which is just absurd. This is kind of like the opposite where it's like, oh, I actually, the more I learn about this, the less I realize I know. And that continues. I mean, I got into birdwatching years ago and I still, you know, to this day, I will hear a bird that I thought I knew make some weird sound and it, you know, like, and it means some strange thing

or it's like some part of the year, you know, and I, it just, it's very clear to me that I'll kind of never get to the bottom of that. And I think that that feeling of, of curiosity and investment in learning something, but also acknowledging that I'm going to have to continue to pay very close attention, probably for the rest of my life, to really learn about that is, is just like, it's so refreshingly different from how I think judgment is exercised online. And then the second more, you know, like I could definitely be accused of like the California hippie element. But I really, you know, I really strongly believe this is that as I've gotten to know individual words, like the crows that visit my balcony every morning. And crows can recognize human faces and are very intelligent animals. It's just, you know, I spend a lot of time looking at them looking at me.

And they also will like stop me on the street. Like if I'm within like a couple blocks of my apartment, like it actually happened yesterday and I was like, oh, I don't have a peanut. And I was like, so worried. But, but yeah, you know, the fact that this non-human, but social and like intelligent animal is looking at me, who is also a social animal. You know, it's like this really helpful, like perspective that is not only, you know, outside of the very myopic kind of personal branding perspective,

it's outside of even the human, like ego perspective. And I just, you know, I can't totally explain it, but if I am in some like deep funk or like I am, you know, I can't totally explain it. But if I am in some like deep funk or like I am, you know, convinced that I live in this like apocalyptic dystopia or something like, you know, I could be having the worst day and just spending time around just non-human forms of intelligence and sentience. human forms of intelligence and sentience, it just so reliably breaks me out of that. And then, of course, it leads to this recognition that I exist in this kind of community, like a human social community, but also a more than human social community, that I am in a time and in a place. And like that kind of grounding has really been a huge lifesaver for me. Right. So that idea of context and of being a human who's physically incarnated in a time and a place, right?

In a world that's around you that isn't just, you know, bits and packets of data and isn't just even human created concrete, and isn't just even human created concrete, uh, but is also a portion of the natural world. That's on a particular spot of the globe that has a particular climate, particular flora and fauna, uh, as that, that's a big,

big part of the book. And you have so many anecdotes in the book about how you return your attention to that over and over again, whether it's by birdwatching. By the way, I love that you say in the book, you say, birdwatching, we should really call it bird noticing. I love that. That it's like, yeah, you're not really all you do is like, hey, there's a bird. Oh, there's a blue jay. I know what that one is. It's a blue jay. Maybe I'll write it down in my book. I noticed it. I see that it was there. That's such a beautiful,

simple action to do over and over again, to simply notice something. And you also talk about how you went to the, a creek that went to your, I don't want to tell the story for you, but through your childhood home and sort of followed where it went and where the watershed came from and bringing. So, so tell me about how bringing your attention to those things in the natural world which are you know the realist of all physical objects how that is a tonic for our attention economy um yeah so that creek is like maybe a really good example where um i think it has to do with kind of grabbing on to something that is not only like real right but it it wasn't put there i mean that's the funny thing to say about

a creek right but um it wasn't engineered it's not an amenity um it's just there it's a consequence of the fact that water has to go somewhere yeah um so I... Water just trickles down the hillsides, like it rainfalls, the land is arranged in a particular way of peaks and valleys. So water flows in this particular pattern and that's where a creek forms. And that's the only reason the creek is there.

Right. Yeah. And it's been there for a while. It's been there from before Cupertino was a city, which is Cupertino is where I grew up. Yeah. You know, it's been there from before Cupertino was a city, which is Cupertino is where I grew up. Yeah. And so I think just paying attention to that.

And I should also say, like, this creek is similar to a lot of urban creeks in that it's not necessarily that it's hidden away. And from the research that I've done, it sounds like, you know, especially like in the 70s, like it was just like really not taken care of. And there was just like trash in there. And like, so it's not, it's not as bad as it could be, but it's certainly not something that's like very enthusiastically like offered up for observation. When you're, when you're like, you know, it's like the creek is like, oh, there's that like one weird bridge when I'm driving on, you know, Stevens Creek or something. I mean, it sounds like the LA River here in Los Angeles. It's there. People are aware it's there, but nobody thinks about, nobody even thinks I'm crossing the

river when they do, because it's just this sort of channel that we don't give a thought to. Yeah, exactly. It's very similar. It's actually really, really similar because the second part of this creek I wrote about has a concrete bottom. So it's probably very similar. Yes.

But yeah, it's like, you know, just standing there and kind of thinking like, okay, like, A, this is here. B, this water came from somewhere. And then this now makes you have to think about, like, weather systems. And, like, I write about the fact that, you know, sometimes we get atmospheric rivers in California where the water is coming from the Philippines, which is where half my family is from. And so I suddenly became way more interested in rain and just thinking about where clouds are coming from. And just it kind of like very quickly opens up onto this whole level of reality that is pretty frequently unacknowledged. I mean, I think it depends on where you are and how people feel about it there. But for the most part, it is similar to this creek,

which is this thing that it's sort of like, you can see in urban planning, they're like, well, this has to go somewhere. And so they're kind of like routing it through things. It literally goes through the Apple campus, which I find just to be like a really funny detail. And so like in the midst of this, this tech campus, right. Which is like this landscape of efficiency where all of these like very

efficient products are coming out of you. Ultra designed. Yeah. Yeah. Like you have this not really designed old thing kind of going through. I mean, it's not totally accurate. Cause you know, there's always been kind of infrastructural engineering that goes into like urban creeks, but, but been kind of infrastructural engineering that goes into like urban creeks. But the fact of its existence, right, is really old and it's kind of not possible to really argue with it. And I find it, you know, helpful to think about just personally for some of the reasons I mentioned earlier, like just kind of getting outside of this human centric and very kind of endless present type of mindset. But I think collectively

it's, it's only going to become more important to pay attention to things like that because like the, I think a lot about the kind of like granular everyday felt effects of something like climate change. And it like a lot of it, it's just going to be things like, like that, right? Like flooding. It's like, oh, right. Like there's water and it has to go somewhere like like that right like flooding it's like oh right like there's water and it has to go somewhere and that's non-negotiable you cannot engineer away water um you know like it's kind of um or the fact that like things normally happen at a certain time and now they're going to start happening at like weird times um i just think it's this kind of um i uh even though it can be sort of depressing to think about like i think

that paying attention to the traces of of the non-human that already exist kind of beneath and around us um are important ways of being reminded of what we're ultimately beholden to like whether we want to think that or not yeah we're we're living on, I mean, here in Los Angeles, I'm living on the San Andreas Fault, whether or not, you know, no matter how high tech my life gets, I'm still living on the intersection of two tectonic plates. And that's going to determine something about my life. And that's still a context that I need to be aware of and that it, you know, I can develop a deeper understanding of the place I live by becoming aware of it. Yeah. And, and as you know, I'm terrified of earthquakes, like, don't get me wrong, but I think that, that, again, we're not kind of put here by any one person, that we're all kind of subject to that.

It provides this like really important limit. Like I read a book recently that brought up this phrase, Inferno of the Same, to describe. It's by the author of, I'm forgetting his name, but he wrote The Burnout Society. But it's not The Burnout Society. It's a different book. But he talks about the Inferno of the Same as like this kind of, if you can sort of have everything,

right, like, and everything sort of exists for you to consume or have or see, like that's actually a very depressing situation because it never kind of throws you back upon yourself and you never have an actual encounter with the truly other um like something that uh you don't understand or that you can't control um and and that he's basically he was arguing that like this is the these are the conditions for like actual like desire and aliveness. And it's similar to what I talk about in the book with the Martin Buber, the I-thou idea that there's a difference between an I-it relationship, which is like everything exists for me or in relationship to me as something to be used.

It's my food or it's my person to have sex with or it's my opportunity to go retreat. Everything is for my use, like things are in a video game in many cases. It's like everything is has some purpose for me to make use of it. know, things like, you know, acknowledging like watersheds and, you know, tectonic plates and just these things that, you know, they predate us and they condition our existence. Again, whether we choose to acknowledge that or not, even though that's really scary at a time like this, I think it's also just a really, you know, it's important to feel that encounter with something that is not under your control. Well, we have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more Jenny O'Dell. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. So we were talking about finding context in the natural world and how understanding these sort of forces outside of ourselves is so important. But you also talk a lot about how that context exists between people, that in face-to-face interactions, family interactions, friend interactions,

friend interactions, there's so much irreducible detail in how we interact with each other that we are, when we're in face-to-face or in small groups, we're constantly negotiating and how, what a rich thing that is and how that is almost completely lost when we take those conversations to social media, for example. Can you speak on that at all? conversations to social media, for example. Can you speak on that at all? Yeah. I think that there's just a lot of ways of perceiving and knowing that are embodied, right? Like we are humans and bodies, at least for the time being. And so, you know, it's like this idea that somehow you could fully capture all of that in a purely verbal format, not to mention like 140 characters. You know, it's kind of...

Well, 280 now, and now it's 280. Come on, they fixed everything. It's 280 now. Yeah. Yeah, I just... I think it's kind of part of the larger argument that I'm making about context, which is that, like, so much of the meaning of any expression is the circumstances in which it was expressed and kind of the context around that. think that even for someone, let's say, like, who, for whatever reason, like, can't often communicate with other people in person, like, there's still something very different about, let's say, like, having a phone conversation with one person versus 280 characters communicated to, like, hundreds of thousands of people. And not only hundreds of thousands of people, but, like,

people might show up in this weird sort of nebulous audience that you didn't even think were there. Yeah. Oh, that happens constantly to me on Twitter. Yeah, you write something and you think you have in mind the person who's going to read it. And then people who you did not intend at all read it and bring a meaning to it that you did not intend. And you find yourself in this weird position of having said something that you didn't think you were saying. It's, it's, we're, we're all familiar with that horrible clusterfuck. Right. Yeah. And I think it, it has to do, you know, or it's, some of it's inevitable, right?

But, but like an interesting thing has been, you know, I, I have now written this book. The book is somewhat, you know, inevitably alienated from me. It is out in the world. People can, you know, have interpretations of it that I did not intend, like in good and bad ways. And that's not, there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but like it's a book. So, it's kind of long and you have to sit through it. And like people who contact me about the book, you know, have spent the time. And, you know, it's hard to imagine having a knee-jerk reaction to a book that you read the entirety of. But it's way easier to imagine having a knee-jerk reaction to a sentence. Yeah.

Or a headline or like a small snippet of a video. Especially when not only are you seeing it isolated, you're seeing it isolated and then followed by everyone else's knee-jerk reactions. Yeah. So I think a lot about the kind of context in which information is presented and, you know, obviously what that does for reactions to it, but also then over time, what that does for what is even getting expressed in the first place. Because in a kind of horrible way, I feel like individuals are becoming their own marketing departments, doing their own kind of start to see like these expressions being shaped by those contexts or made for them specifically at the expense of forms of expression that require more context and time. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the experience of being on Twitter, for instance, is the experience of

trying to craft thoughts and ideas that are going to do well in that very specific environment where, you know, all context is removed and people are only reading that one sentence. And one of the things that often strikes me is the, you know, the internet was originally this wonderful force where we could all become publishers or broadcasters. And now we're seeing what that's actually like once everybody, once literally everybody is a broadcaster. I mean, you know, for instance, you know, 15 years ago, you know, Jon Stewart was complaining about Fox News, right? Now we live in a world where everybody, you know, everybody in that group, the Fox News viewers, have all become Fox News themselves.

You know, they're all making those posts. They're all, you know, saying the same things that they would say if they were on the air. And the same thing goes for any other group of folks. You know, when I tweet an article about, you know, urbanism or whatever, I phrase it almost as though I'm writing a headline for curbed.com or whatever it is. And I think the point that you make is that, correct me if I'm wrong, that the sort of movements that we need among people to actually make change in the world can't happen in that space, we can't focus enough as a group and we don't have the context that we need to actually make change in the world. Is that correct? Yeah. And I mean, I will say that I wouldn't want to discount, you know, the potential for spreading awareness of something, you know, on social media. I think, you know, like there are many like hashtag campaigns to point to where, you know, in terms of just like speed of getting the word out about something, I mean, I think that's kind of amazing. Of course, that can also be used for terrible things. But,

but then, you know, beyond like, just kind of being aware of an issue, like the actual part of like, learning, you know, the context and the history behind it and having like having discussions with other people in which you can kind of like work out your ideas which is something i really believe in um i mean so many of the ideas in my books i feel like they emerged like literally within conversation with some other person that i know like or maybe like one or two other friends like over drinks um and And so I, and similarly, I was kind of looking back through the history of successful activism and seeing this pattern over and over again of small, small-ish, like groups that are small enough where you have a kind of, you're recognized in them as an individual.

And there's a context for what you say and what you have said and and what has been kind of like said and accomplished in that group and then those groups are kind of existing in this almost like federated structure where they are all in touch with each other let's say across the country so that you know if one group kind of comes up with something interesting and new like they can share it with the others quickly but like that kind of comes up with something interesting and new like they can share it with the others quickly um but like that kind of um collection of of kind of like concentrated nodes is very different than just like a sea of under undifferentiated all completely totally connected points um and uh and the way information spreads through that kind of network is going to be really different. And, you know, like, I just, I even see it, right, like, in my own class.

Like, I just see, I've seen in my art classes, like, ideas kind of, like, forming within a 14-person group where people feel, like, proud of their accomplishments and feel like they're, you know, seen and heard by other people in the group. And I feel like that's just so like, that is so necessary for kind of coming up with new ideas, which we definitely need a lot of right now. And new and like nuanced and complex ideas, not soundbite ideas. And so, this is what I love about the book because I love the connection between the contexts that we find in nature when you're going for a walk in the woods and there's so many different levels on which everything's operating. you know, which species are able to survive in the soil type and et cetera, that, that makes it a rich place. And that gives us, you know, gives that place a lot of possibilities and power. And then when we're seeing each, when we're coming together in those small groups as individuals, we have a similar amount of rich context that, okay, you come from this place, you have this identity, you have this background, you have these abilities, and I'm going to take you as a full real person, right? And not try to reduce that. And we've got these connections between us. And there's so much richness there that we can understand and that we need to understand in order to create a lot of possibility and power.

power. And what the attention economy does is it strips all of that away. And we just have these, we each become these little boxes. Does that sound, I'm really paraphrasing your work a lot. No, no, no. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think, you know, alongside the algorithmic honing in that I mentioned, I think there's also, you know, this risk of only being in contact with people you 100% agree with, which I don't think, and not even like, because of where it's happening, it's like agree with in a sort of, in a soundbite way, like not even in a sort of complex way. It's like you have boxes that you're checking and you all check the same boxes or something like that. I think like for me, like a really ideal group, right? If I were to be in one of these groups, right, that I'm describing, like an ideal group would be one in which, you know, there's enough, there's agreement about around like why you're there and what you're trying to

achieve, but there's different viewpoints and a little bit of tension, right? I think that you should examine your own beliefs. And I'm friends with not as many as I would like to say, but a few people that I really strongly disagree with about a lot of things, especially around technology. And I really value our conversations because there are ideas that I have come up with or they have come up with or we have come up with that I don't think either one would come across alone. Like if I'm just by myself or

I'm with people who exactly agree with me, I'm just going to keep plodding along and doing the same exact thing. And I think if I'm with others who, you know, either directly or indirectly kind of cause me to question, you know, some of the ways that I think about things without, you know, like necessarily like questioning the underlying like, you know, political cause or whatnot. I think that that would be a really like, you know, I kind of hate the word innovative, but it would be right an innovative environment where like new ideas would arise and new ways of addressing problems. So I think that's another really great thing that can come from from the small group where if you have enough mutual respect, and you've all decided to be

there and you and you want to support each other, like you can have those debates and those discussions without it getting completely shut down down or getting like canceled on Twitter or something. Right. And those are the sort of conversations that become more and more difficult on Twitter for everyone to bring like that sort of principled disagreement is it seems only possible in that really close interpersonal context. is it seems only possible in that really close interpersonal context. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it has to do with the fact that you aren't, you're not anonymous, like in that context either, right? Like, you know, if I'm in that group, I'm Jenny, not, you know, a tiny circle avatar, you know, that like, that no one knows anything else about except for the thing that I just said. I think if you're in a group with context, it's like, it's known that like, I have the sort of Jenny perspective and things that I say are going to come out of that. And then, you know, likewise for everyone else.

Yeah. I want to return to the topic of attention. In the book you talk, you call for a discipline deepening of attention. And you write that what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of excessive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. One of the things that put me in mind of is it seems that there's a connection with contemporary mindfulness culture, with meditation practices, which are, you know, I think one of the more, I think that's one of the more interesting movements of the decade that so many people are becoming interested in meditation and

mindfulness and these sorts of topics that there's a, you know, almost a form of secularized Buddhism that's taking hold in a lot of places in America. And I noticed a lot of resonances between your work and that trend, but you never use any of that language. And I was a little bit curious if you felt that there was an intersection there or if there's a reason that you shy away from it. There is not really any particular. I didn't feel like I was shying away from it. In retrospect, you know, I probably should have talked about it at least a little bit just to kind of make that acknowledgement. Maybe I think in my head it was like so obvious I didn't need to say it.

But I think a couple of people have sort of mentioned the same thing. I think I might have also been sort of subconsciously influenced by not wanting to play into a certain type of mindfulness culture that there is a lot of in the Bay Area, which I would describe as mindfulness as life hack. So, you know, I, uh, and I think that's very, that's a very specific and kind of like narrow, um, uh, subset of this. But, you know, this is like the sort of like mindfulness in order to be more productive. But, you know, this is like the sort of like mindfulness in order to be more productive. Oh, yeah. Like the enlightened meditation teacher is going to show up at the Microsoft campus and lead everybody in 10 minutes of mindfulness training. So they're all 20 percent better at coding.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. And I have the same problem with that as I do with, you know, the idea of like digital detox retreats and, you know, this what I was saying earlier about, you know, productive of what and kind of really questioning the idea of productivity altogether. So, I think maybe I was trying to not kind of fall into that bucket because some of the book is about technology and I think you see a lot of that kind of in tech. And so, and I also, I, so I don't have, I've been asked a lot kind of because of this connection, like whether I have like a mindfulness practice and I don't. I, well, because it depends on how you define that. Right. So I, I think that like probably

really like in a general sense I do, but like from the point of view of like the kind of tradition of, of mindfulness, like I don't, um, so I don't, you know, like sit and meditate and, uh,

I, I go for a walk, you know, and like I, um, and I think that I maybe make an effort to, to look differently or notice differently. But,

um, I think it probably achieves something really similar. And that's why the book like has those resonances. But it's not something that I ever, I think I sort of like came around to it from like a weird angle, maybe personally through like birdwatching instead of, you know, going to like a Buddhist retreat or something. But it's definitely true that the goal is, I mean,

there is no goal, right? The goal is to have no goal. But that is definitely similar where it's kind of like a pause and a reflection and kind of looking with curiosity, not only at the outside world, but at one's own thoughts, kind of, you know, connected to what I was saying earlier about the self, where if you really examine yourself, it very quickly kind of, you know, connected to what I was saying earlier about the self, where if you really examine yourself, it very quickly kind of dissolves. And I think that's a very kind of mindfulness type idea. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's a huge part of, you know, those Buddhist traditions that led to, you know, that sort of evolved into contemporary American mindfulness culture. And that's, and the fact that, you know, that's a

big part of the book as well as what put me in mind of it. But yeah, I mean, I relate to that. I'm also the sort of person who, you know, I'll listen to a lecture by, you know, a speaker, you know, by a meditation teacher while I'm going for a walk. But then when I actually sit and try to do the exercise, I'm like, ah, this is not doing it for me. Um, and, but it sounds like the practice of it, the way you talk about it, it makes it sound like the practice of bird watching or bird noticing is very similar that you're simply returning your attention, not to your breath, but to the sound of a bird song over and over again, um, in order to notice it. Uh, I, I certainly noticed that resonance there. Um, but do you have any fear of, because what happened

with mindfulness culture is, you know, capitalism did what it does, right? Which is it co-opted it and brought it in and it became something that could be packaged and sold as it did with, you know, Che Guevara on the t-shirt, right? That the sort of form of resistance became a part of capitalism itself. Do you have any fear of that happening with your own work? I don't know if you've seen it, but it's like magnetic. It's like this puddle of magnetic putty. And then they put like some kind of metal cube in it. Oh, yeah.

And then the putty is just like, blah. And it like just like eats the cube. Yeah. And it's like really creepy. And I was like, this is an image of capitalism appropriating literally everything. Like, it's amazing what it can do. Like you could have like it can even appropriate anti-capitalism. It's I mean, yeah um kind of amazing so I yeah I'm I I'm very aware of that with this book but I think I've always been aware of it

because you know I've been an artist and I make things and then kind of the minute you put them out into the world it's like you're gonna watch that happen usually um so uh yeah I mean what like there are things that I've sort of I did did, you know, preemptively to try to address that. And one of them is just, I think the book is really kind of weirdly shaped. Like, it's, I mean, you've read it, it's like all over the place. And it's not very easy to summarize. Maybe it's hard for me to even summarize it. maybe it's hard for me to even summarize it. It's kind of like this collection of things that almost like barely holds together. And then maybe after reading it, like something emerges from that. And I think that that format is a little bit harder to appropriate because it's harder to pinpoint like anything about it. You know, like I,

I have like, it's hard to put it on a t-shirt. What is the t-shirt going to be? Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, I have like it's hard to put it on a t-shirt what is the t-shirt gonna be yeah exactly and like um you know it's like I've almost at first I was like horrified but then kind of interested in like watching those forces like kind of around the book be like I want it to be a book about technology or like I want it to be a book about the environment it's like no it's both it's like it's not one or the other you know um and and so i think i the way i kind of uh set the book up or like the structure was kind of intended to forestall that a little bit but i mean believe me i've gotten like you know like the idea of doing nothing like it can very easily be turned into some kind of caricature like oh absolutely

being like oh we want to do a photo shoot of you like doing nothing, like in the field. And I'm like, oh, my God, I would never do that. I don't know. It sounds like a pretty good spread. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what it's honestly one of the things I enjoyed about the book was I was talking to our researcher, Sam, you know, to prep for this interview. And we were talking about the book and I was like, all right, the book is, you know,

about resisting the attention economy, resisting capitalism. And what is her answer for what doing nothing means for what that refusal is for what resisting is, he asked me. And I was like, well, having read the book, it seems like the answer is paying attention to bird songs, Having read the book, it seems like the answer is paying attention to bird songs, but also that, you know, activist meetings should happen face to face, right, in small groups, and that it's an important component of organizing. And those two conclusions seem so disparate, but having read the book, I feel like I see how they come from the same ethos and how they're connected thematically. And the only thing is, it would take me the length of this interview to explain why. And that's what I've been sort of struggling to do in a pleasurable way over the course of it is finding these connections. And that, I don't know, that irreducibility of the book's conclusions neatly echoes the irreducibility of the context of nature and the context between us that you talk about. So I think that's very cool.

by the diversity of references that you use to make your points. You know, I mean, as in my own work, you know, when I am trying to make a bit of cultural commentary, I'll go to a study or to, you know, a journalist or to a piece of history to sort of support that point, right? Here's the claim I want to make. And in 1950, XYZ happened. What I really found fascinating about the book is your references that you use to support your points are so diverse. You refer to everyone from the philosopher William James to the ancient philosopher Diogenes to conceptual artists to even Tom Green, the Canadian comedian.

You reference a bit on his public access show in the way of a point you're making about our social organization. How do you go about what is your research process look like and how do you how did you go about pulling those references together and why? Some of it was maybe so some of it was intentional and some of it was unintentional. It's a lot like the do nothing farming kind of model that I described at the end of the book where you are you are still farming, but it's like you're really just almost like trying to mimic a natural ecosystem and just nudging it a little bit to produce like, you know, rice or something. to produce like, you know, rice or something. But it's very different than kind of industrial farming where you're like, I'm going to plot out this thing and it's going to produce this over here and this over here at this particular time. So, my process has always been kind of very, you know, like creating a structure, but leaving it really open, like really open. And so, there are a lot of things in the book that I actually encountered while writing it.

So things that I encountered last summer that I would never have expected to be in the book. Um, and then there are a lot of things that I just kind of happened to have encountered for different reasons over the years and kind of like stored them away. Um, I think that my process could probably pretty well be described to, um, what a bower bird does, which I don't know if you've ever seen a video of a bower bird no i never have um so the these are birds that um they create the male bird creates this like it's it it's not a nest but it's almost like a nest like structure but it's like a little um it almost looks like a little house type thing but it's really just his

like stage for dancing. And then he goes around and collects everything blue and puts all the blue stuff around. And then when the female comes along, he like does a little dance and is like, look at all my blue stuff. And I actually highly recommend watching the David Attenborough. Like I think it's some like bird documentary series where where he shows this whole process and then the bird does the dance and apparently he does it like a little bit too enthusiastically and then the female's like never mind um I've been there I have definitely been that that is my 20s in a nutshell doing the dance too enthusiastically yeah yeah but um so you, the only criteria for the bird is like, it's blue. So, um, you know, now you'll see, you know, uh, one of these bowers will have,

you know, blue, like blue, let's say like butterfly wings or flowers or things like that. But then they'll also be like plastic, um, and just like trash, like anything that's blue. Of course, like the overall effect is like really beautiful, but they come from all different kinds of places. And the only thing they have in common is that they're blue. And so I've found that my research process is often like I have some really weird question. And even though it probably wouldn't be able to be phrased as a very specific question, I know what it is in my head. And then everything I experience whether and it's

kind of horrible because sometimes I feel like I'm always working for this reason but it's also kind of amazing because it I don't know it gives some sort of like impetus and like curiosity to my everyday experience but you know everything goes through the filter of my experience and if it's blue right I kind of like set it aside

and so I just have like folders and folders of just like notes on my computer. Every single book I read, I type up all of the quotes that I think I might ever use ever. Wow. Which takes forever. Yeah. But then down the road is, you know, really helpful. So, you know, every movie I see, every conversation I have, it's like usually there's like something in there that is sort of related to whatever question I'm currently obsessed with. And there always seems to be one, whether or not I'm working on anything.

And so I just, it's this like long process of kind of like collecting these little bits and storing them away. That's wonderful. So I want to ask you as an artist, you use art extensively through the book, you refer to different artists, different artworks as examples for a point that you're trying to make in various parts about how our society is organized. It's strange to ask an artist this, but why do that? And what power do you think art has to sort of teach us about the world around us in that way? That's a great question. I think part of it is just the practical experience of having taught art to non-art majors for five years. So, you know, I am trying to argue for the value of art in, for instance, learning to see things in the world differently. And so through that teaching practice, like I have collected these examples. And oftentimes they're,

you know, examples like the ones in the book where I can personally attest to a piece of art, you know, like a John Cage piece, for instance, like totally changing how I hear everything after that. Not in some sort of abstract conceptual way, but like actually changing how I listen. So it's just something that I have thought about for a long time. And of course I make art and usually that's kind of my yardstick for myself is like, is the work that I'm making

helping someone see something different. I mean, I almost compare it to like a set of binoculars or a microscope, right? Like there are tools in culture that help you see things that you wouldn't be able to see either with the unaided eye or with your own perceptual bias. I think they're kind of the same thing, right? So if there is some way to sort of bridge that gap and give some new area of experience to someone through like renewed perception or redirected perception.

Like, I think that's one of the most generous things you could possibly do. And I think that artists in particular, you know, have spent a lot of time thinking about attention and how to bring something to someone else's attention that they themselves have noticed. And not just that, but I mean, speaking from my own experience, like I, when I make work, I want someone to have the same experience of excitement and discovery that I had. Like, I don't want to just kind of like put the information in front of them and be like, here, I found this, you know, like, you know, as an example, when I was an artist in residence at the dump in San Francisco, like that is so it's so amazing there. I mean, I could go on, but

I'm really nostalgic for the dump. And there's this public disposal area that we had access to and the three, the three artists in residence, and you'd go in and it's like loud and there's these like u-hauls you know backing up and like just throwing just debris and like objects into this giant pile um and the pile is different every hour um like the other one of the other artists and i apparently set a record for like the amount of time we were in the pile because we were just like addicted to it we're like because what's in the pile now who's standing there timing how long the artists are in the pile with a stopwatch oh they've been in there a long time i mean i like to give you some idea like the day of our exhibition like we were like you know nicely dressed like this other artist like it was like

15 minutes before the opening he's like i'm just gonna go i'm gonna go check in the pile i'm just gonna see if there's anything in there like I'm like, the show is already up. No, it's fascinating. Like, what is going to be? It's a different treasure box every time, I imagine. Yeah, it really is. So, like, that in itself is exciting, right? And then my whole project was going and getting these objects, which I didn't really have any particular criteria.

I was just trying to get, a good overall picture of like human stuff of all different ages and taking it back to my studio, like the Bowerbird, and then like researching every single object almost, you know, to the level of absurdity. Like what year was it made? What is the address of the place where it was made? What is it made out of? Like, why does this thing exist? Are there YouTube videos of it? Like on and on forever. I mean, it kind of drove me crazy. Um, and I did that for three months and, and there was this question at the end of like, okay, I have all this information and I had been sort of posting it online as I was going. But for the exhibition, it's like, how can I make someone else have the

same experience that I had without having to go into the pile? And so my exhibition was kind of, you know, it didn't look the same as a lot of other shows there, which typically, you know, they have like a lot of sculptors or like people who like make objects or installations. Mine was just like white shelves with these 200 objects on them with tags that you could scan with your phone and get all of this information and watch the YouTube video and see street view of the factory. And just like all of the just crazy stuff that I found out about that object. Like you could just stand in front of it and like find that out. That's wonderful. I, you're making me want to learn so much about these because the feeling of going deep on something sort of trivial right in front of you is one that I really relate to. You know, it's that feeling of like, I don't know, when you're walking down the street and you see like

a really weird, I don't know, fixture or like, it's not like it like transfixed by a manhole cover that has like an engraving on it made by such and such a company. And I'm like, what is that company? When did they make this manhole? Like, where did this thing come from? You start like having all these questions in your mind and the idea of going down and answering those is so fascinating. Yeah. And, and like talking to other people who are excited about the same thing, like I find it so interesting that the, that the human response to like finding something cool or like unexpected is like, you immediately want to show someone else. Right.

Like, which, you know, like I've had this experience before where I've been hiking alone and I saw like some like really unexpected bird and there wasn't anyone around. And I'm just like, ah, I need to like show someone this thing. And there's like no one here. Yeah. I experience that all the time. But it's really funny because it also feels like it mimics my process in in comedy because for me comedy is so much about seeing something or noticing something or something happening me that struck me as funny

and then me trying to reproduce why that's funny for someone else uh so that we can experience it as funny together uh that's like entirely what stand-up comedy is. Exactly, right. And it's like, I mean, I talked to Joe about this a lot, where it's like, it's so much about observation and attention. And like, you know, most things, if you slightly change the perspective with which you're looking at them, are really funny. Or they're at least like deeply weird.

Like, you know, at first when I was at the dump, I feel like I was kind of trying trying to maybe subconsciously like picking like interesting or like weird things like things that already appeared interesting and weird and then by the end it was like no i'm gonna research this like my little pony toy from like 2011 because like you know like that experience of like finding out the story behind that is like gonna have a higher kind of ratio in terms of like me thinking that this is a really like boring and sort of given object and then finding out that it's like deeply, deeply weird. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's, we do need to wrap up sadly, but I just want to ask, what do you hope that people will take away from the book just in terms of their day-to-day

behavior, right? In terms of the way they interact with the attention economy or with capitalism at large, what sort of experience or change are you hoping for them? I think there's a couple of things. And I've been really pleased by a couple of people who have mentioned that after they finished the book, they felt like they were on hallucinogens. Which you can maybe see why, right? Well, that's the experience of those drugs is one of noticing. You start noticing things very intensely and attending to things that normally you gloss over. Right. And often kind of like looking at things without judgment, which will let a lot of things

into, things will flood your perception that were not part of it before, right? And so, yes, a few people have mentioned that, especially people who started using the app iNaturalist after reading the book. That's the app that I mentioned that you can take pictures of plants and it'll give you a good guess of what they are. And then it'll be confirmed by a person usually within a couple of days. So it's like this like feeling of like, oh my God, there's all this stuff around me. And then like, and then like finding out what it is. And it's just kind of this like really sort of like dizzying experience. I think that's just like amazing. And I'm so flattered

that anyone would have that, that reaction. And so I would hope, yeah, that someone might have something like that, like the kind of experience of like the maybe opening up more of experience, particularly things that have always been around you. I mean, that is the experience that I had, you know, again, reading this book on a boat in Alaska, right, where on a daily basis, we were, I was reading about your experience noticing these things around you. But then on a daily basis, we were also, you know, going ashore and, you know, looking in the intertidal zone at all the different creatures that were there and, you know, had guides who were explaining, oh, this is this plant. This is this interaction. This is this. This is why this is why this type of tree grows on this slope and not on that slope. And it made me resolve both those experiences together. Like, I just need to do this stuff at my home. I need to learn about

the plants that grow in my nearby park and get this goddamn app it was yeah yeah very much had that experience yeah that's amazing that's and i i've it's so great that you were there because you all it's also just this demonstration of like life is i mean life like you know uh living like living beings and systems is just so weird yes and just like amazing and i could think about it all day um so that so that's like, you know, one thing that I sort of hope for, but, um,

maybe more importantly, I, I really hope that it restores a sense of agency to someone who reads it. Um, I, um, I was just in this, okay,

this is going to sound really morbid, but I was in the cemetery the other day. Um, and it's like a very beautiful cemetery that you'll have to take my word for it. It's not uncommon for lots of people to go for was in the cemetery the other day um and it's like a very beautiful cemetery that you'll have to take my word for it is not uncommon for lots of people to go for walks in the cemetery and uh it's kind of up sort of in the hills and um and has all these branching kind of pathways like there's my point is that there's like no obvious way to walk through the cemetery like none at all it's completely just like branching and random. And I was walking through it and I was just reflecting on the fact that because it's

designed that way and because it's so big and because there's nothing really like to do in a cemetery unless you're like visiting a grave, my movement through that space is, I would imagine, maybe the closest thing that I typically experience to free will. I mean, that sounds sort of weird, but I am not being impelled by anything. I'm not doing something that I think I'm supposed to be doing. I'm not working. I'm not looking for anything. I mean, I might be noticing some birds. I'm not looking for anything.

I mean, I might be noticing some birds, but I, I, if I take a right turn somewhere, that's just because I felt like taking a right turn. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, or there's like something, oh, I see something over there. I'm curious. I'm going to go look at that, you know? And especially doing that alone, right? Where you're not even asking anyone else, like what you should do.

Like you're just following your own sort of like instinct. you're not even asking anyone else like what you should do like you're just following your own sort of like instinct um and that to me is like the polar opposite of doing and everything and behaving exactly the way that um things are designed to make you behave um like having the reactions that social media would like you to have or um framing your experiences in the way that you've learned it's the right way to frame them um i think. I think it's so important for me to step outside of that because I need these reminders that there are all these options around that that I haven't considered and that I can just make the decision to do those things instead. And it sounds sort of like silly and like simple, but I have talked to like a few people who read the book were like, oh yeah, it was just this kind of reminder that I don't, there are a lot of things that I think I have to do that I don't, and I can make that decision. Oh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about it. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Jenny O'Dell for coming on the show.

Her book once again is called How to Do Nothing. I really recommend you check it out. It's a wonderful read. And that is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK, for lending us that fantastic theme song. Hey, if you want to learn more interesting things or just find out what I'm up to, check out my website, adamconover.net. You can sign up for my mailing list there. Until next time, we'll see you next week on factually. That was a hate gun podcast.